Hong Kong: 6 arrested for security law breach

Police's National Security Department arrested four men and two women aged between 32 and 67 in Tin Hau, Mong Kok, Ngau Tau Kok, Tsuen Wan, Sheung Shui and Cheung Chau on suspicion of committing an act or acts with seditious intention, contravening the Crimes Ordinance.

The arrested people are being detained for further enquiries.

They are suspected of having purposely caused a nuisance during their attendance for hearing in different courts, including the High Court, the West Kowloon Magistrates' Courts and the Eastern Magistrates' Courts, between December 2021 and January 2022.

These acts severely affected jurisdictional dignity and court operations.

Police also conducted searches at the arrested people's residences with a court warrant. A number of items in suspected connection with the case, including records of conspiracy to cause a nuisance in the courts, were seized.

Police reminded the public that doing an act or acts with seditious intention to bring into hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection against the administration of justice in Hong Kong is a serious crime. Offenders shall be liable to imprisonment for two years.

This story has been published on: 2022-04-06. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
OH Court Grants Air Force Members Protection from Shot Mandate

NEWS PROVIDED BY

Liberty Counsel

April 5, 2022



CINCINNATI, Ohio, April 5, 2022 /Christian Newswire/ -- U.S. District Court Judge Matthew McFarland in Cincinnati granted a preliminary injunction that protects 18 Air Force officers, airmen and reservists from the COVID shot mandate until their lawsuit is resolved.

These active duty and active reservist Airmen, stationed across the United States, sought injunctive relief from being required by the Air Force to receive the COVID-19 injections in violation of their sincerely held religious beliefs and despite having applied for religious exemptions. The plaintiffs sued Air Force officials, including the Secretary and Surgeon General of the Air Force, claiming statutory and constitutional violations of their rights to free exercise of religion.

Judge McFarland wrote, "From the time our Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence and, later, the United States Constitution, United States citizens have been provided with the freedom to practice their religious beliefs as they deem fit. Religious liberty was just as important to those who founded this nation as it is today. As John Adams said, '[n]othing is more dreaded than the national government meddling with religion.'"

"Because the Air Force has willingly and freely granted administrative and medical exemptions but refuses to grant virtually all religious exemptions, this Court finds that the Air Force has not satisfied the least-restrictive-means standard. Accordingly, Plaintiffs established that the Air Force's COVID-19 vaccination mandate is a substantial burden on Plaintiffs' sincerely held religious beliefs. Defendants failed to establish a compelling interest as to the specific Plaintiffs before the Court to justify the mandate, and, even if they did, Defendants failed to establish that the mandate satisfied the least-restrictive-means standard," wrote Judge McFarland.

The Court also added, "And with a respectful nod of gratitude to the Father of our great country, this Court, as a sworn guardian of the Constitution, will not order the Air Force personnel at this stage to forfeit the protections of our laws and of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment."

Citing Liberty Counsel's case striking down COVID restrictions on behalf of Maryville Baptist Church in Kentucky, Judge McFarland wrote: "Like the Sixth Circuit held in Maryville Baptist Church, restrictions inexplicably applied to one group and exempted from another do little to further [Defendants'] goals and do much to burden religious freedoms."

Liberty Counsel continues to press for class certification for members of all branches of the military in the case of Navy SEAL 1 v. Austin. Last Friday, Judge Steven Merryday issued another emergency order protecting a Captain in the Marine Corps. Liberty Counsel will return to the court on April 11.

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, "This is a great victory for the religious freedom of these Air Force service members who love God and love America. We commend this Ohio court for recognizing the unconstitutional way the military is treating these honorable service members. We continue to press forward to obtain class certification relief to protect every member of the military who submitted religious accommodation requests."

Liberty Counsel provides broadcast quality TV interviews via Hi-Def Skype and LTN at no cost.



SOURCE Liberty Counsel



CONTACT: Mat Staver, 407-875-1776, Liberty@LC.org



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State lawmakers advanced a major tax package Tuesday after nixing a bid to include income tax cuts for middle-income Nebraskans.

As advanced, LB873 would ratchet down the states top income tax rates for corporations and individuals, expand income tax credits for property taxpayers and phase out income taxes on Social Security benefits.

The bill cleared the second of three rounds of debate on a voice vote, following a 43-0 vote on a filibuster-ending cloture motion.

But senators voted 26-18, with four abstentions, against adopting an amendment that would have gradually lowered the income tax rate on people in the next-to-highest tax bracket.

Sen. Wendy DeBoer of Bennington offered the amendment, saying the tax package would otherwise leave out large numbers of Nebraskans. Those would include people who do not own property, do not get Social Security benefits and whose incomes fall below $40,676 for singles or $81,352 for married filers.

As a result, she said, a married couple, filing jointly and making $80,000 a year, would get no income tax break under LB873. A single filer, making $20 an hour at a full-time job, would get only an $11 cut.

"We've got to take the middle class and give them something, too," DeBoer said. "A vote against this means you don't want to give half of Nebraskans a tax cut."

Sen. Lou Ann Linehan of Elkhorn, the Revenue Committee chairwoman, said she would love to give more tax cuts. But she argued that Nebraska can't afford the additional $97 million revenue loss that would result from DeBoer's amendment at full implementation.

Revenue Department officials estimate the tax package already would reduce state revenues more than $863 million by the fiscal year ending June 30, 2027, the final year of implementation.

Linehan said the amendment would upset the balance of income tax cuts and property tax relief that supporters had agreed upon. She also pointed out that Nebraska reduced the lower three income tax rates in 2013, but had left the top rate at the level set during a state fiscal crunch.

Sen. Tom Briese of Albion defended LB873 as it had emerged from the Revenue Committee.

"It's time to respect the package," he said, suggesting that proponents of the middle-income cuts try their proposal another year.

Other senators made clear that support for the tax package was linked politically with upcoming votes to override Gov. Pete Ricketts' budget vetoes.

The governor used his line-item veto power to strike about $100 million out of the state budget package Monday. His chief targets included increased payments for providers caring for vulnerable Nebraskans, affordable urban housing development, and vocational and life skills programs to help inmates succeed outside of prison.

In his veto message, Ricketts said he was issuing the vetoes to ensure that Nebraskans get tax relief.

On Tuesday, the Appropriations Committee voted to recommend overriding all but one of Ricketts' vetoes. That last veto would leave $14 million in the governor's emergency fund, instead of moving it into the state's cash reserve fund.

Earlier in the day, Sen. John Stinner of Gering, the Appropriations Committee chairman, called the governor's vetoes "disgraceful," particularly those affecting provider rate increases.

"No way I'm going to vote for a tax cut on the backs of providers, no way," Stinner said.

Under LB873, the top individual and corporate tax rates would drop to 5.84% over five years. The top individual rate is 6.84% now, while the top corporate rate is 7.5% for this year and is slated to drop to 7% next year.

The package would help property owners by creating a new refundable income tax credit equal to a portion of what they pay in community college property taxes. The community college credit program would start at $50 million this year and ramp up to $195 million by 2026.

The new credit program would be similar to the LB1107 program created two years ago, which offsets a portion of K-12 school property taxes. That program will provide up to $548 million worth of credits this year. The tax package would set the size of that program at $560.7 million for 2023, then allow the amount to grow as property valuations grow.

The final piece of the package would phase out income taxes on Social Security benefits in four annual steps.

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Days of negotiations between state lawmakers, the governor and others failed to yield any consensus on how to slow Nebraskas fastest-in-the-nation prison growth.

That was clear during debate Tuesday on a bill to implement the recommendations and ideas that came out of a joint study of the states criminal justice system by the Legislature, Gov. Pete Ricketts and the states court system.

In the initial debate last week over LB920, senators were sharply divided over provisions of the bill that would reduce some criminal penalties. State Sen. Suzanne Geist of Lincoln, who like Ricketts strongly opposed those provisions, introduced an amendment to strip them out of the bill.

In response, Speaker of the Legislature Mike Hilgers had brokered talks in the past week in an effort to break the logjam.

Those meetings included Ricketts and a number of interested senators, including Omaha Sens. Steve Lathrop, Terrell McKinney and John Cavanaugh. It also included a number of representatives of the criminal justice system, including Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine, Douglas County Public Defender Tom Riley and Aaron Hanson, former president of the Omaha police union.

But despite some initial promise, the talks ended Monday without any agreement.

We tried, Hilgers said in an interview. Youve got some people that have some significant philosophical differences on how to kind of solve some of these problems. I dont know if they are solvable with the time we have remaining.

That was evident in the sharp division in the Legislature on Tuesday.

Lathrop, sponsor of LB920, said the amendment Geist was offering would strip away the parts of the bill that would make any meaningful impact on the trajectory of the states prison population.

They included provisions to reduce penalties for possession of a small amount of drugs, eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for some drug offenses, establish criteria for judges to determine when sentences for multiple crimes should be served consecutively, lower the penalty for burglaries that dont involve breaking into a personal dwelling, and require that those sentenced as habitual criminals under the states three strikes law to have previously committed violent offenses.

An Omaha World-Herald analysis earlier this year found Nebraskas prison system is the fastest growing and most overcrowded in the United States. Its also among the nations most racially unequal.

Lathrop noted that under current projections, the states prisons would add an additional 1,300 inmates by 2030. That would mean needing to build yet another prison on top of the $270 million, 1,500-bed prison that Ricketts has been pushing.

Its not one prison, its two, and its not $270 million, its closer to $500 million, Lathrop said.

An analysis by the Crime and Justice Institute, a nonprofit that facilitated the Nebraska justice reinvestment process last year, estimated LB920 as introduced by Lathrop would largely flatten Nebraskas current inmate growth, reducing Nebraskas 2030 prison headcount by 1,000 from the current projections. An analysis of Geists amendment indicated it would cut current projections by less than 150 inmates.

Geist said her amendment was focused on 15 provisions that came out of last years criminal justice study that received consensus support from the group. She said she was particularly looking to preserve elements of LB920 that would enhance treatment and programming for inmates, helping them avoid reoffending and returning to prison.

Do I think we should lock them up and throw away the key? Absolutely not, said Geist, who had also served on the criminal justice study panel. But I am not for lowering penalties and having our judges change their sentencing.

Debate on the bill was expected to continue Wednesday.

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Poet and musician

Brent Mitchell is, quite simply, one of my favorite musicians, songwriters and people. He is an absolute assassin songwriter, killing every line with wit, depth and nuance.

The Texas native and Grammy Lister will perform Friday night at Union Park Tavern in Kenosha. Yes, the Kenosha Poet Laureates song Hand of God received a Grammy listing.

Mitchell has also appeared on PBS, toured the U.S., Mexico and U.K. and has many album credits. At shows, Mitchells songs are woven together with wonderful stories. This show is not to be missed.

Brent Mitchell will perform starting 8:30 Friday night, April 8, at Union Park Tavern, 4520 Eighth Ave in Kenosha.

Symphony concert

The Racine Symphony Orchestra is back in action Sunday afternoon, with a program titled Remembrance.

The central piece of the program is Gabriel Faures Requiem. It has been called one of the most emotionally cathartic works in the history of music.

The RSO will be accompanied by the University of Wisconsin-Parksides choirs.

Faures Cantique de Jean Racine Op.11 and the winner of the Young Artists Competition, Ashley Springer, will be featured as well.

Springer, a senior at Tremper High School in Kenosha, currently serves as concertmaster for Trempers Symphonic and Chamber Orchestra. For four years, Springer has participated in the Wisconsin School Music Association State Honors Orchestra, serving as second violin principal in 2019 and as concertmaster last year.

The Racine Symphony Orchestra performs 3 p.m. Sunday, April 10, at Memorial Hall, 72 Seventh St. in Downtown Racine. General admission tickets are $30; free for students (age 18 and younger). Get tickets at racinesymphony.org.

Siren of Sorrow show

Kenoshas Siren of Sorrow band is celebrating Saturday night at 58 Below in Kenosha with some like minded bands.

The metal act will be releasing a five-song EP at 58 Below and will be joined by The Hatred Embrace, Devangelist and Revel in Rot.

If you arent familiar with Siren of Sorrow, you can check out the song Barriers on the bands YouTube Channel. There will be a limited run release of physical copies before an upcoming digital platforms release.

Siren of Sorrow will host and perform at the bands CD Release Party Saturday, April 9, at 58 Below, 504 58th St. in Downtown Kenosha. Doors open at 8 p.m., with the first band starting at 8:30 p.m.

The Almas

The Almas will make a return visit to Route 20 on Friday night.

This will be the first local show of the year for the modern rock band. The band will be joined by another modern rock band familiar to many, Saint Tragedy, along with Rons Supper Club. They do 90s to early 2000s covers and some originals.

Route 20 is a big, open room with pro sound and lights capabilities.

The Almas, Rons Supper Club and Saint Tragedy perform starting at 8 Friday night, April 8, at Route 20, 14001 Washington Ave. (Highway 20) in Sturtevant. Tickets for the all ages show are $10 at rte20.com. Doors open at 7 p.m., with the music starting at 8 p.m.

Thats it for this week. Bands, artists and venues, please send me your gig listings, event posts, bios, Facebook event invites or anything else you think might be useful to me to write you up. Email me at pjfineran@gmail.com.

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CLAIM: The Waunakee Community School District in a suburb of Madison, Wisconsin, has a furry protocol that allows students who identify as furries to opt out of speaking in class, sit and lick their paws during gym class and bark and growl in hallways.

APS ASSESSMENT: False. The district does not have a protocol for students who identify as animals, and it does not allow disruptions at school, according to Superintendent Randy Guttenberg.

THE FACTS: A baseless rumor that students who dress up as animals are getting special treatment in a Wisconsin school district is circulating widely online this week after a conservative radio host said shed received an email about the issue last month.

Vicki McKenna, who hosts a show on a Madison AM radio station, said on a March 17 podcast that a she received an email from a grandparent of students in the Waunakee Community School District saying the students were being told to normalize the behavior of classmates who preferred to dress and act like animals.

The Furries can choose whether they want to speak in class or not, read part of the purported email, shared onscreen in a video version of the podcast hosted by a University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, professor. The Furrys are allowed to dress in their choice of furry costumes. The Furries can choose not to run in gym class but instead sit at the feet of their teacher and lick their paws. Barking hissing and similar animal noises are common place in the hallways at the schools.

The claim is completely false, according to Guttenberg, who clarified in an email to The Associated Press that the Waunakee Community School District does not have protocols for Furries, nor do we allow disruptions in our school and classrooms.

McKenna did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

The bogus claim comes as lawmakers and political candidates have shared similar misinformation about student furries in Michigan, Nebraska and other Wisconsin school districts amid the culture wars and legislative action involving gender identification in schools.

Social media comments claiming students who identify as animals are being allowed to use the restrooms incorrectly in Wisconsins Denmark School District, Green Bay Area Public School District and Pulaski School District are unfounded, administrators in those districts told the AP.

Craig Janssen, a school board candidate in Denmark School District southeast of Green Bay, advanced the false narrative with a statement on his campaign website about bodily excretion nonsense that would cause your jaw to drop happening in local schools.

District Administrator Luke Goral said his staff investigated a rumor that a student urinated on the floor of a school restroom and found no evidence to support it. He said none of the staff in the district have reported students causing a disruption by behaving like animals on campus.

Residents in Denmark School District were voting for candidates in local school board elections on Tuesday. Janssen, who is on the ballot, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Goral said he was aware of misinformation about furries in schools spreading in other districts in Wisconsin before it reached his district.

About six months ago, there were rumors in Seymour, there were rumors in Green Bay, and now I guess its just our turn, Goral said in a phone interview. If anyone is doing things that are causing a disruption to the learning environment or doing anything as far as using the bathrooms inappropriately, it will be addressed as any other situation will be addressed.

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BURLINGTON  A new approach by city leaders to examining the future of Echo Lake started Tuesday with a guided tour of the troubled manmade lake.

Members of the newly appointed Echo Lake Master Plan Steering Committee began their work by walking along the lakeshore and envisioning the potential for either saving the lake or redeveloping the site.

By summer, the group hopes to formulate competing plans to present to the Burlington City Council  and possibly to voters for a public referendum on the issue.

Appointed by Mayor Jeannie Hefty, the nine-member volunteer panel includes a mix of appointees who favor removing the lake and others who want to preserve it. City staff and consultants guiding the discussion urged committee members Tuesday to set aside their personal preferences and to embrace the assignment of devising blueprints for both scenarios.

Its going to be multiple options throughout the process, consultant Chris Silewski told the group.

Whether the lake is maintained or drained and replaced by a restored White River, the city will have the option  depending how much it wants to spend  of tweaking the estimated 70-acre site as a place for public recreation and enjoyment.

The Burlington Park Board voted in January to recommend draining the lake so that the White River can resume flowing naturally through the community.

Ideas exchanged

Gathered along the shore at Echo Lake, committee members tossed around ideas for such improvements as boat launches and riverside pedestrian paths. Some, however, also voiced uncertainty about what lies within the range of possibilities.

How do we dream big out here? committee member Beth Reetz said.

City Public Works Director Peter Riggs said the important work at this stage is identifying what the committee thinks the public would want in a new recreation site built around a new riverfront or a retooled lakefront.

We can find space to accomplish that vision, Riggs said.

Added Silewski: Engineers can make almost anything work.

Echo Lake was created in the 1800s when entrepreneurs erected a dam on the White River as a source of power for a mill. The impoundment later became popular for outdoor recreation, although it has suffered from years of pollution and neglect.

State regulators have determined that the city-owned dam no longer meets safety standards. As a result, the city must either expand and upgrade the dam, or remove it and allow the impoundment to drain back into the White River.

Consultants have estimated that salvaging Echo Lake would cost more than $5 million, while removing the dam and draining the lake would cost less, with estimates ranging from $1.1 million to $2 million.

New features like boardwalks or fishing piers would require additional investment to be determined separately.

Referendum a possibility

City officials, considering holding an advisory referendum in November, have enlisted the consulting firm Ayres Associates Inc. to present more detailed concepts built around the competing ideas of keeping Echo Lake or restoring the White River.

The steering committee empaneled to help in the process includes, in addition to Reetz, Clay Brandt, Cassie Quist, Peter DeSmidt, Mary Lynch, Renee Richter, A.J. Schkeryantz, Russ Egan and Paul Haynes.

Haynes, a former Burlington Park Board president, was earlier omitted by city officials from the groups membership list.

Quist was absent from Tuesdays meeting.

At the first meeting, the appointees learned that they will be called together about six times before finalizing their concepts in June.

Committee members raised questions about the method for dredging the polluted lake if necessary, for evaluating the quality of soil under the lake, and for determining what sort of development can occur if the lake is drained.

Those are all really good questions, Silewski said. Were going to back into those.

Collection: Burlington charts a path toward tough decisions on its beloved Echo Lake Follow along as we chronicle the steps that Burlington has taken so far while confronting the dilemma of either investing millions to save Ech

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CALEDONIA  Yes, Kwik Trip is interested in the DeRango The Pizza King property at 4621 Six Mile Road. No, the pizza and steak restaurant wont be closing anytime soon.

Tony DeRango said he and the restaurant he owns get up to six calls a day from loyal customers asking when they are closing for good because of rumors circulating that The Pizza King is going to close.

He aimed to set the record straight with a call to The Journal Times this week.

There is a deal in the works. But, they (Kwik Trip) have to go through all the proper procedures, for lack of a proper term, he said.

Before his beloved restaurant could be replaced by a gas station, he said the:

Department of Transportation would have to approve changes.

Department of Natural Resources would need to sign off.

Village of Caledonia itself would have to give approval.

The Pizza King, as a result, will be reigning for at least a while more.

Nothing is for sure regarding the sale, but for the time being it is still business as usual at The Pizza King, DeRango said.

He added that even if the property is sold, he would still be in business on Racines north side at 1439 N. Main Street, the location of DeRangos fathers original business now known as DeRango The Pizza King & Premium Chocolates.

Im not retiring by any means, said DeRango, a 1984 St. Catherines High School graduate.

The dining room of the Six Mile Road business, however, remains closed; food is only available through carryout and delivery right now. That has nothing to do with the potential sale, but rather an ongoing staff shortage, DeRango said.

Im still looking for staff, he said. To current and new staff, anyone who works until the locations last day (whenever that may be) will receive a bonus, DeRango has promised.

Of the potential of Kwik Trip moving in, he said: I think its a good fit for the area. A well-run, Wisconsin-based company.

Kwik Trip did not reply to requests for comment on this report before press time Tuesday.

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The former state Supreme Court justice leading Wisconsins GOP-ordered review into the 2020 election attended a Donald Trump-hosted event on Tuesday that largely focused on unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud  which continue to fuel Republican scrutiny of the presidential election that Trump lost more than 17 months ago.

Michael Gableman, who was hired by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, last year to lead the review at a cost of $676,000 in taxpayer funds, was one of several Trump supporters to attend the meeting at the former presidents Mar-a-Lago resort, where he was met with applause from the crowd and praise from Trump, The Washington Post reported.

Michael, youve been unbelievable, Trump told Gableman, according to the Post.

The event served as the premiere of a film called Rigged: The Zuckerberg Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump by Trump supporter and Citizens United President David Bossie. The 42-minute film alleges Facebook pumped money into largely Democratic communities to drive up the vote for President Joe Biden.

The Mark Zuckerberg-funded Center for Tech and Civic Life provided $8.8 million to the cities of Milwaukee, Madison, Racine, Kenosha and Green Bay to help cover the cost of conducting an election during a pandemic. While the grants, which have become a focal point of Gablemans review, went to about 214 municipalities, including many that went for Trump, the bulk of the money went to the states five largest cities, which turned out strongly for Biden. Multiple courts have ruled the grants were legal. The grants were also not denied to any municipalities that requested them.

A recount, court decisions and multiple reviews have affirmed that Biden defeated Trump in Wisconsin by almost 21,000 votes. Only 24 people out of nearly 3.3 million who cast ballots have been charged with election fraud in Wisconsin.

Despite that, Gableman earlier this year suggested the Legislature decertify the 2020 results, which experts and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have described as a legal and constitutional impossibility. He also called for the elimination and dismantling of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, based largely on guidance the agency provided in 2020 to not send poll workers to nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Wisconsin State Journal review found that Gablemans interim report falsely claimed nursing homes in Dane and Milwaukee counties had 100% voter turnout in 2020 despite a number of them being incompetent to vote. In fact, the newspaper found, the percentage of registered voters who cast ballots in all but one Dane County facility ranged from 42% to 91%. Gableman insinuated that malign actors had filled out ballots on behalf of nursing home residents, even though there is no evidence of widespread fraud.

District attorneys in three counties have already declined to file charges against members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission related to the agencys decision in a public meeting to waive laws related to absentee voting in nursing homes in the 2020 election.

Gablemans team did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

While Vos has also made claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, he has adamantly opposed both decertifying the election and dismantling the elections commission.

After extending Gablemans contract through the end of April, Vos later said he was considering rescinding subpoenas issued by the former justice so that a Republican attorney general if elected in November could file criminal charges against the subpoenaed individuals, though he did not provide specifics on what charges could be pursued.

Backing off on subpoenas could drastically shorten the ongoing review. The new contract maintains Gablemans existing budget, but does allow for the possibility of added funds to cover the costs of legal battles related to the probe.

Meanwhile, Waukesha County Circuit Judge Ralph Ramirez has scheduled a July 11 hearing in a case to decide if Gableman has the authority to demand that the mayors of the states five largest cities and other officials be jailed for not cooperating with his subpoenas. Several mayors, including Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, have said they are willing to meet with Gableman, but not behind closed doors.

Gableman has issued subpoenas to local and state election officials, the mayors of the states five largest cities and two companies that make vote-counting systems, Election Systems & Software and Dominion Voting Systems. Many of the subpoenaed parties have rejected Gablemans requests for in-person meetings or documents, while the former state Supreme Court justice has also withdrawn some requests, including one filed with immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera Action.

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PLEASANT PRAIRIE  Voters approved a $1.6 million referendum that would allow the village to increase its tax levy by $1.6 million to hire 16 new public safety employees, firefighters and police officers, next year.

On Tuesday night, the public safety referendum was favored 2,370 to 2,199, according to completed, but unofficial, vote tallies. The polling is considered unofficial until a canvass of the votes on Friday.

The referendum asked village voters to exceed the levy limit to fund the hiring of four police officers and 12 fire-medics. Currently serving the village are 36 sworn police officers and 25 full-time fire-medics.

Pleasant Prairie Fire Chief Craig Roepke Pleasant Prairie Fire Chief Craig Roepke stands next to the pump controls on a fire engine. Since 2010, fire and rescue service calls have inc

I think its really going to help the community. Were very helpful and grateful and happy that it passed, said Village Fire Chief Craig Roepke late Tuesday. Roepke said that he was encouraged by the previous surveys that indicated that residents wanted to maintain the public safety services they have that are part of the quality of life they experience in village.

Pleasant Prairie Police Chief David Smetana Pleasant Prairie Police Chief David Smetana says the department would need to take a hard look at how it would redistribute services among e

I was encouraged by the last numbers that I saw (votes). As the representative of half of the public safety element of Pleasant Prairie I can tell you Im proud of the officers and proud of the effort we put forth in the referendum. I am grateful for the appreciation and support from the community, said Police Chief David Smetana, also cautiously optimistic of the results.

Smetana credited voters for educating themselves about the referendum.

We tried to reach as many people as possible because what we really wanted was an educated group of voters to make that decision, he said. We tried to be as transparent as we could through the entire process  Im just grateful for the support of the community.

By state law, the village is limited to a 2.57% increase to the tax levy in 2023, which would put the levy at $14,619,727 for next year. However, the referendum calls for a 10.94% increase, or $1.6 million, on that levy, which would result in a total levy of $16,219,727 for next year. The referendum would include an increase of $1.6 million on the levy each fiscal year.

Because a majority of village voters approved the referendum, residential and commercial property taxpayers will see an estimated increase of $42 per year on their tax bill  or approximately $3.50 per month for every $100,000 of property value, starting next year.

The village draws upon 50% residential and 50% commercial properties for its tax base to support the levy. With referendum, it is no different. Owners of commercial and residential properties are paying an equal share.

Since 2010, fire and rescue service calls have increased by 62 percent. Many of them have been patient assists, which involve residents over the age of 65 whove experienced falls or have needed help with other issues.

Over the last decade, the number of calls police officers have responded to has increased by 7 percent; and, broken down to the last two years, by 12.5 percent, according to police department data.

Williamson vs Kedrow

In the only contested race in the village, newcomer James Kedrow unseated one-term incumbent Brock Williamson, a local landscape architect and project manager, for the Village Board Trustee No. 4 seat by a vote of 2,093 to 1,800. A retired physicians assistant and U.S. Army veteran, Kedrow has said he wanted to give voters a choice for a conservative candidate.

I hope to do the best I can for the citizens of Pleasant Prairie  to make the village a beautiful place they continue living in," Kedrow said.

In addition, Kedrow has said he wants improved transparency, ensuring taxes are spent wisely and to promote individual freedom and liberty.

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Illicit fentanyl overdoses are the leading cause of death for individuals aged 18 to 45. It kills more people in this age bracket than car accidents, COVID-19, or heart disease.

In the last year, Kenosha County had 48 fentanyl-related deaths, and Racine County had 68 fentanyl-related deaths. It doesnt have to be this way. If we work together, we can end illicit fentanyl deaths.

Recently, our community has seen a dramatic increase in drug overdose deaths from this illicit substance. In Kenosha County, local police have reported an increase in drug overdoses, most commonly from heroin laced with fentanyl. It is imperative that we are bringing awareness to this issue and stopping the flow of illicit fentanyl from entering our community. This is a top priority of mine.

Since 2019, illicit fentanyl has become dramatically more prevalent across the United States. In a recent 12-month period, 64,000 Americans died from a fentanyl related substance overdose. This illicit substance is not to be confused with fentanyl that can be prescribed at the doctors office. According to the Drug Enforcement Agency, China and Mexico are the primary source countries for creating and trafficking synthetic fentanyl into the United States. Synthetic fentanyl is uniquely dangerous because it takes many different forms  it can be a liquid or a powder. This deadly, illicit substance can be dropped onto paper, put into candies, water bottles, nasal sprays, eye drops, and anything else you can think of. Smugglers can put illicit fentanyl in gas tanks, tires, transmissions, if you can think of it  it has been tried.

The illicit fentanyl coming into our community serves a significant purpose for drug dealers. By adding this synthetic powder into different substances, the drugs become highly addictive. This can help increase a dealers profit by encouraging users to come back and purchase more. These criminal acts must be stopped.

A lethal dose of fentanyl is just two milligrams. That barely covers Abraham Lincolns face on a penny. The Drug Enforcement Administration seized 15,000 pounds of illicit fentanyl last year. This is enough to kill every American four times over. Of major concern right now is illicit fentanyl killing first-time users. This synthetic opioid has often been found in commonly used substances like Adderall and marijuana, as well as cocaine and heroin. As a result, the drugs being purchased are becoming more addictive and deadly.

To shine a light on the increase in overdose deaths in our community, I recently held a roundtable discussion in Southeast Wisconsin with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas Agency, the Racine County Sheriff, local prosecutors, and local advocates to discuss this ongoing crisis. It was clear from our discussion how devastating illicit fentanyl can be to our communities.

Three key steps to stop illicit fentanyl overdose deaths include securing the southern border, funding local law enforcement, and making fentanyl related substances a permanent Schedule I drug. Doing so would increase penalties and enforcement of illicit fentanyl. This gives law enforcement the tools they need to arrest drug dealers and help keep this illicit substance away from young adults.

We must stop illicit fentanyl from coming into our community. The reality of fentanyl is shocking, particularly as too many victims never know they are even taking it. I will continue to work with partners at the local, state, and federal level to raise awareness of this deadly substance and keep our communities and young adults safe.

Bryan Steil, R-Wis., is the U.S. representative for the First Congressional District.

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*This tribune was originally published in French in Le Monde dated 30/3/2022

After unsuccessfully and repeatedly calling on Russian President Putin to end this deadly conflict and respect the United Nations Charter, Antonio Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations (SG), seems to have disappeared from the radar. Heads of State talk to Putin, heads of State visit Ukraine, and the SG stays in his office in New York far from the fighting and the images.

In front of Putin, who has long decided on this war and this invasion and has prepared his people to believe all the lies he utters, all efforts seem to remain vain. The resolutions of the Security Council of the United Nations are blocked by the Russian veto, those of the General Assembly of the United Nations, not legally binding, are not respected by Russia.

Despite his limited room for manoeuvre, it is urgent that the Secretary-General intervene with force and use what remains of power in the United Nations to impose an immediate ceasefire and the opening of negotiations, taking into account the right of people to self-determination (UN Charter, Article 1, paragraph 2). He may not succeed, but trying is part of his responsibilities and a moral obligation.

It is essential that he does not content himself with speeches but acts on all fronts. But where is he? Has he developed with his teams a strategy of influence, in support of the discussions he should have with all countries, on solutions acceptable to both parties? Has he appointed envoys to discuss with opinion leaders, politicians, and civil society on all continents? Maybe he did, we dont know

Global impacts

And yet apart from the terrible price paid by Ukraine and Russias non-respect for human rights and other conventions, all countries and especially the poorest, some of whom abstained at the time of the vote at the General Assembly, will suffer from what is happening today. The increase in the price of wheat and other cereals, energy, certain metals, added to the consequences of climate change, will have a major impact on many countries, particularly the poorest ones. It is likely that food riots such as those we have experienced in the past will break out in several countries, increasing the suffering of populations and reinforcing authoritarian regimes. This conflict is not only a European war, it will have consequences all over the world. It is the role of the United Nations (its secretariat and its specialized agencies: WHO, FAO, UNHCR, etc.) to be a tool for peace, influence, and information, as set out in the United Nations Charter signed in 1945 and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights signed in 1948.

The United Nations is not only there to repair the damage of war, but it also exists to develop political solutions with the Member States and to defend the people. Has the UN become a politically neutralized organization? Is it only good for humanitarian issues: assessing the damage, taking care of the victims, sending equipment, finding funding with no means to act on the causes-? That seems to be the case today. The humanitarian component is deployed, often effectively, in Ukraine and the surrounding countries (WHO, UNHCR, UNDP, etc.) but the UN is no longer using it to advance the political agenda.

In this regard, it is interesting to note that most UN agencies involved in Ukraine carefully avoid using the word war and to name the aggressor: the Russian Federation. An attitude denounced by some media but which persists despite the clarification of the Secretary-General. Last example: on March 17, the Director-General of the WHO did not mention the word Russian Federation once during his remarks on Ukraine before the Security Council. Naming what is happening in the most objective way possible is one of the primary tasks of the secretariat, is it in the process of capitulating in front of Russia?

Acceptable solution

Mr. Secretary General, wake up The United Nations must mobilize around a strategy that gives priority to policy, information (countering fake information), and the mobilization of all countries in favor of a negotiated solution acceptable to Ukraine, the invaded country. All the staff, wherever they are, can and must work for a just peace, all means must be used. Be present on all fronts, unify the secretariat and all agencies in the same fight for peace, communicate what you know about the situation, the fake news, the atrocities, and make proposals that could lead to fair negotiations  for example with the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) and other regional organizations  support the efforts of the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) in defense of the Geneva Conventions and for the respect of humanitarian law, support the current legal battles at the International Court of Justice. Get involved politically!

Avoiding a global disorder that will lead to more suffering is a priority. This conflict opens a particularly dangerous chapter in international relations and may mark the end of the United Nations.

Mr. Secretary-General, use the weapons of courage, will, intelligence and ethics in the face of the greatest crisis the world has known since the end of the USSR. We cant wait any longer!
1. Yes. Raising the bar for future developments will boost the citys housing market.

2. Yes. It will help in newer areas, but more needs to be done to change Killeens image.

3. No. The new standards will just slow down homebuilding and drive away developers.

4.No. The ordinance will do little more than drive up the price of new homes in the city.

5. Unsure. Its hard to say what the effect will be until they have been in place for a while.

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KEARNEY  Kearney Public Schools Board of Education member Drew Blessing has announced his campaign for re-election.

During his four years on the Kearney Public School Board he has played a role in increasing staff hourly pay, increasing teacher family health insurance contributions, expanding alternative education at the Hanny Arram Center for Success, prioritizing in-person learning and lowering the total property tax levy.

No one could have predicted what we would encounter over the last four years. Im thankful for all of those moments that polished me as a member of the board and a leader in our community. Im proud of the impact weve had on improving our schools for students, teachers, and staff and I look forward to continuing that work through a second term, Blessing said.

Blessing grew up in Ogallala, attended Chadron State College and moved to Kearney more than a decade ago. He is married with one child and works as a software engineer.

Blessing finds serving on the school board as his way to give back to his community.

I have a long history of working in education. When I initially moved to Kearney I worked at Educational Service Unit 10. At ESU 10 I provided technology services and support to schools in south-central and western Nebraska. Since then Ive volunteered with several community organizations that teach kids about technology. All of these experiences helped form my understanding that our community needs and thrives because of a robust public education, said Blessing in a press release.

During the next four years and beyond, Blessing sees a number of important issues he wants to address. First is ensuring student success through quality education. Recently, the KPS Board adopted a new math curriculum and a new reading curriculum.

In the future, Blessing believes the board should continue expanding educational opportunities such as alternative education; high ability learner programs; and college, career and trade readiness opportunities at the high school.

The second issue is mental health access for teachers, staff members and students. Blessing understands that teachers have more on their plates than ever before and students face challenges outside the classroom that can affect their ability to learn. He seeks to support all students, teachers and staff and provide resources to improve mental health.

Finally, property tax and school funding continue to be a challenge in Nebraska. Blessing believes some relief can be found through collaboration with schools, the Legislature and the governor. He understands the importance of shifting the burden away from property tax while retaining local control and ensuring continued strong school funding.

I am proud of the education our schools provide and know we can make our schools even better. I humbly ask for your support for re-election, he said.

Learn more about Blessing and his campaign at DrewBlessing.com.
KEARNEY  Kansas City-based glass artist Tyler Kimball will visit the University of Nebraska at Kearney next week to conduct demonstrations for UNK students and the public.

Kimballs demonstrations are scheduled for 3:35-5:30 p.m. Monday, 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Tuesday and 5-8 p.m. Tuesday in the UNK glass studio, located in Room 306B inside the Fine Arts Building.

He will also present a public lecture 3:30 p.m. Tuesday in the Fine Arts Building Room 312. All events are free to attend.

Glass has been Kimballs main medium since 1999. He worked as a glass artist in Seattle and Portland, Oregon, before returning to his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri, where he owns and operates Monarch Glass Studio.

His work has been displayed in galleries and museums internationally, and he has public art installed across the country. Kimball has been invited to several colleges and institutions as a visiting artist, including the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, and Salem State University, where his work is part of the permanent collection.

Kimball works with transparency and line-play to achieve motion and pattern in his glass. He is always pushing the limits of color, pattern and shape.
KEARNEY - A Kearney pair were arrested for allegedly distributing and possessing drugs in Kearney after warrants were served Tuesday morning on their Kearney apartment.

Around 8:45 a.m. the Kearney Police Department along with the assistance of the Nebraska State Patrol and members of the Tri Cities Drug Enforcement Team (TRIDENT) executed two search warrants in Kearney for the distribution of methamphetamine. Search warrants were served at the basement apartment located at 3402 Ave. F, along with a storage unit, a KPD news release said.

Approximately three ounces of suspected methamphetamine was located along with prescription medications, marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms, items of drug paraphernalia, and other items consistent with drug distribution.

Christopher Poley, 41, was arrested on suspicion of three counts of possession of a controlled substance with the intent to deliver and four counts of possession of a controlled substance. Jessa Binder, 32, was arrested on suspicion of two counts of possession of a controlled substance.

Poley and Binder are both being held at the Buffalo County Jail.

This was an excellent job by the Criminal Investigations Bureau and TRIDENT Task Force to work as a team in the Kearney/Buffalo County area to help remove methamphetamine from the community and deter individuals from distributing controlled substances," said KPD Lt. Gabe Kowalek.

The TRIDENT Drug Task Force consists of officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Kearney Police Department, Buffalo County Sheriffs Office, Grand Island Police Department, Hastings Police Department, Hall County Sheriff's Office Adams County Sheriffs Office and the Nebraska State Patrol.
KEARNEY  City Manager Michael Morgan said a new enplanement record couldnt come at a better time for Kearney Regional Airport.

On Tuesday the city of Kearney announced 2,435 passengers flew to either Denver or Chicago, eclipsing the prior record for March, set in 2020 when 1,584 passengers flew from Kearney.

Tuesdays news is significant, Morgan said, because growing enplanement numbers reflect a successful airport as the federal Department of Transportation attempts to resolve the situation that could leave 29 cities served by Sky West Airlines without federally subsidized commuter air service. Sky West flies out of Kearney Regional Airport as United Express.

The airline announced in March its intent to drop Essential Air Service in Kearney, North Platte and Scottsbluff. Morgan said that 11 of the 29 airports involved in United Express attempt to drop its EAS routes are from Nebraska and Kansas.

Morgan said the EAS agreement contains a hold-in clause that requires United Express to fulfill requirements of its contract until it expires. Many of the cities that could be abandoned are asking DOT to extend the hold-in period. Doing so would help extend how long Kearney is served by federally subsidized flights and it also would buy cities and the DOT time to receive and evaluate proposals from airlines interested in taking over the service Sky West wants to drop.

Well be requesting an extension later this week, Morgan said. Kearneys current EAS contract expires on Aug. 31.

Sky Wests 90-day termination notice said it intends to eliminate EAS on or before June 10.

A nationwide shortage of pilots is the top reason Sky West has cited for dropping its service.

Various proposals to reduce the pilot shortage are being floated, Morgan said.

One would allow pilots to work until age 67, another proposal would allow student pilots to carry more student debt because their classes are so expensive. Other proposals involve rules about recruiting military pilots and work visas for foreign pilots.

Airlines with smaller aircraft, such as the 50-passenger jetliners flown by Sky West, have contended with chronic pilot shortages as their pilots migrate to larger aircraft with more popular routes and higher pay.

Citing Kearneys March enplanement record, Morgan encouraged residents to continue using the air service.

The success of the airport is very important to Kearney and surrounding communities, Morgan said.

U.S. Sens. Deb Fischer of Nebraska and Jerry Moran of Kansas have been assisting the Nebraska and Kansas cities seeking to find new airlines to take over their EAS service.

Sen. Fischers staff members have been very helpful. Were also working with a Kansas group, Morgan said. The mood still is positive because of the DOTs hold-in requirement.
GRAND ISLAND - Two pallets of tortillas were recovered by police Wednesday following a pursuit with a rental truck reported stolen in Grand Island.

At 3 a.m. Wednesday the owner of La Mexicana Tortilla Factory reported a 26-foot yellow Penske rental truck was stolen from outside of the business at 383 N. Pine St. in Grand Island. Multiple tortillas estimated at $3,000 were inside, a Grand Island Police Department news release said.

Around 8:20 a.m. the Nebraska State Patrol was notified that a Penske rental truck had fled an attempted traffic stop in Kearney with officers from the Buffalo County Sheriff's Office and Kearney Police Department. The truck entered Interstate 80 near Kearney and BCSO/KPD officers ended their efforts to stop the truck.

About five minutes later, a trooper tried to stop the truck on eastbound I-80 but the driver refused to stop, a NSP news release said. The trooper then began a pursuit.

The truck drove recklessly, weaving between lanes and leaving the roadway at times, the NSP news release said. During the pursuit, NSP dispatch learned that the truck had been reported stolen from Grand Island Wednesday.

The pursuit lasted about 20 minutes with speeds reaching up to 70 mph, the NSP release said.

Near the Alda I-80 interchange the truck entered the median and rolled onto its side. Troopers then took the driver, Tankika Beacham, 24, of Lincoln, into custody.

She was transported to CHI Health St. Francis in Grand Island where she was treated and released, and later taken to the Hall County Jail. Beacham was arrested on suspicion of flight to avoid arrest, willful reckless driving, possession of stolen property, driving under suspension, and an outstanding warrant from Lancaster County.

According to NSP, the rental truck contained two pallets of tortillas.
Sen. Steve Erdman's effort to call for a vote of the people on a proposed constitutional amendment to repeal the state income tax, the state sales tax and local property taxes while creating a new consumption tax to support state and local government failed to clear its first floor hurdle in the Legislature on Tuesday and disappeared from the agenda.

The bill (LR264CA), which also would eliminate the inheritance tax, was trapped on a 19-14 vote that left it six votes short of the 25 required to move on to second-stage floor consideration.

Erdman, who hails from Bayard in western Nebraska, argued that "Band-Aids will not fix the problem" of high taxes in the state, which he said are leading to people leaving Nebraska and exacerbating an ongoing workforce shortage.

"Our economy will explode" if that exodus continues and jobs remain unfilled, he said.

Most of the evening debate was confined to senators who endorsed the proposal and unfolded in front of supporters of the bill who filled the gallery in the legislative chamber's north balcony.

The consumption tax would apply only to purchases of new goods and led to some concerns about reduced revenue to support government functions and activities.

Sen. Tom Brandt of Plymouth questioned whether the change would "place local control at risk."

Sen. Mark Kolterman of Seward warned that the proposal was full of "a lot of unknowns."

At one point, Erdman said he hears people who are "more worried about those who collect and spend the taxes than the taxpayer."

"Change scares us," said Sen. Tom Brewer of Gordon, a supporter of the proposal, "but we can't continue and survive this (current tax challenge), especially in the agricultural sector."

Tuesday's vote represented a reduction in support for the dramatic change in tax policy; a similar bill received 23 votes for advancement in 2021.

If this year's proposal would have been approved, the final decision would have been left to voters in the 2022 general election, with legislative implementation following in 2023 and only the new consumption tax, along with excise taxes, in effect beginning Jan. 1, 2024.

When 40 representatives of special interests show up to oppose the bill at its public hearing, Brewer said, "we are on the right track."

"Anger about property taxes is what drives this proposal," Sen. Tom Briese of Albion said.

Reach the writer at 402-473-7248 or dwalton@journalstar.com. On Twitter @LJSdon
A special service came to Viroqua March 26-27  the Consulate of Mexico office in Milwaukee brought a mobile consulate office to the basement of Viroqua Methodist Church.

Daniela Casandra Castorena Sanchez, consul of documentation with the Consulate of Mexico office in Milwaukee, oversaw the operations of the mobile office. More than 200 people were served during the two-day event.

The mobile office provided identical services as those offered at the consulate office in Milwaukee. Those services include assistance with processing passports, ID cards, birth certificates and other documents.

The church basement was set up to include a welcome table, a waiting area, five stations where people had their photo and biometrics taken and fingerprints scanned, and one station to print passports and ID cards. At the final station, each persons paperwork was checked before the new documents were printed.

Sanchez said the entire process takes 30 minutes. She said the services offered are free; however, there is a charge to have the ID cards and passports printed to cover the cost of materials. The office was open from 9:30 a.m. to about 2:30 p.m. each day. Most people had appointments; those without appointments were also served.

A woman who was printing passports on March 27, said Mexico started issuing electronic passports in October 2021; the passports have a chip, which includes biometric information.

Sanchez said part of the consulates strategy with the mobile offices is to cover different areas of the state. The Consulate of Mexico office serves 53 counties in the south, north and east portions of Wisconsin and 12 counties in Michigans Upper Peninsula.

Most Mexicans are moving from Madison and Milwaukee, Sanchez said. She said it can be complicated for some people to travel to Milwaukee to access the services offered at the consulate office. Sanchez said there is a possibility that the mobile services office could return to Viroqua in 2023.

Sanchez said the consulate office in Milwaukee was established in 2016. (There are 50 consulate offices in the United States and one in Washington, D.C.) The first mobile services offices were in Madison and Green Bay; mobile consulate offices have also been offered in Beloit and Janesville. Four mobile consulate offices are offered each year.

The mobile consulate office came to Viroqua as a result of collaboration between McIntosh Memorial Library of Viroqua, Viroqua resident Gabriela Marvan and the consulate office in Milwaukee.

Connections between the library and the consulate office began in July of 2020, when Laci Sheldon, the librarys youth services director and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) advisor, asked Marvan, an artist originally from Cuernavaca, Mexico and the founder and U.S. director of the Mexican Folk Art Collective, to present a pinatas workshop for the library via Zoom.

In October 2020, Marvan had a Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) exhibit at VIVA Gallery in Viroqua. Marvan invited Sheldon to help set up the exhibit. Marvan also invited representatives from the Mexico Consulate in Milwaukee to visit her exhibit. Juan Ayala and Norma Sanchez Arellanes from the office came to Viroqua to see the exhibit on Oct. 1, 2020.

From there, the three-way collaboration grew. Representatives from the Mexico Consulate would attend Zoom folk art workshops offered by the library throughout 2021. The workshops featured Mexican Folk Art Collective artists, Sheldon as the host and Marvan as the translator.

Through the connection with the Consulate of Mexico office, Sheldon and Viroqua Library Director Trina Erickson were offered a box of Spanish language books and textbooks on general subjects. The librarians traveled to Milwaukee in May 2021 to express their gratitude and present a gift basket with items representing the Viroqua area. They met Norma Sanchez Arellanes, Karina Rodriguez, deputy consul, and Julian Adem, head consul.

Sheldon said its incredible for Viroqua to have a relationship with the Consulate of Mexico office. Mayor Karen Mischel said the relationship with the office is the culmination of work she has done since taking office in 2018 to make the city a welcoming and safe place.

To have this collaboration (is incredible), said Mischel. The mobile consulate office has been in cities much bigger than us. To have such a great service (come to Viroqua), as outgoing mayor, it makes me feel good we have people in place to continue (the collaboration).

Sheldon said it was an honor to meet Consul Adem in May of last year, and she appreciated having the mobile consulate services come to Viroqua.

The Consulado de Mexico en Milwaukee ensures equal access to their resources by bringing their Mobile Consulate to areas across the state, Sheldon said. Similarly, librarians have the responsibility to ensure equal access to library services. Both of our organizations embrace inclusivity by respecting the uniqueness of an individuals agency, and their lawful rights, which include privacy and access to public services. It is an honor to uphold these values in alliance with the Consulado de Mexico en Milwaukee.

Erickson said the collaboration with the Consulate of Mexico office fulfills the librarys mission to make the library welcoming. This relationship has changed me ... Im excited to be on this journey.

Angela Cina can be reached at angie.cina@lee.net.

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PERSI will be the subject of the next genealogy class, to be held at the museum on Thursday, April 14, at 10 a.m. What is PERSI, you ask? The letters stand for Periodical (PER) Source (S) Index (I). Periodicals are magazines, journals, newsletters, etc., that are produced periodically, such as once a week, twice a month, or four times a year. PERSI helps you to find genealogy and local history articles on topics that you are interested in from a wide variety of periodicals.

This index is produced by the staff of The Genealogy Center of the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Our own Vernon County Historical Society newsletter is collected by The Genealogy Center as one of their periodicals. You can view PERSI online from the following website: https://www.genealogycenter.info/persi/

The Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library describes itself as the second largest family research center in the United States. Visitors from across the country and around the world rely on the Genealogy Center for its international collection of physical resources; free access to numerous databases; and knowledgeable staff.

Learn more about how to use PERSI and what you can find out about your own family from it by attending the genealogy class at the museum on Thursday, April 14, at 10 a.m. Teacher Karen Sherry will lead this class. All genealogy classes are $5 for non-members, and free for members of the Vernon County Historical Society. New students are always welcome.

Looking ahead to next month, the museum is pleased to announce that it will host the Wisconsin Historical Societys traveling exhibit, Great Lakes Small Streams: How Water Shapes Wisconsin, from May 2 to 27. The Great Lakes region is home to one of the largest freshwater resources on the planet. That water shapes the landscape, history, and communities of our state. This exhibit explores our states long relationship with water and the impact we have had on our vast waterways. Our museums own Vernon County water exhibit, Drops of Water, continues to be on display.

The museum is now on its springtime hours. For the months of April and May, well be open to the public from Monday through Friday, noon to 4 p.m., or by appointment. To make an appointment, contact us at 608-637-7396, or museum@vernoncountyhistory.org.

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Big telecommunications companies, including Frontier and AT&T, are asking the state for millions in the most recent round of broadband expansion grants, according to the list of applications submitted to the Wisconsin Public Service Commission.

Many of these companies have already received tens of millions from federal programs to improve service in Wisconsin and across the country. Critics are wary of giving them more public cash.

My fear is that companies like Frontier, Charter and AT&T will simply use this money to substitute for their existing capital expenses, Barry Orton, a professor emeritus of telecommunications at the UW-Madison, wrote in an email. As they have multiple times in the past, they could cherry-pick service areas based on revenue expectations, leaving their less lucrative Wisconsin customers unserved and underserved yet again.

Past federal programs like the FCCs Connect America Fund distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to large telecommunications companies with the intention of upgrading service in areas without high-speed internet. But the programs were poorly designed and poorly enforced, said Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative, a Minnesota-based think tank that aids communities telecommunications efforts.

For example, the Connect America Fund only required that projects provide internet speeds of 10 megabits per second of download speed and 1 megabit per second of upload speed, a standard that has quickly become obsolete.

Burying fiberoptic lines in the ground for high-speed internet is expensive, and national companies have little financial incentive to make that investment in rural areas with few potential customers. Experts like Orton and Mitchell accuse those big telecommunications companies of using the federal funds in more populous profitable areas rather than rural ones, saying the federal grant programs were too lax.

In the current grant round in Wisconsin, Frontier, which declared bankruptcy in 2020 and is being sued by the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive business practices, is asking for more than $20 million. The company has already received nearly $185 million from the federal government to upgrade its internet service in Wisconsin.

Frontier is widely reviled for providing poor service. It finishes near the bottom of a ratings survey of telecommunications companies by Consumer Reports, and the Better Business Bureau gives the company a grade of F.

It applied for nearly $35 million from the state in a grant round last year, but received nothing.

Frontier emerged from bankruptcy as a new company with a new leadership team committed to building critical digital infrastructure across the country, company spokesperson Brigid Smith wrote in an email. Were focused on supporting a digital society, closing the digital divide, and working toward a more sustainable environment.

AT&T, which has received more than $45 million from the federal government to improve broadband in Wisconsin, asked for nearly $10 million from the state in this round of grants.

AT&T has met the obligations in these programs, including expanding service in underserved areas and (has) committed to work to close the digital divide, company spokesperson Jim Greer wrote in an email.

Charter/Spectrum asked the state of Wisconsin for nearly $200 million in grants, the largest request this round. The company has received more than $160 million in federal funds for internet projects in Wisconsin. It received about $1 million in state grants in the past two years, committing to spend about $3 million in its own funds on those projects.

The fact is we have a very solid track record of keeping our promises on state broadband grants in Wisconsin, company spokesperson Kim Haas wrote in an email.

TDS, which has received nearly $80 million from the federal government for internet projects in Wisconsin, asked for more than $22 million from the state.

TDS has leveraged federal funding, grants, and invested millions in capital to improve internet access to nearly 50,000 rural, hard-to-serve, addresses over the last 10 years alone, company spokesperson Missy Kellor wrote in an email. We are expanding broadband access to more than 35,000 rural addresses in Wisconsin.

In La Crosse County, Coon Valley Farmers Telephone Company asked the state for about $1.2 million, and pledged an equal match, to provide high-speed internet via fiberoptic cable to one business and 255 residences in Bangor and in the town of Leon in Monroe County.

Charter/Spectrum asked for nearly $9 million and pledged to spend about $500,000 for a project that would bring high-speed internet to three businesses and 487 residences in Holland, Farmington and Barre.

Despite all the federal money thats already been distributed, much work still needs to be done to bring high-speed internet to the entire state, said Gail Huycke, a community development outreach specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension who focuses on broadband expansion.

Unfortunately, the infrastructure expectations were not very high when a lot of the past dollars were distributed, she noted in an email. Although companies met the requirements laid out at the time they received funding, that infrastructure may no longer be viable. I have worked with numerous communities where large sums of (federal funds) were utilized but the service is now failing, and it needs to be replaced.

Last year, Wisconsin PSC chair Rebecca Cameron Valcq told the state legislatures budget committee that nearly 400,000 households in the state, most of them rural, still lack access to high-speed internet access. At the time, Valcq estimated the cost of bringing it to all of them could be about $700 million.

The state of Wisconsin has tried to fill the gap by increasing the funds it puts towards broadband expansion grants the past few years. To date, the state has awarded about $178 million in broadband expansion grants, according to the PSC. About $158 million of that has come during Democratic Gov. Tony Evers tenure. The current state budget funds an additional $129 million in grants over the next two years.

For this most recent, $100-million round of broadband expansion grants, the state received nearly $500 million in requests, the PSC announced.

The grants are awarded based on several criteria, including whether a project is in an area unserved or underserved by internet providers, PSC spokesperson Jerel Ballard said.

The PSC also takes into account things like scalability, impact, matching funds, applicant capacity and performance, service affordability, economic development and public-private partnership, Ballard added.

In the previous round of state broadband expansion grants announced last October, the big telecommunications companies got little to nothing.

Compared to the large national companies, smaller, local phone companies and co-ops have generally done a decent job getting homes and businesses connected to high-speed internet, Mitchell said.

And small carriers and co-ops are often the ones filling the community gaps where large carriers have chosen not to go, Huycke noted.

This round of grant winners will be announced in early summer, PSC spokesman Matthew Sweeney said.

The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported, investigative journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin. For more visit thebadgerproject.org. This story was funded in part by a grant from the La Crosse Community Foundation.

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MADISON  A total of 54 grade or middle school student spellers competed this year in the annual Wisconsins Badger State Spelling Bee competition held last Saturday at Madison Area Technical Colleges Mitby Theatre.

Among the statewide entrants in the event were three representing the La Crosse area Cooperative Educational Service Agency (CESA) District 4: Harmanpreet Kaur Virk of Holmen, Lewis Go of La Crosse, and Gowri Prakash of Onalaska, who won the CESA 4 district spelling bee finals on February 10.

This years state spelling bee was back to an in-person staged event after last years competition was held viaonline virtual with students spelling words from their computer at home.

Lewis Go, an eighth-grader from Aquinas Middle School who previously competed in the state contest in 2020 as a student at St. Patrick Elementary School, lost out in round three last weekend placing 41st; and immediately after, Gowri Prakash incorrectly spelled environs in the third round. He is a seventh-grader at Onalaska Middle School.

The last standing area entrant, Harmanpreet Kaur Virk, 11, a sixth-grade student at Holmen Middle School, lost in round four after incorrectly spelling osmosis. Her sisters previously competed in the state spelling bee: Simran in 2020, and Harsimranpreet came in fourth place in 2019.

Additionally, nearby entrant Maria Gonzalez of Melrose, an eighth-grader from Melrose-Mindoro School, came in 52nd place in the 2022 state spelling bee after misspelling millionaire in round two. She is the daughter of Jill Kramer and Carlos Gonzalez.

Unable to compete in Madison was scheduled entrant Maisie McKinney of West Salem, an eighth-grade student at Coulee Christian School. Her older brother Kieran Ryan McKinney competed in the national spelling bee in 2017, 2018, and 2019.

Winning the state spelling bee for the fourth consecutive year was Maya Jean Jadhav, 13, of Fitchburg who will advance to the Scripps National Spelling Bee, May 31 to June 2, in National Harbor, Maryland. Coming in second place after two vocabulary rounds and 22 spelling rounds was Aiden Devima Wijeyakulasuriya, 11, of Middleton, who is the reigning Madison spelling bee champion.

Directing the state spelling bee for the first time was freelance newspaper and magazine reporter Kirsten Adshead who succeeded Wisconsin State Journal reporter Gayle Worland, who organized the city and state spelling bee events since 2019.

Returning for the 44th time as on-stage spelling bee announcer was La Crosse radio show producer and news reporter Bradley G. Williams. The Prairie du Chien native won the state spelling bee on May 3, 1969, after correctly spelling grisaille and lamprey.

He would later lose in the fourth round in the 1969 Scripps National Spelling Bee held in Washington, D.C.

The Wisconsin State Journal has sponsored the state spelling bee since 1949. Joanne Marie Lagatta of Clintonville won the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 1991 and she remains as the only student from Wisconsin to win the national contest.

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A group of Central High School students on Monday presented a petition to the La Crosse Board of Education, advocating to keep school resources officers in the district.

The four students stated that more than 300 people have signed a petition in support of SROs, which started after multiple threats at the high school this year and what they say is an increase in vandalism and fights.

Kids need safety in schools and as they have been abandoned by the school board, we need to take action in order to keep every child safe when entering the buildings, said student Adam Manka.

In 2020, the school board voted to pare down and eventually phase out its SRO program, reducing the amount of officers present in schools this year from five to three, and down to two starting next school year.

This decision came after a review of the program which showed marginalized students and students of color were disproportionately and negatively impacted by the presence of police in schools, and that SROs contributed to the school-to-prison pipeline.

The students on Monday stated that a bathroom at Central High School is currently shut down due to rampant vandalism, and graffiti is common throughout the building. One student said he hears and sees fights or violence every day. Manka said instances like these are more common this year than in the past.

Central junior Kaden Young said that after a January bomb threat that resulted in an evacuation, he wondered how much the school took safety seriously.

I can speak for almost any student who was there that day when I say the emotions, the concern, the fear that was felt that day was enormous, Young said. He said the communication from the school in the aftermath felt like a copy and paste from past incidents.

Some of the students argued that the removal of SROs was part of an agenda that began the summer of 2020, when there was massive outcry around the nation over racism and police brutality.

Its come to a point where students have to advocate for themselves, as a few members of the school board have been evading this issue since we started, Manka said.

The students spoke during a public hearing on Monday and no action or discussion was taken by the board.

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Calculating the Costs: Reparations Task Force Approves Expert Team to Determine Compensation

A day after the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for African Americans decided who would be eligible for compensation, the nine-member panel approved a framework for calculating how much should be paid  and for which offenses  to individuals who are Black descendants of enslaved people in the United States.

The task force voted 8-0 to consider a blueprint of 13 harms, titled Model 2: State Specific Harms/Atrocities Framework, presented by an expert team it appointed.

The Task Force will give us some directions and what to pursue to use this framework to figure out a procedure to have calculations, said Dr. Kaycea Campbell, a member of the expert team. (It) will allow us to identify specific atrocities or harms for which California should compensate.

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The expert panel reported that a conservative estimate of two million African Americans in California have ancestors who were enslaved in the United States. According to the US 2020, there are about 2.6 million Black Californians in a state that has a total population of nearly 40 million residents.

The expert team identified 13 categories that would be the methodology and procedure to calculate damages to determine what constitutes harms and atrocities, Campbell said.

Those harms include unjust property taking by eminent domain, intellectual property deprivation; homelessness; unwarranted police violence; segregated education; denial of representation on estate commissions; and housing discrimination; labor discrimination; environmental harm; mass incarceration; and sentencing; public health harms; transgenerational effects; among others.

The inflictions are prioritized to establish the case for compensation, with specificity to California, based on evidence gathered during witness testimonies over a course of nine months.

The list is in no way final, can be expanded, and can be shrunk, Campbell told the task force on March 30. But we wanted to give an idea of these particular atrocities, as they are identified, and have the task force direct us as to what we should be looking at.

Campbell, who is based on Long Beach, is an experienced career economist specializing in economic theory, analysis, and policy. The Chief Executive Officer for Ventana Capital Advisors and Associate Professor of Economics, Los Angeles Pierce College, she has a Ph.D. degree in Economics-Management from Claremont Graduate University.

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Campbell says the five-member unit is tasked with providing an economic perspective of the work the task force is doing, helping to quantify past economic injustices African Americans faced in the state and elsewhere, and determining what or how much compensation should be for Black people living in California.

The expert team includes Williams Spriggs (former Chair of the Department of Economics at Howard University. He currently serves as chief economist for the AFL-CIO), and Thomas Craemer (Public Policy Professor at the University of Connecticut).

Spriggs and Craemer testified in front of the task force last October.

Rounding out the panel of experts are William A. Sandy Darity Jr., the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University, and Kirsten Mullen, a writer, and lecturer whose work focuses on race, art, history, and politics.

Darity is a Samuel DuBois Cook professor of public policy, African and African American studies, and economics at Duke University. His research focuses on racial, class and ethnic inequality and stratification economics; education and the racial achievement gap; North-South theories of trade and development; and the economics of reparations.

Darity and Mullen co-authored the book, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century. They testified before the task force during the first meeting in June 2021.

The task force chose the Model 2 framework over Model 1, called the National Reparations Framework. The first option captures all the opportunities and losses linked to enslavement, Jim Crow laws, elements of lost wages, and others.

The expert team expressed their concerns about the national model because many of the atrocities, discrimination, and wage gap only relate to southern territories that did not happen in California.

The national strategy of attempting to eliminate the racial wealth gap is something that is not replicated at the state level given the resources that the state of California currently possesses, Darity said. The second issue is the condition of racial wealth and equality in the state of California is not exclusively a consequence of a chain of events that took place solely in the state.

On March 29, the task force voted 5-4 in favor of lineage over race as the determining factor for compensation. The members of the expert team suggested that a reparations tribunal would be one approach where individuals and families could establish residency and file claims of harm based on lineage.

Task Force chair Kamilah Moore said the community eligibility portion will be based on lineage determined by an individual being African American, the descendant of a (person enslaved as chattel) or descendant of a free-Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century.

By statute, the task force will issue a report to the Legislature by June 1, 2022, which will be available to the public.

Model 2 of the Framework for Reparations and Calculations could potentially arrive with modifications when the expert team reports back to the task force during the next meeting, Moore said.

After the expert teams presentation, testimonials were provided on the War on Drugs and the crack-cocaine epidemic during the March meeting.

Those harms could be added to one of the categories.

I am just putting that on our radar as a potential and distinct harm, Moore said of the injuries not currently listed in Model 2.

The Task Force will hold its next meeting at San Franciscos Third Baptist Church on Wednesday, April 13 at 9 a.m. and Thursday, April 14 at 9 a.m.

Third Baptist Church is at 1399 McAllister in San Francisco.
The shocking images and stories out of Bucha and surrounding towns in Ukraine have led to calls for a war crimes trial against Russia.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday that it was the most terrible war crime since World War II. He said the Russian military killed civilians just for their pleasures. He accused them of shooting men in the back of their heads and raping and killing women in front of their children.

Anyone who has given criminal orders and carried them out by killing our people will be brought before the tribunal which should be similar to the Nuremberg tribunals, he said.

Earlier on Monday, United States President Joe Biden had also joined leaders around the world in calling for a war crimes trial against Russian President Vladimir Putin. He said Putin was a war criminal who should be brought to trial.

But experts warn the path to holding the Russian president and other leaders criminally responsible is long and complex.

Clint Williamson served as a U.S. diplomat for war crimes issues from 2006 to 2009. He told the Associated Press: Certainly, the discovery of bodies which bear signs of executions -- such as gunshot wounds to the head -- presents strong evidence of war crimes. He added the actions were not permitted whether those who had been taken prisoner were civilians or soldiers.

Russian officials strongly denied the accusations. Its defense ministry said that not a single civilian has faced any violent action by the Russian military. And Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed that the images were staged to bring anti-Russian feelings.

The New York Times disproved the Russian claims in its study of satellite images provided by Maxar Technologies. The Times reported that at least 11 bodies of those killed in Bucha had been on the street since March 11. Russian troops did not withdraw from the area until March 30.

War crimes investigation

The International Criminal Court, or ICC, has already opened an investigation in March into crimes against civilians in Ukraine. The investigation came after Russian airstrikes hit a hospital for children and pregnant women in Mariupol.

To build a case for war crimes, prosecutors must gather evidence to establish the cause and facts of the victims deaths. They also need to show that the crime happened in an armed conflict, which is the case in Ukraine.

Then comes the more difficult work of establishing who is responsible for the crimes. It could be forces on the ground, military commanders or government leaders.

Andreas Schuller is the program director for International Crimes and Accountability at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin. He said prosecutors need to look into the chain of command and establish a link to the evidence.

Documents could be leaked, or witnesses could speak up and disclose internal planning operations, he added.

Building a case against Putin and other Russian leaders will be more difficult. Youve got to prove that they knew or they could have known or should have known, said Philippe Sands. He is a British lawyer and professor at University College London. He warned there is a risk that the trials will involve mid-level people without reaching the top leaders.

Crime of aggression

An easier path would be to charge Russian leaders for the crime of aggression, which is the act of launching a war without cause against another country. However, the ICC has no jurisdiction over Russia for the crime of aggression because Russia, like the U.S., has not agreed to the treaty. Russia could also veto any attempt in the U.N. Security Council to bring the case to the ICC.

In March, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown launched a campaign to create a special tribunal to try Russia for the crime of aggression in Ukraine.

The tribunal will need the backing of an international group like the U.N. or a collection of nations. For example, after World War II, the Nuremberg tribunal was established by the U.S., Britain, France, and the former Soviet Union to try Nazi leaders.

Alex Batesmith served as a U.N. prosecutor in Kosovo and Cambodia and is now teaching at the University of Leeds law school. He said the evidence against Russia is very strong. But he added, theres no way on earth Putin will surrender to the ICC or be arrested and brought to the ICC

Last month, ICC prosecutors sought to arrest three Russian generals for possible war crimes in the 2008 war against neighboring Georgia. They have not surrendered so far.

Im Susan Shand. And I'm Jonathan Evans.

The Associated Press reported this story. Hai Do adapted the story for Learning English with additional sources.

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Words in This Story

tribunal  n. a court or forum of justice

stage  v. to create a false scenario

prosecutor  n. one who is in charge of the process of pursuing formal charges against an offender to final judgment

disclose  v. to make known or public

jurisdiction  n. the power, right, or authority to interpret and apply the law
The Cambridge University Library in Britain received a gift in early March.

Someone left a pink gift bag near the building with a note: Happy Easter, X, it read. In this case, X was in place of a persons name.

Inside the bag was the gift: two small notebooks from the famous British naturalist Charles Darwin. He is credited with the theory of evolution which says living things change over large periods of time.

One of the notebooks has a famous drawing in it called the Tree of Life. Darwin made the drawing in 1837.

The university talked about the incident on Tuesday.

Cambridge believes the notebooks were taken 20 years ago. They were first thought to be missing inside the building after they were taken to be photographed. But, after searching through 10 million books, maps and documents, the university reported the notebooks stolen to police in 2020.

British investigators notified police around the world, and a search began. The notebooks are valued at millions of dollars.

They were returned, however, in good condition.

Darwins notebooks contained writings about his famous trip around the world on the ship H.M.S. Beagle. The research led to his book on evolution called On the Origin of Species.

Cambridge University Librarian Jessica Gardner said she was relieved to see the notebooks. But she said her true feelings are profound and almost impossible to adequately express.

Gardner said the notebooks will go back into the Darwin Archive. The library is also home to the works by scientists Stephen Hawking and Isaac Newton.

The notebooks will be on display later this year in a Darwin show at the library.

Local police said they are continuing to look into who may have taken the notebooks and asked for help from anyone who has information about the case.

Im Dan Friedell.

Dan Friedell adapted this story for VOA Learning English based on a report by the Associated Press.

Where do you think Darwins writings were for the last 20 years? Let us know. Write to us in the Comments Section and visit our Facebook page.

Words in This Story

profound adj. very strongly felt

adequately adv. enough for some need or requirement
In Bangladesh, the south west seaport town of Mongla is home to thousands of refugees. They are not fleeing war or another conflict. They are refugees from climate change.

Monira Khatun is 29 years old and is one of these refugees. She returned to her fathers home after her husband left her, only to have her father die. She had to care for three other family members. A river washed away her familys home.

"I lost everything. There was darkness all around. My parents' home was gone to the river for erosion, we had no land to cultivate, Khatun said.

She moved to Mongla and now works in a factory in a special economic zone that gives jobs to climate refugees.

There are about 150,000 climate refugees in Mongla. They have lost their homes, land and work. Most are from nearby villages. Now there is chance at a new life in the coastal town near the Bay of Bengal.

A United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a report stating that by 2050, 143 million people will be forced to move because of climate change. They will move either within their countrys borders or beyond because of rising sea levels, droughts, hot temperatures and other climate disasters.

Asia is one of the hardest-hit places, and its leaders are trying to find answers.

Mongla is now a model town of climate resilience. Saleemul Huq is a climate scientist and the director for the International Center for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He says Monglas success story is a model for how climate refugees can change their lives through new opportunities.

"Mongla has offered new opportunities to them. With its seaport and an export processing zone and climate-resilient infrastructure, Mongla town has become a different story," Huq said.

With such a successful model, more towns along the coast in Bangladesh could become migrant-friendly locations. These river and sea port towns are economic centers, and the model could be copied in those places. Huq says that talks have started with leaders of six towns so far.

"These are all secondary towns with populations of up to half a million, which can shelter up to another half a million climate migrants each. Thus, we can offer alternatives to at least 10 million climate migrants over (the) next one decade, Huq said.

Bangladesh is vulnerable to the effects of climate change because it is near sea level. Millions are at risk of being forced to leave their homes just in Bangladesh because of river erosion, increased movement of salt water and intense storms.

The World Bank reported in 2021 that by the year 2050 Bangladesh will have half of the estimated number of refugees in all of South Asia, a total of almost 19 million displaced people.

The idea of creating new communities for the displaced is called transformative adaption. It is an alternative to forcing the climate refugees to move into the poorer areas of larger cities, like in the capital of Dhaka. Twenty-four smaller coastal towns like Mongla could accept 10 million refugees minimum.

"The trend is that climate migrants move to places where there are economic activities for them. We can't stop displacement, we can only offer alternatives that they will accept," he said.

Small changes in Bangladesh have occurred in recent years, like rice that is able to grow in saltwater. These changes have helped some communities manage the effects of climate change, but Huq says that these changes are not long term. Transformative adaptation is the best solution.

The government of Bangladesh is protecting the town of Mongla by spending tens of thousands of dollars creating climate-resilient infrastructure. Foreign investments from countries like the United States, Japan, South Korea and China have increased over the past four years. These investments in the Mongla Export Processing Zone (EPZ) have created new factory jobs for the climate refugees.

Sheikh Abdur Rahman is the mayor of Mongla. He says that more investment has been coming to the EPZ, which brings new infrastructure. The new infrastructure includes measures to stop flooding, an improved drainage system, water holding areas and a factory to process and clean the water. Other infrastructure includes widening of the Mongla river channel and a new rail line to connect Mongla with India across the border.

"There was only about 2,600 workers in the Mongla EPZ in 2018, but now there are about 9,000 workers employed in different factories. The changes are visible, Rahman said.

Resh Begum is a 28 year old woman and one of Monglas newest factory workers. Her home was lost to a river. Now she lives with her family on another persons land, but she has dreams for the future.

"Now I earn a good amount of money each month to support my family. Maybe we will build a new house in the future by saving some money," Begum said.

Im Faith Pirlo.

Julhas Alam reported this story for the Associated Press. Faith Pirlo adapted it for VOA Learning English.

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Words in This Story

erosion  n. wearing down caused by water

droughts  n. lack of food and water caused by dry conditions

cultivate  v. to grow crops on land

resilience  n. ability to bounce back and be strong

adaptation  n. the state of adapting or changing

infrastructure  n. physical structures and organizations that support operation of a population such as highways and bridges

vulnerable  adj. open or at risk to effects of danger

displaced  adj. moving from your home by force like war or climate change within your own country

trend  n. movement or change towards something thats different from before

alternative  n. a different option or choice

What do you think about the climate refugee crisis and towns like Mongla? We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section.
Defense experts say China has the technology, equipment and knowledge to carry out a war from space.

The experts say Chinas Peoples Liberation Army could place military equipment systems in space or use satellites to gather intelligence.

Richard Bitzinger is a visiting researcher with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. He said China could use special equipment to find enemy submarines.

Bitzinger said, The military uses of space are pretty self-evident, and the Chinese would probably be foolish if they did not try and militarize space. He said it is one of several stated future goals for the Peoples Liberation Army.

In 2019, China released a government report called Chinas National Defense in the New Era. It noted increasing activities of the Peoples Liberation Army Air Force in space. The report also said Chinas air force will speed up moving to both offensive and defensive capabilities.

Andrew Yang is secretary-general of the Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies, a research group in Taiwan. He said space equipment could help China carry out strikes with several kinds of missiles.

Developing capabilities

The Chinese government report said Chinas air force will improve its ability for early warnings, airstrikes, and missile defense.

In November, Astronomy magazine reported about Chinas tests of hypersonic weapons. Hypersonic weapons are the ones that can travel at least five times faster than the speed of sound. The tests reportedly included a vehicle that is launched into space on a rocket and an orbital system for missiles.

Collin Koh is a researcher at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies, part of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. He said Chinas network of satellites has the ability to find military equipment on Earth.

Koh added that some of Chinas space satellites are for ocean surveillance. He said they have both civilian and military uses.

Koh said Chinese officials are trying to prevent a possible enemy from disabling their BeiDou Navigation Satellite System. The system for business use tells users where they are on Earth.

Where space would meet Earth

Experts say the Chinese military would most likely use military technology in space to seek control of the disputed East and South China seas. They add that the goal is to drive back competitors from the open ocean of the Western Pacific just beyond Chinas nearby waterways, known as the near seas.

Gregory Poling is with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He said Chinas goal is to control the near seas and to project force to deal with an enemy in the island chain.

Alexander Vuving is a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii. He said that agenda represents a threat to Asian countries that dispute Chinas claims to the near seas.

China has already placed air force buildings and military surveillance equipment on the small islands in the South China Sea. China has competing claims over the South China Sea with Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

All six parties value the 3.5 million-square-kilometer waterway for its fisheries and energy resources.

Im Jill Robbins.

Ralph Jennings reported this story for Voice of America. Gregory Stachel adapted it for our VOA Learning English readers and listeners.

_______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

capability  n. the ability to do something

decade  n. a period of 10 years

surveillance  n. the act of carefully watching someone or something especially in order to prevent or detect a crime

project  v. to send outwards

agenda  n. a plan or goal that guides someone's behavior and that is often kept secret

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.
Young people all over the world are seriously concerned about the state of politics and education. That information comes from a survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD.

The study looked at 151 youth organizations from 72 countries. It centered on young people aged 15 to 29.

The researchers noted that people between those ages have lived through two worldwide crises  the 2008 financial collapse and the coronavirus pandemic. OECD researchers say it is important to learn the effects of the pandemic on younger people. The pandemic, they said, has affected different age groups differently andits repercussions will be felt by many for decades to come

Youth organizations were asked to identify three areas in which young people were finding it most difficult to deal with the effects of COVID-19. The top answers were mental health, education and employment. Other areas of concern were personal relationships, personal wealth and limits on individual freedom.

The researchers said the pandemics long-term effects on education remain to be fully observed. The study added that the crisis has greatly reduced international student mobility, widened educational differences across different populations and increased the risk of students ending their education.

An OECD study released this year found that, on average, 6 percent of 15- to 19-year-olds in OECD countries were not involved in employment, education or job training in 2020.

In poorer countries like Colombia and Brazil, at least 20 percent of young people were not involved in employment, education or training.

The effects of the crisis have been more severe, the study said, for young women, young people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds, young people not in employment, education or training  and other young people in vulnerable circumstances, the study said.

Several countries have increased educational spending and sought to improve the lives of vulnerable groups.

Canadas government, for example, provided money to help native groups complete secondary school. The country also introduced more childcare support for young women in an effort to close the wage difference between men and women.

Sweden extended the time for which young immigrants studying in upper secondary education must find a job after graduation from 6 to 12 months. There, immigrants are required to have a job upon graduation to get residency.

France, Belgium and Estonia have started new programs and trainings for young people out of education and the workforce to build new skills. Overall, just three out of 32 OECD member countries studied by the researchers  Iceland, Japan and Luxembourg  did not target young people as part of their recovery plans.

Even with such efforts, young peoples trust in government has decreased since the pandemic started. Of all countries taking part in the study, 37 percent of youth organizations say their trust in government has decreased. They also reported low levels of approval for government services like healthcare, housing and education. Thirty-four percent of youth organizations surveyed also say they are less satisfied with democracy.

Many countries looked to build trust with young people by partnering with youth organizations in planning recovery measures. Australia invited youth organizations to comment on the governments budget goals. Estonia listed the National Youth Council as an important partner in the creation of its recovery plan. Mexico questioned 20,000 of its young citizens on issues like education, employment, health and violence to inform policy measures.

When governments communicate proactively, the researchers said, they can generate citizen buy-in and engagement, including among young people.

Im Dan Novak.

Dan Novak wrote this story for VOA Learning English.

Quiz - Study: Young People Worried about Education, Employment, Democracy Start the Quiz to find out Start Quiz

_______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

survey  n. an activity in which many people are asked a question or a series of questions in order to gather information about what most people do or think about something

youth n. young people

repercussion  n. something usually bad or unpleasant that happens as a result of an action, statement, etc., and that usually affects people for a long time

mobility  n. the ability or tendency to move from one position or situation to another usually better one

disadvantage  n. something that makes someone or something worse or less likely to succeed than others

vulnerable  adj. easily hurt or harmed physically, mentally, or emotionally

circumstance  n. a condition or fact that affects a situation

resident  n. someone who lives in a particular place

proactive  adj. controlling a situation by making things happen or by preparing for possible future problems

engagement  n. the act or state of being involved with something
It's Oregon's mystery political job. One of five elected executive offices  alongside governor, secretary of state, treasurer and attorney general.

The position has been around since 1903  with different names. It has no term limits  one man served 24 years. Four Republicans and three Democrats held the job before it became a non-partisan office with the 1996 election.

The mystery office? Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor and Industries, commonly referred to by its acronym as "the BOLI." Often, the job is called by its original name, Labor Commissioner.

The official title has changed several times, with the longest moniker from 1918 to 1930: Oregon Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Inspector of Factories and Workshops.

The vacuum left by Hoyle's departure from the race drew three veteran political candidates.

Yamhill County Commissioner Casey Kulla switched from the Democratic primary for governor to the BOLI race.

Portland employee rights attorney Christina Stephenson, who placed second in a 2020 run for the House District 33, filed the day after Kulla.

On the last day to file for office, former Rep. Cheri Helt, R-Bend, jumped into the race.

Rounding out the field are Cornelius forest management businessman Aaron Baca, Aloha banker Brent Barker, Oregon City truck driver Chris Henry, and Greenhorn laborer Robert Neuman.

If one can win more than 50% of the vote in the May 27 primary election, the race is over  there would be no run-off in November. With seven candidates and three with political track records, it's a longshot that the final winner won't be determined in the Nov. 7 general election.

The BOLI job is part workplace referee, part civil rights enforcer, part job training promoter, part government information desk and complaint box.

Quality journalism doesn't happen without your help Support local news coverage and the people who report it by subscribing to the Albany Democrat-Herald.

There's a $31 million budget for the office  not a lot by state government standards. The job pays $77,000  less than the $98,600 the governor makes and barely twice the $32,839 paid state lawmakers for their officially part-time jobs.

Unlike other offices, it hasn't been a springboard to bigger things. Incumbents have run for governor, U.S. Senator, Oregon Supreme Court Justice, and secretary of state. None has won.

The three most active candidates have been Helt, Kulla and Stephenson.

Cheri Helt

A restaurateur in Bend, Helt served about 10 years on school boards, and two years in the Oregon House representing Bend.

Helt is a remnant of a vanishing political species that once dominated state politics: the moderate Republican.

Elected to the House from a Democratic-leaning district in 2018, Helt often bumped heads with the GOP caucus  sponsoring legislation for mandatory vaccinations for school children that was opposed by Republicans. When the House GOP caucus walked out to deny a quorum to consider a controversial carbon cap bill, Helt was the only one of 22 Republicans who remained in Salem.

After losing her 2020 re-election bid to now Rep. Jason Kropf, D-Bend, Helt's focus was on maintaining her family business and employees during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Looking to return to public office, Helt felt she was a good match for the politically moderate electorate in the newly aligned 5th Congressional District. She could win a general election, but winning a closed primary against opponents who are avidly pro-Trump and supported by vaccine skeptics seemed unlikely.

Hoyle's decision to drop her re-election bid for BOLI was an opportunity.

"I liked that BOLI was non-partisan," Helt said. "It fits my experience well. I've been a business owner for 18 years. We've had 103 employees. BOLI has 120. No other candidate has run a business with over 100 employees."

Helt said she'd seen the ups and downs of career and technical training programs as a school board member. She praised Hoyle for realigning programs to better fit with real world job demands in Oregon. Her time in the Legislature gave her a view on how workplace law evolves.

"The office takes all of my hats and combines them into one," Helt said.

Helt rejects the label of conservative in the race, but wants to bring an open and pragmatic approach to the job.

"The job is to uphold the civil rights of all Oregonians," Helt said. "It has to be a fair process and a balanced process. Part of the job is ensuring that everybody knows the rules. This shouldn't be a 'gotcha' agency. I think most employers want to do the right thing. But for the bad actors, I'll enforce the law."

Casey Kulla

Kulla was the first candidate to sign up for the 2022 Democratic primary for governor when the window to file opened last autumn.

But as more candidates entered the race, the Yamhill County commissioner saw money and attention among Democrats focused on former House Speaker Tina Kotek, D-Portland, state Treasurer Tobias Read, and, before he was ruled ineligible because of residency requirements, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

In mid-January, Kulla switched to run for BOLI. With Hoyle running for Congress, Kula was briefly the clear frontrunner.

Kulla says the labor commissioner's top priority is ensuring the civil and working rights of workers and people seeking housing are protected.

The commissioner's office has to be a place that proactively gets out information to workers that business owners don't make the rules  and BOLI is a place to get information and if necessary, seek help to resolve disputes.

"But first, they need to know that BOLI exists," Kulla said. "It doesn't matter if there are rules if people don't know about them and who enforces them."

Kulla said relations between businesses and workers that come to BOLI don't have to always be adversarial. As one of the first cannabis licensees in the state, Kulla took part in creating the rules and regulations that would guide the legal marijuana business into the future. Both the state and the growers shared expertise and dispelled inaccurate information.

"It was a great example of the regulators and the regulated listening to each other and finding solutions that worked," Kulla said.

Oregon's economy and workforce are rapidly evolving, Kulla said, with areas such as gig workers and farm workers whose jobs don't fit easily into existing definitions of jobs. BOLI needs to keep both workers and operators in these areas up to date with changes in the rules.

On technical job training, Kulla said he wants to see more cooperation with Oregon employers so that the students who commit to the programs as a path to their post-high school or community college working lives don't just end up with a certificate.

"There has to be a clear path to real jobs at the end," he said.

Christina Stephenson

The day after Kulla filed for BOLI, he was followed by Christina Stephenson, a Democrat and employee rights attorney.

Stephenson has won the backing of at least 21 labor union groups, including the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, Teamsters, along with political action committees for Planned Parenthood and Pro Choice Oregon.

She's been endorsed by Hoyle, and four former BOLIs. Political backers include U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, former Gov. Barbara Roberts, House Speaker Dan Rayfield, retiring U.S. Rep. Peter De-Fazio, D-Springfield, and eight current state lawmakers, along with several local officeholders.

Stephenson says she's had a front row seat to the shortcomings of labor law in Oregon.

"My job has been representing workers getting a raw deal for employers who aren't following the rules," Stephenson said.

Stephenson said BOLI needs to be a resource for both employers and employees so that they know what's right and wrong from the start.

"The law is complicated," she said. "There are a number of different tests  civil rights vs. wage and hour laws, workers compensation, unemployment. Both sides are probably unsure of where they stand. BOLI's role is to help everyone understand rights and responsibilities."

Stephenson said the gig economy in which businesses consider themselves middlemen between customers and contracted workers will be a challenge to define in labor law. So will the evolving status of farm workers.

"It's up to the Legislature to make the laws," she said.

That may mean taking a step like California to legally define the status of gig workers as employees or something else.

"What everyone wants and needs is clarity and simplicity," Stephenson said.

BOLI's role in job and technical training is to align students as early as middle school to know their options. Programs have to match employers' needs. The result has to be good jobs that pay a living wage.

Stephenson said she was proud of the support she's received from organized labor, but that didn't mean she would come into the job in an adversarial stance to business.

"Quality jobs, fair housing, fair wages, should all be pretty non-controversial issues," she said. "Our good employers don't want these bad actors breaking the law. It puts them at a competitive disadvantage when someone else is making money through wage theft."

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FICTION: In a dazzling sci-fi novel, likable characters land in strange situations, challenging their assumptions about human life and the passage of time.

"Sea of Tranquility" by Emily St. John Mandel; Alfred A. Knopf (272 pages, $25)



Emily St. John Mandel's new novel, "Sea of Tranquility," is smart, brisk and entertaining. Let's hope it's less prophetic than her previous work.

In 2014, the Canadian author published "Station Eleven," an unsettling yet inspiring novel (recently adapted by HBO) about the survivors of a merciless pandemic. Six years after that book came out  well, you know.

Her latest, "Sea of Tranquility," is a full-on mind-blower. Inspired by real-world ills and eccentric philosophical theories, Mandel has crafted an enthralling narrative puzzle, plunging her relatable characters into a tale that spans five centuries.

It's 1912 when the story starts, and Edwin St. John St. Andrew, a young Briton with a "double-sainted name," has committed quasi-blasphemy, suggesting England shouldn't rule the world. Sent packing by his aristocratic family, Edwin comes to rest on Vancouver Island. One day, in the Canadian woods, he's enveloped in "a flash of darkness, like sudden blindness or an eclipse." He feels like he's entered a "vast interior"  a train station, maybe and he hears a violin. It's a "supernatural" episode he'll never forget.

In the book's next section, Vincent Smith  a female character from Mandel's 2020 novel "The Glass Hotel"  is a 1990s teen when she films some nature footage. Unbeknownst to her, she's standing where Edwin had his mysterious 1912 incident. In Vincent's video of the still-wooded area, we hear anomalous "overlapping sounds"  a train station and a violin.

Subsequent chapters  each with their own uncanny occurrences  focus on a 23rd-century author commuting between her home on the moon and the heavily polluted Earth; and 25th-century siblings working for a secretive company that investigates "moments from different centuries" that seem to overlap.

Mandel alludes to global crises like climate degradation and life-consuming tech devices, but she doesn't quite offer us original ways to think about them. But she more than compensates for this shortcoming with a bracing set of story lines about virtual reality, time travel and the essence of human life itself. The strange video that links Mandel's story lines across the centuries  is it evidence of a "file corruption" in our "vast and terrible" virtual realm?

Readers who enjoy some weirdness with their literary fiction are likely to become immersed in this deceptively poignant novel. In one scene, Olive, Mandel's 23rd-century writer, packs burrs "from some mysterious plant" as she prepares to head home to the moon; they're a present for her daughter, who's never been to Earth.

Lest we think Mandel a doomsayer, consider her hopeful take on the future of publishing. In 2203, Olive is on tour to promote a novel, copies of which she autographs for eager fans. Maybe Mandel's an optimist after all.



Kevin Canfield is a writer in New York City.
The night Demone Cummins was arrested in the shooting death of a Fitchburg man just outside the Dane County Jail, he made several phone calls from jail, telling two people there was a good chance he would be spending the rest of his life in prison, a criminal complaint filed Tuesday states.

I aint going to lie to you, Cummins told one woman about six hours after the March 30 shooting death of Dwayne L. Collins Jr., 32, who had just been released from the Dane County Jail on a signature bond. Go ahead and live your life. I might be fried. Im not going to lie. It might be over.

Cummins, 20, of Chicago, was charged Tuesday with first-degree intentional homicide along with possession of heroin with intent to deliver. Another man, Amond D. Galtney, 25, of Madison, was charged with being a party to first-degree intentional homicide and attempting to elude police.

Galtney is alleged to have been the driver of a Ford Explorer SUV that he and Cummins drove from the shooting scene on South Carroll Street, just outside the jail and across the street from the Madison Police Departments Central District station.

While the 18-page criminal complaint describes in great detail what is seen on city and private security cameras  the shooting itself, the Explorers path from the scene and footage of the likely murder weapon being tossed from the vehicle on West Badger Road  it is silent on the connection between Cummins and Galtney to Collins, and any explanation for the shooting.

They shot and killed my baby in front of me, Collins mother, Angela Briggs, told Court Commissioner Scott McAndrew at a court appearance for Cummins on Tuesday. She implored McAndrew to keep Cummins locked up on the biggest bail you can set so he dont step out of that jail again.

McAndrew set bail for Cummins at $1 million, which was requested by Deputy District Attorney William Brown.

Brown said Cummins brazenly executed Collins when Collins was just out of jail and defenseless, in front of his mother. And while out on bond for other charges in Cook County, Illinois, Brown said, he decided to execute someone in front of our police station.

Galtney did not appear in court on Tuesday.

According to the complaint, Briggs had come Downtown to pick up her son as he was being released from jail, where he was being held after an alleged domestic battery at home two days earlier.

Briggs watched Collins walk away from the jail with another man, who she believed had also just been released from jail. An SUV pulled up, she told police, and a passenger got out and shot Collins.

I seen him pointing something and then he was just shooting, Briggs told police, according to the complaint.

Police found 15 bullet casings on the ground, fired by a .40-caliber weapon. Video of the shooting itself, captured by city street cameras, showed the shooting lasted just three seconds. The weapon suspected of being used in the shooting had been modified to fire automatically and was equipped with an extended magazine with a 28-round capacity, the complaint states.

Tracked by dog

According to the complaint:

Officers heard the gunshots about 5 p.m. on March 30 and were quickly at the scene and rendered aid to Collins. He was taken by ambulance to UW Hospital but died at 5:35 p.m.

Other officers on patrol in the area heard the call about gunshots and spotted a blue Ford Explorer, which had been described as a possible suspect vehicle. As they tried to catch up to it, the vehicle sped off, leading to a pursuit that ended on East Rusk Avenue near the Alliant Energy Center, where it was abandoned.

Galtney was arrested a short time later. A police dog was used to track Cummins, who was found in a large open warehouse.

Cummins admitted having heroin on him but he wasnt carrying a gun. In a statement to police, Cummins denied having anything to do with any shooting. He said he had arrived in Madison that day. Cummins described taking part in a marijuana transaction involving two women, and after switching cars he noticed he was being followed by police and fled. He denied knowing Galtney.

But video from city cameras in the 200 block of South Carroll Street showed Cummins getting out of a blue Ford Explorer, which had gone south on South Carroll Street and stopped near Collins, who was standing near the jail.

Cummins arms were stretched in front of him. Collins turned toward Cummins, who began shooting. Collins dropped to the ground almost immediately, the video showed.

Cummins then got back into the Explorer, which drove off. Briggs then got out of her vehicle and ran toward Collins.

Second vehicle

Street video indicates that a second vehicle, a maroon Chevrolet Impala, had traveled to the jail with the Explorer. The vehicles are first seen together on video at about 4:15 p.m. on South Park Street, then on West Washington Avenue. At about 4:20 p.m., the Impala pulled over on South Fairchild Street at South Hamilton Street, and the Explorer passed it to travel on to the jail.

The Explorer is seen parking in the 100 block of South Carroll Street, while the Impala circled the block. A short time later, the Explorer also began to circle the block. Both vehicles eventually park near the jail.

After the shooting, the Impala also fled and was last seen traveling south on John Nolen Drive from Broom Street.

The gun, which also had a laser sight mounted on it, was found about 6:15 p.m. by a passerby in the 1000 block of West Badger Road. Footage from a private home security camera indicates the gun was thrown from the front passenger window of a blue Ford Explorer at about 5:07 p.m. Madison police squad cars are then seen going past in pursuit of the Explorer.

Galtney made no phone calls from jail after his arrest. But Cummins made several calls, including to two women in separate calls.

Cummins told the first one he might be charged with a murder a couple of days down the line but denied he did it. When the woman reassured him there wont be enough evidence, he says, Car. Clothes. Me.

He asked if she could realistically wait 30 to 40 years for him, and told her, My (expletive) is probably through.

In another call to a different woman, he said, Hey boy, I might be smoked. When she asked what he did, he replied, First degree. He then told her to go ahead and live your life.

Cummins told her, Most likely Im probably fried, for a long time. They both cried, and he added, All Im praying is I just dont get life.

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Newcomer Laura Simkin, who distinguished herself from her opponent as a supporter of police in schools, will join the Madison School Board after winning the districts only contested race in Tuesdays election.

But Simkin said Tuesday night she didnt think reinstating school resource officers would be broached by the board in the near future. Instead, she plans to spend some time looking into what work has been done regarding school safety so far and to figure out what options there are to address the issue.

Im feeling like the work is just about to begin, Simkin said.

Simkins opponent, Shepherd Janeway, who preliminary results showed trailing by a significant margin, did not rule out a future run for public office.

Congratulations to Laura Simkin. This was a fantastic opportunity, Janeway said. Im incredibly pleased with the results, and I look forward to using the community connections that Ive built and bolstered and using the lessons learned in the future.

The candidates aligned on many issues facing the district and on controversial stands taken by previous boards, except for one: the June 2020 unanimous vote to remove school resource officers from Madisons four main high schools.

Janeway expressed support for the decision to remove police from schools while Simkin told the Wisconsin State Journal in March she would like to see the reinstatement of SROs at Madisons four main high schools.

But on Election Night she sounded a cautionary tone on whether she would engage the School Board on that issue.

I plan to work with the School Board as part of a seven-person team, and I will work with the School Board to decide what issues were going to be working on, she said.

Simkin said she believes voters were impressed by her 30 years of experience in childcare and as a parent of a Madison student.

When I talked to people, they were looking at the whole picture, she said.

Over the next few days, she said she plans to relax and continue to educate herself on issues faced by the board before shes sworn in on April 25.

Other board seats

Board president and first-term incumbent Ali Muldrow, who was endorsed by Dane County Democrats, will retain Seat 4 after handily beating registered write-in candidate and conservative blogger David Blaska.

Muldrows long-term plans include expanding access for students to dual-language programs, making sure students are prepared to vote  with a drivers license  once they turn 18, as well as making the arts part of the core curriculum at the elementary level.

I am so grateful for my community, Muldrow said, and thanked her supporters, her partner and Madison teacher Sandy Welander, and her three children. It is such an honor to serve and I will always be grateful for this opportunity.

Nichelle Nichols, a former district administrative staff member and a parent of four former Madison students, ran uncontested and will also join the board later this month. She told the Wisconsin State Journal in January that her main concerns are the lasting impact of staffing shortages on the morale of teachers, staff and students.

Im looking forward to being on this board and starting to focus on making our district stronger, she said.

The three members will be sworn in during the boards regular meeting on April 25.

Madison School Board elections are likely unique in Wisconsin and unusual nationally in requiring candidates to run for numbered seats that are not connected to specific geographic areas in the School District. Madison candidates run only against those running for the same seat, even as all seven board members are expected to represent the entire district.

Around the county

In Mount Horeb, Adam Mertz, Carly Fisher and Leah Lipska won school board seats after an election season heated by controversy surrounding COVID mitigation policy and K-12 curriculum brought out 11 candidates ahead of the February primary.

A field of candidates was whittled down from 11  making it the largest school board race in Dane County in the February primary  to the top six vote-getters, which included newcomers Mertz, Fisher, Joel Craven, Jeff Shields and Kristen Karcz, as well as incumbent Leah Lipska, who had previously survived a COVID-19-related recall effort.

Voters in the school districts of Barneveld, Belleville, Cambridge, Columbus, Deerfield, DeForest, Evansville, Lodi, McFarland, Middleton-Cross Plains, Milton, New Glarus, Pecatonica, Poynette, River Valley, Sun Prairie, Verona and Waunakee also elected board members Tuesday.

Editor's note: This story was updated on April 6 to include an explanation of the way Madison elects its School Board.

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Newcomer Laura Simkin will join the Madison School Board after winning her bid for Seat 3 in one of only two competitive races on the ballot in the city of Madison in Tuesdays election.
Incumbents on the Dane County Board fended off challengers in Tuesday nights elections, although liberal newcomers who ran unopposed for 11 vacant seats could ensure one of the most activist, reform-minded boards to date.

Nearly a third of the boards incumbents chose not to run for reelection, resulting in many open seats that candidates from all corners of the political spectrum sought to fill.

A crop of conservative challengers did try to unseat incumbents and gain ground on the overwhelmingly liberal board, but those efforts werent successful, with some of those challengers losing by large margins.

Sup. Jeff Weigand, 20th District, one of the boards most conservative voices who led a challenge to Dane Countys mask mandate, narrowly won reelection Tuesday night, defeating challenger Scott Michalak with 51% of the vote.

With the makeup of the board now set, supervisors will vote for their next board president, a test of the leadership of Sup. Analiese Eicher, 3rd District, who has served as chair since 2020.

Eicher said her pitch to new supervisors will be to build on the boards work in the past two years, adding that incoming officials are already showing initiative on criminal justice reform, affordable housing and transportation.

Weve been doing incredible work the last few years under incredibly difficult circumstances, Eicher said Tuesday night. That means delivering results for everybody, not just making statements, but delivering sound policy and real changes and sustainable changes to county government.

Newcomers to the board include Brenda Yang, who ran unopposed in the 19th District, which includes Sun Prairie. Yang, the director of Madison East and La Follette High Schools Upward Bound program, named as her top priorities boosting mental health resources, affordable housing and outreach for services and grants for marginalized groups. Yang will be the first Hmong supervisor on the board.

I am excited to be able to have the opportunity to partner and collaborate with all parties, it doesnt matter what perspective or what party affiliation, Yang said in an interview last week. I just want to make sure that the policies and the stuff were overseeing is humane.

Another candidate who ran unopposed, Dana Pellebon in the 33rd District, which includes Fitchburg, said she was excited to build on the efforts of supervisors like Anthony Gray, Yogesh Chawla and Heidi Wegleitner, three supervisors who are well to the left of most of the board.

Pellebon, an executive director for the Rape Crisis Center and a longtime housing activist, said the incoming board needs to prioritize affordable housing, including making sure the county provides enough services to the United Ways Housing First program.

I really just want to utilize the experience that I have to bring my expertise to the table in ways that may not have been there before, she said.

Other newcomers to the board who ran unopposed include: Jeff Hynes, 5th District; Jeffrey Glazer, 8th District; Aaron Collins, 10th District; Olivia Xistris-Songpanya, 13th District; April Kigeya, 15th District; Rick Rose, 16th District; Jacob Wright, 17th District; Kierstin Huelsemann, 27th District; and Michael Engelberger, 35th District.

Tuesdays winners are set to inherit a board that has made major reforms to the countys criminal justice system. Most pressing of those reforms is the ongoing Dane County jail expansion and consolidation project.

In early March, the board voted to put an additional $16 million toward the jail under a scaled-back compromise plan due to rising construction costs. Ahead of the vote, some supervisors complained the compromise was rushed since the incoming board likely wouldnt have had the votes to pass it.

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U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson said Tuesday that he will vote against confirming Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court.

With three Republican senators declaring their support for Jackson and Democrats holding a Senate majority, Jackson is all but certain to become the first Black woman to serve on the high court.

Democratic senators, including Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison, have rallied behind the Washington, D.C., federal appellate court judge. She could be confirmed as early as this week.

While I enjoyed my meeting and conversation with Judge Jackson and think she is a decent person with a compelling life story, I have reservations with her nomination to serve a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, the Oshkosh Republican said in a statement.

He said that Democratic presidents universally nominate individuals who become activists instead of judges who apply the law rather than alter it.

I sincerely hope she proves me wrong, but I will be voting no on Judge Jacksons nomination to the Supreme Court, he said.

Baldwin confirmed last Monday that she will vote to confirm Jackson, calling her extremely well qualified and pointing out her experience as an appellate judge.

She has a proven record of being an impartial, fair and independent judge guided by the rule of law, and the Senate hearings made that clear, she said.

That same day, Johnson spokesperson Alexa Henning said, From testimony last week, it seems that President Biden has nominated a Supreme Court Justice who will tend to impose her policy preferences from the bench.

But she made clear Johnson would meet Jackson before deciding how he will vote.

U.S. Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine; Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska; and Mitt Romney, R-Utah, have said they will vote to confirm Jackson.

If confirmed, Jackson would replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, for whom Jackson clerked.

A Marquette Law School Poll found 66% of adults, including 29% of Republicans, 67% of independents and 95% of Democrats, support confirming Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Billings West High junior Emily Pennington is one step closer to attending her senior year.

The school board passed the first reading of a change to policy that will allow all students up to age 20 to enroll in high school. The change was prompted by Pennington, who has Down syndrome, and her parents' intense efforts to persuade the district to enroll Emily for her senior year, and let her graduate with her class.

The change will affect students whether they are special-needs or are not.

Policy 2050 had barred any student who turned 19 before Sept. 10 from enrolling in school. The new policy changes 19 to 20, and allows for students meeting certain special-needs criteria to enroll, provided they do not turn 21 before the Sept. 10 deadline. Pennington is 18 years old and turns 19 in July.

The policy will be read a second time at the regular board meeting on April 18 and the members will vote on it again.

The controversial policy came to light after Jana Pennington, Emily's mother, posted to social media about her struggle. She had been working for months to have the issue of enrolling her daughter in her senior year added to a board meeting agenda.

Since the public post and subsequent media coverage, the issue was raised with the superintendent and the board of trustees who hastily held a public meeting last week to discuss the policy and its relation to a 2021 law known as House Bill 233, that offered funding for extended education for special-needs students.

The board Tuesday reviewed five possible options ranging from broad enrollment of 19-year-olds across the district to taking no action at all.

Superintendent Greg Upham cautioned that a one-year general addition to the age-out policy would be doable without major additions to staff but that a two-year general change would require more full-time employees and funding. He also cautioned against another "zero-tolerance" policy.

It goes both ways, he said. It makes it simpler for decision makers, but it makes it more difficult to take in any consideration of any extenuating circumstances that would come into play in the opportunity to make the decision.

Trustee Russell Hall also advocated for a policy that allowed for exceptions because the zero-tolerance is why were talking today, he said.

In the end, three trustees voted against the measure and six trustees voted to amend. Every trustee expressed interest in moving forward with changing the policy, but some wanted it implemented immediately while others wanted to wait.

Trustees Janna Hafer and Zack Terakedis opposed an immediate policy change along with Chairperson Greta Besch Moen. The board also acted on a motion to waive the three reading policy for the amendment, but that measure needed to be unanimous and failed with a single no-vote by Trustee Janna Hafer.

Following the vote, Upham apologized to the Pennington family and took responsibility for not bringing the district's policy in line with the changing law when it happened last year.

"I take full responsibility for it, I apologize," he said. "I apologize to you, and we will correct this issue in the future, and Im sorry."

Besch Moen told the members of the board that the deadline to apply a permissive levy for the next school year passed in March meaning the district could not add to their coming funds without passing a levy to supplement. Immediate funding needs were not clear for the policy change at the meeting.

"These comments about the fiscal note and if OPI has budgeted enough for this is immaterial," said trustee Mike Leo. "We can certainly see what the implications are over the next year and take those into account, and revise this if we need to  it's the right thing to do."

House Bill 233 was passed last July to provide funding for special-needs students until they are 21 years old. The law does not mandate that districts take advantage of that funding, which does not cover the total projected expenses.

But Emily Pennington and her family's struggle to enroll her in her senior year has made her the face of this controversy in Montana. The coverage has drawn commentary and support from Montana's superintendent of public instruction, Elsie Arntzen, a large number of state lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and even Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., all of whom urged the school board ahead of last week's meeting to "do the right thing" for Pennington and allow her to continue her education.

Walkout at West high school

In support of Pennington ahead of Tuesday's meeting, hundreds of West High students walked out of class Tuesday morning.

The students rallied outside for about 30 minutes with some chanting let her stay and cheering on Pennington.

Ive always thought that [special-needs students] definitely need more attention because they go unrecognized for the struggles they get put through and how they get made fun of all the time, Cami Goodman, a West High sophomore attending the walk-out said Tuesday.

This controversy brings awareness to those struggles, she added.

Katie Rousch, a junior, has attended school with Pennington since seventh grade describing her as having a positive attitude, working hard in class and deserving of attending her senior year. She frequently helped another special-needs girl in one class, Rousch remembered of Pennington.

Emily faces aging out after she repeated kindergarten because of numerous serious health conditions and medical operations as a child, including open heart surgery, a seizure disorder and leukemia. At one point, she spent six months in a childrens hospital in Salt Lake City.

Rousch also had open-heart surgery, so she knows how hard it can be to recover.

I got it done during the summer because my parents didnt want me to have to try to catch up, but sometimes you dont get to choose, she said.
Many high school seniors have been opening emails over the past weeks that tell them whether they got into the colleges of their choice. Even as they do so, the criticisms of published college rankings that may have guided their preferences are cropping up  again.

A math professor at Columbia University is challenging the data that the Ivy League school reported to U.S. News & World Report, which earned it the No. 2 ranking this year. The University of Southern California, which seems almost incapable of staying out of trouble for more than a few months at a time, pulled its graduate school of education out of the rankings this year after discovering a history of inaccuracies in the data it reported.

A couple of weeks ago, in what must be the granddaddy of fake-data scandals, the ousted dean of Temple Universitys business school received a 14-month sentence after he was convicted in federal court of sending bogus information to U.S. News & World Report to boost the schools prestige. Claremont McKenna College, George Washington University and many other schools have tweaked data to boost rankings.

But the ultimate issue with the rankings doesnt lie with the cheaters. The problem is the rankings themselves. They can be a counterproductive way for families to pick schools  for example, a much less expensive school might offer an equal or better education than a more highly ranked but costlier one.

The most selective schools  Princeton, MIT and so forth  dont need rankings to boost their reputation or applicant pool. And the differences between a school that might be 70th on the list and one that might be 90th are unlikely to have much of an effect on a students post-graduate prospects or college experience.

Probably few college applicants are aware that the single biggest factor U.S. News uses to rank schools is their reputation among officials at other colleges, who might or might not have deep knowledge of the schools. That accounts for 20% of the score.

The second biggest factor is six-year graduation rates. But since low-income students are far less likely to graduate within that time period  or ever  than middle-class students, this is more an indication of student affluence than academic excellence. In fact, it can have the perverse effect of discouraging colleges from accepting more low-income students, lest it worsen their graduation rates.

An extensive Gallup Poll found in 2017 that alumni who attended prestigious schools are only slightly happier with their choice of college than those who attended schools lower on the list. The biggest factor in student satisfaction with college was whether they had ended up in debt, though U.S. News only gives student debt a 5% weight in the rankings. ...

U.S. News has made some positive changes in recent years. It dropped student acceptance rate as one of the criteria, which had led colleges to heavily market to students even if they had almost no chance of acceptance. Lower acceptance rates equaled higher rankings. The rankings started including the percent of Pell grant students who graduated within six years  a meaningful statistic indicating whether colleges were helping low-income students complete their education.

But many other factors used in ranking the schools have little meaning to a students experience. The rankings use alumni donations as a proxy for students happiness with their alma mater. Thats a pretty meager way to measure satisfaction.

What most high school students and parents need to know is whether a college offers a rich choice of courses with good instructors; whether graduates will leave with a load of debt; whether students will feel comfortable and engaged on campus; and whether theyll be prepared for a fulfilling career.

College administrators bemoan the rankings but they continue participating. They should stop going along with the charade and insist on being partners in drawing up more valid ways to evaluate higher education. What should matter most is how satisfied students and alumni were with their choice. Using the data from the 2017 poll, Jonathan Rothwell, an economist at Gallup, published a study in which he devised an alumni-satisfaction ranking but published only the 25 schools with the highest satisfaction marks. Many of them were among the top-rated in any published ranking, but there were some surprises, including the University of La Verne and Azusa Pacific in Southern California. Rothwells study also found that the price of a college didnt necessarily correlate with how happy alumni were with it.

If colleges and ranking organizations joined forces, though, they could create a uniform polling process for students and alumni that would be far more useful and a better reflection of colleges worth, combined with other factors.

A new approach could include specific issues students might find useful, for example: Which schools are more arts-oriented? Which ones specialize in experiential learning? Which ones have lots of extracurriculars, or a friendly, accepting campus environment?

Despite years of criticism, U.S. News and other college rankings publications arent going to give up on one of their popular and profitable annual features. Its up to colleges to stand up and refuse to go along with rankings that fall short, and collaborate on a method that gives students worthwhile information to navigate the bewildering task of picking a college.
Now that the dust has settled on redistricting and official declarations for office, fundraising is picking up for Idaho Senate candidates  and quite a few of those candidates just finished their last session in the Idaho House of Representatives.

Idaho has 35 legislative districts, with two state representatives and one senator for each district. Candidates are required to file a monthly report with the Idaho Secretary of States office by the 10th of each month, which includes all donations of any amount, in-kind contributions and loans, as well as expenditures and other financial activity from the previous month. The individual maximum contribution for a single election in legislative races is $1,000.

Overall, candidates have raised close to $896,000 so far, with about a month left before the primary election. Several Senate candidates have a large amount of cash on hand, including Sen. Fred Martin, R-Boise, who has more than $103,000. Scott Herndon, who is challenging Sen. Jim Woodward, R-Sagle, for his seat has close to $63,000 in cash on hand.

Of the nine Democrats seeking Senate seats, two have larger sums of cash on hand, including Sen. David Nelson, D-Moscow, who has about $43,000 in cash and no primary opponent.

Idahos primary election will take place May 17, and the general election will be held Nov. 8.

The Idaho Capital Sun has compiled the donations for legislative candidates into a visualization of the fundraising totals, expenditures and cash on hand for each candidate who has raised at least $500 since Jan. 1, 2021.

These tables will be updated on a regular basis throughout the 2022 election cycle.

Idaho representatives hope to gain foothold in the Senate

Ten Idaho representatives are vying for Senate seats in the 2022 primary, and one is running unopposed  Rep. Doug Okuniewicz, R-Hayden.

Several House members have said they are running for Senate seats because too many bills passed by the House have stalled in the Senate, including Rep. Codi Galloway, R-Boise, who is challenging Martin, R-Boise. Martin is seeking his sixth term as a senator and is the chairman of the Senate Health and Welfare Committee.

In my short time in Idaho government, Ive learned theres a problem  and the problem is not in the House, Galloway, who was elected to the House in 2020, said in one of her campaign announcements. She listed bills the House passed in the 2021 session related to prohibiting vaccine mandates and parental rights in education.

The problem is, youve probably never heard of these bills. Thats because after the House passed the bills, they went over to the Senate, where they were quietly killed by some senators who are not as conservative as we had hoped.

In a candidate survey from the Idaho Republican Party, Rep. Tammy Nichols, R-Middleton, gave largely the same explanation.

We say in the House that the Senate is where good bills go to die, Nichols wrote. The Senate is in desperate need of help, the only way to make the changes needed is to get people in who understand what needs to change, and who wont allow the government to cast aside your God-given right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Other representatives have different reasons for seeking Senate seats, including redistricting changes. Rep. Laurie Lickley, R-Jerome, served two terms representing District 25, which used to include Jerome County and part of Twin Falls County. The new map includes Blaine County, which was represented by Sen. Michelle Stennett, D-Ketchum, for 12 years. Stennett is not running for re-election.

In an interview with the Times-News in January, Lickley said its time for her to work with a different demographic.

My background in resources positions me very well to represent my new constituents in the Blaine County area after this next election cycle, she said.

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With self-interest perhaps best described as psychopathic megalomania, Russia's current leadership has long planned to subsume Ukrainean independent neighboring countryregardless of the cost in destruction and lost/broken lives.

Unfortunately, Vladimir Putin's vision for restored Soviet "glory" doesn't end with Ukraine. (Nor did it start there.) As such, every former Soviet-bloc nation not named Russiaespecially European countries which have significantly backtracked on democratization (looking at you, Hungary and Poland)now sees the urgent need to bolster their democratic institutions and external security alliances.

Add USA to that list. Although obviously not a European or former Soviet countrybut very much an ongoing target of staggering Russian subterfugeAmerica is experiencing its own, similar "Break Glass In Case Of Emergency" moment...

Our nation's Declaration of Independence, adopted by this country's founders on July 4, 1776, begins its description of the USA as follows: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men* are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." (*If written today, the word 'men' would instead be 'people' or human beings.)

Yet, in the 246 years since 1776, we continue to fall well short of that bedrock promise. In fact, although one of our two main political ideologies insists on those "unalienable Rights" for all, the other prefers to dole out such rights depending on ethnicity, gender, religion/religious views, country of origin and/or economic status. One approach strengthens democracy, society, national security, and international cooperation, while the other deepens autocracy, authoritarianism, oligarchy/plutocracy, kleptocracy, and kakistocracy.

For Americans who hope for a future of greater justice, peace and prosperity, the alarms should already be audible.

For everyone else, there are always megalomaniac demagogues and the associated grifters and pawns.

Jeremy Fryberger

Ketchum

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Marions award-winning meadery is now featured in the pages of Our State magazine.

Our States April issue came out just in time for the spring and summer seasons, when more people are traveling and visiting cities and towns in the Tar Heel State. On page 46, a feature article by writer Jen Tota McGivney takes a look at Keepers Cut Meadery, complete with photos of the meaderys interior and products.

The newest craft drink trend is one of the worlds oldest alcohols, reads the article. In McDowell County, a meadery turns North Carolina honey into a traditional beverage.

Owners Charlie Myers and Kathryn Curran said to The McDowell News they are grateful Our State chose to include their business in the April issue. Myers son Kurt is also a partner in the business.

Curran said the magazines editors reached out to them about doing an article. McGivney came in early December 2021 to do the interview and a photographer arrived in January of this year to get some pictures.

Myers and Curran said the Our State editor loved the logo for Keepers Cut Meadery.

This was Kathys dream, before we even opened, to get in Our State magazine, said Myers.

It has already paid off for Marions acclaimed meadery.

Weve had visitors come here because of this article, said Curran. On the day it came out, six people came in carrying the magazine. They were not local.

We were grateful and thrilled that Our State magazine wanted us in their publication, said Myers.

Other local businesses that have been featured in Our State are Jack Frost Dairy Bar and Bruces Fabulous Foods.

Last year, Keepers Cut Meadery won gold, silver and bronze medals at a statewide competition of mead, cider and fruit wine.

In May 2021, the inaugural North Carolina Mead-Cider-Fruit Wine Competition announced 27 medals, including three Peoples Choice awards, and a Best in Show each in mead, cider and fruit wine. Keepers Cut entered four meads in the competition and all four got medals.

Almonde Amarena (almond black cherry), Royal Blue (blueberry) both won silver medals and Melissas Gold (traditional) won a bronze. Autumn (pumpkin spices) won a gold medal and the Peoples Choice award.

But like other small businesses, Keepers Cut felt the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some did not survive the pandemic but Keepers Cut found ways to keep going.

When the pandemic started and places like Keepers Cut had to shut down, Myers and Curran were in the unfortunate position of having to lay off employees. They managed the business themselves.

Myers said they were able to survive because they own the property. In addition, they got federal restaurant revitalization grant, which helped them stay in business. They could still make mead and sell it in bottles only.

Our local following was very supportive, and even though we couldnt have on-site tastings for a couple of months, people came in and bought bottles of mead, said Curran.

The federal grant allowed them to increase production which meant more online sales and shipping products out of state.

Other similar businesses were not as fortunate. Myers said a cidery in Charlotte and a meadery in California closed permanently during the COVID pandemic.

There were businesses in our industry that were severely affected, he added.

Keapers Cut Meadery is now open Wednesdays and Thursdays from 3 to 9 p.m. and Fridays and Saturdays from noon to 9 p.m. In addition, a part-time employee has been hired.
An Emirati court in Dubai has sentenced Israeli women to prison after she was charged for possessing drugs in the Gulf country, reports say.

Israels Channel 12, Middle East Monitor (MEMO) notes, reported that the woman identified as Fidaa Kiwan, a resident of Haifa who owns a photography studio, was convicted of possessing half a kilogram of cocaine while visiting Dubai for work, on Tuesday.

She was arrested in March last year.

Kiwan however denied any wrongdoing as she claimed the drugs are not hers and were planted in her bag and in the apartment she was staying in. Her family told Channel 12 that the drugs were delivered to the apartment that she was staying in.

The Gulf country has strict anti-drug laws, with those convicted of drug trafficking facing a possible death sentence. However, MEMO notes, the death sentences are not rigorously enforced in many cases and tend to be converted into heavy prison sentences.
The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries Wealth and Water Resources has banned the import of live fish, their derivatives and their offal from Sibiu, Republic of Romania; citing the recommendation from the World Organization for Animal Health.

The Ministry prohibits the import of live fish, their derivatives and their offal from Sibiu, Republic of Romania, based on a recommendation from the World Organization for Animal Health, the ministry said in a statement.

The ban shall remain in effect until revised and a decision is issued in this regard, The Arabian Stories reports. Products which are treated and processed in accordance with the Aquatic Animal Health Law issued by the World Organization for Animal Health are exempted from the ban, the media adds.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida expressed his intention to cooperate with Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Prime Minister of Bahrain, in fostering a closer bilateral relationship, the foreign ministry in Tokyo said, according to Arab News.

This came during a telephone conversation between Kishida and the Crown Prince on Tuesday.

Al Khalifa, the ministry said expressed his renewed hopes for strengthening the bilateral relationship, and expressed his appreciation for Japans cooperation in the launching of the Bahrain-UAE joint nanosatellite Light-1 from the Japanese Experiment Module Kibo on the International Space Station.

Both leaders, the ministry also pledged to boost cooperation in various fields, in both the public and private sector, through signing the agreement between Japan and the Kingdom of Bahrain for the Reciprocal Promotion and Protection of Investment at an early time.

Their discussions also touched on the situation in Ukraine and how to shape the framework of the international order going forward, including the United Nations Security Council. They also confirmed that Japan and Bahrain will continue to closely coordinate their response to the situation.

In addition, both sides confirmed that Japan and Bahrain will cooperate towards the stabilization of the international oil market. The two countries are marking this year the 50th anniversary of the establishment of their diplomatic ties.
A former militia leader will become the first person to be tried at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for atrocities committed in Darfur, the scene of a bloodbath nearly 20 years ago.

At least 45 people died in the week leading up to the hearings in renewed tribal clashes in the western Sudanese region that is regularly plagued by violence, according to local security officials.

Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, 72, an aide to former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, was the leader of the Janjaweed militia, a proxy force for the Sudanese government accused of abuses during the Darfur conflict.

Also known by his nom de guerre Ali Kosheib, he is accused of 31 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in 2003-2004 in Darfur. The conflict erupted at that time when members of ethnic minorities took up arms against the Arab majority regime in Khartoum.

Khartoum responded with the Janjaweed, a force drawn from the regions nomadic tribes. Human rights groups said they carried out a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing targeting the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups.

The human toll of the conflict is estimated at 300,000 dead and 2.5 million displaced, according to the United Nations. In April 2007, the ICC, based in The Hague, issued an arrest warrant for Abd-Al-Rahman.

Abd-Al-Rahman fled to the Central African Republic in February 2020 when the new Sudanese government announced its intention to cooperate with ICC investigators. He surrendered in June 2020 to the ICC after 13 years on the run, and denies the charges against him.

According to ICC prosecutors, the militia leader, supported by Sudanese forces, carried out attacks on villages in the Wadi Salih area of Darfur in August 2003, in which at least 100 villagers were murdered, women and girls were raped, and members of the predominant Fur ethnic group were forcibly relocated and persecuted.
Authorities in Mali have summoned Oumar Mariko after the opposition figure criticized the ruling junta and suggested that the army was murdering people, relatives said.

A member of the politicians family and a security official said he had received a summons to report to the gendarmerie Tuesday morning.

Mr. Marikos party, the left-wing SADI, said in a statement that armed men had gone to his home on Sunday and, when they did not find him there, they surrounded his home and are waiting for him to arrive so that they can kidnap him.

The political group denounced the intimidation and threats of power and assured to take national and international opinion as witnesses on the autocratic excesses of the transitional regime.

During a public meeting, Oumar Mariko suggested that the army had come to assassinate people in Moura, in the center of the country.

Mr. Mariko listed several recent killings in Mali and deemed them unacceptable, including the one last week in Moura. When a people does not feel free at home, when a people does not feel in control of its destiny, a revolution is needed, Mariko said.

The Malian army announced on Friday that it had killed 203 fighters of armed terrorist groups during an operation in a Sahelian zone conducted from March 23 to 31. This announcement was followed by a wave of condemnations, from France to the United States and the United Nations, about possible exactions by Malian soldiers and Russian mercenaries.
Thailand eyes 1.1 million tourists from Southeast Asia











The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) aims to attract 1.1 million tourists from Southeast Asia this year, given that residents in the region can now largely travel without restrictions, according to Thanet Phetsuwan, TAT deputy governor of marketing for Asia and the South Pacific.

Tourists at Maya Bay, Thailand (Photo: VNA)

The TAT is actively promoting tourism as airlines are resuming international flights, borders are being re-opened, and people are learning to live with COVID-19, he said.

Besides Southeast Asia, the goal for Australia is around 200,000 tourists, and 450,000 for India, Thanet said.The official said TAT has partnered with Thai AirAsia (TAA) to boost international visitors by launching joint promotions in different countries to attract at least 18,000 inbound package tours between April and July.It set the goal of attracting 11,000 package tours from Vietnam, mainly targeting independent travellers and families with children, and 3,000 tours from Singapore, made up of young people and young couples.The campaign is also targeting medical and wellness visitors from Malaysia and Cambodia, with around 1,000 package tours from each country.Thailand has prepared a roadmap to define COVID-19 as an endemic disease in the coming months to accelerate the countrys economic recovery and attract more foreign visitors.The country hopes to welcome 7 million foreign tourists this year after gradually easing restrictions, but given the current situation, some research units have reduced their foreign tourist arrival projection to 5.7 million, bringing revenue of 300 billion THB (about 9 billion USD).
President Cyril Ramaphosa announced earlier this week that all legal restrictions related to the Covid-19 pandemic would end at midnight, stressing that it was time to boost economic growth.

The pace of new infections and deaths from the virus has slowed significantly in South Africa since mid-February. Ramaphosa said the death rate has dropped from a daily average of 420 in July last year to just 12 last week.

We hope that the worst is behind us, and that better days lie ahead, he said as he announced the lifting of the latest restrictions from midnight.

Now is the time to grow our economy and create jobs  to get our country back on track. It is now time to heal, to recover and to rebuild, he said in a televised address to the nation.

South Africas economic situation has been worsened by the pandemic, with unemployment reaching a record high of 35.3 percent in the last quarter of 2021. While the pandemic is not over, and while we remain cautious, we can be confident that we are now in a better position than we have been at any time in the last 750 days, Ramaphosa said.

However, some transitional measures such as masking in indoor public spaces will remain in place for the next 30 days.

South Africa is the country on the continent that has suffered the most from the pandemic with more than 3.7 million people affected by the coronavirus. According to the latest official figures, the pandemic has killed nearly 99,900 people in a total population of 59 million.
A group of Libyans, including NGOs and a brother of one of 11 civilians said to be killed by the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) in November 2018, has filed a criminal complaint against the former Italian commander at the U.S. air base in Sigonella, Sicily, seeking accountability for his role in the killings, Libya Observer reports, citing US media The Intercept.

The complainants, the US media notes, had asked the public prosecutors office in Siracusa, where the base is located, to investigate and prosecute for murder Col. Gianluca Chiriatti and other Italian officials involved in the attack.

Madogaz Musa Abdullah, the brother of one of the victims claims that AFRICOM killed 11 people on the basis that they were terrorists, but those young men were completely against terrorism. They were killed without evidence and we are challenging AFRICOM to produce evidence that even one of them was on a US target list, he said.

Death is a fact that we cannot deny but the injustice of eleven people being killed, accused of terrorism despite the fact they were innocent, affected us deeply especially when we had to bury them in a common grave, said Abdullah, in a sworn statement accompanying the complaint.

According to Abdullah, hospitals also refused to establish death certificates  resulting in psychological damage for the loves ones.

AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan told The Intercept the force is aware of the reports of civilian casualties from this strike. Cahalan however stressed US Africa Command followed the civilian casualty assessment process in place at the time and determined that the reports were unsubstantiated.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday ordered a new national push to research the nature and impact of long COVID, a constellation of sometimes debilitating symptoms that linger long after infection in nearly one-third of Americans.

The research initiative will be orchestrated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and will span several federal agencies as scientists work to build on ongoing research at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The effort will also include federal agencies offering support to patients and doctors by providing science-based best practices for treating long COVID, while protecting access to insurance coverage and workers' rights as people with the condition return to their jobs.

"Many individuals report debilitating, long-lasting effects of having been infected with COVID-19, often called 'long COVID,'" Biden said in a statement announcing the research effort. "Our world-class research and public health organizations have begun the difficult work of understanding these new conditions, their causes, and potential prevention and treatment options."

The administration's plan for direct support for patients includes extending civil rights protections to individuals who have long COVID while protecting their insurance coverage. It will include an emphasis on minority communities who experienced greater impacts from the pandemic, the Associated Press reported.

For treatment, an HHS unit called the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality will investigate best practices and provide that information to hospitals, doctors and patients, while the Department of Veterans Affairs will be an incubator for researching long COVID strategies, the AP reported. That agency already has long COVID programs in 18 facilities.

The research efforts will include speeding up the registrations of 40,000 people both with and without long COVID for a study on the condition, while building on the $1 billion RECOVER Initiative, an NIH research study.

People with long COVID experience symptoms that range from brain fog to fatigue, shortness of breath and pain. It's not clear why, but ongoing research has suggested it could be lingering infection or remnants of the virus that trigger inflammation, the immune system attacking normal cells, or some impact from tiny clots caused by the virus.

Experts welcomed the news.

"This is a very important move on the part of the Biden administration to acknowledge that long COVID is real, that it is a significant threat, and that much more needs to be done," Dr. Leana Wen, a former Baltimore health commissioner, told the AP. "The emphasis on treatment for long COVID and recognizing this could be a source of ongoing disability are long overdue."

This comprehensive approach could address "an extremely thorny issue that has previously received a scattershot approach," Diana Berrent, founder of Survivor Corps, a support group that connects patients with government and private researchers, told the AP. "This is the first effort that truly comports with the needs of people who are suffering."

Explore further Long COVID may qualify as a disability: Biden

More information: Visit Johns Hopkins for more on Visit Johns Hopkins for more on long COVID.

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China reported more than 20,000 COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, the highest daily tally given since the start of the pandemic as millions in locked-down Shanghai began a new round of testing.

The country's "zero-COVID" strategy has come under immense strain as cases spike, with around 25 million residents of ShanghaiChina's largest city and economic engine roomordered to stay at home as the authorities struggle to contain the outbreak.

Until March, China had kept daily cases low with snap localised lockdowns, mass testing, and strict restrictions on international travel.

But the caseload has hit thousands per day in recent weeks, with Shanghai driving the surge of the highly transmissible Omicron variant.

The city locked down in phases last week and complaints have swelled online of fresh food shortages caused by logistics disruptions and panic buying, which has left many residents waking early to try to beat the queues on grocery apps.

State broadcaster CCTV reported that the city will launch a fresh round of tests on the entire population on Wednesday.

Shanghai's "prevention and control situation is very severe," National Health Commission official Lei Zhenglong said Wednesday, adding the outbreak is still "in its peak phase."

It was the latest dour warning suggesting a long run in lockdown may be ahead, while city health officials have converted a convention centre into a makeshift COVID hospital for 40,000 people.

Grocery woes

China recorded 20,472 infections on Wednesday, according to the National Health Commission.

It is the country's highest daily infection number given by authorities, even during the peak of the initial outbreak which centred around Wuhan.

The majority of the cases are, however, asymptomatic.

Authorities reported no new deaths, in a country which says only two people have died of the virus in nearly two years.

Yet China faces low vaccination rates, especially among the elderly, leaving officials with a high-wire balancing act of maintaining public health while keeping the economy moving.

Omicron can only be thwarted by vaccination "protecting high-risk populations like the elderly and those with underlying conditions," Wang Guiqing, an infectious disease expert of Peking University said in a Wednesday press conference.

In Shanghai quarantine facilities are bulging with people who test positiveeven if they are asymptomaticas city officials stick rigidly to virus protocols.

Those include separating COVID-positive babies and children from parents who test negative, a policy that has anguished worried families.

City officials said on Wednesday that parents of some child patients with "special needs" would now be allowed to remain with their COVID-positive children.

Anger over lack of fresh food and curtailed movements is rising among residents as officials extend what was originally intended to be a short lockdown.

The Weibo hashtag "buying groceries in Shanghai" was censored from the platform, even though many of the posts detailing residents' efforts to nab coveted vegetables were still visible on Wednesday.

Shanghai, China's largest city, accounted for more than 80 percent of the national tally, city officials said Wednesday.

A top Shanghai official has conceded that the financial hub had been "insufficiently prepared" for the outbreak.

China, the country where the coronavirus was first detected in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019, is among the last remaining places in the world following a zero-COVID approach to the pandemic.

The outbreak has taken on an increasingly serious economic dimension, with China's factory output falling to its lowest in two years in March, according to independent indices released by Chinese media group Caixin.

Explore further Hong Kong urges testing, Shanghai struggles under lockdown

 2022 AFP
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Climate-related health emergencies are on the rise in Africa, though the continent contributes the least to global warming, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday.

According to new WHO analysis such climate-related health emergencies account for "more than half of public health events recorded in the region over the past two decades," its regional bureau said in a statement.

Of the public health events recorded throughout Africa between 2001 and 2021, 56 percent were climate-related, the UN health agency said.

In Africa, "frequent floods, water- and vector-borne diseases are deepening health crises," said Matshidiso Moeti, WHO's regional director for Africa.

"Although the continent contributes the least to global warming, it bears the full consequences," she added.

On Thursday the WHO celebrates World Health Day, with this year's theme "Our Planet, Our Health".

The organisation is calling on governments to "prioritise human well-being in all key decisions, stop new fossil fuel explorations and subsidies, tax polluters and implement WHO air quality guidelines".

In Africa "diarrhoeal diseases are the third leading cause of disease and death in under-five children," the WHO said in its new analysis.

"A significant proportion of these deaths is preventable through safe drinking water, adequate sanitation and hygiene," it added.

 2022 AFP
SARS-CoV-2 (shown here in an electron microscopy image). Credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH

A study led by researchers at Boston Children's Hospital explains for the first time why COVID-19 causes severe inflammation in some people, leading to acute respiratory distress and multi-organ damage. Surprisingly, the study also finds that antibodies that people develop when they contract COVID-19 can sometimes lead to more inflammation, while antibodies generated by mRNA COVID-19 vaccines seem not to.

The researchers, led by Judy Lieberman, MD, Ph.D. and Caroline Junqueira, Ph.D. in Boston Children's Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine, with Michael Filbin, MD, at Massachusetts General Hospital, published their findings April 6 in Nature.

"We wanted to understand what distinguishes patients with mild versus severe COVID-19," says Lieberman. "We know that many inflammatory markers are elevated in people with severe disease, and that inflammation is at the root of disease severity, but we hadn't known what triggers the inflammation."

The investigators analyzed fresh blood samples from patients with COVID-19 coming to the emergency department at Massachusetts General Hospital. They compared these with samples from healthy people and patients with other respiratory conditions. They also looked in lung autopsy tissue from people who had died from COVID-19.

A fiery death of immune cells

They found that SARS-CoV-2 can infect monocytes  immune cells in the blood that act as "sentinels" or early responders to infection  as well as macrophages, similar immune cells in the lungs. Once infected, both types of cells die a fiery death (called pyroptosis) that releases an explosion of powerful inflammatory alarm signals.

"In the infected patients, about 6 percent of blood monocytes were dying an inflammatory death," says Lieberman. "That's a large number to find, because dying cells are rapidly eliminated from the body."

Examining the the lung tissue from people who died from COVID-19, they found that about a quarter of the macrophages in the tissue were dying.

When the researchers studied the cells for signs of SARS-CoV-2, they found that about 10 percent of monocytes and 8 percent of lung macrophages were infected.

The fact that monocyte and macrophages can be infected with SARS-CoV-2 was a surprise, since monocytes don't carry ACE2 receptors, the classic entry portal for the virus, and macrophages have low amounts of ACE2. Lieberman thinks SARS-CoV-2 infection of monocytes might have previously been missed in part because researchers often study frozen blood samples, in which dead cells do not show up.

The study also showed that while SARS-CoV-2 was able to infect monocytes and macrophages, it wasn't able to produce new infectious viruses. The researchers believe the cells died quickly from pyroptosis before new viruses could fully form.

"In some ways, uptake of the virus by these 'sentinel' cells is protective: it sops up the virus and recruits more immune cells," says Lieberman. "But the bad news is that all these inflammatory molecules get released. In people who are more prone to inflammation, such as the elderly, this can get out of control."

Antibodies facilitating infection?

A certain group of monocytes was especially likely to be infected: those carrying a receptor called CD16. These "non-classical" monocytes make up only about 10 percent of all monocytes, but their numbers were increased in patients with COVID-19, the researchers found. They were also more likely to be infected: about half were infected, as compared with none of the classical blood monocytes.

The CD16 receptor appears to recognize antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. The researchers believe these antibodies may actually facilitate infection of monocytes carrying the receptor. "The antibodies coat the virus, and cells with the CD16 receptor then take the virus up," Lieberman says.

However, when the team studied healthy patients who had received mRNA vaccines against COVID-19, the antibodies they developed did not appear to facilitate infection. The reason for this is still unclear; the researchers believe that vaccine-generated antibodies have slightly different properties than antibodies that develop during infection and don't bind as well to the CD16 receptor. As a result, the cells don't take the virus up.

Lieberman and her colleagues believe these findings may have implications for using monoclonal antibodies to treat COVID-19, helping to explain why the treatment works only when given early. "It may be that later on, antibodies may help enhance inflammation," she says. "We may need to look at the properties of the antibodies."

Explore further New research may explain severe virus attacks on the lungs

More information: Judy Lieberman, FcR-mediated SARS-CoV-2 infection of monocytes activates inflammation, Nature (2022). www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04702-4 Journal information: Nature Judy Lieberman, FcR-mediated SARS-CoV-2 infection of monocytes activates inflammation,(2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04702-4
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Terry Golaner is counting the days until her two youngest children can be vaccinated against the coronavirus, continuing with masks and careful consideration of social activities.

"I feel like my two younger ones potentially could be sitting ducks," the Pikesville, Maryland, mother said. "At some point we all may have COVID, but I want them to have the vaccine because I don't want them to end up in the hospital or with long-haul COVID or die."

The wait is frustrating, especially with much of the public moving on from the pandemic as cases plummet and mandates lift.

What's worse for public health officials staring down a possible new wave of infections from another omicron subvariant called BA.2 is the fear other parents won't see a need to get their kids vaccinated when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorizes it for children under age 5, as soon as April.

The percent of fully vaccinated Americans has stagnated at about two-thirds. Just under half of those eligible have gotten a booster dose. Federal regulators authorized a second booster last week for older and immunocompromised people, but it's unclear how many people will want those either.

Children remain the least protected with about 35% of parents of those aged 5 to 11 choosing to vaccinate their kids since they became eligible in November.

A Kaiser Family Foundation survey found even greater hesitancy among parents of younger kids. Only 1 in 5 parents said they will follow Golaner's plan to immediately vaccinate their children aged 6 months to 5 years, the survey found. About a quarter said they'd wait and see, 15% said they'd do it only if required and 35% said they would not vaccinate.

"We do need to do better, but I'm not sure we know how to do that anymore," recently lamented Dr. William Moss, executive director of the Johns Hopkins International Vaccine Access Center. "At this stage of the pandemic, it's hard to convince people. We pay a high price for that."

He and colleagues said the low vaccination rate among those aged 5 to 11 is an ominous sign about coverage for the younger ones.

Children have largely weathered the virus, with about 12 million reported cases and fewer than 1,000 deaths. But 5 million of the youth cases have been recorded so far in 2022 alone, boosting the number of hospitalizations. Long-term effects remain unknown.

Some newand oldmethods are being deployed to persuade parents to get their children and themselves vaccinated.

In Maryland, with higher than average vaccination rates, Gov. Larry Hogan has consistently pushed both vaccination and boosters with lotteries and other means, and the state has continued to offer testing and vaccinations at sites including hospitals.

Demand has waned, but the Maryland Department of Health keeps testing and vaccinations sites in "warm" status, or ready to ramp back up if needed.

"If we need to utilize these sites, we can staff them, stock them with inventoried supplies and have them operational very quickly," said Andy Owen, a department spokesman, adding the state continues to monitor cases, including testing for BA.2.

Federal funding for such efforts is expected at least through June.

"We are actively planning for the availability of COVID vaccines to Marylanders under age 5 based on the latest federal guidance and information," Owen said.

Rupali J. Limaye, director of behavioral and implementation science at Johns Hopkins' International Vaccine Access Center, has helped develop a course about how to talk to people about vaccinating their children.

"So far the messaging is that COVID in kids has been mild," she said. "But we're seeing increases in hospitalizations for children in recent months. And we've seen a lot of kids in this age range have long-term effects as well."

Limaye thinks the shifting advice, and now dropping mandates, has sent mixed messages about the need for vaccines and maybe the tactics need to change.

"The best thing may be moving away from the messaging coming from the health care system," she said. "Make it more peer-to-peer, with more interpersonal communication, grounded in empathy.  Target the moveable middle."

Delays in authorization of vaccines for the youngest kids may further reduce uptake, she said.

The FDA put off consideration of the low-dose, two-shot Pfizer-BioNTech vaccinations in February because it wasn't as effective as expected in young children. The drug makers are testing three doses.

Similarly, Moderna's two doses didn't reach the 50% effective rate that the CDC set as a threshold. But experts believe that is because it was tested during the surge of omicron, which has been better at evading protections.

But both vaccines are expected to offer significant protection from severe disease for young children.

Effectiveness is definitely a concern among the vaccine hesitant, said Rev. Derrick DeWitt, senior pastor of First Mount Calvary Baptist Church.

DeWitt was enlisted as a messenger, serving as a vaccine ambassador for the state of Maryland, encouraging everyone, but especially African Americans, to get their shots.

He said he's heard every excuse from concerns about how quickly the COVID vaccine was developed, though the mRNA technology has been around more than a decade, to conspiracy theories about implanted chips.

"I heard no way, no how am I ever going to do this, and my kids are not going to do this," said DeWitt, who mandated vaccination for staff at the Maryland Baptist Aged Home, where he also serves as president of the board, when only 11 of 60 employees initially opted for vaccination.

Teens seemed especially receptive to conspiracy theories they find online, said DeWitt, who believes schools may have to mandate vaccination. That could increase uptake to like 80%, with the remainder convinced when nothing bad happens to their friends.

For now, DeWitt has turned to incentives, such as handing out food along with a shot and a COVID test.

"We're giving away video games and gift cards along with food," he said. "Some call it gimmicks. But we had to develop a way to get people to register."

The Baltimore Community Foundation recently received $700,000 in funding from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to hand out to leaders like DeWitt, with an emphasis on Black and Hispanic residents of Baltimore city and county aged 18 to 34in many cases parents of young children.

Groups can apply on the foundation website, and the foundation also is working with Michigan State University to analyze what methods work best.

The outreach and the research will both be crucial for this and the next pandemic, said Kiara Mayhand, a public health fellow at the foundation spearheading the initiative.

"Getting vaccinated is what we know works and is our best option to protect ourselves and our families," Mayhand said. "We're uncertain about what the next phase of the pandemic will hold."

The public health experts know reaching children and their parents remains a heavy lift, with the Baltimore health department reporting only about a quarter of kids 5 to 19 are fully vaccinated, compared with 75% of those over age 60.

About 44% of Black residents are vaccinated compared with about 60% of white residents and 67% of Hispanic residents.

Golaner, the Pikesville mom, said she understands that people may have trouble getting good answers about the vaccines for themselves and their kids if they don't have people they trust to ask like she does. Her brother is a has a doctorate in biochemistry, her mother is a nurse and she's also worked in health care.

But she believes that education can work and is needed to boost vaccine rates that also protect her children, ages 11, 4 and 20 months until they get their shots.

Even then, she doesn't expect it will end the efforts.

"COVID isn't going to go away," Golaner said. "It'll be a part of our lives. We get a flu shot every year and we'll get COVID shots if we have to. I want them protected from the really bad stuff."

2022 The Baltimore Sun.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach during a press conference on the coronavirus pandemic in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, Dec. 22, 2021. Germany's health minister has backed off a decision to end obligatory isolation for people who test positive for COVID-19, declaring that it was a mistake and sent the wrong signal. Credit: AP Photo/Michael Sohn,file

Germany's health minister has backed off a decision to end compulsory isolation for people who test positive for COVID-19, declaring that it was a mistake and sent the wrong signal.

Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said on Monday that obligatory self-isolation, usually for 10 dayswhich can be cut to seven days with a negative testwould be scrapped May 1 and replaced with a strong recommendation to isolate for five days. Local health offices would still have ordered infected people in health facilities to stay off work.

Lauterbach, who first announced his change of heart on a television talk show Tuesday night, said Wednesday that the idea "was a mistake I am personally responsible for."

"I have withdrawn the proposal because the completely wrong impression would have arisen that either the pandemic is over or the virus has become significantly more harmless than was assumed in the past," he told reporters in Berlin.

He noted that nearly 350 coronavirus-related deaths were recorded on Tuesday, and said Germany has case numbers "that are much too high" and that long COVID is "a big problem."

Lauterbach said his aim had been to lighten the burden on local health offices and that he will instead do so by lifting a requirement for the contacts of infected people to quarantine. He said he would propose keeping a compulsory five-day isolation period for inviduals with COVID-19 in place.

Infection levels in Germany have been drifting down, and most coronavirus restrictions have recently been relaxed.

Lauterbach, an epidemiologist and longtime lawmaker with Chancellor Olaf Scholz's center-left party, was one of Germany's most prominent voices urging caution and strict measures against the coronavirus in the earlier stages of the pandemic.

Since becoming health minister in December, he has tried to balance that approach with the political challenges of a diverse three-party coalition government and the impact of the omicron variant, which has brought high case numbers but in many cases relatively mild illness.

Speaking on Deutschlandfunk radio, opposition leader Friedrich Merz assailed what he called a "breathless" style of government "with decisions that don't last for 48 hours."

Merz also criticized the government's approach to a potential vaccination mandate ahead of parliamentary votes set for Thursday. Scholz favors a mandate, but left it to lawmakers to come up with cross-party proposals amid divisions in his own government.

Backers of obligatory vaccinations for adults backed off that idea this week, at least for now, after struggling to build enough support.

They agreed to a compromise that foresees a mandate for people age 60 and over taking effect in October. Parliament could decide this fall whether to extend the requirement to all residents over 18. It's unclear whether that or any other proposal has a chance of winning a majority in parliament.

Some lawmakers in the governing parties oppose any mandate. Merz said his center-right party is sticking to its own proposal, which foresees setting up a national vaccination register but doesn't include an immediate vaccination mandate.

Explore further Germany makes COVID quarantine voluntary from May 1

 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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The health and wellbeing needs of the social care workforce must be brought in line with the standards set for NHS workers as part of the reform of UK social care, according to public and occupational health experts at Imperial College London. Writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, they say it is impossible to understand what is happening across the fragmented care sector with respect to workforce health and wellbeing.

There are an estimated 17,700 different organizations providing care in the sector. Just like healthcare workers, social care workers come into close contact with patients at their most vulnerable. Yet, unlike healthcare workers there is no national guidance around worker health.

The government has pledged to use the new Health and Social Care Levy to improve training and support in the care sector, as well as bring an end to the high costs of care faced by those who need it.

Lead author Dr. Lara Shemtob, Honorary Clinical Research Fellow at the School of Public Health, Imperial College London, said: "Carers delivering care at the bottom of the organizational hierarchy are least protected. With no carer unions or professional bodies and workforce health and wellbeing falling outside of the CQC's remit, a national approach to standards and audit is necessary to protect carers and those they care for."

In a recent survey over 70% of care providers reported increasing challenges in recruiting and retaining staff and maintaining staff morale.

"The importance of baking occupational health into social care reform is twofold", said Dr. Shemtob. "Firstly, the fragmented sector needs cohesive guidance around workforce health to protect staff and patients. Secondly, improving workforce wellbeing and strengthening the appeal of social care work will go some way to tackling the recruitment crisis."

The authors say there is a need to improve the infrastructure around workforce heath in care, from an immunization program to protect both carers and patients, to support with the emotional burden of dealing with mentally unwell or distressed patients and the physical demands of personal care.

"Carers need avenues for support, standards for dealing with periods of workforce illness and policies tackling absenteeism and presenteeism", added Dr. Shemtob.

More information: Health and wellbeing of care workers must have a place in UK social care reform, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2022). Journal information: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine Health and wellbeing of care workers must have a place in UK social care reform,(2022). DOI: 10.1177/01410768221090673
Israel's government made a second booster dose of the Pfizer vaccine available to all of its citizens aged 60 and older at the beginning of this year.

Now, emerging data suggests this fourth dose greatly boosts protection against the Omicron variant.

In a study published April 5 in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers looked at data collected on more than 1.25 million Israelis over 60.

All were "eligible for the fourth dose during a period in which the B.1.1.529 [Omicron] variant of SARS-CoV-2 was predominant," explained a team co-led by Yair Goldberg, of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.

In terms of sheer case numbers, 177 out of every 100,000 people who got a second booster became infected with COVID-19, compared to 361 cases among those who'd gotten just three doses of vaccine, the study found.

Analyzed another way, within a month of getting their fourth shot, people had half the odds of becoming infected with COVID compared to people in the three-dose group, Goldberg and his colleagues said.

However, they noted that "this protection waned in later weeks."

The benefits were even greater when it came to shielding a person against a severe case of COVID.

Compared to people in the same age group who did not get a fourth Pfizer shot, those who did were more than 3.5 times less likely to develop severe COVID-19 within a month of getting the shot, the researchers reported.

In this case, protection seemed to last, too: "Protection against severe illness did not wane during the 6 weeks after receipt of the fourth dose," the Israeli group noted.

The new data arrives after last week's announcement by the Biden Administration that second boosters of COVID vaccines are now available to all Americans over the age of 50 who got their first booster more than four months ago. People with certain medical conditions are also eligible.

Dr. Amesh Adalja is senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore. He believes the Israeli data "demonstrates that in high-risk persons such as those above 60 years of age, fourth doses appear beneficial against what matters: severe disease."

Should everyone try and get a fourth booster? Maybe not, Adalja said.

"Boosters are best targeted to those who are at risk for severe breakthrough infections and not a one-size-fits-all recommendation for the general population, regardless of risk," he said.

Explore further Pfizer asks US to allow 4th COVID vaccine dose for seniors

Copyright  2022 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Like several other countries, Azerbaijan seeks to retain functioning relations with both Russia and Ukraine amid Russias invasion. Baku provides Ukraine with humanitarian aid yet avoids actions directly opposing Moscow for fear of retaliation. Bakus position reflects its interest in maintaining Russias acceptance of Azerbaijans multi-vector foreign policy and in gaining Moscows support for its objectives in Nagorno-Karabakh. Moreover, the recent surge of violence in Nagorno-Karabakh suggests that Baku is taking advantage of the opportunity arising as Western and Russian attention is directed elsewhere to improve its own position vis-a-vis the separatist region.

BACKGROUND: Azerbaijan has striven to maintain positive relations with Ukraine and Russia simultaneously, which is in line with Bakus balanced and independent foreign policy. Azerbaijan is also emulating Turkey, which has developed substantial cooperation with both Kyiv and Moscow, and has now taken the lead in mediating between the two. In the past several years, relations between Russia and Azerbaijan have improved and intensified in numerous areas such as economy, military and culture. Growing political dialogue and bilateral trade reinforced these positive dynamics. Azerbaijan has become Russias number one partner in the South Caucasus and is under pressure from Moscow to join the Eurasian Economic Union and the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Russias deployment of a Russian peacekeeping contingent to Azerbaijans territory after the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war provided Moscow with significant leverage over Baku and substantial influence in matters concerning Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azerbaijan did not publicly criticize Russia for recognizing the independence of Ukraines separatist regions Donetsk and Luhansk, although Bakus foreign policy is centered on respect for the principle of territorial integrity. Moreover, Azerbaijan has not joined sanctions against Russia and Baku has avoided publicly criticizing Russia for the military attack on its neighbor. This has been the case despite Azerbaijans close relationship with Kyiv. In recent years, trade between Ukraine and Azerbaijan has grown consistently, and Ukraine has become one of Bakus main military partners and energy export destinations. Kyiv also took Azerbaijans side during the war in Nagorno-Karabakh and voiced support for its territorial integrity. Azerbaijans President Ilham Aliyevs visit to Ukraine in January this year was a sign of these positive dynamics. Aliyev traveled to Kyiv when Russias military attack on Ukraine was imminent and signed several documents with Ukraines President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which reaffirmed the sovereignty and territorial integrity of both countries, and the need for protection of their internationally recognized borders. Nevertheless, Baku did not offer Ukraine either political or military support after Russias attack on February 24. Instead, Azerbaijan sent humanitarian aid and provided free fuel for Ukrainian ambulances, fire fighters and other emergency vehicles. A majority of the Azerbaijani public seems to support Ukraine and condemns Russias attack. On February 27, Azerbaijani civil society organizations also staged a pro-Ukraine solidarity rally gathering a substantial number of attendants, a rare occurrence in authoritarian Azerbaijan with its restrictions on the freedom of assembly.

IMPLICATIONS: Azerbaijan seems to purposefully remain on the sidelines of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in order to avoid antagonizing either Kyiv or Moscow, and to realize its own policy objectives while the world is preoccupied with the Russian aggression. Although the 2020 tripartite ceasefire agreement remains in place, Baku remains focused on Nagorno-Karabakh and a range of unresolved issues that hinder peace efforts in the region.

From Azerbaijans perspective, Nagorno-Karabakh was the number one concern behind the recent Declaration of Allied Interaction, which was signed by President Aliyev and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on February 22 in Moscow, just before Russia recognized the so-called independence of Ukraines separatist regions Donetsk and Luhansk and attacked Ukraine. Despite the particularly poor timing of the Moscow visit, Azerbaijan achieved several important objectives in exchange for its neutrality in the upcoming conflict between Russia and the West. The declaration elevated Russia-Azerbaijan ties to the level of allies and strengthened their cooperation in several areas including military and security, trade and energy. The most important points for Baku was that Russia reconfirmed Azerbaijans territorial integrity and vowed not to support any separatist attempts against it. Moreover, the declaration reaffirms both parties right to conduct an independent foreign policy, which several experts regard as Moscows acceptance for Azerbaijans multi-vector foreign policy, and an expression of Russias intent to continue peacekeeping efforts in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Another reason why Russian goodwill is important for Azerbaijan is that the Russian peacekeeping mission in Nagorno-Karabakh still lacks a clear mandate after its deployment in November 2020. The only legal framework for the peacekeeping mission is the general provisions of the November 2020 tripartite agreement and discussions on its legal mechanism are still ongoing. Baku has become increasingly critical of some aspects of the Russian peacekeeping mission and has lately sought to clarify its mandate. Azerbaijan particularly opposes the fact that the Russian contingent is either unable or unwilling to stop Armenian military deployments in Nagorno-Karabakh in breach of the ceasefire, and that it allows Armenians to utilize the Lachin corridor without Bakus permission.

Against the backdrop of Azerbaijans growing discontent with the Russian peacekeeping mission, clashes between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh and along their shared state border have intensified amidst the Russian aggression against Ukraine. Armenian authorities of the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh Republic accused Azerbaijan of recurrently cutting off gas supplies to the region, causing intermittent shortages in heating for the local population in sub-zero temperatures. The Armenian side has also warned that the Azerbaijani military has shelled villages and ordered locals to leave, and reported a large Azerbaijani military build-up along the line of contact, accusing Baku of seizing the opportunity presented by the situation in Ukraine to plan renewed military attacks on the region. Pro-government Azerbaijani media and some political figures have initiated a rhetorical campaign against the Russian peacekeeping contingent in Nagorno-Karabakh, accusing it of being unable to ensure the ceasefire and of ignoring attacks against the Azerbaijani military due to corrupt ties with the Karabakh authorities.

A major escalation took place on March 24-25 when Azerbaijani troops breached the line of contact and captured the village of Farrukh (Parukh) in Nagorno-Karabakh, using firearms and drones. Clashes followed between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces, which according to Karabakh authorities left 3 Armenians dead and 14 wounded. The Azerbaijani side did not release information about their casualties. The Azerbaijani incursion was condemned by all Minsk Group co-chairs including Russia, which criticized Azerbaijan for violating the ceasefire and entering the area under the Russian peacekeeping missions responsibility. However, the Russian peacekeeping contingent reportedly did not stop the Azerbaijani military advances. Armenias Prime Minster Nikol Pashinyan addressed this in his March 25 telephone conversation with Vladimir Putin, urging the Russian president to investigate why. On March 26, Azerbaijans Ministry of Defense responded with a request to Russia to facilitate the complete withdrawal of Armenian military and armed detachments from Azerbaijans territory. Baku also asserted that Azerbaijan will not abandon recently captured territories, and hinted that it will attempt to gain control over additional areas of Nagorno-Karabakh.

CONCLUSIONS: Azerbaijan seeks to balance its relations with Ukraine and Russia during the war; however, its engagement is rather symbolic and based on pragmatic calculations. Baku has carefully avoided criticizing Russia for its actions in Ukraine even after shelling the Azerbaijani honorary consulate in Kharkiv in early March. Baku did not join Western sanctions in order to avoid antagonizing Russia, which has a substantial influence over the Nagorno-Karabakh issue.

Nagorno-Karabakh is the exclusive center of Bakus attention and Azerbaijan clearly wants to seize the moment as the West and Russia are preoccupied with the war in Ukraine to further improve its positions in the region. Baku is therefore ramping up pressure on the Russian peacekeeping contingent tasked with overseeing the ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh and accusing it of inability to perform its duties. Moreover, Azerbaijan seemingly seeks to gain control over areas of Nagorno-Karabakh that it did not recapture in 2020, and is testing the ground in the hope that Russia will not be able to handle multiple fronts at once. Thus, in the absence of more decisive reactions from the Kremlin, further Azerbaijani advances should not be ruled out.

AUTHORS BIO: Natalia Konarzewska ( This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ) is a graduate of the University of Warsaw and a freelance expert and analyst with a focus on political and economic developments in the post-Soviet space.
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Women who remained adherent to COVID-19 preventive measures in Uganda in mid-2020 were more likely to experience intimate partner violence (IPV) than women who were poorly adherent to the measures, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS Global Public Health by Ronald Anguzu of the Medical College of Wisconsin, US, and colleagues.

51% of young girls and women in Uganda have experienced one form of physical or sexual IPV. COVID-19 lockdowns have been associated with psychological distress and decreased quality of life, especially in households with high poverty levels. Concerns have been raised about the population-level effects of COVID-19 prevention strategies and policies on violence against women and girls.

In the new study, Anguzu and colleagues conducted a three-month prospective cohort study, from July to October 2020, among 148 women living in informal settlements of Kampala, Uganda. Participants had a mean age of 32.9 years, 50.7% were married or cohabitating, and 78.2% reported food insecurity during the lockdown period. They were surveyed at baseline, 3 weeks and 6 weeks on their adherence to COVID-19 preventive measures, sociodemographic factors, and IPV.

Overall, 10.1% of participants were poorly adherent to COVID-19 preventive measuresincluding social distancing, wearing face masks and use of hand sanitizer. 58.1% of women in the study experienced at least one form of IPV between baseline and endline surveys. After controlling for potential confounders, remaining adherent to all four COVID-19 preventive measures was independently associated with 3.87 times higher odds of experiencing IPV (OR 3.87, 95%CI 1.09, 13.79).

The current study was not able to follow up participants to further investigate the socio-cultural context surrounding their experiences of IPV during the first COVID-19 wave in Uganda. However, the authors conclude that integration of violence prevention and response strategies into the national COVID-19 prevention strategy for Uganda is critical.

Explore further Pandemic lockdowns had severe mental health consequences for women in the developing world

More information: Adherence to COVID-19 preventive measures and its association with intimate partner violence among women in informal settings of Kampala, Uganda, PLOS Global Public Health (2022). Adherence to COVID-19 preventive measures and its association with intimate partner violence among women in informal settings of Kampala, Uganda,(2022). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0000177
Bar charts of interaction of marital status and loss of income earner on (A) mothers depression and (B) mothers anxiety. *P<0.01, **p<0.001. Blue bar represents mothers who did not lose income earner(s); orange bar represents mothers who lost income earner(s). n.s, not significant. Credit: BMJ Open (2022). DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2021-052103

The advent of COVID-19 has led to much discussion about the severe toll it has taken on people's mental health worldwide. A recent World Health Organization study revealed that the global prevalence of anxiety and depression rose by a staggering 25 percent in the first year of the pandemic, and that young people and women were the worst hit. Multiple stress factors contributed to this, with the report citing the unprecedented levels of stress arising from social isolation during the pandemic as a major reason for the rise.

However, there has been a dearth of research on the mental health conditions of society's long-term poor during this period. Addressing this, a team of NUS researchers from the Department of Social Work at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences embarked on a novel study to examine COVID-19's impact on the levels of depression and anxiety of low-income Singaporean mothers and their coping strategies.

The study revealed an unexpected findingthe mental health state of financially-poor mothers was found to be relatively stable in spite of the uncertainties wrought by the pandemic, with many adopting different strategies to cope with financial distress. Also, COVID-19 government support grants helped cushion the financial stress.

Associate Professor Esther Goh, who heads the social work department and led the study, revealed, "This is one of the first studies that empirically tracked the mental health conditions of low-income mothers at the initial phase of COVID-19 pandemic and immediately after the peak of infection in Singapore in June 2020. It gives rich insights into the coping strategies of the poor and government grant provisions that might have mitigated the unprecedented impact of COVID-19 on their mental health."

The team's findings were published in the medical journal BMJ Open in January 2022.

Tracing Singapore's experience with COVID-19 in 2020 and its impact on low-income mothers

In response to the fast-evolving pandemic in Singapore in 2020, a multi-ministry task force was formed to pre-empt the potential risks and mitigate the ramifications of the pandemic. To stem virus spread, a nationwide partial lockdown, known as circuit-breaker, was implemented between 7 April and 4 May 2020, and this was subsequently extended to 1 June 2020. Only essential services and key economic sectors could keep their premises open whereas non-essential industries were ordered to close. On 1 June 2020, circuit-breaker measures were progressively lifted in phases.

The tightened safety measures brought about social, psychological and economic consequences on Singaporeans. To cushion the economic impact, the government introduced four budgets from February to May 2020, with subsequent enhancements. The budgets, which amounted to about S$100 billion, focused on helping companies and saving jobs, providing social support to households, and providing critical support for affected employees and firms.

To understand the pandemic's impact on financially-disadvantaged mothers' mental health, the team rode on a larger study on low-income families in Singapore, conducting five focus group discussions (FGDs) with 39 interviewers who carried out surveys with 424 mothers from low-income families post-lockdown between June and September 2020, and gleaning observations from the interviewers on the risk and stress levels of these mothers during the period leading up to March and April 2020the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition, survey data from two time pointspre-COVID-19 (December 2019 to February 2020) and post-COVID-19 pandemic height (June to September 2020), measuring the relationship of mother's job loss, income earner loss, marital status, number of children and, permanency of employment and mother's hope levels with mother's depression and anxiety, were used to triangulate the observations from the FGDs.

Low-income mothers' mental health state linked to availability of support in social milieu

Interestingly, data gathered from the FGDs revealed that about four-fifth of the mothers did not show extreme financial stress despite COVID-19 impacting family finances. Although interviewers observed a higher level of financial stress particularly among those who experienced income and job losses, most mothers were able to cope. The researchers also found few observations of emotional distress that were linked to the pandemic.

In addition, the mothers mentioned a range of strategies to manage their financial and emotional stress. Government COVID-19 payouts were cited as an important resource that tided them over the income reduction months and prevented them from plunging into a state of crisis.

These mothers were also knowledgeable in applying for other applicable COVID-19 grants through the assistance of social workers. In addition, they were found to be well-informed of community resources including Family Service Centers and Social Service Offices, and displayed a willingness to step forward to seek help, thereby revealing their proactive adaptive behaviors.

Another unexpected and prominent finding was that notwithstanding the financial and emotional stress reported, a sense of hope and resilience prevailed amidst the pandemic.

The impact of policy on low-income mothers' resilience

Indeed, a strong link between the significant resources provided by the government and the sense of hope and resilience the mothers felt was observed. The team suggested several attributes in the political and economic context of Singapore that may have facilitated the internal resilience of the study respondents.

First, Singapore has a strong fiscal capacity with a total national reserve that is estimated to be well above S$500 billion, and this reserve has been drawn on during times of crisis. To cushion COVID-19's impact, four budgets amounting to about S$100 billion were rolled out and this translated to practical and timely financial help for Singaporeans. Second, the whole-of-government approach taken in managing the pandemic, coupled with high political centralization meant that the government was able to pass legislation quickly, such as the drawing of past reserves.

Third, the economic schemes were well-timed to coincide with the established domestic laws so that when the public health measures and human control measures kicked in to restrict human and therefore economic activities, the shock on lives and livelihoods was cushioned. Fourth, the vulnerable and low-income groups had access to information on the government support schemes and payouts, as details about the schemes were actively circulated and easily accessible through local news media. Lastly, the administration of the schemes also facilitated the access to help by those from the lower socio-economic group.

Assoc Prof Goh noted, "As a result of the significant resources provided by the Singapore government, the financially poor mothers have gathered various adaptive strategies to cope with the unexpected financial distress. This external (social milieu) resilience bolstered the financially poor mothers' internal (psychological traits) resilience. Specifically, the availability of COVID-19 payout grants facilitated the coping processes and resilience in the familial and individual levels of low-income families, thus enhancing their stress-adaption processes."

She added, "We found that the injection of fiscal policies by the Singapore government was effectively geared to save the livelihoods of the people. However, as Singapore begins transition from a pandemic to an endemic, a vital question to ask is: 'what does this mean for the livelihood and mental health of these poor mothers?' This is a potential area for future research."

Explore further Disadvantaged mothers report high rates of job loss and stress during COVID-19 pandemic

More information: Esther Chor Leng Goh et al, Why did COVID-19 not further harm the mental health of poor mothers? A mixed-method study on low-income families in Singapore, BMJ Open (2022). Journal information: BMJ Open Esther Chor Leng Goh et al, Why did COVID-19 not further harm the mental health of poor mothers? A mixed-method study on low-income families in Singapore,(2022). DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2021-052103
"I really believe that this is a potential strategy that is accessible and practical for families, and that we could mitigate some of the inequities in childhood asthma," said Michelle Trivedi, MD. Credit: University of Massachusetts Medical School

A UMass Chan Medical School pilot study in which Central Massachusetts parents of children with asthma were sent text message medication reminders during the COVID-19 pandemic school closures demonstrated feasibility and acceptance of the text messaging and improved health outcomes for the children.

The study, which was published Jan. 30, in Pediatric Pulmonology, was led by Michelle Trivedi, MD, MPH, associate professor of pediatrics, pediatric pulmonologist and asthma clinical researcher. T.H. Chan School of Medicine second-year students Juliana Arenas and Sarah Becker contributed to the research.

"We know preventive inhalers work really well, but they don't work if you don't take them," Dr. Trivedi said. "Asthma disproportionally impacts families from disadvantaged backgrounds and communities of color. Families of children with asthma experience many competing demands, like working multiple jobs and trying to put food on the table, and we were hoping to support them with ensuring their child gets their preventive asthma medicine.

"During school closures, we were able to link the school system to these families and to the clinical system at a time when largely all of these groups were siloed and isolated but working towards the same goal of improving a child's asthma."

The observational study coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, in which most schools shut down in-person learning. Students with uncontrolled asthma would normally receive their daily inhaler with their school nurse through Trivedi's program, Asthma Link. However, during COVID-related school closures, these students and families were separated from that avenue of support. But even before the pandemic, Trivedi explained, health researchers were looking for other ways to support school-based, preventive care during school vacations, holidays and weekends.

In December 2020, researchers recruited children enrolled in school-supervised asthma therapy in Central Massachusetts to participate in this school-linked text message intervention, called Remote Asthma Link. Their parents or guardians were sent two-way, automated, daily text reminders in English or Spanish, asking if they had given their child their daily preventive asthma medicine. Researchers notified the school nurse if the parent or guardian did not consistently respond to text messages. School nurses performed weekly remote check-ins with all families.

Twenty-six children and their caregivers were enrolled in the intervention with 96% retention at six months.

Caregiver response rate to daily text messages was 81% over the study period. And children experienced significant improvements in asthma health outcomes, such as fewer symptom days between baseline and follow-up, fewer emergency visits and asthma-related hospital admissions, fewer oral steroid courses, and greater medication adherence.

Trivedi said that the national average rate of pediatric asthma is 8%, but in Worcester it can be as high as 20%.

Researchers highlighted the impact, borne out in this pilot, that school nurses can have on the health care of children, particularly the most vulnerable ones.

"Part of what drives me to pursue medicine as a career path is promoting health equity," medical student Arenas said. "There are a lot of inequities when it comes to asthma outcomes and, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, there were also a lot of inequities in terms of school closures. And so, I was really interested in how this project could be a community-based intervention to promote health equity."

Becker agreed, adding that as a Holden native, she was drawn to the project because, "I got to do good in the community firsthand and be involved in taking a lead on that project. In many things in research, you don't get to see the fruits of your labor. I think this project allowed us to make an impact and we could see it blossom."

Arenas and Becker made calls to parents and conducted surveys to get their feedback.

"This response rate really supported that this could be an intervention method that could be used in the future, too," said Arenas. "It was great talking to parents and seeing how much they truly valued this program."

The next phase for Remote Asthma Link is to talk to the nurses, families and providers who participated to understand more deeply what worked and what didn't, Trivedi said. She then plans to refine the program and deploy it in a clinical trial to test it against a comparison group.

"It provided a great proof of concept here. I really believe that this is a potential strategy that is accessible and practical for families, and that we could mitigate some of the inequities in childhood asthma by connecting clinics, schools and families through a remote system," said Trivedi. "The biggest goal is that this can be something we use for the greater good of child health equity."

Explore further Follow-up prevents repeat emergency department visits for kids with asthma

More information: Juliana Arenas et al, A response to COVID19 school closures: The feasibility of a schoollinked text message intervention as an adaptation to schoolsupervised asthma therapy, Pediatric Pulmonology (2022). Juliana Arenas et al, A response to COVID19 school closures: The feasibility of a schoollinked text message intervention as an adaptation to schoolsupervised asthma therapy,(2022). DOI: 10.1002/ppul.25851
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Spain's health minister wants to lift face mask requirements for indoor spaces except public transportation and medical centers after Easter Week, when many residents travel and see their families.

Spanish Health Minister Carolina Darias said Wednesday that she would bring the proposed action to a government Cabinet meeting on April 19. If approved as expected, it would take effect the following day.

Over 92% of Spaniards over age 12 have received at least two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine. The country's high vaccination rate has meant relatively low pressure on hospitals during the most recent surge of infections.

Authorities made outdoor mask use no longer obligatory in February as a wave of cases caused by the more contagious omicron variant eased. In March, Spain eliminated mandatory home isolation for people infected with the coronavirus but experiencing no or mild symptoms.

Explore further Spain to drop masks outdoors as omicron surge decelerates

 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
A set of rare notebooks filled with notes by Charles Darwin have been anonymously returned to the University of Cambridge, over 20 years after they were initially reported missing.

The two notebooks  one of which includes Darwin's famous 1837 "Tree of Life" sketch  were returned to Cambridge University's Library in March 2022, the university said in a statement.

They were left outside the librarian's office and wrapped in plastic, inside a pink gift bag with a brown envelope containing the notebooks' archive box, and an unsigned printed note.

"Librarian, Happy Easter X," the note said.

The precious items, which the university believes could be worth "millions," were discovered missing during a routine check in January 2001, when it was revealed that the small box containing the notebooks had not been returned to its correct place in the university's special collections strong rooms.

Following an "exhaustive" search spanning years, the university officially declared the notebooks missing  and likely stolen  in November 2020.

At the time, the university issued a global call-out to help find the books.

"My sense of relief at the notebooks' safe return is profound and almost impossible to adequately express. Along with so many others all across the world, I was heartbroken to learn of their loss and my joy at their return is immense," Dr. Jessica Gardner, a Cambridge University librarian, said in a statement announcing the return of the notebooks.

"They may be tiny, just the size of postcards, but the notebooks' impact on the history of science, and their importance to our world-class collections here, cannot be overstated."

"I am incredibly glad to hear of the notebooks' safe return to their rightful home," Professor Stephen J Toope, the Cambridge University vice chancellor, said in a statement announcing the return of the notebooks.

"Objects such as these are crucial for our understanding of not only the history of science but the history of humankind."

Cambridgeshire Police's investigation of the notebook's disappearance and return is ongoing, the statement added.

Darwin used the idea of the tree of life to contextualize the theory of evolution, and show how all species on Earth are related and evolved from a shared ancestor, according to London's Natural History Museum.

His first "Tree of Life" sketch was drawn in the summer of 1837, a year after he returned to England from his worldwide voyage on the HMS Beagle. Over two decades later, Darwin would go on to publish the most seminal book of his career, "On the Origin of Species," where he expanded his ideas on evolution.

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When deciding who to support in this years elections, I will vote for candidates who have the qualities and abilities of the best attorneys who appeared in my court when I was a judge. Thats why I will vote for Monica Tranel to represent Montana in the Congress.

Being a good lawyer, and a good representative, requires being a fierce advocate for clients and constituents. Everyone is equal before the law and everyone, regardless of status or income or place in life or the power of opponents, deserves representation and advocacy. Good lawyers are committed to that representation and provide it unstintingly. Thats what Monica did when she represented everyday Montanans  workers, small businesses, farmers and ranchers, consumers  against powerful corporations, and won. She will take that same urgent commitment to advocate for her constituents to Congress.

Good lawyers know that in order to represent their clients effectively, they have to base their claims on sound and clearheaded arguments, facts and evidence, and of course an appreciation of the laws and the Constitution. They need to write and speak articulately and compellingly. These are all abilities that Monica has displayed throughout her career as a lawyer, and which she will take to Congress.

Lawyers have to be forceful, or even combative, at times, and we have all come to expect that after watching courtroom dramas on television. But the best lawyers also know how to negotiate and to find workable solutions that benefit all the parties in a dispute. They know that all those parties should be treated with civility and respect, and not with hostility and posturing. We need look no farther than the Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to see how now, more than ever, that kind of civility and respect is sorely needed in the United States Congress, and Monica will insist on it.

As a judge, I presided over a centuries old process that was designed to resolve, as fairly and sensibly as possible, otherwise intractable conflicts. At the conclusion of a case, the parties leaving my courtroom were not always happy with the outcome, but they did leave knowing that they had been heard and dealt with fairly. A conflict had been resolved without tearing apart the fabric of society. I firmly believe that we should expect no less when it comes to resolving legislative and political conflicts.

Unfortunately, we have become a deeply and bitterly divided nation that elects a deeply and bitterly divided Congress that entrenches our divisions and fails to unite us. It shouldnt be that way, it wasnt always that way, and it doesnt have to be that way forever. We can turn it around by electing representatives like Monica Tranel, who has devoted her professional life to serving Montana, who understands Montana, and who will represent Montana in Congress with energy, intelligence, civility, wisdom and integrity. Isnt it time we sent a Montanan to Congress to represent Montana?

Ed McLean is a retired judge of the Missoula District Court.

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A special ceremony was held March 17 at Richards Coffee Shop to award Quilts of Valor to four veterans  John Beyerle, Herman Bullard, David Phillips and Charles Schuller.

Sharon Bormann, group leader of the local Grateful Quilters who all made these special quilts, thanked the group for allowing them to be there as she said, we are excited to be here, honored to be here to present Quilts of Valor to some veterans who served our country in the armed forces.

She recognized other members of the local chapter, which included Jean Cable, Tina Coffman, Melba Mick, Barb McKeever and Sandy Newsome, who were on hand to help with the presentation.

As the name of each veteran was announced, he came forward and his special quilt was presented to him by wrapping it around his shoulders while Bormann shared about his time in service, which each provided. Afterward, they were individually thanked for their service and welcomed home.

Lt. Colonel John Beyerles military career spanned 22 years. The first 10 years were served during the Vietnam War as a combat pilot. While in Vietnam a total of 43 months, he participated in combat missions totaling 1,000 hours of combat flight time. Consequently, this allowed many opportunities for receiving medals.

He received two Distinguished Flying Crosses, one for an airdrop mission in a C-130 into Khe Sanh while under hostile fire. The fuel tanks were ruptured by 20 rounds of small arms fire, but they were able to deliver the low altitude parachute drop of needed ammunition even while under fire. The second was for a mission in North Vietnam. His B-52G was hit with shrapnel from the lead B-52 that was hit with a surface-to-air missile. This caused four of the engines on the right side of the aircraft to ingest the debris and catch fire. He was able to descend and gain the necessary airspeed to control the aircraft, allowing for a safe landing in Thailand.

For each 25 missions flown in combat, an Air Medal was awarded. Air Medals were also awarded for specific missions. Having flown more than 350 combat missions, Beyerle was awarded 14 Air Medals. He also received three specific mission Air Medals in the C-130 for classified missions in-country for a total of 17 Air Medals.

A Bronze Star was awarded for a mission flown out of Tan Son Nhut Airbase, Saigon to a location outside of Kontum for the purpose of evacuating the wounded and KIA, all while the outpost was under siege.

An Air Force Commendation Medal was awarded for service from Feb. 20, 1975 through March 12, 1976.

Beyerle was deployed during the Dominican Republic crisis and flew daily missions in support of multinational forces deployed during the crisis. About the same time, he flew a mission into Brazil, bringing in troops to support Dominican Republic forces. He was part of the Strategic Air command (SAC)/Tactical Air Command (TAC) exchange program and left TAC to fly B-52s as an aircraft commander for which he received the Combat Readiness Medal.

Additional medals include the National Defense Service Medal, the Vietnam Service Medal with 18 Stars, the Vietnam Gallantry Cross with Palm, the Vietnam Campaign Medal and the Presidential Unit Citation. Beyerle was also proud to have received the Outstanding Airlift Air Crew for the Year Award given by the Tactical Air Command.

Lastly, he had the honor of being a pilot for President Lyndon Johnson on Air Force One.

Following the presentation, Beyerle told the group that when he moved to North Carolina, I didnt realize I would find my second home here at Richards, but I was proud to be a pilot in the Air Force. I always wanted to fly airplanes. He concluded by telling them that This is my home, and I appreciate this award. Its going to be great. Thank you and God bless you all.

Chief Warrant Officer 4 Herman Bullard enlisted in the United States Army on Feb. 25, 1956 and served in the enlisted ranks in the Intelligence Collection Unit for six years. At this point, Bullard was accepted into the warrant officer program. It was noted that at that time there were only 100 billets available for active-duty chief warrant officers (CWO) throughout the entire U.S. Army. Upon earning his commission as a CWO, Bullard was one of a handful of officers selected for helicopter pilot training. Shortly after completing nine months of pilot training, he earned his wings and an assignment to Korea, which was ultimately diverted, and he deployed to Vietnam in 1962.

From 1962 to 1968, Bullard spent his time as a helicopter pilot, primarily the CH-47 (Chinook) in Vietnam, serving in various Special Forces units: 82nd at Fort Bragg, 116th Assault Helicopter Company and the 147th Assault Support Helicopter Company. He would be deployed for 90 days to Vietnam, returning to his home unit at Fort Bragg, then back for another 90 days, repeating this cycle for several years. During this time, he also deployed to the Dominican Republic in support of the 1965 Dominican Civil War.

Starting in 1969, while at Ft. Bragg, Bullard served in various high-visibility positions, including leadership as the 18th Airborne Corps flight standards officer, the inspector general and as the flight examiner. He was also sent to Vietnam again where he flew missions in support of the Army Intelligence Service. He was also handpicked to serve as the Aide de Camp for the Corps Commander, Lt. Gen Henry Emerson. His last duty assignment was Vicenza, Italy where he retired from active duty on Dec. 1, 1988.

Some of the many medal he earned throughout his career have included two Bronze Stars (with Valor) earned for his role in ground combat, a Distinguished Flying Cross and a Silver Star.

It was noted that Bullard is particularly proud of the Humanitarian Award he earned for his efforts during the 1980 Italian earthquake. After the initial officer-in-charge of the response effort was relieved of his duties, Bullard, an Army Captain (03) at the time, was handpicked to oversee the entire relief effort.

He retired as a CW4 from the United States Army with 32  years of dedicated service.

Bullard shared his appreciation for the quilt as he said, thank you, thank you all!

Lt. Colonel David Phillips entered the U.S. Army on April 29, 1963 at Fort Sill, Oklahoma after being commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in the Field Artillery at Purdue University. He served for 23 years and retired June 2, 1986 as a lieutenant colonel.

Phillips duty assignments included: April 1963 to June 1963, Field Artillery Officers Basic Course at Fort Sill, Oklahoma; July 1963 to March 1964, new battalion at Fort Sill; April 1964 to March 1967, deployed with the 3rd/81st to Darmstadt, Germany as the artillery platoon leader; April 1967 to March 1968, Field Artillery Advanced Course at Fort Sill; April 1968 to July 1968, Vietnam language course at Fort Bliss, Texas; August 1968 to August 1969, served as a military advisor in Vihn Long, Vietnam; August 1969 to June 1972, professor of military science at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky; July 1972 to June 1973, prepared the 3rd/81st Battalion for deployment S3 at Fort Sill; July 1973 to June 1974, 3rd/81st Battalion Artillery Camp S3 in Coburn, Korea; July 1974 to June 1977, recruiting command, District Executive Officer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; July 1977 to June 1980, Headquarters 7th Corps G3 Training at Stuttgart, Germany; July 1980 to June 1983, reserve liaison in West Palm Beach, Florida; July 1983 to June 1986, force development at Fort McNair, Washington, DC; and in June 1985, Phillips retired from military service.

His medals include the Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Meritorious Service Medal (2nd Oak Leaf Cluster), Army Commendation Medal (1 Oak Leaf Cluster), Army Achievement Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Vietnam Service Medal, Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal, Overseas Service Bars, Army Service Ribbon, Overseas Service Ribbon, Vietnam Campaign Medal, Republic of Vietnam Honor Medal First Class, Republic of Vietnam Gallantry Cross and Unit Citation with Palm.

Phillips expressed his thanks with the group as he said, I want to thank you for this great honor, and I will always cherish this beautiful quilt that youve made for me. I thank each and every one of you for your support of me. Thank you all so much.

Staff Sargent Charles Schuller volunteered and was sworn into the U.S. Air Force May 25, 1952, completing basic training at Samson Air Force Base in New York. He completed mechanical and gunnery training at Lowery Air Force Base in Denver, Colorado and B-29 training at Randolph Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas.

Schuller was assigned to the Strategic Air Command at Topeka Air Force Base in Kansas, where he flew as a gunner on B-29s. He was combat ready, but never assigned. When the Korean War ended, he was assigned as a boom operator and load master on KC-97s, refueling B-47s in mid-air at 30,000 feet. Schuller was assigned to Lincoln Air Force Base in Nebraska until released from active duty May 25, 1956. He was honorably discharged May 25, 1960.

Sharing that it seemed like a long, long time ago, he said, Ive always had a special heart for the service. Id just turned 18, and it made a man out of me. Schuller said that the Air Force had been good to him. Thank you all, he told them. I really appreciate it.

During the ceremony, Bormann shared the history of the Quilts of Valor Foundation, noting that it started in early 2003 by quilter Catherine Roberts, a Blue Star Mom whose son was deployed in Iraq as a Humvee gunner. One night she had a dream where she saw her son and his fellow comrades wrapped in quilts, being comforted from the ravages of war.

With that vision and the help of a few fellow quilters, Roberts started sewing in her living room, and the first Quilt of Valor was awarded to a veteran from Operation Iraqi Freedom in November 2003. Since that time, the mission of QOV has evolved to include all active-duty members and veterans of our armed forces who have been touched by war.

Bormann told them that the quilt brings the veteran a three-part message:

First, we honor you for your service in our armed forces. We honor you for leaving all you hold dear to serve in time of peace or conflict.

Our quilters realize that freedom is not free. The cost of our freedom is the dedication of men and women like you, and this quilt says Thank You for your sacrifice and your willingness to lay down your life for our country.

Finally, this quilt is meant to comfort you as you are forever in our thoughts and our hearts.

This Quilt of Valor unequivocally says Thank You for your service, your sacrifice, and your valor in serving our nation.

The ceremony concluded as Bormann told the four honorees, on behalf of the Quilts of Valor Foundation and a grateful nation, thank you for allowing us to recognize you today. Welcome Home!
In March, the N.C. Department of Public Instructions Office of Learning Recovery and Acceleration presented state lawmakers with a preliminary report on learning loss in North Carolina.

The picture across the state, just as it was when 2020-21 test scores were released in September, is bleak, showing the toll that more than a year of pandemic-related shutdowns, precautions and family challenges have taken on student proficiency.

Across the state, proficiency levels among fourth- through eighth-grade students fell by double-digit margins in math and reading, according to the September results. Among minority and low-income students, the results were even worse, further demonstrating the pandemics role in widening the achievement gap in North Carolina.

In Burke County, the picture was mixed. While proficiency rates among fourth- through eighth-grade students dropped by double-digit margins in math and reading between 2019 and 2021, the losses here were not as drastic as those experienced statewide.

Karen Auton, Burke County Public Schools assistant superintendent, credits the districts quick reaction to the new challenges posed by the pandemic as a key factor that allowed it to minimize losses.

We recognized early on that our teachers needed support and training in effectively delivering instruction in a remote and semi-remote Plan B setting, Auton said. We also recognized that parent and family communication was essential early on and made that a top priority and expectation for our teachers and instructional staff.

Despite the positive news, proficiency rates among Burke County students still fell dramatically in most areas, according to the 2021 test results.

Last year, only 40% of Burke County fourth- through eighth-grade students achieved proficiency in math and only 46% in reading. This is a dramatic downturn from 2019, when 60% achieved proficiency in math and 59% in reading. Despite the drop, Burke County students did remain narrowly ahead of state averages in both areas.

Statewide, pandemic-related learning loss was most dramatic among minority students and those from economically disadvantaged families. The number of fourth- through eighth-grade students from economically disadvantaged families achieving proficiency in math declined by 48% between 2019 and 2021, according to test results. This compares with a drop of 28% among students who did not come from economically disadvantaged homes in the same period.

Burke County managed to buck the statewide trend, seeing a 37.7% drop in math proficiency among economically disadvantaged fourth through eight graders compared with a 30% drop in proficiency among those who are not. Across the board, statistics like this show that while the achievement gap in Burke County did widen, the inequities were not as dramatic as those seen in many other North Carolina districts.

Auton said the districts focus on parental and family communication was particularly impactful for minority students and those from economically disadvantaged families.

The silver lining that came out of the pandemic was the development of those parental partnerships, so wed like to hold onto that strategy and continue to make that a focus, she said. I certainly think it made a difference in the achievement gap,

Still, as in schools across the state, the achievement gap in Burke County is significant. In 2021, only 33% of economically disadvantaged fourth through eighth graders in Burke County achieved proficiency in math compared with 51% of those who did not come from an economically disadvantaged homes. Additionally, only 20% of Black fourth- through eighth-grade students passed the state math test compared with 45% of white students. Similar gaps exist in reading proficiency as well, according to state reports.

Ross Rumbaugh, director of testing and accountability for Burke County Public Schools, acknowledged that the decline in proficiency among its students is troubling but said that proficiency statistics do not tell the whole story. He cited another measure, Educator Value Added Assessment System, which he said provides a more accurate picture of the job Burke County educators are doing.

Rumbaugh explained that the system tracks growth by measuring each student against themselves and focuses on the growth of the individual student, not just group proficiency levels.

Detractors have pointed out that the system can actually mask educational inequities among economically disadvantaged students by factoring out variables such as race and socio-economic status that have been shown to increase the achievement gap. Still, Rumbaugh insisted that the system is a critical tool for measuring a districts success and one that the countys schools lean on heavily to assess and train teachers.

EVAAS, the growth tool that measures teacher impact on student learning isnt perfect, but it is the fairest tool weve had in education at leveling the playing field between affluent schools and those that serve our most needy students, he said.

According to Rumbaugh, Burke Countys EVAAS statistics are encouraging.

All math growth in grades five through eight exceeded expected growth, which puts BCPS in the top 20% of schools in the state for math growth, he said. All reading growth in grades three through eight exceeded or met growth.

Auton said the data demonstrates the commitment of Burke County teachers and administrators to the success of their students.

The growth data released also gave us an indication of how well we grew our students academically compared to others across the state, she said. It was satisfying to know that our teachers rose to the occasion.

Still, Auton admitted there is work to be done, saying that it may take years to overcome the losses experienced as a result of the pandemic shutdowns. She said the district is currently implementing plans to increase the number of certified staff, offer targeted support to teachers and principals, offer remediation in every school and address the mental health crisis among students, teachers and staff. She believes these measures will help put the district back on track and reverse the losses experienced in 2020 and 2021, but cautioned that it would take time.

I think were going to continue to make steady gains, she said. I dont think its something we can overcome in one years time. I think its going to take several years, but our hope is that we can eventually close it.

Jason Koon is a staff writer and can be reached at jkoon@morganton.com
Intermountain Healthcare and SCL Health, two leading nonprofit healthcare organizations, have completed their merger, creating a model health system that provides high-quality, accessible, and affordable healthcare to more patients and communities in Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and Kansas. With the close of this merger, Intermountain Healthcare is the 11th largest nonprofit health system in the U.S., St. James Healthcare said in a Tuesday press release.

The combination employs more than 59,000 caregivers, operates 33 hospitals (including one virtual hospital), and runs 385 clinics across seven states while providing health insurance to one million people in Utah and Idaho.

As you start to see our new name and logo in the coming months, I want to reassure the people of southwest Montana that many things will stay the same in how you currently receive care and services from St. James, said Jay Doyle, President of St. James Healthcare. The great quality care that you are used to receiving will stay the same, and how you access and utilize our services will not change.

The new organization, named Intermountain Healthcare, is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, with regional offices in Broomfield, Colorado, and Las Vegas, Nevada. Intermountain Healthcare President and CEO Marc Harrison, MD, is confident about this united effort.

With this merger, well create a model for the future of healthcare that focuses on keeping people healthy and proactively addresses causes of illness through high-quality, affordable, and accessible care to more patients," Harrison said. "The merger provides a model for healthcare for the rest of the country.

Harrison leads the new organization. Lydia Jumonville, CEO of SCL Health and the Executive Sponsor of Integration, will lead the integration of the two systems and work in partnership with Harrison and serve as a member of the new Intermountain Board. In addition to the newly integrated Board of Trustees, the enterprise leadership team has been selected from both systems as the dynamic integration process is now moving forward.

Were pleased with how our organizations have come together, said Jumonville. Our work is well underway, and we are being very thoughtful about moving the best of our systems forward to continue providing the highest quality of care in the communities we serve. We will advance our mission and better serve the entire region together.

SCL Healths Catholic hospitals retain their distinctive Catholic names and continue to operate according to existing practices.

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A Butte-Silver Bow official has formally declared two Uptown buildings that have served as the Butte Rescue Missions thrift store as dangerous, a move that could speed up their proposed demolition.

Building Official Rusty Christensen has invoked a public safety exclusion on the buildings at 123-125 E. Park St., negating any potential review or action on the matter by the Historic Preservation Commission, or HPC.

The council of commissioners must still approve the demolition and could do so Wednesday night, but the HPC will have no official say. Kate McCourt, who became the countys new historic preservation officer in March, acknowledged that during a county meeting last week.

That didnt stop the HPC from bringing up and discussing the proposed demolition at its meeting Tuesday night. A few members raised concerns or objections about it and one said the HPC should have been consulted anyway.

It seems that it should have come before us, said member Bobbi Stauffer.

But Christensen had already determined the buildings were at risk of collapse and demolition was needed to ensure public safety.

The overall plan also includes demolition of a vacant, crumbling building at 135 E. Park St. Commissioners authorized that but demo work was halted after it started in February 2021 because of a potential shared wall.

After more analysis, officials said it would have cost $150,000 just to stabilize a shared wall between the now county-owned building at 135 E. Park Street and the thrift store so demolition of the vacant structure could proceed.

But a structural engineer also inspected the thrift store buildings and determined they, too, were unstable and unsafe and needed repairs would cost well over $200,000.

Under a new plan, the county would pay the Mission $38,572 for the thrift store property and up to $12,000 in relocation expenses, then tear down all three buildings.

In an April 1 letter to commissioners, Christensen essentially said it was the only safe route to go.

The engineering report states that the building located at 123-125 East Park Street is at risk of collapse in its current condition and would still be at risk of collapse even if a new western wall is constructed, he wrote.

He pointed to a section of the municipal code that allows demolition to abate unsafe or dangerous conditions and said engineering reports indicate this is an appropriate measure to ensure public safety.

In early 2021, shortly after J.P. Gallagher became chief executive, the Historic Preservation Commission temporarily blocked a proposed demolition of the so-called Blue Range prostitution cribs on East Mercury Street, saying they were an iconic part of Buttes Red Light District history.

The property owners disagreed and even though the countys building official at the time cited an engineering analysis saying they were dangerous, the HPC was allowed to weigh in. They issued a temporary demolition stay that resulted in weeks of controversy.

It ended when the building official invoked the safety exclusion and the cribs were ultimately torn down. In hindsight, Gallagher said the county should have declared the safety exclusion from the start and avoided delays and added contention.

Christensens declaration, per county ordinance, should prevent any HPC delays in this case.

Last time we went against what we should have done once we had the engineering report that designated the building (cribs) unsafe, Gallagher said. It was a lesson learned on following the language of the ordinance.

The proposed demolition was not specifically mentioned on the HPC meeting agenda Tuesday night, but member John Riordan, who is also a commissioner, brought it up under the category of staff/member reports and suggested the HPC had been slighted on the matter.

I have heard from a couple of people who think the buildings can be fixed, he said.

Stauffer said the demolition decision seemed like a rush job and would be a costly job to carry out. Member Mitzi Rossillon said a new procedure was needed for addressing such issues.

The council meets at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday on the third floor of the courthouse at 155 W. Granite St. The meetings are also live-streamed on the county's website at www.co.silverbow.mt.us

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I read the story on the proposed Fire opencut mine near Libby with great interest and frustration. Libby Rep. Steve Gundersons HB 599 is now paving the way for Thompson Contracting Inc. to develop a 14.4-acre gravel pit near his constituents homes, regardless of their concerns about noise, dust or water quality impacts. Honestly, the whole situation reminds me of Frankenstein: Dr. Frankenstein worked so hard to create something he could be proud of that he didnt realize he created a monster. And just like in Frankenstein, if the cause of the suffering isnt dealt with, its just going to get worse.

During the 2021 legislative session, people across Montana labored to defeat HB 599 due to the harmful impacts it would have on air quality, water rights, water quality, noise, dust and property rights. The Legislature turned a deaf ear to overwhelming public concern, even after hearing that a neighbor to a Gallatin County gravel pit had an appraiser decrease her property value by 50% after an opencut operation opened near her home.

The majority of legislators, including Rep. Gunderson, shrugged off these community concerns or claimed they were false. Proponents wrongly (and somewhat callously) said that only rural Montana would suffer the consequences of this misguided bill. They were wrong. All Montanans near proposed opencut gravel operations will suffer from the consequences of changes in the law, regardless of whether they are in rural areas or in more populated parts of the state.

Im sorry to see the people of Libby suffer the same fate as others across this state. Due to the passage of HB 599, Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has fewer tools available to protect Montanans. The new law eliminates DEQs ability to protect people from the noise or visual blight of an opencut gravel mine, regardless of its size or location. DEQ can no longer mitigate fire danger or dangerous traffic impacts to communities. It can no longer limit operating hours, leaving neighbors to suffer through late night or early morning heavy equipment noise and truck traffic on their roads.

Rep. Gundersons bill also eliminated the opencut permitting programs ability to consider surface or groundwater impacts and offsite sedimentation. When we took a closer look, we were told that another section of DEQ deals with water issues, but most of those water pollution discharge permits are called general permits, meaning the public has no opportunity to comment on water issues related to a specific opencut mining operation. When all of these concerns were raised before the Legislature, they were ignored. Worse, we were told these issues werent true and they only applied to rural areas. Its clear that legislators failed to read the bill before pulling the lever to create a monster.

The problem is so much worse than Frankenstein, however. Instead of just one monster, there are about 1,869 opencut mining operations in this state, and many have an abysmal record. After the Legislature passed this harmful legislation, MEIC started investigating whether opencut mines are complying with reclamation requirements. After reviewing documents received in a public information request, we analyzed the DEQs data. What we found was disturbing.

The state seems more focused on issuing permits than with following up to make sure the operator is following the law, complying with its permit, and reclaiming the property. Among other things, a review of DEQs opencut mine files shows there are:

 778 opencut mines with expired reclamation dates,

 169 mines that were mining past their reclamation date from 2015 through 2020, and

 185 operators with permitted sites that failed to even submit their annual reports by the deadline.

These numbers should give legislators, DEQ, and the people of Libby serious pause. Legislators gutted the law last session. But what the Legislature takes away, it can also restore.

The Legislature can fix the problems that were caused by HB 599, and they should do so for the sake of the folks in and around Libby, as well as all Montanans impacted by these mines near their homes and businesses.

We would like to work with Rep. Gunderson to fix his law in order to protect public health, water quality, water quantity and property rights. We would like him to restore DEQs ability to say no to mines in the wrong location or to mitigate the harm a mine may cause to nearby landowners.

Let him have the courage to fight his own monster as Dr. Frankenstein never did.

Anne Hedges is the director of policy and legislative affairs for the Montana Environmental Information Center.

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By Shawn Touney | Apr 6, 2022

The House Citation was introduced and delivered on March 8, 2022  100 years to the day of Murray States founding  by State Representative Mary Beth Imes.

MURRAY, Ky.  Murray State University was recently recognized for its centennial year in 2022 by the Kentucky House of Representatives.

The House Citation was introduced and delivered on March 8, 2022  100 years to the day of Murray States founding  by State Representative Mary Beth Imes, who represents House District 5, which includes Calloway County, home of Murray State University, as well as a portion of Trigg County.

"Murray State University is a vital part of our social fabric in Murray-Calloway County. It is a major economic engine, fantastic institution and brings students from all over the country and world to the Commonwealth, many of whom end up staying here after graduation, said Representative Imes. I am proud of our region and grateful for the important role that Murray State University plays in my home county and state. This is a very celebratory time for us in that Murray State University is celebrating its 100th year, Calloway County is celebrating its 200th year and Murray Independent Schools is celebrating its 150th year."

We are very appreciative of State Representative Mary Beth Imes and the Kentucky House of Representatives for presenting Murray State University with this legislative citation of appreciation, Murray State President Dr. Bob Jackson said. This is truly a special year for Murray State University, and we are grateful for the support shown by so many in our legislature toward our institution to positively impact our students, faculty and staff while helping advance our region and state.

Murray State is celebrating its centennial throughout 2022 with numerous special events, exclusive merchandise and items, fundraising campaigns and much more. Individuals interested in learning about the Universitys centennial plans and its 100-year history can visit murraystate.edu/centennial.
By Shawn Touney | Apr 6, 2022

Senator Jason Howell (left), with Murray State University Executive Director of Government and Institutional Relations Jordan Smith (right)

MURRAY, Ky.  Murray State University was recently recognized for its centennial year in 2022 by the Kentucky Senate.

Senate Resolution 166 was introduced and delivered on March 8, 2022  100 years to the day of Murray States founding  by Senator Jason Howell. Jordan Smith, Executive Director of Government and Institutional Relations was presented the Senate Resolution in person on the Senate floor on behalf of the University.

"It was a tremendous honor to file Senate Resolution 166 to honor Murray State University's centennial. I am very proud to live and work in Murray and to have this fine institution literally in my backyard. As I spoke on the Senate floor during the reading of this resolution, I thought in particular about my mother who received her teaching degree from Murray State and the important place Murray State University holds in mine and my family's heart," said Senator Howell, who represents Senate District 1, which includes Calloway, Crittenden, Fulton, Graves, Hickman, Lyon and Trigg Counties.

"As a proud Murray State University alumnus and Murray State University dad, I was honored to co-sponsor the Senate Resolution commemorating the 100th anniversary of Murray State University. Congratulations Racers!" said Senator Danny Carroll, who represents Senate District 2, which includes Ballard, Carlisle, Livingston, Marshall and McCracken counties. Senator Carroll, along with other west Kentucky senators, Senator Robby Mills and Senator Whitney Westerfield co-sponsored the resolution.

We are very appreciative of Senators Howell, Carroll, Mills, Westerfield and the Kentucky Senate for this resolution commemorating our special centennial year, said Murray State President Dr. Bob Jackson. This is truly a special year for Murray State University. We are committed to continue serving an important role in helping advance our region and state. We are thankful for the support shown by so many in our legislature toward our institution.

Murray State University is celebrating its centennial throughout 2022 with numerous special events, exclusive merchandise and items, fundraising campaigns and much more. Individuals interested in learning about the Universitys centennial plans and its 100-year history can visit murraystate.edu/centennial.
MUSCATINE  On Thursday evening, the Muscatine community will get the chance to give feedback on a city of Muscatine plan to apply for four grants from the Iowa Economic Development Authority (IEDA).

During Thursdays regular city council meeting, a public hearing will be held on the request to submit the Neighborhood Revitalization Pilot Project Proposal and three Community Development Block Grants (CDBG). The pilot project proposal is a request to support the Mulberry Neighborhood Revitalization Project. Two of the CDBG requests would support projects at Muscatine Center for Social Action (MCSA) to meet the food and shelter needs of the residents and one would support the Community Foundation of Muscatine.

In April, the council adopted the Igniting Vitality Through Workforce Housing, a plan to address housing issues with the community that was developed by a team made up of people from area nonprofits, local businesses and city and county staff. The plan was presented to community leaders during the Housing Summit.

After the summit, IEDA director Debi Durham asked the city to develop a pilot project focused on revitalizing one block that was near the downtown and would have high visibility. The team focused on the Mulberry Street area between Sixth and Seventh streets. The total project covered under the grant would cost $1.8 million and would include a Wi-Fi network, Living Street improvements, lighting, sidewalks, a bikeway trail, trees, a pocket park, commercial facade improvements, exterior housing rehabilitation, and the addition of a forgivable loan to rehabilitate nuisance properties.

One of the CDBG plans, with a maximum award of $500,000 would be used by MCSA to provide isolation services to guests testing positive for COVID-19, and to expand housing options for low-income residents of Muscatine. The grant would be used to rehabilitate two vacant properties to increase the amount of shelter space.

The second involving MCSA would be used to open a walk-in food pantry, purchase a hydraulic lift and refrigerated truck, and offset expenses incurred due to increased demand as a result of the COVID-19 health crisis. MCSA is requesting $100,000.

The other grant would be used to help the Community Foundation of Greater Muscatine acquire and rehabilitate the button factory located at 215 W. Mississippi Drive. The foundation is in talks to purchase the building with plans to make improvements that will maintain the exterior appearance and facilitate active use through office and meeting spaces. The Muscatine Community College culinary art program will continue to use the existing commercial kitchen. The Foundation is requesting a $100,000 grant.

The CDBG funds were made available through COVID-19 relief legislation, but require cities to be the applicant and fiscal agent.

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  The mass killing that left six people dead and 12 wounded outside bars just blocks from Californias Capitol last weekend was a gunfight involving at least five shooters from rival gangs, Sacramento police said Wednesday.

Police said they identified at least five gunmen but there may have been more. Only two suspects  both brothers wounded by gunfire  have been arrested in connection with the shooting and, so far, only face firearms charges.

We're still working through ... who the actual shooters are in the case, Sgt. Zach Eaton said.

Until Wednesday's announcement, police had been silent on what led to the shooting that erupted early Sunday as bars were letting out. Rapid-fire bursts of over 100 gunshots echoed through the streets as terrified patrons ran for their lives and others were hit by bullets.

Police said at least two gangs were involved. They declined to provide more details or name the gangs involved or the affiliation of any suspects.

Experts said that if gangs were to blame, it would mark an unusually bloody feud.

In 20 years of researching gangs in Los Angeles, Alex Alonso said he cant remember a gang-related shooting with such a high body count.

Its extremely rare that a gang shooting happened as the way this one is being characterized, Alonso said. Its extremely rare to have that happen in a public place with so many victims.

Gregory Chris Brown, a criminal justice professor at California State University, Fullerton, said gangs often target rivals in drive-by shootings with fewer victims, though innocent bystanders are sometimes also struck.

The location of the Sacramento shooting  in a bustling area of watering holes near the entertainment district  was incidental to whatever fueled the fight.

If rival gang members see each other it doesnt matter if theyre in the Capitol of the United States of America, Brown said. If you see a rival gang member and youre going to attack them, it doesnt matter where they are.

The large number of casualties was the result of high-capacity weapons in a crowded area, he said.

Berry Accius, founder of Voice of the Youth who leads gun intervention and prevention programs and offered his services to counsel families who lost loved ones in the shooting, criticized police for characterizing the crime as gang-related, which he said will lead some to think Black people.

He said people will see the photos of the Black women and men who were shot, assume they were in a gang and wonder why gang members are downtown.

Thats the narrative we dont need at this particular time, Accius said. "This idea that were going to put blame to one demographic of folks and blame them for the violence that ensued.

Bill Sanders, a criminologist at Cal State LA, said he wanted to see more evidence the shooting was gang-related, a term police often use to drum up support. He said gang shootings are more mundane and most occur in what are considered gang neighborhoods.

If you looked at a map of gang homicides in the city  or any city  over time, youd see the same areas lighting up  meaning thats where they occur. If these guys were white, this wouldnt be considered gang related  not even for a minute.

Authorities credited witnesses who contributed nearly 200 videos, photos and other tips with helping the investigation.

Police were trying to determine if a stolen handgun found at the crime scene was used in the massacre. It had been converted to a weapon capable of automatic gunfire.

They are also investigating whether a gun one of the brothers, Smiley Martin, 27, brandished in a video was used in the shooting, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press. The official was briefed on the investigation but was not authorized to publicly discuss details and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Martin and his brother were among those wounded in the gunfire that erupted about 2 a.m. Sunday as bars closed and patrons filled the streets.

The Sacramento County coroner identified the three women killed as Johntaya Alexander, 21; Melinda Davis, 57; and Yamile Martinez-Andrade, 21. The three men killed were Sergio Harris, 38; Joshua Hoye-Lucchesi, 32; and Devazia Turner, 29.

Ten people were wounded in addition to the Martin brothers. At least two remained hospitalized with gunshot wounds.

Smiley Martin faces charges of possession of a firearm by a prohibited person and possession of a machine gun. He remained hospitalized and it wasnt clear if he had an attorney who could speak for him.

His brother, Dandrae Martin, 26, was arrested as a related suspect and appeared briefly Tuesday in Sacramento Superior Court on a charge of being a convict carrying a loaded gun.

He did not enter a plea and his attorney said she would wait to see if prosecutors brought more serious charges before deciding whether to seek his release.

Both men have criminal records. Smiley Martin was released from prison in February after serving about half of a 10-year prison sentence for beating a girlfriend. He was denied parole last year after prosecutors said he clearly has little regard for human life, documents show.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg questioned why the brothers were on the streets.

Those questions need to be answered and they will be answered over the days ahead, Steinberg said.

A 31-year-old man seen carrying a handgun immediately after the shooting was arrested Tuesday on a weapons charge. Police said they dont believe his gun was used in the shooting.

This version corrects that Smiley Martin served about half of a 10-year prison sentence, not about two years of the term.

Melley reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Stefanie Dazio, Christopher Weber in Los Angeles, Don Thompson in Sacramento, Michael Balsamo in Washington, Jacques Billeaud in Phoenix and News Researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York City contributed to this report.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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INDIANAPOLIS  For more than 30 years, the family of a woman who was sexually assaulted and killed while working an overnight shift at a Merrillville hotel has lived with the heightened state of awareness that comes from knowing there is evil in this world.

On Tuesday, the family of Margaret Mary "Peggy" Gill and two other women killed by the same man in 1989 learned his identity.

Law enforcement officials also thanked a fourth woman, who survived an attack by the man in 1990, for her assistance and said her case was critical to solving the homicides committed by the "Interstate 65 Killer," also known as "the Days Inn Killer."

Harry Edward Greenwell, who was identified as the suspect using modern DNA analysis, died Jan. 31, 2013, in Iowa at the age of 68, said Sgt. Glen Fifield, spokesman for the Indiana State Police Lowell post.

Greenwell, who was born in Kentucky, was known to travel frequently through the Midwest and had an extensive criminal history, police said.

DNA evidence and ballistics testing have now linked Greenwell to the homicides of Vicki Heath, 41, on Feb. 21, 1987, in Elizabethtown, Kentucky; Gill, 24, on March 3, 1989, at a Days Inn in Merrillville; and Jeanne Gilbert, 34, also March 3, 1989, at a Days Inn in Remington, Indiana.

The fourth woman, who survived and helped investigators, was attacked Jan. 2, 1990, at a Days Inn in Columbus, Indiana.

After police announced Greenwell's identity during a news conference in Indianapolis, Gill's family said she loved 1980s music, decorating cakes and cross-stitching. She grew up in unincorporated Merrillville, where Gill's parents, her two uncles and their families all lived next door to each other.

"She was very quiet, very easygoing," said Rene Parobek, Gill's sister. "You just don't expect this to happen to your family. And then it does."

Gill's cousin Karen Spoor, who was an 18-year-old high school senior when "Peggy" was killed, said they did everything together.

"It really got me," Spoor said. "And it still does."

Gill's mother, Anna Gill, said she was glad her daughter's killer was dead because the family would not have to experience going to his court hearings.

Indiana State Police Superintendent Doug Carter said multiple generations of police officers were dedicated to solving the case.

"The message is: You might be able to hide for a while, but we're going to find you," he said. "Even if you're not here."

He thanked them for their help over the years and assured them the cases made police better investigators.

Herbert Stapleton, special agent in charge for the FBI's Indianapolis field office, said law enforcement understood that the families of Health, Gill and Gilbert have never forgotten the pain of their losses.

"I know that this announcement can't take away the pain that you've felt," he said. "But what we hope is that through today's information and revelation, this provides some answers that may aid you in your healing process that you go through every single day and bring you some sense of peace."

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MTNs share price took a beating on Tuesday, closing over 8% lower on news that the Nigerian Communications Commission will require that it cut off millions of subscribers.

Nigeria ordered the nations wireless companies to bar outgoing calls from phone numbers not linked to the National Identity Number (NIN) in a bid to control extortions and abductions.

The system is similar to South Africas RICA requirements.

The rule will come into effect Monday, the National Communications Commission (NCC) said in an emailed statement.

President Muhammadu Buhari in December 2020 ordered all phone lines to be linked to an identity number to curb rising incidents of abductions in the countrys northern region.

Kidnappers usually call relatives of their victims with unregistered subscriber identity module, or SIM cards, which authorities in Africas most populated nation are unable to trace.

The latest rule will mean about 75 million phone lines that arent linked to the national identity number wont be able to make calls.

Out of the nations 198 million phone connections, 125 million SIM cards had been verified and linked to 78 million unique national identity numbers, according to the commissions statement.

MTNs Nigerian unit is the largest operator with 75 million subscribers, giving it a market share of about 38%.

Other major operators include billionaire Sunil Mittal-backed Airtel Africa and Globacom.

MTN confirmed that its Nigerian unit received a formal directive from the NCC to implement a phased suspension of services to affected subscribers.

From 4 April 2022, unregistered subscribers were placed on receive-only status.

In line with operating licence requirements, MTN Nigeria has complied with the directive and implemented the restrictions on only outgoing voice calls of affected subscribers, the company stated.

All other services remain available to all subscribers, including those that are yet to submit their NINs.

MTN Nigeria said it supports the work being done by the Federal Government of Nigeria to build a reliable and sustainable National Identity Management system.

It will aid national economic planning and enhance security, governance and service delivery at all levels, MTN stated.

In addition, MTN Nigeria has deployed more than 4,200 points of enrolment across the country to support the NIN enrolment drive. This network continues to be expanded to ensure that enrolment is within reach of all Nigerians.

MTN Nigeria is also working with the National Identity Management Commission to accelerate the bulk verification of NINs collected.

MTN Nigeria has made good progress with around 47 million subscribers having submitted their NINs by 31 March 2022, the company said.

This represents approximately 67% of the MTN Nigerias subscriber base and 76% of service revenue for FY 2021.

Outgoing voice revenue from the current subscribers who have not submitted a NIN amounts to about 9% of MTN Nigerias service revenue for the 2021 financial year on an annualised basis, the company said.

For MTN Group, this would amount to approximately 3% of FY 2021 service revenue on an annualised basis.

Reporting with Bloomberg

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South Africas data centre market has received substantial financial injections in recent years, with several large companies announcing plans to build new facilities.

Companies such as Teraco and Africa Data Centres have invested or plan to invest billions of rands in developing new data centres in South Africa.

The biggest investment  a R15 billion hyperscale data centre campus in Waterfall, Gauteng  is currently being constructed for Vantage Data Centres.

Africa Data Centres also announced a substantial investment in the South African market in September 2021. The company is building hyperscale data centres to the value of R7.2 billion throughout Africa  including one in South Africa.

Shortly after Africa Data Centres announcement, Teraco Data Environments opened a multi-billion rand data centre in Cape Town. The facility is the largest of its kind in the Western Cape.

Some of the most recent and crucial developments in South Africas data centre market are summarised below.

Vantage Data Centres Waterfall campus

Vantage Data Centres announced that it had begun construction on its Waterfall data centre in October 2021, and the first phase of the 80MW campus is expected to come online in the last quarter of 2022.

According to the company, the carrier-neutral campus will comprise three facilities across a 12-hectare property. It will offer 60,000 square meters of data centre space once fully developed.

Vantage EMEA president Antoine Boniface explained that Johannesburg was a data centre hub on the continent due to its strategic location, IT ecosystem, fibre connectivity, and access to renewable energy sources.

Africa Data Centres invests R7.2 billion in Africa  and buys Standard Banks data centre

Africa Data Centres began the process to buy Standard Banks Samrand data centre in April 2020 and received approval from the Competition Tribunal to complete the purchase the following month.

The company explained that the centre has sufficient power and space for significant expansion, adding that it is widely regarded as the most reputable data centre in Africa.

The unique combination of this outstanding facility with Africa Data Centres certified operational excellence makes it the ideal choice for the most demanding organisations, particularly those in the financial services sector, former Africa Data Centres CEO Stephane Duproz said.

Duproz now serves as group executive director of Africa Data Centres parent, Cassava Technologies.

In September 2021, Africa Data Centres announced plans to invest R7.2 billion to build hyperscale data centres throughout Africa. More recently, the company announced that it is expanding its capacity in Johannesburg to 100MW of IT load.

Africa Data Centres said it also plans to expand its hyper-scale and business-focused data centres at its campuses in Midrand and Samrand.

Teraco opens multi-billion rand data centre in Cape Town

Teraco Data Environments announced that it had completed the first phase of its new hyperscale data centre in Brackenfell, Cape Town, in October 2021.

The facility, known as CT2, features 25,000 square meters of building structure, 8,000 square meters of data hall space, and 18MW of critical power load and is linked to all other Teraco-owned data systems through a web of network operators making up Platform Teraco.

Recently, a San Francisco-based real estate investment group, Digital Realty, valued Teraco at over R50 billion when it announced its intentions to buy a 55% stake in the company.

Acronis opens its first South African data centre

In January 2022, Acronis announced that its Cyber Cloud Data Centre  situated in Johannesburg  was up and running.

A local presence is a necessity for modern cloud businesses, and we are proud to deliver the Acronis Cyber Cloud Data Center in South Africa, Acronis Peter French said.

The new data centre is one of 111 being developed by Acronis, and it supplies service provider partners with cyber protection services, through which they can build new products.

Oracle goes live in Johannesburg

The cloud services provider Oracle went live in Johannesburg in January 2022. Its Johannesburg data centre is its first in Africa.

Oracle EMEA executive vice president, Richard Smith, said the new region could provide a leading-edge cloud platform to help run applications faster, more securely, and at a lower price point.

Companies that are set to benefit from the new region include the Airports Company South Africa, Government Pensions Administrative Agency, and Telkom.

Now read: Best companies in South Africa to host your website
South Africas Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE) opened its sixth bid window for private renewable energy more than six months after it was meant to happen.

Bid Window 6 (BW6) will see Independent Power Producers (IPPs) make their proposals for a further 2,600MW in renewable energy projects that will feed electricity into Eskoms grid.

The department envisions procuring 1,600MW of onshore wind and 1,000MW of solar power and has set an 11 August 2022 deadline for bid submissions.

Its announcement comes after several delays.

The department initially said it aimed to open the bid window by 28 September 2021.

In October, it revised this date to not later than the end of January 2022. A notice on the DMREs IPP projects website later stated the window would open towards the end of March.

The DMRE has been blasted over the delay in procuring additional generating capacity, particularly considering that South Africa recorded its worst year of load-shedding in 2021.

Bid Window 7, which was set to open on 15 February 2022, has also been pushed back.

Last week, the DMRE confirmed it had postponed signing 2,000MW emergency power purchase agreements as part of South Africas Risk Mitigation Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (RMIPPPP).

It is now expected to be completed by the end of April.

The RMIPPPP has been riddled with legal delays due to the involvement of Karpowership after it was accused of trying to circumvent environmental regulations in its bid to provide 1,200MW via its powerships.

Power utility Eskom also refused to sign long-term deals to procure power from the company, stating that it needed clarity on how the industry regulator would calculate the price of the liquified natural gas used to run the powerships turbines.

The South African Wind Energy Association (SAWEA) has welcomed the DMRE announcement of BW6, stating it would add vitally-needed power capacity to the country.

This also adds impetus to the sectors push for industrialisation, which relies on rolling procurement in order for the industry to attract the necessary market investment and reduce risk, said SAWEA CEO Niveshen Govender.

The association said its industry depended on policy tones set by the government. Hence, it was grateful to the various government departments for implementing procurement-enabling policies over the last few years.

Policy shifts indicate a clear direction in terms of plans to procure new generation capacity on an ongoing basis, in line with the energy roadmap, which sees 14.4GW of new wind power over the next decade, the association said.

For context, Eskom currently procures wind energy from an installed capacity of around 2.6GW, including its own Sere Wind Farm.

Govender added that South Africa could harness the abundant potential of increasingly cost-competitive renewable energy to meet South Africas growing electricity demand and avoid a potential fossil-fuel lock-in.

He said this would have the additional benefit of attracting local and foreign investment.

Furthermore, renewable technologies present potential for the creation of new industries, job creation and localisation across the value chain, he stated.
Sinkholes like the one that formed right next to the N1 in Centurion in February are becoming increasingly common in South Africa.

That is according to the Council for Geosciences (CGS), which is working with the South African National Roads Agency (Sanral) to fix the hole and reopen all of the lanes on the N1 southbound.

Following the sinkholes formation in February, Sanral was forced to close several of the freeways lanes.

This was to ensure traffic could move past it safely, as cracks had also started forming in the lanes on the left side of the road.

Sinkholes are not a rare phenomenon in South Africa.

Many sinkholes developed in the far West Rand during the 1950s to 1980s due to deep mining and groundwater abstraction.

Perhaps the most well-publicised and terrible sinkhole occurrence happened in the mining village of Blyvooruitzicht in Carletonville on 3 August 1964, when a 100-metre wide sinkhole swallowed the homes of the Oosthuizen family and their neighbours.

The top part of the highest piece of rubble in the hole was also about 100 metres below the surface, with all the houses bricks and the familys car wholly submerged.

Rescue workers gave up looking for the bodies of the Oosthuizen couple, their three children, and their live-in domestic worker, who were sucked in and trapped under the collapsed debris.

Fortunately, the neighbours were not at home at the time of the disaster.

It is estimated that around 38 other people in South Africa have died due to sinkhole occurrences over the past 50 years.

With around 25% of Gauteng underlain by dolomitic rock, a type of limestone highly susceptible to sinkholes, there is an urgent need to manage sinkhole formation to protect people and infrastructure.

The CGS found that around 200 sinkholes had formed in the province during the past five years. Repairing them has cost more than R1 billion.

Sinkholes primarily occur due to one of two factors:

Concentrated ingress of water  Due to leaking underground water and sewerage pipes, stormwater ingress, or leaking swimming pools

 Due to leaking underground water and sewerage pipes, stormwater ingress, or leaking swimming pools Extensive abstraction of groundwater  From large-scale agriculture, mining practices, or domestic groundwater supply (boreholes)

Typically, the water moves through overlying soft materials on the Earths surface and seeps into underlying cave systems with dolomitic profiles.

The images below illustrate how a sinkhole is formed.

According to the CGS, sinkhole occurrences can be managed by eliminating or keeping ingress of water or significant groundwater fluctuations within tolerable levels.

Research undertaken in the late 1990s indicated that sinkhole occurrences can be reduced by as much as 96% by implementing risk management and mitigation measures.

Once a sinkhole has formed, filling it up and rehabilitating the area around it requires several steps.

Firstly, geologists and geotechnical experts undertake an initial risk assessment to establish the cause and coverage of the unstable area around the sinkhole and the extent to which infrastructure is affected.

This assessment sets out to determine the immediate mitigation measures to be carried out, such as the temporary evacuation of structures, road closures and traffic diversions, the rerouting of affected bulk infrastructure, the deployment of temporary works as a mitigation measure against further imminent collapse and the demarcation of the area to be investigated in detail, the council explained.

Next, the appropriate remedial methods are determined, requiring geotechnical stability investigations and the development of engineering designs.

The repair methods can vary from basic solutions to specialised construction activities, depending on the complexity of the particular situation.

It might include using a combination of earthworks and dynamic compaction or deep grouting.

The purpose of these interventions is to prevent further erosion into the subsurface voids and to repair mobilised materials and damaged infrastructure, the council explained.

Time and costs

The CGS said that sinkhole remedial work and the duration of the appropriate construction depend on the complexity of the geological profile where the sinkhole formed and the affected infrastructure.

For complex sinkholes where key infrastructure  like roads and bulk water lines  is affected, repair works typically require specialised methods, the council said.

For this reason, it can take up to nine months to improve the subsurface profile and reinstate affected infrastructure.

The council said repair costs would also depend on the complexity and extent of the required construction work and the affected infrastructure.

Generally speaking, the cost is determined by the extent of the area requiring remedial work and the strategic importance of the infrastructure affected or damaged by sinkhole-induced ground movement.

Previous media reports have suggested that the repair of the sinkhole near the N1 could vary between R2 million and R20 million.

Sanral previously told MyBroadband it estimates the cost to be in the tens of millions.
After a two-year hiatus, the 11th annual bASH went off without a hitch on April 2.

Putting the "b" in bASH, more than 250 guests paid $175 each to attend the popular wine- and food-centered event. A collaboration between Appellation St. Helena (ASH), the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone (CIA) and the St. Helena Chamber of Commerce, the event was held in the cavernous stone-walled barrel room at the historic Greystone.

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Its been a bit of a challenge  what with COVID and everything being virtual until recently  so its great to be getting back to it, said ASH board president Katie Simpson. The event always has a fantastic vibe. The students are challenged and eager for feedback, the guests are excited to taste the pairings and vote, and the wineries are always excited for the opportunity to share their latest and greatest wines.

The occasion showcased wines from 19 ASH member wineries and appetizers prepared by 19 teams of CIA students. In a friendly but serious competition, all attendees cast their votes as to which wine and food items paired best, with the top three vote-getters in each category being awarded ribbons and bragging rights.

Participating wineries at this years event included Anomaly Vineyards, Calafia Cellars, Charles Krug Winery, Chase Cellars, Ehlers Estate, Hall Wines, Mending Wall Winery, Monticello Vineyards/Corley Family, Pellet Estate, Raymond Vineyards, Rombauer Vineyards, Saint Helena Winery, Salvestrin Winery, Spottswoode Winery, Taplin Cellars, The Crane Assembly, Unwritten Wines, Varozza Vineyards and Young Inglewood Vineyards.

This is a great opportunity for our students to work directly with a specific winery and get creative with their pairings, said Lars Kronmark, a professional chef, professor at the CIA and culinary chair for this years event. For the most part our students are learning and refining established cooking skills and techniques, but here they can let loose and show everyone what theyve got.

No one seemed to hold back at this years event.

We wanted to bring the best of our best to bASH this year, which is why we are pouring our 2019 Spottswoode Estate Cabernet Sauvignon, said Beth Novak Milliken, president and CEO of Spottswoode. Not only is bASH a celebration of St. Helena, but it is also one of the most intimate and enjoyable food and wine events in Napa Valley. I also love the competition format, which adds to the energy and excitement of the evening.

While the wineries brought some of their finest wines, the students creations were creative and diverse  from wine-infused chocolate truffles to burritos filled with duck confit and blackberry compote.

It works surprisingly well with the wine, said Sylvia Taplin of Taplin Cellars, whose student team had concocted the burrito. The fruit along with the richness of the duck brings out flavors and softness in our wine.

The burrito was served with their deliciously fruit-forward 2018 Taplin Terra Cabernet Sauvignon.

At the end of the evening, the winners were announced, with students Pierce Wei from Taiwan and Collin McGowan from Illinois taking first place. The two had made savory braised oxtail dumplings to pair with the luscious Mending Wall Winerys 2019 Tournahu Vineyard Cabernet. First-, second- and third-place winners each took home cookware from Le Creuset, one of this years sponsors. Other sponsors included Sunshine Foods and Salute Sante.

For all of the participants in this years shindig, the biggest prize was a chance to let loose a little after more than two years of intermittent lockdowns, reduced travel and social distancing.

This was our first big trip from Canada, said Canadian resident Richelle Chatterson. We love wine and we love food, so weve had an unbelievable time.

All proceeds from the occasion fund ASH and the Culinary Institute of America scholarship fund, so beyond the fun and frivolity, the evening represents an opportunity for ASH to refill its coffers a bit so that it might continue its mission to share the regions wine history with the broader world.

Both ASH and bASH have done an amazing job of helping to tell the story of St. Helena and its central role in the history of the Napa Valley wine industry, Milliken said. As the stewards of a historic vineyard that was originally planted in 1882, we have deep and enduring roots in St. Helena, and the event is a fantastic opportunity for our winemaking community to come together and showcase what makes our region so unique and exciting.
Excuse me, could you please give me some directions? Im feeling a bit lost. Ive become accustomed to having my column on Page B4, but Im told my column isn't running in print this week. But never fear; I'll be back in black and white next week. Expect a column from editor Jesse Duarte explaining the new layout, which has to do with the Star being printed at a different press.

***

How many District 3 supervisor candidates have knocked on your door? Ive had two out of six so far. You can get to know Anna Chouteau, Anne Cottrell, John Dunbar, Matthew Hooper, Cio Perez and Rafael Rios at a candidate forum hosted by the League of Women Voters of Napa County at 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 20, via Zoom. Check the events calendar at lwvnapa.com for a link.

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Of course, thats far from the only race appearing on this packed June ballot. The league is also hosting a candidate forum for sheriff candidates Jon Crawford and Oscar Ortiz at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 19. Link available at the aforementioned website.

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You can also help oil the gears of democracy by working at one of the countys nine vote centers May 16 through June 7 and/or Oct. 17 through Nov. 8. Hourly pay starts at $17.31. Apply at countyofnapa.org/715/Napa-County-Careers, and tell Registrar of Voters John Tuteur that Aunt Helena sent you. (Not that hell particularly care  I just like saying that!)

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Im pleased to bring you an academic star, and no ordinary one. St. Helena High School alum Kate Johnson, soon to graduate from Columbia University, has been awarded a coveted Fulbright Scholarship to spent nine months in Bologna, Italy. Kate, whos been fascinated with bees ever since she worked with beekeeper Rob Keller at the St. Helena Montessori School, will be studying viruses and bacteria in bee products like honey, beeswax and propolis. Huzzahs to a budding scientist with a bright future.

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Mark your calendars for St. Helena Earth Day from 9 a.m. to noon on April 23 at the Napa Valley College Upper Valley Campus. Bring your e-waste, pharmaceuticals, and papers that need to be shredded. And while youre there, make a donation to the Boys & Girls Club Teen Center.

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Dont forget the Napa Open Space Districts annual celebration on April 20 at Skyline Park. Toast the districts 15th anniversary with wine and light refreshments. Free tickets are available at Eventbrite.

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The St. Helena Farmers Market doesnt open until May, but with a donation of $250 you can get a snazzy tote bag stuffed with merchandise from this years vendors. This is a great gift idea for a special someone who loves the market. Details at sthelenafarmersmkt.org.
Rombauer Vineyards on Tuesday announced the acquisition of three premium vineyards totaling 154 vine acres in the Carneros-Sonoma, Sonoma Valley and Fiddletown appellations.

The acquisitions include the Haire Vineyard in Carneros-Sonoma, the Carriger Vineyard in Sonoma Valley, and a vineyard in the Fiddletown American Viticultural Area (AVA) of Amador County, bringing the family-owned winerys estate and leased vineyards to a total of 830 planted vine acres.

The Rombauer familys goal has always been to produce the highest quality wines possible," President and Chief Executive Officer Bob Knebel said in a press release. "Having control over our own vineyards and consistent access to premium fruit is key to our philosophy of continual improvement in wine quality and style. The acquisition of these long-established premium vineyards also gives us the resources to satisfy the increasing demand for our world class portfolio of wines.

The 52-acre Haire Vineyard in Carneros has been a source of Chardonnay for Rombauer for nearly two decades, ever since Koerner Rombauer shook hands with owner Jim Haire on a deal to acquire the fruit. Planted by the Haire family in 2000 and farmed by them ever since, the block near the San Pablo Bay features Haire clay loam soils. Fruit from the vineyard is described by Rombauer Vice President of Viticulture and Winemaking Richie Allen as having the classic characteristics of melon, peach, and nectarine. It is a prized source for Rombauers Carneros Chardonnay.

The Carriger Vineyard sits in a small pocket on the southwestern reach of Sonoma Valley, an historical AVA with a tradition of winegrowing dating back over 150 years. With well-drained soils of high rock content, the vineyard has been a source for Rombauers Sauvignon Blanc, with 45 acres planted to the variety. Climatically the site is a sweet spot between Rombauers other Sauvignon Blanc sources in the warmer Napa Valley and cooler Russian River Valley, and the fruit brings punchy varietal intensity to the wine. Rombauer plans to replant 45 additional acres at Carriger to Sauvignon Blanc to meet demand for this wine.

Sitting at an elevation ranging from 1,600 to 1,700 feet, the new 90-acre Fiddletown vineyard  including 13 acres planted to old-vine Zinfandel  features multiple sloping hillsides with different aspects and sandy loam soils from decayed granite. With plans to plant an additional 50 acres to Zinfandel and Barbera, Rombauer has begun preparing the land and laying out new blocks destined to become part of the winerys California Zinfandel.

Owning and farming our own vineyards is essential to the high-quality winemaking we are dedicated to, and these three sites are destined to become jewels in Rombauers portfolio, Allen said. Its especially gratifying to see properties like Haire and Fiddletown pass from family to family. Rombauer is determined to be an excellent, long-term steward of these premium sites."
The Napa public school system lifted its mask-wearing requirement on its campuses last month, but an attempt to block future mandates will come before its school board Wednesday evening.

Trustees of the Napa Valley Unified School District will hold a special meeting at 5:30 p.m. to vote on a resolution that would compel the district to honor mask choice for all, ruling out any requirements for students to wear face coverings on campuses. The vote will take place more than three weeks after NVUSD lifted its mask requirement, in line with a California directive that changed the mandate to a strong recommendation effective March 12, following a fall-off in COVID-19 infections since the surge of the Omicron variant late last year.

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The three-page resolution contradicts federal and state public health guidance in disputing the effectiveness of masks as protection against COVID-19 transmission, and claims any masking requirement is ill-advised and in opposition to the social-emotional goals of the district. It also seeks to block NVUSD from requiring students without symptoms of illness to be tested for the virus, although it states that the district will continue to provide masks to students and staff and "promote the availability and efficacy of one-way masking with N95 masks as a personal choice."

NVUSD staff did not recommend the anti-mask resolution, which was proposed by a community member, according to Superintendent Rosanna Mucetti, who declined to name the petitioner. The agenda for Wednesdays special meeting attributes the request to the See My Smile Campaign, a name used by various groups across the U.S. trying to block or overturn school face-covering requirements.

Mucetti pointed to a NVUSD bylaw that allows community members, as well as school board members, to request that a matter within the jurisdiction of the Board be placed on the agenda of a regular meeting. Bylaw 9322 requires such requests to be filed with the district in writing at least a week before a scheduled meeting. (NVUSD trustees normally meet on the first and third Thursday nights of the month, but the district has scheduled a Celebrating Our Schools presentation for this Thursday and will not discuss or vote on any items that evening.)

Napa County will follow California guidance, lift school mask-wearing mandate March 12 The existing masking requirement at public and private K-12 schools will become a recommendation, the county education and health offices said.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 led schools in Napa and across California to shut down their campuses and pivot to months of internet-based remote instruction. Seven months later, NVUSD began a slow transition back to in-person learning, gradually increasing its on-campus schedule from two to four days a week while continuing to offer a virtual learning option throughout the 2020-21 year.

Full-time classroom teaching resumed in August 2021 for the vast majority of the districts 16,000-plus students in Napa and American Canyon, along with a requirement that students, teachers and other staff wear masks in all indoor spaces.

As Californias COVID-19 infection rates began declining from an Omicron-fueled peak over the Christmas and New Years holiday season, the state ended mask mandates for most indoor areas starting Feb. 16, extending the change to schools the following month.

Napa County to relax mask requirement for vaccinated people Feb. 16 For now, the lone Bay Area holdout is Santa Clara County, where county health officials argue that lifting local indoor mask requirements would present an unnecessary risk to residents who are vulnerable to the virus.

Before the lifting of state rules, however, a small group of Vintage High School students staged a walkout Feb. 18 in protest of the on-campus masking requirement. Protesting students marched through the Vintage quad in north Napa during lunch period, then joined adult supporters with the advocacy group Born Free Napa Valley for a protest picnic at nearby Solomon Park.

COVID-19 infections among NVUSD students and employees hit a one-week high of 590 in mid-January  more than 3.2% of the combined student-staff population  before steadily dropping through the winter, reaching a low of seven cases during the week of March 21, according to the districts website. The number of cases increased to 30 last week, the most since the week of Feb. 21.

Wednesdays special meeting will take place at the NVUSD boardroom at 2425 Jefferson St. in Napa, and spectators can view the meeting in person or by Zoom teleconference. The district reopened board meetings to in-person audiences March 17 after conducting them exclusively online for two years.

You can reach Howard Yune at 530-763-2266 or hyune@napanews.com

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Sri Lanka's president declares state of emergency amid mass protests

Austria needs several years to give up on Russian gas

Biden to sign new arms package for Ukraine worth at least $100 million

Armenia's third President Serzh Sargsyan in France Square

Resistance Movement to hold rally tomorrow in Vanadzor, women's march to take place in Yerevan

2nd Chamber of Istanbul Regional Court dismisses appeals by lawyers in Hrant Dink case

European Parliament: Ankara deliberately 'destroyed' its chances of joining EU

NEWS.am digest: Large scale protests continue in Yerevan, people forcibly arrested

Scholz to take part in G7 Ukraine discussion with Zelenskyy

Germany to supply Ukraine with seven self-propelled howitzers

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Al-Monitor: More niceties, zero progress in third round of Turkey-Armenia peace talks

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Investigative Committee: Criminal case opened into hooliganism committed by marchers in downtown Yerevan

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Armenia FM Mirzoyan, US Senator Menendez stress inadmissibility of provoking tension by Azerbaijan

Oil rises in price

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The chief prosecutor for the State Bar of California said Tuesday that the agency was taking a fresh look at attorney conduct in landmark Armenian genocide reparations cases following an investigation that detailed corruption and misdirection of funds in one of the settlements, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The State Bar is reviewing these cases to determine whether there is any new information that would warrant further action, said the bars Chief Trial Counsel George Cardona, a former federal prosecutor appointed last year to lead investigations and prosecutions at the agency that regulates the legal profession in California.

The bar previously disciplined one attorney and attempted to discipline two others in connection with the genocide litigation.

There was a terrible injustice done when descendants of those murdered in the Armenian Genocide were denied their rightful settlements, Cardona said in his statement. He described those already prosecuted as most directly responsible for these misappropriations but added, the State Bar has the responsibility to take action when it becomes aware of new evidence.

Cardonas announcement in a statement to The Times comes after four California lawmakers, including U.S. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), called for a probe into the misconduct the newspaper outlined.

The report last month drew on newly unsealed court records to explain how a $17.5-million settlement in 2005 for heirs of genocide victims was marred in subsequent years by a claims process that rejected 92% of applicants and sent money to sham claimants, relatives of a settlement administrator and a lawyer with no official role in the case. It also revealed irregularities in the distribution of charity funds, including more than $750,000 that Armenian church groups say they never received.

Three American Armenian attorneysprominent Los Angeles lawyers Mark Geragos and Brian Kabateck and Glendale attorney Vartkes Yeghiayanwere lead counsel in the case. The bar received complaints about the three lawyers and others over the last decade from claimants and members of a court-appointed settlement board, according to court records and complaints submitted to authorities.
Quite obviously, Israel has been refraining these many years from officially recognizing the Armenian Genocide out of an effort not to excite the fury and retaliation of Turkey. Israeli psychologist and genocide scholar Israel Charny wrote this in an article published by The Jerusalem Post. Charny continued as follows, in particular:

The Turks have persisted in their bizarre denials of the factual history of the Armenian Genocide through all these years, and are known to have devoted literally millions of dollars to campaigns of censorship and cancellations of reports, articles, books, professional congresses, art exhibits, and even musical events that in one way or another were intended to express pain and caring about the Armenian Genocide.

In Turkey, an easy one-way ticket to jail has been to bring up the subject of the Armenian Genocide prominently  although strangely there also grew a generation of brave intellectuals and artists who managed to get across the memory of the slaughter of the Armenian people and survived, though a good many of them had to go through painful legal trials of charges of insulting the government, and the ones who survived came at the expense of periods of being in jail. Obviously, the Turks took the subject terribly seriously. One might say that it was the Turkish version of the American taboo of cussing the other guys mother  in the age when to say that to a good old American marine was an established one-way ticket for getting yourself sluggedin Turkey you went to jail if you talked of a genocide.

So, big grown-up countries  like the United States and I think Israel deserves to be characterized in this way, too  have been scared from getting involved with Turkish sensitivity. Writing in the Times of Israel, Lazar Berman notes, Many countries have refrained from recognizing the genocide out of fear of the Turkish response, which often involves recalling its ambassador for a period of time. That was Ankaras reaction in 2011 when the French National Assembly passed a bill making it illegal to deny the Armenian Genocide. It also recalled its ambassador to the Vatican when Pope Francis used the word genocide during a 2015 mass marking the 100th anniversary of the slaughter, and its ambassador to Germany after the Bundestag passed a resolution calling the murder of Armenians a genocide in 2016.

HAPPILY, AUTHOR Berman nonetheless was of the opinion that Turkey likely would not take any steps against the US for its recognition, and that has proven to be the case. In fact, even in earlier years when Turkey was far less stressed, economically and politically, than it is today, its characteristic modus operandi has been to react with a torrent of invectives and threats, including concrete announcements that it would cancel major economic relationships, and in some cases seemed to go about implementing their threatened repercussions, but then, quite consistently, withdrew from retaliating and resumed essentially complete relationships.

Israel is a country that takes special pride in not being afraid, and of standing up proudly and firmly against huge Samson-like antagonists. It has been humiliating and puzzling that in a matter of basic ethics and factual truth, Israel has been so meek, obsequious and fawning that it has failed to extend the simple honor of recognizing another peoples suffering and destruction in a massive genocide. Is it so beyond our imagination as Israelis to be able to say to Turkey at this time, We have every respect for you as an important country and are happy to work closely with you, but we owe our own culture the clear cut responsibility to identify with a people whose historical record  confirmed by an overwhelming number of scholars all over the world  shows that they were subject to governmental extermination. The truth is that this is a universal problem for all of mankind, and as Germany has shown in its greatness, it is possible to acknowledge genocide in ones history and go on to contribute to building better lives for ones own people and other peoples.

Will we not feel prouder and stronger if we speak that way?

Insofar as Israel still fears the Turkish response, it has an unusual opportunity to recognize the Armenian Genocide under the umbrella of the first anniversary of American recognition. The linking of Israels recognition of the Armenian Genocide to the recognition by the US on the same day, April 24, which is designated as the start of the Armenian Genocide, will also provide an additional layer of defense for Israel, since any retaliation against Israel will also take on a meaning of being an attack on the US, as well. As President Joe Biden said, Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian Genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever occurring again... the American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia sent congratulatory messages to President Xi Jinping and Premier China Li Keqiang of China on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

The message of the Prime Minister to the President of China reads as follows, in particular:

"The Armenian-Chinese friendly relations have a rich history, are distinguished by mutual trust and great respect. It is this rich traditional foundation that our interstate cooperation is anchored on, which has continuously developed over the past thirty years in a healthy and stable way. A high-level political dialogue has been maintained between Armenia and China, the partnership over international and regional issues, including on multilateral platforms, has been strengthened.

During these three decades, our countries have achieved significant results in cooperation in trade, economy, development, security, culture, education, science and other spheres, the friendship between the Armenian and Chinese peoples has strengthened, mutual understanding and recognition has deepened.

The Government of Armenia attaches great importance to the Armenian-Chinese relations, considering the development of multifaceted cooperation with the People's Republic of China as one of its foreign policy priorities.

I would like to express our gratitude for the support provided by the Chinese Government to the development of Armenia over these years, which has helped to solve important problems for broad layers of population in Armenia. One of the latest episodes in this series is the assistance provided in the fight against COVID-19.

Marking the 30th anniversary of the establishment of Armenian-Chinese diplomatic relations, I express my readiness to make efforts with you to achieve new success in the future-oriented Armenian-Chinese relations."

Nikol Pashinyans message to Li Keqiang runs as follows, in part:

The traditional Armenian-Chinese friendly relations come from the depths of history, having a solid foundation of mutual trust and respect. The establishment of interstate relations three decades ago gave our countries and peoples an opportunity to open a new era, to develop and strengthen cooperation in various fields, recording significant achievements.

Armenia highly values the existing political dialogue between our countries, attaching great importance to the further comprehensive, sustainable, consistent development and expansion of the partnership with China, on both bilateral and multilateral formats. Significant results have been achieved in the past period in trade, economics, security, science, education, culture, interpersonal exchanges, and many other areas.

One of the important components of the Armenian-Chinese relations is the economic cooperation, which we are committed to maximally expanding, embracing new and promising programs of mutual interest. In this regard, we attach importance to Armenia's participation in the "Belt and Road" initiative, which creates new development opportunities for the region.

China has stood with Armenia over these years also through programs implemented within the framework of gratuitous assistance provided by the Chinese government. One of the latest examples of mutual support and cooperation between our countries is the joint fight against COVID-19.

On the occasion of this remarkable anniversary, I would like to express my readiness to work with you to bring the Armenian-Chinese relations to a new level for the benefit of our countries and peoples.
Premier Li Keqiang of China sent a congratulatory message to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. The message reads as follows, in particular:

"Since the establishment of diplomatic relations, healthy and sustainable development dynamics has been observed in the Chinese -Armenian relations during the last 30 years. The political mutual trust between the two countries is constantly deepening, the practical cooperation in different spheres is progressing, and the cultural and humanitarian exchanges are getting closer.

Taking the opportunity of the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations, I express my readiness to make joint efforts with you to deepen bilateral relations in various spheres, to enrich the agenda of the Chinese-Armenian friendly relations for the benefit of our countries and peoples.
Indonesia and Australia, among the world's largest coal exporters, have reached their production limits and are unlikely to be able to meet Europe's need for additional supplies if the European Union bans Russian coal imports. This was stated by the heads of mining companies.

The European Commission has proposed new sanctions against Russia, including a ban on the purchase of Russian coal and a ban on Russian ships from entering EU ports.

The EU imports about 45% of coal from Russia.

Prior to the EU proposal, some European buyers were already in talks with Indonesian companies seeking to replace Russian supplies, said a senior Indonesian Coal Miners' Association (ICMA) executive.

The miners can't ramp up production that quickly, it's difficult, and capacity is already very limited, ICMA chairman Pandu Sjahrir told Reuters.

The Indonesian government has targeted production at 663 million tonnes this year, a target that miners are already struggling to achieve as unexpected export restrictions in January and prolonged rainy weather impacted productivity.

The country has also tightened oversight of its mandatory domestic sales after stockpiles of local power plants fell to a critical low.

According to the Ministry of Energy, Indonesia's coal exports in January-March amounted to 37.64 million tons, compared with 53.77 million tons in the same period last year.

Indonesia's monthly benchmark coal price has already risen to a record $288.40 per tonne in April due to strong global demand.

In Australia, producers have responded to calls from buyers dependent on Russian coal and have been asked by the government to help coal buyers in allied countries such as Poland replace Russian supplies.

Australian miners are benefiting from rising prices for metallurgical coal used in steel mills as well as thermal coal used for power generation.

Production in Australia was hit by flooding in New South Wales and Queensland, outbreaks of COVID-19 and labor shortages, leaving production below full capacity.

Total steam coal exports for the year to June 2022 are expected to rise by about 7% from a year earlier, when production was hit by China's unofficial ban on Australian coal, to 206 million tons before falling to 204 million tons in 2023.

Mining companies have also been unable to expand production in the near future as they face severe regulatory barriers to new mines, resistance from the public and farmers to build new mines, and a lack of capital.
Are there any risks that Gyumri, Yerevan, Goris, and other cities of Armenia may end up under the bombardment by our big neighbor? Quite recently they did not imagine it in [Ukraines] Kharkiv either. Former MP Mikayel Melkumyan said this during a discussion held Wednesday.

He noted that Russia is now engaged in other affairs, and asked rhetorically whether Armenia is ready to defend against it.

"Only 17 percent of Armenians live in Armenia. Questions arise: Is Armenia an appealing place for Armenians? Are we able to mobilize our resources? What is being done to prevent what happened 100 years ago? If everything will be repeated, then it is a shame," Melkumyan added.

He noted that the Armenian people do not fight because of the non-increase of salaries and pensions, and today they realize that there are security problems.

"It does not matter how many people will take to the streets. It is more important how everything needs to be organized and what goals are set," the former lawmaker added.
Europe is ramping up coal shipments from around the world amid a proposed European Union ban on imports from Russia and a fight to reduce gas shortages, Reuters writes.

The European Commission on Tuesday proposed new sanctions against Moscow, including a ban on the purchase of Russian coal and a ban on Russian ships entering EU ports.

The new restrictions come at a time of uncertainty over future Russian gas supplies to the EU later this month after the Kremlin demanded that buyers start paying in rubles.

In March, European countries imported a total of 7.1 million tons of thermal coal, which is used to generate electricity and heat, up 40.5% from last year and the highest level since March 2019, according to an analysis by the broker Braemar ACM.

Braemar data showed that the EU imported 3.5 million tons of Russian thermal coal in March, the highest monthly figure since October 2020.

According to Braemar, the weekly period from March 28 to April 1 saw the highest level of Russian thermal coal imports since the invasion began on February 24, with 887,000 tons of Russian thermal coal imported into the EU.

Colombian thermal coal imports totaled 1.3 million tonnes in March, up 47.3% year-on-year, data from Braemar showed.

U.S. imports totaled 809,000 tons in March, up 30.3% year on year and reaching the highest level since October 2019.

Imports from South Africa have also increased, with 287,000 tons arriving in March compared to no shipments in March last year.

Australia has also detected a renewed buying interest from Europe with thermal coal imports totaling 537,000 tons in the first quarter of this year, compared to no supplies for the same period in 2021.

But Indonesia and Australia, among the world's largest coal exporters, have reached their production limits and are unlikely to be able to meet Europe's need for additional supplies if the European Union bans Russian coal imports, mining executives said.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who is in Brussels on a working visit, met with President of the European Council Charles Michel.

During the meeting, the interlocutors touched upon the trilateral meeting of the Prime Minister of of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan, President of the European Council Charles Michel and President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, as scheduled for today.

The Armenian PM presented the situation in Artsakh as a result of the recent actions of the Azerbaijani units, humanitarian issues and stressed the need for a targeted response from the international community.

Pashinyan and Michel exchanged views on the implementation of the agreements reached at the trilateral meeting held on December 14 last year in Brussels. They expressed the hope that today's trilateral talks will be effective, which will contribute to stability and a comprehensive settlement of the issue.

Nikol Pashinyan and Charles Michel also discussed issues on the Armenia-EU bilateral agenda, in particular, the implementation of the investment and economic plan announced by the EU for Armenia in the amount of 2.6 billion euros.
The US today announced economic measures to ban new investment in Russia and impose the most severe financial sanctions coordinated with the G7 and the EU against Russia's largest bank and several of its most important state-owned enterprises, as well as against Russian government officials and members of the their families. This is stated in a statement from the White House.

According to the statement, full blocking sanctions are imposed on Russian banks: Sberbank and Alfa-Bank, the most important large Russian state-owned enterprises, as well as a ban on new investments in Russia.

The White House also announced full blocking sanctions on the Russian elite and their families, including sanctions on the adult children of President Putin, the wife and daughter of Foreign Minister Lavrov, members of the Russian Security Council, including former Russian President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

The US Treasury has banned Russia from making debt payments from funds under US jurisdiction. Currently, sanctions do not prevent payments on Russian sovereign debt, provided that Russia uses funds outside the jurisdiction of the United States. However, Russia is a global financial pariah and will now have to choose between running out of available funds to make debt payments or defaulting, the White House said in a statement.
Armenian News - NEWS-am presents the daily digest of related top news as of 06.04.22:

Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev met today in Brussels for talks mediated by EU Council President Charles Michel.

In March, Armenia accused Azerbaijan of violating a cease-fire agreement when Azerbaijani troops captured the town of Farukh, a strategically important village in Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan rejected the accusation, saying the town was part of its internationally-recognized territory. Armenias security council has since accused Azerbaijan of preparing the ground for fresh provocations and an offensive on Nagorno-Karabakh.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan first met with President of the European Council Charles Michel.

The Armenian PM presented the situation in Artsakh as a result of the recent actions of the Azerbaijani units, humanitarian issues and stressed the need for a targeted response from the international community.

A trilateral meeting between the leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan and the EC head was held afterward.

Armenia's political opposition has rallied to demand no territorial concessions to Azerbaijan ahead of the two leaders meeting in Brussels, the first face-to-face between the two leaders since December.

Thousands, in the largest demonstration since elections in July 2021, rallied in central Yerevan on Tuesday under a banner reading Artsakh will not be part of Azerbaijan.

The rally was organized by the two opposition blocs in parliament, Armenia and I Have Honor, who accused Pashinyan of putting Armenias own security at risk with his conciliatory moves toward Azerbaijan.

"None of us here want war, but we can't surrender to the butcher," Aram Vartevanyan, a senior member of the Armenia Alliance, told the crowd.

The rally also saw a rare public appearance by Serzh Sargsyan, the former president of Armenia.

Sargsyan told reporters he doubted a formal agreement would be reached in Brussels but that Pashinyan and Aliyev may come to a verbal agreement that would be unacceptable for Armenians.

Speakers at the rally demanded that Armenia must remain Nagorno-Karabakhs security guarantor and that the country could not sign a treaty with Azerbaijan that would violate the rights of the Armenian population of Karabakh to self-determination.

In Karabakh itself, the territorys parliament also issued a statement on the eve of the Brussels meeting calling for Armenian unity.

A meeting between Russian and Armenian FMs will be held in Moscow on Friday, Russian MFA spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a briefing.

Ararat Mirzoyan's visit will be working.

According to Maria Zakharova, the FMs will thoroughly discuss bilateral cooperation in all spheres, integration alliances and other international organizations.

There will also be a detailed exchange of views on the implementation of the trilateral statements of the leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia.

The chief prosecutor for the State Bar of California said Tuesday that the agency was taking a fresh look at attorney conduct in landmark Armenian Genocide reparations cases following an investigation that detailed corruption and misdirection of funds in one of the settlements.

The State Bar is reviewing these cases to determine whether there is any new information that would warrant further action, said the bars Chief Trial Counsel George Cardona, a former federal prosecutor appointed last year to lead investigations and prosecutions at the agency that regulates the legal profession in California.

The bar previously disciplined one attorney and attempted to discipline two others in connection with the genocide litigation.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan had a phone talk with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The sides touched upon the issues on the agenda of the Armenian-US relations, highlighting the further development and strengthening of bilateral cooperation in various spheres. The PM thanked the American side for its support to Armenia in the direction of democratic reforms, noting that the further strengthening of democracy is the policy adopted by the Armenian Government.

Nikol Pashinyan and Antony Blinken referred to the processes taking place in the South Caucasus, the increasing tensions over Nagorno-Karabakh. Nikol Pashinyan presented the situation in Artsakh caused by the actions of the Azerbaijani units, the humanitarian issues and attached importance to the addressed reaction of the US.

Russian far-right politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, known for provocative stunts has died after a long and serious illness, the speaker of parliament said on Wednesday.

Zhirinovsky, 75, was admitted to hospital earlier this year after contracting COVID-19, according to Russian media.

He was known for outrageous statements, including threats to launch nuclear weapons against various countries, seize Alaska from the United States, and expand Russia's frontiers to the point where its soldiers could wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.

According to Russian media reports, Zhirinovsky, who had been in declining health for some time, had been gravely ill for weeks after contracting Covid-19, despite claiming to have received eight vaccine doses.
A celebration of faculty eminence on March 24 at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts marked the contributions of several distinguished groups  faculty who had earned promotion and/or the grant of tenure, were appointed to named and endowed professorships or had earned membership in the National Academies or the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020 and 2021.

Jonathan K. Layne, vice chair of the Board of Trustees and chair of the boards Academic Affairs Committee, noted that a great university arises in several ways: by attracting top students, establishing first-rate facilities and garnering significant community support. All of these things are critical. But faculty are the key, and I and my fellow board members  along with everyone assembled here tonight  salute what their research, teaching and service mean to Emory.

Layne shared emcee honors with President Gregory L. Fenves and Ravi V. Bellamkonda, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs.

Donors and honorees  the latter flanked by proud family members, colleagues and supporters  as well as deans and associate deans, chairs of the newly tenured faculty and members of the Tenure and Promotion Advisory Committee gathered in Emerson Hall. Provost Bellamkonda began by congratulating those who had earned tenure and promotion.

A signal moment in a faculty career: tenure and promotion

It is a wonderful, joyous occasion today. I hope you take the time to pause, to celebrate your hard work,Bellamkonda said.

As someone who experienced the tenure-and-promotion process earlier in his career, he could not resist a little levity but did so by also making a serious point about what it is to be an individual academic in a larger community of scholars.

When I was pursuing tenure, I put my head down, he noted. I confined myself to a room in my house. After receiving tenure, I left my room and noticed that the kitchen faucet had a little drip. I asked myself, whose job is it to fix that? Now that you have received tenure, I hope that you will invest in things other than your own room.

He went on to encourage faculty members to hold close the reasons they joined their particular fields and to seek out, as their careers develop, lines of inquiry that bring a sense of joy and accomplishment. As he concluded, the provost introduced a video showcasing those who received promotion and tenure.

Mohammed K. Ali, MD, MBA. MSc | Professor of Global Health

Angelika Bammer, PhD | Professor of Comparative Literature and Interdisciplinary Humanities

Robert A. Bednarczyk, PhD, MS | Associate Professor of Global Health

Jesse Bockstedt, PhD, MS | Professor, Information Systems and Operations Management

Mariana Candido, PhD, MA | Associate Professor of History

Howard Chang, PhD | Professor of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics

Hee Cheol Cho, PhD | Associate Professor of Pediatrics with Tenure

Jinho Choi, PhD, MS | Associate Professor of Computer Science and Quantitative Theory and Methods

Ruomeng Cui, PhD | Associate Professor, Information Systems and Operations Management

Tasha Dobbin-Bennett, PhD, MA, MPhil | Associate Professor of Art History and Studio Art

Christine Dunham, PhD | Professor of Biochemistry

Astrid Eckert, PhD, MA | Professor of History

Sarah Fankhauser, PhD | Associate Professor of Biology

Matthew Freeman, MPH, PhD | Professor of Environmental Health

Neel Rajnikant Gandhi, MD | Associate Professor of Epidemiology

Jennifer Gandhi , PhD | Professor & Chair of Political Science

Thomas Gillespie, PhD, MS | Professor of Environmental Sciences

Adam N. Glynn, PhD | Professor of Political Science and Quantitative Theory and Methods

Kali Gross, PhD | National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of African American Studies

Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez, PhD | Professor of English

Bridgette Gunnels, PhD, MA | Associate Professor of Spanish

Madeleine Hackney, PhD | Associate Professor of Medicine

Ihab Hajjar, MD | Professor of Neurology

Erika V. Hall, PhD | Associate Professor of Organization and Management

Jehu J. Hanciles, PhD, MTh | D.W. and Ruth Brooks Professor of World Christianity

Jennifer M. Heemstra, PhD | Professor of Chemistry

Hao Huang, PhD | Associate Professor of Mathematics

Kristin Johnson, JD | Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law

Warren R. Jones, PhD | Associate Professor of Pediatrics

Harshita Kamath, PhD, MTheo | Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Associate Professor in Telugu Culture, Literature and History

Robert Krafty, PhD, MA | Professor and Chair of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics

Wilbur Lam, MD, PhD | Professor of Pediatrics

Gregory Lesinski, PhD, MPH | Professor of Hematology and Medical Oncology

Ellen O. Marshall, PhD, MA | Professor of Christian Ethics and Conflict Transformation

Jennifer McGee, PhD, MA | Associate Professor of Psychology

Pablo Montagnes, PhD | Associate Professor of Political Science and Quantitative Theory and Methods

Joshua Mousie, PhD, MA | Associate Professor of Philosophy

Roger Nam, PhD, MDiv, MTheo | Professor of Hebrew Bible

John Oshinski, PhD, MS | Professor of Radiology and Imaging Sciences and Biomedical Engineering

Rachel E. Patzer, PhD, MPH | Professor of Surgery

Chrystal M. Paulos, PhD | Associate Professor of Surgery

Molly Perkins, PhD, MA | Associate Professor of Medicine & Graduate Faculty of Emory Sociology

Laura Plantinga, PhD | Associate Professor of Epidemiology

Devaka Premawardhana, PhD | Associate Professor of Religion

Monika Raj, PhD | Associate Professor of Chemistry

Connie B. Roth, PhD, MSc | Professor of Physics

Joellen Schildkraut, PhD, MPH | Professor of Epidemiology

Rafick-Pierre Sekaly, PhD | Professor and Vice-Chair of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine

Dianne Stewart, PhD | Professor of Religion and African American Studies

Ymir Vigfusson, PhD | Associate Professor of Computer Science

David Weiss, PhD | Professor of Medicine

Deanna Ferree Womack, PhD, ThM, MDiv | Associate Professor of History of Religions and Multifaith Relations

William Wuest, PhD | Professor of Chemistry

Canhua Xiao, PhD, RN, FAAN | Associate Professor of Nursing

The value of endowed professorships

For his part, Layne underscored the critical role that named and endowed professorships play in the life and reputation of a top research university such as Emory, calling them one of the most significant philanthropic contributions one can make.

An endowed chair is the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a faculty member. Endowed chairs advance the work of departments in an area of academic or clinical interest while honoring a distinguished faculty member and the individual for whom the chair is named.

Being able to award endowed professorships not only enables the recruitment and retention of the highest-quality faculty members but also enhances the student experience. In Laynes words, investing in endowed professorships means investing in academic rigor and thought leadership that produces top-notch graduates ready to deliver meaningful, lasting contributions to humankind.

Layne introduced a video expressing appreciation of the universitys endowed chairs; it also featured trustees and donors making the case for why endowed chairs are integral to Emorys eminence.

Alvaro Alonso, MD, PhD, MPH | Stephen D. Clements, Jr. Professor and Chair, Rollins School of Public Health

Allen D. Beck, MD | F. Phinizy Calhoun Sr., Chair, Emory School of Medicine

Valerie Biousse, MD | Reunette Harris Chair, Emory School of Medicine

Lawrence H. Boise, PhD | R. Randall Rollins Professor and Chair, Emory School of Medicine

Nicholas M. Boulis, MD, MSC | Al Lerner Chair, Emory School of Medicine

Jericho Brown, PhD | Charles Howard Candler Professor, Emory College of Arts and Sciences

Kenneth Cardona, MD, FACS | Patricia R. Reynolds Professor, Emory School of Medicine

Puneet Chehal, PhD, MA | Rollins Assistant Professor, Rollins School of Public Health

Anita H. Corbett, PhD | Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor, Emory College of Arts and Sciences

Victor G. Corces, PhD | Dean's Eminent Investigator, Emory School of Medicine

Mani A. Daneshmand, MD | Andrew J. McKelvey Professor, Emory School of Medicine

Satyanarayana Gedela, MD, MRCP | Marcus Professor, Emory School of Medicine

Tracy Clifton Green, PhD, MA | John W. McIntyre Professor, Goizueta Business School

Edwin M. Horwitz, MD, PhD | Marcus Professor, Emory School of Medicine

Timothy P. Jackson, PhD, MPhil, MA | Bishop Mack B. and Rose Stokes Professor, Candler School of Theology

Kristin Johnson, JD | Asa Griggs Candler Professor, Emory Law

Harshita Kamath, PhD, MTheo | Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Associate Professor, Emory College of Arts and Sciences

Robert T. Krafty, PhD, MA | Rollins Distinguished Professor, Rollins School of Public Health

Daniel W. LaChance, PhD | Winship Distinguished Research Professor, Emory College of Arts and Sciences

Amelia A. Langston, MD | Winship 5K Research Professor, Emory School of Medicine

Yang Liu, PhD | Gangarosa Distinguished Professor, Rollins School of Public Health

Adam I. Marcus, PhD | Winship 5K Research Professor, Emory School of Medicine

Carmen Marsit, PhD | Rollins Distinguished Professor, Rollins School of Public Health

Lauren E. McCullough-Young, PhD, MSPH | Rollins Assistant Professor, Rollins School of Public Health

Shivani A. Patel, MPH, PhD | Rollins Assistant Professor, Rollins School of Public Health

Brenda Poindexter, MD | Marcus Professor, Emory School of Medicine

Usha Ramakrishnan, PhD, MSc | Richard N. Hubert Distinguished Professor, Rollins School of Public Health

Whitney S. Rice, DrPH, MPH | Rollins Assistant Professor, Rollins School of Public Health

Nabil F. Saba, MD, FACP | Lynne and Howard Halpern Chair, Emory School of Medicine

Joellen M. Schildkraut, PhD, MPH | Jules and Uldeen Terry Distinguished Professor, Rollins School of Public Health

David A. Schweidel, PhD, MA | Rebecca Cheney McGreevy Endowed Chair, Goizueta Business School

Noah Scovronick, PhD, Msc | Rollins Assistant Professor, Rollins School of Public Health

Karen L. Sedatole, PhD, MBA | Asa Griggs Candler Professor, Goizueta Business School

Ted A. Smith, PhD, MDiv, MA | Almar H. Shatford Professor, Candler School of Theology

Stephen F. Traynelis, PhD | Dean's Eminent Investigator, Emory School of Medicine

Michael T. Treadway, PhD | Winship Distinguished Research Professor, Emory College of Arts and Sciences

Sergei Urazhdin, PhD | Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor, Emory College of Arts and Sciences

Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec, PhD, MSc | Winship Distinguished Research Professor, Emory College of Arts and Sciences

Courtney R. Yarbrough, PhD | Rollins Assistant Professor, Rollins School of Public Health

National academy inductees in a class of their own

President Fenves rounded out the program with a fulsome appreciation of the individual faculty members who had been elected to the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020 and 2021. Before doing so, however, he honored the scholarship, creativity, heart and ambition of our professors and researchers who, through their groundbreaking work, expand new frontiers of knowledge, elevate the student experience and empower Emory.

Its said that faculty are the heartbeat of a great university, Fenves continued, and at Emory especially, I know this to be true. The standard of excellence you have set is in a class of its own. You are the leaders in your fields. And when the public, our policymakers and peers at organizations across the globe have questions, they often turn to you  to Emory  for the answers.

Five Emory faculty members gained election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which was founded in 1780 and, according to its charter, has as its mission to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people.

Three faculty members were welcomed into the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Founded in 1863, the National Academies provide independent, objective advice to inform policy with evidence, spark progress and innovation and confront challenging issues for the benefit of society.

The president introduced a video attesting to the significance of these national honors, narrated by Emory faculty who are also academy members.

American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2021 Rafi Ahmed, PhD Director, Emory Vaccine Center

Eminent Scholar, Georgia Research Alliance

Investigator, Emory Center for AIDS Research

Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, Emory School of Medicine Carol Anderson, MA, PhD Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies, Emory College of Arts and Sciences

Chair, African American Studies, Emory University Jericho Brown, MFA, PhD Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing, Emory College of Arts and Sciences

Director, Creative Writing Program, Emory College of Arts and Sciences Sanjay Gupta, MD Associate Professor of Neurosurgery, Emory School of Medicine

Associate Professor of Epidemiology, Rollins School of Public Health

Associate Chief of Neurosurgery, Grady Memorial Hospital Vanessa Siddle Walker, EdM, EdD Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American Educational Studies, Emory College of Arts and Sciences

National Academy of Medicine, 2021 Denise Jamieson, MD, MPH James Robert McCord Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Emory School of Medicine

Chair, Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics, Emory School of Medicine Susan Margulies, PhD Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Injury Biomechanics

Assistant Director, National Science Foundations (NSF)  Directorate of Engineering

Professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology

National Academy of Sciences, 2020 Victor Corces, PhD Professor of Human Genetics, Emory School of Medicine

National Academy of Engineering, 2020 Susan Margulies, PhD Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Injury Biomechanics

Assistant Director, National Science Foundations (NSF)  Directorate of Engineering

Professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology

As attendees then made their way to a reception on Patterson Green, the synergy between Emorys donors and faculty could not have been more clear. In a closing gesture of appreciation to donors, Fenves said, Your support enables this level of achievement, strengthening and expanding the impact of life-changing scholarship and research, creating exciting new pathways of discovery.
As society increasingly relies on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, how can ethically committed individuals and institutions articulate values to guide their development and respond to emerging problems? Join the Office of the Provost to explore the ethical implications of AI in a new AI.Humanity Ethics Lecture Series.

Over four weeks in April and May, world-renowned AI scholars will visit Emory to discuss the moral and social complexities of AI and how it may be shaped for the benefit of humanity. A reception will follow each lecture.

Matthias Scheutz: Moral Robots? How to Make AI Agents Fit for Human Societies

Monday, April 11

Lecture at 4 p.m., reception at 5:30 p.m.

Convocation Hall  Community Room (210)

Register here.

AI is different from other technologies in that it enables and creates machines that can perceive the world and act on it autonomously. We are on the verge of creating sentient machines that could significantly improve our lives and better human societies. Yet AI also poses dangers that are ours to mitigate. In this presentation, Scheutz will argue that AI-enabled systems  in particular, autonomous robots  must have moral competence: they need to be aware of human social and moral norms, be able to follow these norms and justify their decisions in ways that humans understand. Throughout the presentation, Scheutz will give examples from his work on AI robots and human-robot interaction to demonstrate a vision for ethical autonomous robots.

Matthias Scheutz is a professor of cognitive and computer science, director of the Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory and director of the human-robot interaction degree programs at Tufts University. His research and areas of interest are in the field of AI, artificial life, cognitive modeling, complex systems, foundations of cognitive science, human-robot interaction, multi-scale, agent-based models and natural language understanding.

Seth Lazar: The Nature and Justification of Algorithmic Power

Monday, April 18

Lecture at 4 p.m., reception at 5:30 p.m.

Convocation Hall  Community Room (210)

Register here.

Algorithms increasingly mediate and govern our social relations. In doing so, they exercise a distinct kind of intermediary power: they exercise power over us; they shape power relations between us; and they shape our overarching social structures. Sometimes, when new forms of power emerge, our task is simply to eliminate them. However, algorithmic intermediaries can enable new kinds of human flourishing and could advance social structures that are otherwise resistant to progress. Our task, then, is to understand and diagnose algorithmic power and determine whether and how it can be justified. In this lecture, Lazar will propose a framework to guide our efforts, with particular attention to the conditions under which private algorithmic power either can, or must not, be tolerated.

Seth Lazar is professor of philosophy at the Australian National University (ANU), an Australian Research Council (ARC) future fellow and a distinguished research fellow of the University of Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI. At ANU, he was founding lead of the Humanizing Machine Intelligence project and recently launched the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab, where he directs research projects on the moral and political philosophy of AI. He is general co-chair for the ACM Fairness, Accountability and Transparency Conference 2022, was program co-chair for the ACM/AAAI AI, Ethics and Society conference in 2021, and is one of the authors of a study by the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, reporting to Congress on the ethics and governance of responsible computing research. He has given the Mala and Solomon Kamm lecture in ethics at Harvard University and will in 2023 give the Tanner Lectures on AI and human values at Stanford University.

Ifeoma Ajunwa: The Unrealized Promise of Artificial Intelligence

Thursday, April 28

Lecture at 4 p.m., reception at 5:30 p.m.

Oxford Road Building  Presentation Room and Living Room/Patio

Register here.

AI was forecast to revolutionize the world for the better. Yet this promise is still unrealized. Instead, there is a growing mountain of evidence that automated decision making is not revolutionary; rather, it has tended to replicate the status quo, including the biases embedded in our societal systems. The question, then, is what can be done? The answer is twofold: One part looks to what can be done to prevent the reality of automated decision making both enabling and obscuring human bias. The second looks toward proactive measures that could allow AI to work for the greater good.

Ifeoma Ajunwa is an associate professor of law with tenure at the University of North Carolina School of Law, where she also is the founding director of the AI Decision-Making Research Program. Prior to that, Ajunwa earned tenure at Cornell University. Ajunwa is currently a Fulbright Scholar (2021-2022) and a nonresidential visiting fellow at Yale Law School. She has also been faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School since 2017. Her research interests include race and the law, law and technology, employment and labor law, health law and more.

Carissa Veliz: On Privacy and Self-Presentation Online

Thursday, May 5

Lecture at 4 p.m.

Online via Zoom

A long tradition in philosophy and sociology considers self-presentation as the main reason why privacy is valuable, often equating control over self-presentation and privacy. Veliz argues that, even though control over self-presentation and privacy are tightly connected, they are not the same  and overvaluing self-presentation leads us to misunderstand the threat to privacy online. Veliz argues that to combat some of the negative trends we witness online, we need, on the one hand, to cultivate a culture of privacy, in contrast to a culture of exposure (for example, the pressure on social media to be on display at all times). On the other hand, we need to readjust how we understand self-presentation online.

Carissa Veliz is an associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute for Ethics in AI, as well as a tutorial fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford. Her work is based in digital ethics (with an emphasis on privacy and AI ethics), and practical ethics; more generally, political philosophy and public policy.

Mona Sloane: About the Social in AI

As artificial intelligence progresses and becomes part of our everyday lives, evidence of its potential to negatively impact society grows. But to date, we do not have a robust concept of AI as a social phenomenon. The harm that AI can cause is often considered a technical problem that requires a technical solution. This process falls short of addressing the root problems of discriminatory AI. Sloanes lecture will outline a new approach to uncover and understand new approach to understanding AIs social dimensions. It will emphasize on the social organization of ethical AI, interdisciplinary AI auditing, AI accountability techniques and practice-based compliance frameworks for AI organizations. Sloane will showcase how cross-disciplinary collaborations help diagnose harmful AI to create technology that is in the public interest.

Monday, May 23

Lecture at 4 p.m., reception at 5:30 p.m.

Convocation Hall  Room 208

Register here.

Mona Sloane, PhD, is a senior research scientist at the NYU Center for Responsible AI, an adjunct professor at NYUs Tandon School of Engineering, a fellow with NYUs Institute for Public Knowledge, a fellow with the GovLab and the technology editor for Public Books. Currently, she serves as inaugural director of the *This Is Not A Drill* program on technology, inequality and the climate emergency at NYUs Tisch School of the Arts and holds an affiliation with the Tubingen AI Center at the University of Tubingen in Germany. Her research examines the intersection of design, technology and society, specifically in the context of AI design and policy.

For more information about the AI.Humanity Ethics Lecture Series, contact Melissa Daly.
Spring semester might be winding down, but Emory Arts still has a full calendar of events to enjoy. Highlights in April include Emory Dance Companys spring concert, multiple opportunities to learn about and discuss art and the first live, in-person production of Emory StageWorks since 2019.

Experience all that Emory Arts has to offer by adding these events to your calendar.

Art creations and exhibitions

Few things symbolize summer better than camp. Emory Arts invites students to return to that mindset during Camp on the Quad on Thursday, April 7, at 7 p.m. Get creative while making camp crafts, watch an outdoor screening of The Parent Trap and enjoy free offerings from food trucks.

All art lovers can view the works of graduating seniors during a capstone project showcase on Wednesday, April 27, at 5 p.m. in the Emory Student Center. Participating artists are part of the integrated visual arts co-major.

Student and professional concerts

April is Jazz Appreciation Month, so stop by Patterson Green on Thursday, April 7, or Thursday, April 14, to groove with Jazz on the Green. Both programs by the Emory Jazz Combos begin at 6 p.m. and are free. Jazz fans can also enjoy a joint performance with Gary Motley, jazz faculty and the Emory Big Band for a free concert on Wednesday, April 20, at 8 p.m. at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts.

The Candler Concert Series continues on Saturday, April 9, at 8 p.m. when the Academy of St Martin in the Fields Wind Ensemble performs at the Schwartz Center. These acclaimed wind players take their audiences on a new adventure exploring some of the best all-wind and wind and piano classical repertoire. Tickets are $60 for general admission and $10 for Emory students.

On Sunday, April 10, join Emory Chamber Ensembles for a performance of chamber works for strings, brass, winds, percussion and guitar. These student musicians are mentored by Emorys artist faculty. The program begins at 4 p.m. at the Schwartz Center. No reservations are needed.

Later that evening, the Emory Concert Choir presents its spring concert. Daybreak features music from the upcoming international tour by the band of the same name. The choirs performance is Sunday, April 10, at 7 p.m. in the Schwartz Center. The program is free of charge and no tickets are needed.

The Emory Wind Ensemble presents a free evening of classic and emerging works for winds, brass and percussion on Thursday, April 14, at 8 p.m. at the Schwartz Center. Students take the stage again on Tuesday, April 19, at 8 p.m. for the Spring Composition Showcase. The program, held at the Performing Arts Studio, features new work by student composers. There is no charge but reservations are needed.

The Emory University Symphony Orchestra and the University Chorus follow with concerts on Friday, April 22, and Saturday, April 23, at 8 p.m. They will perform Mozarts Requiem and a newly commissioned work as part of the Composer Commission Project: EUSO @ 100. The free programs will be at the Schwartz Center; no tickets are needed.

On Saturday, April 23, the Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta debuts the inaugural concert in a new series endowed by James Waits, former dean of Candler School of Theology. Haydns Seven Last Words of Christ with the Vega Quartet features a unique work of Haydn performed in a magical setting. Seven speakers of diverse faiths will give a short reflection on each of the seven statements between each movement. The program will be at 8 p.m. in Cannon Chapel; it is free but registration is required.

On Sunday, April 24, at 7 p.m., the Emory Gamelan Ensembles presents Seven Golden Raindrops. Livestream the concert or register to attend in person at the Performing Arts Studio. Also on April 24 at 7 p.m., Emory music students compete to perform as soloists with the Emory University Symphony Orchestra and the Emory Wind Ensemble during the Emory Concerto and Aria Competition. The program, held at the Schwartz Center, is free.

The months musical performances conclude with the Atlanta Master Chorales season finale, Immortal Fire. Programs will be Friday, April 29, and Saturday, April 30, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $30 for general admission, $25 for discount category members, $10 for Emory students/youth and $15 for the livestream only.

Film and art lectures

The Michael C. Carlos Museum hosts a series of lectures in Ackerman Hall beginning Thursday, April 7, at 7:30 p.m. when Princetons Harriet Flower delivers the annual Benario Lecture in Roman Studies. Her lecture is titled Dowry, House and Household in Republican Rome. Participants may also register to watch the program online.

The beloved Rosemary Magee Creativity Conversation Series continues on Saturday, April 9, at 3 p.m. Harry Lennix, an accomplished stage, screen and television actor and a co-founder of the new African American Performing Arts Museum in Chicago, holds a discussion with Emory music professor Dwight Andrews. In addition, Clint Fluker, the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library curator of African American collections, will discuss the Rose Library holdings in African American performing arts. The free program, presented by Emorys Film and Media Department, will be in the Jones Room of Woodruff Library. Registration is required.

On Sunday, April 10, the Carlos Museum welcomes writer-director Mary Zimmerman and Mary Louise Hart, former curator at the Getty Villa specializing in the art and performance of Ancient Greek drama. They will discuss It Was Ever Thus: Theater and Adaptation from Classical Antiquity to the Present with Ruth Allen, the Carlos Museums curator of Greek and Roman art. Register for the free, online Laszlo-Excalibur Lecture here.

Monday, April 11, brings the Art History Departments annual Heath Lecture in Modern + Contemporary Art at 6 p.m. Dana Cuff, director of cityLab and professor of architecture and urban design at UCLA, will speak on Spatial Justice: Rethinking the Architecture of Social Housing. Attendees can join the program at Ackerman Hall in the Carlos Museum or can watch online.

Learn more about the exhibition And I Must Scream at the Carlos Museum during a gallery talk at noon on Friday, April 15, with curator Amanda H. Hellman. The lecture is free, but registration is required. The program is part of the In This Moment lunchtime talk series during which Carlos Museum curators and Emory faculty and graduate students discuss works of art that reflect the complex social issues of their time and place.

As part of Carlos Reads, join the book club on Monday, April 18, at 7:30 p.m. to discuss Imbolo Mbues How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, the book tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Clint Fluker, curator of African American collections at Emorys Rose Library, leads readers through Mbue's powerful novel, which was named one of the ten best books of 2021 by The New York Times. The cost (which includes a copy of the book) is $25 for Carlos Museum members and $40 for nonmembers. Space is limited, and registration is required by calling 404-727-6118.

Theater and dance performances

In the return to its first live and in-person production since 2019, Emory StageWorks 2022 presents a cabaret of musical song and dance. Featuring an operatic premiere  plus opera and musical theater excerpts from a myriad of favorites including Chicago, Waitress the Musical, The Marriage of Figaro and more  the production at the Performing Arts Studio on Saturday, April 16, at 8 p.m. is not to be missed. Admission is free, but registration is required.

The Schwartz Center will host a Flamenco Showing on Tuesday, April 19, at 3 p.m. featuring students from professor Julie Baggenstosss class. Mark Herzog will accompany the performers with vocals and guitar. Admission is free.

Emory Dance Company also performs at the Schwartz Center, presenting their spring concert on Thursday, April 21, at 7:30 p.m. This performance showcases the original creative work of student choreographers who are emerging in the field of contemporary dance. Additional performances will be held on Friday, April 22, at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, April 23, at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $10 for general admission.
Three juniors in Emory College of Arts and Sciences have been named Goldwater Scholars for 2022, the fourth consecutive year that multiple students have won the nations top scholarship for undergraduates studying math, natural sciences and engineering.

Anish Max Bagga, Noah Okada and Yena Woo are among the 417 recipients chosen from more than 1,240 nominees from universities across the country. Emory has produced 45 Goldwater Scholars since Congress established the program in 1986 to honor the work of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater.

Selected for their demonstrated excellence in coursework and research and for their potential for significant contribution in their chosen fields, each Goldwater Scholar will receive up to $7,500 per year for their studies, until they earn their undergraduate degrees.

Were thrilled to see these Emory students recognized for their research accomplishments and future potential, says Megan Friddle, director of the Emory College National Scholarships and Fellowships program. Max, Noah and Yena all bring exciting multidisciplinary perspectives from the liberal arts and sciences to their work, tackling scientific questions with both intellectual curiosity and a strong commitment to improving the lives of others.

Anish Max Bagga

Bagga ignored well-intentioned advice that his strength in mathematics was separate from skills he would need to work in medicine.

Inspired by the pandemic disruption, the joint major in math and computer science decided to tackle two distinct projects: Building a computational model of how humans distribute thyroid hormones to tissue as part of research at Rollins School of Public Health and, at Emory School of Medicine, conducting spatial analysis to see how efficient different animal hosts are at allowing the flu virus to exchange genes and create new strains.

He hopes to merge the virology-focused influenza project with his modeling skills in order to build a model that can show how the flu spreads, accumulates and dissipates in people.

To me, the beauty of applying math and computer science to medicine is you can treat more than one patient at a time with your work, says Bagga, who began his projects as a first-year student at Oxford College. I want to be the clinician who formulates a treatment plan through research for my patients that could have impacts for people all around the globe.

Rollins associate professor Qiang Zhang, whose specialty is environmental health and computational toxicology, invited Bagga to join his project to build predictive models examining the impact that different environmental endocrine disrupting chemicals have on human health. First, he needed to build a model for how the bodys plasma and tissue typically transport and uptake the hormones.

Bagga began building the model for normal human physiology after discussing the structure and molecular interactions with Zhang. The pair have since been able to run several scenarios, including one that shows how different plasma-binding proteins work to get thyroid hormones into cells evenly and another that predicts how the circadian rhythm of thyroid hormones may originate.

He is the only undergraduate I work with, and his dedication is among the best Ive ever seen among all students I have worked with, Zhang says. He has the ability to do this work and understand what is important.

Associate professor Anice Lowen found Bagga similarly resourceful in his work in her microbiology and immunology lab focused on the mechanisms of influenza A evolution. There, Bagga built simulations of the flus reassortment to determine how efficient birds, pigs and humans were as hosts to this process that gives rise to genetic changes in the virus. He recently completed a second study, developing and applying spatial models to examine the reassortment in specific compartments within pig lungs.

I dont typically take on undergraduates, but Max has been really helpful and productive in moving our research forward, Lowen says. He is very self-motivated and thoughtful in his work.

Bagga is considering how to combine his research experiences into a new project. He also is committed to his favorite activity outside the lab  participating and traveling with Emorys Model United Nations  and is weighing starting a nonprofit related to COVID-19 vaccine distribution.

I always thought I wanted to be a neurosurgeon until I worked more with computational models that I think will have more impact in virology and infectious disease, says Bagga, who plans to pursue a joint MD/PhD. I just want to apply my skills in a way that can help the most people.

Noah Okada

Okada, a double major in computer science and neuroscience and behavioral biology, figured his love of programming would lead to becoming a software engineer.

Then he suffered a brain injury during a high school wrestling accident. The neurosurgeons patient explanations during his lengthy recovery sparked a new interest in both brain function and the lack of resources for people with cognitive and neurological disorders.

Okada realized he could combine those interests when Daniel Drane, a neurology professor at the School of Medicine, mentioned during a guest lecture that a lab he worked in wanted to add virtual-reality (VR) tools to its epilepsy research. Okada has worked in that lab since then, developing VR landscapes and memory paradigms that recreate real-world experiences that open new research options in neuroscience.

That I can build an environment that puts people through the process of activating memory, it really brings the pieces together to fit our understanding of what may be happening from a singular disruption in the brain, Okada says.

Nigel Pedersens epilepsy and systems neuroscience lab focuses on the clinical evaluation and electrode-implantation planning for patients who have uncontrolled epilepsy. The related research aims to capture intracranial recordings and stimulation, especially in the brains memory networks associated with epilepsy.

Okadas project involved building 64 pairs of scenes  with similar designs but different layouts  for 128 virtual spaces such as a museum gallery and video arcade. Asking patients about recall of each space helps researchers better understand the mechanistic work that helps form memories and the metamemory best known as deja vu.

Weve built this from ground up and Noah has been involved since the beginning, making original contributions on what could easily be a graduate-level project, says Pedersen, who included Okada on a case study paper published last year. He has been an important part of a very collaborative group.

That group includes philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists, specialists whose interest is in ensuring that there is a humanistic center to such research. Okadas Goldwater project, for instance, will involve integrating VR and intracranial recordings, but only after practical considerations such as finding the most comfortable VR headsets and techniques to reduce cyber sickness during immersion.

Okada continues those interdisciplinary conversations as a board member of the undergraduate research Grey Matters journal. He is also involved with Emory Entrepreneurship and Venture Management to feed his interest in the business prospects of neuro-technology.

Having studied the molecular neuroscience of the blood-brain barrier last summer with Mercedes Balcells at MIT, Okada plans to split this summer between Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology, furthering his abilities with intracranial EEGs and the use and creation of VR paradigms. Long-term, the plan is to continue similar research with a cognitive neuroscience PhD.

It is especially great because I can see a career using VR technology to tackle older problems weve only been able to study in animal models, Okada says. We can now create the chance to live some of these experiences as we study them and ask really interesting questions about what makes us who we are.

Yena Woo

Woo, a chemistry major with a minor in anthropology, convinced her father to learn how to say the alphabet backwards with her when she was just 10.

It was her way of feeling she was doing something, anything, as she watched her grandmother slowly slip into the haze of Alzheimers disease.

That commitment to action earned her a semifinalist spot in the national Regeneron Science Talent Search while in high school, when she conducted independent research into a compound thought to refold the misshapen proteins affiliated with Alzheimers.

She has worked at Manuel Yepes lab in the School of Medicine since her first year, working to untangle how the plasminogen-activator system (an enzymatic cascade known for its role in breaking down clots) and its inhibitors and activators might help the brain heal after a stroke, injury or from degenerative diseases.

I remember feeling so helpless, and I dont want anyone to feel that way, says Woo, who plans to pursue an MD/PhD. Everyone has their own niche in how they can contribute to this world, and this is what I feel Im called to do.

As the Rollins Chair in Stroke and Imaging Research, Yepes is a physician-scientist focused on finding ways for stroke victims to recover. In 32 years of mentoring, he says hes never had such a driven student.

For instance, when the lab shut down early in spring semester 2020, Yepes said Woo repeatedly contacted him for work she could complete remotely. She ended up second author on a review paper with Yepes, on the role of plasminogen-activator systems in neurological disease and injury.

It is one of three papers Woo has published, and a fourth is under review. She also developed an immunohistochemistry lab protocol for working with 20-year-old tissue from chimpanzee brain  complex and delicate work  to see if the healing proteins found in mice exist there.

Ive never seen anything like her, even from doctoral fellows, Yepes says. She is special because she knows what she wants and she is very persistent in getting it.

Woo plans to continue her research on brain tissue in Yepes lab for her Goldwater project. She also will continue as a leader with Emorys chapter of Medlife and the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology before shadowing a surgeon this summer for more exposure to clinical work.

Long-term, I want to develop therapeutics for Alzheimers and other neurodegenerative diseases, she says. Im really grateful for my family in supporting all my ideas and for the opportunity to pursue them.
S Korea's Yoon wants return of US nuclear assets

Yoon Suk-yeol wants a more constant US security presence. File photo: AFP

Advisers to South Korea's president-elect on Wednesday sought the redeployment of US strategic assets, including nuclear bombers and submarines, to the Korean peninsula, one adviser said.



A team of foreign policy and security aides to incoming president Yoon Suk-yeol met US national security adviser Jake Sullivan in Washington. Yoon has called for a more constant US security presence to deter threats from North Korea as it steps up weapons tests.



"Deploying the strategic assets is an important element of reinforcing the extended deterrence, and the issue naturally came up during the discussions," Park Jin, a four-term lawmaker who led the delegation, told reporters.



He added that both sides explored ways to bolster nuclear deterrence at the talks, which were held on a trip aimed at securing an early summit between Yoon and US President Joe Biden.



A White House official, asked whether Washington supported deployments to South Korea, responded that both sides had "discussed generally" US defence commitments, but did not elaborate.



Yoon is set to be sworn in on May 10 just as tensions have flared on the peninsula. North Korea launched a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) last month.



Deployment of US bombers, aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines was part of Yoon's election platform, in which he promised to "respond firmly" to the North's threats.



Yoon has also vowed to "normalise" joint military drills with the US that were scaled back under outgoing liberal President Moon Jae-in, in a bid to placate Pyongyang and resume stalled talks to rid the peninsula of nuclear weapons.



North Korea has long denounced the exercises as a rehearsal for war, and Washington and Seoul have reduced field training and shunned use of major weapons such as bombers and air carriers, focusing instead on computer simulations.



Park did not elaborate, however, when asked about plans for regular spring exercises, which domestic media have said could include nuclear bombers for the first time in nearly five years.



"We agreed that what's most important is to maintain deterrence so that we can strongly respond to any possible North Korean provocations. (Reuters)
Industry benchmark report confirms SESs position as a global leader in content delivery over satellite

LUXEMBOURG--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SES announced today the results of its annual Satellite Monitor market research, the industrys premier accounting of satellites TV reach, which underscores SESs position as the leader in enabling content delivery via satellite directly and indirectly. SES now delivers almost 8,400 TV channels  including 3,130 in HD or UHD  to a total of 366 million TV homes worldwide, an increase of five million homes over the previous year. SES continues to outperform the industry with the highest number of TV homes reached and record-breaking number of channels delivered.

The increase of TV households served by SES can be attributed to the growing reach in Africa (+9.1 million), APAC (+1 million) and Latin America (+1.7 million), where direct-to-home satellite platforms and IPTV continue to gain traction as leading TV reception methods. In SESs key European market via 19.2 degrees East, SES continues to reach 117 million homes, delivering content to half of all TV homes in the market via satellite, cable or IPTV. SESs reach to TV homes in North America is down by 6 million as American audiences turn toward online streaming alternatives.

In Africa, SES continues to expand its satellite reach due to the growth of Ethiopian free-to-air offering, including the countrys first dedicated TV platform Ethiosat. SES has also led an intensive programme to get TV viewers in Ethiopia to repoint their dishes at the satellite positioned at 57 degrees East for the past two years, and is currently serving a predominant number of satellite TV homes in Ethiopia.

The following table shows the 2021 Satellite Monitor regional breakdown of SESs TV home reach:

Market

TV Homes

Europe

170 million

North America

59 million

Africa

46 million

Latin America

44 million

Asia Pacific

34 million

Middle East

13 million

Additionally, key trends have been identified in African and European markets:

TV home evolution in Africa  TV penetration across markets in Africa, such as Ethiopia, Nigeria and Ghana, has soared by 27% since 2017 as satellite gains popularity as the leading means of TV reception Free-to-air in Europe  As more turn to over-the-top TV (OTT) packages, free-to-air satellite TV remains stable in Europe over the last five years, underscoring the value proposition of satellite TV and the complementary nature of OTT IPTV growth  Internet protocol television (IPTV) continues to grow across Europe as an emerging distribution method, whereas terrestrial television (DTT) declined.

"For almost three decades we have been publishing the Satellite Monitor market research on a yearly basis, enabling our video customers from all over the world to leverage the impartial data to make informed decisions about their business. These additional insights, combined with our premium fleet of satellites ability to deliver content in the most cost-effective way to the widest possible audiences, demonstrate why leading broadcasters continue to extend and expand their partnerships with us. This underscores the solidity of our video business for the years to come, said Deepak Mathur, Executive Vice President of Global Video Sales at SES.

For 28 years, SESs Satellite Monitor has been a key industry benchmark report conducted by leading market research institutes to analyse the market dynamics (TV reception, resolution, devices, etc.), reach (by country, orbital position and reception mode) and social demographics.

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About SES

SES has a bold vision to deliver amazing experiences everywhere on earth by distributing the highest quality video content and providing seamless connectivity around the world. As the leader in global content connectivity solutions, SES operates the worlds only multi-orbit constellation of satellites with the unique combination of global coverage and high performance, including the commercially-proven, low-latency Medium Earth Orbit O3b system. By leveraging a vast and intelligent, cloud-enabled network, SES is able to deliver high-quality connectivity solutions anywhere on land, at sea or in the air, and is a trusted partner to the worlds leading telecommunications companies, mobile network operators, governments, connectivity and cloud service providers, broadcasters, video platform operators and content owners. SESs video network carries 8,400 channels and has an unparalleled reach of 366 million households, delivering managed media services for both linear and non-linear content. The company is listed on Paris and Luxembourg stock exchanges (Ticker: SESG). Further information is available at: www.ses.com.
The Green Solutions appoints Black & Veatch to study the generation and storage of green hydrogen and green ammonia in Vietnam

SINGAPORE -- (BUSINESS WIRE) --

Black & Veatch and The Green Solutions (TGS) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to advance the production and supply of green hydrogen and green ammonia in Vietnam.

Specializing in renewable energy project development, manufacturing and services, TGS leads efforts to harness green energy in Vietnam for the manufacture of green hydrogen and green ammonia. Black & Veatch, a global leader in hydrogen energy development, brings its vast expertise in clean energy technologies and ammonia processing to the project team.

The Green Solutions is committed to applying the most advanced technologies in the field of renewable energy in Vietnam. Partnering with Black & Veatch will allow us to adapt global best practices to Asias requirements and contribute to the regions zero-carbon future, said Winnie Huynh, Founder & CEO, TGS.

Hydrogen can be used for power generation, energy storage and advanced transportation solutions. While ammonia, which can be liquified for storage and shipment globally, can be used in multiple energy-intensive industries to produce electricity or other green chemicals.

Under the MoU, Black & Veatch and TGS are targeting to produce 180,000 tons of green ammonia and 30,000 tons of green hydrogen per year to support regional decarbonization efforts.

TGS has appointed Black & Veatch to study the production and storage of green hydrogen in Vietnam utilizing solar or wind power supplied through the grid. The study also includes development of a green ammonia production plant as well as plant configuration and technology review, technology evolution risk and tentative mitigation, conceptual design, order of magnitude cost estimates, and levelized cost calculations. Augustus Global Investments will provide the initial development funding for the project.

Given our 80-year history working with hydrogen and ammonia production in the fertilizer industry, we bring expertise in all stages of hydrogen infrastructure projects  from technical advisory services and design through operations. As an early mover in serving clients across the hydrogen and ammonia value chains, Black & Veatch is eager to partner with sustainability-focused companies like The Green Solutions as we pursue our shared passion for decarbonizing energy in Asia by broadening the use of green hydrogen and green ammonia, said Narsingh Chaudhary, Executive Vice President & Managing Director, Asia Pacific, Black & Veatch.

Augustus integrates environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) factors in our investment and portfolio management processes. We are pleased to support forward-thinking businesses like The Green Solutions and Black & Veatch as they work to realize Asias decarbonization ambitions, said Fadi Krikor, Founder & CEO, Augustus Global Investments.

The MoU responds to Asias optimism for green fuels such as hydrogen and ammonia. According to Black & Veatchs 2022 Asia Electric Report, 73 percent of respondents believe that hydrogen will help meet carbon emissions goals beyond 10 years from now  more than any other technology. In addition, the report also reveals that 46 percent think it will take off as a clean and affordable alternative to gas generation by 2030.

As a global engineering, procurement, consulting, and construction partner, Black & Veatch has strong experience in the development of renewable energy and natural gas feedstocks; water treatment for industrial applications; hydrogen generation and purification; hydrogen compression, handling and power generation; and selection of cost-effective storage technology.

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Editors Notes:

Black & Veatch has been selected as Owners Engineer by Intermountain Power Agency (IPA) for the Intermountain Power Project Renewal Project (IPPRP), which marks one of the earliest installations of combustion turbine technology designed to use a high percentage of green hydrogen. Black & Veatch provided conceptual design and conducted a cost assessment for the integration of gaseous hydrogen from nearby industrial facilities as a combustion fuel into the Long Ridge Energy Terminal 485-MW combined cycle GE 7HA.02 advanced class power plant. Black & Veatch has been selected by Enegix Energy to perform a feasibility study to support the development of the worlds largest green hydrogen plant . The facility is targeting production of more than 600 million kilograms of green hydrogen annually.

About Black & Veatch

Black & Veatch is a 100-percent employee-owned global engineering, procurement, consulting and construction company with a more than 100-year track record of innovation in sustainable infrastructure. Since 1915, we have helped our clients improve the lives of people around the world by addressing the resilience and reliability of our most important infrastructure assets. Our revenues in 2021 exceeded US$3.3 billion. Follow us on www.bv.com and on social media.

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DALLAS & TOKYO -- (BUSINESS WIRE) --

Lone Star Funds (Lone Star) today announced that an affiliate of Lone Star has successfully acquired SENQCIA Corporation (SENQCIA). Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Headquartered in Tokyo, SENQCIA is a leading structural building materials company in Japan, with expertise in developing, designing and distributing structural and building safety products, seismic reinforcement products and raised access (including clean room) floor products. With over 300 employees, including more than 60 building operation and management engineers, installation managers and technical sales staff, SENQCIA designs, builds, distributes and installs a suite of technical building foundation and other structural support products and specialty flooring.

Affiliates of Lone Star have invested in building products companies in other regions of the world since 2013, including leading manufacturers of general building products, flooring and insulation solutions.

We look forward to working with SENQCIA, a market leader in building products in Japan, said Donald Quintin, President, Lone Star Opportunity Funds. This opportunity is consistent with Lone Star's strategy to invest in businesses with substantial runway for growth. We are excited to partner with SENQCIAs talented management team and for the growth opportunities ahead.

About Lone Star

Lone Star, founded by John Grayken, is a leading private equity firm advising funds that invest globally in real estate, equity, credit and other financial assets. Since the establishment of its first fund in 1995, Lone Star has organized 22 private equity funds with aggregate capital commitments totaling approximately $85 billion. The firm organizes its funds in three series: the Commercial Real Estate Fund series; the Opportunity Fund series; and the U.S. Residential Mortgage Fund series. Lone Star invests on behalf of its limited partners, which include institutional investors such as pension funds and sovereign wealth funds, as well as foundations and endowments that support medical research, higher education, and other philanthropic causes. For more information regarding Lone Star Funds, go to www.lonestarfunds.com.

About SENQCIA Corporation

SENQCIA Corporation, formerly known as Hitachi Metals Techno, is a company specialized in the design, manufacturing and sales of structural building materials. The company develops leading products such as Raised Floor Systems, HIBASE Methods and HIRING Methods, vibration dampers, and a new highly valuable business offering earthquake-resistant products for new construction and existing buildings primarily in Japan.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220404005767/en/

CONTACT:

Jed Repko / Ed Trissel / Joseph Sala

Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher

(212) 355-4449
R&D investment up 11.7% to 4.1 billion EUR in 2021 (20.0% of net sales)

More than 25 billion EUR investment in R&D and 7 billion EUR in capital expenditure over the next five years

Human Pharma pipeline acceleration: up to 15 new product launches expected until 2025

INGELHEIM, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In 2021, Boehringer Ingelheim again stepped up its annual investments in R&D to a new high in its 137-year history. The company spent 4.1 billion EUR on R&D (2020: 3.7 billion EUR), up 11.7%. R&D investments in Human Pharma rose to 3.7 billion EUR (2020: 3.3 billion EUR), while investments in Animal Health were up 1% to 416 million EUR (2020: 412 million EUR).

2021 was a good year for patients, for animal owners and for our company. We expanded our contribution to transforming human and animal lives and further strengthened our combined pipeline, explained Hubertus von Baumbach, Chairman of the Board of Managing Directors. Accordingly, we also intensified our efforts in Research and Development and achieved significant medical progress, including three breakthrough therapy designations granted by the US FDA for innovative medicines in Human Pharma. In Animal Health, we laid the foundation for the launch of innovative new solutions for companion animals and livestock in 2022 and 2023.

We present these results at a time when war has been brought back to Europe, continued von Baumbach. Our thoughts are with all Ukrainians. The aggression against the country is heartbreaking. We are supporting those seeking refuge and those in need in Ukraine, through short-term and long-term financial support, through product donations and supply of medicines, and many of our employees engage in support initiatives using our volunteering days program. We all hope that this horrific situation will end soon.

Growth across all businesses

Despite the ongoing COVID-19 challenges, 2021 was a successful year. Boehringer Ingelheim recorded net sales of 20.6 billion EUR (2020: 19.6 billion EUR), a 5.4% increase compared to the previous year. Adjusted for currency effects, net sales rose by 7.5%.

Operating income at Group level rose to 4.7 billion EUR (2020: 4.6 billion EUR). Income after taxes saw an 11.2% year-on-year increase to 3.4 billion EUR (2020: 3.1 billion EUR). Cash flow from operating activities decreased slightly by 117 million EUR to 3.9 billion EUR (2020: 4.0 billion EUR). At the end of 2021, the equity ratio stood at 48% (2020: 47%).

All our businesses contributed to the solid financial results in 2021, a strong achievement, especially when considering the overall pandemic and economic situation. As a result, we can continue making significant investments and have strengthened our overall financial basis  and thus our independence, said Michael Schmelmer, Member of the Board of Managing Directors responsible for Finance and Group Functions. The extraordinary commitment of all our employees in a second pandemic year drove our achievements. Working conditions were often challenging, both for those of us who worked from home on an almost permanent basis and for those who worked under restricted conditions on our sites. In times of need, we all stand up for each other. This makes me feel positive and optimistic and is particularly important for the long-term success of our company.

Human Pharma - Significant progress in late-stage R&D pipeline

The R&D pipeline in Human Pharma comprises more than 100 clinical and preclinical projects. Based on the progress of the later stage projects, the pipeline has the potential to deliver up to 15 new product launches until 2025. A key focus in research is to gain a deeper understanding of the connections between different diseases. JARDIANCE (empagliflozin) is a good example. This medication was initially approved as a type 2 diabetes medication. Investing into the better scientific understanding of the interconnectedness of cardio, renal and metabolic systems has enabled Boehringer Ingelheim to broaden its use from diabetes to heart failure. Empagliflozin is now the only approved treatment for adults with symptomatic chronic heart failure in the European Union. Furthermore, it may also be of benefit in a broad range of chronic kidney diseases, as demonstrated from a positive interim analysis data readout of the EMPA-KIDNEY trial. It is also being assessed for the prevention of heart failure following a heart attack in the ongoing EMPACT-MI trial.

The pace of innovation from the companys immunology research was further underscored by Spesolimab, an IL-36 specific monoclonal antibody for the treatment of generalized pustular psoriasis (GPP). GPP is a rare and sometimes even life-threatening skin disease with no globally approved treatments. Spesolimab has been granted US FDA Breakthrough Therapy Designation and pivotal data was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Regulatory submissions for the treatment of GPP flares have been filed in major geographies, with the aim of bringing Spesolimab to eligible patients this year.

Other inflection points for the companys R&D pipeline this year include lung fibrosis, the central nervous system (CNS) and oncology. A study to evaluate how a PDE4B inhibitor affects lung function of people with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) will be published at a medical conference later this year. In February 2022, the US FDA has granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation to the compound in this indication. In CNS, a Gly-T1 inhibitor was also granted US FDA Breakthrough Therapy Designation for the treatment of Cognitive Impairment Associated with Schizophrenia (CIAS), and a high level data readout is anticipated for later this year. Also in CNS, Boehringer Ingelheim is collaborating on the digital therapeutic CT-155 as an adjunct to pharmacotherapy, which aims to help patients modify their behavior and train new skills. The promising MDM2-p53 antagonist is the most advanced asset in oncology now in a pivotal phase II clinical trial for rare soft tissue sarcoma, an area of significant unmet medical need that lacks novel approved therapies.

Strong growth for JARDIANCE and OFEV

At 15.3 billion EUR (2020: 14.4 billion EUR), net sales of human pharmaceuticals grew by 8.4%* and accounted for 74% of total net sales. The United States remains the largest market for Boehringer Ingelheim. The company generated net sales of 5.8 billion EUR (2020: 5.7 billion EUR) in the US, up 5.9%*. In the EUCAN region (Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, net sales excluding licensing income) rose by 4.1%* to 4.4 billion EUR (2020: 4.2 billion EUR). In Emerging Markets, including the Peoples Republic of China, the company registered net sales of 3.0 billion EUR (2020: 2.8 billion EUR), a 5.9%* increase. In Japan, net sales increased by 7.1%* to 1.3 billion EUR (2020: 1.3 billion EUR).

Medicines for the treatment of cardiovascular and metabolic, as well as respiratory diseases, remain the most important contributors to net sales. JARDIANCE remains the biggest revenue contributor in Human Pharma, generating net sales of 3.9 billion EUR (2020: 3.1 billion EUR) and growth of 28.6%*. OFEV was the companys second-strongest revenue contributor with net sales of 2.5 billion EUR (2020: 2.1 billion EUR) and growth of 25.4%*.

Animal Health  Higher net sales in a very competitive market

The Animal Health business of Boehringer Ingelheim is a global leading provider of vaccines, therapeutics and preventative care offerings that protect animals from disease and pain. In 2021, the Animal Health business significantly increased its net sales in a highly competitive market and grew by 6.2%*, with net sales of 4.3 billion EUR (2020: 4.1 billion EUR).

In terms of sales, the companion animals portfolio remains by far the largest segment of Boehringer Ingelheim Animal Health, including the best-selling product NEXGARD, a parasiticide for dogs, with growth of 16.6%* and net sales of 916 million EUR (2020: 804 million EUR). The antiparasitic FRONTLINE for dogs and cats is another major product, with net sales up 4.8%* at 418 million EUR (2020: 406 million EUR). Growth in this segment was also fueled by more people acquiring a new pet during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The livestock segment grew only moderately due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and African swine fever, especially in Asia and Europe. Whereas the overall swine segment expanded by 3%, the swine vaccine INGELVAC CIRCOFLEX saw a decline in sales of -2.7%* to 253 million EUR (2020: 264 million EUR).

Biopharmaceutical production  One of the leading providers in the industry

Boehringer Ingelheim is one of the leading manufacturers of biopharmaceuticals, both for its own portfolio and for partners in the industry. 60% of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies and innovative biotech firms are clients of Boehringer Ingelheims Biopharmaceutical Contract Manufacturing business, known under the brand name Boehringer Ingelheim BioXcellenceTM. The biopharmaceuticals business achieved net sales of 917 million EUR in 2021 (2020: 837 million EUR), up 9.5%* due to strong demand for our customers products.

Investments in tangible fixed assets remain at a high level

In 2021, the company invested 968 million EUR (2020: 1.05 billion EUR) in tangible fixed assets, including the large-scale production facility for biopharmaceutical products (LSCC) in Vienna, Austria, which was inaugurated in October 2021, and the new development center for biopharmaceutical medicines (BDC) in Biberach, Germany. Restricted construction activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on the investment sum.

Outlook for 2022: Boehringer Ingelheim expects a slight year-on-year increase in net sales on a comparable basis

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the geopolitical tensions in Europe and a challenging industry environment are expected to have an impact on the results of Boehringer Ingelheim. For 2022, the company expects to achieve a slight year-on-year increase in net sales on a comparable basis. For the next five years, plans are to invest over 25 billion EUR in its research pipeline. In addition, capital expenditures for novel production technologies and a cutting-edge supply network are planned, with well over 7 billion EUR of investments targeted for the next five years. This includes further expansion of the biopharmaceutical production capacities.

*year on year and adjusted for currency effects

2021 Annual Report at https://annualreport.boehringer-ingelheim.com/

Please click on the link for Notes to Editors and References

https://www.boehringer-ingelheim.com/media-overview/press-releases/boehringer-ingelheim-good-2021-business-performance
John Eland Appointed Chief Executive Officer, STACK EMEA

Adam Tamburini Appointed Chief Hyperscale Officer, STACK EMEA

DENVER -- (BUSINESS WIRE) --

STACK Infrastructure (STACK), the digital infrastructure partner to the worlds most innovative companies, today announced that it has appointed two experienced data center industry professionals to its EMEA leadership team. John Eland has joined as Chief Executive Officer, STACK EMEA and Adam Tamburini has joined as Chief Hyperscale Officer, STACK EMEA.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220403005089/en/

Were thrilled to welcome John to the STACK team to drive our strategy and operations in the EMEA region, said Phil Koen, Chairman of the Board of STACK. John is a proven leader who brings over two decades of strategy, development and management experience in the data center industry, including extensive regional expertise that we believe will be highly valuable as we continue to expand STACKs already successful European business.

John joins STACK with over 22 years of experience across the data center, telecom and investment sectors. Most recently, he served as Chief Strategy Officer of the Global Data Centers division at NTT Ltd., a London-based global technology services company. In this role, John led strategy and corporate development in existing and new markets. He also oversaw NTTs ongoing expansion efforts through M&A, joint ventures, strategic partnerships and development.

John commented, I have been impressed by STACKs accelerating momentum both globally and in Europe, where we have created a strong operating platform and team now operating under the STACK brand. I look forward to driving continued growth across the EMEA region and further strengthening STACKs market position as a trusted global digital infrastructure partner with significant resources, capacity and development expertise.

Mr. Koen added, We are also excited to welcome Adam, another proven leader in the data center industry. We are confident he will be successful in supporting John and the EMEA leadership team on growing and enhancing relationships with key hyperscalers.

Adam has decades of experience in the data center industry in sales and development and construction. Most recently, he served as SVP Hyperscale Sales at NTT where he was responsible for sales and customer relationships globally with the hyperscale accounts. While at NTT, Adam held various other positions in construction and development in EMEA.

About STACK Infrastructure

STACK provides digital infrastructure to scale the worlds most innovative companies. With a client-first approach, STACK delivers a comprehensive suite of campus, build-to-suit, colocation, and powered shell solutions in the Americas, EMEA and APAC regions. With robust existing and flexible expansion capacity in the leading availability zones, STACK offers the scale and geographic reach that rapidly growing hyperscale and enterprise companies need. The world runs on data. And data runs on STACK.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220403005089/en/

CONTACT:

STACK Infrastructure

Alyssa Lorenzo / Hayley Cook / Michelle Van Wyk

Sard Verbinnen & Co.

STACK-SVC@sardverb.com

(Photo: Business Wire)

(Photo: Business Wire)
Wipro will continue to invest in Telangana as the state government here is progressive, Founder-Chairman of Wipro Group, Azim Premji, said on Tuesday. "Wipro will continue to invest here because we find the state government to be very progressive," he said at the inauguration of a manufacturing facility of Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting in Hyderabad. Stating that Wipro is pro-active, Premji said the group will continue to support Telangana in terms of investment and creating employment opportunities, especially for women as "we find women to be extraordinarily committed". He said there was complete disruption of life during the Covid-19 pandemic when many poor were compelled to take loans at high rates of interest. He then suggested the Telangana government to work with the banking and non-banking institutions to subsidise the loans taken by the poor. He also praised Telangana for its handling of the Covid crisis, saying that the state has by and large contributed significantly towards managing the pandemic. Premji along with Telangana Minister for Industries and Information Technology, K.T. Rama Rao, inaugurated the facility at Maheshwaram. The company has invested Rs 300 crore to set up the facility and is creating direct and indirect employment for about 900 people, with over 90 per cent of employment opportunities for the locals. The facility, which has come up on 30 acres of land, produces Santoor soaps and Softouch fabric conditioners. It will add manufacturing capability to produce Yardley talcum powder, Santoor handwash and Giffy dishwash. It has invested in a state-of-the-art soap finishing line that runs at the highest speed of 700 soaps per minute. In addition, the company has four more soap finishing lines. Rama Rao requested Premji to set up Wipro's proposed facility of manufacturing LED lights in Telangana, stating that the state has a dedicated LED park. The minister also urged Premji to consider setting up a private university in Telangana to encourage social sciences. He pointed out that Telangana has already enacted a private university legislation. KTR, as the minister is popularly known, said Telangana approved investment proposals worth over Rs 2.20 lakh crore during the last seven-and-a-half years under its unique industrial policy, TSiPASS. This is expected to create over 16 lakh jobs. The minister said that under this self-certification policy, an investor can start working on a project without any approvals with a mere online application. "You will get all the approvals in 15 days. If you don't get the approval in 15 days, it's deemed approved on the 16th day. No other state in the country has this policy," he said. KTR noted that the Azim Premji Foundation was the single largest contributor to Telangana during the Covid pandemic as it provided healthcare relief worth Rs 25 crore, another Rs 12 crore for vaccination efforts and also gave Rs 44 crore to various NGOs working to provide relief to the people. Telangana's Education Minister Sabitha Indira Reddy, Principal Secretary, Industries Commerce & Information Technology, Jayesh Ranjan, and CEO of Wipro Consumer Care, Vineet Agrawal, were also present on the occasion. --IANS ms/arm ( 520 Words) 2022-04-05-21:32:07 (IANS)
Noida (Uttar Pradesh) [India], April 6 (ANI/PRNewswire): AgreeYa Solutions, a leader in software, solutions and services, was honored with two awards at the 30th World HRD Congress and Awards event in Taj Lands End, Mumbai, India. The recognition as 'Dream Company to Work For' and for its 'Talent Management' achievements underscores AgreeYa's longstanding commitment to its employees and their ongoing success. "We are honored to be recognized by the World HRD Congress for our continued efforts to create a culture of support and growth opportunities for our 2,000+ AgreeYans," said Ajay Kaul, managing partner at AgreeYa Solutions. "Growing a team of dedicated and talented staff is critical to ensuring our products and solutions exceed our customers' expectations." The 'Dream Company to Work For' award recognizes companies that create an atmosphere that allows employees to participate in meaningful work, among a supportive team and provide opportunities to grow and advance. AgreeYa's mantra that a 'successful business needs happy and healthy employees' guides the organization and enables employees to enjoy a balanced working environment. At AgreeYa, employees are more than a number - they are family. AgreeYa's commitment to its employees has allowed it to continue to attract top talent, growing 32% in the last year. "At AgreeYa, we believe that human capital is our biggest asset," said Krista Sheldon, AgreeYa's U.S. vice president, human resources and administration. "We are proud to be recognized for our efforts to create a company culture that retains top talent and creates a space that empowers our employees to do their best work." AgreeYa was also recognized for its commitment to talent management, including identifying and nurturing employee skills for long-term growth. AgreeYa's talent management program plays a critical role in improving operational efficiency and the customer experience. AgreeYans can participate in various programs that allow them to grow skills needed to succeed in their role and further support the organization in maintaining a competitive edge amid a volatile talent market and remain progressive. "Investing in our company culture and our employee's well-being has been a longstanding value of AgreeYa," stated Sangita Srivastava, director of human resources in India. "We take immense pride in our 'I-CARE' value system, which is driven by our respect for our employees, customers and partners and is built on the pillars of integrity, commitment, advocacy, respect and excellence." To learn more about opportunities at AgreeYa Solutions, visit: https://agreeya.com/job-openings/. AgreeYa Solutions is a leading global provider of software, solutions and services to small, medium and global Fortune 100 organizations. Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Folsom, Calif., AgreeYa has over 2,000 professionals helping clients across the U.S., India, EMEA and Mexico. Leveraging a technology-enabled, consultative approach and diverse talent, AgreeYa offers modern workplace, smart analytics, intelligent automation, AI/ML, cloud transformation, mobility and talent management solutions to deliver digital transformation to its clients. AgreeYa has received considerable recognition including certifications like Microsoft Gold Partner and Cloud Solutions Provider; AICPA SOC 2 Type 2, SEI CMMI and ISO 9001:2015; and awards including 'Dream Company to Work For' and 'Best Employer Brand'. Discover more at www.agreeya.com and follow AgreeYa on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. This story is provided by PRNewswire. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/PRNewswire)
New Delhi [India], April 6 (ANI/BusinessWire India): USAID's flagship health system strengthening project NISHTHA, implemented by Jhpiego in partnership with Unilever, organized a collaborative virtual event "WASH Matters Now More than Ever: Prioritizing Hygiene for Building Resilient Health Systems and Communities." The event brought together key stakeholders and policy makers to discuss COVID-19 WASH interventions and highlighted the importance of cross-sectoral efforts and convergent actions for achieving a sustainable water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) future. In India, USAID supports partnerships that leverage the combined expertise, assets, and resources of the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to deliver cost-effective and results-oriented development solutions. Through its flagship health system strengthening project NISHTHA, and in collaboration with Unilever, USAID is expanding the reach and impact of healthy hygiene behaviors among communities across India for improved health and well-being. The partnership aims to leverage NISHTHA's existing network of Health and Wellness Centers (HWCs) and community platforms like Panchayats/Self Help Groups/Village Health Sanitation and Nutrition Committees. Speaking at the event, Dr Anuradha Jain, Technical Advisor, Health System Strengthening, USAID/India, noted that reliable access to safe water and sanitation saves lives, improves livelihoods, and makes communities more resilient. Investments in water security, sanitation and hygiene are critical for progress in nearly all aspects of global development. This has been further emphasized to address the COVID-19 pandemic. She highlighted that USAID will continue to support innovative community-based, decentralized, and affordable safe WASH services and WASH-related policy interventions through public-private partnerships and active engagement with communities to ensure that the investments made bring efficiency, continuous access to improved WASH services, and empower communities to demand WASH services. Anila Gopal, Global Director, Health & Wellbeing, Unilever highlighted Unilever's commitment through hygiene brands like Lifebuoy and Domex to leverage the company's scale, expertise and resources to accelerate progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. She also highlighted the important role played by the private sector for creating a sustainable WASH future and how strategic collaborations between business and NGOs can make a tangible impact on people's lives, including in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Speaking as a Chief Guest Shri. S T.S Singh Deo, Hon'ble Health Minister - Family Welfare & Panchayat Raj for Chhattisgarh, shared insights on prioritizing WASH in healthcare systems. The keynote speaker Dr. Jayanti.S.Ravi, IAS (Former PS Health, Gujarat), Secretary, Auroville Foundation discussed about the Government Priorities and Strategies for the WASH. Other panelists included Pratibha Pal, IAS, Municipal Commissioner, Indore, BinuArickal, Head Strategic Initiatives Water Aid, Anuj Sharma, Chief Executive, Piramal Sarvajal, and Ms Manvita Baradi and Director Urban Management center, Gujarat, Ahmedabad. The session reinforced the understanding that transformative approaches to building a sustainable WASH future require stronger collaboration and partnerships, governance, and increased investments. There is a need to strengthen the capacities of health and sanitation workers, create mass awareness among the larger public through concerted behavior change programs and community engagement, and collaborate with the private sector and other partners for investing in the area of WASH. This will go a long way in building a sustainable WASH future and empower people to take sustained action at local levels. This story is provided by BusinessWire India. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/BusinessWire India)
Port Louis [Mauritius]/ Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], April 6 (ANI/BusinessWire India): Merck Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Merck KGaA Germany underscore their commitment to building healthcare capacity in Mauritius during their high-level meetings with H.E. Prithvirajsing Roopun, The President of Mauritius, H.E. Pravind Kumar Jugnauth, The Prime Minister of Mauritius and Hon'ble Kailash Kumar Jagutpal, Minister of Health of Mauritius. During the two meetings, the long term plans and of Merck foundation programs in Mauritius was shared by Prof. Dr Frank Stangenberg Haverkamp, Chairman of both Executive Board of E.Merck KG & Merck Foundation Board of Trustees and Dr Rasha Kelej, CEO of Merck Foundation. Prof. Dr Frank Stangenberg-Haverkamp, expressed, "Our aim is to improve the overall health and wellbeing of people by building healthcare capacity, by providing access to quality and equitable healthcare solutions. We are committed to transforming Patientcare landscape in Africa through our scholarship programs. More than 1300 scholarships have been provided for young doctors from 44 countries in 27 critical and underserved specialties." Senator, Dr Rasha Kelej, CEO of Merck Foundation emphasized, "It was a great honor to meet H.E. Prithvirajsing Roopun, The President of Mauritius, H.E. Pravind Kumar Jugnauth, The Prime Minister of Mauritius and Hon'ble Kailash Kumar Jagutpal, Minister of Health of Mauritius, to discuss the ongoing Merck Foundation programs and our long-term partnership to strengthen healthcare capacity, break infertility stigma, and support girl education in the country. I am very proud to share that Merck Foundation has provided more than 63 scholarships to young Mauritian doctors for a one-year diploma and two-year master's degree in underserved and critical specialties like Preventative Cardiovascular Medicine, Diabetes care, Acute Medicine, Respiratory Medicine, Oncology, Fertility Specialty, Gastroenterology, Dermatology, Clinical Microbiology and infectious diseases, Neuroimaging for Research, Internal Medicine, Pediatric Emergency Medicine, Neonatal Medicine, Ophthalmology, Laparoscopic Surgical Skills, Critical Care, Psychiatry and more. We will continue with our efforts and scale up our scholarship programs to create a stronger platform of skilled and specialized Mauritian doctors in the public sector." Merck Foundation also conducted their MF Alumni Summit to meet the doctors who have completed or are undergoing the scholarships provided by Merck Foundation. The Summit was co-chaired by Prof. Dr Frank Stangenberg Haverkamp, Chairman of both Executive Board of E.Merck KG & Merck Foundation Board of Trustees and Dr. Rasha Kelej, CEO of Merck Foundation together with the Hon'ble Kailash Kumar Jagutpal, Minister of Health of Mauritius. "Merck Foundation, through their "More Than a Mother" movement is also working to raise awareness about infertility prevention, male infertility, breaking infertility stigma, supporting girl education, and addressing a wide range of social issues in the country and across Africa through media partnership and fashion and art with purpose" she emphasized. Merck Foundation conducted their 2nd edition of Health Media Training for the Mauritian Media Representatives in partnership with Media Trust Board, Mauritius. The training was conducted to emphasize on the important role that media plays to influence our society to create a cultural shift with the aim to address wide range of social and health issues such as: Breaking Infertility Stigma, Supporting Girl Education, Women Empowerment, Ending Child Marriage, Ending FGM, and/ or Stopping GBV at all levels; to underscore the importance of Empowering Girls and Women in Education and to understand the Influence of infertility stigma and other social issues like GBV, Child Marriage, FGM etc. on women and couples - Social and Psychological Impact. Apart from this, it also included a session on the importance of increasing the awareness of early detection and prevention of Diabetes and Hypertension. The training session was co-chaired by Senator, Dr Rasha Kelej CEO of Merck Foundation & President of 'More Than a Mother' Movement and Chayman P. Surajbali Chairman, Media Trust Board, Mauritius, and was addressed by top Medical and Media Experts. Talking about the Health Media Training Program Senator, Dr Rasha Kelej explained, "This program is a part of 'Merck More than a Mother' community awareness Program. I strongly believe in the critical role that media plays in shaping our society. The media has the capacity to address and raise awareness about sensitive social and health issues in our communities. We conducted a Health Media Training for Mauritian journalists last year through an online platform. I am extremely happy to meet the media representatives in person during our first onsite training session in the country." Moreover, Merck Foundation also announced the Call for Applications for their 8 important awards for Media, Musicians, Fashion Designers, Filmmakers, students, and new potential talents in these fields. The award announced are: 1. Merck Foundation Africa Media Recognition Awards "More Than a Mother" 2022, in partnership with Media Trust Board, Mauritius 2. Merck Foundation Fashion Awards "More Than a Mother" 2022, in partnership with Fashion & Design Institute, Mauritius 3. Merck Foundation Film Awards "More Than a Mother" 2022, in partnership with Mauritius Film Development Corporation 4. Merck Foundation Song Awards "More Than a Mother" 2022 5. Merck Foundation Media Recognition Awards 2022 "Diabetes & Hypertension", in partnership with Media Trust Board, Mauritius 6. Merck Foundation Fashion Awards 2022 "Diabetes & Hypertension", in partnership with Fashion & Design Institute, Mauritius 7. Merck Foundation Film Awards 2022 "Diabetes & Hypertension", in partnership with Mauritius Film Development Corporation 8. Merck Foundation Song Awards 2022 "Diabetes & Hypertension" Entries for the above awards can be submitted to us at: submit@merck-foundation.com For information on the above awards, please visit the company's website: www.merck-foundation.com About 'Merck Foundation More Than a Mother' "Merck Foundation More Than a Mother" is a strong movement that aims to empower infertile women through access to information, education, and change of mindset. This powerful campaign supports governments in defining policies to enhance access to regulated, safe, effective and equitable fertility care solutions. It defines interventions to break the stigma around infertile women and raises awareness about infertility prevention, management, and male infertility. In partnership with African First Ladies, Ministries of Health, Information, Education & Gender, academia, policymakers, International fertility societies, media, and art, the initiative also provides training for fertility specialists and embryologists to build and advance fertility care capacity in Africa and developing countries. With "Merck Foundation More Than a Mother", we have initiated a cultural shift to de-stigmatize infertility at all levels: By improving awareness, training local experts in the fields of fertility care and media, building advocacy in cooperation with African First Ladies and women leaders and by supporting childless women in starting their own small businesses. It's all about giving every woman the respect and the help she deserves to live a fulfilling life, with or without a child. The Ambassadors of "Merck Foundation More Than a Mother" are: Merck Foundation launched new innovative initiatives to sensitize local communities about infertility prevention, male infertility with the aim to break the stigma of infertility and empowering infertile women as part of Merck Foundation More than a Mother COMMUNITY AWARENESS CAMPAIGN, such as. 'Merck Foundation More than a Mother' Africa Media Recognition Awards and Health Media Training 'Merck Foundation More than a Mother' Fashion Awards 'Merck Foundation More than a Mother' Film Awards 'Merck Foundation More than a Mother' Song Awards Local songs with local artists to address the cultural perception of infertility and how to change it Children storybook, localized for each country Click on the link below to download Merck Foundation App https://www.merck-foundation.com/MF_StoreRedirection Join the conversation on our social media platforms below and let your voice be heard Facebook: Merck Foundation Twitter: @Merckfoundation YouTube: MerckFoundation Instagram: Merck Foundation Flickr: Merck Foundation Website: www.merck-foundation.com This story is provided by BusinessWire India. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/BusinessWire India)
The Government of India, which targets to raise around Rs 60,000 crore by diluting its 5 per cent stake in Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India through an IPO, is unlikely to further reduce its stake in the insurer for at least the next two years. Answering questions from prospective investors during roadshows top officials of LIC clarified that the Government of India does not have any plan of further dilution of its stake in the Corporation. Officials said the Corporation has sufficient capital for the next two years and won't require any funding support from the government. The government plans to raise around Rs 60,000 crore by selling about 31.6 crore or 5 per cent stake in Life Insurance Corporation of India through an initial public offering (IPO). The company has filed the Draft Red Herring Prospectus with the market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). It has time until May 12 to launch the IPO. If it is not done by May 12, the company would be required to file fresh papers with the market regulator. (ANI)
New Delhi [India], April 6 (ANI/TPT): DigiPe Fintech Private Limited will launch first-of-its-kind services that help generate a double QR Code in one single stand and further assist merchants in doubling the transactions. The platform is one of India's fastest-growing Neo Banking Services companies and is looking forward to providing quick and hassle-free verification with a paperless process. DigiPe is solving this problem with two QR codes with multiple banks servers supporting each QR hence increasing the success rate of the transaction. The brand offers touch-free, safe & secure, and a broad suite of Neo Banking Services that covers both Merchant's and Customers' entire life-cycle payment needs. These new services for two QR code services will be provided in Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, and Telangana. Based out of Vizag, the firm DigiPe brings effectiveness and excellence to all the banking and financial transaction services. The platform brings everything under its roof, from providing safe and secure transactions, exciting cashback, hassle-free onboarding, and robust support to making your banking quick, easy, and safe. Having 200+ corporate clients, 27000+ merchant relationships, 3+ million users, 17000+ app downloads, 50+ employees, five offices, seven banking partners, 150B+ value txns yearly, and five networking partners, the firm is building its strong position in the market. Talking about the surging demand for online bank transfers, the founder Sankar Rao says, "With the world going digital, the payment method is also updating its processes. In recent years, there is no doubt that online payment methods have gained popularity among the masses and will be reaping more prominence shortly. Fortunately, technological improvements have resulted in various payment methods that have simplified online transactions. However, technology is a double-edged sword that brings its own set of issues. Therefore, taking this into account, DigiPe Fintech Private Limited considers all these important aspects to provide customers with a seamless checkout and payment system." The DigiPe Platform has built-in firewalls and multi-layer validations to ensure a safe & secure payment system. Founded in 2019, the company has a strong vision and methodologies and offers merchants unique payments experiences. Drive, Integrity, Gender Equality, Innovation, Professionalism, and Ethics are some of the core values that the brand follows. Furthermore, the brand DigiPe fosters teamwork and helps employees collaborate, quickly communicate principles to clients and customers, and hire the right resources for the given roles and responsibilities. Some of the other USPs entail unlimited settlements, Instant payouts, and Hassle-free accounting. This story is provided by TPT. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/TPT)
New Delhi [India], April 6 (ANI/BusinessWire India): University Living, an intelligent software-retrieval global Student housing marketplace, has clocked in over USD 300 million in gross bookings Incepted in 2015 and launched in 2016, University Living has seen tremendous growth in these past 6 years. By expanding their reach and catering to 265+ popular global study-abroad destinations across the UK, Ireland, USA, Australia, Canada & Europe, they have managed to double their revenue year-on-year since inception, with a whopping 3.5x growth during the pandemic year in 2021. Saurabh Arora, Founder and CEO at University Living, said that since its launch back in 2016, University Living has booked over 7 million nights, interacted with over 6 million students and even managed to stay profitable since day one. Saurabh adds, "In just a matter of 6 years we have come a long way and what an incredible journey it has been! However, we have miles to go before we sleep. We've only just scratched the surface; exciting times lie ahead. We plan on creating enhanced and seamless experiences in the student accommodation arena, pursue exciting global opportunities and rapidly advance our core product & service offering." "As more students venture out to study abroad, the student accommodation sector continues to expand rapidly with their being a dearth towards the fag end of the booking season. We plan on addressing all of those concern areas and more to give a student a holistic experience in their home away from home. We are working closely with our partners to bring safe, thought-through accommodation spaces that make their stay seamless and their lives simpler." The top preferred destination among students continues to be the UK, followed by the US, Canada, Australia and Europe. The RedSeer report indicates that the student housing market has tripled in the last 10 years and is slated to double from its current size by 2025. In fact, according to data shared by AECC global, 91% of Indian students preferred to study abroad in 2021, regardless of Covid-19. Globally there are over 35 million studying abroad. Recent trends show that students are looking for study destinations to set them up with an all-inclusive package. LA's Ares Management Corp. invested a whopping USD 217 million on their first student housing property in the UK, and Malaysia's Sunway RE Capital partnered with MBU Capital to manage a PBSA in the UK worth 110 million. Blackstone formed a USD 784 million joint venture with Landmark Properties to invest in eight student housing properties totaling 5,416 beds across the U.S. All this just goes to show that the student housing market has shown resilience in the face of the pandemic and investors are starting to pay attention and take steps to help further it. Sachin Tagra, Partner, JSW Ventures, has been personally vested in University Living's growth story. He recalls," The journey hasn't been easy for UL, but even in the face of adversity and grave challenges, the team led by Saurabh and Mayank have fought bravely. It's incredible to see how they have managed to scale the business from scratch and bring it to 300 million GMV! The focus for University Living has always been to create a long-term sustainable business by focusing on the right balance between new-age business deliverables and adding value to the end user. They have managed to spread their geographical footprint globally while being headquartered in India. Customer-centricity, transparency and innovation has always taken the wheel for their growth story." He continued to talk about how UL adapted to the disruption of the pandemic stating, "...they adopted future-proof technology, sought out productive partnerships and didn't hesitate to venture into new customer markets. This helped with cost efficiencies and premeditated damage control. I wish them well as they continue on this journey." Hence, this milestone becomes significant in the current scheme of things. They seem to be working judiciously on several new product and service launches this year from the 150+ person-startup headquartered in Delhi NCR, including the platform's compare feature, one-click instant bookings, exclusive deals and discounts on accommodation, travel and even exclusive scholarship deals and more. Apart from accommodation, University Living also covers other aspects of living abroad such as local guarantor support, forex solutions, room essentials, concierge service, and helping them with their overseas bank account, among others. The start-up also enables students to access forex support and education loans. They boast of a 150K strong global student community that they are connected to via their social channels. Mayank Maheshwari, Co-Founder & COO at University Living, stated, "Over 35 million full-time students pursue higher education in our addressable markets. Out of that, only 16% students can be accommodated in existing university-led hostels. There are approximately 3 million student housing PBSA beds being operated by major players in the addressable market. This is a market that has plenty of potential for growth with the student to bed ratio skewed at 4:1 ratio. This is exactly the kind of market demand that we, at University Living, want to fulfill. We strive to build the world's largest student housing managed marketplace that is both efficient and loved; a platform that delivers the best-in-class living experience to guarantee a home for every student." This story is provided by BusinessWire India. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/BusinessWire India)
New Zealand, Vietnamese universities sign co-operation agreement in training

New Zealands University of Auckland and Ho Chi Minh Citys Polytechnic University (HCMUT) have signed a co-operation agreement in the fields of training, research, student exchanges, and lecturers, as well as offering Bachelor's and Master's degree programmes.









Representatives from HCMUT and University of Auckland at the signing ceremony (Photo: vtv.vn)



Through the joint co-operation scheme, students at the faculty of Computer Science at HCMUT will be given the opportunity of studying and conducting research at the leading faculty of Science at the University of Auckland.



The partnership between the two institutions is expected to bring about financial benefits and offer greater opportunities for Vietnamese students to gain access to global education.



Joseph Nelson, consul general and trade commissioner of New Zealand in Ho Chi Minh City, underscored the importance of the partnership between HCMUT and the University of Auckland in providing students with valuable learning experience, adding his hope that there will be additional training co-operation programmes set up in the future.



Erik Lithander, vice chancellor for Strategic Engagement at the University of Auckland, also highlighted the importance of international co-operation in exchanging students and lecturers and transferring knowledge, noting that the partnership will contribute to promoting global innovation and diversity.



He noted that the long-term co-operation relationship with HCMUT, a similar educational institution to the University of Auckland, is expected to fulfill commitments aimed at supporting the development of students and the wider community.
Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], April 6 (ANI/PNN): Rama Steel Tubes Limited (RSTL) is a pioneer and leading manufacturer in the steel tube industry. As per bulk deal data available on NSE, Sixteenth Street Asian Gems Fund has picked up 220,000 shares for an average price of Rs. 350 on 05 April, 2022. Earlier in January, the company had inked exclusive arrangement for supply of specialty steel SKUs in Nigeria, West Africa, through RST Industries Ltd. (a stepdown subsidiary of RSTL). RST Industries Ltd, Nigeria signed annual contract with Huihai Group Ltd, Hong Kong where RST industries Ltd will have an exclusive arrangement for supply of specialty steel SKUs of - 15,000 MT per annum in Nigeria. RSTL has been continuously striving to improve its performance by increasing sales, share of value-added products, innovating new products and aggressive cost optimization on a continual basis. RSTL products range includes MS ERW black pipes from 15mm to 200mm diameter pipes confirming to lS: 1239, lS:1161, lS:3589, lS:3601, &lS:4270 and G. l. Pipes from15mm to l-50mm NB in light, medium and heavy sizes. RSTL has 2O per cent exports rate, with a global presence in more than 15 Countries. RSTL has a subsidiary in UAE and a step-down subsidiary in Nigeria which has strengthened the company/s presence in global markets. RSTL has the world's latest technology, plant and machinery, which also includes sophisticated testing equipment. RSTL has 4 state-of-art manufacturing capabilities located at Sahibabad (U.P.), Khopoli (Maharashtra) and Anantpur (Andhra Pradesh) and has got strong distributor network spread across lndia. This story is provided by PNN. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/PNN)
New Delhi [India], April 6 (ANI/PNN): The Lecture on Krantijyoti Savitrimai Phule's 125th Memorial Day titled as - Savitrimai's contribution towards upliftment of the backward classes was presented by Jai Bheem Short Video App. It was streamed live on Facebook and telecast on Awaaz India TV Channel and the YouTube channel of Jai Bheem Short Video App. The Speaker was Professor Hari Narke, Head of Mahatma Phule Chair in Pune University and an author and orator. Prof Hari Narke is the author of 53 books and is mainly noted for his works on Mahatma Jyotirao Phule and Savitrimai Jyotiba Phule. He has delivered lectures across Europe, the Middle East and Asian countries, apart from being the most sought after speaker across India. The live streaming was moderated by the Head of Awaaz India Channel, Aman Kamble. The streaming began with a short clip on Savitrimai Phule and her husband, Jyotiba Phule, who set up the first school for girls in 1848 at Bhide Wada in Pune. Savitribai was the principal of this pioneer institution that was open to girls from all castes and communities. This was the first occasion for girls from the Dalit community to attend school. Such was the opposition from the society in that era that often, the ladies of Pune threw Cow-Dung and stones at Savitribai during her commute to the school, as they thought girls going to school was anti-religion during that time. She also set up a Centre for Expectant widows as widows delivering children used to be considered a blotch on society. Savitribai took care of the upbringing of these so called 'unwanted children and even adopted a child into her family. After the death of Mahatma Jyotiba Phule, Savitrimai took over the responsibilities of Sahitya Sangram. Such was the dedication to serve the people that during the outburst of Plague in Pune, Savitrimai immersed herself in complete service to the plague victims. This eventually resulted in her being diagnosed with a plague that led to the end of her life. "There is a widespread of illiteracy; casteism spread across India hence we had initiated our work towards the eradication of these ills of the society, replied Mahatma Jyotiba Phule and Savitrimai to a British media person," was the initial observation of Prof. Hari Narke. He himself was born in an impoverished Mali caste family at Talegaon Dhamdhere, Tal. Shirur, Dist. Pune managed to complete his education by working in a graveyard. Says Girish Wankhede, the CEO of Jai Bheem Short Video App, "We at Jai Bheem App are highly privileged that a great personality such as Professor Hari Narke chose our medium to speak about the contribution of Savitrimai Phule towards the upliftment of Backward classes. Prof Narke has narrated informative bits and experiences at length about Savitrimai Phule and her untiring efforts for the education of girl children." This story is provided by PNN. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/PNN)
Hyderabad (Telangana) [India], April 6 (ANI/BusinessWire India): INCOR Healthcare has successfully raised financing of INR 1550 million from Emerging India Credit Opportunities Fund I (EICOF I), an Investec managed SEBI registered Category II Alternate Investment Fund along with co-investment by Investec Bank PLC. INCOR Healthcare, which operates the Multi-speciality Hospital business under the brand name OMNI Hospitals was founded in the year 2010 with the aim of bringing affordable, accessible, and accountable healthcare within the reach of everyone. Over the years OMNI has grown into a dynamic multi-specialty hospital chain of 6 hospitals spread across Andhra Pradesh & Telangana. With over 30 specialties, 800-plus beds, 20 OTs, 21 ICUs, 2000-plus healthcare workers, OMNI is a leading multi-specialty hospital in South India in the segment it caters to. Functional for over 11 years, the hospital has been successful in creating a unique identity of its own as a professional medical care provider with a strong adherence to ethics and a clear focus on bettering the health and lifestyle of the community in which it operates in. The expansion plan for INCOR, under the brand OMNI Hospitals includes taking the bed count from 800-plus to 1,500 - 2,000 beds (based on investment availability) over the next 5-6 years. There will also be a geographic expansion, from current presence of 2 Indian states to 5 Indian states. INCOR will continue to exercise its expertise in acquiring and turning around sick hospitals into profitable centers. This growth will be supported and enabled with paperless technology environment support, and a patient engagement portal that will open up franchising opportunities enabling further growth. INCOR Healthcare also operates their Mother and Child hospitals- Under 'GIGGLES' brand, this brand has been designed to bring quality delivery, gynecology, pediatric, fertility and neonatal care to the masses. Targeting the lower middle class, this hospital chain provided hygienic, world class infrastructure at affordable costs. The focus of INCOR Group will continue to be providing affordable, accountable, accessible (AAA+ Care) healthcare to those who need it. It will continue to operate on its core philosophy of PATIENT FIRST, i.e., always putting the needs and requirements of the patient above it all and delivering quality care with love and compassion. The investments by Investec managed EICOF I and Investec Bank PLC reinforces the strength of INCOR's healthcare business. EICOF I focuses on investing in and providing private debt financing solutions to mid-market companies with strong promoter pedigree, corporate governance and robust financial performance, amongst other things. Investec Bank PLC is a UK-based leading mid-market focussed international financial services company that has been underwriting mid-market private credit in India since 2013-14. OMNI Hospital's Group Chief Executive Officer, Dr Aloke Chandra Mullick said, "There is renewed interest and growth momentum in this sector over the past two years. We plan to grow our asset base and financials, so as to be ready for a public listing in three years." OMNI Hospital's Group Chief Financial Officer, Ankit Shah who was leading the transaction has said, "This transaction closure has been the fastest for any institutional investor backed investment in INCOR, with respect to closure timelines. The funding helps INCOR to firm up its consolidation strategy by giving an exit to its outgoing Private Equity investor, ASK Pravi. The consolidation also portrays conviction of the Promoter in its core philosophy in Healthcare and the growth strategy." This story is provided by BusinessWire India. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/BusinessWire India)
Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], April 6 (ANI/PNN): 'Angel Eyes' popstar Raghav Mathur gives an ode to devoted fans from India with a 'refreshed' video celebrating one of his biggest chartbusters 'Teri Baaton' after the almost twenty-year-old track went viral on Instagram earlier this month. The much-loved party staple of the early 2000s caught on social media supplemented with a hard-to-miss dance challenge and foot-tapping beats. With over 1.5 M reels on Instagram from multi-generational audiences in India alone, millennials were quick enough to transverse back in time to the good ol' pop era as they jumped the bandwagon to make their own renditions of the reels. The newly released official video featuring Raghav himself entails a compilation of some of the best fan creations. With each one adding their own individual spin to the hook steps, it projects the resonance across age groups while mirroring its freshness and timeless appeal even almost two decades later. Retaining the flavour and the vibe of the original, the reprised version of the track can leave you yearning for the music that formed an integral part of your youth. The hit that ruled millions of young hearts in 2004 off the legendary album "Storyteller" that still remains the 6th biggest selling international album of all time in India is back in a big way. It was also featured in the Oscar nominated film "The White Tiger" starring Priyanka Chopra. Commenting on the occasion, the Indo-Canadian songster Raghav Mathur said, "Teri Baaton's new viral love has been heartwarming. While I've always believed that the Indian youth hold a sentimental value towards some of my tracks of yesteryear and I still get messages from my fans here, it was interesting to see younger listeners loving my historic music and enjoying every bit of it. It was quite overwhelming to witness 'Teri Baaton' being corroborated as the 'song of today.' It was stationed among the top 5 spots on Shazam for almost a month in almost every city in India. Currently based out of Canada, Raghav Mathur plans to visit India in June for a series of live events. Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JafbA1fWAy8 Facebook | Instagram (@raghavworldwide) | Twitter(@raghavworldwide)|YouTube This story is provided by PNN. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/PNN)
Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], April 6 (ANI/BusinessWire India): This World Health Day, P&G Health announced its partnership with Mumbai-based not-for-profit organisation, Apnalaya, to support Apnalaya's project for providing care to underprivileged pregnant women, new mothers and newborns. This project is intended to build capacity, raise awareness and strengthen antenatal care facilities in government health posts in Mumbai's M West Ward. The service will benefit over 4,000 direct beneficiaries and about 4 lakh indirect beneficiaries in the community. This is P&G Health's first urban community health initiative under its flagship CSR program 'SEHAT'. Milind Thatte, Managing Director, P&G Health India said, "P&G Health is committed to building a Healthier India through our CSR program 'SEHAT'. Our interventions in the areas of maternal and child health in rural India are in line with this commitment. And today on World Health Day, we are delighted to announce our partnership with Apnalaya, who will now help extend technology-enabled point-of-care diagnostics to urban communities towards improving antenatal care services. The project will enable screening to identify high-risk pregnancies, help educate on maternal health and nutrition, and ensure uptake of antenatal care and post-natal care services offered by government healthcare providers. It will also build capacity amongst community health workers to provide counselling and support for pregnant women and families." Community health workers or Aarogya Sakhis are trained by Apnalaya and empowered with a mobile-based application called AnandiMaa for monitoring, reporting and decision support for high-risk pregnancy follow-ups, which has been developed by Apnalaya's technology partner CareNX Innovations. The app is a decision support tool that analyses the data from antenatal tests and recommends an appropriate line of support so that high-risk complications are managed early, while a web portal/dashboard helps stakeholders access data when needed and deliver care effectively. Along with this, an antenatal care kit with smartphone integrated portable diagnostic devices is provided at the government healthcare facility to support service provision. The kit includes simple point-of-care tests to assess blood pressure, haemoglobin levels, urine protein and sugar, blood sugar, fundal height, and foetal heart rate that are critical to monitor during pregnancy. Commenting on the project, Praveen Singh, CEO, Apnalaya, said, "We are happy to partner with P&G Health to extend this successful model to yet another ward in Mumbai, build healthcare capacity, and improve access to antenatal care for the urban poor. Over the last few years, we have had encouraging results from our work in the healthcare facilities in the M East Ward. Our ultimate goal is to expand this program all over Mumbai, and our work with P&G Health is a step forward in that direction." P&G Health's 'SEHAT' (recently awarded the 'Best Public Health Program' at the India Health and Wellness Awards 2022) comprises a host of programs dedicated towards public health. These include 'Swasthya Sakhi', a rural community outreach program in partnership with the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), which helps to digitize health information, conduct primary diagnostics on pregnant women, and refer high-risk cases to the nearest Public Health Centres (PHCs); and 'Yes to Poshan', in association with Tata Trusts, which aims to advance the nutritional status of women and children in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh. This story is provided by BusinessWire India. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/BusinessWire India)
Hyderabad (Telangana) [India], April 6 (ANI/NewsVoir): The Radha TMT Teach for Change Annual Fundraiser hosted by Actor Lakshmi Manchu was held at the Westin Hyderabad Mindspace on April 3, 2022. A one-of-a-kind event where the Indian Film Fraternity walked the ramp for the cause of Quality Education in Government schools in Ace Designer Duo Shantnu & Nikhil's collection and Hiya Designer Jewellery. The occasion was graced by the presence of Sudha Reddy, Director MEIL Group and Mahima Datla, MD Biological E. Limited as the Chief Guests. The occasion was also graced by Smt. Renuka Chowdary, Dr Andrew Fleming, Deputy High Commissioner of UK Consulate, Dr J Geetha Reddy, Dr M Mohan Babu, Corporate leaders and Senior Government Officials - Shri Jayesh Ranjan IAS. Please click on the link for Ram walk Pictures: we.tl/t-ry21AiNtCA The Teach for Change Annual Fundraiser, in its 10th edition was supported by the Radha TMT as the title sponsor, Co-hosted by the Westin and Powered by The Tribe Concepts. The Initiative partners for the Fundraiser include Nava Skin Clinic, Laddu Box, Centro, Kamal Watch & Co, Stellar, WE Connect, Minttu Sarna, Royal Leo Club, Vivido and Silver Star Mercedes Benz. Acclaimed actors Aditi Rao Hydari, Akhil Akkineni, Lakshmi Manchu, Pragya Jaiswal, Sundeep Kishan, Manasa Varanasi, Sudheer Babu, Rohit Khandelwal, Eesha Rebba, Adith Arun, Navdeep, Nivetha Pethuraj among others walked the ramp in aid of Teach for Change. Started in 2014, by Lakshmi Manchu and Chaitanya MRSK, Teach for Change Trust is a nationwide movement to improve literacy among primary school children studying in government-run schools. The movement works in collaboration with the state governments of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu to develop literacy skills among primary school children. Pega Teach for Change's Flagship Literacy program brings together people from all walks of life - Homemakers, Retired employees, Bankers, IT Employees, Teachers, doctors, who work towards advancing Foundational Literacy skills in Primary school children. Through Pega Teach for Change Smart Classroom initiative, the classrooms are revamped and provided Audio Video Curriculum along with the dedicated teachers in both rural and urban parts of Telangana. With the support of Pegasystems, Teach for Change work toward inculcating ICT Curriculum in Government High Schools by installing Digital labs, Providing Internet facilities and a dedicated trainer along with a curated ICT curriculum with real-time applications Suman Reddy, MD Pegasystems reiterated the importance of integrating the ICT Curriculum in Government Schools. He said, "The pandemic has created a learning deficit, more pronounced in the underserved sections of the society where children do not have access to smartphones, computers, etc. The commitment of Teach for Change to expand its reach and work towards enhancing the quality of education is commendable. We are delighted to continue extending support to Pega Teach for Change and to back them in improving opportunities for the youth of tomorrow and enabling a holistic future for them." Chaitanya MRSK, Trustee and CEO of Teach for Change has said, "The annual fundraiser organised by Teach for Change Trust brings together members of civil society from across the spectrum for a cause. I'm glad to share that Teach for Change has impacted the lives of over 42,608 Children in over 500 Government Schools with the support of over 1274 Volunteer Teachers. Teach for Change has installed Smart Classrooms in over 20 Government Schools and Digital labs in over 10 Schools with the support of Pegasystems." Lakshmi Manchu, Chairperson and Managing Trustee of Teach for Change called on committed and enthusiastic citizens who are interested to volunteer and work in Government schools to apply on the website www.teachforchange.in. Akshat Saraf, Director, Radha TMT said that it's an honour for Radha TMT to be the Title Sponsor for Teach for Change Annual Fundraiser. He said, "While steel is the foundation to a building, Education is the foundation to any individual's life. It is important that we ensure every student has the fundamental right to quality education so that a level playing field is created for every individual to thrive. As an Advisory Board member at Teach for Change, I'm glad to witness that Children in Government Schools, where we are working, are reading with greater fluency and greater comprehension and the schools have witnessed improvement in attendance rate and reduction in dropout rates." "An evening of gusto, flamboyance and memorable moments, the tenth edition of the Teach for Change fundraising event hosted at our property is bound to resonate in the memories of those who attended. In the spirit of creating change, this event shall contribute extensively to all those children who've faced numerous challenges, especially over the past two years. It was an honor to be a part of such a wonderful initiative," said Amitabh Rai, Cluster General Manager, The Westin Hyderabad Mindspace and Hyderabad Market. This story is provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/NewsVoir)
India's exports to Russia rose to USD 3.18 billion in April - February period of 2021-22 from USD 2.65 billion recorded in the full year 2020-21, Union Minister of State for Commerce and Industry Anupriya Patel said in a written reply in the Lok Sabha.

India-Russia's total trade in the first 11 months of the financial year ended March 31, 2022, rose to USD 11.86 billion from USD 8.14 billion recorded in the financial year 2020-21.

India's trade with Ukraine has also increased sharply. India's total trade with Ukraine rose to USD 3.09 billion in the first 11 months of 2021-22 from USD 2.59 billion in 2020-21.

"The effect of the war on exports/imports from Russia and Ukraine can be assessed only after the situation stabilises," the minister said. (ANI)
Post-merger the capital base of the merged entity will be ~ INR 30 Crs. Post completion of the listing formalities Purple Finance intends to raise capital to strengthen its capital base using shares as a currency for growth.

Purple Finance a new age digital NBFC will be offering secured business loans ranging from INR 4 lacs - INR 10 lacs in the outskirts & tier II cities of Maharashtra, Gujarat & Orissa. Purple Finance with its superior technology platform aspires to simplify the existing processes in the mortgages segment and is confident of making a difference to the MSME borrowers with simplified funding options and timely loan disbursements.

Purple Finance is all set to build a large institution with a vision to set up a Small Finance Bank in next ~ 4-5 years.

https://purplefinance.in/

This Story is provided by Purple Finance. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/Purple Finance)
Johannes Larcher, Head of HBO Max International, the streaming service of WarnerMedia, has made a strong case for why growth for the global OTT platforms can now only come from markets outside the United States. Speaking at the MipTV market in Cannes, Larcher pointed out that the international might of Netflix is a motivating factor for HBO Max's own growth beyond the U.S. In a number of slides dedicated solely to Netflix, reports 'Variety', Larcher highlighted the projected growth in Netflix's international subscribers from 2021 to 2026 (147 million in 2021 to an estimated 266 million by 2026). "Netflix is clearly reaching saturation in the domestic market. Where will growth come from? Only one place: outside the US," Larcher said, citing analyst estimates. He also pointed to Netflix's aggressive content spend, which he said was expectd to grow from $12 billion in 2021 to $21 billion by 2026. "$9 billion additional programming dollars buy a lot of content," Larcher pointed out. "That buys you almost 700 episodes of 'The Crown', 50 'Spider Man: No Way Home' movies. That ability to spend more on content on behalf of fans drives the need to go global." A streamer can only afford such dizzying levels of content spend, Larcher continued, "if you can leverage the investment over a larger number of subscribers. That's why all of us desire to go global." HBO Max outside the U.S., which garnered 27 million subscribers by December 2021, is leaning into "different elements" of the service, Larcher pointed out. The streamer says it intends to launch in India soon, but it has not announced a firm date. It is "heavily emphasising" core IP such as 'Sex and the City' and 'Game of Thrones' -- shows that are more likely to be household names in global markets -- as well as local originals. --IANS srb/ ( 321 Words) 2022-04-05-21:32:08 (IANS)
Shanna Moakler expressed heartfelt greetings to her ex-husband Travis Barker for his surprise wedding to reality TV star Kourtney Kardashian in Las Vegas. People magazine reached out to Moakler, 47, following the news that Barker and Kardashian had tied the knot early Monday at One Love Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. "Congratulations to the happy couple. I wish them the best that life has to offer on their journey together," said Moakler who was married to Barker from 2004 to 2008 and shares two children daughter Alabama, 16, and son Landon, 18 with him. Moakler is also mother to 23-year-old daughter Atiana De La Hoya who she shares with ex-beau and former pro boxer Oscar De La Hoya. For the unversed, TMZ reported on Tuesday that Travis Barker and Kourtney Kardashian eloped at a Las Vegas chapel at approximately 1:30 am local time on Monday. Insiders told TMZ that Kardashian and Barker did not allow the venue to take pictures and had their own photographer and security instead. They reportedly asked for an Elvis Presley impersonator to officiate the ceremony. Also, the duo might have tied the knot in Las Vegas after Sunday's 2022 Grammy Award ceremony but there is nothing legal about it, as they have not received a marriage license, sources told Page Six. After initially sparking dating rumours back in December 2020, the couple confirmed their romance on Instagram in February 2021. They got engaged just eight months later, when Travis popped the question in a dreamy, beachside proposal at the Rosewood Miramar hotel in Montecito, California. This is Kourtney's first marriage, although she has three children with ex-boyfriend Scott Disick. Meanwhile, her rocker beau has been married twice before. First to Melissa Kennedy from 2001 to 2002 and Shanna Moakler from 2004 to 2008. He shares son Landon and daughter Alabama with Moakler, as per Page Six. (ANI)
Kiara, 29, was spotted at the Mumbai airport wearing a lime green Jacquard co-ord set. Giving major summer vibes, the 'Kabir Singh' star left her hair breezy loose.

Shankar's upcoming political drama 'RC 15' for which Kiara is heading to Amritsar, also features superstar Ram Charan in the lead role.

Kiara and Ram Charan have earlier worked together in the 2019 Telugu action movie 'Vinaya Vidheya Rama' and have been friends since then.

The upcoming project is jointly produced by Dil Raju and Shirish Garu under the banner of Sri Venkateswara Creations for a pan India release.

'RC 15' will release in three languages - Telugu, Tamil and Hindi. (ANI)
On Wednesday, they shared a message for cyber security on Instagram by referencing a famous, hilarious scene from the film 'Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham'.

The clip features Kajol and Farida Jalal, saying, "Cookies..aha lovely," and they end up with a dismissive gesture.

"Humesha cyber safety, never gham. Third party cookies can leave you vulnerable and should be declined or deleted," the post's caption read.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb_s2kyJRw7/

Instagram users dropped appreciation in the comments section.

"Mumbai police OP," a social media user commented.

"Mumbai police insta handle spreading all Khushi and absolutely no gham by these op post," another added.

'K3G' director Karan Johar also appreciated the post by sharing it on his Instagram Story along with inserting 'face with tears of joy' emoticons.

The police department keeps posting relatable and funny clips and pictures on their social media handle, earning appreciation from their followers along with spreading awareness on various relevant subjects. (ANI)
An international team of health researchers have described how genetic defects influence the spectrum of vision development and cause problems in developing babies' eyes. Researchers from the University of Leicester led an international effort consisting of 20 expert centres in the largest study of its kind to date, examining the genes associated with the arrested development of the fovea. The study was published in the journal Ophthalmology. The fovea is part of the retina at the back of the human eye and is the structure responsible for sharp, central vision. Arrested development of the fovea, or foveal hypoplasia, is rare and is often caused by genetic changes. This lifelong condition can have serious consequences and can affect the individual's ability to read, drive and complete other daily tasks. There are currently no treatments available for this condition. Most often, during infancy, one of the first visible signs of a foveal problem is 'wobbly eyes'. This is often seen in the first six months of life. There are large gaps in our knowledge about which genes control the development of the fovea and at what time points during development, this occurs. The study combining data from more than 900 cases across the world, researchers have been able to identify the spectrum of genetic changes behind these foveal defects and - crucially - at which point they occur in the development of the unborn baby. Dr Helen Kuht is a research orthoptist and Wellcome Trust post-doctoral fellow within the Ulverscroft Eye Unit at the University of Leicester, and the first author of the study. "This research has really helped to solve the puzzle of why some babies with these genetic changes present with varying severity of foveal hypoplasia. Thus allowing us to diagnose, predict future vision and help prioritise genetic testing, subsequent counselling, and support," she said. Dr Mervyn Thomas is an NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturer in Ophthalmology and Genomic Medicine at the University of Leicester and University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust. He has previously pioneered a worldwide standard for grading the severity of foveal hypoplasia called the Leicester Grading System. "Most previous studies in this area have been limited to one or two centres making it difficult to draw meaningful conclusions in rare disorders like foveal hypoplasia. With this study we were able to combine datasets from large collaborative centres across the globe," Dr Thomas, lead author for this study added. "We are extremely grateful to all our collaborators that have come forward to support this effort and the funders within each country that have made this possible. This has helped understand how these genes influence foveal development and to what extent the foveal development is arrested based on the genetic defect," he added. Arrested development of the fovea is detected using a special camera, called optical coherence tomography (OCT), which can scan the back of the eye. Researchers used OCT scans to identify the location of the fovea, a small pit measuring approximately 2mm in diameter. These scans were then analysed to categorise the severity of each individual case using the Leicester Grading System and compared with genetic markers to identify the genes associated with varying severities of the condition. Identifying these relationships between genetic defects and the degree of arrested foveal development is the first step in building possible future treatments for individuals with foveal hypoplasia. Leicester established the Foveal Development Investigators Group (FDIG) in 2020, bringing together expertise in foveal developmental research spanning 11 countries. These include centres in the UK, South Korea, Denmark, Netherlands, USA, China, France, Australia, Germany, Brazil and India. Dr Brian Brooks is a Senior Investigator at the National Eye Institute in the USA, branch chief for ophthalmic genetics and visual function, and co-author of this study. "Dr Kuht and Dr Thomas have assembled the world's largest consortium of investigators interested in causes of foveal hypoplasia. Their work represents the best cross-sectional data we have on the genetics of this condition to date," he added. (ANI)
Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy on Tuesday met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi and discussed several key issues related to the state including the Polavaram project, Kadapa Steel Plant, rationality in coverage of beneficiaries under National Food Security Act and arrears from Telangana discoms to the state. During the interaction, the Chief Minister requested the Prime Minister to approve the revised cost estimates of Rs 55,548.87 crore for Polavaram as per Technical Advisory Committee meeting on February 11, 2019. He said Rs 31,118 crore needs to be spent on the project of which Rs 8,590 crore is for construction and Rs 22,598 crore is for rehabilitation. He also requested the Prime Minister to clear the bills in toto, and not component-wise and added to directly transfer R&R package amount to the accounts of beneficiaries without any delay. According to the Chief Minister's Office (CMO), the Chief Minister said there is inadequate coverage of beneficiaries under NFSA (National Food Security) Act, and a large number of needy and deserving persons being uncovered. He said while the state government is providing ration to 1.45 crore families, only 0.89 crore families are receiving ration from Central government and the state government is providing ration to remaining 0.56 crore families. He also urged the Prime Minister to renew the approvals of the site clearances for greenfield international airport at Bhogapuram. In regard to setting up of an Integrated Steel Plant in YSR district, he said MECON, a Government of India undertaking, has not yet concluded its report as to the feasibility of the integrated steel plant. He said the state government has incorporated 'YSR Steel Corporation Ltd' for establishing the steel plant and sought the Centre's support. The Chief Minister also asked the Prime Minister to give approvals to allot beach sand minerals to the Andhra Pradesh Mineral Development Corporation in 16 places, and give approval for setting up another 12 teaching hospitals in the state. He said the state government has spent Rs 32,625.25 crore in the form of pending bills during bifurcation and as a part of implementation of X Wage Commission recommendations and urged the Prime Minister to fill the revenue deficit. The Chief Minister said the state government has lost revenue due to bifurcation and Covid pandemic and urged the Prime Minister to relax the credit limit of the state. He said an amount of Rs 6,455.76 crore is receivable by the Andhra Pradesh Generation Corporation Ltd (APGENCO) from the Telangana state distribution utilities and Telangana discoms and requested the Prime Minister to direct the authorities concerned to settle these dues at the earliest so that the state power sector is financially strengthened. Later, the Chief Minister called on Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and discussed issues related to the state. --IANS ms/vd ( 482 Words) 2022-04-05-20:32:05 (IANS)
A court here has dismissed the bail pleas of eight accused persons arrested for vandalising the residence of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's noting that prima facie it is clear that their fundamental right to peacefully protest is exceeded by them knowingly or intentionally. Though the right to assemble and protest by political party is a fundamental right, it is subject to certain restrictions and not an uncontrolled one, Additional Sessions Judge Naveen Kumar Kashyap observed in Monday's order while denying bail to the accused. The court also observed that the accused persons caused damage to the public property and injury to the police officials. "... it is rightly stated by the police official concerned that investigation is at very initial stage and they are still investigating the other offences which are committed, if any... It is further stated that they are still awaiting reply to the notice given to the concerned official of the CM house regarding the CCTV footage and the damage to the boom barrier. Further, even the period to seek police remand is not yet over. Therefore, having regard to the manner in which the present offence is committed, the very initial stage of the investigation and the role assigned to the present accused persons, this Court is not inclined at this stage to grant them regular bail. With these obsevations these eight connected bail applications are disposed of as dismissed," the order read. As per the Delhi Police, the FIR was registered under sections 186 (Obstructing public servant in discharge of public functions), 353 (Assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of his duty), 188 (Disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant) and 332 (Voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servant from his duty) of the IPC and under section 3 of the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act. On March 30, around 70 people were detained for creating ruckus outside Kejriwal's residence during a protest that was spearheaded by the BJP's Yuva Morcha over the Chief Minister's recent remarks in the Assembly on 'The Kashmir Files' that were deemed as "against" the Kashmiri Pandit community among the saffron clans. Kejriwal was not present inside the residence at the time of the incident. --IANS jw/shs ( 389 Words) 2022-04-05-20:52:02 (IANS)
Based on intelligence, a male passenger who flew in from Dubai was intercepted at the exit by the officials of Air Intelligence Unit.

On examination of his person, two packets containing gold in paste form, concealed in his inner wear, were recovered.

Totally, 840 grams of gold worth Rs 40.08 lakh was seized by the Chennai Air Customs and the passenger was arrested.

--IANS vj/vd

( 100 Words)

2022-04-05-20:58:06 (IANS)
The Supreme Court on Tuesday expressed discontent at the fact that the cases either before a lower court or tribunal, eventually ended up before it. A bench headed by Justice K.M. Joseph orally observed: "We do not want to use the word, but legislature has been dumb in this regard. We don't want to use the word but that is the word." It noted that that every case ultimately ends up before the top court, as it highlighted that the legislature was not correct in providing statutory appeals against orders of the National Green Tribunal (NGT) directly to the Supreme Court. The top court made this observation during the hearing of a plea by the Madhya Pradesh High Court Bar Association, challenging Section 3 of the NGT Act, in connection with the establishment of the tribunal. The plea has been filed through advocate Mrigank Prabhakar. The bench queried the counsel representing the petitioner whether the Act excludes the jurisdiction of the high courts under Articles 226 and 227. Attorney General K.K. Venugopal, representing the Centre, submitted before the bench that it was legislature's prerogative to provide for statutory appeals to the apex court. He said that the Tribunal Reforms Act was brought but it was struck down, and later an ordinance was brought, which is also under challenge. The petitioner's counsel submitted that there is no explicit exclusion, rather has an implicit exclusion and this is by way of direct appeal in the top court. The AG submitted that tribunals are highly specialised, in matters of electricity, telecom, copyright etc. Venugopal emphasised that specialisation in these areas makes tribunals equal to the high courts and they cannot be termed inferior to the high courts. After hearing arguments, the bench, also comprising Justice Hrishikesh Roy, reserved judgment in the matter. "Judgment reserved. Parties may file written submissions within five days," it said. --IANS ss/vd ( 328 Words) 2022-04-05-21:51:23 (IANS)
Elevating the probability of discussing cabinet expansion of his eight-month-old government, Karnataka Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai on Tuesday said that he is likely to meet Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) top brass including JP Nadda and Home Minister Amit Shah in Delhi during his two-day visit. "I have come here to discuss various projects and meanwhile I will meet BJP National President JP Nadda and Union Home minister Amit Shah. Issues related to party organisation would be discussed during the meeting with them," Bommai told mediapersons here. The chief minister said, "However, no appointment has been fixed for the meeting with party top brass yet. Whether we would go for a ministry expansion or reshuffle would be known only after the meeting." On being asked about Hijab and Halal issues, CM Bommai said that celebrating godly and social events is a "religious issue", however, the law is the same for all. "The law is the same for all, everyone should obey the rule of law. Maintaining peace, law and order is our priority. Earlier on Tuesday, Bommai, in a press conference, also said that he will meet Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to discuss various issues. "I am scheduled to meet Union Finance minister Nirmala Seetharaman and discuss issues related to GST. Union Defence minister Rajnath Singh has agreed to affiliate Sangolli Rayanna School as Sainik School. I will meet Rajnath Singh too to discuss a few issues," he added. (ANI)
Apart from Gadkari, Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut was also at the dinner but sources say that politics was not on the menu as the dinner was for the state MLAs visiting Delhi for training in the Parliament.

The dinner party gains significance as on Tuesday, the Enforcement Directorate had attached assets linked to Raut, amid the tussle between the Centre and the state over the ED.

The ED on Tuesday slapped attachment orders on assets worth Rs 11.15 crore belonging to friends and wife of Raut in a money-laundering case -- hours after the Maharashtra government formed a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe allegations of corruption against the central probe agency.

--IANS miz/vd

( 156 Words)

2022-04-05-22:36:08 (IANS)
In another step toward eliminating single-use plastic, Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav on Tuesday launched "Prakriti", a mascot to spread greater awareness about small changes that can be sustainably adopted in the lifestyle for a better environment. Various green initiatives were taken by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) to ensure effective Plastic Waste Management (PWM) in the country, in the presence of the Minister of State, Ashwini Kumar Choubey and senior officials of the government. Speaking on the third report by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an UN-backed science body, Bhupender Yadav said, "the report underlines the need for deep and urgent global emissions reduction and justifies India's emphasis on equity at all scales in climate action and sustainable development. We welcome it." The report also supports India's view on the necessity of public finance for developing countries and the need for scale, scope and speed in Climate Finance, he said. "In a drive toward global action on plastic pollution, India will implement a blanket ban on single-use plastic items such as earbuds with plastic sticks, plastic flags, plates, glasses, cutlery, etc to be banned from July 01 2022," Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) tweeted. To tackle the challenge of plastic pollution, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced India's pledge to phase out Single-Use Plastics (SUPs) by 2022. India's plastic waste management rules 2016 were amended banning the import of plastic waste SUVs with effect from July 2022 onward. Taking the momentum forward and stressing the need for active public participation, the Union Minister also administered the "Swachh Bharat Harit Bharat Green Pledge" to the gathering. The dignitaries present along with the students who participated in the launch took a pledge for the "Swachh Bharat Harit Bharat Green Pledge." He also urged everyone to join in the efforts to beat plastic pollution and work towards a better future and appreciated the innovative solutions developed by start-ups entrepreneurs and students in India Plastic Challenge-Hackathon 2021 highlighting the immense talent and potential of India's youth. In conclusion, the Union Minister said that India sends a message of hope and optimism that humanity can meet the challenges posed by climate change and will be a part of the solution to climate change. (ANI)
Author Erika L. Sanchez watches a rehearsal for an adaptation by Steppenwolf Theater of her book, "I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter," in Yondorf Hall on Feb. 15, 2020. (Camille Fine / Chicago Tribune)

Entering a Steppenwolf rehearsal space in Yondorf Hall last Saturday meant stepping into the world of Julia Reyes, the teenage protagonist and star of Erika Sanchezs bestselling book, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter.

In case, you were wondering, Julia was learning some dance moves for her quinceanera scene with choreography guidance from playwright Isaac Gomez.

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On Feb. 26, the world will be introduced to the stage adaptation of the National Book Award for Young Peoples Literature finalist that starts with: Whats surprised me most about seeing my sister dead is the lingering smirk on her face.

Its that phrase that got the attention of Gomez when he read Sanchezs novel about a Chicago high school student for the first time.

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The book cover struck me  seeing this young brown woman with braided hair, the braid is a very significant cultural marker for Latinas for sure, but most especially Mexicans, he said. The second thing that struck me was the title, which was just as evocative and then I opened it and read (the first line) and got goosebumps. I bought the book, brought it home and received its gift pretty quickly.

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter" is about Julia, the youngest of two children and the more rebellious and misunderstood one. Her older sister, Olga, was considered the perfect daughter. But now that Olga is deceased, Julia and her parents Ama and Apa (undocumented immigrants from Los Ojos, Mexico) are trying to cope. The book follows Julias path toward adulthood and her freedom from her strict home life in becoming a writer in New York. On her path of self discovery, she navigates her hometown of Chicago and the limitations put on her by her parents to find her own voice while themes like mental health, domestic violence and sexual trauma persist.

[ Review: I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter at Steppenwolf cant help but reach young audiences ]

We see a young person in this story who is battling depression and who ultimately had an attempt of death by suicide, but we also see her on the other side of that working with a mental health professional, said Megan Shuchman, Steppenwolfs director of education. I think that its really important that we not act as though those things arent echoing in our communities of young people, but instead to really acknowledge it, to show it and to say: What are we as adults doing to support our young people when they are in moments of crisis? Our goal is not to shy away from those things. We want to be meeting those young people where they are and then making sure we say: Hey, this protagonists journey doesnt have to be your journey.

Isaac Gomez practices a dance move with actor Karen Rodriguez during rehearsal for Gomez's adaptation of "I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter" in Yondorf Hall in Chicago. (Camille Fine / Chicago Tribune)

Gomez adapted Sanchezs book, his first adaptation, to collaborate with I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter director and Steppenwolf ensemble member Sandra Marquez. According to Gomez, the first draft of the play went from 400 pages down to the now 134.

I was living in every crevice of every word, he recalls. I think Ive read the book now at least 18 times, probably more. I had a lot of fear that I was imposing because the book is so beloved by so many that I felt akin to when I saw Harry Potter for the first time in theaters and being pissed when my favorite parts werent in the movie. I was like, someones going to think, how dare you left out XYZ."

But Sanchez trusts in Gomezs artistry. She, like Marquez, go with their gut when it comes to making art.

I knew this was going to be great, Sanchez said. Knowing his background and his work, Im very, very lucky to see this happen. Especially at Steppenwolf which is so incredibly prestigious.

As soon as tickets were available, it was practically sold out because the teachers in the community knew about it, Marquez said.

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We talked to Sanchez, Gomez, and Marquez about I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter coming to theater audiences (including a few Chicago-area area juvenile detention facilities, according to Shuchman) and what it means to see Mexican representation in this medium, arts accessibility and the need for more stories like it. The interview has been condensed and edited.

Q: If this book had been set in a different city, would it have had the resonance that it does?

Sanchez: I couldnt have written it anywhere else because I know Chicago very, very well. To me, its such a special place. I wrote it with this sensibility of being a young woman and wanting so much out of life and seeing this city and all the possibilities and still not feeling like I could live the life that I wanted. Julia and I are very similarwere not the same, but were similar. Its definitely fictional, but theres so much of myself in it that it would be inconceivable to me that it would be anywhere else. Chicago has been the backdrop of my entire life so it felt very important. I treated Chicago like a character.  I wanted people to be like: Oh, this is my neighborhood.

Isaac Gomez, center, directs the cast during rehearsal for Gomez's adaptation of "I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter" in Yondorf Hall in Chicago. (Camille Fine / Chicago Tribune)

Q: The play being put on at this moment in time given the national and local landscape, what does that mean?

Marquez: On the first day of rehearsal, I was reminded when I was in grad school and went to hear Sandra Cisneros read Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. When she began to read, I began to cry and I wasnt clearly understanding why. I wept the whole time. Later, when thinking about it, I was really drawn to books by Jewish writers and Southern writers and in retrospect I understand that I was looking for people who were connected to their culture. My culture wasnt really available until I read Cisneros. So when I saw her, it was the first time that I was seeing an artist do her thing and that meant that I could do what I wanted to do."

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Gomez: As a writer, my plays come out with a lot of urgency and theyre usually informed by trauma  mostly mine or that of my environment or my community. A lot of my writing is in service of Mexican women in particular, which is why the book spoke to me so profoundly and I hope to only be a vessel in that way. When I think about how present Mexican women were in my life and to see a lack of their presence in theater, TV and in film, its unsettling in really, really deep ways. When it comes to this play, so many friends have reached out to me saying they have organized an unofficial Latina mother and daughter night where like 80 moms and daughters are coming to see this because of how the book has spoken to them.

Sanchez: Thats amazing. Were so diverse and its usually not reflected anywhere. Its just so upsetting to me. I feel like theres a cultural shift going on and Im just so happy to be a part of it in any way.

Gomez: You did that. The thing I learned as a playwright, we are the firsts but there can be more.

Sanchez: This is a story that I needed to tell and I love that its been so well received. But I also want other people to have the same opportunities to tell their story. I want to hear the story about being a fat Mexican man, queer, and living in a border town 

Gomez: You can watch it right now at Steep Theater. Its called The Leopard Play, or Sad Songs for Lost Boys and its running concurrently to Mexican Daughter too.

Sanchez: I want so many stories to be told. For me, breaking through was really important because I felt that I could open up some doors. It wasnt just about me as a person, it was my community. I want girls to feel seen and important and to feel like: I can do that also. And Sandra Cisneros was one of the first people that I saw where I thought I can be a writer. I didnt even know that was possible. Most of the writers I read were white people. Now that the book has done so well and its reached so many people, its inconceivable to me. ...

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I wrote this book pre-Trump. People are always asking if I wrote this book in response to him, but no. I didnt want the book to be as relevant as it is  that upsets me. The border violence, the xenophobia, the racism, the sexism  I just wish that werent relevant or true anymore, but it is. Here we are. How are we going to fight against all those things?

Playwright Isaac Gomez, center, talks with actors Robert Quintanilla, Karen Rodriguez, Dyllan Rodrigues-Miller and Harrison Weger during rehearsal for Gomez's adaptation of "I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter" in Yondorf Hall in Chicago. (Camille Fine / Chicago Tribune)

Q: What is the significance of this play traveling to juvenile detention centers?

Sanchez: Its freaking awesome that kids who are forgotten, kids who are not treated as human beings often times, get a little piece of art, which is such a necessary part of being a person. I feel like its so unfair that they dont have access to any of it, a lot of the time. It strips them of humanity when theyre not allowed to just be, see themselves and feel heard.

Q: When people walk away from the play, what do you want them to come away with?

Sanchez: Ive been thinking a lot about beauty. I want people to be able to see it in the everyday, in others, in their community, in themselves. Thats what I hope people gain from this, an acknowledgement of beauty and the resilience of human beings.

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Gomez: I want people to walk away feeling like this play was so Mexican in the most beautiful ways because thats what the book is and thats who the artists are who are making this come to life. I want them to hear Julias and Amas words and feel what people feel when they read the book  a deep connection with presence, of self, and where you come from. I want people to walk away feeling that deep, deep love of who we are and why were here.

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter runs at Steppenwolf for Young Adults from Feb. 26 to March 21. A post-show discussion will follow a book signing with Erika Sanchez on March 1. A Storycatchers Theatre performance will follow the March 14 show and feature performers from the Chicago Illinois Youth Center. More at www.steppenwolf.org.

drockett@chicagotribune.com
The former minister's comment came after a picture of Farah went viral on social media.

Ismail, while addressing a press conference alongside former Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, said that PML-N has been saying the same things that the estranged PTI leader Aleem Khan had previously said about Farah.

The PML-N leader alleged that the First Lady's close aide "took the money" for the transfer of civil servants in Punjab.

"Who did that money go to," asked Ismail, adding that the PTI was claiming that Farah Khan cannot be a corrupt person as she was a "private person".

"She can engage in corrupt activities because she is friends with the wives of public officeholders. She was someone's frontwoman," alleged Ismail.

Including Usman Buzdar into his broadside, Ismail said the former Punjab Chief Minister was "also someone's frontman", Geo News reported.

"When Aleem Khan claimed to inform Imran Khan about Usman Buzdar's corruption but Imran Khan kept him, who was Buzdar paying," Ismail asked.

The former Finance Minister said that a picture is circulating on social media since Monday, showing Farah with an allegedly high-value bag.

"Farah Gujjar, while using a Punjab government's plane, had a bag that was worth $90,000," claimed Ismail. He added that in local currency, the bag was worth Rs 16.2 million.

The PML-N leader shared that the masses were told to have "one roti" instead of two, adding that people bought a single roti due to the rising wheat and sugar prices, but Farah Khan's bag was worth Rs 16.2 million.

Farah, a close friend of Imran Khan's wife Bushra Bibi, has reportedly left the country amid serious allegations of corruption levelled against her by the Opposition, a media report said.

According to sources, Farah left for Dubai on Sunday after the dissolution of the National Assembly in the wake of the no-trust move against Imran Khan, Dawn reported.

--IANS san/arm

( 359 Words)

2022-04-05-23:00:04 (IANS)
The budgetary allocation for the Indo-China border has been increased to six times in the the current fiscal under the Border Infrastructure and Management (BIM), the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) informed Lok Sabha on Tuesday. Responding to a question asked by BJP MP Dilip Saikia, the Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai said that the funds allocated for the security of border areas of the North East states have been utilised within the stipulated time frame. Listing out the funds allocated under BIM, he said the MHA has increased BIM funds for the Indo-China border areas from Rs 42.87 crore in 2020-21 to Rs 249.12 crore in 2021-22 that is nearly around six times higher than the last year while the fund for 2019-20 was Rs 72.20 crore. The government also allocated Rs 20 crore for the Indo-Myanmar border in the year 2019-2020 which has been reduced to Rs 17 crore in 2020-21 but it was again increased around three times to Rs 50 crore in the 2021-22, he added. Rai further said that for the Indo-Bangladesh border, the budget for the year 2019-2020 was Rs 407 crore that was decreased to Rs 294 crore in the year 2020-21 but in the year 2021-22 it was marginally increased to Rs 303 crore. The minister also said that the budget allocation for the year 2019-2020 was Rs 407 crore that was decreased to Rs 294 crore in the year 2020-21 but in the year 2021-22 it was marginally increased to Rs 303 crore. Responding to a question on steps taken by the government to strengthen the safety of border areas, Rai said that the MHA has adopted a multi-pronged approach to strengthen the security along international borders by deploying adequate numbers of the border guarding force, effective domination of the borders by patrolling, setting up observation posts and new Border Out Posts (BOPs) and holistic review of deployment periodically. --IANS ams/shs ( 340 Words) 2022-04-05-23:02:01 (IANS)
Top central and Tripura intelligence officials continued their interrogation of Imran Hussain, 25, an Imam, Abul Kashem 32, a teacher, and Hamid Ali, a farmer, who were arrested on Sunday from Jatrapur, a village in Sepahijala district along India-Bangladesh border.

"We have found their close links with the Bhopal detainees and they also confessed that they are in alliance with the people arrested in Bhopal," a top police officer, who is a part of the investigating team, told IANS on Tuesday night.

The police officer, however, declined to share more information, saying an investigation is underway.

The Anti-Terrorist Squad of Madhya Pradesh has arrested the four persons affiliated to the outlawed JMB from different areas of Bhopal on Sunday.

The three individuals in Tripura were booked under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).

Before their arrest, an intelligence team from Delhi came to Jatrapur village and in a joint operation with the Tripura police, arrested the three individuals.

--IANS sc/pgh

( 214 Words)

2022-04-05-23:06:05 (IANS)
Sources say that MLAs have complained that Congress ministers in the MVA government ignore them and party workers and apprised her that there is a strong resentment against the ministers due to this.

Sonia Gandhi gave them a patient hearing and assured them of amicable solution within a week.

A letter written by the MLAs over the "cold response" of the ministers in the state. The party chief is likely to call ministers of the Congress along with the state in charge to address their grievances.

The meeting comes on heels of after the Congress asked Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray to now start implementing the Common Minimum Programme (CMP) of the three partners.

In a letter to Thackeray, state Congress President Nana Patole said that the Shiv Sena-Nationalist Congress Party-Congress -- hailing from different ideological backgrounds -- had decided to run the government on the basis of a CMP.

"Owing to the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic since March 2020, the CMP implementation was delayed, but now as the coronavirus threat is over, the CMP should be executed for the overall development of all sections of society," he said.

--IANS miz/vd

( 231 Words)

2022-04-05-23:21:52 (IANS)
The event witnessed the flagging of 100 Mukhyamantri Chiranjivi Mamta Expresses.

The event was in conjunction with the initiation of two-day Nirogi Rajasthan MediFest 2022.

Ministers Shanti Dhariwal, Prasadi Lal Meena, Sudhir Bhandari, Principal and Controller, SMS Hospital and Medical College Jaipur among others were present during the programme.

The IPD Tower will be a well-facilitated 24-storey hospital with 1200 additional beds, teaching rooms, ICUs, 20 OPDs, 4 Cath Labs, 100 OPD Registration counters, 1 Helipad and a Medical Martyr Memorial centre.

The foundation stone laying day witnessed the commencement of the ongoing Nirogi Rajasthan Medifest 2022 and Exhibition on Tuesday, which will conclude on April 6.

Gehlot said, "It is a proud moment for all of us today as we are launching India's tallest hospital in Rajasthan. The model of Nirogi Rajasthan was conceptualised and implemented in 2019. The state government will soon be launching the Right to Health Bill... We intend to reach out to every nook and corner and even the farthest places at the bottom of the pyramid."

Prasadi Lal Meena, Minister of Medical Health Rajasthan appreciated the thought of introducing the Medical Martyr Memorial for all doctors and those from the medical fraternity who sacrificed their lives during Covid-19.

The total IPD Tower project was conceptualized by Principal Dr Sudhir Bhandari and his team and architect Anoop Bhartaria. The project will be constructed for Rs 588 crores.

--IANS arc/shs

( 275 Words)

2022-04-05-23:28:42 (IANS)
According to officials, the attached immovable properties belonging to Akinchan Developers Pvt Ltd, Indo Metal Impex Pvt Ltd, Paryas Infosolutions Pvt Ltd, Manglayatan Projects Pvt Ltd, JJ Ideal Estate Pvt Ltd, Swati Jain, Sushila Jain and Indu Jain. The attachment by the ED was made in a disproportionate assets case.

The ED has also initiated a money laundering case registered by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) against Satyendar Kumar Jain and others under the provisions of Section 109 of the Indian Penal Code and Sec 13(2) and 13(1) (e) of Prevention of Corruption Act.

"Investigation by the ED has revealed that during the period 2015-16 when Satyendar Kumar Jain was a public servant, the above-mentioned companies beneficially owned and controlled by him received accommodation entries to the tune of Rs 4.81 crore from shell companies against cash transferred to Kolkata-based entry operators through the hawala route. These amounts were utilised for direct purchase of land or for the repayment of loans taken for the purchase of agricultural land in and around Delhi," ED said in an official statement.

Accordingly, immovable properties worth Rs. 4.81 crore in the form of land belonging to the above-mentioned companies or individuals have been provisionally attached as per Section 5 of the PMLA, 2002, the statement added.

Further investigation, in this case, is under progress. (ANI)
Water Resources Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat on Tuesday assured Karnataka Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai of declaring the "Upper Bhadra project" as a national project after getting approval from the finance ministry and a nod from the Union Cabinet. "I have had a detailed discussion on Mahadayi, Mekedatu, Upper Krishna and Upper Bhadra projects. I have provided details about the State's stand and the resolutions passed in the State legislature about these projects," Bommai told media persons after meeting Shekhawat in the national capital. "The Union minister has assured speedy approval for the DPR for Mekedatu project and feasibility report on Mahadayi project. I am set to meet the Union Finance Minister tomorrow," he added. Karnataka Chief Minister also said that the Mekedatu project would not pose any problem for Tamil Nadu as their share of water would be released annually. "We will get our judicious share of water from the Mekedatu project. The project would not pose any problem for Tamil Nadu. Their share of water would be released annually. Tamil Nadu is getting excess water except during distress years. Their share of water would be ensured in accordance with the Triban award," he stated. Speaking about Upper Krishna Project, Bommai said, "The issue of taking up UKP third phase project is before the court. The Union government has to submit its affidavit. I have requested the union minister to act on this. Our counsels too have presented their argument before the court. Efforts are also on for appointment of the Judge at the earliest." (ANI)
Satara Police has registered three different FIRs against the accused who is identified as Pravin Shivaji Margaje.

The arrested accused is a resident of Kanhawadi in Khandala taluka of Satara district.

During the search operations, police along with MI have recovered forged identity cards, Indian Army uniforms, four mobile phones, bank passbooks, SIM cards, and cartridges of airguns from him.

After getting information about Margaje's presence in Kanhawadi in Khandala taluka on Monday, a joint team of MI and Satara Police nabbed him red-handed for taking money from prospective youth for getting them recruited into Army.

He had been taking Rs 9 lakh from each aspirant candidate - Rs 4.5 lakh before and Rs 4.5 lakh after recruitment, police informed.

The accused, Margaje has been arrested in a case registered under IPC sections 420 and 34 at Dahiwadi Police station and sent to police custody for seven days by the Satara Magistrate Court, police added.

Police said that Assistant Police Inspector Santosh Tasgaonkar is further investigating the case.

Meanwhile, the Superintendent of Satara Police Ajay Kumar Bansalmade a public appeal that whoever is being duped by the accused shall come forward and registered the complaint against him. (ANI)
"Encounter has started at Tral area of Awantipora. Police and security forces are on the job. Further details shall follow," the Kashmir Zone Police said in a tweet.

Further details are awaited.

Earlier on Monday, the Indian Army and Jammu and Kashmir police in a joint operation apprehended a Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist in the Ladoora area of Rafiabad, Sopore. (ANI)
One terrorist has been killed in an encounter that broke out between security forces and terrorists in the Tral area of Awantipora district of Jammu and Kashmir on Wednesday, said police. "Awantipora Encounter Update: 01 terrorist killed. Operation in progress. Further details shall follow," the Kashmir Zone Police tweeted. The encounter began earlier today between security forces and terrorists in the Tral area of Awantipora district. Further details are awaited. Earlier on Monday, the Indian Army and Jammu and Kashmir police in a joint operation apprehended a Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist in the Ladoora area of Rafiabad, Sopore. (ANI)
Dear Amy: I really like my job, my boss, and my immediate coworkers.

Recently though, Ive been assigned to work on a project managed by Bob  a man whos been accused of sexual harassment multiple times.

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The company recently lost a lawsuit because of his actions, and while the company policy is not to disclose punishments, presumably Bob faced some.

Bob has behaved professionally toward me, but knowing some of the accusers, seeing the texts he sent, and hearing their stories, I have no respect for him!

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Im having trouble maintaining my professionalism under his management.

My instinct is to disregard his instructions and throw him under the bus for every minor setback.

Obviously, that doesnt bode well for the project.

The fact that this man is still a manager horrifies me, regardless of any punishment he may have received.

Ive considered quitting in protest, but Id be replaced within hours  if the company even noticed I was gone.

I also genuinely believe that my work is making a positive difference.

The likelihood of me getting a comparable job is also slim.

On the one hand, working with him is temporary, and I dont want one project to derail my career, particularly when Im otherwise happy.

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On the other hand, he recently hired two women who seem just his type.

How do I survive working with him and warn his new hires, without getting myself in trouble?

 Between a Rock and a Barred Case

Dear Between: You should take any specific questions and concerns regarding your experience to your boss, and/or to HR at your company. Ask if these new hires have been notified about previous accusations against Bob.

You need to tread carefully and understand that the way to win at this is to always behave professionally at all times.

You dont seem to know the particulars  or even the vague outlines  of this lawsuit, and it immediately occurs to me that there is a remote possibility that your colleague Bob remains at the company because he won the lawsuit you are referring to.

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And, even if you know he is guilty, if you follow your instincts and actually manage to throw Bob under the bus  and yet still remain at the job you love (despite the fact that he has proven himself to be quite the survivor), then you would win the Machiavelli award for employee excellence.

(In short, I dont recommend that you behave this way.)

If Bob sexually harassed you, then it would be ethical to warn these new hires, unless you signed a legal document prohibiting you from discussing it with anyone. (Never sign an NDA without your own legal representation.)

As things are, make sure these new hires understand that they have an amiable ally and a supportive colleague in you.

Dear Amy: I am a 33-year-old woman and have been with my partner for 10 years.

Neither of us wants children. We do have a senior dog that we love very much. Despite sharing this with my partners mother multiple times, she never fails to make snide comments when I see her.

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A favorite is: This dog is the closest to grandkids that Ill ever get.

My partner has told her to knock it off. He also has two sisters, neither of which are coupled or plan to have children.

I think his mother sees me as her only hope for grandchildren.

Im tired of her commentary on what I view as a fundamental life choice that is really no ones business, except my partners and my own.

I believe people can live long and fulfilling lives with or without children.

How do I make her stop her snide comments?

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Recently, and much to my dismay, she has taken to saying them when my partner is out of earshot.

 Childless Punching Bag

Dear Childless: If you and your partner cant seem to stop his mother, perhaps you should lean in.

She makes her dog comment, and you smile and reply: Thats right! So say hi to your grand-pup. Hes a very good boy and loves ear scritches.

Ask Amy Daily No-nonsense advice for better living delivered to your inbox every morning. For a limited time, sign up for the Ask Amy newsletter and get the book Ask Amy: Essential Wisdom from Americas Favorite Advice Columnist for $5. >

Dear Amy: Thank you for mentioning in your column that it is long past time for us to retire the phrase maiden name regarding a womans birth surname.

Its been a long time since Ive known any maidens.

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 A Fan

Dear Fan: Use of the word maiden to describe a womans identity before marriage might seem charmingly vintage, but I say its long-past time to retire it.

Got a question for Amy? Enter it here and well send it to her.

Sign up here to receive the Ask Amy newsletter to get advice e-mailed to your inbox every morning, and for a limited time  get the book "Ask Amy: Essential Wisdom from Americas Favorite Advice Columnist" for $5.

2021 Amy Dickinson.
Assistant Commissioner Ashutosh Mishra is very close to Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) Saurabh Tripathi, the suspended IPS officer who is accused in the Angadia extortion case.

After getting the transit remand from the local court, the team of the Mumbai Crime Branch will reach Mumbai today and Mishra will be produced in the court.

The Angadia extortion case pertains to a complaint made by the Angadia association in December last year to a senior Mumbai Police officer that Saurabh Tripathi is threatening angadia operators and its employees with an Income Tax raid and extorted Rs 15-18 lakh from them. Later, Angadia operators approached Mumbai police commissioner Hemant Nagrale and filed a complaint. Following this, the commissioner ordered an inquiry into the case.

DCP Tripathi used to send money received from angadias (courier) extortion racket to Uttar Pradesh through the hawala channel.

Saurabh Tripathi, who is a resident of Uttar Pradesh's Kanpur, is missing. A total of 5 teams have been constituted for the investigation. Tripathi filed an anticipatory bail plea in Sessions Court in connection with the Angadia extortion case.

Mumbai Crime Branch team is continuously looking for IPS officer Saurabh Tripathi. Tripathi is absconding for a month, and two teams of the Crime Branch are present in Uttar Pradesh in search of Tripathi.

The police had earlier suspended three officers for allegedly extorting Rs 15-18 lakh from an Angadia operator. Later, the officers - Nitin Kadam (API), Samadaan Jamdade (Sub Inspector) and Om Vangate were arrested. (ANI)
Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri on Wednesday unfurled the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) flag at his residence on the occasion of the party's 42nd foundation day and said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government has given a new definition of governance in the last eight years. "PM Modi-led Government has given a new definition of governance in the last 8 years - Good governance is also good politics. I would like to give you an example of Uttar Pradesh, we received success there because development was done there rapidly and with all sincerity," the Union Minister told ANI. Puri also extended greetings to all the party workers on the BJP's 42nd foundation day and said that due to the hard work of everyone, today BJP has become a big political party not only in India but all over the world. BJP president JP Nadda also hoisted the flag at the party headquarters and garlanded the statues of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee and Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath also unfurled the BJP's flag at the party office in Lucknow on the party's 42nd foundation day today. The party will also organise a blood donation camp at its headquarters. The Prime Minister will address the party workers across the country at 10 am via video conferencing. Nadda will participate in a procession at 11 am in Karol Bagh. The party will organise "Samajik Nyay Pakhwara" between April 7-20. Envoys of various countries will also be visiting the BJP headquarters in New Delhi on Wednesday. The BJP's earlier avatar was the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) which was founded by Syama Prasad Mookherjee in 1951. Later the BJS was merged with several parties in 1977 to form the Janata Party. In 1980, the National Executive Council of the Janata Party banned its members from the 'dual membership' of the party and the Rashtriya Swayam Sewak Sangh (RSS). Consequently, the former Jana Sangh members left the party and floated the BJP on April 6, 1980. (ANI)
The accused in the Gorakhnath temple attack case, Murtaza, will be sent to Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) headquarter in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh's for further inquiry on Wednesday. He will be moved to lucknow after a medical test. His laptop and mobile will also be sent to Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) for investigation. The Uttar Pradesh ATS is investigating the case. The UP-ATS on Monday reached Mumbai and learnt that the accused Murtaza had not met his family members since last three years. Yesterday, the team visited Navi Mumbai where the accused Murtaza used to live earlier with his family. UP ATS team has reached Mumbai to investigate the Gorakhnath Temple attack case. Yesterday, the team visited Navi Mumbai where the accused Murtaza used to live earlier with his family. Murtaza did not meet his family members for the last 3 years. Notably, the father of the accused has said that his son is mentally not stable and had no plan to commit the offence. "He is not mentally stable. Since childhood, he is suffering from depression. He also received medical treatment," Munir Ahmed Abbasi, the father of the accused told ANI while adding that due to some developments (in his mental health), the accused believed that police were after him."He had no planning and did this due to his current mental state," Abbasi added. According to Uttar Pradesh Police, a man forcibly tried to enter the Gorakhnath Temple premises and attacked the on-duty police personnel with a sharp weapon on Sunday. The accused has been identified as Ahmed Murtaza Abbasi, a resident of Gorakhpur. The Uttar Pradesh government has decided to hand over the probe to the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS).ADG (Law and Order) Prashant Kumar said the man who attacked two police personnel at Gorakhnath temple has been arrested. "He is a resident of Gorakhpur. A sickle has been recovered from him. An FIR has been lodged against him. There could be a terror angle in it. The case will be transferred to ATS," he said. Police said the accused Ahmed Murtaza Abbasi, after being presented in court on Monday, has been sent to judicial custody. Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya said strict action will be taken based on the investigation. (ANI)
Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut on Wednesday accused the former BJP MP Kirit Somaiya of financial bungling, alleging that while he had collected about Rs 50 crore from the people as part of a campaign to save the INS Vikrant but the fund wasn't submitted to the state exchequer. Addressing a press conference in the national capital, the Shiv Sena leader demanded a probe by the Maharashtra government against Somaiya while also claiming that it's a fit case to be probed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Income Tax (IT) and Enforcement Directorate (ED). "In the 1971 war against Pakistan, the Indian Navy played a key role, including the INS Vikrant. When the situation of the INS Vikrant got bad and it got difficult to maintain, there were campaigns for turning it into a museum," Raut said. He said about Rs 200 crore was required for the purpose, and the Central or state governments couldn't provide the financial support. "There were campaigns across the country for saving the INS Vikrant. All party leaders from Maharashtra used to come to Delhi and meet the then Defence Minister AK Antony or the Prime Minister. Kirit Somaiya used to be part of the campaign," added Rout. The Shiv Sena leader alleged that Kirit Somaiya started a campaign to raise funds for the INS Vikrant. "Somaiya appealed to the people with the help of his volunteers to collect money to 'Save Vikrant' by wearing the t-shirts and jerseys and going to Mumbai airport and railway stations. Many people back then in the name of the INS Vikrant donated lakhs and crores of money. Three-four people called me yesterday and said that they had donated Rs 5,000 and 10,000 rupees in Navy Nagar, Church gate and Chembur," he added. Raut alleged that more than Rs 50 crore was collected for the INS Vikrant but the information from Raj Bhawan said that not a single paise was submitted. "As per the information, more than Rs 50 crore was collected officially. People thought that all this money will go into saving INS Vikrant. Somaiya then said in all the newspapers that they will submit the money to Raj Bhavan's account by opening a separate independent account. We got the information from Rajya Bhawan that no such amount had been submitted," alleged Rout. The Shiv Sena leader stated that "while the amount may be less than the Bofors, Agusta Westlands or Rafale scams, it's connected with the nation's security". "The Maharashtra government will investigate this matter. But it is also the responsibility of the central government. I appeal to Income Tax, and the CBI to hold an inquiry. It is directly a case of treason," alleged Rout. (ANI)
The men were nabbed on Tuesday when acting on a tip-off, a police team from Jagiroad police station in Morigaon set up a naka checking on the National Highway-37.

The persons apprehended have been identified as Safikul Islam and Mafidul Islam

"We received information about two persons coming from Sonitpur to sell gold," said Hemanta Borgohain, the officer of Jagiroad police station.

"Based on the tip, we had set up Naka checking in front of Jagiroad police station and caught two persons. During the probe, we had found two gold bars in their possession," the officer said. (ANI)
Supreme Court will be hearing the case of capital punishment of three convicted for the rape and murder of a 19-year-old girl in Delhi's Chhawala on Thursday. The three convicts were awarded the death penalty after being held guilty of raping and killing a 19-year-old woman in 2012. The victim's body mutilated body was found in a field with multiple injuries due to assault with objects ranging from car tools to earthen pots. A three-judge bench of Justice Uday Umesh Lalit, Justice S Ravindra Bhat and Justice Bela M Trivedi, in its March 29 order, has listed the matter for April 7 for hearing on the issue of sentence. "List these matters before the appropriate Bench for hearing on the issue of sentence on April 7, 2022, at 3.00 PM after taking the requisite directions from the Chief Justice of India," the bench said. A Delhi court in February 2014 had convicted three men for raping and killing a 19-year-old woman in 2012 and had awarded them the death penalty. The capital punishment was confirmed by the Delhi High Court on August 26 2014, saying they were "predators" moving on the streets and "were looking for prey". Three men-- Ravi Kumar, Rahul and Vinod were convicted under various charges dealing with kidnapping, rape and murder. The three convicts have challenged the Delhi High Court order in the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the victim's family and activist Yogita Bhayana has filed an intervening application to render rendering assistance to the bench about the offence committed by the convicts. Activist Bhayana and the father of the victim had said that they were fully conversant with the fact of the case. The case dates back to February 2012, when a 19-year old girl's body was found in Haryana. The girl was brutally killed after being raped. A case was registered regarding this at outer Delhi's Chhawala (Najafgarh) police station. According to the prosecution, the offence was barbaric in nature as they first kidnapped the woman, raped her, killed her and dumped her body in a field in Rodhai village in Haryana's Rewari district. "The woman was kidnapped by the three men in a car from near her house in Qutub Vihar area on the night of February 9, 2012, while she was returning from office," the prosecution has said. The prosecution had also revealed multiple injuries on the woman's head and other parts of her body and said that the three men had assaulted the woman with a car jack and an earthen pot. The crime was committed by Ravi Kumar with the help of the other two accused as the girl has refused the friendship proposal of Ravi Kumar, the prosecution had said. (ANI)
The Jhalda Police on Wednesday said that a suicide note was recovered from the house of the Congress worker.

Niranjan Baishnab was also an eyewitness in the Jhalda Municipality Congress Councilor Tapan Kandu murder case.

However, the police claimed that Baishnab hasn't blamed anyone for taking the extreme step.

"The body of the deceased has been sent to the Purulia Sardar Hospital for postmortem," he added.

The police stated that the note mentioned that Baishnab had been suffering from mental depression since the murder of Tapan Kandu, because of which he had not been able to sleep or do anything.

Kandu was allegedly killed in his presence.

"I have never been to a police station and I could not bear the repeated calls for enquiry anymore" the police stated while quoting from the note.

A relative of Baishnab, Dipak Baishnab has demanded a probe.

Tapan Kandu was allegedly murdered while walking with Baishnab on March 13 this year.

Congress MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury alleged that the party's elected representative (Kandu) was shot dead by "goons" of the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC). (ANI)
A total of 22 Indian Police Service (IPS) officers have been charged under various sections during the last five years for their involvement in criminal activities, informed the Ministry of Home Affairs on Wednesday. Responding to a question asked by a Member of Parliament in Rajya Sabha on the number of IPS officers, against whom cases have been registered under various sections during the last five years, Minister of State in the Ministry of Home Affairs Nityanand Rai informed that criminal cases have been registered against 22 IPS officers under various sections from 2017 to March 30, 2022. On being asked about the number of IPS officers declared fugitive in Uttar Pradesh, he informed that as per information provided by the State Government, one IPS officer has been declared fugitive. A question was also asked on whether it is a fact that cases of involvement in criminality amongst police force are increasing in the country and whether any study has been undertaken to ascertain the reasons for such growing tendency. Rai informed that Police is a State subject under List-II (State List) of the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution of India. It is primarily the responsibility of the State Governments and UTs to register cases of involvement in criminality in the Police force. However, as per the data available with the National Crime Record Bureau (upto year 2020), the number of charge sheeted cases has declined during the period from 2018 to 2020, he added. (ANI)
The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) data produced in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday showed a declining trend in terrorist incidents in Jammu and Kashmir with a figure showing a downfall of almost 50 per cent in these cases from 417 in 2018 to 229 in 2021. Union Minister of State for Home Nityanand Rai presented the data before the Upper House through a written reply, mentioning "the government has a policy of zero-tolerance against terrorism and there has been a substantial decline in terrorist attacks from 417 in 2018 to 255 in 2019, 244 in 2020 and 229 in 2021". The Minister also produced data that shows the killing of 87 civilians and 99 security personnel by terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir between August 5, 2019, and November 2021 in comparison to the killing of 177 civilians and 406 security personnel from May 2014 to August 2019. Rai further said robust security and intelligence grid is in place to prevent any terrorist attack. "In addition, day and night area domination, round the clock checking at Nakas, patrolling and proactive operations against terrorists are being carried out." The Minister's response came in reply to a question about the number of civilians and security personnel killed by terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir during the period from August 2019 to November 2021. (ANI)
The Delhi High Court on Wednesday reserved the order on an anticipatory bail plea of Ajay Singh, Promoter and Managing Director Spicejet in an alleged cheating case registered against him. Last week trial court had dismissed his bail plea stating that the grant of anticipatory bail at the stage of investigation may frustrate the investigating agency in interrogating the accused and in collecting useful information and also the materials which might have been concealed. The bench of Justice Anoop Kumar Mendiratta reserved the order after the conclusion of the submission of all sides. The court will pass the order this Thursday (tomorrow). The petitioner Ajay Singh through Senior Siddharth Luthra submitted that the petitioner has been cooperating with the investigation and ex-facie no offence is made out against him. The FIR clearly amounts to an abuse of the criminal machinery to pre-maturely enforce a commercial contract. The FIR has been registered for the offence of cheating in a case which is entirely based on a civil and commercial dispute arising out of a Share Purchase Agreement dated 09.07.2018, to which the Complainant/ Informant and the Petitioner herein are parties. Luthra also submitted that the Complainant/ Informant is blatantly abusing criminal machinery to enforce an erroneous interpretation of the Closing Date of the transactions stated in the Share Purchase Agreement dated 09.07.2018. The FIR is a blatant attempt to tarnish the Petitioner's sterling reputation in society and disrupt the smooth workings of the Airline Company, he added. Senior Advocate Vikas Pahwa appeared for complainant in the matter and strongly opposed the anticipatory bail plea. The trial court of Delhi last week declined the anticipatory bail and had said, considering the gravity of the offence and the aforementioned ratiocination held, this Court does not find sufficient ground to grant the relief sought in the application filed by the accused applicant and the same is accordingly, dismissed. Court noted that success in such interrogation would elude if the accused knows that he is protected by the order of the court. Earlier on March 9, the same court had granted interim protection to the accused in the matter. According to the Delhi Police, the present case was registered at Hauz Khas Police Station with the directions of the court under section 156(3) of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), on the complaint of Preeti Nanda, wife of Sanjiv Nanda wherein it was alleged by her that Singh defrauded her. The complainantt alleged that there was a share-purchase agreement between him and the accused and she paid Rs 10 lakh for 10 lakh shares of SpiceJet. These shares, however, were not transferred leading to the filing of the police complaint against Singh. The complainant submitted that it was subsequently found that the delivery instruction slip was invalid and outdated. Delhi Police while opposing the anticipatory bail plea stated that Investigation revealed that there are four other cases that have also been registered against Ajay Singh which shows his conduct. Delhi police also earlier said, the investigation is at a very crucial stage and still very much pending in this case as the accused/ applicant can manage the witnesses in the case and can also tamper with the evidence. (ANI)
BILLINGS, Mont.  A wind energy company was sentenced to probation and ordered to pay more than $8 million in fines and restitution after at least 150 eagles were killed over the past decade at its wind farms in eight states, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

NextEra Energy subsidiary ESI Energy pleaded guilty to three counts of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act during a Tuesday court appearance in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It was charged criminally in the deaths of nine eagles at three of its wind farms in Wyoming and New Mexico.

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In addition to those deaths, ESI acknowledged the deaths of golden and bald eagles at 50 wind farms affiliated with ESI and NextEra since 2012. The birds died in eight states, prosecutors said: Wyoming, California, New Mexico, North Dakota, Colorado, Michigan, Arizona and Illinois.

The birds are killed when they fly into the blades of wind turbines. Some ESI turbines killed multiple eagles and because the carcasses are not always found, officials said the number killed was likely higher than the 150 birds cited by prosecutors in court documents.

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NextEras plea deal comes amid a push by President Joe Biden for more renewable energy from wind, solar and other sources to help reduce climate changing emissions. It also follows a renewed commitment by federal wildlife officials under Biden to enforce protections for eagles and other birds under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, after criminal prosecutions were halted under former President Donald Trump.

Its illegal to kill or harm eagles under federal law.

The bald eagle  the U.S. national symbol  was removed from protection under the Endangered Species Act in 2007, following a dramatic recovery from widespread decimation due to harmful pesticides and other problems. Wildlife officials say more than 300,000 bald eagles now occupy the U.S., not including Alaska.

Golden eagles have not fared as well, with populations considered stable but under pressure from wind farms, collisions with vehicles, illegal shootings and poisoning from lead ammunition. There are an estimated 31,800 golden eagles in the Western U.S., according to a study released last week by leading eagle researchers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other entities.

More than 2,000 golden eagles are killed annually due to human causes, or about 60% of all deaths, the researchers said. The study concluded that golden eagle deaths will likely increase in the future because of wind energy development and other human activities.

Companies historically have been able to avoid prosecution under the century-old Migratory Bird Treaty if they take steps to avoid bird deaths and seek permits for those that occur. ESI did not seek such a permit, authorities said.

The company was warned prior to building the wind farms in New Mexico and Wyoming that they would kill birds, but it proceeded anyway and at times ignored advice from federal wildlife officials about how to minimize the deaths, according to court documents.

For more than a decade, ESI has violated (wildlife) laws, taking eagles without obtaining or even seeking the necessary permit, said Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Departments Environment and Natural Resources Division in a statement.

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ESI agreed under a plea deal to spend up to $27 million during its five-year probationary period on measures to prevent future eagle deaths. That includes shutting down turbines at times when eagles are more likely to be present.

Despite those measures, wildlife officials anticipate that some eagles still could die. When that happens, the company will pay $29,623 per dead eagle, under the agreement.

NextEra President Rebecca Kujawa said collisions of birds with wind turbines are unavoidable accidents that should not be criminalized. She said the Juno Beach, Florida-based company which bills itself as the worlds largest utility company by market value  is committed to reducing damage to wildlife from its projects.

We disagree with the governments underlying enforcement activity, Kujawa said in a statement. Building any structure, driving any vehicle, or flying any airplane carries with it a possibility that accidental eagle and other bird collisions may occur.
The killing of people belonging to minority communities in Jammu and Kashmir was at its peak in 2021 with 11 deaths in different terrorist attacks, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) stated in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday. As per the data, a total of 11 people from the minority communities were killed in J-K in 2017 followed by three killings in 2018, six in 2019, three in 2020 and 11 in 2021. Union Minister of State for Home Nityanand Rai shared the data in the Upper House while responding to a question in a written reply, mentioning the killing of 34 persons belonging to minority communities, who lost their lives in the terrorist-related incidents in J-K between 2017 and 2021. On "what measures have been taken by the government to ensure the safety of minorities in the valley", the Minister said, "The government has taken several measures to ensure the safety of minorities in the valley". "These include a robust security and intelligence grid, group security in the form of static guards, day and night area domination, round the clock checking at Nakas while patrolling is being carried out in the areas where the minorities reside besides proactive operations against terrorists," added Rai. Besides, the Minister said an ex-gratia of Rs 5 lakh is given under the Central scheme for assistance to civilian victims, family of victims of terrorist attacks, the LWE (Left Wing Extremism) violence and cross-border firing and mine, IED blasts on Indian territory. In addition, Rai said Rs 1 lakh is paid to the next of kin of civilians killed in militancy-related violence under the existing scheme of the government of Jammu and Kashmir. (ANI)
After the meeting, Mandaviya said Ethiopia expressed interest in the COWIN platform -- the only portal for registration of COVID-19 vaccination and Pradhan Mantri Bhartiya Janaushadhi Pariyojana (PMBJP) -- Centre's scheme for making generic medicines available to all at affordable prices.

"Discussed ways to further strengthen bilateral cooperation, experience & knowledge sharing in public health, pharma & health tech; common position on GAVI related matters," Mandaviya said in a tweet.

"Ethiopia expressed strong interest in the COWIN platform & PM Bhartiya Janaushadhi Pariyojana. India is committed to ensuring affordable healthcare for all through active collaboration & adopting tech-based solutions," he added. (ANI)
INS Tarangini, the first Sail Training Ship of the Indian Navy, departed on Wednesday for Lokayan-2022 from Southern Naval Command (SNC) in Kochi, Kerala. The highlight of this voyage will be hosting the national flag in the heart of London on the occasion of 75th Independence Day as part of Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav. During the voyage, the ship will be visiting 17 ports across 14 countries. Chief of Staff, Southern Naval Command, Rear Admiral Antony George, NM, VSM flagged off the voyage today. The voyage includes the main aspect of training under trainee officers that form a part of the first Training Squadron, as well as to participate in prestigious Tall Ship Race events in Harlingen, Antwerp and Aalborg. "INS Tarangini, the sail training ship of Southern Naval Command is embarking for a seven-month long voyage for participating in tall ship races as well as to impart training to our sea training. The ship will touch 17 ports and visit 14 countries," Rear Admiral Antony George said. As part of the Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav, he said, the ship will be entering London where the national flag will be hoisted. He also said that it will be a "momentous occasion" for the Indian Navy as well as the country. "During the course of this voyage, 300 sea trainees would embark on the ship at various phases for undergoing sea training. While participating in these tall ship races earlier, the ship has done very well. And we look forward to the ship coming out with flying colours during the tall ship races that is going to participate," Rear Admiral George said. The ship will come back in November this year. (ANI)
The meeting comes in the backdrop of action by Enforcement Directorate (ED) against leaders of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government in Maharashtra especially some leaders of NCP and Shiv Sena in money laundering cases.

The Enforcement Directorate had on Tuesday provisionally attached assets worth Rs 11.15 crore of three people, including Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut's wife Varsha Raut, in a case related to irregularities in a chawl redevelopment project at Mumbai's Goregaon.

The assets of Varsha and the two others -- businessman Pravin Raut, and Swapna Patkar, wife of the MP's close associate Sujit Patkar -- have been attached under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray had last month targeted the BJP-led government over the role of probe agencies in the state including the Enforcement Directorate's action in a case linked to his relatives and dared it to put him behind the bars.

He also referred to Mahabharta, saying while he is no Krishna, "can you (BJP) say you are not Kans".

The ED had attached properties of nearly Rs 6.45 crore during raids at his brother-in-law Shridhar Patankar's premises.

Thackeray had also referred to state Minister Nawab Malik, who has been arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in connection with a money laundering case and asked if the NCP leader was in the wrong, what were the agencies doing for so long. (ANI)
After the repeal of Article 370 from Jammu and Kashmir, about 2,105 migrants have returned back to Kashmir valley for taking up jobs provided under Prime Minister's Development Package, Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai told the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday. In a written reply to a question, the Minister said a total of 841 appointments were made in 2020-2021 under Prime Minister's Development Package followed by 1,264 in 2021-2022. Rai shared the said details when asked about the nu,mber of Kashmiri Pandits rehabilitated in the Kashmir valley by the Central Government after the repeal of Article 370 in 2019. On the killing of Hindus along with Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu and Kashmir since August 2019, Rai said, "a total of 14 people, including 4 Kashmiri Pandits and 10 other Hindus, were killed by the terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir from August 5, 2019, till March 24, 2022". As per the data shared by the Minister, three Hindus were killed between August 5, 2009, and December 31, 2019; two people including one Kashmiri Pandit in 2020; nine people including three Kashmiri Pandits and six other Hindus were killed in 2021. Not a single Kashmiri Pandit and other Hindus have been reportedly killed in any terrorist attack in the Kashmir Valley this year till March 24, mentions the data. The Minister later said that the government has taken several measures to ensure the safety of minorities in the valley. "These include a robust security and intelligence grid, group security in the form of static guards, day and night area domination, round the clock checking at Nakas, patrolling in the areas where the minorities reside besides proactive operations against terrorists," said Rai. (ANI)
The Prem Nagar Police on Wednesday busted a gang involved in child trafficking and arrested six accused, including the father in the kidnapping of an infant here. The accused were identified as Ikrat alias Guddi (30), Renu (28), Moni Begum (30), Rekha (46), Yogesh (36) and Mohammed Saddam (50) who is the father of the missing infant. Police recovered the five-day-old baby from Faridabad and handed it over to the family. About five lakh rupees were also recovered from the possession of the accused. According to the police, on April 1, Prem Nagar police station received a missing complaint of a five-day-old baby. Police reached the spot and recorded the mother's statement wherein she stated that she was sleeping with her five days old baby in the afternoon and when she woke up at around 12.30 pm, she found her baby missing. The police registered the case under section 363 of the Indian Penal Code and initiated the investigation. The police revealed that the accused forged the documents for legal adoption and introduced themselves as the parents of the baby. They lured a childless couple to the adoption of the infant for five lakh rupees. During the investigation, the police analysed the CCTV footage of the cameras in the vicinity and spotted a lady carrying the missing baby, whereas another lady Ikrat alias Guddi, who called the police station to file the missing complaint, was seen following her. In the footage, the two were seen together and it came to light that Ikrat is the niece of the baby's mother and had been living with the family. On interrogation, Ikrat identified the lady carrying the baby as Renu who runs a grocery shop in Kanjhawla. She also revealed the involvement of the infant's father in the case who wanted to sell the baby following serious financial issues. The accused admitted that she had administered sedatives to the mother of a child in order to steal the baby from her custody. She, along with co-accused Renu, Gudia, and Moni went to Noida Extension in an IVF clinic and handed over the boy to Yogesh, Sonam and Rekha who work as consultants in the IVF Clinic and have access to all the data regarding childless couples. They lured a childless family for adoption through legal procedures. Renu, Ikrat, Gudiya and Moni were offered Rs 50,000 each whereas, 1 Lakh rupees were handed over to the father of the infant. Further, in the case of accused Yogesh, the police recovered the kidnapped baby from Faridabad, Haryana. The baby was taken into police possession and further handed over to his mother after producing him before the Child Welfare Committee in the Rohini area of New Delhi. (ANI)
The first case of the 'XE' variant of COVID-19 was detected in Mumbai, according to the statement by the Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation on Wednesday. However, the Union Health Ministry is yet to confirm the detection of the first XE variant in the country. According to the sources, the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG) is doing a deep genomic analysis of the case as a follow-up declared XE positive by BMC. The results for the 11th test under the COVID genome sequencing were announced today. As many as 230 samples were tested, out of which 228 tested Omicron variant positive and one was 'Kapa' variant positive. One sample tested positive for the 'XE' variant of COVID-19. "Covid virus samples from 230 patients in Mumbai have been studied in the 11th batch and its results have been announced. It found 228, or 99.13 per cent, patients with Omicron. It was concluded that one of the other two victims was affected by the 'Kapa' variant and the other by the 'XE' variant," said the statement. However, the 21 patients who were hospitalised and tested positive did not need oxygen support or intensive care, as per the statement. According to the sources, the patient is a costume designer by profession and a member of the shooting crew. As per guidelines regular testing was carried out. She arrived from South Africa on February 10. She does not have any travel history prior to that and is vaccinated with both doses of the Comirnaty vaccine. On arrival in India, she was negative for COVID-19. However, on March 2, in routine testing, she was found positive and was quarantined in a hotel room at Taj Lane End hotel. The result of the test done on the next day, i.e. on March 3 was negative. Speaking to ANI earlier, Dr Pragya Yadav Top Scientist, ICMR- NIV said that the XE variant is being closely monitored by the WHO. "XE belongs to the Omicron variant until significant differences in transmission and disease characteristics, including severity, may be reported. The variant is being closely monitored by WHO for the public health risk associated," she said. Notably, the variant was first detected in the United Kingdom on January 19. XE is recombinant of Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 sublineages of COVID-19. According to the World Health Organization (WHO)'s latest report, the new mutant called XE may be more transmissible than any strain of COVID-19 reported so far. (ANI)
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Wednesday inaugurated the Air Force Commanders' Conference (AFCC) at Air Headquarters in New Delhi. The conference was attended by Union Minister of State for Defence Ajay Bhatt and Defence Secretary Dr Ajay Kumar, along with senior commanders of the Indian Air Force. After the conference, Rajnath Singh said that he discussed preparedness, upcoming challenges and the tasks ahead. "Addressed the IAF Commanders Conference at Vayu Bhawan today and shared my thoughts on issues pertaining to preparedness, upcoming challenges and the tasks ahead. The issues discussed in the conference are significant, pertinent and forward-looking," the Defence Minister tweeted. Speaking to the senior commanders, Rajnath Singh stated that the topics being discussed in AFCC were relevant and contemporary in the-present context, and covered the entire canvas of issues/ challenges that are being faced by the nation. He brought out that he was happy to observe that the directions given by higher authorities were comprehensively being discussed in the conference and would be the guiding light for all future courses of action. He covered the challenges being faced on the Northern and Western borders and expressed his satisfaction with the way Indian Armed Forces have been able to respond to emerging situations. The Defence Minister praised the Indian Air Force's evacuation effort in Operation Ganga which has been appreciated by the country. He brought out that the current geopolitical situation has again highlighted the need for indigenisation. The Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal VR Chaudhari, subsequently addressed the commanders and asked them to be ready to meet all challenges and enhance their capabilities for responding in multiple domains at short notice. He also emphasised the need for conserving assets, optimally utilising resources and the need for joint manship to enhance National Security. To provide a boost to the growing indigenous drone industry, Hon'ble Raksha Mantri launched the "MEHAR BABA COMPETITION - II". The competition is aimed at developing technology for a "Swarm Drone-based system to detect Foreign Objects on Aircraft Operating Surfaces". During the three-day conference, the Air Force Commanders will discuss important issues related to future challenges in a Hi-tech and evolving operational scenario. The theme for this Conference is 'Optimising human resources' and the focus will be on the conduct of operations in a smart and efficient manner. Mitigation of threats posed by drones will also be brainstormed during the conference. (ANI)
With the aim to provide enhanced facilities, New Delhi Railway Station and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, Mumbai have been identified for redevelopment under the Hybrid Built-Operate-Transfer model, said Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Wednesday. For the development of Railway stations, the Ministry of Railways has formulated various developmental schemes like Model, Modern and Adarsh Station Schemes for upgradation or augmentation of stations on Indian Railways. In a written reply to a question in Lok Sabha, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw informed that New Delhi Railway Station and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus are identified for development under the Hybrid Built-Operate-Transfer model of Public-Private Partnership (PPP). He also informed in his reply that 1,253 railway stations over Indian Railways have been identified for development under Adarsh Station Scheme. Out of these, 1,213 railway stations have been developed and the remaining 40 stations are targeted for development in the financial year 2022-23. In his reply, the Minister stated that presently, railway stations are upgraded under Adarsh Station Scheme based on identified need of providing enhanced passenger amenities. Vaishnaw further said that a new scheme of major upgradation of railway stations has been initiated. The facilities envisaged in this scheme include rebuilding, improvement or augmentation of station building, congestion-free non-conflicting entry/exit to the station premises, segregation of arrival/departure of passengers, adequate concourse without overcrowding, integration of both sides of the city wherever feasible, user-friendly signages, well illuminated circulating area and sufficient provision for drop off, pick up and parking, etc. All facilities of Divyangjans among other facilities as per requirement and feasibility will be provided. So far 41 stations have been identified for major upgradation under this scheme. Two railway stations, Rani Kamlapati and Gandhinagar were developed and commissioned on November 15, 2021, and July 16, 2021, respectively. One more station, Sir M Visvesvaraya Terminal, Bengaluru is ready for commissioning, Vaishnaw added in his reply. (ANI)
Ministry of Earth Sciences, through the India Meteorological Department (IMD), has issued forecasts and warnings for thunderstorms and associated weather phenomena five days in advance with regular updates, said a press release by the Ministry. Dr Jitendra Singh, Minister of State for Science and Technology, in a written reply in Lok Sabha today, informed that the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, an autonomous research institution under MoES, has established a lightning location network at 83 places in the country to detect and locate lightning strikes with utmost accuracy. The central processor of this network located at IITM, receives and processes the signal received from the network and identifies the location of lightning strikes with less than 500 metres accuracies. The output from this network is shared with IMD and various State Governments and is used for nowcasting purposes. From National Weather Forecasting Centre in IMD, these forecasts and warnings are given on the meteorological sub-divisional scale whereas State Meteorological Centres issue the same at the district level. In addition to that, thunderstorms and associated disastrous weather phenomena are covered by nowcast (forecast for the next 3 hours issued every 3 hours) in the location/district level by State Meteorological Centres. At present, this facility is extended to all the districts and for about 1084 stations across the country. In 2020, Damini Lightning apps were developed by IITM-Pune. The App is monitoring all lightning activity that is happening over India and alerts the person if lightning is happening near the person by GPS notification within a 20 km and 40 km radius. A detailed description of instructions and precautions is provided in the mobile app while in a lightning prone area. It also provides the lightning warning at the location valid for the next 40 minutes. There are more than 5 lakhs downloads of the Damini app over India. Apart from the above, the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has taken effective steps for mitigation action in the concerned issues. NDMA has issued Guidelines for Action Plan on Thunderstorm & Lightning/ Squall and Strong wind in 2018-2019 and sent to all State Governments/ UTs and uploaded on the website of NDMA. Further, NDMA has taken initiatives as follows: *NDMA issued specific advisories Do's and Don'ts on Thunderstorm and Lightning to State Governments/ UTs for taking necessary action. *NDMA Reviewed the preparedness & mitigation measures on Thunderstorm and Lightning through Video Conferencing (VC) with most affected States. *Develop a protocol for early warning dissemination on Thunderstorm and Lightning, *NDMA produced IEC materials like TVCs, Pocket Books containing do's and don'ts, and audio-visuals on thunderstorms and lightning. *Special panel discussion (TV Debate) on 'AapdakaSaamna' show on Doordarshan. *Doordarshan and All India Radio - NDMA has run a campaign through TV (Doordarshan) and Radio (All India Radio) for awareness generation among masses on 'Thunderstorm & Lightning' during April 2021 in the States prone to the disaster including the North Eastern States and West Bengal. *Social Media campaigns on thunderstorms and lightning are being conducted by NDMA. Do's and don'ts are being shared on NDMA's social media platforms and videos are being continuously posted on Twitter and Facebook. (ANI)
Former Chicago police Superintendent Garry McCarthy is being appointed interim chief of police in southwest suburban Willow Springs.

The appointment will be announced at a news conference Thursday morning at the Willow Springs Village Hall, according to an email sent by the village on Wednesday. The village has about 5,800 people.

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McCarthy was CPD superintendent from 2011 to 2015 while Rahm Emanuel was mayor. Emanuel fired him after the delayed release of a video showing then-Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times.

The former police chief of Willow Springs, Jim Ritz, resigned, creating the vacancy, a spokesman said.

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The residents of Willow Springs support our Police Department and we value living in a safe community, Willow Springs Mayor Melissa Neddermeyer said in the emailed statement. We welcome Garry McCarthy as the Chief of Police for Willow Springs. We are confident in his leadership to oversee our police operations because he is an experienced and well-trained professional.

McCarthy declined to comment on his new job, saying hed rather not get ahead of the mayors announcement on Thursday.

McCarthy ran for mayor of Chicago in 2019, hoping to unseat Emanuel. After Emanuel decided not to seek a third term, McCarthy stayed in the race and finished 10th in the primary.

Former Chicago police Superintendent Garry McCarthy in Chicago on March 21, 2018. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)

Just before the primary election, in January 2019, McCarthy told the Tribune he was not standing in that guys shoes, when asked whether Van Dyke was justified in killing McDonald.

McCarthy was recently working as a security consultant for a Logan Square marijuana dispensary. In 2012, with McCarthys support, Chicago decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana. Still, police continued to make thousands of arrests each year under McCarthy, with Black people and Latinos disproportionately targeted.

McCarthy is set to be sworn in at a Willow Springs Village Board meeting later this month.
The Parliament on Wednesday passed a bill that seeks to make the investigation of crime more expeditious and increase the conviction rate. The Criminal Procedure (Identification) Bill, 2022, bill was passed by Rajya Sabha on Wednesday after a reply by Home Minister Amit Shah. The bill was passed by Lok Sabha on April 4. Amit Shah said the purpose of the bill is to decrease the crime rate, increase the rate of conviction of criminals and boost the security of the country. The Minister said the bill will not compromise the privacy of any individual and that the rules of the Act will be notified after proper scrutiny. "Our law is 'bachha' (nothing) in terms of strictness as compared to other nations. There are more stringent laws in countries like South Africa, UK, Australia, Canada and the US, which is why their conviction rate is better," he said. Shah said the Bill is about safeguarding the "human rights of the victims of crimes, and not just criminals." "We do not have the intention of misusing the provisions of the Bill. It is meant to keep our police ahead of criminals. Next-generation crimes cannot be tackled with old techniques; we have to try to take the criminal justice system to the next era," he said. He sought to allay apprehensions voiced by the opposition about the possible misuse of the new legislation. "Best technology will be used for safeguarding data and there will be the training of manpower," Shah said. The bill provides for legal sanction for taking appropriate body measurements (finger impressions, palm-print and foot-print impressions, photographs, iris and retina scan, physical, and biological samples) of persons who are required to give such measurements to "make the investigation of crime more efficient and expeditious". It also seeks to empower the National Crime Records Bureau to collect, store and preserve the record of measurements and for sharing, dissemination, destruction and disposal of records. It also empowers a magistrate to direct any person to give measurements and empowers police or prison officers to take measurements of any person who resists or refuses to give measurements. A total of 17 members participated in the debate on the Bill. Some opposition members termed the bill "unconstitutional" and that it should be sent to the select committee. (ANI)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday lauded the "rich level of debate" in Lok Sabha on the Ukraine situation and evacuation of Indian citizens through Operation Ganga and said there is bipartisanship on matters of foreign policy which augurs well for India at the world stage. The Prime Minister, who made a series of tweets, said the government will leave no stone unturned to ensure people do not face any troubles in adverse situations. "Over the last few days, Parliament has witnessed a healthy discussion on the situation in Ukraine and India's efforts to bring back our citizens through Operation Ganga. I am grateful to all MP colleagues who enriched this discussion with their views," PM Modi said. "The rich level of debate and the constructive points illustrate how there is bipartisanship when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Such bipartisanship augurs well for India at the world stage. It is our collective duty to care for the safety and well-being of our fellow citizens and the Government of India will leave no stone unturned to ensure our people do not face any troubles in adverse situations," he added. Four union ministers - Hardeep Singh Puri, Kiren Rijiju, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Gen VK Singh - who went to countries neighbouring Ukraine as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's special envoys during the evacuation effort also took part in the debate. Congress members talked of the relevance of principles of non-alignment in the complex geopolitical situation created by the Ukraine-Russia crisis. In his reply to the debate, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said India is "first and foremost" strongly against the conflict. He said no solution can be arrived at by shedding blood, and at the cost of innocent lives and in this day and age, dialogue and diplomacy are the right answers to any dispute. The minister said the contemporary global order has been built on the UN Charter, on respect for international law, and for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states. "If India has chosen a side, it is the side of peace, and it is for an immediate end to violence. This is our principled stand, and it has consistently guided our position in international forums and debates including in the United Nations," Jaishankar said. Participating in the debate, several members lauded the efforts of the government to bring back Indian students from Ukraine. National Conference leader Farooq Abdullah said India "is a neutral country and never took sides". (ANI)
Fortunately, nobody was reported to be injured in the incident. Several fire tenders rushed to the spot to douse the flames. The bus was on route no 534 which plies between Anand Vihar ISBT and Mehrauli.

Meanwhile, Tata Motors which is the manufacturer of the bus did not explain the cause of the fire.

"An unfortunate fire incident occurred on one of the CNG buses in New Delhi. Fortunately, there were no injuries to anyone. While we are unable to comment on specifics pending investigation, we will extend our fullest cooperation to the authorities in identifying the cause. Tata Motors is committed to offering safe and high-quality vehicles for public transport," said Tata Motors spokesperson. (ANI)
BJP OBC Morcha General Secretary Yashpal Suvarna on Wednesday, while reacting to the video statement by Al-Qaeda chief Ayman Al Zawahiri on the hijab row, said that the issue was hatched by the anti-social elements and demanded an NIA enquiry into the matter. "Hijab issue was hatched up by anti-social elements. I had said that these students are not acting like students, they are supported and sponsored by some other anti-social organisations and also terrorist organisations are supporting them," he said. "The government should take a dynamic decision on the issue against such elements. I request the government to take action and also an NIA enquiry into the matter," Suvarna added. Suvarna further said that such issues will "affect the administration and economy." Earlier today, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said Al-Qaeda will never understand the importance of wearing uniforms in educational institutions. "Karnataka High Court gave a clear verdict that it's not expected of a student to wear something else except hijab," he told media persons when asked about the Al-Qaeda video. "If you wear hijab, I will wear something else (it will become an idealogy), then school and college will become a platform for the display of religious clothes and religious behaviour. So, how can then school and college continue (with permitting hijab)? That is why the term uniform came so that there's no difference between Hindus and Muslims. There is no difference between poor and rich," the Chief Minister added. "Al-Qaeda will never understand but I am sure that Indian Muslims will understand that we have to wear uniforms. Once you finish your school and college, you come back to your home and whatever you want to wear, you wear. I am sure that Indian Muslims are with the judiciary," he said. Zawahiri in a video had praised student Muskaan Khan for standing in defence of the headscarf. (ANI)
The Department of Tourism of Rajasthan Government on Wednesday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Federation of Hospitality and Tourism of Rajasthan (FHTR) for organizing the Rajasthan Domestic Travel Mart (RDTM) 2022, said an official release. The MoU was signed between the Director of Tourism, Nishant Jain and the President of FHTR, Apurv Kumar in the presence of Principal Secretary, Tourism, Gayatri Rathore. Speaking on the occasion, Gayatri Rathore said that the objective of the MoU is to promote Rajasthan as the most favourable tourist destination nationally and informed that the second edition of RDTM will be organized from July 22-24, 2022 at Birla auditorium, Jaipur. She said "We are very thankful to the FHTR team for joining hands with us. We would like to take domestic tourism to the next level this year. The tourism sector has a huge potential in terms of attracting investments in hospitality and the development of tourist sites." "Currently tourism sector is contributing 9 per cent of the state GDP and providing employment to about 50 lakh people. With favourable policies being introduced such as Rural Tourism, Film Tourism and Heritage Tourism; the sector will have exponential opportunities," added Gayatri. Signing the MoU, FHTR President Apurv Kumar said that following a long gap of two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federation in collaboration with the State Government is ready to bring back the much-awaited RDTM. "The Mart will bring hospitality operators from the State of Rajasthan and major operators and influencers of tourism from different states under one roof, through B2B meetings. It will also inform and create awareness among the potential buyers of the particular features of the exhibiting hotel, resorts as well as tour operations in different aspects," he said. He further added, "The State Government has been generous in providing a very good budget to the tourism and hospitality industry. The tourism sector has also been declared an industry. It has received the benefits of the industry status which was long pending since 1989. This has given a huge boost to tourism", he said. RDTM is being jointly organized by the Department of Tourism, Government of Rajasthan and FHTR. All the industry associations of Rajasthan like the Hotels and Restaurants Association of Rajasthan (HRAR), Indian Heritage Hotels Association (IHHA) and Rajasthan Association of Tour Operations (RATO) will be supporting the event. RDTM will also receive support from national associations like IATO, ADTAOI, TAAI, TAFI, ATOAI, ICPB and ETAA. This event will prove to be a unique marketing opportunity for hotels, resorts and tour operators to tap into the potential of the Indian domestic tourism market. (ANI)
The delegation discussed the information technology, biotechnology and Startup ecosystem with the Minister.

During this meeting at Vikasa Soudha, Narayan apprised the members of the delegation with regard to IT/Biotechnology, startup, defence research, and technology ecosystem among other things. He also recalled the address made by the Prime Minister of Israel at the Bengaluru Tech Summit (BTS) held in a hybrid model last November.

Taking to Twitter, the Minister said, "Held meeting with a delegation from Israel's National Defence College. Discussed the catalytic role of advanced tech methods in the new digital era in fields like Medical Science, Education, and IT; we are working towards making India more self-sustainable in the upcoming years."

Meanwhile, the members of the delegation explained how topics on national security, international relations, United Nations, European Union, America, Nato, etc are taught in one year course at the National Defense College.

The delegations also expressed appreciation regarding the way startups are growing in the state and assured needed help and guidance. Minister Narayan, informed the delegation that 34 startups from the state have achieved unicorn status.

The delegation included COL (Res) Yehuda Yohananoff, COL Samuel Boumendil, Shai Zontag of Israel Prime Minister's office, Commander Yagel Fink (Israel Police), Commander Nava Barina Ben Shahar (Israel Police), Lt Col Kelly Borukhovich (Air Force - USA), Lt Col Bill Wallace (Marine Corps - USA). (ANI)
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national president JP Nadda on Wednesday interacted with envoys of 13 nations at party headquarters on the occasion of the party's foundation day under its "know BJP" initiative. The BJP aims to foster friendly relations with foreign countries and in this context, he apprised them of the party's history, characteristics, ideology and development initiatives taken under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. BJP's foreign affairs in-charge, Vijay Chauthaiwale, welcomed the foreign diplomats to the event. The national vice president Baijayant Jai Panda, while delivering the inaugural speech, briefed the delegates about the party's ideology and its expansion over the years. Following Panda's speech, a short film on the journey of the party from 1951 till date was shown to the delegates. Out of the three-hour stay of the Head of the Missions to BJP HQ, 50 per cent of the time was spent in the question and answer session of Nadda with the Diplomats. "I welcome you to the headquarters of the biggest political party. The journey of the BJP from nothing to today has been full of difficulties and struggles. Today, we have completed 42 years as a party but our history dates back to 1951 with the establishment of Jan Sangh," said Nadda. He added that the party has never sacrificed its ideology since the party's establishment. "Without compromising on principles and ideology, it has been our commitment to building a new India on the basis of cultural nationalism, mankind and Antyodaya. Every effort we put in through our protests or governments is in line to achieve these objectives," he added. The various events planned by BJP will take place for the entire week starting from April 6 and will conclude with the commemoration of Ambedkar Jayanti on April 14. The party workers are directed to organise various events on the block level from April 6 to 14. "Cleaning lakes, blood donation camps, health checkups and vaccinations camps" are among some of the events BJP workers have been asked to organize. On April 14, party workers will celebrate Ambedkar Jayanti by organising various events in residential areas of the poor. (ANI)
The Defence Ministry will come up with a third positive indigenisation list of major equipment and platforms on Friday, in steps towards achieving self-reliance in defence manufacturing through banning of import of these equipment and platforms. This third list builds on the first list of 101 items and second list of 108 items that were promulgated on August 21, 2020 and May 31, 2021 respectively. The major items in the first list include 155mm/39 Cal ultra-light howitzers, the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Mk-IA-enhanced indigenised content, conventional submarines, and communication satellites GSAT-7C. The major items in the second list include next generation corvettes, land-based MRSAM weapon system, smart anti-field weapon system (SAAW) Mk-I, onboard oxygen generation system (OBOGS) based integrated life support system for fighter aircraft and 1000HP engine for tank (T-72). The third list will consist of over 100 items, including complex equipment and systems which are being developed and likely to translate into firm orders over the next five years. Orders worth more than Rs 2,10,000 crore are likely to be placed on the Industry in the next five years as part of the items covered in the third list. With the notification, over 300 sophisticated items will be covered, ranging from complex weapon systems to critical platforms such as armoured vehicles, combat aircraft, submarines etc. Since the notification of the first and second lists, contracts for 31 projects worth Rs 53,839 crore have been signed by the armed forces. Acceptance of Necessity (AoNs) for 83 projects worth Rs 1,77,258 crore have been accorded. In addition, cases worth Rs 2,93,741 crore will be progressed in the next five-seven years. The notification of the third list is a major initiative to achieve self-reliance in defence manufacturing and shows the growing confidence of the government in the domestic industry that they can create and supply equipment of international standards to meet the demand of the armed forces. The aim of 'Aatmanirbhar Bharat' as envisioned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to achieve sustained security, essential for a sovereign nation, without relying on imports from other countries. The objective is to build the domestic industry in order to make India a defence manufacturing hub which not only caters to the domestic needs, but also fulfils international requirements. --IANS sk/vd ( 390 Words) 2022-04-06-19:27:58 (IANS)
In a major breakthrough in the energy trading sector, Nepal has received permission to export an additional 325 MW of electricity to the Indian energy market. The Indian Central Electricity Authority has given approval to the Nepal Electricity Authority to sell an additional 325 MW of electricity in the Indian market, Nepals Energy Minister Pampha Bhusal said during a press conference on Wednesday. Earlier, Nepal had permission to export only 39 MW of electricity to the Indian Energy Exchange. With this new decision in effect, Nepal will now be allowed to export 364 MW of electricity. Nepal and India had signed various agreements during a recent visit of Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba to India. Those agreements are being implemented gradually, according to the Ministry of Energy, Water Resource and Irrigation. For this new facility, we want to thank the government of India, said Bhusal adding that during the recent visit of Prime Minister Deuba to India we signed a Nepal-India Joint Vision Statement on Power Sector Cooperation which has come into effect. Although Nepal has been making efforts for a long time to sell the surplus electricity produced during the monsoon in the regional market, it has not been successful. During the India visit of Prime Minister Deuba from April 1-3, India congratulated Nepal on its significant progress in the power sector including becoming a near power surplus country. "Prime Minister Deuba appreciated India's recent cross-border electricity trade regulations that have enabled key partners like Nepal to access India's market and trade power with India. He also acknowledged with appreciation India's contribution to developing Nepal's power sector, through capacity building and direct support to infrastructure projects related to generation and transmission," said a statement issued by India's Ministry of External Affairs on August 2 after delegation level talks between Deuba and his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi. During the visit, both Prime Ministers had agreed that there are unprecedented opportunities for expanding and further strengthening mutually beneficial bilateral cooperation in the power sector including joint development of power generation projects in Nepal; development of cross-border transmission infrastructure; bi-directional power trade with appropriate access to electricity markets in both countries based on mutual benefits; market demand and applicable domestic regulations of each country; coordinated operation of the national grids and institutional cooperation in sharing latest operational information, technology and know-how. To expand such cooperation to include their partner countries under the BBIN (Bhutan, Bangladesh, India and Nepal) framework subject to mutually agreed terms and conditions between all involved parties. Based on their respective national policies and climate-change commitments, to make renewable energy production, hydropower in particular, a cornerstone of their energy partnership, the statement read. "That Indian investment into Nepal's renewable power sector, in particular the hydropower sector, has the potential to benefit both the countries by strengthening their economies, generating employment, enhancing export earnings and contributing to further development of industrial and financial capacities, and mutually agreed sharing of other benefits." Nepal, during the meeting between Deuba and Modi also invited Indian companies to invest in the development, construction and operation of viable renewable power projects, including in the hydropower sector. including storage-type projects through mutually beneficial partnerships. The Prime Ministers of both the countries have described the Common Vision as the biggest achievement so far in the energy sector. It is believed that this will pave the way for exporting surplus electricity to India, Bangladesh and Bhutan. "It is a matter of happiness that Nepal is exporting her surplus electricity to India. This will make a huge contribution to Nepal's economic progress," Modi had said addressing the joint press conference with Deuba on Saturday. "I feel further happiness that we are going to accept Nepal's proposal to sell additional electricity in India." Modi's statement allayed longstanding Nepalese fears that India may refuse to procure surplus electricity generated in Nepal, assuring that proposals for import of Nepali electricity will be accepted. Nepal is currently buying electricity from India during the dry season but will be able to sell surplus elicitricty to India during the rainy season. --IANS giri/bg ( 693 Words) 2022-04-06-20:24:08 (IANS)
Senior Congress leader and former Union Minister KV Thomas will put an end to the anticipation over his participation in a seminar of CPI(M) at 11 am on Thursday. A seminar of CPI (M) has been organised in Kerala's Kannur from April 6 to April 10. Thomas has said that the decision to attend the seminar will be announced in a press meeting on Thursday. He has been invited for a seminar on April 9 at 5.00 pm on the subject of 'Centre-State Relations'. Earlier, the CPI(M) has also invited Shashi Tharoor for attending two seminars as part of the 23rd party congress of CPIM which is going on in the Kannur district of Kerala. After denying permission by the AICC for both leaders, Tharoor backtracked from his decision of attending the seminar, however, the former Union Minister has continuously approached Congress President Sonia Gandhi for permission. But Sonia Gandhi refused his request twice. In the meantime, Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) President K Sudhakaran made it clear that no one is above the party. Speaking to mediapersons here, Sudhakaran said, "We have taken a stance. If one is to remain with the party, one must follow the party policy. If I am not toeing the party line, then I too must be expelled. If KV Thomas wishes to exit from the party, he can do so. But I am sure that he will not do it. He will not attend the CPI(M) seminar also." (ANI)
Tim Mapes, former chief of staff to Michael Madigan, gestures at the Illinois State Capitol in 2010. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune)

Michael Madigan was still the most powerful politician in the state when two FBI agents went to Springfield in 2019 and asked his former chief of staff to sit down for coffee, according to a court filing unsealed Wednesday.

Two years later, a memo that the former Madigan staffer, Tim Mapes, wrote to himself about the unusual meeting was shown to him during questioning before a federal grand jury, where Mapes had been granted immunity in exchange for his sworn testimony about his former boss, the filing stated.

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This memo was the only document they showed (Mapes) to refresh his admittedly foggy memory of events, and it did the trick, Mapes lawyers wrote in a motion to dismiss made public in U.S. District Court. Mr. Mapes remembered the meeting after being shown the document.

What Mapes discussed with the FBI was not revealed, but the conversation was among several new details included in the motion asking U.S. District Judge John Lee to dismiss large portions of the obstruction of justice indictment against Mapes.

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The 11-page indictment alleged Mapes repeatedly lied during a March 31, 2021, appearance before the grand jury when asked about Madigans relationship with his longtime confidant Michael McClain, who was charged in 2020 with orchestrating a bribery scheme by Commonwealth Edison to shower money on Madigans associates in exchange for the speakers help with legislation in Springfield.

Mapes also lied when he said he had no knowledge that McClain had communicated with two unnamed state representatives in 2018 on Madigans behalf, the indictment alleged. The Tribune reported they are Rep. Bob Rita of Blue Island and former Rep. Lou Lang of Skokie.

Mapes is one of the closest advisers from Madigans extremely small circle of trusted associates to face federal charges. He has denied wrongdoing and maintained that federal authorities are attempting to squeeze him to give up incriminating information on Madigan.

His indictment in May 2021 caught many by surprise, particularly since he was granted immunity from prosecution by the U.S. attorneys office and warned by the chief judge before his testimony before the grand jury that failing to answer truthfully could result in criminal charges against him.

His attorneys have said in court filings their defense will include that Madigan kept information close to the vest and kept private conversations with others private, and that McClain often talked mysteriously, cryptically, and oddly  including about and when referring to Madigan.

House Speaker Michael Madigan, left, with his chief of staff Tim Mapes in the Illinois State Capitol in 2015. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune)

According to the motion unsealed Tuesday, Mapes was asked more than 650 questions over hours of testimony that day, and that Mapes did his best to answer truthfully.

In his testimony, Mapes gave high-level examples of McClain passing along pieces of information providing his perspective to Madigan on various matters, attorney Andrew Porter stated in the motion.

But when questions turned to Mapes recollection of specific phone calls and dates, his memory was admittedly hazy, the motion stated.

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At one point, immediately before one of the answers that prosecutors say was a lie, Mapes told the grand jury he had no recollection of an event, but could come back to it later if he was shown something and it pops my memory, the motion stated.

The prosecutor did not follow up on any of these matters  nor did the prosecutor attempt to refresh Mr. Mapes recollection on any specific subject matters that could pop Mr. Mapes memory, Porter said.

The new filing reveals the FBI has recordings in which McClain and Mapes talked after Mr. Mapes retirement in 2018. But Porter wrote that none of those recordings prove Mapes was lying three years later when he told the grand jury he couldnt recall specific tasks or assignments that he and McClain had talked about.

Indeed, the government never played those conversations for Mr. Mapes in the grand jury, the motion stated. Nor did the government even reference those conversations in an attempt to refresh his memory or to probe his understanding of what Mr. McClain was talking about during those conversations.

Madigan and McClain were indicted last month on racketeering conspiracy charges alleging a range of corruption schemes spanning more than a decade, including the scheme involving ComEd. Both have pleaded not guilty.

In addition to their motion to dismiss, Mapes attorneys also filed a second motion Friday asking that references to him being granted immunity by prosecutors be stricken from the indictment against him.

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Mapes attorneys say there was no legal reason for prosecutors to include the references to immunization and speculated in their filing that prosecutors were putting other witnesses on notice about the weapons at its disposal if they didnt testify as expected.

One possible motive for adding such language to the indictment is to send a signal to other witnesses with whom the government was attempting to meet in 2021 concerning its investigation of Mr. Madigan, the motion stated. While the government may have had a motive to publicize to other potential witnesses the weapons at its disposal, the fact of immunization has no relevance to the charges against Mr. Mapes.

Lee gave prosecutors two weeks to respond. A status hearing was set for June 1.

Mapes lost his public positions as Madigans chief of staff and House clerk in 2018, when a staffer accused Mapes of sexual harassment over several years and fostering a culture of sexism, harassment and bullying that creates an extremely difficult working environment.

jmeisner@chicagotribune.com

rlong@chicagotribune.com
Boasting about the government's achievement, Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri on Tuesday said that Operation Ganga which was undertaken to evacuate the stranded Indians from war-torn Ukraine was one of the most well-coordinated and successful evacuation missions anywhere in the world. Puri was speaking in the Lok Sabha during a discussion on the situation in Ukraine. "Operation Ganga will rank as one of the most well-coordinated and successful humanitarian evacuation missions undertaken by any country, anywhere," the Union Minister for Housing and Urban Affairs said. He further talked about the involvement of the government in the Operation from the level of the Prime Minister to the External Affairs Minister and said, "we were worried about the welfare of each one of our citizens." He gave the example of Budapest in Hungary where he was deputed by the government to coordinate the evacuation efforts. "One evening in Budapest, suddenly 1700 people came because there was clogging at the border of Romania and Poland and some people were just being pushed down... we still managed... we increased the number of flights from 4 to 7 to 11 in a day," he said. Hardeep Singh Puri was one of the four cabinet ministers who were deputed to the neighbouring countries of Ukraine to coordinate the evacuation efforts on the ground, the other ministers being, Kiren Rijiju, Jyotiraditya Scindia and VK Singh. "The prime minister was working the telephone lines... he was speaking to the heads of state and government, not only in the Russian Federation, not only in Ukraine but all the others," Hardeep Puri further said. Earlier in March, the External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar in a written statement laid on the table of Rajya Sabha said that the government has been able to safely bring home 22,500 Indian citizens and 147 foreign nationals belonging to 18 countries from Ukraine since February 2022. In addition, the Union Minister also briefly talked about the recent fuel price hike, saying that the fuel prices hiked in India are 1/10th of prices hiked in other countries. "Fuel prices hiked in India are 1/10th of prices hiked in other countries. Comparing gasoline (petrol) prices between April 2021 and March 22, the prices in the US have increased by 51 per cent, Canada 52 per cent, Germany by 55 per cent, UK 55 per cent, France 50 per cent, Spain 58 per cent but in India 5 per cent," the Union Minister said. (ANI)
Netherlands is looking forward to India's December Presidency of the G20, King Willem Alexander said on Tuesday during a State Banquet at Royal Palace hosted in honour of President Ram Nath Kovind. King Alexander in his speech said that the country is honoured by President Kovind's visit to the Netherlands. "This is a special year for your country. Seventy-five years ago, India gained its independence. The international community welcomed a new, self-assured country full of amazing potential and talented people. ...We feel privileged to celebrate the 75th anniversary of independence with you, and we congratulate the people of India on all their diversity," King of Netherlands said. During his speech, King Alexander recalled his 2019 India visit, saying that it's hard to believe how much has changed since then. "A few months after our last meeting the world was hit by a pandemic that has sorely tested us all. I know how severe the impact has been in India. And in the Netherlands, too, we have wrestled with the terrible effects of this crisis. I am grateful that we were able to support each other actively in that difficult time." "In August 1947, the Netherlands was among the first countries to establish diplomatic relations with independent India. Our ambassador was present in the Indian parliament when Nehru proclaimed independence," King said in his banquet speech. The King further said the Netherlands is proud that the friendship between the two countries has only deepened in the past 75 years. "And we are grateful that, over the years, we've been able to welcome so many Indians to our country, as students, researchers, IT specialists and entrepreneurs. A number of them are here with us this evening." Willem Alexander said his wife, who supports the UN Secretary-General as Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development, has told him about India's impressive achievements in combating poverty. "Hundreds of millions of people have gained access to financial services. An incredible leap forward." "As an economic power, India has a decisive role in global efforts to reach the UN Sustainable development Goals. The eyes of the world are on India, and they're full of expectation," he added. During his address, King further noted the effects of climate change, which is damaging our living environment. "The earth's natural resources are under threat, and our economies are under pressure. Agriculture, in particular, is feeling the impact," he added. "The Netherlands has the technology to ensure that, in times of drought, not a single drop of water is wasted. And we're proud we can share it with you. Obviously, it's just as important that we tackle the cause of climate change and transition together to renewable energy. That's an area in which we can learn a lot from you." He noted how over a third of the electricity in India comes from renewable sources. "I'm confident that we can strengthen each other further. For example, with offshore wind energy," he added. Praising India's cultural riches and diversity, the King of the Netherlands said that diversity deserves to be cherished and protected. "India is the land of Bollywood and brilliant scientists. Of the Himalayas and high-tech. Of Mahatma Gandhi and megacities. Of the Ramayana the rule of law," he said. (ANI) +
Sri Lanka President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on Tuesday issued a notification revoking the proclamation issued declaring the State of Emergency, as the island nation continue to stare at the countrywide protests over the severe economic crisis. The State of Emergency will be revoked from midnight of April 5, 2022, the English language newspaper Daily Mirror reported. Earlier, Rajapaksa had announced an emergency in the country to ensure "public security and maintenance of public order." Anti-government protests continue to take place in the island nation, demanding solutions to the current economic crisis. An emergency health situation has been declared in Sri Lanka today, due to a severe shortage of medicines in the country. Sri Lanka is battling a severe economic crisis with food and fuel scarcity affecting a large number of the people in the island nation. The economy has been in a free-fall since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sri Lanka is also facing a foreign exchange shortage, which has, incidentally, affected its capacity to import food and fuel, leading to the power cuts in the country. The shortage of essential goods forced Sri Lanka to seek assistance from friendly countries. On Sunday, 26 Sri Lankan Cabinet Ministers resigned en masse from their positions amid rising public anger against the government over the economic crisis. All 26 of them signed a general letter, consenting to resign paving the way for a new Cabinet to be formed, Daily Mirror reported. The United States on Tuesday said it is deeply concerned about the economic situation in Sri Lanka and urged authorities in the island nation to exercise restraint and avoid social media blackouts. "We are deeply concerned about the economic situation in Sri Lanka. All have the right to peacefully protest and voice their views. We urge authorities to exercise restraint and to avoid social media blackouts and arrests under the Prevention of Terrorism Act in response," US State Department spokesperson Ned Price tweeted. (ANI)
In what is likely its strongest statement on the Ukraine situation so far, India on Tuesday "unequivocally condemned" the killings of civilians in Bucha after hearing Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and UN officials giving heart-rending descriptions of the atrocities in the city. "Recent reports of civilian killings in Bucha are deeply disturbing. We unequivocally condemn these killings and support the call for an independent investigation," India's Permanent Representative to the UN, T.S. Tirumurti, said at the Security Council. While making probably the harshest criticism of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, Tirumurti straddled the fine line of neutrality by not naming Russia. "India continues to remain deeply concerned at the worsening situation and reiterates its call for immediate cessation of violence and end to hostilities," he said. "We continue to emphasise to all member states of the UN that the global order is anchored on international law, UN Charter and respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty of states," he added in an implied criticism of Russia. Over the weekend, harrowing images of atrocities against civilians in Bucha dominated the Security Council meeting. Before Tirumurti spoke, Zelensky through a video link said that in Bucha, "there is not a single crime that they (Russia) would not commit" and listed a range of horrific atrocities that he said had been committed by the Russian troops that withdrew from the city near Kiev. He likened the atrocities there to those committed by the Islamic State terrorist organisations in the Middle East. He showed the Council a video that he said documented what he called war crimes, showing piles of bodies, some with hands bound. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the Security Council, "I will never forget the horrifying images of civilians killed in Bucha." "I am also deeply shocked by the personal testimony of rapes and sexual violence that are now emerging," he added, while calling for an independent inquiry into the matter. Russia's Permanent Representative to UN< Vasily Nebenzia, asserted that some images in the video were staged and others showed victims of Ukrainian forces or "neo-Nazis" and questioned the timeline of the video and other images that have emerged. UN Under-Secretary-General, Rosemary DiCarlo, said, "The horror deepened this past week as shocking images emerged of dead civilians, some with hands bound, lying on the streets of Bucha, the town near Kiev formerly held by Russian forces. Many bodies were also found in a mass grave in the same locality." "Reports by non-governmental organisations and media also allege summary executions of civilians, rape and looting in Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Kiev regions," she added. As the invasion continues into its second month, Tirumurti said, "The situation in Ukraine has not shown any significant improvement since the Council last discussed the issue. The security situation has only deteriorated, as well as its humanitarian consequences." He added, "When innocent human lives are at stake, diplomacy must prevail as the only viable option. In this context, we take note of the ongoing efforts, including the meetings held recently between the concerned parties," he added. Representatives of Russia and Ukraine have held in-person meetings in Turkey and followed it up with virtual talks, but with no sign of a ceasefire yet. In addition, Guterres has designated Under-Secretary-General Martin Griffiths for a UN peace effort in Ukraine. He had visited Moscow over the weekend. Tirumurti said that New Delhi hoped the international community would continue to support humanitarian efforts in Ukraine, adding, "We stand ready to provide more medical supplies to Ukraine in the coming days." India has already sent medicines and relief materials to Ukraine and its neighbours, he said. (Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed @arulouis) --IANS al/arm ( 630 Words) 2022-04-05-22:30:09 (IANS)
Slamming Imran Khan over his "move to dissolve the Parliament rather than face a no-confidence," Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Tuesday that the action "effectively deprives Pakistani citizens of their right to choose their government". The New York-based watchdog said that the "move has plunged Pakistan into constitutional crisis". It added that the legal experts, journalists, and rights groups have condemned the April 3 actions "as an assault on the country's democracy". "Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan's move on Sunday to dissolve parliament rather than face a no-confidence vote that could remove him from power effectively deprives Pakistani citizens of their right to choose their government," the HRW said. Pakistani President Arif Alvi on Sunday dissolved the Pakistani parliament following Khan's advice. Imran Khan made the proposal minutes after parliament's deputy speaker rejected a motion of no confidence in him as "unconstitutional."Pakistan media and opposition parties criticised this decision saying that it violated all rules governing proceedings in the House. "The move has plunged Pakistan into constitutional crisis. Under Pakistan's constitution, the prime minister ceases to hold office if a majority of the National Assembly votes for a motion of no confidence - Imran Khan's party appeared to have lost its majority by April 3. The action allows Khan to continue as prime minister until a caretaker government takes over, with neither a national assembly nor a federal cabinet," the rights watchdog said. The rights watchdog said Imran Khan's dissolution of parliament to prevent it from voting so that he could remain in office threatens core democratic principles. "It infringes on the rights of Pakistani citizens to choose their government, which is protected under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The government's threatened use of violence, allegations of treason, and abrogation of the constitution are hallmarks of dictatorship, which Pakistanis have previously endured and should not have to endure again," the HRW said. On Tuesday, the Chief Justice of Pakistan Umar Ata Bandial said that constitutional orders are above the rules of the national assembly, Geo News reported. "SC does not practice interference in foreign policy or state policy affairs. It would be easier for us if the case is examined in the light of law and Constitution instead of policy issues," Bandial remarked during the hearing of the case filed against the dissolution of the Pakistan Parliament. (ANI)
The UN human rights office (OHCHR) on Tuesday expressed concern over the deepening economic crisis in Sri Lanka and urged the government to defuse tensions peacefully. The situation in the island nation has worsened and there have been shortages of food and fuel, along with power cuts, prompting new protests by desperate Sri Lankans, OHCHR Spokesperson Liz Throssell said in a statement. OHCHR Spokesperson said her office was "concerned that such measures are aimed at preventing or discouraging people from legitimately expressing their grievances through peaceful protests, and that they frustrate the exchange of views on matters of public interest". "We are closely following developments in Sri Lanka where in the past few days the authorities announced a state of emergency and other restrictions in response to mass protests against the country's worst economic crisis in decades," she added. Sri Lanka is experiencing its worst economic crisis since its independence. The crisis is caused by a shortage of foreign currency resulting from the restriction of tourist flow due to the coronavirus pandemic, as a result of which the country cannot buy enough fuel. The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the island's tourism sector, a key source of foreign currency, sharply, and remittances from Sri Lankans working abroad have also declined. There is an acute shortage of food and essential supplies, fuel and gas in the country. The authorities of Sri Lanka previously imposed a curfew on the island, which was valid until Monday, and limited access to all social networks. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on Tuesday lifted a state of emergency in the country imposed on April 1. The UN Human Rights Office said it will continue to closely watch developments. "As the High Commissioner noted in her recent report to the Human Rights Council in February, the drift towards militarisation and the weakening of institutional checks and balances in Sri Lanka have affected the State's ability to effectively tackle the economic crisis and ensure the realization of the economic, social and cultural rights of all people in Sri Lanka," Throssell said. "We urge the Government, political parties and civil society to engage in immediate, inclusive and meaningful dialogue to find a solution for the pressing economic and political challenges that Sri Lanka faces and to avoid further polarization of the situation," she added. (ANI)
"On April 5 Special Representative for the DPRK Sung Kim met with the People's Republic of China (PRC) Special Representative for Korean Peninsula Affairs Liu Xiaoming in Washington, D.C., to discuss recent developments in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)," US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in a statement.

Price said Special Representative Kim condemned the DPRK's March 24 ICBM launch, the latest in a series of increasingly escalatory actions by the DPRK.

Kim noted that each of the DPRK's 13 ballistic missile launches this year constituted clear violations of multiple UN Security Council resolutions and posed a serious threat to regional stability, and reiterated the importance of responding firmly to these escalatory actions.

"Kim reaffirmed that the United States is committed to engage in serious and sustained diplomacy with the DPRK," the State Department spokesperson added.

The two envoys also discussed opportunities to advance the "shared goal of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula and how to encourage the DPRK to engage in meaningful negotiations," Price added.

On Monday, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's sister, Kim Yo Jong, said her country will use nuclear weapons if threatened by South Korea.

She said it was "a very big mistake" on the part of the South Korean defence minister to speak about a preventive strike against North Korea. (ANI)
Members of the East Turkistani or Uyghur diaspora, led by the East Turkistan Government in Exile, in Istanbul, the Washington DC metropolitan area, and the Canadian cities of Toronto and Edmonton peacefully demonstrated to commemorate Baren Revolution that erupted on April 5, 1990, which became to known as the Baren Massacre. In the spring of 1990, Baren Township, near Kashgar, in Chinese Occupied East Turkistan, suffered under a reign of Chinese terror unlike any other. As part of its decades-long campaign of colonization, forced assimilation, and population control, China's government was forcing Uyghurs and other Turkic women to abort their babies. The villagers of Baren finally had enough. At the time they had suffered under 41 years of Chinese colonization and occupation and they have just seen 250 local women robbed of their babies. So they peacefully protested and when that failed they took up arms to defend themselves from the Chinese invaders. The Chinese occupation forces responded by flooding Baren Township with People's Liberation Army soldiers, and they began a massive massacre of innocent civilians, including women and children. According to different sources, anywhere from hundreds to thousands of innocent Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples were massacred with heavy weaponry and airstrikes. Dozens of East Turkistan in Istanbul condemned the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) for remaining silent against China's ongoing genocide and urged Turkey and the Turkish people to act against China's genocide in East Turkistan. "We condemn the silence of the Muslim world and Muslim organizations like the Organization for Islamic Cooperation for not only standing silent but also supporting China's genocide of the Muslim majority Turkic peoples of Occupied East Turkistan," said Fatmagul Cakan, the Istanbul Representative of the East Turkistan Government in Exile. "We call on the Turkish state and the Turkish people to act against the genocide of their fellow Turkic brothers and sisters in East Turkistan," she added. In Washington, DC, the East Turkistan Government in Exile along with the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement held a demonstration with over a dozen Uyghurs in front of the White House where they urged the U.S. to act against China's genocide in East Turkistan as well as the growing Chinese hegemony. "Governments, including the Government of the United States must pressure the International Criminal Court to start investigations before UN Human Rights Commissioner Michele Bachelet's visit to East Turkistan in May. Furthermore, governments, especially the U.S. Government must also file a parallel case at the International Court of Justice," said Prime Minister Salih Hudayar of the East Turkistan Government in Exile. "We again urge the U.S. Government to uphold its commitments to freedom and human rights by supporting East Turkistan and its peoples by recognizing East Turkistan as an Occupied Country, accepting more Uyghur refugees and being a voice of freedom and justice on the international stage. We urge the U.S. Government and its allies across the world to support East Turkistan in the same way that they are supporting Ukraine," he added. In Toronto, Canada, the East Turkistan Government in Exile along with the East Turkistan Youth Association of Canada held a march to commemorate the Baren Massacre and urged the Canadian Government to act to end China's campaign of colonization, genocide, and occupation in East Turkistan. "We urge Canada to uphold its treaty obligations and act against China's ongoing genocide in East Turkistan," said Haji Mahmut, the Deputy Prime Minister of the East Turkistan Government in Exile. "We also call on Canada's Government to secure the immediate release of Uyghur Canadian citizen Huseyin Celil who has been unlawfully imprisoned by China for the past 16 years," he added. The East Turkistan Government in Exile honours all those killed during the Baren Revolution of April 1990 as martyrs and sees it as a symbol of East Turkistan's will to restore their independence. (ANI)
Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Umar Ata Bandial on Tuesday said that the Supreme Court would only look into the legality of Pakistan National Assembly (NA) Deputy Speaker Qasim Suri's rejection of the no-confidence motion moved by the Opposition against the Prime Minister Imran Khan-led government. While hearing the arguments from the Pakistan Muslim League-N's (PML-N) counsel Makhdoom Ali Khan on the rejection of the no-confidence motion, Bandil said that the court will not interfere in foreign policy and in the matter of state policies, Dawn reported. On Sunday, the Pakistan National Assembly Deputy Speaker had rejected the no-confidence motion against the Imran Khan government on the grounds that the motion was contradictory to the Pakistan Constitution's Article 5. A five-member larger bench of the apex court, headed by Justice Bandial and comprising Justice Ijazul Ahsan, Justice Muneeb Akhtar, Justice Mohammad Ali Mazhar, and Justice Jamal Khan Mandokhel, is hearing the arguments on the question of the legality of the decision of the Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly, according to Dawn. The PML-N's counsel proposed that the apex court should see the foreign conspiracy matter which was raised by Imran Khan in his address to the nation. "Right now we are looking at the law and Constitution," the CJP replied and also said, "we prefer that a decision be taken on this matter only. We want to see if the court can review the ruling of the Deputy Speaker." The court adjourned the hearing till 11:30 am today. Earlier at today's hearing, Pakistan's Supreme Court sought the record of NA proceedings of Sunday when the no-confidence motion was rejected. Pakistan media and opposition parties criticised the NA Deputy Speaker's decision on the no-confidence motion, saying that it violated all rules governing proceedings of the House. (ANI)
India and Australia Economic Corporation Trade Agreement will help create job opportunities for both countries, said Australian Trade Minister Dan Tehan on Wednesday. Speaking to ANI, the trade minister said that due to the friendship between both countries, there are many opportunities that will spring out of the India-Australia Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement (Ind-Aus ECTA) agreement. "It's gonna bring out the two economies closer together, which will provide jobs here in India and Australia," he told ANI. Furthermore, He thanked Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal for the hard work he made for Ind-Aus ECTA agreement and said that due to the friendship between India and Australia, there are many opportunities that will spring out of this agreement. "Due to the friendship between the two countries, there are many opportunities that will spring out of this agreement -- whether it is research and development and including other areas where we can collaborate in other areas. It will bring out the two economies closer together so that we can work together on geo-strategic cooperation," he said. The newly signed trade pact with Australia is expected to take bilateral trade from the existing USD 27 billion to nearly USD 45-50 billion in the next five years and the government expects one million jobs to be created in India in the next four to five years. The India-Australia Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement (Ind-Aus ECTA), was signed on April 2, 2022, between Indian Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal and Australian Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment, Dan Tehan, in a virtual ceremony in presence of Indian PM Narendra Modi and Australian PM Scott Morrison. Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal on Wednesday paid a visit to the University of Melbourne as part of his three-day visit to Australia. He was accompanied by Australia's Trade Minister Dan Tehan and Allan Myers, Chancellor, University of Melbourne, at the Melbourne Law School in The University of Melbourne. (ANI)
Ald. Raymond Lopez, 15th, announces his run for mayor in a press conference at the Plant, in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, April 6, 2022. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune)

Southwest Side Ald. Raymond Lopez, one of Mayor Lori Lightfoots biggest critics on the City Council, is now trying to succeed her in office.

Lopez, whose ward includes the Back of the Yards and West Englewood neighborhoods, announced Wednesday that he will run for mayor in the 2023 election.

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In a short speech at the Plant, a former industrial factory that has been redeveloped into a brewery and commercial space, Lopez focused on high crime in Chicago and promised to support the citys first responders. He also said he would fire police Superintendent David Brown, Lightfoots pick to head the department.

My No. 1 goal is safety, Lopez said. We must prioritize safety in our city or else nothing will happen.

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Lightfoot has not formally declared her campaign for reelection but is widely expected to seek a second term and has strongly hinted she will run. In January, for instance, she told the Tribune her work isnt done and Im yielding to no one.

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She will likely campaign on her track record getting the city through the coronavirus pandemic and pushing for greater investment on the citys South and West sides. But she faces significant criticism over crime, which spiked over the past two years.

Ald. Raymond Lopez, 15th, center, celebrates with his husband, Hugo Lopez, after he announced his run for mayor in a news conference on April 6, 2022. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune)

Other potential candidates include businessman Willie Wilson, whos recently been in the news for his gas giveaways. Local Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara, whose union has fought bitterly against Lightfoots COVID-19 vaccine mandate, has also said he will run for mayor.

Many other names have been discussed as possible 2023 mayoral candidates, including fellow Chicago Ald. Roderick Sawyer and Ald. Brian Hopkins. Others include U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley, former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, state Reps. Kam Buckner and La Shawn Ford, Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Stacy Davis Gates, former city Building Commissioner Judy Frydland and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson.

Aldermen rarely announce runs for mayor, in large part because they cannot run for reelection and pursue the citys top job at the same time. Lopez has been one of the citys most prominent aldermen since getting elected in 2015, and he expressed confidence he could get elected for another decade while acknowledging that he is giving up his seat.

Elected to the council in 2015, Lopez has criticized and publicly feuded with Lightfoot since soon after she took office in 2019. He has accused her of being negative, petty and vindictive  traits that some of Lopezs critics say he shares. Lightfoot, in turn, has accused Lopez of carrying water for indicted Ald. Ed Burke, Lopezs ward neighbor and ally.

In previous elections, Lopez has pushed back efforts to defeat him by progressive groups and generated a reputation as one of the councils most conservative members, particularly on crime.

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After a mass shooting in Brighton Park, Lopez said he was thankful that no innocent lives were lost and called out members of the community for what he said was their complicity in the violence, drawing intense criticism from some residents.

A former skycap for Southwest Airlines armed with a mile-high contrarian streak, Lopez is a complicated figure in Chicago politics with ties to numerous political organizations. Known to some of his colleagues as Showpez and Lil Burke, Lopez is a fast talker who asks sharp questions at committee hearings, and had the best attendance of anyone on the City Council last term, according to a WBEZ and Daily Line analysis.

Critics, however, say Lopez is a publicity hound who nitpicks Lightfoot to gain attention. He will have to broaden his base beyond the 15th Ward to mount a serious challenge against Lightfoot. Whether Lopez is able to raise enough money to run citywide or overcome criticism that he is just an obstructionist remains to be seen.

If elected, he would be the first openly gay man to be elected and the first Latino.

Alderman Ray Lopez, 15th ward, speaks during a council meeting at City Hall on Dec. 18, 2019. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)

Lightfoot is also likely to criticize him for his ties with Burke, the indicted 14th Ward alderman she has made her political nemesis. Lopez has acknowledged his close relationship with Burke, but also noted he became alderman in 2015 by defeating Raul Reyes, a Burke lieutenant who ran for the post, a point he reiterated on Wednesday.

I am my own man and to be perfectly honest, its insulting to hear from her that someone like me cant think on my own, Lopez said.

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Lopez grew up near Midway Airport and has five siblings. His parents split up when he was 2 and his grandparents helped raise him.

By age 18, Lopez was a precinct captain with the 23rd Ward Democrats led by then-U.S. Rep. Bill Lipinski, where Lopez recalled being the only Mexican in a room full of white guys.

After a stint with Daleys office of special events, Lopez left full-time politics to work for Southwest Airlines. There, Lopez told DNAinfo in 2015, he learned more about customer service and accountability.

While working for Southwest in 2007, Lopez and his husband, Hugo, bought a home in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood.

One day, Lopez previously told the Tribune, he became enraged with his alderman over bulk garbage pickup and an office aide hung up on him.

I knew damn well I was being lied to when they told me this was not something the city offered, Lopez said, citing his work with Lipinski. At one point, I told the staff, If you want me to come down and show you how to do this, I can do it too. Click.

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Lopez said he told neighbors someone needs to run against that man, Tony Foulkes, because he sucks as an alderman.

Unbeknownst to me, it was a woman (named Toni) who also had an office two blocks from my house, Lopez added.

Foulkes, who told the Tribune she never met or heard of Lopez until he ran against her, beat him with 69% of the vote in a 2011 runoff. But the next year, Lopez ran for ward committeeman and took the post Foulkes previously held.

Post-census redistricting that year resulted in shifted boundaries that moved Foulkes to the 16th Ward, leaving the 15th Ward seat wide open. Leading up to the 2015 election, when he won a seat on the City Council, Lopez performed as a sort of shadow alderman.

Ald. Ray Lopez, 15th, arrives for work at the doors of City Hall on Dec. 18, 2019. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)

Freshman members of Chicagos City Council traditionally and informally are advised by senior aldermen to keep their mouths closed and ears open. Lopez said he initially planned to heed that advice, but the ward became a flashpoint in the citys crime problem during his first term, leading him to speak out in exceptionally harsh terms.

During Lopezs first term, the worst street conflict in recent memory raged as the Saints, Satans Disciples and La Raza gangs used rifles to inflict massive carnage around his ward. A Tribune count in December 2017 found more than 140 people had been shot and 50 killed by gang members wielding rifles dating to September 2016, many of them in the Back of the Yards and Brighton Park neighborhoods.

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In May 2017, 10 people were shot  two fatally  at a memorial for a man gunned down in the Brighton Park neighborhood. Lopez said he was thankful that no innocent lives were lost and called out members of the community for what he said was their complicity in the violence.

While the gang war raged, Lopez clashed with Emanuel over how to spend nearly $15 million in leftover property tax rebate funds that the alderman tried to earmark for violence prevention. In an encounter behind council chambers, Emanuel asked Lopez, Why are you f------ with me? and Lopez responded, Im not f------ with you. Ive got people dying in the streets. What do you want me to do? the alderman recalled in 2017.

Lopezs words about gang violence have generated intense criticism. The no innocent lives comment led to serious death threats and Lopez was temporarily put under police protection.

Community leaders, however, have reacted with mixed views. Some appreciate the tough talk, saying its a very simplistic view of the world.

Lopez previously announced a run to replace U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez in Congress but withdrew before the 2018 primary.

Lopez is one of Lightfoots harshest critics and the two have strong antipathy toward one another. He has criticized her inaugural address, where she turned to face aldermen after saying stopping corruption is in the City Councils interest.

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Just after Lightfoot finished delivering her inaugural address, Lopez went on WGN Radio and expressed his displeasure with how the newly sworn-in mayor turned to face the aldermen seated behind her while calling out Chicago corruption.

I wish we couldve had more of a celebratory tone as opposed to a confrontational, everyone standing behind me is corrupt and Im defending you against them and their evil mechanisms, Lopez said.

During the height of civil unrest in Chicago neighborhoods following the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, Lightfoot hosted a call with all 50 aldermen that devolved after Lopez complained about what he said was an inadequate response by the city to looting.

When Lopez finished his comments, Lightfoot tried to move on without answering him and Lopez insisted that she address his questions.

I think youre 100% full of s---, is what I think, Lightfoot responded.

Lopez replied, Well, f--- you then.

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On Wednesday, Lopez said the citys police officers dont feel supported by City Hall and promised to consider potential incentives to keep officers from retiring, like longevity bonuses or a potential removal of the citys requirement that officers live in Chicago. Motivated police officers can help curb high crime, Lopez said.

Speaking to city workers and public employees, Lopez said, This mayor will support you.

gpratt@chicagotribune.com
The recent murder of an infant by her father in Pakistan's Punjab province might have come as a shock to many but critics argue that it should not as the country ranks a lowly 153 out of 156 countries on the Gender Gap Index. On March 10, a man entered a house in Punjab's Mianwali district and snatched his seven-month-old daughter from his wife, pulled out a gun and shot the girl. The accused killed his daughter because he wanted a son, The Pakistan Daily reported. "He had expressed his desire for a male child to his wife and other relatives. He didn't even show up to see his daughter at the hospital when she was born," a police officer was quoted as saying by The Pakistan Daily. "The sole purpose of killing the child was her gender," Chairperson of the country's National Commission on Status of Women (NCSW) was quoted as saying. The data from the Gender Gap Index indicates that Pakistan is degrading and also doesn't show a positive or helpful picture for the country. The Pakistan publication pointed out that some critics believe that education plays an important role in changing the family's mindset. It further states that education will also tell that girls are not a piece of meat and beating a wife, daughter or sister is not masculine. Analysts also said that unless the people understand these things and break these cultural norms and age-old rotten traditions, these issues will stay as they are. Pakistan's societal preference is nothing new as the newborn girls in Pakistan often go missing. Scores of infants are left in white metal Edhi cradles and the more unfortunate ones either get tossed in the nearby trash dumps or are conveniently buried elsewhere, as per a report in the The Daily Times. Pakistan's gender gap has widened by 0.7 per cent points in 2021 compared to 2020. Interestingly, since the Imran Khan government came to power in August 2018, Pakistan's Global Gender Gap Index has worsened over time. In 2017, Pakistan ranked 143, slipping to 148 in 2018. The report also indicates that Pakistan needs 136 years to close the gender gap, with the existing performance rate. These statistics show that overall progress in reducing the gender gap is stagnant in Pakistan in four areas: economic participation and opportunity; educational attainment; health and survival, and political empowerment. In other words, women in Pakistan are faring badly to men in these four dimensions of the gender index. (ANI)
"As a responsible government, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa will not resign under any circumstances," Highways Minister Johnston Fernando said.

Fernando said that the President will not resign as he was elected to office, reported Colombo Gazette.

Meanwhile, the Government also defended the President's decision to enforce a State of Emergency and later revoke it.

Minister Dinesh Gunawardena said that the State of Emergency was declared after attempts were made to attack the President's Office and other public property, reported Colombo Gazette.

He said that the Government defends the decision to enforce the State of Emergency.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa yesterday revoked the gazette enforcing emergency regulations.

The regulations have been revoked with effect from 5th April.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa had on Tuesday issued a notification revoking the proclamation issued declaring the State of Emergency, as the island nation continues to stare at the countrywide protests over the severe economic crisis.

Earlier, Rajapaksa had announced an emergency in the country to ensure "public security and maintenance of public order."

Anti-government protests continue to take place in the island nation, demanding solutions to the current economic crisis. An emergency health situation has been declared in Sri Lanka today, due to a severe shortage of medicines in the country.

Sri Lanka is battling a severe economic crisis with food and fuel scarcity affecting a large number of the people in the island nation. The economy has been in a free-fall since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sri Lanka is also facing a foreign exchange shortage, which has, incidentally, affected its capacity to import food and fuel, leading to the power cuts in the country. The shortage of essential goods forced Sri Lanka to seek assistance from friendly countries.

On Sunday, 26 Sri Lankan Cabinet Ministers resigned en masse from their positions amid rising public anger against the government over the economic crisis. All 26 of them signed a general letter, Daily Mirror reported. (ANI)
Over 70 per cent of healthcare centres in Afghanistan are funded by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). As per the Ministry of Public Health, both organizations have provided financial aid to around 70 per cent of health centres in 34 provinces of Afghanistan, reported Tolo News. "These two organizations fund 2,568 health centres, which support 71 pc of the health sector," said Javid Hajir, spokesman for the Ministry of Public Health. Meanwhile, the European Union (EU) announced the delivery of 34 tons of medical supplies and equipment to Afghanistan. "Over 34 tons of much needed medical equipment and material were successfully delivered today to Afghanistan. The EU and its partners continue to support the most vulnerable Afghans in the country as long as it is needed," Janez Lenarcic, the European Commissioner for Crisis Management tweeted. The aid comes as some international organizations have already expressed concern about the poor state of health care in Afghanistan. In the meantime, officials at the Jamhoriat Hospital, the only government-run cancer treatment hospital in Afghanistan, expressed concern over the lack of medical equipment in this hospital, reported Tolo News. "We have a lot of problems in terms of staff, lack of space and medical facilities," said Manouchehr Samadi, head of the cancer treatment department at the Jamhoriat hospital. Patients in the hospital also complain about the lack of suitable facilities and a lack of medicine, reported Tolo News. "We buy medicine from the market, I have been sick for 4 years, but I have been buying medicine from the market for two years, they do not give us medicine here, I have to borrow money to buy medicine from the market," the patient said. Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan last August, international aid has dried up for Afghanistan and healthcare facilities are among the hardest hit sector. (ANI)
Considering Sri Lanka's economic crisis, South Korea has said that it will focus on providing more employment opportunities to the nationals of the island country in Korea. The decision was announced after South Korea's Coordination Minister Koo Yun Cheol's courtesy call to Sri Lanka's President Gotabaya Rajapaksa at the Presidential Secretariat here. The Korean minister was on an official visit to Sri Lanka from March 31 to April 2. During the call, the Korean Coordination Minister said that in the 45th anniversary year of diplomatic relations between Sri Lanka and South Korea, both countries should look into different ways to strengthen their strong bilateral ties in the future. Cheol assured that he would encourage more Korean entrepreneurs to invest in Sri Lanka and said that they will share Korea's technological expertise with the locals. Meanwhile, Sri Lanka's Chief Government Whip Johnston Fernando informed the Parliament that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa will not resign and will face the current issues, as the parliament demanded the resignation of the President. "As a responsible government, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa will not resign under any circumstances," Minister Fernando said. Anti-government protests continue to take place in the island nation, demanding solutions to the current economic crisis. An emergency health situation has been declared in Sri Lanka today, due to a severe shortage of medicines in the country. Sri Lanka is battling a severe economic crisis with food and fuel scarcity affecting a large number of the people in the island nation. The economy has been in a free-fall since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sri Lanka is also facing a foreign exchange shortage, which has, incidentally, affected its capacity to import food and fuel, leading to the power cuts in the country. The shortage of essential goods forced Sri Lanka to seek assistance from friendly countries. (ANI)
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Wednesday condemned the Bucha killings in Ukraine and supported the call for an independent investigation. Replying to India's stand on the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the lower house of the Parliament, he said, "Many MPs brought up the incident of killings in Bucha and I want to say that we are deeply disturbed by the reports. We strongly condemn the killings which have taken place there. It's an extremely serious matter and we support the call for an independent investigation. Reports have said that more than 300 people have been killed and the total number of casualties was likely to increase as the whole city is being checked. Hundreds of civilian residents were found dead on the streets, beside their homes and in mass graves. Ukraine accused Russia of the Bucha massacre. However, Russia has denied the allegations and said that it was Ukrainian propaganda. The Bucha killings have drawn criticism of Russia and pledges of further sanctions against Moscow from the West. He reiterated that India is strongly against the Russia-Ukraine conflict and suggested in the Lok Sabha that the issue can be resolved through dialogue and diplomacy. "What is India advocating in Ukraine? We are, first and foremost, strongly against conflict. We believe that no solution can be arrived at by shedding blood and at the cost of innocent lives. In this day and age, dialogue and diplomacy are the right answers to any disputes," said Jaishankar. He urged countries to respect the international law, sovereignty and territorial integrity of all States. "This should bear in mind that contemporary global order has been built on UN Charter, on respect for international law, and for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all States. If India has chosen a side, it is a side of peace and it is for an immediate end to violence," said the EAM. (ANI)
Union Minister for External Affairs S Jaishankar on Wednesday said in the Lok Sabha that the Ukraine and Russia conflict has had significant consequences on the global economy while the government is taking measures in the national interest to mitigate the impact. He, while explaining India's stand in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, said that India encourages talks between Kyiv and Moscow, including at the level of their Presidents. "In terms of diplomacy, India continues to press forcefully for an immediate cessation of hostilities and an end to violence. We encourage talks between Ukraine and Russia, including at the level of their Presidents. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spoken to both of them in this regard," Jaishankar said. The Minister underlined that the conflict has had significant consequences for the global economy, including India's. Like all other countries, we too are assessing the implications and deciding what is best in our national interest, he added. Jaishankar further said that New Delhi conveyed the message when Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was in Delhi that "if India can be of any assistance in this matter, we will be glad to contribute". Explaining India's stand over the Russia-Ukraine situation, he said: "What should India do in these circumstances? At a time when energy costs have spiked, we clearly need to ensure that the common person in India is not subjected to additional and unavoidable burden." Hre stated that fertiliser prices have a direct implication for the livelihood of the majority of the population, besides the food prices. Even the security of the nation is at stake as we maintain our defence posture in the manner that current security challenges warrant, he said. He urged countries to respect the international law, sovereignty and territorial integrity of all States. "This should bear in mind that contemporary global order has been built on UN Charter, on respect for international law, and for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all States. If India has chosen a side, it is for peace while calling for an immediate end to violence," said the EAM. (ANI)
Pakistan Prime Minister's aide and former federal Information and Broadcasting Minister Fawad Chaudhry on Wednesday lost his cool and heckled a journalist who asked about corruption allegations against Farah Khan, believed to be a close friend of the first lady Bushra Bibi. The showdown took place at a press conference outside the Supreme Court today, following which mediapersons boycotted the meeting that was attended by ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) members Asad Umar, Shahbaz Gill and Ali Muhammad Khan, and demanded an apology from Chaudhry, Geo TV reported. The incident took place while Umar who was the former federal planning and development minister was briefing mediapersons, outside the country's top court when a journalist asked a question about Farah Khan a friend of Imran Khan's wife. Fawad Chaudhry responded harshly and the situation quickly escalated into a heated argument with the former minister accusing the journalist in the question of taking bribes from certain elements and called him "kiraye ka aadmi (a man who has been hired)". Although other journalists and media representatives attempted to intervene and defuse the situation, Fawad Chaudhry continued to make derogatory remarks and refused to apologise, following which journalists boycotted the press conference. Earlier a photograph of Farah Khan seen on a flight with a handbag that is claimed to costs $90,000, had gone viral on social media. According to reports in local Pakistan media, PMLN leader and former finance minister Miftah Ismail alleged that the handbag was worth $90,000 (Rs16.5 million). On Tuesday Ismail had while addressing a press conference alongside former prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi alleged that Farah Khan had "taken money" for getting civil servants transferred and posted according to their choices "Farah Gujjar, while using a Punjab government's plane, had a bag that was worth $90,000," claimed Ismail reported Geo TV. Ismail also alleged that Farah Khan was a frontwoman of Usman Buzdar, the former chief minister of Punjab. Another Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Romina Khurshid Alam took to Twitter to post "Farah Khan, Bushra's Frontwoman who ran away. The bag with her is for $90,000. Yes that's ninety thousand dollars." According to Geo TV, Farah Khan whose real name is Farah Shahzadi, had reached Dubai on April 3, the same day when Imran Khan dissolved the National Assembly and the no-trust motion brought by the opposition was dismissed by the speaker. (ANI)
In a bold move, the Vietnam government has started asserting itself against the Chinese dominance in the South China Sea. Hanoi commemorated (March 14) the 34th anniversary of a battle against the Chinese navy in the (Gac Ma reef/Johnson South reef) of the South China Sea (SCS), reported The Singapore Post. The ceremony was officially attended by the Prime Minister, Pham Minh Chinh for the first time in history. Chinh was the first top Vietnamese leader to lead such a commemoration of the fallen soldiers in SCS. Johnson South is a reef in the Spratly Islands in the SCS. It marks a new stand as for a long time, the Sino-Vietnam clash was not publicly discussed due to Chinese pressure. It is still not included in the educational curriculum. The Vietnamese state-controlled media tend to omit the word "China" and replace it with "foreign forces" while referring to the incidents, reported The Singapore Post. Chinh visited the Memorial for the Johnson South Reef battle in the south-central of Khanh Hoa province (the administrative headquarters of Vietnam's Spratly Islands) and paid tribute to the Vietnamese soldiers. The Vietnamese PM also recorded his views in the visitors' book and affirmed that "64 soldiers of the Vietnam People's navy had heroically and selflessly defended the sacred sovereignty of the fatherland". It may be recalled that 64 Vietnamese soldiers were killed in the incident on March 14, 1988, and the reef in SCS was occupied by the Chinese navy. Earlier, the PM also visited and offered tribute to martyrs (Sino-Vietnam war 1979) at the Po Hen memorial site in Mong cai city, Quang Ninh province on January 26, 2022. In addition, the government of Vietnam also took the unprecedented step of allowing print and electronic media to cover these events. Further, Chinh also ordered the local government to develop the Spratlys into "an economic, cultural and social center" and assert its authority in the SCS, reported The Singapore Post. Earlier, the Vietnamese state systematically silenced the commemoration of the war by censoring journalists and covering the topic vaguely in Vietnamese history textbooks. The significant change in the present attitude of the Vietnam government indicates that the new dispensation aims to give a clear message of its maritime sovereignty and self-reliance. China claims sovereignty over all of the Spratly Islands, whereas Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam all have similar claims. Vietnam's coastline bordering the South China Sea is over 3,000 km long and its geographic proximity to these waters stands in the way of China's SCS ambitions and maritime expansionism. (ANI)
Of the local confirmed cases reported Tuesday, 973 were in Jilin, 311 in Shanghai, and 17 in Zhejiang.

Besides, a total of 32 new imported COVID-19 cases were reported across the mainland, Xinhua News Agency reported.

Tuesday also saw 19,199 new asymptomatic cases on the Chinese mainland, including 19,089 local ones and 110 imported ones, said the commission.

Among the asymptomatic cases, 16,766 were reported in Shanghai and 1,798 in Jilin.

Following the recovery of 1,910 patients on Tuesday, the number of COVID-19 patients currently undergoing treatment stood at 24,565, including 75 in critical condition, the news agency added.

There have been no new COVID-19 deaths and the death toll has remained unchanged at 4,638.

The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases reported on the mainland, both local and imported, was 158,793 as of Tuesday.

Earlier, China has sent the military and thousands of healthcare workers into Shanghai city which has been facing the worst COVID-19 outbreak, according to the Chinese media outlet.

Citing Chinese People's Liberation Army Daily, Global Times reported that the country dispatched more than 2,000 medical staff to Shanghai in one of its biggest-ever public health responses.

The medical staff were drawn from seven medical units affiliated with the army, navy and joint logistics support force. Upon arrival in Shanghai, they quickly carried out medical treatment, nucleic acid testing and other essential tasks, the newspaper said.

According to Global Times, a Chinese Air Force heavy transport Y-20 aircraft was parked at an airport in Shanghai early Monday morning.

The city on Monday reported 425 confirmed and 8,581 asymptomatic domestically transmitted cases, the highest daily increases since the latest outbreak, bringing the total number of COVID-19 infections in the city to over 60,000.

Regions including East China's Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, and Jiangxi provinces, North China's Tianjin, and Central China's Hubei province have also sent medical teams to help Shanghai combat the outbreak, with the total number of medical staff from other regions supporting Shanghai reaching about 10,000 as of Sunday, as per Global Times. (ANI)
Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of United Nations Watch on Wednesday urged the 2022 Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy to expel Russia, China, and Pakistan from United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) over Ukraine invasion, human rights abuses and terrorism respectively. Welcoming the representatives at the 14th Geneva Summit, he said, "We meet today at a fascinating moment. It is only the second time in history that Member-States of UNHRC is likely to be removed tomorrow. The US announced that working together with Ukraine and other European states, they will move to suspend Russia from the Council." Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy meet to shine a global spotlight on urgent situations of human rights and to place them on the international agenda. "At Geneva Summit we elevate and empower the oppressed, those who dare to speak out in the name of freedom and human dignity for their people," said Neuer. On Tuesday, US Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas Greenfield said, "Russia should not have a position of authority in the body whose purpose is to promote respect for human rights. Not only this is the height of hypocracy, but it is also dangerous. Russia is using its membership in the Council as a platform for propaganda to suggest that it has a legitimate concern for human rights. Russia's participation in the Council hurts its credibility, undermines the entire UN and is just playing wrong." Neuer further stated that Russia will be ousted from UNHRC as Greenfield will lead the push with Ukraine and European states. "It's guaranteed to pass because only a handful will vote No and abstentions won't count for the required two-thirds majority," said Neuer. Reports of Russia's mass killings of Ukrainian civilians in the city of Bucha have persuaded the Biden administration to seek Moscow's removal from the UN Human Rights Council after a month-long delay. The Human Rights Council has faced persistent criticism for giving an international platform to human-rights-abusing regimes, including Russia, China, and Cuba. The dictatorships that hold membership in the body often use their status for propaganda purposes and to advance criticism of Western countries intended to deflect from their own human-rights records. "This is exactly what we have been saying all along when we first tried to stop Russia, China and Cuba from getting elected in the first place in 2020. We couldn't get any governments to say these words. From day one, the invasion in February, we called on Russia to be expelled. We hope that the resolution tomorrow pass with a large majority. After Russia is removed, we urge the same to be done to other dictatorships on the Council. China too does not belong to Human Rights Council nor does the Cuban dictatorship. Venezuela, the narco-criminal state also does not belong here. I urge everyone to sign the petition that we launched," said Neuer. He also questioned the membership of non-democratic countries in the Council. "What US ambassador said about Russia applies perfectly to HRC members like Eretria, which have slave labours; Libya which tortures African migrants; Mauritania which has slavery; Pakistan which hosts terrorists; Somalia with female-genital mutilations. People ask the UN, why do the organization have non-democracies? 68 per cent of the members are non-democracies," added Neuer. The annual world assembly discusses human rights dissidents, pro-democracy activists, former political prisoners and family members and representatives of current political prisoners. (ANI)
The Chicago Federation of Labor, a powerful ally of Democrats, bucked the Cook County partys endorsed candidate for the June 28 primary and backed challenger Kari Steele over first-term incumbent county Assessor Fritz Kaegi.

The CFLs political committee, meeting on Tuesday night, also made no endorsement in the race for county sheriff, where Tom Dart is backed by the Cook County Democratic organization for the post he has held since 2006.

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In a statement, the CFL said its endorsements, which included Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkles bid for reelection, were based on candidates who demonstrate a strong understanding and respect for the issues that are important to working families. Preckwinkle also chairs the Cook County Democratic organization.

Metropolitan Water Reclamation Commissioner Kari Steele, who is running for Cook County assessor, outside the Jardine Water Purification Plant in Chicago on May 27, 2021. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)

Labor officials did not elaborate on their decision to back Steele, the president of the board of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, over Kaegi, who defeated controversial longtime Assessor Joseph Berrios in 2018.

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Kaegi has sought to institute changes in what he calls a modernization of the assessment system to ensure the very wealthy and big corporations are paying their fair share, in turn reducing the homeowners share of the burden of property taxes.

But his system has several critics and its implementation and subsequent revisions have made it likely that the August property-tax bill payment will be delayed into next year.

Larry Rogers Jr., who chairs the countys Board of Review, last month accused the assessor of blaming others for his disastrous implementation of new technology and inability to get property assessments certified on time.

Dart faces four primary challengers in his bid for reelection as sheriff, though objections to candidacy petitions have been filed against two of them and questions have been raised about whether the insurgent candidates meet new qualifications for the post created by a recently enacted state law.

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Speaking to ANI, an officer of the bank said, "We are protesting against the government as they have taken wrong decisions and the people are facing many difficulties because of them."

The union demanded an election in the country and wanted a new regime to take over.

Anti-government protests continue to take place in the island nation, demanding solutions to the current economic crisis.

An emergency health situation has been declared in Sri Lanka today, due to a severe shortage of medicines in the country.

Meanwhile, Sri Lanka's Chief Government Whip Johnston Fernando informed the Parliament that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa will not resign and will face the current issues, as the parliament demanded the resignation of the President.

"As a responsible government, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa will not resign under any circumstances," Minister Fernando said.

Sri Lanka is battling a severe economic crisis with food and fuel scarcity affecting a large number of the people in the island nation. The economy has been in a free-fall since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sri Lanka is also facing a foreign exchange shortage, which has, incidentally, affected its capacity to import food and fuel, leading to the power cuts in the country. The shortage of essential goods forced Sri Lanka to seek assistance from friendly countries. (ANI)
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Wednesday told Lok Sabha that India is in touch with Ukraine's neighbouring countries Hungary, Romania, Kazakhstan and Poland to help the evacuated medical students from the war-torn country to pursue their studies. "We have been in touch with Hungary, Romania, Czech Republic, Kazakhstan and Poland (about continuing education for the students evacuated from Ukraine) because they have similar models of education," he said in Lok Sabha. Responding to the Opposition's concerns over the disruption of the studies of the evacuated medical students, Jaishankar said that India is in talks with Poland, Romania, Kazakhstan, and Hungary to find ways to help the affected students complete their education. On the Opposition criticism that the government sent Union ministers to neighbouring countries to gain political mileage, Jaishankar said that the presence of the ministers helped the evacuation process. "Had the four ministers not gone to countries neighbouring Ukraine, India would not have got the same level of cooperation from them, and, in fact, the ministers worked as a team," he said. Commenting on India's advisories, Jaishankar said: "Our advisories helped people get updates on which border was open and where to move for them in Ukraine." He further said that Ukraine Government decided that there'll be relaxation (for students) in respect of completion of the medical education. "The KROK 1 (Ukrainian Medical Examination) exam, for 3rd-year medical students to go to the 4th year, postponed to next academic year while students are allowed to progress to the next academic year on the basis of the completion of the study requirement," Janshankar said. He added that for 6th-year students, there is an exam called KROK 2. The Ukraine Government decided that on the basis of the results of academic assessments, they will be awarded degrees without taking KROK, he said.
Reacting over the posted video on Hijab row by the leader of al- Queda, Ayman al Zawahiri, defence expert Dhruv Katoch on Wednesday said that for Zawahiri to wade into the Hijab row is the most hypocritical thing as the way, al-Qaeda suppressed and mistreats their women is just ironical to his statement given in the video. Speaking to ANI, Defence Expert said, "For Zawahri to wade into the Hijab row, I think is the most hypocritical thing that this particular person has done. Now, the way they have suppressed their women is unimaginable and they support suppressions and mistreatment of their women, quoting the Quran." He further said that to praise the woman, who shouted the religious slogan at Hindu students in Karnataka's Udupi after the Karnataka High Court released their decision on the Hijab row, is a hypocrite and added, "but there is something else which I think needs to be told as far as the hijab row is concerned." Katoch said, "now once you make it into a religious issue, Muslim women will be pressurized into wearing the hijab. That means you are depriving Muslim women of the fundamental right to choose by imposing this pressure on them." Referring to the example of Afghanistan, he stated that Muslim male always refuses to speak for Muslim women and that has been India's tragedy. "I think the bigger danger is the Muslim male who refuses to speak for the Muslim woman and that has been India's tragedy. The Muslim male always kept quiet. That is the tragedy of Afghanistan where the Muslim male kept quiet and the Taliban took over. Here the educated Muslim male, which constitutes 95 per cent of the Muslim population, should come forward for their women" Katoch added. Defence Expert called the Muslim male's silence, a sign of cowardice and urged them to speak on these issues and especially for their women. "Zawahiri deserves condemnation. And I hope every right-thinking Indian Muslim male does so," he added. Katoch talked about Muskan and said that she knew she was not in danger and this is the reason that she stood still there. He said, "Muskan, knew she was never in danger. That was why she didn't run away. That's the difference." He questioned, "Now reverse the situation. Let there be a Hindu girl and let there be Muslims around her. What will they do? I think that is the difference and once we understand that difference we will know what exactly is the problem in Muslim society and where to have the mullahs in the Muslim society." Katoch said that this is why Muslim women lose their basic rights and this is tragic for India and for the Muslim groups within India. (ANI)
Amid the ongoing political turmoil in the country, the President's Secretariat has asked the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to propose dates for the general elections. As per a press release shared by Pakistan President Arif Alvi on Twitter, in a letter dated April 5, the President's Secretariat has asked the ECP to propose dates for holding general elections within ninety days from the date of dissolution of the National Assembly, that is April 3, in accordance with the provisions of the country's constitution. "ECP has been conveyed that clause 5 (A) of the Article 48 and clause 2 of Article 224 of the Constitution provide that the President shall appoint a date, not later than ninety days from the date of dissolution of the National Assembly, for holding general elections to the National Assembly," read the release. It further said that as per the Elections Act 2017, a consultation with the ECP is required to announce the date of general elections. On Sunday, Alvi dissolved the Pakistani parliament following Prim Minister Imran Khan's advice. Imran Khan made the proposal minutes after Parliament's Deputy Speaker rejected a motion of no confidence in him as "unconstitutional." Meanwhile, Imran Khan will continue as the Prime Minister until the caretaker Prime Minister is appointed, said the President as the SC is looking into the matter of National Assembly dissolution. (ANI)
The Army chief was briefed about the Coordination of a Multi-Nation HADR Response Mechanism and measures to enhance Maritime Security.

"General MM Naravane #COAS visited the Regional HADR Coordination Centre #RHCC & Information Fusion Centre #IFC at #Singapore. #COAS was briefed about the Coordination of a Multi-Nation HADR Response Mechanism & measures to enhance Maritime Security," Indian Army tweeted.

General MM Naravane is on a three-day (April 4 to 6) visit to Singapore.

Yesterday, Naravane called on Singaporean Defence Minister Dr Ng Eng Hen and discussed regional geopolitical developments between the two countries.

The strong and long-standing bilateral defence relationship between both nations was re-affirmed during the meeting, the Indian Army said.

"General MM Naravane #COAS called on Dr Ng Eng Hen, Minister for Defence, #MINDEF, #Singapore & discussed regional geopolitical developments. The strong & long-standing bilateral defence relationship between both Nations was re-affirmed," the Indian Army tweeted.

Chief of the Army Staff also called on Brigadier General David Neo, Chief of Army, Singapore Army and discussed the roadmap to further enhance defence cooperation between both countries.

"General MM Naravane called on Brigadier General David Neo, Chief of Army, #SingaporeArmy and discussed the roadmap to further enhance defence cooperation between both nations," Indian Army said.

Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) also reviewed the Guard of Honour at the Ministry of Defence (MINDEF), Singapore. The COAS complimented the Guard for an impeccable Turnout and Parade.

On Monday, the Chief of Army Staff visited the Battle Box Bunker at Fort Canning which was used as an emergency, bomb-proof Command Centre during World War II.

During his visit, he was briefed on the cultural and historical significance of the place.

"General MM Naravane #COAS visited the Battle Box Bunker at Fort Canning, #Singapore & was briefed on the cultural & historical significance of the place. The Bunker was used as an emergency, bomb-proof Command Centre during World War II," tweeted Indian Army on Monday.

Earlier in the day, the Army Chief also laid a wreath at Kranji War Memorial in Singapore and paid tributes to the soldiers who laid down their lives during the Second World War in Singapore.

The Army Chief is also scheduled to call on with the Minister of Defence, Chief of Singapore Army and other senior dignitaries where he will discuss avenues for enhancing India-Singapore defence relations.

The COAS will also visit the Infantry Gunnery Tactical Simulation and Wargame Centre, Regional HADR Coordination Centre, Info Fusion Centre and the Changi Naval Base. (ANI)
According to the report, the land is very close to Pakistan Air Force (PAF) base Qadri.

Notably, women and children also staged a protest against the Pakistan administration and Pak Army in Ghanche district, Chorbat, Gilgit-Baltistan against continuous harassment over a soldier going missing in the region about three years ago.

As per reports, there are multiple incidents of unrest in Gilgit-Baltistan. The local population is discontent with the Pak government's attitude and their poor handling of the issues.

The population is feeling threatened by the Pakistan government's unilateral decisions, especially regarding land acquisition policies.

Pak government under the pressure of land mafias is acquiring land from local communities and leasing them to various companies and oligarchs, according to the reports.

Given the current volatile political scenario in Pakistan and the Imran Khan government's losing political support, these incidents are likely to exacerbate in the coming times as the Pakistan Army will gain more power and the population will continue to be brutally suppressed, said the reports.

Gilgit Baltistan has been under the illegal control of Pakistan for over seven decades and the people of the region have been increasingly demanding freedom. However, so far they have made no gains with their voices being suppressed violently by the Pakistani state. (ANI)
The Democratic Bulgaria alliance demanded earlier this month that the Russian ambassador be expelled from the country in connection with the provocation in Ukraine's Bucha.

According to Vassilev, the cabinet can voice its stance on the matter later on Wednesday, the Nova broadcaster reported. (ANI/Sputnik)
Talking about the Rupee-Rouble transaction arrangement between India and Russia, External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar on wedensday said that the government's effort is to stabilize economic transactions between the two countries on the light of close partnership. Jaishankar made the remarks while replying to a question from Congress's leader in the Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chaudhary on India's transactions with Russia, in light of sanctions on the latter, during a Rule 193 discussion on the 'situation in Ukraine'. "Our effort today is to stabilize economic transactions between India and Russia because this is very important for us. Russia is a very important partner in a variety of areas and I think all honourable members (of Parliament) understand that," Jaishankar said. Elaborating further on the arrangements in the work to facilitate transactions between the two countries, Jaishankar said, "At the moment there is an inter-ministerial group, which is led by the finance ministry, which is seeing how the payments issue can be best addressed, there are experiences from the past which are relevant in this regard." "But I think this is quite honestly an issue where the Finance Minister would finally have to take the call," Jaishankar added. The EAM addressed a host of issues in his nearly 45 minute address to the Lok Sabha, including the evacuation of Indians from Ukraine under Operation Ganga, the country's stance on the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, and also condemning the killings of civilians in Ukraine's Bucha, calling for an independent investigation. He also said that the way forward for India to deal with the emerging 'new world order' is to reduce the country's dependency on the external world and fulfil 'Atmanirbhar Bharat'. He urged countries to respect the international law, sovereignty and territorial integrity of all States. "This should bear in mind that contemporary global order has been built on UN Charter, on respect for international law, and for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all States. If India has chosen aside, it is for peace while calling for an immediate end to violence," said the EAM during the discussion. (ANI)
Former Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen, who has been running the "India Out" campaign in the archipelago, was involved in a secret deal with a Maltese company during his presidency to set up a private armoury in a northern Island of the country, a media report said. In the August of 2015, the then Maldivian Vice President and a close aide of Yameen, Ahmed Adeeb met with the President of Malta and presented a letter from President Abdulla Yameen, the contents of which are unknown, Maldives Voice reported. Soon after, in the October of the same year, Malta's Marshall Consultants Group, Safety at Sea Logistics Ltd. (SASL) company confirmed plans to build a private armoury in Haa Alif Atoll Uligan in Northern Maldives. The Uligan island straddles the eight-degree channel, along the Gulf of Oman and Red Sea shipping lanes. It was stated that the armoury would have been supervised by the Maldives National Defence Forces (MNDF), but, MNDF had declined requests for an armoury in Uligan, saying it does not have the resources to deploy soldiers in the remote north, the report said citing sources. The Opposition immediately picked up on the issue saying that the private armoury deal could facilitate trade in arms, and encourage terror attacks in the Maldives in the wake of the availability of arms, the report said, adding that the Opposition prompted the Yameen administration to deny the existence of the deal. However, Parliament Speaker and Former President Mohamed Nasheed in a recent parliament sitting made chilling statements that the Yameen's signing of the Malta deal existed. Following the Malta visit by Adeeb in August, a minor blast on the presidential speedboat in September resulted in the arrest and impeachment of Vice President Adeeb. The report went on to claim that the bomb attack could have been a cover-up to divert the attention of the Opposition and the media's prying eyes from the armoury deal. The SASL's plan to build a land and floating armoury in Haa Alif Atoll Uligan was because of its Geostrategic importance, the report said. Large vessels carrying goods travel just north of the Maldives. Due to the risk of sea robbery in some areas, the vessels are assisted by armed guards. If a vessel crossing the area sought services from the SASL unit in Uligan, the armed SASL guards would board the vessel by speedboats and would guard the vessel until it reached its destination. The company SASL had many red flags from the beginning with its Managing Director James Fenech having a track record of shady arms dealings in Libya, the report said. Without the quick intervention by the then opposition into the matter and the continuous work by the then media outlets to look into it, the report said, the Maldives would have been facing challenges to its independence, sovereignty and national security, which are incidentally the same topics that Yameen regularly rakes up these days. The deal going through to its logical conclusion would have made Maldives the 'largest illegal arms supplier' from the Indian Ocean, the report said. (ANI)
From left, Jim and Jason Ebel co-founded Two Brothers Artisan Brewing, which will celebrate its 25th anniversary with an event on April 21 at the Two Brothers Roundhouse in Aurora. (Two Brothers Artisan Brewing / HANDOUT)

Two Brothers Artisan Brewing is celebrating its 25th anniversary making craft beer, a milestone the owners never saw coming when they began the operation in the late 1990s.

Twenty-five years ago, I sure never thought wed be where we are, said Jason Ebel, co-founder of Two Brothers. Were surprised that craft beer has become such a dominant player in the market and never thought wed have as many breweries as we have wineries in the United States.

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Jason and his brother Jim Ebel began Two Brothers Brewing Co. in Warrenville and later took over the historic Roundhouse in Aurora.

The roundhouse was built in 1865 to house locomotives of the old Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. Walter Paytons Roundhouse Complex opened there in 1996. The cavernous limestone building, an Aurora Historic Landmark, opened as Two Brothers Roundhouse in 2011.

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Two Brothers Roundhouse in Aurora will be the scene of a 25th anniversary event for Two Brothers Artisan Brewing on April 21. Two Brothers has operated the Roundhouse facility since 2011. (Two Brothers Artisan Brewing / HANDOUT)

Jason Ebel said the past 25 years have been an amazing run for Two Brothers.

Its so exciting to see how its all grown, he said. To be honest, we were just totally passionate about creating craft beer and I didnt have preconceived ideas about multiple state distribution or diversification across beer and coffee and restaurants. We just got into it out of the love of making beer.

The quarter century of brewing beer and more will be the focus of an anniversary celebration beginning at 5 p.m. April 21 at the Roundhouse, 205 N. Broadway in Aurora. The event will include a Two Brothers History Flight featuring returning and new beers, the release of a new double IPA that will be served on draft, Two Brothers coffee and spirits as well as favorite foods from their menu, music and more, company officials said.

The brewery is also releasing a 25th anniversary 12-pack in honor of the occasion.

Jason Ebel said the whole business began rather simply.

He said he wasnt a business major in college so I probably should have had more foresight, adding that the Two Brothers concept was just a passion project right from the start.

To date, he estimates anywhere from 400 to 500 different craft beers have been produced by Two Brothers and brought to market in some form, along with a growing diversity of products ranging from the Two Brothers coffee brand to spirits and pre-mixed cocktails, as well as the opening of restaurants both here in Illinois and in Arizona.

Two Brothers Artisan Brewing has been making craft beer since the late 1990s. It will celebrate its 25th anniversary with a celebration at the Two Brothers Roundhouse in Aurora on April 21. (Two Brothers Artisan Brewing / HANDOUT)

There have been hundreds of beers. There were years we were making 35 to 40 different ones and then we have multiple breweries across the country, he said. Our diversity comes from my brothers and my love of the hospitality business and our goal of having people enjoy an experience around food and beverage. Its a very European way to look at things  slow down and enjoy the product with your friends and make it a social experience and thats given us the focus to branch out and say lets get into coffee and spirits and restaurants.

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Looking ahead, Jason Ebel said the most exciting thing for him is that his son Teegan, 22, is getting ready to graduate from college at Arizona State University and will be joining the family business.

He (Teegan) wants to come into the business, and well have a second-generation business, he said. He wants to help us carry the torch moving forward and thats exciting. We always looked at it as a generational thing and were going to see that actually happen.

More growth is on the way for Two Brothers, he said.

As far as the business goes, wed like to do some brick-and-mortar coffee cafes to expand our brand, he said. We are working on some other food-related products that are under development that will expose themselves in the next few months  things youd see in your grocery that would complement your favorite beer.

For more information on the Two Brothers anniversary event, go to www.twobrothersbrewing.com

David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.
The Pakistani government is further tightening its grip on cyber laws after showing utter disregard for media freedom in the country, a report said. It means it will deny people the right to express themselves, especially on social media. The government made an amendment in section 20 of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, 2016 (PECA) through an amendment, increasing the jail term for defamation from 3 years to 5 years. Furthermore, the definition of "person" has been expanded to include any company, association or body of persons whether incorporated or not, institution, organization, authority or any other body established by the government under any law or otherwise, the Nation reported. The government has also added a section to explain "the timeline" for wrapping up the case. "The trial should be expeditiously, but preferably not later than six months of taking cognizance of the case," the law reads. Not so surprisingly, the opposition and journalist bodies in the country have opposed the law. Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Chairman Bilawal Bhutto said, "Freedom of expression and press are being muzzled under the guise of preventing false news" and went on to add, "Khan Sahib himself is the biggest leader of the fake news mafia in Pakistan". A journalist body Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ) filed a petition in Islamabad High Court (IHC) against the amendments and the court stopped the government from making any arrest under the law." "(The) Interior Ministry secretary and Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) director-general will be responsible if the SOPs are not followed," Justice Minallah warned. Critics insist that almost every government in Pakistan has tried to mould the media and social media opinions in its favour. PECA, for instance, was established with a jail time of three years in 2016. Pakistani observers note that when the politicians are in opposition, they want the most independent media and social media in the country but as soon as they come to power, the same freedom of expression starts to bother them, which leads to curbs, the report said. (ANI)
In the meeting with the Netherlands Prime Minister, President Kovind asked to address the global challenges together and also emphasised India's role as a defender and in providing security and growth in the Indo-Pacific region.

Earlier in the day, Rutte gave a warm welcome to President Kovind at his office and hosted a lunch in his honour.

President Kovind, who is on a three-day visit to the Netherlands, also visited the state general building where he was welcomed by Jan Anthonie Bruijn, President of the Senate and Vera Bergkamp, President of the House of Representatives in Hague.

Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of Senate Prof EB Van Apledoorn and Chairman of The Committee on Foreign Affairs of House of Representatives AH Kuiken were also present in the meeting.

The Dutch side appreciated the growing importance of India on the global stage and also sought a larger global role for India.

Dutch House of Representatives said that the Netherlands has made India the focus country for the next three years and there is a growing interest of India in the Netherlands.

The Dutch side also proposed more parliamentary exchanges and cooperation between both countries.

Earlier on Tuesday, the King of Netherlands hosted dinner in Royal Palace Amsterdam in honour of President Kovind who is on a state visit to the Netherlands from April 4 to April 7. (ANI)
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) on Monday had nominated former chief justice, Gulzar Ahmed, as the caretaker Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Sharif, in a letter written to President Arif Alvi, said that the process of naming an interim prime minister or government is unconstitutional as National Assembly's ruling on the no-confidence motion is already challenged in Supreme Court, ARY News reported.

He added that every step of the president or prime minister will be subject to the apex court ruling.

Earlier, President Alvi had written to both PM and Opposition leader Shehbaz Sharif seeking their nominees for the post of interim PM. However, Sharif claimed that he had not received "any letter" from President Alvi regarding the appointment of caretaker prime minister.

On Sunday, Pakistani President Arif Alvi dissolved the Pakistan Parliament following Imran Khan's advice. Imran Khan made the proposal minutes after parliament's deputy speaker rejected a motion of no confidence in him as "unconstitutional."

Pakistan media and opposition parties criticised this decision saying that it violated all rules governing proceedings in the House.

Meanwhile, Imran Khan will continue as the Prime Minister until the caretaker Prime Minister is appointed, said the President as the SC is looking into the matter of National Assembly dissolution. (ANI)
"The briefing was excellent. We learned a lot about the system, we love it," Chau told ANI here.

As part of the 'To Know BJP' exercise, which is being initiated on the party's 42nd foundation day, BJP's national president JP Nadda interacted with ambassadors and high commissioners from 13 countries at the party headquarters earlier today.

Envoys of 13 counties included France, Romania, Bangladesh, Portugal, Switzerland, Poland, Singapore, Slovakia, Italy, Hungary, Vietnam, Norway and European Union.

Nadda's meeting with foreign envoys on BJP's foundation day comes soon after the visit of Nepalese Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba to the party headquarters at Deen Dayal Upadhyay Marg.

The meeting lasted for nearly two hours at the party office. (ANI)
Anti-government protests continue to take place in the island nation, demanding solutions to the current economic crisis.

Earlier today, the Bank of Ceylon employees union staged a protest against the government over the economic and political crisis in the country.

Speaking to ANI, an officer of the bank said, "We are protesting against the government as they have taken wrong decisions and the people are facing many difficulties because of them.

"The union demanded an election in the country and wanted a new regime to take over.

An emergency health situation has been declared in Sri Lanka today, due to a severe shortage of medicines in the country.

Meanwhile, Sri Lanka's Chief Government Whip Johnston Fernando informed the Parliament that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa will not resign and will face the current issues, as the parliament demanded the resignation of the President.

"As a responsible government, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa will not resign under any circumstances," Minister Fernando said.

Sri Lanka is battling a severe economic crisis with food and fuel scarcity affecting a large number of the people in the island nation. The economy has been in a free-fall since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sri Lanka is also facing a foreign exchange shortage, which has, incidentally, affected its capacity to import food and fuel, leading to the power cuts in the country. The shortage of essential goods forced Sri Lanka to seek assistance from friendly countries. (ANI)
The United States, along with the G7 nations and European Union (EU) has imposed severe and immediate economic costs on Russia for its "atrocities in Ukraine, including in Bucha". As per an official statement from the White House, as a part of mechanisms to hold Russia accountable for its actions in Ukraine, the US has announced economic measures to ban new investment in Russia and imposed severe financial sanctions on Russia's largest bank and several of its most critical state-owned enterprises and on Russian government officials and their family members. These sweeping financial sanctions follow our action earlier this week to cut off Russia's frozen funds in the United States to make debt payments, read the statement. In the new economic cost, the US has announced full blocking sanctions on Russia's largest financial institution, Sberbank, and Russia's largest private bank, Alfa Bank. This action will freeze any of Sberbank's and Alfa Bank's assets touching the US financial system and prohibit US persons from doing business with them. The US has also prohibited new investment in the Russian Federation as President Joe Biden will sign a new Executive Order (E.O.) that includes a prohibition on new investment in Russia by US persons wherever located, aimed at isolating Russia from the global economy. Further, full blocking sanctions on critical major Russian state-owned enterprises have been imposed, aimed at prohibiting any US person from transacting with these entities and freezing any of their assets subject to US jurisdiction. The US has also imposed full blocking sanctions on Russian elites and their family members, including sanctions on Russian President Putin's adult children, Foreign Minister Lavrov's wife and daughter, and members of Russia's Security Council including former President and Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. The US Treasury has also prohibited Russia from making debt payments with funds subject to US jurisdiction. However, sanctions do not preclude payments on Russian sovereign debt at this time, provided Russia uses funds outside of US jurisdiction. However, the US has expressed its commitment to exempting essential humanitarian and related activities from its sanctions. Meanwhile, Biden on Tuesday authorized an additional USD 100 million in security assistance to Ukraine to meet a need for additional anti-armor systems. This brings the total US security assistance commitment to Ukraine to more than USD 1.7 billion since the beginning of Russia's military operation in the war-torn country, according to the US state department. (ANI)
Saying that parliamentary exchanges between the two countries would help in promoting mutual understanding and exchange of ideas, President Ram Nath Kovind on Wednesday extended an invitation to the Netherlands to send a parliamentary delegation to India. The remarks came during President Kovind's interaction with the President of the Netherlands Senate Jan Anthonie Bruijn and the President of the House of Representatives Vera Bergkamp. President Kovind is on a three-day visit to the Netherlands. There is a need for more regular exchanges between our two Parliaments, the President said, adding that, India would be happy to receive a visit by a parliamentary delegation from the Netherlands and a similar goodwill delegation could visit the Netherlands at a mutually convenient time. "Both our countries are vibrant parliamentary democracies with rich parliamentary cultures and traditions. India is the world's largest democracy with a strong tradition of debate and discussion. The Netherlands is a natural democracy and is a strong voice in Europe," a Rashtrapati Bhavan statement said. The Dutch side appreciated the growing importance of India on the global stage and also sought a larger global role for India. Dutch House of Representatives said that the Netherlands has made India the focus country for the next three years and there is a growing interest in India in the Netherlands. Later, President Kovind was hosted by Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte for lunch. "During the one-to-one meeting with Prime Minister Rutte, the President congratulated him on his remarkable leadership and continuing fourth term in office. He said that it demonstrates the faith of the people of the Netherlands in his leadership. He noted that in the past 11 years, the Indo-Dutch bilateral relationship has gone from strength to strength," the Rashtrapati Bhavan statement said. President Kovind also called for a 'new-age partnership' with the Netherlands to combine the resources, expertise and knowledge of the two countries with the skill to address contemporary challenges, add strategic direction to the cooperation, and maximize benefits for both countries. Earlier on Tuesday, the King of the Netherlands hosted dinner in Royal Palace Amsterdam in honour of President Kovind who is on a state visit to the Netherlands from April 4 to April 7. (ANI)
The conflict between two tribal groups over disputed land has intensified and resulted in a violent clash in the Gilgit-Baltistan region. The two tribal groups, Ganish (Hunza) and Nagar, have expressed dissatisfaction with the local administration and Pakistan Army, which is occupying the land, for failing to resolve the land dispute. According to reports, angry mobs burnt an ambulance and threw stones at each other. The clash between the two ethnic groups has changed the security dynamics of the region. The Karakoram Highway was temporarily shut down due to this incident and many tourists were left stranded. As per the natives, both groups have been claiming ownership of 3,000 canals of land situated at the village Dong Das, Nagar District. Hundreds of people from both parties were seen protesting at the site since March 22. However, the peaceful protest turned into a violent clash when one of the parties forcibly took a corpse to the graveyard situated at the above-mentioned land. Both the parties pelted stones at each other and at law-enforcement agencies. Dozens of people were injured in the incident including Hunza SP Tahira Yasub. Subsequently, Rangers and FC troops which were deployed used tear gas to control the mob. Gilgit Baltistan has been under the illegal control of Pakistan for over seven decades and the people of the region have been increasingly demanding freedom. However, so far they have made no gains with their voices being suppressed violently by the Pakistani state. (ANI)
The UN General Assembly will resume its Emergency Special Session Thursday morning and the meeting will be open and speeches will be available on camera through UNTV, CNN quoted the spokesperson for the president of the UNGA, Paulina Kubiak Greer, as saying.

A vote on whether or not to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council will happen either Thursday or Friday, added the spokesperson.

The development comes after the US envoy to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield made a case for seeking the suspension of Russia from the Human Rights Council in front of the UN Security Council on Tuesday.

"Russia should not have a position of authority in a body whose purpose -- whose very purpose -- is to promote respect for human rights. Russia's participation on the Human Rights Council hurts the council's credibility. It undermines the entire UN. And it is just plain wrong," the media outlet quoted Thomas-Greenfield as saying.

Notably, the UNGA would need to vote in favor by two-thirds to remove Russia from the Human Rights Council. (ANI)
Hanoi starts Covid-19 vaccination for kids aged 5-11

Hanoi has just launched the Covid-19 vaccination campaign for children aged between 5 and 11.



According to the municipal Department of Health, around one million local children aged between 5-11 will be given the Covid-19 vaccine before September this year.





The Covid-19 vaccination in Hanoi
On March 22, 2022 local time, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with Somali Foreign Minister Abdisaid Muse Ali in Islamabad on the sidelines of the session of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation upon invitation.

Wang Yi said, Somalia is an important country in the Horn of Africa with a sound endowment for development. Due to geopolitical and other factors, Somalia's national development has been disrupted, and the improvement of people's livelihood has a long way to go. China supports various factions in Somalia in strengthening coordination, focusing on development and revitalization and maintaining political and social stability. China and Somalia are good friends and old friends. We have always supported Somalia in safeguarding its sovereignty, security and territorial integrity, never interfered in its internal affairs, never sought geopolitical interests and never participated in the major-power rivalry. We are ready to continue to contribute to Somalia's peace, stability and development.

Abdisaid said, Somalia and China have strong historical relations and China is a reliable friend of Somalia. He thanks China for its long-term support and assistance and looks forward to continued support from China in realizing peace, security and development. He hopes to learn from China's experience in state governance, especially the experience in poverty alleviation.

Wang Yi said that prioritizing development and improving people's livelihood are important elements of the Global Development Initiative (GDI) proposed by President Xi Jinping, and China is ready to deepen exchanges of state governance experience with Somalia within the framework of the GDI. China will push for the implementation of the nine programs of cooperation with Africa in Somalia and is stepping up the implementation of emergency food aid to Somalia. China is ready to continue providing humanitarian material assistance and personnel training, and strengthen practical cooperation in areas such as agriculture, fishery, health and capacity building.

Abdisaid introduced the current situation in the Horn of Africa and the African Union Mission in Somalia. He spoke highly of China's efforts to promote unity and cooperation in the Horn of Africa and agreed to hold the Horn of Africa peace conference. Wang Yi said, China is willing to continue to contribute wisdom and strength to peace and stability in the Horn of Africa.
Moscow [Russia], April 6 (ANI/Sputnik): The withdrawal of Russian forces from the Kyiv region is a gesture of goodwill to create favourable conditions for Russia-Ukraine talks, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told France's LCI broadcaster on Wednesday. Peskov added that Russia is interested in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's "accepting" conditions that were proposed at negotiations and aims to end the military operation based on those conditions. "Ukraine needs to agree on the statuses of Crimea and Donbas republics," the Kremlin spokesperson said. The spokesman asserted that the status of Crimea as a Russian region and the status of Donbas republics as independent countries is "obvious." The statements come amid Russian withdrawal from several areas of Ukraine in what is being seen as a shift in strategy following major setbacks in the over a month-long Russian campaign. Talking about the killings of civilians in Bucha, Pescov said that the matter should be investigated, but added that, "it is necessary to decide what will be an impartial and independent probe." "Of course, the monstrous staging in Bucha should and must be investigated. But it must be decided what will be a truly impartial, independent investigation. We all remember various types of investigations where Russia has not been a party lately, and which under no circumstances can be perceived as independent. It is very important to avoid such a situation," Peskov told reporters. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged on Sunday to conduct an independent investigation of the case in Bucha near Kyiv, which the Russian Defense Ministry called a staged provocation by the Ukrainian authorities. Meanwhile, Western countries including the European Union, the G7, the US and the UK issued fresh rounds of sanctions on Russia over its actions in Ukraine. (ANI)
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to repress Tibetan religious practices amid other gross violations in Tibet, said a report. The annual 2021 report of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) said that communication between Tibetans inside and outside Tibet is severed due to heavy restrictions imposed by China, Phayul reported. The findings emphasized the increasing cases of surveillance of Tibetans including US citizens, adding that advanced technology measures including "DNA data collection" could further enable other authoritarian states. "The Chinese government's horrific abuse of human rights and trampling of human dignity makes it more important than ever that the Congressional-Executive Commission on China document abuses of human rights and the rule of law in China, as the Commission has done for the past 20 years," Phayul quoted CECC Chairman Jeff Merkley as saying in a statement. The commission on China called on US President Joe Biden's administration to use the resources made available by Tibetan Policy and Support Act 2020, a landmark bill passed during the Trump presidency, to help protect Tibetan culture and to confront policies that endanger the Tibetan language, Phayul reported. It further reported that another recommendation by CECC implored the members of Congress and the US administration to interact "regularly" with the leaders of the Central Tibetan Administration, also known as the Tibetan government-in-exile, and with parliamentarians around the globe to build international support for Tibet. "It is no secret the Xi Jinping regime has embraced an ever more authoritarian agenda directly opposed to the values of democracy, rule of law, and human rights. In Tibet, brutal oppression and intense surveillance continue the CCP's systematic work to erase Tibetan culture, religious freedom, and basic human rights," Franz Matzner from International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) said on the findings, according to Phayul. Chinese troops occupied Tibet in 1950 and later annexed it. The 1959 Tibetan uprising saw violent clashes between Tibetan residents and Chinese forces. (ANI)
Amid the ongoing political turmoil in Pakistan, National Assembly Speaker Asad Qaiser has written letters to Prime Minister Imran Khan and Leader of the Opposition Shehbaz Sharif seeking the constitution of a parliamentary committee for the appointment of caretaker Prime Minister, reported local media. The development came after Imran Khan and Shehbaz Sharif both failed to reach a consensus regarding a name for the slot of the caretaker Prime Minister, reported Radio Pakistan. In a fresh communication, Asad Qaisar has asked Imran Khan and Shehbaz Sharif to nominate four members each from the treasury and the opposition benches so that they can decide on a caretaker Prime Minister. Notably, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) on Monday had nominated former chief justice, Gulzar Ahmed, as the caretaker Prime Minister of Pakistan. However, Shehbaz Sharif on Wednesday rejected Ahmed's name for the post of caretaker prime minister, local media reported.Sharif, in a letter written to President Arif Alvi, said that the process of naming an interim prime minister or government is unconstitutional as National Assembly's ruling on the no-confidence motion is already challenged in Supreme Court, ARY News reported. He added that every step of the president or prime minister will be subject to the apex court ruling. Earlier, President Alvi had written to both PM and Opposition leader Shehbaz Sharif seeking their nominees for the post of interim PM. However, Sharif claimed that he had not received "any letter" from President Alvi regarding the appointment of caretaker prime minister. Meanwhile, Imran Khan will continue as the Prime Minister until the caretaker Prime Minister is appointed, said the President as the SC is looking into the matter of National Assembly dissolution. (ANI)
Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan came to power in 2018 with the accusation of being selected by the countrys powerful military establishment. This is why the Opposition parties termed Khan as "selected" and called his ruling government a "hybrid regime". Khan came with a reputation of being a celebrity image, who would be best suited to be the premier and work towards easing down tensions with the West and correct the image of the country, which struggled to establish its image of being much more than a terror harbouring country in the eyes of the western world. With 3.5 years completed of his ruling, it seems that Khan has taken a U-turn from his assigned task and opted to take an anti-American narrative, with his party members raising slogans of "death to America". The narrative has been formed after Khan claimed that the US is plotting a massive conspiracy to oust his government, after his visit to Russia on the eve of the day when Moscow carried our its first air strikes in Ukraine, which has now become an all-out invasion and war. Khan said that his visit to Russia irked the Americans and that is why the latter decided to use the Opposition parties to move a no-confidence motion against him. "Money has been flooded into Pakistan through these Opposition parties to buy the loyalties of our party members and coalition partners. Can we allow any other country to interfere in our country's national interest and plot a conspiracy to topple the government, only because I refused to join their bloc against Russia and went ahead with my visit," Khan asked. The anti-American narrative is working well with the supporters of Khan's political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), but the same narrative is the reason why the military establishment has pushed itself away from supporting Khan. Khan claims that the 'threatening letter', which is part of a diplomatic cable communication, exposed the fact that the Opposition parties are working hands in glove with an international conspiracy to oust his government. Khan has even gone to the extent of declaring his Opposition as traitors because of the same conspiracy. However, Khan's claims do not seem to be getting a nod from the country under question, nor from his own military establishment. The US has denied the allegations and termed them as baseless, while the officials in the military establishment have also revealed that they did not find any evidence to establish a foreign conspiracy in the letter. Since the military establishment seems to be keeping itself away from the ongoing political chaos in the country, Khan continues to flare up the anti-American narrative and keeps calling on his supporters to take to the streets in protest against a foreign intervention for a regime change in the country. This is a major concern for the other quarters of the country, who understand that not only is the US and the West the largest trade destinations for Pakistan, they are also important partners to Pakistan, especially with regard to regional security, progress and the developing situation in the war-torn Afghanistan. Khan is looking towards elections, while the Opposition parties believe that he will have to get through the ruling of the Supreme Court of Pakistan and other legal platforms and be punished for violating the Constitution by dissolving the National Assembly and blocking the voting on the no-confidence motion. --IANS hamza/arm ( 581 Words) 2022-04-06-19:00:16 (IANS)
The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) had on Monday proposed the name of the former Chief Justice for the caretaker Prime Minister's slot.

Former Information and Broadcasting Minister, Fawad Chaudhry, said in a tweet that in response to President Arif Alvi's letter, Prime Minister Imran Khan recommended the former CJP's name after consultation and approval of the PTI's core committee.

It is pertinent to mention that the President had written a letter to Imran and Shehbaz Sharif in this regard.

Alvi and former federal ministers discussed legal issues related to the appointment of a caretaker Prime Minister following the dissolution of the National Assembly on April 3 on Imran Khan's advice, Express Tribune reported.

The discussion took place during a high-level meeting held at the Presidency. The meeting was chaired by the President and was attended by Attorney General Khalid Jawed Khan, and former federal ministers Babar Awan, Fawad Chaudhry, Imtiaz Siddiqui, Asad Umar, Shafqat Mahmood and Pervez Khattak.

Sources privy to the development said that the President wants to keep the way open for consultation with the Opposition. Sharif is considering sending two names in response to the letter, they added.

--IANS san/arm

( 240 Words)

2022-04-06-19:46:04 (IANS)
Imran Khan attempted to sack Pakistan's Chief of the Army Staff Qamar Javed Bajwa, claimed the disgruntled leader of Pakistan Tahreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Amir Liaquat Hussain in a video message which went viral on social media. Amir Hussain, who recently announced his decision to leave PTI, said Imran Khan discussed the matter with him, during which he said, "I am going to remove COAS Qamar Javed Bajwa." He even claimed that he knew many secrets and if he made them public, it would create an upheaval. The disgruntled PTI leader event said that there was no truth in the existence of any threat letter, adding that the alleged letter was written by people including, Shah Mehmood Qureshi was also involved in the scheme. After his video message went viral, Liaquat was mercilessly trolled on Pakistan's social media outlets. On Sunday, Liaquat announced his decision to leave PTI after the dissolution of Pakistan's National Assembly. "After the drama is over, I want to say that what the prime minister did prove that the opposition was doing the right thing, so I am announcing to leave the PTI," he had said. On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) had said Imran Khan's move to dissolve the Parliament rather than face a no-confidence, "effectively deprives Pakistani citizens of their right to choose their government". The New York-based watchdog said that the "move has plunged Pakistan into constitutional crisis". It added that the legal experts, journalists, and rights groups have condemned the April 3 actions "as an assault on the country's democracy". "Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan's move on Sunday to dissolve parliament rather than face a no-confidence vote that could remove him from power effectively deprives Pakistani citizens of their right to choose their government," the HRW said. Pakistani President Arif Alvi on Sunday dissolved the Pakistani parliament following Khan's advice. Imran Khan made the proposal minutes after parliament's deputy speaker rejected a motion of no confidence in him as "unconstitutional." Pakistan media and opposition parties criticised this decision saying that it violated all rules governing proceedings in the House. (ANI)
The Metropolitan Police said on Wednesday said 57-year-old David Smith was extradited from Germany to the United Kingdom.

"David Ballantyne Smith, 57 (24.07.64), a British national who was living in Potsdam, Germany, is charged with nine offences under the Official Secrets Act 1911," the police said in a statement.

The alleged offences are related to the collection and transfer of information useful to the Russian state. The offences were presumably committed between October 2020 and August 2021.

Smith will appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court on Thursday, the police added.

Last August, the German police arrested Smith working as a security guard at the British embassy in Berlin on suspicion of spying. Smith reportedly cooperated with the Russian intelligence service since November 2020.

He mainly worked with British documents, Sputnik reported citing German media.

German law enforcement believes that the suspect received a monetary reward for his services, presumably in cash. (ANI)
Chinese political dissident Yan Xiong, who last fall announced his candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York, was reportedly stalked, harassed, and intimidated by the secret police of China. Yan Xiong, who escaped from China after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, reached the shores of the United States, seeking political asylum. He later served in the US Army. Subsequently, Yan decided to run for the US House of Representatives from New York. Last month, the US Justice Department had charged five people with helping the Chinese Communist Party stalk, harass or spy on political dissidents in the US, including a congressional candidate and a Los Angeles sculpture artist. Although the candidate was not named in the complaint, but it matches the description of Yan Xiong. "All the defendants allegedly perpetrated transnational repression schemes to target U.S. residents whose political views and actions are disfavored by the (People's Republic of China) government, such as advocating for democracy in the PRC," a DOJ statement said. According to court documents, all the defendants allegedly perpetrated transnational repression schemes to target U.S. residents whose political views and actions are disfavored by the PRC government, such as advocating for democracy in the PRC. In one of these schemes, the co-conspirators sought to interfere with federal elections by allegedly orchestrating a campaign to undermine the U.S. congressional candidacy of a U.S. military veteran who was a leader of the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing, PRC. In another of these schemes, three defendants planned to destroy the artwork of a PRC national residing in Los Angeles that was critical of the PRC government and planted surveillance equipment in the artist's workplace and car to spy on him from the PRC. "The complaints unsealed reveal the outrageous and dangerous lengths to which the PRC government's secret police and these defendants have gone to attack the rule of law and freedom in New York City and elsewhere in the United States," stated U.S. Attorney Breon Peace for the Eastern District of New York. "As alleged, all of the defendants charged today at the direction of the PRC secret police, engaged in a series of actions designed to silence the free speech of Chinese dissidents in the United States," said Assistant Director-in-Charge Michael J. Driscoll of the FBI's New York Field Office. "Transnational repression schemes pose an increasing threat against U.S. residents who choose to speak out against the People's Republic of China and other regimes. The FBI is committed to protecting the free speech of all U.S. residents, and we simply will not tolerate the attempts of foreign governments to violate our laws and restrict our freedom." Assistant Director Alan E. Kohler Jr. of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division, said the Ministry of State Security is more than an intelligence collection agency. "It executes the Chinese government's efforts to limit free speech, attack dissidents, and preserve the power of the Communist Party," he said. "When it exports those actions overseas, it violates the fundamental sovereignty of the United States and becomes a national security threat. These indictments should serve as a stark warning to the MSS and all foreign intelligence agencies that their efforts at repression will not be tolerated within our borders." According to Global Strat View (GSV), these incidents clearly show the CCP's attempts to silence its critics within China or abroad, 34 years after the Tiananmen Square massacre. "The protests, which began on April 15, 1989, culminated in June when the CCP imposed martial law and ordered 300,000 People's Liberation Army (PLA) troops to occupy parts of central Beijing and crush protests. But in doing so, the troops resorted to the gravest of crimes and brute use of force," the Global Strat View argued. Human rights organizations have ardently put pressure on China by highlighting the fateful events of Tiananmen. Rights groups have called the massacre China's 'indelible stain,' and repeatedly called for China to acknowledge and take responsibility for the killings. It is no surprise that whenever the anniversary of the massacre approaches, the CCP becomes edgy, detains human rights activists, and censors discussions of the crackdown. Moreover, it has also used its tech lead to erase online mentions of events related to the massacre. (ANI)
Leader of the Opposition in the outgoing National Assembly of Pakistan, Shehbaz Sharif, informed President Arif Alvi on Wednesday that the Opposition does not agree with the suggestion of appointing Justice (Retd) Gulzar Ahmed as the interim Prime Minister and that the process for the appointment issued by the head of the state was a "violation of law and Constitution", Geo News reported. In a letter, Sharif confirmed to the President that he had received the latter's April 4 message regarding the appointment of a caretaker Prime Minister. Sharif, who's also the President of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), informed Alvi that the Speaker's ruling on April 3 on the no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Imran Khan was a "blatant violation of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan" and the "Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business" of the Lower House. "The entire super-structure built thereon, including all consequential notifications relating to dismissal of the resolution, advice of the Prime Minister regarding dissolution of the National Assembly, and continuation of the Prime Minister in office are all illegal, without lawful authority and of no legal effect," wrote Shehbaz. The former Opposition leader also informed President Alvi that the Supreme Court is holding suo motu hearings on the National Assembly deputy speaker's ruling. "Thus, the process of appointing a caretaker Prime Minister initiated by you under Article 224(1A) of the Continuation in a hurried manner is simply to defeat the process of law and Constitution without waiting for the decision in the sou motu case and petitions filed by combined Opposition parties and other petitions challenging the rejection of the no-confidence motion against the Prime Minister and prorogation of requisitioned session of National Assembly by the Deputy Speaker and consequent dissolution of National Assembly by Prime Minister, which are still pending adjudication before the Supreme Court. "Thus the start of the said process by you is not acceptable as it is violation of the law and Constitution and is subjudice," wrote Shehbaz, Geo News reported. The PML-N President also said that Gulzar Ahmed's nomination as caretaker premier by Imran Khan was a "blatant attempt to subvert the provisions of the Constitution and to pre-empt the decision of the Supreme Court". He added that all issues, including the violation of Article 244 and 224A at this point, are "subjudice" and informed the President that the Opposition does not agree with the suggestion of appointing Gulzar Ahmed as the caretaker Prime Minister. --IANS san/arm ( 428 Words) 2022-04-06-21:16:19 (IANS)
The Chinese government should respect the right to health and other basic rights in its response to the COVID-19 surge in the country, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Wednesday. Authorities in Shanghai have imposed draconian lockdown measures since March that have impeded people's access to health care, food, and other life necessities, the New York-based watchdog noted. An unknown number of people have died after being denied medical treatment for their non-Covid related illnesses. The authorities have separated small children from their parents after positive Covid-19 tests under the "Zero Covid" policy, which requires those testing positive to isolate in a hospital or designated facility. According to HRW, the authorities have hindered discussion of public concerns surrounding the Covid response by further tightening restrictions on social media. "The Chinese government's 'Zero-Covid' approach to pandemic control by imposing stringent citywide lockdowns has resulted in the systematic denial of medical needs of people with serious but non-Covid related illnesses," said Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch. "Authorities should treat the health of citizens as the end goal, not a zero-Covid infection rate." On April 3, the Chinese government announced the deployment of thousands of military personnel to Shanghai to assist in the mandatory testing of all 25 million residents for the virus that causes Covid-19. On April 4, Shanghai authorities said the city would indefinitely remain under lockdown - meaning that residents are not allowed to leave their homes - as it reviews results of the mass Covid testing. Numerous netizens took to Chinese social media to share stories of their or their loved ones being denied access to medical care for non-Covid related illnesses either due to hospitals being closed because of Covid-restrictions, or the lack of health care workers because they were quarantined or got diverted to administer Covid tests. The rights watchdog said that Chinese officials denied some patients care because they had a Covid infection or they did not have proof of a negative Covid test. Netizens have reported threats of self-harm or violence when family members were denied access to health care. The authorities have forcibly separated some children who tested positive from their parents to be quarantined in medical facilities. So far, Shanghai authorities defended the policy, stating that anyone found positive - regardless of age - must be isolated from non-infected people, and that a parent can only be quarantined with their child if both are infected. China's much-publicised 'zero-covid' strategy that the government credited for bringing the country out of the pandemic till recently is falling apart as the rapidly mounting cases are again forcing mass lockdowns like those seen in 2020. (ANI)
On April 5, 2022, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi had a phone conversation with Canadian Foreign Minister Ms. Melanie Joly at the latter's request.



Wang Yi said, the people of China and Canada have enjoyed long-term friendly exchanges, and Canada was one of the first Western countries to establish diplomatic ties with the People's Republic of China. However, in recent years, China-Canada relations have suffered a serious setback due to the Meng Wanzhou case. This is something we do not want to see. The essence of this case is that the United States suppressed Chinese high-tech enterprises by coercion. Such despicable behavior is seen clearly by the world. Wang Yi said, no country should embolden this unilateral bullying by "playing the jackal to the tiger", a Chinese proverb indicating "help a villain do evil". All countries also have the right to make necessary responses to it.

Wang Yi said, China has always viewed and handled China-Canada relations from a strategic and long-term perspective. The current situation of bilateral relations is not in the interests of both sides, and Canada should face up to the problems and meet the Chinese side halfway. Wang Yi put forward a three-point proposal in this regard:

First, take a positive and objective view of China and pursue a prudent and pragmatic China policy. China's political system and development path are the Chinese people's own choices, which have inevitable historical logic and are in line with China's national conditions and its people's needs. China's development and progress is not only the legitimate right of 1.4 billion people, but also an important part of the modernization of all mankind. China and Canada have neither historical disputes nor real conflicts of interest. China hopes that Canada will keep in mind the goal of mutual benefit and win-win results and do more practical things that are conducive to enhancing mutual trust and promoting bilateral relations.

Second, respect each other's core interests and not set new obstacles to China-Canada relations. The one-China principle is the political foundation of China-Canada relations. If the Taiwan question is not handled properly, China-Canada relations will suffer fundamental damage. China hopes that Canada will adopt a correct attitude and position on issues concerning China's core interests.

Third, uphold independence and eliminate unnecessary external interference. The older generation of leaders of China and Canada broke through resistance and made the decision to establish diplomatic relations. The exchanges between China and Canada featured many good stories and traditions, which should be cherished and carried forward. China hopes that Canada will work with China to eliminate external interference and overcome difficulties to achieve sound, steady and sustainable development of bilateral relations.

Joly said, Canada was one of the first countries to recognize the People's Republic of China, and Canada-China relations have a solid foundation. Canada respects China's sovereignty, system and the choices made independently by the Chinese people, and speaks highly of China's great achievements in development, especially poverty alleviation. Noting that Canada-China relations were at a difficult phase in recent years, Joly said that Canada is ready to work with China to bring Canada-China relations gradually back on the right track and build a more resilient bilateral relationship on the basis of treating each other with candidness and respect, and in a forward-looking spirit. Canada appreciates China's important contributions to the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, and stands ready to strengthen cooperation with China on climate change, environmental protection and pandemic response.

The two sides also exchanged views on the Ukraine issue. Wang Yi said, President Xi Jinping has made a comprehensive and authoritative elaboration on China's position. China calls on all parties to think calmly and rationally, create opportunities for peace and open up prospects for talks. At present, the talks are facing setbacks and difficulties, but as long as the talks continue, there will be the possibility of a ceasefire and the hope of peace. Upholding an objective and impartial position, China will continue to play a constructive role in this regard. Joly said, Canada is ready to maintain communication with China.
The White House has announced a wide new slate of sanctions on Russia that includes first-time individual sanctions on the two adult daughters of President Vladimir Putin in response to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Asked why the US was targeting Putin's daughters, a senior Biden administration official said the US thought they could be in control of some of their father's assets. "We believe that many of Putin's assets are hidden with family members, and that's why we're targeting them," said the official who spoke on background to preview the new measures. The Russian president's two adult daughters-- Katerina Tikhonova and Maria Putina-- are with his former wife Lyudmila Shkrebneva. Maria Putina has been reported living under the assumed name Maria Vorontsova. Tikhonova and Vorontsova, in their 30's, are rarely seen in public and almost never mentioned by their father. The Kremlin has only ever identified them by their first names. The White House said that Vorontsova and Tikhonova were being added to the sanctions list "for being the adult children of Putin, a person whose property and interests in property are blocked". The announcement described Tikhonova as "a tech executive whose work supports the GoR [the Russian government] and defence industry". Tikhonova is director of Innopraktika, a USD 1.7 billion project to create a science centre at Moscow State University, as well as deputy director of the Institute for Mathematical Research of Complex Systems at the same institution. She was married to gas company executive Kirill Shamalov, son of the co-owner of Rossiya Bank, between 2013 and 2018. Her sister, Vorontsova, the announcement went on, "lead state-funded programs that have received billions of dollars from the Kremlin toward genetics research and are personally overseen by Putin". Vorontsova is also the eldest of the two sanctioned daughters. She spent much of her early life in Dresden, East Germany, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, where her father served as a KGB agent. She reportedly played the violin as a child and went on to study biology at St Petersburg State University and medicine at Moscow State University. She is married to Dutch businessman Jorrit Faassen and the couple reportedly now live in Moscow. In addition to Putin's daughters, the US will sanction Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's wife Maria Lavrova and Ekaterina Lavrova, his adult child. The United States has also designated 21 members of Russia's National Security Council, including former President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, for their role and authority in crafting the Kremlin's brutal policies and resulting abuses, US State Secretary Anthony Blinken said in a statement. U.S. officials said this latest round of sanctions was in direct response to shocking new evidence of what are likely to be "war crimes" committed by Russian troops in the Ukrainian town of Bucha. "There's nothing less happening than major war crimes," President Joe Biden said in a speech Wednesday in Washington. "Responsible nations have to come together to hold these perpetrators accountable," he said. "Together with our allies and our partners, we're gonna keep raising the economic cost and ratchet up the pain for Putin." US President Joe Biden has signed sign a new executive order prohibiting any new investment in Russia by Americans, which will apply to both U.S. residents and those living abroad. (ANI)
There is resentment in the Pakistan foreign office over the outgoing government's move to use the diplomatic cable for political mileage, as diplomats have voiced concerns that the controversy would undermine their working, Express Tribune reported. One official said that the negative impact of the way the Imran Khan government used secret and classified communications for political objectives would be felt in the foreign office for many years to come. The official explained that the first negative fallout of this controversy would be that now diplomats posted abroad would be very careful in their assessments. "Diplomats are the eyes and ears of Pakistan who give frank and honest feedback from countries where they serve," the official said. "Such honest and candid assessments are meant for policymakers to form policy accordingly," the official explained, adding: "But if governments start using such secret communications for their political gains, the diplomats would be reluctant to make honest assessments," the official cautioned. Another official admitted that the government seemed to have blown the "cable" issue out of proportion. "If the foreign office starts making diplomatic cables public, people would be blown away," the official said, insisting that such candid discussions between diplomats are common. But a retired senior diplomat, who also served in the US as Pakistan's ambassador, said the language used by certain American officials were "harsh and unusual", Express Tribune reported. --IANS san/arm ( 248 Words) 2022-04-06-22:39:13 (IANS)
ProFootball Talk on NBC Sports

The Browns and Baker Mayfield may eventually need each other in 2022. Someone may be trying to blow things up before it ever gets to that point. A new article from Jake Trotter of ESPN.com throws more bituminous on the burn pile in Cleveland, highlighting how and why player and team got to the point [more]
Two people were wounded Tuesday night in a workplace shooting at a South Carolina industrial plant, and the suspect took their own life, authorities said.

The shooting unfolded around 10:30 p.m. at 416 A.M. Ellison Road in Anderson, the address of a Fraenkische plant, Anderson County Sheriff Chad McBride said during a late night news conference.

The call came that there was a gunman inside shooting, he said. Three people have been shot including the suspect."

The sheriff noted there were about 30 employees at the plant when the gunfire erupted. Some ran out of the building and took shelter at a nearby restaurant called Tipsy Tavern, according to McBride.

Authorities responded to the scene just after the confrontation ended, noting no officers were involved in the shooting.

The suspect died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound by a single gunshot, Anderson County Coroner Greg Shore said.

The injured were taken to a hospital, one by private car and another by ambulance, according to the coroner. One was in critical condition when they left the scene, Shore said.

While the sheriff did not have an immediate motive in the shooting, McBride said authorities believe the shooter once worked at the plant.

We believe that the suspect may have came to the job site prior to the shooting, he said.

McBride also said it appeared a rifle was used in the shooting.

Officials said the workplace attack appeared to be an isolated incident. The investigation is ongoing.

Fraenkische is a manufacturing company that develops pipes, shafts and system components made of plastic and metal, according to the companys website.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.
TALLAHASSEE  Florida health care facilities have a new set of rules for restricting visitation thanks to a bill approved Wednesday by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Senate Bill 988, which sponsors named the No Patient Left Alone Act, was largely a response to the early months of the coronavirus pandemic in which the DeSantis administration severely limited visitation at Floridas long-term care facilities and hospitals.

The state put those restrictions in place in 2020 in the hope of controlling the spread of COVID-19. As the months of isolation for residents and patients added up and complaints from loved ones mounted, DeSantis began relaxing those rules.

Starting with an emergency order issued Sept. 1, 2020, the state began allowing some visitation at nursing homes. By March 2021, DeSantis administration had lifted the last remaining major state restrictions.

SB 988 was a major legislative priority for DeSantis this legislative session. At a bill signing ceremony in Naples, DeSantis said a state law was needed to ensure future leaders couldnt repeat the mistake of cutting off human interaction during a crisis.

If there is another crisis, I think its important that we not lose sight over things that really matter, DeSantis said. This bill today really creates cement around those rights.

Here are five things the bill  which applies to hospitals, nursing homes, hospice facilities, assisted living facilities and intermediate care centers  will do.

1. Visitation must be allowed in certain specific cases.

The new law outlines a series of circumstances in which visitation must be allowed, even in pandemics or other emergencies. If a patient or resident is giving birth or is about to die, they must be allowed visitors. Pediatric patients can also have visitors. If residents or patients are struggling with a new environment, need encouragement eating or speaking, are going through emotional distress or grieving a loss, facilities have to allow visitors. The same is true for a resident or patient about to make a major medical decision.

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2. Facilities will have to make visitation rules.

Health care companies will have 30 days to create or update visitation rules that can be no more stringent than rules for staff members around patients or residents. Those rules have to include infection control procedures, but facilities will not be able to require any immunization or vaccination of visitors. And they have to allow for consensual touching of patients or residents.

3. Essential caregivers get greater access.

Facilities will be required to allow patients or residents to designate an essential caregiver who can visit for up to two hours daily.

4. Visitors can have their visitation rights suspended.

The new law will allow facilities to have visitors agree to their rules. If the visitor breaks them, they can have their privileges revoked. The rules must be easily accessible from the homepage of the facilitys website.

5. The new law takes effect immediately.

DeSantis signature Wednesday made the legislation state law.
An adorable but increasingly aggressive fox roaming Capitol Hill was trapped on Tuesday after legislators, reporters, and passersby reported some violent skirmishes with the animal.

Reporters and politicians had captured video and pictures of their close encounters with the red fox this week, sharing them on Twitter. But after the fox aggressively approached several people, warnings were issued to legislators and staffers on the Hill Tuesday morning, urging people to keep their distance.

At least one legislator, Rep. Ami Bera from California, and a journalist with Politico reported being bitten by the fox.

Several people shared images of the fox in the area of the Senate on Monday and Tuesday:

Capitol fox on the run. Video of the Capitol fox, captured by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) early one morning at the foot of Capitol Hill on the Senate side. 07:26 PM - 05 Apr 2022

Spotted outside the Capitol: a red fox. I was sitting at a gazebo outside the Russell Senate Office building when this little one came trotting up. Then galloped after a squirrel 07:32 PM - 04 Apr 2022

Capitol fox currently in lower senate park 05:56 PM - 05 Apr 2022

A few of the encounters prompted an alert to workers on the Hill that the animal was aggressive. US Capitol Police on Tuesday morning also reported that animal control officers were on the grounds looking for the fox.

We have received several reports of aggressive fox encounters on or near the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.For your safety, please do not approach any foxes.Animal Control Officers are working to trap and relocate any foxes they find. 04:50 PM - 05 Apr 2022

By then, Bera confirmed that he had been bitten by a fox and had to take a series of shots as a precaution against rabies.

Bera told reporters he had been bitten Monday night in an "unprovoked" attack and had used his umbrella to scare away the fox.

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Rep. Ami Bera confirms he was BIT by the Senate fox last nightHe described attack, which occurred near Russell building, as unprovokedI didnt see it and all of a sudden I felt something lunge at the back of my leg, Bera said.I jumped and got my umbrella, he continues 07:21 PM - 05 Apr 2022

Politico reporter Ximena Bustillo also reported being bitten by the fox Tuesday on Twitter.

By 3:30 p.m. local time, the US Capitol Police confirmed the fox had been captured.

A spokesperson for the Capitol Police told BuzzFeed News it would be up to animal control to decide what to do with the animal.

On Wednesday, DC Health confirmed the fox had been euthanized so as to perform a test for rabies that later came back positive.

"DC Health is contacting all human victims who were bitten by the fox," the agency said in a statement. "Animal control will post informational flyers around Capitol Hill advising of the foxs positive rabies status and encouraging people who might have been exposed to call DC Health."

The fox was an adult female and her litter of kits were also captured on Wednesday, DC Health said.

On Thursday, the agency announced the kits, too, had been euthanized due to their suspected exposure to rabies.
Easter travel chaos as delays and cancellations hit BA, EasyJet, Eurostar and Dover - Jamie Lorriman

Airlines have cancelled dozens more flights as they continue to struggle with Covid staff absences.

EasyJet and British Airways have cancelled more than 100 flights due to run on Wednesday, adding to days of havoc at airports.

In the past week, well over 1,000 flights have been affected, according to figures from data company Cirium, compared to 197 the same week in 2019, with holidaymakers waiting in hours-long queues to get through airports.

EasyJet has pulled at least 30 flights to or from Gatwick airport on Wednesday, while BA appeared to have axed 78 flights in and out of Heathrow.

The cancellations come after airlines reported difficulties with staffing as Covid infections force workers to call in sick.

Earlier this week easyJet said disruption was set to continue over the Easter holidays and it was cancelling services in advance to "give customers the ability to rebook onto alternative flights".

A spokesman added: "We are sorry for any inconvenience for affected customers."

British Airways, meanwhile, has reduced its schedule for the coming weeks as it attempts to ramp up its operations as demand for travel returns.

"Aviation has been one of the industries worst hit by the pandemic and airlines and airports are experiencing the same issues rebuilding their operations while managing the continuing impact of Covid, a spokesman for the airline said.

So while the vast majority of our flights continue to operate as planned, as a precaution we've slightly reduced our schedule between now and the end of May as we ramp back up.

Manchester airport has been among those badly affected by travel delays, with some passengers missing flights due to long queues at security screening.

Earlier this week the mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, suggested police could be drafted in to help bring the situation back under control.

The airport's managing director, Karen Smart, said on Tuesday she would step down after eight years in the role.
Ames Watson, a Columbia, Md.-based private equity holding company, is the lead investor in a Class B funding round for Margaux, a womens footwear brand. The size of the investment was not disclosed.

This marks the latest in a series of investments and acquisitions for Ames Watson, whose portfolio of properties include Lids, Fanatics Lids College and South Moon Under.

More from WWD

Harvard alumnae Sarah Pierson and Alexa Buckley started the New York City-based Margaux in 2015 as a way to fulfill their search for comfortable, well-crafted shoes. The brand has since expanded to include heels, sandals, loafers and sneakers, all made at family-owned factories in Spain and Portugal. The brand also has a flagship in New York City as well as an e-commerce site.

Margaux has disrupted the womens footwear space and we see tremendous growth opportunities across the industry, said Lawrence Berger, cofounder and partner of Ames Watson. In identifying growth investment opportunities at Ames Watson, were always looking for special brands with exceptional teams of entrepreneurs  and weve found that in Sarah Pierson and Alexa Buckley.

Tom Ripley, cofounder and partner of Ames Watson, said the Margaux investment represents the companys sixth minority investment in the last year.

We have a growing community of shoppers and are excited to have found a true partner in Ames Watson, Buckley and Pierson said. Ames Watsons brand-building expertise and proven track record in scaling retail and e-commerce businesses will be key to Margauxs continued growth and success.

This investment follows Ames Watsons recent announcement that it has raised $250 million in a new round of funding for acquisitions and investments for Lids and for separate stand-alone control and passive investments. Additional Ames Watson minority investments include Mitchell & Ness, Watchbox and Zygo.
You are here: Arts

The first in-person London Book Fair, one of the world's biggest publishing trade fairs, kicked off in London on Tuesday after suspensions due to the COVID-19 pandemic since 2019.



The Fair, which was launched in 1971, is set to run until Thursday with more than 900 exhibitors.

The event was canceled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and was offered in virtual format last year.

"It makes a big difference to see people as you don't get quite the same buzz in a Zoom meeting. This will lead to far more business," said children's publisher Janetta Otter-Barry.

"Publishing is a creative industry and you thrive off learning from other people. We're excited to get back and network with writers and publishers," said Jane Rowland from the publisher Troubador.

Guo Guang, general manager of China Youth Press International Ltd., told Xinhua that he has noticed a growing international demand for books on Chinese art, history and modern-day development.

This year, more than 60 Chinese publishers participated in the event.
(Reuters) - Armenia and Azerbaijan on Wednesday agreed to peace talks to address tensions over the long-disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which borders both nations, the office of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said.

The European Union, which hosted the meeting between the two former Soviet states, said it hoped the discussions would serve as the first step in a durable peace.

It was the third meeting in six months between Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev after a conflict in 2020 in which Azerbaijan recaptured territory in and around the enclave that the Armenians had held for decades.

Pashinyan's office said the two men had agreed that by the end of April they would set up a bilateral commission.

"The Prime Minister of Armenia and the President of Azerbaijan instructed their foreign ministers to begin preparations for peace talks," it said in a statement.

There was no immediate comment from Azerbaijan.

European Council President Charles Michel, who helped facilitate Wednesday's meeting, said he hoped the talks would help bring together the two sides.

"I am confident that tonight we took an important step in the right direction. It doesn't mean that everything is solved, of course," he told reporters in Brussels.

Both Russia and the United States had expressed concern about recent developments.

Last month, Armenia accused Azerbaijani forces of firing on residents inside Nagorno-Karabakh and said three people died. Azerbaijan said it was responding to movements by what it calls illegal armed groups.

Armenia said it expected Russia to make Azerbaijan withdraw troops from an area policed by Russian peacekeepers. Azerbaijan said the area was its sovereign territory.

Pashinyan's office said the two sides agreed to create "a bilateral commission on the delimitation of the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which will also be authorized to deal with questions of ensuring security and stability along the border." It did not give details.

(Reporting by David Ljunggren and Ron Popeski; Editing by Leslie Adler and Gerry Doyle)
Anti-abortion activist Lauren Handy, right, speaks at a news conference alongside her colleague Terrisa Bukovinac. (Photo: via Associated Press)

Anti-abortion activist Lauren Handy, right, speaks at a news conference alongside her colleague Terrisa Bukovinac. (Photo: via Associated Press)

Two anti-abortion activists made new claims Tuesday about the five fetuses police found in one of their apartments last week, attesting that a medical waste worker had allowed them to seize 115 fetuses from outside a Washington, D.C., clinic last month.

Lauren Handy and Terrisa Bukovinac made their claims at a press conference days after D.C. police confirmed that officers had found fetuses in an apartment belonging to Handy, whom the FBI arrested that same day on charges of blocking access to an abortion clinic in 2020. She was later released.

Handy and Bukovinac, who both hold leadership positions at a group called Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, told reporters Tuesday that they had actually obtained 115 fetuses, not just five, from outside the Washington Surgi-Clinic, where theyd gone to protest on March 25.

They claim they had approached and taken the fetuses from a driver for Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services who was loading boxes into a vehicle.

We asked him if he knew what was in the boxes, and after he said no, we told him: dead babies, Bukovinac said Tuesday. The driver was visibly shaken. After he confirmed the boxes were from Washington Surgi, I asked him, Would you get in trouble if we took one of these boxes?

Bukovinac said the driver willingly handed the box over after she and Handy told him they wanted to give the contents a proper burial and a funeral.

Handy and Bukovinac showed reporters images of the box they claim a medical waste worker willingly gave them. (Photo: PAAU)

Handy and Bukovinac showed reporters images of the box they claim a medical waste worker willingly gave them. (Photo: PAAU)

Curtis Bay denies this account.

On March 25, a Curtis Bay employee took custody of three packages from the Washington Surgery Center (Washington Surgi-Clinic) and delivered all of them to Curtis Bays incineration facility, the company said in a statement to The New York Times, adding that the worker did not give away any of the boxes. Any allegations made otherwise are false.

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Bukovinac said they brought a box back to Handys apartment to unpack it and eventually buried 110 fetuses they believe were aborted during the first trimester of pregnancy. The other five she described as late-term or nearly full-term and the victims of possible federal crimes, so the women began seeking out a doctor to confirm the fetuses gestational ages.

When they failed to find a medical professional for that purpose, Bukovinac and Handy coordinated with attorneys to alert the D.C. homicide unit of the location of the five larger babies and requested an investigation into their deaths on March 29, Bukovinac said.

The patterns of their wounds suggest violent federal crime, Handy claimed on Tuesday, shortly before displaying graphic images of the fetuses they collected.

But before D.C. police arrived the next day and found the fetuses in Handys apartment, the FBI arrested and charged her and eight others with federal civil rights offenses. According to prosecutors, they violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act in October 2020 when they used their bodies, furniture, ropes and chains to block the doors of an abortion-providing clinic in the capital.

D.C. police say they have not found anything criminal in nature regarding the five abortions the activists wanted investigated. The city does not ban the procedure at any stage of pregnancy and leaves the decision up to patients in consultation with their doctors.

Nationwide, around just 1% of abortions are performed 21 or more weeks into a pregnancy, and physicians typically provide them at that stage because of severe fetal anomalies or threats to the mothers life.

Neither Bukovinac nor Handy have been arrested or charged in connection with obtaining the fetuses but said Tuesday that they believe its a possibility. Were not afraid, Bukovinac said.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

Related...
Attorney General Merrick Garland. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Attorney General Merrick Garland said "we have seen the mass graves" in Ukraine.

Garland said the Justice Department was supporting investigations of potential war crimes.

President Joe Biden called Vladimir Putin a "war criminal" earlier this week.

The Justice Department is assisting international efforts to examine possible war crimes committed in Russia's war on Ukraine, Attorney General Merrick Garland said Wednesday, declaring that "we have seen the mass graves" and bombed buildings.

"We have seen the dead bodies of civilians, some with bound hands, scattered in the streets," Garland said, flanked by FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco.

"The world sees what is happening in Ukraine. The Justice Department sees what is happening in Ukraine," he added.

Garland's remarks came days after images emerged of Ukrainian civilians killed in Bucha, a town near Kyiv. Amid the mounting international anger over the atrocities allegedly committed by Russian soldiers, President Joe Biden said he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is a "war criminal."

"This guy is brutal, and what's happening in Bucha is outrageous, and everyone's seen it," Biden said.

Garland on Wednesday said the Justice Department has a "long history" of helping to hold alleged war criminals accountable. He invoked a former attorney general and Supreme Court justice, Robert Jackson, who served as the chief American prosecutor at the post-World War II Nuremberg trials.

In response to the atrocities in Ukraine, he said, a top Justice Department official in Paris has met with a French war crimes prosecutor. Garland said Justice Department officials have also met with Eurojust and Europol  a pair of law enforcement agencies to the European Union  and are assisting the top Ukrainian prosecutor.

Asked if he was calling for the creation of a Nuremberg-style tribunal, Garland said, "I'm not calling for anything at this time. Right now we're in the collection of evidence stage."

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On Wednesday, Justice Department officials also announced the first charges stemming from the special task force created to hunt down the assets of Russian oligarchs closely tied to Putin. In a newly unsealed indictment, the Justice Department charged the oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev with sanctions violations, alleging that he attempted to evade the sanctions by using co-conspirators to surreptitiously acquire and run media outlets across Europe.

Just days earlier, at the Justice Department's request, Spanish authorities seized a mega yacht belonging to Viktor Vekselberg. In court papers linked to the seizure, the Justice Department said Vekselberg, the head of the Moscow-based Renova Group conglomerate, used shell companies to obfuscate his ownership of the yacht  named the "Tango"  and avoid bank oversight of transactions related to its upkeep.

"Our message to those who continue to enable the Russian regime through their criminal conduct is this: It does not matter how far you sail your yacht," Garland said Wednesday.

Garland added: "It does not matter how well you conceal your assets. It does not matter how cleverly you write your malware or hide your online activity. The Justice Department will use every available tool to find you, disrupt your plots, and hold you accountable."

Read the original article on Business Insider
Former Sen. Mark Udall, a Democrat from Colorado, is among 37 former federal lawmakers calling on Congress to ban its members  and their immediate family members  from trading stocks. Reuters

Dozens of members of Congress have violated a federal conflicts-of-interest law.

The former lawmakers say a congressional stock ban will "help restore public trust."

A congressional committee will conduct a hearing Thursday on lawmakers' stock trades.

Thirty-seven former members of Congress are asking current congressional lawmakers to ban themselves  and their immediate family members  from trading individual stocks while in office.

"Congress has a unique opportunity right now to help restore public trust," the group of 25 Democrats and 12 Republicans wrote in a letter sent Wednesday to every congressional office. "Members on both sides of the aisle, along with the American public, share concern over members holding financial securities in companies that are directly affected by legislation under their control."

Among the signatories: former Sens. Gary Hart, a Democrat of Colorado; Russ Feingold, a Democrat of Wisconsin; and Carol Moseley-Braun, a Democrat of Illinois; as well as former Reps. Charles Boustany, a Republican of Louisiana; Sue Myrick, a Republican of North Carolina; Chris Shays, a Republican of Connecticut; Zach Wamp, a Republican of Tennessee; and Tim Roemer, a Democrat of Indiana.

The letter, sent under the auspices of nonpartisan government reform group Issue One, arrives as the Committee on House Administration is scheduled Thursday to conduct a congressional hearing on whether to ban or otherwise restrict members of Congress from buying and selling stocks.

Also up for debate: whether penalties for violating the current Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 are too weak.

Insider's "Conflicted Congress" project in December found that dozens of lawmakers, and at least 182 senior congressional staffers, had in recent months failed to comply with the reporting requirements of the STOCK Act.

"Conflicted Congress" also found numerous examples of conflicts of interest among federal lawmakers.

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For example, at least 75 members of Congress or their spouses bought or sold stock in companies that make COVID-19 vaccines, treatments, and tests in the weeks before and after the pandemic gripped the US in early 2020.

Four members of Congress or their spouses have either currently or recently invested money in Russian companies, and at least 19 have invested money in defense contractors that make weapons Ukraine is using to fight Russia's invasion.

"As times change, so must the laws that govern oversight of Members in order to reduce the appearance of corruption," the group of former lawmakers wrote. "The moment has come to close loopholes and ensure Americans know their members are working for them. The onus now rests on Members of both parties to come together and find the best possible solutions."

In late March, a coalition of 19 advocacy and watchdog groups similarly called on House leadership to support legislation that would bar members of Congress, as well as their spouses and dependent children, from trading individual stocks.

Both Republicans and Democrats have introduced several different bills designed to curb lawmakers' stock trading. Leaders from both parties have signaled an openness to, if not outright support of, changes to the STOCK Act and related Ethics in Government Act. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has played a leading role in negotiating legislation that Congress would vote on.

But it's unclear whether there's requisite support among members to advance significant reforms, and if there is, what specific forms they'll take.

Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia, commenting on a proposed stock-trade ban, said the "whole concept is bullshit  why would you assume that members of Congress are going to be inherently bad or corrupt?"

Rep. Rodney Davis of Illinois, the ranking Republican on the Committee on House Administration, is also skeptical of stopping his congressional colleagues from trading stocks, although he said he hasn't yet made up his mind on a path forward.

"I don't want to pigeonhole myself into laying out what I think my priorities are," he told Insider.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin testifies before the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, April 6. Evan Vucci/Associated Press

President Joe Biden had sharp words for Rep. Matt Gaetz after he criticized the Defense Department.

Rep. Matt Gaetz wound up in a shouting match with the secretary of defense at a committee hearing.

Lloyd Austin was on Capitol Hill Tuesday to testify on the Defense Department's 2023 budget request.

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ended up in a shouting match with Rep. Matt Gaetz during his testimony before the House Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, President Joe Biden came to Austin's defense while addressing a national union conference.

"Secretary Austin basically looked at him and said, 'What the hell do you think we've done? Why do you think they're able to fight? We've trained them and we've given them weapons. That's what's happening," Biden said.

Austin was on Capitol Hill to discuss the Defense Department's 2023 budget request, but Gaetz used his five-minute round to ask about the US military's "wokeness" and how it has led to apparent Defense Department failures.

The Florida Republican asked Austin about a lecture the French economist Thomas Picketty gave at the US National Defense University titled "Responding to China: The Case for Global Justice and Democratic Socialism."

"Why should American taxpayers fund lectures at the National Defense University that promote socialism as a strategy to combat China?" Gaetz asked.

When Austin said he was unfamiliar with the lecture, Gaetz called his lack of knowledge of the coursework at NDU "surprising" and asked if he thought "embracing socialism" would be an "effective strategy to combat China."

The exchange continued until Gaetz accused Austin of "blowing a lot of calls lately on matters of strategy."

"Mr Secretary, you guys told us that Russia couldn't lose. You told us that the Taliban couldn't immediately win," Gaetz said. "And so I guess I'm wondering what in the $773 billion that you're requesting today is going to help you make assessments that are accurate in the face of so many blown calls."

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"I'm sorry you are embarrassed by your country," Austin replied. "Has it not occurred to you that Russia has not overrun Ukraine because of what we've done and our allies have done?"

Gaetz said the Defense Department is "behind in hypersonics" and has "failed to deter Russia."

Austin replied: "What do you mean we're behind in hypersonics; how do you make that assessment?"

In March, the US quietly tested the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept, CNN reported on Tuesday.

The Lockheed Martin-made weapon successfully launched from a B-52 bomber off the West Coast, a defense official told CNN. In September 2021, DARPA announced the Air Force successfully tested the Raytheon-made HAWC, but offered few details about the launch other than the fact that the missile was faster than Mach 5.

The March test happened days after Russia said it used its own hypersonic missile during its invasion of Ukraine.

US officials downplayed the use of the Russian Kinzhal missile. Austin said he didn't view the missile as a "game changer" and Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said it was "hard to know what exactly the justification" for Russia's use of the missile since it targeted a storage facility.

Read the original article on Business Insider
It's hard to get Jim Breyer to say a critical word, publicly, about anything, so it's no surprise that, when asked why he moved to Austin from his longtime headquarters in Silicon Valley two years ago, he spends some time talking first about the Bay Area and its many advantages, including Stanford University and the numerous "intelligence platform companies" that he has backed over the years, including, famously Facebook.

"Austin will never have, in my humble view, the deep technology underpinnings of Silicon Valley. The most passionate entrepreneurs with deep tech continue to be in Silicon Valley," says Breyer during a recent hour-long call.

Still, Breyer is clearly very happy with Austin, a city to which he traveled back and forth for years as a member on the board of Dell between 2009 and 2013 and during which time he says, he "just fell in love with the city" and to which he "thought there was a very high likelihood I would move at some point."

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Indeed, he calls finally making that move, the planning of which he began before the pandemic took hold, "a wonderful decision." Austin, he says, "almost more than any city in the country, encourages a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration," meaning that unlike the Valley, which remains intensely tech heavy, Austin is home to many types of professionals, says Breyer. "It's not just technologists, but artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, doctors, professors associated with the University of Texas. There is a collaborative spirit that I think is really unique." Austin is also continuing to attract "young, brilliant entrepreneurs from around the country and in many cases from around the world" because of that mix of energy and expertise, he adds.

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As for what Breyer finds most compelling about Austin from an investing standpoint, he notes the city's strengths when it comes to fintech startups in particular, but says that his investment firm, Breyer Capital, has made 20 investments in both for-profit and nonprofit organizations altogether to date, and that these range from the job placement startup Workrise to the at-home lab testing outfit EverlyWell to ZenBusiness, which offers a business formation service specifically focusing on small business owners.

He also notes that Austin is home to a growing crypto scene, one that's been fueled in part by Multicoin Capital, a thesis-driven investment firm that invests in cryptocurrencies, tokens and blockchain companies and which sprung up on the Texas scene five years ago. (As an early investor in Coinbase and Circle Financial through a firm Breyer is closely partnered with, IDG, he says he has been "very active" in backing crypto technologies.)

And Breyer notes that Austin is home to a wide number of startups that are focused on managing data, including spinouts from Dell. Indeed, one company he holds up as an example of a "company doing groundbreaking work in managing data for small, medium and large enterprises" is Data.World, which just this week announced $50 million in Series C funding led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management.

Not last, Breyer says the "intersection of computation and medicine" has long been, and remains, perhaps the biggest area of interest for him, and that there's no shortage of interesting work coming out of the Austin region, including thanks to the now eight-year-old Dell Medical School, which is, by Breyer's telling, "collaborating very deeply across the University of Texas campus."

Of course, another reason that investors like Breyer have been heading to Austin in recent years owes not just to the usual aspects -- lower expenses, politics, the fact that Texas doesn't have a capital gains tax -- but because it also remains relatively unchartered territory compared with Silicon Valley.

While a small number of venture firms ruled the roost for years, including LiveOak Venture Partners, Silverton Partners, and, earlier in time, Austin Ventures (a firm that disbanded in 2015), there are still few enough investors in Austin that most VCs there aren't facing a lot of sharp elbows just yet.

Indeed, asked about what he is seeing in terms of potential syndicate partners, as well as rivals, Breyer says that he is "great friends" with many former partners of Austin Ventures, many of whom continue to make angel investments. He notes that firms like LiveOak and Capital Factory are "doing superb work" and that he has become friendly with Joe Lonsdale, whose firm 8VC also relocated to Austin in 2020.

He says he also finds that "though the community of venture capital is not necessarily extremely large, the entrepreneurs in many cases are very active as angel investors, so many of the investments that Breyer Capital has made are early-stage startups, with [the backing of] entrepreneurs. "In that sense," he continues, "the community is really interesting because the entrepreneurs are backing other entrepreneurs."

Breyer expects the area to have many more entrepreneurs soon, too. I do see more [operators] deciding theyre interested in joining the Google or Facebook or Apple or Tesla offices in Austin, and these are the entrepreneurs of the future. When they start to hit their early 30s and want to do something on their own, that's typically the kind of background that we love to intersect with."

It is, he adds, "really exciting for Austin."
The Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District board voted to approve a resolution that bars the teaching of critical race theory in district classes. It is unclear whether it has been ever been taught in the district. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

A divided Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District board voted late Tuesday night to ban the teaching of critical race theory in its classrooms, ending months of contentious debate in the Orange County school district.

The 3-2 board vote came after pointed comments from trustees, two of whom called the measure censorship. Supporters, however, said parents should be the ones who decide what to teach their children about race.

I dont want my politics, I dont want your politics, I dont want anybodys politics in [classrooms], said board member Leandra Blades, who supported the ban. I do believe in teaching kids to think critically. But there are so many classes ... there are so many things you could teach your kids at home. If you really are passionate about these subjects, then teach them.

Approved after an hour of in-person public comments  with more than half expressing opposition  the resolution encourages culturally relevant instruction and states that the district values all students and promotes equity and equality. But the school district will not allow the use of critical race theory as a framework to guide such efforts. The resolution also states other similar frameworks will not be used to guide teachings on race, but these teachings were not identified.

Blades argued against statements from other board members who said the resolution was politically driven and would censor educators. Last year, Blades faced calls to resign after attending the rally outside the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, that preceded the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Board President Carrie Buck, who opposed the ban, said teachers and students were largely against it.

This is the first time in the 12 years Ive been here that Ive had 105 students send me an email or call me or send me messages saying, Dont do this, said Buck.

Board member Karin Freeman, who also voted against the ban, called it misleading at best and an abridgement of free speech and censorship at worst.

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This change creates obstacles and impediments for students success, Freeman said. If students arent able to have access to rigorous coursework, the impact will be real.

It is not clear if the district has recorded instances where critical race theory has ever been taught in a classroom.

But the resolution comes at a time when an increasing number of states have passed laws that ban or restrict the teaching of critical race theory in K-12 schools. The resolution does not say whether educators will be punished if they discuss it in their classroom. The board discussed a process where, if parents are concerned that critical race theory is being taught, they can complain to the school principal, who will then investigate.

Critical race theory is a university-level academic framework that seeks to examine how racial inequality and racism are historically embedded in legal systems, policies and institutions in America.

The once obscure academic theory has been pilloried recently by Republican activists and lawmakers who seek to restrict how race and racism are taught in classrooms  saying that it teaches that white people are racist oppressors and people of color are the oppressed. Democrats say the campaign against it is meant to restrict broader discussions about the countrys history.

The speakers Tuesday night reflected the deep divide. The vast majority of students who spoke criticized board members who support the ban, saying it would limit critical thinking and discussions among their peers. And in one particularly passionate comment, a pair of eighth-graders from Kraemer Middle School presented a petition signed by more than 550 middle school students  about half the school  who opposed the ban.

Teaching race-related topics is not about blaming any one group. Instead, it is trying to understand different perspectives, especially those different from our own, so we can understand how past history affects our current society, one of the eighth-graders said. This is critically important for us, as the next generation, to not repeat past mistakes.

Another student, who said they have appeared before the school board four times to oppose the ban, said she has been yelled at by parents who say she doesnt know what racism is and that I hate my country.

If you say teachers are oppressing white students, then ban racism, the student said. Ban something substantial.

One student vowed to do everything to reverse their decision.

Parents who spoke in favor of the ban said they believed it was already being taught in schools and their children would be harmed by the teachings. One parent called for teachers to sign copies of the ban so the consequences are very clear from the get-go and they be kicked out of schools if they were caught intentionally teaching it, like students who violated masking mandates during pandemic restrictions.

We need to preserve our history and not blame anybody and move forward and stop dividing this country, said one parent who supported the ban. Everybody wants to pick a side. Stop picking a side and pick the side of the future.

The district has had a prolonged debate over the topic of critical race theory, at one point spending hours over how to define it in the proposed resolution. Other school districts in Orange County have also debated ethnic studies and critical race theorys role in the course.

Ultimately, the district settled on the definition put forth by the California Board of Education, which describes it as a practice of interrogating race and racism in society. Critical race theory recognizes that race is a social construct and acknowledges racism is embedded within systems and institutions that perpetuate racial inequality.

The American Historical Assn., a membership organization of professional historians that defends academic freedom, wrote to the school board in January expressing its concerns about the resolution.

Critical race theory is usually not taught in K12 classrooms. Why explicitly mention this theoretical construct and not others, since there is a nearly infinite universe of theoretical approaches that are currently not taught in the district but might be objectionable to different people for different reasons? executive director James Grossman wrote, adding that American history curricula and textbooks have long distorted the past, such as portraying Confederate leaders as heroes and omitting the role of racism in American institutions.

Grossman questioned whether critical race theory has ever been a part of the districts curriculum.

While California lawmakers have largely advocated for deep discussion about race in the classroom by requiring ethnic studies for all California high school graduates starting in 2030, some school districts have become battlegrounds for contentious anti-critical-race-theory activists.

In July, the Orange County Board of Education hosted a forum for parents to ask questions about the states new ethnic studies curriculum.

A panel of scholars was put together by the conservative-majority board, but one prominent panelist, Theresa Montano, who advised the state board on the ethnic studies curriculum guidelines, declined to attend.

Montano, a professor at Cal State Northridge, said that critical race theory is not discussed in K-12 classrooms, but discussions of race remain an important subject matter for all children.

No amount of censorship or school district resolution will erase the reality of racial inequity, racial trauma and systemic racism, Montano said of the boards Tuesday vote.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
An exhibition showcasing the works of seasoned Chinese artist Huang Yongyu is currently held in Beijing, offering a chance for the audience to admire the artworks and learn better about the inner world of the artist.



A total of 58 illustrations by the 97-year-old artist are shown together with excerpts of his poems along with some of his original manuscripts.

All of them are from his latest poetry collection called "Jian Xiao Ji". It contains more than 150 poems that were written over a span of 70-plus years.

"I think it is a very interesting cultural scene that Huang illustrated his own poems. Though poetry and painting are two different forms of art, each can shine more brilliantly in each other's company," said Li Jingze, curator of the National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature. "Through his works, we can feel his childlike innocence."

Videos of Huang reading his poems are also on show at the exhibition.

Huang is a contemporary Chinese artist known both for his woodcut prints and traditional paintings.

Born in 1924 in central China's Hunan Province, he never attended a regular school, but instead studied literature and art on his own. Huang is also a prestigious professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the leading fine arts academy in China.

The exhibition, co-hosted by the Writers Publishing House and the National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature, will last until April 12.
LONDON (Reuters) - A British man who worked in the British embassy in Berlin has been charged with offences under the Official Secrets Act related to passing on information useful to Russia, London police said.

David Ballantyne Smith, 57, who was living in Potsdam, Germany and was employed as a security guard at the embassy, was extradited to Britain from Germany on Wednesday following his arrest by German police in August 2021, the police said.

He is accused of collecting information from the embassy with the intention of passing it to a foreign state, Britain's Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said.

Nick Price, head of counter terrorism at the CPS, said Smith had been charged with nine offences.

"He is accused of seven offences of collecting information with the intent of sending it to the Russian authorities, one of attempting communication and one of providing information to a person he believed was a member of the Russian authorities," he said.

Smith is due to appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court in London on Thursday, the police said.

(Reporting by Paul Sandle; Editing by Kate Holton and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
By Thiam Ndiaga

OUAGADOUGOU (Reuters) -Burkina Faso's former president Blaise Compaore was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for complicity in the 1987 murder of his predecessor Thomas Sankara in a coup, a military tribunal ruled on Wednesday.

The charismatic Marxist revolutionary Sankara was gunned down in the West African nation's capital Ouagadougou at the age of 37, four years after he took power in a previous putsch.

Two of Compaore's former top associates, Hyacinthe Kafando and Gilbert Diendere, were also sentenced to life imprisonment.

All three have previously denied involvement in Sankara's death along with eleven other defendants accused of involvement in the plot. Three of the eleven were declared innocent and the rest received prison terms of between three and 20 years.

Compaore was found guilty of an attack on state security, complicity in murder and concealment of a corpse, the tribunal said in its ruling.

He went on to rule for 27 years before being ousted in another coup in 2014 and fleeing to Ivory Coast, where he is still believed to live.

'AFRICA'S CHE GUEVERA'

Sankara, who gained a reputation as Africa's "Che Guevara", took power on a promise to thwart corruption and post-colonial influences, denouncing foreign aid as a control mechanism.

He rolled out mass vaccination against polio, banned female circumcision and polygamy, and was one of the first African leaders to publicly recognise the growing AIDS epidemic as a threat for the continent.

A former fighter pilot, Sankara won public support in the impoverished nation by selling a government fleet of Mercedes, lowering the pay of well-off public servants and forbidding first class state travel.

He cut his own salary, refused to work with air conditioning and jogged through Ouagadougou unaccompanied.

Critics say his reforms curtailed freedoms and did little to enrich ordinary people. But admiration remains and justice has been long-awaited by Sankara's family and supporters.

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"I think Burkinabe know now who Thomas Sankara was... what he wanted and what those who assassinated him wanted too," said Sankara's widow, Mariam Sankara, speaking at the courthouse.

A procession and gathering are planned later in the day at the spot Sankara was shot, where a statue of him now stands.

"Today I am very proud to see the culmination of a legal battle of almost 30 years, proud to have a country where justice works," said Guy Herve Kam, a lawyer for Sankara's family.

(Reporting by Thiam Ndiaga; Writing by Nellie Peyton and Sofia Christensen; Editing by James Macharia Chege, Alexandra Hudson)
Actor Courtney B. Vance. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

Since his debut in the original Broadway productions of August Wilson's "Fences" and John Guare's "Six Degrees of Separation," Courtney B. Vance has jumped between stage and screen, playing an extensive gallery of strong, vibrant characters in a career that has spanned almost four decades.

But while his Tony Award-winning role in 2013's "Lucky Guy" and appearances in "The Hunt For Red October," "Picket Fences," "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," "The Closer," "The Preacher's Wife," "Isle of Dogs" and scores of other projects established Vance as a familiar presence to audiences, the breakout role that would display the full range of his craft remained elusive.

His defense of O.J. Simpson proved to be a game-changer.

Vance's sly portrayal of Simpson's cunning defense attorney Johnnie Cochran was a standout of FX's "The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story," scoring the actor an Emmy and opening the door to more prominent roles.

"Folks saw 'O.J.' and said, 'Wow, this guy is an overnight sensation,'" Vance said with a slight chuckle during a recent Zoom interview. "So I said, 'OK, I'll take that.'"

His subsequent projects  including HBO's "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" and NatGeo's "Genius: Aretha"  won him more praise, and his guest role as a traveling guidebook author in HBO's "Lovecraft Country" brought another Emmy.

The actor is now the lead in AMC's "61st Street," playing a veteran public defender just days from retirement who gets wrapped up in the charged case of a Black college-bound athlete accused of killing a white Chicago police detective. Already burdened with serious health and family issues, Vance's character, Franklin Roberts, steps up to defend the young man  a decision that does not sit well with his activist wife, Martha (Aunjanue Ellis), and other members of the community.

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Premiering Sunday, the drama, which lists Michael B. Jordan as an executive producer, is already generating buzz, winning an Audience Award at last month's SXSW Film Festival. And it continues Vance's streak of projects that grapple with the often-explosive subject matter of race and racism.

Said Vance: "I'm still trying to find projects that ask questions, are about provocative issues, that are fun to do and make a little money. My wife and I, we will literally sit there and say, 'Is this worth doing?' We will literally ask ourselves that question because sometimes it's not clear."

During the interview, Vance, who is married to actor Angela Bassett ("Black Panther," "9-1-1") spoke of the impact of "The People v. O.J. Simpson," race in Hollywood and his memories of working with Whitney Houston, his "Preacher's Wife" co-star.

You've always had a busy and steady career. But it seems like you've become even busier since your Emmy win for 'The People v. O.J. Simpson.'

Vance: Things shifted after "O.J." Prior to that, I still had to audition for everything. But after "O.J." and coming up on being 60 years old, I said, "OK, I think I've earned a little right to at least have something presented to me." The Emmy gave me that.

Were you surprised that series made such an impact?

Vance: There were people who thought "O.J." would not do well because everyone knows what happened. We all saw the news coverage. But we hadn't seen what happened in the bedroom between Johnnie and his wife as he was picking out his tie and she told him not to wear a purple tie because it made him look like a grape. That's the kind of stuff people wanted to know.

We see at every turn that Johnnie is out-dueling Marcia Clark. She had no idea what she was entering into, and thought it was business as usual until it was too late. Those are the kinds of things that made the show bigger, bigger than the actual case. It took on a life of its own. We knew we had a great project, but did we know people would get behind it and make it the thing to see? Nobody knows that. The reception is not up to us.

Vance won an Emmy for guest actor in a drama series in 2021 and for lead actor in a limited series or movie in 2016. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

How has it been after all the accolades, including winning two Emmys?

Vance: The recognition is wonderful. For the longest time, I didn't know if people knew what I was doing. But I can't let that get me down. I'm the same person when you want to know me as I am when you don't want to know me. I have to focus on my life. I gotta get to the cleaners. I've got doctor's appointments. The kids have got to get their braces.

'61st Street' is one of numerous TV dramas to look at race in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the death of George Floyd and others. Looking at "O.J.," "Lovecraft" and other projects you've been involved in, this issue appears to be of great importance to you.

Vance: These shows open up an opportunity to have a conversation. The tragedy is we avoid the conversations, and these situations keep coming up because we avoid them. There's George Floyd. There's Trayvon Martin. Just go down the list. And there's going to be another one until somebody says, "These communities have to talk to each other." There can't be just two or three ways of dealing with people based on their skin color. It's very painful. But slavery was painful. And it took a long time for us to come to the realization that we're better off trying to work it out outside the institution than within it.

We don't do anything in this country unless it's an emergency, because we don't want to change. It's great to look at other countries and say, "Oh, they're terrible. Look at what Russia is doing to the Ukraine." But look at our history. We ain't too pretty, either. We need to look at ourselves. We got some mess in this country. Always have.

Your character in "61st Street" is dealing with a lot of heavy issues, including prostate cancer, which makes taking on this case even more difficult.

Vance: It's life. I've dealt with prostate issues. I didn't have the cancer but had to have my prostate hollowed out. It was pressing on the urethra. The condition that is happening in the series where Franklin can't urinate  that was real, my situation. Health is wealth. That's the message. You have to go get checked. You have to get the colonoscopy, the mammogram. You have to get your teeth checked. You have to take care of the temple. I don't want somebody coming up on me saying, "If you had just come here a little earlier." That's the whole fear of going to the doctor in the African American community.

Everything is happening to Franklin. It's one sick man going against the system. But there are certain things bigger than all of us.

The series also reunites you with Aunjanue Ellis, who played your wife in "Lovecraft Country" and was nominated for an Oscar this year for "King Richard." What's it like working with her?

Vance: We're the same. I love playing with her. She's a consummate artist. She's due. She's overdue, just like Angela is overdue.

There's been a lot of discussion recently about Whitney Houston, as the 10th anniversary of her death passed in February. You and Angela worked with her. What are your thoughts about Whitney?

Vance: It's painful. It was painful to see someone who was so pure in terms of that voice. ... It's all about how we feel about ourselves. If we don't feel whole, it doesn't matter what the image of ourselves is. We're not going to survive unless we get some help. That was the struggle for Whitney, to find the help in time before she sabotaged herself. It can happen to any of us.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Canada may soon echo Australia in making internet companies pay news publishers to use their content. CBC News reports Canada's ruling Liberal Party has introduced legislation requiring that Facebook, Google and other online firms compensate news outlets for either reproducing or easing access to content. The money would help foster the "sustainability" of Canadian news, according to the government.

Companies that don't pay publishers would be subject to binding arbitration led by Canada's telecom regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. The CRTC will also decide which news sources qualify for compensation.

Officials saw this as a matter of necessity. Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez claimed the news industry was "in crisis" and that publishers couldn't rely on ad revenue like they had in the past. This merely addressed a "market imbalance," he said.

We've asked Google and Facebook parent Meta for comment. In the past, they've maintained that publishers benefited from the traffic driven to their websites through search results and social media posts. They've also threatened to disable services rather than pay publishers, although Google ultimately caved in Australia and struck deals to avoid an arbitration battle. In a statement to CBC News, Google said it was "carefully reviewing" the legislation and "fully support[ed]" access to news.

The legislation may well pass. Although the Liberals don't have a majority in Canada's House of Commons, they recently reached an agreement with the New Democratic Party to advance bills reflecting shared interests. Whether or not it works as promised is another concern. As University of Ottawa internet research chair Michael Geist warned, there's a concern that the CRTC's role will lead to just a "handful" of major companies profiting at the expense of smaller outfits. If so, it might not prevent further damage to the country's news industry.

Update 4/6 11:40AM ET: Google Canada spokesperson Lauren Skelly has shared the company's full statement with Engadget. You can read the response below. Also, Meta Public Policy Manager Rachel Curran said her company was "currently reviewing" the legislation and would do more once it "fully understand[s]" the nature of the bill.

"We are carefully reviewing the legislation to understand its implications. We fully support ensuring Canadians have access to authoritative news and we look forward to working with the government to strengthen the news industry in Canada."
(Reuters) -Canada's Ontario province said Wednesday it will start offering a fourth dose of COVID-19 vaccines to people aged 60 and over, as well as to all adults in indigenous households from Thursday.

An official Canadian panel recommended a second vaccine booster for some Canadians on Tuesday, as coronavirus infections rose in many parts of the country.

Canadian health officials say the highly transmissible BA.2 sub-variant of the Omicron coronavirus and waning vaccine immunity may be contributing to an increase in coronavirus transmission.

"As we continue to live with COVID-19, we are using every tool available to manage this virus and reduce its impact on our hospitals and health system, including by expanding the use of booster doses," Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott said in a statement.

Ontario, due for a provincial election in June, dropped its mask mandate for all areas except healthcare settings and public transit last month.

Its health ministry said on Tuesday that local health units can impose their own measures, and the province's hospitals can deal with the surge.

The province, Canada's most populous, had been offering fourth doses of COVID vaccines since Dec. 30 to some vulnerable populations, including residents of long-term care homes and retirement homes.

After more than a month of declines, COVID cases started to increase around the world in March due to a combination of factors, including the BA.2 sub-variant and the lifting of public health and social measures, according to the World Health Organization.

Canada was closely monitoring the BA.2 sub-variant and working with health authorities globally to track its spread, health officials said last week.

(Reporting by Ismail Shakil in BengaluruEditing by Bernadette Baum)
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday invited Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to take part in an event supporting Ukrainian victims of the conflict with Russia, amid criticism that Mexico has been too accommodating to Moscow.

During a phone call, Trudeau asked Lopez Obrador to participate in the "Stand Up for Ukraine" campaign event on Saturday to raise funds for Ukrainian refugees and internally displaced people, the Canadian government said.

Trudeau is co-convening the event with the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.

Lopez Obrador has tried to remain neutral in the conflict and has declined to impose sanctions against Russia. While his government backed a United Nations vote urging Russia to withdraw its forces from Ukraine, it has also criticized Europe for sending arms to other countries - as it has for Ukraine.

Last month, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico expressed concern at a public display of solidarity between the Russian ambassador to Mexico and a group of Mexican lawmakers at the inauguration of a Mexico-Russia friendship committee.

Ukraine's ambassador to Mexico, Oksana Dramaretska, on Sunday posted images of corpses on streets of Ukraine and tweeted at Lopez Obrador: "Do you really want to continue friendly relations with those in the Kremlin who are committing genocide after this?"

Lopez Obrador has not commented publicly on the tweet.

Dramaretska posted the tweet after the bodies of civilians shot at close range were discovered in the Ukrainian town of Bucha.

Ukraine has called the killings Russian war crimes. Russia denied targeting civilians and described evidence presented as a "monstrous forgery" staged by the West to discredit it.

Canada's government said Lopez Obrador and Trudeau also discussed their concerns about the humanitarian impact of the conflict and global challenges stemming from it, including those related to energy and food security.

(Reporting by Dave Graham; Additional reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Leslie Adler)
Apr. 6FARMINGTON  A Canadian man was sentenced Tuesday to serve four years in prison for bringing 4.6 pounds of cocaine into Maine on Nov. 12, 2021, according to court documents.

Jermaine T. Phillips, 41, of Brampton, Ontario, pleaded guilty Tuesday to aggravated trafficking in schedule W drugs, namely cocaine.

A charge of illegal importation of scheduled drugs was dismissed in a plea agreement.

Phillips and co-defendant Shanna C. Brown, 38, of Cornwall, Ontario, were indicted by a Franklin County grand jury on March 22. She is being held in lieu of $100,000 bail at the Franklin County Detention Center.

The couple's vehicle was stopped at the Coburn Gore Township crossing in Maine by U.S. Border Patrol.

Agents, with the help of a K-9, discovered the powdered cocaine in a suitcase in the trunk of the car. The couple told investigators they were using a GPS and didn't see that they were entering the United States, according to a Maine Drug Enforcement agent's affidavit filed in a Farmington court.

Phillips has no prior history in the U.S. He is the father of children ages 14, 10 and 3, with the youngest having severe autism, his attorney Jason Ranger previously said.

Phillips had been held in lieu of $350,000 bail since shortly after his arrest last year.

He is required to pay a $400 fine, according to court documents.

He faced up to 30 years in prison on the charge.
At the Universal Beijing Resort, what attracted the attention of many tourists were not only the signature Transformers and Jurassic World themed zones, but also a special BMW roadshow therein, which showcased a new X5 vehicle, one of the German carmaker's most popular models.



According to the company, the X5 has been among its best-selling models worldwide since its debut in 1999. But what made the launch of the new X5 model especially significant was its new position as "the flagship of BMW's locally produced lineup."

On March 31, the company launched its all-new X5 with a China-exclusive wheelbase design, marking the first time that the model was made in China.

"The new car again reaffirms our targeting the Chinese market as top priority," said Johann Wieland, president and CEO of BMW Brilliance Automotive Ltd. (BBA), a joint venture between BMW and Chinese carmaker Brilliance China Automotive Holdings Ltd.

At a time when many Chinese cities are fighting against COVID-19 resurgences, BMW's launch of the new model shows its strong confidence in China's anti-pandemic measures and the country's stable and sustained economic development.

Many other European enterprises have also fixed their eyes on the booming Chinese market, and they foresee long-term success regarding China's promising economic prospects and sound business environment.

Investment enthusiasm

On Feb. 11, the German auto giant strengthened its partnership in China by extending the joint-venture contract of BBA until 2040, and increased its shares from 50 percent to 75 percent by investing some 27.9 billion yuan (about 4.4 billion U.S. dollars).

"We continue to expand our long and successful commitment to China," said Oliver Zipse, chairman of the board of management of BMW AG. "Our continued success in the world's largest automotive market can only go hand in hand with the growth and further development of our BBA joint venture."

Since 2010, the group has poured 73 billion yuan into its production base in Shenyang, northeast China's Liaoning Province, and built it into its largest production base worldwide with an estimated annual output of more than 650,000 units. In 2022, the group will witness three new or upgraded plants open in Shenyang and Zhangjiagang, east China's Jiangsu Province.

In February, another German automaker Audi cooperated with China's leading automaker First Automotive Works, and officially launched a project to produce pure electric vehicles in Changchun, capital of northeast China's Jilin Province.

Bearing a total investment of more than 30 billion yuan, the project will be aimed at economic and trade cooperation between China and Europe, as well as northeast China's revitalization.

This joint project was expected to be put into operation around the end of 2024 with an annual production capacity of 150,000 vehicles, the automakers noted.

Swiss compressor manufacturer Burckhardt Compression AG is also betting on China's super-large market. In 2021, the company acquired the remaining 40 percent of the shares of Shenyang Yuanda Compressor, based in Shenyang City, and made it a wholly owned subsidiary.

The Swiss company told Xinhua that the sales revenue of Shenyang Yuanda Compressor has maintained double-digit growth in recent years, having expanded its factory area from 89,000 square meters to 164,000 square meters to increase production capacity, which is currently occupied through to October.

According to the latest data from the Ministry of Commerce, foreign direct investment into the Chinese mainland, in actual use, expanded 37.9 percent year on year to 243.7 billion yuan in the first two months of this year.

China remained one of the top investment destinations for foreign companies, especially German firms. A report released by the German Chamber of Commerce in China and KPMG showed that nearly 60 percent of German companies in China reported improved business operations last year and 71 percent plan further investment in the country.

China's determination and confidence in high-level opening-up and continuous effort to improve the business environment for multinational enterprises has made the Chinese market more attractive, which brought win-win outcomes both for Chinese and multinational companies, noted Jochen Goller, president and CEO of BMW China.

Increasing China-EU cooperation

The trade volume between China and the European Union turned the tide and reached a record high of more than 800 billion U.S. dollars in 2021, up 27.5 percent year on year.

During the same period, as a pillar for trade and economic cooperation across the Eurasian continent, the China-Europe freight train service handled a record 15,000 trips, and transported 1.46 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) of goods, up 22 percent and 29 percent respectively over the previous year.

China State Railway Group Co., Ltd. said the service now reaches 180 cities in 23 European countries with 78 routes planned, transporting more than 50,000 types of goods including IT products, automobiles and parts, chemicals, and mechanical and electronic products.

In addition, new technologies and the two sides' common pursuit of green development have become another development booster between China and the EU.

"We see China as a pacesetter in topics like electrification or digitalization. What moves China today will move the world tomorrow," said Zipse, adding that BMW's four innovation and digitalization bases in China are its largest R&D bases outside Germany.

For Audi, the new base in Changchun will be its first for pure electric car models in China, which will produce its first three electric car models including one SUV and one sedan after completion. The base is expected to realize carbon dioxide neutralization during car manufacturing and have its own battery assembly workshop.

"China is already the world's leader of electro-mobility, a key driving force of digitalization, and now is decisively pursuing high-quality growth and a circular economy. It is a perfect place and a great partner for us to drive transformation, going electric, digital and circular," said Nicolas Peter, member of the board of management of BMW AG.

China's commitment to high-quality and institutional opening-up also offers promising prospects for foreign investors. This year's government work report published in March listed pursuing higher-standard opening up and promoting stable growth of foreign trade and investment as the government's major tasks for 2022.

On Jan. 1, a shortened negative list for foreign investment came into force with off-limit items cut to 31 from 33 a year ago, which included the removal of the foreign capital cap in China's auto industry. This has enabled more European enterprises like BMW to expand their investment in China.

These future prospects are further brightened by China's policy decisions, according to Zipse. "Looking ahead, we are encouraged by China's pledge to further open its market, as well as its efforts to promote green development and innovation."

From his perspective, collaboration and mutual trust are key to creating growth and prosperity.

"The year 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the establishment of Sino-German diplomatic relations. And for the sixth year in a row, China was Germany's most important trading partner in 2021. Our experience in China is a good example of successful collaboration between the two countries and between China and Europe," said Zipse.
Buying a low-cost index fund will get you the average market return. But if you invest in individual stocks, some are likely to underperform. That's what has happened with the Canadian Tire Corporation, Limited (TSE:CTC.A) share price. It's up 26% over three years, but that is below the market return. In the last year the stock price gained, albeit only 1.6%.

With that in mind, it's worth seeing if the company's underlying fundamentals have been the driver of long term performance, or if there are some discrepancies.

Check out our latest analysis for Canadian Tire Corporation

While the efficient markets hypothesis continues to be taught by some, it has been proven that markets are over-reactive dynamic systems, and investors are not always rational. One flawed but reasonable way to assess how sentiment around a company has changed is to compare the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price.

Canadian Tire Corporation was able to grow its EPS at 21% per year over three years, sending the share price higher. The average annual share price increase of 8% is actually lower than the EPS growth. So it seems investors have become more cautious about the company, over time. This cautious sentiment is reflected in its (fairly low) P/E ratio of 9.89.

The graphic below depicts how EPS has changed over time (unveil the exact values by clicking on the image).

It's good to see that there was some significant insider buying in the last three months. That's a positive. On the other hand, we think the revenue and earnings trends are much more meaningful measures of the business. Before buying or selling a stock, we always recommend a close examination of historic growth trends, available here..

What About Dividends?

When looking at investment returns, it is important to consider the difference between total shareholder return (TSR) and share price return. The TSR is a return calculation that accounts for the value of cash dividends (assuming that any dividend received was reinvested) and the calculated value of any discounted capital raisings and spin-offs. It's fair to say that the TSR gives a more complete picture for stocks that pay a dividend. In the case of Canadian Tire Corporation, it has a TSR of 38% for the last 3 years. That exceeds its share price return that we previously mentioned. This is largely a result of its dividend payments!

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A Different Perspective

Canadian Tire Corporation shareholders are up 4.3% for the year (even including dividends). Unfortunately this falls short of the market return. On the bright side, the longer term returns (running at about 6% a year, over half a decade) look better. Maybe the share price is just taking a breather while the business executes on its growth strategy. It's always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand Canadian Tire Corporation better, we need to consider many other factors. Consider for instance, the ever-present spectre of investment risk. We've identified 1 warning sign with Canadian Tire Corporation , and understanding them should be part of your investment process.

There are plenty of other companies that have insiders buying up shares. You probably do not want to miss this free list of growing companies that insiders are buying.

Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on CA exchanges.

Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team (at) simplywallst.com.



This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.
Block disclosed today that a security breach involving a former employee impacts 8.2 million Cash App users. In an SEC filing, the company reported that an ex-employee on December 10th downloaded a number of reports with information on customer information. The exfiltrated data included full names, brokerage account numbers, brokerage portfolio value, brokerage portfolio holdings and reports of stock trading activity.

According to the filing, only customers that used Cash Apps stock function are potentially included in the breach. While Cash App got its start as a peer-to-peer payment app, its customers can also use it to buy stocks and Bitcoin. No other Cash App features outside of stocks were involved in the breach, nor did it include any customers outside of the US, according to the company.

The reports did not include usernames or passwords, Social Security numbers, date of birth, payment card information, addresses, bank account information, or any other personally identifiable information. They also did not include any security code, access code, or password used to access Cash App accounts. Other Cash App products and features (other than stock activity) and customers outside of the United States were not impacted, wrote Block in the filing.

Block has launched a formal investigation into the incident and has contacted law enforcement. It also plans on notifying all 8.2 million customers involved in the breach by email.

According to the filing, the ex-employee once had access to the customer information as an employee at CashApp. But by the time the breach occurred, they had already been gone from the company for several months. Its unclear how a former employee was still able to retrieve such highly sensitive information. Engadget has reached out to Block for a response, and will update if we hear back.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has lowered its travel warning for Canada and Jamaica.

In an update on Monday, the health agency said the level of COVID-19 in Canada has upgraded from Level 4 (Very High) to Level 3 (High).

Level 4 is the highest risk level in the CDCs COVID-19 advisory system.

Even with the newly updated guidelines, the health agency still advises American travelers to be fully vaccinated against the virus before traveling to the country.

If you are not up to date with COVID-19 vaccines, avoid travel to Canada, the CDC said. Even if you are up to date with your COVID-19 vaccines, you may still be at risk for getting and spreading COVID-19.

Recently, Canadian authorities announced on Friday that it has dropped its pre-entry testing requirement for vaccinated travelers.

This comes as Canada is among the 25 countries to receive updated guidelines for its COVID-19 trajectory as the spread of the virus continues to slow down in parts of the world.

South Africa, the Dominican Republic and Iraq are among the five countries to be placed in a Level 2 advisory, meaning that the virus spread in the country is moderate.

Jamaica is one of the six countries to receive a Level 1 guidance from the health agency, meaning there is a low spread of the virus in the country.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
With the rise in bicycle accidents nationwide, kids are now getting directly involved with safety efforts outside their own schools.

On any road youll see dozens of signs  stop signs, street signs, speed signs  but youve never seen signs as sweet as these. Bike symbols were styled by kids and now their paintings are proudly paving the way on bike lanes.

Photos: Central Florida students design bike icons

I was originally going to draw a person on there but Im too bad at drawing people, so I just drew a cat, said Heidi Erickson, a fifth-grader at Bentley Elementary School.

A neon pop-tart galaxy cat, that is. Its a cute drawing designed to involve kids in safety.

The Florida Department of Transportation asked students at four Central Florida schools to create a bike icon.

READ: Ocala man solves CASHWORD and claims $1 million prize in Florida Lottery

The winners were chosen, and their designs came to life on the bike lanes near their campuses.

It is exciting to see them winning to see them winning, to see them thriving, to see that they left a little mark in our community, said Dumarie Rodriguez Dillard, principal at Bentley Elementary School.

At Bentley Elementary School in Seminole County, Heidi received the honor.

Im very proud because I didnt even expect it to win, she said. Neither did second-grader Xavier Zapotecas.

READ: Seminole School district unveils 3rd Physics Bus to promote interest in STEM education

The surprises continued over at McCoy Elementary in Orange County.

They took me outside to see it and I was super excited, said Fatima Rodriguez, a fifth-grader at McCoy Elementary School.

Winners Fatima and Noah Melendez love keeping their classmates safe.

FDOT reviewed the dos and donts when walking or biking.

In my experience, Ive had students that have been hit by cars before so any kind of acknowledgment and training and learning that we can bring to the table is important, said Eric Hunger, principal at McCoy Elementary.

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READ: Seminole County Fire Dept. unveils first airboat, named by Geneva Elementary School students

Those lessons will go a long way and these students hope you enjoyed learning about the creativity from their classroom that has made it out into the community.

The other two schools with winners are in Brevard County  at Fair Glenn Elementary School and Viera Elementary School.

Click here to download the free WFTV news and weather apps, click here to download the WFTV Now app for your smart TV and click here to stream Channel 9 Eyewitness News live.
Welcome back to another Chicago Cubs season at Wrigley Field.

The roster has a lot of new faces (hello, Marcus Stroman and Seiya Suzuki), but a lot around the ballpark hasnt changed, except maybe the size of the bag you can bring in.

Heres what to know if youre going to a Cubs home game this season.

Planning your trip to the ballpark

Whats the Cubs schedule?

If you had the schedule marked down on a calendar when it was announced last August, youre going to need a big eraser thanks to the MLB lockout.

The Cubs now open the season Thursday at home versus the Milwaukee Brewers to kick off a four-game series before going on a six-game trip to Pittsburgh (April 12-13) and Denver (April 14-17). Heres the full schedule  and heres our guide to watch or stream all the games.

Whats the ticket policy?

Cubs tickets are exclusively mobile  via the MLB Ballpark app  and must be scanned for entry. Photographs and/or screenshots of tickets will not be accepted. For rainouts and game rescheduling, specific information will be provided to the email used to purchase tickets on a case-by-case basis.

And if you want season tickets, theres currently a waiting list.

What promotions are going to be given away this season?

From a Hawaiian shirt to a Patrick Wisdom bobblehead to a Cubs fanny pack, heres the schedule of promotion and theme nights for 2022.

What time does the ballpark open before games?

Gates open 90 minutes before first pitch for 6:40 p.m. games and two hours before first pitch for all other games. Click here for a map showing gate locations.

Whats the bag policy?

Think small. No backpacks, hard-sided coolers or bags larger than 16 by 16 by 8 inches are allowed inside Wrigley Field. Some exceptions are made for medical and diaper bags, but all bags will be inspected before entry.

These types of bags  if 16 by 16 by 8 inches or smaller  are permitted:

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Briefcases

Drawstring bags

Fanny packs

Purses

Soft-sided coolers

Wallets

Can I bring an umbrella into Wrigley Field?

Yes, but it needs to be small and collapsible. Umbrellas with metal tips and those larger than 10 inches are on the prohibited items list. Also, dont bring that much cash  all in-ballpark purchases are cashless, from retail to concessions (more on that below).

Heres what else to leave at home:

Air horns or other distracting noisemakers

Brooms, poles, staffs or sticks

Inflatables (including beach balls)

Selfie sticks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (including drones)

Whats the best way to get to Wrigley Field?

Wrigley Field is located at 1060 W. Addison St. in Chicagos Lakeview neighborhood.

Public transportation is the easiest and cheapest way to get to Cubs home games.

Chicago Transit Authority

Check out transitchicago.com for fare information, route schedules and maps. Cost is $2.25 by bus or $2.50 by train. Extra service is planned before and after home games. Masks are required.

Plan to buy tickets in advance using the Ventra app.

By CTA bus

Use Nos. 152 Addison or 80 Irving Park. Adjacent routes include Nos. 8 Halsted, 22 Clark, 36 Broadway and 151 Sheridan.

By CTA L train

Red Line: Exit at Addison station, which is a half-block east of Wrigley Field.

Purple Line: Southbound trains stop at Sheridan during weeknight games. Riders can then walk three blocks south on either Sheridan Road or Sheffield Avenue to Wrigley Field or transfer to a southbound Red Line train and exit at Addison station.

Yellow Line: Take southbound, then transfer at Howard to the Red Line. Exit at Addison station.

Metra

Check metra.com for route schedules and maps. Plan to buy tickets in advance using the Ventra app.

Day passes  which are available only in the Ventra app  cost $6 or $10, depending on distance traveled.

From Union Station: Walk six blocks east to CTAs Jackson station. Take the Red Line north (Howard-bound). Exit at Addison station.

From Ogilvie Transportation Center: Walk six blocks east to CTAs Lake station. Take the Red Line north (Howard-bound). Exit at Addison station.

Pace

The Wrigley Field Express bus will not operate during the 2022 regular season because of a driver shortage. Fans can sign up for email updates to be notified if service returns.

By bike or personal scooter

A free valet service is available for Cubs home games. Its located in the alley just east of the CTAs Red Line stop on Addison Street. These items can be checked up to two hours before a home games scheduled start time. The service closes 30 minutes after the game ends.

How much is parking and where is the best spot?

There are a variety of parking options nearby  but it will cost you.

Some spots can be purchased in advance through Spothero and StubHub.

Need an ADA parking option? Contact Wrigley Field fan services at (773) 388-8270.

Parking around Wrigley Field

Irving Park Lot (entrance is on Irving Park Road just north of Seminary Avenue) : Located at 1052 W. Irving Park Road, this lot is open to season parking pass holders and game-day paid parking.

Toyota Camry Lot (entrance is on Grace Street between Racine and Clifton avenues) : Located at 1126 W. Grace St., this lot is open to season parking pass holders and game-day paid parking.

Toyota RAV4 Lot (entrance is on Eddy Street west of Seminary Avenue): Located at 1140 W. Eddy St., this lot is open to season parking pass holders only.

Free parking and shuttle

Remote lot (entrance is on Irving Park Road): Located at 3900 N. Rockwell St., just east of the Chicago River. Open for night and weekend games. Includes free shuttle service to and from Wrigley Field, which drops off and picks up fans on Irving Park Road between Clark Street and Seminary Avenue.

What about street parking?

Check ParkChicago to find the nearest metered parking areas and restrictions.

Pregaming and photo ops

Can I tailgate?

No tailgating is allowed (to do that, head south to Guaranteed Rate Field). But there are plenty of spots around Wrigleyville to eat and drink before the game (or wait out a rain delay)  here are our picks.

Whats that area under construction?

That would be the DraftKings Sportsbook. The three-story building will be open year-round and will feature an open-air rooftop deck. The Cubs are targeting opening day 2023 to begin operations, but labor and worldwide supply chain issues might delay the timeline.

No ones more protective of Wrigley Field than we are, president of business operations Crane Kenney told the Tribune.

The Wrigley sportsbook space previously was the location of the Captain Morgan Club (2009-18) and then the DraftKings Fantasy Sports Zone before becoming a tent setup with fixtures inside.

Sheffield Avenue will remain open during construction. The affected area will run from the right-field Wintrust gate west toward the main gate.

Wait, where did the statues go?

The Billy Williams and Ron Santo statues were removed Jan. 31 from the corner of Addison Street and Sheffield Avenue. The Cubs plan to make Gallagher Way the site for all current and future player statues. When the Cubs unveil Hall of Fame pitcher Fergie Jenkins statue in May, the statues of Ernie Banks, Santo and Williams also will be moved to Gallagher Way. The Harry Caray statue will remain behind the center-field bleachers.

Anyone can access Gallagher Way until three hours before first pitch, at which point a same-day game ticket is required to enter the space until one hour after the game, per a city ordinance.

Whats the most Instagrammable spot?

Cmon, you must be new here.

Once youre at the ballpark

Where should I sit?

Thats really up to you  and your wallet. But if youre concerned about foul balls (or flying bats), the netting extends to the outfield edge of each dugout. If youre up for the whole Wrigley experience, there are the bleachers, which is a first-come, first-served seat grab.

Heres a 3D map of Wrigley so you can scope out your vantage point ahead of time.

Can I mobile order my food again?

Yes, you can  and the Cubs will be testing new grab-and-go technology for concession stands, hoping to shorten wait times. They are piloting the feature at the main concession stand by the Wrigley Field marquee gate.

Just like you do at grocery stores, youll bring your five items, youll put them on a tray, it will scan immediately and tell you what it is you just purchased, Kenney explained in an interview with the Tribune. You put your credit card in and you walk away. Youll never see a concession worker. ... Were trying to reduce wait times in every place that you bottleneck at Wrigley Field.

The Cubs will continue to follow city, state and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for fan COVID-19 protocols.

What should I eat  and drink?

Theres ... a lot of food to eat. So pace yourself. From Hot Dougs sausage to Jeff Mauros bao to the pork sandwich to Giordanos 6-inch stuffed pizza, you can sample Chicagos best eats at the ballpark (including vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options). And dont forget about the soft serve helmet.

New options include The Twisted Tater  a crispy spiral potato skewer served with dill pickle dip  and a Nashville hot chicken sandwich  breaded chicken breast dipped in hot sauce topped with coleslaw and bread-and-butter pickles, served on a toasted brioche bun.

Heres the full list with locations  including where to find the hot chocolate and coffee for those April games.

What else should I check out while at Wrigley?

A Hall of Fame debuted in August with a tiered system of recognition that can range from a statue outside Wrigley to a retired number, a name on a flag or a plaque in the Hall of Fame located beneath the left-field bleachers. Anyone with a ticket to a game will be able to access the area.

The basic criteria to be inducted are being a Cub for five or more years or making a significant contribution to the organization through service or time. One of the notable names not included among the initial 56 plaques in the Hall of Fame is outfielder Sammy Sosa, who has a complicated relationship with the Cubs.
(Corrects paragraph 7 to clarify sub-index remained below 50.0 but did not decline.)

BEIJING (Reuters) - Activity in China's services sector contracted at the sharpest pace in two years in March as a surge in coronavirus cases restricted mobility and weighed on demand, a private sector survey showed on Wednesday.

The Caixin services Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) dived to 42.0 in March from 50.2 in February, dropping below the 50-point mark that separates growth from contraction on a monthly basis. The reading indicates the sharpest activity decline since the initial onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in February 2020.

The survey, which focuses more on small firms in coastal regions, tallied with an official survey, which also showed deterioration in the services sector.

Analysts say contact-intensive services sectors such as transportation, hotel and catering were hurt the most, clouding the outlook for a much anticipated rebound in consumption this year.

A sub-index for new business fell for a second consecutive month, and at the fastest pace since March 2020.

Firms' input prices rose in March after easing to a six-month low in February.

The virus outbreaks and softer demand reduced firms' appetite for additional staff, with the employment sub-index showing continued contraction in activity albeit at a slower pace.

While firms remained generally upbeat about output over the next year, optimism slipped to a 19-month low amid concerns over the pandemic and the economic fallout from the Ukraine war.

Caixin's March composite PMI, which includes both manufacturing and services activity, slumped to 43.9 from 50.1 in the previous month, signalling the quickest reduction since the height of the country's COVID-19 outbreak in 2020.

"Overall, both manufacturing and services activities weakened in March due to the epidemic. Similar to previous COVID outbreaks in China, the services sector was more significantly affected than manufacturing," said Wang Zhe, Senior Economist at Caixin Insight Group, in a statement accompanying the data release.

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"Policymakers should look out for vulnerable groups and enhance support for key industries and small and micro businesses to stabilise market expectations."

As Chinas economy faces serious challenges, the big question is how long the country's zero tolerance COVID policy can be sustained, Zhiwei Zhang, chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management said in a note.

"Economic activities have been sacrificed to achieve more effective policies against the Omicron outbreaks. I expect the outbreaks will be brought under control, with significant economic costs," Zhang said.

The Caixin PMI is compiled by S&P Global from responses to questionnaires sent to purchasing managers in China.

(This story corrects paragraph 7 to clarify sub-index remained below 50.0 but did not decline)

(Reporting by Ellen Zhang, Stella Qiu and Ryan Woo; Editing by Sam Holmes and Kim Coghill)
A surprising find inside a mans cane led to a hiccup in his travels through Logan Airport.

The Transportation Security Administration says its agents discovered a blade hidden inside his cane on Monday.

The man was questioned by Massachusetts State Police.

According to the TSA, the man had no idea the blade was in there.

After surrendering the cane, he was cleared to continue, according to a post from the TSA.

Yesterday @TSA officers @BostonLogan discovered this hidden blade inside of a cane. When questioned by @MassStatePolice the man claimed he had no idea the blade was in there.After surrendering the cane, he was cleared to continue. #travelfail pic.twitter.com/Toqo0OORYZ  TSA_NewEngland (@TSA_NewEngland) April 6, 2022

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GOP Reps. Lauren Boebert, left, and Marjorie Taylor Greene heckle President Biden, a Democrat, during his State of the Union address last month. Greene is also targeting fellow Republicans with outlandish accusations. (Evelyn Hockstein / Associated Press)

For the second time in two weeks, GOP lawmakers have found themselves the targets of outlandish, evidence-free attacks  lobbed by fellow Republicans.

The first salvo came from freshman Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, who was rebuked last week by House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield for suggesting on a podcast that their colleagues partook in orgies and cocaine.

Then, freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a perpetual GOP firebrand from Georgia, smeared three Republican senators as "pro-pedophile" in a tweet Monday evening because they have said they intend to support Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation to the Supreme Court.

Jackson's Republican detractors  lobbing charges debunked by judges and commentators across the political spectrum  have accused her of handing down lenient sentences in cases involving images of child sexual abuse. Those accusations, critics and the White House have noted, echo an obsession of QAnon conspiracy theorists.

Increasingly, conservatives are lobbing incendiary and unsubstantiated charges that their political opponents  namely, Democrats  are aligned with predators. But Cawthorn's and Greens comments offer a new twist, with newer GOP politicians harnessing sensationalized rhetoric and nodding at right-wing conspiracy theories to harm members of their own party.

"When I was at [the Republican National Committee] in 2012, if one Republican had said another was a pedophile sympathizer, that would've been unimaginable," said Tim Miller, a former RNC spokesman who has since left the party and now writes for the Bulwark, a center-right website.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) laughed Tuesday when asked to respond to Greene's Twitter attack, which targeted her along with fellow Republican Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska for backing Jackson. A vote by the full Senate to confirm Jackson to the Supreme Court is expected by the end of this week.

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"Obviously, I don't think that's a healthy dialogue," Collins said. "She obviously can say whatever she wishes, but that's clearly ludicrous and sadly typical of what I expect of her."

Collins' reaction was typical of many Republicans, who treated Greene's comment as an irritant rather than a major outrage.

"Very inappropriate," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said in a brief condemnation. Asked whether House GOP leaders should admonish Greene, his response was noncommittal: "It's a free country. You can say outrageous things if you want to; but it's very inappropriate."

Since joining Congress in 2021, Greene has consistently courted controversy. Despite having been booted off House committees by Democrats and a handful of Republicans for provocative social media posts, she has not toned down her combative posture and norms-defying behavior. She called a fellow Republican congresswoman "trash," heckled President Biden during his State of the Union address, and appeared at a conference held by white nationalists. She later claimed she didn't know the group leader's racist views, but was unapologetic for speaking before the audience.

The relatively muted reaction to Greene on Capitol Hill starkly contrasted with the fallout for Cawthorn for claiming on a podcast that members were using illegal drugs and holding sex parties. Fellow Republicans complained they could be implicated in the salacious assertions, for which Cawthorn offered no evidence. McCarthy, after giving Cawthorn a private talking-to, told reporters that the 26-year-old lawmaker had "lost my trust."

Cawthorn followed with a statement that defiantly insisted "corruption and unethical activities exist in Washington," but said it was the news media and the left, not his original comments, that were disparaging his Republican colleagues.

Political mudslinging is nothing new. As early as 1800, the presidential race between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson featured the founding fathers trading over-the-top character assassinations.

"The Adams campaign claimed in effect that Thomas Jefferson was the Antichrist. That's pretty harsh rhetoric," said John G. Geer, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University whose research focuses on negative campaigning.

But Greene's and Cawthorn's insinuations of depravity stand out, because the targets are fellow members of their political party and the claims occurred outside the context of an election. And while negative campaigning can sometimes help inform voters, Geer said, that's only the case when the attacks are anchored with some kind of evidence.

"People are making up an alternative reality and playing to that," Geer said. "That's a serious problem."

Observers say there is another troubling element in the two Republicans' rhetoric  the emphasis on sexual deviancy, which is a fixation of believers in QAnon, an amorphous conspiracy theory that alleges a cabal of Democrats and elites are part of a widespread effort to traffic children.

"They're pandering to the base and specifically to white suburban women who responded to QAnon content very strongly in the run-up to the presidential election," said Sophia Moskalenko, a psychologist who specializes in radicalization and extremism.

The conspiracy theory became especially popular during the pandemic, capitalizing on increasing distrust in institutions and widespread anxiety, especially among parents trying to keep their children safe, Moskalenko said. Republicans' focus on pedophilia and sexual immorality can serve as a signal to believers of the conspiracy, she said.

"It's a dog whistle or a revamping of the storyline that faded a little bit from the public consciousness," said Moskalenko, co-author of "Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon."

The theme has exploded among conservatives in recent days, particularly after GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed legislation prohibiting classroom instruction on gender identity or sexual orientation for students in kindergarten through third grade. Opponents say the measure, which they call the "Don't Say Gay" bill, is overly broad and could end up harming LGBTQ youth. Supporters of the measure have called it an "anti-grooming bill" and labeled those who critique it as "groomers," harking back to a homophobic trope.

Lately, activists have turned their ire to the Disney Co., which eventually opposed the legislation.

But Miller, the former RNC official, said Greene's and Cawthorn's comments show the trope can also be another weapon in the GOP civil war, in which loyalists of former President Trump battle other Republicans they see as insufficiently aligned with the "Make America Great Again" movement.

Miller noted that Republican Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan had announced Tuesday that he intended to retire. Upton is the fourth GOP lawmaker who voted to impeach Trump last year to say they won't seek reelection.

"Their attempt to purge non-MAGA Republicans is working," Miller said.

Mason reported from Los Angeles and McCaskill from Washington.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Apr. 6An aldermanic committee is recommending a third year of expanded outdoor dining in downtown Manchester  this time at a cost to local businesses.

For the last two summers, Manchester aldermen voted to join communities across New Hampshire in offering the outdoor dining option to businesses struggling in the pandemic.

Similar measures met with success in other New England communities, including Nashua and Portsmouth, Portland, Maine, and Boston's North End.

On Tuesday, members of the Aldermanic Committee on Public Safety, Health and Traffic heard a request from Manchester Economic Development Director Jodie Nazaka for a third year of the expanded street seating program, to run from May 1 through Oct. 31.

In 2020 and 2021, the city offered expanded seating at no cost to businesses, but Nazaka said with the emergency order lifted, inside dining at full capacity, and the city's loss in parking revenues, "there is no justification to continuing offering this program at no cost."

If the full board approves, businesses interested in participating in the program would be charged $420 per space for the six-month season.

"We took into consideration the last two years this was offered at no cost to businesses looking to participate," said Nazaka. "They were trying to deal with the stay-at-home order and that was key in the success of a lot of those businesses. Now there is no logical way we could justify offering it for free. Expanding onto public property in other communities is now being a little more carefully assessed. I would like it to be free, but in conversations with other departments there was no way to justify that."

City parking manager Denise Boutilier said the $420 figure for six months' use of a space represents the average cost for a monthly parking permit in the city, which ranges between $55-$85.

"A parking space generates about $10 a day," said Boutilier. "If we used that number we would be charging quite a bit of money. We're not trying to gouge the businesses. We feel there needs to be a fee now, and with the board's approval the $420 over six months seems reasonable."

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Back in February, Portsmouth City Council members approved fees of $5 per square foot for cafe area (minimum $1,000) for outdoor dining area on city sidewalks, and $1,500 per city parking space.

Alderman Will Stewart agreed with the reasoning behind charging for spots.

"It's public property," said Stewart. "I can certainly understand the last couple of years doing what we did. Giving it away is no good for city taxpayers and anybody else who would be subsidizing this. I think this makes sense."

Nazaka said conversations she has had with downtown business owners indicate there won't be as much of an interest in expanded outdoor seating this summer.

"Most of them won't be seeking expanded outdoor dining," said Nazaka. "Their kitchen can't withstand doing full capacity inside seating and expanding into the street. We'll be seeing much less this year than we have the last couple years."

Committee members voted 4-1 to recommend the full board approve the proposal, with only Alderman Pat Long opposed.

Businesses will have the opportunity to secure up to three spaces through the same application process through the City Clerk's Office used the last two years, with applications due April 29.

Manchester officials encourage businesses to apply for the Community Event and Activation Grant (CEAG) through the Planning and Community Development Department. Applicants can apply for up to $10,000 per grant for community-based projects and events contributing to community health and safety, economic development, and tourism, and officials say the grants can be used "to enhance the parking spaces to add to our vibrant downtown community."

The proposed timeline for the 2022 expanded outdoor seating, contingent upon approval, is as follows:

Tuesday, April 19: Final Board of Mayor and Aldermen approval;

April 19  April 29: Businesses provide required information to the Clerk's Office (layout, number of parking spaces, use of barriers or other structures for protection, fees, etc.);

May 2-3: Highway Department installs jersey barriers where requested; and

October: Highway Department picks up jersey barriers.

pfeely@unionleader.com
New Britain is on the verge of hiring a new superintendent for the citys 10,000-student school system, its sixth leader in the past decade.

The school board is seeking a chief who can change the pattern of disappointing student test scores that has dogged New Britain schools for many years.

Privately, some school employees say theyre eager for a new leader who can bring down the temperature of the dispute between city hall and Superintendent Nancy Sarras administration.

Mayor Erin Stewart twice last year used high-profile speeches to denounce the schools performance, and in January, Sarra and her second-in-command, Michael Foran, announced theyll retire this summer.

Hoping to have the new superintendent in place by July 1, the board has reduced the field to fewer than six finalists. It is disclosing no information about them, and isnt saying whether most are from within the system or are applying from other towns or states.

New Britains goal is to avoid another extended period with students and teachers led by an interim boss.

In 2011 and again in 2016, the school board conducted lengthy searches, each time appointing temporary superintendents who stayed in the position for months. That created prolonged holding patterns where policy changes and new initiatives were scarce.

The entire 10-person board has been conducting the current search along with a Trumbull-based consultant, Cooperative Educational Services.

Were just about to wrap up the Round 2 interviews, board President Gayle Sanders-Connolly said Tuesday. Hopefully well have more information to share by the end of the week.

The board has been conducting multi-hour interviews with the finalists during evenings and the past weekend.

The search began soon after Sarras retirement announcement.

CES recruited candidates by contacting nearly 10,000 current superintendents and those certified to serve as superintendents across the nation, said Scott Griffin, a spokesman for the consultant. The opening was promoted extensively in professional networks and on a number of state and national education-related websites.

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Carmelo Rodriguez Jr., head of the New Britain Latino Coalition, complained last month that the board didnt give the public enough input in the process.

But the board maintains it has sought out opinions from everyone in the city. It put out community surveys in English, Spanish, Arabic and Polish to get opinion about the most important qualities for Sarras replacement, but wont release the findings until the search is complete.

We have completed 13 focus groups including the mayor, other city officials, community partners, parents and students, Sanders-Connolly said.

Developing better relations between the schools and city hall will be high on the agenda of whichever candidate gets the job.

Stewart, a Republican, blasted the school administration in her 2021 State of the City speech, condemning several worst-in-the-state performance metrics and saying Dead last doesnt cut it in New Britain.

Democratic leaders and the teachers union replied that Stewart was playing politics with education, and has a history of underfunding the schools, which historically get nearly the lowest per-pupil spending in Connecticut.

When she was re-elected in November, Stewart said at her inauguration that New Britain needs a comprehensive plan that fundamentally changes the way that education is delivered ... I want smart, outside-of-the-box thinkers to also be part of shaping that plan.

Last month, four Republicans on the school board called for buying out Sarras contract early, but the full board wouldnt go along.

About 150 of Sarras allies rallied downtown on her behalf before the board voted, and former Democratic Town Chairman John McNamara wrote in the New Britain Progressive that Sarra was being targeted for resisting inappropriate power grabs from city hall.

Supporters of Sarra, a longtime educator in New Britain, say she has built parent engagement and rebuilt staff morale after the departure of Kelt Cooper as superintendent seven years ago.

Cooper had been recruited from Texas to shake up the system, but he and Stewart ended up not speaking to each other in the months before he resigned.
You are here: Business

China's smartphone sales volume fell in February, affected by sporadic COVID-19 outbreaks, an industry report showed.



Around 23.48 million smartphones were sold in February, down 20.5 percent year on year, according to a report by research and consulting company CINNO Research.

On a month-on-month basis, the industry's sales volume dropped by 24 percent from January, said the report.

The top five brands all saw their sales decline from a month ago. Domestic smartphone maker Oppo remained the leading seller in the period, and Honor overtook Vivo to come in second with a year-on-year spike of 141.6 percent.

Apple took third place with its sales dipping by 4 percent from a year ago, followed by Vivo and Xiaomi, the report said.
Apr. 6Nearly all of the roughly 30 Frederick County residents who provided comment during a County Council meeting Tuesday called on council members to require that a new Police Accountability Board include representation from minority communities who they said are disproportionately the victims of police misconduct.

Those who spoke at the meeting said that people from Black, Hispanic and Latino, immigrant and LGBTQ communities in particular must be a part of the nine-member board that will receive complaints of misconduct against police officers in the county.

The most up-to-date version of the County Council bill to create the board, and outline who can be part of it, states that the board should "to the extent practicable" reflect the county's racial, gender and cultural diversity, and include representation from communities who frequently interact with police.

Representation from these communities should be a requirement, said Billy Reid, a Frederick resident and Democratic candidate to represent the county in the state House of Delegates.

"The board needs to include people with the knowledge and understanding of populations that have most likely experienced negative interactions with police," Reid said.

County Executive Jan Gardner, D, will appoint members to the board and the County Council will decide whether to confirm them.

Among the board's nine members, according to bill documents, must be two Frederick residents, one Brunswick resident and one Thurmont resident, to ensure that each municipality with its own law enforcement agency has representation.

Board members from Brunswick and Thurmont, which are predominantly white areas, could take away opportunities for representation from communities in the county who disproportionately experience police misconduct, said Tarolyn Thrasher, a Frederick resident who is running against Reid in the Democratic race for the county's District 3A delegate seat.

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Many, including Julius "Jay" Levine, a retired Frederick Police officer whose son is currently an officer, rebutted the argument that police agencies should have the authority to address complaints of misconduct against their own officers.

Law enforcement agencies have disciplined their own officers for "eons," but Maryland counties are creating boards, because of state law, and because agencies have not successfully deterred misconduct, he said.

While the Police Accountability Board will receive complaints of misconduct, a separate five-person Charging Committee will determine whether an officer will be administratively charged and will recommend discipline.

Frederick County, like every other Maryland county, is required to establish a Police Accountability Board under a state law passed last year.

While the board wouldn't be allowed to begin meeting until July, the county must pass a bill to establish it by May 1 to accommodate a 60-day window for the bill to be enacted into law.

Council members plan to propose amendments to the council's bill next week, said Council President M.C. Keegan-Ayer, D. If amendments pass, the council will hold another public hearing before eventually voting to establish the board.

To meet the May 1 deadline, the council must vote to pass the bill by April 26, the last Tuesday of the month.

If council members' amendments do not pass, the body could vote to pass the bill as soon as April 19, when the body's next legislative meeting is scheduled to be held.

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@jckhogan
Apr. 6INDIANAPOLIS  Appellate judges have rejected a man's bid to cut his sentence in half after he received a total of 100 years for child molesting.

Timothy Patrick, 65, was sentenced to two 45-year prison terms and another 10 years suspended after he was convicted at a trial in June. A jury found him guilty of two counts of child molesting as a Level 1 felony and one count as a Level 4 felony.
Sarah Godlewski, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate

With inflation rising, two top Democratic contenders in the race for U.S. Senate are floating a way to modestly cut soaring prices at the gas pump.

They're calling for a federal gas tax holiday.

Wednesday, state Treasurer Sarah Godlewski made the push to suspend the 18.4 cents per gallon tax as part of what she called her "Cut Costs Plan."

Godlewski said her overall plan on cutting costs "offers straightforward solutions that would help immediately lower costs for working families, address the widespread supply chain issues our country is facing, and crack down on corporate greed because working Wisconsinites deserve a fair shake from Washington, not business as usual.

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She laid out a broad program that included tough sanctions for alleged price gouging and a push to make housing more affordable.

Milwaukee Bucks executive Alex Lasry called for suspending the gas tax back in December.

The gas tax holiday idea has gained traction among Democrats, especially with midterm elections approaching and inflation reaching its highest level in 40 years.

In February, the consumer price index increased 7.9% over the past 12 months, according to the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In a recent ad, Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson pummeled Democrats over inflation, calling it their "tax on the middle class."

"I'm concerned with rising prices, just like you," Johnson said in the 30-second spot.

Lasry called for a six-month temporary suspension of the federal gas tax in December, claiming, Wisconsinites need relief from high gas prices now."

He called the proposal "a commonsense measure that can bring immediate relief to working families across Wisconsin.

Last month, Gov. Tony Evers, facing re-election in the fall, joined five other Democratic governors in a joint letter to congressional leaders to call for suspending the federal gas tax through 2022.

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Godlewski backed a bill pushed by Democratic U.S. Senators Mark Kelly of Arizona and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire to suspend the federal gas tax for the remainder of the year.

There's a significant drawback to the proposals, however. The gas tax is the key source of revenue for the Highway Trust Fund, which provides federal cash for transportation projects.

Asked about the potential of a suspension of the state gas tax, which is pegged at 32.9 cents a gallon, Godlewski said she believed: "that the federal government needs to lead on this issue and do everything they can to lower the price at the pump from temporarily suspending the gas tax to reducing our dependency on foreign oil to investing in renewable energy for the future."

"In order to temporarily suspend the state gas tax, the GOP leaders would need to end their nine-month vacation and bring the Legislature back in to act and we know thats never going to happen," she said.

In her policy paper, Godlewski called for making more products in America to untangle supply chain issues, an increase in tax incentives and other programs to make housing more affordable, and a continued push to make the child tax credit permanent.

Godlewski's plan also called for requiring "corporations that receive significant federal investments not engage in stock buybacks, in sending jobs offshore, or in paying executives more than 50 times what their median worker earns."

The plan also said she was poised to attack price gouging and called for "increasing federal antitrust enforcement."

The paper said Godlewski "will support criminal charges for corporate executives who engage in price-fixing and other forms of criminally anti-competitive conduct."

Our subscribers make this reporting possible. Please consider supporting local journalism by subscribing to the Journal Sentinel at jsonline.com/deal.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Godlewski calls for federal gas tax suspension in 'Cut Costs Plan'
A motorist pumps gas at a Valero station in Encinitas, California, on April 5, 2022. In Southern California's 49th Congressional District, prices have soared above $6 a gallon. (Photo: Sandy Huffaker for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

A motorist pumps gas at a Valero station in Encinitas, California, on April 5, 2022. In Southern California's 49th Congressional District, prices have soared above $6 a gallon. (Photo: Sandy Huffaker for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

House Democrats slammed oil and gas industry executives during a hearing on Wednesday, accusing them of profiteering amid Russias invasion of Ukraine and its impact on the global energy market.

The consensus among committee Democrats and Republicans, as well as the executives who testified, is that the U.S. needs to boost domestic production in the short term in order to provide Americans relief at the pump. Where they fiercely disagree is on the barriers keeping that from happening.

Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations subcommittee, displayed a chart showing that while the price of crude oil has dropped in recent weeks, gasoline prices in the U.S. remain near historic highs.

Why? she asked. If the price of gas is driven by the global market, why is the price of oil coming down but the price at the pump is still at record highs?

Something just doesnt add up, she added.

Industry executives from Exxon Mobil, BP, Chevron, Shell USA, Devon Energy Corp and Pioneer Resources said the global market controls prices, not individual companies, but struggled to explain the widening gap.

Changes in the price of crude oil do not always result in immediate changes at the pump, said Mike Wirth, CEO of Chevron. He added that it frequently takes more time for competition among retail stations to bring prices back down.

It is a very complex set of factors that impact the price of gasoline, including supply risk across all fossil fuel products, said David Lawler, president of BP America.

Rep. Diana DeGette asks BP exec David Lawler why gas prices [are] so high even after crude oil prices came down  heres how he responded pic.twitter.com/aQ4V7N4Urh  NowThis (@nowthisnews) April 6, 2022

Republicans on the committee ran to the industrys defense. Reps. Morgan Griffith (Va.) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.) argued that the Biden administrations anti-American energy agenda and war on fossil fuels are to blame for inflated prices.

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It is impossible to generate confidence or invest in production today when future production is clearly being blocked by this administration, Griffith said.

Griffith asked each of the executives if their company was taking advantage of the crisis in Ukraine to keep prices artificially high in order to increase your own profits? All of them said they were not.

We have no tolerance for price-gouging, Wirth, of Chevron, said in his opening remarks.

But as DeGette and other Democrats on the panel pointed out, and as the executives acknowledged, the industry is raking in record profits. The six companies present Wednesday brought in a combined $75 billion in profits last year. And when the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas surveyed 139 industry executives last month, the majority  59%  cited investor pressure as the main reason producers have not ramped up production.

Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said the industry is ripping off the American people.

At a time of record profits, big oil is refusing to increase production to provide the American people some much-needed relief at the gas pump. Instead, they are buying back their stock at an estimated $40 billion this year. Big oil is lining their pockets with one hand and taking millions in taxpayer subsidies with the other.

Stock buybacks are when a company uses its profits to buy up its own stock, often leading to a surge in the stock price. Pallone asked each of the executives if they would commit to reducing stock buybacks and dividends for shareholders, which would enable them to increase production instead amid ongoing turmoil in the energy market. None of them said they would.

I cant commit to a reduction in buybacks, Lawler said.

Rep. @FrankPallone asks oil company executives: "Will you commit to doing whatever it takes, including increasing production, but also reducing dividends and buybacks, in order to lower prices for struggling American consumers? Yes or no?" pic.twitter.com/LgxCjVfHdb  CSPAN (@cspan) April 6, 2022

Mondays hearing and U.S. lawmakers push for more fossil fuel development come against the backdrop of a new United Nations report that warns global carbon emissions need to peak by 2025, then go down 43% by 2030, in order to prevent catastrophic planetary warming.

Last week, Biden ordered the largest-ever release of oil from the nations strategic reserves  an average of 1 million barrels per day for six months  to combat high prices and act as a wartime bridge until domestic production can ramp up later this year. He also called on Congress to pass use it or lose it legislation requiring oil and gas companies to pay fees on idle wells and unused federal leases.

Highlighting the tightrope that Democrats are walking on energy ahead of the midterms later this year, when gas prices are likely to be high on voters minds, Pallone called on industry executives to take some action to reduce the pain at the gas pump.

Produce more oil, he said on Wednesday. Produce more with the wells you have.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

Related...
A group of Democratic lawmakers unveiled legislation on Wednesday that would force the Supreme Court to adopt various ethics standards, including recusal requirements for justices with financial and personal ties to parties involved in cases before the high court.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) led a group of lawmakers on the House and Senate Judiciary committees in announcing the bill, called the Twenty-First Century Courts Act. Whitehouse said the bill is aimed at addressing a lack of clear, enforceable standards for when justices should recuse themselves.

A Supreme Court justice is not required to address why he or she doesnt think he or she needs to recuse, and if a party thinks they really ought to have recused, they have no recourse, Whitehouse said at a press conference.

Theres no penalty for getting a recusal wrong, he added.

The legislation largely mirrors previous bills aimed at reforming judicial ethics at the Supreme Court, but the Democrats said Wednesday theres a new urgency behind the effort amid outcry over revelations involving Ginni Thomas, a Republican activist and the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas.

Text messages released last month indicated Ginni Thomas had been texting with former President Trumps White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, apparently calling for action to overturn the 2020 election in the days before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Clarence Thomas later participated in the Supreme Courts review of Trumps court battle with the House Jan. 6 select committee over records requests for White House documents and communications with senior officials, including Meadows. Thomas was the lone dissenter in the courts 8-1 decision granting the House committees access to the records.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), one of the bills co-sponsors, said the controversy made the legislation especially timely but that the proposed ethics standards would address long-running concerns about accountability in the high court and the judiciary as a whole.

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The public is watching the United States Supreme Court to see whether or not Justice Thomas will recuse himself in future cases and what action may be taken regarding his failure to recuse himself in past cases, Blumenthal said. But the issue here is much bigger and broader than one justice. In fact, its bigger and broader than the United States Supreme Court.

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, added in a statement, The American public deserves a justice system it can believe in, and that belief must be rooted in accountability and transparency. This essential legislation directly responds to the cascade of judicial ethics scandals that threaten to undermine the integrity of our federal courts.

The bill would, among other things, force the Supreme Court to adopt a code of conduct for justices. The justices are currently the only judges in the federal judiciary who are not subject to such ethics policies.

It would also allow parties litigating before the Supreme Court to file motions asking for a justices recusal. Under the proposed system, all nine justices would be involved in reviewing such motions.

Whitehouse said Wednesday that the lack of standards at the nations highest court have damaged public trust in the institution.

Big special interests spend massive sums of money to rig the federal judiciary in their favor, and Supreme Court justices have the least stringent ethics and transparency rules of any senior federal officials, the Rhode Island Democrat said. Our bicameral bill would help to hold judges to account and restore Americans faith in their courts.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Denton police have arrested the mother of a 7-year-old boy who died April 1 and are saying she concealed the abuse leading to his death, according to a news release from police.

Sabrina Ho, the mother of 7-year-old identified in the release as Phoenix Ho, was arrested on a charge of injury to a child. Hos boyfriend, Todd Shaw, 52, was arrested April 2 on a charge of injury to a child.

Police said they received a call April 1 around 7:30 p.m. about a child having a medical emergency in the 1600 block of East McKinney Street. Medics arrived and took the child to the hospital, where they notified police of suspicious and extensive injuries on the boy.

Phoenix Ho died at the hospital, according to police.

Detectives interviewed Sabrina Ho and Shaw as part of the investigation and found that Ho was aware that Shaw was physically abusing her child, police said. Ho kept him out of school and intentionally neglected health care for the boy to conceal signs of abuse, according to the news release.

Phoenix Ho was a second grade student at a local elementary school, according to police. Sabrina Ho is currently being held at the Denton County Jail awaiting arraignment.
Andrew Leung, president of the Legislative Council (LegCo) of China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), said on Tuesday that the LegCo has returned to rationality after the improvement of Hong Kong's electoral system.

Leung said in the LegCo's annual report that improving Hong Kong's electoral system has ensured the implementation of the principle of "patriots administering Hong Kong" and the steady progress in the practice of "one country, two systems."

Noting the LegCo's working efficiency has greatly improved, Leung said it held 49 meetings in the past year, with no member's grossly disorderly conduct causing meetings to be suspended or terminated.

He said that the LegCo effectively handled a huge backlog of agenda items and passed a record 46 government bills in 2020/2021, more than double the average of about 20 bills for the previous legislative years.

In the past year, the LegCo's Finance Committee effectively discharged its functions to examine and approve public expenditure proposals submitted by the HKSAR government, passing a record high of 120 proposals, involving 327.8 billion HK dollars (41.84 billion U.S. dollars), Leung said.

At present, the overriding task in Hong Kong is to bring COVID-19 under control and restore normal life and economic activity as soon as possible, Leung said, noting that all members of the seventh-term LegCo will work with the HKSAR government and the public to fight the epidemic.
Whatcom County sheriffs deputies are searching for a missing 43-year-old man last seen in early January.

Deputies said Ryan Digaetano was last seen on Jan. 6 at 55 Polo Park Drive, Sudden Valley.

According to a release from deputies, Digaetano told his brother he was going to shovel snow, but has not heard from him since.

Digaetanos family said they are worried about his safety.

Digaetano might be with his girlfriend, according to deputies. It is believed he recently used his EBT card in the Seattle area.

Digaetano is described as white, 5 feet, 10 inches tall and weighs 180 pounds. He has blonde hair but might change his hair color and style. He also has blue eyes and a tattoo on his left shoulder of the Italian flag.

Anyone with information on his whereabouts is asked to call 360-778-6613.

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TheGrio explores how Floridas law banning classroom discussions on sexual orientation and gender identity will affect young people across the LGBTQ+ spectrum.

Floridas new controversial Dont Say Gay bill that bans all discussions on sexual orientation and gender identity has been repeatedly slammed by equality advocates as harmful to LGBTQ+ youth and their families.

But critics and data indicate that the new law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis last week, and other bills like it across the country, could be especially damaging for Black and Brown LGBTQ young people, who are facing not just anti-LGBTQ policies but anti-Black policy through other bills that also ban discussions on race.

This is incredibly impactful to LGBTQ students of color, and in particular, Black students, because of the compounding negative impact on their mental health and well-being, said Preston Mitchum, director of advocacy and government affairs at the LGBTQ nonprofit, The Trevor Project.

Depression and mental health challenges and anxiety sets in and can be really debilitating for many Black and Brown LGBTQ folks, particularly when youre young. Its really important for us to have inclusive conversations in school related to folks race, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Mitchum cited CDC data that found that LGBTQ youth are more than four times more likely to attempt suicide, telling theGrio, Issues like the Dont Say Gay bill create an environment for discrimination and make them a target in their community. He noted that while many discussions are surrounding when its appropriate for a child to talk about sexual orientation or gender identity, young people are very well aware of who they are at a young age.

(Photo: Adobe Stock)

He added, We also know that young people are watching and listening. Theyre not just sitting to the sidelines[theyre] actually understanding the debates being held in the states across the country.

Another study conducted with Morning Consult found that 85% of trans and non-binary youth and two-thirds of all LGBTQ youth  or 66%  say recent debates about state laws restricting the rights of transgender people have negatively impacted their mental health. Whats more, Black LGBTQ youth report higher rates of poor mental health.

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Proponents of the Dont Say Gay law have championed the bill as a win for parental rights. The growing movement across the country to restrict conversation about LGBTQ+ identities has extended to banning books about sexuality, gender identity and race.

Mitchum, who is Black and openly gay, notes, not having those conversations, the books, the names, the statements be in libraries or schools or other educational environments effectively erases us. And not only does it erase us, but it also erases whats related to us, including our history and our culture. That in of itself creates an environment that is incredibly harmful and stigmatizing and that exacerbates harm.

The Dont Say Gay law, officially called the Parental Rights in Education, has ignited fierce political debate and, just days after it was signed, Gov. DeSantis and the state of Florida were hit with a lawsuit filed by advocacy groups who say the new law violates students and families constitutionally protected rights of free speech, equal protection under the law and due process.

I thank God for the checks and balances that have been put in place by our forefathers  thats called the courts, Floridas first openly gay and Black State Sen. Shevrin Jones told theGrio.

Jones said he hopes the courts will look at this as being discriminatory on the surface and that the legal challenge against the Dont Say Gay law will send a strong message to other states contemplating similar legislation.

Senator Jones, who, alongside his Democratic colleagues, tried to stop the bill from being passed in the state Senate, slammed Gov. DeSantis and Republicans for igniting a culture war with a bill he dismissed as vague in language and unnecessary.

LAKELAND, FLORIDA, UNITED STATES  2021/05/28: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at a press conference at LifeScience Logistics to urge the Biden administration to approve Floridas plan to import prescription drugs from Canada, thereby saving Floridians an estimated $100 million annually on drug costs. (Photo by Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

There is no school district  nowhere in this country  no standard that currently teaches [about sexual orientation or gender identity] to kids in kindergarten or the third grade, Jones told theGrio.

As a matter of fact, its barely taught in fourth grade when were talking about sex education. Now, if they want to convolute sex education for sexual orientation and gender identity, well they used the wrong words in the bill language. And our amendment was filed to deal with that, but they denied it because they knew exactly what this bill was and what they wanted it to do.

He said the law as its written is left up for interpretation.

Jones also pushed back against Republicans arguments that children should simply discuss LGBTQ+ topics at home and not in schools, noting that we already have a problem with adoptions and foster care and realizing a lot of young people dont have anybody to go home to and have this conversation withsometimes teachers are the first responders [and] the first people who [students] can and they want to talk to because they trust them.

He argued that not having a teacher they can trust and talk about these issues could lead them to turn to the streets.

Sen. Jones made headlines last month in the state Senate when the bill was being taken up by the upper house after he tearfully delivered an emotional speech about his journey of coming out. I never knew that living my truth would cause church members to leave my dads church or friends to stop talking to me, said an emotional Jones to his colleagues.

I didnt even expect to tell my story in that moment, Sen. Jones revealed to theGrio.

I used that as the opportunity to share my story because I needed to make it real for them. Everybody was speaking in hypotheticals when Im actually a real person who actually sits in the chambers with you. So I wanted to bring that to light.

Jones, who was recently appointed by President Joe Biden to join his board of advisors on HBCUs, said he was compelled to speak out in the way that he did after seeing countless youth advocates inside the Senate building chanting We Say Gay as a counter to Floridas bill.

I looked at those children who came to my office, who were outside of the chambers chantingyou could hear these young people [chanting] to the top of their lungs, who wanted us to hear that were out here, and youre about to vote against our interests in front of our faces, Jones recalled. Thats what really made me cry because I thought about the 16, 17, 18-year-old Shevrin, who wouldnt have had the strength or the support from home to do something like that.

He added, even if I wasnt the first openly gay person to be elected to the Florida Senate, I wouldve still advocated the same way because it is a humanitarian issue. And I think we so often in politics get so caught up in the policy that we forget that youre dealing with real people behind this legislation.

When it comes to public opinion on broader anti-LGBTQ bills, Mitchm noted another study conducted by The Trevor Project and Morning Consult that found that a majority of adults support educational and health resources for LGBTQ+ youth.

The study concludes that 57% of adults oppose blocking students from accessing LGBTQ resources and educational content on the internet at school; 56% oppose the banning of LGBTQ-friendly books from libraries, and 52% of adults oppose bills like Floridas Dont Say Gay law.

On the policy front, both Mitchum and Jones said they would like to see the United States Congress pass The Equality Act, which has been stalled in the U.S. Senate for more than a year. The law would prohibit discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity in education and other public facilities.

A general view of the U.S. Capitol Building on May 14, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Mitchum commended the Biden-Harris administration for speaking out against the Dont Say Gay bill and similar laws. U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona called the bill pure hatred and said that the law indicated that in America there are bulliesright in our own backyard.

U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra issued a memo in response to a similar Dont Say Gay bill being considered in Texas. In a statement reaffirming his departments support for LGBTQ+ youth, Secretary Becerra provided a list of guidelines on how his department and state agencies can support LGBTQ+ youth, particularly trans youth, and their families.

HHS is committed to protecting young Americans who are targeted because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, and supporting their parents, caretakers and families, said Becerra. That is why I directed my team to evaluate the tools at our disposal to protect trans and gender diverse youth in Texas, and today I am announcing several steps we can take to protect them.

U.S. President Joe Biden spends the weekend at the White House on January 30, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Joshua Roberts/Getty Images)(Photo by Joshua Roberts/Getty Images)

During Mondays press briefing, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki categorically condemned Floridas Dont Say Gay law and those like it.

What we think its a reflection of is politicians in Florida propagating misinformed, hateful policies that do absolutely nothing to address the real issues. The Department of Education is well positioned and ready to evaluate what to do next and when and its implementation, whether its implementation violates federal civil rights law, said Psaki.

But I would note that parents across the country are looking to national, state and district leaders to support our nations students [and] to ensure that kids are treated equally in schools and that is certainly this is not a reflection of that.

She added, I think this is a politically charged, harsh law that is putting parents and LGBTQ+ kids in a very difficult, heartbreaking circumstance.

TheGrio is now on your TV via Apple TV, Amazon Fire, Roku, and Android TV. Also, please download theGrio mobile apps today!

The post Dont Say Gay law, and bills like it, will have harmful impact on Black LGBTQ+ youth, say critics appeared first on TheGrio.
Local legislators and law enforcement officials say a bill that aims to choke the market for stolen catalytic converters is likely the best way to curb such thefts, which are becoming more brazen lately.

The state General Assembly's Public Safety Committee late last month passed a bipartisan bill that, if it passes legislative muster and is signed into law, would still allow scrap yards and recycling companies to buy catalytic converters, but only if certain stringent caveats are met.

Senate Bill 256, An act concerning the purchase or receipt of catalytic converters by motor vehicle recyclers, scrap metal processors and junk dealers would in most circumstances prevent a company from buying the devices unless they are physically attached to a vehicle. A recycler could not re-sell a converter until the vehicle identification number from the original vehicle it was connected to is etched onto it.

Arthur Faunce Jr., manager at Plainfield Scrap Metal, says this circa 2008 Audi or Volkswagen catalytic converter is worth $160 as scrap.

Any outfit that does purchase an unattached converter must record a bevy of seller details, including the sellers name, address and drivers license number; the license plate of the vehicle used to transport the converter for sale; and a photo or video of the seller.

In addition, only one converter per day can be accepted by any one dealer and payments would consist of a check mailed to a seller's address. Sales information would need to be forwarded to state police weekly.

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State Sen. Cathy Osten, chairwoman of the Public Safety Committee, said the COVID-19 pandemic led to a spike in a variety of illegal activity in recent years, including an uptick in catalytic converter thefts.

Arthur Faunce Jr., manager at Plainfield Scrap Metal, says this circa 2008 Audi or Volkswagen catalytic converter is worth $160 as scrap.

Short of standing outside and watching your car 24 hours a day, the answer to catalytic converter thefts is to kill the market for their illegal sale, she said in a press release. Criminals arent going to steal something they cant sell, and this bill makes it nearly impossible to sell a stolen catalytic converter. Or, you may steal and sell a few, but the police will easily identify and catch up to you. I think this is going to be a game-changer for the public."

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Thieves cut catalytic converters from under cars in CT parking lots

On April 3, days after the committee sent the bill to the state Senate for consideration, state police were dispatched to a Lisbon shopping center supermarket parking lot where a catalytic converter was stolen mid-afternoon.

These thefts have been happening throughout the region, and can happen during broad daylight in busy parking lots, state police officials said in a news release.

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Last month, more than a dozen catalytic converters were cut out of vehicles parked in the Putnam Ford dealership lot. Putnam Police Chief Chris Ferace, whose departments Special Services District coverage area does not include the Park Road dealership, said officers have been dispatched sporadically in the last couple of years for converter thefts.

He said the anti-theft bills focus on scrap metal dealers and junkyards makes sense.

When someone drives in with a dozen or more catalytic converters for sale, you have to believe theyd been obtained illegally, Ferace said.

A catalytic converter was stolen off a car at Aldi supermarket at Lisbon Commons.

Ferace likened device thieves to a NASCAR pit crew who, after locating an attractive vehicle  ideally one with a high ground clearance - quickly get to work.

Then they get under with a portable saw and chop it away and move on, he said.

Ferace said there are ways to mitigate such thefts and they all require vigilance.

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When you park, do it where theres activity and be prepared to be a good witness, he said. It might not be your vehicle targeted, but one thats three or 10 spaces down. If something looks or sounds out of place, contact law enforcement.

The converters, which reduce nitrogen oxide emissions from vehicle tailpipes, contain several precious metals  platinum, palladium, rhodium  whose values have sky-rocketed in recent years. The committee noted rhodium alone, which sold for $1,850 an ounce in 2018 is now selling for $20,250 an ounce.

Arthur Faunce Jr., manager at Plainfield Scrap Metal, says this circa 2008 Audi or Volkswagen catalytic converter is worth $160 as scrap.

Plainfield Deputy Police Chief Will Wolfburg said the department during the past two years has responded to several commercial and residential catalytic converter thefts, almost all during the overnight hours.

It takes only minutes to complete those thefts by someone who can carry a portable saw under a jacket or in a backpack, but it represents a big financial loss for the victim, he said. And its very hard to track the stolen parts down since theres no identifying numbers on them.

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The National Insurance Crime Bureau estimates catalytic converter thefts jumped 293% nationwide from mid-2020 to the same time in 2021. Converter resale prices are pegged at roughly $150, though it can cost a vehicle owner several thousand dollars to replace a stolen device, the agency said.

Arthur Faunce Jr., operator of Plainfield Scrap Metal, Inc., said his Margaret Lane business almost never purchases catalytic converters brought in for sale.

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Ill do it if its someone I personally know, but thats it, he said. Thats because you really dont know if theyve been gotten illegally.

Faunce said the resale price of a converter can vary wildly depending on makes and models. He said some may only net a few dollars, while a Volkswagen version about the size of a loaf of bread can go for more than $1,200.

A catalytic converter on a 2016 Toyota Camry.

Wolfburg, while supportive of the spirit of the anti-theft bill, said he had some reservations about its efficacy.

One problem is the thieves arent necessarily taking the converters to local dealers to sell and are instead using back-channels, sometimes out of state, he said. (The bill) is a huge improvement, but its like fishing against a rip-tide.

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Wolfburg said converter theft investigations rely heavily on surveillance video and witness statements. He said in past cases suspects identified on camera have later been found with the sort of burglary tools frequently used to carve away converters.

Like Ferace, Wolfburg said the best protection against such thefts is awareness.

You have to be pro-active, he said. If you have a car and a truck, park the truck in the garage.

John Penney can be reached at jpenney@norwichbulletin.com or at (860) 857-6965

This article originally appeared on The Bulletin: Eastern CT police on board with catalytic converter anti-theft bill
A dog peers out from a doorway beside a body of a woman killed in Bucha, near Kyiv, Ukraine. (Felipe Dana / Associated Press)

In a powerful speech to the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of the most terrible war crimes since World War II and rightly demanded that Russia face full accountability for its atrocities committed during its unprovoked invasion.

They cut off limbs, slashed their throats, women were raped and killed in front of their children, Zelensky said of Russian forces. Their tongues were pulled out only because the aggressor did not hear what they wanted to hear from them.

Other nations need not take Zelenskys word for the existence of Russian war crimes. The world has been disgusted by images of dead civilians lying on the streets of Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, from which Russian forces have withdrawn, and horrified by the accounts of abuse. U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said Tuesday that what happened in Bucha was a deliberate campaign to kill, to torture, to rape, to commit atrocities. President Biden joined other world leaders in calling for the prosecution of Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes.

Not all the allegations of war crimes involve Bucha. Human Rights Watch says that it has documented several cases of Russian military forces committing laws-of-war violations against civilians in the Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Kyiv regions of Ukraine, including a case of repeated rape and two cases of summary execution. Russia has also been denounced for the bombing of locations where civilians were hiding in Mariupol in March, notably a theater and a maternity hospital.

Predictably  and unpersuasively  Russias ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, denied that Russian troops were targeting civilians, adding that while Bucha was under Russian control "not a single civilian suffered from any kind of violence." On Tuesday, Kremlin officials ludicrously insisted that the bodies in Bucha were fake. Russia continues to blame the victim.

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It wont be easy to hold Russia or its leaders accountable for these atrocities. In his speech to the Security Council, Zelensky complained about the fact that Russia, as a permanent member of the council, could veto any resolution  and thus protect itself. He suggested that Russia could be deprived of that power, but that is unlikely.

Yet other bodies can gather evidence of Russian atrocities. Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, has opened an investigation of possible war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Ukraine. The European Union also plans to send investigators to Ukraine to help the local authorities "document war crimes."

Whether or not they lead to criminal convictions, atrocities by Russian troops strengthen the case for increasing sanctions. On Tuesday, the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, proposed a ban on coal imports from Russia. It's an appropriate move, but should be extended to cover all energy supplies. The Biden administration is also expected to announce new financial sanctions.

Even if Russia had been scrupulous about safeguarding civilians, its unprovoked aggression against Ukraine, a sovereign nation, was an outrage that warranted significant reprisals. That the special military operation has been pursued with despicable brutality only strengthens the case for holding Russia accountable and empowering Ukraine to continue to defend itself.

No nation should want to be a party to this continuing savagery. The global community should cut off Russia from any source of funding that fuels its appalling campaign of violence and mutilation against the people of a country it claims are its brethren. While that may cause some pain, especially to Europeans who depend heavily on Russian oil and gas, it is a small price to pay if it can stop the massacre of more Ukrainians.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP)  El Salvadors congress, pushing further in the government's dramatic crackdown on gangs, has authorized prison sentences of 10 to 15 years for news media that reproduce or disseminate messages from the gangs, alarming press freedom groups.

The vote late Tuesday was the latest in a flurry of legislative action against the gangs after 62 suspected gang killings on March 26 led President Nayib Bukele to get congressional approval for a state of emergency. Harsh measures against imprisoned gang members and increased prison sentences followed, as well as the arrests of some 6,000 suspected gang members.

But the newest law expands Bukeles offensive to the press, another of his frequent targets.

We consider these reforms to be a clear attempt at censorship of media, the El Salvador Journalists Association said in a statement Wednesday. Prohibiting journalism from reporting the reality in which thousands of people inhabiting these gang-controlled communities live ... will create an illusion that is not faithful to the truth.

The Inter American Press Association said the new law was equivalent to criminalizing the work of the media and journalists.

IAPA President Jorge Canahuati called it a legal gag, a direct and prior censorship of the media that will have profound consequences for Salvadoran society.

A country cannot block violence by censoring public opinion, since it is precisely in public debate that societies find the solutions to their problems, Canahuati wrote.

The reforms passed with affirmative votes from 63 of the 84 lawmakers and went into effect when published Tuesday night in the official gazette.

The law says that radio, television, written or digital media would face 10 to 15 years in prison for the reproduction or transmission to the general population of messages or statements originating or presumably originating from said criminal groups, that could generate anxiety and panic in the population.

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The measure also establishes prison sentences of 10 to 15 years for painting the sort of graffiti commonly used to mark gang territory in neighborhoods across El Salvador.

Bukele has lashed out at the media, as well as nongovernmental organizations and international bodies that have been critical of some of the measures taken against the gangs. He accuses them of siding with the criminals.

Criminal defense lawyer Tahnya Pastor said the legal reform clearly creates a ban on media disseminating gang messages, but that its scope wasnt all encompassing.

For example, she didnt believe the ban would extend to someone writing a book about the gangs, but media outlets distributing messages from the gang about their control of areas that could cause panic would appear to run afoul of the measure, she said.

Others had a broader interpretation. Cesar Fagoaga, president of the journalists association, said at a news conference Wednesday: Its not only affecting us, its affecting the peoples information. This reforms is trying to get people to censor themselves and for us to not say anything.

Under the state of emergency, the government has limited freedom of association, suspended the right to be informed of one's rights at the time of arrest and denied access to lawyers. A suspect can now be held for 15 days without charges rather than 72 hours. Imprisoned gang members had their meals reduced to twice a day, are not allowed out of their cells and had their mattresses taken.

Bukele said via Twitter Tuesday that he had sent proposals to the Legislative Assembly, adding, We will see, once again, who is with the people and who is with the gangs.

Marcela Pineda, a lawmaker from Bukeles New Ideas Party, said Tuesday that, "With those reforms we are telling the gangsters that they cant send audios or text chains to generate fear in the population.

Bukele had hit that theme earlier in the day, saying there were rumors gangs might retaliate for the crackdown by attacking civilians and he threatened to withhold food from imprisoned gang members if they did.

The press association also noted there have been reports suggesting that Bukeles administration, like other administrations before it, had made deals with the gangs to lower the murder rate and provide political support in exchange for other benefits. The U.S. Treasury Department echoed those allegations in December, saying that Bukeles government had bought the gangs support with financial benefits and privileges for imprisoned leaders. Bukele has vehemently denied the accusations.

I dont care what the international organizations say. Let them come here and protect our people, the president said. They can take their gang members if they want; well give them all of them.
Elizabeth Alexander at her home in New York City on June 18, 2020.

Elizabeth Alexander at her home in New York City on June 18, 2020. Credit - Demetrius FreemanThe New York Times/Redux

Poetry is rarely a paying gig. Never has been. John Donne was a priest. Langston Hughes was a newspaper columnist and a lecturer. William Carlos Williams was a pediatrician. But its possible that Elizabeth Alexander has taken the side job to a whole new level: shes currently the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the United States biggest nonprofit dedicated to the arts and humanities. Its endowment sits at about $9 billion.

Having a poetry insider at the head of a big grant-making institute does not mean, however, that poets have moved to the front of the line for funding. Alexander has a much more ambitious vision for the role that the arts and culture play in the formation of society. And, during the pandemic she codified it, in her 16th book, The Trayvon Generation. Its a series of meditations on cultural and artistic artifacts that illuminate the color line, which she identifies as a fundamental, formative and constitutive problem in the U.S., and on the role the arts and humanities play in both drawing and erasing that line. Alexander is like a cultural archaeologist, dusting off and examining relics and shedding new light on the society that produced them. Except in this case, the relics are still in use.

Alexander offers a real life example of the role artists can play when she brings a poets clarity of language to the fraught national discussion of critical race theory (CRT), which, she writes, provides tools helpful for understanding that race is a social category and not a biological fact and that racism is best understood systemically rather than instance by instance. Why then has CRT become such a national flashpoint? The term has been hijacked, says Alexander from her home desk in New York City, in front of an enormous abstract landscape painting, and is now a misnomer and doesnt describe the intellectual tradition that comes from the academy.

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Her book, which sprang from an essay in The New Yorker, is an exploration of whether cultural expression can shape a world where children like Trayvonand Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and Stephon Clark and Ahmaud Arbery and Daunte Wright and too many otherscan be safer. I hope that the ways in which the humanities move along the racial conversation in this countrythorny, difficult, unsettled, she writes, will help us think in terms of process rather than finish line and leave us ever more open to the complexities that the humanities and the arts can reveal to us.

The humanities, of course, have a spotty record when it comes to oppression. Alexander heaps particular scorn on Stone Mountain, a Georgia vacation destination, where people picnic in the shadow of the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world (90 feet high), of three Confederate generals, that was completed in the 1970s. It is a shrine to white supremacy, standing today. Punto, says Alexander. I think people should be curious about that. Curious too, was the timing of a stained glass window at Washington National Cathedral that featured Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. It was installed in the 1950s, shortly after, Alexander notes, Brown vs Board of Education banned school segregation. These figures are put up as worthy of veneration, she says, when in fact, they were traitors to this country in a war that was lost.

In a way, the book acts as a background briefing on Alexanders vision for the biggest initiative in the Mellon Foundations history, a $250 million five-year plan to help rethink monuments. How do we tell the story of who we are and who we have been, in public spaces and in the built environment? she asks. Just as the work of the artist Kara Walker, who grew up in the shadow of Stone Mountain, checks its message, are there cultural responses that can undo these historical distortions? The Monuments Project will sponsor new public art fixtures and museums, finance research into how many monuments there are and what they celebrate, and help recontextualize some existing works.

It will also support the removal of some monuments, but only, Alexander notes, when communities come to us, to say, Weve done the work, and this is our idea for why we no longer want this. She points to the National Cathedral as an example. The [congregation] themselves looked up and said, Why is this here? This is what those people stand for; and this symbol in a church is an impediment to worship. And so they took out the windows and made a decision to put something else in. Mellon is helping fund the new window installation, which will include an inscription of a new poem by Alexander.

The poets ascent to the leadership of one of Americas richest philanthropies was in some ways unlikely and in others, very unsurprising. Raised in Washington, D.C, by a lawyer fatherhe was the first Black Secretary of the Armyand an academic mother, she grew up steeped in politics and social change. Her brother Mark was an advisor to the Obama presidential campaign. On the other hand, shes an artist, or as she calls it an organizer of words. She published her first book of poetry, The Venus Hottentot, when she was just 28 years old and five more since. Shes been a finalist for a Pulitzer (twice) and she read at the 44th Presidents first inauguration.

And then theres her academic careershe taught at Yale for 15 years and headed up its African American Studies department for four. An unexpected stint at the Ford Foundation while she was teaching at Columbia led to the top job at Mellon. She says she still misses the rhythms of the classroomshe has new school year energy every Septemberbut feels very mission-driven. Mellon has increased its giving to rebuild arts and cultural organizations and communities hollowed out by the pandemic and is boosting access to books and education in prisons. These are opportunities that could end tomorrow, she says. So I am trying to do it as intensely as I can as bountifully as I can as well as I can as sharply as I can, because I know its not going to be forever.

Alexander got a hard lesson on the non-forever nature of life 10 years ago, when her husband Ficre Ghebreyesus, an Eritrean painter and chef, died suddenly while exercising. They had two pre-teenage sons. Ghebreyesus, who eschewed self-promotion to paint more, was not a well-known artist in his life, but this year his work will be featured in the Venice Biennale. A responsibility that I was left with is: What do I do with almost a thousand paintings? Alexander says. I certainly never took my eye off that ball, because I knew that his work had something profoundly beautiful to share.

Alexander tilts her computer up to show me the painting behind her desk and beams with pride. It shows a boy, not looking where hes going, head in a book, as he travels from a mostly rectilinear and geometric landscape to a riot of twisted and abstract forms, reminiscent of seas and forest floors and other worlds. Its called Mangia Libro, or Book Eater in English, which was her husbands childhood nickname. She has another painting by Ghebreyesus next to her bed. He made just a little postcard painting for me once, on a little chip of wood, she says. Its got a painting on one side. And on the back, it says, I wake up grateful, for life is a gift.

Although she no longer has time to write poetry, Alexander believes The Trayvon Generation springs from the same well. Art and history are the indelibles, she writes. They outlive flesh. They offer us a compass or a lantern with which to move through the wilderness and allow us to imagine something different and better. While Alexanders book is lyrical, its much more war cry than lullaby. I didnt want to write a book that said and the solution is read these poems and look at these works of art and read this history and you will have the answers and you will feel better and we will get it done, she says. It starts with the question: why are we still trying to figure out this race thing?
iStock

Drying laundry using modern tumbling machines has been tied to the release of potentially harmful microfibers, a new study finds.

Tumble drying a load of laundry releases almost the same quantity of potentially harmful microfibers into the air as are flushed down the drain during a washing-machine load, according to a study in PLOS One.

Previous reports have explored how microfibers released by wash cycles  thousands of tons each year  could pose a threat to aquatic ecosystems. But this latest study warned that the emission of these tiny fragments into the air by vented tumble dryers could also endanger human health.

While the health impacts of microfiber pollution on humans are still emerging, microfibers can often contain toxic chemicals that are intentionally added to textiles during manufacturing, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

But the use of fabric conditioners and dryer sheets  particularly together  can significantly decrease the release of these fibers, according to the study. Lint filters that have smaller pores are also able to trap larger masses, reducing the number of microfibers released into the air.

While many microfibers can be captured in lint filters during drying, if the pore size is too large, a significant amount will be released into the air, comparable to the amount released down the drain in washing, Kelly Sheridan, an expert in textile fibers at Northumbria University, said in a statement.



Welcome to Equilibrium, a newsletter that tracks the growing global battle over the future of sustainability. Were Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin. Send us tips and feedback. A friend forward this newsletter to you? Subscribe here.

Today well turn to Europe to see which EU countries rely most on Russian gas. Then well look at a study that spotlights how a rise in popularity of e-scooters may be leading to more rider injuries in Los Angeles.





The countries most dependent on Russian gas

The European Union is struggling to wean itself from Russian natural gas supplies due to the deep-seated dependence of so many member states on this irreplaceable resource from Moscow.

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Some countries are trying to fast-track their clean energy transition plans or seek out alternative suppliers, but experts agree that for the bloc as a whole, a complete abandonment of Russian gas is not a probable reality. One country, Hungary, is even looking to strengthen the relationship with its gas provider.

Among EU nations, there are wide gaps between which countries import the most Russian gas in quantity and which are most dependent on the Russian gas they import  and for varying reasons. Equilibrium decided to take a look at both groups.

These are the EUs biggest importers of Russian gas in 2021, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA).

Germany: 1.70 trillion cubic feet

Italy: 0.92 trillion cubic feet

France: 0.62 trillion cubic feet

Poland: 0.37 trillion cubic feet

These are the EUs biggest importers of Russian gas in 2020, measured by overall percentage of Russian gas exports, per the EIA.

Germany: 16 percent

Italy: 12 percent

France: 8 percent

Netherlands: 5 percent

Austria: 5 percent

Poland: 4 percent

Hungary: 3 percent

As the engines of the continents overall economy, Germany, Italy and France are the biggest EU buyers of Russian gas, which they not only use to generate electricity and heat, but also to power their manufacturing industries.



For this reason, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner argued on Monday that a full-scale energy embargo would cause more pain to Germany than it would to Russia. And on Tuesday, the EU included a ban on Russian coal in a fresh round of sanctions, but shied away from natural gas and oil thus far.



DEPENDENCE IS DIFFERENT FROM QUANTITY

The countries that are the most reliant on Russian gas, however, varied significantly from those that were importing the biggest quantities or highest percentages of the resource over the past few years.

These are the top-10 most reliant countries, according to the European Commissions Eurostat site:

The Hill, Madeline Monroe/Flourish chart

Of particular interest is Hungary, the nation with the greatest individual reliance on Russian gas. The countrys newly reelected leader, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has been swerving between his EU colleagues and his longstanding relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Despite having supported EU sanctions against Russia, Hungary went against the bloc on Wednesday, when Orban declared that the country would pay for shipments of gas in rubles if Russia asks it to, in response to a question from Reuters.

Hungary agrees to pay for gas in rubles: This statement was in response to Moscows recent demands that foreign buyers pay for Russian gas in rubles.

The EU objected to these orders, leading a European Commission spokesperson to tell Reuters on Friday that companies with euro or dollar contracts should not accede to Russian demands.

Not our war: Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto echoed Orbans sentiments on Wednesday, stressing that the country would be prioritizing the security of the Hungarian people, in a Facebook post translated by the governments international communications office.

This is not our war, so we want to stay out of it and we will stay out of it, Szijjarto wrote. So we will not deliver weapons and we will not vote for energy sanctions.

To read the full story, please click here.

Study underscores injury risks from e-scooters

The injury rate for electric scooters riders in Los Angeles exceeded the national injury rates for motorcyclists, bicyclists and car passengers, a new study has found.

About 115 injuries per million e-scooter riders occurred in one section of LA over the course of six years, in contrast to the national injury rate for motorcyclists of 104 injuries per million trips, according to the study, published in PLOS One.

A startling jump in injuries: There are millions of riders now using these scooters, so its more important than ever to understand their impact on public health, Joann Elmore, senior author and a professor at the University of California Los Angeless David Geffen School of Medicine, said in a statement.

The finding that rates of injuries from e-scooters are similar to rates for motorcycle injuries is startling, she added.

More riders, more injuries: Elmore and her colleagues found the data particularly alarming because the rising popularity of e-scooters means that the associated risk is only likely to grow.

Shareable e-scooters  rented on-demand via smartphone  could soon account for one in 10 trips shorter than 5 miles, the authors explained, citing a 2019 McKinsey report.

The authors looked at 1,354 injured patients who were treated at 180 UCLA outpatient clinics and at UCLA Health emergency departments and urgent care centers from January 2014 through May 2020.

Sharing programs made a difference: The launch of shareable e-scooters, which occurred in 2018, showed a dramatic shift in the number of injuries tied to scooters.

Prior to 2018, there were at most 13 e-scooter injuries each year. Zoom ahead to 2019, and that figure rose to 672.



HARNESSING E-SCOOTER DATA

The study published Wednesday found e-scooter riders suffered injuries but so too did pedestrians, whether hit by e-scooters and or tripping over parked devices.

The authors identified 533 patients who sustained injuries to more than one part of their body, 72 who were admitted to the hospital, 21 who were sent to critical care and two who died from their wounds.

In addition, about a third of victims required substantial follow-up visits and clinical resources  meaning that the impact of novel e-scooter technology may have been underestimated, the authors wrote.

Limitations mean injuries might be higher: The authors acknowledged that they were only able to capture data from UCLA Health facilities and did not include people under treatment at other clinics.

But this restriction, they explained, indicated that injury numbers could really be higher.

E-scooter injuries may be less severe and less fatal than motorcycle injuries, but we still think our e-scooter injury rate is an underestimate, first author Kimon Ioannides of UCLAs National Clinician Scholars Program said in a statement.

To read the full story, please click here.

Water Wednesday

Greenhouse gas emissions drive sea-level rise, ships spark suspicion in foreign seas and developers defy drought in Arizona.

Researchers identify new link between greenhouse gases and sea-level rise

Greenhouse gas emissions are helping melt the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, by driving warm water currents beneath the ice and causing sea-level rise, a new study has found. But the study gave the authors some hope  as it shows that sea-level rise is not out of our control, Kaitlin Naughten of the British Antarctic Survey said in a statement.

Chinese vessels exploit developing nations through illegal fishing, rights abuses: report

Chinas state subsidies have enabled its distant-water fleet  vessels within the 200-mile exclusive economic zone of another country  to exploit the waters of developing nations through illegal fishing, human rises abuses of migrant crews and damage to key marine ecosystems, a new report from the Environmental Justice Foundation has found.

Developers inundate Arizona with homes despite Western drought

Some two dozen developments are in the works around Phoenix as the West continues to endure one of its worst droughts in history, CNBC reported. Douglas Ranch is slated to have more than 100,000 homes  which the developer said will have low flow fixtures, drip irrigation, water reuse and desert landscaping, according to CNBC.

Please visit The Hills Sustainability section online for the web version of this newsletter and more stories. Well see you on Thursday.



VIEW FULL VERSION HERE.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Thousands of those who fled Tigray went over the border to camps in Sudan

Tigrayans are being targeted in a campaign of ethnic cleansing in part of Ethiopia's conflict-hit northern Tigray region, a joint investigation has found.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) accuse officials and security forces from neighbouring Amhara of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in western Tigray - allegations dismissed by Amhara's regional government.

A 23-year-old Tigrayan trader told investigators how he was beaten up and left for dead in Rawyan by a patrol of Amhara Special Forces, who said: "We will erase you from this land. This land is ours. This is the last time a Tigrayan will live in the area."

The western part of Tigray has been largely inaccessible to journalists and aid agencies since the war in Tigray erupted in November 2020 - and all lines of communication have been blocked.

It is an area where land and boundary disputes between neighbouring regions and ethnic groups have long caused tensions and resentments.

The conflict - which followed a fallout between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government and Tigray's dominant political party - has provided an opportunity to settle old scores.

After the war began, Amhara's forces, along with their allies in the Ethiopian army, quickly moved in, took control and a new administration was set up in western Tigray.

The 207-page report, covering events between November 2020 and December 2021, is based on interviews with 423 people, mainly survivors of alleged abuses, and satellite images.

Amnesty and HRW say the evidence collected over a year shows that western Tigray has been the site of some of the worst atrocities committed during the 16-month war - and has been largely ignored.

In the first days of the offensive, one of the first large-scale massacres was in Mai Kadra on 9 November. It involved both sides and left around 229 of the town's residents - both Amhara and Tigrayan - dead.

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Afterwards the report says Tigrayans were targeted in revenge attacks by Amhara security forces, their property was pillaged and occupied.

At this time Jamila told how some Amhara militiamen came into her hair salon in the town of Dansha early one morning as she was working. The 27-year-old was raped in front of her children, aged seven and two: "They said: 'You Tigrayans should disappear from the land west of Tekeze.'"

This refers to the River Tekeze, which splits the western zone of Tigray from the rest of the region.

Once in control of western Tigray, interviewees said the new authorities banned the speaking of Tigrinya and put in place policies to push Tigrayans out, distributing leaflets with a 24-hour or 72-hour ultimatum to leave or be killed.

Three survivors told investigators about the massacre of several dozen Tigrayan men near the Tekeze River Bridge on 17 January 2021 - an incident that prompted many people to flee.

The Tekeze River is on Ethiopia's border with Sudan and Ertirea and also flows through Tigray

Militias rounded up Tigrayan men in the town of Adi Goshu and took about 60 of them to the Tekeze River where they were lined up in rows and shot.

Mesfin said: "They shot all of us, me included. I was shot in my right shoulder and right hand. Bodies were falling one after the other.

"I woke up at around 4am... I saw so many dead bodies around me," the 57-year-old said.

"Some cow herders found me when I entered the forest. They took me to the people hiding in the forest. They treated me there, until I recovered... I lost my son and son-in-law that day."

The report also details how Tigrayan livestock, crops and homes were targeted and how security forces have tortured and deprived people of food.

"This campaign of ethnic cleansing was conducted through a series of human rights abuses, including mass detention and torture, sexual violence, extrajudicial killings, denial of humanitarian aid and forced expulsion of Tigrayans," Amnesty researcher Fisseha Tekle told the BBC.

The two rights groups say that hundreds of Tigrayans remain unlawfully detained and have called for their immediate release.

They also want militias to be disarmed, officials linked to the abuses suspended and have called for an African Union-led international peacekeeping force to be deployed to western Tigray.

The conflict has forced millions of people to flee their homes - and left hundreds of thousands on the brink of famine.

The war is continuing - though a humanitarian truce was declared less than two weeks ago that has seen several lorries of food make it to the capital of Tigray for the first time in months.

However, Amnesty says the western Tigray area is still not getting the help it needs.

During the conflict both sides have been accused of atrocities.

In particular, Ethiopian and Eritrean forces were accused of carrying out massacres in Tigray's holy city of Aksum and using widespread sexual violence, while Tigrayan forces face accusations of war crimes when they invaded Amhara last year.

Map

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European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed new sanctions against Russia. Photo by Thierry Monasse/Getty Images

The European Union is proposing a ban on Russian coal imports.

The EU made its announcement amid mounting reports of Russian atrocities in the Ukraine war.

European Commission President Ursula von de Leyen did not mention natural gas.

The European Union is proposing a ban on Russian coal in its fifth round of sanctions against the country, and considering restrictions against its oil imports  but the trade bloc notably left natural gas out of the conversation.

Von de Leyen's announcement came amid reports of Russian atrocities in Ukraine. Over the weekend, Ukraine accused Russian forces of killing 300 civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha.

"Russia is waging a cruel and ruthless war, not only against Ukraine's brave troops, but also against its civilian population," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Thursday said in a statement. "It is important to sustain utmost pressure on Putin and the Russian government at this critical point."

An EU import ban on Russian coal would cost the country 4 billion euros ($4.4 billion) a year, said von der Leyen. Russia was the world's third-largest exporter of coal in 2020, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The EU is also working on sanctions against Russian oil imports, said von der Leyen. She did not mention natural gas.

The reason the EU commission proposed banning Russian coal, rather than oil or gas, "is likely because it is the easiest to be replaced," Simone Tagliapietra, a senior fellow at Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, told the Washington Post.

The EU imported about half of its coal from Russia in 2020, according to Eurostat, the EU's statistics office. However, Europe has been moving away from coal to the cleaner natural gas for electricity generation. According to Eurostat, nuclear energy and solid fossil fuels  such as coal  accounted for 13% of the EU's energy mix in 2019, while natural gas accounted for 22% of the mix. Petroleum products, including crude oil, accounted for 36% of the energy mix.

European coal prices have gained on news of the potential sanctions, with regional benchmark Rotterdam coal futures closing 11% higher on Tuesday.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has played a positive role in the prevention and control of COVID-19, and TCM treatment will continue to be utilized at temporary hospitals, the Shanghai municipal government said at a press conference on Tuesday.

The utilization rate of TCM for COVID-19 cases in Shanghai has remained above 98 percent, according to Fang Min, president of the city's Shuguang Hospital. Fang said that preliminary clinical data shows that TCM has a unique advantage in accelerating the discharge rate and blocking progression.

Shanghai has been sending multiple TCM medical teams to designated hospitals and quarantine sites since the beginning of the latest resurgence.

A medical team from the Yueyang Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine has been receiving patients at the Shanghai New International Expo Center, the largest temporary treatment center in Shanghai, since April 2.

The team is composed of members from various departments, including respiratory medicine, cardiovascular medicine, neurology, acupuncture and moxibustion, and massage and rehabilitation medicine characterized by non-drug therapy.

According to the latest WHO Expert Meeting on the Evaluation of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the Treatment of COVID-19, promising data suggests that TCM is beneficial in reducing the risk of progression from mild-to-moderate cases of COVID-19 to severe cases.

As of Tuesday, more than 21 million preventive TCM medicines have been distributed to Shanghai residents.
Apr. 6The Biden administration is designating a giant swath of waters off Alaska's Bering Sea and Arctic coasts as critical habitat for ringed seals and bearded seals.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced last week that the area would encompass waters extending from St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea to the edge of Canadian waters in the Arctic.

The snow- and ice-dependent seals were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 2012, but the listings faced court challenges, delaying the designation of critical habitat.

The Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation group, filed a lawsuit against the agency in 2019 for not completing the designation in time, leading to a settlement with a commitment by the agency to determine critical habitat in April this year.

Alaska's Republican U.S. senators decried the move. The area covers more than 260,000 square miles, about the size of Texas, said Sen. Lisa Murkowski in a prepared statement Monday.

[U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to visit Alaska this month]

"It is an abuse of power, inappropriately leveraging the Endangered Species Act," Murkowski said in the statement. "The domino effect this could have on fisheries, shipping, Arctic infrastructure, responsible resource development, and more  is quite serious for Alaska and all who live, work, and raise families here."

"NOAA's designation of critical habitat for both species allows these crushing federal regulatory burdens to take effect across broad swaths of the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas, further locking up our lands, waters and resources," Sen. Dan Sullivan said in the statement.

The agency acknowledges that the proposed designation would likely result in restrictions on oil and gas activities, marine transportation and other industries, the statement from the senators said.

Reduced sea ice is threatening the seals, which rely on the snow and ice for protection from predators and the elements, the Center for Biological Diversity said.

"This is fantastic news for these ice-dependent seals," said Emily Jeffers, an attorney with the conservation group, in a statement. "We can't save them without protecting the places they live."

The critical habitat designation will not restrict subsistence activities by Alaska Native communities, according to NOAA.
Americans will have another five-month reprieve from federal student loan payments, President Joe Biden announced Wednesday.

This is the sixth time that the government has paused payments on federally held student loans since the coronavirus pandemic began. After a two-year break, borrowers were expecting to have to start repayment on May 1, but payments will now be frozen through at least Aug. 31. Biden said he made the decision to extend the pause due to the pandemic and the still-recovering economy.

Today, my Administration is extending the pause on federal student loan repayments through August 31st, 2022. 02:02 PM - 06 Apr 2022

Bidens decision means that student loan payments are now set to resume on Sept. 1, just two months before the midterm elections. Nearly 100 Democrats had sent Biden a letter in late March asking him to freeze payments through at least the end of the year.

The administration also said Wednesday that borrowers who have defaulted on student loans that are currently paused would have that default status removed from their credit history to give them a fresh start when they reenter repayment. That move will prevent borrowers who were in default from facing further wage garnishment or other collections when loan payments resume, an Education Department spokesperson confirmed.

Biden did not take any broader steps to cancel student debt, despite pleas from members of his own party and his own campaign promise to cancel at least $10,000 in federal student debt per borrower. Ahead of Wednesdays announcement, congressional Democrats from progressives like Rep. Pramila Jayapal and Sen. Elizabeth Warren to committee chair Sen. Bob Menendez and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer were all publicly calling on Biden to cancel student debt.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized Bidens decision to extend the freeze again rather than canceling student debt. I think some folks read these extensions as savvy politics, but I dont think those folks understand the panic and disorder it causes people to get so close to these deadlines just to extend the uncertainty, she tweeted Tuesday.

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A coalition of eight other leading Democrats on the issue, including Warren, Schumer, and Jayapal commended Bidens move in their own joint statement, calling the extension welcome. But, they added, that the new September deadline underscores the importance of swift executive action on meaningful student debt cancellation.

Asked in March about Democratic calls for Biden to cancel student debt, a White House spokesperson highlighted the presidents past student loan repayment freezes. The President supports Congress providing $10,000 in debt relief. And he continues to look into what debt relief actions can be taken administratively, the spokesperson said. But all borrowers should do their part: take full advantage of the Department of Educations resources, consider income-based repayment plans to lower payments or public service loan forgiveness, and get vaccinated and boosted.

While Biden has repeatedly put the onus on Congress to pass legislation to cancel $10,000 in student debt per borrower, his administration already canceled more than $17 billion in student loans on its own, according to the Department of Education, including for borrowers who were misled by for-profit colleges. Last month, Bidens administration announced that its earlier changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program would result in about 100,000 borrowers having their loans canceled, bringing the total number of borrowers whose loans were forgiven under Biden to 700,000.

Student loan debt in the US totals nearly $1.8 trillion, the vast majority of which is federal. As the cost of college has skyrocketed in the last four decades, wages for young people have not kept up. Nearly 44 million people have federal student debt, according to the Education Data Initiative, and the burden of federal debt lies disproportionately on Black Americans  they are more likely to get federal loans and Black graduates owe an average of $25,000 more in student debt than white graduates.

While many Democrats support some form of student loan cancellation, Congress hasnt made any significant moves on the issue since Biden took office. The Senate is divided evenly by party, and Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema oppose changing Senate rules that would allow their party to pass major legislation with a simple majority.

Thats why Schumer and other Democrats have pushed Biden to go on his own.

Republicans initially backed freezing federal student loan payments at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, but the party has opposed Bidens latest extensions. Last summer, the top Republicans on the House and Senate Education Committees wrote a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona saying that as more Americans got vaccinated another extension of the freeze would be unnecessary and too costly for taxpayers.
Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck LLP seized the No. 1 spot among Washington lobbying firms last year, completing a meteoric rise for the Denver-based company that employed just a dozen lobbyists at the start of the century.

The firms chairman, Norm Brownstein, says his name is only listed first because he and his closest childhood friends drew straws. It was those friends, Steve Farber and Jack Hyatt, who helped Brownstein overcome tragedy after he lost his mother at age 12 and moved into a foster home shortly after.

He vividly remembers walking to his Denver home after school with Farber and Hyatt only to find that another family was living in it.

I went to unlock my door and a stranger came out and said, You dont live here anymore. We closed on this house today and were living here,  Brownstein recalled in a recent interview.

Farber convinced his parents to let Brownstein sleep on a mattress in their basement. He stayed there for several weeks until he located his father, who had sold the house, and later went into foster care.

Brownsteins life turned around when a Denver foster family  a 24- and 25-year-old couple who already had three young kids of their own  took him under their wing. He lived with them from age 14 all the way until he got his law degree from the University of Colorado.

The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was going to this foster family, because I had kind of lost my way, Brownstein said. It was just the conversations you had at dinner, how they cared about your nutrition, how they cared about how you did in school, your future. Those were things that I wasnt focusing on.

Following brief stints at law firms, Brownstein and his childhood friends launched their own Denver firm in 1968. They focused on real estate  an area that was underserved by major firms at the time  and slowly but surely gained national recognition.

Brownstein didnt engage with Washington until the 1980s, when he centered his lobbying efforts around bolstering the U.S.-Israel relationship, a passion of his that helped him form relationships with Democrats and Republicans who would later become influential leaders.

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Brownstein was met with skepticism when he launched a D.C. office in 1995. Several of the top lobbyists at the time urged him to instead join their firms, warning that he would never find success while continuing to work from Denver.

Its unusual for any Washington lobbyist to live far from the nations capital, where K Street insiders regularly throw parties and fundraisers for prominent policymakers in an attempt to make inroads.

Brownstein nevertheless sought to build lasting relationships with lawmakers that involved hours-long conversations about key issues and everyday life. When he wasnt traveling to Washington, Brownstein would fly lawmakers and clients out to Denver and give them a tour of his office, trips that sometimes ended with Brownstein personally driving them back to the airport.

In 2003, every single senator signed a photograph of the upper chamber for Brownstein with the words our 101st senator inscribed on it.

But despite the widespread acclaim, Brownsteins firm was for years relatively tiny, with its annual lobbying revenue routinely being dwarfed by its larger competitors.

A key turning point came in 2008, when Farber raised significant corporate funds to bring the Democratic National Convention to Denver. The firm capitalized on the opportunity, hosting a 2,000-person party at the Denver Art Museum that attracted more than 30 members of Congress and holding receptions every night for potential Obama Cabinet members.

That really put us on the map, despite our size, as a heavyweight that could compete with the other firms who were deemed in Washington circles to be the top tier of Democratic politics, said Al Mottur, a shareholder at Brownstein and a Democratic fundraiser who was the firms managing partner at the time.

In the first year of the Obama administration, the firms lobbying revenue shot up by 58 percent, placing Brownstein among the top five lobbying firms for the first time.

The firms profits jumped again during the Trump administration and skyrocketed after the COVID-19 outbreak prompted companies to lobby for government aid and federal contracts to fight the pandemic.

When the pandemic broke out, Norm insisted that all of the firms lawyers and lobbyists join a call three times a week  he was able to keep us connected in a way that helped guide us through what became the most successful run in the firms history, said Marc Lampkin, the managing partner of Brownsteins Washington office and a GOP fundraiser.

The firm raked in nearly $56 million in lobbying revenue last year, the largest ever single-year haul for a lobbying firm, according to research group OpenSecrets. Brownstein now fields a roster of more than 70 registered lobbyists, including former senators, Cabinet officials and chiefs of staff to prominent lawmakers.

Brownstein estimates that over the course of his career, his firm has guided through the passage of nearly two dozen bills that were signed into law. He points to numerous corporate tax overhauls and provisions passed during the financial crisis to boost the housing industry and allow struggling corporate giants to restructure their debt.

Hes perhaps most proud of his successful pro bono lobbying effort to substantially increase funding for melanoma and prostate cancer research and helping guide tens of millions of dollars in grants to the University of Colorado and other nonprofits in the state.

Brownstein is the final remaining co-founder of the firm, after Hyatt died in 2017 and Farber passed away in 2020.

I dont see myself retiring, he said. I see myself taking more trips, more time off, but Im always going to be involved, and Im always going to be there for clients to talk to whether Im lobbying or not.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
By Jan Wolfe

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal judge on Wednesday issued the first acquittal in a criminal trial stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, saying prosecutors failed to prove their case against a New Mexico man facing misdemeanor charges.

In a case that could embolden some of the hundreds of other defendants facing minor misdemeanor charges to go to trial rather than seeking plea deals, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden accepted Matthew Martin's argument that he did not know he was breaking the law when he entered the Capitol complex.

Martin, a former U.S. government contractor from Santa Fe, asserted that police officers allowed him into the Capitol building during the Jan. 6 assault on the building by supporters of former President Donald Trump who sought to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden's 2020 presidential election victory.

Prosecutors were required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Martin knew he was entering a restricted area. McFadden, who was appointed as a judge by Trump, decided prosecutors had not met that burden.

Martin's lawyer Dan Cron said in an interview that Martin looks forward to moving on with his life.

Following the Capitol riot, Martin lost his top-secret level clearance and his job as a contractor supporting the U.S. Department of Energy's nuclear stockpile in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Martin had waived his right to a trial by jury, instead asking McFadden to determine his guilt or innocence in a proceeding known as a bench trial. This was the second such trial McFadden oversaw following one last month for another New Mexico man also facing Jan. 6 misdemeanor charges.

McFadden found that defendant, Couy Griffin, guilty of entering a restricted area protected by the Secret Service. But McFadden acquitted Griffin on a disorderly conduct charge, saying prosecutors failed to prove Griffin riled up the crowd.

Also last month, the U.S. Justice Department secured an important victory in the first Jan. 6 criminal case to culminate in a jury trial. Jurors found Guy Reffitt of Texas guilty of all five of the felony charges he faced, including bringing a gun onto the Capitol grounds and obstructing an official proceeding.

In another case, Enrique Tarrio, the former top leader of the right-wing group the Proud Boys, pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to criminal charges accusing him of conspiring ahead of the Capitol riot to block Congress from certifying Biden's 2020 election victory.

(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham and Scott Malone)
PARIS (Reuters) -French prosecutors said on Wednesday they had opened a preliminary investigation into possible money laundering and tax fraud linked to the role of private consultancy firms in the nation's politics.

The inquiry by the national financial prosecution office (PNF) follows a report by the Senate, parliament's upper house, on the growing use of private consultancies by the government.

The use of private consultants by the government of President Emmanuel Macron, who has lost momentum in opinion polls ahead of the first round of presidential elections on Sunday, has emerged as a surprise issue in the campaign.

Rivals accuse Macron's administration of lavishly spending taxpayers' money on international firms that pay little or no taxes in France.

According to a Senate report last month, ministries have more than doubled spending on outside consultants from 379 million euros ($417 million) in 2018 to 894 million euros last year.

Last week the government said it had "nothing to hide" regarding its use of consultants including U.S.-based McKinsey & Co, which has come under increased scrutiny in the country.

The Senate, which is dominated by the conservatives, has said it is launching legal action against McKinsey, alleging that a company executive gave false testimony when he told senators McKinsey was paying corporate taxes in France.

The PNF on Wednesday did not specify which firms were the target of the preliminary investigation.

McKinsey did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

The firm has previously said its French arm paid 422 million euros ($465 million) in taxes and social charges from 2011 to 2020, without specifying whether that included corporate levies.

(Reporting by Dominique Vidalon, Sudip Kar-Gupta and Tassilo Hummel, editing by Mark Heinrich)
Beijing will impose stricter coronavirus prevention and control measures on imported non-cold-chain items to avoid infection risks, a senior official said on Tuesday.

Beijing reported one new locally transmitted COVID-19 infection case between 4 pm on Monday and 4 pm on Tuesday. The patient was a close contact with a person, confirmed to be infected one day earlier, who is an employee of a clothing store that sells imported clothes in Chaoyang district.

By 4 pm on Tuesday, six employees of the clothing store had been infected. Another three confirmed cases reported on Monday were family members of an earlier confirmed case, according to Pang Xinghuo, deputy director of the Beijing Center for Disease Prevention and Control, at a news conference on Tuesday.

"Based on recently reported cases, the imported non-cold-chain items have a high infection risk," said Xu Hejian, spokesman for the Beijing municipal government. "Beijing will strengthen the measures on those items including international mail, packages and industrial components to reduce risks."

According to the new regulation, customs staff members should disinfect imported items regularly and normal imported items should be stored for at least seven days after disinfection and before being used.

The import companies are encouraged to conduct nucleic acid testing of the covers of imported packages. All the imported items will be registered with traceable information during the entire process.

As for storage, all the imported items should be sorted according to countries and regions.

Beijing's health authority reminded the public of the infection risks when purchasing items from countries with severe pandemic situations.

In recent days, some other cities, including Dalian, Liaoning province, and Changshu, Jiangsu province, reported infections related to imported clothing from South Korea.

Dalian reported on Saturday that the gene sequence of one case did not match a recent round of the epidemic in the city. That case involved a staff member at a clothing shop in Dalian.

It's possible that the person was infected by contacting contaminated imported items, health authorities in Dalian said.

Another case in Changshu was reported on Saturday, and items of clothing tested positive. The four items in that case were bought online from South Korea.

Chinese researchers have also found that a COVID-19 cluster detected in Beijing in January involving the Omicron strain was likely caused by contaminated overseas mail.

Experts have reminded the public that people should disinfect packages with 75 percent alcohol spray and tissue when fetching them and should not take the outer wrappings or boxes home.

In addition to the cluster from the clothing store, Beijing reported two transmission chains. One involved a patient who might have been infected during a train trip while returning to the city, and the other patient had flown back during the current outbreak in Beijing.

Epidemiological investigation showed that the patient who had taken the train to Beijing on Thursday had used a bathroom in the waiting hall of a station outside of Beijing that had been used by a contact of a confirmed case. The contact was later confirmed to have the virus.

Li Ang, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Health Commission, said people who return to or arrive in Beijing from outside of the city should not dine out, get together with people or go to crowded places within seven days of arriving.

"Employees should take the nucleic acid test again 48 hours before going back to work. Before that, they should work from home," Li added.

In another development, Pang added that Beijing has downgraded its last medium-risk residential community to low risk after no new confirmed cases were reported in the community in the past 14 days. The whole city has become a low-risk area.
BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called on Wednesday on Russian President Vladimir Putin to immediately end his "destructive war" in Ukraine, vowing to continue supporting the country in every way possible until the Kremlin had withdrawn its troops.

"Withdraw your troops from Ukraine and until then, we will do everything we can to continue to support Ukraine," he said in the Bundestag lower house of parliament.

Germany is delivering weapons to Ukraine from its army stores that are "rapidly available and effective," he added

"It must be our goal that Russia does not win this war," he said.

(Reporting by Thomas Escritt; Writing by Sarah Marsh; Editing by Miranda Murray)
BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany can only supply arms to Ukraine that the country's army will know how to use, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Wednesday.

"These are very old inventories that were used by the NVA (army of former Communist East Germany), which have the advantage that they can be used particularly well in Ukraine because they have experience with this equipment," Scholz told lawmakers in the Bundestag lower house of parliament.

"We have to supply equipment that can be used."

Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Germany said it would supply Strela missiles, among other arms, to Ukraine, staging a historic reversal of its policy of not sending weapons to conflict zones.

(Reporting by Thomas Escritt and Maria Sheahan; Editing by Madeline Chambers)
Memphis Police are searching for the gunman after someone shot a man at a gas station east of the airport.

The man was shot near a Valero Gas Station in the 3700 block of East Shelby Drive near Getwell Road.

FOX13 saw crime tape blocking off part of the parking lot.

According to police, the suspect drove away in a Nissan SUV.

The man was taken to Regional One in critical condition.

Officers are on the scene of a shooting in the 3700 block of E. Shelby Drive. One male shooting victim was located and xported to ROH in critical condition.



The suspect fled in a Nissan SUV. pic.twitter.com/YkfXqeA3R3  Memphis Police Dept (@MEM_PoliceDept) April 6, 2022

If you have any information about this shooting that can help police, call CrimeStoppers at 528-CASH.

Download the FOX13 Memphis app to receive alerts from breaking news in your neighborhood.

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A Vice Studios documentary series on the 2014 disappearance of Malaysian flight MH370 has been sold to History Channel in the U.S. and a raft of broadcasters in Europe.

Vice Distribution, the global distribution and licensing arm of Vice Media Group, pre-sold the three-part series, entitled MH370: The Lost Flight, into A+E Networks History, TV2 in Denmark and Viaplay across its European territories (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Poland and the pan-Baltics). The series was launched to international buyers at this weeks MipTV market in Cannes.

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MH370: The Lost Flight was originally produced for Paramount Plus in the U.K. as part of the platforms debut programming launch as well as SBS Australia.

The series tells the definitive story of the Malaysian Airlines flights disappearance through the eyes of those closest to the tragedy: the victims families. With candid testimony from those most impacted, across four continents, and filmed over 12 months, Vice Studios will chart the twists and turns of the devastating tragedy and unveil new evidence that challenges what we thought we knew.

The doc series comes as the global aviation industry grapples with the mysterious crash of a China Eastern Airlines flight in southern China on March 21 that killed all 132 on board. The plane crashed following a nosedive into a mountainside.

Bea Hegedus, global head of distribution, said: With unique access and never before heard testimony, MH370: The Lost Flight is the definitive series on this tragic event. It is one of a number of original series launching at MipTV, which includes groundbreaking investigative documentaries, gripping true crime series and premium, genre-busting programming that resonates with young audiences around the world.

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MH370: The Lost Flight is produced in association with Vice World News. It is series produced and directed by Steve Webb with Neil Grant as executive producer, alongside co-executive producer Yonni Usiskin for Vice Studios. The series was ordered by Guy Davies, VP commissioning editor for Paramount Plus U.K. The series is distributed worldwide by Vice Distribution.

Vice Distribution launched in 2020, and has a catalogue of more than 1,000 hours of Vice Media Group programming. The distribution business recently launched a FAST channel on Roku Channel and Samsung TV Plus, and has also announced partnerships with Viaplay, Discovery Plus, Pluto TV, Roku, Globo Brazil, Discovery U.S. Hispanic, All 4 and SBS Australia.

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A SAG-AFTRA sign at its headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard in L.A. (Tommaso Boddi/WireImage)

Hollywood's biggest union, representing about 160,000 actors and other performers, has reached a tentative agreement on a new contract with a group representing advertisers.

SAG-AFTRA, whose members include actors, dancers and broadcast journalists, said late Tuesday its national board would vote this weekend on a proposed television and audio commercials contract.

The union did not release details of the agreement negotiated with the Joint Policy Committee (JPC), which represents advertisers and advertising agencies in collective bargaining with unions.

The new contract is one of the biggest that the performers' union has struck since a bargaining agreement with Hollywood studios in 2020.

The previous contract between SAG-AFTRA and the JPC expired on March 31. The two sides said last month they had agreed to extend the existing 2019 commercials contracts on a day-by-day basis until new terms were agreed. Representatives for the two groups started negotiations in February.

By the end of 2021 commercials production had returned to pre-pandemic era levels, FilmLA said earlier this year. The nonprofit organization, which handles film permits for Los Angeles County, reported that the total number of shoot days for commercials in 2021 reached 5,319, up less than 1% on 2019 levels.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
PATERSON  Juan Marrero spent his first week in a Paterson classroom not understanding anything he heard.

Marrero spoke only Spanish at the time, and the classes were in English. He was 11 years old, a new immigrant from the Dominican Republic, and says he felt like an outcast.

That was almost seven years ago, and so much has changed for Marrero since then.

At 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning, Marrero  now 17 years old  was standing in front of an assembly of 150 mostly Spanish-speaking students at Patersons New Roberto Clemente school, explaining the obstacles he overcame and the successes he attained in the intervening years.

Juan Marrero, a senior at Paterson International High School, speaks to Spanish speaking students at New Roberto Clemente School in Paterson, N.J. on Tuesday April 5, 2022. Marrero immigrated to the United States when he was 11 years old and was unable to speak English. He's just been accepted to Johns Hopkins University.

A senior at Patersons International High School, Marrero wore a sweatshirt to the assembly emblazoned with the name of the prestigious college he will be attending next fall: Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The young man wanted to send a message to the students, who were mostly immigrants from the Dominican Republican.

I was in their shoes, Marrero, who wants to become a surgeon, said afterward in an interview in English.

Sham Bacchus, the principal at New Roberto Clemente, said Marreros experiences are motivational for other immigrant students, especially those enrolled in the schools Newcomers program for youngsters who recently arrived in the United States.

They need to see they have the same potential so in a few years they can be standing up there, too, Bacchus said.

Marrero spoke for almost an hour, all in Spanish, engaging the eighth graders with questions about themselves, sometimes making them laugh in recounting his experiences.

I really feel happy now, said Yhanderli Rodriguez, a 14-year-old who came from the Dominican Republic when she was 10. I realize that if he can do what he did, I can do what I want to do.

Reunited: Evas Village in Paterson reopens sit-down meals for needy for first time in two years

Schools chief: Paterson Schools Superintendent Eileen Shafer gets one-year contract extension

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Rodriguez said she would like to become a police officer. Marreros tales of his struggles as a new immigrant echoed her own experiences, she said. Those are the same things that happened to me, she said.

It was amazing to hear him, how he did all that, said one of her classmates, Carla Rodriguez, who moved to Paterson when she was 8.

The New Roberto Clemente assembly was just as important for Marrero as for the students who heard him. I feel like I should give back to the community that helped get me where I am, he said

Determined to learn English

Marrero said during Tuesdays event that after his first week in an all-English fifth grade class, he was moved to another school with a program for Spanish-speaking students. He said he was determined to learn English as soon as he came to this country, as a means to an end.

The teenager said he and his mother forced themselves to improve their English by going to restaurants where the employees didnt speak Spanish.

Success didnt come easily, even in Marrero's new school. He said he failed many tests even after enrolling in the Spanish-language program, partly because the education system in New Jersey was so different from what he was accustomed to in the Dominican Republic. The subject matter seemed more advanced, and the class sizes were much larger, sometimes making him feel lost.

Students listen to Juan Marrero, a senior at Paterson International High School, as he speaks to Spanish speaking students at New Roberto Clemente School in Paterson, N.J. on Tuesday April 5, 2022. Marrero immigrated to the United States when he was 11 years old and unable to speak English and he was just accepted to Johns Hopkins University.

Being in a new country compounded the difficulties.

You feel like an outcast, he said. You feel like you dont belong with anyone except the group that came with you.

Marrero said he thinks the shyness of the students at Tuesdays assembly was a reflection of the same cultural isolation he had endured.

The teenager recalled an inspirational visit to his school by two Hispanic seniors from Passaic County Technical Institute. They had high grade point averages and had been accepted to about 10 colleges each, he said. One of them mentioned getting rejected by Johns Hopkins, he recalled.

A few years later, Marrero continued, a guidance counselor told him Hopkins was a good school for someone who wanted to become a surgeon.

At that time, I didnt even know that it was one of the top schools in the nation, he said. I just knew that it was a place that had a lot of resources.

Joe Malinconico is editor of Paterson Press.

Email: editor@patersonpress.com

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Johns Hopkins-bound Paterson student tells immigrants to dream big
House Democrats expressed concerns on Wednesday about a looming Iran nuclear deal as efforts by the Biden administration to revive the Obama-era agreement are underway.

In a statement and a press conference, 18 lawmakers raised everything from concerns about the negotiations to outright opposition to reviving the 2015 deal, formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, that exchanged sanctions relief for limits to Irans nuclear program.

We understand that while the recent negotiations have not concluded, we feel that we cant stay quiet about the unacceptable and deeply troubling turn that these results have reportedly taken, Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) told reporters.

Former President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the agreement in 2018, arguing that it was not preventing Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, after which Iran largely stopped complying with the deal.

President Biden committed on the campaign trail to reviving the deal, and Iran has been at the negotiating table with other world powers in Vienna over the past year to come to a new agreement.

But lawmakers have been skeptical about reviving the agreement, with senators on the left and the right raising concerns last month that the Biden administration wasnt being completely transparent about the state of negotiations.

Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.), who opposed the deal in 2015, said she was again concerned by public information becoming available about the negotiations.

Any new agreement with Iran must be based on the situation that is on the ground today, not the one from seven years ago, Meng said. This means an agreement that is comprehensive and addresses the full range of threats that Iran poses to the region, including its nuclear program, ballistic missile program and its funding of terrorism.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) said in a statement that he was concerned about the U.S. lifting the foreign terrorist organization designation against Irans Revolutionary Guard Corps, which was placed on the list in 2019. He also raised concerns that the deal would allow Russia to continue doing energy business with Iran.

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Are we seriously going to let war criminal, Vladimir Putin, be the guarantor of the deal? he said. We must address the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, stand strong against terrorists, and protect American values and our allies.

Some Democrats, such as Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), said that they werent opposed to a new agreement broadly but were opposed to one that wouldnt prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

I want to make something abundantly clear. I am not opposed to an agreement, Phillips said. I am opposed to an agreement that does not absolutely, positively prevent Iran from either producing or obtaining a nuclear weapon. I believe I speak for an overwhelming majority of the United States Congress to that end.

Its unclear when a deal would be announced. Late last month, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said that Tehran and the West were closer to an agreement in Vienna than ever before.

But Robert Malley, the U.S. special envoy to Iran, later said that he wasnt confident that a deal was imminent.

I have long said that a new deal with Iran must be stronger and last longer than the previous agreement, said Rep. Kathy Manning (D-N.C.).

Any new agreement should address Irans support for terrorist groups, offer clarity about the sunset provisions and set forth a long-term strategy for preventing a nuclear-armed Iran, she continued.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
The House voted Wednesday to hold two advisers to former President Trump, Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino, in contempt of Congress for defying subpoenas from the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Lawmakers voted almost entirely along party lines, 220-203.

Reps. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), the two Republicans serving on the committee, were the only members of their party to back the resolution.

Navarro, a former trade adviser to Trump, and Scavino, Trumps deputy chief of staff for communications, both defied the committees subpoenas and refused to testify or provide documents.

The vote will refer the charges to the Justice Department, which can choose to pursue further action.

Scavino was one of the committees earliest subpoena targets, seeking an interview with an aide who spent considerable time with the president on Jan. 6 and helped promote the rally.

Navarro was subpoenaed by the committee in February after passages from his own book appeared to show he was involved in plans to delay certification of the presidential election.

Scavino and Navarro have both claimed they cannot cooperate with the committee due to executive privilege concerns. While Scavino was referenced in a letter from Trumps attorney raising that issue, the former president has not done the same for Navarro.

President Biden has said he would not claim executive privilege for either man.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Jan. 6 committee who was also the lead House Democratic prosecutor during Trumps second impeachment, said the two men have blown us off completely, and alluded to the multiple subpoenas issued to Scavino.

If 90 percent of success in life is just showing up, then 90 percent of acting in contempt of congress is not showing up by failing to respond to multiple subpoenas youve been lawfully served, he said.

The rest of contempt is not turning over documents youve been ordered to produce and acting with open disregard and scorn for the rule of law, Congress and representatives of the American people.

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The House has previously voted to hold two other former Trump advisers, former strategist Steve Bannon and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, in contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the committee.

But so far the Justice Department has only acted on one of those recommendations, with Bannon facing trial this summer in a case that could mean up to two years in jail and $200,000 in fines.

A judge ruled in a pretrial hearing Wednesday that Bannon cannot argue that he was relying on his lawyers advice in defying his congressional subpoena.

Its unclear whether the Justice Department will choose to act on the third and fourth recommendations from Congress for criminal charges. Attorney General Merrick Garland brushed aside a question from reporters on Wednesday over whether the failure to take such recommendations renders Congress ineffective in its investigations.

We will follow the facts and the law wherever they lead. We dont comment any further on investigations, he said.

Republicans defending Scavino and Navarro stressed the potential punishment either could face.

Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) noted that Scavino has children, asking colleagues how they would explain such a conviction to his sons.

Mr. Scavino has two boys. Hes a good dad, he doesnt deserve this, his boys definitely dont deserve this. So before we vote today I have got to ask could anyone here explain to those boys why their dad deserves to be behind bars for a year, Banks said.

Contempt is not enforcement; its punishment. Contempt wont get the committee any information. Only the court can do that. But they dont want to go to the judiciary. They dont want neutral arbitration. They want political punishment.

Cheney  who Republicans booted as their third-ranking leader last year for her pushback against Trumps falsehoods about the 2020 election  accused her GOP colleagues of abandoning their constitutional obligations.

Those in this chamber who continue to embrace the former president and his dangerous and destructive lies ought to take a good hard look at themselves, Cheney said.

At a moment of real danger to our republic, when the need for fidelity to our Constitution is paramount, they have abandoned their oaths in order to perform for Donald Trump. That will be their legacy, she added.

At one point in the debate, Raskin also gave an emotional defense of Cheney and Kinzinger, saying Democrats have been left to defend them as Republicans begin the utterly cannibalistic process of vilifying and castigating Republicans just because they disagree with the orthodoxy, the dogma handed down by Donald Trump.

Because if you dont go along with what Donald Trump says, if you dont act like youre a robot or a member of a religious cult, they will attack you, they will vilify you, they will denounce you. These people, Mr. Kinzinger, Ms. Cheney, are constitutional heroes, and they dont deserve your contempt. The insurrectionists and the law breakers deserve your contempt, because they are acting in contempt of the rule of law and the Constitution of the United States, Raskin said.

Despite the lack of cooperation from some prominent figures in the former presidents orbit, the committee has recently secured testimony from two of Trumps closest advisers: his eldest daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner.

According to multiple reports about Trumps actions  or lack thereof  behind the scenes on Jan. 6, Ivanka Trump was in communication with her father and top GOP officials while the Capitol was under siege by the mob of his supporters trying to stop lawmakers from ratifying the presidential election results.

One top point of inquiry for the committee has been to uncover Trumps actions on that day as GOP allies pleaded for help while the Capitol was under attack from the violent mob. Aside from a series of tweets and a video in which he told his supporters to go home and we love you, youre very special, the official public record of Trumps activities on Jan. 6 remains largely unknown.

Overall, the committee has interviewed more than 800 witnesses to date.

While the committee is set to automatically sunset at the end of the year unless the majority party extends it next January, Republicans used debate on the bill to reassert their desire to end its work.

If anyone has acted like they are above the law, it is the select committee, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said on the House floor on Wednesday.

When we take back the House, it will stop.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Ronnie Barker, 72, and Beverly Barker, 69, of Indianapolis, have been missing in Nevada since March 27, 2022.

An Indianapolis couple who went missing in the Nevada desert between Las Vegas and Reno have been found, according to authorities, who said the woman was airlifted to a nearby hospital after rescue teams found the husband deceased.

Ronnie Barker, 72, and Beverly Barker, 69, were on a road trip from Albany, Oregon, to Tucson when they went missing March 27.

The couples RV was found in a remote mountain area of Esmeralda County near Silver Peak, Nevada, on Tuesday around 11:30 a.m., according to the Esmeralda County Sheriffs Office.

The RV appeared to be stuck and it took several hours for rescue teams to reach it. Authorities discovered the Kia SUV they were towing was gone, according to the sheriffs office.

Mineral County Search and Rescue teams followed the tire tracks from the Kia and located the couple about two miles away at 4 p.m. Tuesday.

Ronnie Barker, 72, and Beverly Barker, 69, were driving a 2015 Forest River Sunseeker RV with an Indiana license plate and towing a 2020 Kia Soul when they went missing.

Previous coverage: Indianapolis couple missing in Nevada desert have been found, police say. Details scarce

More news: Clothing, hair, DNA & technology: How police identified the I-65 Killer after 35 years

Authorities found Ronnie Barker had died, and airlifted Beverly Barker out of the desert to a hospital in Reno, according to the sheriffs office.

Sheriffs offices from multiple counties near Silver Peak were involved in the search using helicopters.

"It's high desert, and it's spread out all over the place, Esmeralda County Sheriff Kenneth Elgan said when asked about the difficulties of searching for the couple. We have 3,500 square miles and a population of just 1,000 people in Esmeralda County. There's a lot of wide-open spaces and a lot of area to cover.

Ronnie Barker's official cause of death has not been released as of 3 p.m. Wednesday.

Contact Jake Allen at jake.allen@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @Jake_Allen19.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Missing Indiana couple Ronnie and Beverly Barker found in Nevada
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

Tens of thousands of refugees have fled the brutal regime of Vladimir Putin as outspoken critics and quiet Russian dissenters sneak past border guards to escape the Kremlins ever stricter crackdowns.

One of those emigres, who well call Anna, arrived in Brussels just a few days after the invasion of Ukraine to seek shelter with her friend Elena, a young Russian who had moved to Belgium some years earlier.

It was a WhatsApp message from Anna that told Elena their world had just been turned upside down.

Anna, who lives in Moscow, messaged to say she was in the bank withdrawing all the money from her account. The war has started, she wrote. Elena spent the rest of the day crying, unable to believe that her country had really invaded Ukraine.

Russias Latest Atrocity Unleashed Nitric Acid Cloud That Could Blind Ukrainians

Within days Elena welcomed her friend into her apartment. As a Russian, she has no refugee rights in Europe, unlike the Ukrainians fleeing Putins horrific war.

The exact number is unknown, but thousands of Russians have left the country since the beginning of the war for fear of persecution or because they feel they can no longer live in their country. They feel suffocated.

Elena doesn't believe she will be able to return home until President Putin has gone.

Meanwhile, she helps her friend and also sees her other friends leaving Russiasome have gone to Armenia, others to Turkey and Georgia. A diaspora of Russian refugees is being formed.

Those who decide to stayeither with the intention of challenging the regime or because they have no means of leaving the countryreport a climate of fear and desperation.

Since February 24, life has changed, said Inna, a psychologist whose son, at military age, could be called up at any time to fight. Shes been having trouble sleeping or focusing on anything I try not to read the news anymore, but its impossible to close myself in the house like a snail and stop feeling and empathizing.

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Police officers detain a woman during an unsanctioned protest rally over Putin's invasion of Ukraine at the Pushkinskaya Square on Feb. 27 in Moscow. Konstantin Zavrazhin/Getty

She said that she worries her son might be drafted, but also, Inna explained, I dont not want our boys from poor villages to go like cannon fodder and become murderers.

Like many Russians, she has friends in Ukraine. One of them lost his wife and 10-year-old daughter in Mariupol.

We were brought up in Soviet times, we grew up with the phrase if only there was no war, and now I am shocked by how many of my compatriots support this war. Whenever possible, when ordinary people write to me from Ukraine, I ask for forgiveness. We are to blame for allowing this.

But theres room for hope. Inna says, with a hint of excitement, that some of my acquaintances who previously supported Putin's policy began to realize what was happening.

In St. Petersburg, Katya, an activist, said that day the war started was a day of horror, fear and tears, the first message I wrote to family and friends: Russia has invaded Ukraine, [the war] has begun. I wrote this with tears in my eyes, considering myself a fascist, that evening I went out into the street, shouting no to war' until I was hoarse.

She went out several times to protest and challenge the regime until she was arrested and interrogated by an agent of the federal security service (the dreaded FSB) and a counter-terrorism officer.

"They tortured me with brutal interrogation, tried to access my cell phone to find out what [Telegram] channels I participated in. They said I was one of the organizers of the protest, but I didn't organize anything. They said I was on their special list and threatened to sue me for spreading fake news, a crime in the country, if I opened my mouth to defend Ukraine," Katya said.

She spent 24 hours in detention without being able to even contact a lawyer and said that "it was a kind of horror.

Police block Red Square ahead of a planned unsanctioned protest against Russias invasion of Ukraine in central Moscow on Feb. 24. Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty

Via Telegram, Sophia, a camera operator from Moscow, explained to The Daily Beast that "practically everything has changed" since the war began. In addition to the price hike, almost all foreign stores have closed.

Dozens, if not hundreds of brands and companies have left Russia with no prospect of return. The biggest losers are ordinary citizens. This all sounds very apocalyptic, Sophia exclaims, also saying that it feels like you have to get used to living with a depression-like feeling.

She said she felt incredibly ashamed because my country is doing horrible things that cannot be justified. It is a terrible crime that will not be easily forgiven or forgotten.

The feeling is like if a big part of you has died, you keep doing your things in automatic mode, but you see no purpose. You wake up and find that you have no more future and at the same time you understand that you're not the one being bombarded, that there are people suffering much more at this time, she said.

And despite all the hardships Sophia opposes the war and Putin saying that he destroyed two countries, Ukraine with bombs and the Russian economy, and our future.

Hiding in an undisclosed location, opposition politician Aleksei Miniailo talks hurriedly on the phone. Nervous, he knocks over what he had on the table while frantically typing messages on his computer to friends and other activists.

Miniailo wants his name to be published as its a way to protect myself, after all Im a public person. But it is hard to know if he will have any kind of protection if he is caught by the police. A historian from Moscow State University, he joined the hunger strike organized by Lyubov Sobol, a lawyer and close aid to Alexei Navalny in 2019. In the same year, Miniailo was jailed for two months on charges of promoting protests.

Russian Families Are Disowning Each Other Over Putins War

Now, he works with a group of academics, researchers, activists, and professionals carrying out a project in which they analyze opinion polls critically.

"We survey public opinion in Russia and explain it. The raw numbers are misleading because the country is at war, because in autocracies and dictatorships polls are not really representative of public opinion," he explained.

Miniailos day-to-day life is one of trying to stop the war. From his hiding place he talks to people, tries to persuade them to act and stop the war before Russians face even more dire consequences.

An inscription reading No to war is seen on an advertisement board as riot police officers stand guard nearby during a protest against Russias invasion of Ukraine in central St. Petersburg on March 2. Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty

"Putin thought he was going to win this war in Ukraine in a few days, but he miscalculated. What I see now is more like the war in Chechnya in 1994," Miniailo said.

To him, the main problem is that Ukraine is the closest country to Russia, it's a brotherly people. 20 percent of Russians have relatives in Ukraine. And if we can't dialogue with Ukraine, but prefer to launch rockets, how can we find common ground with any other country?

This is why he is dedicated to digging deeper into the opinion polls. He believes that people are terrified, they cannot understand what is happening.

In Reutov, in the outskirts of Moscow, journalist and human rights activist Evgeny Kurakin also asked for his name to be published. I have been persecuted for my professional activities for 11 years, he said with a certain indifference, adding that he has already been recognized as a political prisoner by the human rights organization Memorialan organization that has been forced to shut down in one of Putins latest crackdowns.

After being thrown out of the Council of Europe, we have been deprived of the right to appeal the decisions of Russian courts: The prospects in Russia have become completely bleak, Kurakin said.

Whispers are heard everywhere. Even if they cannot raise their voices, society discusses the events and is not satisfied. The consequences are very heavy, and the propaganda is so blatant that people begin to distrust the authorities.

I can speak based on my friend, I provide them with alternative information, and today they are already starting to question and ask the right questions. All is not lost, he says with undisguised joy.

Like Sophia, he views the situation with some pessimism for the immediate future but believes that the regime has hastened its demise, and that it will not be sustained forever.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Sen. Mark Steffen, R-Hutchinson.

Ivermectin-supporting anesthesiologist and politician Sen. Mark Steffen told health care providers last week that he considers early treatment with off-label drugs to be the "standard of care" for COVID-19.

"The standard of care is early treatment with FDA-approved medications regardless of their labelled uses," Steffen wrote in a March 31 letter addressed to health care providers on his official Senate office letterhead. "Delays in institution of these treatments are no longer acceptable.

"The Healthcare Provider has a legal duty to ensure facilitation of treatment as expeditiously as possible. Delayed treatment worsens outcomes."

Steffen has promoted ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as COVID-19 wonder drugs, despite mounting evidence to the contrary from reputable studies. He said in a Facebook post that he sent the letter to "over 250 Kansas hospitals, clinics, and government agencies."

He has admitted to prescribing ivermectin and to being under investigation by the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts in connection to his public comments on COVID-19. Steffen has been accused of advocating for legislation that could personally benefit him because a provision of an off-label drug bill would effectively preempt health board investigations related to the pandemic.

"There is no reason to think that prescribing problems will arise from pharmacist or Board of Healing Arts interference," Steffen wrote. "In consultation with the legal community, indications are that 'failure to treat' will now be considered 'wonton disregard.' As such, any perceived statutory immunity will be rendered invalid."

More: Kansas bill would force pharmacists to fill ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine as off-label COVID treatment

Steffen suggesting that ivermectin should be the standard of care for COVID-19 is notable because physicians and prescribers are bound by professional standards of care.

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Before issuing any discipline, the board of healing arts would have to show the standard of care was violated. A legal opinion on ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine from Attorney General Derek Schmidt, a Republican, declined to weigh in on whether prescribing the drugs would violated the standard of care.

The letter was lauded by Peter McCullough, a physician who has been accused of spreading misinformation on the pandemic to his large national following. McCullough, who spoke at Steffen's so-called early treatment symposium, called the Kansas politician an "American hero" who is "demonstrating leadership and progress."

More: Doctor fired for spreading COVID misinformation finds supportive crowd in Bartlesville

Evidence does not support ivermectin, HCQ

Despite Steffen's claims, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment and other health authorities have warned against using the drugs for COVID-19. Medical and public health experts say evidence shows no benefit from ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine.

Ivermectin is an anti-parasitic drug that is commonly used in livestock and is readily available in veterinary form. It is also approved for human use. Hydroxychloroquine, sometimes abbreviated as HCQ, is a malaria drug that is also used to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.

Steffen has previously claimed that ivermectin reduces hospitalizations and death by 85%.

More: Fact check: Ivermectin is not a proven treatment for COVID-19

"Ivermectin, you have to understand that those studies that did show benefit, most of those studies have been retracted for falsifying data," infectious disease specialist Dana Hawkinson of The University of Kansas Health System has previously said. "Those authors have been punished for that.

"When you actually do the review and the analysis of the other articles and research articles that don't have those biases, such as, again, falsifying data, misrepresenting data, there actually shows no benefit for ivermectin. And so I think it is important to understand that, you know, we try to continue to promote the FDA, CDC, World Health Organization and NIH recommended therapeutics because they have those trials. They show benefit."

Buying veterinary ivermectin formulations intended for horses, cattle and other animals "is not a very smart thing to do," Juergen Richt, the director of the Center of Excellence for Emerging and Zoonotic Animal Diseases at Kansas State University, previously said.

"The best way to protect yourself is using a safe and efficacious vaccine," Richt said. "I think using instead a drug with no real, clearly shown efficacy in COVID-19 patients  and on top could be poisonous, toxic to you  doesn't make any sense."

More: Kansas bill would force pharmacists to fill ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine as off-label COVID treatment

Public health bills stalled

Steffen and fellow Republican legislators have pursued several bills rewriting the state's longstanding public health laws in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic. The package stalled in the Legislature last week and saw little progress before lawmakers went home for a three-week spring break.

His off-label drug bill HB 2280, which also targets childhood wellness vaccine mandates, has been the most notable of the group. It passed the Senate last month, but with too few votes to override a Gov. Laura Kelly veto. Before it could reach the governor, it would have to pass the House, which has been reluctant to broach the topic and never voted on the bill.

More: Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine off-label prescription bill passes Kansas Senate in late-night vote

During a Friday evening health conference committee, House Republican negotiators told their Senate GOP counterparts that they were not willing to move forward with the current language. Nevertheless, Steffen's letter, which was dated Thursday, noted the advancement of HB 2280.

The bill would force pharmacists to fill off-label prescription for any FDA-approved drug to treat COVID-19, as long as it isn't a controlled substance. Opponents have said the legislation's language could lead to doctors writing prescriptions for abortion medication, claim they are for COVID-19, and pharmacists would have to fill them.

Opponents contend that the bill is unnecessary because doctors can already prescribe the off-label drugs. Proponents counter that it is hard to find pharmacists willing to fill the prescriptions.

Some Republican politicians have sought protections for doctors who prescribe the drugs. Existing pandemic statutes already grant civil immunity to doctors and pharmacists involved in off-label prescriptions. But supporters of the drugs have demanded more, seeking to preempt investigations by the health board.

Jason Tidd is a statehouse reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached by email at jtidd@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @Jason_Tidd.

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Kansas Sen. Mark Steffen sends pro-ivermectin letter to hospitals
MarketWatch

Comps and advice from your real estate agent and their relationship with the sellers agent can help you determine how much youll need to go over asking  though sometimes, its truly just instinctual. But remember, anything you offer over the appraised value of the home, and your loan amount, will be your responsibility to cover, says Realtor.com home and lifestyle expert Lexie Holbert. Increase your earnest money (the deposit when you make an offer) from the standard 1% to 10-20% to show the seller youre serious, says Holbert.
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol has obtained 101 emails from a former Trump lawyer as part of its ongoing probe into the attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

The emails from attorney John Eastman date from between Jan. 4 and Jan. 7, 2021, the days abutting the deadly insurrection.

Former Trump attorney John Eastman was ordered to turn over dozens of emails to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. (Photo: Andy Cross/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

Former Trump attorney John Eastman was ordered to turn over dozens of emails to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. (Photo: Andy Cross/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

Eastman had attempted to shield the missives from lawmakers, claiming they were protected under attorney-client privilege. The House panel argued that there was an exception for any ongoing or future crimes and a judge agreed.

Based on the evidence, the Court finds it more likely than not that President [Donald] Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021, U.S. District Court Judge David Carter wrote last month.

Carter went on to say he believed the pair launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history.

ALERT: House Select Jan 6 Committee has received the John Eastman records =====> pic.twitter.com/7ZZzQgK3l0  Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) April 5, 2022

The emails allegedly include discussions between Eastman, his associates and Trump aides about the methods they could have used to block the certification of the 2020 election, part of Trumps efforts to remain in power. In some emails, Eastman and others discussed using court cases as a political argument to block the Congressional certification of the vote, CNN reported.

In another email, they spoke about using state court rulings to justify proposals that would have seen then-Vice President Mike Pence enacting such plans.

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This may have been the first time members of President Trumps team transformed a legal interpretation of the Electoral Count Act into a day-by-day plan of action, Carter wrote when he ruled to release the emails.

This is not a criminal prosecution; this is not even a civil liability suit, he added. At most, this case is a warning about the dangers of legal theories gone wrong, the powerful abusing public platforms and desperation to win at all costs.

Although neither Trump nor Eastman have been charged with any crimes, Eastman has become a significant figure linked to the select committees ongoing probe.

Douglas Letter, the general counsel to the House of Representatives, said Eastman appeared to be a central player in the development of a legal strategy to justify a coup.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

Related...
John Travolta surprised staff at Erpingham House in Norwich when he showed up for a vegan meal. (SWNS)

Hollywood stars don't often show up at vegan restaurants in Norwich, so it's no surprise that staff at Erpingham House thought a booking from John Travolta was an April Fool's Day trick.

The restaurant played host to Travolta on Sunday after a booking was made in his name for a party of six, celebrating his daughter Ella's 22nd birthday.

Read more: John Travolta marks release of late wife Kelly Preston's final movie

Erpingham House manager Anna Burnard, 34, said: "Someone booked the table on his behalf. He said: 'Just to make you aware it's for John Travolta'. We did think it was a prank for a minute."

She added that the Grease star spent "a good few hours" in the restaurant and ordered items including a vegan cheeseburger, kale crisps and creamy mushroom pasta.

Watch: John Travolta adopts dog after its Oscars appearance

Burnard added: "We offered them a private room so he could have some privacy and they appreciated that.

"All the staff were excited. They all got to meet him on the day. He even went into the kitchen to thank the chef. He was a delight. They were a really lovely group."

Read more: John Travolta remembers playing Prince Charming to Diana

The 68-year-old star is currently in the UK shooting a 1950s-set short film called The Shepherd, telling the story of an RAF pilot and based on a Frederick Forsyth novella.

As well as his visit to Erpingham House, Travolta was spotted out and about in numerous Norfolk locations posing for selfies with fans  including at a Morrisons supermarket.

John Travolta posed with a Morrisons security guard during his visit to Norfolk. (SWNS)

As well as making a movie about a pilot, Travolta is an accomplished flyer off-screen and recently earned his licence to fly a Boeing 737.

He already had licenses to get into the cockpit of 707 and 747 aircraft, having begun taking lessons in the air when he was just 15 years old.

Read more: John Travolta dances with daughter in Superbowl ad

Travolta made a cameo appearance at the Oscars, joining Samuel L Jackson and Uma Thurman on stage for a Pulp Fiction reunion.

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His most recent film role was in The Fanatic as an autistic fan who becomes dangerously obsessed with his favourite actor, played by Devon Sawa.

Watch: John Travolta joins Pulp Fiction reunion at the Oscars
WASHINGTON  A federal defense contractor with a top-secret security clearance who admitted he entered the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack was found not guilty at trial on Wednesday.

Matthew Martin was acquitted by U.S. District Court Judge Trevor N. McFadden after a two-day bench trial. Martin chose to go to trial in the misdemeanor case before a judge rather than go before a D.C. jury. Martin was the first Jan. 6 defendant to be fully acquitted at trial, and told reporters after the not guilty finding that he hoped to get his job back.

Martin, who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, held a security clearance and took personal leave from his job on Jan. 6. He was arrested in April 2021 and faced charges of entering and remaining in a restricted building; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building; violent entry and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building; and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building.

McFadden, a 2017 Trump appointee and a former police officer in Fairfax County, Virginia, previously convicted Couy Griffin of the group Cowboys for Trump at a bench trial for illegally entering the grounds of the Capitol, but acquitted him on a separate charge. Last month, a jury convicted Guy Reffitt of felony charges in the first Jan. 6 trial.

Related video: Ivanka Trump testifies before Jan. 6 committee

Martin testified at his bench trial, telling McFadden that he didnt see everything that was happening around him during the Capitol attack, even though the footage he filmed (which was played by the government) shows broken windows and an alarm blaring when he entered the Capitol on the east side after rioters busted open the doors leading to the rotunda.

McFadden said that the first charge of entering and remaining in a restricted building was a close call, but said there was reasonable doubt as to whether Martin knew he was entering a restricted building (though he said it was more likely than not that Martin knew he wasnt supposed to go inside).

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McFadden said it was "not unreasonable" for Martin to assume that outnumbered officers were allowing protesters to enter the Capitol. McFadden said that the government did not show evidence of Martin crossing police lines that had been broken down by the mob before Martin arrived.

McFadden said Martin's conduct was "as minimal and not serious" as he's seen in a Jan. 6 case. He said he thought Martin was "largely credible" but believed that Martin had "shaded his testimony on some points, minimizing his actions."

On cross examination on Wednesday morning, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Romano asked Martin whether he told an official at the airport that Jan. 6 was "like a big block party." Martin said he made the comment during an "awkward" conversation with an airport official about the security procedures he needed to go through at the airport, and was referring only to what happened at the Trump rally that proceeded the Capitol riot, which he said had "a festive atmosphere."

Martin tried to downplay what was happening around him when he went into the Capitol on Jan. 6, saying that he didn't specifically remember hearing an alarm blaring when he entered the building.

"I saw no violence," Martin claimed, despite filming a tussle with police inside the rotunda and another rioter trying to smash out a window. He said that he would stay away from the Capitol if he had to do Jan. 6 over again, but said he had "positive" personal experiences outside of being charged.

"I enjoyed everything else. I enjoyed the rally," Martin said. "It's hard for me to say I regret coming to Washington, D.C."

The FBI has made more than 775 arrests in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. More than 2,500 individuals are believed to have entered the Capitol that day, and hundreds of others assaulted officers outside the building. The FBI has hundreds of outstanding cases in the works against Capitol rioters, and the Justice Department has requested more prosecutorial resources to bring the cases to fruition.
Vegetable straws proving a hit around the world

With knowledge and experience gained from a decade working in Korea, a Hanoian man started a business producing straws made from vegetables and fruits.













The straws made from vegetables and fruits have earned a five-star certification from the One Commune  One Product (OCOP) Grading Council of Hanoi .  Photo kinhtedothi.vn



Le Van Tams product even earned a five-star review from the One Commune  One Product (OCOP) Grading Council of Hanoi, the highest possible certification.



Tam, who works with the Red River Agricultural Service Co-operative, learned about organic farming while working overseas.



During a trip with my family, I saw a lot of plastic waste, particularly plastic straws on the beach, he said.



Since then, I thought of making straws with vegetables and fruits.



Returning to Vietnam, Tam rented land to grow organic vegetables and then, use the vegetables to make straws that are not only used to drink water but also nutritious food.



Tam uses potatoes to make straws and vegetables to colour them.



The very first veggie straws that I made were very thick, not evenly rounded or the body was curved and I found it difficult to adjust, he said.



On an area of about 1,500 sq.m, Tam and other members of the co-operative developed six net houses to grow vegetables and tubers in an organic way.



Besides this main source of vegetable supply, the co-operative also cooperates with other farmers in ong Anh district and surrounding areas to purchase more vegetables for straw production.



Having knowledge of technological processes and equipment, as well as experience in producing various kinds of vermicelli and noodle soup from vegetables, Tams co-operative conducted hundreds of trials to make the straws.



In the middle of 2019, we spent more than 90 days staying at the factory, mixing materials, changing machines to find the right formula, he said, adding that they had to throw away 30 tonnes of material due to faulty testing.



To produce a standard straw, cooperative members have to go through many stages of production, each with its own requirements. The production process does not use any preservatives.



Unlike plastic straws, vegetable and fruit straws will become soft after about 30 minutes of being plugged into warm water but still retain the structure and hardness enough to be used for the next ten hours. The product only dissolves when it is continuously soaked in water after more than a day.



Each straw is used once, has a shelf life of up to 18 months from the date of manufacture, and is easily degradable, so it is not harmful to the environment.



Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Red River Agricultural Service Cooperative produced about 50,000 straws daily. The products are supplied to many restaurants, hotels, resorts, and distributed in the system of domestic and foreign supermarkets such as Korea and Germany.



When participating in the Hanois One Commune One Product (OCOP) Programme, the environmentally-friendly straws were highly evaluated and classified by the City People's Committee.



It is also one of the first 13 potential five-star OCOP products in Hanoi, currently waiting for evaluation and star rating by the Central OCOP Council.



According to Nguyen Van Chi, Deputy Chief of the Standing Office of the Hanoi New Rural Construction Coordination Office, these straws are one of the city's most unique OCOP products.



The city encourages the development of products from natural and environmentally friendly materials, Chi said.



Developing green, safe and sustainable products is also the orientation for the OCOP Programme in the future.



According to Nguyen Van Thien, head of the Economic Office of ong Anh District, businesses and cooperatives in the district were constantly trying to find and apply science, technology and high technology to production and create quality OCOP products.



On average, the value of OCOP products increases by 15- 25 per cent after investment.
It is time for a new vision for Afghanistan. The country's constant political and sectarian instability has been a product of it being little more than a launchpad for geopolitical and ideological struggles, particularly stemming from the United States, who ultimately believed that it could impose its own vision of liberal democracy in the country  one that ultimately failed in attaining either stability or prosperity.



The situation in Afghanistan has considerable implications for all those who neighbor and surround the country, leaving them to naturally have a vested interest in the stability, security, and eventual prosperity of Kabul.

If the current situation remains in Afghanistan and is unsupported, then the cycle of unrest, division, and conflict will only continue. Regional countries ought to work together and find a solution to how Afghanistan, with its 39 million people, can move forwards and be better integrated into the region around it. Afghanistan needs roads, transport infrastructure, clean water supplies, access to food supplies, hospitals, medical equipment, and every single thing many people in the developed world ultimately take for granted when living a normal life.

The people of Afghanistan deserve an opportunity to better themselves. The GDP per capita in the country in 2020 was just $500 or so a year, possibly now a lot less. The United Nations estimates that over 97% of the population lives below the international poverty line, with up to 8.7 million on the brink of famine. The world bank recently announced a suspension of up to $600 million worth of projects in protest of its policies on women and education, but this is obviously inadequate in dealing with the prolonged human suffering in the country.

With interference in Afghanistan's politics having failed, the new formula for taking the country forwards ought to cultivate stability and peace there through a policy of engagement, development, and assistance.

China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently held the third multilateral meeting on the country at the town of Tunxi in Anhui province to discuss Afghanistan's situation and its humanitarian crisis. Having visited the country for the first time the week prior, he was joined by his counterparts from Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, where they exchanged views and coordinated positions on promoting stability in Afghanistan and helping and supporting the Afghan people.

China has proposed extending the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to also incorporate that of Afghanistan. At the same time, the country offers a critical gateway from China into Central Asia and onwards to the Middle East, which could hasten its integration into the regional economy and create a "win-win" outcome for those involved. This is why it is important for the local stakeholder countries to take the initiative to support Afghanistan's future, as opposed to watching idly on as the results of decades of failure, destruction, and misery stemming from America's failed ideological and military conquests deepen further. Afghanistan needs a fresh start, and the world should work together to achieve it.

Tom Fowdy is a British political and international relations analyst and a graduate of Durham and Oxford universities. For more information please visit:

http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/TomFowdy.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.

If you would like to contribute, please contact us at opinion@china.org.cn.
The judge in a trial that concluded Monday will decide whether a Modesto boy fatally shot a food truck owner in the face last year.

Testimony took place over several months, marked by COVID-related delays, a witness changing his story and debate over whether a TikTok video showed the weapon used in the alleged murder.

The boy was 13 years old on Feb. 16, 2021, when at 8:15 p.m. he walked up to the Mexican food truck parked outside the Airport Market on Monterey Avenue, prosecutors say. They allege he immediately pulled a gun out of his jacket pocket and within seconds fired into the truck, killing 67-year-old Rafael Avila-Rodriguez.

Surveillance video captured the shooting from two angles, but the quality was poor. Judge Ruben Villalobos said in court that hed watched the videos at least 30 times and described the shooter in the video as a shadow of a person who appears to have been wearing a puffy jacket and a hat that fell to the ground as he fled the scene.

Four hours prior to the shooting, the juvenile was with friends when he was captured on a different video surveillance camera at Le Johns Market on Oregon Drive, also in the airport neighborhood.

The video showed the boy wearing a puffy gray jacket with horizontal stitching and a blue Los Angeles Dodgers hat with a white button and lettering and the sales sticker left on the brim. A hat just like that was recovered by police at the shooting scene.

Eyewitness changes story

In the video of the shooting, another person can be seen on the other side of the street. Prosecutors say that person was a 16-year-old boy who was with the juvenile defendant at Le Johns Market earlier in the day.

Detectives interviewed the 16-year-old boy a few days after the homicide, according to testimony. He initially told investigators he was not with the defendant at the time of the shooting and expressed fear he could be harmed for talking to police.

Deputy District Attorney Jon Appleby said in closing arguments that the boy nine times expressed fear of the defendant and his family. The boy said things like, I dont know, he knows a lot of people, bro, and If he gets this paper on what Im saying, bro ... Im practically a dead man.

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The 16-year-old eventually told detectives that he was at the scene of the shooting and that the defendant told him he was going to do a quick come up, meaning get some cash. He told them he didnt know the defendant had a gun.

But the 16-year-old later told a defense investigator and ultimately testified that he was not at the shooting scene. He did testify that the defendant told him earlier in the day that he planned to do a quick come up but that the two split up and he didnt see him after that.

The defendants attorney, Alonzo Gradford, said in closing arguments that it is reasonable to conclude the 16-year-old witness felt intimidated being in a small interrogation room with armed police officers. He said the boy was pressured and scared and likely gave the statement he did so they would let him leave.

The interrogators are saying over and over, We just want to know why, Gradford said. So he gave them something to get them off his back.

Appleby agreed that the boy was scared, but not of the police. During testimony, it was revealed that the defendants father drove the 16-year-old to Gradfords office to be interviewed by the defense investigator about a month after the shooting.

The boys testimony was tempered by his own fear and concern, Appleby said

The defendants father initially testified that he did not drive the boy to Gradfords office but later admitted he did and had lied because a detective previously told him he would be arrested if he interfered in the investigation.

Gradford said the defendants father was simply trying to follow up on leads that investigators refused to.

The father testified that he told investigators people on the streets were saying the shooter was a guy named Boo-Boo, but that he didnt know Boo-Boos real name or any other identifying information.

Dad picks up suspect near shooting scene

In addition to the clothing and hat and statements made by the 16-year-old witness, Appleby presented as evidence cell phone data that showed the 13-year-old in the area and calling his father three times within minutes of the shooting. Ten minutes after the shooting, the boys father picked him up at Oregon Park, which is just a few blocks from the scene.

Modesto police officers testified that when they arrested the boy at his house in west Modesto four hours after the shooting, he was wearing the same clothing as seen in the Le Johns market video but was missing the hat.

They said that while in the back of the patrol car, the boy tried to kick out the window and slip out of his handcuffs and yelled threats to kill the officers.

Detective Derrick Letsinger testified the boy also made the spontaneous statement, F--- you. I will go to the airport and look for the f---ing people who killed whoever. Letsinger said the boy had been told only that he was being arrested in connection with a homicide, not where the homicide had occurred.

Letsinger testified about administering a gunshot residue test to the minor. The detective said the boy was calm as he swabbed his left hand but pulled his right hand away and tried to wipe it in his hair. The shooter in the surveillance video used his right hand.

The murder weapon has not been found and there were no traces of gunshot residue on the boys hands. However, detectives did find a TikTok video of the boy holding a firearm three days before the shooting. According to testimony, the gun in the video was a Glock clone and the weapon used to shoot Avila-Rodriguez was a Glock or a Glock clone.

Gradford said the prosecutions case is based on circumstantial evidence, all of which could have reasonable alternative explanations. He said the boys clothing and hat are not unique and that the gun seen in the TikTok video is one of multiple Glock clones.

Gradford pointed to testimony by Letsinger that information and word spreads like crazy, so it is reasonable to believe that his client had heard about the shooting during the four hours before his arrest. He said his clients actions following his arrest were consistent with a boy whod been separated from his father and wanted to prove his innocence.

Juvenile law requires more proof

Appleby not only had to present evidence linking the boy to the shooting but, because of the defendants age, had to argue why the boy could legally be prosecuted at all.

Under California law, children under the age of 14 can only be prosecuted for a crime if there is clear proof that at the time of committing the act charged against them, they knew its wrongfulness.

Appleby said the boy had been arrested for a less serious felony offense about six months before the murder and the court found he understood the wrongfulness of that crime.

If he knew the wrongfulness of the first crime he would know the wrongfulness of a greater crime six and a half months later, Appleby said.

Judge Villalobos is expected to rule on the case Monday.

The incarceration time of a convicted juvenile offender is based on rehabilitation needs, not punishment, and is far less time than for an adult convicted of the same crime.

Juvenile court maintains jurisdiction of a case until the minor turns 25, meaning the minor could potentially remain in custody up to that age or be arrested for violating probation.
A federal judge has dealt a significant setback to Steve Bannons defense against criminal charges the former Trump adviser is facing for defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 select committee.

The Justice Department in November charged Bannon with two counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena for documents and testimony related to the select committee probe of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.

Bannon has countered the charges by claiming his decision was based on the advice of veteran defense attorney Robert Costello, who told Bannon that former President Donald Trump had asserted executive privilege, and therefore he had no obligation to respond to the committees subpoena.

But U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols ruled on Wednesday that Bannon will be precluded from making that case in front of a jury. He said that the advice of counsel defense is not applicable in contempt of Congress cases, citing a 1961 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals that he says is still binding on lower courts like his.

The ruling is likely to scramble Bannons defense against the two charges, which carry maximum jail terms of one year apiece. He has vowed to turn the charge against him into the misdemeanor from hell for Democrats and the Biden administration.

But without the ability to make an advice of counsel defense, Bannon is left without his strongest weapon against the charges.

Attorneys for Bannon were not immediately available for comment.

Nichols, a Trump appointee, previously ordered the Justice Department to provide internal documents to Bannon about its charging decision. The department indicated it has provided 218 pages of materials to Bannon in response to Nichols order, nearly all of which were already in the public domain.
A worker at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard has been reinstated to her job and awarded $85,000 in damages following a judge's ruling that a supervisor retaliated against her for raising sexual harassment allegations at a time when Navy leadership was scrutinizing a "culture of toxic behavior" on the waterfront.

Maria Martin is once again a supervisor at the shipyard after being demoted in 2020. After she complained that a supervisor had made sexual remarks toward her, another superior wrote a letter accusing her of "weaponiz(ing) the currently enhanced atmosphere of zero tolerance" toward sexual harassment. But an administrative judge found her claims of sexual harassment valid and ruled she'd been demoted as retaliation for reporting it.

"What really stood out about Ms. Martin's case was the very open and obvious nature of the retaliation," said Martin's attorney, Chalmers Johnson, who was also awarded attorney's fees paid by the Navy of an undisclosed amount. "Usually, there is at least some effort to disguise the retaliatory nature of the action by the perpetrators in these cases, but not in this one."

A US Navy submarine passes Puget Sound Naval Shipyard as it heads out to sea on Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2022.

Shipyard supervisors alleged Martin was demoted for "yelling, cursing and inappropriate comments," but Merit Systems Protection Board Administrative Judge Christopher Riddle reversed their decision, saying such behavior was commonplace in her shop: an environment "rife with cursing, yelling, juvenile behavior, and unprofessionalism."

"The record reflects such behavior is endemic to the agency's work environment," Riddle wrote.

The judge ordered that Martin be reinstated, that she receive $85,000 for pain and suffering and that she receive back pay: everything she lost in wages during the time she was demoted.

Martin said there's no satisfaction for her in the ruling. She said she suffered a heart attack following the demotion and has lost many friends over the case.

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"It's still not really even justice," said Martin, who began as a tank cleaner at the shipyard in 2003 and was a supervisor in Shop 99, temporary shop services. "This experience, I would not wish on anybody."

The shipyard's leadership said it respects the judge's decision but could not comment on the particulars of the case.

"For several years now, PSNS & IMF has pushed ahead aggressively on programs across the Shipyard aimed directly at eliminating sexual harassment in the workplace," said Cesar Yabor, a spokesman for the shipyard. "The Command takes all such allegations seriously and investigates all cases to the extent both civilian law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice allow."

Yabor said that as a result of the investigation and allegations raised about the "culture problem" in the shop where Martin worked, shipyard leadership is "redoubling its efforts to halt abrasive or abusive language and unkind, disrespectful treatment by co-workers at every level of position in the Shipyard, including at the lowest and most junior levels."

"We strive to improve conditions in the workplace for all, and that includes fostering a collegial and cohesive team environment," Yabor said.

In September 2019, shipyard employee Brandon Hunt went public with a litany of allegations that included discrimination, sexism and more in a workforce that is still roughly 80% male. The workplace she described included off-hand comments  that she could get a "nice little secretary position"  to full-on assaults, including a man who grabbed her, smelled her hair, and would wink at her every time they'd pass each other.

Puget Sound Naval Shipyard's building 460 on Sunday, March 7, 2021.

And if those belittled, harassed or assaulted went public, Hunt said, retaliation followed.

Martin met with supervisors on Oct. 3, 2019, not long after Hunt's Facebook post described a culture of toxic harassment at the shipyard. She told them a manager had asked "whether it was her under his desk," and "instructed" her to "tell a fellow supervisor 'how I like it,'" the document said. Martin did not disclose further detail, prompting the superintendent to take "no further action."

The manager was interviewed, and while he did not fill out forms for the investigation, appeared nervous during the interview and provided only brief, "terse" responses, an investigator found no reason to question his "integrity or credibility."

The USS Michigan undocks at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard March 16.

Johnson said the supervisors were obligated to "bubble up" the case, or push it higher up the chain of command, but did not.

"They abandoned it," he said. "They did not bubble it up."

Then, on Oct. 31, 2019, Aaron Nelson, another supervisor present at the Oct. 3 meeting, drafted a response saying her sexual harassment complaint was his "final straw" and that Martin had "weaponized the currently enhanced atmosphere of zero tolerance" toward harassment. He described her as a "cancer at the heart of our shop."

In response, Martin was investigated and found to have "engaged in unprofessional conduct including cursing, yelling and making inappropriate comments." In July 2020, her superintendent demoted her for "conduct unbecoming," including for playing favorites, asking employees to purchase Pampered Chef products and an accusation she was racist, saying on one occasion she was eating "white people's lumpia" and had asked an employee if their family had immigration papers.

Production Workforce Manager Andrew Howard sustained all of the charged misconduct except the allegations that the appellant asked employees to host Pampered Chef parties, to buy the Pampered Chef products she was selling, and that she set her employees up to fail and subsequently berated and belittled them.

Martin lacked the review of a spreadsheet human resources and her superiors used to list complaints against her and weigh whether her discipline was in line with what others had received in the past. Riddle felt she should've had access to this document, and she should've been able to respond to it.

Further, the shipyard's own investigation found that within Shop 99 there is a "cultural problem" where the general foremen and superintendent are unaware of "what's happening on the deck plates."

Martin said that despite the shipyard's efforts to curtail sexual harassment, problems persist.

"There are amazing people that work in the shipyard, that have stood by me, and there are pockets of toxicity," she said. "I hope that people are going to open their eyes to this."

Shipyard leadership spent months researching Hunt's allegations while also instituting reforms of how sexual harassment is reported and investigated. In total, two employees were fired and 13 disciplined. A new team was also formed that handles sexual harassment investigations.

The judge debunked in no uncertain terms the idea that Martin had "laughed off" the harassment as a sign it didn't bother her. "That a victim of harassment does not contemporaneously act offended or identify conduct as inappropriate does not demonstrate that she found the conduct acceptable or that the conduct was objectively acceptable," he wrote, saying it was likely a way for Martin to "defuse the situation."

Johnson called Martin's case evidence of a "pile-on," where other employees, who had been keeping tabs on others' behavior, emptied their notes on Martin when her own disciplinary proceedings occurred.

"In my opinion, the command's continuing failure to address or correct the results of retaliation and the resulting fear of retaliation by employees and management is taking a major toll on the morale of the shipyard," Johnson said.

Josh Farley is a reporter covering the military and Bremerton for the Kitsap Sun. He can be reached at 360-792-9227, josh.farley@kitsapsun.com or on Twitter at @joshfarley.

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Judge restores demoted Puget Sound Naval Shipyard worker over harassment
A Volusia County judge revoked the bond of a man accused of driving drunk when he crashed into a van, killing a 17-year-old New Smyrna Beach High School student.

Police said the crash, which also critically injured the boys mother, happened just after 3:30 a.m. Sunday near state Road 44 and I-95 in New Smyrna Beach.

Michael Miles, 32, posted his $150,000 bond Monday, but the judge revoked that bond Wednesday morning, citing not only the seriousness of the crime but some of the prior offenses on his record.

Police said Miles was drunk behind the wheel when he slammed into a van, killing Siddharth Sukhdeo, 17, known to his friends as Sidd and leaving his mother with eight broken ribs.

READ: Juvenile dies in rear-end crash, driver charged with driving under the influence, police say

Officers said Miles was driving on a suspended license at the time of the crash, and court records show he pleaded no contest to a DUI charge in 2012.

Its clear Mr. Miles has no intention of abiding by reasonable conditions both of the law and of any release, Judge Karen Foxman said.

Sidds father, Satesh Sukhdeo, said Sidd was an honor roll student and a talented musician on both the trumpet and violin with dreams of going to Julliard and becoming a bandleader after graduation.

READ: Candlelight vigil being held for teen killed in rear-end crash, driver charged with DUI, police say

Hes made such an impact on everyone he has touched whether its students, other parents

uncles, aunts he is just a tremendous person and we are at a loss for what he could have done in the future, his father said.

Sidds mother remains hospitalized at Halifax Hospital, and the family says shes undergone three surgeries for her injuries but is doing better.

READ: Video shows boat nearly crushed by Florida drawbridge

Miles entered a not-guilty plea and is expected back in court next month.

Click here to download the free WFTV news and weather apps, click here to download the WFTV Now app for your smart TV and click here to stream Channel 9 Eyewitness News live.
Vice President Harriss communications director tested positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday, marking a close contact exposure to the vice president who will continue with her public schedule as planned.

Jamal Simmons, who joined Harriss staff earlier this year, is isolating and working from home, Harriss press secretary, Kirsten Allen, said in a statement.

The Vice President will follow CDC guidance for those that have been in close contact with a positive individual and will continue to consult with her physician, Allen said. The Vice President plans to continue with her public schedule.

The CDC defines a close contact as someone who was less than 6 feet away from an infected individual for more than 15 minutes.

Simmons is the latest member of Harriss circle to test positive in recent weeks. Second gentleman Doug Emhoff tested positive for the virus last month, though Harris never tested positive herself, according to the White House.

The communications directors positive test was the latest to be revealed on Wednesday amid what appeared to be a fresh outbreak among top officials, lawmakers and media members in the nations capital.

Attorney General Merrick Garland and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who both attended the annual Gridiron Dinner over the weekend, tested positive earlier Wednesday. Reps. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who also attended the dinner, have also since tested positive. Simmons was also in attendance.

Another half-dozen journalists and members of the White House and National Security Council staff also said they tested positive, according to a report by The Washington Post.

President Biden was not considered a close contact of the Cabinet members to test positive, but he appeared next to Harris at an event on Tuesday.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
In response to South Korean Defense Minister Suh Wooks threat of a preemptive strike" last week, North Korean leader Kim Jong-uns sister, Kim Yo-jong, released a statement yesterday saying the country is prepared to retaliate with nuclear weapons.



Kim Yo-jongs statement, released by the North Korean news agency KCNA Watch, describes Suhs threat as a serious mistake and a very dangerous and sinister manifestation.



On Friday, while visiting South Koreas strategic missile command, Suh mentioned that South Korea was capable of launching precision strikes on North Korea if it were to attack with missiles. Kim Yo-jong, a powerful senior official in the North's ruling Worker's Party, then responded on Sunday, blasting Suh as a senseless and scum-like guy.



The statement clarified that North Korea has no intention of starting a war and does not view South Korea as an "opponent." However, Kim Yo-jong warned that if South Korea follows through with possible reckless military action against North Korea, then the South Korean army will suffer [a] tragic lot of extermination.



In other words, the South Korean army will not be a target of our attack unless it takes any military action against our state. If the armies of both sides fight each other, the whole of the Korean nation will suffer disasters more horrible than it suffered half a century ago, apart from who wins and who loses in the war or battle, Kim Yo-jong said in the statement.



Kim added that South Korea can avoid a nuclear disaster as long as they do not provoke North Korea.



If South Korea does not provoke us and harbour a preposterous daydream but thinks about how to avoid the shells we fired, possibly not of course, it will be able to escape the disaster mentioned above, Kim Yo-jong said. "Preemptive strike" on a nuclear state is a wild dream. We definitely clarify once again that we won't fire any single shot at South Korea as we do not regard it as the opponent of our armed forces.



The statement describes North Korea and South Korea as countries of the same nation that should not attack one another and expresses hope that concerns of safety and security can be resolved.



It is not because we compare the military strength of South Korea with us, a nuclear state, but because both are the same nation that must not fight. I hope an abnormal disorder worrying about safety without any ground would recover as soon as possible, the statement said.

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New U.S. sanctions have thrust President Vladimir Putins adult daughters into the global spotlight, which they have largely avoided throughout their lives.

The women are the daughters of former Aeroflot crew member, Lyudmila Putina, who was married to Putin before their relationship ended in 2013.

Details about their lives are scarce. Their maiden names differ, photos of them as adults have not been made public and their father has rarely even referenced them.

Heres what we do know about Maria Putina and Katerina Tikhonova:

Putins remarks

Putin has said he intentionally kept his children out of the public eye, largely for security concerns.

I know that Western political culture implies family members have to be in the limelight. I believe that we are not in a situation where such theatrics would be appropriate, the president said in an October 2020 interview with TASS, a Russian state media outlet.

He also spoke of his grandchildren to the outlet.

I have already said that I have grandchildren, I am very happy, they are very good and sweet. I really enjoy spending time with them, Putin said.

Work and educational backgrounds

At his annual news conference in 2015, Putin confirmed that both of his daughters attended Russian schools. They speak three foreign languages fluently. I never discuss my family with anyone, he added.

Putins eldest daughter, Maria Putina, sometimes referred to as Maria Vladimirovna Vorontsova, was born in 1985 in St. Petersburg. She reportedly studied biology at St. Petersburg University and attended Moscow State University and is a graduate of their Fundamental Medicine Department, according to Reuters.

She now leads state-funded programs that work on genetic research. The programs have received billions in funding from the Kremlin and are personally overseen by the Russian president, the U.S. Treasury Department said when it announced the sanctions.

Katerina, 35, was born on August 31, 1986, in Dresden, Germany, where Putin was stationed at the time. She did not come into the spotlight until 2015, when reports circulated that she was Putins daughter. The news was first reported by a Russian blogger named Oleg Kashin.

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She took the surname Tikhonovna from her grandmother, Yekaterina Tikhonovna Shkrebneva, according to a report from Kashin.

She is a scholar and researcher working on publicly funded projects at Moscow State University, and is also the deputy vice rector overseeing Innopraktika, an artificial intelligence institute at the university.

Katerina also does work supporting the Russian defense industry, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.

Five of her advisers at the university include members of her fathers inner circle, according to a Reuters report.

In an interview with Russian news outlet Interfax in 2015, Katerina said she worked her way up the university ladder as a research student.

At the university, work with students is built on involvement. And I, even when I was studying, actively participated in student volunteering. The most active students are usually offered to stay and work in the university system, she told Interfax.

Personal lives

Maria is reportedly married to Dutch businessman Jorrit Joost Faassen, but little else is known about her personal life.

Katerina married Kirill Shamalov, a wealthy Russian businessman, in 2013. The couple divorced in 2018 following reports that Shamalov personally profited during the marriage.

Her hobbies include acrobatic rock n roll, a type of competitive dance, and she holds a senior position at the World Rock n Roll Confederation.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting from his residence in Moscow, Russia, on April 5, 2022. Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via REUTERS

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday that Russia did not want to kill Zelenskyy.

The Times of London reported that the Kremlin put a bounty on Zelenskyy's head.

Zelenskyy's team say he survived at least 12 assassination attempts since the war began.

The Kremlin on Wednesday denied wanting to kill Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, despite reports that it placed a a bounty on his head.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov made the remark during a Wednesday press briefing, according to the state-run RIA Novosti news agency.

Ukraine says that Zelenskyy been repeatedly targeted by Russia-linked assassins in Kyiv.

Zelenskyy's adviser Mikhail Podolyak told the Ukrayinska Pravda newspaper that, as of March 10, he believed there had been "more than a dozen such attempts" made on Zelenskyy's life. He did not provide any evidence.

In one case, according to The Times of London, a group of Chechen assassins tried to assassinate Zelenskyy on the outskirts of Kyiv on February 26. The Chechens were "eliminated" before they could reach Zelensky, the report said, without giving further specifics.

Earlier in the invasion, Zelensky said that "enemy sabotage groups" were active in Kyiv and that he was their "number one target."

One of those sabotage groups appears to be the Wagner Group, a private army owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Putin ally.

In March, The Times of London reported that the Kremlin had offered mercenaries working for the Wagner Group bounties for killing a list of leading Ukrainian figures, which included Zelenskyy and Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko.

In the early days of the war, Zelenskyy was only occasionally seen outside and recorded most of his video messages from a nondescript location.

Since then he has been out in public more often: he filmed several messages outdoors in Kyiv and on Monday visited the town of Bucha to see evidence of apparent war crimes committed against people there.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Apr. 6SANTA FE  While moving quickly Tuesday to revive a vetoed roughly $50 million spending package, New Mexico lawmakers decided to cast a bit more light on the state's sometimes secretive budgeting process.

Specifically, legislators agreed during a special session at the Capitol to tack on a requirement that each lawmaker's funding allocations in the spending bill be disclosed publicly, after Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham vetoed a previous version of the measure in March and said it did not represent sound fiscal policy.

Under the revived legislation, Senate Bill 1, which passed the Senate and House without a dissenting vote Tuesday, lawmakers' funding allocations for roughly 500 projects included in the bill would be posted no later than 30 days after adjournment of the special session  or by May 5.

A spokeswoman for the Democratic governor said Lujan Grisham's veto had set the stage for the transparency provision to be added to the spending bill, which includes funding for uranium mining cleanup, new police vehicles, domestic violence services and other projects.

"The governor's veto of the previous iteration of the bill hinged in part on the lack of transparency in the junior bill appropriation process," Lujan Grisham spokeswoman Nora Meyers Sackett said. "In working with the Legislature to revise and improve the bill, she has been abundantly clear about her expectation that information delineating what funds were allocated by each legislator is published."

Some legislators said they had no qualms about the disclosure requirement.

Special session ends with approval of new round of tax rebates

Bill would provide $500 to individuals, $1K to couples...

April 5, 2022 4:35AM

"There's no reason to hide anything," said Sen. Michael Padilla, an Albuquerque Democrat.

But Sen. Crystal Diamond, R-Elephant Butte, suggested the governor's veto of the original supplemental spending bill was not motivated by transparency concerns, instead describing it as a "punitive" act.

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She said lawmakers have already added many transparency measures in recent years, such as expanded webcasting of legislative committee hearings.

"It hasn't been more transparent for decades than it is now," Diamond said.

While the bill is largely similar to the original vetoed version, some technical changes were made and about $200,000 worth of projects was removed from the initial legislation.

In addition, lawmakers also considered adding a $1 million appropriation aimed at reducing Rail Runner ticket prices that was not included in the original version of the bill that was vetoed.

The Governor's Office had asked the Legislature to include the funding in the revised bill, but several lawmakers said it was unnecessary since the Rio Metro Regional Transit District, which operates the commuter train, received large amounts of federal relief funds that could be used to reduce ticket prices.

"I think it's a million bucks that's not well spent," said Sen. William Sharer, R-Farmington, who made a successful motion to have the Rail Runner funding stripped out of the spending bill.

A Lujan Grisham spokeswoman said the Governor's Office was "disappointed" by the action, adding it would nevertheless work with Rail Runner operators to identify possible ways to reduce fares and assist commuters.

Such action could already be in the works as Sen. George Munoz, D-Gallup, cited a Tuesday letter from Rio Metro Regional Transit District Director Terry Doyle, who said half-price promotional fares for some types of Rail Runner passes would be provided for the next 3 1/2 months.

Meanwhile, the governor's veto of the original $50.4 million grab-bag of projects, often referred to as the "junior" spending bill, angered many lawmakers  both Democrats and Republicans  and some legislators initially expressed support for an extraordinary legislative session to override the governor's veto.

But top-ranking Democratic lawmakers eventually reached an agreement with the Governor's Office to have the bill brought back in a special session.

Several legislators also disputed suggestions the measure represented pork-barrel, or wasteful, spending.

"These are very important projects that had to happen in each district," said Munoz.

The bill passed the Senate on a 39-0 vote in the afternoon and sailed through the House 63-0 a little after 8 p.m., just 11 hours after the session started.

Dan McKay of the Journal Capitol Bureau contributed to this article.
Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently concluded his trip to South Asia, choosing Kathmandu as the last overseas destination with the lengthiest stopover, which indicates Beijing's willingness to engage more deeply with the Himalayan region.



Before landing in Kathmandu, Wang had visited Islamabad, Kabul and Delhi where a consensus on major global issues was evidently echoed among the regional leaders against a backdrop of growing Cold War attitude while the West is preoccupied with "fueling" the Ukraine conflict. As the world is full of chaos and undergoing rapid transformations, Wang's visit to Kathmandu, while further cementing bilateral ties, has set a new solid ground of cooperation aimed at safeguarding core mutual interests, regional peace and stability along with partnership to address the development deficit in the region.

Cherishing the traditional friendship between the peoples residing on the two sides of Qomolangma, the Chinese diplomatic approach of stability, peace and prosperity, once again is being welcomed in Nepal as mainstream media in the country hailed Wang's visit with the aphorism that "it could not have come at a more appropriate time."

Wang has forthrightly reaffirmed the continuous legacy of Beijing's consistent and balanced diplomacy. During his meetings with Nepali leaders, Wang pronounced that no matter how the international scene and domestic situation of the two countries change, China will promote the building of a China-Nepal community with a shared future along the direction set by the leaders of the two countries. Analysts in Nepal say, with the latest high-profile visit, China has successfully demonstrated its priority allocation to regional diplomacy signaling it to be the key focus going forward.

The Nepalese aspire to transform the nation from a landlocked to a "land-linked" country situated between two of the world's largest economies along the line China promised in 2019. The Transport and Transit Agreement signed by Beijing and Kathmandu in 2016 has offered the landlocked country an opportunity to free itself from geographical constraints. In a country where infrastructure shortfall has become a chief characteristic, China's Belt and Road Initiative lifted hopes, with some people even assuming the Chinese high-speed rail will come to Nepal via the Tibetan mountains.

As it never fails to sense Nepali aspirations, the Chinese side during Wang's stay in Kathmandu defined its willingness to provide support in three aspects: first, through a friendly policy for a development path suited to Nepal's national conditions while calling the parties and party factions to jointly explore a governance model that is conducive to promoting political stability, economic growth and people's livelihood. The second aspect China has attached great importance to is Nepal's independence while pursuing domestic and foreign policies that minimize geopolitical games and safeguard its sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity regardless of its size. China has eloquently expressed its wish for Nepal to become a shining example of cooperation between China and South Asia. The third, as many Nepalese were expecting, China has underlined the importance of furthering projects under the BRI, which is expected to boost Nepal's national infrastructure and speed up its development.

The foreign ministry of Nepal hailed Wang's visit as "a milestone to strengthen bilateral relations" at a press conference following his visit. Moreover, both sides have agreed to complete the China-Nepal cross-border railway project, which has been welcomed by the two peoples.

Many in Nepal agree that China is championing development and multilateralism while the BRI offers connection and integration in an age of division. During his latest trip, Wang has left a memo in South Asian capitals that China's development adds to a more powerful force for peace and will bring new development opportunities for developing countries while seeking to achieve the goal of building a community with a shared future for mankind.

The author is a journalist based in Nepal. He writes on international relations and diplomacy.

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.

If you would like to contribute, please contact us at opinion@china.org.cn.
Representatives Andy Harris, Republican of Maryland, and Earl Blumenauer, Democrat of Oregon, agree on little related to the legalization of marijuana. Harris opposes it for recreational use and also thinks that as a medicine, it should be scaled back. Blumenauer is pushing for pot to be decriminalized.

But the two agree on this  that researchers simply don't have enough access to more potent, high-quality weed, and more producers should be able to grow pot for research.

Their bill that passed the House Monday  after being introduced in several Congresses before  would ease the way for producers at a time when more states are looking at decriminalizing marijuana. The House last week passed a bill to legalize marijuana, although its fate in the Senate is more uncertain.

Currently, researchers at universities and government agencies can't just walk to a street corner or park to pick up some weed for their studies because it's still an illegal substance regulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration. For years, the DEA has stipulated that researchers can only use marijuana from a single government site, which is located at the University of Mississippi.

The university maintains what it calls a "secure plot of land," where marijuana groups are grown in cooperation with the National Institute on Drug Abuse. But the pot grown there often has significantly lower THC levels than what's typically sold on the streets, and since there's just one government-approved producer in the U.S., researchers are often hampered by red tape and supply issues.

The Medical Marijuana Research Act from Blumenauer and Harris would allow more producers to apply to qualify as research growers, expanding the potency and variety of marijuana researchers can access. The bill would also make it easier for researchers to apply and be approved to study pot, as well as set timelines for federal agencies to take action on their applications.

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Exactly how many pot producers would be approved is unclear, but they would have to follow the same government standards as the University of Mississippi, and approved producers would not be allowed to also sell pot for recreational purposes. They would have to grow crops exclusively for research.

"While Mr. Blumenauer and I hold very different views on what good research will yield to inform healthcare providers and policymakers, we have worked together to champion this effort for years  because far too much of the mainstream discussion on marijuana, from both sides, is based on anecdotal evidence, not on rigorous and reliable empirical data or studies," Harris said in a statement to CBS News. "I am very optimistic that we will get this legislation over the finish line so that we can finally cut through the red tape and encourage quality research on the real-world health effects of marijuana."

Harris, a doctor, is opposed to recreational marijuana, and he has concerns about its medical use because he believes the benefits are potentially overstated and not necessarily grounded in science. Blumenauer has been working on marijuana policy for decades, and believes pot can be used to help children with epilepsy, veterans with PTSD, cancer patients and many more groups of people. They might not agree on much, but both congressmen agree good, empirical research is needed to provide Americans more accurate information about the effects of pot.

Don't ask, don't tell: Many Americans still reluctant to discuss pot use despite legalization

When their teams began to speak to researchers years ago, researchers raised the same obstacles  the process to register to study weed is burdensome; the supply is limited and homogenous; and logistical issues mean the pot can arrive late or in poor condition, sometimes even moldy.

So, for the last several Congresses, Harris and Blumenauer have led the charge to pass legislation and get it to the president's desk. This time, they're optimistic it'll work. A similar bill passed the Senate last month.

The bill's proponents hope to have conversations with their Senate counterparts and reconcile the two bills. And then they hope to get the legislation to the president's desk.

"The cannabis laws in this country are broken, including those that deal with the medical research of marijuana," Blumenauer said when the bill passed the House Monday. "America's growing cannabis industry operates without the benefit of a robust research program. Instead, we are outsourcing research to Israel, the United Kingdom, and Canada to our detriment."

"One example of this policy failure is our inability to effectively test for cannabis impairment," he continued. "Employees are failing drug tests, not because they are impaired, but because they used recreational or medical cannabis sometime in the last month. This is just one symptom of our shortsighted, illogical, and destructive set of policies. I am prepared to work with my friends in the Senate to reconcile differences between this legislation and the Senate-passed Cannabidiol and Marihuana Research Expansion Act."

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Rapper T.I. got into a heated confrontation with a comedian in Atlanta on Monday. (Charles Sykes / Invision / Associated Press)

Rapper T.I. got into a heated spat with a comic at an Atlanta comedy club on Monday but has apparently reconciled with her after the exchange spilled onto social media.

Based on Instagram posts from comedian Lauren Knight, the "Ant-Man" and "Genius" actor commandeered the open-mic night she was hosting at Our Bar ATL on Monday after repeatedly heckling her. That led Knight to respond by bringing up sexual-assault allegations and a lawsuit against him that he vehemently denied and asserted had since been dismissed.

Footage posted online from inside the club showed Clifford T.I. Harris taking the microphone and sounding off on Knight while defending himself. By Tuesday, Knight took to Instagram to explain what provoked the outburst.

T.I., who has been dabbling in stand-up comedy for a few months, arrived at the end of the open-mic night and delivered a 30-minute set. When he was done, Knight returned to the stage, but the rapper repeatedly heckled her.

Knight said she was talking about marriage, but T.I. kept cutting her off, telling her shut up and calling her names. He appeared in front of the stage while Knight was on it.

"So, Im like, Alright, come on. Stop playing with me. Its crazy, like you keep going and I cant say nothing to you,'" she said in a Tuesday Instagram video explaining her side of the story. She said that T.I. kept telling her to take off her wig and refused to stop.

She characterized his behavior as harassment, then responded by bringing up the allegations levied against him and his wife, Tameka Tiny Harris, last year. (The couple has denied the alleged 2005 incident, and the Los Angeles County district attorney declined to file criminal charges against the couple.)

I said, All right, Ill take my wig off when you speak on the allegations. Nobody was tight, except for him. Nobody called him a rapist. I responded to him telling me  in a room full of people  to rip my wig off. And made a joke just like he did. So if you gotta a problem with it, not mine," she said Tuesday.

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A four-minute video obtained by Baller Alert shows the heated exchange picking up in the club around when T.I. delivers an expletive-laden tirade denying the sexual-assault accusations.

[W]hen you stop talking about it, when you stop playing with me and mine, Ima stop saying something," he told Knight in the club. "Aint no mother case, aint never been no mother case. Cause I aint did nothing wrong, and my wife aint did nothing wrong. And if you keep on playing with me ... [I'm going to] continue to confront you publicly, verbally.

Knight then told the audience that she believes T.I. and his wife are innocent, but that prompted another confrontation.

T.I. is innocent. I truly believe it, she said. Give it up for him. There are no charges.

The rapper began yelling again and told Knight to stop playing with him. She said she wasn't and reminded him she was just doing her job as a comedian.

This is not a rap battle. This is a mothercomedy show, she said. The rapper later walked onstage and gave her a hug.

And be clear, if I want to make jokes about something, Ill make jokes about something," Knight said. "Absolutely. Youre not going to tell me to shut the f up in my s. This is my s. Lets be very clear.

T.I. then took the mic from her and said "no, it's not." Then the sound was cut.

"See it went from something simple that shouldve got squashed and settled to this man using his platform to lie on me to justify some bull," she wrote Tuesday, posting a video of T.I.'s IG Live claiming that he never called her a b. She then shared footage of him doing just that.

"Everybody is tripping. I just wanna do comedy. @troubleman31 run me my million. We ended on a positive note now you lying and saying s to weaponize your fan base and THAT Im not here for," Knight added. "Idgaf about how yall feel Im here for the truth. Im getting death threats and harassed cause a n wanna lie. Thats lame as hell."

By Wednesday, all seemed to be well again, and the rapper plugged Knight and her work on Instagram, sharing a clip of the two of them briefly making nice onstage Monday night.

"I've said from my entrance into the world of comedy that I intend to use my light to shine on others. To bring awareness to those who also have love and respect for the art form," he wrote. "In the spirit of that... Everyone I'd like to introduce you to @sheslaurenk she's a young up & coming comic on the scene in Atlanta check her out."

"She's a young black women fighting to use her voice for laughter & I understand that may take us down dark roads at times but there's always an opportunity to find a beacon of light & produce a positive outcome," he continued. "As i say all the time... all ships rise with the high tide. May she use whatever fame & notoriety she receives for good. I wish you the best & hope you bring the world more joy & laughter with the light you receive. I've done my part here... moving on. Love & Respect."

Reps for Knight did not immediately respond Wednesday to The Times' request for comment.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Apr. 6Maine Medical Center plans to leave the Anthem insurance network in January 2023 because of the insurer's payment practices, including what hospital officials say is $13 million in underpayments to the hospital and more than $70 million in unpaid claims to the MaineHealth network.

The dispute pitting the state's largest hospital against Maine's largest health insurer could affect more than 150,000 patients, who would have to pay higher out-of-pocket costs at Maine Med.

Maine Medical Center in Portland is the flagship hospital of the MaineHealth network, which announced the change Wednesday.

An Anthem spokeswoman blamed Maine Medical Center for charging unacceptable fees and indicated that there's a chance the dispute could be resolved.

"There is a long way to go before the end of the year, and we would think they will work with us on resolving these issues," Anthem spokeswoman Stephanie DuBois said in a written statement.

Gov. Janet Mills issued a statement saying she is "deeply concerned" and urged the two sides to resolve their differences.

"Maine Medical Center is the largest tertiary care hospital in Maine and Anthem is the state's largest insurer, serving more than 300,000 people, including state employees. Termination of the contract would significantly harm the cost of and access to care for Maine people who are Anthem customers, particularly in southern Maine, and seriously impact the operation of the health care market across the state," Mills said. "Termination should be avoided at all costs. As both private parties negotiate the contract, I strongly urge them to put the interests of Maine people first, to resolve this issue in a timely way, and to reach an agreement that averts the need for such a drastic, damaging move."

The move would mean Maine Medical Center becomes an out-of-network health care provider for people who are insured by Anthem, either through their jobs, the Affordable Care Act marketplace or as individuals. The change would increase out-of-pocket costs for Anthem patients who receive non-emergency care at the hospital. It would apply to non-emergency care only because Anthem would be required by law to fully cover emergency care, MaineHealth said.

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While insurance plans vary widely, out-of-network care generally costs patients far more than in-network. For instance, the price of an in-network procedure might be 80 to 90 percent covered by insurance or even fully-covered, while insurance may only pay 50 percent to 60 percent of an out-of-network procedure. Other patient costs such as co-pays and out-of-pocket maximums also are higher when getting out-of-network care. In one analysis of a $22,000 hospital bill by the California Department of Managed Care Health, an in-network cost to the patient was $2,800, while the same care provided out-of-network would cost the patient $13,600.

Mitchell Stein, a Maine-based independent health policy analyst, said that insurers and health care networks have payment disputes all the time.

"What is unusual is that these disputes don't usually end up being aired in public," said Stein, a volunteer board member for Community Health Options, the Lewiston-based health insurance cooperative.

He said insurers and health care systems have different motives for their bottom line. The insurers are attempting to limit the costs that they pay to hospitals to keep premiums down for their members, while hospitals are trying to maintain revenue streams to pay for the services they provide.

"There aren't good guys and bad guys in this. There are competing interests," Stein said.

MaineHealth estimates the decision would affect more than 150,000 Anthem patients based on the number of patients who made a claim at Maine Med during the past three years.

"Even though Anthem subscribers will have nine months to prepare, we know that this will affect many of our patients, and we deeply regret having to take this step," said Dr. Andrew Mueller, CEO of MaineHealth. "We will do everything in our power to reduce the impact of this change on our patients. However, our relationship with Anthem has reached a point where it is hurting our ability to sustain the level of care our communities have come to expect from MaineHealth and its flagship hospital, Maine Medical Center."

Anthem owes MaineHealth more than $70 million for health care services dating back over three years, MaineHealth said. Anthem also has been reducing negotiated payments to the Portland hospital that should not be in dispute, Mueller said.

DuBois, the Anthem spokeswoman, said that "we've had a strong working relationship with MaineHealth for many years, but for the last few years we've been in discussions with them regarding unilateral increases in charges for health services provided at Maine Medical Center. This has resulted in direct higher costs to our members and all consumers that use Maine Medical Center, which is unacceptable. It's disappointing MaineHealth would choose to alarm consumers by announcing an intention to leave our care provider network when our current contract doesn't expire for another two years. We have a responsibility to those we serve, and we remain committed to resolving these years-long issues with MaineHealth. We hope they will join us and get back to working on how we can restore affordability at Maine Medical Center."

DuBois said MaineHealth has been "overcharging our members" for at least four years and "this is unacceptable."

"During a routine review in 2018, Anthem discovered overbilling by Maine Medical Center for anesthesia and operating room services. We worked with MaineHealth to identify the Anthem members impacted by this, and as a result of our investigation, MaineHealth eventually relented and issued refunds to our members for the amount they were overcharged. These overcharges amounted to nearly $20 million to our members. If it were not for our audits, these overcharges may never have been discovered."

John Porter, MaineHealth spokesman, said the health care network would have no comment in response to Anthem's statement about increased charges.

While MaineHealth said the entire network is owed money by Anthem, the issue is most critical at Maine Medical Center.

Mueller, in a news conference on Wednesday, said Anthem is withholding $1 million per month in payments to Maine Med. He said the reduction is about equivalent to payments the hospital receives from the 340B federal medication discount program, a program that lowers the cost of prescription drugs to hospitals that have a high number of Medicaid patients.

Mueller said Anthem has not admitted that program is the cause of the reduction, but he believes it is not a coincidence. He said if MaineHealth doesn't stand its ground on the issue, it could set a precedent and result in reductions by Anthem across all of the system's nine hospitals. The dispute is an "existential" threat to MaineHealth services, Mueller said.

DuBois said the dispute is not about 340B but "goes back to the fact that MaineHealth unilaterally raised charges, which is costing our members and all of Maine Medical Center consumers more money. We can't allow that to happen. We've been trying to resolve this and now they appear to be walking away."

Mueller said negotiations with Anthem have been "difficult" for a long time, but reached an impasse in January.

"We seemed to be moving farther and farther apart," Mueller said.

Mueller said the drastic move comes as a last resort, because if the reduced payments continue, financial pressures could lead to services being threatened, especially in rural areas. "We have a lot of other issues we would rather tackle," Mueller said.

Timothy Schott, acting superintendent of the Maine Bureau of Insurance, encouraged the two sides to reach an agreement.

"The Bureau of Insurance has been in contact with both MaineHealth and Anthem about the concerns in their relationship," Schott said in a statement. "While the bureau cannot get involved in contractual matters, it has encouraged both parties to work in good faith to resolve their differences well before January 1. The Bureau is currently considering how best to work with Anthem to ensure that it maintains an adequate network of providers so its members can get the benefits to which they are entitled."

The move will not affect subscribers to Anthem-MaineHealth Medicare Advantage plans. MaineHealth said the Portland hospital will remain in-network for those patients. Also, MaineHealth said it has no plans to remove its physicians and other providers in its systemwide medical group from the Anthem network, and no other hospitals are affected.

MaineHealth also is dropping Anthem as the insurance carrier for its 22,000 employees, starting in January 2023. A new carrier has not yet been chosen, Mueller said.

The decision comes on the heels of months of complaints by hospitals about Anthem's issues with paying health care providers in a timely manner.

"We've been getting a lot of complaints from hospitals. Providers are saying their claims aren't getting processed," said Steven Michaud, president of the Maine Hospital Association. "There's been a big problem."

Northern Light Health, which operates Northern Light Mercy Hospital in Portland, continues to experience "some delays" with Anthem payments but is working with the insurer and meeting monthly to discuss outstanding issues, Senior Vice President Suzanne Spruce said in a written statement.

Judith Watters, spokeswoman for the Maine Bureau of Insurance, said in an email response to questions that the "Bureau of Insurance is aware of the payment issues providers have experienced with Anthem."

"The bureau is conducting a market conduct examination of Anthem, which will include a review of provider payment issues. The exam is expected to continue for several months. At this time, Anthem has worked through most of its backlog of claims," Watters said.
Demonstrators hold up signs as they take part in an anti-Asian American hate march and rally at San Francisco City Hall in San Francisco, Calif., on Saturday, March 27, 2021. Photo by Ray Chavez/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images

A 28-year-old man has been indicted on 13 counts in connection to a two-hour hate crime spree.

The man is accused of targeting and physically assaulting seven Asian women in NYC.

The incident illustrates a crisis of rising violence against Asian women.

A 28-year-old man has been indicted on 13 counts after attacking several Asian women in one night, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced Monday.

The attacks highlighted an ongoing crisis in which violence against Asian women has skyrocketed across the country  especially in New York City.

Stephen Zajonc was arrested in connection to a two-hour assault spree targeting women of Asian descent in New York City on March 2.

Zajonc, whose home address is registered at a drop-in shelter, is accused of physically assaulting  by means of punching, shoving, or elbowing  seven women between 6:30 p.m. and 8:40 p.m. on February 27, the New York Police Department previously told Insider, citing video evidence.

"These attacks on seven New York women, each fueled by anti-Asian hate, are yet another sobering reminder of the demonstrable fears AAPI communities, particularly AAPI women, in our City continue to face," Bragg said in a statement.

Zajonc is now charged with six felony counts of assault in the third degree as a hate crime and seven counts of aggravated harassment in the second degree.

Bragg said Zajonc "selectively ambushed seven Asian women in separate assaults, some of which he struck from behind  for no other reason than their perceived race."

There are 27 open cases in the Manhattan District Attorney's office investigating anti-Asian hate crimes, according to Bragg.

Read the original article on Insider
Emergency personnel respond to a mass shooting in Sacramento, Calif., on April 3.

A man arrested in connection with a Sacramento shooting that left six dead and dozens injured on Sunday had previously spent 18 months in an Arizona prison, documents show.

The six were killed and others injured as more than 100 rounds of ammunition were fired into the crowd of patrons leaving bars around 2 a.m. in downtown Sacramento.

Sacramento police announced the arrest of Dandrae Martin, 26, on Monday as a "related suspect" on assault with a deadly weapon and illegal firearm possession, the Associated Press reported.

Maricopa County Court documents obtained by The Arizona Republic show Martin was charged in a 2016 aggravated felony assault on a woman he was in a relationship with, whose children were present.

Documents show Martin pled guilty to choking, kicking and punching the victim.

Martin spent 18 months in an Arizona prison after violating the terms of his probation of the 2016 assault charge and another 2018 marijuana conviction. Martin was released in 2020.

Seven people injured at the scene of the shooting were released from the hospital by Monday, the Associated Press reported, while 4 others remained in critical condition.

Sundays violence was the third time this year in the U.S. that at least six people have been killed in a mass shooting, according to a database compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University.

Two others arrested Tuesday

Sacramento police announced a third arrest Tuesday afternoon. Authorities say Daviyonne Dawson, 31, was caught on camera wielding a firearm after the shooting, though police do not believe the weapon was used in the shootout. He was taken into custody late Monday and faces a charge of being a prohibited person in possession of a firearm, Sacramento police said.

Earlier Tuesday, authorities said Smiley Martin, 27, would face charges in the shooting. He was one of the 12 people found injured at the scene and was "quickly identified as a person of interest," the Sacramento Police Department said in a statement. A law enforcement official, who was briefed on the investigation but could not discuss the details publicly, told The Associated Press that Martin had taken a live video on Facebook hours before the shooting and brandished a handgun. Investigators are working to determine whether the weapon was used in the shooting.

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Martin was arrested Tuesday on charges of possession of a firearm by a prohibited person and possession of a machine gun.

Smiley Martin and Dandrae Martin are brothers.

The Associated Press and USA TODAY contributed to this report.

Reach breaking news reporter Julie Luchetta at jluchetta@arizonarepublic.com.

Support local journalism. Subscribe to azcentral.com today.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Man arrested in Sacramento shooting spent time in Arizona prison
BUCHAREST (Reuters) - A driver died ramming his car into the gate of the Russian embassy in Bucharest early on Wednesday, police in the Romanian capital said in a statement.

A video recorded before firefighters arrived showed the front of the car in flames as it remained wedged in the gate.

It was unclear whether the crash was an accident or deliberate.

During recent weeks, several Russian embassies elsewhere in Europe have been targeted by protesters angered by the invasion of Ukraine.

Police said they were investigating and did not release the identity of the driver.

Romania said on Tuesday it would expel 10 Russian diplomats who are not acting in accordance with international rules, joining other European countries to have done so in recent days.

Nearly 624,860 Ukrainians have fled to Romania since Russia invaded their country on Feb. 24, and around 80,000 are still in Romania.

(Reporting by Luiza Ilie; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
A Minnesota lawmaker from Maplewood has admitted in court documents to a drunken driving charge from earlier this year and said Tuesday he was given a 90-day stayed jail sentence.

Rep. Tou Xiong, a Democrat serving his second term in the state House representing several east metro communities, has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of having a blood alcohol concentration above 0.08 within two hours of being pulled over.

A plea petition and proposed sentencing order were filed Friday in Anoka County District Court after Xiong reached an agreement with prosecutors.

A second charge of misdemeanor fourth-degree driving while impaired was to be dismissed as part of the agreement, according to court records.

Xiong, 31, was scheduled to be appear at a remote arraignment hearing Tuesday; however, it was canceled because the plea petition was filed.

Xiongs case was not updated on the states online court records system Tuesday evening. However, Xiong wrote in a statement to the Pioneer Press that a judge overseeing his case accepted the plea agreement earlier in the day.

Xiong said in addition to the 90-day stayed jail sentence, he was ordered to pay a $488 fine. He said he must also undergo a chemical health assessment and attend of a MADD victim-impact panel.

A misdemeanor conviction carries a maximum sentence of 90 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Xiong was pulled over by a Blaine police officer at Central and 97th avenues just before 10 p.m. Jan. 8, according to a Jan. 13 citation summary report. It does not state why he was stopped or why police suspected drunken driving.

A test revealed his blood-alcohol content was 0.11, according to the plea petition. The legal limit to drive in Minnesota is 0.08.

On Jan. 14, after media reported on the charges, the lawmaker issued a brief statement in which he said he made a terrible mistake by driving under the influence. He called it inexcusable and apologized  and used those same words again in his Tuesday statement.

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Xiong represents District 53A, which includes portions of Maplewood, Oakdale and Woodbury.

Last weekend, he received the DFL endorsement in his bid for the open state Senate District 44 seat representing Oakdale, North St. Paul and Little Canada.

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Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday sent a congratulatory message to Aleksandar Vucic on his reelection as president of Serbia.

In his message, Xi pointed out that in recent years, the China-Serbia comprehensive strategic partnership has maintained vigorous development momentum, with the two sides seeing solid political mutual trust and fruitful bilateral practical cooperation.

Facing major global changes unseen in a century, the two sides firmly respect each other, treat each other as equals, and join hands in building a community with a shared future for mankind, making positive contributions to safeguarding international equity and justice, said the Chinese president.

Xi also said that he attaches great importance to the development of China-Serbia relations, and cherishes the good working relationship and friendship with President Vucic.

He added that he is willing to work with President Vucic to strengthen strategic communication, consolidate political mutual trust, expand and deepen mutually beneficial cooperation in all fields between the two countries, and steer China-Serbia ties towards new achievements, so as to benefit the two countries and their people.
A Marine Corps veteran running as a Republican for an Ohio seat in the U.S. Senate has fielded all manner of strange campaign tactics, but his latest ad left online viewers scratching their heads.

In his most recent video spot, Josh Mandel is seen walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously marched for Black civil rights. Its there that Mandel decries Critical Race Theory, saying that King marched so skin color wouldnt matter.

The ad goes on to show a photo of Mandel serving alongside five Marines of every color, from one of his two tours in Iraq, with darkened hands.

A Twitter user, @NotCapnAmerica, suggested that Mandels head was photoshopped onto a Black soldiers body. Politico reporter Natalie Allison debunked this, finding the original photo, which shows a much lighter Mandel that was seemingly photoshopped darker in the ad.

You folks asked if Josh Mandels campaign photoshopped his head onto a Black man, and I looked for answers. They did not, the campaign says. It appears a darkening filter was used on the ad. Heres the original photo for comparison. pic.twitter.com/7kz5nYseje  Natalie Allison (@natalie_allison) April 5, 2022

Mandel, 44, enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve in 2000 and served for eight years. And while this photo is not the scandal many believed it to be, this is not the first questionable tactic Mandel has deployed in his Senate campaign.

The self-proclaimed Pro-God, Pro-Gun, Pro-Trump candidate recently received the endorsement of disgraced Army Gen. Mike Flynn.

Flynn served as former President Donald Trumps national security adviser until it was revealed that he was less than forthcoming with then-White House officials about conversations he had in 2017 with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the U.S. at the time.

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Mandel also falsely accused his opponent, fellow Republican and businessman Mike Gibbons, of saying the military doesnt count as real work in an ad featuring Gold Star mother Sheila Nowacki, whose Marine son was killed in 2005 in Iraq.

Gibbons, however, never said that military service isnt real work.

During a primary debate on March 18, CNN reported that Gibbons refuted an argument from Mandel about his investments, saying that Mandel wouldnt understand his financials because hes never been in the private sector in your entire life.

Mandel and Gibbons also nearly turned a verbal fight physical during a primary debate.

The pair are running to succeed Sen. Rob Portman, a Republican who is not seeking re-election this year.
More than 5,000 civilians have been killed in Mariupol, Ukraine, since Russian troops took control of the city, local authorities stated on Wednesday.

Mayor Vadym Boichenko said that of the thousands reported dead, 210 were children.

On Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he had asked French President Emmanuel Macron to help those trapped in Mariupol. Zelensky also said that Macron agreed to help provide technical assistance and expert support for investigations into crimes committed in Ukraine by Russia.

In an interview with Turkeys Haberturk Television, Zelensky accused Russian troops of trying to cover up their actions in the besieged coastal city  and alleged that the Russians were not allowing humanitarian aid into the city until they clear it all up.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk accused Russian forces last week of blocking a convoy of buses headed to Mariupol to evacuate civilians. "The Russian Federation, again, does not let our buses pass," Vereshchuk told the Ukrainian news agency Unian. She alleged that Russian soldiers had stolen 12 Ukrainian trucks that were delivering aid to Mariupol.

A man carries a broken window past the body of a person killed in the Russian invasion in a residential area in Mariupol, Ukraine. (Reuters/Stringer)

An International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) team had tried to reach Mariupol, but turned around last week as a result of what it described as inadequate security protections for rescuers. The group later said that it had managed to help around 1,000 civilians safely get to Zaporizhzhia, a government-controlled Ukrainian city located roughly 128 miles to the north, after they left Mariupol on their own for Berdyansk, a city roughly 52 miles west of Mariupol. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Mariupol's population was 400,000.

Pascal Hundt, head of ICRC's delegation in Ukraine, told the Associated Press that conditions on the humanitarian route to Mariupol had prevented the team from saving civilians trapped in the besieged city.

When you travel with a convoy with buses, you have to stop at the checkpoint. You have to explain who you are, what you are doing there. They may be not necessarily aware of you coming in, and then it takes time, and then you proceed to the next one and you start again, he said.

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In the evening, theres a curfew. People cannot move. Everybody gets stressed, including the soldiers at the checkpoint, Hundt added. It took us five days to do that operation.  You can imagine the difficulties we faced.

Bodies of people killed during the Russian invasion lie in a residential area of Mariupol. (Reuters/Stringer)

In recent weeks, a theater in Mariupol was bombed by a Russian airstrike, local authorities said. Satellite pictures show that the theater was marked with large white letters that read CHILDREN in Russian.

Ukrainian officials also said several bombs were dropped on a childrens hospital in the same city  leaving three people dead, including a 6-year-old girl.

Zelensky previously said that Mariupol had been reduced to ashes by Russian airstrikes, and called the attacks "a terror that will be remembered for centuries to come."

After announcing new sanctions against Russia  including President Vladimir Putins two adult daughters  on Wednesday, President Biden decried the major war crimes he says are being discovered in Ukraine, after horrifying photos taken in Bucha this week showed the bodies of executed people discovered after Russian forces withdrew from the city.

People attend the funeral of Sergei Shamut, 22, who died in battle near Mariupol. (Reuters/Igor Tkachenko)

Cover thumbnail photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
This year marks the 10-year anniversary for New York-based fine jewelry designer Marla Aaron.



Over the last decade, the designer has become known for her innovative fine jewelry creations, including fine jewelry hardware locks, necklace chains and charms, as well as Trundle, DiMe, Inlay rings and more.

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Marla Aarons engraved DiMe Ring. - Credit: Courtesy

Courtesy

Last year, the designer was encouraged by DeBeers to create versions of her technically and functionally rooted signature ring designs with center stones.

In terms of bridal, we started with a lock and now we have thousands of iterations, Aaron said over Zoom of her decision to, throw her hat in the ring, and create styles designed as alternative bridal options, as well as for daily life.



The latest collection, titled DiMe Siempre, includes intriguing, alternative bridal takes on her signature designs boasting unique center stones with intricate clasps inspired by jeweled evening bag closures, with the ability to engrave personal messages between the metal bands.

Marla Aarons engraved DiMe Siempre Ring. - Credit: Courtesy

Courtesy

We are in a very emotional business, the jewelry business. I have seen an uptick in the emotional aspect of our jewelry.People are wanting connections and to be together, Im seeing that on many levels. Jewelry is a very emotional purchase  be it a classic engagement ring, or anything, Aaron said of her business, adding that she will also be launching a collection of trundle lock rings with baguettes, which can be worn as locks on necklaces, or as stand-alone engagement rings.

Marla Aarons engraved Trundle Lock Ring.

In addition to new designs and business growth, over the pandemic, the designer raised $80,000 to benefit New York restaurant workers through the sale of miniature sterling silver chairs (modeled after those common in restaurants) in her luxe vending machines.

Last month, the designer brought back the activation and donated 100 percent of the chairs proceeds (a total of $42,000 as of mid-March) to World Central Kitchen, which provides fresh meals to Ukrainian families.

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Matt Le Tissier has become a controversial figure on social media (Getty)

Southampton legend Matt Le Tissier has stepped down from his role as club ambassador a day after retweeting a conspiracy theory about the Bucha massacre in Ukraine.

Mounting evidence is piecing together one of the worst atrocities of Russias war in Ukraine so far, after civilian bodies and mass graves were discovered in the town of Bucha on the northwest outskirts of Kyiv. The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky visited Bucha this week where he reported people found in barrels, cellars, strangled and simply tortured, and US president Joe Biden called for his brutal Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to face a war crimes trial.

Russias foreign minister Sergie Lavrov claimed Bucha was a fake attack, while pro-Russian accounts on social media have tried to claim that footage of dead bodies on the streets was staged, conspiracy theories which have been widely debunked.

Le Tissier, who has more than half a million Twitter followers, has become a controversial figure on social media in recent years, particularly in his questioning of the Covid-19 vaccine and government restrictions during the global pandemic.

On Tuesday, Le Tissier tweeted This with an emoji pointing to a tweet suggesting the media was lying about the massacre of Bucha. The 53-year-old later deleted the tweet, but he faced a fierce backlash on social media.

He responded: Let me make something very clear I do not advocate war in any way shape or form I do not advocate anyone taking lives of others and anyone who commits such acts should be dealt with accordingly, any atrocities leave devastating effects on the families of the victims and us all.

But on Wednesday morning Le Tissier stepped aside from his role with Southampton, the club where he spent his entire professional career, describing his social media presence as work I believe in.

To all the fans of sfc, he tweeted. I have decided to step aside from my role as an ambassador of SFC. My views are my own and always have been, and its important to take this step today to avoid any confusion. This does not affect my relationship with and love for my club, and I will always remain a fan and supporter of everything Saints.

I can, however, see that due to recent events its important to separate the work I believe in from my relationship with the club I have supported and played for most of my life. I will see you all at St Marys and will always do anything I can to help the club.

Le Tissier is no stranger to controversy online. In one retweet in September 2020, he compared the murder of Anne Frank with wearing face masks, for which he later apologised. In another he suggested Christian Eriksens on-field collapse at Euro 2020 could be related to the Covid vaccine (it later emerged Eriksen didnt have the vaccine).
(AFP via Getty Images)

Meghan Markle has shared an open letter, addressing her heartbreak following the death of a close friend who introduced her to the animal shelter that she was formerly a patron of.

In a letter shared exclusively with The Independent, the Duchess of Sussex says she was introduced to the animal welfare charity Mayhew by her dear friend and animal behaviourist Oli Juste which led to her becoming the charitys first patron in 2019.

Mayhew is a London-based charity that works internationally to improve the lives of cats and dogs from its home in Kensal Green.

Juste was a dog trainer and behaviourist who appeared on Puppy School on Channel 4.

We shared, amongst many things, a commitment to animal welfare, and a deep love of rescue dogs, Meghan writes, of her friendship with Juste. In fact, it was Oli and his fiance Rob who helped care for my rescue dog, Guy, when I had just moved to the UK and he was recovering from a debilitating accident. They loved him as though he was their own.

Meghan adopted a rescue beagle named Guy while she was living in Toronto. She later adopted Pula the labrador with Prince Harry. Both dogs live with the couple in their home in Montecito, California.

Juste died on 15 January this year. In a post to his Instagram page, his fiance Rob wrote: Its with great sadness that Oli passed away on Saturday (15/01/22) with me his fiance Rob, sister Helene, brother Michel and my mother Jenny by his side. He had been surrounded by friends and the incredible NHS staff at St.Richards Hospital ITU, Chichester.

Writing of her loss, Meghan said: On 15 January, 2022, my beloved friend Oli tragically and very suddenly passed away. It has left me, and so many others, heartbroken and reflectiveknowing that the legacy he leaves for our furry friends is beautifully simple: just love them. Especially those left behind or forgotten.

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Mayhews chief executive Howard Bridges said the Duchess has generously made a donation in memory of her much-loved friend Oli Juste.

After stepping back as senior working royals, Meghan and Harry have both passed on several patronages. Two of Meghans  the Royal National Theatre and the Association of Commonwealth Universities  were recently given to the Duchess of Cornwall by the Queen.

Although we have mutually agreed not to extend the patronage, as a committed rescue pet parent, The Duchess will continue to support Mayhew and champion our ambitions, he added.

Her enthusiasm for our mission has inspired many more people to support and donate to our charity to save dogs and cats from a life of cruelty and neglect, support local pet owners in crisis and find loving and forever homes for abandoned animals.

During the pandemic the Duchess worked to support the charity from afar, writing the foreword for both the 2019 and 2020 Annual Reviews.

During her patronage she also championed Therapaws, the charitys program to promote physical, social and emotional wellbeing in the communities where it operates.

Meghan Markles open letter tribute to Mayhew and late friend in full:

I was introduced to Mayhew by my dear friend, animal behaviorist, Oli Juste. We shared, amongst many things, a commitment to animal welfare, and a deep love of rescue dogs. In fact, it was Oli and his fiance Rob who helped care for my rescue dog, Guy, when I had just moved to the UK and he was recovering from a debilitating accident. They loved him as though he was their own.

It was nearly four years ago, as I was exploring possible organizations to volunteer with, that Oli brought me to Mayhew. He knew that beyond their adoption and rescue programs, their international work to keep animals safe, and their local work to find abandoned pets homes, that I would be drawn to their deep love of community, which transcended the animals themselves, and extended to the people around them. He was right. I fell in love with Mayhew, and soon became their Royal patron.

As my three-year patronage to Mayhew came to a close earlier this year, I reflected on the work they have achieved in the hardest of timesduring a global pandemic with minimal resources, safeguarding staff from their stations in Afghanistan, and still resolving to remain steadfast in their vital day to day work for animal and human welfare throughout London and across the globe.

Every day there was another twist and turn, every week another updatewhich Oli and I would connect about: What can we do? How can we do more? Look at the amazing work they continue to do.

On January 15, 2022, my beloved friend Oli tragically and very suddenly passed away. It has left me, and so many others, heartbroken and reflectiveknowing that the legacy he leaves for our furry friends is beautifully simple: just love them. Especially those left behind or forgotten. In his memory, we will be creating the Oli Juste wing at Mayhew, to shelter the animals who may have a harder time finding their forever homes. Because much like Oli, they will never be forgotten, and they will always be loved.

Though my time as patron of Mayhew has come to a close, my unwavering support has not. I encourage each of you to support in whatever way you are able. The emotional support of a rescue animal is unparalleledas youll soon realize: it is not you who saves them, it is they who save you.

To the Mayhew community, thank you for entrusting me as your patron. It has been an honor.

As ever,

Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex
Middle school students can participate in free, five-day career exploration camps at three South Dakota college campuses this summer.

The Dakota Dreams Career Exploration Summer Camps will allow incoming 7th and 8th grade students to experience at least 10 different career paths at Black Hills State University, South Dakota State University and the University of South Dakota.

Students will be immersed in engaging, hands-on learning at university and technical college campuses and visit area businesses and industry. By the end of the week's camp, the students will learn more about their career interests, and how their K-12 education prepares them for the workforce.

Career Exploration Summer Camp Dakota Dreams logo.

The career camps give students a chance to dive in, explore their interests, and start thinking about possible careers at a critical age, Tiffany Sanderson, South Dakota Secretary of Education, said in a news release. By showing students the possibilities in their own backyard and beyond, we can help them chart a path for their future.

The Dakota Dreams Career Exploration Summer Camps are a partnership of the South Dakota Board of Regents, South Dakota technical colleges, South Dakota businesses and industry, and the South Dakota Department of Education (DOE). The opportunity is funded with federal dollars available to DOE through the American Rescue Plan Act.

Sometimes the road toward college can feel difficult while students work to transform their dreams into careers, Janice Minder, South Dakota Board of Regents vice president for academic policy and planning, said in a news release. The career exploration camps offer students the chance to start early and explore a number of different career paths, and learn the necessary steps to turn their interests into a career reality.

Each camp will accept 50 participants. The deadline to apply is May 1. Students will be notified of acceptance via email the week of May 16, 2022. Here's where the three camps will be offered this summer:

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June 26-30 at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, partnering with South Dakota Mines and Western Dakota Technical College

June 26-30 at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, partnering with Southeast Technical College

July 24-28 at South Dakota State University in Brookings, partnering with Lake Area Technical College

For more information or to apply for the camps, visit ourdakotadreams.com.

This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: Middle school students can take summer camps at SDSU, USD
Nine days after Ronnie and Beverly Baker were last seen in their RV while driving through Nevada, the missing Indiana woman was found alive on Tuesday. Although family members say Beverly is "doing okay," her husband has died.

Ronnie, 72, and Beverly, 69, were located in a "remote mountain area of Esmeralda County near Silver Peak, Nevada," Tuesday afternoon, the Esmeralda Sheriff's Office said in a statement on Wednesday.

"It was determined that Ronnie had passed away. Beverly was alive and in good spirits considering what took place," police wrote, noting that she was airlifted out of the area and eventually taken to Renown Medical Center in Reno.

The discovery came hours after authorities were able to locate their RV around 11:30 a.m. "Due to the remote area where the motorhome was located it took several hours for these teams to reach it," police wrote, adding that upon their arrival, they discovered that "the motorhome appeared to be stuck."

"After a search of the motorhome, it was determined foul play was not involved," police wrote. Search and rescue teams were then "able to locate and follow the tire tracks" from the couple's car, which they found alongside the couple about 2 miles away.

"Everyone involved would like to give condolences to the family of Ronnie and Beverly Barker. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family during these trying times," police added.

Ronnie and Beverly Barker

Facebook Beverly and Ronnie Barker

RELATED: Surgeon Found Dead After Hiking Trip in North Wisconsin

Ronnie, who had a passion for travel, was on a trip from Oregon to Arizona with his wife when they went missing, according to WTHR.

Loved ones told CBS affiliate KLAS-TV that the couple left Oregon on March 26 and were planning to reach Tucson by March 29 to meet up with friends.

Ronnie and Beverly Barker

Facebook Ronnie and Beverly Barker

The couple never made it to the campground where they planned to spend the night before driving to Tucson, the Esmeralda County Sheriff's Office said, according to KOLD-TV.

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Their RV was last seen driving on Highway 95 in the desert on the evening of March 27, per WTHR. The following morning, the last recorded ping from their phone was recorded in the Coaldale area, the Esmeralda County Sheriff's Office wrote on Facebook.

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Before they were found, the couple's family struggled to make sense of what happened.

"It's all flat. It's all desert. So where did they go? Where did they go?" daughter Jennifer Whaley, who said her parents had health issues, told WTHR. "They're out in the middle of the desert. You can see for miles and a 32-foot RV, towing a car, literally vanishes into thin air. Where did they go?"

RELATED: New Jersey Couple Who Mysteriously Went Missing Found Dead Lying Together in Woods Near Home

Travis Peters, a nephew of the couple, mourned Ronnie's death while speaking with KVVU-TV.

"Ronnie no longer being alive in this family is a hole, and its never going to be filled  he's just a bigger-than-life personality," Peters told the outlet, noting that the family is still waiting to find out what happened.

"Thank God that Beverly is alive, because she will be able to fill in those blanks that we don't know. Why did they go up the mountain? What happened?" Peters said. "She's going to be able to tell us."
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The Chinese-funded new Parliament building in Mt Hampden, about 25 km northwest of the capital Harare, is about to complete with the Chinese contractor putting final touches outside the structure, a Cabinet Minister said Tuesday.

Local Government and Public Works Minister July Moyo told media that the contractor, Shanghai Construction Group, was now working on the exterior of the building while the interior had already been fitted with furniture and equipment.

"The inside of the building is complete, they are now finalizing the exterior. After that, we will have validation teams from China this month and next month to work with our local team and then we are sure everything is done," he said.

Clerk of Parliament Kennedy Chokuda said Parliament had since been notified that its new home was almost ready.

"The Ministry of Local Government and Public Works has advised us that the building is done, they are now putting final touches. We are waiting to be advised of the date to move in," he said.

Construction of the new building started in 2018. The new six-storey Parliament building is being constructed by the Chinese government as a gift to Zimbabwe.

The 650-seat building will replace the current 100-seat building that was built during the colonial era which has become small for parliament business and can no longer accommodate the 350 parliamentarians and staff members.
The 2022 MLBB Southeast Asia Cup will be held offline in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from 11 to 19 June. (Photo: MOONTON Games)

Mobile Legends (MLBB) developer MOONTON Games announced on Wednesday (6 April) that this year's MLBB Southeast Asia Cup (MSC) will be held offline in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from 11 to 19 June.

This will mark the first time that Malaysia will host the MSC, with this year's iteration of the regional championship tournament for Southeast Asia featuring 12 teams competing for their cut of a US$300,000 prize pool  twice the pot of last year's edition.

The 12 participating teams will be comprised of the champions and the runners-up of the MLBB Professional Leagues (MPL) in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Cambodia.

Meanwhile, the representatives for Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand will be determined through qualifying tournaments.

Myanmar will have its own tournament while Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand will share the other qualifier.

Should MSC 2022 follow the format of its predecessor, then it will be split into three stages: the Group Stage, the Play-Ins, and the Playoffs.

The Group Stage will see the 12 participating teams split into four groups of three teams each. The top team of each group will be directly seeded to the upper bracket of the Playoffs while the second and third-placed teams will have to earn their spot in the lower bracket through the Play-In stage.

The MSC 2022 Group Draw will be broadcasted on 29 May, with further details on the tournament also being shared during the event.

MSC 2022 will see the tournament's return to offline competition after last year's iteration, which was won by Filipino team Execration, was held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since 2017, the MSC was previously hosted offline in Jakarta, Indonesia and Manila, Philippines.

For more esports news updates, visit https://yhoo.it/YahooEsportsSEA and check out Yahoo Esports Southeast Asias Facebook page and Twitter, as well as our Gaming channel on YouTube.
WASHINGTON  The U.S. has approved another $100 million in Javelin anti-tank weapons for Ukraine from U.S. military stocks, for a total of $1.7 billion in U.S. aid committed since Russias invasion.

I have authorized, pursuant to a delegation from the President earlier today, the immediate drawdown of security assistance valued at up to $100 million to meet Ukraines urgent need for additional anti-armor systems, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement on Tuesday.

Ukraines use of Javelins and anti-aircraft Stinger missiles supplied by the U.S. and its allies has taken center stage in Ukraines fight to repel Russia. U.S. defense officials credit Javelins with blunting Russias armored forces and Stingers with denying Russia air superiority  all while Russias forces are stumbling logistically and cannot link their air and ground power.

The Javelin, the Stingers have proven to be very, very effective in this fight. Weve also learned that just because you have the capability, it doesnt mean that youre going to overwhelm another force easily, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said of Russia during a House Armed Services Committee hearing Tuesday.

The Russians  have significant mechanized capability, but as you look at the techniques and tactics, procedures that they used, they were not very effective, Austin said.

Will Slovakia send Ukraine S-300 air defenses? The Pentagon is working on it.

At the hearing, Air and Land Subcommittee chairman Donald Norcross, D-N.J., asked Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley whether the shipments of U.S. weaponry could be depleting supplies to risky levels.

We have a strategic stockpile that has been formulated based on risk over the years, Norcross said. Are we anywhere close right now to depleting what we need ... for our own protection?

Milley told Norcross the answer is no.

What weve supplied is a wide variety of small arms munitions, machine guns, grenades, grenade launchers, Milley said. Were still meeting our mission requirements for Javelin, so were not breaking any of those red lines.

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Since Congress allotted the Pentagon $3.5 billion to backfill its supplies as part of a $1.5 trillion government spending package signed into law last month, the department has been trying to figure out how to do it.

The U.S. Armys acquisitions and logistics chief, Doug Bush, said at a March 25 Defense News event Javelins are at a high production rate, but they can go higher with industrys help. To replenish stocks for the Javelin and the Stinger, which is in low-rate production primarily for foreign customers, the Pentagon would need to address some supply chain concerns.

Were working through those issues right now, Bush said. Congress provided a large amount of money in the omnibus to help us replenish our stocks, which we greatly appreciate, and we are very close to being ready to inform Congress of our first moves in that direction.

Raytheon Technologies produces Stingers and a Raytheon-Lockheed Martin joint venture makes Javelins.

Norcross told Defense News the issue raises the question of whether to spend money accelerating production on older weapons for Ukraine that the U.S. military isnt using. It also highlights the defense industrial bases broader weaknesses in the area of ammunition and its components.

There is nothing preventing the United States from helping our friends in Ukraine with Stingers and Javelins. We have a strategic reserve of these items, Norcross said: What I also want bring into the conversation is many of those weapons that were talking about are of a design of decades ago. Is it the best use to reengage those lines or to upgrade? How long will that take versus what we need? What might we potentially need for Ukraine or other countries?

The new authorization follows $300 million in aid the Pentagon announced last week it would expedite, and would mark the sixth drawdown of arms, equipment, and supplies from Pentagon inventories for Ukraine since August 2021. An $800 million security package announced March 16 included 800 Stinger and 2,000 Javelin systems.
Dogs were most commonly given up for adoption (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

More than three million households have given up a pet in the last year, according to new figures from the Pet Food Manufacturers Association (PFMA).

The associations annual report finds that while 4.7 million households acquired a new pet during the pandemic, an estimated 3.4 million have given one up since 2021.

Gen Z (those aged between 16 and 24) and millennials (aged between 25 and 34) made up 53 per cent of new pet owners during the pandemic, but they were also most likely to give them up.

More than one fifth (23 per cent) of people in these age groups have been unable to keep a pet, with 71 per cent of all pets given up for adoption belonging to young people.

The most common pets to be given up are dogs (60 per cent) and cats (45 per cent).

Nicole Paley, deputy CEO of PFMA said the numbers are concerning. We are keen to investigate why owners are giving up their pets and where they are being relinquished, Paley said.

We believe that many pets are being sold on to recuperate funds, in addition to being taken to rehoming centres.

We are working closely with the Canine and Feline Sector Group plus other animal welfare charities to identify what the pet care sector can do to support owners and prevent this from happening.

The main reason 1624-year-olds gave up a pet was a change in their living arrangements, with 34 per cent citing this factor.

Just over a fifth (23 per cent) couldnt keep their pet due to financial difficulties, while 22 per cent cited a change in work arrangements.

Some young pet owners also worried about behaviour, with 13 per cent relinquishing a pet for this reason.

In millennials, working (41 per cent) and living arrangements (39 per cent) were the most common reasons they gave up their pets.

Last month, the National Dog Survey, carried out by Dogs Trust, revealed that 23 per cent of dogs currently owned in the UK were acquired during the pandemic.

Dr Samantha Graines, a pet welfare expert at RSPCA said the relinquishment statistics are very worrying but not surprising.

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She said the RSPCA has started to see an increase in requests for help and rehoming, but mostly in rabbits.

Bringing an animal home to join your family is a significant commitment and responsibility and the increase in ownership during the pandemic did cause concerns that some people may not have fully considered whether they would be able to properly care for them for the rest of their life, Graines said.

The charity is concerned that as people return to normal life after the pandemic, coupled with the rising cost of living, it could see the start of a pet welfare crisis.

We understand that circumstances can change and, sometimes, this leaves families having to make the heart-breaking decision to give up their pets, Graines said.

However, we also know that animals are often signed over to charities, rehomed or even abandoned because people took on a pet without the necessary research or appreciation of the responsibility and commitment.

The PFMAs findings, based on a survey of almost 9,000 households across the UK, show that pet ownership overall is on the rise.

As of 2022, there are a record 35 million pets across the UK, with 17.4 million households owning at least one.

The most popular choices are dogs (13 million), followed by cats (12 million) and indoor birds 1.6 million).

Other common choices are hamsters, rabbits, Guinea pigs, pigeons and horses.
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is being sued by the former Dominion Voting Systems employee Eric Coomer. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has been served with another defamation lawsuit.

He was sued by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, whom Lindell once called a "traitor."

Coomer is accusing Lindell and Lindell's Frank Speech platform of "destroying" his life.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has been served with another lawsuit  this time, from Eric Coomer, a former Dominion Voting Systems employee whom Lindell once accused of being a national traitor.

Lawyers for Coomer, who worked as Dominion's director of product strategy and security, filed a court complaint against Lindell on Monday to kick off a defamation case against the pillow CEO and his online platform Frank Speech. Lindell was served with the lawsuit Tuesday at a mini-rally he hosted in Denver.

Coomer alleged in the complaint that his reputation had been "irreparably tarnished" by Lindell and Frank Speech. Coomer added that Lindell had posted "numerous false statements, defamatory interviews, and other dishonest content" maligning him on Frank Speech, along with "a sales pitch for products from MyPillow."

Coomer also said Lindell made claims about him at the pillow CEO's "cyber symposium" in August in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where Lindell spent 72 hours pushing debunked voter-fraud claims.

"Despite Defendants' baseless claims of election fraud being disproven by credible authorities across political parties, they persist in their campaign to profit from the 'Big Lie' by destroying the lives of private individuals like Dr. Coomer," the court filing said. "They have not acknowledged the harm they have caused, nor have they retracted any of their false statements."

The filing added that Coomer received "frequent credible death threats," which Coomer's legal team attributed to "unwarranted distrust" inspired by what the suit called Lindell's "lies."

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Coomer has, separately, brought a defamation lawsuit against the Trump campaign and its allies.

When asked about the lawsuit and the possibility of being sued by more individuals linked to Dominion, Lindell demurred and said people like Coomer were trying to "cancel" his voice.

"MyPillow and Frank Speech didn't do nothing. I don't even know if I've ever mentioned Eric Coomer," Lindell told Insider. "They're trying to cancel Frank Speech, your favorite show!"

Insider found that Lindell did mention Coomer on the Frank Speech platform last year. In September, Lindell appeared on Frank Speech and urged Coomer to surrender to the authorities.

"Eric Coomer, if I were you right now, instead of going over and making deals at Newsmax, if I were you, I'm turning myself in and turning in the whole operation," he said, "so maybe, just maybe, you get immunity and you only get to do, I dunno, 10 to 20 years."

It's unclear what Lindell was referring to, as Coomer wasn't  and still isn't  known to be facing any criminal indictments.

"You're disgusting and you are treasonous. You are a traitor to the United States of America. You know what: I can say that, just like I can about Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger," Lindell said. "These are things I have evidence of. The evidence is there. It's sitting there."

Lindell is facing several other lawsuits. He is being sued by the voting-tech companies Dominion and Smartmatic for pushing baseless election claims. Dominion said in a January court filing that there was no "realistic possibility" of it settling its $1.3 billion lawsuit with Lindell, given the "devastating harm" it said he and other allies of former President Donald Trump caused the company.

Read the original article on Business Insider
FREEHOLD - An 18-year-old Neptune man was arrested in Brick Tuesday morning in connection with a March 20 shooting in Asbury Park

Kenneth R. Bronson is charged with attempted murder and two related weapons offenses.

Police went to the 100 block of Langford Street in Asbury Park shortly after 6 p.m. on March 20, a Sunday, on the report of a shooting.

The officers found the shooting victim, who was rushed to Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune.

According to an affidavit of probable cause in the case, the victim was shot in the front of the head in a way that caused significant damage to his left eye, Asbury Park Police Detective Terrance McGhee wrote in the affidavit.

"It was expected by medical personnel that he would require surgery and would likely lose his left eye," McGhee said.

Witnesses told the detective the shooter went by the name RD or Rundown, which investigators learned was Bronson's nickname, according to the affidavit. One of the witnesses said Bronson shot the victim with a semi-automatic handgun with an extended magazine from the back seat of a gray Scion.

Those witnesses also picked out Bronson from a photo array. Surveillance video showed the shooting from both ends of Langford Street and included footage of the shooter leaning out of the car, McGhee said.

Through that and other evidence, investigators identified Bronson as the shooter, according to the affidavit.

Barnegat shooting mystery: 13-year-old realizes hes just been hit while alone in park

Bronson was arrested without incident by investigators from the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office and members of the U.S. Marshals Service.

Bronson is being held at Monmouth County Jail while he awaits a detention hearing.

If there's a conviction, the attempted murder charge carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison; the two weapons offenses, 10 years each.

There was no information available on whether Bronson has an attorney.

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Cold cases: Toms River murders from 1974 still open, 'top priority' for investigators

The prosecutor's office is urging anyone with information about the crime to contact Detective McGhee at 732-774-1300 or Detective Matthew Delgado of the prosecutor's office at 800-533-7443.

Ken Serrano covers crime, breaking news, investigations and local issues. Reach him at kserrano@gannettnj.com.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Asbury Park shooting: Neptune NJ man arrested, charged
News brief logo

Vietnam Veterans to be honored Saturday

FREMONT  A Vietnam Veterans Welcome Home Ceremony will be held at 11 .m. Saturday at the Sandusky County Courthouse. The event will be followed by a free lunch at the VFW Post 2947 for all Vietnam Veterans.

Bay Shore Road to be closed April 11 to 15

OAK HARBOR  The Ottawa County Sanitary Engineer's Office will work on a project along Bay Shore Road. The work will require the closure of Bay Shore Road between Church Road and Englebeck Road. No through traffic will be permitted April 11-15.

Changes to schedules will be announced as available. For details, contact Justen Kosmowski with Poggemeyer Design Group at 419-352-7537.

Women's Connection meeting is April 12

FREMONT  Fremont Area Womens Connection will meet 11 a.m.-1 p.m. April 12 at The Victor Event Center, 2270 Hayes Ave. (formerly Anjulinas).

The program is titled Theres No Place Like Home. Present will be Jim Posey, director, and some cast members of the upcoming musical at Fremont Community Theatre, The Wizard of Oz."

Guest speaker is Shirley Davidson from Mansfield, who will share her story of The Unforgettable Memories of the Girl Who Can and the Woman Who Cant.

Cost of the luncheon is $14 and reservations are needed by Friday by calling or texting Donna at 419-680-2251 or emailing Carrol at fawcluncheon@gmail.com. Reservations as well as any cancellations must be reported in the same way.

Joyful Connections nominated for Levenback award

OAK HARBOR  Joyful Connections, Ottawa Countys Source for supervised visitation and exchanges, is one of just five providers worldwide nominated for The Hedi Levenback Supervised Visitation Provider of the Year Award. The members of the Supervised Visitation Network (SVN) nominates and selects a winner from within the network.

The recipient is recognized for demonstration of exceptional skills in the delivery and implementation of a supervised visitation program, commitment to the SVN Standards, engagement in SVN activities, and achieved program excellence and innovation within their own program and community. This award is named in honor of one of SVN's early Board Members, Hedi Levenback.

The winning individual or program will be honored at the 2022 SVN Annual Conference that will be held in Orlando, Florida.

This article originally appeared on Fremont News-Messenger: News Briefs: Vietnam Veterans to be honored Saturday
A Minneapolis police officer who fatally shot Amir Locke during a SWAT raid in February will not face charges, the Hennepin County attorney announced Wednesday, finding his actions were justified.

The family of the 22-year-old man ripped the decision.

Lockes mother, Karen Wells, speaking at the National Action Network conference on a panel on police reform Wednesday, said she was disgusted with Minneapolis.

This country is still a disappointment in 2022, she said at the New York event. We have rights. We vote. We carry legal firearms, and yall still think that we dont matter. Amir is more than a hashtag. Were going to continue the fight for the no-knock warrant bans, she said.

On Feb. 2, SWAT team members served a no-knock warrant on the Bolero Flats apartment in connection to the fatal shooting of Otis Elder the previous month. Body camera footage shows an officer use a key to unlock the door of the apartment, rented by the brother of 17-year-old murder suspect Mekhi Camden Speed, Lockes cousin.

As the officers shouted police and search warrant, Locke, who was asleep on the couch, awoke and grabbed his gun.

Thats when Officer Mark Hanneman shot him three times, twice in the chest and once in the wrist. Locke was pronounced dead at the hospital.

The incident lasted just 10 seconds.

The initial press release from the Minneapolis Police Department described Locke as a suspect, even though he was not named on the search warrant.

Amir Lockes life mattered. He was a young man with plans to move to Dallas, where he would be closer to his mom and  he hoped  build a career as a hip-hop artist, following in the musical footsteps of his father, Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said in a joint statement.

He should be alive today, and his death is a tragedy.

But, they said, the state would have been unable to prove that Hannemans use of deadly force was out of line.

Story continues

Instead, Lockes gun posed a specifically articulable threat that Hanneman perceived as a threat of death or great bodily harm that was reasonably likely to occur and to which the officers had to respond without delay.

The decision to not press charges was strictly about the use of deadly force, not the use of a no-knock warrant, Freeman and Ellison asserted.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey banned no-knock warrants Tuesday night, barely 12 hours before the announcement of no charges.

Starting Friday, officers must repeatedly knock and announce their presence and purpose, then wait 20 seconds before entering the premises, according to the new policy. Between 8 p.m. and 7 a.m., the waiting period stretches to 30 seconds. The ban makes an exception for exigent circumstances, such as the risk of imminent harm or imminent destruction or removal of evidence.

Body cameras must be worn and activated and a supervisor must be present for all planned search warrant executions.

Any time law enforcement interacts with the public, all parties should be able to go home safely, Freeman and Ellison said in their statement Wednesday. No-knock warrants are highly risky and pose significant dangers to both law enforcement and the public, including to individuals who are not involved in any criminal activity.

Wells and Lockes father, Andre Locke, have called for criminal consequences and blamed the officers for not deescalating the situation.

Andre Locke also said his son had gotten the gun because he was working as a DoorDash driver and was scared about a recent spate of carjackings. The gun was licensed, he said.

On Wednesday in Harlem, the still-grieving mother noted shes from Omaha, Neb., where Malcolm X grew up.

Like he said with the infamous words, the chickens are coming home to roost  in Minneapolis, the United States should be prepared for all the chickens coming home to roost, Wells said.

Im here for Amir. And Im here to fight till my last breath.
Pandemic school closures, the economic downturn and budget cuts took a toll on school arts programming in New York City, and more dedicated funding is needed to right the ship, educators and advocates argue.

Its long been a challenge to bring rich arts programming to all of the citys nearly million public-school children. That challenge was exacerbated the past two years with shuttered schools, lean budgets, and the devastating impact COVID-19 had on arts nonprofits that partner with public schools, advocates say.

I think we saw at the beginning of the pandemic that an entire industry was decimated, said Kim Olsen, the executive director of Arts in Education Roundtable, a membership group of teaching artists and nonprofits that work with city schools.

At the same time, Olsen said, the arts served a critical role as an outlet for young people grappling with the psychological effects of the pandemic  with students and educators finding resourceful ways to do creative work even without in-person classes.

Now, with schools back in-person and the budget flush with new state and federal funds, advocates and City Council members are calling for a permanent increase in school arts funding. That includes an additional $21 per student to pay for teachers, a pledge to continue spending federal moneys on the arts, and the restoration of a $24 million city Education Department program that was slashed during the pandemic.

Currently, city public schools get $79 per student from the Education Department to support arts programming  which works out to roughly $65 million. The money can be used to pay the salaries of art teachers or buy supplies, but is spent largely at the discretion of principals, which means the level of arts offerings can vary significantly from school to school, advocates say.

I have been at schools where theres nothing, said Maria Cramer, a veteran teaching artist who works with city public school students.

During the 2018-19 school year, the Education Department reported that only 34% of middle school students met the state Education Department requirement of graduating eighth-graders having taken courses in at least two different arts disciplines taught by a certified art teacher. An Education Department survey that year revealed that 67% of city principals said their arts funding was insufficient.

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Advocates are calling for an increase to $100 spent per student in this years budget, along with a requirement for principals to spend the money on the arts. That proposal is also included in the City Councils most recent budget request.

Advocates applauded the Education Departments decision last September to dedicate 20% of a massive, $350 million pot of federal stimulus money to arts programming. The money cant be used to hire staff since its a one-time distribution, but it can be used to fund partnerships with outside organizations, buy supplies and pay teachers overtime for extracurricular activities or training.

An Education Department spokeswoman said the agency devoted a total of more than $400 million to the arts last school year.

Olsen said the federal stimulus money has been a huge boost for arts programs, helping revive partnerships that laid dormant for two years during the pandemic and breathing life back into the battered industry of teaching artists that rely on city schools for work and funding.

Advocates and Council members are calling on the Education Department to commit to allocating a portion of the $1.3 billion in federal stimulus funds its scheduled to spend next school year to the arts.

Education Department spokeswoman Jenna Lyle said as we emerge from the pandemic, the arts are a critically important outlet of expression, connection and healing for our young people. We look forward to working with our partners in the City Council as we continue to prioritize arts education across all NYC zip codes.
You are here: World

 Flash

The ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) lost parliament majority as 42 members of parliament (MPs) on Tuesday announced they would sit independently.

Among the 42 MPs, 14 are from Sri Lanka Freedom Party, 10 belong to constituent parties of the government, and 12 are SLPP MPs, among others.

The ruling SLPP-led alliance won 146 seats in the 225-member parliament in the 2020 general election.
Its not an exaggeration to say that most of what I know about Ukraine I have learned in the last six weeks, since Vladimir Putin invaded that country. Friends who have been to Ukraine tell me how beautiful it is. Photos show rolling wheat fields and glorious architecture in its cities; five of which have populations exceeding a million people.

The CIAs World Fact Book is a good information source on countries. In spite of the fact that Ukraine had become a major economic player in the region, it is not a wealthy country. In terms of real GDP per capita, Ukraine ranks No. 121 in the world ($12,400). For comparison purposes, Russia ranks No. 72 ($26,500) and the USA No. 17 ($60,200).

Ron McAllister

When Kyiv (a city larger than Chicago) was attacked, whatever economic progress Ukraine had made since independence (1991) was staunched. The United Nations reports that as many as four million of the countrys 43 million people have left. The scale of such emigration is equivalent to forcing the entire population of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and northeast Massachusetts to leave.

The fog of war always makes it difficult to understand what is happening on the ground in a conflict. Add to that the propaganda, bias and political partisanship that characterizes many news sources and you see how hard it is to know whats actually going on. You read that Putin sees himself as the new Stalin, dedicated to restoring the former glory of the Soviet Union; that he overestimated the might of his army and/or underestimated the resistance his troops would face; that he did not foresee the impact of the Wests economic sanctions.

The Observer: Social justice, parental rights and public education

Is all of this true? I dont know. What I do know is that it is never smart to underestimate Putins intelligence (or his capacity for malice). The mans career was built on deception, spy-ops and brutality which he learned in the KGB. Many in the West are happy to see his misadventure go badly and hope that his hubris and malevolence will bring him down.

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They hope for a coup detat or a lasting peace agreement that will lead to a change of leadership in Russia. Each scenario is hard to imagine. Autocrats like Putin have tremendous staying power and have no interest in compromise.

Many welcome the courageous leadership of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the 44-year-old entertainer and politician who has been in the trenches (literally) inspiring his own people as well as nations across the world. Lights on for Ukraine.

At the same time, there are disquieting reports of white nationalists infiltrating the ranks of Ukraines fighters; worrying stories of mercenaries from Syria joining the fight on behalf of the Russian occupation; fears that the NATO alliance will fray. We hear that chemical weapons and battlefield nuclear weapons could be deployed by the Russians. It is easy to imagine a wider conflict that would spread to other former republics of the USSR, and we worry that we are seeing the opening front of the next World War.

Its gotten to the point where I hesitate before looking at the news in the morning. It used to be the first thing I did. Now I dont want to know what happened while I slept. This is the world we live in now; Ukraine always on our minds.

Column: The true signs that spring is here

We see people hunkering down in bomb shelters as their homes and businesses are destroyed from above. We see dead non-combatants in the streets of Bucha. Parents trying to get their children out of harms way by any means possible. It is reminiscent of London during the blitz of 1940-41.

You might think: its 4,400 miles away, too far to implicate my life. Really? Im no military historian but I do know that wars are hard to contain and rarely follow to plan. The knock-on effects of Ukraine are unpredictable and potentially far-reaching.

We see the price of gasoline rising here and the stock markets sloping. We also hear criticisms of President Biden as being too soft (or too aggressive), too old-school (or too old) to be effective. Such concerns must be set aside. We cannot be Democrats or Republicans. We are all Ukrainian now.

Lets pull together on this international catastrophe as if our lives depended on it. Because they just might.

Ron McAllister is a sociologist and writer who lives in York.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: The Observer: We all are Ukrainian now
By David Gaffen

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Oil futures fell sharply on Wednesday after large consuming nations said they would release oil from reserves to counter tightening supply and hawkish minutes from the U.S. central bank that bolstered the dollar.

Selling accelerated into the close, leaving both the Brent and West Texas Intermediate benchmarks at their lowest closing levels since March 16. Brent crude futures settled down $5.57, or 5.2%, at $101.07 a barrel, while U.S. crude fell $5.73, or 5.6%, to $96.23 a barrel.

Member states of the International Energy Agency (IEA) will release 120 million barrels from strategic reserves to try to quell price gains. The release will include 60 million from the United States, according to two sources familiar with the matter. That commitment forms part of the previous U.S. announcement of a 180 million-barrel reserve release.

This is the second time the IEA has released reserves this year and effectively boosts worldwide supply by roughly 2 million barrels a day for at least the next two months as the world tries to overcome the potential loss of Russian oil. The group collectively has about 1.5 billion barrels in strategic reserves.

Crude markets have been through weeks of volatility, with prices surging on supply concerns after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctions on Moscow by the United States and its allies.

Lately the market has been pulling back following reserve releases along with worries of slowing demand in China, where a resurgent pandemic has prompted lockdowns of cities including Shanghai. Chinese refiners of late are avoiding new contracts with Russia, suggesting Beijing is being cautious not to overtly support Moscow at this time.

The U.S. Federal Reserve minutes, meanwhile, detailed that the U.S. central bank was planning to raise rates by 50 basis points at its most recent meeting, but opted for a smaller hike due to the war in Ukraine.

The minutes suggest a hawkish approach for the Fed as it tries to curb inflation, which boosted the U.S. dollar. Oil often moves in the opposite direction to the dollar because most oil transactions are conducted in the U.S. currency.

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"This market mostly appears to be reacting around the Fed comments and the EIA storage report," said Gary Cunningham, director of market research at Tradition Energy. The Fed has "given some strength to the dollar and that's being reflected in lower oil prices."

U.S. crude stocks rose by 2.4 million barrels in the latest week, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said, while analysts had expected a drawdown. Output also rose, hitting 11.8 million barrels a day, the most since late 2021, and output is expected to continue rising. The United States also released nearly 4 million barrels from its strategic reserve in the week.

"The SPR release was huge which does raise confidence that they can move a lot out of the reserve on a weekly basis," said Phil Flynn, senior analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago.

The United States and allies on Wednesday prepared new sanctions on Moscow over civilian killings in Ukraine, which President Volodymyr Zelenskiy described as "war crimes." Russia denied targeting civilians.

The 27 member states will decide whether to approve proposed EU sanctions that would ban buying Russian coal and prevent Russian ships from entering EU ports.

The head of the EU's executive, Ursula von der Leyen, said the bloc was working on additional sanctions, including on oil imports.

(Reporting by Noah Browning and Yuka ObayashiEditing by Richard Pullin, Mark Potter and David Gregorio)
Oscar-nominated Syrian filmmaker Talal Derki (Of Fathers and Sons) is developing an epic fantasy series set in ancient Mesopotamia that marks the acclaimed documentarians first foray into episodic content.

Shemesh Kingdom takes place in the cradle of civilization five thousand years ago, where a prophecy foretells a great catastrophe that will wipe mankind from the face of the Earth. Only one nation will survive, led by a chosen man  the Master of the Crossing  who will usher them into the eternal Kingdom of Shemesh.

More from Variety

Derki, who is planning four seasons of the English-language series, described Shemesh Kingdom as new blood for audiences, adding: Its a different point of view about this type of fantasy [series].

The series begins at a time of peace between the three kingdoms that rule over the ancient world: the kingdom of the East, Gergana; of the West, Lukiana; and of Middle Earth, Azaria. These three civilizations were built by the descendants of Ottonebeshtem, the second father of humanity who saved it from the Great Flood.

Season 1 takes place in the Middle Kingdom, as a horrified shepherd enters the city of Uruk  the greatest metropolis of its time  with a warning to the gathering crowd: the Master of Evil, a demon recognized by his telltale stigmata, has appeared in the kingdom, signalling that the end times are near.

The shepherds warning triggers unrest in the once peaceful city, setting the storyline in motion. Season 1 will follow Gemish  the king of kings of his era, and the first engineer of human civilization  as he grapples with the consequences of this prophecy for his kingdom. A second storyline revolves around the conflict between Gemish and the Queen of the West, Armin, a power struggle that dates back to a romance between the two leaders that was dashed by a betrayal, setting off a series of wars between the great civilizations.

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[Shemesh Kingdom] is about doomsday and the end of the world, and the first fight between nations in the ancient world, Derki told Variety. The series draws on historical sources to provide a map of ancient Mesopotamia and is inspired by religious texts about the end of days, as well as the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is widely considered to be the first written text on earth.

The series, however, is a work of imagination that its creator believes will strike a chord. Its really something unusual. People get tired of [shows] based on Christianity or the Vikings. All the culture, all the background, all the atmosphere [of this] is totally new, said Derki. Its not ancient Egypt, its not ancient Greece. Nobody has seen it in a series. Its a new culture thats never been filmed before.

A story bible for Season 1 has been written by Heba Khaled, who is currently developing her feature directorial debut, Azel, with Derki attached to produce. The psychological horror is set in a conservative household in 1930s Damascus and centers on an honor killing. Principal photography is expected to begin this summer.

Derki is also in the editing room with A Song for Summer and Winter, the last film in his acclaimed Syrian war trilogy that includes Return to Homs, a ground-level look at the Syrian civil war which won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014, and Of Fathers and Sons, a portrait of a radical close-knit Islamist family which won the same prize at Sundance in 2018 and was nominated for an Academy Award.

The director is also developing a top-secret documentary, Hollywood Gate, whose details are being kept under wraps.

Best of Variety

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Click here to read the full article.
The U.S. has seen Russian forces completely withdraw from areas around Kyiv and Chernihiv to regroup in Belarus and Russia, a senior U.S. defense official said Wednesday.

We are not showing Russian forces in or around Kyiv or to the north of Kyiv, and were not showing Russian forces in or around Chernihiv, the official told reporters.

We have now seen that the Russians have moved from the north into Belarus and to Russia for refit and resupply. We have seen indications that that refit and resupply is occurring, the official added.

Russian forces are pulling back from positions across Ukraine as Moscow looks to regroup following what now appears to be a bungled invasion of the country beginning Feb. 24.

Beginning in late March, Russian President Vladimir Putin seemed to shift his plans from an invasion meant to topple Kyiv to an offensive focused in the Donbas in the east. The move follows the Kremlins struggle to take the capital city and other major metropolitan areas after being met with fierce Ukrainian forces armed with Western-provided weapons.

The Kremlin troops continue to shell major cities as they make their withdrawal and have launched more than 1,450 missiles against Ukraine since the invasion began, the official said.

But the official said that we are assessing that they have completely withdrawn from Kyiv and from Chernihiv.

There have also been reports and images of atrocities as Russian forces vacate formerly held areas, including Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv.

The U.S. does not yet have investigators on the ground to document what President Biden has called war crimes, but the apparent murders of civilians appear to be premeditated, planned and very, very deliberate, the official said.

But its difficult to know what more motivation was behind this  whether it was an  attempt or not, clearly a message was sent to the world of Russias brutality, the official said.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
 Flash

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Armenian counterpart, Vahagn Khachaturyan, exchanged on Wednesday congratulations on the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

In his congratulatory message, Xi said that China and Armenia are traditional friendly partners, and since the establishment of their diplomatic ties 30 years ago, bilateral ties have maintained sound and stable momentum for development with political mutual trust deepened, substantial progress made in various areas of cooperations, and cultural and people-to-people exchanges increasingly closer.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the two peoples have helped each other and joined hands in their anti-pandemic fight, epitomizing their profound friendship, he said.

Xi said he attaches great importance to the development of China-Armenia relations, and stands ready to work with President Khachaturyan to take the 30th anniversary of diplomatic ties as an opportunity to push for more achievements in bilateral relations and all-round cooperation so as to benefit the two countries and their people.

In his message, Khachaturyan said that since the establishment of their diplomatic ties 30 years ago, Armenia and China have seen their cooperation in various areas yield great results and the Armenian side attaches great importance to China's development and progress, as well as its role on the world stage.

He said he would like to work with Xi to achieve sustained and stable development in friendly cooperative relations between Armenia and China for the benefit of their people.
UDPATE: Jordan Boyd was found safe, according to Pittsburgh Police.

Pittsburgh police SVU Detectives are asking for the publics help to find a missing 13-year-old.

Jordan Boyd was last seen in Observatory Hill around 6 p.m. on Saturday, according to police.

Police said Boyd is 5 feet, 8 inches tall, 160 pounds with brown eyes and black hair.

According to police, he may be wearing black clothes and a blue jacket.

Boyd reportedly may be in the North Side or Homestead areas.

If you have any information on his whereabouts, call 412-323-7141.

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Minneapolis Police officers are seen carrying out a no-knock search warrant on February 2 that resulted in the death of 22-year-old Amir Locke. City of Minneapolis

The officer who killed Amir Locke in a no-knock raid will not face charges, the state AG announced.

New details about the killing emerged in an AG report released this week.

Statements made by officer who killed Locke didn't line up with the released body camera footage.

Criminal charges will not be filed against Minneapolis police officers in the fatal shooting of Amir Locke, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office said in a joint statement on Wednesday.

There was "insufficient admissible evidence to file criminal charges," the statement said.

The statement said prosecutors "would be unable to disprove beyond a reasonable doubt any of the elements of Minnesota's use-of-deadly-force statute that authorizes the use of force."

Locke was shot by a SWAT member with the Minneapolis Police Department in February while officers were performing a no-knock search warrant related to a St. Paul homicide. He was pronounced dead from gunshot wounds at a nearby hospital.

Police at the time said Locke was not the target of the warrant.

The Minneapolis PD release a still from the bodycam footage, showing Locke holding a gun before he was shot. Minneapolis Police Department

Shot 13 seconds after police arrived

Police arrived at the Minneapolis apartment in the early hours of February 2 and yelled "search warrant," as they entered, according to police body camera video.

Video shows that as officers enter the living room, Locke is seen getting off the couch, where he had been lying under a blanket. About 13 seconds into the video, three shots are fired at Locke, who falls to the ground.

Minneapolis police officials said that Locke was holding a handgun as he got off the couch, and they recovered it at the scene.

The officer who fired the fatal shots was identified as Mark Hanneman. Locke was shot twice in the chest and once in the wrist, according to a fire department incident report.

New details emerge

A report from Ellison and the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office released this week includes excerpts from a written statement from Hanneman after the shooting.

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Hanneman told investigators in his first statement that Locke fell to the floor after another officer kicked the couch that he was on. Hanneman told investigators that when Locke fell, he saw Locke pointing a gun at him from under the blanket.

In the body camera footage, though, Locke only appeared to sit-up briefly before he was shot.

"I was convinced that the individual was going to fire their handgun and that I would suffer great bodily harm or death. I felt in this moment that if I did not use deadly force myself, I would likely be killed," Hanneman wrote in the first statement, according to the report. "There was no opportunity for me to reposition myself or retreat. There was no way for me to de-escalate this situation. The threat to my life and the lives of my teammates was imminent and terrifying."

Hanneman wasn't the only officer on scene who's initial statements didn't seem to line up with the body camera footage that was later released.

According to the report, Sgt. John Sysaath said in a written statement that Locke was engaged in "evasive movements" and didn't comply with verbal commands before being shot.

Another SWAT member, Sgt. Troy Carlson, said he told Locke to "show his hands," but he went back under the blanket and was "vigorously moving around," the report said.

Carlson told investigators that he had seen the body-camera footage before he made his statement, and it had "altered his perception" of what happened, according to the report.

At first he believed that there was a "physical struggle" before the shooting, but after seeing the footage he realized it was likely the "overall commotion at the scene," according to the report.

"He should be alive today, and his death is a tragedy," Ellison and the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office said in their statement. "Amir Locke was not a suspect in the underlying Saint Paul criminal investigation nor was he named in the search warrants. Amir Locke is a victim. This tragedy may not have occurred absent the no-knock warrant used in this case."

Demonstrators hold a "Say His Name" sign during a rally in protest of the killing of Amir Locke, outside the Police precinct in Minneapolis, Minnesota on February 5, 2022 Kerem Yucel / Getty Images

No knock raids still an issue in Minneapolis

The May 2020 killing of George Floyd by then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin ignited nationwide calls for police reform.

In Minneapolis, the calls have been especially loud.

In the aftermath of Floyd's killing  and the Louisville killing of Breonna Taylor  Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey instituted a policy change that was intended to make it more difficult for police to execute no-knock warrants, but it wasn't an outright ban, as it allowed unannounced entry in a variety of circumstances.

On March 14, Frey announced another policy intended to ban the use of no-knock warrants.

This one prohibits the application for and execution of all no-knock warrants in the city, and by MPD officers requested to help in cases involving these warrants in other jurisdictions.

The policy also requires that officers serving search warrants now knock a minimum of 20 seconds during the day or 30 seconds at night before entering.

However, if there are "exigent circumstances present that indicate imminent harm to a person" officers can enter sooner, the policy says.

Read the original article on Insider
Apr. 6Butler County Prosecutor Michael Gmoser reviewed what he called "important segments" that led to Monroe police officers fatally shooting a Monroe man in February.

Gmoser met with the media for nearly an hour Tuesday to discuss the events of Feb. 11 when five officers fired 13 shots and killed Dustin Booth, 35, who was experiencing mental health issues near Garver Road and Ohio 63, Gmoser said.

The officers  Sgt. Caleb Payne, Officer Michael Doughman, Officer Skylar Halsey, Officer Micah Day and Officer Austin Whitt  were placed on paid administrative leave pending the investigation from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation. After a Butler County grand jury recently failed to indict the officers, attorney Konrad Kircher, who is representing Booth's family, told the Journal-News a federal lawsuit will be filed against the officers and the department.

"The grand jury outcome was not justice," Kircher said. "The family will now seek justice in federal court."

In another interview, Kircher claimed that Gmoser may have shown bias in the case.

Gmoser said 11 years ago when he was hired as prosecutor he made the decision to handle all police-involved shootings. He said he never has received any financial support from police agencies so any claims that he has bias are false. He believes the best practice is for the BCI to immediately be notified following a police-involved shooting, then the case should be handled by that county's prosecutor.

He said video evidence shows that Booth pointed a fully-loaded 45-caliber pistol at the five officers and they immediately and simultaneously returned fire.

When Booth pointed his weapon, Gmoser said, the officers had "no time" for crisis intervention, or psychiatric evaluation, or which officer should shoot first, or should the officers shoot at all.

Because of Booth's actions, he either was going to get shot or he was going to possibly shoot the officers, according to Gmoser.

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"Those are the five seconds that count as far as criminality is concerned," he said.

So, he said, the issue of reasonableness was satisfied.

Before the shooting, Gmoser said there was a two-minute, 40-second sequence after Booth exited the car. As Booth raised his arms and walked away from officers, he refused to obey commands to stop, Gmoser said. A Monroe K-9 officer released his dog that leaped at Booth's arm, then circled away.

That's when the officer unsuccessfully tried to take "physical custody" of Booth.

Booth was the father of two sons. His family said he was a great husband and father and coached the boys in multiple youth sports leagues, according to the statement from the attorney. Booth worked for AK Steel/Cleveland Cliffs for 13 years and he had a side business power washing and cleaning the exterior of homes.

------

More online

Read the whole story about what happened between Monroe police and Dustin Booth.

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Fans are taken back after noticing how much Tia Mowrys 3-year-old daughter, Cairo, looks like her uncle, Tahj Mowry. The Family Reunion star flaunted their resemblance by sharing a collage of photos and videos on Instagram Tuesday, April 5.

Cairo and Tahj Mowry are similar in more ways than I can count. Dont you guys see the crazy resemblance between them? she wrote in the caption.

Tia Mowry fans adore the resemblance between the actress younger brother, Tahj Mowry, and her 3-year-old daughter, Cairo. (Photo: @tiamowry/Instagram.)

Many mentioned how cute Cairo and Tahj both looked, calling the uncle-niece duo twins.

This whole post has me DEADT. You really birthed Tahj all over again.

Did you hate him during your pregnancy? Lol cause baby girl looking like your niece instead of his.

Yes, they are definitely twins





I knew she looked like someeeeebody! Its her unc lol.

Omg yessss. You pushed her out but that definitely Tajs offspring.

The Mowrys have strong genes.

To show off their resemblance, Tia Mowry shared baby photos of her younger brother, Tahj Mowry (R), and her 3-year-old daughter, Cairo (L). (Photo: @tiamowry/Instagram.)

Fans agreed that Cairo favored her 35-year-old uncle. One person said, Oh wow, yess! I never noticed until now how much she looks like Unc Unc awwwwww











.

Many couldnt take their eyes off Cairos face, including one who said, Cairos face expressions take me out







. The sixth clip Tia shared is a video of Cairo appearing to give someone the side-eye. She had the same look her uncle Tahj had on his face during a scene from his hit series Smart Guy.

#OnThisDay: In 1997, Smart Guy premiered on The WB starring Tahj Mowry and Jason Weaver. pic.twitter.com/OQXKc3eTsM  NewsOne (@newsone) March 26, 2022

One person wrote, The 6th slide shes a whole mood! Another said, Definitely uncles twin. Still, fans couldnt help but give the final credit to Cairos mom and dad.

A fan wrote, Cairo & Tahj look alike but Cory. Theres some Tia in there too.

The side-eye is killing me, but yes! She looks so much like Tahj and Corey at the same time, added another.

Tia shares her daughter Cairo with her husband, Cory Hardrict. The couple, who also share a 10-year-old son, Cree, will celebrate their 14th wedding anniversary later this month, on April 20.
 Flash

The United States, Britain and Australia announced Tuesday that they will cooperate on developing hypersonic missiles.

In a joint statement issued after conducting a review of the trilateral defense cooperation, U.S. President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said they "committed today to commence new trilateral cooperation on hypersonics and counter-hypersonics, and electronic warfare capabilities, as well as to expand information sharing and to deepen cooperation on defense innovation."

The leaders of the three nations, which formed a security alliance known as AUKUS in September 2021, said the newly announced areas of cooperation "will add to our existing efforts to deepen cooperation on cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and additional undersea capabilities."

When the three nations announced the creation of AUKUS, under which the United States and Britain promised to arm Australia with nuclear-powered submarines, France considered it "a stab in the back," because Canberra abruptly abandoned a conventionally powered submarine deal with Paris without prior notice.

In addition, AUKUS also created fears about arms race among great powers that will destabilize the Southeast Asian region.

Shortly after the establishment of the alliance, the Indonesian Foreign Ministry said it was "deeply concerned about the continuing arms race and power projection in the region."

Around the same time, Malaysian Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob said the nuclear-powered submarine project could "provoke other powers to take more aggressive action in this region."
WASHINGTON  President Joe Biden's administration imposed sweeping new economic sanctions Wednesday on Russia that include targeting President Vladimir Putins two adult daughters in response to atrocities in Ukraine that the White House called war crimes.

Maria Vorontsova and Katerina Tikhonova, daughters of Putin and his ex-wife, Lyudmila Shkrebneva Putina, face sanctions that will cut them off from the U.S. financial system and freeze any assets they may hold in the USA.

The new round of sanctions, which bans U.S. investment in Russia and hits Russia's largest bank and financial institution, follows disturbing reports and images of civilian deaths in the Ukrainian town of Bucha near the capital of Kyiv. The moves continue Biden's strategy of steadily ramping up sanctions as Russia's war in Ukraine escalates.

"There's nothing less happening than major war crimes," Biden said Wednesday, describing scenes of bodies left in the streets of Bucha, including civilians executed with their hands tied behind their heads.

Responsible nations have to come together to hold these perpetrators accountable. And together with our allies and our partners, were going to keep raising the economic costs and ratchet up the pain for Putin, and further increase Russias economic isolation," Biden said during his address to labor union members in Washington gathered for the North Americas Building Trades Unions Legislative Conference.

Responsible nations have to come together to hold these perpetrators accountable" for war crimes in Ukraine, President Joe Biden tells the North America's Building Trades Unions (NABTU) conference in Washington on April 6.

The sanctions were made in coordination with the Group of Seven nations and European Union allies, which were likely to take similar sanctions.

U.S. authorities suspect many of Putins assets are hidden with family members. Vorontsova leads state-funded programs focused on genetics research that are personally overseen by Putin, and Tikhonova is a tech executive whose work supports the Russia defense industry. The sanctions also target the wife and daughter of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

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'The new Auschwitz': Mariupol mayor says more than 5,000 civilians have died in Russian siege. Live Ukraine updates.

Twenty-one members of the Russian Security Council and other Putin associates have been sanctioned, in addition to the 140 oligarchs and Kremlin officials  including Putin and Lavrov  targeted since Russia invaded Ukraine. Dmitry Medvedev, former president and prime minister of Russia, and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin are among the newly sanctioned elites.

"Think about the incredible amounts of money these oligarchs have stolen," Biden said, adding that they won't be able to keep their "$100 million yachts" and luxury homes "while children in Ukraine are being killed, displaced from their homes every single day."

Maria Vorontsova is one of two Putin daughters hit with U.S. sanctions in response to Russia's war in Ukraine. She is a leading researcher at the National Medical Research Center for Endocrinology of the Russian Health Ministry and member of the Presidium of the Russian Association for the Promotion of Science.

LIVE UPDATES: US sanctions target Putin's daughters; Russians retreat from Kyiv; Dutch seize 14 Russian yachts

The Biden administration is imposing sanctions on Russias largest financial institution, Sberbank, 42 of its subsidiaries and Russias largest private bank, Alfa Bank, and six of its subsidiaries. The White House called the moves the most severe financial sanctions the United States can take on these entities. Biden banned the U.S. import of all Russian energy products last month.

The actions will freeze any of Sberbank's and Alfa Bank's assets touching the U.S. financial system and prohibit Americans from doing business with either. Sberbank holds nearly one-third of the overall Russian banking sectors assets, and Alfa Bank is Russias fourth-largest financial institution.

Biden signed an executive order that will prohibit investment in Russia by U.S. citizens  regardless where they live  in a bid to further isolate Russia from the global economy. More than 600 multinational companies have removed business operations or investment out of Russia.

Biden said the investment ban will ensure "new money can't come into Russia to replace what's left."

Other sanctions prohibit Russia from making debt payments with funds subject to U.S. jurisdiction, a move White House press secretary Jen Psaki said presents Putin with a difficult "choice" between draining Russia's limited funds or default.

Psaki said the sanctions are designed to make it more difficult for Putin to fund the war in Ukraine, "and we're seeing the direct impacts of that already."

In coordination with the U.S. actions, the United Kingdom announced a full asset freeze against Sberbank and Credit Bank of Moscow, a ban on Russia investment and targeted investments on eight Russian oligarchs and Putin associates.

US indicts Russian oligarch for sanction violations

The actions come amid revelations into atrocities committed against Ukrainian citizens.

Vadym Boychenko, mayor of the encircled eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, said more than 5,000 civilians, including 210 children, have been killed during the monthlong Russian siege. He said Russian forces bombed hospitals, including one where 50 people burned to death, and destroyed more than 90% of the southern port citys infrastructure.

"The world has not seen the scale of the tragedy in Mariupol since the existence of the Nazi concentration camps. Russia-occupation forces turned our entire city into a death camp," Boychenko said, according to the Ukrainian news agency Interfax. "This is the new Auschwitz and Majdanek."

Biden touted the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions on Russia, pointing to projections that Russias gross domestic product will shrink by double-digits this year. He said sanctions wiped out the last 15 years of Russias economic gains and cut off the country from importing critical technology such as semiconductors.

Were going to stifle Russias ability to grow its economy for years to come, Biden said.

The Justice Department took separate actions Wednesday aimed at a top Russian oligarch, unsealing an indictment against Konstantinos Malofeyev for alleged sanction violations. The Treasury Department identified Malofeyev as one of the main sources of financing for Russians promoting separatism in Crimea and for providing material support for the so-called Donetsk Peoples Republic, a separatist region in Ukraine.

After being sanctioned by the United States, Malofeyev attempted to evade the sanctions by using co-conspirators to surreptitiously acquire and run media outlets across Europe, Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a briefing.

Garland announced the seizure of millions of dollars from an account at a U.S. financial institution, which the indictment alleges constitutes proceeds traceable to Malofeyevs sanction violations.

U.S. authorities disrupted a global botnet controlled by the Russian military intelligence agency  commonly known as the GRU  aimed at infecting Ukrainian networks, according to the Justice Department.

Justice Department takes role in possible war crimes trial

FBI Director Christopher Wray said the cyber disruption disabled Russias intended actions against thousands of devices before they could be launched. Wray said the action strikes a blow against Russian intelligence.

In addition to the enforcement actions, Garland acknowledged for the first time that the Justice Department was assisting in the effort to examine possible war crimes in Ukraine. The attorney general said U.S. authorities met with counterparts in Europe to develop a plan to gather evidence.

This week, Biden called for a war crimes trial against Putin. The International Criminal Court is one possible venue, but the White House said the United States would work with allies to decide the mechanism.

Garland said the Justice Department has "a long history" of helping to hold accountable those who perpetuated war crimes, and he singled out the atrocities in Ukraine: "We have seen the dead bodies of civilians, some with bound hands, scattered in the streets. We have seen the mass graves. We have seen the bombed hospital, theater, and residential apartment buildings.

"The world sees what is happening in Ukraine. The Justice Department sees what is happening in Ukraine," he said.

Reach Joey Garrison on Twitter @joeygarrison

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Economic sanctions on Russia focus on Putin's adult daughters
Netflix

Netflixs recent Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Spaceabout SpaceXs efforts to launch the first all-civilian flight to orbit the Earthwas corporate propaganda of the corniest sort, but the streaming platform redeems itself with Return to Space, yet another venture about Elon Musks aerospace outfit.

Oscar-winning Free Solo directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chins feature-length documentary (April 7) concerns 2020s Demo-2, which sought to transport astronauts to the International Space Station from American soil for the first time in nine years. It was an endeavor of myriad complications, and courtesy of the filmmakers amazing access to Musk, his team of engineers, scientists and experts, and the two brave men charged with piloting this expedition, it proves to be an inspiring portrait of innovation and ingenuity.

The Mysterious Crypto King Who Stole $215M in Bitcoin and Wound Up Dead

The guiding force behind this project is, of course, Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of sharply reducing space travel costs in order to facilitate our eventual journey toand colonization ofMars. As in Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space, Return to Space finds Musk repeatedly discussing his dream of making humanity a multi-planetary species. Though that sounds like science-fiction, hes put his money where his mouth is with SpaceX, investing a fortune to figure out a way to make space exploration more affordablea problem that contributed to the demise of NASAs own shuttle program. NASA is now a partner with SpaceX, ushering in an age of space commercialization thats also seen the likes of Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson enter the domain with their own grand tourist-destination designs on the cosmos.

SpaceXs solution to its price-tag dilemma was to fashion a fully and rapidly reusable rocket thatrather than disengaging above Earth and then plummeting back to the ground, never to be used againcould be steered to a landing pad via the use of revolutionary grid fins. That turns out to be as difficult as it sounds, and Return to Space affords an up-close-and-personal view of the SpaceX teams multiple stabs at concocting this novel system. As is the case throughout the film, Vasarhelyi and Chin have at their disposal a wide array of self-shot and pre-existing footage from the companys flight cameras (located on the interior and exterior of their crafts), as well as from inside their control rooms and training centers, thereby providing a comprehensive view of SpaceXs trial-and-error attempts to perfect this and other breakthrough elements of the project.

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Musk is prone to delivering grand statements such as, Earth is the cradle of humanity. But you cannot stay in the cradle forever. It is time to go forth, be out there among the stars, expand the scope and scale of human consciousness. Yet in Return to Space, he comes across as a champion of human ambition and resourcefulness, and of the belief that pushing past boundariesin search of attaining greater understanding of ourselves and the universe, and of creating a better life for future generationsis a noble undertaking. Vasarhelyi and Chin dont ignore his occasionally wacko showmanship (like smoking weed on Joe Rogans podcast while extolling the wonders of flamethrowers), but the portrayal that emerges is of an idiosyncratic pioneer who is convinced that there are further worthy frontiers to conquer and is powerfully committed to achieving the heretofore unthinkable.

On more than one occasion, Musk tears up while talking about his burdens of responsibility regarding Demo-2, given that theres more than simply money at stake. Manning the Dragon spacecraft are Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, NASA vets who relish the opportunity to re-enter the cockpit, and both men speak eloquently about their steadfast devotion to their (and Musks) chosen cause. That Hurley and Behnken are married to fellow astronauts, and leaving behind young kids, further underscores how much is riding on their success, and though their ultimate fate is now common knowledge, Return to Space nonetheless brings us so close to them that it generates considerable suspense as launch day draws near.

Even better than its nerve-jangling sequences of Demo-2 lifting off, docking with the International Space Station, and making its perilous return voyage back to Earth is the films snapshot of SpaceXs routine failures. Musks company believes that hands-on mistakes provide the insights necessary for progress, and consequently, Return to Space doesnt shy away from clips of malfunction flameouts and exploding rockets. Its a forthright admission that nothing great is accomplished on the first go, as well as a reminder about this works intense danger. SpaceX operates with virtually zero margin for error, and if that werent apparent from their own toil trying to get Hurley and Behnken safely into space, its touchingly hammered home by recaps of the Challenger and Columbia tragedies, whose legacies hang over everyone in this field.

Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken in Return to Space Netflix

Return to Space cant help but feel like SpaceX PR. Still, its depiction of the companys objectives and methods doesnt appear to be overly compromised, in large part because Musk and companys declarations about their true-believer motivations are so obviously genuine, and their methods are so rigorous and trailblazing. When Musk says that technological improvements arent inevitable, hes both correct and making a plea to the world to strive for something more, not only when it comes to space travel, but in every and all other arenas. Though the sincerity of Musks sentiments may not jibe with his general pop-culture persona, its ever-present in Vasarhelyi and Chins film. Furthermore, its matched by the earnestness of Hurley and Behnkens comments about the profundity of being in space, where the Earths enormity casts our own individual insignificance, and our common unity as inhabitants of the same planet, into sharp and worldview-transforming relief.

In that regard, Return to Space is less about the particular value of setting up shop on Mars than it is about mankinds need to keep moving forward. Its a heartening and hopeful film about inventors and dreamers seeking to make the impossible possible and suggests that its only a matter of time before were watching future Netflix documentaries about SpaceXs trips to the moonand beyond.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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A Richland driver had six different drugs in his system when he swerved into oncoming traffic on George Washington Way, killing his passenger.

Now, nearly two months after that collision, Johnny Alexandro Glenn, 25, is in the Benton County jail facing a vehicular homicide charge.

He is being held in lieu of $300,000 bail.

Glenn was driving a Honda Civic south on George Washington Way just before 7 a.m. on Feb. 10. Witnesses spotted the car straddling the left and center lanes and driving erratically, court records said.

Then he suddenly turned into the path of a Ford F-150 pickup and didnt try to stop before slamming into it.

Firefighters had to cut Glenn and his right front seat passenger, Ernesto Moreno-Madrigal, 26, free from the wreckage.

Both men were rushed to a local hospital, but Moreno-Madrigal could not be saved.

Glenn suffered a compound fracture to his arm and a broken clavicle, said the documents.

Police reported finding signs that Glenn used drugs, including a Oregon State Police property report from a Feb. 1 search of his car. The police said they had seized a bag of fentanyl pills, methamphetamine, a digital scale and a gun.

Richland investigators said they also found a piece of aluminum foil with black burn marks, straws used to inhale fumes from pills and a glass pipe used to smoke methamphetamine. And they seized two bags of cannabis.

Glenn was previously arrested on suspicion of DUI, but that charge was changed to first-degree negligent driving before he pleaded guilty.

A sample of Glenns blood taken after the crash reportedly showed he had amphetamine, methamphematine, fentanyl, norfentanyl and sedatives diazepam and nordiazapam in his system, according to court records.
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) -Two leading human rights groups on Wednesday accused armed forces from Ethiopia's Amhara region of waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing against ethnic Tigrayans during a war that has killed thousands of civilians and displaced more than a million.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a joint report that abuses by Amhara officials and regional special forces and militias during fighting in western Tigray amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity. They also accused Ethiopia's military of complicity in those acts.

"Since November 2020, Amhara officials and security forces have engaged in a relentless campaign of ethnic cleansing to force Tigrayans in western Tigray from their homes," said Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch.

Ethiopia's government said in a statement it was committed to holding all those responsible for violations of human rights and humanitarian law accountable.

The government said, however, that the report's "ethnic undertones" could fuel hatred, and its recommendations were

"unhelpful for any peace effort".

Amhara government spokesman Gizachew Muluneh told Reuters the allegations of abuses and ethnic cleansing in western Tigray were "lies" and "fabricated" news.

Military spokespeople, the former commander of Amhara's special forces and the administrator for western Tigray did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Amnesty and HRW said Tigrayan forces also committed abuses during the 17-month war, but that this was not the focus of the report.

The report, which is based on 427 interviews with survivors, family members and witnesses, is the most comprehensive assessment to date of abuses during the war in western Tigray.

Western Tigray has seen some of the worst violence in the war, which has pitted Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government and its allies from the Amhara region against the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF). The TPLF dominated Ethiopia's government before Abiy's rise to power in 2018.

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Both Amhara and Tigray claim the area, which is controlled by Amhara forces and the Ethiopian military.

Besides repeated massacres, the report cited meetings in which Amhara officials discussed plans to remove Tigrayans and restrictions they imposed on the Tigrayan language as evidence of ethnic cleansing.

Federal authorities failed to investigate allegations of ethnic cleansing, while the national army committed "murder, arbitrary arrest and detention, and torture against the Tigrayan population", the report said.

The Amhara government spokesman Gizachew said regional forces had always respected the rule of law.

Reuters could not independently verify details in the report. The news agency has previously reported about massacres committed by Amhara and Tigrayan forces in western Tigray.

In March of last year, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused forces from Amhara of committing "acts of ethnic cleansing".

(Reporting by Addis Ababa newsroom, Editing by Aaron Ross and Alex Richardson)
KAMPALA, Uganda (AP)  Widespread abuses against civilians in the western part of Ethiopia's embattled Tigray region amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have charged in a new report.

The crimes were perpetrated by security officials and civilian authorities from the neighboring Amhara region, sometimes "with the acquiescence and possible participation of Ethiopian federal forces," the rights groups say in the report released Wednesday.

The abuses are part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Tigrayan civilian population that amount to crimes against humanity as well as war crimes," the report says.

Ethiopian federal authorities strongly refute allegations they have deliberately targeted Tigrayans for violent attacks. They said at the outbreak of the war in Nov. 2020 that their objective was to disarm the rebellious leaders of Tigray.

Ethiopian authorities said Wednesday that they are carefully examining allegations in the rights groups' report. While the report has ideas that are not useful for any peace effort, the government will reaffirm its determination to investigate all human rights violations and make public the results, said a statement from the Government Communication Service.

The report, the result of a months-long investigation including more than 400 interviews, charges that hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans have been forced to leave their homes in a violent campaign of unlawful killings, sexual assaults, mass arbitrary detentions, livestock pillaging, and the denial of humanitarian assistance.

Widespread atrocities have been reported in the Tigray war, with Ethiopian government troops and their allies, including troops from neighboring Eritrea, facing most of the charges.

Fighters loyal to the party of Tigray's leaders  the Tigray People's Liberation Front, or TPLF  also have been accused of committing abuses as the war spread into neighboring regions. Fighters affiliated with the TPLF deliberately killed dozens of people, gang-raped dozens of women and pillaged property for a period of several weeks last year in Amhara region, Amnesty said in a report released in February.

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The new report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International focuses on attacks targeting Tigrayans in western Tigray and describes them as ethnic cleansing, a term that refers to forcing a population from a region through expulsions and other violence, often including killings and rapes.

Publicly displayed signs in several towns across western Tigray urged Tigrayans to leave, and local officials in meetings discussed plans to remove Tigrayans, according to the report. Pamphlets appeared to give Tigrayans urgent ultimatums to leave or be killed, the report says.

They kept saying every night, We will kill you  Go out of the area, said one woman from the town of Baeker, speaking of threats she faced from an Amhara militia group, according to the report.

Western Tigray has long been contested territory. Amhara authorities say the area was under their control until the 1990s when the TPLF-led federal government redrew internal boundaries that put the territory within Tigray's borders. Amhara officials moved swiftly to take over the region when the war broke out.

The outbreak of the war brought these longstanding and unaddressed grievances to the fore: Amhara regional forces, along with Ethiopian federal forces, seized these territories and displaced Tigrayan civilians in a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign, the report says.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken asserted in March 2021 that ethnic cleansing had taken place in western Tigray, marking the first time a top official in the international community openly described the situation as such. That allegation was dismissed by Ethiopian authorities as a completely unfounded and spurious verdict against the Ethiopian government.

The new report corroborates reporting by The Associated Press on atrocities in the war, which affects 6 million people in Tigray alone.

In June Ethiopias government cut off almost all access to food aid, medical supplies, cash and fuel in Tigray. The war has spilled into Amhara and Afar regions, with Tigrayan leaders saying they are fighting to ease the blockade and to protect themselves from further attacks.

Facing growing international pressure, Ethiopian authorities on March 24 announced a humanitarian truce for Tigray, saying the action was necessary to allow unimpeded relief supplies into the area. Trucks bearing food supplies have since arrived in the region.

The AP last year confirmed the first starvation deaths under the blockade along with the governments ban on humanitarian workers bringing medicines into Tigray.

Estimated tens of thousands of people have been killed in the war. But there is little hope for peace talks as Ethiopian authorities have outlawed the TPLF, effectively making its leaders fugitives on the run.

Among their recommendations, the rights groups call for a neutral protection force" in western Tigray, possibly with the deployment of an African Union-backed peacekeeping mission, with a robust civilian protection mandate.

Their report also urges the U.N. Security Council to impose an arms embargo targeting all the warring parties.
In October 2020, Rochester police raided the West Main Street apartment of Cristal Starling and her then-boyfriend, who was suspected of dealing drugs.

No drugs were found, but police seized $8,040 in currency that Starling says was hers. Her boyfriend was arrested based on drugs found at another home, but he was later acquitted of the charges.

Starling has been trying to get her money back since the acquittal. She's still trying.

The nonprofit Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm, plans an appeal to a federal court, seeking to reverse a judge's decision that federal and local police can keep Starling's money. Starling's case, Institute attorneys say, is typical of many forfeiture cases in the country: The money is not an overwhelming amount and the administrative process so convoluted that people who lose their money simply give up.

"This is very common where its a small amount of money," said Institute attorney Seth Young. "You dont hire a lawyer and the maze of forfeiture procedures trips up a person who represents themselves and the person ends up losing their money."

Starling tried, without the aid of a lawyer, to chase down her seized money. She also lost use of two cars, which were also taken then later returned. She had to pay for a rental car during those weeks, she said.

Starling said that the money was rightfully hers to begin with, but she felt sure the acquittal of her ex-boyfriend would trigger the return of the $8,040.

Cristal Starling

"After trial I tried to get my money back," she said. "They sent me through this whole process of trying to get it through the courts and I still did not get it."

Court papers show that federal prosecutors maintained that Starling missed deadlines for the administrative filing of claims for the return of the seized money, and that her claim was first made three months after a default awarded the money to the government. Starling said she was on vacation, and records supported this claim, at a time when the government said it gave "direct notice."

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A federal judge upheld the decision by authorities to keep Starling's money, which is typically then divided among police agencies.

The federal appellate court for New York often supports decisions such as that made to affirm the seizure, according to Institute for Justice lawyers. The attorneys had been trying to find a case worthy of appeal, but that hunt was difficult because many people don't challenge the seizure to the extent of Starling, who filed claims and legal action.

"This is sort of the typical case," said Institute attorney Rob Johnson. "Cristal got farther in the fight than virtually anyone, which is why I was able to find her."

Oftentimes, the attorneys said, federal prosecutors offer a return of half of the money, and Starling said that happened with her case, even after the default decision allowed authorities to keep all of the funds.

"My question to them was if I had already lost all rights to the full amount of currency .. and it's already in default, why would you be offering half of it back," Starling said.

The U.S. Attorney's Office declined comment Wednesday,

The Institute has forfeiture data for 21 states, and the median currency forfeiture is $1,276  making most people unwilling to pay for a lawyer, Institute lawyers say.

If local or state police use the federal forfeiture process, by turning over currency or property to federal law enforcement, the local or state agencies can see an 80% return. Some states, including New York, have laws that provide fewer obstacles to people seeking the return of seized money or property, Institute lawyers say.

Should the appeal be successful, Starling's bid to get her money back would return to federal court in Rochester for reconsideration. There, Institute lawyers say, she could argue why she should get the money, and not, instead, be waylaid by administrative deadlines.

"The system is extremely complex and confusing," said Institute lawyer Young. "It's really hard to navigate even for lawyers. ... They get tripped up by the procedures and they miss a deadline in these super strict rules.

"Oftentimes the merits of these cases are never heard," he said.

Starling said her reasons for seeing her money returned are simple.

"I wasn't charged with anything," she said.

Contact Gary Craig at gcraig@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at gcraig1.

Opinion: Civil asset forfeiture: I'm a grandmother, not a drug lord. Why can police take my property?

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Rochester woman fighting to get back $8,000 seized in raid
Gov Ron DeSantiss office is coming under fire from advocates of Floridas open government laws after an investigation published by News 6 alleged that staff intervened in the outlets public records request into the financial records of former state official Halsey Beshears, delaying their release for two months.

In the documents obtained by News 6, the outlet was able to confirm that the financial records of Mr Beshears, a figure who has been reported by Politico to be connected to Matt Gaetz and the federal agency reportedly investigating him for child sex trafficking, were held up for secondary review by the governors office.

Since the investigation into Mr Gaetz began last year, neither he nor Mr Beshears, both of whom served in Floridas legislature together, have been charged with any crimes, while both continue to deny any wrongdoing.

Just recently, Mr Gaetz told an audience of CPAC attendees that he equates the Justice Department, the body carrying out the investigation, to cheaters on a par with Russias Olympic team.

Floridas Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) had, the news outlet reported, in fact prepared Mr Beshears financial records within days of receiving the 15 April 2021 request. Some records, they reported from the emails they obtained, were compiled within hours of the request landing on the departments desk.

The records, instead of going immediately to the requesting news agency, were forwarded to the governors office on 4 May 2021 for a secondary review, where they stayed for the next two months.

In response to New 6s reporting, the governors office told the outlet that the governor has the authority to review such records when the the record includes communications with the Executive Office of the Governor, because the record concerns the Governor, or because there is reason to believe that the Governor may be asked about information in the record, News 6 reported.

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The governors press secretary, Bryan Griffin, who The Independent reached out to for comment but did not hear back from by the time of publication, told News 6 that: In accordance with the Governors duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, the Executive Office of the Governor may review the record to ensure the accuracy and correctness of the record production.

Handing over public records requests such as these as promptly as theyre prepared is a practice that is enshrined in Floridas Sunshine Manual, a guide that helps citizens navigate Floridas public records laws and access government meetings, according to Attorney General Ashley Moody, who maintains the document.

Though the guide does not give a specific time limit that records must be turned over, it does say that delay in making public records available is permissible under very limited circumstances, and the kind of limited circumstances that are permissible under state law include the reasonable time it would take the custodian to retrieve the record and delete those portions of the record the custodian asserts are exempt.

News 6s reporting contends that the governors office intervening in releasing their requested documents does not fall within this very specific definition of delaying a released of records under Floridas Public Record Act.

When public officials or agencies delay a records release, the manual goes on to explain, this unjustified delay in producing public records constitutes an unlawful refusal to provide access to public records, which, if done knowingly, is punishable with up to a year in jail, a $1,000 fine and removal from office.

If a person or agency, however, violates this law, they will still be punished but will instead be slapped with a noncriminal infraction and a fine of up to $500.

In the resulting documents that were held up in the governors office for two additional months, the news agency reported that there were limited redactions made by Mr DeSantiss team and that the records revealed Mr Beshears hadnt misused state money during his tenure as secretary of DBPR.

Matt Gaetz recently told Fox News that he views the federal investigation was an operation to destroy me (AP)

The outlet had originally requested the forms from DBPR in an effort to better understand a trip he and Mr Gaetz went on while the pair had been working in the legislature together where they travelled to The Bahamas with a group.

This trip is the subject of the federal investigation into Mr Gaetz, which is part of a broader inquiry where investigators are reportedly determining whether escorts were illegally trafficked across state or international lines and whether Mr Gaetz was accepting paid sex in exchange for access or legislative favours, according to CBS News .

Both Mr Beshears and Mr Gaetz continue to deny the basis for this investigation, with Mr Gaetz recently telling Fox News that: This was an operation to destroy me.

In an emailed response to News 6, Mr Beshears told the outlet that he has nothing to comment on the record because there is nothing to comment about, adding that he believed, this is not even a story, and it is frustrating to see your paper drag my name through the mud in order to smear the Governor.

The outlet added that Mr Beshears did not respond to a follow-up email offering him the opportunity to dispute published reports about the grand jury subpoena.

The Independent has reached out to Gov DeSantiss office for comment.
Students at Hernandez Middle School practice carrying gallons of water during the Water Walk to understand the importance of clean drinking water and how hard it is for kids in Africa to gather fresh water and carry it.

It's likely to get a little gamey at Hernandez Middle School, but it will be for a good cause.

The Round Rock school will be participating in a Shower Strike from April 20-26 to raise money to install a water well in East Africa.

The event, in partnership with the Austin-based nonprofit Well Aware, is similar to a charity race in which participants pledge money for each day they go without a shower during the weeklong strike. Students also can participate by using less water or by using a bucket of water to clean themselves instead of a shower, said Sarah Evans, the founder of Well Aware.

"These kids, they're just so eager to understand what's happening in different places in the world," Evans said of the Hernandez students. "And just as eager to learn how they can be a part of making a change."

The funds that the middle school raises will go toward Well Awares water system in Atot, a rural village in northern Kenya, said Hannah Ruark, a spokesperson for the nonprofit. This water system, which will be Well Aware's 100th, will be a deep borehole about 150 meters deep with solar-powered pumping and distribution throughout the community of over 2,000 people.

This is the 13th year Well Aware has hosted its Shower Strike and the second year the middle school has taken part. In 2019, the school raised over $5,000, which provided 360 people in Arusha, Tanzania, with clean water through a solar-powered water well, Ruark said.

Over the years, Well Aware has raised approximately $2 million from Shower Strikes for water wells in East Africa, helping over 170,000 people, in Kenya and Tanzania, Ruark said.

FROM 2019: Local middle schools give up showers to rebuild a well in Africa

To better understand the importance of having a working well, the middle school students recently participated in a walk to see how far they could carry 5 gallons of water, the equivalent of what you need in a day. Each full bucket weights about 40 pounds.

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The students learned that often kids Africa, especially girls, are walking to get water and carry it back to the family. They learned about how heavy it is, how time-consuming it can be and how that can prevent girls from attending school. Those students who couldn't carry the full 5 gallons also had the option of carrying less.

Emilee Hinegardner, the coordinator of the school's International Baccalaureate program, which is spearheading the event, said it's important to provide students with an opportunity to connect with others and what their experiences are.

This year the goal is for students to raise a minimum of $15 each, which can provide clean water to one person for the rest of their lives, Hinegardner said.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Round Rock middle school students to give up showers to build a well in East Africa
LONDON (Reuters) - Russia said on Wednesday it would take further measures against British media based there, after London imposed sanctions against Russian state-controlled news outlets.

Britain last week announced sanctions on 14 Russian people and entities including the state media organisations behind the RT and Sputnik news channels, with Foreign Secretary Liz Truss saying President Vladimir Putin's "war on Ukraine is based on a torrent of lies".

Russia Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova singled out Truss in a lengthy attack on British "oppression" of Russian media.

"The only thing Liz Truss has achieved as of today... is that corresponding, mirror image, symmetrical measures - call them what you will - have been taken against British media here in Russia. Have been taken and will be taken," Zakharova told a news briefing.

Russian authorities blocked the website of Britain's BBC on March 16 in what Zakharova said at the time was just the beginning of Moscow's response to an "information war unleashed by the West".

On Tuesday, a Russian parliamentary commission drafted a law under which news organisations from countries deemed to discriminate against Russian media could have their operations promptly shut down.

(Writing by Mark Trevelyan; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
WASHINGTON (AP)  As gruesome videos and photos of bodies emerge from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, Kremlin-backed media are denouncing them as an elaborate hoax  a narrative that journalists in Ukraine have shown to be false.

Denouncing news as fake or spreading false reports to sow confusion and undermine its adversaries are tactics that Moscow has used for years and refined with the advent of social media in places like Syria.

In detailed broadcasts to millions of viewers, correspondents and hosts of Russian state TV channels said Tuesday that some photo and video evidence of the killings were fake while others showed that Ukrainians were responsible for the bloodshed.

Among the first to appear were these Ukrainian shots, which show how a soulless body suddenly moves its hand, a report Monday on Russia-1s evening news broadcast declared. And in the rearview mirror it is noticeable that the dead seem to be starting to rise even.

But high-resolution satellite images show some of the dead bodies have been lying on the residential streets of Bucha since early March, days after the Russian occupation began. On April 2, a video taken from a moving car was posted online by a Ukrainian lawyer showing those same bodies still scattered along Yablonska Street in Bucha. The Associated Press independently matched the location bodies in the satellite images of Bucha from commercial provider Maxar Technology to separate videos from the scene. Other Western media had similar reports.

AP journalists have seen the bodies of dozens of people, many of them shot at close range and some with their hands tied behind them, left on the streets of Bucha since Russian troops retreated last week. On Tuesday, AP journalists saw a pile of six burned bodies, with a child's blackened foot amid the tangled corpses.

Yet Russian officials and state-media have continued to promote their own narrative, parroting it in newspapers and on radio and television. A top story on the website of a popular pro-Kremlin newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, pinned the mass killings on Ukraine, with a story that claimed one more irrefutable proof that the genocide in Bucha was carried out by Ukrainian forces.

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An opinion column published Tuesday by the state-run news agency RIA Novosti surmised that the Bucha slayings were a ploy for the West to impose tougher sanctions on Russia.

Analysts note it isn't the first time in its six-week-old invasion of Ukraine that the Kremlin has employed such an information warfare strategy to deny any wrongdoing and spread disinformation in a coordinated campaign around the globe.

This is simply what Russia does every time it recognizes that it has suffered a PR setback through committing atrocities, said Keir Giles, senior consulting fellow with the Russia and Eurasia program at the Chatham House think tank. So the system works almost on autopilot.

Before the war, Russia denied U.S. intelligence reports that detailed its plans to attack Ukraine. Last month, Russian officials tried to discredit AP photos and reporting of the aftermath of the bombing of a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, which left a pregnant woman and her unborn child dead.

The photos and video from Bucha have set off a new wave of global condemnation and revulsion. After his video appearance Tuesday at the U.N. Security Council, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy enumerated the killings in Bucha by Russian troops and showed graphic video of charred and decomposing bodies there and in other towns. Russian U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia dismissed them as staged. Across social media, a chorus of more than a dozen official Russian Twitter and Telegram accounts, as well as state-backed media Facebook pages, repeated the Kremlin line that images and video of the dead were staged or a hoax. The claims were made in English, Spanish and Arabic in accounts run by Russian officials or from Russian-backed news outlets Sputnik and RT. The Spanish-language RT en Espanol has sent more than a dozen posts to its 18 million followers. Russia rejects allegations over the murder of civilians in Bucha, near Kiev, an RT en Espanol post said Sunday. Several of the same accounts sought to discredit claims that Russian troops carried out the killings by pointing to a video of Bucha Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk, taken March 31, in which he talked about the suburb being freed from Russian occupation. He confirms that Russian troops have left Bucha. No mentioning of dead bodies in the streets, top Russian official Mikhail Ulyanov tweeted Monday. But Fedoruk had publicly commented on the violence before the Russian troops left in an interview with Italian news agency Adnkronos on March 28, where he accused them of killings and rapes in Bucha.

In an AP interview March 7, Fedoruk talked about dead bodies piling up in Bucha: We cant even gather up the bodies because the shelling from heavy weapons doesnt stop day or night. Dogs are pulling apart the bodies on the city streets. Its a nightmare.

Satellite images by Maxar Technologies while Russian troops occupied Bucha on March 18 and 19 back up Fedoruks account of bodies in the streets, showing at least five bodies on one road.

Some social media platforms have tried to limit propaganda and disinformation from the Kremlin. Google blocked RTs accounts, while in Europe, RT and Sputnik were banned by tech company Meta, which also stopped promoting or amplifying Russian-state media pages on its platforms, which include Facebook and Instagram.

Russia has found ways to evade the crackdown with posts in different languages through dozens of official Russian social media accounts.

Its a pretty massive messaging apparatus that Russia controls  whether its official embassy accounts, bot or toll accounts or anti-Western influencers  they have many ways to circumvent platform bans, said Bret Schafer, who heads the information manipulation team at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.

__

Lajka reported from New York. Associated Press writer Colleen Barry in Milan contributed.
Satellite imagery of a section of Yablanska Street in Bucha where dead bodies were found. Satellite image 2022 Maxar Technologies.

Ukrainian military footage verified by The New York Times shows Russian forces shooting at a civilian.

The video captures a scene from Bucha in early March when Russian forces occupied the suburb.

A later video reportedly captured a dead body in civilian clothing matching that of the cyclist.

Aerial footage from Ukraine's military from late February shows Russian soldiers opening fire on a cyclist in the Ukrainian suburb of Bucha, according to The New York Times.

The town outside of Kyiv has been the site of reported mass civilian casualties in recent days as Ukrainian forces move to retake the city after weeks of Russian occupation. Ukrainian officials said earlier this week that nearly 300 people were buried in a mass grave and said corpses were littering the streets of Bucha.

Russia has denied responsibility for the bodies, but a Monday New York Times analysis of satellite images from Bucha suggests Russian forces were responsible for the deaths.

Video: Ukrainians use mass grave in Mariupol

Now, the emergence of new video from the time period when Russia occupied the town, appears to show Russian forces shooting a cyclist.

The video, independently verified and published by The Times on Tuesday, and sourced from the Ukrainian military, shows a person with a bicycle walking down a street in Bucha. The cyclist walks the bike making a left onto a street occupied by Russian forces, where at least two Russian armored vehicles are stationed, per the video. Upon turning the corner, the armored vehicle fires multiple high-caliber rounds, per The Times video. The second armored vehicle follows suit firing two rounds in the direction of the cyclist. Next, white smoke is visible in the video.

After Russia withdrew from the region around March 30, a separate video filmed in Bucha captured a body wearing civilian clothing that matches the cyclist's attire in the aerial footage lying beside a bicycle with a mangled leg, according to the outlet.

A Times analysis of the aerial footage determined that more than 20 Russian military vehicles were positioned near the two armored-vehicles that fired. Per The Times report, the convoy was stationed near Yablonska Street, where more than a dozen dead bodies were documented by The Times visual analysis earlier this week.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Parents, educators and community members in Stanislaus County demonstrated at a rally on Tuesday, expressing concern that their city of Patterson might not be able to support four housing projects that would bring in thousands of families. The concern is that there might be more children coming in than the schools in Patterson can support. More than 6,800 kids depend on the Patterson Joint Unified School District. The four housing projects, one of which is already approved, would lead to 9,000 homes being created. The "Save Our Schools" rally outside of city hall raised questions on if the city could handle that growth, and demonstrators demanded those projects be properly vetted. Growth is not a bad thing. Its actually positive and its inevitable, but it needs to happen responsibly, Valerie Benavides, a parent said.
NEWPORT  Navyn Salem, who founded the nonprofit organization Edesia, Inc. in Rhode Island in 2009 with a mission to treat and prevent global malnutrition in the worlds most vulnerable populations, will present the commencement address and be awarded an honorary degree during Salve Regina Universitys 72nd commencement on Sunday, May 8.

The university also will award honorary degrees during the Mothers Day ceremony to longtime philanthropist Kathleen Walgreen and entrepreneur/philanthropist Carl Allen. The event on the oceanside of McAuley Hall is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m.

Navyn Salem, founder of the nonprofit organization Edesia, Inc., will speak at Salve Regina University's commencement ceremony May 8, 2022.

Salem built Edesias North Kingstown factory to produce a range of fortified, peanut-based products like Plumpy'Nut for humanitarian agencies like UNICEF, World Food Programme, USAID and other NGOs working in emergency and conflict zones.

More: Salve Regina concludes dorm arguments with Zoning Board. Now it's the objectors' turn.

Since 2010, Edesia has reached more than 15 million children in better than 60 countries, including Somalia, Venezuela, Yemen and Syria.

In 2020, Salem expanded her mission to include addressing hunger in the United States and works with the USDA in providing food for its COVID-19 emergency response efforts for both school lunch programs and food banks.

Salem was named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year/New England in 2018, New Englander of the Year by the New England Council in 2017 and New England Business Woman of the Year by Bryant University.

More: Major surgery and bout with cancer has only made Salve Regina's Seth Benson stronger

She was awarded honorary degrees by her alma mater, Boston College (2012) as well as Bryant University (2014), Providence College (2017), Curry College (2018), and University of Rhode Island (2021). She is a Trustee of Boston College.

Walgreen, a member of Salve Reginas Board of Trustees, and her family are longtime friends and supporters of the university. In celebration, Salve Regina named Walgreen Hall in their honor in 2013. The parent of a Salve Regina alumnae, Walgreen has been a staunch benefactor of the Sisters of Mercy and their work both in the U.S. and abroad.

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She is grateful for the 16 years of education she received from the Sisters of Mercy, including her time in nursing school.

An advocate for historic preservation, Walgreen was a member of the Vice Presidents Residence Restoration Foundation in Washington, D.C., and founded the Walgreen Drug Stores Historical Foundation, which has become a leader in the movement to collect and preserve the history and artifacts of Walgreen Co.

More: What caused the Cliff Walk collapse? Newport is hoping an engineering firm can find out

Allen started his business career at Heritage Bag Company, working in most departments within the company before becoming its president and CEO, then buying the Dallas-based company outright in 2005.Under Allens leadership, Heritage experienced its greatest sales and built new manufacturing facilities in California, Utah, Texas, Ohio, Georgia and New Jersey. He sold the company in 2016.

Allens philanthropic projects span several countries with primary focus areas of education, ecology, defense and health research. A passionate outdoors adventurist, Allen hosts The Outdoors with Carl Allen TV series and together with his family launched Allen Exploration in 2016 to research, explore and improve the worlds oceans.

This article originally appeared on Newport Daily News: Salve Regina: Edesia founder Navyn Salem to speak at commencement
United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman announces the indictment against Lawrence Ray aka "Lawrence Grecco" on February 11, 2020 in New York City. Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

A jury found sex cult leader Lawrence "Larry" Ray guilty of 15 counts on Wednesday.

Prosecutors alleged he manipulated and sexually abused Sarah Lawrence College students he met through his daughter.

Over several weeks, former cult members testified about how he manipulated them.

Lawrence "Larry" Ray  the sex cult leader who extorted Sarah Lawrence College students out of millions of dollars  was convicted on 15 counts of sex trafficking, extortion, and racketeering conspiracy by a Manhattan jury Wednesday.

Ray was arrested by law enforcement after the publication of a New York magazine article detailing allegations that he abused and manipulated his daughter's classmates for years at the Bronxville, New York, college.

Throughout the three-week trial, held in a federal court in Manhattan, prosecutors presented his victims, who described being under his spell.

One woman, Claudia Drury, said she met him while she was roommates with his daughter at Sarah Lawrence College in 2011. She testified that he forced her into sex work and took the $2.5 million she made for him over four years, during a time in which she worked seven days a week. Drury testified that Ray physically abused her to keep her in line and convinced her to make false confessions as collateral.

Other victims testified about how Ray went from becoming a father-like figure they trusted, allowing them to live at his apartment in Manhattan's Upper East Side, to a manipulating cult leader.

Prosecutors presented jurors with evidence that Ray maintained academic articles with titles like "Cult Membership: What Factors Contribute to Joining or Leaving?" and "Mind Control: The Ultimate Terror" on his computer hard drives, according to the New York Times.

Ray, who is 62 years old and appeared to experience seizures twice during the trial, faces life in prison.

His defense attorneys have claimed that he was the victim of his accusers, who they said manipulated Ray into delusions of grandeur.

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Ultimately, the jury didn't buy it.

"Twelve years ago, Larry Ray moved into his daughter's dorm room at Sarah Lawrence College. And when he got there, he met a group of friends who had their whole lives ahead of them," Damian Williams, the US Attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement following the verdict.

"For the next decade, he used violence, threats, and psychological abuse to try to control and destroy their lives," Williams added." He exploited them. He terrorized them. He tortured them. Let me be very clear. Larry Ray is a predator. An evil man who did evil things. Today's verdict finally brings him to justice."

Ray's sentencing has been scheduled for September 16.

Read the original article on Insider
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.  It's an unlikely theme here at the largest annual gathering of space industry executives: how to help bring war criminals to justice.

The expanding constellations of commercial spy satellites that have been capturing high-resolution photos and radar images of Russian troop movements are now proving to be a game-changing tool for international authorities and human rights groups who are aggressively working to document Russias targeting of civilians in Ukraine.

And companies are stepping up their efforts to help build war crimes cases.

They are cueing their satellites to pinpoint mass graves, bombed-out hospitals and shattered schools. They are helping to identify military units that have targeted civilians. And their real-time data is being used to deploy investigators, such as those from the International Criminal Court and United Nations, to collect more physical evidence or personal testimony from witnesses on the ground in Ukraine.

There is truth in imagery, Steve Butow, director of the space portfolio at the Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagons Silicon Valley outpost, said in an interview at the Space Foundations National Space Symposium. We know where the hospitals, schools and other things are and the analytics are showing these are exactly the things being targeted.

It is not propaganda from the West, he added. The global community is seeing this for what it is. They can show exactly what is happening on the ground.

President Joe Biden singled out the indiscriminate killing of hundreds of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha over the weekend as a war crime and highlighted the need to collect evidence that could implicate Russian military or political leaders.

Whats happening in Bucha is outrageous, he said.



The White House also said it has other evidence showing Russia violating the laws of war. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. government is working to provide the information that we have to the relevant institutions and organizations that will put all this together and there needs to be accountability for it."

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The International Criminal Court has an active investigation underway into war crimes in Ukraine after referrals from dozens of nations. And on Tuesday, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for a coordinated international effort to collect evidence, citing the wholesale destruction of civilian areas and growing reports of rape and other human rights violations committed by Russian troops.

After the horrifying images of what took place in Bucha, Guterres said, I immediately called for an independent investigation to guarantee effective accountability.

Many of those probes are being guided by images captured from commercial satellites orbiting the Earth.

One of the leading commercial satellite providers, Maxar Technologies, has been working 24-7 operations on this, said CEO Dan Jablonsky.

He said the company has shouldered out other customers who are waiting for imagery so that Maxar can continue to make the Ukraine crisis a high priority.

And one of those increasing demands is to chronicle the humanitarian consequences of the conflict.

Buildings getting blown up, holes being dug for graves, those kinds of things are being tracked and recorded and documented in a way that we think is very important, Jablonsky said in an interview.



The global network of imaging satellites operated by Maxar and other U.S. and international companies are proving to be an unblinking, unclassified eye that is not information from the government but it can be used to hold people accountable for behavior, Butow added.

Stacey Dixon, the deputy director of national intelligence, also revealed at the conference on Tuesday that, at the outset of the Ukraine conflict, the U.S. government encouraged satellite companies to share their imagery far and wide.

Early on, we also asked a few commercial companies  to rapidly make available imagery like the buildup that was happening around Ukraines borders to help shed a light on what Russia was doing, she said. This allowed others to independently interpret the images, piecing them together with other information, and tell the world what was about to happen.

Members of Congress have also urged U.S. spy agencies to declassify intelligence they have collected on alleged Russian war crimes.

But its the widespread availability of commercial satellites  that can collect images day or night  that is reshaping how war crimes are being investigated.

While the technology has been used piecemeal in the past to illuminate Chinese human rights abuses against the Uyghur Muslims in China, genocide in Sudan and other human catastrophes, its role putting the war in Ukraine under the microscope is seen as revolutionary.

The commercial satellite constellations have grown dramatically in size and capability in recent years, providing higher resolution images and allowing much more frequent coverage over areas of interest. Dozens of companies and universities in the U.S. alone have government licenses to operate remote sensing technologies from orbit.

We're able to know in real-time, said Ritwik Gupta, a research scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California who is assisting U.S. European Command in Germany. You want to see human rights violations in Bucha? We can get Maxar tasked and get imagery over that same exact region in a couple of minutes.

Another company that has been working around the clock on the task is Planet Labs, which for years has coordinated with and supported human rights organizations. Now, international war crimes investigators are spending enormous amounts of time using these tools to try to identify instances of the intentional targeting of civilians, said Andrew Zolli, its chief impact officer.

Zolli also said whats different in Ukraine than previous conflicts is that these investigations can now take place in real-time, in large part due to publicly available satellite data that was once the sole purview of secret government spy agencies.

The satellites will guide the war crimes prosecutors to sites where they will collect ground evidence, Zolli said. And the combination of the ground evidence and satellite imagery and other digital sources of evidence will be collected for future prosecutions.

Normally, you have these events occur and people are scattered to the winds and it takes years to track them down, he added. And then you have faulty memories, and you have to collect more evidence  to more firmly establish the facts of what happened.



But it also means international authorities don't have to wait for the shooting to stop to begin their painstaking work.

The prosecutions may come in the future, but the investigation doesn't come in the future anymore, Zolli said. The investigation comes right now. This is about getting real-time information and deploying war crimes prosecutors in the moment when the conflict is still raging.

And unfortunately, he added, there are just more instances than we can count.

For Butow, the war crimes task is also a test of how the space community can use its enormous technological capacity to advance democratic interests.

That to me is a strategic impact, he said. If you really want to shape the world we live in and make sure that democracy and freedom prevails, you want this kind of information to be out there.

Some executives are pushing for more.

HawkEye 360 operates satellites that can track radio frequencies, such as those emitting from military units in confined areas  another possible line of investigation to pinpoint units or individuals responsible for atrocities.

It is urging symposium attendees to harness more of their capacity, in both resources and technology.

The company is circulating a concept paper at panel discussions and cocktail receptions proposing that space companies contribute to a Space Industry for Ukraine initiative to finance high-value projects, such as providing satellite data to assist aid groups operating in Ukraine to maximize their command and control especially during refugee evacuation missions.

We believe there is an additional humanitarian role that our shared space community can serve in supporting the people of Ukraine, it says, citing communications support, and imagery, radar and [radio frequency] data.
A South Carolina woman is facing multiple charges in connection to a robbery in Conway, according to police reports.

Taryn Lee, 20, of Summerville, was arrested Monday and is still incarcerated in the J. Reuben Long Detention Center as of Wednesday, according to online booking records. She has been charged with assault, kidnapping and two counts of burglary.

Lee and two others, who were armed, broke into an apartment on Highway 544 during the day on March 6, where she attacked a woman by punching her in the face, according to arrest warrants obtained by the Conway Police Department.

Lee and her companions damaged the victims TV and refrigerator, an estimated total of $800, and stole three pairs of shoes worth about $600, the warrants stated.

She also broke into someones locked room with another defendant, damaging the door and watched as her partner struck the victim in the face, according to police.

Police said she is also accused of holding two people at gunpoint, along with the co-defendants, which prevented them from running or calling the police. Lee then threatened to kill the victims if they told the cops, according to the warrants.

Jaquan Archie, 25, of Georgetown, has been charged with kidnapping and two counts of burglary for the same incident. He also faces two weapons charges.

Archie was arrested Sunday and is still incarcerated at the detention center as of Wednesday, according to online booking records. The identity of the third person allegedly involved was not immediately available.
COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lanka's President Gotabaya Rajapaksa will not resign despite widespread protests against his handling of the country's economic crisis, a minister told parliament on Wednesday.

"May I remind you that 6.9 million people voted for the president," Chief Government Whip and Highways Minister Johnston Fernando said in response to opposition criticism.

"As a government, we are clearly saying the president will not resign under any circumstances. We will face this."

(Reporting by Uditha Jayasinghe; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
The Biden administration will officially enact another extension of the pandemic payment pause related to federally-backed student loans through the end of August.

In a statement, President Biden stated that "my Administration is extending the pause on federal student loan repayments through August 31st, 2022. That additional time will assist borrowers in achieving greater financial security and support the Department of Educations efforts to continue improving student loan programs. As part of this transition, the Department of Education will offer additional flexibilities and support for all borrowers."

The pause was set to expire after May 1 after being enacted by former President Donald Trump amid the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020 and extended multiple times by President Biden.

The Department of Education is committed to ensuring that student loan borrowers have a smooth transition back to repayment," Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in the press release.

This additional extension will allow borrowers to gain more financial security as the economy continues to improve and as the nation continues to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic," Cardona added. "During the pause, we will continue our preparations to give borrowers a fresh start and to ensure that all borrowers have access to repayment plans that meet their financial situations and needs."

President Biden speaks during the South Carolina State University graduation ceremony at Smith Hammond Middleton Memorial Center in Orangeburg, SC, December 17, 2021. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz

Democrats, meanwhile, are urging the president to do more.

"The payment pause has been a significant federal investment throughout the pandemic, providing essential relief to millions of families during the economic and public health crisis and saving them an average of $393 per month," a recent letter from prominent Democrats stated, later adding that most borrowers "are not financially prepared to shoulder another bill as they face skyrocketing costs for necessities like food and gas."

On Wednesday morning, the lawmakers added that though the pause extension was "welcome," the action "underscores the importance of swift executive action on meaningful student debt cancellation" and added that the group will "continue to implore the President to use his clear legal authority to cancel student debt, which will help narrow the racial wealth gap, boost our economic recovery, and demonstrate that this government is fighting for the people.

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An estimated 37 million borrowers have not had to pay on their loans during the pause, and no new interest has accrued.

Biden's statement noted that the New York Fed recently found that the payment pause has led to "an estimated $195 billion worth of waived payments through April 2022." Another roughly 10 million borrowers who hold private or Family Federal Education Loan (FFEL) loans owned by commercial banks did not benefit from the payment pause.

"If loan payments were to resume on schedule in May, analysis of recent data from the Federal Reserve suggests that millions of student loan borrowers would face significant economic hardship, and delinquencies and defaults could threaten Americans financial stability," the president stated.

Forgiveness still an open question

It's unclear how exactly the administration is approaching the forgiveness question. In December 2020, then-President-elect Biden described cancelling student debt through executive power as "pretty questionable." An Education Department legal analysis related to broad-based cancellation was published on April 5, 2021, in a heavily redacted form.

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain recently said that President Biden "is going to look at what we should do on student debt before the pause expires, or hell extend the pause."

Biden backed broad student loan forgiveness of $10,000 on the campaign trail in 2020 amid more generous proposals from then-rivals Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). An erasure of $10,000 for all borrowers with federally-backed loans would cost roughly $371 billion and erase the loans of about a third of borrowers.



Aarthi is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. She can be reached at aarthi@yahoofinance.com. Follow her on Twitter @aarthiswami.

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CAIRO (AP)  Thousands of Sudanese marched in the capital of Khartoum and other cities Wednesday in new protests against an October military coup that plunged the African country into political turmoil and aggravated its economic woes.

Security forces shot dead at least one person when they violently dispersed protesters, a medical group said.

It was the latest in efforts to pressure the ruling generals, whose takeover has triggered near-daily street protests demanding civilian rule. Called by pro-democracy groups, the demonstrators marched in Khartoum and its twin city of Omdurman amid tight security around the presidential palace, which has seen violent clashes in previous protests.

Security forces fired live ammunition and tear gas to disperse protesters in Khartoum and Omdurman, according to the Legitimate Doctors Union, which is part of the pro-democracy movement. It said one protester died from gunshots in his stomach while taking part in a march in Khartoum.

There were also rallies elsewhere, including in Qadarif and Port Sudan in the east and war-ravaged Darfur region in the west. Footage on social media, which corresponded with The Associated Press reporting, shows young people setting tires on fire and blocking roads.

The army's takeover upended Sudans transition to democracy after three decades of repression and international isolation under autocratic President Omar al-Bashir. It also sent the country's already fragile economy into free fall, with living conditions rapidly deteriorating. A popular uprising forced the military to remove al-Bashir and his Islamist government in April 2019.

Since the coup, a crackdown on protesters has killed more than 90 people, mostly young men, and injured thousands, according to a Sudanese medical group.

Western governments and world financial institutions suspended their assistance to Sudan in order to pressure the generals to return to civilian-led government.

The U.N. envoy for Sudan warned last month that the country was heading for an economic and security collapse unless it addresses the political paralysis following the coup.

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Wednesdays marches were called for by the Sudanese Professionals Association and the so-called Resistance Committees, which were the backbone of the uprising against al-Bashir and have also spearheaded the ongoing anti-coup protests. They demand an immediate handover to a fully civilian government, the removal of the generals behind the coup and holding them accountable in swift and fair trails.

Those generals should be prosecuted before revolutionary courts, and the military should return back to its barracks, said Taha Awad, a protest leader with the Resistance Committees in Khartoum.

The generals insist they will hand over power only to an elected government; elections are scheduled for next year.

A rebel alliance, the Sudan Revolutionary Front, allied with the military, offered a roadmap forward in a meeting Tuesday with Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, head of Sudans ruling sovereign council and the coup leader. The roadmap calls for the generals to release detained protest leaders, end violence against protesters and lift the state of emergency as trust-building measures before engaging in a dialogue about a technocrat Cabinet.

Ossama Said, a spokesman for the rebel alliance, said Burhan welcomed the initiative but did not elaborate.

The U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price on Tuesday urged Sudan's military rulers to allow peaceful protests to continue without fear of violence.

President Joe Bidens administration last month imposed sanctions on Sudans Central Reserve Police, which it described as a militarized unit of the countrys police forces, for using violence against pro-democracy protests.

The latest protests come on the third anniversary of the beginning of a sit-in outside the military headquarters in Khartoum that accelerated the removal of al-Bashir.

They also come on the 37th anniversary of the overthrow of President Jaafar al-Nimeiri in a bloodless coup in 1985 after a popular uprising. At the time, the military quickly handed power to an elected government.

However, the dysfunctional administration lasted only a few years until al-Bashir  a career army officer  forged an alliance with Islamist hard-liners and toppled it in a 1989 coup.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The Supreme Court on Wednesday reinstated for now a Trump-era rule that curtails the power of states and Native American tribes to block pipelines and other energy projects that can pollute rivers, streams and other waterways.

In a decision that split the court 5-4, the justices agreed to halt a lower court judges order throwing out the rule. The high court's action does not interfere with the Biden administration's plan to rewrite the rule. Work on a revision has begun, but the administration has said a final rule is not expected until the spring of 2023. The Trump-era rule will remain in effect in the meantime.

The courts three liberal justices and Chief Justice John Roberts dissented. The courts other conservative justices, including three nominated by President Donald Trump, voted to reinstate the rule.

Writing for the dissenters, Justice Elena Kagan said the group of states and industry associations that had asked for the lower court's ruling to be put on hold had not shown the extraordinary circumstances necessary to grant that request.

Kagan said the group had failed to demonstrate their harm if the judge's decision were left in place. She said the group had not identified a single project that a State has obstructed" in the months since the judge's decision and had twice delayed making a request, indicating it was not urgent.

Kagan said the court's majority had gone astray in granting the emergency petition and was misusing the process for dealing with such requests. That process is sometimes called the court's shadow docket because the court provides a decision quickly without the full briefing and argument. The liberal justices have recently been critical of its use.

Video: 2019 Trump executive order makes steps towards oil and gas deregulation

As is typical, the justices in the majority did not explain their reasoning.

Kagan wrote that her colleagues' decision renders the Court's emergency docket not for emergencies at all."

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The Biden administration had told the justices in a court filing that it agreed that the U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup lacked the authority to throw out the rule without first determining that it was invalid. But the administration had urged the court not to reinstate the rule, saying that in the months since the Alsup's ruling, officials have adapted to the change, reverting to regulations in place for decades. Another change would cause substantial disruption and disserve the public interest, the administration said.

Alsup was nominated to the bench by President Bill Clinton.

The section of federal law at issue in the case is Section 401 of the Clean Water Act. For decades, it had been the rule that a federal agency could not issue a license or permit to conduct any activity that could result in any discharge into navigable waters unless the affected state or tribe certified that the discharge was complied with the Clean Water Act and state law, or waived certification.

The Trump administration in 2020 curtailed that review power after complaints from Republicans in Congress and the fossil fuel industry that state officials had used the permitting process to stop new energy projects. The Trump administration said its actions would advance then-President Donald Trumps goal to fast-track energy projects such as oil and natural gas pipelines.

States, Native American Tribes and environmental groups sued. Several mostly Republican-led states, a national trade association representing the oil and gas industry and others have intervened in the case to defend the Trump-era rule. The states involved in the case are: Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, West Virginia, Wyoming and Texas.
A 2-year-old boy had a gun while inside a parked car at a gas pump, and as he handled it, Pennsylvania police say a 4-year-old girl was shot.

That 4-year-old girl was his older sister, according to local media reports, including WTRF.

The Chester Police Department learned of the Eagle Save Mart gas station shooting at about 10:47 a.m. Tuesday, April 5, according to a news release shared on Facebook.

Police were told the adults on scene immediately took the victim to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Authorities say the gun had discharged, striking the older sibling with a bullet, as the younger brother handled the gun. The name of the child killed has not been released.

The homicide remains under investigation, though investigators believe the gun was left unsecured in the vehicle as the owner of the gun was inside the mini-mart, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. An adult was pumping gas into the car when they heard the gunshot inside the vehicle.

Chester is about 20 miles southwest of Philadelphia.

3-year-old dies after shooting himself with AR-15 he was playing with, TN cops say

8-year-old fatally shoots younger brother with gun found under box of chips, feds say

Toddler killed herself with moms boyfriends gun, feds say. Now Texas man is charged

3-year-old shot at Jiffy Lube in fight between tow truck drivers, Pennsylvania cops say
Gen. Mark Milley at a House Armed Services Committee hearing in Washington, DC, on Tuesday. REUTERS/Tom Brenner

Mark Milley said sending US troops into Ukraine was likely the only way to stop Putin from invading.

But the general said he was against doing so, as it would "risk armed conflict with Russia."

NATO forces have refused to engage militarily with Russia on Ukrainian soil, distressing Zelenskyy.

The top US general said the only way to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin would be to send US troops into Ukraine  an action he and President Joe Biden have both opposed, saying it would spark a new conflict with Russia.

"Short of the commitment of US military forces into Ukraine proper, I'm not sure he was deterrable," Gen. Mark Milley told the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.

"The idea of deterring Putin from invading Ukraine, deterring him by the US, would have required the commitment of US military forces, and I think that would have risked armed conflict with Russia."

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly asked the US and NATO to send troops and enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine, moves that would likely bring Western forces in direct combat with Russian forces.

NATO has stayed away from direct intervention, choosing to supply military and humanitarian aid.

Biden tweeted on March 11 that a direct US or NATO military incursion into Ukraine would be unfeasible and would start a world war.

"I want to be clear: We will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full might of a united and galvanized NATO," he said.

"But we will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent."

On Tuesday, Milley said he "certainly wouldn't have advised" sending US troops into Ukraine to deter Putin.

As the West announced sanctions on Russia following the invasion, Putin put Russia's nuclear-weapons program on high alert, brandishing the threat of nuclear war to ward off military intervention. However, Western officials believe that nothing has actually changed with the readiness of Russia's nuclear program.

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Russia's invasion of Ukraine has slowed in recent weeks. Ukrainian and Western officials have said they believe Putin is repositioning troops for an all-out attack on the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.

The region is home to the pro-Russian separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Russia recognized the Ukrainian territories as independent states days before the invasion.

As the fighting has continued across Ukraine, Russian and Ukrainian officials have held negotiations about a cease-fire.

Zelenskyy told the BBC on Monday that talks would continue despite evidence of Russian war crimes. Ukraine has accused Russia of killing at least 300 civilians, many in a gruesome fashion, in the town of Bucha, near Kyiv.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Steve Erickson, whose latest book is "American Stutter: 2019-2021," in Los Angeles. (Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

Steve Ericksons American Stutter: 2019-2021 is a howling yawp of a book, a diary that becomes a work of witness and of reckoning. This is not a  memoir, Erickson writes. Its not a novel, either. Everything that any reader believes to be fiction may be remembered. Everything that sounds remembered may be fiction. Perhaps the best way to describe it is as a hallucinyx, which Erickson defines as the literary equivalent of a hallucinogen, before admitting  or does he?  that this is an invented word.

In many ways, the slipperiness tells us everything we need to know.

Erickson has long eclipsed boundaries; Leap Year (1989), his account of the 1988 presidential election, incorporates elements of the fantastic, while his recent novels These Dreams of You (2012) and Shadowbahn (2017) engage histories real and imagined and fictionalize the authors family. The same characters  or their counterparts  appear in American Stutter.

In more basic terms, the book is an impassioned argument against the chaos of the Trump presidency and its hateful politics, the collapse of civility and common cause. For Erickson, such breakdowns coincide with creative challenges and the breakdown of his marriage, which he addresses through a searingly personal lens.

Erickson and I have been friends for more than 20 years, and weve spent a lot of time talking about literature and politics. So much of what hes addressing in American Stutter feels so urgent  not least the dislocations of disunity. Recently, we sat down via Zoom to discuss the book, which originally appeared in the online magazine Journal of the Plague Years.

American Stutter is framed as a diary but its also quasi-fictionalized. How did the book come about?

The book started as a journal, and everything in it happened, pretty much. It started as a journal because that was my way of processing the coming apart of certain aspects of my life that seemed to run parallel with the coming apart of the country. As a writer, this is how I make sense of things. But I had no sense when I started whether it would be a book.

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The narrator says he no longer knows if he wants to write. Was that true of you?

Yes, I think it was. I certainly was not engaged by any fictional story. I felt like events had so outraced anything I could imagine. So the journal did kind of present itself to me in lieu of anything else I had to say.

The form is so immediate  its almost as if the standard structures were too rigid to contain the chaos of the moment.

I think you put your finger on it. The journal was the form that seemed to work right now. When I started I wasnt necessarily thinking in those terms, but you know, if youre writing anything for much time at all, some part of your brain starts thinking in practical terms about what youre going to do with it. Thats what happened. But thats not how it started. It started because I didnt have another piece of work in mind that addressed what I was feeling. Anything else would have been a distraction, and I was not going to be distracted.

Ive now gone  and Ill admit this freely  six or seven years without a single idea for a novel. That could be because Im burned out, but I think it is in large part because reality took over and there was nowhere I felt I could retreat.

It was seven years ago that Trump came down the escalator.

And it was that month, the month Trump announced his candidacy, that I finished the first draft of Shadowbahn. The timing is not a coincidence.

Trump plays a significant role in American Stutter. But one of the points you make is that he is not the problem but a symptom. The problem is us.

Trumpism has been around for decades, we just didnt call it that. It goes back to Barry Goldwater, who would no longer be welcome in the Republican Party. When [Sen. Barry] Goldwater voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the seed of Trumpism was planted. Before it was Trumpism, it was Palinism. And before it was Palinism, it was Gingrichism. Trump is just the ultimate and most grotesque expression of something thats been going on for a while.

When did you decide the book would end with Bidens inauguration? It makes for a guardedly hopeful ending, although I dont feel as hopeful now.

The inauguration seemed the natural place to end, along with me finding a new place to live  that break in my own story. As I realized this was going to be a book, I had to balance the personal with the larger picture. January 2021 presented itself as an end point, maybe because I sensed this was as hopeful as things would get.

America Stutter begins in 2019, with Trump looking like a lock for reelection. Then COVID changes everything. Was that your experience?

I remember doing an event at the beginning of March 2020. COVID was out there, but it still felt a little distant. After that, it just descended. Thats what the journal was reflecting. I was caught up in the campaign, caught up in my own life, where my marriage was ending  and COVID was a parenthesis. It seemed to come around the corner very quickly.

What is it about America? Throughout the book, as in much of your work, you track the divide between the worst and better angels of our nature.

Very few countries I can think of started so purely as an idea. One we have clearly fallen short of, but we keep trying to get it right. I think it is as compelling an idea for a country as any other. But it is also clear that at least a third of the country has an idea thats very different. So much gets down to race. Thats been the crucible from the outset. The inescapable reality is that sometime in the next quarter century, theres going to be no more majority. For all of us who find that a thrilling fulfillment of pluralistic promise, theres an America thats just freaked out. So thats the civil war now.

In the middle of American Stutter theres a remarkable passage that begins in third person and ends in first. Its like a three-dimensional metaphor for the dislocation at the center of the book.

It wasnt an aesthetic decision. It was a part of the original journal. For me to step back and write about myself in third person was a classic case of the aesthetic growing out of the psychological. My reaction to all of this was visceral in a way it had never been before. I felt pretty visceral about the Iraq war. But this went to a whole other level.

To be honest, I think it was one reason New York publishers didnt want the book. The word they used was ferocity. The ferocity is going to put off readers. But that was the whole idea.

Ulin is the former book editor and book critic of The Times.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Two people were wounded Tuesday after after an ex-employee opened fire in an Anderson County plastics plant Tuesday night. The gunman fired about six rapid-fire rounds and then killed himself.

The shooting happened at around 10:30 p.m. at FRANKISCHE, a family owned company headquartered in Bavaria.

In a news conference Wednesday, Anderson County Sheriff Chad McBride described the shooter as just legit crazy.

He said the shooter quit Monday, then returned for the third shift on Tuesday..

Anderson County Coroner Greg Shore identified the gunman as Bruce D. Vandermosten Jr, 51, of Anderson. His death was ruled a suicide.

McBride said the weapon was an AR-style rifle and Vandermosten killed himself with a single shot.

One victim was taken by EMS to an area hospital was was in ICU at midday Wednesday. The second employee, a woman, was grazed by a bullet and went in a private car to an area hospital.

McBride said the employee who was seriously injured was working at a station close to a side door the gunman used, which was unlocked.

About 30 employees were at the factory and all but the two who were shot were able to run next door to Tipsy Tavern restaurant, where workers locked the doors and turned out the lights.

McBride said investigators are not certain what caused the shooting, but he had been told it had to do with the gunmans romantic interest in a woman that was not reciprocated.

He said he did not believe anyone was targeted specifically.

McBride said the incident was over by the time deputies arrived. None of them fired a weapon.

He praised the reactions of the employees, saying the best thing to do is get the hell out.

Its a very scary scene, a very sad scene, he said Tuesday night.
The Biden administration on Wednesday announced new sanctions on Russia, including on dictator Vladimir Putins adult daughters, following new evidence of war crimes by Russian soldiers in Putins invasion of Ukraine.

The sickening brutality in Bucha has made tragically clear the despicable nature of the Putin regime, a senior administration official said Wednesday morning on condition of anonymity. Today, in alignment with [wealthy Group of Seven] allies and partners, were intensifying the most severe sanctions ever levied on a major economy.

The new measures freeze any American assets of Sberbank, Russias largest financial institution, and Alfa Bank, the largest Russian private bank, barring them from any contact with the sprawling U.S. financial system or American individuals. They also target Russian individuals, including Putins children and some of his top advisers. And President Joe Biden is issuing a bar on new investment in Russia by Americans.

The administration official said the sanctions that have been imposed previously are already causing Russias economy to contract by double digits and have created inflation of 15% and interest rates topping 20%  and that the new sanctions will exacerbate those conditions.

The sanctions are generating the impact we warned Putin about for months, the official said. And at this rate, it will go back to Soviet-style living standards from the 1980s.

The official acknowledged that Putin has so far not backed down from his invasion despite his worsening economy, but said popular unrest could eventually hurt the dictator.

Even an autocrat like Putin has a social contract with the Russian people. He took away their freedom in exchange for promising stability. Hes not giving them stability at the moment. Hes giving them instability, and insecurity, the official said. Whats the end game here for Putin? Whats he playing for? This is very clearly becoming a failure for him. At some point he will have to recognize that reality.

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The official said that family members of Russian leaders are also being named because Russian officials and oligarchs hide their wealth in the United States and other Western countries through their spouses and children.

Yes, we believe that many of Putins assets are hidden with family members. And thats why were targeting them, the official said, confirming that the sanctions specifically name Putin daughters Katerina Tikhonova and Maria Putina.

After Russian troops withdrew from Bucha, a small city north of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, Ukrainian forces and journalists have in recent days discovered slain civilians  some of them with their hands tied behind their backs  in the streets and in mass graves filled with more than 250 people. Russian troops also killed dozens of civilians in two other towns near Kyiv, Irpin and Hostomel, while they controlled those areas, Ukrainian officials say.

Mothers of Russian soldiers should see that. See what bastards youve raised, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said of the mounting evidence of atrocities on Telegram on Sunday. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg accused Moscow of brutality against civilians we havent seen in Europe for decades.

The view of a burnt and destroyed street in Bucha, a suburb north of Kyiv. As Russian troops withdraw from areas north of Ukraine's capital city of Kyiv, Ukrainian forces and the media found evidence of significant numbers of civilian casualties. (Photo: SOPA Images via Getty Images)

The view of a burnt and destroyed street in Bucha, a suburb north of Kyiv. As Russian troops withdraw from areas north of Ukraine's capital city of Kyiv, Ukrainian forces and the media found evidence of significant numbers of civilian casualties. (Photo: SOPA Images via Getty Images)

Russia claims the apparent excesses have been staged by Ukraine and its international friends. But footage from Bucha shows civilian corpses lying along the streets weeks before the Russians left town, according to a New York Times analysis of videos by residents and satellite images from the intelligence firm Maxar Technologies.

The U.S. is now attempting to expel Russia from the human rights council at the United Nations. The Biden administration has said it is gathering proof of rights violations by the Russians and France, Britain and Germany also believe Putins forces have committed abuses.

Washington and its partners have already imposed unprecedented pressure on Russia over Ukraine, targeting its financial system, some of its most powerful people and its global influence to try to push Putin to relent and cut a deal with Zelenskyy.

The administration official on Wednesday said that if Putin changes his behavior, the sanctions can be lessened or lifted.

None of this is permanent. The only aspect thats permanent is the lives that hes taken away, and he can never bring those back. But the sanctions are designed to be able to respond to the conditions on the ground, and to create leverage for the outcome we seek, the official said.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

Related...
By Manas Mishra and Michael Erman

(Reuters) -Top U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials on Wednesday said the agency is aiming to decide by June whether to change the design of COVID-19 vaccines in order to combat future variants, even if it does not have all the necessary information to measure their effectiveness.

"We're going to have to think about this in a way that is less than optimal because we're not going to have all the data that we'd like to have," Peter Marks, director of FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said at a meeting of the agency's scientific advisers to discuss the issue.

Marks also conceded that future COVID booster campaigns likely need to be less frequent. The FDA recently approved a fourth round of shots for older Americans.

"We simply can't be boosting people as frequently as we are and I'm the first to acknowledge that this additional fourth booster dose that was authorized was a stopgap measure," he said.

The panel of outside experts was convened to discuss how and whether to use additional vaccine boosters after data from Israel showed a fourth dose lowered rates of severe COVID among older people.

The FDA said it was hoping next generation vaccines would be to tackle multiple variants.

"Pivoting toward a monovalent vaccine directed at something like Omicron runs the risk of really narrowing the breadth of coverage for people who might be getting that modified vaccine as their primary series," FDA scientist Doran Fink said.

The advisory panel did not vote on any specific vaccines, but the agency said their discussions could help forge a strategy for future use of booster doses.

Many of the outside scientists raised concerns that the agency's preferred time line would not allow manufacturers to run full trials to generate clinical data on a new vaccines' effectiveness. They may instead have to rely on comparing immune responses generated by new vaccines to the old ones.

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"I think the effectiveness of current vaccines will be a key driver in determining when that threshold, whatever it is, is reached," Dr. Jerry Weir, director of FDA's Division of Viral Products, said about when the regulator would consider additional boosters.

Data presented to the panel showed that current vaccines lose much of their effectiveness in preventing infections from the Omicron variant of the virus, but were better at preventing severe disease.

Those concerns, and data that showed waning protection from vaccines over time, drove U.S. health officials to authorize a second booster dose of the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech shots for people aged 50 and older and the immunocompromised.

A fourth dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine lowered rates of severe COVID-19 among those 60 and older but offered only short-lived additional protection against infection, the study from Israel released on Tuesday found.

(Reporting by Manas Mishra in Bengaluru and Michael Erman in New Jersey; Additional reporting by Leroy Leo in Bengaluru and Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago; Editing by Anil D'Silva and Bill Berkrot)
Getty

The Biden administration is unleashing sanctions on Vladimir Putins daughters after evidence of possible war crimes in Bucha emerged over the weekend.

A U.S. official told reporters the decision was made because there is reason to believe that Putin and many of his cronies and the oligarchs hide their wealth, hide their assets, with family members, that have placed their assets and their wealth in the U.S. financial system, but also many other parts of the world, CNN reports.

In addition to Putins daughters, Maria Putina and Katerina Tikhonova, the sanctions will also affect Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin; the wife and children of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov; and members of Russias Security Council, including former president and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev.

Inside Russias Secret Anti-Putin Resistance Movement

They will all be banned from the U.S. financial system, with any assets they hold to be frozen.

Russias largest bank, Sberbank, was also hit with new sanctions, along with Alfa Bank, meaning that more than two-thirds of the Russian banking sector is in a stranglehold, the official said.

Its a negative feedback loop. So we deny capital, we deny technology, we deny talent that can flow into Russia, and the combination of the steps that were taking create this downward spiral that accelerates the more that Putin escalates, he said.

The European Union is also considering sanctioning Putins daughters, and U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to sign an executive order banning new investments in Russia.

Even an autocrat like Putin has a social contract with the Russian people. He took away their freedom in exchange for promising stability and so hes not giving them stability, the official said.

In tandem with the new round of sanctions, federal prosecutors announced an indictment against Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev for evading sanctions imposed on him earlier by using co-conspirators to surreptitiously acquire and run media outlets across Europe.

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Attorney General Merrick Garland said millions of dollars from a U.S. financial institution that were traceable to Malofeyev had been seized.

The indictment stems from Malofeyevs hiring of Jack Hanick, a former Fox News producer with whom the DOJ says Malofeyev conspired to illegally transfer a $10 million investment that Malofeyev made in a U.S. bank to a business associate in Greece, in violation of the sanctions blocking Malofeyevs assets from being transferred.

Hanick was indicted on charges of violating sanctions and lying to the FBI earlier this month.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Vietnam, UK eye stronger education cooperation

A workshop to promote education cooperation between Vietnam and the United Kingdom's Cambridge University Press and Assessment (CUPA) was held on April 5 within the framework of the Vietnam Days in the UK 2022.













Vietnamese Ambassador to the UK Nguyen Hoang Long speaks at the workshop (Photo: VNA)

Addressing the event, Vietnamese Ambassador to the UK Nguyen Hoang Long emphasised that education is an important cooperation field between the two countries, and the UK is Vietnam's leading partner in this sphere, especially in higher education.



He said there remains a great potential for the two countries to expand education cooperation, especially in teaching and learning English language, skills training, high school and university education, considering the great demand for education in Vietnam.



The bilateral educational cooperation recorded positive results, he noted, saying that not only universities, but many high schools of the UK have recently signed cooperation agreements with Vietnamese education establishments, thus helping improve the quality of education in the Southeast Asian country.



The ambassador also highly valued the cooperation between Vietnam and the CUPA, expressing the hope that the partnership will be strengthened in the coming time.



Francesca Woodward, Chief Executive of Cambridge Assessment English at the CUPA briefed the participants on progress of the cooperation between the CUPA and the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training over the last 15 years, including English language training, the teaching of math and science in English, and training programmes to acquire international degrees and certificates for both teachers and students.



Woodward said that the CUPA is developing the International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) training curricula in Vietnamese language, with textbooks expected to be completed in 2023 and the first IGCSE exam could be held in 2026.



She said the CUPA, with its expertise in teaching, assessment and research, can assist Vietnam in raising the education quality and standard.



Participants focused their discussion on the potential and opportunities for cooperation between Vietnam and the CUPA in English language and skill training for Vietnamese teachers; developing and providing high school and university textbooks and training curricula for Vietnam; and assessing the quality and recognising global certifications./
WASHINGTON  The U.S. will impose a new round of economic sanctions on Russia, the White House announced Wednesday, including sanctions on the adult children of President Vladimir Putin and other influential Russians, in response to new accusations that he committed war crimes in Ukraine.

"These oligarchs and their family members are not allowed to hold on to their wealth in Europe and the United States and keep these yachts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the luxury vacation homes, while children in Ukraine are being killed, displaced from their homes, every single day," President Joe Biden said in a speech Wednesday afternoon.

The U.S. and allies in Europe have already imposed a series of sanctions, including limiting Russian imports and largely cutting the country off from the international financial system. Many major U.S.-based corporations, including Starbucks and McDonalds, have also announced they were withdrawing or limiting their operations in Russia after it launched the unprovoked invasion in February.

U.K. Foreign Minister Liz Truss also announced new sanctions Wednesday, including an end to all Russian oil and coal imports by the end of the year.

Together with our allies, we are showing the Russian elite that they cannot wash their hands of the atrocities committed on Putins orders," she said. "We will not rest until Ukraine prevails."

Other European allies are expected to follow suit.

Biden said Monday that he would roll out more sanctions after he called Putin a "war criminal" over reports of attacks on civilians in Bucha, including images of civilians who were shot with their hands tied behind their backs.

The sanctions announced Wednesday target the families of influential Russians, including Putin's adult children, the wife and daughter of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and members of Russia's Security Council, including former President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

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"These individuals have enriched themselves at the expense of the Russian people," the White House said earlier in the day in a statement announcing the new sanctions. "Some of them are responsible for providing the support necessary to underpin Putins war on Ukraine."

Biden said the U.S. will also prohibit any new investments in the Russian Federation.

Corporate America is stepping up for a change, from McDonalds to Exxon. Theyve left the Russian market on their own accord, 600 of them. Think about that  the private businesses choose to leave Russia rather than risk being associated with Putins brutal war, Biden said. And this ban on investments is going to make sure new money cant come into Russia to replace whats left.

Image: Serhii Lahovskyi mourns next to the grave of his friend Ihor Lytvynenko, in Bucha (Alkis Konstantinidis / Reuters)

Biden said the U.S. would also impose blocking sanctions on Russia's largest financial institution, Sberbank, and on its largest private bank, Alfa Bank. The U.S will also impose full blocking sanctions on any state-owned entities in Russia.

"Were locking down any accounts, any funds, that those banks hold in the United States," Biden said. "Theyll not be able to touch any of their money. Theyll not be able to do any business here."

The U.S. Treasury will also prohibit Russia from making debt payments with any funds subject to U.S. jurisdiction, the White House said.
The U.S., U.K., and Australia announced on Tuesday that the three countries will work together on development of hypersonic weapons.

Development will be coordinated under the AUKUS defense pact announced in September 2021, initially intended to aid Australia develop submarines with nuclear-powered propulsion.

The Tuesday announcement comes after reports that the Russian military used hypersonic missiles during its war in Ukraine, and amid concerns over Chinas development of such weapons. Hypersonic missiles can fly at over five times the speed of sound.

In light of Russias unprovoked, unjustified, and unlawful invasion of Ukraine, we reiterated our unwavering commitment to an international system that respects human rights, the rule of law, and the peaceful resolution of disputes free from coercion, President Biden, U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson, and Australia prime minister Scott Morrison said in a joint statement, which was shared by the White House.

We also committed today to commence new trilateral cooperation on hypersonics and counter-hypersonics, and electronic warfare capabilities, as well as to expand information sharing and to deepen cooperation on defense innovation, the statement added.

The U.S. conducted a hypersonic-missile test launch in March but did not announce it at the time to avoid ratcheting up tensions with Russia, a person familiar with the matter told CNN on Tuesday. While the U.S. has conducted under a dozen test launches, China has conducted hundreds of hypersonic-missile launches, according to the Financial Times.

China has also reportedly tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic glide vehicle that flew through space and circled the globe before landing near its target, according to the FT. China denied that it had tested a weapons system; however, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley later compared the suspected test to a Sputnik moment in comments to Bloomberg.

More from National Review
(Reuters) - Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Wednesday said he planned to appeal to his counterparts from G7 and NATO nations to fulfill Ukraine's request for sufficient weapons to counter Russian forces.

Speaking in a video address, Kuleba said he was meeting the other foreign ministers on Thursday. "The main topic of my discussion in Brussels will be the supply of all necessary weapons to Ukraine," he said.

(Reporting by Natalia Zinets; Writing by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Chris Reese)
A view of devastation in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol under the control of Russian military and pro-Russian separatists, on April 4, 2022. Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Mariupol City Council said Russia is using mobile crematoriums to "cover their tracks."

"They collect and burn the bodies of Mariupol residents murdered and killed," it alleged on Telegram.

The council said Russia ordered the cover-up after international outrage over mass civilian killings in Bucha.

The city council of besieged Ukrainian port city Mariupol accused Russian forces of using mobile crematoriums to burn the bodies of civilians killed in the brutal assault and hide evidence of war crimes.

"Killers cover their tracks. Russian mobile crematoriums have started operating in Mariupol," Mariupol city council alleged Wednesday on Telegram.

"They collect and burn the bodies of Mariupol residents murdered and killed as a result of the Russian invasion," the city council added.

It said Russian leadership "ordered the destruction of any evidence of crimes committed by its army in Mariupol" in the wake of international outrage over the death of hundreds of civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha at the hands of President Vladimir Putin's forces.

Russian forces have continuously shelled Mariupol in a weeks-long campaign, targeting schools, hospitals, and even a theater marked as a shelter with children inside.

The US State Department has suggested that Russian forces have "brutalized" the city because President Vladimir Putin is angry at Ukraine's fierce resistance.

Attempts to evacuate civilians or create humanitarian corridors from Mariupol have been difficult, and it's not immediately clear how many civilians have died there.

In a conservative estimate, the city council said around 5,000 civilians have been killed as a result of Russia's siege.

But, the city council warned, "given the size of the city, catastrophic destruction, the duration of the blockade, and fierce resistance, tens of thousands of civilians from Mariupol could fall victim to the invaders."

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The city council also said that all potential witnesses to Russian forces' "atrocities" are being hunted through filtration camps  which Ukrainians have said are relocation camps for abducted civilians along the Russia-Ukraine border.

"The world has not seen the scale of the tragedy in Mariupol since the Nazi concentration camps. The Russian fascists turned our whole city into a death camp," Mariupol's Mayor Vadym Boichenko said in the Telegram post.

He added: "Unfortunately, the eerie analogy is gaining more and more confirmation. This is no longer Chechnya or Aleppo. This is the new Auschwitz and Majdanek. The world should help punish Putin's villains."

Translations by Oleksandr Vynogradov.

Read the original article on Business Insider
The U.S. is sending up to $100 million in additional military aid to Ukraine as Russias invasion of the country continues.

The State Department and Pentagon announced the military funding in statements Tuesday evening. The money will go toward Javelin anti-armor systems, according to Pentagon press secretary John Kirby.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he authorized an immediate drawdown to address Ukraines need for more anti-armor systems. Drawdowns allow the president to help countries during emergencies without needing approval from a legislative authority or budgetary appropriations, according to a Defense Department handbook.

Tuesday nights drawdown marks the sixth such allocation the U.S. has made for Ukraine since August, according to Blinken. The U.S. has provided Ukraine with more than $1.7 billion since Russias invasion of Ukraine began in late February.

I have authorized, pursuant to a delegation from the President earlier today, the immediate drawdown of security assistance valued at up to $100 million to meet Ukraines urgent need for additional anti-armor systems, Blinken said in a statement.

The world has been shocked and appalled by the atrocities committed by Russias forces in Bucha and across Ukraine. Ukraines forces bravely continue to defend their country and their freedom, and the United States, along with our Allies and partners, stand steadfast in support of Ukraines sovereignty and territorial integrity, he added.

The announcement of additional military aid comes after the U.S. and its allies condemned images of bodies on the streets of Bucha, a Ukrainian town northwest of Kyiv. One person was photographed with their hands tied behind their back with a white cloth.

President Biden on Monday said he believes Russia committed war crimes in Bucha, and on Tuesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the administration will unveil additional sanctions against Moscow in response to the killings in the Kyiv suburb.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
A small number of Ukrainian soldiers already in the United States have been trained on how to use Switchblade tactical drones as the U.S. military sends more of the vehicle-destroying weapons to the ex-Soviet country, the Pentagons top spokesperson said Wednesday.

The very small number of Ukrainian soldiers, who have been in the U.S. since last fall for military training, were taught to use the drone with the expectation that they would soon return to their country to train others on the equipment, press secretary John Kirby told reporters.

We took the opportunity  having them still in the country  to give them a couple of days worth of training on the Switchblade so that they can go back  and they will be going back soon, back home  to train others in the Ukrainian military, Kirby said.

A senior U.S. defense official told reporters earlier on Wednesday that less than a dozen Ukrainian military personnel had been trained.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed a day prior that Switchblades are being sent to Ukraine as part of a $300 million lethal aid package announced by the Pentagon on Friday. He did not say how many, though multiple outlets have reported that 10 of the drones will be delivered.

Bloomberg reported that those Switchblades would be a newer, more advanced series 600 version of the drones, which weigh about 50 pounds, can fly more than 24 miles, stay aloft for 40 minutes and are equipped with a heavier warhead that can damage tanks.

Kirby on Wednesday would not say whether the Switchblade-600 would be sent to Ukraine.

The White House has already sent 100 of the drones as part of an $800 million weapons package announced last month, but those Switchblades were the series 300 versions. That variant weighs less than five pounds, can fly about six miles, hover over a target for about 15 minutes and is designed to attack personnel and light vehicles.

Kirby said those 100 aerial systems arrived in Europe earlier this week and will be getting into Ukraine quickly, if they arent already there.

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As Ukrainian forces dont typically use the Switchblade, some training will be needed, he added. It is not a very complex system. It doesnt require a lot of training. An individual could be suitably trained on how to use the Switchblade drone in about two days or so.

Kirby also said Ukrainians were not being trained by the U.S. military on other weapons but would not rule out such assistance moving forward.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Wet Leg: We get so much joy from something thats really dumb (Hollie Fernando)

Before Wet Leg, I was very scared of electric guitars, because they make the guitar really loud, Hester Chambers says  well, whispers. I hadnt expected it from the co-creator of some of the most delightfully brash, bawdy songs of recent years, but the 28-year-old is incredibly softly spoken. Her bandmate, lead vocalist Rhian Teasdale, is hardly the in-your-face sort, either. Talking to the Isle of Wight duo, in a sun-soaked, pastel-coloured room in their record labels London offices, I get the sense that their rapid success feels, to them, as strange as it does silly.

It all started with Chaise Longue. Wet Legs viral debut single, released last year, was the match that ignited them. Deadpan and surreal, it saw Teasdale speak-singing over a driving beat and post-punk riffs: Is your mother worried? Would you like us to assign someone to worry your mother? It was irrepressibly catchy, earning them tens of millions of streams, praise from Hayley Williams, Iggy Pop and Florence Welch, and a string of sold-out shows.

Dave Grohl told this publication: Wet Leg are about to take over America, adding that he and his friends sometimes stay up till 4am listening to the song over and over and over and over again. Rolling Stone called them the buzziest new band of the year. The New York Times said they had ascended as quickly and unexpectedly as any band in recent pop history.

So, what were they thinking when they wrote Chaise Longue? Just, like, Music is so funny, shrugs the 29-year-old Teasdale. They both giggle. It was really late at night and it was a song that was supposed to be just for us, in a folder called High Jams. I loved those evenings, says Chambers wistfully. Just listening to whatever you did the next morning and being like, Oh my God. We get so much joy from something thats really dumb. Some interviewers have tried to assign political agendas to the song, adds Teasdale, and Im like, No, we were just having a good time. And thats OK.

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Their entire self-titled debut album, out this week, is a pretty good time. They wrote a lot of it before they even had a record deal, and theres a no-pressure breeziness to it all, the lyrics playful and inventive, the music a laissez-faire jumble of dream pop, punk and indie rock. Piece of S*** is scuzzy and languorous  The Moldy Peaches by way of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs; Angelica is a staccato, antisocial anthem; on Wet Dream, a lively kiss-off written as a riposte to a text Teasdales ex sent her, she asks: What makes you think youre good enough to think about me when youre touching yourself?

That one was their second single, but they were told at first that it was too raunchy to be played on the radio. It was funny, wasnt it? says Teasdale to Chambers. Because I think if we were hip-hop artists, it would probably go unmentioned. Yes, it is strange, agrees Chambers. We did something a few months ago where they asked you to censor shave my rat in Too Late Now. I dont really understand why.

The line in question, uttered in an ASMR-inducing almost-whisper, is: I dont need no dating app to tell me if I look like crap / To tell me if Im thin or fat / To tell me should I shave my rat. Asking them to censor it is making it shameful to shave your rat or not shave your rat, says Teasdale. I cant quite tell if shes being serious. Did they censor it? I had to say cat, she says sombrely. Really? Im joking. They collapse into laughter.

A lot of the songs on the album are about the same breakup. Ur Mum, twitchy, shimmering and infantile, is so brilliant that it has the potential to be bigger than Chaise Longue  but Teasdale seems to be having second thoughts about it. Especially the line: When I think about what youve become / I feel sorry for your mum. She doesnt really mean it, she says. Its about having this realisation of, like, Time to go  time to get out of this one! Sometimes, to do that, you have to pretend to yourself that you really hate someone. I think thats why that song sounds so... its a bit harsh, isnt it? I feel sorry for your mum is a very mean thing to say.

It was written, she says, when she was reflecting on a relationship where youre just plodding along behind someone. Its cool being in love and everything, but its also cool to feel motivated and put effort into yourself and into your own goals and aspirations. Sometimes, when youre so focused on trying to make someone love you, its a lot of energy that you could be putting into something else.

It is funny, she adds, having to reflect on that relationship in interviews. I just feel so different now, and theyre probably really happy in their new relationship, and Im really happy. Theres distance from it. When we play that song, I dont really think about it. Were just playing the songs  she turns to Chambers  and Im smiling at you.

Sisters in arms: Wet Legs Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers (Hollie Fernando)

The pair have a sweet, sisterly dynamic. They communicate via looks and smiles, often directing their answers to each other rather than me. When Teasdale finishes a sentence, shell often gesture to Chambers to have her say, too  an invitation her bandmate often declines. When they were pottering around the kitchen before they came into the room, I overheard Teasdale saying, Im proud of us. She should be.

Wet Leg grew up on the Isle of Wight, where theres a small but vibrant music scene. Really small. When I mention my cousins husband, who lives on the island and is a musician, Chambers immediately recognises his name. Andy! We know Andy! He plays the drums! They arent sure whether theres a common thread in islanders music, though Chambers remembers talking to her mainland cousins when she was a teenager, and theyd be like, Yes but it has a sound, doesnt it? Not in a snobby way.

Maybe in, like, an over-romanticised way? offers Teasdale. I think it is a bit over-romanticised. (A few weeks after we speak, the New York Times profile of Wet Leg describes the island as bucolic and full of Victorian cottages, which, sure, but there are plenty of housing estates, too.)

None of Teasdales friends at school were particularly into music, and shed barely played a note when she dropped out of her A-Levels to do a music Btec, a decision that was made purely out of desperation. Her mum panicked on her behalf. She was of the opinion that your education was a stepping stone to succeeding. She even suggested that her daughter join the merchant navy instead. But music was more appealing. It was on that course that Teasdale and Chambers met, and they bonded over a shared love of Laura Marling, Patrick Watson, and Nordic music.

Their first ever practice together felt strange, says Teasdale, because shed never made music in a room with no boys in it. It was just different to feel like it was up to us, I guess. I feel like boys have always been quite confident in those kinds of spaces. I hadnt really found a place where I felt like I was going to flourish. Her brows furrow. Not that I was mad about it. It wasnt like we were in bands with boys and we were like, We want to do this, and they were like, No. Were boys. They both fall about laughing again.

We wanted the songs to be pumped up and fun, but actually were just a bunch of emos

Rhian Teasdale

Their main aim when they started writing music was to get into festivals for free. The point was not, like, Is the song good? but Will this count as a 30-minute festival set? says Teasdale. We wanted the songs to be pumped up and a bit fun... but then, were actually just a bunch of emos. The sardonic, sometimes misanthropic vibe of their music was accidental, she insists. We were trying to write party songs and then, actually, we just wrote songs about how were at a party and we dont like it.

After coming up with their band name by closing their eyes and pressing random emojis on their phone, the duo played as the first iteration of Wet Leg at a festival in the summer of 2018, says Chambers. No, says Teasdale, I think it was 2019. There is a good deal of hushed to-ing and fro-ing. No firm agreement is reached. They are sure of one thing, though: By the end of 2020, concludes Teasdale, we signed to Domino.

Even after theyd signed that deal, they had no real expectations of success. Realistically, says Teasdale, most people that sign to a label will work another job. I think we always thought there would be more balance between being in a band and normal life. I dont think we ever thought: Were going to sign a deal and quit our jobs.

Thats what happened, though. Their ascent has been so fast and steep, in fact, that they dont really seem to trust it. They keep coming back to the same analogy. Were just trying to stay on top of the wave, says Chambers. Because it is going to end, inevitably, adds Teasdale. Were very aware of that. Its important to enjoy the ride, but sometimes youre just clinging on and its hard to pop up. Some days, you pop up. Some days, youre just grabbing onto the rails.

Wet Legs debut album is out on 8 April
White House COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients on Tuesday said its in the U.S.s national interest to vaccinate the world against COVID-19 to protect against potential new variants, days after senators dropped global funding from a coronavirus spending deal.

It is a real disappointment that theres no global funding in this bill. This virus knows no borders, and its in our national interest to vaccinate the world and protect against possible new variants, Zients said during a White House COVID-19 briefing.

Without additional funding for a global response, we wont have resources to help get more shots in arms in countries in need, he added.

Zientss comments come after senators announced on Monday that they reached a deal to allocate $10 billion in funding to combat COVID-19. The agreement, however, omits money for the global virus response.

The initial proposal, worth $15.6 billion, included $5 billion for global vaccine efforts, but the money was nixed from the final deal because of disagreements over how to pay for it. The White House initially requested $22.5 billion in funding.

The COVID-19 funding deal announced on Monday hit a roadblock on Tuesday when Republicans blocked the Senate from advancing the agreement because of a separate disagreement over a Title 42, a public health policy implemented under the Trump administration that allows migrants to be expelled at the border because of COVID-19 concerns.

The Biden administration rescinded the controversial measure on Friday. Republicans are now pushing for a vote to block the administration from revoking Title 42.

Experts have said vaccinating the world is essential to preventing the formation of new variants that could eventually spread to the U.S. Advocates and some Democratic lawmakers had pressed for more global funding.

The U.S. has already provided more than 515 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to upward of 110 countries, according to the State Department.

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Zients on Tuesday said the deficiency in global funding has real implications on our efforts to vaccinate the world.

Without the additional global funding, [the United States Agency for International Development] does not have the resources it needs to help countries get more shots in arms, Zients said.

Well be forced to scale back the work that we do to provide oxygen and other lifesaving supplies to countries that need them. Our global genomic sequencing capabilities will fall off, and that undermines our ability to detect emerging variants beyond our borders, he added.

The COVID-19 response coordinator again emphasized that it is in the U.S.s interest to vaccinate the globe to protect against the emergence of variants in the future.

Its a real disappointment to not have any global funding in this bill. It has real implications. We need funding as quickly as possible. Congress needs to act with urgency to fund our global response so that we can accelerate our efforts to turn vaccines  we do have vaccine supply. We need to turn those vaccines into vaccinations around the world, he added.

Zients announced in March that he will depart from his post at the White House this month to return to private life. Ashish Jha, a public health expert who currently serves as dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, will assume the position.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
The disappearance of a job posting for a new diversity specialist inspired a packed Ankeny school board meeting Monday evening and complaints about both the school board and the schools' atmosphere.

The Ankeny Parents and Educators for Progress posted on Facebook Friday morning about the job posting for a diversity, equity and inclusion specialist getting removed. The job posting had said the specialist would lead and advocate for students of diverse cultural backgrounds and experiences in the district. The proposed position would join the district's existing director of equity.

The activists and their allies showed up in droves for Monday evening Ankeny school board meeting, packing the room until it hit capacity.

KCCI-TV reporter Lauren Johnson, who is Black, said on Twitter that she wasn't allowed in the meeting room after it hit capacity, leading to more outcry online. She wrote that a district official told her she was being loud and would need to watch a live stream.

"Unfortunately, our members of the media expressed an experience we would not want for anyone attending a board meeting. In reviewing our protocols, Ankeny Schools will reserve a space for the news media at future board meetings and work with district staff on creating a welcoming environment," district officials said in a statement. The statement said officials would seek a larger meeting space for future meetings.

Why was the job posting removed?

On Monday, Superintendent Erick Pruitt told the crowd gathered that he decided to "pause" the hiring of a diversity specialist.

On Jan. 18, the school board approved job descriptions for gifted and talented specialist and social-emotional learning specialist positions. On Feb. 1, the board approved a preliminary budget that called for the gifted and social learning specialist jobs and five other office positions meant to address student needs, including the diversity specialist and a safety coordinator.

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Dr. Erick Pruitt, superintendent for the Ankeny Community School District.

Pruitt said the board's actions may have been misinterpreted, and the district paused the hiring process for the five positions that had not been formally approved, including the diversity specialist, on March 23. School board policy calls for the board to establish new positions and approve their function and purpose.

Four other specialist jobs were approved on Monday but Pruitt said he decided to extend the pause on that position to allow a diversity, equity and inclusion audit and other planning initiatives to be completed first.

"I understand that ensuring the community and the school board fully understand the district's initiative is paramount," Pruitt said. He said that he and school board members make meeting agendas together, and that sometimes topics come up that do not make it because they are not ready for a discussion.

"It is disappointing to have to clarify this and spend time addressing rumors as a result of information being shared absent any context when we should all be focused on student achievement and advancing our educational program for students," Pruitt said.

He said students need extra support to grow in their academic success, including students of color, low-income students and students with special needs.

"There is clear evidence that the past two years have impacted our students, the culture and climate of our district and the adults that govern, lead, teach and support our students in this district," Pruitt said.

What did community members say?

On Monday night, several community members urged the school board members to hire a diversity specialist in light of the fear, discrimination, prejudice and stereotyping they or their loved ones have faced in Ankeny schools.

"Unfortunately, in my time living in Ankeny, for about 11 years, I have never thought that Ankeny was an accepting place," Ankeny High School student Natalie Jasso said. "It's really embarrassing to say that because we say that we're diverse and we say that we're connected and together, but it's hard to say that when I'm literally in it, and it doesn't feel that way."

Some community members also said that they do not feel the district officials have been transparent about their decisions.

"I would encourage board members to ask questions and find out more information in the future so the community doesn't find itself in this position again," said resident Lori Bullock, who ran for school board in 2021.

Ankeny Parents and Educators for Progress posted a lengthy statement Tuesday addressing the events at the meeting and expressing gratitude to those who spoke up.

"As a group, we will closely watch the words and the actions of both the school board and school administration in the coming weeks and months to hold those who expressed support for DEI to their promises and to continue to expect transparency from our elected officials," the statement said. "Last night was just the beginning of a very longed for and very needed conversation in our community. We hope for those corridors to remain open."

Will the board vote on the diversity position later?

Board member Amy Tagliareni said that previous leadership on the board made sure that all the members knew what was going on and did not shy away from brining sensitive topics forward. Something has changed with the current board, she said.

Tagliareni said that the diversity position should've been on the agenda Monday, and she does not believe board leadership will allow it in the future. However, she said, she hopes that she is wrong.

Board member Joy Burk said that she has been supportive of the district's diversity efforts. She said she told the superintendent that if he believes the district needs it, she'll support it, unless proven otherwise.

Board President Trent Murphy was not present on Monday. Vice President Ryan Weldon said that the diversity specialist change was not a board decision.

Weldon said that he told the superintendent that he doesn't think it's the board's responsibility to dictate hires, but that he thinks it's too soon to approve the diversity specialist before seeing the results of the audit.

Weldon also said there are opportunities to support diversity efforts and students that go beyond a single specialist position, but that there needs to be a conversation.

"I just really hope that we can move forward as a community, unified in one purpose, and not fighting because that will divide us, and we will never get anywhere," Weldon said.

Chris Higgins covers the eastern suburbs for the Register. Reach him at chiggins@registermedia.com or 515-423-5146 and follow him on Twitter @chris_higgins_.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Ankeny school board hears from residents on diversity specialist job
Rep. Fred Upton speaks during a news conference at the Capitol on May 9, 2018.

Rep. Fred Upton speaks during a news conference at the Capitol on May 9, 2018. Credit - Bill ClarkCQ Roll Call/Getty Images

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIMEs politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

For Fred Upton, politics can be reduced to some pretty simple math: either you have the votes or you dont.

Its how the Michigan Republican got a massive update to health care regulations and mental health services to President Barack Obama for signature. Its how he beat wave elections in his southwest Michigan district over and over again. And its why he so strongly spoke out against Donald Trumps influence on the GOP, even as Upton voted with Trumps legislation almost 80% of the time.

Were not going to win unless were a big tent. And were not going to win unless we add to our base, not subtract from it, he said last year, urging his fellow Republicans not to chase the bogus claims of election fraud embedded in Trumps Big Lie.

Well, the Reagan Administration aide and 18-term Congressman did the math this week and came to a decision with a Midwestern sensibility. On Tuesday, the long-serving Republican took the floor of the House, where he first walked as a Hill staffer in 1976, and announced he wouldnt run for another term. With visible emotion, one of the last members of the disbanded Main Street Coalition of moderates started the process of winding down a remarkable political career that made him the only lawmaker in history to have voted to impeach two different Presidents.

Even the best stories have a last chapter. This is it for me, Upton said. Hopefully civility and bipartisanship versus discord can rule and not rue the day.

Naturally, Trump claimed Uptons as his political scalp. The 45th President had endorsed another candidate in the primary against Upton in retribution for Uptons vote to impeach him in the 2021 probe that focused on his role in the failed Jan. 6 insurrection. Upton found himself one of the lone voices trying to warn colleagues that their fealty to Trump was not just bad for the country but also bad for their long-term political ambitions.

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But the math back home probably had more to do with Uptons choice than anything Trump could menace. While Upton remains well liked in his Kalamazoo districtneighbors simply call him Fred after such a long tenurehis home turf got cut in a tricky way after the 2020 Census. His district got mashed up with the Grand Rapids-based neighboring district, where incumbent Republican Bill Huizenga is running for another term with Trumps endorsement. To run again, Upton would have had to campaign against Huizenga.

Upton may well have survived a primary. His Rolodex is ripe after so long in Washington and money wasnt an issue; he started the year with about $1.5 million banked in his campaign account. Even as late as Monday, he was sounding very much like a candidate during an interview with NBC News on Capitol Hill. If we run, were going to run my own race. Im not changing, he said. If were going to be in the majority, we have to appeal to more than just the Trump voter. Theyre not a majority in the country. They may be a majority in our party.

But being a Trump nemesis in the Republican Party can be a grueling hell. A day later, Upton had revisited the political math. He now becomes the fourth Republican who voted against Trump during his second impeachment to decline to seek re-election, and Trump is working to defeat the other six.

Uptons not alone in confronting a new reality from redistricting chaos. Michigans bipartisan redistricting effort faced a real challenge in redrawing lines in a fair way to deal with the loss of one House seat because the state didnt grow as quickly as places like Texas. Michigans new lines are forcing Rep. Debbie Dingell to move from Dearborn to Ann Arbor to stay in Congress. Rep. Haley Stevens plans to move and switch districts, too. Yet to their credit, Michigans team actually got the maps approved before the deadline, unlike Ohio, where mapmakers are trying to convince the state Supreme Court they shouldnt be held in contempt over gerrymandered district lines. And in New Hampshire, Florida, and Missouriamong othersthe maps arent even drawn yet for incumbents to know if they need to ditch fundraisers in favor of real estate open houses.

Democrats have long eyed the Upton district as winnable. But Upton proved durable in a district he knows well. He refused to drink the Trump Kool-Aid and kept his bipartisan credentials at the fore. In 2018, a year when Republicans nationwide took a walloping, Upton ran an aggressive campaign in his district and actually ran ahead of Republicans voter-registration advantage there. In other words, despite massive headwinds, he still outperformed. (The fact the Economic Club of Southwest Michigan paid Biden $200,000 to speak at an event in the district three weeks before Election Day 2018 didnt hurt, either; Biden called Upton one of the finest guys Ive ever worked with at the event, funded in part through an Upton family foundation.)

Thats the thing about Upton, a buttoned-down, old-school politician who used a friendship forged at a Bible study to recruit a Democratic partner in crafting a bipartisan health care agenda in 2016. Even as Upton railed against Obamacare and did everything in his power to dismantle it, he also recognized the way the country approves new treatments and treats mental health and addiction could use an update. Through hard work and aggressive courtship, Upton managed to deliver one of the last legislative compromises of the Obama eraone that paved the way for fast-track vaccine development during the COVID-19 crisis.

Upton stood united with Republicans during Trumps first impeachment, the one over the Presidents withholding of foreign aid to Ukraine unless that country delivered dirt on the Biden family. But the Jan. 6-based sequel was too much for Upton, who watched the mob march from his offices Capitol Hill balcony. Upton voted to certify the results of the election, including Trumps loss in Michigan, and later voted to impeach Trump.

More recently, he was among a handful of Republicans who backed Bidens bipartisan infrastructure plan. For reporters, Upton played the death threats that followed.

I have no second thoughts or regrets about the votes that Ive cast, whether it be for the Jan. 6 commission to get to the bottom of it, whether it was impeachment. He said he did everything totally appropriate. I disagree, and the facts will come out when the report is done, Upton told reporters just off the House floor on Tuesday.

The dean of Michigans House delegation, Upton is liked across the aisleso much so that Rep. Dingell made a point of being the first Democrat to speak on the floor after Upton announced his retirement. The pair is about as politically different as can be, but she noted the two never made their disagreements personal. After all, she said, Upton was among her late husbands best friends in Congress.

Now, its likely the redrawn district will have its voice in Washington coming from a figure elected during the Tea Party wave of 2010 and probably returning to D.C. with a blessing by the formerand perhaps futurePresident. Uptons brand of compromise was already a fleeting quality in Washington. It might deserve to have its status updated to endangered.

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Beijing native Wang Jixian has been living in Odessa (right) for the past four years. Screenshot from YouTube, OLEKSANDR GIMANOV/AFP via Getty Images

YouTube suspended the channel of a well-known Chinese vlogger who posted about life in Ukraine.

Odessa resident Wang Jixian shares videos where he speaks about his opposition to the Russian invasion.

The 37-year-old has gained more than 104,000 subscribers, but also hate from Chinese nationalists.

YouTube has restored the suspended account of a Chinese vlogger who gained fame  and death threats from Chinese citizens  after posting about his life in Ukraine.

Wang Jixian, who lives alone in Odessa, had been sharing videos almost daily in which he candidly speaks about his opposition to the Russian invasion.

The 37-year-old amassed more than 104,000 subscribers and a combined 6.5 million views on the platform, but has also endured repeated online attacks from Chinese nationalists who call him a traitor for not toeing Beijing's official line. China has not condemned Russia for the invasion, with the media there painting the West as the villain.

YouTube told Wang that his account was suspended over a March 28 video that was flagged for "violent content," Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported.

The video included footage of the city with sounds of exploding missiles and air-raid sirens going off. In it, Wang can be seen cooking in his kitchen and sharing Ukrainian state and media reports about the war.

"I find this inexplicable," he told the outlet. "YouTube claims that my account was reported for violent content, which violates the rules, but where is the violence?"

YouTube has since restored his account, a week after the suspension.

A YouTube spokesperson told Insider: "With the massive volume of videos on our platform, sometimes we make the wrong call on content that is flagged by our community. When this is brought to our attention, we review the content and take appropriate action quickly, including restoring videos that were mistakenly removed."

Wang told RFA he received multiple messages prior to his suspension, warning him not to "provoke the Chinese government" and urging him to avoid being "too aggressive with your comments."

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"I'm non-partisan and I don't have any religious beliefs. I insist that 'people have the right to live' (and that) no one should die in war, so if this belief of mine conflicts with any national interest, please be my enemy," he added in his bio description.

All of his Chinese social media accounts, including on WeChat, have also been shut down, he wrote.

In an interview with CNN last month, Wang said that he has no desire to stop posting videos, despite the hate he has received from trolls.

"I want to (provide) some voice for the people in Ukraine, for the heroes, for my neighbors. Because in my eyes they are all heroes," he told CNN. "I see people being calm, I see people brave... I want to remind you to see who is dying, who has been killed."

According to the outlet, the Beijing native has lived in Odessa for the past four years and works as a programmer there.

Read the original article on Insider
Four years ago  and just two days before a tornado devastated parts of Central Virginia  a group gathered at Randolph College to talk about community resilience as the Earths climate becomes more chaotic.

Members of that same group gathered at Randolph again last week to talk about continuing efforts to better prepare Lynchburg for increasing heat.

Our region will experience higher temperatures, heavier rains and more severe storms. There is also a moderate risk of increased drought.

Residents will face higher electric rates, more power outages, more flooding and more wind damage.

Already our region has about 10 days per year when the temperature exceeds 95 degrees Fahrenheit. In the next 70 years, the Environmental Protection Agency predicts that number will jump to 20 to 40 days. The average Virginia temperature has increased by one degree and is projected to rise by more than 5 by 2100.

Scientists around the world have said repeatedly that preserving forests and planting trees are two of the best ways to mitigate the effects of a warming planet. Its important to figure out where new trees are needed.

Three local professors  Karin Warren at Randolph College, Laura Henry-Stone at the University of Lynchburg and Lisa Powell at Sweet Briar College  have been working with students on an urban heat-mapping project to determine the most vulnerable sections of Lynchburg.

Nationwide, studies have shown that city temperatures can be 5 to 12 degrees higher than surrounding rural areas.

Asphalt and concrete jungles absorb and reflect heat, and without trees, some areas are already unbearably hot in the summer.

For the study, students drove five routes through Lynchburg on July 15, 2021, at three specific times during the day. The highest temperatures recorded were 72 at 6 a.m.; 93 at 3 p.m. and 90 at 7 p.m.

After compiling the data, University of Lynchburg student Emily Cornwell determined Seminary Hill, Fairview Heights and Diamond Hill were the neighborhoods most at risk for extreme heat, while the Winston Ridge and Wards Road/Liberty University areas would also face high heat.

Lynchburg essentially has two types of high-risk areas: those that were redlined to discriminate against people of color in the 1930s and more recently developed commercial corridors.

Redlining was a racist practice, finally outlawed in the 1960s, that allowed banks to deny loans to folks in predominately Black neighborhoods.

In many cities, up to 94% of redlined neighborhoods are the hottest in their city.

Without home ownership, those areas are likely to have fewer trees, smaller lot sizes and be near highways and industrial areas, where asphalt and concrete prevail.

That legacy continues. For people stuck in higher-poverty areas, houses tend to be poorly insulated without central air-conditioning, exacerbating the lack of shade.

To help lower the heat-island effect in Lynchburg and other cities, the Virginia Foundation of Independent Colleges is working with the Virginia Department of Forestry to secure funding for tree planting.

Trees not only reduce heat and runoff, they sequester carbon dioxide and provide food. Get your shovels ready.

Shannon Brennan can be reached at shannonw481@gmail.com.
AMHERST  Two years after the last resident of the Central Virginia Training Center was moved from the Madison Heights campus, a plan to redevelop the property was presented Tuesday to the Amherst County Board of Supervisors.

The CVTC Master Redevelopment Plan will be a catalyst for connecting the twin communities of Madison Heights and the city of Lynchburg and aims to transform the closed site into a premier urban core that attracts talent, investment and enhances the areas quality of life, said Megan Lucas, CEO of the Lynchburg Regional Business Alliance.

The plan is the beginning of actual redevelopment and will be the directive that guides policymakers, developers and stakeholders toward the preferred future of the site, Lucas said.

The plan is available for viewing online in its entirety at www.trainingcentermasterplan.com.

Lucas and Doug Bisson, of HDR, a Nebraska-based company instrumental in forming the plan, outlined the highlights of the 216-page document to supervisors. The board formally accepted the plan and is giving direction to the Amherst County Planning Commission to examine the document and include it in the countys comprehensive plan for growth and development.

I think we are ready to take the next step, County Administrator Dean Rodgers said of the process to usher in new life for the 350-acre campus.

The state-run facility, which was in operation for more than a century, relocated its last remaining resident the first week of April 2020.

Specifically, the plan calls for redeveloping the site by taking advantage of its hilltops to create a pedestrian-friendly urban community with more than 100 acres deemed reasonable to level and grade for uses. The plan outlines mixed-use development through housing such as townhomes, cottage homes and estate-style houses along with commercial buildings, offices, parks and recreational facilities and a brewery. A funicular, a type of cable railway system which connects points along a track laid on a steep slope, to the James River to connect the site to Lynchburg also is envisioned as a possibility.

The plan aims to allow potential developers to reimagine the state-owned propertys future and identify the best use but $25 million in outstanding bonds, along with the cost of demolishing many of its existing buildings, are significant impediments to any development, according to officials. The Senate version of the states pending 2023 fiscal year budget includes the money to take care of the bonds but the House of Delegates still has to agree to it, which Lucas said stakeholders in the redevelopment are hopeful for.

If the state can work out the outstanding debt the property is much more appealing for potential developers to purchase, Lucas said.

Nobody will buy a piece of property that has such a significant amount of debt on it, Lucas said.

The plan includes about 1,000 square feet of commercial retail use, about 200,000 square feet of technology and light manufacturing uses and another 120,000 square feet of commercial space.

This is a complex site, Bisson said. Lots of topography, lot of other things that are impacting the potential development.

The overall concept includes a village center or a neighborhood center that embeds retail into a mixed use of housing and business activity.

Under this concept alone, weve got just under 1,500 residential units so we could have somewhere probably in the range to 3,000 to 4,000, maybe even more, people living on that site, Bisson said.

Preservation of some buildings and trees also is crucial to future development, he said.

It takes 100 years to grow something this magnificent in many cases so we want to use those as key focal points of the site, he said of certain trees.

A new entrance from Virginia 210 into the property, which would connect with Colony Road, the current main corridor, also is envisioned as a new gateway, according to Bisson.

The intersection of those two routes becomes the heart and soul of this neighborhood, Bisson said.

Sen. Steve Newman, R-Lynchburg, has been working to get the outstanding bonds settled to allow the plan, which he said in a news release is a great step toward realizing the sites potential, to succeed.

Otherwise, this site will likely become a blight for our region, particularly on Amherst County, Newman said in the release. In short, the vision cannot succeed until the bonds are eliminated.

Victoria Hanson, executive director of the Economic Development Authority of Amherst County, said future development will take years so the plan is critical in preparing for it.

Overall, Amherst County is very concerned about a void that was left when we lost our largest employer in 1,600 jobs, $87 million in annual activity, Hanson said. So we are looking very forward to seeing this plan successfully implemented so it can be a catalyst for new investment and bring back some of these higher paying jobs, new rooftops and basically revitalize the Central Virginia Training Center.

Amherst County Board of Supervisors Chair David Pugh said he knows a lot of work went into it, which the county is appreciative of. He said the plan looks outstanding and beautiful and spoke of family members who at one time worked at CVTC.

I understand the importance of the site and the many people who worked there, Pugh said. At one time the training center was the largest employer in the county. Weve lost that tax revenue so its imperative we can redevelop this site.

He said the plan will make a huge difference and is a game-changer for the region.

The last thing we want is to see this place neglected and abandoned because it would be a disaster for the county and the region as a whole, Pugh said.

Rodgers said in the release the county is eager to put into place zoning tools that will facilitate investment and create the environment and relationships that will launch the site into a thriving success for its new owner.

Supervisor Tom Martin said he likes that the plan complements historical elements of the county.

I appreciate the vision, said Martin, adding of the scale of hopeful development: This would definitely be a first for Amherst.

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While names like Donna and Richard may have fallen out of popularity, one thing has remained the same: Michael has been in the top 10 names for the past 60 years. Here's a look at the rest.
Habitat for Humanity of Council Bluffs officials, board members and supporters gathered with an area family Tuesday to break ground for their new house on Second Avenue in Council Bluffs.

Rebecca Ngout, a single mother who lives in Omaha, was looking for a bigger home for her three children  and one closer to ConAgra in Council Bluffs, where she works.

She and her children  daughter Nyzoli, 17; son Okey, 12; and daughter Chudier, 5  currently rent a home from Holy Name Housing Corporation, where the children have to share a bedroom, according to Haimi Bagnew, program director at Habitat. Habitat has built several houses on Second Avenue, she said.

The house planned for the site where ground was broken will be a four-bedroom, two-bath home with 1,358 square feet of space, according to Blake Johnson, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Council Bluffs. Ngout will get to choose flooring, countertops and the color of the house.

Shes trying to make her familys life better, he said. Today is the first step.

Drew Kamp, president and CEO of the Council Bluffs Area Chamber of Commerce, thanked Habitat for their work.

There are currently only five houses priced at $160,000 in the city, so the work theyre doing is important, he said.

Anything we can do to impact housing  especially affordable housing  is a good thing, he said.

It takes a community to do the work that Habitat does, Johnson said. Habitats mission is a world where everyone has a decent and affordable place to live.

Ngout came to the United States from Sudan in 1998 during her countrys civil war and became a U.S. citizen in 2014, she said. She and her family have lived in Omaha for about 10 years.

Construction of the house is being sponsored by Mutual of Omaha, Google, Union Pacific Railroad, the Sherwood Foundation and the Charles E. Lakin Foundation.

Habitat is currently holding Homebuyer Information Sessions for those who are interested in purchasing a home and want to learn about Habitat CBs Homebuyer Program. Attending an information session is required to apply for the program. During the hour-long sessions, Habitat staff will go over guidelines and expectations of the program, as well as the application process. Application forms will be available at the end of each session.

Sessions are scheduled for 6 p.m. Thursday night, 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Friday and 10 a.m. Saturday. All sessions will be held at Habitat for Humanity of Council Bluffs, 1228 S. Main St.

For more information, visit habitatcb.org/apply-for-a-home. To register, go to eventbrite.com/e/homebuyer-information-session-with-habitat-for-humanity-of-council-bluffs-tickets-305019911767.

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Moroccan police have arrested four people suspected of involvement in an international drug and organ trafficking network operating in particular between Morocco and Turkey, the countrys security directorate DGSN said.

The operation occurred in the wake of an investigation after an announcement was published on social media proposing kidney removal in private clinics abroad for large sums of foreign currency, DGSN indicated in a statement.

The security agency also indicated that the four suspects, including three women, were allegedly intermediaries, helping those wishing to sell their organs to go abroad, in particular to Turkey.

Two victims had sold their kidneys in Turkey for sums of money have been identified, while some were allegedly exploited to receive and transport drugs in Morocco and abroad, the statement added.

The activities were carried out in connection with a criminal network operating outside Morocco, made up of foreign nationals involved in the removal and sale of human organs, the DGSN said.

Security forces during the operation seized Moroccan and foreign currency, receipts for foreign money transfers, blood group tests of potential victims, as well as cannabis and mobile phones.

Moroccan authorities have alerted Interpol to continue the investigation in Turkey.
Thales has opened a new Cyber-Security Operations Center (SOC) in Morocco. This center will provide real-time protection against cyber-attacks in the country and across the African continent as a whole.

Thales is strengthening its expertise and know-how in the field of cybersecurity in Morocco. The launch of this new SOC demonstrates the Groups aspirations to support the development of security facilities in Africa, while closely matching its customers needs, said Hicham Alj, Thales Director in Morocco.

The creation of a new Security Operations Center on the African continent, based in Morocco, will provide Moroccan and African administrations and businesses with effective supervision resources in the field of cybersecurity.

Increasingly targeted by cyber-attacks, the continents businesses witnessed a rise in risk exposure during the pandemic with a broader field of attack.

The digital transformation of African societies, driven by the extensive use of mobile payments across the continent and the expansion of remote working during covid-19 have increased Africas vulnerability to cyber-attacks.

Furthermore, as businesses, government administrations and individuals are becoming increasingly connected, this requires the deployment of a high-level protection against cyber-attacks.

The SOCs combine 24/7 threat detection and analysis capabilities and deliver responses in compliance with the countrys cybersecurity infrastructure and policies.

Thales, a French electronics group specializing in aerospace, defence, security and land transport, has six SOCs located in Canada, France, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and now Morocco. They currently form an international network offering continuous support to more than a hundred clients around the world.
Spains former Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said that he has been supporting the Autonomy Plan since its introduction by Morocco in 2007.

Zapatero argued that Moroccos serious and credible initiative is in line with the UN-led political process seeking to find a realistic and lasting solution to the dispute.

Zapatero made his remark during an interview with Moroccan news agency MAP on Wednesday.

In the interview, the former Spanish PM emphasized that Moroccos Autonomy Plan is the most solid, safest, and best path for everyone.

Zapatero stressed that Moroccos Autonomy initiative for Western Sahara is in line with the UN-led political process, recalling the Security Councils resolutions describing the proposal as a serious and credible way toward finding a mutual and agreed upon political solution to end the dispute over the region.

Zapateros remarks followed Spains new position, supporting Moroccos Autonomy initiative as the most serious and credible approach to find a lasting and realistic solution to end the dispute.
Washington will slash this year into two its military aid to Tunisia in reaction to the authoritarian path that the North African country has taken, reports say.

The announcement was made by a spokesperson from the State Department in an email to Al Monitor.

Tunisia, a strategic partner of the U.S., will receive $61 million instead of $112 million initially planned.

The Biden administration will also cut by half, $40 million, its economic aid to the North African country in connection with democracy deficit.

The United States seeks to continue to support the Tunisian people and encourage the governments return to constitutional governance, the email said. Cuts in U.S. economic and security assistance, compared to the previous years requests, reflect our significant concerns about the continued decline in democracy, it added.

Tunisia has been through a serious political crisis that has compounded since July 25 after President Kais Saied seized the executive power, fired then Prime Minister, froze the activities of the parliament and suspended the immunity of lawmakers.

Last week, he dissolved parliament after 116 MPs held an online session that adopted a draft law overturning all decisions he has taken since July 25.

Thirty lawmakers among whom Speaker of Parliament had been questioned and put under investigation. They face charges including plot against the state and death penalty if they are found guilty.

Late last month Washington voiced concern over Tunisias democratic trajectory and stressed the importance of an inclusive political and economic reform process that gives civil society a strong voice.

In a press release issued by the U.S. State Department following the visit Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Human Rights Uzra Zeya paid to Tunisia on March 23-27, Washington called for strengthening democracy in Tunisia and implementing an inclusive political and economic reform process, in coordination with political parties, unions, and civil society.

During her visit, the Under Secretary underscored U.S. concern for Tunisias democratic trajectory and the importance of an inclusive political and economic reform process that gives civil society a strong voice and reiterated the need to respect human rights, including freedom of expression and association for all Tunisians, as stipulated in the Constitution and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. She also underscored that an independent judiciary is key to a strong and healthy democracy, and urged the government to cease trying civilians in military courts and prosecution of individuals for peaceful freedom of expression.

The Under Secretary visited Tunisias Independent High Authority for Elections, where she stressed U.S. commitment to free and fair elections and support for this key democratic institution to fulfill its constitutionally mandated role to run the upcoming referendum and parliamentary elections.
Tunisia summoned the Turkish ambassador to Tunis over comments by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticizing the dissolution of the Tunisian parliament.

Erdogan said sacking the parliament was contrary to the will of the Tunisian people and a smear to democracy.

The Tunisian presidency rejected this as an unacceptable meddling in Tunisias domestic affairs.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs Tuesday voiced deep astonishment at Turkish Presidents remarks about the situation in Tunisia, denouncing the remarks as unacceptable interference in Tunisias internal affairs.

The foreign department reaffirmed Tunisias commitment to the independence of its national decision, and firmly rejected any attempt to meddle in the countrys sovereignty and in the choices of its people or to question its irreversible democratic process.

Moderate Islamist party Ennahda is the largest party in parliament. Its leaders have close ties with Erdogans AKP.

President Kais Saied reinforced his power grab by sacking the Parliament last week, eight months after he suspended it, a decision described by critics as a major setback for Tunisias nascent democracy.

The Tunisian president has been criticized by western countries and human rights NGOs for his autocratic decisions and the crackdown on dissent.

The repression at home came at a context Tunisia brings itself closer to other military-dominated authoritarian regimes such as neighboring Algeria, which has no interest in having a democratic neighbor.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images

Former president Donald Trump threw a party at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night, and the only good thing about it was the fried shrimp and pastry-wrapped hot dogs.

The Washington Post reports that Trump and a coterie of his top allies, donors, and paying club members gathered at his Florida club to screen Rigged: The Zuckerberg-Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump, a new film from Citizens United president and Trump pal David Bossie. (For the record, Zuckerbergs plot entailed publicly disclosing in 2020 that he and his wife were donating $400 million to local governments to cover election administration costs.)

It wasnt just the rigged election theme that made this party so bad that even fancy piggies in a blanket couldnt redeem it. Every detail in the Posts write-up was at once utterly bonkers and totally unsurprising. So lets have a little fun with it: Take the quiz below to see how well you know the ex-presidents party style.

What went down at the Mar-a-Lago Rigged premiere party? Who wasnt at the party? Kellyanne Conway Ted Cruz Corey Lewandowski Devin Nunes Hope Hicks Reince Priebus Correct! Though the Texas senator is featured in the film attacking Mark Zuckerberg, it appears that he skipped the party. Wrong! Everyone listed above, except Ted Cruz, attended this whos who of Trumpy folks you never wanted to think about again. Guests were served: Trump steak Goya beans Fast food Trump wine Correct! A Mar-a-Lago employee asked each guest as they entered, Would you like some Trump wine?, according to the Post. Wrong! Unlike Trump's steak order, your response was not well done. Trump was introduced as the winner of which presidential election(s): 2016 2016 and 2024 2016 and 2020 2016, 2020, and 2024 Correct! David Bossie repeatedly introduced Trump as the 45th and 47th president of the United States, according to the Post. Wrong! Next time try rigging the results of this quiz. Trump got a standing ovation: Before he spoke Every time he entered the room After he spoke All of the above Correct! The Post reports, Trump drew lusty standing applauses every time he walked in  and before and after every time he spoke ... Wrong! We're talking about Donald Trump here, not Jeb Please Clap Bush. Trump delivered the same speech twice to the same audience: True False Correct! The event spanned two crystal-chandelier-packed ballroom[s], according to the Post. After addressing the crowd in the first room, Trump moved to the second and gave a similar but shorter speech to largely the same audience. Wrong! Trump loves to say things twice , and speeches are no exception. Trump said he was looking forward to the screening of Rigged more than: Citizen Kane Gone With the Wind Titanic All of the above Correct! Trump had a Leonardo DiCaprio poster on his bedroom wall throughout most of 1998, so this was a really big compliment. Wrong! Frankly, my dear, youre bad at Trump quizzes. This piece of Trump White House paraphernalia was on display: The Sharpie-altered Hurricane Dorian map Trumps model of Air Force One Trumps love letters from Kim Jong-un Trumps Diet Coke button Correct! The Post noted that an Air Force One model was spotted during the event. This wasnt a party decoration; the mock-up of Trump's aborted Air Force One redesign just has a permanent home on a Mar-a-Lago cocktail table. Wrong! None of these items are at the National Archives , where they belong, but only the Air Force One model was spotted at the party. Mainstream journalists covering the event were  Called the enemy of the state Urged to quit their jobs Urged to expose their employers All of the above Correct! Kari Lake , whos running for governor in Arizona, brought a little MAGA rally to the event by approaching journalists, informing them that theyre the enemy of the state, and urging them to expose their mainstream media bosses. Wrong! Now you know how it feels to be Fake News.
HAMILTON, Bermuda, April 06, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Valaris Limited (NYSE: VAL) ("Valaris" or the "Company") announced today new contracts and contract extensions, with associated contract backlog of $181 million, awarded subsequent to issuing the Companys most recent fleet status report on February 21, 2022.

Two-year contract extensions with BP in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico for managed rigs Mad Dog and Thunder Horse. The contract extensions were effective on January 27, 2022.

One-well contract extension with TotalEnergies EP Brazil, offshore Brazil for drillship VALARIS DS-15. The option well is in direct continuation of the current firm program and has an estimated duration of 100 days.

ARO Drilling awarded a three-year contract with Saudi Aramco for standard duty modern jackup VALARIS 140. This contract relates to the previously disclosed three-year bareboat charter agreement between Valaris and ARO Drilling. Contract backlog associated with the bareboat charter agreement is included in the total contract backlog of $181 million awarded subsequent to issuing the Companys most recent fleet status report on February 21, 2022.

The previously disclosed contract awarded to VALARIS DS-11 for an eight-well contract for a deepwater project in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico has been novated from TotalEnergies to Equinor. No material changes to the contract resulted from the novation, including with respect to the termination provisions in the event the project does not receive final investment decision (FID).

VALARIS 67 has been sold and retired from the offshore drilling fleet.

About Valaris Limited

Valaris Limited (NYSE: VAL) is the industry leader in offshore drilling services across all water depths and geographies. Operating a high-quality rig fleet of ultra-deepwater drillships, versatile semisubmersibles and modern shallow-water jackups, Valaris has experience operating in nearly every major offshore basin. Valaris maintains an unwavering commitment to safety, operational excellence, and customer satisfaction, with a focus on technology and innovation. Valaris Limited is a Bermuda exempted company (Bermuda No. 56245). To learn more, visit our website at www.valaris.com.

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Cautionary Statements

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On Day 4 of the capital murder trial for Derrill Richard Rick Ennis, a former Auburn Police detective told the jury that multiple items of cleaning supplies were found inside Enniss vehicle.

Ennis' vehicle was searched on June 14, 2006, one day after Auburn resident Lori Ann Slesinski was reported missing.

Ennis was arrested and charged in 2018 in connection to the cold case investigation of the disappearance of Slesinski. Her car was found engulfed in flames at the dead end of Dekalb Street in Auburn, but her body was never found.

On Wednesday morning, Randy Armstrong, former APD detective in general investigations, was called to the stand.

Armstrong responded to the car fire scene on Dekalb Street in Auburn, where Slesinskis vehicle was found. He said he documented the scene, took photographs and collected evidence.

Lee County Assistant District Attorney Clay Thomas brought a box full of evidence to the stand for Armstrong to identify, and he confirmed the items in the box were found in the backseat of Enniss vehicle on June 14, 2006.

The items in the box were placed on a table in front of the jury and included two tiki torches, two flair bottles (used by bartenders for mixing drinks), Clorox spray bottle, shoe polish, an air freshener, Febreze spray bottle, polish remover, growing formula, pH test, aerosol air freshener spray, three other types of bathroom cleaner bottles, a cloth and a cleaning brush.

In relation to the items that were collected," Thomas asked, "do these appear to be items that are primarily bathroom cleaning or kitchen cleaning items?"

The majority of them, yes, Armstrong said.

Ennis defense attorney, Todd Crutchfield, also asked Armstrong about the cleaning supplies.

So as we stand here today, youre not saying any of these chemicals or bathroom cleaners or anything like that was used in anything to do with this case? Crutchfield asked.

Correct, Armstrong said.

Crutchfield asked if Armstrong knew if any tests were performed on anything that was found inside Enniss vehicle and Armstrong said he wasnt involved in any of that.

Chris Murray, a sergeant in general investigations at the APD in 2006, was also involved in the investigation and took the stand on Wednesday.

Thomas showed Murray a package of evidence, and Murray identified a wire coat hanger that he collected from Slesinskis bedroom on the left side of her bed.

He packaged it and sent it to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences for testing.

What did it look like? Thomas asked.

It was stretched out long ways, Murray said.

Thomas asked Murray if Ennis spoke about his feelings for Slesinski during the police interview, and Murray said he did.

He said that he was friends with her and he wanted to become more than friends, and that she didnt want to get romantically involved with him, Murray said. He said he had deep feelings for her.

Did he explain to you how he expressed these feelings to Lori? Thomas asked.

Murray said that Ennis had told him about a letter he wrote to Slesinski and that Ennis told him the letter made Slesinski mad.

Murray also told the jury it was his understanding that Ennis split time living at his girlfriends apartment and at a residence on Emily Avenue in Auburn.

Thomas asked how long it would take to walk from Chateau Apartments to Dekalb Street where Slesinskis car was found, and Murray replied approximately 10 minutes and 52 seconds.
The capital murder trial of Derrill Richard Rick Ennis continued on Tuesday with multiple witnesses taking the stand, including a forensic analyst who said he found a DNA match between Ennis and a sample of potential blood and semen.

Ennis was arrested and charged in 2018 following a cold case investigation of the June 2006 disappearance of Lori Ann Slesinski of Auburn. Slesinskis car was found engulfed in flames at the dead end of Dekalb Street in Auburn, but her body was never found.

Forensic testimony

Pete Macchia formerly worked in the DNA forensic biology unit for the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences in the Montgomery Regional Laboratory. In 2006, he investigated the Slesinski case and looked for potential DNA evidence in her trailer.

Macchia was called to the witness stand on Tuesday, and Lee County District Attorney Jessica Ventiere asked if he found anything he thought could have been blood inside the trailer in 2006. He replied yes.

Macchia told the jury that he swabbed the interior doorknob of the front door and ran a presumptive blood test of the sample, which returned as possible blood.

The process for this kind of test involves applying chemicals to the sample, Macchia said, and if it changes color then it could be blood.

We refer to this as a presumptive test because it is not a confirmatory test. It just, it could be blood, he continued.

Macchia said multiple items were sent to the Alabama Department of Forensics for testing, including the blood swab, sheets from Slesinskis bed, DNA swabs from Ennis, and handcuffs and pants found in Enniss car.

Ventiere asked Macchia if he found a match for the potential blood swabbed from the door knob. Macchia replied, Yes, there was a match.

Who did it match? Ventiere asked.

It matched to the DNA profile of Derrill R. Ellis, Macchia said. On the report, Macchia said Ennis last name was misspelled as Ellis.

The sheets from Slesinskis bed sent to the Alabama Department of Forensics were tested for blood and semen.

Macchia told Ventiere that all bodily fluids contain DNA and there are different tests for blood and semen.

Ventiere asked if any genetic materials were found on the sheets, and Macchia said they were analyzed for the presence of semen with positive results.

Ventiere asked if he was able to make a match to determine whose semen it was.

Reading from the report, the major component of the DNA profile obtained from the stains on the sheet and the DNA profile of Derril R. Ellis match, Macchia said, again referring to the mispelling of Ennis..

A pair of pants found in Enniss vehicle was also tested, but the results came back negative for presumptive blood.

The fur-lined handcuffs were also tested and Macchia said they came back negative for blood and semen.

The next individual to take the stand who was involved in the forensic analysis with the case was Jason Kokoszka, who was the chief of the forensic biology section in the Mobile Laboratory at the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences from 2005 until 2017.

While on the stand, Kokosza confirmed what Macchia said about the DNA tests matching Ennis.

The combination of genetic traits detected in a major component of Item 23, which is the stains on the fitted sheet, occurs in approximately one of 6.66 quadrillion random unrelated Caucasian individuals. In one of 69 quadrillion random unrelated African American individuals, and with a high degree of confidence Mr. Ennis or his identical twin is the source of the genetic traits previously detected in that major component of Item 23, Kokoszka said.

Police testimony

Earlier on Tuesday morning a former Auburn police officer took the stand and told the jury what he saw while investigating the case in 2006.

Lee Hodge, an officer with the Auburn Police Department from 1980 until he retired in 2008, said he was on duty when the police department received the missing person report on Tuesday, June 13, 2006. He went to Slesinskis mobile home located at Ridgewood Trailer Park in Auburn and the site where her vehicle was found.

When Hodge first arrived at the trailer, he told Ventiere he remembered seeing Slesinskis family, friends and coworkers there.

Ventiere asked if he saw Ennis there and Hodge replied no.

Hodge said he noticed the door to the trailer looked like it could have been forced open and the door looked splintered and damaged. He also told the jury that the damage looked fresh.

Ventiere brought a poster diagram of Slesinskis trailer and put it on an easel next to the stand for Hodge to explain to the jury the layout of the trailer.

Hodge stood up to point to the door he entered and had Ventiere label the rooms inside. The front door opened up into the living room area. To the right was the second bedroom that Hodge said could have been used for office or storage space. To the left was the kitchen and a hallway that led to Slesinskis bedroom and bathroom.

Scratches and scuff marks were along the walls in the hallway, Hodge remembered, and he found a single gold loop earring on the floor in the hallway.

Ventiere asked Hodge to describe the layout of Slesinskis room. He marked on the poster the location of her bed and a night stand table.

One thing that was noticeable in the bedroom, Hodge said, the bedding was not neat. The bedding was all shuffled.

Later, Ennis defense attorney, Todd Crutchfield, quoted Arlene Slesinskis earlier testimony that her daughters bed was made when she visited the trailer before lunchtime on Tuesday, June 13, 2006, and Crutchfield asked Hodge if he disagreed with her testimony.

Hodge said that the bed was not made when he saw it. He had arrived at the trailer around 3 p.m., he said.

Also during his testimony, Hodge told the jury that a phone was on the floor and the cord that connected it to the wall was missing, and that was all that stood out to him at that time.

Slesinskis friends and family had mentioned to Hodge that a green trash can was missing from the residence. Hodge said they told him it was supposed to be outside the trailer close to the front door, and he said the green trash can lid was found inside the trailer in the office/storage room the second time police inspected the trailer.

Hodge also said friends and family had told him rugs were missing from the kitchen, and that the temperature in the trailer was extremely cold, which was not normal.

The APD then interviewed the family members, friends and co-workers and created a BOLObe on the lookoutfor Slesinski and her vehicle, which went out across the state that Tuesday.

Then Ventiere asked Hodge what happened the next day, June 14, 2006. Hodge said the APD received a call that Slesinskis vehicle was located and burned at the end of Dekalb Street.

At that point going from a missing person complaint to then finding her vehicle being burned, at that time it kind of shifted the missing person to something a little bit more serious, Hodge said.

Ventiere brought a large diagram of the area where the vehicle was found and put it on an easel. Hodge stood up to explain the scene.

He told the jury he entered Dekalb Street from Opelika Road, and he pointed to the bowling alley building where Ennis worked and said Slesinskis vehicle was located on the cul-de-sac facing towards Opelika Road.

Ventiere asked if Hodge collected any evidence from the scene and Hodge replied that he collected a partially burned hand-rolled cigarette that was a little damp but not saturated.

Being in the environment that we were in, that hand-rolled cigarette looked very fresh, meaning it hadnt been there very long, he said.

Hodge, who worked in narcotics for about 15 years, said that hand-rolled cigarettes are different from what is sold in stores.

Its rolled in cigarette paper, whats called a leaf, most of the time its white, but to make a hand-rolled cigarette you basically put the tobacco inside the leaf or inside the paper and roll it, Hodge said. After you roll it, youve got to moisten it. Most people lick it to seal it up. It does not have a filter, so its open-ended on both ends.

Hodge said that was all they found on that day, but law enforcement returned to the area and located a gas can in the wooded area behind the dead end of the street.

Ventiere showed Hodge several packages of evidence and asked him to identify each one. Hodge identified the package with the cigarette, the cans he used to put aside debris from the car fire for testing, the gold earring, Slesinskis bed sheets and the green trash can lid.

Ventiere asked Hodge what was on the earring and Hodge replied a piece of hair.

On June 15, 2006, Hodge said, he went back to the trailer with forensic scientist for a more thorough investigation.

After breaking to take shelter inside the Lee County Justice Center during a tornado warning, the capital murder trial of Derrill Richard Rick Ennis reconvened Tuesday afternoon and Hodge returned to the stand for further questioning.

Ventiere asked Hodge if he searched Enniss vehicle. He replied that he was present during the search and police found fur-lined handcuffs inside the vehicle. Ventiere opened an evidence package showing the jury the handcuffs that were found.

Crutchfield asked Hodge about the results of the fingerprint test conducted on the gas can that was found in the woods. Hodge said, There was no latent prints of value. In other words it couldnt be identified.
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Maggie Nelson of Birmingham is Auburn Universitys newest recipient of the German Academic Exchange Service Scholarship.

Nelson, a junior majoring in aerospace engineering in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering and minoring in sustainability studies and philosophy in the College of Liberal Arts, will attend Leibniz Institute of Surface Engineering in Leipzig, Germany.

The scholarship is through the DAAD Rise program, an acronym for Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst, or German Academic Exchange Service, Research Internships in Science and Engineering. It is Germanys premier scholarship program, and it awards competitive merit-based grants for use toward study and/or research in Germany at any of the accredited German institutions of higher education.

DAAD Rise annually offers approximately 300 grants to undergraduate students from North America, Great Britain and Ireland.

While in Leipzig, Nelson will research anti-biofouling properties of new hybrid membrane systems. According to Nelson, porous polymer membranes are commonly used for filtration of drinking water, wastewater treatment, medicine, food and more.

A severe problem in all areas is membrane fouling, or the clogging of the pore structure with substances. The required cleaning of a fouled membrane is associated with the use and disposal of aggressive and environmentally harmful chemicals. Over time, these chemicals will actually break down the membrane materials, leading to the considerable consumption of resources.

The aim of Nelsons research internship is to investigate active polymer-based membranes regarding their biofouling properties. By immobilizing enzymes and photocatalysts/photosensitizers on the membrane surface, these systems are able to degrade absorbate or substances in the surrounding medium and thus generate a self-cleaning surface. The biofouling and self-cleaning properties of the polymer membranes will be investigated using a solution of microalgae, chlorella vulgaris.

I am so honored and humbled to have been offered an internship through DAAD Rise, Nelson said. With the unexpected rise of COVID in the spring of my freshman year, my goal of studying or interning abroad was deterred. I assumed with the rigorous curriculum and expectations within engineering, that I would not have time to study abroad and gain valuable professional experiences.

However, this program has offered me an opportunity to fulfill both by gaining professional research experience abroad. I am beyond excited to experience Europe for the first time and learn more about materials engineering research that I plan to pursue as part of my future studies and work.

Nelson, a member of the Honors College at Auburn, has received a number of accolades during her time on campus, including a recent Barry Goldwater Scholarship nomination. She also was selected as an Astronaut Scholar through the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, as an Undergraduate Research Fellow, as a Center for Polymers and Advanced Composites Research Fellow and as an MIT Research Intern.

This incredible accomplishment is a testament to Maggies years of hard work and dedication to her scholarly pursuits, said Tiffany Sippial, director of Auburns Honors College. We celebrate this dedication and know that Maggie will use this opportunity to advance her research in ways that serve the greater good.

Nelson attributes the amazing faculty at Auburn for her success.

Dr. Russell Mailen and Dr. Soledad Peresin are constantly supporting my pursuits in research and are excited to help me expand my experiences to become the best researcher I can be, Nelson said. They have taught me that making mistakes is okay and that the important aspect of research is to continue moving forward.

I would also like to thank my parents for supporting my decision to pursue this opportunity into the fall. It is a tremendous opportunity to have this international research presented. Adjusting my academic calendar is allowing me to take full advantage of this internship.

Alex Sauer, coordinator for scholarship and research with the Honors College, expects many accomplishments from Nelson in the future.

I am so proud of Maggie for getting accepted to this transformative and highly competitive internship program, Sauer said. She is already something of a rock star in her field as a junior, and Im confident that she will only continue to amaze us as she moves forward with her career in research.

More information on this award or other national prestigious scholarships at Auburn is available by contacting Sauer at ras0046@auburn.edu.
yo that article is wild

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Ummmmm, first question: how did this Sarah Lawrence event happen? Like, no one noticed a middle age dude living in the dorm? Guess I should read the article.

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the parents did complain and Sarah Lawrence stil did nothing

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People complained but the response from SL was that they couldn't stop a parent from visiting their child. Which, lol, is just a mess on so many levels.

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He wasn't visiting he was straight up living there for months. Visiting a kid during normal hours is one thing, maybe staying one night from out of town which itself is weird, but a guy living in a dorm is way over the line

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Its so strange to me since most dorms have a strict limit on the number of nights in their overnight guest policies.

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That's such a lie. Sarah Lawrence's dorms probably don't operate any differently from any other dorms- he was there too many days in a row, which is prohibited by every single place I know. Like someone's college-aged, enrolled SO can't stay in a dorm that isn't theirs for that long.



Now I could buy that by the time the college found out about him, he had rights. But for them to not try? WTF

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It's definitely not satisfactorily explained in the story, SLC is just like "uhhh we have no record of him officially living there" and that's kinda it. It's really fucked up.

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https://www.thecut.com/2019/04/larry-ray-sarah-lawrence-students.html#_ga=2.12147644.905436325.1557241193-1161190511.1503583697 You should link the article in the post

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Oop altho a hyperlink in the body couldnt hurt

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holy fuck

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that article is insane, and it really made me wonder how pervasive these cult-like situations/cult personalities are. my friend's ex-roomie was sucked into something similar to this in SF and she kept telling her roommate to stay away cause it was giving off definite CULT!! vibes, but I don't think she listened.

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While I didn't have a sex cult-like situation, I did have my former roommate try to pimp me out to her sugar daddy's friend this semester Stuff like this is really unfortunately common

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My study abroad school in japan had a cult getting members approved as compensated host families to try and recruit new members and they turned a blind eye to that.

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omg. not those apocalyptic cults??? vom

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Damn I've never heard about this but I'm definitely going to read the article later

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Eww! Dude was allowed in Sarah Lawrence and started that sick predatory shit. Omg.



Somebody gotta @God, @cosmos etc on why are men?

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w t f

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The article was absolutely insane, but what a shame that Marky Mark is now involved.

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Yeah, it seems so opportunistic of him to buy the rights.

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I'm clouded by how much I dislike Wahlberg, but it says something about him that this story just came out and his reaction was to buy the rights, rather than try to help. He could at least bring more attention or something.

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This article was so depressing to read. I felt bad for all the kids and parents who were hurt by this asshole.



And everyone at Sarah Lawrence who turned a blind eye to this should be ashamed of themselves.

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Sarah Lawrence failed these kids and it only cost the kids 60k a year.



And the fact the guy still has several of them wrapped up in it...

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i fell down the rabbit hole after reading the nym article yesterday, and the blogs/websites that he has up to this day are so disturbing. one has all of the personal info of one of the girls still involved with him, as well as a video of her clearly drugged and "confessing" to poisoning people. it's insane.

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Also I take back what I said it's 70k a year now.

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we don't need mark wahlberg playing a cult leader and we don't need him making this film. that article was wild tho.

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He is absolutely the wrong person to handle this.

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I don't like Mark Wahlberg.

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lol my first thought also

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isn't it kind of weird to make a movie about this when it's still going on, no charges have been filed, no lawsuits against sarah lawrence, parents are still estranged from their kids ... really no end in sight? like, are they going to fictionalize an "ending"?

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Maybe itll just be a fade to black ending

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It will bring attention to it at least. I had not heard of it before this topic.

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well, this is probably still at least a year away so hopefully the exposure of the article will lead to some kind of light being shed on the case by the time the movie actually goes into production? idk



we'll see the SVU version first for sure

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Wtf jesus

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I hope she remains safe/in treatment. This is some L. Ron Hubbard shit.

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Omg how is this legal??

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this is a lot...definitely comes off as amphetamine psychosis

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Oh how fabulous. Getting Marky Mark to take time from his busy pants dropping schedule to plant trees. Josh, why dont you just hire a gardener?

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Lmao only appropriate response to this!

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lol ty

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Oh my god, how this wasnt done eons ago BLOWS my mind. That article was harrowing.

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oh this article was WILD and i was horrified at all the comments defending him!

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Learn more about LiveJournal Ratings in Hello! Your entry got to top-25 of the most popular entries in LiveJournal!Learn more about LiveJournal Ratings in FAQ

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another wild thing for me is this guy previously worked for rudy giulani

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why doesn't that not surprise me

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this dude had majorly suspect connections didn't he?

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he is the worst :X

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Jesus fucking Christ. I thought this was about those two kids from Idaho that went missing in September and their cult parents fucked off to chill in Hawaii.

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The fact that they are casually just like letting her chill and asking her to show proof her kids are alive and her not doing it and not being arrested is baffling to me. I fear those kids are dead and have been for a while now.

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I don't think they are alive anymore :(

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Those kids are definitely dead and I don't understand how she hasn't been arrested yet. She should've been arrested as soon as she couldn't physically bring the kids to court like she was ordered to do.

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ive been minor obsessed with this case. its INSANE. i was just saying on twitter  they let her walk away with a TON of cash in that video of their car being taken away in hawaii. and theyre aware she just HAS 35k. you aint worried shes gonna fly the coop? white nonsense.

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I want to know why the fuck she hasn't been arrested yet, it's absolutely ridiculous.

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that case is WILD. and they caught them on camera at a storage unit filled w their kids' stuff like wtf. and they're still claiming their innocence but also refusing to cooperate w police lol ok



i know detectives want to build a solid case but WHAT IS THE DELAY HERE

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jfc this is horrifying

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this story is crazy as hell

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I remember reading this article and it was WILD. Thrilled to hear about these indictments. Kudos to these journalists tbh

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The cynical part of me was like I hope this isnt made into a film before we can even have a fucking trial, and then the one time I read a post in full, I see mark 'hate crime luvr' wahlberg already bought the piece.



Those poor victims. idk how his daughter is doing, but I hope she has gotten out and her fam isnt blaming her

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Side eyeing Mark Wahlberg so hard right now. What kind of person reads that article and their immediate thought is I want to play them on screen? Gross.

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Side eyeing Mark Wahlberg so hard right now.



Mark Wahlberg literally blinded a man in a hate crime and used the fact that Kevin Spacey was a serial sexual predator to squeeze a production out of more money.



Wanting to play this guy is like... the least of the things he's ever done.

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Still though, fuck Wahlberg and everything he's ever done. Not defending Wahlberg's shit because he's awful and I hate him but he didn't blind that man. That man was blinded in the Vietnam war and it got misreported - https://time.com/3631408/mark-wahlberg-victim-pardon/ Still though, fuck Wahlberg and everything he's ever done.

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this is so fucked up

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Im glad the article brought this about finally, so insane and fucked up.

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throw him off a cliff



In May it was reported that Mark Wahlberg had bought the rights to the New York Magazine article, with plans to star as Ray onscreen



the priorities of this racist asshole

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England and France are compromised. China's waiting to see which way the cat jumps. Germany may stay the course...for now. America? That I can't figure. In the end, at worst Ukraine gets annexed against it's will .At best, they have a divided country like Korea.

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I dont think thats the worst case scenario or the best case scenario. Much larger range than that.

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I can't deny that.

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Oh Jesus. VZ looks likes he's aged 40 years in 41 days.





Fuck the RUpublicans. Fuck P*tin. Slava Ukraini. 

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I cried last night looking at pictures of the deceased (murdered) in Bucha.



I am not someone who can ever look at pictures of those who have passed, but I felt I needed to bear witness.



Take care of yourselves, esp you OP.  Thank you for these posts.

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You're stronger than me, bb. I saw the first few photos and I couldn't anymore. Take care of yourself. 

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Thank you and you too, bb.  I reached my limit pretty quickly so I've pulled back - still trying to keep up but not really lingering now.

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I saw a photo on Twitter last night of a toddler girl in her pullup with family members names and numbers written on the skin of her back in case something happened to her parents.



I saw a headline also about an animal shelter in Ukraine that held 300 animals for their safety during all this that ended up, well... I'm sure you can imagine the fate that befell them in the midst of this horror (I don't know how to do a sensitive cut, so I won't straight up say what happened to them).



And then... And then, all these innocent people in Bucha that were tortured and killed and still... our republican house votes against doing more.



I'm just so sad and absolutely disgusted.

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The Russian government is also letting media mouth-pieces write some truly horrific and genocidal stuff, so obviously Putin really has no issue wiping out an entire race of people that are ethnically and geographically neighbours to Russia:

#Analysis: Even by the standards of Russian state media, the language in an editorial from RIA Novosti was extreme.

It says the Ukrainian identity, leadership and culture must be erased. https://t.co/oMAypCmBnm  CBC News (@CBCNews) April 5, 2022 The massacre in Bucha is hitting me especially hard. I always believed atrocities and genocide could only happen when the world wasn't watching or didn't care enough about the people being killed, and that if we just kept shining a light on these crimes and made more people care they wouldn't happen. Russia knew this would be found out and there was no excuse, but they did it anyways. I just feel so hopeless.The Russian government is also letting media mouth-pieces write some truly horrific and genocidal stuff, so obviously Putin really has no issue wiping out an entire race of people that are ethnically and geographically neighbours to Russia:

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"Ever since Russian bombs and artillery began demolishing cities like Mariupol and Chernihiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused the Russian forces of committing "genocide," which he reiterated Monday after the discovery of dead and tortured civilians in Bucha. He said Russia was attempting to eliminate the "whole nation" of Ukraine.



But Finkel, the genocide scholar, said he's usually extremely reluctant to use the term, as it's very hard to prove.



"The definition of [genocide] are acts committed with an intent to destroy an ethnic, racial or national group," he said. "There is a tendency to call what we don't like genocide. But there is a criteria that is pretty hard to prove: you need to prove intent, which is almost impossible to do."



I have no words... This is...

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yah, we just gotta wait till Ukraine is decimated and *then* we can call it a genocide



like wtf

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It's fucked. You know it's bad when a piece of propaganda sickens a genocide historian .

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evidence that Bucha is not an exception. Each massacre might be local initiative, together they are a campaign. And most importantly, the RIA Novosti (a state outlet) piece is one of the most explicit statements of intent to destroy a national group as such that I've ever seen /5  Eugene Finkel (@eugene_finkel) April 4, 2022



The language in the RIA Novosti piece, equating a Ukrainians with Nazis, and saying all Nazis must be eliminated, is horrifically reminiscent of the Commissar Order, and the parts about how Ukraine is an aberration that must be eliminated, and this de-Ukrainization will last a generation, underline Russias clear intent.



Heres a paywall-free link to his Washington post op-ed: Finkel believes its genocide:The language in the RIA Novosti piece, equating a Ukrainians with Nazis, and saying all Nazis must be eliminated, is horrifically reminiscent of the Commissar Order, and the parts about how Ukraine is an aberration that must be eliminated, and this de-Ukrainization will last a generation, underline Russias clear intent.Heres a paywall-free link to his Washington post op-ed: https://wapo.st/3JdX6kL

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It's a real-time example of how propaganda never actually has to make sense - it just needs to sow enough doubt that people disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes and the testimony of real people.



I found this thread on believing authoritarians' lies very illuminating:

I grew up in an authoritarian regime, and you have to understand, the only way people can survive is if they learn to lie to themselves, and learn to make themselves believe in the government's lies. Even after I was sued by the prime minister, that was how my relatives coped.  Roy Ngerng  (@royngerng) April 5, 2022 The propagandists' response to Bucha and other evidence of atrocities is both laughably stupid and infuriating. "The dead bodies are actually living actors!" "What if the Ukrainian Nazis actually killed their own people!"It's a real-time example of how propaganda never actually has to make sense - it just needs to sow enough doubt that people disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes and the testimony of real people.I found this thread on believing authoritarians' lies very illuminating:

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I mean, there's a reason 1984 is such a classic and still remains relevant. It's just wild to me that we've been dealing with Russian propaganda since 1948 and nothing, not even the internet, seems able to properly combat it. The new ways we spread truth just become new vehicles for disinformation and brainwashing. Fucking depressing.

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The brainwashing is the final nail on the coffin. "Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion" imo but we all see everyday how lots and lots and lots of people just go for the lies. It's just everywhere.

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When you consider people in Ukraine are calling their families in Russia and being called liars, its genuinly shocking. And not distant relatives but children calling their parents, siblings and so on.

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When (if) Mariupol is freed its going to be so awful.

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I don't want to even consider the kinds of atrocities that are going to come to light when Mariupol is liberated.

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I've been seeing reports that the mobile crematoriums have been used in Mariupol to burn bodies of dead Ukrainians in that city. I think there was something that came from the mayor of Mariupol, but I'd have to do more looking.

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The stories coming out of Mariupol and Bucha are so devastating.



It has also been heartbreaking to hear about people in Ukraine who have family members that believe Putin's propaganda. I can't find the article, but I remember reading about someone who lost everything because their apartment building got bombed and they called their mom in Russia and she basically told them that they were lying :(

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I read about that yesterday on ddale8's twitter list - they just don't or can't or won't believe even their own relatives.

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yeah you hear stories about people talking to their relatives with the noise of the shelling in the background and they still refuse to believe them. absolutely insane

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the worst i heard is the rhetoric that 'your nazi government is doing it to you, you'll be free soon/part of us soon' like...how is that in anyway helpful or constructive even if it's true or false since there is the immediate issue of potential DEATH right that moment

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I just...I don't get the Russian animosity towards the Ukrainian people. I understand Putin wanting the land and resources of the country, I understand trying to rebuild the Soviet Union...but I don't understand what eliminating the Ukrainian people gets him. That's not the kind of relationship Russia and Ukraine had during the Soviet Union he remembers.



Does Putin want to be Stalin? Does he want to be more notorious than him? Because right now, this is on track to be worse than the Holodomor. If this is what Russia does in any part of Ukraine that it touches and this conflict goes on for years? It may not reach the same numbers as the Holodomor (at least, we all have to hope it doesn't) but it's certainly more savage than a famine that can be argued to not entirely be the machinations of Stalin.



This asshole is just going to keep provoking the West into action, isn't he? It's like suicide by cop on a global scale.

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It's easier to destroy and kill if you don't see the other side as worthy of empathy

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He thought capturing Ukraine would happen in a day. he didnt expect fighting back let alone losing ground. So now he will do whatever it takes not to come out looking like a loser. Even if he has to flatten the entire country it's all about saving face now. He wants Zelenskyy to surrender.

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The upcoming election in France is concerning to me with Le Pen making gains on Macron on the back of rising energy costs and that old stalwart, refugees/immigrants. Scarier times ahead if more openly pro-Putin autocrats come into power (Le Pen, Trump) in the West between now and 2024. Hopefully, someone with more knowledge of the current political landscape in France will chime in.



What I do know is that destabilization at this scale tends to increase the fervor and voter turnout from the right-wing because of how easy it is to crank up the social and economic fear-mongering and racist rhetoric. Which is to say, I'm not optimistic.

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tw



my friend posted (very clearly labeled) photos of dead ukranians and i clicked. why did i do that, who does that help? the dead? no. me?? no. people still living in this nightmare? nope.



war is nothing more than an opportunity for ((cis, het) male) soldiers to shake off the layers of their humanity and indulge in their darkest impulses. when this is "over" will they go back to their lives as if they never murdered innocents in the streets and in their homes?? as if they never left a pile of poorly torched bodies right out in the road?

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TW TW TW TW TW







I have honestly been filled with such impotent rage over these developments, and you have absolutely hit the nail on the head as to why. What these innocent people had to endure reeks of absolute psychopaths gleefully taking the free pass to live out their sadistic fantasies. The admission that it looked like the women the Ukrainian officials observed had been r*ped prior to being murdered sent me over the edge, too, because it's like "I mean, yeah, let's hit all the bingo card squares of the ways you can dehumanize a person".



But it's like...URGH, what can I do other than donate money? I'll do it, but my money isn't going to stop this superpower smugly sitting on the threat of nuclear warfare to stalemate us. It's truly just so fucked up. He is so fucking removed from what he's actually doing, he may as well be playing a game of Battleship.

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Remember the dog in #Bucha who lost his owner? Good news: he found him! This dog sounds human! #dogsofukraine #StandWithUkraine #ArmUkraineNow pic.twitter.com/wjpRuBxKZD  olexander scherba (@olex_scherba) April 5, 2022



A tiny bright spot in the hellishness of this war. A tiny bright spot in the hellishness of this war.

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The way he breaks into a full sprint when he sees his owner  My heart

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Trysts so sweet.



My dog got attacked at the park today and I still cant get his screams out of my head. (Hes fine. Im more traumatised than him)

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The things Russian officials and state media are saying about Bucha are past vile, I can't find proper words to describe what they are doing.

To be honest, I just recently rewatched an interview with one of our famous animators who's been living in EU for quite a while and while explaining the differences in working with Russian and European teams he mentioned that we just fckn hate everyone and can never get along and while this might sound rusophobic (as the state media love to say), but we are hopeless. Really. I've been living abroad for years and whenever I visit my family my anxiety is through the roof because everyone is just so freaking aggressive and most of the time I'm just scared?! Okay, I understand, we had serfdom, then almost straight to the ussr which is not that different, our people have always been poor, so it might play a role, okay, but the deeper you go into our history, the more it is obvious that we've always been like that? I don't know, I have no hope. Maybe if Nemtsov succeeded, things would have been different, but I doubt it.

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I approved this post, just so you know.

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Yes, and I asked for permission this time. I'm a good girl now.

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You may leave the naughty corner now.

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Drunk with power I say! Drunk!!!

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I guess if it was what he wanted.



I would ask politely that you not Weekend at Bernie's me when I die, ONTD. Just light a joint and blow it in my face.

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Can we compromise & vote on it?

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I'm open to negotiations as long as there is marijuana involved.

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I go back and forth with cremation but I think it would be cool to plant me as a tree or make me a into a diamond for a loved one. Idk tho





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I want to be buried at sea and have all sorts of deep sea creatures feast on my body. The ocean fascinates me!

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Maybe this is just me and the fact that I'm a whole mess, but if someone I love died and left me a physical object that represents their life and our love for each other, my resting heart rate would never dip below 100 ever again.



I could lose that diamond. If it got stolen, I'd never stop feeling gross about it.



And a tree! If it's in a public space, it's gonna get chopped down eventually, in your lifetime probably. If it's in your back garden, would you ever feel like you could move somewhere else even if you needed to? What if you find out the property lines aren't what you thought they were and suddenly your neighbors have the legal right to chop down your loved one and plop down a jacuzzi instead?



But I'm generally nervous, I don't need more things to worry about losing, haha.

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I didn't even think about losing the item. Damn. I think the cremation trees would be planted in a private forest. In IL I think there is a forest where the ashes are placed under a private tree. So instead of going to a cemetery, you got to a forest instead

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I never thought about it that way, but I'd feel the same about losing the diamond or whatever! D:



The tree wouldn't be a problem where I live (and in many other countries), as deceased cannot be buried on just any property. It has to be a specially permitted burying site, like a cemetery or a grave forest, which are becoming increasingly popular. So no one's going to redevelop the area or chop down your tree!

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I want whatever poor soul must execute my Will to hike up to a beautiful mountain by a river, dig a ditch, and dump me in the ground without a box so I can become the mushroom overlord of the mountain. With a view.



Or maybe I will just join a body farm for science.

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tysm. Really have me reconsidering. Appreciate you taking the time to reply.

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I want to either be a tree or a river



The idea of being buried freaks me out so much. Idk if its bc it freaked my mom out so much that I just kinda absorbed that or what but bleccchhhh. Let me feed Mother Nature!



(E bc its morning and Im tired: I guess you already do that but this way feels ~nicer~ to me)



Edited at 2022-04-06 01:37 pm (UTC)

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I want to be a cyborg lol

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green burial (aka basically being tossed in a sack somewhere to decompose, lol)

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aquamation after my hair has been saved, so that I can have some bad ass Victorian mourning jewelry made for relatives.

then my remains can be split between anyone who wants them or sprinkled somewhere exotic that my husband or relatives want to travel. or maybe a potter can make me into a bowl or something.

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I have my music picked out and that's pretty much it.



I'd like some sort of green option for burial.



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def cremated but I like the idea of mixing ashes with some seeds so I can live ~through a tree or something romantic like that.

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cremate me, plant me as a tree or donate me to science, but don't keep bits of me around tbh. if i'm getting cremated scatter my ashes somewhere i've picked out. idk how ppl can keep the ashes of their loved ones on them or in their houses. i'm vaguely spiritual and culturally, i think that just invites weirdness, lol. plus, we have a cat who like most cats, likes to go up on high places and knock shit over. he's a big boy so i have no doubt he could one day knock a stone urn over. every once in a while when a car or a home gets broken into in my city there's always some sob story about how the theives took the container containing ashes of a deceased family member. if you bury that urn or scatter the ashes you're never going to have to deal with that trauma.

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Conservation burial.

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whatever is the cheapest, idc at this point. cardboard box in the ground or cremation and stick me in someone's closet or w/e so no one has to pay for a plot



my bf's dad is buried in a really well known, super beautiful cemetery near LA and that almost changed my mind about that but i dont want to think about how much it costs to do that

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i thought about the tree thing but idk if i'd trust anyone to keep my tree alive! whatever happens to me, i don't want any embalming, no viewing for people to cry over my body, and no negative impact on the earth when my remains are disposed of. i'll be dead so as long as nobody is desecrating my body i'm fine with whatever.

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Then the rest of me science can do whatever with. I know they use cadavers for a lot of different things, and Im happy to donate mine to a good cause.



Edited at 2022-04-06 06:44 pm (UTC) Im donating my body to science, specifically the Brain Donor Project: https://braindonorproject.org/ Then the rest of me science can do whatever with. I know they use cadavers for a lot of different things, and Im happy to donate mine to a good cause.

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i will be so pissed if my family decides not to chuck me into the incinerator and buries me instead! burials are just so pointless to me personally, i don't want my meat sack of a body taking up even more space in the earth. i convinced my mom to get cremated too, so that's awesome!

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I want a beautiful gravestone and hot goth babes taking photo shoots with my grace.

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Umm, I guess people all grieve in their own way. I personally don't even want a funeral. Ideally, no one will even know I died.

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Same. NGL I have a bit of resentment toward viewings/funerals bc they are not how I care to grieve, in the presence of people I don't really know or care for, but if it's someone I'm close to and I don't go, I'm an asshole.

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Yeah if it was up to me Id never attend a funeral but when its a close family or friend people judge you if you dont attend

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Nah, I never judge anyone who can't go to a funeral or wake. They're awful. I go because they give me a sense of closure, but I don't blame anyone who stays away.



If you're close to the person who died, send their family some good food or takeout or something. When my brother died, cooking was the farthest thing from our minds.

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I had to attend two funerals last year - one for my uncle, and one for my grandmother. I had to manage my aunt's hysterics for both (it was her twin that passed suddenly, so warranted) that I didn't even get to grieve on my own terms. She's also obsessed with visiting their gravesites and it's gotten exhausting; I'm at the point where I don't want to see her anymore and i'm the only family nearby. Grief counselors help just a little. I told my husband to cremate me or whatever is the cheapest and throw me somewhere fun.

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For those of yall with dependents inc pets, do you have wills in place? Medical or legal power of attorney, etc.?



Are any of yall organ donors?

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I should put something in place for my dogs, even if they're seniors. They came into my life because my brother's girlfriend died very unexpectedly. Of course, he took them but they spend significantly more time with me at this point (well over 90% of the time) and how they came into my life should be reason enough to have all that in place.



I definitely am an organ donor.

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Take_it_all.gif; been a donor since I could. Recently they made being a donor the default and you have to protest it if you don't want to: much better.

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I was reading something the other day about how being a donor in Australia is really low, and I reckon its because people are lazy. I signed up years ago and it was a bit of a palaver. It should be an opt out system, not an opt in one. And if you didnt opt out, your relatives shouldnt be able to veto donation either after youre dead.

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Organ donor all the way. Take my body apart and recycle everything you can!

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I'm an organ donor but I really need to get my shit in order as far as a will is concerned. I don't have any kids of my own, only step daughters and a 19 year old sister.

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I'm an organ donor.

I don't have a will though. I did set up a thing on FB. (Which i dont use) in case of death my bro can take over my account.



My other brother has the password to my phone so he can access pretty much my whole life.



Parents are my life insurance beneficiaries

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everything will go to my husband who will dole out to my sister, niece, and friends as he wishes (I completely trust his judgement). idgaf and I hate all the nastiness surrounding settling estates and fighting over people's assets. i'm absolutely not itemizing my shit or making anyone deal with that level of crap. I would like for some of my jewelry to stay in the family, and I would like other of my artist friends to have a chance to have my art before it's donated. nothing else is really of any value, and if it is I hope my husband will sell it so he can have money to retire or live.

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I know some people have different faith objections but I don't understand how people won't be organ donors. They can take everything when I die: organs, eyes, skin, hair, teeth. If it helps someone, use it! I am clearly done with it. Whatever is left can be tossed into a sack and cremated/turned into mulch.



I think how we as people (specifically Americans) have treated our dead is a HUGE problem. Burials are not the way! There is so much land just being wasted. We could have memorial parks or something that doesn't hurt the planet or take from the people who are still on it. I STRONGLY recommend that you, your partners, your parents, etc. get that shit in writing now. We are dealing with the fallout of someone dying suddenly (fuck cancer) and it is a whole mess. Things are never as set as they seem. My wife and I got these books for our parents (and one for ourselves). My mom loved it so much she gave one to all her friends.I know some people have different faith objections but I don't understand how people won't be organ donors. They can take everything when I die: organs, eyes, skin, hair, teeth. If it helps someone, use it! I am clearly done with it. Whatever is left can be tossed into a sack and cremated/turned into mulch.I think how we as people (specifically Americans) have treated our dead is a HUGE problem. Burials are not the way! There is so much land just being wasted. We could have memorial parks or something that doesn't hurt the planet or take from the people who are still on it.

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I'm an organ donor and I made my friend the beneficiary of my 401k, and she has agreed to take care of my cat. I told her to use the money to treat herself and not to share with it her husband.



I plan to be as annoying in death as I am in life, aka I'm going to haunt everyone.

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I'm an organ donor.



I bought a will kit four years ago and I still haven't done it. I know I really should but eeeeeeeee

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They hygiene issues of being around a corpse though?? Ew

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ok but like acknowledge that it's weird? you weekend at bernie's your son/brother! it's...weird, y'all. usually i'm like let people live their life but you propped up a corpse at a club! i'm not weird for speaking on how WEIRD that is!

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Could you imagine going to a club, thinking youre gonna have a fun night out, only to arrive to see that a corpse is propped up in the corner?



Edited at 2022-04-06 12:48 pm (UTC)

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I feel like this attitude is exactly what Ask a Mortician is all about debunking lol

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what attitude?

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I dont know this lady (pardon my sexist assumption) but I so agree. There is no universal reaction to grief and everything this family is saying resonates with me



Edited at 2022-04-06 02:21 pm (UTC)

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I think its irresponsible for the family to not have informed the night club or the people who attended the event.



Having a month old dead body in an enclosed room propped up as people are unaware partying around it? How is that OK

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Its true, I know nothing about these people other than they thought it was a good idea to prop the dead body of a loved one up on a stage in a nightclub.



And honestly, thats really all I need to know about them.

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Grieve in peace but put him on public display to people who were not aware they'd be viewing a corpse? Ok. The problem isn't the untraditional viewing, the problem is they did not tell people that's what was happening. I get they're grieving but people really need to learn how to consider others in situations where others are involved.

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My aunt passed away in Colombia during covid unfortunately we werent able to attend her funeral. My uncle in law sent pictures of her casket to my sister. My sister did not fucking warn me and she showed me the picture and it made me so fucking uneasy and uncomfortable. She is fully aware of my phobia of death so I was pretty upset with her when she didnt give me a damn trigger warning.

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My Grandma's brothers did this to her and I remember her telling me how upset it made her! Sent her pictures of her Father in casket without a note or any warning. I guess it was considered normal (she was from the Deep South USA originally) but OMG. I would flip out.

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I'm sorry for the 30 seconds of energy I wasted feeling bad about this yesterday. If that's what his family wanted for their "king" and their "legend" then whatever. With all the shit that's happened over the last 2 years, I don't know why this should surprise me,

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is that really what he wanted though?

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Thats my thing. Did HE explicitly say I want yall to prop up my corpse in a loud dark room full of strangers if I die bc if he didnt, then it feels like the family is doing what they wantwhich would be fine given that they were the ones who loved himif this didnt feel like an extreme version of those posthumous albums. It feels like theyre using him for attention one last time, in my opinion.

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I think its so tacky when the living do something they want at someone elses funeral

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Not to mention they were charging $40 to get in. So this thing wasnt even for close friends and family. Which explains why theres so much video. There is a way this could have been done better (?) if its really what the guy wanted.

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I mean maybe?



I don't find it outside the realm of possibility tbh

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i mean, unless he'd expressly stated exactly what he'd like to happen w his body after his death - and ppl aged 24 rarely lay out detailed post mortem plans that go beyond some random offhand comment - does it really matter? ultimately funeral rites are for the living, not the dead. unless they're downright disrespecting the deceased's wishes, grieving families should be able to deal w their loss however they want to.



the only issue here is that apparently many ppl in the club were not aware a dead body would be there for all to see, and that's fucked up.

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See I'm Irish and over here we have wakes, which often turn into panties around the body for a couple days and I was confused why everyone was outraged until I read his body is a month old? Big fat nope. Also the way he was propped up, I'm really surprised they were able to do that.

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the way my eyebrows raised reading the word "panties" lol

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This isnt Iceland!

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Whoops, typo.. terrible image now

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Im going to H - E - double hockey sticks for laughing at the user who commented Weekend at Goonews





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Am I the only one completely underwhelmed by the entire thing? Yeah, it's pretty shocking but if I walked into a club and saw his dead body, I would've posted it on snapchat with a funny caption then left lol. I remember almost every comment in the post yesterday was like "I've had enough of the world". But those comments were pretty tame compared to Christians on Twitter going on about how ppl don't fear God anymore. That's probably the reason why I'm so underwhelmed about the debacle now.

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you are not the only one. honestly I have seen some weird shit living in the deep south from the uber religious! I have hung around my friend's sitting room while granny lay in the corner for viewing. most visitations here are open casket. duck out of the line if you can't handle it. I mean, he was embalmed and refrigerated. his body was preserved and it was for a few hours. this is what his family wanted and how they chose to grieve. idgaf and I am also shocked people would be that scandalized by seeing a dead body. people see death all over social media and in the world all the time. at least he was cleaned up for viewing.

I don't want to see someone dancing around with a body or desecrating it, and I haven't watched any of the clips, but if he was just propped up there...idgaf. the people who were there and scandalized were likely not his family or friends, but lookie-loos.

I understand the club had to make a statement due to backlash but otherwise, people do weird shit when they grieve and i'm not personally scandalized, more fascinated by these posts than anything else.

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I really like the stories he has been sharing on his instagram.

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Much, much rather him than Sean Penn! He'll do a great job.



ETA - sorry, this was meant to be a comment on its own not a reply to you 



Edited at 2022-04-06 08:09 pm (UTC)

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Holy shit, thats a big deal. I hope he documents whats happening, Ive seen Russian pieces of shit saying its all fake all over my social media. Get that proof for the Hague, Cary!

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This is essentially how he started with Sin Nombre if I remember correctly.

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Wow, I had no idea that was him. That movie was (emotionally) rough, but so good.

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He made that movie???? I had no idea. I loved that film.

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Yeah he was the director but I think he made a short about it first!

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I thought it was him in a vid from Jose Andres' twitter yest or the day before. Ok I'm not going nuts. And sorry I need to learn how to do special characters.



Edited at 2022-04-06 08:22 pm (UTC)

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Good on him for trying to help. I'm glad the war tourists are giving up because they realised how fucked up everything is in Ukraine. When the war started there was a bunch of people on social media saying they were going to Ukraine to help, when it was clearly war tourism and throwing their phones in faces of people clearly traumatised by war for views. OR even worse the Evangelicals...

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this reminds of a program I watched last night on Hillsong in Ukraine and the absolutely FUCKED shit they pulled with the original church leaders there.

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there are still those people out there. No civilian has any business going in the war zone, they will only strain the very scarce resources and get themselves possibly into trouble, and they only harm those who are the actual victims of the war. Every hot meal they eat there is literally away from the Ukrainian people. If you're not press, humanitarian aid / medical or otherwise there on official business, gtfo with your phone cameras and plush toys.

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I would reply to every single work email I received with this gif if I was independently wealthy.

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HOMG YOUR ICON, PLEASE GIVE IT TO ME! JILLLLL!

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When Michael fucking Bay has a more nuanced take than lots of celebrities...

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Right? Thats twice today in the oh no person you dislike made a good point department.

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Michael Bay can eat a dick with that bullshit take.

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it's not tho

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Right and I hate this we shouldnt be focusing on X because Z is happening. Its the same logic people use to try and keep black people in America in their place - you shouldnt criticize America because its worse in other places. Theres always (sadly) someone getting blown up somewhere and other shit happens too; most of us are more than capable of indulging in a celebrity fued whilst also caring about more important things



For fucks sake people can care about atrocities happening and still care about pop culture bullshit.

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Michael Bay is right.

It really is the end of the world.

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I don't understand why there are laughing reactions

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works for me

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holy crap, he actually said something I can agree with for once

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Heheheheheheheheh @ Chris Rock and all the comedians cause I imagine others have the same feelings.

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Comedians can't even keep the same energy for their fellow comics. I was so disappointed (but not surprised) that even the alleged "nice guys" like Patton Oswalt and Jim Gaffigan -- the latter in particular -- had quite a bit to say about the slap, yet when it came to Louis CK's Grammy...crickets! A slap is the worst thing that's ever happened, but sexual assault is totes cool I guess.

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Ive never liked Patton but Im surprised(?) at Jim. But oh well theyre all scared cause it doesnt take a lot to want to knock out a comedian.

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Patton is pretty notorious for defending the shitty behaviour of other white male comedians under the guises of its just comedy. Its disappointing because I used to really like him a lot, but following his Twitter for a couple of years made me really dislike him.

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Oh man. Im really fucking sad to hear that about Jim.

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Lol irl @ calling Hollywood very self-absorbed!! Its true plus too many hypocrites traumatized by this oh so quiet on actual consistent abusers.

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That is not how I pictured Michael Bay. I was at least surprisingly compassionate and pictured him bald instead of whatever he has on top of his head.

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this made me realize that whenever i pictured michael bay i was just thinking of james cameron, lol

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Lol me too. I was expecting a bald head.

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they would both be offended by that



which makes it 10x funnier/better lmao

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oh so you've never had to suffer by seeing this photo before?

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Same, I definitely conflated him and McG appearance wise.

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I dont really care. Hollywood gets very self-absorbed. There are babies getting blown up in the Ukraine right now. We should be talking about that. I really dont care.



Thank God someone said it.

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damn, imagine if his movies could be on par with this take 



tbh i appreciate him saying something like this in the aftermath of sony putting bad boys 4 on ice. hollywood's response to the slap has really been something.

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Well I'll be! Say it white man!

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Your icon 

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Release the Michael Bay cut! Millions of dollars in explosions on slappact or riot!

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That's what Michael Bay looks like?



Never knew.

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I am so fucking surprised that I agree with him for once but I don't understand why so many Americans keep calling it "the" Ukraine

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I dont think we, in general, understand the significance of the addition of the the before it? I didnt until someone explained it in here but Ive always said Ukraine and not the Ukraine. Plus we always say THE U.S. or THE United States so that may be it too

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Apparently that's what Ukraine was called during the USSR, and a lot of people just never learned otherwise. I was surprised by that too, because I've only ever heard Ukraine be referred to as, well, Ukraine, but that's what someone else told me.

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Yep that's it, I'm just surprised by how persistent it is. My elderly aunt kept calling Serbia "Yugoslavia" for quite a while but even she eventually caught up

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Neither Ukrainian nor Russian languages has definite articles so I've never been sure where the "the" came from, but it was "The Ukraine" in English until the dissolution of the USSR so older people are more likely to have the habit of saying that.

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when i talk about certain certain countries, i do put "the" in front of it and never thought about it. the us, the uk. maybe it's something i put in front of abbreviated countries, because i can't say i've said the canada or the australia.

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I wish people were aware of the colonialistic implications of the "the" in front of Ukraine. It's Ukraine. There is no "the".

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5 Life-Saving Fire Safety Features

Fire-safety measures can aid in a healthier work environment.

Thousands of fires occur in American homes and businesses each year. Since individuals developed more efficient safety measures, the fatality rate from fires declined. Companies want to eliminate burns and other injuries on-site by establishing strict safety codes.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) developed a list of fire prevention measures. Individuals may apply the prevention features to their workplaces and minimize death and injuries. A companys fire safety measures must abide by OSHAs federal General Duty Clause, which ensures healthy work environments.

What Is the General Duty Clause?

OSHA developed the General Duty Clause to hold company owners responsible for their employees health. The law requires employers to remove hazards from the workplace. Owners must address all workplace hazards pertaining to their buildings, equipment, machines, and other systems.

Part of the clause also pertains to fires in the workplace. OSHA holds business owners responsible for developing a fire prevention plan. They must list all potential fire hazards in the document and define their adequate storage methods. The document should also identify where extinguishers are and how to use them.

Company owners can also protect their employees from injuries and death in manufacturing facilities and offices by developing a fire evacuation plan.

Create a Written Fire Evacuation Plan

Developing an accessible and reliable evacuation plan can protect employees health and well-being. Each year, nearly 3,340 fires occur in commercial buildings. About four deaths and 44 injuries derive from workplace fires.
The largest state-held Chinese refiners are not rushing to purchase heavily discounted Russian crude on the spot market, avoiding being singled out as buyers of Moscows oil amid tightening Western sanctions on Russia, Reuters reported exclusively on Wednesday, citing six sources familiar with the issue.

China, which has grown increasingly closer ties with Russia in the energy sector of late, has not officially condemned Vladimir Putins war in Ukraine, but its government has recently appeared cautious about new spot deals.

SOEs [state oil enterprises] are cautious as their actions could be seen as representing the Chinese government and none of them wants to be singled out as a buyer of Russian oil, one of the sources told Reuters.

If Chinese state refiners continue to steer clear of spot deals with Russian crude, Moscow will be struggling to sell in China the barrels unwanted by Western buyers.

According to Reuters sources, all the largest state-controlled firms, including Sinopecthe biggest refiner in Asia, PetroChina, CNOOC, and Sinochem, have not purchased Russian crude on the spot market for loadings in May, despite the record discounts at which Moscows oil is being offered to buyers compared to Dated Brent. Related: Does Chinas Friendship With Russia Really Have No Limits?

For some of the biggest firms in China, risk management and compliance should come before profits, a source briefed on recent management meetings about trading with Russian oil told Reuters.

Some independent Chinese refiners, however, are said to continue buying spot Russian oil, although they are not bragging about it and are keeping details of the deals, including payment methods and currencies of transactions, under wraps, one of Reuters sources said.

In an estimate earlier this week, Wood Mackenzie said that developed economies, allies of the U.S., and the EU are expected to replace around 650,000 barrels per day (bpd) of Russian crude oil with grades from other producers amid self-sanctioning. Yet, the biggest developing Asian oil importers havent raced yet to buy heavily discounted Russian crude because of short-term contractual obligations with Middle Eastern producers. In addition, China hasnt shown yet too much appetite for Russian crude because of several factors, WoodMac said. These include expensive freight for Russian cargoes due to the sanctions, challenges with payments and tanker insurance, the fact that a Urals voyage takes double the time compared to Middle Eastern grades going to China, and Chinese refiners long-term contracts with oil exporters from the Middle East.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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An immediate ban on imports of Russian oil and gas into Germany is not feasible, Germany's Finance Minister Christian Lindner said on Wednesday, although he added he was all in favor of an energy embargo.

"If I could follow my heart," there would be a ban on Russian oil and gas in Germany, Lindner said in an interview published by German weekly Die Zeit on Wednesday.

An immediate ban on imports of Russian oil and gas, however, is not feasible at present, because it would endanger Germany's economy and social stability, the minister added.

"We can't be responsible for that," he said.

Since the start of the Russian war in Ukraine at the end of February, GermanyEurope's biggest economy, which depends on Russian gas for around half of its consumptionhas been one of the biggest opponents of an energy embargo on Russia.

So far, Europewhich collectively depends on Russian natural gas and oil for around one-third and one-fourth of its demand, respectivelyhas refrained from targeting directly Russian energy exports fearing that sanctions or an embargo could lead to a deep recession in the major European economies, including the biggest one, Germany.

Earlier this week, after photos of Russian atrocities in Bucha and other Ukrainian towns emerged, the mood appeared to be shifting even in Berlin.

The EU should discuss a ban on the import of Russian natural gas, Germany's defense minister Christine Lambrecht was quoted as saying on Sunday.

"There has to be a response. Such crimes must not remain unanswered," Lambrecht said.

The EU is considering proposing a full ban on imports of Russian coal after footage continues to emerge of alleged war crimes committed by Russian troops. The European Commission is working on more severe sanctions, including on oil imports, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Tuesday.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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Iran has left the ball in Americas court, urging the U.S. to settle domestic partisan issues and sign the agreement.

Tehran, however, is not willing to come back to the negotiating table.

Officials with Irans Foreign Ministry are giving indications that the Vienna negotiations are not just "stalled" but effectively over. They say they are prepared to return to Vienna to sign the final deal, but not if its just for more negotiations.

It's not always clear how the Vienna talks are going since the US and Iran have been the only really negotiating parties for weeks, and they dont meet face to face. Indirect talks through EU negotiators look similar no matter how active they are.

All the reports of things being "close" seem to be accurate, with Iran interpreting things as finished, and just waiting for the US to settle any internal issues on accepting the final pact.

The big question remains the removal of Irans Revolutionary Guards from the US terror blacklist, something that is politically difficult for the US. Iran is also keen to get a US assurance that the next president wont unilaterally withdraw from the deal, but that may not be achievable.

Irans Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh accused the United States during a Monday press conference:

Khatibzadeh accused the United States of bringing the talks to a "suspension point." He said, What has become clear for us in the last two weeks is that [US President Joe] Biden and the White House have not made a decision. He continued that the United States has made the nuclear talks a "hostage" in domestic partisan issues.

...He added, The US is responsible for the suspension of the negotiations. If talks are resumed, the United States must provide a logical answer to Irans demands, Khatibzadeh said.

State Dept officials offered an unusually upbeat assessment, saying they believe differences can still be overcome. This is a stark difference from their usual predictions that the deal will fall apart. Its not clear if they picture more negotiations either, or if they, who also believe the deal is near, might resolve the last little bit on their own.

Irans Foreign Ministry also indicated openness to resume other talks in the region to resolve key issues outside of the nuclear deal, including getting back to bilateral talks with Saudi Arabia.

Efforts to keep regional issues separate from the nuclear one is probably a good idea, because some regional powers, like Israel and Saudi Arabia, are so generally hostile to Iran that theyre liable to use anything and everything as an excuse to pressure the US away from a nuclear pact.

By Zerohedge.com

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A fuel shortage is causing political turmoil and social unrest in Argentina, and could even result in a food shortage as the South American nations grain transporters call for a strike in the face of sky-high fuel prices during the harvest season for soy and corn. A blow to Argentinian grain exports would have sweeping consequences both at home and overseas, as the country is a major exporter on a global scale. According to Reuters, the second quarter of the year is the time when the bulk of soybeans and corn are harvested, which last year recorded exports of close to $30.5 billion, including soy oil and meal shipments.

Ironically, Argentina is one of the most gas-rich countries in the world, but in spite of its vast natural gas reserves the government is facing the very real possibility that the natural resource will have to be rationed as the global energy crisis intensifies, driven by continued fallout from pandemic-fuelled supply chain woes and the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine. Despite having shale-gas deposits to rival those in Appalachia, which made the U.S. a major exporter, Argentina's domestic gas production sector has suffered from years of underinvestment that has left it unable to meet domestic demand, never mind the needs of the export market, a recent BNN Bloomberg report explains.

Argentina has long dreamed of being a shale powerhouse thanks to the vast reserves in the massive Vaca Muerte shale play. However, a chronically poor business climate and a generally cash-strapped economy has results in underdevelopment of the sector and insufficient pipeline capacity to transport gas from remote Patagonia to urban and industrial areas, where it is increasingly desperately needed. As a result, not only has Argentina not become a major exporter of LNG, it hasnt even been able to establish energy independence, instead relying on natural gas imports (mostly from the United States and Qatar). This has left Argentina competing with much larger economies for precious shipments of liquefied natural gas (LNG) on the international market right as winter sets in in the southern hemisphere and demand for energy expands.

The BNN Bloomberg report, entitled War Turns Argentina's Shale Boom Dream Into Gas-Buying Nightmare, explains that in all likelihood Argentina will simply be unable to afford the amount of LNG it needs. The country already suffers from ongoing shortages of the hard currency used to pay for imports, and the skyrocketing prices of fuel are leaving Argentina between a rock and a hard place. "It's going to be a tough winter ahead for fuel supplies with the way access to hard currency is in Argentina," Agustin Gerez, head of Argentine state energy company Ieasa, was quoted.

Related: Oil Prices Fall After EIA Confirms Crude Build

This week, brand new Chilean president Gabriel Boric made his first official trip abroad to talk about the fuel shortage with Argentine President Alberto Fernandez. The economy minister of Argentina, Martin Guzman, and the energy minister of Chile, Claudio Huepe Minoletti, signed a joint declaration of bilateral energy cooperation in the face of the crisis. The agreement, however, does not serve to bring more gas into Argentina, but rather re-establishes exports to Chile and outlines the rehabilitation of the Neuquen-Biobio pipeline. While this may bring some much-needed cash into the Argentinian economy, it does nothing to help Argentina fill its LNG gap.

If its shale sector was developed to reach its full potential, Argentina could not only be energy independent, it could also be selling off excess LNG. Achieving this would require no small measure of policy support and investment, both of which have been hard to come by in Argentinian political history. And then theres the question of whether all that gas wouldnt be better left in the ground in the face of the climate crisis. Ultimately, with the countrys tight economy and the global energy crisis continuing to cause market volatility, Argentina has few good options. It is going to be a long, cold winter in Buenos Aires.



By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

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Energy insecurity in the United States is a complicated issue and one that may not be fixed by a simple change of tune on the pipeline.

With countries around the world experiencing increasing energy insecurity following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, many are looking for ways to increase their oil and gas supply. Rising prices and severe shortages have demonstrated how reliant the world is on Russian oil and gas. But some are saying that regions such as Africa, North America, and South America have the potential to significantly boost their supplies to bridge this gap. This has led politicians and citizens across Canada and the U.S. to question the possibility of revisiting the construction of the Keystone pipeline, which could help transport vast amounts of oil across North America. The Keystone XL pipeline extension was proposed by TC Energy in 2008 to transport 830,000 bpd of Alberta tar sands oil to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Oil sands are considered one the dirtiest forms of crude. It is extremely viscous and requires a high level of refining to convert it into fuel.

The approval of the pipeline extension would suggest that the North American oil industry is likely to thrive for decades to come, due to the significant investment in the transportation line. However, U.S. presidents have gone back and forth on the plan, with the Obama administration vetoing the proposal, and then President Trump bringing it back to the table. Finally, President Biden denied the permit required for the project to go ahead on his first day in office, and the development was officially canceled in June 2021.

But now, with major oil shortages being felt worldwide, many are discussing the possibility of bringing the project back to life. While this would have severe environmental implications, it could help provide North America with the crude it needs during a time of soaring prices and energy insecurity.

For some, they say its still not too late to revisit Keystone XL. Concerns around Keystone XL were mainly focused on what an investment in the extension would represent  essentially the longevity of the oil industry. However, if Keystone was approved, the enhanced capacity could help deliver greater levels of oil to North America. This does not necessarily equate to a boost in oil production. This, some experts argue, is the reason why Keystone XL should have been  and still should be  approved.

With TC Energy willing to pump private funds into the project, a movement away from fossil fuels, which could make the pipeline eventually redundant, would not have a negative impact on public funds. Although, this does not consider land use. However, if Keystone XL was deemed necessary, it would provide the U.S. with a close ally to import oil from, moving away from dependence on countries such as Russia, Venezuela, and Iran.

Related: Oil Prices Rebound Despite Biden's Best Efforts

Now, lawmakers in the U.S. are encouraging Biden to reconsider the cancellation of the project. In fact, Montanas U.S. Sen. Steve Daines called on Biden for the immediate restart of the project. He stated, in February, President Biden set us on a dangerous path when he decided to kill the Keystone XL pipeline on Day One in office. Whats happening in Russia and Europe is a stark reminder of the need to support American energy development, not hinder it. Energy security is national security, and a global energy-dominant America is a safer world. Biden must restart the Keystone XL pipeline now.

A recent poll also suggested that U.S. citizens are increasingly in favor of the Keystone XL development, following recent world events. With Canada saying it has the potential to meet the oil demand as global supplies become less certain, many Americans are looking to their friendly neighbor for help during this worrying time.

However, others are not so sure, saying the pipeline wont achieve what we want it to achieve right now. Although the pipeline could be built by the beginning of 2023 if Biden were to reverse his decision, according to Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, the White House does not believe this would help drive down crude oil and petrol prices.

National Economic Council Director Brian Deese echoed previous concerns around the development, "Any action on Keystone wouldn't actually increase supply, and it would transmit oil years in the future." And "What we're focused on right now is what we can do right now, and ... there are wells that are shut-in and that can be brought back online over the course of the next couple months. What we need right now is to address the immediate supply disruption," he added.

This reiterates the idea that building the pipeline does not equate to higher production, it simply means easier transportation. However, critics argue, that the environmental cost is simply too high. In addition, the investment of billions of dollars in the extension suggests to the public, and oil companies, that the U.S. will continue to support fossil fuels for years to come.

While reversing the Keystone XL decision seems like an obvious move to increase the crude transport capacity between Canada and the rest of North America, viewing it this way is rather too simplistic. As Biden faces the challenge of rising energy insecurity, he is not opposed to increasing production levels but believes this can be done at a faster rate by bringing existing wells back online and moving forward with already approved projects across the U.S.

By Felicity Bradstock for Oilprice.com

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Tankers carrying nine million barrels of crude have departed from Kazakhstans CPC terminal after 10 days of no maritime exports, oil exports tracker TankerTrackers.com said on Wednesday.

A large wave of nine million barrels of crude oil finally departed Kazakhstans CPC terminal in Russian territory after 10 days of zero maritime exports, TankerTrackers said in a tweet.

Two weeks ago, crude oil exports from the CPC terminal off the Russian Black Sea coast were halted completely after sustaining critical damage, the head of CPC said. The disruption in crude oil exports was the result of major storm damage and continuing bad weather.

The CPC pipeline transports between 1.2 million and 1.4 million barrels per day of crude oil from Kazakhstan, adding even more pressure to a global market already struggling with tight supplies further constrained by sanctions on Russian crude.

The CPC pipeline carries oil from Kazakstans Tengiz oilfield to export infrastructure along the Black Sea coast. Most of the crude oil carried by the CPC pipeline belongs to Russia, Kazakstan, and international oil majors such as Chevron. It remains a vital crude oil artery for Kazakstan, accounting for two-thirds of the countrys crude oil exports.

Kazakhstan, for its part, said last week that it could lose about 320,000 barrels per day of production in April due to maintenance works on the CPC pipeline. The disruption of exports from Kazakhstan, where only one terminal out of three was operational as of last week, further tightened the already tight global oil supply. Repairs on the two terminals of the CPC Marine Terminal will take tentatively at least 3-4 weeks, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium said last week.

Crude oil exported from Kazakhstan moves primarily through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) system, which passed through Russia, transporting crude oil produced in Kazakhstan to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, the EIA says. Some crude oil produced in Russia is transported in the same pipeline as CPC grade crude oil, but it represents around 10 percent of the crude oil exported through the CPC system.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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Coal prices in northwest Europe jumped on Wednesday to their highest level in one month, after the European Commission proposed on Tuesday a ban on imports of Russian coal over Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

The benchmark European coal contract for delivery in 2023 jumped by 6.5 percent on Wednesday, to $230 per ton, while the front-month contract for May delivery surged by double digits, according to Bloombergs estimates. The May contract surged by 11 percent to $330 per ton.

This weeks renewed rally in European coal prices comes as the European Commission proposed on Tuesday a ban on imports of Russian coal in the European Union (EU), after footage continued to emerge of alleged war crimes committed by Russian troops withdrawing from Ukrainian towns.

The EU failed, however, to approve the measure on Wednesday, with outstanding technical issues still needing to be addressed. A new meeting is scheduled for Thursday.

The EUs fifth package of sanctions against Russia, which the Commission proposed on Tuesday, includes an import ban on coal from Russia, worth $4.4 billion (4 billion euro) a year.

Finally, it was high time to take this step. It is the first time that we directly sanction the import of fossil fuels from Russia, thus cutting an important revenue source, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a speech on Wednesday.

But now, we have to look into oil and we will have to look into the revenues that Russia gets from the fossil fuels. And we really have to make an effort, for example to take a share to an escrow account, so that we will really limit the source of revenues of Russia from fossil fuels. This has to end, and this is the next step we will have to take together, von der Leyen added.

Europe will have to procure alternative supply from the United States, South Africa, Colombia, and even Australia, according to Morgan Stanley.

Reconfiguring global trade flows in such a scenario would take time and raise costs, Morgan Stanley said in a note carried by Bloomberg.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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The European Union will have to impose sanctions on Russian oil and gas at some point, Reuters has reported, citing the head of the European Council Charles Michel.

"I think that measures on oil and even gas will also be needed sooner or later," the official told the European Parliament today, after yesterday the European Commission announced a fifth round of sanctions on Russia, including on coal imports.

Coal use in the EU had the lowest energy import dependency on Russia in 2020, according to data from the EUs statistics office Eurostat. Still, Russian coal provided 19 percent of the EU use of solid fossil fuels.

We will impose an import ban on coal from Russia, worth 4 billion euros ($4.39 billion) per year. This will cut another important revenue source for Russia, EC President Ursula von der Leyen said on Tuesday. Final approval of the latest sanction package is slated for today.

The EC also signalled oil sanctions were being discussed, with French President Emmanuel Macron calling openly for a ban on Russian oil exports to Europe.

We have to differentiate between oil, gas and coal, because the substitution periods are different. But what has to be clear is that we have to cut all economic ties with Russia as soon as possible, said German finance minister Christian Lindner, as quoted by the Financial Times.

In the wake of the Tuesday sanction announcement, Bloomberg noted in a report that Russia accounts for the bulk of European thermal coal importsthe sort of coal used for power generation and heating. A ban in these imports would create a domino effect on the global coal market, the report said, pushing coal prices higher.

The proposed sanction would be devastating to European coal imports, Fabian Ronningen, an analyst from Rystad Energy, told Bloomberg. Some coal can be sourced from other markets, but in general, the global coal market is very tight as well.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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Russia expects to earn additional oil and gas revenues of the equivalent of $9.6 billion (798.4 billion Russian rubles) this month, its finance ministry said on Tuesday.

Despite the self-sanctioning of many European buyers of Russian oil, Moscow continues to export its oil, and Europe continues to pay for and import Russian natural gas. While the U.S. banned imports of all Russian energy exports, including oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG), and coal, the European Union hasnt had the luxury to do so, because it depends on Russian oil for around one-fourth of its supply and on Russian gas for some one-third of its gas consumption.

Even at record discounts of $30 a barrel, Russia is probably selling its flagship Urals grade to willing customers unfazed by the sanctions at around $70 per barrel, considering that oil prices have more or less stayed above $100 a barrel since Putin invaded Ukraine at the end of February.

The European Union condemned on Monday the killing of unarmed civilians by Russian forces while retreating from Ukrainian towns and vowed a new wave of severe sanctions would follow against Russia in a matter of days, including potential sanctions against Russias oil, gas, or coal exports.

Europe has refrained from directly targeting Russian energy exports fearing that sanctions or an embargo could lead to a deep recession in the major European economies, including the biggest one, Germany.

Germany has so far been one of the staunchest opponents to an energy embargo on Russia, but after photos of Russian atrocities in Bucha and other Ukrainian towns emerged, the mood appears to be shifting even in Berlin.

The EU plans to propose a ban on imports of Russian coal after footage continues to emerge of alleged war crimes committed by Russian troops withdrawing from Ukrainian towns, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing sources with knowledge of the discussions.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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NextDecade Corporation signed on Wednesday another long-term agreement for a U.S. exporter to sell liquefied natural gas (LNG) to China in the most recent deal between American and Chinese firms.

NextDecade announced today a deal with ENN LNG (Singapore) Pte Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Chinas ENN Natural Gas Co., Ltd, for the supply of LNG from NextDecades Rio Grande LNG export project in Brownsville, Texas.

Under the 20-year sale and purchase agreement, ENN LNG will purchase 1.5 million metric tons per annum (MTPA) of LNG indexed to Henry Hub prices on a free-on-board basis. The LNG supply will be from the first two trains at Rio Grande LNG, with the first train expected to start commercial in 2026.

The commercial momentum at RGLNG is accelerating and we believe the company is well placed to benefit from the strengthening LNG market, Matt Schatzman, NextDecades chairman and CEO, said in a statement.

Assuming the achievement of further LNG contracting and financing, NextDecade anticipates making a positive final investment decision (FID) on a minimum of two trains of the Rio Grande LNG export project in the second half of this year, with FIDs of its remaining three trains to follow thereafter, the U.S. company said.

Last month, NextDecade signed a deal with another Chinese firm, Guangdong Energy Group Natural Gas Co, to supply LNG from Rio Grande LNG for 20 years.

Chinas ENN LNG, for its part, signed last week two 20-year agreement with Energy Transfer for LNG exports from Energy Transfers Lake Charles LNG project.

We are experiencing strong demand for long-term offtake contracts for Lake Charles LNG and we are optimistic that we will be in a position to take a positive FID by year end, said Tom Mason, president of ET LNG.

These deals are the latest in a series of recent long-term agreements that American LNG developers have signed with Chinese firms.

At the end of last year, Venture Global LNG signed an agreement with China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec), which, the U.S. firm says, will be the largest single LNG supply deal ever signed by a US company and will double imports of US LNG to China. Sinopec will buy 4 million MTPA of LNG from Plaquemines LNG, and UNIPEC, a Sinopec subsidiary, has agreed to purchase 3.5 million tons of LNG from Venture Globals Calcasieu Pass LNG facility. Cheniere Energy also announced in November a binding long-term LNG sale and purchase agreement with Sinochem Group of China.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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The members of the International Energy Agency (IEA) have agreed to release 120 million barrels of crude oil, according to Bloomberg.

But 60 million barrels of that 120 million has already been accounted for as part of the 180 million barrel SPR release that the Department of Energy made last week.

Between the IEA and the United States, 240 million barrels of crude oil is set to be released from the worlds strategic energy stores.

In the United States, the first 90 million barrels of the 180 million set to be released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve will be released between May and July, the DoE said on Monday, through two notices of sale totaling 70 million barrels, plus 20 million barrels set to be released in May. The second half of the 180 million barrels is set to be released between August and October of this year.

The IEA had agreed on March 1 to release 62 million barrels of crude from their collective stockpiles. Before this year, the IEA last released reserves in 2011.

Oil prices sank on the announcement of the release in conjunction with notices from the U.S. Federal Reserve that it would raise rates by less than it had originally planned.

At 3:26 p.m. ET, WTI crude had sunk below $100, trading down 4.83% on the day at $97.09. Brent crude was trading at $101.90 per barrel, down $4.74 (-4.44%) on the day.

The downward pressure on crude oil prices is expected to be temporary, absent any production hikes or demand curbs.

The IEA currently holds a collective 1.5 billion barrels in strategic reserves.

By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Pope Francis on Wednesday condemned what he described as the massacre of Bucha. He held up a Ukrainian flag sent to him from the town where 
Police dogs are trained to subdue criminals.

During a heated struggle 11 years ago today, one such dog bit a mans arm and leg.

Unfortunately, the arm and leg werent attached to the criminal suspect.

The dog, Wiley, a Belgian Malinois, bit Douglas County Sheriffs Deputy David Heins on an arm and a leg. Heins was taken to the Nebraska Medical Center, where his wounds were stitched up and he was released.

Heins and the dogs handler, Deputy Jay Wineinger, were at a southeast Omaha home with three other deputies, serving a warrant on an ex-convict, David Cermak

In the struggle, Cermak, who was armed, shot Deputy Tom Flynn in the side. Cermak was shot and killed.

Heins was injured by Wiley during the confrontation with Cermak.

Wiley, a 4-year-old, had been on the job with Wineinger since 2008 and was one of six dogs with the agency. Wineinger was put on administrative leave during the investigation into the shooting, Sheriffs Capt. Steve Glandt said, so Wiley was on leave, too.

If deputies have enough time, they do have a command to call (their dogs) off, Douglas County Sheriff Tim Dunning said. But again, youre dealing with an animal. A trained animal, but nevertheless its still an animal."

One of the cardinal rules officers must observe when a police dog is on the scene is to refrain from chasing someone if he runs.

The dog isnt going to differentiate, Glandt said. Theres no guarantee that the dog wont go after you.

This was not the first time Wiley, who Glandt estimated weighed 80 pounds, had bitten a deputy. During a training exercise in 2010, Glandt said, the dog bit another deputy in the back of the head.

Police service dogs are great tools, said Sheriffs Capt. Steve Glandt, who oversaw the sheriffs K-9 unit at the time. But theyre not perfect.

Let's have a look at some more "good dogs" that have protected and served:

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Call it a crisis, a special mission or an undeclared war, the conflict in Ukraine should never have happened. It demonstrates a failure of statecraft and is testimony to a world order that is unfit for purpose.

Local residents queue up to receive humanitarian aid in Volnovakha of Donetsk, on March 15, 2022. (Photo by Victor/Xinhua)

Imagine life in Ukraine as it was in January 2022. Waking up, a new day has dawned in Kyiv, Mariupol, or Odessa. People flick on electric lights, brew coffee, work in the office or factory, visit shopping malls, and pick children up from school. Today cities lie in ruins, water is cut-off, and food and survival denied. European civilization is reduced to cave dwelling for those lucky enough to remain alive. Over 10,000 people have already died.

Few envisaged that war was still possible in Europe. History, it was thought, would not repeat itself. Humiliating reparations imposed on Germany at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 hurt ordinary Germans rather than the vanquished leadership. They led to fascism, Hitler, World War II, and the Holocaust. Therefore, victory in 1945 was accompanied by funding for reconstruction. The defeated Axis powers were admitted as full members of the United Nations and, with the development of the European Union, foes became partners in governance.

Lessons had been learned. Peace was preserved for three generations. But not quite. Even before the missiles rained down on Ukraine, at least 62 conflicts had already occurred in Europe since 1945.

European memories are short, and American ones perhaps even shorter. The Cold War ended in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and formation of the Russian Federation. While the Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev observed that The end of the Cold War is our common victory, the West claimed it as their own. Capitalism was victorious, while the Soviets were humiliated. It was celebrated as the triumph of American-led foreign policy and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Lessons had been forgotten.

While the Russian Federation struggled to convert to a market economy, American funds underpinned the transformation of the smaller economies of Eastern Europe that were in time to become members of NATO and the newly formed European Union. The latter entered negotiations with Russia but not for the membership that Russian President Boris Yeltsin had suggested in 1997.

Yeltsin also looked to build a relationship with the United States, even participating in the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, a NATO forum intended to promote relations with non-NATO countries. But Yeltsins advances were rejected. Instead, the United States established military bases in former Soviet states in Central Asia such as Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. NATO, founded in 1949 to deter Soviet expansionism, itself expanded eastwards, well into Russias historic sphere of influence recruiting countries like the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. In 2002, the United States unilaterally abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

NATOs expansion at a time when no country was being threatened and Russia was experimenting with democracy gives lie to the presumption that the Cold War was purely ideological. Instead, it was primarily about maintaining American hegemony. America saw Russia, the worlds largest country and rich in resources, as a competitor and as an adversary. Whether Russia was communist or democratic was immaterial; its advance had to be halted. Only the rhetoric changed after 1991, the policy of containment remained the same.

Likewise, the European Union balked at embracing Russia as a full member. Its inclusion would have increased the combined domestic market by a quarter and could massively have strengthened Europes economic and political footprint. It would, though, have shifted the balance of power in Europe, weakening the dominant influence of Germany, France, and Britain. All old imperial powers, their leaders could not envisage having ever to defer to their long-standing eastern rival.

Photo taken on Feb. 28, 2022 shows the U.S. Capitol building, seen through a barrier fence, in Washington, D.C., the United States. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

Contained and rejected, Russia felt or feigned humiliation. Without the benefits of the European Union membership and with insufficient Western support to build its economy, Russian development faltered. Economic problems multiplied after 2014 when the European Union and the United States implemented sanctions after Russias incorporation of Crimea.

In February 2014, Russia took advantage of a political vacuum in Ukraine. Russia faced the prospect of Ukraine on its southern flank signing an association agreement that required convergence toward the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy. Faced with pro-European protests  the so-called Maidan Revolution  the Ukrainian president fled the country. He was then removed from power by a parliamentary vote that lacked the necessary constitutional majority. Western powers accepted the outcome of the Maidan coup detat but not the loss of Crimea to Russia. Ukraine then signed the association agreement, which went into effect in 2017.

Even so, few people believed that war was imminent as January 2022 slipped into February. The United States released intelligence information saying that Russia was about to invade Ukraine. But previously, U.S. intelligence had erroneously insisted that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. War had then ensued, and many died. Intelligence could be wrong.

Only history will tell whether it was the U.S. intelligence that goaded the Russian leadership into actions that it had never intended. However, George Kennan, former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, predicted in 1998 that the eastward expansion of NATO would trigger a second Cold War. For the people of Ukraine, the cold war has already turned hot.

Kennans prediction was based on the neorealist theory of international relations. Social science theories are generally weak at making predictions; there is nothing comparable with the ability of engineers to land a spacecraft on a comet travelling at 135,000 kilometres/hour. Neorealist theory, though, is different. It is not only a theory of what happens but also a theory of what ought to happen. It is what national leaders, and their international relations advisers, are taught to do. More often than not, they do it.

Neorealism is premised on the notion that nation states are engaged in a continual competition for survival and that security is best assured by becoming the predominant power, the hegemon. The United States achieved this status with the ending of the Cold War and, as offensive neorealist theory predicted, it sought to use this unique period without opposition to reshape the international system for its own purposes. In so doing, the United States provoked a weaker power to risk war in the hope of ensuring survival that it believed to be under threat. All horribly predictable.

There must be a better way, and there is. It prioritises peaceful development and the welfare of all humanity. It speaks to solidarity and cooperation with people around the world and the need to uphold international equity and justice. It is resolutely opposed to hegemony and power politics and calls for more inclusive global governance, more effective multilateral mechanisms, and more active regional cooperation. It argues that to build a community with a shared future for mankind is not to replace one system or civilization with another. Instead, it is about countries with different social systems, ideologies, histories, cultures and levels of development coming together for shared interests, shared rights and shared responsibilities in global affairs, and creating the greatest synergy for building a better world.

This alternative way  the Chinese way  is familiar to anyone who has read Presidents Xi Jinping speech to the 26th Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations on October 25, 2021. However, this alternative approach must be incomprehensible to those schooled in neorealist thought who, presuming that China will side with Russia against the hegemonic United States, threaten China with consequences if it does.

Chinas policy on Ukraine has been consistent throughout. It has stressed the importance of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries; the need to abide by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter; the concept of a common, comprehensive, cooperative, and sustainable security concept; the importance of restraint; the need for rapid dialogue between Russia and Ukraine; and the important role of the United Nations in facilitating a diplomatic solution.

China has not joined in imposing economic sanctions on Russia. Like war reparations, sanctions tend ultimately to hurt ordinary people more than leaders and to be counterproductive. This means that, with the UN Security Council stymied by the Russian veto, China is best placed to support mediation to end the ongoing tragedy.

Moreover, in living up to its international obligations, China has more extensive recent peacekeeping experience than other permanent members of the UN Security Council. Chinas alternative to neorealism creates potential peacemakers not warmongers.

_______________

ROBERT WALKER is a professor with China Academy of Social Management/School of Sociology, Beijing Normal University, and professor emeritus and emeritus fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Academy of Social Sciences in the U.K.
LINCOLN  Efforts to slow Nebraskas nation-leading prison growth and overcrowding collapsed in the Legislature Wednesday.

The defeat of Legislative Bill 920 marked the ultimate failure of a cooperative effort by state lawmakers, the administration of Gov. Pete Ricketts and the states court system to come together with outside experts for a data-driven approach that could help solve the states prison woes.

State Sen. Steve Lathrop of Omaha said what doomed the process in the end was the refusal of opponents  both in the Legislature and within the states law enforcement community  to consider any sentencing reforms that would have made a substantive impact on the growth trajectory of the states inmate population.

With the state projected to add 1,300 inmates to its 5,500-inmate population between now and 2030, the state wont just end up building one new $270 million prison, as Ricketts has proposed, but two, Lathrop said.

It appears that this body, for partisan reasons, has chosen a path to build our way out of the problem, he said. And thats a half billion-dollar undertaking.

Sen. Suzanne Geist of Lincoln, who led opposition to the bill on the floor, defended her objections as based in public safety grounds.

Geist, who had served as one of the Legislatures representatives in the criminal justice study last year, said she still shares many of its goals. She vowed to work beginning next month with senators on both sides of the issue on a broader look at the states sentencing laws.

After eight hours of debate on LB 920 and even more hours spent in off-the-floor negotiations, it seemed for a brief moment Wednesday there was hope of resurrecting the justice reinvestment process launched by Ricketts, Lathrop and Nebraska Supreme Court Chief Justice Mike Heavican last year.

Representatives of the policy arm of Ricketts office approached Lathrop and said if the bill was advanced Wednesday out of the first round of debate, the office would work with Lathrop and others to negotiate on some of the stickier issues. Ricketts has been firmly opposed to the sentencing changes in the bill.

Lathrop asked senators to take a leap of faith and advance the bill so those negotiations could continue with the governor and others before the second round of debate.

But Geist and other opponents did not accept that plan. She objected that the starting point of those negotiations would be Lathrops bill, not her plan that would have pared out several provisions in the bill she opposed.

I just dont see it happening, she said of the prospects for further negotiations on the bill.

With Geist and other opponents voting no, the Legislature failed to come up with the 33 votes needed to continue the debate this session. It fell seven votes short, failing 26-18.

Lathrop afterward said Geists insistence that her plan be the vehicle for negotiation was evidence of the rigid silliness that ultimately killed the justice reinvestment effort.

We brought people in for a data-driven process, and it was sidetracked by stories of catalytic converters and partisanship, a disappointed Lathrop said afterward, referencing concerns about car parts theft that were voiced during debate.

Ricketts had little to say afterward about the failure of the reform process he had helped lead. A Ricketts spokesperson simply noted that there were 17 smart criminal justice reforms that had consensus support from all involved in the process.

Nebraskas prison system is not only the nations most overcrowded, but in the past decade has also grown faster than that of any state in the nation, a recent World-Herald analysis found. Nebraska was one of only two states to increase its prison population between 2010 and 2020, its 16% growth in that time contrasting to a 24% reduction nationwide.

The reduction nationally has been attributed to falling crime rates and states re-examination of the past get-tough-on-crime policies that have swelled inmate ranks nationally since the 1980s. At least 35 states have engaged in such criminal justice reinvestment efforts since 2007.

With the Legislature and Ricketts at loggerheads over building a new prison, the governor, Lathrop and the judicial branch similarly engaged with the nonprofit Crime and Justice Institute for its own reinvestment study, examining why Nebraskas inmate numbers are growing so much and exploring possible reforms.

The result of that process was 21 proposals, 17 of which received consensus support from the panel.

However, the proposals that did not receive consensus represented changes to sentencing laws that CJI found had the most potential to move the needle on Nebraskas inmate numbers.

Lathrop generally included all of the proposals in LB 920. CJI projected the bill would largely flatten Nebraskas current inmate growth path, reducing Nebraskas 2030 prison headcount by 1,000 from the current projections.

But Geist opposed the changes to sentencing and offered an amendment that would have stripped them from the bill. A CJI analysis of Geists amendment indicated it would cut current projections by fewer than 150 inmates.

Three proposals in LB 920 proved particular sticking points: an effort to cap minimum sentences to provide inmates more time on parole supervision; a proposal to make possession of very small amounts of drugs a misdemeanor; and a proposal to set standards for when judges would sentence those convicted of more than one crime to consecutive sentences.

There were efforts in the past week to bridge the differences. Ricketts met in the statehouse last Thursday with a number of senators and representatives of the states criminal justice system, and Lathrop felt progress was made. Lathrop tweaked many of the sentencing proposals in an effort to gain more support.

But when the group reconvened via Zoom on Monday, Lathrop said, Geist and several other senators and law enforcement representatives rejected all of the proposals.

It was no on everything, Lathrop said. He said it was unfortunate, because other states that have been through justice reinvestment show such changes do not compromise public safety.

Ricketts was not part of the Monday meeting, with several senators saying he had been sick that day.

Then when the Ricketts administration made one last effort to continue negotiations Wednesday, the Legislatures vote not to proceed left LB 920 dead.

Lathrop, who is not running for re-election and leaving the Legislature after this year, said he saw no hope of resurrecting it in the final days of the session. He called the failure of the process his biggest disappointment in 12 years hes served in Lincoln.

Geist said she remains interested in finding ways to provide more treatment and programs for offenders, both as alternatives to incarceration and as a way to help those in prison avoid returning once they are released.

She said she has already been talking to Sens. Terrell McKinney and Justin Wayne of Omaha and other LB 920 backers about continuing discussions in months to come, with the idea of bringing the issue back in the 2023 Legislature.

Im committed to the issue, and I know there are others in the body as well, she said.

In the end, the results did leave one thing clear: Nebraskas prison population woes are not going away.

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LVIV, Ukraine  First he missed his flight. Then his gear got lost somewhere between Little Rock and Warsaw. Finally, after he had traveled thousands of miles to help Ukraine fight the Russian military, the countrys foreign legion rejected him.

Cody Heard, a 29-year-old U.S. Army veteran from Arkansas, was undeterred. He and three other young volunteers  a Brit and two Dutchmen  were headed to the Ukrainian capital the next day to try to hook up with a military reserve unit.

They will take us  I hope, said Heard, hanging outside a hostel in Lviv with his three comrades, all bedraggled after days on the move, their packs on the ground. I mean, I messaged them. But I havent heard back yet.

Heard is among hundreds of foreign nationals who have swooped into Ukraine in recent weeks to join the battle against the Russians. Some are ex-soldiers. Many are not.

They come from the United States, Europe, Asia and across the globe. With their military packs, bundles of gear and self-assured struts, they are conspicuous crossing the border from Medyka, Poland, into Shehyni, Ukraine, and hanging out on the streets and in the cafes of Lviv, 40 miles east of the Polish frontier.

As Ukrainian refugees continue to flow westward, the would-be fighters stream in the opposite direction.

After Russias Feb. 24 invasion, it was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who opened the doors. He invited foreigners to join the new International Defense Legion of Ukraine, a force whose grandiose title recalled the venerable International Brigades that fought for Republican Spain in its doomed bid against fascist forces in the 1930s.

The Ukrainian incarnation got off to a difficult start, to say the least.

In the predawn hours of March 13, a volley of Russian cruise missiles struck a military base about 30 miles from Lviv that was a training hub for both Ukrainian troops and foreign volunteers. Authorities say more than 40 Ukrainians were killed.

No foreign recruits were reported lost, but several survivors posted graphic video of the destruction and said they barely escaped.

I ran out and saw a pillar of fire  I couldnt believe it, recalled Hieu Le, 30, a volunteer and former U.S. Army soldier in Afghanistan. It was a madhouse.

Fearing Russian paratroopers were going to drop in, the volunteers took up defensive positions in the adjacent forests.

Shaken by the experience, many at the base left the country, according to volunteers and various social media accounts. Le spoke by telephone from Croatia, where he was unwinding after his ordeal.

The Ukrainian military did not respond to requests for comment and has not said how many foreigners have enlisted, how many have left, how many have been wounded or how many have been killed.

From the outset, volunteers said, the recruitment drive was disorganized.

Ukrainian embassies across the globe were supposed to be the initial point of contact. But many would-be fighters found embassies unresponsive, or simply decided to come to Ukraine without checking in. Volunteers pooled information in online chat rooms and on other social media sites directing them to Poland and across the border to Ukraine  a country that few had contemplated much before the invasion.

The embassy website in Oslo was down when I tried  I heard it was a cyberattack, said a 26-year-old Norwegian volunteer who declined to give his name, citing concerns about his security.

Turning to a Facebook group for guidance, he flew to Warsaw but could find no one to direct him to the border and boarded a train going the wrong way. He finally made it to the Ukrainian border, but was unable to find lodging in a zone overflowing with refugees and slept out in the cold for a night. Finally, he walked to the Ukraine side.

I feel Im sharp now, ready to go, said the Norwegian, who had one year of military service at home, adding: From what I understand, Ill get some training and be ready to fight.

The volunteers also include medics, search-and-rescue experts and others offering specialized skills.

All express outrage at what they call Russian abuses and an admiration for the Ukrainian resistance.

When I started seeing civilians getting hurt, little kids  the same ages as my kids  I was like, This isnt right, said Heard, a father of two, ages 4 and 12.

A warehouse worker at Amazon in Arkansas, he said he left the Army in 2020 after eight years of service without any deployments overseas.

Many of those arriving have no relevant skills  just a profound desire to help Ukraine.

If they have room for one more, Im here, and Im ready to sign up and go, said Jeffrey Trautmann, 50, a retired chemistry professor from the Chicago area who was waiting on a recent afternoon outside the foreign legion welcome tent on the Ukrainian side of the border with Poland.

I would fight for Ukraine. I would. These are good people.

His lack of military experience will probably be an issue for Ukrainian officers, who do initial vetting at the border post. Some volunteers are rejected outright. Others are sent for up to four weeks of training. Those deemed battle-ready are quickly incorporated into fighting units, volunteers said.
Huberty says Yes to Humble ISD bond

Dan Huberty expressed his support and urged voters to support the 2022 Humble ISD Bond.

The following is his message:

To my fellow residents of Humble ISD:

Over the last several months, the Humble ISD Bond Committee has been meeting to put together a package that we will have an opportunity to vote on, starting later this month. Like many of you, I was curious as to the size, scope, and cost of the bond and the various projects that will be completed if the bond passes. As a

result, I went through the reports, looked at all the data, and have tried to summarize it to the best of my ability.

According to Humble ISD, the current enrollment within the school system stands at 48,235 students, of which 2,700 were added just in the last year. Over the last five years, the district has grown by more than 15%, and is expected to grow by another 5,000 students in the next five years, which qualifies it for Fast Growth status as defined by the Legislature. To put that into perspective, when I was elected to the school board back in 2006, the enrollment was just shy of 28,000 students. We have seen and continue to see explosive growth, and our current facilities cannot accommodate our population of students. It is my understanding that the goal of the 2022 Bond is focused on Renewal, so that children who live in

established neighborhoods, where schools were built years ago, have the opportunity to experience educational facilities that are comparable to the newer schools that have been required to be built to keep up with the growth. This includes a replacement for Fosters Elementary, which is over 50 years old; a replacement for Ross Sterling which is over 50 years old; additional classrooms at Summer Creek High School and Summerwood Elementary to keep up with the growth; new classroom at Humble High School;

additions to all high school performance arts centers to allow for new growth; and for a new middle school campus on West Lake Houston Parkway to eliminate the overcrowding at the surrounding schools; and most important to me a new Mosaic School for Special Need young adults transitioning out of the school system.

In addition, as many of the facilities are older in other parts of the district, significant capital expense is required to update chillers, roofs, and broadband access. Finally, the bond will also update all playground equipment at elementary campuses to be ADA compliant; new equipment will be installed at the middle schools to support JROTC instruction; new gymnasiums at all middle schools; and turf will be added at the high schools to prevent injury to the student-athletes.

If you look at the work the district has done to prepare for this bond, it became clear to me that the bond is needed and appropriate at this time. Because of the new commercial and residential properties that have been built over the last several years, and due to the fact that Humble ISD retires its debt annually, the district will not sell any bonds unless the current tax rate can satisfy the debt obligations. In addition, through the actions of the legislature of the last several years, Humble ISD has been able to reduce theM&O tax rate by nearly $.20, which has provided meaningful tax relief for all residents within the boundaries of Humble ISD.

In addition to this bond election, there are two other initiatives on the May 7 ballot. They include a statewide ballot proposition to allow for those with elderly or disabled homestead exemptions to have their tax ceiling reduced if the school tax rate is lowered, and to increase the homestead exemption from $25,000 to $40,000 for everyone who claims the homestead exemption. Both of these measures were passed during the last legislative session, which if approved by the voters will provide additional tax relief to all homeowners within Humble ISD.

I believe that the district has been fiscally responsible over the last fifteen years when we the voters have authorized the last three bonds. The board members and the bond committee have been thoughtful about their plans, and as our representatives, I applaud the work that they have done on our behalf. Therefore, I respectfully request that you vote for the 2022 Humble ISD Bond, both Proposition A&B, and approve the statewide ballot initiatives.
TEHRAN, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Iran has given necessary documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over questions about its past nuclear activities, the country's nuclear chief said Wednesday.

"We sent the documents on March 20 and they reviewed them. Probably the representatives of the agency will come to Iran to review the answers and materials and to prepare a conclusion," Mohammad Eslami, president of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), told reporters, official news agency IRNA reported.

Hopefully, with the agreement reached with the UN nuclear watchdog, the issues of Iran's four places in question would be settled by the end of June, Eslami noted.

IAEA chief Rafael Grossi visited Tehran last month, during which the IAEA and the AEOI agreed to resolve the remaining outstanding issues, mainly related to some alleged traces of uranium particles at some Iranian sites, which could be instrumental in removing part of the obstacles to Vienna talks aimed at reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. 
BLOOMINGTON  A Chicago man is accused of drug deliveries in McLean County.

Lorenzo Sims, 30, is charged with five counts of unlawful delivery of a controlled substance (Class 2 felonies).

He is accused of delivering less than 1 gram of heroin three times and less than 1 gram of fentanyl two times between July 24, 2020, and Aug. 26, 2020.

A warrant for his arrest was issued in June 2021 with a bond set at $100,000 with 10% to apply.

The warrant was returned Monday. A judge ordered his bond to remain as set in the warrant Tuesday, meaning Sims would need to post $10,035 to be released from custody.

Sims is due in court April 22 for an arraignment.

Contact Kade Heather at 309-820-3256. Follow him on Twitter: @kadeheather

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BLOOMINGTON  Author Claudia Rankine's visit to Bloomington-Normal that was scheduled for this week has been canceled.

Rankine, a nationally renowned poet, playwright and essayist, had been scheduled to have events at Illinois Wesleyan University and uptown Normal. An announcement from IWU said Rankine's visit to Illinois had been canceled but did not give a reason.

The announcement said IWU expects the event will be rescheduled, but did not say when that could be.

The visit was sponsored by William Morgan Distinguished Poet Series, which is supported by Illinois State University professor emeritus William Morgan and departments at ISU and IWU.

Contact Connor Wood at (309)820-3240. Follow Connor on Twitter: @connorkwood

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BLOOMINGTON  Zoos across North America are moving their birds indoors and away from people and wildlife as they try to protect them from the highly contagious and potentially deadly avian influenza.

Penguins may be the only birds visitors to many zoos can see right now, because they already are kept inside and usually protected behind glass in their exhibits, making it harder for the bird flu to reach them.

Nearly 23 million chickens and turkeys have been killed across the United States to limit the spread of the virus, and zoos are working hard to prevent any of their birds from meeting the same fate. It would be especially upsetting for zoos to have to kill any of the endangered or threatened species in their care.

At Bloomington's Miller Park Zoo, Superintendent Jay Tetzloff said they haven't found any health issues in their flocks since they were moved indoors last month. Those actions were taken within days of the Illinois Department of Agriculture confirming avian flu was detected in a backyard, non-poultry bird flock in McLean County.

While transitioning zoo birds to interior habitats is never ideal, he said: "We're managing all the birds where they are and keeping them as comfortable as we can."

Tetzloff estimated the outdoor birds will be out of sight for at least a few more months, possibly until late June.

However, avid ornithophiles can still get their feathered fix at the tropical rainforest exhibit at Miller Park Zoo, which remains open. People are asked to tread through a footwear washing tray before entering.

Tetzloff said they're committed to caring for all animals at the zoo.

The interior of the Kathoeffer Animal Building, which houses snow leopards and a Sumatran tiger, remains off-access to visitors because of risks from COVID. The superintendent said they're looking at reopening the facility within a couple of weeks  or at the end of April at the earliest.

Other sections of the zoo are also being reopened. Tetzloff said they opened up their goat and koi fish feeders this week, which had been closed since March 2020.

Losing zoo birds to the avian flu "would be extremely devastating," said Maria Franke, manager of welfare science at Toronto Zoo, which has fewer than two dozen Loggerhead Shrike songbirds that it's breeding with the hope of reintroducing them into the wild. "We take amazing care and the welfare and well-being of our animals is the utmost importance. There's a lot of staff that has close connections with the animals that they care for here at the zoo."

Toronto Zoo workers are adding roofs to some outdoor bird exhibits and double-checking the mesh surrounding enclosures to ensure it will keep wild birds out.

Birds shed the virus through their droppings and nasal discharge. Experts say it can be spread through contaminated equipment, clothing, boots and vehicles carrying supplies. Research has shown that small birds that squeeze into zoo exhibits or buildings can also spread the flu, and that mice can also track it inside.

So far, no outbreaks have been reported at zoos, but there have been wild birds found dead that had the flu. For example, a wild duck that died in a behind-the-scenes area of the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines, Iowa, after tornadoes last month tested positive, zoo spokesman Ryan Bickel said.

Most of the steps zoos are taking are designed to prevent contact between wild birds and zoo animals. In some places, officials are requiring employees to change into clean boots and don protective gear before entering bird areas.

When bird flu cases are found in poultry, officials order the entire flock to be killed because the virus is so contagious. However, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has indicated that zoos might be able to avoid that by isolating infected birds and possibly euthanizing a small number of them.

To help curb the spread of the flu, IDOA is also putting a pause on selling or exhibiting poultry and poultry products for sale at swap meets, exhibitions, flea markets and auctions in the state via emergency rules announced Tuesday.

Dr. Mark Ernest, state veterinarian for IDOA, said they're optimistic that exposure to flocks in Illinois will drop as migratory bird season comes to an end.

Sarah Woodhouse, director of animal health at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium, said she is optimistic after talking with state and federal regulators.

"They all agree that ordering us to depopulate a large part of our collection would be the absolute last-ditch effort. So they're really interested in working with us to see what we can do to make sure that we're not going to spread the disease while also being able to take care of our birds and not have to euthanize," Woodhouse said.

Among the precautions zoos are taking is to keep birds in smaller groups so that if a case is found, only a few would be affected. The USDA and state veterinarians would make the final decision about which birds had to be killed.

"Euthanasia is really the only way to keep it from spreading," said Luis Padilla, vice president of animal collections at the Saint Louis Zoo. "That's why we have so many of these very proactive measures in place."

The National Aviary in Pittsburgh  the nation's largest  is providing individual health checks for each of its roughly 500 birds. Many already live in large glass enclosures or outdoor habitats where they don't have direct exposure to wildlife, said Dr. Pilar Fish, the aviary's senior director of veterinary medicine and zoological advancement.

Kansas City Zoo CEO Sean Putney said he's heard a few complaints from visitors, but most people seem OK with not getting to see some birds. "I think our guests understand that we have what's in the best interests of the animals in mind when we make these decisions even though they can't get to see them," Putney said.

Officials emphasize that bird flu doesn't jeopardize the safety of meat or eggs or represent a significant risk to human health. No infected birds are allowed into the food supply, and properly cooking poultry and eggs kills bacteria and viruses. No human cases have been found in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Josh Funk of the Associated Press contributed to this report.

Contact Brendan Denison at (309) 820-3238. Follow Brendan Denison on Twitter: @BrendanDenison

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BLOOMINGTON  More than 60 years have passed since a young Willie Brown spent his afternoons learning and growing alongside his peers at the Western Avenue Community Center.

Brown grew up to become a senior executive at State Farm and a leader known for championing nonprofits and agencies across Bloomington-Normal. He was widely remembered after his death last month as a generous friend and mentor, relentless in his efforts to give back to his community.

To honor that legacy, State Farm CEO Michael Tipsord and Chief Administrative Officer Mary Schmidt presented a $250,000 check Wednesday to the Western Avenue Community Center.

"When I think about whats really important  and Willies passing crystalized this for me  its the impact that a person has on other peoples lives. At the end of the day, thats what really, really matters, Tipsord said, surrounded by State Farm executives and Western Avenue leaders at the insurance companys south campus in Bloomington.

I know no one in this community whos had a bigger impact than Willie Brown.

Tipsord said he hopes the donation will help the community center expand the impact of Willie through the youth programs in this community that were so near and dear to his heart.

We are honored to have the opportunity to be able to make this contribution to Western Avenue knowing that its going to help perpetuate the impact of our dear friend Willie Brown, he said.

Mike Jones, WACC board president and retired State Farm vice president, said the donation was the largest single gift the center has ever received, calling it a difference maker."

It certainly is a huge gift in the name of Willie Brown that the center will make great use of for all of our programming, but specifically our youth programming," said Jones, who met Brown at WACC when they were youngsters growing up in the same neighborhood.

The center, 600 N. Western Ave. in Bloomington, serves more than 1,000 families a year, offering youth after-school programs, activities for seniors, and a Hispanic outreach program with interpretation services.

"I am anxious to start working with the board of directors to identify some short-term and long-term objectives for use of this money, Jones said, noting he expects summer programs for middle school kids to be among the short-term plans.

Brown, who was 74 when he died from natural causes March 5, had a long career at State Farm that started in 1971 with an entry-level data processing job and ended with his retirement in 2010 as executive vice president.

His leadership and service to the community lasted much longer.

Brown served as a board trustee for Illinois State and Illinois Wesleyan universities, the State Farm Foundation and United Way of McLean County. He was a member of the Urban League, Bloomington-Normal branch of the NAACP and 100 Black Men of America and Central Illinois, which awarded him the inaugural Community Icon Award that later bore his name.

Mary Tackett, executive director of WACC, said while she did not know Brown, past center leadership have called him a champion and a hero for this community and also for Western Avenue. He was always an advocate and the biggest cheerleader for us.

Im a little lost for words, Jones said. Willie was a great friend of mine and I want to say the right thing to honor him.

When they met as children, Brown was "always one of the guys to look up to and not only then, but he continued that with his love and support for this community.

Willie certainly was an icon in this community. He was a friend and inspiration to many, Jones said, calling Brown his best friend.

The impact of State Farms gift will be tremendous, he said.

The fact that it's in Willie Browns name is special, Jones said. Not only is Western Avenue going to benefit from this, but all the people that we serve out of Western Avenue.

Tackett said she was so grateful and honored and humbled, for State Farm's gift continued advocacy for Western Avenue.

Im so grateful that (Brown) thought of us (over the years) and that we can use this gift to continue his legacy and continue to do good work here at the center," she said.

In addition to bolstering the summer program, Jones said the WACC board hopes to establish a signature event and program that embodies three pillars that Brown stood for: academic achievement, leadership and being a good citizen.

Willie Brown was special, Jones said. If you didnt know him, you missed out.

Contact Kelsey Watznauer at (309) 820-3254. Follow her on Twitter: @kwatznauer.

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SPRINGFIELD  Even as state lawmakers gather in the Capitol for the final week of an abbreviated spring legislative session, primary election season continues at full steam with two Republican candidates for governor trading barbs over their primary voting records.

This time, it was the campaign of Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin, a favorite of the state's Republican political establishment, attacking state Sen. Darren Bailey, R-Xenia, a favorite of the conservative grassroots, for voting in the 2008 Democratic primary election.

The mailer from Irvin's campaign leads with the big headline "Bailey breaks with Trump" and features a picture of him next to pictures of former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden.

It goes onto claim  falsely, the Bailey campaign insists  that Bailey "voted Obama into office in 2008" and then quotes him as saying that "I might have voted for Biden" that year.

It then goes on to read "Reject Obama-Biden Republican Darren Bailey."

It's quite a piece of political literature.

Bailey, for what it's worth, said that he pulled a Democratic ballot that year in an effort to thwart the potential nomination of Hillary Clinton. It was part of an effort spearheaded by conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh known as "Operation Chaos."

The Irvin campaign dismissed this explanation, with spokeswoman Eleni Demertzis saying that "the facts show he never could have been a part of any 'Operation Chaos' since that took place a month after the Illinois primary."

Bailey spokesman Joe DeBose, however, said that Bailey did indeed participate "in Operation Chaos with thousands of Republicans, which Rush Limbaugh started talking about in 2007" even if it was not an "official" operation until after the Illinois primary.

"No one seriously following this race questions whether or not Darren Bailey, who was a Trump Delegate to the Republican National Convention, supported President Trump, thats well documented, DeBose said.

According to records from the Clay County Clerk's office, Bailey has pulled a Republican ballot in every other partisan primary he's participated in since 1989.

The move to attack Bailey's Republican credentials comes in response to attacks the candidate has levied against Irvin over his own record.

Irvin, according to records from the Kane County Clerk's office, pulled a Democratic ballot in 2014, 2016 and 2020 as well as in local primary elections in 2017 and 2021. He voted Republican in the 2018 primary.

Irvin has also not answered directly whether or not he voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020. Bailey, on the other hand, was a Trump delegate at the Republican National Convention that year.

Bailey and the other Republican candidates for governor, including businessman Gary Rabine, former state Sen. Paul Schimpf and venture capitalist Jesse Sullivan, have used this record to accuse Irvin of not being conservative enough to be the Republican nominee.

It's a popular line of attack and one of the few that might be able to break through. Irvin, with the funding of billionaire Ken Griffin, has blanketed the airwaves with advertisements that the other GOP candidates, at least at this point, simply can't match.

Through those ads, Irvin's campaign has been able to define him as a tough-on-crime prosecutor who supports law enforcement  a good message to have in a Republican primary.

But in an era where political purity tests are paramount in a partisan primary, the issue of which side you are on and have been on will inevitably keep coming up.

And it isn't just Irvin's Republican opponents  the Democratic Governors Association is now running ads highlighting Irvin's record as a defense attorney.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker, asked Tuesday about the DGA's meddling in the GOP primary on his behalf, said it was fair game.

"I think its important that Democrats be involved in telling the truth out there," Pritzker said. "And when it comes to what the DGA is doing here in Illinois, theyre simply telling the truth, which is more than the Irvin campaign can say. So theyre getting the word out about what the truth is about his record."

Fair enough. All candidates will have to answer for the entirety of their records. With less than three months until the primary election, there is no doubt that all the gubernatorial candidates will continue to be scrutinized.

However, if a Republican candidate for governor says that he is a Republican, it is probably fair to take him at his word.

For one, people's opinions can change with time. Heck, Ronald Reagan was once a Democrat before becoming the revered GOP icon he is today.

But even more importantly, the belief that participating in a partisan primary outs a person's political affiliation shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the state's primary process.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Illinois' primary elections are "partially open." Voters are not required to register with a party to participate in a partisan primary, but they must publicly choose which ballot they wish to take.

So basically, it is not uncommon for Republican voters to pull a Democratic primary ballot and vice-versa depending on the year.

In 2014, for example, many Democrats pulled Republican ballots to vote in the competitive governor and U.S. Senate primaries since incumbent Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn and Sen. Dick Durbin faced nominal or no opposition in their primaries.

Many Republicans in Chicago and Cook County pull Democratic primary ballots simply because that election is paramount to the general election due to the area's Democratic lean.

Undoubtedly, it is a fair question to ask candidates who they supported in those elections as well as in the general elections that followed.

But the simple act of voting in a partisan primary is less revealing than it appears on its face.

Bailey started the attacks by accusing Irvin of being a Democrat. But Irvin has responded in kind with the mailer, which is misleading though not outside the bounds of typical negative campaign literature.

It's not likely that these lines of attacks will cease, but it's worth knowing that there are much better ways of determining a candidate's true conservative credentials.

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100 years ago

April 6, 1922: April showers bring  impassible roads. About thirty miles of Bloomington city streets cant be used because they are too muddy. The situation is just as bad or worse in rural areas of the county. This has gone on longer this year than any of the senior citizens can recall.

75 years ago

April 6, 1947: Mrs. Ray Teal of Waynesville has written a book and a New York publisher has accepted it. The book, Shade of the Sycamore tells her lifes story. Its loaded with human anecdotes, and there really was a sycamore tree. She used Marion Pedersen Teal as a pen name.

50 years ago

April 6, 1972: Bloomington still has a small pocket of residents who came from Syria. Charles Abraham, 82, who was one of them, was found dead in his downtown hotel room. His friends, especially those at the Saratoga pool hall, recall him as a real nice guy and friend to everyone.

25 years ago

April 6, 1997: Saturdays paper drive in Normal was so successful that it actually didnt work out after a while. People brought so much paper to the trucks that they had to close. Others were turned away; some newspapers ended up in the landfill or blown around town in a gusty wind.

Compiled by Jack Keefe; jkeefe@coldwellhomes.com.
The vice-president Dr Mahamudu Bawumia is expected to break his silence on the distressed economy at a public lecture in April.



Vice-President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia will on 7 April 2022 speak on the Ghanaian economy, his spokesperson Gideon Boako announced on Tuesday (22 March).



Following the debilitating effects on the Ghanaian economy, including price hikes on fuel and commodities and depreciation of the Cedi, there are calls on Bawumia as the leader of the Economic Management Team to address the issues publicly.



Dr Boako told Accra-based Asempa FM that his boss will speak on the economy at a public forum in April.



A multiplicity of factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic and Russias invasion of Ukraine, have largely contributed to the economic meltdown across the globe, and Bawumia is expected to address how these factors have impacted the Ghanaian economy, as well as measures the government has taken to address the situation.



Prior to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the Ghana economy was on the rise with positive indicators, earning positive ratings from global economic watchers.



The already tight situation, due to COVID, has also been worsened by the invasion of Russia in Ukraine.

Source: Josephine Acheampomaa/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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Dean of the School of Performing Arts of the University of Ghana, Professor Kofi Agyekum, has thrown his full support to the Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) which is a system for placing Junior High School students in Senior High Schools (SHS) and Senior High Technical Schools (SHTS).



Although thought to be a good initiative, this CSSPS is however criticized as being full of problems.



There are some parents and guardians who complain bitterly about their children or wards having been placed in schools which are not their first choices or schools at remote areas.



Abolish Unfair CSSPS



Wading into this discussion is the former Rector of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Prof. Philip Ebow Bondzi-Simpson, who wants heads of schools to be allowed to admit students into their schools just as authorities at the basic and the tertiary levels do.



Speaking at the Mfantsipim Stakeholders Forum in Cape Coast, on Monday, the Founding Dean of the UCC Law Faculty indicated that the Computerized School Selection and Placement System is destroying traditions of schools and hurting them.



He indicated that if in Ghana, out of all the levels of schools, it is only the secondary school that theres computer placement, then, theres the need for the stakeholders in education to evaluate it and change such a system.



The Mfantsipim Forum is a forum initiated by the school, its old boys, the church and other stakeholders to think about the school and the educational system.



Prof Bondzi-Simpson intimated that the system put in place to admit the students, should take into account old boys/girls of the schools, children of staff, a consideration of the members of the church and small amount of protocol, adding that its out of place to centralize a placement system that disadvantages those who have been contributing to the growth and development of the school.



Prof. Bondzi-Simpson believes the system is unfair and destroying the traditions of the school, apart from the human interferences in the process that are putting many stakeholders of the school at a greater disadvantage.



But despite all these concerns, Prof. Kofi Agyekum, popularly called Opanyin Agyekum, is admonishing authorities not to cancel the CSSPS.



According to him, contrary to criticisms that it is problematic, the CSSPS has made it "easy for parents and students in the choice of schools. It's also reduced the pressure that used to mount on Heads of the SHSs and people of influence to place students in their suitable schools".



Opanyin Agyekum also asked "parents to stop compelling their children to attend schools they attended or see the schools with big names as the only good schools," hence when their wards are placed in a different school based on their performance, it becomes an issue.



To him, the "CSSPS is the best option for placement of students in schools."





Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The National Association of Local Authorities of Ghana (NALAG) has called for an amendment of portions of the Constitution to ensure that the operations of the law in local government are in tandem with the provisions of the constitution.



According NALAG, Article 50 sub-section 1(b) of the Constitution which talks about public elections states that, If by the time of the closure of any nominations and there is only one nominee, that person will be declared elected.



This means that there will be no elections.



But this is not the case in local government, where an aspiring Presiding Member (PM) of a district assembly will require two-thirds majority to win an election, President of NALAG, Bismark Baisie Nkum, stated.



The issue of presiding members failing to meet the constitutional requirement has become common over the years, leading to some district assemblies operating without presiding members.



Speaking to DAILY GUIDE in an exclusive interview, Bismark Baisie Nkum said there is the need for a review of the Constitution to allow for the election of PMs for district assemblies by simple majority.



He explained that under the law, a presiding member, who has a tenure of two years, and is eligible for re-election, presides over the meetings of the assembly, among other functions prescribed by law.



He was speaking at the sidelines of the election of a PM for the Effia-Kwesimintsim Municipal Assembly, in the Western Region.



He said the current nature of the law, which requires a nominee to attain two-thirds of the votes of the membership of the entire assembly, undermined the election process, and made it difficult for nominees to meet the requirement.



He disclosed that many assemblies had failed to elect presiding members due to the strict nature of the law.



The Constitution requires that not less than two-thirds of the membership of the entire assembly should be able to elect a presiding member.



This means that even if one member does not attend the meeting, his absence is factored in the calculation, he explained.

Source: daily guide









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Xi congratulates Aleksandar Vucic on reelection as Serbian president

Xinhua) 08:06, April 06, 2022

BEIJING, April 5 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday sent a congratulatory message to Aleksandar Vucic on his reelection as president of Serbia.

In his message, Xi pointed out that in recent years, the China-Serbia comprehensive strategic partnership has maintained vigorous development momentum, with the two sides seeing solid political mutual trust and fruitful bilateral practical cooperation.

Facing major global changes unseen in a century, the two sides firmly respect each other, treat each other as equals, and join hands in building a community with a shared future for mankind, making positive contributions to safeguarding international equity and justice, said the Chinese president.

Xi also said that he attaches great importance to the development of China-Serbia relations, and cherishes the good working relationship and friendship with President Vucic.

He added that he is willing to work with President Vucic to strengthen strategic communication, consolidate political mutual trust, expand and deepen mutually beneficial cooperation in all fields between the two countries, and steer China-Serbia ties towards new achievements, so as to benefit the two countries and their people.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
TAIPEI, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Taiwan on Wednesday reported 281 locally transmitted COVID-19 cases, the highest number recorded in a single day this year, the island's disease monitoring agency told a press briefing.

It was the sixth consecutive day that new local cases surpassed 100, bringing the total number of locally transmitted infections in April to 1,077.

Taiwan also reported 78 new imported cases on Wednesday, with 27 of that number being travelers who tested positive on arrival in Taiwan, the agency said.

To date, Taiwan has reported 25,225 confirmed COVID-19 cases, of which 16,945 were local infections.

The agency has announced that it is relaxing some home quarantine restrictions in a bid to coordinate the practical needs of the community with pandemic prevention measures. 
The Directorate of Agricultural Extension Services (DAES) has launched an e-Extension Strategy Plan to provide agricultural value chain actors with transformational extension services.



These services, which are driven by information and communications technology (ICT), are meant to be effective, efficient, inclusive, sustainable, demand-driven.



The e-Extension service will be decentralised but coordinated at the national level, with the active involvement of the private sector.



At the launch of the strategy in Accra last Thursday, the Director of DAES, Paul Siameh, said the project started in 2020 but needed adjustment and modifications due to the COVID-19 pandemic.



Before project



Mr Siameh said the provision of the agricultural extension and rural advisory services had suffered loss and decline as a result of limited extension officers.



He said as of 2017 there were 1,586 agricultural extension agents (AEA) serving 3.37 million farmers.



That, he said, imposed a heavy burden on the available staff and the implication on the effectiveness and efficiency of extension delivery.



However, the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) sought approval to recruit more recently.



"This action by the Minister greatly improved and increased the extension agents to 4,286 and subsequently brought AEA: Farmer ratio to 1:706 in 2019, Mr Siameh said.



Unfortunately, he added, the improved AEA: Farmer ratio from the recruitment of 2,700 still fell short of the optimum ratio of 1:500.



Mr Siameh disclosed that due to that MoFA, through the DAES and support from Global Affairs Canada under the Modernising Agriculture in Ghana Project, commissioned Farm Radio International (FRI) to develop a well-researched strategy and plan to enhance Digital Agricultural Advisory Services.



This was to be part of the National Agricultural Extension System to effectively serve men and women farmers as well as other agricultural value chain actors.



He said the Plan was developed after a two-year review of case studies, scanning and assessing ICT tools being used in Ghana, Uganda, Ethiopia and Malawi and assessing the capacity of extension officers.



Mr Siameh said staff were also trained to produce the Green Leaf Magazine across 16 radio stations, while Digital Advisory Focal Persons were selected for each region.



Canadian support



The Agricultural Sector Lead at the Canadian High Commission to Ghana, Candace Holt, commended MoFA, FRI and advising consultants for thier collaboration on the development strategy.



She said the implementation of the strategy plan was an important practice to ensure sustainability and ensure that staff were aware of the strategy and understood it to ensure continued attention to develop and maintain e-extension services.



"From a Canadian perspective, it is extremely important for us to see agriculture extension services that are accessible and geared towards supporting women and men farmers alike, Ms Holt said.



e-Extension plan



The Consultant for DAES and FRI, Doctor Pascal Attengdem, who gave a presentation on the outline of the e-Extension Strategy and Plan, said the outline was in five phases.



He explained that the strategy was transformational because it included a wide range of ICT and digital tools and devices such as radio, telephony, video, television, mobile applications and devices, social media and emerging technologies which were consistent with the guiding principles of the country's agricultural extension policy.



"We have been challenged with the need to move away from the usual foot soldier type of extension, farmer to farmer, extension agent to farmer, and visiting homes to talk to people because it is now evident that ICT or electronic gadgets can do the same things and more effectively," Dr Attengdem explained.



He called on stakeholders, especially the universities, to introduce courses educating agriculturalists on e-Extension in order not to lose out on the project implementation.





Source: graphiconline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The International Federation of Surveyors has adjudged Ghanaian firm, Geo-Tech Surveys Ltd, a global corporate member for the month of March 2022.



Geo-tech has been a member of FIG since 2017. Its Managing Director Stephen Djaba is well known in and around the FIG Community.



FIG is looking forward to close cooperation with Geo-Tech Surveys Limited and the rest of the local organizing committee for the FIG Working Week 2024 that will take place in Accra, Ghana.



A subsidiary of Geo-Tech Systems Ltd, the Federation said Geo-Tech has been the pillar behind innovation and modernization of surveying in Ghana since it was established in 1998.



The recognition comes in the back of a partnership between Geo-Tech and Israeli firm, GMX Systems Ltd earlier in March.



The Federation, in a publication on its website, described Geo-Tech as a team of Geoinformation experts, photogrammetrist and engineers with "proven experience both locally and across the boundaries of Ghana".



It lauded the firm for its corporate social responsibility in partnering with tertiary institutions to provide hands-on industrial training for students and donation of equipment to resource educational and non-educational institutions.



This gesture, the federation said, portends well for the future of surveying in the country.



It credited Geo-Tech as being the first to initiate digital street naming and address system in the country which attracted the attention of the world bank and the government.



Stephen Djaba, the Managing Director of Geo-Tech, speaking with the media said as a rising professional land survey company dedicated to providing land surveying, mapping and related service in a timely manner and at competitive prices, they were concerned not only about the present of surveying in the country but the future.



Mr Stephen Djaba said Geo-Tech has undertaken major geospatial projects in the West Coast including, Benin, Togo Senegal, Liberia, Nigeria and Burkina-Faso.



He said beneficiary graduates get taught among others the use of various equipment such as drones, laser scanners, global navigation survey systems and optics in line with current trends.

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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Burkina Faso's former President Blaise Compaore has received a life sentence in absentia for his role in the assassination of his charismatic predecessor, Thomas Sankara.



Sankara, 37, was gunned down along with 12 others during the 1987 coup d'etat that brought Compaore to power.



The pair had been close friends and had jointly seized power in 1983.



Sankara remains a hero for many across Africa because of his anti-imperialist stance and austere lifestyle.



After seizing power at the age of just 33, the Marxist revolutionary known by some as "Africa's Che Guevara", campaigned against corruption and oversaw huge increases in education and health spending.



The prosecution said Sankara was lured to his death at a meeting of the ruling National Revolutionary Council.



He was shot in the chest at least seven times, according to ballistics experts who testified during the trial.



BBC West Africa correspondent Lalla Sy says the verdict was greeted by applause in the courtroom following the six-month trial that came after years of campaigning for justice by his family and supporters.



Sankara's widow, Mariam Sankara, who attended the trial throughout, said the verdict represented "justice and truth" after a 35-year wait.



"Our goal was for the political violence we have in Burkina Faso to come to end. This verdict will give many people cause for thought."



However, there is little prospect that Compaore will serve his sentence any time soon.



He has lived in exile in Ivory Coast since he was removed from office following mass protests in 2014, and has taken up Ivorian nationality.



He previously denounced the trial by a military court as a political sham.



Ten others were also found guilty, including Compaore's security chief Haycinthe Kafando, who was accused of leading the hit squad that killed Sankara.



He has been on the run for several years and was also tried in absentia. He too received a life sentence.

They had both denied the charges.



Gilbert Diendere, one of the commanders of the army during the 1987 coup and the main defendant who was actually present at the trial, was also sentenced to life. He is already serving a 20-year sentence for a coup attempt in 2015.



Eight other defendants received sentences ranging from three to 20 years, while three defendants were acquitted.



While in power, Sankara changed the name of his country from its colonial one, Upper Volta, to Burkina Faso, meaning the Land of Honest People.



He cut his own salary, and that of top civil servants, and sold off a range of luxury cars.



During his four years in power, he promoted pan-Africanism, self-sufficiency, real independence from former colonial power France and gender equality, by banning female circumcision and polygamy.



However, his critics point to alleged human rights abuses against his opponents.



Activists in several African countries still pay tribute to him, saying they want to continue his legacy.



In 2019, a six-metre (16ft) statue of him was erected in the Burkina Faso capital, Ouagadougou.

Source: BBC









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Mr Yaw Opoku Mensah, the Deputy Spokesperson for the Ministry of Education, says the Ministry has been able to resolve more than 80 percent of complaints received since the commencement of the 2022 Senior High School (SHS) self-placement process.



The exercise is going smoothly as we expect with the pace, we have set for ourselves. Achieving 80 per cent of the complaints which come across the length and breadth of the country gives a clearer indication that we are on top of our business, he said.



Mr Mensah said this in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) on the sidelines of the SHS self-placement ongoing at the GNAT Hall in Accra.



He assured parents and guardians that the over 555,000 students would get their place of choice in terms of the placement for second cycle education.



The Deputy Spokesperson entreated them to remain calm, saying, they would ensure that the last person got to school before the process ended.



He advised them against paying monies to go-betweens for the placement of their wards.



This process is free and fair with a team of officers from the Ghana Education Service, TVET service and the Free SHS secretariat who are here to offer services. So, you do not need to bypass these platforms and go looking for someone to solve the issues for you at a fee, he said.



Madam Nana Afrah Sika, Deputy Coordinator of Free SHS, said they were not able to reach some parents via phone because the contact numbers they provided were not effective.



She said some students also did not come with their real parents and advised parents to accompany their wards to the Centre themselves and not through intermediaries.



Madam Afrah Sika said another challenge was students with poorer grades wanting to be placed in first-class schools.



She said as of Saturday, April 02, 2022, majority of 2,425 students at the placement Centre were placed in schools.







Source: GNA









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A former Rector at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public and Administration (GIMPA), Professor Ebow Bondzi-Simpson, has called for a review of the Computerised School Selection and Placement (CSSP) system to promote efficiency in the admission system.

He said with the many challenges that came with it coupled with the frustrations that came with the CSSPS for both parents and children, it was only reasonable that the system be reviewed.



Prof. Bondzi-Simpson was speaking at a Stakeholders Conference organised by Mfantsipim School on the theme "Ensuring Educational Excellence: the role of the Stakeholders.



What is CSSPS



The CSSPS system is what is used to place prospective students into senior high schools (SHSs) after their Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE).



It was introduced after the manual mode of admissions to the public SHSs was fraught with allegations of corruption.



Prof. Bondzi-Simpson said after years of implementing the CSSPS, it was obvious that it had been bedeviled with the problems it sought to correct.



"We have heard of several allegations that indicate some corrupt practices going on with the current CSSPS system," he stated.



He rather suggested that heads of schools should be made to go back to admitting their own students.



Stages



Prof. Bondzi-Simpson said of the various stages of the education system from the basic to the tertiary, it was only the secondary which had admissions being done by an external body.



He observed that secondary education was unique and provided a bridge between basic and tertiary education and required critical investments to ensure students were adequately prepared for the tertiary level.



He added that it was essential for educational managers to compliment traditional teaching with modern science of education which would stimulate critical thinking, project work skills and problem-solving abilities.





He also called for partnerships with key stakeholders to ensure excellence and to incorporate the junior high into the senior high system.



For his part, the Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church, Most Rev. Dr Paul Kwabena Boafo, said education was the best leveller and it was essential that all relevant stakeholders worked to ensure quality education, especially in Mfantsipim.



He said the Methodist Church would continue to work to build the necessary linkages required for quality holistic education.





The Central Regional Director of Education, Ms Martha Owusu Agyeman, indicated that education must build a total person with excellent moral and social abilities to meaningfully contribute to national development.



The Headmaster of the school, Rev. Ebenezer Aidoo, said his administration was committed to building a school committed to the highest quality of education possible with the involvement of all stakeholders.









Source: graphiconline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The U.K. has announced new measures to ban all new outward investment in Russia and froze the assets of the countrys biggest bank in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.



The British Govt moved to freeze the assets of Sberbank, Russia's largest bank, and the Credit Bank of Moscow in what Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said were 'some of our toughest sanctions yet'.



All new outward investment to Russia has been banned and the UK has also committed to end all imports of Russian coal and oil by the end of the year, with gas to follow as soon as possible.



Sanctions will also be imposed on eight more oligarchs, including Moshe Kantor, the largest shareholder of the fertiliser company Acron and Andrey Guryev, the founder of another key fertiliser company, whom the UK described as a close associate of Vladimir Putin.



Others oligarchs who have been placed under sanctions include Sergey Sergeyevich Ivanov, president of the worlds largest diamond producer, Alrosa, and Leonid Mikhelson, the founder and CEO of the leading Russian natural gas producer Novatek.



The announcement came alongside similar measures from western allies including the EU which has also banned imports of Russian coal. The US announced it was also imposing sanctions against Sberbank, Russians largest bank, along with the UK.



The UK will impose asset freezes on Sberbank and Credit Bank of Moscow and put in place an outright ban on all new outward investment in Russia, which was worth 11bn in 2020.



By the end of 2022, the UK would end all dependency on Russian coal and oil, the sanctions announcement said, with a pledge to end imports of gas as soon as possible thereafter.



Export bans will also be put in place on key oil refining equipment as well as a ban on imports of iron and steel products.



The White House, meanwhile, announced sanctions Wednesday targeting Russia's top public and private banks and two daughters of Vladimir Putin, adding more pressure on the country's economy and its elite over the invasion of Ukraine.



The new sanctions targeted Maria Vorontsova and Katerina Tikhonova, two adult daughters of Putin's with his former wife Lyudmila Shkrebneva.



Also hit with new sanctions were the wife and daughter of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and members of Russia's Security Council, including former President and Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.









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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Northern Innovation Lab (NIL) in partnership with Ghana Tech Lab (GTL) has organized its Walewale Digital Job Fair for 100 youth to catalyze job creation through mobile app development and develop technical and business skills for increased employability and entrepreneurship.



The attendees at the 3rd edition were drawn from Startups in incubation, Interns of Free Mobile App, nation-builders corps (NABCO) Personnel, national service personnel (NSP), Jobseekers and recruiters, and other exhibitors.



Speaking at the event, the Project Manager of NIL, Alfred Opoku emphasized that the project partners are committed to building human capital by supporting unemployed youth through internship opportunities, training, and digital jobs fairs. The Base Innovation Program supports young graduates to acquire relevant industrial skills in various organizations. It allows every trainee in the training programs to benefit fully and maximize their potential.



Mr. Opoku highlighted the essence of the incubation and internship programs in enhancing the entrepreneurial and industry-required skills of all trainees. After the hackathon at the hub level, the top teams are selected to enter the Ghana Tech Lab (GTL) Incubator, and other trainees are allowed to intern in organizations where they can apply the skills they have acquired.



Expounding on the career opportunities, Gerhardt Seddoh, the North-East Regional Director of Education in charge of IT and Statistics said app development has become a need, and it is, therefore, a necessary tool for development. There are dozens of jobs available within the Tech space and individuals need to take advantage of programs like the Free Mobile App Development to build their skills to make a positive change in society since jobs are always in demand in software companies and tech firms.



Touching on Career development opportunities, Charles Dzidufia, an HR consultant, walked participants through preparing for a career process. First, you evaluate yourself where you are and what you need to learn, projecting yourself after adequate preparation and studying; you need to define your skills and qualification in the most attractive way to your potential employers. And finally, look for job offers on platforms such as LinkedIn, Jobberman, etc.



A Tech Associate at Northern Innovation Lab, Jonas Wewovi said digital skills are essential in todays world, calling on participants, jobseekers and individuals to acquire at least a skill in techComputer literacy, web development, mobile app development, photography, and graphic design.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









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The Chief Executive Officer of State Transport Corporation (STC), Nana Akomea, has lauded President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo for what he believes were brilliant submissions by the President in his interview with BBC's Peter Okowche.



BBC Interview



President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo says Ghana like any other country was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, hence the ailing economy in recent times.



He expounded that the current economic hardship facing Ghanaians is not a unique case because several economies including Nigeria and the United Kingdom are also in dire straits.



The world is going through very difficult times. Ghana is no exception, Nigeria is no exception



There is no country in the world that has escaped the ravages of COVID-19. What you need to look at is the elements being put on the ground that looks beyond the Russia-Ukraine war, he told BBCs Peter Okowche.



[the economy] has gone through very difficult times. I can quote statistics of the US and UK economies but they will not serve a purpose. It is a phenomenon that is going on which has made life difficult", he added.



He was very optimistic that Ghana will emerge stronger and better from this global crisis as his government is working around the clock to revamp the economy.



In Ghana, the recovery programme we have is very credible and that is what is going to give us the opportunity to come out of this period a stronger economy, and it is that future we are looking at, President Akufo-Addo stressed.



President Was Frank



Speaking on Peace FM's ''Kokrokoo'', Nana Akomea firmly opined that ''the President was frank'' in his interview.



He sided with the President on emphasizing how the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia/Ukraine conflict adversely impact Ghana's economy like every other country in the world.



Nana Akomea stressed the President was spot on saying "of course, government is not perfect. Government will make one or two mistakes but the economy is where it is because of COVID and the Russia/Ukraine conflict has also affected the oil prices. We all also know when the oil price goes up on the international market, it affects everything in this world. It affects everything in our country . . . last year, our deficit was about 12 percent. If your deficit is 12 percent, it's serious. In fact, by law, our deficit should not be more than 5 percent".



He was however certain, like the President, there will be a massive economic recovery for Ghanaians.





Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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High profile personalities including the First Lady, Rebecca Akufo-Addo are scheduled to grace the Thursday April 7, 2022, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, the Vice Presidents economic forum at the Pentecost Conference Centre at Millennium City, Kasoa Yesukrom in the Central Region.



The National TESCON Training and Orientation Conference is being organised by the National Youth of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in collaboration with Danquah Institute dubbed Bawumia Speaks On Economy' at 1pm.



Other speakers to grace the occasion include Frema Akosua Osei Opare, Chief of Staff, National Chairman of the NPP, Freddie W.O Blay, Antoinette Tseboa-Darko, Executive Director, Danquah Institute among others.



The Vice President is expected to break his silence on the distressed economy at the public lecture.

Following the debilitating effects on the Ghanaian economy, including price hikes on fuel and commodities and depreciation of the Cedi, there are calls on Bawumia as the leader of the Economic Management Team to address the issues publicly.



His spokesperson, Gideon Boako told Accra-based Asempa FM that his boss will speak on the economy at a public forum in April.



Multiplicity of factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic and Russias invasion of Ukraine, have largely contributed to economic meltdown across the globe, and Bawumia is expected to address how these factors have impacted on the Ghanaian economy, as well as measures the government has taken to address the situation.



Prior to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the Ghana economy was on the rise with positive indicators, earning positive ratings from global economic watchers.



The already tight situation, due to COVID, has also been worsened by the invasion of Russia in Ukraine.

Source: daily guide









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The Chief Executive Officer of State Transport Corporation (STC), Nana Akomea, has described as a "misplaced priority" the construction of the E-block schools.



The E-block infrastructure project which was started under the erstwhile Mahama administration was aimed at increasing access to secondary school education.



Nana Akomea speaking to controversies surrounding the Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) said since most parents are determined to take their wards to a grade 'A' or 'B' school, the money invested in the E-block project could have been used to expand schools with "the highest demand".



The STC boss who was speaking during a panel discussion on Peace FM's morning show 'Kokrokoo' added: "So far as there are differences between the school and nothing has been made to get rid of the differences, that pressure will always be there. That is why I disagree with NDC's E-block project; I think it is a misplaced priority. How many of these parents say they want their wards to go to E-Block schools? They want to go to Presec, Achimota, Accra Academy . . . so if we have the resources, why are we not expanding the infrastructure of the schools having the high demands?"



Listen to him in the video below





Source: Peacefmonline.com









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BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) -- A mainland spokesperson on Wednesday slammed Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authority for exploiting the Ukraine situation to mislead the island's residents and international public opinion.

Ma Xiaoguang, a spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, was asked to comment on a DPP official's recent interview on cross-Strait relations.

The DPP authority's true intention in showing its "value" as a strategic pawn of external forces and clamoring the so-called "military threat" from the mainland is to "internationalize" the Taiwan question and justify "Taiwan independence" provocations, Ma said.

Noting that Taiwan is a part of the Chinese territory and that China's reunification cannot be stopped, Ma said that whatever disguise the DPP authority may use, it cannot hide its intention of secession from the country and selling national interests, and any attempt to seek "Taiwan independence" is doomed to fail. 
Pollster, Ben ephson, has hailed the National Democratic Congress (NDC) Member of Parliament for Asawase, Mohammed Muntaka Mubarak, for challenging the decision by the Speaker of Parliament, Alban Bagbin to refer three New Patriotic Party (NPP) MPs to the Privileges Committee of Parliament.



In the view of Mr. Ephson , the action of Muntaka is an indication that Ghanas democracy has been deepened.



Speaker Bagbin during proceedings on Tuesday April 5 referred the NPP MPs after receiving a petition against them for absenting themselves from Parliament without permission for more than fifteen sittings.



The MPs are Kennedy Agyapong for Assin Central, Sarah Adwoa Safo for Dome Kwabenya and Henry Quartey for Ayawaso Central, who is also the Greater Accra Regional Minister.



But Mr. Muntaka, who is an NDC MP, contested the Speakers ruling and said if the decision is allowed to stand, it will set a dangerous precedent which can be used by a dictator speaker in future to hurt lawmakers.



If we allow this to stand it will become precedent, tomorrow it may hurt all of us he said.



But replying to Muntakas submission, the Speaker defended his decision saying you dont want the speaker to be a dictator but you are prepared to create room for committees to be dictators. When the committee decides then that is it.



Reacting to the situation on 3FMs Sunrise on Wednesday hosted by Alfred Ocansey, Mr. Ephson noted that you cannot sacrifice the rules and regulations of a big institution like Parliament for the partisan sake.



Muntaka believes he [Speaker] is doing the wrong thing and it is good for Ghanas democracy. I think Muntaka has done very well.

Source: 3news.com









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Former NDC MP for Tamale Central, Inusah Abdulai Bistav Fuseini says he doubts if parliament will support a referral of three MPs to the Privileges Committee of the House by Speaker Alban Bagbin for absenteeism.



According to him, the move by the Speaker, which is intended to check incessant absence in Parliament is questionable and likely to be overturned by the House.



Inusah Fuseini explained that both sides of the House are likely to unite and vote for a motion filed by the Minority Chief Whip, Mohammed-Mubarak Muntaka, against the Speakers ruling.



You will see a united parliament against the Speaker," he told NEAT FMs morning show, 'Ghana Montie'.



MPs to the privileges committee



Speaker of Parliament, Alban Bagbin has referred three New Patriotic Party (NPP) MPs  Dome/Kwabenya MP, Sarah Adwoa Safo; Assin Central MP, Kennedy Agyapong and Ayawaso Central MP, Henry Quartey  to the Privileges Committee of the House after he was petitioned by former MP, Ras Mubarak to remove the MPs for absenting themselves for more than 15 consecutive sittings.



Mohammed-Mubarak Muntaka has filed a motion challenging the Speakers ruling, saying that it is only an MP who can start a procedure to remove a sitting MP per the rules.



Muntakas motion excellent



Nonetheless, Inusah Fuseini lauded Muntakas reason to challenge the Speaker's decision.



Parliament Standing Orders says that if a Speaker makes a ruling the only way to challenge him is to come by a substantive motion, he explained.



Speakers referral will be revoked?



Mr Fuseini further said, "If the Speaker admits the motion a date will be set for a debate and the motion will be debated and after the debate Members of Parliament will vote and if a majority of the members think that the Speaker is right then the decision stands."



However, if they think that the decision is wrong then the decision will be revoked.



Adding that, I suspect that the decision will be revoked. Let me explain why, Muntaka Mubarak is the Minority Chief Whip so he will be deemed to be speaking for the minority, he is so important that you cannot do without him, so it will be difficult to go against the whips decision.



Again, the majority  all the three members are from the majority, if their seat is vacant, they will suffer and so they have a reason to prevent the suffering.



MPs Are Moonlighting



The former NDC MP also raised concerns over the increasing rate of absenteeism in Parliament and attributed the routine lack of quorum on the floor of the House to the phenomenon.



Whiles describing the high levels of absenteeism as worrying and a setback to the work of Parliament, he intimated that some MPs are deserting the work of the House for their private businesses.



He disclosed that in the last Parliament for instance, there was an MP who absented himself from a full session without recourse to the Speaker.



As a former member of the legislature, I am adequately informed that many MPs are moonlighting, the former MP revealed.



This is a worrying situation in the House and nobody seems to be talking about it . . . it is the reason Parliament is all the time greeted with empty chairs when proceedings are shown on television . . . Going forward there will be some form of accountability among MPs who are members of the article 75 officeholders. How can you not be going to work and still be drawing salaries from the Consolidated Fund?" he queried.









Source: King Edward Ambrose Washman Addo/peacefmonline.com/ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Former Central Regional Minister, Kwamena Duncan, has extolled the virtues of Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia as he leads the nation in the stead of the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.



President Nana Addo is on an international assignment and, in his absence from Ghana, the Veep acts as President of Ghana.



Speaking on Peace FM's morning show ''Kokrokoo'', Kwamena Duncan seized an opportunity to extend his warm regards to some persons who made their presence felt at his late mother's funeral recently held in the Central Region.



In his submissions, he endorsed Dr. Bawumia who attended the funeral stating emphatically that he is the leader Ghanaians need.



"This is the man we need," he said.



Although it is not apparent what Mr. Kwamena Duncan meant by a "man we need" but what was vividly clear is he was obviously optimistic about the leadership qualities of the Vice President.



''This is a man who is a shepherd to every single person. Bawumia is not discriminatory; he thinks about everyone . . . He cares for every single person . . . Ghanaians know you are a good person. Bawumia, you are a good person," he elaborated.





Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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Former Minister for Central Region, Kwamena Duncan, has backed the Speaker of Parliament for addressing the absenteeism of some Members of the August House.



Three Members of Parliament, Lawyer Adwoa Safo; Dome/Kwabenya MP, Kennedy Agyapong; Assin Central MP and Ayawaso Central MP, Henry Quartey have been referred to the Privileges Committee upon the request of the Speaker, Alban Sumana Bagbin.



Making the referral to the Committee, the Speaker said per article 97 (1) of the Constitution, he, the Speaker could refer such matter to the Privileges Committee if a member of Parliament draws his attention on the floor of Parliament to a Member of Parliament who has been absent from Parliament for 15 days without permission or if he receives a petition from a person or persons outside Parliament on the absentee whose absence is without prior permission by the Speaker.



Per Article 97(1)(c) of the 1992 Constitution, a Member of Parliament shall vacate his seat if he is absent, without the permission in writing of the Speaker, and he is unable to offer a reasonable explanation to the Parliamentary Committee on Privileges from fifteen sittings of a meeting of Parliament during any period that Parliament has been summoned to meet and continues to meet.



Touching on the issue during a panel discussion on Peace FM's 'Kokrokoo' programme Wednesday morning, Kwamena Duncan sided with the Speaker for taking action on the issue as, to him, addressing this matter of absenteeism has been long overdue.



He believed "this is an opportune time for Parliament to deal with this matter in the best interest of Parliament, itself, and in the best interest of our democracy'', so there will be a final decision to avoid any future occurences.





Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Former Central Regional Minister, Kwamena Duncan, has supported the National Democratic Congress (NDC) Member of Parliament for Asawase, Mohammed Mubarak Muntaka's challenge of the decision by the Speaker of Parliament, Alban Bagbin to refer three New Patriotic Party (NPP) MPs to the Privileges Committee of Parliament.



Rt. Hon. Bagbin, during proceedings on Tuesday, April 5, referred the NPP MPs, Kennedy Agyapong, Sarah Adwoa Safo and Henry Quartey, after receiving a petition against them for absenting themselves from Parliament without permission for more than fifteen sittings.



But Muntaka contests the Speakers ruling.



To him, if the decision is allowed, it will set a dangerous precedent which can be used by a dictator Speaker in future to hurt lawmakers.



If we allow this to stand it will become precedent, tomorrow it may hurt all of us, he said.



Speaking in a Joy News interview, Hon. Muntaka, who doubles as Minority Chief Whip, further argued that every application to Parliament shall be in the form of a petition and every petition must be presented by a member who shall be responsible for the observance of the rules.



So you see if youre not a member, he explained, youll not be conversant with these standing orders to apply the rules, and unfortunately Speaker is not a member of parliament. So yes, people can write petitions to him, that is why almost all petitions that have been written to Speakers many of them dont get to be on the floor.



He added; So if Speaker has received petitions, talking about Kennedy Agyapong, Henry Quartey and Adwoa Safo, the Speaker himself, suo moto, I disagree cannot bring the matter on the floor. A member of parliament who feels very convinced about these infractions will raise it.



Kwamena Duncan, speaking on Peace FM's morning programme 'Kokrokoo', welcomed Hon. Muntaka's position on the issue.



He believed the Minority Chief Whip's challenge raises some legitimate questions that must be answered.



"I also like the spirited opposition by Muntaka. Is it true that, per order 76, it is only a Member of Parliament that must present such an application in the form of petition? If it is the case, can the Speaker sidestep this order and take an application from outside?'' he questioned.





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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In a time when the 8th Parliament of Ghana has seen grave misconduct from its members, it is uniquely rare to find people admiring the Legislative House as some critics believe intensely that Ghanaians have lost confidence in Parliament and its members.



The 8th Parliament led by Speaker, Rt. Hon. Alban Sumana Bagbin has been characterized by violent acts from Members of Parliament trading blows in the chamber to removing the Speaker's chair to prevent the Deputy Speaker, Joseph Osei Owusu, from acting as Speaker of Parliament among other unparliamentary incidents in the August House.



But even if Ghanaians have indeed lost confidence in the House, Parliament can however be happy to note that all hope is not lost yet.



Parliament has a number 1 fan in the person of seasoned Journalist, Abdul Malik Kweku Baako.



Abdul Malik Kweku Baako, the Editor-in-Chief of the New Crusading Guide, has expressed his unquenchable adoration for Parliament in the wake of the brouhaha happening in the House.



Contributing to Peace FM's ''Kokrokoo'' Wednesday morning, Kweku Baako stated emphatically that, among the three arms of government, Parliament is his favorite.



Speaking to host Kwami Sefa Kayi, Mr. Baako confessed his deep love saying, "My favorite arm of government is Parliament. It's the Legislature and this is because, perhaps, where I grew up and how I grew up, I just love Parliament to bits. And we all know that when there are unconstitutional disruptions, the first casualty is the Legislature and as long as the unconstitutionality prevails, the Legislature is missing from the political landscape. This is all part of the reasons we feel the Fourth Republic is more or less a blessing in the sense that the more legislative experience we have, the more we can consolidate that culture of governance and in the process make a lot of progress."





Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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Seasoned journalist, Kweku Baako has lashed out at Members of Parliament who absent themselves from the House.



Referral Of MPs To Privileges Committee



Following a petition by a Former Kumbungu Member of Parliament, Ras Mubarak to the Speaker of Parliament, Rt. Hon. Alban Bagbin, on the issue of absenteeism, three members of the august House have been referred to the Privileges Committee of Parliament.



The MPs are Henry Quartey representing Ayawaso Central constituency, Adwoa Safo and Kennedy Agyapong who also represent Dome/Kwabenya and Assin Central respectively.



In Ras Mubarak's petition, he said; It has come to my notice through parliaments Hansard, and newspaper and radio reports that some four Members of Parliament, namely Hon. Sarah Adwoa Safo, MP for Dome-Kwabenya; Hon. Henry Quartey, MP for Ayawaso Central; Hon. Ebenezer Kojo Kum, MP for Ahanta West; and Hon. Ken Ohene Agyapong, MP for Assin Central have all absented themselves from Parliament for more than fifteen sittings of a meeting of Parliament without the permission of Mr. Speaker in writing.



In view of this reported breach of the constitutional provision, I respectfully petition your high office to direct for their conduct to be referred to the Privileges Committee for consideration and necessary action.



Rt. Hon. Bagbin, during proceedings on Tuesday April 5, referred the NPP MPs, Kennedy Agyapong, Sarah Adwoa Safo and Henry Quartey, to Parliamentary Committee on Privileges for absenting themselves from Parliament for more than fifteen (15) sittings without permission.



Per Article 97(1)(c) of the 1992 Constitution, a Member of Parliament shall vacate his seat if he is absent, without the permission in writing of the Speaker, and he is unable to offer a reasonable explanation to the Parliamentary Committee on Privileges from fifteen sittings of a meeting of Parliament during any period that Parliament has been summoned to meet and continues to meet.



MP Can't Be Absent From Parliament



Addressing the issue during Wednesday's edition of ''Kokrokoo'' on Peace FM, Kweku Baako wondered why an MP would absent himself or herself from Parliament without prior permission of the Speaker stressing such conduct is unacceptable.



''It is your duty to represent your constituents and make laws on behalf of the country. It's non-negotiable...So, why become an MP if you are not dedicated to the business of the House?''



He emphasized that such culture in Parliament must be dealt with and, for that matter, applauded the Speaker of Parliament for not brushing Mr. Mubarak's petition aside.



''The decision by the Speaker to bring it to the front burner and to trigger some parliamentary proceedings and processes to cure that mischief is welcome in principle'', he said.





Henry Quartey Surprised Package

Mr. Baako also revealed it has become the character of some MPs to go to Parliament, sign their names in the attendance book and hop out of Parliament or its precincts for their own reasons, thinking they should be counted as being present.



He expounded that for a Parliamentarian to be marked present, he or she is expected to be at the chamber during proceedings, so writing his or her name down without being part of the proceedings is same as being absent.



He asserted that absenteeism shouldn't be entertained in Parliament.



''It has become a phenomenon, a certain subculture which must be cured and that is why I think I like the drift of Speaker Bagbin in terms of bringing this to the front burner and giving it to the appropriate Committee of Parliament to deal with it.''





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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Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia will speak on the economy on Thursday, April 7, 2022 following invitation extended to him by the National Youth Wing of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the Danquah Institute (DI) to address issues on the economy.



The public lecture is taking place in Kasoa in the Central region.



There have been public calls for the Vice President who is noted for his economic prowess, to speak on the economy.



Some critics have in recent times, especially former President John Mahama and members of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) have asked about the whereabouts of the Vice President at a time Ghanas economy was going through some challenges as a result of Covid-19 and the ongoing Ukraine/Russia war which has had global effects on oil and economic activities.



Dr Bawumia has been at the forefront of Ghanas digitalisation agenda.



His political opponents, have accused him of intentionally shying away from commenting on the economy.



However, responding to his critics last week when he addressed participants in this years agricultural students career guidance and mentorship dialogue bootcamp (AG-STUD Africa Bootcamp 2022) at the Jubilee House in Accra, the Vice-President said: Sometimes people say well, we thought you were an economist, but youre doing so much in the IT space. Have you left economics behind?



No, no, not at all. In fact, it is because of the economy that I am focusing on digitisation because without building those pillars, our economy will just not be able to stand on its own feet.



The Vice-President said he has not abandoned matters on the economy, as some people seek to suggest.



He explained that what he was doing with regard to digitisation and digitalisation had a direct bearing on the economy.



The Vice-President will therefore be using the opportunity of the event to be hosted at the Pentecost Convention Centre at the Millennium City in Kasoa to speak on the economy.



The event will also host the First Lady, Rebecca Akufo-Addo as the Special Guest of Honour and National Chairman of the NPP, Freddie W.O Blay, Executive Director of Danquah Institute, Antoinette Tsiboe-Darko among other high profile personalities and researchers.

Source: daily guide









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 few weeks ago, a piece of news went viral that Ghana is about to produce a new superstar known as Tom DFrick after he bagged a deal with Medikals Stubborn Academy Label.



Tom DFrick became a topic on the internet after signing on to the Stubborn Academy Label thereby becoming the first artist to be on the freshly created label.



A lot of questions were asked on what his first project would be like and finally, we are happy to say he has released a new song dubbed Stay Wicked featuring AMG Business power-plug, Medikal who doubles as his label CEO.



In the song, Tom DFrick displayed his lyrical prowess and that was topped up by MDK who is known to be a deliverer of hits in the Ghanaian music industry.



This new song has already started trending on many airwaves across the country and beyond and that is a good sign for Tom DFrick.



As an iconic musician who has been tipped by many to be one of the biggest stars from Ghana in no time, it comes as no surprise to have him have his first single off his new label become an instant hit.



You can check out the song exclusively on Boomplay below:



https://www.boomplay.com/songs/87898549

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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Popular Ghanaian Musician Nana Nsiah Piesie has been confirmed dead after he was rushed in an ambulance to the 37 Military Hospital.



This musician is widely known for his Police Abaa Akonti song. According to his brother and spiritual father, Osofo Botwoo, the music legend had an accident at Pokuase in the Greater Accra Region.



Unfortunately, when he was rushed to the 37 Military Hospital, he was not taken care of. They referred him to the Greater Accra Regional Hospital where he died.



It is with a heavy heart to confirm the news of the unexpected departure of our brother and our music legend Nana Nsiah Piesie of Police Abaa fame to the other side on Monday 4th April, 2022 Osofo Botwoo who is the musicians brother wrote on Facebook.



He had a car accident around Pokuase and was rushed to the 37 Military Hospital where they refused to take care of him upon arrival.

They referred him to the Greater Accra Regional Hospital. He couldnt make it as he gave up his soul on arrival, Osofo Botwoo added.

Source: Daily Guide









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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TEHRAN, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Iran will cut uranium enrichment capacity and the number of centrifuges if an agreement is reached in Vienna talks, the country's nuclear chief said Wednesday.

In the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran has a limit on the number of centrifuges, which will be implemented if an agreement is reached in Vienna, Mohammad Eslami, president of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), said in an interview with the Al-Alam, Iran's Arabic language TV network.

"No new decision will be made if the agreement is finalized, we will continue as it was in the past," he added.

Iran signed the JCPOA with the world powers in July 2015. However, former U.S. President Donald Trump pulled Washington out of the agreement in May 2018 and reimposed unilateral sanctions on Iran, prompting the latter to drop some of its nuclear commitments under the agreement by increasing the number of its centrifuges and purity of enrichment.

Since April 2021, eight rounds of talks have been held in Vienna between Iran and the remaining JCPOA parties, namely China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany, to revive the deal.

Over the past weeks, reports from Vienna suggested that the negotiators were "close" to a new agreement but a few key issues remain unsolved pending "political decisions" of the parties. 
" " Refugees from Ukraine arrive in Medyka, Poland, April 4, 2022. Wojtek Radwanski/ AFP/Getty Images

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has caused more than 4.2 million people to flee to the neighboring countries of Poland, Romania, Moldova and elsewhere.

Russia's violence against civilians and attacks on cities caused an additional 6.5 million or more people to become internally displaced. They left their homes but moved within Ukraine to other areas where they hope to be safer.

Russia and Ukraine have been holding sporadic peace talks. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said April 4, 2022, that talks will continue despite Russian soldiers' committing mass murders of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine.

But there is no guarantee that the millions of displaced Ukrainians will want to go back to their homes even once the war eventually ends.

Lessons learned from the experiences of people displaced in other conflicts, like Bosnia and Afghanistan, provide insight into what might happen with Ukrainians at the end of the fighting. A wave of new social science research, including my own as a political scientist studying post-conflict settings, shows that once violence ends, people do not always choose to return home.

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Time Matters

Several factors affect people's choice to return to the place they fled, or to resettle elsewhere. Time is perhaps the most important.

Research shows that generations raised in places of refuge may no longer want to return to the place that was once home.

The faster the Ukrainian conflict is resolved, the more likely it will be that refugees will repatriate or return home.

Over time, displaced people adapt to their changed circumstances. In the best case, they form new social networks and get work opportunities in their places of refuge.

But if governments legally stop refugees from seeking formal employment, their prospects for financial self-sufficiency are grim.

This is the situation in some countries with large refugee populations such as Bangladesh, where Rohingya refugees from Myanmar are forced to live in camps and are prohibited from working.

This would not be the reality for most Ukrainian refugees, however. Most of them are resettling in the European Union, where they can get a special temporary protected status that enables them to work, attend school and receive medical care for at least one and up to three years.

" " Ukrainian children are seen during their first day at school in Ederveen, Netherlands, April 4, 2022. Robin Van Lonkhuijsen/ANP/AFP/Getty Images

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A Larger Refugee Crisis

Ukrainians add to the growing numbers of people who are forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of conflict or climate disasters.

In 2020, the last year with reported global statistics, there were 82.4 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, the highest figure in the past 20 years. Refugees, people who cross an international border seeking safety, make up 32 percent of that number. Internally displaced people are 58 percent of this total figure. The remainder are asylum seekers and Venezuelans displaced without legal recognition abroad.

There are three reasons for the increase in forcibly displaced people.

First, there are unresolved, persistent conflicts in both Afghanistan and Somalia that continue to force people to move.

The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in 2021 caused the latest mass movement of refugees.

A second cause of rising displacement is the recent start of conflicts in Ethiopia, Myanmar, South Sudan and elsewhere.

Third, fewer people caught up in war are returning home once the violence ends. The average length of time refugees stay away from their homes is five years, but averages can be misleading.

For those 5 to 7 million people in situations of protracted displacement  more than five years  the average duration of exile is 21.2 years.

" " Refugee Syrian kids gather around fire to stay warm in a camp during winter season in Idlib, Syria, Jan. 26, 2022. Civilians are forced to burn their clothes to stay warm at night, due to harsh winter conditions. Muhammed Said/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

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Deciding to Go Home  or Not

A recent study of Sri Lankan refugee children raised in India because of the Sri Lankan Civil War from 1983 to 2009 found that some prefer staying in India, even though they are not citizens. These youths feel they could better integrate in India if they were not labeled as refugees.

Some studies have shown that experiences of violence in people's home countries diminishes their desire to return home. Other recent surveys of Syrian refugees in Lebanon show the opposite. These studies found that those who were exposed to violence in Syria  and had a sense of attachment to home  were more likely to want to return.

Age and the attachment to home that often comes with it also influence people's desire to return to their home country, making it more likely that older people will return.

Interestingly, this is also the case in some natural disasters. After Hurricane Katrina forced people to leave New Orleans in 2005, only half of adult residents under 40 later returned to the city. That's compared with two-thirds of those over 40 who chose to go home.

" " Lindal Dawsy sits on the porch of her FEMA trailer next to the remains of her old home May 25, 2006 in Pearlington, Mississippi. Dawsy had no home insurance and was not sure if she would stay and rebuild. Mario Tama/Getty Images

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Rebuilding

Rebuilding houses, returning property that has been occupied by others and providing compensation for property losses during war are vital to encouraging people to return home after displacement.

This work is typically funded by the post-conflict government or international organizations like the World Bank and United Nations. People need places to live and are more likely to remain in places of refuge if they have no home to which they can return.

There are exceptions to this rule. Following ethnic conflicts, refugees and internally displaced people were unwilling to return to homes in ethnically mixed neighborhoods when peace returned in both Bosnia and Lebanon. They preferred to live in new communities, where they could be surrounded by people of their own ethnicity.

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Not Just About Peace

Finally, it is not just peace, but political control that matters to people considering a return.

Nearly 5.7 million Syrian refugees remain in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and other countries after more than 11 years of war in their country. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has retained political power, and some parts of Syria have not seen active conflict since 2018. But it is still not safe for these refugees to return to live in Syria.

The economic situation in the country is dire. Assad's government and related militias still conduct kidnappings, torture and extrajudicial killings.

Even if Russia retreats and pulls its forces entirely out of Ukraine, some ethnic Russians who were living in Ukraine before the conflict are less likely to return there. Returns are most likely when the government and returnees are happy with the outcome and people are going back to their own country.

Russian violence in Ukraine has changed the fuzzy division between ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians into a bright line. The comfortable coexistence of the two groups within Ukraine is unlikely to resume.

Sandra Joireman is the Weinstein Chair of International Studies, and a professor of political science at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia. She receives funding from the University of Richmond, the Fulbright program and the Earhart Foundation.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. You can find the original article here.
Former Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. (Photo: Getty Images)

Former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has thrown her weight behind the UniTeam Alliance of Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos, Jr. and Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio.

This follows the endorsement of the candidates by her party Lakas-CMD, which is fielding Mayor Duterte for vice president.

According to the Philippine Star, Arroyo, who is currently seeking election as Pampanga representative, asked her province mates to support the Marcos-Duterte tandem in the May 9 elections. Pampanga has more than 1.5 million registered voters this year.

On Monday (April 4), the day before her 75th birthday, she told the people of her hometown of Lubao that there would be a "landslide victory" for the duo in Pampanga. "I know all of us are for Bongbong Marcos. I hope you give Sara the equal support you gave Noli de Castro, who was my vice president."

In 1998, Arroyo became the first female vice president of the Philippines before being elected as the country's second female president in 2001. She served as president till 2010.

Arroyo thanked President Rodrigo Duterte in 2019 for "[providing] the atmosphere in which the Court had the freedom to acquit me of the trumped up charges of my successor and your predecessor." She had been acquitted three years earlier of alleged misuse of the P366-million intelligence fund of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office.

The 75-year-old was elected representative of Pampanga's Second District in 2010 and served until 2019, and was also House speaker from 2018 until 2019.

Arroyo is running unopposed in Pampanga. She is set to replace her son Mikey as district representative.
Chemical engineering doctoral student Soumil Joshi (foreground) discusses work on a new AI model for analyzing biomaterials with Assistant Professor and primary investigator Sanket Deshmukh. Joshi was lead author on a Deshmukh lab research paper recently published in an online journal affiliated with Nature. Credit: Tonia Moxley for Virginia Tech

Innovation often leads to new products, but new methods can be just as groundbreaking.

It was the chance to help develop those methods that drew chemical engineering doctoral student Soumil Joshi from his native Mumbai, India, to Virginia Tech in 2019.

"It's a great school, especially for the chemical engineering field, and it is really reputed for research on polymers, which I'm thankful to be doing here," Joshi said.

And in March, three years of work led to his name being listed as first author on a paper describing a new computational method for working with polymers that he and his advisor, Assistant Professor Sanket Deshmukh, hope will lead to significant biomedical advancements.

The paper, titled "Coarse-grained molecular dynamics integrated with Convolutional Neural Network for comparing shapes of temperature sensitive bottlebrushes," details a method developed by the Deshmukh lab, including co-author and visiting scholar Samrendra Singh, that uses artificial intelligence to analyze the shape of important complex soft materials and predict their behaviors.

It was published in npj Computational Materials, an open-access journal from Nature, and not only holds promise for enabling new discoveries in biomaterials, but highlights the growing importance of big data, artificial intelligence, and computational science in chemical engineering.

These computer-assisted innovations are critical to making progress in a range of fields, Deshmukh said. "There are long-standing scientific problems that can't be solved by existing methods, so solving problems and developing new methods go hand in hand."

The researchers developed their "deep-learning" method to work with what are called "soft materials."

In deep learning, artificial intelligence systems are trained to recognize patterns, work on problems, and perform taskswith or without human supervision. Soft materials can include liquids, polymers, glycomaterials, foams, gels, and most soft biological materials. They are used in a wide range of products and applications, from toothpaste, lubricants, and liquid crystal displays to drug delivery systems and tissue scaffolds. But traditional computational methods of analyzing and predicting their behaviors, especially polymers, have limited utility, hindering progress in their development.

To help break that logjam, the researchers worked with a type of branched, tree-like polymers called "bottlebrushes." Their inspiration came from biomolecules, whose different shapes determine their functions. Synthesizing them in the lab could lead to new medical treatments and other industry applications, Deshmukh said. But that can be difficult because the polymers change shape rapidly, depending on temperature and other factors. Without an efficient and accurate way to analyze and predict those changes, creating synthetic versions is difficult.

Their new process uses a well-known deep-learning system called Convolutional Neural Network, or CNN, to identify and predict similarities in shape and function in the polymerssomething that can't be done without computer assistance.

Applying artificial intelligence to this polymer problem is "groundbreaking because it shows the potential of deep learning methods in the field of soft materials," Deshmukh said. "So, in principle, if we understand how the shapes are changing, then hopefully we can control them."

To prove their method would work, Joshi ran 100 unique CNN models, teaching the system to identify bottlebrushes with similar shapes. The project was challenging, not just because it required painstaking work to teach the model what data and features to look for in the polymers, but also because the researchers didn't immediately know what features were relevant. They had to figure that out first.

Developing the models took more than a year, Deshmukh said. "Singh and Joshi did a fantastic job in identifying the processing of the relevant data and then further refining it to make sure the CNN model gets the right information."

"Most of the initial brainstorming on what features to use was carried out by Dr. Singh and Dr. Deshmukh, which helped eliminate plenty of unfavorable options," Joshi said. "This helped us zero in on our current methodology, which I used to code and incorporate into our analysis algorithm."

The results have been very promising, Joshi said, and the team hopes to expand use of the technique into the growing field of glycomaterialscarbohydrate-based soft materials produced by every living organism.

These soft materials contain chains of sugars, called glycans, that play critical roles in health and disease. Of the four building blocks of lifeglycans, proteins, lipids, and nucleic acidsglycans are the most complex and the most challenging to understand. But CNN could spur progress in this area.

"So, just like we created these bottlebrush structures for synthetic polymers, there are a lot of architectures that can be created using glycomaterials and polymers like these glycans," Deshmukh said.

"We plan to help our collaborators design new types of glycomaterials that can be used for biomedical applications," Deshmukh said. "It's really exciting."

This research also points to the growing importance of data science and machine learning in chemical engineering, department head Steven Wrenn said.

"It's important that our graduates know how to work with data scientists and use computer modeling in their own work," Wrenn said. "This training will make our students much more attractive to employers and graduate programs."

In fact, the department is working on a new computational and data science track of study, which, if approved, will train undergraduates to apply computer science to chemical engineering. Deshmukh is involved in developing the study track.

"Training a chemical engineer who is going to work in a chemical plant in data science and artificial intelligence makes them a real asset," Deshmukh said. "Because they are going to help solve problems in the chemical industry that can't really be solved using traditional methods."

Explore further Novel machine learning based framework could lead to breakthroughs in material design

More information: Soumil Y. Joshi et al, Coarse-grained molecular dynamics integrated with convolutional neural network for comparing shapes of temperature sensitive bottlebrushes, npj Computational Materials (2022). Journal information: Nature Soumil Y. Joshi et al, Coarse-grained molecular dynamics integrated with convolutional neural network for comparing shapes of temperature sensitive bottlebrushes,(2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41524-022-00725-7
Electric vehicles offer the best way to get fossil fuels out of transport, the report says. Credit: Shutterstock

If the world acts now, we can avoid the worst outcomes of climate change without any significant effect on standards of living. That's a key message from the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The key phrase here is "acts now". Jim Skea, co-chair of the IPCC working group behind the report, said it's "now or never" to keep global warming to 1.5. Action means cutting emissions from fossil fuel use rapidly and hard. Global emissions must peak within three years to have any chance of keeping warming below 1.5.

Unfortunately, Australia is not behaving as if the largest issue facing us is urgentin fact, we're doubling down on fossil fuels.

In recent years, Australia overtook Qatar to become the world's largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG). We're still the second-largest exporter of thermal coal, and the largest for metallurgical coal.

Time's up, Australia. We have to talk about weaning ourselves off fossil fuels and exporting our wealth of clean alternatives.

Why can't Australia keep selling fossil fuels during the transition?

You might think: "Sure, Australia needs to transition. But it will take decades for the world to rid itself of fossil fuels. Why can't we keep selling gas and coal in the meantime?"

Because we're out of time. As the report states, "if existing fossil fuel infrastructure  continue to be operated as historically, they would entail CO emissions exceeding the carbon budget for 1.5".

And US climatologist Michael Mann recently pointed out, if you were going to pick the worst continent to live on as the climate changes, it would be Australia. We are "a poster child for what the rest of the world will be dealing with," he said.

Urgent action is needed to avoid the devastation and vast expense of unchecked climate change, recently estimated at close to 40% of global GDP by 2100.

We need to accelerate the shift, with much faster greening of electricity supply, electrification of transport, improvement of industrial processes and management of land use and food production. Luckily, the technologies needed to achieve this goal have already been developed and are mostly already competitive with carbon-emitting alternatives.

The economic costs of the transition would be marginal. The required investment in clean energy would be around 2.5% of GDP. That's far less than the costs of allowing global heating to continue, with costs further offset by clean energy's zero fuel costs and lower operating costs.

What are Australia's prospects for weaning off the fossil fuel teat?

Are we seeing signs of the urgency of the situation? If you look at the election platforms of Australia's major political parties, we are still falling far short.

After nine years in office, the Liberal government has reluctantly set a goal of net zero emissions by 2050, but has offered little more than wishful thinking as a policy response.

Last week's budget projected funding cuts of as much as 35% for Australia's clean energy finance and renewable energy initiatives.

By far the biggest shortcoming is the failure to plan for the transition. Despite calls for coal and gas workers to be given an honest assessment of their position, both Liberal and Labor sustain the illusion that coal and gas have a long-term future.

Labor has put forward worthwhile initiatives such as the Rewiring the Nation program aimed at supporting private investment to modernise the grid and make it ready for high levels of renewable energy.

But the opposition's main concern has been to avoid any policy that leaves it open to attack from the Coalition and the Murdoch press. You can see this in Labor leader Anthony Albanese's repeated declaration that "the climate wars are over".

That means, in 2022, we are facing an election campaign in which neither major party has put up serious ideas to cut emissions. There's no mention of a price on carbon or an emissions trading scheme, no real action on land clearing, and no expansion of the government's safeguard mechanism, meant to provide incentives for large industries to cut emissions relative to a baseline.

Lagging on transport

The plunging cost of renewable energy is one of the bright spots in the fight against climate change. Cost alone is driving out coal and gas from the power sector.

The pace of transition is much slower in areas such as transport, which the IPCC report notes had excellent prospects of cutting emissions.

"Electric vehicles powered by low-emissions electricity offer the largest decarbonisation potential for land-based transport," the report says.

In Australia, our failures on transport are palpable. To reach net zero by 2050, we have to move to an all-electric vehicle fleet. Given cars last 20 years on average, almost all new vehicles must be electric by 2030.

By contrast to almost all developed countries, Australia doesn't have a fuel efficiency target, or plans to end new sales of petrol vehicles. The government has no proposal to address this, while Labor offers a minor tax concession on electric vehicles and a fuel efficiency information website.

Bizarrely, these baby steps sit in stark contrast to the bipartisan rush to shield petrol users from rising prices in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.

We've stalled long enough

We've run out of time to deal with the problem of global heating. We cannot afford another three years of inaction.

What would it look like if Australia's next government realises the urgency? It would begin by ending all new investment in fossil fuel production and electricity generation, as well as fossil-fuel reliant industrial plants such as blast furnaces for steel mills. It would accelerate investment in carbon-free replacements, and create pathways for fossil fuel workers to work in the green economy.

And our leaders would talk openly and clearly about the huge threat climate change poses to all of us here, and the benefits we stand to gain by quitting fossil fuels. We would go from laggards to leaders. Imagine that.

Explore further Australia has power to lower CO2 emissions in Asia Pacific

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Whales are threatened by a variety of human activities off the West Coast of the United States, including fishing, ship traffic, and pollution. Overlap between these stressors can compound effects on whale populations, but are rarely addressed by current whale-protection policies in California, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.

The study, published for open access this week in the journal Marine Policy, examines the main causes of death for nine whale species in the California Current Ecosystem, which stretches from British Columbia, Canada to Baja California, Mexico. The whales considered in the study include humpback, gray, blue, fin, minke, sei, sperm, North Pacific right, and killer whales.

"We found that oftentimes, people single out fishing or ship strike for their roles in whale mortality," said co-leading and corresponding author Eliza Oldach, a Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis with the Department of Environmental Science and Policy and the Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute. "But a whole slew of human activities have collided to make the modern ocean a really tough environment for whales to survive. We're excited about efforts that look broadly to rebuild healthy oceans."

Three more threats to consider

The report found that five main contributors to whale mortality are currently targeted with relevant policy responses: entanglements, vessel strikes, noise, water quality and marine debris. But three other threatsnutritional stress, disease and predationneed to also be considered to provide a more holistic approach toward managing whale deaths.

"Gray whales migrate over 5,000 miles between their foraging and breeding grounds at either end of the California Current," said co-leading author Helen Killeen, a Ph.D candidate at UC Davis with the Department of Environmental Science and Policy and the Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute. "Throughout their journey, they must pass through a gauntlet of human activities, all while contending with changes to their environment precipitated by climate change. The best conservation approach for these whales is one that addresses overlapping and interacting stressors that span geographic and jurisdictional boundaries."

Zero-mortality goal

The study comes as the California Ocean Protection Council aims to develop a plan for achieving zero mortality for whales in the California Current Ecosystem this year. Achieving such a goal requires understanding the key drivers of whale deaths, opportunities for policy change and coordinated management across the ecosystem, the report said.

"In our research, we were inspired by a few cases where people and agencies are already collaborating to develop policies that tackle multiple stressors for whales," Oldach said. "Our paper is intended to highlight that approach and urge other policymakers to think along similar lines."

Explore further New map and report expose growing dangers along whale 'superhighways' across the globe

More information: Eliza Oldach et al, Managed and unmanaged whale mortality in the California Current Ecosystem, Marine Policy (2022). Journal information: Marine Policy Eliza Oldach et al, Managed and unmanaged whale mortality in the California Current Ecosystem,(2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.marpol.2022.105039
Example of a polygonal ridge network showing approximately 10-meter thick, intersecting ridges enclosing irregular 100200 meter-sided polygons. Credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS/Caltech Murray Lab/Esri

Over the last two decades, scientists have discovered unusual ridge networks on Mars using images from spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet. How and why the ridges formed and what clues they may provide about the history of Mars has remained unknown.

A team of scientists, led by Aditya Khuller of Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration and Laura Kerber of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, set out to learn more about these ridges by mapping a large area of Mars with the help of thousands of citizen scientists.

Their findings, which have been recently published in Icarus, show that the ridges on Mars may hold fossilized records of ancient groundwater flowing through them.

How the ridge networks were formed on Mars has remained a mystery ever since they were found from orbit. Scientists have determined that there are three stages that were involved to create the ridges, including polygonal fracture formation, fracture filling and finally erosion, which revealed the ridge networks.

To learn more about these ridges, the team combined data from the NASA Mars Odyssey orbiter's THEMIS camera and the Mars Reconnaissance orbiter's CTX and HiRISE instruments. Then, they deployed their citizen scientist project using the platform Zooniverse.

Map of polygonal ridge networks (black dots) identified in mapping area (dashed black outline), covering approximately a fifth of Mars total surface area. The Mars Perseverance rover landing site is shown in purple. Background: Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter Elevation Map. Credit: NASA/JPL/GSFC.

Nearly 14,000 citizen scientists from around the world joined in the search for the ridge networks on Mars, focusing on an area around Jezero Crater, where NASA's Perseverance rover landed last February. Ultimately, with the help of the citizen scientists, the team was able to map the distribution of 952 polygonal ridge networks in an area that measures about a fifth of Mars' total surface area.

"Citizen scientists played an integral role in this research because these features are essentially patterns at the surface, so almost anyone with a computer and internet can help identify these patterns using images of Mars," Khuller said.

Most of the ridge networks (91%, or 864 out of 952) that were analyzed are located in ancient, eroded terrain that is approximately 4 billion years old. During this time period, Mars is believed to have been warmer and wetter, which might be related to how these ridges form.

Previous research in this area has shown that those ridges which were not covered with layers of dust showed spectral signatures of clays. Since clays form from weathering in the presence of water, this suggested to the research team that the ridges may have been formed by groundwater. While the abundant surface dust in these regions makes it difficult to check whether the newly mapped ridge networks by Khuller and Kerber's team also contain clays, their similarities in shape and dimension suggest that they might form from similar groundwater processes.

This discovery helps scientists "trace" the footprints of groundwater running through the ancient Martian surface and determine where it was suitable, during that time 4 billion years ago, for liquid water to be flowing near the surface.

"We hope to eventually map the entire planet with the help of citizen scientists," Khuller said. "If we are lucky, the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover might be able to confirm these findings, but the nearest set of ridges is a few kilometers away, so they might only be visited on a potential extended mission."

Explore further Similar-looking ridges on Mars have diverse origins

More information: Aditya R. Khuller et al, Irregular polygonal ridge networks in ancient Noachian terrain on Mars, Icarus (2021). Journal information: Icarus Aditya R. Khuller et al, Irregular polygonal ridge networks in ancient Noachian terrain on Mars,(2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2021.114833
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Drought had already devastated Allawddin Rahimi's wheat fields when the Taliban reached his village in northern Afghanistan. The group's takeover left him with no choice but to flee.

"I wasn't worried about the Taliban return as much as I was worried about the drought that dried up our only revenue and source of food," Rahimi, 37, said from the port city of Bandar Abbas in neighboring Iran, where he arrived in November to search for a job. He now earns about $3.50 a day as a laborer on a construction site, which he sends home to support a family of seven in Afghanistan's Balkh province.

As the planet warms, the worst dry spell in two decades has coincided with Afghanistan's political and economic upheaval. Climate change is expected to have severe effects on the country over the coming decades, with the ousted Afghan government and the United Nations projecting extreme temperature rises of more than 6 degrees Celsius if global carbon emissions are left unchecked. Already one of the world's poorest countries, its economy's dislocation from billions of dollars in aid leaves Afghanistan more ill-equipped than ever to confront the challenges of global warming and reduced rainfall.

The fallout from the Taliban's takeover, coupled with the drought and soaring wheat prices thanks to Russia's war with Ukraine, means that some 10 million peoplemore than a quarter of Afghanistan's populationare near famine. For the first time, city residents are as vulnerable to starvation as rural citizens who rely on local crops for income and sustenance, according to the Afghan Analysts Network, a research organization in Kabul.

"The overarching drivers on top of a whole lot of other things are the drought and the economic crisis," Mary Ellen McGroarty, country director for the U.N. World Food Program, said in an interview from Kabul. "They're just wiping away the coping mechanisms that households would normally have."

It's not just rural farmers who are suffering. Sayed Ehsan was once a teacher in Mazar-i-Sharif, the capital of Balkh. After the Taliban closed his school for months, he borrowed $5,000 from a relative and sold his wife's jewels for around $1,000 to buy a taxi. He makes about $100 a month.

He and his wife regularly have foodless days. They make sure that their four children, ranging from 4 to 7 years old, eat once or twice a day. Meals often consist of bread and green tea, rather than the traditional local dish of pilaf, made with rice, raisins, almonds and lamb, that they used to eat regularly. The best meal they can look forward to now is a bowl of soup with a piece of meat.

"There is no other option," Ehsan said in a telephone interview. "The only thing that matters now is that we survive and eat. We're like wild animals in a jungle fighting for a slice of bread. That is the current state of Afghanistan."

Ehsan says that he's heard of people selling their infant daughters for between 15,000 ($170) and 20,000 afghanis in order to pay for food. "It's alarming for everyone, and it explains why the country's hunger crisis is so severe," he said.

In Rahimi's village of Qarchi Gak, very low levels of moisture in the soil and inadequate rainfall presage a poor harvest, according to Andy Hoell, a research meteorologist at the U.S. government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's physical-sciences laboratory.

Snow and rainfall will be crucial to Afghanistan's ability to recover from 2021's drought, which was driven by a massive drop in water melting off the nearby Hindu Kush mountains. Meteorologists warn that the La Nina weather pattern in the Pacific Ocean threatens to prolong the drought at least until the end of the year. The increasing risk of extreme weather events also raises the prospect of prolonged water scarcity in the country's rural areas, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

The timing of last year's La Nina couldn't have been worse. As the Taliban made advances and U.S. troops began to withdraw, warmer weather intensified, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a U.S. government-backed website that provides information and data about food-insecure countries. The fundamentalist Islamist group swept to power in August 2021, emboldened by the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from the country after its 20-year war.

Afghanistan's wheat yield dropped 30% during last year's harvest, according to Mohammad Assem Mayar, a former lecturer of water resources management at the Kabul Polytechnic University of Afghanistan and guest author on climate change for the Afghan Analysts Network. Mayar and other experts fear the 2021 drought will continue this year as rainfall drops below average levels in the coming months.

"Wheat is the backbone of Afghanistan livelihoods," said Richard Trenchard, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's representative in Afghanistan. More than 70% of farmlandmuch of it lacking in wateris used to grow the crop. Meanwhile U.S. sanctions have cut off much of the country's banking sector and left its central bank struggling to fund imports of essential goods, including food.

McGroarty, from the World Food Program, has urged the U.S. and other countries imposing sanctions on Afghanistan's economy to preserve access to essential supplies like food. The U.S. has said it won't block humanitarian imports but a decision last month to seize half the Central Bank of Afghanistan's assets to pay victims of the Sept. 11 attacks has prompted wide criticism.

With no signs of policy changing, how the weather turns out this year could decide who gets to eat. "We're all looking at the snowfall. That's going to be critical," McGroarty said.

Afghanistan has seen massive displacement as people fled to urban centers or across its borders. The west and north, where Rahimi used to farm, are among the worst affected areas, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network.

Those who arrive in cities often have to rely on handouts from organizations such as the WFP. In Kabul and throughout Afghanistan, many marketplaces brim with food, but few can afford to purchase it. Costs have increased more than 50% since the Taliban took power and many have lost their jobs. Acute malnutrition is above emergency levels in 25 out of the country's 34 provinces is is expected to worse, according to the WFP.

"We have bags of flour and rice, as well as cooking oil and whatever else you would require, but no one is coming over to buy them," Ghulam Qader, a shopkeeper in Kabul's main food market, said in a telephone interview. He is able to sell some food by lowering prices slightly, but most of the leftovers end up spoiled or thrown away. There are only two or three customers per day, compared with as many as 15 last year.

Mahmood Siddiqi, a 42-year-old economics lecturer at a university in Kabul, has to rely on the WFP to feed his family. The Siddiqi family has survived decades of conflict and civil war, but this is the first time they're facing hunger and malnutrition. "People are only concerned about food. From the poor to the middle class, everyone is suffering every day," Siddiqi said.

Siddiqi was employed at a private university in Kabul until it collapsed after female students stopped attending because of the Taliban's ban on women's education. He sold his television, computer and smartphone to help his family survive until he was able to get help from the WFP.

That involved obtaining a special cardvia biometric checks and approval from a government-appointed local elderthat qualifies his family for food handouts. It's a monthly ration consisting of 50 kilograms of flour, 5 liters of cooking oil and 7 kilograms of beans, which he's been promised over the course of six months, beginning in December.

"Without their support, we would perish within days," Siddiqi said.

Months before the Taliban took power, the former government's National Water Affairs Regulation Authority had announced plans to build 44 dams to help improve agriculture. The future of those projects, along with scores of others related to water and irrigation, is now unclear.

The Taliban says it's already started work on Afghanistan's "biggest ever canal project" to irrigate more than 580,000 hectares of farmland in the country's north by diverting water from the Amu Darya river, which demarcates a section of the border with Uzbekistan. The group's deputy spokesman Bilal Karimi said the Qosh Tepa canal project kicked off on March 30 and is expected to cost some 60 billion afghanis and create 200,000 jobs. Funding will come from the Taliban's "own revenue sources," Karimi said, without giving further details.

No matter what happens with the project, the regime will have to carefully manage water resources to ensure food security in the future, according to Mayar. Ideally, that would include building and modernizing dams to increase national water storage capacity, which is currently 10 times lower than Afghanistan's neighbors, Mayar said. Most current structures predate the Soviet Union's 1979 invasion and Afghanistan's subsequent four decades of almost uninterrupted conflict. After the U.S. invasion in 2001, dams funded by the U.S. and its NATO coalition were frequently targeted by the Taliban.

Iran, which shares a long border with the country, has also accused the government of now-ousted President Ashraf Ghani of breaking a 1973 treaty over access to the Helmand River's water. Last month, Iranian state media reported that officials were in talks with the Taliban over the management of flows into Iran's Sistan-Baluchestan province, where farmers have been protesting water scarcity and parched conditions.

"Some of these water issues are bad now, but could get abruptly worse," said Graeme Smith, senior consultant at the Washington-based International Crisis Group.

How bad the crisis gets depends heavily on the international community's response to the Taliban, given that it's listed as a terrorist group by the U.S., European Union and most of their allies. Washington has said it will release $3.5 billion to organizations such as the U.N. that are working on the ground.

According to McGroarty, who's managing the U.N.'s response in the country, the WFP is already facing a shortfall of around $1.9 billion of the $2.6 billion needed this year to deliver food to 23 million people. Her team has reduced daily food baskets to as little as 50% of the full 2,100 calories that are normally provisioned per person.

"I'm terrified for the people getting across this winter and I hope we are able to do enough in time to be able to save lives and give people some succor, some comfort," McGroarty said.

Explore further Crypto provides fix for some in crisis-hit Afghanistan

2022 Bloomberg L.P. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
The UN warns that nearly half of insect pollinators, particularly bees and butterflies, risk global extinction.

Far from the flowery fields that are their natural home, honey bees imperiled by pesticides in rural Colombia are finding sanctuary on university campuses in the bustling capital Bogota.

Even though hives are banned from the city due to the risk the insects' stings can pose to humans, universities enjoy an exemption for research purposes.

At the University of Rosario, biologist Andre Riveros very carefully feeds a bee some sugar water, watching attentively as it stretches its straw-like tongue, or proboscis, towards the sweet liquid.

The university boasts a rooftop apiary in a bamboo structure some six meters (nearly 20 feet) high, surrounded by trees and flowers.

Here, Riveros and his team study a colony of bees in the hopes of developing a food supplement that will offer the critical crop pollinators protection from insecticides

"Pesticides end up affecting some (neurological) regions that, for example, affect learning and memory and (the bees) end up with damage very similar to Alzheimer's," Riveros told AFP.

"We are trying to find a solution for the problem of bee disappearances," he added. "We seek to shield the bees, in essence."

The team's work focuses on the Apis mellifera, or Western Honey Bee, one of about 20,000 known species worldwide.

Hundreds of hives have been killed off in Colombia in recent years.

Hundreds of hives have been killed off in Colombia in recent years, and investigations into the cause have pointed to fipronil, an insecticide banned in Europe and restricted in the United States and China.

Fipronil has been widely used in a profitable avocado and citrus boom in Colombia, though the Latin American country suspended its use in some crops for six months last year.

'Fleeing the fields'

Elsewhere in Bogota, the EAN University boasts its own hives, perched on a six-story building overlooking the city of eight million people.

Beekeeper Gino Cala extracts honey from the hives as part of his work to instruct and assist universities in the management of urban apiaries.

But Cala told AFP Colombia's bees "are fleeing the fields" partly due to the "indiscriminate use of agrochemicals."

"These insects are extremely relevant and important... because they help guarantee part of the food security of Colombia and the world," he added.

The Apis mellifera or Western Honey Bee is one of about 20,000 known species worldwide.

About 1.4 billion jobs and three-quarters of all crops around the world, according to a 2016 study, depend on pollinatorsmainly bees.

Scientists in Colombia are trying to develop a food supplement that will offer bees protection from pesticides.

From the EAN University grounds, Cala's bees help to pollinate plants in surrounding areas.

About 1.4 billion jobs and three-quarters of all crops around the world, according to a 2016 study, depend on pollinatorsmainly beeswhich provide free fertilization services worth billions of dollars.

In recent years, bees in North America, Europe, Russia, South America and elsewhere have started dying off from "colony collapse disorder," a mysterious scourge blamed partly on pesticides but also on mites, viruses and fungi.

The UN warns that nearly half of insect pollinators, particularly bees and butterflies, risk global extinction.

Despite the city ban, there are private beekeepers in Bogota who sell products such as honey, pollen or beeswax.

The fire department of Bogota says it attends to eight bee sting-related emergencies on average every day.

Explore further Colombian researchers seek safety for bees in urban jungle

 2022 AFP
Computer science professor Neal Davis and linguistics professor Ryan Shosted hold a copy of the Book of Mormon written in the Deseret Alphabet at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The two formed the Illinois Deseret Consortium to provide resources for studying Deseret, which was created by the Mormons and used briefly in the 19th century. Credit: Michelle Hassel

Two University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers are developing resources for studying the Deseret Alphabet, which was created by the Mormons and used briefly in the 19th century.

Linguistics professor Ryan Shosted and computer science professor Neal Davis created the Illinois Deseret Consortium to make available online searchable transcriptions of texts written in Deseret for researchers to study and also to help people rediscover the alphabet.

Their website, at go.illinois.edu/deseret, includes phonemic transcriptions of texts using a computer-readable script so researchers can search for the phonemic spellings without using the Deseret characters, as well as computer-readable transcriptions in the alphabet.

Shosted's research interest is phonetics, and Deseret is a phonetic alphabet, using symbols to spell words the way they sound. Growing up in Salt Lake City, Shosted remembers his grandmother's unique pronunciations. She and other members of her generation pronounced the "or" sound as "ar"so "cord" sounds like "card" and "fork" sounds like "fark." He wondered if texts written in Deseret would offer evidence of that way of speaking in the mid-19th century.

The Deseret Alphabet grew out of the Mormon interest in spelling reform and shorthand that began when they were headquartered in Nauvoo in western Illinois in the 1840s, Shosted said. They wanted to be able to quickly write down the words of church leaders and make them available to the public. Education was a priority for the Mormons, and they also were interested in making English easier to read, he said.

After their arrival in Utah, they invented Deseret, which is heavily influenced by Pitman shorthand. But Mormon citizens rejected the use of the alphabet for education, and it was used for only a short period of time, mostly for official documents produced by the church, Shosted said.

While on sabbatical this semester, Shosted has been researching Mormon texts written in Deseret. He found a first edition Book of Mormon written in Deseretone of only 500 produced using that alphabet, and one of only 200300 still in existenceand the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Illinois purchased the book.

RBML has a strong collection on the history of religion that includes a small but significant group of books related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other closely related denominations, said Caroline Szylowicz, a curator of rare books and manuscripts. The collection includes a first edition of the Book of Mormon printed in 1830; several significant revisions and early translations into foreign languages, as well as related texts; the recently acquired 1869 Book of Mormon written in Deseret; and two 1868 Deseret primers for children.

Producing the Book of Mormon in Deseret "was a major undertaking, at great expense," Shosted said. "The Latter-day Saints in Utah had a lot of financial burdens at the time, and they still chose to invest in this. They were sincerely engaged in the Deseret Alphabet project, but I am still trying to understand their motivation. I suspect it was their commitment to education and publishing the word of God that influenced them the most."

In addition to how the alphabet can shed light on changes in language, Shosted is interested in its role in cultural preservation.

"Deseret Alphabet texts may be as close as we can get to an audio recording of how people spoke in Utah in the late 19th century. It's a window into history because it reflects their pronunciation," he said. "If the Mormons had kept using the alphabet, or used it more widely, it would have preserved some fascinating linguistic information about the emergence of a dialect and culture in Utah that arose from so many immigrants living together in one place."

Other writings in Deseret that are available for research include publications of other Mormon scripture besides the Book of Mormon, minutes of meetings of church officials, diaries kept by Mormon missionaries who transcribed the Hopi language using Deseret, some entries in the Deseret Newsa newspaper in Salt Lake Cityand readers for children. In the University of Utah archives, Shosted found a photograph of a gravestone written in the alphabet.

Many documents written in Deseret are available online through digital scans, but they are not able to be transcribed or made searchable because there is no transcription system that recognizes Deseret characters. Shosted has been painstakingly making phonemic transcriptions of published texts. Davis is developing an optical recognition system that can automatically transcribe printed documents written in Deseret. The goal is to make available a corpus of text-searchable documents that can be used for research, Davis said.

Davis also is producing a new font to replace existing Deseret typefaces with heavy characters that are quite difficult to read.

"We're laying the groundwork so we can get everything available in one place in a way that has not existed before," he said.

The Deseret Alphabet has been added to Unicode, a standard developed to represent the writing systems of the world's languages on computers. Its addition makes working with documents written in Deseret more feasible, Davis said, and it was used for the Deseret texts on the consortium's website.

The alphabet's inclusion in Unicode also has led to a renewed interest in the alphabet, with intellectuals and artists using the alphabet in online forums and to produce copies of popular memes, Davis said.

"It ended up driving a lot of adoption on the internet. A hobbyist community formed around it," he said. "There is a group of people interested in understanding and preserving it as something of a living tradition."

Shosted said the Illinois Deseret Consortium project, as well as the RBML purchase of the Book of Mormon written in Deseret, are important for Illinois.

"Utah dominates the popular imagination when it comes to who the Mormons are, but in many ways, Mormons are Illinois people. The Mormon story is an Illinois story, too," he said. "Maybe we can help Illinoisans remember the major part that communities in this state played in Mormon history. As a small but interesting example, the seeds of the Deseret Alphabet were planted a fairly short distance from Champaign-Urbana, in Nauvoo."

Explore further Reviving the Iban alphabet
HRAC co-founder Todd Ferry works with students in the field to develop tiny home villages serving people experiencing homelessness. Credit: Portland State University

Researchers at Portland State University released one of the first studies that examines the effectiveness of tiny pod villages as alternative shelter for people experiencing homelessness.

The report includes a how-to guide with best practices to help inform city leaders around the country who are considering this model. Psychology, architecture, and urban planning researchers at PSU's Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative (HRAC) spent two years interviewing villagers, site managers, neighbors and builders to develop the report and guide.

One of the key findings was the connection between a sense of agency and villager satisfaction, said lead researcher and HRAC co-founder Todd Ferry, who has been working in this field since 2016 as associate director at the PSU Center for Public Interest Design.

"Giving villagers a voice and sense of agency over how villages operate had a huge impact on villager satisfaction. It didn't have to be a full self-governance model," he said. "But just a clear way that they were involved in decisions."

The study yielded a range of practical recommendations from designing village elements for mobility to the ideal number of villagers, which many placed at no more than 30 residents per site.

Key Findings:

86% of villagers were largely or very satisfied with their pod, 69% were satisfied or very satisfied with their village, 79% were satisfied or very satisfied with their neighborhood.

45% of villagers report food insecurity. Food insecurity remains a major problem.

Villages have disproportionately served white men: 17% of villagers in this study identify as BIPOC despite BIPOC residents representing 40% of the unsheltered population in Portland.

Most neighbors who reported concerns about villages at first reported no longer having those concerns after living near a village.

69% of villagers said that they should share in decision-making at the village, while 26% said that only villagers should determine what happens in the village. Overall, the feeling of having a voice in the village had major impacts on villager satisfaction.

New pods designed for the Clackamas Veterans Village. Credit: Portland State University

The study includes 80 in-depth interviews from six villages and more than 2,000 community surveys in the Portland area. Portland is home to one of the first and longest-running villages, Dignity Village, built 22 years ago by people experiencing homelessness. With the city's long history of villages and multiple examples, Portland is an ideal place to study this type of alternative shelter.

PSU students were integral, not only to the report's completion but in designing, researching and building the tiny home villages. Lisa Patterson, M.Arch alumna, was involved early-on in the design of the Kenton Women's Village while pursuing her graduate degree. While the initial reaction to the village has been positive, she said, the opportunity to look back at the first iteration showed that future villages should be developed with the involvement of the residents who will live there. This belief helped inform the Pop Out Pod design by PSU alum Avery Asato, whose work is featured in the how-to guide.

"There is so much value in listening to and learning from other perspectives and experiences," Asato said. "The design of the Pop Out Pod was the culmination of research, ideas, and input from the whole studio, our teachers, and especially the women at the Kenton Women's Village."

Katricia Stewart worked on the report with HRAC while pursuing a Ph.D. in community psychology, and is now able to use what she learned in her work helping communities implement solutions to homelessness. Stewart said as other communities look to alternative solutions to homelessness, she's able to rely on the research done at PSU to inform her work.

"Solutions to homelessness should be safe and support the dignity and humanity of people experiencing homelessness," she said. "Village models are one way to do those things."

Overall, villagers in the study reported high rates of satisfaction with the pod, village and neighborhood. But the model has not been as effective in serving BIPOC residents. Only 17% of villagers who participated in this study identified as BIPOC despite BIPOC residents making up 40% of the unsheltered population in Portland. BIPOC villagers also reported lower levels of belonging and acceptance in their villages.

"The village model, when implemented thoughtfully, serves an important response to alternative shelter, but questions still remain about the model's racial equity. Projects such as the AfroVillage in Portland, designed by and for BIPOC residents, offer future versions of the village model that could better serve people of color," said Center Director Marisa Zapata.

Kenton Women's Village. Credit: Zach Putnam

Researchers hope that these findings will help communities better understand villages, help improve existing ones and establish best practices for designing villages of the future. The research and design team created the village how-to guide to be as user-friendly as possible so anyone from a potential villager to community organizers could use it.

Marta Petteni, a designer with HRAC who is now working as an equity researcher & designer at Opsis Architecture, said focusing on a user-friendly approach will make it easier for organizations, people experiencing homelessness and advocates to use the guide and build a path that works for their population. Petteni added that while so much of the design process is often isolated, the village projects and this report give students a chance to go back and learn from residents using the spaces.

"When you combine design and research it's so powerful," she said.

The report acknowledges that the only solution to homelessness is permanent housing and supportive services. Villages offer possible alternative shelter while communities strive toward providing permanent housing for all.

"This research gives cities a full picture of what a village is and best practices informed by people with experience living in villages, working in villages, designing villages and organizing villages. I hope it will be a resource that leads to better outcomes for those living in villages," Ferry said.

A few unexplored opportunities identified in this report include: integrating villages into emergency preparedness plans; designing villages to better support parents; creating a city-level village liaison position; designing villages around activities and interests and leveraging village investment toward the creation of affordable housing.

"Identifying, designing, and advocating for solutions to such a complex issue as homelessness requires long-term, collaborative efforts from across different disciplines," said HRAC co-founder Greg Townley. "This has been perhaps the most truly interdisciplinary project I have ever worked on, combining expertise in social science research, urban planning, and architectural design. We hope the information presented in this how-to-guide helps communities better understand the village model and the role it plays in the array of housing and service options available to people."
JERUSALEM, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said on Wednesday that Iran continues to enrich uranium, calling on the international community for a "Plan B" against Tehran.

"We're in a race against time," Gantz said in a briefing to ambassadors from 80 countries, according to a statement issued on his behalf.

Since August, "Iran has gone from 10 kg of 60-percent enriched uranium to 50 kg," he added.

Israel wants "a good deal," which would include tighter international monitoring of Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and have no expiry date, Gantz said.

"But if there's no deal, we must activate a Plan B - to use force, to exert economic pressure and political pressure," the Israeli defense minister added.

Israel has been tightening regional cooperation with old and new allies in the Middle East, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain with which Israel signed normalization agreements in 2020, Gantz told the ambassadors.

"We are also strengthening our cooperation with the U.S. Army in the region through CENTCOM," he said, referring to the U.S. Central Command, one of the combatant commands of the U.S. Department of Defense whose area of responsibility covers Middle East and Central Asia.

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, who also took part in the briefing, said Israel intends to continue to cement ties with its regional allies, citing the late-March Negev Summit in which six foreign ministers from the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, Egypt, the United States and Israel held two-day talks in the Negev Desert in southern Israel.

"The Negev Summit is the right model for regional cooperation in order to fight terrorism and strengthen the diplomatic ties that will ensure regional stability," Lapid noted. 
This Jan. 5, 2020, photo shows a bald eagle in Philadelphia. NextEra Energy subsidiary ESI Energy was sentenced to probation and ordered to pay more than $8 million in fines and restitution after at least 150 eagles were killed over the past decade at its wind farms in eight states. Credit: AP Photo/Chris Szagola, File

A subsidiary of one of the largest U.S. providers of renewable energy pleaded guilty to criminal charges and was ordered to pay over $8 million in fines and restitution after at least 150 eagles were killed at its wind farms in eight states, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

NextEra Energy subsidiary ESI Energy was also sentenced to five years probation after being charged with three counts of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act during a court appearance in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The charges arose from the deaths of nine eagles at three wind farms in Wyoming and New Mexico.

In addition to those deaths, the company acknowledged the deaths of golden and bald eagles at 50 wind farms affiliated with ESI and NextEra since 2012, prosecutors said. Birds were killed in eight states: Wyoming, California, New Mexico, North Dakota, Colorado, Michigan, Arizona and Illinois.

NextEra, based in Juno Beach, Florida, bills itself as the world's largest utility company by market value. It has more than 100 wind farms in the U.S. and Canada and also generates natural gas, nuclear and solar power

Almost all of the eagles killed at the NextEra subsidiary's facilities were struck by the blades of wind turbines, prosecutors said. Some turbines killed multiple eagles and because the carcasses are not always found, officials said the number killed was likely higher than the 150 birds cited in court documents.

Prosecutors said the company's failure to take steps to protect eagles or to obtain permits to kill the birds gave it an advantage over competitors that did take such stepseven as ESI and other NextEra affiliates received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal tax credits from the wind power they produced.

NextEra spokesperson Steven Stengel said the company didn't seek permits because it believes the law didn't require them for unintentional bird deaths. The company said its guilty plea will resolve all allegations over past fatalities and allow it to move forward without a continued threat of prosecution.

The criminal case comes amid a push by President Joe Biden for more renewable energy from wind, solar and other sources to help reduce climate changing emissions. It also follows a renewed commitment by federal wildlife officials under Biden to enforce protections for eagles and other birds under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Criminal prosecutions had been halted under former President Donald Trump for birds killed inadvertently by industry.

It's illegal to kill or harm eagles under the migratory bird act. However, a wide range of industriesfrom energy firms to manufacturing companieshave lobbied for years against enforcing the law for accidental bird deaths.

The bald eaglethe U.S. national symbol since the 1700ssaw its populations widely decimated last century due to harmful pesticides such as DDT and other problems. Following a dramatic recovery, it was removed from protection under the Endangered Species Act in 2007. Biologists say more than 300,000 bald eagles now occupy the U.S., not including Alaska.

Golden eagles have not fared as well, with populations considered stable but under pressure from wind farms, collisions with vehicles, illegal shootings and poisoning from lead ammunition.

Most of the eagles killed at the ESI and NextEra wind farms were golden eagles, according to court documents.

There are an estimated 31,800 golden eagles in the Western U.S. with an estimated 2,200 killed annually due to human causes, or about 60% of all deaths, according to a study released last week by leading eagle researchers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other entities.

The study concluded that golden eagle deaths "will likely increase in the future" because of wind energy development and other human activities.

Companies historically have been able to avoid prosecution under the century-old Migratory Bird Treaty law if they take steps to avoid deaths and seek permits for those that occur.

Charging documents said company representatives, including ESI's president, were warned that eagles would be killed if the company built two wind farms in central and southeastern Wyoming, and also knew about a risk to eagles when they authorized the repowering of a New Mexico wind farm, about 170 miles (274 kilometers) from Albuquerque.

The company proceeded anyway and at times ignored further advice from federal wildlife officials about how to minimize the deaths, according to court documents.

"For more than a decade, ESI has violated (wildlife) laws, taking eagles without obtaining or even seeking the necessary permit," said Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division in a statement.

ESI agreed under a plea deal to spend up to $27 million during its five-year probationary period on measures to prevent future eagle deaths. That includes shutting down turbines at times when eagles are more likely to be present.

Despite those measures, wildlife officials anticipate that some eagles still could die. When that happens, the company will pay $29,623 per dead eagle under the plea deal.

NextEra President Rebecca Kujawa said collisions of birds with wind turbines are unavoidable accidents that should not be criminalized. She said the company is committed to reducing damage to wildlife from its projects.

"We disagree with the government's underlying enforcement activity," Kujawa said in a statement. "Building any structure, driving any vehicle, or flying any airplane carries with it a possibility that accidental eagle and other bird collisions may occur."

Explore further How do wind turbines impact Golden Eagles?

 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Researchers analyze a Florida horse conch as part of a study led by the University of South Florida. Credit: University of South Florida

The Florida horse conch populationone of the world's largest invertebrate animalsis shrinking. Established in 1969 as the Florida state shell with a record length of two feet, it has become symbolic of Florida's natural resources and widely used in advertising for the state's tourism industry. But unregulated commercial harvesting and recreational live collection are pushing populations closer to collapse.

According to a study led by the University of South Florida, the average lifespan of a Florida horse conch is between eight and 10 years, and it doesn't start reproducing until about age six, giving birth to up to 28,000 offspring each year. This is a dramatic shift from previous belief that a horse conch could live for half a centurymeaning far fewer offspring are born to replace those removed as a result of harvest or natural causes.

The interdisciplinary research team, which includes the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) and current and former USF graduate students, also found that the largest Florida horse conch is no more than 16 years old. The two-foot shell is on display at the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum in Sanibel. The team's results, published in PLOS ONE, were based on analyses of museum specimens, reducing harm to an already fragile population if they removed shells from the wild.

To estimate horse conch ages, researchers analyzed chemical bands in the shell, which track water temperature as the snail grows and can be counted like tree rings to measure the passage of time. Unlike tree rings, which are visible, the chemical bands can only be determined by geochemical analysis.

Researchers collect Florida horse conch specimens as part of a study led by the University of South Florida. Credit: University of South Florida

The team was also able to determine the horse conch's amount of growth each year by wrapping string around each coil and then straightening and measuring the string. They found females grow rapidly each year of their lives, whereas males slow down early and mature at a much smaller size. Researchers determined that female horse conchs start laying eggs at about age six, based on spikes in shell carbon levels.

"Our research shows that horse conch reproduction is less likely to keep pace with intense harvest than previously thought," said lead author Greg Herbert, associate professor from the USF School of Geosciences. "Horse conch populations are important. They create habitat for other species by leaving empty shells of dead prey around for fish, crabs and other animals to use as homes. They also contribute to the unique experience that we have in Florida of being able to go to the beach and seeing one of the largest seashells in the world at the water's edge."

Map showing areas where researchers analyzed Florida horse conch as part of a study led by the University of South Florida. Credit: University of South Florida

Data from FWC shows that there has been a steady population decline since the mid-1990s. Commercial fishermen reported a peak count of 14,511 Florida horse conchs in 1996, followed by 6,124 in 2000, 1,461 in 2015 and just 67 in 2020.

"We still know very little about how many horse conchs exist and where their preferred habitats or what their optimal environmental conditions are," said co-author Stephen Geiger, research scientist at the FWC. "Because we have no dedicated funding for more than 1,500 species of mollusks found in the waters that surround Florida, we continue to seek grants that enable us to study their biological traits, including those that will help managers decide if some species are in need of better protection."

A researcher displays Florida horse conch specimens as part of a study led by the University of South Florida. Credit: University of South Florida

The shells that were studied were collected from the Dry Tortugas, Vaca Key, Sanibel Island and Cape Romano. Researchers say the further north you go, the smaller the Florida horse conch, possibly due to overexploited fisheries and recreational collecting.

Explore further Horse mussels need more protection in Scotland

More information: Age and growth of one of the world's largest carnivorous gastropods, the Florida Horse Conch, Triplofusus giganteus (Kiener, 1840), a target of unregulated, intense harvest, PLoS ONE (2022). Journal information: PLoS ONE Age and growth of one of the world's largest carnivorous gastropods, the Florida Horse Conch, Triplofusus giganteus (Kiener, 1840), a target of unregulated, intense harvest,(2022).
Graphical abstract. Credit: Chemistry of Materials (2022). DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemmater.1c03513

The next generation of catalytic converters could have longer lifetimes and need fewer rare materials to operate, a new study suggests.

Catalytic converters turn harmful gases from a car's exhaust, including carbon monoxide and other pollutants, into steam and other safer byproducts, like carbon dioxide and nitrogen.

A good catalytic converter can last for more than a decade, but according to Cheng-Han Li, lead author of the study, there's always room for improvement. He said future catalytic technologies could be designed to effectively scrub pollutants for a longer period of time.

"We want to have a better lifetime for catalytic converters. Otherwise, they will have to be replaced or won't pass the government's emission tests," said Li, who is a doctoral student in materials science and engineering at The Ohio State University.

The study was published recently in the journal Chemistry of Materials.

Depending on where you live, federal emission standards can vary. In 1975, to combat the growing smog problem in cities across the United States, Congress passed legislation stating that all vehicles were required to have catalytic converters.

Although there are various types, modern catalytic converters use a combination of three precious metals: palladium, platinum and rhodium. These three-way catalysts can reduce nitric oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ) emissionstwo substances which if put together, can create NO x , a chemical compound that has both direct and indirect harmful effects on human health.

Rising prices for the three precious metalsespecially rhodiumis why criminals all over have resorted to stealing catalytic converters. Found most often in the river sands of North and South America, rhodium is considered the rarest element in the world, and is more valuable than gold and platinum.

"The cost of rhodium has risen dramatically over the past years due to increasing demand coupled with a fundamental supply deficit," says Li. That means catalytic converters can be expensive to make, and doubly expensive to replace.

And since rhodium-based catalysts are in short supply, it's imperative that they be utilized as effectively as possible. Because the catalysts have been known to deactivate at high temperatures, researchers investigated how their performance changes over time in the presence of high heat.

To do this, Li's team performed several tests on the converters, including having them endure temperatures higher than 1600 degrees Fahrenheit. While real catalysts rarely exceed such conditions in a moving car, they may experience those temperatures at least occasionally over their lifetimes, especially as the converters get older.

Researchers used a transmission electron microscope to study the microstructures of the three-way catalysts at the atomic level and how they were affected by the heat. "By observing the microstructure, we can make the connection between high heat, the converter's real performance, and its microstructure," said Li.

Li noted that rhodium catalysts are supported by oxides like alumina and ceria-zirconia, which help stabilize them.

At high heat with oxygen, rhodium dissolves into the alumina and degrades into the stable solution rhodium aluminate. This solution, however, is chemically inactive, meaning that it can't scrub away harmful pollutants and gases, making the device effectively useless.

But it is reversible.

When exposed to hydrogen some of the rhodium becomes active again, but not nearly enough to return the catalyst converter to its former efficiency.

The study's findings concluded that in the long run, establishing a new design that prevents the formation of rhodium aluminate could help get the most out of these devices. This in-depth understanding of the device's structure could also help inform better designs for future catalytic converters.

"Our results give car manufacturers a specific direction to follow to optimize the use of rhodium-based catalysts," said Li.

Co-authors were Jason Wu, Andrew Bean Getsoian and Giovanni Cavataio of the Ford Motor Company, and Joerg Jinschek, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Ohio State.

Explore further To reduce vehicle pollution, a single atom can do the work of several

More information: Cheng-Han Li et al, Direct Observation of Rhodium Aluminate (RhAlOx) and Its Role in Deactivation and Regeneration of Rh/Al2O3 under Three-Way Catalyst Conditions, Chemistry of Materials (2022). Journal information: Chemistry of Materials Cheng-Han Li et al, Direct Observation of Rhodium Aluminate (RhAlOx) and Its Role in Deactivation and Regeneration of Rh/Al2O3 under Three-Way Catalyst Conditions,(2022). DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemmater.1c03513
Operant conditioning. The figure depicts the estimated coefficients of predicted cohort loss in regressions of county-level entrepreneurship on predicted cohort loss and other controls by birth cohort and 95% CIs. The sample includes persons enumerated by the 2005 Mini-Census born before 1962 who lived in the county of their hukou registration for 5 or more years. The dependent variable is the logarithm of the number of entrepreneurs in each birth cohort in the county. The coefficient of predicted cohort loss represents the effect of hardship during the famine on the logarithm of the actual number of entrepreneurs in the cohort in the county in the year 2005. (A) Both genders. (B) Females. (C) Males. Credit: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2104033119

Hardship experienced in one's younger days is never pleasant, but a new study found that hardship can make one more entrepreneurial in adulthood. However, this effect is more significant for men than for women. The research also has economic policy implications, highlighting how early life experience shapes risk tolerance and socioeconomic outcomes in adulthood.

The study was jointly conducted by Distinguished Professor Ivan Png and Associate Professor Chu Junhong, both from the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School, and Professor Yi Junjian from Peking University's National School of Development. They published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on 5 April.

"There is a long-standing debate on whether entrepreneurship is due to nature or nurture, in particular, whether and how hardship makes one more entrepreneurial," said Prof Ivan Png, who teaches Strategy & Policy at the NUS Business School as well as Economics at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. "It could be that hardship makes people more entrepreneurial or that only those who were entrepreneurial survived the hardship. Our study adds to that debate by investigating which mechanism was at play because it would lead to different policy and managerial implications. We also wanted to find out if the mechanism affected men and women differently."

The challenge with establishing a causal relationship between hardship and entrepreneurship was that researchers could not run social experiments that randomly assign people to different degrees of hardship and track their behavior over their life course.

The research team overcame this challenge by using the Great Famine, which occurred in China between 1959 and 1961, as a measure of hardship. The famine arose from the government's decision to gear agricultural resources from the rural areas towards the manufacturing and export sectors in the urban cities. Random weather fluctuations could cause agricultural production to fall short, and when food redistribution failed, counties across China experienced substantially different levels of food shortages and varying degrees of hardship.

The research team then looked at data from the China 2005 mini-Census for respondents' entrepreneurship status and the 2013 China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) for respondents' self-reported risk attitudes. Specifically, they looked at respondents who were born before 1962 and lived in their county of hukou (the national household registration system) for five or more years. There were about 729,000 and 12,000 such respondents in the mini-Census and CHFS, respectively.

Hardship makes people more entrepreneurial

The figures showed that in counties where the famine was more severe, the absolute number of people who became entrepreneurs in their adulthood increased. Specifically, everything else being equal, if a county's famine intensity was one standard deviation more severe, there would be 10 percent more entrepreneurs in the county.

Assoc Prof Chu Junhong from NUS' Department of Marketing explained, "This showed that the increase in entrepreneurship was due at least in part to hardship conditioning, because if it were simply that those who were less entrepreneurial did not live to adulthood, then the proportion of entrepreneurs in a county would increase, but the absolute number of entrepreneurs would remain unchanged."

She laid out the policy implications. "If hardship makes one more entrepreneurial, that rationalizes the "School of Hard Knocks" and the promotion of entrepreneurship as a pathway for less developed countries. Further, in the wake of economic recessions or natural disasters, policymakers should support new businesses to restore economic growth."

Both genders became more risk-tolerant, but more men owned a business

The researchers found that hardship made both men and women more risk-tolerant, but greater risk tolerance was associated with more men, but not women, owning a business. Overall, men were more likely to engage in entrepreneurship than women: 4.9 percent of men and only 1.9 percent of women owned businesses or were self-employed.

However, when the famine grew more severe, the likelihood of female and male entrepreneurship would grow by 17.1 percent and 12.7 percent respectively.

Prof Yi Junjian from Peking University said, "The gender differences could be because of a Chinese social normwomen focused more on domestic work while men focused on outside work. Also, when husbands chose riskier professions, wives would tend to choose relatively less risky jobs."

Prof Png said, "While we examined China's Great Famine in our study, the principle that hardship conditions people to be more risk-tolerant and take more risks, including starting a business later in their lives, applies generally. We could see more people who now experience the COVID-19 pandemic hardship become entrepreneurs in future."

Next, the researchers aim to quantify how much hardship conditions people to engage more in entrepreneurship and whether a change in the social norm on gender roles can encourage greater entrepreneurship among women.

Explore further Access to gig economy may spur small business creation, study finds

More information: Junjian Yi et al, Early-life exposure to hardship increased risk tolerance and entrepreneurship in adulthood with gender differences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Junjian Yi et al, Early-life exposure to hardship increased risk tolerance and entrepreneurship in adulthood with gender differences,(2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2104033119
TEHRAN, April 6 (Xinhua) -- At least seven people were killed in a car accident in Iran's southern province of Hormozgan on Wednesday, semi-official news agency Young Journalists Club (YJC) reported.

The collision of two sedan cars left all passengers of the two cars dead, the road police from Hormozgan were quoted by YJC as saying.

Turning left by one of the cars was cited as the cause of the accident, according to the report.

Official figures show more than 20,000 people killed and 200,000 others wounded in traffic accidents annually in Iran, reportedly because of inexperienced driving and low efficiency of the cars and the roads. 
FORT EDWARD  A Bronx man pleaded guilty in Washington County Court to multiple charges on Friday and could face up to four years in prison.

Clifford Gamboa, 25, pleaded guilty to a felony charge of second-degree bail jumping, which could carry a prison sentence of 1 1/3 to 4 years in prison, and a misdemeanor charge of second-degree promoting prison contraband that could carry with it a sentence of 1 year in prison.

The sentences would run concurrent to one another.

Gamboa had been accused of entering the Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Fort Ann with a package for an inmate, which was found to contain the contraband. He was arrested and transported to the Granville state police station.

At the time, police said that Gamboa was also found to have a small amount of marijuana and matches in his possession.

He will be sentenced on May 6.
MOREAU  A 38-year-old man from Ithaca has pleaded guilty to felony fourth-degree grand larceny.

Robert Porter was arrested on Sept. 16 in Moreau. State police responded to a residence after the homeowners discovered that someone had gone through their vehicles overnight. A person, later identified as Porter, took multiple credit cards and over $300.

Porter charged over $7,000 worth of dollars in purchases, police said. Troopers conducted interviews and obtained surveillance video from the establishments where the illegal purchases were made and were able to get a description of the suspect. Police found him sitting a picnic table at a Stewarts Shop on Route 9.

Porter's sentencing will be held on June 6 at 9:30 a.m. in Saratoga County Court.
BALLSTON SPA  A 36-year-old Saratoga Springs man was sentenced to prison on Tuesday for multiple incidents of assault, one of which involved a machete.

John Martino was sentenced in Saratoga County Court to two years in prison and three years post-supervision for second-degree assault, which is classified as a violent felony.

He also has been sentenced to 12 years in prison, with 5 years post-release supervision, on a violent felony conviction of first-degree burglary.

They will be concurrent sentences.

On Dec. 2, 2020, Martino was arrested after breaking into a person's home in Wilton and attacking a person with a machete.

While in Saratoga County Jail, Martino allegedly got into a physical altercation with correction officers on Feb. 13, 2021. Two officers were sent to Malta Medical for treatment.

The victim in the machete incident was treated for serious but not life-threatening injuries at Albany Medical Center.
LAKE GEORGE  The American Gold Star Mothers 85th New York convention will be held in late April at the Holiday Inn Resort, the Lake George Regional Chamber of Commerce announced this week. We are honored and humbled to have this group of amazing mothers gather in Lake George for their statewide convention. Its so inspiring how they honor their childrens memories. We are forever indebted to these families for the sacrifices theyve made for our freedom, chamber spokesperson Amanda Metzger said. Since the 1920s, the Department of New York American Gold Star Mothers Convention has brought together mothers of children who were lost while serving on active duty in the United States military. Veterans and family members join the weekend events to share their stories and rally to support the veteran community. Cindy Roberts, president of the American Gold Star Mothers Department of New York, said in a news release she believes bringing the convention to Lake George holds significance. It is my hope to bring the treasured history of American Gold Star Mothers to the Lake George community, sharing not only our memorabilia and history from the 1920s, but also the peace and healing of Lake George. I hope to offer these families and friends a setting of comfort and camaraderie on their journey in a club no one wants to join. I think this is an opportunity to reflect not only on the cost of freedom, but to remember those who have fought and are still fighting every day, Roberts stated. The public will be invited to an open ceremony of the convention on April 29 from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Holiday Inn Resort at 2223 Canada St. The Gold Star Mothers have put together a beautiful ceremony with the Lake George Community Band, memorabilia and refreshments. We encourage all to attend. In our community, we have so many veterans and people who have had to say goodbye too soon to loved ones who served in the U.S. armed forces. We hope this event gives all who attend a sense of camaraderie and comfort and thank the Gold Star Mothers for opening it to the public, Metzger said.

Gold Star Mothers will convene in Lake George

LAKE GEORGE  The American Gold Star Mothers 85th New York convention will be held in late April at the Holiday Inn Resort, the Lake George Regional Chamber of Commerce announced this week.

We are honored and humbled to have this group of amazing mothers gather in Lake George for their statewide convention. Its so inspiring how they honor their childrens memories. We are forever indebted to these families for the sacrifices theyve made for our freedom, chamber spokesperson Amanda Metzger said.

Since the 1920s, the Department of New York American Gold Star Mothers Convention has brought together mothers of children who were lost while serving on active duty in the United States military. Veterans and family members join the weekend events to share their stories and rally to support the veteran community.

Cindy Roberts, president of the American Gold Star Mothers Department of New York, said in a news release she believes bringing the convention to Lake George holds significance.

It is my hope to bring the treasured history of American Gold Star Mothers to the Lake George community, sharing not only our memorabilia and history from the 1920s, but also the peace and healing of Lake George. I hope to offer these families and friends a setting of comfort and camaraderie on their journey in a club no one wants to join. I think this is an opportunity to reflect not only on the cost of freedom, but to remember those who have fought and are still fighting every day, Roberts stated.

The public will be invited to an open ceremony of the convention on April 29 from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Holiday Inn Resort at 2223 Canada St.

The Gold Star Mothers have put together a beautiful ceremony with the Lake George Community Band, memorabilia and refreshments. We encourage all to attend. In our community, we have so many veterans and people who have had to say goodbye too soon to loved ones who served in the U.S. armed forces. We hope this event gives all who attend a sense of camaraderie and comfort and thank the Gold Star Mothers for opening it to the public, Metzger said.

Jana DeCamilla is a staff writer who covers Moreau, Queensbury, and Lake George. She can be reached at 518-742-3272 or jdecamilla@poststar.com. Jana DeCamilla is a staff writer who covers Moreau, Queensbury, and Lake George. She can be reached at 518-742-3272 or jdecamilla@poststar.com.

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MOREAU  The Moreau Industrial Park currently houses one business, but the Hexion plant may soon have two new neighbors.

Bakers Falls Solar LLC has been before the Moreau town and planning boards since the spring of 2021, with plans for a 13-acre solar array in the towns industrial park.

The Boston-based company is in the final stage of review in the town after a year of negotiation and meetings.

The 2.5-megawatt solar project could be constructed within six months of approval, according to the plans submitted by the company.

The Planning Board opened a public hearing on the proposal on Aug. 16, 2021, which remains open, with the opportunity for residents to write letters and emails in support or against the plans.

The project will be put to a final vote in front of the Planning Board on April 18 at 7 p.m. in Moreau Town Hall. Board meetings in Moreau are no longer livestreamed on the towns website.

Also going before the Planning Board at the meeting is Saratoga BioChar Solutions LLC, a carbon fertilizer manufacturing company.

BioChars plans include a $12 million carbon fertilizer plant proposed in the industrial park.

The plant would feature a wood chip receiving and processing center, which would service the town of Moreau and Saratoga County, to be built during the first phase of a three-phase construction plan.

The April 18 meeting is the second public hearing held by the Planning Board on the project.

The company has come before the town and planning boards with multiple presentations on the minimal environmental or residential impacts the facility would have. The proposal is now in the final stage of approval.

Jana DeCamilla is a staff writer who covers Moreau, Queensbury, and Lake George. She can be reached at 518-742-3272 or jdecamilla@poststar.com.

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AMMAN, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Jordan on Wednesday welcomed a resolution adopted by UNESCO on old Jerusalem and its walls, which stated that all Israeli procedures aiming to change the identity of the holy city and its legal status quo are null and void.

Jordan's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Haitham Abu Al-Foul said the resolution was unanimously adopted by UNESCO Executive Board on Wednesday during its 214th session, according to a statement by the ministry.

The official said the resolution is a result of Jordanian diplomatic efforts in coordination with Palestinians and the Arab and Islamic groups at the UN organization, according to the statement.

The resolution calls on Israel to stop its provocations and unilateral illegal procedures against Haram Al-Sharif, also known as the Temple Mount, including the Al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as the Old City of Jerusalem and its walls, Al-Foul said.

The resolution calls for speeding up procedures to dispatch a monitoring mission from UNESCO to Jerusalem to inspect all violations committed by Israel, the statement indicated.

Al-Foul noted that the resolution is in line with the Jordanian stance towards the Old City of Jerusalem and its walls. 
EGG HARBOR CITY  The Atlantic County Board of Elections split 2-2 along party lines Tuesday night over early voting locations for the 2022 primary and general elections, pitting the rural west against the minority-majority city of Pleasantville.

Both parties agreed to add an Egg Harbor Township location, since that is the largest municipality in the county by population, bringing the total number of early voting sites to seven from six.

But disagreement on the four-member board, made up of two Democrats and two Republicans, came over two other proposed sites.

Republicans voted to keep a site at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Buena Vista Township, even though it attracted fewer voters than any other site in the county last year, to give greater access to those in the large, rural areas in the far west of the county.

Democrats, by contrast, voted to drop Buena Vista and add a site in Pleasantville, saying the city has a history of disenfranchisement and transportation issues so should have access within its borders.

The tie will be broken by County Clerk Joe Giralo, a Republican.

Political Briefs: Audrey Miles new deputy election superintendent Audrey Miles, of Brigantine, was approved by the state Senate as deputy superintendent of el

"I am waiting to be officially notified," Giralo said Wednesday. "Once that takes place, I will break the tie."

There will be three days of early voting prior to the primary election June 7 and nine days of early voting before the general election Nov. 8 (starting 10 days before the general election, but with the Monday before Election Day off for preparation).

Republican Atlantic County Commissioner Andrew Parker, of Egg Harbor Township, argued during public comment against opening a site in Pleasantville, saying it would be just 1.5 miles from an existing early voting site at the county's Shoreview Building in Northfield.

"I'm personally offended. It's 2022 and you are saying minorities can't get up the road a mile and a half?" said Parker, who is Black and a teacher in Atlantic City public schools.

Buena Vista Township Clerk Lisa Tilton made a plea for keeping the site there.

"Buena Vista Township was the first to allow early voting in," she said of its participation last year in a pilot program to test early voting machines. "I'd like to urge the board to remain with the Martin Luther King Center. To do otherwise would disenfranchise the western end of the township and Atlantic County."

Democratic Secretary of the Board John Mooney said the Buena Vista site attracted only 270 early voters in nine days of early voting before last year's Election Day. Given the board's costs for running the site, it worked out to a cost of $124.31 per vote, he said. The next highest was the Hammonton site at $43.10 per vote.

The Galloway Township location at the Atlantic County Library, on the other hand, attracted 2,201 voters during the same time, Mooney said, at a cost of just $15.31 per vote.

Mooney read letters from supporters of opening a Pleasantville early voting site, including Atlantic County Democratic Commissioner Ernest Coursey.

In it, Coursey said he had heard a site was being seriously considered for Egg Harbor Township and said it would be wrong for the board to add one in "a white community" if it doesn't also add one in Pleasantville.

Egg Harbor Township is about 60% white, according to the latest U.S. Census figures, 17% Hispanic, 13% Asian, 8% Black and 7% mixed race.

Pleasantville, according to the Census, is 50% Hispanic, 41% Black and 27% white (Some report as more than one group).

Buena Vista Township had been run by Democrats for decades, but recently the GOP took over local government. Pleasantville is run by Democrats.

It was the first meeting for new Democratic Commissioner Creed Pogue, of Estell Manor. The Democrat replaced Audrey Miles, of Brigantine, on the four-member board.

Miles, a Democrat, left to become Atlantic County Deputy Superintendent of Elections on April 19.

The state reimburses counties for early voting site expenses but will only reimburse Atlantic County for seven sites. Any number above seven would involve spending county money.

Last year there were six early voting locations: the Atlantic City Free Public Library, the Atlantic County Shoreview Building in Northfield, the Atlantic County Library in Galloway, the Atlantic County Library in Mays Landing, the Hammonton Family Success Center and the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Buena Vista Township.

It was the first meeting held at the new board offices at 2 Buffalo Ave. in Egg Harbor City. The board moved there last month.

REPORTER: Michelle Brunetti Post 609-841-2895 mpost@pressofac.com

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A California man was sentenced to 42 months in prison Tuesday for defrauding a pair of Vineland seniors through a bogus investment scheme, U.S. Attorney Philip R. Sellinger said.

Christopher Glynn, 59, of Burbank, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Robert B. Kugler in Camden federal court to wire fraud and money laundering.

Glynn maintained a variety of corporate entities, including U.S. Grant Distribution Group, PG Philanthropic Initiative, Perrarus Global Philanthropic Initiative and others. He also claimed affiliation with an international trust that purportedly was funded with billions of dollars, Sellinger said in a news release.

Glynn approached two people in Vineland and offered them an opportunity to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in a business development loan. He told the victims the loan would be used for authorized business and legal expenses related to his entities and the international trust. The loan also would be used for expenses related to an animal welfare charitable foundation and shelter Glynn was helping the victims set up. Glynn assured the victims the international trust would guarantee their business development loan, the loan would generate specific returns for the victims and the victims could use the returns to fund their animal welfare charitable foundation and shelter, Sellinger said.

Glynn sent emails and other correspondence and contracts to the victims. He also arranged for conference calls between himself, his associates and the victims, including one call Glynn claimed included a direct representative from the NSA (National Security Agency), and a representative from either DHS (Department of Homeland Security) or the FBI. Glynn took these steps to convince the victims they were investing in a legitimate business opportunity, Sellinger said.

He ultimately directed the victims to wire funds to various bank accounts that Glynn controlled to fund the business development loan. The victims did so, relying on Glynns representations about how the funds would be used. In addition, Glynn convinced the victims to open credit cards in the name of their forthcoming animal welfare charitable foundation, to which Glynn and his associates would have access, Sellinger said.

Instead of using the business development loan and the credit cards in the manner Glynn had promised, Glynn and his associates misappropriated the victims money and used it for unauthorized personal expenses such as travel, tanning services and luxury retail purchases, Sellinger said.

In addition to prison, Kugler sentenced Glynn to three years of supervised release.
A federal judge ordered a Cumberland County man to spend two years in prison for purchasing firearms when his previous felony conviction forbid him to do so.

U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp sentenced Darick Nollett, 32, of the Heislerville section of Maurice River Township, on Tuesday in Trenton, U.S. Attorney Philip Sellinger said.

Nollett pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting the making of a false statement during the purchase of a firearm, Sellinger said in a news release.

In addition to prison, Nollett must undergo three years of supervised release and surrender any guns, ammunition or firearms equipment recovered from his property, Sellinger said.

Heislerville man pleads guilty to illegal firearm purchases CAMDEN  A Cumberland County man with a prior felony conviction admitted to participating in

Despite a 2015 felony conviction that barred him from buying firearms, Nollett instructed other individuals in 2018 and 2019 to purchase guns on his behalf.

Those individuals told the U.S. Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives they were the sole buyers, Sellinger said, citing court documents.

In 2020, Nollett also ordered fuel filters from China, which Sellinger said he intended to alter and use as gun silencers.

Authorities seized more than 30 firearms, as well as ammunition and firearms accessories, from Nolletts home in May 2020, Sellinger said.

Contact Eric Conklin: 609-272-7261 econklin@pressofac.com Twitter @ACPressConklin

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OCEAN CITY  The local Board of Education is getting closer in its search for a new superintendent, according to information released by the district Monday.

Out of an initial list of 40 applicants from across the country, the board interviewed 10 candidates. Last week, the board held three closed-door meetings, on March 27, 28 and 29, scheduled for interviews with potential candidates. Two meetings were held virtually, and a third at the Ocean City Free Public Library.

According to Mondays statement, the board met with five candidates and further narrowed the search.

The board is prepared and excited to conduct a third round of interviews with three finalists in the coming weeks, the board said. We look forward to continuing this work to select the next permanent superintendent of the Ocean City School District. We have set a high bar, knowing our Ocean City community deserves a superintendent who can not only meet our expectations, but exceed them.

Kathleen Taylor, who spent 15 years as the district superintendent, retired in August 2021. The district then began a national superintendent search.

According to the district, a superintendent search firm called Strategic Educational Advantage conducted the initial screenings and interviews, narrowing the list to 10 candidates. School officials did not release the names of the applicants.

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One name that is not on the list is Thomas Baruffi, the districts interim superintendent, appointed while the search was underway. After the board meetings last week, he said he was not a candidate for the job and never intended to be.

As a retired superintendent, Im simply serving in the interim role until they find a permanent replacement for Dr. Taylor, he said. Baruffi began teaching in 1983. He retired as the superintendent of Linwood schools in 2014, serving as the shared superintendent for Linwood and Mainland Regional High School from 2009 until his retirement. After that, he served as interim super for other districts, including for Somers Point and Margate.

He said he was not involved in the boards interview process and could not comment on the meetings at which candidates were interviewed.

According to a timeline of the search posted to the district website, the consulting firm held focus groups last fall and in August and September conducted an online survey of community members to gather input on the qualifications Ocean City wanted in a superintendent.

In February, the firm interviewed candidates to decide which ones to present to the board. According to the site, the school board received resumes for all applicants.

Plans are to begin contract negotiations with a candidate this month and appoint a new superintendent by April or May.

Contact Bill Barlow: 609-272-7290 bbarlow@pressofac.com Twitter @jerseynews_bill

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EGG HARBOR CITY  The Atlantic County Board of Elections split 2-2 along party lines Tuesday night over early voting locations for the 2022 primary and general elections, pitting the rural west against the minority-majority city of Pleasantville.

Both parties agreed to add an Egg Harbor Township location, since that is the largest municipality in the county by population, bringing the total number of early voting sites to seven from six.

But disagreement on the four-member board, made up of two Democrats and two Republicans, came over two other proposed sites.

Republicans voted to keep a site at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Buena Vista Township, even though it attracted fewer voters than any other site in the county last year, to give greater access to those in the large, rural areas in the far west of the county.

Democrats, by contrast, voted to drop Buena Vista and add a site in Pleasantville, saying the city has a history of disenfranchisement and transportation issues so should have access within its borders.

The tie will be broken by County Clerk Joe Giralo, a Republican.

Political Briefs: Audrey Miles new deputy election superintendent Audrey Miles, of Brigantine, was approved by the state Senate as deputy superintendent of el

"I am waiting to be officially notified," Giralo said Wednesday. "Once that takes place, I will break the tie."

There will be three days of early voting prior to the primary election June 7 and nine days of early voting before the general election Nov. 8 (starting 10 days before the general election, but with the Monday before Election Day off for preparation).

Republican Atlantic County Commissioner Andrew Parker, of Egg Harbor Township, argued during public comment against opening a site in Pleasantville, saying it would be just 1.5 miles from an existing early voting site at the county's Shoreview Building in Northfield.

"I'm personally offended. It's 2022 and you are saying minorities can't get up the road a mile and a half?" said Parker, who is Black and a teacher in Atlantic City public schools.

Buena Vista Township Clerk Lisa Tilton made a plea for keeping the site there.

"Buena Vista Township was the first to allow early voting in," she said of its participation last year in a pilot program to test early voting machines. "I'd like to urge the board to remain with the Martin Luther King Center. To do otherwise would disenfranchise the western end of the township and Atlantic County."

Democratic Secretary of the Board John Mooney said the Buena Vista site attracted only 270 early voters in nine days of early voting before last year's Election Day. Given the board's costs for running the site, it worked out to a cost of $124.31 per vote, he said. The next highest was the Hammonton site at $43.10 per vote.

The Galloway Township location at the Atlantic County Library, on the other hand, attracted 2,201 voters during the same time, Mooney said, at a cost of just $15.31 per vote.

Mooney read letters from supporters of opening a Pleasantville early voting site, including Atlantic County Democratic Commissioner Ernest Coursey.

In it, Coursey said he had heard a site was being seriously considered for Egg Harbor Township and said it would be wrong for the board to add one in "a white community" if it doesn't also add one in Pleasantville.

Egg Harbor Township is about 60% white, according to the latest U.S. Census figures, 17% Hispanic, 13% Asian, 8% Black and 7% mixed race.

Pleasantville, according to the Census, is 50% Hispanic, 41% Black and 27% white (Some report as more than one group).

Buena Vista Township had been run by Democrats for decades, but recently the GOP took over local government. Pleasantville is run by Democrats.

It was the first meeting for new Democratic Commissioner Creed Pogue, of Estell Manor. The Democrat replaced Audrey Miles, of Brigantine, on the four-member board.

Miles, a Democrat, left to become Atlantic County Deputy Superintendent of Elections on April 19.

The state reimburses counties for early voting site expenses but will only reimburse Atlantic County for seven sites. Any number above seven would involve spending county money.

Last year there were six early voting locations: the Atlantic City Free Public Library, the Atlantic County Shoreview Building in Northfield, the Atlantic County Library in Galloway, the Atlantic County Library in Mays Landing, the Hammonton Family Success Center and the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Buena Vista Township.

It was the first meeting held at the new board offices at 2 Buffalo Ave. in Egg Harbor City. The board moved there last month.

REPORTER: Michelle Brunetti Post 609-841-2895 mpost@pressofac.com

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Although she didnt win any of the Democratic county committee endorsements in the six southern counties that make up the district, the slogans chosen by Carolyn Rush, of Sea Isle City, are almost identical to county committee slogans.

Atlantic Countys endorsement, for example, went to Galloway Townships Tim Alexander in a March convention vote. So Alexander gets the privilege of running under the slogan Atlantic County Democratic Committee, showing he is the partys chosen candidate.

Rush chose as her slogan Atlantic County Democratic Organization.

I intentionally made them similar to what the official ones were, Rush said when reached by phone Tuesday. I didnt know what else to put  what a better option might be. Ive never done this before. So I went with what was the official one but made it my own.

Traditionally candidates not endorsed by county organizations choose issue-oriented slogans.

Primary favorites for Van Drew seat emerge after conventions Several candidates say they are running for the seat held by U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-2nd,

U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-2nd, who got all of his county committee endorsements, is running under the partys official slogan of Atlantic County Regular Republicans, for example, while his primary opponents Sean Pignatelli and John Barker chose Protecting Our Veterans and Officers and We, the People, respectively.

I was disappointed to learn that Carolyn is trying to mislead voters with her slogan, said Atlantic County Democratic Chair Michael Suleiman. Our legal team is looking into whether we have any recourse. Tim Alexander has won every countys convention overwhelmingly. Any money needlessly spent on a primary campaign is money we cannot spend against Jeff Van Drew this fall.

In Cape May and Cumberland counties, Alexander has the official Cape May County Regular Democratic Organization and Cumberland County Regular Democratic Organization slogans.

Rush chose Cape May County Democratic Organization and Cumberland County Democratic Organization.

She said she has not received any emails or phone calls from Democrats concerned about her slogans.

Rush got only 10% of the vote at the Atlantic County convention last month, Suleiman said.

Five candidates make deadline to run for Jeff Van Drew seat in 2nd TRENTON  Two Democrats and three Republicans filed petitions by the deadline Monday to run 

Tim Alexander had 143 votes, Egg Harbor Townships Hector Tavarez had 42 votes, Rush had 20 and there were three abstentions, Suleiman said.

Alexander, 57, has also racked up endorsements from names like former U.S. congressional candidate Amy Kennedy and former Assemblyman Vince Mazzeo, D-Atlantic.

Alexander is a civil rights attorney, former police officer and a former Atlantic County Prosecutors Office detective captain.

Rush, 60, a Lockheed Martin engineer, said she would consider changing her slogans.

If they find Ive done something illegal, I certainly will change it, Rush said.

She said another county chairman told her she could make her slogan anything she wanted, and she didnt consider an issue-oriented slogan.

I dont have a specific issue I want to call out, Rush said.

Reporter: Michelle Brunetti Post 609-841-2895 mpost@pressofac.com

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GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP  As humanitarian organizations continue to respond to refugee crises around the world, an exhibition at Stockton University explores the lives of people who were displaced by the Holocaust.

The university hosted a panel discussion Wednesday about the new exhibition, After the End of the World: Displaced Persons and Displaced Persons Camps. Staged in the Richard E. Bjork Library on the Galloway campus, the exhibition details the lives of Jews who lived in displaced-persons camps in the aftermath of World War II. It will be on display until April 28.

The United Nations Archive of Global Communications and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research created the exhibit. Beginning work in 2019, they used materials and artifacts from YIVO and U.N. archives to shine light on the story of Holocaust survivors and the displaced-persons camps. Its opening was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"It's strange to have been born as a stateless person, a displaced person, a refugee," said Deborah Veach, a member of the YIVO Board of Directors. "It's as if you don't know where you belong, and in fact, you belong nowhere."

Veach spoke during the panel about her family and how she had been born in the Fohrenwald displaced persons camp. She said her mother had been in a work camp and was freed by her brother and other fighters. Her father had fled to the Soviet Union during the war, where he was sent to a work camp in Siberia. They both had to go to the American-occupied zone of Germany after the war and lived in a displaced-persons camp.

Tracey Petersen, manager of the Holocaust and United Nations Outreach Programme, said the exhibition sought to explain both the history of the displaced-persons camps themselves  which were established by the Allies after WWII through the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration  as well as the experiences of the communities within them.

South Jersey's Ukrainian Americans help however they can SOMERS POINT  What do you do when your home is under attack but you are thousands of miles away?

On the one hand, its the story about what plans and policies were put in place to deal with people who had survived as refugees, Petersen said. And the other part of the story is about the Jewish Holocaust survivors and what they did when the war ended.

The exhibition included posters, photographs, newspapers and reports from the UNRRA camps, portraying how people tried to return to their lives after years of violence and trauma. There were displays about how adults looked for work, children attended school, neighborhoods celebrated and people struggled to reunite with the family from which they had been separated.

Other people present for the panel discussion included Deborah Dwork, an academic adviser to the exhibition and director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Dwork, whose aunt survived the Holocaust, said she hoped to explain life in the UNRRA camps holistically, taking as an example the topic of parenthood and children. While she noted that birthrates in the camps were high, many women struggled with the physical and mental trauma of the Holocaust when deciding whether to become mothers. She also discussed the decision of some women in the camp to seek abortions, which she said was illegal.

Dwork said it was difficult to decide what to include in the exhibit's short labels and how to try to tell the story of the survivors.

"It takes, I think, the most courageous work that I've ever done as a historian," she said.

Veach said she did eventually, in 2018, visit the location of the UNRRA camp where she was born. The name of the town and its streets had been changed and only one building had been preserved  and even that had to overcome some local opposition. She said she was moved when she finally saw a record of where she was born. She said she has kept two of the boxes from the camp in which her parents packed their belongings.

"I guess I'm here because this is part of my personal story," Veach said.

Petersen said she hoped to demonstrate the initiative of displaced persons within the camps. She also noted how relevant the issue is today, explaining how the postwar displaced-persons camps had laid the groundwork for the modern U.N. High Commission on Refugees and how the international community responds to the struggles of today's displaced persons, such as those who have recently fled Ukraine because of the Russian invasion.

Were trying to make sure that when people visit the exhibition that refugees and the displaced persons were not without agency, Petersen said. They were trying to take control back of their lives, trying to rebuild cultural ties, everything that the Nazis and their racist collaborators had wanted to completely destroy and remove.

After its time at Stockton, the exhibition will be put on display at the United Nations in New York in January 2023.

Contact Chris Doyle cdoyle@pressofac.com

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OCEAN CITY  Through a tangle of phragmites, over a handmade bridge across a drainage stream and a muddy stretch of marsh, lies a deeply rutted dirt and gravel road that leads to Crook Horn Creek, part of the intracoastal waterway.

A few years ago, the city blocked the road to cars, after too many vehicles got stuck in the deep, watery potholes or worse, in the marsh next to the road. With a long thicket of cedar trees and other plants growing along the raised railroad bed next to the road, the area is now a haven for birders, anglers and neighborhood children who drag their bikes over the bridge to ride the route.

Louis Stricoff lives nearby.

He said his friend and neighbor walked out to the bay to fish the other day and found himself stuck in the deep mud, unable to stand while the tide was rising.

Stricoff posted details about the incident to his Facebook page and an Ocean City-focused page, but agreed to talk about what happened only on the condition of keeping his friends name out of the story. He wanted to praise the work of the police and other emergency responders, and their kindness in helping the man.

What was really nice about it was when you see the professionalism of the emergency services, Stricoff said Tuesday. Kudos to these guys. Theyre doing their job, and theyre doing it well.

His neighbor is a senior citizen, Stricoff said. He walked out along the dirt road with his fishing gear and a plastic bucket for a seat. When he stood to leave, though, he slipped in the mud and couldnt get up.

Luckily he had his cellphone and called me, Stricoff said. He walked out to the end of the road but was unable to lift his friend. Eventually, they decided they needed to call 911.

Ocean City police received the call at 5:56 p.m. Saturday.

While we were responding, we were uncertain whether the male was stuck on a boat or not, therefore the Coast Guard and the New Jersey State Police Marine Unit was requested, reads a narrative prepared by Patrolman Timothy Sharpe, who responded with Patrolman Steve Schmidt.

The police, and Stricoff, refer to the dirt road as Crook Horn Trail, although many people in the area just call it the old railroad tracks.

Finding out that the man was on land, the Coast Guard and the Marine Unit were canceled.

Sharpe said the officers helped the man up. After a few minutes, he said he wanted to walk back to the street end. The officers walked him back, and because they were not sure how long he was out in the cold, called Ocean City Fire and Rescue to evaluate him. He declined treatment, and the emergency crews brought him home to his wife.

The police report says no further action was taken, but thats not exactly accurate, Stricoff said.

On top of it, they called him the next day to see how he was doing, he said of the police.

Its about 1,000 feet along Crook Horn Trail from the end of 52nd Street to the water, where there was once a railroad swing bridge and a small house for the bridge tender. There is now a large concrete block but not much more near the water.

Near the bridge at 52nd Street, a pair of ospreys have recently claimed a nesting platform in view of the nearby alley.

The trail starts at 51st Street, where there remains pedestrian access, but along the way are deep puddles that can be difficult to get by with dry feet. All told, it is about three quarters of a mile long.

With the trees on one side and the marsh on the other, the trail can seem remarkably remote, considering it runs next to a neighborhood, Stricoff said.

Its beautiful, he said of the areas sunset views. He warned about intense mosquitoes at times.

Stricoff said he has suggested the city consider repairing the ruts and making the trail more accessible. He wants to place a couple of benches at the end of the route.

City Council President Bob Barr, whose ward includes the path and its neighborhood, said there have been a few discussions about doing something with the trail, but none of them has gotten far.

I know of no plans to do anything there at this time, Barr said.

That doesnt mean nothing might be proposed in the future. But he added that when improvement options for the trail have been discussed in the past, there was considerable opposition from some neighbors.

Not many visitors know about the trail, but it is listed under ecotourism at oceancityvacation.com, a site maintained by the Ocean City Regional Chamber of Commerce.

The Crook Horn Creek Nature Trail may not seem like much at first, as it is the remains of an old paved road that runs along an old railroad line, but the beauty it beholds is nothing short of glorious, the section reads. Be sure to pack your bug repellant and plenty of sunscreen for your trek down this trail.

Contact Bill Barlow: 609-272-7290 bbarlow@pressofac.com Twitter @jerseynews_bill

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LUSAKA, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Zambian Vice President Mutale Nalumango on Wednesday expressed happiness at the increased levels of Chinese investment in the southern African nation.

The vice president said it was gratifying that the levels of investment by Chinese enterprises have continued to increase in various sectors such as mining, agriculture and manufacturing.

In remarks delivered during the launch of the Chinese Chambers of Commerce in Zambia, the vice president said the increase in Chinese investment was strengthening the bilateral and business relationship between the two countries.

She encouraged the organization to get involved in mobilizing more Chinese investment into the southern African nation as well as supporting existing enterprises to expand their businesses.

Li Tie, the president of the Chinese Chambers of Commerce in Zambia, expressed confidence that more investment from China will continue coming to Zambia because of the enabling environment created by the government.

Zambia has seen an increase in Chinese investment, with the country ranking first for Chinese investment destination in Africa last year for three consecutive years, according to the figures provided by the Chinese embassy in Zambia. 
GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP  While the U.S. and its western allies continue implementing restrictive measures against Russia as it continues its invasion of Ukraine, the conflict could continue indefinitely, retired Rear Adm. Kevin Sweeney said Wednesday.

Sweeney, a former chief of staff to U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, spoke during an hourlong online panel discussion sponsored by the William J. Hughes Center for Public Policy at Stockton University and The Press of Atlantic City.

This is a brutal, barbaric operation brought upon the Ukrainian people  and really the world around it  by an individual, Sweeney said of Russian President Vladimir Putins decision to invade his nations western neighbor.

Sweeney made his remarks hours after new sanctions against Russia were announced by the U.S. as the West seeks to hobble the countrys financial infrastructure.

The U.S. on Wednesday targeted two Russian banks, prohibiting assets from going through the American financial system and barring Americans from business affairs with either bank.

New sanctions were also announced against Putins daughters, Mariya Putina and Katerina Tikhonova, as well as Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin; the wife and children of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov; and members of Russias Security Council, including Dmitry Medvedev, a former president and prime minister.

Sweeney Center to push for five-year budget forecasts as first project TRENTON  In the midst of unprecedented state revenues and state spending, along with fear o

The now six-week-old war has forced millions to migrate to other European nations to seek refuge, something Sweeney considers a major crisis in diplomatic affairs.

But Sweeney commended U.S. leaders for their actions, saying the Biden administrations choice to publicly warn the world about the impending attack was valuable to U.S. relations with its allies and the American people.

Putin claimed Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine to defend his nation. Through state media and other means, such as hindering Western influence online, Putin has been driving a false narrative on the conflict, Sweeney said.

Sweeney spent the hour fielding questions from panelists, as well as Press of Atlantic City readers, Stockton students and online viewers. John Froonjian, executive director of the Hughes Center; William Hughes Jr., an attorney whose father is the centers namesake; and Buzz Keough, executive editor of The Press, served as interviewers.

Sweeney, a highly respected national security expert with decades of leadership experience, described the Ukrainian peoples will to fight Russia as inspiring, even while Russian military are attacking Ukrainian civilians, a move that has alarmed world leaders. (Ukrainian) President Zeleknskyy demonstrates the importance of critical leadership in the time of crisis, Sweeney said.

South Jersey's Ukrainian Americans help however they can SOMERS POINT  What do you do when your home is under attack but you are thousands of miles away?

While battles continue throughout Ukraine, a former Soviet Union territory, the U.S. and its other Western allies continue to fight Russia from afar through economic penalties.

But U.S. or NATO forces would need a greater provocation before getting involved. Sweeney said it would require evidence of Russian use of chemical or other weapons of destruction for the United States or its allies to join the fight.

Putin wouldnt benefit from using them, Sweeney said.

Theres no value, Sweeney said of Putin considering nuclear weapons. The risk to him is too high.

Froonjian said a handful of his students are unfamiliar with international conflict on this scale, because they were born after 9/11 and have grown up in a time of of relative peace. Many, he said, are fearful the Russia-Ukrainian conflict could come onto American shores.

Sweeney assured him that Americans are safe and secure, praising U.S. intelligence and its strong Defense Department and military.

From chicken dishes to Jason Voorhees, South Jersey fundraises for Ukraine As the war in Ukraine rages on, people across New Jersey are desperate to help any way they can.

Theres no question about that, Sweeney said of Americans protection.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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The Monmouth University poll says 55% of New Jersey adults approve of Murphys overall job performance, compared with 35% who disapprove. Among registered voters, Murphy has a 57% approval rating, a bump from 52% near last Novembers election, in which Murphy narrowly defeated Republican challenger Jack Ciattarelli.

Murphy began his second term in January.

When the coronavirus began spreading in New Jersey in 2020, Murphy had a comfortable 70% approval rating, according to the poll.

Poll figures also show Murphy remains favorable with Democrats, at 86%, while 51% of independents and 17% of Republicans find his governorship worthwhile. Those figures are similar to the partisan divide in public opinion one year ago, Monmouth University said.

Murphy got a bit of a scare from voters who took part in last years election, but he appears to have recovered a bit, as far as all his constituents are concerned, Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, said in a statement.

Counties look for help in wresting $126 million in 911 fees from state Every cellphone and land line in New Jersey is charged a 90-cent monthly fee that is suppose

Murphys critics say his policies fall short of helping property taxpayers and the general middle class. The governor, in this years State of the State address, said he would prioritize finding relief from New Jersey property taxes, which are some of the nations highest.

Property taxes are a perennial issue in New Jersey politics, and they played a role in nearly upending Murphys reelection bid, Murray said. His budget proposal puts an emphasis on this issue. Well have to see if it pays dividends in the future.

While most New Jerseyans polled say they are pleased with Murphys job performance, most say he would not be suitable for the Oval Office.

Murphy has previously said hes not considering a run for president.

A majority polled (56%) say Murphy is not fit for the presidency, compared with 33% who say he is. Monmouth said the statistic is not a ringing endorsement but better than presidential ratings by New Jerseyans for former Gov. Chris Christie, Murphys Republican predecessor.

In 2015, more than two-thirds of his then-constituents said Christie would not be good in the White House, Monmouth said.

Christie ran for president in 2016 but failed to earn enough support for the nomination, which was captured by now-former President Donald Trump.

Contact Eric Conklin: 609-272-7261 econklin@pressofac.com Twitter @ACPressConklin

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Davenport police are investigating a shots-fired incident that occurred at 8:29 p.m. Monday in the 1400 block of College Avenue.

Officers located a scene in the alleyway that connects Bridge Avenue with Carey Avenue to the west.

Offices recovered shell casings and found three vehicles that had been struck by gunfire.

No injuries or other damages were reported.

Police ask anyone with information about this incident to call the Davenport Police Department at 563-326-6125, Crime Stoppers of the Quad-Cities at 309-762-9500, or submit an anonymous tip via the P3 Tips mobile app or submit a tip online at qccrimestoppers.com.

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Union representatives for correctional officers and staff at the U.S. Penitentiary in Thomson, Ill., are demanding reinstatement of the prisons search team after a staff member was assaulted by an inmate Tuesday.

In a news release issued Tuesday, Tim Kaufman, spokesman for the American Federation of Government Employees Local 4070, said the staff member was assaulted after finding the inmate in possession of a contraband cellphone.

The incident occurred at about 9 a.m.

Kaufman said the staff member was treated and released, but it was not clear if the staff member was treated at the prison or at a hospital.

Union officials have repeatedly requested the return of the prisons search team, which is made up of 10 staff who search for contraband, Kaufman said.

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons disbanded the search team under the guise of what Kaufman said were right-sizing and cost-saving measures.

Local 4070 President Jon Zumkehr said he plans to talk to members of Congress about the unions concerns about the staffing cuts and the potential danger to staff, inmates and the public.

They continue to say we are going to be fine and no one is in jeopardy, but we are very much in jeopardy with all the recent incidents, Zumkehr said in the news release.

Zumkehr said the Bureau of Prisons considers the prison fully staffed even though just 83% of jobs are filled. The staffing shortages affect the ability of staff to rehabilitate prisoners with educational and skills classes, he added.

Thomson is located in Carroll County, Ill., about 11 miles north of Clinton, Iowa.

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The American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa penned letters to Davenport and Bettendorf on Tuesday asking the cities to repeal city ordinances that put restrictions on soliciting money, often called panhandling.

The organization says the cities could risk being sued, writing that courts have found similar ordinances violate the right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment by wrongly shut(ting) down the free speech of people asking for help, according to a press release issued on Tuesday. Instead, the ACLU said cities should focus on access to housing and services and modifying infrastructure for road safety.

The letter from the ACLU calls on the cities to repeal the ordinances, stay enforcement pending repeal and dismiss pending prosecution for those who violated the ordinances.

Davenport bans people from verbally asking for money in roadways, medians, at intersections from cars not legally parked or in a way that impedes traffic. It also prohibits such activity in certain public places.

Davenport City Attorney Tom Warner said the city was still reviewing the ACLU's letter and the citys ordinance.

We like to hear comments and concerns, and Im glad they reached out to us, Warner said of the ACLU.

In Bettendorf, people can apply for a free, six-month license to solicit money in certain areas. In 2015, the city changed its ordinance to order panhandlers 100 feet away from roadways and intersections. At the time, the city had 40 active licenses. As of Tuesday, City Attorney Chris Curran said Bettendorf had no active permits, meaning it had not received any applications in the last six months.

Curran wrote in an email to the Quad-City Times and Dispatch-Argus that Bettendorf staff and elected officials were reviewing the ACLUs letter and will further examine our ordinance to determine whether any changes are necessary.

Bettendorf notes in its code that the city does not encourage any person to contribute to such solicitation and instead that by issuing a permit the city would be in a better position to inform people of ordinances and respond to complaints.

The ACLU argues because the cities specifically target solicitors, similar ordinances have been challenged and overturned in court. In addition to Davenport and Bettendorf, the ACLU also sent letters to Dubuque and Coralville.

"Punishing homeless people with fines, fees and arrests simply for asking for help is not only unconstitutional but also inhumane," ACLU of Iowa staff attorney Shefali Aurora said. "It only prolongs their homelessness. The only true solutions to homelessness are better access to housing and services in our communities.

"Rather than criminalizing panhandling through these ordinances, cities can modify restrictions and infrastructure to optimize pedestrian and traffic safety while avoiding being prejudicial to those in poverty or limiting free speech. We urge the cities to promptly repeal their ordinances to avoid the risk of litigation," Aurora added.

This is the second round of letters the ACLU has filed with cities about panhandling. In 2018, Des Moines, Grimes and Council Bluffs repealed ordinances banning panhandling after the ACLU sent letters urging them to do so.

After repealing its ordinance that banned panhandling without a license, the City of Des Moines then banned standing in the median of roughly 200 intersections, according to the Des Moines Register.

Aurora said similar ordinances have been found unconstitutional as well, citing a case in Oklahoma City where an appeals court overturned an ordinance banning standing in medians.

Courts have actually found ordinances like Des Moines' median ban unconstitutional, too, because medians are traditional public forums where speech is highly protected, Aurora wrote in an email.

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The oldest son of former President Donald Trump has met with the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. That's according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private session. The interview with Donald Trump Jr. took place Tuesday. He's one of nearly 1,000 witnesses interviewed by members of the House committee as they work to compile a record of the worst attack on the Capitol in more than two centuries. He's the second of Trumps children known to speak to the committee. His sister Ivanka Trump sat down with lawmakers for eight hours in early April.
KHARTOUM, April 6 (Xinhua) -- The Sudanese authorities on Wednesday closed most of the bridges linking the cities with the capital Khartoum and declared an official holiday ahead of demonstrations planned for the day.

The planned mass protests, called for by the resistance committees, the Forces of Freedom and Change Alliance and the Sudanese Professionals Association, comes on the anniversary of the April 6 revolution in 2019 that led to the ousting of former President Omar al-Bashir.

"All bridges will be closed on Wednesday, but Suba and Al-Halfaya bridges will remain open to traffic," Khartoum State's security affairs committee said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Secretariat General of the Council of Ministries declared April 6 a national holiday in Sudan.

The security authorities also closed major roads in central Khartoum and deployed military forces around the army's general command headquarters and the presidential palace.

According to eyewitnesses, the security authorities emptied the busiest Sharwani bus station in central Khartoum early Wednesday by ordering all drivers to leave.

The resistance committees announced that the protesters would head to the Airport Road, the Parliament, the Army's Command headquarters, transportation stations, and possibly foreign embassies in Khartoum.

Sudan has been suffering a political crisis since the general commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan declared a state of emergency on Oct. 25, 2021 and dissolved the Sovereign Council and the government.

Since then, Khartoum and other cities have been witnessing continued protests demanding a return to civilian rule. 
A new initiative from Visit Quad Cities is encouraging people to explore the area's coffee shops.

The QC Coffee Trail features around 30 coffee shops and cafes, each bringing their own unique drinks and atmosphere to the Quad-Cities. A list of participating coffee shops can be found online.

To follow the QC Coffee Trail, sign up on the Visit Quad Cities website to receive a text with a digital passport. Download the passport and show it to participating coffee shops to receive discounts or other specials, and ask an employee for their four-digit pin to check in.

Participants earn prizes as they check in at cafes. Visiting five locations earns a QC Coffee Trail car cup holder coaster, completing 15 earns a QC Coffee Trail blanket and checking in at all participating locations earns a QC Coffee Trail insulated flask and a place on the Caffeinated Hall of Fame.

Visit Quad Cities Vice President of Marketing and Communications Charlotte Doehler-Morrison said one of the goals was to shine a spotlight on local businesses.

Eligible businesses can apply to be placed on the trail by contacting Visit Quad Cities at any time, and participation is free.

Doehler-Morrison said they've already gotten some additional interest in joining the trail since its announcement.

"They're excited about the gamification, that people that participate can earn prizes, because it gives more visibility to them as a small business," Doehler-Morrison said.

The coffee trail joins Visit Quad Cities' QC Ale Trail, featuring local breweries, and QC Family Pass, which offers discounts or specials at local, family-friendly attractions.

"It's of interest to people that have niche likes," Doehler-Morrison said. "If your family wants to go to places, but you would like some discounts, there are people that are into craft beer, and there are definitely a lot of people that are into different types of coffee."

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A Scott County judge set a $250,000 cash-only bond for one of three men accused of killing 14-year-old Jamon Winfrey in 2021.

John Eddie Hanes III, 18, of Davenport, made his initial appearance in Scott County court on Wednesday. Hanes is charged with first-degree murder in Winfreys death.

Chrystian Smith, 18, and Javon Combs, 20, both of Davenport, have also been charged with first-degree murder in the shooting.

Winfrey was shot on Feb. 24, 2021, near the intersection of 13th and Farnam streets, but his body was not found until the next day in a yard between houses in the 1300 block of Farnam.

Hanes appeared Wednesday morning by video before Judge Jay R. Sommers, who set his bond at $250,000 cash only. Sommers also appointed a public defender to represent Hanes, whose next scheduled court date is April 15.

Hanes is the last of the three men to appear in court on the murder charges and was booked into the Scott County Jail on Tuesday, after being transferred from the Fort Dodge Correctional Facility, where he is serving an unrelated prison sentence.

Investigators believe that on the day Winfrey was shot, three vehicles  a black four-door sedan, a gold sedan and a silver minivan  were chasing one another with shots being fired from at least one of the vehicles, according to Davenport police.

Authorities in arrest affidavits say Combs, Smith and Hanes blocked the vehicle they were after, causing the vehicle in which Winfrey was riding to stop in the roadway. Two of the men fired at Winfrey, striking him once.

Davenport police Detective Jordan Sander testified at Combs March 25 preliminary hearing that the shooting likely resulted from a rivalry between gangs.

Sander testified that Combs, Smith and Hanes are part of a gang called MMG. He did not say what the group's name meant; however, court records in other cases state MMG stands for Mad Max Gang.

He also alleged Winfrey was part of the Savage Life gang, and said police believe the two groups are rivals and that both have a "shoot on sight" order if a member or members of the rival gang are spotted.

Since December of 2020, Davenport police have arrested several other suspected members of MMG on suspicion of various offenses, including criminal gang participation and theft.

It was not immediately clear Wednesday how many suspected members of Savage Life have been subject to arrest in that time period.

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Union representatives for correctional officers and staff at the U.S. Penitentiary in Thomson, Ill., are demanding reinstatement of the prisons search team after a staff member was assaulted by an inmate Tuesday.

In a news release issued Tuesday, Tim Kaufman, spokesman for the American Federation of Government Employees Local 4070, said the staff member was assaulted after finding the inmate in possession of a contraband cellphone.

The incident occurred at about 9 a.m.

Kaufman said the staff member was treated and released, but it was not clear if the staff member was treated at the prison or at a hospital.

Union officials have repeatedly requested the return of the prisons search team, which is made up of 10 staff who search for contraband, Kaufman said.

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons disbanded the search team under the guise of what Kaufman said were right-sizing and cost-saving measures.

Local 4070 President Jon Zumkehr said he plans to talk to members of Congress about the unions concerns about the staffing cuts and the potential danger to staff, inmates and the public.

They continue to say we are going to be fine and no one is in jeopardy, but we are very much in jeopardy with all the recent incidents, Zumkehr said in the news release.

Zumkehr said the Bureau of Prisons considers the prison fully staffed even though just 83% of jobs are filled. The staffing shortages affect the ability of staff to rehabilitate prisoners with educational and skills classes, he added.

Thomson is located in Carroll County, Ill., about 11 miles north of Clinton, Iowa.

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A new timeline has been established in the search for a chancellor for the Eastern Iowa Community College District.

In a news release issued Tuesday by Johnna Kerres, associate director for marketing and communications, applications will now be accepted through May 3.

New applications will be reviewed by the search committee on May 11 to determine candidates for initial confidential interviews on May 18.

Up to three additional finalists will then be recommended to the EICCD Board of Trustees for consideration.

All finalists will then be invited to visit the Eastern Iowa Community College District for interviews and forums the week of June 6.

A search for a new chancellor has been in the works since current Chancellor Don Doucette announced earlier this year that he will retire effective July 1. Doucette has served as the districts chancellor since 2011.

Four finalists had been chosen from 27 applications that had been submitted earlier this year. However, two of those candidates dropped out of the running when they accepted jobs elsewhere.

The other two finalists from that initial group are Dr. Ellen Bluth, EICC vice chancellor for workforce and economic development, and Dr. John Maduko, vice president for academic and student affairs at Minnesota State Community and Technical College.

Bluth and Maduko were to be involved in public forums this week. However, during a special meeting Saturday, the districts board of trustees voted to extend the search for a new chancellor, and the public forums for Bluth and Maduko were postponed.

Board member Kendra Beck, who is on the search committee, said during Saturdays meeting that she did not feel the committees job was complete.

We really felt we had four really good candidates and were hopeful that we could fill the chancellor position from them, Beck said. One of the objectives of the search committee was to recommend three to four candidates. I dont feel weve completed our job as a search committee.

Board member Bill Vetter, who also served on the search committee, said the decision on a new chancellor was not only critical for the institution but for the region and the institutions competitiveness and future successes.

Honey Bedell, chief of staff of the Chancellors Cabinet, said it needed to be clear that the two candidates remaining were excellent candidates.

The district is comprised of the community colleges in Scott, Clinton and Muscatine counties.

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Niabi Zoo has taken steps to protect its collection of birds from potential avian influenza infection as hundreds of affected flocks of turkeys and chickens across the Midwest are being culled amid outbreaks of the highly contagious disease.

In February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced outbreaks of bird flu in commercial poultry facilities in Indiana and backyard flocks, the first confirmed cases since 2000. The virus spread quickly across the Midwest, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture reporting 14 million birds in 17 states have been destroyed since the end of March.

According to the CDC, avian influenza is caused by an influenza type A virus which can infect birds. It is transmitted by free flying waterfowl such as ducks, geese and other shorebirds. States like Iowa and Illinois along the migratory route of the Mississippi River are particularly vulnerable.

"We've very concerned. We've moved pretty much every bird in our collection inside," Zoo Director Lee Jackson said Wednesday. "When we can't move them, we've modified enclosures."

Jackson said only two birds, a pair of eagle owls that are showing signs of breeding, are still allowed access to the outdoors by making adjustments to their enclosure.

"We've modified their enclosure so no wild birds or bird droppings can come in contact with them," Jackson said. "We've also canceled all poultry products that we use to feed animals, like eggs and (deceased) frozen chicks and chicken parts. The chicks are fed to snakes, lizards and birds of prey. It's wide variety of animals that might get them."

Jackson said zoo employees also are collecting any dead birds found on zoo property, 13010 Niabi Zoo Road, Coal Valley, and sending them to the University of Illinois laboratory for testing.

At this time, only two deceased birds have been found, which Jackson believes happened after the birds flew into windows. Both birds tested negative for avian influenza.

Jackson said the zoo has 102 birds consisting of 21 species that include barn owls, eagle owls, vultures, umbrella cockatoos, ducks, chickens, lilac-breasted rollers and taveta weavers, which are small song birds from eastern Africa that construct woven nests that hang from trees.

The zoo's largest bird, a one-year-old female ostrich, also has been brought indoors for her protection. The zoo's previous ostrich, a resident for more than 20 years at Niabi, died in September from ovarian cancer at the age of 21.

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Students in grades 7-12 in Crawford Public Schools attended six presentations last week during their Mental Health and Safety Day.

Crawford High School Principal Darin Lovercheck, who organized the day with K-12 counselor Mariah Nelson, explained the students took the Nebraska Risk and Protective Factors Student Survey through the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Department of Health and Human Services.

From what the students reported, the school received data on five areas of focus: vaping, substance use and abuse, bullying, distracted driving and mental health.

We had presenters from different community agencies come in, Lovercheck said, and present to our students on those topics. He noted a sixth one was added  human trafficking.

Presenters included: Officer Tim Flick with Nebraska State Patrol for human trafficking; Renee Spotted Thunder, a certified social worker, for substance use and abuse; Tashina Prochazka with Chadron Community Hospital for vaping; Dawes County deputies Shawn Considine and Jeannie Melton for distracted driving; Nancy Welling from Pathways to Wellness for mental health; and Trinity Kimmel and Lisa Peden from DOVES for bullying.

Lovercheck noted all of the presenters were volunteers.

Students, separated by grade, rotated around to the different presentations, each about 25 minutes long. Most had time for questions as well, Lovercheck said. After speaking with some of the students, the principal learned the programs were well-received and providing them with some good information. He plans to send out a formal survey to all students to get a comprehensive report.

Lovercheck further noted he sat in on all of the presentations, and was impressed with the attentiveness of the students as well as their questions and comments. The presenters, he said, did a phenomenal job of including statistics and personal stories. It really added to it and wasnt just about numbers. I think they did a really nice job relating it to the students and what they find interesting or useful.

The schools are looking into getting more social/emotional learning into the classrooms. Thats an area we have found students could use some help with, Lovercheck said. Instead of doing a specific class or having a specific time regarding that, were going to see how we can incorporate it into the curriculum were using.

One example, he said, is junior high English teacher Jessica Whetham teaches a unit on poetry and students wrote on the taste, look and smell of certain emotions. Were looking to do more of that, Lovercheck said.

Lovercheck wants to do another day of presenters next school year, though whether it will be in the spring or fall has yet to be determined.

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Representatives from the city of Box Elder attended Tuesdays Pennington County Commission meeting in hopes of securing a $3.2 million loan in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds from the county to aid in clean water projects.

The citys ultimate goal is to secure a $5 million match from the state  a number they hope Pennington County will help them achieve. Box Elder has already committed its $1.8 million in ARPA funding to their clean water projects. An additional $3.2 million loan from the countys ARPA funds would allow Box Elder to utilize the full amount available from the state.

According to the proposal, the Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources (DANR) has indicated that up to $5 million in matching grant funds could be available, through the states ARPA allocation. The countys commitment would essentially be a two-for-one investment in clean water projects within Pennington County, the proposal suggested.

Box Elders clean water priorities, comprised of five different projects, bring with them an estimated cost of $10 million, with proposed commitments from the city, county and state.

This is a unique and time-sensitive opportunity, said Matthew Connor, Box Elder Public Information Officer and Legislative Advocate, as part of a presentation to the Pennington County Commissioners on Tuesday morning.

The presentation highlighted an opportunity for the city and county to work together in maximizing the available state matching grant. Box Elders clean water projects all are in Pennington County and would encourage long-term sustainability for waste water systems and regionalization for wastewater in the entire region, Connor said.

With the location of Ellsworth Air Force Base and the incoming B-21 program, Box Elder needs to support population growth related to the Ellsworth expansion, Connor said. We have that focus to urgently move forward with these projects. We need to be ready.

Connor said the clean water projects will enable the open space Box Elder has to be prime targets for housing developments and commercial enterprise that will directly support the military increase coming from the base.

Box Elder is already part of the states water plan, having formally notified DANR of their clean water projects and their readiness once funding is arranged. If the city can secure funding, the states match of up to $5 million is guaranteed.

The city of Box Elder already boasts the highest sewer fees in the region, making funding options a challenge. The city is hoping this constraint, combined with the guarantee of insulation from economic downturn, will merit the same urgency in the eyes of the county as it did with DANR.

Those airmen that are being added with the B-21 program  thats a lock, Connor said. This is a sure thing.

By 2025, the city of Box Elder is expecting an additional 3,000 airmen in addition to their families with 80% expected to live off base.

That means new homes and housing units, and they have to have sewer to support those units. The city is committed to making the expansion a success, Connor said. With that said, we need funding to meet this great challenge. Across the state, there may be no bigger need than in Box Elder.

Box Elder City Administrator and Chief Financial Officer Nicole Schneider indicated the Highway 14/16 sewer main expansion  a $4 million project, and main thoroughfare for base traffic  would be the priority for the funding. The proposed project will replace approximately 13,000 feet of existing 10 sewer mains located on Box Elder Road, 5,300 feet of 15 sewer main, and 8,200 feet of 18 sewer main located in the Highway 14/16 median. The 10 main runs parallel to the 15/18 main.

Other projects under the clean water umbrella for Box Elder include a $1.8 million 151st St. sewer expansion, a $2.8 million Westgate sewer interceptor project, a $2.3 million Cheyenne Blvd. sewer interceptor project, and a $929,000 South Box Elder sewer trunk main improvements project.

Discussion from the commissioners raised questions about which of Box Elders five projects the funding would be allocated to, responsibility for grant legwork, and loan repayment.

Schneider reiterated the request is for a loan, not a donation, to create a match in order to obtain an additional match from the state. Time is of the essence, she said, as funds could be exhausted by September of this year.

We cant leave $5 million on the table, knowing what needs to be done.

The commissioners decided more information was needed and moved to continue gathering information for a decision at their April 19 meeting.

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The federal program that for two years has funded COVID-19 testing and treatment of uninsured patients has ended. Because of that, Monument Health and other health care providers across the U.S. must return to pre-pandemic billing practices, according to a press release from Monument Health.

The Health Resources & Services Administration announced in late March that its Uninsured Program was running out of money. This week the agency stopped accepting claims for reimbursement from health care providers, the health care provider said.

When HRSA announced the program in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Monument Health quickly signed up to make sure our communities could benefit, said Ted Syverson, Vice President of Revenue Cycle at Monument Health. It was a great program during a time when so many people were unsure about the future.

COVID-19 vaccinations, including second boosters recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are covered under a separate program that will continue to cover the cost for uninsured patients as well as the out-of-pocket costs for the insured.

Although patients will be responsible for testing and treatment, Monument Health has a number of programs and resources to help uninsured patients meet their obligations.

Please dont delay getting tested or seeking medical care if you believe you have COVID-19. The spread of the virus has slowed in South Dakota, but its still infecting those in our communities, Syverson said.

At-home test kits are still available free of charge through the federal government. Each household can receive up to two sets of four tests. In addition, at-home kits are available for sale at most retail drugstores and pharmacies. For more information about COVID-19 in South Dakota, visit covid.sd.gov.

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COLOMBO, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa will not resign under any circumstance, Chief Government Whip Johnston Fernando told the parliament on Wednesday.

Addressing the parliament session on Wednesday, Fernando said 6.9 million citizens of the country had voted for the president.

"As a member of a responsible government, I can assure you that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa will not resign from his post under any circumstances. We will face this challenge," Fernando said.

The ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) lost its majority in the parliament as 42 members of parliament (MPs) on Tuesday announced they would sit independently. 
Wind gusts predicted to hit 60 mph and 13 inches of fresh snow prompted the Gallatin National Forest Avalanche Center to raise its avalanche danger rating to "high" on Tuesday for the Cooke City area.

The center advised backcountry users to avoid steep, wind-loaded slopes and areas immediately below them as human-triggered avalanches are "very likely." In areas where the wind hasn't created cornices, the center still rated the danger "considerable."

Sixty to 80 mph gusts were predicted for the northern Gallatin and Madison ranges where 10 inches of snow fell, the report stated, raising the danger there to considerable as well.

The warnings come following a Sunday avalanche on Wilson Peak near Big Sky in the northern Madison Range that caught two skiers and injured one.

According to the Gallatin County Sheriff's Office's Facebook post, "One skier was able to self-extricate immediately. The other skier was swept down the slope, through some trees, and ultimately was able to self-extricate at the bottom of the slide." The skier sustained hip and upper leg injuries after hitting a tree that did not allow the two to hike or ski out.

Using a GPS communication device the skiers were able to call for help. Gallatin County Sheriff Search and Rescue members from Big Sky and the helicopter team responded. The helicopter was able to land near the patient, load both into the helicopter and fly them to a waiting Big Sky Fire Department ambulance.

Sheriff Dan Springer commended the skiers for having a communication device that allowed them to call for help. "Having a plan and equipment for emergency events when recreating in the backcountry can make the difference between a quick rescue or spending an unexpected night in the mountains," the Facebook post noted.

So far this winter, 15 recreationists have been killed in avalanches, four in Montana and two in Wyoming.

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Under a new law that requires legislators to weigh in on proposed ballot measures, an interim committee of lawmakers voted 8-2 Tuesday to oppose an initiative to add new environmental protections to stretches of the Gallatin and Madison rivers.

The Water Policy Interim Committee voted to oppose Initiative 191 following a 2  hour hearing. Three Democrats joined the committees five Republicans in opposition, while two Democrats voted to support the ballot measure. The vote will now appear on signature-gathering petitions, per a new state law.

I-191 would designate 35 miles of the Gallatin River, from the Yellowstone National Park boundary to the Spanish Creek confluence, and about 55 miles of the Madison River, from Hebgen Lake to Ennis Lake, as outstanding resource waters. The designation affords the states highest protection and would prohibit any new or increased pollution adversely affecting water quality. The permitting prohibition would also be extended to temporary changes causing an adverse change in water quality  only permanent changes are prohibited under current law.

Currently, waters within national parks and wilderness areas are under outstanding resource water designations. The public may petition the Montana Department of Environmental Quality to designate new waters, a process that includes criteria such as presence of endangered or threatened species, sources of municipal water supply or outstanding environmental or economic values. The process also includes completion of environmental analysis via an environmental impact statement. The Legislature holds final authority over whether to adopt the designation.

Proponents of the measure argued more stringent protections were necessary in response to pollution tied to booming growth in the area.

The secret of Montana is out, said John Meyer, executive director of Cottonwood Environmental Law Center, one of the groups backing I-191. People are coming here from all over the world to buy up a piece of heaven and as more and more people come here, our rivers are being threatened by pollution, and this is our last opportunity to protect these stretches of the Madison and Gallatin rivers for future generations.

Meyer pointed to the Legislatures changes to pollution permit standards for nutrients, namely nitrogen and phosphorus, saying it puts those rivers at risk.

Clinton Nagel with Gallatin Wildlife Association was also among supporters testifying, saying the aim of the initiative is simply to protect water resources for public health, wildlife and aesthetics.

But opponents included a diverse group of lawmakers, as well as those with agriculture, construction, mining, timber and recreation interests, with many arguing the measure went too far and would stifle economic growth and taxes for local and statewide needs.

Like many, I have serious concerns about water quality in the Gallatin River, said Sen. Pat Flowers, D-Belgrade, whos district includes Big Sky. But I dont think designating the Gallatin an outstanding resource water is the right solution.

The initiative would circumvent statute that includes consultation with local governments before a legislative designation, he said. Flowers also raised concerns that the measure could lead to surges in unpermitted nutrient discharges, namely from septic tanks which are not permitted as opposed to waste water treatment facilities. That could ultimately lead to more pollution in the rivers, he said.

The issue of unintended consequences was a prevalent argument of opponents.

Rep. Ken Walsh, R-Twin Bridges, serving in a district that includes Madison County, questioned whether I-191 would allow for additional fishing access sites to be built.

Clayton Elliott with Montana Trout Unlimited told the committee while his organization advocates for cold, clean and connected water, it had concerns the designations could prohibit permitting for some restoration work.

Krista Lee Evans, a water rights consultant with the Association of Gallatin Agricultural Irrigators, said ambiguity in the initiative language, particularly the temporary change, could pose problems for routine maintenance of infrastructure.

And several opponents contended that restricting growth would stifle efforts to build affordable workforce housing.

Responsible development is feasible but extreme reactive measures such as I-191 mean only the most wealthy will be able to live in the Gallatin going forward," said Abigail St. Lawrence, representing the Montana Building Industry Association.

In weighing her vote on the issue, Sen. Jill Cohenour, D-East Helena, cited concerns over the ability to do permitting, and that while she would like to feel like she is taking a position of protecting the resource, what Im seeing is this is not going to be protecting the resource, this initiative goes too far.

Sen. Shane Morigeau, D-Missoula, in explaining his opposition vote, said he believed a balance needed to be struck and that making the designation without environmental review in the form of an environmental impact statement was too big of a risk.

Sen. Jeff Welborn, R-Dillion, believed the measure would tie the hands of whoever is in the governors office.

I think the only thing we really know is what we dont know, he said.

Other lawmakers voting to oppose I-191 were Republicans Sen. Walt Sales, Reps. Rhonda Knudsen, Marty Malone and Bob Phalen; and Democrat Willis Curdy.

Democratic Reps. Tom France of Missoula and Robert Farris-Olsen of Helena voted against opposing the ballot measure but did not publicly state their reasoning.

Tuesdays meeting was the first required of a ballot initiative under House Bill 651. Sponsored by Rep. Marta Bertoglio, R-Clancy, the law inserts the Legislature into the initiative process, requiring an interim committee vote to be reflected on signature gathering petitions. The bill also requires a warning label be placed on signature petitions should the attorney general find the proposal could hurt business.

In January Attorney General Austin Knudsen found the initiative legally insufficient, ruling that it constituted a taking of private property without compensation to property owners. The determination was made under a provision of HB 651, requiring the attorney general to analyze the substantive legality of the proposed issue if approved by the voters.

Last month, the Montana Supreme Court overruled the attorney general, finding Knudsen lacked the authority to reject an initiative based on a government taking of property. The seven justices unanimously ruled that Knudsens legal finding misapprehends and misapplies the law that applies to constitutional takings and contradicts the statutory scheme creating the attorney generals review process.

The high courts ruling cleared the way for Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen to advance I-191 to the Legislature for its portion of the review process under HB 651.

Tom Kuglin is the deputy editor for the Lee Newspapers State Bureau. His coverage focuses on outdoors, recreation and natural resources.

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Richmond Restaurant Week returns April 18-24

This year, Richmond area restaurants will be offering three-course meals for $35.22 with $5.22 donated directly to Feed More. More than 25 local restaurants are participating. Visit rrweek.com to view a list and make reservations.

Its the first time in two years that Richmond Restaurant Week is back to its original dine-in for a fixed price with a built-in donation format. Now in its 21st year, the twice-a-year food celebration with a charitable focus was started by Aline Reitzer, owner of Acacia, which will be reopening in Libbie Mill later this year. Over the past 20 years Richmond Restaurant Week has raised over $920,026 to support local hunger relief efforts.

#WineWednesday deals around town

As restaurants have reopened , many had axed happy hours and nightly dining deals. But they're making a comeback. Heres a round-up of Wine Wednesday specials to add to your list.

Crab Tales Robious (11581 Robious Road): Half off bottles of wine. We suggest a white to go with your seafood boil.

Fat Dragon (1200 N. Arthur Ashe Blvd): Enjoy $20 bottles of select wine and $6 glasses all night.

Fall Line Kitchen & Bar (500 E. Broad St.): Get half off bottles of wine all night. Try a bottle of bubbly and a side of fries in the chic bar area.

Italian Night at Rowland Fine Dining (2132 W. Main St.): Every Wednesday Rowland offers two courses of Italian dishes for $25  the menu includes several choices for each course and changes weekly. Guests also get half off bottles of wine under $39.

Les Crepes Carytown (3325 W. Cary St): Enjoy half off bottles of wine all night  try a light red with your savory crepe.

The Pit and Peel Rooftop (1210 W. Main St.): Score half off bottles of wine with the purchase of food from 3 p.m. until close. We like a nice rose for patio sitting.

Roma Ristorante Italiano (8330 Staples Mill Road): Half off bottles of wine every Wednesday night. Of course, youll need an Italian red to pair with pizza and pasta.

Saison and Saison Market (23 W Marshall St.): Enjoy 25% off bottles of wine at Saison and 10% off bottles at Saison Market with the purchase of food from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m.

Sedona Taphouse Midlothian (15732 WC Main St., Westchester Commons and 5312 Wyndham Forest Drive): Get half off bottles of non-reserve wines and $20 off bottles of reserve wines until 9 p.m. The discount is available for dine-in or takeout.

Wood & Iron (11400 W. Huguenot Road #109B and 1405 Roseneath Road): Get half off the weeks featured burger and half off bottles of wine. Sounds like a red kind of evening.
Colonial Heights Police Chief Jeffrey Faries retired last week after 15 years at the helm, just under a month after he was placed on administrative leave by the city manager following allegations of inappropriate behavior while off duty.

At the request of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, City Manager Douglas Smith on Wednesday provided a copy of an email he received from Faries on March 30, which indicated he is going to retire from the City with his last full day in office on March 31.

Please allow this email as my notice to retire after serving the City of Colonial Heights since August 23rd, 1989, Faries wrote. Effective April 1st, 2022. Thank you.

Asked to make a statement about Faries departure, Smith said, Thank you to Chief Faries for his many years of service to the City of Colonial Heights.

Faries announced his retirement amid an ongoing Virginia State Police investigation requested by Colonial Heights officials into what state police described last month as allegations of inappropriate behavior and interactions in an off-duty capacity by Faries. Police declined to elaborate on the specific nature of the allegations.

Smith referred questions to state police when asked whether city officials have been briefed on the status of the investigation. Contacted Wednesday, a state police spokesperson was checking on where the investigation stood but didnt immediately have an answer.

Faries could not be reached for comment.

Asked whether a decision has been made about Faries replacement, Smith said the city administration will be posting the police chief position for interested parties to submit applications.

Early last month, Smith issued a statement that Faries, who has been with the department since 1989 and its chief for 15 years, was placed on leave March 2. At the time, Smith declined to say why Faries was placed on leave and whether he would be paid during the duration of his absence.

With this being a personnel-related matter, no additional information is being provided at this time, Smith wrote in the statement. He appointed Maj. Robert Ruxer acting chief of the department until further notice.
A Petersburg man was sentenced this week to 58 years in prison for fatally shooting his romantic rival in an ambush killing last year outside the Comfort Suites in Southpark Mall. The suspects former girlfriend, who was dating the victim, was also injured in the attack.

The victim, 31-year-old Gerard Richardson, was shot a total of four times  first while inside his car with his girlfriend near the front entrance of the Comfort Suites, and then again after he managed to drive about 200 yards until his injuries prevented him from going further.

Following a sentencing hearing Monday in Colonial Heights Circuit Court, Judge Lynn Brice sentenced Tyjuan Decourtland Epps, 37, to a total of 73 years in prison with 15 years suspended on convictions of first-degree murder, use of a firearm in the commission of a felony and maliciously shooting into an occupied vehicle.

The punishment is near the mid-range of state sentencing guidelines, which calls for an active term of between 44 years and 9 months at the low end to 74 years and 7 months at the highend. The midpoint is 59 years and 8 months.

A Colonial Heights jury found Epps guilty in February. His alleged accomplice, Brandon Isaiah Brown, 29, was tried by a separate jury during a three-day trial that ended Monday  a mistrial was declared after the jury deadlocked on a verdict.

Prosecutors said Richardson was killed in an act of retribution.

Epps had previously been in a relationship with the woman whom Richardson was dating. The woman had broken off her relationship with Epps, but roughly 14 hours before the murder, Epps reportedly assaulted his former girlfriend  the mother of his child.

Richardson came to her rescue and beat up Epps shortly after Epps assaulted the woman in Petersburg, said Colonial Heights prosecutors Noelle Nochisaki and Erin Barr.

Its really an unfortunate incident, Barr said. I think [the shooting] originally was not linked to domestic violence, but the more we dug into it, it was definitely related to domestic violence.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch is withholding the name of the woman, who is a key witness in the case, because authorities are concerned about her safety.

Nochisaki provided this summary of evidence:

Just before midnight on April 28, 2021, Richardson and his girlfriend arrived at the Comfort Suites South Park at 931 South Ave. to inquire about getting a room for the night. After learning the room they wanted wasnt available, they walked back to Richardsons car outside the front entrance.

After sitting inside the car momentarily to discuss what hotel they should try next, Richardson began to slowly drive away. Unbeknownst to them, Epps had been dropped off at the hotel, and as Richardson slowly pulled away, Epps jogged next to the car before firing six shots into the drivers side.

Wounded, Richardson continued to drive as far as he could before stopping about 200 yards down the road. After stopping, a car drove alongside the couple and a man inside fired four more shots into Richardsons car. Authorities allege the second shooter was Brown.

Following those shots, the woman, while in the passengers seat, tried to drive the car from the scene and got as far as the Holiday Inn Petersburg-North at 401 E. Rosyln Road. Police were called to that location and investigators soon determined that two shootings had occurred at separate locations.

Barr said the state medical examiners office determined Richardson had been shot four times. Two slugs were recovered from Richardsons torso and it was determined they had been fired from two different guns.

The girlfriend sustained cuts to her legs, either from the grazing of bullets or shattered window glass.

In Petersburg, Epps faces charges of assaulting his former girlfriend, entering her house to commit assault and choking her with injury . His trial on those charges is set for Aug. 5.

A second trial date for Brown, the co-defendant, has been set for Aug. 8 and 9.
Richmond police detectives, with assistance from the U.S. Marshals Service Regional Fugitive Task Force, arrested a suspect in the December homicide of Raul Morales on Clarkson Road.

Shaliyah Branch-Dixon, 24, of Richmond, was arrested Tuesday without incident and is charged with murder.

On Dec. 6, officers responded to the 1400 block of Clarkson Road in South Richmond for a report of a person down. Officers arrived and located Morales, down and unresponsive with injuries to his head. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
A collective of congregations called on Richmond and Chesterfield County officials Tuesday to allocate funding for a nonprofit program focused on repairing and replacing mobile homes in the area.

At the behest of Richmonders Involved to Strengthen Our Communities, a multifaith community advocacy group, Councilwoman Stephanie Lynch pledged to vote in favor of giving the Richmond-based nonprofit Project: HOMES $300,000 to pilot a new mobile home initiative.

Together we can fix this, Lynch said. Its going to take a lot to fix hundreds of years of systemic oppression, but we can do it.

The organization said it is advocating for officials to support the program as part of an effort to increase the availability of affordable housing in fair or better condition.

Chesterfield Supervisor Jim Holland declined to support the county giving the nonprofit $150,000 for the program, even though the countys budget does include funding for the nonprofit, according to RISC organizers.

At this point, we are poised to approve the budget given what we know at this point, he said. Im not going to make that commitment right now, because I usually dont make them in advance before the final review of our budget.

Councilwoman Reva Trammell did not appear at the event as planned because of a family emergency, but RISC organizers said she agreed to push for adding $300,000 in the citys next annual budget for the program.

RISC is made up of 22 congregations around the region. Since 2002, the group has backed initiatives to improve childhood literacy for students in Richmond Public Schools and reduce gun violence, among others.

The group is an affiliate of the Direct Action and Research Training Center, a national network of congregation-based organizations that identify local issues, research solutions and lobby government leaders in a public manner to push for action.

RISC estimated that 2,000 of its members from various congregations in the Richmond area attended the groups annual Nehemiah Action Assembly in person or virtually.

Throughout the evening, the crowd of approximately 1,200 in the Greater Richmond Convention Center cried justice demands risk. The group also highlighted the plight of four Spanish-speaking area residents who described the struggle of living in ramshackle trailers.

The group also renewed its calls for the city to adopt the gun violence prevention program Group Violence Intervention.

While Mayor Levar Stoney and other officials recently announced that the city will invest $1.5 million in after-school programs, a gun-buyback program and other initiatives to address the rise in fatal shootings in recent years, Stoney has resisted demands that he implement that program.

Stoney did not appear at Tuesdays assembly. The organization said he has not met with their leadership since his re-election in November 2020.

After a demonstration RISC held at City Hall in February, Stoney in a statement accused the group of bullying and intimidating public officials and using gun-violence victims as pawns. A spokesman for the mayor also criticized the GVI program at the time, calling it a law enforcement-heavy approach.

RISC members pushed back against the mayor and his administrations assertions in Tuesdays assembly.

The group called on members to call Stoneys office to demand action, and requested that he partner with the National Network for Safe Communities, the organization behind the Group Violence Intervention program, to perform an analysis of the citys gun-violence problem.

Addressing the audience Tuesday evening, Holly Gilliam Shaw, a member of Union Branch Baptist Church, said that her husband, Orlanda Shaw Sr., was recently murdered, almost 10 years after his son was murdered.

She said authorities suspect that the perpetrators mistook her husband for someone else.

Mayor Stoney, I am no pawn. This is my story, Shaw said. This is the pain my children and I will live with for the rest of our lives. Ill forever have a hole in my heart because of your unwillingness to act.
The United States Black museums are up in arms that James Madisons Montpelier has denied equal power in governing the Virginia historic site to descendants of the people enslaved by the Madison family.

The Association of African American Museums says it is troubled and disappointed by the Montpelier Foundations rescinding its public commitment to grant an equal share of authority for the Orange County historic site to descendants of Black people enslaved on the the plantation of the nations fourth president.

The foundation board made that promise in June 2021, earning national acclaim for its leadership on this frought topic, as one of the nations most important historic sites.

But last month, the board voted to undo that vow, refusing to grant an equal number of seats to the Montpelier Descendants Committee, the nonprofit group elected by kin of the Madisons slaves to represent them.

Through their most recent action, Montpeliers board has thrown decades of progress back into an era rooted in suppressing the full truth of the site, AAAM said in a statement Monday.

AAAM takes this action from Montpeliers board very seriously, the association said. Such actions have a direct and deleterious effect on our community and membership. To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ... we are asking Montpelier to be true to what they put on paper.

Founded in 1976, AAAM includes more than 800 museums, other institutions, museum professionals and other individuals interested in African American art, culture and history globally.

AAAM Executive Director Vedet Coleman-Robinson said the association plans to investigate Montpeliers action as decades of bridge-building and ethical interpretation work stand to be obliterated through this decision.

The site has been the poster child in our field for how plantation homes should work with descendant communities, and several historic sites have implemented these policies into their own interpretation, Coleman-Robinson told the Culpeper Star-Exponent late Tuesday. Stripping the Montpelier Descendant Committee of their power creates a feeling of distrust that resonates not just throughout the descendant community, but through the field writ-large.

Weve all made incredible strides to tell a more inclusive story of American history, and it is imperative for us to lock arms to make certain that the voices of descendant communities throughout the country are not buried again, she added. We can start this important work through continuing what we started with the Montpelier Foundation Board, the Montpelier Descendants Committee, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Our work, and their work, will not be in vain.

Headquartered in Washington, D.C., AAAM said it stands with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which owns Montpeliers 2,650 acres, in supporting the descendant community.

Last month, before the foundation board acted, Trust CEO Paul Edmonson urged board Chairman Eugene Hickok in the strongest possible terms not to change the nonprofits bylaws.

We believe this change would undermine decades of important work that led to the formation of the committee in the first place, and in turn would set back Montpeliers efforts to continue the necessary work of uplifting descendants voices, and repairing the relationship between the broader African American community and Montpelier, the former site of generations of enslavement, Edmondson wrote Hickok.

Now, AAAMs directors, staff and members stand alongside the many former and current staffers of Montpelier who helped build bridges and cultivate decades worth of trust with several members of the descendant communities, the association said. We value their work.

Earlier, AAAM backed the descendants beginning their research and interpretation of Montpelier. Today, it said it continues to support their efforts of shared stewardship of the site, and encourages Montpeliers innovative staff and Descendant Committee to persevere forward.

More than 6,000 people have signed a petition opposing the foundation boards action. And a majority of the Madison estates full-time staff members have rebuked their employer for breaking its commitment to the Montpelier Descendant Committee.

The Black museums group strongly encouraged the foundations board, the Montpelier descendant community and the National Trust for Historic Preservations board to meet and discuss strategic ways to advance on the issue.

Sampling its membership, AAAM quoted various professionals and institutions on the controversy.

The Board of Montpeliers recent decision is completely antithetical to the promise of progress and reconciliation, one member wrote.

We are disappointed in the Montpelier Foundations decision to disenfranchise the Montpelier Descendants Committee by rescinding their commitment to have shared authority with the descendants of the enslaved. This decision has exemplified the idiom to take one step forward, then two steps backward, said one historic site that is an AAAM institutional member.

In Nashville, Tenn., another site said it stands with the descendant community as we all hope to work towards the ethical, inclusive and empathic interpretation of Southern history.

Until now, Montpelier has been a light for the ways in which similar institutions could begin and cultivate the connection between former plantations and the descendants of those formerly enslaved there, the staff of Belle Meade Historic Site and Winery wrote ... (I)t is a shame to see the regression of such groundbreaking work.

Peoples relationship to place is complicated by shared and divergent perspectives, an AAAM lifetime member acknowleged.

The African American experience is one of triumph and trauma, and descendant voices telling that history is essential, that person said. To marginalize, sensor, or sanitize that expression furthers the harms of the past. In looking back at history, as a nation, it is clear there is always a moment to do things differently. Today is that moment when sites need to come together and empower descendant communities to tell their own stories.

Another AAAM historic site noted that The Rubric which Montpelier and the National Trust created for engaging with slavery-site descendants built upon decades of work to engage with Black communities by sites such as Philadelphias African Meeting House, Manhattans African Burial Ground and Richmonds Shockoe Bottom.

These histories were recovered at the urging of advisory groups and through intentional work with direct descendants as well as the multitudes of African Americans who felt connected, the member site wrote. To distance and silence those voices again is a loss to all people; without the perspective of descendants, the full story would remain hidden. A collective effort representative of the diversity of America has to be the goal.

AAAM leaders participated in the 2018 workshop at Montpelier that developed The Rubric.

In reality, descendant engagement is about all of us, descendants of freedom seekers, enslaved people, free Blacks, slaveholders, abolitionists, change-makers, Native Americans, those who never left, those who returned, 20th Century immigrants, recent immigrants; the bottom line is descendant engagement is a reflection of us all, wrote another historic site, which is an AAAM institutional member. We must tell the unvarnished truth, as stated by historian John Hope Franklin. Direct descendants and those who are willing to talk about the difficult history gives us all a chance to heal from the past. Silencing those voices is a deliberate decision to distort the truth.
Afghan security force members stand guard outside Pul-e Khishti Mosque where a hand grenade explosion took place in Kabul, Afghanistan, April 6, 2022. At least six people were wounded in a hand grenade explosion inside a big mosque in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan, on Wednesday, sources said. (Photo by Saifurahman Safi/Xinhua)

KABUL, April 6 (Xinhua) -- At least six people were wounded in a hand grenade explosion inside a big mosque in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan, on Wednesday, sources said.

"A man hurled a hand grenade inside Pul-e Khishti Mosque at mid-day. As a result, six people were wounded," the Afghan Ministry of Interior wrote on Twitter.

The wounded were shifted to hospitals and a suspected man has been arrested, according to the ministry.

The official report spelled no further details.

"The blast occurred shortly after people offered praying at mid-day. The Taliban security forces have cordoned off the area for precautionary measures," eyewitness Najib Ullah told Xinhua.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack yet. 

Afghan security force members stand guard outside Pul-e Khishti Mosque where a hand grenade explosion took place in Kabul, Afghanistan, April 6, 2022. At least six people were wounded in a hand grenade explosion inside a big mosque in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan, on Wednesday, sources said. (Photo by Saifurahman Safi/Xinhua)

Photo taken on April 6, 2022 shows the Pul-e Khishti Mosque where a hand grenade explosion took place in Kabul, Afghanistan. At least six people were wounded in a hand grenade explosion inside a big mosque in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan, on Wednesday, sources said. (Photo by Saifurahman Safi/Xinhua)
Free speech  at a cost

Wahoo-ping and hollering at UVA over Pence visit

BY JEFF E. SCHAPIRO

Richmond Times-Dispatch

In 1957, as Virginia and the rest of the white South boiled with rage over Black mobilization for civil rights, the famed novelist William Faulkner settled in at the University of Virginia as its first writer-in-residence. Faulkner was delighted to be there, partaking in such diversions as riding to the hounds in the surrounding countryside.

Never mind that Charlottesville, where his daughter and granddaughter lived, was becoming a racial battleground, with some of its public schools shuttered by the state the following year for five months in defiance of court-ordered desegregation.

Faulkner was aware of the cataclysmic events that were reshaping the Old Confederacy, whose troubled legacy had infused his writing. But he was also taken by the perceived self-importance of his hosts.

I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs, and I like snobs, Faulkner told an all-white audience at the university during a talk in which he said Black Americans, emboldened by legal and legislative advances, had to learn responsibility for freedom  a paternalistic notion that seemed moderate to some Southerners, a betrayal of white supremacy by others.

A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time to meddle with you. A snob is someone who is so complete in himself and so satisfied with what he has that he needs nothing from anybody.

In 2022, Faulkners critique of Virginians  it was an effective lampoon because there was a grain of truth to it  might apply to the overwrought controversy at the university over an appearance there next Tuesday by former Vice President Mike Pence. He is scheduled to speak as a guest of the schools chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative organization inspired by William F. Buckley thats had an off-and-on presence at UVA since the 1960s.

In a fresh kerfuffle over free speech at UVA, The Cavalier Daily student newspaper  through its editorial page  is arguing that the university should be closed to Pence because he is hostile to immigrants, gay and trans people.

Plus, a March 17 editorial said, there is the company Pence keeps: He was No. 2 to President Donald Trump, who said the white supremacists who carried out a deadly siege of Charlottesville over two days in August 2017 were very fine people. Trump applied that description as well to the liberal counter-protesters who battled the racist invaders.

Pences presence on Grounds  thats UVA shorthand for the campus  signifies a tolerance of rhetoric that has already harmed our community, the editorial said.

The Cavalier Daily  whose editor-in-chief is Eva Surovell, a third-year French and English major and daughter of Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, no shrinking violet he  has been attacked for its stance by the gold standard of editorial liberalism: The Washington Post.

It opined that Pence  his offensive stance on social and cultural issues, notwithstanding  is entitled to speak at UVA if only because of his defiance of Trump in refusing to overturn the 2020 presidential election, even as Trump supporters angrily swarmed through the U.S. Capitol, some vowing to hang him.

Seventeen members of the university faculty, including political handicapper Larry Sabato, no fan of Trump, wrote to The Cavalier Daily that its position on Pence was misguided and contrary to the tradition of free speech to which the universitys founder, Thomas Jefferson, was strongly committed, despite occasionally being on the receiving end of early Americas sharply partisan press.

The professors lamented that the newspapers editors should enjoy the freedom to say what they want but others with whom they disagree should not. They continued, The First Amendment protects not just those whose views the editors deem harmless. ... And all of us benefit from being exposed to perspectives that may comprehend some aspect of the truth better than we do.

This is the latest free-speech brush fire to break out at UVA, where they have been more frequent in recent years and have attracted national attention, largely because of backlash to Trump and the murder of George Floyd while in police custody.

The left blames this on the right. The right blames this on the left. That this is unfolding in a college town that, by record and reputation, is reflexively liberal means that sometimes diversity of opinion is the exception rather than the rule. And it frees conservatives to label liberals as liberals do conservatives: intolerant, arrogant, out of touch.

In 2020, a student, a Muslim woman of color, who lived on The Lawn  the premier address for premier students  said she was harassed for posting on her door a sign, that used a four-letter expletive that started with an f and ended with k, to protest what she considered the papering over of the universitys history. That, among other things, Jefferson was a slave owner; that the school was built by enslaved labor on land seized from Native Americans.

The universitys president, James Ryan, defended the profane sign as free speech, saying it and others evoke a clash of values. The reaction to Ryans statement, particularly on the right, was bitter and dismissive.

In an recent op-ed in The New York Times, a fourth-year student  a self-described liberal and abortion-rights advocate  wrote that she felt ostracized at UVA; that she was insufficiently woke. Because of strict ideological conformity, she said, she and other students, regardless of political or philosophical orientation, hold back their views. I sometimes feel afraid to fully speak my mind, she said.

And there was the fuss in 2018 over the appointment of Pences future chief of staff, Marc Short, as a fellow of the UVA Miller Center, the focus of which is presidential scholarship. Short came to the center from the Trump White House, where he was legislative affairs director. Two professors resigned in protest; so did one of the centers directors. More than 4,000 people signed a petition opposing Shorts selection.

Short quit after six months to work for Pence. Short  in league with Pences private lawyer, Richard Cullen, now counsel to Gov. Glenn Youngkin  was instrumental in supplying Pence the legal and constitutional arguments for rejecting Trumps claims that the vice president could block congressional certification of Joe Bidens election as president. Short has also testified before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection  a subject on which Pence could elucidate next week.

And on which his critics might learn something  if they arent snobs about it.

Contact Jeff E. Schapiro at (804) 649-6814 or jschapiro@timesdispatch.com. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter, @RTDSchapiro. Listen to his analysis 7:45 a.m. and 5:45 p.m. Friday on Radio IQ, 89.7 FM in Richmond and 89.1 FM in Roanoke, and in Norfolk on WHRV, 89.5 FM.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced four new members of the Virginia Parole Board on Wednesday, picks he needed to make after state Senate Democrats rejected his previous choices during a battle over personnel appointments.

The new board members include the widow of a Virginia State Police trooper killed at a Richmond bus terminal in 2016, as well as a former Henrico commonwealths attorney.

Youngkin said in a statement that his choices would help reform the parole board. The board faced scandal under the previous administration of Ralph Northam after a state watchdog agency found violations of law and policy in the process the board used to release people from prison in some cases, and officials from the governors office reprimanded the watchdog agency.

This group of individuals will restore common sense, reform the Parole Board, and stand up for victims rights.

The new board members are:

Samuel L. Boone Jr., a master trooper and recruiter with Virginia State Police and member of the Chesapeake School Board.

Steven Buck, a former assistant prosecutor in Richmond, Henrico and Albemarle.

Michelle Dermyer, an advocate for survivors of crime whose husband, the late Trooper Chad Dermyer, was fatally shot on duty in 2016 at the Greyhound bus station in Richmond.

Toby Vick, a former partner at the firm McGuireWoods LLP, the commonwealths attorney in Henrico for seven years and previously an assistant U.S. attorney in Richmond, Miami and Houston.

The four will join the boards chair, Chadwick Dotson, a retired judge and former Wise County commonwealths attorney.

As Republicans and Democrats engaged in a partisan fight over personnel appointments this year, Democrats wouldnt confirm four of Youngkins earlier choices for the board.

They were Tracy Banks, a longtime lawyer and law professor from Charlottesville; Cheryl Nici-OConnell of Chesterfield County, a former Richmond police officer injured in a shooting in 1984; Montgomery County Sheriff Charles Partin; and Carmen Williams of Chesterfield.

The move by Democrats followed House Republicans rejection of 11 appointees of Democratic former Gov. Ralph Northam.

Virginia has abolished parole, but the boards duties include making decisions on parole for people in prison who were convicted prior to Jan. 1, 1995.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who met with Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on Monday evening, formally announced his support Tuesday for her confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Given the gravity of a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, my practice is to withhold any decision on a nominee  regardless of my previous positions on that nominee for other judgeships  until I carefully review their qualifications, observe their appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and personally meet with them, Kaine said in a statement.

I have done so and now offer my unqualified support for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to be a Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Jackson is likely to win Senate confirmation by the end of the week and become the first Black woman on the high court. Three Republicans have announced that they will vote for Jackson  Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah. They are likely to join the Senates 50 Democrats in backing the judge.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., formally announced his support of Jackson after meeting with the judge earlier Monday afternoon.

Kaine and Warner  like Jackson  are graduates of Harvard Universitys law school.

Kaine, a former civil rights lawyer, cited Jacksons qualifications, including what he termed her strong track record as a federal public defender, distinguished service as a federal trial and appellate judge, and multiple attestations to her character and fairness, and that her confirmation would make history.

He said he is particularly drawn to two aspects of Jacksons experience  that she would be the first former public defender on the Supreme Court and that she would join Justice Sonia Sotomayor as the second trial judge on the current court.
Well take the good news where we can get it in 2022.

Good news item number one: As of the end of March, the private fundraiser for placing a statue of Henrietta Lacks in Roanokes recently christened Henrietta Lacks Plaza is more than halfway to its goal in a mere two and a half months.

A Black woman born in Roanoke, Lacks only lived to be 31. Married, living in Baltimore, a mother to five children, Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951. The doctors who treated her at The John Hopkins Hospital were unable to save her, and she was buried in an unmarked grave.

However, in a twist stranger than fiction, a sample of her cancer cells, collected without her knowledge, proved able to continue living and replicating outside of her body. Those cells, known as HeLa cells, played a central role in decades of major medical breakthroughs, including the founding of the biotechnology sector.

Yet Lacks descendants did not benefit from any of the scientific advancements or industry profits that her cells enabled. Only after Lacks story became the subject of a 2010 bestselling book did the medical profession engage in serious self-reflection.

Lacks posthumous influence on science gained another dimension as medical institutions reconsidered and rewrote policies governing bioethics and the consent of patients.

Lacks story deserves to be told and retold and her legacy deserves to be celebrated.

Led by Vice Mayor Trish White-Boyd, the Lacks fundraiser aims to accumulate $160,000. This would pay for a statue memorializing Lacks to stand in a space that for 64 years honored the tainted legacy of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The fund also will pay for a multimedia presentation, accessible by residents of and visitors to the Star City, about places that are significant to the history of Roanokes Black community.

The campaign has so far raised $89,000, which is great news, though theres still a lot to go.

Those who wish to donate should make out checks to the Harrison Museum of African American Culture, the fundraisers fiscal agent, with the phrase Henrietta Lacks on the memo line. Mail contributions to The Harrison Museum, P.O. Box 21054, Roanoke, VA 24018.

Good news item number two: On April 1, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed a bill that will rename the northernmost 10 miles of U.S. 220 in Botetourt County as the Norvel LaFallette Ray Lee Memorial Highway.

That bill, introduced by Del. Terry Austin, R-Botetourt, will at last bring some (literal) concrete recognition to a Botetourt County natives astonishing life story, full of accomplishments that have been too long overlooked in Virginia.

Raised in Eagle Rock, Norvel Lee was a champion boxer who in 1952 became the first Black Virginian to win an Olympic gold medal, competing in the light-heavyweight division.

He also was the second American, and the first Black American, to win the Val Barker Trophy, bestowed every four years on the best boxer in the Olympic Games, regardless of category.

Another triumph arguably just as important, or even more so, took place three years earlier, and drew even less attention from the press.

A U.S. Air Force veteran and a Howard University graduate, Lee was arrested in Alleghany County on Sept. 14, 1948, for refusing to give up his seat in the white section of a train car headed to Covington from Clifton Forge  intended as the first leg of a trip to Washington, D.C.

Though a lower court convicted Lee and fined him, he took his fight to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which overturned his conviction, ruling that Virginias segregation laws did not apply to interstate travelers.

According to Lees biographer, Daleville author Kenneth Conklin, Lees Olympic accomplishments were not celebrated in segregated Virginia, and his consequential civil rights battle did not become more widely known until after his death in 1992.

His is another story that deserves telling, retelling, and celebration.

With these developments, the Roanoke Valley is trending in the right direction.
Jalal Awan is an assistant policy researcher at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and an energy and climate policy consultant at The Utility Reform Network (TURN). Aaron-Clark Ginsberg is a social scientist at RAND and a professor of policy analysis at Pardee RAND Graduate School who is researching how to govern crises, including oil and gas disasters.
Have you ever felt stressed or anxious while staring at your maths homework? Did the idea of your maths teacher asking you a question in class fill you with dread?

If so, you may have experienced 'maths anxiety'.

Numbers are all around us  from counting money to reading the time  so maths is a crucial skill to learn at school.

However, many children and adults experience feelings of stress and anxiety when faced with situations relating to maths.

In the latest episode of the Cuppa with a Scientist podcast, Dr Kinga Morsanyi, Senior Lecturer in Mathematical Cognition, discusses the issue and highlights that it's important that those with maths anxiety understand it doesn't mean they're bad at maths.

"People who are anxious about maths, might be actually quite good at it. It's not the same thing to be bad at maths and to be anxious about it", she said.

"But some people have really low confidence in their maths ability, and they think 'oh I'm not a maths person, I'm not so good with numbers', and that's not always true."

Dr Morsanyi's research looks at the effects of maths anxiety when separated from maths knowledge.

She explained: "If you take two people with exactly the same level of maths knowledge but one of them is confident and the other one is anxious then you often find that the person who's anxious will end up with worse results.

"For example, this may lead to worse exam marks, worse outcomes, they may not apply for some jobs because they don't feel confident enough to, and so on.

"So, in a lot of cases, although they have exactly the same ability and same knowledge of the procedures, one person will be disadvantaged in their life choices and their outcomes."

Dr Morsanyi says there is a need for early assessment and intervention to tackle maths anxiety and positive attitudes towards mathematics should start to be developed in the first years of school, or even earlier.

She has shared the following tips to help children and young people overcome mathematics anxiety:

Parents and teachers can transmit negative attitudes and anxiety towards maths so approaches that can increase parents' confidence in their ability to help their children are important. Fun maths games that can be played at home (including traditional board games with dice) are a good start.

Computer programmes and apps can also be good for practicing maths and offer a motivating, attractive, and non-judgmental environment for practising these essential skills.

Drawing students' attention to previous instances where they successfully tackled maths challenges can boost self-confidence and lead to more positive attitudes and less anxiety.

Practising maths with a tutor can also reduce anxiety.

Dr Morsanyi has also shared her tips and the findings of a study she led that looked at maths anxiety in 200 six-year-old schoolchildren in the UK and Italy in the Conversation.

Of what she ultimately hopes to achieve with her maths anxiety-related research, Dr Morsanyi said: "Maths anxiety is a condition that affects many people (including both children and adults) and is more common amongst women and people from lower income backgrounds.

"Because maths anxiety can prevent high ability people to perform at their best in high-stakes situations, it can be a real barrier to some people to enter maths-intensive fields.

"In addition to loss of talent in some professions, another consequence of maths anxiety is that people may be less confident about making some important decisions where numerical information is involved in their everyday life.

"For example, some of our studies showed that maths anxious people are less likely to make advantageous choices about medical treatments when presented with statistical information. They are also less confident in their decisions, which could result in not adhering to effective treatments.

"Given these important consequences of maths anxiety, I am hoping to uncover ways of preventing the development of maths anxiety, reducing maths anxiety in both children and adults, and helping maths anxious people to achieve their full potential."

To watch Dr Morsanyi's full Cuppa with a Scientist podcast episode on YouTube, click here: youtu.be/YqwFsDWaxJk

Or if you prefer to listen to your podcasts, you can do so here: www.buzzsprout.com/1652563/103  gnitive-psychologist

Dr Morsanyi is part of the new Centre for Early Mathematics Learning, which has received over 8m in research funding from the Economic and Social Research Council. More information on the Centre and its goals can be found in a press release here.

'Cuppa with a Scientist' is a podcast series launched by the Loughborough University PR team that aims to inspire the next generation of scientists and dispel the myth that all scientists wear white lab coats. Read more about it here.

Provided by Loughborough University
Indiana University researchers are working with communities in Indiana and North Carolina to help test for lead in household dust, soil and water. The goal is to develop a tool that can predict which residential households are at risk of lead exposure and provide actionable insights to lower that risk.

Even low levels of lead exposure can cause intellectual disabilities and behavioral disorders in children, as well as cardiovascular issues in adults.

In the United States, state and local agencies typically rely on the detection of lead in children's blood tests or the age of a home to determine which households need interventions to address environmental lead hazards.

"The current approach uses children as lead sensors; households typically are only tested after elevated levels of lead are found in a child's blood during a visit to their pediatrician," said Jacqueline MacDonald Gibson, professor and chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the IU School of Public Health-Bloomington. "Lead causes irreversible health effects, so there is no safe level of lead exposure for children or adults. Our vision is to create a 21st-century approach that prevents lead exposure before it ever happens by predicting houses where lead is most likely to be a problem."

The study is led by MacDonald Gibson and co-principal investigators Emmanuel Obeng-Gyasi of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and Jennifer Hoponick Redmon and James Harrington of nonprofit research institute RTI International.

Funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the study will use machine-learning techniques and public data on residential lead exposure risks to create a website and mapping tool to predict lead exposure for Indiana and North Carolina households.

The researchers are asking communities in each state to help them test and improve their predictive model by signing up to collect and ship water, dust, and soil samples for laboratory analysis.

Selected residents in Allen, Delaware, Marion, St. Joseph and Vanderburgh counties in Indiana and Guilford County in North Carolina will receive postcards inviting them to participate in the study. Participants will receive test kits and simple instructions in the mail to collect and ship their samples. Each participant will receive personalized and confidential results, along with actionable recommendations on how to decrease lead exposure, if needed.

"We look forward to the valuable tools that will develop from this study because they will help us help more families to reduce their lead exposure risk. We encourage the communities to take advantage of this great resource and opportunity to reduce lead hazards in their homes," says Samantha Spergel, director of real estate strategic initiatives and engagement, Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority.

"Whether you are pregnant or have young children at home, lead exposure is a serious concern. This study will help families in our state understand the level of lead risk in their home and get rid of it before exposure occurs. And that's a win for all North Carolina kids," says Vikki Crouse, policy analyst and project director at NC Child.

"There are various potential environmental hazards in every home but the thing with lead is this: We have lots of data confirming it is a serious hazard and years of practice at reducing the hazards. What is often lacking in communities are more methods of citizen education, low-cost-private investigation as well as financial support to reduce any identified hazards. I am excited to be allowed to provide my view from the low-income housing community for this project as it seeks to look at all three elements: education, investigation and hazard reduction in the participating communities," says Donna Coleman, senior housing rehabilitation officer, NC Housing Finance Agency.

Provided by Indiana University
European companies show confidence in Chinese market with continued investment

Xinhua) 08:09, April 06, 2022

* On March 31, BMW launched its all-new X5 with a China-exclusive wheelbase design, marking the first time that the model was made in China.

* China remained one of the top investment destinations for foreign companies, especially German firms. Nearly 60 percent of German companies in China reported improved business operations last year and 71 percent plan further investment in the country.

* The trade volume between China and the European Union turned the tide and reached a record high of more than 800 billion U.S. dollars in 2021, up 27.5 percent year on year.

SHENYANG, April 5 (Xinhua) -- At the Universal Beijing Resort, what attracted the attention of many tourists were not only the signature Transformers and Jurassic World themed zones, but also a special BMW roadshow therein, which showcased a new X5 vehicle, one of the German carmaker's most popular models.

According to the company, the X5 has been among its best-selling models worldwide since its debut in 1999. But what made the launch of the new X5 model especially significant was its new position as "the flagship of BMW's locally produced lineup."

On March 31, the company launched its all-new X5 with a China-exclusive wheelbase design, marking the first time that the model was made in China.

"The new car again reaffirms our targeting the Chinese market as top priority," said Johann Wieland, president and CEO of BMW Brilliance Automotive Ltd. (BBA), a joint venture between BMW and Chinese carmaker Brilliance China Automotive Holdings Ltd.

Photo taken on Dec. 21, 2021 shows a view of the new Tiexi Plant of BMW Brilliance Automotive (BBA) in Shenyang, northeast China's Liaoning Province. (Xinhua)

At a time when many Chinese cities are fighting against COVID-19 resurgences, BMW's launch of the new model shows its strong confidence in China's anti-pandemic measures and the country's stable and sustained economic development.

Many other European enterprises have also fixed their eyes on the booming Chinese market, and they foresee long-term success regarding China's promising economic prospects and sound business environment.

INVESTMENT ENTHUSIASM

On Feb. 11, the German auto giant strengthened its partnership in China by extending the joint-venture contract of BBA until 2040, and increased its shares from 50 percent to 75 percent by investing some 27.9 billion yuan (about 4.4 billion U.S. dollars).

"We continue to expand our long and successful commitment to China," said Oliver Zipse, chairman of the board of management of BMW AG. "Our continued success in the world's largest automotive market can only go hand in hand with the growth and further development of our BBA joint venture."

Since 2010, the group has poured 73 billion yuan into its production base in Shenyang, northeast China's Liaoning Province, and built it into its largest production base worldwide with an estimated annual output of more than 650,000 units. In 2022, the group will witness three new or upgraded plants open in Shenyang and Zhangjiagang, east China's Jiangsu Province.

Photo taken on May 7, 2019 shows vehicles at the Tiexi Plant of BMW Brilliance Automotive (BBA) in Shenyang, northeast China's Liaoning Province. (Xinhua/Yang Qing)

In February, another German automaker Audi cooperated with China's leading automaker First Automotive Works, and officially launched a project to produce pure electric vehicles in Changchun, capital of northeast China's Jilin Province.

Bearing a total investment of more than 30 billion yuan, the project will be aimed at economic and trade cooperation between China and Europe, as well as northeast China's revitalization.

This joint project was expected to be put into operation around the end of 2024 with an annual production capacity of 150,000 vehicles, the automakers noted.

Swiss compressor manufacturer Burckhardt Compression AG is also betting on China's super-large market. In 2021, the company acquired the remaining 40 percent of the shares of Shenyang Yuanda Compressor, based in Shenyang City, and made it a wholly owned subsidiary.

The Swiss company told Xinhua that the sales revenue of Shenyang Yuanda Compressor has maintained double-digit growth in recent years, having expanded its factory area from 89,000 square meters to 164,000 square meters to increase production capacity, which is currently occupied through to October.

According to the latest data from the Ministry of Commerce, foreign direct investment into the Chinese mainland, in actual use, expanded 37.9 percent year on year to 243.7 billion yuan in the first two months of this year.

An employee works at the Tiexi Plant of BMW Brilliance Automotive (BBA) in Shenyang, capital of northeast China's Liaoning Province, Feb. 17, 2020. (Xinhua/Pan Yulong)

China remained one of the top investment destinations for foreign companies, especially German firms. A report released by the German Chamber of Commerce in China and KPMG showed that nearly 60 percent of German companies in China reported improved business operations last year and 71 percent plan further investment in the country.

China's determination and confidence in high-level opening-up and continuous effort to improve the business environment for multinational enterprises has made the Chinese market more attractive, which brought win-win outcomes both for Chinese and multinational companies, noted Jochen Goller, president and CEO of BMW China.

INCREASING CHINA-EU COOPERATION

The trade volume between China and the European Union turned the tide and reached a record high of more than 800 billion U.S. dollars in 2021, up 27.5 percent year on year.

During the same period, as a pillar for trade and economic cooperation across the Eurasian continent, the China-Europe freight train service handled a record 15,000 trips, and transported 1.46 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) of goods, up 22 percent and 29 percent respectively over the previous year.

A China-Europe freight train bound for Duisburg of Germany prepares for departure at Tuanjiecun Station in southwest China's Chongqing, Jan. 1, 2021. (Xinhua/Tang Yi)

China State Railway Group Co., Ltd. said the service now reaches 180 cities in 23 European countries with 78 routes planned, transporting more than 50,000 types of goods including IT products, automobiles and parts, chemicals, and mechanical and electronic products.

In addition, new technologies and the two sides' common pursuit of green development have become another development booster between China and the EU.

"We see China as a pacesetter in topics like electrification or digitalization. What moves China today will move the world tomorrow," said Zipse, adding that BMW's four innovation and digitalization bases in China are its largest R&D bases outside Germany.

A staff member prepares to unload a container from a truck at a logistic station of Shenyang East Railway Station in Shenyang, northeast China's Liaoning Province, March 5, 2020. (Xinhua/Pan Yulong)

For Audi, the new base in Changchun will be its first for pure electric car models in China, which will produce its first three electric car models including one SUV and one sedan after completion. The base is expected to realize carbon dioxide neutralization during car manufacturing and have its own battery assembly workshop.

"China is already the world's leader of electro-mobility, a key driving force of digitalization, and now is decisively pursuing high-quality growth and a circular economy. It is a perfect place and a great partner for us to drive transformation, going electric, digital and circular," said Nicolas Peter, member of the board of management of BMW AG.

China's commitment to high-quality and institutional opening-up also offers promising prospects for foreign investors. This year's government work report published in March listed pursuing higher-standard opening up and promoting stable growth of foreign trade and investment as the government's major tasks for 2022.

On Jan. 1, a shortened negative list for foreign investment came into force with off-limit items cut to 31 from 33 a year ago, which included the removal of the foreign capital cap in China's auto industry. This has enabled more European enterprises like BMW to expand their investment in China.

Aerial photo taken on Dec. 28, 2021 shows the new Tiexi Plant of BMW Brilliance Automotive (BBA) under construction in Shenyang, northeast China's Liaoning Province. (Xinhua/Yang Qing)

These future prospects are further brightened by China's policy decisions, according to Zipse. "Looking ahead, we are encouraged by China's pledge to further open its market, as well as its efforts to promote green development and innovation."

From his perspective, collaboration and mutual trust are key to creating growth and prosperity.

"The year 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the establishment of Sino-German diplomatic relations. And for the sixth year in a row, China was Germany's most important trading partner in 2021. Our experience in China is a good example of successful collaboration between the two countries and between China and Europe," said Zipse.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
JAKARTA, April 6 (Xinhua) -- The Indonesian police said on Wednesday that its anti-terror squad has arrested five suspected terrorists in South Tangerang, a satellite town of the capital Jakarta.

National Police spokesperson Ahmad Ramadhan said the suspects, believed to have affiliated with a terrorist network of the Indonesian Islamic State (NII), were apprehended on Sunday.

The police did not revealed the identities of the suspects as the investigation was underway.

On March 25 in West Sumatra province, the Densus 88 police force arrested 16 terrorist suspects who massively recruited new members, including children. They were connected with other NII members in Jakarta, West Java province and the country's resort island of Bali.

NII is a rebel group that wants to make Indonesia an Islamic state led by Kartosoewirjo who was arrested and executed in 1962. 
When journalists sit down to write, they can choose between two compelling storylines  Russias invasion of the Ukraine, or the Third Worlds incursion into sovereign America.

Journalists have reported on the Russia-Ukraine war exhaustively in print and over the air. Even though the Southwest border has been invaded for the same 24/7 period for more than a year by illegal aliens from 150 countries, the mainstream media is stone-cold silent when headlines should be blaring.

Between June 2020 and June 2021, Border Patrol agents took into custody Venezuelans, Haitians, Brazilians and Cubans, with total numbers significantly up from 2020. Over the last nine months, the number of immigrants from Ecuador was up five times from the prior comparable period. Immigrants whose nationality could not be determined doubled from the prior year to 37,000.

About 2 million illegal aliens crossed into the U.S. in 2021, and another 2 million are predicted to arrive before fiscal year-end 2022. Yet the number of words written about the inevitable demographic and socioeconomic changes the invasion will bring to the U.S. could, figuratively, fit on a pins head.

In the worlds history, the alien-perpetrated border incursion is unprecedented. Never before has an independent nation as powerful as the U.S. purposely thrown open its doors to all comers. Several words might explain the establishment medias purposeful neglect  uninterested, indifferent or apathetic. The best word, however, is corrupt.

Despite the flowery language about fairness, balance and their commitment to principled journalism, as well as the highest ethical standards found on the websites of the Society of Professional Journalists and the American Society of News Editors, the open borders story and the dramatic changes it will surely bring to America remain largely unreported.

Its no surprise that trust in the media is near an all-time low. A Gallup survey to determine Americans opinions about the media found that just 7 percent of adults said they have a great deal and only 29 percent responded that they have a fair amount of trust and confidence in newspapers, television and radio news reporting.

Despite the establishment medias effort to obscure the U.S.-Mexico border crisis, a Harvard/Harris poll taken in June found that an overwhelming 80 percent of Americans believe that illegal immigration is a serious issue that needs more attention than its getting from President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris, the anointed border czar. Moreover, 68 percent said Bidens White House is sending migrants welcoming signals that encourage illegal immigration.

Dishonest journalism and White House betrayal merged when the media ignored a huge Department of Homeland Security story thats directly tied to public safety. Every year, DHS releases data that summarizes the numbers of illegal aliens arrested and deported. But this year, the congressionally mandated report was delayed weeks beyond its normal issuance date.

Little wonder that the administration wanted to conceal its contents. The report showed that since fiscal year 2019, Biden has crippled interior immigration enforcement. Illegal alien arrests dropped nearly 50 percent, and deportations were slashed by 78 percent. Detainers, official requests to state and local authorities to cooperate in turning over deportable migrants to ICE, fell dramatically, from 122,233 in 2020 to 65,940.

From October 2020 to September 2021, of the estimated 12-25 million illegal immigrants in the nation, only slightly more than 74,000 were arrested, and only 60,000 deported. Many arrests and deportations occurred during the former administrations final months, which means Bidens arrest totals were lower than the DHS report reflected. Immigration analysts said the drops in arrests and in criminal deportations means that tens of thousands more dangerous people are at large in American communities, some far from their Southwest border point of entry.

Jon Feere, former Immigration and Customs official and the current Center for Immigration Studies director of investigations, noted that the DHS data set omitted several valuable categories such as facts related to family units and unaccompanied minors, criminal charges and convictions against illegal aliens, and aliens country of origin  more coverup thats intended to deceive an unsuspecting public that Bidens immigration practices serve the nations best interests.

The White House and the media, working in tandem and in secret, are doing their level best to destroy sovereign America. So far, theyre doing a job theyre proud of, but worrisome to Americans.

Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
FLORENCE, S.C.  St. Luke Lutheran Church in Florence on Tuesday night awarded 19 grants to 18 area nonprofit organizations from the churchs endowment fund at Eastern Carolina Community Foundation.

Belle Zeigler, executive director of Eastern Carolina Community Foundation, and Tom Ewart co-hosted the brief event, which was followed by a reception with light refreshments.

There are several grantees in this room tonight who are first-time grantees of the St. Luke Endowment Grant. Im thrilled about that, Zeigler said.

The selection process was challenging, Ewart said.

Its hard to make the decisions. Were blessed to have you doing what youre doing and were privileged to review your plans and see the good work youre doing out there for the less fortunate, Ewart said. Its all about you all.

Tuesday nights grant recipients were:

Christian Learning Center

Dramatic Coffee Beans

Florence County Disabilities Foundation

Free Medical Clinic of Darlington County

Help 4 Kids Florence

Helping Florence Flourish

House of Hope of the Pee Dee

iHope Christian Care and Counseling

Lighthouse Ministries

Lighthouse Ministries: Services Connect

Mercy Medicine Free Clinic

One Child at a Time

Pee Dee Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Assault

Pee Dee Speech and Hearing Center

Senior Citizens Association of Florence County

SpeciallyABLED Miracles

Tenacious Grace

The Flo-Town Wisdom Players

The Naomi Project

The Endowment for St. Luke Lutheran Church is a powerful example of the impact that church philanthropy has on our local communities. We are grateful for our partnership with St. Luke and for being able to distribute these important grants to our nonprofits, Zeigler said.

The Endowment Fund at St. Luke Lutheran Church originated from an estate gift of more than $2 million by a church member in 2013. The congregation decided the gift would be most appropriately honored if a fund was established to fulfill St. Lukes Mission  Proclaim, Serve and Witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The church ultimately decided to form a partnership with Eastern Carolina Community Foundation to establish an agency endowment fund. In so doing, the church has been able to grow the investment and faithfully distribute grants in the community every year since.

St. Luke takes an annual distribution from the investment income to distribute to ministries and local nonprofit causes. Nonprofit, charitable, and philanthropic organizations are eligible to submit grant applications.

For more information on St. Lukes fund or Eastern Carolina Community Foundation, contact Taylor Bell at St. Luke Lutheran Church at administrator@stlukeflorence.org or Belle Zeigler, Executive Director of Eastern Carolina Community Foundation, at belle@easterncarolinacf.org.
The Senate has reached a bipartisan deal to provide an additional $10 billion in Covid-19 assistance, less than half of what the White House originally had requested.

It would allow the Biden administration to purchase more vaccines and therapeutics, as well as maintain testing capacity and research. But it does not include $5 billion in funding for global Covid-19 aid, nor would it replenish the program that pays for testing, treating and vaccinating the uninsured.

The deal would be paid for using unspent funds from the Democrats' $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, which was enacted in March 2021.

However, it would not draw from money previously provided for state and local government assistance. That proposed offset prompted several House Democrats to torpedo a $15.6 billion Covid-19 aid package that was initially part of the full-year spending bill.

"We urge Congress to move promptly on this $10 billion package because it can begin to fund the most immediate needs, as we currently run the risk of not having some critical tools like treatments and tests starting in May and June," White House press secretary Jen Psaki wrote in a statement Monday.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, who was negotiating for the Republicans, each released the text and summaries of the deal.

Here's what's in the deal:

Vaccines, therapeutics and testing

The deal would funnel $9.25 billion to the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, according to the summaries.

At least $5 billion would be spent on purchasing therapeutics, such as oral antivirals. Currently, there is a limited supply of treatments, including monoclonal antibodies, which are provided free of charge to Americans, regardless of insurance coverage.

The federal government has already scaled back on weekly allocations of many Covid-19 therapeutics due to both a lack of demand and a drop in available funding. Distribution of two monoclonal antibody treatments -- sotrovimab and bebtelovimab -- was scaled back "because Congress has failed to provide additional funding for the Covid-19 response," a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson said in a statement to CNN last month.

In a fact sheet released last month, the White House said the federal government has no more funding to buy additional monoclonals, including a planned order for March 25. It also said it does not have the ability to purchase additional oral antiviral pills beyond the 20 million already secured.

Also, the additional funds from the deal would be used to purchase vaccines, including booster shots, vaccines for children and, potentially, new types of vaccines. The Biden administration has warned that second Covid-19 vaccine booster shots -- or a new type of vaccine, if needed -- will not be free and readily available to all Americans, if and when they are authorized, without additional funding from Congress.

And the funds would be used to maintain testing capacity so that the manufacturing of at-home tests and lab capacity for PCR tests does not decline during the summer to the point where it can't be ramped up again in the case of a future Covid-19 surge.

Among the ways to ensure testing is available in the future is for the federal government to purchase testing supplies from manufacturers or to provide funding to maintain state and local testing infrastructure.

Future variants

Some $750 million would go to the Public Health and Social Services Emergency Fund for research, clinical trials and development of vaccines for emerging variants. It could also be used to expand vaccine manufacturing capacity as needed.

Without additional funding, the government will have to wind down some Covid-19 surveillance investments that help it detect the next variant, the White House has said.

Here's how it will be paid for:

The $10 billion legislation would be fully offset by Covid-19 relief funds that were previously authorized by Congress but have not yet been spent, according to a summary provided by Romney's office.

Nearly $2 billion is left over from the Shuttered Venues Operators Grant program, which gave money to live music venues, theaters and museums that were forced to shut their doors for some period of time due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The program stopped taking applications in August. It awarded more than $14 billion in grants.

The new bill would also repurpose about $900 million that is remaining for the Covid-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan advance program, which allowed some small businesses to receive up to $15,000 that did not need to be paid back. The program would be left with enough money to accommodate pending loan modifications and the recently announced six-month deferment on loan payments, according to a summary of the bill provided by Senate Democrats.

The new bill would use $1.6 billion of unspent funds that were previously given to the US Department of Agriculture by both the Democrats' coronavirus relief package, known as the American Rescue Plan Act, and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, also known as the CARES Act, which was signed into law by then-President Donald Trump in 2020, according to a summary from Senate Democrats.

More than $2.3 billion would come from the Aviation Manufacturing Jobs Protection Program, which provided funding to businesses to cover up to half of their payroll costs for certain categories of employees for up to six months. In return, those businesses were required to make several commitments, including to not involuntarily furlough or lay off employees within that group during the same six-month period.

The new bill would also use remaining unspent money in the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund, totaling $500 million. That program provided funds to colleges so that they could give emergency financial aid grants to students whose lives were disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The relief package would rescind more than $1.8 billion from the $10 billion in Covid-19 relief funds provided to the State Small Business Credit Initiative Program. The program aims to help states, the District of Columbia, territories and tribal governments "expand access to capital for small businesses emerging from the pandemic, build ecosystems of opportunity and entrepreneurship, and create high-quality jobs." The bill would not rescind the money allocated specifically for small and disadvantaged businesses and very small businesses, according to a summary provided by Senate Democrats.

The new bill would also use $887 million from the Local Assistance and Tribal Consistency Fund, which -- due to a drafting error in previous legislation -- has not been able to use any of the funds without congressional action, according to a summary provided by the Senate Democrats.

***

COVID BY THE NUMBERS

CNN's Katherine Dillinger contributed to this report. The-CNN-Wire  &  2022 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.
COLUMBIA  South Carolinas newest senator was sworn into office on Tuesday.

Surrounded by his family, Sen. Mike Reichenbach became the chambers newest member a week after he won a special election for his Florence County district with 90% of the vote.

Reichenbach is a political newcomer and a car dealership owner in Florence. He is the Senates only Black Republican.

Reichenbach is filling out the last two-and-a-half years of the term of Sen. Hugh Leatherman, a Republican who died last year after serving more than 40 years.

I take the privilege of succeeding him very seriously, Reichenbach said.

Reichenbach ran on promises to bring more economic growth to his region. He also pledged to fight for the right to bear arms and against abortion.

Along with his car dealerships, Reichenbach has worked as a state constable and a game warden.

Reichenbach spent nearly $500,000 on the race, taking out $384,000 in loans for his campaign, according to campaign finance reports.

In his first speech in the Senate, Reichenbach briefly became emotional as he thanked his mother and father, who are white, for adopting him when his teenage mother put him up for adoption.

No one, not a single person, would have believed this could have happened in 1971 when a scared, 14-year-old girl, encouraged by so many to have an abortion, chose life. She chose my life, Reichenbach said.

His adopted parents are white, and Reichenbach said thats an important part of his story too.

He thanked my sister, who in the 1970s put me on her hip and walked me into that all-white high school and dared somebody to challenge her and her little brother.

Reichenbach said he wants to help people who are struggling with rising energy prices and grocery prices.

Acknowledging we will not all see eye to eye on each issue, on each solution, I am certain we can have respectful discourse and come together to prioritize problem solving, Reichenbach said.
Hawaii and Arizona have something in common. Both states refuse to participate in Daylight Saving Time.

I have absolutely no idea what the time difference between here and Hawaii could be. I have no reason to know the time there. However, I know someone that lives in Arizona and based on how confusing time can be, and how the state refuses to play along with the rest of us, I wonder how they know what time Family Feud comes on TV every night.

There is Eastern time, Central time, Mountain time and Pacific time. Add to that Standard Time vs. Daylight Saving Time, which Arizona does not recognize, and I have a puzzle that I cannot solve. If I am watching Steve Harvey on Family Feud at 7 on the CW channel every night, what are people in Arizona seeing? And if they are watching Family Feud at the same time I am, what time is it there?

This seems to be truly unfair to the Arizonians. Based on a little simple logic Steve Harvey is cracking jokes on the television show that I am watching, while most people there are not off from work yet. While I am snuggled up in my favorite chair with my new throw that I got for Christmas, laughing at Steve, most people in the Grand Canyon State are trying to get through the rest of the workday. By the time they get home, Family Feud is over. It just aint right.

A couple weeks ago Sen. Marco Rubio reintroduced the Sunshine Protection Act 2021 which failed last year. This time Nancy dropped the gavel, asked for a vote and it was unanimous and undisputedly passed. No speeches and no discussion. Off to the House it went, slam, bam, thank you maam that fast. The bill in simple terms was to make Daylight Saving Time permanent. When the press asked some senators about their logic and reasoning for wanting constant Daylight Saving Time, it came out that some just voted and had no idea what they voted for. What was the senator from the great state of Arizona thinking? Didnt he understand that there was already enough confusion about the Family Feud time slot in his state?

Before it can become law the bill has to go across the aisle to the Republican majority House. The Republicans said they simply didnt have time for such nonsense and promised to come back to it at a later time. Their response to passing the bill on to the House, in layman terms, was that it was about time that the Senate found something they could easily pass. My prediction is that the bill will fail in the House, and when the time is right, they will discuss it and put it to a vote. There will never be a time when anything is agreeable to both parties.

President Richard Tricky Dick Nixon, tried permanent DST back in 1973 during an energy shortage. People hated it and the next year we switched back to standard time during the winter months and DST during the warm months. Poor ole Nixon just couldnt get anything right. He finally had to go to the house. His house.

This whole-time thing started with farmers in mind. Someone thought changing the time for a few months every year would give farmers more daylight during the year to do their thing, which is farming. Every farmer I ever knew paid no attention to a watch. They got up at daybreak and went to bed when it was too dark to see. The rooster crowed at sunrise whether it was 67 a.m. The cows wanted milking at daybreak and the crops in the field depended on the weather, not time. It was daylight the same number hours a day no matter which time system you use. A farmer is not coming to the house to watch Family Feud until dark and that was always after the chickens were fed and cows were milked.

Me, I am retired and I use my biological clock. I dont need a rooster to tell me the sun is coming up and I get my milk from a jug I buy from Piggly Wiggly. The only time I use my watch, no matter which time system we happen to be on, is to make sure its time to snuggle up with my throw and watch the Feud. I am not sure what time Family Feud is on TV in Arizona. I guess the folks in Hawaii must get up before breakfast to see the Feud when I am watching. Its all about time.

Dr. Darlene Atkinson-Moran grew up in Olanta. She always knew she wanted to be a teacher. She is retired from the education profession and now resides in Florence with her husband, Michael. Contact her at citizencolumnist@florencenews.com.
 With SCOTUS nominee now on path to confirmation, time to fret again about the lack of USSC nominees from Prez Biden | Main | New letter from House CBC members urges EQUAL Act Senate floor vote ASAP 

April 5, 2022

Brennan Center concludes is terrific essay series titled "Punitive Excess"

In this post last year, I was pleased to spotlight a new essay series unveiled by the Brennan Center for Justice, titled "Punitive Excess." Today, I received an email noting that the series in concluding in an exciting way (links from the original):

Today the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law published the final essay plus a new video (90-second version here) in its Punitive Excess series. The video includes voices from the essay collection, each showing a different way that the American legal system takes punishment to the extreme. Asia Johnson and Shon Hopwood speak from personal experience with being behind bars. In the last essay for the series, criminal justice experts Jeremy Travis and Bruce Western propose an honest reckoning with the harms of punitive excess as the path to a new vision of justice that promotes community well-being, not oppression, and celebrates democracy, not racial domination.... The series will be published as a book by Columbia University Press. Lauren-Brooke Eisen, director of the Brennan Centers Justice Program, co-edited the series with Daniel Okrent.

April 5, 2022 at 10:24 PM | Permalink

Comments

Thanks for this post. When Daniel Okrent's Last Call was published in 2011 I hoped it would translate for marijuana legalization. Alas - no

Posted by: beth curtis | Apr 7, 2022 11:29:22 AM

High five for the keen and appreciable effort.

Posted by: FluffyRoss | Apr 7, 2022 11:38:15 AM

Post a comment
 New letter from House CBC members urges EQUAL Act Senate floor vote ASAP | Main | By vote of 53 - 47, US Senate confirms its second former US Sentencing Commissioner to serve as a Supreme Court Justice 

Marc Levin has this notable new Hill commentary, headlined "Confirmation combat cant crush bipartisan criminal justice reform," making an important case for staying bulling on the prospects for bipartisan criminal justice reform efforts. I recommend the piece in full, and here are excerpts:

The soft on crime critique of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has prompted obituaries for the era of bipartisan support for criminal justice reform, a detente that the country has enjoyed since Texas kicked off a wave of policy change 15 years ago. While the coalition may be fragile, the prospects remain encouraging for continued progress on both public safety and justice.

Optimism stems in part from the fact that the primary responsibility for criminal justice policy rests at the state level, and the most significant reforms continue to occur there. Indeed, it was state-level reforms that first led to prison closures and reduced recidivism through treatment courts and other alternatives to incarceration, including in red states like Texas and Georgia. Those advancements, in turn, inspired the federal First Step Act signed by President Trump in 2018, a law that pared back mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes and allowed low-risk individuals to shave time off their prison terms by completing rehabilitative programs.

Today, state legislators remain the most significant actors in this arena, given that about 90 percent of all criminal cases and incarcerated populations are at the state and local levels. In Oklahoma, which has the nations highest incarceration rate, a bipartisan measure that brings consistency and proportionality to sentencing for nonviolent offenses overwhelmingly passed the states Senate on March 23.... Another red state, Ohio, is advancing a handful of significant bipartisan criminal justice reforms in its current legislative session....

While continued momentum on the state level promises to have the most far-reaching impact on the justice system, strong possibilities remain this election year for bipartisan congressional action. One area with potential for progress is marijuana policy. There are a variety of proposals for unwinding failed federal policy on cannabis with varying levels of bipartisan support....

Also, in recent weeks, additional Republican senators have become cosponsors of a bill that would end the pronounced disparity in penalties between crack and powder cocaine, which would affect some 1,500 new sentences every year.... Other bipartisan federal legislation that could reach President Bidens desk this year include bills that abolish federal life without parole sentences for juveniles, prevent the use of acquitted conduct in sentencing, extend Medicaid to otherwise eligible individuals within 30 days of their release from incarceration, and invest in treatment for people with mental illness in the justice system.

Undoubtedly, the recent rise in some types of violent crime, most notably homicides, has strained bipartisan coalitions around sensible reforms. While fearmongering is unwarranted, rigorously evaluating the impact of recent justice system changes is not just desirable, but necessary....

Criminal justice policy is too important to leave to any one political party, and all Americans, regardless of ideology, rightly demand a system that protects both their lives and liberties. While hearings for both Republican and Democratic administration Supreme Court nominees have become circus-like, there is reason to believe that our political leaders can move from confirmation combat to considerable consensus on the next steps to achieve safety and justice for all.
Oliver Hitchcock died two days after being found unresponsive (FOX6)

A Russian woman living in Wisconsin has been accused of murdering her eight-year-old son and attempting to kill her 11-year-old son after she allegedly became agitated about the war in Ukraine.

Natalia Aleksandrovna Hitchcock, 41, a resident of Plank Trail Lane in Sheboygan Falls, has been charged with first-degree intentional homicide and attempted first-degree intentional homicide, according to a criminal complaint filed on Tuesday, reported Law & Crime.

The Sheboygan Falls police department said on 31 March that Ms Hitchcock assaulted her eight-year-old son Oliver in their apartment the previous day. The childs father, who was also in the apartment, called emergency services and started life saving measures.

Oliver was transported to a hospital, where he died from his injuries on 1 April.

According to a criminal complaint, the incident unfolded on 30 March when all four members of the Hitchcock family were at home as the children were on spring break.

Ms Hitchcocks husband said that he was awoken from a nap by his 11-year-old son, who yelled that his younger brother was dead.

He found Oliver lying on the bedroom floor at the base of a bunk bed and took him to the living room to administer CPR.

Ms Hitchcock reportedly told him that she had killed their son.

Natalia Aleksandrovna Hitchcock was arrested for the murder of her eight-year-old son in Wisconsin (Sheboygan County Sheriff)

He told police officials later that Ms Hitchcock then walked around the apartment with a knife, dazed, saying she was going to kill everyone in the house.

Her husband told the police that Ms Hitchcocks mother lived in Russia and that he was worried about Ms Hitchcocks mental state as she watched TV with the war between Russia and Ukraine.

He added that recently, Ms Hitchcock had asked him to stay home from work and wanted to buy survival gear such as a camping stove and fuel, besides buying knives and guns.

She had also complained that she could not book a flight to Russia to see her mother, which made her angry, he told the police.

While Ms Hitchcock had not been diagnosed with mental health disorders earlier, she told police officials that someone was controlling her mind and she had been poisoned.

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She also said that she had been under some kind of a brain fog and admitted that she had suffocated her younger son. I did not want him to be abused, she said, according to the criminal complaint.

When investigators asked Ms Hitchcock about the war in Ukraine, she said her husband had expressed concern that it was causing her stress. However, she claimed to be more worried about being sold on the dark web.

She alleged that she felt people thought of her as a Russian spy and so, she suspected that her children would be taken away from her by social workers.

Her elder son also informed officials of an incident on 29 March. He was in the bathroom tub when his mother asked him to show her how long he could stay under water. He said that he felt her hands pushing his head under water.

Officials also found bottles containing four different types of Tylenol, an empty bottle of Tylenol from within a closet hamper, and several open bottles of alcohol, the document concluded.
Singapores ride-hailing and food-delivery drivers are calling for more government protection to meet retirement and housing needs. (PHOTO: Getty Commercial)

By Olivia Poh

(Bloomberg)  Singapores ride-hailing and food-delivery drivers are calling for more government protection to meet retirement and housing needs, underscoring a potential shift in the way the city-states policies may evolve to better safeguard gig workers.

More than half of the 1,200 workers surveyed voiced concerns about their national pension plan, and 55% of those people supported the idea that companies like Grab Holdings Ltd. should make mandatory contributions to their retirement funds, senior minister of state for health and manpower Koh Poh Koon said in Parliament on Tuesday. He cited statistics from a public consultation that was started last year over who does  and who doesnt  count as an employee when it comes to benefits and protections.

Singapore runs a mandatory social security savings scheme funded by contributions from employers and employees. People can use these savings, which are part of their Central Provident Fund, to buy houses or offset hospital bills. Platform workers  comprising about 3%, or 79,000 people, of Singapores resident workforce  are typically not covered under the mandatory plan.

Platform companies already contribute CPF for their management executives and administrative staff today, Koh said. Gig workers asked a question: As the ones who are bringing in revenue for the companies and risking themselves on the roads, why are they not given some of these basic things that employees working for the companies in the office also enjoy?

He pointed out that most workers who depend on platform work as their main source of income were residents 50 and over, while delivery workers were younger, with the majority below 40 years of age.

Like governments around the world, Singapore is considering legislative changes to protect gig-economy workers. Ride-hailing and food-delivery companies like Grab, Delivery Hero SEs Foodpanda and Deliveroo Plc.  which are built on the labor of these low-wage contract workers  have flourished during the pandemic but also exacerbated social inequities.

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A 59-Hour Week Is Common for Singapore Gig Workers, Study Shows

From the U.S. to Europe to China, these internet business models have drawn criticism for effectively taking advantage of labor arbitrage. Companies get the advantages of having people who work for them without taking on the traditional responsibilities of a corporate employer.

Singaporeans have called for more to be done for this group of precarious workers. These are often forgotten heroes during the pandemic, said Koh. The committee aims to provide practical and sustainable recommendations and is considering an appropriate phasing period for the industry to adjust.

With assistance from Janet Paskin.

 2022 Bloomberg L.P.
SYDNEY, April 6 (Xinhua) -- An international team, including Australian researchers, have identified novel areas of DNA that are linked to the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other forms of dementia.

Researchers believe that the findings could lead to a better understanding into how the debilitating disease takes hold.

The research, published in Nature Genetics and released on Tuesday, was based on a two-stage study of genomes of more than 111,000 people suffering from AD and some 670,000 controls who don't have the disease.

The research found people with AD had numerous risk regions within their genomes which occur less among the control group. They initially found 42 risk regions, and further research in the new loci identified 31 genes that were suggestive of new genetically associated processes.

One of the researchers, Associate Professor Michelle Lupton from Australia's QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, told Xinhua that the findings pinpointed the actual genes and genetic regions that are contributing to heritability.

Based on the findings, they refined a previously existing "genetic risk score" which is used in identifying people who are more likely to get the disease.

"As you get older, you could be diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment. So that's when people start to just see reduced cognition. Fifty percent of people with mild cognitive impairment may go on to get dementia, however others won't."

"This shows that people who have a high-risk score are more likely to get AD within three years, so you could try to prevent them developing the disease."

The research also confirmed previous findings regarding the protein amyloid-beta and tau, which build up in and around nerve cells as Alzheimer's progresses, and pointed to new evidence for the role of genes involved in inflammation.

"We see that a lot of genes that are involved in inflammation in the brain contribute to AD, especially the involvement of microglia, the immune cells in the brain. It gives clues to drug targets, and what to aim for when looking for drugs to treat or prevent AD," Lupton said.

Researchers said their findings suggest that AD is caused by a multitude of different factors. As one of the factors, the heritability of the disease is estimated to be between 60 percent and 80 percent.

These newly identified genetic components provide an opportunity to determine the pathophysiological processes in the disease and to identify new biological features and new therapeutic targets through translational genomics. 
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BUCHA, Ukraine  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused the Russians of gruesome atrocities in Ukraine and told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday that those responsible should immediately be brought up on war crimes charges in front of a tribunal like the one established at Nuremberg after World War II.

Zelenskyy, appearing via video from Ukraine, said that civilians had been tortured, shot in the back of the head, thrown down wells, blown up with grenades in their apartments and crushed to death by tanks while in cars.

Over the past few days, grisly images of what appeared to be civilian massacres carried out by Russian forces in Bucha before they withdrew from the outskirts of Kyiv have caused a global outcry and led Western nations to expel scores of Moscows diplomats and propose further sanctions, including a ban on coal imports from Russia.

Zelenskyy said that both those who carried out the killings and those who gave the orders must be brought to justice immediately for war crimes in front of a tribunal similar to what was used in postwar Germany.

Moscow's U.N. ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, said that while Bucha was under Russian control, not a single local person has suffered from any violent action. Reiterating what the Kremlin has contended for days, he said that video footage of bodies in the streets was a crude forgery staged by the Ukrainians.

You only saw what they showed you, he said.

Associated Press journalists in Bucha have counted dozens of corpses in civilian clothes and interviewed Ukrainians who told of witnessing atrocities. Also, high-resolution satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showed that many of the bodies had been lying in the open for weeks, during the time that Russian forces were in the town.

The dead in Bucha included a pile of six charred bodies, as witnessed by AP journalists. It was not clear who they were or under what circumstances they died. One body was probably that of a child, said Andrii Nebytov, head of police in the Kyiv region. One person had a gunshot wound to the head.

The chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court at The Hague opened an investigation a month ago into possible war crimes in Ukraine.

Zelenskyy stressed that Bucha was only one place and that there are more with similar horrors  a warning echoed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

When and if they withdraw their troops and Ukrainian troops take over, Im afraid they will see more mass graves, more atrocities and more examples of war crimes, he said.

Stoltenberg, meanwhile, warned that in pulling back from the capital, Russian President Vladimir Putin's military is regrouping its forces in order to deploy them to eastern and southern Ukraine for a crucial phase of the war." Russia's stated goal is control of the Donbas, the largely Russian-speaking industrial region in the east that includes the shattered port city of Mariupol.

Moscow is not giving up its ambitions in Ukraine, Stoltenberg said.

While both Ukrainian and Russian representatives sent optimistic signals following their latest round of talks a week ago, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow wont accept a Ukrainian demand that a prospective peace deal include an immediate pullout of troops followed by a Ukrainian referendum on the agreement.

In televised remarks Tuesday, Lavrov said a new deal would have to be negotiated if the vote failed, and we dont want to play such cat and mouse.

Ukrainian officials said that the bodies of at least 410 civilians have been found in towns around Kyiv that were recaptured from Russian forces and that a torture chamber was discovered in Bucha.

Zelenskyy told the Security Council there was not a single crime that Russian troops hadnt committed in Bucha, and he likened their actions to those of the Islamic State group.

The Russian military searched for and purposefully killed anyone who served our country. They shot and killed women outside their houses when they just tried to call someone who is alive. They killed entire families, adults and children, and they tried to burn the bodies, he said.

On Tuesday, police and other investigators walked the silent streets of Bucha, taking notes on bodies that residents showed them. Survivors who hid in their homes during the monthlong Russian occupation of the town, many of them past middle age, wandered past charred tanks and jagged window panes with plastic bags of food and other humanitarian aid. Red Cross workers checked in on intact homes.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the images from Bucha revealed not the random act of a rogue unit but a deliberate campaign to kill, to torture, to rape, to commit atrocities. He said the reports of atrocities were more than credible."

As Western leaders condemned the killings in Bucha, Romania, Italy, Spain and Denmark expelled dozens of Russian diplomats on Tuesday, following moves by Germany and France. Hundreds of Russian diplomats have been sent home since the start of the invasion, many accused of being spies.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the expulsions a short-sighted measure that would complicate communication and warned they would be met with reciprocal steps.

The U.S., in coordination with the European Union and Group of Seven nations, will roll out more sanctions against Russia on Wednesday, including a ban on all new investment in the country, a senior administration official said, speaking on condition to discuss the upcoming announcement.

Also, the EU's executive branch proposed a ban on coal imports from Russia, in what would be the first time the 27-nation bloc has sanctioned the countrys lucrative energy industry over the war. The coal imports amount to an estimated 4 billion euros ($4.4 billion) per year.

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LVIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia is trying to hide evidence of war crimes to interfere with the international investigation.

We have information that the Russian troops have changed tactics and are trying to remove the dead people, the dead Ukrainians, from the streets and cellars of territory they occupied, Zelenskyy said in his daily nighttime video address to the nation late Wednesday. This is only an attempt to hide the evidence and nothing more.

Zelenskyy added that it seems that the Russian leadership was really afraid that the global anger over what was seen in Bucha would be repeated after what was seen in other cities.

The Ukrainian leader also said thousands of people are now missing, either dead or deported to Russia.

Zelenskyy is urging Russian citizens not to be afraid to protest the war.

If you have even a little shame about what the Russian military is doing in Ukraine, then for such Russian citizens this is a key moment: You have to demand  just demand  an end to the war, Zelenskyy said.

KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR:

 Mariupols dead put at 5,000 as Ukraine braces in the east

 US targets Putins daughters, Russian banks in new sanctions

 Burned, piled bodies among latest horrors in Bucha, Ukraine

 Russia's setback in Kyiv was memorable military failure

 Russian media campaign falsely claims Bucha deaths are fakes

 China calls for probe into Bucha killings, assigns no blame

 Go to https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine for more coverage

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:

PARIS  French President Emmanuel Macron spoke out against Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Wednesday evening, defending himself over criticism he held multiple talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin to no avail.

On Monday, Morawiecki ridiculed the French leaders several hours of phone calls with Putin, saying that they achieved nothing.

Some fear the comments from Poland might destabilize unity of the European Union as it hopes to stand unified in the face of Putins aggression in Ukraine.

Macron told TF1 broadcasters evening news that he takes full responsibility for speaking to Putin in the name of France to avoid the war and to build a new architecture for peace in Europe several years ago.

Macron is standing for re-election in France in polls that begin Sunday.

KYIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian authorities say nearly 5,000 people were evacuated from combat areas Wednesday.

Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said 1,171 people were evacuated from the besieged Sea of Azov port of Mariupol, and 2,515 more left the cities of Berdyansk and Melitopol and other areas in the south.

She said an additional 1,206 people were evacuated from the eastern region of Luhansk.

Vereshchuk and other officials have been urging residents of eastern regions to evacuate in the face of an impending Russian offensive, saying that people in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions should leave for safer regions.

Donetsk region Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said at least five civilians were killed and eight others wounded by Russian shelling Wednesday.

Over 10 million people, about a quarter of Ukraines population, have been displaced by the war, and more than 4 million of them have fled the country.

UNITED NATIONS  The United States and United Kingdom have boycotted an informal meeting of the U.N. Security Council called by Russia to press its baseless claims that the U.S. has biological warfare laboratories in Ukraine.

The move by Russia on Wednesday was the latest of several that have led Western countries to accuse Moscow of using the U.N. as a platform for disinformation to draw attention away from its war against its smaller neighbor.

U.N. disarmament chief Izumi Nakamitsu told the council at two official Security Council meetings called by Russia on the issue last month that the United Nations is not aware of any biological weapons program in Ukraine.

A smoke screen to draw attention away from the brutal warfare, irresponsible, dangerous and deplorable were just a few of the responses by countries, including Norway, France, Ireland and Albania.

ROME  Italian Premier Mario Draghi says no embargo of Russian gas is up for consideration at this point as the European Union ponders its next package of sanctions over the war in Ukraine, adding: "I dont know if it ever will be on the table.

Draghi told reporters Monday night that in case a gas embargo is proposed, Italy will be very happy to follow it if that would make peace possible.

Draghi added: If the price of gas can be exchanged for peace ... what do we choose? Peace? Or to have the air conditioning running in the summer? This is the question we must pose.

KYIV, Ukraine  The mayor of the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol says more than 5,000 civilians have been killed during the monthlong Russian blockade, among them 210 children.

Mayor Vadym Boichenko said Wednesday that Russian forces have among other targets bombed hospitals, including one where 50 people burned to death.

Boichenko said that more than 90% of the citys infrastructure has been destroyed by Russian shelling.

The Russian military is besieging the strategic Sea of Azov port, and has cut food, water and energy supplies and pummeled it with artillery and air raids. Capturing the city would allow Russia to secure a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden is saluting the international community and some of the largest corporations in the U.S. for further increasing Russias economic isolation.

Addressing thousands at the North Americas Building Trades Unions Legislative Conference at a Washington hotel on Wednesday, Biden said of the Russia-Ukraine war, Theres nothing less happening than credible war crimes.

The president said responsible nations have to come together to hold these perpetrators responsible, and vowed that were going to stifle Russias ability to grow for years to come.

He said corporate Americas stepping up for a chance, noting that 600-plus firms have chosen to leave Russia.

MOSCOW  Russias Defense Ministry has accused Ukraine of sabotaging a pre-agreed prisoner swap.

Speaking at a briefing, Defense Ministry official Mikhail Mizintsev claimed that Kyiv had for a long time blocked prisoner exchanges, including a swap set to take place Wednesday involving 251 military personnel on each side.

He alleged that the delays gave Moscow all the reasons to suspect that Russian servicemen held in captivity are not at all well."

On April 1, representatives of the Ukrainian presidential office said Ukraine had secured the release of 86 soldiers, including 15 women, through a swap. This was confirmed by Russian officials on Wednesday.

BRUSSELS  A new U.S. commitment of Javelin missiles means the West soon will have provided Ukrainian fighters with 10 anti-tank weapons for every Russian tank in their country, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday.

Blinken spoke to U.S. news broadcaster MSNBC after the U.S. announced an additional $100 million for more Javelin missiles for Ukraine. The U.S. says it has provided $1.7 billion for Ukraines defense and aid since Russia invaded on Feb. 24.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is pressing the West to provide more weapons, faster, and do more to cut off Russia from the global economy, to pressure Putin to make peace.

In terms of what they need to act quickly and act effectively, to deal with the planes that are firing at them from the skies, the tanks that are trying to destroy  their cities from the ground, they have the tools that they need, Blinken said of Ukraines forces. Theyre going to keep getting them, and were going to keep sustaining that.

BUDAPEST, Hungary  Hungarys prime minister has asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to call an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine but says his country will comply with Russian demands to pay for natural gas imports in rubles.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he had spoken with Putin by phone and urged the Russian leader to end the military conflict in neighboring Ukraine. Orban said he also offered to host a conference in Hungarys capital between the warring parties.

I suggested that (Putin)  the Ukrainian president, the French president and the German chancellor hold a meeting here in Budapest, the sooner the better, Orban said. It should not be a peace negotiation and not a peace settlement, because that takes longer, but an immediate ceasefire agreement.

Orban spoke days after his Fidesz party won a fourth consecutive term leading the Hungarian government.

The right-wing nationalist leader, Putins closest ally in the European Union, has vehemently refused to supply weapons to Ukraine or allow their transport across the Hungary-Ukraine border. He also lobbied heavily against the EU imposing sanctions on Russian energy imports.

LARNACA, Cyprus  Russian disinformation about its war against Ukraine needs to be exposed, including on Russias war crimes, a U.S. State Department official said on a visit to Cyprus Wednesday.

Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said Russian lies have evolved to the point of blaming Ukrainians for actions by Russian forces, including the war crimes we see on the ground.

So we all have an interest in exposing Russian disinformation, ensuring our citizens have the truth and ensuring that Russian citizens also (have the truth) ... despite the Iron Curtain that Putin has put down over that, Nuland said.

Nuland was in Cyprus as part of a five-nation tour aimed at strengthening bilateral ties and rallying support for Ukraine.

LONDON  Britain says it will end imports of Russian oil and coal by the end of the year and ban U.K. investment in Russia as part of a new set of sanctions in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

The British government also announced a freeze on the assets of Credit Bank of Moscow and Sberbank, Russias largest bank, and slapped travel bans and asset freezes on eight more wealthy Russians. They included Andrey Guryev, founder of the fertilizer company PhosAgro, and Sergey Sergeyevich Ivanov, president of diamond producer Alrosa.

U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said the measures were coordinated with Britains allies. The U.S. also sanctioned SberBank on Wednesday, and the European Union plans to ban imports of Russian coal.

Truss said the sanctions were aimed at decimating (President Vladimir) Putins war machine and to show the Russian elite that they cannot wash their hands of the atrocities committed on Putins orders.

Britain had already announced a plan to phase out Russian oil, which accounts for 8% of the U.K. supply. Russia is the top supplier of imported coal to the U.K., though British demand for the polluting fuel has plummeted in the past decade. Britain has not ended imports of Russian natural gas, which accounts for 4% of its supply, saying only that it will do so as soon as possible.

UNITED NATIONS  The U.N. General Assembly plans to vote Thursday on whether to suspend Russia from the U.N.s premiere human rights body.

The United States initiated the move in response to the discovery of hundreds of bodies after Russian troops withdrew from towns near Ukraine's capital. Videos and photos of corpses of people who appeared to be civilians have sparked calls for tougher sanctions and war crimes charges against Russia, which has vehemently denied responsibility.

General Assembly spokeswoman Paulina Kubiak said on Wednesday that an emergency special session on Ukraine will resume at 10 a.m. EDT on Thursday, when a resolution to suspend the rights of membership in the Human Rights Council of the Russian Federation will be put to a vote.

The brief resolution expresses grave concern at the ongoing human rights and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, particularly at the reports of violations and abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law by the Russian Federation, including gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights.

To be approved, the resolution requires a two-thirds majority of assembly members that vote yes or no. Abstentions dont count.

WASHINGTON  The U.S. Justice Department is working with European allies and prosecutors in Ukraine to investigate potential war crimes after Russias invasion.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said Wednesday that U.S. prosecutors across the world are working to collect evidence and to collect the information on atrocities that we have all seen in both photographs and video footage.

He pointed specifically to photos and videos from Bucha, where Associated Press journalists have witnessed evidence of killings and torture, including charred bodies.

But Garland stopped short of calling for a tribunal like the one set up to hold Nazi leaders to account after World War II. He said a U.S. prosecutors in Paris were meeting with the French war crimes prosecutor, and that other Justice Department lawyers had met with prosecutors in Europe to work out a plan for gathering evidence with respect to Ukraine.

WASHINGTON  The U.S. on Wednesday announced that it is sanctioning Russian President Vladimir Putins two adult daughters as part of a new batch of penalties on the countrys political and economic system in retaliation for its war crimes in Ukraine.

The U.S. is also imposing toughened full blocking sanctions on Russias Sberbank and Alfa Bank, two of its largest financial institutions, as well as some Russian state-owned enterprises. President Joe Biden is also signing an executive order to ban new U.S. investment in Russia.

In addition to Putins adult daughters, the new sanctions also target the family of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

The U.S. actions are set to be imposed in concert with toughened sanctions by its European allies.

LONDON  A Western official says it will take Russia up to a month to regroup its forces for a major push on eastern Ukraine.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence, said Wednesday that a reasonable estimate would be of three to four weeks before troops that have pulled back from the area around Kyiv and northern Ukraine can be re-equipped and redeployed against the Donbas region in the east.

The official said the Russian units would have to go through a pretty lengthy period of reconstitution and refurbishment before they could rejoin the war.

The official said almost a quarter of the Russian ground units known as battalion tactical groups in Ukraine had been rendered non-combat-effective in the fighting and either withdrawn or merged with other units.

The losses and pullback of Russian troops mean the threat posed to Kyiv is limited for the foreseeable future from Russian ground troops, the official said.

 AP writer Jill Lawless contributed.

BRUSSELS  NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says Finland and Sweden would be welcomed with open arms should they decide to join the worlds biggest security alliance, as Russias war on Ukraine spurs public support in the two Nordic countries for membership.

Russia has demanded that the 30-nation military organization stop expanding, so the prospect of Finland and Sweden joining could anger President Vladimir Putin.

But Stoltenberg says NATO members might be prepared to provide security guarantees for the period from when the two might announce any membership bid and when their applications are approved. He declined to say what kind of protection they might get.

Once members, the two neutral Nordic nations would benefit from NATOs collective security guarantee, which obliges all members to come to the defense of any ally that comes under attack.

Stoltenberg told reporters Wednesday that he is certain that we will find ways to address concerns they may have regarding the period between the potential application and the final ratification.

A poll commissioned by Finnish broadcaster YLE last month showed that, for the first time, more than 50% of Finns support joining the Western military alliance. In neighboring Sweden, a similar poll showed that those in favor of NATO membership outnumber those against.

BERLIN  A German spokesman says the government has information which indicates that bodies found after Ukraine retook Bucha last week had been lying there since at least March 10, when Russian troops were in control of the town.

Steffen Hebestreit told reporters in Berlin on Wednesday that the information was based on non-commercial satellite images taken March 10-18 of Yablonska Street in Bucha.

Credible information shows that from March 7 to March 30 Russian soldiers and security forces were deployed in this area, he said. They were also tasked with the interrogation of prisoners who were subsequently executed.

Hebestreit said that targeted killings by units of the Russian military and security forces are therefore proof that the Russian President and supreme commander has at least approvingly accepted human rights abuses and war crimes to achieve his goals.

The assertions made by the Russian side that these are staged scenes or they arent responsible for the murders are therefore not tenable, he added.

Asked about the source of this information, Hebestreit said that images reviewed by Germany were not commercial satellite images. He declined to elaborate.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark  Norway is following other European nations and expelling Russian diplomats.

Norways Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt said Wednesday that three Russian diplomats had carried out activities incompatible with their status.

The timing for the expulsions was not accidental and comes at a time when the whole world is shaken by reports of Russian forces abusing civilians, especially in the city of Bucha, Huitfeldt said in a statement.

In recent days, numerous European countries have expelled Russian diplomats and staff at Russian diplomatic missions.

GENEVA  The International Committee of the Red Cross says one of its teams in Ukraine has led some 500 people who fled Mariupol in a humanitarian convoy of buses and private cars to a safer location in the embattled country.

The ICRC says its team that has been trying to enter Mariupol since last Friday got within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the besieged city, but security conditions made it impossible to enter. The convoy escorted the civilians from coastal Berdyansk to Zaporizhzhia, to the north.

This convoys arrival to Zaporizhzhia is a huge relief for hundreds of people who have suffered immensely and are now in a safer location, said Pascal Hundt, ICRCs head of delegation in Ukraine. Its clear, though, that thousands more civilians trapped inside Mariupol need safe passage out and aid to come in.

He said the Geneva-based organization remains available as a neutral intermediary to help escort civilians out of Mariupol once concrete agreements and security conditions allow it.

LONDON  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of using hunger as a weapon of war by deliberately targeting Ukraines essential food supplies.

In an address to Irish lawmakers Wednesday, Zelenskyy said Russian forces are destroying things that are sustaining livelihoods including food storage depots, blocking ports so Ukraine could not export food and putting mines into the fields.

For them hunger is also a weapon, a weapon against us ordinary people, he said, accusing Russia of deliberately provoking a food crisis in Ukraine, a major global producer of staples including wheat and sunflower oil.

He said it would have international ramifications, because there will be a shortage of food and the prices will go up, and this is reality for the millions of people who are hungry, and it will be more difficult for them to feed their families.

Zelenskyy spoke by video to a joint session of Irelands two houses of parliament, the latest in a string of international addresses he has used to rally support for Ukraine.

BRUSSELS  A senior European Union official says the blocs member countries should think about ways of offering asylum to Russian soldiers willing to desert Ukraine battlefields.

European Council president Charles Michel on Wednesday expressed his outrage at crimes against humanity, against innocent civilians in Bucha and in many other cities.

He called on Russian soldiers to disobey orders.

If you want no part in killing your Ukrainian brothers and sisters, if you dont want to be a criminal, drop your weapons, stop fighting, leave the battlefield, Michel, who represents the blocs governments, said in a speech to the European Parliament

Endorsing an idea previously circulated by some EU lawmakers, Michel added that granting asylum to Russian deserters is a valuable idea that should be pursued.

BEIJING  China says the reports and images of civilian deaths in the Ukrainian town of Bucha are deeply disturbing and it is calling for an investigation.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Wednesday that China supports all initiatives and measures conducive to alleviating the humanitarian crisis in the country and is ready to continue to work together with the international community to prevent any harm to civilians.

The killings in Bucha may serve to put further pressure on Beijing over its largely pro-Russian stance and attempts to guide public opinion over the war.

China has called for talks while refusing to criticize Russia over its invasion. It opposes economic sanctions on Moscow and blames Washington and NATO for provoking the war and fueling the conflict by sending arms to Ukraine.

Zhaos remarks echo those the previous day of Chinas ambassador to the United Nations, Zhang Jun, who called for an investigation, describing the reports and images of civilian deaths in Bucha as deeply disturbing.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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ANDRIIVKA, Ukraine (AP)  The mayor of the besieged port city of Mariupol put the number of civilians killed there at more than 5,000 Wednesday, as Ukraine collected evidence of Russian atrocities on the ruined outskirts of Kyiv and braced for what could become a climactic battle for control of the country's industrial east.

Ukrainian authorities continued gathering up the dead in shattered towns outside the capital amid telltale signs Moscow's troops killed civilians indiscriminately before retreating over the past several days.

In other developments, the U.S. and its Western allies moved to impose new sanctions against the Kremlin over what they branded war crimes.

And Russia completed the pullout of all of its estimated 24,000 or more troops from the Kyiv and Chernihiv areas in the north, sending them into Belarus or Russia to resupply and reorganize, probably to return to the fight in the east, a U.S. defense official speaking on condition of anonymity said.

In his nightly address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that the Russian military continues to build up its forces in preparation for the new offensive in the east, where the Kremlin has said its goal is to liberate the Donbas, Ukraines mostly Russian-speaking industrial heartland. He said Ukraine, too, was preparing for battle.

We will fight and we will not retreat, he said. We will seek all possible options to defend ourselves until Russia begins to seriously seek peace. This is our land. This is our future. And we wont give them up.

Ukrainian authorities urged people living in the Donbas to evacuate now, ahead of an impending Russian offensive, while there is still time.

Later, people will come under fire, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said, and we wont be able to do anything to help them.

A Western official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence estimates, said it will take Russia's battle-damaged forces as much as a month to regroup for a major push on eastern Ukraine.

Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko said that of the more than 5,000 civilians killed during weeks of Russian bombardment and street fighting, 210 were children. He said Russian forces bombed hospitals, including one where 50 people burned to death.

Boichenko said more than 90% of the citys infrastructure has been destroyed. The attacks on the strategic southern city on the Sea of Azov have cut off food, water, fuel and medicine and pulverized homes and businesses.

British defense officials said 160,000 people remained trapped in the city, which had a prewar population of 430,000. A humanitarian relief convoy accompanied by the Red Cross has been trying for days without success to get into the city.

Capturing Mariupol would allow Russia to secure a continuous land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.

In the north, Ukrainian authorities said the bodies of least 410 civilians have been found in towns around Kyiv, victims of what Zelenskyy has portrayed as a Russian campaign of murder, rape, dismemberment and torture. Some victims had apparently been shot at close range. Some were found with their hands bound.

At a cemetery in the town of Bucha, northeast of Kyiv, workers began to load more than 60 bodies apparently collected over the past few days into a grocery shipping truck for transport to a facility for further investigation.

Zelenskyy accused Russia of interfering with an international investigation into possible war crimes by removing corpses and trying to hide other evidence in Bucha.

We have information that the Russian troops have changed tactics and are trying to remove the dead people, the dead Ukrainians, from the streets and cellars of territory they occupied, he said in his address. This is only an attempt to hide the evidence and nothing more.

Switching from Ukrainian into Russian, Zelenskyy urged ordinary Russians to somehow confront the Russian repressive machine instead of being equated with the Nazis for the rest of your life.

He called on Russians to demand an end to the war, if you have even a little shame about what the Russian military is doing in Ukraine.

More bodies were yet to be collected in Bucha. The Associated Press saw two in a house in a silent neighborhood. From time to time there was the muffled boom of workers clearing the town of mines and other unexploded ordnance.

Police said they found at least 20 bodies in the Makariv area west of Kyiv. In the village of Andriivka, residents said the Russians arrived in early March and took locals' phones. Some people were detained, then released. Others met unknown fates. Some described sheltering for weeks in cellars normally used for storing vegetables for winter.

The soldiers were gone, and Russian armored personnel carriers, a tank and other vehicles sat destroyed on both ends of the road running through the village. Several buildings were reduced to mounds of bricks and corrugated metal. Residents struggled without heat, electricity or cooking gas.

First we were scared, now we are hysterical, said Valentyna Klymenko, 64. She said she, her husband and two neighbors weathered the siege by sleeping on stacks of potatoes covered with a mattress and blankets. We didnt cry at first. Now we are crying.

To the north of the village, in the town of Borodyanka, rescue workers combed through the rubble of apartment blocks, looking for bodies. Mine-disposal units worked nearby.

The Kremlin has insisted its troops have committed no war crimes, charging that the images out of Bucha were staged by the Ukrainians.

Thwarted in their efforts to swiftly take the capital, increasing numbers of President Vladimir Putins troops, along with mercenaries, have been reported moving into the Donbas.

At least five people were killed by Russian shelling Wednesday in the Donbas' Donetsk region, according to Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko, who urged civilians to leave for safer areas.

In the Luhansk region of the Donbas, Russian bombardment set fire to at least 10 multi-story buildings and a mall in the town of Sievierodonetsk, the regional governor reported. There was no immediate word on deaths or injuries.

Russian forces also attacked a fuel depot and a factory in the Dnipropetrovsk region, just west of the Donbas, authorities said.

Ukrainian forces have been fighting Russia-backed separatists in the Donbas since 2014. Ahead of its Feb. 24 invasion, Moscow recognized the Luhansk and Donetsk regions as independent states.

In reaction to the alleged atrocities outside Kyiv, the U.S. announced sanctions against Putins two adult daughters and said it is toughening penalties against Russian banks. Britain banned investment in Russia and pledged to end its dependence on Russian coal and oil by the end of the year.

The European Union is also expected to take additional punitive measures, including an embargo on coal.

Meanwhile, the United States and the United Kingdom boycotted an informal meeting of the Security Council called by Russia to press its baseless claims that the U.S. has biological warfare laboratories in Ukraine.

The meeting was the latest of several moves by Russia that have led Western countries to accuse Moscow of using the U.N. as a platform for disinformation to divert attention from the war.

Russias deputy U.N. ambassador Dmitry Polyansky, who presided over the meeting, asserted that Ukraine, supported by the U.S., was implementing what he claimed were dangerous projects and experiments as part of a military biological program.

The allegations have previously been debunked. Ukraine does own and operate a network of biological labs that have received funding and research support from the U.S. and are not a secret. The labs are part of a program that aims to reduce the likelihood of deadly outbreaks, whether natural or man-made.

The U.S. efforts date back to work in the 1990s to dismantle the former Soviet Unions program for weapons of mass destruction.

Oleksandr Stashevskyi and Cara Anna in Bucha, Ukraine, Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Ukraine, and Associated Press journalists around the world contributed to this report.

Follow the APs coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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SIOUX CITY -- This month, Siouxland film fans will be able to catch a screening of a documentary with a whole lot of local connections.

On Thursday, April 21, at 6 p.m., Western Iowa Tech Community College is holding a screening of the 2019 film "Growing Magic: The Mickey Mouse Cornfield Story" which was written by Buena Vista University students, narrated by former KTIV reporter Bruce Scheid and focuses on North Iowa residents who made a 520-acre "card" for Mickey Mouses 60th birthday.

According to a press release, the presentation, which is being held at the Cargill Auditorium, is meant to honor Scheid who died in 2021. "Unfortunately, Bruce passed away in 2021 without being able to see Growing Magic," the release said.

The idea to plant crops in the summer of 1988 in a way in which a silhouette of Mickey Mouse could be seen by airline travelers was the brainchild of Jack Lindquist, then-vice president of publicity for Disneyland. Lindquist asked Disney pilots if they knew what the most flown-over region of the continental U.S. was at that time. They reported it was over north-central Iowa and southern Minnesota.

The planting of corn and oats followed a blueprint provided by a Disney artist and a surveying crew. By July, crop-dusting pilots could see the image emerging. News spread fast, leading to a front-page story by USA Today and coverage in the Chicago Tribune, Associated Press and more. Pilots reportedly diverted flight tracks by a few miles to give airline passengers a glimpse at the Mickey Mouse coming to life in an Iowa cornfield.

The effort culminated with a Disney Days festival on a steamy weekend in August, a party with appearances by Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Goofy, and Donald Duck. An estimated 20,000 people swarmed tiny Sheffield, Iowa, for the gala.

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Republican-backed candidates in local school board races came out as big winners in the Milwaukee suburbs that are critical for the GOP in statewide elections, but had mixed results in other parts of battleground Wisconsin. Tuesday's school board elections in Wisconsin were among the earliest nationwide this year and are the latest sign of how politicized typically nonpartisan races for local offices are becoming across the country. Former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, a Republican candidate for governor, took the unusual step of endorsing 48 school board candidates. Of those, 34 won including eight incumbents, based on preliminary results.
SIOUX CITY -- Local drug task force agents have busted a man suspected of receiving at least 21 pounds of methamphetamine and selling it to others for distribution throughout the Sioux City area.

After a staged drug buy on Saturday, agents arrested Jose Duenas-Topete and charged him in federal court with one count of conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine. Also arrested and facing the same charge were Leocadio Contreras-Sebastian, who is accused of bringing Duenas-Topete 7 pounds of meth, and Jose Montes-Topete, who was driving Duenas-Topete.

Duenas-Topete came to the Tri-State Drug Task Force's attention last month, when a confidential source seeking a deal on a pending federal drug charge, identified Duenas-Topete as a source of large quantities of meth in Northwest Iowa.

According to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Sioux City, agents arranged, through the source, to receive a shipment of meth on Saturday at a Sioux City business. Agents gave the source $5,000 in marked bills and electronic recording and transmitting devices and set up surveillance at the business.

Duenas-Topete arrived in one vehicle and the source in another. The vehicle in which Duenas-Topete was riding stopped, and he got out to talk with Contreras-Sebastian, who was in a parked vehicle with Arkansas license plates. Agents observed Contreras-Sebastian give Duenas-Topete a white plastic bag, which he put in his vehicle. All vehicles then left, Duenas-Topete heading west on Gordon Drive and Contreras-Sebastian heading east.

After the source contacted agents to tell them he had received his meth from Duenas-Topete, Iowa State Patrol troopers stopped both vehicles.

In the Duenas-Topete vehicle, which was driven by Montes-Topete, agents found a package containing 1 pound of meth in the map pocket of the front passenger door. The $5,000 agents had provided to the source was found in the glovebox of Contreras-Sebastian's vehicle. The source had given Duenas-Topete the money to buy the meth from Contreras-Sebastian.

After the deal, agents met with the source, who turned over a large plastic bag containing seven bundles, each containing approximately 1 pound of meth.

During questioning, Duenas-Topete told agents he was in contact with a person in Mexico who would arrange for multi-pound shipments of meth to be delivered to him in Sioux City. In the past two months, he received four shipments totaling 21 pounds and sold it in up to 1-pound quantities to others in Sioux City and Plymouth County.

Contreras-Sebastian told agents questioning him that he had received a package containing eight bundles of drugs from the Mexican contact in Arkansas five months ago and held on to it until he was instructed to come to Sioux City to sell it to Duenas-Topete.

Duenas-Topete, is scheduled to appear in federal court Thursday for a detention hearing.

Leocadio Contreras-Sebastian, has waived his right to detention and preliminary hearings, and Montes-Topete, was released Monday on a personal recognizance bond and has a preliminary hearing scheduled for Thursday.

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SIOUX CITY -- A judge has denied a defense request to move the trial of a man charged in a fatal Memorial Day shooting in Luton out of Woodbury County.

District Judge James Daane said media coverage of the shooting, Marvin Hildreth Jr.'s arrest and subsequent legal proceedings have been factual and accurate and he could find no good cause for a change in venue.

"At this time, the court finds a substantial likelihood that a fair and impartial trial can be preserved with a jury selected from Woodbury County," Daane wrote in his ruling, filed late Monday in Woodbury County District Court.

Hildreth, 21, of Whiting, Iowa, has pleaded not guilty of second-degree murder and going armed with intent. His trial is scheduled for May 24.

His attorney, F. Montgomery Brown, filed for the change of venue in August, saying media coverage of the case has been extensive and, along with the continued display of Hildreth's mugshot and information about other unrelated criminal cases in which Hildreth may or may not have been involved, would prevent him from receiving a fair trial in Woodbury County. Brown had asked that the trial be moved to Polk, Johnson, Blackhawk or Linn counties.

Daane granted Brown's request that in lieu of moving the trial, he be allowed to submit a questionnaire to potential jurors prior to trial to determine the extent of their knowledge of the case. Woodbury County Attorney Patrick Jennings did not object to the request for a questionnaire. Daane said the questionnaire will be subject to his approval before it is sent to potential jurors.

Hildreth is charged with the May 31 shooting death of Russell Mohr, 40, of Mapleton, Iowa, at a home at 1932 250th St. in Luton. He's accused of shooting Mohr several times in the chest and also shooting Carrie Pauley once in the hip before driving away.

According to court documents, Hildreth told investigators he went to the home to help with a disturbance.

In a search warrant application filed with the court, a Woodbury County Sheriff's deputy said that Pauley reported that Mohr had come to the home, forced his way through the front door and threatened to abduct and do bodily harm to her. Pauley said Mohr was trying to force her into a pickup truck when Hildreth pulled up.

Pauley said Hildreth had words with Mohr, then fired several shots, striking Mohr numerous times in the chest and Pauley once in her leg, before driving away without saying anything. She gave a description of the car Hildreth was driving.

Hildreth was arrested a short time later near Sloan, Iowa, without incident. A gun was found in the back seat of the car he was driving.

During a later interview at the hospital, Pauley told deputies she had called Hildreth for help after Mohr broke into her home.

Brown has filed notice he plans to use Iowa's "stand your ground" law, which allows justifiable force by a person to avoid injury or a threat to one's life, as a defense.

Brown also has filed a motion to suppress statements Hildreth gave to sheriff's investigators, who Brown says continued to interrogate Hildreth after he asked to call his father. Daane has yet to rule on the motion.

If convicted of second-degree murder, Hildreth would face a 50-year prison sentence. He remains in custody in the Woodbury County Jail on $500,000 bond.

Hildreth faces charges in Monona County in connection with a June 2020 incident in Onawa in which he is accused of firing a shot in the air during an assault.

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JAKARTA, April 6 (Xinhua) -- The Indonesian government has re-imposed a visa-free visit policy for citizens of fellow ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) member countries, the Ministry of Law and Human Rights said on Tuesday.

"With this new policy, foreigners from nine other ASEAN countries are able to enter with visa-free visits," said Director of Immigration Traffic Amran Aris.

People from these Southeast Asian countries are only required to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination and a negative polymerase chain reaction test (PCR) taken 48 hours prior to arrival, and use the PeduliLindungi test and track app on their mobile phone. They are no longer required to undergo a PCR test upon arrival as long as they pass a temperature check.

International airports in Yogyakarta, Makassar, Medan and Pekanbaru have reopened. 
Storm Lake Police launched an investigation after it was notified on March 14 of a possible sexual assault of a minor. After investigating, police said that the 49-year-old had sexual contact with the girl from January 2019 until this March at four locations.
SIOUX CITY -- The Sioux City Police Department is investigating a stabbing incident that took place shortly after noon Tuesday after a group of Morningside roommates got in a fight.

At around 12:12 p.m. Tuesday, Sioux City Police officers were dispatched to a report of a shot being fired in the area of S. Irene Street and Washington Avenue, according to a press release from the department.

Officers found a man who had been stabbed and was taken to MercyOne Siouxland Medical Center for a non-life-threatening injury.

An investigation found that three roommates at a residence in the 500 block of S. Irene Street had gotten into an altercation in their residence. One of the roommates armed himself with a knife and stabbed the other roommate, according to the press release.

The suspect then fled the residence, along with a man and a woman that had been in his company. The third roommate, who was not stabbed, gave chase to the trio, and one of the fleeing group fired a gun at the pursuing roommate.

No one was injured by the gunfire. None of the individuals involved in the incident have been identified, and it was unclear whether any arrests had been made.

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SIOUX CITY -- It took more than 77 years for Harry Nichols' remains to be identified. The COVID pandemic delayed his burial by almost three more.

But finally, in May, the Sioux City native, killed on board the battleship USS Oklahoma during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, will be returned home, buried next to his parents in Memorial Park Cemetery.

"It brings closure to the family. It's really just hard to express in words," his nephew, Mark Nichols said. "Seeing him put to rest with his parents means the world."

Storekeeper 3rd Class Harry E. Nichols was among the 429 USS Oklahoma crewmen killed in the attack, in which the battleship took multiple hits from Japanese torpedoes and capsized quickly, trapping dozens of men below deck.

His parents rarely spoke about their loss after the war, Mark Nichols said, and neither did his father, Norman, who was a year older than Harry.

"He did say there wasn't a day that went by that he didn't think of his brother," Mark Nichols said in a telephone interview from his Melbourne, Florida, home.

Harry Nichols was the second of Ernest and Florence Nichols' three children. Norman served in the Army during World War II, returned to Sioux City after the war and moved to California in 1973. Youngest child Betty moved to Arizona sometime later. Both died before seeing their brother's remains identified and returned home.

Harry Nichols enlisted in the Navy in January 1941 and was assigned to the USS Oklahoma at the time of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack. In the days after the attack, victims whose identities were both known and unknown were buried in Honolulu. Remains recovered in 1943 after the ship was righted were buried in mass graves in Honolulu's National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, also known as the Punchbowl.

As of 2003, 394 of the crewmen remained unidentified when efforts were launched to use modern technology to identify the unknowns. In 2015, 388 crewmen remained unidentified, and their remains were unearthed and sent to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency lab at Offutt Air Force base in Omaha, where a team of anthropologists identified 355 of them before the project ended last summer with just 33 who could not be identified individually.

Mark Nichols submitted a DNA sample to the Navy in 2018. The following spring, he was informed his uncle's remains had been identified.

"I was excited as well as just kind of shocked," said Nichols, who grew up in the Sioux City area and graduated from South Sioux City High School in 1970.

Harry Nichols' remains were identified May 30, 2019. A military service and burial were planned for March 2020, but COVID shut down those plans. Mark Nichols said Navy officers met last week with him and his sister, Nancy Eischeid, a Bishop Heelan graduate, at her home in Cleveland, Tennessee, to resume burial planning. Harry Nichols could have been buried at Pearl Harbor or Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, but the family decided he belonged in Sioux City.

"I just thought the proper place would be with his parents," said Mark Nichols, who served four years in the Air Force after enlisting in the fall of 1970.

Nichols, 70, said his father's ashes will be buried alongside Harry and their parents, too. As a veteran himself, Nichols said having his father and uncle together again means a lot to him.

"I know my dad and Harry sacrificed a lot," he said.

Services, with full military rites, will be at 11 a.m. on May 13. A visitation for community members to pay their respects will be 4 p.m.-8 p.m. May 12 at Christy-Smith Funeral Homes, Morningside Chapel, which is in charge of arrangements.

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SIOUX CITY -- Runoff totals into the Missouri River above Sioux City continue to dip further below normal levels.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Monday lowered the 2022 runoff forecast to 17.8 million acre-feet from 20.4 MAF after March runoff was just 1.5 MAF, 48% of average for the month.

"Runoff was well below normal due to dry soil conditions and well below normal precipitation across the entire Missouri River basin," John Remus, chief of the corps Missouri River Basin Water Management Division, said in a news release. "Due to the lack of plains snowpack in 2022, below-average mountain snowpack and dry upper basin conditions, we expect upper Missouri River Basin runoff to be below average."

The annual forecast now calls for runoff at just 69% of normal levels for the year. The average annual runoff is 25.8 MAF.

This year's low runoff comes after the basin saw 15.2 MAF in runoff in 2021, the 10th lowest total in 123 years of record keeping.

Mountain snowpack that melts and feeds the Missouri River and its tributaries in the late spring and early summer is currently 71% to 75% of average. About 95% of the snowpack typically accumulates by this time and peaks near April 15.

Storage in the river's six reservoirs currently totals 48.4 MAF, 7.7 MAF below the system's flood control storage zone, which begins at 56.1 MAF and extends to 67.7 MAF, leaving extra room to store runoff from snowmelt and spring rains.

Releases from Gavins Point Dam near Yankton, South Dakota, have been increased to 22,500 cubic feet per second to provide water flow support for navigation downstream.

The corps will discuss conditions in the basin and how they will affect river operations at a public meeting at 4 p.m. April 12 at the Betty Strong Encounter Center at the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center, 900 Larsen Park Road.

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DECATUR  Prosecutors accuse Jatrevius O. Jarrett of posing for a cozy portrait on Christmas Eve in a Decatur photo studio, and then returning just over an hour later and being involved in a confrontation that ended with the photographer being shot to death.

Jarrett appeared for a preliminary murder case hearing Wednesday in Macon County Circuit Court. His defense is that he was accosted and beaten up after leaving the photo studio, and had gone back to the area later with an accomplice seeking revenge, but he denies being the gunman who pulled the trigger.

Jarrett, 18, entered not guilty pleas to three alternate counts of murder and Judge Jeffrey Geisler said he had found probable cause to try him.

Prosecutors say the sad irony in the case is that Decatur police investigations have not turned up any connection between the dead photographer, Efrem O. Jones, 31, and the attack on Jarrett after he had left the mans studio.

An arrest warrant detailing the case said Jones had operated out of a makeshift studio in his apartment in the 500 block of South Church Street. Police executing a search warrant had found a room set up for taking Christmas-themed portraits. On Joness camera photo card were images of Jarrett taken on Christmas Eve while posing with a 20-year-old woman. The womans name was written on a dry erase board listing her as being booked for noon.

The arrest warrant said police believe, based on witness reports, that Jones was shot to death outside his apartment at roughly 1:25 p.m. His body was hit with six bullets.

Giving evidence at Wednesdays court hearing, Detective Ben Massey said Jarrett had earlier been jumped by several men after leaving the photographers studio and was then battered and beaten-up.

Questioned by Macon County States Attorney Scott Rueter, he said the assault on Jarrett had been caught on video by witnesses.

Massey then told Rueter that Jarrett had returned to the area seeking revenge, and was backed up by a male accomplice. And when they arrived, they encountered Jones as he was leaving his apartment studio and an argument ensued.

And at that point they confronted him and one of those two gentlemen (Jarrett and the accomplice) ended up shooting Mr. Jones, is that correct? asked Rueter.

That is correct, replied the detective.

Massey told Rueter that Jarrett denied being the shooter and said the other man had fired the shots. But it is clear from his statement to officers that he went back there to seek revenge on somebody for beating him up? asked Rueter.

To confront somebody, yes, replied the detective.

Defense attorney Monroe Mcward, on cross-examination, asked the detective to confirm that Jarrett had immediately denied being the gunman, and Massey said that was correct.

Questioned further by McWard, the detective said Jarrett had named the shooter as a man called Tes or Cortes. The detective, in response to another question, said it appeared that Jarrett had not laid his hands on the victim during their confrontation.

The case against Jarrett is now scheduled for a pretrial hearing June 2. He remains in the custody of the Macon County Jail with bail set at $1.5 million, requiring a bond payment of $150,000 for him to be released.

Contact Tony Reid at (217) 421-7977. Follow him on Twitter: @TonyJReid

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MOSCOW, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Russia and Ukraine are continuing negotiations but there remains a long way to go, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday.

"There is still quite a long road ahead ... The working process is continuing, but more viscously than we want," Peskov told a daily briefing, stressing that Moscow would like Kiev to be more active during the negotiations.

The withdrawal of Russian troops from the Kiev region was to facilitate the peace talks, he told France's LCI broadcaster earlier in the day.

Russia is interested in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky agreeing to Russia's conditions, which were clearly formulated by the Russian delegation, so that the military operation will come to an end, he said. 
CEDAR RAPIDS -- U.S. Senate hopeful Michael Franken has raised nearly $1.4 million during the first quarter of 2022, according to a report his campaign will file Wednesday.

The Sioux City Democrat raised $1,397,843 from more than 36,000 unique donors without one dime of corporate PAC money, he will report to the Federal Election Commission. He finished the January to March quarter with more than $1 million cash on hand  98 percent of which is available for the primary contest.

I'm proud to say that the average donation is less than $30 and we bring in a new donor every three minutes, 24 hours a day, Franken said Monday night during a virtual forum with the Iowa Democratic Rural Caucus. Each week his campaign has been gaining between 500 and 900 contributors, so that's a very encouraging thing.

Franken, a retired three-star admiral who grew up on a rural northwest Iowa farm, describes himself as being pragmatic enough to achieve the achievable and progressive enough to aim for the heretofore unachievable.

He is in a three-way primary for the Democratic nomination with former U.S. Rep. Abby Finkenauer of Cedar Rapids and Glenn Hurst of Minden. The winner of the June 7 primary will face the winner of the Republican primary, either U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley or state Sen. Jim Carlin.

Campaign fundraising numbers have many meanings, Franken campaign manager Julie Stauch said, But the common thread is this demonstrates strong leadership.

Overall, he has raised $1.8 million in the 2022 election cycle.

For Iowans, it means that Michael Franken is the candidate who understands their lives and struggles and can win, Stauch said. For donors, it means donating to Michael Franken is an investment in the person who can meet the moment; who has the experience to deal with the challenges we face as a nation; and can win. For those donors who are not Iowans, it means they are responding to his voice and recognizing that he is a leader for the moment, and can win.

Lastly, overall it shows we are trending in the right direction, Stauch said.

Finkenauer and Hurst havent filed their first quarter reports. She reported raising $1.9 million in 2021 with $724,000 cash on hand. Hurst reported nearly $66,500 raised and $34,000 cash on hand.

According to his Federal Election Commission paperwork, Franken has 51,000 donors, including 2,804 Iowans, who contributed an average of $27. Fifteen percent of his money  $207,517  came from Iowans.

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State Sen. Bruce Bostelman caused quite a stir when he stood on the floor of the Nebraska Legislature last week and lamented that schools were providing litter boxes for students who dress as dogs and cats.

Bostelman was shocked and outraged at the non-existent practice. In his televised floor speech, he demanded that school administrators, the Nebraska Department of Education and the State Board of Education explain what was going on.

They meow and they bark and they interact with their teachers in this fashion, Bostelman said during legislative debate. And now schools are wanting to put litter boxes in the schools for these children to use. How is this sanitary?

In fairness, a lot of people would rightly demand an explanation if schoolchildren truly were defecating in litter boxes.

But the responsible way to handle an outlandish claim you read on Facebook  especially when youre an elected official  is not to run to a microphone and treat it as fact.

The correct approach is what Bostelman did in the hours after he made his comments. He said he checked into the claims with State Sen. Lynne Walz, a Democrat who leads the Legislatures Education Committee, and confirmed there were no such incidents. According to a Washington Post story, they actually called a number of school districts to ask about the litter box fable.

Theres a lesson here  and not just for the conservative Republican from Brainard.

Its easy to have a laugh at the senators expense, which plenty of people did. But maybe most of us have done something ill-advised that were quite grateful hasnt been shared around the world.

In humility, maybe wed even admit to having told friends about some outrageous viral story, or relayed juicy but questionable information we read somewhere  even though we had no idea whether it was true.

We hear something that reinforces our preconceived narrative about a politician or group of people, and our skepticism often goes right out the window. That alone is bad enough. But its worse when we become the spreaders of lies.

Bostelman apologized later that day for publicizing the false claims he read online, but added: It was just something I felt that if this really was happening, we needed to address it and address it quickly.

But wouldnt it have been better to make a few calls first and learn the facts?

Our parents perhaps advised us that we should think before we speak. In the same way, we need to think before we blindly accept and distribute something weve read or heard, particularly when it comes to us via Facebook or other online sources.

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Shanna Moakler has congratulated her ex-husband Travis Barker upon his wedding to Kourtney Kardashian.

The 47-year-old model was married to Travis, 46, from 2004 until 2006 and has 18-year-old Landon and 16-year-old Alabama with him as well as 22-year-old Atiana with her former partner Oscar De La Hoya and the former 'Celebrity Big Brother' star was quick to send her well wishes to her ex after hearing the news that he had wed reality star Kourtney.

She told PEOPLE: "Congratulations to the happy couple. I wish them the best that life has to offer on their journey together."

It comes soon after the news that the 42-year-old 'Kardashians' star - who has has Mason, 12, Penelope, nine, and Reign, seven, from her previous long term relationship with Scott Disick -secretly tied the knot with the Blink-182 drummer in an early morning ceremony at Las Vegas wedding chapel Monday (04.04.22).

Chapel worker Marty Frierson explained that the pair seemed "totally in love" at the low-key affair and explained that only a small number of friends attended the event.

Marty said: "There was a lot of kissing and hugging. They barely came up for air! They just seemed

totally in love.. They just had their team, security and three people that had iPhones - [so] five people total with them. There were friends, but they just came in and filmed them from the time they got out of the limousine to the ceremony to them leaving to tossing the bouquet. Everything."

However, an insider has now claimed that the marriage between Kourtney and Travis - who became engaged after less than a year of dating back in October 2021 - isn't legally binding.

The source told the New York Post newspaper's Page Six column: "They had a ceremony, but on paper its not legal yet."

Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0

Originally published on celebretainment.com, part of the TownNews Content Exchange.
Pay Dirt is Slates money advice column. Have a question? Send it to Athena and Elizabeth here. (Its anonymous!)

Dear Pay Dirt,

We were fortunate enough to sell our California house for literally $1.5 million more than we paid for it, and buy a place in another state outright, with about $700,000 left after taxes. I realized I was not saving enough for retirement living in an extremely expensive place and am relieved to finally feel I have a solid financial cushion.

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The problem is, my partner has very grand visions for our new homebuilding a pool, a gym, extending the house to make a giant master bathroom, etc.while Im more practical and want to update the 1950s bathrooms and kitchen, install central AC, and save the rest. I also dont want to spend all our money.

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I feel, though, that I owe him somewhat because he packed up and moved away from family to live here. That said, he was laid off when he turned 62 and hasnt worked since. Hes always had NO concept of money and, when we met, was spending about $2K a month more than he made. Ive handled the money since and were doing well and living within a budget. My plan is to retire in four years (Im 58).

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My initial thought was to squirrel the money away into a retirement account hes only vaguely aware of (I told him about it, but hes shown no interest in managing it). He keeps saying Were millionaires now but when I try to explain that we currently spend that amount of money every 10 years, and were going to live for another 20-30, it seems to go over his head. I want to keep him happy, but at the same time dont want to have to work until I die to do it.

Whats the best way to approach what will likely be a very uncomfortable conversation? Should I pretend to cave and say you can spend $100K on whatever upgrades you want but thats all we can afford?

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We Are Not Elon Musk

Dear Not Elon Musk,

Great job on making over $700,000 by selling your old home and purchasing a new one. I could easily see how your partner would be mentally swimming around in money piles, a la Scrooge McDuck. I certainly would be too!

You technically dont owe him anything. He chose to move there to live with you. Yes, he probably wouldnt have left where he was living, but at the end of the day, we always have a choice with our actions. Youve also been very supportive of what it sounds like is his choice to not go back to work after being laid off at age 62. But one thing keeps replaying in my head: Its still not great to lie to him about this money.

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If a relationship is built on strong trust and understanding, and youre not suffering abuse or planning to leave, its not a good idea to hide money. Especially a significant amount, like this would be. I encourage you to be honest with yourself, and him, and explain why the money is not to be used for his grand plans, but instead for retirement. You could for sure put forth a budget for renovations, like your $100K idea, and emphasize the interesting things you could do with that. Maybe make sure he gets to see at least one of his ideas for the house executed, if not all of them, and not the most expensive ones. If he argues, encourage him to get another job to start helping out with additional upgrades. Good luck.

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Dear Pay Dirt,

I am in my early 30s and have a huge amount of credit card debt (think $30,000), accumulated due to bad decisions with my first-ever credit card and a fraught relationship with money learned from my mothers shopping addiction and my fathers refusal to talk about money. I just managed to pay off one of my cards (yay!) but even with extensive planning its clear that I will not be able to pay the total off for at least three yearsmore likely four.

I make $57,000 a year, but most of my discretionary income goes to paying this down or to veterinary care for my elderly pets. I dont own my car or my housing and have no real assets; I also am not able to contribute to my retirement.

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My father has been running a successful business for over 20 years and has started an investment account on my behalf to the tune of $25,000. He does not know about my credit card debt. I cant get it out of my mind that even taking $5,000 out of the investment account to reduce some of this debt will go a long way towards getting out of my current hole.

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I know its basically never a good idea to take money out of investments, and since I currently dont have the ability to contribute to a retirement account, this investment really fills that void. The other idea Ive had is to consolidate with a personal loan, but I really feel lost when I think of exploring that optionhow to I find a reputable lender, will they give me enough to help my debt, etc. I have good but not great credit, for what its worth.

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What do you think are my best options?

Hed Never Have To Know

Dear Hed Never Have To Know,

If you wanted to cash it all in, Id be like Thats too shady, but I think a $5,000 withdrawal is a drop in the bucket in your investment account, compared to the rest of the debt you have going on.

I would take out the $5,000 (no more!) and then use the debt snowball method to start making some headway on these loans. Line up all your credit cards from smallest to largest in size. Then, after making sure your monthly payments are all caught up, put the $5,000 towards the debt with the smallest amount. Now that you have cleared up what might even be one or two credit cards, their former monthly payment will be freed up. Place that amount towards the credit card with the next largest amount owed.

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By using the debt snowball method, youll pick up some steam that will keep you motivated and help you see the light at the end of the tunnel. I want you to also consider looking into any additional ways you could be making extra money to help speed the process along. You shared you have cats, so maybe you could cat-sit or dog-walk for a while, through a service like Wag or Rover.

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Dear Pay Dirt,

Im a mid-20-something engaged to someone with a severe chronic illness and have acted as his primary caregiver since he was diagnosed two years ago (weve been together almost 9 years). Hes the love of my life, doing well on medication the last few years, and were committed to making it work, but the financial situation is killing us.

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He gets a very small deposit every month via Social Security disability insurance (SSDI), but its not even enough to cover close to half of rent. We live in one of the lowest-income areas of the state and its still a struggle. I work 60-80 hours a week, and make $25 an hour, but the place I work for has a habit of promising us hours well never see. I dog walk, babysit, do basically whatever I have to on the side to make sure we can cover our bills and still try and put some money away for savings, all on top of trying to complete my residency hours for school and licensure. I owe close to $8,000 on a car and owe my parents close to $70,000 for my masters degree student loans (they didnt charge me any interest and took money out of their retirement to try and help us). I want to be able to pay them back, and be able to be around more to get my fiance to and from doctors appointments, and so on.

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What are my options here? Hes still far too chronically ill to work, and struggles to get out of bed most days. Ive tried to get support from his doctors to help me figure out how to work with Medicare as a caregiver, and theyre no help and I cant seem to figure it out on my own. Social Security had told us if we gave them proof he was using the money to pay bills theyd increase the amount of his SSDI. We did, but theyve ignored all attempts at contact since we followed up when they didnt raise the amount as promised. Its been over a year of trying. We keep delaying getting married because of the lack of financial stability. Any advice would be appreciated at this point.

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Were Both So Tired

Dear Both So Tired,

Kudos to you for being a caregiver. Its a hard job and an exhausting one.

Youre not wrong to say that you need help. Your next step should be finding a pro bono attorney or an organization that can help you fight for the benefits he deserves. The Disability Rights Legal Center (DRLC) helps provide free legal assistance to people with disabilities experiencing discrimination in violation of their civil rights. Your fiancee is losing out on aid that has been promised to him, and the DRLC can provide you with the next steps even if they cannot help. You should also be able to type in pro bono social security + your state and get more resources and information. Im cheering for you.

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Dear Pay Dirt,

My relatively successful parents are downsizing their beloved house in one of the hottest housing markets in the country. My siblings and I all live within a few miles of our parents and get along well, but not great. We are all just really different.

My folks offered up their house at a discount (probably in the ballpark of $400k) to us in order to keep the house in the family, as none of us could afford it without a discount (I couldnt with it). My sister took them up on the deal.

Our parents know that this isnt equal in terms of the bottom line of inheritance, and that there is no easy way to recoup the discount if my sister flips the house in a couple years with a huge profit, but are you aware of any strategies to make this as painless and fair as possible? Or traps to avoid? Keeping in mind that it may be 20 years before my folks both actually pass on and any kind of true-up needs to be made.

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Lastly, in the back of mind is the fact that my sister and her husband make two to three times what my brothers family or my family make.

Cant Help Feeling A Way

Dear Cant Help Feeling A Way,

I think for this situation, your parents are not using the phrase keeping it in the family to mean keeping it in the family as part of a collective inheritance. If your sister truly purchased the house from them at a discount of $400,000, and they signed the title over, its now hers. Any changes she makes that may allow her to flip it for a profit will result in just that: a profit, for her.

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The only thing you can do now, besides be mad, is to talk to your parents, as an adult, over lunch or in a neutral place, and ask if they have all their affairs in order, in case they should pass. If they say yes, you can ask questions about how things may be split up, and if they have decided to use a trust or a will. You can also ask them to see who they have chosen to have as their power of attorney.

They may get angry (no one likes talking about death), but unless or until you can get a copy of their will or trust, you cant fully understand what assets they have, and how to direct the conversation toward the painless and fair outcome you might be hoping for. If they do get angry, let it go and try to come back to it at another time.

The truth is, they may not think that what they have done with the house is unfair, at all, even if it seems that way to youand if thats the case, you may just have to learn to come to terms with it.

Athena
In the new espionage thriller All the Old Knives, Thandiwe Newton, playing a CIA agent turned posh suburban matron, finds herself in a circumstance many viewers may envy: across the table from a lovestruck Chris Pine, in a near-empty restaurant with a view of the sea at sunset and a seemingly inexhaustible wine list. They order a glass apiece, white for her, red for him. Later on, midway through a dinner that features as many flashbacks as courses, we will see them with five glasses on the table, three on his side, two on hers. It starts to feel like a long time that this pair, former co-workers and lovers, have lingered over their fancy meal. Eventually we figure out that this setuptwo middle-aged spies at dinner, engaged in a tense game of cat and mouse as they compare memories of a deadly terrorist incident that took place on their bureaus watch eight years beforeis pretty much going to be the whole movie.

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By current action-movie standards, All the Old Knives (the first feature film to be released by Pines own production company) is a bit pokey and old-fashioned, with its single location and focus on dialogue and character rather than big action sequences. But despite an unfortunate title that suggests dull-edged kitchen tools more than international subterfuge, this is a satisfying throwback to a type of movie that used to be plentiful on American screens: the midbudget, adult-oriented thriller in which a pair of extremely good-looking movie stars solves a mystery or diplomatic crisis of some kind, while from time to time getting tastefully naked. When movie fans bemoan the way branded franchise content has taken over the big screen, this is one of the disappearing subgenres theyre mourning. Walking out of All the Old Knives, I thought first of Three Days of the Condor, another CIA-set thriller with a central romantic relationship tinged with kink. And as I recalled that 1975 classic (a much better movie to be sure, directed by Sydney Pollack and attuned to the paranoid public mood of the post-Nixon years), another thought soon followed: Maybe Pine is the Robert Redford of our time, which would explain why, working in a very different cinematic culture from the one that made Redfords career make sense, he has struggled to find the right vehicles for his particular gifts.

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Those gifts are less well displayed in another new film, The Contractor, where he plays a returning soldier who, struggling to provide for his family, takes a mercenary job with a private security firm of dubious morality. The result is a taut but slightly underbaked action-adventure movie that has Pine escaping elite teams of killers through underwater tunnels and improvising life-or-death strategies on the fly after the job he is sent to Berlin to do goes south. Its a Bourne-like tale of intrigue and amorality, but the archetypal Pine persona doesnt really fit with a Jason Bournestyle character. Any number of actors currently working can carry off the grimly set jaw and stoic competence of the contemporary action hero. Far fewer can, as Pine does in All the Old Knives, tuck into a daintily plated appetizer involving maple-glazed bacon, appear to switch fluently among English, German, and Arabic while interviewing a contact in Vienna, and above all, gaze meaningfully into the eyes of a lost love over a table full of empty wine glasses.

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Its possible I link Pine with wine simply because my first glimpse of the now 41-year-old actor on screen was in a movie about viniculture, the 2008 comedy Bottle Shocknow one of my reliable sick-day comfort watches, both for Pines irresistibly buoyant performance as an underachieving cellar rat and for Alan Rickmans sublime turn as a snooty wine merchant reluctantly succumbing to the hedonistic joys of mid-1970s Napa Valley.

In 2009, when Pine had his first high-visibility role as the young James T. Kirk in J.J. Abrams cinematic reboot of the original Star Trek series, he was already familiar to me as that guy with the eyebrows from the wine movie. As I wrote in my review of Star Trek at the time, Kirk is in a way a tougher role to take on than Spock, dependent as the original characters appeal was on William Shatners odd mix of comic bluster and melodramatic intensity. And what actors line delivery would be easier to simply mimic than Shatners trademark staccato speech? But instead of doing a Kirk impression, Pine reinvented the character as a lovably arrogant hothead who is an utterly credible forerunner to the impulsive, womanizing starship captain familiar to us all from reruns. He has since reappeared twice as Kirk, in Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond, and another chapter has long been in the works. The franchise, it might be argued, has offered diminishing returns with each chapter, but Pines Kirk never fails to deliver.

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It probably doesnt hurt that Pines roots in Hollywood run deep. He grew up in a show-business family going back two generations. His maternal grandmother, Anne Gwynne, was a World War IIera pinup model and actress best remembered for scream queen roles in Universal horror films like Black Friday and House of Frankenstein. His father, now 80, has been a working TV actor since the mid-1960s, appearing on the Western series Gunsmoke, the soap opera Days of Our Lives, and most famously the 1980s cop drama CHiPs. Pines mother and sister, too, worked as TV and film actors before switching to careers in psychotherapy. Pine, whos now sometimes trailed by paparazzi asking about his brainy bookstore hauls, earned a degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2002. He happened upon the theater department as a lonely new student seeking his social tribe, and a few years after graduation found himself getting roles like Lord Devereaux, Anne Hathaways hunky aristocratic love interest in The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement.

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Surveying his filmography over what is now a nearly two-decade career, its hard not to notice that Pine has too seldom found roles that take advantage of the qualities that set him apart from many male actors of his generation: a paradoxical mix of boyish enthusiasm (his Steve Trevor in the Wonder Woman movies is a pilot for a reasonSteve really, really loves aviation) and world-weary smarts. Redford in Three Days of the Condor played a professional book reader for the CIA, a character defined by brains rather than brawn; part of the fun of the film is watching what happens when this cerebral desk jockey is called upon to reinvent himself as an action hero. When Pine is lucky, he has found roles that exploit this same brains/brawn tension. His next big role after Star Trek was in Unstoppable, an excellent Tony Scott thriller co-starring Denzel Washington. Pines character, a wiseass trainee at the train conductor job Washingtons jaded hero has been doing for 28 years, has something of the cocky energy of his young James Kirk. Hes a smart guy who needs to be taken down a peg or two, and when the two men butt heads as they work together to stop a runaway train, there is buddy-comedy gold amidst the action.

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A 2014 attempt at reincarnating Jack Ryan, the Tom Clancy action hero previously played by Harrison Ford, Alec Baldwin, and Ben Affleck, foundered after a single unsuccessful chapter, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruita role, and presumably a role choice, Pine later publicly regretted he did not get right. In truth, its more that the cookie-cutter script didnt get him right. Pine didnt find a film role that quite did until 2016, when he appeared in the great Western crime drama Hell or High Water opposite Ben Foster. (The two actors are reunited in The Contractor, and their scenes are the only part of that movie that crackle with dramatic energy.) As the more high-functioning of a pair of bank-robbing brothers, Pine got to play what is probably his meatiest role to date. Around that same time, Pine presented a different side of his performing self when, playing the prince to Anna Kendricks Cinderella, he winningly belted the comic duet Agony alongside Billy Magnussen in Rob Marshalls mostly disappointing adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods. Pine can sing, as in really sing: In 2016, he duetted with Barbra Streisand on her album Encore, his warm baritone blending beautifully with her familiar trumpet-like soprano as they sang an interweaving medley of Ill Be Seeing You and Ive Grown Accustomed to Her Face.

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Unlike the three Marvel-affiliated Chrises (Hemsworth, Evans, and Pratt) with whom he is at times misguidedly lumped, Pine has never taken on a superhero role per se. His presence in DCs Wonder Woman films is, uncharacteristically for a male actor of his physical type, a truly supporting one, as the hyper-uxorious and frequently imperiled boyfriend of Gal Gadots Diana. If anything it is Steve Trevor, not Diana, who most often occupies the position of a damsel in distress, requiring everything from deep-sea rescue to magical Themysciran healing waters to, in an unsettling subplot of Wonder Woman 1984, a borrowed human body in which to reincarnate his spirit. In one of WW84s most charming scenes, Pine even gets a chance to gender-switch the familiar trope of the makeover montage: Transplanted from the World War I era to the year named in the title, Steve models a series of 80s outfits, offering himself up to the viewers gaze in Miami Vicestyle jackets and luxuriantly be-zippered parachute pants (Does everyone parachute now? asks Steve, ever the aviation nerd) and developing a particular attachment to an American-flag fanny pack. Pines recent adoption of ballet lessons as a real-life hobby seems of a piece with the comfort he has always had with the less than stereotypically manly side of himself. He told an interviewer, I just find [ballet] so beautiful because you have to be so strong and kind of masculine, so to speak, but also very gentle and feminine with your arms and your hands.

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In her eh, its fine review of The Contractor this week, the New York Times Manohla Dargis observes that Chris Pine often seems too pretty, too nice, decent and, well, intelligent for his movies. The abundance of pretty is more than fine by me, especially given that as he ages, Pines almost comic degree of handsomeness is acquiring a more rumpled, lived-in quality. And though, again like Redford, Pine generally tends to play decent guys rather than villains, I dont need him to always be nice: In 2015s Z for Zachariah, he was outstanding as a menacing drifter who disrupts the lives of a man and woman trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic landscape. But the intelligencethats the Pine quality that too often remains unexploited, awaiting the kind of scripts not many screenwriters are bothering to write for an industry that no longer makes a place for them.

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This summer, Pine is set to start work on his own directorial debut with Poolman, an L.A.-set comic mystery starring Pine himself, Annette Bening, and Danny DeVito. Directing oneself as an actor is a tricky assignment even for someone experienced at both jobs. (Here again, Robert Redford is a case in point.) Maybe watching Pine meet that challenge will show us new depths in an actor who rarely fails to elevate even the most pedestrian material. Imagine what he could do with the kind of freestanding, unfranchised, character-driven stories that make full use not just of an actors pretty face (however fine a face it may be: those quizzical dark brows! Those swimming pooldeep eyes!) but of the brain churning busily behind it.
On Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted a series of posts accusing any senator who supports confirming Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court of being pro-pedophile, focusing specifically on Republican Sens. Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins, who voted on Monday to move Jacksons nomination out of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Greene wrote that [a]ny Senator voting to confirm #KJB is pro-pedophile just like she is, before calling out Murkowski, Collins, and Romney by name. You are either a Senator that supports child rapists, child pornography, and the most vile child predators, or not, she added.

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If theres any doubt she was accusing her fellow Republicans of being pro-pedophile, Greene went on TV on Tuesday evening and repeated Murkowski, Collins, and Mitt Romney are pro-pedophile.

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I dont even care about Murkowski and Collins and Romney getting offended, but I hope the people in their states call them out for being pro-pedophile, she continued.

Greenes baseless claim came from a bad-faith campaign against Judge Jackson in the Senate Judiciary Committee that was led by Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, who falsely accused the judge of being soft on sex offenders when her record was in line with other judges.

This is not Greenes first foray into citing lies to portray her political adversaries as criminal deviants who sexually abuse children. Before she was in Congress, Greene was a vocal proponent of the Pizzagate and QAnon-inflected conspiracy theories that the Democratic Party is run by a cabal of satanic child predators. Adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory believe that Hollywood elite and Democratic politicians sexually assault children as part of an effort to harvest an imaginary drug called adrenochrome to give them demonic powers. (Really, look it up.) In September 2017, Greene published a blog post titled MUST READ  Democratic Party Involved With Child Sex, Satanism, and The Occult. In a November 2017 post, Greene highlighted an article that she said tells information that John Podesta is a pedophile and pizza gate is real. Pizzagate is the theory that gained popularity after Donald Trumps election that Hillary Clintons campaign manager, Podesta, was running a child sex trafficking ring out of a D.C. pizza shop. (Again, people really claimed this and you can look it up.)

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Notably, Greene endorsed the idea that pizza gate is real after a gunman stormed the pizza place in question and shot up the restaurant while in search of the child sex traffickers. Although nobody was hurt, prosecutors said that outcome was entirely the product of good luck. (The case ultimately went before Judge Jackson, who sentenced the shooter to four years in prison.) Finally, in a 2017 video, Greene said QAnon was something worth listening to and paying attention to and that theres a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out.

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So again, for Greene, these sorts of claims are not new. Whats new was the tactic, used by Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee, to weaponize the beliefs of Greene and others like her to attack a future Supreme Court justice, and label her as being pro-pedophile.

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Whats also new is that, as of now, few Republican leaders seem to have come to the defense of their colleagues Murkowski, Collins, and Romney, many opting to stay silent about Greenes comments. Which raises the question: How many leading Republicans, like Greene, believe that Murkowski, Collins, and Romney are pro-pedophile and that each of them supports child rapists, child pornography, and the most vile child predators.

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I emailed staff for every Republican member of House leadership, every Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, every member of Republican Senate leadership, and the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee (and Romneys niece) Ronna McDaniel to ask if they believed that Murkowski, Collins, and Romney are pro-pedophile and that each of them supports child rapists, child pornography, and the most vile child predators. I will be updating the responses as I get them.

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So far here are the replies.

Yes, I believe those senators are pro-pedophile.

None so far.

No, I dont believe that.

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel: While I strongly disagree with the three Republican Senators intention to confirm Bidens hand-picked, activist judge, I do not at all believe those Senators condone pedophilia.

Sen. Josh Hawley, Missouri: A representative says: Senator Hawley has already commented on this. I dont think that Judge Jackson is pro-pedophile. I think she has a judicial philosophy where she thinks these crimes  are over-sentenced, over-criminalized, Hawley said. I dont think shes in favor of this activity, but I think shes got a philosophy that leads her to treat these criminals leniently. 

Republican Senatorial Committee chairman, Sen. Rick Scott, Florida: No.

GOP House Conference vice chairman, Rep. Mike Johnson, Louisiana: No.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina: Its a free country. You can say outrageous things if you want to; but its very inappropriate.

Sen. Mike Lee, Utah: No, I think thats silly.

Those we are awaiting response from (members of Republican leadership or the Senate Judiciary Committee)

Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa, ranking member of the Judiciary Committee

Sen. John Cornyn, Texas

Sen. Ben Sasse, Nebraska

Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas

Sen. John Kennedy, Louisiana

Sen. Thom Tillis, North Carolina

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Tennessee

GOP Conference secretary, Rep. Richard Hudson, North Carolina

Chair of the House Republican Policy Committee, Rep. Gary Palmer, Alabama

Chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Rep. Tom Emmer, Minnesota

House Minority leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, California

House Minority whip, Rep. Steve Scalise, Louisiana

GOP House Conference chairwoman, Rep. Elise Stefanik, New York

Senate Minority Leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell, Kentucky

Chair of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, Sen. Roy Blunt, Missouri

Senate Minority Whip, Sen. John Thune, South Dakota

Vice chairwoman of the Senate Republican Conference, Sen. Joni Ernst, Iowa

Republican Conference chairman, Sen. John Barrasso, Wyoming

Ive also reached out to the offices of Collins, Murkowski, and Romney to ask them if they were offended by Greenes comments, or if they are pro-pedophile and support child rapists, child pornography, and the most vile child predators. Collins office pointed me to a statement in which she said of Greene: She obviously can say whatever she wishes, but thats clearly ludicrous and sadly typical of what I expect of her. I will update this post if and when there are further replies.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued a 54 shadow docket order reviving a Trump-era ruling that radically limited the ability of states and tribes to restrict projects, like pipelines, that will damage the environment. With their decision, the majority upended decades of settled law recognizing states authority to protect their own waters without bothering to issue a single sentence of reasoning.

Just two days earlier, Justice Amy Coney Barrett once again declared that the Supreme Court is not political during a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation. Americans concerned that a particular ruling was purely results-driven, she said, should read the opinion. A close reading, Barrett asserted, would help the public decide if the ruling is designed to impose the policy preferences of the majority or an honest effort to determine what the Constitution and precedent requires.

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But those upset by Wednesdays decision, which strayed so far from all known law that even Chief Justice John Roberts was driven to dissent, cannot read the opinionbecause there is none. If that logic-free attack on the Clean Water Act is not a purely results-driven attempt to impose the policy preferences of the majority, its hard to see what is.

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The courts order on Wednesday in Louisiana v. American Rivers is an affront to the Clean Waters Act, federalism, judicial restraint, and common sense. It arises out of a dispute between Donald Trumps Environmental Protection Agency and a coalition of states and tribes. The Clean Water Act, first passed in 1972, is a quintessential example of cooperative federalism: It compels the federal government to work with states and tribes before approving a project that could diminish water quality. In a major 1994 rulingone was accompanied by many pages of reasoningthe Supreme Court affirmed states and tribes authority to grant, modify, or deny certification of a potentially destructive energy project, like an oil pipeline or coal export facility.

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For nearly 50 years, states and tribes have done just that, imposing additional requirements on these projects or vetoing them altogether. They may place limitations on discharge into the water, and on the activity as a whole, to protect their environments from pollution. This power has allowed states and tribes to uphold their own water quality standardseven when the federal government is eager to approve an energy companys latest dangerous venture. The states often deny certification because the company refused to provide key information about the negative environmental impact on rivers, streams, and wetlands. Dissatisfied companies can contest a state or tribes decision in state or federal court, as well as administrative tribunals.

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Predictably, energy companies dislike local authorities latitude over their projects, as do many red states. In 2020, Trumps EPA responded to these objections by drastically cutting back state and tribes authority to modify or deny certifications. The agencys unprecedented rule limited these governments review of potential pollution as well as their ability to incorporate new conditions into the permit. It also slashed the amount of information companies must turn over, leaving states and tribes in the dark about the dangerous environmental impact of new projects. The rule caused substantial disarray in a number of states, including Washington, whose aquaculture industry nearly collapsed.

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Roberts upheld the standard that Barrett propounded on Monday before violating on Wednesday.

A coalition of 20 states, three tribes, and six conservation organizations sued to block the rule, while eight red states and three industry trade groups intervened to defend it. In 2021, Joe Bidens EPA announced that it would reconsider and revise the rule. A district court set aside the rule in October, finding evidence that it would impose significant environmental harm. (That decision is pending in the court of appeals.) After dragging its feet for nearly five months, the group of red states and trade groups belatedly asked SCOTUS to put the district courts decision on hold, before the court of appeals could even issue a ruling.

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Now the Supreme Court has agreed and revived the Trump rulethough we dont know why, because the five-justice majority did not deign to explain its action. This silence left Justice Elena Kagan to issue a bewildered dissent, joined by the chief justice along with Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. Kagan pointed out that, by law, the Supreme Court can issue this kind of stay  in extraordinary circumstances, when there is an exceptional need for immediate relief, including evidence of irreparable harm. Here, the Trump rules defenders insisted that states were obstructing vital energy projects. But, Kagan wrote, they have not identified a single project that a state has obstructed under the district courts decision or cited a single project that the courts ruling threatens. Put simply, they failed to explain how returning to the pre-Trump regimewhich existed for 50 yearswould hurt them at all.

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Then Kagan spelled out what the majority is really doing here: Using the shadow docket to restore the Trump administrations stranglehold on the Clean Water Act. That renders the Courts emergency docket not for emergencies at all, she concluded. The docket becomes only another place for merits determinationsexcept made without full briefing and argument.

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It is remarkable that Roberts, who has joined several shadow docket decisions with no apparent basis in the law, signed onto Kagans dissent. And his support was likely quite important to Kagan. Her opinion seems tailor-made to secure Roberts vote, zeroing in on the most egregious procedural aspect of the majoritys decision while excluding the harsher rhetoric from previous dissents. (She even avoided using the term shadow docket, which the conservatives regard as a slur.) Roberts is a longtime foe of the Clean Water Act, and he might even agree with the majority on the merits. But here, as in Februarys shadow docket order neutering the Voting Rights Act, the chief justice drew the line at outright lawlessness. Roberts may eventually vote to gut both the Clean Water Act and the Voting Rights Act in these cases. But unlike his conservative colleagues, he is unwilling to break the courts own rules to do so.

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In other words, Roberts upheld the standard that Barrett propounded on Monday before violating on Wednesday. The chief justice is sending a signal to the far-right justices that if they are going to shred up decades of precedent, they must at least show their work. But these justices do not appear to care. It has shown virtually no compunction about reshaping American law and society in unreasoned, unsigned, fly-by-night orders. Roberts is ringing the alarm about his own sides injudicious aggression, but even he is powerless to stop them. This reactionary bloc has the votes to do whatever it wants.
Readers of D.C.-based media are, at the moment, under the impression that the situation at the United States-Mexico border is a very troubling onefor Joe Biden.

Border politics worsen for Biden, said the headline on ABCs morning newsletter, the Note, on Monday. Senate GOP to crank up the heat on Biden border crossings, announced Politicos Playbook newsletter last week, while the Washington Post wrote that Biden is coping with a border problem that has rattled some Democrats. Axios has described the president as both troubled and plagued by the issue, and the culminating takeaway in CNNs most recent update about the border was that it will be difficult for the Biden administration to avoid taking responsibility for whats happening therewith the implication being that whats happening is some kind of damaging failure.

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Sign Up for the Surge Slates weekly newsletter capturing all the terror of American politics in seven short, disturbing entries. We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again. Please enable javascript to use form. Email address: Send me updates about Slate special offers. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms Sign Up Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time.

What is the huge problem that is looming over this Democratic presidency? Its the end of a two-year Southern border shutdown, known as Title 42, that was initially put in place by the Trump administration at the behest of adviser Stephen Miller before Bidens choice to extend it.

Miller has a documented history of endorsing white supremacist ideas promoted by people who hold apocalyptic, extreme beliefs about race war and genetics. He was also the architect of the 2018-era Trump policy that separated Latin American immigrant children as young as 4 months old from their parents, without any apparent intent to reunite them. According to former colleagues of his who spoke to the New York Times, Miller was vocally obsessed with the idea that immigrants carry disease well before the COVID outbreak; Title 42 refers to the section of U.S. law regarding public health.

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Specifically, the policy closes border ports of entry to walk-up asylum applicants, and authorizes the immediate expulsion of those who would otherwise be screened for potential asylum claims when apprehended during an unauthorized crossing attempt between ports. Its premise for doing so is that these individuals present a security risk to the U.S. because they may spread COVID.

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Under typical circumstances, asylum is available to all individuals who have a credible fear of being persecuted in their countries of origin because of their race, religion, nationality, political beliefs, or membership in a particular social group. As recently as fiscal year 2019under Trumpabout 46,500 asylum claims were granted by U.S. officials out of about 310,000 applications. (Some of these claims were made by individuals who were also acting on behalf of their spouses and minor children, so the actual number of admitted asylees was higher.)

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During Bidens presidency, Title 42 has resulted in the immediate expulsion of more than half of apprehended border crossers. Potential asylum applicants who would otherwise be eligible for admissionor who would be rejected, but only after being housed for some time in U.S. facilitiesare instead being immediately removed and, in many cases, left directly across the Mexican border. (Under Biden, unaccompanied minors are not subject to Title 42 and are processed in the normal way, as are some other individuals who for reasons related to logistics or their country of origin cannot be immediately expelled.)

The practical consequence of the policy has been to create an enormous new pool of migrants living in temporary circumstances on the Mexican side of the border. According to a Government Accountability Office report, some border guards believe Title 42 has even contributed to an increased number of attempted border crossings, because the expedited removal process limits their ability to gather information about smugglers movements and to disincentivize repeat crossing attempts via prosecution (which can be either civil or criminal).

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Axios says the Department of Homeland Security estimates there are 25,000 people waiting in northern Mexico to attempt further crossings. Many have clustered in dangerous and unsanitary conditions at a camp in the Mexican city of Reynosa, where individuals are subject to attack and extortion by groups including drug cartels and corrupt law enforcement officials. The Human Rights First organization has compiled almost 10,000 accounts of crimesmost of them robbery, rape, and kidnapping for profitperpetrated against migrants in the area since Biden took office. The International Organization for Migration says at least 651 people attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexican border died in 2021, more than in any year since 2014.

Title 42 has, in sum, created a humanitarian crisis. According to both public health officials and common sense, it is also difficult to justify from a public health standpoint. There is no evidence that asylum applicants carry a higher risk of spreading COVID than individuals in groups who are still permitted to cross the border, like students and those whove been granted work visas, nor that immigrants in general are more liable to spread COVID than U.S. residents.

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The premise, if it was ever justified, has become even more flimsy as time has passed. Resources for mitigating and treating COVID have become widely available, while at the same time U.S. government bodies at all levels have eliminated safety requirements for residents. Which is to say, if one were require all asylum seekers to wear masks indoors and receive vaccinations, they would be less likely to spread COVID than the current general population of Texas.

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Title 42 has also always appeared to violate both U.S. law and international laws to which the U.S. is a partythe United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the UN Convention Against Torture. Those laws guarantee certain human rights to asylum seekers, and in the words of then-Sen. Kamala Harris and a number of other Democratic senators in an April 2020 letter, summarily suspending their application in the U.S. is a move with no known precedent or legal rationale that suggests the executive branch is attempting to to operate outside of the law. Indeed, Title 42 was one of the programs that Biden seemed to refer to when he called Trumps immigration policies a moral and national shame during the 2020 campaign.

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In early March, the federal circuit court in D.C. confirmed these suspicions, ruling that the Title 42 program violates laws against returning individuals into situations in which they may be tortured or otherwise persecuted. The court said it would enjoin the expulsion of migrants who were at risk of persecution if the government didnt respond to its ruling within 45 days.

Last Friday, as predicted by other reporting, the Biden administration announced it would dump Title 42 altogether. This is presumed to mean that there will be a surge in asylum applications because of pent-up demand. The outlets quoted at the beginning of this story consider this a problem for Biden because polls indicate that that majorities of Americans believe Biden is handling immigration poorly and would like to limit border crossings.

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Indeed, the mainstream press has been covering Bidens immigration policies as a political liability from the outset of his administration, even when the only actions he had taken were to eliminate or repair harms created by a number of Donald Trumps other initiatives, including several (like the Muslim ban and family separation) that the same media outlets had largely (and accurately) reported on as broadly unpopular attacks on human rights. But the reflex of the mainstream political press is to apply adversarial, both-sides scrutiny equally to each party regardless of the underlying merits of the issue involved, which is how Bidens grudging decision to follow a court order instructing him to extend basic, internationally mandated rights to tens of thousands of people gets reported as a major win for the Republican Party.

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There is a striking contrast at hand in the way that Beltway media outlets such as Politico have rallied around a consensus that America ought to show its commitment to a values-based humanitarian world order when it comes to defending Ukraine. The press has presented Bidens decision to admit 100,000 Ukrainian refugees as essentially uncontroversial, and if anything pressured the administration to admit even larger numbers, if not to commit to a global nuclear war on Ukraines behalf.

There are reasons for that contrast: While the conditions that cause people to leave central America and Mexico are localized, long-standing, intractable, and seemingly remote, the plight of Ukrainians is easily understood. Their country has been invaded by Russia, one of the the United States chief geopolitical rivals, which is destroying its major cities and, in many cases, targeting and even executing civilians. That story has been captured extensively in words and images by the press. More than two-thirds of the public supports asylum for Ukrainian refugees, according to Pew.

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Those arent necessarily good reasons, though, particularly given how many members of the media and political class have celebrated the U.S. interventions in Ukraine as a manifestation of idealism. Ideals are supposed to apply regardless of circumstance and political convenience. Whats more, by swamping Bidens attempts to rectify human rights violations at the border with overwhelmingly negative coverage refracted mostly through the lens of partisan politics, Beltway media are creating a strong disincentive for the administration to take action, making it less likely that the U.S. will try to live up to its stated humanitarian values.

Living in a camp, at risk of rape and kidnapping because a global superpower has decided its domestic concerns override your rights: Isnt that something journalism should treat as a problem, regardless of which superpower is responsible?
BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) -- The Russia-Ukraine conflict continued on Wednesday as the European Union (EU) is proposing its fifth sanction package against Russia. Following are the latest developments of the situation:

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Tuesday that the package, which will be discussed and given the final approval by EU ambassadors on Wednesday, includes bans on coal imports worth 4 billion euros a year and on four Russian banks.

She added that the European Commission is also pushing for bans on Russian ships entering EU ports, on Russian and Belarusian road transport operators, and on imports of oil, wood and cement, seafood and alcohol from Russia.

- - - -

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Russia will be more prudent this year in exporting food, especially to countries that are pursuing a hostile policy towards Russia.

Meanwhile, Putin said that "increased production volumes make it possible to ensure food prices in Russia are lower than on the world market."

Food self-sufficiency is Russia's competitive advantage and the country must protect its people from price fluctuations in the global food market, he said.

- - - -

The EU has declared a number of Russian diplomats working in Brussels "persona non grata," and ordered them to leave host nation Belgium, Josep Borrell, the EU's high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, said Tuesday in a statement.

Russia's Permanent Representative to the EU Vladimir Chizhov was summoned to communicate this decision, according to Borrell.

In response, Russia's Permanent Mission to the EU said Tuesday on its website that the EU's "openly unfriendly -- moreover, hostile and, most importantly, completely groundless step continues the EU's policy of dismantling the partnership between Russia and EU, which recently both sides proudly called strategic."

It added that Chizhov has assured the EU side of "the inevitability of adequate reciprocal measures" by Russia.

Several EU member states, including Sweden, Italy, Romania, Portugal and Spain, also announced on Tuesday their decision to expel Russian diplomats.

- - - -

The National Guard of Ukraine said Tuesday its divisions have arrived at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) site and taken control of the facility's security.

"The major task of the national guardsmen on the Chernobyl NPP site is ensuring security and defense of its nuclear facilities as well as physical protection of nuclear material," the National Guard said on Facebook.

The safety of the site and its transport infrastructure will be checked by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, it said. 
This article is part of the Free Speech Project , a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk made a series of audacious moves this week apparently to exert his influence over Twitter. On Monday, a 13G regulatory filing went public revealing that Musk had purchased a 9.2 percent stakeworth about $2.89 billionin Twitter, making him the companys largest shareholder.

Then, on Tuesday, Twitter announced that Musk would be joining its board. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal tweeted of Musk, Hes both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service which is exactly what we need on @Twitter, and in the boardroom, to make us stronger in the long-term. Later that day, Bloomberg reported that Musk had refiled his disclosure forms to switch his investor status from passive to active, which gives him more ability to have input into the companys operations.

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Its unclear how exactly Musk wants to change Twitter, but his past behavior and comments can allow us to make some educated guessesnamely, that he might want more leeway in what users are able to say on the platform. Musk has one of the biggest accounts on Twitter with more than 80 million followers. Hes also one of the most active prominent figures on the site, posting news about his companies along with jokes and memes, which has previously gotten him into trouble. Musks tweet about taking Tesla private at $420 per share resulted in a securities fraud charge from the SEC, and his tweet calling a U.K. diver a pedo guy resulted in a defamation lawsuit.

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While Musk tweets prolifically, hes faulted the platform for being too restrictive with content moderation. Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy, he tweeted in March. If he really believes that Twitter has issues with moderation and free speech, now is his chance to mold the platform in his vision. [Musk] has taken this pretty unequivocal position that Twitters recent practicesbeing a lot stronger on misinformation and hate speechdont align with his values of free speech,  said Zeve Sanderson, the executive director of New York Universitys Center for Social Media and Politics. Though Sanderson noted it would be tough to spot Musks influence in the moderation of billions and billions of tweets, I think that he does sort of want something that is more akin to 2015 Twitter.

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In recent years, Twitter has stepped up its content moderation practices in the form of labeling or removing rule-breaking posts and deplatforming offending accounts, particularly during major events like the coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 election, and the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Musk has taken the opposite approach at his company: He recently announced that he was denying requests to have SpaceXs Starlink satellite internet services block Russian media sources. Sorry to be a free speech absolutist, he wrote of the decision (in a tweet, of course). He also has a track record of personally promoting coronavirus misinformation.

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But Twitters recent moderation policy changes actually support the ability of users to have an active and open conversation, according to the researchers I spoke to. They hope that Twitter doesnt roll them back given Musks arrival. I dont believe that removing labels is a good thing, because freedom of speech does not mean saying something and not being accountable for it, said Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, a postdoctoral research associate at Princetons Center for Information Technology Policy who has conducted studies on the efficacy of labels. In specific cases, labels can also have a deliberative effect so users can see a different perspective. Sanderson further noted that allowing for more hate speech would be to Twitters detriment. It would be normatively disastrous if they went back on some of their public statements trying to defend more marginalized or vulnerable voices, he said. Theyve made a lot of progress on removing hate speech, and we know from both qualitative and quantitative literature that doing so helps more folks engage in conversation publicly. It can be hard to use a platform to share your ideas if youre at risk of getting pummeled with threats.

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Its unlikely that there would be immediate and drastic changes to the way that moderation on the platform functions, given that Musk only has a 9.2 percent stake, and the fact that Twitter is under both regulatory and market restrictions. You have different notions of freedom of speech in every country, and already platforms are struggling with that because they need also to have common moderation tactics curated for the country, said Papakyriakopoulos, who added that speech regulations vary widely around the world, making it difficult to overhaul how moderation works on a platform thats used globally. If problematic content starts being distributed more and more, and the platform does nothing, its going to be accountable. Theres also the danger of driving away portions of the Twitter user base if the platform becomes too rife with misinformation and toxicity. Musk himself might not care about thathe likely didnt buy Twitter shares to make money, since his investment is such a small portion of his total $219 billion wealth, so its doubtful that hes going to be motivated to grow its user base for profit.

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Interestingly, some of Musks ideas arent all that controversial. One of the few concrete fixes to Twitter that Musk has proposed is allowing users to choose how they want their feeds to be organized, by making its algorithms open-source, instead of requiring everyone to rely on the platforms engagement-based algorithm to pick tweets to show them. Tracy Chou, CEO of the anti-harassment Twitter tool Block Party, is optimistic about Musks potential influence on the platform due to this support for algorithmic choice, which she contends could address many of the moderation issues the platform is currently facing. Its an idea that former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has endorsed as well. Weve seen what happens when the platforms have all that power and are building for the best average experience, but not really catering to the very diverse demands of their user bases, said Chou. Block Party is an example of this vision in practice, as its an add-on that lets people create customized block lists and curate the sorts of mentions they want to see. Making Twitters algorithms open-source would complement Block Partys goals of allowing users to personalize the experience.

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Twitter has already experimented with allowing users to set their feeds to chronological order, but Chou notes that there could be a variety of other options too. Users could configure their feed to only show news from mainstream media, or to only allow kid-friendly content. Chou likened this framework to choosing between getting your news from the tabloids at the grocery checkout aisle or subscribing to the New York Times. Users become their own moderators in a way, and Twitter wouldnt have to wrestle as much with the free speech conundrums that enforcing its content policies can present. If we do want to allow people to say what they want to say, it will increase all forms of speech, including potentially the bad stuff, Chou said. But you balance that by giving individuals more control over whether or not they want to engage.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
ARCHIVED - Listeria detected in popular sausage product in Spain



Customers who have consumed the product should seek immediate medical attention if they develop symptoms

The Spanish Agency for Food Safety and Nutrition, Aesan, has issued a health alert warning after the bacterium listeria monocytogenes was detected in a popular pork sausage product which is widely distributed throughout Spain

The contamination was discovered in Cabeza de Cerdo 1 which is produced by the Vincent Lopez brand, and is known to have been sold in Madrid, Galicia, the Basque Country, Aragon, Asturias and Castilla y Leon, although Aesan believes the sliced sausage may also be circulating in other autonomous communities.

The affected product has an expiration date of April 15 2022 and is manufactured by Carnicas Tello SA of Totanes in Toledo. The contaminated batches are 22501 and 22502.

 Alerta por presencia de Listeria monocytogenes en cabeza de cerdo de la marca Vicente Lopez. Ver detalles del producto implicado.



 No consumir



 https://t.co/Fhunq4TwzQ pic.twitter.com/CSMFsD4Q9O  AESAN (@AESAN_gob_es) April 1, 2022

At the moment, the Department of Health has indicated that there is no record of any cases of listeriosis associated with this sausage, but all batches have been withdrawn from stores. Customers who have purchased the product are advised not to consume it and instead return it to the point of sale.

The consumption of products with listeria can pose a serious health risk, especially to pregnant women, cancer patients and immunosupressed people; therefore, anyone who has eaten the product and develops symptoms such as diarrhoea, vomiting, headache or fever should seek immediate medical attention.

According to Aesan, listeriosis is a food-borne illness that is widely spread in both agricultural environments and food processing plants due to its resistance to conditions such as acidity and low temperatures.

The main route of infections in humans is through the consumption of contaminated food.

Its ability to survive and multiply at refrigeration temperatures allows it survive on many ready-to-eat foods with a relatively long shelf life, such as smoked fish products, heat-treated meat and soft cheeses

Now read: Scam alert in Spain over seed oil being sold as olive oil

Image: Aesan
Slovaks have a history of being prone to believe disinformation.

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President Zuzana Caputova warned the public that we face a lot of lies in regards to the war in Ukraine and urged people to be careful.

"Let's not get confused by lies about denazification, biological weapons, and a surrounded Russia that launched a 'special military operation' to liberate Ukraine," the president wrote on social media. On her Facebook page she published a video depicting war-torn Ukrainian cities as well.

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Caputova is grateful

"The aim of these lies is to evoke uncertainty, make us cynical so that we won't believe anything and therefore not even help anyone," Zuzana Caputova warned.

One such claim is the supposed need to denazify Ukraine even though the country's president Volodymyr Zelensky is of Jewish origin. Russian media also created and spread misinformation and conspiracy theories such as public health facilities as a cover up for American biological laboratories.

President Caputova noted that a free Ukraine is key to the security of Slovakia. Post-war Ukraine on a path to European integration will mean development potential for our country. She added that helping Ukrainian war refugees is solidifying our international standing. Even though the amount of refugees poses a challenge, those who remain in Slovakia can become an asset.

She applauded Slovaks for bringing out the best of themselves during the war.

"I'm immensely grateful for how we have conducted ourselves during the crisis. I hope it will continue," she concluded.

From vaccination to war: Slovak disinformation outlets quick to shift the conversation Read more

Combating disinformation

Slovaks have a long history of being prone to believe disinformation and conspiracy theories, as was shown during the Covid-19 pandemic.

At the outset of the war in Ukraine the Slovak parliament passed a law that allows the authorities to temporarily shut down websites that spread disinformation. The first one to be blocked was Hlavne spravy, one of the largest websites circulating Russian propaganda.

The Slovak police maintain a special Facebook page that combats disinformation. The police warn of lies, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and even Russian trolls on a daily basis.
Low emissions and increased comfort are among the benefits of 70 modern buses coming to the capital.

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For more than 30 years iconic soft red buses roamed the streets of Bratislava. Now the capital's public transport company is bidding farewell to the old Karosa buses. On Saturday, the buses went on their final drive through the city.

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"The blocky Karosa buses were an iconic Czechoslovak vehicle," said chair of the board of directors Dopravny Podnik Bratislava (DPB) Martin Rybansky, as quoted by the TASR newswire. "Many Bratislava residents will remember the experience of being on board upon seeing them. However, times have changed and we in the public transport company are doing everything we can to ensure the ride in our vehicles will be the most pleasant."

Related article

Related article New buses will soon travel the streets of the capital Read more

New additions to the bus fleet

Two types of buses roamed the streets of Bratislava. The first type was smaller, introduced in 1981 and serving until 2011. The second type is longer and articulated. It entered the city in 1991. Thanks to many repairs, upgrades and regular maintenance, they served until November 2021.

"The innovation of our bus fleet brings a new era of public transport into Bratislava, such as air-conditioned and low-floor vehicles with other modern technologies," said Rybansky, as quoted by TASR. "On one hand I will miss the Karosa buses, but on the other I'm happy with the new additions in our bus fleet."

The capital's public transport company ordered 70 Otokar Kent C. buses, some of which have already started travelling the streets, mainly the lines with capacity problems.

Related article

Related article Nearly as many cars as people. Statistical yearbook says a lot about Bratislava Read more

Wifi and USB chargers

Bratislava Mayor Matus Vallo hopes these low-emission vehicles will motivate inhabitants and visitors of Bratislava to use public transport more. Their interior is equipped with hygienic leatherette seats and stainless steel handles. There are also blue seats reserved for passengers with reduced mobility and reserved areas for wheelchairs, prams and bicycles. WiFi and USB chargers are also available.

The new vehicles will meet the most stringent emission standard, according to the carrier.
Systems monitor the Slovak-Ukrainian border 24/7.

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Slovak air-defence systems already protect eastern Slovakia, informed the Armed Forces.

The Armed Forces moved the systems into firing positions in a way that covers the biggest possible part of the eastern border.

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Technical tools of the reconnaissance, including a network of radar stands, monitor airspace above the border with Ukraine 24/7, the TASR newswire reported.

First Patriot anti-missile defence system arrives in Slovakia Read more

Members of our brigade use their experience gained through difficult training in practice, said Jozef Panko, commander of the 11th brigade of the Air Force of the Slovak Armed Forces, as quoted by TASR.

According to the Armed Forces, the positions of the tools are chosen with regard to the jaggedness of the eastern Slovak border so that their capabilities and maximised reach at all heights are used in the best possible way.

"At the same time, we apologise to the population for certain restrictions caused during the transfer of heavy equipment, but we do this activity to ensure their protection," Stefan Zemanovic, spokesperson for the Armed Forces added, as quoted by TASR.
He will be part of the EC delegation.

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Slovak PM Eduard Heger (OLaNO) will travel to Kyiv on Thursday evening (April 7), to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

He will accompany EC President Ursula von der Leyen and EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Joseph Borell.

More details will be presented tomorrow.

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A safer trip

Back in mid-March, the media outlets reported that Heger did not participate in the visit to Kyiv attended by Czech PM Petr Fiala, Polish PM Mateusz Morawiecki and deputy PM Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Slovenian PM Janez Jansa.

Slovak PM did not join Czech, Polish and Slovenian counterparts on visit to Ukraine Read more

Though he received an invitation, Heger decided not to go, explaining that security units had not recommended the visit.

According to the Dennik N daily, Heger will join the EC president upon the request of Slovak diplomacy. It is not clear whether he will present any specific aid offers from Slovakia.

Defence Minister Jaroslav Nad (OLaNO) commented that the currently planned visit is safer than the one organised in mid-March.

We are taking all aspects into consideration, but in the end, it is the decision of the prime minister, Nad said, as quoted by the SITA newswire. He hopes Heger will return to Slovakia safely.

Interior Minister Roman Mikulec (OLaNO) said that Heger did not ask about his opinion on the visit, but added that they had discussed the matter. The minister also said that he respects the decision.
People entitled for the certificate will have to fill in some documents and send them to a special email address.

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The problem with registering a vaccination against Covid carried out abroad seems to be finally solved.

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Our paywall policy: The Slovak Spectator has decided to make all the articles on the special measures, statistics and basic information about the coronavirus available to everyone. If you appreciate our work and would like to support good journalism, please buy our subscription. We believe this is an issue where accurate and fact-based information is important for people to cope.

The National Health Information Centre (NCZI), responsible for the registration system for vaccination against coronavirus and issuing certificates, has announced that everybody, even those not jabbed in Slovakia, will receive the EU Digital Covid Certificate (or EU green card), from April.

The NCZI has responded to the request of the Health Ministry and solved the problem that bothered thousands of Slovaks living and working abroad and foreign nationals living and working in Slovakia, said its head, Peter Lukac.

How it will work

The certificate can now be given to everybody who has been fully vaccinated or has received the booster, and has been administered one of the vaccines recognised by Slovakia and/or approved by the European Medicines Agency, i.e. the vaccines by Pfizer, Moderna, Janssen, AstraZeneca, Novavax, as well as Sputnik V.

Covid jabs abroad no longer a problem Read more

The eligible persons will have to send the following documents to the new email address dcc@nczisks.sk, set up especially for people vaccinated abroad:

Good Faith Declaration  signed and scanned;

Information Chart  signed and scanned;

certificates of previous vaccinations.

The necessary documents as well as instructions for requesting the EU green card can be found on the Korona.gov.sk website. After downloading the documents, people should fill in and sign the forms, then scan and send them via the email.

After submitting the documents, people will receive a text message with the Covid-19 pass, i.e. a nine-figure code containing numbers, letters and dashes, which is inevitable for obtaining the EU green pass. They can then ask for the certificate here (Slovak only).

Green pass, Covid pass, Covid certificate. Which do you need when? Read more

Read more about the vaccination against Covid in Slovakia:
Exchange of hryvnias for euros possible in another city. People vaccinated abroad can now apply for EU green pass.

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Good evening. Welcome to the Wednesday, April 6, 2022 edition of Today in Slovakia, which brings the main news of the day in less than five minutes.

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PM Heger to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv

PM Eduard Heger (Source: TASR)

Slovak PM Eduard Heger (OLaNO) announced that he will be visiting Kyiv on Thursday.

He will accompany EC President Ursula von der Leyen and EUs High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Joseph Borell, and is expected meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

More details are yet to be presented. The Dennik N daily reported that Heger will be part of the delegation upon the request of Slovak diplomacy.

Back in mid-March, the Slovak prime minister did not join his counterparts from the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovenia, despite receiving the invitation. At the time, he explained the decision by saying that the security units had not recommended the trip.

This time, the visit seems to be safer, as Defence Minister Jaroslav Nad (OLaNO) said.

Refugees from Ukraine

Altogether 131 refugees from Ukraine are accommodated at the premises of the Presov prison; the capacity of the facility is 151 people. The original inmates were moved to Sabinov. The picture features an angel in the Ukrainian national colours created by one refugee and her son as a thank you gift for visitors. (Source: TASR)

Altogether 2,365 people have crossed the Slovak-Ukrainian border on April 5 ; of them, 636 have applied for temporary protection. Since February 24, when the war in Ukraine started, 307,765 people in total have crossed the border; 62,334 have applied for temporary protection and 167 have applied for asylum.

; of them, 636 have applied for temporary protection. Since February 24, when the war in Ukraine started, 307,765 people in total have crossed the border; 62,334 have applied for temporary protection and 167 have applied for asylum. Sixty-four Ukrainian patients are currently hospitalised in Slovakia , with 37 adults and 27 children. They are mostly placed in internal, trauma and oncology departments, said Health Minister Vladimir Lengvarsky (OLaNO nominee).

, with 37 adults and 27 children. They are mostly placed in internal, trauma and oncology departments, said Health Minister Vladimir Lengvarsky (OLaNO nominee). It is now possible to exchange hryvnias for euros at a Tatra Banka branch on Sturova Street in Kosice . It will join three other exchange places in Bratislava, Michalovce and Humenne.

. It will join three other exchange places in Bratislava, Michalovce and Humenne. The Interior Ministry has asked the municipalities to accept requests for subsidies submitted by persons and facilities that were providing accommodation to refugees from Ukraine in February and March also after the deadline, set for April 7; they should change their office hours to deal with the potential strain as well. The ministry said it will also accept the overview of subsidies applied that will be submitted after April 15, since Good Friday is celebrated on this day.

If you like what we are doing and want to support good journalism, buy our online subscription. Thank you.

Coronavirus and vaccination news

Also people who are jabbed abroad can now apply for the EU Digital Covid Certificate. (Source: SME)

Picture of the day

Slovak scientists have discovered a brand new mineral  argentopolybasite, which typically occurs in the central Slovak town of Kremnica. It produces black tabular crystals up to five millimetres in size. The Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification of the International Mineralogical Association approved the mineral on April 2, 2022.

Feature story for today

Slovaks have long had the dubious distinction of being the most prone in Europe to believe in conspiracy theories and disinformation, which might explain the prevalence of such sites targeting the Slovak information space.

Spurred by warnings from activists and the Slovak Information Service (SIS), the countrys main intelligence service, at the outset of the war in Ukraine the Slovak parliament passed a law that allows the authorities to temporarily block disinformation websites. And in the first month of Russias invasion, the National Security Authority made four such websites inaccessible, but other websites and Facebook profiles, many of which in the past have spread disinformation about COVID-19, are still operating and spreading disinformation on the war in Slovakias eastern neighbour.

Observers of the disinformation scene agree that many such Facebook profiles and sites were not only created when the pandemic hit, but had been operating for some time, feeding on the same topics that had also gone viral in the mainstream media.

Meanwhile, President Zuzana Caputova warned the public that we are facing a lot of lies in regards to the war in Ukraine and urged people to be careful.

From vaccination to war: Slovak disinformation outlets quick to shift the conversation Read more

In other news

The Slovak air-defence systems are already protecting eastern Slovakia . The Armed Forces moved the systems into firing positions to cover as much of the eastern border as possible; they will monitor airspace above the border with Ukraine 24/7.

. The Armed Forces moved the systems into firing positions to cover as much of the eastern border as possible; they will monitor airspace above the border with Ukraine 24/7. Slovakia is discussing the possibility of repairing damaged Ukrainian military technology , said Defence Minister Jaroslav Nad (OLaNO). He added that they were addressed by the Ukrainian side, and that no decision has been made yet.

, said Defence Minister Jaroslav Nad (OLaNO). He added that they were addressed by the Ukrainian side, and that no decision has been made yet. The cabinet allocated 205,800 to buy seeds and fertilisers as part of the humanitarian aid for Ukraine.

as part of the humanitarian aid for Ukraine. The cabinet approved the draft reform of the first pension pillar , with comments. Even though the original proposal contained the parental bonus at 5 percent of their childs gross salary (2.5 percent for each parent), the coalition eventually agreed on reducing it to just 3 percent (i.e. 1.5 percent for each parent) and setting the cap for the amount, said Labour Minister Milan Krajniak (Sme Rodina).

, with comments. Even though the original proposal contained the parental bonus at 5 percent of their childs gross salary (2.5 percent for each parent), the coalition eventually agreed on reducing it to just 3 percent (i.e. 1.5 percent for each parent) and setting the cap for the amount, said Labour Minister Milan Krajniak (Sme Rodina). Retail turnover went up by 16.4 percent year-on-year in February, representing the second highest y-o-y growth since January 2019 . The higher growth was reported in January 2022, when it increased by 17 percent annually, according to the Statistics Office.

. The higher growth was reported in January 2022, when it increased by 17 percent annually, according to the Statistics Office. In Slovakia, the European Public Prosecutors Office is investigating the fifth highest number of cases in the entire EU. In 2021, it opened 45 investigations of corruption and fraud involving EU funds; a higher number was reported only by Germany, Romania, Bulgaria and Italy. Prosecutors delegated from Slovakia assisted in 29 cases in other EU member states. (Euractiv)

More on Spectator.sk today:

Where to fix a bike on your own in Bratislava Read more

Young HR professional: Building corporate culture and making workers feel good Read more

Three churches in one and other surprises of Nitra Castle Read more

If you have suggestions on how this news overview can be improved, you can reach us at editorial@spectator.sk.
Impact of immediate gas cut off could be devastating for industry, experts warn.

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After the taps on pipelines pumping Russian gas into Europe through Ukraine were suddenly turned off by the Kremlin in 2009 over a pricing dispute, Slovakia made some major changes to its gas infrastructure, setting up a reverse flow from Western Europe and new connections to pipelines in neighbouring countries.

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But, as the spectre of a cut off of Russian gas rears its head once again, experts point out these measures merely diversified the routes of a gas flow that still originated in the same place, and which meant Slovakia continued to be one of the most Russian gas-dependent countries in Europe.

And, they say, it remains in a perilous position if the taps are turned off again, with gas fuels making up a quarter of Slovakias energy mix.

The war [in Ukraine] has irrevocably destroyed confidence in Russian natural gas, Jan Klepac, former executive director of the Slovak Gas and Oil Association (SPNZ) and current advisor of its presidium, said.

Speaking during a workshop on the impact of the conflict in Ukraine on Slovakia organised by SPNZ, he added: While the issue of security of supplies resonated after the crisis in 2009 and also after 2014 [when Russia annexed Crimea], it was gradually forgotten about and pushed back by the Green Deal.

The expert said Slovakia should now look for gas supplied from other sources, either natural gas from Azerbaijan or liquid natural gas (LNG) from the US or Qatar, alternative gases such as biomethane and hydrogen, or consider an extension of domestic natural gas production or increasing energy effectiveness.

Energy experts and manufacturing and gas industry chiefs have warned though that while many politicians are pushing for an immediate embargo on imports of Russian gas as part of sanctions designed to stop its aggression in Ukraine, such a move would cause huge problems for Slovakia.

It is not possible to disconnect from Russian gas immediately without jeopardizing energy security, economic development and, lets be honest, our own comfort, said Klepac.

Poker game
MADRID, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Spain's Health Minister Carolina Darias said on Wednesday that she has proposed to the government that face mask legislation for most indoor settings be removed after the Easter holidays.

If the government goes ahead with the plan, the new rule is likely to be in force on April 20.

"I have proposed that in the Cabinet meeting (held on April 19) we will pass a decree that will mean masks are no longer obligatory indoors," Darias said on the ministry's social media site, adding the change would come into effect the following day.

"Thanks to the high level of immunization in the population, we are in a favorable situation," she said.

The minister explained masks would still be required in certain situations, such as on public transport, in hospitals and in residential care homes.

Spain ended the obligatory use of face masks outdoors in February.

Spain has recorded a total of 11,578,653 COVID-19 cases and 102,747 deaths since the start of the pandemic, according to official data. 
WASHINGTON, April 6 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Joe Biden announced on Wednesday that his administration is extending a pause on federal student loan repayments through August 31, 2022.

In a statement, Biden said "millions of student loan borrowers would face significant economic hardship" if loan payments were to resume on schedule in May.

He also asked student loan borrowers to prepare for a return to repayment, look into loan forgiveness programs, and explore other options to lower their payments.

Republicans were critical of Biden's decision, with U.S. Senator Tom Cotton calling the moratorium "an insult to every American who responsibly paid debts."

"There's no free lunch: this reckless move puts taxpayers on the hook for billions," the Arkansas Republican tweeted on Tuesday.

The freeze was set to lapse on May 1 per an extension signed by Biden in December.

Loan payments were first put on hold in March 2020 under then U.S. President Donald Trump and have since been extended five times.

During the 2020 campaign, Biden said he would support the cancellation of at least 10,000 U.S. dollars in federal student loans per person.

Six-in-10 likely voters support extending Biden's pause on student loan payments, according to a poll released in February.

Similarly, nearly two-thirds of likely voters support government action to cancel some or all student loan debt for all borrowers, the poll also showed. 
The Central Ontario Standardbred Association and TROT Magazine are pleased to announce the third annual COSA Fantasy Stable Contest.

Administered by Standardbred Canada, the 2021 contest proved to be even more popular than the inaugural one, with 1,166 entrants (up more than 25% from the previous year). Focussing on the Ontario Sires Stakes program, the contest is FREE to join and asks participants to assemble a stable of trainers, drivers, and Ontario-based stallions, as well as both two and three-year-old OSS-eligible racehorses for the upcoming season.

The number of categories this year goes unchanged, so each stable will include:

Three drivers (dollars accumulated equal to 5% of their 2022 OSS earnings)

Three trainers (dollars accumulated equal to 5% of their 2022 OSS earnings)

Four sires (dollars accumulated equal to 10% of their progeny's 2022 OSS earnings)

12 OSS two-year-olds (dollars accumulated equal to their TOTAL 2022 earnings - from May 20 onwards)

12 OSS three-year-olds (dollars accumulated equal to their TOTAL 2022 earnings - from May 20 onwards)

"The contest has been very popular in its first two years and it works well to help put a focus on the Ontario Sires Stakes program itself," commented COSA Director Matt Bax. "The OSS is a great program, and the fantasy contest has people following it more closely than ever. We believe that it's a fun way to try and get more people watching and maybe even get more involved."

The Grand Prize that will go to the winner of the contest is once again valued at over $4,000 - a night in a private suite at Woodbine Mohawk Park, with $2,500 in betting vouchers and $1,500 in food and drink.

The winner of the inaugural contest in 2020 was Peterborough's Dan Davis, and in 2021 it was Whitby, Ontario's Tyler MacKendrick. There will once again be HPI vouchers of different denominations awarded as prizes to all of those finishing in the top 20 spots.

Full contest rules are available here. The contest is now open, with the closing date pegged as 5:00 p.m. (EST) on Friday, May 20.

To enter the contest, click here.
On Wednesday, February 23, Standardbred Canada hosted its Annual Member Meeting. The meeting was a virtual event that saw 49 members registered.

The Annual Member Meeting received an update from Bill McLinchey, Chair of the Board; Dan Gall, President and CEO; and Predrag Kalas, Sr. Director of Finance & Administration.

Motions that received approval by the membership included:

Minutes of the Member Meeting February 2021

Approval of the 2021-2022 Audited Financial Statements

Appointment of Grant Thornton as Auditor for Fiscal 2022-2023

Bill McLinchey, Chair of the Board, provided highlights of the work that the Board of Directors conducted in Fiscal 2021 which included:

Significant work of the board in reviewing and revising Standardbred Canadas Five Year Plan

Ongoing review of current bylaws to ensure that that association remains compliant and current with bylaws for Not For Profit organizations

OBrien Awards committee reviewed and revised eligibility requirements including renaming the Driver of the Year category to the Keith Waples Driver of the Year

Government Relations committee established first steps in developing an effective government relations strategy for the association and industry

Breeders committee had significant discussion regarding the microchip program and other membership requests and issues

Governance committee took an active role in establishing board assessments and overseeing governance issues of the board and the association.

Dan Gall, President and CEO provided an Association update which included:

The Website Refresh; Why and how SC needed to refresh the website to ensure the association remained competitive and current with the technological upgrades as a refresh has not been done in over 15 years. Continued work is being completed to address errors and concerns that were caused as a result of the major overhaul of the website platform.

Working with the Canadian Thoroughbred Horse Society on a funding application from the federal government to allow both organizations to develop a proper infrastructure for a traceability and identification program for the racehorse sector

The monumental task of microchipping every racehorse in Canada by January 1, 2022

Development of a detailed plan with recommendations on how Standardbred Canada can protect data collection

Centralizing the newly created SC Racing Services department by utilizing employees at head office to create more efficiencies for racetracks and the association

The Board approved the renovation of SCs office space to convert the 18,000 square feet of office space into additional office space for potential new tenants

Building a succession plan for the association by providing SC employees with leadership development and education with a 12-month leadership course

Presenting to the board a business case on the GPS technology for future direction of charting horse races

The board approved that the association conduct a national survey on the racing industry that focuses on the economic benefits the sport brings to the government and provinces.

Gall further reported that the board approved the following strategic tactics to be completed in 2022 by Standardbred Canada including:

Continue to work on a Single Sign On platform to enable one stop access for members

Conduct an internal review of the Staking Process

Complete the Office Renovation

Develop and release an Online Auction platform for the industry

Continue to review internal processes to become more efficient and effective as an association for the membership.

Direct Deposit Expansion  if successful in launching Direct Deposit in Ontario look at other jurisdictions to expand this service

Increase membership through innovation, awareness and introduce our sport to a younger demographic

Promote and support the associations corporate values of Honesty, Own It (accountability) Openness, Respect, Service to Others and Excellence within the organization

Conduct a National Economic study and develop a strategy to socialize findings to government

Generate ownership opportunities within the industry

SC saw a slight increase (from 3,128 to 3,178) more mares bred by stallions standing year over year with increases in Ontario, PEI, Nova Scotia and Manitoba.

SC saw a 1.2% increase in overall membership from December 2020 to December 2021 with increases coming from primarily from the Atlantic, Ontario and Quebec regions

Ontario leads membership in the under 17 to 34 demographic with 440 members

Outside of Ontario the Atlantic region is sporting the most members in the under 17 to 34-year-old demographic followed by the Western and Quebec regions

Questions from the Floor:

What are the rules for drawing horses?

If the question is regarding preference dates (the date the horse last raced), certain types of races are based on preference dates. Different provinces have different rules for what is a preference date so members will need to refer to their specific jurisdiction. Horses that race the longest time ago take preference in the draw. For any horse that has the same preference dates then they are randomly chosen to be included in the draw by the computer which chooses the horse that raced the longest time ago and/or randomly chooses the horse that has the same preference date and then does the draw for post position.

Are any changes coming to SC's TrackIT platform?

TrackIT platform is going to be upgraded and updated and will be a part of the Single Sign On project. There are no dates to announce at this time.

Freeze branding vs. Microchipping

In 2019, the Board of Directors voted to move in favour of microchipping instead of freeze branding and agreed to work in unison with our American counterpart USTA due to the movement of our racehorses back and forth from both countries.

Will SC freeze brand horses going forward?

SC offers both freeze branding and microchipping. Any member may have their horse freeze branded and microchipped if requested

Why wasnt the issue of not to freeze brand put to the membership for a vote?

The Bylaws, approved by the Board, the membership, and the government, allows the Breeders Committee the latitude to make that decision. As per SC Bylaw, Article 4.14, the Breeders committee has governance of Bylaw #2 and Regulation #2. The Breeders Committee proposes amendments to Bylaw #2 which is voted on by and approved by the membership. In Bylaw #2, Article 5 the Breeders Committee establishes the regulations for the individual identification of the horse which is posted in Regulation #2, Article #2 and the committee has governance of Regulation #2 that does not need approval of the membership.

What is SCs position regarding the #IStandforthebrand?

This has been discussed at length in Board meetings. The Breeders committee met February 9 to discuss. A point from the Breeders Committee meeting included solving the core issue in how to prevent horses from getting to the kill pen

Can Breeding numbers and other statistics be posted on the website?

Many statistics including Breeding stats can be found on the website homepage under the Racing tab and clicking on Statistics

The next Annual Member Meeting is scheduled for February 2023 with further details provided in the future.
Add colonial-era Culpeper County to the growing list of localities worldwide where Amazon will locate a data center to meet ever-growing global demand for digital information and storage.

The Board of Supervisors here, by a split vote Tuesday night, approved the controversial rezoning of 243 acres of farmland, along Rt. 3 near Stevensburg, to light industrial from agricultural for the project of Amazon Web Services subsidiary, Marvell Development.

It was a loss felt deeply by the historic and open-space conservation coalition that mounted steep opposition to the project for its potential to ruin the preserved rural character of the historic farming hamlet in eastern Culpeper.

Board approval paves the way for construction over several years of a pair of 45-feet-tall, 445,000-square-feet data centers housing a collection of computer servers. It will sit on a 10-acre fenced-in complex with security cameras around the perimeter, large cooling equipment on the roof and a pair of 240,000-galon water tanks for fire suppression. The facility will get water from aquifer and wells.

The estimated $500 million-project also includes a six-acre substation the applicant says Dominion will build, powering the data centers by connecting to the nearby Remington-to-Gordonsville high-voltage line. The power company in 2018 started upgrading the line that passes by Stevensburg, a hamlet founded 1782, an estimated $107 million-project.

The Amazon facility served by Dominion will neighbor the historic, nationally recognized circa-1757 manse known as Salubria, built for the colonial governors widow. The project sits across from a state-recognized Civil War encampment on the Brandy Station Battlefield, Hansbroughs Ridge, in an area slated to become part of a state park.

The data center site since 2008 has been in operation as Magnolia Equestrian Center. Owner Irene Carnes addressed the board Tuesday night asking them to approve the project. The 82-year-old said she just built a million-dollar home on 20 acres abutting the property on a lot that prominently faces Germanna Highway.

I plan to live the rest of my life thereI do not see Salubria, Carnes said of the view from her house. The landowner said she loves Culpeper County and would do anything to maintain its integrity.

Carnes said at her age she can no longer run the farm and neither can her 62-year-old daughter.

That will be goneit has to be, she said of the equestrian center. I hope you will see fit to put a data center there.

I can see where this is going

Many who also spoke Tuesday night from the public disagreed. Marring the setting of the valuable historic resources as well as the loss of farmland and rural character were major points among 41 people who addressed the board. Five favored the data centers in that location and one or two were neutral, but the vast majority did not want the internet facilities built in rural, historic Stevensburg.

Salem Supervisor Tom Underwood, following two hours of public comment mostly in opposition, acted quickly around 10:30 p.m. Tuesday in making a motion to approve the rezoning request. Cedar Mountain Supervisor David Durr offered a second before the standing-room-only crowd in the boardroom. Chairman Gary Deal and Catalpa Supervisor Paul Bates provided the other two yes votes to give the project majority support.

Vice Chairman Brad Rosenberger, of the Jefferson District, the most senior member of the board, voted no, along with Stevensburg Supervisor Susan Gugino and East Fairfax Supervisor Kathy Campbell.

Deal and Bates acknowledged the passion of the opposition for the historical sites.

Culpeper is my home for generations, said Bates, adding he did not make the decision lightly.

He said he walked Hansbroughs Ridge during the March 28 history tour in the area sponsored by the Journey Through Hallowed Ground, Piedmont Environmental Council, American Battlefield Trust and Germanna Foundation. Bates commented most Culpeper natives had never heard of the ridge.

He said he didnt think the data center would negatively affect the battlefield state park-to-be. Bates mentioned a data center coexisting close to Bull Run Regional Park on the Manassas Battlefield.

We need to look at the future of our county, he said, noting it doesnt have to be one side or the other. I think we can get along, Bates said, calling for compromise.

Rosenberger said he wasnt going to vote for a project that even remotely smacks of spot-zoning.

I can see where this is going, he said as Underwood and Durr moved to pass the request.

Rosenberger referenced the countys comprehensive plan, whose land use map designates the area zoned as agricultural.

The comp plan is the view of the future of the people of this community, he said, stating the board needed to make its decisions based on the plan. The comp plan is the checkbookthe money in the bank is the zoning ordinance.

Campbell said she was deeply shocked the board would pass the rezoning after hearing so much opposition from constituents.

I am against it, she said.

Lawyers pitch, promises

Northern Virginia land use attorney John Foote, representing Amazon, stated the project would generate $5-$8 million in local taxes. He said 100 acres of the property would be placed in conservation easement within two years.

Foote spoke for 40 minutes in introducing the case prior to the public comment Tuesday, answering some previously unanswered questions from last months planning commission meeting. He called Seattle-based Amazon Web Services one of the most remarkable companies in the world, saying the global cloud-computing platform provides an essential service.

Foote, who has represented big developers seeking to build in Culpeper County for 30-plus years, said its always those interested in historic preservation that are against it. He mentioned how it can be twisted, stating the property is not immediately adjacent to Salubria, but half-mile away.

Amazon will donate $10,000 to the Germanna Foundation that owns the National Register listed mansion, he said.

Foote stated the project site is 5,000 feet from Hanbroughs Ridge, claiming very limited visibility of the data center site from the Civil War historic site due to the topography and vegetation, claims strongly disputed by those opposed.

The front of the project will be 767 feet from Route 3 to make it as invisible as possible, Foote said, in addition to extensive landscaping plans, a 10-feet berm and Civil War-style split rail fences along the highway. The back of the property, wooded wetlands, will remain untouched, he promised.

The seasoned lawyer said the countys comp plan needed to be considered in its entirety, namely the economic development part, which calls for county-wide self-sustaining growth and high-paying jobs. Foote said 30 to 35 people would work per shift at the 24-7 operation, slated to have a gated entry and an emergency access road.

He mentioned Luck Stone quarry, with its extensive sets of fossilized dinosaur tracks, being just up the road as well as Bell Nursery, a greenhouse operation Foote said is two times the size under roof that Amazon will be. The economic benefits to Culpeper of the project will be consequential, the lawyer said.

I dont think anybody else has come to this county with a $500 million investment, Foote said.

He acknowledged availability of power is always an issue with high-consuming facilities like a data center.

The magic elixir is access to fiber and power, Foote said, mentioning the Dominion line in near vicinity. It is an opaque world, he said, in reporting timing or routes for Dominions connection to the project. The State Corporation Commission will offer final approval.

Foote said Marvell could commence operations at the site on the level of power currently available. Amazon could have saved $15-$35 million locating in one of the countys existing technology zones as many have suggested, he added.

But the tech zones put in place in 2006 lack adequate power for todays data centers, Foote said, telling the county it needed to take a look at that. Only one tech company ever located in the five designated areas.

Something is awry, he said. If Amazon could have pulled it off in a tech zone it would have.

Public comments

No new zoning, Stevensburg resident Don Haight told the Board of Supervisors. He said his district is under attack, first by big solar, now Amazon.

Local longtime attorney Bob Hudson spoke against it, saying the project was too big for that area and would impact historic resources. Why is the planned substation so big? he asked, referencing a hidden agenda.

Various heavy hitters in the historic and natural resources conservation community addressed the board opposing the project at that site in Stevensburg, including directors and board members from American Battlefield Trust and the Piedmont Environmental Council, The Germanna Foundation, Friends of Cedar Mountain and Brandy Station Foundation.

Members of the Grayson family, who have cared for and preserved Salubria farm since 1853, asked the board to reject the rezoning, saying it was a bad idea to sit the historic house next to a data center.

Use your heart and mind and think about this decision through the eyes of the people who will be here generations from now, Leslie Grayson said.

Chuck Laudner, with Friends of Culpeper Battlefields, read the resolution the board passed in 2016 in support of the state park, referencing hallowed ground. A data center in view from the park is not compatible, he said.

Jim Dugger spoke was among few in support of the data center in Stevensburg, saying it would be a fantastic opportunity, allowing Culpeper to continue to thrive. It cant be just housing developments getting approved, he said, when so many Culpeper residents commute out of the county to work and for other services.

The tax revenue will help pay for the new schools that will be needed in the near future, Dugger said, adding he doubted tourism from the state park would raise as much.

According to Jim Campi with American Battlefield Trust, the battlefields state park in Culpeper will generate $5 million in tourism revenue its first year and $36 million in the first five years. That value will not depreciate over time, unlike the data centers, which technologically will age out, he said, asking the board to reject the rezoning as being in the wrong place.

Germanna Foundation Director Timothy Sutphin said locating a data center that close to Salubria was short-sighted and the $10,000 donation disingenuous.

Is that the value Marvell has put on the property? he said, stating no one from the company has reached out to their group.

Leading landscape preservation architect Glenn Stach said Civil War land in Virginia is rare, covering just one-third of 1 percent of the state. It is plentiful, however, in Culpeper County, with its six battlefields. Screening for the data center project on the Magnolia property is insufficient and will impact visibility from the ridge.

Germanna descendant Kathy Ellis, a Salubria volunteer, said the property is irreplaceable and should be protected; while Ray Butler, of Stevensburg, said he wouldnt approve the data center rezoning.

Because nobody wants ita shame because we probably need it, he added.

More public comments

The preeminent authority on Culpeper Civil War history Clark Bud Hall told the board hes been speaking on behalf of local battlefield preservation since 1988. Its the most marched-upon, camped-upon, fought-upon place of the entire four-year conflict, he repeated.

Many of those soldiers didnt go home, said Hall, a Vietnam veteran. Theyre still here.

Building a data center near and even on the battlefield where they fell dishonors them, he said.

Marching Through Culpeper author Virginia Morton said people love Salubria because they are transported back in time to colonial days. She suggested the county let Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos know that the land next door isnt available for a data center and to work with him to find a more suitable site.

Travis Brown, a union electrician in his first year on Culpeper Town Council, told the county board he was a proponent of the plan. He said it will help replace tax revenue lost when Continental Teves closes in two years. The data center will create service, blue collar and tech jobs, he said.

Theres a giant hole in the ground 1.5 miles away, Brown said of the massive quarry operation at Luck Stone. This isnt virgin land. He said he works in a data center every day and that they are not noisy and dont use much water.

Troy Ralston and Desy Campbell said the location was all wrong for Amazons Culpeper site. Ralston encouraged the company strongly to withdraw its application for Stevensburg and to get another piece of land for their project in the tech zone.

Longtime zoning board member France Updike, speaking in favor of the project location, said it comes down to a NIMBY issuenot in my backyard.

Put it in somebody elses backyardit doesnt work that way, he said. Updike said the Amazon project is an economic dream and cash cow that will have no impact on county services. Some people want us to go back to the colonial times.

He accused the local news media of overtly favoring historic preservation in the case, saying he wondered how many of Culpepers 60,000 residents belong to the opposition groups.

Stevensburg resident Susan Ralston, opposing the project, said NIMBY is a slur, and noted the proposed data centers are gi-normous.

Why wouldnt anyone care about where they live? she said.

Board comments

Supervisor Gugino, in remarks after the public hearing, agreed with the opposition. She emphasized following the comp plan in deciding the case.

We are here to protect peoples investments, Gugino said of the agricultural area. The future land use map has the area remaining in farmland, she added. If we let thing go back and forth so a couple dollars end up in our pocket, I feel like we are abandoning our citizens.

Chairman Deal said many people were not represented at the hearing, saying they were home taking care of their families or working low- and middle-income jobs.

The majority are struggling, worried about gas prices, groceries, inflation at 8 percent, he said. If we dont plan for the future, these people will be impacted. My role is to provide services for those people and to plan ahead.

Taxes generated by the Amazon project will allow the county to maintain its low property-tax rates, he said.

We have to approve these economic development projects, Deal said.

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More ice cream? Yes, please.

Origin Good Group, a manufacturer of ice cream, yogurt and novelty foods, announced on Wednesday that it will expand its facility in Iredell County in response to the growing demand for those products.

We have experienced great success bringing our U.S. operations to Iredell County in 2009. This success has encouraged investment in N.C. and will further foster strong partnerships. We built our company on vast experience and innovative firsts in dairy and functional foods. We find the local economy able to support this tradition, President and CEO Halil Ulukaya of Origin Food Group said.

The expansion will be a $3 million investment in its current facility and more equipment for a new novelty food line. The project will generate up to 40 jobs, according to the company. The company moved its North American operations to Statesville in 2018 when it acquired the building involved in these plans. Origin Food Group is based in South America.

We are excited by Origin Food Groups announcement to expand its current facility in our county. This expansion and investment demonstrate its commitment to deepen its roots here in Iredell County with local dairy farmers and help grow our economy. The company has established solid relationships with our dairy farms and has strengthened ties with this recent decision to expand, Chairman James Mallory of the Iredell County Board of Commissioners said.

The announcement comes after Statesvilles city council approved a performance-based economic incentive for the company on Monday night. That and one from the Iredell County Board of Commissioners add up to $111,739 in economic incentives for the company.

In the announcement, the company also said the state of North Carolina has also provided support to the project through training grant dollars available through the NC Community College System and administered through Mitchell Community College. The project improvements are expected to be completed by end of 2022.

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A wreath stood outside Martin Luther King Park on Monday evening, a quiet reminder that the civil rights leader was assassinated in Memphis 54 years ago.

For a group that included ministers and mayoral candidate Brian Summers who placed the wreath, it was a moment to honor Kings legacy.

This has always been something I wanted to do and be a part of since moving back to North Carolina last year, Brian Summers said. My hope is that we can remember Dr. King and his legacy on April 4 each year at the park.

Summers, along with Mason McCullough, Seifullah El-Amin, Xavier Zsarmani and the late Anthony Turman, spearheaded the effort after initially requesting Shelton Avenue be changed to honor King.

This nation owes Dr. King a debt of gratitude that cant be repaid, Summers said.

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ABINGDON, Va.  A Glade Spring business has moved to the Art Lab at the William King Museum of Art in Abingdon in an effort to gain a greater presence in the community.

Lavelle Manufacturing, which traditionally made custom denim jeans and other high-end clothing, is undergoing a rebranding, changing its name to Lavelle 2.0 and its mission to teaching the practical skills of sewing and other creative arts.

Stephen Curd, owner and operator of the retail workshop space, said the transition is something hes wanted to do for a long time.

Now I plan to teach the community the skills I have honed for the last 15 years of my career, said Curd, who is moving toward an in-person, do-it-yourself workspace.

The new Lavelle will be all about teaching.

The business owner is hosting an open house from 4 to 6 p.m. on April 9 to introduce the public to the new studio. Refreshments will be provided by Tumbling Creek Cider Co. and A Taste of Africa, a food truck serving South African cuisine.

Curd said the Art Labs digital and 3D labs will allow him to push new boundaries with what he can offer his customers.

This is technology thats totally new for my business. I plan to design a printed jacket using the 3D labs to print my own fabrics.

Among the four-hour classes Curd will offer is Sewing 101, a class where he will teach the basic essentials of sewing, such as how to oil a sewing machine, change a needle and adjust thread tension.

By the end of the four hours, youll better understand your machine and will be able to make a small pillow during the last hour of the class, he said.

A Sewing 102 class will teach participants different techniques, such as how to set a zipper.

For more advanced classes, Curd plans to offer class participants things like how to put together a pattern, make a leather wallet or tie-dye T-shirts.

I want to gauge the community and see what people mostly want to learn.

Classes will start at $50 per person.

The store will include ready-made clothing like T-shirts, hats and jewelry.

He will continue his custom design work on a smaller scale, an element of his business that has gained him recognition throughout the region through his online apparel sales and fashion shows each year.

In his new space, Curd will offer three custom-styled fashion items to customers who can select different colors and styles for crossbody bags and backpacks, as well as two styles of denim jackets.

This way, the customer will feel like they are part of the process of making the product.

The Art Lab at William King Museum of Art is at 415 Academy Drive in Abingdon.

To learn more about class schedules, follow Lavelle Manufacturing on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. For more information go to www.lavellemanufacturing.com.

Carolyn R. Wilson is a freelance writer in Glade Spring, Virginia. Contact her at news@washconews.com.
Barry Hoot Busbys career has taken him all over the world. So, how did he wind up as the new pastor at Bastian Union Church? The answer has roots in his college studies.

For his senior project to earn a cartography degree from Mississippi State University, Busby had to choose where in the United States he would like to live, based on a variety of demographics, like population, the crime rate and how likely an area is to suffer from a natural disaster.

After overlaying demographic map over demographic map, two areas met his criteria: Southwest Virginia and Eastern Montana.

I thought that was interesting and put it in the back of my head, he said. I hiked the Appalachian Trail through North Carolina, but never got around to Virginia. All those things were calling my heart to Virginia.

After college, Busby served as a military intelligence officer and later a Special Forces officer for the U.S. Army. After 9/11, he taught trainees going to war in Afghanistan at Fort Jackson in South Carolina. During that time he said he got fed up with the Army and felt God calling him to the ministry, something different.

The base chaplain told him he was supposed to be a chaplain and he was fighting God.

He said you will be miserable until you admit that is what God wants you to do, Busby said. I told my wife, and she said she was thinking the same thing.

So, he and his family moved to New Orleans so he could attend the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, where he stayed longer than originally planned because of two things: the school asked him to be the chief of police for the seminary school and then Hurricane Katrina hit the city.

I was in charge of the campus for a year during the cleanup, Busby said. I took care of the campus and secured it and made sure people were not doing things they werent supposed to do.

He was in seminary school for almost seven years, from 2003 to 2009. While there, he travelled to Israel eight times, Egypt, Italy and Greece. Then, four days before Christmas 2008, he was told his job would be eliminated in May and he needed to find another position. Almost immediately, his phone rang. On the end of the line was a chaplain recruiter asking him if he wanted to return to Fort Jackson as a student in the chaplain school.

He said yes, and attended the school for six months. His first duty station was serving the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg, where he served for five years. Next, he was named the division chaplain for the Armys Criminal Investigations Division. The job took him all over the East Coast, Puerto Rico and Europe as he check on offices and chaplains in 42 different locations.

Two years later, he moved to Fort Lewis in Washington, where he trained chaplains and chaplain assistants in nine states on the west coast. His last job before moving to Bastian was at Fort Lewis as the division artillery brigade chaplain for the 2nd Infantry Division, helping soldiers move to Korea.

Busby retired Feb. 28.

As for where he would retire, Busby and his wife, Anissa, started discussing that more than a decade ago. Virginia was still calling his name, so they looked at the Smith Mountain Lake area and the area of Arafat. Then, they searched online for land in Virginia.

We really wanted to be in the mountains and were really interested in the Appalachian Trail, Busby said. So, they contacted local real estate agent Joey Dykes and told them what they wanted: 20 to 100 acres near the Appalachian Trail with forest and pasture land.

In 2013, they found the perfect place near Ceres on the Smyth County border. Then, the land went off the market. They didnt have enough money to buy it anyway, so they saved money and continued to look for land. Three years later, in 2016, the land came up for sale again. This time, they were ready and bought it.

The family plans to build a home on the property, but for now is living in and RV and cabin on the land.

A friend told him about an associate pastor position at Bastian Union. Then, Pastor Paul Looney died in August.

We were about to retire; we had everything wrapped up, Busby said God just told us to put an application in. We started the process of them looking at us and us looking at them in October. I wanted to give the congregation time to grieve and process and be able to come together as a family for each other. Then we would come in and join them and be the pastor family for them.

Busby started the job March 6.

This is not what I planned for retirement, but its exactly what I am supposed to be doing, Busby said. Everything there is affirmation that I am where I am supposed to be. Thats a cool feeling to be right in the middle of Gods will.

Busby said its always tricky to follow a beloved leader like Looney.

We can reminisce but, really, the future is ahead of us so we have to rally together, he added.

Both he and the church are learning things about one another.

But the church has gotten behind me, and its exciting, he said. They love to share with me, they have blessed my family beyond measure; we are not in need of anything. They are looking to me for leadership, and Im hungry to learn, and Im excited about them and about what I have inherited  The church is mission-minded and community-minded, and they want to serve, and its a joy to be around people who are constantly asking me what can (they) do to serve. We can change the world with that right here from Bland County.

Busby and his wife have six children: Gavin, 26, who is an Army sergeant currently deployed in Poland; Caitlin, 22, a student at Mississippi State University; Ian, 17; Caedmon, 14; Tristan, 11; and Gillian, 9.

We had two in our 20s, two in our 30s and two in our 40s, he said.

As for his unique nickname, Hoot, Busby said it comes from a character in the 2001 movie Black Hawk Down about a 1993 military mission to bring food to the starving people in Somalia. Busby had friends associated with the mission.

At the end of the movie, Sgt. 1st Class Norm Hoot Gibson, played by Eric Bana, talks about why hes returning to the battlefield.

Theres still men out there, he says. When I go home, people ask me, Hey Hoot, why do you do it man? Why? You some kinda war junkie? I dont say a  word. They dont understand. They dont understand why we do it. They dont understand its about the men next to you. Thats it. Thats all it is.

When Busby was hearing Gods call to the ministry but wasnt listening, Busbys chaplain took him to see the movie and from then on would ask him, Why do we do it, Hoot?

In the Bible, when Saul becomes a Christian, his name is changed from Saul to Paul  For me, Hoot is my Saul to Paul. God was calling me from what I did before into a new ministry. Its a silly name, its a funny name. People laugh when its said. But when I hear it, I think about all of the people dying in a lost world. That is what I think about.

To reach reporter Millie Rothrock, call 276-228-6611, ext. 573, or email mrothrock@wythenews.com.
Wytheville Presbyterian Church hopes people will stop by the church on two Saturdays this month to take a peep at whats inside. In addition to stained glass windows, pews and Bibles, there will be everyones favorite marshmallow, sugary Easter treat: PEEPS. Lots of them.

Only these PEEPS arent for eating, they have been molded, folded and glued into artwork ranging from a sumo wrestler to a diorama of The Last Supper.

Its a little something to smile about these days, said church member Charlie Madden.

He and his wife, Janine, brought up the idea of a PEEP Fest outreach program to church leaders. The couple moved to the Wytheville area two years ago. Previously, they lived in Maryland and enjoyed a PEEPS art show in Westminster, Maryland, for years.

The Maryland PEEPS art show started eight years ago with eight entries. This year, there are 150 entries, Madden said, adding that hundreds of such shows are held across the country each year.

The idea is simple: participants use PEEPS of any kind to create sculptures, dioramas, mosaics and more. They can glue them, cut them and squish them, anything they need to do to make the PEEPS become part of their creation. The entries dont have to be all PEEPS, they can include props like clothing for the PEEPS.

For example, church member Kat McCoy used a table and even tiny wine glasses for her diorama of The Last Supper, which features colorful PEEPS as Jesus and his disciples. The table is cardboard with a small tablecloth and the bench on which the men sit is made of Legos. For her second entry, she did an about-face and created Godzilla using lime green Frankenstein PEEPS.

She purchased her candy from Amazon and the Candy Warehouse. Other participants purchased their PEEPS from local stores.

If you let them dry out, they are easier to glue, she said. I used hot glue and it didnt melt them. Im not sure what that says about PEEPS.

Other participants, like Janine Madden and Rebecca Lane, experimented with the best way to cut and glue PEEPS like letting them dry out first or even freezing them.

Lane is making a purple octopus out of PEEPS chicks and bunnies. Shes also creating a diorama with spiders, using PEEPS for their bodies and pipe cleaners for their legs.

There are just two, and they are cute, Lane said.

Madden is making a rainbow water tower like the one in Wytheville with a sign that says Welcome to PEEPville.

Im cutting the bottoms off of chicks and bunnies, she said.

And like McCoy, Maddens second entry is not anything like rainbows and welcome signs; its sumo wrestlers, complete with a wrestling ring, mawashi (loincloth) and a PEEPS audience.

Charlie and I are fans, she explained. Im cutting heads and bodies off (of PEEPS). There will be a referee, too.

For her third entry, Madden once more makes an abrupt turn with plans to create PEEPS Mary at the tomb of Jesus Easter morning.

Shell have her head in a shawl and peep out, her husband said with a chuckle.

Working with PEEPS has one drawback, the church members said: their hands get sticky from the sugar-coated candy.

Janine Madden gave them a helpful hint: Spray your hands with Pam before you begin.

PEEPS are made by Just Born, a family-owned candy manufacturer that has been in business since 1923. Just Born acquired the Rodda Candy Company of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1953. Although better known for its jelly bean technology, Rodda also made a small line of marshmallow products that intrigued the Just Born family. A popular three-dimensional marshmallow chick was made by laboriously hand-squeezing marshmallow through pastry tubes. Bob Born, son of company founder Sam Born, joined the company in 1946 and helped to mechanize the marshmallow forming process in 1954. As a result, what once took 27 hours to produce and package, the iconic PEEPS Chick now only takes 6 minutes.

Wythevilles First Annual PEEP Fest will be held April 9 and 16 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Hatcher Hall at the Wytheville Presbyterian Church. Event organizers have limited the number of entries this year, and the registration period has passed. They hope that after this year, people will be familiar with the concept and there will be more entries next year.

Admission is free, but you can purchase 10 tickets for $1 and use the tickets to vote for your favorite entry. Each ticket is worth one vote.

To reach reporter Millie Rothrock, call 276-228-6611, ext. 574, or email mrothrock@wythenews.com.
ABINGDON, Va.  Two local artists have combined their quilting skills to benefit an Abingdon nonprofit organization.

Mary Warner of Bristol, Virginia, and Marty Gail of Abingdon, both huge talents in their own rights, collaborated together to make and donate their handmade quilt to Holston Mountain Artisans to be raffled off by the end of the year.

Andrea Rhoten, director of the Abingdon cooperative, said money raised from the raffle will support ongoing programs and classes at the cooperative.

Both artists, whose years of quilting exceed more than 50 years combined, say their donation is a good way to give back to the cooperative that has served the region for more than 50 years.

Together the women began their work on the quilt in late 2020 and finished it last month. Gail machine-sewed the quilt pieces together for the top portion of the quilt before Warner attached the layers and hand-stitched the fabrics, a process that took her 50 hours to complete.

The queen-size quilt is made from all-cotton fabrics, a blend of blues, grays and browns.

The colors work well together. Its got neutral colors and can go well in any room, Gail said.

The quilt, named Grassy Creek, was designed by Bonnie Hunter of Mouth of Wilson, Virginia, as a mystery quilt, put together by clues frequently provided by the designer until the quilt is completed and the design is revealed.

You dont know what the quilt will look like until the very end, said Gail.

A label sewn on the underside of the quilt tells the story.

Raffle tickets are $5 each or $20 for a book of five. The Grassy Creek quilt can be seen at Holston Mountain Artisans in the next few weeks before it travels through town to be on display at various locations in town. Check the Facebook page for Holston Mountain Artisans for locations where the quilt will be displayed.

Raffle tickets can be purchased at the cooperative and designated locations throughout the year.

The raffle will be conducted in December during Santas Workshop at the cooperative.

About the quilters

Gail, originally from Ohio, started quilting when she was in the late 20s. After a 10-year hiatus, she became reconnected with the craft when she moved to Abingdon in 1997.

After quilting for 35 years, Gail estimated she has made as many as 300 quilts, mostly baby quilts. Many of her quilts are donated to the Childrens Advocacy Center of Highlands Community Service in Bristol, Virginia.

She is a member of First Frontier Quilters in Kingsport and Wolf Hills Quilters in Abingdon.

Warner also has been quilting for numerous years.

While traveling with her husband, a diplomat with the U.S. State Department, she was introduced to quilting by a friend in the Dominican Republic who helped her pass the time while on bed rest during her second pregnancy.

She taught me basic hand stitches she had learned from her grandmother. It was a good way to learn, Warner said.

With no internet or quilting classes available, the beginner quilter resorted to using her imagination to gain quilting knowledge. By the time the couple moved to Australia in 2003, the self-taught quilter had access to quilting classes and shops.

The quilter later moved to Malawi, a country in southeast Africa, one of the least developed countries in the world. She was able to teach quilting to the ladies who needed it as a means of survival.

It was an amazing feeling to have helped these women who were so appreciative to learn the skills. I saw them go from having little or no skills to buying their own fabrics and supplies and being able to sell their quilted items, she said.

Holston Mountain Artisans is located at 214 Park St. in Abingdon. Check out the cooperative on Facebook, or visit www.holstonmtnarts.org.

New spring hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

Carolyn R. Wilson is a freelance writer in Glade Spring, Virginia. Contact her at news@washconews.com.
Abingdons Town Council authorized its attorney to add a special election to the ballot for an additional Town Council seat in November to replace the late James Scabbo Anderson, who died recently.

Well miss him a lot, Town Attorney Cameron Bell said during Mondays regularly scheduled Town Council meeting.

But before Andersons seat is permanently filled in November, council plans to appoint someone to temporarily fill the seat until the new council member is selected. The Town Council has 45 days to replace Anderson through the appointive process.

It will be a quick turn-around, Mayor Derek Webb said.

Acting on a motion by Councilwoman Amanda Pillion, the council decided to instruct Bell to file a petition with the Washington County Court to set an election in November to fill Andersons remaining term in office, which runs to 2024.

Bell said it would not make practical sense to hold an election prior to the regular election on Nov. 8, when three positions on the Town Council will be on the ballot.

In a related matter, the council appointed Vice Mayor Donna Quetsch to take Andersons place in representing the Town Council on the Abingdon Planning Commission.

In other business, the council instructed Bell and interim Town Manager Earl Mathers to enter a memorandum of agreement with the town of Damascus to maintain trestles on the western half of the Virginia Creeper Trail.

This 34-mile-long trail was developed in the 1980s after trains stopped running in 1977 on the Abingdon branch of the Norfolk & Western Railway.

Near the westernmost trailhead of the Virginia Creeper Trail, and where the Abingdon branch actually originated, a new plan may be coming to an antique railroad depot owned by the town of Abingdon.

On Monday, the towns tourism manager, Tonya Triplett, proposed creating a rental space at the 1909 Abingdon passenger train station, which in recent years has housed police offices, a bike shop and the Historical Society of Washington County, Virginia.

Over the winter, the depot was home to the Abingdon Farmers Market.
COLUMBIA COUNTY, Ore.  Columbia County Sheriff Brian Pixley and Oregon State Police Sgt. Chad Drew are on critical incident leave after a man was killed during a shootout in Scappoose last week.

The Washington County Sheriff's Office Tuesday released the names of the officers involved in the March 31 shooting.

Investigators say Michael Stockton, 39, fired multiple shots at law enforcement at Grumpy's Towing in the 53000 block of Columbia River Highway in Scappoose, after officers were called to the location around 10 a.m. due to a "disturbance."

Investigators say both officers returned fire at Stockton, who was hit. Officers rendered aid until medical units arrived and declared Stockton dead. The results of an autopsy report are pending.

Two handguns were found in Stockton's possession.

Investigators say Stockton was wanted by the Gresham Police Department for murder charges "related to a homicide earlier" in the week, which was unrelated to the March 31 shooting. Court records show, before his death, Stockton was charged with three felonies: second-degree murder, unlawful use of a weapon and felon in possession of a firearm.

Sheriff Pixley was elected to office in 2019. He was a Scappoose police officer from 2006 to 2010. Pixley first joined the Sheriff's Office in 2003 and returned as a deputy in 2010, investigators report.

Sgt. Drew has been with the Oregon State Police for 18 years.

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Editors note: Information is provided by the Cowlitz County Corrections Department and local law enforcement agencies. Each individual named in this report is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Stolen vehicle  Longview police Tuesday arrested Tyler Cashdollar, 25, of Portland, on suspicion of possession of a stolen vehicle, unlawful possession of a firearm and possession of stolen property.

Stolen vehicle  Longview police Tuesday arrested Timothy Collins, 49, of Kelso, on suspicion of possession of a stolen vehicle.

Trafficking  Longview police Tuesday arrested Dave Clark Anderson, 25, of Kelso, on suspicion of trafficking stolen property and violating a protection order.

Theft  Cowlitz County sheriff's officers Tuesday arrested Arthur Mickens, 33, of Kelso, on suspicion of first-degree theft, vehicle prowling and operating a vehicle without an ignition interlock.

Forgery and stolen property  Kelso police Tuesday arrested Matthew Nguyen, 34, of Kelso, on suspicion of forgery, possession of stolen property, obstructing a public servant, driving with a suspended license and operating a vehicle without an ignition interlock.

Eluding police  Longview police Tuesday arrested Ronald Pitsenbarger, 39, of Longview, on suspicion of attempting to elude police and violating an ignition interlock driver's license.

Animal cruelty  Longview police Tuesday arrested Roger Robatcek, 69, of Longview, on suspicion of animal cruelty.

Fraud  A scam call imitating the Castle Rock Police Department on Tuesday asked for $1,000 to be paid for missing jury duty.

Arson

1200 block of Sixth Avenue, Kelso. Tuesday. House fire allegedly caused by squatters.

Assaults

1200 block of 15th Avenue, Longview. Tuesday. Physical dispute, surveillance footage provided to police.

1500 block of Atlantic Avenue, Woodland. Tuesday. Manager allegedly punched caller in face. Alcohol involved.

Burglary

100 block of Florence Street, Kelso. Tuesday. Residential burglary.

Thefts

1900 block of Dorothy Street, Longview. Tuesday. Attempt to steal propane tank.

2100 block of Larch Street, Longview. Tuesday. BMX-style bike stolen.

400 block of 25th Avenue, Longview. Tuesday. Wooden flag taken from porch.

Vandalism/malicious mischief

1600 block of Eighth Avenue, Longview. Tuesday. Two cars had gas tanks punctured and emptied.

400 block of 20th Avenue, Longview. Tuesday. Can thrown from one car hits another car.

Vehicle prowls

3200 block of Columbia Heights Road, Longview. Tuesday. Clothes and guitar taken from vehicle.

3900 block of Kalama River Road, Kalama. Tuesday.

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The Daily News Students in Need drive has reached $8,952.

The drive raises money for the Lower Columbia College Student Success Fund. The fund makes grants to help students overcome financial humps that might otherwise force them to drop out of school.

All proceeds from the fund go to the college because the newspaper absorbs all administrative costs.

This is the drives seventh year, and its fundraising goal is to raise $35,000 by May 1.

To donate online, go to www.tdn.com/students and click on the donate button.

Latest donations

$1,000: Rich and Mary McCool in appreciation of education.

$500: Gerald and Judy Flaskerud.

$250: Jarl and Kay Opgrande.

$200: Hart-Cs.

$100: Bruce and Pat Eyer, Don and Marla Imsland in appreciation of another chance, Betty Bond, Carol Hadley, Alexis Becker, and Tony and Irene Jeanetta.

$90: Darcie Chess in appreciation of Mark and Eileen Bergeson.

$75: Edith L. Uthman in appreciation of teachers.

$25: Anna Jean Morris.

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An awesome NASA photo, taken by Hubble Telescope, shows a planet being born. It is virtually in the womb.

Hubble Telescope, operated by NASA as well as the Subaru Telescope have captured the a STUNNING formation of a planet. The NASA photo shows a planet virtually in the womb itself for all intents and purposes. It is gas giant in the earliest stages of birth. The study published on Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy states that the baby exoplanet was photographed about 508 light-years outside of our solar system. The lead author of this study and astrophysicist Thayne Currie of the Nasa-Ames Research Center said, We find evidence for a Jovian protoplanet around AB Aurigae orbiting at a wide projected separation (~93 au), probably responsible for multiple planet-induced features in the disk. However, it is still very early on in its birthing process.

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A planet that is still in the process of formation is known as a protoplanet. The Hubble Space Telescope has identified two structures located at 430580 au, the candidate sites of planet formation. AB Aurigae, however, is nearly three times as far as Neptune from the Sun and 93 times farther than Earths distance.

Theres one more piece of evidence that suggests the formation of an exoplanet through a top-down gravitational collapse of clouds of gas, instead of the more commonly-observed gradual accumulation of dust and rocks.

Astronomers have also proposed that planet may be forming due to cooling down of the disk around its sun. This may cause gravity to fragment into one or more massive clumps that form into planets. The planet is already nine times the mass of the giant planet Jupiter and is one of the largest gas giant exoplanets astronomers have ever observed. Had it been slightly larger, it would have fallen into the category of a brown dwarf, or a celestial body between a planet and a star.

Notably, if our own Jupiter had been much larger than what it is, it could have had a shot at becoming a Sun itself. However, it never reached that kind of mass and is now categorised as a failed star. Jupiter has the same ingredients as a Sun- hydrogen and helium.
NASA: Four asteroids are headed towards the Earth today. One of them, as big as a bus is going to come terrifyingly close to our planet, closer than even the Moon.

NASA: In a shocking development, it has been revealed that an asteroid will get closer to Earth than even the Moon. NASA has revealed the terrifying truth. In recent times, the incidents of asteroids flying past the Earth have been so frequent that many people are becoming desensitized towards them. But now, there are as many as new four asteroids headed towards Earth and these will ensure a rude awakening for all. Most of the asteroids we have seen in recent times have crossed our planet from a distance of millions of kilometers, reducing the chances of a collision to a minor probability. But all of these four asteroids will zoom past us at a distance less than 400,000 kilometers. And one among them, a bus-sized asteroid will come as close as just 126,000 kilometers. And how far is Moon from Earth? 384,400 km! This is extremely close and the chance of asteroid strike increases exponentially high at this distance. Will the asteroid hit us? Read on to find out.

There are reasons to be worried. Last month, when asteroid 2022 EB5 struck Earth, it was also supposed to make a pass from a similar distance. But due to the powerful gravitational force of the Earth, it got pulled in and smashed into the western coast of Greenland. Now, all of these four asteroids pose a similar threat. And to make matters worse, while 2022 EB5 was just 6-feet wide, these asteroids are all much larger in size.

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NASA: Four asteroids to come dangerously close to the Earth

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory by NASA provides more information about these asteroids. The asteroids are named 2022 GN1 which is 30-feet wide, 2022 GZ1 which is 19-feet wide, 2022 GQ1 has an approximate width of 28-feet and 2022 GA2 which is understood to be around 15-feet. Among them, 2022 GN1 is the scariest asteroid which will make a pass from the Earth at a distance of just 126,000 kilometers, one-third the distance between the Earth and the Moon. The other three are also expected to fly past us at a distance of 240,000 kilometers, 222,000 kilometers and 401,000 kilometers respectively. For more information on these asteroids, you can visit NASAs Small Body Database.

Due to high risk probability, the Planetary Defense Coordination Office or PDCO, a NASA department dedicated towards observing and ensuring protection from any space threats, is constantly watching these asteroids and assessing whether any of them can strike the Earth. At present, a hit to Earth is quite unlikely, but things can change at any moment so the American space agency is maintaining vigilance.
An Indian social content startup that launched its short video app exactly four days after the government banned Chinas TikTok, has received $805 million in funding.

An Indian social content startup that launched its short video app exactly four days after the government banned Chinas TikTok, has received $805 million in funding, the countrys largest venture capital round this year. A little over half the capital, $425 million, in VerSe Innovation Pvt.s latest round, came from the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, the startup announced on Wednesday. Other investors included the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan Board, Luxor Capital and Sumeru Ventures. Existing backers including Sofina Group and Baillie Gifford also participated. The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Google-financed startup, which has raised $1.5 billion in the past year alone, is now valued at $5 billion.

The Bangalore-based company runs the Josh app, billed as the Instagram for Bharat, referring to non-English speaking India that lives outside its half-dozen affluent top cities. VerSe also owns local language content delivery platform Dailyhunt, which preceded Josh, and also focuses on Indias next billion regional-language users.

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Josh has 150 million monthly active users, while Dailyhunt has 350 million, according to the company. Over nine-tenths of the content on the two apps is in Indian languages.

Indias short video startups have seen sky-rocketing growth after India banned TikTok and a rash of Chinese-origin apps in June 2020. Since then, Josh and its rivals such as Roposo and Moj have registered record user numbers, engagement and revenues. ShareChat, the parent of Moj, is in discussions to raise $200 million from investors including Temasek and Alphabet Inc.s Google at a $5 billion valuation, Bloomberg News recently reported.

VerSe will be profitable within the next two or three years, said Virendra Gupta, founder of VerSe.

VerSe will use the capital to broaden its artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, using data science to boost user engagement and retention. It will also drive revenues through influencer-led commerce and live commerce.
Credit: Shutterstock

This week's report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns global warming is headed for dangerous levels unless greenhouse gas emissions halve this decade. This cannot be achieved without a huge effort from China, the world's biggest emitter.

The IPCC says limiting global warming will require, among other measures, a substantial reduction in fossil fuel use and deploying alternative fuels such as hydrogen.

China is responsible for almost one-third of global emissions each year. It's committed to becoming carbon neutral before 2060and producing green hydrogen is key to this plan.

Australia is also pouring millions of dollars into green hydrogen technology. But China's new plan could throw cold water on Australia's dream of becoming a global hydrogen superpower.

Stiff competition

There's much talk about hydrogen's various roles in the global economy as the world races to decarbonise.

Hydrogen is an energy carrierit holds the energy used to extract it. It can be produced without emissionsas "green hydrogen"using solar and wind energy, nuclear or hydropower. It can also be produced from fossil fuels such as gas and coal.

Hydrogen is versatile. It can be used for electricity and to power vehicles. It can also help produce ammonia, chemicals and petrochemicals, glass and metals.

Australia's extensive solar and wind resources mean it's well placed to produce green hydrogen. And our proximity to Asia means we're well-located to export hydrogen there.

The federal government wants to ship hydrogen to the worldcreating an export industry to replace Australian coal and gas, demand for which will fall as global climate action ramps up.

In the past few years, China has been touted as a major prospective export market for future Australian hydrogen, largely due to an expected rise in its use of hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicles.

The location of onshore wind and solar power capacity in western China, far from much of its energy demand in the east and on the coast, also led to perceptions the nation had only limited capacity to generate green hydrogen.

However, China's hydrogen picture is fast changing.

China throws down the gauntlet

Late last month, China released its first national plan to develop a domestic hydrogen industry out to 2035.

It includes mastering technologies and manufacturing processes, coordinating the construction of hydrogen energy infrastructure, and improving policy and industry standards.

It also involves a phased introduction to industry sectors by 2035 and restricting hydrogen produced from fossil fuels.

China's green hydrogen production is expected to reach up to 200,000 tonnes annually by 2025, avoiding up to two million tonnes of CO each year.

It appears increasingly likely China will not need to import Australia's green hydrogenand will compete with us as a green hydrogen exporter.

Cleaning up industry

The IPCC report said industry accounts for about a quarter of global emissions. It warned achieving net-zero in the sector will be challenging, and will require new production processes including hydrogen.

China's manufacturing sector is a major contributor to its national emissionsparticularly energy-intensive cement and steel production.

Making steel involves removing oxygen from iron ore to produce pure iron. Historically this has been achieved using coal or natural gas, which releases a lot of CO.

But hydrogen can be used in steelmaking to replace fossil fuels.

For China, the benefits of home-grown green steel are twofold. As well as slashing national emissions, it would reduce China's reliance on imported coking coal and iron ore from nations such as Australia.

So how will China produce hydrogen?

Fossil fuels account for almost all China's current hydrogen production.

In theory, coal-based hydrogen can be produced cleanly if CO from the process is captured and stored. This is considered a potential hydrogen production route in China.

But the method is notoriously complicated and expensive, and importantly, does not capture all CO emitted.

As nations seek to reduce their emissions, an export market for coal-based hydrogeneven when some emissions are capturedcannot be assured.

To produce green hydrogen, China would probably use a combination of nuclear and hydropowerthe nation's two cheapest non-fossil fuel sources of energy.

Many coastal regions in China are investing in producing green hydrogen from surplus nuclear energy. And there are moves to use nuclear to produce hydrogen for steelmaking.

Hydroelectricity is another option to produce hydrogen in China. It's a low-cost energy source, and is often produced in excess in the Sichuan and Yunnan provinces.

However, development of nuclear and hydropower capacity in China, as elsewhere, comes with risks and social costs.

For example, the creation of dams for hydropower can rob local communities of their livelihoods. And Japan's Fukishima disasterand more recently, Russian threats to nuclear facilities in Ukraineshow the potential for nuclear disasters.

Looking ahead

Australia has spent big on hydrogen of latemost recently in last month's federal budget, which allocated hydrogen a share in A$1.3 billion for new energy infrastructure and development. The private sector is also splashing cash on the technology.

But Australia's hydrogen strategy appears too optimistic about our export prospects. As others have noted, Japan's demand for our green hydrogen also seems to have been overstated.

Australia needs more detailed plans for securing trading partners in green hydrogen. And it should highlight the comparatively lower risk of investing in Australian hydrogen produced from solar and wind, compared to the plans of our global rivals.

Explore further Green hydrogen from expanded wind power in China: Reducing costs of deep decarbonization

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
In this April 26, 2017, file photo is a Twitter app icon on a mobile phone in Philadelphia. Tesla CEO Elon Musk now has a 9% stake in Twitter and a seat on its corporate board of directors, raising questions about how the billionaire business magnate could reshape the social media platform. He is now Twitter's biggest shareholder and has the ear of top managers. Credit: AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File

Tesla CEO Elon Musk now has a 9% stake in Twitter and a seat on its corporate board of directors, raising questions about how the billionaire business magnate could reshape the social media platform. He is now Twitter's biggest shareholder and has the ear of top managers.

DOES MUSK HAVE A HISTORY WITH TWITTER?

Indeed he does. Musk's 80.5 million Twitter followers make him one of the most popular figures on the platform, rivaling pop stars like Ariana Grande and Lady Gaga. But his prolific tweeting sometimes gets him into trouble when, for instance, he uses it to promote his business ventures, rally Tesla loyalists, question pandemic measures and pick fights with those with whom he disagrees.

In one famous example, Musk apologized to a British cave explorer who alleged the Tesla CEO had branded him a pedophile by referring to him as "pedo guy" in an angryand subsequently deletedtweet. The explorer filed a defamation suit, although a Los Angeles jury later cleared Musk.

He's also been locked in a long-running dispute with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over his Twitter activity. Musk and Tesla in 2018 agreed to pay $40 million in civil fines and for Musk to have his tweets approved by a corporate lawyer after he tweeted about having the money to take Tesla private at $420 per sharewhich didn't happen but caused Tesla's stock price to jump. His lawyer has contended that the SEC is infringing on Musk's free speech rights.

WHAT DOES MUSK PLAN TO DO AT TWITTER?

Musk has described himself as a "free speech absolutist" and has made clear that he doesn't think Twitter is living up to free speech principlesan opinion shared by followers of Donald Trump and several right-wing political figures who've had their accounts suspended for violating Twitter content rules.

But what's really driving Musk's Twitter involvement isn't clear. His preoccupations with the service include arguing to make Twitter's algorithm viewable by the public, widening the availability of "verified" Twitter accounts, and blasting a profile photo initiative involving non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.

Musk has also called "crypto spam bots," which search tweets for cryptocurrency related keywords then pose as customer support to empty user crypto wallets, the "most annoying problem on twitter."

"We don't know what his goals are," said Jennifer Grygiel, a Syracuse University communications professor and an expert on social media. "Maybe Elon Musk secretly wants to blow (Twitter) up ... maybe he wants to destroy it."

Tesla and SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk speaks at the SATELLITE Conference and Exhibition in Washington, Monday, March 9, 2020. Musk now has a 9% stake in Twitter and a seat on its corporate board of directors, raising questions about how the billionaire business magnate could reshape the social media platform. He is now Twitter's biggest shareholder and has the ear of top managers. Credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File

WHAT CAN MUSK ACTUALLY DO AS A BOARD MEMBER?

Musk's role as both a board member and Twitter's largest shareholder certainly gives him an outsized voice in the company's future. He's been publicly praised this week by the CEO and other board members, a sign that Twitter leadership is likely to take his ideas seriously.

But he's still just one member of a 12-person board that Twitter says has "an important advisory and feedback role" but no responsibility over day-to-day operations and decisions. That means Musk won't have the authority to add an "edit button" or to restore Donald Trump's suspended account.

"Our policy decisions are not determined by the board or shareholders, and we have no plans to reverse any policy decisions," said Twitter spokesperson Adrian Zamora.

WHAT DO SHAREHOLDERS THINK?

Several Wall Street analysts said they were encouraged by Musk's new role at Twitter. "This is a guy that does push for change, that does, I think, refuse to have failure on his resume. A perfect guy you need on the board of directors for them," said CFRA Research analyst Angelo Zino. That's true, Zino said, even if "what exactly his ideas are, who the heck knows."

Other investors aren't so sure. Meredith Benton, founder of the investment consulting firm Whistle Stop Capital, has been pushing for shareholders at both Twitter and Tesla to back stronger policies affecting workplace harassment and discrimination. She describes Musk's new role as a concerning development for Twitter investors, especially given accusations by California regulators that Tesla has been discriminating against Black employees at its San Francisco Bay Area factory.

"Twitter's greatest current challenge is to navigate successfully through the societal implications of its platform's use," Benton said. "Elon Musk with his air of reckless bravado presents a risk of undermining thoughtful and strategic management of these topics."

WHERE IS TWITTER AS A COMPANY?

There has been executive turnover since co-founder Jack Dorsey's departure in November left Twitter with a new CEO, Parag Agrawal, whose initial actions have involved reorganizing divisions. Wall Street analysts had approved of the choice of Agrawal as the new leader, but there have been no major changes to the platform yet. The company has long lagged behind its social media rivals and boasts far fewer users.

The mere fact of linking Musk's high-profile name to Twitter could get people to spend more time on on the platform and help it make more money, Zino said, calling Musk "the most important individual" at Twitter.

ISN'T MUSK A PRETTY BUSY GUY?

You wouldn't know it from his prolific posts, but he does hold several big roles, including CEO and "Technoking" of electric car company Tesla and CEO of the rocket company SpaceX. He is also the founder of The Boring Company, an underground tunnel company, and Neuralink, which wants to plant computer chips in people's brains.

Explore further Elon Musk joins Twitter board after amassing massive stake

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MIT researchers developed a method that helps a user understand a machine-learning models reasoning, and how that reasoning compares to that of a human. Credit: Christine Daniloff, MIT

In machine learning, understanding why a model makes certain decisions is often just as important as whether those decisions are correct. For instance, a machine-learning model might correctly predict that a skin lesion is cancerous, but it could have done so using an unrelated blip on a clinical photo.

While tools exist to help experts make sense of a model's reasoning, often these methods only provide insights on one decision at a time, and each must be manually evaluated. Models are commonly trained using millions of data inputs, making it almost impossible for a human to evaluate enough decisions to identify patterns.

Now, researchers at MIT and IBM Research have created a method that enables a user to aggregate, sort, and rank these individual explanations to rapidly analyze a machine-learning model's behavior. Their technique, called Shared Interest, incorporates quantifiable metrics that compare how well a model's reasoning matches that of a human.

Shared Interest could help a user easily uncover concerning trends in a model's decision-makingfor example, perhaps the model often becomes confused by distracting, irrelevant features, like background objects in photos. Aggregating these insights could help the user quickly and quantitatively determine whether a model is trustworthy and ready to be deployed in a real-world situation.

"In developing Shared Interest, our goal is to be able to scale up this analysis process so that you could understand on a more global level what your model's behavior is," says lead author Angie Boggust, a graduate student in the Visualization Group of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Boggust wrote the paper with her advisor, Arvind Satyanarayan, an assistant professor of computer science who leads the Visualization Group, as well as Benjamin Hoover and senior author Hendrik Strobelt, both of IBM Research. The paper will be presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Boggust began working on this project during a summer internship at IBM, under the mentorship of Strobelt. After returning to MIT, Boggust and Satyanarayan expanded on the project and continued the collaboration with Strobelt and Hoover, who helped deploy the case studies that show how the technique could be used in practice.

Human-AI alignment

Shared Interest leverages popular techniques that show how a machine-learning model made a specific decision, known as saliency methods. If the model is classifying images, saliency methods highlight areas of an image that are important to the model when it made its decision. These areas are visualized as a type of heatmap, called a saliency map, that is often overlaid on the original image. If the model classified the image as a dog, and the dog's head is highlighted, that means those pixels were important to the model when it decided the image contains a dog.

Shared Interest works by comparing saliency methods to ground-truth data. In an image dataset, ground-truth data are typically human-generated annotations that surround the relevant parts of each image. In the previous example, the box would surround the entire dog in the photo. When evaluating an image classification model, Shared Interest compares the model-generated saliency data and the human-generated ground-truth data for the same image to see how well they align.

Researchers developed a method that uses quantifiable metrics to compare how well a machine learning model's reasoning matches that of a human. This image shows the pixels in each picture that the model used to classify the image (surrounded by the orange line) and how that compares to the most important pixels, as defined by a human (surrounded by the yellow box). Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The technique uses several metrics to quantify that alignment (or misalignment) and then sorts a particular decision into one of eight categories. The categories run the gamut from perfectly human-aligned (the model makes a correct prediction and the highlighted area in the saliency map is identical to the human-generated box) to completely distracted (the model makes an incorrect prediction and does not use any image features found in the human-generated box).

"On one end of the spectrum, your model made the decision for the exact same reason a human did, and on the other end of the spectrum, your model and the human are making this decision for totally different reasons. By quantifying that for all the images in your dataset, you can use that quantification to sort through them," Boggust explains.

The technique works similarly with text-based data, where key words are highlighted instead of image regions.

Rapid analysis

The researchers used three case studies to show how Shared Interest could be useful to both nonexperts and machine-learning researchers.

In the first case study, they used Shared Interest to help a dermatologist determine if he should trust a machine-learning model designed to help diagnose cancer from photos of skin lesions. Shared Interest enabled the dermatologist to quickly see examples of the model's correct and incorrect predictions. Ultimately, the dermatologist decided he could not trust the model because it made too many predictions based on image artifacts, rather than actual lesions.

"The value here is that using Shared Interest, we are able to see these patterns emerge in our model's behavior. In about half an hour, the dermatologist was able to make a confident decision of whether or not to trust the model and whether or not to deploy it," Boggust says.

In the second case study, they worked with a machine-learning researcher to show how Shared Interest can evaluate a particular saliency method by revealing previously unknown pitfalls in the model. Their technique enabled the researcher to analyze thousands of correct and incorrect decisions in a fraction of the time required by typical manual methods.

In the third case study, they used Shared Interest to dive deeper into a specific image classification example. By manipulating the ground-truth area of the image, they were able to conduct a what-if analysis to see which image features were most important for particular predictions.

The researchers were impressed by how well Shared Interest performed in these case studies, but Boggust cautions that the technique is only as good as the saliency methods it is based upon. If those techniques contain bias or are inaccurate, then Shared Interest will inherit those limitations.

In the future, the researchers want to apply Shared Interest to different types of data, particularly tabular data which is used in medical records. They also want to use Shared Interest to help improve current saliency techniques. Boggust hopes this research inspires more work that seeks to quantify machine-learning model behavior in ways that make sense to humans.

More information: Angie Boggust, Benjamin Hoover, Arvind Satyanarayan, Hendrik Strobelt, Shared Interest: Measuring Human-AI Alignment to Identify Recurring Patterns in Model Behavior. arXiv:2107.09234v2 [cs.LG], Angie Boggust, Benjamin Hoover, Arvind Satyanarayan, Hendrik Strobelt, Shared Interest: Measuring Human-AI Alignment to Identify Recurring Patterns in Model Behavior. arXiv:2107.09234v2 [cs.LG], arxiv.org/abs/2107.09234

This story is republished courtesy of MIT News (web.mit.edu/newsoffice/), a popular site that covers news about MIT research, innovation and teaching.
The robot seen here can't see the human arm during the entire dressing process, yet it manages to successfully get a jacket sleeve pulled onto the arm. Credit: MIT CSAIL

Robots are already adept at certain things, such as lifting objects that are too heavy or cumbersome for people to manage. Another application they're well suited for is the precision assembly of items like watches that have large numbers of tiny partssome so small they can barely be seen with the naked eye.

"Much harder are tasks that require situational awareness, involving almost instantaneous adaptations to changing circumstances in the environment," explains Theodoros Stouraitis, a visiting scientist in the Interactive Robotics Group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

"Things become even more complicated when a robot has to interact with a human and work together to safely and successfully complete a task," adds Shen Li, a Ph.D. candidate in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Li and Stouraitisalong with Michael Gienger of the Honda Research Institute Europe, Professor Sethu Vijayakumar of the University of Edinburgh, and Professor Julie A. Shah of MIT, who directs the Interactive Robotics Grouphave selected a problem that offers, quite literally, an armful of challenges: designing a robot that can help people get dressed. Last year, Li and Shah and two other MIT researchers completed a project involving robot-assisted dressing without sleeves. In a new work, described in a paper that appears in an April 2022 issue of IEEE Robotics and Automation, Li, Stouraitis, Gienger, Vijayakumar, and Shah explain the headway they've made on a more demanding problemrobot-assisted dressing with sleeved clothes.

The big difference in the latter case is due to "visual occlusion," Li says. "The robot cannot see the human arm during the entire dressing process." In particular, it cannot always see the elbow or determine its precise position or bearing. That, in turn, affects the amount of force the robot has to apply to pull the article of clothingsuch as a long-sleeve shirtfrom the hand to the shoulder.

To deal with the issue of obstructed vision, the team has developed a "state estimation algorithm" that allows them to make reasonably precise educated guesses as to where, at any given moment, the elbow is and how the arm is inclinedwhether it is extended straight out or bent at the elbow, pointing upwards, downwards, or sidewayseven when it's completely obscured by clothing. At each instance of time, the algorithm takes the robot's measurement of the force applied to the cloth as input and then estimates the elbow's positionnot exactly, but placing it within a box or volume that encompasses all possible positions.

That knowledge, in turn, tells the robot how to move, Stouraitis says. "If the arm is straight, then the robot will follow a straight line; if the arm is bent, the robot will have to curve around the elbow." Getting a reliable picture is important, he adds. "If the elbow estimation is wrong, the robot could decide on a motion that would create an excessive, and unsafe, force."

The algorithm includes a dynamic model that predicts how the arm will move in the future, and each prediction is corrected by a measurement of the force that's being exerted on the cloth at a particular time. While other researchers have made state estimation predictions of this sort, what distinguishes this new work is that the MIT investigators and their partners can set a clear upper limit on the uncertainty and guarantee that the elbow will be somewhere within a prescribed box.

The model for predicting arm movements and elbow position and the model for measuring the force applied by the robot both incorporate machine learning techniques. The data used to train the machine learning systems were obtained from people wearing "Xsens" suits with built-sensors that accurately track and record body movements. After the robot was trained, it was able to infer the elbow pose when putting a jacket on a human subject, a man who moved his arm in various ways during the proceduresometimes in response to the robot's tugging on the jacket and sometimes engaging in random motions of his own accord.

This work was strictly focused on estimationdetermining the location of the elbow and the arm pose as accurately as possiblebut Shah's team has already moved on to the next phase: developing a robot that can continually adjust its movements in response to shifts in the arm and elbow orientation.

In the future, they plan to address the issue of "personalization"developing a robot that can account for the idiosyncratic ways in which different people move. In a similar vein, they envision robots versatile enough to work with a diverse range of cloth materials, each of which may respond somewhat differently to pulling.

Although the researchers in this group are definitely interested in robot-assisted dressing, they recognize the technology's potential for far broader utility. "We didn't specialize this algorithm in any way to make it work only for robot dressing," Li notes. "Our algorithm solves the general state estimation problem and could therefore lend itself to many possible applications. The key to it all is having the ability to guess, or anticipate, the unobservable state." Such an algorithm could, for instance, guide a robot to recognize the intentions of its human partner as it works collaboratively to move blocks around in an orderly manner or set a dinner table.

Here's a conceivable scenario for the not-too-distant future: A robot could set the table for dinner and maybe even clear up the blocks your child left on the dining room floor, stacking them neatly in the corner of the room. It could then help you get your dinner jacket on to make yourself more presentable before the meal. It might even carry the platters to the table and serve appropriate portions to the diners. One thing the robot would not do would be to eat up all the food before you and others make it to the table. Fortunately, that's one "app"as in application rather than appetitethat is not on the drawing board.

Explore further Humans interacting with robot found to mimic and synchronize with its movements

This story is republished courtesy of MIT News (web.mit.edu/newsoffice/), a popular site that covers news about MIT research, innovation and teaching.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

In 2014, as Russia launched a proxy war in Eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea, and in the years that followed, Russian hackers hammered Ukraine. The cyberattacks went so far as to knock out the power grid in parts of the country in 2015. Russian hackers stepped up their efforts against Ukraine in the run-up to the 2022 invasion, but with notably different results. Those differences hold lessons for U.S. national cyber defense.

I'm a cybersecurity researcher with a background as a political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv and working as an analyst in countries of the former Soviet Union. Over the last year, I led a USAID-funded program in which Florida International University and Purdue University instructors trained more than 125 Ukrainian university cybersecurity faculty and more than 700 cybersecurity students. Many of the faculty are leading advisors to the government or consult with critical infrastructure organizations on cybersecurity. The program emphasized practical skills in using leading cybersecurity tools to defend simulated enterprise networks against real malware and other cybersecurity threats.

The invasion took place just weeks before the national cybersecurity competition was to be held for students from the program's 14 participating universities. I believe that the training that the faculty and students received in protecting critical infrastructure helped reduce the impact of Russian cyberattacks. The most obvious sign of this resilience is the success Ukraine has had in keeping its internet on despite Russian bombs, sabotage and cyberattacks.

What this means for the U.S.

On March 21, 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden warned the American public that Russia's capability to launch cyberattacks is "fairly consequential and it's coming." As Deputy National Security Adviser Anne Neuberger explained, Biden's warning was a call to prepare U.S. cyber defenses.

The concern in the White House over cyberattacks is shared by cybersecurity practitioners. The Ukrainian experience with Russian cyberattacks provides lessons for how institutions ranging from electric power plants to public schools can contribute to strengthening a nation's cyber defenses.

National cyber defense starts with governments and organizations evaluating risks and increasing their capacity to meet the latest cybersecurity threats. After President Biden's warning, Neuberger recommended that organizations take five steps: adopt multifactor password authentication, keep software patches up-to-date, back up data, run drills and cooperate with government cybersecurity agencies.

Access control

Cyber defense begins with the entryways into a nation's information networks. In Ukraine in recent years, hackers entered poorly protected networks by techniques as simple as guessing passwords or intercepting their use on unsecure computers.

More sophisticated cyberattacks in Ukraine used social engineering techniques, including phishing emails that tricked network users into revealing IDs and passwords. Clicking an unknown link can also open the door to tracking malware that can learn password information.

Neuberger's recommendation for adopting multifactor password authentication recognizes that users will never be perfect. Even cybersecurity experts have made mistakes in their decisions to provide passwords or personal information on insecure or deceptive sites. The simple step of authenticating a login on an approved device limits the access a hacker can obtain from just gaining personal information.

Multifactor authentication provides a major boost in network security.

Software vulnerabilities

The programmers who develop apps and networks are rewarded by improving performance and functionality. The problem is that even the best developers often overlook vulnerabilities as they add new code. For this reason, users should permit software updates because these are how developers patch uncovered weaknesses once identified.

Prior to the invasion of Ukraine, Russian hackers identified a vulnerability in Microsoft's leading data management software. This was similar to a weakness in network software that allowed Russian hackers to unleash the NotPetya malware on Ukrainian networks in 2017. The attack caused an estimated $10 billion in damage worldwide.

Just days before Russian tanks began crossing into Ukraine in February 2022, Russian hackers used a vulnerability in the market-leading data management software SQL to place on Ukrainian servers "wiper" malware that erases stored data. However, over the last five years Ukrainian institutions have significantly strengthened their cybersecurity. Most notably, Ukrainian organizations have shifted away from pirated enterprise software, and they integrated their information systems into the global cybersecurity community of technology firms and data protection agencies.

As a result, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center identified the new malware as it began appearing on Ukrainian networks. The early warning allowed Microsoft to distribute a patch around the world to prevent the servers from being erased by this malware.

Backing up data

Ransomware attacks already frequently target public and private organizations in the U.S. The hackers lock out users from an institution's data networks and demand payment to return access to them.

Wiper malware used in the Russian cyberattacks on Ukraine operates in a similar manner to ransomware. However, pseudo ransomware attacks permanently destroy an institution's access to its data.

Backing up critical data is an important step in reducing the impact of wiper or ransomware attacks. Some private organizations have even taken to storing data on two separate cloud-based systems. This reduces the chances that attacks could deprive an organization of the data it needs to continue operating.

Drills and cooperation

The last set of Neuberger's recommendations is to continually conduct cybersecurity drills while maintaining cooperative relationships with federal cyber defense agencies. In the months leading up to Russia's invasion, Ukrainian organizations benefited from working closely with U.S. agencies to bolster the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure. The agencies helped scan Ukrainian networks for malware and supported penetration tests that use hacker tools to look for vulnerabilities that can give hackers access to their systems.

Small and large organizations in the U.S. concerned about cyberattacks should seek a strong relationship with a wide-range of federal agencies responsible for cybersecurity. Recent regulations require firms to disclose information on cyberattacks to their networks. But organizations should turn to cybersecurity authorities before experiencing a cyberrattack.

U.S. government agencies offer best practices for training staff, including the use of tabletop and simulated attack exercises. As Ukrainians have learned, tomorrow's cyberattacks can only be countered by preparing today.

Explore further How AI is shaping the cybersecurity arms race

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
THE THIEF,HIS WIFE AND THE CANOE EPISODE 1. Pictured:MONICA DOLAN as Anne Darwin and EDDIE MARSAN as John Darwin. Copyright ITV

Here's all you need to know ITV's new drama telling the story of 'canoe man' John Darwin.

Four-parter The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe is written by acclaimed screenwriter Chris Lang and directed by BAFTA winner Richard Laxton, (Honour, Mrs Wilson, Mum).

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BIFA nominee Eddie Marsan (Ray Donovan, Sherlock Holmes, Happy Go Lucky) plays John Darwin who faked his own death to claim life insurance and avoid bankruptcy while BAFTA-winner Monica Dolan (Appropriate Adult, W1A, A Very English Scandal) plays his wife Anne.

Watch The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe on TV and online

The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe started on Sunday, 17 April at 9PM on ITV.

Episodes of the four-part series will continue on TV nightly this week on Monday 18, Tuesday 19 and Wednesday 20 April at 9PM.

Alternatively, you can watch the full show online now and catch up via the ITV Hub here.

A synopsis of the series shares: "The drama will focus on how Anne Darwin became complicit in her husbands deception as she started to convince the world, their family and friends, the police and insurance companies, that he had gone missing in 2002 whilst canoeing off the coast of Seaton Carew in Cleveland, where the couple owned two large houses with panoramic views of the sea.

"The deception was to take its toll on Anne who lied to their sons, Mark and Anthony, for five years whilst her husband, in the early days of the fraud, secretly lived in a bedsit next door to the home he shared with Anne.

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"Devastated by the loss of their father, neither son had an inkling their parents were capable of such treachery.

"Anne and John Darwin eventually decided to leave Seaton Carew and move to Panama City to start a new life together before their secret was exposed by the discovery of an infamous photo of them posing in a Panama real estate office in July 2006."

Monica Dolan and Eddie Marsan will be joined on the cast by Mark Stanley (White House Farm) and Karl Pilkington (Sick of It, Derek).

Writer Chris Lang said: I am beyond delighted to be working with two of the finest actors of their generation.

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"I have admired them both from afar for many years (not in a creepy way though) and cannot wait to see them bring Anne and John Darwin to life.

The show is based upon the unpublished manuscript written by journalist David Leigh who was the first journalist to track down Anne as she was on the verge of setting up a new life in Panama.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in an impassioned address to the United Nations Security Council, on Tuesday likened Russian atrocities in his homeland to Nazi war crimes, calling for Nuremberg-style tribunals to hold Moscow accountable.

They shot and killed women outside their houses  they killed entire families, adults and children, and they tried to burn the bodies, Zelenskyy said in a video appearance before the council, a day after an emotional visit to the ravaged town of Bucha, outside the capital, Kyiv. They cut off limbs, slashed throats, raped women in front of their children.

In a perhaps risky strategy of sharply criticizing the body from which he is seeking help, Zelenskyy issued a stark challenge to world institutions to make sweeping changes to the global security architecture, asking sardonically at one point: Are you ready to close the U.N.?

It is obvious that the key institutions of the world ... simply cannot work effectively, declared the 44-year-old president, who has won worldwide accolades for presiding over his compatriots fierce and sustained resistance to the Russian attempt to subjugate Ukraine.

Following a Russian pullback from areas around the Ukrainian capital, horrific images and footage have emerged in recent days from the once-placid Kyiv suburbs and other northern areas  bodies lining the streets, corpses with bound hands, the forlorn figure of a man shot dead, sprawled beside his bicycle. At least 410 bodies have been found, including many bearing signs of torture, Ukrainian officials say.

The small town of Borodyanka, about 15 miles northwest of Bucha, was reduced to ruins. Video showed multistory buildings along the main thoroughfare ravaged and burnt out by airstrikes after Russian forces withdrew. Several apartment complexes had collapsed. Officials have said they fear hundreds of people in the town could be dead in the rubble.

More such harrowing scenes are likely to emerge, Zelenskyy said, as Ukrainian forces reassert control in northern areas previously under control of Russian troops, who are now redeploying and refitting for what Ukrainian and Western officials believe is a redoubled offensive in the countrys south and east.

The world has yet to see what they have done in other occupied cities and regions of our country, Zelenskyy said.

The alleged atrocities have set off a new wave of calls for a halt to the fighting and for broad new sanctions against Russia, including a proposal by the European Unions executive arm for a ban on imports of Russian coal.

It is more urgent by the day to silence the guns, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the Security Council before Zelenskyy spoke, citing not only the devastation in Ukraine, but a rapidly developing food crisis in parts of the world as a result of the war.

Nearly six weeks into the war, Ukrainian and Western defense officials warned of a reinvigorated Russian assault in the countrys eastern industrial heartland and elsewhere.

This is a crucial phase of the war, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels in advance of a NATO ministerial meeting beginning Wednesday. U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken is scheduled to attend.

Despite a reprieve for Kyiv and surrounding areas, Ukraines military said Russian forces, largely repelled in the countrys north, were readying a fresh offensive in the Donbas region and in southern Ukraine.

Underscoring the peril faced by humanitarian workers trying to ease desperate hardships in besieged areas, a senior Ukrainian official said a Red Cross team detained near the strategic southern port of Mariupol had been released. But tens of thousands of residents remained in danger in the encircled city.

The deputy Ukrainian prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said there would be a new attempt Tuesday to open seven humanitarian corridors, all in eastern Ukraine. Previous efforts have often been derailed by fighting and Russian shelling.

Moscow has scoffed at the growing body of evidence that its occupying troops have targeted and tortured civilians, dismissing photos as staged and victim testimony as false.

We continue to insist that all accusations against Russia, against Russian military are not merely groundless, but a well-directed show, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Tuesday, according to Russian state media outlet Tass. Nothing else but a tragic show.

Blinken said Tuesday that atrocities committed in Bucha were not the work of a rogue Russian unit but part of a deliberate campaign to kill, to torture, to rape, to commit atrocities.

The reports are more than credible, he said to reporters traveling with him to Brussels, where he will meet with counterparts from NATO. The evidence is there for the world to see.

Blinken said the U.S. and other nations were working to collect the evidence to build a strong case against Russia.

Amid the growing international outcry, any call to action by the Security Council is all but certain to be blunted by permanent members China and Russia. In an address to the U.N. Security Council, Chinas ambassador to the United Nations, Zhang Jun, said Tuesday that the images from Bucha were very disturbing but that independent investigators must verify the facts.

Humanitarian issues should not be politicized, he said.

The White House is set to announce Wednesday a new round of sweeping sanctions on Russia, according to a source familiar with the announcement. The U.S., in coordination with the G-7, or Group of Seven, and the EU, is expected to ban all new investment and increase economic penalties on financial institutions and state-owned enterprises in Russia in a bid to degrade key instruments of Russian state power, impose acute and immediate economic harm on Russia and hold accountable the Russian kleptocracy that funds and supports Putins war.

On Tuesday, more EU countries  including Italy, Denmark, Portugal, Spain and Sweden  joined France and Germany in announcing or carrying out expulsions of dozens of Russian diplomats over the mounting proof of atrocities by Moscow. The Kremlin warned there would be symmetrical diplomatic retribution.

In a signal of European solidarity, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, is to travel to Kyiv this week, her spokesman said. She is to be accompanied by the top EU diplomat, Josep Borrell.

Those war-zone talks with Zelenskyy would be the latest in-person visit by high-ranking European officials since the invasion began Feb. 24. Last week, European Parliament President Roberta Metsola traveled to Kyiv bearing a message of hope. Last month, leaders from Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic took a risky train ride to Kyiv to express their support.

The Ukrainian capital, while seemingly out of immediate danger of a full-scale assault, still has the feel of a city ready for war. Most shops are still closed, but residents walk their dogs or go out for a jog in the late-winter chill, the weather hardly betraying the arrival of spring.

Residents have become accustomed to the matrix of checkpoints that block entrances and exits to neighborhoods  piles of sandbags covered in camouflage netting and some shredded fabric for additional concealment.

Burly troops in winter gear and body armor, toting assault rifles, check drivers IDs, as there is considerable concern about Russian infiltrators and saboteurs. On broad downtown boulevards, traffic appeared relatively light Tuesday morning, but vehicles lined up at checkpoints on the citys periphery.

In Ukraines south, Doctors Without Borders said that a four-member team met Monday with health authorities in an oncology hospital in the port city of Mykolaiv when the facility came under fire.

Several explosions took place in close proximity to our staff over the course of about 10 minutes, Michel-Olivier Lacharite, the groups head of mission in Ukraine, said in a statement Tuesday. The team members were able to take cover and were not hurt, Lacharite said, but the windows of their vehicle were blown out and as they left they saw injured people and at least one dead body.

A regional pediatric hospital, about 300 meters, or 1,000 feet, away in a residential area in the east of the city, was also hit.

Bombing such a large area within a residential neighborhood in the middle of the afternoon cannot but cause civilian casualties and hit public buildings, Lacharite said. In the past two days, three hospitals in Mykolaiv have been hit by airstrikes.

In the northeast, Oleh Syniehubov, the military governor of Ukraines Kharkiv region, said Tuesday that Russian forces had killed six people and injured another eight in Kharkiv and Chuhuiv. Over the past day, the occupiers have struck 54 strikes from various long-range weapons: artillery strikes, mortar and tank shelling, MLRS shelling, he said in a statement on Telegram.

In the countrys east, Western analysts and officials have said they expect Russian forces to push to expand beyond the territory where the Kremlin has fomented an 8-year-old separatist conflict.

The Ukrainian militarys general staff wrote on Facebook that, in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Russian forces were trying to take control of the cities of Popasna and Rubizhne, while continuing to lay siege to Mariupol, whose capture would be key to establishing a land bridge with the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia seized in 2014.

The enemy is regrouping troops and concentrating its efforts on preparing an offensive operation in the east of our country, the statement said, adding that the objective was full control over the territory of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

British military intelligence said in an assessment Tuesday that Ukrainian forces had reasserted control of some crucial northern terrain, including areas around the city of Chernihiv and north of Kyiv, although it said low-level fighting might persist in some of those areas.

Many of those Russian units, however, will be unable to redeploy to eastern Ukraine until they have undergone significant refitting, the assessment said.

With nearly a quarter of Ukraines population displaced by war, and more than 4 million seeking safety beyond its borders, the biggest movement of refugees seen within Europe since World War II has prompted action from some unusual quarters.

In scenes carried live Tuesday by Japans national broadcaster NHK, 20 Ukrainian refugees arrived from Poland on a special flight arranged by the foreign minister in a high-profile show of support. There are already about 400 Ukrainian refugees in Japan.
World will become unlivable unless gov'ts reevaluate energy policies, UN chief warns

Xinhua) 08:11, April 06, 2022

The top UN official notes that "this is not fiction or exaggeration. It is what science tells us will result from our current energy policies. We are on a pathway to global warming of more than double the 1.5-degree Celsius limit" that was agreed in Paris in 2015.

UNITED NATIONS, April 5 (Xinhua) -- Responding to the latest findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Monday that unless governments worldwide reassess their energy policies, the world will be unlivable.

A new flagship UN report on climate change out Monday indicating that harmful carbon emissions from 2010-2019 have never been higher in human history, is proof that the world is on a "fast track" to disaster, the UN chief warned, with scientists arguing that it's "now or never" to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

His comments reflected the IPCC's insistence that all countries must reduce their fossil fuel use substantially, extend access to electricity, improve energy efficiency and increase the use of alternative fuels, such as hydrogen.

Unless action is taken soon, some major cities will be under water, Guterres said in a video message, which also forecast "unprecedented heatwaves, terrifying storms, widespread water shortages and the extinction of a million species of plants and animals."

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks to reporters about the truce agreement in Yemen, at the UN Headquarters in New York, on April 1, 2022. (Loey Felipe/UN Photo/Handout via Xinhua)

The top UN official added that "this is not fiction or exaggeration. It is what science tells us will result from our current energy policies. We are on a pathway to global warming of more than double the 1.5-degree Celsius limit" that was agreed in Paris in 2015.

Providing the scientific proof to back up that damning assessment, the IPCC report, written by hundreds of leading scientists and agreed by 195 countries, noted that greenhouse gas emissions generated by human activity have increased since 2010 "across all major sectors globally."

An increasing share of emissions can be attributed to towns and cities, the report's authors continued, adding just as worryingly, that emissions reductions clawed back in the last decade or so "have been less than emissions increases, from rising global activity levels in industry, energy supply, transport, agriculture and buildings."

Striking a more positive note, and insisting that it is still possible to halve emissions by 2030, the IPCC urged governments to ramp up action to curb emissions.

The UN body also welcomed the significant decrease in the cost of renewable energy sources since 2010, by as much as 85 percent for solar and wind energy, and batteries.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
Veteran Can Now Receive Kidney Transplant

NEWS PROVIDED BY

Liberty Counsel

April 6, 2022



WINSTON-SALEM, N.C., April 6, 2022 /Christian Newswire/ -- A U.S. Air Force veteran who was initially denied a kidney transplant because of his COVID-19 vaccination status, has now located a hospital in Texas that will accommodate him.



Liberty Counsel was contacted by Adam Draper, a North Carolina lawyer who assisted Chad Carswell in locating a hospital which would not require the COVID injection. Carswell previously sought to receive a transplant from Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, but was denied because transplant recipients and donors are required to get the COVID shot.

Fortunately, Carswell now has located Medical City Forth Worth which does not require the shot in order for him to receive the kidney transplant.

A double amputee because of complications from diabetes, Carswell needs a transplant because his kidney function is only at four percent, and he requires dialysis three times a week. Carswell has had COVID twice and said he would rather "die free" than take the shot.

After learning that many facilities required transplant donors and recipients to take the COVID shot, Carswell appeared on numerous news talk shows and networks, including Newsmax and One America News Network. More than 500 people indicated they were willing to donate a kidney to him.

Carswell said that the United Network of Organ Sharing (UNOS) has a set of protocols it recommends hospitals follow to determine viable kidney donation candidates. UNOS recommends that no one refusing to take the "vaccine" be considered a viable candidate for kidney donation.

Draper recently stated, "Chad is going to Texas on April 17 to begin the process of organ matching and the screening to be approved for surgery. What he needs now are prayers for God to sustain his life so that he can receive a new kidney and have a successful transplant procedure."

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, "No one who needs an organ transplant should be denied because of their decision not to get the COVID shots. The case of this Air Force veteran is even more shameful because of his service to our country. People should not be forced to choose between their life and their religious beliefs."

Liberty Counsel provides broadcast quality TV interviews via Hi-Def Skype and LTN at no cost.



SOURCE Liberty Counsel



CONTACT: Mat Staver, 407-875-1776, Liberty@LC.org



Related Links



lc.org/


As the population continues to grow along with concerns about how agriculture will keep up, Iola High School senior Carson Carter sees himself in the front lines of figuring out how to feed the world with some straightforward ideas.

The number one thing to me is really simple: making sure that everyone has a voice, Carter said. It is important that you listen to the people who arent really aware of exactly what agriculture is.

By understanding concerns and each other, those involved in agriculture and consumers can feel heard and start toward the vital work of feeding the world, Carter said.

As an example, Carter talked about his recent exchange with a nuclear engineering assistant professor where they discussed artificial reproductive technologies. By listening to each other and building a relationship, they considered how to apply new breeding technologies to future research associated with radioactive waves emitted from cattle.

Gaining connections and building relationships is super important in advocating for agriculture, Carter said.

This passion for advocating for agriculture aligns with Carters number one goal in life: curing world hunger, he said. This is also why Carter has become passionate about researching new technologies like artificial insemination, conventional flushing and embryo transfer. These new techniques multiply success in breeding and exponentially increase favorable genetic material, Carter said.

Some people may say, That doesnt sound very organic, and they would be right, and this is why we need to listen to each other and address consumer fears, Carter said.

Carters personable, mature and humble nature make him a strong advocate for agriculture, Iola agriculture teacher Corey Ferguson said.

He is just a phenomenal advocate, Ferguson said. He has confidence in talking and advocating for agriculture in a way that is beyond his years  more so than most 40-year-olds. He never meets a stranger. He wants to find out what theyre all about and wants to tell them what hes all about and his experience in cattle. He focuses a lot on reproduction of cattle, and hes spent a lot of time educating himself about that. Theres no stopping him. He could do anything. If I was going to define him in one word, it would be advocate of agriculture. He lives it, breathes it, loves it.

Carter plans to attend Texas A&M University this fall, majoring in animal science and minoring in agribusiness with an aim at becoming an embryologist. To help him reach his goal, he has been applying for scholarships and recently won one that allows him to travel across the state learning about breeding cattle through the ReproLogix organization. He also hopes to intern at Trans Ova Genetics in Bryan.

Along with his passion for feeding the world, Carter has dedicated a lot of his life since his freshman year in high school to FFA, raising and exhibiting cattle. He has had success in shows across the country, including the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo, Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, Brazos Valley Fair and Rodeo, Brazoria County Fair Open Show, West Texas Fair and Rodeo, Northern Exposure Show in California, Clash 4 Cash in California, Tulsa State Fair, Mississippi Youth Expo heifer show, MCCA Winter Preview in Missouri and Arizona National.

Carson himself has sold cattle that he bred as far as California  for him to accomplish that as an 18-year-old is a big deal, Ferguson said. Early in his freshman year, he knew that he didnt want to just show cattle, he wanted to raise them and sell them.

It started when as an elementary student who loved sports, Carters stepfather took him to the Fort Worth Livestock Show where he rode roller coasters and a Ferris wheel. His stepdad asked him if he wanted to come back the next year to show a red angus, and Carter agreed if he could ride roller coasters again. Carter eventually moved away from showing red angus to showing and breeding Charolais. Carter and his stepbrother have seen tremendous success in raising, showing and selling Charolais, including two sales on Sunday  one for $13,000 and one for $16,500.

Besides raising cattle, Carter has been the Iola FFA president since his sophomore year, is student council vice president, president of the National Honor Society, a member of the Texas Junior Charolais Association and Charolais Association of Texas. For the FFA, he is a state finalist for the Star Greenhand-Production, was the Blacklands district president, and captain of the radio broadcasting team, the forages team and the quiz team.

One of the biggest lessons I have had to learn is how to manage my time, Carter said. I am involved in so many things in school, I have to manage my time really well and also, I have to work really hard to achieve all the things we have been achieving. Its about balance. Im glad Im learning how to do it now and not in college.

He also couldnt do these things without his family support, he said.

My family and God: without those two things none of this would be possible, Carter said. Every step of the way, my family has been there for me, has pushed me and motivated me to do great things. Theyve always been there for me for my aspirations in life. I really credit them for being there for me for the whole deal.
Ukraine's technical security and intelligence service is warning of a new wave of cyber attacks that are aimed at gaining access to users' Telegram accounts.

"The criminals sent messages with malicious links to the Telegram website in order to gain unauthorized access to the records, including the possibility to transfer a one-time code from SMS," the State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection (SSSCIP) of Ukraine said in an alert.

The attacks, which have been attributed to a threat cluster called "UAC-0094," originate with Telegram messages alerting recipients that a login had been detected from a new device located in Russia and urging the users to confirm their accounts by clicking on a link.

The URL, in reality a phishing domain, prompts the victims to enter their phone numbers as well as the one-time passwords sent via SMS that are then used by the threat actors to take over the accounts.

The modus operandi mirrors that of an earlier phishing attack that was disclosed in early March that leveraged compromised inboxes belonging to different Indian entities to send phishing emails to users of Ukr.net to hijack the accounts.

In another social engineering campaign observed by Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA), war-related email lures were sent to Ukrainian government agencies to deploy a piece of espionage malware.

The emails come with an HTML file attachment ("War Criminals of the Russian Federation.htm"), opening which culminates in the download and execution of a PowerShell-based implant on the infected host.

CERT-UA attributed the attack to Armageddon, a Russia-based threat actor with ties to the Federal Security Service (FSB) that has a history of striking Ukrainian entities since at least 2013.

In February 2022, the hacking group was connected to espionage attacks targeting government, military, non-government organizations (NGO), judiciary, law enforcement, and non-profit organizations with the main goal of exfiltrating sensitive information.

Armageddon, also known by the moniker Gamaredon, is also believed to have singled out Latvian government officials as part of a related phishing attack towards the end of March 2022, employing war-themed RAR archives to deliver malware.

Other phishing campaigns documented by CERT-UA in recent weeks have deployed a variety of malware, including GraphSteel, GrimPlant, HeaderTip, LoadEdge, and SPECTR, not to mention a Ghostwriter-spearheaded operation to install the Cobalt Strike post-exploitation framework.

The GrimPlant and GraphSteel attacks, associated with a threat actor called UAC-0056 (aka SaintBear, UNC2589, TA471), are believed to have commenced in early February 2022, according to SentinelOne, which described the payloads as pernicious binaries designed to conduct reconnaissance, credential harvesting, and run arbitrary commands.

SaintBear is also assessed to have been behind the WhisperGate activity in early January 2022 impacting government agencies in Ukraine, with the actor preparing the infrastructure for GrimPlant and GraphSteel campaign beginning in December 2021.

Last week, Malwarebytes Labs and Intezer implicated the hacking crew in a new set of late March attacks directed against Ukrainian organizations, counting a private TV channel named ICTV, by means of a spear-phishing lure that contained macro-embedded Excel documents, leading to the distribution of the GrimPlant backdoor (aka Elephant Implant).

The disclosure comes as several advanced persistent threat (APT) groups from Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia have capitalized on the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war as a pretext to backdoor victim networks and stage other malicious activities.
On Tuesday CHI Health St. Francis observed National Donate Life Month with a flag raising as a tribute to those who have donated organs.

Toni Nielsen, a clinical nurse in St. Franciss ICU, serves a leadership role in the hospitals organ and tissue donation awareness committee. She said that transplants are not done at St. Francis. We do the procurement side and take care of those patients until theyre ready to go. They are some of the most special patients that we take care of.

According to Live On Nebraska, more than 300 people in Nebraska are waiting for an organ transplant. Nebraska had a record year for donations in 2020, Live On Nebraska reported. More than 1,000 donated organs and tissue, including deceased and living organ donors, deceased tissue donors and birth tissue donor.

One deceased organ and tissue donor can help up to 100 people, sometimes saving lives.

Live On Nebraska also reports that Nebraskans overwhelmingly support organ and tissue donations (98%), yet 58% of eligible Nebraska are registered donors.

Nielsen estimated St. Francis has about four donors a year, plus another 20 tissue donors. (Tissue donations) would be things like skin for skin graft, pieces of bone to help improve life through surgery, she explained.

Donating organs and tissue can be difficult, said Tim Wegenast, a chaplain at CHI St. Francis, who offered prayers and discussed the importance of organ donations at Tuesdays flag raising.

Whether a sudden death or one thats been expected, its still a loss that theyll have to work through, he said. Were here to just listen to them, and be supportive, sometimes just being present. We dont always have to use words.

Organ donation can be part of the grieving process, Wegenast said. I think the joy comes maybe a little bit later, after a loss. The grief subsides.

Nielsen said the joy is one of the reasons she is passionate about organ and tissue donation. Its a wonderful feeling to be able to help that family go from tragedy to something more glorious. It takes a very strong family to be able to say yes to donation. Its a very special process, and thats what really motivates me want to continue to be involved.

Nielsen herself has been a registered organ donor since age 16  the legal age a person can start registering to be donor. While she doesnt know of any family members who have been touched by organ or tissue donation at this point, it is family that helped inspire her to be a donor  and volunteer to help promote organ and tissue donation through events like the National Donate Life ceremony.

What if my child needed a liver? What if my child needed a heart? I would give mine to them in a heartbeat. If Im willing to do that for my own family, why would I not be willing to do that for others?

Jessica Votipka is the education reporter at the Grand Island Independent. She can be reached at 308-381-5420.

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Two men were arrested Saturday night in Hamilton County following a pursuit and a fight between one of the suspects and a Nebraska State Trooper.

At 7:20 p.m., a trooper observed a Chevrolet Impala fail to yield the right of way as it exited Interstate 80 and began traveling northbound on Highway 2. The trooper attempted a traffic stop, but the driver refused to yield and accelerated. The trooper then initiated a pursuit. The vehicle turned westbound onto a county road, where the driver lost control and entered the ditch. Both occupants then fled on foot.

The trooper was able to catch up to the driver quickly, but the driver began to fight the trooper, according to a State Patrol news release. After a struggle, the trooper was able to gain control of the driver and place him in custody. During the struggle, the passenger returned to the vehicle, took a backpack and fled on foot. The passenger was located a short time later and taken into custody without further incident.

A Hamilton County deputy helped search for the two men. The vehicle caught fire after it crashed near 11th Road and Highway 2. Phillips firefighters helped extinguish the fire.

Troopers located unknown pills, marijuana, a knife and drug paraphernalia in the backpack, based on the news release.

The driver, Dylan Valdez, 23, of Ashland, and the passenger, Logan Korb, 31, of Omaha, are being held at the Hamilton County Jail for numerous offenses.

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A 31-year-old man lost his life when he was hit by a vehicle, Tuesday, March 29, on Highway 34 west of Phillips.

Alexander Alex Sohl of rural Phillips was killed in the crash, which occurred just east of the Highway 2 turn.

The Nebraska State Patrol was called to the accident at about 10:40 p.m.

After an investigation, the state patrol ruled that the accident was a pedestrian-vehicle crash.

The state patrol learned that Sohl was wearing dark clothing and walking in the eastbound lane when he was struck by an eastbound Nissan Pathfinder.

Sohl was pronounced dead at the scene.

The name of the Pathfinder driver is not available.

The investigation remains ongoing, the state patrol said Tuesday. No citations have been issued at this time.

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YORK -- BginUSA has selected the City of York as the location for their next data mining complex. BginUSA expects the project to be an $8 million project that will create five to eight jobs. The data mining project will bring about thirty units of computer servers and an office to the north end of the city-owned industrial plot near the Nebraska Public Power District headquarters.

As Lisa Hurley, executive director of the York County Development Corporation explains, Data mining development fits York well because it brings sizable new revenues and new investments to the community without competing for workers in this tight job market. We anticipate seeing construction yet in 2022.

On Thursday, the city council will consider the purchase offer from BginUSA for the north half of the city industrial development lot during their regular meeting.

At a previous city council meeting, Nicole Sedlacek, economic development manager from Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD), presented information on data mining as a valuable economic development opportunity for York. Data mining operations generate revenues for the city through the citys electricity lease agreement with NPPD as well as city sales tax revenues on electricity sales.

According to Mayor Barry Redfern, the council has been very supportive of efforts to recruit a data mining operation to the city. City officials have been working with YCDC and NPPD to recruit data mining enterprises to locate in York.

Mayor Redfern notes that BginUSAs purchase of the citys industrial lot to develop their data mining business provides an opportunity for the city to move into a cutting-edge technological industry. I have met with the company, and I look forward to their partnership.

York provides an attractive location for data mining because of the low electric rates and energy capacity that NPPD provides in the area that can be put to data mining uses.

Bin Shu, BginUSA manager from the Omaha office stated, We selected the City of York not only because it can provide the power that we need, but also because of the intelligent and hardworking people weve met there. The people make the difference we need to succeed.

BginUsa has been working on a smaller Omaha project and the York project will help them meet the growing demand for scalable, cost-effective digital infrastructure solutions for highly specialized computing needs.

NPPD has experience working with data mining in other communities. A component of their preparation for data mining projects involves studies to ensure that the York system has the necessary capacity for the data mining project so that the project does not in any way risk the power supply for other users.

The agreement for BginUSA to purchase a portion of the city development plot is on the council agenda for Thursday, April 7. After the passage of the purchase agreement, the city is required to post a notice of the purchase for three weeks and then wait 30 days before closing.

Next week the York Planning Commission will review a proposed zoning change that clarifies data mining as an industrial area use in the city. The city council is expected to approve this zoning change at their April 21 meeting. These zoning changes were already being developed prior to the BginUSA offer in anticipation of a data mining entity coming to York.
The fiercest urban battle fought by the Australians in the Vietnam War occurred in June 1969 at the village of Binh Ba.

This writer was involved in the battle as part of D Company, 5th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (5RAR).

Binh Ba (population of about 1,300) was a village adjacent to the French-owned Gallia rubber plantation, located on Route 2 just 6.5 kms north of Nui Dat.

Nui Dat was the 1st Australian Task Force Base (1ATF) and the attack on Binh Ba by a large enemy force was designed to demonstrate how close the enemy could get to the Australian base and then lure them out to an ambush.

Background

The US government advertised a meeting on Midway Island between President Richard Nixon and South Vietnamese President Thieu, perhaps in hindsight, not a good thing to do.

The North Vietnamese Government soon became aware of this meeting and decided to stage their own PR exercise at the same time by creating 122 co-ordinated conflicts throughout South Vietnam as part of a show of force.

Binh Ba village was attacked and overrun by the 33rd North Vietnam Army (NVA) Infantry Regiment along with guerrilla forces from the local D440 Battalion to emphasize their continuing capability to conduct offensive action throughout South Vietnam.

Reports released in 2013 indicate 1075 NVA troops took part in the operation against Binh Ba and two smaller hamlets nearby.

Other enemy attacks were to take place close by aimed at confusing the Australians with three separate engagements at the same time.

The Enemy

The Heroic 33rd Infantry Regiment, according to its own history, had been raised in North Vietnam in 1965 and deployed into South Vietnam via the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

A special task allotted to 33rd Regiment in this plan was to attack an Australian mechanised battalion stationed in the Nui Dat area.

D440 Battalion was to capture parts of Binh Ba village. Its A Company was to then remain within Binh Ba to lure rescuing forces, including Australians from Nui Dat, so they could be ambushed by 33rd Regiment.

The remainder of D440 were to remain adjacent to Binh Ba and conduct further attacks as the battle progressed.

The Battle

On June 6, 5RAR was either resting, training, employed on company operations, convoy protection or on ready reaction standby at Nui Dat, having recently completed six weeks of continuous operations.

As it happened, a Centurion battle tank and an armoured recovery vehicle were travelling from Nui Dat responding to a call for a replacement tank working with 6RAR/NZ on Operation Lavarack further northand as they neared Binh Ba, were fired on from a house just 20m from the road.

The tank was damaged by a rocket propelled grenade and a crewman was injured but responded with machine gun fire before returning to Nui Dat.

If the NVA thought this was the Australian reaction force, they were not only mistaken but also would have been surprised by the quick withdrawal of the two tanks.

The ready reaction company was alerted to the issue at Binh Ba and given 30 minutes to move.

D Company, severely under-strength with just 65 men, together with a composite troop of three tanks and 13 armoured personnel carriers (APCs), left Nui Dat for Binh Ba, under the control of D Company commander, Major Murray Blake.

Several officers and NCOs were unavailable so just one platoon had an officer, the other two commanded by a sergeant and a corporal. Many rifle sections were commanded by private soldiers.

An initial intelligence briefing indicated a small guerrilla force was active in Binh Ba and it was thought the ready reaction company would have no problems dealing with the matter.

Upon arrival at Binh Ba, the leading APC was attacked when well out of range and

D Company left the vehicles and what followed was two days of fierce house-to-house fighting as the Australians removed the NVA and VC from the village.

On day one, the tanks took the lead with infantry behind, not realising how large the enemy force was and every tank crew member was wounded by anti-tank grenades sending red hot metal around inside their tanks. One infantry soldier was killed and some wounded.

The fierce battle raged until nightfall when the Australians withdrew to a safer position, three fresh tanks arrived overnight and another infantry company arrived in support.

Early next morning the enemy did a frontal attack on the D Company harbour position but were forced back by concentrated fire from the tanks, APCs and the infantry soldiers themselves.

Then followed an infantry attack on the village, backed-up by tanks and helicopter gunships. While several more soldiers were wounded, there were no more Australian deaths, the enemy held on but were beaten at every turn and by midday, had started to withdraw.

It is now believed over 350 NVA and VC were killed, many by concentrated artillery fire as they retreated.

D Company was withdrawn from the village late in the afternoon and engineers were called to deal with the destruction and war dead.

The village of Binh Ba, where four in every five houses were destroyed, was completely rebuilt by members of the 1st Australian Civil Affairs Unit.

The writer has recovered from the trauma of being in battle and having been wounded, thanks almost entirely on his faith in God and knowing Jesus as his Saviour.
CARBONDALE  A Indiana man has been sentenced to prison time following a home invasion last year.

Nathan Bigham, 28, pled guilty on April 4 to a Class X felony offense of home invasion, according to a news release from the Jackson County States Attorneys Office.

Bigham was sentenced to ten years in the Illinois Department of Corrections followed by an 18-month period of mandatory supervised release.

Bighams charges stem from a Dec. 8, 2021 incident.

On that day, officers from the Carbondale Police Department were dispatched to a residence on Billy Bryan Street after a homeowner called to report a man was breaking into their home, according to the news release.

Upon arrival, offices found Bigham fighting with one of the homeowners on the kitchen floor.

After a brief struggle with police Bigham was taken into custody.

The incident led to an injury as Bigham caused a laceration to the hand of one of the homeowners, according to the news release.

The investigation of Bighams case was conducted by the Carbondale Police Department and Assistant States Attorney Jayson Clark was responsible for the prosecution of Bigham.

 The Southern

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One Republican candidate for Williamson County commissioner has been removed from the ballot by County Clerk Amanda Barnes.

A lengthy protest was filed to the nominating papers of Andrew Purcell by Williamson County Republican Chairman Jeff Diederich.
There has recently been some very public advocating for changing the designation of the Shawnee National Forest to that of a national park.

However, what I have heard, and the published accounts that Ive read, have been a pretty one-sided version of the story.

So, heres the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey used to say.

First, it is important to note that National Park status would mean no more hunting in the Shawnee Forest. Thats right. Hunting is not permitted in national parks. For the record, there would be no mushroom gathering allowed either.

While I have read that there is a National Park designation (National Preserve) that could allow for hunting, that would not be guaranteed.

National Park status would also likely exclude or significantly limit the use of the forest by horse riders, mountain bikers, and folks using ATVs.

To be clear, a Shawnee National Park could pretty much be a park for hikers only.

Aside from the loss of recreational opportunities to residents of southern Illinois, the economic impacts of those multiple-use restrictions could be devastating to the region. For example, in Illinois Congressional District 12, hunting alone was estimated to have had a $158 million dollar impact in 2020 and to have supported 1,100 jobs.

From a forest management standpoint, it is not clear how National Park status would affect management activities. Those details are critical however, because research as shown that in the absence of active management, the oak forests of the Illinois Ozarks, in southwestern Illinois, will convert to predominately beech-maple forests in the next few decades.

To say that the loss of oaks would be catastrophic for wildlife is not an exaggeration. Oaks are truly the 'trees of life,' well-known to support several important game species but less widely recognized as very important to migrating and breeding songbirds.

For example, entomologist Doug Tallamys research has documented that oaks host significantly more insects than beeches and maples. It is that very abundance of food on oaks that fuels migrant songbirds and feeds songbird babies in our forests. Without oaks a Shawnee National Park would be much lower quality habitat for songbirds and most other wildlife.

Currently, the Forest Service is actively managing the National Forest to maintain oaks and to encourage oak regeneration using a combination of prescribed fire, invasive species control, and limited timber harvests.

Having established those potentially significant negative outcomes associated with a Shawnee National Park, the proposed benefits, from what I have gathered, include a potential increase in tourism and the removed threat of timber harvest or mineral extraction on the Forest.

Of course, increases in tourism are speculative and would have to be significant to off-set the economic losses associated with restrictions of hunting and other recreational uses that could accompany Park status.

Regarding the threats of timber harvest and mineral extraction on the Forest, I wrote recently about both of those subjects in the Carbondale Times.

Timber harvests on the Shawnee have averaged 100 acres per year since 2012 and there have been no clear cuts.

Having said that, I have read a claim that thousands of acres of Shawnee National Forest land are slated for commercial logging.

Here are the facts: Since the 2006 Forest Plan, 7,247 acres (less than 3% of the Shawnees forested area) were approved for harvest spread out over Pope, Massac, Hardin, Alexander, and Jackson Counties. Since 2006, 1,100 of those acres have been selectively harvested. The remaining approximately 6,000 acres may be cut over the next 15 years.

Its important to note that none of this is turning the forest into something else, neither is it clear-cutting. Indeed, the harvests are generally selective cuts designed to encourage the regeneration of oaks and associated plant and animal communities.

Regarding mineral extraction, less than 12% of the Shawnee National Forest has privately owned mineral rights and there is no mineral extraction currently occurring on the forest. Additionally, National Park/Preserve status would not remove the possibility that minerals and/or fuel extraction might still be allowed.

So, taken as a whole, the only certain outcome of a Shawnee National Park, as far as I can tell, would be the restriction of timber harvests in the forest. Which is not even clearly a benefit because there are many species of plants and animals, especially birds, that need the openings (created by the selective harvest of trees) to persist in the forest!

And thats the rest of the story.

There is certainly always value in debate and discussion about how to make something better, but there is also no need to fix something that isnt broken.

In southern Illinois we are fortunate to have the Shawnee National Forest as our backyard. It is almost 300,000 acres of mostly forested land that we all benefit from and enjoy in different ways. And it aint broke, friends. Its working just fine.

Mike Baltz has a doctorate in ecology, is a 20-plus year resident of Jackson County and a former Southern Illinois area director for The Nature Conservancy.

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Orangeburg County

Sheriffs Office

A deputy and K-9 found an 11-year-old boy who allegedly ran away from a Cordova Road home in Orangeburg, according to a sheriffs office incident report.

The boys relatives reported that he left around 10 p.m. Monday.

One of the relatives told deputies that the boy became upset when she asked him to clean up a mess in the home, so he left.

Another relative saw the boy running across the playground at Edisto Primary School.

A deputy and K-9 Mustang began trying to track the boys whereabouts from the school.

About an hour later, they found the boy. He was safe and they returned him to the Cordova Road home.

Orangeburg

Department

of Public Safety

A UPS employee believes a gunman stole items from his vehicle, which was parked at the UPS customer center, located at 861 Mill Street, according to an incident report.

The employee was outside Monday night when he saw a stranger squatting beside his 2001 Honda Civic LX.

The employee approached the stranger, but the stranger stood up and pointed a gun at the employee.

The gunman told the employee to back up, the report states. The employee ran inside the building to report the incident to his supervisor.

The employee discovered that his book bag was stolen. The book bag contained $45 in cash and a Glock 19 Gen 5 9mm handgun.

The value of the stolen items is $665.

In other reports:

 Someone reportedly stole the following items from an unlocked Honda CRV parked on Stanley Street in the early morning hours on Tuesday: a black 9 mm Smith & Wesson handgun containing a flashlight and laser attachment; a holster; a purple and pink knife; a black book bag; $50 in cash and personal bank cards.

The knife and book bag were recovered in a neighbors yard.

The value of the stolen items is $1,200.

 The following items were stolen from a Mary Ellen Drive residential garage on Monday: a mechanics toolbox, a saber saw, a steel saw, a Makita saw, a weed trimmer, a weed blower, a leaf blower, a hedge trimmer, several sizes of sockets, three-quarter-inch ratchets, standard wrenches and standard sockets.

The value of the stolen tools is $1,865.

Contact the writer: mbrown@timesanddemocrat.com or 803-533-5545. Follow on Twitter: @MRBrownTandD

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Art 321 will launch five new art exhibits this month, including shows for wearable and digital art, and a display celebrating the artistic talents of people with developmental disabilities.

The exhibits kick off with a reception at 6 p.m. Thursday at Art 321s gallery in Casper.

During the reception, volunteers will model submissions to a new wearable art exhibit.

The fashion show will include roughly 25 original pieces from 13 artists, said Tyler Cessor, Art 321s executive director.

Casper resident Leah Burback submitted her wedding dress, which she sewed herself, Cessor said.

Pua Linch, who also lives in Casper, entered three shirts from her digital art brand, Pen + Pepa Creative.

There will also be a choker decorated with tentacles  the work of Laramie-based artist Ismael Dominguez.

On Thursday, Art 321 will also unveil its first digital art display.

Digital art is any art made with digital technology  paintings, animation, 3D graphics and photography, for example.

Most digital art can travel across the world with the click of a mouse. So the group got submissions from surprisingly faraway places, Cessor said, including Denmark, Germany, Holland and England.

One entry is a digital animation depicting a slice-of-life walk around an urban neighborhood in Palestine. Its the work of Zain Al-Sharaf, a Palestinian designer and architect who lives in London.

The piece will be displayed on a screen in Art 321s gallery.

Doors, Portals and the Unexpected, a series of paintings by Cheyenne-based artist Steve Knox, is also coming to Art 321 this month.

Knoxs paintings start with seemingly ordinary landscape scenes  a barn, a camper on a beach, the inside of an old house.

But the doors and windows in those scenes all lead somewhere else, as if the viewer were peering through a screen, into another world.

One features a rusted truck in the middle of a prairie. Inside the truck, theres a red-and-yellow Little Tikes Cozy Coupe rolling down a country road.

Knox will host a discussion about his work April 21 at the Art 321 gallery.

This month, the gallery will also display an art exhibit put together by the Wyoming Governors Council on Developmental Disabilities.

The exhibit, which debuted in March in Cheyenne, celebrates the artistic talents of Wyomingites with developmental disabilities.

The show features a wide range of art, including pottery, paintings and sculptures.

One artist made animal-shaped collages out of leaves. They look not unlike the famous tissue-paper creations of Eric Carle.

Finally, Art 321 will debut this years submissions for Keep Casper Beautifuls ongoing public art project.

Three of those submissions will be picked to adorn electrical boxes around Casper. So far, Keep Casper Beautiful has created more than 20 mural wraps from designs submitted by Natrona County artists.

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A Mills man convicted of child abuse is set to spend up to 30 years in prison, a sentencing document filed in March states.

A jury found Ryan Hilyard guilty of two counts of child abuse in November. An affidavit states he and his wife, Sarah, drugged, beat and kicked a child in their home.

Sarah Hilyard accepted a plea agreement late last year, pleading guilty to two counts of child abuse and no contest to an attempted second-degree murder charge for her role in the abuse. She had initially pleaded not guilty by reason of mental illness at her arraignment, court filings show.

She is serving 25 to 35 years in prison for the attempted murder, and is set to serve another sentence of five to 10 years for child abuse after the first is complete.

In March, a Natrona County judge sentenced Ryan Hilyard to 18 to 20 years for aggravated child abuse, and an additional 5 to 10 years afterwards for the other abuse conviction.

Court filings state that the couple was physically abusive to a 12-year-old child, requiring degrading and exhausting exercises and at times withholding food. The charges also state they told another child to beat the 12-year-old.

The abuse came to light, according to the affidavit, when Sarah Hilyard brought the child to Wyoming Medical Center. There, court filings state, scans found bleeding and swelling in their brain, bowel distention and a collapsed ventricle in their heart. They also reportedly had bruises on much of their body and several injuries consistent with non-accidental blunt force trauma.

A doctor told her, according to court documents, that if they didnt act quickly the child would die very quickly. They transported the child to a Colorado hospital for treatment.

She initially told doctors that the injuries came from the child falling down the stairs and fighting with a sibling.

The children told investigators, according to the affidavit, that they were made to do exercises like running up and down the stairs as punishment. One said that the couple yelled at, punched and kicked a sibling who passed out from exhaustion.

A search of the home described in court filings found traces of urine, feces and vomit in the house. Several videos obtained by law enforcement show instances of punishment. The child can be heard in one video, the affidavit states, asking repeatedly for food and water, and clean clothes.

One of the children told a detective that Ryan Hilyard had told them to lie to police about the injuries so Hilyard could avoid jail time, and said to instead say that the child had just fallen.

Court records show Hilyard filed for a new trial in December, alleging improper testimony had tainted his proceeding, but was denied five days later.

Robert Oldham, the attorney representing Hilyard, declined to comment on the case Tuesday.

Follow city and crime reporter Ellen Gerst on Twitter at @ellengerst.

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Casper College staff and Society of Mining members gathered among glass cases and rock specimens at the Tate Geological Museum for a photograph with a giant check.

Casper College received a $132,000 donation on Wednesday from the Central Wyoming section of the Society of Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration (SME). The donation is for the colleges geology and Geographic Information System (GIS) programs.

Treasurer of the Central Wyoming SME section Wayne Heili and his chapter approached the college in October about donating money to the college. Faculty members presented a proposal to the society shortly after. The resulting grant supports a large part of that proposal.

Our endowment has grown, and we were looking for a way that we could share that blessing with the school here at Casper College, Heili said at the donation ceremony.

Its a very important way of reminding humanity about the importance of the mineral extraction industry, he said.

GIS instructor Jeff Sun said the department will buy three small drones and one larger drone along with two drone cameras with money from the grant.

One of the cameras is a $30,000 Light Detection and Ranging camera and will be a new feature of the department. It shoots down a radar signal that bounces back to the camera. That information can be used to make 3D images.

Sun said this technology will help students make maps. The drones also make it easier to keep these maps updated since theyre convenient and less expensive compared to taking images from a helicopter or airplane.

Geology instructor Kent Sundell will also use some of the grant to buy drilling supplies and fund student research in a yearslong project to map a 280 million year old impact crater field near Douglas.

The study that Sundell co-authored in Nature says this is the oldest and among the largest impact crater strewn fields discovered to date. He said that theres nowhere else we can go except the moon to see something similar.

The donation will also pay for a part-time position at the Tate Geological Museum. The hire will help the museum create a program showcasing the mining industry through guest speakers and field trips.

Having modern educational tools will help the college generate graduates that are capable of meeting the challenges of a technologically advanced mining industry, Dayton Lewis, Central Wyoming SME section chairman, said.

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Wyomings redistricting map is defensible in court, Gov. Mark Gordon says.

State lawmakers approved the final legislative district map just before the deadline on the final day of last months budget session.

In the final map, a combined six House and Senate districts were out of deviation, meaning the ratio of constituents to representatives was not within the proportion that courts have held is necessary. If legislative districts are out of deviation, they risk being struck down by judges in violation of the equal protection clause.

Gordon allowed the map to become law without his signature. Speaking Monday to the Star-Tribune, Gordon said he probably wouldve signed the redistricting bill if it was entirely within deviation.

The Joint Corporations Committee  the legislative panel tasked with redistricting  worked for months on redrawing the states districts in light of new census data and population changes over the past decade. The process was fraught at times, especially as lawmakers tried to balance the rural-urban divide and the personal interests of individual lawmakers.

Based on conversations with Attorney General Bridget Hill, Gordon also said his office believes that the map is defensible in court. Proponents of instituting a map that is out of deviation said the same, citing Wyomings unique landscape and the fact that the districts are only slightly out of deviation.

That said, it became clear as the final plan was passed with only two hours to spare that the map was out of deviation mostly to cater to individual lawmakers desires. Drawing a map that kept every district within deviation was feasible.

In the final days, a conference committee made up of three senators and three representatives was appointed to complete a final map. A member of the committee Sen. Dave Kinskey, R-Sheridan, publicly acknowledged that certain district lines were intended to cater to the wants of sitting lawmakers.

The current representatives family lives there, so that was not a good option, he said, while explaining a version of the map.

Rep. Dan Zwontizer, R-Cheyenne, tried to set the record straight.

Theres certainly nothing in case law that says family members of incumbents should be protected ... if thats the rationale for this plan ... thats really difficult for me to stomach, he said.

The members of the conference committee met publicly for only a handful of short stints and did much of their work in private conversations.

Not once through this entire process did we see this map ... in the conference committee, said Rep. Chuck Gray, R-Casper.

In the end, redistricting is a political process, and the bill needed enough votes to make it through both chambers. That reality spurred calls from both sides of the aisle to create an independent redistricting commission to handle the process every 10 years.

Wyoming is one of 27 states where the legislature is responsible for redistricting. Other states use appointed commissions.

In Gordons letter explaining his decision not to sign the bill, the governor said that redistricting is inherently a legislative process. He took issue with the fact that the process was completed in the final two hours of the budget session despite months of work.

The Committee and staff held 20 meetings and listening sessions across the state from Fort Laramie to Worland, he wrote. Hundreds of Wyoming citizens got involved and county clerks dedicated countless hours to crafting a draft bill to help elections run smoothly. The final legislation was amended in the waning hours of the legislative session to a version that apparently establishes some districts that appear to exceed presumptively acceptable deviation limits.

Sen. Charlie Scott, R-Casper, completed his fifth redistricting process as a lawmaker last month. For months, he has warned of a lawsuit if any part of the map was out of deviation.

A redistricting lawsuit is more likely to find success if the plaintiff is from one of the underrepresented districts and can prove harm from the map.

Explore the new districts:

To find your new House district, visit this link. Find where you live and click the color that your home is within. A list will appear on the left of your screen and your district number will appear under District.

To find your new Senate district, visit this link. Complete the same process as above.

Follow state politics reporter Victoria Eavis on Twitter @Victoria_Eavis

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As spring comes around, the Wyoming Department of Health reminds people that baby birds can carry germs, even when they look clean and healthy.

Baby poultry are a common source of Salmonella, a bacterial disease that can cause diarrhea, fever, stomach cramps and other symptoms.

Some people, such as young children, the elderly, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems, have increased risk for severe symptoms.

Wyoming regularly sees cases of Salmonellosis in humans from contact with live poultry, particularly during the spring.

People in Wyoming are regularly infected with Salmonella as part of larger, multistate outbreaks involving baby poultry, Matthew Peterson, the health departments surveillance epidemiologist, said. It happens every year.

People can get infected if they put their hands in or near their mouths after touching birds, Peterson added. There are also germs in bird cages and coops.

The health department recommends children under 5, elderly people and those with weak immune systems to refrain from touching chicks or other live poultry. People should wash their hands thoroughly with soap and water or use hand sanitizer when they do handle live birds.

People should also avoid eating or drinking around live poultry or letting birds in their homes and in areas where food or drink is prepared. Any equipment or materials used to care for poultry, such as cages or feed and water containers, should be cleaned.

Wyoming is also seeing avian influenza spread among domestic and wild birds. The health department recommends that bird owners follow guidance from the Wyoming Livestock Board on preventing exposure to the influenza and report symptoms among their birds to a veterinarian.

Hunters should dress game birds in the field, wear gloves and wash their hands with soap and water afterwards. Others are encouraged to avoid contact with wild birds if possible.

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BILLINGS  A wind energy company was sentenced to probation and ordered to pay more than $8 million in fines and restitution after at least 150 eagles were killed over the past decade at its wind farms in eight states, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

NextEra Energy subsidiary ESI Energy pleaded guilty to three counts of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act during a Tuesday court appearance in Cheyenne. It was charged criminally in the deaths of nine eagles at three of its wind farms in Wyoming and New Mexico.

In addition to those deaths, ESI acknowledged the deaths of golden and bald eagles at 50 wind farms affiliated with ESI and NextEra since 2012. The birds died in eight states, prosecutors said: Wyoming, California, New Mexico, North Dakota, Colorado, Michigan, Arizona and Illinois.

The birds are killed when they fly into the blades of wind turbines. Some ESI turbines killed multiple eagles and because the carcasses are not always found, officials said the number killed was likely higher than the 150 birds cited by prosecutors in court documents.

Its illegal to kill or harm eagles under federal law.

The bald eagle  the U.S. national symbol  was removed from protection under the Endangered Species Act in 2007, following a dramatic recovery from widespread decimation due to harmful pesticides and other problems. Wildlife officials say more than 300,000 bald eagles now occupy the U.S., not including Alaska.

Golden eagles have not fared as well, with populations considered stable but under pressure from wind farms, collisions with vehicles, illegal shootings and poisoning from lead ammunition. There are an estimated 31,800 golden eagles in the Western U.S., according to a study released last week by leading eagle researchers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other entities.

More than 2,000 golden eagles are killed annually due to human causes, or about 60% of all deaths, the researchers said. The study concluded that golden eagle deaths will likely increase in the future because of wind energy development and other human activities.

Companies historically have been able to avoid prosecution under the century-old Migratory Bird Treaty if they take steps to avoid bird deaths and seek permits for those that occur. ESI did not seek such a permit, authorities said.

The company was warned prior to building the wind farms in New Mexico and Wyoming that they would kill birds, but it proceeded anyway and at times ignored advice from federal wildlife officials about how to minimize the deaths, according to court documents.

For more than a decade, ESI has violated (wildlife) laws, taking eagles without obtaining or even seeking the necessary permit, said Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Departments Environment and Natural Resources Division in a statement.

ESI agreed under a plea deal to spend up to $27 million during its five-year probationary period on measures to prevent future eagle deaths. That includes shutting down turbines at times when eagles are more likely to be present.

Despite those measures, wildlife officials anticipate that some eagles still could die. When that happens, the company will pay $29,623 per dead eagle, under the agreement.

NextEra President Rebecca Kujawa said collisions of birds with wind turbines are unavoidable accidents that should not be criminalized. She said the Juno Beach, Florida-based company which bills itself as the worlds largest utility company by market value  is committed to reducing damage to wildlife from its projects.

We disagree with the governments underlying enforcement activity, Kujawa said in a statement. Building any structure, driving any vehicle, or flying any airplane carries with it a possibility that accidental eagle and other bird collisions may occur.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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Mothers will get extra special treatment on Sundaylavish lunches, concerts and gifts of perfumes and roses.

Meanwhile, mere days before the celebration, Port of Spain businesspeoplevendors and huckstersare reporting slow sales. They are cautiously optimistic that it will pick up today.
When Dr Eric Williams decided to lay down his bucket here in the islands after his release from the Caribbean Commission and his debates with Dom Basil Matthews in the Public Library, he held lectures in Woodford Square, which he called The University of Woodford Square. We who were alive then felt happy.

He attracted people of like mind for the betterment of the islands, so he formed the PNMthe Peoples National Movement.
LVIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia is trying to hide evidence of war crimes to interfere with the international investigation.

We have information that the Russian troops have changed tactics and are trying to remove the dead people, the dead Ukrainians, from the streets and cellars of territory they occupied, Zelenskyy said in his daily nighttime video address to the nation late Wednesday. This is only an attempt to hide the evidence and nothing more.

Zelenskyy added that it seems that the Russian leadership was really afraid that the global anger over what was seen in Bucha would be repeated after what was seen in other cities.

The Ukrainian leader also said thousands of people are now missing, either dead or deported to Russia.

Zelenskyy is urging Russian citizens not to be afraid to protest the war.

If you have even a little shame about what the Russian military is doing in Ukraine, then for such Russian citizens this is a key moment: You have to demand  just demand  an end to the war, Zelenskyy said.

KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR:

 Mariupols dead put at 5,000 as Ukraine braces in the east

 US targets Putins daughters, Russian banks in new sanctions

 Burned, piled bodies among latest horrors in Bucha, Ukraine

 Russia's setback in Kyiv was memorable military failure

 Russian media campaign falsely claims Bucha deaths are fakes

 China calls for probe into Bucha killings, assigns no blame

 Go to https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine for more coverage

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:

PARIS  French President Emmanuel Macron spoke out against Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Wednesday evening, defending himself over criticism he held multiple talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin to no avail.

On Monday, Morawiecki ridiculed the French leaders several hours of phone calls with Putin, saying that they achieved nothing.

Some fear the comments from Poland might destabilize unity of the European Union as it hopes to stand unified in the face of Putins aggression in Ukraine.

Macron told TF1 broadcasters evening news that he takes full responsibility for speaking to Putin in the name of France to avoid the war and to build a new architecture for peace in Europe several years ago.

Macron is standing for re-election in France in polls that begin Sunday.

KYIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian authorities say nearly 5,000 people were evacuated from combat areas Wednesday.

Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said 1,171 people were evacuated from the besieged Sea of Azov port of Mariupol, and 2,515 more left the cities of Berdyansk and Melitopol and other areas in the south.

She said an additional 1,206 people were evacuated from the eastern region of Luhansk.

Vereshchuk and other officials have been urging residents of eastern regions to evacuate in the face of an impending Russian offensive, saying that people in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions should leave for safer regions.

Donetsk region Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said at least five civilians were killed and eight others wounded by Russian shelling Wednesday.

Over 10 million people, about a quarter of Ukraines population, have been displaced by the war, and more than 4 million of them have fled the country.

UNITED NATIONS  The United States and United Kingdom have boycotted an informal meeting of the U.N. Security Council called by Russia to press its baseless claims that the U.S. has biological warfare laboratories in Ukraine.

The move by Russia on Wednesday was the latest of several that have led Western countries to accuse Moscow of using the U.N. as a platform for disinformation to draw attention away from its war against its smaller neighbor.

U.N. disarmament chief Izumi Nakamitsu told the council at two official Security Council meetings called by Russia on the issue last month that the United Nations is not aware of any biological weapons program in Ukraine.

A smoke screen to draw attention away from the brutal warfare, irresponsible, dangerous and deplorable were just a few of the responses by countries, including Norway, France, Ireland and Albania.

ROME  Italian Premier Mario Draghi says no embargo of Russian gas is up for consideration at this point as the European Union ponders its next package of sanctions over the war in Ukraine, adding: "I dont know if it ever will be on the table.

Draghi told reporters Monday night that in case a gas embargo is proposed, Italy will be very happy to follow it if that would make peace possible.

Draghi added: If the price of gas can be exchanged for peace ... what do we choose? Peace? Or to have the air conditioning running in the summer? This is the question we must pose.

KYIV, Ukraine  The mayor of the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol says more than 5,000 civilians have been killed during the monthlong Russian blockade, among them 210 children.

Mayor Vadym Boichenko said Wednesday that Russian forces have among other targets bombed hospitals, including one where 50 people burned to death.

Boichenko said that more than 90% of the citys infrastructure has been destroyed by Russian shelling.

The Russian military is besieging the strategic Sea of Azov port, and has cut food, water and energy supplies and pummeled it with artillery and air raids. Capturing the city would allow Russia to secure a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden is saluting the international community and some of the largest corporations in the U.S. for further increasing Russias economic isolation.

Addressing thousands at the North Americas Building Trades Unions Legislative Conference at a Washington hotel on Wednesday, Biden said of the Russia-Ukraine war, Theres nothing less happening than credible war crimes.

The president said responsible nations have to come together to hold these perpetrators responsible, and vowed that were going to stifle Russias ability to grow for years to come.

He said corporate Americas stepping up for a chance, noting that 600-plus firms have chosen to leave Russia.

MOSCOW  Russias Defense Ministry has accused Ukraine of sabotaging a pre-agreed prisoner swap.

Speaking at a briefing, Defense Ministry official Mikhail Mizintsev claimed that Kyiv had for a long time blocked prisoner exchanges, including a swap set to take place Wednesday involving 251 military personnel on each side.

He alleged that the delays gave Moscow all the reasons to suspect that Russian servicemen held in captivity are not at all well."

On April 1, representatives of the Ukrainian presidential office said Ukraine had secured the release of 86 soldiers, including 15 women, through a swap. This was confirmed by Russian officials on Wednesday.

BRUSSELS  A new U.S. commitment of Javelin missiles means the West soon will have provided Ukrainian fighters with 10 anti-tank weapons for every Russian tank in their country, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday.

Blinken spoke to U.S. news broadcaster MSNBC after the U.S. announced an additional $100 million for more Javelin missiles for Ukraine. The U.S. says it has provided $1.7 billion for Ukraines defense and aid since Russia invaded on Feb. 24.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is pressing the West to provide more weapons, faster, and do more to cut off Russia from the global economy, to pressure Putin to make peace.

In terms of what they need to act quickly and act effectively, to deal with the planes that are firing at them from the skies, the tanks that are trying to destroy  their cities from the ground, they have the tools that they need, Blinken said of Ukraines forces. Theyre going to keep getting them, and were going to keep sustaining that.

BUDAPEST, Hungary  Hungarys prime minister has asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to call an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine but says his country will comply with Russian demands to pay for natural gas imports in rubles.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he had spoken with Putin by phone and urged the Russian leader to end the military conflict in neighboring Ukraine. Orban said he also offered to host a conference in Hungarys capital between the warring parties.

I suggested that (Putin)  the Ukrainian president, the French president and the German chancellor hold a meeting here in Budapest, the sooner the better, Orban said. It should not be a peace negotiation and not a peace settlement, because that takes longer, but an immediate ceasefire agreement.

Orban spoke days after his Fidesz party won a fourth consecutive term leading the Hungarian government.

The right-wing nationalist leader, Putins closest ally in the European Union, has vehemently refused to supply weapons to Ukraine or allow their transport across the Hungary-Ukraine border. He also lobbied heavily against the EU imposing sanctions on Russian energy imports.

LARNACA, Cyprus  Russian disinformation about its war against Ukraine needs to be exposed, including on Russias war crimes, a U.S. State Department official said on a visit to Cyprus Wednesday.

Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said Russian lies have evolved to the point of blaming Ukrainians for actions by Russian forces, including the war crimes we see on the ground.

So we all have an interest in exposing Russian disinformation, ensuring our citizens have the truth and ensuring that Russian citizens also (have the truth) ... despite the Iron Curtain that Putin has put down over that, Nuland said.

Nuland was in Cyprus as part of a five-nation tour aimed at strengthening bilateral ties and rallying support for Ukraine.

LONDON  Britain says it will end imports of Russian oil and coal by the end of the year and ban U.K. investment in Russia as part of a new set of sanctions in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

The British government also announced a freeze on the assets of Credit Bank of Moscow and Sberbank, Russias largest bank, and slapped travel bans and asset freezes on eight more wealthy Russians. They included Andrey Guryev, founder of the fertilizer company PhosAgro, and Sergey Sergeyevich Ivanov, president of diamond producer Alrosa.

U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said the measures were coordinated with Britains allies. The U.S. also sanctioned SberBank on Wednesday, and the European Union plans to ban imports of Russian coal.

Truss said the sanctions were aimed at decimating (President Vladimir) Putins war machine and to show the Russian elite that they cannot wash their hands of the atrocities committed on Putins orders.

Britain had already announced a plan to phase out Russian oil, which accounts for 8% of the U.K. supply. Russia is the top supplier of imported coal to the U.K., though British demand for the polluting fuel has plummeted in the past decade. Britain has not ended imports of Russian natural gas, which accounts for 4% of its supply, saying only that it will do so as soon as possible.

UNITED NATIONS  The U.N. General Assembly plans to vote Thursday on whether to suspend Russia from the U.N.s premiere human rights body.

The United States initiated the move in response to the discovery of hundreds of bodies after Russian troops withdrew from towns near Ukraine's capital. Videos and photos of corpses of people who appeared to be civilians have sparked calls for tougher sanctions and war crimes charges against Russia, which has vehemently denied responsibility.

General Assembly spokeswoman Paulina Kubiak said on Wednesday that an emergency special session on Ukraine will resume at 10 a.m. EDT on Thursday, when a resolution to suspend the rights of membership in the Human Rights Council of the Russian Federation will be put to a vote.

The brief resolution expresses grave concern at the ongoing human rights and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, particularly at the reports of violations and abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law by the Russian Federation, including gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights.

To be approved, the resolution requires a two-thirds majority of assembly members that vote yes or no. Abstentions dont count.

WASHINGTON  The U.S. Justice Department is working with European allies and prosecutors in Ukraine to investigate potential war crimes after Russias invasion.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said Wednesday that U.S. prosecutors across the world are working to collect evidence and to collect the information on atrocities that we have all seen in both photographs and video footage.

He pointed specifically to photos and videos from Bucha, where Associated Press journalists have witnessed evidence of killings and torture, including charred bodies.

But Garland stopped short of calling for a tribunal like the one set up to hold Nazi leaders to account after World War II. He said a U.S. prosecutors in Paris were meeting with the French war crimes prosecutor, and that other Justice Department lawyers had met with prosecutors in Europe to work out a plan for gathering evidence with respect to Ukraine.

WASHINGTON  The U.S. on Wednesday announced that it is sanctioning Russian President Vladimir Putins two adult daughters as part of a new batch of penalties on the countrys political and economic system in retaliation for its war crimes in Ukraine.

The U.S. is also imposing toughened full blocking sanctions on Russias Sberbank and Alfa Bank, two of its largest financial institutions, as well as some Russian state-owned enterprises. President Joe Biden is also signing an executive order to ban new U.S. investment in Russia.

In addition to Putins adult daughters, the new sanctions also target the family of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

The U.S. actions are set to be imposed in concert with toughened sanctions by its European allies.

LONDON  A Western official says it will take Russia up to a month to regroup its forces for a major push on eastern Ukraine.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence, said Wednesday that a reasonable estimate would be of three to four weeks before troops that have pulled back from the area around Kyiv and northern Ukraine can be re-equipped and redeployed against the Donbas region in the east.

The official said the Russian units would have to go through a pretty lengthy period of reconstitution and refurbishment before they could rejoin the war.

The official said almost a quarter of the Russian ground units known as battalion tactical groups in Ukraine had been rendered non-combat-effective in the fighting and either withdrawn or merged with other units.

The losses and pullback of Russian troops mean the threat posed to Kyiv is limited for the foreseeable future from Russian ground troops, the official said.

 AP writer Jill Lawless contributed.

BRUSSELS  NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says Finland and Sweden would be welcomed with open arms should they decide to join the worlds biggest security alliance, as Russias war on Ukraine spurs public support in the two Nordic countries for membership.

Russia has demanded that the 30-nation military organization stop expanding, so the prospect of Finland and Sweden joining could anger President Vladimir Putin.

But Stoltenberg says NATO members might be prepared to provide security guarantees for the period from when the two might announce any membership bid and when their applications are approved. He declined to say what kind of protection they might get.

Once members, the two neutral Nordic nations would benefit from NATOs collective security guarantee, which obliges all members to come to the defense of any ally that comes under attack.

Stoltenberg told reporters Wednesday that he is certain that we will find ways to address concerns they may have regarding the period between the potential application and the final ratification.

A poll commissioned by Finnish broadcaster YLE last month showed that, for the first time, more than 50% of Finns support joining the Western military alliance. In neighboring Sweden, a similar poll showed that those in favor of NATO membership outnumber those against.

BERLIN  A German spokesman says the government has information which indicates that bodies found after Ukraine retook Bucha last week had been lying there since at least March 10, when Russian troops were in control of the town.

Steffen Hebestreit told reporters in Berlin on Wednesday that the information was based on non-commercial satellite images taken March 10-18 of Yablonska Street in Bucha.

Credible information shows that from March 7 to March 30 Russian soldiers and security forces were deployed in this area, he said. They were also tasked with the interrogation of prisoners who were subsequently executed.

Hebestreit said that targeted killings by units of the Russian military and security forces are therefore proof that the Russian President and supreme commander has at least approvingly accepted human rights abuses and war crimes to achieve his goals.

The assertions made by the Russian side that these are staged scenes or they arent responsible for the murders are therefore not tenable, he added.

Asked about the source of this information, Hebestreit said that images reviewed by Germany were not commercial satellite images. He declined to elaborate.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark  Norway is following other European nations and expelling Russian diplomats.

Norways Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt said Wednesday that three Russian diplomats had carried out activities incompatible with their status.

The timing for the expulsions was not accidental and comes at a time when the whole world is shaken by reports of Russian forces abusing civilians, especially in the city of Bucha, Huitfeldt said in a statement.

In recent days, numerous European countries have expelled Russian diplomats and staff at Russian diplomatic missions.

GENEVA  The International Committee of the Red Cross says one of its teams in Ukraine has led some 500 people who fled Mariupol in a humanitarian convoy of buses and private cars to a safer location in the embattled country.

The ICRC says its team that has been trying to enter Mariupol since last Friday got within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the besieged city, but security conditions made it impossible to enter. The convoy escorted the civilians from coastal Berdyansk to Zaporizhzhia, to the north.

This convoys arrival to Zaporizhzhia is a huge relief for hundreds of people who have suffered immensely and are now in a safer location, said Pascal Hundt, ICRCs head of delegation in Ukraine. Its clear, though, that thousands more civilians trapped inside Mariupol need safe passage out and aid to come in.

He said the Geneva-based organization remains available as a neutral intermediary to help escort civilians out of Mariupol once concrete agreements and security conditions allow it.

LONDON  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of using hunger as a weapon of war by deliberately targeting Ukraines essential food supplies.

In an address to Irish lawmakers Wednesday, Zelenskyy said Russian forces are destroying things that are sustaining livelihoods including food storage depots, blocking ports so Ukraine could not export food and putting mines into the fields.

For them hunger is also a weapon, a weapon against us ordinary people, he said, accusing Russia of deliberately provoking a food crisis in Ukraine, a major global producer of staples including wheat and sunflower oil.

He said it would have international ramifications, because there will be a shortage of food and the prices will go up, and this is reality for the millions of people who are hungry, and it will be more difficult for them to feed their families.

Zelenskyy spoke by video to a joint session of Irelands two houses of parliament, the latest in a string of international addresses he has used to rally support for Ukraine.

BRUSSELS  A senior European Union official says the blocs member countries should think about ways of offering asylum to Russian soldiers willing to desert Ukraine battlefields.

European Council president Charles Michel on Wednesday expressed his outrage at crimes against humanity, against innocent civilians in Bucha and in many other cities.

He called on Russian soldiers to disobey orders.

If you want no part in killing your Ukrainian brothers and sisters, if you dont want to be a criminal, drop your weapons, stop fighting, leave the battlefield, Michel, who represents the blocs governments, said in a speech to the European Parliament

Endorsing an idea previously circulated by some EU lawmakers, Michel added that granting asylum to Russian deserters is a valuable idea that should be pursued.

BEIJING  China says the reports and images of civilian deaths in the Ukrainian town of Bucha are deeply disturbing and it is calling for an investigation.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Wednesday that China supports all initiatives and measures conducive to alleviating the humanitarian crisis in the country and is ready to continue to work together with the international community to prevent any harm to civilians.

The killings in Bucha may serve to put further pressure on Beijing over its largely pro-Russian stance and attempts to guide public opinion over the war.

China has called for talks while refusing to criticize Russia over its invasion. It opposes economic sanctions on Moscow and blames Washington and NATO for provoking the war and fueling the conflict by sending arms to Ukraine.

Zhaos remarks echo those the previous day of Chinas ambassador to the United Nations, Zhang Jun, who called for an investigation, describing the reports and images of civilian deaths in Bucha as deeply disturbing.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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Lisa Nutt: The Tucson Association of Realtors has named Lisa Nutt, an agent affiliated with the Williams Centre office of Coldwell Banker Realty, the 2021 Realtor of the Year. The association also presented Nutt with the 2021 Committee of the Year award for her service as chair of the Housing Opportunities Committee of TAR.

University of Arizona: U.S. News & World Report released its 2023 Best Graduate School Rankings, with the University of Arizona Eller College of Management holding on to some of 2022s rankings, jumping up the list in multiple categories and ranking No. 3 for its Masters in Management Information Systems program, coming in at No. 1 among public institutions. The UA Eller College of Management ranked No. 47 (up from No. 64 in 2022s rankings) under the Full-Time MBA category and No. 43 in the Evening MBA category, up from No. 51 last year. Additional specialty categories in which Eller ranked include No. 31 in Business Analytics, No. 23 in Entrepreneurship and No. 38 in Economics.

Carondelet St. Marys Hospital: Carondelet St. Marys Hospital has earned national recognition as meeting the guidelines for treatment of serious stroke events. The Primary Plus Stroke Center Certification, granted by the accrediting agency DNV, recognizes hospitals that have met the specific metrics affirming the hospitals readiness to handle a full range of stroke-related medical problems from diagnosis to treatment, rehabilitation and education. Primary Stroke Plus Certification means that Carondelet St. Marys Hospital goes beyond the requirements of a primary stroke center, with the addition of training, equipment, experience, and personnel for performing thrombectomies and post-care for the treatment of acute ischemic strokes. Carondelet St. Marys Hospital also offers an extensive inpatient rehabilitation program to provide and care for stroke patients through the entire treatment plan.

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PHOENIX  Arizona is on schedule to put its first inmate to death in eight years.

The state Supreme Court on Tuesday set May 11 for the execution of Clarence Wayne Dixon. The warrant, signed by five of the justices  two others recused themselves  is good for 24 hours.

Jennifer Moreno with the federal public defenders office, said she and the lawyers there are finalizing our legal options and will proceed accordingly.

Dixon was convicted of killing Deana Bowdin, an Arizona State University student, in 1978. She was found murdered in her bed with a macrame belt around her neck and blood on her chest.

While police found DNA, they were unable to match it to anyone.

The break came in 2001 when Tempe police matched it to Dixon who at that time was serving a life sentence in prison for a 1986 rape. Dixon had lived across the street from Bowdin at the time of her murder.

His post-conviction attorneys made several efforts to block his execution.

Moreno said there are still issues to be resolved and questions to be answered.

Arizona has a history of problematic executions and has not executed anyone since the horrifically mishandled execution of Joseph Wood in 2014, she said. In that case, the state had to administer 14 doses of lethal drugs than the protocol authorized. And it took Wood two hours to die.

On top of that, the state has had trouble obtaining new lethal drugs  and proving that the drugs have not expired.

The state has had nearly a year to demonstrate that it will not be carrying out executions with expired drugs but has failed to do so, Moreno said. Under these circumstances, the execution of Mr. Dixon, a severely mentally ill, visually disabled and physically frail member of the Navajo Nation, is unconscionable.

Attorney General Mark Brnovich said he sees the issue through a different lens.

I made a promise to Arizona voters that people who commit the ultimate crime get the ultimate punishment, he said in a prepared statement. I will continue to fight every day for justice for victims, their families and our communities.

Brnovich said there are more than 100 inmates on Arizonas death row, with about 20 who have exhausted all their appeals. He said many of the crimes go back to the 1970s and early 1980s.

Only one thing is left to be decided: whether Dixon wants to be killed with an intravenous injection or lethal gas.

In 1992, voters eliminated the use of lethal gas, replacing it with lethal injections. That followed gruesome reports of the execution of Don Harding, who took 11 minutes to die.

But that constitutional amendment, approved by a ratio of more than 3-to-1, preserved the right for those already on death row to choose either option. That includes Dixon and 16 others.

Moreno said the choice has to be made 21 days before the scheduled execution.

The warrant comes as some Jewish residents are trying to legally block the use of the gas chamber for future executions.

A lawsuit filed in February by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Phoenix and two of its members asks that a judge declare that the use of lethal gas violates a state constitutional provision against cruel and unusual punishment.

But the organization also seeks to prevent the state from spending more taxpayer dollars, including those of Holocaust survivors, to expedite executing people with the same cyanide gas, called Zyklon B, that the Nazis used to kill millions of Jews.

Brnovichs office has asked that the case be dismissed.

Arizona Death Row Inmates Arizona Death Row Inmates Jose Acuna-Valenzuela John Allen Frank W. Anderson Wendi E. Andriano Michael Apelt Shad D. Armstrong Frank J. Atwood Patrick W. Bearup Trent C. Benson Steve A. Boggs Eric D. Boyston Johnathan I. Burns Jason E. Bush Michael Carlson Alan M. Champagne Derek D. Chappell Scott D. Clabourne Benjamin B. Cota Robert L. Cromwell Leroy D. Cropper John M. Cruz Donald D. Delahanty David S. Detrich Clarence W. Dixon Richard K. Djerf Eugene A. Doerr Charles D. Ellison John V. Fitzgerald Shawna Forde Micahel Gallardo Alfredo L. Garcia Ruben Garza Fabio Gomez Ernest V. Gonzales Mark Goudeau Richard H. Greenway Vincent J. Guarino David Gulbrandson Aaron B. Gunches Tracy A. Hampton Rodney E. Hardy Christopher A. Hargrave Charles M. Hedlund Robert Hernandez Abel D. Hidalgo Murray Hooper Richard D. Hurles James C. Johnson Ruben M. Johnson Barry L. Jones Danny L. Jones Ronnie L. Joseph George R. Kayer Alvie C. Kiles Darrell E. Lee Chad A. Lee Scott Lehr Andre M. Leteve Eric Mann Jahmari Manuel Gilbert Martinez Ernesto S. Martinez Edward McCauley Frank D. McCray Leroy McGill James E. McKinney Efren Medina William Miller Julius J. Moore Cory D. Morris Roger W. Murray Israel Naranjo Brad Nelson Steven Newell Scott Nordstrom Manuel Ovante Darrel P. Pandeli Steven Parker Isiah Patterson Christopher Payne Robert A. Poyson Wayne B. Prince David M. Ramirez Stephen Reeves Charles B. Rienhardt Thomas M. Riley Dwandarrius J. Robinson Pete C. Rogovich Edward Rose Homer R. Roseberry Sean B. Running Eagle Dauntorian L. Sanders John E. Sansing Ronald D. Schackart Eldon M. Schurz Roger M. Scott Allyn A. Smith Joe C. Smith Todd L. Smith Anthony M. Spears Paul B. Speer Christopher J. Spreitz Preston A. Strong James L. Styers Eugene R. Tucker Sammantha E. Uriarte Pete Vanwinkle Juan Velazquez Robert L. Walden Theodore Washington Ronald T. Williams Brian A. Womble

Howard Fischer is a veteran journalist who has been reporting since 1970 and covering state politics and the Legislature since 1982. Follow him on Twitter at @azcapmedia or email azcapmedia@gmail.com .

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PHOENIX  Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich is going to get a chance to challenge a deal that he says illegally gives away taxpayer funds to benefit a private company.

Brnovich did not wait too long before filing suit against the Board of Regents over an agreement to building a 330-room Omni hotel and a 30,000-square-foot conference center on land owned by Arizona State University, the Arizona Supreme Court said Tuesday.

Justice John Lopez, writing for the unanimous court, said state law gives Brnovich up to five years to pursue any claims of misspending of public funds.

But the decision does not mean that the deal is illegal. Instead, it sends the case back to a trial judge to hear evidence.

What the courts ultimately decide, however, likely could affect more than this particular deal. It also could alter or upend other arrangements that state universities have where they approve commercial leases of public property to private entities.

In prepared statements, each side claimed victory, focusing on the points they won and ignoring where the justices found fault with their arguments.

From the very beginning, we said this lawsuit is about protecting hardworking Arizonans by ensuring that taxpayer funds are not used for private business deals, Brnovich said. But that does not address the fact that the justices did not actually conclude the deal was illegal.

And Lyndel Manson, who chairs the Board of Regents, pointed out that the justices affirmed lower court rulings that the land where the hotel is being built is and has long been tax-exempt state land.

Manson also said that the hotel will benefit the university and mentioned that Omni will pay an estimated $120 million in rent.

But she did not address the question the justices said needs to be resolved, like whether it was a good deal or whether the financial arrangement actually amounts to an illegal gift. And Manson also glossed over the fact that the $120 million she cites as a benefit is to be paid over 60 years.

At the core of the lawsuit is the 2018 agreement between the regents and Omni to construct a new hotel, convention center and parking lot on land that ASU owns on the southeast corner of Mill Avenue and University Drive. Construction is currently underway with a planned opening next spring.

That deal gives Omni the option to lease the hotel and conference center property for 60 years and purchase the land at the end of that lease for a nominal fee.

Brnovich argued there are two basic problems with that.

The first is that because the property is owned by the regents, it is tax exempt. That means Omni would not pay property taxes that otherwise would be due during the least term.

That argument didnt wash with the Supreme Court.

The justices said Brnovich was basing his claim on a provision in the Arizona Constitution which makes it illegal to transfer property to evade taxes. But in this case, they said, there was no such evasion as the land, owned by the regents, never was taxable in the first place.

That, however, is only part of the issue.

The other is the nature of the deal itself, and whether it violates the Gift Clause of the Arizona Constitution. It makes it illegal for public agencies to make any donation or grant, by subsidy or otherwise, to any individual, association or corporation.

Brnovich pointed out that ASU is paying $19.5 million to build the conference center even though the contract allows the school to use it without paying rent just seven days a year. And the attorney general said the school agreed to pay about $30 million to construct a 1,200-spot parking garage but will gift Omni 275 of the spots that the hotel gets to use exclusively and keep the revenue from the spaces, a move he contends is giving away the equivalent of $8 million.

Until now, however, Brnovich has been unable to even make his case.

Both the trial judge and the state Court of Appeals tossed the claim, concluding that Brnovich had waited too long because state laws generally say such claims need to be brought within a year.

But Lopez said there is a separate statute that gives the attorney general up to five years to file suit to recover illegally paid public monies. And that, he wrote, gives Brnovich a chance to have his day in court.

Closely related to the Gift Clause is the question of whether the lease portion of the deal is not for the benefit of the state but instead for the benefit of Omni. And here the Supreme Court concluded that Brnovich has the authority to pursue those claims.

Manson said the regents continue to insist those claims are meritless. And ASU President Michael Crow, in his own statement, said he believes the deal will pass legal muster.

It represents an economic development win for the city, an operational asset to the university and the sort of entrepreneurial focus state leaders and the Board of Regents have called upon our public universities to have, he said.

But Crow acknowledged that what the courts ultimately decide will have implications far beyond this specific arrangement. He called the deal a model for future partnerships to advance community and higher education interests for the state of Arizona.

It isnt just Brnovich and the courts who have been looking into how Arizona universities make leases for commercial use.

In a 2019 report, Auditor General Lindsey Perry said the Board of Regents has been leasing out property for commercial use without proper oversight and with only limited transparency, creating a risk of inappropriate use of public resources.

The report found a lack of written guidance for real estate policies, increasing the risk of not ensuring that use of its property benefits Arizona and the universities. That includes any sort of guidance on how the board should document the economic and tax impacts of its policies.

And what that means, according to Perry, is that the board risks approving commercial lease agreements that allow a public resource to be used primary for private benefit.

John Arnold, the boards executive director, said at the time there were new policies that address those issues. But Perry said her staff found those new policies wanting, missing things like how to determine if lease rental rates reflect fair market value.

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PHOENIX  The Arizona Supreme Court wont quash the method of voting used by nearly 90% of state residents, at least not now.

In a brief order late Tuesday the justices rejected a bid by the Arizona Republican Party to declare that early voting is unconstitutional. They rejected arguments by an attorney for the party that the issue is strictly legal and ripe for them to decide, without presenting any testimony or evidence.

But the order, signed by Chief Justice Robert Brutinel, does not end the matter.

He said the challengers are free to refile the case in Maricopa County Superior Court where they can provide some factual basis for their allegations. Only after there is a decision at the trial court  and the judge there makes some findings  would it be appropriate for the high court to review the issue.

Central to the fight is the contention by attorney Alexander Kolodin that the only form of voting specifically authorized by the framers of the state constitution is in person, and on Election Day. What that means, he said, is anything else  including the current system of no-excuse early ballots created by the legislature in 1991  is illegal.

Kolodin had no better luck with his alternate legal theory that even if early voting is allowed, the state is required to return to the way the situation was prior to 1991.

That still allowed people to get early ballots. But they also had to provide some proof they needed it, like being away from their voting precinct on Election Day or a physical disability.

Kolodin said that, at least, would provide more security over early ballots than the current system.

The lawsuit has drawn opposition not just from Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who is the states top election official, but also from Republican Gov. Doug Ducey. He called the legal effort ill-conceived.

It would undo the work of many Republican governors and secretaries of state over the past several decades, he told reporters last month. And Ducey said the lawsuit is poorly crafted.

Kolodin had no better luck with his bid to get the justices to rule that the use of drop boxes for ballots is illegal.

There was no immediate response from Kolodin.

The decision by the justices not to decide the case on strictly legal arguments is in line with a legal brief filed by the Coconino County Board of Supervisors. County Attorney William Ring said they have to consider the rights of those who could lose their right to cast early ballots.

This court must justly consider whether action upon the petition (by the Arizona Republican Party) can or will so interfere as to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage, he told the court. And that, Ring wrote, means the justices have to consider the facts that measure and gauge the personal impact upon the content of individual expectations that are assured by (the Arizona Constitution).

But GOP gubernatorial hopeful Kari Lake, in her own friend of the court filing, urged the justices to take the case and void early voting.

Absent an actual reason why the voter cannot vote at the polls, voting occurs at the polls on Election Day, not election Month, wrote Tim La Sota, her attorney. And a reason does not include that the able-bodied, physically present voters simply does not want to take the minimally burdensome step of presenting him or herself at a polling place on Election Day.

Lake has been among those who has denied that Joe Biden won the popular vote in Arizona, with one of the theories being irregularities in early voting and fraudulent ballots.

The practice, however, is extremely popular among Arizonans: A survey by OH Predictive Insights found that just one out of every 10 registered voters wants to get rid of early ballots in Arizona.

Howard Fischer is a veteran journalist who has been reporting since 1970 and covering state politics and the Legislature since 1982. Follow him on Twitter at @azcapmedia or email azcapmedia@gmail.com .

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The Pima County Board of Supervisors accepted Chuck Huckelberrys resignation on Tuesday amid news the former county administrator retired from the position in July.

The board voted unanimously to accept the resignation with the understanding that acceptance terminates the employment relationship, and appointed Jan Lesher to take over as county administrator. Lesher had been interim county administrator following Huckelberrys injury in a bike crash last October.

It was learned this week that nine months before announcing his resignation, Huckelberry had officially retired on July 4, 2021, and has since received a monthly pension of $12,228, according to the Arizona State Retirement System. The Tucson Sentinel first reported the news Monday.

Since then, Huckelberry has apparently operated as a contractor, receiving his regular salary and pension payments at the same time. Pima County was unable to confirm Huckelberrys official employment status Tuesday.

Huckelberry suffered a brain bleed, a punctured lung and broken ribs when he was struck by a car while riding his bike downtown on Oct. 23. His resignation was announced publicly on April 1 in the addendum for the Board of Supervisors Tuesday meeting.

An attorney officially announced Huckelberrys resignation in an email sent to board Chair Sharon Bronson on Monday on Huckelberrys behalf, stating: I hereby resign as the Pima County Administrator in order to concentrate my full efforts on the recovery of my health.

However, I am not resigning from Pima County. Pima County has a bright and prosperous future with many opportunities and unlimited potential for everyone. After I have recovered, I will be available to assist the County Administrators office and Board of Supervisors in achieving those opportunities and that future.

Its not clear what Huckelberrys future employment plans within the county are, but the boards motion passed unanimously Tuesday terminates his current contract.

The board voted 4-1, with Supervisor Steve Christy dissenting, to appoint Jan Lesher to take over Huckelberrys position. Lesher has served as deputy county administrator since 2017 and has taken over Huckelberrys role since Dec. 7. Her salary is currently $231,000.

Retired in 2021

When the board approved Huckelberrys renewed contract as county administrator in January 2021, it approved a clause in that contract that said: If Employee retires as allowed by the Arizona State Retirement System, Employee can return to work as a contractor without any negation of the terms of this contract, including its length.

Unbeknownst to county residents, Huckelberry officially retired last year and has been paid his annual salary, set at $292,000 in 2021, in addition to monthly pension payments from the state retirement system, without being directly employed by Pima County.

Chuck didnt retire in the sense that he ceased working or providing services to Pima County. The fact is that Chuck applied to the Arizona State Retirement System for the benefits he was lawfully entitled to receive given his age and years of service, Huckelberrys attorney, Ted Schmidt, said in an email. This is no different than a person who is employed full-time filing for Social Security benefits when they become eligible. It is certainly not illegal or improper for someone who has worked all their lives to receive Social Security or state retirement benefits even though they continue to work full time.

The move of simultaneously receiving pension benefits and a regular salary is commonly referred to as double-dipping, and is allowed under state statute in certain conditions.

Amid the news of Huckelberrys resignation, Supervisors Adelita Grijalva, Matt Heinz and Rex Scott added an executive session item to Tuesdays meeting regarding the resignation of the current County Administrator and the potential need for outside counsel. No further action, besides the clarification that accepting Huckelberrys resignation would also terminate his contract, was taken Tuesday. The supervisors were quoted in the Sentinel article as saying they were not aware Huckelberry officially retired last July and was working as a contractor.

Retirement system members can retire, return to work and continue to collect pension benefits if they work less than 20 hours a week after the 19th week of the fiscal year, which runs from July to June. That means the pension recipient can only work full time for 19 weeks of the fiscal year.

According to a memo attached to the boards Tuesday agenda, Huckelberry abided by this rule and received full-time compensation for 19 weeks, as required, and received compensation for 19-hour work weeks from his accrued vacations and sick time thereafter.

Huckelberry was also earning the benefits of his contract, according to the memo, which include an annual $8,200 contribution to a health savings account, a $550 monthly vehicle allowance as well as sick, vacation, holiday and other paid leave. The boards termination of his contract on Tuesday, however, suspends those benefits.

Huckelberry has been the county administrator for 28 years, a role in which he managed a $2.1 billion budget, which includes federal COVID-19 relief funds as well as local taxpayer money, and a staff of more than 7,000 employees. He has worked for the county since 1974.

Contact reporter Nicole Ludden at nludden@tucson.com

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Hudbay Minerals Inc. will begin clearing and grading land this month for its goal of building five open-pit mines on the west slope of the Santa Rita Mountains, it told Pima County officials.

Rosemont Copper, Hudbays Arizona-based subsidiary, anticipates starting clearing, grading, stockpiling and other earthwork activities related to the construction of tailings and waste rock facilities in April on its private land on the west slope, Hudbay Vice President Javier Del Rio wrote to the Pima County Regional Flood Control District on March 10.

The company also plans to start seeking permits later this year from various state agencies to allow construction of its entire Rosemont Copper World project on the west slope, the letter said. Besides waste rock and tailings facilities, the company also plans a heap leach pad, the multiple open pits and some kind of plant site, it wrote.

The initial work consists of ground preparation activities for the tailings and waste rock storage areas on Rosemonts private property. As always, Hudbay will take great care to ensure that we minimize disturbances to the environment and comply with all federal, state and local requirements, Hudbay said in a statement to the Star on Monday.

The company has no specific construction start date yet, it said Monday.

The company will need three state permits to build Copper World on the west slope, it told the Star. Those include an aquifer protection permit, an air quality permit, and a surface water quality permit for stormwater runoff from the site, in addition to many other approvals prior to beginning operations, said Hudbay, without elaborating.

A set of maps that Hudbay sent the county shows five open pits on the west slope, two more than the company had previously shown on earlier maps of possible west slope mining plans in the mountain range southeast of Tucson. The maps also show the site to be directly east of Green Valley.

In responding to Hudbays letter to Pima County, an environmental law firm representing three Arizona tribes sent the mining company a notice Monday that it intends to file suit to block construction activity on the west slope. The notice said grading and clearing activities there would violate the federal Clean Water Acts prohibition of any unpermitted discharges into federally regulated washes.

Under federal law, however, the tribes cant file suit until 60 days after giving notice, meaning they cant seek an injunction to block construction until well after its likely to start.

A developer of a mine or of housing must obtain a Clean Water Act permit if the federal government determines the construction work would require depositing fill material in neighboring washes that are deemed eligible for federal regulation.

Because of recent, conflicting federal actions and a 2021 federal court ruling on the issue, its not clear at this time if the ephemeral washes on the Copper World site will be regulated or not. The Army Corps of Engineers hasnt yet responded to questions from the Star about Hudbays likely activity at the site.

In response to questions from the Star, Hudbay denied its planned activities would damage federally regulated washes.

The site preparation work is being conducted exclusively on Hudbays private property where none of the dry washes have ever been designated as Waters of the United States subject to regulation, the company said. The area includes Helvetia, a historic mining district with dozens of old mines, exposed workings, and the remains of a 19th century smelter and corresponding slag pile.

Additionally, the company said, Hudbay has all approvals required for this initial site preparation work on Rosemonts private property.

The notice of intent to sue said, The proposed mine site contains a dense network of ephemeral streams that qualify as federally regulated waters, protected by the Clean Water Act.

The notice was filed by the Earthjustice law firm, on behalf of the Tohono OOdham, Pascua-Yaqui and Hopi tribes.

Hudbays operations would cause significant, if not catastrophic harm, to our nations waters. Hudbay would destroy the network of ephemeral streams on the site, causing irreparable harm to the environment and degrading downstream waters, Earthjustice attorney Stu Gillespie wrote to the Army Corps on March 28.

Gillespie said he hopes that Hudbay or the Army Corps will choose to not start or allow construction until the company gets a Clean Water Act permit.

As for Hudbays letter to county flood control officials, Hudbay said its submitting that information for review and comment purposes only. The Flood Control District has no authority under state law or county codes to prohibit construction or require a floodplain use permit for construction of waste rock disposal areas or tailings dams, Hudbay said.

If any other planned facilities arent exempt from county floodplain requirements and would lie within a designated floodplain, Hudbay will request a floodplain use permit for them from the county at the appropriate time, wrote Del Rio, vice president for the U.S. and South America operations of Toronto-based Hudbay.

The Flood Control District doesnt disagree with Hudbays stance that tailing dams and waste disposal areas are exempt from permitting, Deputy District Director Eric Shepp responded to Hudbay on March 28. But the district believes other planned development activities on the site are subject to county floodplain management regulations, Shepp wrote.

Shepp also requested more information from Hudbay to meet county requirements for adequate information for the districts review and comment before construction starts.

Hudbays submitted plans appear to be concept level plans rather than construction plans, while Pima County codes require submittal of formal construction plans, Shepp wrote.

This provides the district an opportunity to provide meaningful and substantive comments to ensure the most effective design is considered, Shepp wrote.

Asked about that by the Star, Hudbay replied, Hudbay has been corresponding with the Flood Control District and is currently awaiting comments from the District on the plans we have provided.

Copper World spans 3,430 acres from near the companys proposed Rosemont Mine site on the east slope of the Santa Ritas to to the historic Helvetia mining area on the west, where copper was removed from the 1880s through the early 1960s. About 1,290 acres will be disturbed by construction of Copper World, Hudbay has said. The Rosemont project is tied up in federal court and on hold.

The company won approval in October from the Arizona State Mine Inspectors Office for a Copper World reclamation plan. Hudbay has repeatedly praised the Copper World deposit as being of higher grade and lying closer to the ground surface than its Rosemont deposit.

The initial resource for our Copper World project is larger and at a higher level of geological confidence than we expected at this stage due to the exploration teams success in discovering several quality deposits through an extensive drill program this year, said Peter Kukielski, Hudbay president and chief executive officer, in a news release about the site in December.

The metallurgical testing and mineralogical studies on Copper World are well-advanced, and the company will release a preliminary economic assessment in the first half of 2022, Kukielski said.

Hudbay affirmed to the Star on Monday that the assessment is scheduled for release on that timetable.

Contact Tony Davis at 520-349-0350 or tdavis@tucson.com. Follow Davis on Twitter@tonydavis987.

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LVIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia is trying to hide evidence of war crimes to interfere with the international investigation.

We have information that the Russian troops have changed tactics and are trying to remove the dead people, the dead Ukrainians, from the streets and cellars of territory they occupied, Zelenskyy said in his daily nighttime video address to the nation late Wednesday. This is only an attempt to hide the evidence and nothing more.

Zelenskyy added that it seems that the Russian leadership was really afraid that the global anger over what was seen in Bucha would be repeated after what was seen in other cities.

The Ukrainian leader also said thousands of people are now missing, either dead or deported to Russia.

Zelenskyy is urging Russian citizens not to be afraid to protest the war.

If you have even a little shame about what the Russian military is doing in Ukraine, then for such Russian citizens this is a key moment: You have to demand  just demand  an end to the war, Zelenskyy said.

KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR:

 Mariupols dead put at 5,000 as Ukraine braces in the east

 US targets Putins daughters, Russian banks in new sanctions

 Burned, piled bodies among latest horrors in Bucha, Ukraine

 Russia's setback in Kyiv was memorable military failure

 Russian media campaign falsely claims Bucha deaths are fakes

 China calls for probe into Bucha killings, assigns no blame

 Go to https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine for more coverage

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:

PARIS  French President Emmanuel Macron spoke out against Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Wednesday evening, defending himself over criticism he held multiple talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin to no avail.

On Monday, Morawiecki ridiculed the French leaders several hours of phone calls with Putin, saying that they achieved nothing.

Some fear the comments from Poland might destabilize unity of the European Union as it hopes to stand unified in the face of Putins aggression in Ukraine.

Macron told TF1 broadcasters evening news that he takes full responsibility for speaking to Putin in the name of France to avoid the war and to build a new architecture for peace in Europe several years ago.

Macron is standing for re-election in France in polls that begin Sunday.

KYIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian authorities say nearly 5,000 people were evacuated from combat areas Wednesday.

Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said 1,171 people were evacuated from the besieged Sea of Azov port of Mariupol, and 2,515 more left the cities of Berdyansk and Melitopol and other areas in the south.

She said an additional 1,206 people were evacuated from the eastern region of Luhansk.

Vereshchuk and other officials have been urging residents of eastern regions to evacuate in the face of an impending Russian offensive, saying that people in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions should leave for safer regions.

Donetsk region Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said at least five civilians were killed and eight others wounded by Russian shelling Wednesday.

Over 10 million people, about a quarter of Ukraines population, have been displaced by the war, and more than 4 million of them have fled the country.

UNITED NATIONS  The United States and United Kingdom have boycotted an informal meeting of the U.N. Security Council called by Russia to press its baseless claims that the U.S. has biological warfare laboratories in Ukraine.

The move by Russia on Wednesday was the latest of several that have led Western countries to accuse Moscow of using the U.N. as a platform for disinformation to draw attention away from its war against its smaller neighbor.

U.N. disarmament chief Izumi Nakamitsu told the council at two official Security Council meetings called by Russia on the issue last month that the United Nations is not aware of any biological weapons program in Ukraine.

A smoke screen to draw attention away from the brutal warfare, irresponsible, dangerous and deplorable were just a few of the responses by countries, including Norway, France, Ireland and Albania.

ROME  Italian Premier Mario Draghi says no embargo of Russian gas is up for consideration at this point as the European Union ponders its next package of sanctions over the war in Ukraine, adding: "I dont know if it ever will be on the table.

Draghi told reporters Monday night that in case a gas embargo is proposed, Italy will be very happy to follow it if that would make peace possible.

Draghi added: If the price of gas can be exchanged for peace ... what do we choose? Peace? Or to have the air conditioning running in the summer? This is the question we must pose.

KYIV, Ukraine  The mayor of the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol says more than 5,000 civilians have been killed during the monthlong Russian blockade, among them 210 children.

Mayor Vadym Boichenko said Wednesday that Russian forces have among other targets bombed hospitals, including one where 50 people burned to death.

Boichenko said that more than 90% of the citys infrastructure has been destroyed by Russian shelling.

The Russian military is besieging the strategic Sea of Azov port, and has cut food, water and energy supplies and pummeled it with artillery and air raids. Capturing the city would allow Russia to secure a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden is saluting the international community and some of the largest corporations in the U.S. for further increasing Russias economic isolation.

Addressing thousands at the North Americas Building Trades Unions Legislative Conference at a Washington hotel on Wednesday, Biden said of the Russia-Ukraine war, Theres nothing less happening than credible war crimes.

The president said responsible nations have to come together to hold these perpetrators responsible, and vowed that were going to stifle Russias ability to grow for years to come.

He said corporate Americas stepping up for a chance, noting that 600-plus firms have chosen to leave Russia.

MOSCOW  Russias Defense Ministry has accused Ukraine of sabotaging a pre-agreed prisoner swap.

Speaking at a briefing, Defense Ministry official Mikhail Mizintsev claimed that Kyiv had for a long time blocked prisoner exchanges, including a swap set to take place Wednesday involving 251 military personnel on each side.

He alleged that the delays gave Moscow all the reasons to suspect that Russian servicemen held in captivity are not at all well."

On April 1, representatives of the Ukrainian presidential office said Ukraine had secured the release of 86 soldiers, including 15 women, through a swap. This was confirmed by Russian officials on Wednesday.

BRUSSELS  A new U.S. commitment of Javelin missiles means the West soon will have provided Ukrainian fighters with 10 anti-tank weapons for every Russian tank in their country, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday.

Blinken spoke to U.S. news broadcaster MSNBC after the U.S. announced an additional $100 million for more Javelin missiles for Ukraine. The U.S. says it has provided $1.7 billion for Ukraines defense and aid since Russia invaded on Feb. 24.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is pressing the West to provide more weapons, faster, and do more to cut off Russia from the global economy, to pressure Putin to make peace.

In terms of what they need to act quickly and act effectively, to deal with the planes that are firing at them from the skies, the tanks that are trying to destroy  their cities from the ground, they have the tools that they need, Blinken said of Ukraines forces. Theyre going to keep getting them, and were going to keep sustaining that.

BUDAPEST, Hungary  Hungarys prime minister has asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to call an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine but says his country will comply with Russian demands to pay for natural gas imports in rubles.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he had spoken with Putin by phone and urged the Russian leader to end the military conflict in neighboring Ukraine. Orban said he also offered to host a conference in Hungarys capital between the warring parties.

I suggested that (Putin)  the Ukrainian president, the French president and the German chancellor hold a meeting here in Budapest, the sooner the better, Orban said. It should not be a peace negotiation and not a peace settlement, because that takes longer, but an immediate ceasefire agreement.

Orban spoke days after his Fidesz party won a fourth consecutive term leading the Hungarian government.

The right-wing nationalist leader, Putins closest ally in the European Union, has vehemently refused to supply weapons to Ukraine or allow their transport across the Hungary-Ukraine border. He also lobbied heavily against the EU imposing sanctions on Russian energy imports.

LARNACA, Cyprus  Russian disinformation about its war against Ukraine needs to be exposed, including on Russias war crimes, a U.S. State Department official said on a visit to Cyprus Wednesday.

Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said Russian lies have evolved to the point of blaming Ukrainians for actions by Russian forces, including the war crimes we see on the ground.

So we all have an interest in exposing Russian disinformation, ensuring our citizens have the truth and ensuring that Russian citizens also (have the truth) ... despite the Iron Curtain that Putin has put down over that, Nuland said.

Nuland was in Cyprus as part of a five-nation tour aimed at strengthening bilateral ties and rallying support for Ukraine.

LONDON  Britain says it will end imports of Russian oil and coal by the end of the year and ban U.K. investment in Russia as part of a new set of sanctions in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

The British government also announced a freeze on the assets of Credit Bank of Moscow and Sberbank, Russias largest bank, and slapped travel bans and asset freezes on eight more wealthy Russians. They included Andrey Guryev, founder of the fertilizer company PhosAgro, and Sergey Sergeyevich Ivanov, president of diamond producer Alrosa.

U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said the measures were coordinated with Britains allies. The U.S. also sanctioned SberBank on Wednesday, and the European Union plans to ban imports of Russian coal.

Truss said the sanctions were aimed at decimating (President Vladimir) Putins war machine and to show the Russian elite that they cannot wash their hands of the atrocities committed on Putins orders.

Britain had already announced a plan to phase out Russian oil, which accounts for 8% of the U.K. supply. Russia is the top supplier of imported coal to the U.K., though British demand for the polluting fuel has plummeted in the past decade. Britain has not ended imports of Russian natural gas, which accounts for 4% of its supply, saying only that it will do so as soon as possible.

UNITED NATIONS  The U.N. General Assembly plans to vote Thursday on whether to suspend Russia from the U.N.s premiere human rights body.

The United States initiated the move in response to the discovery of hundreds of bodies after Russian troops withdrew from towns near Ukraine's capital. Videos and photos of corpses of people who appeared to be civilians have sparked calls for tougher sanctions and war crimes charges against Russia, which has vehemently denied responsibility.

General Assembly spokeswoman Paulina Kubiak said on Wednesday that an emergency special session on Ukraine will resume at 10 a.m. EDT on Thursday, when a resolution to suspend the rights of membership in the Human Rights Council of the Russian Federation will be put to a vote.

The brief resolution expresses grave concern at the ongoing human rights and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, particularly at the reports of violations and abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law by the Russian Federation, including gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights.

To be approved, the resolution requires a two-thirds majority of assembly members that vote yes or no. Abstentions dont count.

WASHINGTON  The U.S. Justice Department is working with European allies and prosecutors in Ukraine to investigate potential war crimes after Russias invasion.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said Wednesday that U.S. prosecutors across the world are working to collect evidence and to collect the information on atrocities that we have all seen in both photographs and video footage.

He pointed specifically to photos and videos from Bucha, where Associated Press journalists have witnessed evidence of killings and torture, including charred bodies.

But Garland stopped short of calling for a tribunal like the one set up to hold Nazi leaders to account after World War II. He said a U.S. prosecutors in Paris were meeting with the French war crimes prosecutor, and that other Justice Department lawyers had met with prosecutors in Europe to work out a plan for gathering evidence with respect to Ukraine.

WASHINGTON  The U.S. on Wednesday announced that it is sanctioning Russian President Vladimir Putins two adult daughters as part of a new batch of penalties on the countrys political and economic system in retaliation for its war crimes in Ukraine.

The U.S. is also imposing toughened full blocking sanctions on Russias Sberbank and Alfa Bank, two of its largest financial institutions, as well as some Russian state-owned enterprises. President Joe Biden is also signing an executive order to ban new U.S. investment in Russia.

In addition to Putins adult daughters, the new sanctions also target the family of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

The U.S. actions are set to be imposed in concert with toughened sanctions by its European allies.

LONDON  A Western official says it will take Russia up to a month to regroup its forces for a major push on eastern Ukraine.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence, said Wednesday that a reasonable estimate would be of three to four weeks before troops that have pulled back from the area around Kyiv and northern Ukraine can be re-equipped and redeployed against the Donbas region in the east.

The official said the Russian units would have to go through a pretty lengthy period of reconstitution and refurbishment before they could rejoin the war.

The official said almost a quarter of the Russian ground units known as battalion tactical groups in Ukraine had been rendered non-combat-effective in the fighting and either withdrawn or merged with other units.

The losses and pullback of Russian troops mean the threat posed to Kyiv is limited for the foreseeable future from Russian ground troops, the official said.

 AP writer Jill Lawless contributed.

BRUSSELS  NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says Finland and Sweden would be welcomed with open arms should they decide to join the worlds biggest security alliance, as Russias war on Ukraine spurs public support in the two Nordic countries for membership.

Russia has demanded that the 30-nation military organization stop expanding, so the prospect of Finland and Sweden joining could anger President Vladimir Putin.

But Stoltenberg says NATO members might be prepared to provide security guarantees for the period from when the two might announce any membership bid and when their applications are approved. He declined to say what kind of protection they might get.

Once members, the two neutral Nordic nations would benefit from NATOs collective security guarantee, which obliges all members to come to the defense of any ally that comes under attack.

Stoltenberg told reporters Wednesday that he is certain that we will find ways to address concerns they may have regarding the period between the potential application and the final ratification.

A poll commissioned by Finnish broadcaster YLE last month showed that, for the first time, more than 50% of Finns support joining the Western military alliance. In neighboring Sweden, a similar poll showed that those in favor of NATO membership outnumber those against.

BERLIN  A German spokesman says the government has information which indicates that bodies found after Ukraine retook Bucha last week had been lying there since at least March 10, when Russian troops were in control of the town.

Steffen Hebestreit told reporters in Berlin on Wednesday that the information was based on non-commercial satellite images taken March 10-18 of Yablonska Street in Bucha.

Credible information shows that from March 7 to March 30 Russian soldiers and security forces were deployed in this area, he said. They were also tasked with the interrogation of prisoners who were subsequently executed.

Hebestreit said that targeted killings by units of the Russian military and security forces are therefore proof that the Russian President and supreme commander has at least approvingly accepted human rights abuses and war crimes to achieve his goals.

The assertions made by the Russian side that these are staged scenes or they arent responsible for the murders are therefore not tenable, he added.

Asked about the source of this information, Hebestreit said that images reviewed by Germany were not commercial satellite images. He declined to elaborate.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark  Norway is following other European nations and expelling Russian diplomats.

Norways Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt said Wednesday that three Russian diplomats had carried out activities incompatible with their status.

The timing for the expulsions was not accidental and comes at a time when the whole world is shaken by reports of Russian forces abusing civilians, especially in the city of Bucha, Huitfeldt said in a statement.

In recent days, numerous European countries have expelled Russian diplomats and staff at Russian diplomatic missions.

GENEVA  The International Committee of the Red Cross says one of its teams in Ukraine has led some 500 people who fled Mariupol in a humanitarian convoy of buses and private cars to a safer location in the embattled country.

The ICRC says its team that has been trying to enter Mariupol since last Friday got within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the besieged city, but security conditions made it impossible to enter. The convoy escorted the civilians from coastal Berdyansk to Zaporizhzhia, to the north.

This convoys arrival to Zaporizhzhia is a huge relief for hundreds of people who have suffered immensely and are now in a safer location, said Pascal Hundt, ICRCs head of delegation in Ukraine. Its clear, though, that thousands more civilians trapped inside Mariupol need safe passage out and aid to come in.

He said the Geneva-based organization remains available as a neutral intermediary to help escort civilians out of Mariupol once concrete agreements and security conditions allow it.

LONDON  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of using hunger as a weapon of war by deliberately targeting Ukraines essential food supplies.

In an address to Irish lawmakers Wednesday, Zelenskyy said Russian forces are destroying things that are sustaining livelihoods including food storage depots, blocking ports so Ukraine could not export food and putting mines into the fields.

For them hunger is also a weapon, a weapon against us ordinary people, he said, accusing Russia of deliberately provoking a food crisis in Ukraine, a major global producer of staples including wheat and sunflower oil.

He said it would have international ramifications, because there will be a shortage of food and the prices will go up, and this is reality for the millions of people who are hungry, and it will be more difficult for them to feed their families.

Zelenskyy spoke by video to a joint session of Irelands two houses of parliament, the latest in a string of international addresses he has used to rally support for Ukraine.

BRUSSELS  A senior European Union official says the blocs member countries should think about ways of offering asylum to Russian soldiers willing to desert Ukraine battlefields.

European Council president Charles Michel on Wednesday expressed his outrage at crimes against humanity, against innocent civilians in Bucha and in many other cities.

He called on Russian soldiers to disobey orders.

If you want no part in killing your Ukrainian brothers and sisters, if you dont want to be a criminal, drop your weapons, stop fighting, leave the battlefield, Michel, who represents the blocs governments, said in a speech to the European Parliament

Endorsing an idea previously circulated by some EU lawmakers, Michel added that granting asylum to Russian deserters is a valuable idea that should be pursued.

BEIJING  China says the reports and images of civilian deaths in the Ukrainian town of Bucha are deeply disturbing and it is calling for an investigation.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Wednesday that China supports all initiatives and measures conducive to alleviating the humanitarian crisis in the country and is ready to continue to work together with the international community to prevent any harm to civilians.

The killings in Bucha may serve to put further pressure on Beijing over its largely pro-Russian stance and attempts to guide public opinion over the war.

China has called for talks while refusing to criticize Russia over its invasion. It opposes economic sanctions on Moscow and blames Washington and NATO for provoking the war and fueling the conflict by sending arms to Ukraine.

Zhaos remarks echo those the previous day of Chinas ambassador to the United Nations, Zhang Jun, who called for an investigation, describing the reports and images of civilian deaths in Bucha as deeply disturbing.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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The good Lord may truly move in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform, but one might be hard-pressed to imagine that work would include starting a sandwich shop.

Josh Caffey understands this very well. I know this is going to sound strange, he said, but everything you see here is a gift from God.

Caffey is the owner of the Eiffel Tower Grilled Cheese Co., which started out as a food truck at the Tulsa State Fair last year, and just recently opened its brick-and-mortar location on the corner of 21st Street and Memorial Drive, in a building that in previous incarnations had been a Subway franchise and a Dunkin Donuts.

Caffey has worked in software development for most of his working life, but last year found himself in a perilous financial situation.

I was close to losing everything, Caffey said. And I just started praying. I said, God, if youre real, I need you to show up now.

Caffey said he began to see images of a food truck, a restaurant and other food-related things. I just knew I was being led by someone to this, he said.

Caffey worked with a young friend, Caitlin Warner, who was preparing to attend culinary school, to develop the menu. His sister, Stephanie, who had worked in the restaurant industry in the past, oversees the day-to-day operations.

Choosing the Eiffel Tower as the restaurants symbol was done partly because it was one of the images Caffey said came to him at the start, and because it symbolized the desire to bring a touch of elegance to the relatively simple concept of a grilled cheese sandwich.

The starting point for our menu was fair food, where you want to have something that appeals to almost everyone, Caffey said. At the same time, we wanted to be able to offer something different, to put our own twist on things.

I also wanted this place itself to look as if it was part of a chain, with that kind of attention to detail, he said. But this is very much a local, family-owned restaurant.

The location has certainly been spruced up since Caffey took it over. The restaurant operated out of the food truck from October until March, as the interior was ripped down to the studs and rebuilt.

It was six months of literal blood, sweat and tears to get this place open, Caffey said.

The menu for Eiffel Tower Grilled Cheese features a dozen signature sandwiches, available in combos with a choice of side and drink. All feature cheese of one variety or another, and spend at least some time on the kitchens flat-top grill prior to service, thus qualifying as being a grilled cheese sandwich.

Choices range from the expected, such as the American, with three types of cheese (cheddar, Swiss and Monterey Jack) with garlic butter on sourdough ($8), and the ham and Swiss, dressed with lettuce, tomato, onion and bacon on French bread ($10), to such outre creations as the Dorito & Jalapeno ($8).

It sounds weird, but the combination of all the flavors really works well, Caffey said.

Over the course of a few visits, we sampled the American, which is griddled with garlic butter that adds a nice edge to a straightforward sandwich, along with the French Dip ($10) and what Caffey said is the most popular choice, the Chicken, Bacon & Ranch ($10).

The French Dip had slices of Swiss and Monterey Jack cheese around a good serving of roast beef dressed with a bit of honey (this combination of beef and honey also shows up in the Hawaiian Roast Beef sandwich) on a French roll, accompanied by a cup of deep brown au jus.

Too often the au jus that accompanies a French dip is close to being a salt lick, but here, the natural gravy was savory, even beefy, without being overly salty. The in-house roasted beef was tender, with the delicate application of honey bringing a surprising sweetness.

The white meat chicken in the Chicken, Bacon & Ranch was a bit overdone and dry, but the additions of tomato, Swiss cheese and a judicious use of ranch dressing more than compensated for that. The bacon, also, was perfectly cooked  crisp, and with just a touch of chew so that it didnt disintegrate into smoky dust.

Desserts include a sandwich of Nutella hazelnut spread with blue cheese ($8) and fried pies ($6). Peach is on the menu, but as Caffey said they prefer using fresh peaches, apple is whats available right now. The crust resembles puff pastry, filled with apples in a cinnamon sauce that is close to a caramel by the time its served.

Sides include waffle fries and tater tots ($2-$3), as well as two types of tomato soup  what the restaurant bills as classic as well as a homemade version ($3-$5).

We went with the homemade variation, which was loaded with bits of fresh tomato and onion, and just the right amount of black pepper.

The classic is Campbells tomato, which for many grilled cheese aficionados is the only thing to accompany a grilled cheese sandwich.

I had no idea how passionate people are about their tomato soup, Caffey said. Some people really like the Campbells because it reminds them of childhood, and its better for dipping, because it clings a little better to the bread. Other people really love the homemade soup we do, so we keep both of them. Its all about giving our customers what they want.

EIFFEL TOWER GRILLED CHEESE CO.

2108 S. Memorial Drive

918-605-8535

Food: 3 stars

Service: Order at counter

Atmosphere: 2 stars

(on a scale of 0 to 5 stars)

Vegetarian/Vegan options: Yes

11 a.m.-8 p.m. Monday-Saturday. All major credit cards accepted.

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Easter  whether one marks the day with reverence or frivolity  is at its essence a celebration of renewal, of life beginning again with the coming of spring.

Most Tulsa Protestant and Catholic churches will hold special services that focus on the final week of Jesus mortal life, culminating in Easter Sunday services April 17.

At the same time, local organizations and businesses will be offering an array of family-oriented activities associated with the equally long-lived tradition of an oversized rabbit secreting unusually colored eggs all over creation, for young and old to gather.

Here are a few of the Easter-related activities that are going on around town.

Egg hunts & photo ops

Bunny Photo ExperienceWoodland Hills Mall, 7021 S. Memorial Drive

Woodland Hills Mall is again hosting photo ops with the Easter Bunny, through Saturday, April 16. Hours are 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day except Sundays, when the hours are noon to 6 p.m. Reserving a specific time is highly recommended, as it will ensure a short wait for ones photo.

Easter Bunny PhotosBass Pro Shop, 101 Bass Pro Drive, Broken Arrow 918-355-7600, basspro.com The Easter Bunny will set up shop for portraits at Bass Pro April 9-17. The first 4x6-inch image is free, but special packages are available at an additional cost. All sittings must be reserved in advance.

Easter Egg HuntAmerican Legion Post No. 1, 1120 E. Eighth St. tulsapost1.org The nations oldest continuously operating American Legion post will host its annual Easter Egg Hunt starting at 11 a.m. Saturday, April 9. Hunts will be arranged for age groups, with those 2 years old and younger setting off at 11 a.m., ages 3 to 5 at 11:30 a.m. and everyone else commencing their searches at noon.

Easter Egg HuntAnimal Aid of Tulsa, 6811 E. 21st St. animalaid.org Let your inner bloodhound run wild at this event, beginning at 10 a.m. Saturday, April 9. The hunt is for youngsters ages 12 and younger, and will be conducted according to age groups, to give everyone a chance. A picture booth and face-painting station will be available, as well as the Easter Bunny itself. Cost is $15, with all proceeds going to Animal Aids ongoing efforts to save sick and injured dogs and cats in the Tulsa area.

Cascia Hall Easter Egg HuntCascia Hall Preparatory School, 2520 S. Yorktown Ave. 918-746-2600, casciahall.com

The annual Cascia Hall Easter Egg Hunt, sponsored by the Cascia Hall Alumni Association, will take place beginning at 12:30 p.m. Sunday, April 10, at the school. The Easter Bunny will be on hand for a photograph or two.

Easter Egg Hunt

for the DogsReed Park, 4233 S. Yukon Ave. 918-596-4307, facebook.com/reedparktulsa Bring your faithful four-footed companion to Reed Park for a special dogs-only Easter egg hunt, 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday, April 10. All eggs will be filled with a dog treat or a prize ticket. The Oklahoma Alliance for Animals will be on hand to provide microchipping for $10, and metal engraved dog tags for $5. Double D Delightful Dogs Rescue will also have a number of dogs looking for their forever homes. All dogs must be on a non-retractable leash. (Please DO NOT bring aggressive dogs to the event.)

Family Easter Egg HuntReed Park & Community Center, 4233 S. Yukon Ave. 918-596-4307, facebook.com/reedparktulsa Bring your children ages 2 to 12 to Tulsas Reed Park for a family Easter egg hunt, 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 12. The Easter Bunny will be on hand, as well.

Bikes & Balls Easter EventWhiteside Park Community Center, 4009 S. Pittsburg Ave. 918-596-1525 This event, set for 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, April 13, is geared for youngsters ages 1 to 5, with Easter-themed crafts and activities, and the chance to get up close with real bunny rabbits, thanks to Wind Walker Rabbitry. Cost is $1 per child, while adults are allowed in for free.

Easter Eve Service

and Egg HuntBoston Avenue United Methodist Church, 1301 S. Boston Ave. 918-583-5181, bostonavenue.org Tulsas most iconic house of worship is offering a mix of the sacred and the secular, with an interactive family service beginning at 4 p.m. Saturday, April 16, featuring youngsters leading the congregation in songs and readings from the Bible that tell the story of the Resurrection, followed by an Easter egg hunt that will include appearances by animals real (miniature donkeys) and fanciful (the Easter Bunny), all of whom will pose happily for photographs.

Community

Easter Egg HuntBrookside Collective Park, 3737 S. Peoria Ave. communitybrookside.com Community Brookside Church will host its annual Community Easter Egg Hunt 10 a.m. Saturday, April 16, which will feature bounce houses, crafts, cookie decorating and games. The Easter egg hunt itself, which will have thousands of toy- and candy-filled eggs to find, is for children up to fifth grade.

Easter Egg HuntSt. James Church, 5050 E. 111th St. South sjc.church St. James Church will host an Easter Egg Hunt, 2-4 p.m. Saturday, April 16, featuring some 10,000 hidden eggs, as well as bounce houses, crafts, a photo booth and more. The hunt is for children up to fifth grade and will be divided into age groups, to give all a better chance at finding the goodies.

Easter Egg HuntOklahoma Aquarium, 300 Aquarium Drive, Jenks 918-296-3474, okaquarium.org The Oklahoma Aquarium will host an Easter egg hunt beginning at 2 p.m. Saturday, April 16, on its riverfront backyard, where youngsters will search for eco-friendly bags with candy inside. Hunts will be by age, with those up to age 6 starting at 2 p.m., and children 7-12 starting at 3 p.m. Cost is $13.95 children, $17.95 adults.

Easter Egg HuntChallenger 7 Park, 3909 W. 41st St. The Challenger 7 Park is hosting an all-ages Easter egg hunt 3 to 6 p.m. Sunday, April 17, which will include games, bounce houses, Easter egg decorating, face-painting and an egg hunt that will be conducted by age groups. There will even be a few golden eggs for adults to find.

SWEETS & TREATS

Sweet Tooth Candy & Gifts3541 S. Harvard Ave. 918-712-8785, sweettoothtulsa.com Sweet Tooth is again offering its Build a Basket promotion for Easter, which allows customers to create a custom Easter basket, either by selecting items in store or ordering over the phone. Just select the items you wish to be included in the basket, which must total at least $35, and the Sweet Tooth staff will assemble the gift, complete with a cellophane wrap and custom bow. Deadline for ordering baskets is April 16.

Glacier Confection1902 Utica Square 539-424-5992, glacierconfection.com Glacier Confection offers a variety of specials for Easter, including rabbit-shaped gift boxes, chocolate truffle eggs and the always popular chocolate bunnies, as well as its perennial selection of high-quality, hand-made chocolates. Easter selection ranges from $10 bunnies in milk, dark and white chocolate, to a three-tiered gift box tower with 42 truffles for $95.

Merritts Bakery3202 E. 15th St., 918-747-2301 4930 W. Kenosha St., Broken Arrow, 918-250-1607 9521-G S. Delaware Ave., 918-296-9000

merrittsbakery.com Merritts offers a wide range of baked goods and treats, including bunny cakes, decorated cookies, hot cross buns, Greek Easter bread, brownie pops and more. You can also arrange for your order to be picked up at the Merritts outlet nearest you.

Ludgers Bavarian Cakery6527 E. 91st St. 918-622-2537, ludgersbavariancakery.com Ludgers Bavarian Cakery this Easter offers an array of treats, such as its Easter Parfaits, made with three flavors of its Bavarian cream cheesecake filling, cream puffs and cupcakes. One can also have a special Easter message applied to any of the bakerys line of cakes for an additional $5.

Nouveau Chocolate205 S. Main St., Broken Arrow 918-258-2877, nouveauchocolate.com This shop specializes in handmade chocolates based on traditional Belgian chocolate recipes, and it goes all out for Easter, with 4-inch and 8-inch bunnies, decorated chocolate-covered marshmallows, and chocolate-dipped Peeps.

Tulsa World Scene podcast: Sylvester Stallone comes to Tulsa

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Tulsa Public Schools Board of Education is about to have two new members.

According to unofficial returns released Tuesday night, ELena Ashley defeated two-term incumbent Shawna Keller for the District 4 seat, 556-429.

District 4 includes Cooper, Disney, Dolores Huerta, Kerr, Lewis and Clark, Lindbergh, Peary and Skelly elementary schools; East Central Junior High School; and East Central High School.

A veteran of the U.S. Armys military intelligence program and a parent of three adult children, Ashley has lived in east Tulsa for 15 years and was previously a substitute teacher for TPS. She also previously worked for Tulsa Job Corps and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

We have an opportunity to turn things around for this district, she said Tuesday night. I am excited to do what we can to work together, get some traditional learning back in the schools and change the trajectory so that our children can come out of our schools ready to participate in society comfortably.

Meanwhile, with higher voter turnout on TPS southside than for the February primary, Susan Lamkin defeated former Tulsa County District Attorney Tim Harris in a runoff for the District 7 seat, 2,632-2,249.

By comparison, 3,784 votes were cast in the Feb. 8 primary election.

TPS campuses in District 7 include Carnegie, Eisenhower International, Grissom, Key, Marshall, McClure and Patrick Henry elementary schools; Thoreau Demonstration Academy; and Memorial High School.

The incumbent, Suzanne Schreiber, opted not to seek a third term.

A current TPS parent, Lamkin has been involved in the Parent-Teacher Association at five of the districts campuses over the course of 16 years. She is currently president of Memorial High Schools PTA and a vice president with the Tulsa Council of PTAs.

I want families in District 7 and TPS supporters to know how much I appreciate their recognition of people who are already involved with our schools and know whats going on with our schools  is whats important, Lamkin said. I know theres a lot of work to do, but we can all work together to do it in a positive way moving forward.

Across the rest of the Tulsa area, school board incumbents with Union, Jenks, Bixby, Mounds, Owasso, Sand Springs and Tulsa Technology Center were all elected to another term.

In Unions Zone 2 runoff election, Dr. Chris McNeil defeated challenger Shelley Gwartney, 686-586. As was the case with TPS District 7 runoff, Unions runoff had higher voter turnout than the primary, as 1,052 votes were cast in February compared to the 1,252 cast in Tuesdays election.

Unions Zone 2 includes the campuses of Andersen, Cedar Ridge, Moore and Peters elementary schools.

In Jenks, current school board President Terry Keeling defeated Ashley Cross, 1,319-853, for the districts Ward 2 seat.

Current Bixby school board President Amanda Stephens was also elected to another term, defeating Jake Rowland 476-292 for that districts District 2 seat.

In Mounds, Justin Green was elected to another term, defeating Laci Jones 84-72 for seat No. 2.

In Owasso, incumbent Rhonda Mills defeated challenger Joshua Stanton, 1,163-971, to retain Seat No. 2.

By a 780-309 margin over MaRanda Trimble-Kerley, Mike Mullins was elected to another term on the Sand Springs school board.

Mark Griffin was elected to another term on Tulsa Technology Centers board of education, defeating Jim Provenzano for the Zone 3 seat by a count of 1,806-1,708. Tulsa Techs Zone 3 includes portions of east Tulsa and west Broken Arrow.

Meanwhile, Catoosa school board incumbent Joe Deere, who was appointed earlier to fill an unexpired term, was defeated by Derrick Smith, 413-236. Smith will finish out the unexpired term for Ward 4, which covers the districts far west side.

Voters in Kiefer, Liberty and Owasso approved school bond packages Tuesday. State law requires that school bond propositions receive at least 60% of the votes cast in order to pass.

In Owasso, proposition No. 1 received 70.75% of the votes cast, while proposition No. 2 passed with 74.84% approval.

Proposition No. 1 of the five-year package includes $22.7 for saferooms in two schools; $16.4 million for technology; and $11.8 million for texts, library materials and equipment for the fine arts program.

Proposition No. 2 is $3.6 million for transportation needs, including additional school buses.

Despite two precincts reporting no votes cast on election day, Kiefer Public Schools $29.1 million bond proposal passed with 81.69% of the votes cast. The 20-year package includes funds for a new agricultural education building, a new transportation facility, and a new multipurpose building to house the band program, elementary gym classes and multiple school teams. It also includes funds to restore and repurpose the old Kiefer High School to house the districts administration offices and upper elementary grades.

Farther south, Liberty Public Schools $8 million bond proposal passed with 66.32% of the votes cast. The district will use the money to add six new classrooms and replace the elementary school gym, which dates back to the Works Progress Administration.

The State Election Board will certify results after 5 p.m. Friday.

Unofficial returns

Tulsa Public Schools  District 4

ELena Ashley: 556

Shawna Keller (i): 429

Tulsa Public Schools  District 7

Susan Lamkin: 2,632

Tim Harris: 2,249

Union Public Schools  Zone 2

Chris McNeil (i): 686

Shelley Gwartney: 566

Bixby Public Schools  District 2

Amanda Stephens (i): 476

Jake Rowland: 292

Catoosa Public Schools  Ward 4

Derrick Smith: 413

Joe Deere (i): 236

Jenks Public Schools  Ward 2

Terry Keeling (i): 1319

Ashley Cross: 853

Mounds Public Schools  Seat 2

Justin Green (i): 84

Laci Jones: 72

Owasso Public Schools  District 2

Rhonda Mills (i): 1,163

Joshua Stanton: 971

Sand Springs Public Schools  District 2

Mike Mullins (i): 780

MaRanda Trimble-Kerley: 309

Tulsa Technology Center  District 3

Mark Griffin (i): 1,806

Jim Provenzano: 1,708

Kiefer Public Schools bond

Yes: 232

No: 52

Liberty Public Schools bond

Yes: 128

No: 65

Owasso Public Schools bond  Proposition 1

Yes: 1,618

No: 669

Owasso Public Schools bond  Proposition 2

Yes: 1,710

No: 575

Tulsa World Opinion podcast: Election season is upon us

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One year ago today, on May 1, 2021, a memorial service was held in honor of the 41 Tulsa Police Officers who have died in the line of duty at 
LVIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia is trying to hide evidence of war crimes to interfere with the international investigation.

We have information that the Russian troops have changed tactics and are trying to remove the dead people, the dead Ukrainians, from the streets and cellars of territory they occupied, Zelenskyy said in his daily nighttime video address to the nation late Wednesday. This is only an attempt to hide the evidence and nothing more.

Zelenskyy added that it seems that the Russian leadership was really afraid that the global anger over what was seen in Bucha would be repeated after what was seen in other cities.

The Ukrainian leader also said thousands of people are now missing, either dead or deported to Russia.

Zelenskyy is urging Russian citizens not to be afraid to protest the war.

If you have even a little shame about what the Russian military is doing in Ukraine, then for such Russian citizens this is a key moment: You have to demand  just demand  an end to the war, Zelenskyy said.

KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR:

 Mariupols dead put at 5,000 as Ukraine braces in the east

 US targets Putins daughters, Russian banks in new sanctions

 Burned, piled bodies among latest horrors in Bucha, Ukraine

 Russia's setback in Kyiv was memorable military failure

 Russian media campaign falsely claims Bucha deaths are fakes

 China calls for probe into Bucha killings, assigns no blame

 Go to https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine for more coverage

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:

PARIS  French President Emmanuel Macron spoke out against Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Wednesday evening, defending himself over criticism he held multiple talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin to no avail.

On Monday, Morawiecki ridiculed the French leaders several hours of phone calls with Putin, saying that they achieved nothing.

Some fear the comments from Poland might destabilize unity of the European Union as it hopes to stand unified in the face of Putins aggression in Ukraine.

Macron told TF1 broadcasters evening news that he takes full responsibility for speaking to Putin in the name of France to avoid the war and to build a new architecture for peace in Europe several years ago.

Macron is standing for re-election in France in polls that begin Sunday.

KYIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian authorities say nearly 5,000 people were evacuated from combat areas Wednesday.

Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said 1,171 people were evacuated from the besieged Sea of Azov port of Mariupol, and 2,515 more left the cities of Berdyansk and Melitopol and other areas in the south.

She said an additional 1,206 people were evacuated from the eastern region of Luhansk.

Vereshchuk and other officials have been urging residents of eastern regions to evacuate in the face of an impending Russian offensive, saying that people in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions should leave for safer regions.

Donetsk region Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said at least five civilians were killed and eight others wounded by Russian shelling Wednesday.

Over 10 million people, about a quarter of Ukraines population, have been displaced by the war, and more than 4 million of them have fled the country.

UNITED NATIONS  The United States and United Kingdom have boycotted an informal meeting of the U.N. Security Council called by Russia to press its baseless claims that the U.S. has biological warfare laboratories in Ukraine.

The move by Russia on Wednesday was the latest of several that have led Western countries to accuse Moscow of using the U.N. as a platform for disinformation to draw attention away from its war against its smaller neighbor.

U.N. disarmament chief Izumi Nakamitsu told the council at two official Security Council meetings called by Russia on the issue last month that the United Nations is not aware of any biological weapons program in Ukraine.

A smoke screen to draw attention away from the brutal warfare, irresponsible, dangerous and deplorable were just a few of the responses by countries, including Norway, France, Ireland and Albania.

ROME  Italian Premier Mario Draghi says no embargo of Russian gas is up for consideration at this point as the European Union ponders its next package of sanctions over the war in Ukraine, adding: "I dont know if it ever will be on the table.

Draghi told reporters Monday night that in case a gas embargo is proposed, Italy will be very happy to follow it if that would make peace possible.

Draghi added: If the price of gas can be exchanged for peace ... what do we choose? Peace? Or to have the air conditioning running in the summer? This is the question we must pose.

KYIV, Ukraine  The mayor of the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol says more than 5,000 civilians have been killed during the monthlong Russian blockade, among them 210 children.

Mayor Vadym Boichenko said Wednesday that Russian forces have among other targets bombed hospitals, including one where 50 people burned to death.

Boichenko said that more than 90% of the citys infrastructure has been destroyed by Russian shelling.

The Russian military is besieging the strategic Sea of Azov port, and has cut food, water and energy supplies and pummeled it with artillery and air raids. Capturing the city would allow Russia to secure a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden is saluting the international community and some of the largest corporations in the U.S. for further increasing Russias economic isolation.

Addressing thousands at the North Americas Building Trades Unions Legislative Conference at a Washington hotel on Wednesday, Biden said of the Russia-Ukraine war, Theres nothing less happening than credible war crimes.

The president said responsible nations have to come together to hold these perpetrators responsible, and vowed that were going to stifle Russias ability to grow for years to come.

He said corporate Americas stepping up for a chance, noting that 600-plus firms have chosen to leave Russia.

MOSCOW  Russias Defense Ministry has accused Ukraine of sabotaging a pre-agreed prisoner swap.

Speaking at a briefing, Defense Ministry official Mikhail Mizintsev claimed that Kyiv had for a long time blocked prisoner exchanges, including a swap set to take place Wednesday involving 251 military personnel on each side.

He alleged that the delays gave Moscow all the reasons to suspect that Russian servicemen held in captivity are not at all well."

On April 1, representatives of the Ukrainian presidential office said Ukraine had secured the release of 86 soldiers, including 15 women, through a swap. This was confirmed by Russian officials on Wednesday.

BRUSSELS  A new U.S. commitment of Javelin missiles means the West soon will have provided Ukrainian fighters with 10 anti-tank weapons for every Russian tank in their country, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday.

Blinken spoke to U.S. news broadcaster MSNBC after the U.S. announced an additional $100 million for more Javelin missiles for Ukraine. The U.S. says it has provided $1.7 billion for Ukraines defense and aid since Russia invaded on Feb. 24.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is pressing the West to provide more weapons, faster, and do more to cut off Russia from the global economy, to pressure Putin to make peace.

In terms of what they need to act quickly and act effectively, to deal with the planes that are firing at them from the skies, the tanks that are trying to destroy  their cities from the ground, they have the tools that they need, Blinken said of Ukraines forces. Theyre going to keep getting them, and were going to keep sustaining that.

BUDAPEST, Hungary  Hungarys prime minister has asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to call an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine but says his country will comply with Russian demands to pay for natural gas imports in rubles.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he had spoken with Putin by phone and urged the Russian leader to end the military conflict in neighboring Ukraine. Orban said he also offered to host a conference in Hungarys capital between the warring parties.

I suggested that (Putin)  the Ukrainian president, the French president and the German chancellor hold a meeting here in Budapest, the sooner the better, Orban said. It should not be a peace negotiation and not a peace settlement, because that takes longer, but an immediate ceasefire agreement.

Orban spoke days after his Fidesz party won a fourth consecutive term leading the Hungarian government.

The right-wing nationalist leader, Putins closest ally in the European Union, has vehemently refused to supply weapons to Ukraine or allow their transport across the Hungary-Ukraine border. He also lobbied heavily against the EU imposing sanctions on Russian energy imports.

LARNACA, Cyprus  Russian disinformation about its war against Ukraine needs to be exposed, including on Russias war crimes, a U.S. State Department official said on a visit to Cyprus Wednesday.

Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said Russian lies have evolved to the point of blaming Ukrainians for actions by Russian forces, including the war crimes we see on the ground.

So we all have an interest in exposing Russian disinformation, ensuring our citizens have the truth and ensuring that Russian citizens also (have the truth) ... despite the Iron Curtain that Putin has put down over that, Nuland said.

Nuland was in Cyprus as part of a five-nation tour aimed at strengthening bilateral ties and rallying support for Ukraine.

LONDON  Britain says it will end imports of Russian oil and coal by the end of the year and ban U.K. investment in Russia as part of a new set of sanctions in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

The British government also announced a freeze on the assets of Credit Bank of Moscow and Sberbank, Russias largest bank, and slapped travel bans and asset freezes on eight more wealthy Russians. They included Andrey Guryev, founder of the fertilizer company PhosAgro, and Sergey Sergeyevich Ivanov, president of diamond producer Alrosa.

U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said the measures were coordinated with Britains allies. The U.S. also sanctioned SberBank on Wednesday, and the European Union plans to ban imports of Russian coal.

Truss said the sanctions were aimed at decimating (President Vladimir) Putins war machine and to show the Russian elite that they cannot wash their hands of the atrocities committed on Putins orders.

Britain had already announced a plan to phase out Russian oil, which accounts for 8% of the U.K. supply. Russia is the top supplier of imported coal to the U.K., though British demand for the polluting fuel has plummeted in the past decade. Britain has not ended imports of Russian natural gas, which accounts for 4% of its supply, saying only that it will do so as soon as possible.

UNITED NATIONS  The U.N. General Assembly plans to vote Thursday on whether to suspend Russia from the U.N.s premiere human rights body.

The United States initiated the move in response to the discovery of hundreds of bodies after Russian troops withdrew from towns near Ukraine's capital. Videos and photos of corpses of people who appeared to be civilians have sparked calls for tougher sanctions and war crimes charges against Russia, which has vehemently denied responsibility.

General Assembly spokeswoman Paulina Kubiak said on Wednesday that an emergency special session on Ukraine will resume at 10 a.m. EDT on Thursday, when a resolution to suspend the rights of membership in the Human Rights Council of the Russian Federation will be put to a vote.

The brief resolution expresses grave concern at the ongoing human rights and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, particularly at the reports of violations and abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law by the Russian Federation, including gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights.

To be approved, the resolution requires a two-thirds majority of assembly members that vote yes or no. Abstentions dont count.

WASHINGTON  The U.S. Justice Department is working with European allies and prosecutors in Ukraine to investigate potential war crimes after Russias invasion.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said Wednesday that U.S. prosecutors across the world are working to collect evidence and to collect the information on atrocities that we have all seen in both photographs and video footage.

He pointed specifically to photos and videos from Bucha, where Associated Press journalists have witnessed evidence of killings and torture, including charred bodies.

But Garland stopped short of calling for a tribunal like the one set up to hold Nazi leaders to account after World War II. He said a U.S. prosecutors in Paris were meeting with the French war crimes prosecutor, and that other Justice Department lawyers had met with prosecutors in Europe to work out a plan for gathering evidence with respect to Ukraine.

WASHINGTON  The U.S. on Wednesday announced that it is sanctioning Russian President Vladimir Putins two adult daughters as part of a new batch of penalties on the countrys political and economic system in retaliation for its war crimes in Ukraine.

The U.S. is also imposing toughened full blocking sanctions on Russias Sberbank and Alfa Bank, two of its largest financial institutions, as well as some Russian state-owned enterprises. President Joe Biden is also signing an executive order to ban new U.S. investment in Russia.

In addition to Putins adult daughters, the new sanctions also target the family of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

The U.S. actions are set to be imposed in concert with toughened sanctions by its European allies.

LONDON  A Western official says it will take Russia up to a month to regroup its forces for a major push on eastern Ukraine.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence, said Wednesday that a reasonable estimate would be of three to four weeks before troops that have pulled back from the area around Kyiv and northern Ukraine can be re-equipped and redeployed against the Donbas region in the east.

The official said the Russian units would have to go through a pretty lengthy period of reconstitution and refurbishment before they could rejoin the war.

The official said almost a quarter of the Russian ground units known as battalion tactical groups in Ukraine had been rendered non-combat-effective in the fighting and either withdrawn or merged with other units.

The losses and pullback of Russian troops mean the threat posed to Kyiv is limited for the foreseeable future from Russian ground troops, the official said.

 AP writer Jill Lawless contributed.

BRUSSELS  NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says Finland and Sweden would be welcomed with open arms should they decide to join the worlds biggest security alliance, as Russias war on Ukraine spurs public support in the two Nordic countries for membership.

Russia has demanded that the 30-nation military organization stop expanding, so the prospect of Finland and Sweden joining could anger President Vladimir Putin.

But Stoltenberg says NATO members might be prepared to provide security guarantees for the period from when the two might announce any membership bid and when their applications are approved. He declined to say what kind of protection they might get.

Once members, the two neutral Nordic nations would benefit from NATOs collective security guarantee, which obliges all members to come to the defense of any ally that comes under attack.

Stoltenberg told reporters Wednesday that he is certain that we will find ways to address concerns they may have regarding the period between the potential application and the final ratification.

A poll commissioned by Finnish broadcaster YLE last month showed that, for the first time, more than 50% of Finns support joining the Western military alliance. In neighboring Sweden, a similar poll showed that those in favor of NATO membership outnumber those against.

BERLIN  A German spokesman says the government has information which indicates that bodies found after Ukraine retook Bucha last week had been lying there since at least March 10, when Russian troops were in control of the town.

Steffen Hebestreit told reporters in Berlin on Wednesday that the information was based on non-commercial satellite images taken March 10-18 of Yablonska Street in Bucha.

Credible information shows that from March 7 to March 30 Russian soldiers and security forces were deployed in this area, he said. They were also tasked with the interrogation of prisoners who were subsequently executed.

Hebestreit said that targeted killings by units of the Russian military and security forces are therefore proof that the Russian President and supreme commander has at least approvingly accepted human rights abuses and war crimes to achieve his goals.

The assertions made by the Russian side that these are staged scenes or they arent responsible for the murders are therefore not tenable, he added.

Asked about the source of this information, Hebestreit said that images reviewed by Germany were not commercial satellite images. He declined to elaborate.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark  Norway is following other European nations and expelling Russian diplomats.

Norways Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt said Wednesday that three Russian diplomats had carried out activities incompatible with their status.

The timing for the expulsions was not accidental and comes at a time when the whole world is shaken by reports of Russian forces abusing civilians, especially in the city of Bucha, Huitfeldt said in a statement.

In recent days, numerous European countries have expelled Russian diplomats and staff at Russian diplomatic missions.

GENEVA  The International Committee of the Red Cross says one of its teams in Ukraine has led some 500 people who fled Mariupol in a humanitarian convoy of buses and private cars to a safer location in the embattled country.

The ICRC says its team that has been trying to enter Mariupol since last Friday got within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the besieged city, but security conditions made it impossible to enter. The convoy escorted the civilians from coastal Berdyansk to Zaporizhzhia, to the north.

This convoys arrival to Zaporizhzhia is a huge relief for hundreds of people who have suffered immensely and are now in a safer location, said Pascal Hundt, ICRCs head of delegation in Ukraine. Its clear, though, that thousands more civilians trapped inside Mariupol need safe passage out and aid to come in.

He said the Geneva-based organization remains available as a neutral intermediary to help escort civilians out of Mariupol once concrete agreements and security conditions allow it.

LONDON  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of using hunger as a weapon of war by deliberately targeting Ukraines essential food supplies.

In an address to Irish lawmakers Wednesday, Zelenskyy said Russian forces are destroying things that are sustaining livelihoods including food storage depots, blocking ports so Ukraine could not export food and putting mines into the fields.

For them hunger is also a weapon, a weapon against us ordinary people, he said, accusing Russia of deliberately provoking a food crisis in Ukraine, a major global producer of staples including wheat and sunflower oil.

He said it would have international ramifications, because there will be a shortage of food and the prices will go up, and this is reality for the millions of people who are hungry, and it will be more difficult for them to feed their families.

Zelenskyy spoke by video to a joint session of Irelands two houses of parliament, the latest in a string of international addresses he has used to rally support for Ukraine.

BRUSSELS  A senior European Union official says the blocs member countries should think about ways of offering asylum to Russian soldiers willing to desert Ukraine battlefields.

European Council president Charles Michel on Wednesday expressed his outrage at crimes against humanity, against innocent civilians in Bucha and in many other cities.

He called on Russian soldiers to disobey orders.

If you want no part in killing your Ukrainian brothers and sisters, if you dont want to be a criminal, drop your weapons, stop fighting, leave the battlefield, Michel, who represents the blocs governments, said in a speech to the European Parliament

Endorsing an idea previously circulated by some EU lawmakers, Michel added that granting asylum to Russian deserters is a valuable idea that should be pursued.

BEIJING  China says the reports and images of civilian deaths in the Ukrainian town of Bucha are deeply disturbing and it is calling for an investigation.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Wednesday that China supports all initiatives and measures conducive to alleviating the humanitarian crisis in the country and is ready to continue to work together with the international community to prevent any harm to civilians.

The killings in Bucha may serve to put further pressure on Beijing over its largely pro-Russian stance and attempts to guide public opinion over the war.

China has called for talks while refusing to criticize Russia over its invasion. It opposes economic sanctions on Moscow and blames Washington and NATO for provoking the war and fueling the conflict by sending arms to Ukraine.

Zhaos remarks echo those the previous day of Chinas ambassador to the United Nations, Zhang Jun, who called for an investigation, describing the reports and images of civilian deaths in Bucha as deeply disturbing.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Jerry Griffin of the Tulsa school board has joined John Cox, April Grace, Jena Nelson and Ryan Walters in the race to be Oklahomas next state superintendent.

Griffin, a retiree who previously worked in law enforcement at the Tulsa County Sheriffs Office and the Tulsa Police Department, registered a candidate committee with the Oklahoma Ethics Commission on Tuesday.

The Republican was elected to the District 6 seat on the Tulsa Public Schools Board of Education in June 2020.

I have solutions that will significantly improve the education system in Oklahoma, Griffin said in a written press announcement. Examples are school vouchers, programs to serve Hispanic parents and students, programs to improve students understanding of citizenship, increased funding for (kindergarten) through 3rd grade, a challenge to the United States Supreme Courts prohibition of prayer in school, and other programs that will serve all the students of Oklahoma.

State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister is term-limited and in the fall announced that she was changing her party registration to launch a bid for governor.

Candidate filing for 2022 elections for federal, state, legislative, judicial and county offices will be April 13-15.

Cox, the Peggs Public Schools superintendent, and Grace, the Shawnee Public Schools superintendent, are registered Republicans, though Cox previously ran as a Democrat for the same office and lost to Hofmeister, then a Republican, in 2014 and 2018.

Nelson, the only Democrat in the race thus far, teaches English composition and academic enhancement classes at Deer Creek Middle School in Edmond and was the 2020 Oklahoma Teacher of the Year.

Walters is Gov. Kevin Stitts appointed secretary of education and works as chief executive officer at Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, an education reform outfit. He previously taught history at McAlester High School, where he was a finalist in the 2016 Oklahoma State Teacher of the Year contest.

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With no fanfare and very little noise of any kind, the Oklahoma House of Representatives on Tuesday morning passed and sent to the governor a near-total ban on abortion.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the final vote on Senate Bill 612, by Sen. Nathan Dahm, R-Broken Arrow, occurred as abortion rights activists and others gathered outside the Capitol for a previously scheduled protest against several bans implemented this year by the Republican-controlled state leadership.

If signed by Gov. Kevin Stitt, SB 612 would almost certainly be immediately challenged.

While federal courts have recently upheld state laws severely restricting access to abortion, an outright ban on the procedure has yet to be allowed.

A holdover from last session, when it passed the Senate and a House committee, SB 612 would outlaw all abortions in Oklahoma except to save the life of the woman. It would impose a penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine on anyone performing an abortion.

The law would not penalize women who undergo the procedure.

Some might consider SB 612 redundant, since Oklahoma statute already would reactivate the states long-dormant abortion laws should Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that guaranteed a womans right to an abortion, be overturned.

Some think that could happen in a few months, when the current Supreme Court is expected to issue its decision in a Mississippi case.

Anti-abortion activists calling themselves abolitionists advocate ignoring Roe v. Wade or any other federal action that permits abortion, but SB 612s House sponsor, state Rep. Jim Olsen, R-Roland, said he would not go that far.

Olsen said his bill is intended to have everything in place should Roe v. Wade be overturned.

It could also become a vehicle for a direct challenge of Roe v. Wade if that decision is not overturned.

SB 612 passed off the House floor 70-14, with 16 members not voting. Rep. Carol Bush, R-Tulsa, who is not seeking reelection, was the only Republican voting against the measure.

It was not immediately clear whether Gov. Kevin Stitt will sign SB 612, though he has said previously he would sign any bill restricting abortion rights that comes to him.

House Democrats surprised Republicans Tuesday by not putting up a floor fight, choosing instead to devote their time to the abortion and civil rights rally.

Minority Leader Emily Virgin, D-Norman, said she believes the measure was scheduled for Tuesday morning to divert attention from the rally.

Olsen said he didnt know about the rally until after the vote.

Republicans, for their part, surprised just about everyone by saying very little about the bills passage. Not until more than six hours after his bill passed did Dahm issue a statement on it.

From my first day in office, protecting the unborn has been one of my top priorities, said Dahm, a U.S. Senate candidate. Senate Bill 612 is the strongest pro-life legislation in the country right now, which effectively eliminates abortion in Oklahoma.

Emily Wales, interim president of Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes, said that as we rallied outside today, the House approved a total abortion ban  proving they seek complete control over the bodies and lives of Oklahomans.

They are more focused on governing our bodies than addressing real crises, like the economic turmoil caused by the pandemic and rising maternal mortality rates.

Tuesdays House vote was accompanied by passage of House Concurrent Resolution 1014, by Olsen, declaring Jan. 22 a day of mourning and encouraging Oklahomans to lower flags to half-staff on that day.

Jan. 22 is the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Courts decision in Roe v. Wade. Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of that ruling.

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OKLAHOMA CITY  A Senate panel passed a measure Tuesday that could result in raises for some teachers.

House Bill 4388 would cap dollars going to education from the Oklahoma Lottery at $60 million, said Sen. Adam Pugh, R-Edmond, chairman of the Senate Education Committee.

Under HB 4388, lottery proceeds above the $60 million level would go to the Teacher Empowerment Fund to pay for raises for teachers who meet certain criteria.

This bill seeks to take excess lottery dollars and now fund this mechanism to pay master and lead teachers at a 50% match with the school district, Pugh said.

Last year the lottery provided $64 million to education, Pugh said. The projected current year amount is $82 million, Pugh said.

With the growth of the lottery, this seemed to be a logical place, Pugh said.

He said the measure would not take money away from education but would redirect a portion of it for raises.

Pugh said district participation would be optional.

The measure passed by a vote of 9-3 and now heads to the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Sen. J.J. Dossett, D-Owasso, a former teacher, voted against the measure.

He said he understands that the measure is a work in progress, but he said he thinks the teacher raises should be funded with new dollars rather than from lottery funds that already are slated for education.

Sen. Carri Hicks, D-Oklahoma City, also a former teacher, also voted against the measure.

It is not new money, she said. It is moving existing funds around.

A companion measure, House Bill 4387, provides details of the raise program. It is to be heard by the Senate Education Committee next week.

Under the measure, an advanced certificate could provide a minimum salary increase of $3,000, while a lead certificate could provide a $5,000 salary increase. A master certificate could provide a $10,000 to $40,000 increase.

In addition to the raises, one-time awards from $1,500 to $5,000 could be paid to a teacher who works in a district where at least 40% of the students are economically disadvantaged or that has an enrollment of fewer than 1,000 students.

School districts may identify and designate the highest quality teachers for advanced, lead and master certificates, according to HB 4387.

Districts shall have local control and flexibility in determining how to evaluate teachers and assign designations, but, at a minimum, the designation system shall include a teacher observation, out-of-classroom time and a student performance component.

No more than 10% of a districts teachers may be designated as advanced, lead or master in a given school year, according to the measure.

When you are creating a master or a lead teacher, that is not just a designation. You have to become that, Pugh said. There are some prescribed steps.

Benefits are partially the pay raise but also the creation of someone who can mentor other teachers, Pugh said.

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Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives lashed oil executives on Wednesday for higher gasoline prices while Senate Republicans, led by U.S. Sen. James Lankford, stoked the notion that President Joe Biden is to blame.

"This is not a result of Putin's war," Lankford said in leading off a Republican press conference apparently scheduled in opposition to the House hearing. "This is a result of Biden policies, and everyone knows it. They can try to change the subject all they want to, but everyone knows this is a direct result of the Biden policies."

Meanwhile, the House Energy and Commerce Committee grilled six oil and gas executives, including former Tulsan Richard Muncrief, who is now president and chief executive officer of Oklahoma City-based Devon Energy.

"At a time of record profits, Big Oil is refusing to increase production to provide the American people some much-needed relief at the gas pump," said committee Chairman Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat.

Gasoline prices have actually started to recede from last month's record high but remain volatile  well above those of a year ago and far above the pandemic lows of 2020.

The national average gas price was $4.16 a gallon for regular on Wednesday, up from $2.87 a year ago, according to AAA.

The executives told the House committee they don't set prices.

"We do not control the market price of crude oil or natural gas, nor of refined products like gasoline and diesel fuel, and we have no tolerance for price gouging," said Chevron CEO Mike Wirth.

Democrats have sought to blame higher fuel prices on Russian President Vladimir Putin's attack on Ukraine, which has affected supplies from both those countries and created global political uncertainty, as well as price gouging by the oil and gas industry.

Republicans say Biden's efforts to shift the United States to renewable energy and away from fossil fuel is responsible.

"There is a way to produce more American energy," Lankford said. "There is a way to be able to bring prices down. (Democrats) are just not willing to do it at this point."

Among the moves criticized by Lankford and the Republicans was Biden's decision to release 1 million barrels of oil per day for six months from the nation's 700 million-barrel strategic petroleum reserve.

Lankford said Biden should instead be helping oil and gas companies develop new production and infrastructure such as the canceled Keystone Pipeline.

ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods told the committee that his company stands with communities around the world "in deploring Russia's aggression and the devastation it has inflicted on the Ukrainian people.'' Exxon has halted investments in Russia and is withdrawing from operations there, Woods said.

Exxon is increasing production in the United States, Woods said, including in the oil-rich Permian Basin in New Mexico and Texas. The company also is increasing production outside the U.S., including "a world-class development in Guyana," Woods said.

Biden has called on Congress to impose financial penalties on companies that lease public lands but don't produce oil, a request that so far has been ignored. Biden also invoked the Defense Production Act to encourage mining of critical minerals for batteries in electric vehicles, part of a broader push to reduce the use of fossil fuels and address climate change.

"The bottom line is if we want lower gas prices we need to have more oil supply right now," Biden said last week. "This is a moment of consequence and peril for the world and pain at the pump for American families."

Higher prices have hurt Biden's approval domestically and added billions of oil-export dollars to the Russian government as it wages war on Ukraine.

The release of oil from the U.S. stockpile could reduce oil prices, although Biden has twice ordered releases from the reserves without causing a meaningful shift in oil markets. Biden said last week that he expects that gasoline prices could drop "fairly significantly."

Oil companies have pledged to boost domestic production, but it is growing slowly. Executives point to supply chain and labor constraints, as well as investor demands for returns, and have called for more federal permits to allow additional leases.

Under questioning from Pallone, Woods and other CEOs said oil companies have no plans to halt payments of dividends to stockholders or to restrict stock buybacks that have enriched shareholders and company executives. The six companies at the hearing recorded $77 billion in profit last year, they told Pallone.

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Vietnam and the UK inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on promoting vocational training cooperation between the two countries in Hanoi on Tuesday.

The MoU aims to create a legal framework for bilateral cooperation in vocational training, contributing to realizing the goal of vocational education development in Vietnam, and promoting the bilateral strategic partnership between the Southeast Asian country and the UK in the time to come.

Under the deal, the two sides will share professional knowledge on vocational education, support the development and implementation of sustainable vocational education policies, and share experience in improving the quality of vocational education and increasing the involvement of businesses to ensure supply and demand in this field.

Cooperation in improving the capacity of administration, leadership, teaching, and capacity assessment at vocational training facilities; promotion of digital technology in online training; improvement of vocational training institutions; and development of a database system on vocational training are also key contents of the MoU.

In addition, both nations will foster partnership between their vocational training facilities, mutually recognize certificates and training programs within the framework of vocational training and, implement language programs in line with the sector.

Addressing the event, Vietnamese Minister of Labor, War Invalids, and Social Affairs Dao Ngoc Dung spoke highly of assistance from the UK in recent years, particularly in vocational training via the British Council, the Vietnam Government Portal reported.

Vietnam is currently home to 1,929 vocational training facilities, the VGP cited Dao as saying.

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South Korea said on Wednesday it will add hundreds of international flights per week beginning in May, continuing to ease anti-coronavirus measures as its Omicron wave declines.

From next month, the government will authorise a further 100 weekly flights for such destinations as the United States, Europe, Thailand and Singapore, where quarantine exemptions and visa-free entry are possible, Minister of the Interior and Safety Jeon Hae-cheol said.

Then 100 more weekly international flights will be added in June and a further 300 in July, the transport ministry said.

Only 420 international fights a week currently serve South Korea, down from 4,714 before the pandemic.

"Demand for overseas visits is expected to increase, as countries that have passed the peak of the Omicron wave have eased quarantine policies," Jeon said in a statement.

South Korean cases have been declining for about three weeks.

The country is considering scrapping most pandemic-related curbs later this month, including an obligation to wear masks outdoors, after already dropping national vaccine mandates and mandatory quarantine for vaccinated travellers arriving from overseas.

The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency reported 286,294 new cases for Tuesday, down from a record 621,328 in mid-March.

Shares in Korean Air rose as much as 1.7% after the announcement, versus a 0.9% drop in the wider market.
Read what is in the news today:

Society

-- The Peoples Committee of Hanoi has planned to vaccinate children aged 5 to 12 against COVID-19 in the second quarter of 2022.

-- The National Committee for Children has urged provincial and municipal authorities to strengthen measures to prevent and protect children against drowning and child abuse as cases related to these issues have been on the rise since the beginning of this year.

-- A pedestrian zone near Ho Chi Minh Square in Vinh City of north-central Nghe An Province is set to begin its pilot operation from 7:00 pm to 11:30 pm every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday on April 8.

-- The Investigation Police Agency under the Ministry of Public Security on Tuesday initiated legal proceedings against and arrested Do Anh Dung, chairman of Hanoi-based property developer Tan Hoang Minh Group, for the investigation of fraudulent appropriation of property.

Business

-- Vietnam, Singapore, and Indonesia are named among the hottest business markets in Southeast Asia for 2022, according to an article run by CNBC.

Education

-- Vietnam and the UK signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to create a legal framework for promoting vocational training cooperation between the two countries on Tuesday.

Sports

-- Russian cyclist Igor Frolov of the Ho Chi Minh City-Vinama team won the opening stage of the 2022 Ho Chi Minh City TV (HTV) Cup tournament in northern Quang Ninh Province on Tuesday morning.

-- Manchester City have a slender lead from the first leg of their Champions League quarter-final after Kevin De Bruynes 70th minute goal earned them a 1-0 win over Atletico Madrid at the Etihad Stadium on Tuesday, Reuters reported.

World news

-- The U.S. health regulator said on Tuesday GlaxoSmithKline and Vir Biotechnologys antibody therapy was no longer authorized as a COVID-19 treatment, with data suggesting it was unlikely to be effective against the dominant Omicron sub-variant in the country, Reuters reported.

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Do Anh Dung, chairman of Vietnamese real estate giant Tan Hoang Minh Group, was arrested on suspicion of fraud and property appropriation on Tuesday.

Officers under the Ministry of Public Security arrested and initiated legal proceedings against Dung and six other people, including his son Do Hoang Viet, who is deputy general director of Tan Hoang Minh Trading and Hotel Service Company, a subsidiary of Tan Hoang Minh Group.

The arrests had been approved by the Supreme Peoples Procuracy.

Aside from his position as the chairman of Tan Hoang Minh Group, Dung has also been the chair of Minh Viet Securities Investment Fund Management JSC since 2015.

Lieutenant General To An Xo, chief of staff and spokesperson of the Ministry of Public Security, confirmed to Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that the agency is verifying several violations related to the issuance of bonds and investment mobilization by Tan Hoang Minh Trading and Hotel Service Company and its member firms.

Preliminary investigations showed that Dung and many individuals in the group used three companies, namely Ngoi Sao Viet Real Estate Investment LLC., Soleil Hotel Investment and Hotel Services JSC, and Cung Dien Mua Dong JSC, to distribute unlawful bonds totaling VND10.3 trillion (US$450 million) in nine sessions from July 2021 to March 2022.

Do Anh Dung and six other suspects are held at the police station. Photo: Ministry of Public Security

On Monday, the State Securities Commission announced it had canceled the bond issuance of these three companies within this period, stating that the firms had disclosed false information and concealed information in private bond issuance.

Tan Hoang Minh Group made headlines in late 2021 after its Ngoi Sao Viet Real Estate Investment Company won the auction for a 10,000-square-meter land lot in Ho Chi Minh Citys Thu Thiem New Urban Area.

The firm bought the land plot at VND24.5 trillion ($1.07 billion), over eight times higher than the initial offer.

In January, Dung sent a letter to leaders of the Party, the state, the government, and the Ho Chi Minh City Peoples Committee regarding Tan Hoang Minh Groups decision to withdraw from the land purchase contract, citing the negative effects that his company's winning bid might have had on the real estate market.

Founded in 1993, Tan Hoang Minh Group specializes in various fields including real estate, financial investment, building materials, and furniture, among others, according to its website.

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The Peoples Committee of Hanoi plans to vaccinate children aged 5 to 11 against COVID-19 in the second quarter of this year while its counterpart in Ho Chi Minh City intends to launch the same inoculation drive in September.

The committee issued the plan on Tuesday as it expects that more than 95 percent of children from five to 11 years old living in the capital city will be given COVID-19 vaccine doses between now and June.

It asked grassroots-level authorities to review and compile a list of eligible recipients prior to the vaccination campaign.

The plan was unveiled after the city governing body approved the return to classrooms for direct attendance of students from first to sixth grades starting Wednesday.

Earlier on Monday, authorities in Ho Chi Minh City said they plan to inoculate all children aged 5 to 11 against COVID-19 this September, according to an urgent scheme by the municipal Peoples Committee.

Nearly 900,000 children in the southern metropolis are expected to be immunized under the scheme.

The citys Department of Education and Training and Department of Labor, War Invalids, and Social Affairs have been asked to make a list of eligible kids.

The municipal Peoples Committee also requested localities to work with the health sector in response to adverse incidents, and relevant agencies to keep a close watch on the children following COVID-19 inoculation.

As of Tuesday, more than 207.2 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines had been administered across Vietnam.

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The high-level Peoples Court in Hanoi has upheld the death penalty handed down to the former director of a bank branch in Hai Phong City, northern Vietnam for embezzling VND414 billion (US$18.1 million).

The second-instance trial of Tran Thi Kim Chi, former director of the OceanBank branch in Hai Phong, and three other defendants concluded on Tuesday, with the court rejecting the appeal of all four of them.

At the first-instance trial on September 4, 2020, the Hai Phong Peoples Court sentenced Chi to death for embezzlement.

Le Vuong Hoang and Nguyen Thi Minh Hue, who were the financial controller and accountant at the bank, received a life sentence, while Chu Van Nha, the treasurer, was given a 20-year prison term for the same offense.

From 2012 to August 2017, Chi directed Hoang, Hue, and Nha to create 109 fake savings books, fake account settlements, and false loan applications to appropriate nearly VND414 billion from the bank deposit, according to the indictment.

The prosecution agency determined that Chi was mainly responsible for the appropriated money and the damage caused to the bank, while the remaining defendants were held jointly accountable.

At the appellate court, Chi insisted that the capital punishment is too harsh as she did not appropriate money from the bank and customers for personal gain, adding that she has no idea where the appropriated money is.

The court stressed that the case is especially serious, resulting in damage and losses to national property, thus a strict punishment is necessary to deter similar offenses.

Chi was also required to return VND353.5 billion ($15.4 million) and nearly $2.8 million she had embezzled from OceanBank.

Hoang, Hue, and Nha were required to pay over VND40 billion ($1.7 million) worth of interest.

OceanBank is responsible for paying the money and interest to 27 affected clients.

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A spin-off of Killing Eve to potentially centre around the early life of Carolyn, presently played by Fiona Shaw.

The original series wraps after 3 seasons, but Deadline reports a possible spin-off is under consideration, but yet to be greenlit.

Carolyn, played by Shaw, begins the original show as the ruthless and enigmatic head of MI6s Russia desk and plays a major role in all four seasons of the cat-and-mouse drama. The spin-off will focus on her earlier life, likely looking into her time as young spook in the former Soviet Union.

Shaw recently told TV Tonight, not even Carolyn can be trusted in this complex tale.

You cant trust her. But she also cant trust Eve or Konstantin (Kim Bodnia). She couldnt trust Kenny (Sean Delaney). Everybody betrays everybody all the time, she warned.

People are friendly when they share information, but they also will use that information to sabotage the other person if its for the greater good.

Carolyn is in charge so people have to trust what she says but she may have further information, thats what makes her very powerful.

The audience doesnt know if she has the ultimate information.

A two-episode finale of Killing Eve, which screens internationally next week, will play out in Australia over two weeks on ABC.
Screen Australia and Australians in Film (AiF) are calling for established Australian creatives to apply for their Talent Gateway program and the Global Producers Exchange,

The joint initiatives will enable participants to connect with key US decision makers, and help position Australian projects for success internationally.

Screen Australias CEO Graeme Mason said, With last years programs still underway, were already seeing those participants gaining great exposure in the US market, honing their skills and fostering important relationships. With thanks to additional support from the Federal Government, were delighted to partner again with AiF to offer these invaluable opportunities for another crop of talented creatives this year. The US is the key territory for screen sector finance, distribution and careers, and these initiatives allow filmmakers to build networks and find pathways to tell distinctive Australian stories on a world stage and create career opportunities for themselves and our sector as a whole.

Australians in Film Executive Director Peter Ritchie said, What AiF does best is support and open doors for Australian producers, writers and directors. To that end, we help them establish meaningful partnerships and create strategic pathways to investment, development and casting here in LA. Working with highly-respected and connected industry leaders such as Rebecca Yeldham, Sheila Hanahan Taylor and Jennifer Kushner, and with the incredible support of Screen Australia and all our partners, we have been able to deliver exceptional access to the key creatives and decision makers in the US.

Vanessa Alexander, participant of the 2021 Talent Gateway program said, The program was really well crafted to the needs of creatives looking to the US and international market. I appreciated the opportunity to grow my work and my thinking around my work with the support of top speakers and consultants. I was terrified of pitching because its quite different from how we do it in Australia but this program got me over it.

Erin Bretherton and Darren Dale of Blackfella Films, 2021 participants of the Global Producers Exchange said, The Global Producers Exchange delivers unparalleled insights and access to some of the worlds best content makers and drivers. Its been a game-changer for us as we expand our international footprint and position our projects in the global content marketplace.

Supporting Partners for these industry development programs are Screen NSW, VicScreen, South Australian Film Corporation and Scripted Ink. Industry Partners are Australian Directors Guild, Australian Writers Guild, Screen Producers Australia, Screen Canberra, Screen Queensland, Screen Tasmania, Screen Territory, Screenwest and Screenworks.

Matthew Greenfield (President of Searchlight Pictures), William Horberg (Founder and Producer Wonderful Films  The Queens Gambit), Lynette Howell Taylor (Founder and Producer 51 Entertainment  A Star is Born), Alan Khamoui (Senior Film Executive Amazon Studios), David Levine (Chief Creative Officer Anonymous Content  True Detective), Ben Lusthaus (Manager Original Films Netflix), Bruna Papandrea (Founder and Producer Made Up Stories  Pieces of Her), Quan Phung (Senior Vice President Original Series Topic Studios), Emile Sherman (Co-Founder and Producer See-Saw Films  The Power of the Dog), Brad Simpson (Partner and Producer Color Force  Crazy Rich Asians), Bec Smith (Partner at UTA), Geoff Stier (Senior Vice President of Original Programming SHOWTIME) and Carolyn Strauss (Executive Producer Sister  Game of Thrones) were just some of the leading guest speakers who attended last round of Exchange and Gateway programs.

Applications for both close 5pm AEST Thursday 12 May 2022.
By Georgia Mergler '98 Senior Associate Director, University of Dayton

Twenty-one years ago, an engineering student had a cultural epiphany while on an immersion trip with the Center for Social Concern. That epiphany became the seed for what is now a thriving ETHOS immersion program.

ETHOS immersions offer students the opportunity to work on a humanitarian issue with a nonprofit partner. The experience helps students build cultural competence while putting their engineering knowledge into real-world practice.

ETHOS began as a grassroots effort by students to identify and develop partnerships through which more students could have immersion experiences, said Kelly Bohrer, executive director of the ETHOS Center. Since then, more than 500 students, from all engineering disciplines, have done immersions in 20 different countries across four continents.

Senior mechanical engineering student Elise Clement is one such student. Clement spent 12 weeks on a small island in Puget Sound working with Burn Design Lab, a cookstove development nonprofit. Her project team was tasked with improving production speed and efficiency at a cookstove manufacturing factory in Uganda.

Clement, who has a passion for sustainability, said the experience made the concept of human-centered design come to life.

Working on behalf of a factory that is not in the U.S. forced me to step outside myself and think about things from a different perspective. I was designing production solutions for people who were using hand tools, not machines, to mass-produce cookstoves, she said.

Working with a small nonprofit also gave Clement the opportunity to work autonomously on a variety of tasks. I learned how to work independently. No one was specifically laying out all the steps for me, said Clement.

According to Bohrer, many students have that same experience.

As a result of participating in an immersion, many students become better systems thinkers and learn to be comfortable with the unknown and interact with, and appreciate, people from other cultures. Employers highly value these skills, said Bohrer.

Aside from engineering skills, Clement said the experience of being so far from home, without a support network, also helped her grow personally.

Im thankful to the donors who made this experience possible. Not only did I gain new insights and skills, but it gave me the opportunity to be more independent and see a different part of the U.S. I might not have otherwise. And because my travel and living expenses were covered, I didnt have to go further into debt to have the experience, she said.

Clement recommends immersion trips to all interested students and, thanks to One Day, One Dayton donations to the School of Engineering Deans Fund for Excellence, ETHOS immersion trips are more accessible than ever.

If a student feels called to do an immersion, we dont want money to be the barrier. Donations allow us to extend this hands-on learning opportunity to more students. And when students dont have to worry about the expense, they are able to more fully immerse themselves in the experience, said Bohrer.

According to Bohrer, the future of the ETHOS Center looks bright as new potential partners and research projects are being identified and student interest in immersions continues to grow. Our challenge now is to build capacity to meet the demand for student involvement. Donors, like those who have supported the School of Engineering Deans Fund for Excellence in the past, will be key to that effort, said Bohrer.
By HRC Student Interns

Through internships, fellowships and other engagement opportunities the HRC provides many different learning opportunities to students at UD. For One Day One Dayton this year our current interns reflect on how working at the HRC has impacted their time at UD.

Read what they have to say:

Eric Grimm, Political Science and Communication, Class of 2022:

I first got connected with the Human Rights Center when I was a part of the 2020 cohort of the Malawi Practicum. Sadly, due to Covid the cohort was not able to travel to Malawi. During this process, I learned how to ethically address a communitys needs.This experience showed me that I want to spend my life aiding individuals to obtain opportunities, justice, and equality.

I started officially working for the HRC in November of 2020 as a MarComm intern. Over the year and half working at the HRC I have worked with our social media, podcasts and newsletters. While I worked on all of that, I mostly worked on the blogs that HRC publishes on their website. I love working on the blogs because it gives me the opportunity to share other student experiences and events on campus. This might not seem like a form of advocacy to help tackle injustice in our communities, but allowing students to share their experiences and inform individuals of amazing events allows the community to be informed of different human right causes.

My time at the HRC has changed the course of my life. Through my experiences at the Social Practice of Human Rights Conference and other events, I have gained a new perspective, a human rights perspective. As I graduate this spring and head to law school, I know that I will take the lessons I learned from the HRC with me.

Lucy Waskiewicz, English and Communication, Class of 2024:

I joined the Human Rights Center in February of 2022 as an intern for the MarComm team. Although I have less time under my belt than many of the other HRC interns, I can safely say that my time here thus far has become an invaluable part of my student experience at UD. Every week Im presented the opportunity to hone the skills necessary to my majors through projects that will ultimately contribute to the progression of human rights. The ability to combine my passions for both human rights issues and for the work that I do is one I will never take for granted. Im surrounded by so many motivated and passionate individuals that I wouldnt have met anywhere else on campus, and Im incredibly grateful for the opportunity to do significant work in such a positive environment. I cant wait to see what the rest of my future holds at the HRC!

Ari Butman, Marketing and Business Management, Class of 2023:

I joined the Human Rights Center this February as a marketing and communications intern on the MarComm team. Throughout my short time at the HRC, I have had the privilege of meeting so many amazing and passionate people from different backgrounds. I have also been able to take some of the conceptual theories that I have learned in my classes and apply them to the real world. I strongly believe that this experience has and will continue to shape and improve my time at UD. Im excited for what comes next knowing that I am surrounded in this center by people who are both extremely passionate and motivated. This internship has definitely helped me improve how I communicate and work in a group setting and has definitely set me up for success after college.

Ashley Walker, Communication Management, Class of 2023:

Im an intern for the Marketing and Communication cluster at the HRC. I have spent my time working here learning pertinent skills that I am thrilled to apply to my future career. I have been through multiple training events to further my skills and knowledge in facilitating dialogues, understanding relevant issues in the Dayton community, and my responsibilities to human rights. I apply all of what I have learned to writing blogs, creating content for social media, and attending HRC events. The HRC has surrounded me with a group of individuals that lead with compassion and strength to achieve their goals. Im proud to say that I am able to further my education through the experiential opportunities presented at the HRC.

Anna Beebe, Human Rights Studies, Class of 2022:

I value my experience at the center so much because it helped me figure out how I want to use my degree to make a difference after I graduate. The Human Rights Studies Program is extremely unique and it has provided me with so much valuable knowledge that has allowed me to discover what I am passionate about and how I can use my skills to advocate for my rights and the rights of people all over the world. The Center has provided me with diverse experiences, including an internship with Counterpart International, an internship on the Marketing and Communications Team, and an internship with the Human Rights Studies Program. As I leave Dayton and the Human Rights Center, I am leaving a stronger advocate, critical thinker, storyteller, and individual. I know that wherever I end up in my career, my experiences here will shape the way I see the world and build relationships forever.

Janaya Thompson, Human Rights Major, Class of 2022:

My internship at the HRC started in February of 2022 as a part of the MarComm team. As a member of the team I work mostly on social media content which is something I have previous experiences with but not on a professional level. I think my work in this internship will be beneficial in the long run for my future career even if it doesnt involve a lot of social media aspects. Working closely with a team is completely new for me but I enjoy not having to carry the workload myself and experiencing a tight knit community. Although my time at the HRC has been brief so far I can feel that itll have a lasting effect on my success in future endeavors.

Aaryonne Jackson, International Business Management, Class of 2025:

I joined the HRC in my 2nd semester here at UD. It has been an exciting and challenging learning experience. My work with the HRC has given me the opportunity to learn in depth about human rights issues that I was previously unaware of. It feels good to do my part and create an authentic voice in my community. Advocating for others that are impacted by an issue other than myself. I hope to stay with the HRC throughout the rest of my time at UD to become a stronger voice here on UDs campus. Im very excited to see what I learn and how I grow here as a part of the team at the HRC.

Lenny OConnor, Communication and Political Science, Class of 2025:

I joined the HRC in late March as a Student Engagement Intern and just began to dive into my first project with a great coworker, Allie. Although my time at the HRC is just beginning, I love everything about the center and my work. I love my work space at the center and the environment, and love my current project collaborating with the Hanley Sustainability Institute. In just a short time so far, I have been able to work on my engagement and communication skills, as well as begin to manage a partnership with a campus organization. I look forward to my next three years with the center as I add more skills and get a chance to contribute even more to advancing human rights on campus, in the city, and globally!

Allie OGorman, Human Rights Studies and Criminal Justice, Class of 2024:

I joined the HRC in February 2022 as an intern on the Student Engagement team. Although my experience here has been short, I have already had the opportunity to begin impactful projects and work with amazing students that have taught me so much. I am currently working on a project in collaboration with the Hanley Sustainability Institute to partner and consult with Flyer Enterprises, which helped develop my leadership skills and overall business knowledge. The HRC is a unique place that offers students opportunities to work with hands-on advocacy and engagement work and connect with faculty and staff that are doing it everyday, which I know will leave me with strengthened communication, critical thinking, and academic skills that will support any path I take after graduation.

Help us continue to provide these experiential learning opportunities to students by donating here.
Kamala Lopez seized the opportunity to educate and inform Americans that women are still not included in the United States Constitution. Her non-profit womens rights organisation, Equal Means Equal (EME), launched #WomenMakingHistory2022 to raise awareness, amplify the message of equality and host events surrounding the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) across the United States.

One of EMEs longtime supporters is the artist and photographer Jill Greenberg, responsible for the iconic "Handmaids Tale" campaign, among other world-renowned photographic exhibitions.

Jill co-hosted an Equal Means Equal event at Fotografiska, Manhattans new photography museum.

Events

The event, "Does Equal Mean Equal for Women?", featured a short Film that Kamala directed called "Legalize Equality," followed by a panel discussion about the status of the ERA now that the enforcement date has passed. Panelists discussed a recent New York Times article about it, as well as President Bidens statement, which seems to suggest that the ERA is simultaneously valid and invalid.

Screenings of "Equal Means Equal" were also held at universities and community centres across the country, with panels both in-person and online. At Millersville University in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the audience was divided by gender after the screening.

Conversations were held separately to explore differences in perception of sex discrimination, and participants discussed possible solutions.

Wrapping up the month of events, EME and Reserved magazine co-hosted the premiere of the teaser for "Equal Means Equal: The Sequel" at NeueHouse Hollywood.

Documentary 'Equal Means Equal'

Kamalas original documentary, "Equal Means Equal," which began the new national push for womens equality after a more than 30-year lull, was released in 2016 through The Orchard and can be found on Amazon. The film was released the summer before the first Womens March and the explosion of the #MeToo and Times Up movements, and it exposed the lack of federal equality for women in the United States.

The film spread across the country, carried by women who were shocked to find out their basic rights were being withheld despite overwhelming propaganda otherwise.

From the screenings of the film, in lobbies, community centres and living rooms, viewers formed organic groups in their communities and began organising and mobilising to ratify the ERA in their states. Nevada was the first of the new raft of states to ratify, in March 2017, followed by Illinois in 2018 and Virginia in 2020.

Now Kamala directs the sequel, detailing the path from the 2015 Oscars when executive producer of "Equal Means Equal," Patricia Arquette, won an Academy Award for her role in Richard Linklaters "Boyhood"  and made a speech about equal rights for women  to the moment when the 38th state was ratified and ERA became law, to the lawsuits that followed and beyond.

Acting career

As well as keeping up this fight, Kamala has maintained the momentum of her acting career by booking an exciting new role. She will join the new season of "Mayans MC," a series on FX thats a spin-off from popular show "Sons of Anarchy," about a Southern Californian motorcycle club. She was especially thrilled to work with well-known film and TV star Edward James Olmos, who she acted opposite in "Miami Vice" many years ago in her very first TV role after graduating from Yale.
Two rights groups on Wednesday accused Ethiopian security forces and their allies of waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Tigray, a long-contested part of northern Ethiopia.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Tigrayan civilians had been targeted since the outbreak of Ethiopia's war in November 2020, when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sent troops in to topple rebels.

In a joint report, the rights groups said abuses by officials, special forces and militias in the neighbouring Amhara region amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Ethiopia's military was also accused of complicity in atrocities that have killed thousands of civilians and displaced more than a million.

"Since November 2020, Amhara officials and security forces have engaged in a relentless campaign of ethnic cleansing to force Tigrayans in western Tigray from their homes," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

Federal authorities failed to investigate allegations of ethnic cleansing, while the national army committed "murder, arbitrary arrest and detention, and torture against the Tigrayan population", the report said.

Claims to Tigrayan land

Two of Ethiopia's largest ethnic groups, Amharas and Tigrayans both lay claim to the fertile-rich expanse of western Tigray that stretches from the Tekeze River to Sudan.

For more than a year, Amnesty and HRW interviewed more than 400 people  including refugees who fled to Sudan, and witnesses to the violence still living inside western Tigray and elsewhere in Ethiopia.

They documented the sexual enslavement and gang rape of Tigrayan women, including a victim whose attackers said they were "purifying" her blood.

They also gathered testimony about the death of Tigrayans in overcrowded prisons, and the summary execution of dozens of men by a river.

Story continues

The report, called We Will Erase You From This Land, blamed the crimes on newly appointed civilian administrators in western Tigray, and regional forces and militias in Amhara.

It accused Eritrean troops of joined Amhara forces in looting crops and livestock and driving Tigrayans from their homes.

Thousands of people were rounded up and held in detention camps where some died as a result of torture, denial of medical care, and lack of food and water; guards killed others.

Government denials

Amhara government spokesman Gizachew Muluneh told Reuters the allegations of abuses and ethnic cleansing were "lies" and "fabricated" news.

Amnesty and HRW said rebels in the region  the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF)  had also committed abuses, but that this was not the focus of the report.

Addis Ababa declared a "humanitarian truce" last month, while the TPLF agreed to a "cessation of hostilities" on the condition that aid reach Tigray.

In 2019, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation, and in particular for his actions in resolving the border conflict with Eritrea.

(with wires)
Canadian Farmer Brett Kunz Gets Dream Opportunity Through ClubWPT

April 06 2022 Jon Sofen

Brett Kunz, a Canadian farmer, will take his shot at winning life-changing money in South Florida this weekend all because of the ClubWPT app.

The 28-year-old World Poker Tour fan earned a seat in the $3,500 buy-in WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown by playing in a tournament on ClubWPT. He even admitted he didn't expect it to happen.

"It's been a dream of mine to play in a WPT tournament, and after winning this with around 2,400 people entered, I was kind of in shock that I actually won," Kunz told PokerNews.

Chasing Life-Changing Money

Kunz has just one recorded live tournament cash, an $11,065 score for winning a 194-player field in a $300 tournament in March at Casino Regina in Canada. He could tack on a significant amount of money to his Hendon Mob results should he run deep at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida this weekend.

Last year, Brekstyn Schutten won it for $1,261,095, beating out 2,482 entrants. If Kunz were to win it this year, that would certainly make for quite an interesting storyline.

"I grew up on a grain farm and currently farm with my father, brother, cousin, and uncle," he said.

The poker player lives in a community of around 200 people near a town called Annaheim (not to be confused with Anaheim, California), located in Saskatchewan, Canada. After graduating high school, he became an electrician before getting into the family farming industry.

"I learned to play poker in high school with friends and have enjoyed playing it ever since," says the Canadian poker fan.

He said he learned to play poker in high school and has enjoyed it ever since, but outside of the $11k score a couple weeks ago, his Hendon Mob is bare. That could all change this coming weekend, of course.

Free to Play Slots in the US

Improbable Run to Glory?

Running deep in any WPT event is never easy. The competition is stiff with crushers such as Darren Elias, Chino Rheem, and others almost always in attendance. So, going from playing on a pay-per-month mobile app to poker glory won't be simple.

But Kunz has already conquered one task by dominating a ClubWPT tournament just to make it to Florida. He's now just one step away from winning some unthinkable money. If he doesn't cash in the live poker event, maybe he'll at least cross off a bucket list item  to tilt the "Poker Brat."

"To be able to play in a televised event with all the professionals you see on tv is just so exciting to me. There is so many of them which would be awesome to play with but if I had to say one to be seated at a table with it would be Phil Hellmuth, to win a big hand against him and watch him drop some f-bombs would be a goal of mine," Kunz joked.

Kunz has been a member of ClubWPT "for about a year and a half." He mostly plays during the winter months because he's too busy with work the rest of the year.

"I decided to play ClubWPT after seeing a commercial about the chance to win a prize package just like the one I won," he explains. "It's pretty crazy after I decided to join seeing that there was a two week free-trial within those first two weeks I won this prize package so it was a pretty great way to start off on ClubWPT."

However this story ends  whether he cashes in Florida or not  Kunz is getting an opportunity to live out a dream all because of the ClubWPT app, and he isn't the only one. Numerous players over the years have won prize packages just like this on ClubWPT.

Click here to learn more about ClubWPT and how you can win!

The 2022 WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown kicks off April 8 and will play down to a final table of six April 12. Once the final table has been achieved, the remaining players will take a break and then fly out to Las Vegas to play it down to a winner at the Esports Arena on May 25.
A final table burst from poker Hall of Famer member Phil Ivey was enough to see him triumph in Event #3: $75,000 Short Deck at the Triton Poker Cyprus festival, taking home $1,170,000 in the process.

He defeated Wai Kiat Lee heads-up to top a 51-player field and win his second Short Deck High Roller title in eight months, after previous success at the Super High Roller Bowl Europe festival last year.

Rank Player Country Payout (USD) 1 Phil Ivey United States $1,170,000 2 Wai Kiat Lee Malaysia $840,000 3 Mike Watson Canada $538,000 4 Elton Tsang Hong Kong $408,000 5 Jason Koon United States $315,000 6 Richard Yong Malaysia $241,000 7 Ivan Leow Malaysia $194,500

Kiat Lee

Day 2 Recap

The day began with just 11 players remaining and only 7 places paid. Early eliminations included Mikita Badziakouski, Daniel Cates and Chris Brewer. The latter two were eliminated by Mike Watson who sat atop the counts as the tournament reached the money bubble.

There were mixed fortunes for the Yong family, with Richard Yong doubling to stay alive while Wai Kin Yong was sent to the rail by Phil Ivey, with the remaining players all guaranteed $194,500.

Watson would continue to extend his chip lead during the opening exchanges as Elton Tsang and start-of-day chip leader Jason Koon traded doubles.

Ivey would go runner-runner to eliminate Ivan Leow, while another double from Yong would hinder Watson's charge for the title.

Triton Live Stream Set

Yong was subsequently eliminated by Ivey, who also sent Koon to the rail just minutes later to soar into the lead. Wai Kiat Lee had successfully laddered his way to four-handed, and would send Tsang to the rail to remain in contention.

However, Ivey's elimination of Watson in third place saw him take a more than 2:1 chip lead into heads-up, and would dispatch Lee in the first hand of heads-up to secure the title and seven-figure first-place prize.
These memories -- the talking, the cooking, the ritual -- have limited resonance for those who weren't there. But the pile of bound documents on my desk tells a story that might be more universal. The evolution of our small Jewish feminist community parallels the larger evolution of Jewish feminism, I think. These haggadot are like snapshots of where we were, each year at Pesach-time as our Jewishness, our feminism, and our liturgical sophistication grew.

At last we declared our revisions complete. We took the haggadah to Office Services to be copied and stapled. We scurried around the JRC's kitchen, making tray after tray of potato kugel and shaping a endless number of matzah balls. When the seder rolled around, I remember a few people giving me a hard time -- one woman in particular seemed offended that we wanted to mix the chocolate of our feminism with the peanut butter of her Judaism! But on the whole people seemed moved, or at least intrigued, and the tradition took hold.

I was invited to join the feminist seder committee in the winter of my freshman year. The first feminist seder had been held at Williams in 1992, the year before I arrived, using a haggadah created by Marissa Brett, Joellen Krupp, and Holly Lowy; I worked with Rachel Clark, Dara Eizenmann, Lauren Golden, Holly Lowy, and Marianna Vaidman to revise it for year two. We gathered in a tiny dorm room, leaving our snow- and salt-crusted shoes in the hallway, and had passionate discussions about candle-lighting and hand-washing and blessings for weeks on end.

In preparation for the talk I'm giving at my alma mater on Sunday, I dug through my files and unearthed six versions of the Willliams College Feminist Haggadah. Just holding them in my hands is like travelling through time.

Each year a new group of people (mostly, though not exclusively, women) gathered to study the previous year's haggadah and to invest it with new meaning by making the changes we deemed important. The question of God-language -- what terms we use for God, and how they shape our reality -- was always at the forefront. In 1993, we argued that gender-neutral language left implicit masculine structures intact, and shifted most of the brachot to Brucha at eloheinu malchat ha-olam ("Blessed are You, our God, Queen of the universe" -- we didn't yet know the Brucha at Shekhinah formula that's become fairly standard for feminized blessings now.)

The next year, we changed our modus operandi again. Here's how we described our God-language choices in the 1994 "On Language" paragraph:

As we began to create this year's Haggadah, we were faced with the immediate issue of language. While we recognize the merit of using female imagery to uproot the assumption that the Eternal is male, we feel that feminizing blessings is not enough. Replacing the word "King" with the word "Queen" may aid us in changing the way we envision the "gender" of the Infinite, but this change does nothing to break down our underlying perceptions of the Eternal as ruler and of ourselves as subjects. In an effort to rid ourselves of our understanding of the Infinite as transcendent and dominating -- in an effort to replace this hierarchy with mutual relation and community -- we have chosen to express all blessings in gender-neutral language.

My reaction to that paragraph now is complicated. On the one hand, I remember the Rachel who, at nineteen, wanted so deeply to replace power-over with power-from-within. I still like the point that replacing "King" with "Queen" is only a certain kind of change and may not shake up our calcified notions of God sufficiently. Then again, at thirty-one I'm starting to recognize that though "ruler" is far from the only metaphor I want to use for God, it's a powerful metaphor which I don't necessarily want to scrap. I suspect I needed to spend a while embracing terms like Wellspring and Source and Breath of Life in order to reach a point where I could relate to melech ha-olam again.

Each year we did the best we could, content in the knowledge that we had invested ourselves in improving what had come before -- and that next year what we created could be further refined, so it was okay if it wasn't perfect yet. (It wasn't incumbent upon us to finish the task, one might say, but neither were we free to refrain from beginning it!)

We struggled mightily with the Ten Plagues. One year we paired the Ten Plagues God Brought Upon the Egyptians with the Ten Plagues Humans Have Brought Upon Women; another year we tried connecting each plague to an issue in our collegiate lives. One year we closed the description of each plague with "Tonight let us rededicate ourselves to...," connecting each with an action or intention we thought was an important part of tikkun olam.

And, of course, we kept refining that "on language" paragraph. The 1995 version began like its predecessor, but ended differently:

Replacing the word "King" with the word "Queen" may aid us in changing the way we envision the "gender" of the Infinite, but this change does nothing to break down our underlying perceptions of the Eternal as ruler and of ourselves as subjects. What's more, God-language should not be exclusive of either gender: both female and male were created in the image of the divine. Our language is insufficient to describe the divine, but we do the best we can, bearing in mind that while our words only approach the Infinite, all language spoken from the heart has God in it.

In the changed ending to the paragraph I see a far more sophisticated understanding of how diverse and variable God-language needs to be. And the way the "on language" paragraph shifted, year to year, replicates for me an evolution I see in the larger Jewish feminist community. First we replaced masculine terms with feminine ones; then we side-stepped the binarist paradigm (and the hierarchy encoded in the "ruler" metaphor) by using non-gendered language; then we came to recognize the holiness in all of these forms. In some ways it's a messy shift. Acknowledging the value of a variety of names for God means we no longer have the comfortable and predictable familiarity of "Baruch atah, Adonai, eloheinu melech ha'olam." For me, though, that's a reasonable price to pay to have liturgy that reminds me of God's infinity, paradoxically encoded in the finite words we use.

As the project grew, we began to work on making it beautiful instead of purely functional. More and more poetry peppers these pages as the years go by: Rachel Hadas, Adrienne Rich, Naomi Shihab Nye, Merle Feld, Marge Piercy, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz... This, too, strikes me as an important evolution. It shows that we trusted our message (women have voices too; the Passover story of liberation reverberates in our own lives; our stories need to be told) enough to add ornamentation and flourish.

In 1997, a profound physical shift: suddenly the haggadah is staple-bound on the right-hand side, rather than the left. Were we more comfortable that year embracing our Jewishness? Did the feminist seder project by then feel more like a Jewish one than a women's-studies one? I can't remember the decision-making process, but the bound book speaks volumes. (This same pendulum shift is observable in the Reform movement -- where the older siddur Gates of Prayer was printed in both ways, and many shuls chose left-hand binding, the new siddur Mishkan Tefilah will be available bound only on the right.)

By that point we were well-versed in other feminist haggadot. We quoted from E.M. Broner and Naomi Nimrod's The Women's Haggadah. We borrowed a fantastic reading ("How does the journey to freedom begin?/ Once, and then again and again...") from The Journey Continues, the Passover Haggadah created by The May'an Project. That year was the first year we placed an orange on our seder plate. We'd learned the story slightly wrong -- it would be a few years before I read Susannah Heschel's original account -- but we had the general concept down. "Women," we wrote, "belong wherever Jews carry on a sacred life." Indeed.

The last edition that I own is from 1999, the eighth annual Williams College Feminist Haggadah. I was no longer involved with the project, having graduated two years before, but I attended as a guest. The shift toward increased liturgical sophistication, toward more Hebrew terminology, continued. And the 1999 haggadah had an appendix at the back which collected readings from previous years' haggadot.

And there my tangible bundle of history ends. Some years later, a woman I had known from the Williams feminist seder project contacted me about contributing a reading to The Women's Seder Sourcebook, an anthology which arose from the roots of the Yale Women's Seder project (which began in 1993). She told me that the Williams seder had continued beyond my time -- though today when I check the campus calendar I don't see it listed. I guess the days of the Williams College Feminist Seder are over. Perhaps the student community no longer feels the need. Perhaps the dialectical tension of having two seders (a "traditional" one and a "feminist" one) has led to the synthesis of having a single seder which simultaneously fulfils traditionalist and feminist ideals.

Looking back on all of these haggadot now, I can trace the community's evolution through the years I was there. We wrestled with important questions: what does it mean to be women, and to be Jews? What does it mean to be feminists? Does our feminism influence our Judaism, or the other way around? Do we seek to tell stories which have never been told -- or to tell the old stories, but in a new way? How do we understand the Holy Blessed One, and what words can we use to signify that ultimate reality, knowing that our words are insufficient but that they shape our lived reality in deep ways?

What we created was patchwork. Some of it was academic in tone, some poetic; some was traditional, some transgressive. Some of it came from me and some from every other woman who linked herself with the enterprise. Sometimes I think the most important thing was the way we had to wrestle together with the texts -- and, sometimes, wrestle with one another -- to arrive at something we could collectively and communally call our own.

With the benefit of hindsight, and more experience with liturgy and ritual, I can see that some of what we did was clunky. The process may have been more valuable than the result. Then again, some of what we wrote still ripples through the haggadot I make today. Beginning with a note "on language," to explain my take on how to verbalize the Divine; reading Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb's poem about bedikat hametz, and following it with an invitation to name a personal hametz one intends to discard -- these are traditions I learned from the women of the first feminist seder on my college campus, and I cherish them still.

Some of what we wrote still thrills me. Like these lines:

Memory is not a static deposit; it is neither rules nor happenings that confront us unchanging. As members of living communities, Jews continually re-remember; we retell and recast the Jewish past in light of changing communal experience and changing communal values.

That still resonates for me. (In fact, those lines remain in the current version of the Velveteen Rabbi's haggadah for Pesach. (ETA: for a current link to the haggadah, here's the VR Haggadah page on my website.)

The Williams College Feminist Seder project taught me that the words I pray belong simultaneously to the generations of tradition and to me. It gave me a sense of ownership of my tradition, and empowered me to add my voice to the chorus. It sounds a little corny now, but in some very real ways it set me on the path toward who I am and who I hope to become.

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, feministseder.
Service Above Self: 22 local high school seniors are being recognized for their volunteerism and service in the 42nd annual Youth Citizenship Awards from Rotary Club of Waco and the Tribune-Herald.
The Omaha Public Schools students sat in a wide circle on the still-brown grass in Memorial Park on an afternoon in mid-March.

The seven seniors sitting in this group will graduate in 71 days, but they said some of the final lessons of their high school careers feel more like kindergarten.

Teachers have shown them PowerPoint presentations on how to have conversations and disagreements with peers.

At their school, Central High School, there is a new system called "Eagle Bucks" where students are given fake currency as a way to teach and encourage positive behavior. These bucks, which have been implemented at schools all across the district, can be traded in for rewards like candy and chips.

"We needed it because kids were out of control," said Dina Saltzman, a senior at Central.

At schools across the district, some students show up to school but never attend a class; hallways and bathrooms smell like marijuana as the smoke sets off fire alarms; and teachers have been injured while breaking up fights between students, according to nine students and nine current and former OPS staff members.

They all said the pandemic has changed the school environment as an increase in student misbehavior continues to hinder learning and staff retention. Some of the OPS employees spoke on the condition they not be named because they have not been authorized by the district to speak publicly about their jobs.

The exacerbated behavioral problems are not unique to OPS.

A high school in Connecticut temporarily transitioned to remote learning last fall due to misbehavior. And last month, teachers and school staff in Minneapolis reported similar issues, including more fights and drug use, as well as more kids with anxiety and depression.

For the seniors at the park, their last normal year of school before the COVID-19 pandemic was freshman year. For current freshmen, it was sixth grade.

I feel bad for them, but then they are also treating it like elementary school, said Isabella Manhart, a Central student of the underclassmen. Sometimes there are kids running through the hallways without shoes on and Im like, what is happening?

In their high school careers, these seniors have attended school online, watched overwhelmed teachers cry and felt social anxiety upon returning to school in person. They have watched their fellow students lose loved ones, develop substance abuse issues, drop out, fight in school hallways and do drugs in school bathrooms.

"A lot of people dealt with things like parents losing jobs, like really bad crisis-type situations, losing people during COVID, that school is the last thing they're concerned with and so that's kind of another reason people have stopped caring about school," Saltzman said.

The situations and behaviors described by Central students have been observed by other students, staff and parents at schools throughout the district.

Several medical groups have warned that pandemic isolation from school closures and lack of social gatherings has taken a toll on young peoples mental health.

"It's kind of off the rails as far as behavior. They're bad. Bad. They're naughty," Camille Horner, a junior at Central, said of her fellow students. "Like blunts in the bathrooms, skipping all the time."

The World-Herald reached out to OPS officials for comment on many of the issues outlined in this story. After being given two weeks to fulfill that request, the district offered interviews with OPS officials but only after the newspaper's intended publication date.

All nine members of the OPS board also received emails from The World-Herald requesting comment, but no one responded.

Instead, the school board and the district sent a lengthy joint statement.

"Young people across our community, like adults, have endured three disrupted and traumatic years. One can see this in every aspect of daily life, from schools to work and communities at large  and one can see it across our country," the statement said. "Our district has shared several times that addressing these disruptions will take time  and that we have immediate and long-term interventions in place."

The district said its student code of conduct outlines expectations and repercussions, including behavioral concerns and substance abuse.

"If issues arise, our administrators, safety officers and law enforcement partners intervene to address the concern," the statement said.

Teachers and other staff members have been vocal all school year about the issues inside of their schools. They have said at school board meetings that they are worried about the safety of students and the quality of education those students are getting because teachers don't have time to do their jobs. Because of staff shortages, teachers have been asked to cover additional classes for missing staff members.

One teacher said he has struggled to cover classes outside his content area.

"I was trying to teach Spanish and I know three words maybe and the kids know that," the teacher said. "The kids all knew more than I did."

In response, the district has given students extra days off this year so teachers can plan and prepare, sent district administrators back to the classroom as substitutes, created a concierge team that now has more than 70 employees working part time in the district, increased summer school pay for teachers from $28.50 per hour to $40 and are now paying student teachers and their supervising teachers stipends.

Robert Miller, president of the Omaha Education Association, said while the situation within schools hasn't gotten worse, it hasn't gotten much better either. He said the district's concierge program has helped with duties like serving lunch but it has not alleviated the issues in the classroom.

"Things haven't improved," Miller said. "And teachers must continue to feel valued and they're just not feeling that right now."

While teachers have repeatedly said they're worried that their peers will quit and not return next school year, it's too early to tell if that will actually happen. Teachers have to inform the district of their plans for next year later this month.

Some haven't waited until the end of the school year to quit. Candice Balkovic, who taught for 10 years, resigned from Lewis and Clark Middle School in January.

She said she received one of two responses when she told her co-workers about her resignation: Good for you, I wish I could or Good for you, Im thinking about doing it, too.

That's the state where our education is  every single teacher I talked to is either 'Good for you' or 'I'm right behind you,' she said.

Balkovic said she had to resign due to a cycle of problems in her building that became unbearable.

Student misbehavior causes classroom disruptions and leads to violence against teachers, she said. This can cause teacher burnout and staff shortages, which means theres less planning time and lower-quality instruction. Other staff members, like principals and counselors, have had to help out in classrooms, leaving them less time to do their jobs and address other issues in the buildings.

And the list stretches on and on, she said.

While fights at school happened before the pandemic, some teachers and students said theyve noticed an uptick in the number of altercations in their schools this year.

One OPS teacher said he breaks up at least three fights a week, sometimes a fight a day. Another said she had to break up a fight before noon on the first day of the spring semester this year.

When asked if the district had noticed an uptick in fights and violence at schools this school year, Lisa Utterback, community services chief officer for OPS, told The World-Herald earlier this year that some days are more challenging than others.

I will emphasize that our security officers, our school resource officers and our administrators are the individuals responsible for de-escalating and intervening when there is an altercation between two students, Utterback said at the time.

The teachers said they break up fights because they will not stand by and wait for security while children hurt each other. They also said there are not enough security guards in their buildings.

This school year several altercations have escalated and police have been called to middle and high schools around the district.

A student was cut with a knife during a fight at South High School in October. The student was sent to the hospital while another was ordered to the Douglas County Youth Center. Two 13-year-old students also faced charges last fall after an altercation at Beveridge Magnet Middle School.

A month into the spring semester, police had to use mace to separate students during two large fights on Feb. 11, at Benson High School and King Science & Technology Magnet Center.

A teacher who was present during the fight at King Science had to be sent to the hospital after she was shoved to the ground by a student while barricading a doorway, according to a police report.

One high school teacher spoke to The World-Herald a few hours after being knocked to the ground while trying to break up a fight among students.

You do get hurt," the teacher said. "Not because the kids want to be violent but because students are doing their best to harm one another. Ive never had a child trying to attack me but its not the first time I've been harmed trying to break up a fight.

Another teacher experienced injuries from students at more than one school she worked at in OPS. She said she has had multiple surgeries from the incidents and still deals with chronic pain today.

Violence in the workplace for teachers is real, she said.

The unpredictability of student violence at some OPS schools leaves staff feeling on edge, an OPS teacher said. She has become conditioned to constantly look for escalating behavior, which leaves her exhausted.

Teachers have said their co-workers are also routinely told to f--- off by some students.

Another teacher, during an interview with The World-Herald, described asking a student to pull up their mask and being told: F--- you, b----. Do your f------ job.

One teacher said she was once giving a student a redirection when he told her to shut up and threatened her with sexual assault.

Combative students aren't the only source of disruption.

Wait five minutes in the restroom at Central and youll see a cloud of smoke rising from a stall, said Noemi Gilbert, a junior. The Central High students said it's normal to find students smoking and vaping in the bathrooms, which sometimes sets off fire alarms. The students said this was also a problem before the pandemic.

Three teachers said they observe daily drug use among students in their buildings. One teacher said the blatant use of marijuana in the school is unbelievable.

Another teacher said administrators started locking bathrooms in her school after students continued to smoke marijuana in them.

Brad Podany, a security guard at South High School, said students even smoke marijuana in the halls.

If a security guard smells it, they will try to find whos smoking. Sometimes students will comply with being searched; other times, he said, they will say "I dont care" and walk out of the building.

Teachers said some students come to school only to spend the entire day roaming the hallways instead of going to class. Sometimes those students are loud or fights break out, causing teachers to leave their classrooms full of students to address the behavior in the hallway.

They don't care anymore. They don't care about repercussions, Podany said. And unfortunately, it's a game that they play, and they know that, If I get in a fight or if I smoke, I'm out of school for five days at home. And then I'm right back to doing the exact same thing.

Podany said the misbehaviors revolve around the same group of students who continue to be problematic.

The Central students said while some of their peers might be creating problems, most are just trying to get by as they grapple with what's happening to them outside of school.

Were all trying our best, said Jace Westphal, a senior.

Lydia Hernandez, a senior at Burke High School, said drug use or fights havent been a problem at her school this year.

I have not seen as many fights as I saw in middle school, Hernandez said. In middle school, there was a fight every week.

Hernandez said the main problem at Burke are freshmen students who misbehave, acting like they are still in elementary school.

The transition from remote learning to returning to the classroom full time has been challenging for both students and teachers.

Students went from learning at their own pace and being isolated in bedrooms  sitting in front of a computer for hours  to suddenly being expected to snap back to the rigid routine of in-person school.

The seclusion brought on by the pandemic has taken a toll on young peoples mental health.

A study published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on responses of nearly 8,000 students in 2021, shows 44% reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless during the past year.

About 66% also said they found it more difficult to complete their schoolwork.

Gilbert said just walking the hallways or sitting in a classroom can get overwhelming. Other students said they now deal with social anxiety after being remote for so long.

One teacher said while she was having a really good school year, a lot of her students' stamina was lost because of online learning. And it might take years to recover, she said.

Going back to normal was like going back to the normal expectations, but not providing the support systems to lay out those new expectations, which is, like, a wild thing to do, Manhart said.

The students have also noticed the toll the past few school years have taken on their teachers.

"The teachers don't even want to be there, Horner said. It just gets manifested into, like, how they teach and what we pick up. It's, like, why would we want to be here either?"

Another student said teachers would sit down with her to help her plan for college, but now they say they dont have time.

You can tell that they can't pour from an empty cup because, like, they're so burnt out that there's not really a lot that they can do, Saltzman said. I feel bad for, like, asking them for advice. I just feel really bad for the teachers.

Teachers said staff retention is a large problem in the district. Positions are going unfilled and too many young OPS teachers are burning out quickly, realizing the job cant support them, one teacher said.

People are leaving and not being replaced because theres no one to replace them, the teacher said.

Abigail Jane, a former teacher at South, was in the district for only two years before she resigned in 2021. She said she remembers a specific day when a student came into her classroom while she was teaching and attacked another student.

All the veteran teachers were like, Was that your first fight? And I was like, Yeah, and they said, You'll get used to that, Jane said. Thats just the attitude  if you want to make it in these schools, you literally have to be completely shut down to things. Nothing can shock you. Nothing can scare you.

Several OPS teachers told The World-Herald that they didnt think district administrators understood whats happening in OPS schools.

One of my teachers has two other jobs and that's just not OK, said Saltzman, a student. And I feel like it sucks that all these teachers are quitting, but I almost wonder if that's what the administration is going to need to be like, Oh, they're serious. We may need to listen to them and change something.

Horner said her experiences throughout the pandemic have helped her, and other students, to gain a lot of awareness about their own path in life.

Westphal said with COVID restrictions decreasing, he feels like students are just trying to get back to normal but are not mentally there. He said he feels pushed to go back to normal.

The students agreed that the pandemic has changed their outlook for their future after graduation. It has caused them to be more realistic about their goals, such as staying closer to home.

I think everyone's kind of waiting for the next ball to drop, Saltzman said. Because, like, there have been so many false alarms of, like, things are getting better. I think everyone's kind of lost hope of that. So hopefully this will be the last time, but we're all kind of waiting for another relapse.

Gilbert said they cant picture their life more than six months into the future.

I mean, what else is gonna happen? Gilbert said. And it feels kind of weird and futile, to try and plan a future when everything is working against us.

This report includes material from the Associated Press.
Bonds in subregion show strength

By YANG HAN in Hong Kong (China Daily) 08:24, April 06, 2022

Staff members pack vials of Myancopharm COVID-19 vaccines at Myanmar Pharmaceutical Industry in Yangon, Myanmar, March 23, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]

From pandemic to trade, grouping of Lancang-Mekong states drives progress

The coordinated response to the pandemic showed by countries that work together under the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation grouping demonstrates that the LMC will remain a key driver for regional socioeconomic development and sustainability, experts say.

China has provided nearly 200 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to the five Mekong countries and also worked with Myanmar to produce vaccines there. Earlier, the Mekong countries had donated medical supplies to China when the country was trying to control the outbreak in virus epicenters like Wuhan.

China also accelerated programs such as the Lancang-Mekong Sweet Spring project during the pandemic, with the aim of ensuring safe drinking water in rural areas of the Mekong countries.

Ukrist Pathmanand, director of the Mekong Research Center of the Institute of Asian Studies at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University, said the LMC represents "important regional cooperation" in the Greater Mekong Subregion.

Unlike many other cooperation frameworks in the subregion, the LMC is mainly focused on socioeconomic development, he said. The framework was established on March 23, 2016, by the six countries that share the river.

The names Lancang and Mekong refer to the same important waterway that runs across China and the Indochina Peninsula. The river is called Lancang in China and the Mekong in Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Over these past six years, the LMC has become one of the most dynamic cooperation mechanisms in the subregion as regional countries deepen their friendship and promote pragmatic cooperation.

In the pursuit of joint development, trade volumes between China and the Mekong countries reached nearly $400 billion in 2021, a year-on-year increase of 23 percent, according to Chinese Ambassador to Thailand Han Zhiqiang.

Thailand will become a co-host chair of the LMC this year. Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi met visiting Thai Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai on Saturday, and the two sides agreed to deepen cooperation under the LMC mechanism.

Key infrastructure projects such as the China-Laos Railway have made huge progress in enhancing regional connectivity. As of Sunday, the railway had handled over 2.25 million passenger trips and transported 1.31 million metric tons of cargo since its launch in December, Xinhua News Agency reported.

Besides the close trade and economic ties, Ukrist noted that China, during the pandemic, was the first to provide timely medical support to Mekong countries, sending vaccines to help build up immunity against COVID-19.

"It is very important for China to participate and be a key member of the LMC because (this is about) people-to-people relations in the region," said Ukrist, adding that the LMC functions not only at the government level but also connects ordinary people, especially the poor and those living close to the river.

Thong Mengdavid, a research associate of the Mekong Center for Strategic Studies at the Asian Vision Institute, a think tank in Phnom Penh, said China has committed to many regional development projects under the Belt and Road Initiative and the LMC.

"Regional cooperation should be endorsed and strengthened for the welfare of the people living in the Mekong-Lancang countries," Thong Mengdavid said.

Noting that China since November 2020 has been sharing year-round hydrological information of the Lancang River to Mekong countries and the Mekong River Commission, an intergovernmental agency, the researcher said this contributes to the improvement of river monitoring and forecasts for floods and droughts in the Mekong countries.

While the steady development of bilateral ties between China and Mekong countries, especially in the investment and tourism sectors, will remain crucial, Thong Mengdavid said promotion of the digital economy and digital society has become the driving force for the region's economic growth.

As the pandemic has highlighted the importance of sustainable development, Ukrist said regional governments need to find a balance between economic growth and sustainability.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
There is little doubt that the enormous weapons manufacturing advantage which the Allies possessed, particularly in North America, made victory over the Axis Powers possible during WWII. Key components to this success were the highly skilled factory workers, many of whom were women. Known affectionately as Rosies, due to the wartime advertising campaign featuring images of Rosie the Riveter at work with her rivet gun, these women employed their newly-honed skills to great effect. One such Rosie is a woman named Mary Lou White who, at the age of 18, moved to Kansas City in 1944 to find work in the aviation industry. Mary Lou had learned the art of soldering at a young age, taught by her father, and put these skills to good use at the North American Aviation plant in Fairfax, Kansas where she became adept at wiring up B-25 Mitchell instrument panels.

Now in her late 90s, Mary Lou reconnected with her past on Sunday, March 6th, 2022 when the B-25 History Project surprised her with one of the most historically accurate B-25 instrument panel restorations in existence. Built up by Patrick Mihalek and youth volunteers at the Warbirds of Glory Museum who are rebuilding B-25J 44-30733  aka the Sandbar Mitchell  the panel is dedicated to her work at the plant. The configuration of this panel involved detailed research to match it with the panels she would have helped build during her time with North American Aviation. Subtle modifications were made to this panel to match the eight-gun nose restoration which the B-25 History Project currently has underway.

The surprises didnt stop there, however, as Patrick Mihalek also revealed the equally impressive early B-25J model instrument panel his team will use on the Sandbar Mitchell itself. Patrick then asked Mary if she would do the honors by soldering some of the wiring for that panel, which will eventually take to the skies again.

Dr. Dan Desko, founder and CEO of the B-25 History Project, helped organize this event with Mary Lou, noting: Its important that we recognize and learn from the lessons of the past. As we honor each individual story, we are reminded of how the world came together those 80 years ago to defend democracy. This is a lesson that is still important today.

Patrick Mihalek added: It was important to us that Mary was a part of this restoration. She wasnt able to come to Michigan to work on Sandbar, so we brought Sandbar to her.

Commenting on her experience reliving her days as a Rosie working on B-25s, Mary Lou stated in a recent facebook post: Memories of 1944 I helped build the Sandbar Mitchell B25soldered the wiress on the instrument paneland today I had the honor of of soldering the wires on this new instrument panel that will be installed in the Sandbar Mitchell as she is being restoredMy emotions are running high!

This is the first of several planned efforts which the B-25 History Projects co-founder, Jim Stella, is leading to combine world-class restorations with the stories of the factory workers who built B-25s during the war. As part of this process, they will develop STEM programs to help inspire and educate.

While such gestures of recognition could never convey enough of the gratitude which we all owe the unsung heroes of WWII, and Mary Lou White is certainly one of these heroes, they are still significant moments and how marvelous is it to have a genuine Rosie contribute to rebuilding a B-25 for future generations? Bravo to all involved!
PRESS RELEASE  Arguably the most famous aircraft the RAF has flown in the last 40 years, Bravo November is one of the original 30 Chinooks ordered by the RAF for its heavy lifting capability.

During the liberation of the Falklands Islands in 1982, Bravo November earned itself the nickname The Survivor when the MS Atlantic Conveyor container ship it was sailing on, was struck by a missile causing a fire to break out, subsequently sinking a few days later. The chinook fleet along with all the supplies, spares, and maintenance kits were lost, Bravo November was the only survivor, forcing a radical redesign of how the campaign would be fought. Bravo November remained in service for the rest of the campaign, helping deliver victory through carrying out essential tasks, moving troops, supplies, casualties, and prisoners of war. Its significant contribution was a testament to the skill of the aircrew.

For the first time ever Bravo November is now on public display, and visitors to the RAF Museum Cosford are the first in the UK to be able to get up close to the iconic helicopter.

Dr. Peter Johnston, RAF Museum Head of Collections said: Were absolutely delighted to add Bravo November to the RAF Museums collection and have her on display at the start of the Falklands 40 anniversary commemorations. Bravo November is an iconic aircraft, with a fascinating history in the Falklands and beyond, shes been a real witness to war, having traveled the world doing her job.

Indeed, four of her pilots have been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC), a remarkable achievement for one aircraft, that brings with it amazing stories of courage and bravery. She is a wonderful addition to our collection, and were thrilled to display Bravo November alongside the Harrier GR3, to talk about the role the RAF played in the Falklands campaign, a role that has been overlooked in comparison to that of the Royal Navy and the Army at the time but still just as important.

Alongside the aircraft, new Falklands 40 interpretation displays, including 3D touch models and footage in operation will highlight the role the RAF played in the conflict at this important time of remembrance, reflection, and commemoration. People stories from the Falklands, including first-hand accounts of Bravo November will be shared through the Museums RAF Stories platform.

Group Captain Donal McGurk, Station Commander RAF Odiham said As the Station Commander at RAF Odiham and the Commander of the Chinook Force, it has been a pleasure to be part of the dedication of this iconic aircraft. Bravo November has been at the heart of RAF Odihams operational commitments since she joined the Chinook Force in 1980. It is fitting that we remember her, and all who have served on her, and this exhibit is a fantastic way to showcase her history with the Chinook Force.

Bravo November recently retired after more than 40 years of service with the RAF and was transported by road from RAF Odiham by the Joint Aircraft Recovery and Transportation Squadron (JARTS) and reassembled over five days by a team of Technicians from RAF Odiham and RAF Cosford, before being moved into the Museums hangar for public display.

Be one of the first to view Bravo November, the Harrier GR3, and the new Falklands 40 display at the RAF Museum Cosford. The Museum is also home to the Vulcan and Victor bombers, as well as the VC10, Nimrod, and Hercules, all examples of the type used by the RAF in the Falklands campaign. Entry to the Museum is free, simply pre-book your arrival time online at rafmuseum.org.
MASON CITY  The Iowa Supreme Court has upheld the double murder conviction of a Lake Mills man who challenged the verdict because of the racial makeup of his jury.

Peter Leroy Veal, 35, was found guilty of first-degree murder and attempted murder for allegedly fatally shooting Mindy Kavars, stabbing Caleb Christensen to death and trying to shoot another person in Mason City in November 2017.

On appeal, Veal challenged the verdict, arguing his jury wasnt made up of a representative cross-section of the community in Webster County, where the trial had been moved on a change of venue.

Prosecutors had used a rule that allows them to remove people with prior felony convictions to eject two African-American and one white potential jurors. In Iowa, convicted felons can serve on juries, but they automatically can be removed from the pool if either side requests it without using strikes.

Webster Countys jury-eligible population is 3.02 percent African American, according to court records. Of the 153 people appearing for jury duty, five were African America, three of whom made it to a preliminary panel.

None were seated on the actual jury after the state sought to remove the two for cause because of felony convictions and used a preemptive strike on the third because her father had been prosecuted on serious felony charges by the same prosecutor.

The NAACP attacked the felon exclusion rule in a friend-of-the-court brief in the appeal, saying its use by the state had an incredible impact on the racial makeup of Veals jury.

This was not an aberration; it is consistent with the dramatic racial disparities that have existed in the criminal justice system of Iowa for at least four decades, the NAACP argued.

But in a ruling issued Friday, the Iowa Supreme Court said African Americans were actually overrepresented in the jury pool.

Having a fair cross section of the population in a defendants pool, as the district court noted, doesnt guarantee a racially representative jury, the high courts opinion stated.

The evidence showed that Veals own pool and panel contained a percentage of African-Americans that exceeded their percentage in Webster Countys jury eligible population, and there is no basis under the Sixth Amendment to adjust any calculations as Veal requests based on the for-cause challenges during voir dire, the opinion states.

The ruling noted that 3.27% of his jury pool was African American, and the preliminary panel was 8.82%.

The Supreme Court noted that potential jurors who are felons can be automatically be removed from a panel if either side requests it, but prospective jurors with felony convictions may  and indeed, do  serve on juries if no party challenges them.

Veal is the younger brother of Ruthann Veal, who was convicted of killing a retired librarian in Waterloo when she was 14 in 1993. She was placed on parole in June 2021.

In a related case, the Iowa Supreme Court upheld the second-degree murder conviction of Antoine Tyree Williams, who also challenged the racial demographics of his jury.

Williams was convicted of killing Nathaniel Fleming in a 2017 shooting at a Charles City apartment building.

Two African Americans had responded to a jury summons for Williams trial, and Floyd County officials excused one because she was a college student attending school outside the area.

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WATERLOO  The Waterloo Youth City Council met with 54 legislators at the Iowa Capitol on March 30 to advocate for House File 2294.

The legislation requires the inclusion of the telephone and text numbers for the Your Life Iowa suicide prevention and mental health hotline on the back of all public school identification cards. The youth councils mission is to explore, communicate, and provide for the needs, problems, issues and activities affecting Waterloos young people.

Over the past two years the group has focused those efforts on youth mental health. Rep. Timi Brown-Powers, D-Waterloo, recognized the students passion around youth mental health and invited them to help advocate for this legislation at the Capitol.

The youth council developed sample identification cards in coordination with Your Life Iowa to present to legislators. In addition to the phone and text numbers, the members leveraged technology to include a QR code on the cards.

According to a news release, Waterloo Youth City Council members had legislators try out the QR code with their phones while highlighting the mental health statistics for youth. After leaving the House floor, the youth council members continued their meetings with local Democratic senators Bill Dotzler, of Waterloo and Eric Giddens of Cedar Falls. The students finished their day eating lunch with local Democratic representatives Bob Kressig of Cedar Falls; Brown-Powers; Ras Smith of Waterloo; and Dave Williams of Cedar Falls, before touring the capitol.

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CEDAR FALLS -- Sharon Jensen will be giving a presentation titled Teaching Impressionism to Pre-college Students at the Friday, April 8, meeting of the Northeast Area Music Teachers Association. The program is open to the public and will begin at 10:15 in Mae Latta Hall at the Hearst Center for the Arts. Jensen will go over some beginning to intermediate teaching pieces which introduce students to the colorful world of Impressionism. She will discuss the characteristics of Impressionist music as found in the works of Claude Debussy and the elements of achieving effective style in the performances of students.

Jensen holds music degrees from Calvin College, University of Texas, and University of Michigan. As the recipient of a Rotary Fellowship, she studied at the Hochschule fur Musik in Vienna, Austria, where she received the Artists Diploma.

She has performed recitals individually and with orchestras throughout the Midwest. In March 2010, Jensen made her debut at Carnegie Halls Weill Recital Hall and performed there for four consecutive years with flautist Peg Cornils Luke. In July 2016 she was a pianist for the Prague Choral Festival and performed with members of the Czech Philharmonic in Smetana Hall. Jensen has been heard on Chicagos WFMT Dame Myra Hess series and NPRs Live from Landmark Center and Live from the Chazen.

Recently retired from a 35-year university teaching career, Sharon maintains a private piano studio in Dubuque, IA. In 2015 she was honored by Iowa Music Teachers Association as the Nationally Certified Teacher of the Year and in 2020 as the Foundation Fellow of the Year.

For more information on this program or NAMTA contact Andrea Johnson at andrea.johnson@uni.edu.

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Every now and again, a restaurant opens in San Francisco that doesnt just add texture to the citys food landscape, it rises up from it like a culinary monument.

Its a status Flour + Water realized almost immediately when it opened to a crowd four times what the dining room could hold in 2009. Even Michael Bauer, the former SF Chronicle food critic, recognized the restaurants potential. By the end [of my meal], he wrote 13 years ago, I felt a tingle similar to when I first went to Delfina and A16. I couldnt wait to return.

Like many of us, over the last decade-plus, Ive had a variety of encounters with Flour + Water. Ive whispered over romantic dinners in its dining room and grubbed barside on wood-fired pizza and happy hour wine. But Ive never had a meal like this.

The updated dining room at Flour + Water. (Krescent Carasso)

After four months of renovations, literally everything in the restaurant is new, says co-executive chef and founding partner Thomas McNaughton. With the expertise of SF-based Lundberg Design, Flour + Water has replaced the formerly on-trend reclaimed-wood-and-edison-bulb look with what McNaughton hopes is something more timeless: an interior with simple refined lines, an earthy palette, and an emphasis on artisan craft.

Pendant lanterns, rich walnut chairs and tables, and screens now accessorize the space, along with an Italian marble bar and hand-plastered American clay walls. The original mural on the restaurants back wall has been updated to fit the new aesthetic, and a sound baffling ceiling installed to keep the decibel of Flour + Waters essential playlists from overwhelming the dining room. Even the floors have been completely ground down.

But McNaughton and co-executive chef Ryan Pollnow knew where to draw the line between new and old: at the food that helped define Flour + Water in the first place. While theyve added more of a focus on antipasti (think veal carne cruda with Parmigiano Reggiano, chili aioli, nasturtium, and crispy potato; and grilled black cod with fennel, capers, and crab brodetto), handmade pasta from distinct regions throughout Italy remains the restaurants master work.

As a pescatarian, its not often I get to indulge in a tasting menu and feel like I really get the full expression of a chefs abilitiesthough a sea change seems to be on its way and McNaughton and Pollnow are already ahead of the curve. They offer two versions of their pasta tasting menu, one with amberjack crudo and veal agnolotti verdi, and one that replaces those dishes with versions fit for the discerning non-meat eater. As always, the menus are braided with seasonal delights which currently include golden beets, rutabaga, nettles, celery root, and sea buckthorn.

Antipasti include (clockwise) mushroom arancini, winter pinzimonio, truffle sformato, amberjack crudo, and savory ricotta-filled cannoli. (Krescent Carasso)

To say everything was great is an understatement; if youve ever dined at Flour + Water, you dont need me to tell you that. But

the truffle sformato, oh my god, the truffle sformato! With its potato-crumb-base and a varnish of a parm fonduta as light and airy as marshmallow fluff (and 100 times as good), it is almost like a savory bread pudding. The mushroom arancini, filled with smoked treccione and dolloped with green garlic aioli, is creamy and indulgent. The Taleggio scarpinocc, a standout wooden shoeshaped pasta from Lombardy, draped in melted Parmigiano Reggiano and laced with 25-year-old aged balsamic, and the orecchiette, little pasta ears with maitake and trumpet mushrooms, nettles, and truffle pecorino, are both comforting and complex. For dessert is the only thing thats been on the menu since opening day, a silky chocolate budino topped with espresso whipped cream and sprinkled with sea salt.

These dishes and others (do not overlook the Parmigiano Reggiano gelato) also appear on the a la carte menu. The staff, which is friendly and attentive and eager to answer questions without judgment, will help steer you in the right direction.

Even though the food is the star of the show, the wine list, which is primarily made up of artisan, small-batch Italian vintages that stretch from Piedmont to Puglia, is a worthy competitor. Pair wine with the tasting menu for $65.

So what if it will be another 27 years before Flour + Water can be officially identified as a legacy restaurant of essential intangible cultural significance to the city of San Francisco? It's already legendary.

// Flour + Water is open for dinner only (closed Tuesday and Wednesday); 2401 Harrison St (Mission-Potrero), flourandwater.com
Join the AARP Network of Age-Friendly States and Communities



"Joining age-friendly has hands down been the shift in our community toward thinking and talking about aging in places that it had never occurred before. Just having your community thinking and talking about aging is a huge success.

"We have communities from all over that email our team members asking, 'How did you do this and why should we enter the network?' Aside from all of the incredible materials and research that's available through AARP, it just is important to be part of the official network so we can continue to push this forward and have collective impact.

"In Ohio, we started something called the Coalition of Age-Friendly Communities of Ohio (or CAFCO). We meet on a quarterly basis, we mentor and share information. That cross-state collaboration is well supported by the AARP network, which provides the information, the background, but also the backbone and connections to other communities.

"We all need to be listening and working together and learning from each other. If we learned something in Columbus and Franklin County, and it's working, we want to share that out as quickly as we can so others might be able to utilize it as well. And when other communities are having success, we need to learn from them, too."

Ask Questions  and Listen to the Answers

"We had a whole year or two when we were concentrating really heavily on transportation and mobility, particularly with Safe Routes to Age in Place.

"We learned through the survey and our focus groups that not many older people were taking the bus. We held more focus groups with immigrants and refugees in seven different languages: What would help increase the number of people who take our local bus?

"We came up with a robust list of strategies, including to figure out an easier way to update the bus stops and for older adults to get their discounted bus passes. The bus system was already rolling out an easier way to buy bus passes but we could not figure out who and how to get funding for the bus stop improvements.

"Finally, after multiple submissions, we received a grant that will start in 2022. So in 2022 and 2023, we'll be using our data to know where dense populations of older adults live. We'll actually go with older adults to look at the bus stops they use and ask, 'What improvements do you want?' Well use the funding from the grant and make the improvements through a partnership with our local transit authority.

"It took three years, multiple grant submissions and tons of work and time to show and prove why this is important. We finally are getting it done. Along the way we built these great partnerships, like with our transit authority. There's frustration, there are meetings that are uncomfortable and awkward or you're accidentally making somebody mad by trying to push forward your aging agenda. But when you are based in community engagement and dont give up, eventually it all falls into place. We finally are getting it done, after all these years, and its because of persistence and partnerships. The whole network is still sort of in its infancy and we need to make sure that it keeps going so we can all learn from each other about experiences like this."

Team Up

"Once the funding came together in late 2017, Age-Friendly Columbus was ready to begin its implementation phase. At the same time, Franklin Countys commissioners passed legislation to expand age-friendly countywide.

"The first shared task involved deciding where to house the implementation phase. The Ohio State University College of Social Work was the natural choice, due to its dedication to excellence in research, service, community well-being, and social and economic justice for vulnerable populations.

"The team chose as its office a location near a recreation center just outside of downtown Columbus. Its a bustling spot that allowed us to lead grassroots advocacy efforts. Partnering with a university, if at all possible, is a really smart option to explore. Research and student partners have been invaluable to our growth and success.

"Once we moved into the university, we were able to grow our relationships within and beyond the College of Social Work. We took time to find faculty members whose research and approaches align with the age-friendly approach, such as staff, faculty and students in the School of Public Health. As long as the program goals and approach align, you can really enhance one anothers work.

"Organizing and running focus groups for gathering community input are another benefit of teaming up with an academic institution. I knew how to do focus groups, but a university has a lot more techniques and analysis, and that made the findings more valid and scientific."
With the onset of COVID-19 stay-at-home advisories in March 2020, the Gibson Center for Senior Services in North Conway, New Hampshire, canceled all of its in-person activities.

The closure left the centers elderly clientele stranded at home without access to exercise classes, social activities, meal and transportation services, and medical and family connections.

The Need

When Gibson Center staff began checking in on the homebound older adults, the frustration and despair was palpable. Im so isolated," "I cant see my family, were common complaints. The appeal heard most often? I need a computer.

The Work

Shortly after the COVID shutdowns, the centers staff had watched a video about a program that paired high school seniors with older adults who wanted to learn computer skills. Feeling inspired, Marianne Jackson, M.D., the Gibson Centers executive director, reached out to a program representative to determine if it could work in North Conway. The answer was yes, but with several modifications because of the COVID-19 exposure risks. The center named its program "Equip, Train and Connect" because what's needed was a device, knowing how to use it and having access to high-speed internet.

Although broadband, or high-speed internet access, isnt available throughout the Mount Washington Valley region, Jackson said she and her team decided to focus on what they could do rather than what they couldnt.

I have no control over building out fiber  nor do we have the needed millions of dollars, says Jackson, noting that another group has been at work for several years to build out high-speed fiber lines throughout Mount Washington Valley's Carroll County.
iStock / Getty Images

En espanol

We all handle money differently, based on our personalities and life experiences. For some, saving can lend a sense of security; for others, spending can give pleasure. Sadly, for shopaholics  people who spend compulsively despite the consequences  money can be a source of pain, distress and insecurity.

If money was tight as a child, you may have a scarcity mindset, says Patrick Durst, a certified financial planner (CFP) at LifeMark Securities Corp. in Centennial, Colorado. You save every penny and never spend. Perhaps you could learn to enjoy yourself more if youre over 50 or already retired and have worked hard all your life.

Your partner, on the other hand, may be spender or a spendthrift, or someone who enjoys the occasional extravagance. Tess Zigo, a CFP at Emerge Wealth Strategies in Palm Harbor, Florida, says that she and her husband strike a good balance. Shes a saver, and her husband encourages her to spend to enjoy life nowproof that couples can compromise and work through their money issues. 

The results of a study published in March in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions indicate that compulsive shopping increased in 2020, during the first six months of the COVID-19 outbreak. The researchers also point out that compulsive shoppers often have unmanageable amounts of debt, which create economic and emotional problems for themselves and for their families.

Like alcoholism or drug addiction, compulsive shopping can be a very serious condition, says Lamar Brabham, CEO and founder of the Noel Taylor Agency, a financial services firm in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. If you or your spouse find yourself in debt without the fortitude to control your spending, ask for help. You can recover. Read the following to learn more.

1. A long-recognized issue

For the record, the American Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not officially classify as a disorder shopping addiction, also known as compulsive buying disorder (CBD) or oniomania. However, the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin first identified it as a problem long agoin the early 1900s.

Many experts acknowledge it. A 2007 review of compulsive buying disorder published in World Psychiatry points out that the problem is associated with mood, anxiety, substance use, eating or other disorders of impulse control. It tends to run in families with these disorders.

2. Why some shoppers cant stop

According to an article published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2016, compulsive buyers make purchases to improve their mood, cope with stress, gain social approval or recognition, and improve their self-image. Instead, they often feel regret, remorse, shame or guilt, and find themselves in financial trouble and in conflict with loved ones. Despite these issues, they shop more.

In 2006, the British researcher Helga Dittmar, a professor of social and applied psychology at the University of Sussex, said that two factors may put people at risk: highly materialistic values and poor self-image. Some people view accumulating things as a path to self-improvement.

3. Both men and women are susceptible

The World Psychiatry review also indicates that the problem can be found across the globe and affects nearly 6 percent of Americans. Its especially prevalent during the holidays, which many people find emotionally difficult and when theres a tremendous push to buy online and in stores.

While most of the research has been centered on women, men are at risk, too. Often referred to as collectors, they can get hooked on auctions for tools, gadgets, tech equipment and cameras. Women tend to go for clothes, jewelry, makeup, and home and craft goods.
The Library of Congress will celebrate Joy Harjo, the first Native American U.S. poet laureate, as her third term comes to an end this month.

Harjos closing event will take place in the Coolidge Auditorium at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 28. The library also will host a dance party for Harjo in the Montpelier Room at 7 p.m. Friday, April 29. The event will showcase songs chosen by Harjo, as well as her own recordings.

For a remarkable three terms as U.S. poet laureate, Joy Harjo has tirelessly promoted Native poets and poetry, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said. To her, poems are carriers of dreams, knowledge and wisdom, and she has been an insightful voice during the difficulties of a pandemic. We are eager to welcome her back to the Library to celebrate her tenure as poet laureate and to host the In-Na-Po retreat on her behalf.

The library also will host the first retreat of In-Na-Po, Indigenous Nations Poets, a new organization mentoring emerging Native writers, founded by former Wisconsin Poet Laureate Kimberly Blaeser (Anishinaabe, White Earth Nation.)

An enrolled member of the Mvskoke Nation, Harjo taught at the University of New Mexico. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she is the author of nine books of poetry, including her most recent collection An American Sunrise, as well as Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.
Copyright  2022 Albuquerque Journal

Water wells on some San Juan County ranches are going dry.

A grass fire spread quickly across 30 acres of parched rangeland in northern Lea County earlier this month, and ranchers are grappling with extremely dry pastures in New Mexicos northeast corner.

An on-again, off-again pattern of winter storms has boosted Rio Grande Basin snowpack to above-average levels.

But higher temperatures and below-normal precipitation could make drought worse across New Mexico this spring and summer.

Dave Simeral, a Desert Research Institute climatologist, said during a Tuesday drought briefing with federal weather agencies that much of the Southwest benefited from record rain and snow in the late fall and early winter.

Unfortunately, eastern portions of both New Mexico and Colorado were both kind of shut out from that precipitation, he said, and then we had this drying trend that started in January.

Portales experienced its fifth-driest October to March period on record and ninth-driest January to March.

Nearly all of New Mexico is experiencing some level of drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

A year ago at this time, more than half the state was in the most severe drought category.

That measure has dipped to about 5.5% this year.

Pockets of exceptional drought are impacting the states northeast and southeast corners, as well as Socorro and Sierra counties.

The National Climate Prediction Center forecasts above-normal temperatures and below-normal precipitation across the Southwest for April through June.

Simeral said that forecast likely means that even robust regional snowpack levels may not be enough to address the impacts of long-term drought.

Weve got some pretty decent snow water equivalent numbers, but theyre dropping off rather quickly, he said. Weve seen some really dry soils and lots of below-normal reservoir storage across most of the states in the West.

Theresa Davis is a Report for America corps member covering water and the environment for the Albuquerque Journal.
Copyright  2022 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  While moving quickly Tuesday to revive a vetoed roughly $50 million spending package, New Mexico lawmakers decided to cast a bit more light on the states sometimes secretive budgeting process.

Specifically, legislators agreed during a special session at the Capitol to tack on a requirement that each lawmakers funding allocations in the spending bill be disclosed publicly, after Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham vetoed a previous version of the measure in March and said it did not represent sound fiscal policy.

Under the revived legislation, Senate Bill 1, which passed the Senate and House without a dissenting vote Tuesday, lawmakers funding allocations for roughly 500 projects included in the bill would be posted no later than 30 days after adjournment of the special session  or by May 5.

A spokeswoman for the Democratic governor said Lujan Grishams veto had set the stage for the transparency provision to be added to the spending bill, which includes funding for uranium mining cleanup, new police vehicles, domestic violence services and other projects.

The governors veto of the previous iteration of the bill hinged in part on the lack of transparency in the junior bill appropriation process, Lujan Grisham spokeswoman Nora Meyers Sackett said. In working with the Legislature to revise and improve the bill, she has been abundantly clear about her expectation that information delineating what funds were allocated by each legislator is published.

Some legislators said they had no qualms about the disclosure requirement.

Theres no reason to hide anything, said Sen. Michael Padilla, an Albuquerque Democrat.

But Sen. Crystal Diamond, R-Elephant Butte, suggested the governors veto of the original supplemental spending bill was not motivated by transparency concerns, instead describing it as a punitive act.

She said lawmakers have already added many transparency measures in recent years, such as expanded webcasting of legislative committee hearings.

It hasnt been more transparent for decades than it is now, Diamond said.

While the bill is largely similar to the original vetoed version, some technical changes were made and about $200,000 worth of projects was removed from the initial legislation.

In addition, lawmakers also considered adding a $1 million appropriation aimed at reducing Rail Runner ticket prices that was not included in the original version of the bill that was vetoed.

The Governors Office had asked the Legislature to include the funding in the revised bill, but several lawmakers said it was unnecessary since the Rio Metro Regional Transit District, which operates the commuter train, received large amounts of federal relief funds that could be used to reduce ticket prices.

I think its a million bucks thats not well spent, said Sen. William Sharer, R-Farmington, who made a successful motion to have the Rail Runner funding stripped out of the spending bill.

A Lujan Grisham spokeswoman said the Governors Office was disappointed by the action, adding it would nevertheless work with Rail Runner operators to identify possible ways to reduce fares and assist commuters.

Such action could already be in the works as Sen. George Munoz, D-Gallup, cited a Tuesday letter from Rio Metro Regional Transit District Director Terry Doyle, who said half-price promotional fares for some types of Rail Runner passes would be provided for the next 3 months.

Meanwhile, the governors veto of the original $50.4 million grab-bag of projects, often referred to as the junior spending bill, angered many lawmakers  both Democrats and Republicans  and some legislators initially expressed support for an extraordinary legislative session to override the governors veto.

But top-ranking Democratic lawmakers eventually reached an agreement with the Governors Office to have the bill brought back in a special session.

Several legislators also disputed suggestions the measure represented pork-barrel, or wasteful, spending.

These are very important projects that had to happen in each district, said Munoz.

The bill passed the Senate on a 39-0 vote in the afternoon and sailed through the House 63-0 a little after 8 p.m., just 11 hours after the session started.

Dan McKay of the Journal Capitol Bureau contributed to this article.
Copyright  2022 Albuquerque Journal

Authorities say an alleged affair in northern New Mexico ended with one husband gunning down another in front of his home  as the shooters family watched  last Thursday in El Prado.

Manuel Gamez-Lozoya, 38, is charged with an open count of murder, three counts of tampering with evidence and two conspiracy charges in the death of 55-year-old Cleofas Dominguez-Armendariz.

Gamez-Lozoya has been booked into the Santa Fe County Adult Detention Center. It is unclear if he has an attorney.

A GoFundMe, set up by his wife, for the funeral costs of Dominguez-Armendariz described him as a father of three children and a man of valor who was loved by many in the community.

According to a statement of probable cause filed in Magistrate Court:

Taos County deputies responded around 7:45 p.m. to a home on Straight Arrow Road and found Dominguez-Armendariz dead with at least four gunshot wounds, including one in the face. Dominguez-Armendariz had a .45 caliber pistol beside him, but it hadnt been fired and only 9mm casings were found around the body.

Witnesses told New Mexico State Police, who took over the investigation, that two vehicles pulled up and a man shot Dominguez-Armendariz at close distance. The wife of Dominguez-Armendariz told police she ended an affair with Gamez-Lozoya six months ago, but, on March 31, his wife and children confronted her.

She said Dominguez-Armendariz spoke with the family and learned of the affair for the first time before the wife of Gamez-Lozoya told him to meet her at their house for proof. Gamez-Lozoyas wife told police Dominguez-Armendariz showed up at their home soon after and produced a pistol, firing it once, before her husband shot him multiple times. She said she and her husband and children left the home in separate vehicles afterward.

Detectives confronted Gamez-Lozoyas wife about evidence showing that Dominguez-Armendarizs gun had not been fired, and she replied she was not sure if he had or not.

On Friday, according to police, Gamez-Lozoya walked up to a Santa Fe officer outside an Allsups and began to confess to killing a man in Taos.

State Police detained Gamez-Lozoya and he told them Dominguez-Armendariz showed up to his home with a gun, and he shot him multiple times before fleeing the scene, later throwing his phone out of the car window  believing authorities could use it to track him.
Copyright  2022 Albuquerque Journal

While recreational cannabis sales became legit last Friday in the Land of Enchantment, there shall be no Rocky Mountain highs in the federal forests.

Julie Anne Overton, Santa Fe National Forest spokeswoman, sent out a news release this week clarifying that cannabis is still illegal on forest lands.

Although New Mexico has legalized recreational use of marijuana, she said, the Santa Fe National Forest wants to remind visitors that nothing has changed within forest boundaries.

Under federal law, marijuana is a Schedule I drug and possession on federal lands is illegal.

A closure order, effective until Dec. 31, 2023, bans the possession, storage or transportation of cannabis and authorizes U.S. Forest Service law enforcement to cite those caught with the devils lettuce. Violators can be charged with a misdemeanor and face a fine of up to $5,000 for individuals, $10,000 for organizations, and up to six months in prison, or both.

According to the order, anyone with a Forest Service permit specifically authorizing the otherwise prohibited act is exempt. Overton said the exemption clause is boilerplate that goes from closure to closure and nobody should get their hopes up  the possibility of someone actually issuing such a permit is extremely remote.

The order prohibiting marijuana on the SFNF is typically renewed every five years, Overton said in the news release.

This isnt the first time the Santa Fe National Forest has reiterated its house rules: in June it renewed its order banning nudity, for instance.
Copyright  2022 Albuquerque Journal

Corrections officers at a prison in Los Lunas subjected inmates to sexually degrading strip searches, painful head shaves, and other forms of abuse in 2020, a new federal lawsuit alleges.

The officers prepared a sadistic welcome committee for two groups of inmates transferred from another prison to the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility in Los Lunas, an attorney who filed the suit said Tuesday.

Whats really disappointing to me sitting here today is the fact that we filed a lawsuit against them for similar conduct 10 years ago, said Matthew Coyte, one of two attorneys representing 14 current and former inmates.

Coyte filed a federal lawsuit in 2011 alleging prison officials in Los Lunas forced inmates to strip and sit front to back in long lines for hours. New Mexico taxpayers paid $750,000 in 2013 to settle what was dubbed the nuts to butts lawsuit.

I would say Im very disappointed to be here again today, filing another lawsuit against the department of corrections for the degrading, sexually humiliating and violent incidents that took place, Coyte said in an online news conference.

Coyte and the New Mexico Prison & Jail Project filed the suit Tuesday in U.S. District Court of New Mexico. It identifies by name nine correction officers and three John Doe defendants.

Two of the defendants also were present at incidents that led to the 2011 lawsuit, it alleges.

Eric Harrison, a spokesman for the New Mexico Corrections Department, said Tuesday that the agency has a zero-tolerance policy for all forms of sexual abuse and harassment.

The agency will be investigating these allegations thoroughly and will take action to make certain that any staff involved in any kind of abusive or inappropriate behavior are held accountable to the highest level, Harrison said in a written response.

The suit alleges that two groups of inmates transferred from a state prison in Grants in March and April 2020 were subjected to deliberately abusive and intentionally punishing strip searches intended to sexually humiliate, intimidate and terrorize the men.

One inmate said that he was told to look at the floor and was hit, slapped or kicked anytime he looked up. Another said that when he turned to look at the officers, his head was slammed against a wall multiple times.

After the strip search, certain prisoners were selected to have their heads forcibly and violently shaved, in some cases drawing blood, the suit said.

One Native American inmate alleged that while his head was being shaved, a corrections officer said, this is our version of scalping you.

The suit alleges that the actions violated the inmates constitutional rights to be free from cruel and unusual punishments. It seeks unspecified monetary damages.
ANDRIIVKA, Ukraine  The mayor of the besieged port city of Mariupol put the number of civilians killed there at more than 5,000 Wednesday, as Ukraine collected evidence of Russian atrocities on the ruined outskirts of Kyiv and braced for what could become a climactic battle for control of the countrys industrial east.

Ukrainian authorities continued gathering up the dead in shattered towns outside the capital amid telltale signs Moscows troops killed civilians indiscriminately before retreating over the past several days.

In other developments, the U.S. and its Western allies moved to impose new sanctions against the Kremlin over what they branded war crimes.

And Russia completed the pullout of all of its estimated 24,000 or more troops from the Kyiv and Chernihiv areas in the north, sending them into Belarus or Russia to resupply and reorganize, probably to return to the fight in the east, a U.S. defense official speaking on condition of anonymity said.

In his nightly address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that the Russian military continues to build up its forces in preparation for the new offensive in the east, where the Kremlin has said its goal is to liberate the Donbas, Ukraines mostly Russian-speaking industrial heartland. He said Ukraine, too, was preparing for battle.

We will fight and we will not retreat, he said. We will seek all possible options to defend ourselves until Russia begins to seriously seek peace. This is our land. This is our future. And we wont give them up.

Ukrainian authorities urged people living in the Donbas to evacuate now, ahead of an impending Russian offensive, while there is still time.

Later, people will come under fire, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said, and we wont be able to do anything to help them.

A Western official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence estimates, said it will take Russias battle-damaged forces as much as a month to regroup for a major push on eastern Ukraine.

Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko said that of the more than 5,000 civilians killed during weeks of Russian bombardment and street fighting, 210 were children. He said Russian forces bombed hospitals, including one where 50 people burned to death.

Boichenko said more than 90% of the citys infrastructure has been destroyed. The attacks on the strategic southern city on the Sea of Azov have cut off food, water, fuel and medicine and pulverized homes and businesses.

British defense officials said 160,000 people remained trapped in the city, which had a prewar population of 430,000. A humanitarian relief convoy accompanied by the Red Cross has been trying for days without success to get into the city.

Capturing Mariupol would allow Russia to secure a continuous land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.

In the north, Ukrainian authorities said the bodies of least 410 civilians have been found in towns around Kyiv, victims of what Zelenskyy has portrayed as a Russian campaign of murder, rape, dismemberment and torture. Some victims had apparently been shot at close range. Some were found with their hands bound.

At a cemetery in the town of Bucha, northeast of Kyiv, workers began to load more than 60 bodies apparently collected over the past few days into a grocery shipping truck for transport to a facility for further investigation.

Zelenskyy accused Russia of interfering with an international investigation into possible war crimes by removing corpses and trying to hide other evidence in Bucha.

We have information that the Russian troops have changed tactics and are trying to remove the dead people, the dead Ukrainians, from the streets and cellars of territory they occupied, he said in his address. This is only an attempt to hide the evidence and nothing more.

Switching from Ukrainian into Russian, Zelenskyy urged ordinary Russians to somehow confront the Russian repressive machine instead of being equated with the Nazis for the rest of your life.

He called on Russians to demand an end to the war, if you have even a little shame about what the Russian military is doing in Ukraine.

More bodies were yet to be collected in Bucha. The Associated Press saw two in a house in a silent neighborhood. From time to time there was the muffled boom of workers clearing the town of mines and other unexploded ordnance.

Police said they found at least 20 bodies in the Makariv area west of Kyiv. In the village of Andriivka, residents said the Russians arrived in early March and took locals phones. Some people were detained, then released. Others met unknown fates. Some described sheltering for weeks in cellars normally used for storing vegetables for winter.

The soldiers were gone, and Russian armored personnel carriers, a tank and other vehicles sat destroyed on both ends of the road running through the village. Several buildings were reduced to mounds of bricks and corrugated metal. Residents struggled without heat, electricity or cooking gas.

First we were scared, now we are hysterical, said Valentyna Klymenko, 64. She said she, her husband and two neighbors weathered the siege by sleeping on stacks of potatoes covered with a mattress and blankets. We didnt cry at first. Now we are crying.

To the north of the village, in the town of Borodyanka, rescue workers combed through the rubble of apartment blocks, looking for bodies. Mine-disposal units worked nearby.

The Kremlin has insisted its troops have committed no war crimes, charging that the images out of Bucha were staged by the Ukrainians.

Thwarted in their efforts to swiftly take the capital, increasing numbers of President Vladimir Putins troops, along with mercenaries, have been reported moving into the Donbas.

At least five people were killed by Russian shelling Wednesday in the Donbas Donetsk region, according to Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko, who urged civilians to leave for safer areas.

In the Luhansk region of the Donbas, Russian bombardment set fire to at least 10 multi-story buildings and a mall in the town of Sievierodonetsk, the regional governor reported. There was no immediate word on deaths or injuries.

Russian forces also attacked a fuel depot and a factory in the Dnipropetrovsk region, just west of the Donbas, authorities said.

Ukrainian forces have been fighting Russia-backed separatists in the Donbas since 2014. Ahead of its Feb. 24 invasion, Moscow recognized the Luhansk and Donetsk regions as independent states.

In reaction to the alleged atrocities outside Kyiv, the U.S. announced sanctions against Putins two adult daughters and said it is toughening penalties against Russian banks. Britain banned investment in Russia and pledged to end its dependence on Russian coal and oil by the end of the year.

The European Union is also expected to take additional punitive measures, including an embargo on coal.

Meanwhile, the United States and the United Kingdom boycotted an informal meeting of the Security Council called by Russia to press its baseless claims that the U.S. has biological warfare laboratories in Ukraine.

The meeting was the latest of several moves by Russia that have led Western countries to accuse Moscow of using the U.N. as a platform for disinformation to divert attention from the war.

Russias deputy U.N. ambassador Dmitry Polyansky, who presided over the meeting, asserted that Ukraine, supported by the U.S., was implementing what he claimed were dangerous projects and experiments as part of a military biological program.

The allegations have previously been debunked. Ukraine does own and operate a network of biological labs that have received funding and research support from the U.S. and are not a secret. The labs are part of a program that aims to reduce the likelihood of deadly outbreaks, whether natural or man-made.

The U.S. efforts date back to work in the 1990s to dismantle the former Soviet Unions program for weapons of mass destruction.

___

Oleksandr Stashevskyi and Cara Anna in Bucha, Ukraine, Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Ukraine, and Associated Press journalists around the world contributed to this report.

___

Follow the APs coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
PEMBROKE, Ga.  After violent storms blamed for killing at least three people, Southerners cleared fallen trees from roadways Wednesday and began cleaning up debris from homes and buildings smashed by suspected tornadoes as forecasters warned more violent weather was likely on the way.

In southeast Georgia, residents of Bryan County had barely begun recovery efforts after a likely tornado touched down Tuesday evening, killing one woman and injuring several other people, when local officials urged them to halt work by mid-afternoon Wednesday and take shelter for the night.

The National Weather Service said another round of tornadoes was possible Wednesday, with heightened risk across a three-state area that included the cities of Atlanta; Birmingham, Alabama; and Knoxville, Tennessee.

Gov. Brian Kemp on Wednesday declared a state of emergency following Tuesdays storms, which were blamed for killing people in Louisiana and Texas. The move effectively frees up state resources to be used in storm recovery and response efforts.

Louisiana state police said Gene Latin, a 65-year-old correctional officer, was killed early Tuesday when he crashed into a tree that had fallen across a highway as storms blew through Webster Parish. And in east Texas, 71-year-old W. M. Soloman died when storm winds toppled a tree onto his home in Whitehouse, said Mayor James Wansley.

In Bryan County, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) west of Savannah, a woman was found dead Tuesday night amid the shredded wreckage of her mobile home in the unincorporated community of Ellabell, said Bryan County Coroner Bill Cox.

It was just completely ripped to pieces, Cox said Wednesday. Its like it exploded.

Cox said the dead womans husband was taken to a hospital with injuries. He did not give her name, saying relatives were still being notified.

A motorists cellphone video taken in Bryan County showed a large funnel cloud crossing Interstate 16 as drivers braked and pulled to the side of the roadway.

In the county seat of Pembroke, large sections of roof got torn off the courthouse and the entryway to a government building across was demolished. The storm destroyed at least 18 homes in the county and left more than 10 others with major damage, according to the Georgia Emergency Management Agency. Several people were injured, said Matthew Kent, a Bryan County government spokesperson.

Kemp toured the destruction Wednesday and said it was fortunate the twister did not stay on the ground very long, or the damage and loss of life would likely have been much worse. Places where it did touch down, he said, got hit hard.

It is literally total devastation for some homes, Kemp said. We walked through a house where theres no wood left on that house. Its nothing but a foundation with a water heater sitting there.

In South Carolina, about a dozen homes were destroyed or heavily damaged Tuesday in rural Allendale County. Tractors and other equipment were flipped and twisted on a number of farms in South Carolinas least populated county. Other storms caused damage to solar panels near Bowman and flipped vehicles and shopping carts in a Walmart parking lot in Manning.

National Weather Service forecasters planned to survey damage from several possible tornadoes in Georgia and South Carolina, but said that effort could be interrupted by the potential for more storms Wednesday.

In Alabama, the weather service said it was sending survey teams to examine potential tornado damage in the Wetumpka area.

More than 7,000 customers in Texas and more than 3,000 in Georgia remained without power Wednesday afternoon, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks outages nationwide.
WASHINGTON  Kyiv was a Russian defeat for the ages. The fight started poorly for the invaders and went downhill from there.

When President Vladimir Putin launched his war on Feb. 24 after months of buildup on Ukraines borders, he sent hundreds of helicopter-borne commandos  the best of the best of Russias spetsnaz special forces soldiers  to assault and seize a lightly defended airfield on Kyivs doorstep.

Other Russian forces struck elsewhere across Ukraine, including toward the eastern city of Kharkiv as well as in the contested Donbas region and along the Black Sea coast. But as the seat of national power, Kyiv was the main prize. Thus the thrust by elite airborne forces in the wars opening hours.

But Putin failed to achieve his goal of quickly crushing Ukraines outgunned and outnumbered army. The Russians were ill-prepared for Ukrainian resistance, proved incapable of adjusting to setbacks, failed to effectively combine air and land operations, misjudged Ukraines ability to defend its skies, and bungled basic military functions like planning and executing the movement of supplies.

Thats a really bad combination if you want to conquer a country, said Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel and professor of military history at Ohio State University.

For now at least, Putins forces have shifted away from Kyiv, to eastern Ukraine. Ultimately, the Russian leader may achieve some of his objectives. Yet his failure to seize Kyiv will be long remembered  for how it defied prewar expectations and exposed surprising weaknesses in a military thought to be one of the strongest in the world.

Its stunning, said military historian Frederick Kagan of the the American Enterprise Institutes Critical Threats Project, who says he knows of no parallel to a major military power like Russia invading a country at the time of its choosing and failing so utterly.

On the first morning of the war, Russian Mi-8 assault helicopters soared south toward Kyiv on a mission to attack Hostomel airfield on the northwest outskirts of the capital. By capturing the airfield, also known as Antonov airport, the Russians planned to establish a base from which to fly in more troops and light armored vehicles within striking distance of the heart of the nations largest city.

It didnt work that way. Several Russian helicopters were reported to be hit by missiles even before they got to Hostomel, and once settled in at the airfield they suffered heavy losses from artillery fire.

An effort to take control of a military airbase in Vasylkiv south of Kyiv also met stiff resistance and reportedly saw several Russian Il-76 heavy-lift transport planes carrying paratroopers downed by Ukrainian defenses.

Although the Russians eventually managed to control Hostomel airfield, the Ukrainians fierce resistance in the capital region forced a rethinking of an invasion plan that was based on an expectation the Ukrainians would quickly fold, the West would dither, and Russian forces would have an easy fight.

Air assault missions behind enemy lines, like the one executed at Hostomel, are risky and difficult, as the U.S. Army showed on March 24, 2003, when it sent more than 30 Apache attack helicopters into Iraq from Kuwait to strike an Iraqi Republican Guard division. On their way, the Apaches encountered small arms and anti-aircraft fire that downed one of the helos, damaged others and forced the mission to be aborted. Even so, the U.S. military recovered from that setback and soon captured Baghdad.

The fact that the Hostomel assault by the Russian 45th Guards Special Purpose Airborne Brigade faltered might not stand out in retrospect if the broader Russian effort had improved from that point. But it did not.

The Russians did make small and unsuccessful probes into the heart of Kyiv, and later they tried at great cost to encircle the capital by arcing farther west. Against enormous odds, the Ukrainians held their ground and fought back, stalling the Russians, and put to effective use a wide array of Western arms, including Javelin portable anti-tank weapons, shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and much more.

Last week the Russians abandoned Hostomel airfield as part of a wholesale retreat into Belarus and Russia.

A sidelight of the battle for Kyiv was the widely reported saga of a Russian resupply convoy that stretched dozens of miles along a main roadway toward the capital. It initially seemed to be a worrisome sign for the Ukrainians, but they managed to attack elements of the convoy, which had limited off-road capability and thus eventually dispersed or otherwise became a non-factor in the fight.

They never really provided a resupply of any value to Russian forces that were assembling around Kyiv, never really came to their aid, said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. The Ukrainians put a stop to that convoy pretty quickly by being very nimble, knocking out bridges, hitting lead vehicles and stopping their movement.

Mansoor says the Russians underestimated the number of troops they would need and showed an astonishing inability to perform basic military functions. They vastly misjudged what it would take to win the battle for Kyiv, he says.

This was going to be hard even if the Russian army had proven itself to be competent, he said. Its proven itself to be wholly incapable of conducting modern armored warfare.

Putin was not the only one surprised by his armys initial failures. U.S. and other Western officials had figured that if the invasion happened, Russias seemingly superior forces would slice through Ukraines army like a hot knife through butter. They might seize Kyiv in a few days and the whole country in a few weeks, although some analysts did question whether Putin appreciated how much Ukraines forces had gained from Western training that intensified after Putins 2014 seizure of Crimea and incursion into the Donbas.

On March 25, barely a month after the invasion began, the Russians declared they had achieved their goals in the Kyiv region and would shift focus to the separatist Donbas area in eastern Ukraine. Some suspected a Putin ploy to buy time without giving up his maximalist aims, but within days the Kyiv retreat was in full view.

Putin may yet manage to refocus his war effort on a narrower goal of expanding Russian control in the Donbas and perhaps securing a land corridor from the Donbas to the Crimean Peninsula. But his failure in Kyiv revealed weaknesses that suggest Russia is unlikely to try again soon to take down the national capital.

I think they learned their lesson, said Mansoor.
WASHINGTON  An off-duty police officer stormed the U.S. Capitol because he believed the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump and he wanted to interfere with the certification of President Joe Bidens electoral victory, a federal prosecutor said Tuesday at the start of the Virginia mans trial.

But a defense attorney told jurors that former Rocky Mount, Virginia, police officer Thomas Robertson only went into the Capitol because he wanted to retrieve a fellow officer who had entered the building before him during the riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

Jacob Fracker, the other off-duty Rocky Mount police officer who entered the Capitol that day, could be a key witness for prosecutors at Robertsons trial. Robertson was a mentor and a father figure to Fracker, attorneys said during their opening statements.

Two other Capitol riot defendants already have been tried on federal charges arising from the Jan. 6 siege. The first two trials both ended with convictions, although a judge acquitted one of those defendants of a disorderly conduct charge.

Another trial for a Capitol riot case started Tuesday. While jurors heard testimony for Robertsons trial, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden heard testimony without a jury for the case against Matthew Martin, who has worked for a government contractor at the National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Martin, who is accused of remaining inside the Capitol for about 10 minutes, testified that he saw a police officer wave him into the building. He also said he followed the crowd into the building.

I went with the flow, said Martin, whose trial is scheduled to resume on Wednesday.

Fracker was set to be tried alongside Robertson this week, but he pleaded guilty last month to a riot-related conspiracy charge and agreed to cooperate with federal authorities.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Aloi said Robertson was armed with a large wooden stick and wearing a gas mask when he and Fracker joined the mob that overwhelmed police officers and breached the Capitol.

His intent was to interfere with the election because it did not have the result that he wanted, Aloi said.

Defense attorney Camille Wagner said Robertson, whom she called T.J., knew that he had entered restricted areas of the Capitol where he wasnt supposed to be on Jan. 6. But he isnt accused of engaging in any violence or property destruction, she noted.

All T.J. did was enter, retrieve, depart, Wagner said.

Robertson used a large wooden stick to impede police officers who were trying to hold off the mob, according to prosecutors. Police body camera video captured his interaction with police.

Wagner said Robertson didnt wield the stick as a weapon. She said the U.S. Army veteran was using it as a walking stick because he still has a limp from getting shot in the right thigh while working as a private contractor for the U.S. Defense Department in Afghanistan in 2011.

Robertson is charged with six counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, civil disorder, entering and remaining in a restricted building while using a dangerous weapon and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building. Five of the counts relate to his actions on Jan. 6. The sixth stems from his alleged post-riot destruction of cellphones belonging to him and Fracker.

Fracker pleaded guilty to conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, the joint session of Congress to certify the Electoral College vote.

Aloi said Fracker is ashamed of his conduct at the Capitol and is not the same person today that he was on Jan. 6.

Robertson and Fracker both served as police officers in Rocky Mount. The town, which is about 25 miles south of Roanoke and has roughly 5,000 residents, fired both of them after their arrests.

He held a position of public trust, Aloi said. He broke that public trust when he participated in the attack at the Capitol.

Robertson and Fracker drove with a neighbor to Washington on the morning of Jan. 6. Robertson brought three gas masks for them to use, according to prosecutors.

After listening to speeches near the Washington Monument, Fracker, Robertson and the neighbor walked toward the Capitol, donned the gas masks and joined the growing mob, prosecutors said. Robertson stopped to help his neighbor, who was having trouble breathing. Fracker broke off and entered the building before Robertson, but they reunited inside the Capitol.

Aloi showed jurors some of Robertsons vitriolic posts on social media before and after the Capitol riot. In a Facebook post on Nov. 7, 2020, Robertson said being disenfranchised by fraud is my hard line.

Ive spent most of my adult life fighting a counter insurgency. (Im) about to become part of one, and a very effective one, he wrote.

Robertson was not charged for his beliefs, Aloi said.

He was charged for his actions, she told jurors.

Wagner said Robertson should be judged by his actions, not his words.

We ask you to remember that actions speak louder than words, she told jurors.

A Capitol police officer was the first witness to testify at Robertsons trial. Capt. Ronald Ortega said the mob severely outnumbered officers who were trying to hold back the crowd.

It just seemed unreal at the time, Ortega said.

Robertson has been jailed since U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled in July that he violated the terms of his pretrial release by possessing firearms.

On March 8, a jury decided the first Capitol riot trial by convicting a Texas man, Guy Reffitt, of storming the Capitol with a holstered handgun. In the second trial, the same judge hearing testimony on Tuesday in Martins case convicted New Mexico county official Couy Griffin of illegally entering restricted U.S. Capitol grounds but acquitted him of engaging in disorderly conduct.

Reffitt and Griffin entered restricted areas outside the Capitol but not the building itself.
RENO, Nev.  In a rare emergency move, the U.S government temporarily declared a northern Nevada toad endangered Monday, saying a geothermal power plant in the works could result in its extinction.

The Fish and Wildlife Service announced it is formally proposing a rule to list the Dixie Valley toad as an endangered species subject to 60 days of public comment under the Endangered Species Acts normal rulemaking process.

But it said the emergency listing goes into effect immediately and will continue for eight months while more permanent protections are considered for the toad at the only place it is known to exist in the world.

It marks only the second time in 20 years the service has listed a species as endangered on an emergency basis.

Protecting small population species like this ensures the continued biodiversity necessary to maintain climate resilient landscapes in one of the driest states in the country, the agency said.

It wasnt immediately clear how the toads listing might affect construction of the power plant about 100 miles (160 kilometers) east of Reno. Conservationists and tribal members are trying to block the project in a lawsuit currently before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The dispute is among a growing number of conflicts over wildlife protection and tribal rights on federal lands that the Biden administration faces as it pursues its agenda to combat climate change by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy.

Officials for Reno-based Ormat Technologies Inc., which broke ground on the power plant last month, have said they dont believe a listing would impact the project because the company spent six years developing a mitigation plan to offset any potential environmental impacts.

Ormat long recognized the importance of conserving the Dixie Valley toad, regardless of its legal status, Ormat Vice President Paul Thomsen said Monday in an email to The Associated Press.

Ormat will coordinate with relevant agencies to ensure that any additional required process is met while we continue our work on this important renewable energy project, he said.

Geothermal power is generated from hot water deep beneath the earth.

The Dixie Valley toad lives in wetlands around hot springs next to the construction site. In addition to geothermal development, other primary threats to one of the smallest toads in the western U.S. include disease, predation by non-native frog species, groundwater pumping for human and agricultural uses and climate change, the service said.

The agency agreed last month to expedite consideration of a federal listing of the toad as part of a settlement with conservationists and the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, who are suing to block the power plant. The Nevada tribe says the site is sacred to its people who have lived there for thousands of years.

The Center for Biological Diversity first petitioned for the toads listing in 2017.

Mondays decision comes just in the nick of time for the Dixie Valley toads, which are staring down the barrel of extinction, said Patrick Donnelly, the centers Great Basin director.

Weve been saying for five years that the Dixie Meadows geothermal project could wipe out these tiny toads, and Im thankful those concerns have been heard, he said in a statement emailed to The Associated Press.

The center for Biological Diversity and the tribe won a federal court order in Reno in January temporarily blocking construction of Ormats project on U.S. Bureau of Land Management land east of Fallon.

But the 9th U.S. Circuit of Appeals stayed that order Feb. 4 pending full consideration of Ormats appeal. The San Francisco-based appellate court is considering hearing arguments on the appeal in June.

The last time a species was declared endangered on an emergency basis was in 2011, when the the Obama administration took action on the Miami blue butterfly in southern Florida. Before that, an emergency listing was granted for the California tiger salamander under the Bush administration in 2002.

Other species listed as endangered on an emergency basis over the years include the California bighorn sheep in the Sierra Nevada in 1999, steller sea lions in 1990, and the Sacramento River winter migration run of chinook salmon and Mojave desert tortoise, both in 1989.
SACRAMENTO, Calif.  The mass killing that left six people dead and 12 wounded outside bars just blocks from Californias Capitol last weekend was a gunfight involving at least five shooters from rival gangs, Sacramento police said Wednesday.

Police said they identified at least five gunmen but there may have been more. Only two suspects  both brothers wounded by gunfire  have been arrested in connection with the shooting and, so far, only face firearms charges.

Were still working through  who the actual shooters are in the case, Sgt. Zach Eaton said.

Until Wednesdays announcement, police had been silent on what led to the shooting that erupted early Sunday as bars were letting out. Rapid-fire bursts of over 100 gunshots echoed through the streets as terrified patrons ran for their lives and others were hit by bullets.

Police said at least two gangs were involved. They declined to provide more details or name the gangs involved or the affiliation of any suspects.

Experts said that if gangs were to blame, it would mark an unusually bloody feud.

In 20 years of researching gangs in Los Angeles, Alex Alonso said he cant remember a gang-related shooting with such a high body count.

Its extremely rare that a gang shooting happened as the way this one is being characterized, Alonso said. Its extremely rare to have that happen in a public place with so many victims.

Gregory Chris Brown, a criminal justice professor at California State University, Fullerton, said gangs often target rivals in drive-by shootings with fewer victims, though innocent bystanders are sometimes also struck.

The location of the Sacramento shooting  in a bustling area of watering holes near the entertainment district  was incidental to whatever fueled the fight.

If rival gang members see each other it doesnt matter if theyre in the Capitol of the United States of America, Brown said. If you see a rival gang member and youre going to attack them, it doesnt matter where they are.

The large number of casualties was the result of high-capacity weapons in a crowded area, he said.

Berry Accius, founder of Voice of the Youth who leads gun intervention and prevention programs and offered his services to counsel families who lost loved ones in the shooting, criticized police for characterizing the crime as gang-related, which he said will lead some to think Black people.

He said people will see the photos of the Black women and men who were shot, assume they were in a gang and wonder why gang members are downtown.

Thats the narrative we dont need at this particular time, Accius said. This idea that were going to put blame to one demographic of folks and blame them for the violence that ensued.

Bill Sanders, a criminologist at Cal State LA, said he wanted to see more evidence the shooting was gang-related, a term police often use to drum up support. He said gang shootings are more mundane and most occur in what are considered gang neighborhoods.

If you looked at a map of gang homicides in the city  or any city  over time, youd see the same areas lighting up  meaning thats where they occur. If these guys were white, this wouldnt be considered gang related  not even for a minute.

Authorities credited witnesses who contributed nearly 200 videos, photos and other tips with helping the investigation.

Police were trying to determine if a stolen handgun found at the crime scene was used in the massacre. It had been converted to a weapon capable of automatic gunfire.

They are also investigating whether a gun one of the brothers, Smiley Martin, 27, brandished in a video was used in the shooting, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press. The official was briefed on the investigation but was not authorized to publicly discuss details and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Martin and his brother were among those wounded in the gunfire that erupted about 2 a.m. Sunday as bars closed and patrons filled the streets.

The Sacramento County coroner identified the three women killed as Johntaya Alexander, 21; Melinda Davis, 57; and Yamile Martinez-Andrade, 21. The three men killed were Sergio Harris, 38; Joshua Hoye-Lucchesi, 32; and Devazia Turner, 29.

Ten people were wounded in addition to the Martin brothers. At least two remained hospitalized with gunshot wounds.

Smiley Martin faces charges of possession of a firearm by a prohibited person and possession of a machine gun. He remained hospitalized and it wasnt clear if he had an attorney who could speak for him.

His brother, Dandrae Martin, 26, was arrested as a related suspect and appeared briefly Tuesday in Sacramento Superior Court on a charge of being a convict carrying a loaded gun.

He did not enter a plea and his attorney said she would wait to see if prosecutors brought more serious charges before deciding whether to seek his release.

Both men have criminal records. Smiley Martin was released from prison in February after serving about half of a 10-year prison sentence for beating a girlfriend. He was denied parole last year after prosecutors said he clearly has little regard for human life, documents show.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg questioned why the brothers were on the streets.

Those questions need to be answered and they will be answered over the days ahead, Steinberg said.

A 31-year-old man seen carrying a handgun immediately after the shooting was arrested Tuesday on a weapons charge. Police said they dont believe his gun was used in the shooting.

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This version corrects that Smiley Martin served about half of a 10-year prison sentence, not about two years of the term.

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Melley reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Stefanie Dazio, Christopher Weber in Los Angeles, Don Thompson in Sacramento, Michael Balsamo in Washington, Jacques Billeaud in Phoenix and News Researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York City contributed to this report.
MINNEAPOLIS  Minnesota prosecutors declined to file charges Wednesday against a Minneapolis police SWAT team officer who fatally shot Amir Locke while executing an early morning no-knock search warrant in a downtown apartment in February.

Locke, 22, who was Black, was staying on a couch in his cousins apartment when authorities entered it on Feb. 2 without knocking as part of an investigation into a homicide in neighboring St. Paul.

Prosecutors said body camera video showed that Locke pointed a gun at Officer Mark Hanneman, justifying his use of deadly force. Lockes family has disputed that, arguing that the footage suggests Locke was startled awake and that he grabbed for a gun he was licensed to carry.

Lockes mother, Karen Wells, said she was disgusted by the decision. At a news conference in New York with attorney Ben Crump and civil rights leader the Rev. Al Sharpton, she vowed to keep up pressure on Minneapolis city leaders and spoke directly to Hanneman.

This is not over. You may have been found not guilty, but in the eyes of me, being the mother who I am, you are guilty, Wells said. And Im not going to give up. Continue to have your restless nights, because I know you do.

Locke was shot seconds after officers entered the apartment. The body camera footage shows that Locke was holding a gun before he was shot.

Attorney General Keith Ellison and Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman, whose offices reviewed the case, said Locke might never have been shot if not for the no-knock warrant. But they said there was insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hanneman violated the state statute governing when police can use deadly force.

It would be unethical for us to file charges in a case in which we know that we will not be able to prevail because the law does not support the charges, Ellison said.

Lockes death came as three former Minneapolis police officers were on trial in federal court in St. Paul in George Floyds killing. It sparked protests and a reexamination of no-knock search warrants. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey announced an immediate moratorium on such warrants, and on Tuesday, he formalized a new policy requiring officers to knock and wait before entering a residence, with limited exceptions. Some lawmakers have been pushing for a statewide ban on no-knock warrants, except in rare circumstances.

The department issued a statement from Interim Chief Amelia Huffman saying that Hanneman returned to active duty on Feb. 28 but is no longer on a SWAT team. She did not comment directly on Hannemans actions but said, Officers never want to face split-second decisions that end in the loss of life.

Lockes family was angry that police initially described him as a suspect, which police later said was a mistake.

Our investigation found no evidence that he had any role in the homicide investigation that brought the police to his door at 6:48 on Feb. 2, Ellison said. Amir was a victim. He never should have been called a suspect.

In their applications for search warrants of the Minneapolis apartment and other locations, authorities said a no-knock warrant was necessary to protect the public and officers as they looked for guns, drugs and clothing worn by people suspected in a violent killing. Authorities asked that officers be allowed to conduct the search without knocking, and outside the hours of 7 a.m. and 8 p.m., because the suspects being sought in the Jan. 10 killing of Otis Elder had a history of violence.

Locke was killed seconds after the SWAT team entered the apartment at 6:48 a.m. Body camera video shows an officer using a key to unlock the door and enter, followed by at least four officers in uniform and protective vests. As they enter, they repeatedly shout, Police, search warrant! They also shout Hands! and Get on the ground!

The video shows an officer kicking a sectional sofa, and Locke is seen wrapped in a comforter, holding a pistol. Three shots are heard and the video ends.

I was convinced that the individual was going to fire their handgun and that I would suffer great bodily harm or death, Hanneman wrote in his statement to investigators. I felt in this moment that if I did not use deadly force myself, I would likely be killed.

Ellison and Freeman said they spoke with Lockes parents on Wednesday before announcing they wouldnt file charges.

They, like us, are very frustrated with no-knock warrants. They, like us, believe that if a no-knock warrant hadnt been used Amir Locke might well be here today, Freeman said, declining to give further details about their conversation.

Sharpton said the family will demand that the U.S. Justice Department review the case. Crump faulted police for creating a life-or-death situation, and said gun rights groups should join with the family in demanding an end to no-knock warrants.

He connected Lockes death with that of Breonna Taylor, who was killed in a botched police raid in Kentucky in 2020 in which her boyfriend shot at officers first as they broke into her apartment.

Because if it can happen to Amir, it can happen to Breonna Taylor, it could happen to your children, too, Crump said.

Although Locke was not named in the warrant, his then-17-year-old cousin, Mekhi Camden Speed, was named and has been charged with two counts of second-degree murder in Elders killing.

Elder, a 38-year-old father, was found shot and laying in the street in what police believe was an apparent robbery. Drugs and money were found in Elders SUV, according to court documents.

The police department hired Hanneman in 2015. City records show there were three complaints made about him and that all were closed without him being disciplined, but they give no details. Data on the website of the citizen group Communities United Against Police Brutality shows a fourth complaint, in 2018, that remains open. No details were given.

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Associated Press writer Amy Forliti contributed to this report.

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Find the APs full coverage of the death of Amir Locke: https://apnews.com/hub/amir-locke
WASHINGTON  More than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. health officials are beginning to grapple with how to keep the vaccines updated to best protect Americans from the ever-changing coronavirus.

On Wednesday, a panel of vaccine advisers to the Food and Drug Administration spent hours debating key questions for revamping the shots and conducting future booster campaigns. They didnt reach any firm conclusions.

The questions facing the experts included: How often to update the vaccines against new strains, how effective they should be to warrant approval and whether updates should be coordinated with global health authorities.

Last week, the FDA authorized a fourth dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines for anyone 50 or older and for some younger people with severely weakened immune systems. Its an effort to get ahead of another possible surge.

But the FDAs vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks acknowledged at the meeting we simply cant be boosting people as frequently as we are. He called the latest booster update a stopgap measure to protect vulnerable Americans while regulators decide whether and how to tweak the current vaccines.

Marks cautioned that waning vaccine protection, new variants and colder weather in the fall could raise the risk of more surges.

Our goal here is to stay ahead of future variants and outbreaks and ensure we do our best to reduce the toll of disease and death due to COVID-19, said Marks, adding that he expects more meetings of the vaccine panel in coming months.

Some of the key questions the panel discussed:

HOW SHOULD THE U.S. DECIDE WHEN TO LAUNCH FUTURE ROUNDS OF BOOSTER SHOTS?

One area where experts appeared to agree is that vaccines should be judged on their ability to prevent severe disease that leads to hospitalization and death.

We need to focus on the worst case, which is severe disease, and we need to change strains when were losing that battle, said Dr. Mark Sawyer of the University of California, San Diego.

By that measure, the current vaccines have held up remarkably well.

During the last omicron-driven surge, two vaccine doses were nearly 80% effective against needing a breathing machine or death  and a booster pushed that protection to 94%, federal scientists recently reported.

But only about half of Americans eligible for a third shot have gotten one. And many experts said it was unsustainable to continue asking Americans to get boosted every few months.

A panelist from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that the 80% protection from severe disease could become the standard for evaluating the vaccines.

I think we may have to accept that level of protection and then use other alternative ways to protect individuals with therapeutics and other measures, said Dr. Amanda Cohn, CDCs chief medical officer.

Presentations at the meeting by government health officials and independent researchers underscored the challenges of predicting when the next major COVID-19 variant might appear.

Trevor Bedford, a disease modeler with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said a major new strain like omicron could emerge anywhere from every 1.5 years to once a decade, based on currently available data. Given that unpredictability, researchers will need methods to quickly determine whether current vaccines work against emerging variants.

WHATS THE PROCESS FOR UPDATING VACCINES TO ADDRESS NEW VARIANTS?

All three COVID-19 vaccines now used in the U.S. are based on the original coronavirus version that emerged in late 2019. Updating the vaccines will be a complex task, likely requiring coordination between the FDA, manufacturers and global health authorities.

To speed the vaccines to market, the FDA relied on research shortcuts to judge effectiveness, mainly looking at their early impact on the immune systems antibody levels. A number of panelists said Wednesday they wanted more rigorous data from studies that track patients over time to see who gets sick or dies.

But that approach would likely be too time consuming.

Were looking at a conundrum here in that its going to be hard to generate all the data we want in short order when a new variant emerges, said Dr. Ofer Levy of Harvard Medical School.

A representative for the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority laid out the narrow window that manufacturers could face to reformulate, study and mass produce an updated vaccine by September.

If youre not on your way to a clinical trial by the beginning of May, I think its going to be very difficult to have enough product across manufacturers to meet demand, said Robert Johnson, deputy assistant secretary of BARDA.

The process for updating annual flu vaccines offers one possible model, as laid out by a representative from the World Health Organization.

Twice a year, WHO experts recommend updates to flu vaccines to target emerging strains. The FDA then brings those recommendations to its own vaccine panel, which votes on whether they make sense for the U.S., setting the stage for manufacturers to tweak their shots and begin mass production.

But COVID-19 hasnt yet fallen into a predictable pattern like the flu. And as the coronavirus evolves, different strains may become dominant in different regions of the world.

Several experts said they would need more meetings with more data and proposals from the FDA to decide on a strategy.

Weve never been here before. Were all working together to do the best we can and its very complex, said Oveta Fuller of the University of Michigans Medical School.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON  A federal judge on Wednesday acquitted a New Mexico man of misdemeanor charges that he illegally entered the U.S. Capitol and engaged in disorderly conduct after he walked into the building during last years riot.

U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden issued the verdict from the bench after hearing testimony without a jury in the case against Matthew Martin. McFadden, who was nominated by former President Donald Trump, acquitted Martin of all four counts for which he was charged.

McFadden said it was reasonable for Martin to believe that outnumbered police officers allowed him and others to enter the Capitol through the Rotunda doors on Jan. 6, 2021. The judge also said Martins actions were about as minimal and non-serious as anyone who was at the Capitol that day.

Martin is the third Capitol riot defendant whose case has been resolved by a trial. He is the first of the three to be acquitted of all charges that he faced. The first two Capitol riot trials ended with convictions, although McFadden acquitted one of those defendants of a disorderly conduct charge after a bench trial last month.

In the same courthouse where Martin was acquitted, a fourth trial continued on Wednesday for a former Virginia police officer who is charged with storming the Capitol with another off-duty officer. Jurors heard testimony from the fellow officer, who pleaded guilty to a riot-related charge and agreed to be a witness for prosecutors.

Martin, whose bench trial started Tuesday, testified that a police officer waved him into the building after the riot erupted. A prosecutor dismissed that testimony as nonsense.

The judge, however, said video shows two police officers standing near the Rotunda doors and allowing people to enter as Martin approached. One of the officers appeared to lean back before Martin placed a hand on the officers shoulder as a possible sign of gratitude, the judge said.

McFadden described Martins testimony as largely credible. The judge said it was not unreasonable for him to believe that officers allowed him to enter the Capitol, even though alarms were blaring and broken glass was strewn about the floor.

Martin was charged with four misdemeanor counts: entering and remaining in a restricted building, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building, violent entry and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building and parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building.

The judge said Martin appeared to be a silent observer of the actions of others. McFadden didnt find any evidence that Martin intended to disrupt Congress from certifying President Joe Bidens electoral victory.

Dozens of Capitol riot defendants have pleaded guilty and been sentenced, but Martin is the first to testify at a trial. His acquittal could embolden others to gamble on a bench trial, although McFadden so far is the only judge to preside over one and decide a case.

Martin said he went with the flow as he approached the Capitol and testified that he saw a police officer wave him into the building. Martin remained inside the Capitol for about 10 minutes after entering the building through the Rotunda doors, according to prosecutors.

Martin said he enjoyed the day of the riot.

It was a magical day in many ways, he testified on Tuesday before adding, I know some bad things happened.

You understand that police officers died? Justice Department prosecutor Michael Romano asked Martin.

At least nine people died in the riot or its aftermath. One officer died after he collapsed hours after being sprayed with bear spray and other officers who tried to quell the riot died by suicide in the months following the attack.

Prosecutors said Martin, an engineer, worked for a government contractor at the National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and held a top-secret security clearance on Jan. 6. Martin said he actually worked at a different facility in Los Alamos.

Defense attorney Dan Cron said Martin saw another person shake a police officers hand after entering the Capitol. Martin placed his hand on an officers shoulder as a gesture of thanks and of good will, Cron said.

Romano, the Justice Department prosecutor, said Martin joined the mob in crowding police officers who were trying to disperse the crowd. The prosecutor said Martin knew that he wasnt allowed to be in the Capitol.

The idea that he thought he had permission to do that is nonsense, Romano said.

Other riot defendants have claimed police waved them in or said they could enter.

McFadden presided over a bench trial last month for Couy Griffin, a county official in New Mexico. The judge on March 22 convicted Griffin of illegally entering restricted U.S. Capitol grounds but acquitted him of engaging in disorderly conduct.

On March 8, a jury decided the first Capitol riot trial by convicting a Texas man, Guy Reffitt, of storming the Capitol with a holstered handgun.

After Martins acquittal Wednesday, a jury in a different courtroom heard a second day of testimony for the trial of former Rocky Mount, Virginia, police officer Thomas Robertson. The town fired Robertson and another officer, Jacob Fracker, who joined him at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Fracker was scheduled to be tried alongside Robertson before he pleaded guilty last month to a conspiracy charge and agreed to testify against somebody who was his mentor and a father figure.

I absolutely hate this, Fracker said. Ive always been on the other side of things, the good guys side so to speak.

Fracker testified that he and Robertson both believed the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Trump. Fracker said they both wore gas masks as they joined a mob in storming the Capitol.

Asked why he went to the Capitol that day, Fracker said he wanted to play a part in overturning the election results.

I felt like we had maybe been heard by whoever it was we needed to be heard by, Fracker said.

He said he has grown ashamed of his actions on Jan. 6.

Thats not the person I am, he said. I wasnt raised like that.

Fracker is due to be cross-examined by one of Robertsons lawyers on Thursday.

Prosecutors plan to call two more witnesses, a police officer and FBI agent. A defense attorney said Robertson may testify. Jurors could hear attorneys closing arguments as soon as Friday.

More than 770 people have been charged with riot-related federal crimes. Over 240 of them have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors, and over 140 of them have been sentenced.
Sipping on beer might seem like an unremarkable activity, but one Albuquerque brewery is hoping that simple pleasure will help people on the other side of the world.

The owners of ReSource Brewing Co., Stephanie and Shawn Wright, are releasing Our Lady of Immaculate Fermentation, and categorizing what is usually called a Russian Imperial Stout as a Ukrainian Imperial Stout. The beer was released Friday. Stephanie Wright said the brewery will donate 100% of the proceeds to help the people of Ukraine.

Eastern Europeans are known for their love of strong drink, Stephanie Wright said. Vodka and imperial beers are among the top picks. Shawn and I thought it would be fun to take the Imperial Stout moniker away from Russia  .

The beer is 9% ABV (alcohol by volume) and 65 IBUs (international bitterness units), with a warm, smooth taste, and finishing flavors of stone fruits, black cherry and chocolate.

Many people have watched Russian forces invade Ukraine on their television sets, but the war hits more closely to home for the couple. From 1999-2001, Stephanie Wright was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Republic of Moldova, which borders Ukraine on the southwest.

Ive had the privilege to live among, and make friends with, some of the kindest people youll ever meet, she said. Those of us who have lived in the region have had our eye on Putin for decades because weve known what hes capable of. So, when the unrest started in Ukraine, my husband and I were deeply disturbed and felt compelled to help.

Wright said media coverage may begin to dwindle, but she is getting daily updates from friends in the area and they continue to face an uncertain future. She said the beer is their humanitarian effort to make an impact, and theyve enlisted other breweries to help.

Canteen, Tractor, Rowley Farmhouse in Santa Fe, Brew Lab 101 in Rio Rancho, Nexus, Steel Bender and High & Dry will also have the beer on tap.

ReSource Brewing Co. is at 3107 Eubank NE.
WASHINGTON  House Democrats on Wednesday accused oil companies of ripping off the American people and putting profits before production as Americans suffer from ever-increasing gasoline prices during the war in Ukraine.

At a time of record profits, Big Oil is refusing to increase production to provide the American people some much needed relief at the gas pump, said Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Oil executives, testifying before Congress for the second time in six months, responded that oil is a global market and that oil companies dont dictate prices.

We do not control the market price of crude oil or natural gas, nor of refined products like gasoline and diesel fuel, and we have no tolerance for price gouging, said Chevron CEO Michael Wirth.

Facing sharp questions from Democrats, Wirth, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods and other executives said their companies have no plans to halt payments of dividends to stockholders or to restrict stock buybacks that have enriched shareholders and company executives. The six companies at the hearing recorded $77 billion in profits last year, they testified.

The hearing comes as President Joe Biden has ordered the release of 1 million barrels of oil per day from the nations strategic petroleum reserve for six months in a bid to control energy prices, which have spiked as the United States and its allies have imposed steep sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. The national average gas price was $4.16 a gallon for regular on Wednesday, up from $2.87 a year ago, according to AAA.

Biden and other Democrats have blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin and the U.S. oil industry for the increase, citing reports that oil companies have made record profits in recent months as prices have risen following Russias invasion of Ukraine.

This is the Biden price hike, countered Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state, the committees top Republican.

Noting that prices were increasing before Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, McMorris Rodgers said Americans are too smart and have not fallen for this claim by Biden and other Democrats. She called the hearing purely political.

Woods said Exxon has halted investments in Russia and is withdrawing from operations there. The company is increasing production in the United States, Woods said, including in the oil-rich Permian Basin in New Mexico and Texas. Exxon also is increasing production outside the U.S., including a world-class development in Guyana, he said.

Rep. Kim Schrier, D-Wash., said gas prices are close to $5 per gallon in her Seattle-area district. Her constituents are mad, and they should be, she said, citing the record profits oil companies are reaping.

This feels like gouging. It even feels like profiteering, Schrier said. Prices at the pump have not gone down in recent weeks along with crude oil prices, she and other Democrats noted.

At a time of war and high prices, oil companies should not be sending profits back to shareholders, she said, urging oil executives to restore production to pre-pandemic levels.

Wirth, the Chevron CEO, said his company produced a record amount of oil in 2021, while also making sure to return value to shareholders through higher dividends and stock buybacks.

Theyre not mutually exclusive. We can do both, he said.

Democrats have introduced bills in the House and Senate to impose a windfall tax on oil profits, although the idea has generated little momentum on Capitol Hill. West Coast senators, including Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell of Washington state, have called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate possible price manipulation on the West Coast, where prices in California top $6 per gallon.

Americans have the right to know why one of our most important commodities doesnt have the right amount of transparency and oversight, Cantwell said at a hearing Tuesday. Targeting what she called the mysterious middle of the supply chain, Cantwell said lawmakers and the FTC should ensure that  as in the 2001 energy crisis spurred by Enron  there arent a bunch of smart guys in the room hurting consumers because they think we cant figure out what is happening.

Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., blamed Biden for high gas prices, citing cancellation of the Keystone XL oil pipeline and a moratorium on new drilling leases on federal lands. Walberg said he was disappointed that neither Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm nor any other administration official appeared at the House hearing to answer for the administrations failed policies.

Biden has called on Congress to impose financial penalties on companies that lease public lands but dont produce oil, a request that so far has been ignored. Biden also invoked the Defense Production Act to encourage mining of critical minerals for batteries in electric vehicles, part of a broader push to reduce use of fossil fuels and address climate change.

The bottom line is if we want lower gas prices we need to have more oil supply right now, Biden said last week in announcing the strategic oil release. Higher prices have hurt Bidens approval domestically and added billions of oil-export dollars to the Russian government as it wages war on Ukraine.

Oil companies have pledged to boost domestic production, but it is growing slowly. Executives point to supply chain and labor constraints as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as investor demands for returns. They have called for more federal permits to allow additional leases.

Besides Exxon and Chevron, other companies represented at the hearing were Shell, BP, Pioneer Natural Resources and Devon Energy.
DETROIT  Toyota customers soon wont be able to get U.S. federal tax credits for buying electric or hybrid vehicles.

The automaker expects that sometime before the end of June it will reach a 200,000-vehicle cap on the credits, Bob Carter, Toyotas head of North American sales, said Wednesday. After that, the credits will be phased out over the next year, reaching zero, as Tesla and General Motors already have.

The lack of credits is problematic for automakers shifting from petroleum-powered vehicles to batteries in the effort to reduce emissions, meet government fuel-economy standards and fight climate change. Nissan is about 30,000 vehicles away from reaching the cap, and others will follow as more EVs are introduced.

Tesla, the top seller of electric vehicles in the world, and GM already are at a price disadvantage to other automakers without the credits, and Toyota soon will be. Additional EV tax credits are in the Build Back Better spending bill backed by President Joe Biden, which is stalled in Congress.

Toyota reached the cap largely by selling plug-in gas-electric hybrid vehicles. The companys plug-in RAV4 Prime small SUV with 42 miles of electric range earns the buyer a $7,500 credit, the largest available. The Prius Prime plug-in, with 25 miles of electric range, gets $4,500. Toyota previously had offered a fully electric RAV4, but it didnt sell well and was canceled. Its rolling out a fully electric model called the bZ4X with 250 miles per charge, this summer.

The Build Back Better bill would give EV buyers a $7,500 tax credit through 2026 to charge up sales. But the following year, only electric vehicles made in the U.S. would qualify for the credit. And the base credit rises by $4,500 if the vehicle is made at a U.S. plant that runs under a union-negotiated collective bargaining agreement. Only GM, Ford and Stellantis vehicles would qualify.

Carter, on a conference call with reporters, said Toyota lobbied against the additional credit only for union plants, calling it unfair to nonunion workers. It just needs to be a level playing field, Carter said. We are not anti-EV credits.

Democrats backing the credits for EVs made by the United Auto Workers say supporting union jobs is good for the economy and communities because unions helped to build the middle class.

GM CEO Mary Barra has said automakers that offered electric vehicles early should not be placed at a disadvantage.

Restoring the credits is a question that congress really needs to resolve, Carter said.

Toyota plans to offer 30 fully electric vehicles from its Lexus and Toyota brands by 2030.
Copyright  2022 Albuquerque Journal

Four of the five elected members of the state Public Regulation Commission confronted fellow Commissioner Jefferson Byrd on Wednesday for launching a public survey about energy issues that falsely appears to come from the full commission.

The Albuquerque-based Rio Grande Foundation  a conservative think tank thats critical of the states clean energy transition  helped Byrd design and distribute the survey, which includes provocative questions that counterpose green energy with affordability and reliability, while also highlighting the potential for electric outages this summer.

Friends, are you ready for rolling blackouts? reads the subject headline for the poll, which was sent by email potentially to thousands of people statewide.

The Rio Grande Foundation used its extensive email contact list to distribute the survey and will help analyze recipient responses, said Foundation President Paul Gessing.

We worked with Commissioner Byrd on the survey to find out how a large swath of New Mexicans feel about timely and relevant questions related to energy issues that the PRC deals with, Gessing told the Journal. We want to see where New Mexicans stand on these things, and the commissioner had the same goal in mind.

The PRCs other four members, however, said Byrds individual initiative appears to implicate the entire commission by not explicitly clarifying that the survey comes from Byrd alone. And the poll questions and format seem aimed at influencing respondents against clean energy, according to some commissioners.

At Wednesdays open public PRC meeting, Commissioners Stephen Fischmann and Cynthia Hall said theyve been inundated with inquiries from constituents upset about the poll.

It left the distinct impression that it was sent out with entire commission approval, Fischmann said.

A cover letter from Byrd accompanying the poll said the PRC traditionally holds public forums on controversial issues, but, given pandemic-related protocols,  we decided to conduct an online survey in lieu of an in-person forum.

The use of we implies full commission backing, Hall said at the meeting.

It was misleading, she said.  I was taken by surprise.

The poll also appears as if its pushing support for fossil fuels, Fischmann said. It includes back-to-back questions about whether respondents support state mandates to transition the grid to renewables, whether they care if their electricity comes from wind and solar, and whether theyre aware of the potential for rolling blackouts this summer.

It looked very much like a Rio Grande Foundation survey, Fischmann said. Whether they put it together or not, Im concerned that it seems like the commission is acting as a front for a push poll by the Foundation.

The commission is committed to abiding by the states Energy Transition Act, which requires local utilities to transition the grid to 80% renewables by 2040, and 100% carbon-free generation by 2045, said PRC Chair Joseph Maestas.

The commission should not be associated with any special interests, Maestas said.

Byrd agreed Wednesday to send out a follow-up notice to all poll recipients clarifying that the poll is his individual initiative, not a commission-backed survey.

But some constituents told Hall and Maestas that they may solicit Attorney General intervention to investigate whether Byrd abused his position as a commissioner for political gain.

Byrd, who is the only Republican representative on the commission, reportedly plans to run for head of the State Land Office in this years elections.
Copyright  2022 Albuquerque Journal

The Rio Grande SUN, owned and run for decades by the Trapp family, has been sold to a group of New Mexico-based investors, the newspaper announced Wednesday.

The sale to El Rito Media LLC, the papers new owner, was completed Friday. The purchase price was not disclosed.

I watched my parents come to work every day, literally until the day they died, Robert B. Trapp, the papers most recent owner and publisher, said in a statement announcing the sale. No one owns a weekly newspaper. It owns you. Ive got too many things I want to do before I die, and I cant do them and run a weekly newspaper.

The newspaper will have a new publisher in Richard L. Connor, who has spent decades in journalism. He has worked for major newspapers such as the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and owns the Fort Worth Business Press and the Arlington Sun Gazette and Fairfax Sun Gazette in Virginia. He was brought on to guide the direction of the Espanola-based newspaper going forward.

He replaces Trapp, who will stay on for at least two weeks through the transition to new ownership.

The heart of journalism today is where its always been, Connor said. And thats in smaller communities where the weekly newspaper keeps everyone not only informed, but also connected to one another.

Trapps parents, Robert E. Trapp and Ruth Trapp  along with Bill Birkett and Hollie Birkett  started the newspaper in 1956, serving readers in the Espanola Valley and neighboring areas.

By the 1960s, the Trapps had bought out the Birketts share of the newspaper and became the sole owners, according to the newspapers website.

Robert E. Trapp retained the role of publisher until 2001 before he and his wife backed out of the daily duties, giving ownership and control to their son.

The paper had seen prospective buyers throughout the years, often from then-owner of the Santa Fe New Mexican, Robert McKinney, who has since died.

Trapp helped found the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, a nonprofit organization committed to transparency. He was inducted into the New Mexico Press Associations Hall of Fame in 2000.

Throughout its years, the newspaper has been known for its scrappy, watchdog role in northern New Mexico. Since its founding, the SUN has successfully sued or settled open meetings or records lawsuits against every governmental agency in Rio Arriba County, among others. In 2019, the SUN and Robert B. Trapp settled a lawsuit with the Department of Public Safety related to more than a dozen instances of the department failing to respond to one of the newspapers former reporters. The settlement, Trapp said at the time, was about $250,000.

And, in 2020, the SUN filed a writ of mandamus against Jemez Mountains Electric Cooperative over access to board documents.

The paper has won multiple awards for its reporting, including three from the New Mexico Press Association in 2021. The SUN has also been known for its recurring coverage of the opioid crisis in the Espanola Valley.

The paper was also the subject of a documentary titled The Sun Never Sets, produced by local filmmakers Ben Daitz and Dale Sonnenberg, who followed Trapp and SUN editorial staff as they reported.

It wouldve been easy to just put out a little, friendly, community newspaper, Trapp said in the documentary. But I didnt think thats what this community needed.

SUN news editor Jennifer Burnham told the Journal that editorial staff will remain through the change. Were basically just doing what weve always been doing, she said.

The owners of El Rito Media LLC are Ryan Cangiolosi of Albuquerque, Jalapeno Corp. of Albuquerque, Los Mocositos LLC of Santa Fe, Bryan Ortiz of Santa Fe, Francisco Romero of Albuquerque, Joseph Sanchez of Alcalde, Tom Wright of Santa Fe, Harvey Yates Jr. of Albuquerque and Peyton Yates of Artesia.
Beverage, snack, and food company PepsiCo India has decided to end its 30 years of ties with WPP Group-owned agencies including Mindshare and Wunderman Thompson, after competitor brand Coca-Cola has associated with WPP, as its advertising partner, according to media reports. India is among the few countries where PepsiCo is represented by WPP.

The decision has taken place ahead of an important soft drink season, as, after two successive summers in the midst of Covid-19, companies are gearing up for their marketing and advertising campaigns for the upcoming summer. PepsiCo, which offers Lays snacks, Mountain Dew, Pepsi, among others, spends a huge amount of money in advertising. It spends around Rs 350 crore on advertising and has issued directives for pitches from advertising agencies.

PepsiCo India follows a re-pitching cycle every few years for agencies and partners working on our brand mandates. This year Wunderman Thompson and Mindshare will not be participating in the process. We value our partnership and thank them for what we have achieved together over the years, said PepsiCo India Spokesperson

Coca-cola has announced WPP as its global advertising and marketing partner, for its business valued at $4 billion. Coca-Cola said that the WPP team will be operating under the OpenX and will be managing the marketing, technology, creative, data, media for all of its brands including Costa Coffee.

The Covid-19 restrictions have been lifted partially; however, consumers consumption habits have changed. Advertising has to be aligned to suit both out-of-home consumption and driving in-home consumption, according to an industry executive.
Carat India, the media agency from the house of dentsu India, has appointed Sayami Podder as Associate Vice President (AVP) - Strategy. In her new role, Sayami will be spearheading strategic thinking for the agency. She will also offer insights to the existing agency clients across the West and South regions. She will report into Anita Kotwani, CEO, Carat India.

Armed with more than 12 years of experience, Sayami is specialized in brand, media & communication strategy, consumer research and market mix modelling. She has worked across a wide range of categories including FMCG, Beverages, Fashion, BFSI, E-Commerce & Manufacturing. Sayami has helped brands strengthen their market shares by developing effective communication & media investment strategies, leading to exponential business growth and measurable outcomes.

Prior to joining Carat India, Sayami was with Mindshare India where she led strategy for brands like Ultratech Cement, Castrol, SBI Life, ICICI and Kelloggs. She has also worked with significant retail brands like Pantaloons & Max Fashion and new-age brands like Upstox, Byjus & TCS Ion, to name a few.

Commenting on the appointment, Anita Kotwani said, Talent today is the key differentiator that clients look for. Our core focus is to always ensure that we have the best talent that comes on board and joins the Carat family. Sayamis diverse expertise across data & analytics, research, communication planning and media strategy, is certainly something that will drive growth for the clients. We see her as the ideal team player to lead Carats vision of Designing for People in the West & South markets.

Sayami Podder added, The consumer journey is no more linear, and the media ecosystem is constantly evolving to accommodate our new age audience. Carat is already known for its strategic thinking and integrated approach. With my expertise in data science and creative thinking, I am looking forward to building an insight-led strategy that will generate incremental and sustainable growth for our clients. I am delighted to begin this new journey under Anitas dynamic leadership and contribute to Carats growth story for India.
The Delhi High Court has dismissed Red Bulls injunction application against Pepsis tagline  Stimulates Mind. Energizes Body.  used for its energy drink product Sting. The Delhi High Court, by order dated April 6, 2022, dismissed Red Bulls injunction application on the grounds that Red Bull had not made out a prima facie case.

In 2018, Red Bull filed a trademark suit before the Delhi High Court for its mark Vitalizes Body and Mind. against PepsiCos use of its tagline Stimulates Mind. Energizes Body. on the body of its energy drink product  Sting. Red Bull claimed that the marks are similar and Pepsis use of Stimulates Mind. Energizes Body. amounts to infringement and passing off its trademark  Vitalizes Body and Mind.. Red Bull argued that the mark had acquired distinctiveness and secondary meaning, thus entitled to protection.

Pepsi defended its use of the tagline as being descriptive of the product and thus, no action for infringement can lie. Pepsi also argued that Red Bulls trademark itself is invalid since it is in contravention of Section 9 of the Trade Marks Act.

The Delhi High Court dismissed Red Bulls injunction application on primarily 3 grounds  Red Bull failed to establish prima facie case in its favour, both taglines are descriptive and laudatory in nature and whether Red Bulls tagline has acquired distinctiveness or secondary meaning can only be established at trial. The High Court also found that the balance of convenience was in favour of Pepsi in not granting injunction as products have been selling for 5 years now.

Pepsi was represented by JSA, led by Dheeraj Nair, Partner - Disputes along with Shruti Dass, Senior Associate and in association with K&S Partners. Red Bull was represented by Zeus IP.
One of Bollywoods most iconic villains of all time and veteran actor, Gulshan Grover, partnered with ShareChat, Indias leading social media platform, to launch his new brand of mens grooming products, BADMAN. The partnership involved a UGC campaign #ShareChatKaBadman, which saw participation from 500+ ShareChat users across six days, with 1.6M views. The campaign concluded with Gulshan Grover engaging directly with his fans in a special Chatroom session on 2nd April 2022, that was attended by over 85,000 users.

During the session, Gulshan talked about the inspiration behind creating the brand and how he envisions it will be able to serve his fans and admirers. While speaking about it, he mentioned how it is important for men to understand the need for grooming, breaking the stereotype and changing how we perceive the gender barrier in this domain. He appreciated ShareChat users for making the launch a massive success through their participation in the #ShareChatKaBadman campaign.

He also revealed how one-day renowned director Subhash Ghai invited him over for breakfast and casually offered him the iconic role of the Badman in the movie Ram Lakhan. He shared stories from his early days of starting out as an actor and how he was able to find his niche and make a memorable legacy from it. He also talked about how people had certain presumptions regarding his personality because of his on-screen persona and how they found it difficult to believe that both of them are not the same person.

Speaking about the partnership, Gulshan Grover said, It has been a great pleasure to be part of this project where we have been able to create herbal products for men and help them realize the importance and need for grooming. Ive been part of developing these products along with Divisa Herbal Care to cater to the Indian audience and meet the countrys growing demands. ShareChat has been instrumental in bringing the brand to a larger audience and I was enthralled to see the talent on the platform.

The live audio chat room feature allowed his fans to engage with him in the language they were most comfortable with. A few lucky users who participated in the UGC campaign got the opportunity to talk to him and showcase their talent in front of the legendary actor.

During the discussion, he also shared anecdotes from his career and how he gained recognition as one of the most formidable artists not just in India but globally. He even participated with fans as they enacted his famous dialogues, which made him reminisce about the glorious days of his career.
Shree Rani Sati TradeCorp (Shree Rani Sati Group), a marketing, distribution and supply chain services provider, has strengthened its association with Hamdard Food Division through a new deal to provide Modern Trade Distribution Placement Services across North India and e-commerce services as well. Hamid Ahmed, CEO- Hamdard Food Division, and Rohit Tekriwal, Director- Shree Rani Sati Group, have signed the agreement in this regard. The company will now provide its services for many products of Hamdard Food Division across the region.

Shree Rani Sati Group will make the strategy for the distribution of the products in Modern Trade stores and Government Organisations in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal. The company through its e-commerce services helps Hamdard Food Division to reach out to a large consumer group. The organisation is currently offering services for all the products of Hamdard Food Division. Some of the major products include Natural Blossom Honey, Saffron, Squash, RoohAfza Lassi, RoohAfza Lite, Hamdard Hing, Nariyal Paani, Herbal Juices, Glucose-D, RoohAfza, Jam-e-Shirin, Hamdard Isabgol, Fusion Drinks, RoohAfza Milkshake and others. These products are available in different variants.

Talking about the deal, Rohit Tekriwal, Director- Shree Rani Sati Group, said, "This service expansion deal is a testimony of our quality services to clients and our utmost care. Hamdard has been associated with us for a long time, and this very agreement will bolster our relations. We will make every effort to reach out to every consumer of the target group in the region."

Hamdard Food Division intends to reach out to every consumer in the Northern region with a large range of products. Shree Rani Sati Group will facilitate its efforts while making consumers avail the health benefits of Hamdard Food Division Products. The company will offer different variants of the products that come up with a number of benefits. Shree Rani Sati Group started its association with Hamdard around 25 years ago by providing its services for Dant Manjan in the small region of Bihar.

Hamid Ahmed, CEO- Hamdard Food Division, said, "Shree Rani Sati Group has been facilitating our efforts to accomplish our targets for years. With this agreement, we have given a great responsibility to the company. We are confident to penetrate the target market with the help of the company. "

Shree Rani Sati Group has been offering marketing, distribution and supply chain services to brands across the industries for more than 35 years. It is a one-stop-solution provider for all the marketing and distribution needs of the brands. It aids brands in reaching out to new regions and consumers while enhancing their bottom line.
Having a good job and being equipped with the right skills are two crucial factors for success in career and life. Vi, Indias leading telecom operator, has announced a set of offerings for the youth of Bharat to help them with finding employment, becoming more employable & also help them prepare for government jobs.

Giving wings to its customers aspirations, for a better tomorrow, Vi Jobs & Education integrates Indias largest job search platform Apna, leading English learning platform Enguru and Pariksha a platform specializing in government employment exam preparation.

Primarily targeted towards the large prepaid user base in India, Vi Jobs & Education on the Vi App offers a one stop solution for youth to search for jobs, improve spoken English skills and excel in Govt. employment exams, empowering them to fulfil their career dreams.

Commenting on the launch of this unique proposition, Avneesh Khosla, CMO, Vodafone Idea Limited, said In line with Vis brand promise together for tomorrow, weve been looking at the need gaps in consumers daily lives, where we believe we can play a role of an enabler to help them get ahead in life. When we look at youth in this country their key aspiration is to get a good job and become more employable. The relevance of digital skills and fluency in spoken English have become more pronounced for todays youth. Further, Government Employment remains a top choice for the large part of this segment, particularly for those coming from tier 2 & 3 cities. Based on these insights, we have curated the Vi Jobs & Education proposition in partnership with Apna, Enguru and Pariksha. We believe, that these integrated solutions will enable Vi customers to further their efforts in gaining a competitive edge and march ahead to meet their career aspirations.

1. Job Search Made Easy With Vi Jobs & Education on the Vi App:

The State of Mobile 2022 report suggests that Job-Searches will be the top category for mobile users across the globe. And the emergence of gig economy, according to a joint report by BCG and Michael & Susan Dell Foundation - Unlocking the Potential of the Gig Economy in India, can serve up to 90 million jobs in the non-farm sector alone.

Vi Jobs & Education on the Vi App in partnership with apna, offers free priority access to Indias largest job listing. Priority access ensures double the visibility prospects to recruiters, thus double the chance of interview opportunities for a quick job search solution. This service will be available for all Vi customers at no cost.

Commenting on the partnership, Nirmit Parikh, CEO and Founder, apna.co said "In the last few months alone, apna enabled more than 350 million interviews and professional conversations because of the fast internet proliferation in deep pockets of India made possible by leading telecom operators like Vi. Access to the internet has not only opened avenues for people, but has also played a significant role in reducing the collar divide between professionals. In the coming years, we are certain to completely dismantle this divide through our inclusive platform. As we continue our journey of impacting a billion lives, we are thrilled to partner with a telecom provider such as Vi to digitally empower the youth of our country by giving them an easy access to hyperlocal opportunities around them"

2. English Education Made Easy With Vi Jobs & Education on the Vi App:

English fluency increases prospects of getting a job, getting a better salary and progressing in ones career, in certain segments.

Vi Jobs & Education in partnership with leading English learning platform enguru offers 14 days of free trial with unlimited interactive live classes conducted by experts. Learners can continue with the platform at 15% to 25% discounted price after the trial period. The users will also be entitled to free access of interactive, gamified, industry specific self-learning modules, worth Rs 1500.

Speaking on the association Udit Hinduja, COO, Enguru said We are excited to partner with Vi on bringing a mobile-first, affordable & high quality English learning program to their subscribers. Engurus live classes allow users to practice speaking with expert teachers & students from across the country, with classes offered through the day across all levels of English. We believe our product will help Vi subscribers in their interview preparation & career growth.

3. Preparation for Govt. Jobs Exams made easy with Vi Jobs & Education on the Vi App:

Government jobs have always been highly sought-after for as long as they have existed in India. Each year, millions of youth aspire to land themselves a Government job.

Making the process of applying of Govt jobs convenient for Vi users, Vi Jobs & Education in partnership with Pariksha offers the aspirants of Central/State Govt. jobs , one month free subscription to Pariksha. This also includes unlimited mock tests across 150+ exams. At the end of the free period, users can continue at a nominal subscription fee of Rs. 249/year.

Commenting on the tie-up Vikram Shekhawat, Co-founder, Pariksha said Pariksha is the largest and the fastest-growing vernacular test prep platform which is on a mission to democratize education and make relevant, credible, quality content available to everyone preparing for govt exams in the country. With this deep integrated partnership with one of the largest and most trusted telecom partners, we will be able to reach our goal faster and narrow the gap between opportunities for over 75 million govt job aspirants across Bharat. This partnership will act as the new age digital book and will create the largest impact at the bottom of the pyramid.

The three propositions are in line with Vis strategy to curate a wide range of digital offerings of relevance to its users to help them thrive and stay ahead.
We, at Adgully, have always saluted and honoured women managers and leaders across diverse fields. W-SUITE is a special initiative from Adgully that has been turning the spotlight on some of the most remarkable women achievers in M&E, Advertising & Marketing, PR & Communication industry. In the refurbished series, we seek to find out how women leaders have been managing their teams and work as well as how they have been navigating through the toughest and most challenging times brought about by the global pandemic.

Priya Sharma is the CFO, COO & Co-Founder of ZestMoney, Indias largest and fastest growing Buy Now, Pay Later platform. Using advanced mobile technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning and digital banking, ZestMoney has built a platform to serve the over 300 million households in the country that currently have no access to formal credit due to insufficient credit history.

In conversation with Adgully, Priya Sharma, COO, CFO & Co-founder, ZestMoney, speaks about how the pandemic has changed every aspect of life, the steps to take to make things work without getting burnt out, making diversity, inclusivity and respect a non-negotiable integral part of the work culture, and more.

How do you think the role and scope of women leaders have widened in the post-pandemic world?

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed every aspect of life, including the way we work. But one thing is clear: Though we stumbled, we learnt to navigate and tried to adapt to the unforeseen, unplanned and unprecedented threat to humanity. It may be years before we actually realise the effects  positive or negative  of the pandemic on society and workplaces, particularly on working women. But, women have always been able to successfully lead while taking everyone along. The recent case in point: Some studies showed that countries led by women leaders did systematically better in COVID-19 management than countries that werent led by women.

I think that the pandemic has helped in bringing in flexibility and more choices to women employees, which women in leadership roles have tried to normalise for long. For years, women dealt with a situation where they had the guilt of choosing between work and family, given the fact that women take a disproportionate share of house responsibility. But, that has changed drastically, thanks to the flexible work options such as remote and hybrid in the post-pandemic world. While I am well aware of the difficulty and exhausting efforts involved in balancing their career and family together because of the work from home arrangement, several women folk were able to manage both with the flexibility and choice the situation presented them with.

The rapid transition to digital, an uncertain economic landscape, charting unknown waters, working from home  how have you been navigating during the COVID-19 times? How are you maintaining work-life balance in the new normal?

Pandemic or no pandemic, work-life balance is something Ive always advocated. In my capacity, I have always vouched for flexibility in working. We have people from across the globe working even before the pandemic struck the world. We have no set office hours, we have unlimited sick leaves, we have round-the-clock counsellors available for the mental, psychological and emotional wellbeing of our employees. We encourage our employees to take mandatory time off from work and also organise master classes for their personal growth. We also have learning allowances.

Personally, I try to balance my professional life and personal life, but the lines get blurred sometimes, especially with the remote and hybrid way of work. But, one has to remember that it is not about how efficiently we try to do the balancing act, but about the conscious steps we take to make things work without getting burnt out.

Multiple studies have shown how women leaders performed better during the COVID-19 crisis. According to you, what makes women the best in crisis management?

Women have always been the stronger lot with a high emotional quotient. Although empathy is gender-neutral, womens innate ability to be more empathetic while taking tough decisions, their ability to wear many hats at once, and bring in a holistic view and approach make them stand out. I have seen that women tend to be clearer and more effective in communication as well. Needless to say, effective communication has become all the more critical in the last two years when, for the first time ever, all of us had to work from the confines of our drawing rooms through screens when COVID-19 completely caught us unawares.

All these factors help in building a more open work environment and come in handy in the face of adversity.

What are the five most effective lessons that you have learned as a woman leader?

Conviction matters: Important to always have a vision and equally important is conviction in your idea.

Important to always have a vision and equally important is conviction in your idea. Ignore the noise around you: Ignore the surrounding noise and the stereotypes and raise above them. Dont limit yourself and believe in your caliber.

Ignore the surrounding noise and the stereotypes and raise above them. Dont limit yourself and believe in your caliber. Feel free to reach out for support: Its important for women to reach out to mentors when they need guidance. There are now a lot of women focussed groups so one knows they are not alone in the journey. A lot of women leaders I know of are open to mentoring people.

Its important for women to reach out to mentors when they need guidance. There are now a lot of women focussed groups so one knows they are not alone in the journey. A lot of women leaders I know of are open to mentoring people. Go beyond tokenism: Initiative should not be restricted with the sole aim of bridging the gender representation gap but should be taken up to create a gender-equal working environment where talent and skills are rewarded. Leadership recognising talent just on the basis of merit will organically help create a no bias environment.

Initiative should not be restricted with the sole aim of bridging the gender representation gap but should be taken up to create a gender-equal working environment where talent and skills are rewarded. Leadership recognising talent just on the basis of merit will organically help create a no bias environment. Let go of the guilt: Women are prone to feel guilt a lot with the weight of balancing home and work. Apart from figuring out what works best, letting go of the guilt is liberating. Of course, it is easier said than done but one must make a conscious effort to not let it play on the mind all the time.

Gender sensitivity and inclusion in the new normal  how can organisations effectively encourage and groom women leaders in challenging times?

If you ask me, put women in a challenging situation and they are resilient enough to groom themselves. But, that said, organisations can do it on a larger scale, provided there is conviction. The key here is for the organisations to walk the talk. They should be mindful of the values that their actions reflect.

For instance, at ZestMoney, we have a womens group that organises monthly events. We do multiple panel discussions where various issues, such as problems and challenges faced by working mothers, are discussed openly. This paves way for gender sensitivity and inclusivity. In addition to this, making flexi-hours a norm, leading with empathy, rewarding talent and merit without bias, and above all making diversity, inclusivity and respect a non-negotiable integral part of the work culture will encourage more women to take the lead.
eVTOL-aircraft developer Lilium has begun the next phase of flight testing in Spain with its 5th generation technology demonstrator, Phoenix 2.

Over the coming months at the ATLAS Flight Test Center, Lilium plans to extend the flight envelope through full transition and high-speed flight. These developments come after successful flight testing with the same aircraft in southern Germany last year.

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Lilium also plans to introduce an additional demonstrator aircraft, Phoenix 3, which is scheduled to arrive in Spain for first flight this summer. This aircraft is expected to significantly accelerate the flight test campaign, allowing Lilium to increase learnings and reduce program risks.

Together with excellent weather conditions, the ATLAS Flight Test Center provides optimal infrastructure and enables aircraft to fly over a large, unpopulated area while transitioning fully to high-speed wing-borne flight.

The modern facilities and support from the Andalusian Foundation for Aerospace Development (FADA) and Center for Advanced Aerospace Technologies (CATEC) have been instrumental in setting Lilium up for a successful flight test campaign.

Daniel Wiegand, co-founder and CEO of Lilium said, We are excited to have kicked off our next phase of flight testing in Spain. This step takes us even closer to reaching our goal of creating a sustainable and accessible mode of high-speed, low noise regional air mobility.
The digital town square is undergoing an unexpected shake-up with Elon Musk taking a nine percent majority stake in Twitter. Ramifications will be felt on both sides of the political divide through the midterm elections and beyond.

In a Monday filing with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), it was reported that Elon Musk has taken a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter with 73.5 million shares in the company. His investment was estimated at roughly $2.89 billion. This makes him the majority shareholder in the company.

Musk is among the richest people in the world. Forbes lists his worth as more than $287 billion. As for size, Twitters market capitalization was valued at just over $31 billion the Friday before Musks news. A few hours after Musk bought his shares, the companys market cap rose to over $38 billion. And this is just on the news of his purchase, before any anticipated changes at the company.

For comparison, Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and other digital platforms, had a market cap of roughly $230 billion at the time of the Elon Musk-Twitter news.

Clearly, Twitter is significantly smaller in financial terms than its Big Tech sibling. But its outsized influence has been a point of contention on both the Left and the Right.

The Digital Town Square

Perhaps nobody illustrated the power of Twitter in recent years more than former President Donald Trump, famous for the tweets that gave him a way to speak directly to the American people without the filter of third-party media. At the same time, his tweets drove the corporate media narrative whether it liked it or not.

But the Left controls Big Tech and responded by orchestrating the deplatforming of Trump.

On the Friday after the January 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol, Twitter saw an opportunity and seized on it. It suspended the sitting President of the United States from its platform. Over the course of that weekend other Big Tech firms essentially destroyed upstart Twitter competitor Parler and sought to make Trump a nonentity across several other channels, including e-commerce, email, and other platforms. On the final day of his presidential term, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and others had suspended or effectively banned Trump from the Internet.

As this was happening, hundreds of conservative Twitter users saw massive numbers of followers disappear before their eyes. One by one, many of those users would face suspensions and bans of their own.

For Twitter and the rest of Big Tech, emboldened by its Pearl Harbor-style attack on conservative free speech, the relentless deprivation of speech and censorship continued. In just over a year, America has seen how the narrative for COVID, COVID treatments, vaccines, and other pandemic-related information could be manipulated and censored by Twitter.

A nebulous Terms of Service has been used as a sledgehammer to prevent any thought that strayed from The Narrative from reaching social media users and consumers of corporate media.

It didnt stop with the pandemic. Anyone whose tweets depart from the narratives on school curricula or the pedophilic grooming of children in schools and libraries can risk Twitter suspension or a permanent ban.

Elon Musk has Had Enough

Elon Musk, a regular user of Twitter himself, has grown frustrated with the platforms propensity to manipulate the narrative.

On March 26th, Musk Tweeted, Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. What should be done?

In a series of subsequent tweets, he hinted that he was giving serious thought to either creating a rival platform to Twitter or some other solution. Prudently, he didnt reveal in advance his plans to buy nine percent of the company.

A look at Musks history reveals that he is not afraid to take bold risks, but they are usually smart risks. In the end, he tends to come away with more money than he invested. Chances are hell make money this time around, but its obvious his motives arent completely financial.

Clearly, hes not happy with the companys pattern of censorship, of manipulation, of serving the leftist ideology.

To be sure, its probably a mistake to presume Musk is a conservative, at least in a traditional sense. But he does give an indication that he appreciates the American dream, what it has done for him and so many others. He knows that freedom of speech is the cornerstone to achieving that dream.

Whats Next?

Wall Street will be watching to see if Musk, who is now on the Twitter Board of Directors, takes an activist role in shaking up the Twitter management team, its policies and protocols, and its algorithms that limit freedom of speech.

A major symbolic statement would be to return Donald Trumps Twitter account to him and then to return to other users their accounts that have been suspended.

Will there be a proxy fight for control of Twitter? Anythings possible. If Twitter is deemed to be that important to the Left, there are no small number of well-heeled leftists who could pony up the money to rival Musk for control of the company. This, of course, would drive up the value of company shares making Musk that much richer.

Before they would do that, however, theyd have to consider if its worth it to wage such a fight against a man who has the ready resources to win it if he chooses. If his initial investment is any indication, he plans to win.

In Washington, expect to start seeing more of Senator Amy Klobuchar, the Democrat from Minnesota, who has led the charge from the Left for the repeal of Section 230. This gives Internet platforms like Twitter immunity when it comes to third-party or user-generated content.

It states: No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

Klobuchar and her fellow Democrats have sought to limit Section 230 liability shields because they believe Big Tech is not doing enough to censor users.

On the Right, conservatives have sought to repeal Section 230 because of the unusual power it has placed in the hands of Big Tech, leading to increased censorship of conservative voices. As theyve made their case against Section 230, conservatives have centered on free speech for all.

With Musk presumably taking the lead at Twitter, expect conservatives to cheer his quick fix and his hands-on style to get Twitter as the digital town square back on track. Will they continue to push for the repeal of Section 230? Well have to see.

At the same time, Musk has now put a political target on his back. The Left will throw everything they have at him and his other companies.

Will they continue to defend a private companys right to operate as it wants as they have with Big Tech so far? Thats tricky. The Left will have to balance lashing out at Musk and Twitter against working to protect Meta and other left-leaning tech firms.

But never forget, Twitter is what it is, the national town square. It sets the narrative. The reason alternative versions of Twitter have not succeeded to date is that Twitter is legacy, its big, its powerful. Even the much bigger Facebook platform does not have the same influence on the national discourse.

Now, Twitter has a new boss, not the same as the old boss. Let the fun begin.

Image: Daniel Oberhaus
It is generally held that in the international arena nations do and should act out of national self-interest. Accordingly, moral considerations, in the words of the canonical 450BC Melian Dialogue of Thucydides, are only for equals and otherwise the strong do what they will and the weak obey. Of course, others might argue that such thinking is atavistic in light of the 2005 UN World Summit and the agreement of all UN members on their responsibility to protect (R2P) the citizens of all states from mass atrocities such as genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, or crimes against humanity that are today occurring daily in Ukraine.

Given that this norm is at best aspirational and has no authoritative enforcement mechanism, we are sadly asked to think about the horrific war in Ukraine in terms only of strategic national interest, including whether Putin is right in thinking that Ukraine truly matters geopolitically. (As a Jew, I do so with difficulty, having believed, wrongly, that never again, meant never again for all peoples.)

Putin is far from being mentally unfit -- even if he horribly miscalculated -- as he realizes that with an enslaved Ukraine, Russia can aspire once again to great power status and, without it, it cant. In terms of geography, Ukraine is the second-largest state in Europe, blessed with fertile soil, abundant natural resources, a likely prosperous future, and populated, we now know, by citizens cut from a wholly different and heroic cloth than most of us in the West. It was and continues to be the breadbasket of Europe and much of the rest of the world. Depending on which geopolitical side it lands -- unlike so many NATO member states -- it will play an important role in shaping the balance of power in Europe, if not the world, for the rest of this century, and the balance of power still matters because it is the foundation on which great-power relations rest.

Europe is currently engulfed in the largest land war since the end of World War II, yet NATO has largely been missing in action at this critical moment. NATO, in a fashion similar to domestic welfare agencies, has created dependent vassal states lacking in the courage to defend themselves and the requisite autonomy to act independently of their imperial master. In short, NATO has sapped dependent nations of the will and need to fight as they luxuriate in the corrupting and decadent belief that the United States will, when the time comes, save them once again. (But as the United States after serving as one of the three guarantors of the territorial integrity of Ukraine in the OSCEs Budapest Memorandum of 1994 has failed to honor its commitment, maybe they should rethink this). Frances Emmanuel Macron is right, European nations need to build back the capacity and the necessary virtue to defend themselves. If they are unable or unwilling to do so, then it isnt the job of young Americans and American tax dollars to do so for decadent nations unwilling to fight for their countries freedom. The American defenders of NATO, wrongly I believe, hold that it is in Americas national interest to do so, quite likely due to their belief that European nations are too hedonistic to act collectively in defense of their own freedom. It is time for European nations to stand on their own two feet rather than being vassals of the United States.

Similarly, one must consider the underlying logic of NATOs collective defense posture. Isnt the underlying logic of the United States towards European weakness in tension with the dominant realist criteria of strategic interest described above and that putatively prevents the Wests active intervention in Ukraine? If only strategic interests matter, why then should a country, say North Macedonia, believe that when invaded and occupied in a day with nuclear war threatened by Putin that NATO, i.e. the United States, will rise to the occasion and protect it against a violent aggressor? Our failure to support Ukraine more actively must necessarily raise such questions in the minds of American dependencies in NATO and this should lead them in the direction of independence, autonomy, and moral renewal.

Let me ask, too, with the exception of brave Georgia, why have the countries of Eastern Europe, especially the larger ones -- many who have acted extraordinarily unselfishly in their exemplary humanitarian efforts -- failed overtly to come to the defense of Ukraine? Shouldnt they have been willing, due to their shared history of suffering from Russian oppression and their regional proximity, to have transferred their Soviet-era jets to Ukraine or maybe, too, have committed troops as little green men without hiding behind the unforthcoming imperial cover provided by their putative protector, the United States? The MIG fiasco in particular did not only make the current American administrations fecklessness apparent but, in dissimilar ways that of Polands, whose lack of courage in its leadership is in direct contrast with that of Ukraines citizens and leadership. Is the answer as to why NATOs eastern members -- countries maybe still filled with men of daring and courage -- have overtly failed to act militarily due to the slavish welfare-like dependency that America and NATO have fostered in comparison to the bravery so apparent in Ukraine?

That being said, maybe the one-time brave Poles and others are simply waiting for their time to act virtuously and heroically. If true, why dont Poland and Lithuania, threaten -- it need not be actually done -- a land blockade of Kaliningrad (former Konigsberg) in response to Putins siege of Kyiv? They can threaten something reminiscent of the US naval blockade of Cuba in 1962 and/or the USSRs land blockade of Berlin in 1948-49. Again, it need never take place, but the threat of Polish and Lithuanian forces arraying themselves on their own sovereign territory might be salutary for both countries in truly recovering their independence and virtue and, in rejecting Americas benign imperialism and, potentially useful in further taxing Russias overextended military.

In conclusion, if commonplace morality were to be observed, in which Ukraine comes as close as any state in the past fifty years to being unequivocally in the right and acting virtuously, the United States should be far more energetically assisting Ukraine in its own defense. This is our legal and moral duty under the UN Charter and, equally or more so under the unanimous UN R2P 2005 agreement to protect other nations from mass atrocities.

If, however, these internationally recognized norms are to be ignored and we are to act narrowly on our national self-interest, we should be doing the same for a nation that has uniquely earned the right through its governments and peoples bravery to be allied with states in the West. America might remember that its independence was won due to the courage of its citizens and the massive intervention of a great power in support of it and that bankrupted itself in the process, France. Putin is right in his valuation of the importance of Ukraine in his pursuit of Russian imperial dominance, even if wrong about almost everything else. In opposition to his goals and in pursuit of a balance of power, Ukraine is worth fighting for, the rest of Eastern Europe, up to now, much less, and NATO not at all.

Barry Shain teaches at Colgate University, specializing in eighteenth-century political theory, in particular that of the American Founding period.

Image: G20 Argentina
My parents were avid readers of the daily newspaper. I cant remember a day when they didnt read in full their newspaper of choice, the Pulitzer St. Louis Post-Dispatch. As members of the working class, they chose the Democrat-leaning St. Louis Post-Dispatch over the more Republican-leaning St. Louis Globe-Democrat. In those days, it was a recognized national newspaper. Today, one could say it is basically a local newspaper and, sadly, no longer a good one.

For 60 years, whenever Ive lived in St. Louis, Ive been an ardent reader and subscriber, breaking away only during my college years in South Carolina and the eight years I spent in France and Tunisia. For most of that time, I found the Post-Dispatch to be balanced and trustworthy as to its editorialswritten without sensationalism, without a too-pronounced bias, and rooted in substantive reporting.

The Commentary Pages represented diverse views from both conservatives and liberals. As a freelance writer, many op-ed articles I wrote found their way to the Commentary Pages. One might say those were zenith days of newspaper journalism. Sadly, I fear today represents the nadir days of a once-prominent newspapernadir not only in fortune but nadir in respect.

When the papers founder, Joseph Pulitzer, retired, the platform he wrote included the papers obligation to . . . always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party. Now, though, the paper appears to belong to one party.

One might ask On what basis do I make this claim? Its not just that the majority of editorials and commentaries are definitely left-leaning and Democrat party-prejudicial. As noted above, its always been Democrat-leaning. Whats new is a tone thats mean-spirited, sensationalistic, heavily anti-conservative, and anti-Republican. The news is stringently selective with noteworthy news omitted to support the biased tilt and allegiance to a specific political party. The lack of fair, balanced, and objective treatment of both parties and politicians is too evident to missand rejects Pulitzers platform.

Image: Chromolithograph of Joseph Pulitzer superimposed on a composite of his newspapers (circa 1904). Public domain.

As just one example of florid hostility to Republicans, the paper published an article arguing for a duplicitous, even devious, election tactic. On February 20th, the Post-Dispatch published an op-ed article entitled Why Im voting for an unfit demagogue in this years Republican Senate primary. The author was Kevin McDermott, a primary editor.

McDermott opened the op-ed by stating, Eric Greitens is the worst of the worst! He then described the sexual assault allegations that caused Greitens to resign as Missouris governor and other questionable practices. This is legitimate. Many conservatives and Republicans have expressed concern about this candidate for senator. Even the Wall Street Journal wrote a factual, objective, and substantive editorial about him.

But then Mr. McDermott writes this:

It really is difficult to imagine anyone more demonstrably unfit for public office than Eric Greitens. And Ill cast my vote for him on Aug. 2. Thats the day Missouri voters will go to the polls to pick the Republican and Democratic nominees for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Republican Sen. Roy Blunt. [snip] ...Im planning to vote for Greitens in the primary, and will encourage it for others who understand how important it is to prevent the GOP from retaking the Senate.

Such crossover voting is legal in Missouri, which has open primaries. The argument is that strategically participating in the other partys primary (known as tactical voting) is a form of political sabotage, and not what voting is supposed to be about. After reading his preliminary sentences, one may say, What? or even Whoa!

The August 2 election is a primary election. Farther into the op-ed article, he explains, as a Democrat:

Im actually somewhat sympathetic to that argument, and very uncomfortable about casting a vote for someone like Greitens  not in hopes that he will win the office, but that he and his party will ultimately lose it. [snip] And should Greitens end up in the Senate instead, making Missouri look still more ridiculous while further proving that a party-wide psychosis now grips the GOP  so be it.

Im not sure this couldnt be deemed subterfuge; it is certainly devious and hypocritical. McDermotts 900-word op-ed contains nothing less than a mean-spirited rant against the Republican Party and all its candidates. My question is, does this sound like what Joseph Pulitzer desired for his beloved St. Louis Post-Dispatch in his platform with those honorable words, . . . always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party?

Worse, the opinions in the op-ed do not come from just any writer; they come from a major editor of a newspaper that claims not to belong to any party. It also comes from the only daily newspaper in a large metropolitan area.

When I read the piece, I was appalled at how low a previously prominent national newspaper had sunk. How many reporters or writers seek the esteemed Pulitzer Prize in writing? And yet here we see Pulitzers own newspaper host a steep decline in ethicsperhaps even morality and journalism.

The hypocrisy of voting for a man one claims to be an unfit demagogue is overwhelming. Add to that, inviting others to do so to prove that a party-wide psychosis now grips ones own opposing political party is nothing less than creating or inventing a psychosis that otherwise does not exist. As an Independent voter, I could hardly believe what I read. If I were either Democrat or Republican, I would cringe at such a deceitful, Machiavellian mentality.

Such underhandedness may, unfortunately, be expected of politicians, though we wish not. For many, character still counts. However, for an editor of a daily newspaper that subscribers would like to believe is honest, objective, trustworthy, and truthful, this editors brazen and unashamed admission and the newspapers unconcealed biasespolitical, religious, and socialcause serious concern that the once-honored Post-Dispatch has irrecoverably become a Democrat party propaganda vehicle as opposed to a trustworthy free press that serves all equally.

If this is one national newspapers steep decline, what else is out there? Is this truly a sign of the times? If it is, God help us, God help America.
Way back on April 6th, 1917, the United States entered the First World War. France, England, Russia, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Turkey had already been duking it out for years by then. Roughly concurrent with Americas entry, Russia was forced to pull out due to the success of the Bolsheviks in toppling the Romanov dynasty.

There are many odd facts about this war. For starters, at the wars beginning, France and Switzerland were the only European countries that werent monarchies. Along with this, the ruling monarchs of Russia, Germany and Great Britain were all first cousins. Kaiser Wilhelm II spoke fluent English, the result of paying many visits to his grandmother, Queen Victoria.

A sad irony involves the immense popularity the beginning of the war had with the common people. Europe had not been embroiled in a major conflict since Napoleon. The Crimean and Franco-Prussian Wars were fairly well contained. The Boer War was fought on the other side of the planet. Those in power, however, dreaded the prospect. They knew all too well about the destructive capabilities of modern weapons. The tacticians of the day had no idea how to fight against machine guns. The best they could do was to send so many troops against one that it would eventually run out of ammunition. When Wilhelm sent the telegram to launch the invasion of France as laid out in the Schlieffen plan, he then turned to his generals and famously said: Gentlemen, we will regret this.

Just prior to this meeting, Wilhelm was on vacation, sailing his yacht around the fjords of Norway. He first learned of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia in a Norwegian newspaper. He, of course, turned the boat around and went right back home. Young history students are taught that WW I was the result of pre-existing military commitments, a.k.a. interlocking alliances, that kicked into place after Austrias Archduke Ferdinand and his wife were murdered by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Thats pretty much the case, but I would still refer back to the lack of war-weariness among the general population and the fatal enthusiasm that took its place.

When the U.S. entered the war, we had hardly any boots to put on the ground. But we had a navy pretty much equivalent to that of the Brits, thanks to Teddy Roosevelt and the Great White Fleet. John Keegan, in The Price of Admiralty, said that Napoleon could raise an army in a couple of weeks, but, it takes decades to put together a navy. Thus, a serious strategic advantage was gained by the Allies because of the U.S. Navy. During the deployment, an American sailor named Benjamin Kubelsky would entertain his off-duty shipmates by playing the violin. He later became a show business icon known as Jack Benny.

With Russia knocked out of the war, the Germans were invigorated. It was no mystery as to why they took Lenin from exile in Switzerland and injected him, like a bacillus, into St. Petersburg. Under Ludendorff, the Germans then unleashed a series of major offensives in the West. The French army started to mutiny and both the Brits and French began to consider suing for peace a.k.a. surrender.

But then the Americans started performing on the ground. Unlike the Brits and French, the Yanks had not yet been pounded into war-weariness. Combined with the vastly improved naval presence, the Allies began to starve the Central Powers into submission. In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque describes German artillery shells falling short on their own soldiers due to worn out cannon barrels.

Armistice negotiations then began in the latter part of 1918. The sticking point was the disposition of the Kaiser. Eventually he wound up raising tulips in the Netherlands. A further irony was that, because of intense propaganda, the German people still thought they were on the verge of winning the war until they woke up to find themselves occupied by foreign soldiers. This unhappy surprise particularly affected an injured military message runner who was recovering from temporary blindness due to a gas attack. His name was Adolf Hitler.

The unanswered question in all of this that begs attention is: why was this war ever fought in the first place? There was no fierce aggression on the part of ruthless dictators to be defended against. Nor was there any other compelling national necessity or even a measurable benefit to be gained. Ethnic Serbian nationalism within Bosnia fulfilled Bismarcks warning about: Some damn foolish thing in the Balkans. He also said that the Balkans began in the suburbs of Vienna.

The eminent military strategist B. H. Liddell-Hart linked WW I to the American Civil War, the latter being the first industrial war, which involved railroads, telegraph, armored warships, and repeating rifles. He blames the murderous stagnation of trench warfare on an erroneous biography of Stonewall Jackson. Most the last year of the Civil War was fought in trenches around Petersburg, Virginia. However, unlike the Civil War, WW I did not end with one side obviously defeating the other but rather with a negotiated armistice.

Subsequent consequences included the creation of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, neither of which still exist. Another was the creation of the modern Middle East. The Turks got to keep their Anatolian homeland, but they were stripped of the rest of the Ottoman Empire, in particular the Hejaz, which included the Arabian Peninsula, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria. The reparations imposed on Weimar Germany led to the destruction of its currency and ultimately to the dictatorship of the Third Reich. The depletion of the male population resulted in a major increase in the number of unmarried women, many of whom became spinster schoolteachers. In order to lower demand on the strategically important electrical grid, daylight savings time was imposed in the U.S. for the final months of the war and reimposed, thus far permanently, after Pearl Harbor. Also, isolationism and pacifism achieved serious political influence, paving the way for Hitlers initial military success.

Image: Picryl
Great change is afoot. People can feel it. The post-WWII global order is cracking. At a minimum, a renewed Cold War mindset is driving a permanent wedge between the U.S.-E.U. Atlantic Bloc and strategic competitors in Russia and China are unwilling to yield their national sovereignties to "rules-based systems" run from office suites in Brussels; Washington, D.C.; New York City; and the City of London. As with any zero-sum struggle between competing systems, though, the potential for "cold" wars to turn kinetically "hot" is high.

Will the war in Ukraine stay in Ukraine, or will NATO allies find cause to engage Russia directly? Where are the red lines these days? Nobody seems to know. At the same time, traditional avenues for de-escalation and normal diplomatic stopgaps have largely been thrown out the window. The West has declared linguistic war on all things Russian in a fit of pique, and the Russian people, not surprisingly, increasingly view the U.S.-led West with great apprehension and even enmity. Appeals to emotion within both societies are quickly overtaking sober restraint and common sense. Tempers have begun to boil over and mixed messaging from D.C. and the E.U. has only added a dangerous accelerant of confusion to an already smoldering tinderbox.

With a vaunted cyber-warfare program that allows Russia to cause more harm to its enemies than it achieves with traditional munitions while gaining some measure of plausible deniability, hybrid warfare affecting banking systems, power grids, and supply chains makes total war upon civilian populations inevitable. At the same time, the relative anonymity of cyber-attacks makes it increasingly difficult for hostile parties to distinguish acts of war from criminal mischief or even minor nuisances. The likelihood of misidentification of cyber-aggressors compounds the risks of mistaken intentions, unwarranted retaliations, and lethal engagements. Just as hybrid warfare complicates traditional rules of engagement, it also presents ample opportunity for false flag events to be used as cover for quickly ratcheting up conflicts. Narrative engineering has become a potent weapon for governments, and for this reason, propaganda and information warfare are replacing free speech and debate in Russia and throughout the West. Again, this type of state control over mass communication and the criminalization of dissenting opinion magnify the probability for lethal misunderstanding, misattribution, and mistakes.

While all eyes are on Eastern Europe, China is busy gobbling up strategic Pacific real estate, island-hopping from Samoa to the Solomon Islands in a steady effort to supplant regional American partnerships with its own. Simultaneously expanding its naval presence near Alaska and Hawaii while whipping up a public frenzy at home in support of invading Taiwan, China is committed to shattering American influence in Asia and American hegemony over the Pacific.

It is becoming increasingly undeniable that China has been preparing for this moment ever since the United States welcomed the communist country into the World Trade Organization over twenty years ago. The Chinese Communist Party has aggressively sought to influence Western politicians through a combination of campaign lobbying, personal business engagement, and financial inducement that, if not explicitly illegal, has nonetheless reeked of corruption and quid pro quo. In exchange for U.S. politicians' complicity in orchestrating the largest intercontinental transfer of wealth in world history from the paychecks and savings of the U.S. middle class to the bank accounts and military budgets of the CCP, China has doubled down on U.S. political susceptibility to graft by engaging in two decades of government espionage, trade secrets and industrial theft, commodity dumping, currency manipulation, and rampant violation of human rights.

By luring the U.S. into a state of economic dependency upon its cheap manufacturing, rare earth metals and other raw materials, and regular use of slave labor, China has effectively engaged in hybrid economic warfare that has devastated American wealth and self-sufficiency without requiring the firing of a single shot. While crippling U.S. economic might, it has hooked American politicians on the opium of its sweet monetary kickbacks and too many American citizens on the importation of its deadly fentanyl. As China sat back and watched the U.S. waste lives, resources, and trillions of dollars on two decades of war producing minimal strategic success, the CCP used its ill-gotten, American-transferred wealth to transform its military into a global powerhouse and to erect its own worldwide "rules-based system" under the harmless-sounding, chameleon-like Belt and Road Initiative. For twenty years, China has unleashed debilitating economic carnage throughout the United States, and the American political class has literally paid the communist dictatorship to expand its military and global influence. The fact that China has been at war with the U.S. while Washington politicians have done nothing but smile and nod in either abject ignorance or unpardonable collusion has been arguably the greatest self-inflicted national security catastrophe in American history.

What does all of this say about our current moment of unpleasantness? It says to me that our political aristocracy cannot be trusted to pursue Americans' best interests. On the one hand, the Washington war hawks are tripping over themselves to initiate a war with Russia that normal Americans have no interest in fighting. On the other hand, those same war hawks are noticeably mum about the Chinese dragon's two decades of economic warfare against America's middle class, the destruction of which has caused American families more harm than any other enemy in their country's history, save for perhaps D.C.'s own entrenched political class.

Before our effete Washington "warriors" drag us into a war that most Americans do not seek, should we not at least have a "national conversation" on the matter? Our supercilious "betters" regularly force us into all manner of "national conversations" on the most ridiculous contrivances. You can't say "all lives matter," when only "black lives matter," rube! Of course, men who pretend to be women should be rewarded for their delusions, bigot! How dare you call out our election fraud as evidence for a stolen election, insurrectionist! We have to "talk" about gun violence. We have to "sympathize" with the people breaking our immigration laws. We're forced to discuss the imminent impact of "climate change" as if Obama and other celebrities didn't live in multi-million-dollar properties right on the beach. We have been forced, as a country, to endure never-ending elitist claptrap about the most nonsensical, inane subjects. But we can't discuss whether we as Americans want to fight a war against Russia, while China's threats to the homeland receive but a glance?

For a "ruling class" that regularly yet incorrectly trumpets America's "precious democracy," you would think actual war might warrant a more broadly democratic backing than a Washington gaggle of war-starved neocons, some corrupt elected officials whose children have made big bucks from laundering money in Ukraine, and the corporate news propagandists who desperately want to distract from Joe Biden's escalating political problems here at home. If D.C.'s denizens have proved anything with their cavalier attitude toward nuclear gamesmanship with Russia and their invaluable assistance over two decades in effectuating Communist China's ascendance from third-world pariah state to global existential threat, it is this: war is too damn serious to be left to Washington politicians.

Image: Department of Defense, public domain.
Early in 1971, I noticed a lump on the right side of my neck. I called it to the attention of two physicians who told me not to worry about it. But showing it to a third physician, a family friend, I was told to see Dr. Max Som, a head and neck surgeon.

Examining me, Dr. Som remarked that the lump did not belong there and scheduled me for surgery at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. The surgery was performed on February 16, 1971. The lump turned out to be papillary carcinoma. Following the operation, however, I was not released; Dr. Som decided that I should undergo further surgery. That procedure was performed on February 23, 1971, and it turned out that my thyroid cancer had spread to lymph nodes under my right shoulder.

Following the second operation, I was turned over to an endocrinologist, Dr. Bernard Sachs, who told me that, if I was going to have cancer, thyroid cancer is the one to have. He further told me that I was to see him in his office, on being released from the hospital, to have a drink of radioactive iodine, to kill the function of the sliver of my thyroid gland that could not be removed because it was up against the parathyroid.

Since my surgery fifty-one years ago, I have been taking medication to serve as a substitute for thyroid function  Synthroid and Cytomel.

An April 5 Washington Examiner article reports that Russia's President Vladimir Putin suffers from thyroid cancer and suggests that his treatment consists of bathing in deer's blood. This is news to me. What my experience indicates is that thyroid cancer is not fatal, with treatment including removal of most of the thyroid gland, a dose of radioactive iodine to remove the remaining sliver of the thyroid gland, followed by medication serving as a thyroid substitute. I would add that the only red liquid I imbibe is tomato juice  and borsht (if this Russian soup is still available in food stores as a non-sanctioned item). I would be willing to affirm under penalties of perjury that I have never sipped deer's blood.

I would add that as my treatment began 51 years ago, should any U.S. intel source assert that President Putin suffers a terminal illness, such prognosis likely is no more believable than those reports, five years ago and counting, that Presidents Putin and Trump colluded to put Trump in the White House (until "The Resistance" could organize to thwart his re-election). Bear in mind what I was told by my endocrinologist, in the winter of 1971: "If you are going to have cancer, this [thyroid cancer] is the one to have."

Of course, given the sanctions policy against Russia generally, and Putin in particular, he is not likely permitted to come to the U.S. for treatment  and, consequently, may well have to settle for drinking deer's blood rather than radioactive iodine.

Image: Pixabay.
As Joe Biden asks Congress to formally grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, his administration has already created a sort of hidden amnesty that could accomplish his extremist immigration agenda without congressional approval.

Last year, the Biden administration resettled more than 146,000 unaccompanied alien children (UACs) into the U.S., a number larger than the population of many U.S. cities. These numbers are alarmingly high, especially considering the lax vetting standards we've seen under Biden.

According to data from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Biden administration has lost track of nearly 20,000 of these illegal aliens. Losing track of 20,000 illegal border crossers demonstrates a shocking amount of negligence, even by the low standards of this administration. It also shows that the Biden administration is committed to the cause of amnesty, even if that means quietly resettling illegal aliens without the permission of Congress.

Less than a month after taking office, Biden proposed a massive amnesty bill. The legislation would likely award amnesty to tens of millions of illegal aliens, but the bill has not received a vote yet in the current Congress. As vice president in 2013, Biden helped push a similar amnesty bill through the Senate, which died in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. During his State of the Union speech earlier this month, Biden again pushed for "immigration reform," a Washington, D.C. code word for amnesty, while offering a few crumbs to those of us who believe in enforcing immigration laws.

It's clear that granting amnesty to the large number of illegal aliens has been a goal of Biden's for a long time, and he is more than willing to go around Congress to do it. While Biden's proposed legislation appears to have little chance of moving through Congress, the executive actions he has taken may amount to a hidden amnesty.

The Biden administration's hidden amnesty won't just come as a result of the nearly 150,000 illegal UACs that they have resettled over the past year, but also through illegal aliens who have entered the country through Biden's poorly enforced border and have avoided detection from immigration authorities since. These illegal aliens are known as "got aways," and they have spent the last year feasting on Biden's anti-border policies.

There were roughly 500,000 "got aways" in 2021, according to unofficial data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. These "got aways" came in addition to the nearly two million migrants who were apprehended at the southern border over the course of the past year. All told, Biden has released more than 800,000 illegal aliens into the U.S. in the past year.

Adding to obvious concerns over these high numbers is the Biden administration's complete lack of transparency, and the shady way they have been resettling migrants into the country.

Late last year, White House press secretary Jen Psaki admitted that the administration was resettling illegal aliens in New York through secretive early-morning flights under cover of darkness. Similar reports of secretive night-time flights have emerged in other states, including Florida and Pennsylvania. Just last month, video obtained by Fox News showed large numbers of illegal aliens being released into the U.S. Most of the aliens were single males, with some telling reporters that they were headed to various destinations across the U.S., including Miami, Houston, and Atlanta. While Biden has been unable to get his massive amnesty bill through Congress, he has been able to import large numbers of migrants and dramatically reshape the country through his executive action.

Some governors, including Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Texas governor Greg Abbott, have fought admirably for the safety and security of the people in their states in the face of Biden's border catastrophe. However, Congress has done virtually nothing to hold Biden accountable, despite the pleas of some House Republicans. While state and local governments can take steps to combat the border crisis, it is an exceedingly difficult task in the face of a complicit and apathetic federal government. That's why the next Congress must expose and address Biden's hidden amnesty.

Dale L. Wilcox is executive director and general counsel at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public interest law firm working to defend the rights and interests of the American people from the negative effects of mass migration.

Image: Screen shot from WKRB video, posted on YouTube.
Barack Obama was at the White House yesterday, making it clear, as did others at the reception held in Obama's honor, that Biden's presidency is over. Watching Obama suck the oxygen out of the room made me wonder if Obama is planning a comeback, something he can easily do.

The ostensible reason for Obama's return to the White House was to celebrate Obamacare's twelfth anniversary (if you can celebrate our modern, cowardly, corporate-run "medical care," along with overpriced insurance that does little for people with serious health issues). The reception in Obama's honor, though, hinted that the event's real purpose was to signal to Democrat apparatchiks that Biden is now shark chum.

The chumming process began when Obama referred to Biden as the "vice president," adding, after a long pause, "That was a joke."

Former President @BarackObama: "Thank you. Vice President Biden. Vice President - that was a joke." pic.twitter.com/dm0sBnM7P2  CSPAN (@cspan) April 5, 2022

Well, I guess it was a joke, in the same way a mean husband is joking when he says to his wife, "That dress makes you look like a cute circus elephant" and then tries to avoid her wrath by insisting, "That was a joke. I meant you look cute." No, it wasn't a joke. Biden, showing the deference of the Beta male to the Alpha male (or the abused wife to her abuser), later introduced himself as Obama's vice president and "Jill Biden's husband."

NOW - Biden: "My name is Joe Biden. I'm Barack Obama's Vice President."pic.twitter.com/1DZkytzsGR  Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) April 5, 2022

Self-deprecating humor when you're allegedly the president of what is (was?) the world's most powerful nation isn't charming; it's unnerving.

Worse was still to come. Normally, everyone in the room should be clamoring to be near the American president. After all, political power is the strongest magnetic force in the world. But in Biden's case, he was the creep at the party, the one everyone assiduously ignores and avoids:

Obama came to the White House today, immediately got mobbed, and no one wanted to talk to Biden. pic.twitter.com/69B2H92XVV  Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) April 5, 2022

Not only was Obama the magnetic force in the room, but he also made it clear to all that they should shun Biden:

Does Biden now regret inviting Obama to the White House?pic.twitter.com/E0FvZxAgvq  Ben Owen (@hrkbenowen) April 5, 2022

Watching Biden paw at Obama's shoulder only to have Obama aggressively ignore him is uncomfortable viewing. Even if Obama has no respect for the man (and who would, given Biden's stupidity, incompetence, and corruption?), Obama, of all people, should show respect for the office.

But for Obama, the point of the presidency was never about the office itself; it was always about the fact that Obama bestowed glory on the office. No wonder, then, that his speech, as always, was peppered with his favorite pronouns. No "he/him" for Obama; it's always "I/me."

Meanwhile, an animated Kamala Harris also assiduously ignored her boss. For her, Obama was the only man in the room.

There are three takeaways:

1. Barack Obama, whether in his walled D.C. Kalorama home or in his coastal properties in Martha's Vineyard or Hawaii, is probably the one running the White House show.

2. Obama has signaled that Biden's presidency is over, making Biden toxic. That's the message Tucker Carlson drew, something he illustrated with clips showing Democrat media talking heads finally addressing Biden's economic failures:

3. Kamala Harris still thinks she has a shot at the presidency when (not if) Biden is removed. She was auditioning hard for the job, trying to show Obama that she'll do better than Biden at preserving and expanding the hard-left Obama legacy. However, Obama, who is an extremely smart politician, despite his ignorance and broken, Marxist moral compass, knows that Kamala is as bad as, or even worse than, Biden.

And that fact left me with an admittedly wild theory about how Obama may intend to fix things: Obama's aiming to get back into the Oval Office.

My premise is that Obama fully understands that, if Biden is ousted immediately under the 25th Amendment, there are only idiots and incompetents to take his place. If it's not Kamala Harris, then it's Nancy Pelosi and, if not her, then Patrick Leahy, Antony Blinken, Janet Yellen, Lloyd Austin, Merrick Garland... Obama knows none of these nonentities will secure the transformation he promised America. Instead, there are three steps to return Obama to the presidency:

1. Have the Democrat establishment remove Kamala Harris from office, whether through threats or bribes.

2. Have the Democrats declare that, because world instability (Ukraine, Putin, China) puts us at unprecedented risk, only a politically seasoned person can be vice president, with Obama graciously accepting that role.

3. Oust Biden using the 25th Amendment. And voila! President Obama (again). He can even have Stacey Abrams as his veep.

The 22nd Amendment does not bar Obama from regaining the presidency this way. It only stops him from being "elected to the office." The three steps above avoid an election.

Obama will then have two and a half years to lock down America's "fundamental transformation" into a fully socialized third-world country, and Biden has given him a head start when it comes to destroying institutions. Heck, if Obama does the job right, he can be the new Putin or Erdogan: America's president for life.

And yes, I agree this sounds crazy, but events since 2020 show that we really are nothing more than a fancy banana republic.

Image: Obama ignores Biden. Twitter screen grab.
Writing in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, University of Colorado assistant professor Steven Pittz examines the ideas of Russian geopolitical philosopher Alexander Dugin and speculates about their possible influence on the foreign policy of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Dugin's geopolitical ideas are in fact quite similar to those of Karl Haushofer, a German geopolitical theorist in the 1920s and 1930s who some claimed influenced the foreign policy of Adolf Hitler.

Dugin is the author of several books, including Foundations of Geopolitics (1997) and Last War of the World-Island (2015) (which I reviewed seven years ago in the Asian Review of Books), that portray international relations as a great global struggle between "Atlanticists" (led by the United States) and "Eurasianists" (led by Russia). Professor Pittz notes that Foundations of Geopolitics is a textbook at the Russian military academy and in Russia's state-run school system. The conflict between the West and Russia, Dugin writes, is both geopolitical and civilizational. Russia, he contends, is not part of a larger global civilization or Western civilization, but is its own civilization entitled to its own geographical "space." And that geographical space is Eurasia.

Dugin's Last War of the World-Island updated Foundations of Geopolitics and was written after Putin's aggression in Georgia but before his invasion of Crimea. In the book, Dugin praises Putin for acting to restore "Russia's territorial integrity" and claims that Putin's policies have "expressed the geopolitical, sociological, and ideological tendencies corresponding, mostly, to the main features ... and constants of Russian geopolitical history." And he is critical of both former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and former Russian president Boris Yeltsin for their unnecessary surrender to the West.

Dugin also harshly criticizes former Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev for losing China as an ally, something Putin has attempted to reverse with a considerable amount of success. Russia's defeat in the Cold War, Dugin writes, was a "monstrous geopolitical catastrophe." Putin has made similar comments. As Professor Pittz notes, "Putin's foreign policy ... often lines up with Dugin's geopolitical recommendations."

Dugin's Eurasianism borrows heavily from the geopolitical concepts of Britain's greatest geopolitical theorist, Sir Halford Mackinder, who identified Russia's geographical space as the "Heartland" of the Eurasian landmass. In Last War of the World-Island, Dugin defines Russian geopolitics as "the geopolitics of the Heartland." And the book's title includes Mackinder's concept of the "World-Island" (Eurasia-Africa), the control of which, Mackinder believed, meant world domination. Today's Russia, Dugin writes, "is the geopolitical heir to ... Kievan Rus, the Golden Horde, the Muscovite Tsardom, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union." "Kievan Rus," it is worth noting, is centered in Ukraine.

During the Second World War, there were several books and articles written in the United States and England (e.g., Andreas Dorpalen's The World of General Haushofer, Hans Weigert's Generals and Geographers) attempting to link Hitler's expansionist foreign policy to the ideas of German geopolitical theorist Karl Haushofer, who had served as a general in the First World War and founded the German "school" of Geopolitik, complete with a policy journal by that name, in the 1920s. Haushofer, like Dugin, borrowed geopolitical concepts from Mackinder. Haushofer and his intellectual disciples propagated spatial theories that were consistent with an expansionist foreign policy. Hitler was introduced to Haushofer by Rudolph Hess, and Haushofer's geopolitical worldview was similar to Dugin's Eurasianism  Haushofer applauded the Nazi-Soviet Pact but opposed Hitler's invasion of Soviet Russia.

The common themes of Dugin's and Haushofer's geopolitics are Eurasia against the West, land power against sea power. And just as Haushofer thought Germany and Russia should become and remain allies, Dugin thinks Russia and China should act in concert against their civilizational adversaries, which they appear to be doing today.

Historians and scholars still debate the extent, if any, of Haushofer's influence on Hitler. Professor Pittz writes that it is "unlikely that Putin makes his decisions with Dugin in mind." Putin's invasion of Ukraine may have nothing to do with Alexander Dugin's ideas, but it would be careless of us to ignore the possibility that Putin shares Dugin's vision of Eurasianism and acts in accordance with that shared worldview.

Image: Tasnim News Agency.
Horning in on Florida's democratic process, Disney has made a spectacle of itself by effectively declaring itself a political organization intending to work for the rescission of Florida's parental rights law. That's the falsely labeled "don't say gay" law, which is actually about not teaching sex of any kind to children under the age of eight. Contrary to what the Hollywood elites claim, there is no reference in the law to the word "gay." That hasn't stopped the loud statements and misinformation coming out of Disney's top executives, who vow to step up their LGBTQ+ offerings to the American public, exclaimed that they would work as activists to end the law, and have gotten into a war of words with Florida's popular governor.

But there are signs that that noisy wokester stance is not going over well with Disney's 77,000-plus employees at its Orlando theme park, and that spells trouble for the wokesters running Disney.

According to the Daily Caller:

Employees at Disney are revolting against the company's opposition to a parental rights law in Florida, a congressional candidate told Fox News. "The vast majority of Disney workers support the Parental Rights in Education Bill," Castillo posted on Twitter last week. "They may be a silent majority, but they'll be sending a loud message on Election Day." "There is certainly pressure mounting within Disney," Jose Castillo said during a Fox News appearance Saturday. "At some point I believe Disney executives will have to respond."

The Caller notes that Twitter star Jack Posobiec posted some internal bulletin board messages from Disney employees upset at the company's wokester stance as well. The tweets can be read here.

I did some digging of my own on what kind of people might be working at Disney World in Florida, given that Castillo is a pol running for office and might be over-reading things, and the bulletin boards might contain the words of the most vociferous employees.

What did I find? That, very likely, the worker discontent at Disney World is real.

The first thing you find about the place when you do a Google search is that the theme park has many dedicated, committed employees, with a number of them reaching the 50-year mark for service to the enterprise.

NPR did a spread late last year about at least three workers who've gotten their 50-year pin from the company and who are happy about their life choices:

The employees who make up the 50-year club say the theme park resort has allowed them to grow their careers and try on new hats. Kalogridis worked his way up to be president of Walt Disney World and Disneyland in California. Milam went from a warehouse worker to a buyer of spare parts for rides and shows.

They aren't the only ones. Here's another local account about some other lifers at the outfit.

This is not to say that the place is an old people's club, however. A look at the Indeed.com job reviews at Disney theme parks, and other accounts of Disney World employees describing what they like and don't like about their jobs suggest that there are lots of fresh-faced young workers out of high school who took various Disney jobs on a lark, worked themselves hard at them, then left for better jobs elsewhere say they are pretty happy about their experiences. This worker here said it was indeed supportive and like a family.

Another thing that stood out was that there was a pretty strong culture of excellence, of telling a happy story to guests and giving these customers the best experience as a priority and that was more important than anything. That's quite hard work.

So in general, it's not a miserable place, and many workers do like what they are doing and take pride in it

However, it's not without some real-world problems. Florida, for one, has seen humongous growth as citizens flee blue states and come to Florida. That's driven up real estate prices, pricing many lower-wage workers out of affordable housing and forcing them to drive long commutes, sometimes sleeping in their cars. Various accounts suggest that they feel exploited, particularly since Disney has made double-digit billions in net income and high profits and they are struggling even though they are working to exhaustion. Many have young families to support.

Wages have been forced higher, and at Disney World, they are now at $15 an hour minimum. But the Orlando area does have the lowest average worker wages of any theme park area according to one chart.

And various accounts show that the theme park has a union, a sign of some bad management practices in the past right there.

All of these little details suggest a rather conservative workforce, actually  the pride of their jobs, the culture of excellence, the realities of being a low-wage theme park worker working long hours and feeling powerless, making little money, and having to deal with huge cost increases and wokester preaching. It does rather suggest that the workers' interests at Disney are a bit different from the Disney elite's interests. These workers are the Florida population, after all, and theme park employment is the Orlando area's top type of employment.

Sure enough, there are signs of discontent at the new wokesterliness. Here's one Indeed.com review written a few days ago worth looking at:

Which pretty well tells what at least some of the sentiment is. The reality is, Disney World employees are not "cast members" or other Hollywood figures, but actual employees doing a demanding job and struggling against high costs of living and wokester corporate values that come from being excluded from consideration. That's a pretty strong signal of a conservative workforce  you want a workforce that shows up to work on time, employs a culture of excellence, and doesn't try to scam the system, you will probably end up with a conservative workforce.

That's obvious enough in the various signs seen, which signals that Disney may not only face a consumer boycott and an adversarial Florida legislator and governor, but an employee revolt. Sound like a good corporate practice? The wokesters in charge never consider such things, but perhaps elections in the wake of Florida's enormously popular parental rights bill will get their attention.

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.
Now that Joe Biden's touting Obamacare and bringing President Obama along for the ride at the White House, the media still act as though Obamacare were great even though Obama and others continuously lied to get it passed and then lied about the results.

It's par for the course because they are such a dishonest crew.

The media also are a great supporter of Obama and Biden, as they lied to get the deals done with Iran, which continues to support terrorists and continues to pledge death to America

The media act as though it were treasonous to oppose election results and that no one did it before Trump. Yet they always support Democrats who challenged results in 2000, 2004, and 2016 in Congress. The media and other Democrats called Trump an illegitimate president for four years. They impeached him twice for pure garbage.

The media and others spread the lie that a white cop shot Michael Brown when his hands were up, and he was backing away. How many cops have been injured and killed because of this intentional lie? How much anti-cop rhetoric came about because of this lie? How much has crime gone up throughout the country because of lies implying that white cops indiscriminately kill blacks?

'Hands up, don't shoot' was built on a lie - The Washington Post

The media were a major participant in spreading the lies about Russian collusion for years.

They sought to destroy white Christian boys for the crime of wearing MAGA hats.

Biden and others have continuously lied that Trump never condemned extremists. Not once have social media outlets and others silenced these lies, which are meant to gin up racist hate against Trump.

Biden started his campaign with this lie and repeated the lie at a NATO meeting, yet the sycophant media continually support this incompetent, serial liar.

Trump did condemn white supremacists, too bad so many people won't listen

Can we once and for all kill off the distortion that Donald Trump called white supremacists very fine people? In the very same comments people are always quoting from, Virginia, Trump said, "I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists."

...and...

Biden REPEATS claim that Trump called neo-Nazis 'good people' after the Charlottesville riot in NATO speech hinting he wants a rematch in 2024

...and...

Joe Biden launched his campaign by lying about Donald Trump

Revenues have risen substantially since Trump's tax rate cuts passed, yet the media and other Democrats intentionally lie that the rate cuts have cost the government trillions. Biden and others continually lie that the rich pay lower tax rates than people in the middle class. The media never silence these liars because they are also campaigning for higher tax rates.

The media, Biden, and others continually claim that voter integrity laws are like Jim Crow laws, and the lies are meant to gin up racial hate. There is nothing racist about requiring photo IDs to vote.

The media and other Democrats know that election officials in many states broke election laws yet continually lie when they say the 2020 election was clean.

Poor Chris Wallace left Fox to go to the lying CNN because he said people at Fox no longer cared about the truth about the election and what he continually calls the insurrection, which even the FBI says was not an insurrection. The problem with people like Wallace is that they are very confused as to what is the truth.

Think of the field day that late-night talk show hosts would have making fun of Biden and Kamala if they were comedians instead of partisan hacks, or campaign workers, pushing the leftist agenda to destroy America.

They just can't help themselves.

Image: FreeSVG, public domain.
South Africa: North West to build 97 houses for military veterans

The North West Human Settlements department has committed to build 97 houses for the military veterans in the province.

The project, which is expected to start in a few months, was revealed during the Military Veterans Housing Programme Project Steering Committee meeting, held recently in Mahikeng.

The meeting was held to give an update on the provinces performance in implementing the programme.

Currently, the province has zero percent housing delivery for military veterans and the allocation of stands by the municipalities, including bulk infrastructure and state of readiness, are amongst other challenges experienced since 2020.

This was due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other administrative challenges.

In his presentation, Deputy Director of Peoples Housing Project and military veterans from the national Department of Human Settlements, Jacky Mamabolo expressed concern about the poor performance of the department in the past two years.

Mamabolo urged the province to put military veterans projects at the helm in the new financial year. He noted that the department has identified such projects as one of the priority projects that can be implemented immediately, as part of the recovery plan in the 2022/2023 financial year.

He also advised the provincial department to ensure that it implements the projects that meet the requirements and specification of military housing project.

This will avoid putting the projects that are not ready for implementation on the business plan, and thus painting a negative picture when such projects cannot kick start. As a result, this would affect service delivery as planned targets would not be met, Mamabolo said.

Provincial Coordinator for the Military Veterans Housing Programme, Orapeleng Tabile, acknowledged the challenges experienced for the period under review.

He said this was informed by various setbacks, including unavailability of serviced stands where approved beneficiaries should build houses and the unavailability of geotechnical investigation reports for the areas or villages where construction of houses should happen.

Tabile also noted that the department has managed to fast track the appointment of a contractor in the Moses Kotane Local Municipality, where six houses would be constructed for approved beneficiaries.

He said the process of a contractors appointment is also at an advanced stage for Ganyesa and Lethabong in Rustenburg.

The department is working closely with the Department of Military Veterans on a strategy to communicate with the military veterans who qualify for housing to avoid miscommunication and lack of feedback from the department, as well as to update them on developments in terms of the housing project, said Tabile.

Meanwhile, the Departments of Human Settlements and Military Veterans have warned people posing as military veterans and applying for houses in municipalities to refrain from doing so.

The departments have also agreed that a list of legible beneficiaries be recorded by the Military Veterans Department.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2022-04-06. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Trade sanctions against Russia drives up Canadian export values: statistics

Xinhua) 08:27, April 06, 2022

OTTAWA, April 5 (Xinhua) -- The various trade sanctions against Russia indirectly drove up Canadian export values with higher demand and substantial price increases, Statistics Canada said Tuesday, publishing trade data in February with crude oil contributing the most to the export growth.

According to Statistics Canada data, total trade (exports plus imports) with Russia was 2.8 billion Canadian dollars (2.2 billion U.S. dollars) in 2021, representing 0.2 percent of Canadian trade activity. As a result, the direct impact of the various trade sanctions imposed by a number of countries against Russia is minimal for Canadian merchandise trade values.

As Russia produces goods that are also produced in large quantities in Canada (crude oil, natural gas, grains, lumber, metals, fertilizer, etc.), export values could be indirectly affected by higher demand and substantial price increases, given the consequences of the conflict on the future supply of these goods, Statistics Canada explained.

In February, total exports increased 2.8 percent to a record 58.7 billion Canadian dollars (47 billion U.S. dollars). Exports of energy products rose 7.8 percent to a record 15.4 billion Canadian dollars (12.3 billion U.S. dollars), accounting for 26.2 percent of total exports, an increase of more than 6 percentage points from the share of 19.7 percent observed in February 2021.

Export values of crude oil jumped by 9.9 percent, contributing the most to the growth, largely due to higher prices. The volume of crude oil exports increased 3.9 percent in February, following a decrease of 6.5 percent in January.

Statistics Canada said the imbalance between supply and demand that has persisted for several months, in addition to the uncertainty surrounding the future supply of crude oil due to rising tensions between Russia and Ukraine in late February, is among the causes of the increase in crude oil prices.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
Vladimir Putin and his generals never thought the Ukrainians would fight this hard and long. Putin thought this invasion and takeover would be over in a week.

In many ways, it reminds me of our American Revolution and King George III. The British never imagined that the conflict would last nearly a decade and peace would finally prevail. The tenacity of the American colonists astounded the British commanders. So, too, the Russians.

When war was declared on Britain in 1775, the British troops were much better equipped, had vastly superior weaponry, and were much larger in numbers.

Historically, Ukraine had been treated like a colony since its existence into the Russian orbit in the mid 18th century, exploited for its resources, and its people often treated like second class citizens.

Today, the Ukrainian forces, scattered and with many ordinary citizens taking up arms, have taken to guerrilla tactics, just as the American colonist-soldiers fought the British forces against overwhelming odds.

The United States and other nations, as did France and Spain in the American Revolution, have supplied the Ukrainians with arms and supplies to defend their homeland with stubborn and effective success.

The British, during the American Revolution, employed Hessian (German) soldiers to supplement their forces, just as the Russians are now asking Syrian mercenaries to do.

The Russians have ravaged Ukrainian cities, as did the British burning towns during the Revolution.

However, the Ukrainians have not given up, just as the American colonists fought on in the darkest of times.

The American Revolution ended only when the British forces were effectively cut off at sea by the French fleet and the surrounding American forces at Yorktown. Unfortunately, the Ukrainians have no such naval support in the Crimea.

Legend holds that as the British marched out to surrender at Yorktown, the British fifes and drums played "The World Turned Upside Down." How fitting.

Is Volodymyr Zelensky the George Washington of Ukraine? Yes.

In the interim, the United States and NATO must do more for the Ukrainians, covertly or overtly.

In today's conflict, economic sanctions imposed on Russia can work only if all of the loopholes are cut off, especially with oil and natural gas.

Bottom Line: The fight in Ukraine is the watershed event for Vladimir Putin if he fails to take over. It could mean the end of his reign, or at least the end of the expansion of the Russian state. The United States and NATO must hold firm and re-establish NATO's relevancy in Europe against Russian expansion.

Image: The Presidential Administration of Ukraine via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
As the ugly confirmation fight continues on whether to advance Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court, Senator Mitt Romney announced his support for her nomination. He noted that "in her previous confirmation vote, I had concerns about whether or not she was in the mainstream." After spending a few hours visiting with her and reviewing her congressional testimony, he decided that she was in the mainstream.

He apparently thought differently about Brown when he voted against her confirmation for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. His surprise reversal now is due to this explanation: "I did not have the occasion to sit down with her last year." Now he notes that she is a fine jurist and a person of integrity with family values. Other prominent Republican lawyers and judges have noted that "no serious person can question her qualifications to the Court and to my mind her judicial philosophy is well within the mainstream." This is most interesting, as last year, Judge Jackson told the Senate Judiciary Committee, "I do not have a judicial philosophy, per se."

The problem for conservative Republicans is that the word "mainstream" has become meaningless. For them, "mainstream" is a euphemism for "everything has moved leftward." In fact, "mainstream media" in itself is a trigger term for conservative disgust and anger.

The following positions and philosophies are considered mainstream: pro-choice, the 2020 election was the most secure in history, white people are racist  either overtly or subconsciously, gender binary is a "problematic notion," American culture is hopelessly flawed and needs to be replaced...to name just a few.

The other senator from Utah, Mike Lee, sees Judge Jackson in a different light. He feels that her judicial record is "disturbing" and "troubling," citing the fact that she imposed lesser sentences in child pornography cases and in a child rape case, departing from federal sentencing guidelines. She also acted outside her jurisdiction. As Senator Lee said, "[t]hey told us to look at judicial philosophy, but Judge Jackson said she doesn't have one. They leaned on her record, but what we have of her record is troubling. They said to look at her answers, but she didn't answer basic questions (i.e., What is a Woman?) and endorsed judicial activism." And so it goes with the dueling senators from a red state!

Victor Davis Hanson said it most eloquently when he opined: "We are in a veritable war of competing visions. The strife inside the two parties is irrelevant when compared to the larger existential war for the soul of America." Therefore, it was appropriate for President Trump to fight back with a litany of executive orders to reverse a dangerous leftward trend. To stand on ceremony and say that "this is the job of Congress" doesn't work when Congress is broken and deadlocked.

Likewise, the situation in America is too serious to disregard the judicial philosophies and political leanings of those being considered for the highest court in the nation. Yes, it supposedly used to be that only one's qualifications were the standard to determine eligibility for the Supreme Court  and this according to Romney, who rues the fact that we have strayed from that standard. News flash to Senator Romney: The departure from this standard was blatantly obvious in the opposition of Democrats to the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork in 1987. Bork was considered "too extreme" and out of the "mainstream."

As William Kristol noted, "in the area of constitutionalism, conservative goals have been thwarted, and the key moment of failure, from which conservative constitutional jurisprudence has never recovered, was the Bork defeat in 1987. For the last 18 years, constitutional jurisprudence has continued to drift away from a sound constitutionalism based on the written Constitution and a proper deference to popular self-government in many areas of public life. Bork's defeat was both a cause and a symbol of this continued downward drift." Kristol noted this in 2005. The drift is even greater now.

Somewhere, somehow, Republican elected officials need to stand up for core principles and philosophies. This should trump any concern about being in the "mainstream." There was no muscle movement from the top echelon in addressing the abundant evidence of fraud and illegalities in the 2020 election. Senator Rand Paul asked the question in 2018: "Are most Republicans really pro-life? Of course, they campaign as such, but how often is that more of an attempt to get votes or raise money than being serious about doing something about it?" How serious are Republicans about reducing government spending? Not very, according to a Hill-HarrisX survey in 2019.

History has shown that once justices get on the bench if they drift, it always is to the left, not the right. This should be a serious warning to elected Republican officials such as Senator Romney. He thinks he can afford to take the noble high road, stand on ceremony, and go along to get along. He may be "fiddling while Rome burns." Apparently, being in the mainstream is all that matters.

In the words of Rebecca Solnit, "to say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision, but only an inversion of the mainstream's 'everything's fine.'"

Rebecca Behrends, M.D. is a retired E.D. physician and vice president of research for Michigan Citizens for Election Integrity (MC4EI.com).

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Cash App, the mobile payment app developed by California-based financial services company Block, has suffered a data breach. In an SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) filing Monday, the company disclosed that a former employee stole a huge amount of customer data. This breach affects 8.2 million current and former Cash App customers in the US.

Block confirms Cash App data breach

According to the SEC filing, the Cash App data breach took place on December 10, 2021. The stolen information includes the full name of customers and their brokerage account numbers. The latter is a unique identification number associated with a customers stock activity in Cash App. Some customers also had their brokerage portfolio value, brokerage portfolio holdings, and/or stock trading activity for one trading day stolen by the former Cash App employee.

Block confirmed that no personally identifiable information such as usernames, passwords, Social Security numbers, date of birth, payment card information, addresses, and bank account information was compromised. This data breach also did not include any security code, access code, or password that customers used to access their Cash App accounts.

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Interestingly, the ex-employee had access to all of the information they stole as part of their job responsibilities when working at Cash App. However, the person accessed the servers and downloaded customer data without permission after they had left the company. This is carelessness on the companys part. It shouldnt have allowed a former employee to access its servers.

Its unclear how long the person had access to the data before Cash App got to know of the breach. The company doesnt tell if there has been any misuse of the stolen data.

Cash App is contacting the affected customers

Cash App (formerly Square Cash) started as a peer-to-peer payment app in 2013. Over the years, it has added more functionalities, including stocks and Bitcoin trading. The service is available in the UK and the US. In September 2021, the company reported 70 million annual transacting users. Time will tell if this data breach affects its growth.

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As said earlier, this breach only compromised the data of US customers. Cash App has begun contacting the 8.2 million affected customers. The company is notifying them about the incident and helping them with further steps. It has also launched an investigation into the matter and has notified law enforcement and applicable regulatory authorities of the same. Cash App is taking the help of a leading forensics firm in this investigation.
For the past several years, Samsung has used two different chipsets in its Galaxy S and now-discontinued Galaxy Note series flagships. Buyers in some markets get the companys in-house Exynos processor while in some others, the devices come with Qualcomms Snapdragon SoCs. The Korean brand gets a lot of flak for this but it continued with the strategy this year too. However, for better or worse, things may change drastically from next year. The Galaxy S23 series could come with MediaTek chipsets in some markets, Korean media reports. Even the Galaxy S22 FE could get MediaTek processors.

Samsung to switch to MediaTek chipsets for the Galaxy S23 and Galaxy S22 FE

According to a Business Korea report, Samsung is planning to use MediaTeks flagship Dimensity series processors in the Galaxy S23 series next year. This change is for the Asian market, the report says. Most Asian countries got Snapdragon-powered Galaxy S22 phones this year. While the Europen units came with an Exynos processor, the US and Canada got Snapdragon too. The remaining markets were also divided between the two processors.

Going by this, the Galaxy S23 would come in three processor variants  Dimensity in Asia, Exynos in Europe, and Snapdragon in the US and Canada. But we suspect that would be the case. Instead, Samsung could be looking to ditch Exynos processors for good and use Snapdragon and Dimensity chipsets.

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Exynos chipsets have historically underperformed their Snapdragon counterparts, so wed say its a welcome change. If Samsung has to use two chipsets in the Galaxy S23 series, it better be Dimensity and Snapdragon. The Dimensity 9000 has impressed in power efficiency and performance this year when both Exynos 2200 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 havent lived up to expectations.

Perhaps Samsung is to blame for the poor performance of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. The Qualcomm chipset is fabricated on the Korean firms 4nm process node. MediaTek, on the other hand, had the Dimensity 9000 manufactured by TSMC, whose chip tech has always had a competitive edge over Samsungs.

Is Samsung Exynos on the way out?

Samsung has been making Exynos processors for several years now. The company mostly uses the chipsets in its own smartphones but also sells some of those to others. However, not all Galaxy smartphones feature Exynos chipsets. Perhaps Samsung is now increasingly using MediaTek processors in its budget and mid-range offerings. And come 2023, flagship Galaxy devices will also get MediaTek chipsets.

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Well, this shift will begin later this year with the Galaxy S22 FE. According to the new report, half of the upcoming Fan Edition (FE) phones will use a MediaTek processor. It is expected to launch in the second half of 2022, so we might be looking at the Dimensity 9000 SoC. The Galaxy S23 series, meanwhile, could get the Taiwanese chipmakers next-gen flagship offering.

This shift would mean a massive loss of business for Samsungs foundry division. Perhaps, if the company doesnt bounce back with a much-improved product soon, it may very well spell the end of the Exynos processor lineup. Its market share has been on a downward spiral lately. Samsung is working on 3nm chips using the GAA (Gate All Around) design that is said to bring massive performance and efficiency improvements. Hopefully, it will live up to expectations.

Having multiple players in the market increases competition, which is good for consumers. But Samsung needs to make a product that can compete against its rivals. Time will tell whether the Korean brands Exynos processors would live on.
Qualcomm may soon launch a new mid-range smartphone processor. The company hasnt officially confirmed this, but the said chipset has leaked in great detail on the Chinese social network Weibo (via). According to the well-known tipster Digital Chat Station, it will be a Snapdragon 7 series chipset featuring ARMs v8 architecture.

This octa-core processor will have four ARM Cortex-A710 CPU cores clocked at 2.36GHz and four Cortex-A510 cores at 1.80GHz. For graphics, it will feature the Adreno 662 GPU. Samsung will reportedly manufacture this chipset using its 4nm fabrication process.

This processor could sit just below the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1

Based on the leaked specs, this upcoming Snapdragon 7 series chipset could be Qualcomms best premium mid-range offering yet. It could sit just below the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 flagship in the companys pecking order. If you recall, the latter features the Cortex-A710 and Cortex-A510 CPU cores. But it trades one Cortex-A710 core for the much more powerful Cortex-X2 core.

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As in the Snapdragon 7 series, Qualcomms latest offering is the Snapdragon 778G. It is a 6nm processor, so the upcoming chipset (4nm) will have a clear advantage over it in terms of power efficiency. ARMs newer Cortex-A710 and Cortex-A510 CPU cores should also bring improvements in overall performance from Cortex-A78 and Cortex-A55 cores. The GPU is more powerful too (Adreno 662 vs Adreno 642L).

All in all, this unannounced Qualcomm chipset should bring improvements all-around over the Snapdragon 778G. Hopefully, Samsungs inferior chip tech wont affect its performance. The Korean firm has been finding it difficult to match TSMCs power efficiency and thermal management capabilities.

When will this Snapdragon 7 series processor launch?

Its been almost a year since Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 778G, its last premium mid-range processor. Launched in May last year, it got a plus upgrade in October. So its about time we get a successor to it.

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Unfortunately, the company hasnt confirmed the existence of any new Snapdragon 7 series processor yet. The American chip giant is reportedly also readying the plus upgrade of its Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 flagship processor launched late last year. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1+ could go official as early as May. So going by all this, it should be a safe bet to assume that the upcoming Snapdragon 7 series chipset would also arrive alongside it.

As for the name, we expect Qualcomm to call this unannounced chipset Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 based on its recently revamped branding scheme. We will let you know as and when we have more information.
Hungary summons Ukraine ambassador, stop insulting Budapest Kyiv to "take note of the will of the Hungarian people"

(ANSA) - BELGRADE, APR 6 - Ukraine's ambassador in Budapest has been summoned to the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and he was delivered the message that "it is time for the Ukrainian leaders to stop insulting Hungary and to take note of the will of the Hungarian people," the Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said, quoted on Twitter by the international spokesman of the Hungarian government, Zoltan Kovacs.



"We have been clear from the very beginning about the war in the neighboring country: we condemn military aggression, we stand by Ukraine's sovereignty, we have admitted hundreds of thousands of refugees who are running for their lives," Szijjarto said. "This is not our war, so we want to stay out of it and we will stay out of it," he said, adding that the government is not willing to risk the peace and security of the Hungarian people," the Hungarian Foreign Minister added.



"We understand that the Ukrainians would have had a different interest, and we are not going to argue with them: their interest is the Ukrainian interest, and ours is the interest of the Hungarian people," Szijjarto said. (ANSA).





 Copyright ANSA - All rights reserved
Deal signed between Italian ANSA and Slovakia TASR Mutual use of each other's news service in English, photographs

(ANSA) - ROME, APR 6 - The News Agency of the Slovak Republic (TASR) signed an agreement with the Italian ANSA news agency to enable the mutual use of each other's news service in English and photographs, TASR reported today. The deal was inked in Bratislava by the chief executive officers of TASR and ANSA, Vladimir Puchala and Stefano De Alessandri. The Italian Ambassador to Slovakia Catherine Flumiani attended, TASR informed.



"It's an honour for us to collaborate with ANSA, a major and internationally respected agency," said the TASR chief executive officers Vladimir Puchala, quoted by TASR. (ANSA).





 Copyright ANSA - All rights reserved
Eurox Group raises 4.4M at a significant premium enabling targeted investment

 Portuguese Iberis Capital becomes a new institutional investor

4.4 million in new capital raised by EUROX

Eurox welcomes a new institutional investor Iberis, a leading Portuguese private equity manager with 2 million of new capital to underscore its commitment to its investment in Portugal as a botanical and pharmaceutical research and innovation center in Europe

EUROX is well-capitalised for completion of its state-of-the-art Portuguese facility

With the confidence of its investors in its strategy, EUROX is poised to further accelerate its unique pharmaceutical product development pipeline to secure its position over the long term

Berlin, Germany  As one of the leading European vertically-integrated companies developing and manufacturing cannabis based medicines, Eurox Group, based in Hesse, Germany, has successfully fundraised 4,4 Million from new and existing investors at an approximate 62% premium to its July 2021 fundraise. 2 million has been subscribed by a new institutional investor, Iberis Bluetech Fund, a fund managed by Iberis Capital (Iberis), a leading private equity manager in Portugal with over 250 million of assets under management. Iberis investment is by way of a secured convertible loan note (CLN) and marks its first investment into the medical cannabis sector. The addition of Iberis as an institutional investor emphasizes the critical role that Portugal plays in Eurox business strategy as well as its commitment to pharmaceutical development.

Bernhard Babel, Co-CEO of EUROX, commented: We are delighted to have achieved this milestone and to welcome Iberis Capital to our circle of investors. This will enable us to intensify our product development pathway and to guarantee patients with unmet medical need the highest European quality standards along the entire value chain. We at Eurox look forward to completing our Portuguese facility and engaging with the innovative research community there to expand our product portfolio of independently tested and regulator-approved cannabis-based medicines.

In August of 2021 Eurox began distribution of the first Made in Germany standardised cannabis extracts and APIs in the German market. In the short time since launch, investor confidence in Eurox has grown as the company successively expands its sales and distribution channels to achieve a solid market position while maintaining a clear focus on innovation and product development and delivering cost efficiency. We expect to see revenues increase and the development pipeline grow.

Luis Quaresma, Partner at Iberis Capital commented: It is a pleasure to support Eurox in the development of research & development capacity at their Portuguese operation. This includes exciting new areas such as plant genetics research, product extraction processes and molecular and biological applications. We look forward to participating in the project of establishing Eurox as a European leader in cannabis-based medicines.

About Eurox Group:

Eurox Group, based in Germany with production facilities in Bensheim, Hesse, is one of Europe's leading suppliers of high-quality medical cannabis products. The company was founded in 2019. Its focus is on the production of prescription cannabis extracts. At Eurox, the entire value chain is in one hand - from cultivation of the plants in Portugal to processing in Germany. To ensure the efficacy and quality of its products, the company invests a third of its budget in research and development. Eurox also works closely with the Institute of Pharmaceutical Biology at the University of Frankfurt. Eurox maintains an exclusive, long-term contract and manufacturing agreement for cannabis products with Dr. Reckeweg & Co. GmbH. The EU-GMP certified German pharmaceutical company has over 75 years of experience in manufacturing plant-based medicines.

About Iberis Capital: Iberis Capital is a Portuguese private equity fund manager founded in 2017. Iberis operates in three investment areas: Innovation & Technology, Growth & Buyout and Yielding Investments. Currently Iberis Capital has over 250M AuM and a diversified investor base, with more than 500 investors. Since its inception, Iberis Capital funds have demonstrated solid performances, generating attractive returns for the institutional, corporate and private investors that trust Iberis their investments.

Contact:

Johannes Soller

Kurfurstendamm 195

10117 Berlin

press@eurox-group.de

+49 30 40817037

www.eurox-pharma.com/news-de

PRESS RELEASE - Editorial responsibility news aktuell
ROME - A rare Michelangelo sketch will go on sale at Christie's in Paris on May 18, the auction house said Tuesday.



The "exceptionally rare" drawing is 'Young Male Nude (after Masaccio)', one of the few sketches by the Sistine Chapel master still in private hands.



It is believed to have been executed by the Renaissance great at the start of his career.



It will be put up for auction in the auction titled "Maitres anciens et du XIXe siecle", with an estimate of some 30 million euros after travelling to Hong Kong and New York over the next few weeks.



The sketch comes from a private French collection and was originally classed as a national treasures and banned from being exported for around 30 months.



But the French government recently lifted the ban, Christie's said.
BEIRUT - The letter 'Z' signalling support for Russian military operations in Ukraine has appeared prominently in recent hours on Russian tanks involved in operations in northeastern Syria, according to eyewitnesses cited Wednesday by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).



The sources said that, during a Russian military patrol in the northeast Syria area of Tell Tamer, several tanks had the letter 'Z' on them.



The letter is apparently from the expression "Za Pobedu" ("for victory" in Russian) and has been used frequently for propaganda and morale-raising purposes in Russia.



Russia has had an active military presence in Syria officially since the autumn of 2015 in support of the disputed president, Bashar al-Assad.




TUNIS - The Tunisian foreign ministry has expressed its "astonishment" at the Turkish president's statements on Tunisia, calling them "unacceptable interference into domestic affairs".



He added that this "interference" ran "entirely against the friendship ties binding the two countries and the two populations as well as the principle of reciprocal respect in state relations".



The foreign minister's statement was in relation to remarks made on Tuesday by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan on recent developments in Tunisia in which he stated that President Kais Saied's decree dissolving parliament last week was a "smearing of democracy" and a blow to the will of the Tunisian people.



The foreign ministry reiterated that "Tunisia affirms its keenness on close relations with friendly countries but adheres to the independence of its decision and rejects interference in its sovereignty", stressing that it would continue moving forward on its "democratic path".



"Tunisia is a free and independent country in which the population is in control of its future and is the only one able to decide on the path to ensure its true freedom," the statement said.



"Tunisia preserves the security and dignity of the population, it supports their rights, valorises its successes, and breaks with the past and its formal democracy that has nothing to do with the will of Tunisians," the ministry said.



The decree to dissolve the Tunisian parliament is a blow to the will of the Tunisian people and a "smearing of democracy", Erdogan was quoted by the daily Sabah as saying on Tuesday.



"Dissolving parliament where there are elected officials is concerning for the future of Tunisia and is a blow to the will of the people," he added, calling for a transition based on democracy respecting all of society and the parliament as an institution.
The number of heads of state and former prime ministers across the world backing calls for an international tribunal to try Vladimir Putin over the war in Ukraine has reached 50.

A petition supporting the move has topped 1.5 million, it was revealed on Wednesday.

Former UK prime minister Gordon Brown, one of those calling for a tribunal, said there had to be a clear path to bring the Russian leader to justice.

Gordon Brown (Nick Ansell/PA)

Last week the United Nations human rights body appointed a commission to investigate accusations of war crimes committed in Russias invasion of Ukraine, and identify those responsible.

The Justice for Ukraine campaign announced that 50 former world leaders have signed a proposal to create an international tribunal to try Mr Putin and those accountable for the crime of aggression.

They said a trial, similar to the Nuremberg trials, would act in addition to war crimes investigations by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Mr Brown said earlier: Now that crimes revealed at Bucha and Mariupol and elsewhere in Ukraine have shocked the world, we must set a clear path that brings Putin to justice.

We are delighted to have received the support of 50 former heads of state and prime ministers who have now signed up to support our petition.

Our petition with @Avaaz to put Putin on Trial has just hit over 1.5million signatures. To sign, visit: https://t.co/PUaC1KEKv8  Justice for Ukraine (@Justice4Ukr) April 5, 2022

Nearly 1.5 million people have signed it, an extraordinary sign of resolution from people across the world.

What started off as a European project has now won support from every continent, with backing for a special tribunal from former heads of state and prime ministers in Australia, Canada and across Latin America.

It reflects the widespread global revulsion at the war crimes committed against Ukraine by Russian forces.

At the request of Ukraine, our petition proposes that the ICC sets up a special tribunal to probe the crime of aggression by Putin and his associates.

Doing so will show that the international community is prepared to do whatever it takes to hold him to account for his actions.
The Duchess of Sussex has urged the public to support an animal welfare charity after announcing her time as its patron has ended.

Meghan served a three-year term as the figure head of Mayhew, which she championed during her time in the UK and after stepping down as a working royal and moving with Harry to California in 2020.

Howard Bridges, Mayhews chief executive, said we have mutually agreed to end the patronage, which expired at the beginning of the year, but said the duchess would continue to support their ambitions.

The Duchess of Sussex meets Maggi a Jack Russell during a visit to Mayhew in 2019 (Eddie Mulholland/Daily Telegraph/PA)

In a message posted on the charitys website, the duchess wrote: Though my time as patron of Mayhew has come to a close, my unwavering support has not.

I encourage each of you to support in whatever way you are able.

The emotional support of a rescue animal is unparalleledas youll soon realise: it is not you who saves them, it is they who save you.

The charity was founded in 1886 and today sees itself as an animal welfare social worker, keeping cats and dogs, whether family pets or companions for the homeless, safe and well alongside their owners, and supporting communities.

It has a pet refuge service in London, provides vet services to vulnerable owners and has a team of animal welfare officers who work with local residents helping local communities and also has operations abroad in places like Afghanistan and India.

The duchess has adopted a number of rescue dogs over the past few years including a Guy, a Beagle, and the Sussexes also have a black Labrador thought to be named Pula.

Meghan became friends with another dog  a Jack Russell called Minnie at the Mayhew (Eddie Mulholland/Daily Telegraph/PA)

Meghan reveals in her message her dear friend animal behaviourist Oli Juste, who introduced her to Mayhew, died unexpectedly in January but there will be a lasting legacy to him.

She said: In his memory, we will be creating the Oli Juste wing at Mayhew, to shelter the animals who may have a harder time finding their forever homes.

Because much like Oli, they will never be forgotten, and they will always be loved.

Mayhews chief executive said: It has been an incredible privilege for Mayhew to have worked closely with Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, since 2019 when she became our Royal patron for a three-year term.

It has been a busy and productive three years together where we have gained so much from her kind support.

As we look to the future, Mayhew has launched an exciting new strategy to maximise our critical animal welfare work.

Our Royal Patronage with The Duchess of Sussex came to an end at the beginning of the year. It's been an incredible privilege for Mayhew to have worked closely with Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex, since 2019 when she became our Patron. Full statement: https://t.co/dzSh7z9bTO. pic.twitter.com/RgdgwgqbQ5  Mayhew  (@themayhew) April 6, 2022

Although we have mutually agreed to end the patronage, as a committed rescue pet parent, the duchess will continue to support Mayhew and champion our ambitions.

The duchess has generously made a donation in memory of her much-loved friend Oli Juste, the well-known dog trainer and behaviourist, and we are naming a wing in his honour at our London rehoming centre.
Peers faced calls to raise their hands if they had been stopped and searched by the police, as they debated plans for new voter ID to enter a polling station.

Independent crossbench peer Lord Woolley of Woodford asked peers to raise their hands as he questioned whether the new identification requirement in the Elections Bill would be abused by the authorities to target people from BAME backgrounds.

Lord Woolley, founder and director of the campaign group Operation Black Vote, told peers: When people talk about identification cards, ID cards, let me ask you in this House straight, how many of you here, raise your hands, have been stopped and searched by the police?

Several peers could be heard telling him you cant do that, but others around the House raised their hands, including Lord Woolley himself.

Lord Woolley also raised his own hand after asking: How many of you here have been stopped and stripped-searched?

The peer then addressed laughter that could be heard in the chamber, saying: I am sorry if you find this funny, my lord, this really isnt funny. You ask Child Q if it is funny. Ask her.

Lord Woolley (David Johnson/Homerton College Cambridge/PA)

Lord Woolley also contested claims by Conservative former minister Baroness Verma, who said she had spent weeks talking to people from all backgrounds in Leicester, including black, Asian, minority ethnic and poor communities, and not one had objected to the plans for a voter ID card.

He said: Because our worry, Baroness Verma, in the hands of the authority, that they will use identification cards to target us, because that is our lived experience, and so we worry. We worry will it be abused?

Will we be harassed and humiliated?

I know it is a digression but the subject came up and I wanted to knock it on its head.

I am also from Leicester and I know the young Africans and Muslims there and they are worried about what we do here.

He concluded: That is why I am worried, that is why I have been worried about photo ID. I want to make it work. I want to bring people in, not lock people out.

The peer had earlier claimed that a pilot of voter ID in Derby showed that disproportionately black and brown people didnt come back to exercise their franchise once they had been turned away with insufficient identification.

He added: If you calculate the number, the number was between 0.5% and 0.7% of those that came to the polls, turned away and never came back.

If that translated to the general population we would be looking at hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million people, being turned away for exercising their franchise.

Are we happy to accept that? Are we? Ask yourself that one question.

Lord Woolley withdrew his amendment aimed at removing the requirement for voter ID from the Bill, but peers will continue their line-by-line scrutiny of the proposals.
People Before Profit TDs have been criticised for refusing to clap after Ukraines President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the Dail.

Following Mr Zelenskys speech, those in the Dail got to their feet and applauded the Ukrainian leader, however four People Before Profit TDs refused to clap.

A spokesperson for the party said this was due to a disagreement with calls from Mr Zelensky for Nato involvement in the war, as well as citing demands for more sanctions and a decision to ban opposition parties in Ukraine.

The move was criticised by Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney.

Paul explains why PBP Stand with Ukraine, but didn't applaud calls for NATO escalation https://t.co/0TRseLIVdv  People Before Profit (@pb4p) April 6, 2022

Mr Coveney said: First of all, I think anybody who listens to President Zelensky this morning and who decided not to applaud his contribution, doesnt reflect the views of the vast, vast majority of Irish people.

His country is going through hell right now.

Hes witnessing a lot of that in terms of the areas that hes been visiting in the last number of days.

The idea that you wouldnt stand and applaud his courage, his bravery, his leadership, but also out of respect for what his country is going through, to my mind is extraordinary.

Im glad to say that the vast majority of people, senators and TDs today stood and applauded in respect.

The people who didnt can speak for themselves but I find it extraordinary that they would choose to make a political point somehow by not doing that, when the response of everybody else was such a human one.

We have almost 20,000 Ukrainians who have fled to Ireland because of conflict in their own country, who are waiting at the end of a phone to find out if their loved ones are still alive.

We have people in the Dail standing up trying to make a point by not applauding.

I think that says a lot about those people.

Speaking hours after the speech, People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy said he wanted to expressed his solidarity with the people of Ukraine.

He rejected suggestions that People Before Profit are pro-Vladimir Putin because they do not support further escalation of sanctions against Russia.
Boris Johnson has issued a direct appeal to the Russian people to reject President Vladimir Putins war in Ukraine, which he called a stain on their countrys honour.

In a video message posted online, the Prime Minister urged Russians to download VPNs to enable them to circumvent the Kremlins media controls and see for themselves the atrocities being committed in their name.

His intervention came after President Volodymyr Zelensky used a dramatic address to the United Nations Security to accuse the Russians of the most terrible war crimes since the Second World War.

To the Russian people, look at what is being done in your name. You deserve the truth. You deserve the facts. pic.twitter.com/sqDxvGnTnp  Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) April 5, 2022

The Ukrainian leader called for the creation of a special tribunal along the lines of the Nuremberg tribunals used to try leading Nazis to bring those responsible to justice.

The Kremlin responded by claiming images of civilians said to have been killed by Russian soldiers in the town of Bucha were fake news having been staged by the Ukrainians themselves.

However, the UK Ministry of Defence said analysis of satellite imagery from March 21  when the town was still occupied by the Russians  showed at least eight bodies lying in a street.

In his message, Mr Johnson said the atrocities committed by Russian forces  including the rape and massacre of innocent civilians  were so shocking that Mr Putin had deliberately sought to hide the truth from his people.

Your president knows that if you could see what was happening, you would not support his war, he said.

Latest Defence Intelligence update on Ukraine  5 April 2022 Analysis of satellite imagery dated 21 March 2022 shows at least 8 bodies identified lying in a street in Bucha, Kyiv Oblast. Bucha was occupied by the Russian armed forces until 31 March 2022.  #StandWithUkraine  pic.twitter.com/o1tQ0bVZ8v  Ministry of Defence  (@DefenceHQ) April 5, 2022

He knows that these crimes betray the trust of every Russian mother who proudly waves goodbye to her son as he heads off to join the military.

And he knows they are a stain on the honour of Russia itself. A stain that will only grow larger and more indelible every day this war continues.

Mr Johnson said that people only needed a VPN connection to access independent information from around the world.

Speaking in Russian, he added: Your president stands accused of committing war crimes. But I cannot believe hes acting in your name.

Mr Zelenskys call for a war crimes tribunal was backed by former prime minister Gordon Brown who said President Putin and members of his inner circle could be charged with the crime of aggression.

(PA Graphics)

I believe he could be indicted very quickly because the evidence is clear about him planning, preparing and executing an invasion, he told BBC2s Newsnight.

It is what we had to do in Rwanda, we had to do it in relation to Liberia. We did it in relation to other countries as well in Yugoslavia.

You could be putting out an arrest warrant, not just for Putin but for a lot of his inner circle who have been collaborating with him in these deeds.

Meanwhile, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has reaffirmed her intention to use a two-day meeting of Nato and G7 ministers starting on Wednesday in Brussels to press for further sanctions against Russia.

US officials said they expected to see co-ordinated measures by Western allies including a ban on all new investment in the country.

Other measures are expected to include new restrictions on financial institutions and state-owned enterprises, and sanctions on government officials and their family members.

Following talks in the Polish capital, Warsaw, on Tuesday, Ms Truss said economic actions so far were having a crippling impact and pushing the Russian economy back into the Soviet era.

She said the West has frozen more than 350 billion US dollars (266 billion) of Putins war chest, rendering unavailable over 60% of the regimes 604 billion US dollars (459 billion) of foreign currency reserves.

But she said they must do more by cracking down further on Russian banks and going after industries that are filling Putins war chest, like gold, and agreeing a clear timetable to eliminate our imports of Russian oil, coal and gas.
DETROIT  As the biggest city in China goes on lockdown, General Motors is taking extreme measures to keep new car production going, including asking workers to sleep on factory floors.

Leaders in Shanghai, China's financial epicenter, started a two-stage lockdown Monday to try to control a massive COVID-19 outbreak on the southeastern coast.

That lockdown is forcing automakers and suppliers to scramble and make tough decisions.

China has a "zero-COVID" strategy that relies on mass testing, contact tracing and other policies to control the spread of the virus. It also demands that companies use strict measures to keep factories going  or else shut down. The latter would produce production disruptions and delayed shipments at a time when consumer demand for new cars is strong. Last year, GM delivered 2.9 million vehicles in China.

A source familiar with GM's joint venture with Chinese state-owned automaker SAIC Motor Corp. told the Detroit Free Press, a part of the USA TODAY Network, on Tuesday that it has kept production going in Shanghai by keeping employees living in the plant. The person asked to not be named because there was no authorization given to share that with the media.

In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, volunteers carry daily necessities for residents in Fengxian District in eastern China's Shanghai city on March 28, 2022. China began its most extensive coronavirus lockdown in two years Monday to conduct mass testing and control a growing outbreak in Shanghai as questions are raised about the economic toll of the nation's

But the person said production in its SGM plant continues with the health measures in place, including the "closed loop" requirement.

"According to the Shanghai governments pandemic control measures, companies are required to operate either in closed loop if necessary or have the employees work from home," the person said. "Closed loop operation means that employees must stay in the plant."

More reliable power source: GM partners with utility companies to use future EVs to power homes

Opinion: 5G service is coming to more cars. What can drivers expect  and when?

The story was first reported by Reuters. It said the workers are being asked to sleep on the factory floor and that GM's joint venture got passes for trucks to continue deliveries. Reuters cited two unnamed sources.

A man lifts his child to get a COVID-19 test at a private mobile coronavirus testing facility on March 29, 2022, in Beijing.

Closed loop is a form of quarantine. Reuters described it as a "bubble-like arrangement" where workers sleep, live and work in isolation from the outside community to prevent COVID-19 transmission.

Ford Motor Co. does not have any manufacturing plants in the Shanghai area, said Ian Thibodeau, a Ford spokesperson.

"We do have offices in the Shanghai area and employees there are working from home," Thibodeau told the Free Press Tuesday. "Fords manufacturing plants are located elsewhere in China, and they remain in operation.

Shanghai GM Norsom Phase III plant's assembly shop in China.

GM's facilities in Shanghai produce Buick, Chevrolet and Cadillac vehicles.

GM spokesman Dan Flores said GM, along with its joint ventures supply chain and engineering teams, have "developed and are continuing to execute contingency plans on a global basis with our suppliers to mitigate the uncertainty related to COVID-19."

Follow Jamie L. LaReau on Twitter: @jlareauan.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: GM keeps plants running in China having workers live in factory
hapabapa / iStock.com

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) helps provide food security for more than 41 million people (about one in eight Americans), according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Although its a federal program, SNAP is administered by the states, which means benefits are distributed inconsistently across the country.

While eligibility requirements and benefit levels are uniform across all states except Alaska and Hawaii, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the way benefits are calculated can vary considerably from one state to the next.

Learn: 5 Things Americans Should Know About SNAP Benefits in 2022

SNAP Benefits Increase in 2022: What It Could Mean for the Immediate and Long-Term Future

In New Hampshire, for example, just 6% of the population participates in SNAP, and they receive a relatively low $110 monthly payment. In Louisiana, a full 17% of the population receives SNAP, and they average a fairly high payment of $135. Naturally, states with bigger populations have more SNAP recipients, and states with higher poverty rates have a greater percentage of their residents in the program.

Even the name of the program can change from state to state. In Wisconsin, its called FoodShare. In California, its called CalFresh. In Utah, its still called Food Stamps.

No matter the name, SNAP is a vital part of the social safety net. Heres a look at how the states distribute SNAP.

Household and Individual Allotments Have Gone Up for 2022

In 2021, the USDA announced a cost of living adjustment (COLA) for SNAP in 2022. Heres what you need to know:

For the 48 contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the maximum allotment for a family of four has been raised to $835 per month.

In Alaska, a family of four can now receive between $1,074 and $1,667 per month, depending on their rural/urban designation.

In Hawaii, the COLA raised the monthly limit to $1,573 for a family of four.

The minimum benefit increased to $20 in D.C. and the Lower 48, $26 to $40 in Alaska and $38 in Hawaii.

Benefits were also raised for Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

SNAP Benefits By States

Heres an alphabetical look at each states number of SNAP participation, according to the most recent data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Alabama

Average benefit per household member per month: $129

Number of recipients: 727,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 15%

Alaska

Average benefit per household member per month: $181

Number of recipients: 85,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 12%

Arizona

Average benefit per household member per month: $130

Number of recipients: 797,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 11%

Arkansas

Average benefit per household member per month: $108

Number of recipients: 355,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 12%

California

Average benefit per household member per month: $141

Number of recipients: 3.79 million

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 10%

Colorado

Average benefit per household member per month: $128

Number of recipients: 450,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 8%

Connecticut

Average benefit per household member per month: $143

Number of recipients: 368,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 10%

Delaware

Average benefit per household member per month: $124

Number of recipients: 129,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 13%

District of Columbia

Average benefit per household member per month: $142

Number of recipients: 94,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 13%

Florida

Average benefit per household member per month: $127

Number of recipients: 2.85 million

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 13%

Georgia

Average benefit per household member per month: $132

Number of recipients: 1.42 million

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 13%

Hawaii

Average benefit per household member per month: $258

Number of recipients: 157,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 11%

Idaho

Average benefit per household member per month: $118

Number of recipients: 146,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 8%

Illinois

Average benefit per household member per month: $135

Number of recipients: 1.77 million

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 14%

Indiana

Average benefit per household member per month: $129

Number of recipients: 574,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 9%

Iowa

Average benefit per household member per month: $121

Number of recipients: 320,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 10%

Kansas

Average benefit per household member per month: $119

Number of recipients: 201,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 7%

Kentucky

Average benefit per household member per month: $123

Number of recipients: 541,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 12%

Louisiana

Average benefit per household member per month: $135

Number of recipients: 810,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 17%

Maine

Average benefit per household member per month: $117

Number of recipients: 157,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 12%

Maryland

Average benefit per household member per month: $128

Number of recipients: 619,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 10%

Massachusetts

Average benefit per household member per month: $134

Number of recipients: 760,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 11%

Michigan

Average benefit per household member per month: $120

Number of recipients: 1.18 million

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 12%

Minnesota

Average benefit per household member per month: $111

Number of recipients: 409

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 7%

Mississippi

Average benefit per household member per month: $120

Number of recipients: 455,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 15%

Missouri

Average benefit per household member per month: $130

Number of recipients: 692,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 11%

Montana

Average benefit per household member per month: $123

Number of recipients: 107,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 10%

Nebraska

Average benefit per household member per month: $124

Number of recipients: 161,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 8%

Nevada

Average benefit per household member per month: $125

Number of recipients: 423,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 14%

New Hampshire

Average benefit per household member per month: $110

Number of recipients: 76,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 6%

New Jersey

Average benefit per household member per month: $122

Number of recipients: 705,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 8%

New Mexico

Average benefit per household member per month: $127

Number of recipients: 448,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 21%

New York

Average benefit per household member per month: $136

Number of recipients: 2.66 million

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 14%

North Carolina

Average benefit per household member per month: $126

Number of recipients: 1.33 million

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 13%

North Dakota

Average benefit per household member per month: $126

Number of recipients: 49,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 6%

Ohio

Average benefit per household member per month: $132

Number of recipients: 1.38 million

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 12%

Oklahoma

Average benefit per household member per month: $128

Number of recipients: 574,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 14%

Oregon

Average benefit per household member per month: $133

Number of recipients: 599,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 14%

Pennsylvania

Average benefit per household member per month: $129

Number of recipients: 1.76 million

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 14%

Rhode Island

Average benefit per household member per month: $144

Number of recipients: 152,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 14%

South Carolina

Average benefit per household member per month: $127

Number of recipients: 601,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 12%

South Dakota

Average benefit per household member per month: $136

Number of recipients: 81,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 9%

Tennessee

Average benefit per household member per month: $131

Number of recipients: 903,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 13%

Texas

Average benefit per household member per month: $125

Number of recipients: 3.41

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 12%

Utah

Average benefit per household member per month: $122

Number of recipients: 172,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 5%

Vermont

Average benefit per household member per month: $122

Number of recipients: 69,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 11%

Virginia

Average benefit per household member per month: $128

Number of recipients: 705,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 8%

Washington

Average benefit per household member per month: $119

Number of recipients: 825,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 11%

West Virginia

Average benefit per household member per month: $117

Number of recipients: 305,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 17%

Wisconsin

Average benefit per household member per month: $113

Number of recipients: 617

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 11%

Wyoming

Average benefit per household member per month: $124

Number of recipients: 26,000

Percentage of the population receiving SNAP: 5%

More From GOBankingRates

This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: SNAP Benefits Available in Your State in 2022
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP)  Alex Jones was being questioned Wednesday by lawyers for families of Sandy Hook victims in Connecticut, where a judge had ordered the Infowars host to face mounting fines until he appeared for a deposition.

Relatives of some of the 20 children and six educators killed in the 2012 Newtown, Connecticut, massacre sued Jones for defamation after he said the shooting never happened. A judge found Jones liable for damages and a trial on how much he should pay the families is set for August.

Jones, who lives in Texas, had defied a judge's order to appear for a deposition in the case, saying he was too ill. But Connecticut Judge Barbara Bellis said there wasnt enough evidence that Jones was too sick to attend and ordered him to come to Connecticut for questioning and pay escalating daily fines until he did so. Jones paid $25,000 in fines for Friday and $50,000 in fines for Monday, according to court records.

A spokesperson for the families and their lawyers at Bridgeport-based Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder declined to comment on the deposition Wednesday.

Jones said in a video on the Infowars website that the deposition began Tuesday and was to continue Wednesday. He said in the video that the families' lawyers began the deposition by demonizing him for his questioning official versions of events.

Its just totally insane to sit there and watch this happen and to watch them lick their lips and lick their chops and think were going to finally shut Alex Jones down, Jones said. These people want to put us in prison for our speech.

Jones lawyer, Norman Pattis, said tempers flared at times during the deposition on Tuesday, and much of the questioning was not related to the school shooting.

I had the impression watching the attack on Mr. Jones that this trial will be about something far greater than what happened at Sandy Hook, Pattis said on the video. The trials going to be about ordinary peoples ability to say Im not buying it, I want to raise questions, I want to draw my own conclusions.

Jones missed the originally scheduled deposition in the case on March 23 and 24 in Austin, Texas. He cited a health issue including vertigo that his doctors initially thought was a serious heart problem but turned out to be a sinus infection.

The plaintiffs have said they have been subjected to harassment and death threats from Jones followers because of the hoax conspiracy promoted on his website show. Jones has since conceded the shooting did happen.
SAN ANTONIO (AP)  Former Trump administration officials are pressing Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to declare an invasion along the U.S.-Mexico border and give thousands of state troopers and National Guard members sweeping new authority to turn back migrants, essentially bestowing enforcement powers that have been a federal responsibility.

The urging comes as the Republican governor prepares to announce Wednesday unprecedented actions to deter migrants coming to Texas after the Biden administration announced last week it will end the use of a public health law that has limited asylum to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

It is unclear whether Abbott, who is up for reelection in November and is already installing more border barrier and allowing troopers to arrest migrants on trespassing charges, supports the aggressive proposals former Trump officials are pushing. Abbott did not elaborate on what steps he will announce Wednesday.

Border Patrol officials say they are planning for as many as 18,000 arrivals daily once the health policy, known as the Title 42 authority, expires in May. Last week, about 7,100 migrants were coming a day to the southern U.S. border.

But the way former Trump immigration officials see it, Texas and Arizona can pick up where the federal government leaves off once the policy ends. Their plan involves a novel interpretation of the U.S. Constitution to have the National Guard or state police forcibly send migrants to Mexico, without regard to immigration laws and law enforcement procedures. Border enforcement has always been a federal responsibility, and in Texas, state leaders have not been pushing for such a move.

Tom Homan, the former acting director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump, said at a border security conference in San Antonio last week he had spoken with Abbott but gave no indication about whether the two-term governor supported the idea.

Weve had discussions with his attorneys in his office, Is there a way to use this clause within the Constitution where it talks about invasion? Homan said during the Border Security Expo.

Homan on Tuesday described the response from Abbott's office, which he said took place about three months ago, as non-committal but willing to listen.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is being pressed to declare an "invasion" along the U.S.-Mexico border as justification to give thousands of state troopers and National Guard members sweeping new powers to turn back migrants. (Joel Martinez/The Monitor via AP, File)

In Arizona, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey has also been under pressure within his party to declare that the state is being invaded and use extraordinary powers normally reserved for war. But Ducey, who is term-limited and not on the ballot in 2022, has not embraced the theory and has avoided commenting directly on it.

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, issued a legal opinion in February declaring that Ducey has the power to use National Guard troops and state law enforcement to forcibly send migrants back. Brnovich is locked in a tough Republican U.S. Senate primary in which border security is a top issue.

Driving the effort on the right is the Center for Renewing America, a conservative policy think tank led by former Trump administration officials. It includes Ken Cuccinelli, an immigration hard-liner and former Homeland Security official under Trump. He argued that states are entitled to defend themselves from immediate danger or invasion, as it is defined by the invasion clause, under the states self-defense clause.

While speaking Tuesday to a conservative talk radio station, Abbott's remarks about constitutional authority were in relation to Congress, which he said had the only power to reduce the flow of migrants.

Well be taking unprecedented action, Abbott told radio station KCRS. Congress has to stop talking about it, has to stop complaining about it, has to stop going to the border and looking at it. Congress has to take action, just like Texas is taking action.

Asked if he considered what was happening on the Texas border an invasion, Abbott did not use those words but said he would be discussing it Wednesday.

Cuccinelli said in practice, he envisions the plan would look similar to the enforcement of Title 42, which circumvented U.S. obligations under American law and international treaty to provide asylum. He said he has not spoken with Abbott and said the governor's current sweeping border mission, known as Operation Lone Star, has put little dent in the number of people crossing the border. The mission has also drawn criticism from Guard members over long deployments and little to do, and some arrests have appeared to have no connection to border security.

Until you are actually returning people to Mexico, what you are doing will have no effect, Cuccinelli said.

Emily Berman, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Houston, said the invasion clause cited by proponents is tucked into a broader constitutional assurance that the U.S. must defend states from invasion and domestic violence. Additionally, she said, the state self-defense clause says states cannot engage in warlike actions or foreign policy unless invaded.

Berman said she hasn't seen the constitutional clauses used since the 1990s, when the courts ruled that they did not have jurisdiction to decide what qualified an invasion, but believed that one could only be done by another governmental entity.

For example, Berman said, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia can be qualified as one because it is an outside government breaching another countrys boundaries with the use of military force.

"Just because the state says that it is an invasion that doesnt necessarily make it so, it is not clear to me what additional legal authority that conveys on them, Berman said, adding that state officials can enforce state laws, but the line is drawn at what the federal law allows.

U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat whose district includes the Texas border, has criticized the Biden administration over border security and ending Title 42. But he does not support states trying to use new powers that would let them do whatever they want."

I think it should be more of a partnership instead of saying, Federal government, we dont think youre doing enough, and why dont we go ahead and do our own border security? he said.
Ivanka Trump, former White House adviser and the eldest daughter of former President Donald Trump, answered questions for more than eight hours Tuesday before the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack against the Capitol.

Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the committees Democratic chairman, said Tuesday afternoon that she had been answering investigators questions in a video teleconference since the morning and was not chatty but had been helpful to the probe.

She came in on her own and did not have to be subpoenaed, Thompson said.

Her appearance comes close on the heels of that of her husband, Jared Kushner, who answered the panels questions last week for six hours.

Ivanka Trump

Ivanka Trump (MANDEL NGAN/)

Ivanka Trumps decision to cooperate is significant for the committee, which has been trying to secure an interview with her since late January.

Her testimony, like others before the committee, was held behind closed doors. Public hearings are expected to begin this summer.

The bipartisan panel, which includes nine members of the House, is seeking testimony as to what Ivanka Trump knew about her fathers efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. including a telephone call they say she witnessed to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence.

Ivanka Trumps cooperation stands in contrast with some of her fathers other top advisers, including Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino, who continue the fight against subpoenas and requests for documents.

The twice-impeached president has tried to exert executive privilege over documents and interviews, but in many cases has been overruled by courts or President Biden, who has that authority as the sitting president.

With News Wire Services
A man crashed his car in the gate of the Russian Embassy in Bucharest

BUCHAREST (Reuters) - A driver died ramming his car into the gate of the Russian embassy in Bucharest early on Wednesday, police in the Romanian capital said in a statement.

A video recorded before firefighters arrived showed the front of the car in flames as it remained wedged in the gate.

It was unclear whether the crash was an accident or deliberate.

During recent weeks, several Russian embassies elsewhere in Europe have been targeted by protesters angered by the invasion of Ukraine.

Police said they were investigating and did not release the identity of the driver.

Romania said on Tuesday it would expel 10 Russian diplomats who are not acting in accordance with international rules, joining other European countries to have done so in recent days.

Nearly 624,860 Ukrainians have fled to Romania since Russia invaded their country on Feb. 24, and around 80,000 are still in Romania.
More than 5,000 civilians have been killed in Mariupol, Ukraine, since Russian troops took control of the city, local authorities stated on Wednesday.

Mayor Vadym Boichenko said that of the thousands reported dead, 210 were children.

On Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he had asked French President Emmanuel Macron to help those trapped in Mariupol. Zelensky also said that Macron agreed to help provide technical assistance and expert support for investigations into crimes committed in Ukraine by Russia.

In an interview with Turkeys Haberturk Television, Zelensky accused Russian troops of trying to cover up their actions in the besieged coastal city  and alleged that the Russians were not allowing humanitarian aid into the city until they clear it all up.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk accused Russian forces last week of blocking a convoy of buses headed to Mariupol to evacuate civilians. "The Russian Federation, again, does not let our buses pass," Vereshchuk told the Ukrainian news agency Unian. She alleged that Russian soldiers had stolen 12 Ukrainian trucks that were delivering aid to Mariupol.

A man carries a broken window past the body of a person killed in the Russian invasion in a residential area in Mariupol, Ukraine. (Reuters/Stringer)

An International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) team had tried to reach Mariupol, but turned around last week as a result of what it described as inadequate security protections for rescuers. The group later said that it had managed to help around 1,000 civilians safely get to Zaporizhzhia, a government-controlled Ukrainian city located roughly 128 miles to the north, after they left Mariupol on their own for Berdyansk, a city roughly 52 miles west of Mariupol. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Mariupol's population was 400,000.

Pascal Hundt, head of ICRC's delegation in Ukraine, told the Associated Press that conditions on the humanitarian route to Mariupol had prevented the team from saving civilians trapped in the besieged city.

When you travel with a convoy with buses, you have to stop at the checkpoint. You have to explain who you are, what you are doing there. They may be not necessarily aware of you coming in, and then it takes time, and then you proceed to the next one and you start again, he said.

In the evening, theres a curfew. People cannot move. Everybody gets stressed, including the soldiers at the checkpoint, Hundt added. It took us five days to do that operation.  You can imagine the difficulties we faced.

Bodies of people killed during the Russian invasion lie in a residential area of Mariupol. (Reuters/Stringer)

In recent weeks, a theater in Mariupol was bombed by a Russian airstrike, local authorities said. Satellite pictures show that the theater was marked with large white letters that read CHILDREN in Russian.

Ukrainian officials also said several bombs were dropped on a childrens hospital in the same city  leaving three people dead, including a 6-year-old girl.

Zelensky previously said that Mariupol had been reduced to ashes by Russian airstrikes, and called the attacks "a terror that will be remembered for centuries to come."

After announcing new sanctions against Russia  including President Vladimir Putins two adult daughters  on Wednesday, President Biden decried the major war crimes he says are being discovered in Ukraine, after horrifying photos taken in Bucha this week showed the bodies of executed people discovered after Russian forces withdrew from the city.

People attend the funeral of Sergei Shamut, 22, who died in battle near Mariupol. (Reuters/Igor Tkachenko)

Cover thumbnail photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
At the Russian embassy in Mexico City, Mexicans are rallying in support of Ukraine and urging their government to do the same, shouting, "Glory for Ukraine!" and "No to the invasion!"

Despite having enormous commercial ties to the U.S., Mexico is not aligning itself with the West over the war in Ukraine.

Since Russias invasion, Mexican leaders have emphasized the countrys long-held neutrality on foreign affairs.

We want to maintain good relations with all the governments of the world," Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said.

But Mexicos refusal to sanction Russia and send aid to Ukraine has offended not only Ukraine, but also the U.S.  Mexicos largest trading partner by far.

The president is not very fond of the United States to start with, but also when President Lopez Obrador contracted COVID, President Putin offered to send his medical team to Mexico City to attend to the president, so there's a degree of gratitude there," said Pamela Starr, director of the U.S.-Mexico network at the University of Southern California.

A month after Russian troops invaded Ukraine, lawmakers from Mexicos leftist ruling party created a Mexico-Russia friendship committee and invited the Russian ambassador to the event.

They're very anti-American, and as such, they believe that the enemy of my enemy is my friend," said Mariana Campero, host of Mexico Matters podcast from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The move prompted a strong rebuke from the U.S. ambassador to Mexico who noted that during World War II, the U.S. and Mexico were united against Hitler.

But resentment of American interventionism is long standing in Mexico and Latin America  a sentiment that Donald Trump amplified with his aggressive policies and insults towards the region.

This anti-American sentiment was, you know, put back sort of to the forefront when President Trump started to criticize Mexicans and called them rapists or criminals," Campero said.

At the same time, Russia and China have been gaining influence in Latin America through investment, propaganda and vaccine diplomacy.

They would have much rather had Moderna or Pfizer or AstraZeneca, which are better vaccines, but we didn't get the vaccines for them," said Cecile Shea, senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. "They had to go take what they could get, and the Chinese and the Russians came through with them."

The U.S. also suspects that Mexico harbors a large number of Russian spies  a point recently made by a top U.S. military official.

The largest portion of GRU members in the world is in Mexico right now," said General Glen VanHerck, commander of the U.S. Northern Command. "Those are Russian intelligence personnel."

The statement is an apparent reference to Russia's huge embassy in Mexico City.

Mexico has very little economic ties with Russia, very little political interaction, so to have an embassy in Mexico that's about 30% larger than their embassy in Brazil is suggestive," Starr said.

Internationally, Mexico has been more critical of Russia, voting, for example, in favor of a UN Resolution condemning the invasion.

But domestically, analysts worry about the way Mexican leaders are cozying up to Russia.

Together with the Russian propaganda machine, I think it can explode an already anti-Americanism that is still present in the region and could be very dangerous," Campero said.
An elderly Indiana couple has been found in Nevada about a week after going missing.

Mineral County Undersheriff Bill Ferguson told the Associated Press that the couple were found by their car in a remote mountain area in southern Nevada.

Ronnie Barker, 72, had died and Beverly Barker, 69, was airlifted to a hospital in Reno.

The couple left on a cross-country road trip in an RV last month and were scheduled to arrive back in Indianapolis this week, according to social media posts by family members.

The couple left Oregon on March 27 and were supposed to meet with friends in Tucson, Ariz. a couple days later but never arrived.

Ron and Beverly Barker





Ron and Beverly Barker

The couples RV was found about two miles away stuck in a ditch, but officials said it was not clear how the couple ended up in this situation.

It was just one bad decision after another, undersheriff Ferguson said. Im not sure what took them off course. They got the motor home stuck and then unfortunately they got the car stuck.

Its unclear when Ronnie Barker died or what caused his death.

Travis Peters, a nephew of the couple, told KVVU-TV in Las Vegas that it was a tragedy for the family, but at least Beverly Barker would be able to tell them what happened and they wouldnt always be wondering what if and why.

Thank God that Beverly is alive, because she will be able to fill in those blanks that we dont know. Why did they go up the mountain? What happened? Peters said. Shes going to be able to tell us.

With News Wire Services
Residents walk amid destroyed Russian tanks in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on April 6, 2022. (Felipe Dana / Associated Press)

Russian forces carried out punishing strikes against key Ukrainian cities on Wednesday, brushing aside mounting world outrage over the execution-style killings of civilians even as Washington and its Western allies moved to impose sharp new sanctions against Moscow.

In suburbs around the capital, Kyiv, Ukrainian investigators pressed ahead with the grim task of documenting evidence of war crimes in the form of mass graves and mutilated bodies as Ukrainian troops and mine clearers worked to defuse booby traps and explosives left behind by retreating Russian forces.

Ukrainian officials accused Russia of trying to cover up war crimes in other occupied areas, saying that Moscow is now aware that haphazard efforts in the Kyiv region had left an abundance of evidence behind.

In the southern port city of Mariupol, where municipal authorities say thousands of civilians have died, the City Council claimed Wednesday on social media that Russia was using mobile crematoriums to dispose of corpses.

That allegation could not be verified. Mariupol remains in Ukrainian hands, but many people have been killed trying to leave the city.

Russia has furiously denied committing atrocities, saying graphic video and images that have surfaced in recent days are fake.

With the fighting showing signs of intensifying in the country's south and east, Ukrainian authorities urged residents of the imperiled eastern region of Luhansk to flee an expected Russian assault while they still could. Luhansks governor, Serhiy Haidai, said Wednesday on Facebook that people were fleeing under the roar of enemy guns.

As foreign ministers from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization gathered in Brussels to weigh options to better support Ukraine in its 6-week-old battle against the Russian invaders, the European Union was set to vote on whether to ban Russian coal imports.

People stand next to a mass grave in Bucha, Ukraine, where numerous bodies of slain civilians have been found after a retreat by Russian troops. (Rodrigo Abd / Associated Press)

At the same time, Britain, no longer in the EU, imposed sweeping new sanctions, including a full asset freeze on the largest Russian bank, a pledge to end Russian coal and oil imports by the end of the year and the targeting of eight more Russian oligarchs.

In Washington, the Biden administration announced similar measures, targeting two major Russian financial institutions as well as Russian President Vladimir Putin's two daughters and the family of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

I made clear that Russia would pay a severe and immediate price for its atrocities in Bucha, President Biden said in a tweet.

Together with our allies, we are showing the Russian elite that they cannot wash their hands of the atrocities committed on Putins orders, British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said in announcing her country's measures.

The EU steps under consideration, with a vote expected Thursday, would be the most stringent yet by the 27-nation bloc since Russia invaded its neighbor Feb. 24. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking by video link to the Irish Parliament, urged lawmakers to persuade EU partners to enact sanctions that will really stop Russias military machine.

That would include banning imports of Russian oil and natural gas, a drastic step to which the bloc is beginning to signal openness. Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, said Wednesday that such a move, despite its disruptiveness, probably would have to occur sooner or later.

Although Western leaders have voiced concerns about the Ukraine war spilling over into NATO territory, the alliance said it was prepared for a protracted conflict near its eastern flank.

The war can end now if Putin withdraws his forces, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said as foreign ministers from alliance nations, including U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, began consultations in Brussels. But the fighting could also go on for many months, even many years, Stoltenberg said.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Wednesday that its impossible to know how long the war in Ukraine will continue if not ended through diplomacy.

The fact that [Putin] is going to concentrate in a smaller geographic area certainly presents the possibility that the violence will continue, Kirby said. It could even intensify in that part of Ukraine.

In Ukraine, Russia has clear military superiority yet has been unable to seize Kyiv or capture and hold major cities. But its forces have devastated parts of Ukraine with long-range missile and artillery attacks, and evidence continues to emerge of atrocities against civilians in areas previously held by Russian troops.

Ukrainian servicemen walk at the decommissioned nuclear plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, on April 5, 2022. (Oleksandr Ratushniak / Associated Press)

In an overnight video address broadcast in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky warned compatriots that more hardships lay ahead. He has made increasingly desperate pleas for more Western help, including a scorching speech Tuesday to the United Nations Security Council in which he questioned why the world body even exists if it is helpless in the face of an attack on a sovereign country.

We dont have a choice  the fate of our land and of our people is being decided, Zelensky said in his overnight address. We know what we are fighting for. And we will do everything to win.

Mariupol and the northeastern metropolis of Kharkiv  battered by almost daily bombardment  were again prime Russian targets on Wednesday, Ukrainian officials said. Putin's forces for weeks have besieged Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, whose capture would help Moscow create a land bridge to the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014.

Another principal target has been the Black Sea port of Mykolaiv, where dozens died last week when a missile strike blasted a gaping hole in a government building. The city was hit again Wednesday.

Conditions are increasingly desperate in Mariupol, where tens of thousands of people have been under heavy bombardment, lacking food, water, power and medicine. Ukrainian officials said more than 500 people made it out of Mariupol on Wednesday to the relative safety of the city of Zaporizhzhia.

"The humanitarian situation in the city is worsening," an assessment by British military intelligence said Wednesday, noting that the cutoff of humanitarian access was probably a tactic to pressure defenders to surrender.

While Mariupol's ordeal has taken place largely out of the world's sight, Bucha, outside Kyiv, has become an international byword for Ukraines suffering after the horrors of its occupation by Russian troops came to light in recent days. On Wednesday, Pope Francis pointed sorrowfully to the town's plight as a symbol of why the world must support Ukraine.

Welcoming a small group of Ukrainian children at his general audience at the Vatican, the pontiff called for prayers for the country as a whole and for victims whose innocent blood cries up to the sky.

Francis then kissed a grimy, bedraggled Ukrainian flag that he said had been brought from Bucha.

Pope Francis displays a flag in Ukrainian colors that was brought to him from Bucha, Ukraine. (Alessandra Tarantino / Associated Press)

Russias diplomatic isolation over alleged war crimes deepened Wednesday as Greece became the latest European country to join in the expulsion of Russian diplomats. The government in Athens said a dozen members of embassy or consular staff had been asked to leave, joining what has become a tally of hundreds of Russian diplomats across the EU who have been informed that they are no longer welcome.

In another sign of diplomatic tensions, Ukraine's ambassador was summoned Wednesday by Hungary's Foreign Ministry after days of feuding between Prime Minister Viktor Orban  considered Russian President Vladimir Putins closest friend in the European Union  and Zelensky. Orban won a landslide reelection victory Sunday.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto wrote on Facebook that Orbans government condemns military aggression and supports Ukrainian sovereignty, but added that this is not our war. Hungary has refused to join other EU countries in providing weapons to Ukraine or allowing arms to be sent to Ukraine via its territory.

Hungary's tensions with the EU were underscored Wednesday when Orban, speaking to reporters in Budapest, the capital, declared his willingness to pay the country's energy bills to Russia in rubles, as the Kremlin has demanded. The EU has refused to do so.

Amid the widening repercussions of the war  economic disruptions and threats to the world food supply  another hazard has emerged: naval mines drifting outside the conflict zone.

Officials from Turkey said Wednesday that for the third time, its military had detected a mine drifting in the Black Sea and was preparing to deactivate it. An earlier episode caused the closure of the Bosporus Strait, one of the worlds busiest waterways.

McDonnell reported from Kyiv, King from Budapest and Lee from Los Angeles.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Red Cross workers deliver supplies to residents who have been cut off from humanitarian aid and are hiding in shelters on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken is in friendly territory: the headquarters of NATO, where most European leaders are supportive of U.S.-led efforts to punish Russia and help Ukraine.

But what does a skilled diplomat like Blinken do about the many countries not on board? Does he pressure, promise or punt?

Before he traveled Tuesday to NATO headquarters in Brussels, Blinken spent hours on the telephone with leaders of strategically important countries whose reluctance to join the campaign has most perturbed the administration. Among this group are strong U.S. allies like India, Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

Blinken spoke to India's foreign minister twice in the last week. His aides declined to say whether there was any indication that India, or anyone else, had changed its position to condemn Russia. "We'll see," was the general response.

Here in Brussels, Blinken expected that members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization along with the European Union would come together with yet another batch of economic sanctions to impose on Russia, as well as packages of aid  lethal weapons and medical supplies and food  for Ukraine. The administration has repeatedly extolled its success in bringing allies together for an unprecedented unity in this cause.

"Obviously in the wake of the horrific images coming out of Bucha, we now feel even more compelled to take a fresh look at additional forms of assistance, individually, collectively, any way that we can," U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith said in a briefing Tuesday.

Britain, which is no longer part of the EU, announced sweeping new sanctions Wednesday, including freezing all assets of Russia's largest bank, promising to stop Russian coal and oil imports by year's end and targeting more oligarchs. Meanwhile, the Biden administration sanctioned Russian President Vladimir Putins two daughters and the family of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and also targeted two major Russian financial institutions.

The European Union, however, failed to agree on additional sanctions that would ban Russian coal, among other restrictions. The group was to continue negotiations on Thursday, further demonstrating the challenges of increasing support even among the willing.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets Belgian Foreign Minister Sophie Wilmes at Egmont Palace in Brussels, Belgium, on Wednesday. (Evelyn Hockstein/Associated Press)

Despite the EU's lack of action, the argument in Brussels is a relatively easy one for Blinken. European leaders, confronting a disastrous war on their eastern edges, have more at stake than anyone.

Even within this Western alliance however, there are strains  the United States and powers like Germany remain at odds over imports of Russian energy and other issues.

Asked whether the alliance unity can be maintained in what may stretch out to be a conflict of months, even years, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki acknowledged the challenge.

"'Unity' does not mean 'identical,' " she said, speaking to reporters Tuesday. "And as we're looking at the consequences people are putting in place, the actions they're taking, our expectation is not that it is identical. It is just our effort to do everything we can to make sure it's coordinated, and its unified as it possibly can be."

Blinken's hand may be strengthened by the emerging reports of atrocities that the Ukrainians blame on Russian occupying forces, and whose photographs and videos of Ukrainians shot in the head or buried in hastily dug mass graves have revulsed many parts of the world.

In Bucha, a suburb north of Kyiv, and possibly other towns, Russia engaged in a deliberate campaign to kill, torture, rape, Blinken told reporters who traveled with him to Brussels.

This reinforces our determination  and the determination of countries around the world  to make sure that one way or another, one day or another, there was accountability for those who committed these acts, those who ordered them, Blinken said.

Yet it was not clear that other countries beyond NATO and the European Union would in fact rush to join a campaign pushing for the prosecution of Russian President Vladimir Putin on war crimes charges. U.S. officials privately acknowledge that some countries may continue to sit this one out.

Policemen work on the identification process following the killing of civilians in Bucha, before sending the bodies to the morgue, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine on Wednesday. (Rodrigo Abd/Associated Press)

Each country has its reasons for siding with Russia or, at least, stepping gingerly where Moscow is concerned. Many have strong trade ties or depend on Russia for energy and weapons, like India. There is also anti-U.S. sentiment among some, or a perception that the U.S. and NATO are partly to blame for the catastrophe unfolding in Ukraine because of their expansion to countries closer to Russia's borders, which Putin views as a provocation. Some have had a long diplomatic or political connection to Moscow, or, in the case of countries like increasingly autocratic Hungary, a new one.

U.S. officials are hoping that if some countries cant make a full commitment to confronting Russia, they can make other contributions, such as diplomatic efforts or strictly humanitarian aid. One example is Israel, whose Prime Minister Naftali Bennett might still be able to pursue a supposedly neutral position of mediator between Russia and Ukraine.

The next big test for whether the U.S. has support for expanding its base in this fight is in an upcoming U.N. General Assembly vote to kick Russia out of the body's Human Rights Council.

The resolution proposed by the United States is, Biden administration officials acknowledge, extraordinary, but they contend that a Russian presence on the human rights monitor is a travesty and maintain they can marshal the votes necessary.

"Given the growing mountain of evidence, Russia should not have a position of authority in a body whose purpose  whose very purpose  is to promote respect for human rights," the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told the body Tuesday. "Not only is this the height of hypocrisy  it is dangerous."

Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia responded with the stock response of his government, that the bodies in Bucha were part of a scenario staged by "Ukrainian neo-Nazis."

He warned countries against being "manipulated" by Washington.

Following the day of meetings with its transatlantic allies Wednesday, Blinken lauded the "extraordinary unity" the U.S. and its NATO partners have shown in the the aftermath of Russia's invasion. That unity stands in contrast to the years of the Trump administration, when the former president was dismissive of NATO and international alliances in general. Since taking office, Blinken has worked to repair the damage done during that time.

Staff writer Eli Stokols contributed to this report from Washington.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
FILE  U.S. Representatives Bob Gibbs speaks at the Mansfield Lahm Regional Airport, Oct. 31, 2018, in Mansfield, Ohio. Republican U.S. Rep. Bob Gibbs announced his sudden retirement on Wednesday, April 6, 2022, declaring himself a casualty of "the circus" over Ohio's still-unresolved congressional map. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP)  Republican U.S. Rep. Bob Gibbs announced his sudden retirement on Wednesday, declaring himself a casualty of the circus over Ohio's still-unresolved congressional map.

The six-term congressman from Amish Country exits a primary race in northeast Ohio that, under new temporary maps, would have put him up against Trump-backed Republican Max Miller.

Early voting is already underway.

Miller was initially recruited to defeat U.S. Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, who joined a handful of fellow Republicans who voted in favor of the former Republican president's impeachment. Gonzalez has since retired.

In a statement, Gibbs said almost 90% of the electorate in the new 7th Congressional District where he would be required to run is new, with nearly two-thirds drawn in from another district foreign to any expectations or connection to the district he now serves.

Trump weighed in to congratulate Gibbs on a wonderful and accomplished career. He called Gibbs a strong ally of his America First agenda and the fight against the Radical Left.

Thank you for your service, Boba job well done! Trump said in a statement.

Calling the decision to retire difficult, Gibbs called it irresponsible to effectively confirm the congressional map for this election cycle seven days before voting begins.

He appeared to be referencing a March 30 procedural ruling by the Ohio Supreme Court, which extended the briefing schedule for the legal challenge to Ohio's congressional map well past this year's primary.

However, congressional districts for 2022 elections had actually been set since March 2. That was when Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, the state's elections chief, ordered county boards of elections to reflect the Ohio Redistricting Commission's second congressional map on ballots.

Gibbs said he believes Ohio's prospects are bright despite the circus redistricting has become.

These long, drawn-out processes, in which the Ohio Supreme Court can take weeks and months to deliberate while demanding responses and filings from litigants within days, is detrimental to the state and does not serve the people of Ohio, he said.

The high court's bipartisan majority, comprising Republican Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor and three Democrats, has been engaged in a protracted back-and-forth with the Republican-controlled redistricting commission for months.

In response to lawsuits brought by voting rights and Democratic groups, justices have tossed four plans and counting for legislative and congressional lines, declaring each an unconstitutional gerrymander that unduly favor Republicans.

Their faceoff continues to escalate.

As justices consider a request to hold mapmakers in contempt for their repeated failure to craft lines that meet constitutional muster, Republicans who control the state Legislature are thinking hard about bringing impeachment proceedings against O'Connor.

Gibbs is the 17th House Republican to say he wont seek reelection, compared to 30 Democrats. His term runs through January 2023.
As the war in Ukraine grinds on, a full 63% of Americans now say they agree that Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot remain in power, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll. Just 14% disagree. The rest (23%) are not sure.

In a country as divided as the U.S., that would be a striking level of consensus regardless of the subject  let alone one as controversial and consequential as regime change in Russia. As such, it underscores the degree to which the Russian invasion has transformed Putin into a pariah across the U.S. political spectrum.

At the same time, however, the survey of 1,618 U.S. adults, which was conducted from March 31 to April 4, also found that injecting President Biden into the equation significantly altered public sentiment  a reminder that partisan politics continues to shape and even distort views on the war.

Asked whether respondents agreed with an unattributed quote about Putin  This man cannot remain in power  63% of those surveyed said they did.

But when Yahoo News and YouGov posed the question differently, asking whether President Biden was right or wrong to have said those words  which Biden did on March 26  just 48% of Americans were willing to say the president was right.

Likewise, the number who said Biden was wrong (29%) was more than twice as high as the number who disagreed with his remark before it was attributed to him (14%).

Unsurprisingly, Republicans were responsible for most of this movement. Before Bidens name was mentioned, Republicans agreed that Putin cannot remain in power by a 36-point margin (57% agree vs. 21% disagree). After the remark was attributed to the president, however, they insisted he was wrong by 9 points (46% wrong vs. 37% right).

Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting on Tuesday. (Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via Reuters)

Not all of this reflects pure partisanship; Democrats were also more inclined to agree with Bidens unattributed remark (83%) than to believe he was right to say it (70%), suggesting that at least some respondents saw the episode as a strategic misstep for a president.

The White House, after all, quickly rushed to clarify that Biden was not advocating for regime change in Russia.

"The President's point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region," a White House spokesman said in a written statement. "He was not discussing Putin's power in Russia, or regime change."

Biden himself later characterized his own words as a personal feeling of moral outrage rather than an administration policy of taking down the Russian leader.

The high level of initial support in the Yahoo News/YouGov poll for Putin's not remain[ing] in power also does not mean that Americans necessarily want to engage in the kind of conflict that would force him out. A previous Yahoo News/YouGov survey, for instance, found that Americans went from favoring to opposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine once they were told it means the U.S. military would shoot down Russian military planes  possibly triggering a war between the U.S. and Russia.

Yet the new poll results do hint at the challenges ahead for Biden as he tries to rally Americans around his approach to the war.

Overall, Biden's approval rating for handling "the situation with Russia and Ukraine" has steadily climbed since the start of the invasion, from 34% in late February to 39% in mid-March to 41% today.

President Biden speaks at the White House on Tuesday. (Leah Millis/Reuters)

Similarly, 71% of Americans said in mid-March that they were very or somewhat worried about gas prices rising as a result of the Russian invasion. That number has since fallen to 64%, with the share who say theyre very worried down from 44% to 31%.

Despite this modest progress, however, more Americans still disapprove (46%) than approve (41%) of how Biden has handled the war, including 78% of Republicans and 52% of independents. In fact, Bidens overall job approval rating has actually declined from 42% in February to 39% today. His disapproval rating has held steady at 53%.

In part, thats because Republicans remain resolutely opposed to Bidens approach  regardless of what that approach is. Today, more Donald Trump voters say that Bidens sanctions on Russia have not been tough enough (48%) and that the administration has not provided enough military assistance to Ukraine (44%) than say otherwise. An even greater number (59%) characterize the presidents whole approach to the conflict as not tough enough.

Yet before Russias invasion in February, a plurality of Trump voters told Yahoo News and YouGov that the conflict was none of Americas business and that the U.S. should take neither Ukraine's nor Russias side in the clash.

As a result, Americans overall are more likely to say Bidens approach has been not tough enough (35%) than about right (33%) or too tough (6%). More Americans also say they would prefer a full Russian defeat (59%) than said the same last month (55%). Even among Democrats, just 57% say the presidents overall approach has been about right  and only 35% say the same about his approach to sanctions.

Its unclear what other options are available to U.S. policymakers at this point. But in a country where 63% of the public has come to feel that Putin cannot remain in power, the longer the conflict persists  and the more unsatisfying its possible resolutions become  the harder it may be for Biden to convince even less partisan Americans that there was nothing he could have done differently.

_______________

The Yahoo News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,618 U.S. adults interviewed online from March 31 to April 4, 2022. This sample was weighted according to gender, age, race and education based on the American Community Survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, as well as 2020 presidential vote (or nonvote) and voter registration status. Respondents were selected from YouGovs opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. adults. The margin of error is approximately 2.7%.
FILE - Proud Boys leader Henry "Enrique" Tarrio wears a hat that says The War Boys during a rally in Portland, Ore., Sept. 26, 2020. Tarrio pleaded not guilty on Tuesday, April 5, 2022, to charges that he remotely led a plot to stop Congress certification of Joe Bidens 2020 victory. (AP Photo/Allison Dinner, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

WASHINGTON (AP)  Proud Boys leader Henry Enrique Tarrio pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to charges that he remotely led a plot to stop Congress certification of Joe Bidens 2020 victory.

Though he wasnt at the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, prosecutors say Tarrio organized encrypted chats with Proud Boys members in the weeks before the attack, had a 42-second phone call with another member of the group in the building during the insurrection and took credit for the chaos at the Capitol.

Police had arrested Tarrio in Washington two days before the riot and charged him with vandalizing a Black Lives Matter banner at a historic Black church during a protest in December 2020. The day before the Capitol was attacked, a judge ordered Tarrio to stay out of Washington.

Tarrios indictment said that instead of staying out of town, he met with Oath Keepers founder and leader Elmer Stewart Rhodes and others in an underground parking garage for about 30 minutes on Jan. 5.

His lawyers have said the evidence against Tarrio was weak and relies mostly on text messages and social media.

A judge has postponed the May 18 trial for Tarrio and five others affiliated with the far-right group.

Prosecutors sought the postponement to give them more time to assess and share with opposing lawyers new information gathered in the investigation. Some defendants in the case agreed with the postponement request.

A new trial date is expected to be picked during an April 21 hearing.
Police announced the arrests of two more suspects Tuesday in connection with the chaotic shooting in downtown Sacramento that left six dead over the weekend, bringing the total number of arrests to three as police continue to investigate.

Sacramento Police announced a third arrest Tuesday afternoon. Authorities say Daviyonne Dawson, 31, was caught on camera wielding a firearm after the shooting, though police do not believe the weapon was used in the shootout. He was taken into custody late Monday and faces a charge of being a prohibited person in possession of a firearm, Sacramento Police said.

Earlier Tuesday, authorities said Smiley Martin, 27, would face charges in the shooting. He was one of the 12 people found injured at the scene and was "quickly identified as a person of interest," the Sacramento Police Department said in a statement.A law enforcement official, who was briefed on the investigation but could not discuss the details publicly, told The Associated Press that Martin had taken a live video on Facebook hours before the shooting and brandished a handgun. Investigators are working to determine whether the weapon was used in the shooting.

Martin was arrested Tuesday on charges of possession of a firearm by a prohibited person and possession of a machine gun.

Dandrae Martin, whom police identified as Smiley Martin's brother, was arrested Monday and faces charges of assault with a deadly weapon and illegal firearms possession. DandraeMartin was scheduled to appear in Sacramento Superior Court on Tuesday, according to jail records. He's being held without bail.

Investigators believe the brothers possessed stolen guns and are working to review financial documents, call records and social media messages to determine how and when they procured weapons, the official said. Authorities have searched several locations in connection with the shooting and the firearms investigation.

SUSPECTED ARRESTED: 6 killed in Sacramento shooting rampage; community holds vigil for victims

The arrests comes after the community held a candlelight vigil Monday, where Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg read the names of the six people who were killed in the shooting. More than 100 rounds were fired around 2 a.m. Sunday outside the city's entertainment district as bar patrons filled the streets after a large fight broke out.

Investigators are combing through hundreds of pieces of evidence and examining more than 170 videos and photos shared through an online portal created for the public, police said. Neither suspect has been charged with homicide, and Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said in a statement Monday that she expected more arrests.

The investigation is highly complex involving many witnesses, videos of numerous types and significant physical evidence, Schubert said in a statement.

Here's what we know Tuesday:

Who were the victims?

The Sacramento County Coroner's Office identified the three men and three women killed as Johntaya Alexander, 21; Melinda Davis, 57; Yamile Martinez-Andrade, 21; Sergio Harris, 38; Joshua Hoye-Lucchesi, 32; and De'vazia Turner, 29.

Twelve people were wounded and at least four suffered critical injuries, according to the Sacramento Fire Department. At least seven of the wounded were released from hospitals Monday.

Turner had four young children, including a 3-year-old daughter named Penelope. Born and raised in Sacramento, he played football from a young age until a knee injury slowed him down. He worked as a manager for an inventory company, keeping a close eye on things his mother might like and letting her know when they would go on sale.

He was a protector, his mother, Penelope Scott, said. Raising him as a single mom, you know, he took the role of being the man of the house. He took care of everything.

Turners father, Frank Turner, told the Sacramento Bee that his son had gone to the London nightclub and was with his cousin, Harris, when the shooting broke out. Both were killed.

He was out just having fun with his friends, Turner told Fox40. Theres just nothing to say. Im just here. Im grief, thats all  grief."

Kay Harris, Sergio's sister, told The Associated Press she thought her brother had been at the London.

"My son was a very vivacious young man," his mother, Pamela, told KCRA 3.

Alexander was a doting aunt who wanted to work with children as a social worker.

She was just beginning her life, her father, John Alexander, told the Los Angeles Times, sobbing. Stop all this senseless shooting.

Teresa Andrade told Fox26 her daughter loved music and had traveled to Sacramento for a Tyler the Creator concert.

A small bouquet of purple roses at the site of the shooting was dedicated to Davis, who lived on the streets for years, according to the Bee.

Shawn Peter, a guide with the Downtown Sacramento Partnership who had known Davis for 15 years, told the newspaper that she had been homeless and lived in the area on and off for a decade.

Officials had helped her find housing before the pandemic began but she had returned to the downtown business district in recent months, Peter said. A small bouquet of purple roses with a note saying Melinda Rest In Peace was left on the street in her memory.

Melinda was a very eccentric individual, a very sassy lady, he told the newspaper. This was her world, 24/7.

Hoye-Lucchesi was a dedicated father of six, Nana Turner, the mother of his two oldest children, told the Bee.

His kids was his whole entire heart, and hes really going to be truly missed, by his kids, and myself, and his mother, and a lot of friends, Nana Turner told the outlet.

Authorities investigating multiple suspects

Investigators found a stolen handgun at the scene, which police said in a statement was modified into an automatic weapon.

Sacramento Police Chief Kathy Lester did not say what kind of gun was used in the shooting. Officials did not know whether the victims were targeted, she said.

Detectives and SWAT team members found one handgun during searches of three homes in the area, police said after arresting the first suspect.

Police said Dawson, the latest suspect arrested in connection to the shooting, was not facing charges directly as part of the attack, though detectives "are continuing to investigate," Sacramento Police said in a statement. Police said they found a handgun when taking Dawson into custody.

The two brothers who face charges in the shooting have criminal histories that include violent crimes.

A year ago, prosecutors argued for Smiley Martin, 27, to remain in prison when he was up for early release amid a 10-year sentence for domestic violence and assault with great bodily injury, documents obtained by the AP show. Prosecutors told the state parole board he routinely violated the law and noted his previous convictions for possessing an assault weapon, stealing electronics from department stores and beating a girlfriend he encouraged to be a prostitute.

Martins criminal conduct is violent and lengthy, a Sacramento prosecutor wrote in a letter obtained by AP. Martin has committed several felony violations and clearly has little regard for human life and the law.

The letter includes an ominous warning from prosecutors, according to the Sacramento Bee: If he is released early, he will continue to break the law.

His brother, Dandrae Martin was freed from an Arizona prison in 2020 after serving just over 1 years for violating probation in separate cases involving a felony conviction for aggravated assault in 2016 and a conviction on a marijuana charge in 2018. Court records show he pleaded guilty to punching, kicking and choking a woman in a hotel room when she refused to work for him as a prostitute.

FROM SUNDAY: Police seek multiple suspects after shooting killed 6, injured 12 in downtown Sacramento

He was also wanted on a misdemeanor warrant by the Riverside County Sheriffs Department in Southern California. The Sheriff's Department said the charges stemmed from a 2015 arrest by the Blythe Police Department, but no other information was immediately available.

Lester told KCRA, the local NBC affiliate, investigators were still working to determine what Martin's role was in the shooting. Police said the district attorney is reviewing evidence to determine appropriate charges for the suspects, and more charges may be filed.

What happened during the shooting?

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Lester said a large fight broke out right before the shooting. Videos showed people fighting on a street lined with an upscale hotel, nightclubs and bars when gunshots sent people scattering.

Asa Pickett, who was at the Dive Bar on Saturday, told The Record, part of the USA TODAY Network, he heard about 100 rounds. He and his friends saw people running into one another, and his group found an area in a nearby alley where they hid for about 45 minutes.

"We came out, and there were bodies on the ground," he said.

Sacramento community holds vigil for shooting victims

Members of the Sacramento community gathered downtown Monday evening to mourn the victims of Sunday's deadly shooting.

Monday morning, community members lined the sidewalk with a makeshift memorial of candles, flowers and stuffed animals, the Bee reported. Later that day, the city's mayor, Darrell Steinberg, read the names of the six victims at the vigil.

"We gather today to mourn their senseless deaths," he said. "And we gather for their loved ones, who are represented tonight," motioning to a line of people standing behind him holding flowers, candles and photos of the victims.

Jackie Henderson, a cousin of Sergio Harris, who was killed in the shooting, called for action by public officials during the vigil.

"How many times are we going to sit back and talk about the next time?" he asked the crowd. "A change has to start. When the hell are we going to let it start?"

Contributing: Angelaydet Rocha, The Record; The Associated Press

Contact Breaking News Reporter N'dea Yancey-Bragg at nyanceybra@gannett.com or follow her on Twitter @NdeaYanceyBragg

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Several Sacramento shooting suspects arrested: What we know
FILE - Visitors walk outside the Supreme Court building on Capitol Hill in Washington, Feb. 21, 2022. The Supreme Court on Wednesday, April 6, 2022, reinstated for now a Trump-era rule that had curtailed the power of states and Native American tribes to block pipelines and other energy projects that can pollute rivers, streams and other waterways. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

WASHINGTON (AP)  The Supreme Court on Wednesday reinstated for now a Trump-era rule that curtails the power of states and Native American tribes to block pipelines and other energy projects that can pollute rivers, streams and other waterways.

In a decision that split the court 5-4, the justices agreed to halt a lower court judges order throwing out the rule. The high courts action does not interfere with the Biden administrations plan to rewrite the rule. Work on a revision has begun, but the administration has said a final rule is not expected until the spring of 2023. The Trump-era rule will remain in effect in the meantime.

The courts three liberal justices and Chief Justice John Roberts dissented. The courts other conservative justices, including three nominated by President Donald Trump, voted to reinstate the rule.

Writing for the dissenters, Justice Elena Kagan said the group of states and industry associations that had asked for the lower courts ruling to be put on hold had not shown the extraordinary circumstances necessary to grant that request.

Kagan said the group had failed to demonstrate their harm if the judges decision were left in place. She said the group had not identified a single project that a State has obstructed in the months since the judges decision and had twice delayed making a request, indicating it was not urgent.

Kagan said the courts majority had gone astray in granting the emergency petition and was misusing the process for dealing with such requests. That process is sometimes called the courts shadow docket because the court provides a decision quickly without the full briefing and argument. The liberal justices have recently been critical of its use.

As is typical, the justices in the majority did not explain their reasoning.

Kagan wrote that her colleagues decision renders the Courts emergency docket not for emergencies at all.

The Biden administration had told the justices in a court filing that it agreed that the U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup lacked the authority to throw out the rule without first determining that it was invalid. But the administration had urged the court not to reinstate the rule, saying that in the months since the Alsups ruling, officials have adapted to the change, reverting to regulations in place for decades. Another change would cause substantial disruption and disserve the public interest, the administration said.

Alsup was nominated to the bench by President Bill Clinton.

The section of federal law at issue in the case is Section 401 of the Clean Water Act. For decades, it had been the rule that a federal agency could not issue a license or permit to conduct any activity that could result in any discharge into navigable waters unless the affected state or tribe certified that the discharge was complied with the Clean Water Act and state law, or waived certification.

The Trump administration in 2020 curtailed that review power after complaints from Republicans in Congress and the fossil fuel industry that state officials had used the permitting process to stop new energy projects. The Trump administration said its actions would advance then-President Donald Trumps goal to fast-track energy projects such as oil and natural gas pipelines.

States, Native American Tribes and environmental groups sued. Several mostly Republican-led states, a national trade association representing the oil and gas industry and others have intervened in the case to defend the Trump-era rule. The states involved in the case are: Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, West Virginia, Wyoming and Texas.
The Biden administration on Wednesday announced a new round of sanctions against Russia over its ongoing war in Ukraine, and in direct response to atrocities seen this week in Bucha. Among those sanctioned: Russian President Vladimir Putins two adult daughters, Mariya Putina and Katerina Tikhonova.

The sanctions, which were announced in conjunction with the European Union, target numerous entities  including Russias largest financial institution, Sberbank, and its largest private bank, Alfa Bank  as well as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrovs wife and daughter, and members of Russias Security Council, including Dmitry Medvedev and Mikhail Mishustin.

These individuals have enriched themselves at the expense of the Russian people, the White House said in a statement announcing the new sanctions. Some of them are responsible for providing the support necessary to underpin Putins war on Ukraine. This action cuts them off from the U.S. financial system and freezes any assets they hold in the United States.

But the sanctions imposed on Putins daughters cast a spotlight on the Russian presidents family, which has long been shrouded in secrecy.

So who are Putins daughters?

Russian President Vladimir Putin with his wife, right, and daughter Mariya, left, in 2007. (Alexander Nemenova/AFP via Getty Images)

Little is known about the 69-year-old Russian presidents daughters, as the Kremlin has largely shielded them from public view.

According to the Wall Street Journal, both Putina and Tikhonova were born to Putins ex-wife, Lyudmila Putina, a former cabin crew member for Aeroflot. Their relationship ended in 2013.

Putina, the Russian presidents elder daughter, was born in Russia in April 1985, before Putin and his wife left for Germany, where he was stationed as a KGB officer. Tikhonova was born in August 1986 in Dresden, Germany.

Putina, who is reportedly a doctor specializing in rare diseases in children, is said to be married to Jorrit Joost Faassen, a Dutch businessman. The couple purportedly lived in the Netherlands until they were expelled from the country after the 2014 downing of a passenger jet by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine, an attack that killed 298 people  including nearly 200 citizens of the Netherlands.

Katerina Tikhonova, daughter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is seen participating in the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June of last year. (Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters)

Katerina, an academic who for years competed in acrobatic rock-and-roll dance contests, was reportedly appointed in 2020 to run an artificial intelligence institute at Moscow State University. According to a lengthy 2015 Reuters profile, Katerina described herself as the spouse of Kirill Shamalov, son of Nikolai Shamalov, a longtime friend of Putin and a shareholder in Bank Rossiya.

Among the young couples holdings is a seaside villa in Biarritz, France, estimated to be worth about $3.7 million, Reuters said. They reportedly split in 2018.

Putin rarely talks about them

At his annual press conference in 2015, Putin said that he was proud of his daughters while dismissing speculation that they were living overseas.

They continue to study and work, he said. They are just living their lives.

To talk about where exactly my daughters work and what they do  I have never done this and am not going to do it now, for many reasons, including security issues, he added. They just live their lives and do it with dignity.

Putin has grandchildren too

Putin at a meeting at the Kremlin on March 2. (Mikhail Klimentyev/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images)

In an interview with the Russian state news agency TASS in October 2020, Putin acknowledged that he is a grandfather.

I have grandchildren, I am happy. They are very good, sweet, like that, he said. I get great pleasure from communicating with them.
In an impassioned address to the United Nations Security Council Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy laid down the gauntlet -- urging the U.N.'s most powerful body to either act or "dissolve yourself altogether."

It was a challenge to the world's diplomats sitting in the historic chamber in New York, where any action to even condemn Russia's invasion has been blocked by Russia's veto power as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council.

But it was also a searing indictment of the U.N. system itself, created in the ashes of World War II to ensure international peace and security.

U.N. aid agencies are on the ground providing assistance, its human rights chief is monitoring reported war crimes, including new, shocking images of murdered civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, and nearly three-fourths of its members have joined to condemn Russia's invasion.

But none of that has stopped Russian leader Vladimir Putin's brutal campaign to topple the Ukrainian government and subjugate the country,

MORE: Residents of Bucha recount horrors: 'I recognized him by his sneakers'

"Where is the security that the Security Council needs to guarantee?" Zelenskyy asked. "It is obvious the key institution of the world ... simply cannot work effectively."

Top U.N. officials attended the session Tuesday, including Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who lamented how the war was now fueling food and fuel crises and threatening to throw more people around the world into hunger.

PHOTO: Bodies lie in the street in Bucha, northwest of Kyiv, in Ukraine on April 2, 2022 after Russian forces withdrew from the town. (Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via Getty Images)

"For all these reasons, it is more urgent by the day to silence the guns. ... The war in Ukraine must stop -- now," he told the chamber.

But weeks of condemnation by Guterres and other U.N. diplomats have fallen on deaf ears in Moscow, which continues to use its prominent perch on the Security Council to spread disinformation about the war and accuse Ukraine of provocations, lies, and fakes. On Tuesday, its envoy Vasily Nebenzya again spoke repeatedly to say the atrocities reported by eyewitnesses and journalists in Bucha were "staged."

MORE: Biden calls Russia's killing of Ukrainian civilians a war crime but not genocide

The failure to reproach Nebenzya for his near daily false claims is yet another way the U.N.'s credibility has taken a hit during the crisis, according to some critics.

In his remarks, Zelenskyy himself said the U.N. could be "simply closed" if it doesn't act to punish Russia for its invasion of his country -- "if there is nothing that you can do besides conversation."

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield pushed back on that gently in an interview after the session, telling the BBC Zelensky "is not exactly right."

"No one can question his frustration with the council and how the council operates. The Russians do have veto power. But I have said over and over again -- they cannot veto our voices, they can't veto his voice," Thomas-Greenfield said.

PHOTO: Vasily Alekseevich Nebenzya, Permanent Representative of Russia to the United Nations, speaks during a meeting of the UN Security Council, April 5, 2022, at United Nations headquarters. (John Minchillo/AP)

But Zelenskyy made clear that for Ukraine, that is not enough.

He demanded that "the Russian military and those who gave them orders must be brought to justice immediately" -- urging for "complete truth and full accountability." As he detailed horrific atrocities in Bucha and elsewhere - he said worse is yet to be discovered in the cities still held by Russian forces.

But he also called for wholesale reform of the U.N. system -- saying that the international body has not lived up to the goals set out at its founding in San Francisco after World War II, and that those goals cannot be reached without reforms. He called for Russia to be expelled from the Security Council or for it to be reformed at a global conference, including ending the veto power.

MORE: 'Women were raped and killed in front of their children,' Zelenskyy tells UN

"The veto is not the right to die," he added. "No more exceptions or privileges."

There is no effort underway to expel Russia from the Security Council or the General Assembly, the U.N.'s main chamber -- where all 193 countries have a vote, but whose resolutions are non-binding. An expulsion from the U.N. requires a recommendation from the Security Council itself -- where Russia wields that veto power -- and then a vote by the General Assembly.

That veto power -- shared with the four other permanent members China, the U.S., the United Kingdom, and France -- has rendered the Security Council powerless to even pass a resolution condemning the Kremlin's invasion.

PHOTO: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks via remote feed during a meeting of the UN Security Council, April 5, 2022, at United Nations headquarters. (John Minchillo/AP)

Either way, Putin seems to care little for paper condemnations like U.N. resolutions. The night he launched his war and the bombs started to fall across Ukraine, U.N. diplomats were meeting at the same time in New York late at night to discuss the threat of war, their words ringing even more hollow.

Instead of fully expelling Russia, the U.S. is pushing with its allies and partners, including Ukraine, to suspend Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council. The body's 47 members are elected among U.N. member states for three-year terms, but a country can be suspended with a two-thirds majority vote in the U.N. General Assembly.

"Our votes can make a real difference. Russia's participation in the U.N. Human Rights Council hurts the council's credibility, it undermines the entire U.N., and it is just plain wrong. Let us come together to do what is right and do right by the Ukrainian people," Thomas-Greenfield told her fellow diplomats in the chamber.

U.S. officials have said they believe they have the votes necessary -- pointing to two previous resolutions passed by the General Assembly to condemn Russia's invasion with 141 and 140 votes, respectively. A vote could be held as soon as Thursday, Thomas-Greenfield said.

While only one other country has faced that kind of censure -- Libya in 2011 after Muammar Gaddafi's forces opened fire on protesters -- Russia has already dismissed the efforts, with Nebenzya vowing nothing will stop the Kremlin's campaign.

"We need to cut out the malignant Nazi tumor that is consuming Ukraine and would in time begin to consume Russia, and we will achieve that goal, I hope sooner rather than later, because there is no other outcome," he said.

Zelenskyy challenges UN to punish Russia or 'simply close' its doors: ANALYSIS originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
Sean Penn says Ukraine will win the ongoing war with Russia but that the cost of victory remains unclear.

The filmmaker and Oscar-winning actor said no one on the planet has been tested in leadership like Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky during the conflict.

Penn, who has been in and out of Ukraine while making a documentary about the ongoing Russian invasion, appeared on Fox News programme Hannity on Tuesday evening.

Ive never felt this way about Ukraine or about where our country is, and what I experienced emotionally in Ukraine, he told host Sean Hannity.

We all talk about how divided things are here, but when you step into a country of such incredible unity, you realise what weve all been missing.

These people are fighting for the very dreams that are the aspirations of all of us Americans.

HANNITY EXCLUSIVE: @SeanPenn will join "Hannity" TONIGHT for an EXCLUSIVE interview. We'll talk about his experience filming a documentary in Ukraine. Tune in at 9 PM ET or set your DVR!  Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) April 6, 2022

Speaking about Zelenskys leadership he said: I dont know that theres a person on earth that could know that they were born for such a day, that they could rise to it.

In him I saw something that Ive never seen before in my lifetime this extraordinary courage was in his eyes.

No one on the planet has been tested in leadership like this one human being.

He added: It is clear to me, the Ukrainians will win this, the question is at what cost.

The Oscar-winning actor no one on the planet has been tested in leadership like Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky during the ongoing conflict (Ian West/PA)

The Ukrainians are fighting to win and theyre fighting to win for the very thing were able to do right now, to be free, to dream.

Penn declined to give his thoughts on what direct action should be taken against Russian leader Vladimir Putin, but added: If there is a God, there will be vengeance beyond all possible comprehension.

The actor was branded as an enemy of the state by Hannity back in 2007, but said he now wore the comment as a badge of honour as he refused to get drawn into a political debate by the host.

Penn later appeared on the more left-leaning MSNBC on the show The Last Word With Lawrence ODonnell to heap further praise on President Zelensky.

The Oscar-winner has been actively involved in humanitarian projects throughout the years, including founding the non-profit organisation CORE (Community Organised Relief Effort) in response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
A security guard at the British embassy in Berlin who is suspected of spying for Russia has been extradited to the UK and is to appear in court charged with nine offences under the Official Secrets Act, Scotland Yard has said.

David Smith, 57, is accused of collecting information from the embassy and intending to pass it to a foreign state.

One of the nine offences, which were allegedly committed between October 2020 and last August, relates to allegations he passed information to a person he believed was a representative of the Russian state, according to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

Smith was flown from Germany on Wednesday and is due to appear at Westminster Magistrates Court on Thursday.

 A security guard alleged to have spied at a British Embassy in Germany has been flown back to the UK today to face charges. He is accused of collecting information from the British Embassy in Berlin intending to pass it to a foreign state.  https://t.co/WKr3VZiVib pic.twitter.com/LxC1cuFAYE  CPS (@CPSUK) April 6, 2022

The British national, who was living in Potsdam, Germany, was arrested by German police on August 10 last year and was remanded in custody in the country.

Nick Price, head of the CPS special crime and counter terrorism division, said: David Smith has been charged with nine offences contrary to the Official Secrets Act.

He is accused of seven offences of collecting information with the intent of sending it to the Russian authorities, one of attempting communication and one of providing information to a person he believed was a member of the Russian authorities.

After reviewing the case and authorising charges, we obtained an extradition warrant and worked closely with our German counterparts in order to bring Mr Smith back to the UK.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is set to make an historic address to the Irish Parliament later.

It comes a day after he made a dramatic speech to the United Nations (UN) Security Council.

Addressing nations representatives, including those from Russia, he accused Vladimir Putins forces of creating mass starvation and shooting and raping civilians.

Watch LIVE coverage of the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy's address to the Joint Sitting of Dail & Seanad Eireann  tomorrow, Wednesday, 6th April @ 10am  #seeforyourself  #Ukraine View on #OireachtasTV here  https://t.co/MmumKynf0z pic.twitter.com/5H6UfGjSfr  Houses of the Oireachtas  Tithe an Oireachtais (@OireachtasNews) April 5, 2022

Mr Zelensky called for those responsible to be brought to justice in a tribunal similar to the Nuremberg trials.

Irish Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney said he expects Mr Zelensky to emphasise the brutality of the conflict when he addresses the Dail and Seanad in a joint sitting on Wednesday.

Certainly, my conversation with the Ukrainian foreign minister earlier this week was a very sobering and difficult conversation, he said.

Mr Coveney also said that the government would keep further expulsions of Russian officials from Ireland under consideration, but added that keeping diplomatic efforts open was important.

Mr Zelensky has addressed a number of national parliaments, including the House of Commons last month, as well as the US Congress, and last week spoke virtually at the Grammy Awards.
Not at all. It just seems like a lot of back-and-forth talk.

Yes. I'm growing very worried over what might happen.

If it keeps up, I might be a little more concerned.

I think there are much larger things to concern us as a country.

It's hard to tell; I can't take the leader of either country seriously.

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YEREVAN, APRIL 6, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who is in Brussels on a working visit, had a private conversation with the President of the European Council Charles Michel, ARMENPRESS was informed from the Office of the Prime Minister.

The interlocutors referred to the trilateral meeting of the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan, the President of the European Council Charles Michel and the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev scheduled for today, attaching importance to the continuation of the dialogue.

Nikol Pashinyan presented the situation in Artsakh following the recent actions of the Azerbaijani units, the humanitarian issues and stressed the need for an addressed reaction of the international community.

The Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia and Charles Michel exchanged views on the implementation process of the agreements reached during the trilateral meeting held in Brussels on December 14 last year.

The parties expressed hope that today's trilateral talks will be fruitful, which will contribute to stability and comprehensive solution of the issues.

Nikol Pashinyan and Charles Michel also discussed issues related to the Armenia-EU bilateral agenda, in particular, the implementation of the 2.6 billion economic and investment plan declared by the EU for Armenia.
Jaishankar said India was 'deeply disturbed' by reports of civilians being killed in Ukraine's Bucha and strongly condemned the killings

New Delhi: Asserting that India was on the side of peace, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar told Parliament here on Wednesday that New Delhi was strongly against the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict as no solution can be arrived at by shedding blood, and at the cost of innocent lives.

Mr Jaishankar said India was deeply disturbed by reports of civilians being killed in the Ukrainian town of Bucha and strongly condemned the killings, but made no mention of Russia, which is facing global criticism over the massacre.

This is an extremely serious matter, and we support the call for an independent investigation, the minister said, while replying to a short duration discussion on the Ukraine-Russia conflict in the Lok Sabha. The minister did not name any side over these killings.

Mr Jaishankar said that in this day and age, dialogue and diplomacy are the right answers to any dispute. If India has chosen a side, it is the side of peace, and it is for an immediate end to violence. This is our principled stand, he said.

Mr Jaishankar said India continues to press forcefully for an immediate cessation of hostilities and encouraged talks between Ukraine and Russia, including at the level of their Presidents. The Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) has himself spoken to them both in this regard. This was precisely the message that was conveyed to Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov when he was in Delhi, he said.

The minister said that if India can be of any assistance, we will be glad to contribute He said the ground situation calls for urgent humanitarian relief and India has already given 90 tonnes of relief material. Ukraines deputy prime minister Yulia Svyrydenko called me a few days ago to request the supply of more medicines. The House will be glad to know

that this is under way and delivery should start very soon, he said.

On the Ukraine crisis impact on the global economy, Mr Jaishankar said the governments focus was to soften its impact on our own economy and was working with the international community to mitigate the conomic hardships that are resulting from this conflict.

At a time when energy costs have spiked, clearly, we need to ensure that the ordinary person in India is not subject to an additional, unavoidable burden, said the minister. He noted that these are legitimate pursuits of national interest by India and are similar to what other nations are doing from their particular perspective. Attributing a political colouring to it is uncalled for. It is unfair, he said.

Mr Jaishankar said in a complex and globalised world every nation takes into account the reality of interdependence. Even as they express their position in words and deeds, they also adopt policies that safeguard the well-being of their population. As a result, we have seen, even in Europe, that the energy flows continue despite the tension, he said.

Mr Jaishankar said the world order will change partly because of the consequences of the Ukraine-Russia conflict. To my mind, the solution is, we have to be stronger; we have to reduce our dependency on the external world. It can never be total. But the way to deal with the new world order is really Atma Nirbhar Bharat It is not just an economic policy.

On financial transactions with Russia after sanctions by the West, the minister said that the government was trying to stabilise the economic transactions between India and Russia. At the moment, there is an Inter-Ministerial Group which is led by the finance ministry seeing how the payments issue can be best addressed. There are experiences from the past which are relevant in this regard, he said.

Meanwhile, Indias permanent representative to the UN, T.S. Tirumurti, on Wednesday morning (IST) also condemned the horrific killings of civilians in Bucha and demanded an independent investigation. The situation in Ukraine has not shown any significant improvement since the Council last discussed the issue. The security situation has only deteriorated, as well as its humanitarian consequences. Recent reports of civilian killings in Bucha are deeply disturbing. We unequivocally condemn these killings and support the call for an independent investigation, he said during a discussion at the UN Security Council in New York. Pointing out that the impact of the crisis is being felt beyond the region, with increasing food and energy costs, especially for many developing countries, New Delhi said that humanitarian action must always be guided by the principles of humanitarian assistance, that is humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, and that these measures should never be politicised. India has so far not condemned Russia for its military offensive in Ukraine, even as the West led by the United States is stepping up the pressure on India to take a tougher line on Russia.

The Lok Sabha also passed the Weapons of Mass Destruction and their Delivery Systems (Prohibition of Unlawful Activities) Amendment Bill 2022, which bars funding of weapons of mass destruction. The bill, introduced by Mr Jaishankar, also gives the government powers to freeze and seize the financial assets of people involved in such activities. This bill was introduced as part of Indias international obligations relating to the WMDs.
Mr Pawar categorically ruled out a tie-up between the NCP and BJP and criticised the alleged misuse of Central probe agencies

Mumbai: NCP chief Sharad Pawar on Wednesday met Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Prime Ministers Office in Parliament for nearly 20 minutes. The meeting between the two leaders led to speculation about new equations emerging in Maharashtra politics. However, Mr Pawar categorically ruled out a tie-up between the NCP and BJP and criticised the alleged misuse of Central probe agencies.

He said that he flagged the issue of Enforcement Directorates (ED) action against Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut and the alleged inaction of Governor Bhagat Singh Koshiyari on the Maharashtra governments proposal regarding 12 nominations to the state Legislative Council.

The NCP chiefs meeting with the PM assumed political significance as it took place a day after the ED attached assets worth more than Rs 11.15 crore linked to Rajya Sabha member Sanjay Raut.

After the meeting, the NCP chief told reporters that he spoke with the Prime Minister regarding the 12 members nomination to the legislative council. The government of Maharashtra had written regarding this nomination to the governor. But Mr Koshyari has not acted on it. Therefore, 12 seats of legislative councils have been lying vacant for the last two and half years. I just brought this thing to the notice of the Prime Minister, he said.

I also spoke to the Prime Minister about the case related to my colleague in Rajya Sabha and editor of Saamana newspaper Sanjay Raut. I told him that the way the Central agency attached Mr Rauts flat and half-acre lands is unfair, Mr Pawar said.

When asked about the Prime Ministers response, Mr Pawar said, I think that he will seriously think over these issues and take necessary action.

Mr Pawar added that there was no threat to the MVA government in Maharashtra due to the Central agencys action against MVA leaders. All three parties have been taking a firm stand against the Central agencies. He also claimed that when elections would be held in Maharashtra after two-and-a-half years, the MVA government would be elected again.

Earlier, when asked by reporters about the meeting, NCP leader and Maharashtras deputy CM Ajit Pawar said he had no information about it. The Maharashtra DCM said that there are some important issues which need to be discussed when Parliament is in session.
Today:'s headlines: China's daily Covid-19 case count continues to rise, reaching more than 20 thousand; 6 in 10 Indonesians want Beijing containment policy; Journalists condemned in Vietnam for exposing corruption cases; Kuwaiti government resigns; Kazakhstan declares that it will not help Moscow to circumvent Western sanctions.

INDIA

Delhi has condemned the indiscriminate killing of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha at the UN yesterday, also calling for an independent investigation into the incident. Invading Russian forces occupied the small town on the outskirts of Kiev until a few days ago. Since the outbreak of the conflict, this is the first time that the Indian government has taken a position; so far it has never criticized Moscow's intervention.

CHINA

Chinese health authorities today registered more than 20,000 cases of Covid-19, the highest number since the pandemic broke out two years ago. The most difficult situation is still in Shanghai, where millions of lockdown residents must begin a second close cycle of diagnostic tests.

INDONESIA

6 in 10 Indonesians want their government to join other countries in the region in limiting China's influence. The figure emerges from a survey by the Australia-based Lowy Institute. However, 80% of respondents said that in cases of conflict between Beijing and the U.S., Indonesia must remain neutral.

VIETNAM

A Ho Chi Minh City court yesterday sentenced a journalist to three and a half years in prison. Nguyen Hoai Nam a was blamed for criticizing how the authorities handled a public corruption case he revealed in 2018.

KUWAIT

The Kuwaiti government resigned yesterday, shortly before a no-confidence vote in parliament against Premier Sheikh Sabah al-Khalid. Executive and legislative branches in the wealthy Gulf monarchy have long been at odds over the launch of tax reform.

RUSSIA-UKRAINE

Russia's state-run news agency Ria Novosti published an article by "philosopher and methodologist" Timofej Sergejtsev with a new "de-Nazification" plan for Ukraine that includes control of almost all of its territory except for "the pro-nationalist western provinces, which will never join Russia, and are best left to the Catholics."

KAZAKHSTAN

The first deputy head of Kazakh President Tokaev's administration, Timur Suleimanov, told the press that Kazakhstan will not help Russia circumvent Western sanctions. In line with the UN, Nur-Sultan "respects the territorial integrity of Ukraine" and does not recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea or the independence of Donbass.
by Earl Fernandes *

Pope Francis appointed Earl Fernandes to lead the Diocese of Columbus, thus becoming the first bishop of Indian origin in the US Church. He is grateful for the faith that sustained his parents even amid many difficulties. His roots in Asia are a treasure for America today.

Mumbai (AsiaNews)  Pope Francis named Mgr Earl Fernandes, a priest of Indian origin, as the new bishop of Columbus (Ohio). This is the first time that someone with an immigrant background from India to receive an episcopal appointment.

Born in Toledo (Ohio) on 21 September 1972 into a family from Goa, Fernandes was ordained a priest in 2002 in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, where he has carried out his ministry to this day.

In the following remarks sent to AsiaNews, the new prelate answers our questions about his profile as the son of Indian immigrants and the significance of his appointment for the Church of the United States.

In the United States, there is a great tradition of sons of immigrants becoming bishops. Most commonly this occurred with the Irish, but now more frequently this is also happening with Hispanics and Vietnamese. It is something wonderful because it shows forth the great diversity in the Catholic Church.

Recently my friend Jerome Feudjio was named bishop of the Diocese of St. Thomas in the United States Virgin Islands. He was born in Cameroon but was a perfectly well qualified candidate for the office of bishop. More and more, the United States, and the church in the United States, are becoming diverse and perhaps it is time that the make-up of the bishops reflects that diversity. Nevertheless, we need to have good candidates for the office

As a son of an immigrant, I am filled with gratitude and awe at the sacrifices that my parents made for me and my brothers.

The United States offers so much opportunity and so much freedom, and these are gifts. We want to be good stewards of Gods gifts. Life for immigrants is not always easy. It is not always easy to make connections or to understand perfectly the culture; nevertheless, the church offered stability and care, a place of belonging, and a common form of worship which allows us to encounter God who makes all things possible.

In the midst of difficulties and even sufferings, sometimes even prejudice, we begin to understand how close God is to us. Cooperating with Gods grace and working hard can go a long way.

I imagine, as immigrants, my parents had a very strong Catholic identity which they handed to their children in the midst of great cultural change. They wanted their children to have the gift of faith. When many things in America seemed so different to them, the faith and the Churchs liturgy offered consolation and strength.

I am not sure whether Pope Francis intended to send a message about immigration with my appointment. He has been sending a strong message about immigration from the beginning of the pontificate starting with his visit to Lampedusa. Perhaps this is similar to how he has diversified the College of Cardinals.

Having grown up in the United States, Im perfectly familiar with American culture and customs. I can fit in easily. Bringing a different cultural background to the people of the Diocese of Columbus could enrich the local church.

For example, India has a rich philosophical tradition and Pope John Paul II asked philosophers and theologians in the West to engage that tradition. India also has a tradition of religious tolerance and learning how to live side-by-side with those of diverse faiths. This can be useful as new immigrants come to urban areas especially.

Indian culture and art can also be useful in authentic efforts to evangelize through inculturation without syncretism.

If this is true for Indian culture, we could also say similar things about African Catholics, who are now coming to the United States or Latino Catholics, with their great devotion to the Virgin Mary.

All of these things can enrich the Church in the United States, which at times rather than evangelize the culture has become more like the culture, more secular, more devoid of devotion. I think popular piety can be a great tool in helping incarnate the faith in the Church in the United States.

* Mgr Earl Fernandes is the bishop elect of the Diocese of Columbus (United States)

(Nirmala Carvalho contributed to this article)
In other words, if youre in the market searching for a super-rare Charger, just make sure you find one that comes from the factory with this option.This 1969 Charger, on the other hand, isnt necessarily as special as the rare sibling we just told you about, but on the other hand, this doesnt necessarily mean it doesnt deserve our attention. It does, but unfortunately, our love and consideration arent enough to bring it back to the road.Sadly, eBay seller charg-82 has provided very limited information on the car, but on the other hand, you dont have to be a rocket scientist to figure out this Charger comes in a super-rough condition. Likely sitting under a tarp for many years, the vehicle has obviously been forced to deal with lots of rust.And, just as expected, some parts have been completely wrecked, including the floors and most likely the trunk as well. In other words, whoever buys this Charger would first and foremost have to get rid of the rust, install new panels, and only then start focusing on other restoration things.The VIN indicates this Charger was born with a 318 (5.2-liter) unit under the hood, and while we dont know if an engine is still in the car, its probably safer to assume it is not.Without a doubt, saving this Dodge isnt the kind of job for the Average Job, so dont be too surprised if it ends up serving as a donor for another restoration project.Unfortunately, the seller is also very optimistic about the selling price, as they expect to get no more, no less than $10,000 for this rough Charger. No other offers are seemingly accepted, and if you want to see it in person, you must pay a visit to the owner in Laredo, Texas.
Warning lights came on, the brake pressure dropped, and thats when Bayou knew in the back of his mind that a flatbed is necessary. He also discovered a puddle of brake fluid under the passenger-side rear wheel and not even a nut holding the passenger-side rear wheel to the rear axle. Considering that were dealing with a low-mileage pickup thats never been abused over 3,000 miles (4,828 kilometers) of ownership, this failure is unacceptable.Toyota didnt have the required parts readily available, which is why Mr. Rigs was told by the dealership that he would have to wait for a month or so. But when Toyota Corporate learned of this unsatisfactory timeframe and issue, they bent over backward by expediting the necessary components.On March 31st, the dealership received a brand-new rear axle assembly and rear brake lines on the passenger side. A wiring harness was shipped overnight, and on April 1st, the 1794 Edition was ready for pick up. Bayou took his Tundra back on April 4th, but he still isnt happy with the truck.Since new, Mr. Rigs noticed a vibration when shifting into park at a red light. I could see the passenger seat and water bottle shaking. With the axle replaced, I noticed less vibration. He mentions the old-generation V8 Tundra exhibits no vibrations, proving that there still is room for improvement.Redesigned on the TNGA-F platform of the Land Cruiser and LX, the 2022 Toyota Tundra is exclusively offered with V6 oomph. A hybrid V6 tops the lineup with 437 horsepower and 583 pound-feet (790 Nm) of torque. But on the other hand, its not as frugal as the PowerBoost in the Ford F-150.
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

FoMoCo called back the Mustang Mach-E over inadequate windshield and panoramic sunroof adhesion in September 2021, and three months later, the Focus-based Transit Connect was recalled over panoramic roof separation . Adding insult to injury, the Blue Oval followed has announced yet another inadequate adhesion recall that affects nearly 40,000 Transit Connects.The Critical Concern Review Group started taking this problem seriously in July 2019 due to an increase in field claims related to windshield water leak, wind noise, and looseness. How are the turntables, right? Ford has received approximately 325 field reports from August 2016 to the month of October 2021. Ford isnt aware of any accidents or injuries related to this condition, but nevertheless, it still has to fix a lot of Transit Connects.Documents filed with thereveal that portions of the windshield glass periphery have an inhomogeneous primer layer. This results in inadequate adhesion of the windshield to the body structure, which means the windshield may fly off the vehicle in a crash. The Ford Motor Company puts the blame on inconsistent primer application for the 2016 model year population of vehicles, but the root cause for 2020 models is currently under review. Only these years are affected.The 2016 models were produced between December 2015 and June 2016 at the Valencia plant in Spain. The 2020 models were built between November 2019 and February 2020. That said, dealers have been instructed to reinstall the windshield using wait for it properly formulated materials.Mailing of notification letters is expected to begin on April 18th and will be hopefully completed by April 22nd. Customers who had the windshield reinstalled or replaced from their own pockets are eligible for reimbursement until May 6th, according to the attached recall report.
A few hours ago, an Airbus A330neo sporting vibrant green stripes made its appearance in Toulouse. It will be the first to be integrated into the flight schedule of the Condor airline this autumn, with other colorful, striped brothers to follow. This is the new look of the Condor fleet, inspired by vacations at the beach.When you hold the title of Germanys most popular holiday airline, in addition to being one of the top leisure airlines in the world, you almost have a duty to inspire people to dream and to be happy. Unveiling this unexpected livery is one way of doing that. Sunshine (yellow), Passion (red), Sea (Blue), Island (Green), and Beach (beige) are the new colors that reflect the operators motto  Passion is our compass.Colorful stripes bring happy memories for many of us, reminding us of sun umbrellas, ice cream shops, and, most of all, beach towels. Indeed, these types of stripes are timeless and instantly recognizable, so its not surprising that Condor wanted to have its aircraft associated with them.The Airbus 320-200, operated by the German airline for short and medium-haul flights in Europe and North Africa, will sport the blue stripes. With a total of 180 seats and up to 24 seats in Business Class, it has a range of 4,630 km (2,876 miles).At the other end of the range, the Airbus A330neo is not only capable of long-haul flights but boasts a series of innovations. It consumes just 2.1 liters (0.5 gallons) of fuel per passenger per 100 km (62 miles), cutting CO2 emissions by 20%. It also claims to offer the quietest cabin in the world and increased comfort. Now, with this cheerful livery, it will become even more recognizable.
CBC

Believe it or not, your stolen car could be somewhere in West Africa with a new unsuspecting owner.According to the IBC (Insurance Bureau of Canada) , residents in Ontario alone lose close to $1.6 billion in auto insurance fraud and theft. In the U.S., about 814,400 cars went missing in 2020. 11.8% more from 724,872 in the previous year.News coordinated with local car dealers in Lagos, Nigeria, and sent a team of undercover researchers who discovered a fleet of cars suspected stolen from driveways and shopping malls in Canada.According to IBC, the most stolen cars in Canada include the 2017-2019 Honda CR-V, 2017-2019 Lexus RX350/RX450h, Toyota Highlander, and Dodge Ram 1500.The investigative team found two stolen Honda CR-Vs still holding dealer stickers from Montreal in the west African country. After conducting a simple VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) search, both appeared in the system as possibly stolen. 2018 Ford F-150 Pickup trucks details also came back possibly stolen from Ontario, as well as a Lexus RX350 that still had its Ontario license plate.Natalie Cara, a theft victim, shared with CBC News CCTV footage of her 2020 Lexus getting stolen at night. It took the crooks 20 minutes to steal her new car. Another victim lost her brand new Honda CR-V while shopping in a mall.According to the CBC News team, all it takes is a lock picking device and an essential programming tool that costs less than $1,000 online. Canadian authorities also told the investigative team that car thieves also use a relay attack.The relay attack method uses a device to fool the car into thinking its remote key fob is close, prompting it to unlock and allowing the ignition to go off.
EV

While Apple has so far remained silent on its plans to launch an Apple-brand EV , Xiaomi has already confirmed such an ambition, with the company expected to announce its very first car in late 2023 or in early 2024.And while the transition from the tech world to cars is evidently just a matter of time, it looks like things are also working the other way around.Chinesemaker Nio has recently confirmed its looking into the mass production of a smartphone, though at this point, it looks like a final decision is yet to be made.The confirmation that such a project is currently on the table comes courtesy of none other than the companys CEO William Li, who said in an interview for the local media that a Nio phone is currently being looked into.However, contrary to what many people might expect, Nio doesnt want to launch a phone to compete against the likes of Samsung and Apple in the mobile device race. However, at some level, it would still do this, despite Nios main objective of just building an extension of the EVs it builds.Li claims Nios purpose is to just build a phone that would help build an ecosystem that also includes its cars, so in theory, it wants the mobile device to offer deep integration of its EVs, and the other way around.But despite this final goal, Nios mobile smartphone would still end up becoming a competitor to the iPhone, for instance. Apple has built one very solid ecosystem that has the iPhone at the core of everything, and the upcoming Apple Car is believed to become an essential part of this family as well.Many people believe the Apple Car will be an iPhone on wheels, and at some level, this looks to be what Nio is aiming for as well. For now, however, the project is still uncertain, but well probably find out more about it in the coming months.
Phoenix 2 is the name of the-fifth generation technology demonstrator for Lilium s eVTOL jet. After having conducted initial flight tests in southern Germany last year, Phoenix 2 has just kicked off advanced flight testing in Spain. For this next phase, experts will conduct a full test campaign, including transition flights and high-speed flights.The ATLAS Flight Test Center in Spain was selected due to its advanced infrastructure, providing aircraft with a large, unpopulated area that they can fly over and even transition to high-speed operation. The Andalusian Foundation for Aerospace Development (FADA) and Center for Advanced Aerospace Technologies (CATEC) have also supported Liliums advanced testing campaign.What makes this future eVTOL jet unique is the Ducted Electric Vectored Thrust (DEVT), a technology which Lilium developed over several years. The aircrafts electric jet motors, integrated into the wing flaps, enable more efficient maneuvering through thrust vector control in all flight phases. Its estimated top speed of 300 kph (186 mph) and range of 300 km (186 miles) could make it an interesting option for private, emissions-free air travel.The aircraft can be configured as a luxury private jet with four seats, an air taxi with six seats, or a cargo jet with no seats. The biggest private aviation company in the world, NetJets, will be one of the first to offer these electric jets to private owners, having already agreed to purchase 150 aircraft from Lilium.In order to speed up the flight test campaign even more, the company will work with an additional demonstrator aircraft, the Phoenix 3, set to arrive at the testing facility in Spain this summer.
There couldnt be anything more special than owning a piece of the great space out there. So here's your chance. The first-ever lunar samples collected by astronaut Neil Armstrong during his 1969 Apollo 11 mission will be hitting the auction.The samples will be up for grabs at the Bonhams New York auction on April 13. There are five aluminum sample subs, each with a 10 mm of carbon tape on top containing moon dust ready for the next owners.Neil Armstrong, who was the first person to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969, collected several samples. Now one lucky person can actually own one or more.The particles were originally stored as powdery moon dust and rock fragments in sample bags, but NASA has since opened them for testing. But to make its history even more interesting (not that moon samples actually need to get more interesting), the same items were also lost by NASA.Back in 2005, reports claimed Max Ary, a curator from Cosmosphere space museum in Hutchinson, Kansas, was facing fraud and theft charges after selling some items that belonged to NASA. He was later found guilty, and the stolen samples were confiscated and sold to pay damages. The owner sent them back to NASA for ID and testing, and they turned out to be the same stolen samples from the Apollo 11 mission.After that, NASA retained five of the six scanning electron microscope sample (SEM) stubs with the lunar dust. Lunar expert and geologist Prof. Stephen J. Mojzsisin confirmed to match the composition and textures of the particles from the lunar mission, but only for four samples.The other one, which had a carbon tape from a different generation than the others, suggests that the sampling protocol was different in orientation and technique (from) the other samples, explains Mojzsisin in a statement.As you can imagine, though, purchasing a bit of the moon, which Bonhams explains is the only Apollo sample that can be legally sold, is expected to fetch between $800,000 and $1.2 million on April 13.
That e-bikes are good for the environment is no secret either  if you compare them against passenger cars, which is standard practice. Switch the term of comparison to an old-fashioned pedal bike, and e-bikes are no longer the champions for cleaner air and decongested roads. This is where Swytch Bike comes in.According to the London-based company, out of an estimated 1.1 billion bicycles in the world, 90% can be converted to pedal-assisted machines. Manufacturing an e-bike leads to over 200 kg (441 pounds) of CO2 being released into the atmosphere throughout its lifecycle, but if you convert an existing bike with a Switch kit, youd only be responsible for a quarter of that. As a bonus, you get the option to ride whichever way you want with the least effort and not that big of an investment.Since 2017, Swytch Bike has been selling two models of conversion kits, both in Eco and Pro mode: the Universal and the Brompton kit. Top speed is 25 and 32 kph (15.5 and 20 mph) for the Eco and Pro, respectively, with range going all the way up to 50 km (31 miles). Thats not a whole lot, but you only add a maximum of 3.5 kg (7.7 pounds) of weight to the bike (motor and battery pack), and still have the option to ride by pedal power alone as easily as before.To make the transition between the two riding modes even smoother, Swytch will be offering a new battery pack, as part of the 2022 conversion kit, New Atlas reports. Its smaller and sleeker, almost the size of a smartphone, tipping the scales at 0.7 kg (1.5 pounds), so half the weight of the current one. A full charge is achieved under an hour and, while it only offers 15 km (9 miles) of range, its suitable for carry-on luggage on flights.On the upside, all Switch components are backwards compatible, so riders looking for a smaller battery pack wont have to get the full kit if they already have a version of it. The kit includes the wheel with the motor, a torque shifter, the battery pack and connector, and a pedal sensor. Upgrading to the new battery pack will be a matter of just that: the media outlet says pre-orders kick off next month.Pricing has not yet been announced, but for reference, a Universal Eco kit in full costs 999, which is a little over $1,300 at the current exchange rate.
SUV

EV

Horsepower

BMW was a trendsetter without even knowing it had this power. The X6 was provocative in its early days when a lot of manufacturers and media representatives dismissed it for its bold look. Now everyones doing it, which unfortunately has taken out all the meaning from what weve known the coupe car to be.Tata Motors wasnt going to miss on this trend, so their new Curvv concept adopts the same design language, but with a bit of Indian touch. It may seem a bit weird to you since Tatas not that well known outside of India . Just for reference, the company is now the biggestproducer in the Asian country and has strong ties with neighboring nations like Nepal, for example. Lets also not forget it owns Jaguar and Land Rover. It has enough expertise!Curvvs shape is futuristic and features air vents that keep the wind turbulence to a minimum, sculpted shapes, and digital side mirrors.Inside it looks like the manufacturer gave up on physical buttons. Screens and touch-sensitive areas are all around the cabin, which might not be such a good thing since it doesnt look like theyre the newest tech available. Those black margins you can see on the concept might make it into production even wider than they currently are, which would remove some of the styling cues theyre trying to achieve with the Curvv.The Head of Design at Tata Motors Martin Uhlarik said the company has created a new typology vehicle that kept the wide wheel arches and large cladding with the heightened driving position, but at the same time, it innovated by translating digital art into physical shape. Now thats a statement someone would love to make in any context. For now, the Curvv looks like it would fit well in any crowded city. Besides that, its just another concept that follows the herd.However, if Tata gets the pricing right, it could turn this conceptinto a major production series success. Customers would surely choose a stylish car with smaller screens than to pay a premium just for edgeless design.Production is scheduled to begin in late 2023, with deliveries starting in 2024. Tata plans on giving the small coupe SUV a range of more than 250 miles. While theres no pricing mentioned, you can expect it to reach $30,000 or more, since it will be positioned above Tatas Nexon  another EV thats selling like hot cakes in India.and the maximum charging rate are unknown for now.Tata plans on having at least ten all-electric cars for sale until the end of 2025. The manufacturers own depiction of the vehicle can be found in the press release down below.
To be fair though, even if ICBMs did no longer pop up in casual conversations all that much, they never really went away. In fact, research and development of newer and better such systems continued, and are only visible now because of the events in Europe.For a while now, the American military has been trying to replace the half-a-century-old Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile system with something better. In September 2020, it settled on a thing called Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD), and awarded the contract to make it to a consortium led by Northrop Grumman.Now, Minuteman sounds very cool, but Ground Based Strategic Deterrent does not. As with all stuff military, the new system needed a moniker civilians could relate to, apart from the technical designation, and this week it got exactly that: as per an announcement made by the U.S. Air Force (USAF), from now on the GBSD will be called LGM-35A Sentinel.The name Sentinel recognizes the mindset that thousands of Airmen, past and present, have brought to the deterrence mission, and will serve as a reminder for those who operate, secure, and maintain this system in the future about the discipline and responsibility their duty entails, explained the reasoning behind the decision Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall.Costing less than extending the service of the Minuteman III, the Sentinel will comprise a modular architecture, making it capable of incorporating new technologies as soon as they emerge. The new missiles of the system will also be easier to maintain and operate.The LGM-35A Sentinel is expected to become operational by the end of the decade, and it will be kept on watch until the late 2070s.
4WD

The third generation of the Mitsubishi Delica was no ordinary minivan and it got a good off-road reputation thanks to its Mitsubishi Pajero mechanical platform. Even though the Delica was officially imported into the U.S. between 1987 and 1990, it was only available with a gas engine and rear-wheel drive. What people wanted (and got years later as JDM import) was the diesel version withThe 1989 Mitsubishi Delica Star Wagon weve found on Bring a Trailer comes with all the bells and whistles of a proper off-roader, down to the dual-range transfer case. The 2.5-liter turbodiesel inline-four engine only pumps 86 horsepower, but the 148 ft-lb (201 Nm) torque is more important when it comes to off-roading. Speaking of which, this Delica must have been lifted to make way for the 32-inch General Grabber AT2 tires.With such an off-road pedigree, the Delica is the best base vehicle for a camper conversion that can go anywhere. Our example already comes with the basics, as it features a pop-top roof and comes with a slide-out camper grill at the back. The rear passenger cabin is equipped with heat and air conditioning controls and offers seating for eight on the three rows of seats. The second and third rows fold flat into a sleeping area, but we reckon there is a lot more to work on to make this JDM into a proper camper.If youre curious about what you can do with a 4x4 JDM van, check out this great DIY build where Nat from Element Van Life turned a Toyota Hiace into a very competent camper. These JDM vans are great, offering a lot of space in the cabin and being very reliable. As for the Delica, you can find it on Bring a Trailer with the highest bid of $14,000 at the time of writing, with only one day left to bid.
VW Groups finance chief, Arno Antlitz, told F.T. reporters that the automakers key target isnt growth. They are not keen on volume or market share but more focused on quality and margins.He added that Volkswagen would reduce its range of petrol and diesel cars (at least 100 models) spread over several brands by 60% in Europe in the next eight years.Unlike the Japanese brand Toyota which depends on selling more units for profit, V.W.s new strategy departs from sales practices witnessed in the wider automotive industry.Over the last two years, the auto industry has experienced a roller-coaster of events, including the industry-wide chip crisis and the global pandemic that forced automakers to cut production as demand surged.These events forced European automakers such as BMW and Mercedes to inflate the prices of their models, making record sales profits in 2021 despite selling fewer units.Similarly, VW Group prioritized premium vehicles in their Audi and Porsche brands, that later accounted for a bulk of conglomerates profits. According to Financial Times, executives under Volkswagen Group brands stress that this practice will persist even after supply chain issues ease.Previously, under the leadership of former Chief Executive, VW Group worked to beat Toyota and GM as volume number one."Last week, the German automaker delayed the launch of the VW ID.5 to the first week of May due to disruptions caused by the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia. The interruption of the supply of wire harnesses from Ukraine made the company unable to supply enough exhibition models for their sales partners and dealers.
Rivian is asking Americans from Connecticut to support a bill that would make buying and selling electric vehicles (EVs) a lot easier. Essentially, they want you to talk to your state representative about supporting SB 214. If you dont have time to learn more about the matter, the company is also preparing a videocall to tell you everything you need to know. All the details can be found at the end of this article.Senate Bill 214 (SB 214) allows, if enacted, manufacturers of EVs to sell directly to their customers. Fortunately, the document is sponsored by both Republicans and Democrats. You can find it attached down below. Rivian still wants to make sure theyre heard by lawmakers on the matter. They need this bill to be passed into law because it would allow for selling cars directly to customers in Connecticut. It would also remove any barriers that are currently in place, which automatically translates into developing much-needed local hubs and service centers.This is also the reason why Tesla has mobile service vehicles ready to assist customers from states that dont allow manufacturers to sell directly to customers. It's a compromise Rivian doesn't want to be forced into.Connecticut is known for its tough regulations regarding the activity of companies like Rivian, Tesla, or Lucid. Because of these rules in place today, some customers are forced to have the delivery and service happen in neighboring states. If youre up for one and live in Connecticut now, then the purchase is handled out of state. Afterward, Rivian will manage the transfer of the vehicle and the registration. Its an unnecessary hassle.If this bill is passed, then rules will change in October, just in time for scheduled ramped -R1S deliveries.In the past few years, all-electric carmakers and truck manufacturers were met with a lot of resistance from the local legislators. While there were more debated issues, only one remained important: buying a car or a truck without a dealer interfering. Eliminating the middleman from the transaction would benefit both the customer and the manufacturer. Thats also why Tesla recently warned its customers from Oklahoma that they might be forced to leave the state. There's a new bill that eliminates, if enacted, the possibility to sell directly to customers. It would also establish a costly licensing process that must be done yearly.Here's Rivians message to its customers and fans from Connecticut regarding the bill: Want to learn more and get more involved? Rivians public policy team is hosting a virtual Advocacy Workshop this Thursday, April 7th at 5:30 PM EST.The Advocacy Workshop is a unique opportunity to get to know Rivians public policy team and learn how to have a meaningful impact at the state level. Well explore a range of strategies to help you learn how to make an impact based on your personal interests and strengths.Please email policy[@]rivian[.]com to register for the workshop or with any other questions about how to get involved. Thank you for helping us keep the world adventurous forever.
Regardless of the benefits of working from home, there are aspects of the office environment that could never be replicated in ones household. The sense of camaraderie and everything that it entails, the socializing, and even the free coffee and snacks could all be listed among office perks. Google hopes to add another one to the list: free e-scooters for certain U.S. employees.This week, Google brought its employees back into the office and, in order to make the transition easier, is throwing in the promise of a free daily commute. Its green, too, because were talking about an electric scooter of the premium kind: a Unagi Model One. The Verge reports that Google and Unagi have partnered for a new program known as Ride Scoot, which aims to make the prospect of heading back to the office a tad more enticing.Unagi sells e-scooters but, because theyre premium products usually priced above $1,000, it also offers them on a subscription model described as an alternative to ownership. Customers pay $50 upfront as a one-time fee, and then a monthly subscription: $49 a month on a monthly basis, or $39 a month on an under a year-long contract. This amount covers everything from insurance to maintenance, so its like ownership without having to pay a lot of money at once, and  why yes  theownership.According to the report, Google will offer free Unagi subscriptions, through reimbursement, to employees in Mountain View, California, Seattle, Kirkland, Irvine, Sunnyvale, Playa Vista, Austin, and New York City. The only condition is that the e-scooter be used for at least nine commutes per month, but Google has no plans to monitor actual usage, relying instead on the honor system.The Model One sells for $990 and is a lightweight, foldable and easy transportable e-scooter offered in both single- and dual-motor configurations. It maxes out at 20 mph (32 kph) and is good for 15.5 miles (25 km) on a single charge, so it should prove a suitable solution for the daily commute or, at the very least, a good first- and last-mile solution. Whether that will also turn it into a strong incentive for getting back to the office remains to be seen, but Google is hopeful  at least according to Unagi.They know theres apprehension amongst employees, Unagi founder and CEO David Hyman tells The Verge. People got really accustomed to working from home. And theyre just trying to do everything they can to improve the experience of coming back.Hyman also believes (hopes?) that more companies will take Googles example and turn e-scooters into the new hot office perk.
Wing boasts of this being the first-ever commercial drone delivery service in a major U.S. metropolitan area and the lucky customers to benefit from it will be those from the Dallas-Forth Worth Metroplex. Tens of thousands of suburban homes in the City of Frisco and Town of Little Elm will be able to access the service and have delivered to their doors various items.There are currently four partners on Wings list for the Dallas area: the Wallgreens store, from where theyll deliver health and wellness products, easyvet, for those who need prescription pet medications, Blue Bell Creameries, for ice cream deliveries, and Texas Health, for first aid kits.Wing plans to launch the drone delivery service in the aforementioned area tomorrow, April 7. It will also follow up with more information on what neighborhoods will be included and how people can check if their address is eligible, as the service wont be available from the first day to everyone who lives within the range of their drones.As for Wing s future plans, the Alphabet subsidiary plans to eventually expand to the entire country and beyond it. In fact, its drone delivery service is already popular in Australia, where it is available since 2019. For instance, the city of Logan was named the drone delivery capital of the world, where, by last September, Wing had already made over 50,000 deliveries, with coffee being the main product ordered.Wings autonomous delivery drones weigh around 10 lb (4.5 kg) and can carry an additional 3.3 lb (1.5 kg). They can reach a top speed of 68 mph (110 kph).
73rd anniv of NATO foundation a reminder of US long-term control of Europes security

By Chen Qingqing and Xu Yelu (Global Times) 08:35, April 06, 2022

NATO Expansion Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

As the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) celebrates the 73rd anniversary of its 1949 establishment, a new poll conducted by the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) showed that the majority of Russian people hold a negative attitude toward the bloc that is widely considered as the product of the Cold War. As the real initiator and driving force behind the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, the NATO is destroying Europe, some Russian media said, while Chinese experts noted that the only way for Europe to reach its goal of having strategic autonomy is to shake off the long-term US control in terms of security.

The bloc said on its website on Monday (local time) that April 4 marks the 73rd anniversary of NATO, and since its foundation, it has guaranteed the security and safety of allied citizens in Europe and North America. And to mark the anniversary, capitals across the alliance illuminated buildings in NATO blue and raised the NATO flags.

However, about 60 percent of Russians hold a negative view toward the military-political bloc, and Russian citizens predominantly believe that NATO is a military structure aimed at taking aggressive actions against Russia and its allies, and most Russians are aware of its military operations in Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, as the VTsIOM poll showed on Monday.

The evolution of the NATO over the past 73 years is the history of how the US manipulated and controlled Europe to maintain its hegemony in the continent. From confronting the former Soviet Union ruthlessly to strategically expelling Russia today, NATO helped shape the current security framework in Europe, led by the US, causing division and confrontation in Europe, Li Haidong, a professor from the Institute of International Relations at the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

"It's the main product underscoring the US interests, and the Ukraine crisis shows that it's highly difficult for Europe to strike a balance between NATO and Russia," Li said.

For Europeans, the anniversary of the bloc's founding is rather a shame and even a threat, Russian online newspaper Vzglyad said in an article on Monday. Seventy-three years ago, the entry of European countries into NATO looked logical, as Western Europe considered itself extremely vulnerable to the former Soviet Union and to the potential restoration of German power, but now the need for military protection has greatly subsided, as the basic goals of NATO is to keep the US inside, the Russian media said.

Although there has been a divided attitude inside Europe toward NATO, there have been aggressive expansions of NATO in the past decades that caused concrete security threats to Russia and other non-NATO countries in the region.

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday defended her 2008 decision to block Ukraine from immediately joining NATO, rejecting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's criticism, the AFP reported.

The Ukrainian president also accused the European leaders of seeking to appease Russia with their stance at that time, the AFP said, but Merkel in a short statement issued by her spokeswoman said she "stands by her decisions in relation to the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest."

Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, NATO has lost its traditional enemy and has been seeking a transformation from a purely military bloc to a politically secure one, Wang Yiwei, director of the Institute of International Affairs at the Renmin University of China, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

The military is purely about fighting wars, but in areas like security and non-traditional security, there is also a crucial political function, and the political function is to maintain the transatlantic political ties, like the G7, to defend Western values, he said.

"In the name of making Europe more secure, NATO's 73-year history actually has been dominated by the US, and NATO's presence has largely undermined Europe's ability to equip itself militarily," Wang said.

While Europe keeps calling for strategic autonomy, as long as the NATO stands there, the "brains and muscles" of the military and political bloc are in the hands of the Americans, as their weapons are also from the US, experts said. They noted that the Russia-Ukraine conflict is actually a trap the US has set for Europe: the US military-industrial complex promotes NATO's eastward expansion to make money, then hijacks European security, and creates the Russia-Ukraine conflict to undermine Russia.

As a latest example, the US State Department has approved the potential sales of up to eight F-16 aircraft and related equipment to Bulgaria, in a deal valued at $1.673 billion, Reuters reported on Monday, citing the US Defense Department.

In Russia, an exhibition entitled NATO: Chronicle of Cruelty coincided with the NATO's 73rd anniversary, which will last for three weeks, and the First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Labor, Social Policy and Veterans Affairs Elena Tsunaeva said it is necessary to translate it into several languages to make it accessible to foreign audiences. And it would be possible to send this exhibition to countries like Serbia to make local people remember NATO's attacks on their country, Russian media Vzglyad said.

In the wake of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Europe's status will further decline, which is a dilemma for itself. If there is no relatively powerful country to break the US' monopoly, Europe will gradually break apart and further divide, Wang noted.

"For Europe, the balance must be achieved by placing Europe's strategic autonomy and security in the hands of the Europeans themselves, free of American control," he said.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
Davit Mkrtchian, the deputy chairman of the Union of Armenians of Ukraine, said on Wednesday that 18 of them were civilians while the five others served in the Ukrainian military.

We pray that the real number [of Armenian deaths] is not higher, Mkrtchian told RFE/RLs Armenian Service. Once in every two or three days we hear about people getting killed here and there.

Estimates of the number of ethnic Armenians who lived in Ukraine before the war vary from 100,000 to 400,000. Many of them are said to hold Armenian passports. The European Union has allowed them to enter Ukraines EU neighbors without Schengen visas.

Like millions of Ukrainians, many local Armenians have fled the country since the start of the conflict on February 24. But even their approximate number remains unknown to both the community leaders and Armenias government.

The Foreign Ministry in Yerevan said last month that it has not organized charter flights for such refugees because few of them are willing to relocate to Armenia.

Mkrtchian disputed that claim, saying that many Armenians expressed a desire to take refuge in Armenia at the start of the devastating war.

According to the Kyiv-based activist, a large number of Armenians remain trapped in Ukraines eastern Donbas region, the epicenter of fierce fighting, and, in particular, the regional city of Mariupol besieged and partly occupied by Russian troops.

Karen Ghulian, an Armenian-born man, lived in Mariupol for over two decades. Ghulian said that he, his family and a group of other local Armenians risked their lives to flee the war-torn city late last week.

I realized that if we dont get out I could lose my family, he told RFE/RLs Armenian Service. We got caught in crossfire.

Ghulian said he and his family members moved to a friends apartment weeks ago after their house was destroyed by shelling.

Conditions there were terrible, he said. There was a lack of food, water, everything. There were no working shops. They all were empty, looted or bombed.
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Opening statements were delivered Monday in the trial of a man accused of killing one of the Bakersfield 3, and the prosecution concluded the 
President Joe Biden will allow millions of federal student loan borrowers to freeze their payments until Aug. 31, according to an administration official briefed on the matter, the latest extension of a pandemic relief measure that began more than two years ago.

The delay  the sixth since the pause began early in the pandemic  will come less than a month before payments were scheduled to restart and affect tens of millions of borrowers, including 35 million who have not been making payments that would otherwise have been due.

Those debts have not been accruing interest, and 7 million borrowers who have defaulted received a break from paycheck garnishments and other collection efforts since the pause began.

The extension was expected to be announced this week, according to the administration official, who was not authorized to speak about the plans before they were formally announced.

The extension will be welcome news for people unable, or unwilling, to resume paying bills that can be hundreds of dollars a month or more. Americans owe $1.6 trillion on federal student loans  more than they owe on car loans, credit cards or any consumer debt other than mortgages.

Progressives in the Democratic Party have long called for widespread cancellation of some federal student loan debt. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, and Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, both of Massachusetts, have repeatedly pressed for Biden to wipe out to $50,000 per borrower through an executive action.

Biden has resisted that approach and said he would prefer for any debt cancellation to happen legislatively. Congressional supporters say they dont have the votes. A plan to cancel $10,000 in debt for many borrowers passed the House in 2020 as part of its pandemic relief package, then died in the Senate.

But the Biden administration continues to dangle the possibility of cancellation.

Joe Biden, right now, is the only president in history where no ones paid on their student loans for the entirety of his presidency, Ron Klain, Bidens chief of staff, said last month on the Pod Save America podcast. The question of whether or not theres some executive action on student debt forgiveness, when the payments resume, is a decision were going to take before the payments resume.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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Nehemiah Persoff, who appeared as Barbra Streisands rabbi father in Yentl and had roles in hundreds of films and TV series including Some Like It Hot and Twins, died Tuesday in San Luis Obispo, Calif. He was 102.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Dahlia Reano. Beyond prolific, Persoff racked up almost 200 credits in film and TV in a career that began in the very earliest days of television.

Persoff broke through in the 1959 movie Some Like It Hot, in which he played mobster boss Little Bonaparte. (The actor had been the last surviving member of the cast.) Early in his career, he was known for playing villainous tough guys, such as in Alfred Hitchcocks The Wrong Man, starring Henry Fonda, and Al Capone, starring Rod Steiger, in which he had a substantial role as Johnny Torrio, the mobster who mentored Capone only to be replaced by him. Similarly, on TV, he had a recurring role as gangster Jake Greasy Thumb Guzik on The Untouchables.

The actor most recently appeared in the Ted Post-directed anthology film 4 Faces in 1999 and, for a couple of An American Tail sequels, The Treasure of Manhattan Island and The Mystery of the Night Monster in 1998 and 1999, he voiced Papa Mousekowitz, continuing a tradition of voicing that role that dated back to the original An American Tail film in 1986.

In the 1988 comedy Twins, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito, Persoff played the head of the experiment that resulted in the mismatched brothers.

In one of his last screen appearances, Persoff gave a powerful, complex performance in a 1993 episode of Law & Order in which at first it appears that Persoffs David Steinmetz, an elderly Jewish tailor, killed his wife out of mercy. Later suspicions grow that he may have killed his wife to prevent the truth about his nefarious role in the Holocaust from coming out.

It would take some doing to count the number of times Persoff portrayed a rabbi. He played one on Magnum: P.I., L.A. Law and Chicago Hope, and in Martin Scorseses Last Temptation of Christ, to name some instances.

The actor played Russian heads of state at least twice: For the 1980 telepic F.D.R.: The Last Year, he played Josef Stalin, and for the 1983 TV movie Sadat, in which Louis Gossett Jr. portrayed the Egyptian leader, Persoff portrayed Leonid Brezhnev. In the landmark telepic The Missiles of October, he played Soviet Foreign Minister Andre Gromyko.

He also played Benito Mussolini in a 1959 episode of Playhouse 90. In James Cagneys last-hurrah semi-musical Never Steal Anything Small (1959), centered around shenanigans involving a union election, Persoff played the union president, Pinelli.

One of his memorable roles came in Twilight Zone episode Judgment Night, in which he played the captain of a WWII U-boat condemned to relive over and over his destruction of a defenseless British ship. He played a German of a very different stripe in 1976 feature Voyage of the Damned  a poor Jew seeking to flee the Nazi regime and reunite in Havana with his daughter  who, is unbeknownst to him, a prostitute.

In the film Green Mansions, starring Audrey Hepburn and Anthony Perkins, Persoff played a Venezuelan shopkeeper, and for a 1953 episode of You Are There, he played a Spanish conquistador. In the Western caper pic The Badlanders (1958), starring Alan Ladd and Ernest Borgnine, Persoff played a Mexican demolition expert who is key to the heroes scheme.

Persoff played an Albanian general in the 1971 spy comedy Mrs Pollifax Spy, starring Rosalind Russell and adapted by the actress.

In Anthony Manns unsentimental Korean War movie Men at War (1957), starring Robert Ryan, Persoff did excellent, unsettling supporting work, playing Sgt. Lewis, who loses his cool.

Persoff gave an outstanding performance in another movie starring Robert Ryan, the snowy, very tense, Andre de Toth-directed Western Day of the Outlaw, in which Persoff played Dan, the foreman for Ryans character.

The actor auspiciously made his film debut in an uncredited role as a taxi driver in film classic On the Waterfront in 1954. He next appeared in Bogarts last film, The Harder They Fall.

A Jew born in Jerusalem in what was then the British-ruled Palestine Mandate, Persoff found himself captivated by the circus and cinema as a child. He moved to the U.S. along with his family in 1929, when he was about 9  just before the stock market crash. After working as an electrician in the New York subway system for several years and serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, Persoff took up acting in the 1940s. He auditioned for the Actors Studio in 1947:

My friend (actor) Lou Gilbert told me that if I wanted to audition for the Actors Studio, he would arrange it, Persoff told Cinema Retro magazine. I jumped at the chance. Elia Kazan was one of the busiest directors around, and to study with him and be in his pool of actors was every actors dream. I was in summer stock playing the lead role in George Bernard Shaws The Devils Disciple. I knew that Kazan was with the Group Theatre along with writer Clifford Odets. I thought of doing something from an Odets play but then reasoned that perhaps a more classic approach might work better for me, so I did a monologue from Shaw. Two weeks later, I received an invitation to come to the first meeting of the Actors Studio. I took my seat on a bench and slowly looked around. There were John Garfield, Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Montgomery Clift, Kim Hunter and Maureen Stapleton, among others. Kazan began to speak and told us his aim was to create a group of actors who work as he does, who speak his language, and that the people assembled in this room were the cream of the talent available. This was heady stuff for a nearly starving young actor. I studied with Lee Strasberg. He was brilliant and helped me find myself as an actor I owe him much. Among other scenes, I did a Noel Coward piece with Kim Stanley.

Persoff continued to stage work, in addition to movies and television, throughout his life, from Tel Aviv to New York to Los Angeles. He appeared on Broadway more than a dozen times between his debut in 1947 and 1959.

In later years, the actor appeared onstage in Los Angeles and elsewhere in leading roles in Rosebloom, at the Mark Taper Forum; The Dybbuk, at the Taper; as Tevye in many productions of Fiddler on the Roof; as Fagin in Oliver; as Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha; as Captain Hook in Peter Pan; in Im Not Rappaport in San Francisco; in Cold Storage; as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman at the Shakespeare Festival, Stratford, Ontario; and in his one-man show Sholom Aleichem, which he performed throughout the U.S., Canada and Australia.

After moving to Cambria, Calif., he took up painting and published a memoir The Many Faces of Nehemiah at the age of 101, in which he wrote, Acting is an art, on stage or screen. Its a distillation of certain moments in life, but its not life itself.

He was predeceased by his wife of 69 years, Thia.

In addition to his daughter Dahlia Reano, he is survived by children Jeff Persoff, Dan Persof and Perry Persoff and grandchildren Stacey Persoff, Joey Persoff, Michelle Persoff, Jacqueline Reano and Bridget Reano.

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HARTFORD, Conn. (AP)  Alex Jones was questioned Wednesday by lawyers for families of Sandy Hook victims in Connecticut, where a judge had ordered the Infowars host to face mounting fines until he appeared for a deposition.

Relatives of some of the 20 children and six educators killed in the 2012 Newtown, Connecticut, massacre sued Jones for defamation after he said the shooting never happened. A judge found Jones liable for damages and a trial on how much he should pay the families is set for August.

Jones, who lives in Texas, had defied a judge's order to appear for a deposition in the case, saying he was too ill. But Connecticut Judge Barbara Bellis said there wasnt enough evidence that Jones was too sick to attend and ordered him to come to Connecticut for questioning and pay escalating daily fines until he did so. Jones paid $25,000 in fines for Friday and $50,000 in fines for Monday, according to court records.

Jones said in a video on the Infowars website that the deposition began Tuesday and was to continue Wednesday. He said in the video that the families' lawyers began the deposition by demonizing him for his questioning official versions of events.

Its just totally insane to sit there and watch this happen and to watch them lick their lips and lick their chops and think were going to finally shut Alex Jones down, Jones said. These people want to put us in prison for our speech.

Jones lawyer, Norman Pattis, said tempers flared at times during the deposition on Tuesday, and much of the questioning was not related to the school shooting.

I had the impression watching the attack on Mr. Jones that this trial will be about something far greater than what happened at Sandy Hook, Pattis said on the video. The trials going to be about ordinary peoples ability to say Im not buying it, I want to raise questions, I want to draw my own conclusions.

The families lawyer, Christopher Mattei, said Jones has declared his entire deposition confidential even while he and his attorney conduct media interviews discussing the details.

Accordingly, we are unable to comment further at this time, Mattei said.

The deposition was held at the Bridgeport office of Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder. After it ended Wednesday, Pattis filed a court document asking Bellis to return to Jones the $75,000 in fees he paid, which the judge said he could request only after sitting for questioning. Bellis did not immediately rule.

Jones missed the originally scheduled deposition in the case on March 23 and 24 in Austin, Texas. He cited a health issue including vertigo that his doctors initially thought was a serious heart problem but turned out to be a sinus infection.

The plaintiffs have said they have been subjected to harassment and death threats from Jones followers because of the hoax conspiracy promoted on his website show. Jones has since conceded the shooting did happen.
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WASHINGTON  The U.S. Senate will take up legislation Thursday to end normal trade relations with Russia and to ban the importation of its oil.

Both bills have been bogged down in the Senate, frustrating lawmakers who want to ratchet up the U.S. response to Russias war with Ukraine.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Russian President Vladimir Putin needs to be held accountable for what Schumer said were war crimes against Ukraine.

The trade suspension measure paves the way for U.S. President Joe Biden to enact higher tariffs on certain Russian imports.

The bill banning Russian oil would codify restrictions Biden has already put in place through executive action.

In a virtual speech to Congress last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said new packages of sanctions are needed constantly every week until the Russian military machine stops.

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KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR:

 Mariupols dead put at 5,000 as Ukraine braces in the east

 US targets Putins daughters, Russian banks in new sanctions

 Burned, piled bodies among latest horrors in Bucha, Ukraine

 Russia's setback in Kyiv was memorable military failure

 Russian media campaign falsely claims Bucha deaths are fakes

 China calls for probe into Bucha killings, assigns no blame

 Go to https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine for more coverage

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OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:

WASHINGTON  The U.S. House overwhelmingly passed legislation Wednesday calling for a federal government report on evidence of war crimes committed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Lawmakers backed the measure amid gruesome reports of atrocities in towns around Kyiv, particularly Bucha, and new accounts of the civilian death toll in the besieged port city of Mariupol.

The legislation calls for the U.S. president to submit to Congress a report on efforts to preserve evidence related to war crimes.

Last month, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution seeking an investigation of Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes.

In his daily nighttime video address to the nation late Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of trying to hide evidence of war crimes to interfere with the international investigation.

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LVIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of trying to hide the evidence of war crimes to interfere with the international investigation.

It seems that the Russian leadership was really afraid that the global anger over what was seen in Bucha would be repeated after what was seen in other cities, Zelenskyy said in his daily nighttime video address to the nation late Wednesday.

We have information that the Russian troops have changed tactics and are trying to remove the dead people, the dead Ukrainians, from the streets and cellars of territory they occupied. This is only an attempt to hide the evidence and nothing more, Zelenskyy said.

He also said thousands of people are now missing, either dead or deported to Russia.

Zelenskyy also urged Russian citizens not to be afraid to protest the war.

If you have even a little shame about what the Russian military is doing in Ukraine, then for such Russian citizens this is a key moment: You have to demand  just demand  an end to the war, he said.

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PARIS  French President Emmanuel Macron spoke out against Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Wednesday evening, defending himself over criticism he held multiple talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin to no avail.

On Monday, Morawiecki ridiculed the French leaders several hours of phone calls with Putin, saying that they achieved nothing.

Some fear the comments from Poland might destabilize unity of the European Union as it hopes to stand unified in the face of Putins aggression in Ukraine.

Macron told TF1 broadcasters evening news that he takes full responsibility for speaking to Putin in the name of France to avoid the war and to build a new architecture for peace in Europe several years ago.

Macron is standing for re-election in France in polls that begin Sunday.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian authorities say nearly 5,000 people were evacuated from combat areas Wednesday.

Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said 1,171 people were evacuated from the besieged Sea of Azov port of Mariupol, and 2,515 more left the cities of Berdyansk and Melitopol and other areas in the south.

She said an additional 1,206 people were evacuated from the eastern region of Luhansk.

Vereshchuk and other officials have been urging residents of eastern regions to evacuate in the face of an impending Russian offensive, saying that people in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions should leave for safer regions.

Donetsk region Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said at least five civilians were killed and eight others wounded by Russian shelling Wednesday.

Over 10 million people, about a quarter of Ukraines population, have been displaced by the war, and more than 4 million of them have fled the country.

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UNITED NATIONS  The United States and United Kingdom have boycotted an informal meeting of the U.N. Security Council called by Russia to press its baseless claims that the U.S. has biological warfare laboratories in Ukraine.

The move by Russia on Wednesday was the latest of several that have led Western countries to accuse Moscow of using the U.N. as a platform for disinformation to draw attention away from its war against its smaller neighbor.

U.N. disarmament chief Izumi Nakamitsu told the council at two official Security Council meetings called by Russia on the issue last month that the United Nations is not aware of any biological weapons program in Ukraine.

A smoke screen to draw attention away from the brutal warfare, irresponsible, dangerous and deplorable were just a few of the responses by countries, including Norway, France, Ireland and Albania.

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ROME  Italian Premier Mario Draghi says no embargo of Russian gas is up for consideration at this point as the European Union ponders its next package of sanctions over the war in Ukraine, adding: "I dont know if it ever will be on the table.

Draghi told reporters Monday night that in case a gas embargo is proposed, Italy will be very happy to follow it if that would make peace possible.

Draghi added: If the price of gas can be exchanged for peace ... what do we choose? Peace? Or to have the air conditioning running in the summer? This is the question we must pose.

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KYIV, Ukraine  The mayor of the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol says more than 5,000 civilians have been killed during the monthlong Russian blockade, among them 210 children.

Mayor Vadym Boichenko said Wednesday that Russian forces have among other targets bombed hospitals, including one where 50 people burned to death.

Boichenko said that more than 90% of the citys infrastructure has been destroyed by Russian shelling.

The Russian military is besieging the strategic Sea of Azov port, and has cut food, water and energy supplies and pummeled it with artillery and air raids. Capturing the city would allow Russia to secure a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

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WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden is saluting the international community and some of the largest corporations in the U.S. for further increasing Russias economic isolation.

Addressing thousands at the North Americas Building Trades Unions Legislative Conference at a Washington hotel on Wednesday, Biden said of the Russia-Ukraine war, Theres nothing less happening than credible war crimes.

The president said responsible nations have to come together to hold these perpetrators responsible, and vowed that were going to stifle Russias ability to grow for years to come.

He said corporate Americas stepping up for a chance, noting that 600-plus firms have chosen to leave Russia.

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MOSCOW  Russias Defense Ministry has accused Ukraine of sabotaging a pre-agreed prisoner swap.

Speaking at a briefing, Defense Ministry official Mikhail Mizintsev claimed that Kyiv had for a long time blocked prisoner exchanges, including a swap set to take place Wednesday involving 251 military personnel on each side.

He alleged that the delays gave Moscow all the reasons to suspect that Russian servicemen held in captivity are not at all well."

On April 1, representatives of the Ukrainian presidential office said Ukraine had secured the release of 86 soldiers, including 15 women, through a swap. This was confirmed by Russian officials on Wednesday.

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BRUSSELS  A new U.S. commitment of Javelin missiles means the West soon will have provided Ukrainian fighters with 10 anti-tank weapons for every Russian tank in their country, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday.

Blinken spoke to U.S. news broadcaster MSNBC after the U.S. announced an additional $100 million for more Javelin missiles for Ukraine. The U.S. says it has provided $1.7 billion for Ukraines defense and aid since Russia invaded on Feb. 24.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is pressing the West to provide more weapons, faster, and do more to cut off Russia from the global economy, to pressure Putin to make peace.

In terms of what they need to act quickly and act effectively, to deal with the planes that are firing at them from the skies, the tanks that are trying to destroy  their cities from the ground, they have the tools that they need, Blinken said of Ukraines forces. Theyre going to keep getting them, and were going to keep sustaining that.

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BUDAPEST, Hungary  Hungarys prime minister has asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to call an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine but says his country will comply with Russian demands to pay for natural gas imports in rubles.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he had spoken with Putin by phone and urged the Russian leader to end the military conflict in neighboring Ukraine. Orban said he also offered to host a conference in Hungarys capital between the warring parties.

I suggested that (Putin)  the Ukrainian president, the French president and the German chancellor hold a meeting here in Budapest, the sooner the better, Orban said. It should not be a peace negotiation and not a peace settlement, because that takes longer, but an immediate ceasefire agreement.

Orban spoke days after his Fidesz party won a fourth consecutive term leading the Hungarian government.

The right-wing nationalist leader, Putins closest ally in the European Union, has vehemently refused to supply weapons to Ukraine or allow their transport across the Hungary-Ukraine border. He also lobbied heavily against the EU imposing sanctions on Russian energy imports.

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LARNACA, Cyprus  Russian disinformation about its war against Ukraine needs to be exposed, including on Russias war crimes, a U.S. State Department official said on a visit to Cyprus Wednesday.

Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said Russian lies have evolved to the point of blaming Ukrainians for actions by Russian forces, including the war crimes we see on the ground.

So we all have an interest in exposing Russian disinformation, ensuring our citizens have the truth and ensuring that Russian citizens also (have the truth) ... despite the Iron Curtain that Putin has put down over that, Nuland said.

Nuland was in Cyprus as part of a five-nation tour aimed at strengthening bilateral ties and rallying support for Ukraine.

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LONDON  Britain says it will end imports of Russian oil and coal by the end of the year and ban U.K. investment in Russia as part of a new set of sanctions in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

The British government also announced a freeze on the assets of Credit Bank of Moscow and Sberbank, Russias largest bank, and slapped travel bans and asset freezes on eight more wealthy Russians. They included Andrey Guryev, founder of the fertilizer company PhosAgro, and Sergey Sergeyevich Ivanov, president of diamond producer Alrosa.

U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said the measures were coordinated with Britains allies. The U.S. also sanctioned SberBank on Wednesday, and the European Union plans to ban imports of Russian coal.

Truss said the sanctions were aimed at decimating (President Vladimir) Putins war machine and to show the Russian elite that they cannot wash their hands of the atrocities committed on Putins orders.

Britain had already announced a plan to phase out Russian oil, which accounts for 8% of the U.K. supply. Russia is the top supplier of imported coal to the U.K., though British demand for the polluting fuel has plummeted in the past decade. Britain has not ended imports of Russian natural gas, which accounts for 4% of its supply, saying only that it will do so as soon as possible.

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UNITED NATIONS  The U.N. General Assembly plans to vote Thursday on whether to suspend Russia from the U.N.s premiere human rights body.

The United States initiated the move in response to the discovery of hundreds of bodies after Russian troops withdrew from towns near Ukraine's capital. Videos and photos of corpses of people who appeared to be civilians have sparked calls for tougher sanctions and war crimes charges against Russia, which has vehemently denied responsibility.

General Assembly spokeswoman Paulina Kubiak said on Wednesday that an emergency special session on Ukraine will resume at 10 a.m. EDT on Thursday, when a resolution to suspend the rights of membership in the Human Rights Council of the Russian Federation will be put to a vote.

The brief resolution expresses grave concern at the ongoing human rights and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, particularly at the reports of violations and abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law by the Russian Federation, including gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights.

To be approved, the resolution requires a two-thirds majority of assembly members that vote yes or no. Abstentions dont count.

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WASHINGTON  The U.S. Justice Department is working with European allies and prosecutors in Ukraine to investigate potential war crimes after Russias invasion.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said Wednesday that U.S. prosecutors across the world are working to collect evidence and to collect the information on atrocities that we have all seen in both photographs and video footage.

He pointed specifically to photos and videos from Bucha, where Associated Press journalists have witnessed evidence of killings and torture, including charred bodies.

But Garland stopped short of calling for a tribunal like the one set up to hold Nazi leaders to account after World War II. He said a U.S. prosecutors in Paris were meeting with the French war crimes prosecutor, and that other Justice Department lawyers had met with prosecutors in Europe to work out a plan for gathering evidence with respect to Ukraine.

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WASHINGTON  The U.S. on Wednesday announced that it is sanctioning Russian President Vladimir Putins two adult daughters as part of a new batch of penalties on the countrys political and economic system in retaliation for its war crimes in Ukraine.

The U.S. is also imposing toughened full blocking sanctions on Russias Sberbank and Alfa Bank, two of its largest financial institutions, as well as some Russian state-owned enterprises. President Joe Biden is also signing an executive order to ban new U.S. investment in Russia.

In addition to Putins adult daughters, the new sanctions also target the family of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

The U.S. actions are set to be imposed in concert with toughened sanctions by its European allies.

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LONDON  A Western official says it will take Russia up to a month to regroup its forces for a major push on eastern Ukraine.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence, said Wednesday that a reasonable estimate would be of three to four weeks before troops that have pulled back from the area around Kyiv and northern Ukraine can be re-equipped and redeployed against the Donbas region in the east.

The official said the Russian units would have to go through a pretty lengthy period of reconstitution and refurbishment before they could rejoin the war.

The official said almost a quarter of the Russian ground units known as battalion tactical groups in Ukraine had been rendered non-combat-effective in the fighting and either withdrawn or merged with other units.

The losses and pullback of Russian troops mean the threat posed to Kyiv is limited for the foreseeable future from Russian ground troops, the official said.

 AP writer Jill Lawless contributed.

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BRUSSELS  NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says Finland and Sweden would be welcomed with open arms should they decide to join the worlds biggest security alliance, as Russias war on Ukraine spurs public support in the two Nordic countries for membership.

Russia has demanded that the 30-nation military organization stop expanding, so the prospect of Finland and Sweden joining could anger President Vladimir Putin.

But Stoltenberg says NATO members might be prepared to provide security guarantees for the period from when the two might announce any membership bid and when their applications are approved. He declined to say what kind of protection they might get.

Once members, the two neutral Nordic nations would benefit from NATOs collective security guarantee, which obliges all members to come to the defense of any ally that comes under attack.

Stoltenberg told reporters Wednesday that he is certain that we will find ways to address concerns they may have regarding the period between the potential application and the final ratification.

A poll commissioned by Finnish broadcaster YLE last month showed that, for the first time, more than 50% of Finns support joining the Western military alliance. In neighboring Sweden, a similar poll showed that those in favor of NATO membership outnumber those against.

___

BERLIN  A German spokesman says the government has information which indicates that bodies found after Ukraine retook Bucha last week had been lying there since at least March 10, when Russian troops were in control of the town.

Steffen Hebestreit told reporters in Berlin on Wednesday that the information was based on non-commercial satellite images taken March 10-18 of Yablonska Street in Bucha.

Credible information shows that from March 7 to March 30 Russian soldiers and security forces were deployed in this area, he said. They were also tasked with the interrogation of prisoners who were subsequently executed.

Hebestreit said that targeted killings by units of the Russian military and security forces are therefore proof that the Russian President and supreme commander has at least approvingly accepted human rights abuses and war crimes to achieve his goals.

The assertions made by the Russian side that these are staged scenes or they arent responsible for the murders are therefore not tenable, he added.

Asked about the source of this information, Hebestreit said that images reviewed by Germany were not commercial satellite images. He declined to elaborate.

___

COPENHAGEN, Denmark  Norway is following other European nations and expelling Russian diplomats.

Norways Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt said Wednesday that three Russian diplomats had carried out activities incompatible with their status.

The timing for the expulsions was not accidental and comes at a time when the whole world is shaken by reports of Russian forces abusing civilians, especially in the city of Bucha, Huitfeldt said in a statement.

In recent days, numerous European countries have expelled Russian diplomats and staff at Russian diplomatic missions.

___

GENEVA  The International Committee of the Red Cross says one of its teams in Ukraine has led some 500 people who fled Mariupol in a humanitarian convoy of buses and private cars to a safer location in the embattled country.

The ICRC says its team that has been trying to enter Mariupol since last Friday got within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the besieged city, but security conditions made it impossible to enter. The convoy escorted the civilians from coastal Berdyansk to Zaporizhzhia, to the north.

This convoys arrival to Zaporizhzhia is a huge relief for hundreds of people who have suffered immensely and are now in a safer location, said Pascal Hundt, ICRCs head of delegation in Ukraine. Its clear, though, that thousands more civilians trapped inside Mariupol need safe passage out and aid to come in.

He said the Geneva-based organization remains available as a neutral intermediary to help escort civilians out of Mariupol once concrete agreements and security conditions allow it.

___

LONDON  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of using hunger as a weapon of war by deliberately targeting Ukraines essential food supplies.

In an address to Irish lawmakers Wednesday, Zelenskyy said Russian forces are destroying things that are sustaining livelihoods including food storage depots, blocking ports so Ukraine could not export food and putting mines into the fields.

For them hunger is also a weapon, a weapon against us ordinary people, he said, accusing Russia of deliberately provoking a food crisis in Ukraine, a major global producer of staples including wheat and sunflower oil.

He said it would have international ramifications, because there will be a shortage of food and the prices will go up, and this is reality for the millions of people who are hungry, and it will be more difficult for them to feed their families.

Zelenskyy spoke by video to a joint session of Irelands two houses of parliament, the latest in a string of international addresses he has used to rally support for Ukraine.

___

BRUSSELS  A senior European Union official says the blocs member countries should think about ways of offering asylum to Russian soldiers willing to desert Ukraine battlefields.

European Council president Charles Michel on Wednesday expressed his outrage at crimes against humanity, against innocent civilians in Bucha and in many other cities.

He called on Russian soldiers to disobey orders.

If you want no part in killing your Ukrainian brothers and sisters, if you dont want to be a criminal, drop your weapons, stop fighting, leave the battlefield, Michel, who represents the blocs governments, said in a speech to the European Parliament

Endorsing an idea previously circulated by some EU lawmakers, Michel added that granting asylum to Russian deserters is a valuable idea that should be pursued.

___
Three local districts are planning to give returning employees a reward for coming back.

Beaumont, Jasper and Newton ISDs have released plans to give teachers and other district staff members retention stipends for the 2022-23 school year, all paid throughout the course of the year.

Read each district's plan below:

Beaumont ISD

During its March regular meeting, the school board approved administration recommendations to give returning employees a reward for their "loyalty, hard work and dedication to the district."

RELATED: Beaumont ISD has filled 300 positions. They still need more.

All returning employees will receive a retention stipend of 4% of their 2022-23 base salary. The stipend cannot push teachers over the top of the teacher salary schedule, according to an announcement from the district.

BISD Superintendent Shannon Allen said in the announcement that she heard comments regarding how new teachers receive hiring incentives, but years-long employees had not seen the same kind of reward.

In addition, all full-time returning employees will receive longevity pay of $50 for every verified full year of district service up to the 2021-22 school year.

RELATED: BISD welcoming 'newcomers' with new center

BISD Executive Director of Human Resources Derwin Samuels said that comments received from the teacher advisory committee informed the district that employees wanted to be acknowledged for their hard work and dedication to the district.

Employees can expect to see the retention stipend over the course of the 2022-23 school year and a lump sum payment of the longevity stipend on their Sept. 25 paycheck, according to district Chief Financial Officer Cheryl Hernandez.

Jasper ISD

The Jasper ISD Board of Trustees voted during their March meeting to give teachers and staff a retention incentive for returning to the district for the 2022-23 school year.

The district is utilizing Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief grant funds to give eligible employees the stipend.

RELATED: Jasper ISD going to four-day school week

Teachers will receive $3,000 with all other staff members receiving $1,500, each to be paid in three installments, according to a Facebook post from the district.

"Retaining and recruiting quality teachers is very important to all school districts during a nationwide teacher shortage and the board of trustees is working diligently for our JISD staff," the post said.

Newton ISD

Newton ISD will give professional employees $3,500 and at-will employees $1,800 throughout the course of the next academic year, according to a Facebook post from the district.

olivia.malick@hearst.com

twitter.com/OliviaMalick
Moon Knight Episode 2 Recap & Easter Eggs  Summon the Suit

5 Minute Read

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Moon Knight episode 2 continues the fight for control and reveals more about Arthur Harrows origin.

Episode 1 (read the recap here) introduced us to Steven Grant, his horrid job, sleeping problems, and loneliness. It ends with a fight that is at the core of Moon Knight episode 2  who gets control of the body. Lets dive in and find out who won (for now).

Spoilers Under the GIF

The story picks right back up with Steven waking up, still unsure of what reality is and isnt. He returns to a work zone at the museum. The bathrooms are destroyed and he is being blamed. Since he is unable to explain what happened, Steven Grant is no longer a giftshoppist. Sorry, Donna, youll have to pick on someone else.

Eyes Opening

Now that he has free time he tries to hunt down Marc and figure out what the heck is going on. He uses a key he finds to access a storage unit rented by Marc. Its filled with merc gear and that mysterious scarab from the last episode. At this point, Steven seems to accept his DID and argues with Marc (who appears in the reflective walls) about who is in charge. It is in this conversation that Steven learns that Marc is the avatar of Khonshu and that his history is soaked in blood.

Steven decides to end it by turning himself into the police so that all of this will stop. So he runs from Marc into the worlds most terrifying storage facility. Thanks, Khonshu.

He escapes the moon god and runs smack into Layla  who only knows him as Marc. In their first interaction, we learn that she and Marc are married (on the way to a divorce), that theyve gone on adventures in Egypt, and had a life. He gives her the scarab. The reunion is broken up by two of Arthur Harrows cult members who also happen to be MPs. Layla snags the scarab and hides. With her added involvement Steven doesnt want to go with the cops anymore and tries to weasel out of their grasp. He fails and is put in a car.

On the way to the cults hideout, Steven learns what Marc has done. According to the cops he killed a group of archeologists, execution-style. The fighting between the two alts continues with Steven telling him hell never let Marc have control again because he murders people. Their conversation is interrupted by Harrow who treats Steven with an understanding he hasnt experienced.

What Moon Knight Episode 2 Reveals About Arthur Harrow

The former avatar of Khonshu. Theres no answer as to how he severed his connection with the moon god, but his desire for justice has stayed with him. His loyalty has moved to another god, though  a god that judges souls before they act on their impulses. Arthurs mission to to set Ammit free so that she will save the world. He can use his connection to her not only to judge souls, but to open the Duat to summon jackals (and who knows what else).

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Marcs mission from Khonshu is now clear, but how he ended up here and what kind of beef Arthur has with Khnoshu isnt.

Sumon the Suit

Ok, so we dont quite get Mr. Knight here, but the gag is worth it. The ridiculousness returns with Steven (as Mr. Knight) beating up a jackal that only he can see with his fists while onlookers try to figure out whats happening. He eventually gives in to Marc/Moon Knight to keep those onlookers safe. Theres a rooftop chase and a great shot of an impaled jackal.

Its all in vain, though. The scarab lands with Arthur. Marcs anger at this helps him shove Steven back and to take control. Khonshu berates him for his failure to control Steven and reminds him of the deal theyve struck. The god is not exactly benevolent.

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The episode closes with Marc looking out of a hotel room in Ciaro at the pyramids. To where this all began.

Moon Knight Episode 2  Quick Thoughts

The CG is better this episode.

Im expecting that Marc/Moon Knights origin will be part of next weeks story. Its needed to make the fight thats coming make sense. As well as all Marc all the time  theres a limit to Steven at this point. Im really pleased with the direction the show is going and the cast is fantastic. They have four episodes to cover a lot of ground, it could all unravel.

Is Frenchie actually showing up?

Mr. Knight was created for Secret Avengers

Theres a Global Repatriation Council banner on the side of the bus in the jackal fight

The jackals death is a call back to Werewolf By Night #32

This weeks free comic was in the storage facility

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New episodes of Moon Knight drop on Disney+ every Wednesday through May 4th.

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The NCC directorate of Andhra Pradesh, with cooperation from NCC Warangal, have been able to bring in two Microlight aircrafts to Mamnoor. Staff from both NCC units celebrated the arrival of the new aircraft.  Representational image/DC

Warangal: Another Zen Air Microlight aircraft has been flown successfully to the 4th Telangana Air Squadron National Cadet Corps' (NCC) group headquarters. The aircraft landed at Mamnoor Airfield in Warangal district on Tuesday, said commanding officer and air-wing commander Pratheek Banerji.

The aircraft was flown in by another wing commander, M.V.Mudliar, from Viraf airstrip in Mamidyal, Gajwel district to Mamnoor.

With this new addition, the Mamnoor airfield has positioned 2 Microlights for flying as well as to train cadets, he added.

The NCC directorate of Andhra Pradesh, with cooperation from NCC Warangal, have been able to bring in two Microlight aircrafts to Mamnoor. Staff from both NCC units celebrated the arrival of the new aircraft.
Indonesian President Joko Jokowi Widodo gives a speech at the launch of the first public electric vehicle charging station, which will be used for electric vehicles transporting world leaders during the G-20 conference in October this year, in Nusa Dua, Bali, March 25, 2022.

Indonesian legislators urged President Joko Jokowi Widodo on Wednesday to use his influence as this years G-20 president to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine by calling a meeting of their leaders.

Indonesia, the 2022 holder of the Group of Twentys rotating presidency, risks dividing the grouping of the worlds leading economies through its decision to invite Russia to the G-20 summit in Bali in October, the lawmakers told Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi during a parliamentary hearing.

I see an opportunity [for Indonesia to broker peace]. I hope President Jokowi will meet with the leaders of Russia and Ukraine, said Effendi Simbolon, a member of parliament from the ruling Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan).

Indonesia is torn between appearing to take a side and not inviting Russias Vladimir Putin, or inviting him and risking a boycott by Western G-20 member countries that oppose Moscows war in Ukraine, said another lawmaker, Syariefuddin Hasan of the Democratic Party.

If its just business as usual, that [boycott] may well happen, considering that Russia has violated another countrys sovereignty, he said.

Last month, a foreign ministry official, Dian Triansyah Djani, said that Indonesia had sent invitations to all member countries to attend the G-20 summit, including Russia.

The United States and other Western countries want Russia to be removed from the G-20 because of Putins invasion of Ukraine and for Indonesia not to invite him to the Bali summit.

But in March, Russias ambassador to Indonesia said that Putin planned to attend the meeting.

Ukraine, which is not a G-20 member, had previously urged Indonesia to include discussions on the invasion during the summit. But at the time, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Jakartas stance was that the G-20 summit should focus on global economic issues.

On March 2, Indonesia voted for a U.N. resolution that condemned Russias military strike on Ukraine. However, Jakarta has not directly criticized Moscow or used the word invasion since then.

Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, resulting in at least more than 4 million Ukrainians fleeing the country.

During a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in China last week, Retno urged Moscow to stop the war in Ukraine, citing the urgent humanitarian situation and the conflicts ripple effects on the world economy. Retno said she also asked Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to support efforts to end the Russian invasion during a separate meeting on the same day.

The war must be stopped

On Wednesday, Mukhlis Basri, a member of the parliaments foreign affairs committee, asked Retno what steps the ministry had taken to help restore peace in Ukraine.

In responding, Retno emphasized that Indonesia had been consistent in supporting Ukraine and was considering sending humanitarian assistance to the war-torn country.

She said Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova had requested humanitarian assistance from all countries, including Indonesia, especially in food items amid dwindling supplies.

The war must be stopped immediately, Retno said at the hearing.

Indonesia hopes that negotiations between Russia and Ukraine will be intensified to seek a peaceful settlement and that both parties need to carry out a ceasefire so that humanitarian assistance can be provided, she said.

Makhlis, of the foreign affairs committee, also asked Retno whether in such a situation it was possible for the G20 meeting to be postponed.

Retno didnt respond but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said there had been no discussions to postpone the G-20 summit.

So far, planning is still on schedule, Teuku Faizasyah, a spokesman for the ministry, told BenarNews.

During the hearing, lawmaker Fadli Zon warned that global economic consequences would be severe if the conflict was not stopped.

The West has called for Russia to be suspended from the U.N. Human Rights Council. Indonesia must play a role in promoting a just world order as mandated by our constitution, Fadli said.

During peace talks in Istanbul last week, Russian negotiators agreed to fundamentally cut back operations near the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv, news agencies reported.

But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed Russias pledge and vowed to keep fighting the invading forces.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (left) and Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare review an honor guard during a welcoming ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Oct. 9, 2019.

China is denying that it will build a military base in the Solomon Islands after agreeing with the South Pacific nation to a security pact that is raising concerns in the region and beyond.

Last week, the two sides quietly signed a Framework Agreement on bilateral security cooperation, saying it is conducive to stability and security of the Solomon Islands, and will promote common interests of other countries in the region. A framework agreement is not the final deal but confirms both countries intentions with details to be agreed in the future.

A draft agreement leaked online last week would allow Beijing to set up bases and deploy troops in the Solomon Islands, which lies about 1,700 km (1,050 miles) from the northeastern coast of Australia. The draft agreement and Framework Agreement are separate documents.

It remains unclear how the two documents differ but, in a statement released Tuesday, the Chinese Embassy in Honiara categorically denied that a military base would be developed in the Solomons.

This is utterly misinformation deliberately spread with [a] political motive, an embassy spokesperson said in the statement, responding to a question about whether China would build a military base in the islands.

China-Solomon Islands security cooperation is no different from the cooperation of Solomon Islands with other countries, the spokesperson added.

In recent years, China has been developing closer ties with the Pacific islands, wooing them with infrastructure loans and economic assistance, as well as military exchanges.

The Solomon Islands switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in 2019  a move to please Beijing which seeks to diminish the international diplomatic recognition of the government in Taiwan.

The draft agreement, meanwhile, has provoked fears in the South Pacific regions traditional powers, Australia and New Zealand. Last week, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that Wellington sees the pact as gravely concerning.

The U.S., which has been promoting a free and open Indo-Pacific, also expressed concerns about Chinas moves in the Solomons.

Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, was quoted by the Australian Broadcasting Corp. as saying earlier this week that he was undoubtedly concerned about the China-Solomon Islands security pact.

There is still a path ahead. But anytime that a secret security arrangement makes its way into the light of day, it is a concern, Paparo told the Australian network in Washington.

The U.S. admiral also warned that theres the potential of conflict within our region within a couple of years because of the incredible unpredictability of events.

Chinese Ambassador Li Ming and Colin Beck, permanent secretary of the Solomon Islands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and External Trade, signed a bilateral framework agreement on security cooperation, March 30, 2022. [Handout photo from Chinese Embassy to Solomon Islands]

The security agreement with China will allow the Solomon Islands government to invite China to send police and even military personnel to protect Chinese community and businesses in Solomon Islands during riots and social unrests, said a researcher specializing in the Pacific region at the Australian National University (ANU), who requested anonymity because of personal concerns.

This is different from China establishing a military base in Solomon Islands but may pave the way for China to do so, he told Radio Free Asia (RFA), a sister entity of BenarNews.

Beijing doesnt hide its ambition to set up military bases in the South Pacific. In 2018, media reports about Chinas plan to build a base in Vanuatu prompted a stern warning from then-Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

A possible presence of Chinese law enforcement personnel so close to the homeland has rattled decision makers in Canberra. Australia is the biggest aid donor to the Solomon Islands and, in 2017, it signed a bilateral security treaty with Honiara, its first with a Pacific nation.

From traditional powers perspective, they think such security agreement is not necessary because existing regional mechanisms can meet the demands of Pacific islands like the Solomon Islands, the ANU researcher said.

But the incumbent Solomon Islands government said they need to diversify the countrys external security partnerships, especially with China, which lends strong support to the government during and after the riot in November 2021, he said.

Rioting broke out in Honiara, the nations capital, in late November over the governments decision to diplomatically recognize China over Taiwan.

Last week, Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare told lawmakers that to achieve the nations security needs, it is clear that we need to diversify the countrys relationship with other countries but existing security arrangements with Australia would remain.

His policy of diversification was evident in November when the PM asked Australia  and after that China  to send police forces to help him quell the riots that rocked Honiara.

The Chinese Embassy, for its part, warned against what it called Cold War and colonial mentality, saying the Pacific island nations are all sovereign and independent.

The region should not be considered a backyard of other countries, it said in its statement issued on Tuesday.
Indonesian Munarman (left), joined by his client, firebrand cleric Muhammad Rizieq Shihab, gestures at reporters following Rizieqs questioning at the Regional Police Headquarters in Jakarta, Dec. 12, 2020.

An Indonesian court sentenced a senior member of an outlawed Islamic vigilante group to three years in prison on Wednesday for having provided assistance to the perpetrators of terrorism.

The defendant, Munarman, a former spokesman for the defunct Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), had failed to tell authorities that he knew about events where people pledged allegiance to the Islamic State extremist group in 2014 and 2015, a three-judge panel at the East Jakarta District Court ruled.

[T]he defendant did not report to the police that there was a pledge and a convoy for a declaration of support for ISIS, the chief judge said, using another acronym for the Islamic State.

The defendant did not stop, and even confirmed that he would attend the event. ... The defendant was proven to have provided assistance to the perpetrators of terrorism, ruled the chief judge whose name was withheld over security concerns.

While sentencing Munarman to prison, the judges said prosecutors had not proven their allegation that he participated in the IS pledge.

The events took place at the Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University near Jakarta in July 2014 and at the FPIs headquarters in Makassar on Sulawesi Island in January 2015, and were disguised as religious study sessions, according to the court.

Prosecutors had requested an eight-year jail sentence for Munarman, a former human rights lawyer who once headed the countrys main legal aid foundation. They and a lawyer for Munarman, Achmad Michdan, plan to challenge the sentencing.

We are appealing the decision, Michdan told reporters.

Munarman, who goes by one name, made no comment about the verdict. He has been incarcerated since May 2021.

The defendant has had previous brushes with the law. Munarman was jailed for 18 months for attacking members of a group called the National Alliance for Freedom of Religion and Belief during a rally in Jakarta in 2008.

600 security personnel

Outside the courthouse, police had erected barbed wire on the street in front in anticipation of the sentencing. In addition, East Jakarta police chief Senior Commissioner Budi Sartono said 600 security personnel were deployed to anticipate a rally by Munarmans supporters.

In a statement read in court last month, Munarman blasted what he called a show trial and said authorities wanted him jailed because he had spoken out against the irregularities surrounding the killing of six FPI members by police in 2020.

The case was fabricated to cover up the extrajudicial killings. [They] came up with the slander that the FPI indeed supported ISIS, Munarman said at the time.

The slain FPI members were traveling in a convoy with the groups leader, Muhammad Rizieq Shihab.

The National Commission on Human Rights said its investigation found police had acted unlawfully in killing at least four of the six men.

Two police officers were tried and acquitted as the judges ruled they acted in self-defense.

Rizieq was sentenced to four years in prison last year for withholding his positive COVID-19 test results despite the governments request for information after he held large gatherings.

Previously, Rizieq and five of his associates were sentenced to eight months in prison for violating coronavirus restrictions by organizing events that drew thousands of people.

The Indonesian government officially banned the FPI in December 2020 after it accused the group of violating the law and disrupting peace and security. In addition, 35 members and former members had been convicted on terrorism charges.

The decision to ban the organization was taken jointly by Indonesias home, law and communications ministers, the police and counter terrorism heads, and the attorney general.
VIJAYAWADA: Chief Minister Jagan Mohan Reddy has met Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari on the second day of his two-day Delhi visit and held discussions on key road projects in the state.

The chief minister requested the Union minister to extend support to the Visakhapatnam - Bhogapuram beach corridor project for providing better connectivity and boosting tourism. Officials are preparing better plans for the project as directed by Gadkari during his recent visit to the state, the CM said.

YSRC MPs Vijayasai Reddy and Mithun Reddy accompanied the CM during the meeting with Gadkari. Jagan, concluding his two visits, returned to Tadepalli on Wednesday.

Jagan said the construction works of western bypass in Vijayawada are on a brisk pace and urged the Union minister to link this road to the CRDA grid Road. The state government has identified the lands and is ready to give this for the Multi Model Logistic Park related to Vijayawada western bypass, he said, and urged Gadkari to help prepare DPR and move ahead. He also urged the Centre to prepare the DPR and expedite the works related to the Vijayawada eastern bypass.

Jagan said the Central Transportation Department has sanctioned 20 ROBs for the state and urged the Union minister to sanction another 17 ROBs for the state. The CM requested the Union Minister to take steps for the construction of 1,723km of national highways connecting various tourist destinations, industrial nodals and special economic zones in the state.

He also pleaded for the construction of these roads connecting the centers of the newly formed districts.

The state tourism department has sent proposals for construction of 14 rope ways across the state, of which two were approved, he said, and requested the Union minister to approve the remaining proposals.
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Q: While walking October Mountain just recently, I am sure I saw a mountain lion. It was not in any hurry. Have there been others reporting this big cat recently? I wish I could see it again! (Dont use my name as others think Im crazy).

A: I have hoped to see a big cat, that is bigger than a bobcat, since NatureWatch began getting reports in the 1980s. Most of the reports I would not consider; a few from experienced hunters and outdoor people were hard to discount, although none of them had photographic proof or any footprints or scratch markings except for one naturalist that I have known for years.

We know that strays have wandered through New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts; that does not indicate that a sighting means we have a resident mountain lion in the Berkshires. I would always share potential sightings with Tom French, Ph.D., assistant director of MassWildlifes Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program for nearly 35 years, now retired. In Massachusetts Wildlife magazine (No. 2, 2015) French wrote a thorough piece, "Mountain Lions in Massachusetts: Distinguishing the Fiction from the Facts." (You can download the article from mass.gov/doc/mountain-lions-in-massachusetts-distinguishing-fiction-from-the-facts/download.) It's one piece that he wrote, that I have used in discussing the possibility of hard-to-believe sightings and I quote, People are always hopeful that what they have seen is something unusual, rather than just common and mundane.

Mistaken reports of mountain lions are most commonly bobcats. Many people do not realize how large a grown Bobcat is. An adult male bobcat can reach four feet in length and 35 to 40 pounds. Coyotes have been mistaken for mountain lions.

Most mountain lion sightings are reported without any evidence other than eyewitness descriptions. MassWildlife uses evidence-based criteria to confirm reports of mountain lions and does not investigate or confirm reports without evidence. Evidence considered could include "the body of a dead mountain lion or a live wild-captured animal; photos or video, in which a mountain lion can be identified and MassWildlife can confirm the location; DNA evidence from hair, scat, etc.; track sets or photos of track sets; other tangible physical evidence verified by qualified professionals."

There is no evidence of a reproducing mountain lion population in Massachusetts, MassWildlife says on its website. However, there have been two confirmed reports of mountain lions in the state in the last 30 years. Both cases meet the evidence requirements of MassWildlife. In April 1997, tracker John McCarter found scat near a beaver carcass at the Quabbin Reservation. Two independent labs confirmed the scat found at the site came from a mountain lion.

According to French's article: To date, the only other confirmed evidence of a wild Mountain Lion in Massachusetts was found on March 4, 2011, when Steve Ward, a DCR forester, photographed a trail in the snow crossing a frozen cove near the southwestern end of Quabbin Reservoir. Now, similar proof is what we need!

Learn more about the two confirmed reports of mountain lions in Massachusetts at mass.gov/dfw/mt-lions.

Q: I recently read the book "The Scarlet Pimpernel" by Sir Percy Blakeney and was telling a friend about it, and she reminded me that it is also is a wildflower. I wonder if it grows around here at all?

 Cindy, Pittsfield

A: It is less common than many other invasives but is found here in the Berkshires. I saw it growing in Richmond along the road to Richmond Pond some years ago, pointed out by the late David St. James. It is a low, sprawling plant with small 1.4-inch scarlet flowers. It is considered an invasive species brought by early settlers from Europe (my guess Great Britain) for medicinal purposes and grown for a variety of ailments, among them in those days, leprosy. It is also called Poor mans Weatherglass because it needs a sunny day to open (similar to chicory, another plant, only much larger with blue flowers that were brought here from Europe).

Q: Can you give me an idea if wild turkeys can fly? We have seen them run through our yard.

 Lisa O. (and sons), Holyoke

A: I should have asked a turkey hunter! I have seen them fly and do so  especially into trees  when in danger, either real or imagined. When they fly, it is more like a burst and reaches around 50 mph. They run to about 25 mph.

READER COMMENTS

Carol Ann P., of Hinsdale, wrote, Thank you for the very informative article on invasive species! I was able to look up the particulars and photos online. (I don't get the daily Eagle but I get The Berkshires in Brief [online newsletter] and read it daily.)

I didn't realize mullein was an invasive even though I have it popping up in strange places in my yard every year. The same with garlic mustard. At first, I thought it was pretty, but then it kept spreading on the edge of the woodlands next to my lawn. I pull it up but may not have done so soon enough.

Japanese knotweed and phragmites are the bane of my existence on our road. It seems like nothing will kill them! It is a gravel road and when the plows clear the road in the winter (or grade it in summer) they spread the invasive all along the edge. Oh well, not much I can do about that.

William B., of Pittsfield wrote, I learned something from your column about invasive species. And I would like to see more plants and even animals in future columns. Thank you in advance.

Thomas P. wrote, I never thought coltsfoot was invasive. It was a favorite of Euell Gibbons and I thought it was natures remedy for coughs and colds. A couple of summers ago I found it in our yard and was happy to see it by cultivating it into a small patch. Not a good idea I guess.
PITTSFIELD  The arson conviction of a Jewish man who maintained his innocence for nearly four decades has been dismissed over concern that one of the jurors made antisemitic remarks.

The remarks came to light nearly two months after the jurys 1983 verdict. At the time, Barry Jacobson asked for a new trial because of that.

The judge investigated by interviewing all but two of the jurors, who were unavailable, but they denied or didnt recall hearing others use antisemitic remarks. The foreperson denied making such comments.

Finding no statement had been made that influenced the jurys decision, the judge turned down Jacobsons motion for a new trial and let stand the conviction. The Massachusetts Appeals Court upheld Judge William W. Simons' ruling in a review of the case in 1985.

Jacobson was convicted of setting fire to his family vacation home in Richmond. He served just over 40 days in jail.

Last year, Jacobson, who has maintained his innocence ever since, requested a new trial based in part on the accounts of two jurors, one sitting and one alternate, who reported hearing antisemitism in sworn affidavits. Jacobson's attorney, former Supreme Judicial Court Justice Robert Cordy, said that the judges method of questioning the jurors all those decades ago was flawed, and said several of the jurors later withdrew or qualified their initial denials that the antisemitic comments had been made.

In January, Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harringtons office agreed to dismiss the case against Jacobson, thereby vacating his conviction.

Harrington, who announced the decision at a news conference on Tuesday, said that the legal standard for evaluating claims of impartiality among jurors has also changed in the years since the Appeals Court ruling.

She said that prosecutors have a responsibility to ensure that jurors are free of bias.

In a sworn statement made at the time, one juror recalled comments made by the woman who served as jury foreperson in Jacobson's trial.

From the beginning of our deliberations," the reporting juror said, "the forelady of the jury . repeatedly made references to Mr. Jacobson as being one of those New York Jews who think they can come up here and get away with anything.

The alternate juror recounted hearing similar statements from the jury foreperson, according to the Innocence Project, representatives for which joined the Anti-Defamation League and Harrington at Tuesday's virtual news conference.

Jacobson, who did not participate in the news conference, said in a statement later Tuesday that bias "infected the prosecution and the jury deliberations."

Nearly 40 years ago, I was wrongfully convicted for a crime I didnt commit," he said. This wrongful conviction has cast a painful shadow over my life. I am thankful to God, family and friends. The evils of antisemitism and racism in our legal system must be fought relentlessly.

After jurors convicted Jacobson of arson in 1983, he served just over 40 days in jail and was also ordered to pay a $10,000 fine.

"He spent more than a month in prison for a crime he didnt commit, based on unreliable arson evidence and a baseless claim that he was looking to make insurance money on the home  although no claim was ever filed," according to a statement by the Innocence Project.

Jacobson, a New York realty firm executive, and a friend were indicted on an arson charge in connection with a January 1982 fire at Jacobson's vacation home in Richmond.

The evidence against Jacobson was circumstantial, Cordy argued. Jacobson and his friend had traveled to the vacation home that morning to retrieve a Jeep for his friend to use on an upcoming trip. But the garage door opener didn't seem to work, a light was on in the house, and it looked like a board was missing from the garage.

Jacobson worried there may have been a burglary but didn't have a key, the motion said, so he drove to meet the caretaker of his Richmond property, but in the process his vehicle left the road and ran into a snowbank.

Around the same time, a fire alarm in the home was tripped, triggering a fire department response. State police also came to the scene. The motion said the fire was extinguished shortly after.

Evidence was used that never should have been admitted at trial, Cordy argued.

Authorities had argued that the fire had started on the porch of the house on a carpet, said Barry Scheck, Jacobson's co-counsel and an Innocence Project lawyer.

The carpet was tested for the presence of gasoline, and Scheck said that one year after the fire, investigators "found" a vial of what they claimed was gasoline that had been "squeezed out of the carpet," and that authorities had failed to properly document.

"It was clear to me that this verdict was tainted by stereotypes and bias and that there was absolutely no way that my office could ethically or morally defend Mr. Jacobson's conviction," Harrington said.

Her office agreed to Jacobson's motion for post-conviction relief in January and subsequently filed a dismissal of the charges against him, she said.

Harrington said her office has seen a "shocking rise in hateful incidents over recent years targeting Jewish, Black and Latino communities here in Berkshire County."

"The need to stand against antisemitism is every bit as relevant today as it was in 1983. I will do everything that I can to keep hate and bias from undermining our justice system," she added.

Cordy said Jacobson, now 78, who went on to chair a New York City realty firm, has been haunted by the trauma associated with being wrongfully convicted.

"He's a very strong person, very committed person," Cordy said. "His business, relationships were disrupted. Financing for some of his projects were disrupted, but he kept pursuing them and pursuing it. He's just that kind of person. And so hes made it through in some respects, but in terms of the trauma for him personally and his family, that really can never be undone."
On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., 39, was shot and killed while standing on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee; his slaying was followed by a wave of rioting (Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Chicago were among cities particularly hard hit). James Earl Ray later pleaded guilty to assassinating King, then spent the rest of his life claiming hed been the victim of a setup.
HYDERABAD: The ruling Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) on Wednesday blocked national highways across the state demanding that Centre procure paddy from the state in the ongoing rabi season.

Ministers, TRS MLAs, MLCs, MPs, and elected representatives of various local bodies, cadres and farmers in large numbers staged a rasta roko on four national highways connecting Mumbai, Nagpur, Vijayawada and Bengaluru at several places as part of the agitation.

Traffic came to a grinding halt on highways for nearly five hours from 8 am to 1 pm forcing motorists to face scorching sun. Holding party flags, placards, paddy plants and raising slogans, the protestors squatted on the highways leading to huge traffic jams on both the sides. They strew paddy stocks on roads to block vehicular movement.

Endowments minister A. Indrakaran Reddy led the road blockade on the Hyderabad-Nagpur highway at Kadthal village junction near Nirmal town. Reddy said they were staging rasta roko not to cause inconvenience to people but to raise their voice over paddy procurement. We want our voice to be heard in Delhi and that is why we are staging this rasta roko on national highways, he added.

A massive protest was also held on the Hyderabad-Nagpur highway at Medchal, leading to huge traffic jam on the city outskirts. The police detained the protestors and shifted them to the police station.

Excise minister V. Srinivas Goud led the road blockade on Hyderabad-Bengaluru highway near Bhoothpur in Mahbubnagar district. TRS MP Kotha Prabhakar Reddy and other TRS leaders took part in the protest on the Hyderabad-Mumbai highway at Patancheru in Sangareddy district. The protestors blocked the Hyderabad-Vijayawada highway in Nakrekal in Nalgonda district.

Kothagudem MLA Vanama Venkateshwara Rao staged a rasta roko on Vijayawada-Jagdalpur national highway in Ramavaram.

The party leaders said their protest would continue till the BJP government at the Centre agreed to procure the entire paddy from Telangana as was being done in Punjab and other states.

Srinivas Goud said, " BJP leaders in Telangana who asked farmers to grow paddy and assured them that the Centre would procure, are now hiding their faces." TRS leaders urged farmers to question the BJP leaders in every village about their assurance on paddy procurement.
Community News Editor / Librarian

Jeannie Maschino is community news editor and librarian for The Berkshire Eagle. She has worked for the newspaper in various capacities since 1982 and joined the newsroom in 1989.
Act on Mass held a rally in Amherst last year to build support for transparency reforms in the Massachusetts House. Now, the advocacy group wants to get a ballot question before Pittsfield voters in November.
Local attorney Rinaldo Del Gallo, who submitted the petition for body cameras to the City Council Tuesay, said "clearly body cameras are not a fix all or panacea," but argued that adding the technology to the police department would go a long way to "preserving truth."
Sharing is a wonderful thing  especially when it lets towns work together on preserving quality public services while minding the sustainability of their municipal budgets.

Last month, we praised Becket and Otis for teaming up to share a police chief. Now, Dalton and Hinsdale are considering a shared police department, and were just as enthused to see two more Berkshire towns seriously engaging with regionalization plans that make sense for smaller, rural communities.

Two towns, one police department? That's the question for Dalton and Hinsdale With a state grant in hand, the towns of Dalton and Hinsdale will hire a consultant to study this question: Can one police department, Daltons, serve both communities?

A key driver here for Dalton and Hinsdale is a newly enacted police reform law that, among other things, requires part-time police officers in Massachusetts to meet higher training standards more in line with their full-time counterparts. This measure makes sense. Whether officers serve 10 or 40 hours per week, their duty to protect the public is no less important and the force theyre equipped to inflict is no less lethal. Thats just one of the many reasons why we supported this landmark policing legislation.

Still, as with any statewide measure, consideration should be given to communities in rural, less populous and underserved corners  particularly in Western Massachusetts  that are often overlooked. Some smaller towns, like Hinsdale, only employ part-time officers, which means meeting this new requirement is disproportionately harder for them.

In fact, Hinsdale officials characterized complying with these new part-time officer training standards as a crushing financial demand. Those officials twice aired their concerns with Gov. Charlie Baker, and while the governor did not respond the first time, he did last week when his administration gave Hinsdale and its neighbor, Dalton, $25,000 to study whether a shared police department could be the right move.

We certainly would have preferred a more timely response from the governor to the first inquiry, but its better late than never to see the state help two Berkshire towns take a good look at an elegant solution via shared services. Wed like to see more of it, as there are plenty of small towns, particularly in rural Western Massachusetts, that rely primarily or entirely on part-time officers that might find the new training requisites a heavier lift. Dalton and Hinsdale will put the money toward hiring a consultant and arranging community meetings to see if and how a shared police department between the two towns could work. Theyre already used to sharing a bit when it comes to dispatching services. Were happy to see officials approaching this possibility with some purposeful pep in their step. We do want this done in a timely manner, said Dalton Town Manager Tom Hutcheson, who will prepare a request for proposals.

We hope the efforts to gather residents perspectives is an inclusive one, and that everyone who has thoughts on this endeavor gets to share them. Community-informed policing is the best policing, so both communities should be heard. As with all regionalization talks, though, we urge everyone to resist the parochialism that sometimes make these conversations harder than necessary. There could be good-faith critiques of certain aspects of a shared police department. Those can and should be heard without giving in to unnecessary divisiveness when a creative solution is on the table to let two communities help each other in balancing effective public safety with budgetary considerations.

Officials from both sides of the town line find this a real and promising possibility. Hinsdale Town Manager Robert Graves told The Eagle hes all for higher standards for officer training, and simply wants to make the impact less onerous on his small towns coffers. Meanwhile, Dalton Select Board Chairman Joe Diver said that, while Hinsdale initially approached Dalton, we all hope that the cost would be decreased together.

We agree across the board on the potential here. If theres a common-sense way to level up officer training in both of these communities while finding some savings through efficiency, thats a path worth pursuing. We wish Dalton and Hinsdale luck in finding that better way forward together, and were hopeful their success inspires other communities in similar situations.
Municipalities are set to receive varying amounts of funding, according to projections published by Healey's office. The tiny Berkshire County town of Alford, for example, is in line to get just $1,566 over the next 16 years, while Boston expects more than $22 million over the same span.

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Strengthens its presence in womens health

Bharat Serums and Vaccines (BSV) has acquired Tidilan (Isoxsuprine hydrochloride), a leading brand in womens health from Jagdale Industries, Bengaluru. Tidilan is currently available in tablet and injectable dosage forms. BSV has some of the leading womens health brands such as Rhoclone, Hucog, Hucog 5000 HP, AntiD among others.

Tidilan (Isoxsuprine hydrochloride) is used for relaxing uterine muscles to prevent premature labour, among expecting mothers.

Sanjiv Navangul, MD and CEO, Bharat Serums & Vaccines, said, This will be an important milestone towards our goal of being the top three womens health players in India and as we continue to bring treatments and cures that help serve our patients better.

Rajesh Jagdale, CMD, Jagdale Industries, added, We are proud of our market-leading brand, Tidilan (Isoxsuprine hydrochloride) and are delighted with this partnership with BSV as we are confident that this will expand BSVs offerings in womens health as they work towards bringing more products that will improve lives of women in the country.
The goal of the collaboration is to conduct R&D projects to investigate formulation and product development in the fields of nutraceuticals, phytopharmaceuticals

Zeon Lifesciences signs a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Delhi Pharmaceutical Sciences & Research University (DPSRU) to establish collaboration for academic interaction and research advancement in the specified fields, as well as to share facilities and expertise.

DPSRU and Zeon will conduct collaborative research activities at DPSRU encompassing pharmaceutical technology, synthesis and analytical techniques, pharmacotherapeutics, standardisation of herbal actives and protocols adopted to comply with the regulatory milieu of the region/country concerned.

The goal of this collaboration is to conduct R&D projects to investigate formulation and product development in the fields of nutraceuticals, phytopharmaceuticals, and Ayurveda.

Zeon Lifesciences and DPSRU will be conducting clinical trials as per AYUSH or DCGI guidelines, applicable for selected formulations. Both entities will also conduct studies to compare the prevailing regulations, approaches and challenges while registration of drug products.
News Details

ECG feature attributing to growth of medical wearables market

Date: 06-04-22

Extraordinary growth in wearables is being seen post covid years, covid alone is not the main reason. Major chunk of gadget friendly population were buying wearble for health monitoring even before covid. It's not just gadget crazy people buying wearable devices, even the cost conscious ordinary buyer thinking of investing in a wearable device for the benefits it gives. It saves time in monitoring health of aged person and sick person at home remotely.

The cost and pain of hospitalisation is driving the fear among health-conscious people to give importance to preventive healthcare and that is driving the market for the use of wearable devices by healthy people.

What is hurting the wearable industry is the shortage of semiconductor chips. Consumer electronics can manage with components which are not necessarily as robust as aerospace/mil grade or automotive grade with lot of certifications and approvals. That is helping the consumer-wearble industry to procure semiconductor devices from chip fabs/foundries which don't really fulfil extreme high reliability of components and most of the chips go inside wearable need not be made in cutting edge nodes like 5nm. Even a 28nm is lot good enough for many applications.

The use of wearable devices is rising among common public due to the importance they are giving to daily monitoring of health parameters such as heartbeat, body temperature, blood pressure, wearable device is also becoming needy for hands-free listening and operation of devices,machines, appliances and things around them. The key technologies driving these wearable devices are increased processing ability of chips, extreme low power consumption, new battery technologies, and development of new sensor technologies for monitoring health.

Covid has impacted the society to give more importance to health and at the same time the cost of devices are becoming affordable. For those who have money they can buy very feature rich wearable devices. Due to these reasons the health monitoring wearable device market is booming with massive growth in both shipment and revenue.

Let's look at each of the health concern consumer has and how the Devices address them. When you visit a physician for checkup, He/she most probably picks Stethoscope to test your heart beat. Let's look at the heart related monitoring, the present medical devices can do:

ECG/electrocardiography: if you place electrodes on the human body as close as possible to the heart and blood vessels around the human body in a nonintrusive way, these electrodes detect electrical signals which vary in synchronisation with heartbeat. The pattern of the electrical signal tells a lot about health of the heart. This is called electrocardiography or ECG. Today's smart watches have this electrode sensor built-in inside smart watch. The measurements of ECG in a typical hospital environment, measures ECG from 12 body points. Whereas in smart watch it will provide only a single lead, where the user need to touch the lead using finger to capture the ECG. That's pretty incomplete, but enough to give some idea on the health of the heart, but hardly reliable. However various heart related health conditions can still be detected using single lead and prevent any heart failures. Medical body FDA has approved the single lead ECG capable smart watches from some companies to detect some ailments of heart such as atrial fibrillation. If this is about ECG related sensing, the LED light-based heart beat sensing can be found in most of the wearables just to detect the heartbeat. However the user should have what is called "Strong Heart" to withstand false alarms.

Apple continuously launching series of smart watches with ECG, with the latest Apple Watch 7 models packs maximum features and high performance.

Fitbit as another company offering Smart watch with ECG monitoring. Its model named Fitbit Charge 5 is the latest model providing ECG.

Samsung is offering Smart watch with ECG feature in lots of models. Latest and most performance packed is its Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2. This watch asks you to clean your finger and wear-on the watch for at least 10 minutes before taking ECG.

There are also smart watches with an analog time display providing ECG future. The two models; Withings ScanWatch, and Withings Move ECG have built-in ECG .

Another ECG integrated Smart watch model named Alivecor KardiaMobile 6L can detect a lot more heart related problems compared to their watches such as Afib like bradycardia (slow heart rate), tachycardia (increased heart rate), and sinus rhythm.

Some of the earlier smart watches with ECG feature include Apple Watch Series 6, Apple Watch Series 5, Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, SOREX SG5 Smartwatch, Supersonic SC-84ECG, Omron HeartGuide.

The cost conscious users now also have the option of buying a low-priced portable exclusive ECG monitors which they can carry in their pockets. They can connect portable ECG devices to smart phones and provide the health of the heart along with the ECG images. Eko DUO ECG + Digital Stethoscope is a nice device which can be used to monitor health of the heart with or without connecting Smart phone. Omron KardiaMobile EKG is also one of the nice portable ECG device in the market. Just like smart watches, most of these devices too use single lead. If you are looking for consumer grade multi-lead ECG, these are available online at in the price range of Rs. 2000-Rs. 10,000

India based company called Agatsa has developed a product named SanketLife, the company claims this product is worlds smallest clinical grade touch based 12-lead electrocardiography monitor. It can be operated by anyone with minimal or no training. This heart monitor can measure accurate heartrate (HR), heartrate variability (HRV) stress and almost hundred plus heart diseases, company claims. There are devices starting from Rupees 3000/- to 7000/-. For more details visit https://sanketlife.in/.

To give you one more example, KardiaMobile is a medical-grade personal ECG device that lets you monitor your heart at ease in your home. It is a 6 lead device and need a support of mobile phone app to work. Priced Rs. 18,000/ - , can be purchase online at https://alivecor.in/kardiamobile6l/.

The market growth figures of medical wearable devices:

Polaris Market Research has estimated worldwide Wearable Medical Devices Market to reach to $ 85.6 Billion By 2027 from $ 14.6 Billion in 2019 growing at a CAGR of 24.8% during this period.

Another market researcher predicted worldwide smart watch market of US$11.42 Billion in 2018 and is estimated to reach US$690.38 Billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 66.92% from 2019 to 2026.

In the next article let's look at body temperature measurement feature in wearable devices.
Carla van Pletzen has rejoined the Grey team on a permanent basis as PR Director of the Grey PR and the Influencer Marketing Unit.

Carla van Pletzen, PR Director of the Grey PR and the Influencer Marketing Unit

Congratulations on rejoining the Grey! How are you feeling?

What was your reason for returning?

What will your new role entail?

How and when did this come about?

What excites you most about taking on this role?

Briefly tell us about your journey into the industry.

What do you love most about your career, the industry and what you do?

What approach will you take in your role as PR Director of the Grey PR and Influencer Marketing Unit?

What advice would you give to women looking to enter the industry?

What projects are you working on at the moment? Or what can we see in the coming months?

I am excited about being back with the Grey Wolf Pack! It is one of the best teams to work with  the people, the approach to solving real business problems and the brand teams we get to work with are unique and hard to match.The opportunity to work with the best in the industry; you are learning something new every day and the significant growth the company experiences on an ongoing basis. Within the Grey family, you get to run your division as a business with the support of other disciplines and partners.To cement Grey PR as a discipline within the company which can add significant value from a public relations (strategy, creative thinking, exceptional earned media, support in times of crisis) and influencer marketing (relationships with leading influencers and celebrities in various industries) point of view. We are growing the department and recruiting the best talent in the industry.I have been working with the teams on a freelance basis for the past 20 months. During this time, we have secured always on clients as well as been able to appoint permanent team members within the department. It was a natural progression to permanently join the team and ensure further Grey PR growth.Growth. There is a real opportunity for integration within the Grey culture amongst clients within the company and to offer our existing and new clients 360-degree solutions.Public relations and influencer marketing are renowned for adding high cost-effective value to campaigns to resolve real business problems. The members within the PR department offer professional, expert and strategic guidance to our clients  successfully navigating through some challenging industry obstacles and landing publicity in various sought after publications. Our relationships with media moguls are strong, and we have ongoing two-way conversations with them to ensure crafted content meets their needs.I completed an Honours degree in Corporate Communication. While the plan was always to work as a communications manager within a company, I ended up in an agency environment to gain some experience, and 18 years later, I am still working in an agency.I was very fortunate to start my career working with very well known brands such as Appletiser, House of Coffees, Kellogg's and Five Roses right from the get-go. Beginning at a boutique agency, Sabio Communications, I quickly gained experience relating to all elements PR. Strategy, creativity, execution, media engagements, crisis communications etc.I have worked with over 90 well known South African and global brands  including Kimberly Clark, McCain, Famous Brands, Revlon, PepsiCo, Cartrack and Volvo Trucks.It all comes down to solving a problem your client is facing  whether to sell more products, resonate better with their audience or position themselves as a market leader. Finding the best approach, the balance between being strategic and creative, staying true to the objectives and showing real change  real influence. Nothing beats excellent results and jumping up and down in front of the TV when you see your hard work paying off never gets old.Conviction. It will serve as the foundation for our team's journey. I believe in our skillset, knowledge, passion and the ability to overcome obstacles and allow healthy expansion and growth.Let your work speak for itself. Let the only things defining you be character, integrity and passion.We have two active campaigns in the market: The launch of the new Savanna Chilled Chilli and Viceroy's | VulUmlomo Conversations on Culture.We are working on several exciting campaigns launching soon from Hunter's, Amarula, Scottish Leader and Burger King. We are also pitching for some exciting new business and entering some PR lead campaigns for Awards.We are also expanding our service offering to include 'publicists' following some requests from top SA talent working with us on numerous influencer campaigns.
As Albert Einstein once said, in the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity. In some instances, a crisis can provide brands with the opportunity to create positive brand reinforcement and awareness. However, in many cases, some brands are their own worst enemies in tarnishing their reputations. It is for this reason that issues and crisis strategies should form the bedrock of any brand's communications plan.

The digital influence on crisis management

You cant slap a band-aid on it

Burger King gets it all wrong on Womens Day 2021

Volkswagens proverbial slap in the face

Snapchat gets a bad image

Where to from here?

Prepare a crisis plan with holding statement templates from mocked scenarios

Establish a crisis response team

Get the facts

Accept responsibility and apologise

Choose the right channels for distribution

Communicate your response or plan of action

Monitor the crisis

According to the 2019 JOTW Communications Survey , only 59% of communicators have a communications strategy, while a mere 45% have a documented crisis communications plan. Furthermore, PWCs Global Crisis Survey 2021 suggests that only 62% of business leaders used a crisis plan in their response to the ongoing pandemic. The figures are alarming, particularly given the impact of the pandemic on global business practices, and that in todays digitally-driven world, anything and everything a brand conveys is placed under a microscope.Today, crisis management is more important than ever, compelling brands to be prepared and respond rapidly to a crisis at any given time. This is particularly important given that research by ConverSocial claims that 37% of consumers who use social media platforms to complain or question brands expect a response in under 30 minutes.There are no quick fixes when it comes to crisis recovery. This is evidenced by Deloittes Global Crisis Management Report which indicates that fewer than 30% of C-Suite executives whove experienced a crisis say that their reputations recovered in less than a year, with 16% claiming it took four years or more. Financial and operational crises experienced similar long recovery times. The road to recovery is a long one, with 70% stating that it took more than a year for its corporate reputation to recover.As one of a brands most valuable attributes, corporate reputation can make or break a brand for consumers. Here are three recent brand blunders that should never be repeated, proving that crisis management is important:In celebration of International Womens Day 2021, Burger Kings UK division tweeted that Women belong in the kitchen followed by two further tweets saying if they want to, of course, and the next announcing the fast-food chains new scholarship programme aimed at helping women attain a degree in culinary arts and reduce the gender gap in the restaurant industry.What was meant to capture attention did so, but for the wrong reasons. While the campaign first appeared in print and was interpreted as ironic, using the same direction on social media simply does not have the same effect. Many looked past the subsequent tweets and fixated on the first, resulting in a backlash for a seemingly sexist statement that resulted in Burger King appearing completely tone-deaf.The tweet was eventually deleted, and an apology was issued. While Burger King hoped the attention would spark interest and support for the scholarship program, for many, the damage was already done.After Volkswagens infamous Dieselgate scandal a few years ago, one would think that the worlds largest automotive manufacturer would tread lightly. Well, think again.In 2020, the German conglomerate posted a video on Instagram promoting its latest Golf 8, with a giant white hand flicking a Black person away from the car and into a restaurant by the name of Petit Colon - French for Little Colonist. Given that Volkswagen was founded in 1937 under the Nazi regime, one would assume that anything race-related be approached with extreme caution.What ensued on social media was best described as an utter uproar, and the advert was swiftly removed and an apology was issued. It read, No one from the team realised that flicking away a person is inappropriate on its own  and racist in the context shown. We should never have made a mistake like that. Neither the agencies nor we. We must apologise for that  with no ifs and buts. And ensure that something like it can never happen again.In 2018, social media platform Snapchat ran an advert created by a third party that was modelled after the game Would You Rather. Users were asked whether they would rather slap Rihanna or punch Chris Brown. While the incident occurred many years prior, in 2009, most havent forgotten about the domestic violence case between Rihanna and her then partner Chris Brown, and neither had she.After an uproar across the social sphere, Snapchat was quick to pull the advert and issue an apology, however, the damage was already done. Issuing a statement on Instagram - Snapchats rival - Rihanna lambasted the platform, stating that its not about her own feelings, but those of the women, children and men who have fallen victim to domestic violence in the past.Her sentiments rang true amongst her following, with company shares dropping almost 5% overnight, and reports indicating that Snapchat lost almost $800m after the incident.In todays busy world, marketers need to take notes from the mistakes of others. From always proofing projects and campaigns to not falling out of touch with pressing issues and keeping abreast with current and past events will ensure they dont become tone-deaf and apathetic.According to Talkwalker, this can be achieved in seven steps:There is an increasing need for more preparedness from brands today. Brands need to partner with the right agency to help you plan - from media training key spokespeople to the development of detailed issues and crisis frameworks coupled with in-depth escalation policies, social listening and an internal communications plan for our employees, our biggest advocates.Need to ensure your brand doesnt fall victim to any potential crisis or require help drafting a crisis plan? Send an email to info@eclipsecomms.com and one of our experts will be in touch.
While the pandemic necessitated a shift to online meetings and virtual engagement, there are just some business fundamentals that need to be done in person, especially in emerging markets where it's important to see what's happening on the ground,

Source: Supplied. Bryan Turner, a partner at Spear Capital.

A hybrid approach to business works best

For Spear Capital, a private equity investment firm that holds stakes in various companies in Southern Africa, relationships are key. With smaller economies, its not always possible to just do dashboard due diligence, says Bryan Turner, a partner at Spear Capital. To be on the ground is almost a necessity.Spear works with fast-growing companies in Zimbabwe, Malawi, South Africa and Zambia. As we are not always the majority owners, a good working relationship where all partners are aligned is critical, says Turner. As useful as financials and other virtual forms of due diligence can be, you get as much a sense of whether a companys worth investing in by visiting its premises and meeting with its management team face to face, says Turner.In Zimbabwe, for example, its not as easy to compile a digital overview. To really gain an insight into what a company does or to gauge the needs of a community, its imperative that our team is able to spend quality time meeting with various people, says Turner. Being in town creates opportunities to bump into key players from a cross section of sectors; crucial for fostering relationships.Another advantage of being on the ground is that it's possible to visit a companys premises to gain an accurate overview of the scale of the business and its daily operations. You are less likely to gain that kind of understanding from a Zoom call. You have to be there physically, he adds.But, this is not to say online meetings and virtual collaborations are not important, says Greg Gatherer, account manager at Liferay Africa. The opposite is true. There is, after all, a reason that remote work is constantly shown to improve productivity. It's also true that some people collaborate better in virtual environments, where they feel less restricted in sharing their ideas.He adds: There is no way I would be able to connect with people in multiple countries around the continent on a daily basis if I was relying on in-person meetings.But Turner and Gatherer agree that the way forward is preferably a hybrid of the two; with virtual meetings to establish and maintain connections and in-person meetings to be approached with purpose.On a trip to Kenya at the tail-end of 2021, I was reminded that in-person meetings still have a place and may even be helpful in accelerating digital transformation, says Gatherer.Turner concurs, saying: I can meet with colleagues and investors in Norway and portfolio companies across the SADC region through the course of the day. But its also true that you miss out on things when you dont meet in person whenever possible."We believe in this people-focused approach to investment being absolutely key, and being based on the ground in markets often considered unstable or volatile is Spear Capital's differentiator.Spear works with companies that have been built by people with a vested interest in its ongoing success.Being in a position to acquire a stake in these companies requires personal engagement and connection, he concludes, in addition to the research and preparation we can do online.
Loeries UAE Week gave Loeries the opportunity to exponentially grow its support of creativity across the wider MENA region, while looking back at past successes from the UAE.

Supplied. UAE Loeries Week hosted meetings, brunches and lunches with agencies and stakeholders

Adidas

UAE Government Media Office

Mini

KFC

Lego

Mastercard

Pizza Hut

Abu Dhabi Investment Offcie (ADIO)

Baalbeck International Festival

Donner Song Competition

Havas ME

TBWA/RAAD

MullenLowe MENA

Serviceplan MEA

FP7 McCann Dubai

M&C Saatchi UAE

Impact BBDO Beirut

FP7 McCann Cairo

Horizon FCB Dubai

FP7 McCann Doho

Loeries CEO, Preetesh Sewraj, and COO, Suzie Bowling, recently spent time celebrating the best in creative excellence in Dubai with the people who bring these ideas to life.Meetings were held with a numbers of organisations and agencies including, the UAE Government Media Office, Audi, BBDO, Leo Burnett, TikTok, TBWA/RAAD, Havas, Service Plan, FP7McCann, MullenLowe, M&C Saatchi, Cheil, GTB, Wunderman Thompson, Publicis, and US and Campaign Middle East.The Loeries team also spent time exploring creative innovation through networking at Expo 2020 Dubai and the newly opened Museum of the Future, which they visited as guests of the UAE Government Media Office.These opportunities ensure that the team were able to have a first-hand look some of the best examples of architecture, events, advertising and activations in the UAE.The following is a list of the highest ranked brands and agencies in MENA for 2021:
Jannie Smith, regional manager at GivenGain for South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. | Source: Supplied

What is #GameForGood?

What are the main objectives of the initiative?

To date, what has #GameForGood achieved both locally and internationally?

How can gamers incorporate this fundraising element into their daily gaming activities?

How can charities find gamers for fundraising and connect with gaming influencers?

How do charities and fundraisers alike benefit from the #GameForGood initiative?

For the livestreamer, there is very little effort involved to plug in the widget. They are still doing the thing they love and it is for a good cause, so its even better.

How has #GameForGood  and gaming-based fundraising in general  changed the charity and fundraising landscape?

The #GameForGood initiative enables gamers to livestream their gaming sessions to their armies of online supporters in exchange for donations to their chosen charities and it is proving enormous with fundraisers.Livestreamers like journalist and TV personality Grant Hinds have raised tens of thousands of Rands on the #GameForGood platform, including raising over R41,000 for homelessness charity New Hope SA during his birthday fundraiser.For charities, the initiative enables them to tap into the livestream fundraising trend by pointing them towards the right tools or promoting their cause to online gaming communities.I spoke to Jannie Smith, regional manager at GivenGain for South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, to learn more about the #GameForGood initiative.It all starts with online livestreaming, which has become very popular globally. There are hundreds of thousands of streamers out there now producing all kinds of live online content, like gaming or podcasting, and theyre followed by millions of fans around the world.Now sometimes livestreamers, like anyone, also want to give back to society and support the causes they care about and so they use their online presence to "livestream for good".We realised that some of these livestreamers have challenges in doing so - how do they get started, where do they find a charity to fundraise for, etc. At GivenGain, we created #GameForGood to enable any livestreamer out there, whether they are playing online games or hosting a cooking show, to use their online hobby to help their favourite charity.They do so by simply linking their GivenGain fundraising page with their livestreaming. So, they're having fun and doing good! Weve had 10 livestreamers who raised funds for Mandela Day 2021 by livestreaming for 67 minutes.A lot of livestreamers want to use their platforms to give back but they dont always know how. #GameForGood is about making it easy for them.GivenGain is an online platform for charities, so we connect them with non-profits and donors around the world and offer them expert advice on setting up and promoting their campaigns.Thanks to the GivenGain livestream widget we developed, they can also fundraise natively within their favourite streaming platforms.Since GivenGain launched the #GameForGood livestreaming option in 2019, fundraising around this theme has grown significantly.Our average donation amount is R467 and the biggest single donation we received to date is R25,329. We have extended our support through this initiative to 43 charities in 28 countries across the globe.The top eight livestreamers on GivenGain have all raised more than R10,000 and include Grant Hinds (R87,503), Afro Daddy (R57,800) and Hibeon Twitch - (R25,329). We were also really impressed by the diversity of high-earning livestreaming campaigns on GivenGain.Obviously, gaming streamers like Grant Hinds took to #GameForGood immediately, but we also saw Afro Daddy complete viewer-suggested challenges for charity, and Lizzie Hide host an online Halloween party. Its been a lot of fun seeing all this creativity on display.GivenGain developed a widget that a livestreamer can add to their livestreaming overlay on an online platform like Twitch so that their fans can see it at the top of the screen, where the online activity is being livestreamed.Viewers see the content as always, like a guy playing a game or running around, for example, but theyll also see at the top of the screen the fundraising goal and how much has been raised.Fans can then simply click on a unique donation link that the streamer will share with them, donate securely using their credit card and their name and the amount will pop up on the screen automatically for everyone to see.The amount raised will increase in real-time. That's great interaction for everyone watching and very motivating to the person streaming.We suggest they send out an e-mail or post on social media to introduce the idea to their fans/network.Charities could also reach out to individual streamers who talk about topics related to their cause. They can find streamers already taking part in #GameForGood on the event page on GivenGain.The biggest benefit is that it is 100% free to charities and livestreamers and they can game, but they can also do anything else that they want, like reading stories to children, giving tips on how to fix a bicycle or how to make the perfect lasagna.For charities, you just need to let your supporters know about the #GameForGood idea. Maybe there is someone out there who has been looking for an opportunity like this to support you.With GivenGain, you can do all this from anywhere in the world for a charity anywhere in the world.Its made fundraising more global and more accessible. Real-world mass participation events are incredible fundraising opportunities, but they also require fundraisers to be in a certain place at a certain time.Now streamers can create online events with hundreds or thousands of people attending virtually  and donating  from wherever they are in the world.
Chinese, Canadian FMs hold talks over phone

Xinhua) 08:36, April 06, 2022

BEIJING, April 5 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Tuesday held a phone conversation with Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly at the latter's request.

During their conversation, Wang said that the people of China and Canada have enjoyed long-term friendly exchanges, noting that Canada is one of the first Western countries to establish diplomatic ties with the People's Republic of China.

However, in recent years, China-Canada relations have suffered a serious setback due to the Meng Wanzhou case, which is something we do not want to see, Wang said.

The essence of this case lies in the U.S. suppression over Chinese high-tech enterprises by coercion, a shameful behavior that everyone could see clearly, Wang said.

No country should act as a facilitator of such unilateral bullying, and all countries have the right to make necessary responses, he added.

Noting that China always views and handles China-Canada relations from a strategic and long-term perspective, Wang said the current situation of bilateral relations is not in the interests of both countries, calling on Canada to face up to the problems and cooperate with China. He further put forward three proposals in this regard.

Firstly, Canada should view China positively and objectively with a steady and pragmatic China policy.

China's political system and development path are the Chinese people's own choices, which have inevitable historical logic and are in line with China's national conditions and its people's needs, said Wang.

China's development and progress are not only the legitimate right of its 1.4 billion people, but also an important part of the modernization of all mankind, he said.

China and Canada have no historical disputes or real conflict of interest. China hopes that Canada, in line with the goal of mutual benefit and win-win results, will do more to enhance mutual trust and promote bilateral relations, Wang said.

Secondly, the two countries should respect each other's core interests and not create new obstacles to the development of bilateral relations.

The one-China principle is the political foundation of China-Canada relations, Wang said, adding that if the Taiwan question is not handled properly, China-Canada relations will suffer fundamental damage.

China hopes Canada will adopt a correct attitude and position on issues concerning China's core interests, he said.

Thirdly, Canada should uphold its independence and eliminate unnecessary external interference.

Noting that the elder generation of leaders of the two countries broke through resistance and made a decision to establish diplomatic ties, Wang said there are many good stories and traditions in China-Canada exchanges that should be cherished and carried forward.

China hopes Canada will work with China to eliminate external interference, overcome difficulties and realize sound, stable and sustainable development of bilateral relations, he said.

The two sides also exchanged views on the Ukraine issue.

Noting that Chinese President Xi Jinping has made a comprehensive and authoritative elaboration about China's position on the issue, Wang said China calls on all parties to think calmly and rationally, create opportunities for peace and open up prospects for negotiations.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
By Michael Maharrey

Civil asset forfeiture is a pernicious policy in its own right. It is nothing more than legalized, institutionalized, government-sanctioned theft. Forfeiture laws flip due process on its head and create perverse policing for profit incentives. Its bad enough that police can take peoples stuff, oftentimes without even charging them with a crime. But the damage done by this insidious policy is magnified when police use asset forfeiture money to fund the ever-growing surveillance state.

Such was the case in Boston.

In 2019, the Boston Police Department bought a cell-site simulator with a price tag of $627,000. But the BPD didnt have money in its budget for such an expenditure. It paid for the invasive and controversial surveillance tech with asset forfeiture money.

Commonly known as stingrays, cell-site simulators essentially spoof cell phone towers, tricking any device within range into connecting to the stingray instead of the tower, allowing law enforcement to sweep up communications content, as well as locate and track the person in possession of a specific phone or other electronic device.

The feds require agencies acquiring the technology to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDA). This throws a giant shroud over the program, even preventing judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys from getting information about the use of stingrays in court. The feds actually instruct prosecutors to withdraw evidence if judges or legislators press for information. As the Baltimore Sun reported in April 2015, a Baltimore detective refused to answer questions on the stand during a trial, citing a federal non-disclosure agreement.

In Massachusetts, police chiefs have almost complete discretion over they spend forfeiture money. This means they can use the funds to keep purchases out of the public eye. According to ProPublica, the Boston City Council typically scrutinizes proposed spending by the police department. But because it bought the stingray using forfeiture funds, the BPD was able to circumvent the council.

If it werent for WBUR sifting through hundreds of documents obtained through an open records request, nobody would even know the Boston Police Department has a stingray.

This was the second cell-site simulator purchased by the BPD. It bought its first stingray in 2013. According to ProPublica, the department used budgeted money for the first stingray, but information on its use has been mostly redacted.

During a subsequent hearing on the matter, Bureau Chief for Investigative Services Felipe Colon said the department has deployed a cell-site simulator 106 times over the last six years. Thirty-six of those deployments were without a warrant.

Moving forward, it will be more difficult for Boston police to purchase invasive surveillance technology in secret. In November 2021, the Boston City Council passed an ordinance requiring the Boston Police Department will have to get council approval before acquiring or using new surveillance technology. It will also have to get approval before using existing technology in a new way.

But most local governments have no such oversight. Its almost certain that other local police departments are using asset forfeiture money to secretly buy surveillance technology.

Source: Tenth Amendment Center

Michael Maharrey [send him email] is the Communications Director for the Tenth Amendment Center. He is from the original home of the Principles of 98  Kentucky and currently resides in northern Florida. See his blog archive here and his article archive here.He is the author of the book, Our Last Hope: Rediscovering the Lost Path to Liberty, and Constitution Owners Manual. You can visit his personal website at MichaelMaharrey.com and like him on Facebook HERE
The City of Brandon is still waiting on a legal opinion after a judge found a womans privacy was breached during a police hiring competition.

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The City of Brandon is still waiting on a legal opinion after a judge found a womans privacy was breached during a police hiring competition.

Justice Sandra Zinchuk found the city and Terry Lynn Peters jointly and severally liable for general damages of $45,000 and Peters liable for aggravated damages of $15,000 after being sued by Brittany Roque.

Roque sued Peters for sharing Roques intimate images without her consent. The trial was heard virtually in mid-February 2021. The city is listed as a third party in the lawsuit.

"The decision in the Roque case was sent in for signing last Friday and is likely to be entered into judgment within the next couple of days. The legal counsel retained by our insurer, Bernice Bowley, is drafting an Opinion for our review. It is expected to be complete in the coming weeks," reads a statement from a city spokesperson.

The case stems from a 2017 incident in which Peters shared Roques intimate images with the Brandon Police Service senior executive during a police hiring competition for which Roque applied.

In March 2017, Roque underwent a polygraph test as part of the hiring process, where she disclosed her past relationship with Brandon police officer Ryan Friesen, Peters then-partner.

At the end of the meeting, she was told she could either withdraw from the hiring process or else she would be removed by the Brandon Police Service, according to the agreed statement of fact in Zinchuks decision.

Roque declined to withdraw from the competition and subsequently filed complaints with the IIU and the RCMP.

In the decision, Zinchuk said BPS deputy chief Randy Lewis viewed Roques images without her consent, which "substantially, and unreasonably violated her privacy."

The Sun asked whether the city would appeal the decision, but did not receive a response by press time on Tuesday.

 dmay@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @DrewMay_
The Brandon Municipal Airport is looking to create a wall of fame that would feature plaques of people who have made an impact on aviation in the city across three different categories.

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The Brandon Municipal Airport is looking to create a wall of fame that would feature plaques of people who have made an impact on aviation in the city across three different categories.

Airport manager Greg Brown presented on the project at Mondays city council meeting.

The first category is for people who have made great achievements in aviation either in significant events or over a lifetime.

The second category would recognize those who pioneered or built aviation programs, infrastructure or business at the airport.

The third category would acknowledge people in aviation who have been leaders in the industry or in the Brandon community.

Plaques for successful nominees will be hung on a wall at the Brandon Municipal Airport, in the corridor leading from the entrance to security.

"People, when they think of the Brandon airport, they think of the military history when it was built as part of the Commonwealth Air Training Plan in World War II," Brown told the Sun on Tuesday. "But really, that was 1941 to 1946. The City of Brandon has been leasing that land, and actually now owns [it], since 1946, so there are decades of history as a municipal airport."

Since then, there have been plenty of people who have been involved with the airports transition into a civilian facility, working at the Brandon Flying Club and maintaining operations.

In 1970, the field at the airport was named McGill Field after Ed McGills contributions to Canadian aviation. McGill, Brown said, is a prime candidate for being honoured on the wall of fame.

The commemorative plaque from that event has already been set up in front of what will become the new wall of fame. It had been in storage since the airport terminal redevelopment project was initiated.

Other possible candidates Brown identified include members of the womens league known as the 99s, who arranged in the 1970s for the installation of the monument made from a Royal Canadian Air Force training jet that sits at the entrance to the airport off of Highway 10.

There are also candidates from the Brandon Flying Club, which has been active since before the airport existed.

Though details on the nomination process are still being worked on for release later this week, some information has already been revealed.

A five-person selection committee made up of the citys director of transportation, the airport manager, airport chargehand and two airport stakeholders would review nominations submitted by the public.

"We initially were talking about having five inductees this year and then one every year after that, but we quickly realized that if we put limitations on it, there might only be six [nominations] one year. Why do you say one has to wait?" Brown asked. "How do you make that decision? We decided to make decisions based on the nominations we receive and go from there."

Nominations will have to be submitted in writing to Brown with the primary nomination letter taking up no more than a single regular-sized piece of paper. There must also be two letters attached supporting the nomination written by other people along with support documentation like evidence of other awards or citations, newspaper articles and pictures.

Nominees can be either living or deceased.

Those who are interested in submitting a nomination or who have questions are encouraged to contact Brown by email at greg.brown@brandon.ca.

 cslark@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @ColinSlark
United States President Joe Biden was the first G7 leader to admit publicly that many parts of the world will soon experience food shortages and even famine. The world will be short of many commodities.

United States President Joe Biden was the first G7 leader to admit publicly that many parts of the world will soon experience food shortages and even famine. The world will be short of many commodities.

Regions like the Middle East and northeastern Africa already have dangerously low food inventories. The world will soon discover that the pandemic was just a dress rehearsal for whats about to happen.

The circumstances are the result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia and Ukraine together export over one-quarter of the global supply of wheat and one-fifth of the worlds corn supply.

Saying that Ukraine is Europes breadbasket is an understatement. Half of Africas wheat imports come from Ukraine and Russia, which is also a major fertilizer exporter.

Because of sanctions, Russia cant sell to anyone except perhaps China. And with limited or no access to fuel, farmers in the region cant even think about putting seeds in the ground.

To make matters worse, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), the largest such operation in the world and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020, has lost one of its most significant contributors. Last year, Ukraine was the largest single source of food for the program, providing nine per cent of the total food provisions managed by the WFP, which was already carrying a deficit due to pandemic-related complications.

Countries in need may not be able to rely on the WFP this year. So the almost eight billion people in the world face unprecedented food shortages.

All eyes are on North America to make up for the losses generated by the conflict and subsequent sanctions.

Many observers expect, or at least hope, that farmers will plant more this year. But relying on specific quantities planted by farmers can be problematic. Input costs like fertilizers and fuel are going up even more than the price of grains like wheat.

If the Ukraine conflict ends in the next month, it would be good news for the world. But farmers may end up losing with prices plummeting. Theyre keenly aware of this agonizing possibility.

Mostly unknown in Canada is the fact that Canpotex, a Saskatchewan-based company, is mandated to sell fertilizers to the rest of the world for export markets. Its owned by Nutrien and Mosaic, two industry powerhouses.

Canpotex helps both companies collude and inflate fertilizer prices on world markets. This archaic model is perilous to global food security and this years predicament makes this painfully obvious.

For decades, Canada and Saskatchewan have supported a supply-side economics scheme that drives fertilizer prices higher. Production has been adjusted based on market prices, which is why Nutrien opted to increase its production by 20 per cent recently. But if prices drop, potash mines would close. Thats simple but incredibly irresponsible.

Canpotex was set up to counter another cartel in Belarus that no longer exists. The issue will eventually need to be addressed.

But some things can be done now. To give Canadian farmers immediate help, the industry needs a complete rollback of taxes and adjustments to emission reduction targets. Both federal and provincial governments can do something about this.

Its unreasonable and irresponsible to continue honouring our environmental objectives when many could die from hunger in months. Farmers need all the help they can get.

The food-to-fuel issue is another lingering challenge. About 65 per cent of corn grown in North America is used for biofuel production. This year, food should be considered a priority for businesses and governments involved.

Its highly unlikely Canada will experience severe food shortages. Nonetheless, many countries  including Canada  will face a real and harsh dilemma in the coming months. We must try to balance our nations food security needs while helping other regions.

The WFP and other organizations will come to Canada asking for more help.

Food affordability will continue to be a growing issue. Many families are falling behind as wages cant keep pace with rising food prices.

But ultimately, we should just feel lucky we have food on grocery shelves. This is how bad it will get.

 Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the agri-food analytics lab and a professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University.
Integrity Music songwriters Mitch Wong & Dwan Hill receive GRAMMY Awards | Merge PR / Integrity Music

Nashville, TN - Integrity Music songwriters Mitch Wong and Dwan Hill have won a GRAMMY Award for Cece Winans song Believe For It," which was also co-written with Kyle Lee and Cece Winans. They take the award home in the Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance/Song category, which was announced during the Premiere Ceremony of the 64th Annual GRAMMY Awards held in Las Vegas, NV.

Mitch Wong was also nominated for co-writing Voice of God by Dante Bowe. Nathan Jess, who is also an Integrity Music songwriter, was nominated for Chandler Moores Man of Your Word. After last years ceremony happened online due to the global pandemic, sheer excitement, joy, and thankfulness were palpable at this years ceremony and resounded in Mitch Wongs acceptance speech: This song is all about belief. We believe for a better world, we believe for peace, we believe in the unconditional, no strings attached love of Jesus and we want to thank Him."

Mark Nicholas, Head of Label at Integrity Music, shares, It is our great privilege to celebrate Mitch and Dwans good gifts and songs, particularly 'Believe For It,' which is a resounding anthem to trust in God during precarious times. To see this song honored with a GRAMMY Award is a testament to the worlds need of songs that offer ultimate hope.

Integrity Music is overjoyed to see Christian music represented at Musics Biggest Night and promises to continue to seek and release songs of substance that glorify God. The 64th Annual GRAMMY Awards were held last night, Sunday, April 3rd, 2022, on the CBS Television Network, and hosted by Trevor Noah for the second year in a row. For a full list of all the wins, visit Grammy.com.

ABOUT INTEGRITY MUSIC: Integrity Music is part of the David C. Cook family, a nonprofit global resource provider serving the Church with life-transforming materials. With offices in both the U.S. and the U.K., Nashville, Tennessee, and Brighton, East Sussex, Integrity Music is committed to taking songs of substance to the local church and its leaders around the world.

Integrity publishes many of the top songs in the Church, including Great Are You Lord, Revelation Song, Open The Eyes Of My Heart, In Christ Alone, 10,000 Reasons, Here I Am To Worship, The Lion And The Lamb, Great I Am, and We Believe, among others. Integrity Music artists include Matt Redman, Lincoln Brewster, Darlene Zschech, Leeland, William McDowell, Paul Baloche, David and Nicole Binion, Sandra McCracken, Nashville Life Music, Selah, Thrive Worship, Local Sound, Sarah Kroger, Kees Kraeynoord, ICF Worship, InSalvation, Phil Thompson, Village Lights, Tim Timmons, Mission House, among others.

Additional information is available at integritymusic.com.
Riley Clemmons - 'Godsend (Deluxe)' | PFA Media

NASHVILLE, TN  Today, artist on the rise Riley Clemmons has released a deluxe version of her critically acclaimed album, Godsend. The expanded album features her Top 15 single, For the Good, a new duet version of Godsend feat. Brett Young, a piano vocal rendition of Irreplaceable, as well as two new songs, All of My Days and Everything and More. Listen to Godsend (Deluxe) HERE.

Of Godsend (Deluxe) Riley shares: My hope is that anyone who listens might find themselves somewhere within these melodies and stories and be reminded that so much of the pain, healing, and joy we experience is more common and unifying than we could ever imagine.

Released summer of 2021, Godsend secured Rileys position as an artist to watch. She was named one of People Magazines Emerging Artists 2021 and made appearances on the SHEIN X ROCK THE RUNWAY virtual fashion show, the TODAY Show, and FOX & Friends. Rileys latest single, For the Good, has quickly become her fastest growing single to date, rapidly climbing the charts all the while garnering over 10.5 million global streams since its release. Earlier this year she was named Artist of the Year at Australias TCM Radio making her the first woman in over a decade to have that honor. Riley is currently on tour with Jeremy Camp on his I Still Believe spring tour making stops throughout the east coast and will wrap in Melbourne, FL on May 1st. Tickets for the I Still Believe tour now available at www.rileyclemmons.com/tour

Riley Clemmons is a 22-year-old artist from Nashville, TN who has accumulated nearly 250 million global streams and 50 million YouTube video views in her young career. After spending years honing her craft in writers rooms, Riley sky-rocketed onto the scene with her 2017 Capitol CMG debut single Broken Prayers, which has generated over 30 million global streams to date. Her 2018 self-titled album debut quickly entered the Billboard Heatseekers chart, entering at No. 13. Her sophomore album, Godsend, has solidified Rileys position as an artist the rise and has garnered over 194 million global streams since its release. An accomplished composer, performer, producer, and recording artist, Riley draws inspiration from life experiences, blending musical influences ranging from pop to classic rock to create music that is as catchy as it is relatable.

Connect with Riley Clemmons:

Website
Two flights operated by regional airline Rex have been forced to abort take-off in the past 24 hours due to smoke coming out of an engine.

The captain of a flight bound for King Island and Burnie was forced to evacuate the plane at Melbourne Airport shortly before departure on Tuesday afternoon after it was alerted to flames coming out from the airplanes left-hand engine.

Two Rex planes were forced to abort take-off due to smoke coming out of the egine. Credit:Sam DAgostino

Passenger Pamela told 3AW people were told to leave the aircraft by jumping onto the tarmac, where airport ground staff attempted to catch them. At least one passenger injured his knee and elbow and had to receive first aid.

Travellers were taken to a room at the airport where they were booked into a later flight.
A Sydney woman accused of murdering her mother told a triple zero operator she could not find her after stepping out of the shower and being attacked by a male intruder, a court has heard.

Isabela Carolina Camelo-Gomez, 47, has pleaded not guilty to the murder of her mother, Irene Jones, who was stabbed and strangled to death in an attack in Lansvale, on November 2, 2001, that the Crown alleges was made to look like a home invasion.

Isabela Carolina Camelo-Gomez leaves the NSW Supreme Court on Wednesday. Credit:Janie Barrett

Two triple zero calls, made at 9.45pm and 9.53pm from a neighbours house, were played to the NSW Supreme Court jury on Wednesday.

In the first, Ms Camelo-Gomez, who was then known as Megan Jones, can be heard sobbing and telling the operator theres a man in the house and Mums in the house.
Sydneysiders have been urged by the State Emergency Service to stay at home if possible and to avoid flooded roads as heavy rain lashes the city.

The NSW SES has issued multiple evacuation orders in the citys south and the Bureau of Meteorology has issued a severe weather warning stretching from Morisset near Newcastle to Merimbula on the states South Coast.

The request to stay home on Thursday came as the SES issued evacuation orders for parts of Chipping Norton in Sydneys south-west, as well as for Woronora and Bonnet Bay in Sydneys south, and parts of Camden.

Residents in low-lying parts of Woronora and Bonnet Bay were urged to evacuate by 11.30am. The SES urged people to stay with friends or family where possible. For those who cant, evacuation centres have been established, including at Club Menai.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has reversed his decision to knock back joint support for a $740 million Queensland government pitch to improve, raise or buy back up to 7000 south-east Queensland flood affected homes, after a chorus of criticism including from Brisbanes LNP lord mayor.

Mr Morrison initially suggested the program was a state and council responsibility, raising the ire of insurers and local governments  amid a political storm over disaster funding  who have long called for greater mitigation work and government co-operation to address growing flood risks.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Brisbane lord mayor Adrian Schrinner consult a map during a media conference about the flood situation on February 28. Credit:Peter Wallis/Getty Images

Clearly, much more can be achieved when all three levels of government chip in and work together, Cr Schrinner told this masthead on Wednesday night. However, were eager to sit down with the state government as soon as possible to discuss how best to invest the $370.5 million it has committed towards this fantastic initiative.

Speaking to 4BC on Thursday morning, Mr Morrison confirmed the Commonwealth would now co-fund the package, saying we dont want to play politics while suggesting the support was conditional on the state government bringing greater transparency to $52 million he said remained left over from previous disaster-funding rounds.
A member of the NSW Liberals state executive who launched a legal challenge over the preselection process has been kicked out of the party.

Matthew Camenzuli, who has appealed to the High Court over a federal intervention in the states drawn-out selection of candidates for the election, was expelled from the party on Wednesday due to the legal battle on the eve of the campaign.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison was facing a court challenge to his bid to overrule preselections in the NSW Liberals. Credit:Rhett Wyman

A spokesman for the party would not comment, declining to discuss internal party matters. However, according to multiple party sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Mr Camenzuli was told to leave because he had allegedly breached Liberal Party rules relevant to damaging the partys chances at re-election.

Mr Camenzuli was immediately removed from a group chat for state executive members and replaced by Cristina Talacko, convenor of the Liberal environmental group Coalition for Conservation.
When will the election be called? With the possible dates for a regular federal poll narrowed to two weekends in May, its the question on the minds of everyone holding a passing interest in politics.

Setting the date of the election is entirely within the power of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, with a few constitutional limitations.

At this point, the only possible dates to hold the election are May 14 and May 21  unless the PM wants to split the Senate and House of Representatives elections and send Australians to the polls twice in a year (highly unlikely).

So the question is when he will make the trip to see the Governor-General and actually call it on.
The words of Mutthi Mutthi woman Alice Kelly still ring in the ears of her descendants. There is power in the pen, she would say. Youve got to learn the white mans way to fight for your people.

For Jana Stewart, one of Kellys great-grandchildren, that advice meant attaining quality education and occupying spaces that Aboriginal people have not traditionally occupied.

Jana Stewart hopes the Labor Party can rally behind her and end the infighting. Credit:Scott McNaughton

On Wednesday she made history by becoming Labors first Victorian Aboriginal senator, confirmed at a joint sitting of the State Parliament at 6pm.

The Mutthi Mutthi Wamba Wamba woman will now occupy a space in the Federal Parliament, which has had only 10 Aboriginal parliamentarians in 121 years.
The women, from pro-life group Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, claim they managed to convince the visibly shaken driver to give them one of the boxes so they could give the fetuses a proper funeral. A Catholic priest then helped them bury 110 of the fetuses in an undisclosed cemetery, they told reporters, while five of them, which they believed were near full gestation, were kept in Handys apartment until March 30, when the pairs lawyers called police to collect them after they had tried unsuccessfully to find a private pathologist to examine them. The activists claim the abortions were in breach of federal laws prohibiting certain termination methods from being used after 12 weeks. However, critics reject this and point to the incident as the latest example of the lengths that pro-lifers will go to in a bid to thwart clinics from giving women the pregnancy services they seek. The Washington medical examiners office has, so far, declined to perform any autopsies on the fetuses. Ashan Benedict, the Metropolitan Police Departments executive assistant chief of police, told reporters last week that the fetuses appeared to have been aborted in accordance with DC law. On Wednesday police said the case remains under active investigation.

Loading But some fear that such events could become more frequent in coming months, as more states  and potentially the US Supreme Court  move to restrict access to abortion services across America. Anti-abortion individuals and groups are increasingly resorting to extreme and illegal antics to attempt to intimidate clinic workers and patients, and stop them from seeking or providing abortion care, said a spokesperson from Surgi-Clinic, who also rejected the activists claims that its procedures did not comply with federal and state laws. Attacks like this one are fuelled by the steady rise in anti-abortion legislation across the country. It is more imperative than ever that abortion providers have the security they need to deliver essential health care to our communities. The conservative-dominated Supreme Court will soon rule on a case that could effectively wind back Roe Vs Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that grants women in America the constitutional right to an abortion.

Loading The courts decision centres on a Mississippi law that currently bans abortions after 15 weeks. If the ban is upheld, or if Roe v Wade is overturned altogether, it is expected that abortion could quickly become illegal in as much as half the country. But even with months to go before the courts mid-year decision, research suggests that 2022 is already on track to become the worst year for abortion rights in the US. According to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks reproductive health policy, at least 529 abortion restrictions had been introduced in bills across 41 states by the end of last month. Five states  Arizona, Idaho, Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming  have gone even further by enacting their restrictions. On Monday, another Republican-led state was added to the list, when Oklahoma approved a bill that would make performing an abortion a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison, or a maximum fine of $US100,000 ($132,000) or both.

The bill passed without any debate in the House of Representatives, making exceptions only for an abortion performed to save the life of the mother, but not in cases of rape or incest. Multiple other states have also passed bills in recent weeks banning abortions at 15 weeks of pregnancy, including Florida, Kentucky and Arizona. Washington, DC, on the other hand, is one of the few places that do not have specific laws prohibiting abortion after a certain point in pregnancy, making facilities such as the Washington Surgi-Clinic a major target of protests. Handy, along with eight other pro-lifers, was last week indicted for illegally blocking access to a Washington abortion clinic in October 2020. Meanwhile, her latest bout of activism has been rejected by Curtis Bay Medical Waste Service, which denied any of its employees would have handed over a box of fetuses, saying that any allegations made otherwise are false. Nonetheless, the pair remained defiant.
Latest News 24 lenders raise interest rates Read the full list here

Clients seek advice on interest rate rise City brokers field many enquiries

In November, NextGen rolled out ApplyOnline for variations for Adelaide Bank, to streamline the banks approach to lifelong loan transactions, empowering brokers to take ownership of customers changing needs throughout the duration of a loan.

Read more: Adelaide Bank focuses on ease of use for brokers

But just how does the tech solution empower brokers?

Making the switch from a legacy variations processing system to within ApplyOnline provides brokers with a variations process thats efficient, fast, and compliant.

Our former variations process was manual and paper-based, and brokers had to follow different protocols and processes depending on the type of loan they were originating, which made it very inefficient all round, said Darren Kasehagen, general manager of third-party banking at Bendigo and Adelaide Bank.

ApplyOnline for variations has the same features and efficiencies for existing loans as for new loan applications, but with the added benefit that all application data is already pre-populated.

By enabling brokers to manage variations for customers electronically through ApplyOnline, both the original lender and the broker are at a greater advantage when it comes to retaining the loan.

ApplyOnline for variations replicates the acclaimed ApplyOnline service for new loans and has made Adelaide Bank a one-stop shop for brokers, Kasehagen said.

Through this addition, Adelaide Bank is providing consistency of service to its brokers and customers.

Theres no point of differentiation when you deal with a lender that has embraced ApplyOnline for variations, said Mike Ponsonby, NextGens head of customer accounts. Its the same experience as with a new digital application. Thats what all brokers want. They want consistency of process, reliability, and efficiency in one digital experience. They leverage existing information that theyre already holding. They dont start with a blank page. So its a far quicker and easier process. Its also tailored to the type of variation. For example, if its a non-credit critical variation, they dont need to ask for all the information again.

Along with this enhancement, Adelaide Bank has also implemented the ApplyOnline Document, which enables brokers to upload and verify a borrowers identification documents digitally.

Now we offer a fully digital verification ID service for our brokers, Kasehagen said. This removes a massive pain point, because prior to that we had been asking them to manually upload that information.

Adelaide Bank is proactively forging a seamless experience for brokers, whether it be for onboarding new customers or helping them service existing ones, Ponsonby said. Their innovative approach to utilising technology is working to create better outcomes for borrowers and make lending easy.
Doceree, the physician-only platform for programmatic messaging, on Wednesday announced the completion of the $11 million Series A round led by Eight Roads Ventures, a global investment firm backed by Fidelity. F-Prime Capital and Alkemi Growth Capital also participated in the round.

Doceree will use the funds to scale its global operations, expand partnerships, augment its product portfolio and advance the platforms measurement and behavior lift capabilities to bring greater transparency to results. The will also help it embolden healthcare professional (HCP) communications for pharma and life sciences brands, agencies and health information technology platforms.

It is critical for industry players like pharma and HCP-only platforms to understand and react to the digital touchpoints and behaviors of HCPs for delivering messages they resonate with, says Harshit Jain, M.D., Founder & Global CEO, Doceree.

Docerees proprietary identity-resolution technology, ESPYIAN, enable messaging and targeting of HCPs on endemic (sites physicians visit for knowledge, professional enhancement or to connect with their peer group) and point-of-care (platforms where physicians tend to their patients) platforms. The platform enhances engagement between pharma and their target audience through its global publisher network in a fast-evolving digital pharma marketing ecosystem.

Founded in 2019 by Harshit Jain, a former physician who transitioned into the healthcare marketing space, Doceree empowers pharma brands and media agencies with solutions that seamlessly reach HCPs on professional HCP networks and within their digital workflow to achieve better patient health outcomes.

Doceree is transforming the way digital interactions between pharmaceutical brands and prescribers are facilitated, says Ashish Venkataramani, Partner, Eight Roads Ventures. Pharma marketers navigate significant complexity across point-of-care systems and health information systems. Docerees technology platform seeks to disrupt the fragmented value chain for digital messaging to physicians, and will be at the forefront of this promising sector.

On the back of massive interest of pharma brands and publishers towards Docerees custom-built product offerings within the programmatic pharma marketing space, the company expanded to key international locations, such as emerging markets in the UK & Europe, within two years of the platforms launch in the US. Doceree is working with eight of the top 10 global pharma brands and the company currently engages more than 1 million HCPs across the globe.

For pharma and publishers, having access to data-driven, actionable insights to strategize and implement communication initiatives is critical to reaching HCPs, says Rahul Gupta, Board Member, Doceree.
The government has deferred the merger of state-run telecom firms BSNL and MTNL due to financial reasons, Parliament was informed on Wednesday.

Minister of State for Communications Devusinh Chauhan in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha said that a proposal for the merger of Bharat Broadband Network Limited (BBNL) and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) is under examination.

"Government has approved the revival plan of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) on October 23, 2019, which inter-alia includes in-principle approval for the merger of MTNL and BSNL. Due to financial reasons including high debt of MTNL, the merger of MTNL with BSNL is deferred," Chauhan said.

BSNL Chairman and managing director PK Purwar, who also heads MTNL, has submitted before a Parliamentary panel that the Department of Telecom should consider carving out of over Rs 26,500 crore debt of MTNL and its assets under a special purpose vehicle.

He suggested that thereafter operations of MTNL should be merged with BSNL.

MTNL was earlier expected to turn profitable by 2020-21 and BSNL by 2023-24 after both PSUs were jointly given a relief package of around Rs 70,000 crore in 2019.

"With Rs 26,000 crore debt, even if God comes to earth and tries to address its problems, the company cannot be revived. It is a fact of life; we have to accept it," MTNL CMD told the panel.

(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.)
Hindustan Aeronautics (HAL) announced on Wednesday the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Aerospace Industries (IAI) to convert civil passenger aircraft to multi mission tanker transport (MMTT) aircraft in India.

For the past decade-and-a-half, the (IAF) has been trying to buy six MMTT aircraft to supplement its eight obsolescent Russian Illyushin-78 refuellers. So dire is the IAFs shortfall of refuellers that, to fly in its new Rafale fighters from France, it had to ask Paris for Airbus refullers to top up the Rafales fuel tanks over the Mediterranean Sea.

In two abortive procurement attempts in the past 15 years, the IAF has floated tenders to Ilyushin and Airbus. If a tender is floated afresh, there will be a third vendor in the fray  The Boeing Company, which has developed the KC-46 Pegasus tanker aircraft for the US Air Force.

The reason for the IAFs withdrawal of both tenders was a conflict between procurement cost and life cycle cost. Russias IL-78 tanker is cheaper; but the Spanish Airbus 330-200 tanker worked out cheaper in terms of life cycle costs  considering not just the acquisition cost, but also the cost of operation, maintenance and spares over a 30-year service life.

With leasing of defence equipment now permitted under the Defence Acquisition Procedure of 2020, the IAF could also lease, rather than buy refuellers.

The last option now available  converting civil airliners to refuelling tankers  mirrors the IAFs Phalcon model  in which it approaches to convert a Russian IL-76 into a Phalcon radar-fitted AWACS.

Tankers are valuable force multipliers for air forces such as Indias, which operate fighters for long-distance missions. Mid-air refuelling almost doubles the operating range of fighters. Refuelling them mid-mission saves a trip back to base, and a landing and take-off.

Under the new MoU, HAL will convert pre-owned civil passenger aircraft into air refuelling aircraft with cargo and transport capabilities. The move, will provide Indias defence ecosystem with new capabilities and cost effective solutions in the market, said the IAF.

The MoU will facilitate HAL and IAIs decades long expertise in developing, manufacturing and producing leading defence platforms. The scope of the MoU also covers passenger to freighter aircraft conversion, along with MMTT conversions.

We are glad to join hands with our long-standing partner, IAI, in this venture of MMTT conversion business which is one of the strategic diversification avenues identified by HAL, said HAL chief, R Madhavan.

IAI has experience in modified aircraft for the IAF. In the early 2000s, IAI fitted the Phalcon radar into three IAF IL-76 aircraft, converting them into Airborne Warning and Control Systems (AWACS).

Boaz Levy, president and CEO of IAI, said: We are proud to come together with our counterparts to bring our best value MMTT solution in India, while utilising local resources to manufacture and market the platform. By collaborating with HAL and bringing conversion directly to India, we are supporting the Make in India campaign.

With the Russian options considered outdated, the IAF will probably have to choose between the Airbus and Boeing options. The Airbus 330 MRTT carries more fuel than the KC-46A Pegasus  111 tonnes, as against 96 tonnes  but which remains in many respects a civilian airliner that retains commercial airline-style seating inside for 291 passengers.

Boeing marketing executives argue: The KC-46A is not just a civil airliner that can carry extra fuel. It has been developed as a military aircraft, to the demanding specifications of the USAF.

The KC-46A Pegasus has modular, military style, palletised seating that can be quickly bolted on for up to 160 passengers. Alternatively, it can carry 54 stretchers with patients.

The KC-46As tanker-specific avionics include state-of-the-art displays developed for the 787 Dreamliner. The USAF has insisted on the boom operator  who operates the boom that pumps fuel at 1,200 gallons per minute into the aircraft being refuelled  having a three-dimensional view from seven cameras that look to the rear. The pilots too can view the entire operation, which allows them to position their tanker aircraft suitably.

Airbus, however, points out that its A330-200 has won practically every MRTT contest in the world. It has logged orders from the air forces of Australia, the UK, France, Saudi Arabia, The Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, and the UAE.

However, a senior Boeing executive points out: Those orders were placed when the KC-46A hadnt entered service. Now, it provides India an additional option -- one that consumes 30 per cent less fuel, is 20 per cent cheaper to operate, and that is derived from an aircraft with a despatch reliability rate of 99.7 per cent.
IDFC Ltd is likely to announce the sale of its mutual fund business on Wednesday evening after the Boards approval, sources aware of the development said.

According to media reports, a consortium led by Bandhan Financial Holdings is leading the race to acquire IDFC AMC.

Singapores sovereign wealth fund GIC, private equity player ChrysCapital are some of the partners of the consortium. Bandhan Financial is also the holding company of Kolkata-based private sector lender Bandhan Bank. The deal will allow the Bandhan group to enter Indias growing mutual fund business which currently manages Rs 38 trillion of assets.

IDFC Limited and IDFC Financial Holding Company Limited in its board meeting in September 2021 approved the divestment of its mutual fund (MF) business.

IDFC MF with assets under management (AUM) of over Rs 1.21 trillion as in the Jan-March quarter is one of the top ten players in the MF industry.

IDFC announced the sale of its MF business after the company faced shareholders' ire on delay in divestments and mergers.

In the last financial year, the fund house saw its profit after tax at Rs 144 crore compared to Rs 79.4 crore in FY20. Typically, deals in MFs take place between 5-7 per cent of the AUM. In many cases, valuations can increase if the fund house has a good amount of equity assets.

"The investors presentation of IDFC Limited shows that total income of IDFC AMC stood at Rs 108.4 crore for Q3FY22 as against Rs 100.7 crore in Q3FY21, a growth of 7.6 per cent. While profit after tax surged by 12.8 per cent to Rs 46.1 crore in the third quarter of last fiscal compared to Rs 40.8 crore in Q3FY21."
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) announced that the Department of Labour (KDOL) has selected the company to build a modern, secure, web-based system for the states programme, transforming a legacy mainframe platform from the 1970s into a cloud-based system that improves the delivery of services to residents.

The system will provide Kansans with online self-service functions, including the ability to file new claims, certify weekly claims, check the status of benefit payments, and file appeals. The new system will also enable employers to register their businesses online, make payments and appeals online, and file real time wage reports, among other features.

KDOL is taking a major step forward to modernize the system, said Kansas Governor Laura Kelly. Our efforts for the past year have been focused on selecting a technology partner to move the agency into the 21st century. With this upgrade, KDOL will be able to get back into alignment with its mission of serving unemployed Kansans.

Once launched, the system will also help the Kansas Department of Labour provide better services by enabling electronic correspondence on a single digital platform, reducing costs for Kansas taxpayers, and ensuring program integrity by helping to combat fraud.

We have made a significant amount of progress in a short amount of time and todays announcement is just the latest example of this work, said Amber Shultz, secretary, Kansas Department of Labor. We are committed to partnering with the right people to reflect the agencys commitment to customer service and collaborative innovation.

For more than two decades, has partnered with states across the US to transform unemployment insurance systems, including Connecticut, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, and Wyoming, as well as several cities.

Unemployment Insurance is a critical safety net for thousands of Kansas residents every year. They deserve a secure, world-class system that enables them to file claims and receive payments seamlessly, said Robert Kane, chief commercial officer, US Public Services, TCS North America. We look forward to working alongside the dedicated Kansas Department of Labor modernization team to transform the way they serve Kansas citizens and employers.

As a result of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic and ensuing job losses, government agencies handled unprecedented numbers of unemployment insurance claims. TCS systems successfully processed exponential increases in unemployment claims at the onset of the pandemic, including the integration of Pandemic Unemployment Assistance  a lifeline for self-employed individuals, independent contractors, and other gig workers. Volunteers from TCS also rose to the occasion, partnering with the New York State Department of Labour to troubleshoot and help process thousands of pending unemployment insurance applications in a matter of days, said the company in a media release.
In a first, billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd has set up electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure at its campus to allow employees to charge their EVs free of cost.

The company's HR on Wednesday sent mailers to employees informing about the Jio-bp pulse EV charging zone at its Navi campus, Reliance Corporate Park (RCP).

"Charge your electric vehicle at RCP @ no cost!" the mailer said detailing the process of accessing the facility.

The charging station set up by Jio-bp - the company's fuel retailing joint venture with British energy giant bp - is in line with the firm's promise to achieve net carbon neutrality.

Reliance is likely to create such infrastructure at other campuses too.

According to the email by HR, the Jio bp pulse facility will be available to Reliance employees to charge their free of cost.

The Jio bp pulse zone at Reliance Corporate Park presently includes six chargers of different configurations to cater to both electric two-wheelers and four-wheelers.

Reliance employees need to register through the Jio bp pulse Charge mobile app and scan the QR code on the charging unit to start the EV charging session, it said.

Reliance BP Mobility Limited, operating under the brand name Jio-bp, is working with multiple demand aggregators, OEMs and technology partners with a vision of being the leading EV charging infrastructure player in India.

During 2021, Jio-bp constructed and launched one of the country's largest EV charging hubs in Dwarka, Delhi with BluSmart as its primary customer.

(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.)
Electric vehicle maker Simple Energy has inked an initial pact with the US-based battery technology firm C4V (Charge CCCV) for cell manufacturing in India, the company said on Wednesday.

The Bengaluru-based energy startup had launched its first e-scooter Simple One mid-August last year. It has, however, not yet commenced the deliveries of its maiden offering.

Lithium-ion battery cells are the central unit of any electric vehicle (EV).

Simple Energy is leading the domestic EV industry by vertically integrating the entire value chain. As part of this, the company has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with C4V for setting up a Lithium-ion cell manufacturing ecosystem in India, it said.

In addition to the build-in India initiative, this strategic partnership utilizes cells with industry-leading safety, higher energy density than LFP (Lithium Ferro Phosphate) batteries, faster charging, and longer life cycle based on C4V's patented technology, Simple Energy said.

C4V is currently in the final stages of commissioning its iM3NY Gigafactory in upstate New York and is looking to commence production in the next few months, as per the release.

"By partnering with C4V, we will consolidate cell supply, which is a vital component for us. This strategy also makes us more self-reliant and reduces our dependency on imports," said Shreshth Mishra, Co-Founder, Simple Energy.

C4V continues its efforts to stabilize a comprehensive domestic supply chain in India, bringing along the most advanced Lithium-ion battery technology which powers Simple Energy's upcoming two-wheeler and four-wheeler, it said.

"C4V is looking forward to this strategic collaboration, thereby supporting the development of the EV industry in India," Kuldeep Gupta, Vice President (Strategic Partnership), C4V said.

Oil prices are skyrocketing and the heat is already being felt in the market, he said, adding, "Empowering local manufacturing will not only reduce the burden of import duties but also ensure the timely supply of quality batteries in the EV space boosting the confidence of Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in the electric mobility market.

(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 Tamil Nadu Startup and Innovation Mission (Tansim) is planning to support the creation of at least 10,000 startups in the state by 2026, Tansim Chief Executive Officer Sivarajah Ramanathan said.

Tansim is the nodal agency for in Tamil Nadu and is working on a new start-up policy to boost the new investor eco-system in the state. We formed Tansim a year ago. Our vision is to create 10,000 new in the next four years. This is our mid-term vision, said Ramanathan. The agency will be focussing on the existing 80 incubation centres in Tamil Nadu and taking steps to connecting them with markets and investors. It will also create a startup database as well as form a mentor network.This is to look into how many are there in each district, funding details of them and the sectors in which they are part of.

We will be promoting entrepreneurship networks in colleges. In addition, will ensure that more players get funding outside cities like Chennai and Coimbatore, he added. In the recently concluded Budget, Finance Minister Palanivel Thiaga Rajan had announced the plan to set up regional Startup Hubs in Erode, Madurai and Tirunelveli to ensure the development of startup eco-system across the state.

In addition to this, a corpus of Rs 30 crore was announced for Tansim to boost startups by SC and ST entrepreneurs. The minister also allotted Rs 50 crore to the Emerging Sector Seed Fund to make equity investments in Tamil Nadu-based startups. The state also has plans to set up a start-up hub in Chennai for Rs 75 crore through Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation (TIDCO).

We want to be among the top three states in terms of start-up ecosystem  through supporting ideas, investments, raising funds and developing an entrepreneurial mindset, Ramanathan added. With the idea of having a distributed growth, the state government is giving thrust on agricultural technology start-ups and climate focused players in the long run. Through the current plan Tansim expects at least around 5-10 per cent to get funding in the coming days, which will also boost the job scenario in the state.
is actively considering tapping into some of the export markets beyond South Asia, for its range of (EVs) as it sees an opportunity of selling affordable EVs in markets outside India.

The export plans will coincide with the commercial launch of the Curvve  an electric SUV concept that broke cover on Wednesday, in two years from now, Shailesh Chandra, MD, PVs and Electric Mobility, told Business Standard.

We are actively thinking of the international markets and we would like to go with a portfolio of products. We have identified a few markets and in a couple of years, we should commence the same, said Chandra.

Globally, EVs are priced above $25,000 but electric models priced below that are very disruptive. This is the sweet-spot the company aims to target, he added.

To begin with, it would address the right-hand markets and then extend it further to other markets. However, taking care of the backlog of orders for its EVs in the domestic market, will top the companys priority, said Chandra. On an average it has been selling close1600 units a month and has an order backlog of four to five months.

The CURVV is part of the companys product strategy as part of which it plans to offer technologically superior EVs in terms of design, architecture and range. The company has adopted a three-step approach to introduce progressively advanced electric products to the customers, said Chandra.

In generation 1 models, we had promised and delivered a certified range in excess of 250kms. In generation 2 products, we are looking at a driving range of 400-500kms with fast charging option," Chandra added.

With this SUV concept, Tata Motors will be taking the next big leap to make more aspirational.

The upcoming model will be targeted at the fast-paced life of urban dwellers who appreciate and expect shorter charge time, interactive and intuitive interfaces, quicker response, and feature comfort not only in their everyday lives but also from their cars, Tata Motors said in a statement.

Chandra noted that the SUV segment is rapidly splitting up into various sub-segments with a clear demand for differentiated products.

The Tata group flagship saw its EV sales for the year that ended in March 31, jump 353 per cent year-on-year to 19,106 units.

But for the semiconductor shortage, the company would have sold more. We will continue to monitor the evolving situation closely and are refining our agile, multi-pronged approach to continue to fulfil customer orders," said Chandra.

Backed by a billion-dollar funding from TPG Capital and a new range of models, Tata Motors has been making rapid strides in the personal EV segment. At the company's Annual General Meeting in 2021, N Chandrasekaran had shared the company's target of launching 10 EV models over the next five years.
AirAsia on Wednesday said it is resuming flights connecting India with and from this month.

After two years of coronavirus-induced suspension, India resumed regular international flights on March 27.

In a press release, Malaysian carrier AirAsia said flights will gradually resume on six routes between India and .

While the flights on Bengaluru-Kuala Lumpur and Chennai-Kuala Lumpur routes began on April 1, the flight on the Tiruchirapalli-Kuala Lumpur route began on April 5, it mentioned.

The flights on Kochi-Kuala Lumpur, Kolkata-Kuala Lumpur and Hyderabad-Kuala Lumpur routes will commence from April 18, April 23 and May 1, respectively, it noted.

The Malaysian carrier said flights on five India- routes will begin in May.

The flights on Bengaluru-Bangkok, Chennai-Bangkok, Kolkata-Bangkok, Kochi-Bangkok and Jaipur Bangkok will commence on May 4, May 4, May 2, May 1 and May 1, respectively, it mentioned.

AirAsia is different from AirAsia India airline, which is based out of India and owned by the Tata group.

(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.)
experts on Wednesday sought to downplay apprehensions centred around XE, a new variant deemed more transmissible, and said despite being around since January, the strain has not propelled a surge in cases like Omicron, but advised strict adherence to COVID-19-appropriate behaviour.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Wednesday said a woman who had arrived here from South Africa in February and tested positive for COVID-19 was found infected with the XE variant, which was first detected in the UK. This was the first XE case in Mumbai. However, official sources in New Delhi clarified, "Present evidence do not yet indicate that it is a case of XE variant." According to the Maharashtra department, the XE variant was found in the 50-year-old woman, a South African national, who came here on February 10 and was tested on February 27 for COVID-19 with her test returning a positive result. Her lab sample was referred to Kasturba Hospital Central laboratory for genome sequencing.

It has been found to be a new XE variant in initial sequencing. Though GISAID also confirmed it, INSACOG (Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium) has decided to go for another round of genomic sequencing at a national laboratory for sure confirmation of XE variant, the department said. The woman was asymptomatic and found to be RT-PCR negative on repeat testing, the department added.

Rakesh Mishra, Director of the Tata Institute of Genetics and Society, Bengaluru, said the XE variant is a recombinant of BA.1 and BA.2, the sub-lineages of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19.

In addition to those, it has three other mutations which were not there in Omicron or BA.1 or BA.2.

That is why it is called XE. It will now be a variant, he told PTI.

Senior epidemiologist Dr Raman Gangakhedekar, former head scientist of the Epidemiology and Communicable Diseases Division at the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), said when a recombinant occurs, it tends to last for a lesser time. Recombinant events are chance events because two different types of viruses are in the body and they tend to develop a recombinant new virus, Gangakhedekar said. He said the virus fitness does not increase by a recombinant event. It is unlikely to be stable as recombinants are rare events.

The state health department said the XE variant is a combination of BA.1 and BA.2 strains of Omicron and found to be responsible for enhanced viral transmission.

Asked about its severity and transmissibility, Mishra said as far as the infectivity data is concerned, XE is 10 per cent more infectious than Omicron. This is based on the UK data, he said. There is no information whether the clinical symptoms are worse, or whether its immune escape is more. Data is not available for the same," Mishra noted. The general perception is that this was the known (variant) since the middle of January and now we are two-and-a-half months past that. Not many cases of this variant are seen. The UK has some 600 cases. This means that if it was going to be dangerous, more infectious, by now we would have seen it everywhere, Mishra said. The director of the Tata Institute of Genetics and Society said Omicron appeared in November (in South Africa) and it was all over the world in 4 to 5 weeks and replaced Delta (which caused the second wave in April-May last year), but XE has not done that. I don't think XE is of any concern to us. It doesn't look like we have to worry about it. But we have to exercise caution and follow COVID-19 protocols, Mishra said. Gangakhedekar said he doubted that it is transmissible like BA.2. Frequent changes in genomic structure are part of the natural life course of viruses and there is no need to worry but everyone should opt for appropriate precaution. There is no strong epidemiological evidence that the transmissibility is very high because had that been the cases, we would have seen a surge in the cases. But this must be tracked, the senior epidemiologist said. Anurag Agrawal, Dean, Biosciences and Health Research at the Ashoka University, said there is no critical global signal of concern as of now with regards to XE. The World Health Organisation on April 2 said XE appears to be more transmissible than previous strains of the coronavirus, and stressed that COVID-19 remains a public health emergency of international concern and warning that it is too early to reduce the quality of surveillance. The WHO said in its latest update that the XE recombinant (BA.1-BA.2) was first detected in the UK on January 19 and more than 600 sequences have been reported and confirmed since then. Early-day estimates indicate a community growth rate advantage of 10 per cent as compared to BA.2. However, this finding requires further confirmation, it said.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The ED has summoned AMMK leader T T V Dhinakaran this week for questioning in a linked to alleged bribing of officials to get the AIADMK's 'two leaves' symbol for the VK Sasikala faction, officials said on Wednesday.

The move comes after the agency recently arrested jailed 'conman' and another accused in this case, Sukesh Chandrashekhar.

Both Dhinakaran and Chandrashekhar were arrested by the Delhi Police crime branch in 2017.

Officials said they have recorded the statement of Chandrashekhar in this case early this month and now they want to question Dhinakaran to take the probe forward.

The 58-year-old AMMK general secretary has been asked to depose before the agency here on April 8, they said.

His statement will be recorded under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) once he deposes.

Chandrashekar was arrested in April 2017 from a five star hotel by the Delhi Police for allegedly taking money from Dhinakaran to bribe EC officials to get the AIADMK's 'two leaves' symbol for the VK Sasikala faction in a by-election to the R K Nagar assembly seat in Tamil Nadu.

Dhinakaran, who was charge sheeted by the police, was also arrested by the Delhi Police after four days of questioning for allegedly attempting to bribe EC officials for the symbol.

The bypoll was necessitated by the death of the then Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa, who represented the assembly seat.

The EC had frozen the AIADMK's symbol after the two factions -- one led by Dhinakaran's aunt Sasikala and the other by former chief minister O Panneerselvam -- staked a claim to it.

Dhinakaran's close aide Mallikarjuna was also arrested for allegedly facilitating a Rs 50 crore deal between him and Chandrashekar.

Dhinakaran was the treasurer of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and was expelled from the party in August 2017 along with Jayalalithaa's confidante Sasikala.

He later launched his political party called the Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam (AMMK).

(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.)
Union Home Minister is expected to be on a two-day visit to on April 16 and April 17, a BJP leader said on Wednesday.

This will be Shah's first-ever visit to the state since the disappointing performance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the last year's Assembly polls.

A BJP source told IANS that on April 16, the Home Minister would visit north Bengal, and next day, attend several government and party programmes in state capital Kolkata.

"He will hold meetings with all the elected party MPs and MLAs from the state, as well as the members of the newly formed state committee of the party. He is expected to seek details on the internal evaluations of the state committee on the election disaster," he said.

Confirming this, BJP president Sukanta Majumdar said Shah will attend the party's organisational meetings, besides attending government programmes.

"The state committee will also hand over an organisational report to the Home Minister," Majumdar said.

Meanwhile, state BJP sources said there is also a possibility of Shah holding meeting with the rebel sections in the party's state unit, and suggest solutions to bring an end to the infighting.

--IANS

scr/pgh

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
India has delivered two fuel consignments to Sri Lanka in the last 24 hours, India's high commission on the crisis-hit island nation said on Wednesday. India supplied 36,000 tonnes of petrol and 40,000 tonnes of diesel, the high commission said, taking total Indian fuel supplies to Sri Lanka to 270,000 tonnes. The country of 20 million people is suffering its worst in decades, short supply of fuel resulting in hours-long power cuts every day. Reuters





Petrol, diesel prices hiked again; CNG prices also see steep rise

Petrol and diesel prices on Wednesday were hiked again by 80 paise a litre each, taking the total increase in rates in the last 16 days to Rs 10 per litre or over 10 per cent. Petrol in Delhi will now cost Rs 105.41 per litre, as against Rs 104.61 previously, while diesel rates have gone up from Rs 95.87 per litre to Rs 96.67, according to a price notification of state-run fuel retailers. CNG prices in Delhi, Mumbai and Gujarat on Wednesday also saw steep hikes after the government raised input natural gas prices to record levels. PTI

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India, Aus should look at $100 bn bilateral trade by 2030: Piyush Goyal

Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Wednesday said India and Australia should look at boosting the bilateral trade to $100 billion by 2030 from the current level of around $27.5 billion. Goyal, who is in Australia on a three-day visit, said that both the countries are already at an advanced stage of entering into an agreement for greater collaboration in the education sector. On April 2, India and Australia signed the Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement under which both the countries are providing duty free access to a huge number of goods and relaxing norms to promote trade in services. PTI

Sebi comes out with new rules for KYC registration agencies

Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) on Wednesday issued fresh guidelines for KYC registration agencies, whereby such agencies will have to independently validate KYC records of all clients from July 1. The move comes after Sebi, in January, notified new norms to make KRAs responsible for carrying out independent validation of the KYC records uploaded onto their system by registered intermediaries. PTI
Prime Minister on Wednesday praised bipartisanship in matters of foreign policy.

In a series of tweets, Modi said, "Over the last few days, the Parliament has witnessed a healthy discussion on the situation in Ukraine and India's efforts to bring back our citizens through Operation Ganga. I am grateful to all MP colleagues who enriched this discussion with their views."

"The rich level of debate and the constructive points illustrate how there is bipartisanship when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Such bipartisanship augurs well for India at the world stage," he said.

"It is our collective duty to care for the safety and well-being of our fellow citizens and the government of India will leave no stone unturned to ensure our people do not face any troubles in adverse situations," he added.

--IANS

ssb/arm

(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.)
Shanghai, China's largest city with over 26 million has started a new round of mass testing after the metropolis added 17,007 new COVID-19 infections, setting a daily record for the fifth consecutive day as officials termed the situation extremely grim with the case numbers in the financial hub crossing 94,000 since March 1.

Shanghai's single-day infection numbers also beat China's previous all-time high of 13,436 cases recorded in Wuhan on February 12, 2020, where the outbreak first emerged.

The residents of the city were kept under tight lockdown for the second week, after mass testing found more than 94,000 infections since March 1, Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported on Wednesday.

The city reported 311 positive and 16,766 asymptomatic cases on Tuesday as the city held mass testing of antigen on Sunday followed by nucleic acid tests on Monday for all its population in pursuance of its dynamic zero-case policy, which is coming under severe strain as the cases are spiralling out of control in many cities.

Shanghai's municipal government has started a round of mass testing on Wednesday morning to spot infections and the transmission chain after studying the results of a three-day mass testing exercise from Sunday to Tuesday, the Post report said.

The mass testing exercise, which has never been seen elsewhere in the world, was aimed to spot most of the infections and quarantine them in a quick manner to achieve a dynamic zero-COVID-19 goal, the report said.

China has rushed thousands of personnel from various medical services of the military to in a similar move to contain the infections in Wuhan, where COVID-19 first emerged in December 2019.

The Director of Shanghai's working group on epidemic control, Gu Honghui, was quoted by the state media as saying that the outbreak in the city was still running at a high level."



"The situation is extremely grim," Gu said.

Wu Qianyu, an official from health authorities, said at Tuesday's press briefing that "currently, Shanghai's epidemic prevention and control is at the most difficult and most critical stage."



"We must adhere to the general policy of dynamic clearance without hesitation, without wavering," state-run Global Times quoted him as saying.

Meanwhile, the National Health Commission said on Wednesday that the Chinese mainland reported 1,383 new locally-transmitted COVID-19 cases on Tuesday.

Of the local confirmed cases reported on Tuesday, 973 were in Jilin, 311 in Shanghai, and 17 in Zhejiang.

Tuesday also saw 19,199 new asymptomatic cases on the Chinese mainland, the commission said.

The number of COVID-19 patients currently undergoing treatment stood at 24,565, including 75 in critical conditions, the report said.

As per the official figures, 4,638 people have died of COVID-19 in China so far since the virus emerged in Wuhan.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Indias government is in talks with airlines to remove a cap on passenger fares. The Centre is unlikely to reduce its shareholding in Life Insurance Corporation for at least two years after the company releases its IPO. More on those stories in our top headlines.



Govt, airlines start discussions to remove cap on passenger fares



The government has started discussions with airlines about the removal of price bands for passenger fares. The talks have started after some airlines renewed their demand to remove the pricing caps, claiming the regulation is a hurdle to the full-fledged recovery in domestic air traffic. Read more

Centre unlikely to dilute stake in LIC for at least 2 years after IPO



The Centre is unlikely to reduce its shareholding in Life Insurance Corporation of (LIC) for at least 2 years following the insurers listing because such a move could affect returns for investors participating in the mega initial public offering (IPO). Read more

now sets sights on free trade agreement with Gulf countries



After inking trade pacts with the UAE and Australia, is set to begin deeper engagements with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries as early as May-June to finalize a free trade agreement (FTA) with the group of nations, people aware of the matter said. Read more

Combined entity will get benefit of lower cost of funds: HDFC's Keki Mistry



Keki Mistry, vice-chairman and chief executive officer of HDFC, tells Manojit Saha the option to merge with HDFC Bank was on the drawing-board but it is making sense now owing to a variety of factors. Edited excerpts. Why did HDFC decide to give up its identity? This is not a question of giving up the identity. Read more

Ukraine Prez tells top UN body to make Russia accountable for 'war crimes'



Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy told the UN Security Council on Tuesday that "accountability must be inevitable" for Russia as he accused invading Russian troops of committing "the most terrible war crimes" since World War Two. Read more
The March 31 deadline, which was set by State Bank of India (SBI) within which banks were to transfer Rs 50,000 crore of bad loans to the National Asset Reconstruction Co (NARCL), has been missed due to delay in financial due diligence.

A total of 38 non-performing accounts  amounting to Rs 82,845 crore  were identified for transfer to NARCL, in a phased manner.

Under Phase I, about 15 accounts, totaling Rs 50,335 crore, were expected to be transferred on or before March 31, State Bank of India (SBI) said in late January.

The financial due diligence for some of the accounts took time, but now it has been completed, said a top official aware of the development.

It is a series of steps and that series of steps involves a huge number of stakeholders. has to give its approval. The government has to clear the guarantees. So, all these things take time. And, if any one of these things gets stuck, then the entire process is delayed and the acquisition of assets gets delayed, the official said.

Sources said the due diligence for the 14 accounts are getting over and banks will come up with binding offers in a month.

The process took some time. For the first time, we are doing a structure like this (NARCL-India Debt Resolution Company or IDRCL). There are lots of rules and procedures to be followed. By March 31, all the capitalisation parts had to happen. Private banks needed some approvals to come in. The capital has come in and it (NARCL) is 100 per cent capitalised in accordance with the plan.

Hopefully, we will be completing the first tranche by April end, managing director (MD) & chief executive officer (CEO) Rajkiran Rai told reporters, on the sidelines of an event on Wednesday.

Rai also said the appointment of a full-time CEO at NARCL is likely to happen soon.



Currently, PM Nair, chief general manager of SBI, is on deputation and is managing the affairs of NARCL.

Some of the loans that banks will sell to NARCL have become NPAs over eight years back. Banks have already made 100 per cent provision for these accounts. Any recovery from these accounts will boost the profits of the banks.

NARCL will acquire the identified assets on a 15:85 basis  15 per cent in cash and 85 per cent security receipts (SRs).

These SRs, issued in favour of transferring lenders, will be secured by government guarantee for its face value.

In February, SBI had said all requisite approvals for setting up of NARCL and IDRCL, including from RBI, were received and both the companies are ready to commence business.

IDRCL has been set up to resolve NPAs. NARCL will acquire and aggregate the identified NPA accounts from banks. IDRCL  under an exclusive arrangement  will handle the debt resolution process. This arrangement will be on a principal-agent basis. Final approvals and ownership for the resolution will lie with NARCL, SBI had said.
President Joe Bidens nomination of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti as ambassador to India is in peril with some Democrats as well as Republicans raising questions about his handling of a in his office.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa has blocked the nomination and said he wont lift it until he gets a full report on allegations that Garcetti ignored complaints about sexual harassment in the mayors office.

Im not holding it up because Im against him, Grassley said in an interview Tuesday. Im holding it up because sexual abuse and sexual harassment are very serious crimes. And we need to get to the bottom of it.

Meanwhile, several Democrats, including Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Mark Kelly of Arizona, are expressing reservations. Their support would be key for Garcettis confirmation in the 50-50 Senate if Republicans oppose him.

Kelly said Tuesday hes got some issues with Garcettis nomination, including but not limited to the mayors handling of claims against a top aide who was accused of sexually harassing a Los Angeles police officer on the mayors security detail.

Im looking at it, Kelly said in an interview. Ive been reviewing some information on his nomination.

When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held its hearing on the nomination in December, the issue was raised only briefly. In response to a question by Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Garcetti said he never witnessed any harassment and the matter was never brought to his attention.

An emailed statement from his office on Tuesday said that Garcetti stands by his testimony unequivocally: he absolutely did not witness nor was he informed of any of the behavior being alleged. The mayor has spent the better part of his life advocating aggressively on this issue, and had he been aware of any such behavior, he absolutely would have acted to stop it.

The post of ambassador to India has been open at a time when relations between India and the U.S. are showing strains over Russias invasion of Ukraine despite the two nations cooperating more in the Quad bloc with Australia and Japan. India is the worlds largest buyer of Russian weapons, and has sought to buy discounted Russian oil as fuel prices surge.

The White House has continued to stand by the nomination of Garcetti, 51, who served as co-chair of Bidens presidential campaign.

Naomi Seligman, former Garcetti communications director-turned-whistleblower, said in a statement Tuesday that shes grateful to senators who have taken the time to review the evidence and take our experiences seriously.

A man who has enabled and supported an abuser, laughed at the abuse and then lied about it does not belong in public office, she said.

Axios reported last week that an aide to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told other Democratic staff members that Garcetti doesnt yet have 50 votes in the party caucus and that the nomination wont be put to the full Senate anytime soon.

Garcettis nomination easily cleared the Foreign Relations Committee. The panels chair, Robert Menendez, and member Cory Booker, both New Jersey Democrats, said they have not heard from Schumer or his office. Menendez said some senators are doing their due diligence on Garcettis actions in the .

I have no concerns with it, Booker said. Theres been an independent investigation that came up with no improprieties on his part. I trust the independent investigators.

Iowa Republican Joni Ernst, who also has a hold on Garcettis nomination, said the issue isnt settled for her.

What Ive seen this far is, according to claims from whistleblowers, that he knew about this and did nothing about it, Ernst said. Thats an issue to me.
Springing a surprise on some of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Tamil Nadu-based Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences and Indian School of Mines (ISM) University, Dhanbad debuted as India's two best in the latest QS World University Rankings by Subject 2022.

The twelfth edition of the QS World University Rankings by Subject saw the new entrants Saveetha and ISM break into global top-100 for dentistry and mineral & mining engineering subjects, respectively.

Similarly, the National Institute of Pharmaceutical and Research (NIPER) Mohali made the highest jump in rankings by being placed at 44th global rank in pharmacy & pharmacology subject, up by over 100 places from the 151-200 band in the previous edition.

On the other hand, after four and a half years since inception of the country's 'Institutes of Eminence' scheme, the recognised universities gained moderate ground on the global stage in QS World University Rankings by Subject.

Led by IIT Madras which ranked 30th for petroleum engineering, four Institutes of Eminence achieved top-50 ranks even as IIT Madras became Indias highest-ranking public Institute of Eminence.

The mineral & mining engineering emerged as Indias best subject with two public Institutes of Eminence making it into the top-50 including IIT Kharagpur (37) and IIT Bombay (39). For the development studies subject, the University of Delhi was ranked at 41st place while the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) retained its top-100 ranks for Materials Science (76) and Chemistry (81) while breaking into the top-100 for physics & astronomy (91) and mechanical engineering (98).

The IIT Delhi was ranked in 14 subject tables even as it maintained its top-100 ranks in civil & structural engineering (51-100), electrical & electronic engineering (56), computer science (65), and mechanical engineering (64). In the business & management subjects, Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) Bangalore and Ahmedabad bagged top-100 ranks.

Moreover, public Institutes of Eminence remained significantly better-represented in the QS World University Rankings than private ones.

QS also found that India remained at the forefront of global environmental science research. For instance, data from QSs research partners at Elsevier, which contributes to the QS World University Rankings by Subject, indicates that in 2021 India ranked fifth in terms of its research footprint in this fieldbehind only Germany, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In this backdrop, eight Indian universities are featured in QSs Environmental Sciences 2022 ranking, with IIT Bombay breaking into the top 150 and IIT Kharagpur stable in the 151-200 band. The two new entries in this discipline are Banaras Hindu University (401-450) and Anna University (451-460).

Regionally, India is the fourth-best represented higher system for the number of entries, and it is joint-fifth for the number of top-200 entries.

Commenting on India's performance, QS Research Director, Ben Sowter, said that one of the biggest challenges faced by India is educational in terms of providing high-quality tertiary in the face of exploding demand, as recognized by 2020s National Education Policy (NEP), which set the ambitious target of a 50 per cent gross enrolment ratio by 2035.

"Therefore, it should provide some reassurance that the number of Indian programs featuring across our 51 subject rankings has increased this yearfrom 233 to 274where it had been decreasing previously. However, QS also notes that several programs at Indias privately run Institutes of Eminence have made progress this year, demonstrating the positive role that well-regulated private provision can have in enhancing Indias higher education sector," Sowter added.

Compiled by global higher education analysts QS Quacquarelli Symonds, the rankings provide an independent comparative analysis of the performance of 15,200 individual university programs taken by students at 1543 universities which can be found in 88 locations across the world, across 51 academic disciplines and five broad faculty areas. They are part of the annual QS World University Rankings portfolio, which was consulted over 147 million times in 2021, and covered 96,000 times by media and institutions.
launched its super-app named UnionNXT and transformation project SMBHAV on Wednesday, with an investment outlay of around Rs 1,000 crore for the current financial year 2022-23 (FY23). The public sector lender expects recovery from the spending in two years and aims to have 50 per cent business originating on the platform by 2025.

With this it joins the league of super-apps by large lenders such as State Bank of Indias Yono, Bank of Barodas Bob world and HDFC Banks PayZapp and ICICI Banks iMobile.

A banking super-app essentially combines a number of services, such as payments, online shopping, bill payments, recharges, investment, loans, and fund transfer, on a single platform.

Nitesh Ranjan, executive director, Union Bank said at present the focus is going to be on enhancing offering for liabilities, loans and wealth management. Mumbai-based public sector lender will expand ambit of super-app for the marketplace, that being able to use app features to make purchase of consumer products and services in the next phase. However, it did not specify a timeline for such an offering for the marketplace.

Referring to tie-ups with fintechs, Ranjan said about two dozen entities have partnered with the bank to develop various applications. The intellectual Property rights of applications remain with the bank. At present there is no plan for acquisition of fintech to augment internal capacity. While much of work has been carried out internally, The bank will rope in an advisor for digital transformation.

Rajkiran Rai G, managing director and chief executive said the aim is to build capacity to do whatever you do in a branch on a digital platform. This would impact the functioning pattern of branches, releasing staff for value added work. Over a period there could be some rationalization of branches in metropolitan areas but not in rural and semi-urban areas.

Union Bank today brought on-line five Customer-Centric Digital Lending (end to end Straight Through Processing) journeys -- Pre-approved Personal Loan, Union Cash (Pensioner loan), Shishu Mudra Loan, MSME Loan-Auto-renewal, KCC loan-Auto-renewal. It rolled out of digital applications viz. SoftPos & CRM Application.
Police in the Romanian capital say a car has crashed into the gate of the Russian Embassy, bursting into flames and killing the driver.

Police in Bucharest say the sedan rammed into the gate at about 6 a.m. Wednesday but did not enter the embassy compound.

Video of the aftermath showed the car engulfed in flames as security personnel ran through the area.

According to police, firefighters who arrived at the scene were able to put the fire out but the driver died at the scene.

There was no immediate information on a possible motive or other details.

(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 Russia-Ukraine conflict continued on Wednesday as the (EU) is proposing its fifth sanction package against .

On Tuesday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the package, which will be discussed and given the final approval by EU ambassadors on Wednesday, includes bans on coal imports worth 4 billion euros a year and on four Russian banks.

She added that the European Commission is also pushing for bans on Russian ships entering EU ports, on Russian and Belarusian road transport operators, and on imports of oil, wood and cement, seafood and alcohol from .

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday said that will be more prudent this year in exporting food, especially to countries that are pursuing a hostile policy towards Russia.

Meanwhile, Putin said that "increased production volumes make it possible to ensure food prices in Russia that are lower than on the world market."

Food self-sufficiency is Russia's competitive advantage and the country must protect its people from price fluctuations in the global food market, he said.

The EU has declared a number of Russian diplomats working in Brussels "persona non grata," and ordered them to leave host nation Belgium, Josep Borrell, the EU's high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, said Tuesday in a statement.

Russia's Permanent Representative to the EU Vladimir Chizhov was summoned to communicate this decision, according to Borrell.

In response, Russia's Permanent Mission to the EU said its website on Tuesday that the EU's "openly unfriendly -- moreover, hostile and, most importantly, completely groundless step continues the EU's policy of dismantling the partnership between Russia and EU, which recently both sides proudly called strategic."

It added that Chizhov has assured the EU side of "the inevitability of adequate reciprocal measures" by Russia.

Several EU member states, including Sweden, Italy, Romania, Portugal and Spain, also announced on Tuesday their decision to expel Russian diplomats.

The National Guard of Ukraine said Tuesday its divisions have arrived at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) site and taken control of the facility's security.

"The major task of the national guardsmen on the Chernobyl NPP site is ensuring security and defense of its nuclear facilities as well as physical protection of nuclear material," the National Guard said on Facebook.

The safety of the site and its transport infrastructure will be checked by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, it said.

--IANS

int/sks/svn/

(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.)
This blog covers software patent news and issues with a particular focus on wireless, mobile devices (smartphones, tablet computers, connected cars) as well as select antitrust matters surrounding those devices.
The (EU) has declared a number of Russian diplomats working in Brussels "persona non grata" and ordered them to leave host nation Belgium, the bloc's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said.

"Today, I decided to designate persona non grata a number of officials of the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the EU for engaging in activities contrary to their diplomatic status," Borrell said in a statement on Tuesday.

The Russian Ambassador to the EU was summoned to communicate this decision, according to Borrell, EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Xinhua news agency reported.

Several EU member states also announced on Tuesday their decision to expel Russian diplomats.

(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.)
French financial prosecutors have opened a preliminary investigation into suspected tax fraud by American management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

The national financial prosecutor's office said Wednesday the investigation was launched last week for alleged money-laundering aggravated by tax fraud. A report by the French Senate issued last month said McKinsey had not paid corporate profit taxes in the country since at least 2011. AP/PTI

Erdogan changes Turkeys electoral laws to bolster rule

Turkeys approved on Wednesday a set of changes to the countrys electoral rules that would bolster his partys prospects and consolidate the shift toward an all-powerful presidency.

The amendments reduce the threshold for a party to enter parliament but make it harder for smaller parties to win seats on their own, forcing them to run on tickets dominated by bigger rivals. The changes also close a loophole that would have allowed the countrys main pro-Kurdish party, to circumvent a potential ban. BLOOMBERG

wins copyright case over hit Shape of You

Grammy Award-winning songwriter won a UK copyright battle over his 2017 hit Shape of You on Wednesday, then slammed what he described as a culture of baseless lawsuits intended to squeeze money out of artists eager to avoid the expense of a trial.

The British pop star and his co-writers, Snow Patrol's John McDaid and producer Steven McCutcheon, had denied allegations that the song copied part of 2015's Oh Why by Sami Chokri, who performs under the name Sami Switch. AP/PTI
The White House Press Secretary said that war with is not in the interest of the people of America. It is not in our interest or in the interest of the American people for us to be in a war with Russia, she added.

The United States on Wednesday announced sanctions targeting Russian President Vladimir Putin's two adult daughters and said it was toughening penalties against Russian banks in retaliation for war crimes in .

The United Kingdom and the European Union were set to take additional steps, including a ban on new investment in Russian and an EU embargo on coal, after the recent evidence of atrocities that has emerged in the wake of the retreat by Russian forces from areas around Kyiv, including the town of Bucha.

The US acted against two of Russia's largest banks, Sberbank and Alfa Bank, prohibiting assets from going through the US financial system and barring Americans from doing business with those two institutions.

In addition to sanctions aimed at Putin's adult daughters, Mariya Putina and Katerina Tikhonova, the US is targeting Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin; the wife and children of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov; and members of Russia's Security Council, including Dmitry Medvedev, a former president and prime minister.

President Joe Biden called the latest round of sanctions devastating.

Heavy fighting and Russian air strikes continue in the encircled Ukrainian city of Mariupol, British military intelligence said. Ten high-rise buildings are on fire in Sievierodonetsk after Russian forces shelled the town.

UNGA to vote to suspend from UNHRC

The UN General Assembly will vote on Thursday on a move by the US to suspend from the Human Rights Council of the world body for its aggression and invasion of .

The office of the President of the UN General Assembly said that the Emergency Special Session of the 193-member UN body will resume today at 10 AM and action is expected on the draft resolution to suspend Russia.

Yellen Warns War Threatens Enormous Economic Repercussions

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned on Wednesday that the war in threatens to inflict enormous economic repercussions globally, just as governments impose fresh sanctions on Russia and economists cut growth forecasts.

Russias actions, including the atrocities committed against innocent Ukrainians in Bucha, are reprehensible, represent an unacceptable affront to the rules-based global order, and will have enormous economic repercussions for the world, Yellen told the House Financial Services Committee.

Flee now or risk death, Ukraine tells people in east

Ukraine's deputy PM has asked residents of the eastern regions of Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk to evacuate as fears grow that Russia will intensify attacks there. It has to be done now because later the people will be under fire and face the threat of death," he said. Thousands are desperately trying to flee Ukraines eastern Donbas region as Russia has intensified its strikes on the south and east of the country.
Brent crude futures were down 28 cents, or 0.3%, to $106.34 as of 11:06 a.m. EST (1506 GMT). U.S. crude fell 30 cents to $101.65 a barrel.

edged lower on Wednesday following a surprising rise in U.S. crude stocks and after news that large consuming nations would also release oil from reserves in conjunction with the to counter supply worries.

Member states of the Energy Agency (IEA) will release 120 million barrels from strategic reserves, including 60 million from the United States, according to two sources familiar with the matter. That U.S. 60 million commitment is part of Washington's plans to release a million barrels a day for the next six months for a rough total of 180 million barrels.

futures were down 28 cents, or 0.3%, to $106.34 as of 11:06 a.m. EST (1506 GMT). U.S. crude fell 30 cents to $101.65 a barrel.

Crude have been through weeks of volatility, with prices surging on supply concerns after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctions on Moscow by the and its allies.

Lately the market has been pulling back following reserve releases along with expectations that demand in China will slip as a resurgent pandemic has prompted lockdowns of cities including Shanghai.

U.S. crude stocks rose by 2.4 million barrels in the latest week, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said, while analysts had expected a drawdown. Output also rose, hitting 11.8 million barrels a day, most since late 2021, and output is expected to continue rising. The also released nearly 4 million barrels from its strategic reserve in the week.

"The SPR release was huge which does raise confidence that they can move a lot out of the reserve on a weekly basis," said Phil Flynn, senior analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago.

The United States and its allies on Wednesday prepared new sanctions on Moscow over civilian killings in northern Ukraine, which President Volodymyr Zelenskiy described as "war crimes." Russia denied targeting civilians.

"These concerns have no doubt fed into the oil price trending higher, with volatility expected to continue as the geopolitical situation unfolds," said Sophie Lund-Yates, lead equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.

Proposed EU sanctions, which the bloc's 27 member states must approve, would ban buying Russian coal and prevent Russian ships from entering EU ports.

The head of the EU's executive Ursula von der Leyen said the bloc was working on additional sanctions, including on oil imports.

Britain also urged G7 and NATO nations to agree a timetable to phase out oil and gas imports from Russia.

Demand worries also mounted after authorities in top oil importer China extended a lockdown in Shanghai to cover all of the financial centre's 26 million people.

(Reporting by Noah Browning and Yuka ObayashiEditing by Richard Pullin, Mark Potter and David Gregorio)

(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.)
has kissed a battered Ukrainian flag that was brought to him from the Ukrainian city of Bucha and called again for an end to the war.

Francis welcomed a half-dozen Ukrainian children up to the stage of the Vatican audience hall at the end of his Wednesday general audience and gave them each a giant chocolate Easter egg. He urged prayers for them and for all Ukrainians.

He told the crowd: These children had to flee to arrive in a safe place. This is the fruit of war.

The pontiff held up a grimy Ukrainian flag that he said had arrived the previous day at the Vatican from Bucha, where evidence has emerged of what appears to be intentional killings of civilians during the city's occupation by Russian troops.

Kissing it, he said: This flag comes from the war, from that martyred city Bucha... Let us not forget them. Let us not forget the people of Ukraine.

(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.)
Russian artillery pounded key cities in on Wednesday, as its president urged the West to act decisively in imposing new and tougher sanctions against in response to civilian killings widely condemned as war crimes.

The United States announced a new round of sanctions targeting Russian banks as well as Kremlin officials and their family members. The head of the European Commission signalled further moves - including examining energy imports - on top of sanctions unveiled by the bloc on Tuesday.

Western sanctions over Russia's invasion gained new impetus this week after the bodies of civilians shot at close range were found in the town of Bucha when it was retaken from Russian forces.

Pope Francis, without apportioning blame, described the killings as a "massacre" and Ukrainian

President Volodymyr Zelensky said the West needed to act decisively in taking "more rigid" steps against Russia, which said the Bucha killings were staged.

"I can't tolerate any indecisiveness after everything that Russian troops have done," Zelensky told Irish lawmakers by videolink.

Some Western leaders "still think that war and war crimes are not something as horrific as financial losses", he added.

But a crack in a unified EU front emerged, with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban saying his government was prepared to accede to Russia's demand to pay in roubles for Russian gas.

Moscow last week demanded payments for gas in roubles from countries it deemed "unfriendly", but Brussels said those with euro or dollar contracts should stick to them.

Germany, Europe's largest economy which relies on Russian gas for much of its energy needs, warned that while it supported ending Russian energy imports as soon as possible it could not do it overnight.

The war has killed thousands, turned entire cities into rubble and left a quarter of Ukraine's population homeless. As it heads into its seventh week, the risk that it could escalate into a broader conflict remains a concern.

Reflecting such fears, the EU executive said it had begun a stockpiling operation to boost its defences against chemical, nuclear and biological threats.

Ukraine's foreign minister said only an embargo on sales of gas and oil that provide billions of dollars to every week and cutting off all Russian banks from the global financial system could halt the war.

"It will take a gas/oil embargo and de-SWIFTing of all Russian banks to stop Putin. Difficult times require difficult decisions," Dmytro Kuleba said on Twitter, referring to the SWIFT network for bank transfers.

The new sanctions may increase economic hardship for Russians without putting much of a dent in Russia's energy revenues, according to U.S. sanctions analysts.

supplies around 40% of the EU's natural gas consumption. The EU also gets a third of its oil imports from Russia, about $700 million per day.

"We are at the point where we have to take some pain," said Benn Steil, of the Council on Foreign Relations think tank in New York. "The initial batches of sanctions were crafted as much to not hurt us in the West as much as they were to hurt Russia."

Hungary's Orban said he had spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin and asked him to announce an immediate ceasefire.

He said he had invited Putin for talks in Hungary to be held with the Ukrainian and French presidents as well as the German chancellor. Putin's response was "positive", he said, but added the Russian leader said there would be conditions.

BUCHA IMAGES STAGED, SAYS RUSSIA

Western policymakers have denounced the killings in Bucha as a war crime, and Ukrainian officials say a mass grave by a church there contain between 150 and 300 bodies. Satellite images taken weeks ago in the town, situated north of the capital Kyiv, show bodies of civilians on a street, a private U.S. company said.

Moscow, which refers to the conflict as a "special military operation" designed to "denazify" Ukraine, denied targeting civilians there or elsewhere. Russia's foreign ministry said that images of dead bodies in Bucha were staged to justify more sanctions against Moscow and derail peace talks with Kyiv.

On Wednesday, to the south, a siege of the southern port of Mariupol - under bombardment through most of the invasion that began on Feb. 24 - continued, trapping tens of thousands of residents without food, water or power.

"The humanitarian situation in the city is worsening," British military intelligence said, while Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said people trying to flee would have to use their own vehicles..

Reuters could not immediately verify the British report.

The Committee of the Red Cross said its team had successfully led a convoy of buses and private cars with more than 500 Mariupol residents to nearby Zaporizhzhia after the civilians fled on their own.

Vereshchuk said authorities would try to evacuate civilians trapped elsewhere through 11 humanitarian corridors.

Since pulling back from outside Kyiv last week, Russian forces have shifted their assault towards Ukraine's south and east.

Ukraine's general staff said the northeastern city of Kharkiv remained under attack, while authorities in the eastern region of Luhansk urged residents to leave an area it also expects to be the target of a new offensive.

Ten high-rise buildings were on fire in the eastern town of Sievierodonetsk after Russian shelling on Wednesday, the region's governor said in an online post.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As gruesome videos and photos of bodies emerge from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, Kremlin-backed media are denouncing them as an elaborate hoax a narrative that journalists in have shown to be false.

Denouncing news as fake or spreading false reports to sow confusion and undermine its adversaries are tactics that Moscow has used for years and refined with the advent of social media in places like Syria.

In detailed broadcasts to millions of viewers, correspondents and hosts of Russian state TV channels said Tuesday that some photo and video evidence of the killings were fake while showed that Ukrainians were responsible for the bloodshed.

Among the first to appear were these Ukrainian shots, which show how a soulless body suddenly moves its hand, a report Monday on Russia-1's evening news broadcast declared.

And in the rearview mirror it is noticeable that the dead seem to be starting to rise even.

But satellite images from early March show the dead were left out on the streets of Bucha for weeks.

On April 2, a video taken from a moving car was posted online by a Ukrainian lawyer showing those same bodies scattered along Yablonska Street in Bucha.

High-resolution satellite images of Bucha from commercial provider Maxar Technology reviewed by The Associated Press independently matched the location of the bodies with separate videos from the scene. Other Western media had similar reports.

Over the weekend, AP journalists saw the bodies of dozens of people in Bucha, many of them shot at close range, and some with their hands tied behind them.

At least 13 bodies were located in and around a building that residents said was used as a base for Russian troops before they retreated last week.

Yet Russian officials and state-media have continued to promote their own narrative, parroting it in newspapers and on radio and television.

A top story on the website of a popular pro-Kremlin newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, pinned the mass killings on Ukraine, with a story that claimed one more irrefutable proof that the genocide in Bucha' was carried out by Ukrainian forces.

An opinion column published Tuesday by the state-run news agency RIA Novosti surmised that the Bucha slayings were a ploy for the West to impose tougher sanctions on .

Analysts note it isn't the first time in its six-week-old invasion of that the Kremlin has employed such an information warfare strategy to deny any wrongdoing and spread disinformation in a coordinated campaign around the globe.

This is simply what does every time it recognizes that it has suffered a PR setback through committing atrocities, said Keir Giles, senior consulting fellow with the and Eurasia program at the Chatham House think tank. So the system works almost on autopilot.

Before the war, Russia denied U.S. intelligence reports that detailed its plans to attack .

Last month, Russian officials tried to discredit AP photos and reporting of the aftermath of the bombing of a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, which left a pregnant woman and her unborn child dead.

The photos and video from Bucha have set off a new wave of global condemnation and revulsion.

After his video appearance Tuesday at the U.N. Security Council, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy enumerated the killings in Bucha by Russian troops and showed graphic video of charred and decomposing bodies there and in other towns. Russian U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia dismissed them as staged.

Across social media, a chorus of more than a dozen official Russian Twitter and Telegram accounts, as well as state-backed media Facebook pages, repeated the Kremlin line that images and video of the dead were staged or a hoax.

The claims were made in English, Spanish and Arabic in accounts run by Russian officials or from Russian-backed news outlets Sputnik and RT. The Spanish-language RT en Espaol has sent more than a dozen posts to its 18 million followers.

Russia rejects allegations over the murder of civilians in Bucha, near Kiev, an RT en Espaol post said Sunday.

Several of the same accounts sought to discredit claims that Russian troops carried out the killings by pointing to a video of Bucha Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk, taken March 31, in which he talked about the suburb being freed from Russian occupation.

He confirms that Russian troops have left Bucha. No mentioning of dead bodies in the streets, top Russian official Mikhail Ulyanov tweeted Monday.

But Fedoruk had publicly commented on the violence before the Russian troops left in an interview with Italian news agency Adnkronos on March 28, where he accused them of killings and rapes in Bucha.

In an AP interview March 7, Fedoruk talked about dead bodies piling up in Bucha: We can't even gather up the bodies because the shelling from heavy weapons doesn't stop day or night. Dogs are pulling apart the bodies on the city streets. It's a nightmare.

Satellite images by Maxar Technologies while Russian troops occupied Bucha on March 18 and 19 back up Fedoruk's account of bodies in the streets, showing at least five bodies on one road.

Some social media platforms have tried to limit propaganda and disinformation from the Kremlin. Google blocked RT's accounts, while in Europe, RT and Sputnik were banned by tech company Meta, which also stopped promoting or amplifying Russian-state media pages on its platforms, which include Facebook and Instagram.

Russia has found ways to evade the crackdown with posts in different languages through dozens of official Russian social media accounts.

It's a pretty massive messaging apparatus that Russia controls whether it's official embassy accounts, bot or toll accounts or anti-Western influencers they have many ways to circumvent platform bans, said Bret Schafer, who heads the information manipulation team at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.

(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.)
on Wednesday made some concessions on a widely unpopular child separation COVID policy, in a nod to growing public frustration as it extends a citywide lockdown that has left some residents struggling to buy food.

The lockdown of China's most populous city, which started in parts of 10 days ago and has since been expanded to confine practically all of its 26 million residents at home, has massively disrupted daily life and business.

Public criticism over the curbs, part of Beijing's elimination strategy, has ranged from complaints over crowded and unsanitary quarantine centres to difficulties in buying food or accessing medical treatment.

But the most controversial policy has been Shanghai's practice of separating COVID-positive children from their parents, which came to the fore on Saturday and triggered widespread anger across the country.

In the face of such criticism, the government two days ago said it would relax the policy slightly to allow parents to accompany children if they were also infected. But children will still be separated from parents who were not COVID-positive, prompting further complaints.

On Wednesday, a Shanghai health official said guardians of children with special needs who are infected with COVID could now apply to escort them, but would need to comply with certain rules and sign a letter saying they were aware of the risks.

He did not provide further details and the Shanghai government did not immediately respond to a request for comment for clarification.

The comments brought widespread public relief, especially among parents, though some questioned why there was still a need to apply. A hashtag on the subject on China's Weibo social media platform drew more than 40 million views by Wednesday afternoon.

"This is the right thing to do, carry out management in a humane way," said one widely liked Weibo comment.

Struggling to buy food

Shanghai also said Wednesday it would conduct another round of citywide tests, a mix of antigen and nucleic acid testing.

Movement curbs on residents will continue until it can evaluate testing results, officials said.

There are signs that the curbs, which were initially scheduled to last about five days for most, are fraying residents' nerves. Many are beginning to worry about food and drinking water, as supermarkets remain shut and deliveries are restricted.

Some have complained of having to wake up at dawn for a chance at booking a grocery delivery, but finding them sold out within seconds. have turned to community WeChat groups to try to bulk buy fruit and vegetables.

Liu Min, vice-head of Shanghai's commerce commission, told reporters that authorities were working hard to resolve bottlenecks and take care of the "basic living needs" of the population.

She said efforts would be made to ship food and other necessities to Shanghai from other provinces, and to build emergency supply stations in and around the city to ensure vegetable supplies. But she said the biggest challenge was getting deliveries to homes.

Shanghai will also work to "release delivery capacity", saying the 11,000 riders working for major e-commerce platforms in the city could go to work if they submitted daily negative COVID nucleic acid and antigen tests, she added.

Mounting Economic Pressures

Shanghai detected a record 16,766 new asymptomatic cases on April 5, up from 13,086 a day earlier.

Symptomatic cases also rose to 311 from 268 the day before.

While the city's case numbers remain small by global standards, Shanghai has emerged as a test bed for China's COVID elimination "dynamic clearance" strategy, which seeks to test, trace and centrally quarantine all positive cases as well as their close contacts.

The city has set up 62 temporary quarantine sites at hotels, stadiums and exhibition centres, and is also converting the 150,000-square-metre National Convention and Exhibition Center into a facility that can hold 40,000 people.

Analysts say the impact of the current restrictions on the economy is mounting, especially for small businesses, with nearly 200 million people across under some sort of lockdown, according to estimates by Nomura.

Activity in China's services sector shrunk at the steepest pace in two years in March as the local surge in cases restricted mobility and weighed on client demand, a private sector survey showed on Wednesday.

The tourism sector is also under pressure. The number of journeys taken over China's three-day Tomb Sweeping Festival holiday tumbled by nearly two-thirds from last year, state media said, and was also lower than 2020, when the country was still recovering from the first outbreak in Wuhan.

Nationwide, there were 1,415 new confirmed cases on April 5, up from 1,235 a day earlier, with 1,383 locally transmitted, the National Health Commission said.

The number of new asymptomatic cases, which counts separately, stood at 19,199 compared with 15,355 a day earlier.

(Reporting by David Stanway, Brenda Goh and the Shanghai and Beijing bureaus. Editing by Gerry Doyle)

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Sri Lanka's President Gotabaya will not resign, a minister said on Wednesday, despite protests against his handling of the country's worst in decades and as doctors held street protests over a shortage of medicine.

Rajapaksa, governing the country since 2019 with other family members in top positions, revoked a state of emergency late on Tuesday after five days as dozens of lawmakers walked out of the ruling coalition, leaving his government in a minority.

People have been suffering from shortages of fuel, power, food, drugs and other items for weeks, and doctors say the entire health system could collapse in weeks. Street protests began a month ago and have intensified in recent days, with people openly defying the emergency and a weekend curfew.

"May I remind you that 6.9 million people voted for the president," Highways Minister Johnston Fernando said in parliament in response to criticism from the opposition and cries of "Go home Gota".

"As a government, we are clearly saying the president will not resign under any circumstances. We will face this." As he spoke, dozens of doctors, some in their blue scrubs, stood in protest opposite the national hospital in the commercial capital, Colombo. Some held a banner saying: "Strengthen people's right to live. Declare a health emergency." Malaka Samararathna, who works at the state-run Apeksha Hospital which treats tens of thousands of cancer patients from across the country every year, said not only drugs but even chemicals used in testing are running short.

"The patients who are on chemotherapy, we have to monitor them carefully. Daily we have to monitor these investigations," Samararathna said.

"So, if we can't do it, we can't decide the way forward. We can't decide on the proper management. Sometimes our chemotherapy drugs are causing severe side effects, so the only way we have to find it is by doing these investigations." He said cancer drugs like Filgrastim and Cytarabine, as well as some antibiotics, were in short supply.

Vasan Ratnasingam, a spokesperson of the Government Medical Officers' Association that represents over 16,000 doctors nationwide, said at least one vital drug was not available at all in his Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children.

"And other than that, 102 essential drugs are in shortage.

Some of those drugs are frequently used, such as for respiratory tract infections, for urinary tract infections," he said, warning doctors would have to stop routine treatments and surgeries if immediate action was not taken.

'End of Patience'

Medicines under a $1 billion credit line that India signed with last month still havenat arrived, according to a source aware of discussions between India and .

"But there is definitely a sense of urgency on both sides,a the source said, declining to be named since the discussions were not public.

Sri Lankan and Indian officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Education Minister Dinesh Gunawardena said the government understood the hardships of the people and was working to find solutions, but added: "We have to use democratic means to restore calm".

Rajapaksa's various moves - including securing financial support from India and China - have failed to end the shortages or the spontaneous street protests across the country.

His finance minister resigned on Tuesday, a day after his appointment and ahead of crucial talks scheduled with the Monetary Fund this month for a loan programme.

He dissolved his cabinet on Monday and sought to form a unity government, a proposal rejected by ruling and opposition parties.

There is such a paucity of funds that the country is temporarily closing some of its embassies.

Ruwanpathiranage Dharmawardena, a 65-year-old taxi driver, said people were restless and tired of the suffering.

"They have reached the end of their patience," he said. "One canat say how the people will behave, what decision they will take."

(Addittional reporting by Waruna Karunatilake in Colombo; Writing by Krishna N. Das; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

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Sri Lankan doctors said they will hold a street protest in the commercial capital Colombo on Wednesday as hospitals run out of essential drugs because of the country's worst in decades, even as the government appealed for calm.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa revoked a state of emergency late on Tuesday after dozens of lawmakers walked out of the ruling coalition, leaving his government in a minority in parliament as it struggles to quell protests against the crisis.

The emergency was imposed on Friday.

People have been suffering from shortages of fuel, power, food and other items for weeks, and doctors say the entire health system could now collapse.

"We accept there is a massive financial crisis in this country, and we are now attempting to work to find solutions," education minister and leader of the house, Dinesh Gunawardena, told parliament.

"There are queues for everything, for gas, for fuel and kerosene. We understand the hardships of the people, but we have to use democratic means to restore calm." The Government Medical Officers' Association, which represents over 16,000 doctors nationwide, said medics from across Colombo would gather at the National Hospital of and protest "against the serious shortage of drugs".

Malaka Samararathna, who works at the state-run Apeksha Hospital which treats tens of thousands of cancer patients from across the country every year, said not only drugs but even chemicals used in testing are running short.

"The patients who are on chemotherapy, we have to monitor them carefully. Daily we have to monitor these investigations," Samararathna said.

"So, if we can't do it, we can't decide the way forward. We can't decide on the proper management. Sometimes our chemotherapy drugs are causing severe side effects, so the only way we have to find it is by doing these investigations." He said cancer drugs like Filgrastim and Cytarabine, as well as some antibiotics, were in short supply.

Rajapaksa's various moves - including securing financial support from India and China - have failed to end the shortages or the spontaneous street protests across the country.

His finance minister resigned on Tuesday, a day after his appointment and ahead of crucial talks scheduled with the Monetary Fund this month for a loan programme.

He dissolved his cabinet on Monday and sought to form a unity government, a proposal rejected by ruling and opposition parties.

There is such a paucity of funds that the country is temporarily closing some of its embassies.

Ruwanpathiranage Dharmawardena, a 65-year-old taxi driver, said people were restless and tired of the suffering.

"They have reached the end of their patience," he said. "One can't say how the people will behave, what decision they will take."

(Addittional reporting by Waruna Karunatilake in Colombo; Writing by Krishna N. Das; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
President Gotabaya on Tuesday issued a notification revoking the proclamation issued declaring the State of Emergency, as the island nation continue to stare at the countrywide protests over the severe .

The State of Emergency will be revoked from midnight of April 5, 2022, the English language newspaper Daily Mirror reported.

Earlier, had announced an emergency in the country to ensure "public security and maintenance of public order."

Anti-government protests continue to take place in the island nation, demanding solutions to the current . An emergency health situation has been declared in today, due to a severe shortage of medicines in the country.

is battling a severe with food and fuel scarcity affecting a large number of the people in the island nation. The economy has been in a free-fall since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sri Lanka is also facing a foreign exchange shortage, which has, incidentally, affected its capacity to import food and fuel, leading to the power cuts in the country. The shortage of essential goods forced Sri Lanka to seek assistance from friendly countries.

On Sunday, 26 Sri Lankan Cabinet Ministers resigned en masse from their positions amid rising public anger against the government over the economic crisis. All 26 of them signed a general letter, consenting to resign paving the way for a new Cabinet to be formed, Daily Mirror reported.

The United States on Tuesday said it is deeply concerned about the economic situation in Sri Lanka and urged authorities in the island nation to exercise restraint and avoid social media blackouts.

"We are deeply concerned about the economic situation in Sri Lanka. All have the right to peacefully protest and voice their views. We urge authorities to exercise restraint and to avoid social media blackouts and arrests under the Prevention of Terrorism Act in response," US State Department spokesperson Ned Price tweeted.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy told the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday that must be held accountable for what he and many Western leaders have called war crimes, as the United States and its allies prepared to expand sanctions.

Six weeks into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Western countries will move to isolate the Russian economy further on Wednesday by adding sanctions targeting Russian financial institutions, state-owned companies and government officials, as well as banning new investment in Russia, the White House said.

The West's punishment of Moscow over its actions in has been given new impetus this week following the discovery of civilians shot dead at close range in the Ukrainian town of Bucha seized from Russian forces.

Between 150 and 300 bodies might be in a mass grave by a church in Bucha, north of the capital Kyiv, Ukrainian human rights ombudswoman Lyudmyla Denisova said on Tuesday.

In a live video address from Kyiv, Zelenskiy questioned the value of the 15-member Security Council, which has been unable to take any action over Russia's Feb. 24 invasion because permanent member Moscow is a veto power.

"We are dealing with a state that turns its veto at the U.N Security Council into the right to (cause) death," Zelenskyy said. " wants to turn into silent slaves." Responding to Zelenskyy, Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told the Council that Russian troops were not targeting civilians.

The Kremlin said allegations that Russian forces had executed civilians in Bucha were a "monstrous forgery" staged by the West to discredit it.

says it launched a "special military operation" in to demilitarize and "denazify" a country that President Vladimir Putin regards as an illegitimate state.

The Kremlin's position is rejected by Ukraine, a parliamentary democracy, and the West as a pretext for an unprovoked invasion that has uprooted a quarter of the country's population.

The ambassador for Russia's strategic partner China told the Security Council the reports and images showing civilian deaths in Bucha were "very disturbing" but said the circumstances should be verified and any accusations should be based on facts.

Ambassador Zhang Jun urged the United States, NATO and the EU to pursue dialogue with Russia rather than further sanctions he said were not effective in solving the crisis.

South and East

The tense Security Council meeting came amid heavy fighting in Ukraine's south and east as Russia shifts its offensive away from Kyiv after failing to capture any major cities.

In the besieged southern port of Mariupol, where tens of thousands are trapped with scant access to food or water, a Dominica-flagged cargo ship sank on Tuesday after being targeted by Russian missile strikes, the vessel's flag registry said.

One of the 12 crew members required medical treatment while the were evacuated onto nearby vessels, the registry said. The ship was believed to have been without cargo.

Russia did not respond to a request for comment. Its armed forces said on Tuesday they had shot down two Ukrainian military transport helicopters that were trying to leave the city.

Ukraine's armed forces general staff said attacks in Mariupol were continuing, but did not give any details.

In the east, where Ukraine's second-largest city of Kharkiv has been among Russia's main targets, the general staff said Ukrainian forces had destroyed three Russian tanks and around 20 other armoured vehicles.

Burying the Dead

Reuters has seen at least four victims shot through the head in Bucha, one with their hands tied behind their back.

Residents have recounted cases of several slain, some shot through their eyes and one apparently beaten to death and mutilated.

On Tuesday, Ukrainian Serhii Lahovskyi buried the corpse of a childhood friend who had been shot through the mouth at very close range after disappearing when Russian troops occupied the town.

Lahovskyi and grabbed shovels and dug a shallow grave on a grass verge. They used a carpet to carry the remains, placing him in a ditch before covering him with wooden boards and shovelling earth on top.

"Why did these animals shoot him so?" Lahovskyi said, sobbing. "This is not Russia, this is a monster." Reuters could not independently verify the details of Lahovskyi's account or who was responsible for the killings in Bucha.

Casting Sanctions Net Wider

U.S. officials said new economic restrictions on Russia following Bucha would be taken in "lockstep" with other Group of Seven advanced economies and the EU.

Proposed EU sanctions, which the bloc's 27 member states must approve, would bar Russian imports worth 9 billion euros ($9.8 billion) and exports to Russia worth 10 billion euros, including semiconductors and computers, and stop Russian ships entering EU ports.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said it was working on banning oil imports, too.

Europe, which obtains about a third of its natural gas from Russia, has been wary of the economic impact a total ban on Russian energy - which Ukraine maintains is vital to securing a peace deal - would bring.

A proposed EU ban on Russian coal would be worth around 4 billion euros a year, von der Leyen said - tiny in comparison with last year's 100 billion euros in oil and gas imports from Russia.

But signalling strengthening EU resolve, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said the coal ban was the first step towards an embargo on all fossil fuel imports from Russia.

($1 = 0.9145 euros)

(Additional reporting by Reuters bureaus; Writing by Mark Heinrich and Rami Ayyub; Editing by Catherine Evans, Grant McCool and Rosalba O'Brien)

(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.)
Russian intelligence chief Sergey Beseda and his deputy, Anatoly Bolyukh, were placed under house arrest on March 9. Beseda and Bolyukh oversaw the foreign intelligence branch of the FSB, which is the Russian security service. They were allegedly the main proponents of the assumption that would swiftly collapse, which has proved deeply flawed.

But, as has become increasingly clear over many years, has become intolerant of opinions that contradict his preferred course of action. So although the intelligence was flawed, Besedas claims likely manipulated facts to fit what the Russian president wanted to believe. Having led the foreign intelligence branch since 2009, it is likely Beseda knew what his boss wanted to hear. Yet both he and Bolyukh have taken the blame for the wider invasion failure.

Putin has been living in a virtual bunker. The presidential administration, his primary information source, is a secretive organisation and has been feeding Putin a controlled information flow for over a decade. The institution acts as a gatekeeper to Putin and blocks non-positive intelligence from reaching him.

This twisting of facts to fit a particular worldview is only part of the problem. Another factor is that the different security services compete and undertake their own projects in the hope that this pleases Putin.

The Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB) or Federal Security Service, is one of many agencies. While the FSB is commonly thought of as a domestic intelligence agency, it also operates in other post-Soviet countries, except the Baltic states. Meanwhile the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedkiis (SVR), or Foreign Intelligence Service is involved in foreign intelligence gathering outside the post-Soviet space. The Federalnaya Sluzhba Okhrany (FSO), or Federal Protective Service, protects high-ranking officials. The Glavnoye upravleniye (GU), or Main Directorate  previously the GRU  is military intelligence.

The Rosgvardiya, or National Guard, which was created in 2016, is not strictly an intelligence agency but is effectively Putins praetorian guard. It is increasingly involved in external operations and has a direct line to Putin through its chief, Viktor Zolotov. He was Putins personal bodyguard from 2000 to 2013 before becoming minister of internal affairs and head of the internal troops from 2014 to 2016.

Spy v spy

Ostensibly the different Russian security services are like their western counterparts. But the FSB in particular is more carnivorous than its western equivalents, having largely consumed the signal-intelligence service, FAPSI. Putin as a former KGB Officer himself views them as crucial to his personal survival and making Russia great again. In 2020 Russia spent 5.5 trillion roubles (US$69 billion) on the security services. This amounts to 28% of the annual budget or 3.5 times the amount spent on health and education combined.

This comes at a price, though, with Putin demanding results.

Each service is aware that they need to come up with the scariest crisis  or intelligence that fits Putins worldview  to increase their budget and influence. One example of this scare tactic was FSB chief, Aleksandr Bortnikov, claiming that the 2012 Siberian forest fires were the work of al-Qaeda. Scare tactics and only providing positive information to Putin results in a lack of coherence.

Each security service jealously guards its own territory and views the others with suspicion. This makes working together for a common good difficult. This rivalry is intense, and is built on a combination of mistrust and wanting Putins attention. In particular, the FSB appears to have the highest level of mistrust for other services and is constantly sniping at them. Competition also occurs at the intra-service level, with different groups conducting their own policies sometimes to the detriment of the agenda of their own branch.

All this makes for a very confusing picture, which is likely by design. By having inter and intra-service rivalries, the security services are too focused on their own jealousies, rather than other issues. With the war not going to plan there have also been murmurings that some security personnel are considering a coup.

Isolated and out of touch

Increasingly Putins inner circle is getting smaller and there is a growing level of mistrust and discontentment both by and against Putin. Rosgvardiya deputy Roman Gavrilov resigned in March over alleged claims of leaking information. Like Zolotov, Gavrilov was part of Putins personal bodyguard and when Zolotov tried to intervene, Putin refused to see him.

In the past month, eight generals have allegedly been sacked, in another sign that Putin is growing more isolated. His rambling speech and potted history in the build-up to recognising the independence of the two Donbas peoples republics were from someone who appears increasingly out of touch.

Since the pandemics start, Putin was isolated in a bunker with disinfection tunnels and largely sequestered from face-to-face meetings. The March 18 rally at Moscows Luzhniki stadium is one of many pointers that Putin remains in  or very close to  a bunker, only appearing for crucial meetings.

The long table in the is another sign that Putin fears face-to-face meetings. For years, he has had food tasters. This creates a certain paranoia and the conflict  and before it the pandemic  has turbocharged it.

Putin has long believed he is the most informed politician in the world. But this simply is not the case. Like the emperor with no clothes, Putin suffers from a warped reality where only positive information is allowed. This is what makes the current Ukrainian conflict particularly dangerous.

Stephen Hall, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Politics, International Relations and Russia, University of Bath

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The and its allies on Wednesday prepared new sanctions on Moscow over civilian killings which President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described as "war crimes", as heavy fighting and Russian airstrikes pounded the besieged port of Mariupol.

The southern city of Mariupol has been under attack by Russian forces and constantly bombarded since the early days of the invasion almost six weeks ago, trapping tens of thousands of residents without food, water or power.

"The humanitarian situation in the city is worsening," British military intelligence said on Wednesday.

"Most of the 160,000 remaining residents have no light, communication, medicine, heat or water. Russian forces have prevented humanitarian access, likely to pressure defenders to surrender." Reuters could not immediately verify the report.

Western sanctions over Russia's Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, the biggest assault on a European nation since World War Two, gained new impetus this week after dead civilians shot at close range were discovered in the northern town of Bucha, seized back from Russian forces.

Moscow denied targeting civilians in Bucha and described evidence presented as a "monstrous forgery" staged by the West to discredit it.



New sanctions set to be unveiled Wednesday are in part a response to Bucha, the White House said.

The measures, coordinated between Washington, Group of Seven advanced economies and the European Union, will target Russian banks and officials and ban new investment in Russia, the White House said.

Proposed EU sanctions, which the bloc's 27 member states must approve, would ban buying Russian coal and prevent Russian ships from entering EU ports.

EU executive Ursula von der Leyen said the bloc was working on banning oil imports, as well. Europe, which obtains about a third of its natural gas from Russia, has been wary of the economic impact a total ban on Russian energy would bring.

But signalling strengthening EU resolve, Germany's foreign minister said the coal ban was the first step toward an embargo on all Russian fossil fuel imports. Ukraine says banning Russian gas is vital to securing a deal to end the war in peace talks.

After an impassioned address to the UN Security Council on Tuesday, Zelenskiy said new sanctions "against Russia must be commensurate with the gravity of the occupiers' war crimes," calling it a "crucial moment" for Western leaders.

New Zealand said on Wednesday it would impose a 35% tariff on all imports from Russia and extend export bans on industrial products connected to strategic Russian industries.

"The images and reports emerging of atrocities committed against civilians in Bucha and other regions of Ukraine is abhorrent and reprehensible, and New Zealand continues to respond to (Russian President Vladimir) Putinas mindless acts of aggression," Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta said in a statement.

The has agreed to provide an additional $100 million in assistance to Ukraine, including Javelin anti-armour systems, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.

U.S. chipmaker Intel Corp said it had suspended business operations in Russia, joining a slew of companies to exit the country.

In the small Russian city of Kaluga thousands of auto workers have been furloughed and food prices are soaring as Western sanctions hit its flagship foreign carmakers.

Bucha burial



Ukrainian officials say between 150 and 300 bodies might be in a mass grave by a church in Bucha, north of the capital Kyiv.

Satellite images taken weeks ago show bodies of civilians on a street in the town, a private U.S. company said, undercutting Russia's claims that Ukrainian forces caused the deaths or that the scene was staged.

Reuters reporters saw at least four victims shot through the head in Bucha, one with their hands tied behind their back.

Residents have recounted cases of several slain, some shot through their eyes and one apparently beaten to death and mutilated.

On Tuesday, Ukrainian Serhii Lahovskyi buried the corpse of a childhood friend who had been shot through the mouth at very close range after disappearing when Russian troops occupied the town.

Lahovskyi and grabbed shovels and dug a shallow grave on a grass verge. They used a carpet to carry the remains, placing him in a ditch before covering him with wooden boards and shovelling earth on top.

"Why did these animals shoot him so?" Lahovskyi said, sobbing. "This is not Russia, this is a monster." Reuters could not independently verify the details of Lahovskyi's account or who was responsible for the killings in Bucha.

Since launching its invasion Russia has failed to capture a single major city in what it calls a "special military operation" aimed at demilitarizing and "denazifying" Ukraine.

The Kremlin's position is rejected by Ukraine and the West as a pretext for an unprovoked invasion that has uprooted a quarter of the country's population.

(Additional reporting by Reuters bureaus; Writing by Rami Ayyub and Michael Perry; Editing by Lincoln Feast)

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The United States, United Kingdom and the European Union were set Wednesday to impose new punishing sanctions targeting Russia, including a ban on all new investment in the country, after evidence of torture and killings emerged in recent days from a town outside of Kyiv.

The Associated Press has seen dozens of dead bodies around the town of Bucha while Ukrainian officials have said the bodies of at least 410 civilians have been found in towns around the Ukrainian capital city that were recaptured from Russian forces.

Videos and images of bodies have unleashed a wave of indignation among Western allies, who have drawn up new sanctions as a response.

After several European countries announced the expulsion of Russian diplomats, the European Commission proposed a fifth package of sanctions including a ban on coal imports that could be adopted as soon as Wednesday once unanimously approved by the 27-nation bloc's ambassadors.

The United States and Western allies plan to impose a ban on all new investment in . Among the other measures being taken against are greater sanctions on its financial institutions and state-owned enterprises, and sanctions on government officials and their family members, according to White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

Separately, the Treasury Department moved Tuesday to block any Russian government debt payments with U.S. dollars from accounts at U.S. financial institutions, making it harder for to meet its financial obligations.

The European Commission's proposed ban on coal imports would be the first EU sanctions targeting Russia's lucrative energy industry over its war in Ukraine.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the ban is worth four billion euros ($4.4 billion) per year and that the EU has already started working on additional sanctions, including on oil imports.

She didn't mention natural gas, with consensus among the 27 EU countries on targeting the fuel used to generate electricity and heat homes difficult to secure amid opposition from gas-dependent members like Germany, the bloc's largest economy.

But European Council President Charles Michel said the bloc should keep up the pressure on the Kremlin, suggesting that an embargo on gas imports should also be required at some point in the future.

The new package includes a ban on coal imports, Michel said on Wednesday. I think that measures on oil, and even gas, will also be needed, sooner or later.

The new package of measures proposed by the commission also includes sanctions on more individuals and four key Russian banks, among them VTB, the second-largest Russian bank. The bloc also would ban Russian vessels and Russian-operated vessels from EU ports.

Further, targeted export bans, worth 10 billion euros, in sectors covering quantum computers, advanced semiconductors, sensitive machinery and transportation equipment also were proposed.

I appreciate the strengthening of the 5th EU sanctions package: bans on Russian coal, vessels accessing EU ports, and road transport operators," Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on Twitter. But it will take a gas/oil embargo and de-SWIFTing of all Russian banks to stop Putin. Difficult times require difficult decisions."



Western allies have already cut out several Russian banks of the SWIFT financial messaging system, which daily moves countless billions of dollars around more than 11,000 banks and other financial institutions around the world.

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Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP on Wednesday hit out at the South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) for the closure of meat shops during the nine-day period of the Navaratri festival and said that the Constitution allows her to eat meat and shopkeeper the freedom to run his trade.

Her statement comes amid the row triggered by South Delhi Municipal Corporation mayor Mukesh Suryan's letter demanding the closure of meat shops in the municipal area during .

"I live in South Delhi. The Constitution allows me to eat meat when I like and the shopkeeper the freedom to run his trade. Full stop," the TMC MP said in a tweet.

Earlier on Monday, SDMC Mayor Mukkesh Suryaan said that in the future, licenses for running meat shops will be issued if they agree not to operate during the Navaratri festival.

Meanwhile, South Delhi Municipal Corporation also ordered officers concerned to take action for the closure of meat shops during the nine-day period of the Navaratri festival that is being observed from April 2 to April 11.

The Mayor informed that he has also written to the Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal to withdraw their discount on alcohol during Navratri, and if possible, stop the sale of liquor for nine days too.

Also, East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC) also announced the closure of meat shops on the last three days of Navratri, that is, on Saptami (seventh day), Ashtami (eighth day) and Navami (ninth day).

Notably, the nine-day Navaratri festival is being observed from April 2 to April 11, with Saptami, Ashtami and Navami falling on April 9, 10 and 11 respectively.

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Barbeque-Nation Hospitality tumbled 5.90% to Rs 1175.10, amid heavy volumes.

On the BSE 6.40 lakh shares were traded in the counter so far compared with average daily volumes of 0.07 lakh shares in the past three months.

On the NSE, 83.45 lakh shares were traded in the counter so far compared with average daily volumes of 0.80 lakh shares in the past three months.

On the technical front, the stock's RSI (relative strength index) stood at 37.055. The RSI oscillates between zero and 100. Traditionally, the RSI is considered overbought when above 70 and oversold when below 30.

The stock was trading below its 50-day, 100-day and 200-day simple moving average (SMA) placed at 1300.13, 1369.57 and 1234.17, respectively.

Barbeque Nation is a food services company. It currently owns and operates 169 outlets across India and 3 other countries. The company pioneered the format of 'over the table barbeque' concept in Indian restaurants. The company has a majority stake in 'Red Apple Kitchen', which operates 10 Italian cuisine restaurants under the popular brand 'Toscano'.

The company reported a consolidated net profit of Rs Rs 14.16 crore in the quarter ended December 2021 as against net loss of Rs 0.90 crore during the previous quarter ended December 2020. Sales rose 47.14% YoY to Rs 286.67 crore in Q3 FY22.

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Coastal Corporation jumped 6.58% to Rs 424.90 after the company announced that it will soon commence operations at its new plant (Unit III) at Kakinada SEZ in Andhra Pradesh.

Coastal Corporation said that it invested Rs 70 crore in Unit III. The facility is a completely integrated and has production capacity of 35 MTPD. The trial production at the facility was conducted on 5 April 2022 and the commercial production will start in the next 10 to 15 days.

The Unit III will augment the company's value-added supply to various parts of the Globe. It will serve as an important base for expanding global sales in the future, the firm said in a statement.

"This development is in line with the company's commitment towards fostering sustainable growth while also creating job opportunities in the region. This capacity addition will enable us to expand our footprints and ensure sufficient and timely supplies thereby adding to efficiencies of the supply chain," the company said.

Furthermore, the company informed that its 3.6 MW DC Solar power plant project in Srikakulam is likely to commence next week. The company has received approval from Andhra Pradesh Chief Electrical Inspector to Govt.(APCEIG) for captive consumption. The company will receive credit set off of units consumed at Unit-I, II & III to the extent of units generated at solar plant. This initiative to move towards renewable energy will reduce the power cost and the company's dependence on Andhra Pradesh Eastern Power Distribution Company (APEPDCL).

Coastal Corporation is engaged in processing, production, and distribution of seafood, globally. The company exports various grades of shrimp to countries such as the United States, Europe, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Hong Kong.

On a consolidated basis, the company reported a 37.2% rise in net profit to Rs 4.72 crore on a 16.1% increase in net sales to Rs 146.13 crore in Q3 FY22 over Q3 FY21.

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The state-run firm entered into a MoU with Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) to convert Civil (Passenger) aircraft to Multi Mission Tanker Transport (MMTT) aircraft in India.

Under the pact signed, Hindustan Aeronautics (HAL) will convert pre-owned Civil (Passenger) aircraft into air refueling aircraft with cargo and transport capabilities. The move will provide India's defence ecosystem with new capabilities and cost effective solutions in the market.

This MoU will also facilitate HAL and IAI's decades' long expertise in developing, manufacturing and producing leading defence platforms. The scope of MoU also covers "passenger to freighter aircraft" conversion along with MMTT conversions.

Shares of Hindustan Aeronautics lost 0.11% to Rs 1,549.90 on BSE.

HAL is engaged in carrying out design, development, manufacture, repair and overhaul of aircraft, helicopter, engines and related systems like avionics, instruments and accessories primarily serving Indian defence programme. As of 31 December 2021, the Government of India held 75.15% stake in company.

The PSU company's consolidated net profit surged 9.4 % to Rs 933.38 crore on a 8.6 % increase in net sales to Rs 5891.90 crore in Q3 FY22 over Q3 FY21.

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After receiving fan backlash due to an update that nerfed Genshin Impact's Yae Miko, miHoYo Games will be rolling back to a previous version.



Just like other major action RPGs, Genshin Impact releases regular updates that either provide buffs or nerfs to their characters. The recent update 2.6 resulted in changes for Yae Miko's targeting mechanic, causing an uproar from fans. He Sesshou Sakura's ability's priority was changed. From targeting random enemies, it now attacks the nearest ones. This nullifies the advantage of her two passive which increases the damage and range. This also means that the number of foes taking the attack's damage will be lesser than in the previous mechanism.

Read Also: Genshin Impact Version 2.6: Kamisato Ayato, New Chasm Area, and More Updates to Arrive on March 30





Fans Filed Legal Complaint Against miHoYo after Update 2.6

Yae Miko made her debut in version 2.5 to much fan excitement. Her kit, however, was not well received by the community, especially her Elemental Skill. She can summon up to three Sesshou Sakura, Electro totems that attack random enemies. While this is confusing to some, fans noted that her advantage is the large range of her attack's coverage. With a C2 update applied, the totems' attack range is increased by 60 percent.

Of course, applying a C2 update would be expensive. Once update 2.6 was applied, the new targeting logic rendered her attacks and the C2 updates useless.

Players were quick to express their anger on social media. They questioned miHoYo for their decision to implement this change, believing that the company was "scamming" them. The Japanese community was among the angriest, filing formal complaints to the government's Consumer Affairs Agency, claiming that the company had defrauded them.

MiHoYo Addresses Fan Backlash and Rolls Back Updates for Yae Miko

The backlash from Yae Miko users was understandable. Since it is a five-star character, fans would have to spend money to unlock all of Yae Miko's passive skills. The good news is that miHoYo has released an update on Wednesday to roll back the changes. It also posted an apology, saying that the company would "endeavor to adjust our testing and verification process in the future to avoid making changes that cause the user experience to suffer in certain scenarios. We will seek only to introduce fixes that optimize parts of the experience while otherwise maintaining the existing experience as-is."

Once the update is applied, Yae Miko's Sesshou Sakura will revert back to targeting random foes once again, along with other targeting changes. 100 Primogems were also provided as compensation. The same was also awarded to all players who reached Adventure Rank 5 or above.

What's New in Update 2.6?

Genshin impact Update 2.6 was released last week, Mar. 30, 2022. The patch unlocked access to new banners, events, and new characters, such as the Hydro Sword-wielding Kamisato Ayato. Ayato's abilities include casting water illusions and creating a realm that deals Hydro AoE damage to enemies. He is the head of the Kamisato Clan.

The update also adds The Chasm explorable for players. The Chasm is where Liyue mines ores and houses a wide underground network where enemies, bosses, and treasures can be found. Exploring The Chasms will lead players to meet Dainsleif and learn more about the Traveler siblings and the lost nation of Khaenri'ah.

Related Article: Is Sangonomiya Kokomi Worth Your 'Genshin Impact Primogems? Here are Some Gameplay Factors To Consider

Story posted on GameNGuide

Written by Fred Layno
Hindustan Copper Ltd is quoting at Rs 123, up 0.29% on the day as on 12:49 IST on the NSE. The stock is down 15.32% in last one year as compared to a 20.66% jump in NIFTY and a 55% jump in the Nifty Metal.

Hindustan Copper Ltd gained for a fifth straight session today. The stock is quoting at Rs 123, up 0.29% on the day as on 12:49 IST on the NSE. The benchmark NIFTY is down around 0.43% on the day, quoting at 17880.65. The Sensex is at 59842.39, down 0.56%. Hindustan Copper Ltd has slipped around 1.36% in last one month.

Meanwhile, Nifty Metal index of which Hindustan Copper Ltd is a constituent, has slipped around 9.26% in last one month and is currently quoting at 6640.45, up 0.96% on the day. The volume in the stock stood at 25.22 lakh shares today, compared to the daily average of 62.59 lakh shares in last one month.

The benchmark April futures contract for the stock is quoting at Rs 123.35, up 0.28% on the day. Hindustan Copper Ltd is down 15.32% in last one year as compared to a 20.66% jump in NIFTY and a 55% jump in the Nifty Metal index.

The PE of the stock is 47.91 based on TTM earnings ending December 21.

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The Parliament has passed the Chartered Accountants, the Cost and Works Accountants and the Company Secretaries (Amendment) Bill, 2022 with the Rajya Sabha approving it on Tuesday. The Lok Sabha has already passed the Bill.

The Bill proposes to strengthen the disciplinary mechanism under these Acts and provide for time bound disposal of cases against members of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, the Institute of Cost Accountants of India and the Institute of Company Secretaries of India. The legislation also adds that firms must register with the Institutes by making an application to the respective Councils of the Institutes.

The Councils must maintain a register of firms containing details such as pendency of any actionable complaint or imposition of penalty against the firms. The Bill also empowers the three Councils to constitute multiple Boards and the Presiding Officer and one of the two members must not be a member of the institutes and will be nominated by the central government from a panel of persons provided by the Councils.

Initiating the discussion, Dr. L. Hanumanthaiah of Congress alleged that the government is trying to control the autonomy of these institutes. Mausam Noor of Trinamool Congress raised objections over the several provisions of the bill saying that absence of clearly defined parameters coupled with government presence within the Institutes would set dangerous precedents for obscure and intrusive functioning.

Replying to the discussion over the Bill, Finance and Corporate Affairs Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the bill will bring the required level of accountability and greater transparency.

Over the opposition allegations, she asserted that there is no proposal or intention to infringe upon the autonomy of these three institutions. Dispelling the doubts of opposition, Sitharaman said, three acts are going to continue and they will govern the functioning of three institutes.

Meanwhile, Dr. M. Thambidurai of AIADMK supported the Bill saying that the Chartered Accountant bodies need to be regulated to attract private investment in the country. Suresh Prabhu of BJP termed this legislation very important for the economic growth of the country. He said there is a need to make provision for withdrawal of complaints against the professionals. Sujeet Kumar of BJD said this bill will improve the administrative and governance mechanism and also help in ease of doing business.

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Tata Steel: On a provisional basis, Tata Steel India achieved highest ever annual crude steel production of 19.06 million tons, with a growth of 13% YoY despite the COVID 2nd wave related disruption early in the financial year.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS): TCS announced that the Kansas Department of Labor (KDOL) has selected TCS to build a modern, secure, web-based system for the state's unemployment insurance program, transforming a legacy mainframe platform from the 1970s into a cloud-based system that dramatically improves the delivery of services to Kansas residents.

Adani Enterprises: A meeting of the board of directors of the company is scheduled on 8 April 2022, to consider and approve the proposal for raising of funds by way of rights issue, preferential allotment, including a qualified institutions placement or through any other permissible mode and/or combination thereof.

Tata Power: Tata Power International Pte. Ltd (TPIPL) (a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Power), ICICI Bank Ltd. (ICICI Bank) owns 26% stake in Resurgent Power and the balance 74% is held by ICICI Bank and other global investors. Resurgent Power has completed the acquisition of NRSS XX.XVI Transmission Limited (NRSS).

TVS Motor Company: Jio-bp and TVS Motor Company announced that they have agreed to explore the creation of a robust public EV charging infrastructure for electric two-wheelers and three-wheelers in the country, building on Jio-bp's growing network in this space.

Coastal Corporation: The company announced that Unit III at Kakinada SEZ is now fully ready to commission. The new facility has production capacity of 35 MTPD.

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Utilties stocks were trading with gains, with the S&P BSE Utilities index rising 58.64 points or 1.55% at 3843.73 at 09:51 IST.

Among the components of the S&P BSE Utilities index, Reliance Power Ltd (up 5%), Adani Power Ltd (up 4.98%),Rattanindia Power Ltd (up 4.92%),Jaiprakash Power Ventures Ltd (up 4.92%),NLC India Ltd (up 3.93%), were the top gainers. Among the other gainers were Tata Power Company Ltd (up 3.62%), CESC Ltd (up 3.59%), PTC India Ltd (up 2.78%), Gujarat Industries Power Co Ltd (up 2.62%), and NTPC Ltd (up 2.45%).

On the other hand, Torrent Power Ltd (down 0.12%), Nava Bharat Ventures Ltd (down 0.07%), and Adani Transmission Ltd (down 0.02%) moved lower.

At 09:51 IST, the S&P BSE Sensex was down 434.05 or 0.72% at 59742.45.

The Nifty 50 index was down 119.75 points or 0.67% at 17837.65.

The S&P BSE Small-Cap index was up 59.99 points or 0.2% at 29642.48.

The S&P BSE 150 Midcap Index index was up 1.01 points or 0.01% at 8855.8.

On BSE,1841 shares were trading in green, 1083 were trading in red and 105 were unchanged.

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The TMC has lodged a complaint with the chief electoral officer of Bengal against Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari, alleging that he threatened police personnel of dire consequences in poll-bound Ballygunge assembly segment if they failed to act at the behest of the BJP.

Adhikari, however, rebuffed the allegations as "baseless and politically motivated".

Elections to Ballygunge assembly constituency will be held on April 12.

In a letter to Chief Electoral Officer Aariz Aftab on April 5, TMC state general secretary Kunal Ghosh said that the BJP MLA from Nandigram had "entered the officer-in-charge's chamber (at Rabindra Sarobar police station) to place their illegal demands and attempted to coerce the officers into siding with and/or support the BJP during the bye-election to Ballygunge assembly constituency".

The TMC leader also said that "categorical threats" were made to the officers concerned, stating that if they "did not follow the diktat of the BJP and do not act in accordance to his demands, he would ensure such officers are made to face consequences at the hands of Election Commission".

The party demanded that criminal proceedings be initiated against Adhikari and his supporters for attempting to influence the outcome of the polls.

The letter further noted that Adhikari had said that the consequences might not involve "punishment postings at far-off places but also suspensions".

Ghosh, also the spokesperson of TMC, said the CEO was requested to ensure that Adhikari did not repeat such acts in the future and "a free and fearless environment prevails in the constituency".

The BJP legislator, on his part, said he gave no such threat to any officer.

"I did not issue any threat to any police officer in Rabindra Sarobar thana. I just urged them to see to it that the BJP gets to campaign in the constituency," he added.

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The BJP is the only party that puts the country above everything else and its journey is a matter of surprise for political analysts, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister said on Wednesday.

At a programme held at the BJP's state headquarters in Lucknow on the party's 42nd foundation day, Yogi said whether it was the BJP government at the Centre or in the states, all represent the sentiments of every citizen in the country.

"The interest of the nation is supreme for us. It is the only political party in the country that puts country above all."



Following the ideals of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay, "we strive to reach the people on the last rung of the society", Adityanath said.

He said, "The journey of the BJP is a matter of curiosity and surprise for the political analysts of the country and the world."



The BJP was the world's largest political party and under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and its president J P Nadda is creating a sense of faith in the general public towards democracy, the Uttar Pradesh chief minister said.

Referring to the ups and downs in the BJP's journey, he said, "The Bharatiya Jana Sangh was established in 1952 at the time of the first general elections in the country. Its purpose was also not to do of power but to create a sense of devotion towards India."



About to the Ram Mandir issue, he said, "No one can doubt the dedication of BJP workers towards Ram Janmbhoomi movement, the biggest cultural movement after Independence."



"To save democracy, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, rose above its party and allied with the Janata Party. By this, the Jana Sangh expressed its commitment to democracy and India."



After this "failed experiment", the BJP was formed in 1980. "Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L K Advani and all those great men took the pledge of establishing the BJP as a party representing the feelings of the country," Adityanath said.

He said during the gravest epidemic of this century, the Modi government provided free rations to 80 crore people.

"It is the Modi government that saved the lives of 135 crore people during the pandemic. Tests, treatments and vaccines have been made available for free. So far, 185 crore vaccine doses have been administered in the country... Except for India, no other government is giving vaccines to its citizens for free," Adityanath said.

Referring to various public welfare schemes of the Central and state governments, he said, "The BJP government gave benefits of schemes to every eligible person without discrimination."



"As we celebrate the 42nd foundation day of the BJP, we all have to prepare ourselves to go through new tests every day to fulfil these aspirations of every citizen," Adityanath added.

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AIMIM leader Imtiaz Jaleel on Wednesday asked why NCP chief did not show "urgency" to discuss with Prime Minister the issue of his party minister Nawab Malik's arrest while immediately raising the issue of central agencies' action against Shiv Sena MP .

Pawar met Modi in New Delhi on Wednesday and later told reporters that he talked to the prime minister about the "injustice" being done to Raut.

On Tuesday, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) had attached assets worth more than Rs 11.15 crore of Raut's wife and two of his associates in a money-laundering investigation linked to certain land deals.

"It is our duty to bring to the prime minister's notice the injustice being done to a journalist and a senior Parliamentarian," Pawar said after his meeting with Modi.

Referring to Pawar's statement, Jaleel said in a tweet, "Discussed only about Why? Did u not feel the urgency to discuss with Prime Minister when your own party minister Nawab Malik was arrested? Or is more precious than Nawab! You have your own games to play."



"Do you think that something wrong has been done by your minister (Nawab Malik)?" the MIM leader, who represents Aurangabad Lok Sabha constituency, asked Pawar.

Malik was arrested by the ED on February 23 in a money-laundering probe linked to the activities of fugitive gangster Dawood Ibrahim and his aides.

NCP shares power with Shiv Sena and Congress in the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government led by Uddhav Thackeray.

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Elevating the probability of discussing cabinet expansion of his eight-month-old government, Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai on Tuesday said that he is likely to meet Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) top brass including JP Nadda and Home Minister in Delhi during his two-day visit.

"I have come here to discuss various projects and meanwhile I will meet President JP Nadda and Union Home minister . Issues related to party organisation would be discussed during the meeting with them," Bommai told mediapersons here.

The chief minister said, "However, no appointment has been fixed for the meeting with party top brass yet. Whether we would go for a ministry expansion or reshuffle would be known only after the meeting."

On being asked about Hijab and Halal issues, CM Bommai said that celebrating godly and social events is a "religious issue", however, the law is the same for all.

"The law is the same for all, everyone should obey the rule of law. Maintaining peace, law and order is our priority.

Earlier on Tuesday, Bommai, in a press conference, also said that he will meet Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to discuss various issues.

"I am scheduled to meet Union Finance minister Nirmala Seetharaman and discuss issues related to GST. Union Defence minister Rajnath Singh has agreed to affiliate Sangolli Rayanna School as Sainik School. I will meet Rajnath Singh too to discuss a few issues," he added.

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A 35-year-old man was shot dead following an altercation with some people known to him in Punjab's Patiala district, police said on Wednesday.

The murder triggered criticism by Congress leader and former chief minister Amarinder Singh over the government's handing of law and order.

Dharminder Singh of Daun Kalan village was killed near the Punjabi University in Patiala on Tuesday night following the altercation, the police said, adding that a case was registered in this connection.

A video of the incident even surfaced on social media.

Sidhu slammed the Bhagwant Mann-led over the law and order situation in the state.

"Complete collapse of law & order in Punjab while CM busy seeking votes in Himachal's cool breezes.. 2 more cold blood murders in Patiala today. On an average 3-4 murder taking place daily, people are in state of fear. Best way to discharge your duty is to dispense with it," he said in a tweet and shared a video clip of the incident.

Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann was in Mandi, Himachal Pradesh, on Wednesday where he joined national convener Arvind Kejriwal as the party kick-started its poll campaign in the state. Assembly polls in Himachal Pradesh are due later this year.

Singh also took on the AAP-led government, alleging that the recent spike in incidents of violence in Punjab was worrisome.

"Recent spike in incidents of violence in Punjab are very worrisome. @PunjabPoliceInd is perfectly capable of handling these situations, if they are given a free hand by the @PunjabGovtIndia to take strict action. No one should be allowed to disturb Punjab's hard earned peace," the former chief minister said in a tweet.

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US Secretary of State has spoken with External Affairs Minister over the phone to review regional and global priorities, including the latest developments in Ukraine, a State Department spokesperson has said.

Blinken and Jaishankar also agreed to remain closely coordinated on developments. It was the second telephonic conversation between Jaishankar and Blinken in a week that came amid increasing disquiet in the West over India's indication to buy larger volumes of discounted crude oil from Russia.

"Secretary of State Antony J Blinken spoke with Indian External Affairs Minister Dr Subrahmanyam Jaishankar today to review regional and global priorities, including the situation in Ukraine, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said on Tuesday.

"They agreed to remain closely coordinated on developments and looked forward to meeting again soon," Price said in a readout of the call.

Jaishankar and Blinken speak regularly over the phone and meet at frequent intervals.

"Spoke to @SecBlinken ahead of our 2+2 consultations. Discussed bilateral issues and latest developments pertaining to Ukraine," Jaishankar tweeted.

The conversation between the two top diplomats came ahead of the next edition of India-US '2+2' foreign and defence ministerial talks scheduled in Washington.

Jaishankar and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh are set to travel to Washington to hold talks with their American counterparts Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin.

The phone conversation between Jaishankar and Blinken came days after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov paid a two-day visit to India during which he said Moscow has begun moving toward conducting trade in national currencies with India and other partners to bypass the "impediments" of Western sanctions.

Last week, US Deputy National Security Adviser for International Economics Daleep Singh also visited India.

Talking to reporters in New Delhi, Singh had cautioned that there will be consequences for countries actively attempting to "circumvent or backfill" American sanctions against Moscow and that Washington would not like to see a "rapid" acceleration in India's import of energy and other commodities from Russia.

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A Damascus government agency quoted a Damascus police source as saying that 2 people were injured when an explosive device exploded in their car on southern highway in Damascus, and they were transferred to Al-Mujtahid Hospital.

Meanwhile, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that an explosion took place this morning, on southern highway in Damascus, near Mazzeh neighborhood.

According to SOHR' sources, the explosion was caused by an explosive device that exploded in a car, seriously wounding him, And the security services affiliated with Damascus government rushed to impose a security cordon at the explosion location and to remove the effects of the explosion.

Sh-S

ANHA
Pat Cummins of Kolkata Knight Riders plays a shot during match 14 of the Indian Premier League 2022 cricket tournament between the Kolkata Knight Riders and the Mumbai Indians, at the MCA International Stadium in Pune (Photo: PTI)

Premier pacer shone with the bat like never before, equalling the record for the fastest fifty in the IPL, including amassing 35 in an over, as Kolkata Knight Riders crushed by five wickets here on Wednesday.

Cummins blazed away to his fifty in just 14 balls, joining KL Rahul on the top of the leaderboard, while opener Venkatesh Iyer batted through the innings for his unbeaten 41-ball 50, as completed a chase of 162 with as many as four overs to spare.

It was unbelievable stuff from Cummins as KKR, needing 35 from 30 balls, got them all in just six deliveries with the Australian Test captain hitting six sixes and four boundaries in his 15-ball 56.

Daniel Sams bore the brunt of Cummins' onslaught the most, conceding 35 runs in the 16th over, which sealed it for .

Together with Iyer, Cummins, who came in at number six, shared 61 runs in just 2.1 overs to overhaul MI's total of 161 for four.

MI, thus, slumped to their third defeat in as many matches.

made a sedate start reaching 16 off the first four overs. The wickets of Ajinkya Rahane and skipper Shreyas Iyer made life difficult for KKR as they slumped to 35 for two in the sixth over.

Sam Billings made 17 off 12 balls before he dismissed by Murugam Ashwin.

Iyer, on the other hand, went about his business in his own way and kept the scoreboard ticking.

While Iyer stood firm at one end, wickets kept tumbling from the other as Nitish Rana failed once again, caught at deep midwicket by Sams off Ashwin.

Andre Russell played a five-ball 11-run knock before he left Iyer stranded, top-edging a Tymal Mills short delivery to Dewald Brevis.

Cummins then took the attack to the opposition and struck Mills for a boundary and a six of consecutive balls.

Having conceded 23 runs in the final over when MI batted, Cummins clobbered the MI bowlers to all parts of the ground to take KKR home in a grand fashion.

Earlier, veteran Kieron Pollard complemented Suryakumar Yadav's brisk half-century by amassing 23 runs in the last over to propel MI after KKR kept things tight for a major part of their innings.

After an 83-run fourth-wicket stand between Suryakumar Yadav (52) and Tilak Varma (38 not out), Pollard (22 not out) smashed the world's premier fast bowler for three sixes to end MI's innings on a high.

Opting to bowl first on a fresh pitch with plenty of grass, KKR's opening bowlers used the conditions to perfection as pacer Umesh Yadav (1/25) and debutant Rasikh Salam (0/18) relied on back of length deliveries to trouble MI's opening duo of skipper Rohit Sharma and Ishan Kishan.

Umesh and Cummins (2/49) picked up early wickets to reduce MI to 55 for three.

Umesh looked more threatening of the two as he consistently tested the high-profile MI opening batters with his probing length, producing a fantastic first over which yielded just one run.

Salam tried to match his senior pro.

Umesh struck first blood in the third over with a back-of-length delivery to get Rohit for the fifth time in IPL, with the MI skipper failing to control a pull.

Then came another debutant Dewald Brevis (29), known as 'Baby AB' for his 360 degree shot-making abilities, and he tried to attack the KKR bowlers.

He succeeded in his endeavour for a brief period, hitting two fours and as many sixes, but fell to Varun Chakravarthy (1/32).

All this while, MI's man-in-form Ishan Kishan (14 off 21) was a quiet spectator at the other end.

Unlike his last two innings, Kishan seemed to be struggling from the onset and a poor start didn't help his cause either.

Kishan's struggle came to an end in the 11th over when he miscued a pull off Cummins to KKR skipper Shreyas Iyer.

Varma got a reprieve in the 13th over when Ajinkya Rahane spooned him after a confusion with Billings.

Yadav struck a four and a huge six in the final two deliveries of the same over to give MI's innings some momentum.

Varma grabbed the missed chance with both hand and scooped Cummins over fine leg for a maximum and then followed it with a slash over mid-wicket for a boundary off Chakravarthy.

Yadav, on the other hand, looked in ominous form after returning from injury, dealing mostly in fours and sixes to notch up his fifty in 34 balls.

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It is not in India's "best interest" to continue investing in Russian military equipment, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin has told lawmakers, underscoring the Biden administration's desire that New Delhi scales down its dependence on Russian military equipment.

"We continue to work with them (India) to ensure that they understand that it's not in their -- we believe that -- it's not in their best interest to continue to invest in Russian equipment, Austin told the members of the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday during a Congressional hearing on the annual defence budget.

And our requirement going forward is that they downscale the types of equipment that they're investing in and look to invest more in the types of things that will make us continue to be compatible, Austin said.

The defence secretary was responding to a question from Congressman Joe Wilson, a friend of in the Congress who, of late, has been critical of deciding to take an independent position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Gruesomely, our treasured ally India, the world's largest democracy, is choosing to align itself with the Kremlin by choosing Russian weapons systems over American and allied options, Wilson said.

has faced flak from US lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats, for choosing to abstain from a UN votes to rebuke Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Unlike many other leading Western powers, India has not yet criticised for its invasion of Ukraine and it abstained from the votes at the UN platforms in condemning the Russian aggression.

US officials have expressed concern over India's purchase of the S-400 missile systems by .

What weapons platforms could we offer through the foreign military sales programme that would incentivise rush -- Indian leaders to reject Putin and align with its natural allies of democracy? he asked.

The United States has the finest weapons systems in the world and the most advanced weapons systems in the world, Austin said.

So, we have a range of capabilities that we can provide or offer (to India), said the defence secretary.

I look forward to you continuing to work with the great people of India. And what a great ally they can be if we eliminate some of the restrictions on sales, Wilson said.

In October 2018, India had signed a USD 5 billion deal with to buy five units of the S-400 Triumf air defence missile systems to ramp up its air defence, despite a warning from the then Trump administration that going ahead with the contract may invite US sanctions.

The US has already imposed sanctions on Turkey under the CAATSA for the purchase of a batch of S-400 missile defence systems from Russia.

In March, Donald Lu, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism that it was for the President Joe Biden to decide whether to apply or waive sanctions on India.

Lu said that the Biden administration is yet to decide on applying sanctions on India under CAATSA.

CAATSA is a tough US law which authorises the administration to impose sanctions on countries that purchase major defence hardware from Russia in response to Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its alleged meddling in the 2016 US presidential elections.

On Monday, the US Department of Defense said it is encouraged by Indian efforts to diversify the purchase of its military or defence articles.

We have been very clear with our Indian partners about our concerns over this purchase and encouraging them, as we urge many not to purchase Russian equipment, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby told reporters at a news conference.

We remain encouraged by India's continued diversification of their defense equipment over just the past decade. So, we will continue to have that conversation with India's needs, he said in response to a question.

We have made it very clear to India about our concern on this particular purchase, he said when asked about India's decision to buy the S-400 missile systems from Russia.

Despite strong objections from the US and threat of sanctions from the Biden administration, India has refused to make any changes in its decision and is going ahead with the purchase of the missile defense system.

India pursues an independent foreign policy and its defence acquisitions are guided by its national security interests, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said in November last year.

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In a major push towards defence indigenisation, will on Thursday unveil the third list of over 100 military systems and weapons that will be put under import restrictions under a staggered timeline of over three-and-a-half years.

The defence ministry said orders worth more than Rs 2,10,000 crore are likely to be placed on the Indian industry in the next five years as part of the items covered in the third list.

It said the list will comprise major equipment and platforms which are scheduled to be "completely indigenised" by December 2025.

The first "positive indigenisation" list of 101 items that included towed artillery guns, short-range surface-to-air missiles, cruise missiles and offshore patrol vessels was issued in August 2020.

In May last year, the government approved restrictions on the import of an additional 108 military weapons and systems such as next-generation corvettes, airborne early warning systems, tank engines and radars under a staggered timeline of four-and-half years.

"The third list will consist of over 100 items, including complex equipment and systems which are being developed and likely to translate into firm orders over the next five years.

"Orders worth more than Rs 2,10,000 crore are likely to be placed on the Industry in the next five years as part of the items covered in the third list," it said.

After unveiling of the third list, over 300 sophisticated items will be covered, ranging from complex weapon systems to critical platforms such as armoured vehicles, combat aircraft and submarines that will not be allowed to import under a specified timeline.

"Since the notification of the first and second lists, contracts for 31 projects worth Rs 53,839 crore have been signed by the armed forces. The Acceptance of Necessity (AoNs) for 83 projects worth Rs 1,77,258 crore have been accorded," the ministry said in a statement.

In addition, cases worth Rs 2,93,741 crore will be progressed in the next five-seven years, it said.

The ministry said the third list is a major initiative to achieve self-reliance in defence manufacturing and shows the growing confidence of the government in the domestic industry that they can create and supply equipment of international standards to meet the demand of the armed forces.

"The aim of 'Aatmanirbhar Bharat' as envisioned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to achieve sustained security, essential for a sovereign nation, without relying on imports from other countries," the ministry said.

"The objective is to build the domestic industry in order to make India a defence manufacturing hub which not only caters to the domestic needs but also fulfils international requirements," it said.

In the last few years, the government has taken a series of measures to promote domestic defence production.

India is one of the largest importers of arms globally. According to estimates, the Indian armed forces are projected to spend around USD 130 billion (one billion is equal to 100 crores) in capital procurement in the next five years.

The government now wants to reduce dependence on imported military platforms and has decided to support domestic defence manufacturing.

The defence ministry has set a goal of a turnover of USD 25 billion (Rs 1.75 lakh crore) in defence manufacturing in the next five years that including an export target of USD 5 billion (Rs 35,000 crore) worth of military hardware.

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The first case of XE, a more transmissible COVID-19 variant, was detected in on Wednesday, officials of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) said.

But the data of the patient, a South African resident who has recovered from the infection since, will be sent to the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics (NIBGM) for further confirmation, a civic official said later.

The Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG) experts were conducting genomic analysis of the case reported as that of XE variant by civic officials though scientific evidence so far does not indicate it to be so, official sources said.

A woman who arrived from South Africa in February was found to have this sub-variant, officials claimed earlier, adding that she was asymptomatic and recovered from the infection.

Besides, a case of the Kappa variant of was also detected during a sero survey, a official said, adding the results came in genome sequencing of 376 samples, the 11th batch of testing in the local genome sequencing lab.

Kappa cases have been found in the city earlier too, she added.

As per the sero survey, was found in 228 out of 230 samples (99.13 per cent) collected from . One case was of XE, and another of Kappa.

The genome sequencing of 376 samples was conducted at the municipal Kasturba Hospital's Genome Sequencing Lab.

The condition of the patients found infected with the new strains of the virus was not serious, the official said.

As controversy arose over the accuracy of the BMC's finding, a civic official said late at night that the Kasturba Hospital's Genome Sequencing Lab's head Dr Jayavanti Shashtri participated in the INSACGO meeting, and was asked to send the sequencing data for further confirmation to the NIBMG.

Mumbai on Tuesday reported 56 COVID-19 cases, a three-fold rise from a day earlier, which took the infection count in the country's financial capital to 10,58,185.

The death toll remained unchanged at 19,559 as no new fatality was recorded, while the recovery count rose by 36 to touch 10,38,356, leaving the metropolis with 270 active cases.

A official said the XE variant appears to be 10 per cent more transmissible than the BA.2 sub-variant of . So far, BA.2 was deemed to be the most contagious of all the COVID-19 variants.

The XE variant is a mutation of the BA.1 and BA.2 Omicron strains, referred to as a "recombinant.

As per the initial studies, the XE variant has a growth rate of 9.8 percent over that of BA.2, also known as the stealth variant because of its ability to evade detection.

The World Health Organization has said the latest mutant may be more transmissible than the previous ones. Mangala Gomare, executive health officer of the BMC, told PTI that the woman who was found to have contacted the XE variant had arrived from South Africa and tested positive for infection three weeks after arriving.

"She was asymptomatic and tested negative the next day," Gomare said.

The woman, who is a costume designer, was a member of a film shooting crew. She arrived from South Africa on February 10, 2022.

"She did not have any travel history prior to that. She had been vaccinated with both doses of the COMIRNATY vaccine," the official said, adding that she suffered from no co-morbidities.

On arrival in India she tested negative for COVID-19, but on March 2, she tested positive during routine testing. In the subsequent test, she tested negative.

She had been quarantined in a hotel rook during this period.

As to whether it was the first case of the XE variant detected in India, BMC officials said they could not confirm this.

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Union Bank of India on Wednesday said it will sell its 8 per cent stake in India SME Asset Reconstruction Company.

on Wednesday said it will sell its 8 per cent stake in India SME Asset Reconstruction Company.

"The bank has executed an agreement on April 6, 2022 for sale of its 8 per cent stake in India SME Asset Reconstruction Company Limited (ISARC) in favour of Dhansamridhi Finance," the bank said in a regulatory filing.

The stake sale is subject to obtaining requisite regulatory approvals, it said.

ISARC is the country's first ARC supported by a large number of public sector banks and undertakings, focussed on NPA resolution of the MSME sector.

The ARC is sponsored by SIDBI, Bank of Baroda, Punjab National Bank, and Venture Capital Ltd.

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(Reuters) - Corp investor Investment Partners is pushing the Japanese company's board to take a trio of actions before its annual general meeting, including seeking interest from buyout firms.

In a letter to the company's board on Wednesday, the Singapore-based fund also asked to disclose a mid-range plan that reflects opportunity and consult with shareholders over the board's composition.

owns a 7.6% stake in Toshiba, according to data from Refinitiv.

The letter comes after nearly 60% of shareholders voted in March against a plan to spin off its devices business.

3D's separate call for a private-equity buyout was rejected last month by just short of 55% of shareholders who voted.

(Reporting by Eva Mathews and Chavi Mehta in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D'Silva)

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New Delhi [India], April 6 (ANI/NewsVoir): Receiving a strong positive validation of our People. Planet. Paint. company purpose, AkzoNobel India has been awarded the Great Place to Work Certification (March 2022 to March 2023).

This recognition is proof that AkzoNobel's purpose-led 'People' initiatives are reaping employee trust and forging a work culture that is fair, respectful and credible.

"We know that employees are the most important asset, and being Great Place to Work-Certified reiterates AkzoNobel's strong commitment to investing in its people. As we grow together and build the AkzoNobel of the future, we will continue to bring new best practices where our employees feel included and valued, while also enabling them to bring their best selves to work every day," says Rajiv Rajgopal, Managing Director AkzoNobel India.

Great Place to Work Institute's research shows that great workplaces are characterized by great leadership, consistent employee experience, and sustainable financial performance. These organizations are able to deliver a consistent experience to all their employees irrespective of their role, gender, tenure or level in the organization. Their leaders believe in the vision of creating and sustaining a Great Place to Work FOR ALLTM and role model being 'FOR ALL' Leaders.

"As a global frontrunner, we're passionate about providing a great work experience where our high-performing diverse talent thrives, while living our core values of Safety, Integrity and Sustainability. We're acting on our commitment to make our workplace increasingly diverse and inclusive through hybrid-work model, returnee mother policy, Women Inspired Networks (WIN) and more such initiatives. At the same time, through 'AkzoNobel Cares', we continue to bolster our employee wellbeing and build relationships with each other with our societal volunteering activities. At the end, it distils to our brilliant people, who make AkzoNobel India Limited a great place to work," said Anushree Singh*, Country HR Head, AkzoNobel India (*transitioning to a new role as Global Project Manager for Employer Value Proposition at AkzoNobel).

Great Place to Work is the global authority on workplace culture. Since 1992, they have surveyed more than 100 million employees worldwide and used those deep insights to define what makes a great workplace: trust. Great Place to Work Trust Index(c) Survey empowers leaders with the feedback, real-time reporting, and insights they need to make strategic people decisions.

The Institute serves businesses, non-profits and government agencies in more than 60 countries and has conducted pioneering research on the characteristics of great workplaces for over three decades. In India, the institute partners with more than 1100 organizations annually across over 22 industries to help them build High-Trust, High-Performance Cultures designed to deliver sustained business results.

We supply the sustainable and innovative paints and coatings that our customers, communities - and the environment - are increasingly relying on. That's why everything we do starts with People. Planet. Paint. Our world class portfolio of brands - including Dulux, International, Sikkens and Interpon - is trusted by customers around the globe. We're active in more than 150 countries and have set our sights on becoming the global industry leader. It's what you'd expect from a pioneering paints company that's committed to science-based targets and is taking genuine action to address globally relevant challenges and protect future generations.

For more information, please visit (https://www.akzonobel.com).

AkzoNobel India has been present in India for over 60 years and is a significant player in the paints industry. In 2008, the company became a member of the AkzoNobel Group. With employee strength of around 1,500, AkzoNobel India has manufacturing sites, offices and a distribution network spread across the country.

All manufacturing facilities have a state-of-the-art environmental management system. Its commitment to Health, Safety, Environment and Security (HSE & S) has been among the best-in-class globally, with due care being taken to protect people and the environment.

For more information, please visit (https://www.akzonobel.co.in).

This story is provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/NewsVoir)

DISCLAIMER

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The launch of Tata Groups super app signals its continuing focus on the e-commerce segment, as it attempts to take on Amazon and Jio platforms. At the same time, the Tatas are doubling down on their consumer-facing businesses, which is likely to complement its super app play. In particular, the group is looking at synergies. For example, Air Indias acquisition is likely to help a host of group entities  from TCS to the Tata Neu super app  to cross-sell products to the captive airline customers. As of October 2021, the group was also exploring opportunities for cross-sell Indian Hotels and Tata Capital offerings to Air Indias customers and crew. The idea is to tap into Air Indias three million frequent flier customer base, which can be leveraged to offer discounted products. The group has also acquired like 1MG, Big Basket and made inroads into online fitness, which will add value to the new . The 2021 acquisition of Big Basket cemented Tatas foray into the online grocery market. In June 2021, Tata Digital had acquired a majority stake in e-pharmacy 1mg, putting it in direct competition with Reliance-owned Netmeds. The same month, Tata Digital signed a 75 million dollars deal with CureFit Healthcare.

As part of the deal, CureFit Founder and CEO Mukesh Bansal joined Tata Digital in an executive role as President. The group, however, is also turning its focus on other segments. Last December, reports emerged that the was planning to tap on the growing domestic cosmetics market, which is estimated be worth 20 billion dollars by 2025. In an interview, Trent Non-Executive Chairman Noel Tata had said that beauty products, along with footwear and innerwear, would be a focus area for the group. Trent Ltd, which operates Westside retail stores, is a company. Noel Tata recently told a financial daily that the Tata super app could lead to a potential 10-fold increase in the number of customers for Westside. Thus, Tatas foray into consumer businesses like Air India, Big Basket and the beauty market together with other established brands under Tata Consumer, will directly benefit the groups digital play with Tata Neu. The Reliance and Tata super apps are geared up for a much-anticipated battle royale. While Tata has the advantage of in-house products and brands, RIL has the backing of biggies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook.
In June of 2020, just days after the International Criminal Court or decided to launch a probe into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, the then US president Donald Trump issued an executive order imposing sanctions on officials involved in probing Americans.

The United States is not a state party to the . And its citizens cannot be tried in the court.

Two years later, as Russian fighter jets bombed Ukraine, leaving scores of civilians dead, western countries led by the United States want its president to be tried for war crimes.

It is clear that civilians withstand the worst of wars.

Keeping that in mind, protection of civilians has been made central to humanitarian law, which regulates how a war is supposed to be conducted. Presently, the Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice are involved in upholding the rules of war.

Since civilian casualties have taken place in all recent conflicts, without any of those being labelled as war crimes, you might be wondering exactly what amounts to being a war crime.

For example, the bombing of say a school or a theatre might cause global outrage. But these actions might still not be called war crimes.

This is because a war crime is said to have occurred only when unnecessary injury and suffering is caused by one or more belligerents engaged in a conflict.

Lets consider our earlier example. The bombing of the hypothetical school or theatre will be considered a war crime only if the extent of civilian casualties is excessive, compared to the military advantage gained.

There are three main pillars of humanitarian law. First, is the principle of distinction, which requires distinguishing between civilians and combatants. Second, is the principle of proportionality, which prohibits military actions that would cause incidental loss of civilian life that would be excessive when compared to the military advantage gained. And, third, is the principle of precaution, under which the parties to a conflict must avoid or minimise harm to civilians. If any one or all of these principles are not adhered to, it could be said that a war crime has occurred.

Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention defines war crimes as wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including  wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person  taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly

War crime was defined in the Geneva Conventions, as wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including  wilfully causing suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person 

Civilians, along with infrastructure vital to their survival, cannot be deliberately attacked. The sick and the wounded have to be cared for. This includes injured enemy soldiers, who have rights as prisoners of war.

The ICC is supposed to investigate and prosecute individual war criminals who are not standing before the courts of individual states.

While the ICJ deals with disputes between states, it cannot prosecute individuals. Ukraine has begun a case against Russia at the ICJ. If the ICJ were to rule against Russia, its the UN Security Council that would be responsible for enforcing that ruling.

However, Russia is one of the councils five permanent members and would veto any proposal to sanction it.
190 Iranian lawmakers urge president to get firmer U.S. guarantees in nuke talks

Xinhua) 08:44, April 06, 2022

TEHRAN, April 5 (Xinhua) -- More than 190 Iranian lawmakers on Tuesday urged President Ebrahim Raisi to get firmer guarantees from the United States in the Vienna talks on restoring the 2015 nuclear deal.

The lawmakers put forward the demand in a letter addressed to the Iranian president, calling for full observance of the Islamic republic's red lines and safeguarding its people's interests in the talks, according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency.

Parliamentarian Ahmad Hossein Fallahi, who collected the signatures for the petition, confirmed that over 190 lawmakers had signed the letter.

In July 2015, Iran signed the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with world powers, under which Iran agreed to curb its nuclear program in exchange for easing the U.S.-led sanctions. However, the U.S. government under former President Donald Trump unilaterally quitted the pact in May 2018 and reimposed sanctions on Iran, prompting the latter to reduce its nuclear commitments in retaliation.

Since April 2021, eight rounds of talks on reviving the deal have been held in the Austrian capital of Vienna by Iran and the remaining JCPOA parties, namely China, Britain, France, Russia and Germany. The United States has been indirectly involved in the talks, which are reportedly nearing an agreement.

One of the remaining obstacles includes Iran's demand for U.S. guarantees that its succeeding governments would not quit the deal again.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
Residents of the neighborhood who spoke to ANHAs agency described the policies of the Damascus Government as "starvation policies", and called on the concerned authorities to intervene to "prevent a humanitarian catastrophe."

Citizen Zainab Omar said that preventing the flour supply, and consequently the loss of bread, caused many problems for the people of the neighborhood.

During her talk, Zainab wondered about the law on which the Damascus Government relies to prevent the entry of flour supplies, and "deprive 200,000 people of bread."

She also said, "This is a crime. There are dozens of children without bread today, in this holy month."

As for the citizen Khadija Suleiman, she said that the Kurds all over the world are subjected to extermination in all forms. She said that what the people of Sheikh Maqsoud neighborhood are subjected to today is "extermination through starvation and preventing bread from the people."

As for the citizen Khadija Suleiman, she said that the Kurds all over the world are subjected to extermination in all forms. She said that what the people of Sheikh Maqsoud neighborhood are subjected to today is "extermination through starvation and preventing bread from the people."

Khadija appealed to all Islamic countries and organizations in this holy month to intervene and support the defenseless people, open roads and put pressure on the Damascus Government to allow the supply of flour to the people.

Citizen Omar Jijak noted that the issue of the siege is not a new one, and said that the residents of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh neighborhoods are constantly exposed to these policies. Where basic materials such as flour and fuels in particular are cut off.

Jijak appealed to "all living consciences to intervene and hold accountable the perpetrators who bargained for the people's bread."

T/S

ANHA
China has set up the worlds highest automatic weather station on Mount Everest as part of the Peak Mission scientific expedition launched April 28. The weather station sits over 8,800 meters above sea level on the worlds highest mountain, known locally as Mount Qomolangma. More than 270 researchers participated in the expedition, among whom 13 reached the summit on Wednesday. The team is the first to make the famous climb from China this year

May 06, 2022 08:15 PM
European Union Expansion is hampered by the newly elected leaders of Serbia and Hungary, who are leaning toward the Russian federation but are still in keeping with the bloc.

Most bloc members are supposed to support what Brussels, particularly, has in mind for its political agenda.One objective of expanding and co-opting former eastern bloc members is to intentionally isolate Russian according to US and NATO interests in particular.

Presidential Elections in Serbia, Hungary

Serbian President Aleksandar Vui swept a landslide victory, just as Hungary's right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban was elected by an overwhelming majority of Hungarians, much to the Dismay of the EU, reported the Express UK.

The EU will have more trouble pushing the western agenda connected to the Ukraine war with pro-Vladimir Putin groups not okay with the bloc's stand.

Winning with 60 percent in Serbia, Vucic has a mandate that cannot be denied in Sunday's presidential election, cited NPR.

According to a near-complete tally by state election authorities, his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) garnered 43 percent of the votes in parliamentary elections. Opposition to the elected Serbian leader, United Serbia, was ripped apart in the polls with only 13 percent of the total ballots.

Compared to the triumphant SNS candidate, the opposition party candidate Zdravko Ponos did not capture voters and got a measly 17 percent of the total vote.

One of the promises by the elected leader during elections is to maintain Belgrade's relationship with the Kremlin, even amid the Ukraine war. Refuse to be part of a European Union expansion that is only for western interests.

Read Also: Vladimir Putin Net Worth 2022: Does Anyone Know Russian President's Hidden Wealth?

Though still in EU membership negotiations, the other members of the EU will not like one member supporting Russia while it's trying to sanction Russia into the ground.

Serbian loyalty to the Kremlin in the east is not conducive to the stand of anti-Moscow members who want a 100 percent consensus.

Belgrade has entered agreements with China in the steel industry, which Brussel's leaders are not happy with due to the unnecessary influence wielded by China should the country gain full member status.

EU Gets More Divided

Though still not fully inducted into the bloc, Serbia has been resistant to join others in actively sanctioning Russian President Vladimir Putin because they have a divergent view.

One more stumbling bloc to getting a whole consensus among full EU members is the victory of Viktor Orban, who is hostile to what he sees as unjust sanctions. His win on Sunday will not make Brussel's too pleased for its agenda.

Despite what the EU and US have done to portray Putin, Orban has dismissed everything else but expressed support for Moscow, even calling the bloc's energy policy flawed. An extension of the Hungarian leader's administration has been a roadblock for the EU and has not managed to win its confidence.

Volodymyr Zelensky's rants against Hungary for not supporting Kyiv's plight only got a terse response from the Hungarian leader, noted Axios. He does not support the claims of the alleged killing of civilians pushed by NATO. Orban is at odds with the woke leaders of the EU who are concerned about gender; that is not acceptable.

The EU frowns on what they see as a preference for Putin and the former US President Donald Trump and the rule of law and sending funds to his alleged cronies.

European Union expansion is not going well in its preference for western interests, especially that of the failing US administration. Serbia and Hungary are opposed to it and will not agree on all issues with the bloc.

Related Article: Vladimir Putin Orders To Cut Off Germany's Gas Supply Due to Western Sanctions

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The leaders of Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, collectively known as AUKUS, have decided to collaborate on hypersonic weapons and electronic warfare capabilities.

The development comes after the three countries formed the AUKUS defense alliance in September last year, prompting Australia to cancel a contract for a conventional French submarine in favor of a nuclear submarine program backed by the US and the UK, causing a rift with French President Emmanuel Macron.

Australia To Build Hypersonic Missiles With US, UK

The AUKUS leaders - UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, US President Joe Biden, and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison - said in a joint statement on Tuesday that they were pleased with the progress of the program for conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines for Australia, and that the allies would work together in other areas as well, according to Aljazeera.

The weaponry would help safeguard Australia in an uncertain Indo-Pacific, according to Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. "These are the latest and high-tech missiles that we're talking about. It's not like they've been in operation for a decade or so," he explained. The missiles have a range of 2,000 kilometers and move at five times the speed of sound.

The United States and Australia already have a hypersonic weapon program named SCIFiRE (Southern Cross Integrated Flight Research Experiment). Officials added that while the United Kingdom would not join the initiative at this time, the three countries would collaborate on research and development in the area to broaden their choices.

As a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February, President Joe Biden's government is investing in the research and development of hypersonic missiles, which move at five times the speed of sound. On February 24, Russia announced the start of a special military operation in Ukraine to demilitarize its neighbor. Ukraine and the West reject the Kremlin's position as an excuse for an unjustified attack.

When asked about a hypersonic weapons cooperation agreement between the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia, China's UN Ambassador Zhang Jun warned against steps that may ignite a crisis similar to the Ukraine conflict in other regions of the world, as per SBS News.

Read Also: Global Fury Grows Over Russia's Atrocities in Bucha; President Joe Biden Urges War Crime Trial Following Spread of 'Genocide' Images

AUKUS Also Seeks To Develop Technologies

London, Washington, and Canberra are also attempting to collaborate in areas like as cyber and quantum technologies, artificial intelligence, and robot submarines, all of which are areas in which Western democracies are competing with competitor countries for the upper hand.

The AUKUS accord sparked uproar in Paris when it was first announced, as the submarine deal replaced a prior proposal for France to provide Australia with diesel-electric boats. After keeping the launch under wraps for two weeks to avoid worsening tensions with Russia, the US said Tuesday that it had successfully test-fired a hypersonic missile.

The Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) flew at speeds faster than Mach 5 for more than 300 miles above 65,000 feet, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The time of the test was not mentioned in the DARPA statement, but it occurred when President Biden was about to fly to Brussels last month.

Biden traveled to Belgium for an emergency NATO conference before heading to Poland to meet with Polish President Andrzej Duda, Ukrainian refugees, and US troops. The HAWC's debut last month was the second successful test, with the first taking place in September, New York Post reported.

Related Article: Emmanuel Macron Will Mold the European Union Into a Stronger Bloc If He Wins the Election

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The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was one of the largest that the United States and the world have ever seen and has come under fire after the discovery of a $6 million Southern California home being bought using funds from the organization's donations.

A video last June, recorded by three leaders of the social justice movement, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Melina Abdullah, showed them outside the "secretly bought" home. At the time, they marked the first anniversary of George Floyd's murder.

Maybe I am overthinking it but the fact that a mass movement that raised $90 million (likely more than that but it's what we know of) produced no discernible change for Black individuals feels like something we should be talking about more  professional internet user (@quidditch424) April 4, 2022

BLM $6 Million Home

Cullors previously said that she was weeks removed from being in "survival mode" after an exclusive report in April last year that revealed the purchase of four high-end U.S. homes worth $3.2 million. She said that the criticisms were directed at them because the movement was winning and that they were threatening the establishment and white supremacy.

. @TheLeoTerrell is right  BLMs $90 million dollar shakedown didnt help Black Americans; it exploited them. pic.twitter.com/Krstf4X4iP  Kelly Loeffler (@KLoeffler) April 5, 2022

Ive been housing insecure for YEARS while people who built careers off my work and others buy mansion after mansion.



Disgusting isnt the word.



If Black people had any protection, wed have recourse against vultures like the women that control BLM. https://t.co/PMcSgU9ezs  ashley yates (@brownblaze) April 5, 2022

If youre surprised to find out that #BLM is full of shit, you werent listening. https://t.co/XMlQ0rlJsW  Shemeka Michelle (@ShemekaMichelle) April 5, 2022

However, what Cullors and her colleagues did not reveal were the details of the upscale home that was behind them in the video. The property is a 6,500-square-foot spread that had more than six bedrooms and bathrooms, fireplaces, a pool, and parking for more than 20 vehicles, as per the New York Post.

The purchase of the large home was not reported and BLM leadership was hoping to keep its existence a secret from the public. However, documents, emails, and other communications regarding the home's purchase and day-to-day operation suggest that it was handled with care and secrecy.

Read Also: Virginia Multimillionaire's Son Sentenced to 18 Years for Sexually Exploiting Multiple Minors

The situation suggests that some of the money donated to the social justice movement may have been used by BLM leaders personally. On Mar. 30, the organization was questioned regarding the house, prompting a reply from Shalomyah Bowers in an email statement.

According to the New York Magazine, the BLMGNF board member said that the organization purchased the home with the intention of making it serve as housing and studio space for recipients of the Black Joy Creators Fellowship. The group announced the fellowship, which they said provided recording resources and dedicated space for Black creatives, the next morning.

Internal Memo

An internal memo from the BLM movement read that they tried to angle the purchase of the home to hide their true intentions. It read, "our angle - needs to be to deflate ownership of the property. Another suggestion included a question, "can we kill the story?"

The same memo allegedly included bullet points about the Campus, such as how it is used by the "cultural arm" of the organization and could be used as an influencer house and a safe house. Furthermore, the memo reportedly acknowledged that there were holes in what is called the "security story," because the house would be used for publicly available YouTube videos.

An activist based in Ferguson, Missouri, said in an interview that the purchase of the home was a waste of resources. They had reportedly been trying to raise enough money to build a community center in Ferguson and had been asking for help from the BLMGNF in the form of financial contributions, Fox News reported.

Related Article: Queen Elizabeth Faces Jubilee Disaster; Prince William, Kate Middleton Move to Windsor as Royals Fear Prince Andrew Is Using Her Majesty

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The US Army is looking into whether a medevac pilot intentionally crashed two Black Hawk helicopters at a Georgia base last month.

On March 30, Capt. James Bellew, 26, was on medevac duty at the Wright Army Airfield, a dual-use airfield serving Fort Stewart and the city of Hinesville in Georgia when two HH-60 Black Hawk helicopters collided at about 2 am.

Double Helicopter Crash at Fort Stewart Allegedly Intentional

He was discovered dead at the collision scene the next morning. According to Col. Lindsey Elder, a spokeswoman for the 3rd Infantry Division, Bellew was the only crewmember engaged in the event, and he was the only one injured or died in the incident, as per Army Times.

The combat aviation brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division is based at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, about 30 miles northeast of Wright. In the event of an emergency on the bigger post, MedEvac teams rotate through 24/7 duty shifts at Wright.

It's unknown how he managed to start at least one of the helicopters without waking up the crew or otherwise alerting anyone who could have been there, such as emergency medical professionals or air traffic control officials. According to Elder, the service's Criminal Investigation Division is investigating the collision.

The presence of the CID suggests criminal involvement, as the Combat Readiness Center is generally in charge of standard accent inquiries under Army regulations. According to the Army Times, it would only defer to the CID if the occurrence in issue was judged to be the consequence of criminal conduct.

Read Also: Russian Troops Flee Chernobyl Amid Possible 'Acute Radiation Sickness,' Ukrainian Officials Claim

Army Identifies Fort Stewart Soldier Who Died in Helicopter Incident

The probe comes after many ideas about the incident surfaced on social media, including one that claimed the planes were deliberately destroyed. Bellew of Charlottesville, Virginia, joined the Army through the University of Virginia's ROTC program in 2017 and served as a medical service officer in South Korea until being chosen for the medevac pilot program in 2019.

According to Military.com, he had been stationed at Fort Stewart since March 2020 and had served as a platoon leader in his unit, where medevac pilots train at the neighboring Wright Army Airfield. Moving dangerously ill COVID-19 patients to off-post medical institutions was one of his everyday responsibilities.

Various accounts of what happened next have surfaced in closed social media groups and a now-deleted blog post. However, all of the accounts depicted the incident as a deliberate demolition of both planes. The specifics of the crash sequence and Bellew's objectives could not be independently verified by Army Times.

In addition to other service honors and ribbons, Bellew got an Army Achievement Medal, the Expert Field Medical Badge, and the Army Aviator Badge during his tenure in the military. Former subordinates remember him as a kind and powerful boss, and condolences have poured in on social media.

Bellew's services to the US Army and his unselfish commitment to the profession will forever be remembered by the brothers and sisters with whom he served,' stated the University of Virginia ROTC program on March 31, and Luis B. Blanchard noted that he trained with Bellew, as per Daily Mail.

Related Article: North Korea Blasts South's Missile Claims Says Seoul May Face Serious Threat; Kim Jong Un's Sister Enraged by Defense Minister's Comments

@YouTube

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Maine Sen. Susan Collins criticized Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's accusation that she and two other Republican lawmakers who supported the confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson were "pro-pedophile."

The Georgia official launched the outlandish attack on Monday and echoes her past support for the QAnon conspiracy theory that claims former U.S. President Donald Trump was working to "take down" a powerful cabal of child traffickers. The suspects were typically portrayed as the Democratic elite.

Collins vs Greene

People who believed in the theory, which was already debunked, claim that the Democratic Party supported pedophiles. Collins' support for Jackson was echoed by Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah. The final vote for U.S. President Joe Biden's nominee is expected later this week.

Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley was the first to accuse Jackson of being light in her sentencing of child porn offenders, remarks that were made during the nominee's confirmation hearings. The issue became a running theme among Republicans despite multiple analyses showing that the Black woman's rulings were within the mainstream of her fellow judges, as per Yahoo News.

On Tuesday, Collins said that Greene's Twitter post was something that people have already come to expect. She said that the accusation did not trouble her because it had no hint of truth behind it.

Many experts and fact-checkers have called the statements saying that Jackson was lenient on child porn offenders misleading, typical of other federal judges, and lacking context. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz joined in on the accusations in some of the tense moments of Jackson's hearings.

Read Also: McConnell Expresses Opposition to Biden's SC Nominee, Calling Jackson's Sentencing Record 'Troubling'

According to People, Greene has had a history of headline-making behavior on social media platforms and has continued to express support for QAnon conspiracies. However, the lawmaker later regretted her support for the theory, saying she should be allowed to believe in things that were not true.

Ketanji Brown Jackson's Confirmation

The Senate Judiciary Committee tied on Jackson's confirmation at 11-11, which prompted Democrats to use an unusual procedure that would force the nomination out of the panel. The proposal gained majority support of 53-47.

Murkowski expressed her support of Jackson in a statement saying that her decision was made partly to reject the "corrosive politicization of the review process for Supreme Court nominees, which, on both sides of the aisle, is growing worse and more detached from reality by the year."

The Alaska official praised Jackson's qualifications, which she said no one questioned, her demonstrated judicial independence, her demeanor and temperament, and the important perspective she would bring to the country's highest court.

In Romney's statement, he called the nominee a "well-qualified jurist and a person of honor," and came after another contentious day in the Judiciary Committee. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that lawmakers should not be resorting to the drastic move but argued that it was needed to move Jackson's confirmation forward.

On Monday, GOP lawmakers called Jackson a progressive activist who was soft on crime while Democrats praised her qualifications and experiences, saying that she deserved to be confirmed to the Supreme Court, the New York Times reported.



Related Article: Ketanji Brown Jackson Moves Closer to SC Confirmation After Gaining Some Republican Support

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Palestinians living in large cities in the West Bank went to the polls on March 26 in a peaceful and well-administered exercise to elect municipal councils. A Carter Center election expert mission found that virtually all the major cities in the West Bank experienced competitive electoral contests, notwithstanding a formal boycott by Hamas and a highly challenging political and electoral environment, marked by frequent human rights violations, including intimidation and harassment of political actors.

While the administrative framework supports the conduct of genuine elections, more must be done to ensure respect for Palestinian human rights. The Carter Center urges Palestinian leaders to take immediate steps to create the conditions necessary for citizens in the West Bank and Gaza to fully exercise their fundamental freedoms, including their political and electoral rights. Palestinians should enjoy the right to choose their leaders in regular, periodic national elections, absent harassment or intimidation, and to speak and assemble freely without fear of retribution, whether from Israelis, Palestinian security forces, or other political actors.

The March 26 polls were the second phase of municipal elections and were administered in West Bank cities with populations of more than 15,000; a first phase was conducted on Dec. 11, 2021, in small towns and villages. The municipal elections were scheduled following the last-minute cancellation of national elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council and presidency in May 2021. They provided West Bank Palestinians an opportunity to select local council officials. However, Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, prevented the occurrence of municipal elections there.

In July 2021, shortly after the cancellation of the national elections, The Carter Center issued a statement strongly criticizing their indefinite postponement and proposing a series of steps to promote the conduct of credible polls that would renew the democratic mandate of Palestinian elected officials and help ensure that elected officials represent Palestinians current needs and wants. Such elections are particularly important because at least 40 percent of the voting-eligible population was too young to participate in the last national elections, held in 2006. Even though little progress has been made to facilitate national elections, The Carter Center deployed an election expert mission to assess the municipal races.

The expert mission was duly accredited by the Central Election Commission (CEC). Its threefold mandate was to assess: a) the legal and administrative framework for the municipal elections; b) the degree of political engagement, competition, and respect for the participatory rights of voters and candidates in the process, including in the online environment; and c) the implications of these elections for future Palestinian electoral exercises. During its March 14 to April 7 deployment, a four-person team met with individuals and groups in the West Bank and Gaza, speaking with CEC members and senior staff, Palestinian Authority officials, candidates from various lists, representatives of leading Palestinian civil society organizations  including those monitoring human rights and the electoral process  various analysts of Palestinian affairs, and members of the international community.

The team will soon issue a full report that assesses the electoral environment, legal framework, online environment, political space, and dynamics of democratic participation in West Bank and Gaza. In the spirit of support for strengthening democratic participation among Palestinians, the report will offer recommendations to improve future processes.

Like previous West Bank municipal elections, the 2021-2022 polls took place in a challenging political environment, including the continued Israeli occupation, the longstanding political impasse between the two leading Palestinian political movements (Fatah and Hamas), and the continued erosion of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms in both the West Bank and Gaza.

This round of elections was conducted in 50 municipalities, with 234 lists and 2,306 candidates competing for seats. During a two-week formal campaign period, candidates for the local councils solicited the support of voters through posters, public debates, and social media. Nonetheless, restrictive legal provisions on freedoms of expression and assembly, the impact of the Nizar Banat case, the arrests of various candidates by Israeli authorities, and the fears caused by a repressive political environment cast a shadow over a technically well-administered electoral process and hindered the full expression of citizens rights.

According to the CEC, turnout in this phase was 53.8 percent, and 64.4 percent of the council seats were won by candidates associated with independent lists  although several candidates on these lists were informally associated with existing parties. A quota system ensured that women make up 18 percent of the seats in the new councils. Following the CEC announcement of the final results, each local council will begin the process of selecting a mayor and formally operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Local Government.

According to the Carter Centers expert mission, Palestinian interlocutors expressed hope that the elections would lay the groundwork for much-anticipated national elections or a third phase of municipal elections in the Gaza Strip. Many, however, voiced skepticism about the political will to make this happen and said they were hard-pressed to envision a scenario that allows for a credible, democratically elected government to reassert control over the Palestinian Authority in the near future. While acknowledging that the recent polls provided West Bank Palestinians an important opportunity to reinvigorate municipal council leadership, candidates and voters alike expressed doubt that municipal elections will mark the beginning of a more consistent affirmation of democratic rights.

Virtually all Palestinian stakeholders agree that reconciliation between the major parties, Fatah and Hamas, is essential. Ultimately, Palestinian political leaders must decide whether elections will serve as the mechanism for achieving this goal, or whether some form of reconciliation must occur for national elections to be meaningful.

Several stakeholders suggested that scheduling municipal elections in Gaza could serve as a confidence-building measure and would allow the population there to participate in an electoral exercise for the first time since 2006. The CEC and other institutions should be ready to administer such elections on short notice, even as they also prepare for the much-anticipated national elections.

The Carter Center calls on international actors to respect the fundamental rights of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to choose their national leaders and to help promote a renewal of democratic governance in the Palestinian Territories.

Translations

 :                

Contact: In Atlanta, Soyia Ellison, soyia.ellison@cartercenter.org

In Ramallah, Qais Asad, qaisassad@cartercenter.org

Waging Peace. Fighting Disease. Building Hope.

A not-for-profit, nongovernmental organization, The Carter Center has helped to improve life for people in over 80 countries by resolving conflicts; advancing democracy, human rights, and economic opportunity; preventing diseases; and improving mental health care. The Carter Center was founded in 1982 by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, in partnership with Emory University, to advance peace and health worldwide.
The production is presented by Toho Co., the legendary Tokyo-based production, sales and distribution company which has handled Miyazakis work as well as countless other Japanese live-action and animated classics, including many Godzilla films as well as most of Akira Kurosawas work.

According to Hulu Japan, the performances will take place live on Hulu July 3 and 4 as the show finishes its domestic Japanese run at the Misonoza Theater in Nagoya, after stops in Fukuoka and Sapporo. The reason for the two performances is that the stage play uses the Japanese double cast system, meaning there are two actors for each role.

For shows on July 3 and 4 respectively, lead roles will be played by Kanna Hashimoto and Mone Kamishiraishi (Chihiro), Kotaro Daigo and Hiroki Miura (Haku), Koharu Sugawara and Tomohiko Tsujimoto (No Face), Miyu Sakihi and Fu Hinami (Lin/Chihiros Mother), Tomorowo Taguchi and Satoshi Hashimoto (Kamaji), and Mari Natsuki  a voice actor in the original film  and Romi Park (Yubaba/Zenibaba).

When the stage production was announced last year, Studio Ghiblis Toshio Suzuki, producer of the original film, was full of praise for Caird and his work. He also recalled that Miyazaki himself gave the go-ahead for the stage production almost immediately upon meeting Caird and hearing the pitch.

Caird was equally acclamatory when referring to the legendary filmmakers body of work, praising his stories emotional and intellectual integrity as well as Miyazakis knack for accessing the psyche of children that makes him equal with some of the great storytellers like Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Caroll. I think he will go down in history as one of the greatest storytellers.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified The Walt Disney Company as operator of Hulu Japan. The streaming service is not operated by Disney; it is owned and operated by Nippon Television Network Corporation.

Photo at top courtesy Toby Olie and Toho Stage
Photo: The Canadian Press A processing unit at Suncor Fort Hills facility in Fort McMurray, Alta., on September 10, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson

Suncor Energy Inc. is getting out of the wind and solar business, even as a new UN report on climate change says wind and solar technologies are the two best avenues to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and limit the planet's warming to a critical 1.5C.

The Calgary-based energy giant  which has been involved in renewable energy production for two decades  announced Monday its plans to divest its wind and solar assets to focus on hydrogen and renewable fuels instead.

In 2002, Suncor partnered with Enbridge to build one of the first renewable energy projects in Canada. Since then, Suncor has developed eight wind power projects in three provinces  Saskatchewan, Alberta and Ontario.

But in a news release, the company  which has set a goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050  said it will sell those assets in order to bring more "fit and focus" to its portfolio.

"By doing so, we use our strengths, competitive advantages and resources to drive shareholder returns and value over the long term and help us meet our emissions reduction targets," said Suncor chief executive Mark Little in a news release.

Moving forward, Suncor plans to focus on "targeted activities" which include partnering with ATCO Ltd. on a project to build a hydrogen facility near Fort Saskatchewan, Alta. The proposed project, which was announced last spring and for which the partners expect to make a final investment decision in 2024, could produce more than 300,000 tonnes per year of clean hydrogen.

Suncor said it is also focused on renewable fuel technologies. The company is one of the founding investors in LanzaJet, a technology company that uses ethanol produced from corn or sugar cane as a feedstock to produce sustainable aviation fuel. (Suncor has committed to building and operating a commercial production facility somewhere in North America for LanzaJet).

It has also invested in Enerkem Inc., which operates a plant near Edmonton that turns non-recyclable, non-compostable mixed municipal solid waste into cellulosic ethanol, a popular biofuel.

The company said it wants to focus on areas that it believes "are complementary to and help decarbonize" its base business.

But Greenpeace Canada chief energy strategist Keith Stewart said the timing of Suncor's announcement is akin to "buying Blockbuster stock the day Netflix launches an IPO."

He pointed out that a new report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released Monday identifies wind and solar as the two most essential technologies in the battle against global warming, with the greatest potential for delivering the most extensive potential cuts to greenhouse gas emissions by replacing fossil fuels.

The IPCC report also stated that the costs of wind, solar and battery storage have come down so much in the last decade that the technologies are already commercially viable, giving the world an achievable pathway to halve its carbon emissions by 2030 through rapid deployment.

Stewart said hydrogen and biofuel technologies aren't anywhere near as advanced as wind and solar, but oil and gas companies like them because they don't require as much change to their business models. Biofuels, for example, can be used in existing engines as a top-up to regular gasoline and diesel, while hydrogen can be delivered in a pipeline just like oil and gas can.

"But that's not the future of energy," Stewart said. "The IPCC report was basically flashing a big red strobe light at (Suncor), saying wind and solar are where we need to be investing, and they just looked away, put on their sunglasses and said 'no, we're sticking with what we know.'"

Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers board chair and Crescent Point Energy Corp. chief executive Craig Bryksa said the ultimate goal of the Canadian energy sector is to advance production while reducing its overall emissions intensity. Some companies choose to do that by producing or purchasing renewable power while others focus on reducing carbon emissions directly from their oil business.

"Individual companies make individual decisions. There are some other companies within our sector and within our membership that are picking up more renewables," Bryksa told reporters during the Scotiabank CAPP Energy Symposium on Tuesday.

"But what I would say is the sector as a whole...is very, very good and very efficient at producing oil and natural gas. And we do it in what we believe is the most environmentally friendly fashion that there is."

Suncor said moving forward it will continue to participate in many aspects of the electricity value chain, including producing power through its integrated cogeneration operations, through power marketing and trading, by providing customers with EV charging and potentially procuring renewable power through power purchase agreements.

Monday's announced exit from wind and solar marks Suncor's second major asset divestiture announcement in recent months. Last year, the company announced plans to divest its Norway exploration and production assets as well as the planned sale of its Rosebank interest in U.K. North Sea. That disposition process is underway and expected to close later this year.
Photo: Tidewater Midstream Prince George Refinery

Are your savings held in companies that excessively contribute to global warming, operate in increasingly risky conditions and have no long-term plan to transition to a zero-carbon future? Or is your money invested in firms already prepared for climate change?

Canadian securities regulators are aiming to answer these investor questions by proposing a new set of disclosures for public companies. The disclosures will outline the risk  and in some cases opportunities  a public company is running in the face of climate change. Going forward, companies may be expected to list their greenhouse gas emissions, as well as how climate change is impacting their operations now and into the future.

Climate change is a systemic material risk to the Canadian economy and to Canadian businesses, said Janis Sarra, a law professor at the University of B.C.

Investors want Canadian businesses to shift or they're going to move... their capital outside of the country.

British Columbia felt the brunt of extreme weather in 2021, noted Sarra, pointing to growing acute events such as the heat dome in June, wildfires throughout the summer and atmospheric river flooding events in November.

These are all disrupting businesses, she said.

CANADIAN CLIMATE DISCLOSURES 'LARGELY CONSISTENT' WITH OTHER JURISDICTIONS

A corporate governance expert who has turned her work toward researching how climate change is impacting financial markets, Sarra says governments need to come together with civil society and businesses to act collectively.

She describes the incoming securities law as just one small corner of the whole platform that needs to move, both in Canada and globally.

The idea of creating pan-Canadian disclosure requirements for public companies was first put forward in October 2021 by the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA), a collective of provincial regulators such as the B.C. Securities Commission.

The CSA said its proposal is largely consistent with guidance from the international Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, chaired by business tycoon Michael Bloomberg.

There are four key elements to disclosure recommendations: governance  having a board assess risks and opportunities; strategy  reporting short and long-term scenarios involving different climate outcomes; risk management  identifying challenges posed to operations from climate-related events; and metrics and targets  using data to examine risks and opportunities.

'OVERWHELMING' SUPPORT FOR CANADIAN CLIMATE DISCLOSURES

Last month, Sarra, along with fellow Canada Climate Law Initiative members Michael Irish and Jenaya Copithorne, reviewed submissions from a CSA public consultation process last January. According to their March 2022 report, feedback showed overwhelming support for climate disclosures.

The CSA heard from 27 investors with $21 trillion in assets under management. Together, they represent the financial security of millions of Canadians through pension funds, mutual funds and other investments, stated the research group.

In one submission, Engineers and Geoscientists BC, which works closely with the provinces natural resource companies, was critical of the CSA for not requiring a scenario analysis. Others wanted more requirements for venture companies.

In the end, there was broad acceptance for making emissions reporting mandatory  something the CSA did not initially contemplate in its proposal.

WHY CLIMATE DISCLOSURES MATTER

Sarra says climate disclosures allow investors and regulators to look at companies and say, Okay, do I think you have a plan to align yourself with Canada's international commitments to net-zero by 2050?

Despite their utility, for Sarra, the CSAs proposals dont go far enough to keep pace with U.S. and international financial regulators.

Sarra said the CSA proposal is "a really good first start" but fails to require five-year transition plans to meet net-zero requirements.

Another chief concern: emissions reporting.

Under the CSA proposal, public companies are not required to report emissions  either caused directly through their operations and production, or derived from third-party relationships through the processing, transport, as well as use and later disposal of a product. But, if a company chooses not to report such emissions, it must disclose why.

MIXED REACTION ON THIRD-PARTY EMISSIONS

Environmental groups such as the David Suzuki Foundation have also backed full and mandatory emissions reporting for public companies.

Pushback, however, has mainly come from the oil, gas and mining sectors.

The Canadian Mining Association pushed for a longer time-frame to implement the proposal, and it along with the B.C. mining company Skeena Resources, opposed mandatory reporting for indirect emissions.

Skeena Resources, which supported reporting direct emissions, argued that many categories of indirect emissions are difficult to calculate and often outside of a companys control and should not be required disclosure.

Overall, reaction to the CSA proposal from Canadas oil and gas sector was relatively positive.

We acknowledge that expectations and requirements regarding climate-related disclosure are rapidly changing, stated Enbridge, one of Canadas biggest oil companies.

Enbridge called the proposal a "prudent and reasonable first step" and that climate disclosures could be "refined over time."

Ben Brunnen of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers said the organization supported CSA's approach to climate disclosures. He added: Reporting Scope 3 (indirect) emissions continues to be a challenge at this time and will prove difficult to provide in a timely manner, if at all.

U.S. SEES STIFFER RESISTANCE FROM OIL AND GAS

When last month, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issued its draft regulations, it received a much stiffer rebuke from the fossil fuel sector.

According to a report from the Associated Press last month, both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute maintain that the SEC is reaching beyond its authority with the mandatory reporting rules, which would impose substantial costs on businesses.

Democrat Senator Joe Manchin stated this week in a letter to SEC chair Gary Gensler that he was concerned about the regulations burdening companies.

The most concerning piece of the proposed rule is what appears to be the targeting of our nations fossil fuel companies, Manchin wrote, who has had long-term financial ties to the coal industry in West Virginia.

The pushback comes after the SEC, unlike the CSA, proposed mandatory disclosures for all emissions. The proposal exempts smaller companies from indirect emissions reporting; all companies, meanwhile, are not held liable for their indirect emissions reports.

Not everyone agrees within the SEC. On March 21 SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce issued a statement outlining her concerns about the commissions mandate and the practical application of such disclosures.

While the existence of anthropogenic climate change itself is not particularly contentious, how best to measure and solve the problem remains in dispute, stated Peirce, a Republican commissioner.

Describing the SEC as not an expert in climate policy, the commissioner added, This proposal could inspire future more socially and politically contentious disclosures, which would undermine the SECs reputation as an independent regulator.

Sarra said Canada would benefit from aligning its policies with those of the SEC.

Many companies, she said, trade on both countries' markets. Without alignment, they may be required to file two sets of disclosures.
Photo: Contributed Allain LeBreton, 42, who was stabbed to death after apparently getting into a random argument with another passenger on a Richmond bus in 2019

The family of a murdered man is still looking for answers, almost three years after he got into an argument on a Richmond transit bus before being brutally stabbed to death in broad daylight.

Allain LeBretons suspected killer, a 22-year-old man, was arrested on that dark day, July 23, 2019 at the scene - a bus stop outside the Domo gas station near No. 3 and Cambie roads.

Shortly after LeBretons death, homicide investigators from IHIT sent a file to the BC Prosecution Service (the Crown).

But despite there appearing to be multiple witnesses on the bus, no charges were ever approved by the Crown.

Indeed, the Richmond News reported shortly after the fatal stabbing that a key witness had come forward.

In a statement sent to the News, however, a spokesperson for the Crown said the standard of evidence was not met for the charges to be approved and that LeBretons family has been notified, through counsel, in November 2019.

File has been closed on LeBreton's death

IHIT confirmed to the News this week that the file on the death of 42-year-old LeBreton has been closed.

All of this was news to LeBretons sister, Nancy, who cant wrap her head around how her brothers killer can walk free after apparently stabbing him multiple times in front of other passengers.

What standard? My brother was stabbed multiple times. There were witnesses on the bus. What do you need? said Nancy.

People called 9-11 to say someone was being stabbed. And there was a video on social media of the argument.

Our counsel said he was told (by Crown) that my brother could have been the instigator. So he deserved to be stabbed to death?

And never at any time were we told that there would be no charges laid. None of it makes any sense. Allain was just on his way to Tim Hortons.

There are missing pieces here that we are not being told about and were all still going through hell thinking about it.

Mom calls police every year and on birthdays

Nancy said her 80-year-old mother calls IHIT on every anniversary of her sons death and on his birthday, asking if there has been any developments.

My brother never carried any weapons and was not under the influence of anything, added Nancy.

This senseless murder ripped our family apart. We need to know why it happened.

We need answers; we need to tell this person all the hurt our heart carries.

In its statement to the News, the Crown pointed to two matters that needed to be considered before approval of the charge.

One being whether there was a substantial likelihood of conviction; and, if so, whether the public interest required a prosecution.

Still, none of what she has heard this week makes any sense at all to LeBretons sister.

Im not mad at that person (the killer). I dont hate him. I just want him to know how hurt we all are, she said.

My brothers life seems to mean nothing. Im physically sick out of this.

If it is all over, if the case is truly closed, we need something written down, explaining why it is over.
Photo: file photo

A person is recovering after being assaulted with a hatchet and robbed in downtown New West.

In the early morning hours of Sunday, April 3, New Westminster police officers were called to the area outside the New Westminster SkyTrain station in response to a violent robbery in progress. A witness who called 911 reported that someone was being assaulted with a hatchet and robbed of their bag.

According to the New Westminster Police Department, officers rushed to the scene and located the victim, who was given first aid and was reassured by officers that BC Ambulance and New Westminster Fire and Rescue Services were en route. Nearby, police arrested a suspect matching the description provided by witnesses.

Officers believe there may have been more witnesses that saw this assault and fled the area, NWPD spokesperson Sgt. Sanjay Kumar said in a news release. Were wanting to speak to those people to both listen to what they experienced and provide them resources after having witnessed this violent assault.

The victim was transported to hospital where they are recovering from numerous lacerations to the head and upper body.

At this time, police believe this incident was an unprovoked attack, and the victim and suspect are not known to each other.

Abdulkadir Hassan, a 30-year-old Burnaby resident, has been charged with one count of aggravated assault and one count of robbery.

Anyone who witnessed this incident is asked to call the New Westminster Police Department at 604-525-5411.
Photo: The Canadian Press An elderly woman walks by an apartment building destroyed in the Russian shelling of Borodyanka, Ukraine, Wednesday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of using hunger as a weapon of war by deliberately targeting Ukraines essential food supplies.

In an address to Irish lawmakers Wednesday, Zelenskyy said Russian forces are destroying things that are sustaining livelihoods including food storage depots, blocking ports so Ukraine could not export food and putting mines into the fields.

For them hunger is also a weapon, a weapon against us ordinary people, he said, accusing Russia of deliberately provoking a food crisis in Ukraine, a major global producer of staples including wheat and sunflower oil.

He said it would have international ramifications, because there will be a shortage of food and the prices will go up, and this is reality for the millions of people who are hungry, and it will be more difficult for them to feed their families.

Zelenskyy spoke by video to a joint session of Irelands two houses of parliament, the latest in a string of international addresses he has used to rally support for Ukraine.

MOSCOW  Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says negotiations with Ukraine are continuing despite allegations of war crimes against civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha.

Peskov said Wednesday the talks continued with Ukraine but that the Bucha revelations  which he referred to as a staging  had hampered talks and there was a fairly long road ahead.

The working process continues but it is going much more tough than we would like. Of course we would like to see more dynamism from the Ukrainian side, but the process has not been broken off and is continuing, Peskov said.

Russia retreated from areas around Kyiv and the northern cities of Chernihiv and Sumy after talks with Ukraine in Turkey last week. Ukrainian troops entering the areas found evidence of widespread killings of civilians. Russia denies any war crimes and has alleged Ukraine has faked the incidents.

Since the talks in Turkey, Russia and Ukraines delegations have continued talks via video link.

BRUSSELS  A senior European Union official says the blocs member countries should think about ways of offering asylum to Russian soldiers willing to desert Ukraine battlefields.

European Council president Charles Michel on Wednesday expressed his outrage at crimes against humanity, against innocent civilians in Bucha and in many other cities.

He called on Russian soldiers to disobey orders.

If you want no part in killing your Ukrainian brothers and sisters, if you dont want to be a criminal, drop your weapons, stop fighting, leave the battlefield, Michel, who represents the blocs governments, said in a speech to the European Parliament

Endorsing an idea previously circulated by some EU lawmakers, Michel added that granting asylum to Russian deserters is a valuable idea that should be pursued.

BERLIN  Germanys foreign minister has accused Russia of spreading disinformation to justify its war in Ukraine.

Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Wednesday that as Russian tanks destroy Ukrainian cities, the Kremlins propaganda machine is censoring news, restricting social media, spreading disinformation and punishing those who dare to speak the truth.

She said the aim was both clear and cynical: to demoralize the courageous people of Ukraine while keeping Russians in the dark.

Baerbock spoke in a video message to a conference on disinformation organized by her ministry at which participants also cited examples of Russian efforts to stoke resentment in Europe against refugees from Ukraine.

LONDON  Intel says it is suspending all its business operations in Russia, becoming the latest foreign company to leave because of Moscows war in Ukraine.

Effective immediately, we have suspended all business operations in Russia, the U.S. chipmaker said late Wednesday.

The company had already suspended shipments to customers in Russia and neighboring ally Belarus after the war broke out.

Intel said its working to support its 1,200 employees in Russia and has put in place business continuity measures to reduce disruption to its global operations, though it didnt provide details.

Intel continues to join the global community in condemning Russias war against Ukraine and calling for a swift return to peace, it said in a statement.

BEIJING  China says the reports and images of civilian deaths in the Ukrainian town of Bucha are deeply disturbing and is calling for an investigation.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Wednesday that China supports all initiatives and measures conducive to alleviating the humanitarian crisis in the country and is ready to continue to work together with the international community to prevent any harm to civilians.

The killings in Bucha may serve to put further pressure on Beijing over its largely pro-Russian stance and attempts to guide public opinion over the war.

China has called for talks while refusing to criticize Russia over its invasion. It opposes economic sanctions on Moscow and blames Washington and NATO for provoking the war and fueling the conflict by sending arms to Ukraine.

Zhaos remarks echo those the previous day of Chinas ambassador to the United Nations, Zhang Jun, who called for an investigation, describing the reports and images of civilian deaths in Bucha as deeply disturbing.

VATICAN CITY  Pope Francis has kissed a battered Ukrainian flag that was brought to him from the Ukrainian city of Bucha and called again for an end to the war.

Francis welcomed a half-dozen Ukrainian children up to the stage of the Vatican audience hall at the end of his Wednesday general audience and gave them each a giant chocolate Easter egg. He urged prayers for them and for all Ukrainians.

The recent news from the war in Ukraine, instead of bringing relief and hope, brought testimony of new atrocities, like the massacre in Bucha, even more horrendous cruelty carried out against civilians, defenseless women and children," the pope said. "They are victims whose innocent blood cries up to the sky and implores that this war be stopped, and that the weapons be silenced. Stop disseminating war and destruction.

He told the crowd: These children had to flee to arrive in a safe place. This is the fruit of war.

The pontiff held up a grimy Ukrainian flag that he said had arrived the previous day at the Vatican from Bucha, where evidence has emerged of what appears to be intentional killings of civilians during the citys occupation by Russian troops.

Kissing it, he said: This flag comes from the war, from that martyred city Bucha ... Let us not forget them. Let us not forget the people of Ukraine.

RUSSIA  The governor of Russias Kursk region on the border with Ukraine said Wednesday that Russian border guards were fired at with mortars on Tuesday.

Governor Roman Starovoit said on the messaging app Telegram that the border guards returned fire and that there were no casualties or destruction on the Russian side as a result of the incident.

The Ukrainian military has not yet commented on the allegation, and it could not be independently verified.

LONDON  British defense officials say 160,000 people remain trapped in the besieged city of Mariupol, where Russian airstrikes and heavy fighting are continuing.

The Ministry of Defense said in an intelligence update Wednesday that those in the city have no light, communication, medicine, heat or water. It accused Russian forces of deliberately preventing humanitarian access, likely to pressure defenders to surrender.

Repeated attempts by the International Committee of the Red Cross to get a humanitarian convoy into the southern port city have failed. Ukraines Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Russian forces stopped buses accompanied by Red Cross workers from traveling to Mariupol, which had a pre-war population of about 400,000. She said Russian troops allowed 1,496 civilians to leave the Sea of Azov port on Tuesday.

LVIV, Ukraine - Russian forces overnight struck a fuel depot and a factory in Ukraines Dnipropetrovsk region, and the number of casualties remains unclear, the regions Governor Valentyn Reznichenko said Wednesday on the Telegram messaging app.

The night was alarming and difficult. The enemy attacked our area from the air and hit the oil depot and one of the plants. The oil depot with fuel was destroyed. Rescuers are still putting out the flames at the plant. There is a strong fire, Reznichenko wrote.

In the eastern Luhansk region, Tuesdays shelling of Rubizhne city killed one and injured five more, Governor Serhiy Haidai said Wednesday on Telegram.

The Russian military continues to focus its efforts on preparing for an offensive in Ukraines east, according to a Wednesday morning update by Ukraines General Staff, with the aim to establish complete control over the territory of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Parts of the two regions have been under control of Russia-backed rebels since 2014 and are recognized by Moscow as independent states.
Photo: The Canadian Press

Minnesota prosecutors declined to file charges Wednesday against a Minneapolis police SWAT team officer who fatally shot Amir Locke while executing an early morning no-knock search warrant in a downtown apartment in February.

Locke, 22, who was Black, was staying on a couch in the apartment when authorities entered it on Feb. 2 without knocking as part of an investigation into a homicide in neighboring St. Paul.

His parents have said that from what they saw of the police body camera footage, it appeared that their son was startled awake. His mother, Karen Wells, has called his death an execution. Their attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Locke, who was not named in the warrant, was shot seconds after authorities say he pointed a gun in the direction of officers. Locke's family has questioned that. The body camera footage shows Locke holding a gun before he was shot.

Attorney General Keith Ellison and Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman, whose offices reviewed the case, said they determined that Officer Mark Hanneman was justified in firing his weapon.

There is insufficient admissible evidence to file criminal charges in this case. Specifically, the State would be unable to disprove beyond a reasonable doubt any of the elements of Minnesotas use-of-deadly-force statute that authorizes the use of force by Officer Hanneman, Ellison and Freeman said in a joint statement.

Lockes death came as three former Minneapolis police officers were on trial in federal court in St. Paul in George Floyd's killing. It sparked protests and a reexamination of no-knock search warrants. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey announced an immediate moratorium on such warrants, and on Tuesday, he formalized a new policy that will take effect Friday requiring officers to knock and wait before entering a residence. Some lawmakers also have been pushing for a statewide ban on no-knock warrants, except in rare circumstances.

Amir Locke is a victim, Ellison and Freeman said. This tragedy may not have occurred absent the no-knock warrant used in this case.

In their applications for search warrants of the Minneapolis apartment and other locations, authorities said a no-knock warrant was necessary to protect the public and officers as they looked for guns, drugs and clothing worn by people suspected in a violent killing. Authorities asked that officers be allowed to conduct the search without knocking, and outside the hours of 7 a.m. and 8 p.m., because the suspects being sought in the Jan. 10 killing of Otis Elder had a history of violence.

Locke was killed seconds after the SWAT team entered the apartment where his family said he was staying. Body camera video shows an officer using a key to unlock the door and enter, followed by at least four officers in uniform and protective vests, time-stamped at about 6:48 a.m. As they enter, they repeatedly shout, Police, search warrant! They also shout Hands! and Get on the ground!

The video shows an officer kicking a sectional sofa, and Locke is seen wrapped in a comforter, holding a pistol. Three shots are heard and the video ends.

Ellison and Freeman said the case shows that no-knock warrants are highly risky" and can pose significant dangers to people who aren't engaged in criminal activity.

Local, state, and federal policy makers should seriously weigh the benefits of no-knock warrants, which are dangerous for both law enforcement and the public alike. Other cities, like Saint Paul, and some states, have ended the use of no-knock warrants entirely, they said.

While Locke was not named in the warrant, his 17-year-old cousin, Mekhi Camden Speed, was named and has been charged with two counts of second-degree murder in Elder's killing.

The search warrants were carried out as part of an investigation into Elders death. Elder, a 38-year-old father, was found shot and laying in the street in what police believe was an apparent robbery. Drugs and money were found in Elders SUV, according to court documents.

The police department hired Hanneman in 2015. City records show there were three complaints made about him and that all were closed without him being disciplined, but they give no details. Data on the website of the citizen group Communities United Against Police Brutality shows a fourth complaint, in 2018, that remains open. No details were given.
Photo: The Canadian Press

It's one of those promises that doesn't cost the government too much, but never seems to materialize on budget day.

Children and youth advocates are hoping that changes this week and the Liberals make good on a 2015 campaign pledge to create a children's commissioner.

Groups including Children First Canada and UNICEF have asked for $8 million in annual funding for the watchdog that would monitor and report on how well the federal government is meeting its obligations to children under international law and domestic promises.

A federal ombudsperson would also monitor issues beyond the reach of provincial commissioners, such as the impact from marriage, divorce and criminal laws, as well as federal obligations to Indigenous children.

Sara Austin, founder and CEO of Children First Canada, said there has been support from parties, including the current government.

She said the pandemic and its impact on children in the short- and long-term makes a strong case for why the Liberals should finally follow through on the almost seven-year-old spending pledge.

"There is support at the highest levels of our current government for it, but I guess the question is, is this the government's priority right now?" Austin said.

"There are many competing priorities right now, as we all know, with the ongoing COVID recovery plan, the war in Ukraine, the new commitments around dental care and pharmacare. I don't know where this will sit in the grand scheme of things."

The push to create a commissioner started before the current government's term, and has continued since the Liberals took office, including from senators and opposition MPs whose parliamentary efforts never cross the legislative finish line.

Liberal MP Marc Garneau, who proposed creating a commissioner while in opposition, said children still need their own federal advocate despite measurable improvements over recent years, such as declining poverty rates.

"Although things have improved with respect to poverty and guaranteed child benefits and child-care programs, children are still largely invisible because they have no voice," said Garneau, who spent almost six years in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's cabinet.

Despite privately advocating for a children's watchdog since 2015, Garneau said the government must make decisions about how to spend finite resources. Issues higher on the priority list often make the cut for the budget.

"It's quite possible that it just won't make it into the high level of priority despite the fact that it involves very, very modest costs," Garneau said about his hopes for Thursday's budget.

"I would argue that it is a small amount of money that is well invested because we're talking about the future of the country. We're talking about our children."
Former President Barack Obama paid his first visit to the White House since leaving office in January 2017 on Tuesday to celebrate a new policy that increases coverage under the Affordable Care Act, his major domestic policy success.

In the East Room, Obama remarked smoothly, "Vice President Biden," an introduction he insisted was a joke. The visit provided an opportunity for Obama and Biden to indulge in some light ribbing that, by today's Washington standards, seemed rather quaint.

Obama Tackles Healthcare Bill With Joe Biden

The groundbreaking bill, dubbed as Obamacare and adopted in 2010, was beset by a perplexing implementation, which featured a buggy website. Republicans, including President Donald J. Trump, saw the law as a great target for repeal. Democrats suffered significant losses in the 2010 midterm elections, and they have been unable to reclaim comfortable Senate advantages since then.

The Biden White House revealed a new strategy on Tuesday that will solve one of the healthcare law's largest coverage gaps. The change, which is being suggested as a new regulation, would allow relatives of individuals with employer-sponsored health insurance to qualify for financial aid if they purchase insurance on the Obamacare markets.

The health legislation limits access to those subsidies who had affordable work-based insurance, and earlier interpretations have ruled that their relatives were likewise disqualified, even if their company did not provide an inexpensive family plan, as per The New York Times.

Read Also: Donald Trump's Truth Social Disintegrates, Prompting Top Executives To Resign

Obama, Biden Tout New Provision

The Affordable Care Act, according to Biden, is the most important piece of legislation since Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965, and it must be expanded to include more people. Biden and Obama commemorated the law's 12th anniversary, which was made famous by Biden's remark to Obama in 2010 that it was a "huge (expletive) deal," comments recorded on an open microphone.

Obama got the crowd going with a few deadpan jokes about how things had changed around the White House under Biden, riffing on the current occupant's love of sunglasses and ice cream, as well as his taste in pets.

Three Supreme Court decisions have bolstered "Obamacare's" staying power, as has the late Sen. John McCain's strong thumbs-down vote, which snuffed out then-President Trump's efforts to repeal and replace it.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Biden opened up the health insurance markets to anybody seeking coverage, and his coronavirus relief bill gave a large, if temporary, increase in financial support. As a consequence, a new high of 14.5 million individuals has signed up for subsidized private insurance.

Dependents of employees who receive an offer of workplace coverage that the government regards as affordable are tripped up by the family glitch. People with inexpensive workplace coverage are often ineligible for ACA-subsidized plans, according to ABC News.

Republicans attempted but failed to repeal the legislation several times, notably during the Trump administration's early months in 2017. Even though ObamaCare has risen in favor, it has functioned as a primary attack line for Republicans on the campaign trail. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted in March 2022, 55 percent of the population approved of the bill.

Biden has embraced the law as part of his agenda, advocating for subsidies through the American Rescue Plan and signing executive orders to increase access. At the conclusion of his speech, Obama alluded to the party impasse that has engulfed Washington, DC, since his tenure as president, The Hill reported.

Related Article: Joe Biden-Rupert Murdoch Controversy: New Book Claims POTUS Called FOX Corp. CEO as "Most Dangerous Man in the World"

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Photo: The Canadian Press Sheila Malcolmson speaks at a press conference in the press gallery at the Legislature in Victoria, Monday, Nov. 1, 2021. B.C.'s mental health and addictions minister said Health Canada is thinking about lowering the threshold for the province's decriminalization request. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chad Hipolito

A British Columbia minister says Health Canada is considering its decriminalization request but with a lower threshold for the amount of drugs a person can carry.

Mental Health and Addictions Minister Sheila Malcolmson told reporters today she received an update on what Health Canada has "on its mind" and the decision is not final.

B.C. has applied for an exemption request to decriminalize possession of small amounts of drugs, in an effort to reduce stigma associated with drug use and help save lives.

Leslie McBain, co-founder of Moms Stop the Harm, said Malcolmson shared the update with a circle of stakeholders this week.

B.C. has requested a cumulative threshold of 4.5 grams for opioids, cocaine and methamphetamine, but McBain said the federal government is mulling a 2.5-gram cumulative threshold.

McBain says this limit is too low because people will have to make more trips into the illicit drug market, putting them in dangerous situations more often.

The office of Carolyn Bennett, federal minister of mental health and addictions, also said the decision has not been made.
Photo: The Canadian Press Canadian astronauts (left to right) Dave Williams, Bjarni Tryggvason and David Saint-Jacques take part in the opening of The Living In Space exhibit during its unveiling at the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa on Thursday, May 12, 2011. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

One of Canada's first astronauts has died.

The Canadian Space Agency is confirming Bjarni Tryggvason, who was part of Canada's original six space voyageurs, died at the age of 76.

Born in Reykjavik, Iceland, Tryggvason grew up in Vancouver.

He joined the Canadian space program in 1983 and flew his one and only mission aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1997.

On that 12-day mission, he orbited Earth 189 times, performing experiments on the atmosphere and the effect of space flight on the shuttle's equipment.

After leaving the program in 2008, he returned to teaching at what is now Western University.

In 2009, he flew a replica of the Silver Dart, the first heavier-than-air machine to fly in Canada.

His space program colleagues remembered him fondly as a meticulous engineer and inventor, and as someone who always had a humorous twinkle in his eye.
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March 28 - April 3, 2021

Holy Week is the week before Easter Sunday, beginning seven days before with Palm Sunday. It ends with Holy Saturday. Easter is not part of Holy Week, but rather the beginning of the Easter season of the Liturgical year.

Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday. On this day, we celebrate the triumphant entry of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, into Jerusalem, riding a donkey. On that day, the people laid palms before Him, a gesture reserved for triumphant leaders. We celebrate this at Mass by distributing palms to the faithful who may keep them for a time for use as devotional objects. The palms are blessed at Mass. The faithful sometimes craft portions of palm fronds into crosses. Eventually, these palms are returned to the Church where they are burned. Traditionally, their ashes are saved and distributed at next year's Ash Wednesday services.

Later, when Jesus entered the Temple, he angrily drove out the money changers who had turned the Temple court into a place of business instead of devotion. Once the court was cleared, Jesus began teaching the masses. Meanwhile, His enemies drew plans to kill Him.

The next major event in Holy Week is Holy Thursday. On this day, Jesus celebrated the Passover feast with the disciples. We know this feast as the Last Supper. This is the night He was betrayed by Judas and arrested.

The Last Supper is celebrated at every Mass, and especially on Holy Thursday.

After supper, Jesus went to the Mount of Olives and prayed. From this event comes inspiration for our practice of Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration, where we are invited to spend one hour in prayer with Jesus, truly present in the Eucharist; Body, Blood, and Divinity.

Jesus was arrested on the night of Holy Thursday.

The next day is Good Friday, and on this day, we commemorate the trial, punishment, and crucifixion of Our Lord.

On that morning, Jesus was brought before Annas, a powerful Jewish cleric who condemned Jesus for blasphemy. From there, Jesus was presented to Pilate for trial. Although Pilate found no guilt in Jesus, he agreed to have him crucified to appease the crowd of people and prevent a riot.

Christ was stripped, flogged, and crowned with thorns. He was then forced to carry His Cross to the place of His execution. There, He was nailed to the Cross between two thieves who were likewise crucified. Late that afternoon, seeking to ensure Christ's death, a Roman guard stabbed him in his side with a spear. When Jesus died, an earthquake is said to have occurred as well as a great darkness which covered the land. Suddenly, many people knew Jesus was the Son of God.

Jesus was taken and laid quickly in a borrowed tomb, in accord with Jewish law, which required the dead be buried by sundown before the Sabbath.

In our churches, the Tabernacle is left empty, to show that Christ is departed.

On Holy Saturday, there is no Mass. Parishes may hold services, but there is no distribution of Communion.

On Holy Saturday, we remember that Jesus was descended into hell where He preached the Gospel to those who died before and opened the way to heaven for all those who were worthy.

This concludes Holy Week. The following day is Easter Sunday, the day on which it was discovered the Tomb was empty, and our Lord was resurrected, triumphing over death once and for all time.

Printable PDF of Holy Week
MAN Truck & Bus Schweiz supplies Holcim Switzerland

06 April 2022

MAN Truck & Bus Schweiz AG has again handed over vehicles to its long-standing customer Holcim Switzerland. This time the vehicles will be used by Holcim Gravel and Concrete Ltd at its Mulligen site.



The two powerful MAN TGS 18.510 4x4H BL semitrailer tractors, which not only have a switchable Hydrostatic HydroStatic Front Axle Drive HydroDrive, but are also equipped with all kinds of safety equipment, pull a three-axle tipper semitrailer from Schmitz Cargobill AG.

Published under
Senator Marsha Blackburn, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said she will oppose Judge Ketanji Brown Jacksons nomination to serve on the Supreme Court.

She said, As part of my constitutional duty to provide advice and consent to the President on his nominees, I closely examined Judge Jacksons writings and rulings.

Throughout this process, it became clear that I could not support this nominee. The role of a Supreme Court justice is to interpret the law, not to take up arms in a culture war. I have serious concerns that Judge Jacksons ideology may influence her jurisprudence.

"A justices primary commitment must always be to the Constitution - not to Woke progressivism or results-based judicial activism. Throughout her career, Judge Jackson evaded this duty, with terrible results. She consistently handed down lenient sentences to child predators, and even granted a convicted cop killer compassionate release from prison. I cannot in good conscience support her confirmation to the highest court in the land.
The European Union now has plans to ban Russian coal, ships, and road operators after the brutal events of the Bucha massacre in Ukraine after an extended period of avoiding imposing sanctions on Moscow's energy exports.

The proposal was made by the European Commission and is part of a new package of sanctions on Russia's war on Ukraine. The commission's president, Ursula von der Leyen, said that the latest sanctions were designed to ban Russian coal imports, impose sanctions on four Russian banks, and ban Russian vessels from European Union ports.

EU Ban on Russian Coal

In a statement, von der Leyen said that Moscow's atrocities in Ukraine cannot and will not be left unanswered. She noted that it was of utmost importance to sustain pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government during this critical point in time.

In a tweet on Tuesday, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba urged other nations to stop buying oil, gas, and coal from Russia to prevent "new Buchas." The official called on other leaders to stop financing what he called Putin's "war machine," as per the Washington Post.

The proposal is a phased ban of $4.3 billion worth of Russian coal imports per year with other proposals targeting Moscow's technology and manufacturing imports which total another $10.9 billion. Since the beginning of Russia's war on Ukraine on Feb. 24, Europe has imposed sanctions on Moscow's economy but avoided targeting the energy sector.

Read Also: Russia-Ukraine War: Volodymyr Zelensky's Quest for Peace Talks With Vladimir Putin Continues Despite Russian 'Genocide' Attack

More details and information regarding the new sanctions package are expected to come on Wednesday when EU ambassadors meet for talks. Furthermore, the measures would still need to be approved by all 27 member states.

According to CNN, while imposing bans on Russia's coal exports will negatively affect some European countries, it is considered to be the easiest energy source to wean off. This is because Russia is the world's third-largest exporter of coal in 2020, just behind Australia and Indonesia and Europe is its biggest customer.

Effects of Sanctions

The situation comes as the United States federal government is also planning to impose new sanctions on Russia. UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss also urged for a "tough new wave" of sanctions from G7 and NATO ministers to combat Moscow's continued aggression and alleged war crimes.

Truss said that her Japanese counterpart has already agreed that the international community needed to increase pressure on Putin with coordinated sanctions. EU officials previously indicated that the new measures would focus on enforcing existing sanctions.

On Tuesday, French European Affairs Minister Clement Beaune said that the new sanctions will probably be adopted by Wednesday. The sanctions would include banning Russian companies from taking part in competing for contracts across the EU.

Previous sanctions focused on targeting Putin and hundreds of Russian MPs and companies in the financial and energy sectors. By the end of this year, the 27-member states plan to cut the use of Russian gas by two-thirds and make Europe entirely independent of Russian fossil fuels by 2030 to prevent severe consequences of such a move, BBC reported.



Related Article: Global Fury Grows Over Russia's Atrocities in Bucha; President Joe Biden Urges War Crime Trial Following Spread of 'Genocide' Images

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The city of Red Bank will be getting money from several grants and programs. At the commission meeting Monday night, the commissioners voted to accept the coronavirus local fiscal recovery fund that was allocated to Red Bank, under the American Rescue Plan Act. The city will receive $3,513,087.40. Financial Director John Alexander told the commissioners that the money could be used for any city services provided by the citys government which are approved by the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the comptroller of the state of Tennessee.

The police department will also participate in the Tennessee Highway Safety Office Distracted Driving Reduction enforcement grant. Red Bank applies for and receives this gift each year, said Police Chief Dan Seymour. This 100 percent grant for $63,423, requires no match from the city. It will be used for employee overtime, training and to purchase equipment such as radar units that will be used for distracted driver reduction enforcement.

The police department will also be receiving another grant of $40,000 from the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Assistance to purchase body cameras for the officers.

An agreement between Erlanger Health Systems and the Red Bank Police Department was updated. The memo of understanding will provide medical assistance in conjunction with SWAT team activities.

City Manager Martin Granum told the commissioners that the most recent news latter is now available on the Red Bank website. He gave important upcoming dates that includes the next Jubilee planning committee meeting on April 12. The next Planning Commission work session will be April 19 and the next regular Planning Commission session will be April 21. City offices will be closed April 15 in observance of Good Friday.

Deputy Fire Chief Eddie Iles reported to the commission about the departments recent mutual aid response to recent wildfires in Sevier County. Despite help from multiple agencies, said Chief Iles, 2,675 acres burned and over 300 buildings were damaged or destroyed.

A citywide clean-up day will be held on Earth Day weekend Saturday April 23 from 11 a.m. until 1 p.m., said Vice Mayor Stefanie Dalton. Coffee and pizza will be provided for the volunteers.
A program of study at Georgia Northwestern Technical College is training students to guard sensitive information in a world where hackers are getting smarter every day.Cybersecurity is both protecting the computers of the world and finding security holes; its learning how to setup our networks and computers to protect them from threat agents who want to steal or destroy our information, said Dwight Watt, instructor of Computer Information Systems Technology, adding that the technology also protects financial information.Thieves use phishing scams to ask people for information or ransomware in which they encrypt data in a form we cannot read and demand a ransom payment to get it back, he said.Our financial information, medical information and personal information are all stored on computer servers, and that information becomes a target for attackers, said Rocky Spurlock, director of GNTCs Computer Information Systems Technology program.In Cybersecurity, our goal is to protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the data so that only the people who should have access to the data can access it, that the data has not been changed and that it is available when it is needed.GNTC launched its Cybersecurity program in 2016. Courses cover security policies and procedures, implementing operating systems security, network security, network defense and countermeasures, ethical hacking and penetration testing and computer forensics.It is essential that organizations have trained Cybersecurity professionals to protect their organizations data, Mr. Spurlock said.The demand for these jobs is growing explosively, Dr. Watt said. Within the last year we had to wait in line for gas because threat actors encrypted information at the Colonial Pipeline. Every day we read where information is stolen and sold.GNTCs Cybersecurity program offers three career tracks. The technical certificate typically takes between 12 to 18 months to earn. Students take the basic Cyber courses and no general education courses.The technical certificate is aimed particularly at people with an associate degree or diploma who now want to learn Cybersecurity, Dr. Watt said.The associate degree and diploma tracks take approximately two years. The coursework for a diploma is almost the same, except the general education courses.The Cybersecurity program is based on GNTCs Catoosa County Campus; however, basic courses are also offered on the Floyd, Gordon, Walker and Whitfield Murray Campuses. GNTC offers advanced courses mostly online, allowing students to be based at any campus, while some courses are offered in person.Dr. Watt and Mr. Spurlock are the main instructors for the Cybersecurity program. Mr. Watt said he has worked in the field with various parts of Cybersecurity and continues to take classes on Cybersecurity and many other areas of information technology (IT); he holds the CySA+ and Security+ certifications, along with a number of other certifications. Dr. Watt holds a bachelors degree in political science and masters degree in business administration from Winthrop University and a doctoral degree in education leadership from the University of Georgia.Mr. Spurlock received his bachelors and masters degree in information technology from Kennesaw State University in Marietta. He has been an instructor for GNTC since 2009.GNTC will host a Free Application Week, April 11-15, to help those who are seeking to enroll in the summer semester. That week GNTC will waive the $25 application fee for all new applicants. The admissions deadline for the summer semester is April 25. Classes are scheduled to begin on May 16.GNTC is available through their call center Monday through Friday, 7:45 a.m.-4:15 p.m., at 866-983-4682. For more information on applying for the summer semester, visit www.gntc.edu and click Apply Now. For any questions about GNTCs Free Application Week, contact the Office of Admissions at 866-983-4682 or via email at admissions@gntc.edu.
U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn, along with Senators Rick Scott, Bill Hagerty, Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.), and Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), introduced the Protect Americas Innovation and Economic Security from CCP Act. This legislation will reestablish the China Initiative at the Department of Justice, which the Biden administration ended earlier this year. The Protect Americas Innovation and Economic Security from CCP Act will reinstate efforts to investigate and prevent spying by the Chinese Communist Party on U.S. intellectual property and academic institutions and counter threats to U.S. national security, said officials.

Senator Blackburn said, The Biden administrations policies have reversed President Trumps America first agenda to actively enable the New Axis of Evil  Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China. Instead of continuing the China Initiative  an important program which identified and prosecuted those engaged in trade secret theft, hacking, and economic espionage  Biden is choosing to make the United States less secure. This legislation will continue a vital program to keep America safe by stopping the Chinese Communist Party from undermining our economic stability and national security.

Senator Scott said, We know that the Communist Party of China will stop at nothing in its mission for global dominance  and the Biden administration cannot afford to be naive to the national security threats we face. It is unconscionable that the Biden administration ended the DOJs efforts to hold Communist China accountable for U.S. trade secret theft and economic espionage. Im proud to lead this bill to reestablish the CCP Initiative, which will again be dedicated to protecting the United States intellectual property and our academic institutions from spying and interference by one of our greatest adversaries. Communist China has started the new Cold War with the United States  its our duty to protect our critical infrastructure and private sector, and take action to counter Communist Chinas economic warfare.

Senator Hagerty said, America remains the most innovative country in the world, but the Chinese Communist Party is relentlessly trying to cheat American businesses by stealing their information and technology to fuel its repressive regime and compete against us. FBI Director Wray tells us that the Bureau opens a new Chinese spying case every 12 hours, and yet the Biden Administration is ending the Department of Justice initiative focusing on this unparalleled threat to our national and economic security. This legislation would prevent this misguided decision and ensure that combatting CCP espionage remains a top priority.

Senator Rubio said, The Department of Justice canceled the China Initiative because a band of woke activists smeared it as racist and xenophobic. In the meantime, the espionage and influence campaign of the Chinese Communist Party continues to permeate our nations leading research institutions, exploiting our openness to steal our brightest ideas and most valuable technology. The Chinese Communist Party is the single greatest threat to our national security, and it was a foolish decision to divert resources from confronting this threat. We need to restart this important national security initiative right away.

Senator Braun said, To continue to be the most innovative country in the world, we must take action to protect our intellectual property from the Chinese Communist Party, which has shown time and again they dont play by the rules.

Senator Johnson said, The Biden administration ended the CCP Initiative which the Justice Department used to investigate how China steals our intellectual property through universities. It's outrageous. President Bidens continued display of weakness to the world is tempting our adversaries to take advantage of the moment. We must protect American technology and innovation and hold the Communist Party of China accountable for any attempt at theft. I am happy to support this bill that will reestablish the CCP Initiative in order to protect American institutions and intellectual property from this threat to our national and economic security.






The district attorney, first and foremost, has a duty to every citizen to search for justice without bias. They serve as our representative. It is possibly the most important political race to us as citizens. For this reason, I am concerned when I hear campaign promises that are untenable, impractical or even counter-productive to the fair administration of justice. I wouldnt want a candidate to obtain votes for the impossible or the untrue.

At the recent debate between the district attorney candidates, one candidates selling point was her claim that she would have her assistants at the scene of murders within 15 minutes of the call to police. This is the type of idea that sounds good to the listener, but in reality would harm efforts to achieve justice. It could only be presented by someone without knowledge of criminal procedures or prior management experience in a prosecutors office. In reality, this rule would create headaches for law enforcement and harm their cases.

I speak with experience. I have formerly served as Hamilton Countys federally funded DUI and vehicular homicide prosecutor, Hamilton Countys gang prosecutor and as an assistant United States attorney on the U.S. border with Mexico. It is true that prosecutors need to see the scene of the crime in major cases. I know that it is common practice for them to do so. I used to go to the scene of vehicular homicide cases in the wee hours of the night. I have visited gang shooting scenes to see the location of bullet holes. I have traveled into the desert to retrace the route of cartel-based drug traffickers. However, this always occurred after detectives had reviewed the crime scene thoroughly and collected their evidence. I would never attempt to invade a crime scene, as a prosecutor, 15 minutes after notice to law enforcement. That would cause major problems.

To begin, Id be stepping on law enforcements toes. Effectively, Id be telling them that their investigators, professionally trained, need oversight. Most investigators receive hours upon hours of special schooling to learn processes for collecting and identifying evidence. This is different from the role of the prosecutor in conveying the import of that evidence in court. An intrusion of this kind can lead to command-and-control problems on scene. Do investigators on scene report to a lead investigator, or should they run everything by the states lawyer? From experience, I will tell you that there is often a natural deference toward any lawyer on scene, even when that shouldnt exist. This stymies the chain-of-command for law enforcement.

Legally, an on-scene prosecutor would also be making himself a witness to the crime scene. Crime scene logs exist for a specific purpose. Chain of custody issues exist for each individual piece of evidence. A prosecutor should not be traipsing around a crime scene until all evidence is collected. Otherwise, he is an extra distraction on scene, and he may, unintentionally, disturb (or even destroy) evidence.

Detectives are given the duty of collecting evidence because they may then be required to hold their right hand up in front of a jury and be sworn to testify, at trial, regarding the facts obtained in the case. If a prosecutor finds himself or herself in the middle of that process, he could be called as a witness. This creates a host of problems. For example, what if the prosecutor knows of additional information not collected by law enforcement? What if that additional information was not disclosed before trial? Or, what if the prosecutor overheard a statement and his or her memory involved slightly different language from that in the official report? Does that make the prosecutor a conflicting witness with conflicting testimony? Should a prosecutor be required to take notes of what they see if they arrive on scene while evidence is being collected? This is where a prosecutors lack of professional training in evidence collection is problematic. Being a lawyer does not make one a good detective.

An even bigger nightmare from this scenario is the conflict of interest it creates. If a prosecutor is on scene, and they must dutifully prosecute all crimes within the county without bias, how can they do so if they are on scene at the time law enforcement makes the seminal determination whether a crime occurred? Are they not part of that process? Can they review that decision without bias? If they are a witness to that crime, a defense attorney will certainly ask the judge to exclude them from handling the case. Typically, the complete district attorneys office is recused from the case if one of their own is a witness. This is an overwhelming burden on the taxpayer. Effectively, having assistant district attorneys on scene for homicide investigations would cause all homicides to be handled by prosecutors from outlying counties. In other words, our taxpayers would be paying outsiders to prosecute our homicide cases. This would be expensive, burdensome, and counter-productive. It would allow our DAs office to pass the buck on all major cases.

The district attorneys office has a limited budget. We as taxpayers must fund that budget. Having prosecutors, at all hours of the night, at shooting scenes and vehicular homicide wrecks is also impractical. They are citizens like us. They have families. Their children go to school. They cannot be out in the middle of the night and still effectively serve eight hours a day prosecuting cases. The amount of mental energy necessary to examine and cross-examine witnesses in court is significant. You cannot effectively try cases and conduct hearings on zero sleep. A proposal to have our assistant district attorneys at all overdose death scenes would further exacerbate this issue. We need lawyers in court prosecuting their cases. Prosecutors are always available by phone to handle legal questions as they arise.

It is evident that these campaign promises are not from someone with prior management experience in a prosecutors office. The candidate who proposed this 15 minute arrival time rule should seriously consult with her advisors about the legal ramifications of these proposals. I do not believe them to be legal, practical or wise when considering issues of becoming a witness or being conflicted-out of handling a case. I do not come to this point of view lightly. I have tried cases ranging from DUI to 1st degree murder. I have mediated disputes between ICE, DEA, Border Patrol and the FBI. I have been involved in several cases related to officer involved shootings. I have prepared a death penalty notice on a case arising in this county.

Hamilton County needs someone with decades of experience as a prosecutor rather than someone with brief experience. Hamilton County needs someone who has actively managed a district attorneys office and the many difficulties that arise in that role. I do believe the challenger means well. However, Neal Pinkston is the only person in the present district attorneys race with the experience and knowledge necessary to effectively represent the citizens interests in a fair and unbiased manner. He sees the above issues. He cant propose a 15 minute crime scene arrival rule because it is harmful to the county. He would not put us all at a disadvantage by having outside prosecutors, from other counties, handle our most critical cases. Prosecutors regularly go to crime scenes, however, veteran prosecutors wait to arrive until after the evidence is collected.

The proposal by Pinkstons challenger demonstrates her lack of preparation and understanding of the job she is proposing to do.

Bret Alexander



* * *

Bret, I would encourage you to review State vs. Ownby 2009 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 40 *; 2009 WL 112582. The relevant holding from the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals is as follows:

This court and our supreme court have previously concluded that an Assistant District Attorney General's participation in the investigation leading to the indictment and prosecution of a defendant does not disqualify him from prosecution of the underlying case. State v. Claybrook, 736 S.W.2d 95, 104 (Tenn. 1987); see also State v. Elrod, 721 S.W.2d 820 (Tenn. Crim. App. 1986). "The actions of [the Assistant District Attorney General] in the investigation of this case, including the interrogation of the defendant following his arrest, were a part of his sworn and required duties as an Assistant District Attorney General. There is no merit to this issue." Elrod, 721 S.W.2d at 822. This court has also determined that an attorney, employed by the state and involved in the prosecution of the case who may be called as a witness by the opposing party is not subject to disqualification unless or until it becomes evident that his testimony will be prejudicial to the interests of his client. See State v. Browning, 666 S.W.2d 80, 87 (Tenn. Crim. App. 1983); [*28] see also State v. Zagorski, 701 S.W.2d 808, 815 (Tenn. Crim. App. 1985).

I would also encourage you to review State vs. Grooms 2020 WL 9171956 in which the holding from the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals is similar to State vs. Ownby.

It's unsettling that you have been a prosecutor who has been present on major crime scenes, but you disagree with the notion that prosecutors should be present at major crime scenes.

I, too, have been a prosecutor. District Attorney General Steve Crump encourages his assistant DAs to not only be present on the scene of homicides, but also overdose deaths, in the event that the overdose death could be prosecuted as a second degree murder. Unfortunately, in Hamilton County there are currently too many overdose deaths per year for the latter to occur, but certainly with 30-40 homicides a year, and approximately 28 prosecutors in the District Attorney's Office, it is entirely reasonable to ask an assistant district attorney to be on the scene.

The assistant district attorney, or myself, will be on scene to simply be helpful to law enforcement if the need arose. In the 10th Judicial District, where I prosecuted, it often meant helping with search warrants or simply familiarizing oneself with the case as early as possible.

Also, there will be no "15 minute rule" that you speak of. It's an appealing headline for an opinion piece, but it's simply not part of my platform. I mentioned "15 minutes" in a debate simply as an example. Logistically, one can often not even make it across town in 15 minutes. However, I will attempt to help the law enforcement agencies in Hamilton County by having an assistant district attorney on the scene of a homicide within a reasonable amount of time.

I believe you have my cell phone number. I have not heard from you since I began my campaign, but would love to meet with you any time to discuss this issue, or any others. My email address is also below.

Coty Wamp

wamp.coty@gmail.com






Providing our students with multiple pathways for success is vital to the future of this county. As a youth ministry leader in Red Bank for more than five years, I know this as well as anyone.

Our communities are riddled with crime, a problem worse than many of us want to admit.

Chattanoogas crime problem is the direct result of hopelessness. I witnessed this firsthand as countless students wandered into our church facility searching for an identity and purpose that wasnt modeled or supported at home.

Theres been much chatter about crime from each candidate in the Hamilton County mayors race, but the only candidate Ive seen present a sustainable, long-term plan to address this issue is Weston Wamp. His plan addresses hopelessness, the root of many problems Hamilton County faces today.

A family support system within the home cannot be overstated. The education system will never replace the home, but it can certainly provide a dream and a path to attain it.

Unfortunately, this race seems to have become about political pandering and doing so to the right people. This became clear at the forum hosted by Calvary Chapel weeks ago.

Between Sabena Smedleys commitment to not buy from Starbucks or other woke companies to Matt Hullanders claim to know a lot of people that were there for a peaceful protest and they didn't see any of that, but the media has its own agenda, referring to violence of Jan. 6, it was alarming to see our potential leaders pandering and fostering division.

During my time in ministry, I grew to appreciate the wisdom of Andy Stanley, pastor of Northpoint Community Church in Alpharetta, Ga. He recently spoke to the Georgia House of Representatives. During his 10 minute speech, Stanley addressed the room of Representatives, saying, To those of you who pander to and foster division, you are terrible leaders and let me tell you why. If you need an enemy in order to lead, youre a poor leader.

I appreciate the fact that Weston has refused to pander to the audience before him and displays both thoughtfulness and acknowledgment that there arent easy answers, and all answers require nuance.

I find it quite ironic that the candidate most often described as too political is the only candidate refusing to play the political game.

I will be voting for Weston Wamp for the countys next mayor, and I would urge you to do the same. The county needs a solution to the hopelessness students face, and Weston provides both the plans and the leadership to accomplish this.

Jacob Hutcherson
90 Day Fiance: Before the 90 Days Season 3 stars, Benjamin Taylor and Akinyi Obala give an update on their relationship and life together. Heres an update on their marriage in 2022.

Akinyi Obala and Benjamin Taylor, 90 Day Diaries | TLC

Benjamin and Akinyi want to buy a home

Akinyi, originally from Nairobi, Kenya, is finally together in Phoenix, Arizona. After arriving on a K-1 visa, the couple finally got married in April 2021.

Five months into their marriage, Akinyi told the cameras that her life with Benjamin wasnt how she envisioned it. She wants to find a home where she can start a family. She tells Benjamin, I want a place to have my babies.

Benjamin told Akinyi, Were going to have to rent for about a year, though. Akinyi thought it would be much simpler to buy a house in America. Benjamin explained, Financially, we are struggling. We dont have the funds that I would have had saved up because I had to spend it on travel and the wedding and the whole K-1 visa process.

Benjamin and Akinyi struggle to get pregnant

36-year-old Benjamin, who has a five-year-old son from a previous marriage, and 28-year-old Akinyi are ready to start their own family. However, despite trying to get pregnant for five months, they still struggle to conceive.

Thats when Akinyi and Benjamin decide to go to a fertility center in Phoenix to see if they have any health issues. A week later, Benjamin finds out that there is no problem with either. The fertility specialist, Vinay Gunnala M.D., told the 90 Day Fiance couple that the results had come back normal.

In fact, Benjamin was surprised when he found out his sperm count was higher than average. The doctor reassured them that they should give themselves time and not worry if they hadnt conceived right away.

The 90 Day Fiance couples marriage is strong

Despite not feeling satisfied with her life in the US, Akinyi feels confident about her marriage to Benjamin. She said, Our marriage is strong. I cannot complain about that, but its our life is not where I thought it would be by now.

Still, the Before the 90 Days couple feels like there is pressure from both Benjamin and Akinyis families to have children. Akinyi told the cameras, When the doctor tells us it takes six months to one year to get pregnant, I felt a sigh of relief. Because weve been trying because of all the pressures that our friends, our families have been giving us.

However, Benjamin told Akinyi not to worry about the outside pressures in their marriage. He tells her, everybody can wait. She agrees, Everybody else can wait.

Despite the pressure, the couple is just enjoying their time as newlyweds. New episodes of 90 Day Diaries air Mondays on TLC and discovery+.

RELATED: 90 Day Diaries Laura Jallali Update: Where Is She in 2022 After Divorce From Aladin?
[SPOILER ALERT: Spoilers ahead for Teen Mom 2 Season 11 Episode 5.]

Toward the beginning of Teen Mom 2 Season 11, Kailyn Lowry quit filming after discovering her ex and father of her two youngest sons agreed to participate in the show. However, Kailyn has since returned to Teen Mom 2. Heres what else happened during season 11 episode 5.

Teen Mom 2 stars Kailyn Lowry and Leah Messer | Jamie McCarthy; Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

Leah Messers kids met boyfriend Jaylan during Teen Mom 2 Season 11 Episode 5

During the getaway to Costa Rica, Leah Messers sister, Victoria, got engaged to Royer, the father of her son, while Jaylan Mobley and Leah made their relationship official.

After getting home, she told her kids about the new romance and expressed interest in the man who made their mama smile. Jaylan connected with the kids about his experience being a twin, and they seemed to like him.

RELATED: Teen Mom: Briana DeJesuss Relationship With Chris Lopez Seemingly Played a Role in Her Breakup

Additionally, Ashley Jones admitted to her sister that she preferred saying she didnt know her relationship status to avoid going back and forth. After getting advice that she should continue working on their marriage, she met with her husband, Bariki Smith.

The couple talked about what they needed from each other and seemed committed to making their relationship work with the help of counseling. However, she later admitted to moving forward cautiously in a private confessional.

Kailyn Lowry returned to Teen Mom 2 Season 11 during episode 5

After refusing to film for three months due to ex Chris Lopezs participation in the show, Kailyn Lowry returned to Teen Mom 2 in Season 11 Episode 5.

Speaking to a producer, she explained she felt events that happened during the show didnt align with her current work in therapy and discovered Chris began filming around the same time.

Kail is back! While filming for the first time in 3 months, she reveals some interesting news to Leah about Vee that may put their friendship & podcast in jeopardy. #TeenMom2 is all-new TONIGHT at 8p on @MTV. pic.twitter.com/wpFIvoOrQV  Teen Mom (@TeenMom) April 5, 2022

She then gave an update on her co-parenting situations claiming that Chris hasnt responded to her, so theyre done, and explained that she and Jo Rivera exchange their oldest without speaking as she feels he judges from her past actions.

However, the podcast host said shes currently on good terms with her ex-husband Javi Marroquin amid their constantly changing dynamics. When asked if shes ready to return to the show, Kailyn called it a trial and admitted shes having a hard time allowing the cameras back into her every moment. However, the Delaware native promised shes going to try.

Kailyn and Vee Rivera have short-lived fallout that leads to the demise of their podcast

Speaking with Leah through Facetime, Kailyn revealed her podcast with Jos wife, Vee Baby Mamas No Drama, which might be over. According to the reality TV star, she got into a fight with Javi, and he revealed that Vee lied about something.

Therefore, she confronted all three, and Vee apparently confessed to her that she leaked her pregnancy with Lux to Javi before she wanted to tell anyone. Additionally, Vee reportedly claimed the baby that Kailyn miscarried might not have belonged to Javi, a rumor the podcast host called unforgivable due to the number of times her ex-husband questioned paternity.

Kailyn explained she confronted Vee about the leak through text and noted she apologized for her actions. However, the Pride Over Pity author noticed Vee had already gone to their recording office and removed her things.

After having a conversation with Javi about it, Kailyn met with an apologetic Vee, who admitted she felt alone at the time and wanted someone else to hurt like her. While the podcaster understands and believes they can remain friends, she doesnt think the two can work together anymore. Teen Mom 2 airs Tuesdays at 8/7 on MTV.

RELATED: Teen Mom: Kailyn Lowrys Ex Chris Lopez Would Consider Filming Special With Other Fathers
Within the framework of BioMates, a process is to be established with which renewable raw materials can be processed on a large scale in refineries instead of crude oil.

In the EU-funded project BioMates, the overall production process is now established and running on a validation scale. After producing 1000 kilograms of bio-oil in a test facility for the first time last year, this was another important step for achieving the projects goal to establish a procedure to process sustainable raw materials instead of crude oil on large scale in refineries.

The technology validation phase was carried out in the validation facilities at RISE in Pitea, Sweden, and at CERTH in Thessaloniki, Greece. To date, bio-oil production and post-treatment in validation scale TRL5  referring to the Technology Readiness Level 5 indicating technologies that are validated in an industrially relevant environment  has been achieved, generating a bio-oil stable enough for storing and shipping. Furthermore, the production of 10 liters of BioMates per day via a mild hydrotreatment process has been successfully conducted. This involved the use of a customized hydrotreatment catalyst developed by Ranido and an electrochemical hydrogen compression and purification system developed by HyET hydrogen, which was installed in CERTH's hydroprocessing validation facility.

Demonstration of functionality

The last stretch of the project focuses on the validation of the end-use of BioMates as co-processing refinery feedstock. The functionality of the processes will be demonstrated by the production of approx. 1,000 liters of transportation fuels consisting of 90 % typical fossil input streams (LCO, gasoil) and approx. 10 % BioMates as feedstock - in a co-processing method in the hydroprocessing unit at CERTH. The final diesel-fuel-cut is expected to fully meet the EN 590 specification. All process steps together thus represent the complete BioMates production process on a validation scale.

This is a highly innovative project which brings together not only academic partners, but also a major international energy company and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), holding the potential to reduce Europes dependence on imports of fossil fuels and securing the energy supply, says Dr. Stella Bezergianni, Research Director and Head of the hydroprocessing group of CPERI/CERTH.

Recognition of European experts from research and industry

In the course of the ongoing validation phase, BioMates also hosted an online workshop at the 29th European Biomass Conference & Exhibition 2021 attended by key stakeholders from academia and industry, mainly from Europe. Participants agreed on the innovative technology of BioMates and the use of advanced biofuels and coherent policy frameworks.

About the project

BioMates is funded by the European Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 and coordinated by CERTH in Thessaloniki. The nine-partner -project aims to effectively convert residues and non-food/feed plants into high-quality bio-based intermediates compatible with conventional refinery conversion units, as currently, conventional fuels can only be blended with ready-to-use biofuels at the end of the fuel production process. Using BioMates, this step would no longer be necessary, as hybrid fuels with high bio content and full compatibility with conventional combustion engines could be produced directly in the conventional refinery process.

The BioMates team comprises nine partners from industry, academia and research centers:
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Total Russian trade ban demanded by Polish activists who are sympathetic to Volodymyr Zelensky's demands want to ramrod France and German for opposition to an EU embargo.

Paris and Berlin are in the sights of these pro-Ukraine groups in Poland, which is at the forefront of Opposition to Russia.

Since the start of the conflict, both bloc members have avoided any actions that would the seen as aggressive and got rapped for not helping by sending arms.

EU Continues Trade With Russia Because of Germany, France

They are obstructing trade roads near the German-Belarus border, demanding that the EU block all trade with Russia; France and Germany are unprepared for the repercussions, reported Express UK.

One of them, Polish activist Viktoria Pogrebniak, said that EU sanctions need more force behind them to affect. She derides how the 50km of queueing trucks still roll out from the EU into Russia.

The activists, according to her, after three days of demonstrating, blamed it's not the borders but how the two top EU members led by Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, were the problem. Actions taken by the protestor is to block a primary highway linking Germany and Poland; for two hours.

More Reasons for an EU embargo

Trade with Russia in 2020 would be about 37 percent, including global trade, as a trading partner remarked the block. Bloc members need natural gas from Russian state firm Gazprom which is 45 percent of the energy needs in 2021. In 2022 a Russian trade ban is not on the agenda, angering Polish activists, cited Diverse Bulletin.

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Pogrebniak harshly rebuked the EU as helping further the war and adds the death of Ukrainians were in the hands of the Brussel.

According to European Commission, President Ursula von der Leyen formally proposed another cut of coal from Russia, as charges of massacring 300 noncombatants in Bucha were alleged by Ukrainian officials, noted DW.

The list of new sanctions on Moscow includes the ban of Russian ships from EU ports; four more Russian banks separated from the SWIFT payment systems.

President von der Leyen stated the ones responsible for the crime would be punished; furthermore, a probe to see if the Russian Army had committed war crimes. Activists are forcing the EU to stop the trade of semiconductors, machinery, and transport equipment worth 10 billion euros to the bloc.

Pogrebniak wants a total embargo on Moscow and all activity keeping the EU economically sound: which is why Paris and Berlin are not ready for a blanket ban. Germany does not want to ban oil and natural gas from Gazprom, saying the sanctions are unnecessary. Chancellor Scholz will not sacrifice energy security.

Energy security means keeping Germany's industries firing to avoid a depleted economy. If he listens to the demands of activists and the union, it will be a disaster.

Now EU countries are trying to diversify their energy sources to reduce their dependence on Russia. She has remarked that the union should do something after annexing Crimea in 2014.

All EU member's votes are needed for an EU embargo for a total ban on Russian energy; that would be detrimental to Moscow's energy exports. The Russian trade ban that Polish activists are pushing for is blocked by France and Germany, which thinks apart from other bloc members.

Related Article: Macron Diplomatically Leads NATO in Dealing With the Ukraine Crisis Despite Potshots From EU Members

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Former Hillsong pastors say Brian Houston bullied them into handing over church assets

Hillsong Church founder Brian Houston, who recently resigned from his post as global senior pastor over allegations of sexual misconduct, also bullied church leaders into handing over cash and real estate to enrich his megachurch network, two former pastors who worked with the embattled spiritual leader claim.

Husband and wife pastors Vera and Zhenya Kasevich, who led Hillsong churches in Kyiv and Moscow for more than 20 years, revealed in an ABC Australia report that they were threatened when they tried to break away from the Hillsong network in 2014.



The couple, who recently immigrated to the U.S., said Houston and George Aghajanian, the general manager and a director of Hillsong Church Australia and its international entities, threatened to derail their immigration plans if they didnt comply with their demands for money and property.

Houston has denied the allegations.

Documents signed by Aghajanian reportedly show that Hillsong Church Ltd. asked the Kasevichs to make a voluntary donation of the proceeds of the sale of a property and over $230,000 in cash.

The Kasevichs, who also appear in the Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed documentary on Discovery Plus, say they founded their church in Ukraine in 1992 with financial help from Hillsong Church.

Even though they named their church Hillsong, they maintain that they remained independent. By 2008, the congregation had grown into a thriving church generating $1 million in income from just donations alone. It was around this time, they said, that Houston developed an interest in their work.

Zhenya Kasevich recalled having to pay large sums for guest speakers to attend a Hillsong conference in Kyiv.

We had to pay $13,000 for first-class tickets from the USA to Ukraine, he told the news outlet. He claimed that the excesses made him and his wife uncomfortable.

We could not look at our poor peoples eyes and tell them we are using church money for our benefit and our luxurious life, he added. So when we saw this, we started to raise questions.

Around the time in 2014, while they were trying to break away from Hillsong Church, the Kasevichs say they were also trying to immigrate to the U.S. with the help of the church.

As a result of their disagreement, they claim Hillsong Church threatened to derail their immigration application.

In one email cited by the publication, Aghajanian purportedly notes that he can make things very difficult for the Kasevichs with the American authorities.

Houston warned in another purported email that Vera and Zhenya Kasevich have a lot to fear and that his general manager has a lot of useful information for the US embassy on them.

Basically, [Brian Houston] said ... This church is mine. I will make your life small. I will squash it, Vera Kasevich said.

Houston dismissed the Kasevichs allegations as a complete fantasy. When contacted by ABC Australia, he denied threatening their efforts to immigrate to the U.S.

The couple says now that their immigration to the U.S. was successful, they no longer feel intimidated to speak up about the dealings of Hillsong Church leaders in Australia.

We were quiet for eight full years  and now we are safe, Zhenya Kasevich was quoted as saying.

The Kasevichs say they eventually gave Hillsong Church officials what they wanted to prevent their congregation from being split up amid threats by Hillsong to start a rival church in Kyiv. They say there were forced to completely cut ties with their members.

ABC Australia reported that the Kasevichs refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement with Hillsong. The agreement would have allegedly prohibited them from attending any Hillsong service in Kyiv or Moscow or contacting Hillsong staff or volunteers directly.

We are not afraid to tell the truth, and we want other people who are victims to have a voice, Vera Kasevich said.

The Christian Post asked Hillsong Church on Wednesday if requiring Hillsong Church ministry leaders to sign non-disclosure agreements is standard practice. A response was not immediately received.

The report further detailed how Hillsong Church took over multiple churches and their assets in Australia with aggressive business tactics.

In the U.S., the global megachurch network amassed a real estate portfolio in the United States expected to appreciate to over $40 million since launching its first U.S. location in New York City in 2010, according to private investigator Barry Bowen of the Trinity Foundation, an organization that monitors church fraud.

As the scandals about the megachurch mounted in recent weeks, Hillsong has lost nine of its 16 American church campuses.

Just over a year ago, CP reported how Hillsong Church took hits to its brand due to property-related lawsuits in the U.S. and Australia. The lawsuits accused Hillsong Church leaders of immoral, oppressive and unscrupulous conduct.

In the U.S. lawsuit filed on Jan. 20, 2021, by the Wall Street Theater Company, Inc., Hillsong Connecticut was accused of failing to pay more than $100,000 in rent and removing electronic equipment from the companys property located at 71 Wall Street in Norwalk.

A source told the New York Post that the church claimed they could not afford to pay the rent because they are a small nonprofit organization.

Hillsong just ghosted the theater, the source was quoted as saying. When the theater sent them a bill, they responded saying they were a small not-for-profit and couldnt pay it, and that they didnt owe it anyways because of the pandemic.

Dale Smith, whose company provided security for Hillsong, argued that while the church might claim to be a nonprofit, he thinks it operated more like a corporation.

It just seemed like a business, real robotic, he told the New York Post. Even the ones on the payroll seemed to be fighting, positioning in order to climb that ladder, which, in my opinion, is not what a church is supposed to be.
Kentucky to treat churches as 'essential services' during pandemics, emergencies

Kentucky has passed a law that requires the government to treat houses of worship the same as essential services whenever a state of emergency is declared after many states and municipalities enacted emergency orders during the pandemic limiting the size and scope of religious gatherings.

Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear signed House Bill 43 into law on Tuesday, which exempts houses of worship from specific emergency measures unless such houses have become unsafe to a degree that would justify condemnation in the absence of a state of emergency.

A governmental entity shall not prohibit or restrict a religious organization from operating or engaging in religious services during a declared emergency to the same or any greater extent than other organizations or businesses that provide essential services necessary and vital to the health and welfare of the public are prohibited or restricted, continued the new law.

[N]o health, safety, or occupancy requirement may impose a substantial burden on a religious organization or its services unless applying the burden to the religion or religious service in the particular instance is essential to further a compelling governmental interest and is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.

The new law wont prohibit the state from requiring religious organizations to comply with neutral health, safety, or occupancy requirements that are applicable to all organizations and businesses that provide essential services.

Introduced in January and chiefly sponsored by Republican Rep. Shane Baker, HB 43 passed the House on March 1 in a vote of 83-12, then the Senate on March 23 in a vote of 30-7.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal nonprofit that has argued religious liberty cases at the U.S. Supreme Court level, celebrated the bill's passing.

ADF legal counsel Greg Chafuen said in a statement Tuesday that houses of worship provide soul-sustaining operations that are essential to our society and protected by the First Amendment.

While public officials have the authority and responsibility to protect public health and safety, the First Amendment prohibits the government from treating houses of worship and religious organizations worse than shopping centers, restaurants, or gyms, stated Chafuen.

HB 43 makes it clear that officials cannot discriminate against religious operations, including during a public crisis. We commend Gov. Beshear and the Kentucky Legislature for taking this significant step to defend religious liberty for all Kentuckians.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many and local state governments were accused of treating churches worse than comparable secular entities in their various lockdown policies aimed at mitigating the spread of the coronavirus.

In November 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo that certain New York restrictions had unfairly singled out religious groups.

Members of this Court are not public health experts, and we should respect the judgment of those with special expertise and responsibility in this area. But even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten, stated the majority.

The restrictions at issue here, by effectively barring many from attending religious services, strike at the very heart of the First Amendments guarantee of religious liberty.

In other states, governments have had to pay out settlements in response to lawsuits filed on behalf of churches and other religious organizations who felt their First Amendment rights were violated because their congregations couldnt gather due to restrictions against large gatherings.

Last May, California paid $1.35 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Harvest Rock Church against COVID-19 policies.

Kentucky is not the first state to pass a law aimed at limiting the ability of state agencies to enact emergency orders that place stricter restrictions on religious bodies than comparable secular entities.

In March 2021, North Dakota passed a law stating state officials cant treat religious conduct more restrictively than any secular conduct of reasonably comparable risk, unless the government demonstrates through clear and convincing scientific evidence that a particular religious activity poses an extraordinary health risk.

Similar laws were passed in states like New Hampshire and Indiana.
UK Online Safety Bill threatens free speech, civil liberties groups warn

Civil liberties groups in the United Kingdom have expressed concern about a bill in Parliament aimed at censoring harmful speech online, believing that it could be used to censor unpopular opinions on hot-button political issues like sexuality and gender.

Introduced last month and making its way through the House of Commons, the Online Safety Bill has garnered concerns from groups like the Free Speech Union.

FSU General Secretary Toby Young released a statement expressing concern that the proposed legislation, if passed, could be abused by political activists to silence dissenting views.

We are particularly concerned that the government has said it will force social media platforms to remove legal but harmful content, including harassment, stated Young.

That will enable political activists and interest [groups] claiming to speak on behalf of disadvantaged groups to silence their opponents by branding any views they disagree with as harassment.

Young stated that while the bill includes some free speech protections, it will still have a chilling effect on online speech because the penalty for ignoring free speech will not be nearly as great as the penalties for failing to comply with the new safety duties.

Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, wrote a column published by The Telegraph in which she warned against using Americanized terms of service over domestic speech laws.

Tech companies rules have seen thousands of people censored, suspended and banned for their views on sex and gender, politics, pandemic policies, and for making anodyne jokes, wrote Carlo.

Public outrage at excessive speech interventionism has been, up to now, directed solely at Big Tech, but under these new laws the British Government will be held squarely to blame too.

Carlo argued that the legislation reeks of safetyism and threatens liberal free speech values by broadening what constitutes unacceptable online speech.

Indeed, the Bill creates new communications offenses for speech that may cause psychological harm. There is no clinical definition here, and I have a feeling that in the Twittersphere this threshold will be interpreted very liberally, Carlo continued.

Laws in other countries have been used by Twitter to censor views deemed to be violations of hate speech policy.

Last month, Twitter took action against The Christian Post in response to a tweet that labeled Rachel Levine, a biologically male trans-identified Biden administration official, a man.

As part of its justification, Twitter sent CP a notification explaining that the account had been flagged for possibly violating Frances LCEN law on internet content and warned that such action could lead to civil and criminal penalties.

Last month, the U.K. Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport and Secretary Nadine Dorries announced the introduction of the Online Safety Bill.

Today the government is announcing that executives whose companies fail to cooperate with Ofcoms information requests could face prosecution or jail time within two months of the Bill becoming law, instead of two years, as it was previously drafted, the announcement reads.

According to the announcement, the proposed legislation would protect children from harmful content such as pornography and limit peoples exposure to illegal content, while protecting freedom of speech.

It will require social media platforms, search engines and other apps and websites allowing people to post their own content to protect children, tackle illegal activity and uphold their stated terms and conditions, the announcement continued.

The legislation promises to prohibit social media sites from restricting the free speech rights of users, but it will also require sites to tackle legal but harmful content, such as exposure to self-harm, harassment and eating disorders, set by the government and approved by Parliament.

The legislation would give the U.K. Office of Communications, commonly called Ofcom, expanded powers to regulate telecommunications and punish companies that fail to comply.

The internet has transformed our lives for the better. Its connected us and empowered us. But on the other side, tech firms havent been held to account when harm, abuse and criminal behavior have run riot on their platforms, stated Dorries.

We dont give it a seconds thought when we buckle our seat belts to protect ourselves when driving. Given all the risks online, its only sensible we ensure similar basic protections for the digital age.

Ofcom Chief Executive Dame Melanie Dawes also expressed support for the bill, labeling it an important step towards creating a safer life online for the UKs children and adults.

Our research shows the need for rules that protect users from serious harm  but which also recognize the great things about being online, and protect freedom of expression. Were looking forward to starting the job, she stated.
American tradition of economic liberty comes from covenant theology

The American concept of government, including the order of property rights and free exchange, is unique and arose out of the disconnected relationship between the Crown and the Colonies. Although it is a compact; that is, a covenant structure in form (Declaration and Constitution), its actual manifestation solidifies the form of the American Union. Since nearly all civilizations had, in some forma king as the head or master of its governancethe Great Experiment instituted this same form, but in an entirely distinctive, never before seen, structure.

Federalism is derived from the Latin word for covenant or treaty, foedus. Dr. Donald Lutz writes, It is in a covenant-derived compact written by a deeply religious people who knew a great deal about the political and religious covenants in the Bible. Dr. Alice Baldwin, in 1928, wrote in her extensive analysis of colonial pastors how deeply spiritual and Biblical these clergy believed the role of civil government was and saw it directly as an offspring of scriptural commands. She concluded that the clergy of New England understood the conception of a covenant or compact as the foundation of divine and human relations [was] of basic importance in New England thought. This belief was the genesis of Americas constitutional governance; that a compactual covenant of a social compact and constitution was a societal agreement with God. Christs Law brought liberty, and those liberties were sacred, a part of the divine constitution[.] [] This law of God, natural [revelation] and written [revealed], was not only moral but also rational, and God expected obedience not so much because of His authority as because of its reasonableness and the benefits to be derived therefrom.

As Cornell University historian, Brian Tierney, discloses, Humans were bound by divine law, directly revealed by God, and by the precepts of natural moral law, discernible by human reason. Hence, by the Laws of Nature and of Natures God. So would divine law be the foundation of the American Republic, as it had been the foundation of the Hebrew Republic. Gods hand and His Laws would rise these civilizations to levels unforeseen. The reason, discerned by the Enlightenment theorists like Locke and Montesquieu, would give our Forefathers and Founding Fathers the human reason to understand and implore Gods Law into the American Experiment. As colonial clergyman George Duffield preached in 1783 for a Thanksgiving Day sermon in direct reference to Micah 6:8 (as well as other Scriptural passages), as many of our Founding Fathers often did:

It is, that we love the Lord our God, to walk in his way, and keep his commandments, to observe his statues and his judgements. That a sacred regard be maintained to righteousness and truth. That we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. Then shall God delight to dwell amongst us. And these United States shall long remain, a great, a glorious, and an happy people.

Dreisbach also disclosed that the founding generation connected the American Republic to the Hebrew Republic.

As King David so poetically and insightfully wrote and understood from his study and reading of the Torah, I have kept my feet from every evil path so that I might obey your word. I have not departed from your laws, for you yourself have taught me. He knew that obedience of Gods Laws, the Laws of Nature and of Natures God, kept both individuals and nations on the best trajectory to moral success and economic abundance.

In their astute analysis of the divinity of American constitutionalism tradition, Danial Elazar and John Kincaid noted, In its heart of hearts, a covenant is an agreement in which a higher moral force, traditionally God, is either a direct party to or guarantor of a particular relationship. While a compact is often thought of as a more secular document, in the American tradition a compact was a divine agreement; that is, a covenantal agreement with God always as the witness and as Elazar and Kincaid note, the divine guarantor.

In August of 1787, Reverend William Rogers, while preaching to a congregation including George Washington and other members of the Convention of 1787, pleaded with God, DO THOU visit our land, graciously regard our country, protect and defend our infant, but hitherto highly favoured empire, bless our CONGRESS, smile upon each particular State of the UNION [] who compose our FEDERAL CONVENTION; will it please THEE, O THOU ETERNAL I AM! To favour them from day to day with thy immediate presence; be thou their wisdom and their strength! Pastor Williams was tying Yahweh as the third, and most important, party of the compact, thus acknowledging it as a covenantal compact between the States and the Almighty Lord  a divine confederacy with the blessing of God.

This experimentation of societal compacts from 1620 to 1776 and beyond forged a vigorous amount of learning and engagement of covenant based societies by our Forefathers. This flexibility of usage, notes Daniel Elazar, is consistent with the biblical worldview which see the universe as built upon an interlocking and overlapping system of covenantal relationships. Elazar continues, expressively describing it this way:

The omnipotent Deity, by freely covenanting with man, limits his own powers to allow man space in which to be free, only requiring of him that he live in accordance with the Law established as normative by the Covenant. The Puritans recognition of this aspect of the covenantal relationship between God and man in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Britain and American became the basis of their federal theology  inventing the term federal (derived from the Latin foedus, meaning covenant) to express this theo-political relationship.

Dr. Pauline Maier correlates divine and natural law, noting that to justify revolution the various state and local legislatures of colonial America used the eternal laws of self-preservation or, as others sometimes said, the first laws of nature, drew upon a politicized religious literature that equated the laws of God with the laws of nature and described self-preservation as an instinct by God implanted in our nature. Maier goes on to connect this contractual origins of government and the right of the people to judge their rulers with the writings of John Locke, Sir William Blackstone(who, himself, referred to Lockes work), and other 17th and 18th century English and Scottish jurist and philosophers. Maier concludes that the colonists had both a contractual right and a God-given obligation to resist rulers attempting to destroy them. And these rights and obligations come from the direct tie between the laws of nature and natural rights, divine law, and eternal law; all of which are corollaries of Gods Law. Americas economic preeminence depends on reviving the covenant theology on which the colonial generations depended. Our federal government is too large, precisely because we have forgotten that federal comes from foedus, i.e. covenant.
ELCA church calls for trans bishop to resign over allegations of racism, other issues

A California congregation with a sizable LGBT membership that belongs to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has called for the removal of the denominations first trans-identified bishop.

The Rev. Megan Rohrer, who uses they/them pronouns, was installed as the first trans-identified bishop in ELCA history last September, becoming the leader of the California-based ELCA Sierra Pacific Synod.

However, since then, Rohrer has weathered controversy over allegations of racist behavior toward a Hispanic Lutheran pastor, as well as other issues that have led some to call for Rohrers removal.

The Congregation Council of Our Saviors Lutheran Church, a Fresno-based ELCA congregation that reports having about 50% LGBT membership, passed a resolution on March 22 calling for the removal of both Rohrer and the Synod Council.

Approved by a unanimous vote, the resolution petitioned the ELCA Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton, the Conference of Bishops, and other leaders to begin the process of removing Rohrer and the Synod Council from power.

The resolution cited multiple reasons, including the alleged mistreatment by Rohrer of Pastor Nelson Rabell-Gonzalez of Mision Latina Luterana  which included firing him  litigation surrounding Rohrers actions as pastor of Grace Lutheran Evangelical Church of San Francisco, and other issues.

Rohrers approach to pastoral ministry is incompatible with the expectations of ordained clergy of the ELCA  a pattern of abuse, bullying, manipulation of facts, deceit, and character assassination, stated the resolution.

 the episcopate of Bishop Megan Rohrer, the first transgender bishop of the ELCA, should be cause for great celebration but, instead, by their actions as both Pastor of Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church in San Francisco and as Bishop of the Sierra Pacific Synod, their episcopate is an embarrassment to the LGBTQIA+ members of Our Saviours Lutheran Church and its Mision Esperanza.

Our Saviors Lutheran Church demanded that ECLA leadership begin the process of removing Rohrer and the Synd Council from office, a reversal of the actions taken against Rabell-Gonzalez and others, and demanded a public apology to Rabell-Gonzalez.

The church added that it "refuses to participate in any activities, meetings, assemblies, or other gatherings of the Sierra Pacific Synod while Bishop Megan Rohrer and the current Synod Council remain in their respective positions."

To participate in any activity of the Sierra Pacific Synod at this time, would give tacit approval to the past damage done to Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church in San Francisco (now defunct) by Bishop Megan Rohrer; it would be a betrayal of the core values of our Congregation.

The Christian Post reached out to the ELCA for a response to these developments, but the mainline Protestant denomination did not respond by press time.

Shortly after the resolution was passed, Bishop Eaton announced that a listening team was going to travel to the Synod and conduct interviews, though she did not name Rohrer or any of the controversies in her statement.

These interviews will be times of holy listening to people who have been affected in various ways by the situation, said Eaton.

They will conclude their work after Easter and will provide a report to me that will serve as an advisory document for my prayerful discernment and decision-making.

In December 2021, the Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries (ELM), a group that supports LGBT Lutheran clergy, suspended the membership of Rohrer in their organization.

ELM said at the time that Rohrer was suspended due to an existing pattern of behavior that put the bishop at odds with ELMs Mission, Vision, and Values  specifically as it pertains to being an anti-racist organization.

This suspension is not only a response to recent harm done by the Sierra Pacific Synod Council and Bishop Rohrer to the Latinx community in Stockton, CA. This is a decision that ELM staff and Board have been discerning for much of 2021, stated the ELM board of directors last year.

The Accountability Team has attempted to work with Bishop Rohrer to specifically address how the bishops racist words and actions have harmed members of the ELM staff, board, and community. In September, Bishop Rohrer declined the Accountability Teams invitation for continued work to repair these relationships.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg hopes churches will one day host virtual reality services on platform

Calling faith communities the best of Facebook, the social media giants Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said she's looking forward to the day when churches and other religious groups begin hosting services in virtual reality on the platform as many flocked to the service amid the pandemic to stay connected.

Sandberg made her intentions known during a recent virtual faith summit with several religious groups in which she highlighted the critical role Facebook played when communities of faith were unable to gather as a result of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

As a person of faith myself, I know how important it is for my family to be able to stay connected with our Jewish community remotely. Weve been able to celebrate high holy days  from our home thanks to technology, Sandberg said.

I sometimes reflect on how much harder the experience for the last year might have been if the pandemic had taken place just a few years earlier because it used to be you needed a TV studio to do what you can now do with your smartphone. Nothing has made me prouder than seeing the role Facebook apps have played in keeping people connected at a time when we all had to be apart, she added.

Sandberg explained that well before the pandemic, Facebook began working with faith communities to see how the company could better serve them and those efforts proved fruitful during the pandemic.

I know that faith organizations and social media are a natural fit because fundamentally, both are about connection. This was true long before the pandemic. Back in 2017, we changed our mission to give people the power to build community around the world closer together. We envisioned a world where our platform could help people build community by connecting with others who shared their interests. And we built a team within Facebook to help us better serve people of faith and houses of worship globally, she said.

Four years later, we are gathering on Facebook to again affirming (sic) the value of connecting people to faith, hope, inspiration and love. Facebook can be a place where members of large denominations find common ground or where people from older or smaller religious tradition find each other no matter where they are in the world, she continued. Our hope is that one day people will host religious services in virtual reality spaces as well or use augmented reality as an educational tool to teach their children the story of their faith.

While technology will never be a substitute for joining together in a space of worship, Sandberg believes it will empower them.

Communities of faith represent the best of Facebook and we hope to keep it that way now and in the future, she said.

Nora Jones, a pastor at Open Door Ministries in Gainesville, Florida, and Facebook's director for global faith partnerships, said the company has been working over the last four years to help churches and other houses of worship understand that Facebook is so much more than just a place to make people aware of your programs and events. Its a place where you can build authentic faith community.

So many of you as people of faith and leaders of houses of worship had to reckon with the fact that physical gatherings were suspended for health concerns. And it was during this time of uncertainty when so many people felt lost that you stood up and said, lets take our faith into the digital domain." Jones said.

"The reason why were hosting this gathering today is to celebrate you. To celebrate the fact that when the global faith community was challenged with the opportunity to continue to hope that there could be change and life and light, you created those spaces on Facebook, she added.

A Facebook spokesperson told The Christian Post on Wednesday that churches will also be able to participate in a program called Fan Subscriptions, which allows fans to support their favorite creators with a monthly recurring payment. To participate, all creators, including religious groups, must also have 10,000 followers or 250+ return viewers along with 50,000 Post Engagements or 180,000 Watch Minutes in the last 60 days.

Since the new coronavirus pandemic first led to lockdowns in March 2020, the Church, like many other sectors of society, has had to make many changes, including a significant shift to digital worship, and recent studies show that many of those changes are likely to endure.

One study, Trends in the Black Church, showed that black churchgoers have adapted so well to online church amid the pandemic that some 41% of them now favor a hybrid model of in-person and online services, even after COVID-19 is no longer deemed as severe of a threat. Some 7% say they would rather their church services remain digital going forward the study revealed.

No longer able to pass the collection plate around because they were not able to gather physically, many churches also increasingly shifted to online giving platforms.
Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation to Supreme Court likely as 3 Republicans signal support

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is expected to be confirmed to the United States Supreme Court nomination, as three Republican Senators have recently stated their intention to vote for her.

In February, President Joe Biden nominated Jackson, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to the Supreme Court.

While the United States Senate Judiciary Committee deadlocked on advancing Jacksons nomination to the full Senate, she will make it to the Senate floor for a final vote later this week.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, which consists of 11 Democrats and 11 Republicans in reflection of the 50/50 split in the full Senate, failed to give Jackson a favorable recommendation to the full Senate Monday. While a favorable recommendation is usually an important step in the confirmation process, it is not a prerequisite to obtaining a seat on the Supreme Court.

If confirmed, Jackson will replace long-serving Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer upon his retirement later this year. While the historic nature of her nomination won her praise among Democrats, many Republicans expressed concern that she failed to define the term woman when asked and repeatedly gave child pornography offenders much lighter sentences than the guidelines called for.

After the Senate Judiciary Committee deadlocked, Senate Democrats brought a discharge petition seeking to advance her nomination to the Senate floor. The discharge petition passed in a 53-47 vote Monday, with Republican Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska and Mitt Romney, R-Utah, joining all Democrats in paving the way for a confirmation vote.

So far, Collins, Murkowski and Romney are the only Republican senators who have indicated that they will vote in favor of her confirmation. Jackson receiving their support means she will likely be confirmed as the first African American woman Supreme Court Justice in U.S. history as all 50 Senate Democrats are expected to support her nomination and she only needs a simple majority to be confirmed.

Collins became the first Republican senator to come out in favor of Jacksons confirmation, releasing a statement last week maintaining that Jackson possesses the experience, qualifications, and integrity to serve as an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court. The senator recalled how in discussions with Jackson, Sometimes I agreed with her; sometimes I did not, suggesting that her disagreement with Jackson on past or potential future judicial decisions was not disqualifying.

In my view, the role the Constitution clearly assigns to the Senate is to examine the experience, qualifications, and integrity of the nominee. It is not to assess whether a nominee reflects the ideology of an individual Senator or would rule exactly as an individual Senator would want, she wrote.

In a statement Monday, Murkowski praised Jacksons qualifications, which no one questions; her demonstrated judicial independence; her demeanor and temperament; and the important perspective she would bring to the court as a replacement for Justice Breyer.

Murkowski added that her support for Jacksons confirmation rests on my rejection of the corrosive politicization of the review process for Supreme Court nominees, which, on both sides of the aisle, is growing worse and more detached from reality by the year. She acknowledged that while I have not and will not agree with all of Judge Jacksons decisions and opinions, her approach to cases is carefully considered and is generally well-reasoned.

She answered satisfactorily to my questions about matters like the Chevron doctrine, the Second Amendment, landmark Alaska laws, and Alaska Native issues. The support she has received from law enforcement agencies around the country is significant and demonstrates the judge is one who brings balance to her decisions.

Romney did not support Jacksons nomination to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, unlike Collins and Murkowski. However, he released a statement Monday announcing his support for Jacksons confirmation. Describing Jackson as a well-qualified jurist and a person of honor, Romney predicted that he did not expect to agree with every decision she may make on the Court, adding she more than meets the standard of excellence and integrity.

I intend to vote in support of Judge Ketanji Brown Jacksons confirmation to be an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. My statement: pic.twitter.com/uGaxx8sJn5  Senator Mitt Romney (@SenatorRomney) April 4, 2022

Jackson is the first Supreme Court nominee since Clarence Thomas not to receive a favorable recommendation by the Senate Judiciary Committee. As was the case with the current Senate Judiciary Committee, an equal number of senators on the panel voted in favor of and against sending Thomas nomination to the full Senate as the body considered his nomination in 1991. Thomas was ultimately confirmed in a vote of 52-48 in the Democratic-controlled Senate following a contentious confirmation process.

In a statement issued after the Senate voted on the discharge petition to force a vote on Jacksons nomination, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called on lawmakers to finish the job of confirming the Judge by the end of the week. Jacksons likely confirmation is not expected to alter the ideological balance of the court, which will consist of six justices appointed by Republican presidents and three justices appointed by Democratic presidents before and after she would join the bench.
On Tuesday, Ivanka Trump allegedly spent eight hours answering questions from the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th Capitol Attack.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, the panel's chairman, claimed that the former senior White House advisor was being helpful and answering questions. Around 6 pm, her testimony came to an end.

Ivanka Trump Questioned For Eight Hours

The former First Daughter spoke to the committee a week after her husband, Jared Kushner, gave a six-hour presentation to the panel. She is the first child of former President Donald Trump to testify in the probe, as per Daily Mail.

Her prolonged questioning, like Kushner's, was done remotely. The Trump real estate heiress, who is said to have personally appealed to her father several times throughout the insurgency, did not use the Fifth Amendment during her testimony.

It's a stark contrast to other members of Trump's inner circle, who have claimed executive privilege, the Fifth Amendment, and even legal action against the House of Representatives to block committees. The panel also got 101 papers from the tranche that pro-Trump lawyer John Eastman attempted to suppress on Tuesday. The Capitol riot committee summoned Ivanka Trump, a White House aide, to speak about what she witnessed on January 6th .

Ivanka Trump was seen in and out of the Oval Office as MAGA supporters stormed the Capitol the morning of the incident at the protest where the ex-president spoke on the National Mall. She was alleged to have spent hours that day pleading with her father to condemn the violence and order his followers to leave the Capitol. Last week, Kushner, who functioned as Donald Trump's top counselor, appeared to a House subcommittee.

He was Trump's highest-ranking adviser and the first member of his family to testify. He willingly appeared in private via video connection and was not subpoenaed. He stated that the panel has conducted over 800 interviews and that more would be conducted in the future.

Kushner was not in the White House on January 6, 2021, as he was returning from Saudi Arabia. After Donald Trump's loss in the 2020 election, he and Ivanka stepped away from politics and relocated to Florida with their children. Other aides, including Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff; Dan Scavino Jr., deputy chief of staff; and Stephen K. Bannon, an advisor, were directed not to talk to investigators by the former president.

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are unlikely to conduct any actions that her father would disapprove of, given Ivanka and Donald Trump are incredibly close. Meadows and Bannon were found in disobedience to the House. Bannon is being investigated by the Justice Department, which has yet to decide if Meadows will be investigated as well. This week, the House will vote on whether or not to hold Scavino in contempt, according to the New York Times.

Read Also: Donald Trump Wins by 6 Points Over Joe Biden in a Snap Elections According to Recent Poll

Jan.6 Committee Urges Ivanka To Reveal Donald Trump's Conversations

The former first daughter's testimony comes just days after her husband, senior Trump advisor Jared Kushner, met with the House panel for an interview. Thompson acknowledged that certain things were exposed in Kushner's testimony, but declined to share the details with the public. Ivanka and her husband are among the committee's highest-ranking officials who have testified. Neither of them was served with a subpoena.

In its letter to Ivanka, the committee outlined four key points it wants to learn about during the interview: about the circumstances preceding up to January 6, about what happened on that day, and the riot's aftermath.

The committee found that top White House workers were opposed to Trump's intention to alter the election results, as evidenced by texts. The panel wants to know if her father was aware that his top staff and attorneys felt Pence should have challenged Joe Biden's win against his preferences.

The panel is hopeful that Ivanka Trump, who was asked to speak with her father by staff at that time, will be able to shed light on those interactions and explain why Trump did not address the nation on live television as the Capitol was attacked, Newsweek reported.

Related Article: Hunter Biden's Secret Service Detail Doles Out Around $30-K a Month To Keep an Eye on the President's Son

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Federal judge denies Biden DOJ's emergency demand to block Texas' 6-week abortion ban

A federal judge has rejected the Biden administrations emergency request to block a Texas abortion law, marking the latest setback for abortion advocates seeking to overturn the pro-life measure.

In a one-page opinion released Thursday, U.S. District Judge Robert Pittman rejected the request of the U.S. Department of Justice to issue a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction against Texas Senate Bill 8. The law, which went into effect Sept. 1, bans abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, usually around six weeks gestation. It also allows private citizens to sue individuals who perform abortions and those who help women obtain illegal abortions.

This case presents complex, important questions of law that merit a full opportunity for the parties to present their positions to the Court, wrote Pittman, appointed by former President Barack Obama to serve as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. Accordingly, IT IS ORDERED that the United States Opposed Motion for Expedited Briefing Schedule  is DENIED.

Pittmans ruling comes two days after the DOJ filed its motion for a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction against the Texas law. Accusing Texas of preventing women from exercising their constitutional rights, the DOJs request asserted that this relief is necessary to protect the constitutional rights of women in Texas and the sovereign interest of the United States in ensuring that its States respect the terms of the national compact.

The DOJ cited the U.S. Supreme Court cases Roe v. Wade, which determined that the U.S. Constitution protects a womans decision whether or not terminate her pregnancy and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed a womans right to terminate her pregnancy before viability as evidence that SB 8 was unconstitutional. The term viability refers to a baby's ability to survive outside the womb.

The decision by Pittman to deny the DOJs request to strike down the law is the latest setback pro-abortion activists have faced when attempting to challenge the law using the judicial branch. Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court rejected a request filed by abortion groups to block the law.

A majority of justices on the court agreed that their decision to allow the law to remain in place is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas law. They argued that the plaintiffs did not have a strong enough legal case to justify judicial intervention because enforcement of the law was left to private citizens rather than state officials.

Attorney General Merrick Garland first announced the U.S. governments intentions to challenge the law in court at a press conference last week. In a filing submitted Sept. 9, the DOJ sought a declaratory judgment that S.B. 8 is invalid under the Supremacy Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment, is preempted by federal law, and violates the doctrine of intergovernmental immunity.

Tuesdays filing was an attempt to convince a judge to block the law immediately, before both the U.S. and Texas had a chance to make their arguments in court. While all attempts to put the law on hold have failed thus far, the legal battle surrounding Texas SB 8 will continue for the foreseeable future.

On Wednesday, before deciding whether or not to grant the DOJs Tuesday request to immediately put SB 8 on hold, Pittman scheduled a hearing on the matter for Oct. 1.

Pittman agreed to the states request to hear arguments before ruling, according to The Texas Tribune.

As litigation over SB 8 continues, congressional Democrats are vowing to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law in an attempt to nullify pro-life laws passed at the state level. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., vowed that upon returning from recess, the House will bring up Congresswoman Judy Chus Womens Health Protection Act to enshrine into law reproductive health care for all women across America.

Public opinion polling indicates that the American people remain divided in their opinions on SB 8. A poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports earlier this month found that 46% of likely voters approve of the measure while 43% disapprove. However, 46% of respondents expressed support for President Joe Bidens vow to launch a whole-of-government effort ... to ensure that women in Texas have access to safe and legal abortions.

Polling conducted exclusively among Texans revealed slightly stronger support for banning abortions after six weeks gestation. In April, before SB 8 was signed into law, 49% of Texans surveyed told pollsters at the University of Texas at Austin that they supported banning abortions more than six weeks into a pregnancy while 41% opposed.

The litigation surrounding SB 8 comes as the Supreme Court is scheduled to rule on the constitutionality of Mississippis 15-week abortion ban in its upcoming term, which begins next month. A ruling in favor of the state of Mississippi, which is asking the justices to uphold the ban, would significantly weaken the precedent set by Roe and Casey and give states more latitude to regulate abortions before viability.
Pastor faces death threats after family is abducted, beaten on the street by radical Hindu mob

A pastor in Indias central state of Madhya Pradesh has been falsely charged with forcible conversion and received death threats even as his attackers are roaming free.

Pastor Kailash Dudwe from Kukshi village in Madhya Pradesh states Dhar District, who is still recovering from injuries he and his family sustained in a brutal attack by radical Hindu nationalists in January, has been ordered to go to court to defend himself against a complaint filed by his attackers who claim he violated the states anti-conversion law, Morning Star News reports.

The pastors wife, Jyoti Dudwe, filed a separate police complaint against a Hindu nationalist man, identified as Ashok Bamnia, and about 25 others who broke into their home to apprehend and assault the Christian family. On top of the charges for criminal intimidation, wrongful restraint and assault, police added a section of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act to the complaint against the attackers.

All the accused remained at large, however.

Jyoti Dudwe said her husband, who continues to go to the hospital for regular visits to treat his wounds, has received death threats but police have not provided any protection for him or the family. Further complicating their life, their landlord has also demanded that they vacate their home and no other property owner is willing to rent to them.

On Jan. 14, a mob of more than 20 radical Hindu nationalists physically attacked Pastor Dudwe and six other Christians, including his wife, their 5-year-old daughter, a 16-year-old girl, and four men.

The attackers tried to hit the pastors daughter with an iron bar.

My wife caught the rod and stopped it from hitting our daughter, Pastor Dudwe was quoted as saying. I still get terrified at the thought of their brutality, that they showed no mercy toward my little girl.

In a video of the attack, Christian women are seen pleading with the mob to allow them to give water to the pastor who had fallen to the ground semi-conscious with a bloody nose and unable to lift any part of his body.

The pastors wife and brothers-in-law, Aakash Joshi and Vikas Joshi, were also seriously injured in the attack.

Pastor Dudwe was hospitalized for two weeks. After being discharged, the pastor learned that an arrest warrant had been against him. He surrendered himself at the Kukshi police station on Feb. 1 and was sent to Alirajpur jail. He remained in prison for three days and three nights before he was released on bail.

Pastor Dudwes church services have come to a stop since the attack, and local officials have given orders for other area churches to stop worship.

Indias anti-conversion laws presume that Christians force or give financial benefits to Hindus to convert them to Christianity. Some of these laws have been in place for decades in some states. Radical Hindu nationalist groups frequently use the laws to make false charges against Christians and launch attacks on them under the pretext of an alleged forced conversion.

The law states that no one is allowed to use the threat of divine displeasure, meaning Christians cannot talk about Heaven or Hell, as that would be seen as forcing someone to convert. If any type of food or a meal is served after an evangelistic meeting, that is seen as an inducement.

For Indias Christians, 2021 was the most violent year in the countrys history, according to a report by the United Christian Forum, which recorded at least 486 violent incidents of Christian persecution in the year.

The UCF attributed the high incidence of Christian persecution to impunity, due to which such mobs criminally threaten, physically assault people in prayer, before handing them over to the police on allegations of forcible conversions.

Police registered formal complaints in only 34 of the 486 cases, according to the UCF.

Often communal sloganeering is witnessed outside police stations, where the police stand as mute spectators, the UCF report states.

Hindu extremists believe that all Indians should be Hindus and that the country should be rid of Christianity and Islam, an Open Doors fact sheet explains. They use extensive violence to achieve this goal, particularly targeting Christians from a Hindu background. Christians are accused of following a foreign faith and blamed for bad luck in their communities.

Christians make up only 2.3% of Indias population and Hindus comprise about 80%.
Pro-life group warns Colorado abortion law may lead to infanticide

Pro-life organizations are denouncing a new law in Colorado that allows women to get an abortion up to the moment of birth and denies the rights of pre-born babies.

Gov. Jared Polis signed House Bill 22-1279 on Monday, which affirms the fundamental right of individual Coloradans to make their own reproductive health-care decisions.

A pregnant individual has a fundamental right to continue a pregnancy and give birth or to have an abortion and to make decisions about how to exercise that right, reads the legislation, in part. A fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus does not have independent or derivative rights under the laws of this state.

The law goes on to say that a public entity cannot deny, restrict, interfere with, or discriminate against an individuals fundamental right to  have an abortion in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services, or information.

A public entity shall not  deprive, through prosecution, punishment, or other means, an individual of the individuals right to act or refrain from acting during the individuals own pregnancy based on the potential, actual, or perceived impact on the pregnancy, the pregnancys outcomes, or on the pregnant individuals health, the law continued.

The group Colorado for Life denounced the law as radically extreme and condemned it for stripping the rights of unborn babies.

Against the will of Coloradans across the state who contacted their elected officials, Polis and the radical abortion extremists in our state legislature have ignored us yet again, said Colorado for Life in a statement on its Facebook page after the bill was signed.

Polis signed HB 1279 into law this afternoon. This means that  preborn have no legal rights under Colorado law.  Babies will lose their lives simply because of a disability, or for being the wrong gender or race.  More babies will lose their lives who could otherwise survive outside of the womb.

Abortion tourism will increase, resulting in the murder of preborn babies from all over the country taking place here in Colorado, the pro-life group added.

Noah Brandt, director of Government Affairs at Live Action, raised concerns that the wording of the law, namely the pregnancys outcomes comment, might create a means through which infanticide can be legal.

Under the rules proposed by this bill, if a child is delivered alive during an abortion the doctors are under no legal compulsion to provide standard medical care as they would in any other circumstance and attempt to preserve the childs life, said Brandt in a statement shared with The Christian Post on Monday.

Medical providers would listen to the mothers instructions, which could include not providing life-sustaining medical care to the child, which would lead to the childs death, which most reasonable people would consider infanticide, Brandt added.

Recently, many have speculated that the United States Supreme Court will soon overturn the controversial 1973 decision Roe v. Wade, which struck down laws restricting abortion before fetal viability.

As a result, several states have passed laws that either codify the Roe decision or are trigger measures that will effectively ban abortion once Roe is overturned.

In December, the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which centered on whether Mississippi could enforce a law banning most abortions after 15 weeks into a pregnancy.
Pro-life groups demand DOJ investigate abortionist after finding full-term babies in medical waste box

After the remains of full-term aborted babies were recovered at an abortion clinic before being incinerated as medical waste, pro-life activists are demanding that the Department of Justice take action against the abortionist they believe committed the illegal acts.

Terrisa Bukovinac, the founder of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, and Randall Terry, the founder of the pro-life group Operation Rescue, hosted a press conference in Washington, D.C., Tuesday to discuss Bukovinacs discovery of full-term aborted babies inside a biohazard box marked as medical waste that was to be incinerated and converted into electricity. Bukovinac came across the box while protesting outside Washington Surgi-Clinic, an abortion clinic in the nations capital.

On Friday, March 25, the Day of the Unborn Child, Lauren Handy and I went to Washington Surgi Center to engage in anti-abortion advocacy. Upon arrival, we saw a truck labeled Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services parked outside, she recalled. We approached the driver, who was about to load two large boxes with biohazard symbols onto his truck.

While the driver indicated that he didn't know what was inside the boxes, Bukovinac explained to him that they contained dead babies. The driver agreed to let the pro-life activists take one of the boxes after they told him their plans to give the aborted babies a proper burial and a funeral. Upon opening the box at Handys apartment, the pro-life activists discovered 110 mostly first-trimester aborted children and a clear plastic bag with five more containers, one much bigger than the remaining four.

Bukovinac said one of the buckets contained a beautiful intact and nearly full-term baby boy whom we named Christopher X. She described the discovery of the remains of the full-term babies as the most devastating and soul-crushing experience of our lives.

As they opened the remaining containers they found four more babies with a range of injuries, including [a] fully intact girl we named Harriet who had one eye open, an incision in the back of her neck, her brain suctioned out and her skull crushed. The pro-life activists found two additional babies they named Holly and Angel, who were severely dismembered, and a fifth baby, Phoenix, who was whole and still inside the amniotic sac.

Bukovinac noted that in most abortions conducted after 20 weeks gestation, doctors administer feticide to give the unborn baby a heart attack, which helps prevent a live birth and the excruciating pain of total dismemberment. She discussed how in 2013, undercover footage captured by the pro-life group Live Action showed Dr. Cesare Santangelo, the sole abortionist on staff for decades at Washington Surgi, admitting that he does not use feticide.

Because of this admission and the advanced gestational ages of these babies and their intact condition, the likelihood that some were born alive is undeniable, she maintained. The injuries sustained by Harriet strongly imply she was the victim of a partial-birth abortion.

Bukovinac and Handy alerted the District's Police Homicide Unit about the five larger babies and asked for an investigation into their deaths. Terry stressed that we did not want these babies to go to the D.C. police because they should have gone to the federal government, they should have gone to the DOJ or to the FBI. However, after the pro-life activists were unable to find an independent doctor to conduct an autopsy, they elected to turn the unborn babies over to the police.

We are demanding that the D.C. police conduct a full investigation into the deaths of these babies, including thorough autopsies. We demand that the U.S. Department of Justice prosecute Santangelo for violations of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act and the Partial Birth Abortion [Ban] Act, and were demanding it now.

Bukovinac vowed that Pro-life Americans will not stay silent in the face of such aggressive and barbarous violence and we will diligently work until the American abortion-industrial complex is fully disarmed and dismantled.

A graphic displayed at the press conference listed the names the pro-life activists had given to all 115 unborn babies they found in the biohazard boxes marked as medical waste. The pro-life activists told reporters that the 110 babies aborted in the first trimester were given a proper burial and funeral.

The pro-life activists' discovery from 2020 garnered national attention last week when the DOJ announced that it would be indicting nine pro-life activists for trying to block access to the abortion clinic where the full-term baby was found. If the activists are found guilty, they will each face 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and a fine not to exceed $350,000.

Several pro-life groups issued statements calling for an investigation and legal action t be taken against the abortionist who they believe violated federal law by performing partial-birth abortions.

These horrific images of aborted children  human beings like us, subjected to lethal violence and possibly born alive at an age when their pain would have been excruciating  expose the brutality of every one of the thousands of abortions that take place daily in America, said Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser in a statement on Monday.

We call on the D.C. medical examiner to do an autopsy of these childrens bodies and for federal authorities to perform a thorough, unsparing investigation and prosecute violations of the law."

Live Action founder and President Lila Rose issued a similar statement, insisting that The Washington DC police department and the Districts medical examiner must conduct a thorough forensic medical examination of five dead children discovered outside a DC abortion clinic, to determine their manner of death.

In a Twitter thread last week, Rose also called on Congress to start an inquiry to ensure the federal laws that protect children who are born alive that stop partial-birth abortion are being enforced by @TheJustciceDept.

@DCPoliceDept must conduct a thorough investigation of these potential crimes



Congress must also start an inquiry to ensure the federal laws that protect children who are born alive & that stop partial-birth abortion are being enforced by the @TheJusticeDept#JusticeForTheFive  Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) April 1, 2022

Bukovinac was not the only anti-abortion advocate to speak at the press conference. Missy Smith, a pro-life activist who previously ran unsuccessfully for the position of non-voting delegate representing the District of Columbia in House of Representatives, detailed actions taken by Santangelo. She lamented that pro-life activists working to expose him" were arrested in October 2020. Those arrested included Handy.

In November 2020, I personally retrieved a full-term baby on which Dr. Santangelo had induced an abortion, she said. She was found in the toilet of a Maryland restaurant.

Smith said she firmly believes the DC Metro Police are actively involved in a cover-up of Dr. Santangelos crimes.

The biowaste company from which we intercepted these childrens bodies is Curtis Bay Energy, she added. Curtis Bay Energy states on their website that they burn biomedical waste to sustain the energy needs of the Baltimore area. This means tragically that they have received, transferred and burned the corpses of aborted babies to make electricity for the households and businesses of the Baltimore area. If you live in the Baltimore area, you must know that aborted babies have been burned to keep your lights on and your house warm.

Smith concluded her remarks by calling on Curtis Bay Energy to end this barbaric practice and to confirm publicly that they have done so.

In a statement to the press, Curtis Bay Energy refuted allegations that one of its employees allowed the pro-life activists to take a biohazard box or that it contained the remains of aborted babies, saying:

On March 25, a Curtis Bay employee took custody of three packages from the Washington Surgery Center, Washington Surgi-Clinic and delivered all of them to Curtis Bays incineration facility. At no time did the Curtis Bay employee hand over any of these packages to the PAAU or other third party and any allegations made otherwise are false. As stated in client agreements and company policy, customers like Washington Surgi-Clinic are prohibited from disposing the fetuses and human remains via Curtis Bay Services. Curtis Bay provides its clients with medical waste bags and boxes to use in a manner that complies with applicable law, client agreements and company policy. Curtis Bay continues to fully cooperate with law enforcement.

Bukovinac refuted Curtis Bay Energy's claim, adding: When we spoke with the driver, he said that he had already scanned the boxes in and that was right before he asked what would you do with them so I am not sure if Curtis Bay is lying or if he simply already scanned them in and so therefore theyre accounting for them. From our observation, there was only two boxes but its possible that we had loaded one onto the truck before we arrived.

Its definitely possible that they dont know what is inside the box, she contended. Its possible that Santangelo was in violation of his contract with Curtis Bay by putting these babies in this box.

In a letter to the District's chief medical examiner and the captain of the homicide branch of the Metropolitan Police Department, attorney Steve Cooley urged the appropriate authorities to conduct an investigation and forensic examinations as required by applicable law.

Bukovinac stated in the days leading up to the press conference that the Metropolitan Police Department does not believe a crime has been committed against these babies under D.C. law, emphasizing that the laws in question are federal laws enforced by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Are Virtual Reality Churches the Wave of the Future?

Virtual reality, which can easily allow churches to have global presence and foster diversity and inclusiveness, is far more enabling than live-streaming, which numerous megachurches are currently using to conduct multi-site worship services. So are we going to see a rise of VR churches in the near future as the technology becomes cheaper and more accessible?

"Attend a real church in virtual reality," says the website of a VR church established by Los Angeles, California-based Pastor D.J. Soto and whose mission is "to explore and communicate God through virtual reality, augmented reality, and next generation technologies."

Soto, the owner of Sonata 7 Studios, LLC. which is a film production and virtual reality company, quit his job as a pastor at a branch of his local megachurch in Reading, Pennsylvania, a few years ago with a burden to reach out to people in unusual places. He and his wife even sold their home and most of their belongings and moved with their five young children into a 30-foot trailer.

His journey soon took him to virtual reality as the vehicle of his dream. However, as Pastor Soto spoke about his vision with pastors and church planters, he realized that Christian ministers are not quite ready to try out this new technology, he tells Wired.

"It has been abysmal, to be honest, just trying to connect," Soto is quoted as saying. At times, he wonder is "this the biggest mistake of my life?"

"We haven't stopped trying to connect with churches, but we are wondering if that type of support is further down the road," he adds. "Maybe we need to do a radical tactical shift to support from outside the church and church planting organizations."

The group is going to accelerate plans to create a 501(3)(c), and start a crowdfunding campaign, as he firmly believes that virtual churches can tremendously increase church attendance, particularly among the young and others who feel alienated by real world churches.

According to a 2017 Baylor survey, some 45 percent of Americans already use the internet to access religious and spiritual content.

Wired author Kristen French identifies herself as an atheist but likes the idea of VR churches.

"I stopped going to church at the age of 13," she writes. "But as someone who remains curious about religion, I am, in some ways, Soto's target audience. When I attended a recent service in virtual reality, I was struck by how welcoming and informal it felt. To me, church meant the hushed tones, muted colors, and high tight collars of Sunday best in my youth. Here, the avatars of parishionerssleek chiseled robots and blocky cartoon humanscame and went throughout the service. Many huddled into the pews, laid out in orderly rows. Others spilled out onto a red carpet that stretched to a small stage in front. The music was thumping."

Some Christian ministers share Soto's belief in this technology, but are treading with more caution.

J. R. Woodward, national director of church planting at V3, is quoted as saying, "I think media used carefully and thoughtfully is really, really helpful. But I think what's most needed today is for Christians to be an embodiment of Christ in particular places and contexts. There's nothing really more transformative than that."

However, Neal Locke, a Presbyterian minister who writes about religion and virtual reality, warns, "The virtual world is a place where identity is fluid," and adds that virtual worlds are often used to seek out people and places that differ from the experience of the users.

In a 2015 Christian Post op-ed, Pastor Christopher Benek, who specializes in theology and technology, predicted that VR tech will benefit the physically disabled and others who are unable to be physically present at a worship service.

"The main impact that VR is going to have on the global church is that it is going to, one-day, enable Christians to easily gather from a variety of places without being in the same physical location. This will enable persons who are homebound, sick, caregivers, without transportation, on vacation, or severely disabled to participate in worship with the larger community of faith without needing to leave the place where they are physically residing," he wrote.

Last year, Roger E. Olson, professor of Christian Theology of Ethics at George W. Truett Theological Seminary of Baylor University, warned that congregations that do not have a physical pastor present during worship services and only watch video streams of pastors preaching, could be a sign of Gnosticism.

"One that comes to my mind, as a Christian theologian, is the question of possible partial Gnosticism  at least the lack of concern about bodies and physical presences."

He continued: "Virtual reality replaces bodily and physical reality. Or the two are confused  as if the difference does not really matter. Can a pastor really 'pastor' (shepherd) a congregation if he or she never is among them? Is there really total commensurability  spiritually  between seeing and hearing a local pastor preach, pray and teach bodily, physically, and seeing and hearing a speaker via satellite feed or internet connection?"
Massachusetts city accused of stonewalling church's private school over religious beliefs

Officials in a Massachusetts city have denied allegations that a local school committee rejected an application for the launch of a private Christian school due to the beliefs of the predominantly Hispanic church sponsoring the institution.

Vida Real Church of Somerville, located around five miles from Boston, had asked local officials in 2021 to approve the creation of a private school for kindergarten to eighth grade, which would be known as Real Life Learning Center.

A letter of complaint sent Wednesday to Superintendent Mary E. Skipper and Mayor Katjana Ballantyne alleges that the Somerville School Committee rejected the application by the church to create a private school because officials disliked the churchs beliefs.

The letter was sent on behalf of the church by the conservative legal nonprofit First Liberty Institute and the Massachusetts Family Institute.

Despite Vida Reals expressed desire to open RLLC as quickly as possible, the Committee has repeatedly stonewalled Vida Reals efforts to provide private, religious education for its community for over five months now, wrote Ryan Gardner of First Liberty and Andrew Beckwith of the Massachusetts Family Institute.

Even more concerning, the Committee has expressed hostility towards Vida Reals religious beliefs, and multiple Committee members have stated that RLLCs desire to create a curriculum consistent with its religious beliefs is grounds for denying its private school application.

According to the letter, the committee repeatedly asked for information about the proposed schools curriculum and allegedly mocked some of their beliefs during meetings.

The complaint letter argued that the church satisfied all relevant criteria for obtaining Committee approval and that rejecting the application violated both state law and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The Committee must grant RLLCs application so that RLLC can open in time for the Fall 2022 semester, the complaint states. If Vida Real does not receive approval for RLLC from the Committee by April 18, 2022, or if the Committee denies RLLCs application, Vida Real will pursue all available legal options.

The Christian Post reached out to Somerville Public Schools for comment. A spokesperson emailed a statement from Superintendent Mary Skipper and School Committee Chair Andre Green.

Skipper and Green disagree with the characterizations in that letter of the Committees communications with the RLLC to date and of the appropriateness and lawfulness of the Committees review of the RLLC application.

The Committee has not yet reached a determination about the RLLC application, and all inquiries from the Committee have been for the purpose of evaluating whether RLLC meets the legal standards for approval, they stated.

We note that if a private school is approved, the Committee does not engage in ongoing oversight or monitoring of that school; as such, the Committee considers a thorough review process, including a critical evaluation of whether an applicant has proposed and is capable of actually implementing a program that meets state requirements, to be essential to the Committees statutory obligations.

Skipper and Green added that the school district does not discriminate on the basis of religion or any other protected class. They assured the committees review of the RLLC application has been and will continue to be fair, thorough, and consistent with the Committees legal authority.

The Committee will complete its review of the RLLC application in a timely manner and issue a determination on the merits of the application, they concluded.

However, Massachusetts Family Institute President Beckwith contends that its illegal and unconstitutional for city officials to question the religious beliefs of Vida Real.

This is blatant religious discrimination, Beckwith contends. Its time for Somerville officials to stop treating Vida Real unfairly and allow it to pursue the opening of a school.

The complaint letter argues that the school committee didnt promptly review materials sent in the application and took no action and did not communicate with Vida Real regarding its application for over a month.

In November 2021, the committee told the church that the application was deficient and had to be resubmitted even though no formal process existed regarding such applications, the complaint adds.

[T]he Committee never provided any guidance regarding the form in which the application

should be submitted. Seeking to expeditiously cure the Committees stated issues with RLLCs application, Vida Real again submitted RLLCs application and related materials in November 2021, the letter reads.

The letter accused the committee of taking no action for several weeks before inviting an official with the church to speak with committee members in early January 2022.

After the official spoke with committee members, the letter claims that another month elapsed before the committee took additional action on the schools application.

The complaint letter states that on Feb. 11, the committee contacted Vida Real and submitted 35 questions from its Educational Programs Subcommittee for Vida Real to respond to at a Feb. 28 meeting.

These questions not only sought duplicative information that RLLC had already provided with its application but also inquired about information that is irrelevant to RLLCs application and is improper for governmental inquiry, including questions about RLLCs religious beliefs, the letter adds.

Despite the improper and, in fact, illegal nature of many of these questions, Vida

Real worked diligently to prepare responses for each of the Committees burdensome list of

questions.

At the Feb. 28 meeting, the letter claims that members of the subcommittee expressed hostility to Vida Reals religious beliefs.

Subcommittee members are accused of questioning whether RLLC could adequately provide health education because of its decision to teach on matters of human

sexuality in accordance with its religious beliefs. They also allegedly questioned whether the school should be allowed to teach creationism. Subcommittee members also allegedly voiced disapproval of the schools reliance on Christian authors for its curriculum.

Additionally, the Subcommittee wrongfully accused Vida Real of submitting an incomplete

application that did not include RLLCs handbook even though such materials had already been provided to the Committee multiple times, which the Committee negligently overlooked, the letter continues.

The Subcommittee ended its meeting in the middle of deliberations without a final decision, which the Subcommittee informed Vida Real would result in an additional delay of a month before any further action would be taken on RLLCs application.

Later that night, the letter reports that the subcommittee presented a report on the schools application in which it stated that RLLC does not meet the criteria and falls

short in every subject, particularly science, social studies, and [social emotional learning].

The reports alleged reasons for the Subcommittees conclusion were riddled with factual errors, irrelevant considerations, and disparaging remarks regarding Vida Reals religious beliefs, the letter complains.

According to the letter, the subcommittee took issue with there being no accommodations for students enrolled in special education or plans to address students not making academic progress.

The committees report also claimed the application offered no details on assessments or how school staff would be supported. It also questioned how the application process will result in a diverse set of applicants and if the facilities are appropriate for younger students.

The schools position on homosexuality and creationism make it difficult to see how a thorough science and health curriculum is possible, the subcommittees report stated, according to the complaint letter. The schools approach to student services and counseling

appears to devalue evidence-based psychology and its emphasis on approaches rooted in the belief that mental illness is caused by sin and demons is unscientific and harmful.

After the subcommittee presented the report, the committee voted unanimously to accept the Subcommittees report without any members raising any objections to the disparaging statements contained in the report regarding Vida Reals religious beliefs, the letter reads.

In another meeting three weeks later, committee member Sara Dion was accused of making several comments expressing overt hostility against Vida Real based solely upon its religious beliefs and derided creationism as being factually incorrect.

Dion had allegedly argued that denying RLLCs application was the morally right thing to do and that the committee should do what it could to prevent RLLC from opening.

She even went as far as to state that spending money on costly litigation to prevent or delay RLLCs opening was well worth it, the complaint letter alleges.

[Committee member] Sarah Phillips did not object to any of Ms. Dions comments and stated that her 'heart wants to deny [RLLCs] application as well despite her belief that such a denial would not hold up in court. Indeed, Ms. Phillips essentially conceded that the ACE curriculum proposed to be used by RLLC satisfied Massachusetts law because it is presently used by at least four private schools in Massachusetts. Despite this, Ms. Phillips proceeded to second and vote in favor of a motion by Ms. Dion to recommend that the Committee deny RLLCs application.

The entire committee will consider the recommendation to deny RLLCs application in April.

Wednesdays letter is not the first time that First Liberty Institute and the Massachusetts Family Institute have communicated with city officials in Somerville.

In June 2020, during a time of widespread pandemic gathering restrictions, churches objected to then-Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatones order banning worship gatherings of more than 10 people despite state-level restrictions allowing in-door worship at 40% building capacity.

The organization sent a letter to the city on behalf of churches that planned to hold worship services with safety protocols in place despite the mayors order.

At the time, Jeremy Dys of First Liberty argued in a statement that the citys restrictions would prevent even Jesus and the twelve disciples from lawfully gathering in Somerville.
Pastor used Scripture trying to coerce congregants into sexual relationships, prosecutors say

A pastor charged with inappropriately touching multiple women tried to use Scripture to coerce female churchgoers into sexual relationships, Delawares Department of Justice has claimed.

Bishop Major Foster, a former pastor at Philadelphia Pentecostal Holiness Church of Ellendale, faces pending charges of unlawful sexual contact. Prosecutors are asking women to contact local law enforcement if theyve been abused by the pastor as they now have reason to believe that additional victims may be unidentified.

In a statement Thursday, Delaware authorities say that reports made to law enforcement allege Foster attempted to use scripture to coerce female parishioners into sexual relationships, made inappropriate comments, and instigated prolonged hugs during which he made inappropriate sexual contact with his victims.

These alleged incidents occurred between 2013 to 2020.

The Christian Post reached out to the Philadelphia Pentecostal Holiness Church of Ellendale for comment on Fosters indictment. A representative of the church hung up when contacted by phone. A response was not immediately received through email.

Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings said she is grateful to the women who have come forward to the Delaware State Police and our prosecutors.

We have reason to believe that Fosters alleged years long pattern of abuse includes as yet unreported, additional instances, Jennings said in a statement. We ask that any additional victims or witnesses with information come forward. We will be there to support you.

Last November, a Sussex County grand jury indicted Foster on three counts of unlawful sexual contact in the third degree. He was also charged with offensive touching after he pushed a victims husband when he was confronted.

Before being charged, Foster gained notoriety in Sussex County, for, among other things, co-founding the Ellendale Community Civic Improvement Association and for campaigning to improve local water quality.

In 2018, Foster worked alongside 87-year-old Harold Truxon and others to get an improved center water system installed in their Ellendale neighborhood after decades of effort.

For me, it was a no-lose situation, Foster said in a 2018 interview with The News Journal. We knew it was Gods will. God doesnt want any people to live like that without good water, sewer. We knew that it was our job, some way, somehow to make that happen. We werent going to quit.
An open letter to my daughter in light of Sexual Assault Awareness Month

Dear Andrea:

I want you to know that I pray for you daily. I pray for continued healing from the sexual assault you endured years ago, and healing from the lasting impact it has had on you and our entire family. You, and we, have come so far in recovery and I praise God every night for that blessing!

I also want you to know how proud I am of you. Im proud that you had the courage to tell us about what happened. Im proud that you sought the help you needed to overcome the trauma you experienced, and Im proud that you have overcome the trauma rather than allowing the trauma to overcome you. I know that the effects of that terrible event never go away completely, but I am a proud dad of a sexual assault survivor.

I must also say that I am sorry. I am sorry that you went through what you did, and I am so sorry that I was not able to protect you as a 12 year old the way that dads always want to protect their little girls. But mostly, I am so very sorry that you were afraid to tell me about the assault for years because you feared that you might get in trouble.

My love for you is unconditional and always has been. I am sorry that I failed to let you feel 100% secure in this unconditional love so that you could have shared your hurt and pain with me sooner. Im sorry that you felt the need to try to carry the burden of your trauma by yourself for four years. For this, I will be forever sorry.

Trying to process the physical, mental and emotional harm of sexual assault alone is impossible, especially for a pre-teen. The unjustified sense of shame you felt kept you in a dark place, and in that dark place you believed the lies of evil. You believed that somehow you were responsible and that somehow you had done something wrong. And the longer you held on to the toxic lies, you began to think that you had no value. Nothing could be further from the truth, but the burden of your secret caused you to act on your sense of worthlessness and treat yourself as worthless.

I am forever thankful that you hit rock bottom, which led you to reach out for help, and in that process to let us know what you were going through. Seeking help was a ray of hope. God was able to shine His light into your darkness, revealing the lies that you had listened to for four years. By reaching out, we were able to address the real issues and began to move forward again. Thank you so much for trusting us to help you.

I look at you today and throughout my years as your dad in awe of you. It is unfair that you were forced to face what you had to face, especially at the young age that you did. You not only faced it, but you overcame it. You had love and support and counseling to help in the process, but it is you who made the decision to overcome and move forward.

I am in awe of how you did so well in school after your recovery, how you volunteered to tutor refugee children, and even led mission trips to Africa. God took your pain and let it fuel your passion  what was once meant for evil, God meant for good! You are a shining example to others of how brokenness is not the end of the story, but rather is a chapter in lifes story that is not yet finished.

As you continue your lifes journey, I want to remind you again of my unconditional love for you. For however many days we have left together on this earth, I am here for you. And for however many days I have left, I want you to know how proud I am of you, how sorry I am for all you have been through, how thankful I am for who you have become, and how much I am in awe of you for everything you have overcome.

Love,



Dad




The urgent need for biblical governance

In an age when chaos rages in society, churches should be houses of refuge with biblically-based governing structures. When the Church is unstable, it is reflecting the upheaval of its culture and cannot minister to people whose lives have been turned upside down.

How can people discover the peace of the Kingdom of Heaven when churches  the agencies of the Kingdom  are themselves shattered by the instabilities of the cultures in which they exist?

These issues were brought to my mind as I read a Christian Post report by Barry Bowen, The Dangerous Legal Structures of Hillsong Church.



There Bowen discussed a practice in Hillsong and other megachurches and ministries that include a no members clause in their founding documents. Bowen showed in his report how such foundational documents were like building on a foundation of sand.

In 1986 I was called as senior pastor of a small church in Houston. The pulpit committee chairman told me I could install any kind of church governance style that I desired.

I had just completed two terms as president of The Alabama Baptist Convention, consisting of 3,000 congregations, two universities, a college, and other institutions.

However, during my tenure from 1983-1985, I had become very concerned because of the number of church splits and pastor firings. I began to study causes and interviewed many church leaders in my travels around the state.

Almost invariably the problem was in the governance structures in the local congregations.

Southern Baptists, along with other evangelical groups, had embraced a deacon-led concept for which I could find no support in Scripture. In that model, the pastor was largely regarded as a hireling who worked under the favor and wishes of the diaconate.

In one of the churches I served, we experienced a period of rapid growth that was troubling to the deacon chairman. He told me that years before the deacons had determined that the church would limit itself to 800 members.

Needless to say, tension and discord stirred the stormy climate in almost every deacon meeting.

In 1983, as president of the state Southern Baptist body, I began to probe the reason so many pastors were fired. Non-biblical church governance was almost always a major cause.

So, in 1986, I turned down the call of a much larger church to move to Houston, where I could shape a biblically-based governance structure.

As I studied non-biblical church governance patterns, I could see there were three major styles: majority, oligarchy, and monarchy.

The majority approach prevailed in many evangelical churches, including those under the deacon-led model. Essentially it operated through politics, with meetings conducted in smoke-filled rooms without the smoke. There were secret interactions, deal-making, and all kinds of behaviors I had observed through my years in secular politics and on the White House staff.

I also noted that the deacons in the early New Testament church were servants (the Greek word even can mean, a table waiter). A deacon-led church, therefore, had placed the servants in the role of masters.

The majority model of church governance also seemed at variance with the Bible. It is an authoritarian style that has brought disaster to many churches and ministries

The oligarchy model of church governance put the power in the hands of a few dominant people. They were usually part of the churchs founding group, wealthy, or leaders in the community organizations.

I could find no biblical support for such a governing structure. In fact, the Apostle James had been starkly clear about how possible oligarchs should be treated,

The third type of church governance, the monarchy style is the approach that would put no members in the incorporation papers of a church or ministry. In this style, the senior pastor or ministry leader is authoritarian, and there is little or no sharing of authority. This mode is indeed dangerous as Bowen described problems in Hillsong and other highly visible churches.

So, in 1986 in Houston, I wanted to avoid designing our church governance type around any of those non-biblical, failed models.

The abuse of power I had observed as a young aide in the Nixon White House can extend to every level of human structure and organization. Churches are not immune to Watergates (the scandal that caused Nixon to be the first president to resign). Thus, I wanted the governing structure of our church to be solidly built on the strong foundation of Scripture.

That led me to set in place (in consultation with leaders in our church whom I had come to know as biblically informed, living model lives in Christ, and trustworthy by all the church) to develop the biblical eldership model.

Relationship is vital in the lifestyle to which Christ calls us. I began to pray and spend time with men who might be considered as elders. Since I was the pastor, I was apostolic Greek: sent one) in that the congregation had called me to come as one sent with a broad vision). But to balance this I wanted leaders around me who manifested other ministry giftings as listed in Ephesians 4  prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers, as well as challenge me if I drifted from scriptural authority.



The process took an entire year. In the end, I asked the congregation, after watching these candidates, to bear witness with me that these were the leaders who should be our elders.

That church grew rapidly, and many years later, is still ministering dynamically in Houston  though I have been gone more than 20 years.

The Church in contemporary society should be a stabilizing force, not tossed about. (Ephesians 4:4) Such a church must be stable not only in doctrine but also in structure.
Franklin Graham asks Putin and Zelenskyy for a Holy Week ceasefire amid Ukraine invasion

As more than 1,300 civilians have been killed in Russias unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, evangelist Franklin Graham is urging Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to agree on a ceasefire during the 10 days of Easter observances.

I have written to  Putin and to  Zelenskyy asking for a ceasefire from April 15-24, Graham, who heads the international humanitarian organization Samaritans Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, wrote on Facebook on Thursday.

I shared with them that I will be calling on churches in Ukraine, Russia, and around the globe to join together in prayer during those 10 days, wrote Graham, who recently visited Ukraine. May we humbly unite before the King of kings and the Lord of lords, the Prince of Peace, to ask for His help and mercy.

Graham wrote that he hopes that if they can agree to a 10-day ceasefire, then maybe they can stop fighting for two weeks.

If they stop for two weeks, maybe they can stop for a month, he added. If they stop for a month, maybe they can stop for good. Youve got to start somewhere.

Since Russia began its invasion on Feb. 24, at least 1,325 civilians have been killed and 2,017 injured as of a Saturday update from the United Nations. Among those killed are 120 children. Since the invasion began, more than 10 million people in Ukraine have been forced to flee their homes.

Graham, the son of legendary evangelist Billy Graham, said the deadly conflict is a man-made disaster, a historic humanitarian crisis. He believes God is the only solution.

In an interview with The Christian Post last month, Graham discussed Samaritans Purses efforts to minister to help Ukrainians fleeing the regions of their country targeted by Russia for western Ukraine.

The organization has established a field hospital in western Ukraine. The North Carolina-based charity is operating medical clinics and distributing relief items through 3,000 church partners in Ukraine and Moldova. The charity has made five airlifts, delivering more than 185 tons of supplies since March 4.

Youve got people that are diabetic, youve got people with heart conditions, high blood pressure, all of these kinds of things are just normal everyday problems of life, Graham said. On top of that, you have a lot of people that  have been wounded  due to the shelling. And so, you have to throw that into the mix.

Among the medical clinics Samaritans Purse has established is a 24-hour clinic at a train station in Lviv and another at a bus station in the city. A third clinic is located in Chernivtsi in southwest Ukraine.

Samaritans Purse has over 150 staff members in the region and treats over 100 patients per day. The organization has seen more than 2,400 patients across all of its medical sites as of last week.

The organization plans to set up a second emergency field hospital near the front lines of the conflict.

Graham has received scrutiny in the media for his past meetings with Russian religious and government leaders.

When I go to Russia, were not there for political reasons, Graham said. Were there for spiritual reasons.  We want to have an impact with the churches. Russias the largest landmass in the world, and  they go from one time zone to the other.  This is a huge country and we ought to try to help the churches as best we can.

Graham, who met Putin in 2015, attributed his past meetings with Putin and Russian leaders to a desire to try to be a positive force in Russia to benefit the work of evangelicals and try to improve the relations with churches.

If we dont go and if we dont talk to them, then nothing happens, Graham stated.

Although Graham has met with Russian leaders in the past, he took action in opposition to Russian policies that impact religious freedom.

In 2016, he moved the World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians that was initially scheduled to take place in Moscow out of Russia in opposition to a law that severely limits the freedom to evangelize in public.

Specifically, the law banned evangelism outside of churches, which restricted missionary activities in residential neighborhoods. The law also required Christians to obtain government permission before they can share their faith with others publicly.

Graham rescheduled the summit for Washington, D.C., in May 2017.

In Russia, police have arrested thousands of protesters who have demonstrated against the invasion amid widespread censorship of social media and news outlets.

More than 280 priests and deacons of the Russian Orthodox Church and over 400 ministers of Evangelical churches in Russia have called for reconciliation and an immediate end to Russias ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

In his Facebook post, Graham urged Christians worldwide to pray for God to work in the hearts of leaders involved and to intervene and bring peace and an end to the conflict.

I pray there will be an end to this horrible conflict even sooner  Today! he wrote. But if not, maybe this could be a starting point. Will you join me in this prayer?
South Sudan launches public consultation to pave way for truth, reconciliation

Xinhua) 08:45, April 06, 2022

JUBA, April 5 (Xinhua) -- South Sudan peace monitors on Tuesday welcomed the launch of public consultations to pave the way for the start of truth, reconciliation and healing process under the 2018 revitalized peace deal.

The Reconstituted Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission (RJMEC) said the launch of the consultations demonstrates positive progress after months of delays by the parties.

"This public consultation process has been eagerly awaited by the public. Unfortunately, it has experienced delays due to funding and other constraints. It is encouraging to see this process finally take off despite these obstacles," Charles Tai Gituai, Chairperson of RJMEC said in a statement issued in Juba, the capital of South Sudan.

The official launch of the consultation was attended by President Salva Kiir, First Vice President Riek Machar, and three other Vice Presidents and many other South Sudanese dignitaries and members of the regional and international diplomatic corps.

Gituai hailed the technical committee for the measures it has put in place in a bid to ensure that these public consultation processes be undertaken, aligned with international human rights standards, and best practices.

The official expressed hope that the technical committee will undertake the process in a manner that gives opportunity to the men, women, girls and boys of South Sudan to meaningfully participate and give their honest views about the kind of Commission, Truth, Reconciliation and Healing (CTRH) they wish to see established.

The latest development follows the recent agreement among the parties to share the ratios within the unified army command structure after having disagreed.

Sudan People's Liberation Movement-In Government (SPLM-IG) under President Kiir will have 60 percent of the positions, while SPLM/A-In Opposition led by First Vice President Machar and other opposition parties will share 40 percent of the positions within the army, police, intelligence, prisons and wildlife.

"I wish to encourage the Revitalized Transitional Government of National Unity including the state governments to work in partnership with each other, so as to safeguard the civic space and foster an inclusive environment so that the people of South Sudan can have even more confidence engaging with this process," said Gituai.

Gituai called on the parties in the transitional unity government to expedite the implementation of all chapters of the revitalized peace agreement in letter and spirit.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
According to Save the Children, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has turned the education of 5.5 million children upside down, with an average of 22 schools being attacked every day.

To document the war's impact on children, the international NGO is utilizing official government numbers from Ukraine's Ministry of Education and Science. According to the figures, at least 869 educational institutions have been damaged, accounting for around 6% of all schools in the country, with 83 being destroyed.

Russian Troops Cut Out Ukrainians' Tongues in Gruesome Atrocities

According to the UN refugee agency, over half of the Ukrainians who have fled the nation are youngsters. Since the war began, an estimated 4.2 million refugees have fled Ukraine, with another 6.5 million displaced within the nation. In the last six weeks, more than 10 million individuals - about a quarter of the population - have abandoned their homes. It's been a traumatic period for the 5.5 million youngsters who remain in Ukraine and their instructors as they try to return to school.

As displaced Ukrainians seek refuge from Russian attacks, some classrooms have been converted into emergency shelters. According to Save the Children, about 43% of school assaults took place in eastern Ukraine, the epicenter of the conflict that began in 2014, and more than 400,000 children lived before huge evacuations, according to ABC News.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russian forces in Ukraine of "cutting out citizens' tongues," among other heinous crimes. Zelensky briefed members of the UN Security Council on Tuesday about alleged strikes carried out by Russian President Vladimir Putin's army simply for fun in newly recaptured Ukrainian cities.

President Zelensky, who appeared via video connection, recalled victims being shot in the back of the head after being tortured, with their homes blown up with explosives and their automobiles crushed to death by tanks. He went on to say that those guilty should be charged with war crimes and hauled before a tribunal similar to the one set up after World War Two in Nuremberg.

His remarks came after disturbing photographs of what seemed to be civilian atrocities carried out by Russian forces on the outskirts of Kyiv surfaced in recent days, prompting dozens more Western countries to expel Moscow's diplomats, as per Independent.

Read Also: Global Fury Grows Over Russia's Atrocities in Bucha; President Joe Biden Urges War Crime Trial Following Spread of 'Genocide' Images

Holocaust Expert Says Russia Carries Out Genocide in Ukraine

A Holocaust scholar told Newsweek that Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine, a conclusion he reluctantly reached after mounting proof of Putin's soldiers committing crimes as well as Moscow's rhetoric.

Despite President Joe Biden's statement that suspected atrocities in the Kyiv region were a "war crime," the US did not agree with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Russia was committing genocide. According to Zelensky, photos of dead residents in the Kyiv neighborhood of Bucha after Russian soldiers withdrew revealed Putin's desire to eradicate the entire nation and the people.

Although Biden has dubbed Putin as a "war criminal," White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan stated the level of systematic deprivation of life of Ukrainians has not yet reached the level of genocide. The Kremlin has denied accusations related to the murder of civilians in Bucha and said that "the facts, the chronology of events also don't speak in favor of the credibility of these claims," Newsweek via MSN reported.

Related Article: Russia-Ukraine War: Volodymyr Zelensky's Quest for Peace Talks With Vladimir Putin Continues Despite Russian 'Genocide' Attack

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Pastor Artur Pawlowski released from solitary confinement after 51 days in prison for 'inciting mischief'

A prominent Canadian pastor who has emerged as an outspoken critic of his governments response to the coronavirus pandemic has been released from prison after nearly two months in custody.

Pastor Artur Pawlowski of Street Church and the Cave of Adallum in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, was released from prison Wednesday after 51 days of being moved between a cell and solitary confinement. Pawlowski was arrested last month for allegedly inciting mischief by addressing a crowd of truckers gathered at the Canada-United States border to protest the mandate requiring truck drivers who transport goods between the two countries to either get the vaccine or quarantine for several days upon re-entry into the country.

Critics of the Canadian government, including Rebel News Ezra Levant, described Pawlowskis arrest as an attempt to stop him from expressing himself politically to these truckers. Rebel News also created a website, SaveArtur.com, to raise money for the pastors legal bills.

The gathering of truckers, known as the Freedom Convoy, became a target of immense criticism from both the Canadian government and the private sector. The crowdfunding platform GoFundMe pulled a fundraiser created to raise money to cover the cost of the truckers expenses, purportedly following multiple discussions with local law enforcement and police reports of violence and other unlawful activity.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau defamed the truckers, who represented a wide swath of ethnicities and religions, as proponents of antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-black racism, homophobia, and transphobia.

Officials in the Canadian capital of Ottawa seized fuel from truckers and those seeking to provide fuel for the truckers to stay warm inside their cabins amid freezing temperatures, citing a belief that access to fuel was enabling the truckers to persist in causing mischief.

Rebel News reporter Adam Soos posted a video of Pawlowski leaving the Calgary Remand Centre on his Twitter account Wednesday. Pawlowski embraced his wife Marzena and son, Nathaniel, before Nathaniel Pawlowski drove his parents back home. Pawlowski, sitting in the passengers seat of the car, reached across his son to wave at the camera.

Artur is out.



Full story coming soon at https://t.co/kwmn3j9Pxo. pic.twitter.com/2fSe0wmhar  Adam Soos ? (@ATSoos) March 30, 2022

Ahead of Pawlowskis release, Soos reported that all those gathered to greet Artur upon his release have been instructed to leave immediately under threat Artur would be arrested again should anyone speak with him before he leaves the Calgary Remand Centre grounds. Prior to officials at the Calgary Remand Centre demanding that the crowd disperse, an image captured by Soos showed a group of supporters, led by Pawlowskis wife and son, standing in line hoping to greet the pastor.

All those gathered to great Artur upon his release have been instructed to leave immediately under threat that Artur would be arrested again should anyone speak with him before he leaves the Calgary Remand Centre grounds.



Artur will head straight home.https://t.co/kwmn3j9Pxopic.twitter.com/eEKjrftjJQ  Adam Soos ? (@ATSoos) March 30, 2022

Eagerly anticipating the release of pastor, father and husband Artur Pawlowski.https://t.co/kwmn3j9Pxopic.twitter.com/fjOQYUAZZe  Adam Soos ? (@ATSoos) March 30, 2022

In an interview with Soos, Pawlowskis attorney Sarah Miller said that a judge agreed to release the pastor from custody on bail conditions that she characterized as quite strict.

Miller explained that while this is not the full-blown celebratory type situation that we would hope for because he is under very strict conditions, she concluded that being under strict conditions at home with his family is a far better cry than spending time behind bars.

The Calgary Herald reported that Pawlowskis bail conditions include a nightly curfew of 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., with exceptions that include Street Church services, and that he not attend any protests. Should Pawlowski violate the terms of his bail, his wife and son could be forced to pay $20,000 and $4,000, respectively. While Pawlowski was granted bail for his role in purportedly creating mischief stemming from his appearance at the border blockade, he was ordered to remain in prison for additional days on other charges.

Specifically, the charges that kept Pawlowski in prison included allegations that he twice breached court orders to abide by COVID-19 public health measures and caused a disturbance at a Shoppers Drug Mart. Pawlowski had to put up a $25,000 cash deposit in order to secure his release, while his wife and son had to provide payments of $10,000 and $2,000, respectively.

Miller told Rebel News that Pawlowski has quite a few criminal trials coming up, adding, hes facing up to $100,000 for attending a gathering  in front of city hall. The news outlet also noted that the pastor spent much of his time behind bars in solitary confinement.

Pawlowski first gained notoriety after documenting his tense exchanges with local law enforcement officials seeking to enforce coronavirus worship restrictions in videos that went viral. The videos, published last spring, featured the Polish immigrant to Canada likening the public health officials to Nazis and the Gestapo as they repeatedly entered the Cave of Adallum Church during Passover services and confronted him weeks later during a church service.

In a previous interview with The Christian Post, Pawlowski accused the local government of abiding by a double standard regarding the enforcement of coronavirus worship restrictions because while they targeted his church for holding in-person worship services, the mosques were fully operational and no one harassed them, no one interfered with them. He also contended that government officials had developed a personal vendetta against him.
NEW YORK (AP)  Shonda Rhimes was on vacation when she stumbled upon the first book in the Regency-era Bridgerton book series, The Duke & I," by Julia Quinn and quickly was all in.

I immediately went out and bought all the rest of her books, said Rhimes in a recent interview. "Her way with words is delightful. I thought, These are characters I'd want to know.' They had a universal feeling to them and I thought they'd make amazing television."

Rhimes passed the books on to Chris Van Dusen, who was equally besotted.

I took them home and fell in love with them from the very first moment I read them, he said. Van Dusen went on to create, executive produce and serve as showrunner of the series for Netflix.

 Bridgerton  was the first of Rhimes' series to debut on Netflix under her deal with the streamer and chief content officer Ted Sarandos, and it set a high bar. Debuting on Christmas Day 2020, the show, starring Rege-Jean Page and Phoebe Dynevor in season one, was a hit.

I got an email from Ted Sarandos saying Great job, which I thought meant great job. And then maybe a week or so in, we started to get the numbers and I really understood what great job meant," said Rhimes. I was just excited to have a show at Netflix.

For Quinn, life was pretty good before Rhimes and Van Dusen came calling in 2017, but it's only improved since. She was making a nice living" as a historical romance writer with a following. The show, she says, changed everything to bonkers.

I cant think of a better word. I was going with surreal for a while, but now weve gone from surreal to just bonkers. Every day it seems something new and amazing happens in the Bridgerton world."

Quinn also serves as a consultant on the series and jokes it's the easiest" job ever. I do see the scripts and I'm all, This is great! Nothin to say!'"

Season two of Bridgerton, adapted from book two, The Viscount Who Loved Me," is now playing on Netflix. The new episodes follow Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey,) the family's oldest child, who enters into the social season intent on finding a bride. Page, whose career has blown up thanks to the series, did not return for season two. Dynevor does appear in a supporting role.

Each book in the series focuses on a different Bridgerton family member and the show's seasons are following suit. There are eight books in the series, plus a book of epilogues with a short story called The Bridgertons: Happily Ever After. A limited prequel TV series, written by Rhimes, is also in development about the origin story of characters Queen Charlotte, Lady Danbury and Lady Violet Bridgerton.

Quinn is enjoying a renewed interest in the Bridgerton books.

Romance writing is like a balloon. Eventually you stretch the balloon as far as you can go, and its really hard to get people to come around and go into the balloon. And people outside the balloon have never heard of you, which is totally fine. 'Bridgerton' just popped the balloon," said Quinn.

Suddenly all sorts of people who never picked up a romance novel or historical romance novel were reading them. In April 2021, all eight books were on the New York Times best seller list at once.

Quinn also told The Associated Press why she structured her series the way she did and what else is coming up.

___

AP: The success of the series took a lot of people by surprise. What did you think?

QUINN: I was confident we were going to have, at the very least, a respectable showing. If for no other reason there are millions of romance readers who were dying for something like this. I didnt even know it could be this big.

AP: How did the popularity of the show affect book sales?

QUINN: My publisher printed up a whole bunch of the new books with Rege and Phoebe on the cover, and they sold out instantly and then every title was sold out. It was just frantic. It got to the point where every resource at the company was turned towards trying to get these books reprinted. Thank goodness for e-books. We can anticipate thered be some demand, but nobody thought it was going to do what it did and the last thing I would want to do is print up all those books and waste all that paper if nobody was going to buy them. I felt like every other day I was getting emails from my publishing house with the printing schedule, because for publishers right now, all the printers consolidated and its really hard. You have to reserve your slot at the printers, and its really difficult. But, yeah, the books have just exploded and not just in the United States. Its a worldwide thing.

AP: How did you decide to create a series about a large family where each book follows a different member?

QUINN: Romance series are really more a collection of spin-offs than they are sequels. So it was nothing new. It is new to television, though. And, you know, it was something that a lot of the viewers didnt understand. When they found out that Rege was leaving, everyones like, Oh my gosh, the show is going to fall apart without him. And of course, all the romance readers are saying, Well, you know, wed all love to have him continue as a secondary character  which he is a secondary character in the next book  but its a very minor part. The romance readers were saying, Guys, thats not how it works. We always knew wed have two different leads next time.

AP: What's your next book?

QUINN: The graphic novel  Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron  comes out in May.
LONDON (AP)  Jane Seymour had fun working on her latest project, the light-hearted whodunit series Harry Wild, with some exceptions.

She plays a newly retired English professor in Dublin with time on her hands, who starts getting work as a private sleuth  to the dismay of her son, a police detective. Undaunted, she even takes a young apprentice under her wing. The series is streaming now on Acorn TV.

Seymour, whose credits include War and Remembrance, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and The Kominsky Method, said there were many creative reasons she said yes to the series  and a practical one too.

There isnt that much work for actresses after 40 anyway, but certainly after 70. I mean, theres Dame Judi Dench, Helen Mirren and a couple of others. But I just thought this was just a wonderful, fun character and intelligent. And I think we want to be entertained, she said.

Seymour, 71, did suffer for her art: She shattered a knee two weeks into the shoot while taping a scene, which had started out well.

As Im running across and Ive done it, Im silently saying to myself, There you go, Jane, you could be an action character. You run like a gazelle. Who knows how old you are?'

Things took a turn for the worse on a subsequent take.

Im running on asphalt, in the rain, on wet leaves with felt on the bottom (of her shoes). Splat! I landed, I thought on my chin, which I did, but I didnt get wounded that badly. But I all the way hit my left kneecap. Anyway, the whole crew thought that the show is over, and I proved them wrong.

A lesser annoyance involved drinking non-alcoholic red wine that was absolutely disgusting, eventually replaced by a better-tasting option. But Seymour said she had more trouble with acting like she was drinking shots, because shed never done it before  and she had to toss back flat soda pop, which didn't help.

I do it like Im holding an English teacup and my little finger is sticking out," she recalled, and was told, "'that is not how you do a shot'.... They were all laughing at me because I was getting it all over myself, the shots were going in every direction.

Thats not to say she didnt enjoy the occasional beverage outside of work, alongside her co-star Amy Huberman, who plays her daughter-in-law on the show.

We all hung out on the weekend. It was COVID. We werent supposed to be anywhere near each other, but I had this lovely little house right on the water at Dalkey," a posh seaside Dublin suburb, she said. Patrick Dempsey was living in the house just across the way. We just decided to do our own COVID rules....If it was outside on my rooftop with wine or Champagne, then we could say that we were actually rehearsing.

One unusual element in "Harry Wild'' is that Seymours character has a younger love interest. Stuart Graham, who plays opposite her as Ray Tiernan, is 54.

Turns out her co-star was more shy about love scenes, she said.

As scripted, we both supposed to be naked, and he just said, Thats just not happening. So that was changed slightly, she said. They are talking if we come back in season two.... the father of my son might appear, and they definitely want to make sure that I have some much younger lovers.
After the emotional roller coaster Houstonians were put through during the brief closingand then quick resurrectionof Almeda Road stalwart Spanish Village, the answer for those still confused by it all is: Yes, the beloved Tex-Mex establishment is open, and its famed margaritas are flowing once again.

From its opening in 1953, Spanish Village was under the care of the Medina family for decades, earning a reputation as one of the citys best Tex-Mex destinations. The restaurant shuffled back and forth between different owners in the last few years, until Abhi Sreerama and Ishita Chakravarty, owners since 2018, announced its closure in July 2021. A few weeks later, they revealed it was acquired by Houston nightlife veteran Steve Rogers, who has kept the restaurant open and has long-term goals for its surrounding neighborhood.

Rogers owns Bar 5015 and Faces of Houston down the street, Prospect Park in the Galleria area, and has a minority stake in Turkey Leg Hut (which is pending a lawsuit he filed against his co-owners). He felt the Almeda Road area between the 610 Loop and I-45 lacked retail and dining choices, and wanted to develop the area into more of a dining pocket in the city. He then became aware the Spanish Village property was available.

When the conversation began, I realized that a lot of people had an emotional connection to this restaurant, Rogers said. Generations of families had been dining here. I knew there was a lot of opportunity.

The native Houstonian understood that Spanish Village had a loyal following, but he put wheels in motion to ensure it would continue to thrive in Houstons fast-evolving restaurant market.

Kirsten Gilliam

Rogers brightened up the space, housed in a bungalow built in 1920, with a fresh paint job and more lights, added bar seating in the dining room and removed walls to create more openness. A plaque reflecting the homes address, 4720 Almeda, and an old-fashioned mail slot remain, as do the walls of floor-to-ceiling Polaroids spotlighting the restaurants many visitors, and a dedicated corner of photos honoring John Medina, the original owner.

As Rogers made improvements, he was mindful of preserving the familys legacy. I knew the food was strong, so I did not want to disrupt that, he said, adding that the menu continues to feature dishes made with recipes passed down from the Medinas. Much of the staff have been here for more than 15 years, including chef Carlos [Recinos], and I wanted to keep them in place.

Among the devoted staff is Ingrid Colindres, restaurant manager and resident expert on all things Spanish Village. She says that while guests can expect a few changes, many of the elements Houstonians have loved for the past seven decades remainmost importantly, the margaritas.

Our margarita has been the same since 1953, she said. It is made from a recipe which has been passed down for generations, and our customers would definitely know if we changed itso, it stays as is.

The margaritas are made in batches, a week in advance, using real lime juice. After the flavors fully incorporate, the mix is used to build on-the-rocks and frozen margaritas. Colindres describes the frozen ones as adult snow cones, and warns they are small, but mighty.

Kirsten Gilliam

Its not just the margs that date back to the 1950sso does the restaurants idolized red gravy enchilada sauce. But Spanish Village old-timers will notice some newer menu additions, including tacos de birria, a Mexican dish of tacos and consomme thats become trendy in recent years.

Chef Carlos is very innovative, said Colindres. He knew birria tacos were becoming very popular, and he was right to add them to the menu. They have been a hit.

He expanded the enchilada offerings as well, creating carnitas enchiladas with a revamped red gravy. Despite a few tweaks to the menu, Colindres assures that every item is made in-house, from the chips and salsa and tortillas, to churros and sopapillas, and that Spanish Villages warm hospitality has stayed the same.

When customers would visit, Mrs. Medina would greet them with bienvenido a tu casa meaning welcome home she said. They didnt treat people like customers, they made them feel like family.

She recalls story after story of faithful guests, many who had emotional ties to Spanish Village, including a married couple who spent their second date at the restaurant and continue to dine there 48 years later.

Kirsten Gilliam

Like the food and recipes, the tradition of dining at Spanish Village has been passed on to a new generation too. Father and daughter David and Mary Titus are longtime regulars who were thrilled to learn their favorite Tex-Mex haunt did not shutter.

I remember taking Mary with me to eat at Spanish Village when she was in a baby carrier, said David. Shes 28 today, and we continue to meet there once a week. All three of his children are fans of the restaurant, but Mary, who now lives five minutes away, loves it the most.

I love everything about it. The atmosphere is friendly and casual, and they accept you as you are, she said. It feels like a second home.

Davids is among the many faces in the Polaroids that grace the walls of Spanish Village. He reminisces of his first time dining there in 1982, and the celebrity sightings of Sugar Ray Leonard and ZZ Top over the years. I have seen all of the changes in ownership and management, but the food and service is consistently good, he said. And the margaritas have always been great!

He says the restaurant has become a part of his familys history. When they thought it was closing, before Rogers took over, they even made a point of visiting each night of its last week, collecting menus and memorabilia as keepsakes.

It was actually Mary who broke the good news to me that it was going to stay open, David said.

Spanish Village is gearing up for its milestone 70th anniversary next year. And the Titus duo is back to their regular schedule of visiting weekly.
Despite weathering the COVID-19 pandemic for two years, Bearded Fox Brewing in Tomball became the second Houston-area brewery to announce it was closing for good in the last month, following recent news that 6 Wards Brewing in Dickinson had shuttered its doors.

Bearded Fox, which will serve its last rounds on April 10, announced the closure via Instagram on March 21. When the brewery first opened its brick-and-mortar location five years ago, it was the first of its kind in Tomball; two others breweries have sprung up in the area since then, Fire Ant and Paradigm, which Bearded Fox's post encouraged followers to support when theyre gone.

The outgoing brewery is only open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. They are pulling all the pints they can before April 10including their GOAT IPA, No. 48 Porter and Aunt Rose Helles beers, each on tap for $4 before 7 p.m.as well as selling off merchandise, collectors items and memorabilia. This weekend will be the last to visit.

This was a difficult decision, but one that was necessary, Bearded Fox wrote in the Instagram post. Representatives at Bearded Fox have not returned requests for comment.

Meanwhile, 6 Wards officially closed its doors Feb. 27, but opened for two extra days at the end of March to sell off inventory and offer 50 percent off merchandise. Only two years old, the brewery had opened just after the pandemic started.

The health crisisand the resulting fallout for businesseshas been difficult for the hospitality industry as a whole, and has presented a unique set of challenges for breweries.

In Texas, the establishments were classified as bars during the pandemic, and werent allowed to reopen like restaurants were under Gov. Greg Abbotts plan. Many brewery operators felt this was misguided: Taprooms typically have large outdoor areas and warehouse spaces with good airflow, but had to stay shut while restaurants crammed patrons indoors.

Breweries were still brewing during that time, but rather than kegging suds for on-site consumption at the taproom or on-premise restaurant sales, they had to pivot entirely to takeout and, for those with large enough distribution, grocery store sales. Eventually, Texas breweries, like bars, were able to apply for temporary food licenses to become de-facto restaurants and resume dine-in operations.

Despite the challenges of the early-pandemic era, only one Houston-area brewery, Fetching Lab in Texas City, closed during the first two years since COVID-19 cases started to disrupt our lives. Now, it seems breweries struggles are coming to a head.

The Dallas Morning News reported last week that three popular breweries in the DFW area recently closed. Just because your favorite brewery has seemingly made it through the pandemic, it doesnt mean theyre not still reeling from the impacts of business from the past few years, Caroline Wallace, Texas Craft Brewers Guild deputy director, told the newspaper.

Charles Vallhonrat, the guilds executive director, said that while there has been some recovery from the pandemic due to people visiting taprooms and beer being distributed to bars and restaurants again, conditions are still very difficult for breweries.

Getting equipment, sourcing ingredients and keeping staff are extremely challenging right now, Vallhonrat explained. Those issues follow suit with the two main ripple effects of the pandemic: supply chain issues and labor shortages. Even trouble with merchandise including hats, T-shirts and glassware, while not a core part of any brewerys business, is an additional revenue stream that's been disrupted by these on-going issues.

People are evaluating their business models and seeing what they need to do to stay afloat, Vallhonrat said. Or make a tough decision like these two breweries have made.

By far the biggest headache for the industry today is access to cans. Not only have breweries shifted from topping off kegs to filling cans in the past two years, many products from other sectors have also made the switch to aluminum packaging, Vallhonrat said, adding that the three primary can producers in the U.S. aren't able to keep up with demand.

Ball Corporation, which has the largest market share of the major can producers, recently increased its minimum order capacity to such a high figure that it effectively excludes almost all but the largest breweries from being able to order from them, Vallhonrat noted.

Vallhonrat is optimistic about an Austin-based company, American Canning, which is expanding to a larger production facility this year solely to meet the increased demand for cans in the beer industry.

While the majority of Houston-area breweries are holding strong, theyre still struggling, whether visible or not. Local Group Brewing in Northside announced on March 24 that due to some unforeseen circumstances it will be shutting down its kitchen, which served some of the best and most ambitious food of any brewery in town.

The Local Group team could not be reached for comment, but a note on the brewerys website states: Our kitchen is temporarily closed. We will let you know as soon as we reopen it.
SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP)  Prosecutors have charged two men after authorities allegedly found more than 20 pounds (9 kilograms) of fentanyl, nearly 200 pounds (91 kilograms) of cocaine and more than 800 pounds (363 kilograms) of methamphetamine in a minivan in Southern California.

The Orange County District Attorney's Office said in a statement Wednesday that 36-year-old Edgar Alfonso Lamas and 53-year-old Carlos Raygozaparedes have pleaded not guilty to six drug-related counts with enhancements.
JUNCTION CITY, Kan. (AP)  Authorities say a 9-year-old boy was shot and wounded while playing with a gun with his 11-year-old brother.

The Junction City police department said in a news release that the shooting happened Tuesday.
Two men from Southeast Texas are among many defendants allegedly improperly billing the federal government for various healthcare programs.

Nearly 20 defendants are named in the complaint including True Health Diagnostics former Director of Strategic Accounts and MSO recruiter, Stephen Kash, of Beaumont. Owner and operator of Ascend Professional Management Inc., Ascend Professional Consulting Inc., and BenefitPro Consulting LLC, William Todd Hickman, of Lumberton, also was named, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Eastern District of Texas.

The Department of Justice is committed to holding accountable individuals and entities who commit and profit from healthcare fraud, said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton, head of the Justice Departments Civil Division. We will continue to pursue those who enter into unlawful financial arrangements that waste taxpayer dollars, improperly influence healthcare providers medical judgments and subject patients to unnecessary testing or other services.

The 154-page complaint alleges laboratory executives and employees at True Health Diagnostics LLC and Boston Heart Diagnostics Corporation allegedly worked with small Texas hospitals, including Rockdale Hospital doing business as Little River Healthcare, to pay doctors to induce referrals to the hospitals for laboratory testing, which was then performed by the diagnostic companies, the release said.

The complaint alleges that the hospitals paid a portion of their laboratory profits to recruiters, who in turn kicked back those funds to the referring doctors. The release said the recruiters set up companies to make payments to referring doctors disguised as investment returns, the release said.

As alleged in the complaint, BHD and THD executives and sales force employees leveraged the MSO kickbacks to doctors to increase referrals and, in turn, their bonuses and commissions, the release said. The complaint alleges that laboratory tests resulting from this referral scheme were billed to various federal health care programs, and that the claims not only were tainted by improper inducements but, in many cases, also involved tests that were not reasonable and necessary. In addition, the complaint alleges that, to increase reimbursement, LRH falsely billed the laboratory tests as hospital outpatient services.

The federal Anti-Kickback Statute prohibits offering, paying, soliciting or receiving pay to induce referrals of items or services covered by Medicare, Medicaid and other federally-funded programs, the release said.

The release also details participation by a number of True Health employees, including its CEO, in other kickback schemes, including requiring a number of unnecessary fees and inducing referrals for lab tests that were not reasonable and necessary.

Paying kickbacks to physicians distorts the medical decision-making process, corrupts our healthcare system and increases the cost of healthcare funded by the taxpayer, said U.S. Attorney Brit Featherston for the Eastern District of Texas in the release.

Tips and complaints from all sources about potential fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement can be reported to the Department of Health and Human Services, at 800HHSTIPS (800-447-8477), the release said.

As a result of its efforts, the United States has already recovered more than $30 million relating to conduct involving Boston Heart Diagnostics, True Health Diagnostics and Little River Healthcare, including settlements with 25 physicians, two healthcare executives and a laboratory company, the release said.

meagan.ellsworth@beaumontenterprise.com

twitter.com/megzmagpie
According to a Netflix director, Prince Charles sought PR guidance from Jimmy Savile after the Lockerbie bombings when the Duke of York made a misstep.

According to filmmaker Rowan Deacon, Savile prepared a public relations handbook for the Prince of Wales, who then showed the information to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.

Prince Charles Allegedly Sought Advice From Pedophile Jimmy Savile

As said by Deacon, director of the upcoming documentary Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story, the late BBC broadcaster served as an unofficial adviser to the Prince during a 20-year correspondence. The filmmaker obtained hundreds of letters in which she alleges Prince Charles sought advice from Savile on public addresses and his personal life.

A document titled Guidelines for Members of the Royal Family and Their Staffs, penned by Savile for the Prince in 1989, is among them, according to Deacon. The paper, according to the director, was created in response to the Duke of York's remarks regarding the 1988 Lockerbie incident. "I think statistically something like this has to happen at some point," Prince Andrew told reporters, Telegraph reported.

After Prince Andrew's performance in the aftermath of Pan Am Flight 103's bombing in December 1988, the Prince had sought Savile's advice on dealing with public relations gaffes. Eleven individuals perished, along with the 259 passengers and staff members on board the Heathrow-bound flight to New York. Andrew, on the other hand, seems to have shown little empathy in the aftermath of the national calamity.

Read Also: Meghan Markle Net Worth 2022: How Wealthy Is the Duchess of Sussex?

Prince Charles Exchange Letters With Jimmy Savile

In response, Savile devised an action plan that included the installation of an incident room with separate phone lines and the need that every planned action be reviewed by Her Majesty, which was purportedly seen by the Queen and Prince Philip. On January 27, 1989, Prince Charles replied, attaching a letter on catastrophes "incorporating your points" that would be given to the Queen.

The new Netflix documentary will shed light on Savile's eccentricities and generosity, which he exploited to hide his decades of sex abuse charges. Savile, who went from a low working-class beginning to become one of Britain's biggest television personalities, died in 2011 at the age of 84.

Throughout his successful tenure with the BBC, he sought to dispel rising rumors about his illicit adventures in his later years. Throughout a four-decade campaign of sexual assault, he abused at least 72 children, some as young as eight, according to a Corporation-led investigation into his crimes. His first abuse happened in 1959, and his last occured in 2006, according to Daily Mail.

Following Prince Andrew's performance after the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, Prince Charles sought to advise on disaster response. On December 21, 1988, a jet exploded over Lockerbie, killing 259 people, including 11 on the ground, yet the Duke of York seemed unconcerned.

Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story examines how Savile cultivated relationships at the highest echelons of society, including then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and top police officials, in the documentary Jimmy Savile: British Horror Story.

It also reveals how The Sun was one of the first periodicals to call attention to his dark side. The said publication released an essay in 1983 in which he provided a rare glimpse of his dark side, as per The Sun.

Related Article: Queen Elizabeth Faces Jubilee Disaster; Prince William, Kate Middleton Move to Windsor as Royals Fear Prince Andrew Is Using Her Majesty

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HELENA, Mont. (AP)  Several months after the state of Montana said it was spending $1.5 million in federal pandemic relief money to shore up the public defender's office in the Billings area and offer higher pay to contract attorneys, a group of attorneys in western Montana said they want a pay increase too.

Theyre not wrong in their assertions they need more money, Brett Schandelson, development and operations bureau chief with the Office of State Public Defender, told the Montana State News Bureau. "On the other side, we are a state entity bound by legislative appropriation.

OPD is working with the state budget office to find a way to increase pay for other contract public defenders, who take cases for indigent clients when attorneys in the local public defenders' office have a conflict in representing them.

Last week, 10 private attorneys in western Montana said they would no longer take cases from the public defenders office, beginning on April 1, unless they receive the same pay that contract attorneys in the Billings area receive.

I dont think it would be sustainable for this situation to last for a long period of time, Schandelson said.

The increased pay in the region served by the Billings office came after Yellowstone County District Court Judge Donald Harris held the public defender's office in contempt and fined the agency up to $10,000 after learning that as of July 31, 2021, more than 660 criminal cases did not have a public defender assigned.

Harris said some defendants could be innocent, others were sitting in jail because they didn't receive a timely bail hearing and some who committed violent crimes may have their cases dismissed due to the lack of a speedy trial.

Attorneys working for OPD make about $13,000 less per year than other attorneys employed by the state, making it difficult for the agency to recruit and retain attorneys, the agency has said. Unassigned cases are usually outsourced to contract attorneys, but few were taking cases at the state rate of $56 per hour. The federal defense contract rate is $150 per hour.

The federal pandemic relief money temporarily increased the contract attorney pay in the Billings area to $71 an hour.

Im basically giving away two- or three-fourths of my time free to do OPD cases, which I dont have a problem with at all, I love doing them, said former public defender and current private attorney Melanie DIsidoro. But if someone else is making more than me just because theyre over in Billings, my position is that OPD needs to be following the statute.

The state is seeking to hire a dozen public defenders in various cities with a pay range of between $55,000 and $71,000 per year, while the pay for a Billings public defender job starts at $65,000 and goes up to $84,000, depending on experience.

The pay for an attorney for the Public Service Commission ranges from $81,000 to $95,000, according to a current job listing.

The Office of State Public Defender is planning to ask the 2023 Legislature for money money to pay public defenders and contract public defenders, Schendelson said.

Ultimately, its going to be up to the Legislature, he said. But I think everyone is understanding now that these issues are real, its not just OPD crying wolf. We do have the lowest paid attorneys in the state and we are well below the market rate.
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP)  Oregon authorities are searching for a 30-year-old man who is missing after he went snowboarding on Mount Hood.

KOIN-TV reports that Ryan Mather was reported missing around 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, when his girlfriend called authorities and said he never came home from the snowboarding trip to Mt. Hood Meadows. Hood River deputies and ski patrol started a search for Mather after finding his car in the resorts parking lot.
MIAMI (AP)  Democrats in Congress are sounding the alarm over what they claim is mounting evidence that Mexicos chief prosecutor  a vital partner of U.S. law enforcement  is assailing the nations independent judiciary and selectively targeting for prosecution opponents of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

In a harshly worded letter sent Wednesday to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Attorney General Merrick Garland, Sen. Bob Menendez, the powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and three colleagues call on the Biden administration to raise their concerns directly with their Mexican counterparts.

Lopez Obradors tenure has been marked by an increasing pattern of seemingly selective prosecutions disproportionately targeting government critics, according to the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. "President Lopez Obradors efforts to advance legitimate accountability initiatives must strengthen, not dismantle, democratic institutions and the rule of law.

The letter, which is bound to stir the ire of Lopez Obrador and his allies, focuses on a number of questionable actions and what they consider personal vendettas pursued by Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero.

The top prosecutor, a close ally of the leftist president, first caught the attention of American officials after the Trump administration dropped criminal narcotics changes against former Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos and returned him to Mexico on promises he would be investigated at home.

But the probe against Cienfuegos was quickly closed and Gertz Manero later threatened to press charges of his own against U.S. prosecutors accustomed to working hand-in-glove with Mexican law enforcement to dismantle the country's powerful cartels.

We urge you to give serious consideration to the risk of a weakened, politicized justice system in Mexico, according to the letter, whose signatories include Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the appropriations committee, and Senators Benjamin Cardin of Maryland and Jeffrey Merkley of Oregon.

Lopez Obrador was elected in 2018 on a promise to sweep clean Mexico's notoriously corrupt politics and likes to tout his commitment to austerity by taking commercial flights. But critics call it a stunt to distract from a worrisome accumulation of power, failure to deliver on campaign promises and repeated attacks on opponents that undermines the rule of law in the U.S.' second largest trade partner.

This Sunday, his supporters are expected to give him another boost when they head to the polls for a first-of-its-kind referendum on whether he should be allowed to finish his six-year term  something that has never been in doubt and which many see as a sideshow.

The Democrats in their letter fault Lopez Obrador for publicly attacking a judge who ruled against his energy policies, pushing a seemingly unconstitutional plan to extend the term of a sympathetic Supreme Court chief justice and calling for the resignation of Mexicos top electoral court.

They also raise concerns about criminal charges pressed against Ricardo Anaya, a prominent conservative opponent of Lopez Obrador.

Anaya, who finished second in the 2018 presidential election, was accused last year with money laundering in connection to an alleged bribe he took in exchange for his support on an energy reform bill. The charges are based on the testimony of the former head of Mexicos state run oil company, who claims that on the instructions of Lopez Obradors predecessor he paid lawmakers, including $525,000 to Anaya, to vote for the overhaul.

Some have questioned the strength of the evidence, given that the alleged bribe was paid months after the reform was approved, when Anaya had already left office. Anaya has since fled Mexico and is living in the U.S.

Lopez Obrador has dismissed claims of score settling in the Anaya and other cases as lies and falsehoods" promoted by opponents to weaken his rule.

There was no immediate response from either his or the attorney general's office when the AP sent them a copy of the letter.

Under Gertz Manero's leadership, the Mexican prosecutor's office has also failed to seriously investigate allies of the president, according to the letter. These include allegations of money laundering and finance law violations against the president's brother, who was caught on video receiving cash from a campaign supporter. Lopez Obrador has defended the contributions as legitimate.

The Democrats also accuse Gertz Manero of pressing personal matters while in office.

These include trying to lock up 31 scientists in a maximum security prison because he claims they improperly received about $2.5 million in government funding years ago. The laws at the time allowed such funding, and the researchers say it wasnt misspent. Critics say the charges are payback for the researchers' refusal to recognize Gertz Manero's own academic credentials.

The attorney general also can be heard in a recently leaked recording of a conversation with a colleague cursing a Supreme Court justice. In the recording, Gertz Manero claims the judge won't heed to demands that the top court keep in jail a niece he blames for the death of his older brother, who died while in her care.

Gertz Manero has acknowledged obtaining an advance copy of a proposed Supreme Court opinion recommending the relative be released  something that struck many as a potential conflict of interest.

But he claims he received the court ruling because he was taking action in the case as a family member of the deceased, not as attorney general.

___

AP Writer Mark Stevenson in Mexico City contributed to this report.
DENVER (AP)  The Denver suburb where police officers and paramedics have been charged in the death of a Black man in 2019 ousted its reform-minded police chief Wednesday, faulting her management of a department at a time of rising crime and officer departures.

However, lawyers for Vanessa Wilson, who became chief in Aurora in 2020 after the death of Elijah McClain gained new attention amid protests over police brutality and racial injustice following the police killing of George Floyd, said she was the victim of a campaign to damage her reputation by conservative city council members who opposed reforms.

Last year, the city signed an agreement with State Attorney General Phil Weiser to make changes aimed at ending a pattern of racially biased policing and excessive force. Before that, Wilson also acted quickly to discipline and fire officers accused of misconduct, including officers who took and shared photos appearing to mock McClain's death.

In an effort to justify getting rid of Chief Wilson, the City and Council have engaged in a conspiracy to leak misinformation to the media and falsely attribute responsibility for the departments long-standing historical problems to Chief Wilson, Wilson's lawyers said.

City Manager Jim Twombly said Wilson excelled in her community outreach work in Colorado's third-largest city but he said he fired her because of concerns about her leadership and management of the department. He declined to give specific examples other than mentioning a backlog of thousands of crime reports, with the potential to delay investigations and arrests, that he said he first learned about last month, in a list of more general factors contributing to his decision. A report on the findings of a city-commissioned independent audit on the records backlog was issued Tuesday.

Twombly also said he had ongoing conversations with officers in the department and was concerned about the number of officers who have left. When asked by a reporter, he said he was concerned about the rise in crime in the community but he did not attribute that to Wilson.

It really comes down to a lack of confidence on my part for her to be able to lead the department, he said.

Twombly said Aurora would continue to uphold its consent decree agreement with the attorney general, signed in November, but some were skeptical.

Aurora is already regressing soon after the ink has dried on the consent decree, said Qusair Mohamedbhai, who represents McClain's mother, Sheneen McClain, and Kyle Vinson, a Black man who was shown on video being pistol whipped by an Aurora police officer last year.

The state lawmakers who represent Aurora, all Democrats, issued a statement saying Wilsons firing will set back efforts to eliminate the departments longstanding pattern and practice of racist policing.

"Her firing in the middle of these efforts sends a terrible message to the police force and to the community about Auroras commitment to reforming these practices, they said.

___

AP journalist James Anderson contributed to this report.
MANISTEE  Manistee shipping season is set to kick off late this weekend with the return of the M/V Sam Laud.

The freighter is due in Manistee bearing coal bound for Tondu Energy Systems Filer City, according to Chris Franckowiak, whose Facebook group, Manistee, MI Vessel Traffic monitors ship arrival and departures in the port of Manistee.

M/V Sam Laud

Just over 630-foot long, the vessel was built for American Steamship in 1975 and named for General American Transportation Corporations former chairman, Sam Laud.

The ship was originally scheduled to arrive on Thursday, but Franckowiak said it had been delayed due to ice, in a post shared to Manistee, MI Vessel Traffic, on Monday.

Sam Laud was downbound in the St. Marys River (Sunday) afternoon bound for Stoneport, MI, states part of the post. A large piece of plate ice dislodged from shore near Point aux Frenes, making passage impossible. The (U.S. Coast Guard) broke her out this morning without incident.

Ice cover on the Great Lakes reached its peak in mid-March, when nearly 80% of Lake Superior was frozen. Now, just under 40% of the lake is covered in ice. Even so, ice has slowed the movement of vessels since the Soo Locks opened on March 25.

There is a possibility of a delivery of road salt from Detroit, MI to the Rieth-Riley dock in early April as well, Franckowiak reported on a March 25 post.

Maple Street Bridge work

Jeff Mikula, Manistee Harbormaster and Manistee Department of Public Works director, said the city was ready for the start of shipping season. Despite ongoing work on the Maple Street Bridge, Mikula reported it would remain open for the large freighters' arrival.

Though the bridge was originally scheduled to reopen to vehicle traffic in late April, Mikula said progress on the repairs is moving ahead of schedule.

The schedule was very conservative based on weather and not knowing what weather would be in March and April, he said. We had hoped that we could open it up a few weeks ago but there's still some balance issues in it. We're able to operate it for freighter traffic, but we want the contractor to finish all their work before we open it up to full vehicular traffic.

Mikula said that residents could expect to see some work being done along the Manistee River even into shipping season.

Dock replacement work begins

On Tuesday, the Duluth, a tug owned by Great Lakes Dock & Materials of Muskegon, arrived to complete the next phase of the Manistee Municipal Marina dock replacement project.

The tug and barge are replacing five of the marina docks, Mikula said. All the marina docks with the exception of five were replaced when they were structurally damaged by the meteotsunami, years ago.

The marina dock replacement will cost $425,775, according to the bid that Great Lakes Docks & Materials gave to the city in September.



The city received a Michigan Department of Natural Resources Waterways Grant worth $203,000, and $213,700 in proceeds from the Capital Improvement Bond were allocated for the second phase of the project.



Mikula said he expects the dock replacement work to be completed within "the next couple of weeks.
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ANDRIIVKA, Ukraine (AP)  The mayor of the besieged port city of Mariupol put the number of civilians killed there at more than 5,000 Wednesday, as Ukraine collected evidence of Russian atrocities on the ruined outskirts of Kyiv and braced for what could become a climactic battle for control of the country's industrial east.

Ukrainian authorities continued gathering up the dead in shattered towns outside the capital amid telltale signs Moscow's troops killed civilians indiscriminately before retreating over the past several days.

In other developments, the U.S. and its Western allies moved to impose new sanctions against the Kremlin over what they branded war crimes.

And Russia completed the pullout of all of its estimated 24,000 or more troops from the Kyiv and Chernihiv areas in the north, sending them into Belarus or Russia to resupply and reorganize, probably to return to the fight in the east, a U.S. defense official speaking on condition of anonymity said.

In his nightly address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that the Russian military continues to build up its forces in preparation for the new offensive in the east, where the Kremlin has said its goal is to liberate the Donbas, Ukraines mostly Russian-speaking industrial heartland. He said Ukraine, too, was preparing for battle.

We will fight and we will not retreat, he said. We will seek all possible options to defend ourselves until Russia begins to seriously seek peace. This is our land. This is our future. And we wont give them up.

Ukrainian authorities urged people living in the Donbas to evacuate now, ahead of an impending Russian offensive, while there is still time.

Later, people will come under fire, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said, and we wont be able to do anything to help them.

A Western official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence estimates, said it will take Russia's battle-damaged forces as much as a month to regroup for a major push on eastern Ukraine.

Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko said that of the more than 5,000 civilians killed during weeks of Russian bombardment and street fighting, 210 were children. He said Russian forces bombed hospitals, including one where 50 people burned to death.

Boichenko said more than 90% of the citys infrastructure has been destroyed. The attacks on the strategic southern city on the Sea of Azov have cut off food, water, fuel and medicine and pulverized homes and businesses.

British defense officials said 160,000 people remained trapped in the city, which had a prewar population of 430,000. A humanitarian relief convoy accompanied by the Red Cross has been trying for days without success to get into the city.

Capturing Mariupol would allow Russia to secure a continuous land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.

In the north, Ukrainian authorities said the bodies of least 410 civilians have been found in towns around Kyiv, victims of what Zelenskyy has portrayed as a Russian campaign of murder, rape, dismemberment and torture. Some victims had apparently been shot at close range. Some were found with their hands bound.

At a cemetery in the town of Bucha, northeast of Kyiv, workers began to load more than 60 bodies apparently collected over the past few days into a grocery shipping truck for transport to a facility for further investigation.

Zelenskyy accused Russia of interfering with an international investigation into possible war crimes by removing corpses and trying to hide other evidence in Bucha.

We have information that the Russian troops have changed tactics and are trying to remove the dead people, the dead Ukrainians, from the streets and cellars of territory they occupied, he said in his address. This is only an attempt to hide the evidence and nothing more.

Switching from Ukrainian into Russian, Zelenskyy urged ordinary Russians to somehow confront the Russian repressive machine instead of being equated with the Nazis for the rest of your life.

He called on Russians to demand an end to the war, if you have even a little shame about what the Russian military is doing in Ukraine.

More bodies were yet to be collected in Bucha. The Associated Press saw two in a house in a silent neighborhood. From time to time there was the muffled boom of workers clearing the town of mines and other unexploded ordnance.

Police said they found at least 20 bodies in the Makariv area west of Kyiv. In the village of Andriivka, residents said the Russians arrived in early March and took locals' phones. Some people were detained, then released. Others met unknown fates. Some described sheltering for weeks in cellars normally used for storing vegetables for winter.

The soldiers were gone, and Russian armored personnel carriers, a tank and other vehicles sat destroyed on both ends of the road running through the village. Several buildings were reduced to mounds of bricks and corrugated metal. Residents struggled without heat, electricity or cooking gas.

First we were scared, now we are hysterical, said Valentyna Klymenko, 64. She said she, her husband and two neighbors weathered the siege by sleeping on stacks of potatoes covered with a mattress and blankets. We didnt cry at first. Now we are crying.

To the north of the village, in the town of Borodyanka, rescue workers combed through the rubble of apartment blocks, looking for bodies. Mine-disposal units worked nearby.

The Kremlin has insisted its troops have committed no war crimes, charging that the images out of Bucha were staged by the Ukrainians.

Thwarted in their efforts to swiftly take the capital, increasing numbers of President Vladimir Putins troops, along with mercenaries, have been reported moving into the Donbas.

At least five people were killed by Russian shelling Wednesday in the Donbas' Donetsk region, according to Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko, who urged civilians to leave for safer areas.

In the Luhansk region of the Donbas, Russian bombardment set fire to at least 10 multi-story buildings and a mall in the town of Sievierodonetsk, the regional governor reported. There was no immediate word on deaths or injuries.

Russian forces also attacked a fuel depot and a factory in the Dnipropetrovsk region, just west of the Donbas, authorities said.

Ukrainian forces have been fighting Russia-backed separatists in the Donbas since 2014. Ahead of its Feb. 24 invasion, Moscow recognized the Luhansk and Donetsk regions as independent states.

In reaction to the alleged atrocities outside Kyiv, the U.S. announced sanctions against Putins two adult daughters and said it is toughening penalties against Russian banks. Britain banned investment in Russia and pledged to end its dependence on Russian coal and oil by the end of the year.

The European Union is also expected to take additional punitive measures, including an embargo on coal.

Meanwhile, the United States and the United Kingdom boycotted an informal meeting of the Security Council called by Russia to press its baseless claims that the U.S. has biological warfare laboratories in Ukraine.

The meeting was the latest of several moves by Russia that have led Western countries to accuse Moscow of using the U.N. as a platform for disinformation to divert attention from the war.

Russias deputy U.N. ambassador Dmitry Polyansky, who presided over the meeting, asserted that Ukraine, supported by the U.S., was implementing what he claimed were dangerous projects and experiments as part of a military biological program.

The allegations have previously been debunked. Ukraine does own and operate a network of biological labs that have received funding and research support from the U.S. and are not a secret. The labs are part of a program that aims to reduce the likelihood of deadly outbreaks, whether natural or man-made.

The U.S. efforts date back to work in the 1990s to dismantle the former Soviet Unions program for weapons of mass destruction.

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Oleksandr Stashevskyi and Cara Anna in Bucha, Ukraine, Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Ukraine, and Associated Press journalists around the world contributed to this report.

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Follow the APs coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
Russian President Vladimir Putin's daughters are allegedly included in the list of individuals that the European Union is planning to sanction to ban investments that would benefit Moscow amid the war on Ukraine.

EU officials are reportedly discussing potentially imposing sanctions on the Moscow leader's two daughters, Katerina Tikhonova and Mariya Vorontsova, said people familiar with the matter. The issue comes as the region continues to respond to the killings of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha.

Putin's Daughters

The alleged list still needs the approval of European governments and could get an overhaul on who is included. It also writes down dozens of other individuals, such as political figures, tycoons and their family members, and several propagandists.

The move to sanction Putin's daughters is largely seen as a symbolic move because it remains unclear whether or not they have significant assets outside of Russia. However, the list was also designed to get the Russian president's attention. Katerina and Mariya's lives have largely been kept a secret and the Kremlin has never confirmed the names or released photographs of the two as adults, as per Time.

The planned measures will expectedly include the freezing of assets and a ban on international travel.

Read Also: EU Plans To Ban Russian Coal, Ships, Road Operators After Bucha Massacre in Ukraine

The situation comes as Vorontsova is known to co-own a healthcare investment project while her sister, Tikhonova, runs an artificial intelligence institute at Moscow State University. Furthermore, the EU is expected to impose a ban on coal imports that is worth roughly $4.3 billion.

According to the Telegraph, the decision is the first time that the European Commission will impose sanctions on Russia's energy sector since the start of Moscow's war on Ukraine. Authorities said that they were working on more sanctions that would target oil, but they noted that there were no plans to hit more significant gas imports.

EU Sanctions on Russia

The EU imposed the new sanctions after allegations of "genocide" in Bucha, Ukraine, where dead bodies have littered the streets as Russian soldiers fled from the area. The new measures also include a ban on Russian imports, including cement, liquor, vodka, and caviar, that are worth roughly $6 million per year.

Furthermore, officials plan to sanction four Russian banks, including the country's second-largest, VTB. In a statement, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the four banks, which have been totally cut off from the markets, represent 23% of the market share in the Russian banking sector.

If all 27 member states approve the new measures, the ban would include Russian vessels and Russian-operated vessels being unable to enter EU ports. Exceptions to this will be essentials such as agricultural and food products and humanitarian aid and energy.

Another export ban will affect roughly $11 billion worth of products, a move that was proposed to include sectors covering quantum computers, advanced semiconductors, sensitive machinery, and transportation equipment. In a statement, von der Leyen said that the new sanctions will aim to degrade Russia's technological base and industrial capacity, Dailymail reported.



Related Article: Finland Ignores EU Sanctions, Opens Canal To Enable Trade With Russia as a Neutral Country Not Involved With NATO

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Pennsylvania State Police settled a federal lawsuit alleging troopers routinely and improperly tried to enforce federal immigration law by pulling over Hispanic motorists on the basis of how they looked and detaining those suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, officials announced Wednesday.

The settlement pays a total of $865,000 to 10 plaintiffs, with a portion going to the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. The ACLU filed the federal suit in 2019 asserting police aggressively questioned motorists and their passengers about their immigration statuses without cause or justification, and held them for federal immigration agents.

Troopers from around the state engaged in a pattern and practice of unlawful civil immigration enforcement that has ripped apart families, terrorized motorists, and sent a clear message to communities across Pennsylvania: the state police are in the immigration business, said the suit, which alleged discrimination and civil rights violations.

Under the settlement, state police agreed to amend their policy to forbid troopers from enforcing civil immigration law.

PSP does not have jurisdiction with respect to civil immigration enforcement, the new policy language says.

Troopers may not make a traffic stop based on a motorist's suspected nationality or immigration status, and may not ask questions about a person's immigration status unless it's necessary as part of a criminal investigation, according to the policy. Nor may troopers stop, search or detain someone solely based on a federal immigration detainer request.

State police had long profiled Latino residents, the ACLU claimed, but troopers efforts to target people without legal permission to be in the U.S.  using alleged vehicle infractions as a pretext  accelerated in early 2017 to coincide with the Trump administrations crackdown on illegal immigration.

Our investigation found that the six incidents described in the lawsuit were the tip of the iceberg, reflecting a pattern of discrimination by state troopers against Latinos and people of color, Vanessa Stine, immigrant rights attorney for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said in a written statement.

The settlement did not require state police to admit wrongdoing. All six troopers named in the suit are still working for state police, along with a PSP supervisor in commercial vehicle enforcement who was also a defendant, according to an agency spokesperson.

One of the defendant troopers was involved in three of the incidents, according to the plaintiffs.

In one stop, the trooper pulled over a Latina woman who was driving from New York to Virginia to visit family. Even though the woman's alleged infraction was speeding, he began interrogating her partner and adult son  who were also in the car  repeatedly demanding to see their papers and questioning whether they were legal or illegal, the plaintiffs said. The trooper put them in handcuffs and held them for hours until federal immigration agents showed up and took them to prison to await deportation proceedings, the suit said.

All of the plaintiffs still reside in the U.S., according to the ACLU.

We hope our victory means that this will never happen again, said Rebecca Castro, one of the plaintiffs and a U.S. citizen who was stopped on the basis of her appearance, according to the suit.

State police highlighted the recent policy changes, along with mandatory training and a data collection program that began last year to capture demographic information on traffic stops in hopes of identifying potential racial and ethnic disparities in policing.

I am confident these changes to policy and training will ensure the department is in compliance with current case law, state police Commissioner Robert Evanchick said in a written statement.
DEERPARK, N.Y. (AP)  A New York man fell to his death when he tried to retrieve a drone that had crashed into a steep river bank, police said.

Binh Ledinh, 42, of Lumberland, was flying a drone at Hawk's Nest in Orange County on Tuesday when the drone crashed 17 feet down an embankment overlooking the Delaware River, the New York state police said in a news release.
ROCKY MOUNT, N.C. (AP)  QVC will not rebuild a North Carolina distribution center destroyed in December blaze that also killed a worker.

The company said in a statement Tuesday that it made the decision not to rebuild the facility built more than 20 years ago after months of assessment and careful consideration, WRAL-TV reported. The company said it may lease or sell the land.
KAMPALA, Uganda (AP)  Widespread abuses against civilians in the western part of Ethiopia's embattled Tigray region amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have charged in a new report.

The crimes were perpetrated by security officials and civilian authorities from the neighboring Amhara region, sometimes "with the acquiescence and possible participation of Ethiopian federal forces," the rights groups say in the report released Wednesday.

The abuses are part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Tigrayan civilian population that amount to crimes against humanity as well as war crimes," the report says.

Ethiopian federal authorities strongly refute allegations they have deliberately targeted Tigrayans for violent attacks. They said at the outbreak of the war in Nov. 2020 that their objective was to disarm the rebellious leaders of Tigray.

Ethiopian authorities said Wednesday that they are carefully examining allegations in the rights groups' report. While the report has ideas that are not useful for any peace effort, the government will reaffirm its determination to investigate all human rights violations and make public the results, said a statement from the Government Communication Service.

The report, the result of a months-long investigation including more than 400 interviews, charges that hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans have been forced to leave their homes in a violent campaign of unlawful killings, sexual assaults, mass arbitrary detentions, livestock pillaging, and the denial of humanitarian assistance.

Widespread atrocities have been reported in the Tigray war, with Ethiopian government troops and their allies, including troops from neighboring Eritrea, facing most of the charges.

Fighters loyal to the party of Tigray's leaders  the Tigray People's Liberation Front, or TPLF  also have been accused of committing abuses as the war spread into neighboring regions. Fighters affiliated with the TPLF deliberately killed dozens of people, gang-raped dozens of women and pillaged property for a period of several weeks last year in Amhara region, Amnesty said in a report released in February.

The new report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International focuses on attacks targeting Tigrayans in western Tigray and describes them as ethnic cleansing, a term that refers to forcing a population from a region through expulsions and other violence, often including killings and rapes.

Publicly displayed signs in several towns across western Tigray urged Tigrayans to leave, and local officials in meetings discussed plans to remove Tigrayans, according to the report. Pamphlets appeared to give Tigrayans urgent ultimatums to leave or be killed, the report says.

They kept saying every night, We will kill you  Go out of the area, said one woman from the town of Baeker, speaking of threats she faced from an Amhara militia group, according to the report.

Western Tigray has long been contested territory. Amhara authorities say the area was under their control until the 1990s when the TPLF-led federal government redrew internal boundaries that put the territory within Tigray's borders. Amhara officials moved swiftly to take over the region when the war broke out.

The outbreak of the war brought these longstanding and unaddressed grievances to the fore: Amhara regional forces, along with Ethiopian federal forces, seized these territories and displaced Tigrayan civilians in a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign, the report says.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken asserted in March 2021 that ethnic cleansing had taken place in western Tigray, marking the first time a top official in the international community openly described the situation as such. That allegation was dismissed by Ethiopian authorities as a completely unfounded and spurious verdict against the Ethiopian government.

The new report corroborates reporting by The Associated Press on atrocities in the war, which affects 6 million people in Tigray alone.

In June Ethiopias government cut off almost all access to food aid, medical supplies, cash and fuel in Tigray. The war has spilled into Amhara and Afar regions, with Tigrayan leaders saying they are fighting to ease the blockade and to protect themselves from further attacks.

Facing growing international pressure, Ethiopian authorities on March 24 announced a humanitarian truce for Tigray, saying the action was necessary to allow unimpeded relief supplies into the area. Trucks bearing food supplies have since arrived in the region.

The AP last year confirmed the first starvation deaths under the blockade along with the governments ban on humanitarian workers bringing medicines into Tigray.

Estimated tens of thousands of people have been killed in the war. But there is little hope for peace talks as Ethiopian authorities have outlawed the TPLF, effectively making its leaders fugitives on the run.

Among their recommendations, the rights groups call for a neutral protection force" in western Tigray, possibly with the deployment of an African Union-backed peacekeeping mission, with a robust civilian protection mandate.

Their report also urges the U.N. Security Council to impose an arms embargo targeting all the warring parties.
CHICOPEE, Mass. (AP)  The superintendent of schools in a Massachusetts city was charged Wednesday with lying to federal agents investigating threats made by text messages to a candidate for police chief, who eventually withdrew from consideration.

Lynn Clark, the superintendent of Chicopee schools, was arrested on a charge of making false statements, according to the U.S. attorney's office in Boston. She was scheduled to appear in court Wednesday. No defense attorney was listed in court records and a message seeking comment was sent to her work email.

Chicopee, a city of about 55,000 residents roughly 80 miles (129 kilometers) west of Boston, was in the process of hiring a new police chief late last year when law enforcement received a report that a candidate for the position had received texts from unknown numbers that seemed intended to force them to withdraw their application, federal authorities said.

The texts threatened to expose information that would cause the candidate reputational harm, and as a result, that person withdrew their candidacy, authorities said. They did not disclose any information about the candidate's identity or any other information about the alleged threats.

According to FBI affidavit in the case, Clark sent 99 messages that were threatening in nature to the candidate, the candidates spouse and to herself, using an app that allowed her to hide her cellphone number.

Clark, who lives in Belchertown, eventually admitted she sent the messages, but not before pointing the finger at others, authorities said.

The affidavit said Clark believed that if the candidate was named chief, it would negatively impact" her position as superintendent and she wanted the candidate to get knocked down a peg.

Chicopee Mayor John Vieau in a statement called the allegations disheartening.

The mayors office is aware of the situation and we are working to ensure that school department operations continue smoothly through this transition as the education of children remains paramount," the statement said.

The school committee has scheduled a meeting for Wednesday night to discuss Clarks future.
Federal student loan borrowers won't have to scramble to resume their payments at the end of May.

President Joe Biden extended the payment pause to August 31. It was set to expire May 31, but the President pushed the resume date toward the end of the summer. The payment pause came in March 2020 when President Donald Trump ceased payments and froze interest at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
NEEDVILLE  A 16-year-old Needville High School student admitted to starting the blaze that destroyed part of his school and caused students to retake the state-mandated TAKS tests, his attorney said Monday.

The 10th-grader arrived at the Fort Bend County courthouse with his attorney Steven Rocket Rosen on Monday and spent a couple of hours giving investigators a statement. He could be taken into custody today.

"He has admitted the wrongdoing. He is the one who started the fire," Rosen said. The teen's name is not being released because he is a juvenile. School officials said he was serving an in-school suspension when the fire occurred.

Rosen declined to discuss the motive for the April 23 fire but did say it had nothing to do with TAKS tests administered the week before the blaze. The test booklets were destroyed by the fire, which razed a large portion of the high school in the rural community.

"This was the best thing for Needville, for him, for the family, for the community and for law enforcement," Rosen said about the teen's admission. Rosen said he expects the teen to be placed in the juvenile detention center soon.

District Attorney John Healey said he could not discuss any case developments because of confidentiality laws involving juveniles. But he did say the investigation was progressing.

Damage in millions

Meanwhile, the superintendent of the Needville Independent School District, Curtis Rhodes , said he wants the youth to be certified as an adult for trial.

"This is not a juvenile act," Rhodes said Monday. "This was a premeditated break-in to a school. It took effort. It was not accidental."

Rhodes said school officials and insurance adjusters have not finished adding up the damage but that it runs in the millions of dollars.

"Here he comes along and for whatever reason intentionally sets a fire. I think there is a price that needs to be paid, and I think the price needs to be as severe as it can be," Rhodes said.

Rhodes described the boy as a good student who was active in sports.

Calls to the boy's parents for comment were not returned.

Classes were canceled in the week after the blaze and resumed April 30. Students have started retaking the TAKS tests.

Emily Janicek, a freshman, was one of those who will take the test today.

"I know it will be hard," Janicek said. "But, we have taken it once and we can do it again. I know a lot of kids are upset because we have already done it."

'Gorgeous building'

Janicek said the old high school building with its wooden floors will be missed.

"I walked through that school every morning. It was just a gorgeous building. What I am going to miss the most about it is all the tradition."

Sophomore Alysha Oler said many students have been devastated by the fire.

"But we have moved on and gotten stronger. We are uniting to get through this," she said.

Rosen, the teen's attorney, said he wants the case to remain in the juvenile court system. He said the youth has had mental problems in the past seven months, but would not provide further details.

Rosen said he discussed the case with investigators and told the boy's family the best course of action would be for the teen to tell police he started the fire.

"He was man enough to come forward and say this is how it happened and speak to the authorities, and where the chips fall, they fall," he said.

Started in two places

Investigators have been tight-lipped about the probe, but county fire marshal Vance Cooper said the teen's admission was helpful.

"The investigation is moving forward. With this statement we are tying up loose ends," Cooper said.

Police and Rosen would not say if there are other suspects in the case.

The fire at the high school broke out about 4:30 a.m. and before the flames were extinguished, firefighters from 21 different departments responded. Investigators quickly learned the school had been broken into and that the fire had been started at two locations.

The building contained administrative offices, a teachers lounge and seven classrooms. The science building and the cafeteria were also heavily damaged.

eric.hanson@chron.com
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HOUSTON (AP)  A group of bipartisan Texas lawmakers on Wednesday visited a death row inmate whose execution they are trying to stop amid doubts about whether she fatally beat her 2-year-old daughter.

State Reps. Jeff Leach, a Republican, and Joe Moody, a Democrat, led a group of lawmakers to the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville, Texas, where the state houses women on death row. Melissa Lucio faces execution on April 27.

We are blessed to have the opportunity to meet with Melissa, to pray with her, to spend time with her and were more resolute and committed than ever to fighting over the next three weeks to save her life, Leach told The Associated Press in an interview after the meeting.

Lucio was convicted of capital murder for the 2007 death of her daughter Mariah. Prosecutors say Mariah was the victim of child abuse and there is no evidence that would acquit Lucio of her daughters death.

But Lucios lawyers say jurors never heard forensic evidence that would have explained Mariahs various injuries were actually caused by a fall days before her death. They also say Lucio wasnt allowed to present evidence questioning the validity of her confession, which they allege was not actually a confession and was given under duress after hours of relentless questioning.

Among those who have doubts about Lucios guilt are a bipartisan group of 83 Texas House members led by Leach and Moody. They sent the states Board of Pardons and Paroles and Gov. Greg Abbott a letter last month asking them to grant an execution reprieve or commute her sentence. A spokeswoman for Abbotts office did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

Leach said he and six other lawmakers toured the prison for about two hours before meeting privately with Lucio for about 40 minutes. The meeting was first reported by The Quorum Report, which covers Texas politics.

The lawmakers encouraged Lucio and talked with her about their efforts to stop her execution, Leach said.

It was just a sweet, sweet time together, very powerful, Leach said.

After Wednesdays meeting, Moody tweeted that, She prayed with us & hugged us; today might be the last genuine human contact she has before the state kills her.

Efforts to stop Lucios execution have also received support from reality TV star Kim Kardashian West and from several jurors at her trial who are now expressing doubts about her conviction.

In an op-ed published Sunday in the Houston Chronicle, juror Johnny Galvan Jr. said he believes jurors werent given all the information needed to make a proper decision and he now feels deep regret for sentencing Lucio to death.

The idea that my decision to take another persons life was not based on complete and accurate information in a fair trial is horrifying. There are so many problems in this case that I believe she must not be executed, Galvan wrote.

In 2019, a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Lucios conviction, ruling she was deprived of her constitutional right to present a meaningful defense. However, the full court in 2021 said the conviction had to be upheld for procedural reasons.

Lucios attorneys had asked the appeals court to recall its decision but the request was denied last week.

But in a footnote in the brief decision, 5th Circuit Judge Patrick Higginbotham called Lucios case a systemic failure, producing a train of injustice which only the hand of the Governor can halt.

Lucio, 53, would be the first Latina executed by Texas since 1863 and the first woman since 2014. Only 17 women have been executed in the U.S. since the Supreme Court lifted its ban on the death penalty in 1976, most recently in January 2021.

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Follow Juan A. Lozano on Twitter: https://twitter.com/juanlozano70

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This story has been corrected to show that Lucio would have been the first Latina to be executed by Texas since 1863, not ever.
A new Israeli study found that a fourth dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine offered significant protection against the infection for elderly individuals but noted that its effects waned quickly.

The study that was published on Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine observed and reviewed the health records of more than 1.25 million vaccinated individuals in Israel. The people included in the study were aged 60 years or older and were monitored from January to March 2022, the period when the Omicron variant was the dominant strain.

Second COVID-19 Booster Shot

The researchers found that the rate of severe COVID-19 infection in the fourth week after a fourth dose of the vaccine was much lower compared to people who only got three doses. The numbers varied by a factor of 3.5.

Furthermore, they found that the protection offered by the second booster shot against severe illness did not seem to wane in the six weeks following the fourth shot. However, the study was not conducted long enough to determine exactly how long the protection provided lasts, as per CNN.

However, protection from infection provided by the fourth dose waned after just four weeks despite shielding an individual from severe illness. The results of the research come before a meeting by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Wednesday.

Read Also: New COVID-19 Variant Discovered! Is the XE Recombinant in the US Already?

Officials will discuss the need for additional booster shots which comes a week after the United States authorized a second booster dose for individuals 50 years and older. The decision is being discussed amid the spread of the BA.2 subvariant of the coronavirus.

According to Reuters, European health ministers have encouraged the bloc's government to support the fourth dose for people aged over 60. In Asia, on the other hand, South Korea has begun handing out fourth doses of the coronavirus vaccines in February. Singapore has also announced that they plan to provide second booster shots for people aged 80 and older.

Spread of the Omicron Variant

The Israeli researchers wrote that for confirmed infection, a second booster shot appeared to provide only short-term protection. Discussions for a fourth vaccine dose have intensified amid the rapid spread of the Omicron variant which sometimes can evade a human's body immune defenses.

The FDA also authorized an mRNA booster for adults who have already received two doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. However, many believe that support for another vaccine shot will be hard to acquire as 66% of Americans have already been vaccinated and only 30% have received their first booster shot.

While it was obvious that the Omicron variant has reduced the effectiveness of the coronavirus vaccines, data on the benefits of a second booster remain limited. Israeli researchers conducted another study previously and found that older adults who received a second booster shot were 78% less likely to die of COVID-19 than individuals who only received one booster dose. However, the study was not published in a scientific journal and it received criticism from scientists who cited its methodology, the New York Times reported.



Related Article: Fourth Wave Scare: China Ramps up Medical, Military Personnel in Shanghai To Test 25 Million Residents for COVID-19

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UNITED NATIONS (AP)  The U.N. General Assembly will vote Thursday on whether to suspend Russia from the U.N.s premier human rights body. The move was initiated by the United States in response to the discovery of hundreds of bodies after Russian troops withdrew from towns near the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, sparking calls for its forces to be tried for war crimes.

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield made the call for Russia to be stripped of its seat on the 47-member Human Rights Council in the wake of videos and photos of streets in the town of Bucha strewn with corpses of what appeared to be civilians. The videos and reporting from the town have sparked global revulsion and calls for tougher sanctions on Russia, which has vehemently denied responsibility.

We believe that the members of the Russian forces committed war crimes in Ukraine, and we believe that Russia needs to be held accountable, Thomas-Greenfield said Monday. Russias participation on the Human Rights Council is a farce.

General Assembly spokeswoman Paulina Kubiak said Wednesday the assemblys emergency special session on Ukraine will resume at 10 a.m. EDT on Thursday when the resolution to suspend the rights of membership in the Human Rights Council of the Russian Federation will be put to a vote.

While the Human Rights Council is based in Geneva, its members are elected by the 193-nation General Assembly for three-year terms. The March 2006 resolution that established the Human Rights Council states that the assembly may suspend membership rights of a country that commits gross and systematic violations of human rights.

The brief resolution to be voted on expresses grave concern at the ongoing human rights and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, particularly at the reports of violations and abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law by the Russian Federation, including gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights.

To be approved, the resolution requires a two-thirds majority of assembly members that vote yes or no. Abstentions dont count.

The General Assembly voted 140-5 with 38 abstentions on March 24 on a resolution blaming Russia for the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and urging an immediate cease-fire and protection for millions of civilians and the homes, schools and hospitals critical to their survival.

The vote was almost exactly the same as for the March 2 resolution the assembly adopted demanding an immediate Russian cease-fire, withdrawal of all its forces and protection for all civilians. That vote was 141-5 with 35 abstentions.

Thomas-Greenfield said Monday that her message to the 140 members who voted in favor of those two resolutions to support Russias suspension from the Human Rights Council is simple: The images out of Bucha and devastation across Ukraine require us now to match our words with action.

We cannot let a member state that is subverting every principle we hold dear to continue to sit on the U.N. Human Rights Council, she said.

Supporters of the resolution are optimistic about its approval, though not necessarily with the support of 140 countries.

Russia asked an unspecified number of countries to vote no, saying an abstention or not voting would be considered unfriendly and would affect bilateral relations.

In its so-called non-paper obtained by The Associated Press, Russia said the attempt to expel it from the Human Rights Council is political and being supported by various countries to preserve their dominant position and control over the world and continue the politics of neo-colonialism of human rights in international relations.

Russia said its priority Is to promote and defend human rights, including multilaterally in the Human Rights Council.

Russias ambassador in Geneva, Gennady Gatilov, called the U.S. action unfounded and purely emotional bravado that looks good on camera -- just how the U.S. likes it.

Washington exploits the Ukrainian crisis for its own benefit in an attempt either to exclude or suspend Russia from international organizations, Gatilov said, in comments relayed by a Russian diplomatic mission spokesman.

Russia and the other four veto-wielding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council  Britain, China, France, and the United States  all currently have seats on the Human Rights Council, which the U.S. rejoined this year.

The only country to have its membership rights stripped at the council was Libya in 2011, when upheaval in the North African country brought down longtime leader Moammar Gadhafi, said council spokesman Rolando Gomez.

No permanent member of the Security Council has ever had its membership revoked from any U.N. body.
Teachers and students at Jasper ISD will be changing up their schedules for the 2022-23 school year, opting for a four-day week as part of a larger effort to lower costs and improve the well-being of educators.

First reported by the Houston Chronicle, polls conducted by the district found 64 percent of parents and staff in favor of moving to a four-day schedule and 84 percent of educators approving of the reform.

Jasper ISD Superintendent John Seybold told the Chronicle that the district's shift to an abbreviated week will not necessitate lengthening the overall school year. In 2016 Texas passed House Bill 2610, which struck down previous language from Texas laws requiring districts to provide at least 180 days of instruction. Under the new law, educators are required to provide "a minimum of 75,600 minutes" per school year, instead of the previous day-based mandate.

This distinction allows districts a measure of flexibility in creating schedules, and Jasper will not be the first in Texas to experiment with alternative school week layouts since the change.

In 2016 Olfen ISD became the first Texas school district to approve a four-day schedule. The small district near San Angelo shifted to a four-day week that reserved Fridays as an optional day, allowing students with passing grades the choice to stay home or come in for enrichment activities such as karate or pottery sculpting. The move led to Olfen's small student population increasing from 60 to over 130 students in the following years and made the system more attractive to students in larger districts, according to officials.

"The only ones not happy about this is the eighth-graders who are moving on next year," said Olfen ISD Superintendent Gabriel Zamora at the time of the change. "I know this is going to be good for our school, for the community and surrounding areas."

In 2019 Dime Box ISD in Central Texas opted to institute a four-day school week, carving out Mondays as a "flex day" for students and staff. Parents lacking childcare options are allowed to send their children to school on Monday, but the district only requires attendance Tuesday through Friday. Dime Box teacher Candi Becker said she was initially concerned about the change, but the truncated week actually sharpened the focus of students during class.

"The students realized early on that school time is business time," Becker told a reporter for the Association of Texas Professional Educators. "You have to get down to business while you're here."

Jasper ISD's shift to a four-day schedule is accompanied by monetary incentives approved by the Board of Trustees for teachers and staff. Teachers will receive three payments totaling $3,000 while other staff will receive $1,500 infusions the district hopes will keep the district staffed and competitive amid a growing national teacher shortage.

"Retaining as well as recruiting quality teachers is very important," Seybold told the Chronicle. "The Jasper ISD Board of Trustees is working hard for the entire staff of the district."
For at least two days, a brown fox has eluded officials and nipped at politicos at the United States Capitol building in Washington, D.C.  and has become the talk of the town.

A fox was finally captured by animal control Tuesday afternoon, Capitol Police said in a tweet  but not before counting a Northern California congressman as one of its victims. Rep. Ami Bera, who represents portions of Sacramento County, says he was bit by the wily mammal Monday while walking to his office, according to Axios and Punchbowl News managing editor Heather Caygle.
WFO LOS ANGELES Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Friday, April 8, 2022

_____

HEAT ADVISORY

URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE

National Weather Service Los Angeles/Oxnard CA

1223 PM PDT Wed Apr 6 2022

...HEAT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 PM PDT FRIDAY...

...WIND ADVISORY IS CANCELLED...

* WHAT...Temperatures up to 95 expected.

* WHERE...Ventura County Beaches and Malibu Coast.

* WHEN...Until 6 PM PDT Friday. Hottest temperatures expected

Thursday or Friday.

* IMPACTS...Hot temperatures may cause heat illnesses to occur.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out

of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors. Young

children and pets should never be left unattended in vehicles

under any circumstances.

Take extra precautions if you work or spend time outside. When

possible reschedule strenuous activities to early morning or

evening. Know the signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat

stroke. Wear lightweight and loose fitting clothing when

possible. To reduce risk during outdoor work, the Occupational

Safety and Health Administration recommends scheduling frequent

rest breaks in shaded or air conditioned environments. Anyone

overcome by heat should be moved to a cool and shaded location.

Heat stroke is an emergency! Call 9 1 1.

* WHAT...Temperatures up to 97 expected.

* WHERE...Ventura County Inland Coast. Hottest temperatures expected

* WHEN...Until 6 PM PDT Friday.

* WHAT...Temperatures up to 102 expected.

* WHERE...Los Angeles County San Fernando Valley and Santa

Monica Mountains.

* IMPACTS...Gusty winds will blow around unsecured objects and

make driving difficult, especially for high profile vehicles.

Tree limbs could be blown down and a few power outages may

result. Hot temperatures may cause heat illnesses to occur.

...WIND ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 3 PM PDT THURSDAY...

* WHAT...For the Wind Advisory, north winds 15 to 25 mph with

gusts up to 40 mph. For the Heat Advisory, temperatures up to

97 expected.

* WHERE...Santa Clarita Valley.

* WHEN...Through 6 PM PDT Friday. Hottest temperatures expected

Use extra caution when driving, especially if operating a high

profile vehicle. Secure outdoor objects.

* WHAT...For the Wind Advisory, northeast winds 15 to 25 mph with

gusts up to 40 mph expected. For the Heat Advisory,

temperatures up to 98 expected.

* WHERE...Central Ventura County Valleys and Southeastern

Ventura County Valleys.

* WHEN...For the Wind Advisory, until 3 PM PDT Thursday. For the

Heat Advisory, through 6 PM PDT Friday. Hottest temperatures

expected Thursday or Friday.

* WHAT...Temperatures up to 91 expected.

* WHERE...Santa Barbara County Southeastern Coast and Santa

Barbara County Southwestern Coast.

* WHAT...Temperatures up to 92 expected.

* WHERE...Santa Ynez Mountains Western Range.

* WHAT...Northeast winds 20 to 30 mph with gusts up to 50 mph.

* WHERE...Ventura County Mountains and Los Angeles County

Mountains.

* WHEN...Until 3 PM PDT Thursday.

result.

_____

Copyright 2022 AccuWeather
ZZ Top pulled into the Thunder Bay Community Auditorium Wednesday evening for a rocking performance. The band has been together for over five decades and sold over 30 million records across 15 studio albums. The loss of long-time bassist Dusty Hill in 2021 did not stop the band as his spot o
Several European countries expelled more than 73 Russian diplomats following the release of horrendous images of the alleged Russian army's mass killings of civilians in Ukraine.

Greece has announced on Wednesday its removal of 12 members of the diplomatic and consular missions of the Russian Federation.

According to the Greek Foreign Ministry, the Russian diplomats were declared "as personae non-gratae," and the Russian Ambassador in the country was informed about the decision, CNN reported.

On Tuesday, Portugal, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Estonia, Denmark, and Latvia all declared that Russian diplomats and personnel would be expelled from their respective countries.

Spain's foreign minister, Jose Manuel Albares, announced that his country was removing roughly 25 Russian diplomats and embassy workers who pose "a threat" to the country's "interests and security."

Security Threat

Italy's Foreign Minister, Luigi Di Maio, announced in a statement early on Tuesday that his government had ordered the expulsion of 30 Russian envoys for national security reasons, according to The Guardian.

The Italian official explained that the decision is "in agreement with other European and Atlantic partners," which is "necessary" in connection to national security. He added that the measure is "in the context of the current crisis caused by the unjustified aggression against Ukraine on the part of the Russian Federation."

Sweden has also declared the expulsion of three Russian diplomats due to spying per Foreign Minister Ann Linde.

Meanwhile, Denmark Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod said that the country has expelled 15 Russian "intelligence officers" disguised as diplomats who have been proven to have conducted "spying on Danish soil."

The Danish government has also expressed its condemnation of "Russia's brutality" against civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha" and called the attacks "a war crime."

However, Denmark clarified that it "does not wish to break diplomatic relations" with Russia. Kofod said that the Russian ambassador and the rest of the embassy in Copenhagen are not included in the "expulsion."

Russia's ambassador to Denmark was informed of the decision on Tuesday morning, where the government also expressed its denunciation of "Russia's brutality" against civilians in Bucha."

"Deliberate attacks against civilians are a war crime," it said.

On the same day, Latvia and Estonia ordered the closure of two Russian consulates and advised their staff to leave their respective countries. The personnel's number was not cited.

The Latvian Foreign Ministry said that the action was made in support of Ukraine in its battle against Russia's "unprovoked and unjustified" military strikes, according to a report from Al Jazeera.

According to the ministries' statements, the consulates in Latvian towns Daugavpils and Liepaja, as well as Tartu and Narva towns in Estonia, will be closed starting April 30.

The developments on Wednesday came following a slew of actions against Russian diplomats in Europe and the United States.

France dismissed 35 Russian diplomats on Monday, while Germany ordered the expulsion of a substantial number of Russian envoys.

Read Also: Putin's Daughters Included in EU Sanctions List Amid Plans To Ban Investment That Would Benefit Russia

Russia Blasts The Removal of Envoys

Following the pullout of Russian forces in the Kyiv region, horrific photographs of corpses lying in the streets of Bucha, northwest of Kyiv, some with their hands chained behind them, drew international criticism, and the EU is mulling extra measures.

Moscow has denied responsibility, claiming that the photographs are fabricated or that the killings occurred after Russian soldiers withdrew from the region.

On Tuesday, the Kremlin said that the decision of the European countries to remove Russian diplomats would only make communication more complicated.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a journalist that "narrowing down" means for diplomatic communication in an unprecedented crisis is a "short-sighted move that will further complicate our communication" that is necessary for resolving the war in Ukraine.

"And this will inevitably lead to retaliatory steps," he said.

Related Article: Emmanuel Macron Will Mold the European Union Into a Stronger Bloc If He Wins the Election

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Wilkes Barre, PA (18701)

Today

Cloudy with periods of rain. Low 49F. Winds ENE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall near a half an inch..

Tonight

Cloudy with periods of rain. Low 49F. Winds ENE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall near a half an inch.
Germany's Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) recently announced it took down the German server infrastructure for the Russian darknet marketplace, Hydra.

The organization's announcement also mentioned that it was able to seize a large amount of Bitcoin attributed to the darknet marketplace during the operation.

The Hydra darknet market is allegedly one of if not the world's largest illegal darknet marketplaces, with around 17 million customers and over 19,000 registered seller accounts.

BKA Hydra Takedown Details

According to Wired's report, the BKA was able to seize Hydra's German server infrastructure through a joint operation with the United States' FBI, DEA, IRS Criminal Investigations, and Homeland Security Investigations. During the operation, the BKA was able to confiscate around $25.2 million worth of Bitcoin.

Bleeping Computer reported that the BKA cannott share any information on the evaluation of the seized infrastructure due to the ongoing investigations.

The BKA announcement also revealed that it "extensively investigated" Hydra since August 2021, along with several U.S. authorities.

Read More: Google Pixel 6's Latest Update Fixes Camera and Charging Issues

German authorities suspect that the Russian-language darknet marketplace is a criminal trading platform that grants an opportunity for the unauthorized purchase or unauthorized sale of narcotics and commercial money laundering. The marketplace is a hub for stolen credit card information, counterfeit bills, fake documents, and other illegal goods and services.

The Verge mentioned in its report that the Hydra darknet marketplace primarily caters to Russian criminals and similar individuals from surrounding nations. Dealers connected to Hydra called "treasuremen" push drugs throughout the region using geo-tagged pickup locations to hide packages.

According to Flashpoint, cybercriminals could also purchase cryptocurrency from other sellers for Russian rubles and receive their cash through payment apps like YooMoney and Tinkoff. Other cybercriminals can also receive their money through the marketplace's "treasuremen" in the same procedure they use for drug pushing.

The BKA and the Central Office for Combatting Cybercrime said Hydra has an estimated turnover rate of around $1.35 million in 2020 alone, which gave the darknet marketplace the highest turnover rate out of any illegal market in the world.

Germany and the US' Follow Through Operations

The successful takedown operation led German authorities to launch an investigation into the "unknown operators and administrators" of Hydra, which are suspected of selling narcotics and money laundering. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets announced it sanctioned Hydra for its proliferation of malicious cybercrime services, dangerous drugs, and other illegal offerings.

Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen said that the U.S. is concerned with the global threat posed by cybercrime and ransomware originating in Russia and the ability of criminal leaders to operate with impunity. She also added that the department's actions send a message to criminals that "[they] cannot hide in Russia or anywhere else in the world."

"In coordination with allies and partners, like Germany and Estonia, we will continue to disrupt these networks," Secretary Yellen said.

Related Article: Russia is Considering Legalizing Software Piracy  Is It a Response to the West's Sanctions?
Consultant national pentru elaborarea conceptului unui program guvernamental de stagii pentru tinerii din diaspora - studenti sau absolventi ai institutiilor universitare de peste hotarele tarii
Emmanuel Hoog was hoping to secure a fresh term as the head of Agence France-Presse last Wednesday. Then he received an unwelcome phone call. Hoog, whod served as AFPs chairman and CEO since 2010, was about to go up against challenger Fabrice Fries in a board of directors vote when the French government calledhours before the vote was scheduled to take placeto say it wouldnt be supporting him. Hoog quickly stepped aside.

While the French state only controls three of the 18 seats on AFPs board, its all but impossible for a CEO to operate without its confidence. AFP may be the third-biggest news agency in the world (after Reuters and AP)with operations in multiple languages and 151 countriesbut it gets up to about 40 percent of its funding from its home government. In recent years, the sustainability of that funding has been called into question. Observers say the French state wants AFP to stand on its own feet, and that Hoog failed to advance its agenda fast enough. Its pick to run the agency is, therefore, a political one.

ICYMI: A journalist left her house, got into her car and left for the bank. Three minutes later, she was dead.

AFP staffers called for the vote to be abandoned and rerun with two or more candidates at a later date, thus ensuring a choice between different visions of AFPs future. But the board decided to let Fries, who has spent most of his career in the private sector, go forward unopposed. During his confirmation vote the day after Hoogs withdrawal, staffers temporarily stopped working in protestdropping their coverage of a televised interview with French President Emmanuel Macron as a result.

On Monday, the drama continued. Three AFP directorswho serve on the board as independent expertsaddressed an open letter to the French Minister of Culture, criticizing the last-minute jettisoning of Hoog. The election wasnt done in a good way, because in the end there was only one candidate put forward, one of the signatories, economist Julia Cage, tells CJR. We considered it our duty to denounce what happened.so that in future theres a change in the way the agency is governed.

The letters signatories stressed that their gripe was procedural, not a personal affront to Fries. And even though the board of directors contains representatives of employees, public broadcasters, and regional and national press, its not unusual for the French state to flex its muscles when it comes to selecting a CEO for the agency. Its rejection of Hoog last week may have lacked class, but it was really just a case of swings and roundabouts: According to Le Monde, Hoog himself was only pulled into contention through government support prior to taking the job in 2010.

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His ouster nonetheless compounds a moment of uncertainty for AFP. Under old statutes guaranteeing its independence from both public and private sector interference, it has operated in a gray areanot exactly a state agency, nor quite a private company. But changes in recent years have opened it to more commercial imperatives. The European Union handed down a competition ruling in 2014 allowing AFP to keep its public funding, at least for the time being. But that ruling also effectively compelled the French state to reevaluate the legal basis for its contribution to the agency, and the funding might have to be scrapped down the line.

Its a bit awkward at a company like AFPwhich is a big French media house in a complex environment and with tough challenges in front of itthat were being forced to vote for one guy, says Francois Moriniere, a businessman and board member who also signed the open letter. I dont think thats the right way to nominate someone or to elect a CEO. Its not good for him, its not good for us, its not good for the people at the company, for journalists.Its a signal that We, the state, decide at the last minute, and you just have to follow us.

Although editorial firewalls mean the state cant touch AFPs news output, the CEO sets the direction of the company as a whole, giving the position wide-ranging power at times of strategic reevaluation. Hoog aggressively pushed a pivot to video in recent years, and had asked the state for close to 60 million to invest (at least in part) in repositioning AFP output before he stepped aside. Fries wont necessarily depart sharply from that strategyaccording to Moriniere and others, his plans arent set in stone. But Fries promised to lead a leaner, more commercially savvy operation in his proposal to the board and, controversially, left the door open to private funding for the agency.

Its not good for him, its not good for us, its not good for people at the company, for journalists.

Responding to a request for comment, an AFP official says that while the agency needs to invest in its development one or way another, any injection of outside capital would have to guarantee AFPs editorial independencepointing out that this independence isnt just part of the companys DNA, but a major source of its value in a muddied media landscape. Fries, for his part, has said opening up AFP to private funding is not an immediate priority for him. (The French Culture Ministry, Fries, and Hoog did not provide comment by time of publication.)

But Friess stated future openness to the strategy has spooked unions that represent AFP staffers, which only just concluded a contentious long-term renegotiation of pay and conditions with management. Union reps, as well as media observers, say that by pushing out Hoog in favor of Fries, the French government has shown that, at the very least, it supports Friess vision of a trimmer, more profit-oriented agency.

AFP hasnt always proved adept at making moneyit lost nearly 5 million last year after a court ordered it to honor years worth of unpaid staff salary increases. [AFP] often has deficits that arent enormous but that do make things difficult, says Patrick Eveno, a French media expert and academic. And because media companies have less and less money to pay news agencies, subscriptions have gone down.

ICYMI: The unknown former FBI official who deserves journalists support

Its quest to turn things around comes against the backdrop of energetic public sector reform in France, as President Macron tries to open state-backed properties, like the French lottery, to private investors. Theres been no suggestion thus far that Macrons administration has plans to restructure AFP in this wayand in any case, existing statutes dont allow for privatization. I think the government and Emmanuel Macron do want to change the direction of AFP, says Eveno. But at the same time, the government has very little power over AFP.

That said, lawmakers could try to change that legal underpinning. And the 2014 EU judgment continues to be an elephant in the room, casting doubt over AFPs long-term access to state funding. In the next seven years, how do we replace that 40 percent of our budget with private funding? asks Richard Lein, a union rep who works on AFPs English language desk.

Its not yet clear, even to officials, how Fries will reform AFP, how hell manage a potential budgetary shortfall, and what the states response will be to his leadership. But the way the HoogFries selection process was handled has only amped-up that uncertaintyraising at least a specter of worrisome government intentions, and leaving a bad taste in the mouths of some employees and board members.

Whatever Fries does next, Lein and others say privatization is not the path he should pursue. Its the complete antithesis of AFPs public interest mission, Lein says. It would be an abandonment of everything the statute stands for.

ICYMI: Dont tell a reporter you have Spanx in a bag if you dont want them to report that you have Spanx in a bag

Update: This post has been updated to clarify that in Fabrice Friess proposal to the AFP board, he did not specifically talk about opening the door to a potential privatization, but rather to capitalisation , or the introduction of private funding.

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and The Nation, among other outlets. He writes CJRs newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.
On a dreary February afternoon last year, at a courthouse in Erbil, in Iraqs Kurdistan Region, a three-judge panel sentenced five journalists and activists to six years in prison. It was widely perceived as retaliation against those who had supported and reported on anti-government protests in 2020.

Outside the courthouse, the severity of the sentences sank in. Those gathered to hear the verdict comforted one another. The families of the defendants cried as they spoke to reporters from local outlets, who were processing their own potential jeopardy in a changed landscape.

We didnt believe that the court would be so bold as to issue such an unjust and oppressive punishment, said Niyaz Abdulla, a veteran journalist with a long history of criticizing the Kurdistan Regions two ruling partiesthe Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)for corruption, human rights violations, and political and economic mismanagement.

The trial confirmed that the deterioration of press freedoms in the region was accelerating. Although we expect all kinds of oppression, Abdulla said, we still didnt expect it to that degree.

As she absorbed the news, Abdulla recalled her own experience a year earlier fighting a lawsuit filed against her by a powerful member of the KDP under a law of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) commonly referred to as Law 6.

The statute was originally passed as a way to combat online harassment. Instead, powerful figures increasingly employ Law 6 as a part of a legal tool kit to silence critics and intimidate journalists into self-censorship. The court ultimately acquitted Abdulla for lack of evidence, but not until she had to endure a time-consuming, costly, and public ordeal that turned her life upside down.

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Currently, Abdulla said, the Kurdistan Region is a kind of hell for journalists.

In the Kurdistan Region, mass media developed under the tight control of both the former Baathist regime and the Kurdish parties fighting against it. But there was a brief flowering of independent journalism in the 2000s, embodied in publications like Awene and Hawlati. Threatened by this, the KDP and PUK began to establish well-funded TV stations and websites to promote their own narratives; today, most outlets are directly affiliated with political parties or even specific politicians.

Journalists who refused to be coopted have been pressured, arrested, and attacked. Four journalists have been killed in connection with their work in Kurdish-controlled areas of Iraq since 2008, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Press freedom is in complete retreat, said Diyaree Mohamed, the executive director of local watchdog the Metro Center for Journalists Rights and Advocacy. She noted that last year, there were 353 reported violations against 260 journalists in the Regionor nearly one violation every day, which include beatings by the security forces, arbitrary arrests, media outlet closures, equipment seizures, retributive lawsuits, and preventing reporters from covering a story. There were 385 violations in 2020 and 231 in 2019.

Press freedom in the Kurdistan Region is getting worse and worse, Sabrina Bennoui, the head of the Middle East desk for Reporters Without Borders, said. At the end of 2020, the Committee to Protect Journalists took the extraordinary step of writing to the KRGs leadership, calling on it to live up to promises to respect press freedom.

Of the three journalists currently imprisoned in Iraq, all are in the Kurdistan Region, and all have been prosecuted under a national security law that allows for twenty-five years in jail. A fourth was released in February, after a year and a half in jail in part due to a conviction under Law 6.

Democracy is currently in withdrawal, and the state of journalism is also withdrawing to a high degree, said Speaker of the Kurdistan Parliament Rewaz Fayaq.

Not everyone agreed about the severity of the situation. KDP lawmaker Peshawa Hawrami acknowledged that violations happen, but argued that compared with Iraq and the Middle East, in Kurdistan, press freedom is in a very good state.

For members of the media, however, the overwhelming feeling is that there is no rule of law, said Hemin Mamand, a journalist who has been prosecuted several times under Law 6. Political parties and tribes make decisions and the rights of journalists are not protected, especially those who are independent.

Social media and mobile communications came relatively late to the Kurdistan Region, but by the late 2000s many Kurds were avid Facebook users. Lawmakers in the Kurdistan Parliament felt it was important to tackle the growing problem of online harassment. Womens groups in particular supported passing legislation because women and girls were facing torrents of abuse online, which they argued contributed to gender-based violence in the Region. The result was Law 6 (formally known as the Law to Prevent the Misuse of Telecommunications Equipment in the Kurdistan Region), which passed unanimously in 2008.

Article 2, a section of Law 6, criminalizes the misuse of a mobile phone, telecommunication or communication devices, internet, or digital post to threaten or insult another person, spread fabricated news that provokes terror, publish photos without permission, or take any other action that might violate the integrity or honor of another, incite a crime, or disclose personal information even if its true.

Those convicted of violating the law can be imprisoned for up to five years and fined between one million and five million Iraqi dinars (between $685 and $3,425). But Speaker Fayaq said that Law 6 has nothing to do with press work, near or far. Instead, there is a consensus that, if journalists are going to be charged, it should be under the KRGs Press Law, which results in a fine, at most, rather than jail time.

Article 2 leaves open this whole area where you could be prosecuted for political speech, said Megan Connelly, an attorney and independent researcher. You would think this would be a concern, but it doesnt seem to be something that was controversial at the time.

The main goal of the law was to protect individuals from harassment, from defamation over social media, online, or on websites, journalist Asos Hardi said. At least ideologically, it was not a tool for limiting freedom of expression.

Even Abdulla, who would later be prosecuted under Law 6, saw it as a great achievement when it first passed, because it was important for there to be a law that can punish people who threaten women for social issues, especially at that time, when smartphones were increasing in Kurdistan.

No one I spoke with could say for sure when the first journalist was prosecuted under Law 6there is extremely poor access to legal records about individual cases in the Kurdistan Regionnor are there precise statistics of how many journalists have been prosecuted under the law. But there is general agreement that it has become a problem for members of the press in the past five years.

And the attacks are coming from everywhere. Individuals, lawmakers, party organs, the KRG prime ministers office, and government ministries and departments have all filed cases against journalists under Law 6.

Judge Abdulkarim Haidar Ali insisted that many members of the judiciary are good and independent but had a wrong understanding of Law 6. Nevertheless, he conceded that political pressure was exerted on judges who owed their own appointments to political parties.

Using the law to prosecute journalists itself is illegal, Hardi said. It is part of misusing the judiciary system against freedom of speech.

And while it is clear that Law 6 is being weaponized against journalists in the Kurdistan Region, it is an open question whether the legislation has been effective in its intended purpose of preventing online harassment. All those interviewed agreed that the law had not eliminated the phenomenon by any means and that women and girls in particular continue to be targets for abuse.

Niyaz Abdulla and Hemin Mamand are two of the more high-profile journalists to be prosecuted under Law 6. At the mercy of an arbitrary justice system that is beholden to those in power, their lives and careers were upended, forcing them to flee their homes in Erbil, the regions capital.

On July 17, 2019, two gunmen shot dead Turkish diplomat Osman Kose as he finished lunch at a bistro in an expensive enclave of Erbil favored by local elites and expats. Two bystanders were also killed. Mateen Barzani, a member of the most powerful family in the KDP and the nephew of the president of the Kurdistan Region, was sitting at a nearby table during the shooting.

The incident dominated local media for days and received international coverage. It was highly embarrassing for the government and shook the carefully constructed image of the Kurdistan Region as the Other Iraqsafer and more prosperous than its neighbors, with Erbil aiming to be the next Dubai.

At the time, Abdulla was working at a radio station and serving on an advisory board for a local outlet, Draw Media. In their article published in the immediate aftermath of the killing, reporters for Draw highlighted Barzanis presence and cited some senior sources in Erbil alleging his possible involvement, with the caveat that they could not confirm the sources information and a note that an investigation was under way. Hours later, Barzani confirmed in a Facebook post that he was present at the time of the murders but said it was a complete coincidence and vowed to sue anyone who implied anything else. Abdulla herself was not directly involved in reporting out or writing the article.

In October, she found outfrom friends, rather than the courtthat Barzani had filed a lawsuit against her. After consulting with lawyers, she learned that the charges were filed under Law 6, alleging that she had participated in writing the article and defamed the president.

Subsequently, she appeared in court and was formally arrested. Her lawyers asked the judge to drop the charges, since she had not been involved in the story. My case should have been closed in that phase, but the investigator told me, Niyaz, Im sorry, we cannot close it because you know who this person is, she said, referring to Barzani. She was released on five million Iraqi dinars ($3,450) bail but was told that she could be rearrested at any time the court or the police decided.

Abdulla was acquitted for lack of evidence on March 1, 2020. She has since left Erbil for her own safety after receiving numerous threats that she be killed or sexually assaulted. Even now, she continues to receive threats by phone and over social media. The danger always continues, she said. They never give up.

Barzani also sued Mamand for a piece the journalist wrote about the Erbil shooting for Mawda Press. He was arrested around the same time as Abdulla, held for a week, and released on eight million Iraqi dinars ($5,520) bail.

Before that lawsuit could be resolved, Mamand was rearrested on March 24, 2020, after criticizing the KRG prime minister in a Facebook post for failing to provide aid to low-income residents during the regions initial covid-19 lockdown. He was held in pretrial detention on Law 6 charges after the prime ministers office, the KRG Health Ministry, and the office of the general prosecutor each filed lawsuits.

Mamand remained in jail until April 5, when he was released on five million Iraqi dinars bail. On Facebook he criticized the police for his treatment while in detention and was arrested in a raid two days later. During his time in detention, he was denied access to his lawyer. Finally released on April 28 on six million Iraqi dinars ($4,110) bail, he decided to leave Erbil and moved to Sulaymaniyah for his protection. In November 2021, a court in Erbil sentenced him to two years in prison in absentia in relation to the lawsuit filed by Mateen Barzani in October 2019.

That conviction and the other pending lawsuits against him hang over his life, preventing him from traveling and separating him from his elderly mother, who still lives in Erbil. Nevertheless, he says, he remains determined: I still continue and will until I die. I will not compromise. I will continue on the path I chose until my last breath.

Kazhan Mahmood contributed interpretation and translations to this article.

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Winthrop Rodgers is a journalist based in Sulaymaniyah, focusing on politics, economics, and human rights. Currently Project Manager at Metrography, Iraq's first photojournalism agency, he was previously Senior Editor at NRT English.
Last week, CBS News announced that Mick Mulvaney, who led the Office of Management and Budget and served as acting chief of staff under President Trump, had joined its ranks as an on-air contributor. For his first appearance in that capacity, he was invited onto a MoneyWatch segment to, as the CBS News Twitter account put it, break down President Bidens plan for a wealth tax on the super-rich. Anne-Marie Green, the anchor, introduced Mulvaney as a former OMB director without specifying whose OMB he directed, calling him the guy to ask about this before getting him to explain how Bidens proposal might work, the obstacles it might face, and whether the regular, working-class American should care. Its easy to look at it and say, Dont worry, youre not going to pay this, Mulvaney said. There is that issue, though, of how theyre going to prove that they dont have to pay it. That could be troublesome: every single year proving that youre not worth a hundred million dollars.

Media critics were soon up in arms about Mulvaneys appearance and CBSs broader decision to hire himone of the most egregious violations of media ethics Ive ever witnessed; one can only assume that the CBS newsroom leadership has suffered a mass amnesia event; Cronkite weptoften pointing to his complicity in Trumps attempted extortion of Ukraine (which looks even worse now than it did at the time), the time he called covid a media hoax, and his prediction that, should Trump lose the 2020 election, he would concede gracefully. According to the Washington Posts Jeremy Barr, CBS staffers were variously embarrassed and baffled by the hire given Mulvaneys sparing history with the truth; one employee told the Hollywood Reporters Alex Weprin that while insiders were not as angry as the outside observers, Mulvaneys ties to Trump should at least have been disclosed during the wealth-tax segment. Per Barr, the CBS standards department subsequently reminded staff to always identify a guests relevant background and biographical information, including which administration they served. (Its not clear if Mulvaneys current lobbying commitments should count, too, but CBSs announcement of his hiring certainly didnt mention them.) The text accompanying the online version of the wealth-tax segment still doesnt link Mulvaney to Trump.

New from CJR: A kind of hell for journalists

The most eye-catching quote in Barrs story actually predated the Mulvaney announcement, with Neeraj Khemlani, the co-head of CBS News, reported to have told staff, in a meeting last month, that when it comes to contributor hires, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority, because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms. Theres nothing out of the ordinary in former politicians taking cushy gigs as TV talking headssome even land their own showsor political reporting turning on access to powerful people, as tedious as the former, and compromising as the latter, can be. As the Posts Margaret Sullivan has argued, however, Khemlanis rationale was unusually explicit in its cynicism. The question arises here: Access to what? Sullivan asked. To those who will spout the big lie about the 2020 election? To those who will excuse and arrange for corrupt behavior? She then pointed to the larger issue with Khemlanis words: the news medias blind and relentless pandering to the outdated notion that both sides of the aisle are pretty much equal.

If the merits of access journalism are highly debatable, the both sides impulse, to my mind, is a more urgent problem. It has proved remarkably persistentimpervious, even, to mounting evidence to the contraryand it can take many forms. Sullivan is right that Khemlanis stated rationale was overtly cynical: the political reality is that the Republicans will probably soon control Congress; we need access to them; lets hire Mick Mulvaney. But a similar impulse often finds expression in sunnier waysnot least the media practice of relentlessly waxing nostalgic for the bygone days of bipartisanship in Washington, rooted less in cold calculations about the balance of political power than the belief that bipartisanship is a good thing, a proxy for unity, consensus, and the healing of painful divisions. This framing was rampant in much early coverage of the Biden administration and it hasnt gone away, even as Bidens pledge to restore legislative cooperationnever fully, or even primarily, in his grasphas clearly proved DOA. (The Sunday shows have continued to be one particularly prolific vector of such thinking. This past weekend, CNNs Dana Bash ended a blue-versus-red panel debate on immigration policy with a reminder that there was a time when people worked together on this issue.)

Perhaps because Im British, Ive always found the idea of bipartisanship as an end in itself to be bizarresure, the US political system is less adversarial than that of the UK, and so bipartisanship is more often necessary to get stuff done, but that doesnt make the stuff that is being done good, or the stuff that doesnt inspire consensus bad. Every country has its political myths. The more immediate problem is the apparent refusal of many in political media to recognize that, even on its own terms, the prospect of meaningful bipartisanship is pretty much dead and that the Republican side of the aisle bears disproportionate responsibility for this, before we even get into GOP attacks on the fabric of the democratic system itself. Lots of journalistsan increasing number, I would sayrecognize and have articulated this state of affairs. Too many, though, still seem to lament it as something that just kinda happened, or for which both sides are equally responsible, while watching with hawk eyes for signs of a truce.

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The Supreme Court confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, which could be finalized as soon as tomorrow, is a case in point. Throughout the process, major news organizations have expended a thoroughly disproportionate amount of energy on the question of whether any Republican senators might support Jackson (in the end, three will do so), even though Democratic and Republican votes count the same and Democrats dont need the latter to get her on the court. The support of Susan Collins does not strike me as warranting a headline or push notification much more than that, say, of her fellow Maine senator, Angus King; in fact, neither warrants centering, since Jacksons record and credentials, and the historic nature of her nomination, are what matter here. (As MSNBCs Ayman Mohyeldin, who also took issue with the push notifications, has pointed out, describing Jacksons confirmation as bipartisan, while technically now accurate, also risks implying much broader Republican support than she will actually get.)

There is a real debate to be had here, about the value and ongoing tenability of the idea that senators should vote for qualified Supreme Court nominees regardless of the party of the president who appoints them; this tradition has clearly slipped in recent years, and both sides have been complicit, if thats the right word, in its erosion. Again, however, describing this state of affairs as something that just kinda happened or for which both sides are equally responsible is an oversimplification at best, and a distortion at worst. Our job, ultimately, should always be to cover the arguments around individual confirmation fights on their meritsand on this occasion, the most prominent right-wing arguments against Jackson have been strikingly meritless, not least the ridiculous, QAnon-adjacent smear that she is soft on pedophilia. This reflects a dangerous radicalization more than the regrettable death of a bipartisan tradition. The former is the story. The latter is mostly just hand-wringing.

If Khemlanis apparent reasoning for hiring Mulvaney comes across as cynical, the notion that bipartisanship is goodwhich springs from similar principles, even if its a different argumentreads as idealistic, sometimes to the point of naivete: less Heres the way the cookie crumbles, more Why cant we all just get along? To the extent that focusing on bipartisanship is actually useful, however, its as a function of real-world political power dynamics. More broadly, cynicism and idealism, while contrary-seeming, are hard to disentangle here. In our present political reality, clinging to a both sides ideal is only really tenable if you can somehow downplay, or at least rationalize, the deep and disproportionate cynicism of those on one side of the aisle.

Thats not to say that we shouldnt scrutinize or challenge that cynicism; indeed, we should do so relentlessly, especially where its logical endpoint is most dangerous. But wishcasting is not scrutiny. Nor is handing a prominent cynic a contributor contract, then presenting them as an expert without disclosing their ties to the Cynic in Chief.

Below, more on bipartisanship and Capitol Hill:

King and the Hill: According to Barr, of the Post, Gayle King, a senior anchor on CBS, responded to Khemlanis comment about hiring more Republican contributors by noting that John Thune, the Republican senator for South Dakota, had appeared on her show that morning and that shed told him, We like Republicans. We like rational Republicans here, Senator Thune. Per Barr, Khemlani then said he would love for the network to book House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy [R-Calif.] as a guest, and King agreed.

According to Barr, of the Post, Gayle King, a senior anchor on CBS, responded to Khemlanis comment about hiring more Republican contributors by noting that John Thune, the Republican senator for South Dakota, had appeared on her show that morning and that shed told him, We like Republicans. We like rational Republicans here, Senator Thune. Per Barr, Khemlani then said he would love for the network to book House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy [R-Calif.] as a guest, and King agreed. A different perspective: Jack Shafer, Politicos media columnist, had a different take on the Mulvaney hiring. Granted, Mick Mulvaney is no Tim Russert. For one thing, his powers of prognostication suck, Shafer wrote, but his critics seem to be confusing the mans employment with a lifetime achievement award. While I wouldnt hire Mulvaney to fish the moldy leaves out of my eaves, if the co-president of CBS News thinks a man of such low repute will help him capture some scoops, well, thats journalism.

Jack Shafer, Politicos media columnist, had a different take on the Mulvaney hiring. Granted, Mick Mulvaney is no Tim Russert. For one thing, his powers of prognostication suck, Shafer wrote, but his critics seem to be confusing the mans employment with a lifetime achievement award. While I wouldnt hire Mulvaney to fish the moldy leaves out of my eaves, if the co-president of CBS News thinks a man of such low repute will help him capture some scoops, well, thats journalism. A media-made match: Per Politicos Marianne LeVine and Burgess Everett, Bidens selection of Doug Jones, the former Democratic senator for Alabama, to steer Jackson through the confirmation process as her sherpa came about after a reporter emailed Jones to ask whether the White House had approached him about the role. I did not respond, Jones said. But I did send it off to my contacts at the White House. And the next thing I know, theyre calling me back saying: If youre interested, were interested.

Per Politicos Marianne LeVine and Burgess Everett, Bidens selection of Doug Jones, the former Democratic senator for Alabama, to steer Jackson through the confirmation process as her sherpa came about after a reporter emailed Jones to ask whether the White House had approached him about the role. I did not respond, Jones said. But I did send it off to my contacts at the White House. And the next thing I know, theyre calling me back saying: If youre interested, were interested. The threat to democracy: Yesterday, Nick Quested, a filmmaker whose crew captured a meeting between far-right extremists the day before the insurrection, testified for hours before the House committee investigating the attack, which had a broad set of questions for him. Quested has also been subpoenaed by the Justice Department; according to Politicos Kyle Cheney, he was initially treated like a co-conspirator of the Proud Boys, though he says he doesnt feel pressure from DOJ like he did at the outset.



Other notable stories:

ICYMI: How Putins war overshadowed a week of crucial elections in Europe

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and The Nation, among other outlets. He writes CJRs newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.
A solar storm will sweep across the Earth Wednesday night, raising prospects of dazzling Northern Lights visible as far south as Chicago while prompting airlines and electric-grid operators to step up monitoring of the potentially damaging geomagnetic activity.

Solar eruptionscalled coronal mass ejectionsburst from the sun in two waves Monday and are building up enough energy to potentially become a level 3 geomagnetic storm when it hits, according to Rob Steenburgh, a space scientist with the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center.

SpaceX Satellites Falling Out of Orbit After Being Hit by Solar Storm How to Prepare for the Next Black-Swan Event? Lloyds Has Some Suggestions.

Solar storms, like hurricanes, are ranked on a five-step scale, with one being the weakest and five the strongest. Researchers wont exactly know this storms strength until it reaches a monitoring satellite about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth, at that point the waves will be about 90 minutes away, and the forecast could be updated.

A G3 storm can trigger false alarms for protection devices in power grids, create drag on low-orbiting satellites and disrupt high-frequency radio traffic. In early February, Space X lost 40 Starlink satellites when they were launched into a geomagnetic storm. Airlines will have to monitor radiation levels, which could cause them to re-route polar routes. The storms could also interfere with birds, which sometimes causes havoc for pigeon racing, Steenburgh said.

Electric grids, for the most part, wont get jazzed up about a G3, he said.

The sun goes through a 22-year cycle where it produces a lot of sunspotsthe source of many stormsand then very few. It is currently moving toward the peak of its cycle. The sunspot region that caused the coming storms is actually shifting to the back of the sun now. But another area currently not visible did spark a large blast into space in the last day that was directed away from Earth.

There is more activity working its way around, Steenburgh said. We are keeping an eye on things  this is one of many to come.

Photograph: An M8.7 solar flare erupts from the sun accompanied by a large coronal mass ejection. Photo credit: NOAA.

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.
A federal jurys $14 million award to Denver protesters hit with pepper balls and a bag filled with lead during 2020 demonstrations over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis could resonate nationwide as courts weigh more than two dozen similar lawsuits.

The jury found police used excessive force against protesters, violating their constitutional rights, and ordered the city of Denver to pay 12 who sued.

Nationwide, there are at least 29 pending lawsuits challenging law enforcement use of force during the 2020 protests, according to a search of the University of Michigans Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse.

The verdict in Denver could give cities an incentive to settle similar cases rather than risk going to trial and losing, said Michael J. Steinberg, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and director of the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative. It could also prompt more protesters to sue over their treatment at the hands of police.

Jury Awards $14M in Damages to Colorado Protesters

Theres no doubt that the large jury verdict in Denver will influence the outcome of pending police misconduct cases brought by Black Lives Matter protesters across the country, said Steinberg, whose law students have been working on a similar lawsuit brought by protesters in Detroit.

Lawyers for the claimants argued that police used indiscriminate force against the nonviolent protesters, including some who were filming the demonstrations, because officers did not like their message critical of law enforcement.

To the protest of police violence they responded with brutality, one of their attorneys, Timothy Macdonald, told jurors.

People who took part in the protests have already made similar allegations in lawsuits filed across the country.

In Washington, D.C., activists and civil liberties groups sued over the forcible removal of protesters before then-President Donald Trump walked to a church near the White House for a photo op. The claims against federal officials were dismissed last year but a judge allowed the case against local police to continue.

Several lawsuits alleging protesters were wrongfully arrested or that police used excessive force have been filed against New York City and its police department, including one brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James that claims police used excessive force and wrongfully arrested protesters. In Rochester, New York, people who protested the death of Daniel Prude, a Black man who lost consciousness after being pinned to the street by officers during a mental health call in 2020, claim police used extreme force against them in a lawsuit that also alleges city officials have allowed a culture of police brutality against racial minorities to fester.

One of their attorneys, Donald Thompson, said he plans to raise the Denver award in settlement talks with the city and note that unlike most of the Denver protesters, some of his clients suffered lasting injuries including the loss of an eye and scarring from being hit in the face with a tear gas canister. Thompson also thinks the Denver verdict shows that the public, in the age of cellphone and body camera videos, is not as willing to give police the benefit of the doubt anymore.

Now people see how this policing really works. You cant be naive, he said.

A spokesperson for Rochester did not return a call and an email seeking comment. When the case was filed, the city said it had already revised the way police responds to protests.

Over the last two months, the city of Austin, Texas has agreed to pay a total of $13 million to four people who were hit in the head with bean bag rounds fired by police.

Even before the Denver ruling last week, the police department made some changes in response to criticism that arose from the protests, including eliminating the use of 40mm foam rounds for crowd control and changing the way officers are permitted to use pepper balls.

Denvers Department of Public Safety, which includes the police department, said in a statement that the city was not prepared for the level of sustained violence and destruction. During the trial, lawyers and witnesses said over 80 officers were injured as some in the crowds hurled rocks, water bottles and canned food at them.

The department said it continues to evaluate its policies to better protect peaceful protestors while addressing those who are only there to engage in violence.

Still, the large award is not expected to lead to an overhaul of how officers respond to what experts say are inherently chaotic situations that are difficult to prepare for.

Ed Obayashi, a use-of-force consultant to law enforcement agencies and a deputy sheriff and legal adviser in Plumas County, California, said society may have to bear the cost of such settlements because innocent people can be injured during protests as outnumbered police try to react on the fly, including to people intent on violence.

It really goes south in an instant because there are individuals out there who want to cause chaos, he said.

Obayashi said there is not much police training for protests, which have been relatively rare. He said it would be prohibitively expensive to have officers practice deploying equipment such as tear gas canisters. Because projectiles used in crowds and considered less lethal by police, such as rubber bullets and pepper balls, have less velocity and less power to hurt people, it is harder to ensure they hit their intended target, he said.

Lawyers representing people who have also alleged police misconduct and violation of their constitutional right to protest can now use the Denver damage award as part of their own settlement negotiations, said Mark Silverstein, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented some of the winning Denver protesters.

The decision came nearly two years after thousands of people angry about Floyds death took the streets nationwide, a relatively quick result for the legal system and soon enough for others who allege misconduct by police to file a claim. In Colorado and many other states, there is a two-year statute of limitations for such lawsuits Silverstein said, leaving only a few months for others to sue.

The city attorneys office said it has not decided whether to appeal the verdict, but appeals in such big cases are common, said Gloria Browne-Marshall, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Outside lawyers will also scrutinize the case to try to determine if there are unique circumstances that may have led to a lightning in a bottle verdict that is less likely to be repeated.

However, she thinks the verdict sends a significant message that regular people respect the right of protest and demand change from the government, which she believes police and prosecutors have been undermining.

It should send a message to both, but whether or not they listen is a different issue, Browne-Marshall said.

Top Photo: A placard with a portrait of George Floyd, who died while being detained by police in Minneapolis on Memorial Day, is held above demonstrators as they march down East Colfax Avenue after a rally calling for more oversight of the police Sunday, June 7, 2020, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Tuesday said it is opening a review to ensure all defective batteries produced by LG Energy Solution have been recalled by automakers.

The auto safety agency noted Mercedes-Benz MBGn.DE, Chrysler-parent Stellantis, General Motors and Hyundai Motor have issued recalls since 2020 due to internal failures in high-voltage vehicle batteries that pose fire risks.

NHTSA said the equipment query covers 138,324 vehicles and will communicate with LG and other companies that might have purchased the same or similar equipment from LG, notify them of this defect in any vehicles they manufactured, and to ensure thorough safety recalls are conducted where appropriate.

An LG Energy Solution spokesperson in a statement said the company understands the request by NHTSA is a follow-up procedure, adding, LG Energy Solution will fully cooperate with the inquiry.

Among recalls cited by the agency were GMs recalls of its Chevrolet Bolt EV that prompted it to halt sales and production of new models in August.

In October, LG Chem Ltd 051910.KS, which owns LG Energy Solution, said it would take a charge of 620 billion won ($510 million) in its third-quarter results in connection with the GM Bolt recall.

NHTSA noted in February that Stellantis recalled 16,741 2017-2018 Pacifica Plug-In Hybrid Electric vehicles after the automaker said hybrid battery packs produced by LG were involved in 12 reports of vehicle fires.

The automaker said it has not yet determined whether the battery packs were defective or the root cause of the fires.

NHTSA also cited a March 16 Volkswagen recall of 351 ID4 vehicles from the 2021 model year over batteries that may contain insufficient soldering points and potentially unreliable connections inside the high voltage battery. VW said vehicles may break down while driving, potentially leading to a crash
NORTH MIAMI BEACH, Fla. (AP)  Residents of a five-story apartment building in North Miami Beach have been ordered to evacuate after officials deemed the building structurally unsound during its 50-year recertification process, officials said.

The residents were ordered out Monday by city officials. Its the second building ordered evacuated in the city since the collapse of Champlain Towers South last June in nearby Surfside, which killed 98 people.

In an April 1 report, engineer Brownie P. Taurinski wrote that the building must be evacuated immediately, the Miami Herald reported.

The building, which has 60 units, had been undergoing repairs since July as part of the recertification process, the city said in a statement released Monday.

City Manager Arthur Duke Sorey told the Herald he just learned of the engineers report Monday because officials received it in their emails after working hours Friday and did not see it over the weekend.

I was told while I was walking my dog that we had to be evacuated from the building, resident Sebastian Rojas told WSVN.

He and his family have lived in the building for about 25 years.

Its astonishing, you know. This is where I grew up, having to take all of your stuff. You have to figure out whats important to you, whats not, Rojas told the television station.

They said, `Grab anything light and get out of here, resident Clara Ulffe told WPLG.

City officials said residents would be able to return later this week to gather more belongings.

Many residents told news outlets they were notified by phone and given little notice to leave. They were allowed to enter the building through 11 p.m. Monday, showing IDs to get inside.

They were given three-day hotel vouchers to help in the immediate future and the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust and the American Red Cross will help with housing if they have difficulty finding accommodations, Mayor Anthony Defillipo said.

Shortly after the Surfside collapse, North Miami Beach officials ordered the evacuation of the 10-story Crestview Towers Condominium. Residents of that building have not yet been allowed back. That building is about 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the collapsed Surfside site.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
The U.S. Department of Justice confiscates crypto worth $34 million tied to operations in illegal dark web activities.

A cryptocurrency forfeiture action filed by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida resulted in the successful seizure of approximately $34 million in cryptocurrency linked to illegal Dark Web activity

This operation makes it one of the largest cryptocurrency confiscations ever in the United States.

Stolen Cryptocurrency

Following the filing of a civil forfeiture complaint with the United States Department of Justice, law enforcement agents singled out a "South Florida resident" using the Dark Web to sell illegal items and hacked accounts for millions of dollars.

The police department also acquired a number of cryptocurrency wallets believed to be linked to illegal Dark Web activity on the internet.

As part of an investigation, it was discovered that the South Florida resident used so-called Cryptocurrency tumblers. A tumbler is service users utilize in mixing cryptocurrency transactions. Tumbler mixes multiple cryptocurrency transactions into a single transaction.

The tumbler then distributes the cryptocurrency to a designated cryptocurrency wallet at random times and in random increments, according to a predetermined algorithm.

The goal is to conceal the identity of the original source of funds. This is usually used for privacy and also money laundering.

This strategy is also known as chain hopping and is deemed under U.S. laws as a violation of federal money laundering statutes.

The Department of Justice did not name the "South Florida resident" who was involved in the sales, and the press release did not state whether the agency intends to file an indictment against him.

Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces

An investigation by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF), which included federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, resulted in the successful operation and seized the stolen cryptocurrency. This operation is part of Operation TORnado.

According to CNET,the OCDETF operation was formed to address transnational organized crime. In addition, the OCDETF program's primary mission is to identify, disrupt, and dismantle the highest-level drug traffickers, money launderers, and other priority transnational criminal organizations that pose a threat to the citizens of the United States.

Furthermore, OCDETF focuses its partner agencies on priority targets, manages and coordinates multi-agency efforts, and leverages intelligence across multiple investigative platforms, it is able to facilitate complex joint operations.

The charged individual involved in this crime was allegedly using TOR to access dark web marketplaces. This information got into the police authorities and called the operation The Onion Router, or TOR.

Read Also: Twitter Confirms Addition of Edit Button - Is Elon Musk Responsible?

US Authorities on Dark Web

The U.S. authorities are seizing operations with crimes involving the Dark Web. As recently reported by CNBC,

Germany's authorities, working in collaboration with American law enforcement, seized and shut down Hydra Market. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Hydra Market was considered to be the world's largest and oldest darknet marketplace for illegal goods and services.

The DOJ stated that an alleged Hydra Market operator is now being charged by the DOJ with conspiracy to distribute narcotics and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Aside from that, the DOJ added that the German Federal Criminal Police seized cryptocurrency wallets from the market that contained $25 million in bitcoin.

Related Articles: Crypto Rug Pulls: The Biggest NFT Scams Yet
Block's Cash App experienced a massive data breach affecting more than 8 million of its users last year in December.

Block confirms that the data breach involves a former employee of the company who downloaded reports from Cash App containing some U.S. customer information.

Cash App is a peer-to-peer payment app owned by Block, previously known as Square.

Block's Cash App Breach

Block's Cash App breach became public on April 4 due to the company's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The filing stated that the hacking of the former employee occurred on December 10.

As reported by TechCrunch, the SEC filing states, "While this employee had regular access to these reports as part of their past job responsibilities, in this instance these reports were accessed without permission after their employment ended."

The data hacked on Cash App users varies differently. The breached data includes users' full names, brokerage account numbers, brokerage portfolio value, brokerage portfolio holdings, and stock trading activity for one trading day.

In addition, Block stated that the information accessed by the threat actor is only personal identification data, like names, and no other type of information was hacked beyond that.

Block clarified that the usernames or passwords, Social Security numbers, payment card information, or addresses of Cash App users were not affected.

The Cash App data breach also does not affect customers residing outside of the United States.

The U.S. SEC filing states: "The reports did not include usernames or passwords, Social Security numbers, date of birth, payment card information, addresses, bank account information, or any other personally identifiable information. They also did not include any security code, access code, or password used to access Cash App accounts. Other Cash App products and features (other than stock activity) and customers outside of the United States were not impacted."

Read Also: Twitter Confirms Addition of Edit Button  Is Elon Musk Responsible?

Block Investigates Cash App Breach

Block and Cash App is now under scrutiny as people are wondering how a previous employee still has access to the Cash App database even after the person was no longer in the company at the time of the hacking. However, Block did not comment further on the incident.

Block, Cash App, and the SEC filing did not say how many users were affected by the data breach. Although Cash App stated it will be contacting approximately 8.2 million current and former customers about the incident.

Along with its discovery of the breach, which took place four months after it occurred, the company has launched an internal investigation and has informed the appropriate regulatory authorities and law enforcement agencies of the situation. It also intends to send out an email to all 8.2 million customers who were affected by the data breach.

According to a statement provided to TechCrunch and CNET, Danika Owsley, Cash App spokesperson said: "At Cash App we value customer trust and are committed to the security of customers' information...Upon discovery, we took steps to remediate this issue and launched an investigation with the help of a leading forensics firm. We know how these reports were accessed, and we have notified law enforcement. In addition, we continue to review and strengthen administrative and technical safeguards to protect information."

Related Article: US Gets a Win Against Dark Web Crimes, Confiscates $34M Worth of Stolen Crypto From South Florida Hacker
Following the poor performance of his Truth Social app, former President Donald Trump may join the conservative social media platform Gettr, The Washington Post reported.

According to Reuters, Trump's social media platform, which he launched in February to compete with Twitter and Facebook, has been such a disaster that two of its top executives have resigned.

Trump Reportedly Mulls Joining Gettr

After Trump's supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, he and many of his subordinates were banned from every major social media site, prompting right-wing personalities like former Trump spokesman Jason Miller to launch alternative platforms that they claimed were censor-free, Forbes reported.

Miller stated in October 2021 that he was unable to reach an agreement with the former president on the creation of a social media site. The two subsequently parted ways, with Miller heading up Gettr and Trump unveiling his venture with the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG).

The platform will be completely functioning in the U.S. by the end of March, according to CEO Devin Nunes, a former congressman who left Washington to operate the app. However, according to RollingStone, this did not happen because the app has been plagued by technical issues since its launch in February.

Read Also: Plex Solves Problem of Having Too Many Different Streaming Apps

Truth Social is only the 28th most popular social network on Apple's App Store, and it is not yet available for Android.

It was reported that Truth Social has just over 500,000 daily active users, compared to Twitter's 215 million. It's the 355th most popular app on Apple devices right now.

According to The Washington Post, Trump has "privately fumed" about Truth Social's failure to garner a large audience since its launch, citing an anonymous source familiar with the situation.

"The former president is also considering joining Gettr," the source noted.

Trump made his first post on the Truth Social in February, shortly after it was launched.

Time for some Truth!!! pic.twitter.com/jvyteDb5gW  Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 15, 2022

Since then, he failed to post anything.

The Washington Post's source said that Trump has been avoiding posting on Truth Social because he does not believe the app is "ready for prime time."

Two Key Tech Executives Quit Truth Social

The company's chief of technology and chief of product development, Josh Adams and Billy Boozer, respectively, are the two executives who are leaving after less than a year. According to eight sources who spoke with Reuters, both were crucial aspects of the operation.

According to two sources familiar with the company, the departure of two executives critical to the app launch preparations might jeopardize the company's development as it strives to prove it can compete with mainstream platforms like Twitter.

One of the sources said, "If Josh has left ... all bets are off," calling Adam the "brains" behind the app's technology.

Reuters said that it is unclear whether Adams and Boozer are still involved in the company in some form after leaving their leadership positions. It also could not determine the particular reason surrounding the executives' resignations, as well as whether they have been replaced or their responsibilities changed.

Related Article: Truth Social App: Where and How to Download Donald Trump's Social Media App
Intel recently announced that it had suspended its business operations in Russia, becoming the latest western tech firm to leave the country.

The chipmaker also added that it is working to support everyone affected by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, including its 1,200 employees in Russia.

"Our thoughts are with everyone who has been impacted by this war, including the people of Ukraine and the surrounding countries and all those around the world with family, friends, and loved ones in the region," Intel said in its previous statement.

Intel's Business Operations Suspension Details

Intel said in this announcement on April 5 that the suspension of its business operations in Russia was immediately effective.

According to the chipmaker, the suspension of business operations in the country is its way to continually join the global community in condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It also joins the calling for a swift return to peace in the region.

Intel previously announced in its earlier condemnation of Russia's actions against Ukraine earlier in March that it had suspended all of its shipments to customers in Russia and the landlocked country of Belarus.

Belarus was criticized by the White House in early March for "enabling Putin's invasion of Ukraine." NPR.org said in its article that the country served as a staging ground for Russian troops in the months before the invasion occurred.

Read More: 'Short-Ass Movies' Catergory Now on Netflix Thanks to Pete Davidson's SNL Dig

Intel is currently working to get all of its employees through the recent developments, especially those with close ties to the region. It previously launched an employee donation and matching campaign through the Intel Foundation, which had already raised over $1.2 million for relief efforts back then.

"We will continue to stand with the people of Ukraine and the global community for an immediate end to this war and a swift return to peace," Intel said in its previous announcement.

The company also announced it had implemented business continuity measures to minimize the disruption to its global operations.

Tech Firms Leaving Russia

Intel is not the only western tech firm that recently left the country as part of their condemnation of Putin's "special military operation." Nikkei Asia reported that IBM has also taken the same steps Intel did, with the company suspending its shipments to the country.

The suspension of IBM's shipments and businesses in Russia can be a heavy blow to Russia's IT infrastructure due to the country's companies and government agencies' reliance on technology developed by the West as the basis for its IT systems.

IBM, Dell Technologies, and HP top the market in Russia in the IT system market, per Reuters.

Other tech firms like Apple, AMD, and Adobe have either halted product sales in Russia or have outright pulled out of the country during the early days of Russia's conflict with Ukraine, per Tech Crunch.

Bleeping Computer also reported that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co has also joined other tech firms in suspending sales and shipments to Russia.

Related Article: Intel Unveils 'The World's Fatest Desktop Processor'  What are Its Specs?
China's PC monitor shipments to drop slightly in 2022: report

Xinhua) 08:51, April 06, 2022

BEIJING, April 5 (Xinhua) -- China's shipments of personal computer (PC) monitors are forecast to edge down 1.4 percent this year, lower than the 3.6 percent worldwide drop in 2022, data from an industry report showed.

The country is expected to ship no more than 32 million PC monitors in 2022, said the report released by global market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC).

Last year, China shipped 32.31 million PC monitors, up 9.7 percent year on year, the highest growth in the past decade, said the report.

The market lacks growth momentum after the demand for PC monitors reached a peak last year, said the IDC, adding that contracting purchases from government and the education sector also posed increasing challenges to the PC monitor market.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
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Jang Ho-joon, left, vice president at SC Bank Korea's retail banking group, poses with Hyundai Card CEO Kim Deok-hwan after signing a strategic partnership agreement in Seoul, Tuesday. Courtesy of SC Bank Korea



By Lee Min-hyung



Standard Chartered (SC) Bank Korea has teamed up with Hyundai Card to jointly develop premium financial products.



Under the strategic partnership, both companies will launch a credit card sometime in the latter half of 2022, which they said allows customers to enjoy special promotional benefits from SC and Hyundai Card.



The two companies also said they would keep launching a diverse set of financial products in wider areas, such as loans and investments.



Given that the two financial firms have strong premium brand identities, they reached a consensus in developing more high-end financial products. SC has expertise in wealth management, with the bank having a global network in around 60 countries. Hyundai Card, a leading player in Korea's VIP card market, has also pushed for premium strategies by launching a series of special credit cards featuring symbolic colors.



The two companies also agreed to expand their business ties not just in retail sectors, but also in research and development. They underscored that the latest partnership is aimed at mapping out a broader set of joint business strategies. Toward that end, they will share their know-how on data management and set up joint strategies for future business models.



"The latest partnership is meaningful in that the two financial firms holding expertise in different business areas have laid a foundation for co-developing innovative and differentiated products," Jang Ho-joon, vice president at SC Bank Korea's retail banking group, said.



Hyundai Card also said it would continue to enhance its ties with SC for more business synergy down the road.



"Both companies will be collaborating with each other by taking advantage of their data science capabilities and business competitiveness," Hyundai Card CEO Kim Deok-hwan said.



"We will also help customers enjoy more convenient experiences through the business synergy from both companies," he added.


The headquarters of K bank located in central Seoul / Courtesy of K bank



By Anna J. Park



K bank, which marks its fifth anniversary this month, has achieved steady growth, garnering over 7.5 million customers as of the end of March. The internet-only bank's solid growth rate is impressive, particularly during the past two years, which contrasts with the tough time it had during the first few years when it was first established in April of 2017.



Since the bank resumed providing loan products in July 2020, its customers and the size of its capital have increased exponentially. In 2021 alone, the bank drew nearly five million new customers. That means the bank added one new customer every six seconds. The partnership with UpBit, the country's largest cryptocurrency exchange, is seen as playing a significant role in the bank's growth during the past couple of years.




Nepal PM pays obeisance to Varanasi shrines during his India visit

Nepalese Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba was welcomed by UP CM Yogi Adityanath during his visit to Varanasi.

This is Deubas first bilateral visit abroad after becoming Prime Minister in July last year for a fifth time following a spell of political turmoil in Kathmandu. Photo courtesy: Twitter/@PM_nepal

Deuba, who came to India along with his wife Arzu Rana Deuba, visited several Varanasi shrines.

After his arrival, Deuba offered prayers at Kaal Bhairav temple in Varanasi. CM Yogi Adityanath was also present. Deuba is expected to visit the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor, a key developmental project inaugurated by the Uttar Pradesh government last year, which connects the Kashi Vishwanath temple and the ghats along the river Ganga, the Hindustan Times reported.

Sher Bahadur Deuba also visited the Samrajyeshwar Pashupati Nath Temple, known as the Nepali temple. CM Yogi accompanied him during this visit as well.

Tight security arrangements were made in the city for the Nepalese PM's visit. Hoardings with pictures of Sher Bahadur Deuba and Yogi Adityanath were also seen at the main intersections of Varanasi ahead of the visit.

Deuba met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and held delegation-level talks at Hyderabad House in New Delhi. The two leaders jointly launched multiple projects which are likely to boost connectivity between the two countries while they expressed hope that the key initiatives being taken by them would take India-Nepal relations to new heights.

This is Deubas first bilateral visit abroad after becoming Prime Minister in July last year for a fifth time following a spell of political turmoil in Kathmandu.

Read more India News here
The Korea Times reporter Ko Dong-hwan, right, who writes for the politics and city desk, receives an award at the annual Korean Association of Newspapers Award at Press Center in downtown Seoul, Wednesday. The award recognized 54 winners from different local news outlets nationwide who helped their companies contribute to improving the country's journalism industry. The award was held a day before the National Newspaper Day. Courtesy of Korean Association of Newspapers
65%

Website gotest.pk uses latest and advanced technologies like: JQuery and Boostrap. It is very popular on the web, it's within the 1 million most visited websites of the world at position 26706 by Alexa. It supports HTTPS and GZIP compression. The main html page has a size of 56487 bytes (55.16 kb uncompressed) and 10701 bytes (10.45 kb compressed).

This CoolSocial report was updated on 2022-04-06, you can refresh this analysis whenever you want.
Zccup.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 11 May 2013, you can refresh this analysis whenever you want.

This is the sum of two values: the total number of people who shared the zccup homepage on Twitter + the total number of zccup followers (if zccup has a Twitter account). The total number of people who shared the zccup homepage on StumbleUpon. The total number of people who shared the zccup homepage on Delicious. This is the sum of two values: the total number of people who shared, liked or recommended the zccup homepage on Facebook + the total number of page likes (if zccup has a Facebook fan page). The total number of people who shared the zccup homepage on Google Plus by a google +1 button.

Basic Information

PAGE TITLE IT |  DESCRIPTION ITITIT KEYWORDS , , win7, win8, , , ,  OTHER KEYWORDS win7, win8, excel, mac, office, iphone, winxp



The keywords meta-tag found in the head section of the homepage. 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. 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 Chinese (Simplified, China) UTF-8Chinese (Simplified, China) DETECTED LANGUAGE SERVER nginx/0.8.49 (PHP/5.2.9) OPERATIVE SYSTEM

Represents HTML declared type (e.g.: XHTML 1.1, HTML 4.0, the new HTML 5.0) Operative System running on the server. Character set and language of the site. The language of zccup.com as detected by CoolSocial algorithms. Type of server and offered services.

Site Traffic trend during the last year. Only available for sites ranked <= 100000 in the world.

Referring domains for zccup.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

The URL of the found Facebook page. 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 type of Facebook page. The total number of people who like website Facebook page. Facebook Timeline is the new layout of Facebook pages. A Facebook page link can be found in the homepage or in the robots.txt file.

Twitter account link

TWITTER PAGE LINK NOT FOUND
Kim Byeong-uk, the president of the North Korea Development Institute, talks about the dictionaries of financial and real estate terminologies for North Korean defectors in this photo taken in December 2021. The financial terms dictionary was published in September 2021 and the real estate terms dictionary was published in February this year. Courtesy of Kim Byeong-uk



Kim comes up with dictionaries to prepare for inter-Korean unification



By Yi Whan-woo



A lack of financial literacy _ the ability to understand basic financial principles and skills such as personal financial management, budgeting, and investing _ is a challenge faced by North Korean defectors who settle in South Korea.



Even South Korea, the world's 10th largest economy, lags behind when it comes to financial literacy, which means it is that much harder for the defectors to become familiar with the concepts of capitalism.



Only 33 percent of South Korean adults were financially literate, ranking the country 81st out of 142 in a Standard & Poor's Global Financial Literacy Survey.



This is how Kim Byeong-uk, the president of the North Korea Development Institute, came up with two dictionaries since last year _ one on financial terms and another on real estate terminology _ that explain relevant terms in South Korea to the defectors and compare the differences in the usage of words across the Demilitarized Zone.





Front cover of the "Dictionary of South-North Financial Terms" published by the North Korea Development Institute / Courtesy of Kim Byeong-uk





Front cover of the "Dictionary of Real Estate Terms South and North Koreans Should Know" published by the North Korea Development Institute / Courtesy of Kim Byeong-uk



The dictionaries are the first two works of the institute's so-called "53 project" of publishing dictionaries covering 53 major academic disciplines categorized by the government and academia here.



The project is intended to narrow the language gap between the two Koreas to prepare for unification down the road.



The 53 subjects range from computer science, history, music, philosophy and politics to religion.



The fact that the project prioritized finance and real estate implicitly shows the urgent nature of the language gap felt by the defectors concerning the two areas, according to Kim.



"The frustration and struggle of the defectors regarding financial literacy can be too much for them to bear considering they come from a country where the economy is completely the opposite to that of South Korea," Kim told The Korea Times in a recent telephone interview.



"The dictionaries are intended to help them overcome difficulties stemming from ideological and economic gaps and better adapt to South Korean society," he added.





Kim Byeong-uk, fifth from left, the president of the North Korea Development Institute, is joined by financial experts during a discussion about the "Dictionary of Real Estate Terms South and North Koreans Should Know" in this photo taken in January this year. Courtesy of Kim Byeong-uk
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But how did Davis end up befriending people we imagine would sooner shank him than shake his hand? It all began at a bar, which makes perfect sense, since this is the sort of odd coupling that seems possible only when your BAC gets you confused with a jug of moonshine.

Back in the early '80s, Davis, a traveling musician, decided to share his craft with the patrons of an all-white country-western bar. After his performance, a guy approached him to say he was impressed that a black man could play the piano as well as Jerry Lee Lewis. Davis proceeded to blow the man's mind by letting him know that not only did Lewis learn to play rock 'n' roll by imitating black people (like, you know, everyone else) but he was a personal friend. The man, in turn, surprised Davis by mentioning he was a Ku Klux Klan member.

Daryl Davis

Then they recorded a rap album together, judging by this photo.

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Somehow the two logical adversaries hit it off, and Davis never forgot the night he won over a racist man with his magic fingers. Nearly eight years later, the musician tracked down his barroom buddy hoping to gain insights from Klansmen for a book he was writing. Through his pal, Davis arranged meetings with other KKK members, sometimes without letting them know he was black at first -- some turned violent and attacked him, but others became so comfortable with the open-minded musician that they let him attend their Klan meetings. Here's a video of a KKK Imperial Wizard proclaiming his respect for Davis during a rally (he drops an N-word while doing it, but hey, it's something):
The song brings up a good point; movies are getting crazy-long these days. The Batman was a whopping three hours, and Bruce Wayne never had to go to the bathroom once. Its true that we could really use more cinematic brevity in the world, which is probably why the song has been so popular.

Not one to ever squander the possibility of attention, Netflix responded to the sketch by adding a Short-Ass Movies category on their service, which has generated a lot of publicity. But Netflix  already had this category?

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Sure, it didnt have the word ass in the name, thus rendering it inherently inferior, but they have a Movies under 90 minutes section. Seemingly, they just rebranded their existing feature as something new  its basically the streaming equivalent of offering Malibu Stacey but with a new hat.

Also, the worst part is: its not very good. Netflixs Short-Ass Movies are just a hodge-podge of wildly different, mostly not-great films like Peter Rabbit 2, Anaconda, and the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot in which Leatherface takes on cancel culture. There are some gems like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but its missing most of the classics mentioned in the song like Eraserhead, The Lion King, and The Evil Dead  not to mention all the Ernest movies that were shouted out by Simon Rex. Maybe youd be better off just watching that VHS copy of Amadeus in two sittings.

You (yes, you) should follow JM on Twitter!

Top Image: NBC Universal
The Bank of Korea / Yonhap



By Yoon Ja-young



The Bank of Korea (BOK) was once known as "god's workplace," attracting some of Korea's smartest young people with high salaries and job security. However, the BOK's younger employees seem to be increasingly deserting their once-coveted jobs, as the central bank is failing to meet their expectations, while working conditions, compensation and company culture are all improving in the private sector.



According to data on the central bank submitted to Rep. Kim Soo-heung of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, 311 employees quit their jobs at the BOK before reaching the legal retirement age between 2012 and 2021. The current legal retirement age is 60.



This means that around 30 BOK employees are quitting their jobs each year  or 1 percent of all employees  but the figure has been rising rapidly. According to media report, seven employees quit the BOK in January, followed by six in February this year.



Also notable is the fact that young people are quitting. Among the 311 who quit during the past decade, 135 were in their 20s or 30s.



"Previously, most of those who quit were aiming to get degrees. Recently, young people in particular are switching to jobs in the private sector, such as in fintech, private equity funds and asset management," an official at the central bank said.



A major factor behind the move is workers' dissatisfaction with their compensation. BOK employees were paid 107 million won ($87,848) on average last year. Their salary rose by a mere 0.9 percent last year, following a raise of 0.7 percent the previous year, as the finance ministry restricts steep pay raises.



These figures contrast with those of the private sector, where salaries have been rising sharply. The average salary at four securities companies  BNK, Bookook, Hanyang and Meritz  surpassed 200 million won last year. Male employees in charge of sales, fund management and research at these brokerages were paid 467 million won on average. Central bank workers who boast top qualifications might thus think they are not compensated enough. Some also point out that the BOK's conservative, bureaucratic and inflexible office culture, as found in a 2021 McKinsey survey of 1,300 central bank employees, doesn't suit the needs of the young generation.



The resulting brain drain has been causing serious concern, as the competence of the central bank is required for Korea's economy to be stable.


If you are like me, you follow world events and news such as Okta being breached by a group of teenagers to see if you need to change your defenses. This may not be a time to roll out new technologies or major changes to your network, as this will introduce other types of risk. Instead, consider taking these steps in response to current events.

Block traffic selectively

Blocking traffic from Russia and Belarus may help you limit noise from your log files, and if you run a customer-facing website, from trolls and spam comments, but blocking their location will not slow a dedicated attacker. They will merely hop on another VPN and come in from another location. If you do want to reduce traffic, review your business needs and limit to those countries and locations that you do business with.

Review how you use multi-factor authentication

The Okta breach made some of us rethink how multi-factor authentication (MFA) is implemented. We tend to roll out push-style MFA to make it easy on the users, but often this lures users into approving prompts without thinking about what is happening. Consider the risks of the users and for what they use MFA.

Microsoft is urging folks to move away from prompt-based two-factor authentication to matching an item. Already rolled out to their consumer-based Microsoft account MFA, the company is now using a prompt of a number to match.

Keep communications on threats relevant to users and leadership

Sending too much communication to staff and management about what should or should not be done is just noise. The sky is not falling, and that noise will only encourage people to tune out the important messages. Send communications only when it is relevant to your firm and can be actionable to your end users.

You still need to keep senior leadership informed about what is going on and perhaps what you are seeing in your log files. Use fact sheets on news items and security events, and prepare briefs to show where you have taken action, where you are researching actions to take, and what resources you might need to maintain or complete a goal.

Find appropriate information and technical resources

Find resources regarding how attacks occurred and determine if your firm has the necessary resources to protect itself. For example, recent events in Ukraine used ransomware and disk wiping software to do the most damage. Do you have the resources to restore or redeploy systems? Do you have resources to withstand DoS attacks?

Ensure that someone on your staff watches social media sites for information on attacks and methodologies. Twitter often has insight and information into events. Even if you dont tweet, you can set up an account watch what others say. Start with a recommended list of tweeters, and then look at who they follow and add them to your list. The SANS Internet Storm Center is also another excellent resource for information about incidents and events.

If you have a Microsofts 365 E5 license, you can review threats on the Threat Analytics website. The console provides actionable information regarding the attacks Microsoft is investigating. You can drill down in the console to review recommendations for mitigation and prevention.

Susan Bradley Threat Analytics console

You will often see recommended Attack Surface Reduction (ASR) rules to block and protect machines. You can often enable ASR rules without any major side effects, but its recommended to roll these rules after testing. I highly recommend that you start an analysis of the impact of such rules in your network.

Susan Bradley Threat Analytics recommended Attack Surface Reduction rules

To stay up to date on global threats, pay attention to government advisories. In particular, review two documents that were released as a result of potential Russian cyber activity: the White Houses Fact Sheet: Act Now to Protect Against Potential Cyberattacks and the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agencys (CISAs) Shields Up advisories. If you are part of a government network or critical infrastructure, the Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) for your industry will also have relevant information on recent threats.
Will your companys decision and position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine or their continued presence in the Russian market (or exit from this market) carry with it the prospect of retaliation? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. Decisions, even to decide to do nothing and straddle the fence, carry consequences. Even if the consequences are wrong-headed, unjust and unwarranted, individuals, governments and organizations will make their own interpretations.

Ive spoken to the disruption in supply chains, to threading the needle on exiting or not exiting the Russian market due to Russias invasion of Ukraine. In addition, the U.S. governments effort at outreach to ensure companies have the opportunity to digest and implement advisories being issued by CISA has reached a new level of both urgency and frequency.

Supply chains to and from Russia are disrupted by both the sanctions levied upon Russia as well as the decisions of airlines and sea freight companies to exit the Russian market. Some companies have opted to press on, while others have seen their brand banned from Russia and look-alikes pop up (as is the case with both McDonalds and Instagram).

Even within the criminal world there have been divisions. Individual criminals taking one side over another has resulted in internal rifts after hanging the internal laundry in the proverbial front yard.

For example, a Ukrainian researcher began publishing files from Conti, a Russian/East European syndicate of cybercriminals. The internal files from the organization include references to the criminal entity being associated with the Russian security apparatus, a claim previously made by the United States. His rationale? I cannot shoot anything, but I can fight with a keyboard and mouse.

While, Jeffrey Carr in his March 22 piece, D-day in Kyiv, discusses his efforts to assist the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine (GURMO) and the expansion of its capability to leverage open-source intelligence (OSINT). He went on to share how satellite provider ViaSat had been taken down via a cyberattack on the morning of February 24. Hours later, GURMO had begun its counterattack against Russian entities.

This is in line, though apparently unassociated with, previously discussed steps being taken by the Ukraine government to put together a cadre of information technology professionals to conduct offensive operations. Subsequently, the government of Ukraine noted that it now has over 3,000 participants and is targeting cyberattacks against entities in Russia (public and private). In late March, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense doxed over 600 Russian officers from within the Federal Security Service (FSB) on the Ukrainian MOD website.

Risk of cyber retaliation is real

There should be no doubt that there is a cyber domain to the conflict. More importantly, the potential for being directly affected is real.

Trellix, together with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), issued a report that highlighted how companies are outmatched by nation-states. This hypothesis makes sense given businesses are resource-constrained and governments are less so, and the results of their survey evidence such:

Access to consumer data was the motive for state-backed cyber incidents for 48% of respondents who believe they have been the victims of a state-backed incident.

Only 33% of organizations reported reaching out to their customers to disclose a cybersecurity incident.

Forty-six percent of respondents believe the personally identifiable information (PII) they hold from their customers is one of the main factors for which they would be targeted in a future cyberattack.

Forty-one percent of respondents believe the PII they hold from their employees is one of the main factors for which they would be targeted in a future cyber attack.

No surprise, the key players, are those identified in the most recent ODNI Annual Threat Assessment, Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

There is no letting up on the war of words.

Russia has taken a page right out of the playbook being used to get the word out on the state of affairs in Ukraine to the general public of Russia with mass SMS and robocalls. In the United States on March 28, Verizon subscribers began receiving SMS messages with embedded links which took the unsuspecting to a Russian media or website. Verizon, responding to The Verge, confirmed it is working to block the spam messages. While in this instance, the recipients were receiving SMS messages ostensibly from themselves, it doesnt take a rocket scientist to see the point of origin could have spoofed service providers, vendors, or businesses in an effort to discredit or otherwise negatively affect their ability to conduct commerce.

Employees as hacktivists a risk

Then we have the insider to think about.

I spoke recently with DTEX Systems senior vice president of engineering and cyber intelligence, Raj Koo, and the companys director of security and business intelligence, Armaan Mahbod, on how the Russian invasion has affected the risk quotient to companies from their insiders. The issue is no longer a hypothetical. Indeed, Koo notes, Weve seen an uptick where companys employees are generating a huge amount of risk  in particular when using corporate resources for hacktivism from within the corporate network.

Mahbod adds, DTEX has seen an uptick by individuals who are unhappy with their employers decisions and have acted. For example, doxing their boss for taking a position, which they disagreed.

CISOs key communicators to explain company decisions

CISOs are in a unique position of being able to communicate directly to the employee base and highlight the risks of external cyberattacks and misuse of company resources in a straightforward manner. Communication and awareness are key. Prudence tells us that explaining to the employee base why an unpopular decision was taken may well reduce the likelihood that an insider who may disagree with the decision will evolve into an insider with a malevolent bent.

On the other side of the coin, as evidenced by the cyberattack against ViaSat, those who are providing goods or services to NATO, European Commission and U.S. governmental entities may also find themselves receiving more than the usual amount of attention by Russian cyber entities. As detailed in the recent CISA Shield Up alerts, companies engaged in infrastructure are firmly within the targeting matrix of Russia.
As fears mount over the prospects of a cyberwar initiated by the Russian government, the number of identified Russian threat actors also continues to climb. Last week CrowdStrike publicly revealed a Russia-nexus state-sponsored actor that it tracks as Ember Bear.

CrowdStrike says that Ember Bear (also known as UAC-0056, Lorec53, Lorec Bear, Bleeding Bear, Saint Bear) is likely an intelligence-gathering adversary group that has operated against government and military organizations in eastern Europe since early 2021. The group seems motivated to weaponize the access and data obtained during their intrusions to support information operations (IO) aimed at creating public mistrust in targeted institutions and degrading government ability to counter Russian cyber operations, according to CrowdStrike intelligence.

Ember Bear is responsible for using the WhisperGate wiper malware against Ukrainian networks in January before Russia invaded Ukraine. The malware masquerades as ransomware but lacks a payment or data recovery mechanism, masking WhisperGates true intent, which is the destruction of data. The WhisperGate campaigns began with website defacements containing threatening messages in Ukrainian, Russian and Polish languages.

Despite its state-sponsored Russia nexus, Ember Bear differs from its better-known kin such as Fancy Bear or Voodoo Bear because CrowdStrike cant tie it to a specific Russian organization. Its target profile, assessed intent, and technical tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) are consistent with other Russian GRU cyber operations.

Praise for Bidens efforts in addressing Russian threats

Before a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on Russian cyber threats yesterday, Adam Meyers, senior vice president, intelligence at CrowdStrike, said that As Russia began to amass forces on the Ukrainian border, Russian cyber threat activity targeting the nation increased in kind.

As Meyers noted, a host of other attacks followed the WhisperGate wiping attacks, including DDoS attacks, which CrowdStrike attributes to Russias GRU, other wiper attacks, and destructive attacks targeting Ukraines satellite capabilities.

On top of these efforts, criminal groups chose sides in the conflict, and a range of hacktivist organizations entered the fray. Despite this activity level, Russia hasnt launched high-level cyberattacks thus far in the war. But, Meyers said, there are indications that Russia may become more aggressive in retaliation for foreign support to Ukraine and significant sanctions on Russian personnel and entities.

Speaking at the same hearing, Kevin M. Morley, manager, federal relations at the American Water Works Association (AWWA), said, Recent federal recommendations on how to mitigate Russian cyber threats have been invaluable to AWWAs members. The water sector has actively participated in multiple briefings provided by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that illuminate the evolving threat environment and help professional organizations, such as AWWA, build awareness among members. Working with sector partners, EPA reached out to 58,000 water systems collectively serving about 300 million Americans regarding cyber threat concerns at the end of December 2021. This led to several sector level briefings hosted by EPA to share information on Russian cyber threat activity. Morley said.

Steven Silberstein, CEO, Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, told the panel members his group applauds the Biden-Harris Administration and its various federal government components on the expeditious and early sharing of information throughout the escalating geopolitical situation in Eastern Europe and current Russian invasion of Ukraine. The sector appreciated the paradigm shift from reactive to proactive warnings forecasting Russian military action.

Finally, Amit Yoran, chairman and CEO of Tenable, also praised the administrations efforts to help companies deal with Russian cyber threats but said that For almost all organizations, cybersecurity risk management practices are the same regardless of whether the attack is coming from the Russians, other nation-states, cybercriminals or other bad actors.

The representatives certainly understood that there is something new happening vis-a-vis CISA and the JCDC [CISAs Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative], the public-private sharing and how important it is for the collective security of the United States, CrowdStrikes Meyers tells CSO.

Regarding Ember Bear and why CrowdStrike went public with what it knows about the group, Meyers says, We were looking at this adversary that had engaged in several attacks in Eastern Europe and wiper attacks in Ukraine, keeping it internal versus making it public. The calculus had changed, and we wanted to share that information so that others could track this group and understand how they operate and what their objectives are.

Russian escalation against the West now the big fear

As to why Russia hasnt engaged in damaging cyber activity, Meyers says, Widespread and destructive cyberattacks in Ukraine would have been counter to Russian efforts on information operations and psychological warfare against the people of Ukraine. They needed the systems to be up and running, the infrastructure to be up and running to be able to transpose the various messaging they wanted to get out into the Ukrainian media and public, whether that be for psychological purposes or to disrupt or create misinformation about how Ukrainian forces were reacting.

Given the shifting dynamics in Ukraine, At some point, that may become moot, Meyers says. They may decide they no longer wish to operate disinformation operations against Ukraine, and its more beneficial for them to operate disruptive operations that turn the lights out.

Ukraine very well might become the lesser of Russias digital battlegrounds. The big concern becomes escalation against the West. At some point, the calculus might be that its more beneficial to conduct a disruptive attack against the U.S. in order to affect some sort of political or ideological message.

In the meantime, at least one member of the panel plans to introduce further legislation that shores up the cybersecurity posture of satellite operators in the wake of Russias cyberattack against satellite provider Viasat. During the hearing, Representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) said that he will be introducing legislation shortly that will allow satellite operators to better protect themselves against cyberattacks.
President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol answers questions from reporters on his way to the presidential transition committee's office in Seoul, Tuesday. Joint Press Corps-Yonhap



Yoon's move is a step in the right direction: experts



By Lee Min-hyung



The incoming administration headed by President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol will seek to overhaul the country's highly controversial minimum wage policy in a bid to help small businesses reeling from the economic fallout of the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic.



The dispute is centered on revamping President Moon Jae-in's pro-labor wage policies by applying differential wage systems for each industry at a critical juncture where a growing number of the self-employed and small business owners are crying foul over a rising labor cost burden.



The country's hourly minimum wage came in at 6,470 won ($5.31) in 2017, the first year of Moon's presidency. But it soared by 16 percent the following year and has since been on a steep rise to 9,160 won in 2022, an increase of 41 percent compared to five years ago.



Yoon has expressed his idea of revising the system in a more realistic manner by adopting a differential system based on regions and industries.



"There should be discussion over the introduction of a forward-looking minimum wage system by differentiating wage policies for each region and type of business," Yoon had said while running for the presidency.



Starting Monday, the Minimum Wage Commission, a sub-organization under the Ministry of Employment and Labor, started an internal discussion on the minimum wage policy for next year. The commission will have to submit its decision to the labor minister by June 29. But due to the contentiousness of the issue, it typically takes more time for the commission to make a final decision on the annual agenda.



Prime Minister nominee Han Duck-soo also expressed his negative viewpoint on Moon's minimum wage policy.



"When the minimum wage rises steeply, companies will reduce employment, which will result in a lose-lose game for both sides," Han told reporters recently.



"The minimum wage should be decided by negotiations between labor and management, and the government needs to minimize its intervention and remain very careful before taking action on the issue."



The Moon administration has pushed for raising the minimum wage as part of its flagship income-led growth strategy.



But the much-touted policy ended up a de facto failure, driving the self-employed and small business owners into a corner and aggravating a series of employment-related indices. According to data from Statistics Korea, the number of temporary workers here has increased gradually during Moon's presidency. In 2017, the figure was at 6.57 million, but it has since risen to 8.06 million as of August 2021.



Given that the minimum wage hikes have added to the financial burden of the self-employed suffering amid the prolonged pandemic shock, the incoming administration is widely expected to scrap the botched economic drive adopted by the Moon administration.



Experts said Yoon's policy stance is a step in the right direction, as the income-led growth strategy turned out to be far from reality over the past five years.



"The differential minimum wage policy is more reasonable, as each industry player has a different ability to bear labor costs," said Sung Tae-yoon, an economics professor at Yonsei University.



"The purpose of the income-led growth policy is understandable, but the gap between reality and ideals has taken a huge economic toll on the self-employed and small business owners," Sung added.



Kim Dae-jong, a professor of business administration at Sejong University, advised the incoming administration to follow in the footsteps of major developed countries in its minimum wage policy.



"The global trend is to differentiate the minimum wage by region and age," he said. "Singapore does not even have a fixed minimum wage system. The minimum wage policy under the Moon administration has caused multiple side effects. Many social groups will benefit from a differentiated minimum wage policy."


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BRIDGEPORT  The citys law department has determined Fairfield University and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport do not need the zoning commissions approval to open a small, non-residential college on the latters property in the North End.

That will help propel forward the two institutions plan to offer a 2-year associates degree program to as many as 200 students from under-represented communities ... for whom a Fairfield education has not been accessible.

But the law departments conclusion, that because the dioceses headquarters at 238 Jewett Ave. once housed a high school it can again be used for educational purposes, strips foes of the college proposal of their chance to influence a zoning commission vote. That public hearing had been scheduled for April 11.

This has taken our voice and rights to speak away, said City Councilwoman Michelle Lyons on Monday. She had been mobilizing opposition to the Bridgeport Roman Catholic Diocesan Corporations now deemed unnecessary application for a special permit and site plan review.

Lyons and some of her constituents were concerned about increased traffic and an impact on property values and quality of life. Lyons and other North End residents in 2017 successfully fought the City Councils effort to purchase 238 Jewett Ave. to relocate Classic Studies Academy Magnet school there.

Raymond Rizio, the zoning attorney for the diocese, in an interview Monday said Fairfield University will commit to working with the neighbors and addressing any concerns they have as they go along. He emphasized the college will be a great addition to the area and to Bridgeport.

The university and diocese in a previous joint statement to Hearst Connecticut Media said their Bridgeport college proposal, called Bellarmine, is part of a broader partnership between the two entities announced last summer to realize greater diversity, equity and inclusion, which is part of a much larger and ongoing effort to bring new hope and opportunity through education.

The Jewett Avenue location will offer a 2-year associates degree program to no more than 200 students. The curriculum is still being planned. There will be no on-campus residency and the diocese would still maintain its own office space there.

The building, erected in 1917 as a contagious disease hospital, previously housed Notre Dame Girls Catholic High School from 1963 until 1974. Besides currently serving as headquarters for the diocese there is a hall available for community meetings, and the facility during the pandemic has also operated as a COVID-19 testing site.

The zoning commission had been scheduled to host a hearing on the college last month. That was then postponed until April 11.

But Russell Liskov, a lawyer for the city assigned zoning issues, recently issued an opinion that, because the zoning commission had previously granted a special exemption for the Jewett site for educational purposes, Unless the owner affirmatively relinquishes such special exception, it remains in place in perpetuity.

Rizio said the college project will still require the necessary building approvals, though he noted any construction will be on the inside.

Retired Superior Court Judge Carmen Lopez, an activist and potential 2023 mayoral contender whose parents lived in the North End, has come out against the college. In a letter Monday to Zoning Director Dennis Buckley, Lopez took issue with Liskovs decision, arguing in part that he ignored distinctions in municipal regulations between schools and colleges.

Although a special permit ... runs with the land, it cannot be utilized as a vehicle to allow a property owner to shoehorn (in) a use which is not permitted in that zone, Lopez wrote.

She concluded, The special permit allegedly issued to enable Notre Dame High School to operate and exist on the property does not provide authority for the proposed Bellarmine College.

Liskov could not be reached for comment Monday.

Lopez last month had publicly inquired why Fairfield University did not try to offer this program for low-income students on its existing campus in that neighboring town. The university in a statement last week to Hearst responded, The location of Bellarmine College at the Catholic Center is animated by the desire for student success, and is based in research that suggests that academics and student services brought to the community has the greatest outcomes and rates of student success, which has been confirmed by conversations with community partners.

Lyons suggested the university and diocese consider alternate sites around town, including the University of Bridgeport campus in the South End.

Why are you gonna destroy a neighborhood when this program could be an advantage, but in the proper location? she said.

Leaders from Fairfield University recently met with some local Black leaders, including Rev. Stanley Lord, head of the Greater Bridgeport NAACP, and Rev. Herron Gaston, a candidate for state Senate.

Lord on Monday said the program has a lot of potential. But he has concerns about whether students will have adequate transportation to the North End.

If you were trying to get a community of color, thats not really where they are, Lord said. We havent taken a real stand on whether its a good idea or not. Our question is, how are we gonna get our kids there?

And for that same reason Lord dismissed neighbors concerns about traffic congestion. He said the majority of the students will likely use public transportation, get other rides or bike to class and not be driving their own cars to and from Jewett Avenue.

Gaston in a separate interview Monday said, given Fairfield University historically has not had sufficient representation of communities of color within its student body as well as its faculty and staff the North End college will be a very positive thing.

Being nestled next to a Black and Brown city, this is a way for them (Fairfield University) to really put their boots on the ground in Bridgeport in a real way to show their actual commitment to diversifying the institution at all levels, he said.

Gaston also works for Mayor Joe Ganims administration but said he was involved as a private citizen and a faith leader and not as a municipal official.

As for Lords issues with accessibility, Gaston said he believes the university has all the resources in place to address those concerns and maximize what they are looking to do and accomplish to build a robust and rigorous program that attracts this demographic.
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WASHINGTON (AP)  The Biden administration has charged a Russian oligarch linked to the Kremlin with violating U.S. government sanctions, and disrupted a cybercrime operation that was launched by a Russian military intelligence agency, officials said Wednesday.

The actions came as the Justice Department said it was accelerating efforts to track down illicit Russian assets and as U.S. prosecutors helped European counterparts gather evidence on potential war crimes committed by Russia during its war on Ukraine.

FBI and Justice Department officials announced the moves on the same day that the U.S. separately revealed sanctions against the two adult daughters of Russian President Vladimir Putin and sanctions that blocked two key Russian banks.

We have our eyes on every yacht and jet. We have our eyes on every piece of art and real estate purchased with dirty money and on every bitcoin wallet filled with proceeds of theft and other crimes, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said, adding that "our goal is to ensure that sanctioned Russian oligarchs and cyber criminals will not find safe haven.

The indictment against Konstantin Malofeyev, a Russian media baron and founder of Russian Orthodox news channel Tsargrad TV, is the first of an oligarch since Russia's war with Ukraine began in February. Malofeyev has trumpeted the invasion as a holy war" and has supported Russia-aligned separatist groups in Ukraine.

He was sanctioned by the Treasury Department in 2014 for financing Russians promoting separatism in Crimea. Though those sanctions barred him from doing business with U.S. citizens, prosecutors say Malofeyev evaded those restrictions by hiring an American television producer to work for him in television networks in Russia and Greece and enlisted his help in trying to acquire a TV network in Bulgaria. It was all part of an effort to spread pro-Russia propaganda throughout Europe, the Justice Department said.

Jack Hanick, a former CNBC and Fox News employee, was arrested last month for his work as a television producer for Malofeyev. That case is pending.

Malofeyev is not in custody and is believed to be in Russia. It was not immediately clear if he had a lawyer to speak on his behalf. The two sanctions charges each carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.

The Justice Department said it is seeking the seizure of a $10 million investment that Malofeyev had illegally transferred to a business associate in Greece.

Federal authorities also announced that they had taken down a botnet  a network of hijacked computers typically used for malicious activity  that was controlled by the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU. The botnet, which in this case involved thousands of infected network hardware devices, was dismantled before it could do harm, said FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Wednesday's announcements came two days after U.S. officials seized a huge yacht in Spain belonging to a Russian oligarch, Viktor Vekselberg, with close ties to Russian President Putin.

After the war began, the Justice Department set up a task force to enforce sanctions against Russian oligarchs and target ill-gotten proceeds.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said Wednesday that Justice Department prosecutors were also helping international efforts to uncover potential war crimes committed by Russia. U.S. officials have met with European prosecutors to develop a plan for gathering evidence, he said.

We have seen the dead bodies of civilians, some with bound hands, scattered in the streets. We have seen the mass graves. We have seen the bombed hospital, theater, and residential apartment buildings," Garland said. "The world sees what is happening in Ukraine. The Justice Department sees what is happening in Ukraine.
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FAIRFIELD  Republican Bob Stefanowski said Tuesday he found a fellow outsider to join his second campaign for governor who will otherwise serve as foil for his staid corporate background: A mother, lawmaker and resolute critic of Democratic leadership in Hartford.

State Rep. Laura Devlin represents a cross-section of experiences that Stefanowski told reporters he lacked after announcing his decision outside the Town Hall in Devlins home of Fairfield.

Im an outsider, Lauras been an outsider until recently, but she knows how to manage the legislature  thats going to be critical, Stefanowski said. I wanted a diverse candidate, somebody from Fairfield County that can help me understand the issues.

Stefanowski, a businessman from Madison who has never held political office, said he considered around 20 candidates to serve as his running mate, before interviewing several and ultimately asking Devlin to join his ticket as candidate for lieutenant governor within the last few days.

Devlin said she accepted the offer over the phone with no hesitation.

He kept asking me if I had any questions and Im like, No, I dont, Devlin said. I really think hes the right guy and Im so honored to have the opportunity to work with him.

During their announcement, Stefanowski and Devlin also foreshadowed what will likely be a central theme of their campaign over the next six months: Railing against incumbent Gov. Ned Lamont and Democrats ties to various political scandals, including a federal investigation into school construction contracts overseen by a former state budget official.

Devlin, who is serving her fourth term in the legislature, previously helped lead the successful effort by Republicans to defeat Lamonts trucks-only toll proposal to fund infrastructure projects, which he touted in his 2018 campaign for governor against Stefanowski.

We would not have gotten the outcome that we got if it wasnt for Laura, Stefanowski said of Devlins role in the fight against tolls. Shes tough when she needs to be, Ive seen that side of her, which you need up in Hartford.

Devlin, who grew up in the Chicago suburbs, moved to Fairfield more than 20 years ago while commuting to New York City for work, according to her legislative biography. Devlin said Tuesday that she first became involved in politics running for the towns Board of Assessment Appeals out of frustration with local tax increases.

I wanted answers about how our local government worked and where our taxes were going and why they were so high, Devlin said.

After being elected to that board in 2011, Devlin went on to serve on Fairfields Representative Town Meeting and later the state House of Representatives, representing House District 134 since 2015.

State Sen. Tony Hwang, R-Fairfield, who previously represented the 134th district, said he was an early champion of Devlin as Stefanowski was rumored to have several women on his short list for lieutenant governor, calling her an absolutely perfect complement to the ticket.

I think she really has a voice, an elegant touch with the people she represents, Hwang said. From Day One, I thought she would be a perfect candidate.

Stefanowskis running mate in the 2018 campaign, state Sen. Joe Markley, R-Southington, was chosen by voters during a three-way primary. That ticket ended up losing to Gov. Lamont and Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz by less than 5 percentage points in a strong year for Democrats nationally.

This time, Stefanowski said it was very important for him to be able to choose his own running mate to ensure diversity on the ticket. He also noted Devlins former role as vice president of communications for Pfizer when asked what management experience she brought to the ticket.

No other Republicans have publicly declared their intentions to run for the GOP nomination for governor or lieutenant governor at next months party convention, paving the way for Stefanowski and Devlin to receive the nomination.

In their initial response to Stefanowskis choice of a running mate, Democrats avoided making any direct criticisms of Devlin, and instead focused their message on Lamonts record over the last three years.

Dan Morrocco, Lamonts campaign manager, deferred comment Tuesday to the state party, which had Stamford Mayor Caroline Simmons provide a response to the pick at a nearby coffee shop in Fairfield.

I think its unclear, what policies the Republican ticket will pursue, Simmons said.

Weve seen the track record that the governor and Lt. Gov. [Bysiewicz] have had in our state, we know we can trust their leadership, they are full of integrity, compassion and devotion to our state, Simmons said.

Lamont and Bysiewicz are expected to be re-nominated at a state party convention in May. Like the Republican ticket, they are not expected to face any challengers for their partys nomination.

The general election will take place on Nov. 8.
The legislatures Finance Committee took the first step Tuesday toward creating a new state income tax credit for low and middle income families with children.

The Democrat-controlled panel technically endorsed a bill that would immediately create a new $600-per-child credit. But Rep. Sean Scanlon, the committees co-chair, quickly qualified that the proposal will be revised Wednesday to comply with federal restrictions on how much tax relief Connecticut can offer while it accepts emergency federal pandemic aid.

Scanlon is expected to announce Wednesday that the credit will be phased in starting two years from now, once the federal relief has expired.

The finance panel, which faces a 5 p.m. Thursday deadline to finish proposing bills for the 2022 legislative session, also endorsed a new income tax cut for Connecticuts working poor families. This relief amounts to an average of about $300 extra for more than 185,000 families earning less than $58,000 per year.

The child tax credit Scanlon has been fighting for since last year is more than an aspiration, the Guilford Democrat said during Wednesdays meeting. It will be a reality.

Committees often adopt bills that members know are likely to be modified or even rejected.

But Rep. Holly Cheeseman of East Lyme, ranking House Republican on the finance panel, said she didnt want to dangle relief in front of Connecticut residents and then not deliver.

At the end of the day, the only thing that matters to the residents of Connecticut is can we make this happen? said Cheeseman, who voted for the measure. I, too, aspire to do great things. Lets make this work.

The bill, which passed by a 2-1 margin with bipartisan support, still faces challenges in its current form because of U.S. Treasury rules governing states that accepted federal pandemic relief through the American Rescue Plan Act.

State government here got $3 billion in ARPA funds and billions more went to Connecticut municipalities and school districts.

States are supposed to use those funds to restore services hurt by the pandemic, not cut taxes. Gov. Ned Lamonts administration said it believes the state cannot cut General Fund tax receipts next fiscal year by more $200 million without running afoul of the treasury rules.

You cant do everything, the governor said Tuesday, adding lawmakers will have to make some tough choices.

Lamont is insisting that the legislature cut income taxes for the middle class this year in a different fashion  by expanding from $200 to $300 a credit that offsets a portion of municipal property tax bills. The governor needs to do this to fulfill a promise he made in his 2018 campaign for office.

This relief would cost about $120 million per year, and the tax break for the working poor  which leaders of the House and Senates Democratic majority vowed would be adopted this year  costs another $42 million.

The doesnt leave much room for the child tax credit, which would return $300 million annually to taxpayers.

Scanlon didnt provide details Tuesday, but he has said on several occasions the relief could be set to start a year or two down the road, after the pandemic aid expires.

The finance panel is expected to be asked Wednesday to adopt a broader tax plan that includes Lamonts promised relief, the tax break for the working poor, and a child tax credit that would begin at $300 per child in 2024, and then grow in future years.

To help pay for it, and to support a second big initiative, the committee is recommending that Connecticut slow down, modestly, the big budget surpluses it has been racking up in recent years.

Sen. John Fonfara, D-Hartford, the committees other co-chairman, proposed that Connecticut suspend its revenue cap.

Designed to stop legislators from creating budgets with no room for error, this cap was created in 2017 and says appropriations cannot exceed 99 percent of projected revenues this fiscal year. Thats a built-in cushion of $275 million.

By 2024 the revenue cap would reach 98.5 percent, and would create a cushion of $321 million.

About half of those funds would be used to support the child tax credit two years from now.

The other half would be dedicated to early childhood development, something Fonfara says is vital to reduce the education achievement gap and foster greater economic opportunity in poor urban centers.

Too many children are denied those opportunities that most of Connecticut enjoy, great opportunities, he said.

If we dont invest in these children, added Sen. Patricia Billie Miller, D-Stamford, our schools are going to be a pipeline to prisons.

Fonfara also noted a second, larger savings program for the state budget  also created in 2017  would remain in place.

Labeled the volatility adjustment, it prohibits the legislature from spending a portion of state income tax receipts tied to capital gains and other investment earnings.

The volatility adjustment has never allowed the state to save less than $500 million since its creation, and this year likely will build a cushion that tops $1 billion.

But while the Finance Committee endorsed suspension of the revenue cap Tuesday, moderate Democrats and Republicans said they will fight to keep that provision out of the next state budget.

I am very much supportive of our states most precious commodity, said Rep. Kerry Wood, R-Rocky Hill. But, she added, Connecticut must do it without violating a cap that has helped end years of deficits, build a healthy reserve and accelerate reduction of pension debt.

In other business Tuesday, the Finance Committee also approved bills that would:

Require the Capital Region Development Authority to study the possible redevelopment of the Brainard Airport property in Hartford.

Make heating, air conditioning and other air quality control projects in municipal schools eligible for assistance through the states school construction grant program.
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STRATFORD  Stratford Mayor Laura Hoydick was ready Tuesday for a chance to present her pitch for the towns proposal to purchase Sikorsky Memorial Airport to the commission that manages it. But she never got the chance.

The meeting was canceled shortly before its scheduled start time due to a lack of quorum, according to airport manager Michelle Muoio.

I have thoughts to share with the commission on how we should go forward and it would be a public RFP (request for proposal) process, Hoydick said shortly after the cancellation. And that I think its important to be as transparent as possible with, not just the citizens of Bridgeport, but the residents of Stratford about the process going forward.

Hoydick and state Sen. Kevin Kelly, R-Stratford, on March 18 sent a letter to Gov. Ned Lamont, Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim, Bridgeport City Council President Aidee Nieves and the airport commission declaring the towns interest in purchasing the airport.

The commissions agenda for Tuesdays meeting included an item for a discussion/vote on the sale of the airport. While not specifically on the agenda, a discussion of Stratfords interest could have happened but likely would have been in a private executive session, Hoydick said. It would have been Stratfords first opportunity to explain its interest and answer any questions the commission might have.

Hoydick said she has not received information on a date or time for the meeting to be rescheduled.

I just think its important that its a public process, Hoydick said. I think that we should go out to RFP for all those that are interested in purchasing or leasing the airport, as were doing with the leases for the hangars. I think that everything can be disclosed and questions can be asked and answered in public and I hope we move forward in that vein.

The commission recently decided to seek other proposals for the services now rendered by Atlantic Aviation, the firm that has operated hangars at Sikorsky for over three decades after concerns were raised by a competitor of a plan to extend Atlantics contract.

Stratford is seeking local control of the airport, which lies within its borders in the Lordship neighborhood. Hoydick and other Stratford officials have voiced concern that safety agreements and contractual measures in place with Bridgeport could go away should the Connecticut Airport Authority take over the property.

Our aim is to develop the Sikorsky Memorial Airport in a manner that is consistent with the values and character of the surrounding community, and protects the critical environmental assets that surround the airport, Hoydicks letter said.

Hoydick said Stratfords plan is to purchase the airport and lease it to an operator. The town intends to model a possible revitalization of the airport similarly to Tweed Airport in New Haven.

The commission previously tabled a vote on CAAs bid to purchase the airport for $10 million at the last meeting, which was held shortly after Hoydick shared the towns interest in purchasing the property. CAA put forward a term sheet  or document outlining the general terms of a purchase contract  to the commission in February.

CAA operates six state-owned airports, including Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks. The authority would move to bring commercial flights back to Sikorsky should it be chosen to purchase the property. The airport has not hosted commercial passenger flights in over 20 years. At least one airline, Breeze Airways, has demonstrated interest in Sikorsky in the past.

Ganim previously said he is open to hearing Hoydicks proposal, but thinks the CAA is the only real opportunity for the airport.

Muoio could not be immediately reached for comment.

mike.mavredakis@hearstmediact.com
BRIDGEPORT  Former Fairfield dog rescue president Heidi Lueders had destroyed her beloved home but Celly Roberts was not going to get any hoped-for justice on Wednesday.

Wiping tears from her eyes, Roberts told Superior Court Judge Peter McShane that Lueders had totally trashed her house while housing five dogs that allegedly died in her care.

I am a lover of animals, Roberts said, turning to Lueders who was sitting with her lawyer at the defense table. Miss Lueders, do you remember when I told you, you could use my house for your animal rescue? What followed is me losing everything. I lost my house. Justice needs to be imposed.

But while the judge said he had sympathy for Roberts plight, he said he had already agreed to grant Lueders lawyer a continuance in her sentencing.

You came here today to have your voice heard and I can tell you, you have been heard, he said.

The 34-year-old Lueders, the former president of Bully Breed dog rescue, was accused of leaving five dogs to die in the Prince Street home in Fairfield that she rented in November 2018 from Roberts. The remains of the dogs  skin and bones  were found in locked cages throughout the house.

Lueders was charged with five counts of first-degree maliciously killing an animal  a felony  and one count of first-degree criminal damage to property.

But in February, following a trial before the judge, McShane found Lueders not guilty of the animal counts and only guilty of the criminal damage charge.

You may be listening to this and think does this judge honestly believe or think these dogs died of natural causes, the judge said after announcing his verdict to the more than a dozen animal rights activists sobbing in the back of the courtroom. It doesnt matter what I think, what matters is what the state proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

The criminal damage to property is a class D felony punishable up to five years in prison. Lueders was to be sentenced Wednesday on that charge but as the courtroom filled with spectators, Lueders lawyer, Robert Serafinowicz, asked for a continuance.

Serafinowicz told the judge that the pre-sentence report prepared by the Office of Adult Probation had wrongly included facts about the death of the dogs but, more importantly, a psychiatric evaluation of his client had not been done.

The court will be well-served by that evaluation. I apologize to the victim but I have an obligation to my client, Serafinowicz said.

Assistant States Attorney Felicia Valentino told the judge she was prepared to go forward with the sentencing hearing.

But the judge said he agreed that the evaluation will be necessary in deciding what sentence to impose and continued the hearing to May 4.
Unification Minister Lee In-young speaks during a press conference at the Office of the Inter-Korean Dialogue, April 6. Yonhap





South Korea's outgoing point man on North Korea urged the country's incoming administration Wednesday to adopt a "forward-looking" approach toward North Korea, especially in order to prevent nuclear weapons testing amid heightening tensions on the Korean Peninsula.







Unification Minister Lee In-young made the remarks during his last regular press conference in his capacity as the liberal Moon Jae-in government's top official on Pyongyang.







Earlier this week, Kim Yo-jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, issued a statement warning that her country could use nuclear forces against South Korea to "take initiative at the outset of war."







"The North has broken its moratorium on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) and there are many signs regarding nuclear weapons tests as well. We must put an end to this right here," Lee said.







A silver lining is that the North has not crossed the "red line" yet in terms of the moratorium on nuclear testing, which is regarded as a far more serious strategic provocation than the launching of a long-range missile on a lofted angle. Even China and Russia did not conceal their uneasiness or anger over the North's previous underground nuclear weapons tests.







Concerns have grown about the future of already soured inter-Korean ties, with Moon, who has endeavored to advance the Korea peace process, set to be succeeded by Yoon Suk-yeol of the conservative People Power Party in May.







The minister said the Yoon administration needs to seek a "very forward-looking and active policy for peace" to stop the North from testing its nuclear weapons and create momentum for the resumption of dialogue. He raised the need for Yoon to take a "contrarian" approach amid the widespread view that conservative South Korean administrations tend to be more hawkish toward Pyongyang than liberal ones.







Meanwhile, a senior ministry official said later that the South has reached out to the North to confirm of the fate of the South Korean-built facilities at the Mount Geumgang resort, after detecting signs of the North dismantling some of them.







"We have asked the North (for confirmation) via inter-Korean communication lines but it has not made any official announcement," the official said on condition of anonymity, referring to a floating hotel known as Haegumgang.







Pyongyang had earlier announced that it would remove the facilities at Mount Geumgang, once regarded as a key symbol of inter-Korean reconciliation and economic cooperation, since leader Kim called for tearing down all "unpleasant-looking" facilities in 2019.







Tensions have escalated recently on the Korean Peninsula after the North launched its first ICBM since November 2017, formally ending its self-imposed moratorium on long-range missile testing, last month.







Observers here voice worries that the North could engage in additional provocative acts, like a nuclear weapons test, on the occasion of the 110th anniversary of the birth of its founding leader Kim Il-sung, April 15, and the founding anniversary of the North Korean People's Revolutionary Army, April 25.







They say Pyongyang may try to use additional provocations to put more pressure on the new South Korean government to be launched May 10 and the Joe Biden administration ahead of the mid-term elections in November. (Yonhap)






HONG KONG (AP)  Hong Kongs No. 2 official, a staunch supporter of a Beijing-backed crackdown on pro-democracy activists, tendered his resignation on Wednesday to pave the way for his run in the city's upcoming leadership race.

John Lee, who is the citys chief secretary for administration, submitted his resignation to Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam, according to a government statement.

If my resignation is approved by the Central Peoples Government, I shall plan to stand for the upcoming chief executive election, said Lee at a news conference. Having been in the government for over 40 years, to serve the people of Hong Kong is a glory."

He said he would elaborate on his "next move" if the Chinese government approves his resignation.

Lee, who is seen as Beijings favored candidate for the chief executive position, is a staunch advocate of the citys national security law, which has been used since 2020 to target pro-democracy activists, supporters and media, diminishing freedoms promised to Hong Kong at Britain's handover to China in 1997.

His potential leadership of Hong Kong could signal a further tightening of Beijings grip on the semi-autonomous Chinese city.

Lam said Monday she would not seek a second term, following a rocky five years punctuated by the COVID-19 pandemic, a crackdown on political freedoms and Beijings growing influence over the territory.

Local media, including the leading South China Morning Post newspaper, reported that Lee will be the sole candidate to be endorsed by the Chinese government.

Other candidates tipped by local media as likely contenders include the city's finance minister, Paul Chan, although he has yet to express an intention to run.

Beijing's likely endorsement of Lee's candidacy signals that China is looking for loyalty and an emphasis on national security for Hong Kong, according to Ivan Choy, a senior lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong's Department of Government and Public Administration.

Compared to previous chief executives, Lee would have much less policy-making experience because he has spent most of his civil service career in the police and overseeing security matters, Choy said.

Given that inexperience, Beijing could play a more important role in the city's local and domestic affairs, he said.

The citys next leader will be selected on May 8 by an election committee of about 1,500 people, a majority of whom are pro-Beijing.

Hong Kong's leader is chosen every five years, although the selection process is carefully orchestrated behind the scenes by Beijing.

The four chief executives selected since Hong Kong's handover to mainland China in 1997 have all been candidates seen as favored by Beijing.

Lee, 64, a former career police officer who rose steadily through the ranks, was named Hong Kong's chief secretary in June and previously served as Lams secretary for security.

He was a key figure in proposing contentious legislation in 2019 that would have allowed suspects in Hong Kong to be extradited to mainland China. He dismissed calls from critics to write safeguards into the bill.

The proposed bill led to massive protests in the city before it was withdrawn, and Lee oversaw a police crackdown on demonstrators during several months of massive anti-government protests in 2019.

After the protests were snuffed out, Lee threw his backing behind the sweeping security law, which was used as justification for the arrests of more than 150 people. It outlaws subversion, secession, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces in the city's affairs.

Lee, Lam and other Hong Kong and mainland Chinese government officials were sanctioned by the U.S. in 2020 for undermining Hong Kongs autonomy and restricting the freedom of expression or assembly.

Nominations for the leadership race began Sunday and continue until April 16, with the committee vote scheduled for May 8.

The leadership race is the first since Hong Kong's electoral laws were amended last year to ensure that only patriots loyal to Beijing can hold office. The changes make it difficult for pro-democracy supporters to run for chief executive.

The new leader takes office on July 1, the day Hong Kong was handed over to China by the British in 1997.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP)  The third day of deliberations ended Wednesday without a verdict in a trial that centers on a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker urged jurors to keep their thoughts about the case private when away from the courthouse.

We're obviously at a delicate time, he said. You're in the midst of deliberations. You now know a lot more about the case than you ever expected to know and a lot more about each others views than you ever expected to know.

Adam Fox, Barry Croft Jr., Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta are charged with a kidnapping conspiracy. Three of them also face additional charges, including conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, namely an explosive.

The trial has covered 18 days since March 8, including 13 days of testimony.

Prosecutors said the conspiracy against Whitmer was fueled by anti-government extremism and anger over her COVID-19 restrictions. The men trained with a crudely built shoot house to replicate her vacation home in September 2020, according to testimony.

Fox and Croft, traveled to Elk Rapids, Michigan, that same weekend to see the location of the governor's lakeside property and a nearby bridge, evidence showed. Harris and Caserta have been described as soldiers in the scheme.

Another man, Ty Garbin, who pleaded guilty, said the goal was to get Whitmer before the fall election and create enough chaos to create a civil war and stop Joe Biden from winning the presidency.

Defense lawyers attacked the government's investigation and the use of a crucial informant, Dan Chappel. They claimed Chappel was the real leader, taking direction from the FBI and keeping the group on edge while recording them for months.

Croft is from Bear, Delaware, while the others are from Michigan.

Whitmer, a Democrat, rarely talks publicly about the plot, though she referred to surprises during her term that seemed like something out of fiction when she filed for reelection on March 17.

She has blamed former President Donald Trump for fomenting anger over coronavirus restrictions and refusing to condemn right-wing extremists like those charged in the case.

___

Find APs full coverage of the Whitmer kidnap plot trial at: https://apnews.com/hub/whitmer-kidnap-plot-trial

___

White reported from Detroit.
SCAPPOOSE, Ore. (AP)  The Columbia County sheriff and an Oregon State Police trooper were identified as the people who shot and killed an armed man Thursday at a tow yard northwest of Portland in Scappoose.

The Oregonian/OregonLive reported Michael Stockton initiated the shooting at Grumpy's Towing by firing at Sheriff Brian Pixley and state police Sgt. Chad Drew, who both returned fire, according to the Washington County Major Crimes Team, which is investigating the incident. Pixley and Drew werent hurt. Both have been put on paid administrative leave.
Contributed Photo / Ansonia Police Department / Contributed Photo

ANSONIA  Police say they are investigating a suspected drug deal in Ansonia Tuesday that led to the shooting and killing of a Stratford man.

A man called police around 12:50 p.m. reporting that his friend was shot on Main Street near Kingston Drive. At the scene, officers found the passenger of a silver Honda suffering from a gunshot wound. Officers provided first aid until an ambulance arrived and took the victim to a local hospital, according to the Ansonia Police Department.
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BRIDGEPORT  As he stood outside the Golden Hill Street courtroom Wednesday, Wilner Joseph trembled.

It had been nearly five years since his younger brother, Max Antoine, was shot down in the street outside a downtown restaurant and Joseph was going to finally get to see his brothers alleged killer.

It was tough finally seeing the person who took my brothers life, but I managed to keep my composure, Joseph said later. But it was tough.

Police said the 34-year-old Antoine, of Stamford, was an apparent innocent bystander when he was shot multiple times as he left the former Tiagos restaurant on State Street in the early morning of April 20, 2017.

His alleged killer, 34-year-old Shardel Ragin, of Bridgeport, was charged Tuesday with murder, attempted murder, criminal possession of a firearm, carrying a pistol without a permit and possession of weapons in a motor vehicle.

During Ragins arraignment hearing Wednesday afternoon, Senior Assistant States Attorney Nicholas Bove requested a high bond based on the seriousness of the case.

But Ragins lawyer, Assistant Public Defender Anne Marie Kindley, sought leniency for her client, arguing he has been working two jobs to support his two children. And he has a third child on the way, she added.

But Superior Court Judge Ndidi Moses ordered Ragin held in lieu of $3 million bond and continued the case to April 12.

My brother was just an innocent bystander, Joseph said later as he stood on the steps of the courthouse. Im glad this day is finally here but until he (Ragin) is put away I wont have any closure.

According to the arrest warrant affidavit, shortly after 12:30 a.m., Antoine was leaving a party with another man when a black car drove down the street towards them. The driver of the car leaned out the window and fired multiple shots as the two men ran, according to the affidavit.

Antoine was shot in the chest, arm and leg and died on McLevy Green, the affidavit states. The other man, who later spoke to police with his lawyer present, told detectives he didnt know who shot at them or why, the affidavit states.

The case remained unsolved until December 2021 when the affidavit states that a man came forward and told detectives he had witnessed Ragin shoot at the victims.

The affidavit continues that the witness told detectives he had been outside Tiagos the early morning of April 20, 2017, when Ragin pulled up in a black car.

The car went around the block and then, suddenly drove towards the front of the restaurant, the affidavit states. Ragin then began firing at the two victims, the document states. The affidavit states that Ragin told the witness the shooting was in retaliation for one of the victims previously shooting Ragin and his wife in Stamford.

The affidavit states that the witness told detectives he had waited to come forward out of fear of Ragin. But in 2021 Ragin had been arrested for another homicide in the city and was in custody.

Stamford police confirmed that 10 months before the Tiago shooting, Ragin and his wife had been seriously wounded in a drive-by shooting in that city, according to the warrant affidavit.

Ragin is already awaiting trial on charges of first-degree manslaughter, criminal possession of a firearm and carrying a pistol without a permit in the May 24, 2018 shooting of 27-year-old Willie Nance of Bridgeport.

Police said Nance was shot twice as he stood outside Ragins Asylum Street home and died at St. Vincents Medical Center.
Rep. Park Jin of the main opposition People Power Party, right, head of the U.S.-South Korea policy consultation delegation sent by President-elect Yoon, is seen posing for a photo with U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan during a meeting at the White House in Washington, April 5, in this photo provided by the South Korean delegation. Newsis





South Korean delegates representing President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol discussed the possible deployment of U.S. strategic assets to South Korea in a meeting with U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Tuesday, according to the head of the delegation.







Rep. Park Jin of Yoon's People Power Party also said the sides discussed a need to hold a bilateral summit between U.S. President Joe Biden and Yoon at an early date.







"The two sides also exchanged views on the need to hold a U.S.-South Korea summit at an early date since their two leaders remain determined to strengthen the South Korea-U.S. alliance," Park told reporters after meeting with Sullivan at the White House.







Park said the group, called the U.S.-South Korea policy consultation delegation, also delivered a personal letter for Biden from Yoon that was given to the White House national security advisor.






STRATFORD  State Senate candidate Justin Gendrons political career has taken a backseat to his professional one, with the Stratford Democrat announcing Tuesday that he has ended his campaign due to time constraints.

Gendron previously worked part-time but has now gotten a full-time job in graphic design, making the run for the seat less feasible, he said.

I went from a part-time job where I definitely could have done a whole state Senate campaign because they had the time, to a full-time career that really required full-time hours, Gendron, 22, said. Trying to make a living and run a Senate campaign at the same time, its just not something that I could do.

A recent Southern Connecticut State University graduate, Gendron filed his candidacy on Jan. 5, running on making the state more affordable, prioritizing clean energy and investing in public education. The 21st District includes Stratford, Monroe, Seymour and Shelton.

Gendron said he spoke with Stratford Democratic Town Committee chair Steve Taccogna about the time commitment of a state Senate run and decided it would be too much, considering the increased workload. Gendron also said that some smaller aspects contributed to the decision as well, like not seeing his family or his dog as much as he liked.

We just talked about if the timing is right for Justin right now with everything he has going on, Taccogna said. I think it was a very healthy and important conversation between a party chair and somebody as new to it all as Justin. I think it was a good kind of level-setting.

Taccogna said that the party is still behind Gendron and the members are all united in a common purpose, even though he is no longer running.

His campaign had raised over $3,000 in support from donors, according to campaign treasurer Karen Tracy. It has not yet been determined how the money raised with be handled at this time, Tracy said.

I appreciate all the love and support from everyone, and everyone who donated their time, their money, Gendron said. I extend my sincere gratitude to all of them.

The campaign is in contact with the State Elections Enforcement Commission on how to move forward.

Justin Gendron is a great candidate and has made a decision unrelated to his viability, Nancy DiNardo, chair of the state Democratic Party, said in a statement to Hearst Connecticut Media. Its early in the election season and were confident the Democratic Town Committee can find a replacement.

Taccogna said there have been conversations with other possible candidates. Gendron had not officially received the party nomination, which will come in May should there be a new candidate, Taccogna said.

Gendron said he will continue to work toward the goals outlined in his campaign and issued an open invitation to help the towns state legislators, Rep. Joe Gresko and Rep. Phil Young.

He also sought to reassure those who feared he is ill, or a personal tragedy had happened to him recently.

Kelly is a six-term incumbent who has served in the Senate since January 2011. He ran unopposed during the 2020 election.

Kelly could not be immediately reached for comment.

Republican Town Committee Chair Lou DeCilio wished Gendron well in his career.

Im sure the Democrats will try to look for another candidate, but Kevin is in good shape no matter what they decide, he said.

mike.mavredakis@hearstmediact.com
This is an important time of the year for Christians, Jews and Muslims.

Easter is Sunday, April 17, for most Christians. Its April 24 on the Eastern Orthodox calendar. Easter celebrates the resurrection of Jesus after his crucifixion.

Passover begins Friday, April 15, and ends Saturday, April 23. It celebrates the liberation of Jews from slavery in Egypt.

In the U.S. Ramadan began Saturday, April 2, and ends Monday, May 2. During the Islamic holy month, Muslims ask God to forgive them for their sins. Many fast from dawn to sunset.

I am a Christian, but I also feel connected with Jews and Muslims. Christianity, Judaism and Islam share the belief that there is one God. Christians. Jews and Muslims are all children of Abraham.

As a high-school student, I was invited by a Jewish classmate to his familys Seder, a dinner at the beginning of Passover. The youngest child there asked the traditional question: Why is this night different from all other nights?

When my wife and I were married in a church wedding, the matron of honor was a Jewish friend of ours.

Our daughter married a Muslim in Indonesia with our blessing. They live in Connecticut with their two teen-age sons. In March they celebrated their 21st wedding anniversary.

I wish my fellow Christians Happy Easter!

I wish Jews Happy Passover!

I wish Muslims Blessed Ramadan! (Reflecting on ones sins and Happy dont seem to belong together.)

Paul Janensch

Bridgeport
Rep. Park Jin, right, of the main opposition People Power Party, who heads the ROK-U.S. Policy Consultation Delegation sent by President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol, poses with U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan during their meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., Tuesday (local time). Courtesy of ROK-U.S. Policy Consultation Delegation



Deployment of strategic assets unlikely: experts



By Kang Seung-woo



President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol's U.S. delegation held discussions with the U.S. side, Tuesday (local time), about the permanent presence of U.S. strategic assets on the Korean Peninsula amid mounting threats from North Korea.



In addition, the two sides also talked about holding a summit between Yoon and U.S. President Joe Biden at an early date.



The ROK-U.S. Policy Consultation Delegation, led by Rep. Park Jin of the main opposition People Power Party, visited the White House and met with U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan for some 40 minutes. The ROK refers to the Republic of Korea, South Korea's official name.



"The deployment of strategic assets is an important part of building up extended deterrence against North Korea's provocations and in that sense, the issue was included in the consultation," Park told reporters following the meeting with Sullivan, but did not elaborate further.



The term, "strategic assets," refers to long range bombers, nuclear-powered submarines or aircraft carriers. "Extended deterrence" refers to the commitment to use nuclear weapons to deter attacks on allies. The U.S. has provided extended deterrence or a nuclear umbrella to South Korea since removing all of its nuclear assets from the South in 1991.



So far this year, the Kim Jong-un regime has conducted multiple missile tests, including the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile  Washington's unofficial "red line" against North Korea's saber-rattling  so there have been calls from some for the Biden administration to show strong determination to deter North Korea's military provocations.



In addition, the president-elect has pledged to enhance South Korea's deterrence against Pyongyang's nuclear and missile threats.



At a policy briefing to Yoon's transition committee last month, the Ministry of National Defense said it will seek to reactivate regular meetings of the Extended Deterrence Strategy and Consultation Group (EDSCG), a high-level consultative mechanism to achieve North Korean denuclearization through steadfast deterrence, which last met in January 2018. According to Park, the seven-member delegation held a meeting with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, Monday, during which they agreed to revive the EDSCG.



However, Park said that they did not discuss with Sullivan the deployment of another battery of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), a pledge Yoon made during his election campaign.









Park also delivered a personal letter from Yoon to Biden that highlights the need to upgrade the South Korea-U.S. alliance further in order to tackle the North Korean nuclear issue while also enhancing the level of cooperation between the two countries on a range of regional and global issues including climate change and supply chain resiliency.



The delegation and Sullivan also exchanged views on the need to arrange a Yoon-Biden summit at an early date since their leaders remain determined to strengthen the alliance. Yoon is scheduled to take office on May 10.



"We concurred that a summit should feature substantial and important issues related to strengthening the alliance," Park said, adding that there was no discussion of a specific timetable.





Rep. Park Jin answers reporters' questions after a meeting with U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan at the White House in Washington, D.C., Tuesday (local time). Joint Press Corps
Chinese embassy pays homage to Chinese peacekeepers martyred in Cambodia

Xinhua) 08:52, April 06, 2022

KAMPONG CHAM, Cambodia, April 5 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese Embassy to Cambodia on Tuesday paid homage to two Chinese peacekeepers martyred in the United Nations mission in the Southeast Asian country in 1993.

The event, which was held on the occasion of China's traditional Tomb-Sweeping Day, was attended by more than 30 people including Chinese diplomats and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) experts who are working here to assist in Cambodia's fight against COVID-19.

The visitors laid wreaths at a memorial monument in Kampong Cham province to honor the Chinese peacekeepers who lost their lives in a UN peacekeeping mission.

Wu Guoquan, the embassy's economic and commercial counselor, said the two Chinese peacekeepers were killed in a mid-night explosion on May 21, 1993, and that they were among about 800 Chinese peacekeepers arriving in Cambodia in 1992 to perform the UN peacekeeping mission.

Wu said the life sacrifice of the Chinese peacekeepers for peace as well as the efforts devoted by Chinese personnel for the development of Cambodia have both contributed to the longstanding China-Cambodia friendship.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
The defense ministry compound in Yongsan, central Seoul, is seen in this March 22 file photo. Yonhap





The Cabinet approved 36 billion won ($29.5 million) in reserve government funds for President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol's plan to relocate the presidential office, Wednesday.







The spending was approved in an extraordinary Cabinet meeting presided over by Prime Minister Kim Boo-kyum, a day after President Moon Jae-in ordered the swift approval of the relocation budget.






Boris Johnson has reportedly described the Home Office as a 'basket case'. Former Labour Home Secretary John Reid once said it was 'not fit for purpose'.

Any sensible politician would prefer to try to cross the Sahara Desert with a leaky water bottle than become Home Secretary. Success is inconceivable. Survival is the best that can be hoped for.

Even that can be a stretch. Of the past ten Home Secretaries, five have been sacked or resigned. Priti Patel, the present incumbent, may soon add her name to the list of casualties.

I have some sympathy for her. She has been ground down by the bureaucratic incompetence and in-built inertia of the Home Office. Early in her stint, she exploded in rage against its top civil servant, Sir Philip Rutnam, who stomped off. It can't be said that his departure has made any discernible difference.

Priti Patel has been ground down by the bureaucratic incompetence and in-built inertia of the Home Office

Ms Patel would probably have succeeded if she had been offered another, less intractable department. As it is, her own shortcomings have compounded those of the Home Office.

Would-be refugees from Ukraine are facing administrative obstruction, even though more than 200,000 generous people have offered them places in their homes. Meanwhile, migrants are crossing the Channel in record numbers, with over 3,000 arriving last month.

It's fair to say that Priti Patel and the Home Office have failed to stop illegal migrants arriving in large numbers, while they appear to be throwing obstacles in the path of Ukrainian refugees.

No wonder that Ms Patel  once the toast of the Tory grassroots who admired her can-do talk  got one of the lowest ratings of any Cabinet minister in a poll published earlier this week by the Conservative Home website.

Why are we making it so difficult for refugees to leave war-torn, devastated Ukraine and find safety in this country where, as I say, there are more than 200,000 people willing to offer accommodation for at least six months?

Poland has welcomed over two million of them, no questions asked. We have accepted around 30,000 so far. There are two schemes: one for those with relatives here, and one for those who are sponsored.

The latter group is encountering the greatest impediments. At the end of last week  I don't suppose the figures have improved greatly since then  out of 5,200 people who had been given visas under the scheme, only 500 had reached the UK.

Applicants, who are inevitably distressed, have to complete a 51-page application form. It includes questions such as: 'Are you a war criminal?' What idiocy. If Vladimir Putin were to apply, he would presumably say 'No'. War criminals are like that.

No less absurdly, parents are asked whether toddlers have ever been given a speeding ticket or have a criminal record. Which species of sadists devise these forms? What world do they live in?

Priti Patel and the Home Office have failed to stop illegal migrants arriving in large numbers, while they appear to be throwing obstacles in the path of Ukrainian refugees

If you are a Ukrainian who turns up in Britain without having filled in the form, you will be unable to make an application because some unhelpful bureaucrat has decreed that it should be so.

Yesterday's Mail carried a story that illustrated how jobsworths, presumably with the blessing of the Home Office, are doing their utmost to frustrate the smooth working of the scheme.

Mike Rundell is a wealthy architect with a large, agreeable house in South London. He is one of the 200,000-plus people who have offered to provide a haven for Ukrainian refugees.

But he was told by a busybody working for Lambeth Council that he will need to make certain 'upgrades' before Ukrainian refugees are allowed in his house. These include lockable windows, closable doors, extra fire alarms on each floor and a 'Gas safe' certificate.

These people have been driven out of a country where Russian soldiers are murdering thousands of civilians, raping women and starving Ukrainians into submission. And here is an official insisting on closable doors and fire alarms. I despair.

Priti Patel has a notoriously explosive temper, and I daresay such stories could send her into orbit. But why can't she do something about it? Why doesn't she cut through the nonsense and simplify the forms, speed up the application process and tell officials to stop insisting on damn fool conditions?

One of the Home Secretary's proposals is to send illegal migrants to a foreign country, probably Rwanda, where their claims for asylum would be processed. The hope is that migrants may think twice before crossing the Channel if they think they may end up in Rwanda

It's hard, working with inhumane, officious or stupid people  of course it is. I feel for her. And yet no one forced her to be Home Secretary. Now that she is, she should be doing a better job.

That is also true in respect of the thousands of illegal migrants who continue to arrive in ever-increasing numbers on our shores, despite the Conservatives having made a solemn pledge to protect our borders.

To be fair, this is a huge problem and there are no easy solutions. Nor has Ms Patel been sitting on her hands. She has produced the Nationality and Borders Bill, designed to deter illegal migrants, which the House of Lords has been watering down this week.

One of the Home Secretary's proposals is to send illegal migrants to a foreign country, probably Rwanda, where their claims for asylum would be processed.

The hope is that migrants may think twice before crossing the Channel if they think they may end up in Rwanda.

It is an imaginative idea but is it workable? For one thing, it has been estimated the cost of the policy could be as much 100,000 per asylum seeker. For another, lawyers are queuing up to challenge the Government's right under international law to transfer migrants to an impoverished country thousands of miles away.

If you are a Ukrainian who turns up in Britain without having filled in the form, you will be unable to make an application because some unhelpful bureaucrat has decreed that it should be so. Pictured: A heavily damaged apartment building following a Russian attack in the center of Borodyanka, Ukraine, Wednesday, April 6

If Priti Patel pulls off her extraordinary plan, I shall take my hat off to her. But I suspect that if it goes ahead (Boris Johnson is reported to be wobbling) it will meet with insuperable resistance. A less ornate and more practical approach seems advisable.

By the way, there are some who accuse the Government of double standards in welcoming Ukrainians  at any rate on paper  while trying, albeit ineffectually, to discourage illegal migrants.

But there are important distinctions. Ukrainians are fleeing one of the most savage wars the world has seen since 1945. According to Priti Patel, though some have questioned her figures, 70 per cent of asylum seekers are economic migrants.

Even though there are some who are fleeing conflict among the migrants gathered in France, their predicament, for the most part, can scarcely be compared with the plight of people driven out of their country. Moreover, unlike the migrants, Ukrainians are not seeking permanent residence.

Ukrainians are fleeing one of the most savage wars the world has seen since 1945. According to Priti Patel, though some have questioned her figures, 70 per cent of asylum seekers are economic migrants. Pictured: A monument to Taras Shevchenko, a Ukrainian poet and a national symbol, seen with traces of bullets against the background of an apartment house ruined in the Russian shelling in the central square in Borodyanka

When will the Government do more to help them? The new refugees minister, Lord Harrington, has said he wants to reduce the time for an application to be approved from at least a week to 48 hours.

His heart is in the right place, as I am sure is the Home Secretary's. The trouble is that they are riding a blundering, heartless leviathan called the Home Office, and so far seem incapable of imposing their will.

What has happened is shaming. Britain led the way in arming and supporting the Ukrainian government, but it is the laggard of Europe when it comes to helping that country's refugees. I am afraid much of the blame attaches to Priti Patel.
Drinking culture has given rise to a toxic 'mommy needs wine' mentality that makes it 'acceptable' for 'white, middle-class mothers' to reach for the booze at the end of a day but judges women of color who do the same, an author claims.

Psychotherapist Veronica Valli, who lives in the US, argues a normalization of binge drinking has led to women being 'culturally conditioned' into thinking there is 'nothing wrong with rewarding themselves with a drink' after they have 'survived' another day of parenthood.

She notes that the idea has been embraced by pop culture. Social media is full of slogans like 'kids happen, wine helps', while parents can buy baby clothes with messages like: 'I'm the reason mommy needs wine'.

However Valli, who is sober, argues that while white 'drunk mommies' are perceived as 'harmless', women of color are more likely to be judged and reported to social services.

Drinking culture has given rise to a dangerous 'mummy needs wine' mentality that makes parents think they need alcohol to 'survive' parenthood, an author claims. Stock image

'Cute memes and jokes about drunk mommies are seen as harmless fun when it's a middle-class white mom,' Valli writes in her new book Soberful.

'But how would a mother of color be perceived? Would a drunk mom of color in charge of her kids be seen the same way? How would she be judged?

'The idea that "Mommy needs wine" is something that is unquestioned for middle- and upper-class white women. Women of color and working-class women would not be afforded the same luxury.'

The author speaks to Grachelle Sherburne, a licensed clinical social worker, who agrees the notion that 'mothers need wine' to 'make it through motherhood' is an example of white privilege.

In soberful, pictured, Valli argues society has become too accepting of binge drinking culture

'If there was an organized group of women of color, socially drinking in a public place with their babies on their hips, the Department of Family and Children Services would be called immediately,' she claims.

'As a social worker, I have seen calls being made to Child Protective Services on families of color, but for the same situation, resources, and support be given instead to white families.'

Valli, who grew up in the UK, says she had years of 'self-destructive drinking' before ditching alcohol for good.

She claims the issue of the 'mommy needs wine' mentality is rooted in wider attitudes towards alcohol.

'Alcohol is deliberately associated with as many positive experiences and celebrations as possible,' she writes.

'Most people can't even imagine a birthday party, Christmas dinner, wedding, coworker socializing event, school reunion, or weekend without alcohol.

'I believe it's fair to argue that alcohol is appropriate in many of those situations, but there's an important distinction between appropriate use and required use. We can do all of those things sober without our joy or fun being in any way diminished.

'But the distinction between optional and required has been almost completely lost. We now view a significant number of events as inconceivable without alcohol.

'We have been persuaded that without alcohol, none of those events can be tolerable, let alone fun. We believe we need alcohol to really enjoy them.

'What bothers me most is the expansion of events and situations that alcohol is now being associated with.

The author claims a normalisation of binge drinking has led to women being 'culturally conditioned' into thinking there is 'nothing wrong with rewarding themselves with a drink'. Stock image

'I've even recently seen yoga studios offering yoga and wine eventsbecause a toxin-laden, dehydrating, central-nervous-system-depressing substance is exactly what you want with your yoga session.'

However Valli says that this attitude towards alcohol is particularly concerning with regards to parenthood, and argues that it is in fact a reflection of the lack of support offered to mothers who are struggling to cope.

'This new "Mommy needs wine" culture strikes me as a barely concealed primal scream. Women lack the support, childcare, and community that are necessary to raise a child,' she writes.

Psychotherapist Veronica Valli, pictured, shares her thoughts in a new book

'Being a mother is demanding, exhausting, and lonely. Which makes it easy to buy into the lie that alcohol is the best way to create the connection and relief mothers are craving.

'Mothers are desperate to hold on to some part of their former selves because motherhood is way, way harder than they expected. And if they can't get proper support from their society or spouses, at least they deserve a drink!'

The author argues this breezy approach to booze glosses over the damaging effects of alcohol that can impact children and families.

'What I take particular issue with is the dishonesty around drinking, especially binge drinking, which is deceitfully presented as fun and without consequences,' she continues.

'There's a myth that there are only two camps drinkers: those who can't handle it (full-blown alcoholics) and everyone else (the majority who can handle it just fine).

'In reality, many people drink to excess who don't fit the definition of an alcoholic, but they definitely face consequenceshangovers, embarrassment, depression, anxiety, spending too much money, loss of opportunities, or the dullness alcohol brings to your mind and soul.

'We use our spin-doctor skills to turn our consequences into a humorous story to entertain our friends, while burying our shame, embarrassment, and self-disgust.

'We have normalized abnormal drinking by brushing away its severe and frequent consequences. It's a collective and deliberate denial that alcohol causes any consequences whatsoever to the vast majority who can "handle it".

'Hangovers are shrugged away as insignificant and irrelevant. Alcohol is fun, something we need; it is our right. And it is now being inserted into all parenting activities.'

Soberful: Uncover a Sustainable, Fulfilling Life Free of Alcohol, by Veronica Valli, published by Sounds True Inc, 14.99
Ever felt a peculiar tug of sexual excitement for something a little unusual?

Could be you have a fetish. Lots of us do: studies show a high majority of people who enjoy sex have at least one!

A fetish means you have a heightened fascination for a specific object or non-genital body part and use it for sexual gratification.

Mention 'fetish' and most people think of something 'sexy': wanting a lover to wear a corset, stockings, high heels or a dog collar.

But people can develop sexual fetishes for virtually anything, says social psychologist Dr Justin Lehmiller. 'It's not a stretch to say that if you can think of it, somebody probably has a fetish for it.'

Cars, insects, statues, cats, they're all on the fetish list.

Two people can have the same fetish  a foot fetish, for instance  and experience it in completely different ways.

One person might like to smell or lick feet; another wants to touch and feel while a third might merely enjoy looking at them.

A fetish means you have a heightened fascination for a specific object or non-genital body part and use it for sexual gratification

How do fetishes develop?

Most experts in the field believe it's through an early sexual experience that involved high arousal (with or without orgasm) that included a particular object or experience.

If your schoolteacher who spanked you for doing something wrong aged six, wore a silky skirt when she did it, you might develop a fetish for silk clothing.

The spank gave you a sexual thrill and that was paired with the feeling of silky fabric.

Basically, it's about 'pairing' and 'conditioning'  both illustrated by the famous Pavlov's Dog study.

Tracey Cox (pictured) says people who have high arousability enjoy sex more than those who don't. Because they enjoy it so much, they're easy to please in bed. No bells and whistles needed for them! Even missionary-style, lights-off sex is exciting and enjoyable

Physiologist Ivan Pavlov conditioned dogs to salivate  something they usually do when expecting food - when they heard the ring of a bell. He would ring the bell, then feed the dogs meat powder which made them salivate. By repeating the experiment, the dogs started salivating when they heard the bell, before they'd been fed the meat powder, because they associated it with food.

If you pair something with a sexual reward, the person will become aroused by it.

Dr Jim Pfaus, a researcher in behavioural neuroscience used the same methods to link sexual arousal in rats to odours and clothing.

THIS IS HOW I BECAME SEXUALLY ATTRACTED TO When I asked people on my socials to tell me their personal stories of how they think their fetish started, I was astonished at how closely they all conformed to the psychological theory of conditioning. Medical staff and equipment 'I developed a medical fantasy fetish because I was constantly naked on the operating table with lots of urologists standing around, looking at me and discussing the best treatment. At the time, I hated it but now when I think of anything medical, it makes me feel aroused.' Pantyhose 'I have a tights/pantyhose fetish. It came to me as a young child. I always liked the look of them on women's legs. One night, I was being babysat at a friend of my Mum's house. A pair of worn pantyhose were left out. I pulled out my penis and started rubbing it against the nylons. Since then, I have always been sexually attracted to women wearing them. I also enjoy wearing them, along with panties. It's opened me up sexually to enjoying a lot of new experiences.' Boots 'I'm a certified sexuality coach and had an old client who had a boot fetish. He remembers wearing brand new wellington boots to the beach. He was standing too close to the edge of the sea, his mother told him to come back but too late! The cold waves crashed over his completely naked body and filled his boots with water. Seconds later, he felt a crack across his bottom, as his mother spanked him. He said the sensations of the cold waves, the shouting and warmth from the slap, make his senses pop and, from there on, he loves being naked in boots. His fetish started that day and because of this, he carved out a career for himself in handmade footwear.' Ankle jewellery 'I was on a beach in the South of France and it was the first time I'd seen a woman sunbaking topless. She wore a gold band around her ankle and I was intrigued. This forged a link between this type of jewellery and being bold and naughty.' Advertisement

He allowed virgin male rats to have sex with female rats wearing little 'jackets'. Later, when the scientists gave the males the chance to mate again, the rats preferred to have sex with the jacket-wearing female rats rather than 'naked' ones.

Previous studies have trained rats to associate a certain odour with sex (almond), with male rats preferring to mate with females 'wearing' that scent.

(If you think this all sounds rather odd, how about the fact that Dr Pfaus, when necessary, stimulated the clitoris of the female rats with a tiny probe. Who knew rats had a clitoris to start with!)

This is all well and good, I can hear you say, but are the results the same for humans?

Can you make a penny 'sexy'? In the 1960s, researchers decided to test the Pavlovian response theory and see if it applied to sex.

They asked male college students to view images of nude women and images of boots. Initially, the men weren't aroused by the image of the boots alone. But when the experiment was repeated over and over, they were.

The pairing of boots and nudity worked: the boots made them feel like sex.

Wondering if the boots-sex link was skewing the results (given lots of men find boots on women sexy), researchers in the 1990s decided they'd try to make men become aroused by something completely and utterly non-arousing.

They settled on an image of a jar of pennies  nothing sexual there! - and got the same result. Once the pennies were linked with images of sex, the images of the pennies alone got the male participants aroused.

So that's how fetishes form. But who gets them?

Are some people more likely to develop a fetish than others?

Yes: men are more likely to develop fetishes than women.

There are various societal reasons to explain this (women aren't as encouraged to explore 'kink' and more likely to be judged if they do).

Fetishes could also be linked to our personal 'arousability' level.

Some people are easy to arouse for sex, others require more intense physical stimulation.

Not surprisingly, people who have high arousability enjoy sex more than those who don't.

Because they enjoy it so much, they're easy to please in bed. No bells and whistles needed for them! Even missionary-style, lights-off sex is exciting and enjoyable.

If your arousal level is low, it takes a great deal of stimulation to get you even remotely interested in sex. It's very low on your list of 'Things I enjoy'unless something happens to finally jolt you out of sexual blah-land.

You swap a conservative lover for someone who's more adventurous. They want to try something you haven't  a tie-up game, spanking, hair-pulling - and suddenly your nerve-endings zing to life. 'So THAT'S what sex should feel like!', you think, exhilarated.

'I WAS PAID TO SATISFY THESE FETISHES' Nikki Sequoia is the partner of a US adult industry production company but also produced her own content and performed on webcam. These are some of the fetishes she was paid to satisfy and, in her words, how she did it. Smoking: They wanted me to smoke: sometimes nude, sometimes sultry, and in my pyjamas, as if I was their friend. Vore: Vore is the fetish of being consumed. On live webcam, it usually consisted of teasing: I would eat it/him. I'd dangle the webcam, as though it is them, and make chewing or swallowing noises, then say they are now in my belly. Giantess: It's common for a vore fetish to be paired with a giantess fetish, which is the act of you being large and the client being teeny tiny. Playing giantess is fun because there's unlimited scenarios when it comes to producing videos for clients  I got to use lots of camera tricks and creative video editing. I am five feet tall and got to feel so big and powerful fulfilling this fantasy. One shoe: This was my favourite. I stumbled across it by a client who commissioned me to make a video of me losing my shoe and then walking around the parking lot to find it. Hardly any nudity in this one but after producing the custom video, I eventually offered it for sale and it was so popular! One shoe fetishes became extremely popular for me. I loved creating random scenarios as to why in the world I would be somewhere doing something in one shoe. Stomach rumbles: I started coming up with the most ridiculous things I could create. These videos always did well. I did some compilation videos of the phone just sitting on my stomach, recording the sounds of my belly growling. Blinking, hiccups, breaking wind, chewing, teeth brushing, hair brushing, toenail clipping, ear pulling: Compilation videos of all of these everyday things were also really popular. Trans women burping: I also co-own a website that makes five minute videos of trans women models burping. It's doing well. The point of creating this site was to show young trans men and women that they can make fetish content without being the fetish. Advertisement

Whatever you just tried quickly becomes the favoured way for you to enjoy sex  and why wouldn't it!

The more you 'fight' a fetish, the more you want it.

Fetishes become powerful because they're labelled as 'kinky' and 'wrong' by society  making them even more appealing.

The more you ban yourself from enjoying something, the stronger the craving for it becomes.

'Vanilla' sex, the sort that most other couples are having, just can't compare to the naughty thrill you get from indulging your 'thing'. But that's bad. You shouldn't want it but you want it even more. In fact, you'd rather have no sex at all, rather than have sex without it.

Can watching porn create a fetish?

Porn can have a role in developing a fetish.

You're sexually aroused while watching porn, so it's pretty easy to 'pair' that arousal with something. You might start to notice your favourite porn video includes women who have a specific kind of tattoo. Suddenly Marnie  a friend you've never been attracted before  gets some ink and you feel a stirring that wasn't there before.

'Habituation' also comes into play: if you do something over and over, you get used to it and the thrill wears off. You then need to push to a new level to get the same kick.

This is often the theory touted to explain the draw of auto-erotic asphyxiation: choking yourself to get the euphoric 'high' that reportedly happens when the brain is starved of oxygen. Looking for that next level, some devotees push it so far, they die.

Dr Pfaus, the man who put the rats in jackets, finds it interesting that old style porn  the porn we used to watch in the beginning  doesn't do it for this generation.

Today's porn is far more graphic. This could be a case of too much of it being available, making us need more explicit images.

Can you get rid of a fetish?

Not really. Because they are developed in childhood and usually formed during our very earliest, most intense sexual experiences, they become part of our sexuality.

Most fetishes don't hurt people (unless the fetish is about pain and that's usually done with a consenting adult). Most are fairly harmless, albeit something traditional and conservative lovers can find hard to understand and relate to.

Current thinking is that instead of trying to eradicate a fetish that's causing you distress, you'll have more success learning how to accept and live with it.

That usually means finding a community of people who share the same fetish and learning to enjoy it, rather than be upset by it.

You'll find lots more practical information about sex on traceycox.com. You'll also find her two sex toy ranges, her blog and podcast, SexTok with Zibby and Tracey.
Products featured in this Mail Best article are independently selected by our shopping writers. If you make a purchase using links on this page, MailOnline may earn an affiliate commission.

For the days when pulling on a pair of jeans is less than appealing, but jersey leggings feel a little too basic, Amazon shoppers are reaching for these JOYSPELS Women's Bootcut Yoga Pants.

Made from a four-way stretch, bootcut leg and high-waist, the tummy control trousers are as comfortable as pyjamas but equally appropriate for the office.

The spandex-blend trousers have racked up hundreds of impressive reviews from shoppers who rave about their affordable price point and flattering fit that's both comfortable and smart. And right now they're on sale for 22.09 (was 30.99).

Fitting like a second skin, these yoga pants sit comfortably and flatteringly on the waist, hips and legs - they're now on sale for as little as 22.09 on Amazon

JOYSPELS Women's Bootcut Yoga Pants Designed with a high-rise, wide waistband, the JOYSPELS Womens Bootcut Yoga Pants offer you impressive tummy control for a supportive and flattering fit. And, as they've been designed with a 20 per cent Spandex blend, these fit like a second skin, sitting comfortably and flatteringly on the waist, hips and legs. Shop

The easy-to-wear JOYSPELS Women's Bootcut Yoga Pants tick boxes for comfort and style, offering the perfect amount of stretch for the ultimate comfort but flattering enough to wear out and about.

Thanks to the four-way stretch and breathable fabric, the pants are ideal for the gym, but shoppers have found that they are so 'comfortable and nice to wear' that they've been wearing them outside of workouts.

As one reviewer confirmed: 'high waisted and give a light support. Very comfortable pair of leggings. Perfect for the gym or heading to the shops.'.

If you've been looking for a perfect pair of everyday trousers that won't leave you feeling frumpy, then these are a great option.

Flattering and functional, the JOYSPELS Women's Bootcut Yoga Pants are a great addition to your wardrobe as well as your gym kit.

A versatile alternative to leggings, these will see you through any workouts thanks to the four-way stretch fabric, moisture-wicking material and a supportive thick waistband.

Better still, the support trousers have styling opportunities outside of the gym. Scores of shoppers have raved about how they are 'very flattering', with shoppers noting how they 'didn't feel any chafing' and enjoying how it 'hugs thighs and hips and flares out subtly'.

'They make you feel amazing!': Amazon shoppers are impressed with the quality, look and feel of the spandex-blend trousers, with many wearing them in and out of the gym

One impressed shopper left a five-star review for the JOYSPELS Women's Bootcut Yoga Pants writing: 'These leggings are amazing, I cannot fault them. They are made of really thick material, which is both warm and never see-through.

'They are so versatile as I have worn them to work and even on a night out. The hidden pockets are a lifesaver when I don't want to carry a bag. Not to mention a super flattering fit. 10/10.'

Another agreed, adding: 'Excellent. Dead comfortable to wear. I wear them for lounging around the house. And when doing pilates. They wash well. Love them. I am going to order another pair in a different colour.'

A third penned: 'I love these! I was doubtful when ordering but figured I'd try my luck, they fit like a glove, they're super soft and make you feel amazing!

'They're tight but not restricting and not see-through. I'm about to order more in other colours.'
Viewers were left horrified after a documentary charting the work of morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse showed footage of paedophiles lobbying on TV to have sex with children legalised.

Banned! The Mary Whitehouse Story, which aired last night on BBC Two, detailed how the former Midlands housewife raged against an increasingly permissive society in the 1960s and 70s.

In last night's epsiode, Author Ben Thompson, who wrote Whitehouse's 2013 biography Ban This Filth!, explained how on the edges of the sexual revolution were the few who deemed sex with children to be acceptable.

Viewers were then shown shocking footage of the Paedophile Information Exchange, Peter Bremner and the group's leader Steven Adrian Smith, appearing on Newsnight in 1983, claiming that children could consent to having sex with adults.

Founded in the '70s, the group advocated for the age of consent to be abolished and offered support to adults facing legal action for sexual acts with underage victims.

A year later, Bremner was found guilty of sending obscene material in the post and jailed for six months. He was cleared of incitement to commit sexual offences with children.

Shocking footage of two members of the Paedophile Information Exchange appearing on Newsnight in 1983 claiming that children could consent to having sex with adults emerged in a BBC documentary last night

Banned! The Mary Whitehouse Story, which aired last night on BBC, detailed how the former Midlands housewife raged against an increasingly permissive society in the 1960s and 70s

In one section of the interview, one member of the group said: 'I would be all in favour of children finding their own way sexually, but I think also adults have a part to play.'

One of the members was asked: 'How can a child of 12 make a mature judgement about something like sex for the first time, which they have no idea about and cannot possibly weigh the consequences of it?'

'A child is able to recognise a pleasurable experience,' said the paedophile. 'He is able to express consent and to recognise that this is something he wishes to continue, and a responsible, caring paedophile always refers to the wishes of the child.'

What was the Paedophile Information Exchange? The Paedophile Information Exchange was founded in Edinburgh in October 1974 by two gay campaigners, Michael Hanson and Ian Campbell Dunn, both of them leading members of the Scottish Minorities Group, which later became the Scottish Homosexual Rights Group. An outspoken, egocentric individual who worked as a town planner in Edinburgh, Campbell Dunn was a trade union official and Labour party activist. At one stage he was a local Labour council candidate, and, before his death, he had applied to become a candidate for the Scottish Parliament. He publicly denied he was a paedophile, claiming he had become involved in PIE because he believed in supporting minorities. Yet he allowed his flat to be used as the mailbox for an insidious journal called Minor Problems, which billed itself as a radical review for free inter-generational and child sexuality. The group also lobbied for the of the age of consent to be abolished, and said the law should only interfere in sexual activity if consent was not given. They offered support to adults facing legal action concerning sexual acts with underaged partners. It's believed there were up to 250 members, mostly from London and the South East, at any one time. Part of the group's strategy was to link up with other Left-wing campaign groups, and it infiltrated the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) and joined the National Council of Civil Liberties. The Paedophile Information Exchange was officially disbanded in 1984. By Leo McKinstry for MailOnline Advertisement

Other disturbing footage featuring in the documentary series showed a pornographer who said he 'specialised in the Lolita market' - meaning he supplied erotic content of girls aged between 15 and 17.

He went on to explain that within the 'international sex market' others referred to children from 15 to 12 as 'muppets' while children younger than 12 were known as 'nymphets'.

Author Ben Thompson, who wrote Whitehouse's 2013 biography Ban This Filth!, explained how on the edges of the sexual revolution were the few who deemed sex with children to be acceptable.

'On the extreme fringes of counter cultural endeavor, there was a view held by outwardly respectable people that any form of sexual expression was fine even if this involved children, he said.

'There was an organisation called the Paedophile Information Exchange, which functioned above ground and some people deemed to be an acceptable thing.

'There were some in the National Council of Civil Liberties who supported it, but Mary Whitehouse did not think it was acceptable and campaigned to reform laws to protect children from sexual exploitation.'

He said there are parts of the Protection of Children Act 1974 that he found 'absolutely stunning' weren't already covered by law.

He added: 'It wouldn't have passed when it did without Mary Whitehouse's involvement'.

Whitehouse was a Christian fundamentalist who harbored various bigoted views, campaigning against social liberalism, feminism and the gay liberation movement throughout her career.

However viewers were surprised at how modern the campaigner's views were when it came to pornography - which she considered a male commodity, made by men' - and the sexual exploitation of children.

She was instrumental in the introduction of the Protection of Children Act 1974, which included legislation against owning or distributing indecent images of children.

Writer and author Louise Perry, who is currently working on a book assessing the impacts of the sexual revolution, explained: 'The thing is with radical social transformations is there is no progressive arc of the universe bending towards justice.

'What there is is just conflict groups engaging and people winning and people losing, and this is what I find so interesting about Mary Whitehouse, is that in some senses she is on the wrong side of history.

The Paedophile Information Exchange was a British pro-paedophile activist group founded in 1974. The group campaigned for 'children's sexuality' and lobbied for the of the age of consent to be abolished

Other disturbing footage featuring in the documentary series shows a pornographer explaining that he 'specialises in the Lolita market' - meaning he supplied erotic content of girls aged between 15 and 17

'I think it's fairly clear she was genuinely homophobic, her use of archaic blasphemy laws - very few people now would see that in a positive light.

'But at the same time Mary Whitehouse was one of the few people of that era taking child sexual abuse seriously.'

Viewers were quick to take to Twitter with their views on the documentary, with many insisting the 'dead-eyed sleazemongers and child abuse advocates' Whitehouse came up against 'have not aged well'.

'Banned! The Mary Whitehouse Story on BBC2 is well worth a go. I remember being unkind about her puritanism when I was young,' wrote one.

Viewers were quick to take to Twitter with their views on the documentary, with many insisting the 'dead-eyed sleazemongers and child abuse advocates' Whitehouse came up against 'have not aged well'

'Maybe it's me getting older and though I think I'm still a very broadminded liberal, Mary was right about some things'.

Another said: 'I only saw the second BBC Mary Whitehouse programme but it made me view her in a more sympathetic light and above all, feel glad that I totally missed the 70s.

'The dead-eyed sleazemongers and child abuse advocates who were her antagonists haven't aged well.'

'This programme about Mary Whitehouse is fascinating. It seems she was quite prescient', wrote a third.

'Just finished watching The Mary Whitehouse documentary on BBC2 she was onto something but didn't do it the right way. Nowadays you'd probably call her woke, or lefty Funny how we are still having these same debates about media to this day and adding social media into the mix', said another viewer.
An association of Yongsan residents and environmentalists holds a press conference against President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol's plan to relocate the presidential office to the Yongsan District of Seoul, April 6. Yonhap





Residents and environmentalists protested Wednesday against President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol's plan to move the presidential office to Seoul's Yongsan District, lambasting it as being rushed and without public support.







Yoon has been pushing to move the presidential office out of Cheong Wa Dae and into the defense ministry compound in Yongsan, central Seoul, saying the relocation would help him connect better with the people.







Holding a press conference in front of the ministry compound earlier in the day, an association of Yongsan residents and environmentalists also claimed a rushed relocation could derail a national park establishment project in the neighborhood and cause traffic congestion.







"At a time when 58 percent of the people object to it, (Yoon's) manner of vowing to finish the relocation, a task that requires public consent, within 50 days is tantamount to a one-sided notice, rather than communication," a protester said, referring to a recent poll.







They said the relocation, if carried out in a rushed manner, could interrupt the complete execution of a project to build Yongsan Park, referring to a national park project being carried out in the neighborhood following the closure of a U.S. military base there.







They said the resolution of environmental issues stemming from the military base should be put ahead of the relocation project.







"The owners of this country are people, and the owners of Yongsan are its residents," an activist said. "(Yoon) should stop politics of no communication and instead listen to the voices of people." (Yonhap)






An Australian model who had a cancerous freckle cut out of the bottom of her foot has updated fans on her doctors' dire warning: She's ten times more likely to get another skin cancer now.

Dominique Elissa, 26, who is often spotted on Sydney's most famous Bondi Beach to Bronte coastal walk of a morning, had a freckle cut out of her skin on Tuesday last week after doctors' highlighted its abnormalities.

Today she told her 230,000 followers on Instagram that a biopsy concluded the freckle was 'pre-cancerous' - the earliest stage of a skin cancer legion - and if it had been left, could have been deadly.

Today she told her 230,000 followers on Instagram that a biopsy concluded the freckle was 'pre-cancerous' - the earliest stage of a skin cancer legion - and if it had been left, could have been deadly

'So many of you have asked about my results from the biopsy. It has warmed my heart to get your messages,' she said.

'I got the results today and it was pre-cancerous, which means that if it was left it would have turned into cancer. Thank goodness I caught it early. The incision took it all out.

'Now I have to go every six months for a check. They said my chances of getting skin cancer have gone up 10 times which is really frightening. It means i'm going to be so sun safe and be super careful.'

'So many of you have asked about my results from the biopsy. It has warmed my heart to get your messages,' she said

About 60 percent of people who have had one skin cancer in their life will be diagnosed with a second one within 10 years, a 2015 study by JAMA Dermatology reported.

Dominique shared a photo of the tiny, cancerous mole doctors found underneath her foot after a skin check last week.

'So I put on my Instagram Story that I can't train strenuously for the next three weeks... the reason for this is that about two weeks ago I got my skin checked and they checked all my spots,' she said at the time.

Dominique Elissa, 26, who is often spotted on Sydney's most famous Bondi Beach to Bronte coastal walk of a morning, had a freckle cut out of her skin on Tuesday after doctors' highlighted its abnormalities

'They were all fine and then there was the tiniest one under my foot. Honestly it was the size of a little freckle like that and it was of concern,' she explained, pointing to a mark on her forearm.

'So yesterday they had to remove it. I had to get two stitches so I can't walk properly for three weeks. I can't do intense training which yes, is an inconvenience for me.

'However, I'm so grateful that I caught it early and I'll get my results in a week. I just wanted to say, go and get your skin checked. Wear sunscreen on your hands and under your feet.

'Just be careful in the sun because it's not worth it at the end of the day.'

While the young model doesn't yet know what type of early stage cancer it could be, it has certainly been a stark reminder of how powerful the sun is Down Under (pictured showing the size of the spot)

It has certainly been a stark reminder for the young model about how powerful the sun is Down Under

Melanoma is the most common cancer for the 20 to 39 age group to get in Australia, partly because of our outdoor lifestyle and harsh climate.

It happens after the DNA in skin cells is damaged (typically due to harmful UV rays) and then not repaired so it triggers mutations that can form malignant tumours.

Dominique isn't the only woman who has opened up about their brush with cancer.

Melanoma is the most common cancer for the 20 to 39 age group to get in Australia, partly because of our outdoor lifestyle and harsh climate

A lifestyle blogger who lost her father to melanoma in 2019 issued a warning about the deadly disease after finding a tiny cancerous spot on her own leg a year later.

Louise Hay visited Bondi Junction's Skin Cancer Clinic in Sydney for a routine check of her moles only to be told that one very insignificant-looking freckle was actually a dangerous cancer.

'This time last year I lost my dad to melanoma, so ever since then I've been super vigilant about getting my skin checked,' she said in an Instagram Story at the time.

'Last week was my one year check up and they found a little mole on my leg which they removed and sent off to get checked, to find out what it was, and yesterday I found out it was a melanoma.'

Louise Hay visited Bondi Junction's Skin Cancer Clinic in Sydney three months ago for a routine check of her moles only to be told that one very insignificant-looking freckle was actually a dangerous cancer

Louise was told the spot was graded a 'stage zero', meaning it's just on the surface of her skin and can easily be removed. She had caught it early (pictured)

Louise was told the spot was graded a 'stage zero', meaning it's just on the surface of her skin and can easily be removed. She had caught it early.

'This is great, they can just cut it out and it will be fine. I just got it removed today. I just wanted to take this opportunity to remind everyone to get their skin checked,' she said.

'I never would have thought it would happen to me until my dad was diagnosed and it's crazy to think I would never have gone for a skin check and found the melanoma that I did had my dad not gotten sick.'

Louise's father Donald Hay, who built the company Hayco into one of the world's largest brush makers, died on July 17 from melanoma at the age of 76.

Louise's father Donald Hay (pictured with his daughter), who built the company Hayco into one of the world's largest brush makers, died on July 17 from melanoma at the age of 76

Louise shared the cut doctors had to make in her leg to remove the freckle on Instagram

His daughter believes he is still 'looking after me' from 'up there' after her own brush with cancer became a story of survival and awareness.

On her social media page Louise posted an image of what the mole looked like on June 5, and later, the large cut doctors had to make to remove it.

'I know everyone thinks they are invincible and it'll never happen to them but... just go and get your skin checked. Put a date in the diary once a year with your girlfriends,' she said.

After posting the images the Sydney socialite was inundated with messages of gratitude, with many of her followers booking in their own skin checks as a result.

'So many of you have gone and booked skin checks,' she acknowledged in a separate post.

'This was my annual check up... where they found the mole that looked funny. I didn't see that there was anything wrong with that mole, it just looked like a freckle to me, honestly it was so small. It looked completely normal.'

Louise encouraged her fans to follow the page Call Time On Melanoma, which works to dispel some of the myths about sun protection and how much sunscreen you need to apply to be safe.

She encouraged her fans to follow the page Call Time On Melanoma , which works to dispel some of the myths about sun protection and how much sunscreen you need to apply to be safe

While most people believe the hole in the ozone layer above Australia is the sole cause of our high rates, it's actually got more to do with migration.

Most Australians have the wrong type of skin for their environment. Our country has been populated by people with fairer skin types whose ancestors come from much less sunny climates, like the United Kingdom.

Having less protective pigmentation leaves our skin cells vulnerable to the DNA-damaging rays from the sun, cancerwa reported.
Jacinda Ardern has been praised for 'keeping it real' with her social media followers after she admitted to suffering a hilarious wardrobe malfunction.

The New Zealand Prime Minister posted a photo to Instagram of the questionable choice of footwear she was forced to wear to Parliament on Monday.

Alongside the image of her mud-splattered gumboots the mother explained to her 1.7million followers she had grabbed the pair of wellies in the dark.

'Ahhh daylight savings,' the prime minister wrote on Monday.

'Poor Clarke was up multiple times with our small person, so when they both were finally getting some sleep at 6am and I realised retrieving my shoes would wake them, there was only one option. Gumboots to work.'

Alongside the image of her mud-splattered gumboots (pictured) the mother explained to her 1.7million Instagram followers she had grabbed the pair of wellies in the dark

Ms Ardern, 41, (pictured) and her partner of eight years Clarke Gayford, 44, welcomed their daughter Neve Te Aroha, in June 2018

Social media followers were quick to applaud the prime minister for being so relatable, with other empathising with the realities of being a working mum.

'I cannot tell you how much this sort of update makes me laugh. And absolutely adore your honesty,' one woman commented.

'The benefit of being in charge. Did nobody get the boots memo?, another joked.

'You are one amazing family working together as a team!' another said.

Ms Ardern, 41, and her partner of eight years Clarke Gayford, 44, welcomed their daughter Neve Te Aroha, in June 2018.

The prime minister remained working right up to her three-year-old's birth and returned to work after just six weeks of maternity leave.

Ms Ardern is only the second elected female leader to have a child while in office and the first since Benazier Bhutto in 1990.

The prime minister remained working right up to her three-year-old's birth and returned to work after just six weeks of maternity leave (pictured is the family in September, 2018)

Social media followers were quick to applaud the prime minister (pictured in March, 2022) for being so relatable, with other empathising with the realities of being a working mum

'It must be great having such a devoted loving father/partner. There should be more stay-at-home dad's I reckon,' a fourth said.

It's not the first time the working mother-of-one has been applauded for her honesty and ability to multitask as both a leader and a caregiver.

In March 2020, the PM posted an photo of her shirt smeared in nappy cream, telling her followers she'd 'spare everyone the details' of the mishap.

'Why is it only when you are the furtherest you could possibly be from a change of clothes before you notice that you have nappy cream on you?' she wrote.

One follower said she shouldn't beat herself up for missing the nappy cream as she left for work in the morning because she would have been 'too busy being the world's best prime minister'.

In March 2020, the PM posted an photo of her shirt smeared in nappy cream, telling her followers she'd 'spare everyone the details' of the mishap (pictured)

In January, Ms Ardern (pictured with her daughter Neve in February 2021) confirmed she would have to delay her own wedding after putting all of New Zealand on Covid Red Alert

In January, Ms Ardern confirmed she would have to delay her own wedding after putting all of New Zealand on Covid Red Alert and bringing in harsh restrictions.

She said the long-awaited wedding would be postponed due to the latest outbreak because she 'was no different to other New Zealanders'.

'Such is life,' she told reporters during a press conference in which she reiterated the country was not entering a lockdown.

'My wedding will not be going ahead, but I just join many other New Zealanders who have had an experience like that as a result of the pandemic.'

The PM was due to wed her television host fiance Clarke Gayford this summer in Gisborne on the North Island after becoming engaged in early 2019.
A woman has revealed how she spent $25,000 cloning her dead cat because she believed the pet was her soulmate.

Speaking to Alison Hammond and Dermot O'Leary on ITV's This Morning, Kelly Anderson, 32, from Texas, said she was distraught when her five-year-old pet, Chai, died in 2017.

Kelly described Chai as 'the closest thing she could describe to a soulmate', adding:' I lost her very young, so when she passed I remembered a conversation I had with my room mate about cloning and I reached out to ViaGen Pets. Belle came into my life just last year.'

As she held Chai's clone Belle on her lap, she went on to describe how the process of cloning her animal took four years - but it was 'definitely worth the wait.'

Kelly Anderson, from Texas, spent $25,000 cloning her dead cat Chai because she believed the pet was her soulmate (pictured, with Chai's clone Belle)

Biologically her new cat Belle (left) is part of Chai (right), because they share the same DNA due to the cloning process

Biologically her new cat Belle is part of Chai, because they share the same DNA due to the cloning process.

ViaGen Pets, based in Texas, is a division of TransOva Genetics, that offers animal cloning services to pet owners.

ViaGen Pets has been cloning horses and livestock for 17 years, three and a half years ago they started cloning cats and dogs.

Cloning a dog costs $50,000 while a cat is now $35,000 - the company recently increased the fee by $10,000 to cover rising costs.

Kelly explained that the full process took nearly four years from start to finish, however she admitted that isn't the 'normal length of time'

The difference in price is due to dogs going into heat only once or twice a year while a cat's reproductive cycle is much more frequent.

To clone a pet, ViaGen Pets requires at least two skin samples to collect the DNA.

Most skin samples are taken from the belly or the inside of a pet's leg.

These samples are then chilled with ice packs and sent to a laboratory where they are placed in an incubator and cells start to grow.

Kelly explained how her new cat Belle is her own creature and she never expected her to be exactly like Chai

She went onto say she also adopted two other cats but she wanted to clone Chai (pictured) because she felt she 'didn't have that time with her' after she died young

Within two to four weeks, there are millions of cells.

HOW ARE CATS CLONED? The process involves obtaining at least two skin samples from a living cat or a cat five days after it has died. In the next step of cloning, a donor egg is taken from a donor animal. Eggs are collected from the egg donor through a procedure called 'flushing' and the nuclei of the eggs, which contain DNA of the egg donor, is removed. Then donor cell obtained from the skin sample is then injected into the nucleated egg and the two cells are 'fused' together. This fusion procedure produces a cloned embryo that is transferred into a surrogate cat. The whole process takes less than a day but comes with a hefty price tag. Dogs can also be cloned, but its pricier because dogs go into heat only once or twice a year while a cat's reproductive cycle is much more frequent. Cloning a dog costs $50,000 while a cat is now $35,000 - but ViaGen Pets recently increased the fee by $10,000 to cover rising costs. Advertisement

The cells are harvested and placed in vials which are frozen in liquid nitrogen tanks.

This genetic preservation costs $1600 with an annual $150 fee for storage.

In the next step of cloning, a donor egg is taken from a donor animal.

The nucleus of the egg is removed so there is no DNA and it is replaced with one of the millions of cells that have been grown in the laboratory.

The embryo is implanted into a surrogate animal who gives birth to kittens genetically identical to the original cat.

Kelly explained that the full process took nearly four years from start to finish, however she admitted that isn't the 'normal length of time'.

Speaking about the process of cloning, the pet owner said: 'They take a skin biopsy and they recommend to do it while your pet is still alive.'

However she did admit if you wait until after your pet has already passed away then you need to 'do it quite quickly because the cells start dying off.'

When asked by Alison if Belle feels like the same cat, Kelly explained: 'She's her own cat' and she 'never expected her to be Chai.'

She continued: 'I never wanted her to be Chai, to me that felt like a replacement.

'It's a piece of Chai so that's what matters the most to me.'

She went onto say she also adopted two other cats but she wanted to clone Chai because she felt she 'didn't have that time with her' after she died young.

Kelly received a lot of trolling online after deciding to clone her cat but the pet lover said people are mostly concerned about how she 'spends her money.'

She explained: '$25,000 is definitely a lot of money but people spend that on cars everyday or more and no one says anything about that.'

Meanwhile the animal-lover also revealed she has been trolled online about how she 'spends her money'
A mother who had no idea she was pregnant was stunned after giving birth to her third baby alone in the shower.

Dimitty Bonnet, 28, from Campbelltown, New South Wales, was left dumfounded when she felt the sudden urge to push in the shower - catching the baby's head between her legs.

She had stopped trying to have children after giving birth to Nate, five, and Darci, three, with husband Jason and assumed her extra weight was due to piling on the pounds during lockdown.

The mum had regular periods and had even done a negative pregnancy test a few weeks before the surprise birth in late February this year.

Dimitty Bonnet, 28, from Campbelltown, New South Wales, had no idea she was pregnant before giving birth to her third baby alone in the shower

'My weight has fluctuated my whole life, so I didn't think anything of it when I put on a few pounds', she said 'I assumed it was just a bit of lockdown weight, and it was nothing too noticeable.

'I'd flown on a plane a month before, and even had an x-ray after a rugby injury six weeks before I gave birth.

'There was no part of me that thought I could be expecting - to be sure I even took a test a month before giving birth and it came back negative.'

Admin manager Dimitty had no idea that anything was wrong until her stomach started to feel 'a bit off' the evening before she gave birth.

The mum had regular periods and had even done a negative pregnancy test a few weeks before the surprise birth in late February this year. She is pictured four months pregnant

Dimitty and Jason named their surprise baby boy, Harvey Eric Barry Timmins (pictured at home). He weighed 6lbs 8oz

'The evening before he was born, I just felt a bit yuck. My stomach felt a bit off, so I put the kids to bed and got an early night myself', she said.

'I woke up around 1am and felt so uncomfortable. It was like I really needed the toilet, but I wasn't able to go.

'The pain started to get worse, so I decided to have a shower to make myself feel better.

'I didn't want to wake my husband, so I kept the light off and showered in the dark. I felt a sudden urge to push, and the next thing I knew, I was holding a baby's head.'

Despite her shock and confusion, Dimitty managed to sit down on the floor in the dark and after a final push her baby was born in the early hours of the morning.

Dimitty had stopped trying to have children after giving birth to Nate, five, and Darci, three, with husband Jason - however the children were thrilled to have a new sibling

After giving birth Dimitty called for Jason, who was shocked to find his wife covered in blood cradling their newborn son. Jason and Dimitty are pictured together

She called for her husband, Jason, who rushed into the bathroom and was shocked to find his wife covered in blood cradling their newborn son.

The pair called for an ambulance, which arrived around 15 minutes later and helped Dimitty deliver the placenta.

After the paramedics cut the cord they took the family to Campbelltown Hospital, New South Wales, where the pair were monitored for 24 hours.

Dimitty and Jason named their surprise baby boy Harvey Eric Barry Timmins. He weighed 6lbs 8oz.

'It was such a huge shock that the first few days are a bit of a blur,' Dimitty said. 'My older kids were so excited when we told them, particularly my daughter as she's always wanted to be a big sister.

'She's so caring and has taken on her new role really well.

After the paramedics cut the cord they took the family to Campbelltown Hospital, New South Wales, where the pair were monitored for 24 hours. Baby Harvey is pictured in hospital

Dimitty and Jason named their surprise baby boy Harvey. He is pictured at home after being monitored in hospital

'Our family and friends have all been so supportive as we weren't prepared at all  in fact we'd thrown away all our old baby stuff a month before.

'But everyone came together to make sure we had a pram, clothes, nappies, and a bed for him.

'It took us about 24 hours to come up with a name for him, but we chose Harvey after Jason's grandfather, which is really special.

'My other two pregnancies were so different so I never thought something like this could happen to me. It's taken my brain and body a bit of time to process what's happened, but we are finding our feet and feeling more settled now.

'He's such an amazing baby and we feel so lucky to have him join the family, even if it was quite a shock at first.'

Her husband Jason added: 'He's a precious little man but it was the biggest shock of my life.'
Princess Diana's biographer Tina Brown has blasted the 'offensive' narrative that the late royal was manipulated into giving her Panorama interview with Martin Bashir.

Writing in Vanity Fair ahead of the release of her new royal book, The Palace Papers, Brown, 68, said the Princess of Wales was 'pleased' with her 1995 Panorama interview with the BBC presenter where she opened up about her marital issues with Prince Charles.

A 2021 inquiry found that the BBC fell short of 'high standards of integrity and transparency' over the interview, and that Bashir used deceitful methods in order to obtain an audience with Diana.

However, Tina, who penned The Diana Chronicles in 2007, said the Princess of Wales didn't 'have a bad word to say about Martin Bashir' before her death in July 1997.

Princess Diana's biographer Tina Brown, 68, said it is 'offensive' to say that the mother of Prince William and Prince Harry was a manipulated by Martin Bashir into giving her 1995 Panorama interview

'I dont subscribe to the now pervasive narrative that Diana was a vulnerable victim of media manipulation, a mere marionette tossed about by malign forces beyond her control,' she said.

'While strongly sympathetic to her sons pain, I find it offensive to present the canny, resourceful Diana as a woman of no agency, as either a foolish, duped child or the hapless casualty of malevolent muckrakers.'

The author went on to say that Gulu Lalvani, a wealthy Pakistani-born British entrepreneur who briefly dated Diana before her death, told her the late royal was happy with the Bashir interview.

Lalvani claimed she had no regrets about speaking to the BBC presenter because it served her purpose.

A 2021 inquiry by Lord Dyson found Bashir, pictured in the 1990s, had used 'deceitful' methods in order to secure the interview with the Princess of Wales

According to Brown, Diana wanted to be portrayed as a betrayed woman in the eyes of the British public before her divorce to Charles the following year.

The author recalled how opinion pools were 92 per cent in favour of Diana after the interview aired.

The author also claims that Diana breached her own privacy several times in order to make the men in her life jealous.

For instance, she claims it was Diana who tipped off the photographer Mario Brenna about her holiday in Corsica with her lover Dodi Fayed, to send a message to Hasnat Khan, a heart surgeon and the true object of her affection.

Lalvani also suggested that Diana used him to make Hasnat Khan jealous and potentially tipped off the paparazzi about their dates.

The Palace Papers, by Tina Brown, will be released next week on April 12

Brown, who met Diana in person in 1997, six weeks before her death, said she was impressed with how media-savvy the Princess was, and how she wooed her and Vogue Editor Anna Wintour, who was present at the same lunch meeting.

She said the royal sucked them in by talking about the loneliness she felt, before expertly switching to how she hoped to used her fame to promote the causes she cared about.

She went on to say that the camera was Diana's weapon of choice, and that though it could not be denied that Princess Diana was hounded by the press, it was also true that she relished media attention.

After the 2021 Lord Dyson inquiry into the BBC's handling of the 1995, Panorama interview, Prince William said in a statement

'It is my view that the deceitful way the interview was obtained substantially influenced what my mother said.

'The interview was a major contribution to making my parents relationship worse and has since hurt countless others.

'It brings indescribable sadness to know that the BBCs failures contributed significantly to her fear, paranoia, and isolation that I remember from those final years with her,' he added.

Meanwhile, Prince Harry, 37, said the 'ripple effect of a culture of exploitation and unethical practices' ultimately took his mother's life and is still 'widespread today.'
Prince Charles had enjoyed a busy day in Cumbria today, where he visited one of the UK's poshest service stations

The 73-year-old Prince of Wales toured Tebay Services' shop, located by the M6, in the Eden district of Cumbria, to mark the 50th anniversary of the outlet, which even has its own farm, kitchen and butchers attached.

He was treated to some of the cheese produced at the shop's farm, and got to meet some of the local producers working with Tebay, which is one of the establishments that benefits from the support of his Prince's Countryside Fund.

During his visit, the heir-to-the-throne seemed very amused as he unveilled a plaque commemorating the service's station's milestone, which was covered in sheep wool.

After his visit to the service station, Charles headed to the Newton Rigg agricultural college.

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The 73-year-old Prince of Wales toured Tebay Services' shop, located in the Eden district of Cumbria, to mark its 50th anniversary

Prince Charles enthusiastically sampled the local food sold at the Tebay Services, which has its own kitchen, and seemed to particularly like the cheese it produces

One of the wool producers working at the shop proudly showed her work to an impressed Charles

For today's event, smart dresser Charles donned a light grey suit with a light pink shirt and a red and blue tie, paired with an orange and gold pocket square.

The royal had also pinned a badge to the lapel of his jacket for his Prince's Countryside Fund, a programme of which he is patron that aims to support sustainable farming with grants programme.

Tebay Services is one of the businesses that benefit from this programme.

The Prince of Wales was as cheerful as ever as he met with the service shop's staff and some of the producers who work with it.

For today's event, the Prince of Wales donned a grey lined suit with a light blue shirt and a red and blue tie

Prince Charles seemed delighted with one of the samples of cheese he got to taste during his visit

He enthusiastically sampled the local cheese during his visit, chatting with the producers behind the counter.

Charles was his usual chatty self has he hopped from one stand to the others and exchanged pleasantries with the producers who patiently waited to introduce their produce to him.

He seemed particularly impressed with a sample of grey wood one of the producers presented him with.

The Prince of Wales moved on to unveil a plaque during his visit, which was covered with wool rather than a basic piece of cloth

As he unveilled a plaque commemorating his visit and the shop's 50th anniversary, Charles seemed very amused by the fact it was covered in sheep wool

The senior royal was left in stitches when came time to unveil a plaque commemorating his visit.

The Prince of Wales seemed to be very amused by the fact the plaque had been covered with sheep wool rather than a basic cloth.

After he unveilled the plaque, he burst into laughter, the wool still in hand, as the rest of the attendees chuckled.

Founded in 1972 by John and Barbara Dunning, now in their eighties, when the M6 was built across their farm, Britain's first family-run service station has been building a faithful following, with some customers travelling hundreds of miles to sample their Sunday Roast.

It sells Ramen noodle broth, hand-baked bread and marmalade available in Fortnum & Mason to customers

Tebay Services as a lot to celebrate this year, as it was awarded the Specialist Food Retailer of the Year 2022.

After his visit to the service station, Charles headed to the Newton Rigg agricultural college where he met with faculty members

A relaxed Prince of Wales signed a book during a meeting with the trustees of the agriculture college
Four of the ballerinas who are suing Boston Ballet's former star dancer and her instructor husband for sexual assault and rape have spoken out about the horrific abuse that they allegedly faced at the hands of the 'evil' couple.

Last year, five different women filed a joint lawsuit against dance teacher Mitchell Taylor Button, now 36, and his prima ballerina wife Dusty Button, now 32 - with one claiming that he 'tied her up in a gun-filled room' and forced her to have sex with him while she 'sobbed and screamed' for help.

The explosive complaint claimed that Dusty - who was a wildly popular dance influencer at the time - would befriend the young girls and promise to help them make them famous.

She would then introduce them to her husband, who allegedly forcefully sexually assaulted them - sometimes, as Dusty would hold them down.

'The Buttons abused their positions of power and prestige in the dance community to garner the loyalty and trust of young dancers,' the lawsuit stated.

Last year, five different women filed a joint lawsuit against dance teacher Mitchell Taylor Button and his wife Dusty Button (pictured together in May 2018)

The explosive complaint claimed that Dusty (pictured) - would befriend them and introduce them to her husband, who allegedly forcefully sexually assaulted them

Professional dancers Sage Humphries (left) and Gina Menichino (right) were the first to speak out, filing a civil complaint against Mitchell on July 28, 2021, in US District Court in Nevada

Months later, three more women - Rosie DeAngelo (left), Danielle Gutierrez (right), and a third who is anonymous - came forward and filed an expanded lawsuit against Dusty and Mitchell

'The Buttons then exploited those relationships to coerce sexual acts by means of force and fraud.'

The 19-page federal complaint did not name Dusty as a defendant, but as a 'non-party co-conspirator.'

Now, four out of five of the women have detailed the terrible abuse that they allegedly suffered from the Buttons during a shocking new interview with Cosmopolitan. Dusty is pictured in 2015

Professional dancers Sage Humphries and Gina Menichino were the first to speak out, filing a civil complaint against Mitchell on July 28, 2021, in US District Court in Nevada, in which they accused him of sexually and emotionally abusing them years apart.

Then, months later, three more women - Rosie DeAngelo, Danielle Gutierrez, and a third who has stayed anonymous - came forward and filed an expanded lawsuit against Dusty and Mitchell.

Now, four out of five of the women have detailed the terrible abuse that they allegedly suffered from the Buttons during a shocking new interview with Cosmopolitan, while opening up about the long-lasting effects it has had on them.

Sage, now 24, met Dusty in 2017 at the Boston Ballet when she was 18 years old. The two women became friends, and when Dusty invited Sage over to her apartment one evening, she met Mitchell for the first time.

At the time, Mitchell offered to help run Sage's social media accounts. She was at the height of her career as a dancer and had recently gained thousands of followers, and was unsure of how to navigate her newfound fame.

She agreed, and he soon gained access to her phone, email, and accounts. He then began 'monitoring her communication and infiltrating everything,' Cosmopolitan reported.

The couple then allegedly began controlling almost every aspect of Sage's life, including where she lived, who she talked to, and what she wore.

'This was calculated. These people are predators. This is a pattern,' she told Cosmo.

'I used to think ballet was a safe place. Now, its interesting to me how the most evil people hide in plain sight, where no one would suspect.'

Sage (pictured), now 24, met Dusty in 2017 at the Boston Ballet when she was 18 years old. The two women became friends, and Dusty eventually introduced her to Mitchell

The couple allegedly began controlling almost every aspect of Sage's life, including where she lived, who she talked to, and what she wore

The lawsuit alleged that on multiple occasions, Dusty held down Sage so she could not move while her husband violently penetrated her without her consent, including in her sleep

'The Buttons began to insist that Sage sleep at their apartment on a regular basis,' the lawsuit alleged. 'The Buttons instructed Sage to wear their clothes and style her hair to match Dustys hair.'

She was also expected to drink heavily, according to the complaint.

'If Sage ever attempted to distance herself or disobey the Buttons, they would threaten to revoke their financial support and sabotage her career,' the complaint continued.

'Any time Sage attempted to develop other friendships and spend time apart from the Buttons, the Buttons would become enraged.'

The lawsuit claimed that on multiple occasions, Dusty held down Sage so she could not move while her husband violently penetrated the young woman without her consent, including in her sleep.

On one occasion, Mitchell allegedly forced Sage to preform oral sex on him as punishment for having lunch with a group of women.

Another complaint claims that when the Buttons and Sage were lying on a mattress together watching a movie, Mitchell sexually assaulted his young protege after his wife dozed off next to them.

The lawsuit alleged that the Buttons insisted that Sage 'prioritize them over her family,' and that they even joined her on a trip to California to visit her parents once 'so she could not be alone' with them.

Years earlier, Rosie, now 31, met Mitchell while he was a teacher and she was a student at the Centerstage Dance Academy in Tampa, Florida (pictured)

Eventually, he allegedly began sexually assaulting her, and Rosie explained to Cosmo that Mitchell manipulated her into believing that what he was doing was OK

She eventually switched schools to get away from him, and now, she is still dancing. She currently lives in NYC and works as the artistic director of a small performance collective

'One evening, Sage went to the Buttons apartment after rehearsal, and the apartment was completely dark,' read the complaint.

'Dusty and [Mitchell] demanded that Sage put on a spandex suit that covered her entire body, including her mouth and eyes, and left only her nose and ears exposed.

'Dusty led Sage into a room of the Buttons apartment that had an arsenal of guns hanging on the wall.

'Sage told the Buttons she was scared. They instructed her to lie down on a table, and they tied up her arms and legs so she was unable to move. The Buttons then sexually assaulted Sage.

'Sage began sobbing and screaming, begging the Buttons to untie her. The Buttons told her she was being weak and stupid.'

After that incident, Mitchell allegedly began having sex with Sage 'whenever he pleased.' During sex, the dance instructor allegedly would 'choke, slap, and pull' Sage's hair, leaving her covered in bruises.

He claimed it wasnt illegal because he wasnt that much older... Its the easier thing to trust, when youre a teenager and learning how to love people Rosie DeAngelo

'The Buttons also regularly used painful sex toys on Sage and would tie Sage up in order to have sex with her,' the lawsuit contended. 'Sage never consented to these violent sex acts.'

By May 2017, the Buttons allegedly forced Sage to live with them full time. They did not charge her rent and paid for her meals and personal expenses, rendering her financially dependent on the couple.

Eventually, Sage's parents became concerned with her living situation and forced her to return home.

In August 2017, the young dancer sought and received abuse protection orders against the Buttons.

Years earlier, Rosie, now 31, met Mitchell while he was a teacher and she was a student at the Centerstage Dance Academy in Tampa, Florida. At the time, she was in her mid-teens and he was in his early 20s.

She said their relationship began innocently - with him insisting on taking her out to meals and adding sexual innuendos into their conversation.

But eventually, he allegedly began forcefully sexually assaulting her. Rosie explained to Cosmo that Mitchell manipulated her into believing that what he was doing was OK so she wouldn't tell anyone about it.

'He claimed it wasnt illegal because he wasnt that much older,' Cosmopolitan reported.

However, she was left feeling 'disoriented' and 'confused.'

'Its the easier thing to trust, when youre a teenager and learning how to love people,' she told them.

Dani (pictured), now 31, was 17 when she first came in contact with Mitchell. She also met him while she was taking classes at Centerstage

Mitchell allegedly groomed Dani (pictured as a kid) for years, and when she graduated high school and went off to college, he convinced her to stay local so that they could be together

She said that throughout their relationship, he would often scream at her in public, and that she even felt scared for her life at times. She is pictured in 2021 with her husband and daughter

She eventually switched schools to get away from him, and now, she is still dancing. She currently lives in New York City and works as the artistic director of a small performance collective. She also teaches yoga to elementary kids.

Dani, now 31, was 17 when she first came in contact with Mitchell. She met him while she was taking classes at Centerstage, and she recalled Mitchell telling her that she was like a 'little sister' to him.

'I had a perfect childhood, wonderful parents - I never knew people like this existed,' she told the mag.

And because she didnt know, she 'didnt recognize the warning signs.'

Mitchell allegedly groomed Dani for years, and when she graduated high school and went off to college, he convinced her to stay local so that they could be together.

She said that throughout their relationship, he would often scream at her in public, and that she even felt scared for her life at times.

She is now speaking out in the hopes that it will educate other young girls about the warning signs of a predator.

'Where are the good people?' she asked. 'As much as we see all these horrible stories and all these peoples trauma, theres still not enough education about what to look out for.

'Like, "These are the steps, and if you find yourself in this situation, you need to get out. Now."

'Every time I talk about this, its scary - I have to gather up my strength and bravery and keep reminding myself of the bigger purpose.

'I want people to be educated enough not to have the same experience.'

Now, she teaches dance and makes sure to warn her own students about potential red flags.

Gina (pictured), now 25, was just 13 when she was allegedly abused by Mitchell. She also met him at Centerstage, and recalled being in awe of him at first

'Mitchell took a special interest in Gina and would single her out for special attention and opportunities in dance class,' the lawsuit against Mitchell and Dusty claimed

Mitchell allegedly convinced Gina that if she told anyone about their relationship, it would ruin her career - leaving her terrified

She added: 'If the kids have something - anything - going on in their lives, they know Ill help them.'

Gina, now 25, was just 13 when she was allegedly abused by Mitchell. She also met him at Centerstage, and recalled being in awe of him at first.

That's why when he chose her for a solo performance she was honored.

'Its the first memory of when the grooming began,' she recalled to Cosmopolitan.

'Mitchell took a special interest in Gina and would single her out for special attention and opportunities in dance class, such as allowing her to assistant teach his dance classes,' the lawsuit against Mitchell and Dusty claimed.

On her 14th birthday, he gifted her a teddy bear that he sprayed with his cologne so that she could feel like she was 'sleeping' with him.

My trauma, my PTSD - Its always there Gina Menichino

'The thing about being a young dancer is were trained to seek approval,' she explained to Cosmo.

'You dont come out of the womb knowing you shouldnt be touched or talked to like that by someone twice your age. I know now. I didnt then.'

Mitchell allegedly convinced Gina that if she told anyone about their relationship, it would ruin her career - leaving her terrified.

'No one really helped me,' she said.

In 2018, Gina reportedly filed a police report against Mitchell, but after an investigation took place, it was decided that there wasn't enough evidence to go to court.

Now, although she is doing much better, she admitted: 'My trauma, my PTSD - Its always there.'

Through their attorney, the Buttons denied the 'baseless' allegations detailed in the lawsuit, calling them 'false and fraudulent,' when it was first filed in July.

The legal case is still ongoing, and Dusty's employment with the Boston Ballet was terminated in May 2017.
The question may have sounded innocent to others, but I knew it was laced with subtext. So how is Nick? Alice asked a mutual friend of ours. Is he still deciding what he wants to do with his life?

Now Nick is my son. Over the years hes had a few issues. Nothing major. He didnt do well at school, found education a challenge, and failed to get a good degree.

Now 27, he has a low-level job in construction he enjoys but doesnt love. He doesnt tick the usual middle-class boxes  exam results to boast about and a high-paid graduate role.

Sophie Bates reveals why she felt she had to ghost her friend of over 40 years after she found out she had been comparing their children

When our mutual friend later reported to me what Alice had said (I hadnt been there), I knew she had been digging for gossip. For her, status is everything and shes always been competitive with me.

She didnt care about Nick  she wanted an excuse to revel in the fact my child is struggling to find his way while her offspring continue to fly: the best grades, the best jobs.

For me, this relatively innocuous inquiry about my son is the last straw, the reason Im finishing our decadesold friendship.

Im not going to have it out with Alice, however  Im simply going to ignore her calls and make no attempt to get in contact. Ghost her.

We hear about the pain of being ghosted  when a friend or lover suddenly pretends you dont exist.

Recently, Jane Green wrote about how it feels to be cut off without warning by a friend, how hurtful and disorientating it is, making you question everything you thought you knew about the friendship and yourself.

Sophie says that ghosting isnt just done by horrendous people. People do it  and have it done to them  for different reasons.

Except you can be sure there probably will be a reason, and sometimes ghosting is the only way to protect your mental health.

In my case there were warnings with Alice, but because of our history Id overlooked the competitive, catty side of her personality. Until she fished for dirt on my son.

It is one thing when a friend makes inappropriate inquiries about me, or tries to make out I am a loser, but when it comes to my child, relishing in his misfortune, well, I am a lioness.

Alice is wonderful in so many ways, otherwise I wouldnt have put up with her for nearly 40 years. She is clever and witty, stylish and a force of nature. Her energy and laugh are infectious, and she is good fun.

Our years of friendship have seen quiet nights in having supper, drinking wine and giggling, as well as some wild partying. In the old days, pre-marriage, we would plot and advise each other about our respective flings and relationships.

She was wise and sharp, if tediously competitive and sometimes blunt. A Marmite personality. Popular yet exasperating, some people cant understand why Ive ever liked her.

But we go back a long way, and the controversial friends tend to be the most interesting, no?

I met Alice when I moved to a new school aged 12. We used to hide literally behind the bike sheds and smoke cigarettes.

When we got caught once, she wouldnt allow the teacher to punish me because she said the idea and the cigarettes were hers; it was true, but a rare act of altruism, and Ive never forgotten it.

She had long, dark curly hair and blue eyes and was better at French than me, but I used to trump her (her word) at Maths and help her with homework.

She had  and still has  a lot of charisma. But while her exterior is hard as nails, when you know her as well as I do, there is vulnerability, too.

She doesnt like to show it because she wants people to think of her as an alpha-type person who has no weak points.

Sometimes, though, the hidden fragility just leaks out and, because we have spent so much time together, I happen to have been there on the few occasions when it has. When my mum died, for example, she was supportive and wrote me a letter of nostalgia, generosity and tenderness.

Because our friendship was forged during such a formative time and I know shes not as tough as she seems, Ive forgiven her much over the years.

When my business was floundering years ago, even though she was in a position to help (by which I mean with advice and introductions; not financially), she chose to pretend it wasnt happening and didnt call once.

Another time, knowing I had put on weight, she came prancing round in skinny jeans that showed off the half stone she had lost, and looked me up and down.

It felt as though her eyes were scrutinising every added ounce of me as they rejoiced in every lost ounce of her own.

She says that she feels so much for doing this and her self-worth has grown as a result of cutting Alice out of her life

She lives in a huge house in the country done up by an interior designer. I live in a two-bedroom property that she has visited only twice in the eight years since I moved here.

Once she even made the comment: Ive just come back from a marvellous holiday in the Maldives. Everyone was there. You should have come!

She knew full well that A) I hadnt been invited, and B) even if I had, I didnt have the means to go.

Put like this you might wonder why Ive stayed friends as long as I have. Certainly, if I met her now I wouldnt like her one bit.

But theres something about a long friendship thats hard to leave. Because shes seen me grow up, I dont have to explain myself to her, she knows the context of my life, and as Ive explained she can be very good company.

Ill add that she works hard, something I respect.

Her homeware business deserves to have made her a lot of money, and her three adult children  I have two, so she feels superior on that matter too  are absolutely lovely. A credit to Alice, they are, in fact, much nicer than she is.

But while Ive shared my worries and frustrations about Nick with other parents who I know care, and open up about their own parenting issues, she doesnt give a jot about him.

When I bring up something Im worried about, she changes the subject. She doesnt talk about him with empathy. She doesnt offer advice or a sympathetic ear.

Its become clear all she cares about is feeding like a vulture on my sons misfortunes, presumably so she can feel better about her own children and herself.

Ghosting isnt just done by horrendous people. People do it  and have it done to them  for different reasons. Hurt, jealousy, bad manners and indifference can all be factors.

I could ring Alice and tell her Im angry and why this is the end for us, but I dont like confrontation because my father had anger issues and I made a conscious effort to be the opposite.

I looked at my dad from a young age and thought, confrontation: what is the point? It achieves nothing but negativity.

Alice is not going to change, or, if she is, then it will come from a realisation within her, not me pointing out her faults.

I think Im better off putting my energy into other friends who dont upset me and where the relationship is consistent and balanced  and infinitely more healthy.

I have not ended the friendship lightly, but sometimes the scales just slump too far in the direction that makes continuing with it untenable.

Ill miss her  our shared history, the idea of her  but I wont miss the bits that succeeded so expertly in making me feel undermined and traduced.

Ultimately, I have ghosted her for my own good. I just feel happier without someone in my life wishing to do me ill, however cleverly and amusingly.

So I havent contacted her for weeks  we last spoke before Christmas  and I have no intention of doing so ever again.

Ive never done that to anyone before, but belatedly I have discovered enough self-worth to make it possible. If she tries to contact me, I will simply not pick up. Ever again.

The thing is, she is so wrapped up in herself, she probably wont even notice. And surely that tells me everything I need to know.
Every day, it seems, comes another sorry tale illustrating the many and varied ways in which the Metropolitan Police have let women down.

The latest involves the strip search at a London school of a 15-year-old black girl who was on her period, an incident so disturbing you can scarcely believe it happened.

But, in my view, women have long been betrayed by these misogynistic attitudes. As a barrister, a significant part of my work involves trying to help women who have been subjected to serious violence and found the police unwilling to do anything about it.

Top barrister Harriet Johnson's damming new book reveals that victims are routinely ridiculed, disbelieved and denied justice

Recently, I acted for the parents of Shana Grice, 19, who was murdered by her ex-boyfriend after police ignored her complaints of stalking. When a new case comes in to me, it usually involves a cover letter from the solicitor who has hired me, giving a summary of the facts. For most, the first pages are eerily similar.

They start with an account of the attack suffered: the abuse, domestic violence and, usually, rape.

Halfway down the page, it details how the woman in question went to the police and told them what had happened.

WAYNE COUZENS: The 48-year-old married father of two was a serving police officer with the Met when he kidnapped, raped and murdered Sarah Everard in March 2021. He was jailed for life last October, and is now facing four further charges of indecent exposure

By the bottom of the page, she has been told there is nothing the police can do. Whether for lack of forensic evidence, or the simple fact the police do not deem her to be believable, they cannot proceed with a prosecution.

At the top of page two, the story will continue in one of two ways: And then he did it again. Or: And then he killed her.

IAN NAUDE: The 33-year-old met one 13-year-old victim when called to an incident at her home in October 2017. He raped her in his car and filmed the attack on his phone. Convicted of rape and sexual assault, alongside 30 other offences, involving at least six victims, he was jailed for 25 years in December 2018

By definition, the cases Ive seen over the 12 years since I was called to the bar dont involve the many police officers who do an excellent job supporting a rape victim through the justice system to get a conviction at court.

I have an inherently skewed data sample. But the cases I see are too awful, and have too much in common, to be written off as the one-off failings of a rogue officer.

KEVIN BENTLEY: In June OF last year, retired police officer Kevin Bentley was found to have assaulted five women and one girl over a 30-year period dating back to the 1970s. Bentley, 68, from Spennymoor in Co Durham, was convicted of 24 serious sexual and physical assaults, including two counts of rape, six of assault and eight of indecent assault, and sentenced to 28 years, of which he must serve 18-and-a-half years. Bentley retired as a constable with Durham Constabulary in 2006, and none of his offences related to his job as a police officer

One of my clients, whod been drugged and raped at a party, went to the police to tell them she thought something had happened the previous night: she couldnt be sure, but she had a strange feeling.

She was examined by a specialist forensic unit and the results were awaited. When the forensic report came back, it was read by a junior female officer. She emailed her supervisor, telling him: Surprise, surprise, forensics show nothing.

IAN CLARKE: the 52-year-old police constable, who worked with the major crime team at North Wales Police, entered a bedroom naked and raped a sleeping woman in December 2015 while his fellow police officer wife slept in an adjoining room. Clarke was jailed for five years.

JAMES EVANS: Despite knowing the 15-year-old girl hed met on Tinder had been raped, James Evans, 31, an officer in Ealing, West London, took her to his flat for sex. He was caught after the girls mother read her diary. Evans admitted six counts of sexual activity with a child and was jailed for four years in August 2016.

He replied: Youre kidding? But she had a funny feeling and everything!

But the forensic report, which had been misread by the junior officer, showed the presence of semen: evidence that, with the womans account of being drugged, could have supported a prosecution for rape.

STEPHEN MITCHELL: The Northumbria police constable, 52, received two life sentences for raping and sexually assaulting up to 30 shoplifters and drug addicts he met while on duty. At his trial in 2010, it emerged hed been charged with sexual assault before joining the police.

In another case, my client reported her rape and gave a detailed video interview. She was told there was not enough evidence to prosecute.

The message is that womens safety is not a priority

Years later, two weeks before her wedding, a police officer knocked on her door. My client saw the uniform and said: Hes done it again, hasnt he?

The officer explained that her rapist had indeed been accused of rape by another woman, and that the police were now hoping to prosecute both cases at once, as they were factually very similar. They hoped this would help them to get a conviction.

My client was told she had to be interviewed again. She asked why, as her first account had been video-recorded, and was told the DVD had been lost.

CLIVE GARTON: Serving officer with 23 years experience, Garton stalked his victim and planted recording devices in her home before raping her in 2016. The 59- year-old, from Sittingbourne, Kent, was sentenced to nine years for rape, perverting the course of justice and stalking

In another case, my client reported that her husband had raped her and attempted to rape another woman with severe learning disabilities. She gave an account to the police, and showed them messages in which he had threatened to kill her.

She waited and waited to be told what was happening. More than a year later, while still under investigation, her husband raped, then murdered, another woman. In another case, forensic swabs  containing crucial DNA evidence that supported my clients allegation of rape  were lost by police. Her case was abandoned.

The consequence of poor investigations  where evidence is lost, reports misread and women disbelieved  is not just that the conviction rate for reported rape languishes at around 1 per cent.

It is not even just about the compounded harm done to the victim: the cumulative damage of going through one of the worst traumas, only to be told by the people whose job it is to support you that you are not worthy of being believed.

MARK LINDOW: Despite leaving the Kent force in 2015, Lindow used the name British bobby on a messaging app to target his teenage victim. He became violent when she refused sex, and filmed his friend raping her. Last December he was jailed for 21 years for five counts of rape and making and distributing an indecent image of a child.

It is that a person who has committed a serious crime remains free to do it again.

It is the constant, quiet message that the vast majority of rapists go free, which tells women their safety is not a priority.

Of course, police officers are drawn from society and have the same prejudices and biases as the rest of us. Disbelief or pre-judgment of victims is part of a culture of victim-blaming that pervades the UK.

And yet the police are also the ones in authority, the gatekeepers of the justice system. When they pre-judge what a jury might think  and, in my experience, thats a central and systemic problem when it comes to prosecuting violence against women  then often a jury doesnt even get the chance to form an opinion.

LEE MARTIN-CRAMP: The constable used his position as an officer with Wimbledon police to win the trust of an American nurse in May 2015. He then drugged her drink and raped her while attending a wedding in Antigua. MartinCramp was extradited to the island and jailed for 15 years.

Most barristers will tell you that, out of juries and magistrates, a jury will usually give a fairer verdict  for the simple reason that anyone who deals with the same sorts of cases repeatedly can lose perspective and balance. It is called becoming case-hardened, and it is something from which, in my view, many magistrates can suffer.

I have seen successful rape prosecutions with no forensic evidence, no DNA evidence, no CCTV and no eyewitnesses  prosecutions that rely on nothing more or less than the victims word, and a skilled and fair prosecutor. Any lawyer who has spent time in a criminal court will be able to tell you the same thing.

So when police officers decide that a jury would not believe a victim, on the basis of their own prejudicial, bigoted or simply case-hardened ideas about rape, they are undermining the function of a jury and, in turn, the rule of law in this country.

With charging rates for reported rapes at just 1.6 per cent, the consequence is that, in 98.4 per cent of cases, juries do not get the opportunity even to hear womens complaints, still less evaluate them.

DEAN ROBERTS: The South Wales Police officer, 51, filmed himself raping a baby and then shared the footage online. He was caught after his colleagues traced the child abuse footage back to him. He operated with an accomplice, lawyer John Guess, and the pair shared their abuse of children on a chat forum. At Cardiff Crown Court in 2018, Roberts admitted rape, sexual assault of a child, and possessing and distributing indecent images of children, and jailed for 16 years.

But the problem doesnt just lie in deeply unfair decisions taken behind the scenes. There is also, of course, the problem of very overt prejudice.

Last month, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) published the report on its investigation into the behaviour of a group of officers at Charing Cross Police Station between 2016 and 2018. The details were damning, not least for the shocking misogyny revealed in a series of texts.

One officer texted a colleague: I f***ing need to take my bird out ... Making it up to her from when I backhanded her.

His colleague replied: Grab her by the p***y.

One officer asked another: You ever slapped your missus? It makes them love you more. Seriously since I did that she wont leave me alone. Now I know why these daft c***s are getting murdered by their sp****c boyfriends.

He continued: Knock a bird about and she will love you. Human nature. They are biologically programmed to like that sh*t.

LEE RACKHAM: The 45-year-old was jailed for attempting to rape a woman in her own home. Reports of his trial in 2009 encouraged four other women to come forward, claiming hed used his position with Humberside Police to abuse their trust. He was jailed again in 2014 after admitting four counts of sexual assault.

Another joked, Getting a woman into bed is like spreading butter. It can be done with a bit of effort using a credit card, but its quicker and easier just to use a knife.

One officer was nicknamed Rapey McRaperson because of rumours hed brought a woman back to the station for sex, and his behaviour in harassing women.

In my experience, the attitudes shown at Charing Cross police station are reflected across the Metropolitan Police as a whole.

These men  and it is often men, as they make up 70.8 per cent of Metropolitan police officers  are the ones we are supposed to speak to when we suffer violence; the people who are supposed to protect us and bring the perpetrators to justice when we fall victim. Yet now it has been confirmed that, as far as some officers are concerned, violence against women is not a problem, but a punchline.

What is almost as shocking is the fact all of this is in writing. You dont put such things in writing if you know its not tolerated. You behave like that if you know there will be no consequences. If its part of the culture.

DEREK SEEKINGS: In January 2021, Seekings, 65, a member of Surrey Police before he retired in 2005, was convicted of two counts of rape, inflicting severe psychological harm on his victim. One attack took place when Seekings, from Farnborough, Hants, was on a break from work. He was jailed for 11 years

The lack of consequences for officers is part of a pattern. In September 2021, it was revealed that over half of Met officers found guilty of sexual misconduct kept their jobs.

The Met has persistently tried to distance itself from the cases of officers it would have us believe are bad apples. From the outgoing Met Commissioner Cressida Dick saying of Wayne Couzens: Sadly, on occasion, I have a bad un; to all the times he was called an ex police officer by the Met in the aftermath of Sarah Everards murder (he was serving at the time).

Since then, however, there has been a torrent of cases that have shown that the problem of misogyny in the Met goes far beyond Wayne Couzens.

PC Jamie Rayner, who was jailed last November for two years and three months for assaulting his partner  also a police officer  during a coercive and controlling relationship.

DCI Neil Corbel, sentenced in January to three years in prison for 19 counts of voyeurism against vulnerable women.

DC Paul Allgood, who last May was given a suspended sentence despite being in possession of indecent images including the abuse of babies, and an upskirting video of a schoolgirl, taken on public transport.

These are just some of the cases where Met Police officers have been convicted of crimes. Then there are the allegations  as yet unproven  against a raft of others.

The IOPC said it believes the Charing Cross incidents are not isolated or simply the behaviour of a few bad apples.

Home Secretary Priti Patel has ordered a public inquiry led by Scotlands former Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini into the murder of Sarah Everard, and into Wayne Couzens.

However, Priti Patel has also refused to put the inquiry on a statutory footing  meaning it will have far fewer powers than it should have to implement real change. The Home Secretary has been asked repeatedly by womens groups to give the Angiolini inquiry real powers. She has not done so.

How, against this background, can we expect women to come forward to tell police theyve been raped? Knowing that the officer to whom they report it might have been making jokes about exactly the same thing to his colleagues moments earlier?

Misogyny in the Met goes far beyond Wayne Couzens

How can we ask women in abusive relationships to report their assaults, when the officer they tell may have just been bragging about hitting his own girlfriend?

In the 1.6 per cent of reported rape cases that do result in a charge, the situation remains fairly dire. Underfunding of the criminal courts means that victims of rape and other serious violence wait years for their case to be heard.

In that time, many, understandably, decide to withdraw their allegations simply to regain some control of their lives.

So how can we make the criminal justice system work for women? Part of the change required to end the culture of violence against women is to train police officers properly to investigate it.

This mandatory training must include an understanding that the focus should be on the perpetrator, not the victim; and that there is no reason why a prosecution cannot go ahead based on the word of one person.

It must include training designed to help them support vulnerable and marginalised women, including in cases of domestic violence. I have seen too many cases where disabled women are written off as unreliable witnesses by ill-informed officers.

Training to better support black victims of domestic abuse  recommended by Valeries Law  should also be included. Named for Valerie Ford, who was murdered by her former partner despite asking police for help, it recognises that bruises do not show as clearly on dark-skinned women.

It must make officers understand the reasons why victims might not trust the police. For that trust to have any hope of being regained, there must be zero tolerance towards sexual misconduct by officers.

Priti Patel needs to take her obligation to women seriously, and prioritise reform  starting with a full and comprehensive inquiry, with real powers. There is much to be done. We can only hope she can find the guts to do it.
Hhamurrjgedd? I slurred woozily as I came round from the sedation. Translation: How many did you get? It was all I wanted to know. Had the doctor retrieved a good number of eggs from my ovaries?

For a fortnight I had been jabbing myself in the stomach with a syringe every night, pumping in hormones to produce as many eggs as possible. And what was my haul? Eight. Eight potential lives that were whisked off to be frozen and remain, to this day, on ice.

So I understand Sienna Millers revelation that she froze her eggs last year. Although she has a daughter, the actress felt pressure to have more in her 30s. Biology is incredibly cruel to women in that decade, she says. Indeed. The pressure from others to procreate can be, too.

Clare Foges explains why she froze her eggs at age 31. Like Sienna Miller (pictured) who felt pressured to have more children in her 30s

I was 34 when I took the radical step of freezing my eggs, besieged by what is quaintly called the tick-tock of the biological clock.

Tick-tock? To me it was more like a blaring Code Red at a nuclear reactor.

It is difficult to describe the pressure you feel as a thirtysomething woman who longs to have children and hasnt found the right man yet. You date and work and busy yourself with hobbies and friends but, at the back of your mind, Old Father Time is tapping his watch and tutting.

All the while you are chided by people who assume you are foolishly putting your career before having children. One colleague told me to remember I didnt have forever to have a baby. Oh really? Silly me. I thought I could bear children into my 80s!

Actually, Id always known I wanted children  so at 31, with no man on the scene, I trotted off to a fertility clinic to have my egg reserves checked out. A few days later, a letter arrived saying if you wish to start a family, we suggest you do not delay. What? I scrolled through my mental Rolodex of men, trying to decide if there were any I could date/marry/procreate with in a matter of weeks.

At 34, I was still single and starting to panic. I was sick of dating, tired of feeling there was little I could control about the one thing I wanted more than anything else. Then I realised there was something I could do: freeze my eggs. It wasnt cheap  the 5,000 cost wiped out my savings  but it bought me a little peace of mind.

Within a year I had met my husband and we now have three children under four. Looking back, I wonder if the measure of relief egg-freezing brought me played a part in us getting together; more relaxed and less manic about finding a potential father for my children, I could instead just look for someone I enjoyed being with.

Clare (pictured) also shares the story of her dear friend, whose eggs were destroyed by a fertility clinic when the vials were damaged whilst being moved

Still, almost eight years on, the eggs sit in some storage facility. I cant bring myself to give permission for them to be destroyed; by law that will happen after ten years anyway. And although they were never used, I cant regret the expense or the effort. For the first time in years, I felt in charge of my own destiny. Freezing your eggs is a small way of wresting back control. As Miller said: Having been really focused on the need to have another baby, Im [now] just like if it happens, it happens. That kind of existential threat has dissipated.

Thats not to say women should treat this as a foolproof insurance policy. The latest figures (from 2010-16) show the success rate for women using their own frozen eggs was just 18 per cent, though freezing and de-thawing techniques have developed since.

And there can be shattering disappointments, as a dear friend of mine discovered.

Having frozen her eggs several years ago and paid for their storage ever since, she wanted to use them. The fertility clinic had them transported from a storage facility, only to find the vials were broken and the eggs lost.

It was utterly heartbreaking and bewildering. I could not find the words to comfort her; we thought, perhaps, that because of a dreadful error she might never become a mother.

As I already had my own children, any consoling words sounded hollow. I ached for her loss. But  thank heaven  she now has a beautiful baby, conceived with her own fresh eggs.

Sienna Miller is right that the process of wanting children, trying for children, having children or making peace with not having them can be cruel.

For some women, that journey will be made easier by having their eggs frozen. Can you blame us for seeking a little respite?

Why cant Rihanna just stick to a pair of comfy joggers?

She asks Rihanna (pictured) to wear some Primark joggers during her pregnancy for comfort

Rihanna has been wowing the world with her lacy, racy and, ahem, minimal maternity wear.

Next week shell wrap some dental floss around her bump and cover her modesty with three postage stamps.

The response to this display seems to be you go, girl! Do maternity your way! But ye gods, is there any part of a womans life that wont be sexualised?

For both mother and observer, the last months of pregnancy are best encased in forgivable stretchy fabric. RiRi, I still have some XL Primark joggers if youre interested.

Clare tells the BBC to choose Clive Myrie (pictured) as its next political editor. In fact she votes him for News at Ten anchor, political editor, business editor, fashion editor and showbiz correspondent

Who will be the BBCs next political editor? First we learnt it was an all-woman race, which had a whiff of PC stitch-up. Now we hear nice Chris Mason is the frontrunner, while an insider calls the flip-flopping a farce. I can save BBC bigwigs a lot of bother: pick Clive Myrie. Housewives favourite, baritone smoothie, hero of the airwaves. Im a fan, as you may be able to tell. In fact, I vote Myrie for News at Ten anchor, political editor, business editor, fashion editor, showbiz correspondent. Oh, and weatherman

Spanish police have seized Tango, a Russian-owned superyacht. You know what? The cops are doing oligarchs a favour: their vessels are truly hideous, like Soviet-era blocks plonked in the sea. The style police should have clamped down long ago.

MPs are all addicted  to adulation

MP in cocaine and sleaze shock! scream the headlines. Not such a shock to me, having worked in Parliament for five years in my 20s. The place might as well have been designed to create scandals.

The MP at the centre of this one, Tory David Warburton, has lost lots of weight, took selfies of his bulging biceps and was photographed in front of what is claimed to be lines of cocaine. In short, it appears he is in the grip of a full-blown midlife crisis  while allegations of sexual assault against him, which he strongly denies, are more troubling.

For certain men, life in Westminster leads inevitably to an out-of-control ego. Striding those famous corridors, they come to believe it likely  nay, inevitable  that they will be PM one day. While working late at night in the office, they fancy themselves as someone out of The West Wing, forgetting that they are in fact working on the Woodland Wildlife Bill.

It is a place where their egos are constantly stroked, their opinions fawned over. Never mind cocaine. Adulation and sycophancy are intoxicating drugs  and SW1 is rife with them.




Kang Yong-seok announces his bid to run for Gyeonggi Province governor in the local election set for June 1, in front of Seryu metro station in Suwon, April 4, 2022. Yonhap



Controversial lawyer's return to politics for local election draws mixed reactions from conservative party



By Ko Dong-hwan



Former lawmaker and lawyer Kang Yong-seok has declared his bid to join the main opposition People Power Party's (PPP) primary in order to be a part of the candidate selection process to run for governor of Gyeonggi Province on June 1.



If his candidacy is approved, Kang will compete in the internal primary competition with Yoo Seung-min, a former lawmaker who ran unsuccessfully in the 2017 presidential election, and Rep. Kim Eun-hye, a former MBC anchor who served as President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol's spokesperson before she quit on Tuesday and declared her bid to join the race on Wednesday.



Unlike the other two candidates, Kang has an obstacle to overcome to make his bid effective. He lost his membership in the party 12 years ago due to his inappropriate remarks about female news show hosts. In a casual meeting with university students, he said those wishing to become successful news anchorwomen "have to think about giving everything." His remarks drew a backlash from news show hosts who viewed it as derogatory. Consequently, the conservative party stripped him of his party membership.



Kang applied to the PPP's Seoul chapter, April 5, to regain his party membership as all candidates must be affiliated with the party to run in the primary.



The PPP Seoul chapter's party member qualification assessment committee held a meeting that day and unanimously approved Kang's request to join. The committee's rule states that those ousted from the party cannot re-enter within a five-year period.



Nevertheless, Kang still needs the final approval of the party's floor leaders to join the party again officially.



Kang is also the face of Hoverlab , a right-wing YouTube news channel with over 900,000 subscribers that has been making numerous scandalous claims against celebrities and politicians.



He said on Facebook that news reports about the PPP's Seoul chapter deciding to approve of his membership were "good news" and promised to be careful with his words and actions as a party member from now on.





On Jan. 25, 2022, former MBC reporter Kim Sae-ui, left, and Kang Yong-seok, who are the faces of YouTube channel Hoverlab, walk out of a Seoul Metropolitan Police station after being questioned over publicly claiming that People Power Party Chairman Lee Jun-seok was bribed by a startup company's president. Newsis
Queen Maxima of the Netherlands was a vision in red as she and King Willem-Alexander stepped out for an evening of music in Amsterdam tonight.

The mother-of-three, 51, and her husband, 54, who are currently entertaining the visiting president of India Ram Nath Kovind and his wife Savita, treated their guests to an evening of music at the Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam's biggest stage, this evening.

After dazzling in a blue gown for a state dinner yesterday, Maxima opted to wear crimson from head to toe for tonight's event.

The royal seemed delighted to take her guests, who are due to depart tomorrow, on a cultural outing tonight.

Queen Maxima of the Netherlands was a vision in red as she and King Willem-Alexander stepped out for an evening of music in Amsterdam tonight (pictured)

Known for her love of monochrome outfits, Maxima looked stunning in the red jumpsuit.

She paired her wide-legged trousers with a satin red top which revealed her collarbones with an asymmetrical bow across the chest.

She did not wear a coat over the stylish outfit, but was seen carrying a shawl in case the evening got chilly.

Known for her attention to detail, she matched her outfit with a red velvet clutch bag, and a pair of crimson velvet heels.

The mother-of-three, 51, and her husband, 54, who are currently entertaining the visiting president of India Ram Nath Kovind and his wife Savita, treated their guests to an evening of music at the Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam's biggest stage this evening

The group were in high spirits as they attended the event earlier this evening at the concert hall (pictured)

The royal couple could be seen beaming as they attended the concert earlier this evening (pictured)

Queen Maxima's husband King Willem-Alexander looked dapper in a navy blue suit, which he wore with a white shirt and a purple tie

She completed the glamourous getup with a gorgeous pair of dropped diamond earrings with rubies and a silver bracelet.

The mother-of-three styled her glossy blonde locks into an intricate bun that finished the look nicely.

She also sported an elegant makeup, with a trait of black eyeliner bringing some drama to her hazelnut gaze, and bronzer highlighting her healthy glow.

The Dutch Queen brought the look together with a bright red lip.

Meanwhile, her husband King Willem-Alexander looked dapper in a navy blue suit, which he wore with a white shirt and a purple tie.

Maxima and Willem-Alexander welcomed their guest at the music venue tonight ahead of the concert

The Dutch Queen was a vision in crimson in a monochrome look with wide-legged trousers and a bow-neck top

President Ram Nath Kovind opted to wear a dark blue bandhgala suit set with a round collar and a cap, and his wife looked very elegant in a green outfit, which she paired with gold jewellery and a colourful jacket that reached down to her knees.

The foursome met in front of the Muziekgebouw tonight, where they were going to enjoy a contra performance.

Founded in 2005, the Muziekgebouw is Amsterdam's biggest music stage and its concert hall welcomes more than 250 performances per season.

Yesterday, Maxima and Willem-Alexander hosted a reception at the Royal Palace to mark the first day of the three day state visit of India to the Netherlands.

Maxima and Willem-Alexander, who share three daughters, appeared in high spirits at the event earlier this evening

Indian President Ram Nath Kovind wore a stripped navy blue bandhgala suit and a handcrafted grey hat for tonight's event

The foursome merrily made their way to the music venue. Maxima was not wearing a coat, but was holding a shawl in case the weather for chilly as the evening progressed

Both wore the Dutch royal orders or orange and blue stripes, representing the union between the Houses of Orange and Nassau (blue) for the occasion.

Ram Nath Kovind, 74, is an Indian politician serving as the 14th and current President of India since 25 July 2017.

Along with his wife Savita, 69, he was met with a welcome ceremony at Dam Square in Amsterdam on along with a reception by King Willem Alexander and Queen Maxima of Netherlands.

The president wore a black bandhgala suit set with a black and silver handcrafted hat, whilst his wife Savita choose a stunning lime green and hot pink shimmering sari.

This is the first presidential visit to the Netherlands in 34 years since the visit of President R Venkataraman in 1988.

It marks the 75th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries.
Jane Seymour has opened up how she is 'always labeled' by her four divorces, saying she refuses to feel like she 'failed' because she has 'created some wonderful children' and is 'still very close' with her exes.

The 71-year-old English actress reflected on her past relationships and why she and her longtime partner, David Green, plan to remain unmarried at this stage in their lives during her appearance on the Yahoo Life series 'Unapologetically.'

'Every time I've gotten divorced, I have had to develop a new lust for life. 'I've had to figure out a way that I find myself again, because I'd find myself embedded in a relationship that maybe didn't work, or circumstances were ... impossible to repair,' she said.

Jane Seymour, 71, reflected on her four divorces and her relationship with her longtime partner, David Green on the Yahoo Life series 'Unapologetically'

The English actress has been in a relationship with Green, 73, for the past eight years, but she has no plans on marrying the director, saying: 'I don't think in this day and age you need it'

'And I've had to pick myself up and just say, "OK, Jane, what are you gonna do now?" And every time that's happened, I've kind of put it out there in the universe.'

Seymour's first marriage was to theater director Michael Attenborough, the son of famed movie director Richard Attenborough. She was only 20 years old when they wed in 1971, and they divorced in 1973.

She married Geoffrey 'Geep' Planer in 1977, but they parted ways the following year.

The actress went on to wed businessman David Flynn in 1981, and they had two children together, Katherine Flynn and Sean Flynn.

Their marriage collapsed after she discovered he had multiple affairs and squandered her money away. They divorced in 1992.

Seymour's first marriage was to theater director Michael Attenborough. She was only 20 years old when they wed in 1971, and they divorced in 1973

The actress married Geoffrey 'Geep' Planer in 1977, but they parted ways the following year

Seymour wed businessman David Flynn in 1981, and they had two children, Katherine Flynn and Sean Flynn. She is also a stepmom to his daughter Jenni Flynn. They divorced in 1992

'When I found out he had lost my money and been unfaithful, that was the end of that. You could say I chose the wrong person, but we raised children we adore and we get along very well now,' she told The Daily Mail in 2020.

Seymour, who was left millions of dollars in debt and homeless, gave Yahoo Life an example of the universe taking care of her, saying she was 'literally handed the role of Dr. Quinn' on the CBS series 'Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman' after her third divorce.

The hit show ran for six seasons, from 1993 to 1998, earning her multiple Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe win in 1996.

The 'Live and Let Die' star's longest marriage was with her fourth husband, actor James Keach, whom she was with from 1993 until they separated in 2013. The former couple, who share twin sons Kristopher and John, finalized their divorce in 2015.

She also has remained close with her two stepchildren, Jenni Flynn and Kalen Keach, from her last two marriages, telling The Guardian in 2013 that they 'don't use the word stepkids.'

Seymour said she was 'literally handed the role of Dr. Quinn' on the CBS series 'Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman' after her divorce from Flynn left her broke and homeless

Seymour's longest marriage was with her fourth husband, actor James Keach, whom she wed in 1993. They had twin sons Kristopher and John, and finalized their divorce in 2015

Seymour (pictured with her children Katherine, Kristopher, Sean, John, and Jenni in 2020) said she 'created some wonderful children' with her ex-husbands

Seymour explained to Yahoo Life that she has learned to ignore other people's judgement regarding her past relationships.

'I'm always labeled [by it],' she said. '"Oh, you've had so many divorces'  like I've failed or something, but I dont feel I have,' she said. 'I created some wonderful children and I'm still very close to the people who loved me, and I love them and we still love each other.'

Seymour has been in a happy relationship with Green, 73, for the past eight years, but she doesn't have any plans to marry the British director and producer.

'I don't think in this day and age you need it,' she said.

The couple met three decades ago when Green was supposed to direct her in a film that never got made. She reconnected with the divorced father of three through a mutual friend after her last divorce.

Seymour met Green decades ago and reconnected through a friend after her fourth divorce

The star explained that she needs someone who is 'understanding' of her love of her acting career, saying: 'You know, I might be in Australia next week'

'I can do whatever I want,' she said. 'I saved some money, so I'm comfortable. I work because I want to. I can pick the projects that I want to'

'We just sort of looked at one another and went, "Well, we're in the same boat,"' she said. 'I would say there are different times in your life where you look for different things. When you're 30 you may be looking for somebody to be a life partner to have children with.

'And then, you know, if sadly you've been divorced and you're raising your kids, you're now looking for someone who can handle a woman who has kids. And in my case, can I find somebody who's going to be understanding of my love of my career, of loving to act? You know, I might be in Australia next week.'

When she's not acting, she is keeping busy with her non-profit Open Hearts Foundation, traveling, and other creative pursuits, including writing books and painting.

'I can do whatever I want,' she said. 'I saved some money, so I'm comfortable. I work because I want to. I can pick the projects that I want to. I do not suffer fools gladly, so I have curated my life and the amount of time I have to be with friends and family and people I'm interested in.'

Seymour shared in new interview with The Mirror that she likes living life on her 'own terms' and is a 'pretty independent woman,' like her crime-solving character in the detective series 'Harry Wild.'

'I always deferred to my husband for advice, even though it was my career and I was earning money,' she explained. 'What Ive learnt since the last divorce is that I can do it myself. So life changed a lot nine years ago, and Im a lot more like my new character, Harry.'
The Swedish royal family hosted a glittering dinner at the royal palace in Stockholm this evening,

King Carl Gustaf and Queen Silvia hosted the event at Stockholm Palace, or the Royal Palace as it is also known, which is the official residence of the Swedish monarch.

The couple were joined at the spectacular occasion by Crown Princess Victoria and her husband Prince Daniel along with Prince Carl Philip and his wife Princess Sofia.

Crown Princess Victoria opted for a stunning red gown for the occasion which featured a heart shaped neckline, which she paired with a glittering tiara.

The Swedish royal family hosted a glittering dinner at the royal palace in Stockholm this evening (pictured, Prince Carl Philip with Princess Sofia)

King Carl Gustaf and Queen Silvia hosted the spectacular occasion and were joined by Crown Princess Victoria and her husband Prince Daniel (pictured)

Princess Sofia, who shares three children with her husband Prince Carl Philip, showcased her fashion prowess in a figure-hugging green gown, teamed with a shimmering clutch. Her husband looked dapper in his formal attire.

Elsewhere, Queen Silvia wore a vibrant blue gown, while her husband looked equally charming in all his finery.

The appearance comes days after Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden and her daughter Estelle looked radiant in new ultra-glamorous official portraits shared online this week.

The Swedish royal family launched a new website which features newly-shot portraits of the entire family in ball-gowns and glittering tiaras.

Crown Princess Victoria opted for a stunning red gown for the occasion which featured a heart shaped neckline, which she paired with a glittering tiara

Prince Carl Philip and his wife Princess Sofia appeared in high spirits as they attended the event earlier this evening

Queen Silvia wore a vibrant blue gown, while her husband looked equally charming in all his finery (pictured)

The photographs, which include snaps of Victoria, 44, Estelle, 11, and Princess Sofia, 37, were taken by Linda Brostrom of the Royal Court.

King Gustaf has sat on the Swedish throne since 1973 when he succeeded his late father, Gustaf VI Adolf.

He married the German-born Silvia Sommerlath, now 75, in 1976 after meeting her when she was a hostess at the 1972 Olympics.

In 1980, a law was passed which abolished male preference in the line of succession.

That means Crown Princess Victoria, rather than her eldest brother Carl Philip, is the heir apparent to the throne.

King Carl Gustaf and Queen Silvia appeared in high spirits at the dinner earlier tonight, which was at the official residence of the Swedish monarch

Crown Princess Victoria, who was accompanied by her husband Prince Daniel, was stunning in a crimson gown at the dinner this evening

She is expected to become Sweden's first female monarch since the 18th century.

In 2019, the king passed a law to remove the children of Prince Carl Philip and Princess Madeleine from the Royal Household.

The monarch made the controversial decision, following the launch of an investigation by the Swedish parliament - the Riksdag - into how the 12million annual budget of the generally popular royal family could be kept under control.

The five youngsters stripped of their royal titles, aged between one and five, are the offspring of the King's two younger children, Prince Carl Philip and Princess Madeleine, and their respective partners.

As a result, they are not directly in line to the throne and Princess Madeleine - mother to Princess Leonore; Prince Nicolas, and Princess Adrienne - said they would now have 'a greater opportunity to shape their own lives'.

Also affected are Prince Alexander, and Prince Gabriel, who are the children of Prince Carl Philip and his wife Sofia Hellqvist.
Customers around Australia have the opportunity to decide which new Arnott's Tim Tam flavour will launch in Coles stores nationwide.

The two options include a Dark Choc Espresso Martini Tim Tam or Butterscotch and Cream Tim Tam.

Australians can cast their vote by visiting here until Sunday April 10 and the winning flavour will be announced on April 11.

The Butterscotch and Cream Tim Tam has rich brown sugar and toffee notes paired with a creamy blend of buttery smooth butterscotch cream, coated in delicious milk chocolate

The Dark Choc Espresso Martini Tim Tam is made with roasted espresso and vodka flavoured cream sandwiched between two crunchy biscuits, all coated in decadent dark chocolate

The Dark Choc Espresso Martini Tim Tam is made with roasted espresso and vodka flavoured cream sandwiched between two crunchy biscuits, all coated in decadent dark chocolate.

To compare, the Butterscotch and Cream Tim Tam has rich brown sugar and toffee notes paired with a creamy blend of buttery smooth butterscotch cream, also coated in delicious milk chocolate.

Both flavours bring strong flavour profiles to the table and would make an indulgent addition to the pantry.

The winning flavour will join the classic Tim Tam flavours on shelf in July this year, alongside the recently released Tim Tam Deluxe range.

This isn't the first time Arnott's has called on shoppers to make the all-important choice.

In 2021, Dark Choc Banoffee narrowly took the winner's title against Caramelised Pineapple, with only a 6 per cent difference in votes between the two.

Similarly to previous years the chosen flavour will be available exclusively in Coles merely weeks after voting closes.

Rebecca Chan, Arnott's Senior Brand Manager said: 'We know how passionate Australians are about Tim Tams and we love giving them the opportunity to choose a new flavour each year.

'The two flavour contenders are certainly our most indulgent so far, bringing an espresso martini into mouth-watering biscuit form, with the ultra decadent Butterscotch and Cream alongside as a fierce contender.

'We can't wait to see how many get voting this year and which flavour takes the winning title - Aussies might struggle to make a decision!'
Letting your dog lick your face or eat from your plate could be fueling the superbug crisis, a study has warned.

Experts have also called for pet owners to wash their hands after stroking their pets or picking up dog waste, in a bid to quell the spread of deadly bugs.

Antibiotic resistance, deemed to be as big a threat as terrorism and global warming, kills millions of people every year. It is caused by pathogens evolving to evade drugs, with the problem fuelled by unnecessary prescriptions of antibiotics.

But scientists fear cats and dogs are becoming potential reservoirs for the antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.

A team of UK and Portuguese researchers say the transmission occurs 'via the faecal-oral route', meaning that dogs who lick their own backsides could be spreading the drug-resistant bacteria.

Humans may also get infected from touching dog waste and then later their mouth, if they don't wash their hands.

While cute, letting dogs and cats lick your face could increase your risk of catching a superbug a type of bacteria resistant to medication

WHAT IS ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE? Antibiotics have been doled out unnecessarily by GPs and hospital staff for decades, fueling once harmless bacteria to become superbugs. The World Health Organization (WHO) has previously warned if nothing is done the world is heading for a 'post-antibiotic' era. It claimed common infections, such as chlamydia, will become killers without immediate solutions to the growing crisis. Bacteria can become drug resistant when people take incorrect doses of antibiotics or if they are given out unnecessarily. Former chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies claimed in 2016 that the threat of antibiotic resistance is as severe as terrorism. Figures estimate that superbugs will kill 10 million people each year by 2050, with patients succumbing to once harmless bugs. Around 700,000 people already die yearly due to drug-resistant infections including tuberculosis (TB), HIV and malaria across the world. Concerns have repeatedly been raised that medicine will be taken back to the 'dark ages' if antibiotics are rendered ineffective in the coming years. In addition to existing drugs becoming less effective, there have only been one or two new antibiotics developed in the last 30 years. In 2019, the WHO warned antibiotics are 'running out' as a report found a 'serious lack' of new drugs in the development pipeline. Without antibiotics, C-sections, cancer treatments and hip replacements will become incredibly 'risky', it was said at the time. Advertisement

Experts from the UK Royal Veterinary College and the University of Lisbon, tested the faeces of human and animal inhabitants of 41 Portuguese and 45 British homes.

The project, to be presented at a medical conference in Portugal, included a total of 114 humans, 85 dogs, and 18 cats.

Samples were collected and then genetically tested for superbugs.

Scientists found 14 dogs, one cat, and 15 humans tested positive for strains of drug-resistant E.coli, which can be life-threatening in some cases.

These strains are known to be resistant to multiple antibiotics, such as penicillin and cephalosporins.

Additionally, in four households, people and their pets were found to have bacteria with matching antibiotic-resistant genes.

The results implied that one had contaminated the other.

The study was only observational, meaning it cannot prove that pets were directly responsible for spreading superbugs to their owners.

However, lead author Dr Juliana Menezes, an expert in veterinary science, said their findings were worrying.

'Even before Covid, antibiotic resistance was one of the biggest threats to public health,' she said.

'It can make conditions like pneumonia, sepsis, urinary tract and wound infections untreatable.

'Our findings reinforce the need for people to practice good hygiene around their pets and to reduce the use of unnecessary antibiotics in companion animals and people.'

She also told The Telegraph that bacteria being spread between people and their pets were likely to come from a variety of events.

'Risk factors include kissing, licking the owner's face or eating from the owner's plate,' she said.

'To reduce the spread of these bacteria within the household, it would be necessary to reduce this close relationship between the owners and their pets, and also to have greater hygiene practices.

'Bearing in mind that the bacteria we studied are found colonising the gastrointestinal tract, the transmission occurs via the faecal-oral route, so good hygiene practices on the part of owners would help to reduce sharing, such as washing hands after collecting dog waste, or even after petting them.'

The study will be presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases in Lisbon later this month.

Despite the potential risk of superbugs owning a pet has been linked to swathe of both physical and mental health benefits.

These include helping reduce blood pressure and providing companionship to increasing opportunities for exercising and socialising with others.

Earlier this year researchers from the University of Washington and University of Oxford said antibiotic-resistant infections directly killed 1.2million people in 2019, and contributed to the deaths of 5million more.
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The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) acknowledged the value of natural Covid immunity from infection on Tuesday, and even said it could temporarily replace the fourth dose of the vaccine, a stark change from previous guidance from the agency.

Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, said during a White House COVID-19 briefing Tuesday that people who are already fully vaccinated and boosted, and have recently suffered an infection from the virus, are safe to put off receival of a second booster dose for two to four months.

While the CDC had previously acknowledged that there is some immunity provided from previous infection, notably allowing proof of it to serve in lieu of a negative test for some travel restrictions in the past, this is the first time the agency has said that natural immunity could replace vaccine-induce immunity - even if only temporarily.

'If you've had omicron disease in the last two or three months, that really did boost your immune system quite well,' Walensky said.

The comments from Walensky come as the CDC and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) face criticism for their handling of the roll out of fourth doses of the vaccine.

Dr Cody Meissner (left), the chief of pediatrics at Tufts Children's Hospital and member of VRBPAC, is unsure whether the virus poses enough of a risk at the moment to make a fourth shot necessary. Dr Eric Rubin (middle), editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, believes that there is not enough data supporting the shots for Americans as young as 50. Dr Paul Offit (right), director of vaccine education at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia asks 'where's the evidence that somebody over 50 benefits from a fourth dose?'

The FDA greenlighted second booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines - and fourth doses overall - for Americans aged 50 and older at the end of March.

Unlike previous shots, the FDA chose not to hold and advisory panel meeting to receive opinion from outside experts before the approval of the jab.

Dr Rochelle Walensky (pictured), director of the CDC, said that Americans that were recently infected with Covid can put off receiving the fourth vaccine dose until this fall

Many of the experts that would have been on that panel are now voicing their opinions, with some saying they would not have approved the shot had they been asked.

Dr Eric Rubin, editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, and member of the FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) - which usually would advise on these decisions, said last month he did not see enough data to support the need for the shots.

'The only data that I've seen has been for participants followed for just a few weeks,' Rubin told CNN.

'The most important information is going to be how well a fourth dose protects highly vulnerable people against serious disease and death, and I don't know when that will be available.'

Dr Paul Offit, also a VRBPAC member and the director of the vaccine education center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, was a critic of the rollout of the first booster dose and takes issue with this approval as well.

'Where's the evidence that somebody over 50 benefits from a fourth dose? Because the evidence to date appears to support the possibility for those over 65, although I haven't, we haven't, seen all the data... but where's the evidence for a 50 to 64 year old? Where's that evidence? Because absent that evidence, then there shouldn't be this recommendation' he told CNN.

Dr Cody Meissner, the chief of pediatrics at Tufts Children's Hospital and also a member of VRBPAC, is unsure whether the virus poses enough of a risk at the moment to make a fourth shot necessary, describing it as 'an unanswered scientific question for people with a normal immune system' to a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Advisors were finally given an opportunity to convene on Wednesday, where they questioned the FDA on the decision to leave them out of the process for approving the fourth shots.

Dr Peter Marks, who leads the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, making him the top vaccine regulator in the agency, replied by saying the authorization opened the door for vulnerable groups to receive an additional shot, but everyone can choose for themselves when they feel the shot is necessary.

Marks' statements reiterate what Walensky had said during the briefing on Tuesday.

She said that while many people in the eligible group were going to receive the next shot, that it is 'very reasonable' if some people choose to wait.

Both Marks and Walensky, among other officials and experts, have predicted that another Covid jab will be needed for all Americans this fall.

On Tuesday, the CDC chief that she does not believe middle-age to elderly Americans who get the shot now will need yet another jab later on.

'If you're prone to go ahead and get a vaccine, there's very little downside to doing so right now  especially those at high risk of severe disease,' she said.

'If you get a shot now, that very well may mean you still need another shot in the fall.'

This comes as Covid continues to recede across America. Daily cases are down 15 percent over the past week, to 29,521 daily infections.

Deaths are continuing their rapid decline as well, falling 34 percent to 538 per day over the last seven days.

Cases are starting to rise once in again in 21 states, though, potentially an indicator of the BA.2 'stealth' variant's spread across the country.

The CDC revealed Tuesday that the BA.2 strain - which is 30 percent more infectious than BA.1 but just as mild - now makes up 72 percent of sequenced cases in the U.S. Omicron as a whole, including BA.1, still makes up every single sequenced case in America.
Social media use is rising among children, especially as many spent significantly more time indoors during the COVID-19 pandemic.

While some experts are issuing dire warnings about kids in their phones, there may be some positives to regulated social media use for youngsters.

Dr Jaclyn Halpern, director of the SOAR program at Washington Behavioral Medicine Associates in Chevy Chase, Maryland, told DailyMail.com that social media use among children is a 'mix of positive and negative.'

On one hand, these platforms can be addicting and harm a child's social development, and even expose them to dangerous and unhealthy content.

On the other, it is a communication tool that can help children take part in communities and hobbies they would not have been able to otherwise, and allows them to make new friends.

Use of social media among children has increased in recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when the platforms became important parts of maintaining relationships in a time of social distancing (file photo)

Social media use among children has been rising in recent years, and rocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As children attended school from home, and missed other regular events due to lockdowns, pandemic mandates and fear of the virus, their reliance on social media to make and stay connected with friends increased.

A University of Cambridge study from late last month caught attention after it found that girls aged 11 to 13 and boys aged 14 and 15 who frequently used social media reported decreasing life satisfaction.

Dr Jaclyn Halpern (pictured), of Washington Behavioral Medicine Associates, said that there are some positives and negatives of social media usage for kids, but parents should play a role in keeping their children safe

The study joins of host of others that have warned parents of the negative impacts of social media use in adolescence.

Social media use among all age groups exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially among younger people, meaning that any problems caused by the platforms could have been exacerbated over the past two years.

Halpern says that the platforms are not all bad, though.

Social media can open doors for children that did not exist in the age before these platforms rose to prominence.

'It gives kids a chance to interact with their peers engage in new hobbies, things they didnt know before,' she explained.

Many children use social media for fun, and it can help them connect with others across the world with similar hobbies or interests.

It can also help them discover new hobbies and interests that they may not have been exposed to in their every day life.

Things can get worrying, though, especially for parents trying to protect their children from the worst aspects of the online world.

Social media can be fun for children, and allow them to take part in communities and hobbies they would not be able to otherwise, Halpern said (file photo)

When a child is making friends online, there is always a chance that a person they believe to be their age is actually a grown adult - and potentially a predator.

Children may also begin to develop unhealthy and unrealistic pictures of other people's lives, Halpern explains.

They often compare themselves negatively to peers, she said.

For example, a child may see a student post pictures to social media where they look attractive, and look down of themselves.

What the child may forget, though, is that the person posting the photo may have needed 100 pictures to get the 'perfect shot' and also that many are using apps to alter their appearance to look more desirable.

Many children take part in these same types of behaviors themselves, but do not realize others are doing the same.

Another source of envy can often be vacation and travel photos, where a child will see a peer enjoy time in another place, and feel envious, forgetting that they themselves had traveled for vacation in recent years as well.

[Children may] lose the ability to socialize positively and see themselves in a positive light,' she said.

Social media can cause children to develop unhealthy body and beauty standards, and also start to feel their lives are inferior to that of others around them

Halpern also says that social media addiction is a major problem among younger Americans, a problem which some experts fear has exacerbated during Covid.

Clear signs of social media addiction include changes in behavior, like a child who suddenly starts changing how they dress, speak and if they suddenly start hanging out with different friends.

Changes of eating and sleeping patterns could be another sign. She warns that girls, children with attentive disorders like ADHD or children who seem to care about social power are the most at risk.

Another sign may be children still using phones to communicate even when with each other in person.

The rise of pro-anorexia content, and other material that can cause a child to develop eating disorders or conditions like body dysmorphia, have been prevalent on the internet from even before the rise of social media. Halpern warns that the problem has gotten worse on these platforms.

Many children, girls in particular, will pick up unrealistic body standards online, and then eventually find their way to content that promotes eating disorders to get 'skinnier' or 'healthier'.

There has also been a rise of a new popular body type on Instagram, often associated with figures like Kim Kardashian.

Halpern says it is worrisome, and even a sign of addiction, when children still communicate with one-another via phone, even when sitting together in person

While many celebrities will use editing tools and even cosmetic surgery to widen their hips and breasts, while slimming their wastes, a young child may not know that, and believe that it is a realistic standard to attain in order to feel attractive.

Halpern warns that this type of content that pushes unrealistic, potentially dangerous, body standards onto children could be the most damaging, and that parents should be the vigilant to prevent it from reaching their children.

Social media use among children can not totally be written off as a bad thing, though, and parents should allow their children to safety use some platforms.

The expert notes that the most important thing, over all else, is that children are happy and comfortable.

As long as it does not impact their schoolwork or in-person relationships, social media use can add to a child's life.

Parents can also help make sure their child is using these platforms in a healthy way by making sure 'conversation [with their child about social media] is permitted and its not judged,' Halpern says.

'it is going to be a different world [going forward], but its not necessarily a bad thing... [it's] a change of the tide,' Halpern said.
Avon Protection saw its share price tumble today after the group reported profits being hurt by higher manufacturing costs and a weaker sales mix.

Avon Protection shares plummeted by 19 per cent to 10.51 on Wednesday, making it the largest faller on the FTSE Small Cap Index by some stretch.

It marks a continued torrid pandemic-era period for the respiratory equipment maker, which has been beset by troubles in its body armour business, supply chain bottlenecks and profit warnings.

Problems: During the coronavirus pandemic, Avon Protection has been beset by troubles in its body armour business, supply chain bottlenecks and profit warnings

Last November, the Wiltshire-based firm's share price dropped 51 per cent in one day when it admitted that a batch of bullet-proof vests designed for use by American soldiers had failed regulatory tests.

Before then, the company saw 260million wiped off its total market capitalisation on 13 August after it downgraded revenue forecasts and cautioned that earnings would be affected by logistics issues for the next two years.

In a trading update today, Avon said its profitability had been hit by supply chain problems pushing up costs of production, particularly in its helmets business, lower-than-expected sales and a sluggish performance by its body armour division.

Order intake was likewise down for the six months to the end of March relative to the much stronger comparable period last year, although revenue was up around 4 per cent and in line with anticipations.

But, because of the war in Ukraine, the manufacturer has noted an increase in customer enquiries and said it was having discussions over possible incremental orders for both respiratory and helmet products.

Alongside this, the group recently won a five-year contract worth as much as $204million from the US Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) - an organisation within the US Department of Defense - to provide combat helmets.

Interest: Avon has noted an increase in customer enquiries since the Ukraine War started

'As a global leader in military-grade respiratory and head protection, we are seeing an increased demand for our products for both the short and longer-term,' remarked Avon's chief executive Paul McDonald.

'We are working proactively with our key customers to confirm their requirements and maximise our available capacity in the short term. Longer term, this will create further opportunities and will likely result in mid-term capacity expansion to meet expected demand.'

Avon also stated that it was making 'good 'progress' on its plan to save $15mllion in overhead costs, having shut one of its offices in the United States and altered its management structure.

In the second half of the fiscal year, the group forecasts margins benefitting from this efficiency programme, as well from stronger revenues and a 'substantial unwinding' of the unfavourable sales mix.

Yet while it expects profitability to additionally improve, it cautioned that full-year underlying earnings would still be weaker than it had previously anticipated.

Founded in 1885 and formerly known as Avon Rubber, the business started as a tyremaker before later turning its hand to manufacturing gas masks during the First and Second World Wars.

It has also moved into making cow-milking machines, leg and neck tags for animals, and thermal imaging cameras, but is now predominantly a supplier of personal protection gear for the US military and law enforcement.
Police have used DNA data to unmask the so-called 'I-65 killer' who murdered three female motel clerks and sexually assaulted another in the late 1980s.

Harry Edward Greenwell, 68, of Iowa, is responsible for the series of slayings that occurred at motels near Interstate 65 in Indiana and Kentucky from 1987 through 1990, Indiana state police revealed during a press conference Tuesday.

Police used a new DNA analysis process called forensic genealogy to link Greenwell to the killings of Vicki Heath, Margaret 'Peggy' Gill and Jeanne Gilbert, as well as the assault of an unnamed victim.

Forensic genealogy analyzes crime scene evidence for particular genetic markers and creates a profile which is then compared to existing profiled on public genetic testing and genealogy sites to look for potential relationships. This process led police to one of Greenwell's close relatives, WHAS reported.

'It was determined that the probability of Greenwell being the person responsible for the attacks was more than 99 percent,' Indiana State Police Sgt. Glen Fifield said, explaining the process during Tuesday's press briefing.

The Kentucky-born killer died of cancer in 2013 in New Albin, Iowa, according to his obituary. He had an 'extensive criminal history' and was imprisoned several times, police said, noting that he even escaped from jail on two separate occasions.

Harry Edward Greenwell, 68, of Iowa, (pictured in an undated booking photo) has been identified as the so-called 'I-65 Killer' who murdered three female motel clerks and sexually assaulted another in the late 1980s

Greenwell is reportedly responsible for a series of slayings that occurred at motels near Interstate 65 in Indiana and Kentucky from 1987 through 1990

The first known victim in Greenwell's trail of crimes was Vicki Heath, 41, who was sexually assaulted and fatally shot while working a night shift at a Super 8 Motel in Elizabethtown, Kentucky.

Police found her body behind the motel in the early-morning hours of February 21, 1987, The Courier Journal reported.

Ruben Gardner, then-chief of Elizabethtown police, believed Heath's killer had been someone traveling along I-65, however he didn't have the evidence to substantiate his theory.

She was a mother and had gotten engaged shortly before she was killed. Her loved ones also said she was as an avid reader.

The first known victim in Greenwell's trail of crimes was Vicki Heath, 41, (pictured) who was sexually assaulted and fatally shot while working a night shift at a Super 8 Motel in Elizabethtown, Kentucky

Two years later, on March 3, 1989, Greenwell is said to have sexually assaulted and killed Margaret 'Peggy' Gill, 24 (pictured). She was working as a night auditor at the Days Inn in Merrillville, Indiana, when Greenwell attacked her sometime between 12.30am and 2.30am

Two years later, on March 3, 1989, Greenwell is said to have sexually assaulted and killed Margaret 'Peggy' Gill and Jeanne Gilbert.

Gill, 24, was working as a night auditor at the Days Inn in Merrillville, Indiana, when Greenwell attacked her sometime between 12.30am and 2.30am.

She had been promoted to night auditor after previously working at the motel as a maid. Her family said she loved to bake and decorate cakes for her colleagues.

She was also known for her exemplary cross-stitch work, which she seemingly loved. Her coffin was draped with a cross-stitched scene of the Last Supper that was made for her by a friend.

Gilbert, 34, was also killed on the night of March 3. She had been working as a part-time auditor at the Days Inn in Remington, Indiana.

The mother-of-two was not originally scheduled to be working that evening, but had traded shifts with a colleague so she could watch her daughter's final cheerleading performance.

Gilbert's body was discovered shortly after dawn by a motorist driving through the area. Greenwell had left her body near the roadway after shooting her three times.

Jeanne Gilbert, 34, (pictured) was also killed on the night of March 3, 1989. She had been working as a part-time auditor at the Days Inn in Remington, Indiana

Gilbert's body was discovered shortly after dawn by a motorist driving through the area. Greenwell had left her body near the roadway near the Remington Days Inn (pictured) after shooting her three times

Investigators also linked Greenwell to the Jan. 2, 1990, sexual assault and stabbing of a 21-year-old woman working as a clerk at a Days Inn in Columbus, Indiana.

The unnamed woman managed to flee Greenwell and was able to describe him to authorities as a 6-foot-tall man with greasy hair, a gray-spotted beard and drifting green eyes. Her description was then used create a composite sketch of the suspect.

'This victim was able to escape her attacker and survive. She was later able to give an excellent physical description of the suspect and details of the crime,' Fifield explained. 'She is the only known victim to have survived the vicious, brutal attacks of this killer.'

Police said Tuesday there is a 'distinct possibility' Greenwell may be responsible additional attacks and killings, noting that similar crimes were reported in Minnesota, Kentucky and Illinois during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In 1991 a Minnesota woman, who was also sexually assaulted and stabbed, gave local police a description of her attacker that seemingly mirrored the 21-year-old's account of Greenwell, which included a lazy eye.

Fifield said investigators are continuing to reach out to other police departments in the Midwest to see if Greenwell was connected to any unsolved killings, rapes, robberies or assaults.

Investigators also linked Greenwell to the Jan. 2, 1990, sexual assault and stabbing of a 21-year-old woman working as a clerk at a Days Inn in Columbus, Indiana. The unnamed woman managed to flee Greenwell and provided police with a description that yielded this sketch

Greenwell had a lengthy criminal history and was arrested at least seven times between 1963 and 1998

While the murders of Heath, Gill and Gilbert, as well as the assault of the 21-year-old, all occurred within a three-year span police weren't able to connect the cases for more than a decade.

Elizabethtown police detective Clinton Turner submitted DNA collected from Heath's crime scene into an updated database in 2008, according to WHAS. Police then used that sample and ballistics data to connect Greenwell to all three crimes.

'It was this scientific breakthrough that ultimately led to the identification of the I-65 killer,' Fifield said Tuesday, recalling how police cracked the case.

The DNA analysis in combination with traditional genealogy research and historical records, 'generated a significant and important lead' in the four cases.

'Further investigation and kinship lab testing by the Indiana State Police lab of crime scene samples positive identified the suspect. The match was 99.9999% positive,' the sergeant said.

He also noted that one of the primary factors linking the four crimes was their proximity to Interstate 65, which runs from Gary, Indiana, to Mobile, Alabama.

Police believe there is a 'distinct possibility' Greenwell (pictured in an undated booking photo) may be responsible additional attacks and killings, noting that similar crimes were reported in Minnesota, Kentucky and Illinois during the late 1980s and early 1990s

Indiana State Police Sgt. Glen Fifield explained during Tuesday's press conference that through forensic genealogy 'it was determined that the probability of Greenwell being the person responsible for the attacks was more than 99 percent'

Greenwell was born in Louisville, Kentucky in December 1944. He worked was an employee of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, providing 'public safety' for 30 years, before retiring in February 2010, WTHR reported.

He had a lengthy criminal history and was arrested at least seven times between 1963 and 1998. He was charged with a variety of crimes ranging from traffic violations to sodomy and armed robbery.

He was first arrested on January 17, 1963 for an armed robbery and paroled from the Kentucky State Penitentiary in 1969, police documents obtained by the TV station revealed.

In April 1978 his wife died in a Wisconsin house fire. Greenwell remarried a little over a year later. He was then arrested for robbery in the summer of 1982. During his sentence, he managed to escape from jail twice and was recaptured both times.

Greenwell was then arrested twice in 1998 in Iowa, once for violating a restraining order and another time for felony possession. His case was dismissed that November.

It remains unclear how many crimes he committed before passing of lung cancer in January 2013. His obituary claimed Greenwell was remembered for being a 'man with many friends who loved his straight up-attitude.'

He was never formally charged with the I-65 killings or assault that he has been connected to.

Gilbert's daughter, Kimberly Gilbert Wright (pictured speaking during Tuesday's press conference) said she believes Greenwell's family and friends were also victims of his crimes, saying: 'They likely never knew the person that he truly was'

Some of his victim's relatives, including Gilbert's daughter, Kimberly Gilbert Wright, attended Tuesday's press conference which was hosted by by members of the FBI, the Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and Columbus, Indiana, police departments.

Wright said her family was very grateful for law enforcement's efforts to identify her mother's killer and helping bring some type of closure to her family and the other victims' relatives.

'She's still in my family's hearts,' Wright said of her mother. 'We talk about her as if she hasn't gone. My brother and I were fortunate enough to have spent the last seven months of her life living with her and experiencing the joy that she could bring to every day of our life.'

Wright also noted that she believes Greenwell's family and friends were also victims of his crimes, saying: 'They likely never knew the person that he truly was.'
Jacqui Berlinn and Gina McDonald are co-founders of Mothers Against Drug Deaths

Business is booming in San Francisco, except it's not anything that anyone should be proud of.

We call this multi-million dollar industry the homeless industrial complex  and San Francisco is leading the way.

Feces, dirty needles, and tent encampments on the streets of the Tenderloin are part of it.

Children walked to school by hired guards, smash and grab crimes and loose fentanyl residue on sidewalks that can be licked by a dog or carried by the wind into a playground are part of it.

Drug dealers, armed with guns and machetes, standing in packs of dozens, openly selling fentanyl while police helplessly look on are part of it.

But the addicts  barely surviving, with clothes hanging off their shoulders showing open sores, pipes in their hands  are the most important part of the homeless industrial complex.

If the addicts were gone tomorrow this business would disappear, but apparently the powers that be don't want that to happen.

We are the co-founders of Mothers Against Drug Deaths (MADD) and we say: Enough!

We've seen with our own eyes what's happening in San Francisco, because we're on the streets, talking with the street-people, protesting against the drug dealers and searching for our loved ones.

We are the co-founders of Mothers Against Drug Deaths and we say: Enough! (Above) Gina McDonald (on left) and Jacqui Berlinn (on right) protesting outside San Francisco's Linkage Center on February 5, 2022

This city is a mother's worst nightmare.

Our children (Sam, daughter of Gina and Corey, son of Jacqui) had seemingly normal young lives.

Sam attended private school, played volleyball and was a solid student.

She smoked pot in her teenage years and got hooked on heroin when she was 21-years-old after a bad breakup.

Corey played saxophone in the marching band. He's an avid reader and writer, who taught himself to play guitar.

He also used pot and alcohol in high school. He was convicted of a felony at 18-years-old for selling marijuana, then a girlfriend introduced him to heroin.

Both of them eventually got hooked on fentanyl, which is mixed with all sorts of drugs these days.

Today, Sam is in treatment outside of San Francisco.

Corey is still on the street.

He calls home every couple of weeks from a pay phone or when friends let him use their cellphones.

He's lost some of his teeth. He can't stand upright.

He was nearly killed when a drug dealer stabbed him in the chest and punctured his lung.

Another dealer hacked his hand with a machete, leaving him unable to use all his fingers.

We've seen with our own eyes what's happening in San Francisco, because we're on the streets, talking with the street-people, protesting against the drug dealers and searching for our loved ones. (Above, left) Jacqui Berlinn with her son Corey before he became homeless addict (Above, right) Corey seen living on the streets of San Francisco

This city is a mother's worst nightmare. (Above) Gina McDonald with her daughter Sam

We know our children made terrible choices, but we will not give up on them. A mother's love knows no bounds.

That's why we were hopeful when San Francisco Mayor London Breed declared an emergency in the Tenderloin.

She promised to address the overdose and addiction crisis that is killing more than two people a day in the city.

But 90 days later, she declared an end to the emergency, and unfortunately, they had made it worse.

Breed opened a so-called linkage center near United Nations plaza, where addicts can go to seek help and referral to treatment.

It was meant to be a refuge. It's not.

Attached to the center is an open-air drug consumption area, where addicts lie on the ground or slumped in plastic chairs all day.

They're provided all the tools necessary to continue using  needles, foil, pipes and more.

There are also drugs available.

Corey (above as a child on left and teenager on right ) played saxophone in the marching band. He's an avid reader and writer, who taught himself to play guitar.

Corey (above) was nearly killed when a drug dealer stabbed him in the chest and punctured his lung.

Directly across the plaza is the largest open-air drug market in the city.

If you haven't seen it for yourself, it's hard to believe. At least 100 drug dealers standing in the bright sunshine  without any fear of police.

Anyone that knows anything about addiction would find this unfathomable.

Fentanyl withdrawal causes extreme dope sickness. That's what makes it so difficult for some addicts to quit.

Many addicts on the street, like Corey, don't even get high anymore. They just use to stave off the dope sickness.

But San Francisco has chosen to put its linkage center a stone's throw away from the dealers.

How is that supposed to help these desperate addicts quit?

It's a sick joke, and it's no surprise that it has been a complete and utter failure.

According to the city's own records, which we have compiled, out of 23,000-plus visits to the linkage center since it opened in December, only 18 people have received medical treatment for substance abuse or have been successfully referred to rehab. And we don't even know if those 18 people are clean today, because there's no way to track them.

For their part, the city wants to open more drug consumptions sites, even though it is plain to us that they're not working.

The linkage center at the United Nations plaza cost at least $10 million (we've heard the project cost as much as $19 million).

The staff at the linkage center are provided by a network of non-profits, including organizations called HealthRIGHT 360 and Urban Alchemy.

At this point we must ask: Who is this multi-million dollar homeless industrial complex really serving? Because it's not serving the addicts.

We do what little we can to raise awareness over this insanity.

We protest against drug dealers in the city  holding signs on the same corners where they stand.

Mothers Against Drug Deaths recently paid to put up a billboard in Union Square that reads: 'Famous for the world over for our brains, beauty and now dirt-cheap fentanyl.' (Above) The MADD billboard

We protest against drug dealers in the city  holding signs on the same corners where they stand. (Above) Jacqui Berlinn leading a protest in San Francisco

We never feel completely safe.

The dealers give us the evil eye, or yell at us when they think we're using our phones to film them. But we're not going away.

We're actually more afraid of the politicians. They're the ones who will do anything. They say that we just want to throw everyone in jail, but it's not true.

Corey would be the first to tell you that San Francisco does not know how to help the addicts.

The city is enabling them. We want mandated treatment.

The city should be arresting people for stealing and using and dealing drugs. Then, they should give the addicts a choice: jail or treatment.

If Mayor Breed doesn't have enough police  then ask the state for help.

If there aren't enough beds in the hospitals  then open more.

If she isn't up to the job  she should step aside.

Corey once called San Francisco Pleasure Island. And it is  in every nightmarish way.

Except it's not just San Francisco's problem anymore. Corey and the other addicts are seeing new faces.

Authors Gina McDonald (left) and Jacqui Berlinn (right)

High schoolers are coming into the city on the train, buying fentanyl and taking it back home to the suburbs.

We are not just mothers, we're also grandmothers. We cannot allow this to continue and threaten another generation.

Last month, in another slap in the face of parents trying to save their kids, Breed flew off to Europe to promote San Francisco as a destination for foreign tourists.

She talked about the dropping of mask mandates and the Golden Gate bridge and our famous cable cars.

She didn't mention that Tenderloin.

We have a different message for European tourists. This is no place to bring your family.

Mothers Against Drug Deaths recently paid to put up a billboard in Union Square that reads: 'Famous for the world over for our brains, beauty and now dirt-cheap fentanyl.'

And sadly, that's the truth.




Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon is leading Rep. Song Young-gil, former head of the ruling Democratic Party (DP), by a wide margin in a hypothetical two-race for the upcoming June mayoral race, a poll showed Wednesday.







According to the survey of 1,015 voters aged 18 and older conducted by Realmeter from Monday to Tuesday, Oh led Song 50.3 percent to 36.7 percent, which was outside the margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence level. Those who didn't have a preferred candidate stood at 7.3 percent.







Oh also outpaced Park Young-sun, former minister for SMEs and startups, and Im Jong-seok, former presidential chief of staff, when pitted against the liberal politicians in separate two-way races.







Song was the chairman of the DP ahead of the March 9 presidential election but stepped down following its defeat. Last week, the five-term veteran lawmaker declared his bid for Seoul mayor in the June local elections. (Yonhap)


There has been a cry for help from the Russian Embassy in Ireland as it faces a fuel shortage.

Diplomats have complained that Irish oil companies have refused to deliver supplies to their Dublin property due to the invasion of Ukraine.

The embassy has become the focal point for Irish anger over the war raged by Vladimir Putin.

The Russian Embassy in Dublin has asked for help with the heating after Irish fuel companies refused to deliver supplies. Pictured: Police at the embassy as protesters gather last month

Former Irish broadcast journalist Charlie Bird joined crowds at the embassy at a March rally

The Irish Daily Mirror reported that the embassy has written a letter to Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney's department about the issue.

They have urged the Irish Government to intervene in what they have termed as a 'clearly discriminatory case'.

Asked about the matter on Tuesday, Ireland's deputy premier Leo Varadkar said that, while he does not have sympathy for the Russian Embassy, there are rules in which Ireland must follow when hosting international diplomats.

'There are particular rules under the Vienna Conventions as to how we're supposed to treat diplomats and diplomatic commissions in our country so I think they have to be followed,' the Tanaiste said.

'I actually didn't have the chance to read that article so I don't know the details.'

The embassy has been the scene of demonstrations by those opposed to the invasion of Ukraine.

Protesters outside the Russian Embassy to mark one month since the invasion on March 24

A group of protesters stand outside the Russian Embassy with signs and flags on March 29

Since the invasion began, protests have been staged across the city and the country as both Irish people and Ukrainians living in Ireland gathered to express outcry at the war.

The Irish Government has also face repeated calls to expel the Russian Ambassador to Ireland, Yury Filatov.

Last month a man was charged with criminal damage and dangerous driving after his lorry rammed the embassy gates on Orwell Road in the south of the city.

On Tuesday evening the embassy had not confirmed whether it had managed to secure fuel supply.

Meanwhile Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is set to address the two houses of the Irish Parliament on Wednesday.
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Property photos offer an glimpse inside the luxurious interior of a $6million mansion reportedly bought with Black Lives Matter donations.

The 6,785sq ft, seven-bed six-bath property in Studio City, near Los Angeles, was purchased in October 2020 for $5,888,800 by a financial manager for BLM leaders.

Pictures inside the grand home, sitting on a three-quarter-acre lot, reveal a pool, tree-lined yard, outdoor fireplace, 'butler's pantry', its own miniature filming studio, 24 parking spaces, and two separate guest houses along with the main house.

The property listing says the mansion's guests have included Hollywood royalty such as Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart.

Other luxury features boasted by the mansion's listing are a 'mud room, custom wrought iron staircase, and rejuvenation light fixtures, handles and other details.'

Property photos show the luxurious seven-bedroom, 6,500-square foot $6million Los Angeles mansion reportedly purchased with Black Lives Matter donations

The mansion comes complete with a sound stage (pictured) and mini filming studio. According to the property listing, the mansion's guests have included Hollywood royalty such as Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart

The Studio City home - which sits on a three-quarter-acre lot - boasts more than half-dozen bedrooms and bathrooms, a 'butler's pantry' in the kitchen (pictured) as well as multiple fireplaces and a 'mud room'

The property's patio and outdoor yard features an inground pool and cabana

The home is also designed with opulent finishes such as a 'soapstone center island,' Carrara marble and Calacatta gold stone featured in bathrooms, three fireplaces - 'one imported from Italy and one with handmade Arto Cement Tile Hearth.'

The home, dubbed 'Campus' by BLM executives, was purchased by Dyane Pascall in October 2020 with cash, according to reports.

Pascall is the financial manager for Janaya and Patrisse Consulting LLC, a private consulting firm for disgraced BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors and her spouse Janaya Khan.

Soon after the purchase, the home was transferred to a company established in the opaque tax haven state of Delaware by law firm Perkins Coie, leaving its current ownership shrouded in mystery.

The purchase came days after BLM's official charity Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) received an injection of $66.5million in donations that had flooded in from around the globe by people devastated by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman.

Redfin now estimates the property is worth $5,992,289.

News of the property purchase comes amid heightened scrutiny of the foundation, which famously grew into one of the largest international movements against racial injustice in mid-2020 and has since faced calls for financial transparency.

BLM founders (from left) include Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi (pictured together left in 2015) and LA faction founder Melina Abdullah (right photo)

The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation famously grew into one of the largest international movements against racial injustice in mid-2020 but has now come under intense scrutiny over its finances

Emails show the firm wanted to keep the purchase secret, despite filming a video on the home's patio in May

BLM attempted to quell speculation of suspected misappropriation in early 2021 by releasing a financial report that showed it had taken in $90million throughout 2020, distributed grants to its partner organizations, and had $60million remaining in its accounts.

Earlier this year, DailyMail.com also revealed the group blew $12.7million of those funds on 'professional fees', according to the charity revenue and expenses statements that were included in its application for tax-exempt, nonprofit status in August 2020.

However, neither of those reports included records of the $6million property purchase made months earlier.

News of the real estate acquisition was first reported by New York Magazine on Monday as the organization allegedly hoped to keep the house's existence a secret - despite three of its former leaders reportedly filming a series of videos dining and drinking champagne outside the estate last spring.

Documents and internal communications reportedly reveal the luxury property was handled in ways that 'blur boundaries' between charitable use and those that would benefit some of the organization's leaders - including Cullors, who shared video in June of her enjoying a ritzy brunch outside the estate with fellow officials Alicia Garza and Melina Abdullah, who have both since left the organization.

When contacted by New York Magazine for comment regarding the property's existence, officials seemingly attempted to make the story go away. The magazine said it learned of the estate through a source from within the firm, who had access to the BLM brass' internal emails.

After receiving the email asking for comment, BLM officials reportedly circulated an internal memo with possible responses to the outlet's query concerning the alleged purchase, ranging from 'Can we kill the story?' to, 'Our angle - needs to be to deflate ownership of the property,' the magazine reported.

The memo reportedly included bullet points that outlined how 'Campus is part of cultural arm of the org - potentially as an 'influencer house,' where abolition+ based content is produced by artists & creatives.'

Another bullet point was reportedly titled 'Accounting/990 modifications,' according to the paper, and read in part: 'Need to first make sure it's legally okay to use as we plan to use it.'

Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza, and Melina Abdullah, allegedly laid out $6million to buy a 6500-square foot Southern California mansion (seen in background) Emails show the firm wanted to keep it secret, despite filming a video on its patio in May (pictured) - an incident officials in emails called a 'hole' in story given to the paper

Cullors, 38, came under fire last year for a slew of high-profile property purchases. She resigned after facing backlash from critics and supporters. BLM brass assert the latest purchase is above board, despite internal emails showing members attempting to cover up its existence when confronted with real estate records detailing the purchase

The video, posted in June, shows Cullors (not pictured) enjoying a ritzy brunch outside the estate with fellow officials Alicia Garza and Melina Abdullah, who have both since left the organization

The memo goes on to designate the property as a 'safehouse,' for leaders whose safety has been threatened.

The internal bulletin, however, notes: 'Holes in security story: Use in public YT videos,' seemingly referencing Cullors' public video reportedly outside the supposed secret hideout, in which the three officials casually sipped champagne on the property's patio over an ornate table spread and addressed controversy over Cullors' now notorious property purchases and alleged misuse of foundation funds.

'For me, the hardest moments have been the right-wing-media machine just leveraging literally all its weight against me, against our movement, against BLM the organization,' Cullors says in the 17-minute clip, posted shortly before her resignation following backlash over her reported purchase of four lavish homes for $3.2 million.

'I'm some weeks out now from a lot of the noise, so I have more perspective, right? While I was in it, I was in survival mode,' Cullors said, referring to an April 2021 article in the New York Post that detailed the purchases.

'I think they've attempted to cancel us, but they have not been successful in canceling us,' Abdullah says at another point in the recorded discussion meant to address the 1-year anniversary of the death of Eric Garner, but quickly became a defense of Cullors' real estate ventures.

'They've attempted to say - and I'm just gonna say it - 'She bought some damn houses. We gonna cancel her.'' Garza said, in a pointed comment addressing Cullors' critics.

In a letter issued to BLM Monday, the California Department of Justice also accused the charity of failing to submit its annual financial reports and alleged it was in delinquent status

She too left the group shortly after the roundtable, saying that neither right-wing attacks nor criticism from Black organizers angered by disproportionate gaps between the fortunes of the movements most lauded figures and on-the-ground activists, were reasons for her departure.

With that said, the idea the house simultaneously serves as a secret refuge for embattled BLMers and also a place for broadcasting content online seem to conflict with one another, being fundamentally opposed in nature.

In an emailed statement to New York Magazine April 1, Shalomyah Bowers, a BLM board member, asserted that the foundation had bought Campus 'with the intention for it to serve as housing and studio space for recipients of the Black Joy Creators Fellowship.'

The fellowship, which 'provides recording resources and dedicated space for Black creatives to launch content online and in real life focused on abolition, healing justice, urban agriculture and food justice, pop culture, activism, and politics,' was announced on April 2, the following morning.

Bowers also maintained in the statement that BLMGNF had 'always planned' to disclose the house in legal filings this May.

The board member also doubled down on declarations that the estate does not serve as anyone's personal residence, and that purchasing property via private LLCs is customary in real estate for legal reasons.

The statement did not address why the supposed creative 'influencer' space, relatively little content - aside from the aforementioned video, in which none of the former BLM officials addressed the property behind them - has been produced there over the course of 17 months.

The foundation's decision to keep mum on the house until now, when confronted, is unusual for a supposedly charitable - and tax-exempt - organization such as BLM, and it is one that leaves the organization open to further critique and scrutiny, nonprofit expert Jacob Harold told New York Magazine Monday.

'That's a very legitimate critique,' said Harold, a former CEO of GuideStar and the co-founder of Candid, an information service that reports on nonprofits, said of the reported purchase.

The revelation could negatively affect further donations to the foundation, Harold added, as it continues to face scrutiny over dodgy finances.

In February, foundation leaders were hit with a notice from the Department of Justice asserting that members could be held personally liable if they fail to disclose financial records about the charity's $60million in donations within the next 60 days.

BLMGNF filed IRS documents requesting to become a nonprofit in 2020 when millions of dollars in donations began pouring in after the police killing of George Floyd

Under 'professional fees' in the organization's IRS Form 1023, BLMGNF listed $12,706,366 for 2020 and predicted a similar sum, $12.7million, on such costs for 2021

The DOJ requested a copy of BLM's annual registration renewal fee report and its 2020 IRS tax forms within two months time.

If the organization fails to submit these documents, its charity exemption status will be revoked. It could also face fines for 'each month or partial month for which the report(s) are delinquent.'

The letter, which was obtained by the Washington Examiner, threatened that 'directors, trustees, officers and return preparers' would be 'personally liable' for 'all penalties, interest and other costs incurred to restore exempt status'. The DOJ noted that 'charitable assets cannot be used to pay these avoidable costs'.

Day earlier, it had been revealed that BLM has not had designated anyone as in charge of its finances after co-founder Cullors' resignation.

It is not clear who is currently in charge of the activist group after all three of its founding members - Cullors, Garza and Opal Tometi - left the organization.
The source who distributed Hunter Biden's laptop to congressmen and media has fled the US to Switzerland, saying he fears retaliation from the Biden administration.

Jack Maxey gave DailyMail.com a copy of the hard drive from Hunter's abandoned laptop in the spring of 2021.

He also gave copies and material from it to the Washington Post, New York Times, and Senator Chuck Grassley in his role as ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee  but he claims they all sat on it for months.

For the past two weeks, Maxey has been in hiding in Zurich, working with IT experts to dig out more data from the 'laptop from hell'.

Maxey, a former co-host of ex-Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon's podcast the War Room, claims he and his colleagues have found '450 gigabytes of deleted material' including 80,000 images and videos and more than 120,000 archived emails.

He said he intends to post them all online in a searchable database in the coming weeks.

Jack Maxey gave DailyMail.com a copy of the hard drive from Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop in the spring of 2021. For the past two weeks, Maxey has been in hiding in Zurich, working with IT experts to dig out more data from the 'laptop from hell'

Hunter's laptop is brimming with evidence of apparent criminal activity by him and his associates including drug trafficking and prostitution. This photo of him grabbing a unidentified woman's hair was recovered from his laptop

Hunter abandoned his laptop at a Delaware computer store in 2019. The owner, John Mac Isaac, gave a copy to Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who passed it on to Maxey.

'I came here so that we could do a forensic examination of Hunter's laptop safely in a country that still respects human liberty and the ideals of liberal democratic principles,' he told DailyMail.com.

Hunter is seen in a photo with a crack pipe in his mouth as he sleeps. The photo was recovered from his laptop

'I do not believe this would have been possible inside the United States. We had numerous attempts on us from trying to do things like this there.'

Maxey said that after contacting DailyMail.com about the laptop last year, black suburban SUVs appeared outside his house, and former US intelligence officer friends he shared copies with told him they received strange calls.

'I showed this to a friend of mine in desperation in February [2021] because nobody would listen to me. No news organizations would take it. In fact, the very first major news organization to take it was the Daily Mail,' he said.

'Very dear friends of mine, the sharp tip of the spear, were making welfare calls to me every day, basically to see if I was still alive.'

Maxey claimed one former intelligence agency senior staffer told him soon after he received the hard drive in 2020: 'If you don't release enough of this, so that they know you can release all of it, I'm telling you brother, you're a dead man.'

Maxey took their advice in October 2020 and posted batches of emails and other files from the laptop on file sharing sites.

But after about an hour, the links were taken down.

Maxey said he believes the US government was hunting down files from the laptop posted online and flagged them to the companies.

'There were five drop boxes: two in the United States, one in New Zealand, two in the UK. All the same drop boxes in which they tell us child pornography is shared around the globe without any consequence because they can't look at it.

'These are all Five Eyes countries, English speaking countries in an intelligence sharing agreement. And they were all ripped down.

'So this means that our intelligence services, who still have not even acknowledged that they have Hunter Biden's laptop, were obviously diligently doing cache searches across the internet to find out if any of this stuff was being released.

'That should terrify every single decent person in the West.'

DailyMail.com has been unable to verify the claims.

Emails between Hunter and Eric Schwerin, his business partner at consultancy Rosemont Seneca, show Schwerin was working on Joe's taxes. The emails were recovered from Hunter's laptop

Maxey says he has found '450 gigabytes of erased material' including 80,000 images and videos and more than 120,000 archived emails

Emails from Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop, obtained by DailyMail.com, revealed Joe and Hunter shared bank accounts and paid each other's bills

Maxey said one reason he chose Switzerland as a hideout was because the only file sharing site that did not take down the laptop files was Swiss Transfer, a file sharing service based in the historically politically neutral country.

The former Bannon podcast co-host said he is livid at the FBI, who he believes slow-walked their investigation into Hunter and failed to enter the laptop they received from Mac Isaac into evidence for months.

According to the New York Times, files from the laptop are now part of the evidence in Hunter's federal prosecution for alleged tax fraud, money laundering and illegal foreign lobbying.

Among the files on the laptop are a raft of emails and documents showing Hunter's dealings with Burisma, a Ukrainian gas firm that became the center of Trump's first impeachment in December 2019.

The then-president was accused of pushing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce investigations into the Bidens and Burisma for alleged corruption.

Maxey claims that had the FBI come forward in 2020 with the emails showing the details of Hunter's work for Burisma, Trump would have been vindicated.

'The FBI had this on the ninth of December 2019,' he said. 'I suppose the first person betrayed was a sitting US president in an impeachment hearing, when the FBI had the exculpatory evidence in their hands to have that end instantly, and they did nothing.

'The second group of people to be betrayed were all of the Democratic candidates in the spring primaries that year,' he added.

'The American people were utterly betrayed, because I guarantee you that Joe Biden couldn't run for dog catcher if the American people knew about this laptop.'

In emails from the hard drive Hunter and his business partners make apparent references to Joe's involvement in a multi-million-dollar deal with Chinese government-linked oil giant CEFC.

Maxey railed against the Senate Judiciary Committee and its GOP ranking member Chuck Grassley (pictured) for failing to respond to his offer of the laptop last year

A shocking photo obtained from Hunter's laptop shows his badly damaged and worn down teeth - also known as 'meth mouth' - as he sits in a dentist chair

In October 2020 Maxey posted batches of emails and other files from the laptop on file sharing sites. But after about an hour, the links were taken down. This photo is from Hunter's laptop

One infamous May 2017 email by Hunter's partner James Gilliar, he suggests 10% of the equity in the deal would go to 'the big guy'  a phrase consistently used throughout Hunter's communications to refer to his father.

Other emails show that Joe and Hunter shared a bank account and paid each other's bills.

Maxey also railed against the Senate Judiciary Committee and its GOP ranking member Chuck Grassley for failing to respond to his offer of the laptop last year.

'I have a lot of admiration for Chuck Grassley  or I did,' Maxey said.

'I wrote a very reasoned, rational, respectful letter to Chuck Grassley and delivered him a copy of the laptop that arrived on the eighth of July, I have the signed receipts.

'I never heard a word back from the Senate Judiciary Committee even once.'

A spokesman for Grassley told DailyMail.com that an investigator for the Senator spoke at length with Mr. Maxey about the hard drives hed provided to various entities in Washington, and noted that conducting appropriate due diligence in order to conduct a credible investigation takes time.

The spokesman said Grassley had been investigating the Biden familys foreign financial engagements since the summer of 2019, and has been collecting bank records to independently verify the revelations on Hunters laptop.

Upon receiving the laptop, Sen. Grassleys and Sen. Johnsons investigation focused largely on collecting bank records that independently verify content on the laptop and corroborate the senators earlier reports, the spokesman said.

Weeks before the New York Post first published material from the laptop in October 2020, Grassley co-wrote a report with Senator Ron Johnson publishing bank documents obtained by his committee evidencing millions of dollars sent by the Chinese to Hunter and his uncle, Joe's brother Jim Biden.

Grassley pointed to more documents showing the flow of funds from CEFC to Hunter and Jim in a speech to congress this week.

Maxey also gave a copy of the hard drive to the Washington Post in June 2021. The paper took nine months to authenticate it, publishing its first story announcing the validity of the laptop this week.

The paper hired experts using similar techniques to the top cyber forensics experts DailyMail.com used to validate the laptop last spring.

Maxey also gave hundreds of documents from the laptop to the New York Times, which finally admitted it was real in a story two weeks ago.

He claimed that even Fox News, which has covered stories arising from the laptop extensively, declined to take a full copy of the hard drive from him, receiving only batches of certain documents instead.

'If you have an honest press, who are willing to report the bad stories, and uncover the corruption, then we as voters are more informed about who we should have in elected office. And they failed us miserably,' Maxey said.

Extracts from one email published show how Hunter Biden was to be paid $850,000 in part of his arrangement with a Chinese firm

Jen Psaki referred to Hunter's laptop as Russian disinformation in 2020, when a group of former intelligence officials labeled it as such

In the prior months, both newspapers prominently reported claims the laptop was Russian disinformation.

More than 50 top former intelligence officials wrote an open letter casting doubt on the laptop's provenance in October 2020, claiming it 'has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.'

Signatories included former CIA directors or acting directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta and Gen. Michael Hayden, and former National Intelligence Director James Clapper.

'They essentially declared in their 'best opinion'  you notice how they always use weasel words  that this is a fabrication of elves in the basement of the Kremlin,' Maxey said.

'Still to this day, I can't understand how Panetta, Clapper, Haden and Brennan declared it to be a fabrication.'

Maxey believes the 'cover-up' of Hunter's laptop is a bipartisan problem and said he wants to see an entire new congress to investigate it in open hearings.

'We have an election coming up in the fall. And my prayer is that every member of the United States House and Senate who are running for office this year get replaced  Republicans and Democrats. We need to take back the country,' he said.
President Joe Biden nominated Admiral Linda Fagan to lead the US Coast Guard, and, if confirmed by the Senate, become the first female uniformed leader of a branch of the US armed forces.

Biden made the announcement in a tweet on Tuesday.

'Her leadership and integrity are second to none,' the president wrote.

Fagan, 58, who currently serves as vice commandant of the Coast Guard, must be confirmed by the Senate to the post. She's served in her current post since 2021, when she was named the first female four-star admiral in Coast Guard history.

She would replace Admiral Karl Schultz, who has served as commandant since 2018.

Admiral Linda Fagan has been nominated to lead the US Coast Guard and become the first female uniformed leader of a branch of the US armed forces

'Her leadership and integrity are second to none,' the president said in a tweet announcing her nomination Tuesday

'Admiral Fagan is an exceptional senior Coast Guard officer and nominee, possessing the keen intellect, the depth of operational experience, and the well-honed leadership and managerial acumen to serve with distinction as our Service's 27th Commandant,' Schultz said in a statement.

Fagan has served on all seven continents and is currently the vice commandant of the Coast Guard, acting as the branch's second-in-command.

The appointment drew a rare instance of bipartisan approval, with both Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Commerce Committee - which is in charge of passing her nomination to the full Senate for approval - applauding the president for his choice.

Washington Senator Maria Cantwell, chairwoman of the Senate Commerce Committee, said in a tweet: 'Admiral Fagans nomination will inspire generations of American women to strive to serve at the highest level in the Armed Forces.'

The Republicans on the Senate Commerce Committee also heaped praise on Fagan, writing on Twitter, 'POTUS has finally nominated an outstanding leader for @USCG. If confirmed, Linda L. Fagan would be the first female Commandant of the USCG. It is important for the Commerce Committee to proceed efficiently so the Coast Guard is not left without a leader.'

Admiral Karl L. Schultz praised his potential replacement in a statement on Wednesday

The Department of Homeland Security also put out its approval Tuesday.

'Adm. Fagan is a tremendous leader, trailblazer, and respected public servant who will lead the Coast Guard across its critical missions with honor. Over Adm. Fagan's 36 years in the Coast Guard, she has served on seven continents, was previously commander of the Coast Guard Pacific Area, and is the officer with the longest service record in the marine safety field,' the DHS said in a statement.

Fagan graduated from the Coast Guard Academy and received a masters at the University of Washington in marine affairs as well as in national security strategy from the National Defense University.

Fagan also served aboard the USCGC Polar Star and as deputy director of operations at US Northern Command.

She is the first recipient of the Coast Guard's Gold Ancient Trident, an award created in 2016 for the service member with the longest record in Marine Safety.
A newly-revealed text message allegedly 'proves' that lawyer Michael Sussman lied to the FBI to hide his links to the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign when he presented the bureau with purported links between Donald Trump and a Russian bank.

In a Monday court filing, Special Counsel John Durham released a 2016 exchange between Sussman and FBI counsel James Baker in which the former asks the agent for a meeting the night before their face-to-face.

'Indeed, on September 18, 2016 at 7:24 p.m., i.e., the night before the defendant met with the General Counsel, the defendant conveyed the same lie in writing and sent the following text message to the General Counsels personal cellphone,' the filing states.

Sussman goes out of his way to claim he was operating 'on my own.' He's currently being accused of lying about arranging to meet with Baker on behalf of Clinton's presidential campaign and tech executive Rodney Joffe.

'Jim  its Michael Sussmann. I have something time-sensitive (and sensitive) I need to discuss. Do you have availibilty for a short meeting tomorrow?' the text provided by Durham reads.

'Im coming on my own  not on behalf of a client or company  want to help the Bureau. Thanks.'

Baker allegedly replies, 'Ok. I will find a time. What might work for you?'

In a new court filing, Special Counsel John Durham (left) accused former Clinton-linked lawyer Michael Sussman (right) of 'writing' his alleged 'lie' that he was not working with Hillary Clinton's team when he presented links between Donald Trump and a Russian bank to the FBI

'Any time but lunchtime  you name it,' Sussman says.

The following meeting supposedly involved Sussman relaying suspicions about a connection between Trump and Russian-based Alfa Bank.

Sussman had worked for the Democratic National Committee after Russia hacked the organization's servers and stole information.

The law firm he used to work at, Perkins Coie had retained the group Fusion GPS which hired former British spy Christopher Steele to compile his infamous and discredited dossier on Trump.

Sussman's partner at Perkins Coie was Marc Elias, who was representing Clinton's 2016 team and hired Fusion GPS.

Durham's Monday filing alleges that Sussman met with 'the author of a now well-known dossier regarding Trump,' believed to be Steele, at the offices of 'Law Firm-1,' believed to be Perkins Coie.

The special counsel also claims Sussman worked with who Joffe and his company and 'numerous cyber researchers, and employees at multiple Internet companies' to access damaging information about Trump.

Sussman 'exploited' his access to sensitive data to do it, Durham claimed.

Durham said Sussman was working on behalf of the Clinton campaign at the time.

In the text exchange, Sussman appears to go out of his way to say he is not looking to meet 'on behalf of a client or company'

He accuses Joffe of getting researchers 'to mine Internet data to establish an inference and narrative tying then-candidate Trump to Russia.'

'In doing so, Tech Executive-1 indicated that he was seeking to please certain VIPs, referring to individuals at Law Firm-1 and the Clinton Campaign,' Durham's filing states.

The Clinton lawyer's legal team accused Durham of pushing a 'baseless narrative that the Clinton campaign conspired with others to trick the federal government into investigating ties between President Trump and Russia,' according to the New York Times.

Sussman's attorneys want the judge in the ongoing legal proceedings to block Durham's ability to enter the Steele dossier into court record, something they claim he will do.

Durham asked the judge to prevent Sussman's team from presenting evidence or arguments that depict him as acting on 'political bias' or call his appointment under the Trump administration into question.

He also moved to enter a tweet from the Clinton campaign posted on October 31, 2016 into the record.

While it's not specified what tweet Durham is referring to, one post from that day claimed that links between Trump and Alfa Bank were mysteriously 'uncovered.'

'Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank,' the campaign's official Twitter account said.

Attached was a statement from then-Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan, who currently serves as President Joe Biden's National Security Adviser.

It called the purported evidence 'the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow.'

The Clinton campaign also tweeted that day, 'It's time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia.'

'Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank,' she tweeted on October 31, 2016 while sharing a statement from her then-special policy advisor Jake Sullivan
Scott Morrison has taken a brutal swipe at the ABC's 7.30 program after refusing to commit to two interviews with host Leigh Sales during the election campaign.

The Prime Minister faced a grilling from Sales on Tuesday night, answering tough questions about criticism from members of his own party, as well as his friendship with disgraced Hillsong founder Brian Houston.

But as the interview was wrapping up, Sales asked the Prime Minister if he would commit to two interviews with her during the election campaign - sparking a feisty back and forth between the pair.

'Prime Minister, every election campaign for the past 27 years that this show has been on, both leaders have done a couple of prime-time interviews on this show during the campaign,' the journalist said.

'I've already invited Mr Albanese and he agreed. So I wanted to invite you while I'm here. Would you be happy to do a couple of interviews on air?'

But the PM refused to commit - simply saying he would appear across 'many programs' during the campaign.

'Well, we'll be appearing on the ABC and everybody's programs over the course of the campaign, Leigh, and we've always made ourselves pretty available,' Mr Morrison said.

'That's not a direct answer, actually. Will you be doing two interviews on prime-time on 7.30?' Sales fired back.

Mr Morrison then blatantly said the 'election isn't about the 7.30 Report'.

'It's about the Australian people and we'll make ourselves available to the ABC and all the networks and I'll be standing up every day,' he said.

Sales then pointed out he'd be the first Prime Minister not to appear on the program throughout the campaign.

Scott Morrison has taken a swipe at the prominence of the ABC's 7.30 Report, after refusing to commit to two interviews with host Leigh Sales during the election campaign

'You will be the first Prime Minister in 27 years to not do two interviews on the main prime-time current affairs program in country,' she said.

Mr Morrison flatly responded: 'Surprisingly, I don't think the major issue that people are thinking about at the next election is the 7.30 Report.'

Sales replied: 'No, not at all but they do want to hear from and that's a million people that you're turning your back on if you don't do it.'

'They will get that opportunity, Leigh,' the prime minister concluded.

Sales then promised to 'put in a bid everyday' until she heard back from Mr Morrison.

Earlier in the interview the veteran journalist asked the PM about leaked text messages sent by former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian to another Liberal minister describing the PM as a 'horrible person'.

The PM said he would appear across many programs during the election campaign

Mr Morrison quickly shot down the accusation, claiming Ms Berejiklian denied sending the message - despite the former premier never formerly doing so.

In January, after the bombshell text exchange was made public, Ms Berejiklian issued a statement expressing support for the PM - but she never claimed she was not responsible.

'I understand there has been some commentary today concerning myself and the PM. I have no recollection of such messages,' Ms Berejiklian's statement read.

'Let me reiterate my very strong support for Prime Minister Morrison and all he is doing for our nation during these very challenging times.

'I also strongly believe he is the best person to lead our nation for years to come.'

Defending his reputation, Mr Morrison claimed long lists of scorching discreditations were inevitable as prime minister.

Leigh Sales was left begging for an answer to whether Mr Morrison would appear on her program for two more interviews during the election campaign

He was also asked about his relationship with Mr Houston, who last month resigned amid allegations he harassed two women in the church.

'Why did you kind of disown him last week when you were asked [by reporters] about that [situation] given he a long-term close friend?' Sales said.

'I wouldn't describe that as my reaction. I said I was disappointed and I was shocked,' Mr Morrison said.

Sales shot back: '[But] as a loyal mate, why didn't you say 'I don't want to join a pile on of this bloke?''

Mr Morrison deflected the question, reiterating his initial response.

'I didn't. I said I was disappointed and shocked like a lot of people have been and the church's response was very appropriate and I think it was,' he said.

Mr Morrison is expected to call the election in the coming days.
Daniel Andrews' wife Catherine has been struck down with Covid along with two of their children, after the Premier slammed Scott Morrison for criticising isolation rules for close contacts.

The Victorian leader first tested positive for the virus on March 28 just days after attending the highly-acclaimed Hamilton musical premiere at Her Majesty's Theatre in Melbourne.

This week, Ms Andrews confirmed that although the family did all they could to protect themselves it, they couldn't escape the contagion and she tested positive on Saturday.

It comes after he had a public spat with the Prime Minister over isolation rules for close contacts of Covid cases, which Mr Morrison called to be scrapped.

The rule forcing household contacts of confirmed cases to stay home for a week is still in place in every state and territory across Australia, and in many other countries, as they are likely to test positive at some stage in the days after their exposure.

'I have Covid. That's 3/5 in our family who are positive despite best efforts,' she posted on Twitter.

Mr Andrews (pictured with wife Catherine) tested positive for the virus on March 28 just days after attending the highly-acclaimed Hamilton musical premiere at the at Her Majesty's Theatre in Melbourne - and wearing masks

Daniel Andrews' wife Catherine has been struck down with Covid along with two of their children

'Thank goodness for science and vaccines.

'Thinking of all the carers and patients going through this right now.'

Mr Morrison said the rule making close contacts quarantine for a week was redundant, and he was 'looking forward' to it being axed.

However he said the decision was out of his hands, and up to state premiers.

'We don't make those decisions at the commonwealth level. It's premiers who decide to shut cities down or open them up,' he said in Melbourne on Monday, referring to lockdowns.

Mr Andrews quickly fired back at Morrison's comments on Tuesday, saying the issue had been discussed at National Cabinet with a major health committee - who deemed it wasn't the right time with case numbers still high.

'It's somebody else's job? No,' Mr Andrews said.

'National Cabinet  which is chaired by the Commonwealth  asked Australian Health Protection Principal Committee to have a look at this very issue.

Scott Morrison (Pictured in Melbourne on Monday) called for an end to the Covid close contact rule that's starving many businesses of staff - but said it was up to state governments to make the change

Dan Andrews (pictured) fired back at Scott Morrison's comments, saying: 'I'm in the business of taking advice from the experts'

'They came back and said "not at this time".

'He has asked a question, on behalf of all of us, and he doesn't like the answer and that is apparently my fault,' Mr Andrews explained.

'If there's a quarrel between the Prime Minister and chief medical officer than I suggest he sorts that out.

'I'm in the business of taking advice from the experts.'

The AHPCC advice to National Cabinet stated isolation and testing rules could be eased after the current wave of infections from the Omicron BA.2 subvariant had peaked, expected by mid-April 'in some jurisdictions'.

AHPPC advice recommends that in the place of isolating, close contacts should take rapid antigen tests, wear masks in public and avoid high-risk settings.

Isolation is still recommended for confirmed positive and asymptomatic cases.

Despite this, Victoria's government is concerned about how soon it could scrap the requirement, due to uncertainty about how high the BA.2 wave could peak - and exactly when that will happen.

Victoria's Medical Research Minister, Jaala Pulford, said easing restrictions could 'prematurely' put the state's health system at risk.

'While the numbers are still going up around Australia with this current wave, and because we have not yet peaked, it would be a risk that [the chief officers are] not prepared to recommend the government makes,' Ms Pulford said on Monday.

Meanwhile, in New South Wales, Health Minister Brad Hazzard said he wouldn't be advising the state government to relax its isolation rules at this stage of the pandemic amid fears people were becoming complacent.

'As Health Minister I wouldn't be rushing to recommend to government that we change our position currently on close contacts,' Mr Hazzard told the Sydney Morning Herald.

'Every day there are thousands of people who are confirmed positive and every day there are people dying.'

The health minister has previously stated he holds concerns around 'the failure of about 45 per cent of eligible people not having had a booster'.

The nations peak medical body, the AHPCC, said testing and isolation rules could be eased in jurisdictions that would see the peak of the latest wave of new cases in mid-April (pictured, testing in Sydney)

Earlier this month, the prime minister said Phase D of the pandemic would mean Australians lived alongside the virus as if it were the flu.

'The other big change we talked about yesterday is getting rid of the close contact rule, which makes a lot of sense,' Mr Morrison said.

'It is important that we remove this close contact rule because it is starving businesses of staff, hospitals of staff.

'That rule is becoming, we believe as leaders, redundant, so we tasked the medical expert panel to say what your urgent advice is on this as soon as possible.

'We would like to say goodbye to that rule as quickly as we can.'
Australia's Gen Z and Millennials say they would refuse to fight for the nation in the face of an invading force after years of being frozen out of the housing market.

Even if China was to launch an unlikely invasion Down Under as in Ukraine with Russia, young Australians say they would rather flee the country than take up arms.

The Institute of Public Affairs polled 1,000 Australians for the study and overwhelmingly found teens through to 30-somethings had lost their fighting spirit.

Australia's Gen Z and Millennials say they would refuse to fight for the nation in the face of an invading force after years of being frozen out of the housing market

Even if China was to launch an unlikely invasion Down Under as in Ukraine with Russia, Australia's young say they would rather flee the country than take up arms

The war on the property front has left them disconnected from the national identity and unwilling to join a fight for survival like the Ukrainians are facing against Russia.

The revelation comes as tensions with China hit a new low, with government warnings about the growing threat and defence spending increasing to counter it.

Research firm Dynata last month asked 1,000 Australians: 'If Australia was in the same position as Ukraine is now, would you stay and fight, or leave the country?'

The research found just one-third aged under 34 would stay and fight, while 40 per cent would flee the country, with 28 per cent unsure if they would stay or go.

Young people say they have been alienated by the crisis in real estate which has left them little hope buying a home

The war on the home front had left them disconnected from the national identity and unwilling to join a fight for survival like the Ukrainians are facing against Russia

The IPA said the results show Australia's young people are 'ashamed' of the country 'after years of relentless attack on our values by the cultural and media elites'.

'The negative, self-hate view of Australian history and culture being forced onto students at schools and universities means that now barely one-third of young Australians believe Australia is even worth fighting for,' said Daniel Wild, IPA Director of Research.

'Since World War II millions have fled racial division, sectarian conflict, and abject poverty for a better life in a tolerant and free society that Australia offers.

'Yet young Australians are denied the opportunity to be taught about this inspiring, optimistic, and hopeful reality of Australias history.'

But the poll sparked a furious response online, with many confirming they would never sign up to protect Australia from an invading force because they are literally not invested in the nation's future.

Many young Aussies said they had been alienated by the crisis in real estate, which has left them little hope of buying a home.

'For young Aussies, no one can afford a house,' wrote one.

'They're in debt for education boomers were never subjected to, our manufacturing base is gone, we make nothing, build very little and our political system is only about three-year terms and the political parties' power.

'No long-term visions, plans or prospects, at least nothing young people can relate to. It's only ever about boomers. The option to leave is only seen as a good option if there are better prospects elsewhere.

The poll of 1000 Australians by Dyndata for the IPA found just one-third aged under 34 would stay and fight, while 40 per cent would flee the country

'Maybe not now, but certainly if guns are getting pointed at you and you're getting told to go risk your life to defend the boomers' wealth, particularly when you're not included. There have been warnings about this for many years.'

Another added: 'Why would they stay and fight? This country has no national identity, no culture and poor leadership in both the main political parties.

'The average Australian only cares for rising property prices, with the government and RBA doing their best to deliver that.

'The generation of our youth of fighting age are the poorest of any of the generations previously before them. Again, I say why would they stay and fight?

'Send the boomers off to fight, they have the most to lose.'

Another added: 'Young people can't afford a home to live here, it should be land owners' primary responsibility to put up the fight.'

But one hit back: 'You think the trenches of Flanders were full of 20-year-old property magnates from Kew in 1915? If you'll only fight for a country where you have a mortgage, better for all of us if you leave now.'

The poll sparked a furious response online, with many confirming they would never sign up to protect Australia because they are literally not invested in the nation's future

Others supported the IPA's interpretation of the results that modern culture was the cause.

'No surprise. This is what happens when you put all your eggs in the 'diversity, equity and inclusion' basket,' said one.

'Younger Australians are just like Americans, taught to hate their country and be ashamed of who they are.'

Another added: 'You reap what you sow. Enjoy your dystopian future, kids, thanks to the woke left-wing moral crusaders.'

Others just took aim at the upcoming generation: 'Our kids are the most pampered, spoilt, self-entitled brats in the universe. They, alongside feminist and Green voters will be the first to seek asylum.'

And some blamed migration: 'Unlike Ukraine, Australia is migrant-heavy and lacks the national pride of other countries.'

Another wrote: 'Once upon a time Australia was worth fighting for.

'After Covid lockdowns, leftist values being pushed at our kids and the constant growth and overreach of governments  they can have it.'
Large trucks carrying billboards of Chinese president Xi Jinping voting for the Labor party have sparked an early election uproar as they are spotted in cities across Australia.

The ads feature Mr Xi putting a ticket that says 'LABOR 1' into a ballot box, a hammer and sickle communist logo on a red background and the words 'CCP SAYS VOTE Labor.'

CCP stands for Chinese Communist Party and the ad follows recent attacks by Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Minister for Defence Peter Dutton claiming Labor leader Anthony Albanese is Beijing's preferred candidate.

The truck has most recently been pictured driving around Melbourne, allowing it to be seen by a lot more people than would a fixed billboard.

Activist group Advance, which opposes 'woke politicians and inner city elites' has paid for the billboards which have also been spotted in Perth, Newcastle and on the Gold Coast in Queensland.

A truck carrying a billboard of Chinese president Xi Jinping voting for Labor displayed on three sides has caused an early election controversy

The tarring of Labor comes two months after Mr Dutton and Mr Morrison both launched similar attacks on Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese.

'The Chinese Communist party, the Chinese government, has also made a decision about who they're going to back in the next federal election,' Mr Dutton said.

'And that is open and that is obvious, and they have picked this bloke as that candidate,' he said, pointing to Mr Albanese.

Mr Dutton said this using parliamentary privilege, meaning he can not be sued for doing so, regardless of the truth or otherwise of his words.

Mr Morrison used a similar line of attack when he said 'those who are seeking to coerce Australia' knew that 'their candidate' in the election was 'the leader of the Labor party'.

The not very subtle implication from Mr Morrison, Mr Dutton and the roving truck is that Labor would be soft on China.

The truck campaign comes at a time when Mr Morrison is under increasing pressure from his own side of politics, with current and former MPs labelling him dishonest, the latest being Liberal Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells.

Both Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton have suggested that Labor leader Anthony Albanese (pictured with his partner Jodie Haydon) is Beijing's preferred candidate for Prime Minister

While political advertising that stretches the truth to breaking point has been common for decades in the US, it has really only gathered steam in Australia in relatively recent campaigns.

Days before the November 2007 election, a senior NSW party official and an MP's husband were caught up in a dirty tricks campaign involving race hate in the Sydney seat of Lindsay.

Why do electoral communications need to be authorised? The objects of the authorisation requirements are to promote free and informed voting at elections by enhancing: the transparency of the electoral system, by allowing voters to know who is communicating electoral matter;

the accountability of those persons participating in public debate relating to electoral matter, by making those persons responsible for their communications; and

the traceability of communications of electoral matter, by ensuring that obligations imposed by the Electoral Act in relation to those communications can be enforced. Source: Australian Electoral Commission Advertisement

The men, along with three others, were caught distributing bogus pamphlets in the electorate portraying Labor as sympathisers of Islamic terrorists.

They were caught and photographed doing it by Labor Party members who had been tipped off that it was happening.

The attempted slur backfired and the story dominated the last days of the election, which Labor under Kevin Rudd won easily.

With the Covid pandemic over the last two years having drawn more attention to political misinformation and disinformation, some politicians want to do something about it.

Late last year, independent federal MP Zali Steggall proposed legislation to prevent the spreading of falsehoods during federal elections, with her website claiming: 'It's perfectly legal to lie in a political ad.'

Though that may sound like an exaggeration in itself, it is actually accurate.

There is no federal law specifically designed to stop lies in political advertising.

The Commonwealth Electoral Act bans misleading political ads, but only if this affects the vote-casting process - for example if an ad said not to vote for someone because they had pulled out of the contest if they had not.

South Australia and the ACT each have laws that regulate political ads, but they don't cover federal elections.

The Australian Electoral Commission does, however, require that political advertising is authorised, which is why you will be hearing a lot of the phrase 'Authorised by the Australian government, Canberra' on TV and radio ads in the coming weeks.
The Deltacron hybrid strain of Covid-19 is the latest variant to worry Australian health experts as Covid case numbers soar.

On Wednesday, daily cases in New South Wales reached 24,151, Queensland had 8,534, and Victoria had 12,150. Across Australia, daily cases averaged 56,000 - nearly triple the rate of mid-February.

So what do you need to know about the latest 'Deltacron' strain? We asked the Covid experts.

What is the 'Deltacron' strain?

Deltacron is a hybrid 'recombinant' of the Delta and Omicron strains of Covid-19.

It was first detected in France in February, but case numbers have remained low worldwide.

'If Deltacron wound up as something with the virulence of Delta and transmissibility of Omicron, then that would be something to really worry about,' said Professor Catherine Bennett, chair in epidemiology at Deakin University.

Many recognise Delta as the Covid strain potentially producing the most severe illness. On the upside, studies showed vaccination reduced the risk of infection and severe illness from Delta.

Omicron, which emerged in late 2021, is more contagious than Delta but generally produces less severe illness.

Despite widespread fears over hybrid variant 'Deltacron', most experiences of Covid-19 though unpleasant will confine the sufferer to home for a week or so but be no worse

Microbiologist Professor Peter Collignon says rising Covid infections now would actually mean winter isn't as scary as some have predicted this year

The Deltacron hybrid strain of Covid-19 is the latest variant to worry Australians, with some predicting nightmare scenarios are possible

'That could mean more severe illness, especially in people who are not fully vaccinated, but at the moment, we are not seeing that.'

The reality of Deltacron is also that it is an umbrella term for local recombinant strains - happening in different parts of the world where Delta and Omicron have been present at the same time.

That means Deltacron may not be exactly the same everywhere.

Masks remain one of the most important precautions against Covid infection experts say

Even after recovering from Covid, it is advised to wear a mask as you may still be positive

Is Deltacron even in Australia?

Professor Bennett says genomic testing from infection samples is being conducted, but the likelihood that Deltacron has reached Australia is very low.

'We would know if it was here in any number, especially if associated with more of a Delta-like illness.'

Another strain discussed but not yet apparent here is the XE variant, a combination of two Omicron strains - BA.1 and BA.2 - and potentially more infectious.

There have been 640 cases in Britain, but experts are not concerned it is more severe than BA.2.

Deltacron is not yet confirmed in Australia, but it's likely it is or will get here - as we have not been shielded entirely from any strains or variants of Covid-19

Professor Bennett says genomic testing from infection samples is being conducted, but the likelihood is that Deltacron is minor if it's even present here

What is happening with Covid overall in Australia?

While there are rising Covid case numbers, Professor Bennett said there is little evidence for a resurgence in cases of the delta strain.

In fact, they look more like Omicron, especially the BA.2 strain.

'We are seeing the high transmissibility of Omicron is still dominating, and that keeps anything not as infectious at bay.'

The way viruses work is that one strain at a time tends to dominate, by definition, that is the most infectious version.

If that strain is less virulent, the hospitals won't see as much traffic through intensive care wards.

Australians can go about their everyday lives but should still take reasonable precautions against the spread of Covid, experts say - including getting vaccinated.

Australians can go about their normal lives but should still take reasonable precautions against the spread of Covid, experts say

People with Covid will often be too unwell to be out and about - which should help slow the spread of the virus

Professor Peter Collignon, professor of microbiology at the Australian National University, said recombinant variants could be more lethal, 'but the track record shows that is not happening so far, so let's go with the track record'.

Do new restrictions look necessary with more people getting sick?

Ironically, the growth of Covid infections may control the spread because many people are 'too unwell to be out and about', Professor Bennett said.

'If you have more people with symptoms, even if they're not bad enough to put you in hospital, you are less likely to be out mixing.

'When people have symptoms they can't ignore, they won't be taking it to work, restaurants, or visiting friends. That slows the virus down.'

The virus is expected to spread more easily as people head back indoors over winter

Why do people keep saying the virus will get worse in winter?

Winter is a concern, Professor Collignon says, because viruses spread more easily when we are indoors in close proximity.

For this reason, Professor Collignon advises anyone who is unvaccinated to get vaccinated 'especially if you are older'.

Older or immunosuppressed people should also get a booster if they haven't had one before Winter.

Professor Collignon advises people to entertain 'outside on the veranda at lunchtime instead of over dinner inside at night'.

'We're lucky in Australia, we can do that.'

Will Deltacron - or any other variant - create extra danger this winter?

Professor Bennett said the continued dominance of Omicron, most likely via the BA.2 strain, means the worst-case scenarios about Deltacron appear unlikely.

'We wouldnt expect Deltacron to be anything like the Delta outbreaks last year,' she said.

That is partly because the high take-up of vaccines 'tamed the virus' in terms of transmission and the number of people in hospitals.

Professor Collignon says the current spread of Covid-19 could actually mean winter in Australia is not as bad as initially feared.

That is because the high numbers of people getting sick and recovering raises the proportion of the population with good quality immunity.

Professor Collignon says the current spread of Covid-19 could actually mean winter in Australia is not as bad as initially feared

Reinfection from Covid is not common although it does happen

'I have been fairly pessimistic about winter, but the other way of looking at it is winter may not be as bad because so many people have been infected, so theyll have immunity for the next six to 12 months.'

'Studies from Qatar show that people who have had two doses of a vaccine and a Covid infection have greater protection than those who have had two doses and a booster.'

But isn't it possible to get Covid twice?

Yes, but as a proportion of cases, reinfection is extremely low and appears to happen mostly in younger people.

'A recent Danish study showed that reinfections were rare, making up only 1 in 10,000 of reported infections,' Professor Bennett said.

'It is possible there are more reinfections, but they might be so mild or have no symptoms that they are not reported.

'So this suggests that the risk is low, especially in people who are vaccinated.'

The best protection against Covid remains vaccination, experts say

What precautions are most important this winter?

Aside from vaccination, which has reduced the severity and spread of the virus, there are several precautions we can take.

'Well-fitting masks when around people from other households, especially when indoors and cant keep your distance,' Professor Bennett said.

If you can, keep some distance from people so you don't breathe in as they breathe out.

The greater ability of BA.2 to live on surfaces increases the need to wash our hands and avoid 'high touch' surfaces too.

'Practice hand hygiene, especially when out and about and touching common surfaces like hand rails or lift buttons,' Professor Bennett said.

How do I tell if I have Deltacron?

If you get a positive Covid test result, you won't know what strain it is - no public tests currently tell us that.

But if your symptoms are bad enough to send you to bed, you probably won't care what strain you have.

The symptoms that tend to confirm you have Covid and not influenza or a 'supercold' are loss of taste and smell.

Other than that, Covid tends to include fever, fatigue, headaches, dizziness, brain fog, a sore throat and a runny nose. Earache is also emerging as a symptom of Omicron.

In many cases recovery from Covid - in terms of being able to resume life as normal - takes at least two weeks and up to a month

How do I recover from Covid?

That depends on how sick you get. In most cases, the infectious period is over in seven days.

The infectious, or acute period can last up to two weeks and that is likely to be when your symptoms are worst: including fever, headaches, an aching body, breathing difficulties and fatigue.

Some cases include diarrhoea, nausea or vomiting.

If breathing difficulties become severe and you experience severe confusion or chest pain, call 000.

If your symptoms can be managed from home, it is advised to rest and stay hydrated by drinking water, herbal tea or juice and to take paracetamol to reduce fever.

But in many cases, recovery - in terms of being able to resume life as normal - takes at least two weeks and up to a month.

Post-COVID-19 symptoms, such as a lingering cough, mild fever, tiredness, and a reduced sense of smell or taste, can last for weeks or months after you recover from the acute stage.

When symptoms last for months, they are commonly referred to as 'Long Covid', which has drawn comparisons to chronic fatigue syndrome.
University revokes admission of ex-minister's daughter



Pusan National University (PNU) has decided to nullify the 2015 admission of former Justice Minister Cho Kuk's daughter to its medical school. The school in the southeastern port city of Busan held a faculty meeting Tuesday afternoon and finalized the decision on the fate of Cho Min. Hours later her lawyer filed an injunction seeking the suspension of the decision.



Tuesday's decision was affected apparently by the Supreme Court's conviction of her mother, Chung Kyung-shim, in January. Chung was found guilty on all seven charges associated with her daughter's admission fraud. Cho Min entered Korea University in 2010 and graduated in 2014. She was then admitted to PNU's Graduate School of Medicine in 2015 and passed the state medical licensing exam in January last year.



Following PNU's decision to invalidate her admission, the health ministry will begin a procedure to revoke Cho Min's medical license. But she could maintain her license for a considerable while if she takes legal action against the ministry.



The school's decision is long overdue, considering that Chung Yoo-ra, the daughter of Choi Soon-sil who was at the center of a corruption scandal that led to the impeachment of former President Park Geun-hye, was expelled from Ewha Womans University even before her mother was convicted in the lower court. PNU cited the principle that one is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty, but critics accused the school of walking on eggshells, alleging that Cho Kuk was one of President Moon Jae-in's closest confidants. It took nearly two years for PNU to make a preliminary nullification decision last August, and another seven months were needed before the final decision was made.



What's clear is that his daughter was admitted to the schools illicitly thanks to the fabrication of documents, provoking the ire of ordinary people. The former justice minister should feel the enormous pain of some applicants who couldn't enter Korea University and PNU because of his daughter. He should apologize to them sincerely instead of trying vainly to take legal action.




Vladimir Putin has made the case for fracking stronger, the Business Secretary said yesterday as he announced a review of the controversial process.

Kwasi Kwarteng said as long as the West is dependent on oil and gas it is vulnerable to Putins malign influence.

Fracking  shale gas extraction  was halted in the UK in 2019 following concerns over earthquakes, but following rising oil and gas prices and Russias invasion of Ukraine a number of Tory MPs called for a rethink, prompting a row.

Now Mr Kwarteng has written to the British Geological Survey asking for a report on the latest fracking science, including new techniques and improvements in geological modelling.

Kwasi Kwarteng said as long as the West is dependent on oil and gas it is vulnerable to Putins malign influence

He said the Government would be guided by the science on shale gas and lift the pause only if it was safe, sustainable and of minimal disturbance.

He emphasised that fracking would take years of exploration and development... and would certainly have no effect on prices in the near term, but said that in the light of Russias invasion of Ukraine it was absolutely right that we explore all possible domestic energy sources.

He told the Harvard Kennedy School: For as long as we depend on oil and gas  wherever it is from  we are all vulnerable to Putins malign influence on global markets.

Fracking  shale gas extraction  was halted in the UK in 2019 following concerns over earthquakes

It comes as the Government prepares to unveil its new energy security strategy tomorrow.

It is expected to set out plans to boost new nuclear power capacity, solar and offshore wind.

Labour climate change spokesman Ed Miliband condemned the move to review fracking, saying: The Government itself concluded that fracking is unsafe, and will not help our energy security or cut bills, and fracking is strongly opposed by local communities.
A former Russian diplomat recently posted to the United Nations in New York was a devoted neo-Nazi who plastered the city with Nazi insignia, DailyMail.com has learned.

The news comes as his former boss, Russian President Vladimir Putin, defends his invasion of Ukraine as an effort to 'de-Nazify' the country.

Kirill Kolchin, a onetime member of Russia's diplomatic support staff based at the country's permanent mission to the United Nations, arrived in New York City in the summer of 2019 with his wife Alena and their two children. They left around six months later, in February 2020.

A man who appeared to be Kolchin was photographed making a Nazi salute in an image posted to the Old School Skins account on Instagram - a Neo Nazi group which Kolchin promotes on his own page.

On July 29, 2019, a photo was posted to the OSS page showing an OSS sticker being held in front of Nazi uniforms and newspapers in Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea, in what looked like a museum.

Kolchin, who is believed to be in his late 30s, describes himself as 'father, OSS and huckster', and pictures on his page include the Iron Cross symbol adopted by Hitler.

Russia's decision to employ an open neo-Nazi on its UN staff is particularly jarring given Putin's statements on the ongoing war in Ukraine - which he has taken to referring to as a 'special military operation' to demilitarize and 'denazify' the country.

He's blamed the invasion - without evidence - on 'Nazis, murderers and collaborators' that have stirred up 'Russophobia' within the former Soviet nation.

Announcing the 'special military operation', Putin boasted: 'Its goal is to protect people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kiev regime for eight years. And for this we will strive for the demilitarisation and deNazification of Ukraine, as well as bringing to justice those who committed numerous, bloody crimes against civilians, including citizens of the Russian Federation.'

The comments brought widespread condemnation from Western leaders.

Kirill Kolchin and his wife Alena are pictured in Times Square in the summer of 2019. They lived in the city for around six months, leaving in February 2020. Kolchin made no secret of his neo-Nazi links

Kolchin and his wife are pictured on December 26, 2019, attending what appeared to be a gala or diplomatic function in Manhattan. The Russian Mission to the U.N. is house on Lexington Avenue, at East 67th Street

A man who appears to be Kolchin is pictured on the OSS page performing a Nazi salute

Kolchin's Instagram page features the Nazi insignia, the Iron Cross. He describes himself as a supporter of OSS - the Old School Skins, a neo-Nazi group which openly promotes violence

Kolchin and his wife are pictured in the Dumbo district of Brooklyn in November 2019

Kolchin's personal page is private, but the OSS page features people brandishing knives and brass knuckles.

Kolchin frequently poses in the black t-shirt of the OSS, with its bulldog logo.

He is seen wearing the t-shirt at Coney Island, and another OSS t-shirt at Cassidy's Pub in Manhattan, around the corner from Trump Tower.

The OSS sticker is pictured being held aloft around various sites around New York City - near Times Square, in front of the Queensborough Bridge, and on Brighton Beach - home to a large Russian community.

In one image, a hand is seen holding an OSS sticker in front of a NYPD cruiser.

On August 31, 2019 - while Kolchin was in New York - a video was posted to the OSS page showing a hand sticking an OSS sticker, bearing the neo-Nazi 'totenkopf' or 'death skull', to a lamp post near Times Square.

The video is captioned: 'F****** USA'.

Kolchin is pictured in the OSS bulldog t-shirt in Coney Island

The Russian diplomat is pictured at Cassidy's Pub, around the corner from Trump Tower in Manhattan, wearing an OSS t-shirt

On August 27, 2019, an image was posted to the OSS page of a hand holding their sticker in front of a NYPD cruiser

On August 30, 2019, the OSS Instagram page shared a photo of their sticker by the Queensborough Bridge, near the United Nations headquarters

Another OSS sticker, with the 'death's head' logo, was pictured on August 31, 2019 at Brighton Beach - a Brooklyn district with a large Russian population

The same OSS sticker was pictured plastered onto a pay phone booth in Brighton Beach

Kolchin's son was photographed wearing an OSS mask, which also featured the Celtic Cross and the letters SS

Kolchin himself is never seen attaching the stickers.

In October 2019, Kolchin's son is pictured on the OSS page wearing a mask emblazoned with the SS logo.

Kolchin's personal page also links to an Instagram store, selling designer goods from labels such as Burberry, Ellesse, Lacoste and Ralph Lauren. He himself is often pictured in the clothes, as is his wife.

The OSS account was deactivated in January 2020 - a month before Kolchin left.

It reactivated in October 2020, with all the New York postings removed.

New posts included rifles, knives and brass knuckles, plus what appeared to be canisters of pepper spray.

One of the images of the guns was captioned with: 'Head shot antifa scum'.

The OSS account was deactivated, and posts from New York deleted. It has now returned

A post to the OSS page from September, captioned: 'Congratulations. You have just met the OSS'

Kirill and Alena are seen on January 26, 2020, outside the Soho Grand hotel in Manhattan

Kolchin and his wife are pictured on what appeared to be the Staten Island ferry

The couple are pictured at the rooftop bar of the Hyatt Hotel near Times Square in October 2019

Kolchin's official activities while in New York are unclear.

He was officially a member of the diplomatic support staff, based at the Russian Mission to the U.N. on the Upper East Side.

While based in New York, Kolchin posted photos of visits to Central Park, and him and his wife strolling Manhattan.

They now appear to be back in Moscow.

Kolchin's wife on March 27 posted a photo of her celebrating her birthday, captioned: '33! And I'm happy!'

On February 12, she and her husband were pictured in Moscow, at the Los Bandidos Bar. Kolchin was wearing his OSS t-shirt.

He is frequently seen on social media in Moscow bars with other friends who boast of being OSS members on their Instagram profiles.

She posted what appeared to be a throwback photo of her two young sons in New York City on February 4, captioned: 'How time flies'.

Vassily Nebenzia, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, continues to insist that Russia is attempting to 'de-Nazify' Ukraine

Kolchin and his wife Alena are seen at the Los Bandidos Bar in Moscow on February 12 this year - Kolchin wearing his OSS t-shirt

Alena, 33, has not responded to DailyMail.com's request for comment

Alena and her two sons returned to New York for Christmas this year, with the Russian captioning her video: 'The most incredible thing that could happen to us is to visit New York on Christmas and New Year's Eve, to see all the beauty with our own eyes, a real fairy tale for children and adults'

Alena and the two boys explored New York City in December, amid the Christmas festivities

The mother and her two sons were impressed by New York's celebrations, including the Chanel festive display in a store

Kirill and Alena Kolchin, back in Moscow, are pictured at a Moscow bar on March 29. The caption reads: 'Here they are, our strong guys'. The men are all wearing OSS shirts

It is unclear why Kolchin's posting was so unusually short. Normally diplomatic staff will spend at least four years in one post, before moving on.

Alena and the children returned to New York this Christmas, with the two boys reveling in the sights.

'The most incredible thing that could happen to us is to visit New York on Christmas and New Year's Eve, to see all the beauty with our own eyes, a real fairy tale for children and adults,' she captioned her video.

'Crazy atmosphere of celebration and fun.'

She did not respond to DailyMail.com's request for comment about her husband's neo-Nazi beliefs and his job duties in New York.

His boss in New York, Vassily Nebenzia, has continued to staunchly defend Russia's actions 'de-Nazifying' Ukraine.

On February 24, the day of the invasion, Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, described Russia's allegations as absurd.

'They tell you that we're Nazis,' he said.

'But how can a people that lost 8 million lives to defeat the Nazis support Nazism?

'How can I be a Nazi? Say it to my grandfather, who fought in World War II as a Soviet infantryman and died a colonel in an independent Ukraine.'

Putin's outrageous claims that his invasion of Ukraine is a 'special military operation' to 'de-Nazify' the country Vladimir Putin, announcing the start of his invasion of Ukraine, said that the 'goal is to protect the people who are subjected to abuse, genocide from the Kyiv regime.' He added: 'To this end, we will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine and put to justice those that committed numerous bloody crimes against peaceful people, including Russian nationals.' Putin's claim that his mission was to 'de-Nazify' Ukraine was described as absurd by Ukraine's president. The message was amplified by Putin's cronies. American officials led by President Biden are responsible for the 'Nazification' of Ukraine, one of Russia's top lawmakers said. On February 25, just one day after the invasion, Russia's ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, told the UN Security Council: 'We are carrying out a special military operation against nationalists to protect the people of Donbas, ensure denazification and demilitarization.' He has repeatedly used the 'de-Nazification' of Ukraine as a justification for the invasion. On February 29, Nebenzia told a special session of the UN General Assembly that the 'demilitarization and de-nazification of Ukraine' would bring peace to the country. On March 17, he said: 'We want to demilitarize Ukraine, to denazify it, and to make Ukraine a neutral state which is not threatening Russia.' While there are undoubtedly far-right groups in Ukraine, as in all European countries - most infamously Ukraine's far-right Azov Battalion, which was incorporated into the country's military - there is certainly no widespread Nazi ideology in the country's political leadership. 'When Putin used the term 'denazification' in his declaration of war, he was not speaking to foreign audiences, he was speaking first and foremost to his own public,' said Izabella Tabarovsky, a senior program associate at the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute, Washington DC, who studies historical memory and anti-Semitism. 'It was an attempt to demonize, to create a false equivalence between Ukraine today and Nazi Germany. 'The subtext of his message was: 'Look, we are still the good guys here! It's a war of self-defense! There is a genocide against our people! We are fighting a just war, just as we did in 1941-45!' Advertisement

The pictures that shamed the UN into silence: Volodymyr Zelensky slams world leaders for failing to protect Ukraine as he shares gruesome footage of dead civilians and warns women were raped in front of their families in the 'worst war crimes since WWII'

Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russian of 'war crimes' as he shared harrowing footage revealing the true horrors of war during a fiery speech to the Security Council as he slammed the UN body for failing to protect Ukraine.

Members of the UN Security Council were left in stunned silence as the Ukrainian president warned Russia had 'committed genocide' in the country and shared dozens of pictures of charred bodies, civillians shot dead and mass graves taken in Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol in recent days.

The wartime leader said atrocities have been carried out throughout the country, with women raped and killed in front of their families, people captured and deported to Russia and turned into 'slaves' in his blistering address as he demanded Putin be brought to justice for the alleged atrocities.

He called out the Security Council for failing to provide any security, demanding Russia's expulsion from the global body and reform to ensure no further illegal invasions in the future.

The Ukrainian president asked: 'So where is the security that the Security Council needs to guarantee? It's not there. Although there is a Security Council and so where is the peace?

'It is obvious that the key institution of the world which must ensure the coercion of any aggressor to peace simply cannot work effectively.'

He told of civilians being run over deliberately by tanks, people's tongues being cut out and gang rapes being committed by invading Kremlin forces in 'the most terrible war crimes' since the Second World War, as he shared a harrowing video of burnt corpses and bodies stuffed in wells to the council.

People 'were killed in their apartments, houses... civilians were crushed by tanks while sitting in their cars in the middle of the road, just for their pleasure,' Zelensky told the Council, including Moscow's envoy.

In Bucha, advancing Ukrainian units met discovered hundreds of bodies strewn all over residential roads in the suburban town that was once home to 28,000 people.

'The massacre in our city of Bucha is unfortunately only one of many examples of what the occupiers have been doing on our land for the past 41 days', Zelensky added.

The Ukrainian president said atrocities have been carried out throughout the country, with women raped and killed in front of their families

The UN Security Council is shown a barrowing image of dog lying in the road next to its owner who has been shot dead in Bucha, Ukraine

Images showing piles of dead bodies in the besieged city of Mariupol are shown to global leaders on Tuesday

Soldiers and investigators look at charred bodies lying on the ground in Bucha today where Russia has been accused of war crimes

Russia's envoy Vassily Nebenzia (pictured) predictably dismissed the claims as 'lies' as he repeated unfounded Kremlin claims about Nazis running Ukraine

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres (pictured) has said Russia's invasion of Ukraine is one of the greatest challenges ever to international order

The Mariupol theatre lies in ruins after Russian shelling in the besieged port city

Nina, 74, reacts as she walks past buildings that were destroyed by Russian shelling, amid Moscow's invasion of Ukraine in Borodyanka, in the Kyiv region of Ukraine

A satellite image taken of a street in the city of Bucha on March 19 - when Russian forces were in full control of the city - shows dark objects in the road that exactly match where civilian corpses were later discovered by Ukrainian troops

Zelensky showed pictures from Bucha displaying the mass murder of civilians at the hands of Russian soldiers

A mass grave was discovered in the grounds of the Church of St. Andrew and Pyervozvannoho All Saints in Bucha, containing the bodies of dozens of civilians

'History will remember who looked the other way': Boris Johnson pleads with Russians in their own language to seek out 'the truth' of Putin's horrific war crimes in Ukraine By David Wilcock and Jack Wright for MailOnline Boris Johnson tonight directly appealed to Russians in their own language to seek out 'the truth' of Putin's illegal war in Ukraine, calling alleged atrocities in Bucha a 'stain' on the country's global standing and warning: 'History will remember who looked the other way'. In a video message posted online, the British Prime Minister urged the Russian public to get round Putin's repressive controls on the media by seeking out for themselves 'the truth' of what was happening from independent news outlets online. Grisly images of what are claimed to be civilian massacres allegedly carried out by Russian forces in Bucha before they withdrew from the outskirts of Kyiv have stirred a global outcry in recent days, and prompted Western nations to expel dozens of Moscow's diplomats and propose further sanctions, including a ban on coal imports from Russia. Boris Johnson directly appealed to Russians in their own language to seek out 'the truth' of Putin's illegal war in Ukraine Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russia of committing 'genocide' in Ukraine, comparing Moscow's military to the Islamic State terror group in a video address to the UN Security Council and demanding that Putin be brought to justice for his alleged atrocities. The Kremlin claimed the images of civilians were 'fake news' and 'a crude forgery' staged by the Ukrainians themselves. Moscow's UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia insisted that while Bucha was under Russian control, 'not a single local person has suffered from any violent action'. He added: 'You only saw what they showed you. The only ones who would fall for this are Western dilettantes.' In his message on Tuesday night, Johnson said the reports were so shocking that Putin had deliberately sought to hide the truth from his people, adding: 'Your president knows that if you could see what was happening, you would not support his war. 'He knows that these crimes betray the trust of every Russian mother who proudly waves goodbye to her son as he heads off to join the military. And he knows they are a stain on the honour of Russia itself. A stain that will only grow larger and more indelible every day this war continues.' Johnson said that people only needed a VPN connection to access independent information from around the world: 'When you find the truth, share it. Those responsible will be held to account. And history will remember who looked the other way.' Speaking in Russian, he added: 'Your president stands accused of committing war crimes. But I cannot believe he's acting in your name'. Advertisement

The wartime leader said he feared Russians turning his people into 'silent slaves' as he said 'hundreds of thousands' of Ukrainians have been deported to Russia.

Zelensky's words were reiterated by Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S ambassador to the UN, who said tens of thousands of captured Ukrainians were being separated from family in 'filtration camps' where their personal possessions were confiscated.

She told the security council: 'I do not need to spell out what these so-called filtration camps are reminiscent of. It's chilling, and we cannot look away'.

Zelensky also urged reform of the UN because the current system of global security has failed, and called on world leaders to act 'immediately' against Russia.

Russia's envoy predictably dismissed the claims as 'lies' as he repeated unfounded Kremlin claims about Nazis running Ukraine and said allegations of atrocities have not been confirmed.

The Kremlin claimed the images of civilians were 'fake news' and 'a crude forgery' staged by the Ukrainians themselves. Moscow's UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia insisted that while Bucha was under Russian control, 'not a single local person has suffered from any violent action'. He added: 'You only saw what they showed you. The only ones who would fall for this are Western dilettantes.'

Nebenzia said Moscow places 'on your conscience the unfounded accusations against the Russian military, which are not confirmed by any eye witnesses.'

He rejected allegations of war crimes, claiming there are 'flagrant inconsistencies in events shown by Ukrainian and Western media'.

The diplomat repeated disproved claims that corpses found in Bucha were not there when Russia withdrew, saying: 'The corpses in no way resemble those that could be lying on the street for three or four days.'

But satellite images shows corpses on the street nearly two weeks before the Russian departure.

In a video address to the people of Russia on Tuesday night, Boris Johnson, speaking in Russian, said the reports were so shocking that Putin had deliberately sought to hide the truth from his people, adding: 'Your president knows that if you could see what was happening, you would not support his war.

'He knows that these crimes betray the trust of every Russian mother who proudly waves goodbye to her son as he heads off to join the military. And he knows they are a stain on the honour of Russia itself. A stain that will only grow larger and more indelible every day this war continues.'

Meanwhile UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has said Russia's invasion of Ukraine is one of the greatest challenges ever to international order.

Speaking to the Security Council in New York, the UN chief said there is mounting evidence of war crimes, rapes and sexual assaults by Putin's forces.

He said, referencing the piles of civilians bodies near the capital of Kyiv which emerged this weekend: 'I will never forget the horrifying images of the civilians in Bucha.'

'The war in Ukraine must stop - now,' Guterres told the Council, after calling it 'one of the greatest challenges ever to the international order.'

'We need serious negotiations for peace, based on the principles of the United Nations Charter,' he said.

Guterres said the war was putting even more pressure on the developing world, with more than 1.2billion people particularly vulnerable to to spiking food, energy and fertilizer costs.

'We are already seeing some countries move from vulnerability into crisis, and signs of serious social unrest,' he added.

UN undersecretary-general for political and peacebuilding affairs, Rosemary DiCarlo told the meeting of 'credible' claims Russia has used indiscriminate cluster munitions two dozen times in populated parts of Ukraine.

She said: 'OHCHR has received credible allegations that Russian forces have used cluster munitions in populated areas at least 24 times.'

She said the global body was 'gravely concerned by the persistent use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area,' saying such weapons are causing the most civilian casualties in the war.

Finland and Sweden would be welcomed into NATO if they applied to join, Secretary-General Stoltenberg says  as Russia warns of retaliation Finland and Sweden would be welcomed into NATO if they applied to join, the head of the alliance has said today, in what would be a major blow for Russia amid Vladimir Putin's faltering invasion of Ukraine. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO general secretary, told a news conference that the 30-member alliance would work to overcome 'security concerns' between the countries applying to join and being ratified - amid fears Russia would retaliate. He spoke after Finland's prime minister Sanna Marin said her country could take a decision on joining the alliance within weeks and polls in Sweden also showed a majority of people support membership. If either country opts to join the alliance, it would mark an historic reconstruction of European security architecture that has held since the end of the Second World War. Finland, which fought a short but bloody conflict with the Soviets in the build-up to World War Two, has been officially neutral since signing a pact in 1948. As part of the pact, Finland agreed never to join a military alliance viewed as hostile to Russia, never to allow its territory to be used for an attack against Russia, and to maintain an armed forces for self-defence purposes only. In return, the country - which shares an 830-mile border with Russia - was given guarantees by Moscow that it would not be attacked. Advertisement

During a visit on Monday to Bucha, where AFP counted 20 bodies on a single street, he accused Russia of 'war crimes' and attempted 'genocide' and asked Europe to apply the 'most severe pressure'.

The head of NATO, meanwhile, warned that Russia is regrouping its forces in order to deploy them to eastern and southern Ukraine for a 'crucial phase of the war,' and said that more 'atrocities' may come to light as Russian troops continue to pull back in the north.

'When and if they withdraw their troops and Ukrainian troops take over, I'm afraid they will see more mass graves, more atrocities and more examples of of war crimes,' NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said.

Among the horrors inflicted on Bucha are a man who had his cheek cut out before being shot in the heart, another who was kidnapped and burned with a flamethrower, and a 'torture chamber' filled with bodies inside a children's hospital:

Survivors of a month-long Russian occupation - endured in cold, dark silence after Putin's troops cut off all links with the outside world - are just now starting to emerge from basements and makeshift bunkers.

Vladislav Kozlovsky, who returned to Bucha at the outbreak of war to care for his mother and grandmother, told The Telegraph how two men he knew had tried to escape through an abandoned glass factory but were found by the Russians.

One was shot in the back of the head. The other had his cheek cut out before being shot in the heart.

Volodymyr Pilhutskyi, another Bucha resident, recounted how his neighbour was taken away by Russian troops because he was wearing military-style trousers which were deemed 'suspicious'.

He was tortured and killed, Mr Pilhutskyi said, with burn marks from a flamethrower found on his body.

Ukrainian armed forces say they have now uncovered a Russian torture chamber, located inside a children's hospital that was also being used as a makeshift barracks.

The bodies of five men were found shot to death in the basement, a spokesman said, with their hands tied behind their backs. Some had been tortured.

Graphic images taken by Ukrainian prosecutors show the bodies of the men lying on a rubble floor surrounded by pools of dried blood. At least one appears to have been shot through the kneecap.

Tanya Nedashkivs'ka, 57, weeps in the street over the death of her husband who was found killed as Ukrainian forces liberated the city of Bucha, to the west of Kyiv, after a month under the occupation of Russian troops

Ukrainian soldiers claim to have uncovered a Russian torture chamber in the basement of a children's hospital where five men - their hands tied behind their backs - were brutalised before being shot dead

Serhii Lahovskyi, 26, and other residents carry the body of Ihor Lytvynenko to bury him in Bucha, April 5, 2022

Serhii Lahovskyi, 26, hugs Ludmyla Verginska, 51, as they mourn their common friend Ihor Lytvynenko, following his burial at the garden of a residential building in Bucha, April 5, 2022

People light candles as they hold a vigil for those killed in Bucha and the surrounding areas on April 5, 2022 in Lviv

Pictured: A Russian military vehicle (top-left) is seen in drone footage positioned on a road moments after a cyclist turned the corner into the street. The vehicle opened fire

Boris Johnson, Joe Biden and Scott Morrison agree to develop hypersonic missile technology in latest strengthening of AUKUS security pact that infuriated Macron By Jacob Thorburn for MailOnline The UK, US and Australia today announced a new step in their partnership that will see them develop hypersonic weaponry in a bid to counteract the high-speed missiles constructed by Russia and China. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, US President Joe Biden, and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison issued an agreed statement on Tuesday in which they reiterated 'unwavering commitment' to an international system which 'respects human rights'. The three countries, which form the AUKUS military pact which was announced last September, committed to 'commence new trilateral co-operation on hypersonics and counter-hypersonics, and electronic warfare capabilities, as well as to expand information sharing and to deepen co-operation on defence innovation'. The announcement comes after China successfully completed tests of its own version of the deadly weapon, WU-14, in recent years, as well as Russia claiming the first deployment of hypersonic missiles in an active theatre of war last month. Initially surrounding submarines, Mr Johnson previously suggested the alliance could go beyond that and, on Tuesday, the three leaders said: 'We reaffirmed our commitment to Aukus and to a free and open Indo-Pacific. 'In light of Russia's unprovoked, unjustified, and unlawful invasion of Ukraine, we reiterated our unwavering commitment to an international system that respects human rights, the rule of law, and the peaceful resolution of disputes free from coercion.' The leaders also said they were 'pleased with the progress' Australia was making in the development of nuclear-powered submarines. They added: 'We also committed today to commence new trilateral cooperation on hypersonics and counter-hypersonics, and electronic warfare capabilities, as well as to expand information sharing and to deepen co-operation on defence innovation. 'These initiatives will add to our existing efforts to deepen co-operation on cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and additional undersea capabilities. 'As our work progresses on these, and other critical defence and security capabilities, we will seek opportunities to engage allies and close partners.' Hypersonic missiles, like traditional ballistic missiles which can deliver nuclear weapons, can fly at more than five times the speed of sound. While ballistic missiles fly high into space in an arc to reach their target, a hypersonic weapon flies on a trajectory low in the atmosphere, potentially reaching a target more quickly. Crucially, a hypersonic missile is manoeuvrable - like the much slower, often subsonic cruise missile - making it much harder to track and defend against. The initial announcement of the AUKUS pact caused outrage in Paris, as the submarine deal came at the expense of a lucrative agreement between Australia and France to provide diesel-electric boats. Advertisement

As western leaders condemned the killings in Bucha, Italy, Spain and Denmark expelled dozens of Russian diplomats, following moves by Germany and France. Hundreds of Russian diplomats have been sent home since the start of the invasion, many accused of being spies.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the expulsions a 'short-sighted' measure that would complicate communication and warned they would be met with 'reciprocal steps'.

In another show of support, the European Union's executive branch proposed a ban on coal imports from Russia, in what would be the first sanctions from the bloc targeting the country's lucrative energy industry over the war. The coal imports amount to an estimated 4 billion euros (3.3billion) per year.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said the EU needed to increase the pressure on Putin after what she described as 'heinous crimes' carried out around Kyiv, with evidence that Russian troops may have deliberately killed Ukrainian civilians.

She did not mention natural gas, with consensus among the 27 EU member countries on targeting the fuel used to generate electricity and heat homes more difficult to secure.

The EU gets about 40% of its natural gas from Russia, and many EU countries, including Germany  the bloc's largest economy  are opposed to cutting off gas imports.

So far, Europe had not been willing to target Russian energy over fears that it would plunge the European economy into recession but the recent reports of civilian killings have increased pressure for tougher EU sanctions.

The US and the UK previously announced they were cutting off Russian oil, Poland said it plans to block imports of coal and oil from Russia, while Lithuania said it is no longer using Russian natural gas.

It comes as drone footage revealed today appeared to show Russian tanks opening fire on a cyclist in Bucha.

Footage of the attack in the Kyiv Oblast town shows a man walking his bicycle up a street, apparently unaware that several Russian tanks lay in wait around the corner.

Another video purportedly showed the aftermath of the attack after Bucha was reclaimed from Moscow's clutches in recent days. In it, a person believed to be the same man can be seen dead on the side of the road next to his bicycle.

In the first video, captured on March 3, the drone appears to be watching the Russian tank column, but the footage also tracks the man as he is walking up the road that runs through a neighbourhood of destroyed or damaged buildings.

The operator of the drone repeatedly pans upwards, showing a long queue of military vehicles - including tanks, armoured personnel carriers and trucks - positioned between buildings, on the next street over from the man.

As the cyclist continues down the street - first on his bicycle and then on foot, pushing it along side him - the drone focuses more on his movement up the road.

Putin seeing red: Truss says sanctions turning Russian economy into Soviet-style mess 'Crippling' Western sanctions are returning the Russian economy to a mess last seen in the communist era, Liz Truss said today as she urged the allies to tighten the screw on the Putin regime. The Foreign Secretary spoke after meeting the Polish counterpart Zbigniew Rau and PM Mateusz Morawiecki in Warsaw as she pushes for 'maximum' sanctions. Ms Truss is expected to push for harder action at a G7 meeting on Thursday, while Boris Johnson will encourage Germany to set a date for phasing out Russian gas when he meets Chancellor Scholz in Downing Street on Friday. Mr Morawiecki has criticised German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for focusing on the 'voices of German businesses' rather than the innocents slain in Ukraine. The Foreign Secretary highlighted the impact of the economic constrictions carried out so far on the Russian economy, saying: 'We have frozen over 350 billion US dollars (266billion) of Putin's war chest, making over 60 per cent of the regime's 604 billion US dollars (459 billion) foreign currency reserves unavailable. 'Our co-ordinated sanctions are pushing the Russian economy back to the Soviet era.' Meanwhile, senior Tories have urged the UK to drop the commitment that only 'defensive' weapons should be sent to Ukraine, after Volodymyr Zelensky asked for tanks and heavy artillery. Advertisement

He is shown nearing a junction in the road and turns left down a narrower street, where an armoured vehicle and a tank are positioned around 150ft away.

As soon as he turns the corner into the side road, a flash is seen from the armoured vehicle's turret, and a rocket is shown flying through the air.

Russia's death toll in Ukraine is nearing 20,000, Kyiv has claimed, as Ukraine continues to push back invading Kremlin troops and retake 'key terrain' around the capital and Chernihiv.

Putin's forces are retreating from major cities in the west as they refocus their efforts on the Donbas, with 60,000 Russian reservists expected to be called in to reinforce Moscow's offensive in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk provinces claimed by separatists.

The brutal siege of Mariupol is continuing where the Ukrainian civilian death toll has risen to 5,000, while a nitric acid tank in Rubizhne, Luhansk, has been shelled, forcing civilians to remain inside their homes with their windows shut.

A red and brown cloud of poisonous smoke prompted warnings to residents to wear wet face masks after the release of the dangerous chemical, which both sides blamed on the other.

Luhansk governor Sergiy Gaiday said Russia is planning a major attack in the region as he ordered a mass evacuation, saying: 'We understand that they are preparing for a full-scale big breakthrough. Please don't wait for your homes to be bombed.'

Meanwhile, Ukraine's general staff said Russia has again used banned cluster munitions in Mykolaiv, targeting civilian buildings including a children hospital in a horrific attack which has killed 11 and wounded 61.

British defence officials said 'low-level fighting is likely to continue in some parts of the newly recaptured regions, but diminish significantly over this week as the remainder of Russian forces withdraw' from Kyiv and Chernihiv.

In an intelligence update posted online, the UK says many of the Russian units 'are likely to require significant re-equipping and refurbishment before being available to redeploy for operations in eastern Ukraine.'

It comes as the UK, US and Australia today announced a new step in their partnership that will see them develop hypersonic weaponry in a bid to counteract the high-speed missiles constructed by Russia and China.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson, US President Joe Biden, and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison issued an agreed statement on Tuesday in which they reiterated 'unwavering commitment' to an international system which 'respects human rights'.

The three countries, which form the AUKUS military pact which was announced last September, committed to 'commence new trilateral co-operation on hypersonics and counter-hypersonics, and electronic warfare capabilities, as well as to expand information sharing and to deepen co-operation on defence innovation'.

The announcement comes after China successfully completed tests of its own version of the deadly weapon, WU-14, in recent years, as well as Russia claiming the first deployment of hypersonic missiles in an active theatre of war last month.

Initially surrounding submarines, Mr Johnson previously suggested the alliance could go beyond that and, on Tuesday, the three leaders said: 'We reaffirmed our commitment to Aukus and to a free and open Indo-Pacific.

'In light of Russia's unprovoked, unjustified, and unlawful invasion of Ukraine, we reiterated our unwavering commitment to an international system that respects human rights, the rule of law, and the peaceful resolution of disputes free from coercion.'

Russia has shelled a nitric acid tank in Rubizhne as the chairman of Luhansk ordered everyone to remain inside and close their windows

A red and yellow cloud of poisonous smoke prompted warnings to residents to wear wet face masks after the suspected deliberate shelling of a dangerous chemical

A Ukrainian service member walks near an abandoned Russian tank in Vablya in Kyiv region, April 5, 2022

Field engineers of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine stand next to destroyed armoured vehicles on a street in the town of Bucha, on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, April 5, 2022

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said that even though Ukraine is taking back the capital, he urged civilians not to return for 'at least another week', with explosives left around the city. Pictured: teams work to clear explosives

The wreckage of a car is seen at the central square of Borodianka, northwest of Kyiv, as Russian troops start to withdraw from the capital

A body is carried at a school in Bucha where Russia has been accused of carrying out war crimes after piles of corpses were found following Ukraine's recapture

Other measures proposed by the EU's executive arm include sanctions on more individuals and four key Russian banks, including the second-largest, VTB.

'These four banks, which we now totally cut off from the markets, represent 23% of market share in the Russian banking sector,' Von der Leyen said. 'This will further weaken Russia's financial system.'

If the proposal is adopted unanimously by all 27 EU countries, the new package of sanctions would also ban Russian vessels and Russian-operated vessels from EU ports, with exceptions for essentials such as agricultural and food products, and humanitarian aid and energy.

Further targeted export bans worth 10 billion euros (8.3 billion) have been proposed in sectors covering quantum computers, advanced semiconductors, sensitive machinery and transportation equipment.

Von der Leyen said: 'With this, we will continue to degrade Russia's technological base and industrial capacity.'

According to EU trade commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis, 62% of Russia's exports to the EU were hydrocarbons last year.

'If we really want to affect Russia's economy, that's where we need to look,' he said. 'And that's exactly what is subject to discussions concerning this sanctions package.'

Because of its climate ambitions, the EU has been moving away from coal. Coal use fell from 1.2 billion tons a year to 427 million tons between 1990 and 2020, but imports rose from 30% to 60% of coal use.

The European Union gets about 25% of its oil from Russia, while the EU imported 53% of hard coal from the country in 2020, which accounted for 30% of the EU's hard coal consumption.

Russian coal would be easier to replace than Russian gas because coal comes by ship and there are multiple global suppliers. Germany's association of coal importers said in March that Russian coal could be replaced 'in a few months'.

Analysts at the Bruegel think tank said in March that Germany and Poland were particularly reliant on Russian coal for power generation and that 'Russian coal can be replaced because global markets are well supplied and flexible'.

But they added that 'replacing Russian coal imports will require the lightspeed deployment of new supply chains to bring the right type of coal where it is needed. Most European coal users already source from different suppliers and should be able to build on existing relationships'.

But the switch would mean more import demand from Europe and higher global coal prices, with significant effects on emerging and developed economies that also rely on coal.
A teacher in Texas was fired after 'torturing' her students by playing a video of a high-pitched dog whistle for 40 minutes to punish them.

The unidentified woman played the YouTube clip at Leland Edge Middle School for an entire period on March 2, leaving students clutching their ears in agony, and accusing them of torture.

It is unclear what the class had done to merit being punished.

The teacher has since been dismissed, with police also probing the incident, as one girl who was in the classroom condemned the teacher's behavior.

Zoey Lohrs told NBC DFW: 'She put on the ringing noise everyone was covering their ears. One of them walked out of the classroom, one of them was yelling that it was torture and one was trying to unplug the computer.'

The TV station also played a noise similar to the one broadcast to the class - a shrill, high-pitched constant whistle so unpleasant that they had to issue a warning to viewers over a broadcast lasting just a few seconds.

Zoey Lohrs, (left) one of the students in the classroom, said that students literally felt like they were being tortured and even tried to turn the computer off to end it. Her mom Janice, right, also blasted the teacher over the incident

Police are investigating a teacher at Leland Edge Middle School who decided to discipline her students by playing a 40- minute 'dog whistle' YouTube video

Her mother Janice said the teacher's actions are even more unacceptable because she was aware that her daughter has high sensitivity to high pitched noises that leads to migraines.

'I would understand if the teacher used it for a split second to gain the attention of the class but not for the excess of 40 minutes. Not when kids are begging you to stop,' Zoey's mother said.

In a statement to NBC DFW the school district confirmed the teacher was fired and said 'student health, safety and security remains the highest priority for the district.'

Police have opened an investigation into a former teacher, Community Independent School District said

School officials are currently questioning students and staff about the incident as police continue their investigation.

'The District will cooperate fully with local law enforcement agencies and the legal process. While CISD wants to be as open and honest as possible, we cannot comment further on this matter until the ongoing investigation has been concluded,' the district said.

But Janice Lohrs says she hopes the teacher faces repercussions for her actions.

'I would really like her held accountable for her actions, this is not ok. You have my kid for eight hours a day. It's supposed to be a safe place,' she said.

YouTube has multiple whistle type videos, claiming that some of the sounds are so high only a child can hear, and that some are of a different pitch that is only audible to an adult.
Jodi Gordon (pictured) has been targeted by trolls

Actress Jodi Gordon has been told to 'grow up' by merciless trolls after she was slapped with an AVO and accused of 'hitting her boyfriend in the face with a wine bottle' during a drunken night at a luxury bed and breakfast.

The former Home And Away and Neighbours star, 37, was holidaying with her investment banker partner Sebastian Blackler, 31, in Kurrajong Heights, north-west of Sydney, on the weekend when the getaway allegedly descended into chaos.

Police were called to the scene early on Sunday morning amid reports of a domestic dispute, and arrived to find Mr Blackler with a swollen left eye and Gordon with a bruised eye and mouth, and with three bumps on her head.

Court documents state that Mr Blackler alleged to officers that his girlfriend 'hit him with a wine bottle' but refused to make a formal statement, while Gordon said she 'fell against the counter' - despite police saying her injuries were days old.

They were both hit with AVOs on one another's behalf on Sunday and warned they must not stalk, harass or intimidate each other.

In the days following the alleged incident, keyboard warriors flooded Gordon's Instagram feed with vile comments.

Jodi Gordon (left) split with Mr Blackler (right) in May last year, but the pair reportedly rekindled their relationship in February

Vile trolls attacked Gordon after she and her boyfriend Sebastian Blackler were hit with AVOs against each other (pictured: troll comments)

On Monday, one person told Gordon 'you just can't get your life together' on an Instagram photo she posted two weeks ago.

The user continued their scathing attack by saying 'your kid is more mature then her mother. Thankfully [sic] your she lives with her dad'.

Gordon had her daughter Aleeia with ex-husband and rugby league player Braith Anasta. The couple ended their three-year marriage in 2015, but continue to co-parent the eight-year-old.

Another ruthless troll said on Tuesday: 'I'm so glad she isn't the mother of my kids.'

Someone else told her to 'grow up'.

Jodi Gordon, 37, (pictured) has not commented on the alleged incident over the weekend

Trolls also took aim at Jodi Gordon (pictured) after her string of failed relationships was revealed

But sympathetic followers defended the TV star and asked trolls to back down.

'Jodi is a really nice person ... give the lady a bit of peace,' one woman said on Facebook.

Gordon has not commented on the AVO or the allegations against her, but on Tuesday she was pictured for the first time since the alleged incident when it was announced that she would be an ambassador for luxury salon, Cole Hair Studio.

She appeared fresh-faced during a visit to the salon with no clear signs of injury, though it is not known whether the photos were taken before or after the incident.

'Introducing our newest #colehair ambassador [sic] @JodiGordan looking stunning, as always,' the salon wrote on Instagram on Tuesday morning, below two images of the 37-year-old with a fresh head of caramel beach waves.

Cole Hair Studio would not comment when contacted by Daily Mail Australia.

Jodi Gordon was pictured on Instagram for the first time (above) since the alleged incident with her boyfriend

Cole Hair Studio announced on Tuesday morning that Jodi Gordon would be the salon's ambassador (post pictured)

Following the alleged dispute on Sunday, AVO documents obtained by The Australian newspaper allege Gordon was 'well affected by intoxicating liquor' and told police she 'fell against the counter'.

'Police fear domestic assaults are occurring between the parties with Gordon's consumption of intoxicating liquor exacerbating the violence,' the court documents said.

'There is clearly domestic violence occurring between the parties [but they] are reluctant to disclose how the injuries have been sustained.'

Officers took out a restraining order against Gordon on Sunday morning on behalf of Mr Blackler.

Mr Blackler, a portfolio manager at a wealth management firm in Sydney, was also issued with an AVO over the same alleged incident.

Police would not provide a statement when contacted by Daily Mail Australia.

The 37-year-old Home and Away and Neighbours alumni has been in a 'tumultuous on-off relationship' with 31-year-old banker Sebastian Blackler since November 2020

Police were called to a bed and breakfast on Sunday morning following reports of a domestic dispute between Jodi Gordon (pictured) and her boyfriend Sebastian Blackler

The former couple broke up in May 2021, but are understood to have rekindled their relationship in February.

Court orders state the pair must not must not assault or threaten stalk, harass or intimidate each other.

They are also prohibited from intentionally or recklessly destroy or damage any property or harm an animal the other person owns.

Gordon's order also bars her from being in Mr Blackler's company for at least 12 hours after drinking alcohol or taking illicit drugs.

Both parties will both face Windsor Local Court on April 21.
A top BBC executive intervened to reinstate the word 'women' after a backlash against a journalist who substituted it for the phrase 'assigned female at birth'.

Rhodri Talfan Davies, the BBC's director of nations, reportedly asked for 'women' to be added back into a March 26 feature on endometriosis.

An online article raising awareness of the condition came under fire for language which critics said 'obscured data on this already misunderstood and overlooked women's health issue.'

Rhodri Talfan Davies, (above) the BBC's director of nations, reportedly requested 'women' replace the phrase 'assigned female at birth' in a March 26 feature about endometriosis

The backlash was led by bestselling pregnancy author Milli Hill on Twitter, and after 'hundreds' of complaints the article was changed to state that endometriosis is a 'condition that affects one in 10 women of any age in the UK'.

Milli, from Somerset, faced a furious backlash in 2020 after challenging the use of the term 'birthing people' while speaking about obstetric violence - medical interventions performed during childbirth without a woman's consent.

Nickie Aiken, Conservative MP for the Cities of London and Westminster, also weighed in, stating she was 'born with, not assigned' her gender.

She wrote: 'Like 51% of the UK population I was born not assigned a woman at birth. And after circa 500 periods, two pregnancies and labours and now the menopause, I can confirm it ain't no picnic. So I can't imagine what it is like to live with #endometriosis as well.'

Prior to being changed, the BBC article stated: 'On average it takes eight years to receive a diagnosis - a figure, according to the charity Endometriosis UK, that's not changed in a decade. There is no known cause or cure.'

Pregnancy campaigner and bestselling author Hill argued that endometriosis is a condition for which there is no cure, 'because this is an issue that only affects women'.

Originally, the March 26 article said endometriosis affected one in 10 people 'of any age in the UK, who are assigned female at birth'

The edited version of the article, which reinstated 'women' following a backlash

Sharing a screenshot of the original article, she wrote: 'Sex is not 'assigned at birth'. Saying '1 in 10 people' obscures the stat. Also, the reason there is 'no known cause or cure' is undoubtedly because this is an issue that only affects women, and has been consistently overlooked.'

The Corporation's official explanation for making the change was because the journalist had interviewed two women, but stronger reservations were shared by senior BBC staff.

One insider told the Times: 'Management saw the language and thought the change was appropriate'.

A second source continued: 'I think management has woken up to this and if they're willing to take on idiots, that's good'.

The piece about alleged murderer Harvey Marcelin, (above) from New York City, was amended after publication to reveal she was in fact male-bodied and had recently started identifying as the opposite sex

Another article was recently updated about a suspected serial killer to make clear she had only recently started identifying as a transgender woman.

The piece about alleged murderer Harvey Marcelin, from New York City, was amended after publication to reveal she was in fact male-bodied and had recently started identifying as the opposite sex.

Marcelin, who killed two women in 1963 and 1984, was charged with murder, criminal tampering of evidence and concealment of a human corpse.
The White House is blasting Senate Republicans in a Tuesday evening statement after GOP lawmakers blocked an effort to move forward on a $10 billion Covid aid package.

A 47-52 vote saw every Republican senator decide against beginning debate on the spending bill, after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell threatened to withhold support absent a provision keeping a Trump-era border policy known as Title 42 in tact was included.

The Biden administration announced it would lift the order, which allows any border agent to turn away asylum-seekers on contact in the name of keeping virus cases down, on May 23.

Democrats needed 10 Republicans on board for the measure to move forward. It now could be delayed until after the Senate's two-week break beginning April 11.

'It is disappointing that Senate Republicans voted down consideration of a much-needed bill to purchase vaccines, boosters, and life-saving treatments for the American people,' White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement hours after the vote.

'As we have repeatedly said, there are consequences for Congress failing to fund our COVID Response. The program that reimbursed doctors, pharmacists and other providers for vaccinating the uninsured had to end today due to a lack of funds.'

'It is disappointing that Senate Republicans voted down consideration of a much-needed bill to purchase vaccines, boosters, and life-saving treatments for the American people,' White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a Tuesday evening statement after the GOP blocked the $10 billion Covid aid bill in a 47-52 vote

Psaki also reiterated the Biden administration's warnings that treatments like monoclonal antibodies, favored by many in red states like Florida and Texas as an alternative to vaccination, would run out in May without more funding.

Covid test manufacturing capacity would also dwindle by late June, she said.

'Todays Senate vote is a step backward for our ability to respond to this virus. We will continue to work with the House and Senate to move this vital legislation forward,' the Biden official concluded.

Democrat Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., voted with Republicans against moving the bill forward. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer switched his 'yes' vote in a last-minute procedural move to enable him to bring the package back to the floor.

Their fellow Democrat Senator Bob Menendez, D-N.J., did not vote, according to the Senate Press Gallery.

Schumer said after the vote, 'This is a potentially devastating vote for every single American who was worried about the possibility of a new variant rearing its nasty head within a few months.'

It comes as scientists warn a new sub-variant of the Omicron Covid strain, known as BA.2, could lead to a spike in virus cases in the US after recent waves in Europe and Asia.

One Democrat, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, joined Republicans in blocking the measure. Schumer switched his vote to 'no' in a last-minute procedural move

GOP Leader Mitch McConnell said earlier on Tuesday that there would need to be an amendment keeping Title 42 in place in order for Democrats to pass more Covid aid with the 10 Republican votes they needed to make it happen.

'There'll have to be an amendment on Title 42 in order to move the bill,' McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters on Tuesday. 'We'll need to enter into some kind of agreement to process these amendments in order to go forward with the bill.'

Schumer said that the Covid relief bill should 'not be held hostage' to other proposals.

Lawmakers reached a bipartisan deal to offer $10 billion in additional Covid-19 funding on Monday. The bill funded vaccines, therapeutics and other Covid safety measures domestically, but dropped funding for fighting the pandemic abroad.

The Biden administration announced last week that the Centers for Disease Control's (CDC) emergency health order, Title 42, which is used to expel a majority of immigrants on the southern border, will expire by May 23. Department of Homeland Security officials say the expiration is likely to cause a fresh surge in border crossings.

'There'll have to be an amendment on Title 42 in order to move the bill,' McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters on Tuesday. 'We'll need to enter into some kind of agreement to process these amendments in order to go forward with the bill'

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said he 'absolutely' wanted a Title 42 amendment to the bill. 'It's utterly insane that the administration claims to be concerned about COVID,' he said. 'At the same time, they've decided just to throw open the doors to illegal aliens who are COVID-positive.'

The order was first implemented by the Trump administration in March 2020 and has been used to expel most migrants at the border. In February, 55 percent of people who arrived at the border were turned away due to the order.

More than 1.6 million migrants - mostly single adults and family units - have been expelled under Title 42 by both Trump and Biden.

In order to pass the $10 billion coronavirus aid deal before April 9, when both chambers go on a two-week break, all 100 senators need to cooperate, potentially giving Republicans leverage to force an amendment vote.

The $10 billion plan is less than half of what the White House originally requested, but some Republicans were prepared to offer nothing as they claimed previous Covid funding had been squandered or still had yet to be spent.

While past Covid-19 relief bills, such as the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, have been saddled with funding for struggling families and businesses, the new deal would be narrowly tailored to public health efforts to fight the virus.

A migrant girl walks through an encampment where she lives along with other migrants that were mostly sent back to Mexico and now they wait to be allowed into the U.S. when Title 42 is lifted, in Reynosa, Mexico, April

Elvia, 9, Sarai, 10, and Yadira, 8, asylum-seekers from Central America, pass their time at a migrant camp at the border where they have lived for months with other migrants that were mostly sent back to Mexico and now they hope to be allowed into the U.S. when Title 42 is lifted, in Reynosa, Mexico, April 1

Migrants that were mostly sent back to Mexico wait to receive a meal prepared by other migrants that live at the encampment yards away from the border as they hope to be allowed into the U.S. when Title 42 is lifted, in Reynosa, Mexico, April 1

Senate Republicans including Mitt Romney, Utah, Richard Burr, N.C. and Roy Blunt, Mo., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., were working with Democrats after the pandemic funding was pulled from the 2022 budget bill. Lead negotiators on the Democratic side were Sens. Chris Coons, Del., Chuck Schumer, N.Y., and Patty Murray, Wash. The new deal could clear the upper chamber as soon as this week.

A number of moderate Democratic senators have opposed the rescission of Title 42, but none have weighed in on the amendment suggestion. Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema, both Arizona Democrats, put out a statement warning against rolling back the order without a plan to deal with an onset of migrants, and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., said he is discussing with Republicans what to do about the matter.

White House press secretary pushed back on the idea of the amendment. Decisions on Title 42 should remain independent of the urgently needed funding for Covid aid. This is a decision made by CDC, it's a public health decision. It's not one, of course, that should be wrapped up in politics.'

A number of House Democrats had threatened to vote against the new aid deal without international funding, arguing it was necessary to keep new variants from developing and spreading to the U.S. But during a Democratic Caucus meeting Tuesday leadership urged them not to vote 'no' on the package. Some have suggested a separate bill on international Covid aid could come up later in the year.

Migrants that were mostly sent back to Mexico pass their time at an encampment yards away from the border while many hope to be allowed into the U.S. when Title 42 is lifted

Biden asked Congress for another $22.5 billion to fight the pandemic, and lawmakers had originally included $15.6 billion in aid as part of the fiscal year 2022 budget bill, meaning it could have passed with a simple majority vote. But the Covid aid was yanked at the last second after progressives protested the pay-fors of the funding - repurposing about $7 billion in leftover state and local Covid relief.

Moderate Republicans who could be swayed to vote for further aid insisted it was paid for, and demanded a full accounting of where other aid money has gone so far.

The new deal set to be announced Monday is paid for by repurposing aid from previous Covid-19 bills, but does not dig into state assistance.
EU countries are handing Vladimir Putin a billion euros a day for oil and gas  as the bloc moved a step closer to banning Russian coal.

EU foreign minister Josep Borrell said it was unable to ban Russian gas imports because some member states were so dependent on it that they were refusing to budge, despite widespread revulsion at Putins aggression.

Mr Borrell acknowledged that EU energy payments were effectively financing the war in Ukraine.

He said sanctions had to be extended to energy if they were to have any impact on Putins war machine, but said this could not be done overnight.

EU foreign minister Josep Borrell (pictured) said it was unable to ban Russian gas imports because some member states were so dependent on it that they were refusing to budge

The revelation of the scale of spending on oil came as the European Commission brought forward proposals to ban Russian coal.

EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said the ban on coal imports would be worth 4 billion euros (3.3billion) a year.

Polish PM Mateusz Morawiecki called on the EU to do more, saying it had to sever all trade relations with Russia without delay.

So far, Europe has not been willing to target Russian energy over fears that it would plunge the European economy into recession but the recent reports of civilian killings have increased pressure for tougher EU sanctions.

The US and the UK previously announced they were cutting off Russian oil, Poland said it plans to block imports of coal and oil from Russia, while Lithuania said it is no longer using Russian natural gas.

To take a clear stand is not only crucial for us in Europe but also for the rest of the world, Miss von der Leyen said.

A clear stand against Putins war of choice. A clear stand against the massacre of civilians. And a clear stand against the violation of the fundamental principles of the world order.

Other measures proposed by the EUs executive arm include sanctions on more individuals and four key Russian banks, including the second-largest, VTB, which is already sanctioned by the UK.

These four banks, which we now totally cut off from the markets, represent 23 per cent of market share in the Russian banking sector,

Miss von der Leyen said: This will further weaken Russias financial system.

EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said the ban on coal imports would be worth 4 billion euros (3.3billion) a year

If the proposal is adopted unanimously by all 27 EU countries, the new package of sanctions would also ban Russian vessels and Russian-operated vessels from EU ports, with exceptions for essentials such as agricultural and food products, and humanitarian aid and energy.

Further targeted export bans worth 10 billion euros (8.3 billion) have been proposed in sectors covering quantum computers, advanced semiconductors, sensitive machinery and transportation equipment.

Mr Morawiecki, who held talks in Warsaw with Liz Truss yesterday, said emerging evidence of a massacre of civilians by Russian troops in the town of Bucha amounted to acts of genocide.

He added: The EU must confiscate all Russian assets in its western banks as well as those of Russian oligarchs. It must sever all trade relations with Russia without delay. European money must stop flowing to the Kremlin. Putins criminal and increasingly totalitarian regime needs to have one thing imposed on it: sanctions which actually work.

Miss Truss said sanctions were already having a crippling impact - but acknowledged the West needs to go further.
This is the Russian commander accused of orchestrating heinous war crimes in Bucha.

Lieutenant Colonel Azatbek Omurbekov has been branded the Butcher of Bucha over the mass slaughter of civilians in the Kyiv commuter town.

Ukrainian intelligence indicates that he commands the 64th Separate Motorised Rifle Brigade, involved in Buchas occupation before retreating to Belarus last week. Omurbekov was blessed by a Russian Orthodox priest in November.

As Ukraine said troops behind the atrocities could already be back on the front line, one report suggested they could be sent to areas which left them no chance of surviving to stop them testifying at war crimes trials.

Lieutenant Colonel Azatbek Omurbekov (pictured) has been branded the Butcher of Bucha over orchestrating the heinous war crimes and mass slaughter of civilians in the Kyiv commuter town

The countrys defence ministry said Omurbekovs batallion was now in Belarus having left Bucha on March 30.

But intelligence suggested they are preparing to head to Belgorod in western Russia before they can be redeployed to fighting hotspots such as Kharkiv to intimidate civilians.

Images of the senior officer show him wearing a Russian ushanka - or trapper - hat and bearing two stars on his shoulder epaulettes, signifying his rank.

Following the blessing service in the city of Khabarovsk in the far east of Russia, where his unit is based, Omurbekov said: History shows that we fight most of our battles with our souls.

Weapons are not the most important thing. The church is a place where we can take communion and prepare for the coming events. With the blessing of the Almighty, we hope to achieve the same things that our forebears achieved..

In 2014 Omorbekov was given a medal for outstanding service by Russias deputy defence minister Dmitry Bulgakov, according to The Times.
Locals have blasted a decision to shut down an entire national park following the tragic deaths of a British father and son in a landslide, saying it's like shutting down every beach on the coast following a shark attack.

Authorities shut the Blue Mountains National Park from Wednesday morning - with the exception of the Evans and Govetts Leap lookouts - due to heavy rain smashing the city.

The closure comes just days after a bushwalker dad, 49, and his son, nine, were crushed to death in a rockslide in Wentworth Falls on Monday afternoon.

The man's wife, 50, and another son, 14, were also hit by the falling rocks and are now fighting for life in a critical condition. A 15-year-old girl escaped the landslide and raised the alarm in a frantic call to emergency services at around 1.30pm.

The Blue Mountains National Park will be closed from Wednesday morning, excluding Evans Lookout and Govetts Leap lookout due to heavy rain forecast

The closure comes after a British father and his son were killed in a landslide in Wentworth Falls on Monday afternoon

Local environmentalist and former director for the Colong Foundation for Wilderness, Keith Muir, said the closure of the entire park is an 'overreaction'.

The closure is related to significant rain forecast for the rest of the week. Monday's landslide came after a week of torrential rainfall.

'This is an overreaction to a very sad event,' Mr Muir said. 'Equivalent to closure of ocean beaches after a fatal shark attack.'

Mr Muir said the event was very sad, but noted the tragedy was rare.

'It's a very sad event but it's a very rare event and needs a nuanced approach rather than a shutdown of any at risk walking track,' he told the Blue Mountains Gazette.

'The Parks service and the council can't protect the public from every single tree or every single rock in the park, it's just impossible.'

A local environmentalist said closing the entire Blue Mountains National Park was an 'overreaction'

The park has been closed due to heavy rainfall forecast for the rest of the week

The environmentalist added that the walking tracks offered mental health benefits for hikers and should be kept open 'for that reason alone'.

Mayor Mark Greenhill said he'd asked the council to close any tracks which were in at risk areas.

The family who were caught in the landslide had been were permitted to use the advanced Wentworth Pass track, famous for its stunning waterfall views and valley lookouts, despite weeks of wild weather making the area dangerous for hikers.

NSW National Parks confirmed the 5km loop was inspected days before the landslide as part of a routine assessment program.

Paramedics were winched from a rescue helicopter down the cliff face as they searched for anyone who had been taken by moving debris

'Unfortunately, it is not possible to predict and eliminate all natural risks such as rockslides, which can occasionally occur around the state,' a statement read.

The Wentworth Pass track is considered as having a grade four difficulty under NSW National Park and Wildlife Service guidelines, which recommends only experienced bushwalkers use it.

But several areas around Wentworth Falls have been closed since March 11 due to flood damage, with a major landslip recently shutting down Kedumba Valley Road, which is next to the trail.

National Pass, another trail about 350 metres away from Monday's deadly incident, has also been closed for the past few weeks due to an 'ongoing rockfall risk'.

A man who was at the popular tourist spot about the same time as the Brits on Monday told Daily Mail Australia he cautiously cut his hike short because the ground was muddy and stairways were wet and he'd recently suffered a leg injury on a trek.

Hiking fanatics who visited the same trail in recent days have expressed their shock and offered condolences to the British family online.

Police are seen at the scene following the death of the father and son on Monday

'This is the trail we completed two days earlier and were unaware of any dangers at the time,' they wrote on Facebook.

'Our thoughts are with the families of these walkers'.

The family were holidaying in Australia from the UK, NSW Police have confirmed, and the British Consulate is now assisting.

Authorities are still working to determine whether the landslide fell on the group while they were walking along a bush track, or if they were trekking along the cliff face that fell.

'Unfortunately there's been a landslip while they were bushwalking and a man and a boy have passed away,' NSW Police Detective Acting Superintendent John Nelson said.

'In terms of the site, it's extremely dangerous and unstable.'

Police crews returned to the scene early on Tuesday morning to recover the bodies of the man and boy.

The retrieval of the bodies was a planned and delicate operation due to the nature of the terrain at the site.

The tracks in the Wentworth Falls precinct of the park have been closed indefinitely.
Germany is facing speed limits on its famously unregulated autobahns thanks to the war in Ukraine.

The Green Party, which is in a three-party governing coalition, is pushing for a temporary 80mph limit to save fuel and cut Russian imports.

Joint party leader Ricarda Lang said: Every litre of oil we can save counts.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz is thought to back the move but the liberal Free Democrats say it would impinge on national freedom.

Germany is facing speed limits on its famously unregulated autobahns thanks to the war in Ukraine. (Pictured: The German Autobahn A2 at Gelsenkirche)

The Green Party, which is in a three-party governing coalition, is pushing for a temporary 80mph limit to save fuel and cut Russian imports. Joint party leader Ricarda Lang (pictured left with German Minister of Economics and Climate Protection Robert Habeck), said: Every litre of oil we can save counts'

Chancellor Olaf Scholzt, pictured yesterday, is thought to back the move but the liberal Free Democrats say it would impinge on national freedom

A 62mph limit during the 1973 oil crisis lasted just three months.

Mr Lang said: There are hardly any other measures that work quickly, so we need a temporary autobahn speed limit until the end of the year when we plan to end Russian imports.

The FDP say a limit would impinge on the freedoms Germans have become used to.
Russia condemned for mass killings of Ukrainians



The Russian army has caught the world off guard with its apparent mass killings of civilians in the towns of Ukraine along with other atrocities such as sexual offenses and even torture. Ukraine said it has recovered more than 410 corpses in Bucha and other cities on the outskirts of Kyiv who were victims of atrocities committed by Russian troops.



Agonizing images of Bucha reported by global news outlets show dead people with their hands bound behind their backs with many of them being shot to death at close range. The footage of a mass grave in Bucha vividly demonstrates the cruelties committed by Russian troops.



Russia has been the target of international condemnation since it fired missiles at civilian facilities such as hospitals and kindergartens from the beginning of the war. They allegedly used weapons like thermobaric bombs and cluster bombs which are prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and even threatened to use nuclear weapons.



Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed Russian troops killed thousands of civilians including children and tortured and raped Ukrainian women. A woman said Russian soldiers shot her husband and son in front of her before raping her. Wartime rape was defined as a war crime by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1998. International human rights organizations criticized the Russian army for committing rapes as part of its military tactics, thus sowing the seeds of deep trauma in Ukrainian society.



Russia's atrocities have fanned an outcry in the global community. Yet Russia has denied the allegations of its army's misconduct, describing them as "signs of video forgery and various fakes."



Russia claims the civilians whose bodies were laying on the streets of Bucha were killed after its troops withdrew from the city around March 30. But the New York Times unveiled an analysis of satellite images that rebuts the Russian claim and shows many of the civilians were killed more than three weeks ago when the Russian army was occupying the city.



On Monday, U.S. President Joe Biden dubbed Russian President Vladimir Putin a war criminal who should stand trial. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres cited the need for an independent investigation into the case to reveal the truth and punish the responsible people. Even Pope Francis implicitly slammed Putin on Saturday for "fomenting conflict," saying he was considering a visit to Kyiv.



Without a doubt, Russia's massacre of civilians is clearly a war crime that violates international law. Those responsible for such inhuman crimes should receive punishment without fail after the truth is revealed following thorough investigations. Russia is threatening the world with its military forces and energy resources.



Seoul should more proactively join global efforts to provide assistance to Ukraine and impose more economic sanctions on Russia. Global citizens will remember Putin as a slaughterer regardless of the consequences of the ongoing war. We strongly condemn Putin's brutal criminal acts and urge him to stop the crimes and the war immediately.




EU leaders plan to place Vladimir Putin's daughters on its latest sanction hit-list as the bloc prepares its latest crackdown on Moscow in the wake of alleged war crimes in Ukraine.

Katerina Tikhonova, 35, and Mariya Vorontsova, 36, are on the EU's latest draft list of targets that includes oligarchs, politicians and those said to be within Putin's inner circle.

Little is known about the personal lives of Tikhonova, a scientist and former acrobat, and Vorontosva, an endocrinologist, but they are expected to be subject to asset freezes and travel bans across the continent from Wednesday.

Although it is unclear if the pair have holdings outside of Russia, any potential life of luxury they could have led in Europe is now likely to be a distant dream.

It comes as the G7, EU and United States are said to have agreed on a ban on 'all new investment' in Russia as part of its latest economic retaliation against Putin.

The new measures will also widen the net of sanctions on Russian banks and state owned businesses and aim to cripple government officials and their family members.

Katerina Tikhonova, 35, (pictured) and Mariya Vorontsova, 36, are on the EU's latest draft list of targets that includes oligarchs, politicians and those said to be within Putin's inner circle

Little is known about the personal lives of Tikhonova, a scientist and former acrobat, and Vorontosva, (above) an endocrinologist, but they are expected to be subject to asset freezes and travel bans across the continent from Wednesday

The new measures will also widen the net of sanctions on Russian banks and state owned businesses and aim to cripple government officials and their family members

The latest round of sanctions are understood to have been trigged by allegations of 'genocide', atrocities and war crimes against Ukrainian civilians discovered after Russian troops fell back from their position in Bucha, near Kyiv.

Further Russian imports worth an estimated 4.6bn each year, understood to include cement, liquor, vodka and caviar, will also be banned under the new raft of measures.

Other measures proposed by the EU's executive arm include sanctions on more individuals and four key Russian banks, including the second-largest, VTB.

'These four banks, which we now totally cut off from the markets, represent 23% of market share in the Russian banking sector,' EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen said.

If the proposal is adopted unanimously by all 27 EU countries, the new package of sanctions would also ban Russian vessels and Russian-operated vessels from EU ports, with exceptions for essentials such as agricultural and food products, and humanitarian aid and energy.

Further targeted export bans worth 10 billion euros (8.3 billion) have been proposed in sectors covering quantum computers, advanced semiconductors, sensitive machinery and transportation equipment.

Von der Leyen said: 'With this, we will continue to degrade Russia's technological base and industrial capacity.'

Sources said new economic penalties would 'impose significant costs on Russia and send it further down the road of economic, financial, and technological isolation'.

Meanwhile, a source told the Financial Times that banning new Western investors from trading in the Russian market would 'degrade key instruments of Russian state power, impose acute and immediate economic harm on Russia, and hold accountable the Russian kleptocracy that funds and supports Putins war'.

The ramping up of punitive economic measures came as members of the UN Security Council were left in stunned silence as President Volodymyr Zelensky warned Russia had 'committed genocide' and shared dozens of pictures of charred bodies, dead civilians and mass graves in Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol in recent days.

In Bucha, advancing Ukrainian units discovered hundreds of bodies strewn all over residential roads in the suburban town that was once home to 28,000 people.

'The massacre in our city of Bucha is unfortunately only one of many examples of what the occupiers have been doing on our land for the past 41 days', Zelensky added.

One Brussels source explained: 'We had already concluded that Russia committed war crimes in Ukraine, and the information from Bucha appears to show further evidence of war crimes'.

Sources said new economic penalties would 'impose significant costs on Russia and send it further down the road of economic, financial, and technological isolation'

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said the EU needed to increase the pressure on Putin after what she described as 'heinous crimes' carried out around Kyiv, with evidence that Russian troops may have deliberately killed Ukrainian civilians

In another show of support, the European Union's executive branch proposed a ban on coal imports from Russia, in what would be the first sanctions from the bloc targeting the country's lucrative energy industry over the war. The coal imports amount to an estimated 4 billion euros (3.3billion) per year.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said the EU needed to increase the pressure on Putin after what she described as 'heinous crimes' carried out around Kyiv, with evidence that Russian troops may have deliberately killed Ukrainian civilians.

She added: 'We all saw the gruesome pictures from Bucha and other areas from which Russian troops have recently left. These atrocities cannot and will not be left unanswered.'

Ms von der Leyen did not mention natural gas, with consensus among the 27 EU member countries on targeting the fuel used to generate electricity and heat homes more difficult to secure.

The EU gets about 40% of its natural gas from Russia, and many EU countries, including Germany  the bloc's largest economy  are opposed to cutting off gas imports.

So far, Europe had not been willing to target Russian energy over fears that it would plunge the European economy into recession but the recent reports of civilian killings have increased pressure for tougher EU sanctions.

The US and the UK previously announced they were cutting off Russian oil, Poland said it plans to block imports of coal and oil from Russia, while Lithuania said it is no longer using Russian natural gas.

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has demanded Brussels' leaders join this commitment and set out a timetable ahead of Wednesday's meeting with Nato and G7 members.

Ms Truss explained that Western sanctions were working to reverse Russia's economy back 'into the Soviet era', but is demanding more action from European allies, reports the Telegraph.

She said that the UK had frozen 266.3 billion of Putins war chest and made more than 60 per cent of his 461.5 billion of foreign currency reserves unavailable.

It comes as Italy, Spain and Denmark expelled dozens of Russian diplomats, following moves by Germany and France. Hundreds of Russian diplomats have been sent home since the start of the invasion, many accused of being spies.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the expulsions a 'short-sighted' measure that would complicate communication and warned they would be met with 'reciprocal steps'.
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Travellers face chaos at Britains busiest airports for several weeks as massive queues and cancelled flights continue to derail families Easter getaways.

More than 1,140 flights have been grounded at Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Birmingham since the much-anticipated school holidays began  with airlines EasyJet and British Airways both cutting 60 and 98 flights respectively in a single day yesterday.

The unprecedented bedlam is being blamed mostly on staffing shortages and recruitment challenges, and a sudden surge in passenger numbers  both caused by Covid and the curbs which have been in place for most of the past two years.

Have YOU experienced airport delays? Email jack.wright@mailonline.co.uk or tips@dailymail.com Advertisement

Yesterday Karen Smart was forced to resign as managing director of Manchester Airports Group (MAG), which owns Manchester, Stansted and East Midlands airports, after just two years in the post.

Airport management were due to meet political leaders and unions to discuss the ongoing situation, after Blackley and Broughton MP Graham Stringer furiously challenged Manchesters management to get a grip or get out.

And unions are warning that the carnage is set to go on throughout the summer because of the delays in processing counter-terror checks needed for new airport staff, with some said to be taking 30 weeks instead of the usual 14 to 15 while civil servants WFH.

In a statement, MAG chief executive Charlie Cornish said: Over the last two years, Karen has guided Manchester Airport through the most challenging period of its 84-year history, having made a major contribution to MAG throughout her time with the business.

I am sorry to lose Karen after her years of valuable service, but also understand her desire to return to the South for family reasons and indeed to explore new career opportunities.

While there are sure to be further challenges ahead, I am confident we will soon start to see the benefits of the recovery plans Karen has helped put in place and look forward to working with Ian and his leadership team to drive them forward.

Yesterday, passengers at Manchester were spotted jumping over barriers and abandoning their luggage in a desperate attempt to make their flights, according to Nicky Kelvin, head of travel website Points Guy UK.

Meanwhile at Heathrow, a male passenger in his early 30s collapsed while queueing as staff shortages left people waiting four hours to clear passport control.

Travellers face chaos at Britains busiest airports including Heathrow (pictured), Gatwick and Manchester

More than 1,140 flights have been grounded at a number of major airports including Manchester (pictured)

The unprecedented bedlam is being blamed mostly on staffing shortages and recruitment challenges (Gatwick pictured)

Manchester, the UKs third busiest airport, has been mired in chaos in recent weeks

Karen Smart has resigned as managing director of Manchester Airports Group (MAG), which owns Manchester, Stansted and East Midlands airports, after just two years in the post, the company confirmed this afternoon

EasyJet cancels more than 220 flights due to Covid staff shortages to leave some passengers stranded amid airport chaos EasyJet has cancelled more than 220 flights, blaming the disruption on high levels of staff sickness due to Covid. At least 222 flights have been axed since Friday, including 62 that had been scheduled for Monday alone, the majority of which were cancelled at short notice on Saturday. Covid infection numbers are some of the highest they have been since the start of the pandemic. An EasyJet spokesperson said yesterday: 'As a result of the current high rates of Covid infections across Europe, like all businesses EasyJet is experiencing higher than usual levels of employee sickness. 'We have taken action to mitigate this through the rostering of additional standby crew this weekend, however, with the current levels of sickness we have also decided to make some cancellations in advance.' They said the focus was on 'consolidating flights where we have multiple frequencies so customers have more options to rebook their travel, often on the same day.' They added: 'Unfortunately it has been necessary to make some additional cancellations for today and tomorrow. 'We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause to customers on affected flights. 'We have made 62 preemptive cancellations for flights to and from the UK for tomorrow which represents a small proportion tomorrow's total flying programme which was planned to be more than 1645 flights. 'We cancelled the majority of these yesterday.' Advertisement

Eyewitness Jessica Oliver told MailOnline: I just walked past and he was on the floor. There were people helping him  I dont know if it was dehydration or very low blood sugar, but its very hot and staff are handing out water bottles. It was also chaotic at Amsterdam, but Ive never seen anything like this.

The mans current condition is unknown and Heathrow Airport has been contacted for an update.

Travellers also took to social media to share photos of huge queues stretching up to four hours long, with one person writing: Chaos at Heathrow Airport arrivals. Some people have been standing here for the past four hours and the queues are not moving. What is causing the disruption?.

Another passenger added: Three hour plus clearing immigrations wait at Terminal 3 for under two hours European flight!! Still nowhere near through. No one giving any updates!.

And while sat in Terminal 5 at Heathrow, Hannah Swales told MailOnline about her shambolic return flight from Dubai. She said: We were delayed from Dubai for three hours and then had to be rebooked on the next available flight. We were to stay in Heathrow Airport with no luggage and no access to medication in our luggage.

Paul Charles, chief executive of travel consultancy The PC Agency, said: Airlines are certainly seeing a high level of demand to fly, but are simply unable to cope with that demand due to a lack of resources. Its a nightmare situation for airlines and airports at the moment.'

Martin Chalk, general secretary of the pilots union Balpa, also told The Telegraph: The chaos witnessed at British airports may well be repeated throughout the summer because airlines, laden with debt have not yet rehired enough staff.

The rise in bookings is overtaking the number of airline staff being hired, which is being further exacerbated by security checks.

An industry source further blamed the vetting process, saying it can take up to six months before someone is able to come in and do a job at an airport.

But a spokesperson for the Department for Transport (DfT) contended the aviation industry is responsible for resourcing at airports, adding: They manage their staff absences, although we want to see minimal disruption for passengers during the Easter period.

The requirement for Counter Terrorist Checks for aviation security staff is important for the protection of the travelling public and the Government continues to process these security clearances in a timely manner.

There were also reports of travel chaos at Heathrow and Gatwick airports on Monday, as well as long delays at Dover and a train blockage in the Channel Tunnel.

Heathrow warned passengers of possible delays, tweeting: We continue to advise passengers arrive 3 hours prior to their scheduled departure time as we are not able to estimate queue times ahead of journeys, due to them being influenced by a significant range of factors.

Long queues were also reported at Birmingham from 7.45am yesterday, with one passenger warning others to get here early. Another traveller, Luka Beckett, said she was 'trapped' on a grounded plane for 40 minutes on Sunday due to a lack of staff.

She told Birmingham Live: We should have been home at around 10pm, but got in sometime after midnight. It was horrific.

This follows a week of reported mass disruption with more than 1,100 flights cancelled throughout the UK. In the week up to April 3, a total of 1,143 flights were cancelled from and to the UK compared with just 197 flights cancelled the same week in 2019.

The carnage is set to go on throughout the summer because of the delays in processing counter-terror checks needed for new airport staff, with some said to be taking 30 weeks instead of the usual 14 to 15 while civil servants work from home. Pictured: passengers queuing at Heathrow this afternoon

Passengers queue early on Tuesday for security at Manchester Airport's Terminal 1, as travel chaos continues at airports and ports as the Easter holidays get underway

Long queues seen yesterday as passengers arrive at Heathrow Airport's Terminal 2 for the start of their Easter holiday

The latest figures show British Airways cancelled 662 flights while easyJet axed 357 last week, according to data from Cirium, which carries out aviation analysis. But some of these totals are based on historical cancellations and were flights axed months ago. Pictured left and right: Huge queues for security at Manchester Airport

Eurotunnel passengers face three-hour delays after train is halted in the Channel Tunnel Eurotunnel passengers face a three hour delay on Monday morning due a train being halted in the Channel Tunnel. Eurotunnel - the vehicle carrying railway tunnel that connects Folkestone with Coquelles beneath the English Channel - is reporting a three hour delay to services. The travel firm, which is separate from the passenger-only Eurostar service, said it was due to a train stopped in the tunnel. 'Due to a train stopped temporarily in the tunnel, our service is currently experiencing delays. Please check-in as planned. Apologies for this,' Eurotunnel said on Twitter. Passenger service Eurostar, which operates trains between London St Pancras and Europe, and which uses the same tunnels, also has delays, according to its website though has yet to post any updates on its Twitter page. A delay warning on its website says: 'Your train has been delayed because part of the track is temporarily closed in the Channel Tunnel. Speed restrictions are in place. We are sorry for the impact this may have on your plans.' Advertisement

The latest figures show British Airways cancelled 662 flights while EasyJet axed 357 last week, according to data from Cirium, which carries out aviation analysis.

But some of these totals are based on historical cancellations and were flights axed months ago while airlines have claimed they represent a small percentage of their total flights.

Speaking to the Manchester Evening News, Mr Stringer, the former leader of Manchester Council and chairman of the airport board, said: Covid has made life difficult for everyone in the aviation industry. The way to respond to that is by good employment procedures and not by casualisation, effectively using fire and rehire. The airport needs to reset and pay above the market rate to stabilise the situation and give confidence to employees and the travelling public.

On Monday, Manchester Airport chiefs apologised for falling short following long delays over the weekend.

Meanwhile, pictures showed long queues at Heathrow, with airport bosses blaming a huge spike in passenger numbers. Heathrow chiefs say passenger numbers have now reached pre-pandemic levels, with Saturday being the first school holidays since the start of the pandemic with no travel restrictions in place in England.

Bosses at Gatwick also said passengers numbers were returning to 2019 levels at the Sussex airport and that while there were some check-in queues that it was generally coping well with the increase in footfall.

One travel expert estimated that there had probably been more resignations in the last three months than during the Covid crisis because staff were worn out. Another warned disruption at airports such as Manchester could last for months, with firms having to train new staff to deal with the post-Covid increase in demand.

Bosses of the company behind Manchester Airport, which is in the same group as Stansted and East Midlands Airport, said it had seen a 1,300 percent increase increase in passenger numbers in February  compared to the previous year when the country was in lockdown.

Pictures taken at Manchester Airport on Monday showed long queues of people attempting to get through to security. Passengers also bemoaned a lack of organisation at the check-in, with long queues also seen at the check-in desk. In a tongue-in-cheek Twitter post, one frustrated traveller described a snaking queue at the airport as a world record attempt at the worlds slowest, longest conga line.

A Manchester Airport spokesperson told MailOnline: Manchester Airport apologises to passengers whose experiences have fallen below the standard we aim to provide. We want to assure customers and colleagues that their safety and security will always be our first priority.

Our whole industry is facing staff shortages and recruitment challenges at present, after the most damaging two years in its history. The removal of all travel restrictions after two years, coupled with the start of the summer travel season, has seen a rapid increase in passenger numbers, which is putting an enormous strain on our operation.

We are doing all we can to recruit the staff we need to meet this demand, but this is taking time due to the lengthy vetting and training processes involved. That is why we have been advising travellers that there may be, at times, longer queues than normal.

Whenever this is the case, we do all we can to redeploy resources and prioritise passengers within queues as best we can.

We are also aware that partners working on our site, such as baggage handling agents, are facing similar challenges. We will continue to support them in any way we can to deliver the best possible experience for customers during this challenging time.

It comes after the west-London airport faced its own chaos last week, after a major BA IT meltdown forced the airline to cancel or delay hundreds of flights.
The night Leigh Sales revealed she would be departing as host of the ABC's flagship 7.30 current affairs program there was a tell-tale sign she was about to make a major announcement.

It was one of the rare occasions Sales chose to front the show wearing the lapel pin that signifies the journalist is a Member of the Order of Australia.

Sales did the same thing on Tuesday night when she grilled Prime Minister Scott Morrison in a long-awaited interview ahead of him calling a federal election in coming days.

The night Leigh Sales revealed she would be departing as host of the ABC's nightly 7.30 current affairs program she wore the lapel pin that signifies the journalist is a Member of the Order of Australia (above). It was one of the rare occasions she chose to wear the badge

Sales wore her Order of Australia pin on Tuesday night when she grilled Prime Minister Scott Morrison in a long-awaited interview ahead of him calling a federal election in coming days

In a sometimes testy exchange Sales bombarded Mr Morrison with questions about his leadership and reputation among Coalition colleagues.

Sales confronted the prime minister over claims made by members of his own party he was a bully, liar and 'horrible, horrible person' during the milestone showdown.

While Mr Morrison - who does not hold any official honour - sported an Australian flag badge on his coat, Sales's gold AM pin was displayed on the lapel of her jacket.

The 48-year-old journalist was made a Member of the Order of Australia - the third highest honour in the system - in June 2019 for 'significant service to the broadcast media'.

As such she is entitled to wear the AM's lapel stud but rarely seems to do so on camera or anywhere else in public.

Sales did wear the badge when she interviewed former British prime minister David Cameron in January 2020 in the wake of United Kingdom voters' decision to exit the European Union.

The pin's appearance on Tuesday night does not seem to be part of a long-running tradition when Sales goes head-to-head with Australian political leaders.

She did not wear it when interviewing Mr Morrison in September 2019, or during interrogations of the prime minister in March, July and October 2020, or May 2021.

The 48-year-old journalist was made a Member of the Order of Australia - the third highest honour in the system - in June 2019 for 'significant service to the broadcast media'. She rarely wears the pin that signifies the award. Sales is pictured at the 2019 Logies

Sales wore the Order of Australia badge when she interviewed former British prime minister David Cameron in January 2020 in the wake of the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union

It went largely unnoticed when Sales wore the pin on her left lapel as she announced she would be leaving 7.30 on February 10 but it was clearly a significant occasion for the presenter.

The lapel badge consists of the emblem of the Order, approximately 1cm in diameter with an enamelled blue centre

Sales, who has hosted 7.30 for 11 years, shocked viewers when she said she would quit the program after the federal election to spend more time with her 'two beautiful little boys'.

'I was appointed to the job on December 3, 2010,' Sales said at the end of that night's program.

'This is my 12th year in the seat. That was five prime ministers ago. It was so long ago that Donald Trump was just a guy with a bad orange hair-do hosting The Apprentice.

'There's nothing wrong other than I just feel a strong sense of it being time to pass the baton to the next runner in the race and to take a break. At the end of an election cycle feels like a good time to move on to something new at the ABC.'

Sales said anchoring 7.30 has been 'the most amazing job and I'll never stop being grateful for the opportunities it's given me'.

Sales did not wear her Order of Australia badge when she grilled Dominic Perrottet in October last year during his first major sit-down interview since becoming NSW premier

She had always tried 'to ask frank questions of people in power, without fear or favour, that a fair-minded, reasonable person with some common sense watching at home might like to ask.'

Sales said she had 'tried to shut down and call out bull****, hold powerful people to account, expose lies, incompetence and exaggeration in all political parties and all issues and present facts even when they're unpopular or inconvenient.'

The three-time Walkley Award winner described a similar commitment to her profession when she was named an AM in the Queen's Birthday Honours List four years ago.

Rather than talk about her own achievements Sales used her appointment to urge Australians to demand more from their political leaders.

Sales, who has hosted 7.30 for 11 years, shocked viewers when she said she would quit the program after the federal election to spend more time with her 'two beautiful little boys'. She is pictured at the opening of Muriel's Wedding The Musical in Sydney in July 2019

'The best way the Australian public can honour good journalism is by telling elected MPs that they demand freedom of information, accountability from people in power and a free press,' Sales told The Australian at the time.

'And journalists need to take that responsibility very seriously by being fair, balanced, accurate and accountable.'

Sales did make one personal reference to the gong, saying she wished she could have shared news of the honour with her late father.

'When I told my mother, she said she wished my father were alive to see it and I wish that too,' she said.

Landmark interviews with failed United States presidential candidate Hilary Clinton and music legend Sir Paul McCartney - which Sales has described as one of the greatest experiences of her life - came before she was made an AM.

The full-size medal of the Member of the Order of Australia is a badge with the gold-plated silver insignia of the Order in the centre.

The central insignia is inscribed with the word Australia in gold capital letters and the circle also contains two gold sprigs of mimosa.

The medal is hung from a royal blue ribbon with a central band of mimosa blossoms.

The lapel badge consists of the emblem of the Order, approximately 1cm in diameter, with an enamelled blue centre.

According to the Order of Australia Association the lapel badge may be worn on civilian clothes at any time.

Comment has been sought from Sales.
As anyone who tried can attest, accessing council services during the pandemic was the devil's own job.

Social-distancing rules meant local authorities (never fleet-footed at the best of times) slowed to a glacial crawl.

Work from home? For too many staff it was more like DON'T work from home.

But in the cloud-cuckoo world of Town Halls, this dilatory lifestyle wasn't penalised. Just the opposite. For senior staff, milking the taxpayer continued unhindered.

The local government rich list, compiled by the TaxPayers' Alliance, shows officials earning more than 100,000 rose by 119 last year to 2,921. Some 234 fat cats were paid more than the Prime Minister. And that's before annual expenses and bonuses.

Jo Negrini, the former chief executive of Croydon Council in south London, received 613,895

With local authorities preparing to hit householders with a sharp council tax rise, these stratospheric pay packages are a slap in the face for hardworking millions facing a brutal cost of living squeeze.

Of course, this culture of avarice in the public sector is a hangover from the economically reckless days of New Labour, when salaries rose dizzyingly.

But with cash so tight, isn't it time these councils looked hard at their priorities?

Now ban Kremlin gas

The United Nations sanctimoniously believes it is the planet's premier peacekeeper. Yesterday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky powerfully disabused it of that outdated notion.

In a visceral address, he told the Security Council that Russia had 'unleashed horror' in his country and committed war crimes.

But because Moscow has a veto, the UN is shamefully impotent to stop the butchery. When Mr Zelensky scornfully suggested it 'dissolve itself', it was hard to disagree.

It would be easy for Boris Johnson  who issued a direct appeal to Russians to reject Putin's war  and fellow Nato leaders to be swept up by emotion and give tanks and fighter jets to Ukraine.

The United Nations sanctimoniously believes it is the planet's premier peacekeeper. Yesterday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky powerfully disabused it of that outdated notion. In a visceral address, he told the Security Council that Russia had 'unleashed horror' in his country and committed war crimes

But such an escalation could spiral out of control, pushing the world towards nuclear war. For now, the tactic of supplying Ukraine with defensive arms and targeting the Kremlin with brutal sanctions is right.

At long last, the EU has proposed a ban on coal imports. But Germany, reliant on Russian hydrocarbons, is scandalously blocking a full embargo on gas, even though it funds Putin's bloodshed.

Berlin boasts of its moral leadership in Europe. But when push comes to shove, it has put its own energy needs before the lives of innocent Ukrainians.

Protecting children

There is something disturbing about the way militant trans activists are up in arms over the Government sensibly ditching plans for a total ban on conversion therapy.

While coercing people to deny their sexuality will still rightly be outlawed, attempts to sensitively raise questions about someone's desire to change gender will not.

Cue cries of 'transphobia', resignations and a mass boycott of an LGBT conference hosted by ministers. But Boris Johnson should stand firm. Changing gender can and frequently does involve life-altering hormones and surgery.

Ministers are simply trying to protect children, often vulnerable, from making choices they may later bitterly regret, while not criminalising parents and doctors who question their reasoning.

There is something disturbing about the way militant trans activists are up in arms over the Government sensibly ditching plans for a total ban on conversion therapy (stock image)
Crab, lobster, skate and monkfish caught off parts of the British coast are among seafood to be avoided according to a sustainability guide.

The Marine Conservation Societys Good Fish Guide gave crab and lobster off the west coast of Scotland a red fish to avoid label over concerns that the fishing gear used poses a risk to passing minke whales.

Only brown crab from the Shetlands and European lobster from Jersey were given the highest green rating for sustainability.

Other fish to avoid included monkfish from the North Sea and west of Scotland, most species of skates and rays and all Atlantic cod caught in UK waters.

North Sea herring, Southern Celtic Seas and English Channel sardines and mackerel were all green rated.

It comes as the Government is consulting on a legislative framework for managing local fisheries.

The Marine Conservation Societys Good Fish Guide gave crab and lobster off the west coast of Scotland a red fish to avoid label over concerns that the fishing gear used poses a risk to passing minke whales. Pictured: The society's app in front of salmon

Wildlife charities are calling for the framework to be strengthened to better protect the UKs seas.

The MCS said the ratings illustrate the urgent need for transparency and better management if were to recover fish stocks in UK seas.

Charlotte Coombes, Good Fish Guide manager said, The latest ratings on the Good Fish Guide highlight how better management of UK seas is needed to stop overfishing and protect wildlife.

Only brown crab from the Shetlands and European lobster from Jersey were given the highest green rating for sustainability. Pictured: The Good Fish Guide app

The conservation charities want to see commitments to recover depleted stocks within set timeframes through effective ecosystem-based management, a firm commitment to roll out camera monitoring on fishing vessels and urgent and effective action to tackle bycatch in UK waters.

They also want to see a climate-smart fisheries strategy with a net zero target for the sector by 2050, with goals to reduce the UK fleets carbon emissions and protect stores of blue carbon such as seagrass and seabed from damaging activities such as bottom trawling.

Clara Johnston, fisheries policy manager at the Marine Conservation Society, said: For a thriving industry, future food security and the health of our ocean, its crucial that the UK Governments seize the new opportunities posed by the joint fisheries statement and fisheries management plans to fix our fisheries.
Actor Alec Baldwin has asked to dismiss a $25million defamation lawsuit filed against him by the sister of a Marine killed in the Kabul airport suicide bombing in August.

Roice McCollum claims she received hateful messages on Instagram after the actor shared her post of a political comment and a photo taken during a rally at the Washington Monument held by then-President Donald Trump just before the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

The Wyoming woman is arguing she was defamed because of the online messages. She is seeking $25 million in damages, saying she was never involved in the riots or charged with any related crime.

Now, the actor is asking a judge to dismiss the case, arguing that the Wyoming court does not have jurisdiction over him, and that private communications between he and McCollum cannot be defamatory.

'Reposting a photo Roice (McCollum) herself publicly posted and then expressing a political opinion about it cannot be the basis for an intentional infliction claim,' Baldwin's attorneys argued Monday.

Roice McCollum says she received hateful social media messages after Alec Baldwin shared on social media a photo she posted (pictured) of demonstrators at a Donald Trump rally on January 6, 2021, and made a political comment

McCollum posted the picture in January this year, writing 'throwback' as the caption

McCollum filed the lawsuit in January. Her brother was killed by a suicide bomber at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Afghanistan, on August 26, 2021.

Last year, after learning of the death of Marine Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum of Wyoming, and the expected birth of his daughter, Baldwin reached out to Roice McCollum via Instagram and donated $5,000 to the family. The family had started a fundraiser for McCollum's widow, Jiennah, who gave birth in September, according to The Associated Press.

In January, Baldwin saw that Roice McCollum had posted on Instagram a picture of demonstrators at former President Donald Trump's rally at the Washington Monument on January 6, 2021.

Some attendees of the rally went on to storm the U.S. Capitol building that same day in a bid to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The event has since resulted in hundreds of charges.

After she posted, Baldwin sent her a message asking if she was the one who had organized the fundraiser. She confirmed she was the same woman and that she had been at the protest which she called 'perfectly legal,' according to court documents.

'Are you the same woman I sent the $ for your sister's husband who was killed during the Afghanistan exit?' Baldwin wrote on Roice's Instagram post from his own account, according to complaints filed in federal court, and screenshots of the post.

'When I sent the $ for your late brother, out of real respect for his service to this country, I didn't know you were a January 6th rioter,' the '30 Rock' star wrote.

Roice McCollum pushed back, saying she was not involved in the riots and was never accused of any crimes during the mayhem. She said she'd been interviewed by the FBI who cleared her of any involvement.

That didn't stop the 30 Rock actor from commenting back in a direct message.

Actor Alec Baldwin (pictured in December) has called for a judge to dismiss a $25million defamation lawsuit that was filed against him by the sister of a Marine killed in the Kabul airport suicide bombing in August last year

After learning of the death of Marine Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum of Wyoming (pictured), and the expected birth of his daughter, Baldwin reached out to Roice McCollum via Instagram and donated $5,000 to the family

'Your activities resulted in the unlawful destruction of government property, the death of a law enforcement officer, an assault on the certification of the presidential election. I reposted your photo. Good luck,' Baldwin allegedly wrote back.

Roice said that she received 'hostile, aggressive, hateful' messages from strangers after Baldwin posted her photo to his own Instagram account. Messages also accused Rylee McCollum's widow of being an insurrectionist, even though she was not in Washington at all that day.

Roice McCollum also said people compared her family to ISIS or the Nazis, and said that Baldwin appeared to encourage it based on his direct messaging.

Baldwin told Roice McCollum he'd shared her photo with his 2.4 million Instagram followers.

McCollum said messages included one telling her to 'get raped and die,' and that her brother 'got what he deserved,' according to the lawsuit, which was filed in Wyoming.

The lawsuit also said some users told Baldwin he should be refunded the money he donated and that he did nothing to stop his 2.4 million followers from dogpiling on Roice, sister Cheyenne, or McCollum's widow.

'Baldwin's conduct was negligent and reckless as he should have known that making the allegations he did against Plaintiffs to his millions of followers would cause Plaintiffs harm,' the lawsuit alleged.

Smoke rises from explosion outside the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Aug. 26, 2021

A Taliban fighter stands guard at the site of two powerful explosions, which killed scores of people including 13 US troops on August 26, at Kabul airport on August 27, 2021

Community members honor Marine Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum during a procession in Jackson, Wyo., Friday, Sept. 10, 2021. McCollum was one of the service members killed in Afghanistan after a suicide bomber attacked Hamid Karzai International Airport on Aug. 26

'I think it's worth noting, too, that his social media following  is five times the population of your state,' the family's attorney, Dennis Postiglione, added.

The complaint, which also names Cheyenne McCollum and Rylee's wife, Jiennah McCollum, as plaintiffs, says they were defamed following the online dispute. They are seeking $25 million in damages.

Baldwin's response lists several reasons the lawsuit should be dismissed, including arguing the court does not have jurisdiction over Baldwin because he does not live in Wyoming, that private communications between himself and Roice Baldwin cannot be defamatory and that Cheyenne and Jiennah's claims should be dismissed because Baldwin didn't make any statements about them.

Baldwin 'was struck by the irony that his tribute to a fallen Marine, a patriot, was coordinated by an individual who participated in an event that - in Baldwin's and many other people's opinion - was an assault on the core of American democracy,' his response said.

'The real irony here is that Roice is suing Baldwin for expressing his widely supported opinion about January 6, when Roice had written to him moments before that her participation at January 6 - an event that promoted the false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen - constitutes the "freedom of protest,"' the response said.

Baldwin, 64, is already facing scrutiny and is under investigation after accidentally shooting and killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of his film Rust in October.

The actor has been named as a defendant in multiple lawsuits filed in connection with the fatal shooting.

Baldwin, who was also a producer on Rust, was pointing a Pietta Long Colt 45 at Hutchins inside a small church while preparing to shoot a scene for the western October 21 in New Mexico. The gun fired, killing Hutchins and wounding the director, Joel Souza.

Baldwin (left), 64, is already facing scrutiny and is under investigation after accidentally shooting and killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins (right) on the set of his film Rust in October
A controversial open-air substance abuse center in San Francisco has treated just 18 of the 23,367 drug users who've visited, with most instead using it to get high.

Statistics compiled from publicly-available data by local anti-drugs advocate Gina McDonald show that 0.07 per cent of all visitors to the Tenderloin Linkage Center have received medical treatment for substance abuse issues, or referral to rehab.

McDonald, who has co-written an op-ed for DailyMail.com on the issue, said that just five visitors to the Tenderloin Linkage Center had received a link to medically assisted treatment (MAT) between the center's inception on January 17, and March 27.

MAT involves giving drug addicts access to methadone or suboxone to try and wean them off the illegal substances they're hooked on.

Meanwhile, another 13 were successfully linked with substance abuse treatment, which offers either detox or residential treatment to those seeking to get off drugs.

McDonald set up Mothers Against Drug Deaths (MADD) after her daughter got hooked on heroin she'd bought off the street, although her daughter has since completed a stint in rehab, and has been clean for four months.

A woman is pictured injecting herself with drugs close to San Francisco's Tenderloin Linkage Center in January, as one local activist mom branded the facility a flop

Figures compiled by Gina McDonald show that fewer than one in 1,000 visitors to the center have actually received treatment or a referral to rehab

McDonald, pictured earlier this week, helped found Mothers Against Drug Deaths (MADD) after her daughter got hooked on heroin she bought in the street in San Francisco

She set up the group with fellow mom Jacqui Berlinn, whose son Corey still lives on the streets of San Francisco, and is battling a substance issue.

Earlier this week, MADD spent $25,000 to erect a billboard close to the linkage center which says: 'Famous the world over for our brains, beauty and now, dirt cheap fentanyl.'

And McDonald says she hopes publicizing the drugs market might finally embarrass local officials into action.

She told DailyMail.com: 'The issue is ridiculous.

'The linkage center was never intended to be a place where people could come to do drugs, but that is exactly what has happened.

'It's dystopian and scary.' San Francisco's Democrat Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in the city's famously sketchy Tenderloin neighborhood in December, in a bid to clean up rampant crime and drug use in the area.

A sign for the Tenderloin Linkage Center, which McDonald says is not being used for its intended purpose, and is instead worsening San Francisco's drug problem

Part of the linkage center is pictured behind screens in January. It was never intended as an area for drug users to get high - but thousands of them are now doing exactly that

Drone footage shot in January shows San Francisco's homeless and drug addicted population inside the center, which is estimated to have consumed much of the $10 million set aside to tackle crime in the city's Tenderloin neighborhood

MADD has now erected a $25,000 billboard close to the linkage center in a bid to shame city officials into action

She earmarked $10 million in funds for the project, and said that visitors to the linkage center were not permitted to take illegal drugs.

But McDonald says she's heard the project has so far cost $19 million, with much of that cash blown on the chaotic linkage center.

And she said that the brazen drug taking of visitors to the linkage center makes a mockery of Breed's warning.

The campaigner added that there are even separate areas set aside for users to take drugs using their preferred method.

McDonald explained: 'There's an outside space which users can access, with tents that have now been put up to stop people from seeing what's happening.

'There's an area for smoking your drugs, a space for injecting drugs, and a space for eating. There are no medical professionals in the vicinity.

'People are given clean needles to use, but it isn't a sterile facility, like those you see in New York City.'

San Francisco has seen drug abuse and crime rocket in recent years, with its latest woke attempt to fix the issue now blamed for worsening it

A homeless man smokes on a street close to the Tenderloin Linkage Center in January

Another homeless person is seen doubled over very close to the controversial center

She continued: 'It was billed as a place for people to come for medical needs and substance abuse treatment. It was never stated that you were going to be able to use in there.'

The linkage center has received public funding and was run initially by the city's Department of Emergency Management, as well as the Department of Public Health.

It is also managed by a local non profit, HealthRIGHT 360, which has a multi-million dollar contract with the city.

The center's official website describes it as 'a safe space for anyone to easily and quickly access San Francisco health and human service resources.'

Services listed on the website include access to breakfast, lunch and dinner, showers, laundry and overdose prevention supplies, as well as methadone and buprenorphine (suboxone) access.

The linkage center also claims to offer employment services, 'housing and reentry programs for people involved with the justice system', food stamps and referrals as well as enrollment in substance abuse treatment programs.

Locals say the linkage center has made the squalor even worse on streets surrounding the facility

A man is seen lighting up what appears to be a glass pipe close the the linkage center - with locals saying people are free to use illegal drugs as they please inside the facility itself

But McDonald says her number crunching shows just how poorly the most vital services are being used.

Just days after the linkage center was opened, grim photos were beamed around the world showing users - most of them homeless - injecting drugs in abject squalor.

In 2020, 700 people were killed by overdoses in San Francisco, while 650 died of drug abuse in 2021.

The facility is located in downtown San Francisco, close to the Californian city's famed Civic Center and Union Square.

The area was once a popular hotspot for tourists, and is still filled with high-end shops and restaurants.

But in recent years it has become increasingly dirty and derelict, with San Francisco's reputation as a city ruined by crime and woke public policies scaring visitors away.

And the linkage center has itself been blamed for a recent crime spike in the city.

San Francisco Police Department data shows murders are up 20 per cent so-far this year compared to the same period of 2021, from 10 to 12.

Meanwhile, the number of rapes has rocketed by 14 per cent over the same period, with 56 sex attacks this year compared to 49 last year.

Robberies have spiked by seven per cent, from 532 to 569, while larcenies have soared by 28 per cent, from 5,891 to 7,565.

District Attorney Chesa Boudin - notorious for his soft on crime policies - faces a recall election in June, with recent polls suggesting he'll be booted from office.

DailyMail.com has contacted Mayor London Breed's office for a comment.
A third person has been charged with murder in relation to the disappearance of missing Queensland man Lachlan James Griffiths.

A 28-year-old man was arrested during a police search of a Brisbane residence on Tuesday and will face the Caboolture Magistrates Court on Wednesday.

His arrest follows that of Francescos Giorgi, 40, who was charged over Mr Griffiths' death following a raid of a Gold Coast hinterland property on March 24.

A 40-year-old Tingalpa man has also been charged in relation to the alleged murder.

A third person has been charged with murder over the death of Lachlan Griffiths (left), whose body is yet to be found. The remains of missing man Andrew Walsh (pictured) were found in a concrete pit in Brisbane last month. The two men were connected to a transport depot

Mr Griffiths, 35, was last seen alive in the Brisbane CBD in January, before his mother reported him missing on Australia Day.

Queensland Police believe Mr Griffiths was taken by car to a Coopers Plains transport depot but are yet to find a body.

His alleged death is linked to that of 35-year-old Andrew Christopher Walsh, whose body was found encased in concrete at the same transport depot last month.

The deaths of the two men is connected in the sense that the pair both had a link to the above Brisbane transport depot

Queensland Police are seen at the transport deport in Brisbane where Walsh's remains were found encased in a concrete slab

The depot is the common link between the men, but detectives don't believe Mr Griffiths' remains are buried there.

Mr Walsh was reported missing by family in the north Queensland town of Mossman in January, however detectives say he was last seen alive at Slacks Creek in November.

David Lee Tan, 39, Dewald de Klerk, 27, and a 39-year-old Thagoona man have been charged with being an accessory after the fact of Mr Walsh's murder and misconduct by interfering with his corpse.
An epidemiologist has warned increasing Covid-19 case numbers in Australia and new strains of the virus could lead to the return of restrictions such as face masks.

Tony Blakely, a Professor of Epidemiology, said it does matter that the numbers are tracking up across the country, with an average of 57,000 new cases each day.

New South Wales is seeing around 21,000 cases per day, its highest number in two months, while Victoria has around 10,000 a day.

This could lead to 'mask mandates for all indoor environments and encouraging people to work at home,' said Professor Blakely of the University of Melbourne.

With case numbers increasing, mandatory mask wearing may have to be brought back. Pictured are members of the public wearing masks in Darling Harbour, Sydney

Tony Blakely, a Professor of Epidemiology a the University Of Melbourne, said it does matter that Covid infections are tracking up across the country, with an average of 57,000 new cases each day

He cautioned that despite very high rates of vaccination in Australia - 94.3 per cent aged 12 or older have had two doses - 'we can never say never with Covid-19'.

If hospitalisation numbers increase to a level that stretches health services, some public health measures may need to be brought back, he wrote in The Conversation.

Professor Blakely imagined what would happen if a new Covid variant arrives in Australia during winter that is as virulent or even more so than Delta.

He said this new variant would not spread as fast, not infect as many people and not hospitalise and kill as many people as if it had arrived two years ago when there were no vaccines.

But it could still stress our health systems and society again.

'So if a new variant arrives that is innately more severe, we will probably have to turn some restrictions back on, such as wearing masks indoors and working from home if you can,' he said.

The professor said to avoid going back to lockdowns Australia needs to properly prepare.

He said to keep society open in the face of a new, more infectious and more severe variant, there needs to be planning and action in four key areas.

These are: ongoing improvement of ventilation of indoor spaces; large stockpiles of rapid antigen tests; a large stockpile of masks; and early access to next-generation vaccines that will better protect us against new variants.

Despite very high rates of vaccination in Australia - 94.3 per cent aged 12 or older have had two doses - 'we can never say never with Covid-19'. Pictured is a woman getting her Covid vaccination jab

Though mask wearing has been dropped for most occasions, it is still mandatory on public transport. Pictured are people at a light rail station in Sydney

Professor Blakely said KN95 and N95 masks reduce a person's risk of Covid infection by 83 per cent, compared to 56-66 per cent for cloth and surgical masks, and that new vaccines should arrive later this year or in 2023 and 'will be a game-changer for protection'.

Distributing 10 high-quality masks to all Australians aged 12 and older would also be a huge help in a serious outbreak, he said.

'But to enable this, federal and state governments will need to stockpile 200 million or more KN95 or N95 masks.'

The professor said the government must be careful not to 'repeat the policy failure of not ordering RATs in 2021, and be better prepared'.

What is causing rising Covid-19 case numbers in Australia? Omicron BA.2  a sub-variant of the original Omicron  has become the dominant strain. BA.2 is more infectious than old Omicron, including among the vaccinated. Mask mandates in many settings were dropped in NSW, Victoria, ACT and Queensland in late February and early March, so people are out and about more, with a greater number of social contacts each day. Omicron BA.2 case numbers are unlikely to reach worrying heights requiring reinstating restrictions. We do, however, need to be ready to respond to new variants which may be more virulent (think Delta or worse, with high hospitalisation and death rates) and highly infectious (think Omicron or worse). Source: Professor Tony Blakely of the University of Melbourne Advertisement

Professor Blakely said, contrary to what some others have said, it does matter that case numbers are rising.

'Older people and those with underlying health conditions are at higher risk of hospitalisation and death, and want to avoid Covid infection,' he said.

His advice for them is to keep up-to-date with vaccinations (including booster shots as they become available), wear high-quality masks when around other people indoors and ask visitors to have a rapid antigen test before visiting.

For younger people and those who are vaccinated, an Omicron infection will most likely be a mild illness, but it is not yet known how people with Omicron are affected by long Covid.

'But given it causes less severe disease than Delta and is more of an upper respiratory illness and less likely to infect the lung tissue, long Covid is likely to be less common and less severe,' Professor Blakely said.
Hilarious footage of curious children meeting the Queen during a tour of Australia has gone viral 22 years after they first made international headlines.

More than two decades ago Queen Elizabeth II, now 95, paid a visit to Vasse Primary School in Busselton in Western Australia's south-west on the final day of her 16-day Royal tour of Australia with her late husband Duke of Edinburgh Prince Philip.

The Queen was caught off-guard by several kindergarten pupils who failed to recognise her during a tour of their classroom.

'What's your name?' inquisitive youngster Sol Masters is heard asking her.

The Queen looked briefly perplexed and chose to ignore the question before the persistent boy requested again for her name.

The Queen (pictured) was left perplexed by an inquisitive youngster while visiting Vasse Primary School in WA on her Royal Tour of Australia in 2000

Another boy named Jake looked confused while being greeted by the Queen as she inspected his artwork.

The footage which resurfaced on TikTok last week also shows four-year-old Jacinta Haywood bursting into tears and being comforted by a teacher after she copped a whack on the head from classmate Sol, who was sitting next to her.

The incident which unfolded in front of the media sparked headlines around the world, including broadcasters BBC and CNN.

Teachers had spent weeks preparing the pupils for the special visit to ensure they would be on their best behaviour. But three-year-old Sol had been absent for most of the preparations.

'He's only been here for two days,' teacher Sue Merry told the media at the time.

'We've been telling the kids about the Queen, but he's missed it all.'

Amused TikTok viewers jumped to Sol's defence and slammed the Queen's cold response after the old footage resurfaced.

'Why couldn't she just say who she was? They are children for goodness sake,' one commented.

A classroom visit from the Queen sparked confusion from curious youngster Jake (pictured)

Another quipped: 'For someone with four children, she really has no idea how to talk to kids.'

Other viewers sparked comparisons of how the late Princess Diana and the Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton would have handled the situation far differently.

'What would Diana have done? Got down to there [sic] eye level and said 'hello my name is Diana.' Her silence is deafening,' one posted.

Another added: 'Can you image Diana or Kate just ignoring them?'

The awkward encounter wasn't the only memorable moment from the Royal visit to Vasse Primary School.

The couple later enjoyed a performance by the school choir during a special assembly when two boys in the audience became embroiled in a scuffle, forcing embarrassed staff to intervene.

The incident sparked amusement from Prince Philip, BBC reported.

Teachers had spent weeks preparing the schoolchildren for the Queen's special visit

Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh Prince Philip spent the final full day of their Royal Tour in Busselton in WA's south-west. They're pictured inspecting Aboriginal food gathering implements during a civic reception

The visit in late March 2000 was the final leg of the Royals' 16-day Australian tour, which included time in NSW, the ACT, Victoria, Tasmania and the Northern Territory.

It was part of the Queen's 13th Australian tour and her second appearance at the school, 46 years after she visited during her first tour in 1954.

The Royals then headed north to Perth for their final night in Australia, where they attended a civic reception at Government House.

'Prince Philip and I have been given the warmest of welcomes from everybody we have met, whatever views and aspirations they might have for the future of this country,' the Queen addressed attendees.

'This has been true of people from every background, age or walk of life.'

The visit to Busselton, WA in late March 2000 was the final leg of the Royals' 16-day Australian tour. The Queen is pictured in Melbourne during the visit

The Queen has since toured Australia on three more occasions in 2002, 2006 and 2011.

The Queen's daughter Princess Anne will represent her mother as the guest of honour when the Sydney Royal Easter Show opens this week.

Princess Anne, 71, will open the Easter Show on Friday and is also expected to tour regional parts of Australia.

She's the first member of the Royal family to tour Australia since then-newlyweds Prince Harry and Meghan Markle visited in late 2018.
Dmytro Vi, a Ukrainian living in Korea, speaks during a protest by a coalition of activists against Korean financial firms' investments in Russian fossil fuels in front of Mirae Asset Global Investments' office building in downtown Seoul, April 6. Courtesy of Solutions for Our Climate



By Ko Dong-hwan



Environmental activists from four organizations on April 6 protested against a group of Korean financial firms for their investments in Russian fossil fuels and financing of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.



A coalition of activists from Solutions for Our Climate, the Korea Federation for Environmental Movements, Without War and Youth Climate Emergency Action raised their pickets in front of Mirae Asset Global Investments' office building in downtown Seoul.



Mirae Asset, along with Kiwoom Asset Management and the National Pension Service (NPS), has been investing heavily in Russian energy companies that use fossil fuels, according to the activists. The activists claimed that the three firms have also not joined the recent movement by Korean financial firms to refrain from investing further in coal as an energy source, and are thus not participating in the domestic and global efforts to fight the climate crisis.



"It's been over a month since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began," the activists' joint statement read. "Despite the two countries' repeated talks, merciless violence killing people has been continuing. But some of our domestic financial firms have been investing an incredibly large amount of capital in Russia's fossil fuels, which may be funneled into Russia's invasion of Ukraine."



International financial entities have been canceling their investments in Russian fossil fuels and reducing their reliance on the country's energy sources amid mounting criticisms that such investments might be helping to finance Russian President Vladimir Putin's much-criticized war in Ukraine, according to the protesters. "Amid this global movement, our financial firms are still allowing investments in Russian fossil fuels," said the statement.



Solutions for Our Climate shared data with The Korea Times that showed which Russian companies Korean firms have been investing in. It revealed that the top three Korean firms together own over 50 billion won ($41 million) worth of stock in Russian energy companies that use coal, oil and gas.



Mirae Asset owns 13.5 billion won worth of stocks in Severstal and RusHydro, both coal-using companies. The Korean firm also owns stocks in Russian energy companies that use oil and gas, like Gazprom, NK Lukoil and Novatak.



The NPS owns over 10 billion won worth of stocks in Severstal and coal-using power generation company Inter Rao.



Kiwoon has 3.2 billion won worth of stocks in Severstal, Inter Rao and the coal-based power generation company, OGK-2. The Korean firm also partly owns Gazprom, NK Lukoil, NK Rosneft and Novatek.



Hanwha Asset Management, Woori Financial Group, KB Financial Group and Kyobo Axa Investment Managers have also invested in Russian oil and gas companies, according to the data.





Pictured in this image from September 2018 is the Vostochnaya Thermal Power Plant, operated by RAO Energy Systems of the East, part of the RusHydro Group. TASS-Yonhap
Anthony Albanese will expand a screening program to test newborn babies to include up to 80 conditions if he wins the election.

The Labor leader has pledged $38.4 million to deliver a 'world's best practice' screening program that would be the same for every baby in Australia.

'A Labor Government will expand the newborn screening program. We'll test for more conditions so all Australians can get a better start to life,' he said on Wednesday.

Anthony Albanese (centre) will introduce a universal screening program to test newborn babies for up to 80 conditions if he wins the election

The federal government helps fund newborn baby screening, which normally involves testing blood taken from the baby's heel.

But states and territories decide which diseases to screen for and only test for around 25 conditions.

Mr Albanese is proposing to make the program the same across the nation and expand the number of diseases that are tested for up to 80.

'Different states also screen for different conditions, leading to inequality in health care across Australia,' he said.

'Labor will put an end to this testing lottery by introducing a universal screening program.

'Parents can be confident that no matter which hospital their child is born in, their baby will be fully screened for rare conditions.'

Conditions currently screened for include cystic fibrosis, primary congenital hypothyroidism, phenylketonuria and congenital adrenal hyperplasia.

Labor has not yet provided detail on which extra conditions will be screened for.

Labor claimed the screening programme has not been updated since the 1980s but Heath Minister Greg Hunt said: 'Not for the first time, Labor's been caught out not knowing the facts on health.

'The Commonwealth already pays for these services through the National Health Reform Agreement (NHRA), following the recommendation by the expert Medical Services Advisory Committee (MSAC).

'The newborn bloodspot screening (NBS) program has been updated multiple times, most recently in 2020 to include Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (offered in NSW, ACT, SA, QLD, TAS & NT) and Spinal Muscular Atrophy (offered in NSW & ACT).

'Once a condition has been recommended for inclusion in the screening program by MSAC, it is then up to states and territories to determine whether they offer the screening in their jurisdictions.

'Labor's commitment again ignores the medical advice to get a headline. After having to walk back their aged care nursing commitment just four days after announcing it, it paints a stark picture that Labor is nowhere near ready to manage the nation's health.'
A drunk stepfather violently raped his eight-year-old stepdaughter after she asked him for an ice cream, before demanding the little girl not tell her mum.

The 33-year-old chef from the Sunshine Coast attacked the little girl by forcefully raping her as she bravely tried to fight him off, but wasnt strong enough to escape.

He then demanded the eight-year-old not speak to anyone about the incident, but she told her mother the next day.

A Sunshine Coast man has been jailed for violently raping his eight-year-old stepdaughter after she had asked him an innocent question about ice cream. Stock image

The victim had asked her stepfather for an ice cream before the horrific crime, Maroochydore District Court heard on Monday.

The man, who had drank eight alcoholic drinks at the time, asked the girl 'what do I get?' in response, according to the Sunshine Coast Daily.

She replied to the question with, 'whatever you want'.

The man proceeded to push the young girl onto a couch before he 'forcefully' raped her vaginally and digitally.

She kicked and struggled to get away but was unable to do so.

After telling her mother about what had happened, police arrested and charged the man.

The 33-year-old chef appeared at Maroochydore District Court on Monday for sentencing. He was sentenced to seven and a half years behind bars for the horrific crime. He will be eligible for parole in two years and four months

It was revealed the man had consumed the alcohol after hearing 'distressing' information about the girl's mother.

The man's defence team said he had a 'difficult upbringing' and was a witness to 'domestic violence in the home' as a child.

Since the sexual assault, the young victim has become completely reclusive and dresses differently, the prosecution told the court.

Judge Gary Long said the man's actions were a 'significant breach of trust' before he sentenced him to seven and a half years in prison.

He will be eligible for parole on August 20, 2023.
A university literature course has removed Jane Austen to help 'decolonise the curriculum' and 'contribute increased diversity' on the syllabus.

Stirling University's English Literature programme has replaced the famous author of Pride and Prejudice with award-winning writer Toni Morrison, who is known for her works about the experiences of African Americans.

The institution is following up on a commitment made during the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, with principal Professor Gerry McCormac saying that the university must 'support an anti-racist agenda in higher education'.

Stirling University's English Literature programme has replaced Jane Austen (pictured), the famous author of Pride and Prejudice with award-winning writer Toni Morrison, who is known for her works about the experiences of African Americans

According to The Telegraph, those who are taking the Special Authors module will also learn about black postmodernism, Gothic, and 'the aesthetics of the contemporary US and African-American novel.

The new material in the Scottish university's English Literature course will also have 'racial difference and critical race theory' as well as 'gender and sexuality', which are very different themes to that of Austen's.

Trigger warnings have also been added to students' reading lists to make them aware of 'the language of colonialism'.

One cautionary note on one of the English modules reads: 'Some of the material in this module includes 'discussion of colonialism (including colonial violence towards men and women), enslavement, violence, racism, sexism and issues surrounding representation of gender, class, race and mental health'.

The department running the English Literature course said that the university changes focus annually and has not critiqued Austen.

Austen was amongst many historical figures dragged into the debate about slavery and calls to bring down statues of those with links to such, with the author's House Museum in Hampshire, which 're-examined her place in Regency-era colonialism'.

The writer's ties to slavery as her father, Rev George Austen, was once a trustee of a sugar plantation in Antigua.

Others included Winston Churchill and Charles Dickens, whose museum was targeted by a man inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement.

Ian Driver scrawled 'Dickens Racist, Dickens Racist,' on the outside of the The Dickens House Museum in Broadstairs, Kent, and attempted to black-out the lettering on a street sign for nearby Dickens Road.

The new material in the Scottish university's English Literature course will also have 'racial difference and critical race theory' as well as 'gender and sexuality', which are very different themes to that of Austen's (Stirling University pictured)

The carer wore a denim jacket and cream shorts as he took to the streets in the dead of night on Saturday to campaign against what he claims is 'institutionalised racism' in the seaside town.

The Black Lives Matter protester who claims he 'tagged' the statue of Winston Churchill said he did it because he believes Britain's greatest Prime Minister was a 'confirmed racist' who cared more about colonialism than black people.

The masked young man, who is being searched for by the Metropolitan Police today for the vandalism in Parliament Square, claimed that Mr Churchill only fought the Nazis to protect the empire - not for 'people of colour'.

Using black spray paint yesterday he daubed the phrase 'was racist' below the wartime leader's name, leaving the monument reading: 'Churchill was a racist'. A 'f*** your agenda' was also added on the stone.

Sir Winston's Churchill's legacy was also reviewed in late 2020 by the Imperial War Museum as bosses examine his views on 'sensitive topics' in wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Internal documents reveal discussions took place at the museum that holds the Churchill War Rooms.

Museum bosses have called for examination into the wartime leader's views after his statue in Parliament Square, London, was defaced with the word 'racist' graffitied on to it.
NYC Mayor Eric Adams has been branded a hypocrite after his administration fired a mom who protested against him - even though he used to regularly rail against his bosses at the NYPD.

The mayor's own track-record of insubordination has re-emerged after former NYC Law Department Attorney Daniela Jampel, 38, was fired on Monday.

Mom-of-three Jampel was booted just 30 minutes after confronting Adams about his refusal to lift masking rules for under-5s at a press conference.

Sources close to Jampel, who was on maternity leave at the time of her dismissal, insisted she did not pose as a reporter, as alleged, and say her dismissal was not related to her performance at work.

But the tactics that landed her in trouble will have been familiar to Adams, who regularly took aim at the New York Police Department during his 22 year career there.

He held frequent press conferences to slate the NYPD's handling of issues including police brutality against black people, and the department's failure to diversify.

Unlike Jampel, Adams was still allowed to end his career on his own terms, and retired in 2006 having attained the rank of captain.

Eric Adams, left, has been branded a hypocrite over the dismissal of NYC city lawyer Daniela Jampel, right, after she confronted him at a press conference - despite the mayor regularly blasting his own bosses during his 22 year career at the NYPD

And that hypocrisy rankled at least one New York parent whose family is affected by the ongoing under-5's mask mandate.

The parent, who did not wish to be named, told DailyMail.com: 'Eric Adams is demanding that no one disagrees with him but has conveniently forgotten the very many times he publicly humiliated the NYPD when he was a cop.

'And he was probably right to do so.

'Very much like this poor mother who is simply and bravely standing up for the rights of her kids and New Yorks youngest kids not to be muzzled by unnecessary and harmful masks in day-care.

'Hypocrisy is not a strong enough word to describe the way this playboy mayor is dealing with her.

'He should give her job back now, apologize and get back to running this city for the residents, many of whom will be regretting voting for him.

'But I very much doubt his supermodel friends at the swanky parties he attends will bring the subject up with him so he can pretend the problem doesnt exist  which is why it is so vital that people like Jampel stand up to him and tell him in no uncertain terms to remove the masks that do not protect kids and are harming their development.'

Adams is pictured in 2004 at the launch of a report by the 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Group, which blasted his then NYPD bosses for failing to diversify the force

Adams is pictured attacking Manhattan's district attorney in 2000 over the decision to let white collar drug buyers off with a slap in the wrist, saying the city's prosecutors would have meted out far harsher punishment to black drug buyers

Adams joined the NYPD in 1984 after graduating second in his class at police academy, and forcefully disagreed with a chief in October that year about a controversial case.

He clashed with the boss, who said a sergeant had been justified in shooting a mentally-ill, disabled black woman called Eleanor Bumpurs, and insisted Bumpurs would be alive had she been white.

Adams' friend David C Banks told the New York Times the interaction saw the future mayor become a 'marked man' in the department, and likely stopped the clever cop from rising to the highest echelons of the force.

But that didn't stop him from engaging in further activism. Having joined the Guardians Association of black cops on joining, Adams later rose to become leader of the organization, which is formally-recognized by the NYPD.

During the 1990s, he warned that arresting teens for low-level offenses would ultimately backfire, and that such policing would disproportionately target black and Hispanic New Yorkers.

Adams also began speaking out against racism experienced by black cops and said many were fearful of being mistaken for criminals when out of uniform.

In 1995, Adams helped form 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a police pressure group not formally recognized by the NYPD.

He proceeded to become even more outspoken, railing against the shooting of a Bronx man named Amado Diallo, and blasting the department over what he said was its excessive use of stop-and-frisk.

In the early 2000s, Adams devised a report card that graded the NYPD on issues pertaining to racial equality. But his superiors claimed much of Adams behavior was linked to his desire to launch a political career, rather than borne of a hunger to reform the department.

Further drama erupted in 2005, when Adams claimed the NYPD had deliberately-timed news of a terror plot to let then Mayor Michael Bloomberg skip an election debate.

Adams was subsequently found guilty of speaking without authorization at a disciplinary hearing, and docked 15 days of vacation pay.

The incident prompted him to retire, shortly before he successfully ran for New York's State Senate.

He began to center himself as a pro-police moderate during his mayoral campaign last year, and has taken a more centrist approach than his progressive predecessor Bill de Blasio.

Jampel, pictured with her partner and two of her children, is a mom-of-three who now finds herself unemployed for using similar tactics to those deployed by Adams. She has been vocally-outraged over the delay in lifting mask mandates for under-5s in NYC

But Adam's insistence on maintaining a mask mandate for under-5's proved the straw that broke the camel's back for Jampel, particularly as the mayor's whirlwind social life has seen him regularly attend showbiz events unmasked in recent weeks.

It had been due to expire on April 4, but was extended indefinitely on April 1 in response to an uptick of COVID cases in NYC, with under-5s currently ineligible to receive a COVID vaccine.

Jampel has repeatedly taken aim at Adams in recent months, with her former bosses claiming her prior decision had informed the decision to terminate her.

During Monday's press conference about LGBT rights, she said to Adams: 'Three weeks ago, you told parents to trust you that you would unmask our toddlers,' she said.

'You stood right here, and you said that the masks would come off April 4. That has not happened.

'Not only did you renege on your promise, you had your lawyers race to court on Friday night arguing that there would be irreparable harm if children under 5 are allowed to take off their masks today along with their older siblings in school.

'So my questions are, what is the irreparable harm to children aged 2 to 4 take off their masks, just as they do in Long Island, just as they do in Westchester? When will you and will you unmask our toddlers?'

Adams positioned himself as a pro-police centrist during his successful run for mayor, leading to claims of opportunis

Adams answered by saying that the mask mandate had been maintained over an uptick in cases, because under 5's aren't eligible to receive the shot. Just hours later, it was revealed Jampel had been fired from her role as an attorney, with a city official condemning her behavior at the press conference.

After her firing Jampel tweeted unrepentantly, saying: 'Je ne regrette rien' (I regret nothing), before adding: 'The fight continues.'

Jampel in December wrote an op ed for DailyMail.com, asking: 'Where is the outrage on behalf of our children, who have been forced to endure these restrictions going on 2 years?

'Why don't we insist on the same quality of life -- that we demand for ourselves -- for our own kids?'

Jampel issued a statement on Twitter in the wake of her dismissal suggesting that she wouldn't comment further on her firing.

She wrote: 'My statement is that I am retaining counsel and will not litigate in the press.'

Contacted by DailyMail.com on Monday night, she said she would not be commenting further until she had retained a lawyer.

A Law Department spokesman told DailyMail.com in a statement: 'We hold all of our employees to the highest professional standards. In public statements, Ms. Jampel has made troubling claims about her work for the city Law Department.'

'Based on those statements, the decision had been made to terminate her prior to [Monday],' the spokesman added.

The statement added that Jampel's 'decision to lie to City Hall staff and state she was a journalist at a press conference, demonstrate a disturbing lack of judgment and integrity.'
One of Australia's most feared bikie bosses is no longer leading a notorious Melbourne gang, sparking several theories behind his sudden departure, with one senior member saying he was kicked out.

Toby Mitchell, who was until recently a prominent member of the Mongols OMCG since April 2019, last week announced he would be cutting ties with the group.

While the motivations behind the sudden exit remain unclear, it has been suggested the 47-year-old had finally grown tired of the bikie lifestyle following years of public brawls, arrests, and stints behind bars.

Mitchell kept the Mongols in the headlines after taking over as president in late 2020, with the unwanted media attention understood to have caused a divide.

Another motivator behind the shock departure is pressure from alleged senior Mongol members, including Nick 'The Knife' Forbes and Phillip Main, the Herald Sun reports.

One senior Mongols member says Mitchell was 'booted' from the motorcycle club over claims he was associating with a police witness.

He claims Mitchell was voted out over accusations he was 'running with dogs' that included a police witness in the manslaughter case against club member Lachlan Floyd.

Toby Mitchell, (pictured in 2018) a prominent member of the Mongols OMCG since April 2019, last week announced he would be leaving the bikie lifestyle forever

The 47-year-old (pictured with Tammy Hembrow) is believed to have been pushed out of the notorious group by his fellow gang members Nick 'The Knife' Forbes and Phillip Main

Floyd was jailed for six-and-a-half years over the fatal shooting of his ex-girlfriend's partner Stuart Townsend in February 2016.

'Mitchell was booted last night for running with dogs even after being repeatedly warned,' the insider reportedly told the Courier Mail.

'There was a 100 per cent vote against him, even from people who are loyal to him.

'He thought he was bigger than the club but we don't tolerate bad behaviour and he's gone bad.

While some disagreed with Mitchells' departure, it was rumoured key players had grown tired of his publicity constantly casting a dark shadow on the club.

Mitchell was formerly a senior member of the Bandidos, an arch-rival of the Mongols, but defected in 2013 and took over as president in September 2020.

He has more than 300,000 followers on Instagram, and he regularly updates his social media account with photos of gym workouts, luxury cars and encounters with celebrities, including boxer Anthony Mundine and AFL legend Sam Newman.

His exit comes just months after he celebrated his birthday in style with fellow gang members, with roadside shots and a flashy birthday cake.

Mitchell had earlier posted footage of him and mates partying in Euchuca, a town in country Victoria, before he was arrested for his part in an alleged brawl.

Echo Taskforce detectives alleged the 47-year old former kick-boxer punched a man during a fight that erupted in the town on the NSW-Victoria border in November.

His barrister Damian Sheales successfully argued for appeal bail with the bikie ordered to pay a $10,000 surety and abstain from drinking alcohol.

The court had heard Mitchell twice slapped a man he had been drinking with for at least two hours at the American Hotel in Echuca.

CCTV footage retrieved by police showed Mitchell in the company of a female when he lashed out at the man with a left fist to the face after a drunken argument.

When the man returned seconds later Mitchell slapped him to the ground and left the pub, but not before asking the manager to erase the CCTV footage.

Mitchell has never been far from the headlines since being shot multiple times back in 2011.

It was just a month from Christmas when Mitchell was shot six times outside a Brunswick gym while sergeant-at-arms for the Bandidos bikie gang.

He spent weeks in intensive care, underwent 30 operations and lost a kidney, gall bladder and most of his liver.

He was shot again in 2013 in another attempt on his life.

Mitchell (pictured) had a colourful three years with the gang and has never been far from the headlines after having multiple attempts on his life since 2011

His shock departure from the Mongols comes just months after he celebrated his birthday in style, with roadside shots (pictured) and a flashy birthday cake

In 2017, Mitchell was arrested over a Christmas brawl which saw him deck a drunk who was silly enough to disrespect his female companion.

Mitchell again received bail just before Christmas.

The bikie found himself behind bars after an embarrassing video emerged showing him being knocked-out by a homeless man in October 2020.

The video showed a 'street kid' dressed like a 'lumberjack' knock Mitchell on his behind after the bikie had enjoyed a boozy night out with mates.

Mitchell had picked a fight with the homeless man for no apparent reason before trying to punch on with the stranger.

The incident had seen Mitchell released on bail just before Christmas, but he was forbidden from mingling with other Mongols and confined to his swanky quarters between 8pm and 6am over the Christmas period.

Mitchell (pictured) one again found himself under the spotlight after an embarrassing video emerged in October 2020, showing him being knocked-out by a homeless man

Mitchell's mates can been seen trying to hold him back, but the tattooed bikie could not be placated.

Hilarious video shows the brave 'victim' give Mitchell a send-off as his mates drag the dazed bikie away from the fight he had moments earlier instigated.

The incident saw Mitchell released on bail just before Christmas 2020, but he was forbidden from mingling with other Mongols and confined to his swanky quarters between 8pm and 6am over the Christmas period.

Mitchell pleaded guilty to possessing ice, cocaine and a baton after police searched his car and Docklands apartment in September 2015.

In June 2016, he was sentenced to almost two years in jail after he was busted with drugs and a weapon in his car.

A year later, Mitchell was arrested over another Christmas brawl which saw him attack another man after he allegedly disrespected his female companion.

Mitchell took over as president of the Mongols Outlaw Motorcycle Gang in September 2020

In 2011, the bikie hardman was shot six times as he left a gym in inner-city Melbourne, when he was at that time associated with the Bandidos gang.

He spent weeks in intensive care, underwent 30 operations and lost a kidney, gall bladder and most of his liver.

Mitchell was shot again in 2013 in another attempt on his life.

The court has previously heard shootings over the years has left the bikie boss in poor health, and forced to have several organs removed.

The court heard he required up to 27 medications a day, some twice daily.
The owners of the house crashed into by a speeding ute caught on dash cam say they escaped death by just minutes - and it has happened before.

Speaking exclusively with Daily Mail Australia, Andrew Roberts said he and his wife Rebecca had just gone to work when the ute slammed through their front fence in the coastal town of Carnarvon, 900km north of Perth at about 7.20am last Friday.

Incredible footage of the high-speed crash was captured on dash cam by neighbours Fred and Cindy who live around the corner.

In the dramatic aftermath, the female driver took her belongings out of the ute and tried to flee.

Mr Roberts said the accused driver, Tomasina Chubby, lives in a part of Carnarvon known locally as 'The Bronx' - just metres from where Cleo Smith was held captive for 18 days.

The Roberts' front yard shows the devastation after Carnarvon local Tomasina Chubby smashed her ute into their house, dash cam footage of which went viral

Andrew Roberts and wife Rebecca (above) had only left for work 20 minutes before the crash and say 'anyone on our front lawn would have been dead'

Tomasina Chubby (above) is restrained by Fred and Cindy and another passer-by after she crashed her ute into the Roberts' house and then gathered her belongings to flee the scene

With the help of passers-by, Fred and Cindy restrained Ms Chubby and then called the police who have since charged her with driving under the influence and reckless driving.

On the morning of the crash, last Friday, Mrs Roberts left for her job in support services cleaning at Carnarvon Hospital at 6.30am.

Mr Roberts left for his job as a mining site supervisor at 7am, and at 7.20am Ms Chubby made the approximately two minute drive from her home and careened around the corner of Meiklejohn Crescent into the Roberts house on Richards Street.

'Anyone on our front lawn would have been dead,' Mr Roberts said.

'I had taken my vehicle out and put it on the drive to rinse off because it was raining.

'It's now a write-off. She ploughed into the roller door of the shed, the front steps and the balustrading.

Tomasina Chubby, driver of the ute caught in a dramatic crash on dashcam footage, lives around the corner from the Tonkin Crescent house (above) where Cleo Smith was held captive

Four-year-old Cleo Smith (pictured above after her rescue) was held for 18 days in terry Kelly's derelict house in 'The Bronx', near home of last week's accused drink driver Tomasina Chubby

'It happened to us once before, about six years ago and there's been plenty of near misses by drivers.

'I've called the owner of the car, Marcus Chubby, who can't tell me whether it's insured, and they live on David Brand Drive - that's 'The Bronx' where Cleo Smith was found.

'I can't say anything without causing a riot in the town.'

Mr Roberts said he got a call from a neighbour after the crash saying 'you better get back here, someone's just smashed into your house'.

The couple who filmed the dash cam footage hung around to help and another neighbour pitched in.

Fred and Cindy's dash cam footage shows the silver ute flying down Meiklejohn Crescent and ploughing through the front fence which the Roberts had only replaced a few years ago after the earlier crash.

'Jesus Christ. What the f***,' Fred can be heard yelling as the vehicle collides into Mr Roberts' parked Toyota HiLux.

In video of the brutal collision, a silver ute comes flying down a steep hill and smashes through the fence of a two-storey home

'Jesus Christ. What the f***,' the owner of the dash cam yells as the vehicle slams straight into the home and a car parked out the front (pictured)

As shocked neighbours rush towards the home, video shows the door of the silver ute swinging open and Ms Chubby jumping down from the drivers seat.

'Call the police quick,' Cindy tells Fred as Ms Chubby tries to collect her belongings from the back seat of the vehicle.

As more concerned neighbours emerge from their homes, Ms Chubby is seen throwing a bag over her shoulder and attempting to walk away from the ute.

Fred blocks Ms Chubby from leaving the property before another man grabs hold of her T-shirt as she breaks into a sprint.

As shocked witnesses rush towards the home the door of the silver ute swings open and a young woman jumps down from the drivers seat (pictured)

One man attempts to block the woman from leaving the property before another witness is forced to grab hold of the driver's t-shirt as she breaks into a run (pictured)

After her unsuccessful attempts to leave the property two men are seen holding tightly to each of the woman's arms as a bystander calls the police.

The 20-year-old driver was charged with driving under the influence and reckless driving, a Western Australia Police spokeswoman said.

Ms Chubby will be summoned to court at a later date.

Mr Roberts said he would be asking Carnarvon Council to install a speed hump along Meiklejohn Crescent and possibly Richards Street, because drunk drivers had smashed into the kerb outside his house previously, usually around 6pm.
Australia is still set to be in a strong position on COVID-19 in coming months despite the looming threat of a winter infection surge, according to the country's chief medical officer.

Speaking before a Senate estimates hearing on Wednesday, Professor Paul Kelly said the country was well placed to handle any new variants that may emerge in coming months.

Australia is well equipped to handle the challenge of a COVID-19 winter surge, CMO Paul Kelly says

Prof Kelly stressed vaccine booster take-up was essential in minimising the number of hospitalisations and deaths from the virus.

'While there may be challenges ahead, I see no reason why, even with the easing of restrictions, the strong position in Australia will not likely change over the winter months,' he said.

'The 2022 winter season may well present challenges to health systems, health care providers, aged care and disability care residents, communities and the economy.'Health officials have warned the coming winter could bring with it a spike in cases combined with the first flu season in the country since the start of the pandemic.

While Prof Kelly said the threat of a new variant was a possibility, Australia would be prepared to handle the situation.

'Work is well under way in all states and territories ... to prepare our healthcare system for the likely co-circulation of COVID-19 and influenza,' he said.

'The general principle will be to move away from reducing COVID-19 transmission to protecting people at higher risk of developing severe disease, essentially reducing harm.'

Prof Kelly stressed vaccine booster take-up was essential in minimising the number of hospitalisations and deaths from the virus.

It comes as a second booster rollout began earlier this week for older and vulnerable Australians ahead of the coming winter.

Latest vaccination figures show more than 94 per cent of those in aged care - and more than 90 per cent of those over 70 - have had their first booster.

The head of the country's vaccination rollout, Lieutenant-General John Frewen, said Australia was ranked 22nd out of OECD countries for the booster rollout.

He told estimates the rate was due to the booster rollout starting later than other countries and other nations using different metrics for the rollout.

Australia's OECD ranking for two doses is fifth.

'Originally we were much lower down the OECD rankings for two doses, and as our rollout has proceeded, we've climbed right to the heights,' Lt Gen Frewen said.

'We will see that through the booster program as well.'

The rollout head also attributed the slower take-up rate for boosters due to many people having contracted the virus and not being as fearful of the newer variants, along with complacency.

LATEST 24-HOUR COVID-19 DATA FROM ACROSS AUSTRALIA:

NSW: 24,151 cases, 15 deaths, 1444 in hospital, 51 in ICU

Victoria: 12,150 cases, three deaths, 331 in hospital, 16 in ICU

Tasmania: 2408 cases, one death, 39 in hospital, one in ICU
Joe Biden was pictured Tuesday looking lost after fans ignored him to flock around Barack Obama during the former president's first trip back to the White House since leaving office.

Biden, 79, was filmed raising his hands in gentle exasperation Tuesday, as he was ignored by a group who instead ran to greet Obama, 60.

Criticism of the award interactions emerged on Twitter, causing the 43rd president to jump to his former VP's defense.

'Always great catching up with @POTUS,' he wrote Tuesday evening.

'Thanks for all you're doing to help even more Americans get access to quality, affordable health care,' he continued, reposting an image of his reunion with Biden.

Obama was invited back to his old home by his former No. 2 to celebrate the 12th anniversary of the launch of the Affordable Care Act, more casually known as Obamacare.

Scroll Down For Video:

Joe Biden is seen wandering around the East Room looking for someone to talk to

Obama is seen to the side chatting with fellow politicians while President Biden looks on alone

Obama started his speech by joking he was joined by 'Vice President' Biden, said 'some changes have been made' in the the five years since he left

Following criticism of the awkward interactions during the ACA event, Obama took to Twitter to praise Biden for 'all you're doing to help even more Americans'

The duo were together to present the Biden administration's plan to 'fix' the so-called 'family glitch' in the ACA.

Before Biden was shunned for his charismatic predecessor, the event had been a lovefest between the two leaders, with both men joking about their time together under Obama's tenure. They hugged, quipped and laughed as the Democrats in the East Room - crowded to the gills - cheered and applauded.

Obama started his speech by joking he was joined by 'Vice President Biden' and said 'some changes have been made' in the five years since he left - including all Secret Service agents being 'forced to wear aviators' and that 'there's a cat running around' the residence. He even joked about having to put a tie for the day.

'Thank you. Vice President Biden. Vice President - that was a joke,' Obama said to much laughter and applause.

He again clarified: 'That was all set up. My president, Joe Biden.'

During the event, Obama, who is 19 years younger than the current president, appeared markedly-more energetic than 79 year-old Biden, who is on track for a midterms wipeout

But following his speech, Obama was seen shaking hands with fans and fellow politicians in the East room while Biden - who is the oldest ever president - wandered around looking confused.

In another clip, Biden was seen standing behind Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris as they shook hands with people, while he watched with no one seemingly paying him any mind.

Obama commanding all the attention is not surprising considering the former president remains hugely popular within his party.

He also appears markedly-more energetic than 79 year-old Biden, who is on track for a midterms wipeout.

Several polls show Biden's approval at a dismal 39 percent and an average from Real Clear Politics has the president averaging a 53.7 percent disapproval rating.

The clip has garnered online reaction, with some people saying the president was outshone by his former boss and that he can not command respect in his own White House.

One person tweeted: 'I almost feel bad seeing this,' while another person tweeted: 'The man who purportedly got 80 million votes...but can't find a single friend in a crowded room'

One person said people should have come up to Joe out of respect: 'Sad, you can tell he is lost. At lest respect the office and show the man a little dignity. I don't agree with his policy or the democrats, but I would have been speaking with him if no one else would,' they tweeted.

'I guess we know who's really running the White House and it ain't Joe!' another person tweeted.
Anthony Albanese awkwardly refused to take a question from a voter who crashed his press conference with Mark McGowan.

The punter approached Mr Albanese as he addressed the press in Perth on Wednesday morning.

'I'm not a media person, I'm just a local resident, I've got a tough question for you,' the man said.

Anthony Albanese awkwardly refused to take a question from a voter who crashed his press conference with Mark McGowan

Mr Albanese interrupted him and said: 'Hang on, hang on, hang on, you can't'.

But the insistent man asked the Labor leader if he was 'up for' answering.

Mr Albanese responded: 'I'm absolutely up for it' but then rejected taking a question from the man in front of the media.

'Sorry we can't really do that. The media alliance will be a bit upset,' he said.

The voter persisted, saying: 'I'm sure they wouldn't mind' and Mr Albanese responded: 'I'm absolutely up for it'.

But as the man started to ask his question, Mr Albanese waved his hands and said 'no, no, no we're just taking questions from journalists.'

Mr Albanese refused to take a question from the voter despite his persistence

The man was wearing a grey T-shirt and had headphones around this neck as he crashed the presser

Poll Should Anthony Albanese have answered the question? Yes No Should Anthony Albanese have answered the question? Yes 1217 votes

No 115 votes Now share your opinion





Mr Albanese then moved away from the microphones and let Mr McGowan take centre stage. He told the man he would 'have a chat afterwards'.

The punter asked 'are you up for it Premier McGowan?' and he replied: 'I'm here to do a press conference we can talk to you afterwards mate'.

Mr McGowan wagged his finger to direct the man to leave before he was escorted away.

The touchy moment came after Mr Albanese pledged to expand a screening program that tests newborn babies to include up to 80 conditions if he wins the election.

The Labor leader has pledged $38.4 million to deliver a 'world's best practice' screening program that would be the same for every baby in Australia.

'A Labor Government will expand the newborn screening program. We'll test for more conditions so all Australians can get a better start to life,' he said on Wednesday.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese and Premier Mark McGowan outside Midland Hospital on Wednesday

Anthony Albanese will introduce a universal screening program to test newborn babies for up to 80 conditions if he wins the election

The federal government helps fund newborn baby screening, which normally involves testing blood taken from the baby's heel.

But states and territories decide which diseases to screen for and only test for around 25 conditions.

Mr Albanese is proposing to make the program the same across the nation and expand the number of diseases that are tested for up to 80.

'Different states also screen for different conditions, leading to inequality in health care across Australia,' he said.

'Labor will put an end to this testing lottery by introducing a universal screening program.

Mr Albanese held a boy in his arms as he campaigned alongside Premier McGowan

The Labor heavyweights took selfies while campaigning in Perth on Wednesday

'Parents can be confident that no matter which hospital their child is born in, their baby will be fully screened for rare conditions.'

Conditions currently screened for include cystic fibrosis, primary congenital hypothyroidism, phenylketonuria and congenital adrenal hyperplasia.

Labor has not yet provided detail on which extra conditions will be screened for.

Labor claimed the screening programme has not been updated since the 1980s but Heath Minister Greg Hunt said: 'Not for the first time, Labor's been caught out not knowing the facts on health.

'The Commonwealth already pays for these services through the National Health Reform Agreement (NHRA), following the recommendation by the expert Medical Services Advisory Committee (MSAC).

'The newborn bloodspot screening (NBS) program has been updated multiple times, most recently in 2020 to include Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (offered in NSW, ACT, SA, QLD, TAS & NT) and Spinal Muscular Atrophy (offered in NSW & ACT).

'Once a condition has been recommended for inclusion in the screening program by MSAC, it is then up to states and territories to determine whether they offer the screening in their jurisdictions.

'Labor's commitment again ignores the medical advice to get a headline. After having to walk back their aged care nursing commitment just four days after announcing it, it paints a stark picture that Labor is nowhere near ready to manage the nation's health.'
A 12-year-old is lucky to be alive after his head got caught in the roof cavity of a carousel at a Gold Coast theme park, witnesses say.

The boy was riding on the Daffy Duck seat of the Looney Tunes Carousel at Movie World at about 1pm on Tuesday when he stood up on the foot rests - so his head was almost parallel with the roof of the ride.

'His head went into the holes in the roof where the carousel poles go,' Simone Cooper told Daily Mail Australia.

Ms Cooper, who was visiting the amusement park with her five-year-old and 16-month-old, said there was a loud bang before children started crying and a boy fell off the ride with 'pretty much his scalp showing'.

'His hair was pulled to one side and blood pouring down his face,' she added.

It is understood the accident was not the result of any structural or mechanical malfunction on the ride.

A 12-year-old boy almost scalped when his head went in to the roof of the carousel (circled). Pictured is a boy on the Daffy Duck seat of the ride, who was not involved in the incident

The boy, 12, had blood gushing down his face after his head got caught in the machanics of the ride (pictured)

Another witness recalled the boy fell from the ride after he was hit in the head by the mechanism.

The boy was rushed to Gold Coast University Hospital and is believed to be in a stable condition.

Ms Cooper said her five-year-old saw the whole incident unfold.

'The poor young ride attendant was also in shock,' she said.

'The guest received a laceration to his head and was attended to by Movie World's nurse before being taken to hospital in a stable condition,' a Village Roadshow Theme Parks spokesman told Daily Mail Australia.

'Our thoughts are with the guest and his family and we wish him a speedy recovery.'

A boy was was rushed to Gold Coast University Hospital and is in a stable condition

The spokesman added that 'We pride ourselves on our standards of care and quality and an investigation is being conducted as a matter of priority into the exact cause of the incident.

'In an abundance of caution the ride has been closed while we understand how the incident occurred.

'The safety and wellbeing of guests and team members is our top priority at Village Roadshow Theme Parks and we are committed to providing guests with a fun and safe environment.'

Queensland Ambulance Service supervisor William Houghton described the injury as a 'deep laceration to the back of the head'.

'The scene was fine, the patient was at the side of the amusement ride, he had been tended to by (a registered nurses) before we got there so he had good first aid rendered to him before we arrived,' he told News Corp.

'I think it calmed everybody down at the scene as well .... Everyone was really helpful.'

He said the boy was shaken but alert and in good spirits, adding that he was 'extremely lucky' that his injuries weren't fatal.

The ride is closed today as Movie World starts its extensive investigation.
A screenshot from SK On's comedic recruitment promotional video "Why should I choose SK On?" / Screenshot from YouTube



By Kim Hyun-bin



LG Energy Solution, SK On and Samsung SDI are competing to recruit skilled workers in order to take the lead in the rapidly growing battery market, according to company officials Wednesday.



Recruitment is one of the top priorities for battery companies and the most recent methods of recruitment have been breaking traditional norms. Companies have come up with innovative ideas to better attract younger workers, including uploading comical videos on YouTube of their interview procedures as well as uploading videos of human resources personnel explaining in detail the selection process and criteria.



SK On has been accepting applications for entry-level employees since March 28 and will receive applications through April 10. Ahead of the recruitment process, a job ad video was uploaded on the company's YouTube channel with the title, "Why should I choose SK On?"



This video depicts a conversation between an applicant and an interviewer through an online video interview. The applicant appears to wear a sport coat and dress shirt, but also reveals he's wearing gym pants. The applicant asks the majority of the questions while the interviewer is left busy answering them. It seems the roles of the applicant and the interviewer are reversed giving it a comical feel.



The interviewer boasts of the company's high growth potential, environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) management and easygoing corporate culture. In particular, it actively promotes the strengths of SK On by emphasizing the perks including a self-approval vacation system to better appeal to viewers and prospective applicants.



"We are hiring a lot these days, even entry level employees. We tried to introduce the company in a fun format to better suit the MZ generation style," an SK On official said.



Samsung SDI received resumes through mid-March and is conducting interviews now. The company also uploaded a nine-minute video on its official YouTube channel last month, in which an HR employee introduces the recruitment procedures and explains the characteristics of each job in detail.



"The younger generations are more in tune with social media and YouTube, and since last year we have posted videos of our recruitment procedures that have gained popularity and received positive feedback," a Samsung SDI official said. "It also provides better in-depth information on our recruitment procedures to potential applicants."



LG Energy Solution (LGES) focused on portraying the daily lives of employees. It uploaded a video titled "Ensol Inside," which portrays the real story of an intern who became a full-time employee.



The three companies are also focusing on nurturing students by offering full tuition support and guaranteeing a job after graduation. SK On has cooperative relationships with Sungkyunkwan University and Ulsan Institute of Science and Technology, while Samsung SDI works with Seoul National University, POSTECH, KAIST, and Hanyang University, and LGES has ties with Yonsei University and Korea University.


The Queen has paid tribute to the countless Australians who have been devastated by floods in recent weeks.

The Royal Family shared the Queen's letter of condolence to Australia's Governor-General on Wednesday, as heavy rain continues to hammer down around the east coast.

'I have been following the news of the recent floods in Queensland and New South Wales closely and have been saddened to hear of the loss of life and the scale of devastation,' Her Majesty wrote.

'In the immediate response, Australians' resolute spirit and community mindedness has once again shone through.

The Queen has written a letter of support to Australians who have been affected by floods in recent weeks (pictured Lismore, NSW)

Her Majesty said Australians' 'resolute spirit and community mindedness has once again shone through'

'My thanks go out to the emergency services and many volunteers who have tirelessly assisted those in need.

'My thoughts continue to be with those who have been impacted as the focus now turns to the long recovery phase ahead.'

Communities around south-east Queensland and northern NSW, as well as Sydney, have been rocked by torrential rainfall that has lashed down in recent weeks.

This week up to 500mm of rain is expected to fall on the east coast over Wednesday, Thursday and Friday alone.

Sydney and the south coast of NSW were pummelled with torrential rain on Wednesday morning, and the weather radar shows the situation will only get worse with up to 250mm predicted to hit on Thursday.

The Bureau of Meteorology has warned the deluge will stretch 570km from Gosford to Bega.

There are fears of flash flooding in rivers and catchments already saturated by previous rainfalls.

The BoM said heavy rain was forecast for the Illawarra, parts of the South Coast and the Southern Tablelands and would extend to inland areas.

The excessive downpours are expected to extend towards metropolitan Sydney, the Hunter and Central Tablelands from Thursday.

Brisbane residents comfort each other after moving their belongings onto a boat when their house was flooded last month

Weatherzone predicts the heaviest rain will hit the southern half of NSW's coast and ranges with 100 to 200mm expected to fall over the next 96 hours (pictured is a weather map)

Meteorologist Ailsa Schofield said heavy falls would continue into Friday.

'On Wednesday we might see rainfall total in excess of 100mm,' Ms Schofield said.

'On Thursday we might see rainfall totals in excess of 200-250mm. On Friday we will see higher rainfall totals in excess of 150mm.'

The weather expert said minor flooding could occur in the Illawarra, South Coast and Far South Coast with the possibility heavy rain could bring renewed flooding.

She said moderate flooding could occur in the Colo River, the Upper Hunter, and the Hawkesbury and Nepean Valley.

Clean-up efforts in northern NSW will be put on hold as flood-weary residents brace for more rain, after suffering through two major flood events in March that claimed the lives and homes of many.
An Aussie larrikin has shared a useful tip with punters of what not to do with their bets after they pick a winner, teaching a mate a valuable lesson in the process.

Perth construction and landscape company owner Brad Higgins couldn't believe his luck last week when a friend made the rookie error of sharing a photo of his TAB windfall of $690.

The image of the bet slip included the barcode, prompting Mr Higgins to play a prank and show how easy it was to head down to the local TAB to cash in the unclaimed windfall himself.

'So my friend sent me his bet slip last night but he left the barcode on it,' he explains in a TikTok video.

'Rule one, rookie mistake when sending a bet slip to your mates. Do not leave the barcode on because someone can cash it in.'

'He won $690! I'm going to TAB right now to cash it in to prank him.'

The footage shows him processing the ticket at the TAB machine before walking out with wads of cash.

'It f****** worked! What a d*******,' a delighted Mr Higgins said.

'If I wasn't his friend, I could rob (him). But I'm his friend so I'll give it to him today at footy.'

The TikTok video has gone viral with more than 23,500 views.

'Tab and so on need to change their system so that can't happen and people need to learn not to overshare,' one man commented.

Another warned: If you can prove it was yours, the person who cashed it in will be charged for fraud.'

Brad Higgins showed how simple it was to cash in on a lucky punter's rookie error

Several others recalled how friends had been robbed by up to $80,000 by making the same error.

'Happens all the time, that's what this video is for, to tell people it can happen,' Mr Higgins replied.

While his mate will get his windfall, a punter who backed the 100-1 odd Melbourne Cup winner in 2015 wasn't so lucky.

Chantelle from Perth snared $825 after jockey Michelle Payne rode Prince Of Penzance to victory to become the first and only female rider to win the race that stops the nation.

She posted a selfie proudly clutching the winning ticket, only for a Facebook 'friend' to use the barcode and steal her winnings.

Within 15 minutes of posting the selfie, Chantelle went to the TAB to collect her winnings and was shocked to discover the thief had already beaten her to it.

Brad Higgins played a trick on his mate in the hope other punters will learn from his mistake

The $20 bet was Chantelle's first ever crack at gambling and later reported the theft to police.

'I've never bet before so me and my two friends went along as you do and put some money on a few different races,' she told Triple M radio station at the time.

'When Prince of Penzance's name came up we were pretty stoked, being amateurs at it. Naturally I took a selfie to show my friends.'

'My fingers were covering some of the barcode, so someone had a pretty good game at filtering my picture and cutting out my barcode and putting it into an automated machine.'

Almost seven years on, Chantelle's lesson is still going viral online and was shared on Reddit last month.
A young Australian woman penned a blog about her dreams of becoming a mum, years before she killed her baby daughter by laying her on train tracks.

Five-years-ago Melissa Arbuckle wrote about her then-successful and happy life as a well-respected veterinarian who travelled the world with her 'cheeky' husband.

However, the Victorian Supreme Court this week heard Ms Arbuckle had developed severe major postpartum depression and psychosis following the birth of her daughter Lily.

Sadly, she was diagnosed too late to save the life of her baby girl, with the 'significantly disturbed' mum lay her little girl on the train tracks in Upwey in Melbourne's east.

She was holding Lily at the time, and used the little girl's hand to wave at the train, it was revealed at the Victorian Supreme Court, where she will be sentenced Thursday after pleading guilty to one count of infanticide.

Arbuckle kept a personal blog, where she journaled about trips overseas with her husband and her dreams of one day starting a family

Years before the horror, her life appeared to be very different.

Five years ago, she wrote a blog sharing her dream to have children with her partner, and described her devotion to 'helping people and their pets', her passion for volunteering through the 'incredibly rewarding' Scientist in Schools program and her love of hiking, snowboarding and running.

She reported that she had never been 'unhappy' and said, for her, happiness lay in the simple things in life, like ensuring bills are paid, spending time with loved ones and friends, and travelling often.

Reflecting on the new year in early 2017, she said the past 12 months had been the best in her life.

'2016 was one of the most enjoyable and productive years of my life,' she wrote.

'I am so grateful for the experiences I had, my personal growth and the support and encouragement from my wonderful boyfriend.., my close friends and family.

'I've never considered myself to be unhappy and I'm incredibly fortunate to be able to say that, but there are certainly ways to strive to live a happier life,' Ms Arbuckle wrote.

She frequently posting about her ambitions and beliefs in the importance of maintaining good health.

In November of that year, she revealed she had undergone treatment after suffering from a condition affecting her uterus and how the incident had inspired her to begin taking her health seriously with the intention of one day having a family.

'This trip to hospital was the beginning of my journey to start focusing on my health. I'm not getting any younger and I look forward to having a family of my own one day so I decided it's time to take my health seriously,' she wrote.

The couple's life appeared to be filled with adventure, with Arbuckle sharing photos and stories about their travels across Australia and Japan.

Arbuckle worked at a veterinary clinic in inner eastern Melbourne for several years. She also wrote about her Italian background and love for cooking.

'A diverse identity is important to me so I strive to always be more and am forever growing and learning,' she wrote.

'Growth is difficult but isn't life so much more enjoyable when we challenge ourselves? Perhaps not at the time but certainly upon reflection.'

While the blog mostly had a positive tone she also wrote about her private battles.

'I'm sensitive. Now that may be an understatement. I'm also a romantic and I'm proud to say it because for a long time I fought against it,' she wrote.

'I pride myself on being an independent woman who don't need no man (but loves her man nonetheless!) and thought I had to be one or the other but I'm both!

'I cry more than I would like because it often gets in the way of general life activities but when I experience something whether it's pure joy or sadness I really feel it.

She also described the stress from her career as a vet.

'Being a vet isn't an easy job. Some days it can fill me with joy and fulfilment and other days with sadness,' she explained.

'The Australian Veterinary Association (AVA) outlines that recent Australian studies show that vets are four times more likely to commit suicide than the general population  Common causes of stress for vets include long working hours, interpersonal relationship issues and dealing with difficult clients.

'To add to that I believe other factors such as isolation, lack of support and constantly managing people's emotions and expectations contribute to the mental and overall health concerns of veterinarians today.'

Years later, her life tragically started to decline as she battled postpartum depression after the birth of her child.

Arbuckle (pictured) worked at a veterinary clinic in inner eastern Melbourne for several years

Victoria's Supreme Court this week heard that in the weeks before Lily's death, Arbuckle had been 'really down' and believed she hurt the little girl after rocking her bassinet too vigorously, according to the summary read in court.

She started to believe the child had shaken baby syndrome as a result.

'She had a fixed delusional belief she had harmed her child and they were both broken,' Arbuckle's lawyer Megan Tittensor said this week in court.

'She had a perfectionist personality and need for control  she wanted to be the perfect mother.

'She had come to believe dying was her only option. She would hear voices telling her she was a bad mother.'

The crown prosecutor, Robyn Harper told the court that on the day of the horror, Arbuckle's sister and mother came to visit her three-month-old daughter, Lily.

Moments after the visit, Arbuckle texted her husband and said their daughter was 'losing it after a feed' and decided to take her for a walk, Harper told the court.

The mother laid the baby on the tracks in front of a moving train (stock image)

A train driver then spotted Arbuckle walking on the tracks at Upwey in Melbourne's east.

The baby was struck and thrown under the carriage while Arbuckle was left with serious injuries.

Witnesses rushed to help the pair and helped to pull out the still breathing baby.

The baby was rushed to hospital, but died shortly after from head injuries.

Arbuckle will be sentenced on Thursday.

For confidential 24-hour support in Australia call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or beyondblue 1300 22 4636.

For postpartum depression support call PANDA on 1300 726 306.
A leaked internal Labor Party memo reveals Anthony Albanese's secret strategy to 'censor' his frontbenchers and dominate media coverage during the election campaign.

The plot to keep shadow ministers out of the limelight was detailed in an email from Labor's campaign directors to press secretaries and candidates.

In what is called 'a very different way of operating', Labor HQ said transcripts of interviews, speeches and opinion pieces will be hidden from the media unless they involve the leader.

An leaked internal Labor Party memo reveals Anthony Albanese's secret strategy to 'censor' his frontbenchers. Pictured: Mr Albanese with WA Premier Mark McGowan on Wednesday

The plot to keep shadow ministers out of the limelight was detailed in this email from Labor's campaign directors to press secretaries and candidates. Scroll down for the full email

Labor politicians will have to get advance permission to hold a press conference, send quotes to media or give a speech.

They have also been told to cancel regular TV and radio interviews, with every appearance now 'subject to approval based on the media context on that day'.

The memo said the strict measures have been taken to 'keep our daily message clear'.

It comes hot on the heels of a PR disaster when frontbencher Mark Dreyfus admitted on radio that Labor's flagship policy for 24/7 aged care nurses may not work, just four days after Mr Albanese announced it.

Labor did not release a transcript of the interview in which Mr Dreyfus said the policy may need to be 'paused' if there are not enough nurses.

'This new way of working is important to ensure Campaign HQ Comms is able to focus on the most important task  helping win the election  and that we are all focused on that goal,' the memo said.

'There will inevitably be some teething issues in our first weeks.'

The memo said the strict measures have been taken to 'keep our daily message clear'. Pictured: Mr Albanese with his son and girlfriend Jodie Haydon

The memo was leaked by a Labor operative furious about new rules which strip MPs of their independence.

The Coalition said the memo proves Labor is 'hiding' from voters to 'sneak' into Government.

Finance Minister Simon Birmingham also said it makes Labor hypocritical because Mr Albanese has been campaigning for greater transparency and accountability in politics.

'This is a hypocritical attempt by Labor to dodge scrutiny,' he said.

'Labor's small target strategy is already hiding detailed policies or plans from the Australian people and it's now clear that they want to hide their shadow ministers too.

'It is becoming clearer and clearer that Anthony Albanese wants to cruise through this election campaign without any accountability or transparency.'

Mr McGowan and Mr Albanese took selfies while campaigning in Perth on Wednesday

Earlier this week Shadow Treasurer Jim Chalmers revealed Labor wants to scrap a tax cap which prevents tax revenues exceeding 23.9 per cent of GDP.

Mr Birmingham said the memo 'appears to be a sign that Anthony Albanese doesn't trust his frontbench, who have already called out weaknesses in his aged care promises and exposed the potential for higher taxes under Labor.

'How are Australians expected to decide if Labor's frontbenchers are up to the job of being Ministers if they are being censored?'

Mr Morrison is expected to call the election any day now for either May 14 or 21.

Labor is ahead by a sizeable eight points according to the latest Newspoll.
Republicans want Texas to declare an 'invasion' at the southern border to give permissions for state troopers and National Guard members to turn back migrants as the country braces for Title 42 to end next month.

Immigration enforcement is giving migrants who are released into the U.S. smartphones with tracking apps installed so they can keep track of released illegal immigrants.

Parole release migrants are being released into the country and are asked to turn themselves into Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a city of their choice and are being given government phones to track them.

There is, however, no way to stop these migrants from getting rid of the phones.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki did not deny on Wednesday that migrants are receiving smartphones upon release in the country, claiming during her daily briefing that the government needs to 'take steps to ensure we know where individuals are and we can check in with them.'

A new report also shows that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are receiving released migrants with 'welcome bags and backpacks' and helping them arrange transportation to a location within the U.S. of their preference.

Pandemic-era Title 42, which allowed for instant expulsion of migrants without hearing their asylum claims during the coronavirus health emergency, is coming to an end on May 23, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on Friday.

Estimates warn that this could lead to a tripling of the already record-breaking number of monthly migrants apprehended by Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Migrants are being given smartphones with tracking devices so Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can track them once they are released into the country

There is no failsafe in place, however, to stop migrants released into the country from ditching the cell phones and evading ICE in whatever city on which they relocate

Former Trump administration officials and other Republicans are urging Texas to declare an 'invasion' at the southern border in order to use war time powers to expel migrants. Pictured Wednesday, April 5: Ukrainians seeking asylum in the U.S. sleep as they wait at a makeshift encampment in Tijuana, Mexico to cross the border

Since Biden took office in January 2021, CBP has encountered more than 2.2 million migrants and the border  and that number could as much as triple with the end of Title 42 next month

Former Trump administration officials are pressing GOP Texas Governor Greg Abbott to make the 'invasion' declaration along the U.S.-Mexico border in order to give enforcement powers to troops and Guard members that have previously been the responsibility of the federal government.

Driving the effort on the right is the Center for Renewing America, a conservative policy think tank led by former Trump administration officials, including Ken Cuccinelli, an immigration hard-liner and former Homeland Security official under Trump.

He argued that states are entitled to defend themselves from immediate danger or invasion, as it is defined by the 'invasion clause,' under the 'states self-defense clause.'

Cuccinelli said in practice, he envisions the plan would look similar to the enforcement of Title 42, which circumvented U.S. obligations under American law and international treaty to provide asylum to legitimate claims.

He said he has not spoken with Abbott claiming the governor's current sweeping border mission, known as Operation Lone Star, has put little dent in the number of people crossing the border. The mission has also drawn criticism from Guard members over long deployments and little to do, and some arrests have appeared to have no connection to border security.

'Until you are actually returning people to Mexico, what you are doing will have no effect,' Cuccinelli said.

The urging comes as Abbott prepares to announce Wednesday 'unprecedented actions' to deter migrants coming to Texas after the Biden administration announced last week it will end the use of the Title 42 public health law.

The limitations on asylum claims the last two years have been used to prevent the spread of COVID-19 since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020.

An Ecuadorian immigrant shows the app he uses for reporting his location to ICE during an interview October 21, 2021 as immigration authorities turn to smartphones to keep tabs on immigrants and ensure they attend their deportation hearings

It is unclear whether Abbott, who is up for reelection in November and is already installing more border barriers and allowing troopers to arrest migrants on trespassing charges, supports the aggressive proposals former Trump officials are pushing.

Abbott did not elaborate on what steps he will announce Wednesday.

Border Patrol officials say they are planning for as many as 18,000 arrivals daily once the health policy expires in May. Last week, about 7,100 migrants were coming a day to the southern U.S. border.

But the way former Trump immigration officials see it, Texas and Arizona can pick up where the federal government leaves off once the policy ends. Their plan involves a novel interpretation of the U.S. Constitution to have the National Guard or state police forcibly send migrants to Mexico, without regard to immigration laws and law enforcement procedures. Border enforcement has always been a federal responsibility, and in Texas, state leaders have not been pushing for such a move.

Tom Homan, the former acting director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump, said at a border security conference in San Antonio last week he had spoken with Abbott but gave no indication about whether the two-term governor supported the idea.

'We've had discussions with his attorneys in his office, 'Is there a way to use this clause within the Constitution where it talks about invasion?'' Homan said during the Border Security Expo.

Homan on Tuesday described the response from Abbott's office, which he said took place about three months ago, as 'non-committal but willing to listen.'

Texas Governor Greg Abbott says he will he announce Wednesday, April 6, 2022, 'unprecedented actions' to deter migrants coming to Texas but did not elaborate

In Arizona, Republican Governor Doug Ducey has also been under pressure within his party to declare that the state is being 'invaded' and to use extraordinary powers normally reserved for war.

But Ducey, who is term-limited and not on the ballot in 2022, has not embraced the theory and has avoided commenting directly on it.

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, issued a legal opinion in February declaring that Ducey has the power to use National Guard troops and state law enforcement to forcibly send migrants back. Brnovich is locked in a tough Republican U.S. Senate primary in which border security is a top issue.

While speaking Tuesday to a conservative talk radio station, Abbott's remarks about constitutional authority were in relation to Congress, which he said had the only power to reduce the flow of migrants.

'We'll be taking unprecedented action,' Abbott told radio station KCRS. 'Congress has to stop talking about it, has to stop complaining about it, has to stop going to the border and looking at it. Congress has to take action, just like Texas is taking action.'

Asked if he considered what was happening on the Texas border 'an invasion,' Abbott did not use those words but said he would be discussing it Wednesday.

Emily Berman, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Houston, said the 'invasion clause' cited by proponents is tucked into a broader constitutional assurance that the U.S. must defend states from invasion and domestic violence. Additionally, she said, the 'state self-defense clause' says states cannot engage in warlike actions or foreign policy unless invaded.

Berman said she hasn't seen the constitutional clauses used since the 1990s, when the courts ruled that they did not have jurisdiction to decide what qualified an invasion, but believed that one could only be done by another governmental entity.

For example, Berman said, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia can be qualified as one because it is an outside government breaching another country's boundaries with the use of military force.

'Just because the state says that it is an invasion that doesn't necessarily make it so, it is not clear to me what additional legal authority that conveys on them,' Berman said, adding that state officials can enforce state laws, but the line is drawn at what the federal law allows.

U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat whose district includes the Texas border, has criticized the Biden administration over border security and ending Title 42. But he does not support states trying to use new powers that would let them 'do whatever they want.'

'I think it should be more of a partnership instead of saying, 'Federal government, we don't think you're doing enough, and why don't we go ahead and do our own border security?'' he said.
A political pundit who has correctly forecast every Australian federal election result, bar one, for decades said there is an 'overwhelming sense of doom' over Scott Morrison.

'The electorate has had enough of Morrison, and everyone in politics should take note of this,' said former Labor Senator and party powerbroker Graham Richardson.

Mr Richardson, who has predicted more Coalition than Labor victories over the years, is still considered to have one of Australia's sharpest political brains.

The one election win he didn't predict was the 2019 one, which every published poll said Labor would win.

The Labor numbers man has in recent times praised Mr Morrison and been close to other conservative politicians and commentators such as Alan Jones.

A political pundit said there is an 'overwhelming sense of doom' over Scott Morrison (pictured)

In February 2020, after Mr Morrison was heavily criticised for going to Hawaii during the bushfires crisis, Mr Richardson said on Sky News that he was 'a very good Prime Minister'.

But with the election just weeks away, Mr Richardson, whose autobiography is called Whatever it Takes, has changed his tune.

'If Scott Morrison embarked on an expedition to try to find some good news for his future, that search would undoubtedly prove fruitless and forlorn,' he wrote in The Australian, under the headline 'Overexposed and underwhelming, Scott Morrison appears to have run his course.'

Mr Richardson also thinks the Coalition government is beset with self-doubt.

'The latest bout of lavishing one-off goodies on the electorate just before an election suggests a serious lack of confidence about the result,' he wrote.

Mr Richardson said the Liberal Party's time-honoured tactic of claiming Labor will spend recklessly if they win is no longer available.

'Given the amount of debt racked up by the Coalition, the task of doing the usual bucket job on Labor as the profligate spenders has been rendered hopeless, if not impossible.'

He added that no government in Australia's history has spent like the current one.

Former Senator Graham Richardson (pictured) has correctly forecast every Australian federal election result for decades

Though polls got it wrong by predicting a Labor victory in the 2019 election, Mr Richardson said similar predictions now are 'significant', especially as many of them have Labor leader Anthony Albanese leading Mr Morrison on the question of preferred prime minister.

Though Mr Albanese rejects the claim of taking few concrete policies into the election campaign, it is certainly true that this time Labor has far fewer policies than under Bill Shorten in 2019.

This relative lack of policies will lead to a highly negative campaign of personal attacks on the Labor leader, Mr Richardson said.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese (pictured) speaks to the media during a press conference at St. John of God Hospital in Perth on Wednesday

'Albanese's character will come under sustained attack but he is tough enough to ignore the personal jibes and get on with the job.'

Before the 2007 federal election, Mr Richardson predicted Labor would get a huge swing, win the election and that then Prime Minister John Howard would lose his own seat.

All his predictions were proved true meaning Mr Morrison will be taking notice of what Mr Richardson is now saying.
An ex-P&O Ferries chef has accused bosses of sacking him because he is British in a lawsuit for unfair dismissal against the company and its chief executive.

John Lansdown, who joined the company as a 16-year-old trainee, was working as a sous chef on The Pride of Canterbury when he was sacked 'out of the blue'.

The 39-year-old, from Herne Bay, Kent, is the only seafarer able to take legal action against the company, which said all but one employee had accepted a settlement.

In his landmark claim to London South employment tribunal, Mr Lansdown accuses P&O Ferries of treating him unfavourably in a 'sham' redundancy because he is British.

He is claiming race discrimination on the basis that P&O replaced staff with non-British crew paid an average of just 5.50 an hour - less than the minimum wage.

Mr Lansdown is seeking six figure compensation for lost earnings and injury to feelings in his claim against P&O and its chief executive Peter Hebblethwaite.

It comes after criminal and civil investigations were launched on April 1 into P&O Ferries' decision to lay off nearly 800 workers over Zoom without notice last month.

John Lansdown (pictured above), 39, filed a tribunal claim accusing the shipping firm of racial discrimination because he is British and entitled to minimum wage

Mr Lansdown said his action was about the 'bigger picture', telling the BBC: 'This is not just about me.

'Seven hundred and ninety nine of my seafaring family have lost their livelihoods, their way of life, their homes for half the year.'

In legal papers submitted to the tribunal, he also said that P&O Ferries' parent company, Dubai Ports World (DP World), is highly profitable.

On the basis of such profits, he also seeks exemplary damages of up to 76 million to 'deter' P&O Ferries or DP World from any future 'fire and hire' policy.

Tribunals have never previously made a punitive award of damages on such a scale.

Should he make legal history, Mr Lansdown says he would use the money to create a new trust to campaign for improved wages and terms and conditions for seafarers.

P&O Ferries says that Mr Lansdown is the only staff member not to have accepted its controversial settlement offer.

It says that its payouts linked to length of service totalling 36.5 million - with 40 workers receiving over 100,000 and no worker less than 15,000 - is the 'largest compensation package in the British marine sector'.

In a statement responding to Mr Lansdown's claim, P&O Ferries says that the job cuts were 'categorically not based on race or the nationality of the staff involved'.

It insists that the company 'needed fundamental change to make it viable', adding: 'We knew this decision was the only way to save the business.'

Mr Lansdown, who is the only seafarer taking legal action over the dismissal, is seeking financial compensation and exemplary damages of up to 76million (file photo of a P&O ferry)

In his legal document, Mr Lansdown tells how he was a sous chef on The Pride of Canterbury on the Dover to Calais route.

He had worked for P&O Ferries in two spells, leaving in the mid 2000s before re-joining the company in 2014.

He was working on the ship and had to leave his belongings behind when he was notified 'out of the blue and without any prior consultation' about his instant dismissal, he says.

The RMT union member alleges that private security staff, carrying handcuffs and wearing balaclavas, were hired to remove workers who refused to disembark ferries.

His claim states: 'I was devastated by the brutal summary dismissal after many years of loyal and diligent service. The manner of the dismissal was harassing.'

He accuses P&O Ferries of 'violating' his dignity and creating an 'intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating environment'.

P&O Ferries chief executive Peter Hebblethwaite (pictured on March 24) said his company broke the law by not consulting with trade unions before sacking workers

He says the redundancy was unlawful as there was no fair selection process and no diminished need for his job.

Speaking today, Mr Lansdown branded P&O Ferries 'unscrupulous' and said he wanted to get 'justice' for all his former colleagues who felt they had little choice but to settle their cases.

He said: 'The actions of P&O Ferries have upended the lives of 800 loyal and dedicated seafarers and their families.

'Their grotesque disregard for due process in this country will set a dangerous precedent if allowed to stand.

'The tribunal claim I have filed is intended to bring Peter Hebblethwaite and those responsible at P&O Ferries to justice and make them accountable for their unlawful action.'

Mr Hebblethwaite previously admitted to MPs that his decision to sack 800 workers without notice or union consultation had broken the law but said he would make the same decision again if he had to.

At the time, he said that no union would have accepted the plan and it was easier to compensate workers 'in full' instead.

The Insolvency Service has launched criminal and civil investigations into the controversial mass redundancies.

A spokesperson for P&O Ferries said: 'No staff involved in the redundancies wore balaclavas nor were they directed to use handcuffs or force.

'Staff remained professional, sympathetic and calm in a challenging situation for everyone, trying to ensure the safety of all the people on board the ships. There was no harassment.

'We took this difficult decision as a last resort and only after full consideration of all other options but, ultimately, we concluded that the business wouldn't survive without fundamentally changed crewing arrangements, which in turn would inevitably result in redundancies.'
A Liberal MP has released a statement defending Scott Morrison after he was hit with multiple allegations of bullying from members of his own party.

Melissa McIntosh, the MP for Lindsay in western Sydney, blasted 'malicious factional players' who have come forward with allegations against the PM, which he denies.

Ms McIntosh revealed she was 'threatened, challenged and attacked' for several months last year by conservatives within the Liberal ranks who wanted to replace her.

Liberal Member for Lindsay Melissa McIntosh (left) with Prime Minister Scott Morrison today

Melissa McIntosh is pictured at home. She has released a statement defending the PM

She said Mr Morrison encouraged her to stay in politics and described him as a 'good man'.

'The Prime Minister stepped up and helped me through this difficult time,' she said.

'He listened to me, advised me, and fought hard for me to defeat the challenge and stick with politics.

'It was not an easy road but his personal support for me did not falter and made the difference to me contesting this election.

'He is a strong leader, yes, but he is also a good man, and has helped a lot of people.'

Ms McIntosh said she was inspired to speak out because she could 'no longer abide the nonsense being peddled in the public domain about the Prime Minister.'

Mr Morrison has regularly visited Melissa McIntosh's marginal electorate of Sydney. They are pictured together last week

Outgoing conservative Liberal Concetta Fierravanti-Wells laid into Mr Morrison during a fiery late-night parliamentary speech last week, calling him an 'autocrat' and saying he was 'unfit to be Prime Minister.'

The extraordinary attack came after she lost a winnable spot on the NSW Liberal Party senate ticket.

One Nation senator Pauline Hanson and independent Jacqui Lambie also accused the PM of being a bully based on their 'one-on-one' dealings with him.

This week outgoing NSW upper house member Catherine Cusack also attacked Mr Morrison, saying he is a ruthless self serving bully who has no moral compass.

Scott Morrison (pictured on Tuesday) has won a court case letting him handpick his favourite Liberal candidates for the May election

The PM has repeatedly denied the allegations, saying they come from disgruntled Liberals or political opponents.

On the 7.30 Report on Tuesday night he said he has been standing up for women in his parliamentary team.

In her impassioned defence of the PM, Ms McIntosh revealed she was one of those women.

It comes after Mr Morrison won a crucial court case letting him handpick his favourite Liberal candidates - paving the way for the the PM to call an election imminently.

The NSW Court of Appeal ruled on Tuesday the party's federal executive did have the power to over-ride local members and install the Prime Minister's preferred candidates.

Under NSW Liberal Party rules, election candidates are supposed to be chosen with a vote by local branch members.

But with several candidates - including three sitting MPs - still not selected by early March, the federal executive stepped in and selected them without branch votes.

A committee including Scott Morrison, former Liberal president Chris McDiven and NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet chose Environment minister Sussan Ley in Farrer, Immigration minister Alex Hawke in Mitchell and backbencher Trent Zimmerman in North Sydney.

The executive on Saturday selected more candidates in the remaining NSW seats including the winnable seats of Warringah, Parramatta, Greenway, Eden-Monaro and Hughes - and the safe Labor seats of Fowler, Grayndler, McMahon and Newcastle.

The move was challenged in court by furious Liberal members, including businessman Matt Camenzuli, who say their voting rights were cast aside.

Liberal senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells savaged the PM and his closest ally Mr Hawke in a fiery speech on Tuesday

Mr Camenzuli's case was an impediment to the PM calling an election but was knocked back on Tuesday, with a three-judge bench ruling the matter was not justiciable, meaning the court has no authority over it.

Justice John Basten went further to shut down the challenge by insisting the Liberal Party federal constitution 'confers a broad power of intervention on the federal executive to bypass the divisional constitution.'

Mr Morrison is expected to go to the Governor-General to call the election any day now.

Liberal insiders say picking up seats in NSW will be crucial to offset any potential losses in Western Australia or Queensland where the party is at a high water mark.
A covert police photo shows the moment a drug courier realised a package of drugs worth an estimated $10million was missing from a bush hideaway.

Personal trainer and vape seller Christian Tachev was sentenced to 11 years in prison on Wednesday for his role as a bag man in a 'sophisticated' drug syndicate operating across Western Australia.

Tachev, who shuffled around duffel bags full of money and meth for bikie thugs, was on the wrong end of a police sting with investigators watching on as he tried to dig up the drug package.

The 25-year-old had been under surveillance by the Federal Police for some time when he drove into suburban scrubland on a number of missions to bury and dig up a total of 15kg of ice. He was also captured by detectives loading the boot of a car with $500,000 in cash.

A drug courier (Christian Tachev, pictured) who shuffled around duffel bags full of money and meth for bikie thugs was on the wrong end of a police stitch-up when investigators watched on as he tried to dig up a $10million package of drugs - only for him to find it wasn't there

The personal trainer and vape seller (pictured) was sentenced to 11 years in prison for his role as a bag man in a 'sophisticated' drug syndicate operating across Western Australia

Tachev is seen on March 19 2021 at Maniana Park in Queens Park, in Perth's southeast, donning gloves before diggin for 25 minutes at the secret spot until panic set in as he realised the drugs were gone

Tachev buried a blue duffel bag containing 10kg of the dangerous drug at Edgewater park in Perth's north last year.

A senior Hells Angels Outlaw Motorcycle Gang member was later arrested after he allegedly dug it up.

Police then conducted a search at another area in the southeast of the city where Tachev, a former Curtin University student, had also visited earlier that day.

Officers uncovered a black bag buried in a shallow hole at Maniana Park in Queens Park filled with another 5kg of meth, prompting the AFP to obtain a 'surveillance device warrant'.

On March 19, 2021, soon after the camera was set up, Tachev arrived at the park and donned gloves before he began to dig for 25 minutes at the secret spot.

Then panic set in.

The drug squad had already seized the package of ice and a confused Tachev was captured with his hands on his hips and a grimace on his face.

He then headed off empty-handed.

But it remains unclear whether the drug runner was expecting to pick up the drugs he stashed there earlier or a large sum of money in its place.

The 25-year-old (pictured) was under surveillance by the Federal Police when he drove into suburban scrubland on missions to bury and dig up a total of 15kg of ice

Detectives trailed Tachev and later witnessed him place about $500,000 into the boot of a car, before he was eventually arrested at his Joondalup vape shop on April 6 and charged with one count of commercial drug trafficking and one count of dealing with the proceeds of crime.

WA Supreme Court Justice Joseph McGrath ruled 'the offences that you have committed are most serious' and motivated 'solely by financial gain'.

'The Crown accepted that your role could be described as that of a 'courier',' he said.

'However, there was a high level of sophistication to your conduct given the manner in which the drugs were buried and concealed in bushland areas around Perth, and the fact that these locations were only able to be located through GPS coordinates.'

Police are pictured digging up the bag of meth that Tachev buried for the crime syndicate

AFP Senior Constable Josh Gilmour said the 15kg meth haul took about 150,000 hits off the streets

The operation worked by separating the packages of drugs for supply so they could then be delivered to an agreed location for collection by the purchaser.

'Whilst your role may be described as a 'courier', I am satisfied that the role you undertook was pivotal to the trafficking of methylamphetamine in the community,' Justice McGrath said.

'I further find that whilst you undertook the role of courier, you obviously had trust reposed in you from other persons involved in the trafficking and that you undertook a vital role in endeavouring to achieve success in respect of the criminal activity.'

The young man, who regularly posted topless photos of himself on social media, is now worried about his parents and the threat of reprisals his family may face at the hands of crime gangs as a result of his sentence.

Tachev is now worried about his parents and the threat of reprisals his family may face at the hands of crime gangs as a result of his sentence

AFP Senior Constable Josh Gilmour said the 15kg meth haul took about 150,000 hits off the streets.

'People who move cash and drugs for criminal syndicates play a vital role in helping other members to profit from this damaging trade,' he said.

'The AFP and our partners are working tirelessly to stop drugs from reaching our community and arresting those involved in the distribution.'

Tachev will be eligible for parole after seven and a half years.
A Wisconsin surgeon and hiker was found dead on a local trail in the state at least one week after she'd last contacted her family - with her body turning up near a waterfall with a steep 90-foot dropoff.

Kelsey Musgrove, 26, had told family that she had reached Potato River Falls in the town of Gurney on March 26, according to sheriffs in Iron County.

Four days later on March 30, police in her native Middletown asked the county to search for the cardiothoracic surgery fellow at the University of Wisconsin.

Authorities found Musgrove's car in the parking lot at Potato River Falls and found her body near a 90-foot waterfall on April 3, they said in a press release.

The sheriff's office said it does not suspect foul play in relation to her death - but did not yet give a reason.

A Wisconsin surgeon and hiker, Kelsey Musgrove, was found dead on a trail a week after she'd last contacted her family

Musgrove, 26, had told family that she had reached Potato River Falls (pictured) in the town of Gurney on March 26, according to sheriffs in Iron County

Musgrave, who often posted her outdoor exploits on social media, was found dead a week later

The sheriff's office did not suspect foul play but did not yet give a reason for Musgroves' death

'All indications at the scene and information from family and friends lead us to believe she had gone hiking along Potato River and had not returned to her vehicle,' they wrote.

'We would like to express our sincere condolences to Kelsey's family,' police added.

UW Health, where Musgrove did her fellowship, put out a statement of their own lamenting her death.

'We are deeply saddened by the loss of our colleague Dr. Kelsey Musgrove,' spokesperson Emily Kumlien said. 'She was recognized by her peers as a great surgeon, an outstanding mentor and an incredibly kind and positive spirit. Our thoughts and condolences are with her friends and family during this difficult time.'

Sara Margaret Grossi, a frequent travel companion and close friend of Musgrove, also posted about her grief to her Facebook page.

'I could always cheer her up no matter how big the problem with pistachio ice cream. I cant fix this with a few scoops this time but I can keep loving her even though shes not here to lay under the stars with me anymore and guess constellations. Well meet again one day in those stars and awkwardly wink at one another and laugh.'

A fellow doctor at UW Health remembered her in another Facebook post.

Post from a good friend of Kelsey Musgrove, Sara Margaret Grossi, someone she travelled often with

Doctors at UW Health also remembered Musgrove as a caring person and beloved colleague

'She was well on her way to becoming a great surgeon,' wrote one co-worker of Musgrove

Statement and photo from the Iron County, WI Sheriff's Office on the disappearance and death of Kelsey Musgrove

'Kelsey Musgrove was one of the kindest and most positive residents Ive had the privilege of working with and she was well on her way to becoming a great surgeon,' wrote Aaron Zachary. 'Shes gone way too soon and had so much more life to live. May we all remember the kindness she showed us and strive to be great and kind the way she was.'

Jad Sattar added: 'I love you Kelsey. Forever and always. Until we meet again.'

Musgroves often posted herself on hiking trails and in the great outdoors on her Facebook and Twitter accounts. She was also a Black Lives Matter supporter and posted recently about raising money for MS research.
Demonstrators hold placards and shout slogans during a protest against a surge in prices and shortage of fuel and other essential commodities near parliament in Colombo, Tuesday. AFP-Yonhap



By Park Jae-hyuk



Samsung Electronics, Hyundai E&C and other companies doing business in Sri Lanka are increasingly concerned about the potential negative impact of the island country's political turmoil and economic crisis, according to industry officials, Wednesday.



Fears have escalated since anti-government protests broke out last month against the Sri Lankan government for its failure to solve the deepening economic crisis which global investment banks and credit rating agencies expect will lead to a sovereign debt default.



Although Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa revoked a five-day emergency order late on Tuesday (local time) and the International Monetary Fund promised to discuss a loan program with the government, the country is still suffering from a shortage of food products, medical supplies, electricity and even paper and ink.



However, Korean companies in Sri Lanka have remained cautious about taking countermeasures against the worsening situation, amid the Korean government's continuous efforts to enhance economic cooperation with the local government.



"Even if Sri Lanka goes bankrupt, there will be less likelihood of our business there facing financial problems," said a spokesman from one Korean conglomerate doing business in Sri Lanka. "But we will keep a close eye on the situation to protect the safety of our employees there."



Last Wednesday, the Minister of the Office for Government Policy Coordination Koo Yun-cheol visited Sri Lanka to discuss official development assistance (ODA) with the country's top government officials, including Rajapaksa. National Assembly Speaker Park Byeong-seug also flew to the country earlier this year to boost economic ties.



During their visits, the Sri Lankan government reportedly expressed its gratitude for Korea's increased ODA, support for COVID-19 quarantine measures and the increased hiring of Sri Lankan workers by Korean companies.



According to the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency, 16 Korean companies and institutions, most of which engage in the construction and manufacturing industries, were doing business in Sri Lanka as of 2020.



The volume of trade between the two countries recovered last year to pre-pandemic levels as Korea's exports to Sri Lanka rose 67.3 percent year-on-year to $288 million, while Korea's imports from Sri Lanka reached $142 million, up 27.8 percent over the same period.



Over the past few years, Korean builders have won sizable infrastructure construction projects in Sri Lanka.



In 2020, KT announced it would help Sri Lanka build smart networks in the country's largest city of Colombo and neighboring regions by using artificial intelligence, the internet of things and big data technologies. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport has also taught Sri Lanka its know-how of building smart cities.



The Korea International Trade Association expected the latest crisis to affect Sri Lanka's cooperation with Korean companies for the construction of infrastructure and new towns.



Kim Min-hee, a researcher at the state-run Korea Institute for International Economic Policy's India and South Asia team, said that Sri Lanka will face difficulties in solving its chronic financial problem soon, citing a slowdown in the country's tourism industry, which resulted from the Easter bombings in 2019 and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.



"In order to minimize damage from Sri Lanka's economic crisis and support Korean firms doing business there, the government should preemptively come up with countermeasures," the researcher said.


Mehraab Nazir, 49, and his nine-year-old son were killed while hiking in the Blue Mountains

A high-flying British executive has been identified as the victim of a freak landslide alongside his youngest son while on holiday in Australia.

Mehraab Nazir, 49, and his nine-year-old son were killed while hiking in the Blue Mountains on Monday afternoon following weeks of heavy rains and flooding.

The pair are survived by Mr Nazir's wife Anastasia, 40, 14-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter, who has been described as a 'hero' for raising the alarm and contacting authorities after the rockslide.

It's understood the two teenagers have been reunited with their godmother while their mother Anastasia remains in a critical condition in hospital.

The family were on a trip of a lifetime to Sydney from their home base in Singapore, where Mr Nazir worked as a finance lawyer specialising in international transactions. They moved from London more than 10 years ago.

Some relatives have already arrived in Sydney while others are still making the trip. They're receiving consular assistance.

The family are part of the Zoroastrian religion, one of the world's oldest faiths which is based in Iran and follows the teachings of the ancient prophet Zoroaster.

A member of the religious community said they're mourning such a 'tragic loss'.

'While we all still come to terms with this immense tragedy, the outpour and generosity of our community is very heart-warming,' a spokeswoman said.

'The surviving children have been united with their Godmother which is very comforting.'

The tiny Zoroastrian religious community in Sydney are in mourning after the deaths of a father and son during a freak landslide

'The community always rallies around to help each other,' a spokesman from the Australian Zoroastrian Association said.

'It's a case of strangers helping strangers.'

Ana Nazir (pictured) remains in a critical condition in hospital

The group helped to communicate with Mr Nazir's next of kin after word spread of his death.

'There is much grief among both the London and Sydney Zoroastrian community for this family tragedy,' another said.

British High Commissioner to Australia Vicki Treadell issued a statement early on Wednesday confirming she is assisting the family.

'My team are providing support & in contact with the local authorities,' she said.

According to the last census results, there are just 3,000 people who identify as Zoroastrian in Australia.

The family's 15-year-old daughter escaped the landslide physically unscathed and raised the alarm in a frantic call to emergency services at around 1.30pm.

It's understood the distraught teen told the operator: 'I don't know where we are'.

Mr Nazir, a partner at Watson Farley & Williams, Singapore, is pictured speaking at a legal conference in 2019

The Nazir family had lived in Singapore for more than a decade after migrating from England

Relatives have flown to Sydney to be with the kids while Mrs Nazir fights for life in hospital

Paramedics were winched from a rescue helicopter down the cliff face as they searched for anyone who had been taken by moving debris

Police rescue crews returned to the scene on Tuesday morning to recover the bodies of the father and his young son killed by a landslip

She walked from the scene with the help of emergency crews, which involved trekking for an hour-and-a-half along the hiking track.

The family were permitted to use the advanced Wentworth Pass track, famous for its stunning waterfall views and valley lookouts, despite weeks of wild weather making the area dangerous for hikers.

NSW National Parks confirmed the 5km loop was inspected days before the landslide as part of a routine assessment program.

The Wentworth Pass track is considered as having a grade four difficulty under NSW National Park and Wildlife Service guidelines, which recommends only experienced bushwalkers use it.

A day trip to the Blue Mountains ended in tragedy for a British family after a man and his nine-year-old son were killed by a freak landslide (pictured, emergency crews making the trek)

Authorities are still working to determine whether the landslide fell on the group while they were walking along a bush track, or if they were trekking along the cliff face that fell.

'In terms of the site, it's extremely dangerous and unstable,' NSW Police Detective Acting Superintendent John Nelson said.

Police crews returned to the scene early on Tuesday morning to recover the bodies of the man and boy.

The retrieval of the bodies was a planned and delicate operation due to the nature of the terrain at the site.

The tracks in the Wentworth Falls precinct of the park have been closed indefinitely.

The rescue operation also involved local police, Police Rescue, Fire and Rescue NSW, National Parks & Wildlife Services, Blue Mountains detectives, and PolAir and rescue helicopters

Local environmentalist and former director for the Colong Foundation for Wilderness, Keith Muir, said the closure of the entire park is an 'overreaction'.

The closure is related to significant rain forecast for the rest of the week. Monday's landslide came after a week of torrential rainfall.

'This is an overreaction to a very sad event,' Mr Muir said. 'Equivalent to closure of ocean beaches after a fatal shark attack.'

Mr Muir said the event was very sad, but noted the tragedy was rare.

'It's a very sad event but it's a very rare event and needs a nuanced approach rather than a shutdown of any at risk walking track,' he told the Blue Mountains Gazette.

'The Parks service and the council can't protect the public from every single tree or every single rock in the park, it's just impossible.'
A nine-year-old boy experienced intense gastro issues after he tested positive for Covid - and he is just one of many children in Australia who have endured the same symptoms after becoming infected.

Gibson James suffered through four straight days of constant stomach pains, cramps and vomiting, with his mother Emma recalling how she almost had to call an ambulance for her son after witnessing the distress and pain he was going through.

'He couldn't keep anything down and had stomach cramps that were so severe we were going to get an ambulance thinking it could be appendicitis,' she told WA Today.

Nine-year-old Gibson James experienced intense gastro issues when he recently tested positive for Covid - and he is just one of many children who have endured the same symptoms after becoming infected (stock image)

Ms James said her son's gastrointestinal symptoms came abruptly not long after he tested positive for the Omicron strain of the virus.

The second day of the boy's illness brought about constant vomiting that 'didn't stop' before the stomach issues set in.

Gibson said he also experienced terrible headaches and felt lightheaded whenever he stood up.

'The stomach pains were really bad,' he recounted to the publication.

Similar issues struck eight-year-old Savannah Jones and her 12-month-old sister Everleigh after they became infected.

Their mother, Rebecca Jones, recalled how Savannah contracted the virus when it 'ripped through her school'.

She began with the usual virus symptoms - sore throat and fever - before her painful stomach cramps set in.

Savannah's gastro pains became that intense she refused to eat or drink anything and had 'non-stop' diarrhoea for more than a week.

'I had read some people had gastro symptoms but I was not expecting it to be as severe as it was, particularly for my baby,' Ms Jones said of her daughter's illness.

It wasn't long until Everleigh also contracted the virus and the young bub endured similar gastro problems.

Research from Italy found that 1 in 10 children will experience severe gastrointestinal symptoms after testing positive for the virus (stock image)

The children's experiences raised questions as to just how prevalent gastro issues are for young people infected with Covid.

Research from Italy found that one in 10 children will experience severe gastrointestinal symptoms after testing positive for the virus.

The study, which was conducted from February 2020 to 2021, tracked the symptoms of 685 infected children, with researchers finding 10 per cent of the cohort suffered gastrointestinal conditions within four to six weeks of their diagnosis.

These conditions included appendicitis, intussusception, pancreatitis, abdominal fluid collection and diffuse adenomesenteritis.

A similar study conducted by the UK on children of health care workers who had Covid-19 found identical results.

The research observed the symptoms of 68 Covid-infected children.

They discovered that 19 per cent of children who tested positive had gastrointestinal problems including stomach cramps, vomiting and diarrhoea.
P&O Ferries customers face having their Easter holidays ruined after fully-booked rivals said they cannot honour their tickets from Dover to France this weekend.

Anyone with a ticket from the ferry operator has been able to travel with DFDS, one of Europe's largest shipping operators, over the past few weeks.

But this mutual agreement is being paused on Friday until next week due to a lack of capacity, leaving ticketholders rushing to get refunds from P&O Ferries.

The announcement follows three-hour waits and gridlocked roads around the Port of Dover last Saturday, owing to fewer services in the wake of the redundancy debacle.

P&O Ferries suspended its Dover-Calais crossings on March 17 after terminating nearly 800 members of staff to hire cheaper agency workers.

Criminal and civil investigations were launched on April 1 into the company's decision, which was widely criticised for making seafarers redundant without notice.

And this morning, it was reported that a former P&O Ferries chef, John Lansdown, was suing the business for unfair dismissal, racial discrimination and harassment.

Meanwhile, one of the firm's ships, the Pride of Kent, was detained in Dover last month after a coastguard inspection found it was 'not safe to go to sea'.

It came less than a week after the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) said another ship, the European Causeway, was prevented from going to sea in Larne, Northern Ireland, due to 'concerns over its safety'.

P&O Ferries customers face having their Easter holidays ruined after fully-booked rivals said they cannot honour their tickets from Dover to France this weekend, Pictured: Long queues at the Port of Dover on Saturday, April 2

The mutual agreement is coming to an end on Friday, leaving ticketholders rushing to get refunds from P&O and rebook with its competitor DFDS

In a tweet shared yesterday afternoon, the transport company wrote: 'All P&O Ferries Passenger Services are suspended this weekend.

'For travel 8/9/10th April please re-book directly with another operator before arriving at the port.

'DFDS will not be able to transfer P&O customers onto their services.'

Last weekend's traffic chaos, which saw some cars stuck for up to three hours, prompted motorists to seek alternative routes towards the ferry terminal causing further delays in towns across Kent which spilled over into Saturday.

Drivers heading to the coast were warned to expect delays well in excess of an hour, while it was reported that some hauliers waited for up to eight hours.

Closures were first implemented on Friday night as part of Operation Brock to allow lorries heading for the channel crossing to be 'stacked' on the motorway, in theory allowing them smoother access to the Kent coast.

A Department for Transport spokesman said at the time: 'We are aware of queues at Dover, and the Kent Resilience Forum and local partners are working to minimise any disruption by deploying temporary traffic-management measures as standard.'

The ongoing dispute involving P&O Ferries has dramatically reduced the capacity of the port.

Last month, P&O Ferries admitted to breaking the law in the manner in which it terminated 800 members of staff to hire cheaper agency workers, a move that has caused a major backlash from politicians and workers (file photo)

Two P&O ferries remain in the Port of Dover, Kent, as freight lorries queue to check in on April 1

A spokesperson for DFDS told The Telegraph: 'As we look towards the weekend, we have very high booking levels, which sadly means we won't have any capacity available for other operators.

'We will of course do everything we can outside the peak weekends to carry as many P&O customers as possible.

'What we don't want to do is to create a situation where we have to disappoint customers arriving in the port who we cannot get to France because we are full.'

P&O Ferries was widely criticised for making seafarers redundant without notice on March 17.

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said the Insolvency Service had started 'formal criminal and civil investigations'.

The Insolvency Service said: 'Following its inquiries, the Insolvency Service has commenced formal criminal and civil investigations into the circumstances surrounding the recent redundancies made by P&O Ferries.

'As these are ongoing investigations, no further comment or information can be provided at this time.'

P&O Ferries chief executive Peter Hebblethwaite told a joint hearing of the Commons' business and transport committees that his company broke the law by not consulting with trade unions before laying off workers.

P&O Ferries chef accuses bosses of sacking him because he is British as he launches 76million lawsuit for unfair dismissal after he was one of 800 workers fired over Zoom and replaced with cheaper foreign agency staff

An ex-P&O Ferries chef has accused bosses of sacking him because he is British in a lawsuit for unfair dismissal against the company and its chief executive.

John Lansdown, who joined the company as a 16-year-old trainee, was working as a sous chef on The Pride of Canterbury when he was sacked 'out of the blue'.

The 39-year-old, from Herne Bay, Kent, is the only seafarer able to take legal action against the company, which said all but one employee had accepted a settlement.

In his landmark claim to London South employment tribunal, Mr Lansdown accuses P&O Ferries of treating him unfavourably in a 'sham' redundancy because he is British.

He is claiming race discrimination on the basis that P&O replaced staff with non-British crew paid an average of just 5.50 an hour - less than the minimum wage.

Mr Lansdown is seeking six figure compensation for lost earnings and injury to feelings in his claim against P&O and its chief executive Peter Hebblethwaite.

It comes after criminal and civil investigations were launched on April 1 into P&O Ferries' decision to lay off nearly 800 workers over Zoom without notice last month.

John Lansdown (pictured above), 39, filed a tribunal claim accusing the shipping firm of racial discrimination because he is British and entitled to minimum wage

Mr Lansdown said his action was about the 'bigger picture', telling the BBC: 'This is not just about me.

'Seven hundred and ninety nine of my seafaring family have lost their livelihoods, their way of life, their homes for half the year.'

In legal papers submitted to the tribunal, he also said that P&O Ferries' parent company, Dubai Ports World (DP World), is highly profitable.

On the basis of such profits, he also seeks exemplary damages of up to 76 million to 'deter' P&O Ferries or DP World from any future 'fire and hire' policy.

Tribunals have never previously made a punitive award of damages on such a scale.

Should he make legal history, Mr Lansdown says he would use the money to create a new trust to campaign for improved wages and terms and conditions for seafarers.

P&O Ferries says that Mr Lansdown is the only staff member not to have accepted its controversial settlement offer.

It says that its payouts linked to length of service totalling 36.5 million - with 40 workers receiving over 100,000 and no worker less than 15,000 - is the 'largest compensation package in the British marine sector'.

In a statement responding to Mr Lansdown's claim, P&O Ferries says that the job cuts were 'categorically not based on race or the nationality of the staff involved'.

It insists that the company 'needed fundamental change to make it viable', adding: 'We knew this decision was the only way to save the business.'

Mr Lansdown, who is the only seafarer taking legal action over the dismissal, is seeking financial compensation and exemplary damages of up to 76million (file photo of a P&O ferry)

In his legal document, Mr Lansdown tells how he was a sous chef on The Pride of Canterbury on the Dover to Calais route.

He had worked for P&O Ferries in two spells, leaving in the mid 2000s before re-joining the company in 2014.

He was working on the ship and had to leave his belongings behind when he was notified 'out of the blue and without any prior consultation' about his instant dismissal, he says.

The RMT union member alleges that private security staff, carrying handcuffs and wearing balaclavas, were hired to remove workers who refused to disembark ferries.

His claim states: 'I was devastated by the brutal summary dismissal after many years of loyal and diligent service. The manner of the dismissal was harassing.'

He accuses P&O Ferries of 'violating' his dignity and creating an 'intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating environment'.

P&O Ferries chief executive Peter Hebblethwaite (pictured on March 24) said his company broke the law by not consulting with trade unions before sacking workers

He says the redundancy was unlawful as there was no fair selection process and no diminished need for his job.

Speaking today, Mr Lansdown branded P&O Ferries 'unscrupulous' and said he wanted to get 'justice' for all his former colleagues who felt they had little choice but to settle their cases.

He said: 'The actions of P&O Ferries have upended the lives of 800 loyal and dedicated seafarers and their families.

'Their grotesque disregard for due process in this country will set a dangerous precedent if allowed to stand.

'The tribunal claim I have filed is intended to bring Peter Hebblethwaite and those responsible at P&O Ferries to justice and make them accountable for their unlawful action.'

Mr Hebblethwaite previously admitted to MPs that his decision to sack 800 workers without notice or union consultation had broken the law but said he would make the same decision again if he had to.

At the time, he said that no union would have accepted the plan and it was easier to compensate workers 'in full' instead.

The Insolvency Service has launched criminal and civil investigations into the controversial mass redundancies.

A spokesperson for P&O Ferries said: 'No staff involved in the redundancies wore balaclavas nor were they directed to use handcuffs or force.

'Staff remained professional, sympathetic and calm in a challenging situation for everyone, trying to ensure the safety of all the people on board the ships. There was no harassment.

'We took this difficult decision as a last resort and only after full consideration of all other options but, ultimately, we concluded that the business wouldn't survive without fundamentally changed crewing arrangements, which in turn would inevitably result in redundancies.'
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Customers have slammed Heathrow Airport over a Twitter post greeting its 'wonderful passengers' after days of airport chaos with more than 100 flights being cancelled across the UK today as huge queues formed at Birmingham, Manchester and Stansted.

British Airways axed at least 78 flights scheduled to and from Heathrow for Wednesday, while easyJet called off at least 30 at Gatwick.

The delays and cancellations are being blamed mostly on staffing shortages and recruitment challenges, and a sudden surge in passenger numbers  both caused by Covid and the lifting of curbs which have been in place for most of the past two years.

Amid the unprecedented bedlam, Heathrow posted on its official Twitter account: 'Good morning and welcome to Heathrow! We just love interacting with our wonderful passengers and are already available online.'

Have YOU experienced airport delays? Email katie.weston@mailonline.co.uk or tips@dailymail.com Advertisement

One passenger reacted in fury to the chirpy post, commenting: 'What c*** you sprout, you don't give a damn about your passengers, clearly showed that a few days ago, when everything went pear shaped and you went into hiding.'

Another wrote: 'Seriously? Due to the current clusterf*** at Heathrow maybe the CEO should follow the Chief Executive at Manchester! There was plenty of time to plan for these two weeks!'

Travellers also shared pictures on social media of long lines forming at some of Britain's busiest airports earlier today, with one sharing a video at 1.50am of crowds waiting at UK Border Control in Stansted.

He wrote: 'Terrible arrival into Stansted Airport 45 mins ago. Very slow queue and loads of people behind too.'

Tweeting a picture of two lengthy queues, another flyer said: 'If it's helpful this is what Birmingham Airport security queue looks like at 4.10am today! Estimated 10-15 mins wait.'

Over 1,140 flights were grounded at Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Birmingham in the week up to April 3  with EasyJet and British Airways also cutting 60 and 98 flights respectively yesterday.

It comes after John O'Neill, North West Regional Industrial Officer for the trade union Unite, said officials met management at Manchester Airport yesterday to discuss pay.

He warned: 'Summer is going to be far worse than this. It is the time to get everything in place otherwise summer is going to very difficult.'

And Karen Smart was yesterday forced to resign as managing director of Manchester Airports Group (MAG), which owns Manchester, Stansted and East Midlands airports, after just two years in the post.

Manchester Airport management were due to meet political leaders and unions to discuss the ongoing situation, after Blackley and Broughton MP Graham Stringer challenged them to get a grip or get out.

And unions are warning that the carnage is set to go on throughout the summer because of the delays in processing counter-terror checks needed for new airport staff, with some said to be taking 30 weeks instead of the usual 14 to 15 while civil servants WFH.

In a statement, MAG chief executive Charlie Cornish said: Over the last two years, Karen has guided Manchester Airport through the most challenging period of its 84-year history, having made a major contribution to MAG throughout her time with the business.

I am sorry to lose Karen after her years of valuable service, but also understand her desire to return to the South for family reasons and indeed to explore new career opportunities.

While there are sure to be further challenges ahead, I am confident we will soon start to see the benefits of the recovery plans Karen has helped put in place and look forward to working with Ian and his leadership team to drive them forward.

Yesterday, passengers at Manchester were spotted jumping over barriers and abandoning their luggage in a desperate attempt to make their flights, according to Nicky Kelvin, head of travel website Points Guy UK.

Meanwhile at Heathrow, a male passenger in his early 30s collapsed while queueing as staff shortages left people waiting four hours to clear passport control.

Amid the unprecedented bedlam, Heathrow Airport posted on its official Twitter account: 'Good morning and welcome to Heathrow! We just love interacting with our wonderful passengers and are already available online'

Crowds are seen at Heathrow Airport's Terminal 2 in London this morning as families try and get away for the Easter holidays

British Airways axed at least 78 flights scheduled to and from Heathrow for Wednesday, while easyJet called off at least 30 at Gatwick. Pictured: passengers queuing at Heathrow Terminal 2 today

Over 1,140 flights were grounded at Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Birmingham in the week up to April 3. Pictured: Pilots and airline staff waiting at London's Heathrow Airport today

Unions are warning the carnage is set to go on throughout the summer because of the delays in processing counter-terror checks needed for new airport staff. Pictured: Heathrow Terminal 2 as families try and get away for the Easter holidays today

At Heathrow yesterday, a male passenger in his early 30s collapsed while queueing as staff shortages left people waiting four hours to clear passport control. Pictured: Passengers are seen queuing with their luggage at Heathrow this morning

Huge queues started forming at Birmingham, Manchester (pictured today) and Stansted airports from 4.10am this morning with passengers arriving early as cancelled flights and delays continue to derail Easter getaways

Passengers took to social media early today to share pictures of long lines already forming at some of Britain's busiest airports, with one traveller sharing a video (above) at 1.50am of crowds waiting at UK Border Control in Stansted

Tweeting a picture of two lengthy queues (above, taken today), another passenger said: 'If it's helpful this is what Birmingham Airport security queue looks like at 4.10am today! Estimated 10-15 mins wait.'

Travellers face chaos at Britains busiest airports including Heathrow (pictured yesterday), Gatwick and Manchester

More than 1,140 flights have been grounded at a number of major airports including Manchester (pictured yesterday)

The unprecedented bedlam is being blamed on staffing shortages and recruitment challenges (Gatwick pictured yesterday)

Manchester, pictured yesterday, the UKs third busiest airport, has been mired in chaos in recent weeks

Karen Smart has resigned as managing director of Manchester Airports Group (MAG), which owns Manchester, Stansted and East Midlands airports, after just two years in the post, the company confirmed on Tuesday afternoon

EasyJet cancels more than 220 flights due to Covid staff shortages to leave some passengers stranded amid airport chaos EasyJet has cancelled more than 220 flights, blaming the disruption on high levels of staff sickness due to Covid. At least 222 flights have been axed since Friday, including 62 that had been scheduled for Monday alone, the majority of which were cancelled at short notice on Saturday. Covid infection numbers are some of the highest they have been since the start of the pandemic. An EasyJet spokesperson said yesterday: 'As a result of the current high rates of Covid infections across Europe, like all businesses EasyJet is experiencing higher than usual levels of employee sickness. 'We have taken action to mitigate this through the rostering of additional standby crew this weekend, however, with the current levels of sickness we have also decided to make some cancellations in advance.' They said the focus was on 'consolidating flights where we have multiple frequencies so customers have more options to rebook their travel, often on the same day.' They added: 'Unfortunately it has been necessary to make some additional cancellations for today and tomorrow. 'We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause to customers on affected flights. 'We have made 62 preemptive cancellations for flights to and from the UK for tomorrow which represents a small proportion tomorrow's total flying programme which was planned to be more than 1645 flights. 'We cancelled the majority of these yesterday.' Advertisement

Eyewitness Jessica Oliver told MailOnline: I just walked past and he was on the floor. There were people helping him  I dont know if it was dehydration or very low blood sugar, but its very hot and staff are handing out water bottles. It was also chaotic at Amsterdam, but Ive never seen anything like this.

The mans current condition is unknown and Heathrow Airport has been contacted for an update.

To reduce the impact on passengers, most cancellations are being made at least a day in advance and on routes with multiple daily flights, so passengers can be offered alternative departures.

British Airways said many of its cancellations include flights cut as part of its decision last month to reduce its schedule until the end of May.

Travellers also took to social media to share photos of huge queues stretching up to four hours long yesterday, with one person writing: Chaos at Heathrow Airport arrivals. Some people have been standing here for the past four hours and the queues are not moving. What is causing the disruption?.

Another passenger added: Three hour plus clearing immigrations wait at Terminal 3 for under two hours European flight!! Still nowhere near through. No one giving any updates!.

And while sat in Terminal 5 at Heathrow, Hannah Swales told MailOnline about her shambolic return flight from Dubai. She said: We were delayed from Dubai for three hours and then had to be rebooked on the next available flight. We were to stay in Heathrow Airport with no luggage and no access to medication in our luggage.

Paul Charles, chief executive of travel consultancy The PC Agency, said: Airlines are certainly seeing a high level of demand to fly, but are simply unable to cope with that demand due to a lack of resources. Its a nightmare situation for airlines and airports at the moment.'

Martin Chalk, general secretary of the pilots union Balpa, also told The Telegraph: The chaos witnessed at British airports may well be repeated throughout the summer because airlines, laden with debt have not yet rehired enough staff.

The rise in bookings is overtaking the number of airline staff being hired, which is being further exacerbated by security checks.

An industry source further blamed the vetting process, saying it can take up to six months before someone is able to come in and do a job at an airport.

But a spokesperson for the Department for Transport (DfT) contended the aviation industry is responsible for resourcing at airports, adding: They manage their staff absences, although we want to see minimal disruption for passengers during the Easter period.

The requirement for Counter Terrorist Checks for aviation security staff is important for the protection of the travelling public and the Government continues to process these security clearances in a timely manner.

There were also reports of travel chaos at Heathrow and Gatwick airports on Monday, as well as long delays at Dover and a train blockage in the Channel Tunnel.

P&O Ferries customers face having their Easter holidays ruined P&O Ferries customers face having their Easter holidays ruined after fully-booked rivals said they cannot honour their tickets from Dover to France this weekend. Anyone with a ticket from P&O has been able to travel with DFDS, one of Europe's largest shipping operators, over the past few weeks. But this mutual agreement is coming to an end on Friday, leaving ticketholders rushing to get refunds from P&O and rebook with its competitor. This could lead to further queues and gridlocked roads around the Port of Dover, following three-hour waits last Saturday owing to fewer services in the wake of the redundancy debacle. In a tweet shared yesterday afternoon, P&O Ferries wrote: 'All P&O Ferries Passenger Services are suspended this weekend. 'For travel 8/9/10th April please re-book directly with another operator before arriving at the port. 'DFDS will not be able to transfer P&O customers onto their services.' Advertisement

Heathrow warned passengers of possible delays, tweeting: We continue to advise passengers arrive 3 hours prior to their scheduled departure time as we are not able to estimate queue times ahead of journeys, due to them being influenced by a significant range of factors.

Long queues were also reported at Birmingham from 7.45am yesterday, with one passenger warning others to get here early. Another traveller, Luka Beckett, said she was 'trapped' on a grounded plane for 40 minutes on Sunday due to a lack of staff.

She told Birmingham Live: We should have been home at around 10pm, but got in sometime after midnight. It was horrific.

This follows a week of reported mass disruption with more than 1,100 flights cancelled throughout the UK. In the week up to April 3, a total of 1,143 flights were cancelled from and to the UK compared with just 197 flights cancelled the same week in 2019.

The latest figures show British Airways cancelled 662 flights while EasyJet axed 357 last week, according to data from Cirium, which carries out aviation analysis.

But some of these totals are based on historical cancellations and were flights axed months ago while airlines have claimed they represent a small percentage of their total flights.

Speaking to the Manchester Evening News, Mr Stringer, the former leader of Manchester Council and chairman of the airport board, said: Covid has made life difficult for everyone in the aviation industry. The way to respond to that is by good employment procedures and not by casualisation, effectively using fire and rehire. The airport needs to reset and pay above the market rate to stabilise the situation and give confidence to employees and the travelling public.

On Monday, Manchester Airport chiefs apologised for falling short following long delays over the weekend.

Meanwhile, pictures showed long queues at Heathrow, with airport bosses blaming a huge spike in passenger numbers. Heathrow chiefs say passenger numbers have now reached pre-pandemic levels, with Saturday being the first school holidays since the start of the pandemic with no travel restrictions in place in England.

The carnage is set to go on throughout the summer because of the delays in processing counter-terror checks needed for new airport staff, with some said to be taking 30 weeks instead of the usual 14 to 15 while civil servants work from home. Pictured: passengers queuing at Heathrow this afternoon

Passengers queue early on Tuesday for security at Manchester Airport's Terminal 1, as travel chaos continues at airports and ports as the Easter holidays get underway

Long queues seen yesterday as passengers arrive at Heathrow Airport's Terminal 2 for the start of their Easter holiday

The latest figures show British Airways cancelled 662 flights while easyJet axed 357 last week, according to data from Cirium, which carries out aviation analysis. But some of these totals are based on historical cancellations and were flights axed months ago. Pictured left and right: Huge queues for security at Manchester Airport

Eurotunnel passengers face three-hour delays after train is halted in the Channel Tunnel Eurotunnel passengers face a three hour delay on Monday morning due a train being halted in the Channel Tunnel. Eurotunnel - the vehicle carrying railway tunnel that connects Folkestone with Coquelles beneath the English Channel - is reporting a three hour delay to services. The travel firm, which is separate from the passenger-only Eurostar service, said it was due to a train stopped in the tunnel. 'Due to a train stopped temporarily in the tunnel, our service is currently experiencing delays. Please check-in as planned. Apologies for this,' Eurotunnel said on Twitter. Passenger service Eurostar, which operates trains between London St Pancras and Europe, and which uses the same tunnels, also has delays, according to its website though has yet to post any updates on its Twitter page. A delay warning on its website says: 'Your train has been delayed because part of the track is temporarily closed in the Channel Tunnel. Speed restrictions are in place. We are sorry for the impact this may have on your plans.' Advertisement

Bosses at Gatwick also said passengers numbers were returning to 2019 levels at the Sussex airport and that while there were some check-in queues that it was generally coping well with the increase in footfall.

One travel expert estimated that there had probably been more resignations in the last three months than during the Covid crisis because staff were worn out. Another warned disruption at airports such as Manchester could last for months, with firms having to train new staff to deal with the post-Covid increase in demand.

Bosses of the company behind Manchester Airport, which is in the same group as Stansted and East Midlands Airport, said it had seen a 1,300 percent increase increase in passenger numbers in February  compared to the previous year when the country was in lockdown.

Pictures taken at Manchester Airport on Monday showed long queues of people attempting to get through to security. Passengers also bemoaned a lack of organisation at the check-in, with long queues also seen at the check-in desk. In a tongue-in-cheek Twitter post, one frustrated traveller described a snaking queue at the airport as a world record attempt at the worlds slowest, longest conga line.

A Manchester Airport spokesperson told MailOnline: Manchester Airport apologises to passengers whose experiences have fallen below the standard we aim to provide. We want to assure customers and colleagues that their safety and security will always be our first priority.

Our whole industry is facing staff shortages and recruitment challenges at present, after the most damaging two years in its history. The removal of all travel restrictions after two years, coupled with the start of the summer travel season, has seen a rapid increase in passenger numbers, which is putting an enormous strain on our operation.

We are doing all we can to recruit the staff we need to meet this demand, but this is taking time due to the lengthy vetting and training processes involved. That is why we have been advising travellers that there may be, at times, longer queues than normal.

Whenever this is the case, we do all we can to redeploy resources and prioritise passengers within queues as best we can.

We are also aware that partners working on our site, such as baggage handling agents, are facing similar challenges. We will continue to support them in any way we can to deliver the best possible experience for customers during this challenging time.

It comes after the west-London airport faced its own chaos last week, after a major BA IT meltdown forced the airline to cancel or delay hundreds of flights.

BA's IT meltdown: How old computers, outsourcing and an historic lack of investment are blamed for glitches that have sparked widespread disruption

By James Robinson for MailOnline

Outdated IT equipment, an historic lack of investment in new technology and outsourcing are behind BA's recent spate of issues which have been causing chaos for passengers at Heathrow airport, according to experts.

In the latest IT meltdown, more than 5,000 passengers faced widespread disruption last week following what the airline described as 'technical issues' within its IT set-up.

At least 50 short-haul flights to and from London were cancelled due to the two-day disruption, which mostly impacted BA's main hub at Heathrow Terminal 5.

It comes as customers of BA and other airlines this week faced major disruption at airports such as Heathrow and Manchester, with huge queues at security and check-in.

BA's IT issues last week - which are not behind this week's airport chaos - have long been documented.

The airline's former chief executive, Alex Cruz, claimed back in 2016 that some of the firm's systems were 'up to 50 years old'.

His comments came a year before BA suffered a major IT failure in 2017, when more than 75,000 passengers were impacted. The issue ultimately led to a 60million legal action between the airline and one of its partners.

While the IT issues appeared to smooth out during the Covid pandemic, when passengers numbers were significantly lower, BA's tech woes returned earlier this year.

In March, almost 200 BA flights were disrupted, with passengers left queuing for more than an hour to check in their bags and others forced to return home without their luggage, due to the same IT issues.

And in February, passengers were also hit by chaos from BA as more than 500 flights were cancelled or delayed after the airline suffered its biggest IT meltdown for years.

While the real reason for the recent spate of issues are unclear, experts and former bosses have suggested outdated IT systems are to blame.

In the latest IT meltdown, more than 5,000 passengers faced disruption last week following what the airline described as 'technical issues' within its IT set-up

At least 50 short-haul flights (pictured: Library image of a BA plane) to and from London have been cancelled today due to the disruption, which BA say mainly impacted its operations at Terminal 5

In an internal message to staff, chief executive Sean Doyle (pictured) admitted passengers and employees were 'fed up' with the recent issues, which included IT issues and staff shortages

One industry insider told MailOnline that BA had attempted to invest in new IT infrastructure in recent years. But they said the firm was still facing issues with its computer systems.

'I think they are still trying to put their finger on what is going wrong,' one source told MailOnline.

'As I understand it they upgraded their check-in systems - which are called 'Fly' - a few years ago, so most of the computers are new and I think most people thought this issue was sorted.

'They (BA) are being quite quiet on the issue, so either they are not sure what is going on or something else is going on.'

Other industry sources agreed that BA had made attempts to upgrade their IT systems following a spate of incidents six years ago.

'I think that (old IT equipment) is the still the root of the issue. Certainly there is a bit of concern,' said one industry source, who also ruled out the possibility of outside interference, such as cyber attacks by Russia.

BA meanwhile say its parent company, IAG, which also owns Irish airline Aer Lingus, is investing 450million pounds ($600million) in bumping up IT infrastructure.

However they say the upgrades, which include moving BA's data centres on to a digital cloud system, will 'take time'.

'In the interim we are also investing heavily in building more resilience to our existing systems,' said one BA spokesperson.

Experts have also agreed that BA faces a 'complex' task in upgrading its IT infrastructure.

John Strickland, CEO of air transport consultancy firm, JLS Consulting told MailOnline: 'BA has been investing in IT renewal but with a multiplicity of systems built up over many decades this is both a complex, intricate and slow process.

'Given the scale of its operation in the UK, the impact of failures can be high and more visible than for some other similar airlines.

'Low cost carriers have the relative advantage of more simple business models and newer IT architecture but even there some systems may be twenty years old.

'The industry as a whole needs to invest continuously to exploit the advantages of digital technology which can support their business and improve reliability of systems.'

It is not the first time that BA's IT infrastructure has been called into question. Alex Cruz, the former boss of BA, told the Financial Times in 2016 that airlines were still using outdated technology and needed to raise their game.

'If you look at the underlying systems that all big airlines . . . rely on, it is 20, 30, 40, 50-year-old technology, it is truly amazing to see,' he said.

Others say cost cutting pressures from BA's owners, the Anglo-English firm International Airlines Group (IAG), may have also contributed

Renewing IT systems is complex, time-consuming and expensive  a factor that prompts many companies to put it off as long as possible, said Loizos Heracleous, a professor of strategy at Warwick Business School, told AP in 2017.

Mr Heracleous said costly upgrades for larger firms such as BA have played into the advantage of newer firms such as Ryanair, which launched in 1984.

'The ability to set up an airline from scratch by-passes a lot of the legacy issues, because you can go for state-of-the-art systems,' Heracleous said.

'Newer airlines can also invest in IT systems that are more easily upgradeable and scalable.

'An airline such as Ryanair, that is also financially successful, has more leeway to divert needed resources towards upgrading its IT systems.'

Alex Cruz (pictured left), the former boss of BA, told the Financial Times in 2016 that airlines were still using outdated technology and needed to raise their game. Wayne Osse (pictured right), Director of Sales Engineering and the real-time data IT expert for the aviation industry at Solace, told MailOnline: 'Being able to sense and respond to events can make a big difference in overall operational responsiveness and passenger satisfaction.'

Experts also warned about potential bumps in the road ahead following the big IT failure in 2017.

Kathleen Brooks, the research director at City Index, told AP back in 2017 that IAG's cost cutting would 'come back to bite' them.

'Although cost cutting has been good for the share price, it will come back to bite IAG if it stops them from doing what they are supposed to do: Fly passengers to their destinations,' she said.

Others have called for major airlines to 'accelerate' the modernisation of their IT systems, not only to prevent losses and improve security, but to improve their services.

Wayne Osse, Director of Sales Engineering and the real-time data IT expert for the aviation industry at Solace, told MailOnline: 'Being able to sense and respond to events can make a big difference in overall operational responsiveness and passenger satisfaction.

'There is clearly a feeling that modernisation efforts need to be accelerated.

'Having better access to data and, importantly, sharing it in real time will transform the way we manage air traffic.

'Being able to sense, respond to and even predict crucial events can make a big difference in flyer satisfaction and overall operational responsiveness.

'With the return of international travel post-covid and further safety implementation because of the pandemic, now is the time for the aviation industry to operate in even more real time and embrace the much needed digital transformation.'

BA as a major airline is far from alone in its troubles with outdated IT equipment.

Other firms, including several major US airlines, also suffered issues with IT back in 2016, according to Conde Nast Traveller, a luxury travel magazine produced by the company behind the likes of Vogue and QC.

In 2015, Delta suffered three days of delays after a small fire knocked out a transformer supplying power to the airline's data centre.

It meant airline agents couldn't check in passengers, flights could not take off and self-serve kiosks at airports were down.

The airline lost $100million in revenue after cancelling 2,000 flights, according to Conde Nast Traveller.

Then, in 2017, United Airlines was forced to ground all domestic flights, and Delta ground 451 flights due to a 'major system-wide network outage.'

And in 2019, 780 flights were delayed when critical flight data provider AeroData suffered a systems outage.

According to Conde Nast Traveller, soon after the earlier 2015 incident, Delta, along with American Airlines, launched multibillion-pound projects to overhaul their systems.

In 2015, Delta (pictured: Library image) suffered three days of delays after a small fire knocked out a transformer supplying power to the airline's data centre

Alongside suggestions of a lack of investment in tech infrastructure, unions have blamed BA's IT issues on outsourcing.

In 2017, after the computer fiasco that affected 75,000 passengers, the GMB union claimed it could have been avoided if the airline had not cut the jobs of 'hundreds of dedicated and loyal' IT staff and contracted the work to India last year.

However the airline rejected this, saying it had been caused by the ' loss of power to the UK data centre which was compounded by the uncontrolled return of power which caused a power surge taking out our IT systems'.

BA said in their 2017 statement: 'It was not an IT failure and had nothing to do with outsourcing of IT, it was an electrical power supply which was interrupted.'

A spokesperson said at the time the company was undertaking an 'exhaustive investigation to find out the exact circumstances' in order to 'ensure that this can never happen again'.

Later it transpired that BA had, as it had stated at the time, lost power to the company's data centre.

But it was also revealed that the services had failed to shift to the company's back up facility.

BA, which reportedly faced up to 100million in compensation claims over the issue, ended up taking the data centre's operator, CBRE to court, over 58million in losses.

However, according to Computer Weekly, the two groups ultimately settled out of court in 2019, with no admission of liability.

Despite this, BA's computer woes continued and In 2019, at least 15,000 passengers across 84 flights had their journeys canceled due to an IT outage.

BA's IT troubles have resurfaced again this year. In February, passengers were hit by chaos from BA as more than 500 flights were cancelled or delayed after the airline suffered its biggest IT meltdown for years.

Last month, almost 200 BA flights were disrupted, with passengers left queuing for more than an hour to check in their bags and others forced to return home without their luggage.

Passengers queue at the Arrivals entrance of Heathrow Airport T5, London, in February after British Airways cancelled all short-haul flights from the airport until midday and further disruption is expected throughout Saturday due to ongoing technical issues

In an internal message to staff, chief executive Sean Doyle admitted passengers and employees were 'fed up' with the recent issues, which included IT issues and staff shortages.

BA said flights would have to be cancelled over the next few weeks, through the Easter holidays and until the end of May.

The issues have come at the worst time for BA, with bookings at their highest levels since the start of the pandemic after the UK and most European countries ditched Covid traveller tests for fully vaccinated holidaymakers.

Over the weekend, passengers at Heathrow said there were 'not enough staff to explain what was going on' and a lot of the desks looked 'unmanned' at the baggage check-in at Terminal 5.

Meanwhile the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), the statutory corporation which oversees and regulates all aspects of civil aviation in the United Kingdom, said it would 'not hesitate' to take action against airlines that failed to follow its guidance on cancellations and delays.

A spokesperson told MailOnline: 'The UK Civil Aviation Authority has a track record of standing up for consumer rights and will continue to do so. We have guidance on cancellations and flight disruption and expect airlines to follow this.

'Where we have evidence that airlines are not following these guidelines, we will not hesitate to take further action where required.

'If your flight is delayed, your airline has a duty of care to look after you. This can include providing food and drink, as well as accommodation if you are delayed overnight.

'If your flight is cancelled you should be offered a choice of refund or offered alternative travel arrangements at the earliest opportunity.

'This can include flights on other airlines, or a new flight at a later date at your convenience. We also expect airlines to proactively provide passengers with information about their rights when flights are disrupted.'
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A driver has been killed in a fireball this morning after crashing his car into the gates of the Russian embassy in Romania.

The man, identified locally as father's rights activist Bogdan Draghici, rammed his sedan into the building in Bucharest at around 6am.

Video showed the car engulfed in flames as security personnel ran through the area. Firefighters put the fire out but the driver died at the scene.

Days earlier, Draghici had posted a message of support for Ukraine on Facebook, branding Putin 'Hitler's clone' and lashing out at Moscow's 'sadistic' invasion.

The Russian embassy said no employees were injured and the man had 'committed this act under the influence of an explosion of anti-Russian hysteria in connection with a staged provocation in the city of Bucha'.

Romania's foreign ministry hit back: '[We] reject any attribution of context or political significance to this tragic incident and call on the Russian embassy to refrain from any interpretation until the investigation is finalised.'

Draghici's vehicle did not enter the embassy compound, police said.

Prosecutor Bogdan Staicu said the driver doused himself in petrol and set himself on fire before crashing into the building.

The driver smashed his vehicle into the embassy wall before bursting into flames, the shocking footage shows

The car smashed into the embassy wall and the driver set it alight while still inside this morning

Driver Bogdan Draghici (pictured) visited Kyiv in 2019 and said he was horrified the city was being attacked by 'Hitler's clone' Putin

The car's wreckage is attended to by police and forensic experts after fire was extinguished

Staicu said: 'The car crashed into the gate and right after the person inside the vehicle lit a device and that's how the fire inside the car started.

'Inside the car, containers with inflammable substances were found.

'So far we can't say that this act is tied to something else other than the driver's personal circumstances.'

Video of the aftermath showed the car engulfed in flames as security personnel ran through the area.

In a furious Facebook post two days ago, Draghici wrote: 'I'm Ukrainian too! Let's all be Ukrainians until this horrible war which threatens all humanity is over!

'The places where I was looking for souvenirs was sprayed by rockets fired by Hitler's clone.'

Draghici was leader of the father's rights group TATA (Anti-Discrimination Alliance of All Dads).

A city police statement said: 'This morning, around 06.00, a car left the road and hit the fence of a diplomatic mission.

'The driver died and the intervention of fellow firefighters was needed to to extinguish the fire manifested in the car.'

He was sentenced yesterday to 15 years in prison for sexually assaulting a minor, but was in the midst of an appeal.

Draghici was under 'judicial control' and banned from leaving the country till May 26, 2022, but was able to walk free pending the outcome of his appeal.

The Russian embassy said none of its employees were injured, and expressed condolences to the family of the driver.

They said: 'We must state with regret that whatever the motives of the driver, there is no doubt that he committed this act under the influence of an explosion of anti-Russian hysteria in connection with a staged provocation in the city of Bucha.'

He recently changed his Facebook profile picture to include a Ukrainian flag and in a fiery post wrote: 'Let's all be Ukrainians!'

Dozens of investigators remain on the scene in Bucharest while they search for more clues

Russia's embassy in Bucharest told the Associated Press earlier in a telephone call that it could not yet provide any details about the incident.

Romania, which shares a long land border with Ukraine, has taken in more than 600,000 refugees since Russia invaded its neighbor.

Since the war started Feb. 24, protesters have gathered outside Russias embassy in the capital to call an end to the Russian aggression.

On Tuesday, Romania ordered 10 diplomats from the embassy expelled following a string of expulsions of Russian officials across the 27-nation European Union.

Romanias Foreign Ministry said the actions of 10 embassy workers, who have been declared persona non grata, 'contravene the provisions of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relationships.'

Police officers guard the crime scene outside the Russian Embassy earlier this morning

The driver's motive remains unclear but he is alleged to have been a dad's rights campaigner

Bucharest (compound pictured) has taken in more than 600,000 Ukrainian refugees since war

Since the war began Romanian protestors have repeatedly gathered outside the embassy

On Tuesday Romania expelled 10 diplomats from the compound (pictured) amid war crimes

The incident comes days after Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed Romanias parliament Monday, when he labeled the slaying of civilians in the town of Bucha a 'war crime' and called for tougher sanctions against Russia.

Before Zelensky's address, Romania's President of the Chamber of Deputies, Marcel Ciolacu, said that the 'horrible images' that emerged after Russian troops withdrew from Bucha have 'overwhelmed and revolted us all.'

Nearly 625,000 Ukrainians have fled to Romania since Russia invaded their country on February 24, with around 80,000 still in Romania.

Wednesday's incident in Bucharest comes weeks after footage emerged of a large supplies truck reversing through the gates of the Russian embassy in Dublin as people stood nearby holding placards.

A man was arrested following the incident, which took place at around 1.30pm on March 8 before he was taken to Rathfarnham Garda Station.

The scene was cordoned off and roads near the embassy remain closed. No injuries were reported after the incident in south Dublin.
An Australian entrepreneur has burned through more than $165 million in venture capital funds only for his business to collapse.

Domm Holland shut down his one-click checkout software company Fast after failing to secure any more money to keep going.

The Brisbane native moved to Silicon Valley and booted up the company in 2019, but its product failed to catch on with American businesses.

'After making great strides on our mission of making buying and selling frictionless for everyone, we have made the difficult decision to close our doors,' he said.

Australian entrepreneur Domm Holland announced on Twitter on Wednesday that his company Fast would be closing

A statement was shared to Fast's Twitter page on the behalf of Domm Holland, the e-commerce company's Aussie CEO

'While you'll no longer see the Fast button at checkout, we are incredibly proud of the team we assembled and our work to democratize commerce through Fast's one-click checkout experience.

'Sometimes trailblazers don't make it all the way to the mountain top. But even in those situations, they pave a way that all others will follow.'

Mr Holland said he was grateful to the investors and staff at Fast and took responsibility for the company's failure.

Mr Holland said he was grateful to the investors and team at Fast and took responsibility for the company's failure

'Start-ups fail for many reasons, of which Fast obviously was not immune,' he wrote in a tweet.

'But decisions made that lead to this outcome which I take responsibility for.

'One thing I am 100 per cent certain that we did right was hire truly incredible people.

'So if you have a chance to hire someone from Fast, do so because they are the most phenomenal people I have and you will have had the pleasure of working with.'

According to Crunchbase, Fast - based in San Francisco - received US$124.5 million (AU$165 million) since it was founded in 2019.

Fast was Mr Holland's second business venture after he launched Tow - dubbed the 'Uber of towing' - in Brisbane in 2014

The company sold 'one-click checkout' software to e-commerce companies that Mr Holland said was inspired by his grandmother-in-law's struggle with online shopping.

Fast was backed by many major American investors, including Stripe, Index Ventures, and Addition Capital.

Fast was Mr Holland's second business venture after he launched Tow - dubbed the 'Uber of towing' - in Brisbane in 2014.

Tow looked to be heading in the right direction after signing a contract with Queensland Police but was liquidated in 2018.

Fast faced a lawsuit last month by a former employee who claimed 'sex discrimination was routine and gaslighting was a common tactic used to manage women'.
Prices at Aldi supermarkets in its home country of Germany will rise by as much as 50 per cent, raising fears they will do the same in Australia.

The grocery giant blamed Russia's invasion of Ukraine causing higher production and distribution costs in Europe.

Prices will rise by 20 to 50 per cent on many products, with meat and butter to be 'significantly more expensive'.

'Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, we are witnessing jumps in purchase prices that we have not experienced before,' spokesman Florian Scholbeck said.

Supermarket giant Aldi has confirmed major price rises will follow in their stores by as much as 50 per cent (pictured, shoppers at am Aldi store in Chatswood on Sydney's north shore)

While the hikes are only set to hit German shoppers hard, there are fears Australia could follow suit (pictured, an Aldi store in Newcastle, north of Sydney)

Australian shoppers were concerned global supply chains could mean prices could also rise dramatically here, even if not by as much.

'This is in Europe, but give it time,' one wrote online.

Aldi Australia said it was determined to keep prices lower than its major competitors Woolworths and Coles.

'We can confirm that even if prices on products do increase locally, we are committed to keeping them as the lowest in the market for our Australian customers,' it said.

'It is our unwavering priority to continue to have the lowest prices on high quality products, no matter what happens in the world around us.'

On January 25 in 2001, Aldi opened its first couple of stores in Australia.

Aldi opened its first Australians stores on January 25, 2001, in Marrickville in Sydney's inner-west and Bankstown in the south-west.

Up to 90 per cent of the brands were initially unknown to Australian shoppers, and in-store customers needed to bring and pack their own bags.

Aldi now operates in six states and territories, employing more than 13,500 staff.

Among its products are 'special buys' each week, which include televisions, lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners at reduced prices.
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The Czech Republic has become the first NATO country to send tanks to Ukraine, providing T-72 and armoured infantry vehicles following President Zelensky's plea for help.

Several BVP-1 infantry fighting vehicles, howitzer artillery pieces and more than a dozen T-72 tanks were yesterday loaded on a train bound for Slovakia where they are expected to head on to Ukraine, footage run by public broadcaster Czech Television showed.

The delivery is understood to be a gift agreed on by NATO allies, raising fears the trans-Atlantic bloc could be dragged into the Russian war in Ukraine despite remaining on the sidelines for more than a month.

NATO leaders have so far given Ukraine anti-tank and anti-craft missiles as well as small arms and protective equipment, but have not offered any heavy armour or fighter jets. Prague's decision to supply tanks to Kyiv will pile pressure on NATO allies to follow suit.

It comes as Russian artillery continued to pound the Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Kharkiv today as the West prepared more sanctions against Moscow in response to civilian killings that Kyiv and its allies have called war crimes.

The Czech Republic has become the first NATO country to send tanks to Ukraine, providing T-72 and armoured infantry vehicles following President Zelensky's plea for help (pictured, tanks loaded on a train bound for Ukraine on Tuesday)

Several BVP-1 infantry fighting vehicles (pictured) and more than a dozen T-72 tanks were yesterday loaded on a train bound for Ukraine, footage published by Czech Television showed

The delivery is understood to be a gift agreed on by NATO allies, raising fears the trans-Atlantic bloc could be dragged into the Russian war in Ukraine despite remaining on the sidelines for more than a month

Five T-72s and four BMP-1s spotted being moved out of storage and loaded on a train in Czech Republic. They will reportedly head to Slovakia, and possibly then to Ukraine

The Czech delivery of T-72s (pictured) has been funded by Prague as well as private donors who have contributed to a crowdsourced fundraising campaign to supply arms to Kyiv

NATO is set to discuss the delivery of more weapons to Ukraine at a meeting today and tomorrow, according to Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, but the US is widely expected to reject most demands over fears NATO could be pulled into the war

What is the T-72 battle tank? First made in Russia, the T-72 is staple of eastern European militaries and is owned by the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Bulgaria. Most of these are the T-72M standard model, which are slightly behind Russia's updated T-72B3 versions that have been used in Ukraine. The Czech Republic has ordered 35 tanks upgraded to T-72M4 CZ, giving the tank a comprehensive upgrade in every aspect and costing more than $5million per tank. It is understood the tanks Prague has sent to Ukraine are not the T-72M4 but have undergone some local modifications. Crew: Three people Main gun: 125 mm smoothbore Anti-tank guided missile: 9M119 Svir or 9M119M Refleks Machine guns: 1 x 7.62 mm, 1 x 12.7 mm Weight: 45 tons Length (including gun): 9.53 metres Width: 3.46 metres Height: 2.2 metres Top speed: 37 to 47mph Advertisement

Czech Defence Minister Jana Cernochova told parliament yesterday: 'I will only assure you that the Czech Republic is helping Ukraine as much as it can and will continue to help by [supplying] military equipment, both light and heavy.'

She declined to provide further details on the transfer but it comes after Ukraine's Vlodymyr Zelensky demanded NATO deliver armour, fighter jets and other military equipment during a summit in Brussels on March 24.

Ukraine burns through in a single day the same amount of weaponry it receives in a week, according to a senior Polish official, and Kyiv's eastern neighbours are concerned with keeping up with demand, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The Czech delivery has been funded by Prague as well as private donors who have contributed to a crowdsourced fundraising campaign to supply arms to Kyiv.

Prague, and neighbouring Slovakia which has no tanks to give, are also considering helping repair and refit damaged Ukrainian military equipment. Germany will send several dozen infantry fighting vehicles to Kyiv and the UK has approved the delivery of 20 ambulances.

The United States has agreed to provide an additional $100 million in assistance to Ukraine, including Javelin anti-armour systems, the Pentagon said on Tuesday. US chipmaker Intel Corp (INTC.O) said it had suspended business operations in Russia, joining a growing list of companies leaving the country.

NATO is set to discuss the delivery of more weapons to Ukraine at a meeting today and tomorrow, according to Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

But western officials on Monday suggested the Biden administration in Washington would act as a throttle on plans to supply more equipment to Ukraine, over fears that the war machines could breach rules allowing only defensive weapons to be supplied.

One said that the US was 'not minded' to support the supply of T-72 tanks of the type used by Ukraine from sympathetic neighbours, adding: 'They have this offensive dimension, they are not purely defensive. They would not be particularly relevant to the military activities the Ukrainians need to undertake.'

A proposal to transfer 28 MiG jets from Poland to Ukraine via the US last month was scrapped amid NATO concerns about getting drawn into conflict with Russia.

NATO leaders have so far given Ukraine anti-tank and anti-craft missiles as well as small arms and protective equipment, but have not offered any heavy armour or fight jets (pictured, Czech tanks on a train bound for Ukraine)

Prague, and neighbouring Slovakia, are also considering helping repair and refit damaged Ukrainian military equipment (pictured, Czech tanks on a train bound for Ukraine)

Field engineers of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine stand next to destroyed armoured vehicles on a street in the town of Bucha, on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, April 5, 2022

Serhii Lahovskyi, 26, and other residents carry the body of Ihor Lytvynenko to bury him in Bucha, April 5, 2022

Soldiers and investigators look at charred bodies lying on the ground in Bucha where Russia has been accused of war crimes

Finland and Sweden would be welcomed into NATO if they applied to join, Secretary-General Stoltenberg says  as Russia warns of retaliation Finland and Sweden would be welcomed into NATO if they applied to join, the head of the alliance has said today, in what would be a major blow for Russia amid Vladimir Putin's faltering invasion of Ukraine. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO general secretary, told a news conference that the 30-member alliance would work to overcome 'security concerns' between the countries applying to join and being ratified - amid fears Russia would retaliate. He spoke after Finland's prime minister Sanna Marin said her country could take a decision on joining the alliance within weeks and polls in Sweden also showed a majority of people support membership. If either country opts to join the alliance, it would mark an historic reconstruction of European security architecture that has held since the end of the Second World War. Finland, which fought a short but bloody conflict with the Soviets in the build-up to World War Two, has been officially neutral since signing a pact in 1948. As part of the pact, Finland agreed never to join a military alliance viewed as hostile to Russia, never to allow its territory to be used for an attack against Russia, and to maintain an armed forces for self-defence purposes only. In return, the country - which shares an 830-mile border with Russia - was given guarantees by Moscow that it would not be attacked. Advertisement

NATO has already supplied fuel, ammunition, helmets, protective gear and medical supplies to Ukraine, Stoltenberg said yesterday. The discussions come despite the bloc's desperate efforts to avoid being dragged into Putin's war in Ukraine.

President Joe Biden has in recent weeks ordered more US troops to NATO's eastern flank to reassure edgy allies and pledged to protect the bloc's territory if Russian forces stray over more borders.

A visibly angry Zelensky on March 26 demanded that Western nations hand over military hardware that was 'gathering dust' in stockpiles, saying Ukraine needed just one per cent of NATO's aircraft and one per cent of its tanks.

Zelensky accused the West of holding back on supplies because of 'intimidation' from Moscow and suggested Russia is in charge of NATO.

And in a late night address on Saturday, Zelensky said: 'We need more ammunition. We've already been waiting 31 days. What is NATO doing?

'Who is in charge of the Euro-Atlantic community? Is it really still Moscow, because of intimidation? We are asking for one per cent of what NATO has, nothing more.'

'If only those who have been thinking for 31 days on how to hand over dozens of jets and tanks had one per cent of their courage,' Zelensky said as he praised his troops' efforts.

Russia's constant artillery barrages and aerial bombing are reducing Ukrainian cities to rubble, killing thousands of people and driving millions to flee their homes.

Russian artillery pounded the Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Kharkiv today as the West prepared more sanctions against Moscow in response to civilian killings that Kyiv and its allies have called war crimes.

The besieged southern port of Mariupol has been under almost constant bombardment since the early days of the invasion that began on Feb. 24, trapping tens of thousands of residents without food, water or power.

'The humanitarian situation in the city is worsening,' British military intelligence said. 'Most of the 160,000 remaining residents have no light, communication, medicine, heat or water. Russian forces have prevented humanitarian access, likely to pressure defenders to surrender.'

Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said authorities would try to evacuate trapped civilians through 11 humanitarian corridors today, though people trying to leave the besieged city of Mariupol would have to use their own vehicles.

Zelensky accused the West of holding back on supplies because of 'intimidation' from Moscow and suggested Russia is in charge of NATO

A car is seen riddled with bullet holes on the street on April 5, 2022 in Bucha, Ukraine. Milley said the war in Ukraine could last for years

Nina, 74, reacts as she walks past buildings that were destroyed by Russian shelling in Borodyanka, in the Kyiv region

Russian forces last week pulled back from positions outside Kyiv and shifted the focus of their assault away from the capital, and Ukraine's general staff said the northeastern city of Kharkiv, the country's second-largest, also remained under attack.

Authorities in the eastern region of Luhansk on Wednesday urged residents to get out 'while it is safe' from an area that Ukraine also expects to be the target of a new offensive.

Western sanctions over Russia's invasion of Ukraine, described as a 'special military operation' by Moscow and the biggest assault on a European nation since World War Two, gained new impetus this week when dead civilians shot at close range were found in the northern town of Bucha after it was retaken from Russian forces.

Moscow denied targeting civilians there and called the evidence presented a forgery staged by the West to discredit it.

Speaking a day after the European Union announced new sanctions, including a ban on Russian coal imports and denying Russian ships access to EU ports, the head of the EU executive, Ursula von der Leyen, said there was more to come.

'These sanctions will not be our last sanctions,' she told European Parliament on Wednesday. 'Now we have to look into oil and revenues Russia gets from fossil fuels.'

Europe gets about a third of its natural gas from Russia and has been wary of the economic impact of the total ban on Russian energy imports advocated by Ukraine, but Von der Leyen's remarks signal the bloc's strengthening resolve to take the step that Kyiv says is vital to securing a deal to end the war.

The White House said it would also unveil new sanctions today, in part in response to Bucha. The new sanctions, coordinated between Washington, the Group of Seven advanced economies and the EU, will target Russian banks and officials and ban new investment in Russia, the White House said.

After an impassioned address to the UN Security Council on Tuesday, Zelensky said new sanctions against Russia 'must be commensurate with the gravity of the occupiers' war crimes,' calling it a 'crucial moment' for Western leaders.

Ukrainian officials say between 150 and 300 bodies might be in a mass grave by a church in Bucha, north of the capital Kyiv. Satellite images taken weeks ago show bodies of civilians on a street in the town, a private US company said.

Reuters reporters saw at least four victims shot through the head in Bucha, one with their hands tied behind their back. Residents have recounted cases of several others slain, some shot through their eyes and one apparently beaten to death and mutilated.

Since launching an invasion that has uprooted a quarter of Ukraine's population, Russia has failed to capture a single major city.

Dead bodies litter the streets near Bucha, a suburb of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, after Russian forces withdrew from the region - leaving evidence of 'war crimes' in their wake

Ukrainian servicemen inspect the wreckage of houses, cars and Russian military vehicles in the town of Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, yesterday

Men take away bodies of Ukrainian civilians killed in the Russian invasion, on a street in the small city of Bucha of Kyiv (Kiev) area, Ukraine, 03 April 2022

Members of the 64th Motorised Rifle Brigade of the 35th All-Russian Army, who Ukrainian authorities named as the culprits responsible for the torture and slaughter of hundreds on the outskirts of Kyiv, withdrew from Bucha (pictured) last week and arrived in Mazyr, Belarus, yesterday

Bodies of civilians in plastic bags lay in a mass grave in Bucha city, which was the recaptured by the Ukrainian army, Kyiv (Kiev) area, Ukraine, 04 April 2022. More than 410 bodies of killed civilians were carried from the recaptured territory in Kyiv's area for exgumation and expert examination
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Covid infection rates in England are now the 'highest we've ever seen', according to one of the country's leading virus experts.

Professor Paul Elliott, an Imperial College London epidemiologist, warned rates were 'unprecedently high in over-75s, which is 'a bit of a worry because that's the most vulnerable group'.

His comments come on the back of Imperial's Government-backed REACT-1 study, a massive surveillance project that routinely swabs around 100,000 people. Despite estimating that around 6.4 per cent of people were infected on March 31  roughly one in 16, it spotted signs that prevalence was 'plateauing' in children and younger adults.

NHS bosses have warned they are already running behind schedule on tackling the record backlog which built up during the pandemic due to the rising numbers of infected patients being admitted to hospitals and virus-related staff absences.

More than 2,000 virus patients were hospitalised in England on Sunday and more than 16,500 beds were taken up by infected people yesterday morning, the latest dates figures are available for. Both figures are nearly on par with the January peak.

It comes on the same day that a 1.25 per cent national insurance hike kicks in for millions of Brits, which will raise 39billion over the next three years to bail out the NHS and social care.

The Government-backed REACT-1 study estimates around 6.4 per cent people had Covid in England in the seven days up to March 31  a record high for the study

The REACT data  based on random swabbing of around 100,000 people  suggested rates were growing rapidly in over-75s

Infections are around 20 per cent higher in over-55s than their average over the entire pandemic

Experts say official figures are meaningless given No10's decision to axe mass testing Ministers should ditch the daily Covid statistics now that the numbers are almost meaningless, leading experts and MPs argued. Boris Johnson's decision to axe England's 2billion-a-month free testing regime means that tens of thousands of cases are being missed. MailOnline can also reveal people who buy a test privately are unable to report a positive result to the Government, skewing the case numbers even further. And scientists have for months warned the daily hospital and death numbers are misleading because they don't necessarily equate to patients who have been killed or left severely ill from the illness. No10 insiders originally hinted the daily dashboard would be stood down in April, coinciding with the end of the Government's mass-testing programme. But health officials have yet to pull the plug, despite months of appeals to stop publicising the figures every day. Department of Health insiders say there are 'currently no plans' to ditch the daily 4pm releases, even though the weekend dashboard reporting system has already been cancelled under the Prime Ministers strategy to live with coronavirus like the flu. Advertisement

Professor Elliott, who runs the REACT study, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the latest results, based on swabs of 109,000 people between March 8 and 31, show one in 16 people in England were carrying the virus  the highest prevalence ever recorded.

He said: 'The highest rates are in the primary school-aged children, getting on for 9 per cent. And of course, they're the group that, until this month, haven't been vaccinated.

'Even at the other end of the age distribution, we've got 5 per cent nearly in the over-75-year-olds. Clearly that's a bit of a worry because that's the most vulnerable group.'

He blamed the surge in the cohort in part on Omicron's 'intrinsic transmissibility, which is higher than previous variants', its ability to better evade vaccine protection and waning immunity against infection.

The infection rate among older Britons 'absolutely' highlights the need for them to get a spring booster jab, with the programme open to around 5million over-75s and half a million immunocompromised people, who were last offered a jab in the autumn.

'We do know that there is some waning protection against infection with time,' Professor Elliot said.

'Although, of course, the vaccine is extremely good at preventing serious illness and people going into hospital.'

It is the last dataset from the REACT study, which is being wound down under No10's 'living with Covid' strategy.

The Office for National Statistics infection survey, which is still being funded by the Government, on Friday claimed more than 4.1million people had the virus on any given day over the week to March 26, equivalent to one in 13 being infected.

It comes as NHS bosses warned the health service is already behind on targets for tackling the Covid backlog, which hit 6.1million in January.

The health service is expected to increase its capacity by 30 per cent on pre-pandemic levels and carry out at least 9million more scans, tests and procedures.

A new national insurance tax, which comes into effect from today, will see workers pay 1.25 per cent more to help with the recovery.

But Chris Hopson, head of NHS Providers, said virus hospitalisations and Covid-related staff absences 'mean we're not going as fast as we would like on backlog recovery'.

Professor Paul Elliott an Imperial College London epidemiologist, said almost five per cent of over-75s are infected, which is 'a bit of a worry because that's the most vulnerable group'

He told the Times hospitals 'wanted to come out of winter and hit warp speed, meeting our target of 104 per cent of pre-Covid activity as quickly as possible'. But he said some areas are only hitting 90 per cent of pre-pandemic levels.

The REACT study found infections were 'unprecedently high' among over-75s were, jumping from 1.25 per cent from its February report to five per cent by the end of March.

Speaking at a press briefing, Professor Elliott said: 'The rates are extremely high in over-75s  we've never seen higher rates in that group.

'Infections are around 20 per cent higher in over-55s than their average over the entire pandemic. They are unprecedently high.'

Over-75s are most likely to suffer severe illness with Covid but 'there is very high vaccination in the group', he said.

Professor Elliott said immunity protecting people against hospitalisation and death still appears to be high across most age groups.

But he claimed boosters given to older generations at the tail-end of last year may not be protecting them from being infected as effectively now.

According to the study: 'The high and increasing prevalence in older adults may increase hospitalisations and deaths despite high levels of vaccination.'

Professor Christl Donnelly, a statistical epidemiologist at Imperial College London, and University of Oxford, said: 'It's still the case that if you see more infection, you would expect, even if it's a very small proportion of those, to see more of the severe outcomes.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimated more than 4.1million people had the virus on any given day over the week to March 26, equivalent to one in 13 being infected. The figure is the highest ever recorded in England, topping the previous peak of 3.7m at the height of the Omicron wave in January. It is also 18 per cent higher than last week

UK's 'completely irrelevant' daily Covid cases plunge by 38% in a week to lowest level in a month... after No10 scrapped free testing Daily Covid cases have plunged to their lowest level in a month in Britain following No10's decision to scrap free testing. Another 50,202 positive tests were logged by UK Health Security Agency bosses yesterday, down 38 per cent on last week's tally. It marks the smallest daily total since March 4. Experts say the daily counts are now 'completely irrelevant', however, because they rely entirely on testing. Tory MPs yesterday insisted that 'it's time to stop' the constant cycle of updates because they 'are of little interest' and 'in isolation tell us nothing'. Swabbing rates were declining in England even before the Government chose to axe its 2billion-a-month mass-testing programme forever on April 1. But rates have since plunged further. Separate Covid-tracking surveillance projects, which show infections have hit pandemic highs and are yet to slow down, are based on tens of thousands of random tests. UKHSA officials yesterday also registered 368 deaths, in the highest daily toll since early February, while another 2,378 hospital admissions were recorded across the UK. Both measurements were up slightly week-on-week. However, both figures  which tend to spike weeks after any increase in cases  are counts of patients who have tested positive for the virus, and don't necessarily equate to patients who have been killed or left severely ill from the illness. More than half of 'Covid' patients in hospital are primarily being treated for other reasons, like a broken leg, other data shows. And the virus is not the underlying cause of death in up to a third of all fatalities. Critics say that the rise in so-called 'incidental' figures, driven by the sheer prevalence of the now-dominant BA.2, is skewing the Government's daily coronavirus statistics. Omicron's milder nature and sky-high immunity rates, from both the UK's historic vaccination drive and repeated waves over the past two years, have drastically blunted the threat the virus poses. Government data suggests it is now no deadlier than the flu. Advertisement

'So we don't yet know when we'll see a peak in the oldest age group  the 55 plus  and because those people are at higher risk of severe outcomes, that is a particular worry.

'It is possible if the prevalence continues to go up, that you will see further increases in the severe outcome rates.'

Responding to the findings, Dr Layla McCay, director of policy at the NHS Confederation, said: 'We are now seeing record numbers of people currently infected with Covid, and it's particularly concerning to note the unprecedented and still rising levels in older people.

'Nearly 20,000 people are now in hospital with Covid in England and the NHS, and its exhausted staff are once again really struggling to cope with increasing admissions and bed occupancy.

'NHS leaders and their teams are increasing their Covid services and reopening coronavirus wards, but the Government must take heed, combined with chronic staff shortages, and a waiting list backlog that now tops 6.1million, we really need a realistic conversation about the current situation in the health service.'

Despite the record numbers reported by random-swabbing studies, official Covid cases plunged to their lowest level in a month yesterday in Britain following No10's decision to scrap free testing.

Another 50,202 positive tests were logged by UK Health Security Agency bosses yesterday, down 38 per cent on last week's tally. It marks the smallest daily total since March 4.

Experts say the daily counts are now 'completely irrelevant', however, because they rely entirely on testing. Tory MPs yesterday insisted that 'it's time to stop' the constant cycle of updates because they 'are of little interest' and 'in isolation tell us nothing'.

Swabbing rates were declining in England even before the Government chose to axe its 2billion-a-month mass-testing programme forever on April 1. But rates have since plunged further.

UKHSA officials also registered 368 deaths, in the highest daily toll since early February, while another 2,378 hospital admissions were recorded across the UK. Both measurements were up slightly week-on-week.

Boris Johnson's decision to axe England's 2billion-a-month free testing regime means that tens of thousands of cases are being missed.

MailOnline can also reveal people who buy a test privately are unable to report a positive result to the Government, skewing the case numbers even further.

And scientists have for months warned the daily hospital and death numbers are misleading because they don't necessarily equate to patients who have been killed or left severely ill from the illness.

No10 insiders originally hinted the daily dashboard would be stood down in April, coinciding with the end of the Government's mass-testing programme.

But health officials have yet to pull the plug, despite months of appeals to stop publicising the figures every day.

Department of Health insiders say there are 'currently no plans' to ditch the daily 4pm releases, even though the weekend dashboard reporting system has already been cancelled under the Prime Minister's strategy to live with coronavirus like the flu.
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Jimmy Savile penned a five-page crisis management dossier at the request of Prince Charles after a series of gaffes including a foot-in-mouth moment for Prince Andrew at Lockerbie, newly released letters unearthed by Netflix revealed today.

Prince Charles wrote to depraved child rapist Jimmy Savile to ask him to help with the Royal Family's ailing image - and boosting his own profile - in a series of 'To Jimmy' letters and postcards spanning 20 years.

The Prince of Wales lavished praise on the predatory paedophile's 'straightforward common sense' and asked him for advice on improving speeches and helping him with public visits to charities. Charles also asked Savile, who was knighted in 1990, to advise his sister in law Sarah, the Duchess of York and her gaffe-prone husband Prince Andrew.

The TV star, later revealed to be one of Britain's worst child abusers who also bragged about performing sex acts on corpses in hospital morgues and stealing glass eyes from the dead for jewellery in almost 60 years of sickening attacks, even drew up a media relations handbook for Charles.

In a handwritten 1989 document he called 'Guidelines for members of the Royal Family and their staffs', Savile told Charles: 'There must be an 'incident room' with several independent phone lines, teletext etc. The Queen should be informed in advance of any proposed action by Family members'.

He said this crisis unit would be run by 'a special person with considerable experience in such matters', adding that he could speak with confidence on such matters, saying: 'I get into St James Palace and Buckingham Palace on a regular basis'.

The prince went on to incorporate some of the advice and replied to Savile: 'I attach a copy of my memo on disasters which incorporates your points and which I showed to my Father. He showed it to H.M [the Queen].'

It came a year after the Duke of York said on a visit to Lockerbie, where 270 people died: 'I suppose statistically something like this has got to happen at some stage... Of course it only affects the community in a very small way.'

In 1987 Charles wrote to Savile: 'Perhaps I am wrong, but you are the bloke who knows what's going on. What I really need, is a list of suggestions from you. I so want to get to parts of the country that others don't get to reach.' And in 1991 he sent a note thanking him 'for the most useful assistance you have provided for my speech in Guildhall'.

These are the first words of a five-page PR guide drawn up by Jimmy Savile in 1989 on how the royals should respond to significant incidents, which was sent to Prince Charles at his request and adopted in part

Savile called for a 'special person' to run a royal crisis centre, complete with multiple phone lines and Teletext

Savile's personal observations, in his own words, were based on his 'regular' visits to Buckingham Palace and St James' Palace, he said

The paedophile, who exchanged letters with Charles for 20 years, said the Queen should be informed immediately in a PR crisis

Charles went on to incorporate some of the advice and replied to Savile (pictured): 'I attach a copy of my memo on disasters which incorporates your points and which I showed to my Father. He showed it to H.M [the Queen].'

The Prince of Wales' correspondence with Savile, then the Jim'll Fix It presenter, will be shown to the world in the new Netflix documentary Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story

Charles asked Savile for help after Prince Andrew went to Lockerbie after the bombing and bungled the visit with some insensitive comments

This is one of several 'To Jimmy' postcards and letters sent to Savile by Prince Charles, who asked him for help for himself and his family

In this note he asked whether he would be willing to meet Sarah, the Duchess of York, and offer her some of his 'straightforward common sense'

Charles also asked Savile where he could make public visits as he knew he was well connected with many institutions through his fundraising

Royal experts have said that Savile was a regular at various palaces and 'walk in and drift around Diana's apartment' at Kensington Palace. He would kiss the hands of the secretaries and even 'rubbing his lips' up their arms as a greeting. Daily Mail royal writer Richard Kay said Savile once licked Princess Diana's hand, and recoiled, later saying: 'It was something very creepy'.

His correspondence with Savile, then the Jim'll Fix It presenter and arguably the most famous man in Britain at that time, are revealed to the world in the new Netflix documentary Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story, which goes online today. Experts described Charles' judgement in leaning on Savile as 'catastrophic' and a 'terrible reflection' on him.

Charles and other members of the Royal Family had no idea Savile's philanthropy was a cover for decades of abuse.

'He [Charles] was duped, like we all were,' the Netflix documentary's director Rowan Deacon told The Times, adding: 'The letters show the trust that Prince Charles put into Jimmy Savile. He was trying to appeal to the British people, trying to modernise. And he saw Jimmy Savile as his conduit to that. In hindsight, that was catastrophic.'

Charles' letters have got him in hot water in the past. The Prince of Wales has been forced to promise he will not 'meddle' in public affairs when he becomes king after a series of high-profile rows. In 2015 he had to defend his decision to write a series of letters to government ministers, some of which are known as the 'black spider' memos, so-called because of his use of black ink and his scrawled handwriting. In 2004 and 2005 it emerged he wrote 27 memos with policy demands and various comments sent to Labour's then prime minister Tony Blair and his cabinet.

And between 2010 and 2015 he he had 47 meetings with Cabinet ministers and 21 with junior ministers  at a rate of more than one a month. Some of his notes were bizarre, including a personal plea to protect the rare Patagonian Toothfish from illegal fisherman 10,000 miles away. He also lobbied ministers to use more alternative medicine such as homeopathy on the NHS because he 'couldn't bear people suffering unnecessarily'.

Savile was asked to guide the future king between 1986 and 2006 on matters from public speeches to family matters. At that time the BBC star used his fame, wealth and prolific fundraising, which raised millions for the NHS, as a way to be free to abuse who he wanted.

A five-page PR guide was drawn up in 1989 on how the royals should respond to significant incidents.

Other letters revealed how Savile was also asked to help the Duchess of York with her public relations. On December 22, 1989 Charles wrote: 'I can't help feeling that it would be extremely useful to her if you could. I feel she could do with some of your straightforward common sense.'

In one note, the Prince asks if Savile would mind meeting his then sister-in-law to help reign her erratic behaviour in.

Knowing his connections within the charity industry, Prince Charles would also ask for Savile's suggestions for public visits, without knowing these were the very places the television personality would use to attack his victims.

Later letters lavish praise on Savile's affable traits - long before the presenter's heinous past came to light - that the television star would use over a near 50 year campaign of terror to abuse hundreds of victims as young as five.

Savile came into contact with the Prince and Princess of Wales after his work on the Stoke Mandeville Hospital - whose spinal injuries ward Princess Diane opened in 1983.

It would later emerge that the paedophile DJ attacked 60 NHS patients at Stoke Mandeville Hospital alone, where he was given his own private bedroom and 24 hour access to all wards. It is also likely that he had sex with bodies in a mortuary at Leeds General Infirmary for up to 50 years and is believed to have stolen glass eyes from the dead and made them into medallions and rings.

Charles' writings paint a picture of a hospitable relationship between the Prince and the TV star.

Charles informally signs off his correspondence with his first name, while addressing Savile as Jimmy.

A request to tap Savile's influence and connections to form a 'list of suggestions... to get to parts of the country that others don't get to reach' was among the Prince's earliest letters.

Writing from Sandringham on January 14, 1989, Charles asked: 'Perhaps I am wrong, but you are the bloke who knows what's going on. What I really need, is a list of suggestions from you. I so want to get to parts of the country that others don't get to reach.'

The Prince had earlier asked for Savile's advice on responding to PR blunders, after Prince Andrew's performance in the wake of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in December 1988.

Eleven people died, along with the 259 passengers and crew on board the New York-bound plane which had set off from Heathrow. But Andrew had seemed to show little empathy in the wake of the national disaster.

Savile came into contact with the Prince and Princess of Wales after his work on the Stoke Mandeville Hospital - whose spinal injuries ward Princess Diane opened in 1983

Charles' writings paint a picture of a hospitable relationship between the Prince and the TV star. He informally signs off his correspondence with his first name, while addressing Savile as Jimmy

Netflix's new documentary will cast a light on the eccentricity and philanthropy used by Savile to mask his many decades of sex abuse allegations. Pictured: The Prince of Wales meeting Savile and Frank Bruno in November 1998

The day after the bombing, Charles wrote Savile and asked: 'I wonder if you would ever be prepared to meet my sister-in-law, the Duchess of York?

'I can't help feeling that it would be extremely useful to her if you could. I feel she could do with some of your straight-forward common sense.'

In response, Savile concocted an action plan, which was reportedly viewed by the Queen and Prince Philip, that would see an 'incident room' with independent phone lines installed and required all proposed action to be vetted by Her Majesty.

Charles later wrote back on January 27, 1989, in which he attached a memo on disasters 'incorporating your points' that would be shown to the Queen.

On April 16 that year, as Charles pondered a speech he would make at London's Guildhall, he wrote: 'You are so good at understanding what makes people operate and you're wonderfully sceptical and practical.

'Can you cast an eye over this draft and let me know how you think we can best appeal to people?'

Netflix's new documentary casts a light on the eccentricity and philanthropy used by Savile to mask his many decades of sex abuse

The television star would use his affable personality over a near 50 year campaign of terror to sexually abuse hundreds of victims, some as young as five. He also used access to vulnerable children and adults to abuse, including in the NHS

On July 4, he wrote from Highgrove House: 'Dear Jimmy, I can't tell you how grateful I am for the most useful assistance you have provided for my speech in the Guildhall the other day.

'It was really good of you to take the trouble to put together those splendid notes and provide me with considerable food for thought.

'Whether you think the final result is in any way worthwhile is another matter. With renewed and heartfelt thanks, Charles.'

Netflix's new documentary will cast a light on the eccentricity and philanthropy used by Savile to mask his many decades of sex abuse allegations.

Savile, who rose from a humble working-class upbringing to become one of British television's biggest stars, passed away aged 84 in 2011.

In his final years, he fought to quell growing speculation about his illegal exploits throughout his illustrious career with the BBC.

A Corporation-led inquiry into his actions found he had molested at least 72 children, some as young as eight, over a four decade campaign of sexual abuse with his first victim in 1959 and his last in 2006.

His horrific reign of abuse could be charted 'in the corridors, canteens, staircases and dressing rooms of every BBC premises', their 2016 report found.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine appears on screen and speaks during a United Nations Security Council meeting on the situation in Ukraine amid the Russian military invasion, at the United Nations headquarters, in New York, April 5. EPA-Yonhap



Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused the Russians of gruesome atrocities in Ukraine and told the U.N. Security Council, Tuesday, that those responsible should immediately be brought up on war crimes charges in front of a tribunal like the one established at Nuremberg after World War II.



Over the past few days, grisly images of what appeared to be intentional killings of civilians carried out by Russian forces in Bucha and other towns before they withdrew from the outskirts of Kyiv have caused a global outcry and led Western nations to expel scores of Moscow's diplomats and propose further sanctions, including a ban on coal imports from Russia.



Zelenskyy, speaking via video from Ukraine to U.N. diplomats, said that civilians had been tortured, shot in the back of the head, thrown down wells, blown up with grenades in their apartments and crushed to death by tanks while in cars.



''They cut off limbs, cut their throats. Women were raped and killed in front of their children,'' he said. He asserted that people's tongues were pulled out ''only because their aggressor did not hear what they wanted to hear from them.''



Zelenskyy said that both those who carried out the killings and those who gave the orders ''must be brought to justice immediately for war crimes'' in front of a tribunal similar to what was used in postwar Germany.



Moscow's U.N. ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, said that while Bucha was under Russian control, ''not a single local person has suffered from any violent action.'' Reiterating what the Kremlin has contended for days, he said that video footage of bodies in the streets was ''a crude forgery'' staged by the Ukrainians.



''You only saw what they showed you,'' he said. ''The only ones who would fall for this are Western dilettantes.''



As Zelenskyy spoke to the diplomats, survivors of the month-long Russian occupation took investigators to body after body of townspeople allegedly shot down by troops. Others simply surveyed the destruction.





A resident looks for belongings in an apartment building destroyed during fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces in Borodyanka, Ukraine, April 5. AP-Yonhap



In Borodyanka, northwest of Kyiv, 25-year-old, Dmitriy Yevtushkov searched the rubble of apartment buildings and found that only a photo album remained from his family's home. In the besieged southern city of Mykolaiv, a passerby stopped briefly to look at the bright blossoms of a shattered flower stand lying among bloodstains, the legacy of a Russian shell that killed nine. The onlooker sketched out the sign of the cross in the air, and moved on.



Associated Press journalists in Bucha have counted dozens of corpses in civilian clothes and interviewed Ukrainians who told of witnessing atrocities. Also, high-resolution satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showed that many of the bodies had been lying in the open for weeks, during the time that Russian forces were in the town.



The dead in Bucha included a pile of six charred bodies, as witnessed by AP journalists. It was not clear who they were or under what circumstances they died. One body was probably that of a child, said Andrii Nebytov, head of police in the Kyiv region. A gunshot wound to the head was visible on one.



The chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court at The Hague opened an investigation a month ago into possible war crimes in Ukraine.



Zelenskyy stressed that Bucha was only one place and that there are more with similar horrors  a warning echoed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.



Stoltenberg, meanwhile, warned that in pulling back from the capital, Russian President Vladimir Putin's military is regrouping its forces in order to deploy them to eastern and southern Ukraine for a ''crucial phase of the war.'' Russia's stated goal currently is control of the Donbas, the largely Russian-speaking industrial region in the east that includes the shattered port city of Mariupol.



''Moscow is not giving up its ambitions in Ukraine,'' Stoltenberg said.









While both Ukrainian and Russian representatives sent optimistic signals following their latest round of talks a week ago, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow won't accept a Ukrainian demand that a prospective peace deal include an immediate pullout of troops followed by a Ukrainian referendum on the agreement.



In televised remarks Tuesday, Lavrov said a new deal would have to be negotiated if the vote failed, and ''we don't want to play such cat and mouse.''



Ukrainian officials said that the bodies of at least 410 civilians have been found in towns around Kyiv that were recaptured from Russian forces and that a ''torture chamber'' was discovered in Bucha.



Zelenskyy told the Security Council there was ''not a single crime'' that Russian troops hadn't committed in Bucha.



''The Russian military searched for and purposefully killed anyone who served our country. They shot and killed women outside their houses when they just tried to call someone who is alive. They killed entire families, adults and children, and they tried to burn the bodies,'' he said. They used tanks to crush civilians ''just for their pleasure,'' he said.





Ukrainian soldiers walk through destroyed Russian military machinery in the recaptured city of Bucha, northwest of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, April 4. Ukraine and Western nations accused Russian troops of war crimes after the discovery of the mass graves and civilians who were apparently executed in Bucha. UPI-Yonhap
A heartbroken Ukrainian mother has found the body of her four-year-old son 26 days after he went missing in a terrifying boat escape from Russian missiles and bombs.

Sasha Zdanovych was fleeing Putin's forces on a vessel across a reservoir on the River Dnieper near Kyiv with his grandmother Zoya, 60.

They were wearing lifejackets when the boat capsized from suspected Russian gunfire, and Zoya was killed and her body recovered soon afterwards.

A heartbroken Ukrainian mother has found the body of her four-year-old son 26 days after he went missing (pictured together)

Sasha Zdanovych (pictured) was fleeing Putin's forces on a vessel across a reservoir on the River Dnieper near Kyiv with his grandmother Zoya, 60

The four-year-old and his grandmother were on a boat on a reservoir (pictured) trying to flee Russian forces last month

Sasha's mother, Anna Yakhno, 25, had hoped her only child had somehow escaped and been carried to safety by other fleeing Ukrainians.

But she has now revealed his body has been recovered after their desperate search.

She said: 'Today we found Sashenka's [Sasha's] body.

'I thank everyone who believed, who helped in the search. I thank everyone for your prayers and faith. I thank you for your support.

'Thanks to you, my little boy has come to meet me. Sashenka, our little angel is already in Heaven! Today his soul has found peace.'

Earlier she said she was hoping for a 'miracle' after hearing possible sightings of her only child with refugees who fled to Romania but they proved mistaken.

Sasha's mother, Anna Yakhno (pictured), 25, had hoped her only child had somehow escaped and been carried to safety by other fleeing Ukrainians

Earlier she said she was hoping for a 'miracle' after hearing possible sightings of her only child

Anna said: 'Sashenka, our little angel is already in Heaven! Today his soul has found peace'

She also hoped a villager had taken him to their house to hide from the carnage unleashed by Putin's invaders.

'We believe in a miracle and wait for any useful information,' said Anna six days after he went missing.

Until the Russian withdrawal, it had been difficult to search the area where he went missing after eight people had fled in a small boat.

During the search she 'barely slept' and was 'totally shattered'.

Earlier she had said: 'My little son - our only child - was staying with his beloved grandmother Zoya, 60, when the war began.

She also hoped a villager had taken him to their house to hide from the carnage unleashed by Putin's invaders

Until the Russian withdrawal, it had been difficult to search the area where he went missing after eight people had fled in a small boat

'They were in a small village with only two shops and two days after the start of the invasion all the food was gone.

'The longer they stayed there, the worse it got with supplies and electricity.

'The three last days before they decided to escape by boats there was no electricity .

'We were trying to get to them several times, or to get them out by road, but each time we had to turn cars back because of shelling.'

She said: 'Trying to escape from occupation, they ventured across Kyiv reservoir [on the Dnieper, also known as the Kyiv Sea] taking two dogs.

'Connection with them was lost.

'Sasha's granny was found dead on [March] 11, we could not collect her body, and asked locals to bury her.'
A man who is facing life in prison for killing his terminally ill wife in a failed suicide pact has told his daughter he will kill himself to be with her again.

David Hunter, a retired coal miner, is currently in prison in Cyprus after suffocating his wife, Janice, at their home near Paphos as she was suffering from leukaemia.

The 74-year-old killed his wife of 56 years in December last year, and has since been charged with her murder despite his claims she wanted to die.

David Hunter (left) is currently in a Cypriot jail accused of murdering his wife Janice (right) at their home near Paphos. The couple's daughter Lesley says it was a failed suicide pact as her mother was terminally ill

Janice, who was 75, was found unresponsive while Mr Hunter, who hails from Northumberland and tried to overdose on prescription pills, survived.

He now faces spending the rest of his life behind bars, and has told his daughter, Lesley Cawthorne, that he wants to kill himself as he does not 'know how to live without her'.

The Mirror reports he spoke to her from jail last week, where he said: 'I'm Janice's husband, and without her, I don't really know who I am.'

She is now appealing both for her father not to take his own life, and for the Cypriot authorities to drop his murder charge to one of assisting suicide, which could give him a hope of being released from prison.

Mr and Mrs Hunter, pictured here on their wedding day, had retired to Cyprus before she was diagnosed with Leukaemia

Speaking to The Mirror, the 49-year-old said her father talks to his late wife in his prison cell at night and is haunted by dreams of Janice screaming in pain from the blood cancer.

'The only thing he really cared about was giving his family a nice life,' she said.

'Now its ended like this theres a real possibility he will die alone in a foreign prison.

'I cannot bear the thought of anyone thinking badly of my dad, because my dad really is the loveliest of men.'

Speaking to the Daily Mail last month, Mrs Cawthorne said she still supports her father despite what happened and the pair had been inseparable.

'He always said that from the moment he saw her, he never looked at another woman,' she said.

'They laughed together, always had something to say to each other; they never left one another's side.

'Dad is a good man. He doesn't deserve to die on his own in a foreign prison. He is so lonely. After 56 years with Mum, it's like missing a limb.

'He is living with 12 other prisoners in a single room, sharing one lavatory. He is used to a spotless house and the levels of hygiene trouble him. It is grim.

'He has done nothing but love Mum. He's a true gentleman. Some people have asked: 'How can you forgive him?' But I just see his kindness and compassion.'

The loving daughter says her father has claimed Janice was 'talking about it (ending her life) daily'.

Lesley (pictured) said she hasn't started grieving for her mother yet because she has to keep going for her dad

'To begin with, he tried to dissuade her, then he said he would go with her,' she said.

'He loved her so much. He has nightmares now when he can still hear her screaming in pain, and they had to deal with that on their own.

'I'm horrified they were so desperate they thought that dying together was the only way out.

'They always said they didn't want to be a burden to me because I was their only child. Dad would say: "You don't want to be lumbered with us."

'They were both very proud. So they hid from me how terrified they were and it breaks my heart that I didn't know they were in such despair.'

The tragic events came to light when Mr Hunter rang his little brother in the UK after Janice's death to say he had taken an overdose of pills, and asking him to 'look after Lesley'.

His brother contacted police in the UK, who in turn contacted Interpol and they helped arrange an emergency response in Cyprus.

The former colliery worker was rushed to hospital in Paphos, where he spent four days in intensive care before being transferred to a psychiatric hospital.

'He was saying he wanted to die and I would beg him to stay alive for me,' Mrs Cawthorne said.

'Each day I spoke to him, he seemed to come out of the fog a bit more and kept telling me how much he loved me.

'Dad told me Mum had been in constant, agonising pain in the weeks before her death.

David Hunter claims Janice had been in 'constant, agonising pain' in the weeks before her death.

'She had continual diarrhoea and Dad would make nappies out of towels and lift her into the shower to wash her. She was mortified. She felt she'd lost all her dignity. She only had paracetamol and that didn't touch the sides of her pain.

'The last week of her life was terrible. She had horrendous nose bleeds, her sight was going, she couldn't eat or drink and though exhausted she couldn't sleep.

'Dad couldn't get her upstairs to bed so they lay in reclining chairs downstairs. All night he held her hand.'

After her father told his story, he was charged with his wife's murder and moved to prison, where he has remained since, not even being let out to attend Janice's funeral.

His daughter just wants him to come home where he can be supported by his family.

She is being helped by Justice Abroad, a UK-based organisation that is appealing for the charges against her father to be changed from murder to assisting suicide.

Unless her legal team can persuade the island's Attorney General to commute the charge, David, who pleaded not guilty to murder when he appeared at a preliminary court hearing earlier this month, will face a mandatory life sentence when his case is heard this month.

Speaking to the Daily Mail Michael Polak, director of Justice Abroad, said: 'David is a model prisoner, however at this stage in his life he needs to be with his family in the UK, not in jail abroad.

'So we are concentrating on getting the charge reduced to assisting suicide so he can serve a shorter sentence at home.'

If you have been affected by this story, you can call the Samaritans on 116 123 or visit www.samaritans.org.
A director of the PPE firm which is under investigation over its links to Tory peer and lingerie tycoon Michelle Mone has suddenly left the company.

Voirrey Coole, 40, had been an officer with PPE Medpro since it was formed on May 12, 2020.

That same month Lady Mone - who has strenuously denied any association with the company - recommended it to the Cabinet Office as a potential supplier.

The firm went on to win contracts awarded by the Department of Health and Social Care worth 203million to supply the NHS with face masks and surgical gowns.

In January Labour peer George Foulkes referred Lady Mone - who is married to Isle of Man-based billionaire Doug Barrowman - to the House of Lords Commissioners for Standards over PPE Medpro.

They confirmed she would be investigated and it is understood the probe would look closely at any connections she and her husband had to PPE Medpro's directors Anthony Page and Ms Coole.

Yesterday papers seen by MailOnline announced Ms Coole - another Isle of Man resident - had left the firm.

The company filings announced her appointment had been terminated, but her own listing declared her as having resigned.

Neither PPE Medpro, Ms Coole or lawyers for Lady Mone responded to MailOnline over the change in personnel or the reason for it.

The businesswoman, 50, has not posted on her Twitter feed for nearly four months - the last time on January 7 saying 'I love to put on makeup to feel my best-self'.

Voirrey Coole, left, and Anthony Page, right, were both directors when company was formed

Tory peer Michelle Mone and her billionaire husband (both pictured) face questions over their involvement in a 203million Government contract for PPE at the start of the pandemic

House of Lords Commissioners for Standards website details the probe into Baroness Mone

Lady Mone has repeatedly denied any association with the company, which she recommended to the Cabinet Office as a potential supplier in May 2020.

Although she has no actual formal connections with the company, her denials have come under scrutiny thanks to publicly documented connections between Anthony Page, PPE Medpro's owner, and businesses run by Lady Mone and her husband Mr Barrowman.

Labour peer George Foulkes referred her to the commissioners in January earlier this year.

Pictured: Anthony Page, PPE Medpro's owner, circled, at Lady Mone's wedding in 2020

PPE Medpro shows these products among items it currently offers on its website

Government details show how Lady Mone referred PPE Medpro as a potential supplier

From leaving school in Glasgow with no qualifications to modelling and business deals: How 'Baroness Bra' made her millions Lingerie tycoon Michelle Mone was born in 1971 and grew up in Glasgow's East End, leaving school with no qualifications aged 15 before finding work as a model. After running a sales and marketing team for the Labatt's brewing firm, she decided to create a range of support bras after the idea came to her while wearing an uncomfortable bra during a dinner party. Lady Mone founded MJM International with her then-husband Michael Mone in November 1996, and three years of research, design, and development resulted in the patented Ultimo bra. In August 1999, a month after having her third child, she launched Ultimo at the Selfridges department store in London, which sold the pre-launch estimate of six weeks of stock within 24 hours. The business grew rapidly and in 2010 she earned an OBE from the Queen for her contribution to business. But she sold 80 per cent of Ultimo in 2014, one year after announcing she had left the company following a breakdown in her marriage. Lady Mone was nicknamed 'Baroness Bra' after being elevated to the House of Lords in 2015, where her official title is Baroness Mone of Mayfair. To celebrate her 50th birthday, she decided to host five parties - one for each decade of her life  with her new husband billionaire tech tycoon Doug Barrowman, 55. Advertisement

They have have now confirmed she is being investigated under several sections of the Lords' code of conduct, including a section saying peers 'must never accept or agree to accept any financial inducement as an incentive or reward for exercising parliamentary influence'.

She is also being investigated under as section of the code saying peers 'must not seek by parliamentary means to confer exclusive benefit on an outside body or person (a) in which he or she has a financial interest (including by way of salary, fees, shareholding or other arrangement) or (b) in return for payment or reward'.

Lord Foulkes said Lady Mone had failed to fully disclose her business interests in PPE Medpro and asked the commissioners to investigate whether she had breached the rules against lobbying when she referred the firm to the Government.

Mr Page, the sole owner of PPE Medpro, is a wealth management expert who works for Barrowman's Knox House Trust, part of the Knox Group of companies based on the Isle of Man, where Lady Mone and her husband live on a 25 million estate.

In December The Mail on Sunday revealed Mr Page is the director of a firm that owns a luxury yacht, called Lady M, on which Lady Mone sailed around the Adriatic last summer.

Mr Page is also the majority shareholder of Lady Mone's new business venture Neo Space, which operates spaces for rent in Aberdeen.

Lady Mone founded lingerie brand Ultimo through parent company MJM International in 1996.

She was made a life peer by David Cameron in 2015.

Millions of the medical gowns bought by the NHS from PPE Medpro were never even used.

At the time they had to reach the British Standard for the sterilisation of medical devices or what was called a 'technical equivalent'.

If the equivalent was the standard aimed for, health regulator the MHRA had to approve them.

It publishes lists of current products that had been given its authorisation to be used.
Priti Patel and Liz Truss have been clashing over the backlog in visas for Ukrainian refugees, it was revealed today.

The Home Secretary is said to have asked the Foreign Secretary for more staff to help process applications.

However, Ms Truss apparently rebuffed the request saying her officials are too busy on the diplomatic response to the Russian invasion.

Barely 10 per cent of the 4,700 people granted visas under the Homes for Ukraine scheme had arrived in the UK by the end of last week - and that in itself was a fraction of those who had applied.

The separate Ukraine Family Scheme  for refugees with relatives in the UK  has awarded 24,400 but only 'hundreds' are believed to have reached Britain.

Lord Harrington, the refugees minister, admitted during a phone-in last night that the situation is a 'disgrace'.

Priti Patel (left) and Liz Truss (right) have been clashing over the backlog in visas for Ukrainian refugees

Barely 10 per cent of the 4,700 people granted visas under the Homes for Ukraine scheme had arrived in the UK by the end of last week. Pictured, refugees at the Ukraine-Poland border yesterday

The Home Office, which has more than 36,000 staff, has assigned just 300 to process visas for Ukrainian refugees.

According to The Times, Ms Patel asked for more 'manpower' from the Foreign Office, as high security clearance is needed for the work.

However, she was told the department could only offer more specialised computer terminals.

HM Revenue & Customs and the Department for Work & Pensions have reportedly supplied extra staff.

'Priti thinks the Foreign Office has failed to provide any help. She wants manpower to help process visas,' a government source told the newspaper.

'But the Foreign Office says it is really stretched at the moment. It's basically saying, 'Back off, Priti, it's your problem'.'

On an LBC phone-in last night, Lord Harrington said he had no 'excuses' as he was repeatedly grilled by frustrated callers about problems in the system.

Told by one caller that it was a 'disgrace', the peer said he 'finds it hard to disagree'.

'We know things are not good. Ten days of waiting is not acceptable,' he said.

Top surgeon hoping to help house Ukrainian refugees hits out at UK's 'disgusting' delays to visa scheme

A leading neurosurgeon who is trying to provide a home for a Ukrainian family last night branded delays to Britains refugee scheme as disgusting.

Dr Henry Marsh, 72, who has spent time working in Ukraine free of charge for more than 30 years, said his application had been held up for weeks by Home Office checks.

He said: Im distressed, embarrassed and ashamed about how the British Government has failed to deal with the refugee problem.

One gets the distinct impression that the whole thing was set up to fail. It takes such a long time that the Home Office hopes by then the war will be finished and we wont have to take the refugees.

Thousands of visa applicants fleeing the war are still waiting for a response from the Homes for Ukraine scheme which was launched three weeks ago.

Dr Henry Marsh, pictured, 72, who has spent time working in Ukraine free of charge for more than 30 years, said his application had been held up for weeks by Home Office checks

The doctor said he has faced radio silence as he tries to host cardiologist Olena, her mother and her four-year-old son Danylo who have fled Lviv.

He believes his application is being held up by criminal record checks which he says could be completed after the arrival of the family at his London home.

He said: I dont know how long it will take. All I know is that they are in no hurry and the reputation of this country will suffer even more.

Its disgusting when you compare it to the rest of Europe. Theres no reason why they could not have said: Come to England and sort out the paperwork afterwards.

Olena has been trying to get her family to safety while her doctor husband stays behind in Ukraine.

She is currently living in very unsatisfactory conditions in Warsaw and her son has been left traumatised by the upheaval.

Dr Marsh, best-selling author of Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery, said he feared the family and others like them could be exploited by criminal gangs.

He insisted: We already know sex traffickers are preying on people fleeing. They are not exactly safe at the moment... and all this when my London home is ready and waiting.

Thousands of visa applicants fleeing the war are still waiting for a response from the Homes for Ukraine scheme which was launched three weeks ago. Pictured: Refugees from Ukraine are seen on the platform boarding the train to Warsaw, at the railway station in Przemysl, southeastern Poland, on April 5

The delays have left him feeling helpless as he watches the grotesque war unfold.

He said: Its an obscene, foul thing that has happened and I feel like Im standing outside the gates of Auschwitz and unable to do anything about it. Ukraine is my second home. I know she is having a hard time and all I can say is Im very sorry.

The Home Office, which has more than 36,000 staff, has assigned just 300 to process visas for Ukrainian refugees. Figures last week showed only 4,700 visas have been granted under Homes for Ukraine, with a backlog of 27,500.

The separate Ukraine Family Scheme  for refugees with relatives in the UK  has awarded 24,400. So far only hundreds of Ukrainians have actually arrived in Britain.

A Government spokesman said: We are moving as quickly as possible to ensure that those fleeing Ukraine can find safety in the UK through the Ukraine Family Scheme and Homes for Ukraine.

We have streamlined the process so valid passport holders do not have to attend in-person appointments before arriving in the UK, simplified our forms and boosted caseworker numbers while ensuring vital security checks are carried out.

We continue to speed up visa processing across both schemes, with almost 30,000 visas issued in the last three weeks alone and thousands more expected to come through these uncapped routes.
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Tornadoes tore across the South, where authorities warned today will see a second day of dangerous weather after violent weather killed at least two people, one in Georgia and the other in Texas, on Tuesday.

A woman died on Tuesday evening in Pembroke, Georgia, where a tornado ripped part of the roof from the Bryan County courthouse, destroyed the entrance to a local government building across the street and damaged homes nearby.

Several others were injured in Bryan County, located 30 miles west of Savannah, county government spokesman Matthew Kent said. He said the woman died in one of the damaged neighborhoods, but had no further details.

In eastern Texas, W. M. Soloman, 71, died when wind toppled a tree onto Solomon's home in Whitehouse, about 100 miles southeast of Dallas, the local mayor James Wansley said. Officials said trees fell on at least four homes there.

The National Weather Service warned 7 million people in the South to expect a second day of violent storms on Wednesday, with severe thunderstorms and tornadoes likely across the Southeast.

Birmingham in Alabama, Atlanta and Macon in Georgia are among cities placed under enhanced risk of severe storms with heavy rain and damaging winds.

In Georgia, tornadoes ripped through towns and cities on Tuesday, as the National Weather Service warned of further violent weather on Wednesday

A tornado ripped part of the roof from the Bryan County courthouse (pictured) in Pembroke, Georgia, on Tuesday

A power pole ripped from its location lies on East College street in Pembroke, Ga., after a storm damaged several homes in the city on Tuesday

The National Weather Service warned 7 million people in the South to expect a second day of violent storms on Wednesday, with severe thunderstorms and tornadoes likely across the Southeast

More than 50,000 homes and businesses were without power Tuesday night from eastern Texas to South Carolina. The outages came on a day when the National Weather Service issued a nonstop stream of tornado warnings for hours as the storm system tore across Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.

In southeast Georgia, Gage Moore, 23, was driving home from work Tuesday evening on Interstate 16 in the county where Pembroke is located when his fiancee called saying she heard tornado sirens. About two minutes later, Moore said, he looked up to see a towering twister looming to the left of the highway.

Moore said he pulled over and stopped his car behind an overpass, then took cellphone video of the funnel cloud churning across the interstate.

'Everybody started slamming on brakes all around me,' Moore said. 'I could actually feel my truck shaking back and forth and hear the roar of it passing by.' He added: 'Thankfully we all stopped and left a huge gap in the interstate where it crossed.'

Afterward, Moore continued his commute home. He said he could tell where the twister crossed the highway because of the mangled exit sign and damaged trees left behind. 'Some were bent and some were broken,' Moore said, 'the tops were broken out of them.'

In South Carolina, Allendale County Manager William Goodson said a tornado, captured in a video on social media, caused damage in his rural county, but exactly how much and whether there were any injuries were unknown.

'I know we have buildings damaged and power lines down,' Goodson said.

Damage is seen at a house on South Main Street in Pembroke, Ga., on Tuesday

The Bryan County Courthouse was damaged and trees broken in half on Tuesday after a storm passed through the city of Pembroke

In South Carolina, Allendale County Manager William Goodson said a tornado, captured in a video on social media, caused damage in his rural county, but exactly how much and whether there were any injuries were unknown

Debate also was delayed for nearly an hour in the South Carolina Legislature after the state House chamber was evacuated for a tornado warning for Columbia. The legislation being debated would require athletes to compete with the gender listed on their birth certificates.

The weather service said it was sending survey teams to examine potential tornado damage in Wetumpka, Alabama. Lightning struck a flea market in the north Alabama community of Laceys Spring, causing a fire that gutted the building, news outlets reported.

Fallen trees and limbs closed a stretch of highway for hours in Newton County, Mississippi. As storms pushed into Georgia, a large tree fell and crashed through the roof of Marie Jordan's home in metro Atlanta, coming down in the living room, kitchen and garage.

'It just took everything,' Jordan told WSB-TV. 'For years and years, I have watched that tree.'

Elsewhere in Texas, one person was injured when the storms swept through Johnson County, about 40 miles southwest of Dallas. Brittaney Deaton said she became trapped in an RV trailer behind her familys home after the trailer flipped over. She said her stepfather got injured trying to free her.

'I was screaming on the phone. I couldnt get out. I was terrified,' Deaton told KDFW-TV. 'And I felt like I was just trapped, like it was going to roll with me in it. And I just thank God that I got out.'

The threat of damaging weather will move further north on Wednesday, forecasters said, with severe storms possible across an area stretching from western Alabama to the western tip of the Carolinas.

Officials say to expect airport delays due to Wednesday's system, which will see much of the Eastern Seaboard hit with heavy rain, all the way up to New England.

More than 10 million people in metro areas including Atlanta; Birmingham; and Chattanooga, Tennessee, will be at risk, the Storm Prediction Center said.

The region has faced a barrage of weather recently that included a tornado last month in metro New Orleans, where one person died, and storms that killed at least two people in the Florida Panhandle last week.

A house is seen damaged on South Main Street in Pembroke after a storm passed through the city on Tuesday

The wayward system is the latest in a series of storms that have ravaged the US South for the past three weeks.

The first system saw a deadly EF-3 tornado strike several towns in New Orleans, killing at least one, injuring dozens, and leaving more than structures in the New Orleans area destroyed.

Texas, meanwhile, saw a shocking 25 tornadoes last month alone.

Bill Bunting of the Storm Prediction Center told CNN of the continued storms, that weather systems often can fall into repetitive cycles.

'The atmosphere has a fairly chaotic component to it, but it does occasionally get into patterns where we see this repeatability. We've seen it in all seasons,' said Bunting.

'Unfortunately, for this past month, and certainly for the week ahead, the threat for severe weather is going to be present again, in many of the same areas that have already seen enough severe weather just over the past four weeks.

'The very moist air flowing northward from the Gulf of Mexico, which has helped the storms develop over the last few weeks, is once again what we will see this week.'
Asked whether he would still go to work if he was tired or had a headache, Sajid Javid (pictured) said he would 'first reach for the Nurofen'

Britons should go to work if they have a headache or feel tired  even though both are now officially recognised as Covid symptoms, the Health Secretary suggested today.

It comes after union bosses warn of a 'free for all' on staff absences following the decision to axe free testing in England.

Asked whether he would still go to work if he had a headache, Sajid Javid claimed he would 'first reach for the Nurofen'. He said it would also depend 'how tired I felt'.

Health chiefs last week quietly expanded the list of tell-tale signs of the virus to warn of nine other symptoms.

As well warning of headaches and feeling tired, officials also now say that a blocked or runny nose, a loss of appetite and feeling or being sick can signal that someone is infected.

The decision marked a huge change in the Government's stance on symptoms, after acknowledging only three for the entirety of the pandemic (a fever, cough and loss or change to taste or smell), despite other countries and health bodies including up to 14.

The move coincided with the vast majority of employees in England no longer being able to get any free swabs as part of Boris Johnson's 'Living With Covid' strategy.

Experts warned the axing of free tests for all but the most vulnerable  coupled with the expansion of the NHS symptom list  will trigger a 'free for all' on staff absences, leaving workers to decide 'whether or not they stay at home and for how long'.

Covid levels have already reached a pandemic high in England, with one in 12 people thought to be currently infected.

Since the start of the pandemic, the NHS has only listed three Covid symptoms: a high temperature, a cough and a loss or change to taste or smell. But it has now quietly expanded its list of all the tell-tale signs of the virus to also include a loss of appetite, feeling or being sick and a headache. Shortness of breath, feeling tired, an aching body, a sore throat, a blocked or runny nose and diarrhoea were also added to the list

Asked on Sky News whether he would still go to work if he had a headache or felt tired, he said: 'To answer your question directly, if I had a headache or I was feeling a bit tired, it depends how tired I felt.

'I might want to get some more sleep, and if I had a bit of a headache, Id first reach for the Nurofen.'

Covid rates in England are now the 'highest we've EVER seen', mass-testing survey reveals Covid infection rates in England are now the 'highest we've ever seen', according to one of the country's leading virus experts. Professor Paul Elliott, an Imperial College London epidemiologist, said almost five per cent of over-75s are infected, which is 'a bit of a worry because that's the most vulnerable group'. His comments come on the back of Imperial's Government-backed REACT-1 study, a massive surveillance project that routinely swabs around 100,000 people. Despite estimating that around 6.4 per cent of people were infected on March 31  roughly one in 16, it spotted signs that prevalence was 'plateauing' in children and younger adults. NHS bosses have warned that it is already running behind schedule on tackling the Covid backlog due to rising numbers of infected patients being admitted to hospitals and virus-related staff absences. More than 2,000 virus patients were hospitalised in England on Sunday and more than 16,500 beds were taken up by infected people yesterday morning, the latest dates figures are available for. Both figures are nearly on par with the January peak. It comes on the day a 1.25 per cent national insurance hike kicks in for millions of Britons, which will raise 39billion over the next three years  24billion of which is exclusively for the health service to tackle the backlog, while 5.4billion will go towards adult social care. Advertisement

The NHS notes on its website that the now 12 Covid symptoms  which also include an aching body, a sore throat and diarrhoea  are 'very similar to symptoms of other illnesses, such as colds and flu'.

People experiencing these symptoms, who also have a temperature or don't feel well enough to work, should 'try to stay at home and avoid contact with other people'.

They should also take 'extra care' to avoid contact with anyone at higher risk from the virus.

Mr Javid told Sky News it is 'absolutely right' that the virus symptom list is expanded 'as we learn more about Covid and as we come across new variants'.

He said: 'There are still three major symptoms but its right others have been added to give people a bit more information about what may or may not be Covid.'

Just suffering from one or two of the symptoms 'doesn't in itself say that you've got Covid', Mr Javid said.

People should 'look out for' the three main symptoms, he added.

His comments come days after free Covid tests for the majority of people in England were axed.

Only the elderly, most vulnerable residents and health and care workers can access tests for free.

Tests are, however, available at high street retailers such as Boots for 2.

It marked one of the final steps on the route back to normal life, after mandatory self-isolation rules were scrapped in mid-February.

Unions yesterday warned people suffering cold-like symptoms will be left to decide if they should stay at home or go to work.

Lucy Moreton, a professional officer at the ISU, the union for borders, immigration and customs, warned that it is 'inevitable' staff will be off work with mild symptoms if they are unable to confirm whether or not they have Covid.

Julie McCulloch, director of policy at the Association of School and College Leaders, told The Daily Telegraph that the Government's strategy could spark chaos.

She said: 'The Government's new "Living With Covid" strategy feels like a complete free for all, in which it will be impossible to confirm whether or not symptoms are Covid, leaving individuals to decide whether or not they stay at home and for how long.

'This confusion is likely to lead to transmission of the illness just as many pupils are preparing to take exams.'

It comes as the UK's two biggest surveillance studies suggest Covid infection rates are at their highest ever level.

UK Health Security Agency data shows another 143,382 positive Covid tests were logged over the weekend, down by a third in a week. But the drop in cases comes as the number of tests taken in the UK plummeted to its lowest level in a year (shown in graph)

The REACT study, based on swabs of 109,000 people, yesterday reported that one in 16 people in England (6.4 per cent) were infected.

And the Office for National Statistics on Friday claimed more than 4.1million people had the virus on March 26, equivalent to one in 13 being infected.

But despite the record numbers reported by the random-swabbing studies, official Covid cases plunged to their lowest level in a month.

Another 50,202 positive tests were logged by UK Health Security Agency bosses yesterday, down 38 per cent on last week's tally. It marked the smallest daily total since March 4.

Experts say the daily counts are now 'completely irrelevant', however, because they rely entirely on testing.

Tory MPs insisted that 'it's time to stop' the constant cycle of updates because they 'are of little interest' and 'in isolation tell us nothing'.

Swabbing rates were declining in England even before the Government chose to axe its 2billion-a-month mass-testing programme forever on April 1. But rates have since plunged further.

UKHSA officials also registered 368 deaths, in the highest daily toll since early February, while another 2,378 hospital admissions were recorded across the UK. Both measurements were up slightly week-on-week.
An elderly retired police officer shot dead his terminally ill wife before turning the gun on himself after telling his family he couldn't live without her.

Former soldier John McDonald Smith, 79, was devoted to wife Carol, 76, and spent the final days of her life caring for her at their home in Bexhill, East Sussex, after she was discharged from a hospice.

In an email to his children, Smith wrote: 'I do not wish to live without your mum. This is not a slight on any of you. I love you all and I just don't wish to live without your mum.'

On February 5, 2021, the couple's son Andrew visited them and saw his mother in 'severe pain' with her face turning blue. Smith showed his son a revolver and in the early hours of the next morning, shot dead his wife before turning the gun on himself.

Incredibly, Smith survived and still has the bullet lodged in his head.

At Lewes Crown Court, the former soldier was handed a custodial hospital order after pleading guilty to manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility and possession of a firearm.

John McDonald Smith, 79, was devoted to wife Carol (pictured), 76, and spent the final days of her life caring for her at their home in Bexhill, East Sussex

In the early hours of February 6, 2021, Smith shot dead his wife Carol before turning the gun on himself. Incredibly, he survived and still has the bullet in his head

The former soldier, who served in the Far East before joining Surrey Police, broke down in the dock as prosecutor Philip Bennetts QC described that it was obvious his wife did not have long to live when she came home to die in February last year.

'She kept saying, "I want to die, I want to finish,"' Mr Bennetts said.

Andrew Smith visited his parents at their home on what was to be their final day together.

Mr Bennetts said: 'When he was alone with his parents, his mother was in severe pain. His father said, "When you go, I go" and his mother nodded in agreement to this.

'He said he would be going straight away, immediately.'

Smith showed his son the revolver and said the skin turning blue around her nose and chin was a sign his mother was going.

'Andrew left the room,' Mr Bennetts said. 'Shortly afterwards, there was the sound of gunshots. At 2.02am, she was pronounced dead and he was arrested.'

The revolver was recovered from the house.

Police and forensic investigators explore the scene of the shootings at Mr and Mrs Smiths home in Bexhill, East Sussex

John Smith survived and still has the bullet in his head, lodged between the brain stem and carotid artery.

In an email on February 5 shortly before the shootings, Smith wrote to his children: 'Your mum and I had been married for 47 years.

'In our late 70s, it was never really likely we would clock up many more years. If she was to pass away before me, I would like go right away.

Smith was interviewed in hospital by officers and became distressed at learning he would make a full recovery. Upon hearing of his wife's death, he said: 'I'm glad... she was in a lot of pain.'

Smith was sectioned under the Mental Health Act soon afterwards.

The court heard Smith cared for his wife for many years and the family were concerned for his mental health when it became clear she did not have long to live.

Another son, James, said that his father told him he could not live without his wife.

In a statement, he said: 'I feel it is important for his sake for the court to know, he would have wanted to stop her pain.'

Son-in-law Michael Hewson described how he had given his Smith a pistol and ammunition to hand over to authorities when he was still a serving police officer. Smith also claimed to have found another gun at around the same time and kept both.

At Lewes Crown Court, the former soldier was handed a custodial hospital order after pleading guilty to manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility and possession of a firearm

Forensic psychiatrist Dr Marco Picchioni told the court there had been a degree of preparation and planning and recommended returning Smith - who had a history of depression and suicide ideation - to hospital for further treatment.

Tom Nicholson Pratt, defending, said: 'There is nothing to contradict his love and devotion to her.

'Her condition was difficult for both of them, but he lovingly attended to both of their needs.'

The lockdown restrictions apparently took a toll on the mental health of both husband and wife, leaving him feeling 'helpless' to alleviate her suffering.

Judge Christine Laing QC told Smith it was clear he adored his wife.

'She was your wife for more than half of your lifetimes. She had limited mobility and was in severe pain.

'You ended her life by placing a gun in her mouth and pulling the trigger.

'It is the duty of the court to uphold the sanctity of human life in all circumstances, no matter what personal views people may have.

'You were rightly charged with her murder and the crown have accepted your responsibility was diminished by reason of your mental health at the time.

'You were a devoted couple, still very much in love with each other and could not contemplate life without the other. This was not a situation where you had had enough or wished to be free.

'You and Carol decided neither of you wished to live without the other. You shot her to ensure she would not be resuscitated again because having shot her, you shot yourself.

'As somebody who had worked in service of the public for most of your adult life in the army and police service, you can be considered as somebody of exemplary character.'

Judge Laing told Smith he would be returning to hospital where it would be for psychiatrists to decide if and when he was to be released.

'Today, you will be going back to the hospital and it will be for the doctors to decide when and if it is safe to release you.'

The judge thanked Mr Bennetts for dealing with a very difficult and very tragic case.

Before he was helped out of the dock and down the stairs to the cells, Smith said: 'Thank you, your honour. Thank you.'
Gen Z activists from Just Stop Oil today climbed onto lorries and locked themselves to pipes at the UK's largest oil depot, as one declared: 'They can take away my liberty, they can take away our freedom, but they cannot take away our courage.'

It came as at least 20 protestors from the recently formed eco-mob blocked critical facilities at the Navigator oil terminal in Thurrock, Essex, for the sixth day in a row.

The group unfurled banners and sent out video messages during the protest, which started at around 3am, with one declaring he would 'rather be at home in bed' than out demonstrating, adding that he has no choice due to the government's 'refusal to act on the climate crisis.'

It came after two activists were arrested last night after spending five days in the oil depot's tunnels 'trying to stop the flow of oil'.

In a video message shared before they were removed, the man and woman said: 'We've been here for five days, we're f*****g shattered and we haven't had any food, and it's been a challenge.'

They added: 'We need an emergency response, oil is killing people right now and causing wars... we need to stop oil.'

The young movement describes itself as a 'coalition of groups' which want to 'immediately halt all future licensing and consents for the exploration, development and production of fossil fuels in the UK.'

Among the activists at the Navigator oil terminal today was 23-year-old Hannah (pictured in video message), from Brighton, who said: 'I'm so scared. It's obscene'

Some 25 protesters from the environmental organisation climbed onto lorries (pictured above) at the Navigator oil terminal in Thurrock, Essex, and locked themselves to pipework today

Elsewhere, another 11 activists sat down in the road before being intercepted by police. Pictured: Activists from Just Stop Oil attempt to block traffic in Thurrock, Essex, today

'We're f*****g shattered': Eco-warriors from Just Stop Oil record video message from inside pipes at Navigator oil terminal, imploring more people to join the fight against the climate emergency. They said they spent five days in the pipe network.

Elsewhere, another 11 activists sat down in the road as they attempted to block a nearby roundabout before being intercepted by police.

It comes as UK motorists continue to suffer at the pumps with petrol prices hitting record levels in recent weeks after Brent crude oil hit a high of $128 last month - up from lows of $19 seen at the peak of the pandemic.

Among the activists at the Navigator oil terminal today was 23-year-old Hannah, from Brighton, who said: 'I'm so scared. It's obscene.

'I'm 23 and the only way people will listen to me is if I lock myself onto the pipework of a fuelling station.'

She added: 'Every drop of new oil is signing the death sentence of children in the global south and the children I want to have one day.

'My message is: They can take away my liberty, they can take away our freedom, but they cannot take away our courage.'

Another said he was 'furious' after watching the Government 'get into bed' with the fossil fuel industry.

He stared directly at the camera, adding: 'I don't want to be here, I want to be at home in my bed, but our government refuses to act on the climate crisis, so we have to, we don't have a choice right now, otherwise our lives are on the line.'

This Just Stop Oil protestor said he was 'furious' after watching the Government 'get into bed' with the fossil fuel industry as he demanded more people to join his cause

Meanwhile, two supporters of the group who spent five days in a secret network of tunnels (pictured on April 1) dug at the oil terminal were removed and arrested last night

Meanwhile another protester named Nathan, 22, from Coventry, said: 'It's quite simple. New oil does not happen if our government is serious about the climate crisis.

'I am facing living out the rest of my life surrounded by unimaginable horror that has been brought on us all by the rich and powerful.'

He added: 'Fossil fuel companies, governments, and dirty bankers have gotten away with robbing ordinary people across the world, and the UK, for too long.'

As of Monday, police across the UK had arrested a total of 275 people in connection with the fuel protests - including activists who erected bamboo towers outside an oil terminal near London Heathrow Airport yesterday.

Essex Police said they had arrested 10 people earlier this week following a number of demonstrations at fuel sites in the county on Friday.

The force added it had arrested 172 people in total as of yesterday and it was 'continuing to engage with a small number of people remaining in situ'.

Activists from the Just Stop Oil environmental group are detained by police as they attempt to block traffic in Thurrock, Essex, this morning

Two police officers are seen alongside four Just Stop Oil protesters in Thurrock, Essex, today. It comes as UK motorists continue to suffer at the pumps with petrol prices hitting record levels in recent weeks

On Monday, Extinction Rebellion said around 30 protesters returned to the Esso oil facility near Heathrow Airport at 4am, erecting a bamboo structure in front of its entrance.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said four people had been arrested, bringing the total number of arrests following protests in London and Staines to 18.

Warwickshire Police meanwhile said it had arrested 68 people for a range of alleged offences including criminal damage, obstructing a highway and public order offences after weekend protests at Kingsbury Oil Terminal.

West Midlands Police said 13 people had been arrested following a protest at a terminal in Tyburn, Birmingham on Sunday.

Hampshire Police said its figure stood at four arrests after demonstrations took place on Friday at Hythe Terminal in New Road in Hythe and at BP in Hamble Lane and Copse Lane.

Andrew Smith, from Extinction Rebellion, said following the Esso protest: 'We're here to say that climate action cannot wait. Right now, governments are choosing to exploit the crisis in Ukraine to hand out oil licences and continue the fossil fuel economy that's destroying us.

Police on the scene as the eco protesters block a road leading to the Kingsbury oil terminal in Warwickshire yesterday morning

Activists from Just Stop Oil sit on an oil tanker as they block the Kingsbury oil terminal in Warwickshire on Tuesday morning

Some 20 protesters sit down in the road with banners at the gate to the Kingsbury oil terminal in Warwickshire yesterday

'The reality is, the UK public wants faster action on climate as the energy crisis hits. We know what is happening and what needs to be done - by acting in favour of corporate interest over the will of the people, the Government is showing contempt for the people who elected them.

'How long ago did our Prime Minister say Cop26 was our last chance to save humanity? And now they're sidelining climate policy once again. This is not living in reality.'

The group said further action is expected from this Saturday in London's Hyde Park.

A Government spokesman said: 'Any criminal activity will not be tolerated, and swift action is being taken by the police, preventing significant disruption to the public and industry.

'While we are working to drive down our use of expensive fossil fuels, there will continue to be ongoing demand for oil and gas over the coming decades while we transition to cheaper low-carbon energy.

'As the Business Secretary has said, turning off our domestic source of gas overnight would put energy security, British jobs and industries at risk, leaving us more dependent on foreign imports.'
A former chef at Tom Kerridge's double Michelin-starred gastropub is suing for 150,000 after he was scalded by boiling water during a kitchen accident involving a pressure cooker.

Andrew Lewis was working at the TV chef's lauded Hand & Flowers - the UK's only pub with two Michelin stars - when boiling stock water exploded out of an urn.

Mr Lewis, 28, claims he suffered scalds across more than a third of his body, leaving him permanently scarred, suffering flashbacks and mentally traumatised.

He said he had been attempting to fix a leak on a stock boiler by tightening the tap.

He is now suing The Hand and Flowers Ltd, of West Street, Marlow, Buckinghamshire, and IPM Catering Ltd, of Kettering, Northamptonshire, the company responsible for servicing the stock boiling urn, claiming up to 150,000 compensation.

Former Hand & Flowers chef Andrew Lewis (left), is suing Tom Kerridge's restaurant and the company responsible for servicing the stock boiling urn that exploded and covered him in boiling water for 150,000

Tom Kerridge's restaurant is being sued by a former employee, who claims the stock boiler which exploded was faulty and defective

The Hands & Flowers (pictured) was opened in 2012 and was the first pub in the UK to be awarded two Michelin stars

Mr Lewis had been trying to prevent a leak from the stock urn when the tap came loose and boiling water was ejected over him (stock image)

Mr Lewis says he was effectively exposed to a 'trap' and that one or other of the companies was negligent in 'failing to ensure he was adequately protected from the risk of burn and scald created by the unintended ejection of the stock'.

And according to documents lodged with London's High Court, each of the companies insists the other was to blame for the accident.

The Hand & Flowers gastropub in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, opened in 2005 and is owned and operated by Tom Kerridge and his wife Beth Cullen-Kerridge.

Famed for its 88 steaks, it gained its first Michelin star within a year of opening and a second in the 2012 list, making it the first pub to hold two stars, and was named the AA Restaurant of the Year for 2011-12.

Mr Kerridge on the gastropub's website explains the Hand and Flowers philosophy, saying: 'I'm a big believer that food brings people together in a space where they can enjoy not just the flavours, but the company they're with. I don't go in for that 'temple of gastronomy' thing - I just want people to have a nice time, and that includes the warmth of hospitality.'

Mr Lewis noticed stock was leaking from the urn, when he tried to tighten the tap it suddenly came away from the stock boiler, causing pressurised, boiling stock water to be thrown over him

In court documents, Mr Lewis' barrister Simon Brindle explains how the accident happened, saying that he had been working at the Hand and Flowers as a demi chef du partie for just over a year when he was injured on October 24, 2018.

During his shift, he was responsible for 'setting up and switching on' the 'stock boiler' in the gastropub's back kitchen, 'a large, free-standing, pressure cooker... a drum on four legs, which has a lid on top and a tap on the front'.

'Water, vegetables and/or meat (the stock) is placed inside the drum, the machine is switched on and then, once ready, the stock is extracted from the stock boiler via the tap. The stock inside is heated under pressure, resulting in the temperature of the water exceeding 100 degrees,' the barrister explained.

Having later noticed that stock was leaking from the urn onto the kitchen floor, Mr Lewis 'first cleared it up, and then attempted to fix the leak by tightening the tap.

'To do so he crouched down in front of the tap. Unfortunately, as he was trying to tighten the tap, it suddenly came away from the stock boiler, causing pressurised, boiling stock water to be ejected from it and over him.

'As a result of the accident, the claimant suffered 34% partial thickness burns to his left chest, abdomen, left forearm, right forearm and both legs, feet and ankles.

'He required emergency hospital admission,' the barrister added.

'It is the claimant's case that the stock boiler was faulty and defective within the meaning of the Defective Equipment Act.

How to treat a scald To treat a burn the NHS recommends you follow this first aid advice: Immediately get the person away from the heat source to stop the burning Cool the burn with cool or lukewarm running water for 20 minutes  do not use ice or any creams Remove any clothing or jewellery that's near the burnt area of skin Make sure the person keeps warm by using a blanket Cover the burn by placing a layer of cling film over it Use painkillers such as paracetamol or ibuprofen to treat any pain If the face or eyes are burnt, sit up as much as possible Advertisement

'The second defendant undertook maintenance, servicing and repair of commercial kitchen equipment, including the stock boiler,' the barrister said.

He added that Mr Lewis' 'primary case' is that a maintenance engineer employed by IPM failed to secure the tap properly after servicing it.

He continued that IPM deny that claim and contend that somebody employed by the Hand and Flowers was responsible for the tap being loose.

The barrister went on to say that Mr Lewis, of Blackthorne Rise, Tetsworth, Thame, Oxfordshire, 'has been left with extensive scarring and discolouration on his right leg, left leg, chest, abdomen and both hands,' which 'represents a permanent cosmetic disfigurement'.

'As a result of the accident, the claimant suffered delayed onset post traumatic stress disorder,' he said.

Mr Lewis 'has returned to work and is now a head chef at a different restaurant.

'However, he finds that he experiences significant pain in his legs at the end of the working day.

'At present, he is able to work through the pain and it is hoped that it will improve with time.

'Accordingly, and in any event, the claimant claims lump sum damages for the risk that he will suffer a loss of earnings in the future, as a result of his injuries,' the barrister said.

The defence to the action of both defendants was not available from the court.
Relative of Ackland said 'Everyone is devastated, and absolutely its a tragic time'

Ackland pleaded guilty in Plymouth Crown Court to murdering her in November

A relative of the indie band guitarist who murdered teenager Bobbi-Anne McLeod has described the killing as 'a tragedy for everyone'.

Cody Ackland, 24, yesterday confessed to snatching the 18-year-old off the street in November 20 last year in Plymouth as she waited for a bus to see her boyfriend.

He is said to have beaten her with an unknown blunt instrument before dumping her tiny 4'11' body at Bovisand on November 23 last year.

One of Ackland's relatives said outside Plymouth Crown Court yesterday: 'My family are going through quite a difficult time at the moment.

'Everyone is devastated, and absolutely its a tragic time for everyone, especially Bobbi-Annes family.

Ackland - who was a stranger to her - was born in Germany, where his father, 53 is believed to have served in the British Army.

His parents are separated but live close to each other in Plymouth.

The killer had previously been in a band called Rakuda  named after a bar in the city  who disbanded after he was charged.

Murderer and his innocent victim: Cody Ackland, 24, snatched Bobbi-Anne McLeod, 18, off the street before killing her

Bobbi-Anne McLeod's mother Donna sobbed during the hearing where Ackland pleaded guilty

She had been waiting at this bus stop - just minutes from her home - when she was snatched and murdered by Ackland

Social media content from Ackland quoted Oasis song Cast No Shadow and showed beach near where Bobbi-Anne was left

Cody Ackland, 24, who lives in central Plymouth with his mother and played in popular local band Rakuda, at an early hearing

Ackland's four-piece band were named after Bar Rakuda, a venue in the centre of the city which they regularly frequented

Cody Ackland, in the dock at Plymouth Crown Court, after he pleaded guilty to the murder of the 18-year-old student

Ackland and his fellow bandmates, who had described their influences as Kasabian and Oasis, had built up a cult following.

They had released a number of songs on Spotify with titles such as: 'I want to enter your soul; Atomic Woman;' and 'Where do I go?' as well as an EP played on local BBC radio.

Social media pictures of Ackland, who went to Estover Community College in Plymouth, showed him downing pints between songs.

The killer also appeared to revel in the image of a booze filled rocker, with one associate claiming at the time of his arrest: 'He's a good-looking bloke and fancies himself as a bit of a lad.'

In court yesterday Bobbi-Anne's devastated family sobbed as Acland pleaded guilty to murdering her as she headed into Plymouth to meet boyfriend Louie Leach, 17.

She had been last seen waiting for a bus near her home but never got off at the other end where she was planning to meet her boyfriend.

Ackland bundled Bobbi-Anne, who was just 4'11' tall, into his car then apparently beat her repeatedly with a blunt instrument in the relentless attack.

After he killed the teenager he hid her in woodland in a desperate attempt to escape justice.

The search for Bobbi-Anne sparked a massive police hunt after she vanished waiting for a bus just four minutes from home

Poser Cody Ackland, 24, uploaded arty pictures to his social media page, but hid a secret side as a violent murderer

Bobbi-Anne McLeod, 18. smiles happily in a self-taken picture in a mirror, complete with fun social media filter effect

Bobbi-Anne's disappearance prompted a huge search after her phone, bus ticket and headphones were found abandoned. Police were able to trace her phone but could not pinpoint where in the city she was.

The hunt for Bobbi-Anne's murderer: how tip-off led to 18-year-old's body November 20 - Bobbi-Anne fails to catch her bus into town, prompting a call to police when she does not arrive. November 21 - Officers tracking her phone say it is still in the Plymouth area but it has now stopped ringing. November 22 - Police appeal for the public's help to find Bobbi-Anne and shortly afterwards locate her phone. November 23 - Information is passed to the police which leads to the discovery of Bobbi-Anne. Two men from Plymouth, aged 26 and 24, are arrested on suspicion of murder. November 25 - The 26-year-old man is released without charge. November 26 - Jody Ackland - the 24-year-old arrested man - is charged with murdering Bobbi-Anne and appears in court. December 1 - Plymouth Coroner's Court says it is still not known how Bobbi-Anne was killed. April 5 - Jody Ackland pleads guilty to murdering the 18-year-old in a short crown court hearing. Advertisement

Bobbi-Anne's disappearance prompted a huge search after her phone, bus ticket and headphones were found abandoned. Police were able to trace her phone but could not pinpoint where in the city she was.

But three days later, Ackland walked into a police station and told police what he had done and revealed he had hidden Bobbi-Anne's body in a wooded area off a lane near the local beach. Half a year previously he had posted scenes from a fire at the sands, complete with lyrics from Oasis song Cast No Shadow.

Yesterday her family and friends' very worst fears were realised as Ackland confessed to deliberately killing her in the attack, pleading guilty to the single count of murder.

Bobbi-Anne McLeod's mother, father and brother were seated in the public gallery while the victim's friends and extended family were seated in a separate court room via video link. The victim's mother Donna McLeod wept throughout the brief hearing.

Police believed she had been abducted but the prosecution said it would not seek a trial on a charge of kidnap due to the guilty plea to murder.

Judge Robert Linford told Ackland: 'You have pleaded guilty to murder and the sentence is fixed by law. The sentence is imprisonment for life and the only issue will be the minimum term I will impose.'

Bobbi-Anne's parents and other family members sat next to police officers just a few feet from the enclosed glass fronted dock where Ackland sat surrounded by security staff.

Before Ackland was brought into court, Judge Linford said: 'When this case last came before the court I asked for an atmosphere of restrained silence during the proceedings, I got it, and I was very grateful for the way everyone conducted themselves in difficult circumstances

Louie Leach, 17, Bobbi-Anne's grieving boyfriend (pictured together), was comforted by her family after her body was found by investigators

Bobbie-Anne McLeod was last seen waiting at a bus stop in Plymouth on the evening of Saturday November 20 last year

Police said at the time there was 'no known link between the suspect and the victim', who was 4'11' tall and of slight build

'I want to repeat that these are very difficult, tense hearings but again I expect the case to proceed in silence with no reaction from anyone to anything that may be said or done during the hearing.'

Prosecutors said said the were 'fully intending' to serve the full psychiatric report by the end of this week and judge Linford said he would not be seeking further psychiatric evidence in the case.

Richard Posner, prosecuting, said he was awaiting further evidence from a neuropathologist's report that he hoped to be able to serve on the court before the end of the month.

He said when he had received it, he would be ready to set out a full sentencing note detailing the facts of the murder.

Ray Tully QC, for Ackland, said that he would be providing the court with a psychiatric report about the defendant ahead of the sentencing hearing.

Bobbi-Anne lived in a three-bedroom terrace house on a 1970s housing estate in the Leigham area of Plymouth, which is made up of a mix of council and private homes.

She attended Leigham Primary School and then Tor Bridge High School and was not believed to be working at the time of her death.

Her disappearance happened as she was on her way to meet her boyfriend Louie in Plymouth.

At the time one of her friends said he was being comforted by her family.

They said in November: 'Louie is with Bobbi-Anne's family now and they are helping each other through this difficult time.

'They can barely speak. There are no words for the horror they are living through.

'Bobbi-Anne and Louie were really in love and were a wonderful couple.

'They had their whole lives ahead of them and now this has been cruelly taken away from Louie and it's crushed him.'

Assistant Chief Constable Nikki Leaper said yesterday morning: 'We note the guilty plea entered at court today by Cody Ackland for the murder of Bobbi-Anne McLeod.

'We now await sentencing of Ackland at a later date by HH Judge Linford.

'Our thoughts remain with the McLeod family and those close to Bobbi-Anne who have had a daughter, sister and friend so cruelly taken from them.'
Chinese enterprises hailed for skills transfer to Zambians

Xinhua) 09:22, April 06, 2022

LUSAKA, April 5 (Xinhua) -- Chinese enterprises operating in Zambia have been commended for contributing to skills development in the country, an industry body said on Tuesday.

The Zambia-China Friendship Association said a visit to some Chinese enterprises operating in the country revealed an exciting trend of skills transfer in the local workforce.

Fredrick Mutesa, the association's secretary-general said it was gratifying that local workers who did not have any skills have been provided skills and were able to use the skills acquired in their workplaces.

He said when he appeared on a live radio interview "Let the People Talk" on Radio Phoenix that a number of Chinese enterprises have put in place deliberate programs aimed at imparting skills to local workers in order to improve productivity.

Chibeza Mfune, the association's deputy secretary-general said the association was happy that China has been at the forefront of providing skills in Zambia.

He said during the same program that apart from providing skills through scholarships in various skills such as medicine and engineering, among others, local people undertaking China-funded projects were also being imparted with skills.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
President Joe Biden speaks during an event about the Affordable Care Act, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, April 5. AP-Yonhap





The United States and its Western allies plan to pile additional sanctions on Russia, Wednesday, after the emergence of troubling new evidence of war crimes in Ukraine, according to the White House. The new penalties will include a ban on all new investment in Russia.







Among the other measures being taken against Moscow are greater sanctions on its financial institutions and state-owned enterprises, and on government officials and their family members, according to White House press secretary Jen Psaki.







"The goal is to force them to make a choice," she said. "The biggest part of our objective here is to deplete the resources that Putin has to continue his war against Ukraine."







Separately, the Treasury Department moved Tuesday to block any Russian government debt payments with U.S. dollars from accounts at U.S. financial institutions, making it harder for Russia to meet its financial obligations.







The Biden administration also announced Tuesday night that it was sending an additional $100 million worth of military assistance to Ukraine. Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said the new equipment will meet "an urgent Ukrainian need for additional Javelin anti-armor systems."






Drone footage taken from the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant appears to have confirmed reports that Russian troops dug trenches and fortifications in some of the most irradiated parts of the region.

The footage, which has been geolocated and widely shared on social media, shows mounds of disturbed earth and fortifications dug on the outskirts of the Red Forest, just a few miles west of the Chernobyl plant.

After the drone camera zooms out from the abandoned Russian positions and pans out, the ominous steel confinement dome that encapsulates the destroyed reactor can be seen in the distance.

The Red Forest sits firmly inside the inner exclusion zone around Chernobyl, and was the area most heavily affected when the No. 4 reactor exploded in 1986, causing the world's worst nuclear accident.

Last week, Ukraine's state nuclear energy company Energoatom reported that several Russian troops had been evacuated from the forest to Belarus for acute radiation syndrome (ARS) treatment - though this is yet to be verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The last contingent of Russian troops retreated from their positions around Chernobyl on Friday last week, handing control of the territory around the power plant back to Ukraine for the first time since the start of the invasion on February 24.

Drone footage taken from the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant appears to have confirmed reports that Russian troops dug trenches and fortifications in some of the most irradiated parts of the region

The footage shows earth fortifications, trenches, and pits filled with water, as well as deep tracks in the soil churned up by Russian armoured vehicles. It also appears some of the earth has been scorched around the Russian encampment

After zooming out from the abandoned Russian encampment, the drone panned out to the left and captured the ominous steel dome that contains the destroyed nuclear reactor at Chernobyl power plant

The Red Forest sits firmly inside the inner exclusion zone around Chernobyl, and was the area most heavily affected when the No. 4 reactor exploded in 1986, causing the world's worst nuclear accident. The reactor is now encapsulated in concrete and a thick steel shell to prevent further radioactive leaks

This map of the exclusion zone around Chernobyl shows just how close the Russian trenches were dug to the site of the 1986 disaster, a stone's throw away from Pripyat - the abandoned town where the plant's workers lived with their families prior to the explosion

Though reports that Russian troops were evacuated from the Red Forest to Belarus to receive treatment for ARS are yet to be confirmed by the UN's nuclear watchdog, there is speculation that soldiers who built the fortifications could well have been exposed to high levels of radiation.

Huge swathes of land in and around the Red Forest were heavily polluted by radioactive smoke and dust in the aftermath of the 1986 disaster, and many of the trees and wildlife in the forest died.

The site got its name when dozens of square miles of trees that did not die in the aftermath of the explosion turned red after absorbing incredible doses of radiation.

In the years following the accident, the land was razed and covered with fresh soil and sand before new trees were planted, but the radioactive particulates still remain trapped underneath the forest's top soil.

The region has become a natural wildlife reserve in recent years as all manner of flora and fauna have flourished unperturbed by humans, and the powerplant still maintains a number of employees tasked with maintenance and safety work - though they were rotated regularly prior to the Russian invasion.

But experts believe that Russian troops who returned to the exclusion zone to dig trenches and fortifications may have sustained major doses of radiation as they became exposed to the irradiated dust and soil which had remained sealed underground for decades.

The Red Forest near Chernobyl got its name when dozens of square miles of trees that did not die in the aftermath of the explosion turned red after absorbing incredible doses of radiation

Power plant workers told Reuters that the Russian soldiers' disregard for safety procedures and lack of anti-radiation gear when they seized the Chernobyl site was 'suicidal' (pictured: radiation warning signs near Pripyat, close to the Red Forest)

What is Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS)? ARS, known commonly as radiation sickness, is an illness that can happen when a person is exposed to high levels of radiation, typically over a short time period. The initial symptoms of ARS include nausea, vomiting, headache, and diarrhea. But the way in which radiation affects our bodies is not fully understood. Symptoms can start within minutes to days after the exposure, can last for minutes up to several days, and may come and go. After the initial symptoms, a person usually looks and feels healthy for a period of time, but will likely suffer further symptoms at varying degrees of severity, depending on the dose. These symptoms include loss of appetite, fatigue, fever, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and possibly even seizures and coma. This seriously ill stage may last from a few hours up to several months. Absorbing high doses of radiation can also dramatically increase the likelihood of developing cancers and other chronic illnesses years down the line. Besides the two workers who were killed instantly in the initial explosion at Chernobyl in 1986, a total of 134 plant staff and emergency workers experienced ARS in the days following the accident, of which 28 died. Source: CDC Advertisement

Physicist Edwin Lyman, Director of Nuclear Power Safety with the U.S.-based Union of Concerned Scientists, said it 'seems unlikely' a large number of Russian troops would have developed severe radiation illness.

However, he confirmed that contaminated material was buried and covered with new topsoil during the cleanup of Chernobyl, and that soldiers who were tasked with digging the trenches would have been exposed to 'hot spots' of radiation.

Lyman's comments came following a statement by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, who said last week that Ukraine would work with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to establish what Russian troops did while in control of the site, before warning their activities would've exposed them to dangerous levels of radiation.

'Russia behaved irresponsibly in Chernobyl on all accounts, from not allowing personnel of the station to perform their functions to digging trenches in the contaminated areas,' Kuleba said on Friday.

He said the Russian government must 'answer to the mothers, the sister, the wives of those soldiers - why did they force them to put their lives at risk.'

Meanwhile, Yaroslav Yemelianenko, an employee at the Ukrainian state agency overseeing the exclusion zone, claimed 'several batches' of Russians had been evacuated from the Red Forest for treatment.

'With minimal intelligence in command or soldiers, these consequences could have been avoided,' he said, adding that radiation protection is 'mandatory because radiation is physics  it works without regard to status or shoulder straps.'

Other power plant workers told Reuters that the Russian soldiers' disregard for safety procedures and lack of anti-radiation gear when they seized the Chernobyl site was 'suicidal'.

A total of 28 staff members and emergency workers died from ARS in the days following the Chernobyl explosion in 1986, as well as two workers who were killed instantly in the blast.

But studies conducted in the years following the disaster discovered a considerable increase in incidences of thyroid cancer among the population who lived near the plant.

According to a United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) report, there had been almost 20,000 cases of thyroid cancer reported in children and adolescents who were exposed at the time of the accident between 1991-2015.

Increased awareness of the risk of cancer from radiation exposure and improved detection methods are two of the factors associated with the startling figure, but at least 5,000 incidences of cancer were directly attributable to children drinking fresh milk containing radioactive iodine from cows who had eaten contaminated grass in the first few weeks following the accident.

Rafael Grossi, the head of the IAEA, said last week he would be leading a mission to the Chernobyl as soon as possible to ascertain the damage caused by Russian troops and to ensure the plant safety protocols for storing nuclear waste (pictured) have not been disrupted

Some Russian troops stationed at Chernobyl were reportedly to Belarus for treatment for 'acute radiation syndrome', an employee at the Ukrainian state agency overseeing the exclusion zone claimed (pictured, Russian tanks seize the site in February)

The Red Forest is considered so highly contaminated that even the nuclear plant workers are not typically allowed to go there.

Valery Seida, acting general director of the Chernobyl plant, said: 'Nobody goes there... for God's sake. There is no one there.'

Rafael Grossi, the head of the IAEA, said last week he would be leading a mission to the Chernobyl as soon as possible to ascertain the damage caused by Russian troops and to ensure the plant safety protocols for storing nuclear waste have not been disrupted.

'I will head an assistance and support mission to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant as soon as possible. It will be the first in a series of such nuclear safety and security missions to Ukraine,' Grossi said.

The Kremlin is yet to recognise the reports of its soldiers suffering ARS and has not commented on the withdrawal of its troops from Chernobyl.
A Lebanese-Australian former politician has accused Scott Morrison and his allies of launching a vicious smear campaign against him in a 'desperate' bid to secure the future PM his first seat in federal Parliament.

During a live TV interview with The Project's Waleed Aly days before the federal election campaign is announced, Michael Towke doubled down on his claims that Mr Morrison had spearheaded an effort to smear him.

Mr Towke and Mr Morrison were both vying for pre-selection for the seat of Cook, which takes in part of the Sutherland Shire, in Sydney's south, for the 2007 election.

Mr Morrison was ultimately successful, while Mr Towke's career in public life came to an end and he never ran for another political office.

But on Wednesday evening, Mr Towke appeared in his first ever TV interview to accuse the PM and his then-factional allies of inventing and circulating rumours to destroy his reputation.

He claimed Mr Morrison's camp whipped up negative stereotypes about Lebanese-Australians in a bid to tarnish his bid for office.

Lebanese ex-politician Michael Towke (pictured) has levelled a series of bombshell allegations against Scott Morrison

Mr Towke claimed Liberal party apparatchiks both publicly and privately smeared him as a Muslim crime figure even claiming he was associated with neo-Nazis.

There were brazenly false rumours spread that he ran a brothel and was somehow involved in the Cronulla riots.

Mr Towke also claimed he was coerced by senior party officials to drop out of the contest against Mr Morrison or he would 'never be able to find a job' ever again.

Mr Morrison has emphatically denied the 'malicious' claims he would use a candidate's racial background against him, after they resurfaced last week.

Several community figures including Danny Abdallah, the father of three children who were killed in a car crash, have defended the PM as anything but a racist.

During their bitter 2007 pre-selection battle, Mr Towke won the ballot on the first round - scoring 84 votes compared to Mr Morrison's eight.

But Mr Towke alleged his popularity immediately began to sink after his political opponents - Mr Morrison and his allies - started spreading 'two sets of allegations' - ones privately through the Liberal party and others publicly via the press.

'Privately, the Liberal Party was accusing me of owning and operating a number of brothels, being involved in a criminal syndicate, the Cronulla riots, the Bulldogs Army and, as part of that group, being involved in a number of physical altercations,' he said.

'The (claims) they published publicly, (were that I) breached Liberal Party rules in signing members up - false - that I exaggerated my academic qualifications, exaggerated my military record, my business record.

'They ran with the dodgy [Lebanese] angle.'

Mr Morrison is also alleged to have told locals members that no-one Lebanese would be able to hold the seat after the 2005 Cronulla race riots, and allegedly spread the rumour Mr Towke was Muslim when he is actually a Maronite Catholic.

Mr Towke said Mr Morrison and his allies spread vicious rumours to smear him as a 'dodgy' Lebanese man

SCOTT MORRISON'S DENIAL Mr Morrison has repeatedly and strenuously denied all of Mr Towke's allegations. He denied using his preselection opponent's heritage to get himself elected and told reporters he rejected the allegations 'absolutely'. 'It's just simply untrue,' he said. 'These are quite malicious and bitter slurs, which are deeply offensive, and I reject them absolutely. It comes at an interesting time that these vicious personal attacks come on the eve of an election. 'I'll let people work out their their own findings on what's motivating these voices. Bitterness can often produce all sorts of slings and arrows.' When asked about the allegations on Saturday, Mr Morrison denied suggestions on three occasions that he 'warned' voters about Mr Towke's family background or that he was a practicing Muslim. The prime minister then added 'you'll have to ask them' when asked where the accusations originated from. His spokesman on Friday also dismissed the bombshell allegations and labelled them as 'baseless and false' and spread with 'malicious intent'. Advertisement

Mr Towke said efforts to destroy his reputation were 'pretty nasty' and he frequently woke up to find himself featured in frontpage newspaper stories 'based on fabricated material'.

'That was shocking, stunning. I was numb,' he said.

'I would have been the first Australian of Lebanese heritage to be a federal member of Parliament on the Liberal Party side and that's a bit of history there which they stole from me.'

Mr Towke claimed Mr Morrison was 'front and centre' of the smear campaign and that 'it was for him, and he was involved'.

'He got desperate. They were hoping that I would be knocked out and that they would somehow do some deal and get the votes to fall in behind him,' he said.

Aly asked why Mr Morrison would attempt to bring Mr Towke down given he was coming last and would still need to beat several other political candidates to win.

Mr Towke claimed the other candidates who had beaten Mr Morrison during the first pre-selection did not bother to turn up to the second, because they 'knew this was Morrison's'.

'They knew they wouldn't have the numbers,' Mr Towke's said.

He also alleged he was 'coerced' by senior members of the party to pull out of the running to hand the seat over to Mr Morrison.

'They figuratively put a political gun to my head and basically told me they were going to ruin me [and] that I would never be employable again if I didn't withdraw from the pre-selection and throw my numbers behind Morrison.'

'And that's what I did. The hardest pill to swallow was throwing my weight behind the most meritless candidate.'

Mr Towke said he did not stand a chance because he was not 'one of the boys' and Mr Morrison is a 'well-connected' individual.

Michael Towke made a legally-binding statutory declaration in 2016 accusing the PM of 'racial vilification' during the pre-selection battle

He said formed the belief that his character assassination was spearheaded by Mr Morrison through multiple conversations with people, including journalists.

The ex-politician also denied historical allegations levelled against him by former MP Bruce Baird that he was involved in branch stacking, saying he never signed anyone up without their knowledge.

Mr Towke said he did not imagine the scandal would be revived, and was shocked to wake up last Wednesday to find the saga in the limelight following Ms Fierravanti-Wells speech.

'I have moved on, but the more that this is unfolding, and just watching the Prime Minister's very non-credible responses, I've chosen now to not remain silent anymore,' he said.

Mr Towke said he has since received text messages from a cabinet minister expressing their support for him.

'I have text ministers from a current Cabinet minister saying, 'I believe you. You just have to be careful,' he said.

Mr Towke said this was good advice because he soon got word that more outrageous attack against him were being prepared in an effort to shut him up.

He claimed people associated with Mr Morrison were spreading a story that some of his supporters were neo-Nazis, suggesting he associated with the extremist group.

Some of Mr Towke's accusations are backed by Mr Morrison's former campaign manager Scott Chapman.

In a 2016 statuary declaration, Mr Chapman claimed he was told by Mr Morrison there would be a swing in Cook if Mr Towke was elected 'because of his Lebanese background'.

Mr Morrison has denied the racial vilification allegations and on Sunday offered to sign a statutory declaration confirming his account of the situation.

Mr Towke said he wanted Mr Morrison to sign the legally binding form in NSW, not in Canberra, where it could be scrutinised by the Independent Commission Against Corruption.

Mr Towke himself made a statutory declaration in 2016 accusing the PM of 'racial vilification' during the pre-selection battle.

He added on the weekend: 'I stand by the declarations I asserted in my statutory declaration.

'Among many unedifying tactics used to unseat me from my preselection victory for Morrison, racial vilification was front and centre and he was directly involved.'

Scott Morrison (pictured delivering his maiden speech in 2008) has been accused of using a political rival's Lebanese background against him when he first ran for political office

Mr Morrison has strenuously denied all the claims as categorically untrue and has said he would sign a statutory declaration saying just that.

The latest revelations come after the Project host Jan Fran unleashed an explosive attack on Mr Morrison and branded Australia as being 'full of racists' in response to the political row.

On Sunday Ms Fran, who is Lebanese-Australian, took to Instagram and Twitter to hit out in a full-frontal attack on the PM and Australians, in a post that began: 'Strap in, babes!'

She branded the row almost comical as Lebanese people can tell someone's religion and their village from their surname.

'But a lack of nuance is the least of our worries here,' she wrote, before treating the denied allegation against Mr Morrison as a fact.

'Morrison seems to believe that being a Muslim is so terrible a thing he can use it to ruin someone's good standing. He can use it as a weapon. A smear!

'And worse than that  its effective. We all know what this says about our country and its leadership but Ill spell it out.

The pregnant mum-to-be branded previous visits by PM Scott Morrison to Lebanese Catholic churches in Adelaide and Sydney's Punchbowl as insincere attempts to win votes

'Were full of racists and there are people ready to exploit that.'

The pregnant mum-to-be branded previous visits by the PM to Lebanese Catholic churches in Adelaide and Sydney's Punchbowl as insincere attempts to win votes.

'Lemme tell you what ethnic minorities have known since forever in this country.,' she wrote.

'Those in power (and it aint just Morrison) will use you when its politically expedient.

'The solidarity, appreciation, respect they show is always, ALWAYS conditional. They will turn on a dime.

She added: 'Theyll come to your church and wax lyrical about the deep appreciation they have for your heritage.

'And then theyll use that very heritage  the one they so deeply appreciate  to throw you under the bus the second they need to.'

The Project host Jan Fran has unleashed an explosive attack on Prime Minister Scott Morrison and branded Australia as being 'full of racists'

'The next time politicians come to your church or mosque or community organisation with a camera (or not)...take it with the largest pinch of salt possible.'

The outburst was liked more than 4,000 times on Instagram with many replies agreeing with her.

'Instead of having representation from our ACTUAL community, he eliminates the competition that is in fact a Lebanese Maronite, then breaks bread with his people,' wrote one.

'And because we are looking for any kind of representation, any kind of sign of acceptance... we take it.

'You cannot be rumoured to be of a certain religion. What even is that??! The better guy didn't win because he was sabotaged, as with many of us who a rumoured to be Middle Easterners.

'Just look at my eyebrows honey the rumours are true. I am furious. Thanks for sharing Jan, means so much to give a hoot. A big Middle Eastern honking one!'
Boris Johnson wants a massive push to increase the amount of 'clean' hydrogen gas to heat homes and reduce reliance on foreign gas.

The Prime Minister has already set out plans to expand the use of the highly flammable substance to replace natural gas and reduce carbon emissions.

But he is hoping to include targets to double production capacity from 5GW to 10GW as part of a drive to see it used in a third of UK homes by 2050, the Times reported.

But such a move will require a step-change in the production of equipment required. A decision on whether the technology using the flammable gas is even safe for home use is not due to be made until 2026, with transport and industrial use only permitted until then.

Manufacturers of some of the prototypes have suggested that the new boilers will cost the same as natural gas ones once they are in mass production - estimating a cost of around 600. But they are not yet in production.

Mr Johnson is expected to unveil his much-delayed energy security strategy tomorrow, with a focus on nuclear power.

Ahead of Thursday's announcement, backbench MPs have demanded that Western nations come together to back production of 'modular' nuclear power plants.

Craig Mackinlay, chairman of the Net Zero group of Tory MPs, told MailOnline: 'We need a new agreement between friendly countries we could come together and make a new Western small nuclear modular like a Model T Ford.

Boris is hoping to include targets to double production capacity from 5GW to 10GW as part of a drive to see it used in a third of UK homes by 2050

This graphic from the Government's Hy4Heat innovation programme shows how the hydrogen homes will be powered. The two show homes swill include boilers, hobs, cookers and fires that release no carbon emissions, as displayed above

This Hy4Heat graphic shows the planning for the rollout, with the 'demonstration facilities' element set to open in Gateshead in April. The 'hydrogen quality standards' section will look at defining the purity of the gas and odorant to be added

Javid defends tax rise for millions of workers The Health Secretary has defended the decision to increase national insurance (NI) for millions of workers as he claimed it would be 'morally wrong' to let 'our children pay for our healthcare and our adult social care'. From Wednesday, national insurance contributions will increase by 1.25 percentage points. From April 2023 onwards, the rate will decrease back to the 2021-22 level, with a new 1.25 per cent health and social care levy legally introduced. The UK Government predicts the tax rise will raise 39 billion over the next three years to help reduce the Covid-induced NHS backlog and reform adult social care for the long term. Speaking on BBC Breakfast, Sajid Javid justified the tax increase, arguing that funding health and social care through borrowing would not just be 'economically wrong' but also 'morally wrong'. He said: 'The choice for us as a country is we either put that money in ourselves now, and if we don't do it ourselves, we will have to borrow it. And that is mortgaging the future of our children and our grandchildren. 'I think it not only is economically wrong and opens up more risk for the public finances, I think it is morally wrong. 'Why should our children pay for our healthcare and our adult social care? They are going to have enough challenges as they grow older. I think that will be the wrong approach.' Advertisement

'Interchangeable skills, interchangeable everything. That is what we need.

'We have been up the route too many times of building these one-offs that cost an absolute fortune.

'There's no other industrial practice in the world that goes up that route, so why do we do it in government?'

He also warned that there needs to be a focus on exploiting 'domestic hydrocarbons' until nuclear power comes on stream, and the strategy cannot just 'talk a load of hot air' about fracking and boosting solar.

Yesterday ministers ordered scientists to re-examine the case for fracking amid a demand for ways to cut energy bills for millions of Britons.

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng commissioned a review of the latest scientific evidence on shale case to see if it can be safely extracted from under the UK countryside.

The technology has been linked with earthquakes and there has been a moratorium on drilling since November 2019, on the basis of evidence that it was not possible to accurately predict tremors.

But Mr Kwarteng has written to the British Geological Survey asking for a report on the latest science around fracking including new techniques, improvements in geological modelling or areas outside of Lancashire less at risk of tremors.

He said the Government was and would be guided by the science on shale gas but in the light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine it was 'absolutely right that we explore all possible domestic energy sources'.

'However, unless the latest scientific evidence demonstrates that shale gas extraction is safe, sustainable and of minimal disturbance to those living and working nearby, the pause in England will remain in place,' he said.

Boris Johnson is under huge political pressure to cut soaring gas bills as Britons are walloped with a cost-of-living crisis.

A new survey today suggests insulating homes is the top priority for Britons in the push to reduce the use of Russian gas.

Ahead of Thursday's announcement, backbench MPs have demanded that Western nations come together to back production of 'modular' nuclear power plants. Craig Mackinlay (top), chairman of the Net Zero group of Tory MPs, told MailOnline: 'We need a new agreement between friendly countries we could come together and make a new Western small nuclear modular like a Model T Ford (pictured above)'

A poll for the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit found that 84 per cent of those asked about the action the Government should take to curb reliance on gas from Russia thought insulation was very or fairly important.

But just four in 10 (41 per cent) thought it was important for the Government to focus on increasing domestic gas production by drilling or fracking, the survey of 1,473 UK adults by YouGov found.

Nearly three-quarters (73 per cent) thought it was important to provide support to households to install more efficient electric heating systems such as heat pumps.

Seven in 10 backed more gas from other countries such as Algeria, Qatar or the US, while almost as many (69 per cent) thought replacing gas-fired power generation with renewables was key.

There was limited support, at just 31 per cent, for reducing industrial activities, such as shutting factories or cutting their output.

The polling was released ahead of publication of the Government's delayed energy strategy, which is expected on Thursday to back a boost to new nuclear power and offshore wind - but not cheap onshore wind.

There are concerns it will do nothing to reduce demand for gas through new measures to make homes more energy efficient.
This is the inspiring moment a Ukrainian soldier proposed to his girlfriend next to a pile of sandbags on the streets of war-torn Odesa.

The hero husband-to-be gets down on one knee before his flabbergasted girlfriend, whose shock suddenly turns to joy when she realises exactly what is going on.

And sure enough, he presents a ring. That causes the young woman to cover her mouth with both hands before shrieking and saying 'YES!', the viral TikTok shows.

None the wiser: the pair met up by a pile of sandbags in Odesa, but she had no idea what's next

The woman's surprise turns to sheer joy when she realises what her boyfriend is asking

After placing the ring on his fiancee's finger, which fits perfectly, the girlfriend celebrates her good luck with a fist pump.

He then brings a huge bouquet of flowers to top it all off.

Though the couple's names are unknown, the heartwarming clip has clearly touched a nerve, gaining 850,000 views and 179,000 likes within a few hours.

Supportive comments, mostly in Ukrainian, include well-wishers hoping the soldier stays safe during the war.

One user wrote: 'Awww so sweet, live long and happy!' Another added: May you be safe and victorious! Congratulations!'

Left: the brave soldier holds the huge bouquet of flowers he bought just for the occasion. Right: the bride-to-be pumps her fist when the ring fits perfectly, a sure good luck charm

And one other TikTok commenter remembered their surroundings, saying: 'I wish you many years of a married life in a peaceful Ukraine!'

The incredible act came just before Russia's stuttering invasion of the city.

Putin's generals promised to 'choke off' Odesa during a lengthy siege, but have so far failed to make ground as other Black Sea port towns including Mariupol hold out.

Should the city fall, Ukraine would lose its biggest port and become essentially landlocked.

But it isn't all bad news for Ukraine's formidable forces. The inspiring proposal follows another frontline love story last month at a check-point near Kyiv.

Lesya swapped her helmet for a white veil during the ceremony, which took place near Kyiv

The happy couple (right and second from right) were serenaded by a soldier playing a bandura

Territorial defense soldiers Valery and Lesya, both in uniform, tied the knot at a Ukrainian army checkpoint close to the capital.

A fellow soldier played the bandura, a type of lute which is also the national instrument.

One of the soldiers also appears to be wearing an Orthodox Christian cross, often seen at weddings in a country where the religion is widely followed.
A decorated ex-Army corporal has been jailed after he was linked to a 1.3million cocaine gang in an Encrochat police sting.

Liam McGrath had been awarded the Queen's Jubilee Medal and the Iraq Medal during his nine years in the military.

But now he has suffered a fall from grace after being jailed for seven years his role in a massive drugs ring in Greater Manchester.

The 34-year-old was involved in discussions to help move at least 13kg of the class A drug in just seven weeks while the country was in the midst of the first Covid lockdown.

Liam McGrath has been jailed for seven years for his role in the 1.3million cocaine gang operating in Manchester

The 34-year-old was involved in discussions to move at least 13kg of the class A drug in just seven weeks while the country was in the midst of the first Covid lockdown

When police moved in on the gang they found large amounts of cocaine and illicit goods

Two other men, Jake Meade and Dale Reid, were also jailed for more than 14 years each for their leading roles in the criminal enterprise.

The group was busted when police hacked into messages between them on Encrochat - an app used by criminals to securely contact each other.

Meade, 33, and Reid, 31, were described as being the brains behind the operation, whic was found to have amassed more than 1.1million in criminal cash assets.

But in Manchester Crown Court was told it was the former soldier, McGrath, who was trusted to move the drugs and cash, MEN reports.

The 'trusted courier and storeman' had left the army having being awarded two medals, but struggled in civilian life.

The suicide of his father and memories of what he had seen in the armed forces left him with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Following on from this he became involved in drug use and racked up debts which he tried to pay off by working for the gang, Judge Timothy Smith was told on Monday, April 4.

The group were arrested as part of Operation Venetic, a nationwide crackdown focusing on criminal use of Encrochat.

In messages Meade operated under the name of 'Cookietender' and directed the flow of drugs with the help of Reid - also known as 'Navalhound' and 'Usualbee'.

Both men then used McGrath, who was known as 'Stoicrider', to help move and store the illicit items.

The court heard he took a wage 'more akin to a paid employee'.

Messages revealed the three discussed purchasing a van and installing a hide within it to conceal their drugs and money rather than using a backpack.

Jake Meade (left) and Dale Reid have both been jailed for 14 years and five months after being found organising the criminal enterprise

When Meade and Reid were arrested in July 2020 officers seized more than 43,000 in cash, three vehicles, large amounts of designer clothing, handbags and jewellery including a Cartier watch and bracelet, a diamond ring and Louis Vuitton bracelets.

Meade, of Dean Brook Close, Moston, Reid, of Latrigg Crescent, Middleton, and McGrath, of Lonsdale Road, Oldham, all pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply class a drugs, namely cocaine.

The court was told both Meade and Reid had previous convictions for supply of class A drugs.

Judge Smith said the group had been involved in selling cocaine on a 'commercial scale', adding: 'It's clear you are heavily involved in the dealing of cocaine at the very point the communication is detected.'

'You Mr Meade and you Mr Reid effectively orchestrated this enterprise together,' he said.

'You each, together, hoped to make money and in your own words Mr Meade, make yourselves rich.

'There are significant sums of money which are talked about. And it's highly likely the amounts are more than suggested.'

He added he was not swayed by McGrath's suggestions he was pressured into doing what the gang wanted when he refused to name who was forcing him to do it.

Meade and Reid were jailed for 14 years and five months each, with McGrath jaield for seven years.

The group was caught after police intercepted messages from them discussing the movement of large amounts of cocaine

Detective Sergeant Paul Halliwell, from GMP's Organised Crime Coordination Unit, said: 'This was a sophisticated and organised drugs operation which led to multiple kilos of cocaine being distributed across the region.

'They attempted to hide their operation by using the sophisticated and expensive Encrochat technology but were caught out by us and we were able to see the extent in which they used the phones to run their operation.

'A huge quantity of drugs have been taken off the streets as a result and three more drug dealers have been put behind bars for a considerable number of years, putting an end to their drug dealing days which they attempted to cover up.

'GMP is dedicated to relentless pursuing and disrupting those flooding the region with drugs and will do all we can to bring those involved to justice.

'Drugs not only pose a risk to those who take them, but they are also often one of the biggest factors that lead to serious violence on our streets.

'Anyone with information about drugs in their area can report it online or by using our LiveChat service at www.gmp.police.uk. Alternatively, contact Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.'
Nicola Sturgeon suffered a blow today as a poll found support for independence falling with a majority of Scots wanting to stay in the UK.

Research by Survation found 53 per cent would vote 'no' in a separatist referendum, excluding those who said they were undecided.

The figure was up a point on last year, with trackers showing unionists consistently ahead on the question.

The findings emerged as the Scottish Tories urged voters to 'send Nicola Sturgeon a message' in local elections next month by keeping the SNP out of power in more than a dozen key areas.

Writing in today's Scottish Daily Mail, Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross issued a rallying cry to voters, telling them they can protest against a series of failings and 'help us knock the Nats down to size'.

Research by Survation found 53 per cent would vote 'no' in a separatist referendum, excluding those who said they were undecided

He condemned Ms Sturgeon's 'narrow-minded obsession with splitting us apart', plans to introduce the hated workplace parking levy, growing problems with potholes and bin collections, and a controversial sex survey introduced in schools.

However, the Survation poll - carried out between March 24 and 28 - had a sting in the tail for the Tories, showing them slipping to third place behind Labour on Holyrood and Westminster voting intentions.

The poll, carried out between March 24 and 28, recorded the SNP on 46 per cent on the Holyrood constituency vote, down two percentage points on last year's elections, with Labour on 25 per cent (+3), the Tories on 20 per cent (-2), and the Lib Dems on 7 per cent (unchanged).

On Westminster voting intentions, it put the SNP on 45 per cent, down three points, Labour on 27 per cent (+7), the Tories on 19 per cent (-3), and the Lib Dems on 6 per cent (-1).

Mr Ross said: 'One month from today, across Scotland, you will have the opportunity to remove the SNP from power. The prize is there for the taking. The SNP are beatable.

'In local election results since the Holyrood vote last year, we're only a few hundred votes behind them across Scotland. On May 5, in councils across the country, this election is a two-horse race.'

The 14 councils where Tories believe the SNP can be defeated include ten where Conservatives got a higher percentage of the vote in 2017.

They say just a few seats changing hands in Dumfries and Galloway and South Ayrshire would allow for a majority to remove the SNP/Labour coalitions. They believe gaining a couple of seats in Moray could oust the SNP.

Ms Sturgeon has been using the Easter recess to get out on the campaign trail ahead of local elections

Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross has been urging voters to 'send a message' to the SNP, but he is in isolation after testing positive for Covid

In four other areas  Argyll & Bute, Midlothian, North Ayrshire and East Dunbartonshire  Tory strategists believe a swing of between one and three seats could allow them to overtake the SNP as the largest party.

On the campaign trail yesterday, Ms Sturgeon highlighted her government's decision to double the Scottish child payment to 20 per week, saying campaigners called it 'game changing' in the fight against child poverty.

She told LBC: 'It is the most significant anti-poverty measure that we are introducing.'

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar said: 'Every single Scot is living through the cost of living crisis and yet neither of Scotland's Governments are doing anywhere near enough to help.'

Mr Ross suffered a further election setback yesterday as he was forced to self-isolate after testing positive for Covid.
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Pope Francis called out the 'atrocities' and 'ever more horrendous cruelties' by Russian forces in Ukraine as he prayed with child refugees this morning.

The pontiff also kissed a ragged Ukrainian flag brought from Bucha, the Kyiv suburb where war crimes are alleged to have taken place in recent days.

Francis, 85, stood with child refugees at his weekly general audience at the Vatican, handing them chocolate Easter eggs.

Francis kissed a ragged, faded Ukrainian flag brought to the Vatican from Bucha near Kyiv during days of civilian attacks

He held up the flag to the gathered audience and slammed Russia's targeting of 'defenceless' innocents including children

Pope Francis blessed and prayed with Ukrainian child refugees gathered at the Vatican on Wednesday morning

He said: 'The recent news about the war in Ukraine, instead of bringing relief and hope, instead attests to new atrocities, such as the Bucha massacre.

'Ever more horrendous cruelties, also perpetrated against defenceless civilians, women and children. These are victims whose innocent blood cries out to heaven and begs for mercy', AFP reported.

The pope looked to the children and said: 'These children had to flee in order to arrive in a safe land. This is the fruit of war. Let's not forget them and let's not forget the Ukrainian people.'

He also lamented the 'powerlessness' of international organisations and said 'the old history of competing great powers' has continued despite the hope which followed World War Two.

The pope has been careful not to take sides since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, but has in recent days hardened his careful rhetoric.

Francis blessed those gathered and said Russian 'cruelties' in Ukraine must end, adding 'Let's not forget the Ukrainian people'

Francis handed out chocolate Easter eggs to Ukrainian refugee families in front of a huge crowd assembled in the Paul VI Hall

Francis met with the children during his weekly address, saying their lucky escapes from Ukraine made them the 'fruits of war'

A crowd of thousands gathered at the Paul VI Hall, Vatican City on Wednesday morning to Francis give his weekly address

He pleaded with Putin in March: 'In the name of God I ask you, stop this massacre.'

Grisly images of what are claimed to be civilian massacres carried out by Russian forces in Bucha before they withdrew have stirred a global outcry in recent days.

Horrifying news out of the Kyiv suburb has prompted Western nations to expel dozens of Moscow's diplomats and propose further sanctions, including a ban on coal imports from Russia.

President Zelensky has described the targeting of innocent Ukrainians, including women and children, as 'war crimes' and 'genocide'.

Serhii Lahovskyi, 26, mourns his friend Ihor (covered by a house rug) in stricken Kyiv suburb Bucha after their street was hit

Tanya Nedashkivs'ka, 57, weeps in the street over the death of her husband at the hands of retreating Russian forces

A civilian mass grave was discovered next to the City Church of Bucha. Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk estimated 280 are here alone

Boris Johnson and Joe Biden have repeated these claims. The US president called for a war crimes trial in the wake of the Bucha killings.

Speaking to the UN security council, Zelensky reported civilians were shot in the head after being tortured.

Some, he said, were crushed to death by tanks while in their cars.

'They cut off limbs, cut their throats. Women were raped and killed in front of their children. Their tongues were pulled out only because their aggressor did not hear what they wanted to hear from them,' he said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the UN Security Council via video link in his first appearance to the body

Russia's UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia described reports of war crimes as 'lies' and said Ukrainians are seeing 'fake' videos

'Anyone who has given criminal orders and carried them out by killing our people will be brought before the tribunal which should be similar to the Nuremberg tribunals.'

Making his first appearance before the UN's highest body, Zelensky said the Russian troops are no different from other terrorists.

He showed the council brief video footage of bloody corpses that ended with the words 'Stop Russian Aggression'.

He stressed that Bucha was only one place and there are more with similar horrors and called for a tribunal similar to the one set up at Nuremberg to try war criminals after the Second World War.
A Tory peer has jokingly reeled off a list of Channel 4 'cultural gems' including Kitchen Nightmares, Steph's Packed Lunch and a Place in the Sun as he mocked claims it provides shows the private sector could not.

Daniel Hannan ridiculed critics of the government's plan to privatise the broadcaster who have argued it provides unique coverage of important social issues that could be harmed if it enters the open market.

When it was launched by the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1982, Channel 4 was given the remit of appealing to tastes that weren't catered for on the three existing television channels.

It became known for airing scenes that were considered controversial at the time but came to be seen as cultural turning points, such as the 1994 gay kiss on soap opera Brookside, but more recently has been accused of airing shows that are simply provocative for the sake of it, like uncensored nude dating show Naked Attraction.

Addressing Channel 4's current output, Daniel Hannan told his fellow Lords: 'Even since the announcement was made we've been hearing about all these rare cultural gems that have been made possible by the unique way in which Channel 4 is financed that somehow wouldn't be possible under red in tooth and claw jungle capitalism.

'So I've been looking at what the programming is now and, with your permission, I'll tell the house. It's Kitchen Nightmares, Undercover Boss, Steph's Packed Lunch, Countdown, A Place in the Sun, A New Life in the Sun, Sun and Sea and Selling Houses.

'Is it really credible to say that we are defending something that couldn't be provided by the private sector?'

Daniel Hannan mentioned Kitchen Nightmares (left) and A Place in the Sun among his jokey list of Channel 4's 'cultural gems'

Undercover Boss (left) also made Lord Hannan's list, while Naked Attraction (pictured right, presenter Anna Richardson) has been criticised on Twitter

Labour has called the decision to privatise Channel 4 'cultural vandalism' - but some viewers have pondered whether much of its content can be considered culturally valuable.

Channel 4 has won multiple BAFTAs for shows including This Is England '88 and Random, while movies backed by its film unit Film4, such as Asif Kapadia's Amy, have bagged Oscars.

However, Channel 4 News has been dogged by accusations of left-wing bias for years, most recently for its coverage of Brexit. Its star presenter Jon Snow, who retired last year after 32 years, was accused of chanting 'f**k the Tories' at Glastonbury.

Cultural treasures or trash? Today's Channel 4 schedule 7.10am - Cheers 7.40 - Everybody Loves Raymond 9.05 - Frasier 10.35 - Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares USA 11.35: Undercover Boss USA 12.30: Steph's Packed Lunch 2.10pm: Countdown 3.00: A Place in the Sun 4.00: A New Life in the Sun 5.00: Sun, Sea and Selling Houses 6.00: The Simpsons 6.30: Hollyoaks 7.00: Channel 4 News 8.00: The Great Home Transformation 9.00: The Simpler Life 10.00: Naked Attraction Best... Naughty Bits 11.05: First Dates Advertisement

When it was founded by the Thatcher government, Channel 4 was also asked to screen programmes which 'encourage innovation and experiment'.

As well as Countdown and Brookside, it also became known for hit comedy Father Ted, late night show The Word and many other popular programmes.

But its schedule is now packed with property shows that follow a time-worn format, like A Place in the Sun and The Great Home Transformation, and repeats, like Cheers and The Simpsons.

More recent shows, including the likes of Sex Box, have attracted criticism from some viewers for allegedly being inappropriate.

Some critics have claimed Nadine Dorries' pledge to take Channel 4 out of public ownership is 'payback' for 'biased' news coverage, with one hysterical MP branding it 'fascism'.

Ministers deny they are pursuing any vendetta, with Ms Dorries pushing ahead with plans to sell the broadcaster in what will be the biggest disposal of a state-owned asset since Royal Mail in 2013.

Today, Sajid Javid said privatising Channel 4 will set the network 'free'.

Speaking to LBC Radio, the Health Secretary said: 'I love Channel 4. I think it's great, but I want a Channel 4 that can compete in what is a fast-changing landscape. I think we can all agree that since Channel 4 was created the media landscape has changed.'

He added: 'You must think carefully about why could it be better off being sold, and the reason is that, to compete properly, it needs to be able to raise its own funds and capital, whether that's debt or equity, to do that in a way that it can properly compete in a vastly-changing media landscape.

'This will set Channel 4 free. It will still be, by the way, a public broadcaster like ITV. It will have a public licence. They will have duties under that.

'You know, ITV is a great British broadcaster too, but it has been privately held now for many, many years. And it's growing stronger. It has been able to compete, I think, as a result of that more effectively.

'And, by the way, my understanding is the funds that will be raised - I don't know how much eventually, that will have to be worked out - but the funds that will be raised, which will be considerable, from the sale will all be reinvested back in the creative industries, including independent productions.'

US TV giants Paramount and Discovery are said to be vying with ITV and Sky to buy Channel 4 for 1billion and take it out of public ownership amid years of rows over its treatment of the Conservatives.

MSP Murdo Fraser was among those pointing out some of Channel 4's lower quality output

When Boris Johnson secured a 80-seat majority in 2019, boos rang out in the studio during C4's live news coverage of the general election hosted by Krishnan Guru-Murthy.

Shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell said today that the decision was a 'petty little vendetta against Channel 4' that will 'serve no good for the British public', adding: 'It doesn't make any sense. I can't find many people are in favour of it'.

Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former spin doctor, tweeted: 'The Channel 4 move is right out of the Orban playbook and timed to make it blatant. Part of their purpose is to wind up 'liberals'.'

Disgraced Labour MP Claudia Webbe, now an independent, tweeted: 'This is not freedom or independence - its the seedbed of fascism. Tory privatisation of Channel 4 is revenge for all the good journalism they did'.

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries is pushing ahead with plans to sell the broadcaster in what will be the biggest disposal of a state-owned asset since Royal Mail nine years ago

Labour supporters including disgraced MP Claudia Webbe and Alastair Campbell compared the move to fascism and Viktor Orban

The Government has given the green light to the privatisation of Channel 4 after rows over funding and the balance of its coverage

US TV giants Paramount and Discovery are said to be vying with ITV and Sky to buy Channel 4 for 1billion

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries tweeted: 'Channel 4 rightly holds a cherished place in British life and I want that to remain the case'

Now retired Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow was accused of apparently joining in a chant of 'F*** The Tories' while attending Glastonbury music festival in 2017 (pictured)

Top Tory: C4 sale viewed as 'payback time' for years of 'biased coverage' DCMS select committee chair Julian Knight has questioned if the Government's plans to forge forward with the privatisation of Channel 4 are 'revenge', adding that many Tories believe the move is 'payback time' for 'biased coverage'. He wrote on Twitter: 'It is certainly true that Channel 4 will have greater freedom to compete once privatised and if managed well it should be able to continue to innovate and crucially appeal to young audiences - a real usp in today's broadcast landscape. 'However, this is a big risk. The question has to be, do you think a restricted but brilliant small state broadcaster will part compete with the likes of Apple and Amazon or does it need to be able to borrow and grow in a way only privatisation can unlock? 'In all this, it's crucial the Government protects the prominence of all public service broadcasting through the new media bill, in order to give the likes of a new privatised Channel 4 a head start. 'Now, elephant in the room time - is this being done for revenge for Channel 4's biased coverage of the likes of Brexit and personal attacks on the PM? The timing of the announcement 7pm, coinciding with Channel 4 news, was very telling... 'Undoubtedly, across much of the party - there is a feeling of payback time and the word privatisation tickles the ivories of many. The money is irrelevant - equivalent to four days' national debt interest - so it must be used to support skills in creative sectors. 'So, to sum up. Privatisation - even for some wrong reasons - can work for C4 but must be part of a thorough overhaul of all public service broadcasting. If this is in the media bill I will support the Government. Finally, these are my views not those of the Committee more generally.' Advertisement

Tory MP Julian Knight, chair of the Common's culture committee tweeted: Elephant in the room time - is this being done for revenge for Channel 4's biased coverage of the likes of brexit and personal attacks on the PM? The timing of the announcement 7 pm, coinciding with Channel 4 news, was very telling'.

Ministers have not ruled out the broadcaster being sold into foreign hands with Paramount, owned by US giant ViacomCBS, and Discovery, co-owned by WarnerBros, considering buying into the UK market. ITV are said to have long coveted the channel with Sky also looking to expand into free-to-view TV.

Some Tories are also opposed. Former minister Damian Green said: 'The sale of Channel 4 is politicians and civil servants thinking they know more about how to run a business than the people who run it. Very unconservative. Mrs Thatcher, who created it, never made that mistake'.

Ruth Davidson tweeted: 'Channel 4 is publicly owned, not publicly funded. It doesn't cost the tax payer a penny. It also, by charter, commissions content but doesn't make/own its own. It's one of the reasons we have such a thriving indy sector in places like Glasgow. This is the opposite of levelling up'.

Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, who is tipped to be a future party leadership candidate, said he was 'pretty doubtful' that selling Channel 4 would be a good move. He said: 'Given the success Channel 4 has had in promoting independent production around the UK, I remain to be convinced this is going to achieve the aim the government has set out'.

'I'm not in favour of it because as it stands, Channel 4 provides competition to the BBC on what's called public service broadcasting, the kinds of programmes that are not commercially viable  and it'd be a shame to lose that,' Jeremy Hunt said.

Channel 4 was launched in 1982 by Margaret Thatcher to provide a not-for-profit fourth television service for Britain, alongside BBC1, BBC2 and ITV.

It has been funded by advertising and sponsorship deals since the outset, with revenues of around 1billion, boosted recently by a surge in traffic to its All 4 streaming platform where the biggest watched shows are The Great British Bake Off, Gogglebox, SAS: Who Dares Wins as well as its archive of shows including Father Ted, The Inbetweeners, Friday Night Dinners and Peep Show. The shows are free to watch but 3.99 per month if you want to remove adverts.

But the broadcaster has also come under repeated attacks from Conservatives who complain that some of its output is biased against the Tories. One MP said despite being home to many much-loved shows, it 'sealed its own fate' with years of 'one-sided' left-leaning news shows.

TV stars and writers have rushed to criticise the decision after a consultation last year. Location Location Location and Love it or List it presenter Kirstie Allsopp tweeted after Ms Dorries' statement: 'This is a load of utter twaddle! No true Conservative would sell Channel 4, Lady T will be spinning in her grave. C4 was set up to foster the British film & TV industry and it has done that job admirably. Any Tory MP who votes for this is a traitor to their party & country'.

The former head of news and current affairs at Channel 4 has said the Government plans to privatise the network to 'throw a bit of red meat to Tory supporters'.

Speaking to Times Radio on Tuesday, Dorothy Byrne insisted that Channel 4 is not left-wing, adding: 'I think it's being privatised to throw a bit of red meat to Tory supporters of a very right-wing nature at a time that the Government is in trouble.

'I think the political agenda is to show that the Government is doing something radically right-wing to please people. It's the same agenda as attacking the licence fee.

'It's that knee-jerk thing, privatise thing, that's a good thing to do.'

The Thick Of It creator Armando Iannucci tweeted: 'They asked for 'a debate'; 90% of submissions in that debate said it was a bad idea. But still they go ahead. Why do they want to make the UK's great TV industry worse? Why? It makes no business, economic or even patriotic sense.'

The writer of It's A Sin, Russell T Davies, has previously said privatising Channel 4 would be a 'great crime' that would result in programmes like his hit series not being made.

Kirstie Allsopp, pictured with her TV partner Phil Spencer, has blasted Nadine Dorries' decision to put C4 up for sale

The outspoken star said Mrs Thatcher would be 'spinning in her grave' over the decision

Channel 4 News, presented by Jon Snow until last Christmas, has repeatedly been branded left-wing and accused of unfairly trashing the Conservatives, reportedly sparking complaints from its own journalists about the programme's 'anti-Tory bias'.

In 2017 it was even claimed that Mr Snow joined in a chant of 'F*** The Tories' while attending the Glastonbury festival and in 2019 there was a grovelling apology after the veteran presenter said he had 'never seen so many white people in one place' while reporting on a pro-Brexit rally.

And after an attack on two gay women on a London bus, a reporter was accused of 'coaxing' the couple into blaming Boris Johnson for the homophobic crime and saying that he was 'not fit to lead the UK'.

In 2019 Ofcom rejected a Conservative complaint over Channel 4's use of an ice sculpture to stand in for the PM during a debate on climate change, after a subtitler mistakenly reported him saying 'people of colour' when he said 'people of talent' at a rally.

Another example of controversial output was the much criticised spoof Queen's Christmas Day speech, with jibes aimed at Harry and Meghan and Prince Andrew, which was branded 'woke rubbish', 'disgusting' and 'mean-spirited' by viewers.

How quiz show Countdown was the first programme to air on Channel 4 after Margaret Thatcher ordered its launch in 1982 When it was launched by the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1982, Channel 4 was given the remit of appealing to tastes that weren't catered for on the three existing television channels. Until then, the public broadcaster BBC and its commercial rival ITV had held a duopoly over Britain's TV screens. The first voice heard on the new channel when it launched on November 2, 1982, was that of continuity announcer Paul Coia. He said: 'Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be able to say to you welcome to Channel Four.' After a montage of clips that were played to the sound of the channel's signature tune, the first show to air was an episode of quiz show Countdown that was presented by Carol Vorderman and Richard Whiteley. Previously, Countdown had only aired in pilot form before being bought by Channel 4. The first advert to air on the channel was for car maker Vauxhall. On its first day, the channel also broadcast soap opera Brookside, which was created by Phil Redmond. In the 1980 Broadcasting Act, the Government said Channel 4, which was headed up by chief executive Jeremy Isaacs, would have to provide 'a suitable proportion of matter calculated to appeal to tastes and interests not generally catered for.' The channel was also asked to screen 'educational' programmes which 'encourage innovation and experiment'. As well as Countdown and Brookside, Channel 4 also became known for hit comedy Father Ted, late night show The Word and many other popular programmes. More recent shows, including the likes of Naked Attraction and Sex Box, have attracted criticism from some viewers for allegedly being inappropriate. The former is a dating show in which contestants' bodies - including their private parts - are slowly revealed from the feet up. In the latter, couples who featured on the show had sex in a box on stage. The channel has also been slammed for its alleged left-wing bias in recent years. Channel 4 was launched by the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1982, to provide a fourth television service to Britain, alongside BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. Above: The Channel 4 studio on the day the broadcaster was launched Channel 4's creation was part of a raft of changes to Britain's media landscape during Mrs Thatcher's time in office. The changes brought in by Mrs Thatcher also included the launch of breakfast station TV-am and the insistence that independent producers should make much of the shows that were appearing on Britain's television screens. Before the changes, the BBC and ITV had made nearly all their shows in-house. From the outset, Channel 4 was also obligated to get 'a substantial proportion' of its programmes from independent producers. It was funded by advertising and sponsorship deals. Before Channel 4's launch, a government report had concluded that 'the younger generation of producers is bubbling over with ideas which are not allowed to surface.' Writing to mark Brookside's 30th anniversary in 2012, Redmond said Channel 4 'made a huge, immediate impact' because it was given a remit to 'cater for minorities and find voices that were unheard'. The first show to air was an episode of quiz show Countdown that was presented by Carol Vorderman (pictured) and Richard Whiteley Countdown proved hugely popular and continues to air on Channel 4. Above: Original presenters Richard Whiteley and Carol Vorderman 'It certainly lived up to that. It allowed new people to be seen on TV, with new ideas and voices,' he added. However, the channel was hit by controversy after less than 24 hours of being on air, when members of the Deaf Broadcasting Campaign besieged its London headquarters to complain that there was a lack of news programmes for the deaf. The first major drama to air on the channel was Walter, the story of a mentally handicapped man played by Ian McKellen. In recent years, it has become known for its left-leaning coverage. Channel 4's creation was part of a raft of changes to Britain's media landscape during Mrs Thatcher's time in office Some of Channel 4 News's original presenters are seen above. They include Sir Trevor McDonald (pictured far left) in 1982 The first major drama to air on the channel was Walter, the story of a mentally handicapped man played by Ian McKellen In 2017, it was claimed that former lead presenter Jon Snow joined in a chant of 'F*** The Tories' while attending the Glastonbury festival and in 2019 there was a grovelling apology after the veteran presenter said he had 'never seen so many white people in one place' while reporting on a pro-Brexit rally. And after an attack on two gay women on a London bus, a reporter was accused of 'coaxing' the couple into blaming Boris Johnson for the homophobic crime and saying that he was 'not fit to lead the UK'. In 2019 Ofcom rejected a Conservative complaint over Channel 4's use of an ice sculpture to stand in for the PM during a debate on climate change, after a subtitler mistakenly reported him saying 'people of colour' when he said 'people of talent' at a rally. From the outset, Channel 4 was also obligated to get 'a substantial proportion' of its programmes from independent producers. It was funded by advertising and sponsorship deals The channel is also known for its programming for young people and 'property porn' shows such as Grand Designs and Location, Location, Location. It is also home of the Great British Bake Off and known for its groundbreaking drama. Recent show It's A Sin was lauded for its portrayal of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Channel 4 is commercially funded. It raised revenues of 985million in 2019, but a pre-tax loss of 26million. Selling Channel 4 could be seen as something of an easy win for the Government, as it seeks to find new savings. The taxpayer has a 100 per cent shareholding in Channel 4 but relatively few viewers are even aware that it is state-owned. Channel 4's original female presenters are seen above. Left to right: Dr Linda Barrett Cathy Hytner, Beverley Isherwood and Carol Vorderman On its first day, the channel also broadcast soap opera Brookside, which was created by Phil Redmond A studio is seen being prepared shortly before the launch of Channel 4 in November 1982 When proposals to privatise the channel were first raised in 1988, Mrs Thatcher rejected them over fears the broadcaster would be forced to abandon its public service remit. After a series of meetings over the issue, Mrs Thatcher decided that commercial pressures faced by the newly privatised channel would mean its role in catering for underserved audiences and taking risks with new programmes would be threatened. A minute of the meeting that was revealed in Government papers last year read: 'It was extremely doubtful whether the Channel's distinctive remit would be sustained by a profit-driven organisation in a highly competitive climate.' The committee chaired by Mrs Thatcher had also warned that the Government would be vulnerable to a defeat if the privatisation was put to a vote in the Parliament. More recent shows, including the likes of Naked Attraction (pictured) and Sex Box, have attracted criticism from some viewers for allegedly being inappropriate Advertisement

Supporters of Channel 4 have said the sale comes after repeated attacks from senior Tories who consider their output left-wing, and suggest the process is politically-motivated to stifle a critical voice of the Government.

Tory MP Craig Mackinlay told MailOnline last year: 'It has always occupied a very strange location being under public ownership and it being a commercial enterprise. I don't think it should be in public ownership. It should be out surviving on its own.'

The privatisation is expected to raise more than 1billion, and ministers have not ruled out a sale to a big US streaming service such as Netflix or Disney.

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries is braced for a backlash from the channel and its network of independent production firms, who have long opposed a sale.

Channel 4 was slammed in 2020 for mistakenly captioning the footage of Boris Johnson in an election year, which mistakenly reported him saying 'people of colour' when he said 'people of talent'

A reporter was accused of 'coaxing' a couple attacked on a bus into blaming Boris Johnson for the homophobic crime and saying that he was 'not fit to lead the United Kingdom'.

There was more fury when an ice sculpture was put in place for Prime Minister Boris Johnson when he failed to attend a climate change debate amid Tory concerns the show would not be balanced

Why is Channel 4 being sold, who could buy it and how much will it cost? - Why does the Government want to privatise the broadcaster? The Government has argued that Channel 4's long-term future needs to be secured amid concerns for its survival in the streaming era. A statement by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) said it had made the decision to allow the channel to 'thrive in the face of a rapidly-changing media landscape' while a Government source said the move would 'remove Channel 4's straitjacket'. The Government has also argued that a sale could allow the channel, which has limited ability to borrow money or raise private sector capital to invest in new platforms and products and cannot own and sell its own content, to establish its own production house and generate its own intellectual property. - What is the current model? Channel 4, which was founded in 1982 to deliver to under-served audiences, is currently owned by the Government. It receives its funding from advertising, not from the taxpayer. - What has happened so far? Ministers launched a public consultation into a potential change in ownership of the channel last July and Ms Dorries has been working through 60,000 responses to the consultation. The Government informed the broadcaster of the decision to go ahead with the sale on Monday. It comes after years of clashes between the two sides. - What happens now? The DCMS said further details will be announced 'shortly'. Channel 4 chief executive Alex Mahon said 'there will now be a long process ahead', writing to staff in an internal email on Monday that it could take 18 months or more for the required legislation to pass through the House of Commons and then Lords. 'During that time, we'll continue to work with DCMS and Government, and with our supporters across the industry to make the arguments to ensure that Channel 4 can continue to deliver its remit,' she said. Plans for the sale will be set out in a White Paper later in April and will be included in a new Media Bill for spring 2023, according to reports. Bids for the broadcaster are expected to come in next year with a view to complete the sale in early 2024, ahead of the next general election expected at latest in May that year, the Daily Telegraph reported. - How has Channel 4 reacted? A spokesperson for Channel 4 said it was 'disappointed' with the decision, but would 'continue to engage' with the Government on the process to 'ensure that Channel 4 continues to play its unique part in Britain's creative ecology and national life'. The channel explained that it presented the Government with an alternative to privatisation that would 'safeguard its future financial stability' and allow it to do more for the public, creative industries and the economy. Ms Mahon also said in the internal email to staff that they had proposed a 'vision for the next 40 years' which was rooted in 'continued public ownership' and 'built upon the huge amount of public value this model has delivered to date and the opportunity to deliver so much more in the future'. However, she added that ultimately the ownership of the channel was for the 'Government to propose and Parliament to decide' and that her priority now was to 'look after all of you and the wonderful Channel 4 spirit'. The broadcaster said that it will continue to engage with the Government during the legislative process and plans to do everything it can to 'ensure that Channel 4 continues to play its unique part in Britain's creative ecology and national life'. - What have proponents of the sale said? Baron Grade of Yarmouth, who was the channel's chief executive between 1988 and 1997, has said 'the status quo is not an option' and that its current remit is like a 'straitjacket' in today's media landscape. He told the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee last October: 'Channel 4 needs to do what every other free-to-air advertiser-supported business is doing, which is to own its own IP and to be able to gain scale. 'Everything in the Channel 4 constitution presently is against that and therefore it will, in my view, in a very short time really begin to struggle.' - Who could buy Channel 4? Foreign ownership has not been ruled out, as long as the regulator Ofcom's 'fit and proper' test for ownership is passed, according to reports. The Telegraph reported that ITV is understood to be interested, while Discovery has held informal talks and Rupert Murdoch has been linked to a possible takeover. Bids from Sky, Channel 5 owner Paramount, Amazon and Netflix are also possible. A Government source told the newspaper that ministers 'expect a lot of interest in purchasing C4 from a range of serious buyers who want to build on C4's strengths and help unleash its full potential.' - How much could it be sold for? No price tag has been set by the Government yet, but reports suggest the channel could be sold for as much as 1 billion. Ministers have said they will seek to reinvest the proceeds into the creative industries. Advertisement

But ministers believe Channel 4, whose top shows include the Great British Bake Off and Gogglebox, can only flourish in the long term if freed from the 'straitjacket' of Government control. Under its current rules, the broadcaster faces strict controls on the amount it can borrow, meaning it faces an uphill struggle against streaming giants with multi-billion-dollar budgets.

The sale will be formally announced next week, but it is understood Mrs Dorries told Cabinet colleagues and the Channel 4 board last night that she intends to proceed with it.

It will be the biggest privatisation since the 2013 sale of the Royal Mail. Independent production firms, which now make all of Channel 4's domestic output, have warned a sell-off could be a disaster for the sector in the UK.

But Mrs Dorries is expected to announce the sale's proceeds will be put into a 'creative dividend' to train young British talent.

A Government source said although Channel 4 was 'currently performing well', ministers are convinced 'government ownership is holding it back in the face of a rapidly changing and competitive media landscape'.

They added: 'A change of ownership will remove its straitjacket, giving C4 the freedom to innovate and grow so it can flourish and thrive long into the future and support the whole of the UK creative industries.'

Privatising Channel 4 'doesn't make any sense' and will cause a 'great deal of damage to jobs and opportunities', Labour has said.

Shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'It doesn't make any sense. I can't find many people are in favour of it.

'I think it will cause a great deal of damage to jobs and opportunities in the creative industries, especially in Leeds and Bristol, and Manchester, and outside of London.

'I fear that ... rather than competing with some of the big US streaming giants, it is more likely to be bought by one of them.

'That will take money out of the UK economy, out of the creative industries and the independent sector that has so thrived under Channel 4.'

When asked if Labour would take it back into the public ownership if in government, Ms Powell said: 'Well, I have not written our manifesto commitment on this overnight since this announcement was laid. There is going to be a very long and drawn-out, difficult process because there are many people opposed on their own side of the Conservative Party on this.

'They are going to have a difficult issue getting this through Parliament, which is also why I don't understand why they are doing it because of all the things that we could be spending our time doing in Parliament right now, dealing with the pensioners who can't afford to keep the heating on, the families who can't put food on the table, people can't afford petrol in the petrol pump, and we are going to be expending a huge amount of parliamentary and political time doing something that no-one in the public wants, and no-one in the industry wants either.'

Channel 4 will continue to be classed as a public sector broadcaster in the same way as private sector ITV. A source said the sale was not expected to have a direct impact on Channel 4 News.

Senior Tories have clashed with Channel 4 over alleged bias in the past. Boris Johnson boycotted it in 2019 after its then head of news Dorothy Byrne branded him a 'known liar'.

But a Government source last night insisted the sale was not motivated by politics, adding: 'This is about what is best for Channel 4.' It will be disposed of via a straight sale. A final decision on a preferred bidder will be made by ministers.

A spokesperson for Channel 4 said it was 'disappointed' with the decision but would 'continue to engage' with the Government on the process to 'ensure that Channel 4 continues to play its unique part in Britain's creative ecology and national life'.

The statement said: 'With over 60,000 submissions to the Government's public consultation, it is disappointing that today's announcement has been made without formally recognising the significant public interest concerns which have been raised.

'Channel 4 has engaged in good faith with the Government throughout the consultation process, demonstrating how it can continue to commission much-loved programmes from the independent sector across the UK that represent and celebrate every aspect of British life as well as increase its contribution to society, while maintaining ownership by the public.

'Recently, Channel 4 presented DCMS with a real alternative to privatisation that would safeguard its future financial stability, allowing it to do significantly more for the British public, the creative industries and the economy, particularly outside London.

'This is particularly important given that the organisation is only two years into a significant commitment to drive up its impact in the UK's Nations and Regions.'

It continued: 'Channel 4 remains legally committed to its unique public-service remit. The focus for the organisation will be on how we can ensure we deliver the remit to both our viewers and the British creative economy across the whole of the UK.

'The proposal to privatise Channel 4 will require a lengthy legislative process and political debate. We will of course continue to engage with DCMS, Government and Parliament, and do everything we can to ensure that Channel 4 continues to play its unique part in Britain's creative ecology and national life.'

Channel 4 chief executive Alex Mahon previously questioned the 'logic' behind such a move and whether privatising the broadcaster would help with efforts to 'level up' outside of London.

In an internal email to staff, she said her priority was to 'look after all of you and the wonderful Channel 4 spirit'.

She also implied that the channel's current leadership would not go down without a fight saying 'ultimately the ownership of C4 is for Government to propose and Parliament to decide'.

She said: 'In our engagement with Government during its extended period of reflection, we have proposed a vision for the next 40 years which we are confident would allow us to build on the successes of the first 40.

'That vision was rooted in continued public ownership, and was built upon the huge amount of public value this model has delivered to date and the opportunity to deliver so much more in the future.

'But ultimately the ownership of C4 is for Government to propose and Parliament to decide.

'Our job is to deliver what Parliament tasks us to do, and if or when that changes, then I am confident that this incredible organisation will respond with the relentless energy it has always displayed in pursuit of its goals and the remit.

'My priority now, along with the rest of the Exec team, is to look after all of you and the wonderful Channel 4 spirit, and make sure we all carry on doing what we do best - making incredible shows for our audiences, creating opportunities for young people and supporting the creative industry across the UK.

'There will now be a long process ahead - it could take 18 months or more for the required legislation to go through the House of Commons and then Lords.

'During that time, we'll continue to work with DCMS and Government, and with our supporters across the industry to make the arguments to ensure that Channel 4 can continue to deliver its remit.'

The Government has been consulting on plans to privatise the broadcaster, which was founded in 1982 to deliver to under-served audiences, following concerns for its survival in the streaming era.

C4's biggest shows include The Great British Bake Off, Gogglebox, Hollyoaks and Big Fat Quiz (pictured: Paul Hollywood, Prue Leith, Noel Fielding and Matt Lucas on Bakeoff)

Channel 4 will be sold off by the Government for at least 1billion before the next election (pictured: Channel 4 News presenters including Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Cathy Newman)

Nadine Dorries: 'I have come to the conclusion that government ownership is holding Channel 4 back from competing against streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon'

Ministers think that government ownership of Channel 4 is 'holding it back' and that privatising the broadcaster would 'remove its straitjacket', a Government source has said.

'HMG is expected to pursue a sale of C4 as part of a package of reforms to modernise and sustain the UK's public service broadcasting sector,' the source said.

In an internal email to staff, Channel 4 chief executive Alex Mahon (pictured) said her priority was to 'look after all of you and the wonderful Channel 4 spirit'

'Following a consultation, ministers have decided that, although C4 as a business is currently performing well, government ownership is holding it back in the face of a rapidly changing and competitive media landscape.

'C4 is a great business with a strong brand built around it being creative, innovative and distinctive but a change of ownership will remove its straitjacket, giving C4 the freedom to innovate and grow so it can flourish and thrive long into the future and support the whole of the UK creative industries.

'Ministers will seek to reinvest the proceeds of the sale. They want to use the cash resulting from the sale to spend on a 'creative dividend' - putting money into independent production and levelling up wider creative skills in priority parts of the country.

'C4 will remain a public service broadcaster - just like ITV is a privately owned PSB (public service broadcaster) - and we will ensure it continues to make an important social, economic and cultural contribution to the UK. Importantly, this will include an ongoing commitment to prime time news.'

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries tweeted: 'Channel 4 rightly holds a cherished place in British life and I want that to remain the case.

'I have come to the conclusion that government ownership is holding Channel 4 back from competing against streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon.

'A change of ownership will give Channel 4 the tools and freedom to flourish and thrive as a public service broadcaster long into the future.

'I will set out the future plan for Channel 4 in a White Paper in due course.

'I will seek to reinvest the proceeds of the sale into levelling up the creative sector, putting money into independent production and creative skills in priority parts of the country - delivering a creative dividend for all.'

From Jon Snow caught on camera chanting 'F*** the Tories' at Glastonbury to manipulating Boris's subtitles to THAT melting ice sculpture stunt  all the times Channel 4 proved its anti-Tory credentials

2020

The Christmas message included jibes aimed at Prince Andrew, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and Boris Johnson

Channel 4 was criticised for its 'deepfake' version of The Queen's Christmas Day speech in 2020, which saw the monarch discussing Harry and Meghan as well as her son Prince Andrew.

The channel produces a light-hearted alternative to the annual Christmas address but last year's offering has angered viewers, some of which branded it 'woke rubbish', 'disgusting' and 'mean spirited'.

It made a mockery of the Queen - with jibes aimed at Prince Andrew, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and Boris Johnson - 25 minutes after the Queen's BBC broadcast at 3pm.

The digitally-created 'deepfake', played by actress Debra Stephenson, was filled with gags, including jokes about the toilet roll shortage at the beginning of the pandemic and saw the monarch perfecting her moves for a dance on Tik Tok.

But not all the viewers were impressed, including politician Nigel Farage who tweeted 'How dare they' in response to the video. Others took to Twitter to share their outrage, with one writing: 'Disgusting. The Queen has been steadfast in her duty and still going strong. God save the Queen.'

2019

Krishnan Guru-Murthy with (rear left to right) Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson, SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and Green Party Co-Leader Sian Berry, standing next to ice sculptures representing the Brexit Party and Conservative Party who didnt appear at the event

The broadcaster was also slammed for wrongly captioning a video of Boris Johnson with subtitles referring to the race of immigrants.

Mr Johnson made a speech in which he said new immigration controls would ensure 'people of talent' still come to Britain.

But in Channel 4's subtitles of the speech, the phrase was changed to become 'people of colour'.

Channel 4 was forced to apologise after news anchor Jon Snow said he had 'never seen so many white people in one place' while reporting on a pro-Brexit rally

In the same year Ofcom rejected a Conservative complaint over Channel 4's use of an ice sculpture to stand in for Boris Johnson during a debate on climate change

The Tories complained that the broadcaster failed to allow the former environment secretary Michael Gove to be its representative for the debate, which saw party leaders face questions over how they would tackle climate change. But the regulator rejected the Tories' complaint.

The Conservative response was incendiary. An unnamed source threatened to review Channel 4's public service broadcasting licence when it expires in 2024. The Conservatives complained to Ofcom about what they termed a 'partisan stunt'.

Channel 4 News also apologised for Jon Snow's 'unscripted observation' after the broadcaster said he had 'never seen so many white people in one place' while reporting on a pro-Brexit rally.

In a statement, Channel 4 News said it 'regrets' any offence caused by the presenter's remarks, which came as protesters brought Westminster to a standstill on what was supposed to be the day the UK exited the European Union.

2017

Now retired Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow was accused of apparently joining in a chant of 'F*** The Tories' while attending Glastonbury music festival in 2017 (pictured)

Jon Snow branded a Channel 4 News panellist 'a b***end' after being reprimanded on live TV for an alleged four-letter attack on the Tories.

It was in relation to claims that Mr Snow joined in a chant of 'F*** The Tories' while attending Glastonbury music festival.

But the presenter was reportedly left lost for words when a right-wing think-tank's spokesman quipped 'not everyone hates the Tories as much as you do.'

It was in relation to claims that Mr Snow joined in a chant of 'F*** The Tories' while attending Glastonbury music festival at the weekend. While Mr Snow has said he has 'no recollection' of the Glastonbury incident, he was nonetheless taken to task live on air by Matt Kilcoyne of the Adam Smith Institute.

2015

A Channel 4 docudrama about an imagined Ukip victory at the general election was investigated by Ofcom

Ofcom launched an investigation into a Channel 4 docudrama which led to more than 6,500 complaints after it depicted people rioting in the streets following an imagined Ukip election win.

The broadcaster was accused election bias and scaremongering after it painted a country marred by race riots and mass unemployment under an imagined leadership by Nigel Farage in 'Ukip: The First 100 Days'.

2014

Backbench Tory MP Philip Davies was involved in a heated exchange with veteran broadcaster Jon Snow on a tour of Channel 4 News's studios

Jon Snow became embroiled in a furious shouting match with Tory Mp Philip Davies, the Channel 4 newsroom turned into their unlikely sparring arena after Channel 4 was accused of biased coverage.

The row  played out in front of 50 journalists  began when 'playground bully' Mr Snow confronted Mr Davies, who was on a tour of the studio, about accusations of political bias.

They traded insults for ten minutes  with Mr Davies saying Mr Snow was 'past it'  before fellow presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy waded in and told their visitor to 'clear off'.

According to witnesses, he argued with Mr Davies over accusations the MP had made that he was 'biased' to the Left.

And some of the other controversies

2008

Channel 4 opted to end the year on a controversial note by inviting the then president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to deliver a talk in Farsi with English subtitles

President Ahmadinejad's Christmas speech In the Alternative Christmas address of 2008, a Channel 4 tradition since 1993 with a different presenter each year, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a thinly veiled attack on the United States by claiming that Christ would have been against 'bullying, ill-tempered and expansionist powers'.

2004

A documentary showing a woman undergoing an abortion caused upset while Channel 4's digital offshoot More 4, made headlines of its own by staging the assassination of George W Bush in its film Death of a President.

2002

Gunther von Hagens performed a public autopsy in the UK - the first one for 170 years.

Despite the furore, he was invited back for 2012's Crucifixion on Easter Sunday, in which he mapped out his own interpretation of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
Kidnapping suspect Troy Driver has been formally accused of shooting 18-year-old Naomi Irion in the head and chest

Kidnapping suspect Troy Driver has been now been accused of shooting 18-year-old Naomi Irion in the head and chest in a remote part of Nevada, before burying her in the desert and getting rid of his truck's tires to cover up the crime.

Lyon County District Attorney Stephen Rye filed an amended criminal complaint Tuesday, adding first-degree murder and other crimes to the kidnapping charge already facing Driver, 41, of Fallon.

Driver is accused of kidnapping Irion from a Walmart parking lot in rural Fernley on March 12, and killing her on or before March 25. That's the day Driver was arrested for kidnapping.

Four days later, investigators acting on a tip found her body in a grave just across the Churchill County line.

In addition to burying Irion's body, the new complaint says Driver disposed of tires from his truck and destroyed or hid her cellphone in an effort to eliminate evidence that might help lead to his arrest.

Since his arrest, Driver has been held on $750,000 bail in the Lyon County jail in Fernley, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) east of Reno.

He's now accused of first-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon, first-degree kidnapping, robbery, burglary of a motor vehicle and destroying evidence, according to the new complaint Rye filed Tuesday in Lyon County's Canal Township Justice Court in Fernley.

Driver is accused of kidnapping Naomi Irion from a Walmart parking lot in rural Fernley on March 12, and killing her on or before March 25 - the day Driver was arrested for kidnapping

Driver's public defender, Mario Walther, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

The complaint said Driver shot Irion in or near a rural portion of northern Churchill County northeast of Fernley, where he took her 'for the purpose of committing sexual assault and/or purpose of killing her.'

It said he entered the 1992 Mercury Sable Irion was sitting in at the parking lot in Fernley with intent to commit grand petit larceny, assault or battery, then drove it away with her inside against her will.

Driver committed various crimes at various locations in northern Nevada's Lyon, Churchill, Humboldt and/or Eureka counties, the complaint said. It's appropriate to prosecute him in Lyon County because the felony crimes for which he 'concealed or destroyed evidence were committed in whole or in part in Lyon County,' it said.

Driver had been scheduled to appear in justice court in Fernley on Tuesday for a pretrial status hearing on the kidnapping charge ahead of a preliminary hearing scheduled April 12.

But on Monday, a judge continued that hearing until May 10, when a new date will be set for the preliminary hearing to determine if there's enough evidence to bound the case over for trial in Lyon County District Court in Yerington.

Troy Driver, 41, made his initial court appearance from a Nevada jail on March 30 via Zoom. His bail was kept at $750,000

Naomi Irons left her house on in her blue sedan at 5am on March 12 (image 1); she was then seen buying snacks at a nearby gas station (image 2); shortly after, she drove to a Walmart parking lot where she waited for her work bus to take her to her job at a Panasonic factory. While there, the suspect approached her car, got into the driver's seat and drove away (image 3). Irion's abandoned car was found on March 15 in a nearby industrial park (image 4). Police said on Thursday, March 30, that they have found her remains 60 miles away (image 5)

Hundreds of volunteers joined in searches across the vast desert area around Fernley over a two-week period, looking for Irion.

The Churchill County and Lyon County sheriff's departments, which have been working closely on Irion's case, issued condolences to her loved ones.

'We would like to extend our sympathy and condolences to the Irion family and thank all the volunteers for their hard work in trying to find Naomi and bring closure to the family,' the law enforcement offices wrote in a press release.

Irion, the daughter of a U.S. State Department staffer, was last seen around 5.25am on March 12 in her car in a Walmart parking lot in Fernley, about 30 miles east of Reno.

In an initial criminal complaint filed the morning of March 30, prosecutors alleged Driver - who was apprehended March 25 in connection to her disappearance - 'did abduct Naomi Irion and did hold or detain her for the purpose of committing sexual assault and/or for the purpose of killing her.'

He made his initial court appearance March 30, via video conference from Lyon County Jail, before Canal Township Justice Court Judge Lori Matheus who ruled that his bail will remain at $750,000.

Irion lived in Fernley with her older brother, Casey Valley, who told reporters after the hearing that the family was 'all in shock' that any bail was set.

Surveillance footage showed a hooded suspect apparently waiting outside of the Walmart parking lot in Fernley, Nevada for Irion that morning

Surveillance footage from the morning of her disappearance, showed Irion sitting in the driver's seat while she waited for a company shuttle to take her to her job at Panasonic.

A man wearing a hoodie - believed to be Driver - was filmed approaching her vehicle after circling the area.

It's unclear if she was in the store at the time he broke into the vehicle or if she was in the car, but footage shows the pair driving off with the suspect in the driver's seat.

The pair then drove out of the lot with the man behind the wheel. Her abandoned car was found on March 15 near a paint manufacturing facility in an industrial park along Interstate 80 less than a mile away from the Walmart store.

Valley said earlier his sister usually catches a bus from the Walmart lot to work at a Reno-area Panasonic facility. He contacted family members and authorities after she failed to arrive at work and didn't return home that weekend.

Irion's family claimed the teen went on a date with an unknown man the day before she vanished and had complained about being sexually harassed at work.

Panasonic knew about the harassment and had handled it 'internally,' according to her brother.

Before authorities announced that her body had been identified, Valley told reporters Wednesday that the family appreciated the support from the community and praised efforts by sheriff's deputies and federal agents to find his sister.

'Lyon County and the FBI are working very hard,' he said. 'I wish there was more and everybody does.'

Irion is seen walking before a man got into her car and drove off with her. It is unclear if she knew Driver, her alleged kidnapper

Irion is seen buying snacks at a gas station convenience store on her way to a her factory job

Driver is a convicted felon and previously served 12 years in California state prison for his role in a methamphetamine dealer's murder.

Criminal records show he was convicted in 1997 of accessory to a murder after the fact in relation to the killing of 19-year-old Paul Steven Rodriguez.

Driver's rap sheet in California also includes convictions on charges of second-degree robbery and burglary.

The Ukiah Daily Journal reported that in April 1997, Rodriguez, who was a methamphetamine dealer from Willits, California, was shot in the head by his 17-year-old girlfriend, Alissa Marie Moore.

Driver, who was 17 years old at the time, and 19-year-old Carl Herbert Dulinksy helped Moore dispose of Rodriguez' body and hide his torched car in a nearby forest.

The trio of suspects were arrested after the victim's remains were discovered two weeks after the killing.

Ex-convict Troy Driver, 41, is accused of kidnapping Irion from the Walmart parking lot in Fernley during the early morning hours of March 12. He made his initial court appearance before Canal Township Justice Court Judge Lori Matheus, who ruled that his bail will remain at $750,000.

This article published in the Ukiah Daily Journal in 1997 recorded Driver's arrest in connection of a 19-year-old meth dealer's murder in California

Driver's sister, Sharla Driver Cassidy, was also implicated in his crimes after she admitted to driving the car used to lure Rodriguez to his death. She also acted as the getaway driver in her brother's robberies, which he claimed to have committed to help his sister buy plane tickets to Italy.

Four months later, Driver pleaded guilty to the accessory charge related to the murder. He also admitted to robbing a convenience store and a service station, and to breaking into a hardware store.

Driver was sentenced to 15 years in state prison but was released after 12 years.

Since regaining his freedom more than a decade ago, Driver settled in Nevada, living in Elko County, and, more recently, in Lyon County, and working in construction.

According to his LinkedIn page, Driver is currently employed as project superintendent at Ledcor, a construction company operating throughout the US and Canada.

A spokesperson for Ledcor confirmed Driver's employment status to DailyMail.com.

'Ledcor is fully cooperating with the FBI and law enforcement officials in their investigation,' the company representative said in a written statement. 'We have also encouraged employees who might have information that could help with the investigation to immediately contact the authorities. We hope for the safe return of Naomi Irion to her family.'

Irion moved to America last year after growing up in sheltered communities in Russia, Germany and South Africa, a result of her father's job with the State Department

Irion's family said she as exploring life as a free, young American woman. She wanted to learn how to drive, get a job, go on dates and attend community college

Irion's family revealed to DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview last month that the 18-year-old was exploring life as a free, young American woman after growing up in sheltered communities in Russia, Germany and South Africa - a result of her father's job with the State Department.

She moved to America last year to live with Valley, an Apple employee who served in the Navy as a nuclear machinist from 2009 to 2016. She wanted to learn how to drive, get a job, go on dates and attend community college.

Fernley, where she was living with her brother, is a safe area where the residents are stunned by what has happened.

'She really wanted to experience life in America being an American kid. Most kids get to learn how to drive a car and go on dates and get some freedom but in the diplomatic community overseas, you can't have that. You can't learn how to drive a car. You can't really go on dates safely.

'You have to be secure and there's a lot of security that keeps us safe. She hadn't experienced life without that yet.

'She really wanted to explore herself as a free American young woman and what that looked like for her.'

'She was so excited to move back to America,' her mother, Diana, told DailyMail.com on March 29 after flying in to Nevada from South Africa, where she still lives with her husband, Herve Irion, and their three Ukrainian-born adopted sons.

Until this year, Irion had never driven nor gone on dates freely. She was meeting people 'online' and at work, just like other teenagers and adults, her family said.

She was excited about having a car, a job in the Panasonic factory in Reno, where she was making friends.

Her plan was to use her brother's safe home as a launchpad for her own life, saving up enough money from her job at Panasonic to afford her own place, and enrolling in community college.
British holidaymakers caught up in travel chaos at UK airports have now touched down in Spain, only to be greeted by colder temperatures, rain and beaches decimated by storms.

Tourists hoping to relax in the sun after mayhem leaving home were facing more disappointment today after arriving to find Spain chillier than parts of Britain and their favourite stretches of sand washed away.

Midday temperatures on most of the Costa Blanca were due to reach just 12 degrees Celsius (53 degrees Fahrenheit), colder than London (55F) and just a touch warmer than Manchester.

The start of the day in the Costa del Sol meanwhile was marked by grey skies and drizzle, and it was raining in the Majorcan capital Palma with temperatures nudging just 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) at 11am.

Storms over the past few days have left many beaches on the Costa Blanca and Costa del Sol, the most popular stretches of Spanish coastline with British holidaymakers, looking like they've been hit by a bomb.

British holidaymakers caught up in travel chaos at UK airports have now touched down in Spain, only to be greeted by colder temperatures, rain and beaches decimated by storms

Tourists hoping to relax in the sun after mayhem leaving home were facing more disappointment today after finding huge swathes of their favourite beaches washed away or covered in debris

Beaches on Spain's Costa del Sol have suffered significant damage from storms. The head of the Costa del Sol tourist board has said it could put tourism recovery in 'jeopardy'

Spanish each bar owners are openly admitting their Easter hopes have already been ruined following the fresh havoc wrought by a series of storms over recent weeks which had already left resorts with repair bills running into hundreds of thousands of euros

Costa tourist chiefs admitted today they were in a race against time to refill eroded beaches with dredged sand in time for Easter week when the weather is expected to be a mixed bag of sunshine some days and rain on others.

But many beach bar owners are openly admitting their Easter hopes have already been ruined following the fresh havoc wrought by a series of storms over recent weeks which had already left resorts with repair bills running into hundreds of thousands of euros.

Debris including upturned deck chairs and sun loungers by the shoreline and beach showers yanked out of their stands litter the beach in the upmarket Costa del Sol resort of Marbella.

Miguel Muncharaz, manager at iconic Marbella beach bar and restaurant Trocadero Playa, admitted: 'This last storm has devastated this place. Only the structure is left.

'It's a disaster. There's no way we'll be able to get everything back to the way it was before Easter.'

British tourist Dave Prentice, who owns a holiday home in Villajoyosa near Benidorm where at least four beaches have been badly damaged by the force of the waves, said: 'I've been coming here for years and this is the worst I have seen the coastline at this time of the year.

'I was hoping to go back home with a tan but since I got here last week all I've seen is rain and more rain.'

This image shows huge waves whipped up by a storm decimating beachside cabins in Marbella

Storm damage is pictured on the beaches of Mijas today in Malaga

The head of the Costa del Sol Tourist board Francisco Salado has called for the Malaga coast to be declared a disaster zone because of the damage caused by recent strong winds and sea swells.

Tourism chiefs in the area are hoping to put the coronavirus pandemic behind them this year and see foreign holidaymakers returning in the sorts of numbers they were getting pre-Covid.

Mr Salado said: 'The beaches are our biggest tourist attraction and we rely on them being in good condition.'

Estepona's mayor Jose Maria Garcia Urbano said long-term measures to protect the coastline were needed,

'Replacing the sand is a medicine whose effects last a few weeks and sometimes just a few days,' he said in an open letter.

The bad weather greeting newly-arrived Brits today came after days of mayhem at UK airports which saw some passengers miss flights because of huge queues.

Tourism chiefs in the area are hoping to put the coronavirus pandemic behind them this year and see foreign holidaymakers returning in the sorts of numbers they were getting pre-Covid

The bad weather greeting newly-arrived Brits in Spain today came after days of mayhem at UK airports which saw some passengers miss flights because of huge queues

Travel chaos at Heathrow Terminal 2 as families try and get away for the Easter holidays Travel chaos at Heathrow Airport, London, UK - 06 Apr 2022

Manchester Airport boss Karen Smart resigned yesterday over the travel chaos, while more than 100 flights were cancelled across the UK today with huge queues forming at Birmingham, Manchester and Stansted airports from 4.10am as delays continued to derail Easter getaways.

British Airways axed at least 78 flights scheduled to and from Heathrow for Wednesday, while easyJet called off at least 30 at Gatwick.

The unprecedented bedlam is being blamed mostly on 'staffing shortages and recruitment challenges', and a sudden surge in passenger numbers  both caused by Covid and the curbs which have been in place for most of the past two years.

Over 1,140 flights were grounded at Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Birmingham in the week up to April 3  with EasyJet and British Airways also cutting 60 and 98 flights respectively yesterday.
An X-51A WaveRider hypersonic flight test vehicle under the wing of a B-52 Stratofortress is seen during testing, March 26, 2010, in this U.S. Air Force file photo. The U.S., UK and Australia announced they will work together via the recently created security alliance to develop hypersonic missiles. AFP-Yonhap



The United States, United Kingdom and Australia announced Tuesday they will work together via the recently created security alliance known as AUKUS to develop hypersonic missiles.



The move comes amid growing concern in the U.S. and its allies about China's growing military assertiveness in the Pacific. U.S. President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the plan after holding a check-in on the progress of AUKUS, the Indo-Pacific alliance that was launched by the three countries in September.



The leaders said in a joint statement they were ''committed today to commence new trilateral cooperation on hypersonics and counter-hypersonics, and electronic warfare capabilities, as well as to expand information sharing and to deepen cooperation on defense innovation.''



The U.S., Russia and China have all looked to further develop hypersonic missiles  a projectile so fast that it cannot be intercepted by any current missile defense system.



In October, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed that China had conducted a test of a hypersonic weapon system as part of its aggressive effort to advance in space and military technologies.



Milley described the Chinese test as a ''very significant event of a test of a hypersonic weapon system, and it is very concerning,'' in a Bloomberg Television interview.



Russia has used hypersonic missiles ''multiple'' times in Ukraine, according to the top U.S. commander in Europe.



Last fall, as U.S. intelligence officials had become increasingly concerned about the massing of Russian forces on the Ukraine border, Russian President Vladimir Putin urged the country's arms manufacturers to develop even more advanced hypersonic missiles to maintain the country's edge in military technologies.



The Russian military has said that its Avangard system is capable of flying 27 times faster than the speed of sound and making sharp maneuvers on its way to a target to dodge an enemy's missile shield. It has been fitted to the existing Soviet-built intercontinental ballistic missiles instead of older type warheads, and the first unit armed with the Avangard entered service in December 2019.



The Kinzhal, carried by MiG-31 fighter jets, has a range of up to 2,000 kilometers (about 1,250 miles) and flies at 10 times the speed of sound, according to Russian officials.



The Pentagon's 2023 budget request already includes $4.7 billion for research and development of hypersonic weapons. It includes planning that would have a hypersonic missile battery fielded by next year, a sea-based missile by 2025 and an air-based cruise missile by 2027.



Biden, Johnson and Morrison have billed the creation of AUKUS as a chance to build greater sharing of defense capabilities. As their first major action, the alliance said it would help equip Australia with nuclear-powered submarines. (AP)




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A woman has been pulled alive from the rubble of a home in Rubizhne after a Russian airstrike which killed a civilian, as Putin's forces continue to pound the east of Ukraine.

Emergency services shared photos this morning of the distressed woman buried under timber and rocks as they scrambled to free her following the latest savage attack.

Once she was pulled to safety yesterday afternoon, the woman was carried by rescuers to an ambulance and she is being treated at hospital.

The airstrike injured five people and seven more 'extricated themselves from the rubble', the local governor Sergiy Gaiday said.

It comes as shells and rockets are landing regularly in the industrial city of Severodonetsk, the easternmost city held by Ukrainian forces on the eastern frontline, as Putin refocuses his brutal campaign in the Donbas after suffering major losses further west.

In Mariupol, the city council have accused Russians of setting up mobile crematoriums to remove any evidence of potential war crimes.

Officials estimate the death toll in the port city is as high as tens of thousands, and the Kremlin is now trying to 'cover their tracks' after the international condemnation to the horrific scenes of Bucha where civilian bodies were piled high and buried in mass graves, they said.

The city council said: 'After the widespread international genocide in Bucha, Russia's top leadership ordered the destruction of any evidence of crimes committed by its army in Mariupol.

'All potential witnesses to the occupiers' atrocities are being identified through filtration camps and destroyed... The scale of the tragedy in Mariupol the world has not seen since the times of Nazi concentration camps.'

Russia has even attempted to install a pro-Kremlin puppet mayor in Mariupol, Kostyantyn Ivashchenko, while the true mayor Vadym Boychenko remains trapped in the besieged city.

A woman has been pulled alive from the rubble of a home in Rubizhne after a Russian airstrike which killed a civilian, as Putin's forces continue to pound the east of Ukraine

Emergency services shared photos this morning of the distressed woman buried under timber and rocks as they scrambled to free her following the latest savage attack

Once she was pulled to safety yesterday afternoon, the woman was carried by rescuers to an ambulance and she is being treated at hospital

New drone footage has also revealed the scale of destruction in Borodyanka, a liberated town near Bucha

Firefighters work at a site of burning fuel storage facilities damaged by an airstrike in Dnipropetrovsk

A heavily damaged apartment building is seen following a Russian attack in the centre of Borodyanka

Ivashchenko is a local council member from the pro-Russian party Opposition Platform, and was pronounced mayor on Monday during a party meeting.

Meanwhile Ukraine has told residents of the country's eastern regions to evacuate 'now' or 'risk death' due to a feared Russian attack.

'The governors of the Kharkiv, Lugansk and Donetsk regions are calling on the population to leave these territories and are doing everything to ensure that the evacuations take place in an organised manner,' deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk wrote on Telegram.

Vereshchuk asked residents to cooperate with authorities, saying Kyiv will 'not be able to help' them after an attack.

'It has to be done now because later people will be under fire and face the threat of death. There is nothing they will be able to do about it, nor will we be able to help,' she said.

'It is necessary to evacuate as long as this possibility exists. For now, it still exists,' she added.

In Luhansk, a new strike on a humanitarian aid distribution centre killed two and injured five today.

Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko shared photos from the town of Vuhledar, where he said Russian artillery fire had struck a humanitarian aid distribution point.

The photos showed two women stretched out on the ground. Another person had a serious leg wound and a fourth was shown with a bloodied leg, being helped into a rescue vehicle.

'At the moment it's known that two people were killed and five were injured. We document all the crimes committed by the Russian Federation on our land,' Kyrylenko wrote.

Authorities in the eastern region urged residents to get out 'while it is safe' from an area that Ukraine expects to be the target of a major new offensive.

The Luhansk region governor, Serhiy Gaidai, said Russian forces now controlled 60 per cent of the eastern town of Rubizhne and reported 81 mortar, artillery and rocket strikes across the region over the previous day.

'I appeal to every resident of the Luhansk region - evacuate while it is safe,' he wrote in an online post earlier on Wednesday. 'While there are buses and trains - take this opportunity.'

Ukrainian state emergency servicemen clear shells near Chernihiv after the northern city was vacated by Russian troops

The Ukrainian flag flies outside the town administration building that was damaged during heavy shelling in the town of Derhachi outside Kharkiv

Russian forces overnight struck a fuel depot and a factory in Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region as firefighters tackle the huge blaze

The number of casualties from the fuel depot strike remains unclear, the region's Governor Valentyn Reznichenko said

Reznichenko said: 'The night was alarming and difficult. The enemy attacked our area from the air and hit the oil depot and one of the plants'

To the south, the besieged southern port of Mariupol has been under bombardment throughout most of the invasion that began on February 24, trapping tens of thousands of residents without food, water or power.

The crucial port city remains surrounded and under siege from Russian forces amid constant shelling.

Mariupol's capture could enable Russia to entrench a land passage between two separatist, self-proclaimed people's republics in Donbas and the Crimea region which Russia seized and annexed in 2014.

'The humanitarian situation in the city is worsening,' British military intelligence said on Wednesday, while Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said people trying to flee would have to use their own vehicles.

Russian forces overnight struck a fuel depot and a factory in Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region, and the number of casualties remains unclear, the region's Governor Valentyn Reznichenko said.

'The night was alarming and difficult. The enemy attacked our area from the air and hit the oil depot and one of the plants. The oil depot with fuel was destroyed. Rescuers are still putting out the flames at the plant. There is a strong fire,' Reznichenko wrote.

New drone footage has also revealed the scale of destruction in Borodyanka, a liberated town near Bucha, which Zelensky said could reveal more horrors of the Russian occupation.

Ukrainians build a new bridge next to a bridge damaged by Russian strikes in Irpin

'The night was alarming and difficult. The enemy attacked our area from the air and hit the oil depot and one of the plants

Ukrainian state emergency servicemen clear shells near Chernihiv following the Russian withdrawal towards the east

Volodymyr Zelensky says he fears more tragedies like the one seen in Bucha in other Ukrainian cities such as Borodyanka (pictured in new drone footage)

A view of the destruction left behind by Russians after the Ukrainian army regained control of Borodyanka

Nina, 74, reacts as she walks past buildings that were destroyed by Russian shelling in Borodyanka, in the Kyiv region

A monument to Taras Shevchenko, a Ukrainian poet and a national symbol, in seen with traces of bullets against the background of an apartment house ruined in the Russian shelling in the central square in Borodyanka

A Ukrainian woman cries among the ruins of the ghost town Borodianka that was the scene of heavy clashes for weeks

A Christian reverend prays for the Ukrainian war victims among the ruins, as the Russian attacks continues, in Borodianka

Russian forces last week pulled back from positions outside Kyiv and shifted the focus of their assault away from the capital, and Ukraine's general staff said the northeastern city of Kharkiv, the country's second-largest, also remained under attack.

Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Ukraine was trying to evacuate trapped civilians through 11 humanitarian corridors across Ukraine, but that people trying to flee Mariupol would have to use their own vehicles.

The city mayor said last week up to 170,000 civilians were trapped in Mariupol with no power and dwindling supplies.

Western sanctions over Russia's invasion gained new impetus this week when dead civilians shot at close range were found in the town of Bucha after it was retaken from Russian forces.

As Pope Francis described the killings there as a 'massacre', the head of the European Commission signalled further sanctions - including examining a ban on energy imports - on top of ones unveiled by the bloc on Tuesday. Washington is in turn due to announce new sanctions on Wednesday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the West needed to act decisively in taking 'more rigid' steps.

'When we are hearing new rhetoric about sanctions... I can't tolerate any indecisiveness after everything that Russian troops have done,' he told Irish lawmakers by videolink.

A woman walks past a church that was damaged during heavy shelling in the town of Derhachi today

Zelensky accused the West of holding back on supplies because of 'intimidation' from Moscow and suggested Russia is in charge of NATO

A car is seen riddled with bullet holes on the street on April 5, 2022 in Bucha, Ukraine. Milley said the war in Ukraine could last for years

Ukrainian officials say between 150 and 300 bodies might be in a mass grave by a church in Bucha, north of the capital Kyiv, where satellite images taken weeks ago show bodies of civilians on a street, a private U.S. company said.

Moscow, which refers to the conflict as a 'special military operation' designed to demilitarise Ukraine, denied targeting civilians there and called the evidence presented a forgery staged by the West to discredit it.

Reuters could not immediately verify the British report.

Vereshchuk said authorities would try to evacuate civilians trapped elsewhere through 11 humanitarian corridors.

Ukraine's foreign minister said that while he welcomed the latest set of EU sanctions only an embargo on Russian gas and oil and cutting off all Russian banks from the global financial system could 'stop' President Vladimir Putin.

'I will take a gas/oil embargo and de-SWIFTing of all Russian banks to stop Putin. Difficult times require difficult decisions,' Dmytro Kuleba said on Twitter.

Speaking a day after the European Union announced new sanctions, including a ban on Russian coal imports and denying Russian ships access to EU ports, the head of the EU executive, Ursula von der Leyen, said there was more to come.

'These sanctions will not be our last sanctions,' she told European Parliament on Wednesday. 'Now we have to look into oil and revenues Russia gets from fossil fuels.'

Von der Leyen's remarks signalled the bloc's strengthening resolve to take the step that Kyiv says is vital to securing a deal to end the war. But German Finance Minster Christian Lindner said in a newspaper interview, Europe's biggest economy which relies on Russian gas for much of its energy needs, was just not ready for an immediate ban.

The White House said earlier that new sanctions, coordinated between Washington, the Group of Seven advanced economies and the EU, will target Russian banks and officials and ban new investment in Russia.
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Margaret Thatcher made repeated attempts to win a knighthood for Jimmy Savile despite warnings about his 'manner of life'.

The former prime minister made at least five requests for the now-disgraced DJ to be considered for the top honour, but senior civil servants voiced fears about his 'strange and complex' private life.

There is no suggestion that Baroness Thatcher or her aides were aware of his vile abuse.

But there were concerns about his lifestyle and admissions in the 1980s that he was called 'The Godfather' by friends and bragged openly about having someone beaten up.

The revelations were aired in the bombshell Netflix documentary Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story which was released today.

It showed a letter from Mrs Thatcher's private secretary Nigel Wicks in 1986, which said: 'She is most disappointed that Mr Savile's name has not been recommended. She wonders how many more times his name is to be pushed aside.'

The Tory leader believed he should be given the highest honour for his charity work. She and her husband Dennis were friends with him, once inviting him to Chequers over Christmas.

The Netflix documentary showed an interview with him, where he predicted they would 'play games' and not talk about politics.

Mrs Thatcher eventually succeeded in her quest and the DJ and Jim'll Fix It presenter was made Sir Jimmy Savile in 1990, a month after she left Downing Street.

The new documentary also laid bare Savile's cosy relationship with the Royal Family, who for years leant on him heavily for advice to make them more popular and how to squash gaffes and scandals.

The BBC star, who was later unmasked as Britain's worst paedophile, acted as Prince Charles' 'unofficial chief advisor' and penpal while fostering a friendship with Princess Diana, who he called 'his girl' and embarrassed with lewd jokes.

In newly unearthed footage, the heir to the throne praises the paedophile in 1983 as the only person in Britain he believed could raise 10million for Stoke Mandeville Hospital in three years.

Patients and staff working on the NHS wards in Buckinghamshire said they would see royals 'all the time', including Princess Diana, who would join Savile for regular visits. One patient on the spine injury ward recalled how on one occasion the Princess of Wales asked her: 'What do you do all day?', before Savile cut across and said: 'They watch porn'. Diana is said to have blushed and laughed.

The Duke of Edinburgh was also a visitor to Stoke Mandeville. And on one occasion he and Savile were filmed giggling 'like little boys' as the Top of the Pops host chose to drive the Queen's husband to the local railway station, much to the panic of his royal protection officers.

One hospital worker told the Netflix two-part documentary, which went online today, said: 'They [the royals] were always asking his opinion on things. I used to say to him: 'I don't know who they think you are'. We'd see them or hear them on the phone [to Savile] or they would come to Stoke'.



Prince Charles' personal correspondence with Savile, then the Jim'll Fix It presenter and arguably the most famous man in Britain at that time, has been described as 'catastrophic' and a 'terrible reflection' on him. Alison Bellamy, a Yorkshire journalist who became Savile's biographer said: 'Jimmy Savile was an unofficial chief advisor to the Prince of Wales', adding: 'Charles had found his link with the people of Britain'.

Charles and other members of the Royal Family had no idea Savile's philanthropy was a cover for decades of abuse.

'He [Charles] was duped, like we all were,' the Netflix documentary's director Rowan Deacon told The Times, adding: 'The letters show the trust that Prince Charles put into Jimmy Savile. He was trying to appeal to the British people, trying to modernise. And he saw Jimmy Savile as his conduit to that. In hindsight, that was catastrophic.'

Margaret Thatcher made repeated attempts to win a knighthood for Jimmy Savile despite warnings about his 'manner of life'

Jimmy Savile gets into a Jaguar to drive a laughing Prince Philip to the station after a visit to Stoke Mandeville Hospital

New archive footage shows Savile laughing with Princess Diana. He once cracked a joke about patients watching porn, which is said to have left her blushing

Prince Charles praised Savile's fundraising (pictured) and also leant on the star for help. Experts say the Royal Family was 'duped' like millions of others of Britons

Royal experts have said that Savile was a regular at various palaces and would 'walk in and drift around Diana's apartment' at Kensington Palace. He would kiss the hands of the secretaries and even 'rub his lips' up their arms as a greeting. Daily Mail royal writer Richard Kay said Savile once licked Princess Diana's hand, and she recoiled, later telling him: 'It was something very creepy'.

It emerged after Savile's death that he also reportedly counselled Charles in the late 1980s as his marriage to Diana was failing badly. In 1989 Diana was recorded telling her childhood friend James Gilbey: 'Jimmy Savile rang me up yesterday, and he said: 'I'm just ringing up, my girl, to tell you that His Nibs [Prince Charles] has asked me to come and help out the redhead [the Duchess of York], and I'm just letting you know, so that you don't find out through her or him; and I hope it's all right by you.''

In a stinging attack on the Royals, Mark Williams-Thomas, whose ITV documentary led to him being unmasked as a prolific sex offender, claimed Savile regularly popped into Buckingham Palace and was even set to be Charles's official marriage guidance counsellor.

Speaking on GB News this, TV investigator Mark said: 'They will do what the royals do, which is bury their head and make no comments at all.

'When we did the second Savile exposure programme, we looked very closely into the connection between Prince Charles and Savile and also other members of the family.

'Savile used to go into Buckingham Palace and sit down and have cups of tea with the staff there.

'He was very, very close to Prince Charles and to Lady Diana and in fact, at one stage he was courted to be the counsel for Prince Charles and Charles would go into problems in his relationship with Princess Diana.

'I mean - absolutely mad, given that Savile himself had no long term relationships ever in his past.'

Savile even penned a five-page crisis management dossier at the request of Prince Charles after a series of gaffes including a foot-in-mouth moment for Prince Andrew at Lockerbie, newly released letters unearthed by Netflix revealed today.

Charles wrote to depraved child rapist Jimmy Savile to ask him to help with the Royal Family's ailing image - and boosting his own profile - in a series of 'To Jimmy' letters and postcards spanning 20 years.

The Prince of Wales lavished praise on the predatory paedophile's 'straightforward common sense' and asked him for advice on improving speeches and helping him with public visits to charities. Charles also asked Savile, who was knighted in 1990, to advise his sister in law Sarah, the Duchess of York and her gaffe-prone husband Prince Andrew.

The TV star, later revealed to be one of Britain's worst child abusers who also bragged about performing sex acts on corpses in hospital morgues and stealing glass eyes from the dead for jewellery in almost 60 years of sickening attacks, even drew up a media relations handbook for Charles.

In a handwritten 1989 document he called 'Guidelines for members of the Royal Family and their staffs', Savile told Charles: 'There must be an 'incident room' with several independent phone lines, teletext etc. The Queen should be informed in advance of any proposed action by Family members'.

He said this crisis unit would be run by 'a special person with considerable experience in such matters', adding that he could speak with confidence on such matters, saying: 'I get into St James Palace and Buckingham Palace on a regular basis'.

The prince went on to incorporate some of the advice and replied to Savile: 'I attach a copy of my memo on disasters which incorporates your points and which I showed to my Father. He showed it to H.M [the Queen].'

It came a year after the Duke of York said on a visit to Lockerbie, where 270 people died: 'I suppose statistically something like this has got to happen at some stage... Of course it only affects the community in a very small way.'

In 1987 Charles wrote to Savile: 'Perhaps I am wrong, but you are the bloke who knows what's going on. What I really need, is a list of suggestions from you. I so want to get to parts of the country that others don't get to reach.' And in 1991 he sent a note thanking him 'for the most useful assistance you have provided for my speech in Guildhall'.

These are the first words of a five-page PR guide drawn up by Jimmy Savile in 1989 on how the royals should respond to significant incidents, which was sent to Prince Charles at his request and adopted in part

Savile called for a 'special person' to run a royal crisis centre, complete with multiple phone lines and Teletext

Savile's personal observations, in his own words, were based on his 'regular' visits to Buckingham Palace and St James' Palace, he said

The paedophile, who exchanged letters with Charles for 20 years, said the Queen should be informed immediately in a PR crisis

Charles went on to incorporate some of the advice and replied to Savile (pictured): 'I attach a copy of my memo on disasters which incorporates your points and which I showed to my Father. He showed it to H.M [the Queen].'

The Prince of Wales' correspondence with Savile, then the Jim'll Fix It presenter, will be shown to the world in the new Netflix documentary Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story

Charles asked Savile for help after Prince Andrew went to Lockerbie after the bombing and bungled the visit with some insensitive comments

This is one of several 'To Jimmy' postcards and letters sent to Savile by Prince Charles, who asked him for help for himself and his family

In this note he asked whether he would be willing to meet Sarah, the Duchess of York, and offer her some of his 'straightforward common sense'

Charles also asked Savile where he could make public visits as he knew he was well connected with many institutions through his fundraising

Netflix director: Prince Charles trusted and respected Jimmy Savile Savile came into contact with the Prince and Princess of Wales after his work on the Stoke Mandeville Hospital - whose spinal injuries ward Princess Diane opened in 1983 The director of a new documentary about Jimmy Savile has said it aims to examine the disgraced entertainer's relationship with the British public and the establishment to explain how he was 'hiding in plain sight' for so long. The new two-part Netflix programme, Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story, delves into archive footage covering a 50-year period to consider how one of the biggest stars in television got away with his crimes as a prolific sex offender. It also explores Savile's relationship with the Prince of Wales, in particular the letters they exchanged over many years during which the presenter often provided advice on public and family matters. The documentary's director, Rowan Deacon, told Times Radio that some of the material they examined was Savile's correspondence with Charles, which, she said, gave them an 'understanding of the nature of the friendship that they had', which she feels has not been fully understood before. She said: 'I suppose what was most interesting, and why we've included those in the film, which looks really broadly at many reasons why Jimmy Savile wasn't apprehended before he died, is that the relationship was one where Prince Charles trusted and respected Jimmy Savile. 'And I think that's really interesting because I think what we were trying to do is look honestly at our, the British public's, relationship with Jimmy Savile, in order to try and explain how he got away with it. 'And I think there's been a temptation to say after the revelations 'Oh well, I always knew, I always hated the man'. That seems to be the common answer we got when we phoned people up. 'And I think that's unhelpful because I don't think the archive material or footage brought that out. I think that isn't the case. He was trusted and respected. And I think that we need to look at that in order to understand how perpetrators behave and how this happened.' Deacon noted in conversation with The Times 2 supplement that they are 'not suggesting for one moment' that the prince knew what Savile was 'really up to'. The director also said that a great deal of the more than 700 hours of footage that the documentary team looked at had been put away following the revelations of Savile's years of sexual abuse. Through her analysis, she feels his approach at 'hiding in plain sight' changed across the decades. She said: 'I think in the 1960s and 1970s what's most shocking is that his what we now describe as lascivious, creepy, assaulting behaviour on women, which is happening in front of the camera on broadcast footage, what's shocking about that is not that he's doing it, because we now know what we know, it's that nobody blinks an eye, it's completely normal. 'So I think that the social conditions at the time normalised that kind of behaviour. 'I don't mean the things that we found out that he was also doing, but the sort of public lasciviousness and creepiness (that) was not judged as anything problematic.' Deacon feels Savile's tactics changed by the 1990s as by then she thinks he was seen as a 'creepy and strange figure' so he himself became the 'source of the rumours'. 'He's the one saying the creepy things and suggesting that he's up to no good, and I think he does a kind of double bluff with the audience', she said. 'So it's quite confusing and people end up thinking 'Well, he's sort of saying it so it can't be true'. 'And I think that kind of psychological game that goes on, it's quite complex, that we can now look back at in the archive and we also asked our interviewees who were in the archives to look back at it themselves, which was kind of an interesting experience, really helps us to understand how this happened in a way that's illuminating.' Advertisement

Charles' letters have got him in hot water in the past. The Prince of Wales has been forced to promise he will not 'meddle' in public affairs when he becomes king after a series of high-profile rows. In 2015 he had to defend his decision to write a series of letters to government ministers, some of which are known as the 'black spider' memos, so-called because of his use of black ink and his scrawled handwriting. In 2004 and 2005 it emerged he wrote 27 memos with policy demands and various comments sent to Labour's then prime minister Tony Blair and his cabinet.

And between 2010 and 2015 he he had 47 meetings with Cabinet ministers and 21 with junior ministers  at a rate of more than one a month. Some of his notes were bizarre, including a personal plea to protect the rare Patagonian Toothfish from illegal fisherman 10,000 miles away. He also lobbied ministers to use more alternative medicine such as homeopathy on the NHS because he 'couldn't bear people suffering unnecessarily'.

Savile was asked to guide the future king between 1986 and 2006 on matters from public speeches to family matters. At that time the BBC star used his fame, wealth and prolific fundraising, which raised millions for the NHS, as a way to be free to abuse who he wanted.

A five-page PR guide was drawn up in 1989 on how the royals should respond to significant incidents.

Other letters revealed how Savile was also asked to help the Duchess of York with her public relations. On December 22, 1989 Charles wrote: 'I can't help feeling that it would be extremely useful to her if you could. I feel she could do with some of your straightforward common sense.'

In one note, the Prince asks if Savile would mind meeting his then sister-in-law to help reign her erratic behaviour in.

Knowing his connections within the charity industry, Prince Charles would also ask for Savile's suggestions for public visits, without knowing these were the very places the television personality would use to attack his victims.

Later letters lavish praise on Savile's affable traits - long before the presenter's heinous past came to light - that the television star would use over a near 50 year campaign of terror to abuse hundreds of victims as young as five.

Savile came into contact with the Prince and Princess of Wales after his work on the Stoke Mandeville Hospital - whose spinal injuries ward Princess Diane opened in 1983.

It would later emerge that the paedophile DJ attacked 60 NHS patients at Stoke Mandeville Hospital alone, where he was given his own private bedroom and 24 hour access to all wards. It is also likely that he had sex with bodies in a mortuary at Leeds General Infirmary for up to 50 years and is believed to have stolen glass eyes from the dead and made them into medallions and rings.

Charles' writings paint a picture of a hospitable relationship between the Prince and the TV star.

Charles informally signs off his correspondence with his first name, while addressing Savile as Jimmy.

A request to tap Savile's influence and connections to form a 'list of suggestions... to get to parts of the country that others don't get to reach' was among the Prince's earliest letters.

Writing from Sandringham on January 14, 1989, Charles asked: 'Perhaps I am wrong, but you are the bloke who knows what's going on. What I really need, is a list of suggestions from you. I so want to get to parts of the country that others don't get to reach.'

The Prince had earlier asked for Savile's advice on responding to PR blunders, after Prince Andrew's performance in the wake of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in December 1988.

Eleven people died, along with the 259 passengers and crew on board the New York-bound plane which had set off from Heathrow. But Andrew had seemed to show little empathy in the wake of the national disaster.

The day after the bombing, Charles wrote Savile and asked: 'I wonder if you would ever be prepared to meet my sister-in-law, the Duchess of York?

'I can't help feeling that it would be extremely useful to her if you could. I feel she could do with some of your straight-forward common sense.'

In response, Savile concocted an action plan, which was reportedly viewed by the Queen and Prince Philip, that would see an 'incident room' with independent phone lines installed and required all proposed action to be vetted by Her Majesty.

Charles later wrote back on January 27, 1989, in which he attached a memo on disasters 'incorporating your points' that would be shown to the Queen.

On April 16 that year, as Charles pondered a speech he would make at London's Guildhall, he wrote: 'You are so good at understanding what makes people operate and you're wonderfully sceptical and practical.

'Can you cast an eye over this draft and let me know how you think we can best appeal to people?'

Charles' writings paint a picture of a hospitable relationship between the Prince and the TV star. He informally signs off his correspondence with his first name, while addressing Savile as Jimmy

Netflix's new documentary will cast a light on the eccentricity and philanthropy used by Savile to mask his many decades of sex abuse allegations. Pictured: The Prince of Wales meeting Savile and Frank Bruno in November 1998

Netflix's new documentary casts a light on the eccentricity and philanthropy used by Savile to mask his many decades of sex abuse

The television star would use his affable personality over a near 50 year campaign of terror to sexually abuse hundreds of victims, some as young as five. He also used access to vulnerable children and adults to abuse, including in the NHS

On July 4, he wrote from Highgrove House: 'Dear Jimmy, I can't tell you how grateful I am for the most useful assistance you have provided for my speech in the Guildhall the other day.

'It was really good of you to take the trouble to put together those splendid notes and provide me with considerable food for thought.

'Whether you think the final result is in any way worthwhile is another matter. With renewed and heartfelt thanks, Charles.'

Netflix's new documentary will cast a light on the eccentricity and philanthropy used by Savile to mask his many decades of sex abuse allegations.

Savile, who rose from a humble working-class upbringing to become one of British television's biggest stars, passed away aged 84 in 2011.

In his final years, he fought to quell growing speculation about his illegal exploits throughout his illustrious career with the BBC.

A Corporation-led inquiry into his actions found he had molested at least 72 children, some as young as eight, over a four decade campaign of sexual abuse with his first victim in 1959 and his last in 2006.

His horrific reign of abuse could be charted 'in the corridors, canteens, staircases and dressing rooms of every BBC premises', their 2016 report found.
Reinvention king Matt Hancock has revealed his new love of crypto currencies as 'a force for good in the world' in a toe-curling promo in front of a giant video of a fire.

The former health secretary, 43, left his now-familiar non-MP outfit of jeans and a black turtleneck top at home for the occasion, instead donning a suit and tie.

But Mr Hancock - who was caught cheating on his wife with his aide Gina Coladangelo - sparked ridicule with the footage posted on his Twitter feed.

Some remarked the dingy surroundings and fake fire made it 'look like he was entering the fires of hell'.

While another quipped 'Matt Hancock probably thinks Crypto is Superman's dog'.

Mr Hancock's crypto chat was made to Crypto Club Global, which started similar events four months ago.

He told the guests, who could only be seen in shadow, that: 'Cryptocurrencies are a force for good in the world. Bad people are going to use all sorts of currencies and have since currencies were invented.

'That is also true of cryptocurrencies. But the advantage of a currency that is based on the blockchain is that if you get the regulatory piece right, then you get more transparency, not less, and the FBI have recently proved this in the states, which was excellent.

As Health Secretary Mr Hancock was one of the stern faces of Britain's pandemic response

Mr Hancock has been compared to the Milk Tray Man over his black turtle-neck top outfits

Online critics ridiculed Mr Hancock's crypto drive and questioned his expertise in the field

'So when it comes to things like sanctions, you can see the flow of money.

'And of course, there are dark corners that make this more challenging, but the mass market is a force for good, and so, there is a need to be making this argument.'

The video took many by surprise, including some critics, who decried Mr Hancock's digital credentials.

One opined 'It looks like he's speaking from the pits of Hell', while a further asked 'Who would have known that it would be Matt Hancock to single-handedly make crypto so uncool he saved humanity.'

Mr Hancock's foray into the digital currency comes just days after Rishi Sunak announced an HM Treasury NFT.

But one friend of the MP suggested his interest in the technology was not as surprising as it may look on first blush.

They added: 'Matt was an economist at the Bank of England and this is all about innovation and finance.

'He's had a long-held interest in tech too so to say it is a new thing for him just isn't true.'

Mr Hancock's crypto push comes in the wake of numerous different activities and looks for the former minister.

Since the end of his tenure as health minister, Mr Hancock has appeared to have embraced casual clothing and some more off-beat activities.

In February, speaking to The Diary of a CEO podcast, he said he 'fell in love' with Coladangelo after bringing her in to work with him.

Matt Hancock caught on camera having a passionate clinch outside his Whitehall office with aide Gina Coladangelo

Matt Hancock finds himself in cold water as he enjoys London's Serpentine after a run

Culture Secretary Matt Hancock once posted a video of him trying out parkour by jumping off concrete blocks

Mr Hancock is also a big runner and has shown an unusual attitude to getting over low fencing

He told the podcast host, entrepreneur and Dragons' Den investor Steven Bartlett: 'It actually happened after the rules were lifted, but the guidance was still in place. I resigned because I broke the social distancing guidelines by then.

'They weren't actually rules. They weren't the law. But that's not the point.

'The point is they were the guidelines that I'd been proposing. And that happened because I fell in love with somebody.'

A month earlier he was seen after he peeled off the layers for a dip in Hyde Park's icy Serpentine lake at 7.45am in morning.

But he has always been keen to get involved with new activities.

In 2020 he was seen trying out parkour - where participants try to get from point A to point B in the most fluid way possible - when he was culture secretary.

And he has also demonstrated a love of music in an historic Tweet.

He posted: 'Ed Sheeran has been amazing for the music industry this year and the whole album is fantastic but Galway Girl is probably my favourite song from it.'

Former Chancellor George Osborne once said of him: 'Sometimes people say about Matt that he's too Tiggerish, too like Tigger in Winnie-The-Pooh.

'Frankly, that is all about his youth and his energy and his enthusiasm, and in a political system that is full of Eeyores we could do with a few more Tiggers.'
An Instagram influencer has been publicly shamed for approaching a restaurant requesting free meals in exchange for 'exposure'.

Jasmine Rollason, who has over 36,000 followers on Instagram, messaged a bemused restaurant owner out of the blue through its social media page.

She wrote she would soon be heading to tourist hotspot Noosa in Queensland and 'would love to help your business grow'.

Ms Rollason said she would share content from the eatery on her Instagram page to her loyal followers who 'value my opinions and posts'.

Self-proclaimed social media 'blogger' Jasmine Rollason has been exposed for approaching a restaurant in Noosa requesting free meals in exchange for publicity online

Ms Rollason, who has over 36,000 followers on Instagram, informed the restaurant owner on Queensland's Sunshine Coast she 'would love to help your business grow'

She added she would be 'more than happy' to hand over material the restaurant could use to promote their own business - with the blonde bombshell also willing to 'add her personal touch' if need be.

She signed off the cringeworthy message by pointing out she is a model 'with lots of experience'.

When asked to comment by Daily Mail Australia about her 'offer' to the restaurant owner, Ms Rollason swiftly deleted her Instagram account - before changing her handle.

Prominent food critic John Lethlean shared the message on his own Instagram page on Tuesday night.

He sarcastically pointed out Ms Rollason is a 'model as well as a reviewer', before adding the hashtag #couscousforcomment - a reference to the irritating tend of influencers seeking free meals.

The start of Ms Rollason's message where she points out how keen she was 'to help the business grow' in Noosa - via her personal Instagram page in exchange for free meals

She goes onto point out that she has over 35,000 followers on social media who 'value her opinions and posts'

She ended her cringeworthy message by pointing out she is a 'model with lots of experience'

The hashtag has gone viral in recent months, with countless cafe and restaurant owners tired of being approached for food bills to be covered in exchange for social media exposure.

In February, another fed-up restaurant owner sent a scathing response to an Instagram influencer who asked to 'try out' his meals.

Food blogger Elle Groves, who runs the page @twoteaspoons with friend Annie Knight, approached the restaurant for a 'collaboration'.

'We would love to come and try it out in exchange for some stories on our personal accounts, and a post and stories on our food page accounts,' Ms Groves wrote.

'Hey, Elle apologies for the delay... I've been grappling with how much rage to demonstrate/throw in your direction,' the irate owner eventually responded.

'I've decided to take the high road and explain a few things to you in the hope that you'll learn something and become a better person.

'Reaching out blind to a venue you know nothing about looking for free stuff is a s**tty enough thing to do in the best of times.

Food blogger Elle Groves, who runs the page @twoteaspoons with friend Annie Knight, approached the unnamed restaurant in February for a 'collaboration' in exchange for a free meal

The restaurant owner sent a scathing response which was praised by many social media commenters

'But it's even worse when Covid is still very much a thing, affecting small businesses like us devastatingly for two years now.'

The owner goes on to tell Ms Groves her message 'triggered' him after Covid forced him to pick up another job on his days off to ensure his staff were paid.

Ms Groves and Ms Knight told Daily Mail Australia the aim of their page was to create awareness for small cafes and businesses by promoting them to their 10,000 combined followers.

'We have never asked companies for free food, it is always left open to them to what they want to offer,' @twoteaspoons said.

'We have dined at 99 per cent of restaurants featured on our page paying full price.

'We always have the restaurants best interest at heart.'
President Joe Biden wrote a college recommendation letter for the son of Hunter Biden's Chinese business partner in 2017, it has been claimed.

The president's letter for the son of Jonathan Li, CEO of Chinese investment firm BHR, was sent directly to the president of Brown university through FedEx, according to a chain of emails that have resurfaced.

Biden has consistently denied having conversations with his son Hunter about his business ventures, with White House press secretary Jen Psaki as recently as Tuesday denying the pair held any such discussions.

The string of emails were sent between Li and Hunter Biden's business associates involved in his own firm Rosemont Seneca, and specifically its joint venture with Chinese firms BHR and Bohai Capital. While Hunter himself did not send an email in the chain, he was copied in to the messages.

The emails originated from a laptop said to belong to Hunter Biden that has become the focus of intense debate around the president, his son and the media's coverage of the laptop's contents.

In an email dated January 3, 2017 sent to Hunter Biden and business associates Devon Archer and Jim Bulger - Jonathan Li tells the recipients he has attached the CV of his son - Christopher Li.

President Joe Biden wrote a college recommendation letter for the son of Hunter Biden 's Chinese business partner in 2017. Emails show Hunter's business partner Jonathan Li in a back and forth about

Li's son was applying to Brown University, Cornell and New York University. It's unclear which school he ended up attending

Li shared his gratitude with Hunter for helping his son with the applications to the colleges

President Joe Biden (right) wrote a college recommendation letter for the son of Hunter Biden's (left) Chinese business partner in 2017, it has been claimed

'Gentlmen[sic], please find the attached resume of my son, Chris Li. He is applying the following colleges for this year,' the email says, listing Brown University, Cornell University and New York University and asking for advice for his applications.

Bulger replies to the email, copying in Hunter and Archer, telling Li that they had received the uprated CV. 'Lets [sic] see how we can be helpful here to Chris,' Bulger writes.

The following month, on February 18, president of Rosemont Seneca at the time Eric Schwerin sent a follow-up email to Li, saying he had been asked to pass on a recommendation letter that has been written by Hunter's father.

'Jonathan, Hunter asked me to send you a copy of the recommendation letter that he asked his father to write on behalf of Christopher for Brown University,' Schwerin wrote.

Schwerin adds that a copy of the original letter is being 'FedExed to Dr. Paxson directly at Brown,' saying it should be delivered by Tuesday (which would have been February 21, 2017).

Dr. Christina Paxson has been Brown University's president since 2012.

The president's letter for the son of Jonathan Li, CEO of Chinese investment firm BHR, was sent directly to the president of Brown university through FedEx

Jonathan Li replied the following day (February 19, 2017) thanking Schwerin and Hunter profusely for organising the letter.

'Hi Eric, Just see[sic] the email,' he wrote. 'It is just great! Thank you very much! And Hunter, thank you very much too. All the best to you all,' he added, a screengrab of the email sent on February 19 showed.

The recommendation letter being discussed in the email, that was purportedly sent by Joe Biden to Dr. Paxson, has not been seen

It was not immediately clear whether Christopher Li was accepted into Brown University - or either of the other two colleges listed by his father - following the purported letter, and if so whether he went to the college.

The White House declined its request to respond to the claims, saying it does not comment on the laptop, while Brown University declined to comment on issues regarding student admissions.

President Biden has denied having knowledge of his son's business dealings.

As recently as last year, Hunter held a 10 percent stake in BCR - something the White House has acknowledged. Speaking to the New York Times in November, Hunter's attorney said he had since divested from the company.

Dr Christina Paxson Christina Paxson, President of Brown University. Biden's letter of recommendation was sent directly to Dr Paxson, the emails suggest

Pictured: Hunter Biden's associates Devon Archer (left) and Eric Schwerin (right), who were both included in the email chain. Schwerin told Li that the recommendation letter from 'Hunter's father' had been sent to Brown University's president Dr. Christina Paxson, according to screenshots of the emails from the broadcaster

In March 2021, DailyMail.com hired experts to validate material on the abandoned laptop's hard drive. The laptop was one of three handed to a Delaware repair shop, and was found to have thousands of emails on.

Last week, the Washington Post confirmed the authenticity of the laptop which showed his foreign business dealings - nine months after first receiving a copy and a full year after DailyMail.com authenticated it.

The Post had cyber forensics experts validate material on the abandoned laptop hard drive, using similar methods that experts hired by DailyMail.com used.

After months of publishing articles suggesting the laptop could be Russian disinformation, the analysis published by the Post marked a U-turn.

Its admission also followed the New York Times, which quietly noted 1,200 words into a story published last month that it had also validated material from the laptop.

The laptop has been at the center of controversy surrounding the Biden family, with files found on Biden's personal computer including emails showing dodgy business dealings between the President's son and foreign officials.

Files revealed Biden has had business dealings with the state-controlled Chinese energy company CEFC and even made keys for his family - including Joe and Jill Biden - to use at his office.

But The Post spent months ignoring stories arising from the laptop and prominently reporting claims that it was 'Russian disinformation'.

The New York Post had published excerpts of emails and photos from the laptop ahead of the 2020 election, but without authentication they were widely dismissed as fake or 'Russian disinformation'. Pictured: Photos recovered from the computer

The Macbook Pro fell into the hands of news organizations in October 2020 after the president's son left the device at a repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware in April 2019 and never returned for it

Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson promised last Wednesday to keep investigating the Biden's family's foreign entanglements and accused media organization of suppressing damaging stories about the President's son.

'It's clear the corporate media was complicit in helping Joe Biden get elected by suppressing what they knew would be damaging stories. They covered up for him in 2020 and continue to cover up for him now,' Johnson said in a statement to DailyMail.com.

'But facts are stubborn things. As the Bidens, the Democrats, and the media are learning, it is difficult to keep them hidden forever.'

'The Washington Post story should be viewed as what Nixon's advisers once termed, a 'modified limited hangout,'' Johnson continued.

The term means when one concedes a little, but stonewalls on the rest.

'Senator Grassley and I will continue to investigate the Biden family's foreign financial entanglements and provide the American people with the truth to the best of our abilities,' Johnson added.

The New York Post broke the story of the laptop's contents of the first of three 'misplaced' laptops belonging to Biden in October 2020, which came into computer repairman John Paul Mac Isaac's possession after an 'inebriated' Biden brought it in for repairs to his Delaware shop in April 2019 and never picked it back up.

Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson promised on Wednesday to keep investigating the Biden's family's foreign entanglements and accused media organization of suppressing damaging stories about the President's son. Pictured: Grassley on the senate floor on Wednesday revealing receipts that claim financial dealings between Hunter Biden and a firm tied to the Chinese government

Files found in Biden's personal computer included emails showing shady business dealings by the current US president's son with foreign officials, and texts that showed him repeatedly using the 'N-word' and accidentally overpaying a prostitute $25,000 from an account linked to his dad.

It also uncovered a 2015 effort by Biden to set up a meeting between Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser at a Ukrainian energy firm, and his father, then-vice President Joe Biden, and other instances of the scion looking to cash in on his family connections.

In its March 30 piece, the Washington Post claimed it tried to get hold of a copy of the laptop's hard drive in October 2020 but failed, and didn't get its hands on the laptop drive until June 2021, when Jack Maxey gave them a copy.

Maxey, a former co-host of ex-Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon's podcast the War Room, also gave DailyMail.com a copy in February last year  and has been doggedly trying to get the US's two most prestigious papers to investigate its contents ever since.

The Post accidentally deleted their first copy and had to get Maxey to fly out to their Washington DC office with a new one in October last year, he said.

'I'm not going to disclose the details of our conversations, but I gave them a copy of it in June. I personally delivered it to their offices and met with senior editors,' Maxey told DailyMail.com.

'I had to go a second time in October because they broke the first copy.

'They haven't done anything [until now]. They're not just late to the party, they didn't even show up.'

Photos provided by Maxey show him at the newspaper's offices, and a copy of the laptop hard drive lying on the Post's boardroom table.

But the Post dismissed the hard drive as 'Russian disinformation' and an 'explainer' piece published in October 2020 played down major revelations including that Joe Biden met with Hunter's business partners, but has since been updated to reflect the paper's new position  admitting that at least some of the material on the laptop is real.

Photos provided by Maxey show him at the newspaper's offices last October, and a copy of the laptop hard drive lying on the Post's boardroom table

Jack Maxey, a political activist and former Steve Bannon podcast co-host, who gave DailyMail.com the laptop, said he also provided the Washington Post with a copy last summer

AUTHENTICATING HUNTER'S LAPTOP DailyMail.com commissioned cyber forensics experts at Maryman & Associates to examine the hard drive to determine its authenticity. The firm's founder, Brad Maryman, was a 29-year veteran of the FBI, served as a Chief Information Security Officer and founded the bureau's cyber forensics unit. His partner, Dr. Joseph Greenfield, is an associate professor at the University of Southern California and helped write their degree program in intelligence and cyber operations. After an extensive analysis of the hard drive, Greenfield and Maryman produced a report for DailyMail.com detailing their findings. Using the same forensic tools as federal and state law enforcement in criminal investigations, they found a total of 103,000 text messages, 154,000 emails and more than 2,000 photos. - They found emails for multiple accounts on the laptop dating back to 2009, and other data which 'appears to be related to Mr. Biden' between 2016 and 2019. - The report's findings were consistent with the known timeline for the hard drive. A Wilmington, Delaware computer store work order with Hunter's signature shows he left his 2017 MacBook Pro laptop there on April 12, 2019. - The Maryman & Associates report said the original 'Macintosh HD' drive was created on March 28, 2018 - Hunter's iCloud email address was added to the laptop's system on October 21 2018, as well as his work email at his firm Rosemont Seneca on February 2 2019. - The same day, a Gmail address he used to log onto sex cam sites, and another personal Gmail address belonging to Hunter, were also added. - Beau Biden's old Gmail account was added on February 7 2019. - Emails addressed to Hunter's various email addresses dating from December 2009 to December 2020 were found on the system. - An iPad with the name 'Hunter's iPad' and three email addresses associated with the Biden family was backed up on the laptop and on iCloud in January 2019 and again a month later. - Greenfield found 818 call logs in this iPad backup with timestamps from June 2016 to February 2019. - There were 8,942 entries in the iPad's contacts book, created between April 2016 and January 2019. - In February 2019 an iPhone XS was also synced with the laptop. Its serial number was consistent with the timestamps of the data on the phone. In conclusion, 'The operating system timestamps appear to be authentic, and no evidence was found to suggest that the timestamps or data were altered or manufactured,' the report said. 'No indications were found that would suggest the data was manufactured.' Advertisement

A story based on the laptop's contents published by the newspaper on March 30 focuses on the millions of dollars Hunter and his uncle, Joe Biden's brother Jim, received from their partnership with a Chinese government-linked oil behemoth CEFC.

The story, which has been previously reported by DailyMail.com and others, includes documents showing Hunter was paid a $1million retainer in 2017 to represent his business partner Patrick Ho, who was being prosecuted by the US government.

Other documents show CEFC wired the Biden family a total $5million.

One startling email among those now validated by the Post indicates the president could have been involved in Hunter's business dealings with the Chinese.

In September 2017 Hunter was planning to open a new office for his multi-million-dollar joint venture with CEFC at the House of Sweden, a Georgetown building home to the Swedish embassy.

He wrote to a building manager: 'please have keys made available for new office mates: Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Jim Biden, Gongwen Dong (Chairman Ye CEFC emissary).

'I would like the office sign ton [sic] reflect the following: The Biden Foundation, Hudson West (CEFC US).'

'We are very excited and honored to welcome your new colleagues!' the manager replied.

Biden Foundation board member Jeffrey Peck told the Post: 'There was never any thought  like zero thought or consideration  given to that building.'

The House of Sweden said they made the keys but Hunter never picked them up.

The Post's admission, hot on the heels of that of the New York Times, coincides with an apparent growing momentum in Hunter's federal prosecution over reported tax fraud, money laundering and illegal foreign lobbying allegations.

The New York Times reported that material from the laptop is part of the FBI's evidence in the case.

Hunter abandoned his laptop at a Delaware computer store in 2019. John Paul Mac Isaac, the store owner, gave a copy of its hard drive to Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani in September 2020, after handing over the original to the FBI the previous year.

Giuliani reportedly leaked documents and photos from the drive to the New York Post, and also gave a whole copy of the drive to Bannon and his podcast co-host Maxey.

The New York Post published excerpts of emails and photos from the laptop ahead of the 2020 election, but without authentication they were widely dismissed as fake or 'Russian disinformation'.

In spring last year DailyMail.com hired Brad Maryman, an expert who founded the FBI's cyber forensics unit, and his firm Maryman & Associates to analyze the laptop.

Their report showed the laptop was real. From then on, DailyMail.com began to reveal its sordid and potentially incriminating contents over the following year.

Using the same forensic tools as federal and state law enforcement in criminal investigations, Maryman & Associates found a total of 103,000 text messages, 154,000 emails and more than 2,000 photos on the hard drive.
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One of the men arrested for shooting dead six people in a wild gunfight in Sacramento on Sunday filmed himself on Facebook live brandishing a weapon hours before allegedly opening fire.

Smiley Martin, 27, appears in the video holding a black handgun which he pointed towards the camera. One of the guns used in the shooting was a stolen handgun, according to police.

He says little throughout the 38-second clip but other men can be heard in the background. Law enforcement wiped the video from his Facebook account after his arrest on Tuesday.

After he posted, a wild shooting spree broke out on the corner of 10th Street and K Street in Sacramento as bars and nightclubs let out for the night.

Witnesses described shooters firing indiscriminately at one another from cars and men running away from the scene with weapons in their hands.

Smiley Martin, 27, appears in the video holding a black handgun which he pointed towards the camera. He says little throughout the 38-second clip but other men can be heard in the background. Law enforcement wiped the video from his Facebook account after his arrest on Tuesday

Smiley showed off his belt and jeans sunken beneath his backside in the brief video clip

Martin, 27, is shown (left) in a social media photograph and (right) in his mugshot. Martin was among those injured. He was taken to the hospital but was arrested on Tuesday but has now been booked into the Sacramento County Jail

Six innocent people were killed in the crossfire, including a homeless woman who slept on the streets near where it happened.

'GUNMAN' LET OUT OF PRISON EARLY DESPITE PLEAS FROM DA THAT HE WOULD BREAK THE LAW AGAIN Smiley Martin is a career criminal who was released from prison in February just four years into a 10-year sentence for felony gun and robbery convictions. The decision, made by California's Department of Corrections, was even made over the strenuous objections of the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office, which submitted a letter saying that the man 'displayed a pattern of criminal behavior' and posed a 'significant' danger to the community. A letter from the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office to the Board of Parole Hearings on April 29, 2021, asked for the state DOC to deny Smiley's request for early release from prison 'as he poses a significant, unreasonable risk of safety to the community.' In the letter, Danielle Abildgaard, the deputy district attorney, states that Smiley 'clearly has little regard for human life and the law,' and has displayed a pattern of criminal behavior his entire adult life as he has committed several felony violations. The letter from the DA's office says Smiley had prior felony convictions of robbery and possession of a firearm. He also had a prior misdemeanor conviction of providing false information to police. 'Inmate Martin has demonstrated repeatedly that he cannot follow the laws, or conditions the court places on him,' the letter states. 'His history indicates that he will pursue his own personal agenda regardless of the consequences and regulatory restraints placed upon him. 'If he is released early, he will continue to break the law.' Despite this request, Smiley Martin was released in February, California corrections spokeswoman Dana Simas said, citing pre-sentencing credits for the early release. 'Prior to reaching a CDCR facility, Martin had already received 508 days of pre-sentencing credits, and received a variety of additional post-sentencing credits,' the spokesperson wrote in an email. 'He was released to Sacramento County probation in February 2022.' Advertisement

Martin was among those injured. He was taken to the hospital but was arrested on Tuesday but has now been booked into the Sacramento County Jail.

His younger brother Dandrae has also been arrested on guns charges. He made his first court appearance in Sacramento yesterday afternoon.

A third suspect has also been arrested; Daviyonne Dawson, 31, is charged with carrying a gun near the scene of the shooting.

None have been charged with manslaughter or murder but the Sacramento District Attorney's Office says it intends to file more charges.

Members of the public who were in the area at the time of the shooting have been asked to submit evidence to the Sacramento Police Department. Since the shooting, they have received more than 170 videos and photos.

Smiley is a career criminal with a lengthy record dating back to 2013, who last year was described by prosecutors as a danger to the community - and someone who should not be freed.

He was serving a 10-year sentence for domestic violence and assault with great bodily injury, according to the Sacramento Bee.

A letter from the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office to the Board of Parole Hearings on April 29, 2021, asked for the state DOC to deny Smiley's request for early release from prison 'as he poses a significant, unreasonable risk of safety to the community.'

In the letter, Danielle Abildgaard, the deputy district attorney, states that Smiley 'clearly has little regard for human life and the law,' and has displayed a pattern of criminal behavior his entire adult life as he has committed several felony violations.

The letter from the DA's office says Smiley had prior felony convictions of robbery and possession of a firearm. He also had a prior misdemeanor conviction of providing false information to police.

'Inmate Martin has demonstrated repeatedly that he cannot follow the laws, or conditions the court places on him,' the letter states.

'His history indicates that he will pursue his own personal agenda regardless of the consequences and regulatory restraints placed upon him.

'If he is released early, he will continue to break the law.'

Despite this request, Smiley Martin was released in February. 'Prior to reaching a CDCR facility, Martin had already received 508 days of pre-sentencing credits, and received a variety of additional post-sentencing credits,' the spokesperson wrote in an email.

'He was released to Sacramento County probation in February 2022.'

Dandrae was taken to the Sacramento County Jail on Monday night.

He is also being held on an outstanding warrant from the the Riverside County Sheriff's Office, according to inmate records obtained by DailyMail.com.

In a statement on Tuesday morning, Sacramento Police said: 'Smiley Martin was quickly identified as a person of interest and has remained under the supervision of an officer at the hospital while his treatment continues.

Dandrae Martin, 26, is seen on Tuesday in court in Sacramento. He did not enter a plea

Witness video showed rapid gunfire of at least 76 shots ringing out over the course of 54 seconds as people screamed and ran for cover

The shooting broke out at 2.01am in downtown Sacramento after a brawl broke out on 10th Street

'Based on information developed during this investigation, Smiley Martin was taken into custody by Sacramento Police Department detectives on April 5, 2022.

'Once Smiley Martin's medical care has been completed and he is determined to be fit for incarceration, he will be booked at the Sacramento County Main Jail for possession of a firearm by a prohibited person and possession of a machine gun.'

Police are still asking for photos and videos from the public. Since Sunday, officers say they have received more than 170 pieces of evidence.

In a statement on Monday, Schubert said she believes more people will be taken into custody.

She emphasized the fact that no one has been charged with murder or manslaughter. 'The investigation is highly complex involving many witnesses, videos of numerous types and significant physical evidence.

'This is an ongoing investigation and we anticipate more arrests in this case,' she said.

Melinda Davis, 57, was sleeping rough in the center of the Californian state capital, and was among those who died in Sunday's shooting in downtown Sacramento

Joshua Hoye-Lucchesi, 32, and Johntaya 'Jojo' Alexander
Twitter employees are voicing their concerns after Elon Musk vowed to make 'significant improvements' to the social media platform as a company board member and majority shareholder, admitting his investment in the company was not passive.

After news broke of the Tesla CEO's $3billion investment in the platform, employees took to Twitter issuing messages of both serious uneasiness and mockery.

'Good morning to our new overlord!' Lara Cohen, the company's Global Head of Partners, tweeted.

Company researcher Matt DeMichiel shared a meme featuring rapper Drake that seemingly implied Musk would move the company's focus from growth, product innovation and sustainability to ways to further financial success.

'Elon Musk just (temporarily at least) made me a lot of money. And I still dislike him,' added Haraldur Thorleifsson, a Twitter team lead, referencing how news of Musk's stake and board membership prompted a nearly 30 percent surge in the company's stock value.

The billionaire, who initially filed a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosure document intended for passive shareholders, filed a second form Tuesday indicating that he invested in the platform with the goal to evoke change.

The new filing, which was obtained by DailyMail.com, revealed Musk began purchasing Twitter stock on January 31 and continued to buy shares during every trading session through April 1.

Twitter employees are voicing their concerns after Elon Musk vowed to make 'significant improvements' to the social media platform as a company board member and majority shareholder, admitting his investment in the company was not passive

Twitter announced Tuesday morning that Musk would hold a seat on the company's board of directors until the platform's 2024 annual shareholders meeting.

In exchange, Musk - either alone or as a member of a group - is not allowed to push his stake in the company past 14.9 percent during the duration of his board membership and for 90 days after, according to Tuesday's SEC filing.

However, Twitter employees appeared worried about company operations and values now that Musk seemingly holds significant weight in the company.

Michael Sayman, a company product lead, took to the platform to share a meme allegedly depicting the next company board meeting.

The post featured a group attending a meeting with Wario, the antagonist in Nintendo's Mario series, sitting at the head table. The meme was captioned: 'Twitter's next board meeting'.

DeMichiel, who shared the Drake meme, also responded to a commenter asking if employees were required to include Musk on all work-related communications.

He answered: 'That and all email signatures have to link to Tesla's website.'

Although most responses featured targeted sarcasm, EJ Samson, a member of the platform's marketing team, issued a more neutral response, questioning Musk's role at the company.

Retweeting a poll the SpaceX CEO had posted asking if users wanted an edit button, Samson replied, via meme: 'What is happening?'

Lara Cohen, the company's Global Head of Partners, compared Musk to a feudal lord

Company researcher Matt DeMichiel shared a meme featuring rapper Drake that seemingly implied Musk would move the company's focus from growth, product innovation and sustainability to ways to further financial success

DeMichiel also responded to a commenter asking if employees were required to include Musk on all work-related communications

Haraldur Thorleifsson, a Twitter team lead, referenced how Musk's stake and board membership prompted a surge in the company's stock value

Michael Sayman, a company product lead, compared Musk to Wario, the antagonist in Nintendo's Mario series

EJ Samson, a member of the platform's marketing team, seemingly questioned Musk's role at the company

As employees voiced their concerns, subscription newsletter platform Substack taunted the workers, saying that although the outlet was hiring, Twitter employees should not apply.

'If you're a Twitter employee who's considering resigning because you're worried about Elon Musk pushing for less regulated speech please do not come work here,' Lulu Cheng Meservey, the Vice President of Communications at Substack, tweeted on Tuesday.

'But for everybody else, we really are hiring! Join a talented, determined, passionate, motley team of all backgrounds and beliefs,' she added. 'We debate respectfully, execute maniacally, and live to serve writers and podcasters. Long live independent publishing.'

Her comments were met with significant criticisms from social media users who argued she was unprofessional, acting with political discrimination, unfair and hostile.

One user even wrote: 'Congratulations on helping me to the decision that Ill never write at Substack or subscribe to any writers there.'

Meservey, who alleged 'context collapse has now happened' after her remarks were publicly slammed, issued a statement to DailyMail.com Wednesday, clarifying her commentary: 'It was a lighthearted poke at Twitter, but of course we welcome applicants from all backgrounds and with a wide range of beliefs and opinions, because diversity is strength.

'But working at Substack only makes sense if you support the ideas relating to our core mission, including that what you read matters, that writers do important work and deserve to be paid well for it, and that healthy discourse needs to allow for respectful disagreement. If thats you please check out Substack.com/jobs!'

Meservey Tuesday's commentary came amid backlash from progressive social media users who seemingly feared Musk, a known critic of Twitter's apparent censorship policies, would ruin the platform.

'No good will come of this. Hoping entrepreneurs are dreaming up new alternatives to Twitter and Facebook,' Amy Siskind, activist, author and president of The New Agenda, told Fox News after Tuesday's board member announcement.

Political analyst Tim O'Brien argued free speech activists should be worried about the entrepreneur's newfound power at the company.

'Musk fashions himself a free speech purist, but bullies critics,' he said.

As employees voiced their concerns, subscription newsletter platform Substack taunted the workers, saying that although their outlet was hiring, Twitter employees should not apply

Lulu Cheng Meservey, the Vice President of Communications at Substack, touted her platform's dedication to 'independent publishing' after telling Twitter users they weren't welcome to work at the platform

After being met with criticisms, Meservey claimed the 'context' behind her remarks had been lost. She likely made her comments in response to Tuesday's backlash from progressive users who feared Musk, a known critic of Twitter's apparent censorship policies, would ruin the platform

One user accused Meservey of political discrimination

Another slammed Meservey for posting the remark and then claiming it was misunderstood

Most users dismissed Meservey's claim that 'context collapse has now happened'

Another user noted that in wake of Meservey's comments they would never subscribe to Substack or read work from its writers

Meservey was hit with significant criticism for her remarks about Twitter employees joining the Substack staff

Podcast host Sawyer Hackett, who also served as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Obama Administration, slammed Musk as a hypocritical fraudster who allegedly evaded taxes.

'The newest member of Twitter's board of directors once went on Twitter and called a U.S. Senator "Senator Karen" because she suggested he - the richest man in the world - should pay income taxes,' Hackett said. 'He paid $0 in income taxes last year.'

Others, including MSNBC host Joy Reid, raised concern that Musk would demand that company reinstate former President Donald Trump's account, which was permanently suspended last year following the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

'So if this platform brings Trump, his white nationalist friends, Q-anon and the anti-vaxxers back, and it becomes no different from failing side-apps like Gettr (still one of the most unintentionally hilarious brand names ever) or Gab, how many of y'all will remain on here?' Reid argued.

She added: 'If they let the hive back in, theyll have about the same sized audience as those failed new Twitters, and the path will be wide open for a smart developer out there. Just sayin Twitter can be unpleasant enough without the disinformation and nazi bros.'

Twitter spokesperson Adrian Zamora, in a statement issued to DailyMail.com, reiterated the platform has no plans to reinstate Trump's account in wake of Musk's appointment.

'Twitter is committed to impartiality in the development and enforcement of its policies and rules,' Zamora said Tuesday. 'Our policy decisions are not determined by the Board or shareholders, and we have no plans to reverse any policy decisions.'

'As always our Board plays an important advisory and feedback role across the entirety of our service. Our day to day operations and decisions are made by Twitter management and employees.'

The billionaire, who initially filed a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosure document intended for passive shareholders, filed a second form Tuesday indicating that he invested in Twitter (San Francisco headquarters pictured) with the goal to evoke change

Twitter entered into its board membership agreement with Musk on Monday, an SEC report revealed.

After submitting the regulatory filing on Tuesday, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announced Musk's board membership on the social media, alleging the billionaire brings 'great value' to the company.

'I'm excited to share that we're appointing @elonmusk to our board! Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our Board,' Agrawal wrote.

'He's both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service which is exactly what we need on @Twitter, and in the boardroom, to make us stronger in the long-term. Welcome Elon!'

Musk responded to the CEO, saying: 'Looking forward to working with Parag & Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!'

Other board members seemed receptive to Musk - who has 80 million Twitter followers - joining their ranks, with several issuing welcome messages online, including platform founder Jack Dorsey.

Twitter board members, including founder Jack Dorsey, seemed excited about Musk's appointment

Several, including Omid Kordestani, the board's executive chairman and a current member, posted messages of welcome to the platform

Board chair and Salesforce Co-CEO Bret Taylor said they were excited to work with Musk

'Im really happy Elon is joining the Twitter board! He cares deeply about our world and Twitters role in it,' Dorsey tweeted. 'Parag and Elon both lead with their hearts, and they will be an incredible team.'

Board chair and Salesforce Co-CEO Bret Taylor echoed the sentiment, saying: 'Welcome to the Twitter board, @elonmusk! We are all excited to work with you and build the future of Twitter together.'

Taylor's post was retweeted by fellow board members Mimi Alemayehou, Senior Vice President for Public-Private Partnership at Mastercard; Martha Lane Fox, Founder and Chairperson of Lucky Voice Group; and Stanford University professor Dr. Fei-Fei Li.

Omid Kordestani, the board's executive chairman and a current member, wrote: 'Welcome @elonmusk!'

The four remaining board members - Former World Bank President Robert Zoellick, Invoia Capital general partner Patrick Pichette, 1stdibs.com Inc. CEO David Rosenblatt, and Egon Durban, Co-CEO of Silver Lake - did not publicly commented on Musk's appointment to the board.

None of the members immediately responded to DailyMail.com's request for comment.

Twitter stocks have surged since mid-March when Musk purchased his stake

Stock prices rose by more than 3 percent on Tuesday after news of Musk's board appointment

Despite the fact that Twitter claims policy decisions are not determined by board members or shareholders, millions of investors flocked to Twitter's stock after Musk disclosed his 9.2 percent stake in the company.

The stock became the most bought U.S. stock by retail investors on Monday, surging 27 percent in value.

Stock prices rose by more than three percent, to 50.98, on Tuesday after news of Musk's board appointment. The stock was trading at around 39 on Friday.

However, Wall Street analysts allege the Musk-fueled buzz around Twitter is a 'bit extreme,' given that the platform's fundamentals and challenges 'remain broadly the same'.

Jeffries equity analyst Brent Thill told Fox Business the stock's gain was a 'potential overreaction given the unclear rationale behind Musk's $3.7B investment.'

Bernstein analysts Mark Shmulik and Toni Sacconaghi Jr. told the news outlet they believe Musk's interest in Twitter was 'mainly personal and nothing more than a potential distraction.'

'We view the interest as a potential distraction for Musk and TSLA shareholders, given that Musk is arguably already overcommitted, and his fervor for the topic of censorship/free speech is high,' the pair reportedly wrote their clients Tuesday.

'The magnitude of the pre-market stock move speaks volumes of an investor base eager for any positive jolt, as the stock was previously around IPO levels. Some investors are certainly hoping for a sale, but we believe the stock move is likely an overreaction for this broadly speculative possibility.'

Musk has developed a loyal following of investors who stuck with his company Tesla Inc for most of the past decade while it was still struggling to streamline production of electric cars and make them affordable. Tesla is now among the world's most valuable companies with a market capitalization of more than $1 trillion.

Musk, who is also behind other ventures such as rocket maker SpaceX, is the world's richest person with a net worth pegged by Forbes at $290billion.

The entrepreneur's popularity with retail investors was one of the reasons why Twitter agreed this week to offer him a seat on its board of directors, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Musk and Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.

Musk initially filed a 13G ownership disclosure document with the SEC on Tuesday, which is reserved for passive shareholders. Later, following the announcement of his board seat, Musk filed a 13D form (pictured), confirming his intentions to be active in Twitters business

The 13D filing, which was obtained by DailyMail.com, revealed that Musk began purchasing Twitter stock at the end of January and continued to do until April 1

News of Musk's board seat came amid allegations he broke SEC rules after missing the ownership-disclosure deadline for his stake in Twitter.

According to an SEC 13G filing obtained by DailyMail.com Tuesday, Musk purchased 73.5 million shares of the platform on March 14, worth about $3billion. A SEC 13G filing is reserved for passive investors.

Tax experts argued the SpaceX CEO had left himself open to penalties of up to $207,183 after he failed to submit the ownership acquisition disclosure late within 10 days of acquiring 5 percent of the company, as required by U.S. securities law.

Musk should have disclosed his shares by March 24 but didn't sign the filing until 21 days after his purchase. He also failed to include a certification indicating he didn't acquire his stake in Twitter to change or influence control of the company, as is typically done when filing a 13G report, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Instead of including the certification in his form, Musk simply wrote: 'Not applicable'.

Later Tuesday, following the announcement of his board seat, Musk filed a 13D form, confirming his intentions to be active in Twitters business.

The 13D filing, which was obtained by DailyMail.com, also revealed that Musk began purchasing Twitter stock at the end of January and continued to do until April 1.

His largest purchase occurred on February 7 when he acquired more than 4.8 million shares, worth approximately $176million.

Twitter closed at its 2022 low point on March 7 when shares were trading at $32.42 each. They had ended January at $37.51 and have significantly surged in the wake of the news surrounding Musk's involvement with the platform.
One of Britain's most decorated pilots and a former Red Arrows ace has pleaded guilty to possessing nearly 100 indecent images of children.

Andrew Cubin MBE, 59, appeared at Swindon Magistrates Court via videolink yesterday, which heard that he has since changed his name to Andrew Lloyd.

He pleaded guilty to three charges of possessing indecent images of a child - including 48 in the most serious category.

During a 20-year career in the Royal Air Force, when he was known as Andy 'Cubes' Cubin, he flew in the Red Arrows.

Prosecutor Keith Ballinger said Wiltshire Police launched an investigation after they received information relating to an IP address being used to upload images to the internet.

'The IP address was found to belong to an address in Malmesbury', he said.

Andrew Cubin, 59, flew in the Red Arrows as Red 6 leading the synchronised pairing

Having changed his surname to Lloyd, he has pleaded guilty to three charges of possessing indecent images of a child

'Officers attended the address on February 17 last year and arrested Mr Lloyd.'

Mr Ballinger said the defendant told the officers 'you can take my laptop, I used that', before stating 'I have removed all the images'.

Various items were seized from the property near Malmesbury, Wiltshire, including the laptop.

Forensic analysis revealed a number of indecent images of children - some were pictures and others were videos.

The court heard that 48 Category A images were found - all of which involve children engaging in penetrative sexual activity.

39 Category B images - which show non-penetrative sexual activity with a child - were discovered, and ten Category C images were also found.

He made full admissions in an interview in custody, the court heard.

In 2016, Lloyd hit headlines when he described how he and his wife battled in vain to save their 14-year-old daughter who suddenly died on a sleepover, later raising over 64,000 for the Wiltshire Air Ambulance Trust.

Mr Ballinger said that during the police interview, Lloyd made a reference to his daughter.

This mention was opposed by defence solicitor Nicholas Wragg, who said: 'Is that really necessary?'

Cubin appeared at Swindon Magistrates Court yesterday where he pleaded guilty to the three charges

Former RAF captain Cubin will be sentenced at Swindon Crown Court on May 6

Lloyd, now living in Windsor, Berkshire, was told that he must register as a sex offender at Bracknell Police Station within 72 hours.

Magistrates committed the case to Swindon Crown Court for sentencing on May 6. A pre-sentence report will also be prepared.

Lloyd, who was released on unconditional bail, flew in the Red Arrows as Red 6 leading the synchronised pairing.

Before qualifying as a fast jet instructor, he flew Jaguars and Hawks.

The pilot has boasted in the pastabout having completed more than 500 display flights across the UK, where after he would meet and greet the public.

Since leaving the RAF in 2002, he has worked for some of the world's biggest airlines as a Captain, flying the Airbus A321, A320 and A319.

Lloyd also flies stunt planes for a company.

Outside of aviation, Lloyd describes himself as having an 'infused a passion for photography'.

On his profile, he claims to have a commercial and wedding photography business and teaches photography workshops in Wiltshire.
Just 435 people had a Covid vaccine at a cost of 535 each at an East London 'kebabs for jabs vaxfest' - as pictures show an empty park with just a handful of toddlers dancing around.

The four-day summer festival took place at Langdon Park and cost Tower Hamlets Council 237,000 to arrange.

It included live on-stage music and free food vouchers with the offer of a walk-in Pfizer jab service for adults aged over 18.

The festival formed part of an aim to find 'innovative ways' to tackle low vaccine uptake in the area.

But a Freedom of Information request has shown that just 435 people received their jab at the event held between July 30 and August 2 last year, the BBC reports.

Data obtained also shows the council did not record the number of festival-goers in attendance, but footage from the event showed only a dozen people present at times - many of whom were toddlers.

Footage from the four-day event showed Langdon Park to be largely empty, despite offers of live music and free food

Tower Hamlets Council was running a #Ihadmyjab campaign in partnership with the NHS when the festival took place

A woman receives her jab at the festival on July 31 last year - one of fewer than 500 people to do so

John Biggs, Mayor of Tower Hamlets, said at the time: 'Our summer festival is the latest local clinic weve set up to support everyone to get vaccinated.

'We know events like this appeal particularly to younger groups, so come along protect yourself and have some fun.'

The council's 'community engagement bus' was also on site during the event to engage with residents about other measures to stay safe from Covid alongside vaccination.

According to government figures, vaccine uptake in Tower Hamlets for the two jabs and booster was 55.7 per cent - below the average of 67.6 per cent and one of the lowest in the UK.

The uptake rate in the borough is among the worst in Britain

A spokesperson for the council said: 'Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic we have worked hard to keep Tower Hamlets safe, including vaccinating as many residents as possible and working to address vaccine hesitancy.

'The vaccine event at Langdon Park, funded by Covid-19 grants from central government, was set up to help vaccinate young residents, where data was showing a low uptake in this group.

'Councils across the country have been actively encouraged to use funding to deliver vaccines in new and innovative ways, which is important in efforts to address vaccine hesitancy and low uptake in particular groups.'
Police believe they've finally found the person responsible for leaving baited dog meat to poison unsuspecting pups.

A woman, 52, was allegedly caught red-handed dropping the piles of poisoned dog meat on a Melbourne street where local pet owners have lived in fear.

A witness claimed they saw the woman from Prahran drop 19 dog baits on High Street, between Glenferrie and Orrong roads.

Melbourne dog owners have been on high alert after reports of dog baits around the city flooded social media

A woman as been arrested after witness alleged saw her drop 19 dog baits on High Street, between Glenferrie and Orrong roads

The woman was taken to Malvern Police Station but has been released while police wait for testing results on the meat she dropped.

If found guilty she will face fines up to $90,870 or two years in prison.

Dozens of piles of baited dog meat have been spotted in major Melbourne suburbs in the past two weeks including Kallista, Montmorency, Caulfield North, the City of Yarra, and Stonnington.

The Instagram page Stonnington Dogs said it received reports of a mustard-coloured poison in piles of meat that made two dogs sick.

One dog was reportedly blinded in one of its eyes by the poison.

If found guilty she will face fines up to $90,870 (500 penalty units) or two years in prison for leaving piles of meat filled with poison around the city

Yarra City council issued an alert to dog owners on its Facebook page while Stonnington City Council promised to investigate and 'increase patrols' of the area.

'Please be careful when taking your dog for a walk that they don't consume any meat left out in Yarra's parks,' it read.

'We have had a report of a dog consuming baited meat at Annette's Place - a local park in Richmond. The issue is currently being investigated by our animal management team.'

Michelle Green from RSPCA Victoria told Herald Sun the organisation had a 25 per cent jump in baiting reports compared to 2020.

Anyone with information or CCTV footage is urged to contact police.
In this 1998 file photo made available on March 19, 2004, Ayman al-Zawahri poses for a photograph with Osama bin Laden in Khost, Afghanistan. Rumors of the death of Ayman al-Zawahri have circulated for more than two years, but in a video released on Tuesday, April 5, 2022, and translated by the SITE Intelligence Group, the reclusive al Qaida chief praises Muskan Khan who defied a ban on the wearing of the hijab in schools in India's southwestern state of Karnataka. AP-Yonhap

A rare video has appeared of al-Qaida's chief praising an Indian Muslim woman who in February defied a ban on hijab wearing, revealing the first proof in months that he is still alive.



Rumors of the death of Ayman al-Zawahri have persistently circulated, but in a video released Tuesday and translated by the SITE Intelligence Group, the reclusive al-Qaida chief praises Muskan Khan who defied a ban on the wearing of the hijab in schools in India's southwestern state of Karnataka.



She shouted ''God Is Great'' as Hindu radical students jeered at her over the Islamic headscarf. In March the court in India's Karnataka state upheld the ban, outraging civil activists and Muslim groups in India and elsewhere.



A previous video of Zawahri, which circulated on the anniversary last year of 9/11, did not reference the Taliban's August takeover. It did mention the Jan. 1, 2021 attack that targeted Russian troops on the edge of the northern Syrian city of Raqqa.



''He could still be dead, though if so, it would have been at some point in or after Jan 2021,'' tweeted Rita Katz, SITE's director following Zawahri's 9/11 anniversary video.



From Tuesday's video there is no clear indication of the location of Zawahri. He is shown in a traditional white head scarf beside a poster praising ''the noble woman of India.''



However, it raises the specter of al-Qaida having a presence in Afghanistan, and highlights concerns over the commitment of the ruling Taliban to fight terrorist groups and deny them space in Afghanistan.



Zawahri took over leadership of al-Qaida after the 2011 death of Osama bin Laden, killed by U.S. Navy SEALS during a daring nighttime raid deep inside Pakistan where he was hiding. Bin Laden, who masterminded the 9/11 attacks in the United States, was found in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad, barely 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the capital Islamabad.



Zawahri has been rumored to be in Afghanistan's northwestern Kunar and Badakhshan provinces on the border with Pakistan. The border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan is lined with inhospitable mountain ranges that have served as redoubts for a number of terrorist groups in the region.



Amir Rana, executive director of the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies think tank said that Zawahri was also rumored to be in Pakistan's southern port city of Karachi, where many of the Taliban leaders long maintained homes during Afghanistan's 20-year war.



''He was even rumored to have died in Karachi,'' said Rana, adding that regardless of his location, Zawahri's video is certain to cause headaches for the ruling Taliban with the international community.



Afghanistan's Taliban were ousted by a U.S.-led coalition in 2001 for harboring bin Laden. They returned in August last year after a chaotic end to the U.S. and NATO 20-year war in Afghanistan.



They say they're adhering to an agreement they signed with the United States in 2020  before taking power  in which they promised to fight terrorists. Since returning to power they have repeatedly said that Afghanistan would not be used as a launching pad for attacks against other countries. (AP)


Canada has revealed proposed legislation to force the likes of Facebook and Google to pay news publishers for their content and negotiate commercial deals.

The 'Online News Act' would mean tech giants must make fair commercial deals with Canadian outlets for the news shared on their platforms or face binding arbitration.

If such deals do not meet a set of criteria set out in the act, the platforms would have to go through mandatory bargaining and arbitration processes overseen by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) regulator.

The move comes after more than 450 news outlets have closed in Canada since 2008 - including 64 in the past two years, as digital platforms exploit their news content.

The legislation would put Canada in step with a major law passed by Australia last year to protect news providers against Big Tech, which dominates online advertising.

Reporters speak to Canada's PM Justin Trudeau at Parliament Hill in Ottawa last Thursday

Canada's Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez (pictured) told a news conference yesterday that the 'news sector in Canada is in crisis' which is helping fuel a 'rise of harmful disinformation'

Canada's Online News Act is now expected to be passed into law by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal government with backing from a small leftist faction.

The country's Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez told a press conference yesterday: 'The news sector in Canada is in crisis and this contributes to the heightened public mistrust and the rise of harmful disinformation in our society.'

Could Facebook and Google be forced to pay news media for content in Britain? Facebook and Google would be forced to pay UK newspapers and other media outlets for using their stories under new laws being considered by Nadine Dorries. The Culture Secretary's plans would encourage tech firms to negotiate payments, with an independent arbitrator stepping in to set a fair price if talks fail. The payment regime would be regulated by the Digital Markets Unit (DMU), a watchdog set up within the Competition and Markets Authority to rein in the power of the tech giants. But the DMU can't act until it is supported by legislation passed by Parliament. Miss Dorries has told officials in her department that the DMU should have 'robust' powers, The Mail On Sunday reported in January. She later said in an interview for the Sunday Times in February that she wanted to make sure that news organisations that offer articles to the public for free still exist in a decade's time, saying: 'I saw the pervasiveness of big tech when I was in health, and I see what it's doing to our democracy and our press from this department.' Advertisement

He noted that billions of dollars in advertising revenues that once fed newsrooms across Canada now go mostly to Facebook and Google.

Mr Rodriguez added: 'We want to make sure that news outlets and journalists receive fair compensation for the work. We want to make sure that local independent news thrives in our country. It shouldn't be free.'

Canada's publishers have pressed against Facebook and urged the country's government to bring in more regulation of tech companies.

The news media want the industry to be able to recoup financial losses they have suffered in the years that Facebook and Google have been steadily gaining greater market shares of advertising.

The legislation would cover news businesses operating in Canada, including newspapers and news magazines with a digital presence, and allow them to bargain individually as well as in groups.

Mr Rodriguez said the Canadian government had held discussions with both firms, adding: 'They were open to regulations ... those conversations were very frank, honest and nice.'

The Canadian law would work similarly to the one in Australia introduced in February last year, which made it mandatory for Google and Facebook to pay media companies for content on their platforms

Australia's New Media Bargaining Code, which was a world first, was a reform that has been heralded as a model for others around the world to copy.

Australian regulators had also accused the companies of draining cash away from traditional news organisations while using their content for free.

Big Tech firms had fiercely opposed the Australian legislation initially, fearing it would threaten their business models, but with amendments it was easily passed in the country's Parliament.

The law came in after Facebook blacked out all media in the country, stripping the pages of domestic and foreign news outlets for Australians and blocking its users from sharing any news content.

Elsewhere, in November 2021, Google signed agreements with French newspapers to pay for their content, after a European Union law on 'neighbouring rights' was introduced in 2019.

The Paris-based news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) signed a five-year content agreement with Google at the end of last year, as well as two commercial contracts.

Mr Rodriguez tweeted about the Online News Act (pictured). He noted that billions of dollars in ad revenues that once fed newsrooms across Canada now go mostly to Facebook and Google

Facebook and Google would also be forced to pay UK newspapers and other media for using their stories, under new laws being considered by Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries (pictured)

Google and Facebook took about four-fifths of the 14billion spent in 2019 on digital advertising in the UK, while national and local newspapers took less than 4 per cent.

Rachel Curran, public policy manager for Facebook's owner Meta, said today: 'We are currently reviewing the proposed legislation in detail and look forward to engaging with stakeholders once we more fully understand what the bill entails.'

Facebook believes that global news media which use its platform choose to do so because of its value, in that the tools and access to potential readers are free.

The company also feels that it connects publishers with wider communities than they might not reach on their own and this can help them drive more revenue, either from generating new subscriptions or selling more adverts from referral traffic.

Facebook and Google have voluntarily agreed to invest around 600million each over three years on journalism initiatives globally.

Facebook has also signed commercial deals with 18 news publishers in Canada as part of its 'news innovation test' in which it pays media for the ability to link to additional news stories not already posted on Facebook.

Google Canada spokesman Lauren Skelly told MailOnline today: 'We are carefully reviewing the legislation to understand its implications.

'We fully support ensuring Canadians have access to authoritative news and we look forward to working with the government to strengthen the news industry in Canada.'
A longtime Utah government official died Monday evening, officials said Tuesday, after falling 20 feet at the Grand Canyon while on a boating trip along the Colorado River.

Salt Lake City resident Margaret 'Meg' Osswald, the assistant director the Utah Division of Water Quality, was pronounced dead by Arizona safety officials at about 8:30 pm Monday after falling more than 20 feet during a hike just off the 1,450-mile-long river.

Oswald, 34, who in the past ten years has held posts at the Utah Attorney General Office, the Utah Department of Natural Resources, and the US Department of Justice, was on the sixth day of a 'multi-day' private river tour when she died.

Officials arrived at the scene near Ledges Camp - a site with stair-stepping slabs of rock - at river mile 152 by helicopter, responding to a report of an unresponsive river trip participant near the campground.

Salt Lake City resident Margaret 'Meg' Osswald, the assistant director the Utah Division of Water Quality, was pronounced dead by Arizona safety officials at about 8:30 pm Monday after falling more than 20 feet during a hike in the Grand Canyon, just off the Colorado River

Officials say Osswald fell near Ledges Camp (pictured) - a site made up of stair-stepping slabs of rock at river mile 152. Officials arrived at the site Monday evening by helicopter, after receiving a report of an unresponsive river trip participant near the campground

Authorities said Osswald had hiked into the canyon to meet members of the river trip at Phantom Ranch - a popular lodge more than 60 miles downriver at the bottom of the canyon - last Wednesday.

The National Park Service identified the victim as Osswald Tuesday.

'We are deeply saddened by this loss,' a spokesperson for the Utah Division of Water Quality said in a statement on Tuesday. 'And our thoughts and support go out to her loved ones at this difficult time.'

The water quality division also confirmed that Osswald recently was appointed assistant director - a promotion noted in her LinkedIn profile.

National park officials said that campers tried CPR before crew members arrived, but were unsuccessful in their efforts to resuscitate her.

Oswald embarked on the boat trip last Wednesday from popular lodge Phantom Ranch, located near the bottom of the canyon, before falling to her death during a hike more than 60 miles upriver on Monday

Pictured is the Phantom Ranch, where Osswald began the 'multi-day' boat tour

An investigation into the incident is currently being conducted by the state National Park Service and the Coconino County Medical Examiners Office. Both parties have declined to release any additional information regarding the incident.

According to the Utah State Bar, Osswald was a University of Utah law graduate and passed the bar in 2016.

She served in the Utah Attorney General's Office environment and natural resources divisions for seven years before being promoted to her current position in the state's water quality service.

Prior to that, Osswald worked as a Forestry Technician Utah Department of Natural Resources, and a law clerk for the US Department of Justice.

The incident comes just 11 days after another woman, Mary Kelley, 68, also on a private boating trip in the Grand Canyon, died after falling out of her raft and into the raging river.

Four people overall have died so far this year in the sprawling national park, a Grand Canyon spokesperson said Tuesday.

The park service and the Coconino County Medical Examiner continue to investigate Osswalds death.

Oswald, who in the past ten years has held posts at the Utah Attorney General Office, the Utah Department of Natural Resources and the US Department of Justice, was on the sixth day of the boat trip when she died. Pictured: A similar Colorado River tour
Police are hunting for a man in a black cap and red hoodie over a sickening attack where a commuter's throat was slashed with a boxcutter on the subway in the latest act of random violence in New York City.

The NYPD released surveillance footage of a man wearing a red hoodie, gray pants, black hat, and carrying a backpack who jumped the turnstile to get on a northbound train ay Wall Street station on Tuesday.

The suspect, believed to be in his 30s, was seen struggling to jump the turnstile to avoid paying just moments before he became involved in an argument with the victim. He is then alleged to have pulled out a boxcutter and slashed the man's throat before fleeing the station, leaving a pool of blood on the stairs.

The victim, believed to be in his 40s, was taken to Bellevue Hospital where he is expected to recover.

Police are now offering a $3,500 reward for help identifying the suspect.

The unidentified suspect, described by police to be in his 30s with 'dark skin,' was seen wearing a red sweatshirt, black hat, and gray pants as he fled the Wall Street subway station around 6am on Tuesday

Surveillance footage caught him struggling to jump the turnstile, causing him to fall forward toward the gate

He was seen moments later successfully jumping the gate before getting on a northbound 4 train and slashing a man's throat with a boxcutter

The stabbing is the latest in an uptick of violence on the subway that has coincided with commuters returning to the office after the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is also part of a wider trend of rising crime that the NYPD is struggling to keep a lid on.

NYPD cops at the scene in the Wall Street subway station on Tuesday morning after a man was slashed in the neck with a box cutter

The victim was on a northbound train when he was attacked. He is understood to have disembarked at Wall Street. He was then taken to the hospital

Violent crime is soaring across all of New York City. Subway violence is up by 70 percent

Shootings are also on the rise; on Monday night, an innocent 61-year-old woman was shot and killed in the Bronx after getting caught in the crossfire of three men.

Juana Esperanza Soriano De-Perdomo died after being hit by a stray bullet shortly after 7pm. She was walking near a deli at the time.

New mayor Eric Adams, 61, has vowed to crack down on the problem but so far has failed to ease New Yorkers' fears.

He announced the new Subway Safety Plan initiative in early February with Governor Kathy Hochul, after the mayor deemed the subway 'unsafe' after commuting to work a few times since he took office. Hochul also said the state would deliver 600 new psychiatric beds and another 500 beds at shelters in the city to try and provide help for those currently living in the subways, many of whom suffer from severe mental illness.

However, its main focus was on escorting homeless people off trains and challenging fear beaters.

The state will also be investing $9million a year to recruit psychiatrist and nurses as Adams said a 30 teams of service and health workers would also be deployed to work alongside officers at the subway.

'Let's be clear on this, [the homeless] are not dangerous,' Adams said. 'The vast majority are not dangerous, but we have to be honest about the number of individuals dealing with mental health crises. They are dangerous to themselves and dangerous to New Yorkers.'

However, during a 48-hour period in February, six people were stabbed on trains and New Yorkers are facing a growing fear over random attacks as crime skyrockets throughout the boroughs.

Overall crime is up almost 50 percent, while assaults are up 19.1 percent. All violent crimes, except murder, are up in the Big Apple, with robbery, rape, and shooting victims up 47.2, 15.8, and 14.5 percent, respectively.

Transit crimes are also up a shocking 65 percent.

The subway station was blocked off during rush hour on Tuesday because of the attack
A 60-year-old man in Harlem was bludgeoned with a brick Thursday afternoon after a dispute with a woman at his apartment building. The disturbing incident was captured on surveillance footage amid skyrocketing crime in New York City.

The elderly victim, who lives in an apartment complex on the corner of Adam Clayton Powell Jr Boulevard and West 132nd St., approached a woman in his building and accused her of stealing packages from the lobby around 3 p.m., according to the New York Police Department (NYPD).

The woman, who remains unidentified, left and came back with two people. One of them started hitting the victim with a brick and his fists in the middle of the street until he crumpled to the ground, video released this week shows.

Emergency medical services responded to the scene and took the victim to Harlem Hospital with severe lacerations; he is in good condition.



The suspect, who remains on the loose as of Wednesday morning, fled south on foot on Seventh Avenue.

After being accused of stealing the 60-year-old man's packages in their building, the woman came back with two individuals to beat the elderly man up

One of the the two men, identified as the main suspect, repeatedly beat the victim with a brick in broad daylight until he fell to the ground

The suspect fled south on foot on Seventh Avenue. As of Wednesday morning, no arrests have been made.

The assault is part of a wider trend of rising crime that the NYPD is trying to contain.

In 2021, 20,543 crimes were reported, whereas this year, nearly 30,000 have been reported to the NYPD - an increase of 44 percent.

Crimes in nearly all categories, including felony assaults, shootings, rape and robbery, have risen in comparison to last year except the city's murder rate.

Felony assaults have increased by 19.1 percent. In the same period in 2021, 4,673 assaults were reported, while this year, 5,673 have been reported.

Shootings are getting worse despite the state's strict gun laws. Compared to the same period last year when 290 shootings were reported, this year's numbers have gone up a staggering 14.5 percent - 332 shootings have been reported so far in 2022.

Last year, 354 rapes were reported over the same period as this year, 410.

Robberies are by far the most common crime in the city. An astonishing 47 percent increase has seen 3,945 robberies committed so far this year. In 2021, over the same time period, 2,680 had been committed.

The latest crime surge comes after Mayor Eric Adams last month promised a designated subway police task force to tackle crime and homelessness in stations and on trains.

Violent crime is soaring across all of New York City. Felony assaults are up by 19.1 percent, as 3,824 attacks have been committed so far this year, compared to 3,210 over the same period in 2021

The bludgeoning last Thursday came two days after a man had his neck slashed with a boxcutter on the subway in the morning. NYPD officials said the victim, in his 40s, was traveling on a northbound 4 train when he and another man got into an argument.

The other man, who is described by police as being in his 30s with 'dark skin' and wearing a sweatshirt, pulled out a boxcutter and cut the man's neck before fleeing at Wall Street subway station.

Anyone with information in regard to both incidents is asked to call the NYPD's Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782).

The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the CrimeStoppers website at https://crimestoppers.nypdonline.org/ or on Twitter @NYPDTips.
Scott Morrison has landed in the centre of yet another leaked text scandal amid claims a cabinet minister has privately backed allegations the PM racially vilified a former political rival.

Michael Towke, a Lebanese-Australian ex-politician, revealed a senior MP sent him messages of support over allegations Mr Morrison sabotaged his 2007 pre-selection bid.

The bombshell claims are after the prime minister's office was rocked by back-to-back text leaks in January involving close associates in the Liberal party.

In one an exchange, a minister branded Mr Morrison a 'complete psycho' to former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian, who in response called him a 'horrible, horrible person'.

Lebanese-Australia former politician Michael Towke (pictured) levelled a series of bombshell allegations against Scott Morrison on Wednesday

Days later, texts by Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce were exposed in which he labelled Mr Morrison a 'hypocrite and liar' whom he 'never trusted'.

During a live TV interview with The Project's Waleed Aly on Wednesday, Mr Towke doubled down on his claims that Mr Morrison spearheaded an effort to smear him in a bid to win the seat of Cook in 2007.

Mr Towke claimed another dissenter within Mr Morrison's ranks recently reached out to him to express their support after the PM repeatedly denied the accusations.

'I've got text messages from a cabinet minister telling me "I believe you, and do what you need to do, just be careful",' he said.

Mr Towke said the person was a 'current cabinet member' whom he never previously had contact with.

Although Mr Towke declined to identify the minister, he said the individual was publicly seen to be aligned with Mr Morrison.

The sender's caution, he said, was in reference to concerns he may become a target for renewed smear campaigns.

'There's desperation here and they will go to what ever lengths to deal with that,' he said.

Mr Towke said it was good advice because he soon got word that more outrageous attack against him were being prepared in an effort to shut him up.

He claimed people associated with Mr Morrison were spreading a story that some of his supporters were neo-Nazis, suggesting he associated with the extremist group.

Mr Towke said a cabinet minister had sent him a message of support after Mr Morrison denied the allegations of racial vilification

Mr Towke and Mr Morrison were both vying for pre-selection for the seat of Cook, which takes in part of the Sutherland Shire, in Sydney's south, for the 2007 election.

Mr Morrison was ultimately successful, while Mr Towke's career in public life came to an end and he never ran for another political office.

On Wednesday evening, Mr Towke appeared in his first ever TV interview to accuse the PM and his then-factional allies of inventing and circulating rumours to destroy his reputation.

He claimed Mr Morrison's camp whipped up negative stereotypes about Lebanese-Australians in a bid to tarnish his bid for office.

Mr Towke claimed Liberal party apparatchiks both publicly and privately smeared him as a Muslim crime figure even claiming he was associated with neo-Nazis.

SCOTT MORRISON'S DENIAL Mr Morrison has repeatedly and strenuously denied all of Mr Towke's allegations. He denied using his preselection opponent's heritage to get himself elected and told reporters he rejected the allegations 'absolutely'. 'It's just simply untrue,' he said. 'These are quite malicious and bitter slurs, which are deeply offensive, and I reject them absolutely. It comes at an interesting time that these vicious personal attacks come on the eve of an election. 'I'll let people work out their their own findings on what's motivating these voices. Bitterness can often produce all sorts of slings and arrows.' When asked about the allegations on Saturday, Mr Morrison denied suggestions on three occasions that he 'warned' voters about Mr Towke's family background or that he was a practicing Muslim. The prime minister then added 'you'll have to ask them' when asked where the accusations originated from. His spokesman on Friday also dismissed the bombshell allegations and labelled them as 'baseless and false' and spread with 'malicious intent'. Advertisement

There were brazenly false rumours spread that he ran a brothel and was somehow involved in the Cronulla riots.

Mr Towke also claimed he was coerced by senior party officials to drop out of the contest against Mr Morrison or he would 'never be able to find a job' ever again.

Mr Morrison has emphatically denied the 'malicious' claims he would use a candidate's racial background against him, after they resurfaced last week.

Several community figures including Danny Abdallah, the father of three children who were killed in a car crash, have defended the PM as anything but a racist.

During their bitter 2007 pre-selection battle, Mr Towke won the ballot on the first round - scoring 84 votes compared to Mr Morrison's eight.

But Mr Towke alleged his popularity immediately began to sink after his political opponents - Mr Morrison and his allies - started spreading 'two sets of allegations' - ones privately through the Liberal party and others publicly via the press.

'Privately, the Liberal Party was accusing me of owning and operating a number of brothels, being involved in a criminal syndicate, the Cronulla riots, the Bulldogs Army and, as part of that group, being involved in a number of physical altercations,' he said.

'The (claims) they published publicly, (were that I) breached Liberal Party rules in signing members up - false - that I exaggerated my academic qualifications, exaggerated my military record, my business record.

'They ran with the dodgy [Lebanese] angle.'

Mr Morrison is also alleged to have told locals members that no-one Lebanese would be able to hold the seat after the 2005 Cronulla race riots, and allegedly spread the rumour Mr Towke was Muslim when he is actually a Maronite Catholic.

Michael Towke made a legally-binding statutory declaration in 2016 accusing the PM of 'racial vilification' during the pre-selection battle

Mr Towke said efforts to destroy his reputation were 'pretty nasty' and he frequently woke up to find himself featured in frontpage newspaper stories 'based on fabricated material'.

'That was shocking, stunning. I was numb,' he said.

'I would have been the first Australian of Lebanese heritage to be a federal member of Parliament on the Liberal Party side and that's a bit of history there which they stole from me.'

Mr Towke claimed Mr Morrison was 'front and centre' of the smear campaign and that 'it was for him, and he was involved'.

'He got desperate. They were hoping that I would be knocked out and that they would somehow do some deal and get the votes to fall in behind him,' he said.

Aly asked why Mr Morrison would attempt to bring Mr Towke down given he was coming last and would still need to beat several other political candidates to win.

Mr Towke claimed the other candidates who had beaten Mr Morrison during the first pre-selection did not bother to turn up to the second, because they 'knew this was Morrison's'.

'They knew they wouldn't have the numbers,' Mr Towke's said.

He also alleged he was 'coerced' by senior members of the party to pull out of the running to hand the seat over to Mr Morrison.

Scott Morrison (pictured delivering his maiden speech in 2008) has been accused of using a political rival's Lebanese background against him when he first ran for political office

'They figuratively put a political gun to my head and basically told me they were going to ruin me [and] that I would never be employable again if I didn't withdraw from the pre-selection and throw my numbers behind Morrison.'

'And that's what I did. The hardest pill to swallow was throwing my weight behind the most meritless candidate.'

Mr Towke said he did not stand a chance because he was not 'one of the boys' and Mr Morrison is a 'well-connected' individual.

He said formed the belief that his character assassination was spearheaded by Mr Morrison through multiple conversations with people, including journalists.

The ex-politician also denied historical allegations levelled against him by former MP Bruce Baird that he was involved in branch stacking, saying he never signed anyone up without their knowledge.

Mr Towke said he did not imagine the scandal would be revived, and was shocked to wake up last Wednesday to find the saga in the limelight following Ms Fierravanti-Wells speech.

'I have moved on, but the more that this is unfolding, and just watching the Prime Minister's very non-credible responses, I've chosen now to not remain silent anymore,' he said.

Some of Mr Towke's accusations are backed by Mr Morrison's former campaign manager Scott Chapman.

In a 2016 statuary declaration, Mr Chapman claimed he was told by Mr Morrison there would be a swing in Cook if Mr Towke was elected 'because of his Lebanese background'.

SCOTT MORRISON'S LEAKED TEXT SCANDALS JANUARY Text messages emerge between Gladys Berejiklian and a Liberal MP, where the former NSW premier described Mr Morrison as a 'horrible, horrible person' who is more 'concerned with politics than people'. After the bombshell exchange is made public, Ms Berejiklian issued a statement expressing support for the PM - but she never claimed she was not responsible. 'I understand there has been some commentary today concerning myself and the PM. I have no recollection of such messages,' Ms Berejiklian's statement read. 'Let me reiterate my very strong support for Prime Minister Morrison and all he is doing for our nation during these very challenging times. 'I also strongly believe he is the best person to lead our nation for years to come.' February A message Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce sent Brittany Higgins, the former Liberal staffer at the centre of rape allegations, while he was a backbencher after he was briefly unseated as party leader is made public. In it, Mr Joyce wrote: 'He is a hypocrite and a liar from my observations, and that is over a long time. I have never trusted him and I dislike how he earnestly rearranges the truth to a lie.' The Deputy Leader admitted responsibility and apologised to Mr Morrison, telling reporters he made the comments based on 'assumptions' while on the backbench. He said he offered to resign but Mr Morrison wouldn't allow it, and claimed that was a testament to the PM's character. April Michael Towke, a Lebanese-Australian ex-politician, reveals a senior MP sent him messages of support after historic allegations last week resurfaced that Mr Morrison had sabotaged his 2007 pre-selection bid. 'I've got text messages from a cabinet minister telling me "I believe you, and do what you need to do, just be careful",' he said. Mr Towke said the person was a 'current' cabinet member' who he had never previously had contact with. Although Mr Towke declined to identify the minister, he said the individual is publicly seen to be aligned with Mr Morrison. Advertisement

Leaked texts between former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian (pictured) rocked the prime minister's office in January

Mr Morrison has denied the racial vilification allegations and on Sunday offered to sign a statutory declaration confirming his account of the situation.

Mr Towke said he wanted Mr Morrison to sign the legally binding form in NSW, not in Canberra, where it could be scrutinised by the Independent Commission Against Corruption.

Mr Towke himself made a statutory declaration in 2016 accusing the PM of 'racial vilification' during the pre-selection battle.

He added on the weekend: 'I stand by the declarations I asserted in my statutory declaration.

'Among many unedifying tactics used to unseat me from my preselection victory for Morrison, racial vilification was front and centre and he was directly involved.'

Mr Morrison has strenuously denied all the claims as categorically untrue and has said he would sign a statutory declaration saying just that.

The prime minister's message-leak saga began on January 31, when political reporter Peter van Onselen published the texts, which claimed Ms Berejiklian said Mr Morrison was more 'concerned with politics than people'.

'Morrison is a horrible horrible person. He is actively spreading lies and briefing against me re fires,' she wrote, in reference to the deadly black summer bushfires.

Barnaby Joyce has revealed why he called Scott Morrison a 'hypocrite and liar' in leaked texts before admitting he offered to resign as deputy prime minister

Amid the turmoil, Ms Berejiklian released a statement saying she did not 'recall' sending the message, but offered her 'support' for Mr Morrison as the leader of the nation.

In February, a new message emerged that Mr Joyce had sent to Brittany Higgins, the former Liberal staffer at the centre of rape allegations, while he was a backbencher after he was briefly unseated as party leader.

Mr Joyce wrote: 'He is a hypocrite and a liar from my observations, and that is over a long time. I have never trusted him and I dislike how he earnestly rearranges the truth to a lie.'

The Deputy Leader admitted responsibility and apologised to Mr Morrison, telling reporters he made the comments based on 'assumptions' while on the backbench.

He said he offered to resign but Mr Morrison wouldn't allow it, and claimed that was a testament to the PM's character.

On Tuesday, Mr Morrison was called a liar after falsely claiming Ms Berejiklian had denied sending the leaked texts during an interview with ABC's Leigh Sales on Tuesday.

Asked about why so many people - including Ms Berejiklian, Mr Joyce, and Ms Fierravanti-Wells - had spoken poorly about him, Mr Morrison tried to claim Ms Berejiklian rejected being responsible for the messages.

van Oneselen quickly fired up his Twitter account to debunk Mr Morrison's claim.

'The Prime Minister Just told ABC 7.30 Gladys Berejiklian "denies" the "horrible, horrible person" text. That is an out and out lie,' he said.
The search for a British man, 46, and three other European divers missing off a Malaysian island has been postponed due to poor visibility.

The group, which included a French woman, 18, Dutch boy, 14, and a 35-year-old Norwegian woman were diving off the tiny island of Pulau Tokong Sanggol nine miles off the southeastern coast of Malaysia when they vanished earlier today.

Officials say the four 'failed to return after undergoing a diving exercise'.

A hunt involving boats from the coastguard, the police and the fisheries department was launched at 2.45pm (6.45am GMT), senior coastguard official Nurul Hizam Zakaria said in a statement.

But it was postponed at 7.30pm local time due to poor visibility and amid bad weather. The search is set to resume at 7am tomorrow.

The search for a British man, 46, and three other European divers missing off a Malaysian island has been postponed due to poor visibility

The island where they disappeared, Pulau Tokong Sanggol, is about nine miles (15km), off the Malaysian coast

'The search today involved an area of 21.45 sq nautical miles, Zakaria said in a statement.

Nurul Hizam said the operation was carried out in rough weather conditions with wind speeds of between 10 and 20 km'h and waves of up to 3.5ft.

Earlier, he said: 'The incident involved four foreign divers who failed to return after undergoing a diving exercise at about noon today.

'The divers comprised a 14-year-old male, a 46-year-old British man, an 18-year-old French woman and a 35-year-old Norwegian woman.

'The divers were reported missing by the boat captain who took them out to sea.'

The area is popular with foreign and domestic visitors - there are resorts dotted along the coast and on nearby islands.

The area is popular with foreign and domestic visitors - there are resorts dotted along the coast and on nearby islands. Pictured: Paradise island Pulau Sibu near the search area

Diving accidents, while rare, do occasionally take place in Malaysia.

In 2013, a British tourist died when she was struck by a passing boat's propeller while diving off resort islands in the South China Sea.

The tropical Southeast Asian nation's white-sand beaches and lush rainforests have long made it a major draw, but the tourism industry was hit hard by travel curbs during the coronavirus pandemic.

The country's borders reopened to foreign tourists last week after a two-year closure.
Republican state lawmakers in Ohio have introduced a bill mirroring Florida's controversial law that critics dub 'Don't Say Gay', teeing up another fierce confrontation over how sex and gender issues are handled in schools.

Introduced on Monday, Ohio's HB 616 would forbid classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, just like the Florida law condemned by LGBTQ advocates.

State Rep. Mike Loychik, a Bazetta Republican and one of the bill's two sponsors, wrote in a tweet: 'Curriculum about gender identity and sexuality has no place in K-3 classrooms, period.'

The bill's other sponsor, GOP Rep. Jean Schmidt of Loveland, said in a statement: 'The classroom is a place that seeks answers for our children without political activism.'

'Parents deserve and should be provided a say in what is taught to their children in schools. The intent of this bill is to provide them with the tools to be able to see what their child is being taught,' added Schmidt.

Ohio state Reps. Mike Loychik and Jean Schmidt introduced a bill on Monday that would forbid classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in grades K-3

After Florida's new law drew activist fury and lawsuits, the Ohio bill is sure to generate controversy -- and the proposal in the Buckeye State goes even further.

The Ohio bill would also require that any curriculum or instructional materials on sexual orientation or gender identity in grades four through 12 must be 'age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.'

It also tackles a separate hot-button issue by banning the teaching of 'critical race theory', 'intersectional theory' and 'the 1619 Project'.

The bans would apply to all public schools, as well as private schools that accept taxpayer-funded vouchers.

The bill would allow members of the public would to file complaints against school employees in violation of the bans.

Accused educators would be entitled to a hearing on the allegations, but would face discipline if they are found in violation, in addition to the school district facing a loss of state funding.

Exterior of the Ohio Statehouse is seen in a file photo. Republican state lawmakers in Ohio have introduced a bill mirroring Florida's controversial 'Don't Say Gay' bill

Republicans control both houses of the state legislature, but it is unclear whether Governor Mike DeWine (above), a moderate Republican, would support the new bill

'Children deserve a quality education that is fair, unbiased and age appropriate,' Loychik said in a statement. 'This legislation promotes free and fair discussion.'

But Democrats and LGBTQ advocates have already expressed outrage, saying that the proposal would gag teachers from discussing important issues.

'There is far too much ambiguity in the bills,' Ohio State Board of Education Member Christina Collins told the Columbus Dispatch.

'My interpretation is there can be no books of any kind that deal with any LGBTQ+ issues,'' Collins said.

'Ohio's Don't Say Gay bill is yet another insidious attempt to chill and censor free speech in the classroom. Lawmakers are effectively trying to erase LGBTQ+ people and skew history in their favor,' Equality Ohio's Executive Director Alana Jochum told CNN.

'Attacks like these are a product of a small minority of people pushing their agenda to dismantle diversity at all costs  and in the process putting educators and families in jeopardy for political gain,' Jochum added.

'Equality Ohio vehemently opposes House Bill 616, and we will work tirelessly to stop it from inching its way into our classrooms.'

Republicans control both houses of the state legislature, but it is unclear whether Governor Mike DeWine, a moderate Republican, would support the new bill.

A spokesman for DeWine did not immediately respond to an inquiry from DailyMail.com on Wednesday morning.

Disney employees protesting CEO Bob Chapek's handling of the staff controversy over Florida's 'Don't Say Gay' walk out of the company's Burbank offices last month

High school students in Tampa protest the Florida bill last month, before it became law

Meanwhile, Florida's law continues to drive controversy, and last week gay rights advocates sued Governor Ron DeSantis to block the law.

The law has catapulted Florida and DeSantis, a potential 2024 Republican presidential candidate, to the forefront of the country's culture wars.

Critics call it the 'Don't Say Gay' law and argue that its true intent is to marginalize LGBTQ people and their families.

The challenge filed Thursday in federal court in Tallahassee on behalf of Equality Florida and Family Equality alleges that the law violates the constitutionally protected rights of free speech, equal protection and due process of students and families.

'This effort to control young minds through state censorship - and to demean LGBTQ lives by denying their reality - is a grave abuse of power,' the lawsuit says.

'The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that LGBTQ people and their families are at home in our constitutional order. The State of Florida has no right to declare them outcasts, or to treat their allies as outlaws, by punishing schools where someone dares to affirm their identity and dignity,' the lawsuit says.

The law deliberately employs broad terms and invites arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement, empowering parents to be roving censors who can sue school boards for damages based on any perceived violation, the lawsuit adds.

The Florida law states: 'Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.'

Parents would be able to sue districts over violations.
A gun-sniffing dog hired at Neiman Marcus in central Chicago alerted the store to the presence of a man carrying a gun in the story - who was then caught allegedly stuffing his jacket with merchandise, police said.

Derrick Latham, 23, was arrested on Chicago's Magnificant Mile on Monday when the canine working at the store alerted security that there was a man carrying a gun in the store. Guards then followed the Latham and watched as he grabbed a belt and two belt buckles before trying to leave, CWB Chicago reported.

A Neiman Marcus spokesperson said dogs are at the store to help ensure safe shopping for all its customers on the Magnificent Mile.

'To reinforce our commitment, we are investing in additional security measures in select stores,' the company said. 'In addition to Neiman's full-time in-store security team, we are now working with a private security firm and its K-9 unit for weapons detection.'

Cook County Assistant State's Attorney Loukas Kalliantasis said the security officers allegedly found $995 worth of stolen merchandise on Latham, as well as a 9 mm handgun and 16 counterfeit $100 bills.

Kalliantasis added that Latham was on electronic monitoring after being charged with punching a police officer at a Nordstrom in January.

He had previously been arrested for carrying a handgun at a Christian Doir store in September. Despite his repeated offenses, Latham was allowed to go free after posting 10 percent of his $30,000 bail and promising not to return to the store.

Latham's arrest comes as Chicago faces soaring theft, robbery and other crimes and mayor Lori Lightfoot coming under attack for failing to tackle the problem.

The mayor in 2020 pledged to cut $80 million from the police budget and offered her support for the 'Defund the Police' movement.

Derrick Latham (above), 23, was arrested on Monday after a canine hired at the Niemen Marcus alerted security that he was carrying a gun. Latham had been out on a pretrial release program after he assaulted an off-duty police officer at a nearby Nordstrom in January

A gun-sniffing canine (similar to the one pictured) detected Latham's weapon when he stepped into the store on Monday, with the handler notifying the store's security guards

Latham was arrested in September (left) for carrying a loaded gun into a Christian Doir. He was also arrested in 2020 (right) for property damage at a liquor store and resisting arrest

Despite his repeated offenses, Latham was allowed to go free after posting 10 percent of his $30,000 bail and promising not to return to the store on the Magnificent Mile (pictured)

DERRICK LATHAM'S HAS BEEN FREED DESPITE MULTIPLE ARRESTS Derrick Latham, 23, was once again allowed to walk free after posting 10 percent of his $30,000 bail on Monday despite a history of criminal charges at stores around Chicago. April 4, 2022: Latham was arrested at the Niemen Marcus on the Magnificent Mile after police found him with $995 worth of stolen merchandise, as well as a 9 mm handgun and 16 counterfeit $100 bills January 17, 2022: Latham was arrested for assaulting an off-duty police officer at the Nordstrom near the Magnificent Mile, allegedly punching the cop twice in the face September 17, 2021: Latham was arrested for carrying a loaded weapon inside the Christian Doir just north of the Magnificent Mile March 3, 2020: Latham was arrested for property damage caused at a liquor store and also charged for resisting arrest October 4, 2018: Latham was arrested for illegal panhandling June 4, 2018: Latham was arrested for illegal panhandling February 3, 2017: Latham was arrested for illegal panhandling Advertisement

Latham had been out and about on the Magnificent Mile with an electronic monitoring bracelet as a part of a pretrial release program following the incident in January.

The Cook County State's Attorney's Office said Latham was handing out flyers inside a Nordstrom with another man near the Magnificent Mile on January 17 when an off-duty officer who was at the store asked them to leave.

Latham allegedly punched the office twice in the face and ran out the door.

Judge Charles Beach allowed Latham to go free the following day after posting a $500 deposit towards his $5,000 bail, with the condition that he wear the monitor bracelet and follow a 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew, CWB reported.

Latham also agreed not return to the Nordstrom.

Latham had made a similar promise to Beach just four months earlier after he was arrested for carrying a loaded gun inside a Christian Doir just north of the Magnificent Mile.

On September 17, a Doir employee flagged police patrolling near the store, alerting them that they had spotted him pull out a gun and place it in a black bag he was carrying, according to Chicago Police.

Latham was arrested, and police found a 9 mm handgun on him.

He was charged with felony unlawful use of a weapon, but it was reduced to a misdemeanor charge and was sentenced to serve only 80 days, CWB reported.

Latham has also been arrested multiple times in the last four years. In March 2020, he was arrested and charged for criminal property damage at a liquor store and for resisting arrest.

He was also arrested twice in 2018 and once in 2017 for illegal panhandling.

Latham's crimes at and around the Magnificent Mile are reminiscent of the spade of brazen looting that plagued luxury stores in the area last year.

In September, 12 men raided a Bottega Veneta, stealing 35 handbags that go for thousands of dollars each.

Another gang of thieves shoved a security guard at a Burberry store and made off with nine handbags. It was the group's second robbery after stealing $43,000 wort of merchandise at a Salvatore Ferragamo in August.

Just four months into the year, crime is up by 36 percent in the Windy City, especially with thefts and robberies.

The Chicago Police department reported a 69 percent rise in thefts, with 3,778 incidents reported so far this year compared to 2,238 in the same time last year.

Robberies have gone up from 1,755 to 1,978 this year year, a 13 percent rise.

Criminal sexual assault also seems to emerge as a growing problem, with 489 complaints this year to date - up from 476 same time last year.

Instances of shootings and murder however appear to be decreasing. The city has seen 525 shooting incidents so far, compared to 600 at the same time last year.

Similarly, there have been 132 murders in the city in 2022 so far, compared with 139 this time in 2021.

The rise in crime has led to continued criticism of Lightfoot for failing to do enough to hep battle crime.

The city of Chicago's police department had been increasingly at odds with Lightfoot - a Democrat who publicly supported the 'defund the police movement' after the death of George Floyd in 2020 and slashed the force's budget by $59 million that same year - since she was elected in 2019.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (right), who once supported the Defund the Police movement, continues to face criticism for failing to combat the city's soaring crime rate

Lightfoot has since denounced the 'defund the police' movement, backtracking in August after the shooting death of Officer Ella French earlier that month, unveiling a new plan to 'refund the police.'

The very next month, in September, Lightfoot unveiled a a $16.7 billion spending plan that boosted funding for the department, lifting the Chicago Police Department's annual budget to $1.9 billion, up from $1.7 billion in 2021.

The mayor had also called on city courts to alter the method in which bail is granted to keep more people who are arrested in jail after police department revealed in January that 90 people accused of murder and more than 800 charged with aggravated gun possession were freed on electronic monitoring ankles.

Chicago's top cops - Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart and Chicago PD Chief Superintendent David Brown - said that while it only represents 1 percent of those arrested in 2021, one percent is too high.

Lightfoot had proposed to change the bail reform system, but Chief Justice Timothy Evans, who imposed the reform in 2017, had refused to revoke it.

'A judge cannot hold someone pretrial without a finding that the defendant poses a real and present threat to the physical safety of any person.

'This must be found by clear and convincing evidence and the burden of proof is on the prosecution.

'The mayor's proposal seems to require that defendants facing certain allegations be considered guilty until proven innocent,' Evans said.
Democrats lashed out at Senator Tom Cotton after the Arkansas Republican said Tuesday that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson might have defended Nazis in the Nuremberg trials was she given the chance.

'The last Judge Jackson left the Supreme Court to go to Nuremberg and prosecute the case against the Nazis. This Judge Jackson might have gone there to defend them,' Cotton said in a Senate floor speech during debate on whether Jackson should become the next associate justice of the Supreme Court.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison hit back at Cotton for the comment, writing on Twitter: 'Bless the tiny, mold and maggot infested space where @TomCottonAR heart is supposed to be.'

Harrison used Cotton's remarks Tuesday against Jackson to claim that Republicans don't deserve to have power in the U.S.  a message likely to be repeated throughout the year as Democrats try to defend their razor-thin congressional majorities going into the 2022 midterms.

So far, predictions suggest that a Republican bloodbath is coming this year as President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris continue to face dismal approval polling and a slew of Democrats already announced retirement.

The DNC chair went on MSNBC's morning program on Wednesday to further lambast the Arkansas senator.

'In a Senate where there's Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton is the lowest of the low,' the DNC chair said to the Morning Joe panel.

'He does not deserve to have that pin,' he continued. 'He doesn't deserve to be in the United States senate, representing the good people of Arkansas He put his hand on the bible, took an oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and he uses it as a play toy.'

Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison said on Wednesday,'In a Senate where there's Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton is the lowest of the low' after the Arkansas Republican claimed Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson might have defended Nazis

Cotton said Tuesday that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would likely defend Nazis in Nuremberg if she was given the chance as he voiced opposition for President Joe Biden's Supreme Court nominee

Cotton is one of the 11 Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who last month grilled President Joe Biden's Supreme Court nominee  specifically on her judicial philosophy and her sentencing record in child pornography cases.

On Monday the Senate Judiciary Committee deadlocked on Jackson's nomination in an 11-11 party-line vote, forcing Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to initiate a discharge petition, which passed in a 53-47 votes as moderate Republicans Mitt Romney of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska all opted to allow Jackson's nomination to come before the Senate for a full floor vote.

After the Senate voted to formally begin debate on Jackson's nomination, Cotton made his floor remarks where he, not surprisingly, opposed her confirmation.

His comparison to the last Judge Jackson was in regards to Robert Jackson, who was nominated by President at the time Franklin Roosevelt. The justice service from July 1941 through October 1954.

Justice Jackson took a leave of absence from the high court to prosecutor Nazis in the Nuremberg trials. Cotton feels that this Judge Jackson would have been on the other side of the court, defending them.

Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democrat National Committee, blasted @SenTomCotton as "maggot-infested" for criticizing Ketanji Brown Jackson. pic.twitter.com/BnVYhzMGeS  CNSNews (@cnsnews) April 6, 2022

The DNC chair said the place where Cotton's heart should be is instead filled with a 'tiny, mold and maggot infected space'

The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish non-governmental organization based in the U.S. and specializing in civil rights law, also lashed out at Cotton's comments

Ketanji Brown Jackson, when confirmed, will become the first ever black woman to sit on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States.

'That is the Republican party we see today,' Harrison said in claiming Cotton's remarks are part of a larger trend within the GOP.

'It is a party built on fraud, fear, and fascism  and they don't deserve to be in power. Not because Democrats should, but because they don't deserve to be in power of this great nation.'

The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish non-governmental organization based in the U.S. and specializing in civil rights law, also lashed out at Cotton's comments.

'Absolutely shameful conduct from @SenTomCotton,' the group wrote on their Twitter.

'To use a Nazi analogy as some sort of twisted way to attack Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is reprehensible,' they added. 'We've said it a thousand times and we'll say it again: stop trivializing the Holocaust for political gain.'

Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell said that Cotton was proposing that 'criminal defendants should not have legal representation.'

'The government would prosecute without an adversarial system testing its burden of proof,' he added in a tweet. 'Cotton's preferred system of justice is exactly the type of justice meted out by dictators.'
The European Union has sent almost 1billion to Russia each day for energy since the war in Ukraine began, its chief of foreign affairs admitted earlier today.

Josep Borrell told the European Parliament that the amount of aid given to Kyiv pales in comparison to the amount the EU has spent on Russian energy as he pushed for more sanctions on oil and coal to be levied against Putin, and renewed weapons shipments to the frontlines.

'We have given Ukraine 1 billion euros... but a billion euros is what we pay Putin every day for the energy he provides us,' the EU's top diplomat said.

'We have to continue arming Ukraine... More weapons, that is what the Ukrainians expect of us.'

The 27 state-strong union has paid Russia around 35bn since the start of the conflict in Ukraine on Feb 24, according to Borrell.

With the conflict now into its 41st day, this means that roughly 850million has been funneled into Putin's coffers from Europe each day since Russian tanks rolled across the border.

The EU has condemned the invasion of Ukraine and has already implemented several rounds of sanctions designed to cripple the Kremlin's finances, but some countries are scrambling to establish alternative energy supplies amid a heavy dependence on Russian resources, particularly liquified natural gas (LNG).

The European Union has sent almost 1billion to Russia each day for energy since the war in Ukraine began, its chief of foreign affairs admitted earlier today (European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell delivers a speech during a debate at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, 06 April 2022)

Germany is heavily dependent on Russian resources and has thus far been resistant to cutting off payments for oil and gas (A compressor station of the Jagal natural gas pipeline that transports Russian natural gas to Germany)

'We have given Ukraine 1 billion euros... but a billion euros is what we pay Putin (pictured) every day for the energy he provides us,' the EU's top diplomat said earlier today

'We have to continue arming Ukraine... More weapons, that is what the Ukrainians expect of us,' Borrell said (a Ukrainian civilian takes part in a territorial defence unit training exercise in Lviv)

Putin seeing red: Truss says sanctions turning Russian economy into Soviet-style mess 'Crippling' Western sanctions are returning the Russian economy to a mess last seen in the communist era, Liz Truss said today as she urged the allies to tighten the screw on the Putin regime. The Foreign Secretary spoke after meeting the Polish counterpart Zbigniew Rau and PM Mateusz Morawiecki in Warsaw as she pushes for 'maximum' sanctions. Ms Truss is expected to push for harder action at a G7 meeting on Thursday, while Boris Johnson will encourage Germany to set a date for phasing out Russian gas when he meets Chancellor Scholz in Downing Street on Friday. Mr Morawiecki has criticised German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for focusing on the 'voices of German businesses' rather than the innocents slain in Ukraine. The Foreign Secretary highlighted the impact of the economic constrictions carried out so far on the Russian economy, saying: 'We have frozen over 350 billion US dollars (266billion) of Putin's war chest, making over 60 per cent of the regime's 604 billion US dollars (459 billion) foreign currency reserves unavailable. Advertisement

Separately, European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen told the parliament that the EU would impose more sanctions against Russia, likely including measures against oil imports.

So far, Europe had not been willing to target Russian energy over fears that it would plunge the European economy into recession, but the recent reports of mass civilian killings have increased pressure for tougher sanctions.

In March, European countries imported a total of 7.1 million tonnes of thermal coal, which is used in power and heat generation, a 40.5 per cent increase year-on-year and the highest level since March 2019, analysis from shipbroker Braemar ACM found.

On a weekly basis, March 28 - April 1 saw the highest levels of Russian thermal coal imports since the Feb. 24 invasion began, with 887,000 tonnes imported into the EU, according to Braemar.

The EU depends on Russia for around 45 per cent of its coal imports, 45 per cent of its gas imports and around 25 per cent of its oil imports, according to the European Commission website.

Germany, the EU's largest economy - has remained opposed to cutting off Russian energy imports, and Chancellor Olaf Scholz has been called out by Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky previously for his reluctance to reduce German consumption of Putin's resources.

German coal importers' group VDKi on Wednesday said the country should be able to find alternatives to Russian hard coal imports by the peak demand winter season, but warned there will be technical issues and increased costs.

The US and the UK previously announced they were cutting off Russian oil, Poland said it plans to block imports of coal and oil from Russia, while Lithuania said it is no longer using Russian natural gas.

The moves to cut reliance on Russian energy come at a time of uncertainty about future gas deliveries from Russia to the EU later this month, after the Kremlin demanded last week that buyers start paying Russian gas giant Gazprom in roubles.

Meanwhile, the United States and G7 are also are preparing new sanctions on Russian financial institutions, state-owned enterprises and more Russian government officials and their family members.

The allies plan to ban new investment in Russia, and the United States has banned Moscow from paying sovereign debt holders with money in U.S. banks.

The moves may increase economic hardship for Russians but may not put much of a dent in Russia's energy revenues, according to U.S. sanctions analysts.

'We are at the point where we have to take some pain,' said Benn Steil, international economics director for the Council on Foreign Relations think tank in New York.

'The initial batches of sanctions were crafted as much to not hurt us in the West as much as they were to hurt Russia.'

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has received criticism for condemning Russia's war in Ukraine while simultaneously resisting plans to dramatically reduce payments for Russian-supplied energy

European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen told the parliament that the EU would impose more sanctions against Russia, likely including measures against oil imports

The EU has sent one billion euros' worth of financial aid and weapons to Ukraine, but this pales in comparison to the amount of money spent on Russian energy

The States has been pushing its European allies to inflict more pain on Russia while trying to make sure that the alliance against Putin does not fray - a balance that only gets tougher as countries on all sides begin to feel the effects of war.

'You've kind of hit the ceiling - on both sides of the Atlantic - for what can be done easily and what can be done in short order,' said Clayton Allen, U.S. director at the Eurasia Group political risk consultancy, said of sanctions.

To move to a tougher round of sanctions, U.S. officials will need to provide some assurances to European countries that energy markets and supplies can be stabilized to avoid severe economic hardship, Allen said.

An economically weakened EU helps no one, he added.

'If Western Europe is plunged into a recession, that's going to drastically limit the amount of support - both moral and material - that they can provide to Ukraine,' Allen said.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to press the case for more actions in Brussels this week at NATO and G7 meetings of foreign ministers.
Sally Hasson watches television at home as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy appears on a screen addressing members of Irish parliament via video link, amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in Dublin, Ireland, April 6, 2022. Reuters-Yonhap



Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Wednesday accused some Western leaders of considering financial losses to be worse than war crimes, saying he could not tolerate indecisiveness on rigid new Russian sanctions.



"When we are hearing new rhetoric about sanctions... I can't tolerate any indecisiveness after everything that Russian troops have done," he said in an address to Ireland's parliament on Wednesday.



"The only thing that we are lacking is the principled approach of some leaders - political leaders, business leaders - who still think that war and war crimes are not something as horrific as financial losses," he added, speaking through an interpreter.



Western gained some impetus for more sanctions this week after dead civilians shot at close range were found in the town of Bucha following a Russian withdrawal. But Europe has so far stopped short of restrictions on Russian gas imports that countries in the region are heavily reliant on.



Zelenskiy called on Dublin to convince its European Union partners to introduce "more rigid" measures against Moscow.



Kyiv and the West say there is evidence, including images and witness testimony gathered by Reuters and other media organisations in Bucha, that the apparent executions were carried out by Russian soldiers.



The Kremlin denies its forces were responsible for the deaths and said on Tuesday that Western allegations Russian forces committed war crimes were a "monstrous forgery."



New U.S. sanctions are set to be unveiled on Wednesday. A fresh round of proposed EU sanctions would ban buying Russian coal, prevent Russian ships from entering EU ports, and suspend nearly 20 billion euros ($21.77 billion) worth of trade.



Speaking to a joint sitting of both chambers of Ireland's parliament by video link, Zelenskiy accused Moscow of trying to "destroy the foundations of independent life, destroy our identity, everything that makes us Ukrainian."



He also said Russia was deliberately provoking a global food crisis that could lead to violence and a new wave of refugees.



Russia has denied targeting civilians or civilian infrastructure in what it calls its "special military operation" in Ukraine. (Reuters)


Barbeques Galore founder Peter Woodland was flying the four-seater helicopter that crashed near the Snowy Mountains, killing two people.

Mr Woodland, 75, was killed along with his wife, 64, about 200m east of the NSW Snowy Mountains late on Monday night.

The Sydney businessman was the co-founder of outdoor recreation retailers Barbeques Galore and BeefEater Barbeques.

Barbeques Galore founder Peter Woodland (above), 74, and his partner, 64, were killed in a helicopter crash on Monday

Emergency services were called to Kiandra Flats on Monday night after a request from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority rescue centre

Emergency services were called to the scene at Kiandra Flats around 11.55pm on Monday after a request from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority rescue centre.

Australian Transport Safety Bureau chief commissioner Angus Mitchell said an investigation was still piecing together the final moments of the helicopter's journey.

'We're still piecing together the last movements and indeed the last day or so of this helicopter,' Australian Transport Safety Bureau chief commissioner Angus Mitchell said.

'We do know that it was flying on Sunday, quite likely in company with a number of other helicopters.

The helicopter was found crashed 200m east of the NSW Snowy Mountains at Kiandra Flats around 11.55pm on Monday

Investigators have not yet determined what caused the crash but said the helicopter  a red and white Bell 206 Jet Ranger (above)

'We don't know where it's launched from at this stage and whether it's refuelled. We don't believe that there was a distress call made.'

Superintendent John Klepczarek described the scene as 'horrific'.

Investigators have not yet determined what caused the crash but said the helicopter  a red and white Bell 206 Jet Ranger  had landed early from a trip on Sunday, possibly due to poor weather.

Nine News found flight radar data showing Mr Woodland's helicopter left his property on Saturday morning to fly to Goulburn and Canberra.

His helicopter was also spotted on the radar between Jindabyne and Khancoban at 10.19am on Sunday.

A report will be prepared for the Coroner.
Rep. Bob Gibbs (R-Ohio) is retiring from Congress at the end of this year, he announced on Wednesday, just weeks after a newly-drawn district map put him in a head-to-head primary race with Donald Trump's former aide Max Miller.

Before running to represent Ohio's 7th Congressional district, Miller was known for a tumultuous relationship with ex-White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham when both were working for the Trump administration.

Grisham accused Miller of physically abusing her the day they broke up, after which he filed a defamation suit.

Miller has the backing of the former president, who reasserted his support for the ex-staffer in November after Grisham told CNN that Trump's endorsement despite his alleged knowledge of her accusations felt like a 'gut punch.'

Gibbs, also a Trump supporter, blasted Ohio's redistricting process as a 'circus' in a statement announcing the end of his time in Congress.

'It is irresponsible to effectively confirm the congressional map for this election cycle seven days before voting begins, especially in the Seventh Congressional District where almost 90 percent of the electorate is new and nearly two thirds is an area primarily from another district, foreign to any expectations or connection to the current Seventh District,' Gibbs said.

'This circus has provided me the opportunity to assess my future. To that end, after considerable deliberation, I have decided to not seek re-election this year. This was a difficult decision, one which I did not make lightly.'

Rep. Bob Gibbs, a pro-Trump Republican, has represented Ohio's 7th Congressional District since 2013 and has served in Congress since 2011

Last month a newly-redrawn version of Ohio's district map made ex-Trump staffer Max Miller, who had been challenging anti-Trump Republican Rep. Anthony Gonzalez in the May 3 primary, switch to Gibbs' territory

He thanked his supporters as well as family and friends, stating he was 'eternally grateful' for his time at the US Capitol.

'Thank you to my family, especially my wife Jody, for putting up with the long drives, late dinners, and my weeks away from home. I will use this opportunity to spend more time with her, my children, and grandchildren,' Gibbs said.

Trump praised the Ohio congressman after news of his retirement broke, though his statement made no mention of Miller.

'I want to congratulate Congressman Bob Gibbs of Ohio on a wonderful and accomplished career. His retirement, after serving in Congress for more than a decade, should be celebrated by all,' the former president said through his Save America PAC.

'He was a strong ally to me and MAGA, voting to support my America First agenda and fighting strongly against the Radical Left. Thank you for your service, Boba job well done!'

Gibbs' office did not say whether he would endorse Miller or any other candidate when asked for comment by DailyMail.com.

Miller was accused of physical violence by his ex-girlfriend Stephanie Grisham, who was one of Trump's press secretaries

However, his outgoing statement takes aim at the Biden administration and makes his case for retirement on his 'confidence' in Republicans to take back the majority in the House of Representatives in November.

'While America still faces considerable challenges, many of which are self-inflicted crises by President Biden and the radical socialist policies in Congress, I am confident in the future of our nation and the prospects of a Republican majority in the House to stop the worst instincts of the Biden administration and the progressive liberal agenda,' Gibbs said.

Like Trump, Miller was equally congratulatory in his reaction to Gibbs' retirement. He publicly thanked the conservative lawmaker for his service in Congress.

'Congressman Bob Gibbs has championed Ohio values in Congress for more than a decade. He has been a fighter for Ohio voters and we should all be thankful for his contribution to our state and our country. Thank you for your service, Congressman,' Miller wrote on Twitter Wednesday.

Gibbs is the seventeenth House Republican to leave the lower chamber for retirement or to seek higher office. Thirty-one Democrats have done the same.

When the former Trump aide first mounted his Congressional campaign last year, he was up against Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio), one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 Capitol riot.

But since then Ohio's proposed new district map, drawn by the Republican majority, has been reshuffled multiple times and even faced litigation in the state Supreme Court.

Democrats on Ohio's redistricting commission had accused the GOP members of unconstitutionally favoring their own party in its attempts to redraw the map.

Ohio's Supreme Court has yet to weigh in on the latest iteration, but state officials have decided to move ahead anyway with their May 3 primary. Early voting, even with the current map in dispute, began on Tuesday.

Trump praised Gibbs' tenure in Congress shortly after the Ohio Congressman revealed he would be stepping down from the House at the end of 2022

The former president has vehemently endorsed his ex-staffer (pictured together in 2020), which Grisham called a 'gut punch' after her allegations

The latest shuffling changed the bounds of the 7th Congressional District that Gibbs had been representing since 2013, after first taking over the 18th District in 2011. The newly-redrawn borders would put more suburbs in what had been a predominantly rural area.

In his announcement to run in the 7th District, Miller made no mention of Gibbs but pointed out that the region 'includes 90% of the area where where I've spent the last year engaging with voters...This is also were I live.'

'With the support of this district, the continued support of President Trump, and the resources necessary to win, I look forward to taking this first -- and the values of this District -- all the way to Congress as a representative of the people,' Miller said in a March 3 statement.

In October 2021, Miller's ex Grisham published an op-ed in the Washington Post titled 'I told the Trumps my relationship with a White House staffer had turned abusive. They didnt seem to care.'

After claimed Trump told her how 'broken up' Miller had been about their breakup, Grisham wrote: 'I told the president that this great guy had anger issues and a violent streak. I was not some stranger making a wild accusation. I hoped that he would take me seriously, that he would do something.'

'After I finished, the president crossed his arms and just said, "That surprises me. He was really broken up over things",' she wrote.

Grisham seemed to acknowledge that Miller was the unnamed staffer in question when asked by CNN's Jake Tapper, telling him that 'I didn't put his name in there on purpose because Ive moved on and if there's anything that I can take away from this experience, it's that Im almost stronger than ever now.'

Miller's attorneys filed a 13-page complaint that Grisham's op-ed was just a 'malicious attempt to secure personal financial gain' while trying to sell copies of her White House memoir.

At the time, Grisham also claimed that Miller took from her a French Bulldog puppy that he'd given her as a birthday present 10 months before their breakup.

'Keeping the dog he bought me for my birthday was the final insult,' Grisham said at the time. 'Who does that?'

Miller's lawyer countered that the dog was not bought for her, and that all the animal's paperwork was in Miller's name.

In her book, I'll Take Your Questions Now, Grisham indicates that Miller was known around the White House as the 'Music Man' for his penchant for playing show tunes to calm the former president down when he was upset or angry.

A favorite song among those was reportedly 'Memory' from Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Cats.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky challenged Ireland to press for tougher EU sanctions on Russia in an address to both houses of the Irish parliament.

Zelensky also rowed back scolding comments made last month that Ireland had 'almost' stood with his country in the wake of Russia's invasion.

And though he was greeted by ovations by almost all parliamentarians gathered in the Dail chamber, members of the People Before Profit party refused to applaud.

In a speech to a joint sitting of the Houses of the Oireachtas, Zelensky said: 'Although you are a neutral country, you have not remained neutral to the disaster and to the mishaps that Russia has brought to Ukraine.

Zelensky (on screens, upper left and right) addressed the Irish parliament after 10am today

He repeated his description of Ireland as a 'neutral country', but said he is grateful for its help

'You did not doubt helping us, you began doing this right away.'

Zelensky's address followed a contentious speech to the European Council last month in which he declared Ireland had 'almost' taken Ukraine's side in the conflict.

He had said on March 25 that Ireland had been a keen supporter of Ukraine - adding 'Well, almost'.

This morning Zelensky was more positive, thanking Ireland's politicians and the public for their 'caring' attitude towards Ukrainian refugees.

The Ukrainian president rowed back on a statement last month that Ireland was 'almost' an ally

A packed-out Dail chamber gave Zelensky a standing ovation before and after his address

He told a packed-out Dail: 'Thank you for the humanitarian and financial support extended to our country and thank you for your caring about Ukrainian people who found shelter on your land.'

But Zelensky again challenged Dublin to push its EU partners for a stricter sanctions regime on Russia, saying 'I can't tolerate indecisiveness' after everything Ukraine has gone through.

Zelensky said: 'We still have to convince even some of the European companies to abandon Russian markets.

Attending guests included Ukrainian ambassador to Ireland Gerasko Larysa (front right)

The Dail then heard premier Micheal Martin predict Kyiv's victory: 'Ukraine will prevail', he said

'We still have to convince Europe that Russian oil cannot feed Russian military machinery with new sources of funding.

'The country which is doing this is does not deserve to be in the circle of the civil countries.'

Kyiv's president reminded the politicians and foreign dignitaries gathered of the toll taken by Russia's invasion since February 24.

He said 927 schools have been damaged, 258 hospitals were wrecked and 78 ambulances shot at. At least 167 children have been killed since the outbreak of war, he added.

Putin has targeted Ukraine's food supply, starving its people, he said.

Before Zelensky's speech, Ukrainians in Dublin gathered outside the parliament building

Refugees Damir Zubchuk, five (left), and Artem Myroshnykov, six (right), arrived last month

'For them, hunger is a weapon against us ordinary people as an instrument of domination', Zelensky added, in comments which may have been intended to reference Ireland's struggle with starvation in the 1840s.

'They are blocking humanitarian access to the half-million people in Mariupol who can no longer melt snow for water', he continued.

'They are bombing 24/7. There is no single house left intact.'

In a speech after the president's address, Irish premier Micheal Martin said he believes Ukraine will win its war against Russia.

The Fianna Fail leader said: 'We are with Ukraine and I am certain that, in the end, Ukraine will prevail.

Hundreds of people gathered outside Leinster House to chant in favour of stronger sanctions

Damir and Artem were among the first Ukrainian refugees taken in by Ireland after war began

'We are a militarily neutral country. However, we are not politically neutral in the face of war crimes. Quite the opposite.

'Our position is informed by the principles that drive our foreign policy - support for international human rights, for humanitarian law and for a rules-based international order.

'We are not neutral when Russia disregards all of these principles. We are with Ukraine.'

Zelensky's speech was warmly received by People Before Profit's four TDs Brid Smith, Gino Kenny, Richard Boyd Barrett and Paul Murphy stood still during the ovations.

Murphy said later: 'We don't agree with President Zelensky's calls for a NATO-imposed no fly zone, which would mean a hot conflict between NATO and Russia and contains the risk of nuclear war.

'We also don't agree with the extension of sanctions which are hurting ordinary Russian people and appear to be actually helping to bolster Putin's support at home.'

Hundreds of people gathered outside the Irish parliament building before Zelensky's speech, waving flags and chanting in support of tougher sanctions.
A four-year-old girl was fatally shot by her two-year-brother at a gas station after he found a gun in the car while her dad paid for fuel.

The children, who were not identified by police, were inside a car at the Eagle Save Mart in Chester, Pennsylvania, about 11am on Tuesday when the two-year-old found the gun.

While handling the legally-owned weapon, he accidentally shot his sister.

The children's father and another guardian were reportedly inside the store paying at the time of the shooting. The father reportedly ran outside when he heard the gunshot and rushed his little girl to the Crozer-Chester Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead.

A gas station worker, Theodore Crumpler, who is a friend of the father, said 'Moon' and his children frequently come to the gas station.

'He went in the store. Usually, he has someone pumping gas, which would be me or somebody else and I would watch the kids,' Crumpler told NBC Philadelphia. 'But I wasn't here today. I'm so hurt that I wasn't here.'

A four-year-old girl was fatally shot by her brother, two, at Eagle Save Mart (pictured) on Tuesday around 11am. The father's friend, who works on the gas station and was not on shift on Tuesday, said it wouldn't have happened if he was there, because he usually watches the kids while he pumps gas

Their guardians were inside the mart's shop while the unidentified children were left unattended in the vehicle. It is unclear how the little boy access the gun, but the police said the gun was legally registered

Police said the gun was legally owned, but they are still trying to figure out how the boy came in possession of it.

'Who actually pulled the trigger and why was the gun available? Those are questions that still need to be answered,' Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer said at a press conference.

No charges have been pressed at the moment and the Chester City Police are still investigating ABC 6 reported.

Chester residents are calling for a change, as crime rates are rising.

'Please come together, stop this s**t,' Crumpler said. 'Stop the nonsense, man.'

Fellow Chester resident Carlton Gordy told NBC Philadelphia: 'We just had an article yesterday, they said the crime rate is decreasing, and since that time, we've had two unfortunate accidents.'

Gordy, who lost his own so child to gun violence 16 years ago on Thanksgiving Day is calling to 'look at city government' to give the area's children 'something to do.'

'There ain't nothing for those kids to do. Very little,' he said. 'You think about your loss and what you could have done differently. Split-second and your whole life could change.

Stollesteimer also said the City of Chester was 'heartbroken' and called the shooting 'absolutely tragic.'

More than 400 children have died by a gun violence this year and almost 1,000 have been injured, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

In neighboring New York, a 12-year-old boy was recently shot and killed while sitting in a car with his cousin, 20, and another eight-year-old relative in Brooklyn.

The girl's guardians rushed her to Crozer-Chester Medical Center (pictured) immediately after hearing the gunshots go off at the gas station

She was pronounced dead at the hospital (pictured)

Kade Lewin, 12, was shot in the head and chest with multiple bullets after he and two relatives pulled over to eat their Boston Market on East 56th Street and Linden Boulevard in East Flatbush at around 7:45 p.m. on Thursday. He was pronounced dead at the scene after the shooter fired 11 bullets into the Toyota Corolla.

His cousin Jenna Ellis, 20, who was sitting in the driver's seat, was hit in the upper leg and right cheek. She was rushed to Kings County Hospital where she is expected to survive, but remains in critical condition. She had recently gotten her license and was driving Lewin's mother's car. Lewin and Ellis were reportedly very close and saw each other frequently.

A younger female relative, eight, was sitting in the back seat and was uninjured. She said she was eating and looking at her phone when the violence begun.

The police called Lewin's killing 'senseless,' and said the boy and his 'church-going' family were not the intended targets of the shooting.

'Once again I'm standing here before you to brief you on another senseless shooting, this time a shooting involving the death of a 12-year-old child,' NYPD Assistant Chief Mike Kemper, commanding officer of Brooklyn South, said during a Thursday night press conference from the scene.

Investigators believe the family was not targeted. A source told the New York Daily News that the gunman was targeting someone who drives a similar make and model car.

Immediately after the shooting, two black sedans were reported to have fled the scene at high speeds.

His death is still being investigated.
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Britons' spring holidays are being cut short by plane chaos around Europe - with some having to leave their hotels a day early because operators are cancelling scheduled flights and rebooking them on others.

Staff shortages and the start of the post-Covid Easter holiday rush are causing large numbers of cancellations and huge airport queues - with British Airways axing at least 78 flights to and from Heathrow for today, while easyJet called off at least 30 at Gatwick.

Have YOU experienced airport delays? Email katie.weston@mailonline.co.uk or tips@dailymail.com Advertisement

The delays and cancellations are being blamed mostly on 'staffing shortages and recruitment challenges', and a sudden surge in passenger numbers  both caused by Covid and the lifting of curbs which have been in place for most of the past two years.

Steven Fletcher, MailOnline head of sport, was due to fly home from Agadir in Morocco to London's Gatwick Airport on Friday, but had his flight cancelled and must now return tomorrow morning. He was informed via an email from easyJet that he had been rebooked to fly out at 10.10am on Thursday, instead of 9.35am the next day.

Mr Fletcher branded the process an 'absolute shambles', saying: 'We've already paid for the hotel and lost a day of our holiday. Since then, the only correspondence has been to tell us there are unlikely to be any refreshments on the flight home.

'We paid 478 for two return flights and have now lost a day. And on the flight out they had no food on the first flight of the day, at 5.35am from Gatwick, because the new supplier can't keep up with demand.'

Another passenger told MailOnline: 'I arrived 36 hours late to my ski holiday in the French Alps because BA cancelled our flight to Grenoble. To make matters worse they managed to leave my bag in London so I then had to spend a morning cobbling together something to ski in. So a 6 day ski holiday was reduced to 4.5. Three days in, my bag still hasn't been returned to me. I've heard nothing from BA as to irs whereabouts so I'm having to borrow clothes from my family to wear each evening. For a holiday that has been postponed for two years it's very disappointing. '

Other passengers have similarly complained about the airline rebooking their inbound departures a day earlier, with one customer writing on Twitter: 'Outraged with @easyJet right now.

'It's one thing to cancel my flight and rebook me a day earlier, but to charge me 30 extra just to get the cabin bag and legroom I'd already paid for on the initial flight is pretty despicable.'

Meanwhile, another person experienced their outbound flight being rebooked at an earlier time, incurring additional hotel costs.

They wrote: '@easyJet - you cancelled my flight to see my dad who I haven't seen in 16 years. You have booked me on an earlier flight. I have to take out extra accommodation (one extra night). Will you cover this cost?'

A spokesperson for easyJet said: 'When a flight is unfortunately cancelled, we sometimes proactively rebook customers on to an alternative flight within 24 hours of their original departure, to try and get them to their destination as soon as possible.

'If this alternative not suitable, customers are also provided with the option to rebook onto a different flight, or take a refund or a voucher if they would prefer, along with guidance on how to do this quickly and easily online. We are very sorry for any inconvenience experienced by affected customers.'

MailOnline's head of sport Steven Fletcher, pictured with his wife Eloise. He was due to fly home from Agadir in Morocco to London's Gatwick Airport on Friday, but had his flight cancelled and must now return tomorrow morning

Other passengers have similarly complained about the airline rebooking their inbound and outbound departures a day earlier

Travellers shared pictures on social media of long lines forming at some of Britain's busiest airports earlier today, with one sharing a video at 1.50am of crowds waiting at UK Border Control in Stansted.

He wrote: 'Terrible arrival into Stansted Airport 45 mins ago. Very slow queue and loads of people behind too.'

Tweeting a picture of two lengthy queues, another flyer said: 'If it's helpful this is what Birmingham Airport security queue looks like at 4.10am today! Estimated 10-15 mins wait.'

Over 1,140 flights were grounded at Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Birmingham in the week up to April 3  with EasyJet and British Airways also cutting 60 and 98 flights respectively yesterday.

It comes after John O'Neill, North West Regional Industrial Officer for the trade union Unite, said officials met management at Manchester Airport yesterday to discuss pay.

He warned: 'Summer is going to be far worse than this. It is the time to get everything in place otherwise summer is going to very difficult.'

And Karen Smart was yesterday forced to resign as managing director of Manchester Airports Group (MAG), which owns Manchester, Stansted and East Midlands airports, after just two years in the post.

Manchester Airport management were due to meet political leaders and unions to discuss the ongoing situation, after Blackley and Broughton MP Graham Stringer challenged them to 'get a grip or get out'.

Crowds are seen at Heathrow Airport's Terminal 2 in London this morning as families try and get away for the Easter holidays

British Airways axed at least 78 flights scheduled to and from Heathrow for Wednesday, while easyJet called off at least 30 at Gatwick. Pictured: passengers queuing at Heathrow Terminal 2 today

Over 1,140 flights were grounded at Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Birmingham in the week up to April 3. Pictured: Pilots and airline staff waiting at London's Heathrow Airport today

EasyJet cancels more than 220 flights due to Covid staff shortages to leave some passengers stranded amid airport chaos EasyJet has cancelled more than 220 flights, blaming the disruption on high levels of staff sickness due to Covid. At least 222 flights have been axed since Friday, including 62 that had been scheduled for Monday alone, the majority of which were cancelled at short notice on Saturday. Covid infection numbers are some of the highest they have been since the start of the pandemic. An EasyJet spokesperson said yesterday: 'As a result of the current high rates of Covid infections across Europe, like all businesses EasyJet is experiencing higher than usual levels of employee sickness. 'We have taken action to mitigate this through the rostering of additional standby crew this weekend, however, with the current levels of sickness we have also decided to make some cancellations in advance.' They said the focus was on 'consolidating flights where we have multiple frequencies so customers have more options to rebook their travel, often on the same day.' They added: 'Unfortunately it has been necessary to make some additional cancellations for today and tomorrow. 'We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause to customers on affected flights. 'We have made 62 preemptive cancellations for flights to and from the UK for tomorrow which represents a small proportion tomorrow's total flying programme which was planned to be more than 1645 flights. 'We cancelled the majority of these yesterday.' Advertisement

And unions are warning that the carnage is set to go on throughout the summer because of the delays in processing counter-terror checks needed for new airport staff, with some said to be taking 30 weeks instead of the usual 14 to 15 while civil servants WFH.

In a statement, MAG chief executive Charlie Cornish said: 'Over the last two years, Karen has guided Manchester Airport through the most challenging period of its 84-year history, having made a major contribution to MAG throughout her time with the business.

'I am sorry to lose Karen after her years of valuable service, but also understand her desire to return to the South for family reasons and indeed to explore new career opportunities.

'While there are sure to be further challenges ahead, I am confident we will soon start to see the benefits of the recovery plans Karen has helped put in place and look forward to working with Ian and his leadership team to drive them forward.'

Yesterday, passengers at Manchester were spotted jumping over barriers and abandoning their luggage in a desperate attempt to make their flights, according to Nicky Kelvin, head of travel website Points Guy UK.

Meanwhile at Heathrow, a male passenger in his early 30s collapsed while queueing as staff shortages left people waiting four hours to clear passport control.

Eyewitness Jessica Oliver told MailOnline: 'I just walked past and he was on the floor. There were people helping him  I don't know if it was dehydration or very low blood sugar, but it's very hot and staff are handing out water bottles. It was also chaotic at Amsterdam, but I've never seen anything like this.'

The man's current condition is unknown and Heathrow Airport has been contacted for an update.

To reduce the impact on passengers, most cancellations are being made at least a day in advance and on routes with multiple daily flights, so passengers can be offered alternative departures.

British Airways said many of its cancellations include flights cut as part of its decision last month to reduce its schedule until the end of May.

Travellers also took to social media to share photos of huge queues stretching up to four hours long yesterday, with one person writing: 'Chaos at Heathrow Airport arrivals. Some people have been standing here for the past four hours and the queues are not moving. What is causing the disruption?'.

Another passenger added: 'Three hour plus clearing immigrations wait at Terminal 3 for under two hours European flight!! Still nowhere near through. No one giving any updates!'.

Unions are warning the carnage is set to go on throughout the summer because of the delays in processing counter-terror checks needed for new airport staff. Pictured: Heathrow Terminal 2 as families try and get away for the Easter holidays today

At Heathrow yesterday, a male passenger in his early 30s collapsed while queueing as staff shortages left people waiting four hours to clear passport control. Pictured: Passengers are seen queuing with their luggage at Heathrow this morning

Huge queues started forming at Birmingham, Manchester (pictured today) and Stansted airports from 4.10am this morning with passengers arriving early as cancelled flights and delays continue to derail Easter getaways

Passengers took to social media early today to share pictures of long lines already forming at some of Britain's busiest airports, with one traveller sharing a video (above) at 1.50am of crowds waiting at UK Border Control in Stansted

Tweeting a picture of two lengthy queues (above, taken today), another passenger said: 'If it's helpful this is what Birmingham Airport security queue looks like at 4.10am today! Estimated 10-15 mins wait.'

Travellers face chaos at Britain's busiest airports including Heathrow (pictured yesterday), Gatwick and Manchester

More than 1,140 flights have been grounded at a number of major airports including Manchester (pictured yesterday)

The unprecedented bedlam is being blamed on 'staffing shortages and recruitment challenges' (Gatwick pictured yesterday)

Manchester, pictured yesterday, the UK's third busiest airport, has been mired in chaos in recent weeks

Karen Smart has resigned as managing director of Manchester Airports Group (MAG), which owns Manchester, Stansted and East Midlands airports, after just two years in the post, the company confirmed on Tuesday afternoon

P&O Ferries customers face having their Easter holidays ruined P&O Ferries customers face having their Easter holidays ruined after fully-booked rivals said they cannot honour their tickets from Dover to France this weekend. Anyone with a ticket from P&O has been able to travel with DFDS, one of Europe's largest shipping operators, over the past few weeks. But this mutual agreement is coming to an end on Friday, leaving ticketholders rushing to get refunds from P&O and rebook with its competitor. This could lead to further queues and gridlocked roads around the Port of Dover, following three-hour waits last Saturday owing to fewer services in the wake of the redundancy debacle. In a tweet shared yesterday afternoon, P&O Ferries wrote: 'All P&O Ferries Passenger Services are suspended this weekend. 'For travel 8/9/10th April please re-book directly with another operator before arriving at the port. 'DFDS will not be able to transfer P&O customers onto their services.' Advertisement

And while sat in Terminal 5 at Heathrow, Hannah Swales told MailOnline about her 'shambolic' return flight from Dubai. She said: 'We were delayed from Dubai for three hours and then had to be rebooked on the 'next available flight'. We were to stay in Heathrow Airport with no luggage and no access to medication in our luggage.'

Paul Charles, chief executive of travel consultancy The PC Agency, said: 'Airlines are certainly seeing a high level of demand to fly, but are simply unable to cope with that demand due to a lack of resources. It's a nightmare situation for airlines and airports at the moment.'

Martin Chalk, general secretary of the pilots' union Balpa, also told The Telegraph: 'The chaos witnessed at British airports may well be repeated throughout the summer because airlines, laden with debt have not yet rehired enough staff.'

The rise in bookings is overtaking the number of airline staff being hired, which is being further exacerbated by security checks.

An industry source further blamed the vetting process, saying it can take up to six months before someone is able to come in and do a job at an airport.

But a spokesperson for the Department for Transport (DfT) contended the 'aviation industry is responsible for resourcing at airports', adding: 'They manage their staff absences, although we want to see minimal disruption for passengers during the Easter period.

'The requirement for Counter Terrorist Checks for aviation security staff is important for the protection of the travelling public and the Government continues to process these security clearances in a timely manner.'

There were also reports of travel chaos at Heathrow and Gatwick airports on Monday, as well as long delays at Dover and a train blockage in the Channel Tunnel.

Heathrow warned passengers of possible delays, tweeting: 'We continue to advise passengers arrive 3 hours prior to their scheduled departure time as we are not able to estimate queue times ahead of journeys, due to them being influenced by a significant range of factors.'

The carnage is set to go on throughout the summer because of the delays in processing counter-terror checks needed for new airport staff, with some said to be taking 30 weeks instead of the usual 14 to 15 while civil servants work from home. Pictured: passengers queuing at Heathrow this afternoon

Passengers queue early on Tuesday for security at Manchester Airport's Terminal 1, as travel chaos continues at airports and ports as the Easter holidays get underway

Long queues seen yesterday as passengers arrive at Heathrow Airport's Terminal 2 for the start of their Easter holiday

The latest figures show British Airways cancelled 662 flights while easyJet axed 357 last week, according to data from Cirium, which carries out aviation analysis. But some of these totals are based on historical cancellations and were flights axed months ago. Pictured left and right: Huge queues for security at Manchester Airport

Eurotunnel passengers face three-hour delays after train is halted in the Channel Tunnel Eurotunnel passengers face a three hour delay on Monday morning due a train being halted in the Channel Tunnel. Eurotunnel - the vehicle carrying railway tunnel that connects Folkestone with Coquelles beneath the English Channel - is reporting a three hour delay to services. The travel firm, which is separate from the passenger-only Eurostar service, said it was due to a train stopped in the tunnel. 'Due to a train stopped temporarily in the tunnel, our service is currently experiencing delays. Please check-in as planned. Apologies for this,' Eurotunnel said on Twitter. Passenger service Eurostar, which operates trains between London St Pancras and Europe, and which uses the same tunnels, also has delays, according to its website though has yet to post any updates on its Twitter page. A delay warning on its website says: 'Your train has been delayed because part of the track is temporarily closed in the Channel Tunnel. Speed restrictions are in place. We are sorry for the impact this may have on your plans.' Advertisement

Long queues were also reported at Birmingham from 7.45am yesterday, with one passenger warning others to 'get here early'. Another traveller, Luka Beckett, said she was 'trapped' on a grounded plane for 40 minutes on Sunday due to a lack of staff.

She told Birmingham Live: 'We should have been home at around 10pm, but got in sometime after midnight. It was horrific.'

This follows a week of reported mass disruption with more than 1,100 flights cancelled throughout the UK. In the week up to April 3, a total of 1,143 flights were cancelled from and to the UK compared with just 197 flights cancelled the same week in 2019.

The latest figures show British Airways cancelled 662 flights while EasyJet axed 357 last week, according to data from Cirium, which carries out aviation analysis.

But some of these totals are based on historical cancellations and were flights axed months ago while airlines have claimed they represent a small percentage of their total flights.

Speaking to the Manchester Evening News, Mr Stringer, the former leader of Manchester Council and chairman of the airport board, said: 'Covid has made life difficult for everyone in the aviation industry. The way to respond to that is by good employment procedures and not by casualisation, effectively using fire and rehire. The airport needs to reset and pay above the market rate to stabilise the situation and give confidence to employees and the travelling public.'

On Monday, Manchester Airport chiefs apologised for 'falling short' following long delays over the weekend.

Meanwhile, pictures showed long queues at Heathrow, with airport bosses blaming a huge spike in passenger numbers. Heathrow chiefs say passenger numbers have now reached pre-pandemic levels, with Saturday being the first school holidays since the start of the pandemic with no travel restrictions in place in England.

Bosses at Gatwick also said passengers numbers were returning to 2019 levels at the Sussex airport and that while there were some check-in queues that it was generally 'coping well' with the increase in footfall.

One travel expert estimated that there had 'probably been more resignations in the last three months' than during the Covid crisis because staff were 'worn out'. Another warned disruption at airports such as Manchester could last for 'months', with firms having to train new staff to deal with the post-Covid increase in demand.

Bosses of the company behind Manchester Airport, which is in the same group as Stansted and East Midlands Airport, said it had seen a 1,300 percent increase increase in passenger numbers in February  compared to the previous year when the country was in lockdown.

Pictures taken at Manchester Airport on Monday showed long queues of people attempting to get through to security. Passengers also bemoaned a lack of organisation at the check-in, with long queues also seen at the check-in desk. In a tongue-in-cheek Twitter post, one frustrated traveller described a snaking queue at the airport as a world record attempt at the 'world's slowest, longest conga line'.

A Manchester Airport spokesperson told MailOnline: 'Manchester Airport apologises to passengers whose experiences have fallen below the standard we aim to provide. We want to assure customers and colleagues that their safety and security will always be our first priority.

'Our whole industry is facing staff shortages and recruitment challenges at present, after the most damaging two years in its history. The removal of all travel restrictions after two years, coupled with the start of the summer travel season, has seen a rapid increase in passenger numbers, which is putting an enormous strain on our operation.

'We are doing all we can to recruit the staff we need to meet this demand, but this is taking time due to the lengthy vetting and training processes involved. That is why we have been advising travellers that there may be, at times, longer queues than normal.

'Whenever this is the case, we do all we can to redeploy resources and prioritise passengers within queues as best we can.

'We are also aware that partners working on our site, such as baggage handling agents, are facing similar challenges. We will continue to support them in any way we can to deliver the best possible experience for customers during this challenging time.'

It comes after the west-London airport faced its own chaos last week, after a major BA IT meltdown forced the airline to cancel or delay hundreds of flights.
Imran Ahmad Khan, 48, arrives at Southwark Crown Court in London this morning

A Conservative MP accused of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy told a court today that the teenager became upset and 'bolted' from a bedroom when the topic of pornography was raised.

Imran Ahmad Khan, 48, said he was trying to be 'kind' and 'helpful' when discussing sexuality with the boy, who he said appeared 'troubled'.

The politician, who was elected as the MP for Wakefield in West Yorkshire in 2019, denies sexually assaulting the teenager in a bunkbed at a house in Staffordshire in January 2008.

He said he had been engaged in a 'philosophical' discussion about sexuality with the boy during the course of the evening, but rejected any suggestion it was sexual.

Asked at Southwark Crown Court in London today whether he had any agenda in speaking about sexuality, he said: 'No, absolutely not. Not at all. I was just trying to be kind and helpful to a young man who wanted to talk.

'He seemed very keen to want to talk about this (sexuality). I think it would have been rude or perhaps a tad cruel to shut him down.'

The trial has heard that Khan allegedly forced the youngster to drink gin, dragged him upstairs and asked him to watch pornography before touching his feet and legs, coming within a 'hair's breadth' of his genitals.

Imran Ahmad Khan was elected as the Tory MP for Wakefield in West Yorkshire in 2019

The MP, who is gay and a Muslim, claims he only touched the Catholic teenager's elbow when the boy 'became extremely upset' after a conversation about his confused sexuality.

Giving evidence today, Khan became choked up at points and wiped his eyes as he told of his distress over the allegations.

He said: 'This whole thing was simply me trying to be kind and helpful to somebody who I think was a troubled young man.'

Khan, who wore a light-coloured suit and light pink shirt, said he had referenced pornography at the end of the evening when standing in the bedroom while the boy sat up in the bed.

The MP said he made a comment as a way of advising the boy 'that may be a way to find out where your attraction lay'.

He said that 'seemed to have triggered something in him' and that the teenager became 'very upset' and 'bolted out'.

Khan said: 'I placed my hand either on his elbow or his arm to placate him.'

He said the touch had been 'momentary' and he had used words to the effect of 'don't worry, it will all be OK, everything will sort itself out'.

At Southwark Crown Court in London (file picture), Khan denies sexually assaulting a teenager

Asked by defence barrister Gudrun Young QC if he had felt the teenage boy's feet, up his legs or towards his groin area, Khan replied that he had not.

He said he had been 'utterly astonished' to hear allegations that he had dragged the boy up the stairs, saying: 'I just don't know where he is coming from... or why he is making it up.'

Asked about who was drinking or serving drinks at the house, Khan said: 'I would have offered and poured drinks for everyone who asked for one.'

The MP said he was not drunk on the evening in question, adding: 'I think we were all probably a little merry.'

The trial has heard that the alleged victim was 'scared, vulnerable, numb, shocked, surprised' by the incident.

The complainant, now 29, previously told the court: 'When he got to my groin and was about to touch my testicles it was sheer panic.'

He said he 'froze', adding: 'I freaked out and jumped out of the bed and ran as fast as I could.'

The jury has been told of a different allegation against Khan, which is not part of the charge they are trying him on, whereby the MP is said to have sexually assaulted a man in his sleep in Pakistan after a party.

The alleged victim said he had reported the incident to the British High Commission and the Foreign Office but did not want to go to police in Pakistan because of Khan's 'powerful connections' in the military and government.

He came forward as a witness after hearing Khan had been charged with sexual assault, the court heard.

But Khan insisted sexual contact between him and the complainant in November 2010 had been consensual.

Khan said the morning after, when he attempted to perform a sex act again, the man told him: 'Stop, no.'

He said he 'immediately' stopped and that the man appeared 'upset, regretful and ashamed' about what had happened.

'I think there was a great deal of embarrassment,' he added.

Asked how he felt being in court, accused of sexual assault, Khan said: 'It is hellish, it is a nightmare.'
A school leaver has been left sickened after finding an image of herself on a pervy social media account that posts photos of pretty girls in their school uniforms.

Sophia Armstrong from The Ards Peninsula in County Down, Northern Ireland left school last year but was shocked to find a photo of herself on the Facebook group on Monday.

The 19-year-old, who is now studying history and politics at Queen's University in Belfast, was sent a link to the photo from a friend.

Sophie Armstrong, pictured third left, with her school friends after finishing their secondary education last year, discovered that the innocent image was being shared online by internet perverts

The Facebook page was open to anyone and involved people sharing images of young girls online without their permission

Sophia Armstrong, pictured, said she complained about the Facebook page as soon as she was made aware of it

The image shows Ms Armstrong and nine of her friends wearing school uniforms on their leavers day last year.

She had given little thought to the image until she was sent a link to The Best Schoolgirls Facebook group.

The account, which had 1,400 followers, described itself as a group for sharing pictures of pretty girls in their school uniforms - genuine pictures only please.

Ms Armstrong was stunned to find images of girls from all across Northern Ireland - with some believed to be as young as just 14 years old.

She said she was disgusted by the graphic comments from fans of the page about what they would like to do to the girls.

The Facebook page was still live until yesterday following complaints from Ms Armstrong and other shocked members of the public.

Speaking today, Ms Armstrong said: 'Older men were commenting on the post saying just the most outrageous stuff.

Ms Armstrong, pictured, said some of the images had a watermark linking it to another website promoting 'prime jail bait'

'There was one picture of some girls on the grass and they were saying "Id tap that", "I want a bit of that" and "oh, that ginger one looks a bit of a ride".

'It is outrageous the fact that this group has 1,400 followers and it says pretty young schoolgirls.

'The group might have been taken down but on the corner of the pictures there was a watermark which said "prime jail bait dot com" but I have not gone on the site as Im worried about it.

'I dont know what I will find, it is sickening to think of my image on a child pornography site but I want people to know about this.

'There are people whove gone on that site and on the Facebook group probably for sexual gratification and it makes you feel disgusting that people are looking at you.

'Theres such a restriction on schools using pictures of children online but somehow this is deemed acceptable.'

Ms Armstrong said she contacted the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) to report the group and see what action could be taken.

However, she said they told her they couldnt do much and advised her to change her privacy settings on the social media site.

A Police Service of Northern Ireland spokesperson today said: 'The Police Service of Northern Ireland has received three reports to date in relation to a Facebook page that has been set up called "The Best School Girls" which shows images of girls from all over the world in their school uniform, taken from their own public social media accounts.

'The reports made to the Police to date have been investigated and the images were found to have been posted by the page in question and taken from accounts already in the public domain.

The PNSI told Ms Armstrong that while seeing the images in this context was distressing, the Facebook page had not broken the law

'Policing social media is complex and there are definitions of what constitutes a criminal offence in these online spaces.

'Offences online may include pictures that show nudity of children or indecent images of children, threats to kill, threats to cause damage, criminal conduct amounting to harassment and comments that incite racial hatred, violence or rioting.

'As the photos investigated by the Police to date were already open to the public and showed no nudity, no criminal offence was found.

'We understand the distress young people and their parents/guardians must feel when they see images taken from their own accounts and circulated on pages like this. We do not underestimate how difficult it must be and the urgency in which you would want those images removed.'
Padstow's traditional May Day parade 'must be professionally managed' following the death of a mother-of-two who was struck by a wooden horse costume, a coroner has today told an inquest.

Laura Smallwood, 34, died in hospital three days after she was struck in the back of the head by the wooden framed horse - known as an 'Obby 'Oss' - an inquest heard.

The incident took place during the 2019 May Day parade in the north Cornwall town, which has hosted such celebrations since as far back as the 16th Century.

The Obby Oss, meanwhile, is thought to have been used as part of the parade for more than 200 years.

The inquest in Truro heard there are two 'Obby 'Osses, one with a red ribbon and one with a blue ribbon, that parade through the town and each has a separate organising committee.

But police told the hearing that there had not been one person in overall charge of the celebrations.

Today coroner Andrew Cox, who is holding an inquest into the death of Mrs Smallwood, said the event, which regularly attracts more than 20,000 people to Padstow's streets, should now be 'properly managed'.

'We need to make sure there is proper professional management of the event,' Mr Cox told the inquest.

Laura Smallwood (pictured), 34, died in hospital three days after she was struck in the back of the head by the wooden framed horse - known as an 'Obby 'Oss' - an inquest heard

Today coroner Andrew Cox, who is holding an inquest into the death of Mrs Smallwood (pictured), said the event, which regularly attracts more than 20,000 people to Padstow's streets, should be 'professionally managed'

The incident took place during the 2019 May Day parade in the north Cornwall town, which has hosted such celebrations since as far back as the 16th Century. Pictured: An Obby Oss at the Padstow Traditional May Day Festival

'What we need is someone taking responsibility of the event. These arrangements are not working and we need to do something about it.'

Mr Cox's comments came after Jay Trestain, a member of the committee behind the blue Obby 'Oss, told the hearing of her deep sorrow at the death of Mrs Smallwood.

Fighting back tears, she said: 'I would like to personally express my ongoing sorrow and sympathy to Mrs Smallwood's family and friends.

What is the 'Obby 'Oss Day celebration? 'Obby 'Oss Day is the biggest day in Padstow's calendar. Thousands of people cram into the little town to celebrate the festival every May Day. The origins of the Obby Oss are numerous. Some say the celebration has its roots in pagan times, others that it's a rain maker, a fertility symbol, a deterrent to a possible landing by the French some centuries ago or perhaps a welcome to the summer. Locals spend the night decorating the town's streets with flags, flowers and greenery complete with a maypole. The next morning, two 'osses', one red and one blue emerge from their stables. The 'osses', swirling and dancing proceed through Padstow's streets taunted by a Teazer, who leads the dance with theatrical movements. As the procession moves around the town, dancers perform a traditional gyrating dance to the sound of musicians and drummers. Source: Visit Cornwall Advertisement

'Mrs Smallwood was a well-loved, well-known and popular member of our community, not just as a friend but an exceptional midwife in neonatal intensive care caring for babies struggling at birth, including my own child.

'Her passing has torn a hole in our community in the most painful way.

'Padstow is a small place and close-knit community where many come together to celebrate an ancient and unique May Day tradition.

'The fact that one of our own lost her life during the celebration is something I don't think our small town will ever recover from.'

Mrs Trestain said there had been ongoing improvements to the festival since 2017, including more stewards, medical support and road closures, as well as improved communications between the two committees.

And measures had also been introduced to increase the distance between spectators and the 'Obby 'Oss.

'We come to this year's May Day in a very different place (than) where we did in 2019 and previous years in terms of the relationship we have built with the authorities and the improvements we have made,' she said.

Amanda Hannon, an events planner with Devon and Cornwall Police, told the inquest there had not been one person in overall charge of the celebrations.

'That would be best practice,' she said.

She added there was a 'reluctance' from Padstow Town Council to 'come forward or contribute to the running of May Day' and they 'don't want to be identified as an organiser'.

Mr Cox said that in correspondence with the council it did not have any 'obligation' to be the event organiser.

'Isn't the answer for me at the end of this to write to Government and say legislation as it stands does not deal with the situation where no-one comes forward as the event organiser,' Mr Cox said.

'When you are getting to an event of this size with this number of people, if safety is being compromised because no-one is willing to take that on, then that should give consideration to whether these events should continue.

'Let me be very clear. It would be a terrible thing if May Day could not continue. I am not for the first second saying that is what I want to see.

'These are the events that keep Cornwall Cornish. I want them to continue but they have to continue in a way that minimises the risks to everyone who attends and hopefully any similar fatalities in the future.

Mr Cox's comments came after Jay Trestain, a member of the committee behind the blue Obby 'Oss, told the hearing of her deep sorrow at the death of Mrs Smallwood (pictured)

Another witness, Charlotte Stupple, said Ms Smallwood (pictured with her friends) had been laughing about a 'scuffle' earlier with a young woman called Chelsea Powell

'At the moment the police and no-one else has any way of compelling someone to act as an event organiser.'

Ms Hannon replied: 'No, we also can't grant or deny permission for these events to take place.'

The inquest heard Mrs Smallwood, a paediatric nurse, was 'knocked out' when the Obby Oss struck her as it was paraded through the streets of the town in the annual festival.

Home Office forensic pathologist Dr Amanda Jeffery carried out a post mortem and said she had been told 34-year-old had 'some direct contact' with the Obby Oss in the region of her head, neck or shoulder.

Dr Jeffery said there was 'very little to see' in terms of external wounds and 'nothing significant around the face or back of the face or back of the neck'.

The pathologist said that Laura's cause of death was brain stem stroke caused by a tear to both arteries in the neck.

Coroner Mr Cox heard that Laura may have suffered a 'minor incident' around ten days before the Obby Oss collision, which had likely caused some damage to her arteries.

Activities like doing yoga or painting a ceiling can cause such an injury, Mr Cox was told.

The inquest was also told that Mrs Smallwood had earlier intervened in a row between a young couple and suffered a 'push, slap or wallop' to the face from a woman .

The hearing was told that scuffle left her with a mark on her face but she had 'laughed' it off.

But Dr Jeffery said: 'The Obby Oss worsened the damage precipitating her (Mrs Smallwood's) collapse.'

And she also said of the earlier incident: 'The blow to the face (from the earlier row) could have aggravated the damage that was present.'

She said the final incident with the Obby Oss was the most significant but said she was not dismissing earlier things that happened that day that may have contributed.

Consultant neuropathologist Dr Kathryn Uranker said Mrs Smallwood had suffered a tear around ten days before May Day and it was healing - but the injury had torn again on May Day.

The festival is one of the biggest events in Padstow's calendar as thousands flock to the small town in Cornwall

Dr Jeffery said it was 'extremely unlikely' that the unknown incident around ten days earlier caused Laura's collapse.

She told the inquest the Obby Oss collision worsened the damage that was there and was her 'favoured cause of the final deterioration'.

Earlier in the inquest, the coroner told how Mrs Smallwood was standing behind the Obby Oss, which is carried by a person inside the wooden framed costume, when it suddenly moved backwards.

A witness told the inquest they believe Kevin Constance, a 66-year-old who was inside the Obby Oss at the time, had slipped and the wooden structure had struck Mrs Smallwood in the back of the head.

The inquest heard that shortly after, Mrs Smallwood felt dizzy and grabbed a friend's arm. Her face had begun to droop before she collapsed.

Mr Constance told the coroner: 'I was not aware of hitting anybody. I could only see forward.'

The hearing was told that up to 20,000 people may attend the May Day parade and it is considered a 'low risk' event.

Police sergeant Susan Honeywill told the inquest it would be helpful if there was more legislation in place to ensure safety at this type of event.

The inquest at Cornwall Coroner's Court continues and is expected to end on Thursday.
A California transgender woman sentenced to a juvenile facility last year for molesting a 10-year-old girl in 2014 had been accused of assaulting a 4-year-old girl just a year before the first attack.

The 26-year-old defendant, who now goes by the name Hannah Tubbs, received a generous plea deal of just two years in a juvenile facility for assaulting a girl at a Denny's bathroom in Palmdale.

Court documents from a 2013 incident show that then 16-year-old Tubbs, who used the name James at the time, was also accused of exposing herself and molesting a 4-year-old child, Fox News Digital reported.

The alleged attack happened at a library in Bakersfield, two hours away from Los Angeles, while the child's mother was browsing books 'just a few aisles over.'

The young victim told her mother that Tubbs, who was wearing a ripped black shirt and shorts with blonde hair, cornered her near locked bathrooms and proceeded to touched her.

The little girl allegedly escaped while Tubbs tried to retrieve the bathroom keys and returned to her mother 'crying hysterically' and pointing at her mouth and private parts.

It is unclear what charges were filed against Tubbs or whether she was convicted, as her records are sealed because she was a minor at the time.

DailyMail.com has requested information from the Kern County Juvenile Court.

After the 2013 alleged attack, Tubbs went on to assault a 10-year-old girl at a Denny's bathroom in 2014.

Tubbs was two weeks away from turning 18 years old when police said she walked into a women's bathroom, locked a 10-year-old girl in a stall, grabbed her by the throat, shoved her hand down the child's pants and proceeded to sexually assault her.

Tubbs only stopped when someone else walked into the restroom.

She got off with a slap-on-the-wrist sentence of just two years in a juvenile facility as per LA District Attorney George Gascon's reforms.

Court documents from a 2013 incident show that then 16-year-old Hannah Tubbs, who used the name James Tubbs at the time, was accused of exposing herself and molesting a 4-year-old child. After the 2013 alleged attack, Tubbs went on to assault a 10-year-old girl at a Denny's bathroom in 2014

The alleged attack happened at a library in Bakersfield, two hours away from Los Angeles, while the child's mother was browsing books 'just a few aisles over'

In calls revealed earlier this year, Tubbs openly laughed at her generous plea deal and was heard mocking her 2014 victim from her jailhouse.

Tubbs got off with a slap-on-the-wrist sentence of just two years in a juvenile facility for the 2014 assault as per LA District Attorney George Gascon's reforms, although she was just days from turning 18

She boasted to her father in the November call that she will not have to register as a sex offender, and that 'nothing' will be done to punish her for violently assaulting a 10-year-old, according to an audio recording that was obtained by Fox.

'So now they're going to put me with other trannies that have seen their cases like mine or with one tranny like me that has a case like mine,' Tubbs told her father.

'So when you come to court, make sure you address me as her.'

Tubbs also reportedly made crude and disparaging comments about the child she had abused, jokingly talking about her sexual attraction for the 10-year-old.

Gascon has admitted that Tubbs may have been given too lenient of a sentence, after he refused to prosecute her as an adult for the crime that she committed as a male juvenile.

Tubbs' victim, now aged 18, hit out at Gascon for his handling of the case, which she described as 'insulting.'

'The things [Tubbs] did to me and made me do that day were beyond horrible for a 10-year-old girl to have to go through,' the young woman said, referring to Tubbs as a male.

'That man was very clear minded and old enough to know what he did that day was wrong and still did it anyway.

'It's something I struggle with and it's insulting that this is all he was given as punishment. Ans I want something done about it.'

Gascon, who has been widely criticized as being soft on crime, later backtracked on some of his most controversial policies, including not pursuing sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole, and not prosecuting juveniles accused of serious offenses as adults.

His sudden change of heart comes as he faces a second recall effort organized by his critics, who contend that his woke policies are to blame for Los Angeles' rising crime rates.

The progressive DA highlighted the case of Hannah Tubbs, who was sentenced in January to just two years in a juvenile facility after pleading guilty to sexually assaulting the 10-year-old girl.

'After her sentencing in our case, I became aware of extremely troubling statements she made about her case, the resolution of it and the young girl that she harmed,' Gascon stated in February.

EXCLUSIVE: In in-custody phone calls, 26 y/o transgender child molester Hannah Tubbs boasts about not having to serve prison time or register as a sex offender before being sentenced to 2 yrs in a juvenile facility after LA DA @GeorgeGascon refused to prosecute Tubbs as an adult. pic.twitter.com/n9KesabvXE  Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) February 21, 2022

LA DA George Gascon (left) has admitted that convicted child molester Hannah Tubbs, 26 (right) should not have been prosecuted as a juvenile and should have received a harsher sentence for sexually assault a child

Tubbs was two weeks away from turning 18 years old when police said she walked into a women's bathroom, locked a 10-year-old girl in a stall, grabbed her by the throat, shoved her hand down the child's pants and proceeded to sexually assault her in 2014

Gascon was reportedly unaware of the the jailhouse phone conversations between Tubbs and her father until he was contacted by Fox News about them.

During one exchange last November, Tubbs tells her dad: 'don't worry about it. ... I'm [going to] plead out to them and plead guilty. They're going to stick me on probation. And it's going to be dropped. It's gonna be done, done. I won't have to register nothing.'

Tubbs' father asks to clarify if she won't have to register as a sex offender, and she confirms that she will not have to do that.

'So what are they going to do to you then?' the father inquires.

'Nothing!' Tubbs replies.

She then adds with audible glee: 'if there is a next time I ever get in trouble, I'm leaving the state, I'm leaving the country. I ain't staying!'

Tubbs, who is a career criminal with an extensive history of offenses in multiple states, was only connected to the sexual assault after being arrested in 2019 for an unrelated crime.

Because Tubbs was 17 years old when she committed the sexual assault in 2014, Gascon's office prosecuted her as a juvenile.

After pleading guilty to the assault, Tubbs would be eligible for a reduction in time, or even an early release on good behavior, after six months.

Gascon said around the time of Tubbs' sentencing that he was concerned that the defendant, who is mentally disturbed, could be victimized in an adult facility as a transgender woman, and said a probation report recommended she be sentenced to home confinement.

Tubbs has a vast criminal record including arrests in multiple states. She is pictured in some of her old mugshots taken prior to her transition from a man to a woman

Tubbs was arrested in Idaho in 2019 on suspicion of battery. Tubbs was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon for a stabbing and served time in a state prison when she was linked to the 2014 molestation.

DNA entered into a database that matched Tubbs with the sexual assault at Denny's, and she was brought back to California - by which point there were arrests, for battery, drug possession and probation violations in several states.

Tubbs was eventually brought to LA in November 2021 and quickly confessed to the sexual crime. By this point, Tubbs had transitioned and was known as Hannah.

LA County Deputy District Attorney Jon Hatami, a prosecutor and supporter of the movement to recall Gascon, said earlier this year that Tubbs was too dangerous to be in the juvenile system.

'This was done with limited guidance and no concerns for public safety,' Hatami said speaking of California's system to handle violent juveniles.

'This clearly shows you the dangerous aspect of the blanket policies of George Gascon,' he said.

'Under George Gascon's 'reforms,' a 26-year-old admitted child molester is being housed with juveniles,' Hatami said. 'She may be released early, back into the community, with no sex registration. Only innocent victims and the public suffer because of George Gascon's so-called 'progress.''

'This is not somebody who should appear in the juvenile system.'

Gascon was elected to the DA's office in November 2020 campaigning on a reform agenda when he successfully unseated incumbent DA Jackie Lacey.

But last spring, victims rights advocates joined Sheriff Alex Villanueva in launching a bid to recall the newly-elected DA.

The protests did not end Gascon's recall but protestors' anger has not been subdued. In January, LA residents were granted permission to launch a second bid to recall the DA, and the push to oust Gascon has already drawn $1.8million in donations.
Scott Morrison faced a nightmare election campaign trail stopover at a regional pub in enemy territory when he was ambushed by a pensioner who shouted that he was 'sick of his bulls***.'

The Prime Minister dropped into the Edgeworth Tavern in Newcastle's west on Wednesday night and faced an expletive-laden rant from the pensioner, before being ambushed for a selfie by a woman who was clearly not a fan.

Edgeworth is in the Hunter division, a long-held Labor seat - and the locals made that clear.

As he was gridlocked in a crowd of people in the lively pub, punters seized the opportunity to give Mr Morrison verbal sprays while he could not walk away.

The lowlight of the visit for the PM was facing a very public barrage, on camera, from a disability support pensioner upset over restrictions on his payments.

Scott Morrison stopped by Edgeworth Tavern, in Newcastle, on Wednesday (pictured) as part of his pre-election trail

Mr Morrison offered to sit down and talk to the man (pictured) as he raised his concerns

'This is what you said when you got elected last time: "We're going help all those people that worked all their lives, paid their taxes and those that have a go, get a go".

'Well, I've had a go, mate, I've worked all my life and paid my taxes.'

When Mr Morrison tried to coax the man away from cameras to explain his situation to staff he became angrier.

'You better f***ing do something ... I'm sick of your bullsh**,' he said.

One woman cunningly asked him to pose with her for a selfie video, before telling him 'congratulations on being the worst prime minister we've ever had'.

Mr Morrison's smile quickly disintegrated into a frown as the video, which has gone viral on Twitter, came to an end.

One woman captured a video of herself ripping into the prime minister after posing as a fan requesting a selfie (pictured)

'Just got to give Slomo my sincerest congratulations,' she wrote, 'I never thought Id get the chance to meet him dreams do come true.'

Asked how Mr Morrison responded, the woman wrote: 'He said thanks, then processed what I said and lost his smirk and turned his back on me.'

The disability support pensioner had also cornered the Prime Minister to blast him in an expletive-riddled rant over his measly disability pension.

'Listen to me for a change. You can have a million dollar house, $250,000 in the bank and franking credits but a disability pensioner can't have an income,' the man said to Mr Morrison.

'You've also been immigration minister. I've got a partner I've been with six and half years and I've got a right as an Australian to choose who my partner should be.

'We've been to the tribunal twice and won on both occasions. That was 14 months ago. Why can't I have a partner?

'You know another promise you made. You were going to have an integrity commission.

As the punter bristled, Mr Morrison said he had 'raised very important issues' and offered to sit down with him to 'get to the bottom' of his concerns.

'I've been fighting for 12 years, you treat a disability pensioner who's worked all his life, paid his taxes... now he's getting taxed again,' the elderly man continued.

'Listen to me for a change. You can have a million dollar house, $250,000 in the bank and franking credits but a disability pensioner can't have an income,' the man (pictured in blue) said to Mr Morrison.

As the punter (pictured with his back to the camera) bristled, Mr Morrison said he had 'raised very important issues' and offered to sit down with him to 'get to the bottom' of his concerns

'This is what you said when you got elected last time: "We're gonna help all those people who worked all their lives and paid their taxes, those who had a go." Well I've had a go, mate.

'I'm doing this before the election because this is two promises that you made.'

The interaction sparked mixed reactions online, with many praising the man for speaking out.

'That man is a hero, right there. Morrison speechless for once,' one person tweeted.

'To be honest I think this confrontation from a pensioner tonight will hurt Scomo more than any ad,' a third said.

But others claimed the man hijacked the event.

'I was there and very disappointed I did not get the opportunity to talk on account of this man and others poor behaviour,' one woman said.

'He took the whole floor what about everyone else waiting to speak.'

The bitter showdown was the latest saga in a tumultuous week for Mr Morrison, rocked by in-house friction and allegations of racism and bullying.

Last week, Liberal Minister Concetta Fierravanti-Wells accused Mr Morrison under parliamentary privilege of being a 'bully' and 'autocrat' and claimed he made racist remarks about his former political rival Lebanese-Australian Michael Towke.

The personal attacks continued with Catherine Cusack, a member of the Upper House who lives in the flood-devastated Northern Rivers region, days later accusing Mr Morrison of only providing disaster relief to Coalition-backed regions.

Mr Morrison's opponent, Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese, faced his own unruly hecklers on the campaign trail on Wednesday.

He awkwardly refused to take a question from a voter who crashed his press conference with Mark McGowan in Perth on Wednesday morning.

'I'm not a media person, I'm just a local resident, I've got a tough question for you,' the man said, asking the Labor leader if he was 'up for' answering.

Mr Albanese responded: 'I'm absolutely up for it' but then rejected taking a question from the man in front of the media.

'Sorry we can't really do that. The media alliance will be a bit upset,' he said.

Anthony Albanese awkwardly refused to take a question from a voter who crashed his press conference with Mark McGowan

While Mr Morrison was copping the fury of Hunter locals, more bombshell allegations were levelled at him.

During a live TV interview with The Project's Waleed Aly, Lebanese-Australia former politician Michael Towke accused Scott Morrison and his allies of launching a vicious smear campaign against him in a 'desperate' bid to secure the future PM his first seat in federal Parliament.

Mr Towke and Mr Morrison were both vying for pre-selection for the seat of Cook, which takes in part of the Sutherland Shire, in Sydney's south, for the 2007 election.

Mr Towke claimed Liberal party apparatchiks both publicly and privately smeared him as a Muslim crime figure even claiming he was associated with neo-Nazis.

There were brazenly false rumours spread that he ran a brothel and was somehow involved in the Cronulla riots.

Mr Towke also claimed he was coerced by senior party officials to drop out of the contest against Mr Morrison or he would 'never be able to find a job' ever again.

Mr Morrison has emphatically denied the 'malicious' claims he would use a candidate's racial background against him, after they resurfaced last week.

Lebanese-Australia former politician Michael Towke (pictured) levelled a series of bombshell allegations against Scott Morrison on Wednesday

Mr Towke claimed another dissenter within Mr Morrison's ranks recently reached out to him to express their support after the PM repeatedly denied the accusations.

'I've got text messages from a cabinet minister telling me "I believe you, and do what you need to do, just be careful",' he said.

This was just the latest leaked text scandal for the prime minister, whose own close colleagues and allies exchanged unflattering words about him.

In one an exchange, a minister branded Mr Morrison a 'complete psycho' to former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian, who in response called him a 'horrible, horrible person'.

More details were released on Tuesday by the 7.30 report with Ms Berejiklian questioning his motives and handing of the bushfires which devastated large parts of Australia in 2019.

'Morrison is a horrible horrible person. He is actively spreading lies and briefing against me re fires,' she wrote followed by a red-faced emoji.

The politician on the other end is even more scathing in reply, calling the PM a self-obsessed 'psycho'.

'Morrison is about Morrison. Complete psycho. He is desperate and jealous. The mob have worked him out and think he is a fraud.'

The text message exchange between Gladys Berejiklian and an unnamed politician calling Mr Morrison a 'fraud'

An leaked internal Labor Party memo reveals Anthony Albanese's secret strategy to 'censor' his frontbenchers. Pictured: Mr Albanese with WA Premier Mark McGowan on Wednesday

The plot to keep shadow ministers out of the limelight was detailed in this email from Labor's campaign directors to press secretaries and candidates. Scroll down for the full email

Other texts by Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce labelled Mr Morrison a 'hypocrite and liar' whom he 'never trusted'.

Also on Wednesday, a leaked internal Labor Party memo revealed Mr Albanese's secret strategy to 'censor' his frontbenchers and dominate media coverage during the election campaign.

The plot to keep shadow ministers out of the limelight was detailed in an email from Labor's campaign directors to press secretaries and candidates.

In what is called 'a very different way of operating', Labor HQ said transcripts of interviews, speeches and opinion pieces will be hidden from the media unless they involve the leader.

Labor politicians will have to get advance permission to hold a press conference, send quotes to media or give a speech.

They have also been told to cancel regular TV and radio interviews, with every appearance now 'subject to approval based on the media context on that day'.

The memo said the strict measures have been taken to 'keep our daily message clear'.

Mr Morrison is expected to call the election any day now for either May 14 or 21.

Labor is ahead by a sizeable eight points according to the latest Newspoll.
NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg today warned the war in Ukraine could last 'months, even years' as there is no sign Vladimir Putin has lost 'his ambition to control the whole country'.

It comes as Ukrainian authorities today warned civilians in the country's east to flee 'now' or 'risk death' as Russian forces regroup ahead of what is expected to be a fresh offensive in the Donbas region.



Stoltenberg, speaking ahead of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels, said the international community should be 'realistic' about Moscow's intentions and 'realise that this may last for a long time' as the war entered its 41st day.

'We need also to be prepared for the long haul, both when it comes to supporting Ukraine, sustaining sanctions and strengthening our defences,' he added.

NATO's foreign ministers were meeting today and tomorrow to discuss sending more arms to Ukraine after the Czech Republic became the first bloc member to send tanks and armoured infantry vehicles to Kyiv.

Members of the trans-Atlantic alliance had until today given Ukraine only anti-tank and anti-craft missiles, small arms and protective equipment, but not offered heavy armour or fighter jets.

Today's delivery is understood to be a gift agreed on by NATO allies, raising fears the bloc could be dragged into the Russian war in Ukraine despite remaining on the sidelines for more than a month.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg today warned the war in Ukraine could last 'months, even years' as there is no sign Vladimir Putin has lost 'his ambition to control the whole country'

Members of the trans-Atlantic alliance had until today given Ukraine only anti-tank and anti-craft missiles, small arms and protective equipment, but not offered heavy armour or fighter jets (pictured, destruction wreaked by Russian forces in Borodyanka)

A car is seen riddled with bullet holes on the street on April 5, 2022 in Bucha, Ukraine. Milley said the war in Ukraine could last for years

Chief Stoltenberg said the international community should be 'realistic' about Russian President Vladimir Putin's (pictured) intentions and 'realise that this may last for a long time' as the war entered its 41st day

Stoltenberg also confirmed that some members of the alliance had sent heavy weaponry to Ukraine following reports the Czech Republic had supplied Soviet-era tanks to Kyiv.

'Since the invasion allies have stepped up their support. I also expect that ministers when they meet today and tomorrow will discuss how they can further support Ukraine,' he said, declining to give details.

'I can say that the totality of what allies are doing is significant and that includes also some heavier systems combined with lighter systems.'

Several BVP-1 infantry fighting vehicles, howitzer artillery pieces and more than a dozen T-72 tanks were yesterday loaded on a train bound for Slovakia where they are expected to head on to Ukraine, footage run by public broadcaster Czech Television showed.

The Czech delivery has been funded by Prague as well as private donors who have contributed to a crowdsourced fundraising campaign to supply arms to Kyiv.

Ukraine burns through in a single day the same amount of weaponry it receives in a week, according to a senior Polish official, and Kyiv's eastern neighbours are concerned with keeping up with demand.

Prague, and neighbouring Slovakia which has no tanks to give, are also considering helping repair and refit damaged Ukrainian military equipment. Germany will send several dozen infantry fighting vehicles to Kyiv and the UK has approved the delivery of 20 ambulances.

The United States has agreed to provide an additional $100 million in assistance to Ukraine, including Javelin anti-armour systems, the Pentagon said on Tuesday. US chipmaker Intel Corp (INTC.O) said it had suspended business operations in Russia, joining a growing list of companies leaving the country.

NATO has already supplied fuel, ammunition, helmets, protective gear and medical supplies to Ukraine, Stoltenberg said yesterday.

President Joe Biden has in recent weeks ordered more US troops to NATO's eastern flank to reassure edgy allies and pledged to protect the bloc's territory if Russian forces stray over more borders.

The Czech Republic has become the first NATO country to send tanks to Ukraine, providing T-72 and armoured infantry vehicles following President Zelensky's plea for help (pictured, tanks loaded on a train bound for Ukraine on Tuesday)

Several BVP-1 infantry fighting vehicles (pictured) and more than a dozen T-72 tanks were yesterday loaded on a train bound for Ukraine, footage published by Czech Television showed

The Czech delivery of T-72s (pictured) has been funded by Prague as well as private donors who have contributed to a crowdsourced fundraising campaign to supply arms to Kyiv

Ukraine's deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk today said in a message on Telegram that residents of the country's eastern regions should evacuate 'now' or 'risk death' due to a feared Russian attack.

'The governors of the Kharkiv, Lugansk and Donetsk regions are calling on the population to leave these territories and are doing everything to ensure that the evacuations take place in an organised manner,' she said.

The call for urgent evacuations comes as Ukraine says Russian forces are regrouping to launch a fresh offensive in the country's east after retreating from the Kyiv region.

Vereshchuk asked residents to cooperate with authorities, saying Kyiv will 'not be able to help' them after an attack.

'It has to be done now because later people will be under fire and face the threat of death. There is nothing they will be able to do about it, nor will we be able to help,' she said.

'It is necessary to evacuate as long as this possibility exists. For now, it still exists,' she added.

Russian forces last week pulled back from positions outside Kyiv and shifted the focus of their assault away from the capital, and Ukraine's general staff said the northeastern city of Kharkiv, the country's second-largest, also remained under attack.

Authorities in the eastern region of Luhansk on Wednesday urged residents to get out 'while it is safe' from an area that Ukraine also expects to be the target of a new offensive.

The Kremlin has declared that Ukraine's Donbas is now a priority for the Russian army. NATO believes Moscow aims to take control of the whole Donbas region in eastern Ukraine with the aim of creating a corridor from Russia to annexed Crimea.

Russian artillery pounded the Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Kharkiv today as the West prepared more sanctions against Moscow in response to civilian killings that Kyiv and its allies have called war crimes.

Zelensky accused the West of holding back on supplies because of 'intimidation' from Moscow and suggested Russia is in charge of NATO

Ukrainian servicemen inspect the wreckage of houses, cars and Russian military vehicles in the town of Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, yesterday
A Russian-born mother from Wisconsin has been accused of strangling her eight-year-old son to death and trying to drown his older brother in the bathtub after allegedly becoming 'amped up' about the war in Ukraine and coming to believe that her children would be taken away and abused by Vladimir Putin's regime.

Natalia Hitchcock, 41, made her initial court appearance on Tuesday to face charges of first-degree intentional homicide and attempted first-degree intentional homicide. Her bond was set at $1million.

As she was being led out of the courtroom at the conclusion of the hearing, a visibly distressed Hitchcock turned to face her husband of 15 years, Jeff Hitchcock, and other relatives seated in the audience, and told them: 'I'm so sorry. I love you guys. I don't know what happened,' reported WBAY2.

According to a criminal complaint obtained by Law & Crime, Hitchcock strangled her youngest son, Oliver, with her bare hands inside the family's apartment in Sheboygan Falls on March 30. She also made apparent attempts to take her own life by overdosing on Tylenol and stabbing herself in the chest, but she survived.

When a police sergeant informed Hitchcock on April 1 that Oliver died of his injuries in the hospital, she was quoted as calmly saying: 'well, I guess I accomplished what I set out to do then.'

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Natalia Hitchcock, 41 (left), has been charged in Wisconsin with first-degree intentional homicide and attempted first-degree intentional homicide after she allegedly strangled her eight-year-old son, Oliver (right), to death last month

Hitchcock made her initial court appearance on Tuesday and her bond was set at $1million

During the hearing, a seemingly distressed Hitchcock was seen turning to face her family members in the audience, among them her husband, Jeff Hitchcock

As she was being led away, an emotional Hitchcock told her loved ones: 'I'm so sorry. I love you guys. I don't know what happened'

The six-page complaint that was filed in Hitchcock's case on Tuesday paints a vivid picture of the married mom-of-two's apparent unraveling amid the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, where her husband was born.

Hitchcock was said to be angry that she could not book plane tickets to visit her parents in Russia. She had recently started drinking vodka and experienced 'surges of rage,' according to her husband, who described his wife's descent into apparent paranoia.

In the days leading up to the deadly rampage, Hitchcock reportedly asked her husband to buy survival gear, guns and knives, because she was afraid that their family would be attacked.

The tragedy began unfolding at 5pm on March 30, when officers with the Sheboygan Falls Police Department responded to the Hitchcock family's apartment at 1110 Plank Trail Lane after receiving a 911 call from Jeff Hitchcock, telling a dispatcher that his wife had attacked their son and wanted to kill herself.

Responding cops found Oliver lying unresponsive with bruises around his neck and blood trickling from his nose and right ear, which are signs consistent with strangulation.

On March 30, police responded to the Hitchcock family's apartment in Sheboygan Falls and found 8-year-old Oliver unresponsive with bruises around his neck

The boy died of his injuries two days later at Children's Hospital in Milwaukee. His 11-year-old brother is seen above standing next to his sibling

Paramedics who were called to the scene performed CPR on the eight-year-old before transporting him to Saint Nicolas Hospital, from where he was later transferred to Children's Hospital in Milwaukee.

Meanwhile in the apartment, Jeff Hitchcock led his wife out of the bedroom with a knife in hand and told police, 'she tried to stab me.' It was later revealed that Natalia also knifed herself in the chest in a failed attempt to 'cut her heart,' leaving her shirt soaked with blood.

The couple's 11-year-old son was also in the apartment and told investigators that his mother had allegedly tried to drown him in the bathtub after challenging him to keep his head submerged underwater as long as he could.

'He said that after he went under the water he felt his mothers hands on his head, pushing him down and at some point it felt like her whole body was pushing him down,' the son told the authorities, according to the complaint. 'He said he was able to get out from underneath her so she had not been keeping him under the water.

Hitchcock allegedly admitted to strangling her youngest son with her bare hands to save him from being abused by the Russian government

'He described the water as not having been very high and indicated that if it had been higher he probably would have drowned.'

It was Oliver's older brother who found the eight-year-old strangled under a sheet in his bedroom on March 30 and alerted their father.

'When he got closer to [Oliver] he saw what he described as red dots on his face and that his feet were white,' the court document stated. 'He said that he started screaming very loudly with [Jeff] entering and starting CPR.

'He also said that his mother ended up in the kitchen with a different knife, which she held to her neck. At some point he exited the residence, ran and hid in the garage.'

According to the complaint, Jeff Hitchcock told investigators that he was worried for his wife's state of mind as she watched the news coverage of the war in Ukraine.

He said that the mom-of-two, who previously rejected drugs and alcohol, had recently begun consuming vodka and 'became violent when she was angry.'

Jeff told the cops that three or four days before the killing, she asked him to buy a camping stove and fuel, which he did 'to make her feel safe.' She also wanted to sotck up on guns and kives, ut her husband refused to comply with that request.

Hitchcock is also suspected of trying to drown her older son (right) in the bathtub, although she claimed she was only trying to scare him

'He advised that Hitchcock also complained that she could not book a flight to Russia to see her parents, which made her angry,' the complaint stated. 'He said that he felt the war between Russia and Ukraine amped up Hitchcock more than ever and that she started to drink alcohol.'

Jeff Hitchcock told detectives that on March 30, he was taking a nap when his older son ran to him for help, screaming that his younger brother was 'dead.' His wife then came up to him and allegedly said, 'I killed [Oliver].'

The husband said Natalia then began walking around the apartment with a knife, 'dazed,' and allegedly threatening to kill everyone in the house.

When questioned by a police officer, Natalia Hitchcock allegedly admitted to suffocating her youngest son to save him from being abused.

She also said that she did not have control of her thoughts, was hearing voices and had a 'brain fog.' She also recounted her she emptied a bottle of Tylenol into a glass of orange juice, waited for the pills to dissolve and drank the liquid to 'fall asleep and never wake up.'

The 41-year-old allegedly said that as her husband was napping and her sons were playing video games, 'she began to have thoughts that the Russian government was going to take her children and abuse them,' according to the court filing.

Natalia also claimed that her husband 'was trying to sell her and the boys to the dark web,' she she decided to kill Oliver because he was 'the youngest and most vulnerable.'

During interviews with police, Natalia offered various explanations for what happened, including that she feared that her 'innocent' son Oliver would be sold on the dark web and sexually abused

'She said that she believed [Oliver] would not have been able to defend himself if he had gotten abused and she thought it better to kill him rather than watch him be abused,' Natalia allegedly told the officer.

The mother then described how she 'placed both hands around [son's] neck and squeezed as hard as she could until [Oliver] stopped breathing,' the complaint stated. 'She said that she observed [Oliver's] face lose color and that once he lost consciousness and fell to the floor, she grabbed a kitchen knife and began to stab herself in the chest.'

During a subsequent interview with a detective, Natalia downplayed the role of the stress caused by the war in Ukraine on her decision to kill her son, allegedly saying that she was 'more worried that she was being sold by people on the dark web.'

The woman reiterated, according to the document, that she wished to end Oliver's suffering with her own hands because he was 'so little and so innocent.'

Hitchcock also said that she 'had no other choice' but to kill herself because she said people suspected her of being 'a Russian spy.'

The woman, however, denied trying to kill her older son, telling police that she only dunked his head in the bathtub 'to scare him so that he would understand his life was in danger.'

After she was told of Oliver's death on April 1, Hitchcock 'began to cry softly and said she did it because she was concerned that her son was going to be sexually assaulted and she felt he would be better off dead,' stated the complaint.

Hitchcock has denied suffering from mental health issues want him to be abused. If convicted as charged, she could face life in prison.

The couple's 11-year-old son (left) was the one who discovered Oliver lying motionless under a sheet and alerted their father

Meanwhile, Eric Hitchcock, Oliver's uncle, has launched a GoFundMe campaign to help his brother, who works as a truck driver, care for his surviving son, now as a single parent.

'No one should suffer at the hands of a parent  the person whose job it is to protect a child and keep him from harm,' Eric Hitchcock wrote in the description. 'With no history of aggression or abuse, we are left with nothing but questions as to why and how this could happen.'

The uncle also revealed that Oliver's grieving dad has made the decision to donate his son's organs to help save four other children.

'On the absolute worst day of Jeff's life, he gave four different families their very best days,' Eric wrote.

'My brother Jeff has always believed that his son Oliver was destined to do great things. Oliver, in his short life, has absolutely accomplished the extraordinary.

'Most of us only get the chance to go through life once. Oliver will live on through his donations and our family will always be proud of Jeff for being able to reach beyond his grief and find the level of kindness in his heart to bring joy to others.'
A British taxpayer-funded vaccine manufacturing centre was today bought by a US pharmaceutical giant.

The Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre, in Oxford, was built in 2018 with the goal of developing vaccines to protect against future pandemics, jab shortages and price wars.

But New Jersey-based Catalent has purchased the 74,000-square metre facility for an undisclosed sum.

The site, put up for the sale last year, was not owned by the Government  although ministers had given it 215million in funding. It is unclear whether No10 will be given any cash back, or will be able to secure cheap manufacturing deals with Catalent in the future.

The firm will invest 120million to finish building the facility and equip it with 'state-of-the-art capabilities' to develop and manufacture vaccines and treatments.

But MPs slammed the sale as a 'ridiculously short-sighted move' that could leave the UK 'less prepared for the next pandemic'.

Campaigners also reacted with fury, claiming the deal will see vaccines 'continue to go to the highest bidders'.

The vaccine-making centre had received around 215million in Government funding by March and is expected to produce 70million doses in as little as four months once up and running

Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a visit to the site in September 2020, while the UK was on the cusp of a second wave of Covid infections, to speak to those building the plant and scientists who were set to work in it

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) announced in 2018 that the VMIC would be the UK's first ever dedicated jab-making site.

Its purpose would be to secure the availability of vaccines and ensure the nation was prepared in the face of a pandemic.

Ministers originally pledged to invest 66million in the centre, which was tasked with working to develop Ebola and Lassa fever vaccines before the Covid pandemic took off.

But it had been granted 215million in funding by March, and its construction was fast-tracked to help in the fight against Covid.

The centre, yet to be fully functioning, was set to churn out 70million vaccines over four months  nearly 600,000 doses a day  after it was complete.

WHAT IS THE VACCINE MANUFACTURING AND INNOVATION CENTRE? The Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre was billed as a a manufacturing site to 'lead the fight against deadly disease' when it was first announced in 2018. But just four years on, the VMIC in Oxford has already been sold. US pharmaceutical giant Catalent is rumoured to be in talks to buy the site, which was founded by leading UK universities and received 215million of taxpayer cash. Ministers originally pledged to invest 66million in the centre, which was tasked with working to develop Ebola and Lassa fever vaccines before the Covid pandemic took off. But its construction was fast-tracked to help in the fight against Covid. It was due to open in 2022 and churn out 70million doses in as little as four months  nearly 600,000 doses a day. But rather than relying on the VMIC to develop jabs, the UK bought 114million doses of Covid vaccines in December. And health chiefs insisted this week that the UK has sufficient vaccine supply for the planned spring and autumn 2022 booster rollouts. In its annual financial accounts, the VIMC revealed the Government's need for extra manufacturing capacity has reduced, while the cost of completing the centre 'have increased beyond those envisaged'. Advertisement

But rather than relying on the VMIC to develop jabs, the UK bought 114million doses of Covid vaccines in December.

And health chiefs insisted that the UK has sufficient vaccine supply for the planned spring and autumn 2022 booster rollouts.

In its annual financial accounts, the VMIC revealed the Government's need for extra manufacturing capacity has reduced, while the cost of completing the centre 'have increased beyond those envisaged'.

The facility was founded by the University of Oxford, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Imperial College London.

It received funding from pharmaceutical giants Johnson and Johnson, Merck and and Cytiva.

The VMIC  set up as a not-for profit company  put itself up for sale at the end of last year.

In a statement on its website today, Catalent confirmed it had acquired the VMIC.

It said it will finish building the site and 'equip it with state-of-the-art capabilities for the development and manufacture of biologic therapies and vaccines, including mRNA, proteins, and other advanced modalities'.

The company expects to employ more than 400 staff and 'support public and private organisations seeking to develop and manufacture biotherapeutics'.

Catalent already employs 1,300 workers across four sites in the UK, located in Nottingham, Swindon, Haverhill and Dartford.

It works with other pharmaceutical companies to produce vaccines against infectious diseases, including Moderna and Johnson & Johnson's Covid vaccines.

Mike Riley, president of Catalent Biotherapeutics, said the VMIC purchase enables Catalent to 'collaborate with the rich academic and biomedical science community centred around Oxford, with its world-class talent'.

The facility 'provides opportunities to transform innovation into real treatments for patients across the United Kingdom, Europe, and beyond', he said.

Mr Riley said the site will be up and running later this year and it will then be integrated into Catalent's 'existing network of biologics facilities across Europe to offer a flexible range of manufacturing, technology, and development solutions for the pipeline of thousands of development programs currently underway'.

Professor Robin Shattock, chair of VMIC and head of mucosal infection and immunity at Imperial College London, said the deal ensures the facility 'will stay true to the original purpose of strengthening the UK's manufacturing capability'.

But the move has sparked anger among MPs and campaigners.

Daisy Cooper MP, the Liberal Democrat health spokeswoman, slammed the move as 'ridiculously short-sighted' and risks leaving the UK 'less prepared for the next pandemic'.

She said: 'Vaccines can take decades to develop and selling this facility shows this Conservative Government's lack of long-term planning.

'This facility was purpose-built with more than 200million worth of taxpayers' money to produce vaccines.

'With this Government wasting eye-watering amounts of public money and writing off money spent fraudulently, the Tories must come clean on how much this facility has been sold for.

Campaign group We Own It today claimed the deal will see vaccines 'continue to go to the highest bidders, to make as much money as possible for Catalent's shareholders'. Pictured: We Own It last month protesting outside Oxford Town Hall over plans to sell the facility

'The Prime Minister himself underlined how important this centre would be to protect against Covid and future pandemics. The public has a right to know why he has now changed his mind.'

And Tom Morton, head of We Own It, a campaign group against privatisation, today said: 'The idea behind this centre was to make sure new vaccines got made regardless of whether it was profitable to make them or not.

'It was supposed to support cost-effective development by cutting across competition.

'Selling the centre to a profit-making pharmaceutical company runs completely counter to the original vision.

'We've seen that private patents have caused massive global inequality in terms of access to vaccines and this sale simply means that vaccines will continue to go to the highest bidders, to make as much money as possible for Catalent's shareholders.'

A Government spokesperson said VMIC is a private company and it has not sold the facility.

They added: 'Catalent is a highly regarded global organisation with an excellent track record, and its expansion in the UK will further strengthen our biotherapeutics industry.

'This investment by Catalent is necessary to keep the facility open into the long-term.

'It also represents a strong vote of confidence in the UK as a destination for life sciences, especially following our response to the global Covid vaccine challenge, and Catalent's ambitious plans for this facility will build on that work.'

The sale of the facility has sparked fury since it was first reported at the end of last year.

In a letter published in the British Medical Journal, scientists compared the move to 'defunding fire brigades after extinguishing a major blaze'.

Scientists from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and University College Dublin said the move was short-sighted.

They said the centre is needed to protect against future pandemics by supporting vaccine research, development and manufacturing.

Selling the centre makes little strategic, public health or economical sense and will damage the UK's reputation, according to the authors.
President Joe Biden's Justice Department on Wednesday charged a Russian oligarch with violating U.S. government sanctions, and Attorney General Merrick Garland shared a stark warning for Kremlin elites trying to avoid the West's economic crackdown.

'Our message to those who continue to enable the Russian regime through their criminal conduct is this: It does not matter how far you sail your yacht. It does not matter how well you conceal your assets,' Garland said during a morning press conference.

'It does not matter how cleverly you write your malware or hide your online activity. The Justice Department will use every available tool to find you, disrupt your plots, and hold you accountable.'

He pledged to continue to work with other Western governments to hold Moscow's power players accountable after its autocratic leader Vladimir Putin ordered a brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in late February.

In remarking on atrocities allegedly committed by Russian troops in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, which had been under Kremlin forces' occupation, Garland recalled the American government's involvement in the Nuremberg trials. The Allied governments had forced Nazi war criminals to answer for their actions in the post-World War II hearings.

'We have seen the dead bodies of civilians, some with bound hands, scattered in the streets. We have seen the mass graves. We have seen the bombed hospital, theater and residential apartment buildings. The world sees what is happening in Ukraine. The Justice Department sees what is happening in Ukraine,' Garland warned.

Attorney General Merrick Garland shared a stark warning for Russian oligarchs who are attempting to evade Western sanctions during a press conference announcing charges against a Moscow media baronw

'This department has a long history of helping to hold accountable those who perpetrate war crimes. One of my predecessors, Attorney General Robert Jackson, later served as the chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.'

Garland said U.S. prosecutors would continue to work with allies in Europe to identify those involved and hold them accountable.

The Wednesday indictment against Konstantin Malofeyev, a Russian media baron and founder of Russian Orthodox news channel, Tsargrad TV, is the first of an oligarch since the Russian invasion in February.

Konstantin Malofeyev is a Russian media baron who the Justice Department accused of 'flagrantly and repeatedly' violating sanctions levied against him over his role in the Kremlin's 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine

The case accuses him of evading Treasury Department sanctions resulting from his financing of Russians promoting separatism in Crimea.

'We have our eyes on every dollar and jet. We have our eyes on every piece of art and real estate, purchased with dirty money and on every bitcoin wallet filled with proceeds of theft, and other crimes,' Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said.

'Together with our partners around the world, our goal is to ensure that sanctioned Russian oligarchs and cyber criminals will not find safe haven.'

Though sanctions bar U.S. citizens from working for or doing business with Malofeyev, the Russian billionaire hired an American television producer to work for him in networks in Russia and Greece and tried to buy a television network in Bulgaria, prosecutors said.

Jack Hanick, a former CNBC and Fox News employee, was arrested last month for his work as a television producer for Malofeyev.

During the press conference Monaco accused Malofeyev of 'flagrantly and repeatedly' violating sanctions while attempting to start media outlets that would 'spread pro-Kremlin misinformation.'

In discussing the alleged war crimes committed by Russians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, Garland remarked on the U.S.'s role in the post-World War II Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals

Also at the press conference, DOJ officials revealed they disrupted a cybercrime operation launched by a Russian military intelligence agency.

FBI and Justice Department officials announced the moves as the U.S. separately revealed sanctions against the two adult daughters of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Justice Department took down a botnet -- a network of hijacked computers typically used for malicious activity -- that was controlled by the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU.

The botnet was dismantled before it could cause any damage, said FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Wray said the bureau's work 'struck a blow against Russian criminals and the ecosystem of cryptocurrency tumblers, money launderers, malware purveyors and others supporting them.'

He added it also 'strikes a blow against Russian intelligence, the Russian government.'

Images show civilians with bound hands. Pictured: Ira Gavriluk walks next to the corpses of her husband and her brother

Pictured: Bags containing bodies of civilians, who according to residents was killed by Russian soldiers in Bucha, Ukraine

Plastic body bags are seen inside a mass grave dug by Russian forces in central Bucha, where it is feared hundreds of civilians could be buried

The intelligence chief said it had been conducted by a GRU team known as 'Sandworm.'

'The Russian government has shown that it has no qualms about conducting this kind of criminal activity, and they continue to pose an imminent threat,' Wray warned.

Wednesday's announcements came two days after U.S. officials seized a huge yacht in Spain belonging to a Russian oligarch, Viktor Vekselberg, with close ties to Russian President Putin.

The yacht was 'searched' by Spanish authorities as well as members of the FBI and Homeland Security Department, Monaco said.

The Justice Department in the past year has taken aim against Russia-based cybercrime, recovering in June most of a multimillion-dollar ransom that Colonial Pipeline paid to hackers after a ransomware attack that halted operations. And the department announced charges last fall against two suspected ransomware operators.
She stole drugs she later used to kill herself and her toddler daughter

Mother and daughter found to have cannulas to administer drugs in their arms

A NHS nurse killed herself and her two-year-old daughter with drugs she stole from work after previously being suspended following a misconduct investigation, an inquest has heard.

Shiwangi Bagoan, 25, and Ziana Bagoan, two, were found dead at their family home in Hounslow, west London on December 14.

The toddler's grandmother Jassumati Lalu found the pair with cannulas - medical tubes used to administer medication into veins - in their arms in Shiwangi's bedroom in their flat shortly after 4pm that day.

It is believed that the anaesthetist assistant and daughter died some time on December 11, but were not found for another three days, police said.

Anaesthetist assistant Shiwangi Bagoan, 25, killed herself and her two-year-old daughter Ziana with drugs she stole from work after previously being suspended following a misconduct investigation, an inquest into their deaths has found

The toddler's grandmother Jassumati Lalu found the pair with cannulas - medical tubes used to administer medication into veins - in their arms in Shiwangi's bedroom in their flat shortly after 4pm that day

Investigators deemed the circumstances they were found in as suspicious and murder detectives launched an investigation.

Today, West London Coroner's Court heard how Shiwangi had attempted to take her own life three years earlier, in 2017, when she stole the same drugs she later used to kill herself and baby Ziana.

After being suspended from work for more than a year, she returned to her work at West Moreland Street Hospital in July 2020.

Investigators determined Shiwangi used her knowledge of medical procedures to administer strong sedatives to Ziana, before taking her own life.

CCTV evidence revealed that on December 11, 2020, at around 4am, Shiwangi and Ziana left their home address and made a journey to West Moreland Street Hospital in the middle of the night, arriving shortly after 4.20am.

Today, West London Coroner's Court heard how Shiwangi had attempted to take her own life three years earlier, in 2017, when she stole the same drugs she later used to kill herself and baby Ziana

The inquest heard that the journey was used to steal the drugs Shiwangi later used to kill herself and her toddler daughter from a combination locked fridge in the operating theatre.

Detective sergeant Terry Goodman, who was the lead officer investigating the case, said: 'Enquiries found that vials of drugs were stolen from West Moreland Street Hospital, from a locked cabinet Shiwangi had 24 hour access to.'

The court was also told that Shiwangi had used her mobile phone to search on Google how certain drugs operated in the hours before her death.

The court heard how grandmother Jassumatu used her own key to get into the flat as they hadn't heard from Shiwangi in a number of days, and were becoming increasingly concerned for her welfare.

CCTV evidence revealed that on December 11, 2020, at around 4am, Shiwangi and Ziana left their home address and made a journey to West Moreland Street Hospital in the middle of the night, arriving shortly after 4.20am. The inquest heard that the journey was used to steal the drugs Shiwangi later used to kill herself and her toddler daughter

In a heartbreaking suicide note addressed to her mum, who found the pair , Shiwangi wrote: 'Dear mum I am sorry I have put you through a lot. I am taking Zia with me because I don't want to be selfish in leaving her to you.

'You have done so much for both of us. And all I have done is give you stress.'

The investigation found no evidence of anyone else being involved in their deaths, police added.

Recording the conclusion that Ziana was 'unlawfully killed' and that Shiwangi died by suicide, West London's acting senior coroner Lydia Brown told the court: 'In 2017, Shiwangi attempted to take her own life using the same method she used three years later.

'At the time, she received support from her employment and was able to continue her work as an operating department practitioner.

'At 4am on December 11, 2020, she entered the hospital where she worked, where she took drugs which were later found at their home.

'A final wrote was written to her mother that morning. All the evidence suggests that she died shortly after that note was written.

'Ziana's mother set up an intravenous line with equipment she used in her employment in operating theatres, and administered drugs to Ziana with intention of ending her life. Ziana was found dead on the bed beside her mum, after being unlawfully killed.'

Recording the conclusion that Ziana was 'unlawfully killed' and that Shiwangi died by suicide, West London's acting senior coroner Lydia Brown told the court: 'In 2017, Shiwangi attempted to take her own life using the same method she used three years later'. Pictured: The apartment block where Shiwangi

Referring to Shiwangi's death, Ms Brown said: 'Shiwangi had taken anaesthetic drugs and equipment from her employer. She wrote a number of notes expressing her apologies to her friends and family.

'I am confident that on the balance of probabilities, that she intended to take her own life. Therefore, I record a conclusion of suicide.'

Giving her condolences to the family, she said: 'It is heart-breaking for you to have lost not one, but two, family members, in such difficult circumstances.

'I am sure that these losses have been felt so very widely by all those that knew Shiwangi and Ziana.'

A spokesperson for University College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust described Shiwangi as a 'highly valued member of our team' who will be 'missed by her colleagues'.

A friend of Shiwangi told MailOnline the mother was a 'lovely lady' who 'doted on little Zia', with others saying she had bought bicycles for them both last week.

'She was a good friend of mine and I'm just devastated. I cannot believe she would hurt Zia nor take her own life,' they added.

Detective Chief Inspector Jim Shirley, from the Met's Specialist Crime Command, said after the hearing: 'This is a truly tragic case and my thoughts are with Shiwangi and Ziana's family as they continue to come to terms with what has happened.

'We will never fully know what led Shiwangi to do what she did. It is clear that mental ill health must have played a significant role.'

For confidential support, call the Samaritans on 116123, or visit their local branch
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Incredible video footage has emerged showing the moment a lone Ukrainian tank single-handedly destroyed several Russian armoured vehicles less than 50 miles from Kyiv.

The footage, collected by a drone and published by a Ukrainian volunteer unit on Telegram, shows what appears to be a single well-positioned Ukrainian T-64 tank ambushing a convoy of Russian BTR-82A armoured vehicles on a road in Nova Basan, west of the capital.

Thanks to brilliant positioning, the lion-hearted tank operator was able to fire several rounds at the invaders' convoy, threading the gap between other structures from a concealed location behind a house.

One BTR was quickly set ablaze in the attack, prompting the remaining armoured vehicles to fire back, seemingly aiming at other targets off-camera as yellow flashes of fire were seen streaking across the fields surrounding the road.

But the T-64 appeared unsighted and continued to pound the convoy with shells as it outsmarted the Russian troops until further artillery reinforcements arrived.

The second half of the video cuts to later footage of Ukrainian artillery strikes raining down on the convoy as it attempts to flee, before zooming in on the wreckage of a Russian tank still on fire alongside several corpses.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian soldiers have used one of Moscow's captured thermobaric weapons against Russian troops.

They fired the feared 'blazing sun' TOS-1A rocket launcher near Izyum in eastern Ukraine. The 'vacuum bombs' suck in oxygen from the target area, creating a blast that can destroy internal organs. They are illegal to use against civilians, but are lawful against military targets

Despite the heroics of the Ukrainian army, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg today warned the war in Ukraine could last 'months, even years' as there is no sign Vladimir Putin has lost 'his ambition to control the whole country'.

Ukrainian authorities urged civilians in the country's east to flee 'now' or 'risk death' as Russian forces regroup ahead of what is expected to be a fresh offensive in the Donbas region.



Stoltenberg, speaking ahead of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels, said the international community should be 'realistic' about Moscow's intentions and 'realise that this may last for a long time' as the war entered its 41st day.

'We need also to be prepared for the long haul, both when it comes to supporting Ukraine, sustaining sanctions and strengthening our defences,' he added.

Fantastic drone footage has emerged showing the remarkable courage and tactics of a single Ukrainian tank, which successfully ambushed a whole column of Russian armoured vehicles

The convoy fired rounds into nearby buildings and also directed fire across neighbouring fields, seemingly at targets off camera, but the lone Ukrainian tank remained hidden as it continued to pound the invaders with shells, ultimately destroying two vehicles

The Ukrainian T-64 tank managed to operate incredibly effectively against the Russian armour, despite the considerable discrepancy in their technology (a T-64 is seen firing during a military drill for Ukrainian soldiers at the training centre of Ukrainian Ground Forces near Rivne, Ukraine, February 16, 2022)

A Ukrainian service member walks next to a damaged Russian BTR-82, as Russia's attack on Ukraine continues, in the village of Nova Basan, Ukraine April 1, 2022

A local resident drives past a destroyed Russian armoured personal carrier, as Russia's attack on Ukraine continues, in the village of Nova Basan

Old T-64 tanks covered by snow stands at the depot site at the Tank Repair Plant in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Monday, Jan. 31, 2022

Victims 'blown up with a grenade', a father shot dead in front of his 14-year-old son and troops who 'executed all men under 50': Horrifying details emerge of Russian atrocities in Bucha By Jack Newman and Chris Pleasance for MailOnline Charred body parts lay scattered over the streets of Bucha for days after a man was killed with a grenade, while men were stripped naked, tied up and summarily executed by Russians, traumatised civilians have revealed as vile stories emerge from the Ukrainian town. Survivors from the month-long occupation of the town in Kyiv oblast have started to describe their gruesome treatment at the hands of Putin's invading troops after area was liberated. Mykola, a 53-year-old resident, spent a month hiding in the cold and dark cellar of his apartment building with his wife after witnessing callous executions on the streets of his hometown. He told ABC that when the Russians arrived, they killed all men aged under 50 and then ordered him to bury his friends within 20 minutes. Two of his friends were shot in front of him and another was hit by a grenade, blowing his body to pieces, which lay untouched for days until Mykola was allowed to quickly gather his parts in a bag and bury them in a shallow grave to ward off the dogs. Vanya Skyba told The Economist how Russians rounded up a group of builders, ordered them to strip naked and lie face down on the floor while their bodies and phones were searched for evidence of military tattoos or anti-Russian sentiment. One of the men was killed as an example to make the group talk, forcing one of the men to admit he had been a member of Ukraine's territorial defence who had served in the Donbas, prompting the Kremlin thugs to execute him too. The others were beaten and tortured until an order to kill was issued by a Russian saying: 'F***ing do them in.' They were led to the side of the building and each shot, and Skyba took a bullet in the side which went through his body. He played dead on the concrete floor until he heard silence when he fled over a fence to a nearby home. He was later found there by Russians from a different unit who believed his cover story he was the owner of the home, but they led him back to the cellar where he had been shot where he sheltered with a dozens woman and children until they were freed. After the savage killings, locals said Putin's army occupied the dead civilians' homes, drinking their alcohol, partying and stealing their belongings. Advertisement

The date of the ambush was not given, but it is thought to have taken place last week, given that the majority of Russian forces retreated from towns and villages around Kyiv late last week and over the weekend.

Geolocation shows the ambush took place along the HO7 highway which runs through Nova Basan, connecting Kyiv with the Western cities of Sumy and Kharkiv.

Meanwhile, images published on April 1 showed Ukrainian soldiers inspecting a series of burnt-out Russian tanks and BTRs in Nova Basan, which may well have been the remnants of the effective ambush.

The Ukrainian tank managed to operate incredibly effectively against the Russian armour, despite the considerable discrepancy in their technology.

The T-64 is a Soviet-era machine, first deployed as early as the 1960s, and Ukraine inherited thousands of the vehicles when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Armoured vehicle technology has since moved on massively - the Russian BTRs that were destroyed in the clip only entered service a decade ago - but Ukraine still relies heavily on the ageing tanks as the bulk of its military might.

Images published in January less than a month prior to the Russian invasion showed scores of T-64 tanks left out in the snow, waiting to be retrofitted with upgraded armour and weapons at a tank repair plant in Kharkiv.

The footage of the daring ambush emerged as Ukrainian authorities claim Russia's death toll in the war is nearing 20,000.

Ukraine's armed forces are continuing to push back invading Kremlin troops and retake 'key terrain' around the capital and other eastern cities, while Putin's forces retreat to refocus their efforts on the Donbas.

In an intelligence update posted yesterday, Britain's MoD said that due to the scale of the damage, many of Russian units 'are likely to require significant re-equipping and refurbishment before being available to redeploy for operations in eastern Ukraine.'

However, Russian forces are continuing to conduct brutal bombing campaigns in cities like Mariupol where the civilian death toll has risen to 5,000.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said that even though Ukraine is taking back the capital, he urged civilians not to return for 'at least another week', with explosives left around the city, and described the situation in east of Ukraine as 'critical'.

Elsewhere, Ukraine's general staff said Russia has again used banned cluster munitions in Mykolaiv, targeting civilian buildings including a children hospital in a horrific attack which has killed 11 and wounded 61.

As the Czech Republic became the first bloc member to send tanks and armoured infantry vehicles to Kyiv on Thursday, NATO's foreign ministers met today to discuss sending more arms to Ukraine after it emerged the EU had sent just 1bn in aid to President Zelensky's troops since the invasion began on February 24.

Members of the trans-Atlantic alliance had until today given Ukraine only anti-tank and anti-craft missiles, small arms and protective equipment, but not offered heavy armour or fighter jets.

Today's delivery is understood to be a gift agreed on by NATO allies, raising fears the bloc could be dragged into the Russian war in Ukraine despite remaining on the sidelines for more than a month.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg today warned the war in Ukraine could last 'months, even years' as there is no sign Vladimir Putin has lost 'his ambition to control the whole country'

Members of the trans-Atlantic alliance had until today given Ukraine only anti-tank and anti-craft missiles, small arms and protective equipment, but not offered heavy armour or fighter jets (pictured, destruction wreaked by Russian forces in Borodyanka)

A car is seen riddled with bullet holes on the street on April 5, 2022 in Bucha, Ukraine. Milley said the war in Ukraine could last for years

Field engineers of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine conduct mine clearing among destroyed vehicles on a street of Bucha

City workers carry body bags with six partially burnt bodies found in the town of Bucha, among an estimated 400 civilian corpses

Policemen work on the identification process following the killing of civilians in Bucha, before sending the bodies to the morgue

Stoltenberg also confirmed that some members of the alliance had sent heavy weaponry to Ukraine following reports the Czech Republic had supplied Soviet-era tanks to Kyiv.

'Since the invasion allies have stepped up their support. I also expect that ministers when they meet today and tomorrow will discuss how they can further support Ukraine,' he said, declining to give details.

'I can say that the totality of what allies are doing is significant and that includes also some heavier systems combined with lighter systems.'

Several BVP-1 infantry fighting vehicles, howitzer artillery pieces and more than a dozen T-72 tanks were yesterday loaded on a train bound for Slovakia where they are expected to head on to Ukraine, footage run by public broadcaster Czech Television showed.

The Czech delivery has been funded by Prague as well as private donors who have contributed to a crowdsourced fundraising campaign to supply arms to Kyiv.

Ukraine burns through in a single day the same amount of weaponry it receives in a week, according to a senior Polish official, and Kyiv's eastern neighbours are concerned with keeping up with demand.

Prague, and neighbouring Slovakia which has no tanks to give, are also considering helping repair and refit damaged Ukrainian military equipment. Germany will send several dozen infantry fighting vehicles to Kyiv and the UK has approved the delivery of 20 ambulances.

The United States has agreed to provide an additional $100 million in assistance to Ukraine, including Javelin anti-armour systems, the Pentagon said on Tuesday. US chipmaker Intel Corp (INTC.O) said it had suspended business operations in Russia, joining a growing list of companies leaving the country.

NATO has already supplied fuel, ammunition, helmets, protective gear and medical supplies to Ukraine, Stoltenberg said yesterday.

Chief Stoltenberg said the international community should be 'realistic' about Russian President Vladimir Putin's (pictured) intentions and 'realise that this may last for a long time' as the war entered its 41st day

The Czech Republic has become the first NATO country to send tanks to Ukraine, providing T-72 and armoured infantry vehicles following President Zelensky's plea for help (pictured, tanks loaded on a train bound for Ukraine on Tuesday)

Several BVP-1 infantry fighting vehicles (pictured) and more than a dozen T-72 tanks were yesterday loaded on a train bound for Ukraine, footage published by Czech Television showed

The Czech delivery of T-72s (pictured) has been funded by Prague as well as private donors who have contributed to a crowdsourced fundraising campaign to supply arms to Kyiv

Zelensky accused the West of holding back on supplies because of 'intimidation' from Moscow and suggested Russia is in charge of NATO

Field engineers of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine stand next to destroyed armoured vehicles on a street in the town of Bucha, on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, April 5, 2022

Ukrainian servicemen inspect the wreckage of houses, cars and Russian military vehicles in the town of Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, yesterday

President Joe Biden has in recent weeks ordered more US troops to NATO's eastern flank to reassure edgy allies and pledged to protect the bloc's territory if Russian forces stray over more borders.

Ukraine's deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk today said in a message on Telegram that residents of the country's eastern regions should evacuate 'now' or 'risk death' due to a feared Russian attack.

'The governors of the Kharkiv, Lugansk and Donetsk regions are calling on the population to leave these territories and are doing everything to ensure that the evacuations take place in an organised manner,' she said.

The call for urgent evacuations comes as Ukraine says Russian forces are regrouping to launch a fresh offensive in the country's east after retreating from the Kyiv region.

Vereshchuk asked residents to cooperate with authorities, saying Kyiv will 'not be able to help' them after an attack.

'It has to be done now because later people will be under fire and face the threat of death. There is nothing they will be able to do about it, nor will we be able to help,' she said.

'It is necessary to evacuate as long as this possibility exists. For now, it still exists,' she added.

Russian forces last week pulled back from positions outside Kyiv and shifted the focus of their assault away from the capital, and Ukraine's general staff said the northeastern city of Kharkiv, the country's second-largest, also remained under attack.

Authorities in the eastern region of Luhansk on Wednesday urged residents to get out 'while it is safe' from an area that Ukraine also expects to be the target of a new offensive.

The Kremlin has declared that Ukraine's Donbas is now a priority for the Russian army. NATO believes Moscow aims to take control of the whole Donbas region in eastern Ukraine with the aim of creating a corridor from Russia to annexed Crimea.

Russian artillery pounded the Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Kharkiv today as the West prepared more sanctions against Moscow in response to civilian killings that Kyiv and its allies have called war crimes.

First NATO country sends tanks to Ukraine: Czech Republic provides T-72 tanks and armoured infantry vehicles following Zelensky's plea for help

By Lauren Lewis for MailOnline

The Czech Republic has become the first NATO country to send tanks to Ukraine, providing T-72 and armoured infantry vehicles following President Zelensky's plea for help.

Several BVP-1 infantry fighting vehicles, howitzer artillery pieces and more than a dozen T-72 tanks were yesterday loaded on a train bound for Slovakia where they are expected to head on to Ukraine, footage run by public broadcaster Czech Television showed.

The delivery is understood to be a gift agreed on by NATO allies, raising fears the trans-Atlantic bloc could be dragged into the Russian war in Ukraine despite remaining on the sidelines for more than a month.

NATO leaders have so far given Ukraine anti-tank and anti-craft missiles as well as small arms and protective equipment, but have not offered any heavy armour or fighter jets. Prague's decision to supply tanks to Kyiv will pile pressure on NATO allies to follow suit.

It comes as Russian artillery continued to pound the Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Kharkiv today as the West prepared more sanctions against Moscow in response to civilian killings that Kyiv and its allies have called war crimes.

The Czech Republic has become the first NATO country to send tanks to Ukraine, providing T-72 and armoured infantry vehicles following President Zelensky's plea for help (pictured, tanks loaded on a train bound for Ukraine on Tuesday)

Several BVP-1 infantry fighting vehicles (pictured) and more than a dozen T-72 tanks were yesterday loaded on a train bound for Ukraine, footage published by Czech Television showed

The delivery is understood to be a gift agreed on by NATO allies, raising fears the trans-Atlantic bloc could be dragged into the Russian war in Ukraine despite remaining on the sidelines for more than a month

Five T-72s and four BMP-1s spotted being moved out of storage and loaded on a train in Czech Republic. They will reportedly head to Slovakia, and possibly then to Ukraine

The Czech delivery of T-72s (pictured) has been funded by Prague as well as private donors who have contributed to a crowdsourced fundraising campaign to supply arms to Kyiv

NATO is set to discuss the delivery of more weapons to Ukraine at a meeting today and tomorrow, according to Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, but the US is widely expected to reject most demands over fears NATO could be pulled into the war

What is the T-72 battle tank? First made in Russia, the T-72 is staple of eastern European militaries and is owned by the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Bulgaria. Most of these are the T-72M standard model, which are slightly behind Russia's updated T-72B3 versions that have been used in Ukraine. The Czech Republic has ordered 35 tanks upgraded to T-72M4 CZ, giving the tank a comprehensive upgrade in every aspect and costing more than $5million per tank. It is understood the tanks Prague has sent to Ukraine are not the T-72M4 but have undergone some local modifications. Crew: Three people Main gun: 125 mm smoothbore Anti-tank guided missile: 9M119 Svir or 9M119M Refleks Machine guns: 1 x 7.62 mm, 1 x 12.7 mm Weight: 45 tons Length (including gun): 9.53 metres Width: 3.46 metres Height: 2.2 metres Top speed: 37 to 47mph Advertisement

Czech Defence Minister Jana Cernochova told parliament yesterday: 'I will only assure you that the Czech Republic is helping Ukraine as much as it can and will continue to help by [supplying] military equipment, both light and heavy.'

She declined to provide further details on the transfer but it comes after Ukraine's Vlodymyr Zelensky demanded NATO deliver armour, fighter jets and other military equipment during a summit in Brussels on March 24.

Ukraine burns through in a single day the same amount of weaponry it receives in a week, according to a senior Polish official, and Kyiv's eastern neighbours are concerned with keeping up with demand, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The Czech delivery has been funded by Prague as well as private donors who have contributed to a crowdsourced fundraising campaign to supply arms to Kyiv.

Prague, and neighbouring Slovakia which has no tanks to give, are also considering helping repair and refit damaged Ukrainian military equipment. Germany will send several dozen infantry fighting vehicles to Kyiv and the UK has approved the delivery of 20 ambulances.

The United States has agreed to provide an additional $100 million in assistance to Ukraine, including Javelin anti-armour systems, the Pentagon said on Tuesday. US chipmaker Intel Corp (INTC.O) said it had suspended business operations in Russia, joining a growing list of companies leaving the country.

NATO is set to discuss the delivery of more weapons to Ukraine at a meeting today and tomorrow, according to Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

But western officials on Monday suggested the Biden administration in Washington would act as a throttle on plans to supply more equipment to Ukraine, over fears that the war machines could breach rules allowing only defensive weapons to be supplied.

One said that the US was 'not minded' to support the supply of T-72 tanks of the type used by Ukraine from sympathetic neighbours, adding: 'They have this offensive dimension, they are not purely defensive. They would not be particularly relevant to the military activities the Ukrainians need to undertake.'

A proposal to transfer 28 MiG jets from Poland to Ukraine via the US last month was scrapped amid NATO concerns about getting drawn into conflict with Russia.

NATO leaders have so far given Ukraine anti-tank and anti-craft missiles as well as small arms and protective equipment, but have not offered any heavy armour or fight jets (pictured, Czech tanks on a train bound for Ukraine)

Prague, and neighbouring Slovakia, are also considering helping repair and refit damaged Ukrainian military equipment (pictured, Czech tanks on a train bound for Ukraine)

Field engineers of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine stand next to destroyed armoured vehicles on a street in the town of Bucha, on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, April 5, 2022

Serhii Lahovskyi, 26, and other residents carry the body of Ihor Lytvynenko to bury him in Bucha, April 5, 2022

Soldiers and investigators look at charred bodies lying on the ground in Bucha where Russia has been accused of war crimes

Finland and Sweden would be welcomed into NATO if they applied to join, Secretary-General Stoltenberg says  as Russia warns of retaliation Finland and Sweden would be welcomed into NATO if they applied to join, the head of the alliance has said today, in what would be a major blow for Russia amid Vladimir Putin's faltering invasion of Ukraine. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO general secretary, told a news conference that the 30-member alliance would work to overcome 'security concerns' between the countries applying to join and being ratified - amid fears Russia would retaliate. He spoke after Finland's prime minister Sanna Marin said her country could take a decision on joining the alliance within weeks and polls in Sweden also showed a majority of people support membership. If either country opts to join the alliance, it would mark an historic reconstruction of European security architecture that has held since the end of the Second World War. Finland, which fought a short but bloody conflict with the Soviets in the build-up to World War Two, has been officially neutral since signing a pact in 1948. As part of the pact, Finland agreed never to join a military alliance viewed as hostile to Russia, never to allow its territory to be used for an attack against Russia, and to maintain an armed forces for self-defence purposes only. In return, the country - which shares an 830-mile border with Russia - was given guarantees by Moscow that it would not be attacked. Advertisement

NATO has already supplied fuel, ammunition, helmets, protective gear and medical supplies to Ukraine, Stoltenberg said yesterday. The discussions come despite the bloc's desperate efforts to avoid being dragged into Putin's war in Ukraine.

President Joe Biden has in recent weeks ordered more US troops to NATO's eastern flank to reassure edgy allies and pledged to protect the bloc's territory if Russian forces stray over more borders.

A visibly angry Zelensky on March 26 demanded that Western nations hand over military hardware that was 'gathering dust' in stockpiles, saying Ukraine needed just one per cent of NATO's aircraft and one per cent of its tanks.

Zelensky accused the West of holding back on supplies because of 'intimidation' from Moscow and suggested Russia is in charge of NATO.

And in a late night address on Saturday, Zelensky said: 'We need more ammunition. We've already been waiting 31 days. What is NATO doing?

'Who is in charge of the Euro-Atlantic community? Is it really still Moscow, because of intimidation? We are asking for one per cent of what NATO has, nothing more.'

'If only those who have been thinking for 31 days on how to hand over dozens of jets and tanks had one per cent of their courage,' Zelensky said as he praised his troops' efforts.

Russia's constant artillery barrages and aerial bombing are reducing Ukrainian cities to rubble, killing thousands of people and driving millions to flee their homes.

Russian artillery pounded the Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Kharkiv today as the West prepared more sanctions against Moscow in response to civilian killings that Kyiv and its allies have called war crimes.

The besieged southern port of Mariupol has been under almost constant bombardment since the early days of the invasion that began on Feb. 24, trapping tens of thousands of residents without food, water or power.

'The humanitarian situation in the city is worsening,' British military intelligence said. 'Most of the 160,000 remaining residents have no light, communication, medicine, heat or water. Russian forces have prevented humanitarian access, likely to pressure defenders to surrender.'

Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said authorities would try to evacuate trapped civilians through 11 humanitarian corridors today, though people trying to leave the besieged city of Mariupol would have to use their own vehicles.

Zelensky accused the West of holding back on supplies because of 'intimidation' from Moscow and suggested Russia is in charge of NATO

A car is seen riddled with bullet holes on the street on April 5, 2022 in Bucha, Ukraine. Milley said the war in Ukraine could last for years

Nina, 74, reacts as she walks past buildings that were destroyed by Russian shelling in Borodyanka, in the Kyiv region

Russian forces last week pulled back from positions outside Kyiv and shifted the focus of their assault away from the capital, and Ukraine's general staff said the northeastern city of Kharkiv, the country's second-largest, also remained under attack.

Authorities in the eastern region of Luhansk on Wednesday urged residents to get out 'while it is safe' from an area that Ukraine also expects to be the target of a new offensive.

Western sanctions over Russia's invasion of Ukraine, described as a 'special military operation' by Moscow and the biggest assault on a European nation since World War Two, gained new impetus this week when dead civilians shot at close range were found in the northern town of Bucha after it was retaken from Russian forces.

Moscow denied targeting civilians there and called the evidence presented a forgery staged by the West to discredit it.

Speaking a day after the European Union announced new sanctions, including a ban on Russian coal imports and denying Russian ships access to EU ports, the head of the EU executive, Ursula von der Leyen, said there was more to come.

'These sanctions will not be our last sanctions,' she told European Parliament on Wednesday. 'Now we have to look into oil and revenues Russia gets from fossil fuels.'

Europe gets about a third of its natural gas from Russia and has been wary of the economic impact of the total ban on Russian energy imports advocated by Ukraine, but Von der Leyen's remarks signal the bloc's strengthening resolve to take the step that Kyiv says is vital to securing a deal to end the war.

The White House said it would also unveil new sanctions today, in part in response to Bucha. The new sanctions, coordinated between Washington, the Group of Seven advanced economies and the EU, will target Russian banks and officials and ban new investment in Russia, the White House said.

After an impassioned address to the UN Security Council on Tuesday, Zelensky said new sanctions against Russia 'must be commensurate with the gravity of the occupiers' war crimes,' calling it a 'crucial moment' for Western leaders.

Ukrainian officials say between 150 and 300 bodies might be in a mass grave by a church in Bucha, north of the capital Kyiv. Satellite images taken weeks ago show bodies of civilians on a street in the town, a private US company said.

Reuters reporters saw at least four victims shot through the head in Bucha, one with their hands tied behind their back. Residents have recounted cases of several others slain, some shot through their eyes and one apparently beaten to death and mutilated.
A New York Supreme Court justice killed himself days after cops raided his house as his 'really close' friend - the nephew of Buffalo's alleged top mob boss - faced federal charges of sex trafficking and bribery.

John L. Michalski, 61, was found dead at his home near Buffalo Tuesday morning, his lawyer says. The circumstances of his death remain unclear.

Authorities raided Michalski's home on March 24. Law enforcement sources told The Buffalo News they were looking for evidence of tax crimes and that various other state agencies were looking into his professional and personal conduct.

Michalski tried to kill himself February 2021 by lying on train tracks in the middle of the night. He was hit by a freight train but survived with a serious leg injury.

That suicide attempt was the same day his friend, strip club owner Peter Gerace Jr., was arrested in Florida on charges including conspiracy to commit sex trafficking, maintaining a drug involved premise and bribing a federal drug enforcement agent.

Michalski knew Gerace for decades and had done legal work for him. In 2006, he wrote a letter to a federal judge asking for a lower sentence after Gerace was convicted of wire fraud in connection with a telemarketing sweepstakes business.

The judge was named an acting state Supreme Court justice in 2006. He made $210,900 a year, according to a state salary database.

He is survived by his wife Susan and four adult children, one son and three daughters.

Acting New York Supreme Court Justice John L. Michalski, 61, was found dead from an apparent suicide Tuesday morning at his home in Amherst, New York

Michalski's death comes days after state and federal authorities raided the home he shared with his wife, Susan, (right) looking for 'evidence of tax crimes'

The March 24 raid (above) took place as charges moved forward against his 'really close' friend Peter Gerace Jr., a strip club owner with alleged ties to the mob

Gerace was arraigned in US District Court in Fort Lauderdale last year on charges of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and bribery of a public official - a DEA agent who he allegedly paid off to hide what was happening in his strip club

Terrence Connors, Michalski's friend and one of his lawyers, told DailyMail.com that the judge was a 'well respected jurist and an immensely popular person.

'He was beloved by the lawyers of our community. This was a terrible tragedy felt most by his family but reverberated throughout the entire Western New York legal community.'

Michalski's suicide is likely to spark more questions about his connection to Gerace and whether he helped the strip club owner commit any of the numerous crimes he's charged with.

Michalski was never charged with a crime.

Authorities were seen loading boxes of documents into a black SUV outside Michalski's home in Amherst, a suburb of Buffalo, late last month.

Connors, his lawyer, said Michalski told authorities he knew nothing of Gerace's alleged crimes and that he would've cooperated. He said investigators are focused on an online consignment business run by his wife Susan.

The business appears to be an eBay shop called Everydaydeals364.

Susan Michalski's attorney, however, told the Buffalo News that officers 'were searching for information about both the judge and his wife.'

A law enforcement official told the newspaper: 'They were looking for evidence of tax crimes. You now have criminal investigations, federal and state, involving the FBI, the US Attorney, the state Attorney General's Office and State Police.

'They are looking into whether there was income from the business that should have been reported,' the official said.

The raid and the suicide come as the federal case against Gerace continues to move forward in the Western District of New York.

Gerace was arraigned in US District Court in Fort Lauderdale and charged with one count each of bribery of a public official, conspiracy to defraud the United States, maintaining a drug involved premises, conspiracy to distribute controlled substances, and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking.

Authorities were seen loading boxes of documents into a black SUV outside Michalski's home in Amherst, a suburb of Buffalo, late last month

Gerace, Michalski's friend, is the owner of the Pharaoh's strip club near Buffalo. 'There was just a lot of drug dealing and a lot of dancers using drugs,' his ex-wife said of the club

Judge Michalski, who earned $210,900 a year, tried to kill himself after Gerace was indicted last year. He laid down on train tracks near Buffalo but survived with a seriously injured leg. He then took a leave, returning to the bench in January

Gerace is the nephew of Joseph A. Todaro, who the FBI has accused of running the Buffalo mob, according to WKBW.

He is the owner of the Pharaoh's Gentlemen's Club in Cheektowaga, near Buffalo. He was tapped on the shoulder by Homeland Security Investigations when he was trying to check into a hotel in South Florida last year, according to the Sun-Sentinel.

'I was going to check in, but they checked me out,' he told a judge.

He was accused of paying off Drug Enforcement Administration agent Joseph Bongiovanni 'to protect (the strip club) from federal narcotics investigations.'

Prosecutors said Gerace used the business to 'facilitate prostitutionand (the) use and distribution of controlled substances,' according to an indictment obtained by WGRZ.

Gerace's case was later transferred to federal court in New York.

Bongiovanni was indicted in 2019.

Prosecutors said between 2008 and 2017, the DEA agent 'provided information about investigations, including the status of specific investigative techniques, potential witnesses, and confidential sources during routine recurring meetings with drug traffickers who were paying him bribes.'

Michalski tried to kill himself by lying on train tracks on February 28, 2021, the same day that Gerace was arrested and indicted. The judge took a leave and returned to work in January, working his way back to a full case load.

His cases were reassigned last month after the raid on his home. His professional conduct and mental health during and after his suicide attempt also were being examined by the state's Commission on Judicial Conduct.

Katrina Nigro was married to Gerace for four years. Their wedding was officiated by Judge Michalski.

'There was just a lot of drug dealing and a lot of dancers using drugs,' she said of Gerace's strip club.

Katrina Nigro was married to Gerace for four years. Their wedding was officiated by Judge Michalski. 'He was really close with Peter,' she said of the judge last year

Judge Michalski recused himself from a car crash case involving Gerace in 2019 because of the pair's relationship. Michalski, who was found dead of an apparent suicide on Tuesday, was under investigation by numerous state and federal agencies at the time of his death

She worked there before marrying Gerace. 'Before I was with him, I had an adult store inside and I worked there. I did everything there, bartend, waitress... like whatever to cover. I never danced there though,' she told WGRZ.

On Facebook, she has posted messages reading, '(Gerace) did pay off police,' and called her ex a 'drug dealer (and) sex trafficker.'

Nigro and Gerace were married in a ceremony officiated by Judge Michalski.

'He was really close with Peter,' she said of the judge last year. 'I went to dinner a couple of times with him and his wife.'

In 2019, Michalski recused himself from a car crash case involving Gerace after his friend had an initial court appearance before him, according to WGRZ.
JetBlue Airways has made an unsolicited $3.6 billion bid for Spirit Airlines, potentially snarling merger plans between the ultra-low-cost carrier and Frontier Group Holdings.

The surprise takeover bid shocked some Wall Street analysts, who questioned the benefits of a merger between JetBlue and Spirit and predicted intense antitrust regulatory scrutiny.

'Wait, What?' asked analysts with MKM Partners in a note, reflecting confusion about how the deal would benefit JetBlue.

Frontier, which has its own $2.7 billion plan to merge with Spirit, lashed out at the proposal, calling JetBlue a 'high-fare carrier' and insisting that the deal 'would lead to more expensive travel for consumers.'

However, JetBlue CEO Robin Hayes insists that the combination would help his airline to compete with the big four major carriers, ultimately benefitting consumers.

'You don't have to choose between great service and low fares, you can have both,' Hayes said in an interview with CNBC.

JetBlue CEO Robin Hayes announced a surprise $3.6 billion bid for Spirit Airlines, potentially snarling merger plans between the ultra-low-cost carrier and Frontier

The surprise takeover bid shocked some Wall Street analysts, who questioned the benefits of a merger between JetBlue and Spirit and predicted intense antitrust scrutiny

'When JetBlue flies into a market and competes with a legacy airline, the overall fares come down more than when an ultra-low-cost carrier flies against the legacy airlines,' he insisted.

He says the combination would boost operations in key markets such as Florida and access to constrained hub airports like Atlanta, Detroit, Miami and Chicago.

JetBlue said the deal if completed is expected to deliver $600 million-$700 million in net annual synergies and that the combined airline is projected to have annual revenue of about $11.9 billion based on 2019 revenue.

JetBlue, the sixth largest U.S. passenger carrier, would operate Spirit under the JetBlue brand, Hayes said.

The bid could throw a wrench in a $2.7 billion merger plan between Spirit and Frontier, which in February had announced their intention to combine into the ultimate budget carrier.

JetBlue offered $33 per share all-cash, about 33 percent higher than Frontier's offer of 1.9126 shares of stock and $2.13 in cash, which would value Spirit at $24.93 per share as of Tuesday's closing price.

Shares of Spirit fell 2 percent to $26.37 in morning trading on Wednesday, well below JetBlue's offer price, suggesting investors were skeptical of the deal going through

JetBlue stock was down more than 5 percent as investors seemed skeptical of the plan

But shares of Spirit fell 2 percent to $26.37 in morning trading on Wednesday, well below JetBlue's offer price, suggesting investors were skeptical of the deal going through.

JetBlue stock was down 5 percent, while Frontier shares dropped less than 1 percent.

Though JetBlue and Spirit have a fleet dominated by Airbus SE, any potential cost savings from the deal will be diluted as JetBlue would need to bump up the pay of Spirit pilots, who are on a lower band, Raymond James analyst Savanthi Syth wrote in a note.

As well, any combination will likely invite close antitrust scrutiny from President Joe Biden's administration, which has taken a tough stance against mergers that may reduce competition and increase prices.

JetBlue and American Airlines Group Inc are already facing a lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice over their Northeastern Alliance.

Hayes told Reuters he expects a vigorous antitrust review from the U.S. Justice Department that could last into 2023.

'We've had unprecedented amounts of consolidation, which the DOJ has approved and now it's about how do we make sure the rest of us can continue to discipline the legacy carriers and create that competition,' Hayes said.

'We believe ultimately this is the best deal out there that is going to really drive more competition.'

Hayes said the deal would make the New York-based airline a stronger competitor to the so-called four legacy U.S. airlines that control nearly 80 percent of the U.S. passenger market.

'The number one complaint we get is why don't you fly to more places,' Hayes said in a Reuters interview late Tuesday. 'What we want to do is create a bigger JetBlue' that can serve more consumers.

Though JetBlue and Spirit both have fleets dominated by Airbus SE, any potential cost savings from the deal will be diluted as JetBlue would need to bump up the pay of Spirit pilots

Andre Barlow of Doyle, Barlow and Mazard PLLC said the Biden administration 'is concerned about consolidation that could lead to higher prices. This one impacts consumers, so I think it gets a tough look.'

The Justice Department declined to comment.

The department filed an antitrust lawsuit last September against American Airlines and JetBlue over their Northeastern Alliance partnership, alleging it would lead to higher fares in busy Northeastern U.S. airports.

Hayes said JetBlue is 'very committed' to its alliance with American regardless of whether it was successful in acquiring Spirit.

Hayes said he expects the litigation over the American Airlines alliance will be completed before the Spirit deal review is completed.

Meanwhile, Frontier said it was 'surprising that JetBlue would consider such a merger at this time given that the Department of Justice is currently suing to block their pending alliance with American Airlines.' American did not immediately comment.

Frontier said its Spirit offer 'is in the best interest of consumers and shareholders and would deliver $1 billion in annual savings for consumers' and argued 'significant East Coast overlap between JetBlue and Spirit would reduce competition and limit options for consumers.'

The Spirit-Frontier deal faced criticism from some lawmakers and public interest groups warned in March that a merger between the carriers 'would destroy competition in the only competitive market segment of the highly consolidated airline industry.'

Spirit's customer service has often faced criticism, and the airline canceled 35 percent of its flights Monday amid weather issues.

Analysts remain skeptical that the JetBlue takeover could pass regulatory review.

'We struggle with the idea (of a merger) given both airlines are concentrated on the East Coast with significant operations in Fort Lauderdale, and would suspect there will be heavy regulatory pushback,' Brokerage MKM Partners said.
Houston resident Tonya Robertson, 53, who has a heart condition and lives with her wheelchair-bound son, had just cashed a $3,900 check - something the robber seemed already aware of

Horrifying security footage shows the moment an armed assailant targeted and accosted a 53-year-old grandmother at gunpoint outside her Houston home, for $3,900 in cash.

The video, recorded on 7:35am on March 26, shows the masked mugger rushing out of the passenger side of a black sedan that pulled up to Tonya Robertson's home as she arrived home from a night-shift.

'Quick, quick, come here. Come here!' the hooded robber can be heard shouting in the heart-pounding clip, as he sprints toward Robertson pointing a gun at her.

As the attacker charges forward with the gun outstretched, Robertson, who is at her front door carrying her phone and two bags, throws her possessions toward him in apparent fear.

The robber, however, appears disinterested and they land on the lawn. He continues toward Robertson and pats her down looking for cash.

'Give me the money,' the mugger says in the clip as he grapples with a distraught Robertson. 'B***h Ill blow your head off.'

'I dont have no money!' she shouts, visibly distressed.

The Houston resident, who lives with her wheelchair-bound adult son, 32, had just cashed a $3,900 tax refund check after leaving work at 6:30 am, and had the money on her - something the thief seemingly knew already.

Scroll down for video:

The video, recorded on 7:35 am on March 26, shows the mugger rushing out of a car that pulled up on the woman's Houston home as she arrived from work

Horrifying security footage shows the moment an armed assailant accosting Tonya Robertson, a 53-year-old grandmother, at gunpoint outside her Houston home, before making off with $3,900 in cash she had just received from a refund check. The robber seemed to know she had the cash on her

'Tanesha say- Tanesha say you got the money,' the robber can be heard saying in the clip, still searching her.

Visibly taken aback, a hyperventilating Robertson continues to plead with the robber, 'I swear, I swear,' then gives up in terror.

'Its in there!' Robertson yells in the clip, pointing to her two bags sitting on the front lawn. The mugger immediately diverts his attention to the bags, halting his attack on Robertson to pick them up.

'Its in there. Its in there,' a slightly calmer Robertson repeats as the robber takes the bag - leaving her phone behind - and runs toward the car, still parked at the curb.

The footage then shows Robertson briefly watching the attacker before running into her home. The car, apparently driven by an accomplice, can be seen driving off.

'Help me! Help me!' Robertson yells in the clip as she enters her home.

The encounter occurred in less than 20 seconds.

As the attacker charged forward at a frightening speed with the gun outstretched, Robertson, who had been carrying her phone and two bags, throws her possessions toward him in apparent fear

The robber, however, appears disinterested in the objects thrust on the front lawn by Robertson, instead charging directly to the victim and patting her down looking for cash on her person

'Give me the money,' the mugger can be heard saying in the clip as he grapples with a distraught Robertson in the chaotic encounter. 'B***h Ill blow your head off,' he asserts

'Now Im nervous when I go outside,' Robertson told FOX 26 Houston of the attack.

'I have to protect myself getting in my car, and I have to protect myself when I get home from work. Its crazy.'

Robertson told local outlet News 19 that she planned to use the money to take care of her handicapped son - who was shot and paralyzed as a teenager.

She said he was distraught over not being able to help because of his disability.

'I dont have no money!' Robertson shouts at first, before telling the attacker - who repeatedly insists he knows she has the cash - that the money is in one of the bags on the floor

'Its in there. Its in there,' a slightly calmer Robertson repeats as the robber takes the bag - leaving her phone behind in the process

The mugger then runs back toward the car, still parked on the curb outside the property, which is then driven away by an accomplice. Both are still at large

'He cried, I mean real hard,' Robertson told the station. "Momma, Im sorry I couldnt help you,"' she recalled him saying after the robbery.

'My life is more important because I could be away from my children, my grandchildren and, you know, my loved ones,' she said.

The video of the attack was released by the Houston Police Department on Monday, and has since garnered tens of thousands of views and shares, with many eager to help the mom.

One such good Samaritan, Houston rapper Trae the Truth, viewed the video Monday and immediately posted it to his Instagram page, expressing disappointment while asking for Robertsons contact information so he could reach out to her.

'Maan This Shit Aint Cool At All, Women And Kids Dont Go,' he wrote in the caption. 'What if this was one Of Our Momma Or Grandmas Real Ones Cant Cosign This Yall Get Me Her Info This Aint The Code At All.. Yall Get Me To Her'

Sure enough, social media users made the meeting happen, and the Houston fixture was able to meet Robertson the following day, where he handed the mother a check for an unspecified sum.

'I Made It To Her.. I Made Sure She know That Real Ones Dont Stand By Or Approve What Happen To Her. And Also Blessed Her Protect Our Own,' the rapper wrote on Instagram, in a post that featured a photo of him standing with Robertson showing off the check.

The rapper also wrote that during their meeting, he told Robertson to make a GoFundMe account so that she could receive donations, explaining that a lot of people want to help her.

One such good Samaritan, Houston rapper Trae the Truth, met with Robertson Tuesday after viewing the video the day before, and gifted her a check to get her back on her feet. He also told her to make a GoFundMe account, so that others could chip in

Robertson heeded Trae's advice, and created a page on the fundraising site, asking for aid from prospective donors. Trae shared the page on his Instagram as well

Robertson heeded Trae's advice, and created a page on the fundraising site, asking for aid. 'Hi My Name is Tonya,' she wrote on the page, which is titled 'Early Morning Robbery.'

'I was robbed getting off from work at 7am that morning and a small dark color car pulled up on me, they took everything I had,' she wrote. 'That could have been anybodys mother or grandma.'

Robertson said she had a heart attack recently, which forced her to have metal stents put in the organ to help it pump blood properly. 'These people need to be off these streets,' the mom subsequently asserted.

Support for Robertson has come in droves. In fewer than 24 hours, the woman's GoFundMe page has already amassed more cash than the mugger stole, garnering just under $4,700 as of noon Wednesday - just $300 away from the fundraiser's $5,000 goal.

After less than 24 hours, the woman's GoFundMe page has already amassed more cash than the mugger stole, garnering more than $4,600 as of Wednesday afternoon

'I'm still hurt from the incident, dont no one want a gun pointed at them and robbed,' she told KHOU 11 News Tuesday. 'If I could overcome that fear and everything, Id be fine.'

Robertson says she is not sure how the robber got tipped off about the cash, but said she remembers talking to friends about expecting the $3,900 refund.

She now believes that's what led to the robbery.

'Keep your mouth closed, keep your business to yourself,' she told KHOU. 'You dont know who your friends are, who is around your surroundings.'

Robertson did not provide any comment concerning the identity of Tanesha, the name the robber referenced during the attack. Police are currently investigating the incident, offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the suspects' arrests.

Both the robber and the getaway driver, who was not recorded in the footage, are still at large.
This is the terrifying moment a gang of bandits - one wearing a Joker mask - shot an armored guard in the chest as he and his partner were delivering cash to an ATM at a supermarket in Brazil.

An employee was standing behind the guard who was loading the cash machine located near the entrance of the store in Sao Paolo while another guard stood outside when the suspects ambushed them Tuesday morning.

The guard near the entrance noticed the gun-wielding thieves, including the one wearing a mask of the DC comic book supervillain, running out of a car and pulled out his weapon. But the suspects immediately started firing and struck the guard in the chest and leg as he dove to the ground.

Fortunately, the guard was wearing a bulletproof vest, but his ordeal was not over.

After the robbers swiped the money, they used the wounded guard as a human shield to run out of the store and make their escape.

I've never experienced a scene like this. It's a movie scene, you can't believe something like this will happen to you, a neighborhood resident told TV TEM. 'Everything was normal, until a black car arrived with three individuals entering the market and shooting. They looked professional.'

A thieve donning a Joker mask stands outside of a supermarket in Brazil that he and two other gunmen robbed the ATM on Tuesday. A security guard was shot in the chest, but was saved due to the bulletproof vest he had. He was also shot in the leg. A woman who was shopping suffered a non-life threatening gunshot wound in her foot. No arrests had been made as of Wednesday

A security guard who was shot in the chest and leg is used as a shield by the robbers as they fled the supermarket in Brazil after robbing the ATM

A woman who was shopping at the store in city of Sorocaba was shot in the foot. Her injuries were not considered life threatening.

The assailant with the Joker mask appeared on camera disarming the guard.

His two accomplices approached the guard by the ATM and forced him on the ground.

As one of the shooters stood at the edge of the entrance on the lookout, his cohort removed four metal cash boxes from the ATM.

The injured security guard is escorted from the supermarket while one of the assailants drags a ATM cash box

A thieve wearing a mask of the DC comics supervillain Joker disarms a security guard during a robbery inside a Brazilian supermarket Tuesday morning

One of robbers then pulled the security guard from the ground and used him as a shield as they walked out of the supermarket and headed towards their getaway car.

The guard was then pushed back into the supermarket before a mask-wearing thief aimed his assault rifle and fired multiple times inside the shopping center.

No arrests had been reported as of Wednesday by the Sorocaba Military Police.

A security guard stands near the Brazilian supermarket entrance as his partner reloaded a ATM moments before they were attacked by three thieves Tuesday

A shopper seeks cover as three gunmen barged into the Brazilian supermarket where they shot a security guard twice, wounded a customer and stole four ATM cash boxes Tuesday morning
Arsonists have targeted a Russian TV host's Lake Como villa, while suspected activists scrawled 'killer' onto another of his seized Italian properties and poured red paint into its swimming pool, according to local reports.

Italian firefighters were called to put out a fire at the villa Wednesday morning - reportedly owned by the pro-Putin personality Vladimir Soloyvev, who has been hit with European Union sanctions prompted by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

An official at the Como fire station confirmed firefighters extinguished the early morning blaze at the villa in Menaggio, one of the picturesque towns that dot the lake in northern Italy.

He said police were investigating the fire as a suspected act of protest. The villa was under renovation and the blaze involved tires at the site, said the official who declined to be identified by name, citing official policy.

Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera and news agency LaPresse said the villa was owned by Solovyov, a presenter on Russia's state run Channel One.

Speaking days after Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Soloyvov bemoaned EU sanctions brought against him. He seemed particularly offended by the prospect of losing his Italian holiday destinations.

Pictured: Investigators arrive to an Italian villa said to belong to Russian TV host and pro-Putin personality Vladimir Soloyvev, located near Lake Como. Officials said they were called to reports of a fire at the property on Wednesday morning, caused by suspected arsonists

Soloyvev's swimming pool was filled with red paint by unknown vandals in what local police suspect to be an act of 'protest'

The Russian state TV propagandist owns two houses on Lake Como that are worth a combined eight million euros, according to the Italian government that announced the property seizures last month

Vladimir Soloyvev (pictured) has been hit with European Union sanctions prompted by the Russian president's invasion of Ukraine. According to the EU sanctions, Solovyov is 'known for his extremely hostile attitude towards Ukraine and praise of the Russian government'

Solovyov owns two houses on Lake Como that are worth a combined eight million euros, according to the Italian government that announced the property seizures last month.

Police are also investigating anti-Russian graffiti at the second property, Italian state news agency ANSA reported.

'Just one team of firemen put out the fire within a very short time,' Como fire chief, Gennaro di Maio, told AFP. 'There is hardly any damage, it was burnt tyres that gave off visible black smoke,' he said.

Menaggio's mayor, Michele Spaggiari, told Italy's AGI news agency that the fire appeared to be 'a demonstrative act' causing little or no damage.

Spaggiari said Solovyov bought the property about five years ago.

Firefighters said they were called out at 6 a.m. to the scene, and completed the 'operation' to put out the fire by 8 a.m., adding that as it was under renovation, it was uninhabited at the time.

Italian carabinieri are investigating.

The vandalized facade of one of the two villas belonging to Russian state TV host Vladimir Solovyov on the shores of Lake Como, Italy, seen on April 6, 2022

Pictured: The entrance to Solovyov's villa, with red graffiti sprayed by suspected activists. the word 'killer' can be seen sprayed down one column

At another of his properties - a large salmon-pink villa also on Lake Como, pictures showed the words 'killer' and 'no war' pained in red on the building's facade and entrance way. According to la Repubblica, red paint was poured into the pool

According to the EU list of sanctions, Solovyov is 'known for his extremely hostile attitude towards Ukraine and praise of the Russian government.'

The EU says he was targeted because of his support for 'actions or policies which undermine the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine.'

Days after Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Solovyov publicly lamented losing access to his multimillion-dollar vacation homes due to Italian-imposed sanctions spurred by Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

'Is this the Iron Curtain?' Solovyov opined on the set of his late-night program. 'I was told that Europe is a citadel of rights, that everything is permitted, thats what they said.'

Pictured: Tyres are seen outside the villa which firefighters were called to on Wednesday morning. They said tyres were involved in the small fire

A general view of the villa owned by Russian TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov, after unidentified people attempted to set fire to it, in Menaggio, on Lake Como, Italy, April 6, 2022

Despite early images from Ukraine showing Russia's brutal invasion was already creating a mounting death toll, forcing people from their homes and causing wide-spread destruction, Solovyov seemed most concerned about how the ensuing sanctions will affect his ability to vacation at his sprawling Italian villas.

'I know from personal experience about the so-called "sacred property rights,"' Solovyov, 58, told the show's panel. With every transaction, I was bringing paperwork demonstrating my official salary, income, I did it all.

The vandalized entrance to one of the villas belonging to Russian state TV host Vladimir Solovyov

'I bought it, paid crazy amount of taxes, I did everything,' he griped. 'And suddenly someone makes a decision that this journalist is now on the list of sanctions. And right away it affects your real estate. Wait a minute. But you told us that Europe has sacred property rights!'

Taken aback by the restrictions, which officials said may evolve into the journalist losing the properties altogether if the conflict worsens, Solovyov fumed: 'All of a sudden, now they say: "Are you Russian? Then we will close your bank account, if its in Europe."'

He went on: 'And if its in England, youre allowed to keep no more than a certain amount there. Why? Because youre Russian,'

Renowned Russian economist Mikhail Khazin, 59, interjected: 'And thats if you have an old account. They wont open a new one.'

Solovyov then offered the panel the dramatic comparison between the consequences leveled against Kremlin propogandists by countries against Russia's occupation of the Ukraine, and the Cold War.

'Is this the Iron Curtain?' the host, who appeared visibly emotional during the strange appeal, asked.

Pictured: The villa belonging to Solovyov that was set on fire. It is likely valued in the tens of millions. The estate boasts 14 rooms, five bedrooms, five bathrooms, a living room, a kitchen, an entrance hall, a boiler room and a pantry, as well as a 90-sq-m guest house with three guest rooms, two bathrooms, a cellar and a private, gated porch

Pictured here is the second of Solovyov's multimillion-dollar Italian estates, also in Lake Como, that was vandalised with paint on Wednesday

Germany-based pundit Alexander Sosnovsky replied: 'Yes, absolutely,' before offering a contentious reclassification of the backlash Kremlin supporters are facing following their full-scale military invasion of Ukraine.

'The Iron Curtain in its worst manifestation,' the commentator said. 'Painted in LGBT colours.'

Solovyovv and the other panellists proceeded to nod in agreement, without mention of the effects the ongoing military occupation has had on Ukrainian citizens.

In 2019, Solovyov and other Kremlin propagandists came under scrutiny after a report by famed Putin rival and Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny revealed the long-time NTV host had not one, but two multimillion-dollar properties just down the road from Clooney's $100m estate on the historic Italian lake.

Following the revelation of the two sprawling properties' existence - located within a few miles of each other - neighbors have clamored for Solovyov's exile from the highly exclusive resort area, where properties such as Solovyov's are commonly valued in the tens of million.

In 2019, residents launched a petition to get local authorities to ensure the TV talker did not obtain Italian citizenship through his residency.
A couple is suing a New York fertility clinic for allegedly impregnating the wife with a stranger's embryo instead of their own and then trying to cover it up by claiming she had 'two sets of DNA'.

The couple, whose identities have not been revealed, are suing the New York Fertility Clinic and its specialists for allegedly impregnating the wife with another couple's embryo in July 2021.

The couple met in 2010 and had three kids naturally but struggled to conceive a fourth.

Throughout multiple rounds of egg retrieval and fertilization at the clinic, the couple only ever produced one viable, female embryo.

In July 2021, they were elated doctors transferred what they thought was their female embryo into the mother's uterus.

However in September, they say they learned through tests that the baby the wife was carrying was not their biological child.

The mother underwent a 'Panorama' test which determines chromosome abnormalities among fetuses.

The result was inconclusive because her DNA did not match the baby's, according to the couple's lawsuit.

The staff at the New York Fertility Institute including Dr. Khalid Sultan (right), Dr. Michael Obasaju (center back) and Dr. Majid Fateh (left) who are all named as defendants

'On September 9, 2021, the results of the Panorama test came back.

'The result was No results due to uninformative (suspect nonmatching) maternal/fetal DNA patterns. Possible reasons for uninformative DNA patterns include but are not limited to; egg donor, surrogate pregnancy, bone marrow transplantation.

'This result did not make sense, since Ms. Doe was supposed to be carrying her own embryo,' the lawsuit reads.

The mother claims she called the clinic and spoke to Dr. Khalid Sultan, who had performed the embryo transfer.

'He assured her that this was surely a lab error and that she shouldnt be concerned.

'But, as Mr. and Ms. Doe continued to worry, they decided to repeat the Panorama prenatal screening a second time to ensure the embryo was healthy and was biologically related to them,' according to the lawsuit.

In October, the second test came back with the same result, claiming the mother and the fetus did not share any DNA.

She says she spoke with Dr. Sultan again, and that he insisted it could not have been the wrong embryo because 'she was the only implant that entire week.' Sultan then told her to call a genetic testing specialist at Invitae.

The couple later agreed for the wife to undergo an amniocenteses procedure despite the risk of miscarriage that it carries. It was performed at their hospital, at the request of a different doctor.

After that procedure, she texted an assistant at the NY Fertility Institute.

One of the treatment rooms at the New York Fertility Institute

'Hi Christine. Just wondering if we can talk to Dr. Sultan or Dr. Obasaju.

'We keep meeting with doctors and genetic counselors who tell us the blood tests are coming back as if we had an egg donor (which we did not)-the dna of fetus is not matching my dna. is there any official way we can confirm the embryo transferred was mine?

'Sultan sent me pictures but theyre not sufficient for doctors to confirm that the baby is mine. Do you have a point person at Invitae we could also call? I know this is a lot but were now 4 months pregnant and keep hearing the same thing from different specialists and need to figure it out,' she wrote in a panicked text.'

The lawsuit claims that Dr. Michael Obasaju previously impregnated a woman with another couple's embryo in 1998 too

In late October, the couple say Dr. Sultan called them and claimed there was an explanation after all - that the mother had a rare condition whereby she had two sets of DNA.

'Rather than make the logical conclusion that a mistake may have been made, they instead pinned the situation on Ms. Doe allegedly having this rare genetic condition within her own body,' the lawsuit reads.

The condition he claimed she had was called mosaicism and that 'even for him  a doctor  this was a complex situation and very hard to understand.'

'Callously, Sultan further stated that all that matters is that you have a healthy baby and this will be an interesting research paper to write."'

In November, the mother underwent the amniocenteses which involved a long needle piercing through her abdominal wall and into the amniotic sac to retrieve fluid.

The results proved that there was a '0.00% probability that Mr. Doe was biologically related to the baby'.

'Ms. Doe and Mr. Doe did not know what to do. They had grown to love this baby, who had already begun kicking. On the one hand, they did not want to lose her even if she was not genetically related to them.

'On the other hand, they could not imagine carrying a strangers baby to term, only to potentially lose her in later legal battles to her biological parents, which would be devastating to the entire family,' the couple's attorneys said.

In New York, pregnant women can seek an abortion for the first 24 weeks. After that, they may have to prove they or the baby is at medical risk in order to have one.

The mother was approaching the 24-week mark in late November, when she learned the baby did not share her DNA.

With the clock ticking, the couple hired an embryologist to help them determine whose baby they were carrying, and where their viable female embryo had ended up.

The New York Fertility Institute on the Upper East Side in Manhattan

They say that doctors at NY Fertility however 'stonewalled' them and refused to meet with the embryologist.

On December 1, the couple decided to terminate the pregnancy.

They say that it was the 'most traumatic' experience of their lives.

'Immediately after the termination, Ms. Doe experienced sharp uterine pains and achiness in addition to a large amount of bleeding.

'For four weeks after the surgery, Ms. Doe lactated profusely. Her breasts were so leaky and swollen that she could not leave the house or sleep through the night. When she did sleep, she experienced nightmares.

'She was forced to painstakingly wait while her milk subsided. Ms. Doe also experienced phantom kicking for several weeks after the termination,' the lawsuit reads.

Afterwards, while preparing their lawsuit, the couple say they discovered Dr. Michael Obasaju - who had been involved in their treatment - previously accidentally impregnated another woman with a different couple's embryos, as well as her own.

The 1998 mishap resulted in the woman giving birth to twins, one of which shared her DNA and the other which belonged biologically to the other couple.

He performed that procedure at a different facility but was still allowed to work for NY Fertility Institute, the complaint claims.

Other allegations against the clinic from different women include that doctors accidentally impregnated her with an unhealthy embryo instead of a healthy one and 'lost' the healthy one for 18 months.

The couple say they have both been left with PTSD and now do not trust doctors.

'Ms. Doe and Mr. Doe are haunted by questions about what became of their embryos.

'They have needed to worry about whether their embryos were transferred to another unwitting couple, and whether they have another child or children out in the world whom they have never met?'

They are seeking unspecified damages. The fertility clinic has not yet commented.
Three men in Los Angeles were arrested as suspects in a series of follow-home armed robberies that began in January, including one who was in-and-out of jail three times in 2022 before he was released due to the city's lax criminal policies.

Matthew Adams, 18, was arrested for a fourth time in 2022 on March 31, accused of attacking two UCLA students outside one of the university's dorms, and taking their expensive watches as well as an iPhone, adding up to more than $145,000 in goods, a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) statement confirmed.

Adams also is being linked to at least four other robberies in Hollywood, Burbank and West L.A.

Matthew Adams, 18, was arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department on March 31 at a traffic stop. He is being charged with seven counts of robbery and two gun enhancements, according to police, and could face up to more than 20 years in jail if found guilty. He was released from jail four times this year due to the city's lax bail laws

Adams is seen as the main suspect of at least four other robberies taking place all across L.A. with most of them taking place in Hollywood, between January and March of this year. Two robberies were also reported in Burbank and in the neighborhood of West L.A.

The three are accused of identifying victims wearing expensive items and following them from a public location to a more private one, where they'd mug the targets. Ideal spots included upscale restaurants, and clubs in the Hollywood area. Victims would be tracked back to their apartments or hotels, police said.

The two other men, Eric Wilson and Jayon Sparks, also were arrested in connection with the robberies, police said.

LAPD said there might be other unidentified suspects still at large, according to Fox 11.

In one of the robberies, Adams and an unidentified accomplice followed two tourists from a nightclub to their hotel. Once they made it back and headed to their rooms, Adams and the other suspect robbed them of high-priced watches and other belongings.

LAPD officers arrested and booked Wilson and Sparks on March 24 after Metropolitan Division Officers obtained a warrant to search their apartment. Inside, they found firearms, drugs, ammo and luxury stolen items, including watches, jewelry and cash, according to the LAPD.

Subsequently, Wilson also was charged with one count of possession of a firearm, and Sparks was charged with two counts of robbery and one count of possession of a firearm, the LAPD confirmed.

Eric Wilson (left) and Jayson Sparks (right) were accomplices of Adams although it remains unknown how many robberies they were involved in between January and March of this year. Both were arrested on March 24 and charged on possession of a firearm

LAPD found luxury watches, jewelry, phones, drugs, cash and more inside the apartment of Wilson and Sparks upon their arrest on March 24

Adams was arrested on March 31 - a week after Wilson and Sparks' arrest - during a traffic stop.

He was booked into jail and charged April 4 with one felony count of first-degree residential robbery and six counts of second-degree robbery. LAPD also charged him with two gun enhancements, for all the robberies that he has been involved in between January 7 and March 30, police said.

If found guilty of all nine charges, the 18-year-old suspect faces more than 20 years in prison, the Los Angeles Police Department said.

Adams' latest arrest comes after he was previously detained on January 9, January 27 and February 21. He was booked into jail each time, but always released shortly afterwards.

Prior to his first arrest, Adams was accused in a high-end jewelry store robbery on January 7. He was placed on bond before his release. A group of at least five other men also were involved in the robbery. It's unclear if Wilson and Sparks were part of it.

A group of five is seen on video with what police say appeared to be sledgehammers, obliterating the front window of the store. Adams was involved in the robbery but it is unsure if Wilson and Sparks were too

Adams, Sparks and Wilson would follow victims to their homes or to isolated areas before mugging their watches, cash or any jewelry that they would carry

Adams was then arrested and charged with carrying a hidden firearm on January 27. He was released shortly afterwards.

A little less than a month later, Adams was arrested once more for the same offense - carrying a concealed weapon - before being released.

New criminal policies, which include lenient jail time rules, were set into motion by Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon for the past two years. The new rules allow repeated offenders to be released back into society without facing severe or lengthy punishment for their crimes.

The lax bail laws also caused a rift between LAPD Chief Michael Moore and Gascon. Moore has repeatedly shifted the blame of the city's high crime rate to the district attorney.

'Today, we see that the use of enhancements has been sharply curtailed,' the Los Angeles chief said during a Police Commission meeting on Tuesday. 'I believe that's inconsistent with the underlying importance of those enhancements as to deterring others from being engaged in serious violent felonies with the use of a firearm.'

'While I appreciate the filings that have been obtained, I'm disappointed that the full weight of the existing laws and the support of our district attorney and the court to hold this individual responsible and accountable and keep him from the community was missed,' Moore added.

Gascon, who has been widely criticized as being soft on crime, later backtracked on some of his most controversial policies, including not pursuing sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole, and not prosecuting juveniles accused of serious offenses as adults.

His sudden change of heart comes as he faces a second recall effort organized by critics, who contend that his woke policies are to blame for Los Angeles' rising crime rates.

In the last year, violent robberies and smash-and-grab thefts have skyrocketed in Los Angeles. Robberies are up 18 percent in the year-to-date compared to 2021, while those involving a firearm have surged by 44 percent in the same time period.

Follow-home robberies and smash-and-grab thefts have dramatically increased in Los Angeles so far this year

Many residents blame the city's no-or-low-cash bail policies introduced by the woke D.A. George Gascon, who came into office in 2020

Violent crimes have skyrocketed in Los Angeles in the last year, of which LAPD chief Michael Moore (pictured) has blamed Gascon for

The arrest also comes after the death of a model, whose body was dumped outside a Los Angeles hospital following a warehouse party, was identified as a drug overdose and ruled a homicide.

Christy Giles, 24, had four illegal substances in her bloodstream at the time of her November 2021 death; cocaine, fentanyl, ketamine and GHB - best known as the 'date rape' drug, according to an autopsy.

Los Angeles County Medical Examiner's office also ruled that Giles' friend, interior designer Hilda Marcela Cabrales-Arzola, 26, suffered a fatal drug overdose at the same party, People reported.

Cabrales-Arzola was dumped outside another LA hospital the same evening as Giles, and died following two weeks in a coma. The coroner's report said she had drugs including cocaine and MDMA in her system, and died of a drug overdose, as well as multiple organ failure caused by the drugs she'd taken.

The women were seen being dumped by three masked men driving a Toyota Prius with no license plates. Their families have claimed that they did not take the drugs that killed them willingly, but cops have yet to comment further on those allegations.

Christy Giles, 24, had four illegal substances in her bloodstream at the time of her November 2021 death; cocaine, fentanyl, ketamine and GHB - best known as the 'date rape' drug, according to an autopsy

Hilda Cabrales (right), who was left unconscious outside a Los Angeles hospital two hours after her model friend Christy Giles' (left) dead body was dumped outside a different hospital in the area, died the day before her 27th birthday

Hollywood producer David Pearce, who was pictured partying with Cabralez-Arzola hours before her death, was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter. He is being held on $3.4m bail on separate rape charges, and is accused of searching for countries that do not have an extradition treaty with the US.

Michael Ansbach, 47, as well as Brandt Osborn, 42, were charged with accessory to manslaughter charges but later were reduced to a detention in connection with Giles and Cabrales-Arzola's death.

David Pearce - who has been charged with both women's manslaughter - is seen with Cabralez-Arzola on the evening she and Giles died

Pearce and Cabralez-Arzola are pictured together at a warehouse party on November 13 2021, hours before the architect and her model friend Christy Giles suffered fatal overdoses

Pearce's defense attorney, Jacob Gluckman, previously filed a motion seeking to reduce his bail amount and have him released from jail with a GPS ankle monitor, reported the New York Post.
Attorney General Merrick Garland tested positive for covid on Wednesday after sitting at the head table with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo at the white-tie Gridiron Dinner.

The exclusive private dinner, a invitation-only event with an A-list guest list of Washington elite, is showing signs of being a super spreader.

Besides the two cabinet secretaries, two lawmakers in attendance tested positive for covid, as did many reporters who attended the event.

Garland, who is vaccinated and boosted, is showing no symptoms.

'He asked to be tested after learning that he may have been exposed to the virus,' the Justice Department said in a statement.

The announcement came after Garland held a press conference Wednesday on Russian sanctions. He did not wear a face mask and was surrounded by his deputies. He will isolate at home for at least five days and return to the office following a negative covid test.

Earlier Wednesday Raimondo tested positive with an at-home antigen test after 'experiencing mild symptoms,' the Commerce Department said in a statement.

'Today, I tested positive for COVID. Fortunately, I am fully vaccinated (and boosted!), and I am confident that this vaccine is the reason I don't have more severe symptoms,' she wrote on twitter.

The department said she shared her diagnosis 'out of an abundance of transparency.'

She will isolate for five days and work from home. Raimondo stayed late at the event, hanging out at an after party and speaking to several members of the media who were in attendance.

President Joe Biden is not considered a close contact, the Commerce department said.

He was not at Saturday night's dinner. Neither Garland nor Raimondo did not attend a packed White House event on Tuesday celebrating the Affordable Healthcare Act, where Biden and former President Barack Obama spoke.

Gridiron Club president Tom DeFran said on Wednesday afternoon that there are 14 dinner guests who are known to have tested positive for covid.

'There is no way of being certain about when they first contracted Covid,' his statement says. 'But they did interact with other guests during the night and we have to be realistic and expect some more cases.'

Attorney General Merrick Garland tested positive for covid after attending the Gridiron dinner; he spoke at a press conference earlier Wednesday

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo tested positive for covid after attending the white-tie Gridiron Dinner on Saturday night

Raimondo was the keynote speaker at Saturday night's Gridiron dinner, one of the poshest events of the D.C. social season. The private dinner, held in a Washington D.C. hotel, did not release photos or video footage of the night.

Guests were required to show proof of vaccination but were not required to have a negative covid test ahead of the dinner.

More than 600 people crowded together in rows of tables in the Renaissance hotel ballroom.

Raimondo was seated at the head table with high-profile guests like Garland, Ukrainian ambassador Oksana Markarova and White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

Most attendees at the dinner, which included members of Congress and other administration officials - were maskless.

Among those in attendance were Dr. Anthony Fauci and Centers for Disease Control director Dr. Rochelle Walensky.

Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Joaquin Castro, both of whom attended the dinner, also announced positive covid tests this week. Multiple reporters who attended the dinner have also tested positive.

'I'm feeling fine, and grateful to be vaccinated and boosted. In the coming days, I will quarantine and follow CDC guidelines,' Schiff tweeted.

'Unfortunately, after avoiding COVID-19 for two years, I've come down with it. I tested negative yesterday & last Thursday, but positive today,' Castro tweeted on Tuesday.

Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff (left) and Joaquin Castro (right), both of whom attended the Gridiron dinner, also announced positive covid tests this week

Psaki said on Monday that the White House covid policies have not changed in light of the jump in cases with close ties to the administration.

'Our policy is that all Executive Office of the President employees surrounding the President are on a regular testing schedule to screen for COVID on campus. That is a step beyond CDC guidance. If you're going to see the President, you will be tested that day, even if you're not traveling with him  just if you're going to see him for a meeting,' she said at her press briefing.

'And meetings with the President are often socially distanced in many circumstances as an additional precaution, even as people are tested,' she noted.

Biden is vaccinated and boosted. He received his second booster shot last week.

The Gridiron Club dinner is an off-camera, off-the-record event for members of the media. Politicians and other a-list figures are invited to its annual dinner.

The event features a Republican speaker, a Democratic speaker, and a speaker representing the sitting administration, along with a series of sketches performed by club members.

This year's dinner - the club's 137th - featured Raimondo, Republican Gov. of New Hampshire Chris Sununu, and Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland.
Former President Barack Obama visited the White House on Tuesday for the first time since leaving office in 2017.

He was appearing for a healthcare event, where among other things, they discussed new initiatives to lower the cost of perspective drugs and touted the bona fides of the Affordable Care Act, which for anyone who has forgotten, passed while President Obama was in office, not President Biden.

I'm sure it was supposed to be a very straight-forward event and in many ways it was.

Who doesn't love a harmless throwback, a bit of nostalgia for a time before the chaos of the Trump administration and the emotional and economic malaise of the Biden administration?

But like most of Biden's public events these days, it quickly became a humiliating and dangerous reminder for America and the world  that Biden often appears to be President of the United States in name only.

If you are a Democrat or even an Independent, you more than likely have a fondness and appreciation for Obama.

I would argue the only person on the left more valuable to Democrats would be his wife and our former first lady Michelle Obama.

The Obamas will always be politically valuable to Democrats when they need an image boost. And unless you have been living under a rock, you know that Biden is in desperate need of a boost right now.

Like most of Biden's public events these days, it quickly became a humiliating and dangerous reminder for America and the world  that Biden often appears to be President of the United States in name only.

Video started circulating widely on social media and in political news showing Biden seemingly wandering around the event room alone with no one wanting to speak to him.

Tuesday's event should have produced images of a celebration of a past president and the current one. It was a slam dunk.

But instead, video started circulating widely on social media and in political news showing Biden seemingly wandering around the event room alone with no one wanting to speak to him.

Obama on the other hand is swarmed like the political rockstar he always fashioned himself to be.

Nancy Pelosi, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senator Amy Klobuchar and a cadre of people start crowding around Obama at the event's conclusion.

If you didn't know any better, you would assume he was still the president and not Biden.

At one point, Obama appeared to mistakenly refer to Biden as his 'vice president.' Biden turned to him and saluted.

Obama gamely played it off as a joke  but was it?

In another video, Biden desperately grasped at Obama's shoulder, but the former president goes on chatting  as the current commander-in-chief tries to get his attention.

Let's face it -- there's a reason everyone in the White House wanted to talk to Obama and not Biden, secretly they all wish they were still working for him.

If this were one of a few videos of Biden looking disorganized, somewhat confused, and frankly pathetic, I would let it go.

Things happen and presidents are people.

However, I have seen so many videos like this making the rounds since he was elected that I can't even possibly begin to count them up.

And the reality is that optics are one of the most important things in politics. I don't make the rules, I just know how to play by them.

What you signal while in office, how you present yourself to the country and how you look -- all of these things matter.

At one point, Obama appeared to mistakenly refer to Biden as his 'vice president.' Biden turned to him and saluted. (Above) Former President Obama refers to Biden as 'vice president'

That's why there is always a team of advisors, strategists, a comms shop and an advance team to help you out.

But honestly, I don't know how this media team continues to earn a paycheck.

The President of the United States of America doesn't simply go into a room unannounced with no planning, especially a room with a former president of the United States.

But more often than not, Biden's messaging is undermined by something self-inflicted like this. And make no mistake this matters.

It is obviously not good for his presidency, but it is also not good for the United States of America.

Our enemies, and specifically adversaries like Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Xi of China see all this and they are paying close attention.

Obama got away with advocating for an agenda of American weakness because he appeared to be a strong leader.

Biden simply has neither an agenda or a strong presence. And the weaker and more fragile Biden looks, so does our country.

No matter which side of the aisle you are on, this should concern all of us.

Biden often looks disoriented, walks in the wrong direction and makes strange verbal errors.

Why his staff is not doing anything and everything possible to showcase and produce exemplary events for Biden right now, I may never know.

This is either a failure of staff or frighteningly it is something that has spiraled completely out of their control.

Again, if these instances were few and far between, or hell, even just once every other week at this point, I would have a lot more generosity.

But Biden has a hard time getting through any event without some kind of distraction or error.

The White House must realize the self-inflicted damage that Biden is doing not only to his flailing administration but our country as well. The truly troubling realization is that they likely can't do anything about it.

I want President Biden to succeed because I want America to succeed. He is a fundamentally decent and compassionate person, which is one of the reasons he became president in the first place.

Fundamentally decent and compassionate people can also be strong and intimidating to the rest of the world.

As the war in Ukraine continues to rage on and Putin shows no signs of stopping we need to show strength against dictators, fascists, communists and human rights violations globally.

I worry that Americans are becoming desensitized to all of this. We are becoming conditioned to images of weakness and incompetence, which say what you will, is bad for the American public.

Jimmy Carter is historically associated with weakness, and this is now what is happening to Biden.

His administration should take this seriously and turn the ship immediately  if they can.
Smokers in the UK are at a potential disadvantage when they are looking for a new job, a room to rent or even a date, a survey has confirmed.

More than four in ten non-smokers (41%) who were questioned admitted they may be hesitant to hire a job hunting smoker.

In a further blow to tobacco fans on the lookout for love, almost half of non-smokers (44%) stated that they would never date someone who smoked.

Even having a quick kiss might be problematic, as more than half of non-smokers (54%) insisted they would not like to kiss someone who had just had a cigarette.

Many smokers confirmed their unhealthy habit counted against them , with nearly a third (30%) claiming they had been unfairly treated because of it.

Smokers in the UK are at a potential disadvantage when they are looking for a new job, a room to rent or even a date, a survey has confirmed

The survey commissioned by tobacco manufacturer Philip Morris Limited questioned 1,800 non-smokers and 2,000 smokers to highlight attitudes to smoking.

More than half of smokers (57%) stated that the judgement and lack of understanding that they faced from non-smokers made it harder for them to quit.

Over half (55%) were conscious of negative sentiments about their nicotine habit and said they felt there was a stigma against them and other smokers.

The same percentage of smokers stated that people did not understand what it was like to be a smoker, according to the survey conducted by Lake Research.

The exposed strong feelings towards smokers, particularly on money and health

But nearly four fifths (82%) of non-smokers agreed that more should be done to help smokers find less harmful alternatives to cigarettes.

Philip Morris Limited which is a UK and Republic of Ireland affiliate of Philip Morris International stated in 2016 that it wants to replace cigarettes with smoke-free alternatives such as a vaping.

The survey also exposed strong feelings towards smokers in their everyday life, particularly around money and health.

Most non-smokers believed that smokers waste money (80%) and smelled bad (73%), and over half (54%) stated that had a negative impact on NHS resources.

Christian Woolfenden, the Managing Director of Philip Morris Limited, said: The best thing any smoker can do is quit tobacco and nicotine completely. Many smokers want to quit but feel that being frowned upon by non-smokers across many areas of their lives only makes it harder to do so.

With more support and understanding from friends, family and work colleagues, plus more information from government, regulators and public health experts about smoke-free alternatives, many more smokers could be encouraged to stop completely.

And for those who dont quit, to switch to less harmful options such has heat-not-burn products, e-cigarettes or nicotine pouches.

Philip Morris Limited International stated in 2016 that it wants to replace cigarettes with smoke-free alternatives such as a vaping

The study also found that women are more averse to smoking than men, with 56% believing it should be banned compared to 51% of men.

The finding was similar with regard to personal relationships with 46% of women saying they would never date a smoker, compared to 42% of men.

The survey found that Leicester was the place in the UK where most people were against smoking.

More than six in ten (66%) of residents of the East Midlands city believed smoking should be banned, compared to a national average of 54%.

Mr Woolfenden added: As the only tobacco manufacturer committed to delivering a smoke-free future, we believe that we can all play our part in helping to accelerate the decline in smoking.

We believe cigarette sales can end within ten to 15 years in many countries if the right measures and support are put in place.
Vladimir Putin's bloody regime - and even his close family were targeted by a co-ordinated new wave of Western sanctions today amid horror at the bloody war crimes committed in Bucha.

Britain, the United States and the European Union all unveiled new measures designed to weaken the Russian war machine and force it to withdraw from Ukraine.

The UK has moved to freeze the assets of Sberbank, Russia's largest bank, and the Credit Bank of Moscow in what Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said were 'some of our toughest sanctions yet'.

All new outward investment to Russia has been banned and the UK has also committed to end all imports of Russian coal and oil by the end of the year, with gas to follow as soon as possible.

Imports of Russian iron and steel products will be banned and a further eight oligarchs have also been added to the sanctions list.

The White House, meanwhile, announced sanctions Wednesday targeting Russia's top public and private banks and two daughters of Vladimir Putin, adding more pressure on the country's economy and its elite over the invasion of Ukraine.

Britain, the United States and the European Union all unveiled new measures designed to weaken the Russian war machine and force it to withdraw from Ukraine.

The new sanctions targeted Maria Vorontsova and Katerina Tikhonova, two adult daughters of Putin's with his former wife Lyudmila Shkrebneva.

President Zelensky appears shattered after visiting Bucha to see the bodies of the dead, describing what has happened in the region as 'genocide' and a 'war crime'

A Ukrainian policeman walks by a pit in the village of Motyzhyn, Ukraine, Sunday, April 3, 2022 where the bodies of the mayor of the village, Olga Sukhenko, her husband and son and that of a man believed to be a Ukrainian serviceman, who was not yet identified, lie

The new sanctions targeted Maria Vorontsova and Katerina Tikhonova, two adult daughters of Putin's with his former wife Lyudmila Shkrebneva.

Also hit with new sanctions were the wife and daughter of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and members of Russia's Security Council, including former President and Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

It came as Czechia became the first Nato country to send tanks to Ukraine, providing more than a dozen T-72s and armoured infantry vehicles following President Zelensky's plea for help.

They were filmed being loaded on a train bound for Slovakia where they are expected to head on to Ukraine, in footage run by public broadcaster Czech Television.

Ms Truss said: 'Together with our allies, we are showing the Russian elite that they cannot wash their hands of the atrocities committed on Putin's orders.'

Survivors from the month-long occupation of the town in Kyiv oblast have started to describe their gruesome treatment at the hands of Putin's invading troops after area was liberated.

Charred body parts lay scattered over the streets of Bucha for days after a man was killed with a grenade, while men under 50 were stripped naked, tied up and summarily executed by Russians, traumatised civilians have revealed as more vile stories emerge from the Ukrainian town.

Ukrainian armed forces say they have uncovered a Russian torture chamber, located inside a children's hospital that was also being used as a makeshift barracks. The bodies of five men were found shot to death in the basement, a spokesman said, with their hands tied behind their backs. Some had been tortured.

Graphic images taken by Ukrainian prosecutors show the bodies of the men lying on a rubble floor surrounded by pools of dried blood. At least one appears to have been shot through the kneecap.

Visiting the region on Monday, a shattered President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced what he called 'genocide' by Russian forces, adding that 'we know of thousands of people killed and tortured, with severed limbs, raped women and murdered children  dead people have been found in barrels, basements, strangled, tortured.'

The Kremlin has denied any civilian killings, claiming the images emerging from Bucha are fakes produced by Ukrainian forces, or that the deaths occurred after Russian soldiers pulled out.

In a statement announcing the sanctions, the White House said: 'These individuals have enriched themselves at the expense of the Russian people. Some of them are responsible for providing the support necessary to underpin Putin's war on Ukraine.'

The White House also declared 'full blocking' sanctions on Russia's largest public and private financial institutions, Sberbank and Alfa Bank, and said all new US investment in Russia was now prohibited.

And it said that new sanctions would be announced tomorrow on key Russian state enterprises, aiming to hamper their ability to trade and move money through the global financial system.

The European Commission's proposed ban on coal imports would be the first EU sanctions targeting Russia's lucrative energy industry over its war in Ukraine.

EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said energy was key to Russian President Vladimir Putin's war coffers.

"A billion euro is what we pay Putin every day for the energy he provides us since the beginning of the war. We have given him 35 billion euro. Compare that to the one billion that we have given to the Ukraine in arms and weapons," Borrell said.

After several European countries announced the expulsion of Russian diplomats, the European Commission proposed a fifth package of sanctions including a ban on coal imports that could be adopted as soon as Wednesday once unanimously approved by the 27-nation bloc's ambassadors.
A group of House Democrats on Wednesday outlined their opposition to a new nuclear deal with Iran, warning that the Biden administration's soft negotiating stance meant there were no guarantees Tehran's hardline rulers could not eventually build a bomb - and that lifting sanctions would mean money flowing to its terrorist proxies.

Details of a proposed deal remain under wraps, but would broadly include lifting some sanctions in return for Iran abiding by limits on its nuclear research.

But DailyMail.com has previously reported that the proposals also include lifting the terrorist designation on the Islamist Revolutionary Guard Corp.

Republicans have expressed their opposition to a deal they warn is too soft on Tehran - and on Wednesday 18 House Democrats also signed up to express their concerns.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer set out what he said would be the worst case scenario: 'A nuclear Iran, regardless of what commitments are made, funding Hezbollah, Hamas - through these giving billions of dollars to fund terror around the world to kill Americans to attack our bases, and of course, to kill our allies,' he said at a press conference.

President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 nuclear deal in 2018, accusing Iran of funding terror groups and ignoring the spirit of the agreement by developing ballistic missiles.

Some 18 House Democrats - including Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia - said they had concerns about the Biden administration's plans for a new nuclear deal with Iran, saying sanctions should not be lifted unless Tehran cannot develop nuclear weapons or fund terror groups

Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey said the worst case scenario involved a nuclear-armed Iran able to pour billions of dollars into international terrorism

Since then Iran has enriched uranium closer and closer to the purity and quantity needed to fuel a nuclear weapon.

Last month International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors reported that its stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity had grown by more than 80 percent in three months.

In the meantime, negotiators in Vienna are reportedly close to securing a deal.

However, the U.S. team was hit recently by resignations amid frustration that Rob Malley, U.S. Special Representative for Iran, was caving too easily to Iranian demands such as lifting the terror designation on the Revolutionary Guards.

'We understand that while the recent negotiations have not concluded, we feel that we can't stay quiet about the unacceptable and deeply troubling turn that these talks have reportedly taken,' said Rep. Elaine Luria.

She added that the Israeli ambassador to Washington told her that the agreement 'places Iran and Israel on a collision course.'

She said it was unthinkable that terror designations would be lifted, allowing more money to go to terror groups.

A new generation Iranian centrifuges are seen on display during Iran's National Nuclear Energy Day in Tehran. Iran has increased its enrichment of uranium since the U.S. left the 2015 nuclear deal under President Donald Trump

Robert Malley, US Special Representative for Iran, is pushing the Biden administration to drop the terrorist designation for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard to secure a nuclear deal with Iran

'I believe it's completely unacceptable that's it would be considered as part of this negotiation to lift Iran's Foreign Terrorist Organization designation on Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corp, it's completely unacceptable to eliminate sanctions on the leadership of the Iranian regime, which has perpetuated terrorist attacks around the world targeted so many people and has sought to destabilize the Middle East,' she said.

At a press conference they said the Biden administration should do more to keep lawmakers abreast of the plans.

And several members brought up sunset clauses that could mean the deal eventually expired.

Rep. Donald Norcross said Russia's aggression in Ukraine showed how nuclear weapons emboldened leaders.

'We need only look to today's headlines to see what happens when you have mad men with nuclear weapons - and what they can do and what they can threaten - to know that we cannot allow us under any circumstances,' he said.

This handout photo provided by the IRGC shows an underground base for anti-ship missiles at an undisclosed Gulf location in January 2021

Any sort of sunset provision, he said, meant merely a delay on the time Iran needed to develop a nuclear weapon.

But supporters of a deal say an Iran in a deal - perfect or not - is better than having an Iran free to do as it pleases.

Barbara Slavin, director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council, said many of the individuals and organizations would remain sanctioned under other authorizations anyway even if specific terror designations were lifted.

'Do we want Iran to slow down their nuclear program or not? This deal is worth having,' she said recently.

Last month the top U.S. general in the Middle East on Tuesday said that Iran remained the greatest threat to the region and that it had 3,000 ballistic missiles, some of which could reach as far as Israel's Mediterranean city of Tel Aviv.

Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen Frank McKenzie laid out the biggest challenges in the region and said only a handful of fighters appeared to have taken up Russia's call for Syrians to fight in Ukraine.

But he said Iran represented the biggest day-to-day danger to regional security and would become much more dangerous if it were able to acquire nuclear arms.

Iran's arsenal was on display at the weekend when missiles slammed into a U.S. Army base and a Kurdish news channel office in Erbil, Northern Iraq in retaliation for an Israeli attack

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps recently unveiled a new missile - the 'Khaibar-buster' - with a range of about 900 miles

'My concern is, first of all, that they not have that nuclear weapon but I am also very concerned about the remarkable growth in number and efficiency of their ballistic missile force, their [unmanned aerial vehicle] program, their long-range drones and their land-attack cruise missile program,' he said in one of his final appearances before lawmakers before retiring.

'All of those concern me.'

The danger of Iran's arsenal was on full display not long before he spoke when its rockets smashed into a U.S. Army base and a Kurdish news channel office in Erbil, Northern Iraq.

Iran later claimed responsibility, saying it mounted the attack in retaliation for an Israeli strike in Syria that killed two members of its Revolutionary Guard last week.

No one was hurt in the attack on Erbil.

Last month, Iran unveiled the latest weapon in its arsenal.

The Khaibar-buster, a reference to a Jewish castle overrun by Muslim warriors led by Prophet Mohammed in the early days of Islam, has a range of 900 miles and runs on solid fuel, state media reported.
A Kinder Surprise recall over Salmonella fears has been extended to Kinder Egg Hunt kits and Kinder Mini Eggs, after 63  mostly young children - have been fallen ill in a UK outbreak.

The Food Standards Agency has already advised consumers not to eat the Kinder Surprise with certain best before dates after investigators found a link between the popular children's treat and reported cases of salmonella poisoning across the UK.

No deaths have been reported among the 63 people, who are mainly aged five and under, as chocolate firm Ferrero recalled the batches because of the possible presence of Salmonella, the FSA said.

More cases have reportedly been recorded in Europe, including Ireland, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands.

The recall now applies to 20g Kinder Surprise eggs or three-packs of the eggs with a best-before date of all dates up to and including October 7 2022.

This is along with 100g Kinder Surprise packs with a best-before date between 20 April and 21 August 2022, Kinder Mini Eggs 75g packs with a best-before date between 20 April and 21 August 2022 and Kinder Egg Hunt Kits 150g with best before dates from 21 April to 21 August 2022.

No other Ferrero and Kinder products are affected by the recall of products made in Ferrero's Belgium-based factory.

Kinder Surprise eggs have been recalled by the chocolate giant Ferrero over a 'potential link to Salmonella' after 63 people who were mostly young children fell ill, the FDA has found (file image)

The recall now extends to 100g Kinder Surprise packs with a best-before date between 20 April and 21 August 2022, Kinder Mini Eggs, left, 75g packs with a best-before date between 20 April and 21 August 2022 and Kinder Egg Hunt Kits, right, 150g with best before dates from 21 April to 21 August 2022.

The recall now applies to 20g Kinder Surprise eggs or three-packs of the eggs with a best-before date of all dates up to and including 7 October 2022 and were manufactured in Belgium (file image)

Chocolate firm Ferrero is recalling some batches of Kinder Surprise eggs due to a link with salmonella (Stock image from Centres for Disease Control and Prevention/PA)

What Kinder products are being recalled? Kinder Surprise Pack size: 20g and 20g x 3 Best Before dates: Up to and on 7 October 2022 Pack size: 100g Best Before dates: 20 April up to and on 21 August 2022 Kinder Mini Eggs Pack size: 75g Best Before dates: 20 April up to and on 21 August 2022 Kinder Egg Hunt Kit Pack size: 150g Best Before dates: 20 April up to and on 21 August 2022 Kinder Schokobons Pack size: 200g Best Before dates: 20 April up to and on 21 August 2022 Advertisement

Kinder Schokobons 200g with a best-before date of April 20 to August 21 2022 have also been recalled.

Symptoms of salmonella include diarrhoea, stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting and fever.

While most cases resolve in a few days, symptoms can be severe and lead to hospital admission, especially in the very young and those with weakened immune systems.

In a statement today Ferrero told the MailOnline: 'The company continues to co-operate with the UK Food Standards Agency, the Food Safety Authority of Ireland and Food Standards Scotland in relation to a number of reported cases of salmonella. Although no Kinder products released to market have tested positive for salmonella, we are taking this extremely seriously.

'While the situation remains the same, we are fully aware that Easter is approaching, where we see an increase in sales of these products and therefore, as an additional precautionary measure, today we have decided to voluntarily recall the products listed above due to these additional products having been manufactured in the same facility in Belgium, within the same time frame.

'The company takes food safety extremely seriously and we sincerely apologise for this matter. Our continued commitment to consumer care has driven our decision today to extend the voluntary recall.'

On Monday the FSA said no deaths had been reported in the UK but most cases involved children aged five and under.

No other Ferrero and Kinder products are affected by the recall (stock image of Kinder Surprise eggs)

Salmonella: A bacteria that can cause diarrhea, stomach cramps and fever Salmonella are a group of bacteria that infect the gut. They live in animal and human intestines and are shed through feces. Humans become infected most frequently through contaminated water or food. Contamination is possible if raw and cooked foods are stored together. Symptoms of salmonella infections include diarrhea, stomach cramps and sometimes vomiting and fever. On average, it takes from 12 to 72 hours for the symptoms to develop after swallowing an infectious dose of salmonella. They usually last for four to seven days and most people recover without treatment. But if you become seriously ill, you may need hospital care because the dehydration caused by the illness can be life-threatening. Source: NHS Choices Advertisement

Anyone who has bought products with those use-by dates can contact the Ferrero consumer careline on consumers.uk@ferrero.com or 0330 053 8943 to obtain a full refund.

Investigations so far have been led by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), Public Health Scotland, Public Health Wales and Public Health Agency Northern Ireland.

Tina Potter, FSA Head of Incidents, said: 'We have taken action along with local authorities and authorities in Belgium to minimise the risk based on the evidence so far.

'We welcome the precautionary approach being taken by Ferrero and are advising consumers not to eat any of the products listed in the FSA alert. It is really important that consumers follow this advice to avoid the risk of becoming ill with salmonella poisoning.

'We know that these particular products are popular with young children, especially as Easter approaches, so we would urge parents and guardians of children to check if any products already in their home are affected by this recall.

'The food business involved has voluntarily carried out this product withdrawal and recall and we are working closely with them and their competent authorities to identify the precise cause of this outbreak.

'We are also working closely with UK and international partners including UKHSA and Food Standards Scotland.'

Dr Lesley Larkin, Surveillance Lead, Gastrointestinal Pathogens and Food Safety (One Health) at UKHSA, said: 'We welcome the co-operation of Ferrero International S.A in instituting the recall and withdrawal of a number of confectionary products linked to an ongoing outbreak of Salmonella in the UK.

'We are working closely with the company as well as the Food Standards Agency, Food Standards Scotland, Public Health Scotland, Public Health Wales, Public Health Agency Northern Ireland and international public health and food safety authorities to ensure that the risk to the public is minimised.

'Symptoms of salmonellosis typically resolve themselves within a few days. However, symptoms can be more severe, especially in young children and those with weakened immune systems.

'Anybody with concerns that they have symptoms of salmonellosis should contact their GP or call NHS 111.

'Salmonella can be spread from person to person, so anyone affected should adhere to good hygiene practice such as washing hands thoroughly after using the bathroom and avoiding handling food for others where possible, if you have symptoms.'
An exiled oligarch once named as Russia's richest person has warned that Vladimir Putin believes his country is already at war with Western powers after his troops invaded Ukraine.

As NATO allies continue to supply weapons and aid to Ukraine and ramp up their economic sanctions package against Moscow, Putin already considers his country at war against America and its European allies, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, 58, warned.

While US and NATO officials have always said they would defend 'every inch' of their territory from Russia aggression, Moscow has argued the alliance's eastward expansion threatens its own security and territory, reports Bloomberg.

Putin believes that NATO is 'weak' and that it would refrain from defending the Baltic states should Russia attack - resulting in the 'collapse' of the 53-year military alliance and the decimation of American foreign influence, Khodorkovsky said.

The exiled tycoon, who once had a net worth of around $15bn (11.46bn) as head of Yukos Oil co, made the comments during an interview in Washington in which he implied the West had failed to understand the Russian leader's perspective.

As NATO allies continue to supply weapons and aid to Ukraine and ramp up their economic sanctions package against Moscow, Putin already considers his country at war against America and its European allies, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, 58, (above) warned

Putin believes that NATO is 'weak' and that it would refrain from defending the Baltic states should Russia attack - resulting in the 'collapse' of the 53-year military alliance and the decimation of American foreign influence, Khodorkovsky said

Khodorkovsky said he last met Putin 18 years ago, which is the same time he was jailed for tax evasion and money laundering charges that he claims were revenge for his support of anti-Putin political parties. He was freed in 2013 and now lives in London.

Arguing for a stronger set of measures as the Ukraine war enters its second month, Khodorkovsky said the US should show Putin a 'consistent policy of force' as economic sanctions against the country's billionaires don't go nearly far enough.

Speaking after meeting U.S. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and National Security Officials, the exiled oligarch said he has been asked about Putin's mental state and how he views the future of this conflict.

He praised President Joe Biden's rhetoric against Russia's threats to deploy nuclear-grade weapons in Ukraine, and argued that although his words may have been viewed out of context, his calls for regime change were an important step.

'If the U.S. wants to be a moral leader, it has to make a moral statement,' he said.

Khodorkovsky praised President Joe Biden's rhetoric against Russia's threats to deploy nuclear-grade weapons in Ukraine, and argued that although his words may have been viewed out of context, his calls for regime change were an important step

It comes as NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg today warned the war in Ukraine could last 'months, even years' as there is no sign Vladimir Putin has lost 'his ambition to control the whole country'.

Ukrainian authorities urged civilians in the country's east to flee 'now' or 'risk death' as Russian forces regroup ahead of what is expected to be a fresh offensive in the Donbas region.



Stoltenberg, speaking ahead of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels, said the international community should be 'realistic' about Moscow's intentions and 'realise that this may last for a long time' as the war entered its 41st day.

'We need also to be prepared for the long haul, both when it comes to supporting Ukraine, sustaining sanctions and strengthening our defences,' he added.

The Czech Republic has become the first NATO country to send tanks to Ukraine, providing T-72 and armoured infantry vehicles following President Zelensky's plea for help (pictured, tanks loaded on a train bound for Ukraine on Tuesday)

NATO's foreign ministers were meeting today and tomorrow to discuss sending more arms to Ukraine after the Czech Republic became the first bloc member to send tanks and armoured infantry vehicles to Kyiv.

Several BVP-1 infantry fighting vehicles, howitzer artillery pieces and more than a dozen T-72 tanks were yesterday loaded on a train bound for Slovakia where they are expected to head on to Ukraine, footage run by public broadcaster Czech Television showed.

Thursday's delivery is understood to be a gift agreed on by NATO allies, raising fears the bloc could be dragged into the Russian war in Ukraine despite remaining on the sidelines for more than a month.

NATO leaders have so far given Ukraine anti-tank and anti-craft missiles as well as small arms and protective equipment, but have not offered any heavy armour or fighter jets. Prague's decision to supply tanks to Kyiv will pile pressure on NATO allies to follow suit.

It comes as Russian artillery continued to pound the Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Kharkiv today as the West prepared more sanctions against Moscow in response to civilian killings that Kyiv and its allies have called war crimes.
P&O Ferries has announced it is preparing to restart sailings 'from this weekend' on routes suspended since it sacked nearly 800 seafarers.

The firm revealed plans to resume operations for four of its ships. It has been prevented from running all but one of its vessels since it announced widespread redundancies on March 17.

Earlier it was revealed P&O Ferry customers face having their Easter holidays ruined after fully-booked rivals said they cannot honour their tickets from Dover to France this weekend.

Anyone with a ticket from the ferry operator has been able to travel with DFDS, one of Europe's largest shipping operators, over the past few weeks.

But this mutual agreement is being paused on Friday until next week due to a lack of capacity, leaving ticketholders rushing to get refunds from P&O Ferries.

The announcement follows three-hour waits and gridlocked roads around the Port of Dover last Saturday, owing to fewer services in the wake of the redundancy debacle.

P&O Ferries suspended its Dover-Calais crossings on March 17 after terminating nearly 800 members of staff to hire cheaper agency workers.

Announcing the planned return of service, a spokesman for P&O Ferries today said: 'From this weekend, P&O Ferries are getting ready to resume services across a number of vital routes.

'P&O has been working closely with regulators to ensure our ships are safe to sail.

'P&O is looking forward to welcoming back vital services and we expect to have two of our vessels ready to sail on the Dover/Calais route by next week, subject to regulatory sign-off, namely both the Pride of Kent and Spirit of Britain between Dover/Calais.

'P&O are also expecting to be able to sail both the European Causeway, which runs between Larne and Cairnryan, and the Pride of Hull, which runs services between Hull and Rotterdam.

'We thank our customers for their patience during this time and we apologise to those customers whose journeys have been cancelled and disrupted.'

P&O Ferries has announced it is preparing to restart sailings 'from this weekend' on routes suspended since it sacked nearly 800 seafarers. Pictured: Long queues at the Port of Dover on Saturday, April 2

A mutual agreement which saw passengers book onto rival ferries is coming to an end on Friday, leaving ticketholders rushing to get refunds from P&O Ferries and rebook with its competitor DFDS

Criminal and civil investigations were launched on April 1 into the company's decision, which was widely criticised for making seafarers redundant without notice.

And this morning, it was reported that a former P&O Ferries chef, John Lansdown, was suing the business for unfair dismissal, racial discrimination and harassment.

Meanwhile, one of the firm's ships, the Pride of Kent, was detained in Dover last month after a coastguard inspection found it was 'not safe to go to sea'.

It came less than a week after the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) said another ship, the European Causeway, was prevented from going to sea in Larne, Northern Ireland, due to 'concerns over its safety'.

In a tweet shared yesterday afternoon, the transport company wrote: 'All P&O Ferries Passenger Services are suspended this weekend.

'For travel 8/9/10th April please re-book directly with another operator before arriving at the port.

'DFDS will not be able to transfer P&O customers onto their services.'

Last weekend's traffic chaos, which saw some cars stuck for up to three hours, prompted motorists to seek alternative routes towards the ferry terminal causing further delays in towns across Kent which spilled over into Saturday.

Drivers heading to the coast were warned to expect delays well in excess of an hour, while it was reported that some hauliers waited for up to eight hours.

Closures were first implemented on Friday night as part of Operation Brock to allow lorries heading for the channel crossing to be 'stacked' on the motorway, in theory allowing them smoother access to the Kent coast.

A Department for Transport spokesman said at the time: 'We are aware of queues at Dover, and the Kent Resilience Forum and local partners are working to minimise any disruption by deploying temporary traffic-management measures as standard.'

The ongoing dispute involving P&O Ferries has dramatically reduced the capacity of the port.

Last month, P&O Ferries admitted to breaking the law in the manner in which it terminated 800 members of staff to hire cheaper agency workers, a move that has caused a major backlash from politicians and workers (file photo)

Two P&O ferries remain in the Port of Dover, Kent, as freight lorries queue to check in on April 1

A spokesperson for DFDS told The Telegraph: 'As we look towards the weekend, we have very high booking levels, which sadly means we won't have any capacity available for other operators.

'We will of course do everything we can outside the peak weekends to carry as many P&O customers as possible.

'What we don't want to do is to create a situation where we have to disappoint customers arriving in the port who we cannot get to France because we are full.'

P&O Ferries was widely criticised for making seafarers redundant without notice on March 17.

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said the Insolvency Service had started 'formal criminal and civil investigations'.

The Insolvency Service said: 'Following its inquiries, the Insolvency Service has commenced formal criminal and civil investigations into the circumstances surrounding the recent redundancies made by P&O Ferries.

'As these are ongoing investigations, no further comment or information can be provided at this time.'

P&O Ferries chief executive Peter Hebblethwaite told a joint hearing of the Commons' business and transport committees that his company broke the law by not consulting with trade unions before laying off workers.

P&O Ferries chef accuses bosses of sacking him because he is British as he launches 76million lawsuit for unfair dismissal after he was one of 800 workers fired over Zoom and replaced with cheaper foreign agency staff

An ex-P&O Ferries chef has accused bosses of sacking him because he is British in a lawsuit for unfair dismissal against the company and its chief executive.

John Lansdown, who joined the company as a 16-year-old trainee, was working as a sous chef on The Pride of Canterbury when he was sacked 'out of the blue'.

The 39-year-old, from Herne Bay, Kent, is the only seafarer able to take legal action against the company, which said all but one employee had accepted a settlement.

In his landmark claim to London South employment tribunal, Mr Lansdown accuses P&O Ferries of treating him unfavourably in a 'sham' redundancy because he is British.

He is claiming race discrimination on the basis that P&O replaced staff with non-British crew paid an average of just 5.50 an hour - less than the minimum wage.

Mr Lansdown is seeking six figure compensation for lost earnings and injury to feelings in his claim against P&O and its chief executive Peter Hebblethwaite.

It comes after criminal and civil investigations were launched on April 1 into P&O Ferries' decision to lay off nearly 800 workers over Zoom without notice last month.

John Lansdown (pictured above), 39, filed a tribunal claim accusing the shipping firm of racial discrimination because he is British and entitled to minimum wage

Mr Lansdown said his action was about the 'bigger picture', telling the BBC: 'This is not just about me.

'Seven hundred and ninety nine of my seafaring family have lost their livelihoods, their way of life, their homes for half the year.'

In legal papers submitted to the tribunal, he also said that P&O Ferries' parent company, Dubai Ports World (DP World), is highly profitable.

On the basis of such profits, he also seeks exemplary damages of up to 76 million to 'deter' P&O Ferries or DP World from any future 'fire and hire' policy.

Tribunals have never previously made a punitive award of damages on such a scale.

Should he make legal history, Mr Lansdown says he would use the money to create a new trust to campaign for improved wages and terms and conditions for seafarers.

P&O Ferries says that Mr Lansdown is the only staff member not to have accepted its controversial settlement offer.

It says that its payouts linked to length of service totalling 36.5 million - with 40 workers receiving over 100,000 and no worker less than 15,000 - is the 'largest compensation package in the British marine sector'.

In a statement responding to Mr Lansdown's claim, P&O Ferries says that the job cuts were 'categorically not based on race or the nationality of the staff involved'.

It insists that the company 'needed fundamental change to make it viable', adding: 'We knew this decision was the only way to save the business.'

Mr Lansdown, who is the only seafarer taking legal action over the dismissal, is seeking financial compensation and exemplary damages of up to 76million (file photo of a P&O ferry)

In his legal document, Mr Lansdown, who is married, tells how he was a sous chef on The Pride of Canterbury on the Dover to Calais route.

He had worked for P&O Ferries in two spells, leaving in the mid 2000s before re-joining the company in 2014.

He was working on the ship and had to leave his belongings behind when he was notified 'out of the blue and without any prior consultation' about his instant dismissal, he says.

The RMT union member alleges that private security staff, carrying handcuffs and wearing balaclavas, were hired to remove workers who refused to disembark ferries.

His claim states: 'I was devastated by the brutal summary dismissal after many years of loyal and diligent service. The manner of the dismissal was harassing.'

He accuses P&O Ferries of 'violating' his dignity and creating an 'intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating environment'.

P&O Ferries chief executive Peter Hebblethwaite (pictured on March 24) said his company broke the law by not consulting with trade unions before sacking workers

He says the redundancy was unlawful as there was no fair selection process and no diminished need for his job.

Speaking today, Mr Lansdown branded P&O Ferries 'unscrupulous' and said he wanted to get 'justice' for all his former colleagues who felt they had little choice but to settle their cases.

He said: 'The actions of P&O Ferries have upended the lives of 800 loyal and dedicated seafarers and their families.

'Their grotesque disregard for due process in this country will set a dangerous precedent if allowed to stand.

'The tribunal claim I have filed is intended to bring Peter Hebblethwaite and those responsible at P&O Ferries to justice and make them accountable for their unlawful action.'

Mr Hebblethwaite previously admitted to MPs that his decision to sack 800 workers without notice or union consultation had broken the law but said he would make the same decision again if he had to.

At the time, he said that no union would have accepted the plan and it was easier to compensate workers 'in full' instead.

The Insolvency Service has launched criminal and civil investigations into the controversial mass redundancies.

A spokesperson for P&O Ferries said: 'No staff involved in the redundancies wore balaclavas nor were they directed to use handcuffs or force.

'Staff remained professional, sympathetic and calm in a challenging situation for everyone, trying to ensure the safety of all the people on board the ships. There was no harassment.

'We took this difficult decision as a last resort and only after full consideration of all other options but, ultimately, we concluded that the business wouldn't survive without fundamentally changed crewing arrangements, which in turn would inevitably result in redundancies.'
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A Russian fisherman has discovered an ocean creature that bears a striking resemblance to a baby dragon.

Roman Fedortsov, 39, scours for cod, haddock and mackerel on commercial trawlers and sometimes fishes up to 3,000ft below the surface.

In doing so, the Murmansk-based fisherman reels in a variety of bizarre-looking sea creatures, the latest of which has been dubbed the 'newly hatched baby dragon' by people online who were stunned by its unique appearance.

It has since been identified as a chimaera, a cartilaginous fish also known as a 'ghost shark'.

Fedortsov has also recently discovered other sea creatures which look strikingly similar to a cheeseburger and a juicy jam doughnut.

Those are just three of a wide variety of weird and wonderful sea critters discovered by Fedortsov, who has become somewhat of an internet sensation for his incredible photos of the alien like ocean dwellers.

Fedortsov discovered most of the creatures in the Norwegian and Barents seas in north Russia, but has also found a few strange-looking beasts in the depths of the Atlantic.

Roman Fedortsov's latest discovery has been dubbed the 'newly hatched baby dragon' by people online who were stunned by its unique appearance

The 'cheeseburger fish' - this deep sea find has been compared to a cheeseburger, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and even a chicken sandwich by viewers online thanks to its slimy, orange appearance

Anyone for dessert? This sea creature which at first glance appears to be a succulent jam donut was among the sea critters hauled to the surface by Fedortsov along with the 'cheeseburger fish'

Fedortsov discovered most of the creatures in the Norwegian and Barents seas in north Russia, but has also found a few strange-looking beasts in the depths of the Atlantic.

A scaled fish caught by Roman Fedortsov. He holds its head up to photograph it, with its eyes bulging. Fedortsov scours for cod, haddock and mackerel on commercial trawlers but also catches a variety of bizarre-looking sea creatures

These huge red beast has shocked viewers with its bulging eyes and what appears to be a huge, protruding organ

Sea anemone: This creature is a striking shade of orange and its bulging white eyes give it the look of a cartoon character. Although they resemble flowers, sea anemones are predatory animals

The jaw of one of Roman Fedortsov's deep-sea finds is shown prised open, displaying a row of jagged teeth lining the inside of its mouth, and another group of smaller teeth near the rear of its throat

Pictured: A pair of cusks, a North Atlantic fish similar to a cod. Both are shown with their eyes bulging after being caught by Fedortsov. The left cusk has a strange growth on its back, while the right cusk appears to have tentacles protruding from its yawning mouth

The under-side of a gaping flatfish, half of which appears to have lost its scales. A skin-like colour is contrasted with its darker green-brown scales seen on the right, which also have specks of red and orange

Left: Roman Fedortsov holds a fish upside-down to photograph its underside, showing an unusual suction-like growth. Right: The fisherman shows off another creature he reeled in from the depths of the ocean, which looks like a sea centipede

The images have left social media users stunned as Fedortsov's profiles continue to gain masses of followers.

Curious Instagram users have been questioning what the cheeseburger-like creature is in the comments section, with more than 11,000 liking the post.

One person commented: 'Holy c**p I didn't even realise that was a fish, while another added: 'I thought this was the new chicken sandwich to eat at first'.

Some of the other recent additions to Fedortsov's collection include an alien-headed fish, and another with what looks like bizarre tentacles protruding from its mouth.

Another ancient-looking fish appears to have teeth worn down by overuse that are constantly being replaced by fresh teeth coming from the back of its mouth.

The trawlerman has become something of a celebrity online from his pictures, with many of his images going viral even though he admits that he often has little idea what most of them are, and which he shares out of curiosity.

Despite the many comments that he gets, he said that he found all of the fish fascinating and did not share the opinion of many that they were ugly monsters.

He said: 'In their own way all of these creatures are beautiful.'

He fishes mostly in the Barents Sea, off the northern coasts of Russia, which opens into the Arctic Ocean. But he also travels to other parts of the world, including the Atlantic Ocean, off Africa.

This sea pike - which appears to be smiling as it shows its teeth - is among the newest batch of bizarre-looking sea creatures collected by fisherman Roman Fedortsov. Experts say that the pike can live for up to 25 years and catch other fish and small mammals

Shrimp: This creature is small enough to fit in the palm of a human hand, but looks almost like a tree with limbs and antennae that appear like branches and roots

Wolf-fish v isopod: This sea creature was raised to the surface just after it had devoured a much smaller form of aquatic life. Experts describe the Atlantic wolf-fish as a 'fearsome-looking' species which is a rare catch for fishermen

Black scabbardfish: This jet-black creature has its mouth open, showing off its impressive set of teeth. Experts describe it as a deep-water predator which sometimes live thousands of feet under the surface

Starfish: This red-and-orange creature has also been among the Russian fisherman's batch of finds. Starfish are active predators and devour smaller forms of aquatic life such as mussels and clams, according to experts

This scaly creature is small enough to be held in a person's left hand, blue beady eyes contrasting with its predominant green

King crab: The photographer almost seems to be shaking hands with this terrifying-looking creature, believed to be a king crab which is one of the largest known crustaceans

Fedortsov has discovered a range of incredible looking creatures during his travels, including this squid with bright blue eyes

This creature's eyes almost seem as though they are looking imploringly at the person holding it after it was brought to the surface

This emerald-green fish is one of the sea creatures captured by fisherman Roman Fedortsov on his commercial trawling expeditions in northern Russia

Pictured left, a stoplight loosejaw, and right, a dark green toad-like creature, two of the unusual sea creatures brought to the surface. The loosejaw gets its name from the fact that their mouths can open widely to swallow large prey

Sea spiders: Creatures such as these walk on the ocean floor on their legs. This one is smaller than the size of a human palm

Puffer fish: This toothy specimen is one of a species of aquatic creatures which puff themselves up when threatened. The four large teeth are used to crush their prey

Pictured left: An unidentified orange-yellow creature is held in the photographer's hand; right: a dark-green cusk, a North Atlantic creature similar to a cod

He said that the huge array of different creatures that he was finding was confirmation of anything that so little of the ocean depths have really been explored by man.

The photographer, who studied marine science at university in Murmansk and is an expert on processing and preparing fish, has shared the bizarre images on his social media accounts.

The fisherman previously said: 'All kinds of fish are beautiful in their own way. I can not say that they are 'scary' or 'ugly'. People are very interested in unusual sea creatures,' he added.

'Readers have the impression that with each trawl we bring aboard unusual fish specimens,' the fisherman added. 'In fact, this is far from the case. It is a rarity.

'On the other hand, even a famous fish can be photographed so that it will seem to be a 'monster'.' Most of the raised fish do not survive due to the difference in pressure, he added.

This creature with a domed head seems to have its mouth agape as it is held up for a photo after being raised to the surface

Pale toadfish: This spotted red creature is one of a heavy-bodied species of toadfish which sometimes grow to 16 inches long

Anglerfish: This deep-sea creature appears glossy black on top, with blue patches on its body and sharp teeth

These creatures hardly look like animals at all, small enough that four of them can fit in a human hand like pieces of food

Psolus phantapus: The photographer is wearing gloves to take this picture of a species of sea cucumber, which grow to have orange and white tentacles and can be as long as eight inches

A remora, which attaches itself to the undersides of sharks and rays to scavenge scraps that fall from their mouths

Brown psolus, a U-shaped relative of the sea cucumber, which attaches itself to rocks with the rectangular sole seen on the left, and extends its tentacles to feed

Big boy: This creature - a big sunfish - is one of the larger catches on the trawler where it is pictured with two crew members

The brown psolus in the centre, a relative of the sea cucumber, shows its feeding tentacles

This horrifying unidentified cyclops dragged to the surface by the Russian fisherman may be a species of flatfish

An unidentified sea animal, bright orange on top, which was caught in the nets of the Russian trawler from Murmansk

A close-up view of one of the unidentified bug-eyed fish caught in the trawler's nets
Joe Rogan is slamming the California elementary school that he claims pushed woke anti-racism ideology on his nine-year-old daughter after George Floyd's killing.

The podcaster claims the unnamed school issued a blanket statement email in May 2020 telling families that students 'must be anti-racist,' something he said the kids were too young to even understand.

'When the whole George Floyd thing happened, one of the schools that my kids were going to back in California released this email, saying that it's not enough to not be racist, you now must be anti-racist,' Rogan, 54, said on Tuesday's episode of his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience.

Rogan, who has been embroiled in his own racial controversy after old clips of him using the n-word surfaced, said he could support schools teaching students that 'racism is stupid,' but argues teaching them to be anti-racist is inappropriate.

'These kids are not even remotely racist. Like, they have all sorts of different kinds of friends,' he said. 'I've never heard them discuss it once. It's just "I like this person and she's nice to me and we like to play together and we both like the same things,"' he said. 'So to tell a 9-year-old that you have to be anti-racist, well, then they go looking for racism, they're gonna go looking to confront it.'

Floyd, 46, was killed at the hands of Minneapolis police in May 2020 during an arrest. His death triggered protests around the globe against racism and police brutality.

Joe Rogan is slamming the California elementary school that he claims pushed woke anti-racism ideology on his nine-year-old daughter after George Floyd's killing

Rogan also criticized the educators who truly believe pushing the woke curriculum was a good idea, calling them 'naive'.

'They weren't that good at teaching in the first place,' the podcaster argued. 'And now here there are saying they're going to tackle something, not not just tackle something as complex as race in America, but you're going to establish rules that you can't just be not racist, you have to be anti-racist.

'And you're going to teach this to a nine-year-old?' he questioned. 'So what are you saying? Like, what exactly are you saying, what is your f*****g end goal?'

He stated he supported academics instilling values of equality, but his daughter's school's agenda was confusing

'If you want to tell my nine-year-old, they have to be anti-racist. What does it mean?' he questioned. 'They have to go find racism and confront it?'

Rogan claims the school's remarks came after George Floyd was killed in May 2020. Floyd's death triggered protests (pictured) around the globe against racism and police brutality

George Floyd (pictured) was killed on May 25, 2020, having been arrested for allegedly attempting to use a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes at a grocery store

The podcaster claims the California school's anti-racist push came amid the nationwide push to combat racial injustice that followed Floyd's death.

Floyd was killed on May 25, 2020, having been arrested for allegedly attempting to use a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes at a grocery store.

Shortly after the incident, video emerged of Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd's neck as he lay on the ground for nine minutes.

Floyd cried out, 'I can't breathe!' over and over. His words became a rallying cry for demonstrators the world over.

Chauvin was found guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd's death. Three other officers, Tou Thao, Thomas Lane, and J Alexander Kueng, were fired from the police department who did nothing to intervene while witnessing Floyd's death.

Rogan's remarks about anti-racist education came during a Tuesday interview with playwright and filmmaker David Mamet in which the pair discussed the current state of Hollywood.

The podcaster has been under fire in recent months from progressives who called on Spotify, the streaming service that houses his show, to cancel his $200million deal over his COVID-19 comments and use of racial slurs.

In January, a group of 270 doctors and scientists signed an open letter to Spotify accusing Rogan of pushing 'anti-vax misinformation' and branding him a 'menace to public health'.

Rogan's (left) remarks about anti-racist education came during a Tuesday interview with playwright and filmmaker David Mamet (right) in which the pair discussed the current state of Hollywood

After Spotify didn't respond to the letter, musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell led a boycott and pulled their music from the streaming platform.

Spotify eventually launched content advisory warnings on episodes that include discussion about COVID-19 on a rolling basis.

Then in February, clips resurfaced from Rogan's podcast in which he used the N-word over 20 times. He later apologized, calling it 'the most regretful and shameful thing I've ever had to talk about publicly.'

'It looks f***ing horrible. Even to me,' Rogan said. 'I know that to most people, there is no context where a white person is ever allowed to say that word, never mind publicly on a podcast, and I agree with that now. I haven't said it in years.'

Last month, Rogan threatened to cancel his Spotify deal if 'he has to walk on eggshells.'

'There's more people pouring over it but it's the same thing. I do it the same way,' Rogan said during his March 29 episode.

'If I become something different because it grew bigger, I will quit. If it gets to a point that I can't do it anymore, where I have to do it in some sort of weird way where I walk on eggshells and mind my p's and q's, f*** that!'

Rogan, 54, has been under fire in recent months. Critics have called on the streaming service to cancel the Joe Rogan Experience host's $200million deal for spreading misinformation regarding the COVID-19 vaccine and using racial slurs in the past

To date, Spotify has removed at least 113 episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience - with most episodes that have been taken down recorded involving far-right commentators.

The podcaster was supported by some conservative media figures who pledged to defend his freedom of speech.

Donald Trump Jr condemned 'the woke mob' for trying to cancel Rogan.

Conservative commentator and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro also voiced his support for Rogan and accused the left of using his later racial slurs controversy to 'destroy a guy who doesn't carry water for those with institutional power.'

The President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, who has been largely criticized for his vaccine skepticism and the way he's governed the country throughout the pandemic, also backed Rogan on the social media platform.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek first responded to the controversy surrounding Rogan's comments regarding COVID and vaccines against the deadly virus in an official statement in January, saying Spotify would be adding COVID-19 content advisories to all podcast episodes that cover the virus.

Ek pushed back at employees demanding Rogan be ousted from the service's catalog, saying the controversial podcaster is vital to the platform's future and it's not the company's place to 'dictate the discourse' of his show.

'There are many things that Joe Rogan says that I strongly disagree with and find very offensive,' Ek said at a company town hall.

But 'if we want even a shot at achieving our bold ambitions, it will mean having content on Spotify that many of us may not be proud to be associated with.'

Rogan publicly addressed the controversy earlier this year in a post discussing 'some of the controversy that's been going on over the past few days.'

He told fans on Instagram: 'I don't always get it right. I will do my best to try to balance out these more controversial viewpoints with other people's perspectives so we can maybe find a better point of view.'
Republicans wrote to the White House on Wednesday urging President Biden to divide the $3.5 billion in assets seized from the Taliban for 9/11 victims equally, after it came to light that a lawyer in the White House's inner circle has cinched the bulk of the money for his own clients.

The letter obtained by DailyMail.com urges Biden to rescind his Feb. 11 executive order, which consolidated Taliban assets at the Central Bank in New York and benefits 'a set of politically-connected plaintiffs and trial lawyers at the expense of other victims of terrorism.'

'President Biden must rescind his executive order and direct these funds into existing mechanisms to ensure that all victims of terrorism are treated fairly,' the letter, signed by Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., and Mike Johnson, R-La., and addressed to chief of staff Ron Klain.

In February, Biden signed an executive order to divide some $7 billion in seized Afghan assets, half going toward humanitarian aid for Afghans and the other half going to the Taliban's terrorism victims. But rather than make that $3.5 billion available to the thousands of terror victims throughout the U.S., the executive order will direct it towards about 150 people.

These three Republicans wrote a letter to the White House demanding that it split $3.5 billion in seized Afghan assets equally among victims of terrorism

Those people are known as the Havlish plaintiffs and they include Americans who were injured on 9/11 and those who lost loved ones that day. They won a default judgment against the Taliban in 2011, though their claim did not amount to anything for years while the Taliban had no cash within reach of the U.S. Once the terror group came to power again, the Havlish plaintiffs reasserted their claim to the funds.

Biden's executive order bypasses the Congressionally-approved process of distributing terrorist money to victims equitably - through the Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund of 2015. The compensation pool is distributed 'fairly' by the Department of Justice. Congress' law also caps attorneys' fees at 15% of each payout so victims receive a majority of the disbursements through the VSST.

'Rather than directing the $3.5 billion in seized assets into the VSST fund where all victims with valid claims may be equitably compensated under the pro-rate formula established by Congress, the Biden administration has chosen to circumvent this process in an apparent attempt to pick winners and losers among victims of terrorism,' the letter claims.

The U.S. seized $7 billion in assets from the Afghan Central Bank once the Taliban came to power

In February Biden signed an executive order declaring that the assets would be split equally between humanitarian aid and the Havlish plaintiffs

After $7 billion in assets were picked up from the Taliban, a fight broke out among lawyers representing different groups of victims who claimed they had rights to the money. Last September, the Havlish plaintiffs persuaded a judge to approve sending a U.S. marshal to serve a writ of execution to the Federal Reserve in New York to seize the $7 billion to cover a judgment of $7 billion in damages they had won a decade ago.

The Biden administration intervened and said it would inform the court of how disbursing the money would best serve the interests of the nation. The Justice Department asked for a delay, saying it needed more time, until the administration eventually in February ruled that the money should be split between Havlish plaintiffs and aid for Afghans.

Attorney's for the Havlish plaintiffs are set to score as much as one-third of the multi-billion settlement.

But a lead attorney on the Havlish group's case has a special White House connection - Lee Wolosky, of the firm Jenner & Block, advised the White House on Afghan evacuees as a special counsel to the National Security Counsel until January.

Wolosky says his Havlish clients deserve much of the Afghan assets because they claimed little from the compensation pool distributed by DOJ, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

The lawmakers' letter claims that the payouts to Wolosky's clients creates a 'perception of impropriety.'

The letter calls for all documents and communications relating to the potential distribution of seized Afghanistan Central Bank assets to Havlish plaintiffs and all documents and communications related to Wolosky's service at the White House, including his ethics agreement.

The VSST meanwhile so far has paid out about $3.3 billion to victims of international state-sponsored terrorism, through funds unrelated to the recently-seized Taliban assets. But some spouses and children of 9/11 victims were originally excluded from the fund due to a technicality. By the time they were admitted to the fund in 2019, most of the assets had already been doled out.

Jon Stweart speaks at a news conference on behalf of 9/11 victims and families before the House approved a bill to replenish the victims' compensation fund

'Now we finally have an opportunity for real compensation. All we ask is that all who were harmed be treated equally and that the administration follow the congressionally approved method for compensating victims of terrorism,' Timothy Fischer, son of Capt. John R. Fischer, FDNY, who was killed in the 9/11 attack, wrote in a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

'I have yet to hear from my representatives and have to wonder why they would let the executive usurp their lawful process and authority,' he wrote.

'The Biden administration is unilaterally deciding which U.S. victims of terror are more important and deserving of compensation from USVSST funds. Perhaps it feels that atonement for the botched Afghanistan withdrawal is necessary, but Congress authorized the USVSST fund for all U.S. victims, not a chosen few and their attorneys,' wrote Stuart Force, whose son Taylor Force was stabbed by a Palestinian terrorist in Israel six years ago. 'Stop ignoring the laws passed by Congress.'
Ezra Miller's career with the Justice League could be over following the actor's arrest last week for harassing a woman at a Hawaii karaoke bar - before allegedly robbing and threatening a couple the actor was staying with at the time.

Warner Bros and DC executives have held an emergency meeting on March 30 where they agreed to halt any future projects involving Miller, 29, who is non-binary, following their arrest at the Margaritas Village karaoke bar in Hilo, Hawaii, sources told Rolling Stone.

Insiders told the publication that Miller, who has a history of 'meltdowns', would not be involved in any public appearances for the DC Cinematic Universe despite Miller's The Flash slated to premier next year.

The development comes as the couple Miller was staying with in Hawaii filed a restraining order against the actor because they threatened them and stole their belongings after couple posted bail.

Warner Bros. And DC executives held an emergency meeting on March 30 where they agreed to halt any future projects involving Miller, 29, sources told Rolling Stone

Miller was arrested at the Margarita Village karaoke bar, in Hilo Hawaii, pictured. The actor was charged with harassing a 23-year-old woman and lunging at a man playing darts

Miller, a non-binary actor playing The Flash in the DC Cinematic Universe, was also hit with a restraining order from the couple who bailed them out of jail who said the actor threatened them and robbed them while they were staying in the couple's Hawaii home

Warner Bros. And DC executives also agreed that miller would not be involved in any promotional events scheduled for the DC Cinematic Universe

Miller was arrested on Sunday at Margarita Village for allegedly harassing a number of patrons with belligerent behavior and was charged with disorderly conduct and harassment.

The incident started when Miller was reportedly hurling obscenities at a 23-year-old woman singing karaoke. The actor also tried to grab the microphone from her mid-song.

Then later on the same night, Miller lunged at a 32-year-old man who was playing darts at the bar. Police were eventually called in to deal with the out-of-control star.

A local couple who Miller had met at a local farmer's market and let the actor stay in their house had bailed Miller out of jail on a $500 bond on Monday following the arrest, Radar reported.

The husband, who has not been publicly named, alleged that after returning home from jail, Miller had a breakdown and threatened his wife, saying: 'I will bury you and your s*** wife.'

He told police the actor then stole his wallet and his wife's passport, which they have yet to get back, according to Radar.

A judge for Hilo's Third Circuit District Court approve a temporary restraining order filed by the couple against the actor, with a hearing scheduled for later in April to determine whether or not to make the order permanent.

Miller previously drew controversy in April 2020 when a video circulated that allegedly showed the actor choking a woman while at a bar in Reykjavik, Iceland, Variety reported.

Amid the recent scandal, a video resurfaced on Twitter of Miller appearing to choke a woman at a bar in Reykjavik, Iceland

Miller grabs the woman by the throat and attempts to throw her to the ground.

'Woah, bro. Bro,' the person filming says.

A source told Variety the incident took place after 'pushy fans' approached Miller and the actor lost their temper.

Miller has never publicly addressed the incident.

Miller also made headlines in January when they posted a now-deleted video on Instagram threatening members of the Ku Klux Klan operating in Beulaville, North Carolina.

Miller was seen telling members of the Klan to kill themselves with their own guns, otherwise 'we'll do it for you if that's what you want.'

Miller also had a run in with the law in 2011 where he was arrested for drug possession.

The actor, then 19, was the passenger in a vehicle in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania when they were pulled over and cops discovered 20 grams of marijuana on them.

A judge would later drop the drug possession charge, but they were charged with two citations of disorderly conduct and ordered to pay a fine of $600.
An engineer took his sons ancient Egypt school craft project very seriously and built a life-size sarcophagus complete with a mummified pharaoh inside for 250.

Alexander, seven, volunteered his father, Richard Brigg, 47, to build a sarcophagus for his Year Three class.

Richard crafted an incredible life-size sarcophagus out of foamboard, polystyrene and papier-mache in just over a month.

The 47-year-old, a huge history buff, drew on the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun for inspiration to make it more historically accurate and revamped a Halloween prop for the inside into a mummified pharaoh.

The finished piece - complete with a mummified pharaoh inside and fully decorated - was a huge hit with Alexander's class and his teacher in Lancaster.

A dad took his sons ancient Egypt school craft project very seriously - and built a life-size sarcophagus complete with a mummified pharaoh inside for 250. Pictured: The sarcophagus at Moorside Primary School in Lancaster

Alexander, seven, left in the sarcophagus, volunteered his father, Richard Brigg, 47, right, to build a sarcophagus for his Year Three class

The 47-year-old, a huge history buff, drew on the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun for inspiration to make it more historically accurate and revamped a Halloween prop for the inside into a mummified pharaoh, pictured

Richard, who is the chairman of Moorside Primary School's Parent-Teacher Association in Lancaster, Lancashire, said: 'I have a history of making stuff for the PTA so my boy's teacher asked him in class if he thought I could build one and he came out of school one day with the message to have a chat with her!

'It was a challenge but I thought I could give it a good go, so I went away, had a think and managed to create this in a matter of weeks.

'The schoolkids were quite excited by it from the feedback I received from the Year Three teaching team when us parents were invited in after school on the museum day.

'The kids were showing it off to the parents and various classes at school went to see it as well as the projects that the Year Three pupils had made.

'It even got quite a bit of attention from the passing children of the school next door as we carried off to the car on Friday - we had to keep stopping on the pavement so Alexander could show them!

'I'm really pleased with how it all came together - it turned out better than expected! I'd definitely do something like this again.'

The old halloween prop had to be covered to turn it into a mummy, left, paper mache was put on it, middle, and the finished product is the final image

After cutting foam board to the shape he wanted, he carefully used a glue gun to stick it together to form the back of the sarcophagus

Richard then used several layers of polystyrene insulation sheets cut in different profiles to create the front, carving in the intricate details with a hot wire cutter and craft knives

Richard spent a painstaking 60 hours spread over five to six weeks creating the sarcophagus, pictured, getting to work in the evenings when his son had gone to bed

And he covered both the front and back with paper mache to give it a more durable and harder shell, sealing it with varnish before reaching for the paint

Alexander did also chip into help construct the masterpiece

Tasked with the build in early February, Richard had until the class' ancient Egypt museum day last Thursday (March 31) to create the sarcophagus and spent weeks perfecting his masterpiece.

After cutting foam board to the shape he wanted, he carefully used a glue gun to stick it together to form the back of the sarcophagus.

Richard then used several layers of polystyrene insulation sheets cut in different profiles to create the front, carving in the intricate details with a hot wire cutter and craft knives.

And he covered both the front and back with paper mache to give it a more durable and harder shell, sealing it with varnish before reaching for the paint.

Just a few finishing touches left and the mummy inside the sarcophagus

Dropping off his masterpiece at Moorside Primary School, Richard was thrilled to see his son's (pictured Alexander) classmates overjoyed with his handiwork and hopes it'll be used in years to come by the school

Richard said: 'I looked up the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun for inspiration and a few styling cues to make it at least a little historically accurate for school rather than totally made up.

'The mummified pharaoh inside was a left over Halloween prop which I bulked out with more polystyrene and pipe installation before using paper mache on the head.

'Dying the mummy's bandages with tea was a failure! Apart from making the whole house stink like a tea merchants, by the time we had washed the smell of tea out them, they were nearly normal colour again!'

Richard spent a painstaking 60 hours spread over five to six weeks creating the sarcophagus, getting to work in the evenings when his son had gone to bed.

Dropping off his masterpiece at Moorside Primary School, Richard was thrilled to see his son's classmates overjoyed with his handiwork and hopes it'll be used in years to come by the school.

Alexander and Richard Brigg with the final product

He said: 'If I'm honest, it turned out better than I thought!

'So much so, I'll be offering it to few friends who are teachers and governors at local schools to see if they'd like it when they do ancient Egypt as it seems too good to hide in a cellar for a year.

'It cost about 250 to do but I count the cost as my charity gift to the school and an investment as it'll get used more than once.

'I'd definitely do it again. I'll let the teachers come up with the idea for what might inspire or enthuse the pupils that would be a genuine teaching aid and support in what ever way I can.

'I'll also use it as a plug to encourage parent, grandparent, carer, family involvement and participation with school and PTA.

'So many schools are struggling with tight budgets and resources, I'm sure there are others who are equally and better creatives than I am who could offer support.'
President Joe Biden issued a major warning to Amazon during a speech to trade unions on Wednesday, telling the shipping giant: 'Here we come.'

Days earlier, workers at its Staten Island, New York warehouse took a historic vote to establish the company's first workers' union even despite a reported crackdown on such discussions.

During his speech to the North Americas Building Trades Unions (NABTU)'s 2022 Legislative Conference, Biden also reiterated his vow to 'unify' the country -- though admitted the uphill effort sometimes made him 'angry.'

The president even brought back his trademark whisper when touted the 320,000 new construction jobs he said came from his American Rescue Plan, an economic package aimed at easing the economic burden of the COVID-19 pandemic.

'Laying a strong foundation for the future of this country is about more than having strong roads and bridges, ports and airports that can compete with any in the world. Its also about making sure that here in America, folks that work hard and live their lives, they have an opportunity to live it with dignity and respect. Thats what unions are about, mind you,' Biden told the crowd of unionized workers and their representatives.

'Thats why I created the White House task force on worker organization and empowerment, to make sure the choice to join a union belongs to workers alone.'

He then leaned in close to the microphone to add: 'And by the way  Amazon, here we come.'

President Biden expressed his vehement support for unions and even found time to take a shot at former President Donald Trump in his speech to the North Americas Building Trades Unions (NABTU)'s 2022 Legislative Conference

DailyMail.com reached out to Amazon for comment but has not immediately heard back.

One of the company's executives, Senior Vice President for Policy and Press Jay Carney, formerly worked for Biden as his director of communications in the Obama administration.

The White House walked back Biden's comments after the event, making clear that the president would not be 'involved in any direct effort' to force Amazon to unionize.

'What he was not doing is sending a message that he or the US government would be directly involved in any of these efforts or take any direct action,' White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said during her Wednesday briefing.

'What he was conveying is that -- is his longtime support for collective bargaining, for the rights of workers to organize, and their decision to do exactly that in this case -- something that he has long supported broadly over the course of his career.'

At one point during his address, Biden shared praise for his Labor Secretary, former Boston Mayor Marty Walsh.

The president appeared to add a stereotypical Boston twang, pronouncing the Cabinet official's first name as 'Mahty.'

He also had time to take a swing at his rival, former President Donald Trump, over the Republican's tax cuts for wealthy Americans and businesses.

'That two trillion dollar tax cut the last guy -- what was his name -- anyway, the last guy. I forgot it, he never showed up for the inauguration,' Biden quipped as the audience laughed in response.

'Thats why I created the White House task force on worker organization and empowerment, to make sure the choice to join a union belongs to workers alone,' Biden said, adding: 'And by the way  Amazon, here we come' (Pictured: Union organizer Christian Smalls (right, red tracksuit) celebrates after workers at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse voted in favor of unionizing)

The White House later walked back Biden's comments, maintaining he was not going to be 'involved in any direct effort' to force the shipping giant to accept unions

Toward the end of his roughly 30-minute remarks, Biden reminded the crowd why he ran for president in the first place -- reiterating his promise to 'restore the soul of this country' and 'to rebuild the backbone of America, which is the middle class and working people.'

'And three -- to try to unify the country. That's been the hardest thing so far, not a joke,' Biden admitted.

'But we're going to get there because you can't have a democracy function unless you can generate consensus. You ultimately have to unify, as angry as I sometimes get.'

Biden's speech came just days after workers at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse voted in favor of forming the corporation's first-ever union, after a grassroots campaign by current and former employees.

The final count was a nail-biting 2,654 votes in favor of organizing to 2,131 against, a mark of the sophisticated union-busting tactics the shipping giant took on to fight the movement.

Those included forcing employees to attend mandatory meetings during which they were vehemently discouraged from taking part in what it called a 'third-party.'

The New York City warehouse workers will now be represented by the Amazon Labor Union, which was formed by fired Amazon worker Christian Smalls.

Smalls, a former supervisor at the facility, was let go after he staged an employee walkout to protest the company's lack of health protections during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The company had said Smalls violated company protocols himself by coming to work for the walkout when he was told to quarantine because of a close exposure.

After being dismissed from his role, Smalls formed the Amazon Labor Union, which is unaffiliated with any major trade organizations or national unions in the country.

Asimilar vote to unionize failed at Amazon's Bessemer, Alabama facility was too close to call as of late last month.

Ballots were cast in a do-over election after the National Labor Relations Board ruled Amazon had interfered in a union vote that failed there last year.
A quick-thinking call handler has been praised after a woman fearing for her safety was able to communicate with officers after dialling 999 'to order a pizza'.

The woman, who was riding a bus in the York area at the time, contacted the emergency services to order the takeaway before covertly answering the North Yorkshire Police handler's yes or no questions.

Rather than hang up or consider it a prank call, the handler immediately asked the woman to clarify if she was in trouble, to which she replied yes.

Her position was later geolocated using tracking data, and a 40-year-old man from Leeds was arrested in connection with the incident and remains in custody.

A quick-thinking call handler has been praised after a woman fearing for her safety was able to communicate with officers after dialling 999 'to order a pizza'. [File image]

The woman, who was riding a bus in the York area at the time, contacted the emergency services to order the takeaway before covertly answering the North Yorkshire Police handler's yes or no questions

The call came in to North Yorkshire Police on Tuesday evening, with the operator establishing the woman fearing for her safety could only respond using 'yes' or 'no' answers.

The handler realised she was potentially at risk of harm from someone travelling with her on the bus and kept the phone line open as she texted her for further information.

Several Twitter users heaped praise on the quick-thinking call handler who was able to correctly diagnose the situation, with most pointing out the 'empathy' and 'professionalism' on display.

@BarryGrayston wrote: 'Hats off to North Yorks Police, the call handler. A slap on the back, hip hip hooray to all involved, this is the kind of stuff which brings credit to the often criticised police system'.

@Kieronf2 added: 'Well done to all involved, especially the victim who manage to stay rational and calm despite her terrible ordeal. Well done too to the call handler who immediately realised what might be wrong - training or instinct, it doesn't matter.'

Inspector Dan Spence, of North Yorkshire Police, said: 'This was really good work by everyone involved, allowing us to take immediate action to safeguard a vulnerable woman.

'I'm aware of people using the 'pizza ordering' technique abroad to contact the police, but I cannot recall a similar call in North Yorkshire.'

North Yorkshire Police has since offered advice to anyone facing a similar situation as all 999 calls are directed to BT operators in the first instance.

Several Twitter users heaped praise on the quick-thinking call handler who was able to correctly diagnose the situation

The call handlers will ask which service you require, but if nothing is said or suspicious noises are heard during the call, they will connect you with a police operator.

The force tweeted: 'It is always best to speak to the operator if you can, even by whispering. You may also be asked to cough or tap the keys on your phone in response to questions.

'The police call handler will attempt to communicate with you by asking simple yes or no questions.

'If you are not able to speak, listen carefully to the questions and instructions from the call handler so we can assess your call and arrange help if needed.'

Although this may have been one of the first such instances of a faked takeaway order being used to alert police in the UK, it has become a more common occurrence in the United States.

In 2019, the daughter of a domestic violence victim covertly alerted authorities about an incident unfolding at her home in in Oregon, Ohio, by calling 911 and pretending to order a pizza.

After a brief moment of confusion, the operator realises she is in dangerous and asks the woman if she requires medical assistance.

'This is the wrong number to call for a pizza,' the handler says, as the woman insists before replying: 'No. With pepperoni.'

The dispatcher is then heard advising responding officers to turn off their squad car lights and sirens when they get close to the home.
One of the men held over the Sacramento shooting that killed six people on Sunday has now been released after posting at least some of a $500,000 bond.

Daviyonne Dawson, 31, was released from the Sacramento County Jail on Wednesday, two days after being arrested in connection with the shooting.

He was booked on one count of unlawful possession of a weapon but on Wednesday, he was released.

It's unclear if he paid all of the $500,000 bond or just a portion of it.

The other two men arrested are brothers Smiley and Dandrae Martin, aged 27 and 26 respectively.

They remain in custody on gun possession charges.

Police do not believe that Dawson fired his weapon during the brawl but that he was in the same place at the same time and was armed.

Six innocent people were killed when shots rang out near 10th Street and K Street in downtown Sacramento on Sunday shortly after 2am.

Witness video showed rapid gunfire of at least 76 shots ringing out over the course of 54 seconds as people screamed and ran for cover

The shooting broke out at 2.01am in downtown Sacramento after a brawl broke out on 10th Street

Police now say that the shooting was gang-related and likely between two rival groups.

'Evidence in the case indicates that at least five shooters fired guns during the shooting, and that an exchange of gunfire took place between at least two groups of men. As detectives continue to identify shooters and weapons involved, the number of identified shooters may grow beyond five.

'As detectives learn more about the shootings, it is increasingly clear that gang violence is at the center of this tragedy.

'While we cannot at this time elaborate on the precise gang affiliation of individuals involved, gangs and gang violence are inseparable from the events that drove these shootings,' a police press release said.

Police Chief Kathy Lester added: 'This tragedy downtown is a very public example of what families in many of our neighborhoods know too well.

'The suffering inflicted by gang violence does not limit itself to gang members. It spills over to claim and shatter innocent lives and harm our entire community.'

Hours before the shooting, Smiley Martin posted a video online posing with a handgun.

Smiley Martin, 27, is shown (left) in a social media photograph and (right) in his mugshot. Martin was among those injured. He was taken to the hospital but was arrested on Tuesday but has now been booked into the Sacramento County Jail

Smiley Martin, 27, appears in the video holding a black handgun which he pointed towards the camera. One of the guns used in the shooting was a stolen handgun, according to police.

He says little throughout the 38-second clip but other men can be heard in the background. Law enforcement wiped the video from his Facebook account after his arrest on Tuesday.

After he posted, a wild shooting spree broke out on the corner of 10th Street and K Street in Sacramento as bars and nightclubs let out for the night.

Witnesses described shooters firing indiscriminately at one another from cars and men running away from the scene with weapons in their hands.

Six innocent people were killed in the crossfire, including a homeless woman who slept on the streets near where it happened.

Martin was among those injured. He was taken to the hospital b was arrested on Tuesday but has now been booked into the Sacramento County Jail.

His younger brother Dandrae has also been arrested on guns charges. He made his first court appearance in Sacramento yesterday afternoon.

A third suspect has also been arrested; Daviyonne Dawson, 31, is charged with carrying a gun near the scene of the shooting.

None have been charged with manslaughter or murder but the Sacramento District Attorney's Office says it intends to file more charges.

Members of the public who were in the area at the time of the shooting have been asked to submit evidence to the Sacramento Police Department. Since the shooting, they have received more than 170 videos and photos.

Smiley is a career criminal with a lengthy record dating back to 2013, who last year was described by prosecutors as a danger to the community - and someone who should not be freed.

Dandrae Martin, 26, is seen on Tuesday in court in Sacramento (right) He did not enter a plea

'GUNMAN' LET OUT OF PRISON EARLY DESPITE PLEAS FROM DA THAT HE WOULD BREAK THE LAW AGAIN Smiley Martin is a career criminal who was released from prison in February just four years into a 10-year sentence for felony gun and robbery convictions. The decision, made by California's Department of Corrections, was even made over the strenuous objections of the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office, which submitted a letter saying that the man 'displayed a pattern of criminal behavior' and posed a 'significant' danger to the community. A letter from the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office to the Board of Parole Hearings on April 29, 2021, asked for the state DOC to deny Smiley's request for early release from prison 'as he poses a significant, unreasonable risk of safety to the community.' In the letter, Danielle Abildgaard, the deputy district attorney, states that Smiley 'clearly has little regard for human life and the law,' and has displayed a pattern of criminal behavior his entire adult life as he has committed several felony violations. The letter from the DA's office says Smiley had prior felony convictions of robbery and possession of a firearm. He also had a prior misdemeanor conviction of providing false information to police. 'Inmate Martin has demonstrated repeatedly that he cannot follow the laws, or conditions the court places on him,' the letter states. 'His history indicates that he will pursue his own personal agenda regardless of the consequences and regulatory restraints placed upon him. 'If he is released early, he will continue to break the law.' Despite this request, Smiley Martin was released in February, California corrections spokeswoman Dana Simas said, citing pre-sentencing credits for the early release. 'Prior to reaching a CDCR facility, Martin had already received 508 days of pre-sentencing credits, and received a variety of additional post-sentencing credits,' the spokesperson wrote in an email. 'He was released to Sacramento County probation in February 2022.' Advertisement

He was serving a 10-year sentence for domestic violence and assault with great bodily injury, according to the Sacramento Bee.

A letter from the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office to the Board of Parole Hearings on April 29, 2021, asked for the state DOC to deny Smiley's request for early release from prison 'as he poses a significant, unreasonable risk of safety to the community.'

In the letter, Danielle Abildgaard, the deputy district attorney, states that Smiley 'clearly has little regard for human life and the law,' and has displayed a pattern of criminal behavior his entire adult life as he has committed several felony violations.

The letter from the DA's office says Smiley had prior felony convictions of robbery and possession of a firearm. He also had a prior misdemeanor conviction of providing false information to police.

'Inmate Martin has demonstrated repeatedly that he cannot follow the laws, or conditions the court places on him,' the letter states.

'His history indicates that he will pursue his own personal agenda regardless of the consequences and regulatory restraints placed upon him.

'If he is released early, he will continue to break the law.'

Despite this request, Smiley Martin was released in February. 'Prior to reaching a CDCR facility, Martin had already received 508 days of pre-sentencing credits, and received a variety of additional post-sentencing credits,' the spokesperson wrote in an email.

'He was released to Sacramento County probation in February 2022.'

Dandrae was taken to the Sacramento County Jail on Monday night.

He is also being held on an outstanding warrant from the the Riverside County Sheriff's Office, according to inmate records obtained by DailyMail.com.

In a statement on Tuesday morning, Sacramento Police said: 'Smiley Martin was quickly identified as a person of interest and has remained under the supervision of an officer at the hospital while his treatment continues.

Melinda Davis, 57, was sleeping rough in the center of the Californian state capital, and was among those who died in Sunday's shooting in downtown Sacramento

Joshua Hoye-Lucchesi, 32, and Johntaya 'Jojo' Alexander
Several activists were arrested after chaining themselves to the White House fence Wednesday afternoon, demanding that President Biden declare a 'climate emergency' over shifting global temperatures.

Photos and video posted to social media show Secret Service officers responding to the area where at least five climate activists, including scientist Rose Abramoff, had chained themselves to the fence, drawing a crowd.

The agents pushed the crowds back as they cleared the White House grounds and Lafayette Park.

Agents cut the chains some of the activists used to secure themselves to the fences and hauled them off to jail.

Climate activists chained themselves to the White House fence Wednesday, demanding that President Biden declare a 'climate emergency' over shifting global temperatures

One had attached herself to the fence with a bike lock around her neck, and said she had chosen the bike lock out of opposition to cars

One attached herself to the fence with a bike lock around her neck. The activist said she had chosen the bike lock out of opposition to cars.

'This is me saying, 1.5 C [limit for global temp rising],' she told Ford Fischer with News2Share. 'We need to listen to scientists. We need to listen to indigenous people.'

Two other protesters connected themselves inside a PVC tube on the other side of the White House fence.

'We're here to defend the Earth,' one told News2Share. 'Biden needs to step up his game and call a climate emergency.'

The other chimed in that there is value to 'listening to Earth, rather than to people.'

Secret Service agents were seen pushing crowds back and heard yelling, 'You're resisting! This area is closed!' as they threatened arrest.

One told a family, 'Folks have chained themselves to the White House fence, so they're getting arrested. You can't do that. Take this as lesson learned, buddy!' Don't follow their lead!'

As arrests were made throughout the afternoon, some protesters continued to speak out on H Street.

Some of the activists who had chained themselves to the White House fence were cut down by officers and hauled off to jail

As arrests were made throughout the afternoon, protesters continued to speak out on H Street

Protesters connected themselves with chains, bike locks and other material

Two other protesters had connected themselves inside a PVC tube on the other side of the White House fence and said they were defending Earth

Secret Service officers were seen pushing crowds back and heard yelling, 'You're resisting! This area is closed!' as they threatened arrest
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Republicans doubled down on their demand to hold a vote on an amendment that would keep the Title 42 border restrictions in place as part of $10 billion covid funding bill that President Joe Biden wants passed.

'No amendments, no bill,' GOP Senator Mitt Romney, the lead negotiator for Republicans, told reporters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

And Republicans put the blame for the delay in pandemic funding on the White House, calling the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announcement that the Trump-era policy on the border would expire in May 'not helpful.'

'Putting this Title 42 issue out just as we were about to move forward on this $10 billion deal was not helpful,' said GOP Senator Roy Blunt.

He said the issue was going to to get punted to after Congress' two-week Easter recess, pushing a vote on the measure closer to the end of April.

The White House has described the funding measure as 'vital.'

Republican Senators Mitt Romney (left) and Roy Blunt (right) doubled down on their demand to hold a vote on an amendment that would keep the Title 42 border restrictions in the covid funding bill

On Tuesday night, every Republican senator voted against beginning debate on the bill, halting the legislation in its path. Senate Democrats needed 10 Republicans on board for the measure to move forward.

The $10 billion funding measure - which is less than the White House wanted and contained no international aid - got caught up in border politics after the CDC announced on Friday they would rescind the publich health order known as Title 42 on May 23.

Since March 2020, the Department of Homeland Seurity has used the public health order to quickly expel migrants at the border due to health concerns related to the coronavirus pandemic.

Republicans want the order to stay in place. Three GOP-led states are suing to keep it.

The White House slammed Republicans for stopping the legislation.

'It is disappointing that Senate Republicans voted down consideration of a much-needed bill to purchase vaccines, boosters, and life-saving treatments for the American people,' White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement hours after the vote.

'As we have repeatedly said, there are consequences for Congress failing to fund our COVID Response. The program that reimbursed doctors, pharmacists and other providers for vaccinating the uninsured had to end today due to a lack of funds.'

'It is disappointing that Senate Republicans voted down consideration of a much-needed bill to purchase vaccines, boosters, and life-saving treatments for the American people,' White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a Tuesday evening statement after the GOP blocked the $10 billion Covid aid bill in a 47-52 vote

Ahead of the vote, she told DailyMail.com in the daily White House press briefing that Title 42 was health policy and should not be wrapped up in politics.

'This is a decision made by the CDC. Its a public health decision. Its not one that should be wrapped up, of course, in politics,' she said. 'Certainly COVID-19 doesnt look at your party affiliation before it decides to inflict you with the virus.'

Democrat Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon voted with Republicans against moving the bill forward. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer switched his 'yes' vote in a last-minute procedural move to enable him to bring the package back to the floor.

Their fellow Democrat Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey did not vote, according to the Senate Press Gallery.

Schumer said after the vote, 'This is a potentially devastating vote for every single American who was worried about the possibility of a new variant rearing its nasty head within a few months.'

It comes as scientists warn a new sub-variant of the Omicron Covid strain, known as BA.2, could lead to a spike in virus cases in the US after recent waves in Europe and Asia.

One Democrat, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, joined Republicans in blocking the measure. Schumer switched his vote to 'no' in a last-minute procedural move

GOP Leader Mitch McConnell said earlier on Tuesday that there would need to be an amendment keeping Title 42 in place in order for Democrats to pass more Covid aid with the 10 Republican votes they needed to make it happen.

'There'll have to be an amendment on Title 42 in order to move the bill,' McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters on Tuesday. 'We'll need to enter into some kind of agreement to process these amendments in order to go forward with the bill.'

Schumer said that the Covid relief bill should 'not be held hostage' to other proposals.

Lawmakers reached a bipartisan deal to offer $10 billion in additional Covid-19 funding on Monday. The bill funded vaccines, therapeutics and other Covid safety measures domestically, but dropped funding for fighting the pandemic abroad.

'There'll have to be an amendment on Title 42 in order to move the bill,' McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters on Tuesday. 'We'll need to enter into some kind of agreement to process these amendments in order to go forward with the bill'

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said he 'absolutely' wanted a Title 42 amendment to the bill. 'It's utterly insane that the administration claims to be concerned about COVID,' he said. 'At the same time, they've decided just to throw open the doors to illegal aliens who are COVID-positive.'

Title 42 was first implemented by the Trump administration in March 2020 and has been used to expel most migrants at the border. In February, 55 percent of people who arrived at the border were turned away due to the order.

More than 1.6 million migrants - mostly single adults and family units - have been expelled under Title 42 by both Trump and Biden.

In order to pass the $10 billion coronavirus aid deal before April 9, when both chambers go on a two-week break, all 100 senators need to cooperate, potentially giving Republicans leverage to force an amendment vote.

The $10 billion plan is less than half of what the White House originally requested, but some Republicans were prepared to offer nothing as they claimed previous Covid funding had been squandered or still had yet to be spent.

While past Covid-19 relief bills, such as the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, have been saddled with funding for struggling families and businesses, the new deal would be narrowly tailored to public health efforts to fight the virus.

A migrant girl walks through an encampment where she lives along with other migrants that were mostly sent back to Mexico and now they wait to be allowed into the U.S. when Title 42 is lifted, in Reynosa, Mexico, April

Elvia, 9, Sarai, 10, and Yadira, 8, asylum-seekers from Central America, pass their time at a migrant camp at the border where they have lived for months with other migrants that were mostly sent back to Mexico and now they hope to be allowed into the U.S. when Title 42 is lifted, in Reynosa, Mexico, April 1

Migrants that were mostly sent back to Mexico wait to receive a meal prepared by other migrants that live at the encampment yards away from the border as they hope to be allowed into the U.S. when Title 42 is lifted, in Reynosa, Mexico, April 1

Senate Republicans including Mitt Romney, Utah, Richard Burr, N.C. and Roy Blunt, Mo., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., were working with Democrats after the pandemic funding was pulled from the 2022 budget bill. Lead negotiators on the Democratic side were Sens. Chris Coons, Del., Chuck Schumer, N.Y., and Patty Murray, Wash. The new deal could clear the upper chamber as soon as this week.

A number of moderate Democratic senators have opposed the rescission of Title 42, but none have weighed in on the amendment suggestion.

Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema, both Arizona Democrats, put out a statement warning against rolling back the order without a plan to deal with an onset of migrants, and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., said he is discussing with Republicans what to do about the matter.

A number of House Democrats had threatened to vote against the new aid deal without international funding, arguing it was necessary to keep new variants from developing and spreading to the U.S.

But during a Democratic Caucus meeting Tuesday leadership urged them not to vote 'no' on the package. Some have suggested a separate bill on international Covid aid could come up later in the year.

Migrants that were mostly sent back to Mexico pass their time at an encampment yards away from the border while many hope to be allowed into the U.S. when Title 42 is lifted

Biden asked Congress for another $22.5 billion to fight the pandemic, and lawmakers had originally included $15.6 billion in aid as part of the fiscal year 2022 budget bill, meaning it could have passed with a simple majority vote. But the Covid aid was yanked at the last second after progressives protested the pay-fors of the funding - repurposing about $7 billion in leftover state and local Covid relief.

Moderate Republicans who could be swayed to vote for further aid insisted it was paid for, and demanded a full accounting of where other aid money has gone so far.

The new deal set to be announced Monday is paid for by repurposing aid from previous Covid-19 bills, but does not dig into state assistance.
The violent crime wave in New York City shows no signs of abating, according to the latest NYPD statistics, leading the city's top cop to slam the 'continuing and completely unacceptable violence in our streets.'

For the year through April 3, major crimes are up 44 percent from the same period in 2021, with felony assault up 19 percent and robberies rising 47 percent, the latest NYPD data show.

Although murders have ticked down 9 percent, other crimes are well up, with shooting incidents rising 14 percent, burglary up 31 percent, and grand larceny auto soaring 81 percent.

'This is not what New Yorkers expect or deserve, and we will not stand for it,' NYPD Police Commissioner Keechant L. Sewell said at a Wednesday press conference about the latest troubling data.

'It's clear what we are confronting: A perception among criminals that there are no consequences, even for serious crime. We need tangible changes,' added Sewell.

Without naming names or getting into specifics, Sewell appeared to slam the recent trend toward policies such as bail reform, and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg's stance reducing or dropping charges for many crimes.

'[The justice system] must be fair, but it must first and foremost favor the people it was designed to safeguard and protect. When the focus on those people is lost -- New Yorkers, who deserve to be free from fear -- the policies fail to deliver on their most basic purpose, which is public safety,' said Sewell.

'Everyday New Yorkers need more help. Our police need more help. We need help from every corner of the criminal justice system, and from everyone who lives in, works in, or visits our great city,' said Sewell.

In an emotional statement, Sewell recounted numerous recent shootings of children in the city, including the fatal shooting of 12-year-old Kade Lewin last week in Brooklyn.

Sewell insisted that 'preventing and deterring crime remains our commitment' and said that so far this year, there were 335 arrests linked to murders and shootings, up from 257 last year.

The commissioner said that the murder clearance rate stood at 89 percent for the year -- higher than any year-end rate in the CompStat era.

'This is not what New Yorkers expect or deserve, and we will not stand for it,' NYPD Police Commissioner Keechant L. Sewell (center) said at a Wednesday press conference

Chief of Detectives James Essig detailed a number of ongoing investigations

Meanwhile, in the latest shocking example of violent crime in New York, police are seeking an assailant who stabbed a 70-year-old woman in the back in Brooklyn on March 30.

The apparently random attack took place in broad daylight shortly after 1pm, when the unidentified man attack the woman on a sidewalk near Eighth Avenue and 53rd Street.

The woman was rushed to a hospital and is expected to survive.

In another shocking attack, a 60-year-old man in Harlem was bludgeoned with a brick Thursday afternoon after a dispute with a woman at his apartment building. The disturbing incident was captured on surveillance footage.

The elderly victim, who lives in an apartment complex on the corner of Adam Clayton Powell Jr Boulevard and West 132nd St., approached a woman in his building and accused her of stealing packages from the lobby around 3pm, according to the NYPD.

The woman, who remains unidentified, left and came back with two people. One of them started hitting the victim with a brick and his fists in the middle of the street until he crumpled to the ground, video released this week shows.

Emergency medical services responded to the scene and took the victim to Harlem Hospital with severe lacerations; he is in good condition.



The suspect, who remains on the loose as of Wednesday morning, fled south on foot on Seventh Avenue.

In 2021, 20,543 crimes were reported, whereas this year, nearly 30,000 have been reported to the NYPD - an increase of 44 percent.

Crimes in nearly all categories, including felony assaults, shootings, rape and robbery, have risen in comparison to last year except the city's murder rate.

Felony assaults have increased by 19.1 percent. In the same period in 2021, 4,673 assaults were reported, while this year, 5,673 have been reported.

Shootings are getting worse despite the state's strict gun laws. Compared to the same period last year when 290 shootings were reported, this year's numbers have gone up a staggering 14.5 percent - 332 shootings have been reported so far in 2022.

Last year, 354 rapes were reported over the same period as this year, 410.

Robberies are by far the most common crime in the city. An astonishing 47 percent increase has seen 3,945 robberies committed so far this year. In 2021, over the same time period, 2,680 had been committed.

The latest crime surge comes after Mayor Eric Adams last month promised a designated subway police task force to tackle crime and homelessness in stations and on trains.

Adams, a Democrat and former NYPD captain, was elected on a vow to crack down on crime and clean up the city.
The Pentagon revealed on Wednesday it is training Ukrainians in the use of 'kamikaze' Switchblade drones, single use weapons that fly into their targets and detonate on impact.

The U.S. has been careful not to allow Russia to accuse it of escalating the conflict in Ukraine. And officials have been careful to avoid questions about training soldiers to use the billions of dollars in gear being delivered to Ukraine.

But Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said that the Switchblade was not a system familiar to Ukrainian forces.

'So there is going to need to be a little bit of training,' he said.

'It is not a very complex system that doesn't require a lot of training.

'An individual could be suitably trained on how to use the switchblade drone in about two days or so.'

The administration has already sent 100 series 300 Switchblade drones, which are designed to attack personnel and light vehicles with a warhead carrying the equivalent power to a 40mm grenade.

On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the latest shipment will include the Switchblade-600.

Ukrainian soldiers are being trained in how to use Switchblade drones, like the one being fired here from a launch tube by a rifleman with the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby confirmed that a small number of Ukrainian personnel already in the US were being trained in the use of Switchblade drones

Ukrainian forces have proven adept at stopping Russian armored vehicles with armor-piercing weapons sent by the U.S. and other partner nations. The latest US assessment revealed that Russia has now pulled all its forces back from Kyiv to be reequipped and redeployed

SOPHISTICATED SWITCHBLADES ARE EASY TO USE SWITCHBLADE 600 Can pierce armored vehicles Weighs 50lbs Hovers above targets for 40 minutes Can travel 25 miles Top speed of 115mph Can be aborted at the last minute SWITCHBLADE 300 Designed to kill people and passengers Weighs 5.5lbs Hovers above targets for 15 minutes Can travel 6 miles Top speed of 100mph Can be aborted at the last minute Can fit in a rucksack Costs $6,000 Advertisement

The 50lb drones can fly 24 miles, 'loiter' above a target for 40 minutes before flying into them at 115mph and exploding using special armor-piercing warheads that can destroy a tank.

Both models have been likened to 'flying shotguns' and have been selected for use in Ukraine because of their ease of use and deployment, with the drones able to take off from portable tubes planted on the ground.

Switchblade 300s were first deployed in secret in Afghanistan in 2010 to fight the Taliban, and were deemed a huge success.

Kirby said the training involved a small number of Ukrainians who were already in the country for regular military education programs before the Russian invasion on February 24.

He said they would be able to train other personnel when they return.

Washington pulled its military advisers from Ukraine ahead of the invasion, to avoid any direct confrontation with Russian forces.

Meanwhile, on day 42 of the invasion, a senior defense official said Russia appeared to have completed its withdrawal from around the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.

Forces had been pulled back to Russia and Belarus and were expected to be reequipped and redeployed to the eastern Donbas region, according to the latest assessments.

Over the weekend, Ukraine said its forces had seized back all areas around Kyiv, claiming complete control of the capital region for the first time since Russia launched the invasion.

'We are assessing that all the Russians have left,' said the official.

Senior U.S. intelligence officials say they believe Moscow planned to capture Kyiv within 48 hours of invading in the hope they could quickly then pacify the entire country.

Out of the 130 Russian battalion tactical groups that were sent to Ukraine for the invasion, more than 80 still remained in the country, according to the official.

'Our assessment is that they won't want to spend too much refitting and resupplying because they have made a very public show of saying that theyre going to prioritize their efforts on the Donbas region,' the official said.

Towns around Kyiv bear the scars of weeks of fierce fighting. And some - such as Bucha - have revealed evidence that civilians were killed in war crimes.

'Clearly a message was sent to the world of Russia's brutality, and thats the message that should not be forgotten here,' said the official.

Russia has claimed that the pictures of dead bodies were staged in order to justify more sanctions on Moscow.

But satellite images have suggested bodies had been left in the streets for weeks.

'When you see individuals with their hands tied behind their backs and evidence of being shot in the head, that certainly appears to be premeditated, it appears to be planned, it certainly appears to be very, very deliberate,' the U.S. official said.
Kim Kardashian has come under fire for comments she made on a podcast Wednesday about the 2020 execution of convicted killer Brandon Bernard, who she had campaigned to save.

During the appearance on progressive political commentator Van Jones' Amazon Original podcast, Uncommon Ground, Kardashian recalled the events leading up to Bernard's death on December 9, 2020 - and how it affected her.

I was working on the Brandon Bernard case, and he was, in fact, executed, and I remember crying and feeling so helpless,' Kardashian, 41, told Jones, during a discussion about her recent law pursuits and work to free imprisoned individuals.

'It was his last phone call, and he was telling me, like, Dont cry, its gonna be okay,' Kardashian said, recalling her last conversation with Bernard, who was 18 when he and four other teens abducted and robbed a couple in Texas in 1999. The gang then fatally shot the pair and set their car ablaze with the two still inside and the woman possibly still alive.

The Supreme Court had the final decision to put the 40-year-old convict to death by lethal injection.

Kardashian told Jones about Bernard's previously aired concerns that he would feel claustrophobic while strapped in the injection chair affected her day.

You know, hearing that he was worried that hed be claustrophobic in the chair... moments like that  Im like, if only someone could see my day,' Kardashian gushed.

The reality star then recalled how the weight of the looming execution impeded her ability to pose for a shoot for her underwear company, Skims.

'Im like hysterically crying, calling every governor that I could possibly imagine to try to stop someones execution, and then I have to run into, you know, a Skims fitting, and Im fitting and Im crying and I cant really get my work done, and then I have to, you know - it was just such a whirlwind of a day, Kardashian said.

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During the appearance on Van Jones' Uncommon Ground, Kim Kardashian recalled the events leading up to Bernard's death on December 9, 2020 - and how it affected her own day

The comments quickly inspired a firestorm on social media, with many lambasting the star for seemingly making the execution about herself.

'Only Kim Kardashian could make a criminals execution all about herself,' conservative activist Jack Posobiec, 36, tweeted after the podcast aired Wednesday morning.

He sarcastically added, 'And she even worked in a Skims promo.'

Others were also quick to hone in on Kardashian's seemingly insensitive comments.

'We may have to have a moment of silence for interruption of her day rather than the man who died,' one user sneered.

Kardashian recalled her last conversation with Bernard, who was was 18 when he and four other teens abducted and robbed a couple in Texas in 1999, and described his execution as a 'whirlwind of a day'

The comments quickly inspired a firestorm on social media, with many lambasting the star for seemingly making the execution about herself - including conservative commentator Jack Posobiec

Posobiec also poked fun at Kardashian's revelation that the impending execution affected her ability to do a shoot for her underwear line, Skims

'Better not miss that Skims fitting,' another joked.

'So glad kanye is away from this sickness,' someone else wrote, referencing Kardashian's ongoing split with rapper Kanye West.

'I wish I could be so clueless,' someone else wrote. 'Life would always be so grand.'

'He should have hired a real lawyer,' another joked.

A further user wrote: 'I mean Comon [sic] everyone it was a tough day she had to fit in a fitting in between all this.'

Kardashian, who has been an outspoken advocate of criminal justice reform in recent years, fought fervently to commute Bernard's sentence leading up to his death.

Bernard was 18 when he and robbed and killed Todd and Stacie Bagley, a devout Christian couple, on their way from a Sunday service in Killeen, Texas, in 1999.

According the Associated Press, Bernard spoke for three minutes right before his death, saying he had been waiting for this chance to say he was sorry - not only to the victims' family, but also for the pain he caused his own family.

In his final words, Bernard addressed the families of Todd and Stacie Bagley through the window, telling them 'I'm sorry.

'Thats the only words that I can say that completely capture how I feel now and how I felt that day,' he added.

He remained calm as the curtain was lifted around the death chamber and journalists in the press pool claimed he nodded at them in greeting and showed no signs of fear.

The execution was delayed from 6pm after Bernard's legal team pushed a final appeal, which was dismissed by the Supreme Court.

Social media users were quick to hone in on Kardashian's seemingly insensitive comments

After the execution, held at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, one of the victims' mothers, Georgia Bagley, told onlookers that she forgave Brown, and that his apology 'helped very much to heal my heart' after waiting 21 years for justice.

The families and friends of the Bagleys welcomed the 'closure needed to move on in life' following his death.

'It has been very difficult to wait 21 years for the sentence that was imposed by the judge and jury on those who cruelly participated in the destruction of our children to be finally completed,' said Bagley.

'This senseless act of unnecessary evil was premeditated and had many opportunities to be stopped at any time during a 9-hour period. This was torture as they pleaded for their lives in the trunk of their own car.

'Please remember that the lives of family and friends were shattered and we have all grieved for 21 years waiting for justice to finally be served.'

Following Brandon's death, Kardashian slammed the U.S. justice system, branding it *f***ed up'.

Kardashian has fought for clemency for a slew of other death-row inmates in recent years. Some have proved successful.

Texas mother Melissa Lucio, 53, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on April 27 after she said she 'falsely' confessed following hours of police interrogation to beating her two-year-old daughter to death.

Kardashian has fought for clemency for a slew of other death-row inmates in recent year - with many of the campaigns proving surprisingly successful - with the most recent being a Texas mother, Melissa Lucio, due to be executed in 21 days after she confessed to beating to death one of her daughters. Pictured: Lucio holds her deceased daughter Mariah, while one of her other daughters, Adriana, stands next to them in this undated photograph before the murder

Lucio dabs tears from her eyes as she is sentenced to death on July 10, 2008, in Brownsville, Texas. She is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on April 27 after she 'falsely' pleaded guilty to beating her two-year-old daughter to death following hours of police interrogation

Lucio maintains she is innocent and her lawyers contend Mariah died from injuries from a fall down 14 steps of a steep staircase outside the family's apartment in the South Texas city of Harlingen.

During five hours of questioning, Lucio more than 100 times denied fatally beating the toddler to death. But worn down from a lifetime of abuse and the grief of losing her daughter, her lawyers said, the Texas woman finally acquiesced to investigators at 3am on February 17, 2007.

'I guess I did it,' Lucio said. Her lawyers said that statement was wrongly interpreted by prosecutors as a murder confession.

Kardashian has urged Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to grant Lucio clemency after she 'falsely pleaded guilty' following hours of police interrogation.

'It's stories like Melissa's that make me speak so loud about the death penalty in general and why it should be banned when innocent people are suffering,' Kardashian said.

Lucio, who has been on death row for more than 14 years, had been sexually assaulted multiple times, starting at age 6, and had been abused by two husbands. Her lawyers said this lifelong trauma made her susceptible to giving a false confession.

They are also hopeful that public support spurred by Kardashian's stance on the case will persuade the state's Board of Pardons and Paroles and Abbott to grant an execution reprieve or commute her sentence.

Kardashian also called for clemency for 26-year-old truck driver Rogel Aguilera-Mederos whose brake failure caused a fiery crash that killed four people, and who was sentenced to 110 years in prison.

Rogel Aguilera-Mederos, 26, was driving a semi-truck on April 25, 2019, along Interstate 70 in Lakewood, Colorado, when he slammed into two dozen vehicles - including four other transporters stuck in rush-hour traffic.

The impact caused a fireball explosion that incinerated cars and trucks, killing four people. On October 15, a jury found him guilty, and on December 13 he was sentenced to 110 years by Judge A. Bruce Jones - the minimum allowed by Colorado's sentencing laws.

But in December, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis reduced the sentence to 10 years. Kardashian thanked the governor for the move.

Rogel Aguilera-Mederos, 26, was driving a semi-truck on April 25, 2019, along Interstate 70 in Lakewood, Colorado, when he slammed into two dozen vehicles - including four other transporters stuck in rush-hour traffic. Four people were killed. He is pictured at his December 13 sentencing

The impact caused a fireball explosion that incinerated cars and trucks, killing four people. The driver was convicted of 27 criminal counts and sentenced to 110 years

In October 2017 Kardashian also heard the story of Alice Marie Johnson, sentenced to life in prison in 1997 after a conviction on eight criminal counts for a first-time, non-violent drug offense.

'Life offered me no opportunity for parole because there is not parole in the prison system,' Johnson said in a video posted on Twitter.

Kardashian retweeted the clip, commenting: 'This is so unfair...'

On May 30, 2018 - Johnson's 63rd birthday - Kardashian went to the White House to meet then-President Donald Trump about prison reform and seek a pardon for Johnson. One week later, she was pardoned.

Within a year, she had worked to pardon 19 people, according to BuzzFeed.

In January last year, Trump included another man Kardashian had advocated for on his list of pardons - Chris Young, who the reality TV star had been lobbying for since 2018.

Young was 22 when, due to the 'three strikes' law, he received a life sentence without parole for the non-violent offenses of marijuana and cocaine possession.

Trump commuted the remainder of Young's sentence.
A jury found Sarah Lawrence 'sex cult' leader Larry Ray guilty on all 15 counts after only a few hours of deliberation, for exploiting his daughter's college friends to control them and fulfill an insatiable desire for power, money and sex.

Lawrence 'Larry' Ray, 62, stood motionless with his arms at his sides as the verdict was read. He faces the possibility of life in prison when he is sentenced by Judge Lewis Liman on September 16.

The verdict comes after jurors heard weeks of testimony that chronicled Ray's psychologically manipulative relationship with young people he met in fall 2010 at Sarah Lawrence College, a small New York liberal arts school. Ray moved into his daughter's dorm after finishing a prison stint for a securities fraud conviction.

Larry Ray, 62, faces the possibility of life in prison when he is sentenced by Judge Lewis Liman on September 16

Although he did not testify, Ray maintained through his lawyers that he was not guilty of the 15 counts he faced, including racketeering, sex trafficking, conspiracy and several financial crimes.

A 12-person jury began deliberations at 4:15pm Tuesday in Manhattan federal court and reached a verdict around 3pm on Wednesday.

After the verdict was read, Ray was returned to custody, where he had been since his early 2020 arrest.

His lawyers declined comment outside court and did not immediately return email messages seeking comment.

In a statement, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said Ray had changed 'a group of friends who had their whole lives ahead of them.'

'For the next decade, he used violence, threats, and psychological abuse to try to control and destroy their lives,' Williams said. 'He exploited them. He terrorized them. He tortured them. Let me be very clear. Larry Ray is a predator. An evil man who did evil things. Today's verdict finally brings him to justice.'

Twice, the trial was interrupted when Ray was taken to the hospital in an ambulance for undisclosed illnesses.

During the trial, some victims testified that Ray had made them believe they had poisoned or otherwise harmed him and they needed to pay him back.

One woman testified that she became a sex worker to try to pay reparations to Ray after he convinced her that she had poisoned him. She said that, over four years, she gave Ray $2.5 million in installments that averaged between $10,000 and $50,000 per week.

But Ray's lawyers maintained he was victimized by former friends who fabricated their stories, and that the young people who he had moved in with in his daughter's dorm made him feel paranoid and under attack.

'Everyone was out to get him, Larry believed,' Federal Defender Marne Lenox said, portraying his daughter's friends as 'storytellers' who he believed had intentionally poisoned him.

Lawrence 'Larry' Ray, 62, listens as the verdict is read Wednesday. He was found guilty on all 15 counts, including racketeering, sex trafficking, conspiracy and several financial crimes

The verdict comes after jurors heard weeks of testimony that chronicled Ray's psychologically manipulative relationship with young people he met at Sarah Lawrence College

Several students testified that they were drawn into Ray's world as he told them stories of his past influence in New York City politics, including his role in ruining the career of former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik after serving as the best man at his wedding years earlier.

Ray had, in fact, been a figure in the corruption investigation that derailed Kerik's nomination to lead the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Kerik told the Daily Beast following the verdict that this conviction 'is the only good thing that's come out of this trial. He tortured those kids.... It's difficult for many people to understand how he could do this. But I think people like me people he conned and betrayed, we understand.'

Some of the students agreed to live with Ray in the summer of 2011 at his Manhattan one-bedroom apartment, where his sinister side emerged as he started to claim the students had poisoned and harmed him or his property.

To make amends, they testified, they did what he asked, including turning over money. One man said he gave Ray over $100,000.

Prosecutors said the money was never enough.

Through threats and violence and videotaped 'confessions,' Ray tightened his hold on the young people, including forcing them into landscaping and other work at the Pinehurst, North Carolina home of his stepfather for weeks in 2013, they said.

The abuse culminated in October 2018 when Ray for hours repeatedly abused Claudia Drury, the woman who gave him her proceeds from sex work, forcing her to be tied naked to a chair while he berated her, choked her with a leash and made her fear for her life by putting a bag over her head, prosecutors said.

'This single night of crime tells you almost all you need to know,' Assistant US Attorney Mollie Bracewell told Manhattan federal court jurors.

Drury told the court how Ray (right) allegedly forced her into a life of prostitution, abused her, and threatened to kill her after ingratiating himself with her and her friends when she was a student at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York

Across days of testimony, alleged sex cult victim Claudia Drury told the court that she had been forced into a life of prostitution and handed over more than a million dollars to Ray

Ray carried out his crimes with help from his daughter and Isabella Pollok, a woman who has pleaded not guilty to criminal charges, prosecutors said. Her trial is set for later this year. The daughter has not been charged.

The defense argued in closing on Tuesday that Drury who testified that Ray tortured her in a New York City hotel room, 'enjoyed sex and BDSM', 'went to sex clubs' and 'has problems with truth telling.'

Ray's lawyer said it was her decision to be an escort.

When Drury broke contact with Ray, he didn't go after her, Lenox told jurors. She said that it's up to the jury to review Drury's credibility, adding that she has problems with truth telling. Lenox said Drury is 'not credible,' arguing that there was 'no assault in the Gregory Hotel.'

In a rebuttal summation, Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon criticized the defense for saying that multiple victims lied about their experiences during most of a decade with Ray.

Ray's lawyer, Marne Lenox, concluded closing arguments Tuesday, telling jurors that Claudia Drury 'enjoyed sex and BDSM', 'went to sex clubs' and 'has problems with truth telling'

Judge Lewis Liman on Tuesday charging the jury in the 'sex cult' case. The jury is expected to deliberate today

After three weeks of often harrowing and graphic testimony, and a plethora of witnesses for the prosecution  including four former 'cult members'  the defense case lasted barely two hours and called just two witnesses.

Forensic cell phone analyst John B. Minor, attempted to cast doubt on the credibility of government maps that tracked cell phone activity and appeared to incriminate Ray and co-conspirator Pollok by putting them in the same place as Drury at key times.

Across several days of testimony Drury told the court that she was forced into a life of prostitution and handed over more than a million dollars to Ray by way of 'reparations' for wrongs he coerced her into believing herself guilty.

On Monday, jurors heard that the data was unreliable but under cross examination the quality of Minor's conclusions was undermined leaving it unclear what, if any, gains his testimony had made.

Claudia Drury testifies at trial for Larry Ray on March 21, 2022

Drury (pictured in a court sketch in March) told jurors at Manhattan Federal Court how how she went from naive college student to a life of prostitution

The 31-year-old witness (pictured outside court in March) took the stand to describe the alleged gas-lighting, physical and sexual abuse that she claims she suffered at Ray's hands

The defense had initially hoped to introduce an 'advice of counsel' defense with attorney Glenn Ripa's testimony, arguing that Ray acted in good faith collecting 'reparations' from students including Drury and not paying taxes on them having been told that those actions were legal by Ripa.

Lewis did not allow this, finding that Ripa's testimony  which he described as 'all over the place'  fell far short of reaching that bar.

Instead, Ripa could only testify that he told Ray that reparations for personal damages were not considered taxable income and that he understood Drury to have confessed to having poisoned Ray. But on cross-examination, the prosecution established that the attorney had no records regarding this 'advice,' and made no mention of it to the defense before March 30 this year.

Under intense questioning Ripa went on to admit that he had no idea Ray was already taking money from Drury when he allegedly advised him and that he had no clue that the sums of money involved ran to more than $2million.

Yalitza Rosario, Felicia Rosario, Santos Rosario. Felicia, 39, told the court how she saw herself as Ray's 'wife' only recently realizing their relationship was a sham. Yalitza, 32, testified that her relationship with Ray 'tore her world apart' and led to her mental breakdown. Santos, 30, told of violent physical abuse, coercion, extortion to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars

In closing arguments Monday, Assistant US Attorney Mollie Bracewell sought to strip back a case that has been often dumbfounding in detail and refocus the jury on what, she maintained, was at the heart of it.

Ray, she told the court, had presided over a criminal organization that existed entirely for his benefit. He used trust to assume power and mounted a campaign of terror, sustained over close to ten years, to induce confessions and turn the students of Sarah Lawrence into 'piggy banks.'

She replayed some of the most disturbing audio and video: Santos Rosario, 30, being beaten with a hammer by Ray whose blows rained down again and again; Daniel Levin being tortured with pliers clamped to his tongue and a hammer thrust beneath his chin or into his torso.

Felicia Rosario (pictured arriving court earlier this week) told jurors how she came to realize her 'romance' with alleged sex cult leader Larry Ray was a sham

Felicia, 39, told the court how she regarded herself as Ray's 'wife' only recently realizing their relationship was a sham

And she reminded the jury of the night when Ray and Pollok subjected Drury to hours of torture in her room at Manhattan's Gregory Hotel.

On that night Ray stripped Drury naked, tied her to a chair and repeatedly suffocated her with a plastic bag, choked her with a leash, poured water over her while sitting her in the frigid blast of an AC unit and cut her hair with souvenir scissors that had been a gift from a client and she had kept because she thought them pretty.

They did it because Drury - by then a prostitute - had become too close to the client, Bracewell said, and had to be 'brought to heel.'

Jurors heard audio of this sustained attack during Drury's testimony.

At one point Ray can be heard asking Pollok to pass him the plastic bag  'an instrument of torture,' Bracewell said  at another Drury can be heard choking.

'You can listen to it again,' Bracewell told the jury Monday afternoon and added, 'If you are able.'

The night, she said, was 'a snapshot' that told them 'almost everything' they needed to know about Ray and his crimes.

The effect was powerful and immediate. Jurors sat riveted, some took notes.

Larry Ray's sex trafficking trial was halted after the accused sex cult leader suffered another medical emergency in court

Isabella Pollok is accused of being Ray's 'lieutenant' and conspirator

Ray ultimately ingratiated himself with his daughter Talia's friends at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, including Santos Rosario (pictured left with Talia) Daniel Levin, Felicia Rosario (right) and Isabella Pollok

Ray, Bracewell told them, was at the head of a criminal structure that had a hierarchy, a group of followers and an anointed few  his 'lieutenant' Pollok and his daughter Talia Ray. Both, she argued, were complicit in his crimes.

This was all about the control that Ray 'ruthlessly and relentlessly' pursued over Drury, Levin and the Rosario siblings.

Sarah Lawrence College is an elite liberal arts college in Bronxville, just north of New York City

Lenox concluded Tuesday that it was all about 'storytelling' and storytellers who lost track of the difference between truth and fiction.

They all, she said, 'believed'  Ray included. Ray believed he was the victim of a massive conspiracy, that he had been poisoned and was due reparations.

The students turned his villains into their own and spun tall tales that they themselves came to believe.

'Some people' she admitted 'thought Lawrence Ray was crazy.' But others did not. Others believed in the world in which, she maintained, Ray and the students lived.

She said, 'That world may not be one that you or I can ever hope to understand but for the defendant and others, through the looking glass, this world was real.'
A mother in Alabama, whose body was found six days after she was last seen going to pick up her four-year-old daughter, was allegedly so terrified of her 'abusive' ex that she asked her father to bring a gun to child custody exchanges.

The remains of 37-year-old Cassie Carli were found in a shallow grave close to a barn in St Clair County, Alabama, last Saturday night - 300 miles away from where she was last seen in Navarre Beach, Florida, on March 27.

Santa Rosa County Sheriff Bob Johnson said on Sunday that Carli had been identified by a tattoo, according to Fox13. The grim discovery came hours after her ex Marcus Spanevelo, 34, was arrested in connection with her disappearance.

Carli, of Navarre Beach, had gone Saturday night to pick up the couple's daughter, Saylor, who was found safe in Birmingham, Ala., then disappeared.

The next morning, a series of bizarre texts were sent to her family from her phone.

Now, in a recent interview with The Sun, Carli's younger sister, Raenne, said Spanevelo was an 'extremely abusive' narcissist who scared Carli.

She said her sister once warned her: 'If something should happen to me, it was him.'

Cassie Carli, 37, was found dead in a shallow grave last Saturday night. The Florida mom disappeared on March 27 after going to collect daughter Saylor, 4, from her ex Marcus Spanevelo in a child custody exchange

Carli's body was found this weekend in St. Clair County, Alabama, where Spanevelo allegedly spent the past several weeks helping to renovate a house about 150 yards away

Marcus Spanevelo, 34, who has been described as 'abusive' by Carli's sister, Raenne, was arrested and now is fighting extradition from Tennessee. He has been charged with tampering with evidence, providing false information concerning a missing person investigation, and destruction of evidence but not of murder as of yet

'He was never physical with her or put his hands on her, but he knew she feared him and I think he used that against her,' Raeanne said. 'But he would also be kind to her sometime and try to get her to bring her to guard down.'

Raeanne added that Spanevelo's emotions would often vary drastically, comparing them to a rollercoaster ride, as they were 'just up and down and unpredictable.'

'She would be on alert because of it. Because there were times when he would erupt and be in certain moods on certain weeks.'

'Cassie would say he was being crazy and would sometimes ask my dad to come to a child swap with her, telling him "please bring your gun", because he has a concealed carry,' she revealed.

But the victim's father, Andrew, had stopped attending child custody exchanges with his daughter.

Prior to her death, Spanevelo had been renovating a house about 150 yards away from the barn where her remains were found. He was arrested on Saturday morning in Lebanon, Tennessee, and was charged with tampering with evidence, providing false information concerning a missing person investigation, and destruction of evidence. He appeared in court on Monday and is awaiting extradition.

Her sister said Spanevelo 'never laid a hand on Cassie,' but was verbally abusive to her and would often give her unpleasant looks.

'It may have been something small, but it was the way he would say things to her and the way he looked at her that would freak her out,' Raeanne further told The Sun.

'He was just eerie ... she would tell me, 'he's got this look in his eye and it's just frightening.''

Cassie and Spanevelo locked horns in a bitter custody battle over their daughter. He apparently owed the mother $6,000 in child support

Carli with her daughter, Saylor. The youngster was discovered with her dad earlier this week, and is safe

She claimed that prior to her sister's disappearance, Carli had obtained a court order compelling her ex-boyfriend to pay her $6,000 in child support. Spanevelo also 'filed dozens of false police reports' and phoned child protective services 'so many times, I nearly came to know most of the staff by name,' Carli once wrote in a Go Fund Me page, 'Help Cassie with Legal Fees.'

Raeann, who lives in North Carolina, told NBC's Dateline that Cassie and her ex typically met at a Walmart in Destin, halfway between Navarre and Panama City, where Spanevelo lives, to drop off Saylor.

But for an unknown reason, they decided at the last minute to change their meeting place Sunday.

Nearly four hours after Carli went to pick up Saylor, her father, with whom she lives in Navarre Beach, received text messages from his daughter's phone, telling him that she was having problems with her phone and her car.

'I'm freaking out case call me as soon as you get this message,' Andrew wrote to his daughter.

He then received an answer from his daughter's number, which read: 'I'm sorry, car was acting up and I broke my phone. Marcus is working on it. I will stay at his place tonight.'

Raeanne and her father did not believe that it was Carli who sent that reply.

'If she was having troubles she would never seek help from him, that's just crazy,' Raeanne said, referring to Spanevelo. 'She would walk next door to the restaurant before she asked him for anything.'

She also took to Facebook Messenger to ask her sister's ex where her niece, Saylor, was: 'Is saylor with you? Please marcus... this is NOT like my sister! She has been doing great & was supposed to start a new job!! I hope you will at least cooperate with the police/let them know you have Saylor. she is now a missing person.'

Marcus answered: 'Saylor is with me...she wanted to be dropped off in the middle of nowhere in Destin with saylor..I told her I wouldn't let saylor go like that..to give me an address and I'd take them to it...yeah, cops already called me and might call again for more question...if they do, I will...apparently everybody will be asking me that...so I'll just copy and paste what I told your father.'

A bizarre text message sent from Carli's phone on the night she was reported missing was sent to her father's phone

Spanevelo failed to provide any details about Carli's location, but reassured Raeanne that their daughter, Saylor, was safe

Johnson said Spanevelo had 'absolutely not' been cooperative following his arrest over Carli's disappearance Saturday.

He tore into the suspect, saying he hopes Spanevelo is executed for the crime. 'It's your baby's mother who's missing and you're not going to cooperate with authorities, it's kind of telltale.'

'We hated that Cassie has passed away, but it's good to get closure for the family. Johnson said. It's good to keep this dirtbag in jail, where he belongs.

'I think we have a great case and I think he's either going to spend the rest of his life in jail or get the needle. Hopefully, the needle.'

Carli was pregnant with Spanevelo's child only two months after the former couple started dating

Carli and Spanevelo initially met in 2018 and soon fell into a serious relationship; Carlie got pregnant two months after the pair started dating.

Raeanne said that her sister wanted out five months into her pregnancy.

'During my pregnancy, this mans abusive control and manipulation escalated. But having battled infertility in my first marriage, I desperately wanted a family. So, I justified his erratic behavior as long as I could,' she wrote on her Go Fund Me page.

'There were just too many red flags,' Raeanne said. 'She would tell us, "he's controlling me; he's trying to manipulate me; I don't want to be with him."'

'But even after she broke up with him, she was hopeful that maybe they could figure out a way to co-parent together and stay civilized,' she added.

Prior to her death, Carli and Spanevelo were engaged in an intense custody battle. Spanevelo had previously attempted to patch things with his ex, who was not interested in rekindling their romance, according to the victim's sister
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The 25-year-old woman convicted of manslaughter after she encouraged her boyfriend to kill himself has been spotted for the first time since being released early for good behavior.

Michelle Carter, of Plainville, Massachusetts, was spotted doing yard work outside her home with short, bleach blonde hair and wearing black shorts and a Falmouth University hoodie.

Wednesday's appearance comes days after a new miniseries - The Girl from Plainville, starring Elle Fanning and Chloe Sevigny - premiered on Hulu, portraying the real life events that led Carter, then 17, to goad Conrad Roy III, 18, to go through with his suicide via phone calls and texts when he was having second thoughts.

Michelle Carter, 25, was pictured for the first time on Wednesday in two years after being released early for good behavior in 2020, serving only 11 months of a 15-month sentence for the 2014 manslaughter of her boyfriend, Conrad Roy III

Carter was seen doing yard work with short, bleach blonde hair while wearing black shorts and a Falmouth University hoodie

It was unknown where Carter currently lives, but the photos of her doing yard work confirms she's still in her Plainview home

Carter was convicted of manslaughter in 2017 for her role in Conrad Roy III's (pictured) suicide. Call logs and text messages showed Carter, then 17, goaded Roy into going through with his suicide when he was having second thoughts

Carter was released early from Bristol County Jail for good behavior on January 23, 2020 (pictured)

Carter was last pictured leaving jail on January 23, 2020, and it was unknown if she was still living in Plainville - but the recent photos confirm she's now back home living with her parents, Gail and David Carter.

Carter was convicted of manslaughter in 2017 for her role in his suicide on July 12, 2014, and sentenced to 15 months in prison following a lengthy, high-profile court case.

She was released four months early after earning credit for good behavior.

Roy's mother, Lynn St Denis, said she was speaking with her troubled son on the day of his death when he interrupted her to check on a text message from his car, believed to be the text of Carter telling Roy to go through with his suicide when he expressed doubts about killing himself and leaving his loved ones behind, People Magazine reported.

After walking out the door, Roy got in his pickup truck, drove to a nearby Kmart and parked behind the store. There, he rigged his vehicle to fill the cabin with carbon monoxide.

The outing on Wednesday comes days after Hulu premiered The Girl from Plainville, a miniseries crime drama that portrayed Carter and Roy's relationship and the events leading up to his death

Carter was seen silently doing some yard work, blowing away leaves and picking up twigs, outside her home in Plainview

Although it is unknown which college Carter graduated from, the hoodie suggests she attended Falmouth University

Evidence presented at the trial showed Carter had goaded Roy to commit suicide when he was having doubts

The trail was widely known as the 'Suicide Texting Case.' Carter (right) is pictured with her lawyer moments before she was sentenced to 15-month in prison in 2017 for manslaughter for her role in Roy's death

Elle Fanning (center) played Carter in the new Hulu series, The Girl From Plainville, which premiered last week

As Roy was slowly poisoning himself, he had a momentary change of heart and got out of the vehicle, but phone records presented at Carter's trial revealed that she called her boyfriend and urged him to get back inside his truck.

Other evidence included text messages that Carter, then 17, sent to Conrad earlier in the day, as he was sitting in the car during the outing with his mother.

In those texts, Carter told the depressed teen: 'You just need to do it, Conrad...No more pushing it off. No more waiting.'

She also had suggested to him several methods of suicide, 'why don't you just drink bleach? Hang yourself...jump over a building, stab yourself, idk.' there's a lot of ways.'

When Roy continued to show hesitance, Carter texted, 'You'd better not be bulls******* me and just pretending. Tonight is the night, it's now or never,' according to court documents.

Carter never called authorities or Roy's parents as he died. She later texted his mother to express her sympathy, but made no mention of having prior knowledge of Roy's plans to kill himself.

According to prosecutors, Carter told a friend that she could have stopped Roy in the moments leading up to his death as she wrote: 'His death is my fault. Like, honestly I could have stopped it.

'I was the one on the phone with him and he got out of the car because [it] was working and he got scared and I f***ing told him to get back in ... because I knew that he would do it all over again the next day and I couldn't have him live the way he was living anymore.

'Like, I should have did more. And it's all my fault because I could have stopped him but I f***ing didn't. And all I had to say was I love you and don't do this one more time and he'd still be here.'

Lynn St Denis (above), Roy's mother, opened up about the case ahead of the eighth anniversary of his death

Roy (pictured) was talking with his mother when he reportedly recieved one of Carter's texts in support of his suicide. His family has since been lobbying for the passage of Conrad's Law, which would make Massachusetts the 43rd state to criminalize suicide coercion and make it punishable by up to five years in prison

The young couple (portrayed in the Hulu series above) met in Florida in 2012, but had only seen each other in person a handful of times even though they lived just 35 miles apart in Massachusetts

Carter's defense insisted that Roy was on the path to take his own life for years, and that it was his idea to commit suicide

The young couple met in Florida in 2012, but had only seen each other in person a handful of times even though they lived just 35 miles apart in Massachusetts  Roy in Mattapoisett and Carter in Plainville. They communicated mostly through text messages and phone calls.

In dozens of those texts and calls, Carter encouraged Roy to take his own life.

During her high-profile trial in 2017, prosecutors argued that Carter played a 'sick game' with another person's life to get attention.

Carter's defense attorney insisted that Roy was on the path to take his own life for years, and that it was his idea to commit suicide, not hers. The lawyer also noted that his client had her own mental health issues and was taking medications that may have clouded her judgment.

In the end, Carter was found guilty of manslaughter. In 2019, she entered the Bristol County jail in Dartmouth, Massachusetts to begin serving her 15-month sentence.

Conrad Roy Jr, the dead teen's father, said seeing Carter brought to justice 'doesn't matter.' He added, 'Nothing's going to bring my son back.'

St Denis, however, said she was both 'surprised' and 'satisfied' that Carter was convicted and given prison time for her son's death.

'I wish I knew how he felt when she was messaging that whole month [before Conrad died],' she said. 'I wish I knew what he was thinking. Was she really a friend, or did she really care about him? I mean, for someone to do what she did, how could he think that she cared?'

St Denis' said her focus now is not on Carter, but on her work lobbying for the passage of Conrad's Law, which would make Massachusetts the 43rd state to criminalize suicide coercion and make it punishable by up to five years in prison.

'He was just a vulnerable teenager that suffered from social anxiety and depression,' she said. 'I don't want another family to deal with what I had to deal with.'

The grieving mom said she is hopeful that the star-studded Hulu show would bring attention to her efforts to have Conrad's Law passed.
The wild fox that bit nine people, including a congressman and a journalist, on Capitol Hill tested positive for rabies after being euthanized Wednesday.

Capitol Hill Fox, as the adult female has been nicknamed, was captured by animal control officers Tuesday after a slew of 'aggressive' encounters earlier this week.

Officials 'humanely euthanized' the animal so that health experts could safely conduct rabies testing, a DC Health spokesperson told Fox News on Wednesday. The department later confirmed that the animal had tested positive for rabies.

Authorities captured the fox's kits - or babies - earlier Wednesday morning but have not yet decided what to do with them.

The wild fox that bit nine people, including a congressman and a journalist, on Capitol Hill has been put down amid fears that it might be carrying the rabies virus

Capitol Hill Fox, as the adult female has been nicknamed, was captured by animal control officers Tuesday after a slew of 'aggressive' encounters earlier this week

Representative Ami Bera (D-Calif.) was among those attacked by the wild fox on Monday night. The vixen bit him in an 'unprovoked' attack near the Russell Senate Office Building.

'I didn't see it and all of a sudden I felt something lunge at the back of my leg,' Bera told the New York Times.

The congressman was taken to nearby Walter Reed National Military Medical Center at the recommendation of the attending physician of Congress where he received treatment for tetanus and rabies.

Bera's spokesperson said the lawmaker received seven shots in total, noting he received 'one in both buttocks.' He will receive three additional shots for rabies in the coming days.

Representative Ami Bera (D-Calif.) was attacked by the wild fox on Monday night, alleging the vixen had bit him in an 'unprovoked' attack near the Russell Senate Office Building

Politico reporter Ximena Bustillo also detailed a vixen attack, alleging the vixen nipped her from behind Tuesday

'I feel healthy and am glad to be back at work,' Bera tweeted Wednesday. 'Despite the dustup, I hold no grudge or ill will against @thecapitolfox. Hoping the [fox] and its family are safely relocated and wishing it a happy and prosperous future.'

His spokesperson added that Bera, a doctor himself, 'encourages everyone to stay vigilant around wild animals and to speak with their physician if they get bitten'.

Politico reporter Ximena Bustillo also detailed a vixen attack, alleging the vixen nipped her from behind Tuesday.

'That feel when you get bit by a fox leaving Capitol cause that's of course something I expect in THE MIDDLE OF DC,' she wrote on Twitter. 'I didnt even see it.'

She added: 'Im from Idaho, I know to not try and pet it!'

Officials 'humanely euthanized' so that health experts could safely conduct rabies testing. They expect to get the results later Wednesday

Animal control officers are shown carrying the captured Capitol Hill Fox

Following the attacks, Capitol police issued urgent security alerts warning the public of 'possible fox dens' on Capitol grounds

Following the attacks, Capitol police issued urgent security alerts warning the public of 'possible fox dens' on Capitol grounds.

'Foxes are wild animals that are very protective of their dens and territory,' police warned. 'Please do not approach any fox you see.'

Authorities on Wednesday said they had not uncovered any additional foxes on Capitol grounds but noted there could still be dens spread throughout the city.

They noted that anyone who sees an aggressive or apparently sick or injured animal should contact animal control immediately.

'D.C. Health will not be doing a roundup of healthy foxes in the area and only intervenes to remove wildlife if they are sick or injured or where an exposure to humans has occurred and rabies testing would be warranted,' the spokesperson told Fox News.

'D.C. Health encourages anyone who came into physical contact with the fox to call D.C. Health at 202-442-9143.'

Authorities on Wednesday said they had not uncovered any additional foxes on Capitol grounds but noted there could still be dens spread throughout the city. Officer Peterson is pictured capturing the Capitol Hill Fox on Tuesday

A fox walks near Upper Senate Park on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday

The Capitol Hill Fox is spotted Tuesday near the steps leading up to the Capitol building

The tale of the Capitol Fox has seemingly fascinated area residents.

'I was sitting at a gazebo outside the Russell Senate Office building when this little one came trotting up,' CQ reporter Michael Macagnone tweeted, sharing a photo of a fox that he claims 'galloped after a squirrel'.

Representative Andy Levin (D-Mich.) told the Times his heart 'leaped with joy' when he heard there were foxes roaming around Capitol Hill.

'We need more wild creatures around here and less wild conspiracies,' Levin said, seemingly unaware that his colleague had been bit.

A reporter questions Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) about the fox during a news conference Tuesday, but he ignored the question.

However, Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) confirmed she had spotted the creature.

Officer Best with the Humane Rescue Alliance Animal Care and Control attempts to trap a fox on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol

Animal control officers are pictured capturing the Capitol Hill Fox on Tuesday

'Foxes are wild animals that are very protective of their dens and territory,' police warned after the fox was captured. 'Please do not approach any fox you see'

The news of the Capitol Fox also sparked the creation of a parody Twitter account sharing the thoughts of the vixen.

The satirical account issued a statement Tuesday following the capture of the wild animal, reading: 'As a fox, I cannot speak. And too often - I have nobody to speak for me. They mock me in songs, they wear me as clothes, and they hunt me down like a criminal in my home.

'For what, I ask you? What has a fox ever done to you? Today, I was forcibly removed from my den by very scary and mean individuals. I am innocent of the crimes in question. This will not be the end.'

The statement concluded: 'I am a working in progress.'

The parody account also tweeted pictures of the fox's capture and captioned them with #FreeTheFox.'

On Wednesday, shortly after officials confirmed the vixen's euthanasia, the account posted: 'Gone but not forgotten.'

The news of the Capitol Fox also sparked the creation of a parody Twitter account sharing the thoughts of the vixen. On Tuesday the account issued a 'statement' declaring the animal's innocence
Rishi Sunak's wife has been claiming 'non-dom' status, meaning she could save on her UK tax bill while living in Downing Street, it emerged last night.

Akshata Murthy, the daughter of an Indian billionaire said to be worth 3.5billion, could have saved millions of pounds over several years through the arrangement.

She is registered as non-domiciled for UK tax purposes, a legal way to avoid paying taxes in Britain on overseas income.

A spokeswoman for the Chancellor's wife said: 'Akshata Murthy is a citizen of India, the country of her birth and parents' home.

'India does not allow its citizens to hold the citizenship of another country simultaneously.

'So according to British law, Ms Murthy is treated as non-domiciled for UK tax purposes. She has always and will continue to pay UK taxes on all her UK income.'

Miss Murthy used the valuable tax status as recently as April 2020, two months after her husband was made Chancellor, the Independent reported. A source close to Mr Sunak said: 'Neither of them has done anything wrong and she has complied fully with UK law. They have both followed the rules to the letter.

'The Treasury has known about this all the time he has been there and when he became a junior minister in 2018, he went out of his way to provide extra disclosure to the Cabinet Office that was not strictly required.'

The revelation  on the day Mr Sunak hiked taxes for millions of workers  prompted Labour to claim it was 'yet another example of the Tories thinking it is one rule for them  another for everyone else'.

The annual charge for gaining non-dom status in the UK ranges from 30,000 to 60,000 depending on how long a citizen has lived in the country.

It is understood that Miss Murthy has been living in the UK for nine years. The couple, who now have two daughters, met at university in California and were married in 2009.

Akshata Murty, who is believed to be worth hundreds of billions of pounds, held non-dom status. This means her permanent home is considered outside of the UK and, although she is still liable for UK tax on income made in this country, she does not have to pay UK tax on foreign income unless it is brought into the UK

Ms Murthy used the valuable tax status as recently as April 2020, two months after her husband was made Chancellor

Rishi became a household name after he married Akshata Murthy, the daughter of the billionaire founder of a staggeringly successful IT company. Pictured: The couple at their wedding with Murthy's billionaire parents

Rishi Sunak's net score has dipped six points over the past week as a poll laid bare the political damage from the cost-of-living crisis

They lived abroad before Mr Sunak was elected MP for Richmond in North Yorkshire in 2015.

Mr Sunak is said to have declared his wife's tax status when he became a minister in 2018 and the Treasury was also made aware so any potential conflicts could be managed.

The UK tax rate for dividends is just under 40 per cent for the highest earners, while the highest rate of income tax is 45 per cent.

This is higher than dividend rates for Indian companies, where they are taxed at between 10 and 20 per cent depending on resident status. Income tax in India is 30 per cent.

Details of Miss Murthy's exact tax status are not yet known. It is understood she pays foreign taxes on her foreign income.

Last week, Mr Sunak hit back at 'upsetting' criticism of his wife and father-in-law over her family firm's links to Russia.

He expressed his anger at media coverage of his wife's shares in Indian IT giant Infosys, which was founded by her billionaire father Narayana.

The Chancellor joked that, unlike Will Smith at the Oscars, he 'didn't get up and slap anybody'. But he warned people not to 'come at my wife'.

Infosys, an IT and consultancy firm, was criticised for continuing operations in Moscow before bowing to pressure last week and closing its Russian office.

Mr Sunak was widely criticised for failing to scrap the 1.25 percentage-point increase in national insurance in the Spring Statement, which came into force yesterday.

The Prime Minister yesterday admitted that households will have to make 'tough choices' as the cost-of-living crisis bites but defended the tax hike as 'unquestionably the right thing'.

Shadow economic secretary to the Treasury Tulip Siddiq said last night: 'The Chancellor has imposed tax hike after tax hike on the British people.

'It is staggering that at the same time his family may have been benefiting from tax-reduction schemes. This is yet another example of the Tories thinking it is one rule for them, another for everyone else.

'Rishi Sunak must now urgently explain how much he and his family have saved on their own tax bill at the same time he was putting taxes up for millions of working families and choosing to leave them 2,620-a-year worse off.'

Rishi Sunak and wife Akshata Murthy are listed as 'Wykeham benefactors' in the magazine of the school - where he was head boy

Ms Murty is listed on LinkedIn as being director of capital and private equity firm Catamaran Ventures, gym chain Digme Fitness, and gentlemen's outfitters New and Lingwood.

She is also reported to hold a 0.91% stake in Infosys, which was founded by her now billionaire father.

Infosys is closing its Moscow office after facing pressure to end operations in the country amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Tech giant Infoysys is one of India's largest companies and has a presence in about 50 countries.

It set up an engineering centre in Moscow in 2016 where it is thought that up to 100 people were employed.

Despite many global IT firms suspending operations in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, Infosys had kept what it has described as a 'small team' there until now, according to the BBC.

But in a recent statement, the company had said: 'We do not have any active business relationships with local Russian enterprises.'

Mr Sunak and his wife Ms Murthy had faced questions over her shares in the firm, founded by her father NR Narayana Murthy.

Labour and the Liberal Democrats had both called for Mr Sunak to answer questions over the issue.

In the Commons, a Labour shadow minister was forced to withdraw a claim that Mr Sunak was 'hypocritical' because of his family's shares in the company.

But Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said: 'So far as the Chancellor's wife is concerned, there's just a fundamental principle, is their household benefiting from money made in Russia when the Government has put in place sanctions?'

It comes after it was revealed yesterday that Sunak and his wife gave more than 100,000 to top public school Winchester.

The Chancellor and Akshata Murthy are listed as 'Wykeham benefactors' in the magazine of the school - where he was head boy.

It comes amid a cost of living squeeze in Britain, with Mr Sunak accused of failing to do enough to help struggling families

The magazine for the school - which has annual fees of 43,335 a year or 14,445 a term - includes the Sunaks in a list of people 'whose total donations to Winchester College (including pledges) are greater than 100,000'.

Mr Sunak has been accused of failing to do enough to help struggling families in his Spring Statement a fortnight ago.

He was branded an 'illusionist' after hailing his 'tax-cutting' moves, despite the burden being on course to reach the highest level since the 1940s.

The government's own watchdog has predicted that this year will see the biggest fall in disposable incomes since records began in the 1950s.

There are claims Mr Sunak is already having to draw up a new support package, as he struggles to keep a lid on the UK's 2.3trillion debt mountain and rising interest payments.

He was also ridiculed for photo-ops after the mini-Budget, including posing putting fuel into a Kia Rio owned by a Sainsbury's staff member.

Rishi Sunak's wife is richer than the Queen: Tech billionaire's daughter who he met while studying at Stanford has shares in family's firm are worth 430million - making her one of Britain's wealthiest women

Rishi Sunak's wife has shares in her family's tech firm that are worth 430million, making her one of Britain's wealthiest women and richer than the Queen.

Akshata Murthy and her relatives hold a multimillion pound portfolio of shareholdings which have come to light amid questions over the Chancellor, who met his future wife while studying at Stanford University, California, failing to declare them in the register of ministers' interests last year.

The assets make Indian-born Akshata richer than the Queen, who is estimated to be worth 350million, according to the Sunday Times Rich List.

She is the daughter of one of the richest men in India - billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy - who has been described as the father of the Indian IT sector and 'one of the 12 greatest businessmen of all time'.

Sunak is the son of a GP father and pharmacist mother who emigrated to Southampton from East Africa in the 1960s, and he studied at Oxford University before winning a Fulbright scholarship to Stanford where the future husband and wife met.

The latest revelation comes after Sunak faced demands to reveal details of his financial interests last month, after it emerged he set up a 'blind trust' when he was made Chief Secretary to the Treasury in July last year.

But critics said there was still risk of conflict as Sunak - reputed to be the richest MP - is aware what he put into the trust.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak's wife Akshata Murthy (pictured together at their wedding) has shares in her family's tech business worth 430million, making her richer than the Queen

He became a household name after he married Akshata Murthy, the daughter of the billionaire founder of a staggeringly successful IT company. Pictured: The couple at their wedding with Murthy's parents

Sunak's wife is the daughter of an entrepreneur in India, co-founding technology company Infosys - in which she owns 0.91 per cent shares, totalling 430million.

Her family are also have a joint venture with Amazon worth 900million a year and shares in the firm running Jamie Oliver's Jamie's Italian and burger chain Wendy's in India.

Before becoming Chancellor, Sunak was better known in India than he was in Britain, after he became a household name when he married Akshata, the daughter of a self-made billionaire.

Akshata's father is the 51st richest man in India and ranks at 1135 in the world's billionaire list, according to Forbes.

The father-of-two from Bangalore, India, graduated with a science Master's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology before becoming the co-founder and chairman of Infosys.

He spent 30 years at the company before resigning in 2011, coming back in 2013 to pass the management to a CEO in 2014.

The tech giant was worth around 2billion when Southampton-born Sunak travelled on a Fulbright scholarship to Stanford University in California, where he met his future wife after taking Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford.

It is today valued at around 33.3billion, with Mr Murphy's real-time net worth estimated at around 2.3billion ($3.1bn) at the time of writing.

According to his company profile, Mr Murthy, whose wife, Sudha, works as an author, is currently on the boards of Ford Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey and the United Nations Foundation.

He has also served on the boards of Cornell University, Wharton School, the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and the Rhodes Trust at Oxford, alongside Yale University's international advisory board.

On its website, Infosys says that Mr Murthy 'introduced the concept of the 24-hour work day to the world'.

It states: 'Mr Murthy conceptualized, articulated and implemented the Global Delivery Model (GDM) which has become the backbone of the Indian software industry.

'GDM is based on collaborative distributed software development principles and has resulted in the delivery of superior quality software to global customers delivered on time and within budget. Mr Murthy also introduced the concept of the 24-hour work day to the world.

'Under Mr. Murthys leadership, Infosys became the leader in innovation in technical, managerial and leadership training, software technology, quality, productivity, customer focus, employee satisfaction, and physical and technological infrastructure.'

It was revealed last month that when taking on ministerial duties the Chancellor set up a 'blind trust', meaning he did not know where his assets were being invested. Pictured: Sunak with his wife, Akshata, and their children Krishna and Anoushka

Sunak is locally he is dubbed the 'Maharaja of the Dales' (pictured, their magnificent Georgian manor in North Yorkshire)

Rishi Sunak, pictured with his wife Akshata Murthy, was better known in India than Britain before he became Chancellor

After taking a first in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, Southampton-born Sunak travelled on a Fulbright scholarship to Stanford University in California where met his future wife (pictured with her family, second from right)

Murthy's Millions: Akshata's family business portfolio Combined shareholding in tech firm Infosys worth 1.7billion

Joint venture with Amazon, Cloudtail, in India worth 900m-a-year

Shareholding in UK firm which runs Jamie's Italian restaurants and burger chain Wendy's in India

Also holds shares in Koru Kids and is director of Digme Fitness

Murthy is a shareholder or director in five other UK companies, including Mayfair outfitter which makes Eton College pupils' tailcoats costing 2,500 each

Akshata is also listed as a director of the UK arm of software company, Soroco, co-founded by her brother

Investment firm Catamaran Ventures owned by father N. R. Narayana Murthy

Ms Murthy runs fashion label Akshata Designs Advertisement

Sunak and Akshata married in 2009 in her home city of Bangalore in a two-day ceremony attended by 1,000 guests.

Before entering politics, Mr Sunak, who is now a multi-millionaire in his own right, studied at the 42,000-per-year Winchester College and later at Oxford University.

During his time in business, he worked in California, India and Britain for various investment firms including Goldman Sachs.

He later set up his own business, Theleme Partners, in 2010 with an initial fund of 536million.

While building the hedge fund he spent a couple of days doing voluntary work for the Conservatives  which was when he decided he would like to go into politics full-time.

Speaking about his decision to go into politics, he once explained: 'It was my parents who motivated me, but not in a political way.

'My dad was a GP, my mum a pharmacist, and I grew up working in their surgery; in the pharmacy; delivering medicines to people who couldn't pick them up.

'People would always stop and talk to me about my mum and dad, saying, 'Oh, you're Mrs Sunak's son, Dr Sunak's son.' And then they'd have some story about how my parents had helped them, or their parents, or children, and I thought that was amazing.

'They had done the same job in the same place for 30 years, and it was clear that they as individuals were able to have an amazing impact on the community around us, and that I found pretty inspiring. And that was my motivation for becoming an MP.'

Every year Sunak and his wife throw a summer garden party for local villagers at their magnificent Georgian 1.5million manor house in Kirby Sigston, just outside Northallerton, Yorkshire - leading to him being dubbed the 'Maharaja of the Dales'.

Sir Alistair Graham, a former chairman of the committee on standards in public life, said the Chancellor appeared to have 'taken the most minimalist approach possible' to divulging information.

He told The Guardian: 'Perhaps Rishi Sunak should carefully read the "Seven principles of Public Life" to make sure he is fulfilling the two principles of "Honesty and Leadership".'

But a Treasury spokesman said Mr Sunak had 'followed the ministerial code to the letter in his declaration of interests'.

It follows Mr Sunak facing demands to reveal details of his financial interests last month, after it emerged he set up a 'blind trust' on becoming a minister.

The Chancellor deployed the arrangement, meaning that he does not know how his assets are being invested, when he was made Chief Secretary to the Treasury in July last year.

By setting up the 'blind trust' it means he does not have to disclose fuller details of his investment portfolio. Pictured: Sunak with his wife and children during the recent election

The Chancellor of the Exchequer is pictured with his wife, Akshata, and their two children during a Santa run

The couple married in 2009 in her home city of Bangalore in a two-day ceremony attended by 1,000 guests

Before entering politics, Mr Sunak, who is now a multi-millionaire in his own right and a graduate of 42,000-per-year Winchester College and Oxford University graduate

But critics said there was still risk of conflict as Mr Sunak - reputed to be the richest MP - is aware what he put into the trust.

It also means he does not have to disclose fuller details of his investment portfolio. The presence of the trust was revealed in the latest register of ministerial interests.

It came as other official documents revealed that he did not take his salary for five months when he joined the Treasury last year. He waived the 34,000 top up to his MP's salary until just before Christmas.

Theresa May also attracted controversy as she made a similar move when she became Prime Minister in 2016.

And in the mid-1990s the Tories attacked Tony Blair as it emerged he used a blind trust, when leader of the opposition, to fund his office.

Former standards tsar Sir Alex Allan, who quit his role last week after Boris Johnson overruled his conclusion that the Home Secretary Priti Patel breached the ministerial code, is said to have signed off on Sunak's disclosures.
Former President Trump admitted to a panel of historians that he 'didn't win the election' on Tuesday, telling them that a whole host of U.S. foes were 'happiest' to see Biden come to office.

Trump, speaking to a panel of historians last summer convened by Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor and editor of The Presidency of Donald Trump: A First Historical Assessment, the former president made a curious reference in passing: 'when I didn't win the election,' he said. He has since 2020 claimed that he actually won but the election was stolen from him.

He also admitted to the panel that he would sometimes retweet people he shouldn't have, according to Zelizer's retelling in The Atlantic.

He also said that South Korea's Moon Jae In was one of the happiest world leaders to see Biden take office because he'd reached a deal to get South Korea to pay more for their own defense. That deal was wiped out once Biden took office, after the 2020 election was 'rigged and lost,' Trump said.

Trump admitted to a panel of historians that he 'didn't win the election' on Tuesday, telling them that a whole host of U.S. foes were 'happiest' to see Biden come to office

He added that Iran, China and Russia were also happy to see Biden take office.

'By not winning the election,' Trump said, '[Moon] was the happiest man  I would say, in order, China was  no, Iran was the happiest.

'[Moon] was going to pay $5bn, $5bn a year. But when I didn't win the election, he had to be the happiest  I would rate, probably, South Korea third- or fourth-happiest.'

'Nobody was tougher on Russia than me,' he added.

According to Zelizer, it was the Trump team who reached out to her to set up the interview last summer in order to help shape the narrative about the former president she and other historians presented in their book.

He also said that South Korea's Moon Jae In, above, was one of the happiest world leaders to see Biden take office because he'd reached a deal to get South Korea to pay more for their own defense

'By not winning the election,' Trump said, '[Moon] was the happiest man  I would say, in order, China was  no, Iran was the happiest. Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is pictured above

According to Axios, Trump conducted conversations with 22 authors, mostly journalists, who were writing books about his presidency.

Trump sucked up to the group of historians, calling them 'a tremendous group of people, and I think rather than being critical I'd like to have you hear me out, which is what we're doing now, and I appreciate it'.

Zelizer said that Trump closed out the hour-long Zoom conversation by 'peddling the case that he was not a failed one-term president, like Herbert Hoover or Jimmy Carter, but someone who had victory stolen from him.'

Trump insisted that the Jan. 6 Capitol riot started as a 'peaceful rally' that was 'full of love' and people who believed the election had been stolen. He claimed that he had made a 'very modest,' 'very peaceful' and 'presidential' speech at the Save America rally. He claimed that groups of left-wing Antifa and Black Lives Matter activists had 'infiltrated' the rally and were not stopped by Capitol Police, when 'bad things happened.'

A few days after meeting with the historians, in July 2021, Trump put out a statement: 'It seems to me that meeting with authors of the ridiculous number of books being written about my very successful administration, or me, is a total waste of time.'

'These writers are often bad people who write whatever comes to their mind or fits their agenda. It has nothing to do with facts or reality.'

Trump's remarks on losing came eight months after Jan. 6. While he has consistently insisted that the election was stolen from him, Trump has at times slipped up and admitted that he 'didn't win' the election.

In June, he told Fox News's Sean Hannity that he 'didn't win.'

'Shockingly, we were supposed to win easily at 64 million votes, and we got 75 million votes, and we didn't win,' Trump said in a phone interview. 'But let's see what happens on that.'

And in December, Trump remarked that the wall at the southern border would be completed by now 'had we won the election.'

But the comments are likely a momentary slip-up in phrasing rather than a change in heart.

'The presidential election was rigged and stolen, and because of that our country is being destroyed,' Trump said at a Michigan rally last week. 'We did win. We did win.  We won by a lot, not just a little.'

According to a UMass-Amherst poll from December, three-quarters of Republicans doubt that Biden's 2020 electoral victory was legitimate.
National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd told DailyMail.com that border agents are feeling 'defeated', 'demoralized' and 'unwanted' under the Biden administration

The National Border Patrol Council president says U.S. border agents are feeling 'defeated' and 'unwanted' under the Biden administration as immigration agencies prepare for a massive influx of 18,000 migrants every day once Title 42 is dropped.

Brandon Judd, in an interview with DailyMail.com on Wednesday, pleaded for President Joe Biden to stop 'pandering to the far-left' and start 'protecting the American public'.

'What are border patrol agents saying?' the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) president posed. 'We feel defeated.'

'We're extremely disappointed in this administration's unwillingness to protect the American public not only from a virus that has ravaged the country but also from those that would come into our country to do us harm,' Judd continued.

He said quelling the migration crisis 'can be fixed very easily through policy' but claims 'the administration won't do what the American public needs it to do.'

'And that, of course, makes us feel unwanted, it makes us feel unproductive, it demoralizes all of the agents,' Judd said.

NBPC is the largest labor union representing agents and staff on the U.S Border Patrol.

Judd has promoted in his post that government take a more hard-line approach to illegal immigration, agreeing more with the policies of former President Donald Trump than that of his successor President Joe Biden.

The border agent turned union leader specifically said that getting rid of Title 42 gives migrants even more permission to come to the U.S. and will get rid of the last real deterrent of illegal immigration left.

'We would have had a system that would have ultimately ended catch and release once and for all, but that Biden administration, they brought back the catch and release, they brought back that reward that allows people to cross our borders illegally and ultimately get what they want, which is a release into the United States  never to be heard from again,' Judd said, praising policies of the past administration and lambasting the current.

Title 42 will comes to an end on May 23, and Judd says this is the only remaining deterrent for illegal immigration. Border patrol numbers show that the number of apprehensions and arrests could climb from 8,000 per day to 18,000 per day once the pandemic-era policy ends

Since Biden took office in January 2021, CBP has encountered more than 2.2 million migrants and the border  and that number could as much as triple with the end of Title 42

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki reiterated on Wednesday the administration's support for the perspective of allowing as many asylum-seekers to be released into the country as possible.

'Our concern is ensuring that individuals who irregularly migrate to the United States proceed through our process of, you know, of course being monitored, but also participating in hearings to determine whether or not they will be able to stay,' Psaki said.

Judd said that 'the administration has caused' the southern border crisis.

'Now they're talking about getting rid of the only deterrent that they left in place, which was Title 42,' Judd lamented. 'And they're talking about doing it well, pandemic is still ongoing in this country.'

'It just doesn't make sense, what this administration is doing.'

Title 42 was enacted in March 2020 by then-President Trump to allow for the immediate expulsion of migrants without hearing their asylum claims in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Judd said the Title 42 process takes about 15 minutes at the border.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on Friday that it is ending the pandemic-era policy on May 23, 2022, which Customs and Border Enforcement (CBP) estimates could lead to 18,000 apprehensions every day  up from the current 8,000.

'To get rid of it [Title 42] at this time, we think is the wrong decision,' Judd told DailyMail.com

'It sends the wrong message, it's the wrong decisions and it's just going to put our citizens at more peril.'

When asked why the public health protection is being lifted when the U.S. is still in a declared public health emergency, Judd said: 'Normally somebody would say it's confusing, but when you look at this administration, if you look at how it plays politics, it becomes crystal clear why they are doing it: Since inauguration this administration has pandered to far-left activists. And that's what they're continuing to do now, pandering to far-left activists even though there is clear indications that this pandemic is not over.'

Nearly 2,000 Ukrainian migrants set up a makeshift camp in a public square in Reynosa, Mexico

'If they want to revisit it at a point where the CDC says the pandemic in the United States is over, that can be understandable,' he conceded. 'But, I mean, when they're constantly seeking more money for COVID vaccines, when they're actively trying to get rid of federal employees, whether that's in the civil service or the military, because they refuse to get vaccinated  yet they're going to lift this. Again, it makes no sense.'

Judd said another reason CBP is overwhelmed is because many have quit or were fired due to their refusal to get the COVID-19 vaccine when Biden made it a requirement for federal employees.

On the other hand, migrants who refuse the jab are still being released into the country.

'Migrants are being given the choice, it's their choice  it's their choice, they can refuse to be vaccinated,' Judd explained.

'Now, if they choose to be vaccinated, they can get the vaccine but they can flat out say 'no' and they still get released into the United States,' he added. 'So again, it just makes no sense.'
Australia's east coast is being smashed by more torrential rain with flood warnings issued and millions of locals in coastal areas ordered to stay at home.

New South Wales is already saturated after being hit by repeated flooding in recent months, with the Northern Rivers area devastated by two deluges within weeks and Sydney drenched in its wettest March on record.

More than 100mm of rain fell on parts of southern Sydney overnight, with a further 140mm expected to be dumped on coastal areas in just six hours on Thursday.

The Harbour City has surpassed its average annual rainfall total of 1213mm, setting a new record for the fastest time to receive a year's worth of rain.

An urgent evacuation warning was issued for low lying parts of Woronora and Bonnet Bay in Sydney's south to get out now before it's too late with NSW Rural Fire Service crews were filmed going door to door to warn locals.

Residents in Camden and Picton in the south-west outskirts are also warned to prepare to leave, while Chipping Norton residents have until 3pm to get out.

A severe weather warning is in place for southern and central NSW, metropolitan Sydney, the Illawarra, the South Coast, the Central and Southern Tablelands and parts of the Hunter.

A severe weather warning has been issued for much of the NSW coast. Areas in purple should expect at least 100mm of rain

Some of Sydney could receive up to 250mm of rain on Thursday (pictured, Sydneysiders battling the wild weather on Wednesday)

Severe thunderstorms are also predicted inland for the Central West Slopes and Plains near Parkes and the Upper West near Cobar.

The Bureau of Meteorology on Thursday warned there was an increased risk of landslides, with one already killing a British father and son hiking with their family in the Blue Mountains.

A flood watch has also been issued for central NSW, with minor to moderate flooding forecast for the Southern Coastal Rivers including the Hawkesbury-Nepean, the Macquarie and Queanbeyan rivers on Thursday and Friday.

An urgent warning was issued for low lying parts of Woronora and Bonnet Bay in Sydney's south and Picton in the south-west outskirts to evacuate on Thursday morning.

Major flooding along Nepean River at Menangle, Camden and Wallacia is expected to reach similar levels to the April 1988 flood.

'Floodwaters may isolate the area. If you remain in the area, you may be trapped without power, water and other essential services and it may be too dangerous to rescue you,' an alert read.

'Residents of areas expecting to be flooded should make plans to leave when advised to do so. Ensure you take pets and valuables with you.'

Sydney's south-west is on high alert with major flooding expected at Liverpool and Milperra on Thursday afternoon.

Authorities have urged Sydney motorists to stay off the roads if possible.

'We have seen widespread heavy rainfall overnight and it is expected to continue today with a high risk of flash flooding with lots of roads closed cut off and flooded,' NSW SES assistant commissioner Dean Storey told Sunrise.

'The key message for the community, particularly those getting up getting ready to go to work and hit the roads, is avoid unnecessary travel.

'If you don't have to take to the roads today, please avoid it. If you need to travel, drive to the conditions and never drive through those floodwaters.

'If you live in a flood-prone area that is forecast to the impacted, have a plan in place and be ready to enact that plan if you are required to evacuate your home.'

Commuters battled a tough run into work from Sydney's Northern Beaches, with Pittwater Road inundated with water.

Wakehurst Parkway is also closed between Narrabeen and Oxford Falls.

In the city's south, the Illawarra Highway at Macquarie Pass is closed due to landslip while flooding has cut Audrey Road in the Royal National Park.

Lawrence Hargrave Drive is closed in both directions on Seacliff Bridge between Coalcliff and Clifton due to a fallen tree.

Waterfalls have formed off the cliffs at Vaucluse in Sydney's east after heavy rain on Thursday morning.

SES crews have responded to almost 600 requests for help in the last 24 hours, including seven flood rescues.

One man is lucky to be alive after a dramatic rescue from a flooded creek in Epping in Sydney's north.

Sydney's south copped an battering overnight, where Cronulla has received a 150mm drenching in the last 24 hours. Two thirds fell within three hours overnight.

Sydney Airport recorded 111mm, well above its average monthly rainfall for April.

Homes in Fairy Meadow at Carters lane inundated .. wont find me at uni today #nswrain #wollongong pic.twitter.com/0kKxz5tmU3  Noah Murphy (@noahmurrphy) April 7, 2022

Sydneysiders have been urged to stay off the roads. Pictured is flash flooding on Pittwater Road on the Northern Beaches on Thursday morning

The overnight deluge has already caused widespread damage on Rose Bay North (pictured)

Dozens of roads are closed across Sydney, including Audley Weir (pictured Wednesday night)

Flood warnings are in place for 12 rivers across NSW, including the Hawkesbury, Nepean, Colo and Georges rivers.

Minor warnings have been issued for the Hawkesbury River at Windsor and North Richmond and the Cooks River at Tempe Bridge and the Woronora River at Woronora Bridge.

Moderate flooding could occur on the Colo River at Putty Road.

Little Bay in Sydney's south-east copped a 107mm drenching overnight while Darkes Forest on the south-west outskirts received 67mm within two hours.

On top of the wild weather, an oil spill has sparked havoc at Kurnell in Sydney's south after a pump at the nearby Caltex Refinery, Australia's largest fuel import terminal failed.

It's been a wet night on Sydney roads with some areas receiving up to 120mm overnight on Wednesday

The weather is caused by a strong upper trough and embedded low amplifying over the centre of NSW, working to deepen another trough sitting off the coast.

The systems are expected to weaken on Friday morning.

'Heavy and persistent showers over the coming days will increase the chance of flash flooding and landslips over already saturated catchments,' BOM meteorologist Sarah Scully said on Wednesday.

Severe thunderstorms also pose a threat, including in northeast NSW.

'They may produce localised heavy falls (but) it is not expected to produce that riverine flooding,' Ms Scully said.

'Instead, it'll be more localised flash flooding.'

Six-hourly rain totals between 60 and 100mm are forecast for Sydney on Thursday
Four Cuban migrants including a young child were saved from drowning while trying to cross the Rio Grande river into the United States.

The individuals, including a boy, had joined eight other Cubans in the attempt to wade across the dangerous river on Tuesday before they were swept down the waterway by a strong current.

Video footage filmed by digital news outlet Impacto Vision Noticias showed the 11 adults forming a line with their arms locked and one of the men carrying his son over his shoulders as they set out from the Mexican border state of Coahuila.

The group was in the river for less than a minute when a current broke their human chain and quickly separated them.

Un grupo de unos 14 migrantes cubanos, entre los que habia una familia con un nino de tres anos, tuvo que ser rescatado por las autoridades mexicanas y estadounidenses cuando sus integrantes estaban a punto de ser arrastrados por la corriente del rio Bravo.  @ReporteNi pic.twitter.com/9HIr7wqboX  Juana Guaido Lopez (@juanalachama) April 5, 2022

A Cuban man calms down his son after he and two other migrants decided to return to Mexico after they were separated from seven other migrants from the communist island who were trying to reach the United States border by crossing the Rio Grande River to reach Texas on Tuesday

A dramatic video recorded by digital news outlet Impacto Vision Noticias captured the moment the 11 adults and a child from Cuba formed a line with their arms locked as they set out from the Mexican border state of Coahuila towards the United States

In the dramatic video, an agent with Mexico's National Institute of Migration can be heard instructing the group to return to Mexico.

'There's a lot of water. Come back. Think about your family, think about the children,' the official said in Spanish.

One of his partners went into the river to try to get them to come back, but the current picked up strength and dragged them down the waterway towards a small U.S. Border Patrol vessel.

'If you love your child, come out,' an agent told the Cuban man who was holding on to his son. 'You either come out or I will take you out. If I take you out I will put you in jail.'

Eight of the migrants continued their journey to the U.S. where they were met by border patrol officers under the Acuna-Del Rio International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas.

Still image shows 12 Cuban migrants, including a boy, who left from Mexico on Tuesday and were swept down the Rio Grande River as they tried to reach the United States. Seven of the migrants made it to the U.S. where they were met by U.S. Border Patrol agents while four others returned to Mexico, including a man and his son

The migrants were in the Rio Grande River for less than a minute before a current broke up their human chain Tuesday in Coahuila, Mexico. The group drifted down the dangerous river

The remaining migrants - including two women and the child and his father - stood in the river for a while and later heeded the advice of the agents.

One of the women was escorted to shore by an agent before she dropped to the ground and broke down in tears.

'God knows what He does,' the distraught migrant said.

An immigration agent from Mexico went after the group of 12 migrants and tried to convince them to return to the shore of the Rio Grande River

A U.S. Border Patrol vessel surrounds the Cuban migrants as they drifted down the Rio Grande River on Tuesday

A woman is helped back to shore in Mexico after she gave up her attempt to reach the United States by crossing the Rio Grande River

A Cuban migrant breaks down in tears after she was rescued from drowning in the Rio Grande River on Tuesday

U.S. Customs and Border Protection data shows there have been 46,752 encounters with Cuban migrants stopped for unlawful crossing of the southwestern border since October 1, 2021, the beginning of fiscal year 2022.

The five month totals eclipse the figures for the previous 12-month fiscal period when border agents registered 38,674 interdictions with individuals who have fled the communist-run island, where their civil liberties are limited and the economy has been severely impacted due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has reported 838,685 encounters along the 1,954-mile southwestern border region since October 1, 2021, the beginning of fiscal year 2022. The totals are on pace to surpass the 1,734,686 interdictions for fiscal year 2021

Overall, there have been 838,685 migrant interdictions in fiscal year 2022, surpassing the 1,734,685 incidents that were documented in fiscal year 2021.

U.S. Congress members and immigration officials expect the numbers to spike following last week's announcement by the administration of Joe Biden that the Title 42 police will be removed May 23.

The measure had been in place since March 2020 under orders of former President Donald Trump and provided U.S. Border Patrol the authority to rapidly remove migrants without allowing them the chance to apply for refuge.

More than 1.6 million migrants - mostly single adults and family units - have been expelled under Trump and Biden.
Tammy Sytch, a former WWE wrestler with a history of legal problems, has been accused by Florida police of causing a fatal car accident while under the influence of alcohol last month.

The 49-year-old New Jersey native has not been charged, but she allegedly crashed her 2012 Mercedes into the rear of a 2013 Kia Sorento on March 25 at 8:28pm, according to a report provided to DailyMail.com by Ormond Beach Police.

A 75-year-old man and Sytch were both taken to the hospital for their injuries. The man, identified as Julian Lafrancis Lasseter of Daytona Beach Shores, ultimately died, according to police. TMZ was the first outlet to report the story.

Tammy Sytch, a former WWE wrestler with a history of legal problems, has been accused by Florida police of causing a fatal car accident while under the influence of alcohol last month. Sytch is seen, left, during her wrestling days and, right, after a reckless driving arrest in 2016

Sytch is a WWE Hall of Famer who wrestled under the names 'Sunny' and 'Lynn Sytch'

Police say Sytch had been 'driving at a high rate of speed' before slamming into two cars

The report claims that Sytch had been 'driving at a high rate of speed' before the collision, and police believe she was drunk at the time of the crash. A blood sample was taken from Sytch, but the results have not been released.

'The Ormond Beach Police Department Traffic Unit is actively investigating the crash,' read a statement provided to DailyMail.com. 'The investigation may lead to criminal charges, which are pending toxicology results. OBPD has requested an expedited timeframe on the processing of these samples and the results will be made available as soon as the department receives them.

A third car was also involved in the collision, but its passengers did not require medical attention for their injuries.

Sytch, a WWE Hall of Famer who wrestled under the names 'Sunny' and 'Lynn Sytch' for much of her career, has at least six other DWI arrests, including a 2019 charge in New Jersey for driving the wrong way on a one-way street.

She was also arrested five times in less than a month in 2012 for a variety of charges, including third-degree burglary and disorderly conduct.

Sytch has been in and out of jail in New Jersey and Pennsylvania for several parole violations.

This year, she was arrested in New Jersey after allegedly trying to stab a lover with a pair of scissors, according to the Post and Courier. She was charged with unlawfully possessing a weapon and making terroristic threats.
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In the past week the number of Ukrainian refugees waiting in Mexico to seek asylum in the U.S. has swelled from hundreds to thousands, after the Biden administration agreed to accept 100,000 this year.

Many sleep on the ground in a gymnasium converted into a makeshift shelter in Tijuana, a suitcase containing their life's possessions beside them. They await their number to be called out, when they will get the opportunity to a border agent in hopes of being granted humanitarian parole and allowed into the U.S.

Despite the surge in refugees, only about 150 are being allowed into the U.S. each day due to Customs and Border Patrol staff stretched thin. Entrances are expected to speed up in the coming days.

Ukrainians fly first to Mexico as it is easier to obtain a tourist visa than apply for asylum. Under the Migrant Protection Protocols, otherwise known as the 'Remain in Mexico' policy, they are required to wait in Mexico until their asylum claim is processed. Only a small number of Ukrainians are being allowed in under humanitarian parole, an emergency measure that allows immigrants who would otherwise be ineligible for resettlement to remain in the country for up to a year.

And while Biden said the nation would allow in 100,000 Ukrainian refugees, it's not clear what a formal resettlement process would look like.

Ukrainians who are seeking asylum in the United States gather in a shelter for Ukrainians, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, on April 6 in Tijuana, Mexico.

Many sleep on the ground in a gymnasium converted into a makeshift shelter in Tijuana, a suitcase containing their life's possessions beside them

They await their number to be called out, when they will get the opportunity to a border agent in hopes of being granted humanitarian parole and allowed into the U.S.

Since Russia's Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, more than 4.2 million have fled the country, a large chunk of them resettling in Poland.

Ukraine's armed forces are continuing to push back invading Kremlin troops and retake 'key terrain' around the capital and other eastern cities, while Putin's forces retreat to refocus their efforts on the Donbas.

Ukraine's deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk today said in a message on Telegram that residents of the country's eastern regions should evacuate 'now' or 'risk death' due to a feared Russian attack.

'The governors of the Kharkiv, Lugansk and Donetsk regions are calling on the population to leave these territories and are doing everything to ensure that the evacuations take place in an organised manner,' she said.

The call for urgent evacuations comes as Ukraine says Russian forces are regrouping to launch a fresh offensive in the country's east after retreating from the Kyiv region.

Vereshchuk asked residents to cooperate with authorities, saying Kyiv will 'not be able to help' them after an attack.

'It has to be done now because later people will be under fire and face the threat of death. There is nothing they will be able to do about it, nor will we be able to help,' she said.

'It is necessary to evacuate as long as this possibility exists. For now, it still exists,' she added.

Russian forces last week pulled back from positions outside Kyiv and shifted the focus of their assault away from the capital, and Ukraine's general staff said the northeastern city of Kharkiv, the country's second-largest, also remained under attack.

Horrifying footage from Bucha and other regions where Russia has recently pulled out of has revealed bodies of civilians piled up on the side of the road, some buried haphazardly in mass graves. Some show signs of torture, some are almost entirely burned.

Ukrainians who are seeking asylum walk at the El Chaparral port of entry on their way to enter the United States, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, on April 6, 2022 in Tijuana, Mexico

Authorities opened the El Chaparral port of entry today solely for the processing of Ukrainian asylum-seeker

U.S. authorities are allowing Ukrainian refugees to enter the U.S. at the Southern border in Tijuana with permission to remain in the country on humanitarian parole for one year

Biden has agreed to accept up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees this year, but there is no formal plan for processing and resettling them

A man pushes his bike through debris and destroyed Russian military vehicles on a street on April 06, 2022 in Bucha, Ukraine

Hundreds of bodies have been found in the days since Ukrainian forces regained control of Bucha

As the Czech Republic became the first bloc member to send tanks and armoured infantry vehicles to Kyiv on Thursday, NATO's foreign ministers met today to discuss sending more arms to Ukraine after it emerged the EU had sent just 1bn in aid to President Zelensky's troops since the invasion began on February 24.

Members of the trans-Atlantic alliance had until today given Ukraine only anti-tank and anti-craft missiles, small arms and protective equipment, but not offered heavy armour or fighter jets.

Wednesday's delivery is understood to be a gift agreed on by NATO allies, raising fears the bloc could be dragged into the Russian war in Ukraine despite remaining on the sidelines for more than a month.

The United States has agreed to provide an additional $100 million in assistance to Ukraine, including Javelin anti-armour systems, the Pentagon said on Tuesday. US chipmaker Intel Corp (INTC.O) said it had suspended business operations in Russia, joining a growing list of companies leaving the country.
The moving goodbye letter a murdered ISIS hostage wrote to his parents has been read at the trial of the terror suspect accused of masterminding his abduction.

Peter Kassig wrote the final letter to his parents Ed and Paula five months before he was beheaded by Jihadi John in November 2014, and revealed that he did not believe his captors' claims that his family had given up on him.

It was read at the trial of El Shafee Elsheikh, 33, Wednesday by Peter's retired teacher dad Edward Kassig, who struggled to hold back tears, as Kassig's mom Paula, a former nurse, watched.

'But of course we know you are doing everything you can and more,' the letter said: 'Don't worry Dad, if I do go down I won't go thinking anything but what I know to be true, that you and Mom love me more than the moon!' the 26 year-old aid worker wrote.

Kassig, who was adopted by his parents, also detailed his fears that he was going to die, writing: 'Dad, I'm paralyzed here. I'm afraid to fight back. Part of me still has hope. Part of me is sure I'm going to die.'

He continued: 'I spent a long time taking life for granted and taunting death. I have never wanted to live more. I don't want you and mom ruined over this.'

Kassig, a former US Army ranger, continued: 'if I do die, I figure that at least you and I can take some refuge and comfort in knowing that I went out as a result of trying to alleviate suffering and helping those in need.'

'I spent a long time taking life for granted and taunting death. I have never wanted to live more. I don't want you and Mum ruined over this.'

He also revealed that in the wake of his October 2013 abduction he'd 'cried a lot, but doesn't anymore.'

Edward Kassig, the father of Peter Kassig, held back tears as he read a letter from his son, one of four Americans killed by the terror cell known as the Beatles. He is pictured alongside wife, Paula

The missive was so moving that even Judge TS Ellis III was seen to fight back tears, before calling for an early recess so the court could compose itself again.

The letter was delivered to the Kassigs, who live in Indianapolis, by another hostage who'd managed to escape ISIS captivity.

Sharing his thoughts with the court on reading it for the first time, Edward Kassig said: 'This was a young man knowing his time had come. It was his farewell.'

The testimony left many in the courtroom fighting back tears in what's so far been a two-week trial that has detailed in gruesome ways the brutality inflicted on more than 20 Western hostages held captive by the Islamic State roughly a decade ago.

US aid worker Peter Kassig, 26, - otherwise known as Abdul-Rahman Kassig - in Syria wrote a letter to his father shortly before his death. The letter was read out in court on Wednesday

Kassig was seen at the end of a video which showed the killing of aid worker Alan Henning

Edward and Paula Kassig, parents of Peter Kassig, who was slain by Islamic State militants, depart for a break outside the Albert V. Bryan U.S. Courthouse during the trial of IS member El Shafee Elsheikh, in Alexandria, Virginia

The trial of former British national El Shafee Elsheikh, 33, continued on Wednesday

Elsheikh is better known as one of 'the Beatles,' a moniker given by the hostages to several of their captors who spoke with distinctive British accents, with prosecutors saying he was nicknamed Ringo.

He is accused of taking a leading role in the hostage-taking scheme that resulted in the deaths of four Americans: Kassig, James Foley, Steven Sotloff and Kayla Mueller. Kassig, Foley and Sotloff were beheaded in videos distributed across the world. Mueller was raped by Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi before she was killed.

Kassig, an aid worker, was taken hostage in Syria in October 2013. After leaving the US Army, had started his own nonprofit organization to provide medical training and supplies to areas beyond the reach of some of the larger aid groups.

Carl Mueller, father of Kayla Mueller who was killed by Islamic State militants, departs for a break outside the Albert V. Bryan U.S. Courthouse during the trial of IS member El Shafee Elsheikh, in Alexandria, Virginia

Carl Mueller, left, and Marsha Mueller, in beige shawl, the parents of hostage Kayla Mueller slain by Islamic State militants, leave the Albert V. Bryan Federal Courthouse

Shirley and Arthur Sotloff, the parents of hostage Steven Sotloff slain by Islamic State militants, leave the courthouse on Wednesday

Even the judge, T.S. Ellis III, appeared to be fighting back tears during Wednesday's testimony

Also Wednesday, the jury heard testimony from an FBI agent who helped plan an effort to rescue hostages in July 2014 that ultimately failed because the hostages had been moved from a desert prison south of Raqqa before the rescue attempt.

And they heard testimony from French hostage Nicolas Henin, who survived 300 days of captivity before his release in 2014. Under questioning from First Assistant U.S. Attorney Raj Parekh, Henin described escaping several days after he was taken hostage, and the torture inflicted on him when he was recaptured.

Henin said he asked his guards for a broom to clean up his cell, and he used the broom to help knock loose the bars covering a window.

He crawled through the window in the middle of the night and ran for miles across the Syrian desert until he came to a village near the city of Raqqa, an Islamic State stronghold, where he sought help.

'I met two people in pajamas,' he said. 'Unfortunately you can't recognize an ISIS fighter in their pajamas. They took me to the local police station.'

Bethany Haines, center, the daughter of David Haines, who was slain by Islamic State militants departs for a break on Tuesday

Diane and John Foley, the parents of James Foley, an American journalist slain by Islamic State militants, are seen at the trial last week

The authorities returned him to his captors, who beat him, strung him up in the air dangling from handcuffs that dug into his flesh in the Syrian sun, and finally left him in a cell for 11 days with his wrists chained to his ankles.

In his later months of captivity, he came across the Beatles, who were already recognized by his fellow hostages as particularly sadistic.

He said the three Beatles would regularly inflict beatings, and that the Beatle they dubbed 'Ringo' - said to be Elsheikh - would frequently lecture the hostages on the justification for their captivity.

'They were trying to explain to us that even though we were not carrying weapons, we were still somehow a kind of fighter in the war between the infidel West and Islam,' Henin said.

Prosecutors have said that Elsheikh is 'Ringo,' though none of the hostages who has yet testified has been able to explicitly identify him.

Witnesses have said all the Beatles took great pains to keep their faces fully masked when they were in contact with the hostages.

'They liked to consider that as long as they were masked, they were protected from prosecution. This was maybe a stupid idea,' Henin said, grinning broadly in the direction of Elsheikh, who sat just feet from him at the defense table.

Carl Mueller, center, and Marsha Mueller, right, parents of Kayla Mueller who was killed by Islamic State militants, depart for a break at the Albert V. Bryan U.S. Courthouse on Tuesday

Marsha Mueller, left, had described in court how she and Carl, right, pleaded with ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi for their daughter's safe return

Kayla Mueller (pictured) was kidnapped by ISIS terrorists while on a trip to Syria with her boyfriend in 2013. She was later forced to marry Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

On Tuesday, the mother of Kayla Mueller, Marsha Mueller recounted how she and her husband tried for years to save their daughter who had been kidnapped by the terrorist group while she was on a trip with her boyfriend to the Syrian city of Aleppo in August 2013.

Kayla was later forced to marry ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who raped her. She was then murdered in February 2015 at the age of 26.

The jihadis had reportedly demanded 5 million euros - or about $5.4 million - for Kayla's release, Mueller testified on Tuesday, but because they did not have that kind of money, she and her husband desperately tried for years to plead with the leaders of the terrorist group for her safe return.

At one point, she said, she and her husband even sent a video message to al-Baghdadi, in which Mrs. Mueller pleaded: 'I am coming to you with a mother's heart for the love of her daughter.

'Kayla is not your enemy,' she continued in the video, which was shown to a jury in Alexandria, Virginia, where Elsheikh stands accused of torturing and killing four Americans in Syria. 'I ask from her mother's heart that you show your mercy and release our daughter.'

In this file photo taken on March 30, Diane and John Foley, the parents of James Foley, a US journalist slain by Islamic State militants, return to the Alexandria federal court house

James Foley (left) and Kayla Mueller (right) were both killed after being taken hostage by the ISIS 'Beatles', a cell of several jihadist fighters with British accents

As part of the trial in Alexandria, Virginia, Marsha was asked on Tuesday to verify emails between her family and Kayla's kidnappers.

The first email, according to the Independent, came from Kayla's kidnappers on May 23, 2013 and said, 'We do not want to harm her. She is like a guest with us at the moment.'

Marsha said she was at first relieved that the kidnappers reached out because it meant they could start negotiations to get her back.

She and her husband, Carl, then worked with the FBI to craft responses to the terrorist organization, the Independent reports, with the FBI telling them that all emails should be signed by Carl as the terrorists would show him more respect.

The Obama administration had reportedly reassured their family that 'IS won't harm a woman'.

Soon, Marsha said, the kidnappers demanded the large sum of money, or the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani national who is now serving an 86-year prison sentence after being convicted in 2010 of trying to shoot US military officers while she was in Afghanistan.

Marsha testified that she and her husband replied: 'We are a family of modest means, and are concerned because you are asking for a great deal of money that is more than we could earn in several lifetimes.'

They also reportedly told the captors that they had no influence on the American government to force Siddiqui's release, but Kayla's captors simply wrote back 'get back to work,' the BBC reported.

By July 12, 2014, the emails - which were shown in court on Tuesday - reveal, ISIS gave the Muellers just 30 days to come up with the money or secure Siddiqui's release.

'If you fail to meet this deadline, we will send you a picture of Kayla's dead body,' they wrote.

At that point, Marsha said, she decided all future emails should be signed by both her and her husband.

'I told the negotiators I was going to write something myself,' she said in court. 'Because I'm Kayla's mom. I felt I needed to sign it.'

From then on, the family reportedly made repeated pleas to the kidnappers, ultimately sending the video message on September 16, 2014.

But by February 2015, Marsha testified, she and her husband began to hear reports that their daughter had been killed.

They then emailed the terrorist group asking for confirmation, to which they responded: 'The news regarding your daughter's death is indeed true.'

The terrorists allegedly claimed the Jordanian air force bombed a house where Kayla was staying - but prosecutors have called that into question given ISIS' history of executing American hostages.

The email also included photos of Kayla's body, which Marsha was forced to describe to the jury.

Her heartbreaking testimony followed that of Kayla's ex-boyfriend Rodwan Safarjalani, a Syrian national who was kidnapped along with Kayla in 2013 when she was working as a consultant with the Turkish humanitarian group Support to Life.

Michael Foley, brother of James Foley, a US journalist slain by Islamic State militants, departs for a break from the trial at the Albert V. Bryan U.S. Courthouse on Tuesday

The court also heard from Marcos Marginitez, a Spanish former hostage, who testified that the cell Elsheikh was involved in, known as the 'Beatles' because its members were British, was far more brutal than the French, Belgian and Syrian guards at the Islamic State prisons.

'We were not allowed to look them in the eye, and had to kneel with our hands on the wall whenever they were there,' he claimed, according to the Telegraph.

'They knew how to inflict the most pain,' he said, 'and they enjoyed it.'

The heartbreaking testimony comes a day after James Foley's mother testified that she initially hoped reports her son had been executed were 'some cruel joke.'

'I didn't want to believe it,' Diane Foley testified at the trial on Monday.

'It just seemed too horrific,' Foley said. 'I was hoping it was just some cruel joke.'

Foley said it sank in later that day when US president Barack Obama went on television to confirm that James had indeed been executed by his IS captors.

Diane Foley, who worked tirelessly to try to obtain her son's release, said James, a seasoned combat reporter, left for Syria in October 2012 and promised to be back for Christmas.

The family began to worry when he did not call in November on Thanksgiving.

James Foley is pictured while covering the civil war in Aleppo, Syria

Left: US freelance journalist Steven Sotloff. Right: Kayla Mueller is shown after speaking to a group in Prescott, Arizona. Both were killed in Syria by ISIS

'Jim always called us on the holidays,' she said. 'There was a deafening silence when we did not hear from him.'

She said the family was informed by a colleague of James that he had been kidnapped.

'Those first nine months, we didn't know if Jim was alive or not,' she said.

The first tangible proof that James was alive came when his captors provided emailed answers to three questions that only he would know.

The brother of a journalist murdered by ISIS killer Jihadi John has told a terror trial how he watched the clip of his sibling being beheaded 'once or twice', saying the footage is 'burned into my brain'.

James' brother Michael Foley also testified, saying that he watched the clip of his sibling being beheaded 'once or twice', and that the footage is 'burned into my brain'.

He also said ransom demands made by the terror group in 2012 and 2013 - including 100 million Euros and the release of Islamist prisoners - showed they were never serious about sparing his late brother James. The war photographer was executed in Raqqa, Syria, in August 2014 aged 40, with footage of his murder horrifying the world.

Michael told the hearing in Alexandria: 'We had no ability to secure either of those demands. It's not a reasonable demand. It's not a negotiation, in my mind.'

He went on to say how he'd first learned of his brother's death after being called for confirmation by reporters, which was finally provided days later by then-President Barack Obama.

Michael said he went online and watched the video of his brother in an orange jumpsuit and the knife-wielding IS executioner known as 'Jihadi John.'

'I watched it once or twice,' he said. 'I haven't seen it since but it's burned into my brain.'

Elsheikh is pictured, right, with ISIS Beatle Alexander Kotey, left, who struck a plea bargain last year in return for life behind bars

Elsheikh is better known as one of 'the Beatles,' a nickname he and at least two other Britons were given by their captives because of their accents, with the gang said to have been behind the beheadings of 27 hostages.

Last week, his trial was told of the horrific brutality he allegedly meted out on prisoners, including 'going away' batterings for hostages who'd been freed.

Elsheikh is also said to have beaten one hostage 25 times on learning that it was the unnamed captive's 25th birthday.

Elsheikh and a longtime friend, Alexenda Kotey, were captured together and brought to Virginia to face trial.

Kotey pleaded guilty last year in a plea bargain that calls for a life sentence. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for April 29.

The fourth suspected 'Beatle', Aine Davis, is pictured in 2014. He is currently serving a prison sentence at a Turkish jail

A third Beatle, Mohammed Emwazi, served as executioner in the video of Foley's execution. Emwazi was killed in a drone strike in November 2015, and was the face and voice of some of ISIS's most horrific execution videos.

There have been conflicting statements during the trial about the existence of a fourth Beatle.

An individual previously identified in public discussion as a fourth Beatle, Aine Davis, is serving a prison sentence in Turkey.

Defense lawyers have highlighted the discrepancies over the Beatles' identities, and say there is insufficient evidence to prove Elsheikh was one of the Beatles who participated in the hostage-taking scheme.

Prosecutors, though, plan to present evidence later in the trial that Elsheikh confessed to his role under questioning from interrogators and in media interviews.
Kamala Harris' communications director tested positive for covid on Wednesday and is considered a close contact to the vice president, Harris' office said.

Jamal Simmons, who joined Harris' office in early January, is isolating and working from home.

Simmons was spotted shaking hands and hugging former President Barack Obama at a packed White House event on Tuesday celebrating the anniversary of the Affordable Healthcare Act. Obama had covid last month.

Simmons also attended Saturday evening's Gridiron dinner, a white-tie event for journalists and officials. Several cabinet members, lawmakers and journalists tested positive after the event.

President Joe Biden was next to Harris at Tuesday's event in the East Room. The White House said he was last tested for covid on Monday and was negative.

Harris 'will follow CDC guidance for those that have been in close contact with a positive individual and will continue to consult with her physician,' her spokesperson Kristin Allen said in a statement. 'The Vice President plans to continue with her public schedule.'

It's the second recent exposure for the vice president, whose husband Doug Emhoff tested positive for covid last month.

Harris' office did not immediately respond to inquiries about when the vice president was last tested for covid. She did not appear with President Biden at an event Wednesday afternoon where he signed a postal reform bill.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines a close contact as someone who was less than 6 feet away from an infected individual for more than 15 minutes.

Jamal Simmons (left) with former President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris at an event at the White House on Tuesday; Simmons tested positive for covid on Wednesday

Obama gave Simmons a hug at the event

NEW: Responding to my question what he says to Democrats worried about the midterms, President Obama tells me: We got a story to tell, just got to tell it. pic.twitter.com/eBFsi0o9rA  Peter Alexander (@PeterAlexander) April 5, 2022

Simons is the latest covid case among a spike of positive tests through Washington D.C.'s bold-faced names, many of which have close ties to the White House.

Attorney General Merrick Garland tested positive for covid on Wednesday after sitting at the head table with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo at the white-tie Gridiron Dinner.

The exclusive private dinner, a invitation-only event with an A-list guest list of Washington elite, is showing signs of being a super spreader.

Garland, who is vaccinated and boosted, is showing no symptoms.

'He asked to be tested after learning that he may have been exposed to the virus,' the Justice Department said in a statement.

The announcement came after Garland held a press conference Wednesday on Russian sanctions. He did not wear a face mask and was surrounded by his deputies. He will isolate at home for at least five days and return to the office following a negative covid test.

Earlier Wednesday Raimondo tested positive with an at-home antigen test after 'experiencing mild symptoms,' the Commerce Department said in a statement.

'Today, I tested positive for COVID. Fortunately, I am fully vaccinated (and boosted!), and I am confident that this vaccine is the reason I don't have more severe symptoms,' she wrote on twitter.

The department said she shared her diagnosis 'out of an abundance of transparency.'

She will isolate for five days and work from home. Raimondo stayed late at the event, hanging out at an after party and speaking to several members of the media who were in attendance.

President Biden was not considered a close contact, the Commerce department said.

He was not at Saturday night's dinner. Neither Garland nor Raimondo did not attend a packed White House event on Tuesday celebrating the Affordable Healthcare Act, where Biden and former President Barack Obama spoke.

Gridiron Club president Tom DeFran said on Wednesday afternoon that there are 14 dinner guests who are known to have tested positive for covid.

'There is no way of being certain about when they first contracted Covid,' his statement says. 'But they did interact with other guests during the night and we have to be realistic and expect some more cases.'

Attorney General Merrick Garland tested positive for covid after attending the Gridiron dinner; he spoke at a press conference earlier Wednesday

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo tested positive for covid after attending the white-tie Gridiron Dinner on Saturday night

Raimondo was the keynote speaker at Saturday night's Gridiron dinner, one of the poshest events of the D.C. social season. The private dinner, held in a Washington D.C. hotel, did not release photos or video footage of the night.

Guests were required to show proof of vaccination but were not required to have a negative covid test ahead of the dinner.

More than 600 people crowded together in rows of tables in the Renaissance hotel ballroom.

Raimondo was seated at the head table with high-profile guests like Garland, Ukrainian ambassador Oksana Markarova and White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

Most attendees at the dinner, which included members of Congress and other administration officials - were maskless.

Among those in attendance were Dr. Anthony Fauci and Centers for Disease Control director Dr. Rochelle Walensky.

Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Joaquin Castro, both of whom attended the dinner, also announced positive covid tests this week. Multiple reporters who attended the dinner have also tested positive.

'I'm feeling fine, and grateful to be vaccinated and boosted. In the coming days, I will quarantine and follow CDC guidelines,' Schiff tweeted.

'Unfortunately, after avoiding COVID-19 for two years, I've come down with it. I tested negative yesterday & last Thursday, but positive today,' Castro tweeted on Tuesday.

Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff (left) and Joaquin Castro (right), both of whom attended the Gridiron dinner, also announced positive covid tests this week

Psaki said on Monday that the White House covid policies have not changed in light of the jump in cases with close ties to the administration.

'Our policy is that all Executive Office of the President employees surrounding the President are on a regular testing schedule to screen for COVID on campus. That is a step beyond CDC guidance. If you're going to see the President, you will be tested that day, even if you're not traveling with him  just if you're going to see him for a meeting,' she said at her press briefing.

'And meetings with the President are often socially distanced in many circumstances as an additional precaution, even as people are tested,' she noted.

Biden is vaccinated and boosted. He received his second booster shot last week.

The Gridiron Club dinner is an off-camera, off-the-record event for members of the media. Politicians and other a-list figures are invited to its annual dinner.

The event features a Republican speaker, a Democratic speaker, and a speaker representing the sitting administration, along with a series of sketches performed by club members.

This year's dinner - the club's 137th - featured Raimondo, Republican Gov. of New Hampshire Chris Sununu, and Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland.
President Joe Biden signed legislation to bail out the US Postal Service, with lawmakers including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joining the celebration  without mentioning the the head of the Postal Service installed under Donald Trump who sat quietly in the back.

Biden cheered both passage of the bill and the role of postal carriers in at event at the White House Wednesday, before glad-handing with a line of lawmakers.

Biden hailed the Postal Service as 'essential as it ever was'  to the economy, by delivering people's medicine, and even their mail-in ballots.

DeJoy was nonplussed when asked by DailyMail.com why he did't get a shout-out.

'This is about the Postal Service, not about me. And we all work together and they've been working together for a long time to try and get this unfair legislation straightened out... we all got it done,' he said.

President Joe Biden (C) signs the Postal Service Reform Act into law during an event with (L-R) Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY), Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and retired letter carrier Annette Taylor and others in the State Dining Room at the White House on April 6, 2022 in Washington, DC

DeJoy, who was selected by a Board of Governors filled with Trump appointees, donated millions to Republicans and gave more than $1.2 million to the Trump Victory Committee as of 2020. He has been viewed with suspicion by some Democrats, and got grilled by Democratic lawmakers in the run-up to the 2020 election as Trump spread conspiracies about mail-in ballots.

Some even cast his reform efforts as part of a deliberate plot to slow down mail service  a charge DeJoy vigorously denied.

He agreed to suspend controversial moves to reduce overtime and eliminate mail sorting machines in the weeks before the 2020 elections under pressure from congressional Democrats. Now, Democratic lawmakers say he was helpful on the latest legislation.

'We're very glad that the inequities of the health care and the pensions were rectified. And he was on our side on that,' Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer told DailyMail.com, mentioning provisions that would no longer require the Postal Service to set aside funds in advance for future health expenses.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., poses for a photo after President Joe Biden signed the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington. She and Rep. Rashida Tlabi (D-Mich.) were both there

Ocasio-Cortez and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, along with Rep. Carolyn Maloney, were among the powerhouse New Yorkers who came

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was seated near the back at the event

Ocasio-Cortez, who sits on the Government Reform Committee, greeted lawmakers and even posed with military aides who ask for a picture

Biden called the Postal Service as 'essential as it ever was'

DeJoy can only be removed by a vote of the Board of Governors, noted Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.)

Asked why DeJoy wasn't front and center, House Committee on Oversight and Reform Chair Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) told DailyMail.com: 'Why do you think?'

Then she spoke about DeJoy's job security situation.

'The only way he can be removed is by a vote of the [Postal Service] Board of Governors. Who knows what's going to happen. But that's above my pay grade and I think the president could work his will there if he wanted to,' she said.

Seated up front for the event were such powerbrokers as Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Schumer, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Majority Whip James C. Clyburn  although Biden at one point that 'anybody but Steny can come.'

Biden defended changing the Postal Services health obligations, saying no other federal agency has 'anything like that.'

Biden described stories of people 'getting hit with late fees because their credit card bill arrived a week late, and small businesses 'on the verge of collapse' because payments they were counting on were severely delayed.

He said he made a campaign promise to 'fix this. And today we are.'

The bill passed on a bipartisan majority, with Republican including retiring Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) on hand.
Liz Truss vowed to derail Vladimir Putins war machine with a sweeping new set of sanctions  as the US targeted two of his daughters.

The Foreign Secretary froze the assets of Russias biggest bank, banned all UK investment in the country and pledged to terminate coal and oil imports by the end of the year.

She slapped asset freezes and travel bans on eight more oligarchs who run major Russian industries and have links to the Kremlin  some of whom have homes in London.

The fifth round of UK measures since the invasion of Ukraine began six weeks ago came as the US sanctioned two of Putins daughters amid suspicions that his fortune is hidden away with family members.

Liz Truss vowed to derail Vladimir Putins war machine with a sweeping new set of sanctions  as the US targeted two of his daughters

US President Joe Biden announced sanctions were being imposed on Putins daughters  Katerina Tikhonova and Maria Vorontsova (pictured) - amid suspicions that his fortune is hidden away with family members

Miss Truss, who will Thursday urge her Western counterparts to keep up the pressure, said: We are stepping up our campaign to bring Putins appalling war to an end with some of our toughest sanctions yet.

Our latest wave of measures will bring an end to the UKs imports of Russian energy and sanction yet more individuals and businesses, decimating Putins war machine.

Together with our allies, we are showing the Russian elite that they cannot wash their hands of the atrocities committed on Putins orders. We will not rest until Ukraine prevails.

Boris Johnson echoed her words, saying: Today the UK steps up its stringent package of sanctions on Putins regime. We will not let Russias appalling crimes go unnoticed or unpunished. Ukraine must prevail.

US President Joe Biden announced sanctions were being imposed on Putins daughters  Katerina Tikhonova and Maria Vorontsova  along with key members of Russias security council. The US said they were targeted for being the adult children of Putin, a person whose property and interests in property are blocked.

Miss Tikhonova was described as a tech executive whose work supports the GoR [Russian government] and defence industry. The announcement said Miss Vorontsova leads state-funded programmes that have received billions of dollars from the Kremlin toward genetics research and are personally overseen by Putin.

Miss Vorontsova, 36, is Putins eldest child and believed to be an expert in rare genetic diseases in children.

Miss Tikhonova, 35, is also a scientist and was once a talented acrobat.

A US official said: We believe that many of Putins assets are hidden with family members and thats why were targeting them.

The UKs latest actions to destabilise the Russian economy include a full asset freeze on Sberbank  which holds a third of Russias total banking assets  in co-ordination with the US. The Credit Bank of Moscow was also targeted, bringing the total number of banks sanctioned by Britain to 18.

All new outward UK investment in Russia  worth 11billion in 2020  was banned in what the Government said was another major hit to the Russian economy.

And by the end of 2022, all imports of Russian coal and oil will cease, with gas following as soon as possible thereafter.

Imports of Russian iron and steel will be banned from next week along with high-tech UK exports, in the hope this will damage Putins military capabilities.

The UKs latest actions to destabilise the Russian economy include a full asset freeze on Sberbank  which holds a third of Russias total banking assets  in co-ordination with the US

Eight oligarchs were targeted, bringing the number of individuals sanctioned to 82, with assets estimated at more than 170billion.

They included fertiliser magnates Moshe Kantor, who has a house in north London, and Andrey Guryev, who owns the capitals second-largest family home.

But Labour foreign affairs spokesman David Lammy said: The Government still needs to go faster and harder on sanctions against Putins barbaric regime. It is inexcusable that several previous announcements still have not been implemented.

Weeks after both measures were promised, there is still no ban on the export of luxury goods or limits on Russians depositing money into UK bank accounts. There are still loopholes around trusts and ownership thresholds. Talking tough without delivering is unacceptable.

Fresh action is likely today as G7 foreign ministers meet in Brussels, where Miss Truss will call for efforts to end dependency on Russian energy to be sped up.

Meanwhile, Moscow has vowed to take action against British media in retaliation for the UK targeting state broadcaster RT.
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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says he will be be bussing thousands of illegal migrants who cross the border straight to Washington DC and leaving them on the steps of the US Capitol for President Biden to deal with.

Announcing the new plan at a press conference Wednesday, the GOP governor said: 'To help local officials whose communities are being overwhelmed by hordes of illegal immigrants who are being dropped off by the Biden administration, Texas is providing charter buses to send these illegal immigrants whove been dropped off by the Biden administration to Washington DC.

'We are sending them to the US capital where the Biden admin will be more immediately able to address the needs of the people who come across our border.'

Abbott said the plan was to drop migrants off at the steps of the US Capitol building itself, and added: 'The Biden administration, theyve been dumping large numbers of migrants, on cities up and down the border, leaving cities to grapple with challenges they dont have the capability of dealing with.

'They themselves have been putting these migrants on buses to san Antonio. So I said, "I've got a better idea, instead of bussing these people to San Antonio, lets continue the ride all the way to Washington DC."

Asked how many buses might be deployed for the scheme, chief of Texas's Division of Emergency Management Nim Kidd said they'd deploy as many as needed - and cited the 900 previously called in to help tackled previous disasters.

Kidd told the press conference: 'The long answer is in past disasters we have pulled up to 900 buses for evacuations. We will use as many buses as we need to follow the governors direction to get this done .'

The announcement comes as the Biden administration announced it would drop Title 42, the pandemic-era border restriction that immediately expels migrants back to Texas, which was enacted by Donald Trump.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, pictured Wednesday, has announced a plan to bus illegal immigrants who cross into the Lone Star State straight to Washington DC

Ukrainian migrants seeking asylum are pictured in Mexico on April 6. Abbott says anyone crossing into Texas illegally will now be deposited on the steps of the US Capitol building

Nim Kidd, the chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management (pictured in white shirt to right of Abbott) said as many buses as necessary would be filled, and cited prior disasters where 900 of the vehicles have been called into action

Title 42 was enacted by Trump to try and protect US from COVID Title 42 was enacted by then-President Donald Trump in March 2020, as COVID began to surge across the United States. The policy allows border patrol agents to deny entry to migrants without considering their asylum claims if they have been in a country where a communicable disease  such as COVID  is rife. It has been used more than one million times during Donald Trump's and Joe Biden's presidencies, with its continuation under the Biden administration infuriating left-wing Democrats. Already deeply controversial, the policy was lambasted by top Democrats when it emerged Ukrainian refugees fleeing their war-torn country to Mexico were being turned away at the US southern border under Title 42, despite Biden's promise to welcome them 'with open arms'. But immigration experts told DailyMail.com that although Title 42 has left thousands of refugees in danger in Mexico, there is no plan for an effective and fair replacement system  meaning a pileup of tens of thousands of desperate asylum seekers at ports of entry is likely in border cities like Tijuana, south of California and Reynosa, across the border from Hidalgo, Texas. Advertisement

In a statement on April 1, Abbott called ending Title 42 'reckless' and said Biden's 'open-border policies' have caused the state to take drastic measures like sending out Department of Public Safety troopers and more than 10,000 Texas National Guard members to arrest migrants at the border.

And on Wednesday, Abbott warned that dumping Title 42 would lead to 18,000 illegal migrants crossing the border every day - equivalent to 500,000 a month.

He cited Obama-era Homeland Security Chief Jeh Johnson's 2019 claim that 100,000 migrants crossing the border in a month could be considered a crisis in any circumstances.

And Abbott warned that the flow expected after Title 42 is axed would effectively add the number of people living in LA - four million - to the United States' population by Christmas.

He explained: 'We have more people potentially crossing our border by the end of this year than live in Los Angeles, Americas second-largest city.'

On Wednesday, Abbott also announced enhanced checks on all cars crossing the southern border into Texas, to try and cut down on cartel smuggling.

He warned of advanced wait times for people coming into the US.

Abbott went on to say that state troopers would be given riot gear to push back any orchestrated plans to overwhelm border crossings by caravans, and that they'd be conducting rehearsals in the coming days.

Explaining the measures he is enacting, Abbott said: 'We're deploying boat blockades at appropriate regions in the Rio Grande, deploying razor wire in low water areas and creating container blockades to drive people away from low water areas

'There will be mass-migration rehearsals from tomorrow  troopers will be equipped with riot gear in case of violence.

'The border region is going to be lit at night in prominent smuggling areas to make it easier to detect any illegal activity that is taking place.

'If you're a caravan organizer, and you think you can overwhelm a site of entry, well be waiting for you.'

Abbott noted that Texas had become 'the first state to ever build a wall to secure our border.'

State officials said they will charter 'as many buses as we need' to send migrants on the 28-hour journey from the border to D.C.

Abbott also said he is implementing a 'zero-tolerance policy' for smuggling in migrants in vehicles at the border. He said that agents would conduct 'safety inspections' on every vehicle trying to cross the border.

Abbott said the vehicle checks and migrant bussing would be in addition to blockades the state is implementing along the border. He said that boats blockades, shipping container blockades and razor wire would be erected at high-traffic areas and low water crossings.

Abbott said troopers would be given riot gear to push back any attempts by migrant caravans to overwhelm border crossings, and added that rehearsals for hostile attempts to overwhelm crossing points would be enacted later this week

Abbott said that Biden's decision to axe the Trump era Title 42 policy that expels migrants straight back to Mexico would lead to 500,000 illegal immigrants crossing the southern border each month. Asylum seekers are pictured after being detained at the border in El Paso, Texas, on March 30 this year

Abbott said the National Guard would begin gearing up on Thursday.

'All troopers and specially trained National Guard will be equipped with riot gear in case of potential caravan violence,' he said. The governor concluded his press conference by saying more aggressive measures would be announced next week.

Meanwhile Republicans want Texas to declare an 'invasion' at the southern border to give permissions for state troopers and National Guard members to turn back migrants as the country braces for Title 42 to end.

Immigration enforcement is giving migrants who are released into the U.S. smartphones with tracking apps installed so they can keep track of released illegal immigrants.

Parole release migrants are being released into the country and are asked to turn themselves into Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a city of their choice and are being given government phones to track them.

There is, however, no way to stop these migrants from getting rid of the phones.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki did not deny on Wednesday that migrants are receiving smartphones upon release in the country, claiming during her daily briefing that the government needs to 'take steps to ensure we know where individuals are and we can check in with them.'

A new report also shows that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are receiving released migrants with 'welcome bags and backpacks' and helping them arrange transportation to a location within the U.S. of their preference.

Pandemic-era Title 42, which allowed for instant expulsion of migrants without hearing their asylum claims during the coronavirus health emergency, is coming to an end on May 23, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on Friday.

Estimates warn that this could lead to a tripling of the already record-breaking number of monthly migrants apprehended by Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Migrants are being given smartphones with tracking devices so Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can track them once they are released into the country

There is no failsafe in place, however, to stop migrants released into the country from ditching the cell phones and evading ICE in whatever city on which they relocate

Former Trump administration officials and other Republicans are urging Texas to declare an 'invasion' at the southern border in order to use war time powers to expel migrants. Pictured Wednesday, April 5: Ukrainians seeking asylum in the U.S. sleep as they wait at a makeshift encampment in Tijuana, Mexico to cross the border

Since Biden took office in January 2021, CBP has encountered more than 2.2 million migrants and the border  and that number could as much as triple with the end of Title 42 next month

Former Trump administration officials are pressing Abbott to make the 'invasion' declaration along the U.S.-Mexico border in order to give enforcement powers to troops and Guard members that have previously been the responsibility of the federal government.

Driving the effort on the right is the Center for Renewing America, a conservative policy think tank led by former Trump administration officials, including Ken Cuccinelli, an immigration hard-liner and former Homeland Security official under Trump.

He argued that states are entitled to defend themselves from immediate danger or invasion, as it is defined by the 'invasion clause,' under the 'states self-defense clause.'

Cuccinelli said in practice, he envisions the plan would look similar to the enforcement of Title 42, which circumvented U.S. obligations under American law and international treaty to provide asylum to legitimate claims.

He said he has not spoken with Abbott claiming the governor's current sweeping border mission, known as Operation Lone Star, has put little dent in the number of people crossing the border. The mission has also drawn criticism from Guard members over long deployments and little to do, and some arrests have appeared to have no connection to border security.

'Until you are actually returning people to Mexico, what you are doing will have no effect,' Cuccinelli said.

An Ecuadorian immigrant shows the app he uses for reporting his location to ICE during an interview October 21, 2021 as immigration authorities turn to smartphones to keep tabs on immigrants and ensure they attend their deportation hearings

It is unclear whether Abbott, who is up for reelection in November and is already installing more border barriers and allowing troopers to arrest migrants on trespassing charges, supports the aggressive proposals former Trump officials are pushing.

Abbott did not elaborate on what steps he will announce Wednesday.

Border Patrol officials say they are planning for as many as 18,000 arrivals daily once the health policy expires in May. Last week, about 7,100 migrants were coming a day to the southern U.S. border.

But the way former Trump immigration officials see it, Texas and Arizona can pick up where the federal government leaves off once the policy ends. Their plan involves a novel interpretation of the U.S. Constitution to have the National Guard or state police forcibly send migrants to Mexico, without regard to immigration laws and law enforcement procedures. Border enforcement has always been a federal responsibility, and in Texas, state leaders have not been pushing for such a move.

Tom Homan, the former acting director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump, said at a border security conference in San Antonio last week he had spoken with Abbott but gave no indication about whether the two-term governor supported the idea.

'We've had discussions with his attorneys in his office, 'Is there a way to use this clause within the Constitution where it talks about invasion?'' Homan said during the Border Security Expo.

Homan on Tuesday described the response from Abbott's office, which he said took place about three months ago, as 'non-committal but willing to listen.'

Texas Governor Greg Abbott says he will he announce Wednesday, April 6, 2022, 'unprecedented actions' to deter migrants coming to Texas but did not elaborate

In Arizona, Republican Governor Doug Ducey has also been under pressure within his party to declare that the state is being 'invaded' and to use extraordinary powers normally reserved for war.

But Ducey, who is term-limited and not on the ballot in 2022, has not embraced the theory and has avoided commenting directly on it.

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, issued a legal opinion in February declaring that Ducey has the power to use National Guard troops and state law enforcement to forcibly send migrants back. Brnovich is locked in a tough Republican U.S. Senate primary in which border security is a top issue.

While speaking Tuesday to a conservative talk radio station, Abbott's remarks about constitutional authority were in relation to Congress, which he said had the only power to reduce the flow of migrants.

'We'll be taking unprecedented action,' Abbott told radio station KCRS. 'Congress has to stop talking about it, has to stop complaining about it, has to stop going to the border and looking at it. Congress has to take action, just like Texas is taking action.'

Asked if he considered what was happening on the Texas border 'an invasion,' Abbott did not use those words but said he would be discussing it Wednesday.

Emily Berman, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Houston, said the 'invasion clause' cited by proponents is tucked into a broader constitutional assurance that the U.S. must defend states from invasion and domestic violence. Additionally, she said, the 'state self-defense clause' says states cannot engage in warlike actions or foreign policy unless invaded.

Berman said she hasn't seen the constitutional clauses used since the 1990s, when the courts ruled that they did not have jurisdiction to decide what qualified an invasion, but believed that one could only be done by another governmental entity.

For example, Berman said, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia can be qualified as one because it is an outside government breaching another country's boundaries with the use of military force.

'Just because the state says that it is an invasion that doesn't necessarily make it so, it is not clear to me what additional legal authority that conveys on them,' Berman said, adding that state officials can enforce state laws, but the line is drawn at what the federal law allows.

U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat whose district includes the Texas border, has criticized the Biden administration over border security and ending Title 42. But he does not support states trying to use new powers that would let them 'do whatever they want.'

'I think it should be more of a partnership instead of saying, 'Federal government, we don't think you're doing enough, and why don't we go ahead and do our own border security?'' he said.

EXCLUSIVE: Border agents are 'defeated, demoralized and feel unwanted' because Biden is lifting 'the only deterrent left' against a migrant surge in Title 42 and 'pandering to the far-left' instead of protecting the U.S., union head says

National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd told DailyMail.com that border agents are feeling 'defeated', 'demoralized' and 'unwanted' under the Biden administration

The National Border Patrol Council president says U.S. border agents are feeling 'defeated' and 'unwanted' under the Biden administration as immigration agencies prepare for a massive influx of 18,000 migrants every day once Title 42 is dropped.

Brandon Judd, in an interview with DailyMail.com on Wednesday, pleaded for President Joe Biden to stop 'pandering to the far-left' and start 'protecting the American public'.

'What are border patrol agents saying?' the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) president posed. 'We feel defeated.'

'We're extremely disappointed in this administration's unwillingness to protect the American public not only from a virus that has ravaged the country but also from those that would come into our country to do us harm,' Judd continued.

He said quelling the migration crisis 'can be fixed very easily through policy' but claims 'the administration won't do what the American public needs it to do.'

'And that, of course, makes us feel unwanted, it makes us feel unproductive, it demoralizes all of the agents,' Judd said.

NBPC is the largest labor union representing agents and staff on the U.S Border Patrol.

Judd has promoted in his post that government take a more hard-line approach to illegal immigration, agreeing more with the policies of former President Donald Trump than that of his successor President Joe Biden.

The border agent turned union leader specifically said that getting rid of Title 42 gives migrants even more permission to come to the U.S. and will get rid of the last real deterrent of illegal immigration left.

'We would have had a system that would have ultimately ended catch and release once and for all, but that Biden administration, they brought back the catch and release, they brought back that reward that allows people to cross our borders illegally and ultimately get what they want, which is a release into the United States  never to be heard from again,' Judd said, praising policies of the past administration and lambasting the current.

Title 42 will comes to an end on May 23, and Judd says this is the only remaining deterrent for illegal immigration. Border patrol numbers show that the number of apprehensions and arrests could climb from 8,000 per day to 18,000 per day once the pandemic-era policy ends

Since Biden took office in January 2021, CBP has encountered more than 2.2 million migrants and the border  and that number could as much as triple with the end of Title 42

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki reiterated on Wednesday the administration's support for the perspective of allowing as many asylum-seekers to be released into the country as possible.

'Our concern is ensuring that individuals who irregularly migrate to the United States proceed through our process of, you know, of course being monitored, but also participating in hearings to determine whether or not they will be able to stay,' Psaki said.

Judd said that 'the administration has caused' the southern border crisis.

'Now they're talking about getting rid of the only deterrent that they left in place, which was Title 42,' Judd lamented. 'And they're talking about doing it well, pandemic is still ongoing in this country.'

'It just doesn't make sense, what this administration is doing.'

Title 42 was enacted in March 2020 by then-President Trump to allow for the immediate expulsion of migrants without hearing their asylum claims in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Judd said the Title 42 process takes about 15 minutes at the border.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on Friday that it is ending the pandemic-era policy on May 23, 2022, which Customs and Border Enforcement (CBP) estimates could lead to 18,000 apprehensions every day  up from the current 8,000.

'To get rid of it [Title 42] at this time, we think is the wrong decision,' Judd told DailyMail.com

'It sends the wrong message, it's the wrong decisions and it's just going to put our citizens at more peril.'

When asked why the public health protection is being lifted when the U.S. is still in a declared public health emergency, Judd said: 'Normally somebody would say it's confusing, but when you look at this administration, if you look at how it plays politics, it becomes crystal clear why they are doing it: Since inauguration this administration has pandered to far-left activists. And that's what they're continuing to do now, pandering to far-left activists even though there is clear indications that this pandemic is not over.'

Nearly 2,000 Ukrainian migrants set up a makeshift camp in a public square in Reynosa, Mexico

'If they want to revisit it at a point where the CDC says the pandemic in the United States is over, that can be understandable,' he conceded. 'But, I mean, when they're constantly seeking more money for COVID vaccines, when they're actively trying to get rid of federal employees, whether that's in the civil service or the military, because they refuse to get vaccinated  yet they're going to lift this. Again, it makes no sense.'

Judd said another reason CBP is overwhelmed is because many have quit or were fired due to their refusal to get the COVID-19 vaccine when Biden made it a requirement for federal employees.

On the other hand, migrants who refuse the jab are still being released into the country.

'Migrants are being given the choice, it's their choice  it's their choice, they can refuse to be vaccinated,' Judd explained.

'Now, if they choose to be vaccinated, they can get the vaccine but they can flat out say 'no' and they still get released into the United States,' he added. 'So again, it just makes no sense.'
Air Mauritius will operate 04 weekly commercial flights to and from Antananarivo (TNR) effective Thursday 07 April 2022 on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays with both the Airbus A350-900 and A330-900neo aircraft.

The timings are as below:

From Mauritius

Days of Operations Flight Number Time of Departure Time of arrival Tuesdays MK288 14h20 15h15 Wednesdays MK288 14h20 15h15 Thursdays MK288 14h20 15h15 aturdays MK288 14h20 15h15

To Mauritius

Days of Operations Flight Number Time of Departure Time of arrival Tuesdays MK289 17h00 19h45 Wednesdays MK289 17h00 19h45 Thursdays MK289 17h00 19h45 Saturdays MK289 17h00 19h45

For reservations, you can on 207 7575, airmauritius.com or get into contact with your travel agent.

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A massive fire has ripped through a furniture factory and threatened to spread to nearby homes in western Sydney.

Firefighters rushed to the scene in Rydalmere around 10pm on Wednesday night and arrived to find the entire premises engulfed in flames and smoke.

Terrified neighbours raised the alarm after being woken up by the sound of explosions.

'This woman started knocking on the back door, begging for help,' a resident told Today show.

A massive factory fire threatened to engulf adjoining properties in Rydalmere

'She started screaming saying to call the fire brigade. I heard a couple of explosions. A lot of glass breaking and the roof collapsing and stuff.'

'Next thing you know it just started spreading around the back and also the front. It was actually crazy.'

Up to 100 firefighters worked into the night with large hose streams and aerial appliances battling to contain the fire and managed to protect surrounding buildings.

No one was inside the factory at the time, which has sustained extensive structural damage.

Fire and Rescue NSW Superintendent Adam Dewberry described the incident as a significant fire which required back-up assistance.

Water supply also hampered firefighting efforts.

'To overcome this, we had our fire trucks pumping water from remote distances, including Victoria Road, which caused traffic disruptions,' Supt Dewberry said.

Firefighters used aerial appliances to bring the blaze under control on Wednesday night

Firefighters remain at the scene on Thursday morning to extinguish any hotspots but are yet to enter the gutted two storey building currently deemed unsafe due to debris and rubble after the roof collapsed.

Heavy overnight rain helped to douse the blaze and billowing smoke that engulfed the premises.

An investigation into the cause of the blaze is underway.
Jailed: Bradley Baker posed as a police officer on dating apps and lied to his partner, friends and family

A former journalist and convicted sex offender who posed as a police officer on dating apps and lied to his family and friends has been jailed for 28 months.

Bradley Baker, 28, had his own uniform and lied to his ex-partner, family and friends that he worked for British Transport Police.

A court heard the fantasist posed as an officer on dating apps and also used a fake warrant card to travel for free on the railway and bus networks.

The 28-year-old was convicted of three sex offences in 2018 and was made the subject of a sexual harm prevention order which banned him from using computers.

Baker, of Handworth, Birmingham, was rumbled when he was reported to North Wales Police for a separate offence.

He was reported as a serving BTP Special Constable based in Birmingham but enquiries quickly established he had never worked for the force.

Officers searched his home on February 1 last year and seized a police uniform including a warrant card badge and holder displaying 'DC Baker'.

Two fake BTP warrant cards and multiple police lanyards were also recovered by the force.

Baker also tried to throw laptops out of his window as officers arrived, which were found to be unregistered.

This breached a sexual harm prevention order which stated that any electrical device in his possession must be registered with police.

A laptop which was later found to be stolen from his previous job as a journalist was also recovered as well as amounts of cannabis.

Baker pleaded guilty to possession of police articles and two counts of breaching a Sexual Harm Prevention Order, which was handed to him after committing three sexual offences involving children in 2018.

Baker was jailed for two years and four months at Birmingham Crown Court (pictured)

He was jailed at Birmingham Crown Court on March 25 after also pleading guilty to one count of theft by employee and two counts of possession of Class B cannabis.

BTP Police Constable Jade Ledbrook, said: 'Possessing fake items of police uniform and posing as a police officer is an extremely serious offence, and I'm glad that the severity of Baker's delusional actions is reflected in his sentence.

'Sexual Harm Prevention Orders are given to protect the public, and Baker's blatant disregard for this demonstrates his dangerous mindset.

'Had he not been stopped as a result of this extensive investigation, he could have continued to commit even further, and potentially more serious, crimes - therefore I'm pleased to see him behind bars.'
More than 250,000 of diesel was stolen from a Royal Navy warship under the noses of defence chiefs, it has been revealed.

A gang of thieves drove off with tankers intended to power the HMS Bulwark over a period of weeks at HMNP Devonport in Plymouth, in what is was one of Britain's biggest fuel thefts.

They were able to get away with the daring raid despite a high security presence at the naval base and were only caught when suspicious guards stopped a tanker trying to leave the site.

However, it is believed most of the fuel was sold on the black market before the scheme was uncovered.

The diesel was intended to power generators on the HMS Bulwark, which is a 19,560 tonne assault ship with 325 sailors and up to 405 troops.

The HMS Bulwark is a 19,560 tonne assault ship with 325 sailors and up to 405 troops

The fuel was stolen over a period of weeks at HMNP Devonport in Plymouth, in what is was one of Britain's biggest fuel thefts

A source told The Sun: 'The fuel that was taken was supposed to power the ship as it undergoes a refit.

'It's a bit like generating electricity for a small town given Bulwark's size and the generator is enormous.

'Naturally, the Navy is furious about it  even though none of their personnel were involved.'

HMNB Devonport is also the base where Britain's nuclear submarines undergo refuelling. It covers more than 650 acres and has 15 dry docks, four miles of waterfront, 25 tidal berths and five basins.

Meanwhile, the HMS Bulwark is one of the Royal Navy's two amphibious assault ships, together with the HMS Albion.

Experts have described the theft as a 'huge embarrassment' for the MoD and subcontractors Babcock International, with an urgent probe now launched into the security breach.

Luke Pollard, MP for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport told the Sun: 'The theft of fuel from a Royal Navy warship is not only criminal, it takes scarce resources away from our military in a time of national crisis.

'With the armed forces facing more and more cuts, having such a huge amount of fuel stolen is not only embarrassing, but it also raises serious questions about security at one of our most secure naval bases.'

Rear Admiral Dr Chris Parry, a former commander of the Amphibious Task Group said: 'This is incredibly careless. We expect our civilian contractors to look after us a lot better.'

HMNB Devonport is also the base where Britain's nuclear submarines undergo refuelling. It covers more than 650 acres and has 15 dry docks, four miles of waterfront, 25 tidal berths and five basins

Former Frigate Captain Tom Sharpe said: 'This is extraordinary, I have never heard anything like it.'

Last night, an MoD spokesman said: 'The MOD is aware of an incident involving the alleged theft of fuel from a contractor within HMNB Devonport.

'There was no disruption to Defence operations and the MOD has no further comment.'

It comes as UK motorists continue to suffer at the pumps with petrol prices hitting record levels in recent weeks after Brent crude oil hit a high of $128 last month - up from lows of $19 seen at the peak of the pandemic.
Antarctic sea ice has reached its second lowest level in almost half a century, new satellite data reveals, as scientists warn that the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could cause global sea levels to rise by up to 10 feet.

Analysis revealed that, in March, the amount of sea ice covering the Antarctic was 26 per cent below the 1991-2020 average, particularly in the Ross, Amundsen, and northern Weddell Seas, and the lowest in 44 years.

Data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) also revealed that last month was the fifth warmest March on record, with the global average temperature about 0.72F (0.4C) higher than the 1991-2020 average for March.

It comes as British Antarctic Survey (BAS) scientists have found the first conclusive evidence that rising greenhouse gases are having a long-term warming effect on the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica.

They said that while others have proposed this link, no one had been able to demonstrate it until now.

The scientists warned that the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could cause global sea levels to rise by up to 10 feet (3 metres).

Scientists have revealed the first evidence that rising greenhouse gases have a long-term warming effect on the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica (pictured)

Left: The average Antarctic sea ice concentration for March. The thick orange line denotes the climatological ice edge for March for the period 1991-2020. Right: The Antarctic sea ice concentration anomalies for January relative to the March average for the period 1991-2020

It comes as British Antarctic Survey scientists found the first conclusive evidence that rising greenhouse gases are having a long-term warming effect on the Amundsen Sea. This graphic shows strengthening currents of warm water in the Amundsen Sea, which are thought to be responsible for increased melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet

GLACIERS AND ICE SHEETS MELTING WOULD HAVE A 'DRAMATIC IMPACT' ON GLOBAL SEA LEVELS Global sea levels could rise as much as 10ft (3 metres) if the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica collapses. Sea level rises threaten cities from Shanghai to London, to low-lying swathes of Florida or Bangladesh, and to entire nations such as the Maldives. In the UK, for instance, a rise of 6.7ft (2 metres) or more may cause areas such as Hull, Peterborough, Portsmouth and parts of east London and the Thames Estuary at risk of becoming submerged. The collapse of the glacier, which could begin with decades, could also submerge major cities such as New York and Sydney. Parts of New Orleans, Houston and Miami in the south on the US would also be particularly hard hit. Advertisement

Ice loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in the Amundsen Sea is one of the fastest growing and most concerning contributions to global sea level rise.

The patterns of ice loss suggest that the ocean may have been warming in the Amundsen Sea over the past 100 years, but scientific observations of the region only began in 1994.

In the BAS study, oceanographers used advanced computer modelling to simulate the response of the ocean to a range of possible changes in the atmosphere between 1920-2013.

The analysis shows the Amundsen Sea generally became warmer over the century.

This warming corresponds with simulated trends in wind patterns in the region, which increase temperatures by driving warm water currents towards and beneath the ice.

Rising greenhouse gases are known to make these wind patterns more likely, and so the trend in winds is thought to be caused in part by human activity.

This study supports theories that ocean temperatures in the Amundsen Sea have been rising since before records began.

It also provides the 'missing link' between ocean warming and wind trends, which are known to be partly driven by greenhouse gasses.

Ocean temperatures around the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will probably continue to rise if greenhouse gas emissions increase, with consequences for ice melt and global sea levels.

These findings suggest, however, that this trend could be curbed if emissions are sufficiently reduced and wind patterns in the region are stabilised.

Dr Kaitlin Naughten, ocean-ice modeller at BAS and lead author of this study, said: 'Our simulations show how the Amundsen Sea responds to long-term trends in the atmosphere, specifically the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds.

'This raises concerns for the future because we know these winds are affected by greenhouse gases.

'However, it should also give us hope, because it shows that sea level rise is not out of our control.'

This graphic from the Copernicus Climate Change Service shows the surface air temperature anomaly for March 2022 relative to the March average for the period 1991-2020. Last month global temperatures were about 0.72F (0.4C) higher than the 1991-2020 average for March

Ice loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in the Amundsen Sea is one of the fastest growing and most concerning contributions to global sea level rise

The Amundsen Sea is an arm of the Southern Ocean off Marie Byrd Land in western Antarctica. The sea is mostly ice-covered, and the Thwaites Ice Tongue protrudes into it

The study supports theories that ocean temperatures in the Amundsen Sea (pictured) have been rising since before records began

The Arctic saw its fourth warmest March on record. Arctic sea ice extent was 3 per cent below the 1991-2020 average

Professor Paul Holland, ocean and ice scientist at BAS and a co-author of the study, said: 'Changes in the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds are a well-established climate response to the effect of greenhouse-gasses.

'However, the Amundsen Sea is also subject to very strong natural climate variability.

'The simulations suggest that both natural and anthropogenic changes are responsible for the ocean-driven ice loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.'

The C3S findings, meanwhile, are based on computer-generated analyses using billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world.

The latest data shows that it was 'anomalously warm' in large parts of the Arctic and Antarctic last month.

In Antarctica daily maximum temperature records were broken, while the Arctic saw its fourth warmest March on record.

Arctic sea ice extent was 3 per cent below the 1991-2020 average.

The BAS study has been published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
A malaria parasite originated in African apes before evolving to infect people, a new study shows.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have studied the parasite Plasmodium malariae  one of six species that spreads malaria among humans today.

P. malariae was originally an ape parasite, the researchers say, but mutated to be able to switch hosts and infect humans.

They say the species made the jump from apes to humans around 5,000 years ago, when agriculture was becoming established in sub-Saharan Africa.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have studied the parasite Plasmodium malariae  one of six species that spreads malaria among humans. This photomicrograph shows a mature Plasmodium malariae cell within an infected red blood cell

SIX SPECIES SPREAD MALARIA AMONG HUMANS - Plasmodium falciparum - Plasmodium vivax - Plasmodium ovale curtisi - Plasmodium ovale wallikeri - Plasmodium malariae - Plasmodium knowlesi Advertisement

'Among the six parasites that cause malaria in humans, P. malariae is one of the least well understood,' said lead author Dr Lindsey Plenderleith at the University of Edinburghs School of Biological Sciences.

'Our findings could provide vital clues on how it became able to infect people, as well as helping scientists gauge if further jumps of ape parasites into humans are likely.'

Researchers describe P. malariae's jump from other great apes to humans 'recent', even though it was 5,000 years ago.

'For evolutionary biologists, 5,000 years ago is very recent,' study author Professor Paul Sharp at Edinburgh told MailOnline.

'In the past, there has been speculation whether some of the human malaria parasites have infected us since before we shared a common ancestor with chimpanzee (about 7 million years ago), or whether humans acquired the parasites more recently (tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago).

'Modern humans evolved about 200,000 years ago in Africa. They emerged out-of-Africa into Asia, and then the rest of the world about 70,000 to 100,000 years ago.

'Against this backdrop, 5000 years ago is very recent in human history.'

It's already well known that malaria is caused by parasites in the Plasmodium genus. A Plasmodium parasite will spread to humans through the bites of infected Anopheles mosquitoes.

When an infected mosquito bites, the parasite enters the blood and travels to the liver, where it develops for days to weeks before re-entering the blood.

People who get malaria are typically very sick with high fevers, shaking chills, and flu-like illness. In severe cases, it can cause jaundice, seizures, coma and death.

The Edinburgh researchers say there are six parasitic species that cause malaria in humans, all of which are in the Plasmodium genus  including P. malariae and P. falciparum.

It's well known that malaria is caused by parasites in the Plasmodium genus. A Plasmodium parasite will spread to humans through the bites of infected mosquitoes of the Anopheles genus (pictured)

P. falciparum is the deadliest of the six human malaria species and responsible for the majority of malaria related deaths.

Conversely, P. malariae is generally associated with mild or no disease, and frequently co-exists with other malaria parasites in multi-species infections.

WHO ENDORSES WORLD'S FIRST MALARIA VACCINE In October 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) endorsed the world's first malaria vaccine, which could save hundreds of thousands of lives every year. WHO recommended widespread use of the RTS,S malaria vaccine - developed by British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) - for children in sub-Saharan Africa and in other regions with moderate to high levels of malaria transmission. WHO said that data show the vaccine is safe and effective, and is feasible to deliver to rural parts of the continent. Advertisement

While it is often associated with mild disease, if untreated P. malariae can cause long-lasting, chronic infections that may last a lifetime, according to the researchers.

'However, the parasite can also persist chronically and recrudesce years or decades after the initial infection,' they write in their paper.

Back in the 1920s, scientists identified chimpanzees infected by parasites that appeared identical to P. malariae under a microscope.

It was thought both parasites belonged to the same species, but this could not be verified as the genetic make-up of the chimpanzee strain hadn't been studied.

For the new study, the team, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, obtained DNA from faecal samples from wild apes, and from blood samples from chimpanzees in sanctuaries, all of whom had been infected with P. malariae.

'The parasites are in the blood stream, and the DNA from the parasites also gets into their faeces,' Professor Sharp said.

They then used 'state-of-the-art' techniques to sort through DNA sequence data on a computer.

They did not study the 1920s chimp strain, because there is no longer material available from those samples.

Researchers found that there are, in fact, three distinct species that were once thought to all be P. malariae.

P. malariae infects mainly humans, while the two others infect other members of the great apes.

One of the two ape-infecting parasites, called called P. celatum, was found in chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos across Central and West Africa.

This previously unknown species is only distantly related to P. malariae, the team say.

The other ape parasite species, called P. praemalariae, is much more closely related to P. malariae.

Around 5,000 years ago, the human malaria parasite population went through a genetic bottleneck  when a population is greatly reduced in size.

Its population temporarily shrank and most of its genetic variation was lost, but this likely paved the way for P. malariae to emerge.

'It looks like the ape parasites cannot simply infect humans,' Professor Sharp told MailOnline.

'So it is likely the jump required a special mutation in an ape parasite, that then allowed it to infects humans.

'The first human to be infected with this ape parasite would get (from a mosquito bite) only a small number of parasites, containing only a limited fraction of the genetic diversity present in the ape parasite species; this is the bottleneck.'

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
A rare cemetery filled with the well-preserved bones of ancient flying reptiles that soared over the Atacama desert 100 million years ago has been uncovered in Chile.

The remains belong to pterosaurs, flying creatures that lived alongside dinosaurs and fed by filtering water through long thin teeth - similar to flamingos.

The discovery of this rare cemetery will allow scientists to study the pterosaur's habits, not just its anatomy, according to the team from the University of Chile.

The find was made about 40 miles from another site where other pterosaur remains had been found, supporting a theory these reptiles were once widespread in Chile.

A rare cemetery filled with the well-preserved bones of ancient flying reptiles that soared over the Atacama desert 100 million years ago has been uncovered in Chile. Artist impression

The remains belong to pterosaurs, flying creatures that lived alongside dinosaurs and fed by filtering water through long thin teeth - similar to flamingos

A group of scientists, led by pterosaur expert Jhonatan Alarcon, have been searching for the flying reptiles for years, but this discovery surpassed their hopes.

'This has global relevance because these types of findings are relatively rare,' Alarcon said, adding 'almost everywhere in the world, the pterosaur remains that are found are isolated,' and not in large groups.

Finding isolated remains makes it difficult to learn more about their habitat, breeding and other features that require the discovery of a large group of remains.

'We could determine how groups of these animals were composed, if they raised their babies or not,' he added.

The discovery of this rare cemetery will allow scientists to study the pterosaur's habits, not just its anatomy, according to the team from the University of Chile

The find was made about 40 miles from another site where other pterosaur remains had been found, supporting a theory these reptiles were once widespread in Chile

Another unexpected surprise was how well-preserved the bones scientists discovered were - giving them a deeper insight into their formation.

'Most pterosaur bones that are found are flattened, broken,' said David Rubilar, head of paleontology at Chile's Museum of National History. 'Nevertheless we were able to recover preserved three-dimensional bones from this site.'

This well help scientists better understand pterosaur anatomy, and even look at ways it might relate to the birds that evolved after them.

The remains were discovered in an area that would have been a tidal estuary of the Quebrada Monardes Formation in the Lower Cretaceous, 100 million years ago.

A group of scientists, led by pterosaur expert Jhonatan Alarcon, have been searching for the flying reptiles for years, but this discovery surpassed their hopes

Another unexpected surprise was how well-preserved the bones scientists discovered were - giving them a deeper insight into their formation

The new locality, which is named Cerro Tormento, is in Cerros Bravos in the northeast Atacama region, Northern Chile.

The team found four cervical vertebrae, with one belonging to a particularly small pterosaur, confirming that they belonged to multiple individuals.

What they can't say is whether there were multiple species of pterosaur present, or if they all belong to the same species.

'This finding is the second geographic occurrence of pterosaurs of the clade Ctenochasmatidae in the Atacama region, although it is currently uncertain if ctenochasmatids from both locations were contemporaneous,' they wrote.

A palaeontologist works at the place where pterosaur fossils were found at 'Tormento' hill in the Atacama desert at Atacama region, Chile

The team found four cervical vertebrae, with one belonging to a particularly small pterosaur, confirming that they belonged to multiple individuals

'This suggests that the clade Ctenochasmatidae was widespread in what is now northern Chile,' the authors added.

Ctenochasmatidae is a group of pterosaurs characterized by their distinctive teeth, which are thought to have been used for filter-feeding.

'In addition, the presence of bones belonging to more than one individual preserved in Cerro Tormento suggest that pterosaur colonies were present at the southwestern margin of Gondwana during the Early Cretaceous.'

Gondwana was an ancient supercontinent that broke up about 180 million years ago, eventually splitting into Africa, South America, Australia and Antarctica.

The findings have been published in the journal Cretaceous Research.
Fossilised dinosaur tracks uncovered in Spain were left by a theropod with an injured left foot 129 million years ago, a new study has revealed.

Researchers from the Autonomous University in Madrid studied the tracks, which were found at the Las Hoyas Locality in Spain.

While the tracks made with the right foot clearly show all three toes, the tracks made with the left foot show an injury or deformity to the innermost toe.

Lead author Dr Carlos Herrera-Castillo, said: 'The footprints are spaced more widely than typical theropod tracks, indicating this dinosaur adjusted its gait to compensate for its injured foot.'

Researchers from the Autonomous University in Madrid studied the tracks, which were found at the Las Hoyas Locality in Spain

Hadrosaur that roamed Russia 68 million years had a broken WRIST A 'majestic' dinosaur that roamed Russia 68 million years ago had a broken wrist, new analysis has revealed. Experts believe the hadrosaur Amurosaurus riabinini most likely suffered the injury from running or jumping over rough terrain in search of food or water. They say it appeared to have survived the accident, but the resulting limp may have made it difficult to escape from predators. Advertisement

The theropod - the species of which remains unclear - was wading through a pond where hundreds of fish would have been swimming around.

The unidentified creature was around 6ft 6in tall at the hip - about half its size.

While the second toe would normally have been extended, on its left foot it was curled backwards.

The impediment may have been caused in a fight over territory, or a mate, according to the team.

Dr Herrera-Castillo said: 'The tracks made by the right foot display all three toes.

'But the innermost toe on the left foot is represented only by extremely short and irregularly shaped markings in the sediment, indicating an injury or deformity in that toe.

'All the footprints of the left foot show this deformity - differing from the right footprints.

'Furthermore, the footprints are spaced more widely than typical theropod tracks, indicating this dinosaur adjusted its gait to compensate for its injured foot.

'This is further supported by certain deformations in the right footprints which suggest the animal was putting more weight on that side.'

While the tracks made with the right foot (shown in purple on left) clearly show all three toes, the tracks made with the left foot (shown in red on left) show an injury or deformity to the innermost toe

Similar toe deformities and compensating behaviours are also seen in modern birds, which descended from dinosaurs.

Theropod footbones unearthed across the world are often found with injuries on the innermost toes.

Some were stress fractures believed to have been caused by dominance behaviours, or sudden movements fleeing from predators.

Dr Herrera-Castillo said: 'Taken altogether, this evidence sheds light on how this dinosaur, and perhaps many others, found ways to survive despite pathological setbacks.'

The impressions described in PLOS ONE were preserved at a dinosaur graveyard known as Las Hoyas outside Cuenca, Spain.

The impressions described in PLOS ONE were preserved at a dinosaur graveyard known as Las Hoyas outside Cuenca, Spain

Dr Herrera-Castillo added: 'Fossil trackways are an excellent source of information on the behaviour of extinct animals.'

This isn't the first time that evidence of an injured dinosaur has been discovered.

Last month, the remains of a 'majestic' dinosaur which roamed Russia 68 million year ago were discovered, with evidence the creature had suffered a broken wrist.

Experts believe the hadrosaur Amurosaurus riabinini most likely suffered the injury from running or jumping over rough terrain in search of food or water.

They say it appeared to have survived the accident, but the resulting limp may have made it difficult to escape from predators.
Riders of e-scooters are more likely to get in an accident and suffer an injury than any other form of personal transport, according to a new study.

The work by the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) estimated that for every million rides made on an e-scooter, about 115 will result in some form of injury.

In comparison, motorcyclists face the prospect of an injury 104 times out of a million, and for people on a bicycle it is just 15 injuries per million trips.

They used data on 1,354 people treated at clinics in Los Angeles from January 2014 and January 2020 - before and after the introduction of e-scooters to the area.

The team say the injury rate is likely to be an underestimate, but that the individual accidents that lead to them are likely less severe and fatal than from a motorcycle.

Riders of e-scooters are more likely to get in an accident and suffer an injury than any other form of personal transport, according to a new study. Stock image

A report published by management consulting firm McKinsey in 2019 predicted that in the near future 1 in 10 trips shorter than five miles will be made using a shareable e-scooter summoned from a smartphone app.

'There are millions of riders now using these scooters, so it's more important than ever to understand their impact on public health,' said Dr Joann Elmore, senior author of the study and a professor at UCLA.

'The finding that rates of injuries from e-scooters are similar to rates for motorcycle injuries is startling,' she explained.

'The ease of public access to on-demand shareable scooters and safety regulations that are still in their infancy suggest that e-scooter operators, cities and health care providers will continue to see a significant number of injuries each year.'

The latest findings back up those from a smaller-scale study published in 2019 by UCLA, that found people injured in e-scooter accidents often sustain fractures and head trauma requiring treatment in an emergency department.

That only had data from a few hundred people, whereas the new study included data on 1,354 people that had been treated at 180 outpatient clinics run by UCLA.

The work by the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) estimated that for every million rides made on an e-scooter, about 115 will result in some form of injury. Stock image

By looking at six years of information, the team were able to compare data from before and after the rollout of shareable e-scooters in LA.

'Prior to the widespread introduction of shareable e-scooters in 2018, there were at most 13 e-scooter injuries per year,' the study's authors explained.

'After [the] introduction of shareable e-scooter operators in our region, e-scooter injuries increased to 595 and 672 in 2018 and 2019, respectively.'

Those injured in e-scooter accidents were not only the riders, but also pedestrians who were hit by moving e-scooters or who tripped over parked e-scooters.

E-scooters pose risk to ALL road users without tough regulations controlling their use, leading insurers say Robust regulations and enforcement are needed around the use of e-scooters, say insurance industry bodies amid fears over their safety. In the year ending June 2021 there were 882 accidents involving the devices across Britain, government figures show. This resulted in 931 casualties  of whom 732 were e-scooter users. In a letter to Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, bodies such as the Association of British Insurers said there are concerns about a risk to all road users until there is robust regulation beyond official trials. It called for coherent standards on e-scooter construction and safety, including whether wearing helmets is made mandatory. Last month transport minister Baroness Vere of Norbiton told peers that trials of the devices were 'making progress'. Advertisement

The researchers found that patients often were treated for injuries to the head and limbs as a result of either being hit by, falling off, or tripping over an e-scooter.

More than 530 patients sustained injuries to more than one part of the body, 72 were admitted to hospital, 21 sent to the critical care unit and two died from their injuries.

'Overall, 33 per cent of victims required substantial subsequent therapeutic clinical resources from our health system beyond a single clinical visit,' the team said.

'Therefore, the impact of novel e-scooter technology may have been underestimated by early studies of [emergency department] visits alone.'

The estimated injury rate amounts to 115 injuries per 1 million e-scooter trips, which is more than the rate discovered during a 2007 study for motorcycle accidents.

In the case of motorcycles, there were an estimated 104 injuries per million trips.

Those riding a bicycle had 15 in a million chance of an injury, the rate for car drivers is eight per million trips, and for pedestrians it is two per million journeys.

The team say there were limitations to their findings, including the fact they only looked at data from UCLA health facilities, and not all facilities in the area.

But, they say having data rom other hospitals and clinics would likely make the rate of injury from e-scooters even higher than 115 in a million, rather than lower.

Although the study is based on one specific geographic area, the authors write that their estimate of the number of injuries per million e-scooter trips is 'of the same order' as findings from other limited regional studies and should reflect nationally.

'It is important to note that e-scooter injuries may be less severe and less fatal than motorcycle injuries, but we still think our e-scooter injury rate is an underestimate,' said the study's first author, Dr. Kimon Ioannides, who led the study as a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA National Clinician Scholars Program.

In the UK there has been calls for robust regulations and enforcement when it comes to the use of e-scooters. With insurance industry bodies leading the charge.

They said Government figures show that in the year ending June 2021 there were 882 accidents involving e-scooters across Britain resulting in 931 injuries.

The findings have been published in the journal PLoS ONE.
Space launch provider Rocket Lab plans to catch an Electron rocket using a giant helicopter, as the launch vehicle returns to Earth from space.

This will be the first time the firm has attempted a mid-air helicopter capture, and if successful will be the first reusable orbital small launch vehicle.

The test will happen no sooner than April 19, on a ride share launch of the Electron rocket, from Pad A at Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula.

It is a flight known as the 'There and Back Again' mission, Rocket Lab's 26th Electron launch, sending 34 payloads from a range of commercial operators.

After the rocket has deployed the satellites, it will return to Earth, and instead of splashing down in the ocean, never to be used again, Rocket Lab will attempt to catch it before it reaches the water - and prepare it for a second flight in future.

Space launch provider Rocket Lab plans to catch an Electron rocket using a giant helicopter, as the launch vehicle returns to Earth from space

This will be the first time the firm has attempted a mid-air helicopter capture, and if successful will be the first reusable orbital small launch vehicle

The flight will see satellites from Alba Orbital, Astrix Astronautics, Aurora Propulsion Technologies, E-Space, Unseenlabs, and Swarm Technologies sent in to orbit on the Electron, via global launch services provider Spaceflight Inc.

The launch is expected to bring the total number of satellites launched by Electron to 146, and is the next major step in making Electron a reusable rocket.

Unlike SpaceX, which has the Falcon 9 rocket land on a drone ship, Rocket Lab has been bolder in its recovery effort.

Rocket Lab will be attempting the catch with a customized Sikorsky S-92, a large twin engine helicopter used in offshore oil and gas transport, as well as in search and rescue operations.

Catching a returning rocket stage mid-air as it returns from space is a highly complex operation that demands extreme precision, a spokesperson said, as several critical milestones must align perfectly to ensure a successful capture.

'We're excited to enter this next phase of the Electron recovery program,' said Rocket Lab founder and CEO, Peter Beck.

The test will happen no sooner than April 19, on a ride share launch of the Electron rocket, from Pad A at Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula

ELECTRON: SMALL ROCKET LAUNCHER Height: 18m (59ft) Payload to LEO: 300kg (661lb) Succesful launches: 97 Cost: $100 million Cost per launch: $7.5 million Launch sites: Mahia LC-1 (active), MARS (planned), Sutherland (proposed) First flight: 2017 Advertisement

'We've conducted many successful helicopter captures with replica stages, carried out extensive parachute tests, and successfully recovered Electron's first stage from the ocean during our 16th, 20th, and 22nd missions,' Beck added.

'Now it's time to put it all together for the first time and pluck Electron from the skies. Trying to catch a rocket as it falls back to Earth is no easy feat, we're absolutely threading the needle here, but pushing the limits with such complex operations is in our DNA.

'We expect to learn a tremendous amount from the mission as we work toward the ultimate goal of making Electron the first reusable orbital small sat launcher and providing our customers with even more launch availability.'

Rocket Lab has previously conducted three successful ocean recovery missions where Electron returned to Earth under parachute and was recovered.

Analysis of those missions informed design modifications to Electron, enabling it to withstand the hard re-entry environment, and also helped to develop procedures for an eventual helicopter capture.

It is a flight known as the 'There and Back Again' mission, Rocket Lab's 26th Electron launch, sending 34 payloads from a range of commercial operators

ROCKET LAB: SPACE LAUNCH STARTUP Rocket Lab is an American/New Zealand space startup initially designed to sent small satellites into orbit using small booster rockets. Founded by New Zealander Peter Beck, they became the first Southern Hemisphere firm to launch to space with the Atea-1 rocket in 2009. Its Electron rocket started launching small satellites in 2018 including launches for NASA's ELaNa program. Up until 2020 they had focused on small scale launches with the Electron able to carry payloads up to 300kg. Going public and a period of major expansion in 2021 will see the firm make Electron partially reusable and launch a new heavier rocket. The Neutron will be able to carry up to 8,800kg into orbit including crew. Advertisement

There are dozens of space startups seeking to compete with Rocket Lab in the small launch vehicle market - including UK-firm Skyrora - with varying degrees of reusability.

Skyrora plans to launch the XL from Scotland in the next year or so. It is 22.7 metres high and can carry payloads of up to 315kg, putting it in direct competition with the Electron, which may also launch from Scotland in the future.

The plethora of small launch vehicle startups don't worry Beck, who says competition is a good thing but it is a very difficult industry to break into.

'When we launched Electron there was a crowded market but a lot of other firms trying to do it fell by the wayside as running a rocket launch regularly is difficult,' Beck told MailOnline over Zoom.

'We got to orbit, which turned out to be the easier part, sadly the business of producing the rocket for commercial launch is much harder,' Beck said.

'Launching that first flight into orbit gets you about half way to a sustainable business at best.'

Beck told MailOnline: 'Running a rocket company is like running in a maze at night where there is someone with a shotgun standing at every dead end.

'You have to run as fast as you can to get to the end in order to survive.'

Rocket Lab and SpaceX are the two major new players in the sector, having regular functional launches for paying customers.

'We compete in the same market for the same customers, but the market is big, you can't expect just one commercial launch company,' said Beck.

Rocket Lab is starting to work with NASA and will launch a CubeSat into lunar orbit later this year as part of a pathfinding mission to support the Artemis program.

They will launch on Electron and then use the Photo Lunar spacecraft to launch NASA's CAPSTONE (Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment) into a unique lunar orbit.
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Even the lonely camel thorn trees have petered out. We passed the last town miles back  although barely more than a bottle store and space for tumbleweeds to blow. All around a wilderness of rock opens its arms.

Then, suddenly, the camouflaged camp emerges  12 canvas bungalows, each capped with a golden thatched roof and backed by sunset-red sand dunes.

My husband Mark and I  plus our two children, Zac, nine, and Archie, seven  are staying five nights at Kwessi Dunes.

Kate stays at Kwessi Dunes in Namibia, a new camp owned by the conservation-minded company Natural Selection

One of the lounge areas at Kwessi Dunes, which is located in the NamibRand, a nature reserve in the south of the country

In total, there are 12 canvas bungalows at the camouflaged camp, each 'capped with a golden thatched roof and backed by sunset-red sand dunes'

This new camp, owned by the conservation-minded company Natural Selection, opened in March 2020. It's in the NamibRand, a nature reserve in the south of Namibia, within the globe's oldest desert, the Namib.

On arrival we leap into the swimming pool, while oryx with white dartboard bellies silently pad past  their long horns like speared stalks.

Tourism and mining are the backbone of Namibia's economy, a politically stable country previously colonised by both South Africa and Germany. During the five-hour drive from Windhoek, the capital, our driver Chris laments how crippling Covid has been.

'Our mining is sold to China, so tourism carries the country,' he says.

The NamibRand  a private, non-profit reserve  was started in 1984 by business-man Albi Bruckner, who first began buying up troubled cattle and sheep farms during a prolonged drought. But even knitted together, the land wasn't viable, so he exchanged farming for conservation and tourism.

Now, the fences have been pulled down to create a protected realm almost the size of Luxembourg. And animals which once lived here  such as zebra, red hartebeest and giraffe  have been triumphantly reintroduced.

Namib means 'immense place' in Khoekhoegowab, the click language spoken by local Nama and Damara people. It's one of the planet's few deserts where dunes run into the ocean. And where you can see the break-up of prehistoric Gondwanaland (a supercontinent before the Jurassic period) in the rocky outcrops.

As soon as she arrives at the camp, Kate jumps into the swimming pool, while 'oryx with white dartboard bellies silently pad past  their long horns like speared stalks'

An aerial view of one of the smart desert bungalows. 'All around a wilderness of rock opens its arms,' Kate says of the area's terrain

A peek inside one of the chalets at Kwessi Dunes, complete with an outdoor dining area so you can continue spotting wildlife while you feast

Above is one of the rooms that guests can stay in at Kwessi Dunes. 'Tourism and mining are the backbone of Namibia's economy,' says Kate

Days are spent on game drives or walking. On the first morning we wander among bronze-barked quiver trees. Their succulent leaves resemble spiked stars as branches hoist them high into the air to avoid evaporation.

The Namib is an arid Eden, where everything has learnt to adapt in this beautiful but brutal land. Zac and Archie enjoy exploring with Papa G, our guide, as he fills them with desert stories, points out animal tracks and teaches them songs in his local language, Damara. A flying saucer prances past on long stilt legs.

'It's a toktokkie beetle,' Papa G says. 'They survive by doing headstands. This captures the fog moisture on their domed backs, before the water rolls into their mouths.'

Toktokkie beetles survive by doing headstands. This captures the fog moisture on their domed backs, before the water rolls into their mouths - Kate Eshelby

Most nights we sleep under star-strung skies because each bungalow has an extra bed outside. The reserve neighbours the busier, and more famous, Namib-Naukluft National Park  home to the iconic Sossusvlei. So on day two we drive a couple of hours to visit this corridor of dunes. We climb 325-metre (1,066 ft) Big Daddy, one of the tallest: and from our eyrie look across at wind-whipped dunes the colour of ripe oranges. Then our boys delight in racing down the other side  BOOM BOOM roars the sand.

One gold-glowing dawn, we hot-air balloon over the untamed Namib with Eric, a Belgian, who has been ballooning for 35 years with his family-run company, Namib Sky. We drift above an archipelago of granite inselbergs (isolated mountains), and thousands of circles, like giant necklaces in the sand.

'These are fairy circles,' Eric says. 'Each is ringed with bushman grass, yet nothing grows within. Nobody knows why, but theories vary from termites to UFO landings or meteorite showers.'

Back at camp we whizz into peaked dunes on quad bikes. Yet I feel uneasy: there's so much life under the sand, from sidewinding adders to barking geckos.

'Most nights we sleep under star-strung skies because each bungalow has an extra bed (such as the one pictured) outside,' Kate explains

Describing her hot air balloon trip with the family-run company Namib Sky, Kate says: 'We drift above an archipelago of granite inselbergs (isolated mountains), and thousands of circles, like giant necklaces in the sand'

Guests have the opportunity to venture out on a nature walk while staying at Kwessi Dunes

On the last morning we walk with Alfred, a San Bushman who works at the camp. The San are known for their tracking skills. 'My job is to show guests the smaller animals, those you can't see in Land Rovers,' he says as we set out early on foot. He gets us to crouch down low. Then he peels back a flap just under the sand to reveal a fat, tarantula-like spider.

'Dancing white lady spiders hide behind doors made of silk instead of making webs,' he says.

Later, Alfred leans over to pick up oryx droppings from the ground. Then, to our surprise, he pops them into his mouth before beginning to mimic an oryx.

'We must become the animal, understand it, feel it, before we can track it,' he says. That afternoon a small, six-seater plane takes us up the coast  two-hours north to the elemental outback of Kaokoland. From the air, I fully appreciate Namibia's endless, deserted space.

The area around Kwessi Dunes is home to a rich variety of wildlife, Kate reveals. Pictured are oryx grazing nearby

Kate says the Namib is 'an arid Eden, where everything has learnt to adapt in this beautiful but brutal land'. Above is a cheetah in the desert

Dunes twirl beneath us like the snaking clasps of giant clam shells. Flamboyances of flamingos glide in pink streamers like the Red Arrows. We fly over huge seal colonies; and the only signs of man are the carcasses of shipwrecks tossed along the Skeleton Coast.

Our next week is spent on a mobile safari, organised by Tracks & Trails, partners of Natural Selection. For miles we drive, with our guide Hans, along bumpy trails, towards the Angola border. We wild-camp in dry, ephemeral riverbeds or in basic, community-owned campsites.

The late Garth Owen-Smith, a South African-Namibian environmentalist, started a system of communal conservancies here in the north west. Thanks to him, conservation was put into the hands of native people because he realised communities would only protect wildlife if they saw benefits from tourism. Now, any lodge or campsite leases the land from locals.

Earthly wonders: Above is a view of an oryx walking in the vast Namib Rand Nature Reserve

The NamibRand reserve was started in 1984 by business-man Albi Bruckner, who first began buying up troubled cattle and sheep farms during a prolonged drought, Kate reveals

Kate meets Herero women in traditional headdresses and patchwork dresses during her trip

In this Martian landscape, angry winds whirl and whistle. Herero women pass in traditional, horn-shaped headdresses and long, hooped, patchwork dresses. A herd of copper-gold springboks hear us and leap away as if on pogo sticks, flaring out parachutes of white behind them.

'This is called pronking,' Hans says. 'They spread out white dorsal hair as an alarm call to others.'

We find a family of elephants forcefully shaking Ana trees, before waiting for the pods to fall. And walk into drifts of gold in the dunes of Hartmann's Valley, where mica schist glitters like flashing constellations. Our boys delight in discovering shards of Stone Age tools hidden in the soft sand. Valleys carve through the land. Flaming-red acacias and plum-purple-stemmed commiphora plants pop out of the plains.

We wander past remote Himba villages, their homes like golden orbs. The men wear short ra-ra skirts, although the younger ones don Reebok trainers: change is coming. A tumble of beads and ostrich eggshell necklaces hang around the women's necks.

They welcome us into their village after we hand over gifts of pasta, oil and sugar.

A teenager called Jeckz speaks a smattering of English and tries to translate for us. Zac and Archie start playing a game similar to boules but using makalani nuts with some of the children.

I sit beside a lady and smell the lemony tang of her perfume. It comes from a fragrant resin that the Himba, a semi-nomadic tribe, collect from the gnarled stems of the Namibian myrrh, a tree which only grows here. Her long, ochre-red braids are shiny because  as is the Himba custom  she has freshly applied butter to them.

On the final morning, we walk up a ribbon of green. I marvel at the vitality of these river oases, a tangle of tamarisk, toothbrush trees and makalani palms. The trees punch their roots through the ground, like fists, to find water far below.

This is a land where you need to know the rules to survive. We are lucky to be with those who can show us.
Denmark expels 15 Russian diplomats on espionage accusation

Xinhua) 09:28, April 06, 2022

COPENHAGEN, April 5 (Xinhua) -- Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod announced the expulsion of 15 Russian diplomatic staff members during a Foreign Policy Board meeting on Tuesday, accusing them as "intelligence officers" for espionage.

According to a press release from the ministry, Russian Ambassador to Denmark Vladimir Barbin had been earlier informed of the expulsion of the "intelligence officers working at the Russian embassy in Copenhagen."

The expelled officers have 14 days to depart Denmark.

The Russian embassy in Denmark denies the accusations, claiming that the Danish move aims to further deteriorate relations between the two countries.

"It will not remain unanswered," wrote the Russian embassy in an email to the Danish news agency Ritzau.

In response, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Sputnik on Tuesday that Moscow will take retaliatory measures against Denmark over the expulsion of Russian diplomats.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
Arvind Bundhun, Director of Mauritius Tourism Promotion Authority, unveiled the new advertising campaign for the Indian market at a travel trade and media event ceremony held in Mumbai on Friday 25th March 2022.

The campaign: Where Else but Mauritius consists of videos and visuals that have been launched on digital platforms and portrays various facets of the destination and addresses various target groups.

The campaign was launched in the presence of representatives of EDB, MFDC, Air Mauritius and celebrity influencers, media, travel agents, weddings planners and film producers. Celebrity Chef Sanjeev Kapoor was a special guest at the event and will be working with the destination on the gastronomy angle.

This campaign is designed to attract more Indian visitors to explore the wide variety of offerings that makes Mauritius one of the most popular travel destinations for Indians.

In its first phase, it will spread awareness about the destinations romance, adventure, wildlife, nature, gastronomy, culture and heritage attributes on social media to encourage Indian travellers to visit Mauritius.

In todays travel, safety is the new luxury. We have managed to contain the pandemic through a very successful vaccination roll out. Almost 80% of our population has been inoculated with two doses and our booster dose campaign is at full swing and has reached almost 50% since we opened our borders. We have noticed a pent-up demand from all our tourism markets, and we are confident in the Indian market which has been the sixth largest outbound market for Mauritius. Air Mauritius, our national carrier has increased its frequency to 5 flights per week from Mumbai with other cities to follow in a phased manner. We expect to see a boost in arrivals from honeymoon, weddings, families, and MICE segments, especially that our protocols have been eased. says Arvind Bundhun.

The Director also attended the prestigious Poonawalla Stud Farms Auction Sale Stakes Race Day on 27th March 2022 at the Mumbai racecourse. The MTPA sponsored the Amazing Mauritius Cup which is an opportunity to feature Mauritius among the HNI segment and enhance its visibility as a lifestyle destination.

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Sunrise weatherman Sam Mac made an emotional return to the breakfast show on Wednesday following the death of his beloved pet cat Coco.

Sam, 40, fought back tears during a weather segment as he paid tribute to Coco, who died over the weekend.

After Sam said a few words about his late feline, Sunrise host Natalie Barr, 54, also revealed she had to put down her pet cat Flash just days ago due to old age.

Sad times: Sunrise weatherman Sam Mac made an emotional return to the breakfast show on Wednesday following the death of his beloved pet cat Coco

'My beloved Coco, my rescue cat, who featured on the show for many years, sadly had to say goodbye on the weekend,' Sam began as footage of Coco played.

'It was extremely difficult, any pet lover or anyone who has been through that knows how hard it is. They are family, they're more than just a cat or dog.'

'It was extremely difficult, any pet lover or anyone who has been through that knows how hard it is': Sam, 40, fought back tears during a weather segment as he paid tribute to Coco, who died over the weekend

Another loss: After Sam said a few words about his late feline, Sunrise host Natalie Barr, 54, also revealed she had to put down her pet cat Flash just days ago due to old age

Sam also revealed his GoFundMe page set up in honour of Coco - to help other rescue animals at the Sydney Dogs and Cats home - had raised an incredible $21,000.

'It's real grief when you lose an animal, but I wanted to say a heartfelt thank you to people reaching out... it's still hard to talk about,' he said.

'Mwah, love to Coco.'

Back on the news desk, Barr spoke of her anguish of having to put her cat Flash down at the age of 18.

'It wasn't a good week for cats,' she said.

'We had to put our own cat Flash down... she's not as famous as Coco, she was 18, the kids grown up with her. She had a good life' Nat said

'We had to put our own cat Flash down... she's not as famous as Coco, she was 18, the kids grown up with her. She had a good life.'

Sam broke down in tears on Sunday as he announced his pet cat Coco had died at age 14 over the weekend.

He said he'd been through 'one of the worst days of his life' after coming home to find his Burmilla rescue cat unwell, before confirming Coco's death hours later.

Sam said in a tearful Instagram video: 'I got home from Canada and opened the door. Coco was slumped over against the wall.'

'Her legs weren't functioning. Her eyes were closed, but she was still breathing but in a really bad way. It was extremely confronting.'

Sad: Sam broke down in tears on Sunday when he announced his pet cat Coco had died. He said he'd been through 'one of the worst days of my life' after coming home to find his Burmilla rescue cat unwell, before confirming Coco's death hours later

Sam, who started an Instagram account for Coco which had 13,000 followers, said he rushed his cat to the vet, but she was 'not responsive' to treatment and there was nothing they could do to save her.

'It doesn't feel real. It f**king hurts. She's been such an important part of my life, a real shining light, one of the best things to ever happen to me.

'She's made me so happy. She's my best little buddy. She's always been there for the last 13 years.'

'It doesn't feel real. It f**king hurts. She's been such an important part of my life, a real shining light, one of the best things to ever happen to me,' he said

Sam had adopted Coco from the RSPCA when she was a kitten.

In addition to her appearances on Sunrise and Instagram, Coco also featured on the cover of Sam's 2021 autobiography Accidental Weatherman.

Sam revealed in 2019 he'd taken Coco with him to the Logie Awards, and even treated her to hotel room service.

Sam also confirmed Coco's death in a separate post on Instagram, sharing a photo of himself holding the cat's paws at the animal hospital.

He said his former roommate Ally Mansell and good friend Dr Chris Brown 'dropped everything' to be by his side because his girlfriend Rebecca James was in Melbourne at the time.
Sofia Vergara was a breath of sunshine as she strolled to the set of America's Got Talent on Tuesday.

The AGT judge took the idea of business casual up a notch in an army green tweed jacket with gold buttons and fringe trim, a matching top and pair of curve hugging distressed ankle jeans.

A gorgeous pair of open-toed stilettos, a pink and yellow Christian Dior tote and pair of broad sunglasses contributed to her glamorous daytime togs.

Hello Sunshine. Sofia Vergara took the idea of business casual up a notch in an army green tweed jacket with gold buttons and fringe trim

It's in the jeans: The Colombian beauty rocked a pair of curve hugging distressed ankle jeans. A gorgeous pair of open-toed stilettos, a pink and yellow Christian Dior tote and pair of broad sunglasses contributed to her glamorous daytime togs

The 49-year-old model styled her sun-kissed locks in loose curls and carried a large shopping bag.

Sofia and her AGT colleagues have been watching auditions from would-be superstars, but that doesn't keep them from having fun behind the scenes.

In her Instagram stories, the Hollywood entrepreneur shared a series of short video clips including one in which she's taking part in a photo shoot with co-stars Heidi Klum, Howie Mandel and Terry Crews writing 'Seguimos!!' (we continue) across the top.

BTS fun: The AGT judge has been sharing some lighthearted moments from behind the scenes, including this dancing video with host Terry Crews

Always camera ready: The Modern Family actress shared a quick shot on Instagram of a photo shoot with AGT co-stars Howie Mandel, Heidi Klum and Terry Crews

Another shows the Columbian beauty and Terry Crews dancing the merengue, with the Brooklyn Nine-Nine actor in a bright pink suit and white shirt, while Sofia shakes it in a black and silver jumpsuit with a crystal encrusted strapless bodice and swingy fringe along the legs.

The Hot Pursuit star also took the opportunity to show support for her friend and former Modern Family co-star, Jessie Tyler Ferguson.

The multi-talented actor is starring as Mason Marzac in a revival of the Tony award winning Take Me Out, and couldn't help but share a clip with the actor's names in bright lights above Broadway.
Kanye West reportedly believes Forbes is undervaluing his $7 billion net worth after making the magazine's Billionaires List valued at $2B.

The magazine has listed West's real time net worth at $2 billion on their star-studded list, but insiders have told The Blast West is actually worth $7 billion.

West is one of several celebrities to have made the Billionaires List. He follows Oprah Winfrey, who is valued at $2.6 billion, while his ex-wife Kim Kardashian trails him at $1.8 billion, according to ET Canada.

Not seeing eye to eye: Kanye West reportedly believes Forbes is undervaluing his $7 billion net worth after making the magazine's Billionaires list ranked at $2B

West has several deals in place, but the magazine's criteria for determining someone's wealth does not take into account the 'enterprise value of long-term deals that are in place,' according to The Blast.

Net worth is determined in part on 'revenue from last year only.'

The Blast claims West's team was told about the article in advance and are not pleased by the way his value has been inputted in the story.

On top of his wildly successful music career, West has a multi-year deal with Adidas with his wildly successful Yeezy range, in addition to a major one with Gap which sees him produce and design apparel for the company, according to The Blast.

Forbes star: This is not the first time West has appeared on the pages of Forbes, even garnering a cover in 2019

The Yeezy Gap clothing collaboration garnered $1 billion in sales in its first year and now a new range, Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga, will be released later this year.

Kanye also owns a small stake in his ex-wife Kim Kardashian's shapewear brand Skims, according to The Blast.

According to The Blast, West thinks the publication is trying to 'control and diminish him even at the cost of their own integrity.'

Not happy: The magazine has listed West's real time net worth at $2 billion on their highly-anticipated list, but insiders have told The Blast West is actually worth $7 billion

This is not the first time Kanye has expressed his displeasure with Forbes.

West allegedly sent the magazine a text message criticizing their evaluation of his net worth after the publication bestowed him with the billionaire title in 2020.

The article revealed how the rapper provided documents to the publication, giving them an 'authentic numeric look into Kanye, Inc.' to prove the feat.

However, the article notes that West was left unhappy with their research and findings - stating that he believes his net worth to be around $3.3 billion, rather than the $1.26 billion they have estimated.

'It's not a billion,' West allegedly texted the publication. 'It's $3.3 billion since no one at Forbes knows how to count.'
Grace Warrior, the daughter of Bindi Irwin and Chandler Powell, is officially walking.

The little girl took her first steps earlier this week, after celebrating her milestone first birthday on March 25.

Bindi, 23, and Chandler, 25, shared footage of the sweet moment on Instagram on Wednesday morning.

First steps! Grace Warrior, the daughter of Bindi Irwin and Chandler Powell, is officially walking

Grace looked delighted as she took a few careful steps towards her father while Bindi watched on with pride.

'Hi, dadda,' Bindi said as her daughter made a beeline for Chandler, who added: 'Good walking, good walking.'

Bindi captioned the clip: 'Big moment'.

The couple threw a lavish party for Grace Warrior at Australia Zoo last month to celebrate her first birthday.

Too cute: The little girl took her first steps earlier this week, after celebrating her milestone first birthday on March 25

The party was complete with elaborate blush decorations, a two-tiered pink cake and animals, and there was even a tribute to Bindi's late father Steve Irwin.

Bindi and Chandler shared pictures from the special day on Instagram.

They celebrated with Bindi's family, including mother Terri and brother Robert, as well as Chandler's parents, Shannan and Chris, who had flown over from Florida.

Look at her go! Bindi, 23, and Chandler, 25, shared footage of the sweet moment on Instagram on Wednesday morning

Grace looked cute in a pink tutu as she posed for pictures with her parents and the birthday cake.

Several animals, including small turtles, an echidna and a cockatoo, mingled among guests in true Australia Zoo style.

In a special nod to Steve Irwin, who never got to meet his granddaughter, there was a photo of the late Crocodile Hunter on display at the party.

Too cute! Bindi (left) and Chandler (right) threw their daughter Grace Warrior (centre) a lavish party at Australia Zoo last month to celebrate her first birthday

Steve died in September 2006 after being pierced in the chest by a stingray barb while filming a documentary on the Batt Reef in Queensland.

Bindi said it was the 'greatest blessing' to be Grace's mum in a heartwarming tribute.

'Happy Birthday to my graceful warrior,' she wrote on Instagram.

'One year of watching your beautiful heart bloom into the most extraordinary person. Grace, you have been an old soul from the very beginning. It is the greatest blessing to be your mama. I love you eternally, unconditionally and infinitely.'

Family affair: They celebrated with Bindi's family, including mother Terri and brother Robert, as well as Chandler's parents, Shannan and Chris, who had flown over from Florida

Chandler also shared a tribute to Grace, writing: 'It's been one year since you came into our lives and yet it feels like you've been with us forever.

'I never knew I had so much love to give. Happy first birthday, sweetheart.'

Bindi and Chandler, a former professional wakeboarder, welcomed their daughter on March 25, 2021, which coincidentally was their one-year wedding anniversary.
EastEnders have reportedly found their new manager of The Prince Albert.

The popular BBC soap are said to have cast Aidan OCallaghan as Lewis, who first arrives in Albert Square later this month after landing the managers job at The Prince Albert.

The actor, 33, will play a pivotal role involving Walford regular Ben Mitchell (Max Bowden) reports The Sun when the two become friends.

New guy in town: EastEnders have reportedly cast Aidan OCallaghan as Lewis, who first arrives in Albert Square later this month after landing the managers job at The Prince Albert

While enjoying a night out on the town, however, Lewis is harassed by a homophobic gang, leading to Ben beating one of them unconscious.

EastEnders bosses are reportedly keen to focus on The Prince Albert more, but it is unknown how many episodes Aidan will feature in.

EastEnders did not immediately respond to comment when approached by MailOnline.

Experience: The Irish star has also appeared in Sky drama Wolfe and popular thriller The Rook (pictured in The Rook)

The Prince Albert is currently a gay bar, owned by Kathy Beale since 2019, and was run by Mila Marwa, played by Ruhtxjiaih Bellenea.

The location has been seen less and less recently however, since Mila was written out of the soap after a powerful storyline about Female Genital Mutilation.

This is not the first soap role for Aidan, as he has previously starred as Mike in two episodes of Emmerdale back in 2018.

The Irish star has also appeared in Sky drama Wolfe and popular thriller The Rook.

He is also set to star in the prequel series to The Witcher, called The Witcher: Blood Origin.

He will be playing the role of Kareg opposite Hollywood star Michelle Yeoh and comedy legend Lenny Henry.
She's become a household name after starring on Nick Cummins' season of The Bachelor in 2018 and being Australia's first bisexual Bachelorette last year.

And now Brooke Blurton, 27, is set to release a tell-all book, titled Big Love, later this year through HarperCollins Australia.

The memoir will detail her experience on the reality franchise as well as her traumatic childhood marred by sexual assault, drug-fuelled violence and her mother's suicide when she was just 11.

Ready to spill: Former Bachelorette Brooke Blurton (pictured), 27, told The Daily Telegraph's Confidential on Tuesday that she won't be holding back in her upcoming tell-all book, titled Big Love

Brooke, who is halfway through writing the book, told The Daily Telegraph's Confidential on Tuesday: 'It is quite cathartic but equally hard because I feel like it surfaces things you may have forgotten about.'

'I am not afraid to share the details and we've got the title, which is Big Love, so there is obviously that aspect of it as well.'

Identifying as a proud Noongar-Yamatji woman from Western Australia, Brooke went on to suggest that the reason why people are invested in her story is because she's 'not in it for the fame'.

Like therapy: Brooke, who is halfway through writing the book, said: 'It is quite cathartic but equally hard because I feel like it surfaces things you may have forgotten about'

Reality TV star: The memoir will detail her experience on the reality franchise as well as her traumatic childhood marred by sexual assault, drug-fuelled violence and her mother's suicide when she was just 11

Grounded: Identifying as a proud Noongar-Yamatji woman from Western Australia, Brooke went on to suggest that the reason why people are invested in her story is because she's 'not in it for the fame' in her interview with Confidential

Brooke previously discussed her struggles on SBS program Noongar Dandjoo.

'I grew up in a country town in Carnarvon. I spent my childhood there up until I was about 11, when my mum unfortunately passed away - she committed suicide,' she said.

'That was a hard time, living in Carnarvon with my mum and nan, losing mum, and then nan actually passed away a month later.'

Brooke eventually went to live with her father, but admitted: 'To be honest, he wasn't that supportive.'

'Growing up was pretty complicated': Brooke previously discussed her struggles on SBS program Noongar Dandjoo. 'I grew up in a country town in Carnarvon. I spent my childhood there up until I was about 11, when my mum unfortunately passed away - she committed suicide,' she said. Pictured: Brooke, her mother and her siblings in an undated photo

'Growing up was pretty complicated. [There was] a lot of drug and alcohol violence in my childhood and I had an older sister who suffered from schizophrenia,' she added.

Her brother Troy told the program: 'Brooke was definitely someone I had to run to when I had problems.

'I went through quite a bit of depression when I was on drugs, drinking a lot, wasn't really in the right place.'

Struggles: Brooke's life before fame was anything but a fairytale (pictured with her family)

Brooke also discussed her tough upbringing in a TedX talk in 2019, revealing she was sexually assaulted after her mother's funeral.

'I don't remember how I processed that information or how I was feeling at that time, but what I do remember is I found a phone book and a house phone and I looked up my dad's name, I found a number and dialled,' she said.

'My stepmother answered, and I didn't tell her what had happened, I just said, "Could you come get me?"'

Brooke's father, who was living in Perth, picked her up a day later.

'I don't remember how I processed that information or how I was feeling at that time': Brooke also discussed her tough upbringing in a TedX talk in 2019, revealing she was sexually assaulted after her mother's funeral

'I left in the middle of the night that night and I didn't say goodbye to my brothers. I pretty much left my home,' she recalled.

'I felt like I'd lost everything at that moment. I'd lost my sense of belonging, my family, my mum and also my connection to my Aboriginality. This was when I had first ever thought of suicide.'

Despite the horrors of her childhood, Brooke found the strength to push through her own mental health issues to become a role model for her siblings.

Lifeline crisis support number: 13 11 14. www.lifeline.org.au. Suicide Call Back Service: 1300 659 467
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore (12A)

Rating:

Four years is a long time in fantasy. Since the last film in the Fantastic Beasts series, 2018s The Crimes Of Grindelwald, Johnny Depp, who played the title character, has been accused of crimes of his own and invited to step away.

Meanwhile, JK Rowling, who conceived the whole thing as a Harry Potter spin-off, has helped conjure up a tremendous barney over transgender rights.

Happily, at Monday nights unveiling of the third Fantastic Beasts movie, no audible disgruntlement greeted Rowlings name as it appeared on screen (as co-writer and producer).

I went with my 23-year-old niece Millie who whispered to me as the lights went down that she is anti-JK Rowling and briefly explained why. Maybe its generational. On the whole, Mondays audience was a lot closer to Millies age than mine, but even if you dont think (as I do) that Rowling talks a whole heap of sense about gender, she is still a heck of a storyteller.

Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander and Jude Law as Albus Dumbledore, appearing in the film Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbleore

With the excellent Mads Mikkelsen replacing Depp as the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald, playing him as less overtly evil but more insidiously sinister, this film confirms what was only hinted at last time, that Grindelwald and his nemesis, the benign Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law), were once lovers.

As for Dumbledores protege, magizoologist Newt Scamander, Eddie Redmayne is once more a study in tousle-haired, lip-biting diffidence. As before, you will either want to mother him or murder him.

But he has grown on me as a reluctant action hero, and there is a priceless scene when in releasing his brother Theseus (Callum Turner) from a prison Newt out-manoeuvres a scorpion army by deploying limbic mimicry, distracting them from violent engagement by making them copy his dance moves. It is exquisitely done, pure cinematic joy, and worth the price of admission on its own.

But Newt has other problems. Grindelwalds goons have rudely interrupted one of his beast-gathering expeditions, stealing a new-born, enchanted creature pronounced chillin, a cross between a fawn, a goat and an ancient mystic. Able to see into the soul, it has the power to determine the next head of the International Confederation of Wizards, a position Grindelwald craves.

Luckily, the dark wizards underlings pounced without knowing that a twin was born moments later. Grindelwalds version, it seems, might not be the full chillin.

All this unfolds with energy, wit and dazzling special effects, though youll need to have seen the first two films to have more than a vague clue whats going on. Even if you did, following the plot is less than straightforward.

But the director is again David Yates, whose credits also include four of the Harry Potter pictures, and who knows better than anyone how to bring Rowlings universe to life. I loved his first film in the series, Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them (2016), but found The Crimes Of Grindelwald devoid of magic. This, while overlong, is a return to form.

The excellent Mads Mikkelsen replaces Johnny Depp as the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald

The period has moved on from the Roaring Twenties into the Menacing Thirties, and by shifting the action to Berlin, where Grindelwald is a charismatic demagogue increasingly adored by the masses  the world will hear our voice and it will be deafening, he cries  the parallels with Nazism are as unsubtle as a Nuremberg rally. Other loose story threads from the last film are deftly tied. One reveals the true identity of Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller).

And the principal two words in the title are not overlooked. Newts special friends are again his platypus-like niffler and stick-shaped bowtruckle, and watching them I was reminded of a TV interview I once did with Rowling, when I told her that my then nine-year-old son had been distraught on realising he would never be a wizard.

Far from being charmed, she winced, and said she hated people telling her that. Well, I have news for her. Hes all grown up now, in fact married, but when he watches this he will wish he had a bowtruckle to call his own. Maybe everyone will.
Aussie actor Sam Corlett is a rising star thanks to his breakout role in the hit new Netflix series Vikings: Valhalla.

And the 26-year-old Byron Bay local has now landed his first major magazine cover, gracing the front page of Australian Men's Health, on sale now.

The handsome star goes shirtless for the cover, and rides his dirt bike on the beach for a series of inside shots.

Meet the new Aussie hunk taking on Hollywood: Sam Corlett, 26, goes shirtless for Men's Health after the success of his Netflix show Vikings: Valhalla

In the accompanying interview, Sam reflected on his role in Vikings and his career goals, and also spoke of his private interests in yoga, veganism and the environment.

Sam said he never had his sights set on acting or Hollywood, but rather took up drama in school to help combat his anxiety, which soon evolved into an 'obsession'.

He studied at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, before landing a role in the film The Dry alongside Eric Bana.

Rising star: In the accompanying interview, Sam reflected on his role in Vikings and his career goals, and also spoke of his private interests in yoga, veganism and the environment

After falling in love with acting, he landed a part in Netflix show the Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina.

But he said Vikings: Valhalla - the spin-off of Vikings which is set 100 years after the Lothbrok era - had been a game changer.

In the show, which was released in February, Sam plays the lead role of Norse warrior Leif Eriksson, who was said to be the first European to set foot in North America.

'I used to watch the original show with my dad': Sam said Vikings: Valhalla had been a game changer for his career

'I used to watch the original show with my dad growing up and so I knew that he'd be stoked if I ended up doing this,' Sam said of his role in the sequel.

'I sat down at a Netflix meeting and they just said, "At a press of this button, it's going to 222 million people around the world." I still can't grasp that idea.'

To prepare for his role as Eriksson, Sam tried his hardest to get into the Viking mindset by training like a Viking every morning before heading to the set in Ireland.

Leading man: In the show, which was released in February, Sam plays the lead role of Norse warrior Leif Eriksson, who was said to be the first European to set foot in North America

'Primal mentality': To prepare for his role as Eriksson, Sam tried his hardest to get into the Viking mindset by training like a Viking every morning before heading to the set in Ireland

After morning yoga and meditation, Sam, who calls himself a 'spiritualist', would go for a 40-minute run before taking a dip in the freezing ocean and skipping a shower.

'So getting amongst the elements in the morning, getting in touch with the body and jumping into the ocean, all of these helped forge a primal mentality. And so when I ended up on set, I felt like I'd entered that space,' he said.

Sam follows in the footsteps of Aussie actor Travis Fimmel, 42, who played legendary warrior and king Ragnar Lodbrok in the original Vikings series.

World-famous: 'I sat down at a Netflix meeting and they just said, "At a press of this button, it's going to 222 million people around the world." I still can't grasp that idea,' he said

Despite being an up-and-coming actor, Sam said he admires Sean Penn, who is mostly an activist these days, and hopes to eventually focus on writing/directing.

He wants to do more Australian productions and share stories of Indigenous people.

The latest edition of Men's Health Australia featuring Sam Corlett is out now
Jane Fonda channeled a real-life princess in Elle's new April issue, which features a campaign centered around strong modern heroines.

The Barbarella actress, 84, looked regal in a portrait that featured her in a dazzling Christian Siriano ruffled mint tulle gown and a matching iridescent jacket.

Inside the issue, the activist spoke about her battle for climate change, saying: 'If we don't do what needs to be done, we're robbing the younger generation of a future.'

Heroine: Jane Fonda channeled a real-life princess in Elle's new April issue, which features a campaign centered around strong modern heroines

In the issue, Elle and Disney are honoring '14 real-life heroes and heroines who embody the courage and kindness of the beloved Disney Princess characters, who continue to inspire people worldwide, regardless of age.'

In the video she is also seen in a bright purple skirt and blazer, with a white shirt and black tie underneath. While in another outfit change she dons a ruffled white gown and blue gloves.

'A female hero is a leader, can motivate people, can make people feel good about themselves,' the two time Oscar-winner says in the interview.

The star, who has been a staunch advocate for climate change, said she tries to lead by example.

Regal: The Barbarella actress, 84, looked regal in a portrait that featured her in a dazzling Christian Siriano ruffled mint tulle gown and a matching iridescent jacket

'I don't give advice on much. I just try to live my life in a way that others can learn from,' she stated.

'The thing about life and the world is that there's just a lot of things going on that are beyond bad, beyond cruel, beyond criminal. The burning of fossil fuels and what it's doing to the planet is a major example,' she added.

'If you don't know about it, and you don't understand it and you're ignorant, but if you know and you turn your back, and then you're part of the problem. Know it, and you own it.'

Vivid: In the video she is also seen in a bright purple skirt and blazer, with a white shirt and black tie underneath

Thinking ahead: Inside the issue, the activist spoke about her battle for climate change, saying: 'If we don't do what needs to be done, we're robbing the younger generation of a future'

As far as Disney heroines go, Fonda reveals that she favors bravery, naming Frozen's Princess Elsa 'who ventured into the unknown to embrace her true purpose and help save her kingdom.'

The star also appreciates her fashion sense: 'It's quite a look. I think it would be a great look [for me].'

Fonda is known for her political activism, which goes all the way back to her anti-Vietnam War stance.

Leading by example: 'I don't give advice on much. I just try to live my life in a way that others can learn from,' she stated

The actress moved to Washington, DC, in the fall of 2019, and began holding Fire Drill Fridays - weekly protests on Capitol Hill to 'draw attention to the climate crisis.'

'I will be on the Capitol every Friday, rain or shine, inspired and emboldened by the incredible movement our youth have created,' she previously wrote on her website.

'People started coming from all over the country, from Oregon, Arizona, Wisconsin, Massachusetts,' the Hollywood legend said in the interview, adding, 'It was quite something.'

The star has been arrested multiple times during the protests, including in 2019 as she continued to appeal for politicians to address climate change.

Crusader: The two time Oscar-winner is known for her political activism. Most recently holding Fire Drill Fridays - weekly protests on Capitol Hill to 'draw attention to the climate crisis'

Serious about the cause: The star has been arrested multiple times during the protests, including in 2019 as she continued to appeal for politicians to address climate change

Fonda had told reporters before her arrest: 'I probably will go to jail tonight. It will not be the first time. And I am prepared to do that.'

Elsewhere in the interview the iconic actress discussed the upcoming seventh and final season of Grace and Frankie, the Netflix sitcom where she stars alongside Lily Tomlin.

'We had a great cast and crew, and we were very close. There were tears when we wrapped.'

Luckily, then days later she was back with Tomlin for a new comedy, Moving On, directed by Paul Weitz. 'That made it a lot easier,' she revealed.

The first four episodes of the last season are currently available on Netflix, with the final ones set to drop on April 29.
Kaia Gerber dressed comfortably for a coffee run in Studio City, Los Angeles on Tuesday.

The 20-year-old supermodel was clad in a loose-fitting navy sweatshirt and black leggings as she carried two beverages and a paper bag.

The brunette beauty covered her brown eyes with a pair of black rectangular-shaped sunglasses.

Quick errand: : Kaia Gerber dressed comfortably for a coffee run in Studio City, Los Angeles on Tuesday

The runway regular wore black Nike sneakers with a white sole and added a pair of black socks.

She was spotted leaving trendy Erewhon grocery store by herself. Kaia wore her dark hair loose and in its natural texture.

She went makeup-free under her dark shades and wore stud earrings and a thin necklace.

Lately the top model has been seen out and about regularly, sometimes with her boyfriend Austin Butler.

Laidback look: The 20-year-old supermodel was clad in a loose-fitting navy sweatshirt and black leggings as she carried two beverages and a paper bag

Eyewear: The brunette beauty covered her brown eyes with a pair of black rectangular-shaped sunglasses

The pair was spotted holding hands at a Farmers' Market in Malibu over the weekend. The couple reportedly began dating before December 2021 after she split from Jacob Elordi, 24.

Last week the stunner was seen getting a workout in as she went for a jog in a royal blue sweatshirt and black leggings.

Kaia wore white Beats Fit Pro wireless earphones as she hit the pavement to work up a sweat.

Fit girl: Last week the stunner was seen getting a workout in as she went for a jog in a royal blue sweatshirt and black leggings

Gerber's career has taken off in the last two years, with the leggy stunner nabbing deals with Celine, YSL, Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, and others.

She's also graced the covers of Elle, Vogue, and Perfect magazines.

The multitalented star made her acting debut when she took on a role on the popular series American Horror Stories in 2021.

Latest post: In Kaia's last Instagram post she shared two new glamorous shots with her 7.6 million admirers on the app

In Kaia's last Instagram post she shared two new glamorous shots with her 7.6 million admirers on the app.

The beauty glowed in a sparkly sequined outfit that consisted of a sleeveless gold crop top and a light green skirt.

She dazzled in a full face of flawlessly-applied makeup that warmed her eyelids, cheeks, and pout.
Rachel Riley has detailed the 'invasive and disgusting' misogynistic abuse she is sent on Instagram.

The Countdown presenter, 36, who has over half a million followers, has said she receives dozens of unsolicited sexual videos and images in her direct messages.

She revealed that strangers have also tried to call her through the app and have sent mocked up images of her face on porn stars carrying out sex acts.

'It's astounding to know that strangers are sending porn': Rachel Riley details the 'invasive and disgusting' messages she receives on Instagram (pictured on Tuesday)

According to the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, Rachel's ordeal is not uncommon on the platform, that is not doing enough to protect women.

The television presenter who is an ambassador for the CCDH explained: 'It really makes me not want to go into my DMs at all because it's revolting. It's astounding to know that strangers are sending porn - it empowers them to know that it's gone to your inbox.

'On Instagram, anyone can privately send you something that should be illegal. If they did it on the street, they'd be arrested.'

Shocking: The Countdown presenter, 36, has said she receives dozens of unsolicited sexual videos and images in her direct messages (pictured on Instagram)

She continued: 'For women in the public eye, receiving a constant stream of rude, inappropriate and even abusive messages to your DMs [direct messages] is unfortunately inevitable, and the fact that this happens away from public view makes it all the more intrusive.

'Instagram and other platforms have a duty to keep the women who use their sites safe, but at the moment there isn't enough being done to protect them.'

Rachel added that she believes that platforms are not doing enough to stop the inappropriate messages, even when they are reported.

The television presenter explained: 'It's astounding to know that strangers are sending porn - it empowers them to know that it's gone to your inbox'

Rachel added: 'Instagram and other platforms have a duty to keep the women who use their sites safe, but at the moment there isn't enough being done to protect them'

She said: 'I just think all social media are not fit to regulate themselves, clearly. They've got the technology to identify that this content is revolting, but these users still have the technology to send unsolicited images to you.

'Teenage girls could receive this stuff while no one else knows because it's behind closed doors. It's invasive and disgusting.'

Researchers were given access to the Instagram accounts of Rachel as well as actress Amber Heard and three other high-profile women.

The study revealed how nine in ten abusive messages sent to participants were ignored despite being reported to Instagram moderators.

A further one in every 15 messages received over a two-month period broke the company's rules on abuse and harassment.

The CCDH said findings revealed an 'epidemic of misogynist abuse' on Instagram in which abusers felt empowered to send hateful comments without consequence.

Among those reviewed by researchers were 26 videos sent by one man performing a sex act on himself and another who had sent three images of his penis.

Harassment: Rachel added that she believes that platforms are not doing enough to stop the inappropriate messages, even when they are reported

Other accounts sent her 26 unsolicited sexual comments, often late at night and detailing sexual fantasies about her.

She also received nine fake porn images of herself, including where her head was edited on to a nude model engaging in a sexual act.

Rachel went on to say that the extreme content she received in direct messages 'turned her stomach.'

Research: Researchers were given access to the Instagram accounts of Rachel as well as actress Amber Heard (pictured) and three other high-profile women

Researchers also found that strangers had attempted to video call Rachel on five occasions.

In total they recorded 254 accounts that sent abuse to participants between December 28 and February 28 but despite being flagged, 227 were still active a month later.

Instagram said that just because moderators had not disabled an account it did not mean they had not taken action.

Girl power: Rachel is best known for being the mathematician on Countdown, working alongside host Anne Robinson and lexicographer Susie Dent

Imran Ahmed, CCDH chief executive, said: 'Instagram has chosen to side with abusers by negligently creating a culture in which abusers expect no consequences  denying women dignity and their ability to use digital spaces without harassment.

'There is an epidemic of misogynist abuse taking place in women's DMs.'

Cindy Southworth, head of women's safety at Meta, Instagram's parent company, said: 'While we disagree with many of the CCDH's conclusions, we do agree that the harassment of women is unacceptable.

'That's why we don't allow gender-based hate or any threat of sexual violence, and last year we announced stronger protections for female public figures.'

Unwinding: As news of Rachel's horrific ordeal on Instagram came to light she was seen picking up a bottle of wine after filming Countdown on Tuesday
Married At First Sight's Carolina Santos and Daniel Holmes have brushed off criticism about their sordid affair, packing on the PDA at a Sydney beach on Tuesday.

The 'cheaters' looked as loved-up as ever, passionately kissing while taking a dip in the ocean.

Brazilian bombshell Carolina, 34, left little to the imagination by showing off her incredible curves in a red bikini and a matching G-string.

Still going strong! Married At First Sight's Carolina Santos and Daniel Holmes have brushed off criticism about their sordid affair, packing on the PDA at a Sydney beach on Tuesday

She wore her long brunette tresses out and shaded her familiar face with a pair of sunglasses over her face.

Throwing her arms around Daniel's neck, Carolina gave him a smooch as they cuddled in close.

Loved-up: The 'cheaters' looked as loved-up as ever, passionately kissing while taking a dip in the ocean

Red hot: Brazilian bombshell Carolina, 34, left little to the imagination by showing off her incredible curves in a red bikini and a matching G-string

Shady lady! She wore her long brunette tresses out and shaded her familiar face with a pair of sunglasses over her face

In the doghouse: Carolina flaunted her pert derriere as she played around with her pet pooch

After cooling down in the ocean, Daniel and Carolina headed back to the sand to catch some sunshine and work their tan.

Daniel, 31, showed off his buff physique in a pair of board shorts worn over underwear.

Carolina was originally paired with Dion Giannarelli, 34, while Daniel was 'married' to Jessica Seracino, 27 - but they fell for one another during filming.

Buff stuff: Daniel, 31, showed off his buff physique in a pair of board shorts worn over underwear

The couple came under fire after their co-stars and the relationship experts were left horrified by seeing footage of the pair's sordid 'affair'.

Domenica Calarco called a video of the couple smooching 'disgusting' and yelled for it to be turned off as it was giving her 'diarrhoea'.

Jack Millar agreed, saying to Dion: 'I am so sorry you had to see that mate'.

Found a spot! Daniel and Carolina were seen walking around the beach until they found the prefect spot

Slippery when wet! Daniel slathered suntan lotion all over Carolina's tanned and pert derriere

Don't get that wet! Carolina brought her luxury Louis Vuitton handbag along for the outing

I'm not done yet! At one stage Carolina tried to convince Daniel to get back into the water before she went for another dip herself

Cute: Carolina's pet dog Lola quickly ran over to accompany her

She's fit! Her fit physique was hard to miss as she dived into the ocean

Ella Ding chimed in: 'It was all so calculated and intentional. It's a shame that's their love story.'

Relationship expert John Aiken then joined the pile on, saying calling the couple 'smug and unapologetic'.

'You don't get it. The two of you simply do not understand the consequences of your behaviour. It showed us you are deeply insecure. You need to apologise. I want you to own it and be accountable' he said.

Carolina offered a half-hearted apology to Dion, saying: 'I am sorry for hurting your feelings, it was selfish, but um... I don't regret it. I am happy and I deserve it.'
Married At First Sight cast members howled laughing over a sick joke about one of the show's participants, Samantha Moitzi, being related to serial killer Ivan Milat.

Several MAFS stars were roasted in front of guests at a finale viewing party hosted by bride Domenica Calarco at her parents' farm in south-west Sydney on Sunday.

When the emcee asked why Moitzi wasn't at the party, her ex-'husband' Al Perkins joked she was in the 'state forest' with her great-uncle.

Bad taste: Several MAFS cast members howled laughing over a sick joke about one of the show's stars being related to serial killer Ivan Milat. (Brent Vitiello is seen telling the joke at a private party on the outskirts of Sydney on Sunday, with Ella Ding and Jack Millar behind him)

Milat, Australia's worst-ever serial killer who died in prison three years ago, was the older brother of Moitzi's late grandmother Shirley Soire.

He infamously murdered his victims at Belanglo State Forest, south of Sydney.

While Perkins made the remark privately, it was repeated to the whole room when his co-star Brent Vitiello walked up to the microphone and told the joke.

'Al just said [she's at] the state forest visiting her... great-uncle,' Vitiello said, before bowing his head and walking away.

Joke: When the emcee asked why MAFS bride Samantha Moitzi wasn't at the viewing party, her ex-'husband' Al Perkins (left) joked she was in the 'state forest' with her great-uncle

How it happened: While Perkins made the remark privately, it was repeated to the whole room when his co-star Brent Vitiello walked up to the microphone and told the joke

The other MAFS stars then burst into laughter as someone in the crowd shouted: 'Al!'

Some party guests covered their mouths in shock as the room reeled from the joke.

Calarco and fellow bride Ella Ding could be seen doubling over, as Jack Millar and Perkins gave Vitiello a friendly pat on the back.

What's so funny? The MAFS stars burst into laughter (left) as the emcee doubled over (right)

As previously reported by Daily Mail Australia, Moitzi is indeed related to murderer Milat, but her family link to the 'backpacker killer' was not addressed on the show.

The Gold Coast-based fashion brand manager, 27, left producers and her on-screen 'husband' Perkins stunned when she revealed during filming last year she was the granddaughter of Milat's younger sister Shirley Soire.

Moitzi apparently broke down in tears when Perkins, 25, suggested they watch the 2005 horror movie Wolf Creek, which is loosely based on Milat's grisly crimes.

Secret: As previously reported by Daily Mail Australia, Moitzi (pictured) is indeed related to murderer Milat, but her family link to the 'backpacker killer' was not addressed on the show

'Al wanted to watch Wolf Creek one night and things turned awkward really quickly,' a well-placed source told Daily Mail Australia in March.

Perkins reportedly suggested it would be 'fun' to watch the film because he 'hadn't seen it yet', and thought a scary movie would 'help them bond'.

'He had absolutely no clue about her family. It was very awkward. Sam was hesitant, but just had to tell him. He was gobsmacked,' the insider said.

Family: The fashion brand manager, 27, left producers and her on-screen 'husband' Perkins stunned when she revealed last year during filming she was the granddaughter of Milat's younger sister Shirley Soire. Milat (pictured) murdered seven young backpackers and dumped their bodies in the Belanglo State Forest, south of Sydney, between 1989 and 1992

Awkward: Moitzi apparently broke down when Perkins suggested they watch the 2005 horror movie Wolf Creek, which is loosely based on Milat's grisly crimes. Pictured on November 1

The Australian cult horror movie, starring John Jarratt, was inspired by the real-life murders committed by Milat in the early 1990s.

According to the on-set source, Moitzi was 'anxious' about discussing the subject on camera, so told Perkins privately instead.

The family link was not addressed on the Channel Nine show, but was clearly common knowledge among the cast.

Unaware: Perkins (right) reportedly suggested it would be 'fun' to watch Wolf Creek because he 'hadn't seen it yet', and thought a scary film would 'help them bond'

Shocked: 'He had absolutely no clue about her family. It was very awkward. Sam was hesitant, but just had to tell him. He was gobsmacked,' the insider said

Inspiration: The Australian cult horror movie Wolf Creek, starring John Jarratt (pictured), was inspired by the real-life murders committed by Milat in the early 1990s

Moitzi's grandmother Shirley Soire, who died in 2003, was a staunch supporter of her killer brother and is said to have helped him 'get rid of' a gun.

She married husband Gerry in 1964. The couple had two children and later divorced.

'Shirley used to take her grandchildren to the prison to visit her brother on many occasions,' a source told Daily Mail Australia.

Confirmed: Moitzi explained to Perkins she was the granddaughter of Milat's sister

Family: Moitzi's parents, Veronica (right) and Paul (left), are pictured here

Milat murdered seven backpackers and hitchhikers between 1989 and 1992 in the Belanglo State Forest, south of Sydney, and was suspected of killing others.

He was sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences without parole.

His victims were English backpackers Caroline Clarke, 21, and Joanne Walters 22; Melbourne couple James Gibson and Deborah Everist, both 19; and German backpackers Simone Schmidl, 20, Gabor Neugebauer, 21, and Anja Habschied, 20.

He died aged 74 of oesophageal and stomach cancer at Long Bay jail's hospital in October 2019.

Locked up: Milat was sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences without parole
Lottie Tomlinson showed her support for her brother Louis on Tuesday as she attended his concert in l'Olympia in Paris.

The make-up artist, 23, who is currently pregnant with her first child, sat in a VIP box alongside her boyfriend Lewis Burton and her grandfather Len.

She donned a black skintight dress that put her blossoming baby bump on full display, and added a pair of thigh high boots.

Supportive sister: Lottie Tomlinson showed her support for her brother Louis on Tuesday as she attended his concert in l'Olympia in Paris

Her blonde tresses were styled in neat waves and she finished her look off with hoop earrings and a slick of lip gloss.

She snapped a photo of her in her figure-hugging outfit in a bathroom while cradling her bump and wrote: 'Baby boy is popping today.'

Lottie also shared a video of her growing belly and then panning over to her former One Direction brother singing on stage, writing: 'First time hearing his uncle sing'.

Loved-up: The make-up artist, 23, who is currently pregnant with her first child, sat in a VIP box alongside her boyfriend Lewis Burton and her Grandpa Len

Stunning: She donned a black skintight dress that put her blossoming baby bump on full display, and added a pair of thigh high boots

Flawless: Her blonde tresses were styled in neat waves and she finished her look off with hoop earrings and a slick of lipgloss

Last month the entrepreneur revealed she was expecting a baby boy with her partner.

She took to Instagram to share a cute gender reveal clip in which she and Lewis let off a cannon of blue confetti and powder.

Lottie held her hands up to her face in excitement as the cannon went off, before she turned and hugged Lewis.

Baby joy: She snapped a photo of her in her figure-hugging outfit in a bathroom while cradling her bump and wrote: 'Baby boy is popping today'

Sweet: Lottie also shared a video of her growing belly and then panning over to her former One Direction brother singing on stage, writing: 'First time hearing his uncle sing'

Family: Lottie is the younger sister of former One Direction star Louis (pictured together on a night out)

The pair shared a kiss as the confetti and powder settled in the room before the short video ended.

Lottie captioned her post: 'Our little baby.'

Her friends were quick to leave congratulatory messages in the comments section of her post, with former The Only Way Is Essex star Mario Falcone, writing: 'Congratulations,' along with three blue heart emojis. Wayne Lineker, wrote: 'Congratulations guys amazing.'
Kourtney Kardashian eloped with her neighbor-turned-fiance Travis Barker in Las Vegas on Monday, but fans might forget she nearly did the same with her babydaddy Scott Disick during a family trip in 2007.

The 42-year-old Poosh founder was 28 when she and the 38-year-old Talentless CEO impulsively decided to tie the knot at A Little White Chapel a couple days after a pregnancy scare.

'This feels really rushed but I guess I'm about to get married,' Kourtney shrugged during episode six of the first season of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

Surprise! Kourtney Kardashian (L, pictured Sunday) eloped with her neighbor-turned-fiance Travis Barker (R) in Las Vegas on Monday, but fans might forget she nearly did the same with her babydaddy Scott Disick during a family trip in 2007

'I feel like we just woke up and haven't had a second to think about this.'

Kardashian and Disick picked out a wedding gown and white suit and met with the minister at the same chapel where Britney Spears notoriously eloped with her childhood friend Jason Alexander in 2004.

The half-Armenian beauty's 'devastated' momager Kris Jenner quickly consulted with then husband Caitlyn Jenner before having a serious talk with her eldest child.

'This is wrong. You've got hot pink flowers, and you're standing under plastic roses. I know you,' the 66-year-old grandmother-of-11 reasoned.

Remember? The 42-year-old Poosh founder was 28 when she and the 38-year-old Talentless CEO impulsively decided to tie the knot at A Little White Chapel a couple days after a pregnancy scare in episode six of the first season of Keeping Up with the Kardashians

'I guess I'm about to get married': Kourtney and Scott (R) picked out a wedding gown and white suit and met with the minister (M) at the same chapel where Britney Spears notoriously eloped with her childhood friend Jason Alexander in 2004

'This is wrong': Kardashian's 'devastated' momager Kris Jenner (R) quickly consulted with then husband Caitlyn Jenner before having a serious talk with her eldest child

'It's not about the things. I don't mean to make it about that, but this feels wrong. You're rushing it. [Caitlyn] isn't here, your little sisters [Kendall and Kylie] aren't here. They would die if they thought they weren't your bridesmaids. Where is [Scott's] family? This is about family!'

Convinced, Kourtney gently broke the news to Scott and comforted him with a hug.

'I think maybe my mom's right,' Kardashian said in a confessional.

'This feels so rushed and just not right. I never really thought about what my wedding would be but this is certainly not it.'

The 66-year-old grandmother-of-11 reasoned: 'You've got hot pink flowers, and you're standing under plastic roses. I know you. It's not about the things. I don't mean to make it about that, but this feels wrong. You're rushing it. [Caitlyn] isn't here, your little sisters [Kendall and Kylie] aren't here. They would die if they thought they weren't your bridesmaids. Where is [Scott's] family? This is about family!'

'I think maybe my mom's right': Convinced, the half-Armenian beauty gently broke the news to Disick (R) and comforted him with a hug

Kourtney said in a confessional: 'This feels so rushed and just not right. I never really thought about what my wedding would be but this is certainly not it'

Disick attempted to pop the question to the Calabasas socialite a second time with a yellow Pave diamond engagement ring during an episode of spin-off Kourtney and Kim Take New York in 2011, but she acted too aloof.

Kourtney officially ended their on/off nine-year romance in 2015 after the New York-born real estate heir canoodled with stylist Chloe Bartoli in Monte Carlo, but the deal-breaker was actually his 'substance abuse.'

Scott - whose parents passed away in 2013-2014 - has gone to rehab five times, and he was once hospitalized for alcohol poisoning while they were dating.

Denied again! The New York-born real estate heir attempted to pop the question to Kardashian a second time with a yellow Pave diamond engagement ring during an episode of spin-off Kourtney and Kim Take New York in 2011, but she acted too aloof

He went to rehab five times: The Calabasas socialite officially ended their on/off nine-year romance in 2015 after Scott canoodled with stylist Chloe Bartoli in Monte Carlo, but the deal-breaker was actually his 'substance abuse'

2020 family portrait: Kourtney and Disick - who met at Joe Francis' Cabo home in 2005 - amicably co-parent their 12-year-old son Mason, nine-year-old daughter Penelope, and seven-year-old son Reign

Kardashian and Disick - who met at Joe Francis' Cabo home in 2005 - amicably co-parent their 12-year-old son Mason, nine-year-old daughter Penelope, and seven-year-old son Reign.

Meanwhile, the He's All That actress and the Blink-182 drummer got hitched privately at One Love Wedding Chapel on Monday morning - a few hours after they attended the 64th Annual Grammy Awards together.

The non-legally binding ceremony at the 24-hour chapel was officiated by an Elvis Presley impersonator with only two guests filming all of the action.

They do! Meanwhile, Kardashian and the Blink-182 drummer got hitched privately at One Love Wedding Chapel (pictured Tuesday) on Monday morning - a few hours after they attended the 64th Annual Grammy Awards together

The setting: The non-legally binding ceremony at the 24-hour chapel was officiated by an Elvis Presley impersonator with only two guests filming all of the action

Owner Marty Frierson told People on Tuesday: 'There was a lot of that  kissing and hugging. They barely came up for air! They just seemed totally in love'

He added: 'They filmed everything from the time they walked in, to the time they walked out. The vows, the kiss, the rose bouquet toss, the dancing. I usually take pictures for the chapel but they wanted to handle it all themselves'

'There was a lot of that  kissing and hugging. They barely came up for air! They just seemed totally in love,' owner Marty Frierson told People on Tuesday.

'They filmed everything from the time they walked in, to the time they walked out. The vows, the kiss, the rose bouquet toss, the dancing. I usually take pictures for the chapel but they wanted to handle it all themselves.'

Catch more of the inseparable couple - who want a baby - in The Kardashians premiering April 14 on Hulu, Disney+ internationally, and Star+ in Latin America.
Outback medical drama RFDS may return to Channel Seven for a second season.

The show, about the lives of those serving in the Royal Flying Doctor Service, didn't deliver stellar ratings for Seven last year, but was sold to international broadcasters.

Brook Hall, the network's director of content scheduling, said at a recent industry conference that the show was a 'success', reports Variety Australia.

Making a comeback: Medical drama RFDS, starring Stephen Peacocke (pictured), may return to Channel Seven for a second season

While the show flew under the radar for most Australians, Hall said RFDS was in fact Seven's second highest-rating locally made drama after Home and Away last year.

It was also sold to six major territories before its debut in August 2021.

RFDS premiered to a decent 604,000 metro viewers, but this figure fell to 417,000 for the finale, which isn't considered a sustainable audience for a drama series.

'We're actually in advanced discussions to try and get season two up,' Hall said. 'Because it did succeed.'

Mixed reception: The show, about the lives of those serving in the Royal Flying Doctor Service, didn't deliver stellar ratings for Seven last year, but was sold to international broadcasters

Hall stressed that overnight metro ratings aren't the be-all and end-all, and there are other ways to measure a program's success, including BVOD and regional figures.

He said that with all the relevant numbers accounted for, RFDS regularly reached more than a million viewers in Australia.

'I loved that show,' he added. 'It's one of those ones that gets hurt by the old metrics [the overnight metro ratings system] the most.'

The bigger picture: Brook Hall, Seven's director of content scheduling, said the show was a 'success' when its total audience - not just five-city metro - was taken into consideration

Hall said Channel Seven was searching for ways to keep local premium drama alive on free-to-air television.

Filmed in remote Broken Hill, RFDS was produced by Endemol Shine Australia and has been bought by PBS in the United States and Channel 4 in the UK.

It has also been sold to New Zealands TVNZ, TV4 in Sweden, Belgiums SBS and Talpa in the Netherlands.
Martha Kalifatidis has once again denied she is expecting with her first child with fiance Michael Brunelli.

The 33-year-old addressed the speculation after she stepped out in a white lace dress with cut-out detail around the waist on Tuesday.

She explained she was hit with questions from fans asking if she was pregnant.

Nope! Martha Kalifatidis has once again denied she is expecting with her first child with fiance Michael Brunelli

'Not pregnant but thanks for asking, just got back from a feast,' Martha wrote across a picture of her wearing the long silk frock.

The reality star went on to say she also had gastrointestinal issues.

Martha has been at the centre of many pregnancy rumours several times this year and in February was once again forced to deny the speculation.

'Thanks for asking!' The 33-year-old addressed the speculation after she stepped out in a white lace dress with cut-out detail around the waist on Tuesday

'I am not pregnant! You can stop asking me. I've been offline because I have felt like s**t since Covid,' she said.

'The 'dream' you had I was pregnant isn't real, the inkling you had I was pregnant... babe you ain't onto something,' she added.

Martha spoke out after receiving an influx of comments and messages in response to a photo she'd shared earlier in the day that showed her tummy.

Family planning: Martha has been at the centre of many pregnancy rumours this year and in February was once again forced to deny the speculation

The picture in question was a top-down view of her Louis Vuitton beach towel.

While she denied having a 'bump' in the photo, Martha hinted she hopes to one day have a child with Michael.

'Go talk to your crystals for another month and see what happens, who knows maybe your 'incline' might come true!' she said.

Unwell: The influencer, 33, confirmed on Instagram Stories she was not expecting and was in fact still recovering from Covid-19. Pictured with fiance Michael Brunelli

Martha and Michael first met on Married At First Sight in 2019 and announced their engagement late last year.

In September, personal trainer Michael teased baby plans with his stunning fiancee.

Responding to a fan on Instagram who asked where he hopes to be in five years' time, Michael shared a picture of what is traditionally known as a nuclear family.

Family plans: Martha and Michael met on Married At First Sight in 2019 and announced their engagement late last year. In September, Michael teased baby plans with his stunning fiancee

He went one step further by discussing whether the couple would raise their family in Sydney, or return to their home state of Victoria.

'It's something we're undecided about. There are pros and cons to both,' he said. 'When the time comes, we'll make the decision that best suits us at that point.'

The two reside in Sydney's eastern suburbs.
She looked glamorous late last month when she made her red carpet debut at the Vanity Fair Oscars Party with her boyfriend Michael B. Jordan.

And Lori Harvey kept that energy going on Tuesday when she showed off on Instagram in a stunning red blazer dress.

The 25-year-old model stayed busy later in the day when she was spotted out in Los Angeles in a casual outfit as she headed to a Pilates class.

In her Instagram post, Lori highlighted her plump pout while showing off her trim figure in the red jacket.

The crimson item featured thick black trim and large gold-lined black square buttons.

The off-center lapels veered to the side to create a high-slit emphasizing her toned legs, and the jacket featured a single hip pocket on the other side.

The daughter of Steve Harvey paired her elegant outfit with a side of black open-toe stilettos with crisscrossing straps running up past her ankles.

Workout time: After looking glamorous in a red blazer dress in photos she posted to her Instagram on Tuesday, Lori Harvey, 25, headed out for a session at Forma Pilates in Los Angeles

Sporty: Although the temperatures around the city were rising, she still covered up in a thick gray sweatshirt that hung loosely on her slim frame, plus black leggings and white trainers

Lori had her lustrous raven locks swept back and fanned out, with some strands held in a high ponytail.

She framed her impeccably made-up face with large irregularly shaped gold earrings with thick red and blue stones.

Later on Tuesday, the rising star was seen arriving at a Forma Pilates class in Los Angeles.

Although the temperatures around the city were rising, she still covered up in a thick gray sweatshirt that hung loosely on her slim frame.

Lori paired it with black leggings and white-and-gray trainers, and she carried a small black Louis Vuitton handbag covered in a messy white scrawl on her arm.

The SKN by LH founder had her hair tied back in a ponytail, highlighting her chunky black sunglasses and her hoop earrings.

As she left the studio, she carried a bottle of water to help her rehydrate.

Days earlier, Lori had noted on Instagram that she was having her 'First workout in over a month' at Forma, so she seems to be getting back into a regular workout routine.

Low key: She carried a Louis Vuitton handbag and wore chunky black sunglasses and hoop earrings. Afterward, she rehydrated with a bottle of water

Lori's low-key self-care comes after she made her red carpet debut with her boyfriend Michael B. Jordan at the Vanity Fair Oscars Party.

Both she and her love opted for luminous ensembles, with the Creed star wearing a tuxedo made of a lustrous material, while she glittered in a sheer Tony Ward Couture dress made of loosely woven gold fabric decorated with sparkling jewels.

She completed the look by elevating her 5ft3in stature with towering Jimmy Choo heels.

The lovebirds have been an item since November of 2020, but they've taken their time go public with their romance, and this marked their first time together on a red carpet.

Following the party, the two crossed a picket line to attend Jay-Z's after-party at the Chateau Marmont, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The hotel is being protested by workers alleging that systemic racism and sexual misconduct have gone on unchecked at the hotel for years, though that didn't dissuade the rapper form holding the party.
Scott Disick was seen out for the first time since news broke that his ex Kourtney Kardashian had wed musician Travis Barker in Las Vegas.

Disick, 38, was seen out with model Rebecca Donaldson in Malibu on Tuesday amid news that Kardashian, 42, and Barker, 46, had married at the One Love Wedding Chapel early Monday following the Grammy Awards.

The reality star stayed cool on the sunny day in Southern California in a plaid black and white button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up, dark green patterned shorts and white sneakers.

The latest: Scott Disick, 38, was seen out for the first time since news broke that his ex Kourtney Kardashian, 42, had wed musician Travis Barker, 46, in Las Vegas, as he spent time with model Rebecca Donaldson in Malibu on Tuesday

The Eastport, New York-born TV personality - who shares three children with ex Kourtney Kardashian - Mason, 12, Penelope, nine, and Reign, seven - sported a beard as he wore a black ballcap and black sunglasses, with necklaces and a gold watch.

The Flip It Like Disick personality was seen dining with Donaldson, who is represented by MP MODELS, on the daytime outing, as they frequented the Italian restaurant Tra di Noi.

Donaldson wore a long-sleeved white top with a plunging neck and denim blue shorts, with white sneakers and white socks. She had her dark brown locks down and parted and wore black sunglasses with a pair of thick gold hoop earrings.

Donaldson carried a black and white print bag by Christian Dior and held her phone as she was seen with Disick.

Kardashian and Barker were seen following Sunday's Grammys at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas

The reality star and Blink-182 drummer matched in all-black ensembles prior to exchanging vows at the One Love Wedding Chapel early Monday

Disick stayed cool on the sunny day in Southern California in a plaid black and white button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up, dark green patterned shorts and white sneakers

DIsick sported a beard as he wore a black ballcap and black sunglasses, with necklaces and a gold watch

Exes: Meanwhile Scott's most recent ex Holly Scarfone stepped out for dinner that night

Wow: Holly looked great in a purple dress

Glam: She looked as beautiful as ever

Disick was seen traveling through the well-heeled area with Donaldson in a Ferrari.

Disick was initially linked to the eldest of the Kardashian sisters when they crossed paths in 2006 at a party in Mexico hosted by Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis, according to US Weekly.

The pair dated on-and-off until they broke up in 2015, and have been able to cordially coparent their three children in the seven years since.

Donaldson wore a long-sleeved white top with a plunging neck and denim blue shorts, with white sneakers and white socks

The model had her dark brown locks down and parted and wore black sunglasses with a pair of thick gold hoop earrings

Donaldson carried a black and white print bag by Christian Dior and held her phone as she was seen with Disick

The TV personality and the model chat as they made their way toward the restaurant

In the years since their split, Disick has been romantically linked with model Amelia Gray Hamlin, model Sofia Richie, actress Bella Thorne, celebrity stylist Chloe Bartoli and model Bella Banos.

Barker and Kardashian exchanged vows Monday at 1:45 a.m., less than six months after they got engaged October 17 in Montecito, California when the musician proposed to the reality star at the Rosewood Miramar Beach hotel.

The chapel's owner, Marty Frierson, told People that the nuptials between the stars took about a half-hour.

Disick and Kardashian dated on-and-off until they broke up in 2015, and have been able to cordially coparent their three children in the seven years since

He placed his hand near her back as they made their way into a luxe Malibu restaurant

The Flip It Like Disick personality was seen dining with Donaldson on the daytime outing, as they frequented the Italian restaurant Tra di Noi

The TV star chatted with Donaldson, who is represented by MP MODELS

'I didn't know who it was until they pulled up,' Frierson told the outlet. 'I advertise as 24-hours but they wanted to make sure I was still there. They paid and they requested Elvis Presley, that was mandatory. I called back 5 minutes later and was like, I got an Elvis, and there they were.

'They came, got married, tossed the bouquet in the driveway, and danced to Elvis. They showed a lot of love and had a lot of fun.'

Barker and Kardashian's romance went public in January of 2021, as a source told People that the couple had 'been dating for about a month or two,' as they had 'been friends for a long time but it's turned romantic.'

The couple subsequently confirmed their romance on Instagram as they held hands in a February 2021 post.

The dark-haired beauty beamed as she enjoyed lunch with the father-of-three

Disick was seen traveling through the well-heeled area with Donaldson in a Ferrari

Disick was initially linked to the eldest of the Kardashian sisters when they crossed paths in 2006 at a party in Mexico hosted by Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis

In a preview for the forthcoming series The Kardashians on Hulu, Kardashian said that she and Barker 'want to have a baby' ahead of a doctor's office appointment.

Following their engagement last fall, a source told Us Weekly that Disick was 'absolutely furious' over the romantic union.

The source said that Disick 'knew it was possible, but is very jealous of Kourtney and Travis relationship' and was holding out hope 'that they could call things off before the wedding.'

Donaldson was seen in an Instagram shot looking stunning in a black top and leather pants

The beautiful model was seen getting made up prior to a rooftop shoot
She rose to fame as one of the biggest supermodels of the Nineties.

And Helena Christensen showed off her credentials as she slipped into a sheer lace bodice and leather mini dress to channel the decade on Tuesday.

The Victoria's Secret Angel, 51, posed up a storm in the leggy ensembles as she displayed her new collection for designer Karen Millen.

Incredible: Helena Christensen, 51, put on a leggy display in a semi-sheer bodice and leather mini dress as she celebrated the Nineties in a new fashion shoot on Tuesday

Looking simply sensational in the thigh-skimming mini dress that featured lace up detailing, she further elongated her pins with some strappy heels.

To complete her sultry look she added a white jacket and injected a pop of colour with a slick of dark red lipstick.

Helena then showed off her taut physique in a black lacy body as she layered over an eye-catching canary yellow blazer.

Stunning: Helena then showed off her taut physique in a black lacy body as she layered over an eye-catching canary yellow blazer

Sultry: Looking simply sensational in the thigh-skimming mini dress that featured lace up detailing, she further elongated her pins with some strappy heels

The fashionista then rocked a triangle bralet as she flashed her abs in a pair of skin tight leggings.

She opted for a leather biker jacket with red and white stripes down the sleeves and silver hardware for her third ensemble.

Her brunette locks were worn down and styles in tousled waves as she nailed the eras grungy vibe.

Finally, she slipped into a tasseled dress with a sheer high neck and studded belt as she worked the collection.

Stunning: The fashionista then rocked a triangle bar as she flashed her abs in a pair of skin tight leggings

Edgy: She opted for a leather biker jacket with red and white stripes down the sleeves and silver hardware for her third ensemble

Helena's latest shoot comes after she told how it 'p****s [her] off' to know that she will die one day and can't live forever.

The Danish model joked she would happily let a vampire bite her as she discussed her modelling career and her friend Naomi Campbell becoming a mother.

Speaking to Grazia magazine, Helena said she keeps the future at bay by not planning too far ahead.

She said: 'It p****s me off no end that I'll die one day and not experience the future. If a vampire passed by me in the night I would totally give my neck. I'm so ready to live forever.'

Pose! To complete her sultry look she injected a pop of colour with a slick of dark red lipstick

Working it: Her brunette locks were worn down and styles in tousled waves as she nailed the eras grungy vibe

Eye-catching: Finally, she slipped into a tasseled dress with a sheer high neck and studded belt as she worked the collection.

Pals: The Danish model recently joked she would happily let a vampire bite her as she discussed her career and her friend Naomi Campbell becoming a mother (pictured in the 1990s)

Helena revealed her friend Naomi, 51, told her two years ago she was planning on becoming a mother and is 'so happy' for her.

Naomi announced the birth of her daughter in May 2021 and posed with her on the cover of British Vogue in February and said she was not adopted.

Discussing the star becoming a mother, Helena said: 'It's something she always wanted, to be a mother. She told me backstage at the Michael Kors show about two years ago [that she was having a baby].

The fact that she made the decision and went through with it, and now has her gorgeous little girl, I'm so happy for her.'

Stroll: Trading the glamour for casual chic on Tuesday, Helena looked engrossed in her phone as she walked her pet pooch in New York

Trading the glamour for casual chic on Tuesday, Helena looked engrossed in her phone as she walked her pet pooch in New York.

The Danish supermodel wore a moss green fleece over a stripy knit jumper, completing her look with wide-leg joggers and trainers.

She left her brunette tresses to fall down her back and went makeup free during the outing.
Deadline

Rating:

Smother

Rating:

See, it doesn't have to be so maddeningly complicated. There's no need for multiple flashbacks and criss-crossing timelines, or a cast of thousands.

I'm fed up with crime thrillers that constantly fling up captions  'Liverpool three weeks earlier', 'Tokyo one year later', 'Parallel universe AD2122'  as the narrative zigzags like an out-of-control Tardis.

Deadline (C5) proves none of that is necessary for an engrossing psychological mystery. It takes a tight circle of suspects and a story that starts at its beginning, with an art collector being bashed over the head with one of his own priceless statuettes.

This straightforward approach gives director Joe Ahearne freedom to add some stylish, filmic twists. Our detective, investigative journalist James (James D'Arcy), watches the murder  but as a reconstruction, shot for a true-crime documentary.

Deadline (C5) proves none of that is necessary for an engrossing psychological mystery. It takes a tight circle of suspects and a story that starts at its beginning, with an art collector being bashed over the head with one of his own priceless statuettes

When he interviews chief suspect Natalie (Charlie Murphy), he uses a piece of kit called an 'interrotron', with twin video screens that let him stare into her eyes while simultaneously observing her from one side. Ted Hastings would have loved that on Line Of Duty.

In a neat reversal of a sleuth's usual method, James begins the investigation convinced that Natalie is guilty. Her alibi for the night on which her (much older, very rich) husband was killed is decidedly ropey. When he was being battered to death in his study by an intruder, his wife was with her former lesbian lover  a painter, whose trademark is an image of a man with a headful of exploding blood.

No surprise that the internet has already dubbed Natalie the Black Widow. But after she allows James to glimpse her wrapped only in a bath towel, and then plays the vulnerable little girl in need of a manly protector, he starts to convince himself she is being framed.

When he interviews chief suspect Natalie (Charlie Murphy), he uses a piece of kit called an 'interrotron', with twin video screens that let him stare into her eyes while simultaneously observing her from one side. Ted Hastings would have loved that on Line Of Duty

In the background hovers Natalie's lawyer, an iron-faced Hungarian named Mrs Molnar (Anamaria Marinca)  a woman so contemptuous of all men, she makes Rosa Klebb look like a Playboy Playmate.

The script occasionally lapses into cliche, with James haunted by convenient nightmares to reveal his past. And the billionaire's mansion, with its velvet drapes and crystal chandeliers, appears to be left over from the remake of 1980s diamante soap opera Dynasty. But with a small circle of characters, the sudden twists have a satisfying impact.

Deadline continues every night this week and I have a strong feeling it will not disappoint.

An over-abundance of characters is the chief failing of Smother (Alibi), the Irish family drama that returns for a second series with Dervla Kirwan as the matriarch trying to control every detail of her daughters' lives.

An over-abundance of characters is the chief failing of Smother (Alibi) , the Irish family drama that returns for a second series with Dervla Kirwan as the matriarch trying to control every detail of her daughters' lives

A dozen assorted sisters, spouses and children gathered on the coast to scatter the ashes of somebody's dead husband, at which point I realised that if I'd ever fully unravelled the numerous secrets of the first series last summer, I certainly couldn't remember them now. The only thing to do is concentrate on Kirwan as Val, addicted to the melodrama of her own life.

When she discovers someone has been writing on the bathroom mirror in lipstick, she wakes the whole household in the small hours and confronts them with a silent, stricken face  pointing one trembling finger to the glass.

Her daughters try to keep up with these fraught histrionics as a long-lost brother (Dean Fagan) reappears. It's all hopelessly addled, even if you ignore the glimpse of a violent row before the credits in which someone (oh, the horror) smashes a vase. Confusion is no substitute for good storytelling.
Helen Mirren exuded elegance as she arrived to a screening of her latest film The Duke in New York City on Tuesday night.

The Academy Award winner, 76, modeled a canary yellow wrap dress with a v-neckline that showcased her smooth decolletage.

She layered up with a bright pink cape and toted her essentials in a jeweled emerald green clutch.

Elegance: Helen Mirren exuded elegance as she arrived to a screening of her latest film The Duke in New York City on Tuesday night

Helen completed her vibrant ensemble with a pair of yellow satin heels with bows on the front.

The Queen actress accessorized with gold bangles, one of which was decorated in colorful gemstones.

Her white hair was styled in a soft updo and she enhanced her natural beauty with a bit of eyeliner and lipstick.

She posed for photos with Sony Pictures Classics co-chief Michael Barker, who looked classy in a black suit styled with a deep purple button-up shirt.

Bright: The Academy Award winner, 76, modeled a canary yellow wrap dress with a v-neckline that showcased her smooth decolletage

Perfect pairing: She layered up with a bright pink cape and toted her essentials in a jeweled emerald green clutch; Helen pictured with Sony Pictures Classics co-chief Michael Barker

The Duke is set in 1961 and follows 60-year-old taxi driver Kempton Bunton (played by Jim Broadbent) who steals artist Francisco Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London.

The film was met with critical acclaim during its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival in 2020, as well as at last year's Telluride Film Festival.

Deadline reported back in February that The Duke's theatrical release date had been pushed from March 25, 2022 to April 22, 2022.

Posed up: She posed with Sony Pictures Classics co-chief Michael Barker, who looked classy in a black suit styled with a deep purple button-up shirt

Glowing: Her white hair was styled in a soft updo and she enhanced her natural beauty with a bit of eyeliner and lipstick

It was given a one-week run in December in order to qualify for the 2022 award season. The Duke is the final film from late director Roger Michell, who passed away in September 2021.

The Duke is a Pathe, Ingenious Media and Screen Yorkshire presentation of a Neon Films Production.

Nicky Bentham is the Producer and the Executive Producers are Cameron McCracken and Jenny Borgars for Pathe, Andrea Scarso for Ingenious Media, Hugo Heppell for Screen Yorkshire, Peter Scarf and Christopher Bunton.

Decked out: The Queen actress accessorized with gold bangles, one of which was decorated in colorful gemstones

During the UK premiere in February, Helen spoke about being drawn to the comedy-drama's 'funny' and 'moving' script.

'It was funny, it was moving, it was unexpected. It was a lovely piece of writing, really, really lovely,' she recalled to BANG Showbiz.

Helen plays Kempton Bunton's wife Dorothy, which was a character she really 'wanted to play.'

She continued: 'I wanted to work with Jim, and I wanted to work with Roger, so it all came together for me.'
Katie Holmes showed off her edgy style while attending a dinner party for the launch of Santa Margherita Rose at a townhome in New York City's West Village on Tuesday.

The Batman Begins actress, 43, rocked a nose ring and donned an oversize black double-breasted blazer on top of a white T-shirt, as well as matching black pants.

The ex-wife of Tom Cruise was recently spotted wearing the new piece of jewelry at the Vanity Fair Oscars Party, and she seemed to have debuted it back in July 2021 in an Instagram photo.

Chic: Katie Holmes looked chic as ever while attending a dinner party for the launch of Santa Margherita Rose at a townhome in the West Village on Tuesday

The brunette beauty finalized the cool look with a pair of stylish pointed-toe zebra-stripe heels.

She wore her shoulder-length brown tresses in a sleek straight style, flowing down her shoulders.

As for glam, the Ohio-born entertainer wore glimmering eyeshadow, pink lipstick, and sported well-defined eyebrows.

Edgy: The Batman Begins actress, 43, rocked a nose ring, and donned an oversize black blazer on top of a white T-shirt, as well as matching black pants

New bling: Holmes first appeared to show off a nose stud in a selfie from July 2021

The Dawson's Creek star posed up a storm in front of a large floral arrangement.

Inside of the event she was spotted flashing a big smile and eating a salad paired with a glass of the rose.

Katie appeared to enjoy the beverage and even got a refill, and later on made a toast and clinked her glass with a fellow attendee.

Stylish: The ex-wife of Tom Cruise wore her shoulder-length brown tresses in a sleek straight style, flowing down her shoulders

Beauty: As for glam, the Ohio-born entertainer wore glimmering eyeshadow, pink lipstick, and well-defined eyebrows

It's been a busy week for the actress. She recently attended the star-studded 2022 Vanity Fair Oscars Party in Los Angeles.

The bash followed the 94th Academy Awards ceremony, which awarded the best of Hollywood from this year.

Many of the ceremony's winners were overshadowed by Will Smith's shocking slap of Chris Rock after the comedian made a joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith's shaved head.

The close-cropped look was her attempt to hide hair loss due to alopecia.

Yummy: Inside of the event she was spotted flashing a big smile and eating a salad paired with a glass of the rose

Cheers: The brunette beauty clinked her glass with a fellow attendee sitting across from her

The star is currently working on one of the biggest projects of her career as she stars in the upcoming film Rare Objects, an adaptation of Kathleen Tessaros novel of the same name.

The movie tells the story of a young woman who tries to rebuild her life after taking a job in an antique shop.

The movie is a labor of love for Holmes, who helped write the screenplay, and she is also directing and co-producing the film.

Dawson's Creek is available now only on Stan in Australia.
She has spent most of the past year in Australia, but Tammin Sursok is now heading home to the United States.

The South African-born actress, 38, was seen with her daughters Phoenix, eight, and Lennon, three, at Brisbane Airport on Wednesday ahead of a flight to Los Angeles.

Tammin, who recently filmed a guest role on soon-to-be-axed soap Neighbours, wore a double-denim ensemble for the flight.

Heading home: Tammin Sursok, 38, was seen with her daughters Phoenix, eight, and Lennon, three, at Brisbane Airport on Wednesday ahead of a flight to Los Angeles

The Pretty Little Liars star, who was not joined by her husband Sean McEwen, teamed a denim jacket with jeans, a white T-shirt and sneakers.

She added a touch of designer in the form of a brown Louis Vuitton backpack, and accessorised with a pair of chic reading glasses.

Tammin styled her brunette hair loosely and appeared to go makeup free.

Farewell: The soap star embraced a female friend as she made her way through the terminal

Laid-back style: The Pretty Little Liars star, who was not joined by her husband Sean McEwen, teamed a denim jacket with jeans, a white T-shirt and sneakers

She looked cheerful as she wheeled a number of pink suitcases through the terminal and kept an eye on her daughters.

The former Home and Away star was also seen hugging a female friend.

It comes after Tammin spoke to Stellar magazine last month about what it was like filming a guest role for Neighbours before it was axed.

Big trip? Tammin, who has spent most of the past year in Australia, had several large suitcases

'I needed to go back to a soap and see it through a different lens  as someone who's much older  and make peace with that whole time,' she explained.

'Our children will never know of Neighbours except through reruns! Neighbours will always be a special part of who we were... but I guess it all just moves on'.

Tammin also spoke last month about the vibe on set, as her guest role coincided with news the series was about to be cancelled.

Husband and wife: Tammin shares Phoenix and Lennon with her film producer husband Sean McEwen (left). They tied the knot in 2011

'I love the work ethic of Australians... they came with such professionalism and they did their job and they didn't moan about it and they didn't chuck a hissy fit,' Tammin said on The Kyle and Jackie O Show.

'They were just so professional and it was just really nice to be on that show when it was going through such a transition,' she continued.

Network 10 and production company Fremantle confirmed Neighbours was to be cancelled last month. The last episode will be filmed in June.
Matthew Broderick has tested positive for COVID-19, and will not be able to perform Tuesday in the Broadway production of the Neil Simon play Plaza Suite held at The Hudson Theater.

The 60-year-old actor registered a positive test for the virus 'before todays performance of Plaza Suite, despite strict adherence to COVID safety protocols,' a Plaza Suite spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter in a statement, adding that Broderick took a second test which also came up positive.

'Everybody wishes him a speedy recovery,' the spokesperson said, adding that Broderick is slated to come back to the stage April 15.

The latest: Matthew Broderick, 60, has tested positive for COVID-19, and will not be able to perform Tuesday in the Broadway production of the Neil Simon play Plaza Suite held at The Hudson Theater. He was snapped at the show's opening night March 28

The Manhattan native stars in the play alongside wife Sarah Jessica Parker, 57, who tested negative and will take the stage Tuesday.

Tony-winning performer Michael McGrath, who is Broderick's standby, will substitute for the actor for Tuesday's show, Playbill reported Tuesday.

The play is a revival of Simons 1968 work, which is a comedy focused on love and marriage, examining three different couples as they stay in New York's Plaza Hotel.

One of the couples is struggling in their marriage as they've reached their 24th anniversary; another are the parents of a nervous bride getting ready to marry; and another is a reunion of a high school couple who have not seen one another in years.

The Manhattan native stars in the play alongside wife Sarah Jessica Parker, 57, who tested negative and will take the stage Tuesday

The veteran performer was seen performing during the March 28 show

The married couple co-star with one another in the Broadway production

John Benjamin Hickey is directing, while the cast also features Danny Bolero, Molly Ranson, Eric Wiegand and Cesar J. Romero. Understudies for the play include McGrath, Erin Dilly, Laurie Veldheer, Cesar J. Rosado, Brian Eng, and Olivia Hernandez.

The play began with a limited engagement February 25 under COVID-19 safety requirements and opened March 28. The show is slated to run through June 26.

The latest wave of COVID-19, the Omicron variant BA.2, has impacted a number of other Broadway productions, including A Strange Loop at the Lyceum Theatre, which was moved from Wednesday through Thursday due to positive cases.

Macbeth has also been impacted by the latest wave of coronavirus, as star Daniel Craig and other people involved with the production registered positive tests for the virus. Macbeth is slated to remain dark through Thursday amid the current situation.
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Padma Lakshmi was a total head turner as she arrived to the star-studded screening of The Duke in New York City on Tuesday night.

The supermodel, 51, looked sexy, yet sophisticated while posing for shutterbugs in a fitted grey vest and matching trousers.

She styled the coord with a silky cream blouse that was left partially unbuttoned.

Head turner: Padma Lakshmi was a total head turner as she arrived to the star-studded screening of The Duke in New York City on Tuesday night. The supermodel, 51, looked sexy, yet sophisticated while posing for shutterbugs in a fitted grey vest and matching trousers

Padma slipped her feet into a pair of brown suede boots with pointed toes.

She was decked out in two gold pendant chains, one of which had a trio of green charms that hovered over her cleavage.

The Top Chef host sported a noticeable glow and styled her wavy raven hair in a side part for the night.

The Duke star Helen Mirren modeled a canary yellow wrap dress with a v-neckline that showcased her smooth decolletage.

Golden: She was decked out in two gold pendant chains, one of which had a trio of green charms that hovered over her cleavage

Elegance: Helen Mirren exuded elegance as she arrived to the screening of The Duke, in which she stars

The 76-year-old star layered up with a bright pink cape and toted her essentials in a jeweled emerald green clutch.

The Academy Award winner completed her vibrant ensemble with a pair of yellow satin heels with bows on the front.

She accessorized with gold bangles, one of which was decorated in colorful gemstones.

Her white hair was styled in a soft updo and she enhanced her natural beauty with a bit of eyeliner and lipstick.

Bright: The Academy Award winner, 76, modeled a canary yellow wrap dress with a v-neckline that showcased her smooth decolletage

Perfect pairing: She layered up with a bright pink cape and toted her essentials in a jeweled emerald green clutch; Helen pictured with Sony Pictures Classics co-chief Michael Barker

She posed for photos with Sony Pictures Classics co-chief Michael Barker, who looked classy in a black suit styled with a deep purple button-up shirt.

Kathleen Turner looked sensational in a turquoise velvet top and a pair of matching wide-legged pants.

The 67-year-old actress rocked a natural glam makeup look and styled her golden blonde hair in loose curls that framed her face.

Kathleen posed with a black leather purse in hand that featured an eye-catching camouflage strap.

Posed up: She posed with Sony Pictures Classics co-chief Michael Barker, who looked classy in a black suit styled with a deep purple button-up shirt

Glowing: Her white hair was styled in a soft updo and she enhanced her natural beauty with a bit of eyeliner and lipstick

Decked out: The Queen actress accessorized with gold bangles, one of which was decorated in colorful gemstones

Jessica Vosk cut a stylish figure by rocking a grey puff-sleeve mini dress with a sweetheart neckline.

She gave her look a pop of color by secured her long, raven hair in place with a red braided headband.

Vanessa Moody and Maud Lunenfeld proved the power of the LBD as they arrived to the screening in dueling black tank top dresses.

While Moody decided to pair her dress with a black and white paid coat, Lunenfeld showed off her fitted number in all its glory.

Sensational: Kathleen Turner looked sensational in a turquoise velvet top and a pair of matching wide-legged pants

Accessorized: Kathleen posed with a black leather purse in hand that featured an eye-catching camouflage strap

Natural glam: The 67-year-old actress rocked a natural glam makeup look and styled her golden blonde hair in loose curls that framed her face

Jihae looked every bit the fashionista in a long flouncy pussy bow blouse styled with a black fitted blazer and a pair of skintight faux leather leggings.

Celia Weston modeled a gorgeous neck scarf that accented her A-line plum button-up shirt and classic black pants.

The Duke is set in 1961 and follows 60-year-old taxi driver Kempton Bunton (played by Jim Broadbent) who steals artist Francisco Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London.

The film was met with critical acclaim during its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival in 2020, as well as at last year's Telluride Film Festival.

Stylish: Jessica Vosk cut a stylish figure by rocking a grey puff-sleeve mini dress with a sweetheart neckline

LBD: Vanessa Moody and Maud Lunenfeld proved the power of the LBD as they arrived to the screening in dueling black tank top dresses

Deadline reported back in February that The Duke's theatrical release date had been pushed from March 25, 2022 to April 22, 2022.

It was given a one-week run in December in order to qualify for the 2022 award season. The Duke is the final film from late director Roger Michell, who passed away in September 2021.

The Duke is a Pathe, Ingenious Media and Screen Yorkshire presentation of a Neon Films Production.

Nicky Bentham is the Producer and the Executive Producers are Cameron McCracken and Jenny Borgars for Pathe, Andrea Scarso for Ingenious Media, Hugo Heppell for Screen Yorkshire, Peter Scarf and Christopher Bunton.

Fashionista: Jihae looked every bit the fashionista in a long flouncy pussy bow blouse styled with a black fitted blazer and a pair of skintight faux leather leggings

Statement scarf: Celia Weston modeled a gorgeous neck scarf that accented her A-line plum button-up shirt and classic black pants

During the UK premiere in February, Helen spoke about being drawn to the comedy-drama's 'funny' and 'moving' script.

'It was funny, it was moving, it was unexpected. It was a lovely piece of writing, really, really lovely,' she recalled to BANG Showbiz.

Helen plays Kempton Bunton's wife Dorothy, which was a character she really 'wanted to play.'

She continued: 'I wanted to work with Jim, and I wanted to work with Roger, so it all came together for me.'
Actress Daisy Ridley has made her long-awaited return to social media after a nearly six-year hiatus.

The 29-year-old actress was less than a year removed from her first major film role as Rey in 2015's Star Wars: The Force Awakens, where she played Rey, when she deactivated her Instagram in August 2016.

She made quite the surprising return on Monday, sharing new snaps, with her first post already amassing nearly 50K likes in just under a day.

Daisy returns: Actress Daisy Ridley has made her long-awaited return to social media after a nearly six-year hiatus

Her first post was seemingly from a posh hotel as she relaxed in a white robe while sipping a hot beverage, wearing unique 'glasses' that emitted a red glow on her face.

'Coming out of social media hibernation refreshed, recharged, and ready for what Im calling my Year of Yes. (And thats the tea),' Ridley said.

She added that the photo was, 'courtesy of my <3 glam @lipstickkelly and @dayaruci' in her post.

Insta look: Her first post was seemingly from a posh hotel as she relaxed in a white robe while sipping a hot beverage, wearing unique 'glasses' that emitted a red glow on her face

The actress shared even more photos in her second post, which featured digitally-painted backdrops, and her mimicking two famous paintings - Edvard Munch's The Scream and Johannes Vermeer's Girl With a Pearl Earring.

'Trying to remember how to use this app. Maybe its a good thing I didnt have Insta during quarantine, or else I would have posted these. Oh, well, still posting them,' Ridley said.

Her first post back included a comment from her co-star on 2017's Murder on the Orient Express, Leslie Odom Jr.

Posting: The actress shared even more photos in her second post, which featured digitally-painted backdrops, and her mimicking two famous paintings - Edvard Munch's The Scream and Johannes Vermeer's Girl With a Pearl Earring

Original: The original classic painting Girl With a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer

'Welcome back. Take your breaks when you need em! x,' Odom Jr. told her in his comment.

He also commented on her second post, responding to her 'Year of Yes' comment, stating, 'Yes. All year long.'

Her Star Wars prequel trilogy co-star Joonas Suotamo - who took over as Chewbacca from Peter Mayhew - who stated, 'Welcome back!' with a red heart emoji.

Welcome: 'Welcome back. Take your breaks when you need em! x,' Odom Jr. told her in his comment

Co-star: Her Star Wars prequel trilogy co-star Joonas Suotamo - who took over as Chewbacca from Peter Mayhew - who stated, 'Welcome back!' with a red heart emoji

Ridley only had a handful of guest starring spots and short film performances to her name, when she was cast as Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which skyrocketed her to stardom.

She ultimately deleted her Instagram and Facebook in August 2016 after facing backlash for an anti-gun violence post.

She mentioned in an interview with Spanish magazine S Moda that she has, 'managed to separate my personal life well from my professional life, partly probably because Im not on social media.

'The statistics that link them (social media sites) to anxiety are terrifying. I have friends completely addicted to their phone who have suffered with this problem,' she said.

'I dont want to go back, but sometimes I think about it. But the truth is that no, I wont be returning,' she said last year, before ultimately returning.

Imitation: Daisy Ridley imitates Edvard Munch's The Scream
Mark Wahlberg looked handsome in a navy cable knit sweater and a pair of dark trousers to a special screening of his upcoming drama Father Stu.

While arriving to the red carpet at the AMC Boston Commons on Monday, the Boogie Nights actor, 50, looked to be in good spirits as he mingled with director Rosalind Ross, who rocked a strapless red gown to the event.

After posing for a number of solo shots, he was joined by Ross, 31, who has been dating Braveheart star Mel Gibson since 2014.

Looking good! Mark Wahlberg looked handsome in a navy cable knit sweater and a pair of dark trousers to a special screening of his upcoming drama Father Stu

The champion equestrian vaulter and screenwriter turned heads in her low-cut dress, which she matched to her lipstick and high heels.

She opted to wear her dark brown hair in a romantic updo with a few wavy strands in the front cascading down for an extra touch of glamor.

Once inside the theater, Wahlberg took to the stage to speak about the film to a crowd made of residents living in his hometown of Massachusetts.

Friendly: While arriving to the red carpet at the AMC Boston Commons on Monday, the 50-year-old Boogie Nights actor looked to be in good spirits as mingled with director Rosalind Ross, who rocked a strapless red gown to the event

Sharing their film with the world: After posting for a number of solo shots, he was seen chatting up a storm with Ross, 31, who has been dating Braveheart star Mel Gibson since 2014

Red hot! The champion equestrian vaulter and screenwriter turned heads in her low-cut dress, which she matched to her lipstick and high heels

Father Stu is based on Long's true story, a former boxer whose life was spiraling out of control before a brush with death in a horrific motorcycle accident lead to him taking up a life of the cloth.

He entered the seminary in 2003 and was ordained as a diocese priest in 2007, though his life was cut short by a condition called inclusion body myositis.

Father Stuart Long was just 50 years old when he passed away in 2014.

Strong cast: Wahlberg stars as Father Stu, with Mel Gibson starring as Stu's father, Bill Long, along with Jacki Weaver and Winter Ave Zoli

Coming soon: The film - which hits theaters April 15 - is based on the unlikely true story of Father Stuart Long, a former boxer who turned his life around and became a priest

Previously, Wahlberg revealed in an interview with the National Catholic Register that he first heard of Father Stuart Long while he was at a dinner with two priests in 2016.

He was so moved by the story that he 'broke the cardinal rule' of filmmaking by financing the film with his own money, though it took six years for the film to get made.

Wahlberg stars as Father Stu, with Mel Gibson starring as Stu's father, Bill Long, along with Jacki Weaver and Winter Ave Zoli.

Sweet: Once inside the theater, Wahlberg took to the stage to speak about the film to a crowd made of residents living in his hometown of Massachusetts

How this came to be: Previously, Wahlberg revealed in an interview with the National Catholic Register that he first heard of Father Stuart Long while he was at a dinner with two priests in 2016
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has already made its international debut, but Jim Carrey made sure to make a grand entrance as he lead the stars at the Los Angeles premiere of the sequel to the animated flick adapted from the beloved SEGA video game.

The 60-year-old actor, who voices the mad scientist character Dr. Robotnik, sported a bright red satin blazer and black slacks to walk the blue carpet at the Regency Village theatre in Westwood, Calif.

Carrey caught backlash earlier this week for saying he would have sued Will Smith for '$200million' if he had been on the receiving end of the infamous Oscars slap instead of Chris Rock, only for Twitter users to unearth his 1997 MTV Movie Awards appearance where he 'forcibly' kissed a then-20-year-old Alicia Silverstone before attempting to do the same to Smith.

Standing out: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has already made its international debut, but Jim Carrey made sure to make a grand entrance as he lead the stars at the Los Angeles premiere of the sequel to the animated flick adapted from the beloved SEGA video game

Carrey wore a galactic graphic print T-shirt and black dress shoes to match, in addition to a silver horology pin on his lapel.

Idris Elba looked sharp wearing a blue-and-red Gucci button-down collared shirt for the big night, where he brought along his gorgeous wife, Sabrina Dhowre.

The 49-year-old actor  who voices Robotnik's sidekick Knuckles the Echidna  went for head-to-toe designer duds with Gucci's signature monogram print on top of his leather loafers.

Sabrina, 32, rocked a mustard yellow satin strapless dress with dyed white ombre tips to match her strappy shoes.

Walk this way: The 60-year-old actor, who voices the mad scientist character Dr. Robotnik, sported a bright red satin blazer and black slacks to walk the blue carpet at the Regency Village theatre in Westwood, Calif.

Far out: Carrey wore a galactic graphic print T-shirt and black dress shoes to match, in addition to a silver horology pin on his lapel

Date night: Idris Elba looked sharp wearing a blue-and-red Gucci button-down collared shirt for the big night, where he brought along his gorgeous wife, Sabrina Dhowre

Dressed up: The 49-year-old actor  who voices Robotnik's sidekick Knuckles the Echidna  went for head-to-toe designer duds with Gucci's signature monogram print on top of his leather loafers

Cute couple: Sabrina, 32, rocked a mustard yellow satin strapless dress with dyed white ombre tips to match her strappy shoes

James Marsden, who plays Sonic's father figure and the sheriff of the town they live in, Tom Wachowski, wore a double-breasted suit with satin piping.

The 48-year-old actor went without a tie, but opted for a white pocket square, black socks and black shoes.

Tika Sumpter glittered in a gorgeous gold blazer with matching slacks paired with a black corset top as she walked the bold blue carpet.

Sumpter, 41, portrays a veterinarian and Tom's wife, Maddie Wachowski, in the live-action flick.

Colleen O'Shaughnessey looked lovely wearing a strappy yellow gown with a colorful pendant necklace. She voices the character of Sonic's sidekick, Miles 'Tails' Prower.

Classy: James Marsden, who plays Sonic's father figure and the sheriff of the town they live in, Tom Wachowski, wore a double-breasted suit with satin piping

Fashion: The 48-year-old actor went without a tie, but opted for a white pocket square, black socks and black shoes

Show stopper: Tika Sumpter glittered in a gorgeous gold blazer with matching slacks paired with a black corset top as she walked the bold blue carpet

Flawless: She swiped on a bright red lip and wore gold drop earrings to match her metallic power suit

Bright: Colleen O'Shaughnessey looked lovely wearing a strappy yellow gown with a colorful pendant necklace. She voices the character of Sonic's sidekick, Miles 'Tails' Prower

Star power: Natasha Rothwell rocked a brown leather pleated mini dress with a matching purse, and showed her support for Ukraine with a blue and yellow ring

Music man: Kid Cudi, 38, who sings Stars In The Sky for the film, went for a classically comfortable look in shredded jeans and a hooded sweatshirt

Natasha Rothwell rocked a brown leather pleated mini dress with a matching purse, and showed her support for Ukraine with a blue and yellow ring.

Kid Cudi, 38, who sings Stars In The Sky for the film, went for a classically comfortable look in shredded jeans and a hooded sweatshirt.

Carrey was asked last week about the now infamous Academy Awards moment where Will Smith slapped Chris Rock while the comedian was mid-monologue.

'I was sickened by the standing ovation,' he told Gayle King on CBS Morning News, referring to when Smith took home the Best Actor award not long after the slap incident. 'I felt like Hollywood is just spineless en masse. It really felt like this is a clear indication that we're not the cool club anymore.'

Carrey, who briefly overlapped with Rock in the early '90s on Fox's In Living Color, claimed Rock didn't file charges about the slap because he 'didn't want the hassle' and suggested Smith should have been arrested.

'I'd have announced this morning that I was suing Will for $200 million because that video's gonna be there forever. It's gonna be ubiquitous. That insult is gonna last a very long time,' Carrey said.

The Mask actor seemed to indicate that expressing disapproval of the joke, saying something on Twitter or even yelling from the audience wasn't beyond the pale - but what Smith ended up doing crossed the line.

Carrey told CBS' Gayle King last week that he was 'sickened' by the standing ovation Will Smith received after his Best Actor win following the Chris Rock slap, adding that he 'felt like Hollywood is just spineless en masse'

Hitting out: The comedian, now 60, criticized Hollywood for giving Smith a standing ovation when he won Best Actor, minutes after he slapped Rock on-stage

Oh no: Not long after, though, Twitter users reminded Carrey of his hypocrisy when he walked up to the stage to collect an award from Alicia Silverstone at the 1997 MTV Movie Awards, only to grab her by the head and 'forcibly' pull her into a kiss while she tried to push him off her

Shocked: Following Carrey's interview, many people reacted by reminding him of the moment he forcibly kissed Silverstone and attempted to kiss Smith

'You do not have the right to walk up on stage and smack somebody on the face because they said words,' Carrey said.

Not long after, though, Twitter users reminded Carrey of his hypocrisy when he walked up to the stage to collect an award from Alicia Silverstone at the 1997 MTV Movie Awards, only to grab her by the head and 'forcibly' pull her into a kiss while she tried to push him off her.

During the same 1997 ceremony, Carrey was also seen trying to kiss Smith after he was announced as the winner of the award for Best Kiss. As Smith, who was 28 at the time, prepared to make his way up on-stage, Carrey was seen grabbing him by the neck and sticking his tongue out towards his face, while the actor tried to shove him away.

'It's amazing that Jim Carrey sexually assaulted Alicia Silverstone by physically forcing her to kiss him on national TV, when she was [20], and it had literally no impact on his career whatsoever,' one person wrote, while sharing images of Carrey grabbing Silverstone and Smith during the awards show.

'He's such a complete piece of s*** on so many levels.'

Another added: '[Carrey] forcibly kissed Alicia Silverstone AND also tried to do the same thing to Will Smith. Regardless of age or age gaps, what Jim Carrey did was ASSAULT. He's scum and he had no business forcing himself on people.'
Channel Nine has reportedly sent its top star to Switzerland to help the network land broadcast rights to three upcoming Olympic Games.

Today host Karl Stefanovic has been dispatched to the Central European country with a handful of top executives to help 'seal the deal', reports Mumbrella.

Nine is hoping to score a major coup over Channel Seven by taking its mantle as Australia's exclusive Olympics broadcaster.

Top talent: Channel Nine has reportedly pulled Karl Stefanovic from the Today show and sent him to Switzerland to help the network secure broadcast rights for the 2024 Olympics. Pictured with co-host Allison Langdon

The proposed deal would include coverage of the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, the 2028 Summer Olympics in LA, and the 2032 Summer Olympics in Brisbane.

Seven had the broadcast rights to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, which took place earlier this year, and the Tokyo 2020 Games.

The network paid an incredible $170million to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to secure rights for the past three Games.

Coup: The proposed deal would include coverage of the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, the 2028 Summer Olympics in LA, and the 2032 Summer Olympics in Brisbane

Nine did not deny Stefanovic was in Switzerland helping seal the deal with the IOC.

'Karl Stefanovic has been sent on an assignment and will be returning on Friday,' a network spokesperson said.

'We are always looking at content opportunities locally and globally but we won't be commenting on any specific discussions.'

Tuning in: Olympics coverage is highly prized among commercial networks because it guarantees millions of viewers. Pictured is Australian Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus with her gold medal in Tokyo

Olympics coverage is highly prized among commercial networks because it guarantees millions of viewers.

The 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris will begin on July 26 that year.

Stefanovic is one of Nine's most high-profile stars and is said to be earning between $1.8million and $2million per year as co-host of the Today show.

He has been with Nine for more than 20 years.
She's one of the stars of Michael Bay's newest action film Ambulance.

And Eiza Gonzalez had all eyes on her on Tuesday when she unveiled a glittering white mirrored ensemble for a special screening of the film in Miami, Florida.

The 32-year-old Mexican actress was joined for the event by one of her costars, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, along with the movie's director.

Woman in white: Eiza Gonzalez, 32, stunned in a white mirror crop top and matching skirt as she joined Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Michael Bay on Tuesday for a special screening of Ambulance in Miami

Ambulance stars Abdul-Mateen as Will, a military veteran who turns to his adopted brother Danny  a life-long criminal played by Jake Gyllenhaal  when he needs money to pay for surgery for his wife.

Danny brings Will into a plot to rob a bank for $32 million, but when the rest of their crew are gunned down by police, they hijack an ambulance with EMT Cam Thompson (Gonzalez).

Although she initially tries to escape, she opts to stay with the two fleeing men as she tries to save the life of a police officer whom Will shot.

At the Miami screening, Eiza highlighted her flat tummy thanks to her outfit's sheer white crop top, under which she wore a white bandeau.

Dire straits: Ambulance stars Yahya (L) as Will, a military veteran, who turns to his brother Danny  a career criminal played by Jake Gyllenhaal  to help him get money to pay for his wife's surgery

Stuck in the middle: Danny brings him into a $32 million bank heist, but after the rest of their crew are killed by police, the two hijack an ambulance with an EMT (Gonzalez) aboard

Eye-catching: Eiza highlighted her flat tummy with her outfit's sheer white crop top, under which she wore a white bandeau. It was decorated with hanging triangular mirror panels

The top was decorated with jeweled studs with glittering studs holding up triangular mirror pains that glittered in the light.

The Godzilla Vs. Kong actress paired the top with a matching white maxi skirt that nearly reached to the ground.

The 5ft8in beauty stood tall in a set of pointy silver open-toe heels, and she wore her voluminous brunette locks in thick waves that were swept to the side to reveal her diamond-studded earrings.

Covered up: The Godzilla Vs. Kong actress paired the top with a matching white maxi skirt that nearly reached to the ground

Towering: The 5ft8in beauty stood tall in a set of pointy silver open-toe heels

Joining her was her costar Yahya, who stood out in a short yellow jacket with wide lapels.

He left it unzipped and layered up with a brown cardigan, which he wore over a white shirt.

The Watchmen star completed his mix-and-match look with black pinstripe pants, along with square-toed brown shoes.

Rounding out the major players was the film's director, action extraordinaire Michael Bay.

The Armageddon filmmaker looked classy in a navy suit with peaked lapels, which he paired with a tie-free white shirt.

Colorful display: Joining her was her costar Yahya, who stood out in a short yellow jacket with wide lapels

Striking: He left it unzipped and layered up with a brown cardigan, which he wore over a white shirt. He also had on black pinstripe pants and square-toed brown shoes

The boss: Rounding out the major players was the film's director, action extraordinaire Michael Bay
Bindi Irwin has been busy celebrating her one year-old daughter Grace Warrior learning to walk this week.

However, it appears she still has time to dote over her husband Chandler Powell.

Posting to her Instagram Stories on Wednesday, the 23-year-old shared a sweet dedication to her handsome husband, who she married in March 2020.

Sweet dedication: Posting to her Instagram Stories on Wednesday, Bindi Irwin, 23, shared a sweet tribute to her handsome husband, Chandler Powell, 25

'Forever loving you,' she wrote in her affectionate caption.

Alongside the heartfelt words was a picture of the loved-up couple enjoying a moment of bliss before a meal.

Earlier in the day, Bindi and Chandler celebrated their little girl taking her first steps just weeks after celebrating her milestone first birthday on March 25.

The couple did so by sharing footage of the sweet moment on Instagram on Wednesday morning.

First steps! Grace Warrior, the daughter of Bindi Irwin and Chandler Powell, is officially walking - with the doting parents sharing a clip of the moment on Wednesday

Grace looked delighted as she took a few careful steps towards her father while Bindi watched on with pride.

'Hi, dadda,' Bindi said as her daughter made a beeline for Chandler, who added: 'Good walking, good walking.'

Bindi captioned the clip: 'Big moment'.

The couple threw a lavish party for Grace Warrior at Australia Zoo last month to celebrate her first birthday.

Too cute: The little girl took her first steps earlier this week, after celebrating her milestone first birthday on March 25

The party was complete with elaborate blush decorations, a two-tiered pink cake and animals, and there was even a tribute to Bindi's late father Steve Irwin.

Bindi and Chandler shared pictures from the special day on Instagram.

They celebrated with Bindi's family, including mother Terri and brother Robert, as well as Chandler's parents, Shannan and Chris, who had flown over from Florida.

Look at her go! Bind and Chandler shared footage of the sweet moment with their fans

Grace looked cute in a pink tutu as she posed for pictures with her parents and the birthday cake.

Several animals, including small turtles, an echidna and a cockatoo, mingled among guests in true Australia Zoo style.

In a special nod to Steve Irwin, who never got to meet his granddaughter, there was a photo of the late Crocodile Hunter on display at the party.

Too cute! Bindi (left) and Chandler (right) threw their daughter Grace Warrior (centre) a lavish party at Australia Zoo last month to celebrate her first birthday

Steve died in September 2006 after being pierced in the chest by a stingray barb while filming a documentary on the Batt Reef in Queensland.

Bindi said it was the 'greatest blessing' to be Grace's mum in a heartwarming tribute.

'Happy Birthday to my graceful warrior,' she wrote on Instagram.

'One year of watching your beautiful heart bloom into the most extraordinary person. Grace, you have been an old soul from the very beginning. It is the greatest blessing to be your mama. I love you eternally, unconditionally and infinitely.'

Family affair: They celebrated with Bindi's family, including mother Terri and brother Robert, as well as Chandler's parents, Shannan and Chris, who had flown over from Florida

Chandler also shared a tribute to Grace, writing: 'It's been one year since you came into our lives and yet it feels like you've been with us forever.

'I never knew I had so much love to give. Happy first birthday, sweetheart.'

Bindi and Chandler welcomed their daughter on March 25, 2021, which coincidentally was their one-year wedding anniversary.
Emily Ratajkowski has joined forces with Italian footwear brand Superga as a Global Brand Ambassador.

And the 30-year-old stunned as she modelled her new spring collection with the brand - some of which will drop on Thursday.

She modelled a range of Superga trainers in the shots, showing off her radiant complexion for the collaboration.

Glowing: Emily Ratajkowski showed off her radiant complexion in a host of brand new collaboration shots with Superga

The supermodel kept her look neutral with a glowing makeup look, sporting a nude pink lip and a subtle base.

Emily had her chocolate brown tresses in a tousled wave for the campaign, as she showed off her new range of white trainers.

For one snap, Emily showed off the 4089 Training 9TS vegan sporting trainers - alongside a light grey, quarter-zip jumper with black shorts.

Gorgeous: In another, the beauty cut a chic look in a tailored brown suit - as she slouched back and posed for a snap

Radiant: The supermodel kept her look neutral with a glowing makeup look, sporting a nude pink lip and a subtle base

In another, the beauty cut a chic look in a tailored brown suit - as she slouched back and posed for a snap.

The collection also features a shoe dubbed EMRATA, which will be launched in May and retail for 90.

Speaking on the collection, the London-born American model said she has 'worn the brand for years', continuing: 'this collaboration felt completely natural to me.'

She tweaked the very simple Superga styles to have the bindings in an off-white colour and has rounded the laces for the collaboration.

BTS: She previously teased the collection via her Instagram Stories, posting some behind the scenes snaps from the shoot

The campaign, which was shot in Los Angeles's Milk Studios in January - aimed to portray effortless silhouettes and materials while being comfortable for new mums like Emily.

She previously teased the collection via her Instagram Stories, posting some behind the scenes snaps from the shoot.

Emily also said in a recent interview with Vogue that she mainly prefers trainers to heels.

She shared: 'Im actually becoming kind of an anti-heel person. I think maybe with COVID and becoming a mom they always feel too fussy. I feel more comfortable and like myself in sneakers.'

Mentioning her pup, she continued: 'I live in New York City, and I have a very big dog, so Im walking everywhere all the time.'

During the interview, the beauty also touched on her fashion metamorphosis, saying that nowadays she prefers to wear her own style over what's trendy at the moment.

'I think that were going through this very confusing time in fashion. I personally have recently decided to give up on all of that and just wear what I want to wear rather than following the trends that come and go.'
Molly Sims showcased her age defying figure in a plunging blue swimsuit while enjoying a family getaway in Mexico on Wednesday.

The model, 48, was sure to turn heads as she soaked in the sun in a baby blue Melissa Odabash swimming costume which showcased her toned legs.

The beauty posed up a storm for her 728 thousand Instagram followers while enjoying a beach day.

Stunning: Molly Sims, 48, showcased her age defying figure in a plunging blue swimsuit while enjoying a family getaway in Mexico on Wednesday

The Yes Man star opted to cover up with a white shirt and shaded from the sun in a black pair of sunglasses.

Molly carried her holiday belongings in a woven monogrammed beach bag and matched it with a tan pair of sandals.

The actress accessorised with a statement pair of gold hoop earrings and pulled her blonde wet locks back into a low pony tail.

Incredible: The model was sure to turn heads as she soaked in the sun in a baby blue Melissa Odabash swimming costume showcasing her toned legs

The mum-of-three documented her family trip with several videos and selfies with her children.

Molly married Patriots Day producer Scott Stuber, 53, in 2011 and welcomed their oldest son, Brooks Alan, the following June.

They later added their daughter, Scarlett May, to their family in 2015 and their youngest child, Grey Douglas, was born in 2017.

During an interview with SheKnows, Sims spoke about how she has adopted a highly organized approach to managing her children's schedule, which has had a positive effect on her mental health.

Stylish: The beauty posed up a storm for her 728 thousand Instagram followers while enjoying a beach day

'Each of my kiddos are color coded so I know who goes where, and I have my own color for work. Everything goes in the calendar like time, location and parking info. It makes my life run smooth,' she said.

The performer also spoke about how she had begun following Instagram accounts and listening to podcasts that focused on the experience of motherhood.

She pointed out that she did so in an effort to alleviate 'the struggles of parenting. It makes us moms feel less alone and have a community to rely on.'

Vacay: The mum-of-three documented her family trip with several videos and selfies with her children Brookes, nine, Scarlett, seven [pictured], and Grey, five,
She's long been known for her chic sense of style.

And Tess Daly put on yet another glamorous display as she joined a slew of stars at No7's Pro Derm Scan launch.

The Strictly Come Dancing host, 53, put on a fashion-forward display in the stunning shirt with neck tie detailing as she joined a slew of stars for the launch at The Londoner Hotel in Leicester Square.

Looking good! Tess Daly, 53, cuts a chic figure in a nude blouse and stylish black flares as she joined a slew of stars at No7's Pro Derm Scan launch at The Londoner Hotel on Tuesday

Tess proudly showcased her svelte physique in the simple nude shirt with neck tie detailing, that boasted smart cuffs and loose sleeves.

The presenter teamed the top with black flared trousers and accessorised with matching pointed-toe heels.

Adding a touch of glamour to her look, Tess accessorised with a chunky gold bracelet and a matching necklace.

Gorgeous: The Strictly Come Dancing host put on a fashion-forward display in the stunning shirt with neck tie detailing as she joined a slew of stars for the launch

She was joined by her Strictly co-host Claudia Winkleman to unveil the new No7 Pro Derm Scan, a diagnostic service to provide people with personalised, accessible skincare and cosmetic recommendations.

The scan service uses a hand-held dermatologist-grade diagnostic device to analyse the user's skin condition and skin tone.

The technology, combined with expert advice from No7 beauty advisors, is the first of its kind to be available nationwide and is available in Boots stores.

Style icon: Tess proudly showcased her svelte physique in the simple nude shirt with neck tie detailing, that boasted smart cuffs and loose sleeves

The star-studded guest list included Vanessa White, Ella Eyre, Love Island's Demi Jones, Alex Scott and Montana Brown, while radio hosts Rylan and Vick Hope hosted DJ sets.

Claudia, who was a host at the launch, cut a smart figure in fitted black trousers and a button-up white jacket, while she gave herself a few extra inches in a pair of studded strapped heels.

She styled her fringed chocolate tresses in her recognisable straight fashion, while she accentuated her beauty with a bold touch of eyeliner.
Lacey Turner cut a casual figure in a rainbow jumper as she headed out on a low-key early morning shopping trip in London on Wednesday.

The EastEnders star took a break from filming on Albert Square as she drove to a supermarket for her weekly shop.

The actress, 33, was seen with a full trolley as she donned a rainbow cardigan over a white T-shirt.

She's a long way from Walford! Lacey Turner cut a casual figure in a rainbow cardigan as she headed out on a low-key early morning shopping trip in London on Wednesday

The BBC Soap star kept the look casual in a pair of blue mom jeans as she let her long brunette locks blow in the wind.

Lacey hid under a large pair of Gucci black sunglasses and sported a nude pair of double strapped Birkenstocks.

The mum-of-two opted for a fresh face and accessorised her casual ensemble with a pair of silver earrings and a ankle bracelet.

While she's best known for her long-standing role in the soap, the actress keeps a low-profile at home with barber husband, Matt Kay.

Stylish: The EastEnders star took a break from filming on Albert Square as she drove to a supermarket for her weekly shop

The couple share one-year-old son, Trilby Fox, and two-year-old daughter, Dusty.

The star who plays Stacey Slater, made a dramatic return to the BBC soap in 2021 - after taking maternity leave earlier in the year.

Lacey started working on EastEnders 17 years ago when she was just 16-years old and returned just six months after giving birth.

During the leave, Lacey's character was sent to jail after being falsely accused of a crime, before making her return to the show in September 2021.

Speaking of keeping her bump concealed during filming, the actress told Loose Women at the time: 'I was forever holding a washing basket or tea towel to hide the bump.

'Stacey's not very glamorous... she doesnt hold a hand bag,' she added of her down to earth character.

Out and about: The actress, 33, was seen with a full trolley as she donned a rainbow cardigan over a white t-shirt

Casual: Lacey hid under a large pair of Gucci black sunglasses and sported a nude pair of double strapped Birkenstocks
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Kylie and Kendall Jenner celebrated their Kendall by Kylie Cosmetics line in style on Tuesday night.

Makeup mogul Kylie hosted a lavish dinner at Italian restaurant Osteria Mozza in Los Angeles for her family and friends, including sister Khloe Kardashian, mom Kris Jenner and best pal Stassie Karanikolaou.

Guests documented the VIP bash on Instagram, showing off the flower-adorned table, bespoke cocktail menu and of course, the fun selfies.

Party time! Kylie and Kendall Jenner celebrated their Kendall by Kylie Cosmetics line in style on Tuesday night, hosting a lavish dinner at Italian restaurant Osteria Mozza in Los Angeles for their family and friends

The dinner, organised by the Kardashian family's favourite party planner Mindy Weiss, featured a long table decorated with gorgeous pale purple flowers and candles.

Naturally, Kendall's 818 Tequila was served for guests, who could choose from two special cocktails: the Kylie  which featured the blanco tequila with grapefruit  and the Kenny  which used the anejo tequila mixed with an orange peel and a cinnamon stick.

The dinner stetting included a publicity photo of Kendall and Kylie wearing purple floral headdress that matched the flowers at the celebration.

Flower power: Guests documented the VIP bash on Instagram, showing off the flower-adorned table, bespoke cocktail menu and of course, the fun selfies

Sister act: The dinner stetting included a publicity photo of Kendall and Kylie wearing purple floral headdress that matched the flowers at the celebration

Tucking in: Family friend Jen Atkin was among the guests, sharing a video of model Kendall, who looked gorgeous in a colouful slip dress, happily devouring the Italian feast

Kylie shared some more views of the lovely array, while showing her table placement next to Kendall's, while mom Kris Jenner sat opposite where she was filmed giving a gushing speech.

Kylie shared a short video of part of her mother's toast, where the emotinal Momager told her youngest daughters: 'I couldn't be prouder than anyone in my entire life,' which elicited a loving 'aww' from Kylie.

'I love you @krisjenner [heart],' she wrote over the video.

On tap: Naturally, Kendall's 818 Tequila was served for guests, who could choose from two special cocktails: the Kylie  which featured the blanco tequila with grapefruit  and the Kenny  which used the anejo tequila mixed with an orange peel and a cinnamon stick

Side by side: Kylie shared some more views of the lovely array, while showing her table placement next to Kendall's

Family and friends: Khloe Kardashian was among the VIP guests and revealed she was the first to arrive, while Kylie pouted for a selfie with her best pal Stassi

Toast: Later in the evening, Kylie shared a short video of part of her mother's toast. 'I couldn't be prouder than anyone in my entire life,' Kris said to her two youngest daughters, which elicited a loving 'aww' from Kylie

Family friend Jen Atkin was among the guests, sharing a video of model Kendall, who looked gorgeous in a colouful slip dress, happily devouring the Italian feast.

Kendall also shared posted a photo of her makeup palette  which featured cheeky shade names including 'The Kendall to my Kylie' and 'Not not drinking'  as she got ready.

Kylie chose an edgy look for her big night on Tuesday, wowing in a baggy black jumpsuit in her Instagram Stories as she prepared to depart for the party.

The Kendall by Kiley Cosmetics collection is set to go on sale on Wednesday, April 6.
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Kim Kardashian's new star-studded Skims campaign has been accused of heavily photoshopping supermodel Tyra Banks.

The model, 48, appeared in the new ad in her underwear alongside Candice Swanepoel, Heidi Klum, Alessandra Ambrosio and Kim herself for the campaign.

But many have branded the editing of Tyra's body 'extreme and appalling' after photos emerged of her taken during the shoot day which look dramatically different from the actual ad photo itself, particularly around her waist.

Oh no: Kim Kardashian's new star-studded Skims campaign has been accused of heavily photoshopping Tyra Banks (pictured left before alleged changes and right in real ad with a smaller waist)

TV personality Tyra herself shared multiple photos from the photoshoot on social media leading fans to compare them with the real campaign images.

'These pics are stunning but Tyra looked so gorgeous naturally and this editing is so bizarre and unnecessary?' one Twitter user wrote.

'Tyra seems to be a victim of extreme photoshop in this one - where did her body go?' another said.

Not happy: Many have branded the editing of Tyra's body 'extreme and appalling' after photos emerged of her taken during the shoot day which look different from the actual ad photo itself (pictured)

On the Instagram account Problematic Fame, which frequently posts about beauty standards in Hollywood, Skims was accused also of photoshopping, along with failing to represent 'body positivity and inclusivity'.

'Appalled to see the amount of photoshop done to Tyra Banks' body in Kim Kardashian's new Skims and campaign,' the Instagram wrote

'For a brand that prides themselves on body positivity and inclusivity, this is low,' the caption continued. 'In what world does editing Tyra's body into a clone of Kim's endorse any sort of body positivity and inclusivity?

Wow: The model, 48, appeared in the new ad in her underwear alongside (L-R) Candice Swanepoel, Heidi Klum, Alessandra Ambrosio and Kim (centre) herself for the campaign

Reaction: On the Instagram account Problematic Fame, which frequently posts about beauty standards in Hollywood, Skims was accused also of photoshopping, along with failing to represent 'body positivity and inclusivity'

'Tyra's body is perfect, this photoshop is horrendous and completely unnecessary, disappointing.'

Another commented of Kim's figure: 'Your waist looks 1/2 of Tyra Banks'. Does Tyra Banks have a 50 inch waist or is this photo shopped?

Someone else questioned: 'Why did you photoshop them? Specifically Tyra???'

MailOnline has contacted Skims and Tyra for further comment.

Supermodel: Someone else questioned: 'Why did you photoshop them? Specifically Tyra???' (pictured in one of the solo shots)

Tyra recently spoke about the new campaign, with the supermodel revealing that she had a discussion with Kim about Skims before signing on.

'Kim reached out to me, and we had a beautiful heart-to-heart conversation about the campaign,' the America's Next Top Model creator said in a recent interview with Vogue.

'I've respected her business savvy for quite a while; after that call, my respect grew to an even greater level. Kim dropped words of wisdom from her mom that echoed sage advice my mom has shared with me over the years.

'I hadn't modelled lingerie and undergarments in so long, but I said yes after speaking with Kim and hearing her thoughtful, loving, and instinctive words!'
She is living it up on a sun-soaked getaway in Tulum, Mexico.

And Imogen Thomas, who has been giving her 284,000 Instagram followers a peek into the trip with sunny snaps, paraded her figure in a mix and match bikini on Tuesday.

The Welsh model, 39, strolled along the beach with a friend, throwing on a white beach cover up over her coordinating bikini top and black bottoms.

Bikini-clad: Imogen Thomas continued to lap up her luxe Mexico getaway with a sunny stroll on the beach on Tuesday

The Celebrity Big Brother contestant kept her brown locks in a practical up-do secured with a grip and she framed her makeup-free face with chic shades.

Imogen held a pair of flip flops in her hand, embracing the opportunity to feel the sand between her toes.

The former Miss Wales also took to her Instagram Story to share a glowing selfie in which her natural beauty shone through.

Sunny stroll: The Welsh model, 39, strolled along the beach with a friend, throwing on a white beach cover up over her coordinating bikini top and black bottoms

Chatting: The Celebrity Big Brother contestant kept her brown locks in a practical up-do secured with a grip and she framed her makeup-free face with chic shades

Getaway: Imogen held a pair of flip flops in her hand, embracing the opportunity to feel the sand between her toes

Happy days: It looked as though Imogen's time in the sun was beginning to give her a bronzed glow

Holidaying: The former Miss Wales also took to her Instagram Story to share a glowing selfie in which her natural beauty shone through

She later took to her Instagram to share a slew of snaps from that day, wearing her shirt on her arms, leaving her shoulders bare.

Imogen smiled and posed up a storm surrounding by luscious greenery, and toting a small grey handbag.

Captioning the string of shots, she wrote: 'I slept last night to the sound of the waves. Totally beautiful. wake me up when the dream is over.'

Beauty: She later took to her Instagram to share a slew of snaps from that day, wearing her shirt on her arms, leaving her shoulders bare

Having a blast: Imogen smiled and posed up a storm surrounding by luscious greenery, and toting a small grey handbag

Living in a dream: Captioning the string of shots, she wrote: 'I slept last night to the sound of the waves. Totally beautiful. wake me up when the dream is over'

The outing closely follows Pete Bennett hit back after Imogen accused him of 'attention seeking' following the death of their mutual friend Nikki Grahame .

On Monday, Imogen claimed her Big Brother co-star had 'cruelly betrayed the memory' of his ex girlfriend Nikki, who sadly passed away aged 38 in April 2021 following a battle with anorexia.

Speaking to MailOnline, Pete has now responded to Imogen, accusing her of 'milking' her friendship with Nikki as he asked her to 'let me grieve and let Nikki rest in peace.'

His side: The outing closely follows Pete Bennett hit back after Imogen accused him of 'attention seeking' following the death of their mutual friend Nikki Grahame (Nikki and Pete pictured in 2006)

The row started after Imogen, who appeared on Big Brother in 2006 with both Nikki and Pete, accused Pete of 'betraying' their mutual friend after he publicly shared a photo of her taken shortly before her death.

Despite Pete claiming the late star gave him permission to share the snap, in which she looks painfully thin, Imogen told The Sun: 'He just rocked up at 1am with his girlfriend and took that picture. He only stayed for an hour.'

Pete has now insisted he supported Nikki in her final days and shared the photo to raise funds for his friend's anorexia treatment.

'I am depressed to see the recent attack on me by Imogen in the press just coming up to the first anniversary of Nikki's death,' Pete told MailOnline.

Memories: On Monday, Imogen accused Pete of 'cruelly betraying the memory' of his ex girlfriend Nikki, who sadly passed away aged 38 in April 2021 following a battle with anorexia

'The accusations are simply untrue and poorly timed. Respectfully she should let me grieve, let Nikki rest in peace, and stop milking it.'

Speaking about the night he took the photo of Nikki, Pete explained: 'That evening I stayed all night with Nikki and looked after her till the next day. I have several witnesses, including my then-girlfriend. She was a mental health nurse who dealt with anorexia.'

Pete then claimed that Imogen was busy using her own social media platform for her work as an influencer at the time he posted his photo of Nikki.

'I put up the picture of us to get funds for Nikki's anorexia treatment. I used my platform to help spread the word as much as possible. Imogen did little online apart from promoting McCain oven chips in her Instagram story.'

Despite Pete's claims that Imogen 'did little' to help their friend, she has previously spoken about her visits to Nikki whilst she was in hospital and how she tried to get Nikki sectioned in a bid to save her life.

Sadness: Imogen accused him of 'cruelly betraying her memory' after he publicly shared a photo of her taken shortly before her death (Nikki and Pete pictured in 2021)

'Imogen's warped view on my visit to Nikki and ridiculous self-righteous plugging of "being her best friend" to gain some popularity with Nikki fans is overwhelmingly painful to watch,' Pete continued.

Pete added that he has been in therapy to help deal with Nikki's death, explaining: 'Nikki's passing was very traumatic for me, and I've been in therapy to try and recover. Only I know how much Nikki loved me and what it meant to her that I visited that night. Imogen has poisoned the last memories I had with Nikki.'

Pete also revealed that unlike Imogen, he turned down a chance to appear in this week's Channel 4 documentary Nikki Grahame: Who Is She?

'I turned down the documentary for my mental health, but I hope it's a beautiful send-off for her, regardless of Imogen,' he said. 'It is awful for Nikki's close friends and me that this has been dragged through the papers. Imogen is a very sad person. I hope she gains a conscience one day.'

Old friends: Speaking to MailOnline Pete has now slammed Imogen, accusing her of 'milking' her friendship with Nikki as he asked her to 'let me grieve and let Nikki rest in peace' (pictured on BB in 2006)




John Barrowman has been seen for the first time since he made his controversial return to ITV with their All Star Musicals special on Sunday.

The Doctor Who star, 55, was in good spirits as he paused to sign autographs for fans outside his hotel in London on Tuesday, after many fans shared their outrage as his appearance on the show.

John issued an apology in May after responding to historical claims of 'inappropriate behaviour' on the set of BBC drama Torchwood, an admission that led to him being dropped from Dancing On Ice.

Casual: John Barrowman, 55, has been seen for the first time since he made his controversial return to ITV with their All Star Musicals special on Sunday, as he left his hotel on Tuesday

Donning a padded grey bomber jacket and jeans, John was seen pausing to sign autographs for fans after leaving his hotel.

The West End star's return to All Star Musicals earned a mixed response from viewers.

Taking to Twitter, one outraged license payer wrote: 'Why is John Barrowman still getting work?! Absolutely will not be watching.'

Out and about: The Doctor Who star was in good spirits as he paused to sign autographs for fans outside his hotel in London

Back in the spotlight: On Sunday John's return to ITV as the host of All Star Musicals earned a mixed reception from viewers

Another quipped: 'Hopefully Barrowman will be keeping his boys in the barracks tonight.'

A third said: 'You're seriously telling me they couldn't find a new host. Disgusted.'

In November, Barrowman - who has been replaced by Oti Mabuse on Dancing On Ice - insisted the controversy surrounding his past antics was 'exaggerated' as he gave his first interview since being sacked.

Controversy: John issued an apology in May after responding to historical claims of 'inappropriate behaviour' on the set of BBC drama Torchwood

Reaction: But the West End star's return for the all-singing all-dancing extravaganza earned a divided reaction from viewers

Speaking in an interview with Lorraine, he said: 'All the people that are making the fuss about it, they weren't there, they don't know the context of things that were done.'

Barrowman described his past actions as 'silly behaviour' and insisted that he would 'never do it now' after previously admitting to 'tomfoolery' on the sets of Doctor Who, where he began playing Captain Jack Harkness in 2005 and spin-off series Torchwood a year later.

He explained: 'I think that if it was now, it would be crossing the line. I think that something that happened 15 years ago, it was bawdy behaviour, silly behaviour, it was being done in the confines of the set, and we were like a family, working together.

Speaking out: In November, Barrowman insisted the controversy surrounding his past antics was 'exaggerated' as he gave his first interview since being sacked from Dancing On Ice

'The fact that it was stories that I've already told. I've been telling them for years. I haven't hidden anything, they've been exaggerated, and they've tried to turn them into sexual harassment which it absolutely is not.'

He added: 'The one thing for me, all the people that are making the fuss about it, they weren't there, they don't know the context of things that were done. The continued bashing is not good. We've moved on.

'Like I said, I would never do it now but what we're not allowing people and myself to do we're not allowing people to learn to adapt and to change, and that's the most important thing.'
Nathan Buckley's girlfriend Alex Pike ensured all eyes were on her as she attended the Glamour on the Grid event in Melbourne on Wednesday.

The glamorous cosmetic nurse, 44, dared to bare in a thigh-flashing white gown, which featured a corset bodice and plunging neckline.

The beauty looked incredibly stunning in a figure-hugging dress by designer Alin Le' Kal, which she teamed with a pair of silver strappy heels.

White on the mark! Nathan Buckley's girlfriend Alex Pike dared to bare in a thigh-flashing white gown as she joined Rebecca Harding and Olivia Molly Rogers at Glamour on the Grid event in Melbourne

Her locks were styled sleek and in a low bun, and she sported a dewy makeup palette that accentuated her very youthful looks.

Alex was also joined by Rebecca Harding at the star-studded event.

Rebecca showed off her toned abs in a black crop top and matching coloured flare pants.

The girlfriend of Andy Lee completed her stylish ensemble with a pair of pink strappy heels and held a black bag.

Beauty: The cosmetic nurse looked incredibly stunning in a figure-hugging dress, which she teamed with a pair of silver strappy heels

Beauty in black! Alex was also joined by Rebecca Harding at the star-studded event. Rebecca showed off her toned abs in a black crop top and matching coloured flare pants

Olivia Molly Rogers looked glamorous as ever as she arrived to the event in a purple gown, which featured a lace sleeve and plunging neckline.

She was also joined by April Rose Pengilly, who made a statement in a pleated brown dress and gold handbag.

The 33-year-old actress narrowly escaped a wardrobe malfunction as she slipped into a gorgeous halter neck gown, with ample sideboob on full display.

Olympic swimmer Emily Seebohm went for a similar approach, also showing off her incredible figure in a pleated grey frock.

Fashion statement: Olivia Molly Rogers looked glamorous as she arrived to the event in a purple gown, which featured a lace sleeve and plunging neckline

Effortlessly chic! April Rose Pengilly made a statement in a pleated brown dress and gold handbag

So risque! The 33-year-old actress narrowly escaped a wardrobe malfunction as she slipped into a gorgeous halter neck gown, with ample sideboob on full display

Stylish: Olympic swimmer Emily Seebohm went for a similar approach, also showing off her incredible figure in a pleated grey frock

Meanwhile, Love Island's Anna McEvoy made a style statement in a sparkly green dress with a high slit.

Amy Pejkovic and David Zaharakis looked as loved up as ever as they posed on the red carpet after arriving to the event.

Amy stunned in a sheer silver gown while David looked dapper in black pants and a grey suit jacket.

Shining bright! Meanwhile, Love Island's Anna McEvoy made a style statement in a sparkly green dress with a high slit

Loved-up: Amy Pejkovic and David Zaharakis looked as loved up as ever as they posed on the red carpet after arriving to the event

Tegan Martin showed off her endless pins at the event in a grey mini dress and pair of black stiletto heels.

Meanwhile, Lana Wilkinson ensured all eyes were on her in a bright blue strapless dress, with cut-outs on either side.

Sharon Johal also showed off her sense of style in a gold fringe dress as she posed on the red carpet.

Confident: Tegan Martin showed off her endless pins in a grey mini dress and pair of black stiletto heels

Can't be missed! Lana Wilkinson ensured all eyes were on her in a bright blue strapless dress, with cutouts on either side

Dancing the night away! Sharon Johal also showed off her sense of style in a gold fringe dress as she posed on the red carpet

AFL great Campbell Brown and his wife Jess couldn't wipe the smiles off their faces as she attended the event.

Bonnie Anderson looked effortlessly chic in a light purple tulle gown which she paired with a silver belt.

Meanwhile, Jack Crisp and his wife Mikayla Crisp embraced one another as they posed on the red carpet.

All smiles! AFL great Campbell Brown and his wife Jess couldn't wipe the smiles off their faces as she attended the event

Glamorous: Bonnie Anderson looked effortlessly chic in a light purple tulle gown which she paired with a silver belt

Night out! Meanwhile, Jack Crisp and his wife Mikayla Crisp embraced one another as they posed on the red carpet

Channel 10 sports reporter Caty Price put on a stylish display in an orange silk dress with sleeves.

Looking equally as gorgeous was The Block's own Shaynna Blaze, who oozed elegance in a figure-hugging black one shoulder dress and a pair of stilettos.

Australian Olympian Morgan Mitchell revealed a glimpse of her toned figure in a green dress with a side cut-out.

Loud and proud! Channel 10 sports reporter Caty Price put on a stylish display in an orange silk dress with sleeves

Elegant: Shaynna Blaze looked elegant in a figure-hugging black one shoulder dress and a pair of stilettos

Toned: Australian Olympian Morgan Mitchell revealed a glimpse of her toned figure in a green dress with a side cut-out

Khanh Ong made sure he wasn't missed in a silk green suit as he joined his sister Amy at the event.

Sir Jackie Stewart looked dapper in a green suit jacket, matching coloured pants and a white buttoned shirt.

Studio 10's Victoria Latu also stunned in a long gold gown which featured a long train.

Strike a pose! Khanh Ong made sure he wasn't missed in a slik green suit as he joined his sister Amy at the event

Dapper: Sir Jackie Stewart looked dapper in a green suit jacket, matching coloured pants and a white buttoned shirt

Statement: Studio 10's Victoria Latu stunned in a long gold gown which also featured a long train

Geva Mentor and her brother Raoul also made an appearance at the star-studded event.

Australian chef Shane Delia looked sharp in a grey suit jacket and black pants as he arrived with his wife Maha.

NRL great Cooper Cronk's wife Tara Rushton looked pretty in pink in a tulle dress.

Out and about: Geva Mentor and her brother Raoul also made an appearance at the star-studded event

All smiles: Australian chef Shane Delia looked sharp in a grey suit jacket and black pants as he arrived with his wife Maha

Pretty in pink! NRL great Cooper Cronk's wife Tara Rushton looked pretty in pink in a tulle dress

Miss Universe Australia 2021 Daria Varlamova flaunted her incredible figure in a tiny black crop top and sheer skirt.

Meanwhile, Daniel Rioli looked dapper in a black suit and matching coloured shirt as he arrived with girlfriend Paris Lawrence.

Singer Aydan also made a statement in a red suit jacket and black pants.

Unique: Miss Universe Australia 2021 Daria Varlamova flaunted her incredible figure in a tiny black crop top and sheer skirt

Glamour couple! Daniel Rioli looked dapper in a black suit and matching coloured shirt as he arrived with girlfriend Paris Lawrence

Dressed to impress: Singer Aydan also made a statement in a red suit jacket and black pants

Real housewives of Melbourne star Simone Elliott ensured all eyes were on her in a shiny strapless dress with a thigh-high slit.

Meanwhile, Miss Universe Australia's Maria Thattil flaunted her slim figure in a sheer fringe dress.

The main body of the Jason Grech dress wrapped around Maria's body and neck, while the diamante detailing dripped down her body like butter.

The Miss Universe Australia star whisked her hair into a slinky up-do for the outing, and wore bold makeup to accentuate her striking features.

Celebrity stylist Elliot Garnaut showed off his sense of style in an olive green jacket and matching pants.

Glamorous! Real housewives of Melbourne star Simone Elliott ensured all eyes were on her in a shiny strapless dress with a thigh-high slit

Bombshell in black! Miss Universe Australia's Maria Thattil showed off her slim figure in a sheer fringe dress

Racy: The main body of the Jason Grech dress wrapped around Maria's body and neck, while the diamante detailing dripped down her body like butter

Stylish: Celebrity stylist Elliot Garnaut showed off his sense of style in an olive green jacket and matching pants

Michelle Payne made a statement in a printed long dress, statement earrings and a black clutch.

Former footballer Josh Gibson and his girlfriend Ashley Bright looked like a glamour couple as they posed on the red carpet.

Brodie Harper flaunted her figure in a stunning white dress and black strappy heels.

Stunning: Michelle Payne made a statement in a printed long dress, statement earrings and a black clutch

Beauty in black! Former footballer Josh Gibson and his girlfriend Ashley Bright looked like a glamour couple as they posed on the red carpet

Beauty: Brodie Harper flaunted her figure in a stunning white dress and black strappy heels

Nightclub mogul Nick Russian and his wife Rozalia embraced one another as they arrived to the event.

Bachelor in Paradise's Florence Alexandra put on a busty display in a very revealing white dress.

Meanwhile, Sam Newman rocked a T-shirt, black pants and red blazer.

It-couple: Nightclub mogul Nick Russian and his wife Rozalia embraced one another as they arrived to the event

Busting out! Bachelor in Paradise's Florence Alexandra put on a busty display in a very revealing white dress

Star-studded event: Meanwhile, Sam Newman rocked a T-shirt, black pants and red blazer

Kris Smith also made an appearance at the event, in a navy blazer with a silk collar and matching pants.

Brooke Meredith looked stunning in a long black one shoulder dress and strappy silver heels.

Sarita Hollan also sparkled the night away in a sequinned beige dress and strappy heels.

Looking sharp! Kris Smith also made an appearance at the event, in a navy blazer with a silk collar and matching pants

Stunning! Brooke Meredith looked stunning in a long black one shoulder dress and strappy silver heels
All eyes were on Neighbours star April Rose Pengilly as she stepped out to attend the Glamour on the Grid event in Melbourne on Wednesday.

The 33-year-old actress narrowly escaped a wardrobe malfunction as she slipped into a gorgeous halter neck gown, with ample sideboob on full display.

April opted for a Hollywood glamour style in the shimmery burgundy A-line dress by bridal-wear designer Alin Le' Kal.

So risque! All eyes were on Neighbours star April Rose Pengilly as she stepped out to attend The Glamour on the Grid event in a VERY risque gown in Melbourne on Wednesday

While posing on the red carpet, the former dancer flaunted her incredibly fit physique in the backless number.

On the front, her gown was cut-out at the chest area which drew attention to her ample cleavage.

In-between photos, the former model enjoyed a spin across the red carpet, as she showcased the ensemble's classy pleated skirt.

Her blonde locks were pinned back off her pretty face, carefully styled in waves.

Working it for the camera: In-between photos, the former model enjoyed a spin across the red carpet as she showcased the classy pleated skirt

Beauty: Her blonde locks were pinned back off her pretty face, carefully styled in waves. To accompany her stunning gown, April also donned a bronzed make-up look

To accompany her stunning gown, April donned a bronzed make-up look.

She also carried a pearl and gold encrusted ball-shaped clutch to hold her necessities close to her on the night.

To accessorise, April also wore long emerald-drop earrings, and an embellished white gold bangle.

All class: She also carried a pearl and gold encrusted ball-shaped clutch to hold her necessities close to her on the night

The end of an era! Earlier this week, fans were shocked to hear the finale of long-running soap will air on Monday, August 1

April is best known for playing the role as Chloe Brennan on iconic Australian TV series Neighbours.

She has been on the show since 2018, and will stay on until the soap wraps up later this year.

Earlier this month, fans were shocked to hear the finale of long-running soap will air on Monday, August 1.

The episode will be broadcast on the same day in Australia and the UK, where the show is aired on 10 Peach and Channel 5 respectively.

The Australian broadcaster last month confirmed the series was being axed after an incredible 37 years on the air.
Dillon Passage, the estranged husband of Tiger King star Joe Exotic, has gone public with his demands in their divorce.

Lawyers for Passage, 25, informed TMZ he will agree to finalize their split if he can obtain a permanent injunction banning Exotic, 39, from directly contacting him.

He also wants the injunction to prevent Exotic from 'stalking or harassing him,' and for both men to retain the assets they owned at the start of the marriage, per his counsel.

New details: Dillon Passage, the estranged husband of Tiger King star Joe Exotic (pictured), has gone public with his demands in their divorce

Arm's length: Lawyers for Passage (pictured), 25, informed TMZ he will agree to finalize their split if he can obtain a permanent injunction banning Exotic, 39, from directly contacting him

Passage's counsel claim that Exotic was initially presented these terms in September of last year and retorted: 'It will be a cold day in hell before I sign these papers.... You're out of your f***ing mind.'

However Exotic's new divorce lawyer Autumn Blackledge says that if Passage presents 'reasonable' conditions, an arrangement can be reached.

By last September the two men were estranged and had begun talks about their potential divorce settlement.

However after Exotic went public with the fact he had cancer, the proceedings were shelved, only to resume last week when he filed for divorce.

The latest: The new information about both sides' demands comes after Passage denied that he sought to divorce the imprisoned zookeeper via unlawful means

The new information about both sides' demands comes after Passage denied that he sought to divorce the imprisoned zookeeper via unlawful means.

Passage put out a statement through his lawyers, Chris Kirker and Holly Davis of Kirker Davis LLP, in response to previous claims made by Exotic, whose real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage, that Passage 'failed to serve his husband and did not follow through with obtaining a divorce through the legal system.'

Exotic's legal team said in a statement obtained by People that multiple attempts to speak with Passage over the split were met with no response.

Passage, seen last month in an Instagram shot, said through his lawyers that he went through the proper legal channels in his effort to divorce Exotic

In response, lawyers for Passage said that Exotic has been 'well known for stretching the truth for personal gain, so we are unsurprised to find him doing the same in his divorce case against our client.'

Passage's legal team said that they officially reached out to Exotic's lawyers with 'a full and comprehensive settlement agreement ... on September 3, 2021.

'On September 8, 2021, at 4:59 p.m. CST, our office received an email from Joe that said, "It will be a cold day in hell before I sign these papers" and "Your out of your f***in mind (sic)."'

Passage's lawyers said that Exotic publicly revealed 'that he was fighting cancer' in the wake of the exchange, and that Passage ceased 'pursuing litigation out of respect for Joe's health crisis.

Since his split with Exotic, Passage has been romantically involved with a man named John

'Our firm always urges clients to take the high road, and we applauded his compassionate decision. But Dillon now feels compelled to counter the untrue statements that Joe is making publicly. Dillon is eager to efficiently finalize the divorce agreement he proposed in September of 2021.'

A lawyer for Exotic told the outlet in response that their side has 'heard nothing from his lawyers or Mr. Passage' but are happy 'he's ready to move forward.'

Exotic filed for divorce from Passage last Thursday in Santa Rosa County, Florida, saying in legal docs that the union is 'irretrievably broken' and that he hopes 'they can both move on with their lives and divorce quickly and amicably.'

An attorney for Exotic, Autumn Beck Blackledge, said to the outlet in a statement that 'Joe is nearing the end of his cancer treatment and has fallen in love.

'He has no ill will toward Dillon, but has been trying for a while to reach him to get a divorce settlement. My understanding is that both Joe and Dillion have moved on romantically and they should both have the freedom to love again free from the bonds of marriage.'

Passage's manager Jeff Duncan had previously issued a statement to the outlet stating that Passage was 'pleased to get some finality to the divorce,' and that twice before, his legal team 'drafted the necessary paperwork on two separate occasions which were not signed by and then ignored by Joe.'

Passage and Exotic wed December 11, 2017, months after Exotic's previous spouse Travis Maldonado died after accidentally shooting himself October 6, 2017

Passage was 'happy to get some closure and welcomes progress toward his request for divorce to Joseph Maldonado,' Duncan said.

Exotic's lawyer Blackledge said in response that Exotic was seeking to divorce Passage 'because he desires to marry his new love interest Mr. John Graham whom he met in prison.'

Passage and Exotic initially tied the knot December 11, 2017, months after Exotic's previous spouse Travis Maldonado died after accidentally shooting himself October 6, 2017.

Exotic was sentenced in January 2020 in his native Oklahoma to 22 years in custody in connection with a 2017 murder-for-hire plot of his business rival Carole Baskin, as well as numerous wildlife law violations in the deaths of five tigers, and infractions of the Endangered Species Act. Earlier this year, his sentence was reduced to 21 years after appealing his sentence, citing court errors.

Passage last year revealed in an Instagram post that he and Exotic had been 'seeking a divorce' amid the situation.

'This wasn't an easy decision to make but Joe and I both understand that this situation isn't fair to either of us,' Passage said in March of 2021. 'It's something that neither of us were expecting but we are going to take it day by day. We are on good terms still and I hope it can stay that way. I will continue to have Joe in my life and do my best to support him while he undergoes further legal battles to better his situation.'

Passage last July revealed on the social media site that he was moving on in his love life with a man named John.
Her name soared to headlines after she failed to find love with Texas-born groom Andrew Davis on the most recent season of Married At First Sight.

And Holly Greenstein certainly appeared to be cashing in on her newfound fame on Wednesday, as she attended the launch of fashion brand Guess' Spring handbag range in Paddington, Sydney.

The budding influencer, 38, was positively beaming as she posed with a range of bags at the lavish event, which was also attended by fellow social media stars Bella Varelis and Amy Castano.

She's an influencer now! Married At First Sight star Holly Greenstein appeared to be cashing in on her newfound fame on Wednesday, as she attended the launch of fashion brand Guess' spring handbag range at Portobellos showroom in Paddington, Sydney

Holly looked stunning as she posed with one of the bags, wearing a flowing black dress teamed with a denim jacket, patterned tights and knee-high boots.

She wore her hair in a gentle beach wave, and accentuated her striking features with dewy makeup.

Meanwhile, former Bachelor star and well-known influencer Bella Varelis oozed sophistication at the launch.

Happy: Holly looked stunning as she posed with one of the new bags, wearing a flowing black dress teamed with a denim jacket, patterned tights and knee-high boots

Style: She wore her hair in a gentle beach wave, and accentuated her striking features with dewy makeup

Beaming: Holly couldn't wipe the smile off her face as she posed with one of the handbags

While posing with a white handbag, she sported an oversized grey blazer and a smart black shirt.

She wore her brunette locks in a choppy bob, and wore a flash of bronzer and mascara to complete her look.

Meanwhile, fitness influencer Amy Castano looked nothing short of sensational as she rocked up to the event.

She wore a pair of tight black leggings and a beige top for the occasion, while posing with a pretty blue handbag.

Isn't she lovely! Meanwhile, former Bachelor star and well-known influencer Bella Varelis oozed sophistication at the launch

The trio were also joined by Big Brother star Tilly Whitfield, who wore a smart black blazer and shirt for the outing.

While she failed to find love on the experiment, cinema manager Holly has managed to bag a boyfriend away from the show.

She revealed in an interview with 9Now on Sunday she was in a relationship with a man she had known for a while through mutual friends.

While she did not name her new partner, she confirmed they were living together.

She said she had 'bumped into him on the street' one day, which then led to him 'emailing me and pursuing me'.

Gorgeous: Fitness influencer Amy Castano looked nothing short of sensational as she rocked up to the event

Guestlist: The trio were also joined by Big Brother star Tilly Whitfield, who wore a smart black blazer and shirt for the outing

Holly said she eventually 'caved' and agreed to go on a date, which ended up being a wise decision because they are now in a happy relationship.

'We have the same love languages: words of affirmation, small gifts, we love to travel, we'll share food. He's just incredibly generous and warm,' she said.

She added: 'I feel like sometimes, if you show the the universe you're being strong, and you're trying, it will send me something.'

Holly had a short-lived relationship with Andrew, 39, on this year's season of MAFS, with the couple calling it quits after just two weeks.
She was at the Soho Hotel in London to attend a special screening of her new film The Northman on Tuesday evening.

And Anya Taylor-Joy looked ultra chic as she checked out of the luxe hotel alongside her boyfriend Malcolm McRae the next day.

The 25-year-old actress donned an all-black ensemble as she left, with skinny jeans and a longline patent leather coat.

Chic: Anya Taylor-Joy, 25, cut a chic figure in a longline leather coat as she left the Soho Hotel with beau Malcolm McRae on Wednesday

Blonde beauty: The Queen's Gambit star had her chest-length bleach blonde tresses in a side pleat, shielding her eyes with a pair of black sunglasses

She added lace-up leather boots to her look, carrying a large Dior Book Tote bag and a yellow tote.

The Queen's Gambit star had her chest-length bleach blonde tresses in a side pleat, shielding her eyes with a pair of black sunglasses.

Anya appeared to sport a bare-faced look, accessorising with a coin gold necklace as she waved to onlookers on her way out.

All-black: The actress donned an all-black ensemble as she left, with skinny jeans and a longline patent leather coat

Natural: Anya appeared to sport a bare-faced look for the outing

Accessories: She added lace-up leather boots to her look, carrying a large Dior Book Tote bag and a yellow tote

Her actor boyfriend Malcolm followed behind her - looking trendy in a pair of straight leg black trousers and a royal blue hoodie.

The 27-year-old matched his girlfriend in a leather jacket, adding a pair of dress shoes as he hauled his luggage out of the hotel - which included a music storage box.

Malcolm let his brunette locks fall into a curl while keeping his gaze firmly away from the cameras.

Following on: Anya's actor boyfriend Malcolm followed behind her - looking trendy in a pair of straight leg black trousers and a royal blue hoodie

Home time: The 27-year-old matched his girlfriend in a leather jacket, adding a pair of dress shoes as he hauled his luggage out of the hotel - which included a music storage box

Saying goodbye: Anya gave a wave to onlookers as she turned to smile

The pair cut a more glamorous figure the night before as they attended a special screening for The Northman at the Odeon Luxe in Leicester Square.

Anya plays Olga in the viking movie as she stars alongside Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgard, with the storyline which follows a young Viking prince on his quest to avenge his father's murder.

The co-stars appeared on Lorraine on Tuesday morning to talk about their new blockbuster, with Anya jesting that she was 'annoying' on set.

Event: The pair had stayed at the hotel after attending a special screening for The Northman at the Odeon Luxe in Leicester Square

Coming soon: The star has been attending events to promote her new film, which releases in the UK on April 15

She said: 'I actually had the time of my life. I was very annoying on set! I am a lover of nature, so I was flitting around like a fairy.'

While Alexander admitted to having five breakfasts in a day in order to resemble a 'bear' for the role.

'I tried to basically put on some weight so I would look a bit more like a bear. I had five meals for breakfast!' he confessed, while Anya complimented, 'No one works as hard as this man. I cannot say enough about how much effort and love he put into this role.'
Amelia Hamlin's career seems to keep getting better and better in 2022.

The 21-year-old brunette bombshell from Los Angeles revealed on Tuesday that she has landed the starring role in the new Michael Kors spring 2022 campaign.

The daughter of Lisa Rinna and Harry Hamlin shared a look at the campaign with a shot of her in a pink crop top that displayed her enviably toned tummy.

No one is looking at the purse: Amelia Hamlin flashed a purse for the Michael Kors campaign but all eyes were on her tummy

The siren also had on a pink jacket and low waisted slacks as her black hair was pulled back. The star was also seen in strappy black heels with gold accents.

'Me and Michael Kors,' was all the cover girl said in her caption.

The star held up a black MK purse in one of her shots, but fans were likely looking at her midsection rather than the fashion accessory.

The last big model to work for Kors was Amelia's pal Bella Hadid who had been with the brand for over a year.

Michael David Kors, 62, is an American fashion designer from Long Island, New York whose company is worth about $8billion.

On Sunday Amelia gave her 1.2million followers a closer look at her toned frame as she shared a topless photo to her Instagram Story.

Cropped: The daughter of Lisa Rinna and Harry Hamlin shared a look at the campaign with a shot of her in a pink crop top

MK mood: The siren also had on a pink jacket and low waisted slacks as her black hair was pulled back

The 21-year-old social media personality made sure to obscure her upper chest with her arms while posing for the photo.

Hamlin only wore a pair of loose-fitting gray sweat pants as she took the picture.

The Los Angeles native also kept her lovely brunette locks free-flowing during her time in front of a mirror.

A part of the MK family: . 'Me and Michael Kors,' was all the cover girl said in her caption

And black shoes to match: The star was also seen in strappy black heels with gold accents

The influencer's photo was posted on the same day that she debuted her new dyed-eyebrow look with a set of photos that were shared to her account.

The social media figure kept her hands situated on her upper chest while posing for the first picture in her photoset.

Her eyebrows, which had been dyed blonde stood out and were accentuated by the dark color of her sunglasses.

Hamlin also wore a low-cut black dress underneath a matching coat while she posed for the snap.

The model added various elements of shine to her look with a cross-shaped necklace and several rings.

Baring it all: She gave her 1.2million followers a closer look at her toned frame as she shared a topless photo to her Instagram Story

The influencer made a point of sharing a selfie that showed off her newly dyed right eyebrow.

Hamlin is no stranger to taking chances with her sense of style, and she often shares photos of her new looks to her Instagram account.

Last month, the model showed off a bit of skin while wearing a sheer bodysuit and a matching leather jacket.

The influencer made a point of placing two pieces of tape on her breasts while posing for the photo.

She also left a short message in her post's caption that simply read: 'Sorry mom.'

Doing her thing: Last month, the model showed off a bit of skin while wearing a sheer bodysuit and a matching leather jacket

Hamlin's older sister Delilah Belle made her thoughts about the photo known in the post's comments section

The social media personality wrote: 'I really don't think she cares I think it's more of an I'm sorry daddy.'

The pair's mother appeared to be amused by the comment, and left a message of her own that read: 'Ha! Love you.'
Sunrise weatherman Sam Mac made an emotional return to TV on Wednesday, after mourning the loss of his beloved cat Coco over the weekend.

And after filming wrapped, the 40-year-old revealed that his fans had helped to raise an incredible $23,000 for an animal rescue charity in celebration of the feline's life.

Sam shared a screenshot from his GoFundMe page on Wednesday evening, which showed the amazing amount of money raised for The Sydney Dogs and Cats Home.

Triibute: On Wednesday, TV weatherman Sam Mac took to Instagram to announce his fans had helped raise over $23,000 for an animal rescue charity in celebration of his late cat Coco's life

Alongside the post, Sam reflected on the huge amount of support he'd received which helped him get through the past five days.

'Letting her go honestly broke my heart,' he wrote. 'But your support & this incredible fundraising tally has helped to piece it back together again. Thank you.

'I know shes still with me, & now her legacy is to help others experience the same joy we have.'

He concluded his emotional post with a quote by Dr. Seuss, which read: 'Dont cry because its over, smile because it happened.'

Sam fought back tears during a weather segment as he paid tribute to Coco on Wednesday, who died over the weekend.

Fundraising efforts: Sam shared a screenshot from his GoFundMe page, which showed the astonishing amount of funds raised for The Sydney Dogs and Cats Home

Sad times: Sam Mac made an emotional return to the breakfast show on Wednesday following the death of his beloved pet cat Coco

'My beloved Coco, my rescue cat, who featured on the show for many years, sadly had to say goodbye on the weekend,' Sam began as footage of Coco played.

'It was extremely difficult, any pet lover or anyone who has been through that knows how hard it is. They are family, they're more than just a cat or dog.

'It's real grief when you lose an animal, but I wanted to say a heartfelt thank you to people reaching out... it's still hard to talk about,' he said.

'Mwah, love to Coco.'

'It was extremely difficult, any pet lover or anyone who has been through that knows how hard it is': Sam fought back tears during a weather segment as he paid tribute to Coco, who died over the weekend

Sam broke down in tears on Sunday as he announced his pet cat Coco had died at age 14.

He said he'd been through 'one of the worst days of his life' after coming home to find his Burmilla rescue cat unwell, before confirming Coco's death hours later.

Sam said in a tearful Instagram video: 'I got home from Canada and opened the door. Coco was slumped over against the wall.'

'Her legs weren't functioning. Her eyes were closed, but she was still breathing but in a really bad way. It was extremely confronting.'

Sad: Sam broke down in tears on Sunday when he announced his pet cat Coco had died. He said he'd been through 'one of the worst days of my life' after coming home to find his Burmilla rescue cat unwell, before confirming Coco's death hours later

Sam, who started an Instagram account for Coco which had 13,000 followers, said he rushed his cat to the vet, but she was 'not responsive' to treatment and there was nothing they could do to save her.

'It doesn't feel real. It f**king hurts. She's been such an important part of my life, a real shining light, one of the best things to ever happen to me.

'She's made me so happy. She's my best little buddy. She's always been there for the last 13 years.'

'It doesn't feel real. It f**king hurts. She's been such an important part of my life, a real shining light, one of the best things to ever happen to me,' he said

Sam had adopted Coco from the RSPCA when she was a kitten.

In addition to her appearances on Sunrise and Instagram, Coco also featured on the cover of Sam's 2021 autobiography Accidental Weatherman.

Sam revealed in 2019 he'd taken Coco with him to the Logie Awards, and even treated her to hotel room service.

Sam also confirmed Coco's death in a separate post on Instagram, sharing a photo of himself holding the cat's paws at the animal hospital.

He said his former roommate Ally Mansell and good friend Dr Chris Brown 'dropped everything' to be by his side because his girlfriend Rebecca James was in Melbourne at the time.
Kylie Jenner was looking fierce as she celebrated the launch of her new makeup range Kendall By Kylie Cosmetics on Tuesday evening.

The reality star, 24, wowed in tattered leather jumpsuit cinched into her narrow waist and neon Fox Motocross gloves shielding her hands.

Kylie was spotted leaving her celebratory dinner in Hollywood with her brunette tresses slicked back and a chunky pair of gold hoop earrings jazzing up the look.

Start your engines! Kylie Jenner was looking fierce as she celebrated the launch of her new makeup range Kendall By Kylie Cosmetics on Tuesday evening

The reality star's makeup always looks incredible and Tuesday night was no exception.

Kylie glammed up her complexion with a healthy dose of smoky eye shadow, mascara coating her long lashes, and a dusting of rosy bronze blush over her defined cheekbones.

She touched up her pout with a slick of nude lipstick.

Kylie strutted outside wearing black boots and carried a simple clutch in her hand.

Ready for anything: Jenner shielded her hands with a pair of neon Fox Motocross gloves

Makeup mogul Kylie hosted a lavish dinner at Italian restaurant Osteria Mozza in Los Angeles for her family and friends, including sister Khloe Kardashian, mom Kris Jenner and best pal Stassie Karanikolaou, in honor of her new makeup line with sister Kendall Jenner, Kendall by Kylie Cosmetics.

Guests documented the VIP bash on Instagram, showing off the flower-adorned table, bespoke cocktail menu and of course, the fun selfies.

The dinner, organised by the Kardashian family's favourite party planner Mindy Weiss, featured a long table decorated with gorgeous pale purple flowers and candles.

Party time! Kylie and Kendall Jenner celebrated their Kendall by Kylie Cosmetics line in style on Tuesday night, hosting a lavish dinner at Italian restaurant Osteria Mozza in Los Angeles for their family and friends

Flower power: Guests documented the VIP bash on Instagram, showing off the flower-adorned table, bespoke cocktail menu and of course, the fun selfies

Naturally, Kendall's 818 Tequila was served for guests, who could choose from two special cocktails: the Kylie  which featured the blanco tequila with grapefruit  and the Kenny  which used the anejo tequila mixed with an orange peel and a cinnamon stick.

The dinner stetting included a publicity photo of Kendall and Kylie wearing purple floral headdress that matched the flowers at the celebration.

Kylie shared some more views of the lovely array, while showing her table placement next to Kendall's, while mom Kris Jenner sat opposite where she was filmed giving a gushing speech.

Sister act: The dinner stetting included a publicity photo of Kendall and Kylie wearing purple floral headdress that matched the flowers at the celebration

On tap: Naturally, Kendall's 818 Tequila was served for guests, who could choose from two special cocktails: the Kylie  which featured the blanco tequila with grapefruit  and the Kenny  which used the anejo tequila mixed with an orange peel and a cinnamon stick

Side by side: Kylie shared some more views of the lovely array, while showing her table placement next to Kendall's

Kylie shared a short video of part of her mother's toast, where the emotional Momager told her youngest daughters: 'I couldn't be prouder than anyone in my entire life,' which elicited a loving 'aww' from Kylie.

'I love you @krisjenner [heart],' she wrote over the video.

Family friend Jen Atkin was among the guests, sharing a video of model Kendall, who looked gorgeous in a colouful slip dress, happily devouring the Italian feast.

Kendall also shared posted a photo of her makeup palette  which featured cheeky shade names including 'The Kendall to my Kylie' and 'Not not drinking'  as she got ready.

Toast: Later in the evening, Kylie shared a short video of part of her mother's toast. 'I couldn't be prouder than anyone in my entire life,' Kris said to her two youngest daughters, which elicited a loving 'aww' from Kylie
Bruce Willis' daughter Scout was spotted surfacing in Los Angeles this week for a casual outing with her dog Grandma.

Scout, 30, whom Bruce shares with his amicable ex-wife Demi Moore, made a fashion statement in a t-shirt that read: 'PROTECT TRANS KIDS.' She tucked her top into her skintight jeans, emphasizing her enviably trim waistline as she pounded the pavement.

Her latest sighting comes as Bruce, 67, covered People amid his struggles with the brain condition aphasia, which causes language abilities to deteriorate.

Baby mine: Bruce Willis' daughter Scout was spotted surfacing in Los Angeles this week for a casual outing with her dog Grandma

An insider said his family is 'doing whatever they can' for him and 'have rallied around him in a big way to help Bruce cope with what is to come.'

Bruce's blended family issued a joint statement a week ago announcing that he is 'stepping away from the career that has meant so much to him.'

The statement revealed he 'has been experiencing some health issues and has recently been diagnosed with aphasia, which is impacting his cognitive abilities.'

Political: Scout, 30, whom Bruce shares with his amicable ex-wife Demi Moore, made a fashion statement in a t-shirt that read: 'PROTECT TRANS KIDS'

Demi and the three daughters she shares with Bruce - Rumer, 33, Scout, 30, and Tallulah, 28 - were all among the signatories of the statement.

So were Bruce's current wife Emma Heming, 43, and the two little daughters they have together - Mabel, 10, and Evelyn, seven.

The family are now apparently focused on treasuring the upbeat memories they are able to create together such as Mabel turning 10 on April Fool's Day last week.

'Emma is especially grateful for the daughters she shares with Bruce. Everyone is focused on all the happy moments they are able to share,' a People insider said.

Troubled time: Her latest sighting comes as Bruce, 67, covered People amid his struggles with the brain condition aphasia, which causes language abilities to deteriorate

Although the root cause of his aphasia has not gone public, a friend told The Sun that some of his loved ones believe his condition may be connected to a head injury he reportedly suffered on the set of Tears Of The Sun in 2002.

Bruce sued the production company, claiming to have sustained 'substantial mental and physical injuries' after being struck by a special effects explosive called a 'squib.' The parties reached a settlement in 2005 with details that have remained private.

However Joe Pancake, the special effects specialist on the movie, said Bruce was not hit by a 'hot shell casing,' not a squib, and 'the judge laughed him out of court.'

'In my 38 years of experience I know that they don't fly up and hit you in the head,' Joe told DailyMail.com last week. 'He tried to blame my department. He dragged my name through the mud for two years. It was bulls***.'

'We are moving through this': Bruce's blended family issued a joint statement a week ago announcing that he is 'stepping away from the career that has meant so much to him'

Joe added: 'After all his allegations they made him show his medical records and you know what the doctor prescribed him? Tylenol.'

Bruce's blended family get along so well that earlier in lockdown Bruce was isolating in Idaho with Emma, Demi and all of his daughters.

Since the family went public with news of Bruce's retirement, fans have flocked to social media to share their love for the Die Hard icon.

The Razzie Awards even decided to rescind a special category they had previously announced: 'worst performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 movie.'

Gratitude: 'Id hoped for some love and compassion, I truly NEVER could have anticipated the depth and breadth of the love we received as a family yesterday,' Scout wrote on Instagram

'Id hoped for some love and compassion, I truly NEVER could have anticipated the depth and breadth of the love we received as a family yesterday,' Scout wrote on Instagram amid the outpouring of affection for her father.

In the wake of the news the Los Angeles Times reported that colleagues had been worried for years about his cognitive health.

Sources told the newspaper that Bruce needed to wear an earpiece on set so that he could be given his lines if he went up on them.

While shooting the movie American Siege in 2020, he was even pictured wearing what appeared to be an earpiece.
Simon Pegg has taken a stand against the Ministry of Defence by becoming the latest celebrity to lend star power to PETA's campaign.

The 54-year-old actor is starring in the Go Fake For The Bears' Sake adverts - urging the MoD to replace the bearskins used for the Queen's Guard's caps with animal-friendly material.

In the poster campaign, the Star Trek star is seen clutching onto the world's first faux bear fur and cosying up to a stuffed bear toy.

'It's time for them to drop the petty excuses': Simon Pegg has demanded the Ministry of Defence replace real bearskin caps with faux fur as the latest star to join PETA's campaign

At the moment, the Queen's Guard wear a bear fur hat as part of their uniform, with Simon saying: 'It's a disgrace that soldiers in the Queen's Guard are still parading around with the fur of bears who were gunned down in Canada.

'The caps serve no military purpose, and each one costs at least one bear their life. The ceremonial bearskins could easily be replaced with faux fur, retaining the traditional look but eliminating the cruelty.

Simon is taking a strong stance on the matter, accusing the Ministry of Defence of making 'excuses'.

Simon said: 'It's a disgrace that soldiers in the Queen's Guard are still parading around with the fur of bears who were gunned down in Canada'

Time to go? At the moment, the Queen's Guard wear a bear fur hat as part of their uniform

He continued: 'It's time for the Ministry of Defence to drop the petty excuses and make the switch  it's what the British public wants and what bears need.'

The Ministry of Defence have previously responded to PETA, insisting they use fur from bear killed as part of a 'sanctioned cull' - yet PETA claims to have found no evidence to support this.

It's not the first time Simon has taken an activist stance, signing an open letter in 2020 calling for the wealthiest in society to pay more tax in order to help fight inequality.

Famous faces: Simon's collaboration with PETA coincides with Britain's Got Talent judge Alesha Dixon's petition, which is urging for the same thing for the MoD

The actor, said to be worth about 7 million joined the likes of Love Actually screenwriter Richard Curtis in adding his name to Millionaires Against Pitchforks campaign, which was released to coincide with the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The star, who is gearing up to film Star trek 4, is also a supporter of the feminist campaign HeForShe.

Simon's collaboration with PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) coincides with Britain's Got Talent judge Alesha Dixon's petition, which is urging for the same thing for the MoD.

A Law onto himself: Other stars such as Rafferty Law, the son of Jude Law and Sadie Frost, have challenged the MoD to replace their clothing - putting even more pressure on the government

The petition seeks 100,000 signatures in order to trigger a parliamentary debate, and is currently sitting just above 51,000.

The government has kept strong on their stance, replying to the petition that they still have 'no plans to end the use of bearskins'.

Other stars such as Rafferty Law, the son of Jude Law and Sadie Frost, have challenged the MoD to replace their clothing - putting even more pressure on the government.
Supermodel David Gandy cut a sombre figure on Wednesday as he was seen for the first time since admitting he is not 'particularly happy with the way he's looking'.

The 42-year-old wore a checked wool coat with frayed hem detail for his lunch at London's trendy Scott's restaurant.

The Vogue model, who said he fears his 'nose and ears' growing with age, wore the striking jacket over a black hoodie and black jeans for the outing.

Grumpy Gandy: Supermodel David Gandy cut a sombre figure on Wednesday as he was seen for the first time since admitting he is not 'particularly happy with the way he's looking'

The distinguished star chose a dark beanie hat to keep warm as he spoke on his phone outside the exclusive Mayfair venue.

David failed to raise a smile on the outing, after admitting last week that he is struggling with body image.

The fashion icon told The Daily Mail's Eden Confidential: 'I'm not particularly happy with the way I'm looking at the moment. I'm not at my fighting weight, as I call it.'

Smart: The 42-year-old wore a checked wool coat with frayed hem detail for his lunch at London's trendy Scott's restaurant

Hello? David modelled designer stubble, holding his hand to his ear in order to hear over the busy London traffic

David, who set pulses racing when he starred in a Dolce & Gabbana advert wearing nothing but tight white pants in 2007, also admitted to fearing changes to his chiselled good looks as he ages.

He explained: 'The two things that scare me is that apparently your ears and nose carry on growing. If that's true, I am in massive amounts of trouble.'

The star also told Alan Carr recently on his Life's a Beach podcast, that he struggled to a date in his teens, saying: 'They were not my good years.'

Iconic: David, who set pulses racing when he starred in a Dolce & Gabbana advert wearing nothing but tight white pants in 2007, has spoken about his struggles with body image

'I think you have a different impression, I grew out and then up so I wasnt in my best fighting fit form.'

Quickly butting in, a Alan shocked asked: 'You were minging?'

Which David responded: 'Not far off!'

Say what? David recently admitted he couldn't get any dates when he was a teen - despite carving out a reputation as Britain's most handsome man (pictured in 2001 when he was 21)

The handsome model has since been plastered on a 50-foot billboard in Time Square, New York, in his underwear but unfortunately never got to see it.

He revealed: 'I never saw the b***** thing. Im not wearing much, its a big crouch for Times Square and everyone was taking pictures of it but I never got to see it.'

He once flew '22 hours for a photoshoot before landing and only spent 24 hours on the ground.'

Despite being a frequent flier, the star admitted he still gets 'nervous' if there is ever turbulence while in the air which causes him to 'hysterically laugh a silly little giggle.
She welcomed her son, a baby boy named Levi, with her husband Joshua Kushner last year.

And Karlie Kloss gushed about the 'profound experience' of having a child during an appearance on Today.

'Just turned one!' the model, 29, said of her baby boy on Wednesday. 'I know, it's wild. It's the greatest joy that I never knew. It's the best.'

'The greatest joy that I never knew': Karlie Kloss gushed about the 'profound experience' of having a child during an appearance on Today

'Did you know the moment Levi was placed in your arms or did it take a minute to fall in love? What was it like for you?' Hoda Kotb asked her.

Karlie said she immediately identified with every parent out there after giving birth to her child.

'The moment he was placed on my arms  I literally cry at commercials now, so I might cry right now  I just had this moment of, "Now, every woman who has a child, every parent, goes through this." And it's just the most profound experience that I had no idea [about] until having a kid,' she said.

Now Karlie's life and priorities have changed since becoming a mother.

'I'm actually on time everywhere now': Kloss also described how becoming a mother changed her priorities and her efficiency

Twice as nice! Karlie was spotted making her way around NYC on crutches in two bright outfits

Going green! The model lit up gloomy NYC in her neon green suit

'Everything changes,' she said. 'I think the last few years have changed us as well but becoming a mom? I have become, first of all, so much more efficient with my time. I'm actually on time everywhere now.

'And I'm always a multitasker, you know me, I'm doing a thousand things. But I think priorities just changed,' she said.

She also discussed her coding camp for girls, Koding With Klossy.

Can't rain on her parade! The beauty didn't let the rain keep her from flashing a smile

Overflowing with love: Karlie said she immediately identified with every parent out there after giving birth to her child

'I grew up in a house of all girls and I have parents who helped us realize we can do anything that we set our mind to despite our gender or anything,' she said of what compelled her to begin coding.

'And I just was so infuriated by the fact that there weren't women in these industries at leadership levels, or at even equal representation,' she told Hoda. 'And that's what we really try and do, is create a space that is inclusive, and creative, and fun to learn how to code. And it's all for free.'

Meanwhile, Karlie was seen in New York rocking two head-turning looks - a neon green suit and pink Michael Kors look which showcased her legs.

Girl power: Kloss also talked about her coding camp for girls, Koding With Klossy

Karlie made her way around the Big Apple on crutches, and she addressed her injury during her appearance on Today.

'I'm a bit of a klutz generally, so it's kind of a miracle this hasn't happened sooner with these giraffe legs and knobby knees. I'm okay, I'm rocking the sneaker,' she said.

Karlie shares her son with her husband, businessman and investor Joshua whom she has been in a relationship with since 2012.

Life changing: A couple of months after the baby was born Karlie told Paper that 'everything in my life has changed' since she became a mother

Karlie reportedly announced that her son was called Levi Joseph after a yeshiva (an Orthodox Jewish seminary or college) in Israel accidentally leaked the name and sex.

Yeshiva Reishit in Bet Shemesh published the name while congratulating the parents in the 'Mazel Tov' portion of their email newsletter, Page Six reported.

Joshua, whose brother and sister-in-law are Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, is said in the email to have gone to the yeshiva in 2003.

Karlie has publicly expressed her political disagreements with her in-laws on multiple occasions.

A couple of months after the baby was born Karlie told Paper that 'everything in my life has changed' since she became a mother.

'My whole world really revolves around my son now, and it's so cliche, but it's so true. I never knew I could feel such a deep love and adoration for anything.

'It's so inspiring, but also humbling. I have so much respect for every woman on this planet. It's truly the most rewarding, but also challenging, job. I'm enjoying every second of it.'
Claire Sweeney has revealed the late June Brown showed her how to make herself look younger using gaffer tape, describing it as an 'old Hollywood trick'.

The actress, 50, reminisced about starring in a charity show in Blackpool alongside the EastEnders star, who died aged 95 on Sunday.

During an appearance on Steph's Packed Lunch on Channel 4, Claire said June showed her how to make herself look younger using gaffer tape as they shared a dressing room.

Reminiscing: Claire Sweeney revealed the late June Brown showed her how to make herself look younger using gaffer tape, describing it as an 'old Hollywood trick'

The former Brookside star said she was left amazed as she watched June pull the skin on her neck back using the tape, saying it 'knocked ten years off her'.

She explained: 'June was raising money for donkeys, she was always rescuing donkeys June and she asked me to do a show in Blackpool.

'So I shared a dressing room with her and, before the show, she gets a roll of gaffer tape out of her handbag and I'm watching her in the mirror.

'She undoes this gaffer tape, gets her neck, pulls it back and tapes it there, gets the other side, pulls it back and tapes it and it knocked 10 years off her.'

Hollywood trick: The actress, 50, said June showed her how to pull the skin on her neck back using gaffer tape as they shared a dressing room for a charity show

Claire said June told her it is an 'an old Hollywood trick', adding: 'I thought, I'm going to remember that Maybe I need my gaffer tape on today!'

June passed away peacefully at home on Sunday after becoming a household name as chain-smoking Dot Cotton on the long-running show, a role she played for 35 years before leaving in 2020.

For decades Brown was one of the most famous faces on British TV, playing the devout Christian famed on Albert Square for her chain smoking, gossiping and mothering of those in need.

Her relationship with her tearaway son Nasty Nick Cotton, John Altman, who she forgave and forgave for his crimes until she gave up on him and he died after consuming a bad batch of heroin bought for him by his very own mother.

Sad: June passed away peacefully at home on Sunday after becoming a household name as chain-smoking Dot Cotton on EastEnders, a role she played for 35 years before leaving in 2020

Her loving relationship with Jim Branning, played by John Bardon, would captivate millions, leaving fans in tears as she said goodbye to him following a stroke.

June left the soap in January 2020, making her final appearance in a storyline where Dot came to believe that Martin Fowler had stolen money from her - which turned out to have actually been Sonia.

Confirming her death on Monday, an EastEnders spokesman said: 'We are deeply saddened to announce that our beloved June Brown, OBE, MBE, sadly passed away last night.

'There are not enough words to describe how much June was loved and adored by everyone at EastEnders, her loving warmth, wit and great humour will never be forgotten.'

The actress created one of the most iconic characters in Dot Cotton, not just in soap but in British television, and having appeared in 2,884 episodes, Junes remarkable performances created some of EastEnders finest moments,' the statement concluded.

Heartthrob: As well as paying tribute to June, soap icon Claire also revealed she has an unlikely crush on 61-year-old journalist Robert Peston while appearing on Steph's Packed Lunch

As well as paying tribute to June, soap icon Claire also revealed she has an unlikely crush on 61-year-old journalist Robert Peston while appearing on Steph's Packed Lunch.

When asked by host Steph McGovern if it is true that she has a crush on Robert, Claire became giggly before becoming more overwhelmed as Steph revealed the ITV political editor had a message for her.

As Claire covered her mouth in shock, Robert appeared on screen in a pre-recorded video message, saying he was 'flattered' that he was her 'guilty pleasure'.

He said: 'Hi Claire, Steph sent me a video in which she described me as your guilty pleasure, which obviously shows that you have an acute sense of how ridiculous I am. But I have to say, I'm enormously flattered and deeply honoured!'

Claire admitted that she felt 'emotional', adding: 'My eyelash has come off I can't believe you've done that!'

Overwhelmed by the personal message from her crush, she asked Steph: 'Don't you think he's gorgeous?!'

To which a laughing Steph responded: 'No!... I love him, I have a lot to thank him for, he's a brilliant man, but no!'

Steph admitted Robert was amazed that Claire fancied him, before joking: 'He's got a partner otherwise I would have set you up.'

It comes after Claire revealed she made just 5,000 last year due to the pandemic as Covid-19 'decimated' her industry and prevented her from getting work in 2021.

But the soap icon sold her holiday villa in 2019 for 804,000 and was fortunately able to 'sit it out comfortably' despite the taxes she paid on the sale.

Crush: As Claire covered her mouth in shock, Robert appeared on screen in a pre-recorded video message, saying he was 'flattered' that he was her 'guilty pleasure'

Asked how much she earned in 2021, Claire told The Sunday Times: 'Under 5,000. Our industry was decimated. Thankfully I'd sold a house in Spain, in 2019, so I was blessed that I could sit it out comfortably.

'It was a big house in Mallorca that I'd bought in 2004 for 690,000 (580,000). It broke my heart to sell but it was in its own grounds, and my little boy didn't want that - he wanted to be with other kids.

'I sold it for 950,000 (804,000), but I had to pay Spanish taxes and English taxes.'

It comes after Claire revealed her weight loss secrets ahead of starring in Cabaret All Stars in April.

She opened up about her plans to look her 'physical best' as she is set to wear a 'fabulous catsuit' in the show.

New show: It comes after Claire revealed her weight loss secrets ahead of starring in Cabaret All Stars in April (pictured this month)

The theatre star recently confessed the upcoming show is 'out of her comfort zone' despite having appeared in Chicago and 9 To 5 The Musical.

Claire said in an interview with Closer: 'This show has got a really raunchy feel to it, laced with lots humour.

'I wear a fabulous catsuit! I find it really liberating that I'm going to get completely outrageous and I am going to sing the song Light My Fire with a big band arrangement - and I think they're actually going to set fire to me while I'm doing it.'

The mother-of-one added: 'This does all mean that I want to look my physical best. So the plan is to start going to the gym and hot yoga five days a week, because it's amazing for weight loss and strengthening my core.'

Steph's Packed Lunch airs weekdays at 12.30pm on Channel 4 and All 4.
Eiza Gonzalez detailed conflicts on set with Michael Bay years after both Megan Fox and Kate Beckinsale revealed unpleasant experiences with the filmmaker

The 32-year-old Mexican actress admitted to getting into arguments with the 57-year-old filmmaker while filming Ambulance.

Eiza revealed that she and Bay had clashed over the portrayal of her paramedic character Cam Thompson.

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Passionate: Eiza Gonzalez admitted to getting into arguments with director Michael Bay while filming Ambulance, as the two are seen at an event in Paris last month

Caring for her craft: The 32-year-old Mexican actress revealed that she and the 57-year-old filmmaker had clashed over the portrayal of her paramedic character Cam Thompson

She told Screenrant in an interview Tuesday that she and Bay 'went at each other, at our throats' on set.

Eiza explained: '[The argument was over] Something I did. I was frustrated because listen, I felt a lot of pressure to bring to life a paramedic that felt real in the time that we're living.

'First responders have been dedicating their lives fully, forever obviously, but more than ever. It's very transparently obvious what they are bringing to our society. And so I just didn't want to make a joke or cartoon version of who they were.'

Going at it: She told Screenrant in an interview Tuesday that she and Bay 'went at each other, at our throats' on set (they are seen together in Berlin last month)

She certainly seemed to be taking the role very seriously as she really wanted to embody the character.

Eiza explained: 'I really wanted to level up and bring something that would feel proud of. So I was very vocal about certain things that I didn't feel would be right.

'And then he'd be like, "Just let me do it. Trust me." So we would butt heads a lot, but that's part of the creative process. It's sort of speaking up about what your thoughts are and then finding a common ground.'

'I really wanted to level up and bring something that would feel proud of': She (seen in London last month) certainly seemed to be taking the role very seriously as she really wanted to embody the character

Things ended up being copacetic after the dust up as Eiza told the publication that they got along perfectly after that as they were comfortable enough to discuss their ideas.

This is not the first time an actress has detailed an unpleasant experience with Bay as both Megan Fox and Kate Beckinsale have both aired their grievances over working with the filmmaker.

Back in June 2020, Megan called the movie industry 'ruthlessly misogynistic' in a viral Instagram post as she responded to a viral discussion on how she has been mistreated by Hollywood and sexualized as a young actress.

Megan addressed the rumors of her mistreatment at the hands of directors Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg, who feature in several anecdotes circulating online.

Taking a stand: This is not the first time an actress has detailed an unpleasant experience with Bay as both Megan Fox (pictured) and Kate Beckinsale have both aired their grievances over working with the filmmaker

Referencing the time Bay asked her to wear a bikini and dance under a waterfall in Bad Boys II, Megan wrote, 'I was around 15 or 16 years old when I was an extra in Bad Boys II. There are multiple interviews where I shared the anecdote of being chosen for the scene and the conversations that took place surrounding it. It's important to note however that when I auditioned for Transformers I was 19 or 20.'

She goes on to describe her experience auditioning for Transformers in response to fans who say she was taken advantage of.

'I did 'work' (me pretending to know how to hold a wrench) on one of Michael's Ferrari's during one of the audition scenes. It was at the Platinum Dunes studio parking lot, there were several other crew members and employees present and I was at no point undressed or anything similar.

'So as far as this particular audition story I was not underaged at the time and I was not made to 'wash' or work on someone's cars in a way that was extraneous from the material in the actual script.

Back in June 2020, Megan called the movie industry 'ruthlessly misogynistic' in a viral Instagram post as she responded to a viral discussion on how she has been mistreated by Hollywood and sexualized as a young actress

Greatly appreciated: The actress had a lot to say as she thanked fans for their support after highlighting the sexualization she's suffered since she was a teen

'I hope that whatever opinions are formed around these episodes will at least be seeded in the facts of the events.

'When it comes to my direct experiences with Michael, and Steven for that matter, I was never assaulted or preyed upon in what I felt was a sexual manner,' she continued.

Hinting at more traumatic experiences in the industry, Megan teased the 'many names' that 'deserve to be going viral in cancel culture'.

She ended her note, 'I'm thankful to all of you who are brave enough to speak out and I'm grateful to all of you who are taking it upon yourselves to support, uplift, and bring comfort to those who have been harmed by a violent and toxic societal paradigm.'

'I was never preyed upon': Megan also addressed rumors of mistreatment at the hands of directors Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg, who feature in several anecdotes circulating online

Flashback: Megan was 15 and in tenth grade when she filmed this scene in Bad Boys II

In 2011 Megan was fired from Transformers, after rocketing to fame in their first two movies.

The move came after she compared Bay to Hitler, and was rumored to have been at executive producer Steven Spielberg's request.

At the time she had told Wonderland magazine of Bay: 'He's like Napoleon and he wants to create this insane, infamous madman reputation.

'He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is. So he's a nightmare to work for but when you get him away from set, and he's not in director mode, I kind of really enjoy his personality because he's so awkward, so hopelessly awkward. He has no social skills at all.

Yikes: In 2011 Megan was fired from Transformers, after rocketing to fame in their first two movies as the move came after she compared Bay to Hitler, and was rumored to have been at executive producer Steven Spielberg's request

'And it's endearing to watch him. He's vulnerable and fragile in real life and then on set he's a tyrant. Shia [LaBeouf] and I almost die when we make a Transformers movie. He has you do some really insane things that insurance would never let you do.'

However Bay later revealed the duo were back on good terms, describing her as 'family' before Fox's scathing June 2020 Instagram post.

Then in 2016, Kate Beckinsale revealed she was told to 'work out' by Bay if she wanted to win a role in 2001 Hollywood action movie, Pearl Harbor.

The talented actress, now 48, detailed her shock at being told by the movie's director that she may need to shed the pounds if she wanted to bag her breakout role as Lieutenant Evelyn Johnson.

Shocking: In 2016, Kate Beckinsale revealed she was told to 'work out' by Bay if she wanted to win a role in 2001 Hollywood action movie, Pearl Harbor

Truly beautiful: The talented actress, now 48, detailed her shock at being told by the movie's director that she may need to shed the pounds if she wanted to bag her breakout role as Lieutenant Evelyn Johnson

Appearing on The Graham Norton Show in May 2016, Kate explained: 'I dont think I fitted the type of actress Michael Bay, the director, had met before.

'I think he was baffled by me because my boobs werent bigger than my head and I wasnt blonde.

'Id just had my daughter and had lost weight but was told that if I got the part Id have to work out and I just didnt understand why a 1940s nurse would do that.

'And then, when we were promoting the film, Michael was asked why he had chosen Ben (Affleck) and Josh (Hartnett) he said, "I have worked with Ben before and I love him and Josh is so manly and a wonderful actor".

'And then when he was asked about me, hed say, "Kate wasnt so attractive that she would alienate the female audience".

'He kept saying it everywhere we went and we went to a lot of places.'

Appearing on The Graham Norton Show in May 2016, Kate explained: ' I dont think I fitted the type of actress Michael Bay, the director, had met before. I think he was baffled by me because my boobs werent bigger than my head and I wasnt blonde.'

Action shot: Kate pictured in character during the 2001 film as she explained during the chat show appearance: 'Id just had my daughter and had lost weight but was told that if I got the part Id have to work out and I just didnt understand why a 1940s nurse would do that'

The film, which documented the Japanese Navy's military strike against the US in 1941, was Kate's first major role and saw her play Nurse Lt. Evelyn Johnson.

It was only her second part in a major Hollywood film - after 1999's Brokedown Palace, which saw her and Claire Danes co-star as teenagers jailed in Thailand on drug-smuggling charges.

Meanwhile, Ambulance stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen as Will, a military veteran who turns to his adopted brother Danny  a life-long criminal played by Jake Gyllenhaal  when he needs money to pay for surgery for his wife.

Danny brings Will into a plot to rob a bank for $32 million, but when the rest of their crew are gunned down by police, they hijack an ambulance with EMT Cam Thompson (Gonzalez).

Although she initially tries to escape, she opts to stay with the two fleeing men as she tries to save the life of a police officer whom Will shot.

Ambulance hits theaters this Friday, April 8.
Katie Piper has branded cancel culture cyber bullying, describing it as a new way to manipulate young women.

The activist and TV presenter, 38, said people need to stop shaming women for their pasts and instead help them to evolve.

Speaking to the Mail, she said: For me [cancel culture] is a new way to manipulate young women into behaving in a way society deems they should. Its cyber bullying under the guise of social activism and public good.'

Speaking out: Katie Piper, 38, has branded cancel culture cyber bullying, describing it as a new way to manipulate young women (pictured last month)

She continued: What we need to do as women is humanise women having different sections of their lives and not shame them for their past or prevent them from their experiences that help them grow and learn because when we cancel people, we stop people evolving as a person.

Its like saying you have one chance and if you dont get it right thats you over. The only way you silence or whisper is by taking the mic and sometimes it is good to speak up and be heard on platforms and thats valuable you shouldnt let people feel like you dont have a space.

Her comments come months after she defended comedian Jo Brand over a joke she made about an acid attack, claiming she did not want to be part of the witch hunt.

Opinion: The activist and TV presenter said people need to stop shaming women for their pasts and instead help them to evolve

Funnywoman Jo was discussing the milkshake attacks on a number of politicians on a BBC Radio 4 show in 2019 when she said: Im thinking why bother with a milkshake when you could get some battery acid.

Addressing the comments earlier this year, Katie, who survived an acid attack in 2008, said: I love her comedy. Shes super-smart and what she was saying was in the comedy circuit in the context of a joke about it and was in no way reflective of how she feels about disability or disfigurement.

I never commented on it and I dont feel any which way about it at all. Im not joining this witch hunt.

Katie told the Mail: In western society we like to label people and put them in a box. Youre burnt so you should talk about things to do with scars. Its down to the individual you shouldnt let people typecast you.

Compassionate: Her comments come after she defended Jo Brand over a joke she made about an acid attack, claiming she did not want to be part of the witch hunt (Jo pictured in 2019)

The Loose Women regular, who recently landed a new Sunday morning show on ITV, was speaking to the Mail as part of a new study by ASICS to investigate what happens to mental health and wellbeing when people dont exercise.

The global study found not exercising for a week has the same impact on mental wellbeing as a week of broken sleep, but that 15 minutes of exercise can trigger a mental uplift.

Katie, who is a keen runner, said giving up for a week left her feeling sluggish and significantly reduced her ability to juggle.

She said: My sleep really suffered. I was quite irritable. I just didnt feel I could show off the best version of myself and when I got the results my mood had dropped by 14 per cent.

Exercise has been such a vital tool in my life and it reminded me how much I need to be consistent.

Wellbeing: Mother-of-two Katie also spoke out about how exercise impacts her mental health, with the star enjoying yoga, running and weightlifting

The mother-of-two, who enjoys yoga, running and weightlifting, said women should be wary when discussing how to juggle exercise with motherhood and work.

She said: I am an advocate of being a morning person. There is something to be said for seizing the day

I think its really important, particularly as a woman, to not do other women a disservice and say I get up at four and I do everything, because to tell people you can have it all isnt really true and it makes everyone else feel like theyre doing something wrong.

Katie, who was awarded an OBE in February, also revealed that she recently did some good housekeeping on her Instagram to mute those who make her feel envious or inadequate.

She said social media cannot be blamed for making someone feel down, claiming it is the responsibility of the user to exercise a certain amount of self-control and discipline.

She said: My approach is down to personal responsibility. You know its making you feel crap. You cant really blame social media because its about how you use it.

Its a bit like saying I drink 20 bottles of alcohol a day, alcohol is bad. No its how you use it. Youve got to use it responsibly. I think its the same for social. Know your limits.
Jade Goody's son Bobby Brazier has said he 'misses what could've been' with his late mother, but says he wasn't 'with her long enough to miss her'.

The Big Brother star died from cervical cancer aged 27 in 2009 when her sons Bobby and Freddie were just five and four.

Speaking to The Face, Bobby, now 18, said he is frequently told by people who knew his mother what a 'presence' she had.

Interview: Jade Goody's son Bobby Brazier has said he 'misses what could've been' with his late mother, but says he wasn't 'with her long enough to miss her' (pictured in 2021)

He said: 'I don't feel like I've missed out on a mum. It's normal life to me. I've kind of spent more life without her than I did with her.'

When asked if he misses her, Bobby replied: 'I don't. Because I don't feel like I was with her long enough to miss her.

'I miss what could've been. I hear all the time she was such a presence, that she was one of a kind. What hurts most is that it wasn't just losing anyone, it was losing Jade.'

Bobby, whose father is TV presenter Jeff Brazier, added that he would loved to have seen what other people saw in his mother when she found fame.

Family: The Big Brother star died from cervical cancer aged 27 in 2009 when her sons Bobby and Freddie were just five and four (pictured in 2006)

Bobby lives with his father, his stepmother Kate Dwyer and brother Freddie and is currently carving ut a career as a model.

Jeff previously praised his sons for their resilience in dealing with Jade's death at such a young age.

Speaking to The Sun in 2020, he said: 'My gosh, they are just so resilient. Of course they were so young when she died and it pains me to think they never knew Jade in the same way we all did.

'When Bobby landed his first fashion magazine cover [for Man About Town] he said he hoped his mum was looking down on him and smiling. And Im sure she was.

Candid: Bobby told how he misses 'what could've been' and is frequently told by people who knew his mother what a 'presence' she had (pictured in March 2022)

'When I look at Bobby and Freddie I see their mothers colourful personality shining through. I mean, Jade was one of the biggest characters out there and the boys have both inherited that from her.'

Jeff paid tribute to Freddie at the end of September, on his 16th birthday.

Sharing a series of snaps of him surrounded by balloons, Jeff wrote a sweet caption to go alongside it: 'Its not for parents to define a childs purpose but if this kid doesnt help thousands of people somehow Ill be very surprised.

'Id give anything to have @freddybraz1ers sense of adventure, energy and enthusiasm to have fun and depth and sensitivity around caring for others.

'Excited for him to get the academic phase done this year so he can unleash his creative gifts on the world.'
Irina Shayk showcased her statuesque figure in a clinging swimsuit for a sizzling new album she posted to Instagram on Wednesday.

The 36-year-old supermodel, who shares her five-year-old daughter Lea De Seine with her ex Bradley Cooper, has been soaking in the sun.

One of her smoldering snapshots showed her emerging soaking wet from the ocean and sweeping her drenched hair away from her face.

When you got it: Irina Shayk showcased her statuesque figure in a clinging swimsuit for a sizzling new album she posted to Instagram on Wednesday

Irina, who was born in an industrial Soviet town on the slopes of the Urals, declared in her caption that she was 'MIA' and added a green heart emoji.

She made sure to feature a couple of scenic photographs too, including one of a dazzling sunset dappling over the ocean.

Last month she could be spotted at London Fashion Week joining a cavalcade of models sauntering down the runway for Burberry.

In late February after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Irina posted a peace sign to Instagram and wrote: 'No To War.'

Looking fab: The 36-year-old supermodel, who shares her five-year-old daughter Lea De Seine with her ex Bradley Cooper, has been soaking in the sun

Swanking about: One of her smoldering snapshots showed her emerging soaking wet from the ocean and sweeping her drenched hair away from her face

Gorgeous: She made sure to feature a couple of scenic photographs too, including one of a dazzling sunset dappling over the ocean

Jet set: She made sure to feature a couple of scenic photographs too, including one of a dazzling sunset dappling over the ocean

She added that she would give money to both the Ukrainian Red Cross and to UNICEF, noting that fans could find donation links in her Instagram bio.

Irina's dating history includes Cristiano Ronaldo and last year she was briefly linked to Kanye West in the wake of his split from Kim Kardashian.

She and Bradley are such close co-parents that they have made sure to live just blocks apart in Greenwich Village in order to raise their daughter.

'Hes a full-on, hands-on dad - no nanny,' Irina told Highsnobiety last year. 'Lea went on holiday with him for almost two weeks - I didnt call them once.'

Sizzling sensation: Last month she could be spotted at London Fashion Week joining a cavalcade of models sauntering down the runway for Burberry

The mother of one added: 'Me and her father are very strict. When she finishes eating, she gets up from the table, takes her plate, says "thank you." Without "please" or "thank you" shes not getting anything.'

Irina noted: 'Its hard, because she has so many toys. I had one doll, and I still have this doll. Blonde, blue eyes, big Russian doll.'

The Soviet-born fashionista explained: 'My grandma used to make clothes for her. And I always explain: "Look, this is my doll. I had only one." Or sometimes: "You have this candy. I used to have candy only for Christmas."'
Married at First Sight Australia is a global phenomenon.

But it seems some things were lost in translation when the new season premiered on American cable network Lifetime last week.

The show may only be two episodes in, but U.S. viewers are already confused by the lack of diversity, ear-splitting music volume and excessive lip filler.

Why Americans are furious over MAFS Australia: Viewers complain about the lack of diversity and 'fake lips' as the show is picked up by U.S. network Lifetime. (Pictured: Domenica Calarco)

The main bugbear for Americans was the mostly white line-up of brides and grooms.

In the U.S., racially diverse casts are common on reality TV, and there are usually several black, Asian or mixed-race couples on MAFS America.

'No POC [people of colour]. I won't be watching,' one American viewer wrote on Instagram after the MAFS Australia season premiere on March 30.

'No POC': The main bugbear for Americans was the mostly white line-up of brides and grooms

Response: One person said 'that's just the demographics' in Australia, but others disagreed, arguing the producers should have made more of an effort

Coming soon: A viewer from Australia said there were more participants to be revealed, including 'a gorgeous Asian girl and a couple of mixed Asians'

Diversity: While there were no black people on MAFS Australia this year, the Asian community was represented by Selina Chhaur, who is half-Cambodian and half-Chinese; Ella Ding (pictured), whose surname suggests she is half-Chinese; and Al Perkins, who is half-Malaysian

'Are there no Spanish, black or Asian people in Australia?' another commented. 'Every season they all look the same.'

'Why is everyone blonde and white?' a third asked.

A fourth viewer added: 'No diversity / inclusion on MAFS Australia. I haven't watched one season yet because of the lack of diversity. Other people do exist.'

One person said 'that's just the demographics' in Australia, but others disagreed, arguing the producers should have made more of an effort.

However, someone noted there were more participants to be revealed, including 'a gorgeous Asian girl and a couple of mixed Asians'.

'Does anyone have real lips?' The Aussie brides' fondness for Botox and lip filler was criticised by Americans, some of whom also said they couldn't understand the stars' thick accents

Lost in translation: One fan said, 'I can't keep up with what they're saying with the accent'

'Love and drama come in waves': Lifetime, which airs the American version of Married At First Sight, has been the U.S. broadcast partner for MAFS Australia for several years now

While there were no black people on MAFS Australia this year, the Asian community was represented by Selina Chhaur, who is half-Cambodian, half-Chinese; Ella Ding, whose surname suggests she is half-Chinese; and Al Perkins, who is half-Malaysian.

Meanwhile, other viewers complained about the background music volume, saying it was so loud they struggled to hear people speaking.

'Please take the background music off. We can't hear what they are even saying,' one disgruntled fan wrote on social media.

Another added: 'What's with the melodramatic songs? It's marriage, not war.'

Can you speak up? Other viewers complained about the background music volume, saying it was so loud they struggled to hear people speaking. (Pictured: Mitch Eynaud and Ella Ding)

Not happy, Jan: 'Please take the background music off. We can't hear what they are even saying,' one disgruntled fan wrote on social media

The Aussie brides' fondness for Botox and lip filler was criticised by Americans, some of whom also said they couldn't understand the stars' thick accents.

'Does anyone in Australia have real lips?' one frustrated viewer asked, to which another replied: 'They're all white with perfect bodies and lip filler.'

One fan said: 'I can't keep up with what they're saying with the accent.'

But despite these criticisms, many viewers agreed MAFS Australia was better than their own version, which is produced by Kinetic Content for the Lifetime network.

Mixed reception: 'They're all white with perfect bodies and lip filler. No diversity whatsoever,' one American viewer said of the casting. (Pictured: Samantha Moitzi and Al Perkins)

'Love this show! The process [is] so much better than the U.S. version,' one fan said.

'So much better than the U.S. one. It's obviously scripted but the drama makes it worth watching. The U.S. one pretends to be "real". Such a bore,' another added.

A third commented: 'Can't wait. This is my favourite show. The Aussie version is by far, 150 per cent better than the U.S. version.'

Success story: Despite these criticisms, many viewers agreed MAFS Australia was better than their own version, which is produced by Kinetic Content for the Lifetime network

Popular: Americans praised the Aussie version for its gripping format and 'scripted' drama

Lifetime, which airs the American version of Married At First Sight, has been the U.S. broadcast partner for MAFS Australia for several years now.

However, it does not air every season of the Aussie edition.

MAFS Australia is also very popular in the United Kingdom, where it airs on E4.
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Mark Wahlberg has listed his massive, six-acre Beverly Hills Park estate for $87.5million, 13 years after purchasing the plot of land for $8M and building his dream family home.

The 50-year-old actor initially splashed out $8.25million for a dirt lot in 2009 in the exclusive North Beverly Park community located in the canyon overlooking Hollywood, and enlisted the help of architect Richard Landry of The Landry Design Group to create the home of his dreams.

Now, more than 12 years later, Wahlberg is saying goodbye to the family compound he built from scratch, which features an astonishing 12-bedrooms and 20-bathrooms across 30,500 square feet of living space.

Remarkable: Mark Wahlberg listed his massive, six-acre Beverly Hills Park estate for $87.5million, 13 years after purchasing the plot of land for $8M and building his dream family home

Home sweet home: The massive piece of property is nestled in the canyon just below Mulholland Highway, and overlooks the city of Los Angeles

Unreal: The 50-year-old actor initially splashed out $8.25million for a dirt lot in 2009 in the exclusive North Beverly Park community located in the canyon overlooking Hollywood, and enlisted the help of architect Richard Landry of The Landry Design Group to create the home of his dreams

The 267,335-square-foot lot is nestled behind guarded gates below Mulholland Drive, in the ultra swanky area with neighbors including Denzel Washington, Sylvester Stallone, Justin Bieber, Eddie Murphy and Samuel L. Jackson and Lisa Vanderpump, to name a few.

A spectacular two-story entry welcomes guests into the home and features a grand foyer with a dual staircase and gorgeous wainscoting along the walls.

Round arched hallways throughout the home offer a more Roman design to the contemporary living spaces, with a family room leading to an extensive library.

Marble flooring is used throughout the front of the home until guests reach the kitchen, where dark wooden floors add an extra earthy element to the bright white designs.

Double counter tops with additional cabinets provide ample prep and storage space for the most amateur to professional chefs, with built-in, top-of-the-line appliances to complement the six-burner stove.

Great area: The 267,335-square-foot lot is nestled behind guarded gates below Mulholland Drive, in the ultra swanky area with neighbors including Denzel Washington, Sylvester Stallone, Justin Bieber, Eddie Murphy and Samuel L. Jackson and Lisa Vanderpump, to name a few

Picture perfect: Now, more than 12 years later, Wahlberg is saying goodbye to the family compound he built from scratch, which features an astonishing 12-bedrooms and 20-bathrooms across 30,500 square feet of living space

Inviting: A spectacular two-story entry welcomes guests into the home and features a grand foyer with a dual staircase and gorgeous wainscoting along the walls

Blending designs: Round arched hallways throughout the home offer a more Roman design to the contemporary living spaces, with a family room leading to an extensive library

California cool: Outdoor elements are brought inside with the use of floor-to-ceiling windows

Let's eat! Marble flooring is used throughout the front of the home until guests reach the kitchen, where dark wooden floors add an extra earthy element to the bright white designs

Goals: Double counter tops with additional cabinets provide ample prep and storage space for the most amateur to professional chefs, with built-in, top-of-the-line appliances to complement the six-burner stove

A bright blue breakfast nook has wall-to-wall glass French doors, and received finishing touches with a sparkling chandelier and floral curtains.

One cozy room included a fireplace with a comfortable couch and extra wide crown molding along the ceiling.

Upstairs, the primary room was a sight to be seen as it featured a sitting area with a full couch, chair and ottoman setup next to the luxurious California King-sized four-post bed.

If the bedroom wasn't enough, the closet was surely coveted, with room for an entire shop's worth of clothing to be stored in custom cabinetry and multiple crystal chandeliers sparkling from the ceiling.

Another dressing room appeared to be designed specially for Marky Mark with dark wooden features and athletic shoes covering multiple walls.

A treat: A bright blue breakfast nook has wall-to-wall glass French doors, and received finishing touches with a sparkling chandelier and floral curtains

Theme: One cozy room included a fireplace with a comfortable couch and extra wide crown molding along the ceiling

Sweet dreams: Upstairs, the primary room was a sight to be seen as it featured a sitting area with a full couch, chair and ottoman setup next to the luxurious California King-sized four-post bed

What more could you need? The immaculate setup was fit for royalty, and included a fireplace, television and private patio

If the bedroom wasn't enough, the closet was surely coveted, with room for an entire shop's worth of clothing to be stored in custom cabinetry and multiple crystal chandeliers sparkling from the ceiling

Snazzy: Another dressing room appeared to be designed specially for Marky Mark with dark wooden features and athletic shoes covering multiple walls

Clean: Veering from the closets was an exquisite bathroom with marble countertops to match the floors

Happy place: Mark also built a full-scale gym at his family home, where he was known to keep a rigorous routine, and even last year packed on 20 pounds in just three weeks for his role as a boxer-turned-priest in the upcoming film Father Stu

Veering from the closets was an exquisite bathroom with marble countertops to match the floors.

Entertaining came easy for the Wahlberg family with a built-in theater which provided seating for more than a dozen people at any given time.

Mark also built a full-scale gym at his family home, where he was known to keep a rigorous routine, and even last year packed on 20 pounds in just three weeks for his role as a boxer-turned-priest in the upcoming film Father Stu.

In 2018, Wahlberg shocked his followers when he revealed his carefully regimented schedule where he claimed that his 'typical' day began with him waking up at 2:30 am, followed by 'prayer time' 15 minutes later and getting to the gym by 3:40 a.m.

But the real sweet spot was the outdoor space which was transformed into a serene hideaway with a sparkling pool and spa, in addition to a resort-like grotto.

Wahlberg included a firepit and sitting area into the design plans when building the massive pool area outside, which is nearby a guesthouse and skatepark.

And after swimming a few laps, he made sure he could practice his swing with his own five-hole golf course built on to the side of his property.

The impressive estate was built from the ground up after Mark purchased the land for $8.25million in 2009, and as of 2015, was finally finished building the mansion.

He loves it: In 2018, Wahlberg shocked his followers when he revealed his carefully regimented schedule where he claimed that his 'typical' day began with him waking up at 2:30 am, followed by 'prayer time' 15 minutes later and getting to the gym by 3:40 a.m.

Movie madness: Entertaining came easy for the Wahlberg family with a built-in theater which provided seating for more than a dozen people at any given time

Retreat: But the real sweet spot was the outdoor space which was transformed into a serene hideaway with a sparkling pool and spa, in addition to a resort-like grotto

Relax: Wahlberg included a firepit and sitting area into the design plans when building the massive pool area outside, which is nearby a guesthouse and skatepark

What more could you ask for: And after swimming a few laps, he made sure he could practice his swing with his own five-hole golf course built on to the side of his property

Real estate: The impressive estate was built from the ground up after Mark purchased the land for $8.25million in 2009, and as of 2015, was finally finished building the mansion
Wendy Williams seemed to be in high spirits on Wednesday when she shared a photo of herself grinning ear-to-ear amid her ongoing legal battle with Wells Fargo.

The 57-year-old star of The Wendy Williams Show posted the image to Instagram and wrote that she was 'Ready for court,' though she later edited to just say that she was 'Ready.'

The talk show host  who didn't specify if she was going to court on Wednesday  has been engaged in a lawsuit with the bank after it blocked her from accessing her funds due to its contention that she requires a guardian.

Happy warrior: Wendy Williams, 57, seemed to be in high spirits in an Instagram photo from Wednesday, as she said she's 'Ready for court,' before editing it to just 'Ready'

In her photo, Wendy looked upbeat and healthy, a contrast from recent months, when she had been spotted looking frail and sometimes using a wheel.

She looked cozy in a furry leopard-print coat atop a black dress, and she showed off a large Louis Vuitton handbag with leopard-print trim on the bottom and a thick gold clasp and handle.

The gossip star wore her long blond hair parted down the middle and draped down her chest.

In addition to look great, Wendy said last month that she's looking forward to returning to host The Wendy Williams Show, even though the show's producer and distributor announced in February that it was being canceled.

On the mend? Wendy looked healthy and beamed after she was seen looking frail and sometimes in a wheelchair in recent months

So far, no end date has been announced, and the show is still going through guest hosts, including Sherri Shepherd and Michael Rapaport.

Sherri has been announced as the new permanent host of the talk show Sherri following her lengthy fill-in stint for Wendy, and her upcoming show is set to take over Wendy's time slot in the fall.

Wendy hasn't been seen on her show since July 2021.

In addition to the turmoil over her series, the host has been in conflict with Wells Fargo after the bank refused her access to her money.

Williams has not been able to access her funds since mid-January, and in February a lawyer for her bank sent a letter to New York County Supreme Court Judge Arlene Bluth seeking a hearing over her finances and claiming that she required a guardian.

Lori Schiller, the entertainer's former financial advisor, had claimed in January that Wendy was 'of unsound mind,' which led to her accounts being frozen.

Locked out: She's been engaged in a lawsuit with Wells Fargo after the bank blocked her from accessing her funds in mid-January, later claiming that she requires a guardian; seen in June

Williams' attorney has denied Schiller's claim and also lambasted the bank for exceeding its authority.

Subsequently, Wells Fargo claimed that it merely was seeking to have a 'temporary guardian or evaluator to review the situation and ensure that [Williams'] affairs are being properly handled.'

The bank 'has strong reason to believe' Williams is 'the victim of undue influence and financial exploitation,' it claimed in a filing obtained by Page Six.

After she was denied access to her funds, Williams filed for a temporary restraining order against Wells Fargo

She claimed in March that she had been unable to pay her mortgage and mounting bills since her money was locked away.

Conflict: Williams' former financial advisor claimed she was 'of unsound mind,' and the host later said she hadn't been able to pay her bills or mortgage because of the hold; seen in 2019

'Well, um, you know I want to spend more time with my family. And, you know, working out and waiting for the responses to my money situation and Wells Fargo. And they don't like that,' she said.

Subsequently, a member of her team alleged that Williams' interest in having her son be more involved in her finances may have led to Wells Fargo's actions,

In the same Instagram video update from March, Williams had claimed that her fired manager Bernie Young had been scheming against her.

'I know for a fact that Bernie Young used my American Express card to hire an attorney to file a petition against me,' she claimed. 'That was done with my American Express card.'
: fdfdfe (), : OperaHouse

 : apan deploys Lu Wei's order to lift a rock and hit itself in the foot

: BBS  (Tue Apr 5 21:45:06 2022, )



The Ministry of Defense of Japan plans to deploy missile units of the Ground

Self-Defense Force on Ishigaki Island in Okinawa Prefecture before the end

of 2022.The scale is about 500 to 600 people. Guides have been deployed in

Amami Oshima, Okinawa Main Island, and Miyako Island in Okinawa Prefecture.

The bomb troops, plus the troops on Ishigaki Island, will form a pattern of

4 strongholds. Japan deploys missile department on Ishigaki Island The team

is essentially a traditional island chain containment method, which will not

pose any threat to the Chinese military. Now this year Today, if a military

conflict breaks out across the Taiwan Strait, Ishigaki Island will be the

first target to be hit. Japan's missile force It is "vulnerable" to the

Chinese army. The Taiwan issue involves China's core interests, and there is

no possibility of concession in the slightest.When it is necessary to break

through the "first island chain", China's various military services will

advance together and collectively play a role.

With the power transfer and in-depth development of the powers of East Asia,

the Sino-U.S. bipolar confrontation pattern has become increasingly

finalized. The U.S. and Japan are now Intervention in Taiwan Strait affairs

has been regarded as the key to contain Chinas rise and hinder the great

rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.Edge strategic grasper. The two sides

borrowed weight from each other and asked for something, and it hit it off.

From the beginning of this year until now, the U.S. and Japan Focusing on

the situation in the Taiwan Strait, the alliance mainly carried out the

following cooperative actions.

First, the leaders of the two countries, government department leaders, and

affairs-level officials have repeatedly emphasized the importance of

maintaining "peace and stability" across the Taiwan Strait through various

diplomatic channels, and reiterated that they will strengthen joint military

deterrence and crisis management capabilities. At the same time, it should

be noted that Japans external propaganda intentionally links the tension

in the Taiwan Strait with the confrontation between China and Japan on the

Diaoyu Islands (including Japans distorted reports on Chinas Maritime

Police Law), the safety of the Southwestern islands and even the situation

in the South China Sea, by creating peripheral wars. The crisis atmosphere

has achieved the goal of drawing the United States to reiterate its defense

obligations against Japan, continue to strengthen its own military power (

such as acquiescing in defense costs to exceed the traditional upper limit

of 1% of GDP), and it is controversial and controversial for procurement.

Sensitive high-end weapons and equipment give legitimacy.

Second, the two countries have significantly increased the number and

frequency of reconnaissance surveillance, intelligence collection, and joint

training in the Taiwan Strait and its surrounding Diaoyu Islands and the

East China Sea to deter mainland China with a high-pressure military posture

. For example, data shows that since May 2021, the focus area of 

8203;the US military's reconnaissance aircraft has slowly shifted from the

South China Sea to the East China Sea. At the same time, from January to May

2021, the number of joint maritime power trainings between the United

States and Japan greatly exceeded the same period in the previous two years,

and most of the exercise locations were near the East China Sea, the

Okinawa Islands, and the Philippine Sea not far from Taiwan.

Third, the two countries actively organize other countries to issue joint

Taiwan-related statements, and encourage the inviting of foreign powers such

as India, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany to

send warships and aircraft to Chinas coastal waters and conduct

multinational joint training. At present, through a flexible and easy

security cooperation mechanism such as the "U.S.-Japan Alliance+",

Washington and Tokyo are pinning their hopes on creating a "quasi-alliance"

for Indian maritime security in the coastal waters of China to enhance

conventional deterrence, and using "great forces to suppress the border."

Use momentum to disperse mainland Chinas strategic energy and military

resources in the direction of the Taiwan Strait.

Fourth, the two countries have begun to focus on the military conflict in

Taiwan to conduct table-top weapon exercises and actual combat-oriented

military exercises. Its geographic scope covers the entire "offshore" of

China. In the future, it is possible to further strengthen the military

intelligence sharing and defense cooperation involving China on the "U.S.,

Japan, and Taiwan" trilateral.

Fifth, the two countries have also built forward military bases for

interfering operations against Taiwan and naval blockade against China with

the Southwest Islands of Japan as the core, preparing to introduce new

weapons, organize new troops, and create a new combat system. Among them, in

Amami Oshima, Okinawa Main Island, Miyakojima, and Ishigaki Island, the

Japanese side is accelerating the improvement of anti-ship missile and air

defense missile forces as the core, and electronic warfare forces as the

core, and the electronic warfare forces as the core of the cross-domain "

refusal" operations against China. Force deployment. The U.S. seeks to

dispatch a new type of littoral operation force capable of performing "

island hopping" to the southwestern islands under the guidance of the Marine

Corps' "Expeditionary Advance Base" operational concept, introduce new

types of medium- and long-range land-based missiles and more long-range

missiles. It is also proposed to establish a joint combat command with the

Japanese Self-Defense Forces.

In short, on the one hand, the United States and Japan are fanning the

situation in the Taiwan Strait and calling out thieves to be thieves. On the

other hand, they use this as a cover to accelerate the comprehensive

construction of a frontier deterrence system against China in an attempt to

control and constrain Chinas coastal communications, threaten the economic

heart of the mainlands coastal areas, and regain control. The initiative

in military competition with China in the West Pacific.

--

 :WWW  mitbbs.com [FROM: 103.]


She attempted to kill a candid bikini photo of herself that had leaked onto the internet last year and has been open about using filters in her past.

But Khloe Kardashian boasted about her jean brand Good American being a 'platform for inclusivity and body positivity' as she introduced the latest women joining her Good Squad.

'Good American has always been more than just a fashion brand - it's a platform for inclusivity and body positivity,' Khloe captioned a shot of her with the new models.

Mixed messages: Khloe Kardashian boasted about her jean brand Good American being a 'platform for inclusivity and body positivity' a year after attempting to kill an unfiltered bikini photo

'We've worked hard to be a brand that empowers women, by redefining what is valued or even allowed in fashion by breaking down barriers and challenging dated norms,' the caption continued.

'When Good American launched, we introduced the world to the GOODSQUAD, a group of women who represent the brand and our values. Six years later, in October 2021, we launched a new casting call where we met thousands of women in 7 cities.'

The newest Good Squad consists of eight women from all across the country who were found in an open casting call late last year to become the new faces of the company.

'From the very beginning, we've embraced body positivity and worked hard to be a brand that empowers women, by supporting and inspiring confidence. Our intention has always been to redefine what is valued or even allowed in fashion by breaking down barriers and challenging dated norms.

Calling her out: A fan took Khloe to task for contradictory messaging the reality star had been putting out there

Scrubbing clean: Last year, Khloe attempted to get this bikini photo of her appearing unfiltered and un-airbrushed removed from the internet

'We do this by promising inclusivity in our designs, but we also want our message and movement to represented by real bada**es - our GOOD SQUAD!' reads a description of the squad on the Good American website.

Khloe was taken to task by a commenter who called out her contradictory messaging over the years.

'How about Khloe worked hard as f*** to get the unedited picture of her in a bikini washed from the internet.... Khloe also worked hard at posting edited and filter photos of her self all over the internet, polluting the minds of the young woman following her. They been selling us lies for 20 years now - we have made them billion of dollars. Enough is enough,' they commented.

Khloe previously admitted to being a fan of 'a good filter, good lighting and an edit here and there' after her unfiltered bikini image went viral back in April 2021.

After the unedited image began to make the rounds, it was reported that Khloe and her family were working overtime to wipe any trace of it from the internet.

Squad goals: Khloe's jean brand found eight new women to represent the brand after a nationwide casting call last year

Khloe addressed the drama on Instagram days later, as she shared live videos of herself to prove that her body 'isn't photoshopped.'

Subsequently she issued a lengthy statement where she spoke about the pressure of being in the spotlight and her body being 'micro-analyzed' as a public figure.

The Keeping Up With the Kardashians star also revealed that being compared unfavorably to her siblings, Kim and Kourtney, in addition to 'constant ridicule and judgment' has been 'too much to bear.'

An excerpt from her message read: 'As someone who has struggled with body image her whole life, when someone takes a photo of you that isn't flattering in bad lighting or doesn't capture your body the way it is after working so hard to get it to this point  and then shares it to the world, you should have every right to ask for it to not be shared, regardless of who you are.

Speaking up: Subsequently she issued a lengthy statement where she spoke about the pressure of being in the spotlight and her body being 'micro-analyzed' as a public figure

She continued: 'My body, my image and how I choose to look and what I want to share is my choice. It's not for anyone to decide or judge what is acceptable or not anymore,' also adding that she likes a good filter, good lighting and an edit here and there.'

In 2016 Khloe confessed to airbrushing her images, telling People: 'Of course I believe in airbrushing apps, I just think airbrushing apps, like who doesn't want to airbrush a thing here or there.

'I love FaceTune, that one's great. I don't really know of many more, but a filter, that's like airbrushing. Who doesn't love a good filter? Sometimes you're having a bad day,' she said.

Khloe also admitted she likes filters to add a different hue to her images.

'I dont want to see everybody in color. I need a black and white filter sometimes.'

Khloe has come under fire in recent years for her changing face and body, with many accusing the KUWTK star of brazenly photoshopping her Instagram posts to an extent fans sometimes struggle to recognize her.

Following a slew of questions from fans, cosmetic and injectables specialist Claire McGuinness weighed in on the discussion, offering her opinion on what changes Khloe may have made.

She speculated that the mother-of-one had changed her appearance so dramatically thanks to a combination of 'surgery, injectables, weight loss... and filters, makeup and lighting'.

However, sources insisted that Khloe is not concerned with the backlash over her changing looks.

An insider told Us Weekly back in May: 'Khloe doesn't care about the backlash she's been getting from fans saying she doesn't look like herself in her recent photos.'

'She thinks she looks great,' the insider adds. 'And actually [she] does not care what people think as long as she's happy.'
Teresa Giudice's table-flipping temper flared back up during an argument with Margaret Josephs in a new preview for the Real Housewives of New Jersey.

The tension between the women, which occurred at a group dinner with their cast mates in Nashville, reached a boiling point when the 49-year-old mother-of-four accuses Josephs, 54, of questioning her relationship with her fiance Louie Ruelas.

'You know everybody, Margaret,' Giudice sneered, before Josephs snapped back at her.

Heated: Teresa Giudice's table-flipping temper flared back up during an argument with Margaret Josephs in a new preview for the Real Housewives of New Jersey

The fashion designer shot back: 'Why? Because you said that I spread the rumors about Luis?'

Josephs seemed to be alluding to resurfaced reports about Ruelas, in which his ex-fiancee Vanessa Reiser claimed he 'demanded' she be 'available for sex whenever he wanted.'

'If I objected to his demands, Luis Ruelas would punish me. He would be nasty, withdraw from me, and blame me for what happened,' she alleged in court documents, obtained by Page Six.

Angry: The tension between the women, which occurred at a group dinner with their cast mates in Nashville, reached a boiling point when the 49-year-old mother-of-four accuses Josephs, 54, of questioning her relationship with her fiance Louie Ruelas

'You know everybody, Margaret,' Giudice sneered, before Josephs snapped back at her

Flinging insults: The fashion designer shot back: 'Why? Because you said that I spread the rumors about Luis?'

After Giudice nodded, indicating she believes Josephs is responsible for spreading the gossip, the Macbeth Collection founder called her rival a 'sick, disgusting liar.'

The insult enraged Giudice so much she hurled all the drinks, food, plates and cutlery in front of her onto her co-star.

Josephs was taken aback as a red drink stained her plunging white minidress.

Food fight! Josephs seemed to be alluding to resurfaced reports about Ruelas, in which his ex-fiancee Vanessa Reiser claimed he 'demanded' she be 'available for sex whenever he wanted'

The rest of the table exchanged shocked glances as Giudices brother Joe Gorga queried: 'What are we doing, what are we doing?!'

While Traci Lynn Johnson held her back, Josephs murmured: 'F**king bitch.'

The friction between Giudice and Josephs grew tremendously over the past season after Josephs started digging into Ruelas' past.

Giudice also began resenting Josephs for getting her closest pal Jennifer Aydin to open up about her husband Bill's affair.

All episodes of Real Housewives of New Jersey are available on hayu.
It has been more than 40 days since Russia invaded Ukraine. According to Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), around 1,480 civilian casualties have occurred since Russian's invasion of Ukraine.

123 of the civilian casualties are reported to be children. Furthermore, 2,195 people are reported to have been injured so far.

A fresh spate of attacks by Russia in Kyiv's suburb Bucha has become the talking point at the moment. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claims that the Russian Army is committing the worst human atrocities in Bucha.

The Ukrainian human rights ombudsman said that between 150 and 300 bodies may be in mass graves next to a church in the northern Ukrainian town of Bucha. On the other hand, Russia has called the allegations monstrous forgery aimed at denigrating the army.

On Tuesday, Zelenskyy through video-conferencing, appeared before the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and appealed for help. He also lashed out at the Russian military forces of killing and abducting Ukrainian people. He also commented on the UNSCs role in war crimes like these.

Here are highlights from Zelenskyy's speech at the UNSC:

1. THE ATROCITIES BY RUSSIA

Zelenskyy held up the insane war crimes done by Russian armed forces in Ukraines Bucha. He said that the troops killed women and even entire families. They cut off the limbs and their throats. Women were raped and killed in front of their children. Their tongues were pulled out because the aggressors did not want to hear them, said Zelenskyy.

The Ukraine President also said that civilians were crushed by tanks as they sat in their cars.

2. ACT IMMEDIATELY OR CLOSE DOWN UNSC

UNSC. Photo: Getty Images

Zelenskyy, in his address, also charged at the UNSC for being a mute spectator till now. The UNSC can be simply closed. Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready to close UNSC? If your answer is no, you need to act immediately, said Zelenskyy.

He said that the UN charter must be restored and the UN system must be restored. He also said that the massacre from Syria to Somalia and from Afghanistan to Libya should have been stopped a long time ago.

3. A TRIBUNAL LIKE NUREMBERG FOR RUSSIAN MILITARY

Zelenskyy mentioned that a separate tribunal like the Nuremberg tribunal should be held for the Russian military officers who gave the order for crimes in Ukraine. Anyone who gave the criminal orders should be brought before the tribunal, said Zelenskyy.

Zelenskyy brought up the Holocaust and Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann to talk about the atrocities being commited by Russia in Ukraine.

He urged the UNSC to ensure that the Russian military war criminals dont go unpunished, I would like to remind you that Adolf Eichmann [one of the main criminals of the Holocaust] did not go unpunished.

Mossad captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, he was subsequently found guilty of war crimes, and executed in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1962.

4. RUSSIAN TROOPS DELIBERATELY DESTROYING CITIES

Photo: Reuters

Zelenskyy complained to the UNSC members that the Russian troops were deliberately destroying Ukrainian cities by airstrikes, "They deliberately blew up shelters where civilians hid from airstrikes. They are creating conditions in the temporarily occupied places to make sure as many civilians as possible are being killed. The massacre at Bucha is one of the many examples of what Russian forces have been doing."

The Ukraine President gave the example of Mariupol and Kharkiv and several other cities that the Russian military has reduced to rubble, similar to Bucha.

5. HAVE EVIDENCE

Zelenskyy also said that he has conclusive evidence against Russian military, including satellite images which show the war crimes committed by the Russian troops. I am sure every member of UN State should be interested in this and in punishing those who consider themselves immune [to consequences]. Show all the other war criminals how they will be punished if the biggest one is punished, Zelenskyy said, pointing at Russian President Vladimir Putin.

6. WHAT RUSSIA WANTS, ACCORDING TO ZELENSKYY

Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Photo: AP

Zelenskyy said that Russia wants to usurp Ukraine of all its wealth. He said that Russias leadership feels like colonisers of ancient times. They need our wealth, our people. They have already deported thousands of our people to Russia. They abducted 200 children too, said Zelenskyy.

He lashed out at the Russian military for openly looting the villages and towns. If this continues, all countries will have to rely only on their own armed forces, instead of an international law, for their security, said Zelenskyy.

He also said that Russia wanted to convert Ukraine into silent slaves.

In the end, Zelenskyy said that Ukraine needs UNSC to arrive at a decision to ensure peace in Ukraine. He asked the UNSC to take immediate steps to restore peace in Ukraine and bring to book the perpetrators of the crimes. Or if you have no other option, just dissolve yourself, Zelenskyy said, concluding his speech at the UNSC.
Hyderabad: Ahead of the release of his movie Dangerous, ostensibly Indias first lesbian thriller, its director Ram Gopal Varma is seeking the support of the LGBT community as multiplexes like PVR and Inox have refused to screen the film.

Speaking to Deccan Chronicle, Varma, popularly known as RGV, said that multiplex theatres have a financial obligation and cannot judge a film by its subject.

They said that it is not a movie for a family audience. Even though the censor board has cleared it and the Supreme Court has repealed section 377, these multiplexes seem to be against the LGBT community, he said.

In a Twitter post, he said Its obvious that @PVRcinemas and @INOXCINEMAS are in contempt of the supreme court order for refusing to screen DANGEROUS KHATRA and it proves that they look down upon the #LGBT community (sic).

When contacted, a senior employee from PVR India, Thomas DSouza, refused to comment. Puneet from Inox movies said that the decision had nothing to do with the content. It was a programming call.

In India, a substantial number of films made in a year do not get screened for varied reasons. It is not unusual for a movie not finding screens. Some are not released due to programming differences, he said.

Meanwhile, members from the LGBT community said that Varma is only commercializing his movie with the community tag and has done nothing to represent them.

He is simply interested in lesbian porn and not into the human rights part of it. This is something which he has made clear in TV interviews. It does not mean that he cannot direct a movie on a lesbian couple. This is not how a movie on LGBT is to be made. Rather than objectifying us, he can talk about issues that should be brought to light, be it marriage or the struggles, said Rachana, a trans person and a trans rights activist.

Shama, a member of the LGBT community, said, RGV has given media statements against us and now suddenly he wants to make a movie and is seeking our support. There is nothing humanitarian in his approach. It is all to serve his business interests.

Although section 377 has ceased to exist, we are still stigmatized and isolated. If RGV wants to talk positively about LGBT, why did he say we were the culprits spoiling the younger generation?," asked Madhuri, another member of the community.

Hoshang Merchant, a retired professor from University of Hyderabad and a gay poet, said. I dont think that everything about LGBT should be put up on screen, especially, if it is sub-standard. Either way, I do not watch RGVs movies as they portray a lot of violence. So many bad movies are made about the community.

None of us are sure if it is a queer-friendly movie. His vulgar opinions on women and sex have already been heard. He has not done anything to support us. Let him join the movement and fight in the film industry about the way we are portrayed. It is only then we can back him, said Tashi, another member.

Patruni Chidananda Sastri, a drag queen from the city, said, Even if it is released in PVR and multiplexes, who is benefiting-RGV or the community? Is it message-oriented like Badhai Do or Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui? In a media interaction he wanted to discuss only lesbian and not gay-related issues. If he donates half of his earnings to the community, then yes we can support him, said Sastri.

Meanwhile, the members of the multiplex association said that with the success of RRR, they are unable to figure out slots for upcoming movies like Ghani, KGF chapter 2, Attack and Beast.

No exhibitor will be ready for small budget movies during these times, said Anupam Reddy.
The senior BJP leader also slammed the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) government and the Chief Minister over the issue of Centre procuring rice and asked if the Central government had not been purchasing rice from the state, why was the TRS government and the Chief Minister silent over the past seven years.  DC file image

HYDERABAD: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claimed that it was the only political party in the country that had taken upon itself the mantle of upholding the nations unity and dismissed all other political parties as either dynastic or family run. Senior BJP leader P. Muralidhar Rao on Tuesday claimed that his party was the only one that talked about national unity taking the message even to its grassroots workers, adding, Without the BJP, you cannot imagine national unity.

Speaking to reporters on the eve of the partys Foundation Day on April 6, he said Prime Minister Narendra Modi would address lakhs of party workers on Wednesday to mark the occasion. He said the BJP was the only party whose leaders had not been tainted by corruption or nepotism. There is no other lamp post in India other than the BJP. The presence and vibrancy of the BJP is an important marker for democracy in India. All other parties are either dynastic or family run, he said.

The senior BJP leader also slammed the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) government and the Chief Minister over the issue of Centre procuring rice and asked if the Central government had not been purchasing rice from the state, why was the TRS government and the Chief Minister silent over the past seven years.

This is a government of brokers. The goal of this government is to push farmers into distress and then have its brokers exploit farmers. The Chief Minister rushes to Delhi every now and then to divert the attention of the people here in the state from pressing issues, and to try and gain some foothold among opposition parties. His entire campaign is to project the situation as a Telangana versus Centre battle in an attempt to regain sympathy exploiting the sentiments of people of Telangana, Muralidhar Rao said.

The BJP, he said, would not allow such exploitation of the people and as a democratic and true peoples party, and would take on the family rule of the TRS in Telangana. We will herald good governance in the state and will not stop until we reach that goal, he said.
Vijayawada: All is set for the cabinet reshuffle in AP on April 11. Chief Minister Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy met Governor Biswabhusan Harichandan on Wednesday evening.

Immediately after returning from Delhi on Wednesday evening, the Chief Minister met the governor. He explained about his visit to Delhi for two days.

The new ministers would take oath at 11.31am on April 11, during the auspicious muhurt, at an open place beside the AP Secretariat at Velagapudi.

Jagan had taken permission from the governor for the swearing-in ceremony on April 11. The Chief Minister invited the governor to administer the oath to the new ministers.

The CM also sought permission of the governor for creation of a new tribal district with Polavaram or Rampachodavaram as its headquarters, thereby increasing the total number of districts to 27.

Sources said Jagan would take the resignations of the ministers at a cabinet meeting on Thursday. Though the cabinet meeting was planned for the morning, it was deferred to the afternoon. The CM will visit Narasaraopet for felicitation of village and ward volunteers and address of a public meeting there at 10.30am.

The Chief Ministers office has advised ministers to come to the cabinet meeting with the resignation letters.

According to sources, Jagan decided to replace all present ministers, except for one or two, with new faces and provide representation to all districts in the new cabinet. Jagan briefed the governor on the upcoming cabinet reshuffle.

It appears that the CM will submit the list of new ministers to the governor beforehand.

The last meeting of the present cabinet will be at 3pm in the Secretariat at Velagapudi on Thursday. After receiving the resignations, Jagan will submit these to the governor along with the list of names of new ministers, sources said.

Deputy CM Dharmana Krishnadas said he is going to quit the minister post and his brother Dharmana Prasadarao is likely to get a berth in the new cabinet
HYDERABAD: Telangana Governor Dr Tamilisai Soundararajan said the state government had repeatedly insulted the office of the Governor, and if decisions taken by her following the Constitutional provisions were not acceptable to the government, then the Chief Minister could have always called on her to discuss any issue he might have wanted to.

The Governor was speaking with media persons in New Delhi on Wednesday after meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi. With the increasing distance between the Raj Bhavan and the Chief Ministers official residence Pragathi Bhavan becoming more evident by the day, the Governor said there was no need to brief the Prime Minister about what was happening in Telangana. Everyone knows what is happening in Telangana, she said.

As a constitutional head, I have my opinion. I always go by the system and the law. When such decisions are seen differently and if the government wants to insult the Governor, then I am not worried about that. But the office should be respected. It is not Tamilisai, the office of the Governor should be respected. The people are observing. I leave it to the people of Telangana and the country (to decide), she said.

Dr Tamilisai Soundararajan, who first opened up on April 2, on the eve of Ugadi, the increasing distance between the Raj Bhavan and the Pragathi Bhavan, said if someone who could not attend the event at the Raj Bhavan called and explained the reasons for their absence. But even when that response was not there (from Pragathi Bhavan). When we have not done anything (to warrant being ignored), it was insulting.

Asked about her rejecting the candidature of Padi Kaushik Reddy for an MLC post under the Governors quota, she said, They cannot force me. I have explained several times that it is the Governors quota, and the provision was for service category. When I am not satisfied about the candidature, it is my right to say so. It is not that everything the government sends should be accepted. It was a constitutional decision.

She also mentioned the governments decision to continue with a protem chairman of the Legislative Council and that she had pointed out this was only an interim arrangement. When we point out a system with an open heart, it should be accepted, it should be discussed. I am for open discussion. Even the Chief Minister can come and discuss with me, I am not denying appointments if sought. Anything can be discussed openly, ministers too can come to the office. But if nothing is discussed and taken in a biased manner, I leave it to the people to judge, she said.

She also said the protocol violations during her visits to various districts were nothing short of insulting. Because some decisions may be not accepted by the Governor, should it mean that the Governors office should be insulted? Should the Governors protocol be violated? Is there any rule that the Governor should not be taken care of when she goes for a tour? That the district collector or SP should not come?

On enforcing her authority in the state, she said while she could do so, the government should act responsibly. The Chief Secretary knows how to go about the role of the Governor and even the collector knows how to respect the tour of the Governor. This should not be repeated in the office of the Governor. I may be here now, and another Governor can come, but the office should be respected, she said.
New Delhi: Asserting that for the BJP rajniti" (politics) and rashtraniti" (national policy) are the same, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday said that even now there are some political parties in the country for whom politics means parivar bhakti while for the ruling party it means rashtra bhakti. Noting that the BJPs responsibilities, keeping in mind the global or the national perspective, have been ever expanding, the PM, while virtually addressing the BJP cadre on the 42nd foundation day of the party, said it makes each and every BJP cadre a representative of the nations aspirations and resolve.

BJP president J.P. Nadda, who participated in a procession on the BJPs foundation day, interacted with 13 head of missions, including Frances Emmanuel Lenain, EU delegations Ugo Astuto, Portugals Carlos Pereira Marques, Bangladeshs Muhammad Imran, Italys Vincenzo De Luca, Norways Hans Jacob Frydenlund under the Know the BJP programme on the occasion.

Taking on the Opposition parties promoting dynasty politics, the PM said such parties do not even promote young leaders and have little regard for constitutional norms and cover up corruption and misdeeds of each other even though they may be active in different states.

Congratulating the BJP members, including those living abroad, on the foundation day, the PM asserted that the BJP governments at the Centre and states have worked to take welfare schemes to every beneficiary without any discrimination or biases, reflecting the motto Sabka saath, sabka vikas.

Pointing out how earlier political parties for decades practised vote-bank politics and made promises for some sections of society while others were ignored, Mr Modi said discrimination and corruption were the side effects of this politics. He asserted that the BJP not only fought against this vote-bank politics but was also successful in informing the people of the ill-effects of such kind of politics. Mr Modi also hailed women and youth voters who have been supporting the party and said the BJP cadre have been fighting against the discrimination, tyranny and violence against opponents who do not believe in the Constitution and democracy.

During his interaction with foreign envoys, Mr Nadda informed them about the BJPs history, organization and the expansion of the partys ideology and principles, including at the global level, under Mr Modis leadership.

Earlier in the day, Mr Nadda while addressing party workers said that under Mr Modis leadership the BJP has emerged as the party of the poor, backwards, Dalits and the downtrodden in the society who were not taken care of by anyone so far. Participating in a procession on the BJPs foundation day in the Rajendra Nagar Assembly constituency that is due for bypoll, Mr Nadda called upon the party workers to ensure the benefits of the Modi governments schemes reach the street vendors, drivers and rickshaw pullers.

The BJPs youth wing  Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha - organised bike rallies on the occasion and organised Sanmaan Samelans, where senior Jan Sangh and BJP karyakartas were honoured.
Hyderabad: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) celebrated its 42nd Foundation Day, its Sthapana Divas with its leaders from Telangana and Andhra Pradesh calling on the party cadre to rededicate themselves to the cause of the unity of the country, and to work to strengthen the party in both states. The partys Foundation Day celebrations came as a shot in the arm for the BJP in the two states, with watch parties organised in party offices in all districts to witness Prime Minister Narendra Modis address to the party workers across the country.

The BJP, which increasingly sounds confident about its prospects in Telangana, celebrated the day with the state party president Bandi Sanjay Kumar declaring that the BJP always believed in propagating its ideology instead of craving for power. It is the only party which strongly believes that the Indian way of life is the guiding force for the entire world and is striving for making India the global leader, he said.

Speaking after hoisting the party flag at the BJP office in the city, Sanjay said the BJP, a powerful political force in Telangana, and for its growth in Andhra Pradesh, owes its rise to the sacrifices by BJP workers. With the same spirit, we shall soon end the anarchic rule of the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) and make the saffron flag flutter on the Golconda Fort after the next elections, he said, calling on the party cadre to launch an extensive door-to-door campaign to expose the corrupt, dynastic and dictatorial rule of the TRS.

Recalling the days of the launch of the BJP on April 6, 1980, Sanjay said the famous words of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee at the Mumbai rally that Andhera Chatega, Sooraj Niklega, Kamal Khilega (the darkness will go, the sun will come out and the lotus will bloom), were still reverberating in his ears. Despite several ups and downs, the BJP was never disheartened because it is an ideology-based and service-oriented party. It made the country realise the importance of unity among the Hindus through the Rath Yatra by L.K. Advani for the construction of Ram Mandir at Ayodhya, he said. Party leaders Dr K. Laxman and MLA Raja Singh also led Shobha Yatras in the city on Wednesday to mark the BJPs Foundation Day, while Vijayashanti took part in the celebrations in the partys city office.

In Karimnagar, BJPs Huzurabad MLA Etela Rajendar led a bike rally in Jammikunta. Addressing party workers, he said in its 42 years of political journey, the BJP overcame many hurdles and emerged as the strongest political party in India. The BJP, he said, was in power in 18 states, and would surely form the next government in Telangana. In AP, leading the celebrations, the state BJP president Somu Veerraju in Visakhapatnam said, The BJP was born to remove corruption from India. We will work for the nations unity. The BJP is a historical necessity for the country. In Vijayawada, D. Purand-eswari, partys national general secretary, said Modi was implementing the partys basic principle of Antyodaya in its true spirit. Slamming the AP government over absence of development and investments in the state, she said though the people in AP did not support the BJP in the last elections, the Centre was extending all support to the state. She said both the Jana Sena and the BJP were fighting anti-people policies in the state.
The Mumbai-headquartered Export Credit Guarantee Corporation of India (ECGC) has modified its underwriting policy for export transactions to Sri Lanka.

After carrying out a review of the rating of Sri Lanka in view of prevailing situations, ECGC, which offers credit guarantee, has changed the cover category from Open Cover to Restricted Cover Category (RCC 1).

Follow live updates of Sri Lanka economic crisis here

This category of export credit guarantee offers revolving limits and is normally valid for a year after being approved on a case-to-case basis.

However, the premium rates for the shipments insured under the insurance covers will remain unchanged.

In a press statement, ECGC said that this change has been made to ensure that risks under its export credit insurance policies are assessed and monitored and to place appropriate risk mitigation measures. This measure will assist ECGC customers in improving payment realization prospects from buyers in Sri Lanka, it said.

ECGC has also asked to contact their servicing branch for cover on shipments to Sri Lanka. "ECGC continues to monitor the situation and further review of the underwriting policy will be undertaken based on future developments," it said.

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By Jordan Fabian and Josh Wingrove

President Joe Bidens top economic adviser said that the administration has warned India against aligning itself with Russia and that US officials have been disappointed with some of New Delhis reactions to the Ukraine invasion.

There are certainly areas where we have been disappointed by both China and Indias decisions, in the context of the invasion, the director of the White House National Economic Council, Brian Deese, told reporters at a breakfast Wednesday hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

The US has told India that the consequences of a more explicit strategic alignment with Moscow would be significant and long-term, he said.

Also Read | India in talks with Poland, Romania, Kazakhstan for education of Ukraine evacuees: Jaishankar in LS

While the US, Europe, Australia and Japan have piled economic sanctions onto Russia in response to its war against Ukraine, India has declined and instead has sought to continue imports of Russian oil.

New Delhis reaction to the invasion is complicating its relationship with Washington, where India is regarded as an important partner in countering Chinese influence in Asia.

Deeses comments come after Deputy National Security Advisor Daleep Singh travelled to India last week for meetings with officials.

What Daleep did make clear to his counterparts during this visit was that we dont believe its in Indias interest to accelerate or increase imports of Russian energy and other commodities, Press Secretary Jen Psaki said earlier this week.

Also Read | NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg warns Ukraine war could last 'months, even years'

The US and the rest of the Group of Seven nations will continue to collaborate with India and hope that they can align efforts to the greatest extent possible, a US official said in a briefing for reporters Wednesday on new sanctions against Russia. India and the US collaborate extensively on food security and global energy, the official said.

The official asked not to be identified as a condition of the briefing.

In addition to seeking Russian oil, India is the worlds largest buyer of Russian weapons. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has resisted entreaties from the U.S. and Australia to scale back the relationship, insisting that India needs Russian weapons to counter both Pakistan and China and that alternatives are too expensive, according to people familiar with the matter.

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Pakistan's Supreme Court will try to wrap up on Wednesday the crucial hearing on the dismissal of a no-confidence vote against embattled Prime Minister Imran Khan and the dissolution of Parliament by the president on his advice, Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial said, as the apex court resumed proceedings in a "very important case" for the fourth consecutive day.

A five-member bench, headed by Chief Justice Bandial and comprising Justice Ijazul Ahsan, Justice Mohammad Ali Mazhar, Justice Munib Akhtar and Justice Jamal Khan Mandokhail, took up the case this afternoon.

The Supreme Court wants to wrap up the case on the "unconstitutional" ruling by National Assembly Deputy Speaker Qasim Suri to impede the vote of no-confidence against Prime Minister Khan, Chief Justice Bandial said.

Also Read | Imran played, but not by the rules

"We first want to wrap up the case on what happened in the National Assembly on April 3, the chief justice was quoted as saying by Geo News.

"We are hearing a very important case," the chief justice added.

He said that negative statements were being made against the court and it is being said that the apex court is delaying the matter.

The court will announce the verdict on the basis of law and Constitution instead of loyalties," he said.

The courtroom was packed at the start of the hearing with politicians from both the government and the Opposition in attendance.

President Arif Alvi dissolved the National Assembly (NA) on Sunday on the advice of Prime Minister Khan, minutes after Deputy Speaker Qasim Suri rejected a no-confidence motion against the premier, who had effectively lost the majority in the 342-member lower house of Parliament.

Also Read | Shahbaz Sharif asks Pakistan Army chief, DG ISI to present evidence if Opposition lawmakers committed treason

Chief Justice Bandial said that all orders and actions initiated by the prime minister and the president regarding the dissolution of the National Assembly will be subject to the court's order.

On Monday and Tuesday, a larger bench of the apex court - comprising Chief Justice Bandial, Justice Ijazul Ahsan, Justice Mazhar Alam Khan Miankhel, Justice Munib Akhtar and Justice Jamal Khan Mandokhail - took up the matter after Deputy Speaker Suri rejected the move to dislodge the prime minister by declaring the no-trust motion unmaintainable due to its link with a so-called foreign conspiracy.

President Alvi, the Supreme Court Bar Association and all political parties have been made respondents in the case.

Lawyers from the government and the Opposition presented their arguments regarding the ruling by the deputy speaker.

During the arguments, Chief Justice Bandial said that even if the Speaker of the National Assembly cites Article 5 of the Constitution, the no-confidence motion cannot be rejected.

If Khan gets a favourable ruling, elections will take place within 90 days. If the court rules against the deputy speaker, Parliament will reconvene and hold the no-confidence vote against Khan, experts said.

Chief Justice Bandial on Monday said the court would issue a "reasonable order" on the issue that has led to political and constitutional crises in the country. During the proceedings, Justice Ahsan noted that there were violations in the proceedings of the no-trust resolution.

Justice Bandial observed that a debate before voting on the no-confidence motion had been clearly mentioned in the law but didn't take place.

The decision of the court would determine the legality of the presidential order to dissolve the National Assembly.

However, the Opposition parties rejected both the ruling of the deputy speaker and the dissolution of parliament, and not only challenged it in court but also fought tooth and nail outside the Supreme Court.

Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Shehbaz Sharif at a press conference accused Prime Minister Khan of violating the Constitution and imposing a civil-martial law in the country.

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Al-Qaeda chief Ayman Al-Zawahiri has used the recent hijab controversy in Karnataka to target democracy in India, saying "we must stop being deceived by the mirage of the pagan Hindu democracy".

In an 8.43-minute video clip released by the terror outfit online, and verified by the American SITE Intelligence Group, Zawahiri also showered praises on Karnataka college student Muskan Khan for confronting a group of students opposing hijab in her college in early February.

In the Arabic video clip, with English subtitles provided by SITE Intelligence Group that tracks the online activity of white supremacist and jihadist organisations, Zawahiri also reads out a poem that he says he wrote for "our Mujahid sister" and for her "brave feat".

Also Read | Religious divide to destroy global leadership: Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

"May Allah reward her for exposing the reality of Hindu India and the deception of its pagan democracy," the Al-Qaeda chief said in the video, also ending speculations about his death due to natural causes.

The video, the Al-Qaeda chief's second in the past six months, focused mostly on the hijab controversy.

"...we must shake off the delusions that confound us... we must stop being deceived by the mirage of the pagan Hindu democracy of India, which, to begin with, was never more than a tool to oppress Muslims," said Zawahiri, one of the world's most wanted terrorists.

Addressing the Muslims of the Indian sub-continent, he said they must realise that in the real world there is no such thing as 'human rights' or 'respect of the Constitution' or 'law'.

"It is exactly the same scheme of deception which the West has employed against us, the true nature of which was exposed by France, Holland, and Switzerland when they banned the hijab while allowing public nudity," he said.

Also Read | Hijab row, a chance to become truly secular

"The enemies of Islam are one and the samewho vilify the hijab and assail the Islamic Shariah... It is a war on Islam, its core doctrines, its laws, ethics, and etiquettes."

Calling for the unity of Muslims from China to the Islamic Maghreb, and from the Caucasus to Somalia, Zawahiri said, "We must rely on Allah alone and actively cooperate with one another."

"We must realize that the governments imposed on us, specifically in Pakistan and Bangladesh, do not defend us; rather, they defend the very enemies that they have empowered them to fight against us," he said.

The hijab row began in January from a government PU College in Udupi where six students who attended classes wearing headscarves in violation of the stipulated dress code were sent out. It later spread to a few other colleges in nearby Kundapur and Byndoor.

The Karnataka High Court later dismissed all writ petitions filed by Muslim girl students seeking permission to wear a hijab in colleges, saying hijab is not a part of essential religious practices of Islam.

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India is exploring the option of sending its students evacuated from war-torn Ukraine to Hungary, Romania and Poland as well as Kazakhstan to complete studies, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar informed the Lok Sabha on Wednesday.

Jaishankar said that the Ukraine government too had offered to exempt medical students from taking two key examinations. He also told the members of the Lok Sabha that the Ministry of Finance had asked the banks to assess the impact of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the consequent repatriation of students from the warzone to India on the educational loans taken by them to pursue studies there.

The government found that 1,319 among the evacuees had outstanding loans, the External Affairs Minister said.

Hungary conveyed to India that it could allow medical students evacuated from Ukraine to complete their courses at its universities.

Nearly 22,500 people  mostly students  returned to India in the wake of Russia's military aggression against Ukraine. The Indian government evacuated a majority of them through Poland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Moldova as the airspace of Ukraine was closed immediately after Russia launched its invasion on February 24.

In addition to Hungary, there were offers from other countries. We have been in touch with Hungary, Romania, Kazakhstan and Poland about continuing education for the students evacuated from Ukraine. Because these countries have similar education systems, said the External Affairs Minister.

He said the Ukrainian government has decided there would be a relaxation for students with respect to promotion from the third to the fourth year.

The mandatory KROK exam has been postponed to the next academic year. As for the students in the sixth year, the degrees would be accorded without taking the mandatory KROK-2 examinations. The criterion would solely be academic performance, Jaishankar said.

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Amidst the ideological questions being raised against the CPM over the proposed semi-high-speed rail project in Kerala, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said at the CPM party congress that the government was trying its best to implement the rail project.

Vijayan alleged in his welcome address at the party congress at Kannur in Kerala that the opposition parties in Kerala (Congress and BJP) were raising arguments that defy logic.

Meanwhile, sources said that the party delegates from Maharashtra may take up the matter in the party congress.

Also Read | Kerala government will take forward rail project, reiterates CM

The statement of Vijayan, who is also a politburo member of the CPM, came at a time when the CPM was accused of maintaining a double standard by opposing the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed-rail project and taking forward the semi-high-speed rail project in Kerala. Even Kerala Opposition leader V D Satheesan of the Congress sent a letter to CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury on Tuesday asking him to clarify the party's position on the matter.

The Thiruvananthapuram-Kasargod semi-high-speed rail project being initiated by the Pinarayi Vijayan government as a flagship project has been facing stiff resistance from various quarters with people emotionally resisting laying of demarcation stones as a prelude to acquiring land for the project. Even then the Vijayan government was quite adamant in taking forwards the 530 km greenfield rail project that aims at reducing the travel time between Thiruvananthapuram in the south and Kasargod in the north to less than four hours, while it takes around ten hours by road and rail now.

Vijayan said that the government believed in developing infrastructure. Economic growth, social justice, and protection of the environment were being given equal importance while implementing projects by the state government. Fare compensation would be ensured to those who have to surrender their land for the project, he said.

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Indian Social Forum (ISF) has extended a helping hand to three NRIs from Karnataka who were stranded in Saudi Arabia without any jobs.

ISF General Secretary Siraj Sajipa said the three NRIs were in distress after they were denied jobs. A few months ago, Salahuddin Salman, Tauheed Mysore and Safwan Abdul Rahman had come to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, after paying for their visa through a travel agent from Mangaluru.

But, after landing in Saudi Arabia, they were not offered work, salary and proper accommodation. They were struggling financially and facing problems to meet even basic needs.

After being informed about their plight, a team led by Nizam Bajpe and Jawad Basrur of the ISF provided them basic amenities. The NRIs were also provided counselling.

On behalf of the victims, a case was filed in a labour court and the Indian Embassy was alerted. Finally, the exit formalities were prepared by the company.

In the first phase, ISF succeeded in sending Tauheed Mysore and Safwan Abdul Rahman to India. In the second phase, Salahuddin Salman was sent back to India by sponsoring his air ticket.

The forum also helped in the burial of a 55-year-old man, Hamed Cheriabba, who died of cardiac arrest in Riyadh. He hailed from Mangaluru taluk.
A County Derry scientist is to begin research that will bring us a step closer to treatments that restore the body's ability to grow new blood cells.

Karla O'Neill, from Ballymaguigan, has been awarded a grant of 284,711 by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) to undertake a three-year project into the concept, known as angiogenesis.

A former student of St Trea's PS and St Mary's Grammar School, Magherafelt, now living in Dungiven, Dr O'Neill graduated from Ulster University with a degree in Biology and a PhD in DNA methylation.

She has continued her work under the stewardship of Professor David Grieve at Queen's University Belfast since 2015, but this will be her first independent project.

The project combines my own expertise in DNA methylation and vascular biology that I gained from Queen's when I joined in 2015, Karla told the County Derry Post.

It gives me complete management over the project. I am completely leading on it with David as my mentor.

I come up with all the experimental ideas; obviously in collaboration with other scientists in the field. Science is all about collaboration, working together and pulling in different people's expertise.

Obviously, David Grieve is very well-respected. He is a professor at Queens and has years of experience in cardio-vascular disease research, so I'm really standing on the shoulders of giants.

You're still kind of learning from them, but this is my first step towards developing my own research niche, and the British Heart Foundation has really given me this opportunity.

Karla will be mentored by well-respected Queen's University Belfast professor David Grieve.

As well as providing much-needed funding for research into cardio-vascular disease, Karla says the British Heart Foundation have been hugely supportive to her as a woman in science.

Whilst I've been on my BHF project grants, both David's and this one, I've had three maternity leaves, she said.

The BHF have been amazing in terms of supporting me through those maternity leaves, making sure that my career still keeps going.

I will be eternally grateful to them for that. I've been able to go off, have my babies, come back and the funding is still sitting there.

Queen's have been amazing as well, and I think with all of that support, the number of women coming forward into STEM degrees and jobs will increase and eventually equalise.

I am an ambassador for women in science; we can do it. You can have a family, you can have children and still do it, as long as you have a good support network and a good employer.

Karla highlighted the support of her husband and three children, as well as a supportive family network as being crucial in allowing her to continue her research.

The work she will undertake in her current project will be vital in developing treatments to improve angiogenesis, which will be of huge benefit to those with diabetes or cardio-vascular disease.

Within cardio-vascular disease itself you have exposure to low oxygen to different tissues and endothelial cells, she said.

Endothelial cells are cells that circulate in your blood and help produce blood vessels. They are an important, specialised type of cell and they circulate in your blood.

There are a type of endothelial cell called endothelial colony forming cells, which are really important when you have a wound or when your blood vessels need to repair themselves.

These cells are honed to the site of damage and in people with cardio-vascular disease or diabetes, those cells don't work very well.

My project will be figuring out what's gone wrong with those cells, what has happened them.

I'm specifically going to look at DNA methylation. In multiple diseases, we know that DNA methylation goes wrong, and there are multiple drugs on the market that target DNA methylation.

If I can prove that DNA methylation has a role to play in these cells not working, that gives opportunity for DNA methylation drugs to be used.

That will be a step forward in treating cardio-vascular disease and the blood vessel impairments that people with cardio-vascular disease and diabetes have.

Fearghal McKinney is head of the BHF in Northern Ireland.

Head of BHF NI, Fearghal McKinney, said the public's generosity helped fund Dr O'Neill's vital research.

Heart and circulatory disease causes a quarter of all deaths in Northern Ireland, around 4,100 deaths each year. Thats an average of 11 families who lose a loved one to these conditions each day, he said.

Were delighted to award this grant to Dr ONeill. Its only thanks to the generosity of the public that were able to support vital research like this in Northern Ireland.

For more than 60 years the publics support has helped the BHF turn ideas that once seemed like 'science fiction' into reality. Thousands of people in NI are still waiting for the next breakthrough.

We urgently need the publics support to keep our lifesaving research going, and to discover the treatments and cures of the future.

The BHF has launched a campaign This is Science, calling for the publics support to power science that could lead to new treatments and cures for all heart and circulatory diseases.

To find out more visit https://www.bhf.org.uk/this-is-science.
The Royal Air Force will be formally granted the Freedom of Causeway Coast and Glens Borough on Friday (April 8).

A motion, proposed by Councillor James McCorkell, granting the Freedom of the Borough was passed by the council back in 2018 to mark the RAF's centenary.

However, the formal ceremony was unable to go ahead due to pandemic restrictons and the RAF's continuing involvement in providing military aid to civil authorities.

On Friday, a public parade and ceremony will be held in Limavady town centre with a flypast by a Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft among the highlights of the event.

A ceremonial certificate will be presented to the RAFs joint second-in-command by the Councils Mayor prior to a parade by 100 RAF personnel in the town centre.

Freedom of the Borough is the highest honour that a Council can bestow on an organisation or individual.

It was granted to the RAF in recognition of '100 years of service, and in acknowledgement of the vital air and ground defence roles which they continue to provide for the security of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland'.

During the Second World War, the RAF were based in Limavady and nearby Ballykelly with both stations home to squadrons conducting anti-submarine operations in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Councillor Richard Holmes, the Mayor of Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council, said he is looking forward to the occasion.

The Council is very proud of the Roe Valleys place in the history of the Royal Air Force and the upcoming Freedom ceremony will allow us to give this formal recognition, he said.

It will be a day to reflect on the RAFs significant connections to our Borough, especially during World War II, while also celebrating over a century of exemplary service since it was established in 1918.

"I am looking forward to a very special occasion in Limavady, with the planned flypast and parade around the town set to create a wonderful public spectacle as we grant Councils highest civic honour.

Air Marshal Sir Gerry Mayhew, Deputy Commander Operations, Royal Air Force, added: The Royal Air Force is honoured to be have been granted the Freedom of the Borough in recognition of its continued role in the world, and to mark our long association with Limavady and the wider Borough.

The stations around Limavady were key to protecting the seas during the Battle of the Atlantic and so the Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft that will fly over the town will provide an appropriate link between Limavadys contribution then and the RAFs present-day role in defending the North Atlantic.

The public event will start at 12:05pm at Drumceatt Square, outside Roe Valley Arts and Cultural Centre.

There will also be a short service at the War Memorial in Limavady, and veterans are invited to attend by the Roe Valley branch of the Royal Air Force Association (RAFA), assembling by 12.30pm.

Members of the public and motorists should expect some traffic disruption in Limavady on the day, including restricted parking on Catherine Street.

"The parade will leave from Roe Valley Arts & Culture Centre at 12.35pm making its way down Market Street and Catherine Street for a ceremony at the War Memorial," said a PSNI spokesperson.

"It will then return to Roe Valley Arts and Cultural Centre leaving at 1.10pm. Delays are expected. Please follow diversion signs and directions of local police."
Chinese, Armenian presidents exchange congratulations on 30th anniversary of diplomatic ties

Xinhua) 13:07, April 06, 2022

BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Armenian counterpart, Vahagn Khachaturyan, exchanged on Wednesday congratulations on the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

In his congratulatory message, Xi said that China and Armenia are traditional friendly partners, and since the establishment of their diplomatic ties 30 years ago, bilateral ties have maintained sound and stable momentum for development with political mutual trust deepened, substantial progress made in various areas of cooperations, and cultural and people-to-people exchanges increasingly closer.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the two peoples have helped each other and joined hands in their anti-pandemic fight, epitomizing their profound friendship, he said.

Xi said he attaches great importance to the development of China-Armenia relations, and stands ready to work with President Khachaturyan to take the 30th anniversary of diplomatic ties as an opportunity to push for more achievements in bilateral relations and all-round cooperation so as to benefit the two countries and their people.

In his message, Khachaturyan said that since the establishment of their diplomatic ties 30 years ago, Armenia and China have seen their cooperation in various areas yield great results and the Armenian side attaches great importance to China's development and progress, as well as its role on the world stage.

He said he would like to work with Xi to achieve sustained and stable development in friendly cooperative relations between Armenia and China for the benefit of their people.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Armenian counterpart, Vahagn Khachaturyan, exchanged on Wednesday congratulations on the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

In his congratulatory message, Xi said that China and Armenia are traditional friendly partners, and since the establishment of their diplomatic ties 30 years ago, bilateral ties have maintained sound and stable momentum for development with political mutual trust deepened, substantial progress made in various areas of cooperations, and cultural and people-to-people exchanges increasingly closer.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the two peoples have helped each other and joined hands in their anti-pandemic fight, epitomizing their profound friendship, he said.

Xi said he attaches great importance to the development of China-Armenia relations, and stands ready to work with President Khachaturyan to take the 30th anniversary of diplomatic ties as an opportunity to push for more achievements in bilateral relations and all-round cooperation so as to benefit the two countries and their people.

In his message, Khachaturyan said that since the establishment of their diplomatic ties 30 years ago, Armenia and China have seen their cooperation in various areas yield great results and the Armenian side attaches great importance to China's development and progress, as well as its role on the world stage.

He said he would like to work with Xi to achieve sustained and stable development in friendly cooperative relations between Armenia and China for the benefit of their people. 
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Minister Brophy welcomes President Zelenskyy highlighting global food security

Press release

Minister for Overseas Aid, Colm Brophy T.D., has welcomed the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, highlighting the impact on global food security of Russias war in Ukraine while addressing the Houses of the Oireachtas today.

Speaking to members of the Oireachtas this morning in a historic address, President Zelenskyy spoke eloquently of the wider humanitarian consequences of the war, particularly the food security of millions, given the significance of both Ukraine and Russia in global food systems.

Minister Brophy said:

While working to ease the suffering of the Ukrainian people is President Zelenskyys primary concern, it is to his credit that he reminded us that Russias war in Ukraine may also have a severe impact on vulnerable people in other parts of the world. I share his concern that Russias invasion of Ukraine may be the catalyst for a wider humanitarian crisis.

Ukraine and Russia are leading exporters of wheat, sunflower oil and fertilisers. I am worried about the potential consequences of Russias invasion of Ukraine for people in Africa and the Middle East. As a result of the war, wheat rationing has already been introduced in Lebanon, a country where three quarters of the population are already vulnerable.

I am also very conscious that the World Food Programme, which feeds over 115 million people in vulnerable places such as Syria, Yemen, and the Horn of African, sources half its grain from Ukraine and is now facing higher prices and supply constraints. Ireland has contributed 25 million to the World Food Programme this year to support its life-saving work.

We have so far committed 20 million to the humanitarian response in Ukraine and neighbouring countries. Ireland responds effectively to humanitarian crises around the world. For example, we recently announced 5 million to support humanitarian relief in Yemen and we continue to fund humanitarian relief in Syria, Somalia, South Sudan and many other countries around the world.

Crucially, we are also working to help countries avoid food shortages. As well as continuing to be a leading humanitarian donor, Irish Aid will invest over 800 million between now and 2027 in building global food systems.

ENDS

Press Office

6 April 2022

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Minister Coveney statement on reports of civilian killings in Mali

Statement

Minister for Foreign Affairs, Simon Coveney T.D., said:

Ireland is deeply concerned by the shocking reports emerging of the alleged killing of large numbers of civilians, in the village of Moura in the Mopti region of central Mali, during a military operation conducted by the Malian Armed Forces, reportedly alongside members of the Wagner Group.

Ireland offers its sincere condolences to the families of those killed. Allegations of civilian casualties must be investigated urgently, in a transparent and impartial manner, and those responsible for human rights violations and abuses must be held accountable, regardless of their affiliation or nationality.

We call on the Malian transitional authorities to immediately grant unfettered, timely and safe access to MINUSMA so that it may conduct a full investigation into the incident, as it is mandated to do by the United Nations Security Council. Any findings of such an investigation must be made public and action taken to ensure the protection of civilians.

These reports arrive within the context of a broader, significant deterioration in the security situation and an increase in allegations of human rights violations and abuses in Mali in recent weeks. The fight against terrorism in no way justifies the violation of human rights nor does it confer impunity on the perpetrators of atrocities.

ENDS

Press Office

6 April 2022

|
Statement by Minister Byrne in reaction to latest Eurobarometer survey

Statement

Minister of State for European Affairs, Thomas Byrne T.D., said today:

I welcome the very positive findings reported in the latest Eurobarometer poll concerning Irish attitudes to the EU. The fact that 83% of Irish people are satisfied with how democracy works in Ireland and 81% are satisfied with how democracy works in the EU is testament to the high regard here for National and EU Institutions. It is also heartening to see that over three quarters of respondents were satisfied with the measures taken by the various Irish Government and Local/Regional Authorities to fight the pandemic, markedly higher than the EU27 average".

These findings are in line with those being reflected in the viewpoints being expressed by Irish Citizens who have taken part in events over the past year as part of the Conference on the Future on Europe".

The publication of this poll is also very timely  the 10th of May next will mark 50 years since the referendum where the Irish people voted overwhelmingly (83%) in favour of Ireland joining the European Communities. The Governments EU50 programme over the coming year will provide opportunities to reflect on 50 years of Irish membership of the EU and the Irish contribution to this as well as engaging with citizens on what the EU means for Global Ireland.

ENDS

Press Office

6 April 2022
Where to Watch / Stream The Crusaders Online Theatrical release - Not available on any OTT Platform right now.

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The Crusaders : Release Date, Trailer, Cast & Songs About The Crusaders The Crusaders was released on Apr 07, 2022 and was directed by Maxx Starr .This movie is 22 min in duration and is available in English language. Peter Greene, Sophia Lamar, Tessa Gourin, Jerry Dean, Christopher Ponds, Neko White and Ritchie Franco are playing as the star cast in this movie. The Crusaders is available in Comedy and Crime genres.

Disclaimer: All content and media has been sourced from original content streaming platforms, such as Disney Hotstar, Amazon Prime, Netflix, etc. Digit Binge is an aggregator of content and does not claim any rights on the content. The copyrights of all the content belongs to their respective original owners and streaming service providers. All content has been linked to respective service provider platforms.This product uses the TMDb API but is not endorsed or certified by

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iOS 16 launch is likely to take place on June 6, 2022.

For the third year in a row, Apple WWDC will be held online. Well, for the most part, that is. Apple has announced its 33rd Worldwide Developer Conference will take place from June 6 to June 10. On the first day, i.e., June 6th, there will be a special offline gathering of some developers and students to watch the WWDC keynote and State of Union videos at Apple Park. Rest, on the same day, iOS 16 would be announced alongside iPadOS 16, tvOS 16, watchOS 9, and macOS 12. This years WWDC theme is Call to Code and you could stream it on Apple.com, the Apple YouTube channel, the Apple TV, the Apple Developer app, and the Apple Developer website.

Heres what you could expect from the Apple June 2022 event:

Apple WWDC 2022: What We Know and What to Expect

First of all, Apple has teased to showcase the latest innovations in iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. We think we know what that means. New software versions with new changes and features!

Apple will share these details through the keynote, State of the Union presentations, information sessions, learning labs, and digital lounges to engage with attendees.

Speaking of which, the developers and students who attend the live offline event on June 6 would get access to Apple engineers and technologies to learn how these things work in tandem with the various Apple hardware. But, do note that there will be limited space, and registration for attendance will open through the Apple Developer Site and app soon.

In line with the Call to code theme and being a developer conference, WWDC22 will also conduct Swift Student Challenge wherein the students are encouraged to participate and come up with a Swift Playgrounds app project on a topic of their choice, and their work will be accepted through April 25. You can check out more details about this here.

Finally, Apple notes that this year, there will also be more localized content for the companys global audience.

Apple Swift Playground App

At its heart, WWDC has always been a forum to create connection and build community. In that spirit, WWDC22 invites developers from around the world to come together to explore how to bring their best ideas to life and push the envelope of whats possible. We love connecting with our developers, and we hope all of our participants come away feeling energized by their experience, said Susan Prescott, Apples vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations and Enterprise and Education Marketing.

In all of this, Apple hasnt talked or hinted about any hardware announcement (unless you take the technologies and tools to bring their visions into reality phrase to mean something). *cough cough* Apple Glass. However, as per Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, the AR/VR glass from Apple may have been delayed due to development snags related to overheating, cameras, and software.

Then there are also speculations of maybe a Mac Pro or any other Mac hardware with Apple Silicon to surface at WWDC 22. But since there isnt any concrete evidence to back them up, we cant really be sure. Lets see.

Meanwhile, for other news, reviews, feature stories, buying guides, and everything else tech-related, keep reading Digit.in.
LONDON, April 6 (Xinhua) -- The China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has brought hundreds of billions of dollars to the developing world in the form of infrastructure, public health and digital connectivity, and been "avidly welcomed" in "Global South", an opinion piece published by The Guardian has said.

"These essential investments have been neglected by western investors and development agencies for decades," noted the article on Monday co-authored by Tobita Chow, director of Justice Is Global, a project of the U.S. organization People's Action, and Jake Werner, a Global China post-doctoral research fellow at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center.

"China's global vision in some ways challenges the power of the rich countries and the free-market principles of the liberal international order, but it also holds out the promise of solving some of the most intractable and destabilizing problems facing humanity," the article said.

"Far from imposing a new global order, China is inviting the West to work together on reforming the status quo," it added.

The article also called for greater U.S.-China cooperation on infrastructure and other global public goods, noting that it "would both benefit developing countries and point towards a just, sustainable and peaceful alternative to escalating great power rivalry." 
XI'AN, April 6 (Xinhua) -- A piece of plasticine-like nanomaterial was easily stretched by hand by researchers who were showing the material's incredible resistance to hard blows from external forces.

The intelligent endergonic nanomaterial which can be applied in protective equipment manufacturing is developed by Tuoruikao, a new material technology company in northwest China's Shaanxi Province, among the province's hundreds of high-tech start-ups.

Shaanxi is home to more than 100 higher learning institutions, over 1,300 research institutes and millions of technical personnel.

However, only a few scientific research achievements could be transformed into well-received products on the market in the past, which loomed large over the province's long-term growth momentum.

To unleash the great potential, Shaanxi's Xixian New Area, also the province's only national new area, introduced targeted policies and formed a professional team of nearly 40 technology managers in 2021 to tap into valuable science projects, which helps link scientists and engineers with entrepreneurs.

So far, the area has partnered with 14 higher learning institutions including Xi'an Jiaotong University and Northwestern Polytechnical University and seven research institutes, while a total of 431 technology companies settled down in the area last year.

Tuoruikao's resilient nanomaterial is among the very first program carried out in the area's creative cooperation mechanism.

It took just about four months to come out of the laboratory and into the market, said Zhang Yanfeng, a professor from Xi'an Jiaotong University who now also works as the leading researcher at Tuoruikao.

"We excel at scientific research, but when it comes to market operation, we have to rely on the entrepreneurs," said Zhang, noting that the new cooperation model helps all parties efficiently establish a whole industry chain from raw material production and development to marketing.

According to the area's industrial development plan during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021 to 2025), several leading industry clusters will be formed in a differentiated but orderly way so as to expand and upgrade its current industrial chains.

"The new area has become a major driving engine of Shaanxi's development and its innovative development model can further empower the province's economic transition and upgrade," said Ma Lili, deputy dean of the school of economics and management at Northwest University in Shaanxi.

In the first quarter of 2022, multiple agreements on 48 projects have been signed with a total investment of over 86 billion yuan (about 13.5 billion U.S. dollars) in the area, marking a record high in its investment amount.

Enterprises ranging from new material and biomedicine to intelligent manufacturing and the Internet of Things are expected to further fuel the high-quality development of the local economy. 
Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine Charlie McConalogue T.D. visited County Louth on Thursday 31st March as part of his nationwide tour which will see him visit every county in the country before the end of the year.

The Backing Rural Ireland tour will see the Minister meet with farmers and fishers, as well as food and drink producers, and local businesses.

During these visits, the Minister will take the opportunity to visit farms, piers and food production locations to see first-hand the work that goes into making our great food and drink and will discuss opportunities and challenges for the year ahead.

In Louth, the Minister met with the Marry family on their Olive Pork pig farm in Littlegrange to discuss challenges facing the industry and to discuss their innovative method of farming.

The Minister then met with the Lynch brothers in Clogherhead who business Dundalk Bay Seafoods has been in operation for 50 years.

The Minister then travelled to the Cooley peninsula to visit the Muchgrange family farm run by the Hanlon family and Cooley Oysters run by the Ferguson family. He was joined in Louth by Senator Erin McGreehan.

Commenting on the tour, Minister McConalogue said:

Our farmers, fishers and food and drink producers are the backbone of rural Ireland and are the everyday heroes that ensure food is on our tables every day.

"They also are the backbone of our 13.5bn food export sector. They support so many jobs and industries in every part of rural Ireland and ensure that we have a balanced regional economy.

"I will be visiting every county in Ireland to meet with some of those people and businesses in our communities who produce our world-famous food. I look forward to see you during the year and thank you for facilitating me in Louth.
Louth County Council spent just under 14,000 on purchasing advertisements in awards issues of Public Sector Magazine over the last six years, the Dundalk Democrat can exclusively reveal.

The magazine has recently come under the spotlight, featuring on several episodes of Liveline with Joe Duffy, with several business owners claiming on the programme that they were asked to pay for adverts in exchange for getting an award from Public Sector Magazine.

The information obtained by the Democrat under the Freedom of Information Act shows that Louth County Council made eight separate payments totalling 13,708 to the magazine over six years.

The magazine is in no way affiliated to any official governmental body and is published by a private company, Devlin Media.

Records show that in 2016 the Community and Housing section of the Louth council purchased an advert at the cost of 1,100 (exl VAT).

In 2016, a two-page colour ad appeared in the awards issue of the magazine promoting the Boyne Valley and detailing the Irish Maritime Festival held in Drogheda Port and announcing that the council had been awarded a Local Government Tourism Award from the magazine.

In 2018, the Corporate and LEO (Louth Enterprise Office) sections of the local council spent 1,000 and 1,395 (excl VAT ) respectively on purchasing two advertisements in that years awards issue.

The 2018 awards issue featured three colour ads awarding Louth County Council the Excellence in Road Safety Award, another detailing the work of Louth LEO and awarding it the outright winners award for Business Development and third detailing the work of the council and awarding it the Best website, IT and Social Media award.

Similarly, 2019 saw the LEO and Community and Housing sections of the council spend 1,600 (excl VAT) each on advertisements in that years awards issue of the magazine.

The 2019 awards issue of Public Sector Magazine again featured an identical write up to the one featured in 2018, announcing that Louth LEO had again been given the outright winners award for Business Development.

Another colour ad in the same issue announced that Louth County Council had been awarded the Housing Services County Council Award alongside a short editorial piece entitled, Living in Louth.

The Corporate section of Louth County Council also purchased advertisements in the years 2017, 2020, 2021 at a cost of 1,550, 1,450 and 1,450, respectively.

The Democrat could not verify if any awards were issued to the council in those years as copies of the magazine for those years cannot be found online and the Public Sector Magazine website states that it is closed for updating.

When asked to comment on the above information, a spokesperson for Louth County Council said:

Louth County Council can confirm that it purchased advertisements for the awards edition of Public Sector Magazine from 2016-2021.

Louth County Council has advertised with this publication as the annual awards recognise excellence in the Irish Public Sector and the main target audiences are key stakeholders for the Council, and therefore provided a platform to reach these key audiences.

On an ongoing basis, Louth County Council analyses and reviews awards that recognise high-quality work carried out by the County Council and its staff, and have the potential to reach key target stakeholder audiences.

Public Sector Magazine did not respond to the Democrat when asked to comment.
Last years winner Minella Times has been left at the top of the weights in Saturdays Randox Grand National following the defection of his stablemate Chriss Dream.

Minella Times claimed a historic victory 12 months ago as Rachael Blackmore became the first female rider to win the worlds most famous steeplechase.

But Henry de Bromheads nine-year-old will have to carry 11st 10lb this time around as he bids to follow in the hoofprints of Tiger Roll by successfully defending his crown.

The only other horse previously in the top 40 that has been taken out is the Mick Winters-trained Chatham Street Lad. He could instead tackle the famous fences in Fridays Topham Chase.

As it stands the top 40 horses in Saturday's @RandoxOfficial Grand National @AintreeRaces. Final declarations on Thursday. pic.twitter.com/0tVs4YqlfW  PA Racing (@PAracing) April 4, 2022

The beneficiaries of the two defections are another De Bromhead runner in Poker Party and Dan Skeltons Blaklion, who are now guaranteed a place in the field.

The top three in the market at the time of writing are Gordon Elliotts Delta Work (11st 9lb), the Ted Walsh-trained Any Second Now (11st 8lb) and Snow Leopardess (10st 9lb) from Charlie Longsdons yard.

Elliotts strong squad also includes Escaria Ten (11st 1lb) and Farclas (11st 1lb), while Ciaran Murphys Enjoy dAllen (10st 11lb) is another leading contender from Ireland.
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The Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage Darragh O'Brien has said that the Fair Deal (FD) scheme could be amended in order to allow Ukrainian refugees to use the homes tied into the scheme.

The Cabinet heard an update this morning from the Fianna Fail TD on the response to potentially housing 8,000 refugees under the Fair Deal scheme.

Minister O' Brien first proposed the changes two weeks ago, but this may be easier said than done, as the Cabinet was also told that it is likely that between 50 and 60 per cent of properties pledged by the public for Ukrainian refugees will not be suitable for use.

It was also heard that almost 18,600 have arrived in the country so far, while the State has previously said that it is expected that up to 200,000 Ukrainian refugees will arrive in Ireland as a result of the war in their home country.

However, as pointed out by BreakingNews.ie, it is currently unclear whether they would solely be for Ukrainian refugees, or if they could be put on the private rental market.

Meanwhile, the Business Post has reported that estimates calculated by the Dept of Housing have forecast up to 35,000 homes will be required in Ireland within the next month to meet the demand for Ukrainian refugees.

In related news, Minister Darragh O' Brien TD, along with Minister of State for Local Government and Planning Peter Burke, recently revealed that they are inviting applications from cross-border Local Authority Partnerships for the new Shared Island Local Authority Development Funding Scheme.

According to a statement from the Department: "The 5 million scheme is being funded through the governments Shared Island Fund and will support the development of new joint investment projects by cross-border Local Authority partnerships to deliver on agreed regional development goals and the Shared Island dimension of the National Development Plan."

Meanwhile, Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, spoke to the Oireachtas earlier today via video call, where he thanked Ireland for providing aid for his country, for agreeing to sanctions against Russia, and for taking in Ukrainian refugees.
The Ukrainian president has praised the Irish people in a historic address to the Oireachtas.

President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to a joint sitting of the Oireachtas earlier today (Wednesday April 6) through the aid of a translator, and expressed gratitude to every citizen of Ireland.

He said, "From the very first days, you are supporting Ukraine and this is a fact. You did not doubt starting helping us, you began doing this right away and although you are a neutral country, you have not remained neutral to the disaster and to the mishaps that Russia has brought to Ukraine."

"Thank you for the humanitarian and financial support extended to our country and thank you for your caring about Ukrainian people who found shelter on your land."

The president told the Oireachtas that Russia needs to be held responsible for what has been done to Ukraine.

He said, "They are destroying things that are sustaining livelihoods to people. They also have blocked all of our sea ports, together with the vessels that had already agricultural cargoes for exports.

Watch today's opening remarks by the Ceann Comhairle and the address by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine, at a Joint Sitting of Dail & Seanad Eireann in Leinster House - 6 April 2022 #seeforyourself #Ukraine https://t.co/cR4oYL14dd  Houses of the Oireachtas - Tithe an Oireachtais (@OireachtasNews) April 6, 2022

"Why are they doing this? Because for them hunger is a weapon against us, ordinary people as an instrument of domination."

According to President Zelensky, Russia doesn't deserve to be "in the circle of the civil countries", and called for stricter sanctions on the country.

He continued: "Please, I would like you to show more leadership in our anti-war coalition, I would like to ask you to convince EU partners to introduce more rigid sanctions against Russia that would make sure the Russian war machine will stop.

"We have to put an end to trading with Russia, we have to cut ties of Russian banks to global systems, cut the sources of their income from their oil that they use for their weapon and for the killing.

"There are mechanisms how to do this, the only thing we're lacking is the principle approach of some leaders, political leaders, business leaders who still think war and war crimes is not something as horrific as financial losses. I'm sure your leadership can make a difference and change this.

"I'm sure the whole of Europe will be able to stop this war and bring peace and stability to Eastern Europe. We cannot delay any longer, the longer this aggression of Russia will continue, the worse will be the consequences, not only for our continent but neighbouring regions."

The president received a standing ovation from the Oireachas.

The Taoiseach, Micheal Martin, addressed President Zelensky and said, "Russia will have to live with the shame of what they have done in Ukraine for generations. Those responsible will be held to account. We are with Ukraine and I am certain that, in the end, Ukraine will prevail.

"We are a militarily neutral country. However, we are not politically neutral in the face of war crimes. Quite the opposite.

Our position is informed by the principles that drive our foreign policy  support for international human rights, for humanitarian law and for a rules-based international order.

"We are not neutral when Russia disregards all of these principles. We are with Ukraine."

"To those who have arrived from Ukraine, I hope you find in Ireland safe harbour and friendship for as long as you need it."

Tanaiste Leo Varadkar also spoke and said, "A little over a hundred years ago, perhaps Ukraines greatest national poet captured their dreams of freedom and courage. Her words still resonate today. The people of Ukraine are sowing flowers of flowing colours, even amidst the frost, and watering them with bitter tears. Know that the abandoned fire of your songs will burn forever in the world, it will burn at night, it will burn at the daytime. It will burn forever.

"We also have a message too for the aggressor, for President Putin, his government, his diplomats, his collaborators, and his apologists here and abroad. Over the past 42 days you have violated the human rights of another sovereign people, your neighbours, your friends, your so-called Slavic brothers. You have raped and defiled the very principles of common humanity which bind us together in peace and harmony.

"You have betrayed your own people and your own countrys rich history and culture, your own resistance to oppression over many centuries."

He continued: "To those responsible for this conflict, we have a simple message from this House. Your actions will never be forgotten, they will never be forgiven. Thanks to the power of modern media, we have seen what you've done. You've made yourselves outcasts in the international community, you've strengthened Ukrainian national identity, you've united Europe and the West and you've made our values shine brighter ever still.

"We are a small country but we have a voice, and today we say to the world that Ireland stands with Ukraine. Our hopes, our thoughts, our prayers are with the men, women and children of Ukraine today and tomorrow and forever. We know you will prevail. Slava Ukraini."

Other party leaders, including Sinn Fein's Mary Lou McDonald and Labour's Ivana Bacik, also spoke, with Deputy McDonald concluding an impassioned speech with "Slava Ukraini", meaning "Glory to Ukraine".
TAIYUAN, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Yang Xiquan, a farmer in Longmen Village, Hejin City of north China's Shanxi Province, has just received the last 90,000 yuan (about 14,140 U.S. dollars) of his medical expense reimbursement from the village committee.

Two years ago, Yang's father was hospitalized for lung cancer, bringing a huge amount of medical expenditure for the family. Yang could hardly imagine what would have happened without the help from the local committee and relevant national policies.

"The daily cost could exceed several thousand yuan at the most, far from what a farmer could afford. All I could do was borrow money from others," Yang recalled.

Officials in Longmen Village introduced the village's collective reimbursement system to the worried man after hearing about his plight.

"As long as you are our villager, you can present your expense invoices to the village. Apart from the expenses covered by the national new rural cooperative medical scheme, your remaining expenditure on medical treatment can be reimbursed by the village collective," said Yuan Juanzhen, the village's deputy Party secretary.

Yang received a total medical reimbursement of more than 400,000 yuan thanks to the favorable policies and help from the village collective. The only expenses he had to cover himself were the travel and accommodation fees during his trips to the hospital.

The local village collective not only prioritizes attention to financial burdens brought by diseases but also other livelihood needs including education and pension.

Yuan said that students hailing from the village will get at least 3,000 yuan in scholarship funds if admitted to a university, and the village has funded over 40 million yuan for education over the past two decades. Meanwhile, seniors aged 60 and above can receive pension subsidies ranging from 500 yuan to 650 yuan per month.

All such policies and relevant subsidies stem from the burgeoning collective economy of Longmen. Since 1996, it has blazed a trail of eco-friendly and integrative industrial development based on multiple pillar industries including coking, construction materials, fine chemicals and tourism.

By the end of 2021, the village's fixed assets surpassed 3.2 billion yuan, offering job opportunities to more than 1,600 local villagers, and the per capita net income of its residents reached 37,000 yuan.

On Jan. 10, Wang Jiechen and his family received last year's dividend of 51,000 yuan from the village collective. "This year marks the 26th year of handing out dividends to the locals," said Wang.

To achieve rural revitalization, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs has proposed that relevant departments should study and formulate preferential tax policies to support the development of village-level collective economy and strive to support the development of about 100,000 villages by 2022.

Local governments are also expected to plan industrial development for villages and diversify the development paths of village-level collectives.

Yuncheng City of Shanxi Province has announced that the city aims to see the annual income of all its administrative villages reach more than 100,000 yuan within five years, and half of the villages will even notch up an annual income of over 300,000 yuan.

"Developing and expanding the village-level collective economy can help villagers alleviate their livelihood worries in terms of medical care, education and elderly care, while synergizing efforts to improve work efficiency and fuel rural revitalization," said Zhu Qizhen, a professor at China Agricultural University.

"It is also an important way to lead the villagers to achieve common prosperity," Zhu added. 
The first solar plant developed by North Macedonias national energy company

10MW plant a move towards decarbonisation and energy diversification

Additional EU-supported investments in solar plants are being planned

The first large-scale solar plant in North Macedonia  financed with the support of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and bilateral donors to the Western Balkans Investment Framework (WBIF)  has been connected to the power grid and is producing clean electricity.

The 10MW solar plant, built on the site of the spent Oslomej lignite coal mine, was constructed by JSC Elektrani na Severna Makedonija (ESM), the countrys state-owned electricity company. This is the companys first solar plant in North Macedonia, developed with a view to diversifying energy sources and supporting decarbonisation. It is expected to produce nearly 15 GWh of electricity and displace 12,177 tonnes of CO 2 annually.

The EBRD supported this investment with a 5.9 million loan, while bilateral donors to the WBIF provided an additional 1.6 million investment grant. The total project costs were 8.7 million.

Andi Aranitasi, EBRD Head of North Macedonia, said: The new solar plant will help the country, which faces severe air pollution from coal, to reduce its reliance on ageing coal-fired infrastructure. It will also generate cheap electricity in times of very high market prices. We are proud of this achievement and are eager to continue our work with the authorities to promote further decarbonisation in North Macedonia.

The new solar plant has a tenth of the capacity of the old coal-fired plant, so the EBRD is working with ESM on investing in additional solar power plants. The Bank also approved financing for an extension of the plant in Oslomej and the construction of a new plant in Bitola for a combined total capacity of 30MW. The European Union (EU) is also supporting this investment with a 5.1 million investment grant.

Julian Vassallo, Deputy Head of EU Delegation, said: The transition of North Macedonia from a coal dependant country starts today, by making a step towards the implementation of the Green Agenda for the Western Balkans, in line with the European Green Deal. This first phase of investing in 10MW solar photo-voltaic in Oslomej is a pioneer investment in renewables. Using solar power to create clean energy brings tangible benefits to the lives of citizens by reducing air pollution, while strengthening the energy security of the country. 

In addition to providing financing, the Bank is working with the authorities of North Macedonia to address the implications for inequality of the energy transition and to identify opportunities for economic diversification in the area, including for redeployment and reskilling. The EBRD will help the country to conduct a just transition diagnostic and an inclusive policy dialogue. The just transition project is expected to have a significant demonstration effect for the wider Western Balkans region, which faces similar challenges and requires a green, inclusive and just energy-sector transition.

In addition to the bilateral donors to the WBIF, Italy supported the investment by financing the projects technical feasibility assessment.

The Western Balkans Investment Framework (WBIF) supports socio-economic development and EU accession across the Western Balkans by providing finance and technical assistance for strategic investments. It is a joint initiative of the EU, financial institutions, bilateral donors and the governments of the Western Balkans. The largest individual cumulative pledges to date have been made by Norway, Sweden, Austria, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom.

The Oslomej 1 photovoltaic power plant is one of the 21 flagship projects in the Western Balkan region, selected for the EU financing in 2022 through the WBIF. The project has been identified as part of Flagship 4 - Renewable energy in the EUs Economic and Investment Plan for the Western Balkans 2021-2027.

The EBRD is a major institutional investor in North Macedonia. To date, it has invested more than 2.2 billion in 159 projects across the country. Supporting green energy is a priority for the Bank, as it addresses one of the countrys most pressing challenges.
Odile Renaud-Basso to meet authorities and clients in Greece

EBRD President to speak at Delphi Economic Forum

Greece was among the largest recipients of EBRD financing in 2021

The President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Odile Renaud-Basso, is visiting Greece from 7 to 9 April for high-level meetings with the government and clients.

During her trip, President Renaud-Basso will meet the Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis; the Minister of Development and Investments, Adonis Georgiadis; the Deputy Minister of Development and Investments, Yannis Tsakiris; the Governor of the Bank of Greece, Yannis Stournaras, as well as representatives of the corporate and banking sectors.

The EBRD President will also speak at the Delphi Economic Forum on Friday 8 April, where she will meet with European Commissioners Margaritis Schinas and Kadri Simson, among others.

Ahead of the trip, President Renaud-Basso said: The EBRD has been investing in Greece since 2015 and this visit will be an opportunity to highlight the results we achieved in partnership with the country, as well as to reiterate the EBRDs continuous strong support for Greeces ambitious green energy transition agenda, its economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and the implementation of NextGenerationEU. It also allows me to talk about the impact of the war on Ukraine on the global, national and regional economy, as well as about our support for Ukraine and other countries affected by the war.

The EBRD invested 838 million in a record 20 projects in Greece in 2021, up from 797 million in 17 projects in 2020. This put Greece in the EBRDs top five countries of investment last year.

Recent highlights include investments in green and sustainability-linked bond issues, such as those by Mytilineos, Noval Property, Public Power Corporation and GEK TERNA; an investment of 75 million in PPCs share-capital increase; 25 million to Viva Wallet; a 50 million loan to Cepal Hellas to support the growth of the non-performing loan servicing company; and a 50 million investment in the debut Eurobond issue of PeopleCert Group.

The EBRD is working with the Greek authorities on implementing the countrys Recovery and Resilience Plan, part of the European Unions Recovery and Resilience Facility, and on deploying the funding to the Greek economy.

The EBRD started operating in Greece on a temporary basis in 2015 to support the countrys economic recovery. To date, the Bank has invested more than 5.6 billion in 92 projects in the corporate, financial, energy and infrastructure sectors of the Greek economy.
BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) -- A new report showed China has raised nearly 800 million people out of poverty over the past four decades based on the 1.9 U.S. dollar per day global poverty line, accounting for about 75 percent of the global poverty reduction during the period.

After declaring the eradication of absolute poverty in early 2021 and setting an example for the rest of the world, China has pledged to make more efforts in consolidating poverty alleviation achievements and preventing a mass return to poverty.

What has China done to consolidate such fruits? What still needs to be done? Here is what you need to know:

-- What did China do after eliminating absolute poverty?

In 2021, a number of measures were rolled out to consolidate the achievements in poverty eradication.

A dynamic monitoring and support mechanism to prevent the once poor population from falling back into poverty was established, and nearly 70 percent of those monitored are now risk-free, said Liu Huanxin, head of the National Rural Revitalization Administration.

Last year, the central government allocated 156.1 billion yuan (24.5 billion dollars) in subsidies to promote rural vitalization, an increase of 10 billion yuan over the previous year, Liu said.

The per capita net income of those having been lifted out of poverty reached 12,550 yuan, up 16.9 percent from 2020.

-- What will China do to further help people who had been lifted out of poverty?

At present, the income level of people in some areas is still relatively low, and natural disasters, diseases and accidents may cause people to fall back into poverty, said Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Tang Renjian.

The monitoring and support mechanism for key groups should be optimized, Tang said, noting that rural households at risk of returning to poverty should be carefully monitored, while social assistance and health care services should be provided as soon as possible.

Measures will be taken to shore up weak links for supported rural industries in terms of technology, facilities and marketing, and create more job opportunities for people who had been lifted out of poverty, Tang said.

Technical, educational and medical personnel will assist with relevant development projects in key counties supported in rural vitalization, while the infrastructure and public services of relocation communities will be improved, said the minister. 
A young man who claimed he parked his car to view tractors and agricultural machinery cutting silage in a field was convicted of causing distress to a woman walking in the countryside who saw him masturbating and looking at her.

Judge Marian OLeary said after hearing evidence in the contested case against Daryl Lordan of Fahalea, Carrigaline, County Cork, that she was convicting him of the offence of engaging in behaviour of a sexual nature, which, having regard to all the circumstances, was likely to cause fear, distress or alarm to another person.

Judge OLeary said, He said he was sitting in his car minding his own business to see if he could see tractors and machinery and was only stopped for 30 seconds.

The defendant said the woman came up behind him, screamed, Hey in the window, took a picture of his car, flagged down a passing car and a man got out. The defendant said he drove away because he was feeling very uncomfortable. He testified that he drove home and told his wife what happened.

Daryl Lordan totally denied the offence and said it never happened. He said he was out for a spin at 6.30 pm on May 12 2020, just outside Carrigaline on the Ballea Road and he said he saw a bailer and he pulled in to get a better view of it.

Defence solicitor, Joseph Cuddigan, said, You seem to have a certain obsession with machinery  is that fair to say? He said it was.

Mr Cuddigan put to him the evidence of the woman, who is aged around 30, who said he drove past her a number of times to the extent that she thought he was following her as she went for a walk and that when he parked at the side of the road she walked past, saw him looking out at her and he was masturbating.

Daryl Lordan, who is also aged around 30, replied, I would not dream of doing that.

Cross-examined by Inspector James Hallahan, the defendant said, I was sitting in my car minding my own business and someone comes over shouting at me. She states that your pants were down? the inspector said. The defendant replied, 100 per cent they were not down. He added in relation to her evidence that he masturbated, That is what she thought  I know what happened in my car. Inspector Hallahan said, She knows what happened in your car as well.

Detective Garda Ian Breen, who investigated the case, said the complainant was worried she was being followed by the motorist and she said when she walked past his parked he was looking at her as he masturbated.

Judge OLeary adjourned sentencing until May 3 to allow time for a victim impact statement by the complainant.
A Cork-based company has said it is delighted to explore opportunities on green hydrogen with Germany.

Green hydrogen firm EIH2 welcomed the German ambassador to their headquarters to discuss potential opportunities recently.

German Ambassador, Cord Meier-Klodt, and Ralf Lissek, CEO of the German-Irish Chamber of Industry and Commerce, visited the site and met with the EIH2 team, including CEO Tom Lynch, COO Catherine Sheridan, and project support engineer Jack Reardon.

Mr Meier-Klodt said: Ireland and Germany share an outstanding diplomatic and economic relationship that is once again reflected here, in the mutual support established for a hydrogen economy.

Germany is one of Irelands largest trading partners and in the light of the current energy crisis, our two countries recognise the critical need of stronger cooperation to ensure energy independence for the EU.

CEO of EIH2, Tom Lynch, said: All of us at EIH2 have been following with interest the excellent work on hydrogen in Germany and we are delighted to welcome this chance for Ireland and Germany to collaborate on helping Europe achieving Net Zero 2050.

There are a number of significant Irish hydrogen projects already in planning and due to the vast natural resources that Ireland has, there is an opportunity and capability to create an export industry to support the demand for Green Hydrogen in Germany.

EIH2 was also recently part of the first meeting of the GermanIrish Hydrogen Council where many hydrogen stakeholders came together to create closer relationships in the field of green hydrogen between Germany and Ireland.

CEO of the German-Irish Chamber, Ralf Lissek, said he was pleased to join the ambassador on the site visit to EIH2.

I am pleased to join the German ambassador to pay this visit to EIH2, one of the founding members of the German-Irish Hydrogen Council, whose shared values and efforts in the energy sector support the development of strategic projects that today have been discussed.

Through this partnership we deliver a solid focus on green hydrogen and foresee the environmental and economic benefits that it will bring to Germany and Ireland, thus contributing to the EU long-term objective of achieving climate-neutrality by 2050, he said.

The meeting addressed EIH2s portfolio of projects such as the 4.2GW Green Energy Facility, partnering with Whiddy Island owners Zenith Energy and additional projects that are in development and green hydrogen routes to market.
A Cork GP who was sentenced to two years jail after being convicted of the indecent assault of a teenage girl in the 1980s has been struck off the medical register by the High Court.

The Medical Council had applied to the court to have Kevin Mulcahy (64), of Cregane, Lombardstown, Mallow, Co Cork struck off after a Fitness to Practise Committee found several allegations including that the doctor had exposed himself and hugged and kissed the teenage girl amounted to professional misconduct.

It was also alleged Dr Mulcahy at a later date in 1992 engaged in sexual intercourse with the girl in circumstances where this was inappropriate and on one occasion had allegedly provided the morning after pill after sexual intercourse.

High Court President Ms Justice Mary Irvine said she considered the sanctions proportionate having regard to all the circumstances and in particular the finding of moral turpitude, the age of the complainant, the doctors breach of trust, the repeated nature of the wrongdoing and his abuse of his position as a GP.

The judge added: In 1989 the complainant was only 15 years of age and therefore on the basis of her age was not in a position to consent to a sexual relationship. Further, she was particularly vulnerable as her mother who was attending Dr Mulcahy, was very ill and passed away during that time. It is likely in those circumstances there was a relationship of trust between the complainant and the doctor at the time.

Patrick Leonard SC for the Medical Council told the court that this was one of the most serious cases involving a doctor to come before the courts in a decade and involved a great breach of trust to the patient and the public.

Conviction in 2015

In 2015 Dr Kevin Mulcahy was convicted of a charge of indecent assault of a teenage patient in her own home. Mulcahy had denied the single charge of indecent assault at Cork Circuit Criminal Court.

The incident occurred on a date in December 1989 at the victims home when she was just 15.

The GP was looking after her mother, who was unwell at the time. The teenager said Mulcahy examined her and then touched her inappropriately outside her clothing.

Kevin Mulcahy previously gave an undertaking to the High Court not to engage in the practice of medicine and was restricted, by way of High Court order since March 28, 2011.

In the High Court on Monday Ms Justice Mary Irvine said the complainant who cannot be named by order of the court two years ago made a complaint about the GP relating to alleged childhood sexual abuse alleged to have taken place between 1989 and 1992. The judge read out the allegations including that the doctor abused his position of responsibility and trust as a doctor to form a relationship of an emotional and or sexual nature with the complainant.

It was also alleged that Dr Mulcahy had in 1989 touched and rubbed the girls vaginal area outside her clothing and carried out an examination of her breasts which was inappropriate by reason of it being sexually motivated.

It was further alleged that in December 1991 Dr Mulcahy had exposed himself and that on one or more occasions in 1992 he had engaged in sexual intercourse with the girl in circumstances where this was inappropriate.

It was also alleged Dr Mulcahy had provided the girl on one occasion with the morning after pill following sexual intercourse.

The allegations were found by the Fitness to Practise Committee to be proven as to fact beyond a reasonable doubt and it found they amounted to professional misconduct and constituted conduct that a doctor of experience, competence and good repute would consider disgraceful and dishonourable.

At the end of January this year the Medical Council met and decided to cancel Dr Mulcahys registration and to prohibit him from applying for the restoration of his registration for ten years.

Ms Justice Irvine said the rationale of the Medical Council included its extreme concern at the doctors breach of trust and abuse of his position over a sustained period of time.

The judge said it was evident having considered the documentation before her that the Medical Council is extremely concerned at the conduct of Dr Mulcahy particularly given the breach of trust, abuse of power and the vulnerability of the complainant and the absence of mitigating factors.

She said Dr Mulcahy denied the allegations in their entirety thus demonstrating a lack of insight and remorse.
MUNSTER Technological University came out on top last weekend, winning the Irish Universities Student Yachting Nationals hosted by Howth Yacht Club.

Munster Technological University (MTU) competed in the Student Yachting Nationals to defend the title after their victory in 2019, with this years competition being the first since the Covid-19 pandemic.

Under glorious weather conditions, MTUs Team 1 managed to finish off the first day of five races with a three-point lead, after some very close and competitive racing with Dublin Institute of Technology qualified them to go through to Sundays racing events.

After a victory in the first race on Sunday morning, things were looking up and victory was edging closer.

As the day progressed, the word on land was MTU are romping away with it, and by the end of day, under the watchful eyes of race officer Scorie Walls and her team, MTUs lead had grown to a commanding twelve points after eight more races.

This lead ultimately crowned the team of Harry Durcan, Ronan Cournane, Mark Murphy, Morgan McKnight and Charlie Moloney as winners, with University College Dublin in second place, and Trinity following in third.

MTUs Team 2 were not too far behind Team 1, finishing the competition in eighth place overall.
Drunken and threatening behaviour in and around Mercy University Hospital is a huge problem.

That was the view expressed by Judge Olann Kelleher at Cork District Court.

There is a huge problem with people misbehaving inside and outside Mercy University Hospital, Judge Kelleher said.

The judge said public order cases were frequently coming before the court and that the judge found himself making the same comments about the hard work done by staff and that this kind of misbehaviour was unacceptable.

The latest case involved Margaret Deasy of Mill House, Cork Simon Community, who pleaded guilty to being drunk and a source of danger to herself or others and engaging in threatening behaviour at Grenville Place outside the hospital.

Judge Kelleher imposed a two-month jail term on the 33-year-old.

Sergeant Gearoid Davis said the case arose of an interaction between the defendant and an ambulance crew.

He said it happened after 2 a.m. on February 18 when it was reported that she was being abusive toward them as they were treating her in the ambulance.

This continued in the presence of gardai. She told the ambulance crew to f*** off and keep away from her and she kicked out at one of them, Sgt. Davis said.

Defence solicitor, Joseph Cuddigan, said the accused had addiction difficulties and was making good use of her time in Limerick prison in relation to addressing those problems.

Judge Kelleher said, She has eleven convictions for Section 6 previously. Section 6 of the public order act relates to threatening behaviour.
Kenneth Fox

The Government has announced that those aged 65 year and over as well as those who are immunocompromised will receive a second booster dose of the Covid-19 vaccine.

NIAC has issued new advice that people in those cohorts should receive a second booster jab four to six months after they were first boosted.

Health Minister Stephen Donnelly says the HSE will now work on the rollout of the latest dose for those who need it. Work has been ongoing between the Department and HSE regarding the Covid-19 mid-term vaccination strategy.

The recommendations were made last night by the National Immunisation Advisory Committee (NIAC) to the chief medical officer (CMO).

As well as recommending a second mRNA booster for all those aged over 65, they recommended those aged 12 years and older, who are immunocompromised, receive a second booster or fifth dose.

Those who are immunocompromised aged 5-11 years are advised to complete an extended primary course (total of three vaccine doses).

NIAC reiterated its previous recommendation that pregnant women and adolescents from 12 years of age should be offered mRNA Covid-19 primary and booster vaccination at any stage of pregnancy.

Speaking about the announcement, Minister Donnelly said: I welcome todays update to Irelands vaccination programme. Covid-19 vaccines have achieved extraordinary success in preventing severe disease, hospitalisation and death. These vaccines continue to have a very good safety profile with hundreds of millions of doses administrated globally.

Those who are unvaccinated or incompletely vaccinated continue to be disproportionality affected and account for approximately a third of hospitalisations for Covid-19. As such, I urge anyone for whom an additional dose of vaccine has been recommended, or anyone yet to receive their primary course or booster vaccine do so as soon as possible.

I have asked the NIAC to continue to actively examine the evidence regarding the likely benefit of a second booster to other groups, vaccine choice and interval in order to make further recommendations in this regard.

NIAC have also pointed out the importance of building in flexibility and responsiveness to the Covid-19 vaccination programme to allow for a rapid and dynamic response to changes in viral transmission and disease severity.
In terms of

natural disasters, 2018 was a really bad year. Communities in the United States and around the world were devastated by record-breaking wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and other catastrophes.

Lamentably, these weather and geophysical events caused 10,400 human deaths and $160 billion in estimated damages last year, reinsurance company

Munich Re said on Tuesday.

The deadliest disaster of 2018 was the horrific

earthquake-tsunami combo that struck the Indonesian city of Palu in September, where 2,100 lives perished, according to the German firm.

The years top three most expensive natural disasters all occurred in the U.S. The

Camp Firethe deadliest and most destructive fire in California historytopped Munich Res list with overall losses of $16.5 billion and insured losses of $12.5 billion. Eighty-six people died and thousands of homes and buildings were incinerated during the November fire in Butte County.

Hurricanes Michael ($16 billion) and Florence ($14 billion) round out the top three. Florence in September and Michael in October were part of an

unusually active 2018 Atlantic hurricane season.

In fourth place on this dubious list is

Typhoon Jebi, which struck Japan and Taiwan in September, and cost $12.5 billion; and in fifth place is Japans historic flooding-landslide events in July and cost $9.5 billion, USA TODAY reported from the German analysis.

Whats even more daunting, experts say these disasters will become more severe as temperatures keep rising around the planet.

Our data shows that the losses from wildfires in California have risen dramatically in recent years, Ernst Rauch, head of Climate and Geosciences at Munich Re, said in a

press release. At the same time, we have experienced a significant increase in hot, dry summers, which has been a major factor in the formation of wildfires. Many scientists see a link between these developments and advancing climate change.

While the 2018 sum total of $160 billion is much lower than 2017s extremely high losses of $350 billion caused mostly by hurricane damages, it is above the 30-year average of $140 billion, Munich Re said. About half of 2018s losses were insured.

2018 saw several major natural catastrophes with high insured losses, Munich Re board member Torsten Jeworrek said in the

press release. These included the unusual phenomenon of severe tropical cyclones occurring both in the U.S. and Japan while autumn wildfires devastated parts of California. Such massive wildfires appear to be occurring more frequently as a result of climate change.

Jeworrek continued, Action is urgently needed on building codes and land use to help prevent losses. Given the greater frequency of unusual loss events and the possible links between them, insurers need to examine whether the events of 2018 were already on their models radar or whether they need to realign their risk management and underwriting strategies.

In November, the U.S. government

released a daunting report that warned climate change could kill thousands of Americans each year and slash the GDP by more than 10 percent by 2100.

President

Donald Trump infamously dismissed his own governments study, saying I dont believe it.
The latest heat wave that crippled Paris with 109 degree Fahrenheit heat and saw the mercury hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the Netherlands and Belgium was caused by humans, according to a new study published on Friday, as the Associated Press reported.

The rapid attribution study by a team of respected climate scientists from the international partnership at the World Weather Attribution Group found that the heat wave in France was made 10 to 100 more times more likely by human activity. And, the heat wave that had Great Britain sweltering was made twice as likely by human activity, according to the BBC.

It is noteworthy that every heat wave analyzed so far in Europe in recent years (2003, 2010, 2015, 2017, 2018, June 2019, and this study) was found to be made much more likely and more intense due to human-induced climate change. How much more depends very strongly on the event definition: location, season, intensity, and durations, the World Weather Attribution Groups report explained, as Common Dreams reported. The July 2019 heat wave was so extreme over continental Western Europe that the observed magnitudes would have been extremely unlikely without climate change.

The group published this report, just one month after studying another European heat wave. The back-to-back heat waves are unusual and jarring. The reports lead author sounded the alarm that this latest heat wave is a foreboding omen of what is coming down the pike.

What will be the impacts on agriculture? What will the impacts on water? said Robert Vautard of the Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace in France, as the AP reported. This will put really tension in society that we may not be so well equipped to cope with.

The record-setting temperatures in France and Germany smashed the previous highs by more than 2 degrees Celsius. The study concluded that without temperature rises due to the human-induced climate crisis, temperatures would have been 1.5 to 3 degrees Celsius lower, according to the AP.

We find that it was much more extreme than any other heat wave weve looked at over the last few years, said Jan van Oldenborgh of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, who contributed to the study, to Carbon Brief, as Common Dreams reported. [It impacted] France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, Western Germany, Eastern England, and also parts of Scandinaviaand at the moment its inducing a large melting event over Greenland.

This years heat wave was triggered by a slight movement in the Jetstream, which pulled hot air from North Africa across France and toward Scandinavia. That movement in the Jetstream is not so rare. What is odd is the extent of the warming temperatures, which ranked as a 50 to 150 year event where it peaked in France and Germany. However, if you take the same data and plug it into pre-industrial temperatures, the heat was a once in a millennium event, as Ars Technica reported.

An expert not connected to the study, Celine Bonfils of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, told the AP that the findings are clear: Record hot weather events are becoming more likely, and human-induced climate change is causing this increase in heat wave frequency.
Documents collected via the Official Information Act in New Zealand show that commercial fishers in the area have been killing or injuring sharks to retrieve their fishing gear, including hooks that cost as little as $1.

The documents come from government observers who worked to oversee commercial longline fleets in the country from 2016 to 2021.

Fishing gear on its own already presents problems for wildlife that may become entangled in nets or fishing lines.

Bycatch accounts for about half of global shark catches. Longlines are mostly responsible, but bycatch in nets is also important, according to WWF New Zealand. In the Pacific Ocean alone, 3.3 million sharks are caught each year as bycatch on longlines. Indeed, in terms of numbers, sharks are the most significant bycatch species in the worlds major high seas fisheries. They are also particularly vulnerable to over-fishing due to their relatively slow reproductive rate, with several species showing recent drastic declines.

Yet commercial fishers trying to retrieve their gear are another threat, as the observers documented that these workers would kill or maim sharks that accidentally became entangled in the gear.

The documents noted that fishers would throw sharks, swing them around by their tails, or cut through their jaws to collect fishing hooks, as Plant Based News reported. After cutting off the sharks jaws, fishers would throw the still-alive sharks back into the water.

Another document noted that a skipper, or person in charge of a fishing boat, told crew members to kill off blue sharks to reduce the population, even though the species is considered Near Threatened by IUCN due to overfishing and hunting for shark fins.

The Blue Shark is caught globally as target and bycatch in commercial and small-scale pelagic longline, purse seine, and gillnet fisheries, IUCN reported. Most of the catch is taken as bycatch of industrial pelagic fleets in offshore and high-seas waters. It is also captured in coastal longlines, gillnets, trammel nets, and sometimes trawls, particularly in areas with narrow continental shelves.

Experts have called the documents horrific and appalling and are calling for reforms to prevent these shark killings.

While I can understand the frustration of the fishers in incidentally catching a shark that is not wanted, nothing justifies such inhumane and callous action, said Laws Lawson, chief executive of Fisheries Inshore New Zealand.

Activists have drafted a petition for better shark protections and more monitoring of fishing vessels. The petition also wants fishers to release any bycatch, including sharks, with as little harm as possible.

Sharks that arent intended for food should be released back to the sea alive and unharmed by cutting the line, said Geoff Keey, spokesperson for Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society of New Zealand, also known as Forest & Bird. Forest & Bird is urging the fishing industry to end the practice of killing and maiming unwanted sharks and calls on the Minister of Oceans and Fisheries to ban this horrific practice.

At the time of writing, the petition has just over 30,000 signatures and is looking to reach 100,000.
Hurricane Florence, which the first pre-storm study of its kind shows will be more than 50 percent wetter due to climate change, began to soak North Carolina Thursday night into Friday morning, The Washington Post reported.

While the hurricane was downgraded to a category 1 storm, as of 5:16 a.m. Eastern Time (ET) it had already collapsed roofs and damaged structures in Morehead City and New Bern, North Carolina and unleashed flooding that stranded more than 100 in New Bern.

Warnings are focused on rainfall and storm surge, which the National Hurricane Center said could be life threatening.

It cannot be emphasized enough that the most serious hazard associated with slow-moving Florence is extremely heavy rainfall, which will cause disastrous flooding that will be spreading inland through the weekend, a 5:00 a.m. ET National Hurricane Center update said.

And scientists can now confidently say ahead of time that 50 percent of that rain can be attributed to climate change.

A study by researchers at Stony Brook University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found the storm will be 50 miles larger in diameter than it would have been without climate change and deliver about 50 percent more rain, The Guardian reported.

Scientists were able to figure out last year that chances of Hurricane Harveys devastating rainfall were tripled due to global warming, but that study took place after the storm had passed.

This is the first study to attribute a storms characteristics to climate change before it struck.

The idea we cant attribute individual events to climate change is out of date, its just no longer true, study author and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory staff scientist Michael Wehner. Weve reached the point where we can say this confidently.

What exactly that climate-increased rainfall will mean for the states in Florences path will be revealed in full over the weekend.

The storm is expected to make landfall Friday morning near Wilmington, North Carolina, according to a 6 a.m. ET update from The Washington Post.

There are currently up to 321,692 houses without power, and high water levels are expected to increase as the tide comes in, the same update said.

Flash flood warnings are in effect for Wilmington, Washington, Riverbend and Vanceboro North Carolina.

Flooding, storm surges and heavy winds are expected to persist through Saturday, CNN reported.

The most dramatic impact so far has been in New Bern, North Carolina where more than 100 rescues were in progress after water levels rose 10 feet, Mayor Dana Outlaw said, according to CNN.

WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU. You may need to move up to the second story, or to your attic, but WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU, The City of New Bern tweeted early Friday morning.

Currently ~150 awaiting rescue in New Bern. We have 2 out-of-state FEMA teams here for swift water rescue. More are on the way to help us. WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU. You may need to move up to the second story, or to your attic, but WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU. #FlorenceNC  City of New Bern (@CityofNewBern) September 14, 2018
MOSCOW, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), passed away at the age of 75 on Wednesday "after a severe and prolonged illness," said Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma.

At the plenary session of the State Duma, the lawmakers honored the memory of the senior politician with a minute of silence and announced a break in the meeting.

Zhirinovsky had been the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party since it was founded in 1990. He was a member in all the eight convocations of the State Duma and served as its deputy chairman from 2000 to 2011.

Before Zhirinovsky's death, the LDPR held 23 seats of the 450-seat State Duma, as the fourth largest party in the chamber. 
At least 23 people have died after a tornado barreled through Lee County, Alabama on Sunday, leaving behind damage that Sheriff Jay Jones described as catastrophic, CBS reported.

I cannot recall, at least in the last 50 years, and longer than that, a situation where we have had this type, this loss of life that we experienced today, Jones told CBS affiliate WRBL-TV.

Here's a radar loop of the destructive tornado that ripped through southern Lee County earlier today. This was the 1st tornado to impact the county. #alwx pic.twitter.com/QfKIju6OuN  NWS Birmingham (@NWSBirmingham) March 4, 2019

There are children among the dead, Jones further told The Associated Press. He said the death toll could rise, but that search and rescue efforts had to pause Sunday night because the amount of debris made the work unsafe in the dark.

The National Weather Service (NWS) in Birmingham, Alabama issued a tornado emergency at 2:09 p.m. Sunday for Lee County, AccuWeather reported. The tornado was part of an extreme weather event Sunday that saw several tornadoes touch down across the Southeast as part of a series of storms, The Associated Press reported.

The incident comes a little less than six months after a Northern Illinois University study found that tornado frequency was trending away from the traditional tornado alley of the Great Plains towards the more densely populated Midwest and Southeast. This is bad news for the South, where tornadoes are more deadly because of higher population density, a high number of vulnerable mobile homes and a greater chance of tornadoes occurring at night.

Toto, I get the feeling tornadoes aren't in Kansas anymore (actually they still are, just fewer of them). Tornado activity is moving eastward away from TX & OK toward Miss. River area, north & east ; https://t.co/SARMwYFVEu pic.twitter.com/SlFdOuywe5  @borenbears (@borenbears) October 17, 2018

Researchers told CBS at the time that the eastward shift of tornadoes was related to the eastward push of dry air from the desert into the plains, shifting the Dry Line between dry desert air and warm, wet Gulf of Mexico air along which most tornadoes occur.

Study author Dr. Victor Gensini of Northern Illinois University told CBS this shift could be due to climate change.

Its not a big jump to say that climate change is causing this shift east. The hypothesis and computer simulations support what we are observing and what we expect in the future, Gensini told CBS.

Sundays tornado was at least half a mile wide and measured an F3 on the Fujita scale according to initial NWS calculations. The Fujita scale assesses tornado wind speed and corresponding destruction from zero to five. An F3 tornado has a wind speed of 158 to 206 miles per hour.

We had someone on the ground in Lee Co briefly before the sun went down. First tornado to impact Lee County today was at least an EF-3 & at least 1/2 mi widethis is pending further/more detailed assessment tomorrow. #alwx  NWS Birmingham (@NWSBirmingham) March 4, 2019

The storm destroyed homes and knocked out power in Beauregard, Alabama and destroyed around 20 homes in Smiths Station, Alabama, CBS News reported.

More storm damage about to totally dark, I still hear helicopters and emergency sirens. #tornado in Bearegard pic.twitter.com/nWm1bRNeHW  Scott Fillmer (@scottfillmer) March 3, 2019

Our hearts go out to those who lost their lives in the storms that hit Lee County today. Praying for their families & everyone whose homes or businesses were affected, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey said in a Tweet Sunday, as CBS reported.

Correction: An earlier version of this article referred to Sundays tornado as the first in Lee County, AL. There have in fact been 40 tornadoes in Lee County since 1950, according to NOAAs Storm Events Database, not including Sundays storms.
It is possible to breathe in microplastics.

A study accepted for publication in Science of the Total Environment last month detected microplastics in the lung tissue of living people for the first time, and much deeper than the researchers expected.

We did not expect to find the highest number of particles in the lower regions of the lungs, or particles of the sizes we found, senior author Laura Sadofsky at Hull York medical school told The Guardian. It is surprising as the airways are smaller in the lower parts of the lungs and we would have expected particles of these sizes to be filtered out or trapped before getting this deep.

The research comes as more and more evidence shows that microplastics are penetrating the human body. Another study published days earlier found microplastics in human blood for the first time, and in almost 80 percent of the people sampled.

The new study also found the plastic in the majority of lung tissue samples  11 out of 13, the study authors wrote. A total of 39 microplastics were found in all regions of the lung.

Previous studies had found plastics in lung samples taken from autopsies. One 2021 study in Brazil found microplastics in the lungs of 13 out of 20 people studied, The Guardian reported. A 1998 study of U.S. lung cancer patients found plastic and plant fibers in more than 100 samples. However, the lung tissue in the most recent study came from live patients at Castle Hill Hospital in East Yorkshire, the Press Association reported. It was removed in surgeries as part of the patients routine medical care.

Microplastics have previously been found in human cadaver autopsy samples; this is the first robust study to show microplastics in lungs from live people, Sadofsky said, as the Press Association reported.

The scientists used spectrometry to identify the plastics, The Guardian explained. The most common two types of plastic were polypropylene, which is used for packaging and pipes, and PET, which is commonly used for beverage bottles.

In total, 11 microplastics were found in the upper parts of the lung, seven in the middle and 21 in the lower parts, a result that was particularly surprising, according to the Press Association.

Lung airways are very narrow so no-one thought they could possibly get there, but they clearly have, Sadofsky said, as the Press Association reported.

The findings build on reports that people exposed to microplastics in industrial settings have developed respiratory symptoms and diseases, the study authors wrote.

This data provides an important advance in the field of air pollution, microplastics and human health, Sadofsky said, as the Press Association reported. The characterisation of types and levels of microplastics we have found can now inform realistic conditions for laboratory exposure experiments with the aim of determining health impacts.
Puerto Rico will revise the official Hurricane Maria death toll from 64 to nearly 3,000 following the release of a report by the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health (GW SPH) commissioned by the Puerto Rican government, CNN reported Tuesday.

The study used data from 2010 to 2017 to predict mortality on Puerto Rico if the hurricane had not occurred and compared that figure to actual deaths on the island from September 2017 to February 2018, concluding there were 2,975 excess deaths during that period. That estimate took into account migration away from the island following the September 2017 storm.

Even though it is an estimate, we are officially changing, or we are putting an official number to the death toll, Puerto Rican Gove. Ricardo Rossello told reporters Tuesday, according to CNN. We will take the 2,975 number as the official estimate for the excess deaths as a product of Maria.

The new official estimate comes as various studies have suggested that many more people died in the devastating storm than previous government numbers indicated. The new official number is below the around 5,000 deaths estimated by a Harvard study in May and higher than the 1,139 estimated by a research letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association earlier this month.

I do think this study helps to validate that sense that many people had that there were just too many deaths, GW SPH Dean Lynn Goldman told CNN.

She said the research team would conduct another phase of the study to determine which of the excess deaths were in fact caused by the hurricane.

The numbers refocus attention on the Trump administrations lackluster response to the storm.

These numbers are only the latest to underscore that the federal response to the hurricanes was disastrously inadequate and, as a result, thousands of our fellow American citizens lost their lives, New York Democratic Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez said in a statement reported by The Guardian.

The study also adds more evidence against President Donald Trumps claim, when he visited Puerto Rico shortly after the hurricane, that the death toll was low.

If you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died  16 people versus in the thousands. You can be very proud of all of your people, he said at the time, according to ABC News.

In fact, the official Maria death toll now stands above the Hurricane Katrina death toll of more than 1,800, as estimated by the National Hurricane Center.

The researchers covered a six-month period because so many homes were without power for an incredibly long time. The Guardian reported. Lack of power increased exposure to extreme heat without fans or air conditioning and forced people to make more physical effort. Its fairly striking that you have so many households without electricity for so long. Thats unusual in the US after a disaster, Goldman said.

The report found that the death rate was higher for all age groups and social spheres during the period studied, but that people living in towns with lower socioeconomic development had a risk of death 45 percent higher. Older men were also more likely to experience higher mortality rates.

The Puerto Rican government also commissioned GW SPH to assess how well it implemented the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines for reporting mortality in disasters and how well it communicated crisis and mortality information.

The report concluded that the Puerto Rican governments lack of communication about best practices for death certificate reporting before the 2017 hurricane season, as well as a lack of awareness among doctors about how to report deaths after disasters, decreased the number of deaths attributed to the hurricane on official certificates.

GW SPH also conducted interviews with Puerto Rican government staffers, and found that the Department of Public Safety (DPS) and the Central Communications Office in the Governors Office did not have written communication plans for emergencies.

Interviewees also told researchers that there were not enough communications staff before the hurricane started and that an increase in staff after the hurricane was inefficiently managed.

Further, there were also no plans in place to use alternative communication channels once power cut out following the storm.

Researcher Carlos Santos-Burgoa said in a statement reported by ABC News that the report could provide a template for improvements.

We hope this report and its recommendations will help build the islands resilience and pave the way toward a plan that will protect all sectors of society in times of natural disasters, he said.

Rosello made promises to that effect, announcing the creation of a 9/20 commission for determining how Puerto Rico could improve its disaster response, The Guardian reported.
Smoke from wildfires can make people more susceptible to catching COVID  and dying from it.

Over 700 more people died and nearly 20,000 more were infected with the virus than would have been expected if they had not been exposed to air polluted with particulate matter from fires that burned during last summers record-breaking fire season, a new study from Harvard and published in the journal Scientific Advances on Friday found.

Health experts have suspected since the early days of the pandemic that a link existed between air pollution and the likelihood of catching the disease and experiencing a more severe infection, because small particulate matter known as PM 2.5 in smoke can impair the ability of white blood cells in the lungs to combat respiratory infections. Historically, this has led to higher rates of health problems such as asthma for people  more likely people of color and low income  who live near polluting facilities.

We were not terribly surprised by the results as scientists, co-author Kevin Josey told Gizmodo, but as humans we are dismayed about the impacts.

As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle:

While a correlation between wildfire smoke and COVID-19 doesnt prove causation, the studys authors say the tie is no coincidence. Plenty of research since the start of the pandemic has suggested that exposure to smokes primary unhealthy component PM 2.5, which refers to particulate matter that is 2.5 micrometers in size or smaller, compromises peoples immunity and increases susceptibility to COVID-19. Scientists also hypothesize that the virus may be spread by the particles.

The new findings come as the delta variant fuels yet another surge of coronavirus infections across the country while fire season is again in high gear in the West. Parts of California are already blanketed in smoke, with bad air recently reported as far away as New York and North Carolina.

Its a horrible combination, said Francesca Dominici, one of the authors of the study and a biostatistician at Harvard Universitys T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Together, the wildfires and COVID-19 make us even sicker.

For a deeper dive:

Gizmodo, The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle

For more climate change and clean energy news, you can follow Climate Nexus on Twitter and Facebook, sign up for daily Hot News, and visit their news site, Nexus Media News.




Brazil adds more feedlots to meet importing requirements from China

Industry sources in Brazil said the growth in use of feedlots in Brazilian beef production increased to about a fourth of the country's overall slaughtered cattle due to rising demand from China, Reuters reported.

Cattle exported to China is sold for BRL 20 (~US$4.29; BRL 1 = US$0.21) to BRL 30 (~US$6.43) more per 15kg compared to regular cattle. China accounts for 50% of Brazilian beef exports.

The industry sources said increased demand from China has resulted in the more feedlots compared to grass-fed cows living on large estates.

Hugo Cunha, manager at Dutch nutrition company DSM, said China only purchases cattle that are 30 months old, and they can only do that by completing the cycle in confinement or on a semi-intensive system, adding that most confined cattle are directed to exporting slaughterhouses.

Brazil slaughtered 27.54 million head of cattle lats year, based on government statistics bureau IBGE data. The DSM Confinement Census showed 6.5 million animals were finished in confinement in 2021, corresponding to 23.7% of cattle slaughtered from feedlots.

IBGE data showed Brazil slaughtered 29.7 million cattle in 2016. DSM data for 2016 showed with 3.75 million animals were raised in confinement.

More confinement facilities were added in 2019 after 22 Brazilian beef plants were approved for export to China in that year. There are 37 beef plants in Brazil approved for export to China based on industry and government data.

Brazil is the biggest beef supplier in the world.

- Reuters




By Wang Huijuan

BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhuanet) -- Chinas economic growth last year and its GDP growth target this year had and would definitely have a positive impact on global economy, said Ethiopian Ambassador to China Teshome Toga Chanaka.

The ambassador made the remarks during a recent interview with Xinhuanet. He added that his country is looking forward to attracting more Chinese investment and cooperating with China in more sectors.

The ambassador lauded China's 8.1 percent GDP growth in 2021 as the only major economy that has shown a positive growth trajectory after the pandemic.

According to him, a combination of three factors is the driving force behind Chinas robust economic growth.

The first thing he emphasized is: China has designed a development policy and strategy that suits Chinese situation. He also gave credit for Chinas great results in industrialization and its move into high-tech industries, artificial intelligence, digital economy, etc.

The second thing, he added, is the leadership; and the third is the participation of all sectors of the society.

The ambassador shared his point of view on Chinas GDP growth target of 5.5 percent for 2022. He said, China, as the largest manufacturer, the largest consumer market and a big importer, plays a very important role in the whole global value chain. Because of the size of the economy, if the goal is achieved, it will also have a positive contribution to global economy, said the ambassador.

Referring to the China-Ethiopia comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership, the ambassador elaborated on the achievements of bilateral cooperation during the past year, highlighting the two countries joint fight against the pandemic and cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

He recalled that Ethiopia stood with China when the virus broke out in Wuhan in early 2020, and China reached out to Ethiopia when COVID-19 was found in Ethiopia.



China sent its health experts to Ethiopia, and came out in a very big way in providing the badly-needed personal protective equipment to Ethiopia, he said, adding that such a support at a very critical moment meant a lot to Ethiopians.

The ambassador highlighted cooperation between the two countries which covers a wide range of fields. For instance, he cited the Chinese-built public-owned commercial bank office building, the countrys largest of its kind and also a landmark building inaugurated last month in the center of Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia.

So far we have several projects under the Belt and Road Initiative, including the railway and the industrial park developments, he said, praising BRI as one with global impact benefiting all parties involved.

Taking Ethiopia-Djibouti Railway as an example, he said it will boost regional integration.

Looking to the future, the ambassador hopes more Chinese companies will come to make more investments in Ethiopia, especially in such sectors as human resources, digital economy and medical health.

He emphasized that its important that the two countries partnership is based on equality, mutual respect and mutual benefit, which lay a strong foundation for the ever-deepening all-round cooperation.

To put it in a nutshell, I think we are looking forward to a full implementation of theNine Programs that had been announced at the Eighth Ministerial Conference on the Forum of China-Africa Cooperation, the ambassador concluded. Enditem
Sailing schedules changes due to poor weather

Several sailings will depart earlier than planned today due to adverse weather forecast.

The Steam Packet Company confirmed this the 2:15pm Heysham to Douglas sailing will now leave at 1:30pm and the 3pm Mannanan sailing to Liverpool will leave at 11am.

This evening's 7:15pm return sailing from Liverpool will now depart at 3pm.

A decision on tonight's 7:45pm Ben-my-Chree and return crossing will be made at 5:30pm.
A medical worker from east China's Zhejiang Province takes a swab sample from a child for nucleic acid test at a community in Songjiang District of Shanghai, east China, April 4, 2022. Amid rising numbers of COVID-19 infections in its latest resurgence, Shanghai on Monday launched a citywide nucleic acid testing campaign covering the city's more than 24 million residents. (Xinhua/Zhang Jiansong)

BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese mainland reported 1,383 new locally-transmitted COVID-19 cases on Tuesday, the National Health Commission said Wednesday.

Of the local confirmed cases reported Tuesday, 973 were in Jilin, 311 in Shanghai, and 17 in Zhejiang.

Besides, a total of 32 new imported COVID-19 cases were reported across the mainland.

Tuesday also saw 19,199 new asymptomatic cases on the Chinese mainland, including 19,089 local ones and 110 imported ones, said the commission.

Among the asymptomatic cases, 16,766 were reported in Shanghai and 1,798 in Jilin. 
LONDON  Air pollution over northern Italy fell after the government introduced a nationwide lockdown to combat coronavirus, satellite imagery showed on Friday, in a new example of the pandemic's potential impact on emissions.

China, where the outbreak started, showed a marked reduction in pollution after the government imposed travel bans and quarantines, and the data from Italy, which was hit hard several weeks later, suggested a similar pattern.

The European Space Agency (ESA) said it had observed a particularly marked decline in emissions of nitrogen dioxide, a noxious gas emitted by power plants, cars and factories, over the Po Valley region in northern Italy.

"Although there could be slight variations in the data due to cloud cover and changing weather, we are very confident that the reduction in emissions that we can see coincides with the lockdown in Italy causing less traffic and industrial activities," Claus Zehner, who manages the agency's Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite mission, said in a statement.

ESA published an animation showing how NO2 emissions fluctuated across Europe from Jan. 1-March 11, using a 10-day moving average, clearly showing pollution levels dropping over northern Italy.

Italy has been hardest hit by the outbreak in Europe, with more than 15,100 confirmed cases and more than 1,000 dead, and the government has imposed the most severe controls placed on a Western nation since World War II.

Researchers studying the impact of emissions from industry and transport on climate change and human health are scrambling to understand the possible implications of the pandemic as economies slow, flights are disrupted and quarantines imposed.

In China, Finland's Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air says CO2 emissions fell by a quarter, or an estimated 200 million tonnes in the four weeks to March 1  about half the amount Britain emits in a year.

Satellite data also showed a sharp fall in Chinese emissions of NO2, starting in Wuhan and then spreading over other cities, including the capital, noticeable over a fortnight in mid-February.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday that Europe had now become the epicentre of the pandemic, which has claimed 5,000 lives worldwide.

Reporting by Matthew Green; editing by Nick Macfie.
Over 50 gig workers have been killed on the job in the United States since 2017, according to a report released today by Gig Workers Rising. Of that figure, nearly two-thirds (34 deaths) occurred this year and in 2021, which may indicate a worrying upward trend. And often, the companies they contracted for do little to compensate their surviving relatives.

Based on publicly available data more people are getting killed doing gig work each year. App corporations are not doing enough to protect the workers who make their apps run, wrote Cherri Murphy, a former Lyft driver and one of the report's authors in a message.

The report compiled the 50+ incidents from public documents like news stories, social media, fundraising platforms, police reports, court cases and a database maintained by The Markup of ride-hail driver carjackings. It excludes other kinds of at-work deaths such as "fatal traffic accidents or other causes of injury." And as Gig Workers Rising freely points out, the report is not comprehensive and the "true number is likely to be much greater as gig corporations dont regularly disclose the number of homicides that occur for people working using their app."

Among the kinds of incidents that were included in the report were fatal carjackings, armed robberies or hate crimes. In many instances, drivers were killed by their own passengers. This includes the cases of Christina Spicuzza, a 38-year old from Pittsburgh and Abdul Rauf Khan, a 71-year old from Springfield, Virginia, who were both the victims of fatal carjacking incidents. The Wall Street Journal reported that many gig workers have quit due to a spike in violent crimes last year.

In many of the cases, the families of the victims were not compensated, according to the report. This is due to the same loophole that precludes most gig workers from receiving guaranteed minimum wage, employee-sponsored healthcare or other job benefits: their status as supposedly independent contractors.

DoorDash spokesperson Julian Crowley said the companys occupational accident insurance covers homicides and provides survivor payments of up to $150,000 for eligible dependents. We were the first national delivery platform to offer occupational accident insurers to Dashers at no cost to them, and with no opt-in or application required, which can support them if theyre injured while providing a delivery on our platform, Crowley told Engadget.

Instacart provides eligible shoppers with accidental death benefit payments up to $320,000 for eligible dependents. The company also covers burial expenses up to $10,000. "Shopper Injury Protection applies to all U.S. full-service shoppers and includes coverage for certain medical expenses, disability payments, and accidental death benefits," wrote a spokesperson for Instacart in a statement.

Since day one, weve built safety into every part of the Lyft experience," spokesperson Gabriela Condarco-Quesada told Engadget. "We are committed to doing everything we can to help protect drivers from crime, and will continue to take action and invest in technology, policies and partnerships to make Lyft as safe as it can be.

Uber, Instacart and Postmates did not respond to requests for comment prior to publication.

While the laws regarding worker death benefits vary greatly from state to state, at minimum they often provide some amount of money for funeral expenses; in New York state, surviving family members are entitled to "two-thirds of the deceased worker's average weekly wage for the 52 weeks prior to the accident."

My sister lost her life over a Lyft trip that totaled to be 15 dollars and really only totaled that because it wasnt stopped at the time of arrival but more so after her death," said Alyssa Lewis, whose sister Isabella was killed while on the job last year. "Fifteen dollars that she couldnt even take with her when losing her life for it.

"App corporations are not doing enough to protect the workers who make their apps run," Gig Workers United told Engadget. "Instead, the bedrock of their model is to offload risk onto workers."
Facebook is taking another step to encourage users to create original content for its TikTok clone. The company introduced a new sharing to Reels feature to allow users of third-party apps to post directly to Facebook Reels.

The update allows outside developers to add a Reels button to their app so users can post clips directly to Reels while taking advantage of Reels editing tools, Facebook wrote in a blog post. Initial developers to use the feature include Smule, which makes a popular karaoke app and video editing apps Vita and VivaVideo.

The move is yet another sign of the growing importance of Reels, and how Facebook has tried to borrow from the same playbook it used with Stories. Facebook has pushed Reels into nearly every part of its service in recent months just as it once did with Stories when the company viewed Snapchat as its chief rival. Now, with Facebook losing users to TikTok, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has staked a lot on the success of Reels. He said last fall that Reels would be as important for our products as Stories and that reorienting its service to appeal to younger users was the companys North Star.
Uber customers in San Francisco might soon find a traditional taxi waiting for them when they use the app to summon a ride. According to San Francisco Chronicle, the ride-hailing giant has inked a deal with Yellow Cab SF and Flywheel, the company that operates an Uber-like app used by taxi drivers across companies in the city. The agreement will give 1,075 taxi drivers in the area access to Uber customers in the coming months. Uber recently struck a similar deal in NYC, allowing people in the city to hail any of its 14,000 taxi drivers through the app.

The companies were able to finalize the deal, because the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency board has just voted in favor of allowing taxis to accept flat upfront rates for rides hailed through a third-party app. Customers can expect to pay UberX rates, which are calculated based on trip time and distance on top of a base fare, for taxi rides. The year-long pilot for the deal will begin on August 5th.

Uber's rates are typically lower than metered fares, though they could be higher during surge times. Kate Toran, SFMTA's director of taxis, said during the board meeting that Uber and Lyft fares are about 80 to 85 percent of metered rates. While drivers could earn less than usual for Uber rides, their participation is completely optional. They can accept Uber rides whenever they want, and there are no consequences for rejecting them.

Flywheel and Yellow believe the deal would benefit drivers, who could accept Uber rides to fill in gaps for dead hours. "[H]aving some revenue come in versus no revenue is a much better situation in the end, even if it is lower than the taxi rate," Yellow Cab CEO Chris Sweis said. Still, not all SF cab drivers are thrilled about the development. Mark Gruberg, a board member of the San Francisco Taxi Alliance, expressed concerns about regular taxi customers being ignored during Uber surge times. Another driver told ABC7News that earning less money from Uber rides would mean he'll have a harder time paying off the debts he took to pay for his medallion, which cost $250,000.

If Uber gets its way, though, there'll be no taxi left that isn't part of its network. Uber exec Andrew Macdonald recently said during an investor presentation (PDF) that that the company aims to put every taxi on Uber by 2025. Doing so wouldn't only increase its driver supply, it could also unlock new markets where people don't have their own cars to use for the service.
Shaun Weiss broke his hiatus as he prepares for his first movie in 14 years since his battle with meth addiction.

Weiss shared the good news to fans on Instagram on Thursday, saying that he would appear on the big screen again 14 years after the 2008 "Drillbit Taylor."

"John Erwin & Lions Gate for my first role in ... a while #jesusrevolutionmovie," he captioned the post.

He did not disclose the exact role he got in the upcoming movie, but it would be the latest addition to the flicks under his belt - "Mighty Ducks," "Boy Meets Worlds," "Freaks and Geeks," and "The Tony Danza Show."

The now-42-year-old took fans' worries away, as well, as he celebrated his two years of sobriety last month by sharing a before-and-after photo of him. This resonated with what his friend, Drew Gallagher, told PEOPLE.

According to the advocate, Weiss has been doing pretty awesome in the past years.

What Happened to Shaun Weiss?

The former child star first hit rock bottom when he became unrecognizable due to his crystal methamphetamine addiction. The mug shot photos of his arrests also left the public in shock and disbelief since he was underweight.

In 2020, he was arrested near California and was taken to the Yuba County jail after the actor reportedly trespassed on a residential property. The actor reportedly forced his way through a garage and tried to break into a car.

However, he fell asleep and was taken into custody after the owners found him.

Aside from the 2020 arrest, he also faced three legal issues on three separate occasions. In 2017, he was sentenced to 150 days in the Los Angeles County Jail for stealing from an electronics store.

"[Shaun] hopes jail will help him, and maybe while he is in jail he will write something," his manager, Don Gibble, explained to a news outlet.

READ ALSO: Jenelle Evans Eason's Health in Jeopardy? 'Teen Mom 2' Star Deals With New Issue

Although he only spent 12 days, he was arrested again after a few days for the possession of methamphetamine. A similar incident happened in 2018 when the police found him causing a commotion in California.

Since the drug caused him to have rotten teeth, oral surgeons across the country extended their help and made him undergo several surgeries and implants to correct the damage to his teeth.

His friend, Gallagher, launched a GoFundMe page for him to help him in his methamphetamine treatment program treatment.

READ MORE: Prince Charles Could Bring Back Prince Harry, Meghan; Expert Explains Why
DHAKA, April 6 (Xinhua) -- The Bangladeshi government has so far procured nearly 300 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said on Wednesday.

Replying to a tabled question from a lawmaker in the National Parliament, Prime Minister Hasina said, "We've collected a total of 296,484,120 doses of COVID-19 vaccine till April 4."

She also informed the house that so far over 128,070,948 people have been given the first dose of the vaccine, while 114,267,956 people received their second dose in the country.

Besides, the prime minister said that 10,081,193 Bangladesh people received booster shots.

Hasina said the vaccine doses were procured at a relatively cheaper prices, but did not disclose vaccine prices and related expenses, saying there is a non-disclosure agreement with suppliers.

Bangladesh began its COVID-19 vaccination drive in January last year.

Officials had earlier said approximately two-thirds of the vaccines administered were Chinese shots. 
A few hours ago (around noon Wednesday) DC and Warner Brothers Studios held an emergency meeting to discuss the future of Ezra Miller, and the projects they are starring in or slated for, after the actor's reputation took yet another nosedive this week.

On March 28, the Fantastic Beasts actor was apparently arrested at a bar in Hawaii, after becoming aggressive with a pair of patrons who were simply singing karaoke and playing darts. They lunged at the couple and attempted to attack them, according to police reports.

That's not the worst part.

No, even worse, the next night, after apparently making the $500 that was set for them, Miller allegedly burst into the couple's hotel room, yelling, "I will bury you and and your slut wife," and stole their wallets, including passports and a social security card.

The couple has since filed a restraining order against Miller.

This is not the first time the Justice League actor has acted out like this. In April 2020, footage came out of them apparently choking out a woman in a bar in Iceland - although they were ejected from the bar, no charges were ever pressed.

In addition, Miller threatened a North Carolina chapter of the KKK in January, posting a video on social media suggesting that they should kill themselves with their guns, or otherwise "we'll do it for you if that's what you want." The video has since been deleted, and many chose to take it as just another in a long string of celebrities fed up with right-wing terrorism, but since then a pattern has become more than apparent.

Miller has a history of having "meltdowns" on the set of The Flash, as well, according to a Rolling Stone insider:

"While the insider stresses there was no yelling or violent outbursts, they described Miller as "losing it." "Ezra would get a thought in [their] head and say, 'I don't know what I'm doing,'"

The Secrets of Dumbledore premieres today, a film in which Miller plays Credence, a character whose identity - and relative sanity - is ever in question. This film, obviously, is not being pulled as part of the pause. The Flash film, meanwhile, is slated for debut in June of 2023, and will now in all likelihood need to be pushed back, if the studio decides to finish it at all.

If one thing is clear, it's that Ezra Miller needs some kind of mental health intervention at the moment - and that their career is in jeopardy.
Commentary From Crisis Management Expert Edward Segal, Bestselling Author of the Award- Winning Book "Crisis Ahead: 101 Ways to Prepare for and Bounce Back from Disasters, Scandals, and Other Emergencies " (Nicholas Brealey)

For business leaders, there is never a good time for their employees to make mistakes on the job. This is especially true now for workers who have anything to do with the cybersecurity of their companies and organizations. Given the growing risks of cyberattacks across the world and the increased threats posed by Russia in the aftermath of their invasion of Ukraine, these are certainly perilous times.

Indeed, a new study released last week by email security company Tessian found that one in four employees (26%) lost their job in the last 12 months after making a mistake that compromised their company's security.

According to the second edition of Tessian's Psychology of Human Error report, people are falling for more advanced phishing scamsand the business stakes for mistakes are much higher.

Other Key Survey Findings

The study also found that:

Two-fifths (40%) of employees sent an email to the wrong person, with almost one-third (29%) saying their business lost a client or customer because of the error

Over one-third (36%) of employees have made a mistake at work that compromised security and fewer are reporting their mistakes to IT

Mistakes Are On The Rise

According to the report:

On average, a U.S. employee sends four emails to the wrong person every monthand organizations are taking tougher action in response to these mistakes that compromise data.

Nearly a third of employees (29%) said their business lost a client or customer after sending an email to the wrong personup from 20% in 2020. One in four respondents (21%) also lost their job because of the mistake, versus 12% in July 2020.

Delivering The Bad News

Over one-third (35%) of respondents had to report the accidental data loss incidents to their customers, breaking the trust they had built.

Explaining The Mistakes

When asked why these mistakes happened, half of the employees said they had sent emails to the wrong person because they were under pressure to send the email quicklyup from 34% reported by Tessian in their 2020 study

Over 40% of respondents cited distraction and fatigue as reasons for falling for phishing attacks.

More employees attributed their mistakes to fatigue and distraction in the past year, versus figures reported in 2020, likely brought on by the shift to hybrid working, Tessian said.

About The Survey

In January 2021, Tessian commissioned OnePoll to survey 2,000 working professionals: 1,000 in the U.S. and 1,000 in the UK.

Survey respondents varied in age from 18 to more than 51. They worked in various roles across departments and industries and at organizations ranging in size from two to more than 1,000 people. The margin of error is 3.1%.

Surprising Results

'More Businesses Are Losing Customers'

Josh Yavor, the chief information security officer at Tessian, said, "It's surprising to see how many more businesses are losing customers over mistakes like employees sending emails to the wrong recipient and also how many more employees are losing their jobs because of these errors.

"The consequences of accidental data loss are certainly becoming harsher, and businesses are becoming less forgiving for mistakes that turn into serious data breaches.

More Mistakes

Yavor observed that "It's also surprising to see that people are making more mistakes than compromise security as a result of distraction or fatigue in the last 18 months.

"When you combine these findings with the Zoom fatigue study, carried out by Stanford researchers and referenced in the report, it becomes clear that hybrid working set-ups are significantly impacting people's cognitive loads and their abilities to stay focused at work.

Advice For Business Leaders

Offer A Shame-Free Environment

Yavor said that "Employees will be more likely to admit their mistakes or ask questions if the organization offers a shame-free, transparent environment. Why? Because rewards are far more effective than punishment.

Create Positive Security Experiences

"So rather than scaring employees into compliance, encourage employees to engage with security by creating positive security experiences so that you can cement a partnership mindset between security teams and staff. Those positive incentives will help combat security nihilism and build stronger security cultures," he predicted.

Encourage Breaks

Yavor counseled executives to "Consider how stress impacts cybersecurity behaviors, particularly when employees work in a remote or hybrid way, and take steps to mitigate this.

"For example, encourage employees to take regular breaks between virtual meetings or introduce 'no-video meeting' days, to help prevent cognitive overload caused by Zoom fatigue. Another way is to introduce intelligent technology solutions that can understand employees' behaviors and intervene when a mistake is about to occur, nudging the individual to make a safe cybersecurity decision," Yavor recommended.

Educate Workers

He thought business leaders should, "Educate employees on advanced phishing attacks - like business email compromise and account takeoverand new channels in which cybercriminals will target themlike smishing. By understanding what to look out for, why they could be a target, and the steps they should take if something doesn't look right, employees will feel more confident in spotting attacks and reporting them to IT teams."

Customize Training

Yavor recommended that companies and organizations "Tailor security awareness training to account for differences in security cultures and behaviors across different departments and demographics.

"Employees in highly regulated functions like finance, operations and legal have to comply with strict data regulations on a daily basis, and this means security risks are frequently top of mind. This will likely impact the security cultures in these departments and, consequently, the behaviors of the employees within them," he concluded.

###
The idea of a new tax on the super wealthy is swirling in Washington but thats not the only potential change stirring in the way governments  including Texas  tax personal wealth.

While watching these latest developments coming down the pike, Ive noticed some key realities are often missing from the discussion. Ill address those.

The changes in play would affect Texas homeowners, billionaires, the 50-and-over crowd and retirees. By mid-April, I will be in two of those four categories but I wont specify which ones. Youll have to guess.

Heres a look at each.

Property tax relief

On May 7, Texas voters get to weigh in on raising the school-district property tax homestead exemption to $40,000 from the current $25,000. On the ballot as Proposition 2, this is a constitutional amendment brought by Republican Sen. Paul Bettencourt of Houston.

What should we think about this? Well, Ill vote for it. I have a homestead exemption on my house and the math works out to property tax savings of about $175 per year.

But something else we should think about is this: Who benefits from this tax break and who doesnt?

The fact is taxes on real estate are a tax on wealth that homeowners pay every year. We dont call it a tax on wealth (because that sounds vaguely socialistic) but thats what it is.

If you have a big, expensive house you pay more property taxes and we are usually OK with that because its a proxy for wealth. If you have a modest home your tax bill is more modest. People who dont own real estate do not pay this wealth tax at all, which also seems roughly fair. Yes, renters pay indirectly through rent but that burden is shared with their landlords.

So Bettencourts legislation is a $175 tax break for the more wealthy and provides little or no relief to non-homeowners, who are on balance less wealthy. We should acknowledge that.

Secure Act 2.0

The U.S. House passed Secure Act 2.0 in the final days of March with overwhelming bipartisan support for a tally of 414-5. Only five Republicans voted against it, with San Antonios Rep. Chip Roy the lone Texas dissenter. The bill, which heads to the Senate, is considered a followup to the 2019 Secure Act, another bipartisan bill that included generous provisions for retirement savers and investors.

The first thing to know about this updated retirement legislation is that it would allow people 50 or older to make larger annual tax-advantaged IRA contributions, increasing their limit to $10,000 from $7,000 per year. As Im turning 50 this month, this feels fair to me.

Who does it benefit? Obviously 50-plus-year-olds, but specifically the highly compensated over-50 crowd, because thats who has enough annual income to max out a $10,000 IRA contribution. Medium- to low-compensation people cannot benefit at all from this new legislation. In that sense this is a tax break for the wealthy and highly compensated.

Dont get me wrong; Im in favor of it. I just think its worth being clear-eyed about who wins with this reform. As with lowering property taxes for homeowners in Texas, there are clear winners and losers when you change taxes for specific groups.

A second big impact of Secure ACT 2.0 would be to further delay the age, to 75 from 72, when retirees are forced to take money from their retirement accounts in the form of required minimum distributions.

Most people take distributions from retirement accounts because they have to, at a faster pace than required, because they literally need the money when they stop working.

But some fortunate retirees dont need the money so will happily delay withdrawal and, therefore, taxes on their retirement accounts. Those who take advantage of delayed distributions are by definition pretty darn wealthy. So the net effect of this is reducing taxation on wealthy people. Thats fine and good and, again, Im for it. But we should also recognize what this is: a reform that specifically rewards the wealthy and highly compensated, and nobody else.

A third piece of Secure Act 2.0 does not address taxes on the wealthy but does implement my No. 1 policy objective as your National Personal Financial Benevolent Dictator: automatic enrollment in workplace retirement plans.

On ExpressNews.com: My political platform: retirement accounts

Im pretty confident that both Bettencourts tax break for the wealthy and Congress tax break for wealthy retirees will pass even though neither helps the average person. Both garner bipartisan support, though. Its interesting to think about why that is.

Billionaire tax proposal

In late March, President Joe Biden proposed a Billionaire Minimum Income Tax that would apply to about 30,000 families that have more than $100 million in assets. The tax would be imposed on unsold assets, or unrealized gains, which currently are enjoyed by the wealthy tax free.

As a newly minted billionaire myself, Im OK with this idea. (Oops. I said I wasnt going to specify which categories Im in.)

Do I think this will pass? No. Members of Congress have a proven bipartisan habit of rewarding the folks who are most generous to their campaigns. This tends to protect the extremely wealthy from the kind of thing Biden is proposing.

Also, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, declared his opposition straight away so the idea is dead before it begins unless Biden can win some Republican hearts and minds in the Senate.

Do I think something like this should pass? Heck yes. If youre surprised by my answer, you havent been reading my delightful 2022 series on billionaire philosopher kings closely enough.

On ExpressNews.com: Taylor: For a superuser of shareholder democracy, Larry Finks is a pretty undemocratic approach

But consider this

I know any discussion of taxation on wealth is triggering for some, which is unfortunate. If youre triggered, may I suggest two points worth contemplating?

First, you might think you are anti-tax for libertarian or theoretical market-oriented reasons. I have some libertarian and market-oriented impulses myself so I understand. But that impulse sometimes leads us to believe some version of tax breaks good, tax hikes bad.

So we should challenge ourselves to remember a more sophisticated version: At least in the short and medium terms, tax breaks for some mean greater tax burdens for others. It is simply not possible to lower all taxes all the time. We should talk about the distributional effects of tax policy.

Second, proportionality matters. Whenever I write about tax fairness I receive messages about how low-income households hardly pay any income taxes and the rich already pay the majority of taxes. That is true, but consider an extreme example of differing realities: A billionaire heiress forced into paying a new 20 percent tax on her annual income or unrealized gains will suffer precisely zero negative consequences to her lifestyle. We could very easily extend this same idea down the wealth chain to the $100-millionaire or even $50-millionaire. Meanwhile, a Texas family making the 2021 median household income of $76,727 could have a drastic reduction in quality of life if they paid even $5,000 more in taxes.

The rich truly are different from you and me when it comes to the effects of taxation. What would be devastating to 99.9 percent of people would not really be devastating to the 0.1 percent of people.

So lets keep these complex ideas in our heads while being clear-eyed about what taxation on wealth looks like  and could look like.

Michael Taylor is a columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, author of The Financial Rules for New College Graduates and host of the podcast No Hill For A Climber.

michael@michaelthesmart

money.com | twitter.com/michael_taylor
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The crowds are back, the good vibes are flowing, and the chicken is on a stick.

Veterans of Fiestas A Night in Old San Antonio, the raucous four-night festival that traditionally draws about 85,000 people to downtowns La Villita, welcomed it back Tuesday. The pandemic limited attendance last year and nixed Fiesta altogether the year before.

We are expecting record crowds (this year), said Melody Geoken, a spokesperson for NIOSA. We are thankful that people are ready to get out of their houses and celebrate NIOSA and Fiesta.

Long-timers are answering the call.

It is a break from reality, said Kerry Stanush, who has volunteered selling churros for 15 years at NIOSA. It is a party, a big block party.

On ExpressNews.com: Here's where to park  or ride the bus  for Fiesta 2022

Attendees who make NIOSA a tradition each year said they brave the crowds because of old friends they encounter  people they might not see in their day-to-day life  and because the money goes back to the community.

NIOSA is sponsored by and benefits The Conservation Society of San Antonio, which works to preserve historic structures and sites around the city. The festival typically generates $1.5 million each year, which funds grants, educational tours, advocacy programs, and more.

Now Playing: Express-News interviews Michael Quintanilla aka Mr. Fiesta for things Fiesta this year! Video: Luis Vazquez

I love what NIOSA does for the city, said Jennifer Zepeda, who was volunteering at the cerveza booth Tuesday night. For me, I grew up around the missions. The conservation of the missions is so important right now.

A few weeks ago, there was huge vandalism at Mission Concepcion, Zepeda said. Our churches have become these national treasures. All of those missions were the first homesteads of the city. We need to preserve those things.

Many volunteers got started working the booths because a friend asked them to help one year, and they liked it so much they kept coming back.

On ExpressNews: Photos: Fiesta is back, baby!

Leanna Davis, who has sold hats and accessories for 23 years at NIOSA, took charge of a booth when a friend stepped away because she was busy taking care of her first child.

We start out about four weekends beforehand. We just do it like Sunday afternoons  come to my house and drink some wine and glue some stuff on a hat, Davis said of the pinata- and flower-bedecked headgear. She sells them for $25 to $35.

I call them starter hats. Because you see those people that have the really big hats, Davis said. We cant do that because we would have to sell it for way too much, but you get this one, and then you add to it. 

Volunteering allows Davis to see NIOSA without actually attending NIOSA, she said.

It is crowded out there. I like to be behind the safety of the booth, Davis said. I see people here every year. Maybe it is the only time of year I see them, but they come by the booth and say hi.

Bumping into old friends is a highlight for Stanush, too.

What makes it fun is year after year you see people you havent seen in a year, and its like family, Stanush said. You always run into people from high school or a client.

KAYLEE C GREENLEE BEAL 2022

But in 2021, there were fewer people to bump into.

It was a lot different, said Andrew Lopez, a 22-year-old San Antonio native.

The Conservation Society did put on NIOSA last year, but the event was pushed back to June  and the summer heat  and it came with pandemic occupancy limits and other COVID-19 protocols in place.

There were a lot more precautions last year than this year, said Lopez, who has been attending NIOSA for most of his life. It was a lot hotter, but it was still fun, and it wasnt as packed.

Rene Resendez has been coming to NIOSA for 38 years and always tries to attend the first night. The biggest changes hes seen over the years is the increase in entry price and the variety of food options.

When I get here  it is kind of like Oh my god, what did I get myself into? Resendez said. It is just on the calendar. I have to come back  Its a tradition.

For Letty Coronado, born and raised in San Antonio, NIOSA is the pinnacle of her Fiesta celebrations.

NIOSA is such a traditional Fiesta event, Coronado said. It is for such a good cause  conserve our old buildings. I love coming, I love spending time with my buds, I love spending money because it is for that cause.

claire.bryan@express-news.net
A speeding vehicle crashed into a fire truck late Tuesday night, sending the emergency vehicle careening into an apartment building, said San Antonio Fire Chief Charles Hood.

Engine 27 was driving southbound on Hillcrest Drive, responding to a structure fire off of Culebra Road, when a silver sedan speeding down Quill Drive struck the fire truck. The accident happened at around 10:45 p.m., less than a mile from the fire station.

The crash caused the fire truck to slam into the nearby Summerplace Apartments complex, taking out the stairwell and damaging several apartments.

On ExpressNews.com: 'Grizzly scene': Man and woman killed in apparent murder-suicide inside Converse home

The occupants inside the sedan fled from the scene and have not been located.

Hood praised the seatbelts for saving the firefighters' lives and allowing them to walk away from the crash uninjured.

"This fire truck is absolutely totaled, there is a lot of damage here," Hood said. "There could have been multiple tragedies tonight, but we avoided that so we are happy."

Eight apartments with 17 people inside had to be evacuated due to the damage. Some from the second floor had escape via ladder because of the damage to the stairwell.

No injuries were reported.

taylor.pettaway@express-news.net
The Hispanic community has become antagonistic toward the Democratic Party, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said during a pit stop in San Antonio.

He vowed to win more than half of the Hispanic vote in the upcoming gubernatorial election to applause Tuesday at the Texas Latino Conservative Lunch.

Abbott said most Hispanic people are in favor of securing the southern border and funding law enforcement agencies such as the police  in contrast with most Democrats, including his opponent Beto ORourke.

With your help, we will keep Texas red, he said to an audience of about 150 at the Witte Museums Mays Family Center. We will ensure that we turn South Texas red.

Data indicate the numbers are trending upward for Republicans in Bexar County, where about 60 percent of the population is Hispanic.

In March 2018, 69,695, about 44 percent, of voters cast a ballot in the Republican primary, compared with 89,015, about 48 percent in this years primary.

Samuel Delgado Jr., who attended the luncheon with his wife at the invitation of their friend Bexar County District Attorney candidate Marc LaHood, agreed with Abbotts assessment, noting many of his Latino friends have become disenchanted with the Democratic Party and its policy stances.

Were definitely going that way, toward the Republicans, Delgado, 47, said.

Delgado, a business owner, thinks the Democrats are misguided on key issues such as border security and policing.

I do think that we do need to take care of us before (immigrants trying to enter the United States), he said.

During his remarks, Abbott denounced Democratic politicians, referring to some by name. Invoking U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has become a popular punching bag for the right, he lamented what he saw as the devolution of the Democratic Party.

There was a time when they used to be Democrats, and then they became liberals, and then they became progressives. Now they are socialists. They are representing and articulating and advancing the policies of Ocasio-Cortez, Abbott said, later promising to fire (Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives) Nancy Pelosi.

He concluded by firing up the crowd with a promise to save America from Biden and Beto and keep Texas the greatest state in the greatest nation in the history of the world. He received a standing ovation.

Not all attendees were of Hispanic descent. Wearing a cowboy hat, program manager Ed Olszanowski, 55, who described himself as white, said the event had opened his eyes to changes occurring within the Latino voting bloc.

Hearing some of the statistics, its pretty impressive how things are kind of shifting, he said.

Like Delgado, Olszanowski listed border security and policing as examples of political issues close to his heart. While he didnt necessarily believe a wall was the end-all-be-all solution to preventing illegal immigration, he said the problem was a pressing one affecting the San Antonio community. Something needed to be done about it.

People are coming across the border. We dont know who they are anymore, he said. We even see it in San Antonio  the gang wars that are going on on the South Side of San Antonio, the gang lords that live here and are allowed to stay here. Theres no security anymore. I think there really needs to be a focus on that.

Both Delgado and Olszanowski had previously voted for Abbott. Having seen him in person now, would they do so again in 2022?

Yes, they agreed.

caroline.tien@hearst.com
BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Chinese police have launched a new campaign to apprehend economic fugitives who have fled overseas, the Ministry of Public Security said on Wednesday.

The public security organ pledged all-out efforts to arrest economic fugitives who have fled abroad in the "Fox Hunt 2022" campaign, and will support discipline inspection and supervision departments in fugitive repatriation and the recovering of criminal assets, the ministry said.

The police will work with China's central bank to crack down on illicit money transfers through offshore companies and underground banks, and step up efforts to fight money laundering, the ministry said.

Chinese police have arrested a large number of economic fugitives abroad and recovered approximately 1.4 billion yuan (220 million U.S. dollars) in illegal assets during last year's "fox hunt" campaign, according to the ministry. 
A federal judge has rejected a request from San Antonio and one of its police officers to dismiss a lawsuit by the family of an unarmed Black teen the officer shot and killed in a 2018 incident.

The case of the Oct. 17, 2018, shooting of Charles Chop Chop Roundtree Jr., who was 18 when officer Steve Casanova fired into an occupied house on the West Side, now proceeds to a civil trial scheduled in August.

U.S. District Judge Jason Pulliam has rejected motions from Casanova and the city to toss the case before trial through a process known as summary judgment.

The judge found last week there were discrepancies in the police narrative, compared to other evidence and witness statements, and that the case can be put to a jury so jurors can determine whether the shooting was justified, whether Casanova is liable for the death of Roundtree and whether the city ratified his actions.

The suit accuses Casanova of wrongly using excessive force in violation of Roundtrees constitutional rights. It also alleges the city not only failed to train, supervise and discipline Casanova, but tried to evade liability by tarnishing the reputations of those in the house by falsely associating them with crime.

The city and officer deny the suits allegations and claim the officer is shielded by a legal doctrine known as qualified immunity.

Of course, we are disappointed with the ruling, City Attorney Andy Segovia said Tuesday. We remain confident that this was a justified shooting based on the facts and applicable law. This matter was previously reviewed by a Bexar County grand jury, which declined to indict. The city will continue to vigorously defend this case.

Dallas-area attorney Daryl Washington, who represents relatives of Roundtree and two other occupants, said they can now get their day in court.

I just think the actions of the officer were totally egregious, Washington said. Nobody in that house had committed a crime. They were all there legally when this officer just opened the door and fired without announcing himself as a police officer.

The biggest question is, Who is responsible for the death of Charles Roundtree? Washington added. The city just ratified the shooting.

Roundtree was sitting on a sofa inside a home in the 200 block of Roberts Street with two friends when Casanova  who was investigating reports of an assault or disturbance nearby  came to the door, shined his flashlight inside, opened the door and then fired his gun at one of Roundtrees friends, Devante Snowden, who had gotten up to see who was there.

The shots grazed Snowden but hit Roundtree in the chest and almost hit Taylor Singleton.

Two other occupants were in the back of the house when the shooting occurred.

In the days following the shooting, police said Snowden came at the officer in an aggressive manner and that he was trying to grab a gun from his waistband. Police also said they found a gun outside the home, insinuating Snowden had the weapon but tossed it out.

Later, Casanovas body camera footage was leaked to San Antonio news media, and critics said it contradicted Casanova and the police narrative. The video shows, among other things, Casanova did not identify himself. Those in the house have claimed the officers flashlight blinded them so they could not tell it was police at the door.

A Bexar County grand jury declined to indict Casanova, clearing him of criminal responsibility.

Police arrested Snowden on a charge of a felon in possession of a gun. He was acquitted after jurors heard from investigators who couldnt find his DNA on the gun police found outside the house.

Pulliam held a hearing in late March to take up the motions for summary judgment.

The city argued that SAPDs use-of-deadly-force policy was constitutionally sound and not the moving force behind the violation of Casanovas constitutional rights, that SAPD officer training was proper and that city officials were not deliberately indifferent to any obvious inadequacy. The city also argued it properly supervised and disciplined its officers, that it did not ratify Casanovas conduct and that Snowden was lawfully arrested.

Before ruling, Pulliam reviewed evidence that included the video and depositions in the case of officers, witnesses and Police Chief William McManus.

Pulliam noted the depositions of investigating officers show they agreed that firing into an occupied home without knowing where all occupants were located is reckless.

There is evidence in the record that contradicts the Citys version of the events as they unfolded October 17, 2018, and on that evidence a reasonable juror could find that Snowden merely got up to see who was at the door and Casanova shot him, killed Charles Roundtree, and narrowly missed Taylor Singleton, the judge wrote in the ruling rejecting the citys motion for summary judgment.

The judges retelling of the events said Casanova and other officers retreated while the occupants of the home  not knowing who had shot at them  called 911 for help and tried to save Roundtree. It would be more than 15 minutes before emergency responders arrived. Roundtree had died by then.

Viewing the facts in the light most favorable to Plaintiffs, Casanova pushed open the front door of the home at 217 Roberts, did not verbally identify himself as a police officer, gave a command to Snowden to show his hands, and then, without giving Snowden time to comply, fired two shots, killing Roundtree, hitting Snowden, and narrowly missing Singleton, Pulliam wrote.
An Uber driver told police that he fatally shot a man at a Leon Valley-area apartment while attempting to break up an argument as the victim began throwing pebbles at him.

Ladie Gene Lee II, 40, is charged with murder in the death of Shelton Fersner, 48. Lees bail is set at $250,000.

Leon Valley police found Fersner dead of a gunshot wound Feb. 21 at the Vista Del Rey apartment, 5622 Evers Road. They had been alerted to check on Fersner by a caller who saw him unconscious near a staircase, according to an affidavit supporting Lees arrest. A gun holster and a bullet shell casing were found near Fersners body.

On Tuesday, Lee went to the Leon Valley police headquarters, saying he wanted to talk about Fersners death. Friends and acquaintances of Fersner were accusing Lee in his slaying, which he denied.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio woman arrested in connection with fatal shooting of stepfather

Detectives said they hadnt requested Lees presence and that Lee was not being questioned in the case.

At the end of their discussion, the detective told Lee that they found evidence at the scene that would be sent for DNA analysis, which would help police find the suspect in Fersners murder.

As the detective was handing Lee his card, he responded, I shot him.

The detective was surprised, the affidavit states, and advised Lee of his rights before he continued to confess to the homicide, according to the affidavit.

Lee said he frequents the apartment because he is an Uber driver and bases his calls from there, the affidavit states.

As he was sitting in his car, he said he saw Fersner arguing with another man. He told the detective he walked up to the two men and called out to them, asking them to stop arguing.

Lee said this angered Fersner, who began arguing with him instead, the affidavit states. Fersner started throwing small pebbles at Lee.

On ExpressNews.com: Former state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte of San Antonio badly hurt in Florida collision

Lee said thats when he pulled out his gun and aimed it at Fersner to intimidate him. Fersner instead walked toward Lee, who fired one shot at Fersner. He fell to the ground by a railing as Lee ran to his vehicle.

Lee said he drove away and tossed his pistol  which he said he acquired illegally  at an unknown parking lot, the affidavit states.

Fersner, described by family as a natural entrepreneur, had moved to San Antonio from Washington, D.C., in February 2020, according to his obituary. He was a barber since he was 13, his family said, and worked on Capitol Hill in the U.S. House of Representatives barbershop, known as House Cuts, until he moved to Texas.

According to a Washington Post story, he regularly cut the hair of U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York and had a photo of himself smiling mid-haircut with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

He leaves behind a son, a stepson and his wife, who helped police identify him.

jbeltran@express-news.net
The San Antonio Water System and the U.S. Geological Survey are partnering in an effort to figure out how  and how much  water from Medina Lake recharges underlying groundwater, including the Edwards Aquifer.

On Tuesday, the SAWS board of trustees approved the two-year joint funding agreement with the USGS  not to exceed $101,000  to continue studying the surface water and groundwater system of Medina Lake and the Medina River. The work with the USGS on different water systems has been ongoing since 2016.

The next phase of study, which comes amid increasingly low levels at the human-made reservoir due to drought and irrigation, will evaluate how much water is lost to the Edwards Aquifer, to evaporation and through the lakes winding irrigation canal system. The results will be published in a USGS report in December 2023.

A particular interest right now is Medina Lake in the condition that its in, which is lower than 30 percent capacity, said Robert Puente, CEO of SAWS. Its an opportune moment to do this analysis.

On ExpressNews.com: As Medina Lake falls, local advocates press for state evaluation of the agency managing it

Medina Lake is at 21.4 percent capacity, the lowest its been since 2015. It has been dropping nearly full percentage points every week since the Bexar-Medina-Atascosa Water Control and Improvement District  also known as the BMA  opened the dam gates and began delivering irrigation water for farmers in early March.

The Medina River Basin, just north of the lake, has not received substantial rain for months, which has exacerbated the reservoirs condition.

When the lakes water falls below 50 percent, the entire system acts differently hydraulically than it does when its full, said Donovan Burton, vice president of water resources and governmental relations for SAWS.

SAWS and the USGS seek to better understand the relationship between how much water the BMA releases from Medina Lake and how much reaches the irrigation system, Burton said.

Where is that going and how much? he said.

SAWS hopes that the data collected will provide greater clarity for best management practices at the BMA and for future conservation.

SAWS pays the BMA $3 million annually. Years ago, the Bexar Metropolitan Water District, which has since been dissolved, agreed to a contract with the BMA to buy 20,000 acre-feet of water until 2049. Although SAWS does not take the water these days, its financial obligation to the BMA remains.

SAWS is also obligated to pay the BMA a $225,000 canal maintenance fee, which has been waived for the past five years because of the work that SAWS is doing with the USGS.

William Luther, Staff

The BMA said the money it receives from SAWS goes toward conservation, such as piping the canal system to reduce the amount of water it loses.

You want to look at the worst-case scenario for drought across Texas, such as when youre going to have poor rainfalls and you got a narrow watershed like for Medina Lake, said Karen Guz, director of water conservation at SAWS. Model that worst-case scenario against the water demands. Then ask the question, What level do we not want it to drop below, and what measures are they willing to take to try to retain those desired conditions?

On ExpressNews.com: In Bandera County, who regulates the land around Medina Lake? The court will decide.

Agriculture industry experts in Texas have been researching how to conserve water while irrigating crops, Guz said. One method uses evapotranspiration  the process of water evaporating from soil and transpiring through plants  to determine how much water is needed for plant growth. Another uses technology to increase efficiency in applying water.

Also, understanding the precise characteristics of an irrigation system, such as how much water is lost and where it goes, will bolster future discussions on how to prevent Medina Lake from falling below 20 percent in the future.

Water is, unfortunately, not just an enclosed bucket that we can pull from thats very easy to understand and see, Burton said. This will provide more clarity for the lake and for people to understand how it works. From there, you can make decisions based on what the future holds and what water experts believe is going to happen next.

Elena Bruess writes for the Express-News through Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms. ReportforAmerica.org. elena.bruess@express-news.net

Editors Note: An earlier version of this story misstated the title of Donovan Burton.
Windcrest Fire Chief Ivan Hernandezs first day was eventful for the small fire department.

The department received a call at 12:21 a.m. Tuesday, March 29, about a structure fire at a house in the 200 block of Driftwood Street. Built in 1959, it had been on the code compliance list for some issues, including scattered debris, according to Hernandez. He added he did not believe the house was outfitted with smoke detectors.

By the time Hernandez arrived at the address within 25 minutes of the call, a male resident had emerged. He said he had woken up to crackling noises, indicating the fire was already advanced, but he managed to escape unharmed. However, he wasnt sure if his roommate was home or not, meaning someone could be inside the burning house.

That kind of bumped our level of emergency actions to top-level, Hernandez said.

Firefighters battled poor visibility and 17-mile-per-hour winds as they attempted to extinguish the blaze. They entered the house to search for the roommate.

While they were searching, a senior official finally heard from the roommate  he wasnt home. The roommate had left the house 30 minutes before the start of the fire.

Satisfied the fire was completely out after inspecting the interior with a thermal imaging camera, the firefighters returned to the station around 2:46 a.m. Hernandez remained on the scene with Assistant Chief Robert Weidenbach and a Bexar County Fire Marshals Office arson investigator for another 45 minutes or so.

She advised us that there was no need, Hernandez said. She was like, You guys can leave. This house is clear.

Nearly four hours after the first call, the department received another for the same house. Having decided to wait for daylight to continue her work, the arson investigator was biding her time on the property.

Then, she noticed a glow, according to Hernandez.

She was kind of baffled, were what her words were, Hernandez said. Theres no way this could happen.

The fire had rekindled. Heading back out to the house, the firefighters went to work again.

In the process, a career firefighter twisted his ankle on a lip abutting the curb and was taken to Northeast Baptist Hospital for X-rays after it began to swell. He was diagnosed with a sprain. No other injuries were reported.

Because of the suspicious nature of the fire, Hernandez said the Bexar County Fire Marshals office is investigating the cause.

caroline.tien@hearst.com
More than half of the employees of the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services took a sick day Tuesday.

They werent physically ill, but they were sick and tired of what they regard as chronic cronyism and a lack of transparency and inclusivity from the organizations board of directors.

The coordinated sickout was the culmination of a tense two-week period for the nonprofit, which provides legal and social services to immigrants and refugees.

After word got out that the board planned to name real estate attorney  and former RAICES board chair  Dolores Schroeder to be the organizations new CEO, staffers were quick to register their disapproval.

Their complaints were twofold:

They objected to the insular selection process, which bore no resemblance to the boards promised national search for a new CEO.

RAICES employees also were unhappy about the appointee who emerged from that process.

Staffers view Schroeders real estate background as incongruous with the mission of an organization devoted to serving the disenfranchised. And they see her as someone who, in her two-year stint as board chair, allowed mismanagement to fester at the organization.

On March 30, 22 members of the RAICES management team (including directors of all the legal department programs and managing attorneys of various RAICES offices), sent a protest letter to the board.

RAICES managers said they were shocked by the boards disastrous action, adding that it demonstrated disregard for the culture of RAICES that values inclusion and the opinion of others.

A day later, the RAICES Workers Union sent the board a letter denouncing the selection of Schroeder, who the union described as severely unqualified to run the nonprofit.

There is no evidence of her expertise in immigration law, civil rights law, or federal litigation, and she lacks the experience of managing a unionized nonprofit organization, the union stated.

The allegations of cronyism from RAICES staffers are rooted in the way Schroeder went, in short order, from board chair to the choice of the board for CEO. Some employees suspect an informal deal existed between Schroeder and John Agather, her successor as board chair.

Mrs. Schroeder appointed John Agather to serve as Board Chair, the union stated in its letter to the board.

Shortly after Mr. Agathers appointment, she stepped down from the Board. Then, without consulting RAICES management and staff, Mr. Agather appointed Mrs. Schroeder as the new CEO of RAICES.

Agather did not respond to an interview request for this column.

The Board was in the process of engaging a national search firm to assist in the selection of the next CEO, the board said last week in a message to RAICES employees.

However, after a qualified candidate was independently identified based on the necessary skill set identified, the Board changed course.

Roughly 150 RAICES employees participated in Tuesdays sickout. Many of them got together and posed for a group photo, holding placards that read, Save RAICES From the Board, Sick of Lies and Weve Been Stomped on Long Enough.

This uprising is the culmination of frustration thats been brewing over the past few years, as RAICES has experienced exponential growth and internal dissension.

As RAICES took a key role in representing asylum-seeking families separated at the border in 2018 by then-President Donald Trump, its public profile, funding and staff size expanded.

In a span of about seven months in 2018, its Twitter following grew from 2,000 to 76,000. That same year, RAICES hired 137 employees and opened new offices in San Antonio, Houston and Dallas.

But allegations of fiscal mismanagement have been rampant, with a group of employees retaining a lawyer in late 2018. The group sent a letter to the RAICES board, expressing concerns about a lack of financial oversight and reports of misused and misallocated funds under then-CEO Jonathan Ryan.

There was no financial mismanagement under my watch at RAICES, Ryan said Tuesday in a statement provided to the Express-News. To state that there was is completely baseless and without a shred of evidence.

Ryan stepped down last September under murky circumstances, and staffers hoped his replacement could bring a renewed sense of stability to the organization.

Cristian Sanchez, a supervising attorney at RAICES, told me Tuesday that Schroeder appears to be blatantly unqualified to serve as CEO of the organization. But he said the issue that divides RAICES is bigger than the selection of any one person.

We could have a different CEO, Sanchez said. But the same issue would be there with the board of directors, which is incredibly small and disconnected from the movement and the organization.

ggarcia@express-news.net | Twitter: @gilgamesh470
Now Hiring. Vacancy, Apply Within. No Experience Needed. Join Our Team. Looking For a Rewarding Career? These words are seen everywhere in todays business environment.

Businesses need employees to succeed and keep their doors open. The economic conditions of the past two years as our community fought the coronavirus have only magnified the hiring challenges facing Texas employers. Job vacancies in our state are reaching record highs, with about 46,000 job openings in San Antonio. Yet, our community is also seeing dramatically low unemployment rates. How do we explain that mismatch?

We are missing a pool of talent to fill todays and tomorrows jobs. Our inability to address immigration reform is starving our state of workers. The private sector needs the attention of lawmakers to address this crisis. It is high time federal leaders let go of the political messaging and embrace the business case for immigration reform.

The San Antonio Chamber of Commerce has a long history of advocating for bipartisan immigration reform, and we value the contributions of immigrants in our community. According to a new analysis by FWD.us, immigrants make up a significant share of workers in key industries across the San Antonio-New Braunfels metro area, making up 12 percent of workers in health services, about one-third of the regions construction workers and 14 percent of our restaurant and food services workers.

Our region isnt the only one seeing the powerful impact of immigrants. As the FWD.us analysis shows, Texas depends on immigrants to grow the economy, with more than 3.3 million workers and the second-largest immigrant labor force in the nation. In total, Texas immigrants contribute an estimated $119 billion annually in personal income to the Texas economy. While Congress debates reforms, about 1.1 million undocumented Texans - representing an estimated 8 percent of the states total workforce  are contributing to society by paying state, local and federal taxes to the tune of $6.5 billion annually. Of those, an estimated 930,000 undocumented Texans work in essential industries  with a majority of these individuals having lived in the U.S. for more than a decade.

Beyond the workforce, 429,000 immigrant business owners are creating jobs for all Texans while contributing to the competitiveness of our globally recognized economy. However, immigrant business owners are not immune to the same shortage of available workers and supply chain issues. In fact, they often face additional challenges when it comes to accessing resources, which is especially the case for undocumented entrepreneurs.

Texas should, and must, take the lead on immigration reform so more workers can join our states labor force to give businesses a fighting chance at a sustained recovery.

Reasonable changes to immigration laws will increase access to work permits while deportation safeties for immigrant workers could expand Texas economy by $2 billion each year and add $1.4 billion in annual tax contributions. Bipartisan legislation like the Dream Act can play a major role in improving the lives of young undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. at a young age, otherwise known as Dreamers. The Dream Act would ensure they can continue living, contributing and filling critical roles in the states workforce. Additionally, an estimated 50 percent to 70 percent of agricultural workers in our country are undocumented, and the Farm Workforce Modernization Act would help current immigrant agriculture workers earn citizenship by enabling farmers to more easily access the H-2A seasonal worker visa program.

The U.S. Congress failure to move sensible pro-immigration policies will have lasting impacts on our economy at a time when we need growth the most. Further, establishing an earned pathway to citizenship for certain undocumented Texans would help capable and hardworking people find opportunities to work, earn an education, and fill essential skills and labor gaps. These hardworking people are our neighbors, they are our friends, and they are a real solution to getting business moving. I urge Texas representatives in Congress to take action.

Richard Perez is president and CEO of the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce.
Six weeks into the war between Russia and Ukraine, Im beginning to wonder if this conflict isnt our first true world war  much more than World War I or World War II ever were. In this war, which I think of as World War Wired, virtually everyone on the planet can either observe the fighting at a granular level, participate in some way or be affected economically  no matter where they live.

While the battle on the ground that triggered World War Wired is ostensibly over who should control Ukraine, do not be fooled. This has quickly turned into the big battle between the two most dominant political systems in the world today: free-market, rule-of-law democracy versus authoritarian kleptocracy, the Swedish expert on the Russian economy, Anders Aslund, remarked to me.

Though this war is far from over, and Vladimir Putin may still find a way to prevail and come out stronger, if he doesnt, it could be a watershed in the conflict between democratic and undemocratic systems. It is worth recalling that World War II put an end to fascism, and the Cold War put an end to orthodox communism, eventually even in China. So, what happens on the streets of Kyiv, Mariupol and the Donbas region could influence political systems far beyond Ukraine and far into the future.

Indeed, other autocratic leaders, like Chinas, are watching Russia carefully. They see its economy being weakened by Western sanctions; thousands of its young technologists fleeing to escape a government denying them access to the internet and credible news; and its inept army seemingly unable to gather, share and funnel accurate information to the top. Those leaders have to be asking themselves: Holy cow  am I that vulnerable? Am I presiding over a similar house of cards?

Everyone is watching.

In World War I and World War II, no one had a smartphone or access to social networks through which to observe and participate in the war in nonkinetic ways. Indeed, a large chunk of the worlds population was still colonized and did not have the full freedom to express independent views, even if they had the technology. Many of those residing outside the war zones were also extremely poor subsistence farmers who were not so heavily affected by those first two world wars. There werent the giant connected globalized and urbanized lower and middle classes of todays wired world.

Now, anyone with a smartphone can view what is happening in Ukraine  live and in color  and express opinions globally through social media. In our post-colonial world, governments from virtually every country around the globe can vote to condemn or excuse one side or another in Ukraine through the United Nations General Assembly.

While estimates vary, it appears that between 3 billion and 4 billion people on the planet  almost half  have a smartphone today, and although internet censorship remains a real problem, particularly in China, there are just so many more people able to peer deeply into so many more places. And thats not all.

Anyone with a smartphone and a credit card can aid strangers in Ukraine, through Airbnb, by just reserving a night at their home and not using it. Teenagers anywhere can create apps on Twitter to track Russian oligarchs and their yachts. And encrypted instant messaging app Telegram  which was invented by two Russian-born techie brothers as a tool to communicate outside the Kremlins earshot  has emerged as the go-to place for unfiltered live war updates for both Ukrainian refugees and increasingly isolated Russians alike, NPR reported. And its run out of Dubai, United Arab Emirates!

Meanwhile, Ukraines government has been able to tap a whole new source of funding  raising more than $70 million worth of cryptocurrency from individuals around the world after appealing on social media for donations. And Tesla billionaire Elon Musk activated his SpaceX companys satellite broadband service in Ukraine to provide high-speed internet after a Ukrainian official tweeted at him for help from Russian efforts to disconnect Ukraine from the world.

Such nongovernmental, super-empowered global players and platforms were not present in WWI or II.

But just as so many more people can affect this war, so, too, can more be affected by it. Russia and Ukraine are key suppliers of wheat and fertilizer to the agricultural supply chains that now feed the world and that this war has disrupted. A war between just two countries in Europe has spiked the price of food for Egyptians, Brazilians, Indians and Africans.

And because Russia is one of the worlds biggest exporters of natural gas, crude oil and the diesel fuel used by farmers in their tractors, the sanctions on Russias energy infrastructure are curbing its exports, causing gasoline pump prices to rise from Minneapolis to Mexico to Mumbai, and forcing farmers as far away as Argentina to ration their diesel-powered tractor usage or cut fossil-fuel-rich fertilizer usage, jeopardizing Argentinas agriculture exports and adding further to soaring world food prices.

Theres another unexpected financial globalization angle on this war that you really need to keep your eye on: Putin saved up over $600 billion in gold, foreign government bonds and foreign currency, earned from all of Russias energy and mineral exports, precisely so he would have a cushion if he were sanctioned by the West. But Putin apparently forgot that in todays wired world, as is standard practice, his government had deposited most of it in the banks of Western countries and China.

According to the Atlantic Council GeoEconomics Center, the top six nations where Russian central bank foreign currency assets are stowed by percentage are: China, 17.7 percent; France, 15.6 percent; Japan, 12.8 percent; Germany, 12.2 percent; U.S., 8.5 percent; and Britain, 5.8 percent. Also, the Bank of International Settlement and the International Monetary Fund have 6.4 percent.

Each of these countries, except China, has now frozen the Russian reserves it is holding  so around $330 billion is inaccessible to Putin, according to the Atlantic Councils tracker.

But not only can the Russian state not touch those reserves to prop up its crumbling economy, there will be a huge global push to tap this money to pay reparations to rebuild the Ukrainian homes, apartment buildings, roads and government structures the Russian army destroyed in Putins war of choice.

Message to Putin: Thanks for banking with us. It will be legally difficult to seize your savings for reparations, but youd better get your lawyers ready.

For all these reasons, all of those leaders around the world who have drifted toward some version or another of Putin-inspired authoritarian capitalism or kleptocracy have to be worried, though they will not be easily dislodged no matter what happens in Russia.

These regimes have become adept at using new surveillance technologies to control political opponents and information flows and to manipulate their politics and state financial resources to keep themselves ensconced in power. We are talking about Turkey, Myanmar, China, North Korea, Peru, Brazil, the Philippines, Hungary and several Arab states. Putin was surely hoping that a second Trump term might transform the U.S. into a version of this kind of strongman kleptocracy and tip the whole global balance his way.

Then came this war. To be sure, Ukraines democracy is frail, and the country has had its own serious issues with oligarchs and corruption. Kyivs burning aspiration, though, was not to join NATO but to join the European Union, and it was in the process of cleaning itself up to do just that.

Thats what really triggered this war. Putin was never going to let a Slavic Ukraine become a successful free-market democracy in the EU next door to his stagnating Slavic Russian kleptocracy. The contrast would have been intolerable for him, and that is why he is trying to erase Ukraine.

But Putin, it turns out, had no clue what world he was living in, no clue about the frailties of his own system, no clue how much the whole free, democratic world could and would join the fight against him in Ukraine, and no clue, most of all, about how many people would be watching.

Thomas Friedman is a New York Times opinion columnist.
*Editors note: This story has been corrected to attribute comments and quotes made by Hollis Grizzard Jr.

It appears Greater Harmony Hills on San Antonios North Side may get new representation on City Council even after months of neighborhood leaders opposing the move.

As a committee of San Antonio residents approved a draft map of new boundaries for City Council districts this week, the neighborhood was one of several that would shift.

The process, called redistricting, plays out every 10 years. Federal and local law requires the city to adjust council districts based on U.S. Census data so that each district has roughly equal population.

The draft map isnt final. The committee can continue to make changes or even develop a second draft. Members will gather public feedback on the map in the coming months, with a final City Council vote tentatively scheduled for June.

After the map undergoes legal review, the city will post it online for public comment at sabexarcountmein.org.

San Antonio took a new approach to redistricting this decade. Previously, individual City Council members met with legal counsel to work on a new map, largely outside of the publics view. This time around, City Council members each appointed two people to a committee that has been meeting publicly to draw a new map.

Those meetings allowed the committee time to hear from residents, and neighbors in Greater Harmony Hills were some of the most vocal.

Patty Gibbons, president of the Greater Harmony Hills Neighborhood Association, said they did not want to move out of District 9  which encompasses the North Side from the airport to outside Loop 1604  into District 1, which includes most of downtown and near North Side neighborhoods like Monte Vista.

At a meeting last month, Gibbons said Greater Harmony Hills was one of San Antonios first suburban areas. At its founding, she said it was a bedroom community with cornfields sitting beyond it  land thats now been consumed by development and population boom and sits inside city limits.

Dawn Baamonde, another Greater Harmony Hills resident, said the word suburban had come up a lot.

The values of an urban neighborhood are just not the same, Baamonde said in asking the redistricting committee to keep her neighbors in District 9.

One District 1 resident said in a public comment they felt their area was being misrepresented by Greater Harmony Hills, saying it was being spoken of as an overgrown homeless encampment, rather than the friendly, family community with well-kept homes most of it actually is.

When District 9 committee members ultimately suggested moving the neighborhood into District 1, it came with an apology to District 1 residents.

A good part of this commentary was flatly unfair, said Larry Lamborn, who represents District 9 on the committee. Some of it misrepresented and, upon occasion, certain comments I felt were actually hurtful.

Hollis Grizzard Jr., who also represents District 9, said they listened to the neighborhoods leadership. But, in the end, District 9 must lose population, and Grizzard felt there were limited options for where they could shed residents.

District 9 sits on the growing North Side between two other overpopulated areas, Districts 8 and 10. Instead of adding to their population burden, Grizzard said it made sense to give its residents to District 1 to its south, which needs to gain population.

The committee looked at moving other neighborhoods on the southern edge of District 9 into District 1, but doing so reduced the Hispanic voting strength in District 1  a move the committee wouldnt accept. Under the federal Voting Rights Act, new maps cant dilute the voting power of racial and ethnic minorities.

Theres no other way we can see that we can maintain a respectable, appropriate percentage of Hispanic voting population in District 1 without diluting it  without moving Greater Harmony Hills, Grizzard said.

The neighborhood wasnt the only obstacle to reaching a draft map. An argument over which City Council district should contain the Medical Center, a large economic generator on the Northwest Side, came to a head last week.

The Medical Center will remain in District 8 after District 7 appointees made an effort to split the area, causing accusations of allowing politics into the redistricting committee.

Representatives from Districts 5 and 6 also disagreed on the Old Highway 90 business community and Cuellar Park, all near the Los Jardines neighborhood on the West Side. They eventually reached a compromise neither was happy with, putting a portion of Cuellar Park and an area south of Highway 90 into District 5.

It took the committee four map-drawing sessions to reach its first approved draft.

We are not living in a collection of disparate urban islands constantly in tension with one another, but parts of a wonderful whole that is the city of San Antonio, Lamborn said.

San Antonios redistricting advisory committee will meet at 10 a.m. Saturday, April 23, at Northeast Service Center, 10303 Tool Yard. Learn more about the committee and upcoming meetings at sabexarcountmein.org/Committee/Redistricting.

megan.stringer@express-news.net
SAN ANTONIO (AP)  Former Trump administration officials are pressing Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to declare an invasion along the U.S.-Mexico border and give thousands of state troopers and National Guard members sweeping new authority to turn back migrants, essentially bestowing enforcement powers that have been a federal responsibility.

The urging comes as the Republican governor prepares to announce Wednesday unprecedented actions to deter migrants coming to Texas after the Biden administration announced last week it will end the use of a public health law that has limited asylum to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

It is unclear whether Abbott, who is up for reelection in November and is already installing more border barrier and allowing troopers to arrest migrants on trespassing charges, supports the aggressive proposals former Trump officials are pushing. Abbott did not elaborate on what steps he will announce Wednesday.

AT THE BORDER: Gov. Abbott, Texas officials react as Biden drops Trump-era migrant expulsions at border

Border Patrol officials say they are planning for as many as 18,000 arrivals daily once the health policy, known as the Title 42 authority, expires in May. Last week, about 7,100 migrants were coming a day to the southern U.S. border.

But the way former Trump immigration officials see it, Texas and Arizona can pick up where the federal government leaves off once the policy ends. Their plan involves a novel interpretation of the U.S. Constitution to have the National Guard or state police forcibly send migrants to Mexico, without regard to immigration laws and law enforcement procedures. Border enforcement has always been a federal responsibility, and in Texas, state leaders have not been pushing for such a move.

Tom Homan, the former acting director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump, said at a border security conference in San Antonio last week he had spoken with Abbott but gave no indication about whether the two-term governor supported the idea.

Weve had discussions with his attorneys in his office, Is there a way to use this clause within the Constitution where it talks about invasion? Homan said during the Border Security Expo.

BORDER ENCOUNTERS: A Trump-era rule was supposed to deter border crossings. Theyre rising instead.

Homan on Tuesday described the response from Abbott's office, which he said took place about three months ago, as non-committal but willing to listen.

In Arizona, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey has also been under pressure within his party to declare that the state is being invaded and use extraordinary powers normally reserved for war. But Ducey, who is term-limited and not on the ballot in 2022, has not embraced the theory and has avoided commenting directly on it.

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, issued a legal opinion in February declaring that Ducey has the power to use National Guard troops and state law enforcement to forcibly send migrants back. Brnovich is locked in a tough Republican U.S. Senate primary in which border security is a top issue.

Driving the effort on the right is the Center for Renewing America, a conservative policy think tank led by former Trump administration officials. It includes Ken Cuccinelli, an immigration hard-liner and former Homeland Security official under Trump. He argued that states are entitled to defend themselves from immediate danger or invasion, as it is defined by the invasion clause, under the states self-defense clause.

BORDER POLICY: Ken Paxton wants Supreme Court reversal on immigration, giving Texas more sway in border fight

While speaking Tuesday to a conservative talk radio station, Abbott's remarks about constitutional authority were in relation to Congress, which he said had the only power to reduce the flow of migrants.

Well be taking unprecedented action, Abbott told radio station KCRS. Congress has to stop talking about it, has to stop complaining about it, has to stop going to the border and looking at it. Congress has to take action, just like Texas is taking action.

Asked if he considered what was happening on the Texas border an invasion, Abbott did not use those words but said he would be discussing it Wednesday.

Cuccinelli said in practice, he envisions the plan would look similar to the enforcement of Title 42, which circumvented U.S. obligations under American law and international treaty to provide asylum. He said he has not spoken with Abbott and said the governor's current sweeping border mission, known as Operation Lone Star, has put little dent in the number of people crossing the border. The mission has also drawn criticism from Guard members over long deployments and little to do, and some arrests have appeared to have no connection to border security.

Until you are actually returning people to Mexico, what you are doing will have no effect, Cuccinelli said.

'CATCH AND JAIL': Gov. Abbott is extending border arrest program into three new South Texas counties

Emily Berman, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Houston, said the invasion clause cited by proponents is tucked into a broader constitutional assurance that the U.S. must defend states from invasion and domestic violence. Additionally, she said, the state self-defense clause says states cannot engage in warlike actions or foreign policy unless invaded.

Berman said she hasn't seen the constitutional clauses used since the 1990s, when the courts ruled that they did not have jurisdiction to decide what qualified an invasion, but believed that one could only be done by another governmental entity.

For example, Berman said, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia can be qualified as one because it is an outside government breaching another countrys boundaries with the use of military force.

"Just because the state says that it is an invasion that doesnt necessarily make it so, it is not clear to me what additional legal authority that conveys on them, Berman said, adding that state officials can enforce state laws, but the line is drawn at what the federal law allows.

U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat whose district includes the Texas border, has criticized the Biden administration over border security and ending Title 42. But he does not support states trying to use new powers that would let them do whatever they want."

I think it should be more of a partnership instead of saying, Federal government, we dont think youre doing enough, and why dont we go ahead and do our own border security? he said.

Associated Press reporter Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix and Nomaan Merchant in Washington contributed to this report.
The Hispanic community has become antagonistic toward the Democratic Party, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said during a pit stop in San Antonio.

He vowed to win more than half of the Hispanic vote in the upcoming gubernatorial election to applause Tuesday at the Texas Latino Conservative Lunch.

Abbott said most Hispanic people are in favor of securing the southern border and funding law enforcement agencies such as the police  in contrast with most Democrats, including his opponent Beto ORourke.

MORE: Former Trump officials press Gov. Greg Abbott to declare an 'invasion' along the U.S.-Mexico border

With your help, we will keep Texas red, he said to an audience of about 150 at the Witte Museums Mays Family Center. We will ensure that we turn South Texas red.

Data indicate the numbers are trending upward for Republicans in Bexar County, where about 60 percent of the population is Hispanic.

In March 2018, 69,695, about 44 percent, of voters cast a ballot in the Republican primary, compared with 89,015, about 48 percent in this years primary.

CAMPAIGNING IN TEXAS: Beto ORourke fires back at Abbott donors defamation lawsuit

Samuel Delgado Jr., who attended the luncheon with his wife at the invitation of their friend Bexar County District Attorney candidate Marc LaHood, agreed with Abbotts assessment, noting many of his Latino friends have become disenchanted with the Democratic Party and its policy stances.

Were definitely going that way, toward the Republicans, Delgado, 47, said.

Delgado, a business owner, thinks the Democrats are misguided on key issues such as border security and policing.

I do think that we do need to take care of us before (immigrants trying to enter the United States), he said.

During his remarks, Abbott denounced Democratic politicians, referring to some by name. Invoking U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has become a popular punching bag for the right, he lamented what he saw as the devolution of the Democratic Party.

There was a time when they used to be Democrats, and then they became liberals, and then they became progressives. Now they are socialists. They are representing and articulating and advancing the policies of Ocasio-Cortez, Abbott said, later promising to fire (Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives) Nancy Pelosi.

He concluded by firing up the crowd with a promise to save America from Biden and Beto and keep Texas the greatest state in the greatest nation in the history of the world. He received a standing ovation.

Not all attendees were of Hispanic descent. Wearing a cowboy hat, program manager Ed Olszanowski, 55, who described himself as white, said the event had opened his eyes to changes occurring within the Latino voting bloc.

Hearing some of the statistics, its pretty impressive how things are kind of shifting, he said.

Like Delgado, Olszanowski listed border security and policing as examples of political issues close to his heart. While he didnt necessarily believe a wall was the end-all-be-all solution to preventing illegal immigration, he said the problem was a pressing one affecting the San Antonio community. Something needed to be done about it.

People are coming across the border. We dont know who they are anymore, he said. We even see it in San Antonio  the gang wars that are going on on the South Side of San Antonio, the gang lords that live here and are allowed to stay here. Theres no security anymore. I think there really needs to be a focus on that.

Both Delgado and Olszanowski had previously voted for Abbott. Having seen him in person now, would they do so again in 2022?

Yes, they agreed.

caroline.tien@hearst.com
RTHK: S Korea's Yoon wants return of US nuclear assets

Advisers to South Korea's president-elect on Wednesday sought the redeployment of US strategic assets, including nuclear bombers and submarines, to the Korean peninsula, one adviser said.

A team of foreign policy and security aides to incoming president Yoon Suk-yeol met US national security adviser Jake Sullivan in Washington. Yoon has called for a more constant US security presence to deter threats from North Korea as it steps up weapons tests.

"Deploying the strategic assets is an important element of reinforcing the extended deterrence, and the issue naturally came up during the discussions," Park Jin, a four-term lawmaker who led the delegation, told reporters.

He added that both sides explored ways to bolster nuclear deterrence at the talks, which were held on a trip aimed at securing an early summit between Yoon and US President Joe Biden.

A White House official, asked whether Washington supported deployments to South Korea, responded that both sides had "discussed generally" US defence commitments, but did not elaborate.

Yoon is set to be sworn in on May 10 just as tensions have flared on the peninsula. North Korea launched a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) last month.

Deployment of US bombers, aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines was part of Yoon's election platform, in which he promised to "respond firmly" to the North's threats.

Yoon has also vowed to "normalise" joint military drills with the US that were scaled back under outgoing liberal President Moon Jae-in, in a bid to placate Pyongyang and resume stalled talks to rid the peninsula of nuclear weapons.

North Korea has long denounced the exercises as a rehearsal for war, and Washington and Seoul have reduced field training and shunned use of major weapons such as bombers and air carriers, focusing instead on computer simulations.

Park did not elaborate, however, when asked about plans for regular spring exercises, which domestic media have said could include nuclear bombers for the first time in nearly five years.

"We agreed that what's most important is to maintain deterrence so that we can strongly respond to any possible North Korean provocations. (Reuters)

This story has been published on: 2022-04-06. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Facts about Russia-Ukraine conflict: EU proposing new sanctions, Russia more prudent in food export

Xinhua) 13:08, April 06, 2022

BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) -- The Russia-Ukraine conflict continued on Wednesday as the European Union (EU) is proposing its fifth sanction package against Russia. Following are the latest developments of the situation:

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Tuesday that the package, which will be discussed and given the final approval by EU ambassadors on Wednesday, includes bans on coal imports worth 4 billion euros a year and on four Russian banks.

She added that the European Commission is also pushing for bans on Russian ships entering EU ports, on Russian and Belarusian road transport operators, and on imports of oil, wood and cement, seafood and alcohol from Russia.

- - - -

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Russia will be more prudent this year in exporting food, especially to countries that are pursuing a hostile policy towards Russia.

Meanwhile, Putin said that "increased production volumes make it possible to ensure food prices in Russia are lower than on the world market."

Food self-sufficiency is Russia's competitive advantage and the country must protect its people from price fluctuations in the global food market, he said.

- - - -

The EU has declared a number of Russian diplomats working in Brussels "persona non grata," and ordered them to leave host nation Belgium, Josep Borrell, the EU's high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, said Tuesday in a statement.

Russia's Permanent Representative to the EU Vladimir Chizhov was summoned to communicate this decision, according to Borrell.

In response, Russia's Permanent Mission to the EU said Tuesday on its website that the EU's "openly unfriendly -- moreover, hostile and, most importantly, completely groundless step continues the EU's policy of dismantling the partnership between Russia and EU, which recently both sides proudly called strategic."

It added that Chizhov has assured the EU side of "the inevitability of adequate reciprocal measures" by Russia.

Several EU member states, including Sweden, Italy, Romania, Portugal and Spain, also announced on Tuesday their decision to expel Russian diplomats.

- - - -

The National Guard of Ukraine said Tuesday its divisions have arrived at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) site and taken control of the facility's security.

"The major task of the national guardsmen on the Chernobyl NPP site is ensuring security and defense of its nuclear facilities as well as physical protection of nuclear material," the National Guard said on Facebook.

The safety of the site and its transport infrastructure will be checked by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, it said.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese government has launched a nationwide campaign to regulate the use of Chinese characters in publications and on radio, TV, and the internet.

The National Press and Publication Administration and the National Radio and Television Administration jointly launched a notice, asking local authorities to investigate and correct the misuse of Chinese characters in traditional publications such as books and newspapers, online publications, advertisements, radio, TV programs, and online audio and video programs.

The notice stressed the actions to regulate typeface designs of Chinese characters, removing the designs that deviated from the accepted writing principles and cultural or aesthetic tastes. 
Warrenton, VA (20186)

Today

Thunderstorms, some heavy this evening, then periods of rain late. Low 48F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%. Rainfall possibly over one inch..

Tonight

Thunderstorms, some heavy this evening, then periods of rain late. Low 48F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%. Rainfall possibly over one inch.
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BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) -- The China-Italy Chamber of Commerce (CICC) has announced a sharp rise in its membership, with the number of members nearly doubling in the past two years.

The chamber had a total of 838 members as of the end of 2021, a surge of 92 percent from the end of 2019, according to Paolo Bazzoni, who was re-elected as the chairman of the CICC at a recent elective assembly.

The CICC now has seven offices across various regions in China, including two new offices that opened in Shenzhen and Chengdu last year, to support the development of its member companies and their Chinese partners, Bazzoni said.

Since 2020, the chamber has also organized over 300 events to forge cooperation between Italian and Chinese business communities in spheres ranging from energy transition to food and beverages, according to Bazzoni.

Among the CICC's strategic priorities are identifying and addressing opportunities with its counterparts in China, Bazzoni said, adding that it will continue to provide high-quality guidance and information to its member companies. 
Alia Bhatt once commented on her boyfriend, Ranbir Kapoor's previous relationships. When asked about Ranbir's "troubled past" in a 2019 interview with Filmfare, Alia hinted about her own past relationships as well. Several reports have surfaced in the last week claiming that Alia and Ranbir Kapoor will marry in April. The couple made their first public appearance as a couple in 2018 at Sonam Kapoor and Anand Ahuja's wedding reception. They are frequently seen flying out of Mumbai for vacations and celebrating various festivals together.





Alia described Ranbir as a "gem" rather than a "difficult" person in the interview with Filmfare. She'd stated, Let me tell you hes not difficult. Hes a supremely simple person. Hes such a nice human being that I wish I was as good as him. As an actor, as a person, as everything. Hes way better a person than I am. And about getting married? Well, thats the only thing thats irritating right now. Every morning I wake up to the news that Im getting married. I tell him what the hell. I guess hes used to it. When asked about Ranbir's past, she said, "How does it matter? Its part of someones life and who cares. Aur main thodi na kam hoon."



Meanwhile, Alia was most recently seen in SS Rajamouli's magnum opus RRR, alongside Ram Charan, Jr NTR, and Ajay Devgn. She will appear in Ayan Mukerji's Brahmastra, alongside Ranbir Kapoor. Amitabh Bachchan, Nagarjuna Akkineni, and Mouni Roy will also appear in the film. The film Brahmastra will be released on September 9, 2022. Alia also has Farhan Akhtar's Jee Le Zaraa, in which she co-stars with Priyanka Chopra and Katrina Kaif. She will also make her Hollywood debut alongside Gal Gadot and Jamie Dornan in Netflix's international spy thriller Heart of Stone.
Shah Rukh Khan is one of the most versatile actors in the industry. He is well-versed with what goes behind making a movie and thus he doesnt shy away from giving credits where it is due. In a recent tweet, the star showered praises on Beast actor Thalapathy Vijay.

The trailer drop of Beast caught everyones attention. Shah Rukh Khan in a tweet wrote, Sitting with @Atlee_dir who is as big a fan of @actorvijay as I am. Wishing the best for beast to the whole teamtrailer looks meaner. Leaner stronger!!

Fans also speculate that Shah Rukh Khan will be working on Atlees directorial next. After wrapping up the shooting for Pathaan, Shah Rukh Khan has recently come back from Spain. It is speculated that he has already started working on the next project, with the Tamil director.

A big publication reported that a source told them, While SRK started working on the film last week, Nayanthara joined a couple of days ago. It is also being said that Telugu superstar Rana Daggubati will play the antagonist in the film and he will join the cast later. The movie reportedly also stars Sanya Malhotra and Sunil Grover.

It has also been speculated that South star Vijay might make a cameo in the movie with SRK. As Vijay has previously collaborated with the director on Bigil and Mersal, this could be possible.
With Jersey set to release in a weeks time, Shahid Kapoors next project is already in the pipeline. The actor has decided to make his debut in the digital space, and experiment with web series. He will be starring in Raj-DKs untitled series.

The actor recently opened up about his experience working in the web series. He opened up about working with two of the most ingenious storytellers of the current generation. In an interview with a leading daily, he said, I have two genius men with me. Its my first attempt at long-format storytelling. It becomes a new experience to structure your character, knowing that it will last for four to five hours. How do you build the part? How will people view him? They can stop the show at any point and do their daily chores. These thoughts help you approach something, which you have been doing for a long time, in a different way.

Talking about his character in the series which will be released on an OTT platform with the leading daily, he said, Mumbai ka launda. He is a boy from the streets of Mumbai who has to work hard to earn money and survive. I could relate to him because thats who I was when I was dancing with Shiamak Davar. I used to travel by train, and try to save money. I have lived that life from 16 to 21. It is an edgy character.

The movie also stars South stars Vijay Sethupathi and Raashii Khanna. When asked about how he feels working with such talented people, he told the big publication, One should want to work with people who are at the top of their game, who inspire you to do great work. You should be surrounded by people who know what theyre doing. With time, you realize these things matter so much. Sharing screen space with Sethupathi is the cherry on the top. I have admired Vijay sirs work. We shot for only two to three hours together. He is a fantastic actor.
Rio Tinto has released its 2021 Taxes paid: Our economic contribution report, which details $13.3 billion of global taxes and royalties paid during the year, up from $8.4 billion in 2020.

Despite the ongoing challenges of COVID-19, Rio Tinto made a total direct economic contribution of $66.6 billion in the countries and communities where it operates in 2021, compared to $47 billion the previous year.

In Australia, which is home to around half of the company's assets, Rio Tinto paid $11.1 billion (A$14.8 billion) in taxes and royalties, up from $6.8 billion (A$9.8 billion) the previous year. The company also made significant payments in Canada ($855 million), Mongolia ($544 million), Chile ($562 million) and the United States ($81 million).

Since 2017, Rio Tinto has made a direct economic contribution of more than $251 billion to the countries and communities where it operates.

Rio Tinto Chief Financial Officer Peter Cunningham said "We acknowledge the support of our host governments and communities in helping us keep our sites operating at a time when many other industries were heavily constrained. This enabled us to protect jobs, support local businesses, and produce record financial results. It also resulted in us paying substantial taxes and royalties to the governments where we operate.

"Our economic contribution to governments and communities plays a critical role in the economic health and development of the regions where we operate. The funds governments and communities receive support the basic infrastructure of society bridges and roads, schools and hospitals as well as other local development priorities, including job creation and skills training."

In the past 10 years, the company has paid $73.9 billion in taxes and royalties globally, of which over 78 per cent, or $58.0 billion (A$72.8 billion), was paid in Australia

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Vijoice is first approved treatment to specifically address the root cause of PROS conditions in select patients 2 years of age and older 1





PROS is a spectrum of rare conditions and is characterized by atypical overgrowths and anomalies in blood vessels, the lymphatic system and other tissues 2,3





Approval based on real-world data from EPIK-P1 study, which showed patients treated with Vijoice experienced reduction in the size of PROS lesions and improvement of PROS-related signs and symptoms





Novartis to offer robust patient support program that includes assistance to access medication, financial resources for eligible patients and continued education

Basel, April 6, 2022 - Novartis today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated approval to Vijoice (alpelisib) for the treatment of adult and pediatric patients 2 years of age and older with severe manifestations of PIK3CA-Related Overgrowth Spectrum (PROS) who require systemic therapy.1 Vijoice is the first FDA-approved treatment for PROS, a spectrum of rare conditions characterized by overgrowths and blood vessel anomalies impacting an estimated 14 people per million.2,3 In accordance with the Accelerated Approval Program, continued approval may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit from confirmatory evidence.

"Today's approval of the first treatment for PROS offers hope for a better quality of life to patients and families affected by these rare conditions," said Kristen Davis, Executive Director of CLOVES Syndrome Community. "PROS conditions can be debilitating and disabling and can result in disruptions to everyday activities. Until today, often the only treatment options for patients were surgical or interventional radiology procedures."

PROS conditions can affect quality of life and pose a range of physical, emotional and social challenges for patients and their families, ranging from functional impacts and developmental delays to chronic pain, mobility issues, and feelings of isolation.3-6 PROS management can be challenging, requiring collaboration from a multidisciplinary team, and patients and physicians have only had access to interventions focused on symptom management.6,7

"I am proud of this outstanding achievement for the PROS community. The EPIK-P1 study results build on our earlier pre-clinical findings and demonstrate the efficacy of Vijoice for select PROS conditions, effectively reducing PROS growths," said Guillaume Canaud, MD, PhD, Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital - AP-HP, the Paris Descartes University, Inserm (INEM Institute Necker Enfants Malades - Centre for Molecular Medicine). "This is a significant advancement in therapy for PROS with the potential to positively change the treatment trajectory and outcomes for patients."

FDA approval was based on real-world evidence from EPIK-P1, a retrospective chart review study that showed patients treated with Vijoice experienced reduced target lesion volume and improvement in PROS-related symptoms and manifestations. The primary endpoint analysis conducted at week 24 showed 27% of patients (10/37) achieved a confirmed response to treatment, defined as 20% or greater reduction in the sum of PROS target lesion volume. Nearly three in four patients with imaging at baseline and week 24 (74%, 23/31) showed some reduction in target lesion volume, with a mean reduction of 13.7%, and no patients experienced disease progression at time of primary analysis. Additionally, at week 24, investigators observed patient improvements in pain (90%, 20/22), fatigue (76%, 32/42), vascular malformation (79%, 30/38), limb asymmetry (69%, 20/29), and disseminated intravascular coagulation (55%, 16/29). These improvements were observed in subsets of patients across the study population (n=57) who reported symptoms at baseline and at week 24.1,2



"The approval of Vijoice marks a turning point for patients who, until now, have not had an approved therapy to specifically address their disease," said Victor Bulto, President, Novartis Innovative Medicines US. "We are grateful to the physicians, patients and families who participated in the EPIK-P1 trial. We are continuing to invest in studies to advance the scientific understanding of PROS conditions and to understand the full potential of Vijoice."

In EPIK-P1, the most common adverse events (AEs) of any grade were diarrhea (16%), stomatitis (16%), and hyperglycemia (12%). The most common grade 3/4 AE was cellulitis (4%); one adult case was considered treatment-related.1

Novartis is committed to providing patients with access to medicines, as well as resources and support to address a range of needs. The Novartis Oncology Patient Support Program is available to help guide eligible patients through the various aspects of getting started on treatment, from providing educational information to helping them understand their insurance coverage and identify potential financial assistance options. Patients or providers can call 800-282-7630 or visit Patient.NovartisOncology.com or HCP.Novartis.com/Access to learn more about eligibility and to enroll.

About PIK3CA-Related Overgrowth Spectrum (PROS)

The PROS classification was proposed by researchers and parent representatives of patient-family support and advocacy organizations at a National Institutes of Health workshop in 2013 to unite a group of rare overgrowth conditions caused by PIK3CA mutations.4,6 Specific conditions associated with PROS include KTS, CLOVES syndrome, ILM, MCAP/M-CM, HME, HHML, FIL, FAVA, macrodactyly, muscular HH, FAO, CLAPO syndrome and epidermal nevus, benign lichenoid keratosis, or seborrheic keratosis.4,6 The estimated prevalence of PROS conditions is approximately 14 people per million.3

About Vijoice

Vijoice (alpelisib) is a kinase inhibitor that treats rare overgrowth conditions caused by the effects of PIK3CA mutations in adults and children with PIK3CA-Related Overgrowth Spectrum (PROS). Vijoice works by inhibiting the PI3K pathway, predominantly the PI3K-alpha isoform.1 Vijoice is the first FDA-approved treatment for PROS conditions. Vijoice is not approved for use outside the United States.

FDA approval of Vijoice is based primarily on real-world evidence from the EPIK-P1 study. To further understand the long-term efficacy and safety of alpelisib in PROS, Novartis is conducting additional clinical trials. EPIK-P2 is a prospective Phase II multi-center study with a randomized, double-blind, upfront 16-week placebo-controlled period, and extension period to evaluate the safety, the efficacy and pharmacokinetics of alpelisib to treat pediatrics and adults with PROS. EPIK-P3 is a Phase II study to assess long-term safety and efficacy of alpelisib in people with PROS who participated in EPIK-P1.

Disclaimer

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements can generally be identified by words such as "potential," "can," "will," "plan," "may," "could," "would," "expect," "anticipate," "seek," "look forward," "believe," "committed," "investigational," "pipeline," "launch," or similar terms, or by express or implied discussions regarding potential marketing approvals, new indications or labeling for the investigational or approved products described in this press release, or regarding potential future revenues from such products. You should not place undue reliance on these statements. Such forward-looking statements are based on our current beliefs and expectations regarding future events, and are subject to significant known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. There can be no guarantee that the investigational or approved products described in this press release will be submitted or approved for sale or for any additional indications or labeling in any market, or at any particular time. Nor can there be any guarantee that such products will be commercially successful in the future. In particular, our expectations regarding such products could be affected by, among other things, the uncertainties inherent in research and development, including clinical trial results and additional analysis of existing clinical data; regulatory actions or delays or government regulation generally; global trends toward health care cost containment, including government, payor and general public pricing and reimbursement pressures and requirements for increased pricing transparency; our ability to obtain or maintain proprietary intellectual property protection; the particular prescribing preferences of physicians and patients; general political, economic and business conditions, including the effects of and efforts to mitigate pandemic diseases such as COVID-19; safety, quality, data integrity or manufacturing issues; potential or actual data security and data privacy breaches, or disruptions of our information technology systems, and other risks and factors referred to in Novartis AG's current Form 20-F on file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Novartis is providing the information in this press release as of this date and does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this press release as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

About Novartis

Novartis is reimagining medicine to improve and extend people's lives. As a leading global medicines company, we use innovative science and digital technologies to create transformative treatments in areas of great medical need. In our quest to find new medicines, we consistently rank among the world's top companies investing in research and development. Novartis products reach nearly 800 million people globally and we are finding innovative ways to expand access to our latest treatments. About 108,000 people of more than 140 nationalities work at Novartis around the world. Find out more at https://www.novartis.com (https://www.novartis.com).

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References

Vijoice: Prescribing Information. East Hanover, New Jersey, USA: Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation; April 2022 Canaud G, et al. EPIK-P1: Retrospective Chart Review Study of Patients With PIK3CA-Related Overgrowth Spectrum Who Have Received Alpelisib as Part of a Compassionate Use Programme. Presented at the 2021 ESMO Congress; September 17-21, 2021. Data on file. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp; 2020. Keppler-Noreuil KM, Sapp JC, Lindhurst MJ, et al. Clinical delineation and natural history of the PIK3CA-related overgrowth spectrum. Am J Med Genet A. 2014;164A(7):1713-1733. Parker VER, Keppler-Noreuil KM, Faivre L, et al. Genet Med. 2019;21(5):1189-1198. Mirzaa G, Conway R, Graham JM Jr, Dobyns WB. PIK3CA-related segmental overgrowth. In: Adam MP, Ardinger HH, Pagon RA, et al., eds. GeneReviews [Internet]. Seattle, WA: University of Washington, Seattle; 1993-2019. Hughes M, Hao M and Luu M. PIK3CA vascular overgrowth syndromes: an update. Current Opinion in Pediatrics. 2020;32(4):539-546.

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CAMBRIDGE, England, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Cambridge Nutranostics Ltd, CNL, http://occltest.com has begun validation in clinic of its first test prototype to assess and monitor plasma oxygen, the part of the total blood O2, which can cross the capillary wall and deliver this essential gas for tissue cell respiration.

Medical researchers from Cambridge University, Papworth Hospital and led by Dr Ivan Petyaev, published their discovery that extracellular lipids, lipoproteins, can be the main oxygen carrier in blood plasma https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9505864/. It was found that a decline in OCCL, a reduction of oxygen supply to tissues, might contribute to depression of their functions and development of tissue hypoxia.

CNL has now successfully completed conversion of the established laboratory format OCCL test to its express dry chemistry based point-of-care diagnostic, the first affordable test of its kind able to be used not only by any health care practitioner but also by an untrained person at home. This test would require only one drop of capillary blood and provide results within minutes.

One of the company's first marketing targets are people at risk of developing dementia, and in particularly those who have already experienced hypoxic or ischemic clinical events such as a stroke or a transient ischemic attack, TIA. Around 78 million people globally and 1 person out of 5 of 65 years or older in Japan will have dementia in 2030.

Stroke or TIA as an acute oxygen deprivation shock to the brain makes it more vulnerable and susceptible for future cerebral hypoxia accompanying development of the dementia. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35072712/ Approximately 30% of stroke patients go on to develop cognitive dysfunction within 3 years.

The OCCL point-of-care test would allow a health care practitioner or the person himself or herself, to assess the level of plasma oxygen and detect its potential changes, which may not have any other clinical manifestations. Early diagnosis of these changes may trigger additional medical examination and allow measures to be taken to improve tissue oxygenation.

The company is expecting to launch this test in the first half of 2023. Alexey Shulepov, the CEO of CNL, says "the company is proud to develop this test to help to prevent development of dementia and reduce its impact on people's lives in every country".

dm@occltest.com




BASEL (dpa-AFX) - Novartis (NVS) said that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted accelerated approval to Vijoice or alpelisib for the treatment of adult and pediatric patients 2 years of age and older with severe manifestations of PIK3CA-Related Overgrowth Spectrum or PROS who require systemic therapy. Under the Accelerated Approval Program, continued approval may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit from confirmatory evidence. The approval was based on real-world data from EPIK-P1 study, which showed patients treated with Vijoice experienced reduction in the size of PROS lesions and improvement of PROS-related signs and symptoms. PIK3CA-Related Overgrowth Spectrum is a spectrum of rare conditions and is characterized by atypical overgrowths and anomalies in blood vessels, the lymphatic system and other tissues. Novartis noted that it will offer patient support program that includes assistance to access medication, financial resources for eligible patients and continued education. Copyright(c) 2022 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved 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.
NEW YORK, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Resulticks today announced that it has joined the Qualcomm Smart Cities Accelerator Program to collaborate on transforming the landscape of real-time customer engagement and communications. Together with the best of Qualcomm Technologies' IoT solutions and services, Resulticks' customer engagement solution will add new dimensions to end-consumer experiences, while also accelerating top-line growth for brands.

As one of the fastest growing AI-powered customer engagement solutions, Resulticks has always been ahead of the curve in enabling seamless journeys across the offline and online worlds through the handling of streams of data, events, and digital signals at scale. With the ever-increasing demand for context-based targeting and hyper-personalization, there are infinite ways in which these signals, communications, and analytics can come together at every juncture of the customer lifecycle from lead acquisition to conversion resulting in loyalty.

As part of the Qualcomm Smart Cities Accelerator Program, Resulticks can now facilitate brands to go beyond the usual touchpoints in this journey to leverage the signals from a gamut of sensors, wearables, smart devices, and digital screens that has remained largely untouched today.

"We are pleased to have Resulticks join the Qualcomm Smart Cities Accelerator Program ecosystem where we can together accelerate digital transformation and make it easier for businesses and entities looking to deliver smart AI-powered solutions for enhanced customer engagement," said Ashok Tipirneni, director and head of platform product management, Smart Cities, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

"Our aspiration has always been to be at the forefront of digital evolution, transformation and customer engagement," said Mani Gopalaratnam, CEO, Resulticks. "For example, we are one of the first solutions of our kind to leverage edge and serverless technology and WebAssembly technologies to deliver what is really real-time engagement. But, it is also not about technology for technology's sake. With Qualcomm Technologies, we believe we have all the right ingredients in the right place and at the right time to deliver smart solutions across verticals like retail, telecom, and banking that will deliver tangible outcomes to businesses, consumers, and the entire ecosystem. We are delighted and looking forward to making a difference with Qualcomm Technologies."

About Qualcomm

Qualcomm is the world's leading wireless technology innovator and the driving force behind the development, launch, and expansion of 5G. When we connected the phone to the internet, the mobile revolution was born. Today, our foundational technologies enable the mobile ecosystem and are found in every 3G, 4G and 5G smartphone. We bring the benefits of mobile to new industries, including automotive, the internet of things, and computing, and are leading the way to a world where everything and everyone can communicate and interact seamlessly.

Qualcomm Incorporated includes our licensing business, QTL, and the vast majority of our patent portfolio. Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, operates, along with its subsidiaries, substantially all of our engineering, research and development functions, and substantially all of our products and services businesses, including our QCT semiconductor business.

About Resulticks

Resulticks is a real-time, big-data-driven customer engagement solution built from the ground up by experts in marketing, technology, and business strategy to deliver topline growth. Outcomes-focused and enabled by the world's first customer data blockchain, Resulticks equips brands to make a transformational leap to true omnichannel engagement. With its AI-powered, customer-centric approach and attribution at the segment-of-one level, Resulticks is changing how brands worldwide reach, acquire, and retain satisfied customers. For more information, please log on to www.resulticks.com. Follow Resulticks on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

Qualcomm is a trademark or registered trademark of Qualcomm Incorporated.

Qualcomm Smart Cities Accelerator Program is a program of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.

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NBP14 Targets Possible Primary Driver of Neurodegeneration

Neuro-Bio Ltd, a biotechnology company developing a first-in-class treatment for neurodegenerative disease, finds its new drug candidate effectively treats the signs of neurodegeneration in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease.

Publishing their work in Alzheimer's Dementia: Translational Research Clinical Interventions (TRCI) Neuro-Bio researchers, in collaboration with the drug discovery company Evotec SE, UCLA, and King's College London studied the ability of their patented drug, NBP14, to combat neurodegeneration in an established mouse model of Alzheimer's disease.

Intranasal treatment for 6 weeks resulted in a marked decrease of brain amyloid and, after 14 weeks, improved cognitive performance comparable to that of normal mice. The results underscore the effectiveness of Neuro-Bio's drug candidate and represent a remarkable step forward towards the treatment of Alzheimer's disease in humans.

Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield, Founder and CEO of Neuro-Bio, says: "By using basic neuroscientific knowledge we have identified what we believe is an underlying mechanism driving Alzheimer's disease in the brain, and have developed a molecule (NBP14) to combat it. Our recent efficacy study in mouse models further validates previous work describing an erstwhile unidentified process in neurodegeneration and offers very exciting prospects for treating the disease in humans. This research should help position the drug intercepting this process, NBP14, for human clinical trials and hopefully create an entirely new era of Alzheimer's therapeutics."

Professor Paul L Herrling, former Global Head of Research of Novartis Pharma and Non-Executive Director at Neuro-Bio, says:The results consistently indicate that NBP14 might interfere with the neurotoxic process that leads to neuronal degeneration in Alzheimer's. This work has very exciting implications for treating Alzheimer's because it is based on a strong scientific theory that hasn't yet been applied to treatment of the disease."

The UK regulator, the Medicines Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, has accredited NBP14 with one of their first 'Innovation Passports' as part of a new licensing pathway that aims to reduce the time to market for innovative medicines.

NBP14 works by intercepting the process that Neuro-Bio believe could be a primary driver of neurodegeneration, the action of a brain chemical named T14 [1, 2]. In the last twenty years since it was first identified [3], evidence has become increasingly compelling that T14 plays an important role in early cell growth and normal development. However, this action can become toxic if triggered inappropriately in maturity [4] and ultimately could lead to Alzheimer's disease where brain levels of T14 are shown in the current paper to reflect degree of degeneration.

Inactivation of T14 could potentially serve as a treatment for Alzheimer's by halting the early advance of cell damage occurring first in primarily vulnerable cells deep the brain. Initially identified by the neurologist Martin Rossor back in 1981 [5], these primarily vulnerable cells form a kind of central hub in the brain, extending up from the top of the spinal cord. A key feature is that they are the first to display a pathology early in neurodegeneration [6].

Neuro-Bio believes that detection and measurement of T14 could be developed as a blood test or skin biopsy to identify the occurrence of the degenerative process during the window of ten to twenty years that typically occurs before symptoms start. If NBP14 proves effective in human trials, it could become a routine, home-administered nasal spray to halt neurodegeneration before any symptoms appear.

No harmful side effects at the active dose in the disease model were observed with NBP14 during the efficacy study. Neuro-Bio plan to take the drug to clinical Phase I trials as soon as possible.

Dr Gregory Cole, Professor of Medicine and Neurology at UCLA and Associate Director of the UCLA Alzheimer's Center, says: "I've specialized in Alzheimer's disease research and worked for real treatments in UCLA's Alzheimer program since 1994. Along with my colleagues around the world, we've all witnessed hundreds of failed drug trials based on existing theories and we are ready for truly new approaches. NBP14 has distinct advantages over other drug candidates and I am happy to work with this team at Neuro-Bio and share in their success."

ENDS

Notes to Editors

About Neuro-Bio

Neuro-Bio is a privately-owned biotech out of Oxford University with a focus on developing a first-in-class effective treatment for neurodegenerative disease. The company has discovered a novel 14 amino acid bioactive peptide (T14) derived from the C terminus of acetylcholinesterase (AChE). T14 is neurotoxic in the mature brain and published data shows it to be a potential key driver of neurodegeneration.

Based on almost 40 years of research by Professor Baroness Greenfield at Oxford University, Neuro-Bio Ltd was incorporated in 2013, when seed funding enabled the first patent filing on chemical composition of matter for neuroprotection.

For more information, visit, www.neuro-bio.com

About NBP14

NBP14 is a 'cyclated' peptide, ie a structurally modified form of T14 itself, bent into a circle such that it is inactive at the target (an allosteric site on the alpha-7 receptor). By occupying this target, it will displace its naturally occurring, potentially toxic counterpart from the crucial site of action, thereby protecting against further degeneration. Hence, as reported in the paper, subsequent downstream effects will be blocked such as the production of amyloid in the hippocampus.

References

[1] Garcia-Rates S, Morrill P, Tu H, Pottiez G, Badin AS, Tormo-Garcia C, et al. (I) Pharmacological profiling of a novel modulator of the alpha7 nicotinic receptor: Blockade of a toxic acetylcholinesterase-derived peptide increased in Alzheimer brains. Neuropharmacology. 2016;105:487-99.

[2] Brai E, Simon F, Cogoni A, Greenfield SA. Modulatory Effects of a Novel Cyclized Peptide in Reducing the Expression of Markers Linked to Alzheimer's Disease. Front Neurosci. 2018;12:362.

[3] Greenfield S, Vaux DJ. Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and motor neurone disease: identifying a common mechanism. Neuroscience. 2002;113:485-92.

[4] Day T, Greenfield SA. Bioactivity of a peptide derived from acetylcholinesterase in hippocampal organotypic cultures. Exp Brain Res. 2004;155:500-8.

[5] Rossor MN. Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease as disorders of the isodendritic core. Br Med J (Clin Res Ed). 1981;283:1588-90.

[6] Theofilas P, Dunlop S, Heinsen H, Grinberg LT. Turning on the Light Within: Subcortical Nuclei of the Isodentritic Core and their Role in Alzheimer's Disease Pathogenesis. J Alzheimers Dis. 2015;46:17-34.

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GENEVA, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Alpian SA ("Alpian"), an innovative digital private bank, today announced the granting by FINMA of a banking license and a successful CHF19 million Series B+ closing, enabling Alpian to shortly launch to the public in Q3 2022, becoming Switzerland's first digital private bank.

Alpian, majority-owned by Fideuram-Intesa Sanpaolo Private Banking, secured a third round of financing, fully subscribed by Fideuram - Intesa Sanpaolo Private Banking. The financing will support the deployment of Alpian's range of services in Switzerland, comprising both private and online banking.

This hybrid model combines a secure, state-of-the-art banking experience with the support of Alpian's qualified wealth advisors, giving affluent clients access to services normally reserved for traditional private banking. To complement this, Alpian has seamlessly woven everyday banking features into its digital offering.

Schuyler Weiss, CEO of Alpian, commented:

"Since 2019, we have built what will become Switzerland's first digital private bank. With the funds raised during the Series B+ and with its new standing as a licensed Swiss bank, Alpian is well equipped to launch its offering."

Pasha Bakhtiar, REYL Intesa Sanpaolo Partner and Chairman of the board at Alpian, added:

"We are proud to have passed these two milestones on our way to delivering a truly unique and bespoke digital private banking offering. The successful journey so far is a testament to the resilience and dynamism of the Alpian team, as well as the vision of REYL Intesa Sanpaolo."

Luca Bortolan, Head of Direct Bank Fideuram Intesa Sanpaolo Private Banking, added:

"From the beginning, we have seen Alpian as a great opportunity to invest in the development of digital private banking. Alpian will bring both strategic and synergy driven value, demonstrating our proactive commitment of addressing the needs of its current and future clients."

About Alpian SA

www.alpian.com

Alpian is Switzerland's first ever digital private bank, incubated by REYL Intesa Sanpaolo and incorporated in October 2019.

About REYL Intesa Sanpaolo

www.reyl.com

Founded in 1973, REYL & Cie is a diversified banking group with offices in Switzerland, Europe (London, Luxembourg, Malta) and the rest of the world (Singapore, Dubai).

About Fideuram Intesa Sanpaolo Private Banking

www.fideuram.it

Headquartered in Milan, Fideuram Intesa Sanpaolo Private Banking is the leading private banking player in Italy and a key subsidiary of the Intesa Sanpaolo Group, which controls all the group's private banking activities.
HARBIN, April 6 (Xinhua) -- China's northernmost Heilongjiang Province will allocate an annual fund of no less than 200 million yuan (31.4 million U.S. dollars) to develop its ice and snow industries, local authorities said Wednesday.

The province has introduced incentives for setting up company headquarters and new projects in the ice and snow industries, as well as the transformation of spare real estate into indoor skating rinks, said Chen Zhe, head of the provincial culture and tourism department.

Heilongjiang Province is a popular destination for winter tourism in China. The provincial capital, Harbin, has gained international attention for the International Ice and Snow Festival, which was first held in 1985 and features massive, elaborate ice sculptures, competitions and winter sports. 
KOVE Inc. to Distribute the MolecuLight Product Suite to Large South Korean Wound Care Market

TORONTO and SEOUL, South Korea, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- MolecuLight Inc., the leader in point-of-care fluorescence imaging for real-time detection of wounds containing elevated bacterial loads, and KOVE Inc., announce that the MolecuLight i:X device has successfully received regulatory clearance and is now commercially available to the wound care market in South Korea. In addition, the MolecuLight device has also received reimbursement in Korea from the Ministry of Health and Welfare enabling clinician reimbursement for performing the medically necessary MolecuLight procedure.

Reimbursement for the MolecuLight procedure was granted by the Ministry of Health and Welfare of Korea, as per the notification number 259-858. This was announced based on Reimbursement data from the Korea New Medical Technology - Stability and Effectiveness Evaluation.

MolecuLight is exclusively distributed in South Korea by KOVE, Inc., a company specializing in providing novel products that assist in the treatment of diabetes foot ulcers in Korea including medical devices that assist with the diagnosis and treatment of wounds. KOVE's team of clinical and technical support specialists have more than 30 years of experience in medical devices and wound care. KOVE also performs clinical research with many university hospitals in Korea.

The South Korean market for wound care is significant and can be understood through the pervasiveness of diabetes and diabetic foot ulcers. There are over 5 million Koreans with diabetes1, or 1 diabetic in every 30 adults. 25% of all diabetics also have a diabetic foot ulcer.

"The market for the MolecuLight device is significant in South Korea as there is a comprehensive and progressive health care system that quickly adopts new and clinically useful technologies", says JUNHYOUNG LEE, CEO of KOVE, Inc. "Because of the high national insurance coverage for medical procedures, Korean patients readily visit hospitals to treat ailments and physicians are motivated to treat and monitor wounds until they are fully healed. The MolecuLight technology provides real-time actionable information on wound bioburden and allows clinicians to make bedside decisions quickly. It will be well-received by the South Korean medical community. Significant demand for the MolecuLight device has been verified through market research conducted over the last 12 months as part of the registration and reimbursement process."

"We are most impressed with KOVE, Inc., with their very experienced and responsive team and with their close relationship with the wound care community in South Korea", says Anil Amlani, MolecuLight's CEO. "We believe that the speed with which the MolecuLight i:X received both registration and reimbursement shows the quality of our clinical evidence and the proven clinical outcomes that clinicians can achieve using the MolecuLight device. We are confident that South Korea will become a major market for MolecuLight".

MolecuLight's broad body of clinical evidence includes 55+ peer-reviewed publications, including over 1,400 patients under study, showing the significant benefit of the MolecuLight i:X to wound care clinicians in all care settings.

To request a quotation or a clinical demonstration of the MolecuLight i:X in South Korea, please email junhglee1211@gmail.com or call +82.55.384.2600.

References:

1Korea National Statistical Office

About MolecuLight Inc.

MolecuLight Inc. is a privately-owned medical imaging company that has developed and is commercializing its proprietary fluorescent imaging platform technology in multiple clinical markets. MolecuLight's suite of commercially released devices, including the MolecuLight i:X and DX fluorescence imaging systems and their accessories, provide point-of-care handheld imaging devices for the global wound care market for the real-time detection of wounds containing elevated bacterial burden (when used with clinical signs and symptoms) and for digital wound measurement. MolecuLight procedures performed in the United States can benefit from an available reimbursement pathway including two CPT codes for physician work to perform "fluorescence imaging for bacterial presence, location, and load" and facility payment for Hospital Outpatient Department (HOPD) and Ambulatory Surgical Center (ASC) settings through an Ambulatory Payment Classification (APC) assignment. The company is also commercializing its unique fluorescence imaging platform technology for other markets with globally relevant unmet needs including food safety, consumer cosmetics and other key industrial markets.

About KOVE, Inc.

KOVE, Inc. is a company specializing in the diagnosis and treatment of diabetic foot ulcers and wound-related medical devices. It has been conducting continuous clinical research and presentations with many university hospitals in Korea.

Download for Image:

https://moleculight.box.com/s/03xcwbw0lwd777yt8jyy50bl72w3cbv4

MolecuLight i: X being used by 2 wound care clinicians on 2 patients in a wound care centre to assess whether their patients' wounds have elevated bacterial burden.

MolecuLight being used by 2 wound care clinicians on 2 patients in a wound care centre to assess whether their patients' wounds have elevated bacterial burden. https://moleculight.box.com/s/jbbcbb3hx8pmtbykl2vqkp3q11r6065m

MolecuLight i:X also has the benefit of engaging patients in their own wound care.

For more information, contact: Rob Sandler JUNHYOUNG LEE Chief Marketing Officer CEO MolecuLight Inc. KOVE, Inc. T. +1.647.362.4684 Tel: 82.55.384.2600 rsandler@moleculight.com junhglee1211@gmail.com www.moleculight.com http://kovekorea.com/

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1780902/MolecuLight_MolecuLight_i_X__Receives_Regulatory_Clearance_and_R.jpg
NanoTemper Technologies, in partnership with PharmAI, announced the launch of Proto, a free AI-based web application that reveals the best labeling strategy to help scientists more efficiently measure molecular interactions, a process that's necessary to discover and develop new drugs. Proto is one of the first commercial applications using the AlphaFold protein structure database that was made freely accessible by EMBL-EBI and DeepMind, an Alphabet company.

Scientists in drug discovery need to detect and measure how well proteins bind to molecules, which requires labeling, usually with the aid of a dye. If the wrong labeling strategy is chosen, it leads to time-consuming and costly investigations.

"Proto makes use of more than 700,000 protein structures from AlphaFold or from the RCSB Protein Data Bank to suggest the appropriate dye for binding measurements," explains Christina Wolf, Data Scientist at NanoTemper. "This makes binding measurements more efficient and reliable, and it gives scientists additional confidence in their results."

This novel labeling prediction is another important step towards optimizing experiments in the field of biotechnology and the pharmaceutical industry with the help of artificial intelligence. "We want to help optimize research into diseases and therapeutics that's why we are making the tool free of charge," says Philipp Baaske, Co-CEO of NanoTemper. "There are numerous rare diseases that are currently unprofitable for large pharmaceutical companies to study. The possibilities offered by AI-based software could enable smaller laboratories to enter the field of drug research in the future and make new therapies possible with their work, benefiting us all," adds Joachim Haupt, CEO of PharmAI.

Experience Proto for yourself; visit proto.nanotempertech.com.

About NanoTemper Technologies

Our mission at NanoTemper Technologies is to create biophysical tools for scientists in drug discovery and development who need to tackle challenging characterizations. Working with scientists striving to make a difference in the world gets us excited. If you're facing challenges with affinity screening, molecular interactions, protein stability, protein expression, or protein quality, let's talk.

Learn more at www.nanotempertech.com.

About PharmAI

PharmAI's mission is to make early-stage drug development significantly more efficient by increasing success rates while reducing costs. This is achieved through a breakthrough AI-powered platform for 3D protein structure analysis. This technology will dramatically shorten the timeline for discovering new therapeutic molecules. PharmAI was founded in 2019 as a spin-off of the Technische Universitat Dresden.

Learn more at www.pharm.ai.

Images for Proto can be found under the Photos Material section here: pharm.ai/press.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220405006279/en/

Contacts:

NanoTemper Technologies GmbH

John Valdez

+1 415 670-0424

john.valdez@nanotempertech.com

PharmAI GmbH

Jana Mundus

+49 351-41881626

press@pharm.ai
Positive safety and efficacy results for BIOCERA-VET (arthrodesis and canine osteosarcoma) and VISCO-VET (canine osteoarthritis)

(arthrodesis and canine osteosarcoma) and VISCO-VET (canine osteoarthritis) Initiation of the pivotal European multicentric clinical study evaluating VISCO-VET in canine osteoarthritis

in canine osteoarthritis Commercialization of BIOCERA-VET Bone Surgery and BIOCERA-VET Osteosarcoma in several European countries

Bone Surgery and BIOCERA-VET Osteosarcoma in several European countries Strong cash position of 5.63m at December 31, 2021 giving two years of financial visibility

Regulatory News:

TheraVet ISIN: BE0974387194 ticker: ALVET) (Paris:ALVET) (Brussels:ALVET), a pioneering company in the management of osteoarticular diseases in pets, today announces its annual results for the year to December 31, 2021, provides a business update and confirms its development and commercial prospects for 2022.

Enrico Bastianelli, Chief Executive Officer of TheraVet, said: "2021 was a very exciting and fruitful year for the Company. First the successful Initial Public Offering allowed and will allow Theravet to pursue its ambitious development program and notably the development of its 2 product lines, BIOCERA-VET and VISCO-VET. Also, 2021 was a major turning point for the Company which reached the commercial stage with its bone substitute product line, BIOCERA-VET

Full year 2021 financial results

 (Belgian GAAP) December 21 December 20 Revenue 12,348 0 Other operating income 2,181,390 1,220,017 Stock of finished goods and work in progress 54,843 0 Produced fixed assets 1,930,219 987,810 Operating grants 54,199 87,815 Other operating income 142,129 144,392 Total operating income 2,193,738 1,220,017 Purchases and expenses -3,364,356 -1,574,818 COGS -63,972 0 R&D expenses -1,152,580 -639,134 IPO exceptional expenses -174,932 0 Marketing Sales expenses -199,622 -525 G&A expenses -1.009.862 -465,452 Staff expenses -762,085 -468,689 Other operating charges -1,303 -6,115 EBITDA -1,170,618 -354,801 Depreciation and amortization -558,294 -46,399 EBIT -1,728,912 -401,200 Financial income 261,088 12,247 Profit/loss for the period before taxes -1,467,824 -388,953 Taxes, Adjustment of income taxes and write-back of provisions 126,974 490 Net Profit/loss -1,340,850 -388,463 Net Cash 5,631,418 2,167,462

During 2021, TheraVet generated its first revenues following the launch of BIOCERA-VETBone Surgery in Belgium in April, in France and the Netherlands in October and of BIOCERA-VET Osteosarcoma in December in the same countries.

The Company also generated 1.93 million of "Produced fixed asset" as a result of the activation of development expenses related to the BIOCERA-VET and VISCO-VET programs.

In accordance with the roadmap presented at the time of the IPO, the increase in "Purchases and expenses" reflects the development of preclinical and clinical programs, the commercialization of BIOCERA-VET products and the structuring of the Company:

COGS are counted for the first year: Increased by 0.06 million as compared to 2020 resulting from the commercialisation of BIOCERA-VET products.

R&D expenses contributed to the main part of expenses with 1.15 million and increased by 0.51 million as compared to 2020.

The increase is mainly the result of(i) BIOCERA-VET development with 0.29 million in December 2021 for the validation of the manufacturing process of BIOCERA-VET Bone Surgery and for the clinical studies in order to support the products with safety and efficacy data as compared to 0.26 million in December 2020 and (ii) VISCO-VET development with 0.84 millions in December 2021 contributing to preclinical and clinical developments with the launch of the European pivotal study and the initiation of the validation of the GMP manufacturing process as compared to 0.47 million in December 2020.

IPO exceptional expenses increased by 0.17 million as compared to 2020 and related to the preparation of the Initial Public Offering.

Marketing Sales expenses increased by 0.20 million as compared to marginal expenses of 2020 resulting from the effort of the Company to prepare the commercial launch of the BIOCERA-VET products.

G&A expenses increased by 0.54 million as compared to 2020 mainly as a result of

the effort to increase visibility of the Company to the investors by participating in financial events or promoting the Company,

the lawyers support in the preparation of the different partnership agreements negotiated and signed over 2021 and early 2022,

the increase of the operational consultants to structure and strengthen the Company.

Staff expenses increased to 0.76 million in December 2021 as compared to 0.47 million as a result of the structuring of the Company including the recruitment of 7 employees in 2021.

Finally, the amortization of development expenses related to the BIOCERA-VET Bone Surgery and VISCO-VET programs resulted in an operating loss of 1.7 million and a net loss of 1.34 million.

The Company's cash and cash equivalents at December 31, 2021 amounted to 5.63 million allowing to fund operation at least until first quarter of 2024.

Operational highlights (including events after closure of the financial year)

BIOCERA-VET, the most comprehensive line of bone substitutes

2021 was the year of the development of BIOCERA-VET, TheraVet's line of bone substitutes.

Highlights on the R&D program

The Company announced positive results in the target clinical indications:

In July 2021, BIOCERA-VET Osteosarcoma was used successfully in a multidisciplinary approach to the treatment of osteosarcoma in dogs.

In November 2021, positive safety and efficacy results of BIOCERA-VET Osteosarcoma cementoplasty as a palliative option for canine osteosarcoma were reported with:

Improvement of quality of life

Reduction of pain for up to 6 months after the treatment

Low complication rate

In February 2022, the positive safety and efficacy results of BIOCERA-VET Bone surgery in canine arthrodesis (fusion of carpal or tarsal joint) were confirmed on an enlarged cohort of patients (27 dogs). In this study, BIOCERA-VET was shown to be at least as effective as autologous bone graft but with a lower complication rate (0% vs 25%) and a reduced surgery time (30 to 45 min), positioning BIOCERA-VET as a valuable alternative to the reference procedure. Results were presented and awarded by the "Best Poster Presentation" in February 2022 at an American world-class orthopedic conference, Veterinary Orthopedic Conference (VOS).

Highlights on commercialization

The commercialization of BIOCERA-VET Bone Surgery was initiated in April 2021 in Belgium, and extended to France and the Netherlands in October 2021. BIOCERA -VET Osteosarcoma was launched in December 2021 in the same countries.

Commercial expansion was pursued in March 2022 with the launch in the United Kingdom and Ireland, representing the 3rd biggest companion animal market in Europe with more than 16 millions dogs.

In January 2022, in order to support the Company in sales and according to the Company's strategy, TheraVet signed a distribution agreement with Centravet, one of France's leading wholesaler/distributor of animal health products.

Highlights on the partnership agreements

To build the most comprehensive line of vet bone substitutes the Company signed two additional major partnerships

In November 2021, signing of an exclusive distribution and research partnership with INNOTERE Gmbh (Germany) significantly expanding TheraVet's synthetic bone substitutes portfolio with (i) 2 complementary bone graft lines, (ii) 3D-bioprinted bone endoprostheses for patient-tailored bone grafting surgeries (iii) the development of novel generation proprietary products.

In February 2022, signing of an exclusive partnership with Industrie Biomediche Insubri SA (IBI, Switzerland) on a new biological bone graft product line, "BIOCERA-VET SmartGraft"; in order to provide the veterinary market with a unique and standardized biological bone graft solution combining quality and availability.

With these new partnerships, the Company has built one of the most comprehensive lines of bone substitutes available in the veterinary market.

VISCO-VET, a new solution in canine osteoarthritis and prevention of ligament rupture

VISCO-VET is a line of injectable intra-articular gels addressing dog articular diseases such as osteoarthritis and cranial cruciate ligament deficiencies, representing more than 40 millions patients in Europe and the United States.

In September 2021, laboratory proof-of-concept results were confirmed in a pilot clinical study evaluating VISCO-VET in canine osteoarthritis in client-owned dogs. A single intra-articular injection of VISCO-VET provided:

A statistically significant improvement in dog's mobility

A statistically significant reduction in dog's osteoarthritis-related pain

Long-lasting effects, and increasing over time, for up to 3 months after the injection

Well tolerated with no adverse event reported

The Company announced in September 2021 the launch of the pivotal European multicentric clinical study evaluating VISCO-VET in canine osteoarthritis in France and the Netherlands. Patient enrolment started in October 2021.

Strategy key milestones in 2022

In 2022, the Company intends to continue the development of its various assets and accelerate the ramping up of the commercialization of BIOCERA-VET. The resources will be allocated to achieving the following strategic objectives:

Launch of BIOCERA-VET line in the United States of America and in Germany (the biggest companion animal market in Europe), respectively during the first and second half of 2022

line in the United States of America and in Germany (the biggest companion animal market in Europe), respectively during the first and second half of 2022 Initiation of the pivotal European multicentric clinical evaluating VISCO-VET in canine osteoarthritis in Poland and Portugal anticipated in first semester 2022

in canine osteoarthritis in Poland and Portugal anticipated in first semester 2022 Continuation of the discussion with Regulatory Agencies in Europe and the United States in the preparation of the regulatory filing of VISCO-VET

Annual Report 2021

The 2021 annual report ending December 31, 2021 will be published April 07, 2022 and will be available on the Company's website, www.theravet-finances.com. The accounting data reported in this press release are consistent in all material respects with the financial statements audited by The Company's statutory auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Reviseurs d'Entreprise SRL and derived from the annual accounts.

Financial calendar 2022

Ordinary General Assembly: June 02, 2022

Half-year business update: June 30, 2022

About TheraVet SA

TheraVet is a veterinary biotechnology company specialising in osteoarticular treatments for companion animals. The Company develops targeted, safe and effective treatments to improve the quality of life of pets suffering from joint and bone diseases. For pet owners, the health of their pets is a major concern and TheraVet's mission is to address the need for innovative and curative treatments. TheraVet works closely with international opinion leaders in order to provide a more effective response to ever-growing needs in the field of veterinary medicine. TheraVet is listed on Euronext Growth Paris and Brussels, has its head office in Belgium (Gosselies) with a US subsidiary in Texas.

For more information, visit the TheraVet website

Or follow us on LinkedIn Facebook Twitter

Forward-looking statements

This release may contain forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements may include statements regarding the Company's plans, objectives, goals, strategies, future events, the safety and clinical activity of TheraVet's pipelines and financial condition, results of operation and business outlook. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties, both general and specific, and there are risks that predictions, forecasts, projections and other forward-looking statements will not be achieved. These risks, uncertainties and other factors include, among others, those listed and fully described in the "Risk Factors" section in the Annual Report. TheraVet expressly disclaims any obligation to update any such forward-looking statements in this document to reflect any change in its expectations with regard thereto or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based, unless required by law or regulation.

Statements of operations and comprehensive loss

31.12.2021 31.12.2020 Operating 2.193.738 1.220.017 Turnover 12.348 Stocks of finished goods and work and contracts in progress: increase (decrease) 54.843 Produced fixed assets 1.930.219 987.810 Other operating income 196.327 232.207 Non-recurring operating charges Operating charges 3.922.649 1.621.217 Goods for resale, raw materials and consumables 63.972 Purchases 206.459 Stock: increase/decrease -142.487 Services and other goods 2.536.995 1.100.015 Remuneration, social security costs and pensions (+)/(-) 762.085 468.689 Amortisations of and other amounts written down on formation expenses, intangible and tangible fixed assets 558.294 46.399 Increase, decrease in amounts written off stocks contracts in progress and trade debtors: appropriations (write-backs) (+)/(-) Provisions for risks and charges appropriations (uses and write-backs) (+)/(-) Other operating charges 1.303 6.115 Operation charges carried to assets as restructuring costs Non-recurring operating charges Operating profit (loss) (+)/(-) -1.728.912 -401.200 31.12.2021 31.12.2020 Financial income 310.197 37.146 Recurring financial income 310.197 37.146 Income from financial fixed assets 9.481 9.019 Other financial income 300.716 28.126 Non-recurring financial income Financial charges 49.109 24.899 Recurring financial charges 49.109 24.899 Interest and other debt charges 26.452 21.591 Other financial charges 22.657 3.308 Non-recurring financial charges Profit (loss) for the period before taxes (+)/(-) -1.467.824 -388.953 Transfer from postponed taxes Transfer to postponed taxes Income taxes (+)/(-) -126.974 -490 Taxes 2.596 Adjustment of income taxes and write-back of provisions 129.570 490 Profit (loss) for the period (+)/(-) -1.340.850 -388.463 Transfer from untaxed reserves Transfer to untaxed reserves Profit (loss) for the period available for appropriation (+)/(-) -1.340.850 -388.463

Statement of Financial Position

ASSETS 31.12.2021 31.12.2020 FIXED ASSETS 4.476.838 2.759.657 Formation expenses 818.975 0 Intangible fixed assets 4.263.509 2.572.374 Tangible fixed assets 29.841 24.600 Land and buildings Plant, machinery and equipment 20.401 23.076 Furniture and vehicles 9.440 1.524 Leasing and other rights Other tangible fixed assets Tangible assets under construction and advance payments made Financial fixed assets 183.489 162.683 Affiliated companies 171.564 Participating interests 8.749 Amounts receivable 162.815 Other financial fixed assets 11.925 Amounts receivable and cash guarantees 11.925 CURRENT ASSETS 6.155.650 2.350.911 Amounts receivable after more than one year Trade debtors Other amounts receivable Stocks and contracts in progress 197.330 Stocks 197.330 Raw materials and consumables 25.607 Work in progress 45.576 Finished goods 9.268 Goods purchased for resale 116.880 Contract in progress Amounts receivable within one year 279.243 90.863 Trade debtors 6.916 12.032 Other amounts receivable 272.327 78.831 Current investments Cash at bank and in hand 5.631.418 2.167.461 Deferred charges and accrued income 47.659 92.587 TOTAL ASSETS 11.451.463 5.110.567

LIABILITIES 31.12.2021 31.12.2020 EQUITY 9.647.627 3.391.683 Contributions 10.172.459 3.119.953 Issued capital 322.394 248.930 Uncalled capital Share premium account 9.850.065 2.871.023 Revaluation surplus Reserves Legal reserve Reserve not available In respect of own shares held Others Untaxed reserves Available reserves Accumulated profits (+)/ losses (-) -1.956.667 -615.817 Investment grants 1.431.835 887.547 PROVISIONS AND DEFERRED TAXES Provisions for liabilities and charges Deferred taxes AMOUNT PAYABLE 1.803.836 1.718.884 Amounts payable after more than one year 909.568 699.100 Financial debts 909.568 699.100 Subordinated loans 62.500 Other loans 847.068 699.100 Trade debts Advances received on contracts in progress Other amounts payable Amounts payable within one year 884.468 1.011.465 Current portion of amounts payable after more than one year 92.055 Financial debts Credit institutions Other loans Trade debts 540.165 285.097 Suppliers 540.165 285.097 Bills of exchange payable Advances received on contracts in progress Taxes, remuneration and social security 173.004 120.218 Taxes 16.674 2.341 Remuneration and social security 156.330 117.877 Other amounts payable 79.245 606.150 Accruals and deferred income 9.800 8.319 TOTAL LIABALITIES 11.451.463 5.110.567

Cash Flow Statement

Cash flow Statement 31.12.2021 31.12.2020 Free cashflow -869.908 -326.797 Net cash used in operations -339.325 970.612 Net cash (used in)/from investing activities -3.094.450 -1.111.090 Net cash (used in)/from financing activities 7.767.640 2.553.307 Net cash (decrease)/increase 3.463.956 2.086.032 cash cash equivalents at opening 2.167.461 81.429 cash cash equivalents at closing 5.631.418 2.167.461

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220405006042/en/

Contacts:

TheraVet

Chief Operating Officer

Sabrina Ena

investors@thera.vet

Tel: +32 (0) 71 96 00 43

Chief Corporate Officer

Julie Winand

investors@thera.vet

NewCap

Investor Relations and Financial Communications

Theo Martin Olivier Bricaud

theravet@newcap.eu

Tel: +33 (0)1 44 71 94 94

Press Relations

Arthur Rouille Ambre Delval

theravet@newcap.eu

Tel: +33 (0)1 44 71 00 15

NewCap Belgique

Press Relations

Laure-Eve Monfort

lemonfort@newcap.fr

Tel.: 32 (0) 489 57 76 52
SINGAPORE, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Lighthouse India Fund III, Limited has invested INR 200 crores (USD 27 million) in Ferns N Petals Private Limited ("FnP"), India's leading gifting platform.

Starting its journey from a single flower store in Delhi, FnP has grown to become India's largest, most well-known gifting platform, delighting more than two million customers annually. The Company offers over 40,000 products across various categories, such as cakes, flowers, plants, chocolates, and personalized merchandise. The Company operates through a network of more than 400 franchised FnP stores across India, serving 99% of the Indian pin codes and delivers majority of its orders within 24 hours. Beyond India, the Company has on-ground operations in the UAE, Singapore, and Qatar and plans to further expand into Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and the UK soon. Despite Covid related disruptions, the Company has maintained a 40%+ growth rate and expects a turnover of nearly INR 600 crore in the current financial year. The investment will be managed and advised by Motilal Oswal.

"Gifting is all about 'Delight' and at FnP, we are committed to offering the best curated experience to our customers and their loved ones. We are very excited to partner with Lighthouse and look forward to learning from their deep consumer insights, developed through a focused investment approach," shared Mr. Vikaas Gutgutia, Founder & Managing Director at Ferns N Petals.

On the partnership, Mr. Pawan Gadia, CEO, Retail & Online at Ferns N Petals India, GCC & APAC Regions, said, "Online gifting has its nuances which significantly differentiates it from other online D2C categories. The delivery experience plays as critical a role as the gift itself, if not more. With this fundraising, we plan to invest in improving our systems and technology to ensure a superlative customer experience for all gifting occasions."

"Gifting is a large but highly fragmented market in India. Online gifting has hardly scratched the surface and has huge headroom to grow, with digital tailwinds supporting such growth. FnP has all the required ingredients, including leading brand recall, its extensive supply chain network, a robust tech stack, and a seasoned management team, to capture a large share of this growth," shared Sachin Bhartiya, Founding Partner at Lighthouse Advisors.

Lighthouse is a leading mid-market private equity firm focused on growth investments in India. Lighthouse has over half a billion dollars of assets under management and has invested in over 25 companies across consumer brands, digital transformation, healthcare, and specialty manufacturing. Lighthouse's marquee investments include leading Indian brands like Bikaji Foods, Nykaa, Duroflex Mattresses, Fabindia, Cera Sanitaryware, Dhanuka Agritech, Kama Ayurveda, Poly Medicure, Shaily Engineering, Tynor Orthotics, Unibic Foods and Wow! Momo.

About the Company

Ferns N Petals came into existence in 1994 that has grown to be the Largest Gifting Portal in India in the last 27 years. The journey started with a single store under the entrepreneurship of Mr. Vikaas Gutgutia, which has now emerged as a reputed brand. Today, the brand leads the floral, gifting and cakes industry with 400+ outlets in more than 125 cities pan India.
350 leaders attending the event explore the future of sustainability

President Tsai Ing-wen emphasizes that Taiwan's Net-Zero 2050 target is a goal where failure is not an option

TAIPEI, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Net zero, low carbon and responsible governance have become core issues that can no longer pushed aside by the international community. On March 2022, Business Today, a Taiwan-based financial journal which has long focused on the connection between ESG and industry, held the 2nd ESG & Sustainability Taiwan International Summit. More than 350 government and industry leaders participated in the event, including officials from the Financial Supervisory Commission and the Bureau of Energy, Ministry of Economic Affairs. Taiwan president Tsai Ing-Wen delivered a speech at the forum.

President Tsai Ing-Wen said in her speech that the Net-Zero 2050 target is not only a challenge for the world, but also for Taiwan. She stressed that despite a number of tough challenges, it behooves Taiwan to boost its net-zero transformation by way of a four-pronged approach: first, research into new energy sources such as hydrogen and forward-looking green energy must be undertaken to maintain the energy transition; second, industrial transformation from process optimization to the use of renewable energy must be accelerated to meet changing market conditions; third, a transition to low-carbon public buildings and net-zero emission transportation is a necessary lifestyle change that must be adopted; and fourth, fairness is a must for public engagement in society transformation.

The summit also invited global experts to present an ESG development roadmap to corporate leaders and investors. Key speakers included Robert N. Stavins, A. J. Meyer Professor of Energy & Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, who spoke about his insights into post-COP26 climate policies, and Todd Cort, co-director at Yale Center for Business and the Environment, who elaborated on the carbon trading market after COP26. The two speeches were delivered online.

From the standpoint of financial companies, Wing Fung Financial Group chairman Sih-Kuan Chen pointed out that Climate Action has emerged as the most widespread global consensus of all time, and that companies need to integrate four "imperatives" into their net-zero strategies: compliance, optimization, reinvention and leadership. Wing Fung is committed to realizing net-zero emission goals from operations by 2030 and from the whole asset portfolio by 2050.

Ying-Chou Chen, head of Sustainability Services Group, Deloitte & Touche, said that there are two ways to cope with climate change: on the one hand by operational procedures and/or production facilities are modified to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while, at the same time, energy efficiency is enhanced by developing new carbon reduction technologies, on the other hand, by taken precautionary measures to protect the enterprise from the impact of climate change in the future.

China Petrochemical Development Corporation (CPDC) chairman Ruey-Long Chen noted that in response to future industrial demand, the priority of the current existing green power supply should be to improve carbon output from the process side and upgrade existing equipment to reduce energy consumption. He further added that the amount of water vapor being used by the petrochemical industry is excessive, and that its use should be curtailed or even cut to zero.

Alex Araujo, fund manager of global equities at M&G Investment, mentioned that the influx of money into sustainability funds has led to an overvaluation of clean and renewable energy businesses, and, should the current boom falter, investors are likely to face huge losses.

Taiwan Depository & Clearing Corporation (TDCC) president Hsiu-Ming Lin pointed out that TDCC is the world's first IR platform to provide ESG ratings of individual and institutional investors, a measure that has become highly valued by foreign investors. The platform has become one of the region's key ESG data sources.

Taiwan Housing Group president Pei-Ye Peng said that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) act as the backbone of Taiwan's economy, and what they can bring to the table is something we need to think about. Taiwan Housing is now promoting a 10-year tree-planting initiative, as a way of demonstrating to employees that the company they work for is operating with a long-term perspective.

Pension Fund Association chairperson Professor Li-Ling Wang noted that the ESG investment market has continued to expand and that, post pandemic, investors have been paying more attention to ESG. Over 90% of large institutional investors and pension funds have increased their ESG investments, showing the importance of ESG in future investing decisions.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1777565/ESG.jpg
Evolution of theAtos Board of Directors proposed at the 2022 General Meeting

The announced proposals strengthen the diversity of skills within the Board of Directors in order to support the transformation of the Group

Paris, April6,2022 - The Board of Directors, on the recommendation of the Nomination and Governance Committee, has approved the following changes in its composition:

Approval of the appointment of Rodolphe Belmer as Directorand renewal of this mandate

The approval of the appointment as Director of Mr. Rodolphe Belmer, Chief Executive Officer of Atos since January 1, 2022, and the renewal of his term of office as Director, will be submitted to the vote of the shareholders at the General Meeting on May 18, 2022.

Renewal of the mandates of Valerie Bernis and Vernon Sankey

Ms. Valerie Bernis has been an independent Director since April 2015. She is also Chair of the CSR Committee and a member of the Remuneration Committee.

Mr. Vernon Sankey has been a Director since October 2009.

Appointments of Elizabeth Tinkham, Astrid Stange and Rene Proglio

The appointments of Ms. Elizabeth Tinkham, Ms. Astrid Stange and Mr. Rene Proglio as independent Directors will be submitted to the vote of the shareholders at the Annual General Meeting on May 18, 2022.

Ms. Elizabeth Tinkham, of American nationality, is a former Senior Managing Director at Accenture. She would bring her extensive experience in the cloud business and her in-depth knowledge of hyperscalers to the Atos Board of Directors.

Ms. Astrid Stange, of German nationality, is the former Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the AXA group and a former Senior Partner and Managing Director of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). She would bring her operational experience of large-scale digital and operational transformations on the client side and her intimate knowledge of the financial and insurance sector to the Atos Board of Directors.

Mr. Rene Proglio, of French nationality, is a partner at PJT Partners, former Head of Morgan Stanley in France and Partner for 20 years at Arthur Andersen. He would bring his extensive financial and accounting knowledge as well as his strategic vision in terms of acquisitions and disposals to the Atos Board of Directors.

Non-renewal of the mandates of Colette Neuville and Jean Fleming

Ms. Colette Neuville, Director of Atos since April 2010, and Ms. Jean Fleming, Director of Atos representing employee shareholders since May 2009, did not wish to submit their mandates for renewal at the upcoming Annual General Meeting.

Candidates to represent employee shareholders

As a consequence of the non-renewal of Ms. Jean Fleming's mandate, two employee candidates, Mr. Christian Beer and Ms. Katrina Hopkins, will be proposed at the Annual General Meeting to represent employee shareholders. Mr. Christian Beer is Head of Business Partner Service in Network and Communication Practice at Atos in Germany, and Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Atos FCPE. Ms. Katrina Hopkins is Group Head of Talent, Career and Learning at Atos International.

The Board of Directors, on the advice of the Nomination and Governance Committee, recommends to Atos shareholders the candidacy of Ms. Katrina Hopkins, taking in particular into account her dual legitimacy to represent the employee shareholders of Atos. Ms. Katrina Hopkins was nominated by both the Supervisory Board of the Atos FCPE and by the employee shareholders who directly hold their shares.

The candidate who receives the highest number of votes from the shareholders present or represented at the Annual General Meeting on May 18, 2022, will be appointed as the Director representing employee shareholders.

Resignation of Cedrik Neike

In addition, Mr. Cedrik Neike, Member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG and CEO of Digital Industries, a non-independent Director since January 2020, has submitted his resignation to the Board of Directors with effect after the next Annual General Meeting.

The strategic partnership between Atos and Siemens remains fully in force. As a reminder, this partnership was strengthened and renewed in September 2020 for 5 years through agreements signed by Atos SE with Siemens AG, Siemens Energy AG and Siemens Healthineers AG. The implementation of these agreements enables Siemens to accelerate in the areas of service modernization and digitalization, data-centric digital, cloud transformation and cybersecurity. Siemens and Atos also announced the extension of their Global Alliance beyond technology cooperation to bring their joint digital solutions together to the market.

Bertrand Meunier, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Atos SE, Chairman of the Nomination and Governance Committee, declared:

"I am pleased to submit the appointments of Elizabeth Tinkham, Astrid Stange and Rene Proglio, as well as the reappointments of Rodolphe Belmer, Valerie Bernis and Vernon Sankey, to the vote at the next Annual General Meeting. Collectively, they represent the skills and expertise needed to put Atos back on the path of growth and performance expected by all our stakeholders."

Mr. Meunier added: "On behalf of the entire Board of Directors, I would like to thank Colette Neuville and Jean Fleming for their long-standing commitment to Atos and their important contribution to key stages of the Group's transformation. I would also like to thank Cedrik Neike for his active and significant participation in the definition of the new Atos strategy with Rodolphe Belmer and the rest of the Board of Directors".

The notice of meeting (avis de reunion) concerning the Annual General Meeting to be held on May 18, 2022, containing the agenda, the draft resolutions as well as the rules for participation and voting, was published on April 6, 2022, in the Official Legal Gazette (Bulletin des AnnoncesLegalesObligatoires, BALO) and is available on the Company's website).

About Elizabeth Tinkham

Elizabeth Tinkham, of American nationality, is a dynamic leader and a respected advisor to business leaders on technology, digital transformation and management issues.

Ms. Tinkham was a Senior Managing Director and member of the Global Executive Committee at Accenture PLC, where she held a variety of client facing and executive positions. She was the global account lead for Microsoft, responsible for driving account growth as well as the technology partnership between Microsoft and Accenture. Prior to heading the Microsoft account, Ms. Tinkham led Accenture's Global and North American Management Consulting practice for the Communications, Media and Technology (CMT) verticals. Her responsibilities included revenue growth, M&A activity and chairing the CMT Investment Board.

Ms. Tinkham now advises innovative, growth-focused companies on the challenges and opportunities inherent to shifting to digital technologies. She sits on the board of directors of Particle.io, a San Francisco start-up specializing in the Internet of Things; Headspin, a mobile application testing platform; and Athena Alliance, a digital platform for executive education, networking and placement for top women in business. She also advises the state of Washington on educational and equity issues through her role as chairman of Washington Stem, a non-profit organization.

Ms. Tinkham teaches classes in management consulting and in nonprofit board management at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business. She is the recipient of the Gamble Teaching Award for Innovation in Teaching.

Ms. Tinkham graduated from Ohio State University with a degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering. She serves on the Dean's Advisory Board in the College of Engineering and is a winner of a Distinguished Alumni Award.

About Astrid Stange

Astrid Stange, of German nationality, is the former Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the AXA group and a former Senior Partner and Managing Director of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). She has always been at the forefront of leading large and complex technology-enabled transformations, both in consulting and executive roles.

Ms. Stange started her executive career at Bertelsmann Buch AG as head of direct marketing in 1995. She became Senior Partner and Managing Director of the Boston Consulting Group where she started in 1998 as a member of the Global Insurance Practice. From 2008 to 2013, she led BCG's Insurance Practice in Germany and then became Global Sector Leader for Life Insurance. Ms. Astrid Stange joined AXA in 2014 as member of the Executive Board of AXA Konzern AG (Germany), in charge of strategy, human resources, organization and client management. In December 2017, Ms. Stange was appointed Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the AXA Group and member of the Management Committee of AXA SA. As COO, she led a major transformation of the company regarding technology and data. In 2018, she also took the operational responsibility for the newly built unit AXA Group Operations which delivers infrastructure and application services, cyber security, emerging technologies, but also BPO and procurement services to AXA Group.

Ms. Stange left AXA in October 2021. She has since decided to take on advisory mandates and also supports company founders (Insurtech, NGO) as a strategy advisor.

Ms. Stange studied economics at the Ruhr University in Bochum. In 1993, she obtained a doctorate from the Department of Economics of the Technische Universitat Braunschweig.

About ReneProglio

Rene Proglio, of French nationality, is a partner in the Strategic Advisory Group of PJT Partners. With more than 30 years of experience in the French mergers and acquisitions market, Mr. Proglio brings a strategic vision as well as leading financial expertise to companies.

Mr. Proglio joined PJT Partners in September 2021. He was previously at Morgan Stanley, where he served as Vice President and Head of the French market. Mr. Proglio joined Morgan Stanley in 2003 as a Managing Director in the Investment Banking group and led the advisory business in Paris before taking overall responsibility for the French business.

He began his career at Arthur Andersen in the Audit and Consulting groups, where he served as a partner for 20 years and held various management positions.

Mr. Proglio is a graduate of French business school HEC and holds a Chartered Accountant Diploma.

About Katrina Hopkins

Katrina Hopkins is Vice President of Atos and Group Head of Talent, Career and Learning at Atos International. Ms. Hopkins is a Human Resources Manager with over 20 years of experience.

She has been with Atos since 2011 and joined the Group as part of Atos' acquisition of Siemens IT Solutions & Services. She has held various roles within the Human Resources Department, both regionally and globally, and is currently responsible for Talent Development, Performance and Learning within the Atos Group.

Ms. Hopkins holds a BSc (with Honors), in Psychology and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

About Christian Beer

Christian Beer is Head of Business Partner Service in Network and Communication Practice at Atos in Germany. Mr. Beer has 25 years of experience in diverse management positions in several companies in the digital industry and joined Atos in 2004.

Mr. Beer has been a member of the Supervisory Board of Atos FCPE since 2020 and has chaired it since November 2021. He is also a Senior Expert within the Atos Expert Community since its founding in 2017.

Mr. Beer is a graduate engineer from the University of Applied Sciences in Nuremberg and holds a business management certificate from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

###

About Atos

Atos is a global leader in digital transformation with 109,000 employees and annual revenue of c.  11 billion. European number one in cybersecurity, cloud and high-performance computing, the Group provides tailored end-to-end solutions for all industries in 71 countries. A pioneer in decarbonization services and products, Atos is committed to a secure and decarbonized digital for its clients. Atos is an SE (Societas Europaea), listed on Euronext Paris and included in the CAC 40 ESG and Next 20 indexes.

The purpose of Atos is to help design the future of the information space. Its expertise and services support the development of knowledge, education and research in a multicultural approach and contribute to the development of scientific and technological excellence. Across the world, the Group enables its customers and employees, and members of societies at large to live, work and develop sustainably, in a safe and secure information space.

Contacts:

Investor Relations: Thomas Guillois - thomas.guillois@atos.net- +33 6 21 34 36 62

Media: Anette Rey - anette.rey@atos.net- +33 6 69 79 84 88 - @AnetteRey

Attachment
LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Great Portland Estates Plc (GPOR.L), on Wednesday, said it has signed 520,900 sq ft of new lettings in the year to 31 March 2022, generating a combined annual rent of 38.5 million, with market lettings 9.8% ahead of March 2021 ERV, surpassing the company's previous record leasing high of 31.8 million in 2016. The company also noted that its on-going focus on customer satisfaction resulted in a Net Promoter Score of +27.8, significantly ahead of the UK office sector average of +2.0. During the quarter to 31 March 2022, the company had 18 new leases and renewals signed generating annual rent of 7.3 million, with market lettings on average 8.1% ahead of March 2021 ERV. Four rent reviews were settled securing 1.2 million of annual rent 6.9% ahead of the previous passing rent and 3.8% ahead of ERV; and total space covered by new lettings, reviews and renewals was 114,400 sq ft. Most recently, GPE completed three retail lettings, totaling 8,800 sq ft, at a combined rent of over 2.0 million per annum. Toby Courtauld, Chief Executive, said, 'Having delivered record volumes of leasing in the financial year just ended, we start the new year with healthy levels of demand for high quality spaces, particularly across our recently completed developments and our Flex offerings...' Copyright(c) 2022 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved 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.
Layer-2 interoperability platform secures its presence in Europe's crypto landscape with first digital asset exchange license

Coinweb, a layer-2 cross-computation platform, today announced that it has received its digital asset exchange license in Lithuania, allowing the company to operate not only within the country but with all other European countries, barring conflicting regulations. Coinweb's regulatory approval will allow the platform to act as a virtual currency operator for both deposit and exchange.

The Lithuanian license will help deliver liquidity to Coinweb's projects by enabling the platform to enter relationships with traditional financial institutions. Additionally, the acquired license will facilitate Coinweb's wallet operation with fully-integrated fiat rails, allowing Coinweb's incubated customers to issue and sell tokens to their customer bases under Coinweb's regulatory umbrella.

Coinweb is actively working towards acquiring new licenses to meet the regulations of various worldwide jurisdictions. As one of the earliest members of the European Blockchain Partnership (EBP), Lithuania participated in the declaration to support the delivery of cross-border digital public services while adhering to established standards for security and privacy.

"We are thrilled to receive our Lithuanian license and look forward to greater expansion in Europe. As blockchain technology and acceptance of digital payments grow towards mass adoption, the regulatory environment is sure to evolve constantly, and, for the most part, establish limits to what projects creators can pursue," said Toby Gilbert, Coinweb CEO. "Interoperability platforms such as ours are designed to be nimble, and we apply the same values structurally so that Coinweb and its partners can react quickly to change and innovation. With this license from Lithuania and more in our future from various jurisdictions, Coinweb will be able to deliver greater liquidity and enable projects to provide on- and off-ramp services for fiat, which is key to the growth of the space."

Alongside the acquisition of the license, Coinweb is working to strengthen its operations and build new projects on the platform that will be launched later this year. New innovations include a function to ensure regulatory compliance for projects that require cross-chain token issuance.

About Coinweb:

Coinweb.io is a layer-2 cross-chain computation platform that began its journey in mid-2017. With an impressive line-up of team members and a board of advisors from the worlds of traditional technology, business and blockchain, Coinweb is solving some of the most critical problems that exist within Distributed Ledger Technology today.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220406005133/en/

Contacts:

Sean Lansing

coinweb@wachsman.com
With a current pipeline of over 1,100 rooms in prime locations, Dalata is one of the fastest growing hotel groups in the UK

Dalata Hotel Group Plc ("Dalata" or "the Group"), the largest hotel operator in Ireland, growing rapidly in the UK with a presence in continental Europe, today officially opens the Group's first hotel in Bristol. Clayton Hotel Bristol City is ideally located in the centre of Bristol city and marks the Group's 17th hotel in the United Kingdom ("UK"). The Group currently operates eleven Clayton hotels and six Maldron hotels across the UK.

UK expansion in full flow

2022 is a significant year for Dalata's UK growth plan with the opening of four new hotels, making it one of the fastest growing hotel groups in the UK this year. In addition to Clayton Hotel Bristol City, the first quarter saw the opening of both a Clayton and a Maldron hotel in Manchester and later this year will see the opening of a Clayton hotel in Glasgow.

Post 2022, Dalata has a further pipeline of new hotel openings across the UK, which includes hotels in London, Brighton, Liverpool and Manchester. The Group's current growth plans will see Dalata increase its UK footprint by 65% between the start of 2022 and 2024, bringing its UK room total to over 5,000 rooms.

Dalata is an award-winning employer, providing direct employment to more than 1,200 people across the region. The Group's ambitious UK expansion plan will see it employ just under 1,400 people by 2024.

Clayton Hotel Bristol City

Adding 80 jobs locally, the new 4-star hotel is close to Bristol's commercial centre and within walking distance of the main shopping and leisure districts. The hotel boasts 255 air-conditioned bedrooms, a bar, restaurant, gym, and extensive conference facilities. The new hotel represents a 50 million investment, converting the former Edward Everard's Printing Works on Broad Street in Bristol's city centre. The hotel's main entrance is framed by the historical Art Nouveau facade, dating back to the 1900's, which pays tribute to printing and literature greats Johannes Gutenberg and William Morris.

The decision to refurbish the existing building, rather than demolish and build anew is estimated to have saved 2,084 tonnes of CO2 emissions. These carbon savings are equivalent to the CO2 emitted in powering 264 homes in one year.

Bristol is the eighth most visited town or city in the UK, by international visitors. It is an attractive destination for both business travellers and tourists and welcomed more than 2.5 million visitors in 20191. It has a vibrant and fast-growing economy with burgeoning engineering, aerospace, fintech, digital and creative sectors and was recently named the most innovative UK city outside of London2

Commenting on the opening, Dermot Crowley, CEO of Dalata Hotel Group said:

"The opening of the Clayton Hotel Bristol City is a further demonstration of our Group's ambition to grow our presence in the UK market. It is a fabulous property in one of the UK's most popular destination cities. We are confident of the continued recovery in the hospitality sector and look forward to investing in other targeted UK locations throughout 2022 and beyond.

Our greatest asset continues to be our engaged people, in Ireland, the UK and Germany, and we are proud that we are generating significant new employment in the market. This will be the 17th hotel operated by Dalata in the UK, and our pipeline includes hotels in London, Brighton, Liverpool, Glasgow and Manchester. This is definitely a time to look forward."

Shane Casserly, Corporate Development Director of Dalata Hotel Group added:

Today's opening of the Clayton Hotel Bristol City is another significant milestone in our growth story and demonstrates the strength of the partnerships we have across the UK. I am encouraged by the opportunity that remains across the region, which is a key focus for our team.

We were delighted to work with our valued partners, Artisan Real Estate Investors, Abrdn plc and McAleer Rushe Construction on this development, which willbe a flagship property in the heart of Bristol city centre."

Dalata's UK Footprint

UK Hotel Portfolio Hotels Rooms Clayton Hotel Manchester Airport 365 Clayton Hotel Leeds 334 Clayton Hotel Manchester City Centre 329 Maldron Hotel Glasgow City 300 Maldron Hotel Manchester City Centre 278 Maldron Hotel Newcastle 265 Clayton Hotel Bristol City 255 Maldron Hotel Belfast City 237 Clayton Hotel Chiswick, London 227 Clayton Hotel Birmingham 218 Clayton Hotel Cardiff, Wales 216 Clayton Hotel City of London 212 Clayton Hotel Belfast 170 Clayton Hotel Cambridge 160 Clayton Crown Hotel, London 152 Maldron Hotel Belfast International Airport 104 Maldron Hotel Derry 93 Total Rooms in the UK 3,915

UK Hotel Pipeline Hotels Rooms Clayton Hotel Glasgow City 303 Maldron Hotel Liverpool City 260 Maldron Hotel Brighton 221 Maldron Hotel Cathedral Quarter, Manchester 188 Maldron Hotel Shoreditch, London 149 Extension to Clayton Hotel City of London 14 Total UK Pipeline of Rooms 1,135

-ENDS-

About Dalata

Dalata Hotel Group plc was founded in August 2007 and listed as a plc in March 2014. Dalata is Ireland's largest hotel operator, with a growing presence in the UK and continental Europe. The Group's portfolio comprises 48 predominately four-star hotels with 10,459 rooms and a pipeline of over 1,770 rooms. The Group currently has 29 owned hotels, 16 leased hotels and three management contracts. Dalata successfully operate Ireland's two largest hotel brands, the Clayton and the Maldron Hotels. For the year ended 31 December 2021, Dalata reported revenue of 192.0 million and a loss after tax of 6.3 million. Dalata is listed on the Main Market of Euronext Dublin (DHG) and the London Stock Exchange (DAL). For further information visit: www.dalatahotelgroup.com

1 https://www.visitwest.co.uk/about-the-regional-visitor-economy/research

2 https://www.paymentsense.com/uk/blog/most-innovative-cities/

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220406005312/en/

Contacts:

Dalata Hotel Group plc

Dermot Crowley, CEO

Carol Phelan, CFO

Shane Casserly, Corporate Development Director

Tel +353 1 206 9400

investorrelations@dalatahotelgroup.com

Joint Company Brokers

Davy: Anthony Farrell Tel +353 1 679 6363

Berenberg: Ben Wright Tel +44 20 3753 3069

Investor Relations and PR FTI Consulting

Melanie Farrell

Tel +353 86 401 5250

dalata@fticonsulting.com
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 6, 2022 / FALCON GOLD CORP. (TSX-V:FG)(FRA:3FA)(OTCQB:FGLDF); ("Falcon" or the "Company") reports its upcoming Phase III drill program will be increased from 1,000 meters (m) to 2,000m at the historic Central Canada Mine Project in the Atikokan mining camp of northwestern Ontario (see press release February 22, 2022). Drill contractor delays and drill rig availability is the reason for the postponement. The Company in anticipation of the Phase III program has also filed an additional drill permit to target the J.J. Walshe mine trend where recent sampling of a new zone returned results from 11.2 grams per tonne gold to 79.7 g/t Au. Assay results also highlight several gold-bearing zones across the property previously undocumented including the Sugar shear (22.9 g/t Au), Monte (3.63 g/t Au), Honey (1.04 g/t Au) and Hoist zone (1.12 g/t Au).

To date, Falcon has completed 17 diamond drill holes totaling 2942.5m since 2020. A portion of the Phase III drilling will include 3 holes totaling approximately 1,000m targeting the J.J Walshe Zone (Central Canada Mine Trend) (Figure 1) at vertical depths between 200 and 300m. This will potentially extend the gold bearing zones beyond the current drilled depth of 160m.

Fifteen drill holes of Falcon's 2020 programs intersected the J.J. Walshe Zone, and parallel mineralization within the Central Canada Mine trend (Figure 2). Highlights include 10.1 g/t Au over 3.0m starting at 67.0m and 18.6 g/t Au over 1.0m (with visible gold) from 104m in CC20-01; 3.1 g/t Au over 2.5m from 33m in CC20-02; 0.6 g/t Au over 10m from 93.0m and 7.2 g/t Au over 1m from 114.0m in CC20-07; 2.8 g/t Au over 7.5m from 158.1m in CC20-09; 0.9 g/t Au over 6.8m from 44.1m in CC20-14; 1.35 g/t Au over 4.1m starting at 59.5m downhole in CC20-15; 0.5 g/t Au over 12.4m from 9.8m in CC20-17 and 1.57 g/t Au over 14.8m starting at 89. m downhole in CC20-12. This interval contained visible gold which assayed 20.50 g/t Au over 30cm. Hole CC20-12 also contained 10.8 g/t Au over 30cm starting at 112.4m downhole.

The Central Canada Mine Trend has now been traced for 275m in strike length and to a depth of 160m (Hole CC20-09). The J.J. Walshe zone is open at depth along strike with potential for parallel mineralized zones. The March 2022 drill program will add understanding to the structural controls on mineralization in addition to exploring for a down dip extension of the mineralization. The remaining 1,000m of drilling will be focused on the Monte Zone and the No. 2 Vein.

Mr. Karim Rayani, Falcon's Chief Executive Officer, commented, "Our drilling campaigns have now intersected gold mineralization at the Central Canada Mine Trend (CCMT) to 200m vertically. We look forward to extending this trend at depth below any historical drilling by previous operators. Falcon has been successful in intersecting 4 parallel zones along the CCMT adding almost 200m of strike length. We are also pleased to be expanding the drill program to the Monte Zone and the No. 2 Vein where our 2021 mapping and prospecting program confirmed gold-bearing structures and lithologies that have yet to be drilled."

Figure 1. Falcon Gold's Central Canada property with gold-bearing zones discovered to date.

Qualified Person

Mr. Mike Kilbourne, P. Geo, an independent qualified person as defined in National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed, and approved the technical contents of this news release on behalf of the Company. The QP has not completed sufficient work to verify the historic information on the properties.

About Falcon Gold Corp.

Falcon is a Canadian mineral exploration company focused on generating, acquiring, and exploring opportunities in the Americas. Falcon's flagship project, the Central Canada Gold Mine, is approximately 20km southeast of Agnico Eagle's Hammond Reef Gold Deposit which has currently estimated 3.32 million ounces of gold (123.5 million tonnes grading 0.84 g/t gold) mineral reserves, and 2.3 million ounces of measured and indicated mineral resources (133.4 million tonnes grading 0.54 g/t gold). The Hammond Reef gold property lies on the Hammond shear zone, which is a northeast-trending splay off the Quetico Fault Zone ("QFZ") and may be the control for the gold deposit. The Central Gold property lies on a similar major northeast-trending splay of the QFZ.

The Company holds 8 additional projects. The Esperanza Gold/Silver/Copper mineral concessions located in La Rioja Province, Argentina. The Springpole West Property in the world-renowned Red Lake mining camp; a 49% interest in the Burton Gold property with Iamgold near Sudbury Ontario; and in B.C., the Spitfire-Sunny Boy, Gaspard Gold claims; and most recently the Great Burnt, Hope Brook, and Baie Verte acquisitions adjacent to First Mining, Matador, Benton-Sokoman's JV, and Marvel Discovery in Central Newfoundland.

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Falcon Gold Corp.

"Karim Rayani"

Karim Rayani

Chief Executive Officer, Director

Telephone: (604) 716-0551

Email: info@falcongold.ca

Cautionary Language and Forward-Looking Statements

This news release may contain forward looking statements including but not limited to comments regarding the timing and content of upcoming work programs, geological interpretations, receipt of property titles, etc. Forward looking statements address future events and conditions and therefore, involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements.

This news release may contain forward looking statements including but not limited to comments regarding the timing and content of upcoming work programs, geological interpretations, receipt of property titles, etc. Forward looking statements address future events and conditions and therefore, involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

SOURCE: Falcon Gold Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/696305/Falcon-Increases-Drill-Program-Up-to-2000-Meters-at-Central-Canada-Site-Atikokan-Ontario
KIEV, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Ukraine on Wednesday created 11 humanitarian corridors to allow civilians to leave conflict-affected cities and deliver humanitarian aid, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said on Telegram.

The humanitarian corridors established safe exit routes from five towns in the southern Zaporizhzhia region and five towns and villages in Luhansk, Vereshchuk said.

One humanitarian corridor was set up to allow civilians to leave Mariupol in Donetsk, where there has been fierce fighting, via private transport.

On Tuesday, some 3,800 people were evacuated from conflict-affected areas in Ukraine. 
International Talent Advisory Firm Names New Leader

NEW YORK, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Ferguson Partners, the leading talent management and strategic advisory firm for the global real assets industries, is pleased to announce that Gemma Burgess has been named Chief Executive Officer, effective June 1. Burgess has over 15 years of global leadership experience and brings a vision for 2022 and beyond, which will continue to focus on providing customized, client-centric solutions today while growing and evolving the business for tomorrow's needs. Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer William J. Ferguson will continue to be Chairman and remain actively focused on leading client engagements.

Burgess joined Ferguson Partners in 2007 and has developed a global acumen, originally based in Ferguson Partners' London office, and then transitioning to oversee its New York City office before taking on responsibility for the U.S. search business and then, most recently, the global search business. In her current role as President, Burgess has been instrumental in positioning Ferguson Partners as the go-to firm for executive talent and management solutions. As a recognized leader in executive search, Burgess is also a staunch advocate for DE&I and was responsible for creating the inaugural diversity partnership in 2020 with Real Estate Executive Council (REEC) and continues to be an active participant with the association.

Clients can expect a seamless transition and continued industry-leading services. "Gemma's transition reflects the culmination of a well-planned multi-year succession planning project. She has built an excellent partnership with Jeremy Banoff, Vice Chairman, and is supported by a best-in-class global leadership team. During this period, Gemma has strongly demonstrated her ability to maintain the Ferguson Partners standard of excellence while implementing her vision to evolve the business. Her experience and impact across industries in addition to her broad, global background and perspective make her uniquely qualified for the role and absolutely the right leader to take Ferguson Partners into the future," said William J. Ferguson.

Senior Managing Director and Head of Europe Serena Althaus shared, "After working beside Gemma for more than 15 years, I can't think of a better person to lead Ferguson Partners to its next exciting chapter with a clear focus on DE&I and real assets." Robert Langer, Lead Independent Director added, "On behalf of the entire board, we are thrilled to welcome Gemma as the firm's new CEO and look forward to leveraging her extensive knowledge and value throughout the organization."

"I am incredibly excited for the future of our firm," said Burgess. "With confidence we will continue to grow our global platform and uphold the Ferguson Partners standard of excellence. I will continue to be hands-on with our clients who, as always, can expect our signature tailored, attentive approach to their unique needs."

Burgess' appointment comes as the firm plans an expansion of its corporate leadership team, with future announcements to follow.

About Ferguson Partners

Founded in 1989, Ferguson Partners has built a reputation as the premier firm dedicated to serving the talent management and organizational consulting needs of the real estate and related industries. With offices in Charlotte, Chicago, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, and Toronto, Ferguson Partners is unique in its global reach but executes its work with a boutique touch and highly specialized approach across four main business lines. The firm's website can be found at fergusonpartners.com .

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1781223/Ferguson_Partners_Gemma_Burgess_1.jpg
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 6, 2022 / Pampa Metals Corp. ("Pampa Metals" or the "Company") (CSE:PM)(FSE:FIRA)(OTCQX:PMMCF) is pleased to provide results from the pole-dipole induced polarisation ("IP") survey completed at the Cerro Chiquitin target on its 100% owned, 7,600-hectare Cerro Buenos Aires project in northern Chile. Cerro Buenos Aires is located along the Paleocene or Central Mineral Belt of northern Chile, about 35 km southwest of the multi-million ounce El Penon gold-silver mining district, and around 210 km south-southwest of the giant Spence and Sierra Gorda copper mining cluster.

Key takeaways:

IP study results have improved the understanding of exploration results from 2021 and have clarified drill targets for further shallow and deep drilling near Cerro Chiquitin. The covered area to the southeast of the tourmaline breccia body at Cerro Chiquitin is confirmed as a priority objective for follow-up drilling.

The IP survey completed has provided reliable information up to 600 m below the surface, with interpretable results with respect to mapped geology, other geophysical studies, and wide-spaced reverse circulation drilling, all completed and reported in 2021. Significant chargeability anomalies some 800 m to 1100 m wide (east-west) occur on at least four parallel lines covering an area about 1 km north-south, all of which remain open at depth.



A total of 18.8 linear km of pole-dipole IP were surveyed by Quantec Geoscience Chile Ltda. in January and February of 2022, distributed in six east-west lines each 2.6 km to 3.4 km in length, and with each line separated by 250 m, with readings every 200 m. The IP lines cover an area of approximately 3.5 km E-W by 1.5 km N-S, and were located to the south of the Cerro Chiquitin tourmaline breccia in areas covered by post-mineral gravels.

Cerro Chiquitin Target

Several chargeability anomalies are present in the data from the six lines surveyed, with a line-to-line continuous anomaly from line 7.274.850 in the south to line 7.275.850 in the north (1,000m). The most northerly line (7.276.100) appears to exit the principal chargeability feature, although a modest chargeable feature is still apparent that correlates well with the tourmaline breccia body mapped at surface at Cerro Chiquitin. The chargeable anomalies are open at depth beyond the limits of the survey, and several geophysical profiles show breaks across the profiles that may represent geological faults. Conductive features occur on all profiles, and tend to be sub-parallel to the surface, and may represent one of, or a combination of, water at the base of the gravel cover and clay alteration (intermediate argillic, to phyllic, to advanced argillic). Several chargeable features also correlate well with low-tenor, copper and molybdenum geochemical anomalies from historic soil sampling surveys carried out across the post-mineral "pampa" gravel cover.

The chargeability anomalies reflect the presence of sulphide minerals in the sub-surface that will almost certainly include pyrite (iron-sulphide), but also possibly other sulphide minerals such as chalcopyrite (copper-iron-sulphide - the most common copper mineral).

From south to north:

Line 7.724.850: at the southern end of the IP study shows a high-intensity chargeability anomaly about 800 m wide in the mid-part of the line. The anomaly is relatively shallow, well defined below the 1500 m elevation, and open at depth beyond the limits of the IP survey. The zone of low chargeability to the east correlates with outcrops of volcanic rocks with intermediate argillic alteration and preserved primary magnetite. The western part of the chargeability anomaly corresponds to the along-strike projection of Pampa Metals' RC drill hole CBA06 from 2021, and may represent a target of interest.

Line 7.725.100: shows a moderate to high intensity chargeability anomaly, about 800 m wide and is open at depth. The western boundary of the anomaly may be fault controlled, and was drilled by Pampa Metals' RC drill hole CBA06 from 2021 to relatively shallow depths, and with the best part of the anomaly further east and at greater depths. A steeply dipping resistive feature further east reaches the surface where a small, subdued outcrop of fragmental rhyolites affected by advanced argillic alteration, including silicification, penetrates the gravel cover and has been mapped at surface. The deep resistive anomaly may represent a target of interest.

Line 7.275.350: shows a moderate to high intensity chargeability anomaly that is about 900 m wide, well delineated from the 1600 m elevation and open at depth below the 1100 m elevation. The eastern boundary may be fault controlled. The central part of this chargeability anomaly was tested by Pampa Metals' RC drill hole CBA02 from 2021 (projected from 130 m north of the line). The deep resistive anomaly further east is considered of interest for drill testing. Again, this deep resistor corresponds to a small island hill with fragmentary rhyolitic rocks with advanced argillic alteration were observed.

Line 7.275.600: like the previous line, a moderate to high intensity chargeability anomaly occurs and is about 1100 m wide, well defined from the 1600 m elevation and open at depth below the 1100 m elevation. The eastern margin appears to be limited by a high angled fault. The western part of the chargeability anomaly was tested by Pampa Metals' RC drill hole CBA02 from 2021 (projected from 120 m south of the line), and the more intense are of chargeability to the east remains a target for further drill testing.

It should be noted that the drill holes CBA02 and CBA06, which coincide with some of the geophysical anomalies described above, were highly anomalous in zinc and lead that could be geochemical indicators of the periphery of a mineralised copper-porphyry system, together with lesser arsenic and antimony and minor sporadic, low-tenor gold, which could be indicative of an epithermal overprint.

Cerro Chiquitin Target - Conclusions

The pole-dipole IP survey to the south of Cerro Chiquitin has given positive results that confirm and validate previous results and interpretations from the area, whilst adding further detail and giving clear indicators of potential drill targets prospective for copper (and gold) at depth. The Company is now pursuing plans to carry out follow-up diamond drilling pater this year.

ABOUT PAMPA METALS

Pampa Metals is a Canadian company listed on the Canadian Stock Exchange (CSE: PM) as well as the Frankfurt (FSE: FIRA) and OTC (OTCQB: PMMCF) exchanges. Pampa Metals owns a highly prospective, wholly owned, 62,000-hectare portfolio of eight projects for copper and gold located along proven mineral belts in Chile, one of the world's top mining jurisdictions. The Company is actively progressing four of its projects, including completed and planned drill tests, and has two additional projects optioned to Austral Gold Ltd., with Austral already drill testing its first target on Pampa Metals' ground. The Company has also recently signed an agreement with VerAI Discoveries Inc. giving Pampa Metals access to the latest in artificial intelligence technology in relation to mineral exploration, as well as a further 18,700 hectares of highly prospective terrain in the core of the highly productive mineral belts of northern Chile.

The Company has a vision to create value for shareholders and all other stakeholders by making a major copper or gold discovery along the prime mineral belts of Chile, using the best geological and technological methods. For more information, please visit Pampa Metals' website www.pampametals.com.

Qualified Person

Technical information in this news release has been approved by Mario Orrego G, Geologist and a Registered Member of the Chilean Mining Commission and a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Orrego is a consultant to the Company.

Note: The reader is cautioned that Pampa Metals' projects are early-stage exploration projects, and reference to existing mines and deposits, or mineralization hosted on adjacent or nearby properties, is not necessarily indicative of any mineralization on Pampa Metals' properties.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

Paul Gill | CEO & Director

www.pampametals.com

INVESTOR CONTACT

Ioannis (Yannis) Tsitos | Director

investors@pampametals.com

The CSE nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This news release contains certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical fact, which address events or developments that Pampa Metals expects to occur, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, but not always, identified by the words "expects", "plans", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "projects", "potential", "indicate" and similar expressions, or that events or conditions "will", "would", "may", "could" or "should" occur. Although Pampa Metals believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guaranteeing of future performance and actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements.

Pampa Metals - Project Locations & Major Mines of Northern Chile

Cerro Chiquitin - Pole-Dipole IP Lines & Previous Drilling

SOURCE: Pampa Metals Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/695765/Pampa-Metals-Reports-IP-Chargeability-Anomalies-from-the-Cerro-Chiquitin-Target-at-Cerro-Buenos-Aires-and-Plans-Further-Drill-Testing-of-Shallow-Deep-Porphyry-Targets
Demonstrated significant improvementin six service segments; ranked #2 from overall rank of #7 in 2021

BENGALURU, India, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Infosys (NSE: INFY) (BSE: INFY) (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting, today announced that it has been ranked #2 in the Everest Group PEAK Matrix IT Service Provider of the Year 2022 Awards. Infosys was distinguished for maintaining excellence and consistency in service delivery while demonstrating significant improvement in digital, data and analytics, cloud and infrastructure, banking and financial services (BFSI), healthcare, life sciences, and enterprise platform segments.

For this sixth edition of the PEAK Matrix Service Providers of the Year Awards, Everest Group recognized the consistency of 141 service providers that were featured across 26 PEAK Matrix IT service evaluations published in 2021. As a consistent top performer across segments, Infosys' tangible jump to #2,from #7 in the 2021 overall ranking, attests to its ability to build a wide array of cloud, data, AI, and modernization capabilities powered by Infosys Cobalt for seamless and time-bound execution of enterprise transformation projects. Infosys has tailored its business strategy to evolve and effectively address the changing IT requirements and market demand. The awards additionally highlighted Infosys' ability to leverage its strong global presence, diverse innovation resources, and extensive global partner ecosystem to deliver segment-specific IT services in an efficient and agile manner.

Infosys was ranked as a Leader in the following PEAK Matrix assessments:

Advanced Analytics and Insights (AA&I) Services

Analytics and AI Services Specialists

Application and Digital Services in Banking: Global and Europe

Application Transformation Services

Cloud Services: Europe and North America

and Data and Analytics (D&A) Services

Enterprise Blockchain Services

Enterprise Quality Assurance Services

Finastra IT Services

Healthcare Analytics Services

Insurance Platform IT Services

Intelligent Automation in Healthcare Solutions

Internet of Things (IoT) Supply Chain Solutions

IT Managed Security Services (MSS)

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Services

Network Transformation and Managed Services

Platform IT services in BFS

SAP S/4HANA Services

Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) services

Temenos IT Services

Veeva Services

Chirajeet Sengupta, Partner at Everest Group, said, "Service Provider of The Year awards bring together service provider performances across our enterprise IT services coverage. Infosys' performance in this year's Service Provider of the Year awards is a function of both a strong performance and impressive year-on-year momentum improvement in the PEAK Matrix evaluations we conducted in 2021."

Ravi Kumar S, President, Infosys, said, "Our ranking, along with the recognition as a star performer by Everest Group strengthens our commitment to transform the IT services landscape by leveraging our unique solutions, global innovation hubs, and a creative pool of talent to address the new cohort of business decision-makers across a wide scale of industry verticals. This recognition is also a testament to our continued investments in the Infosys Cobalt suite of cloud offerings to maximize business value for our clients through extensive IT service capabilities. With the desire to go the extra mile on quality and professionalism, we will continue to provide insights and options for contracting top-notch, future-ready IT services for our clients globally across industry segments at competitive pricing."

A customized version of the Everest Group PEAK Matrix IT Service Provider of the Year, 2022 report can be accessed here: https://www2.everestgrp.com/reportaction/EGR-2022-0-SPR-4989/Toc

About Infosys:

Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. We enable clients in more than 50 countries to navigate their digital transformation. With over four decades of experience in managing the systems and workings of global enterprises, we expertly steer our clients through their digital journey. We do it by enabling the enterprise with an AI-powered core that helps prioritize the execution of change. We also empower the business with agile digital at scale to deliver unprecedented levels of performance and customer delight. Our always-on learning agenda drives their continuous improvement through building and transferring digital skills, expertise, and ideas from our innovation ecosystem.

Visit www.infosys.com to see how Infosys (NSE, BSE, NYSE: INFY) can help your enterprise navigate your next.

Safe Harbor

Certain statements in this release concerning our future growth prospects, financial expectations and plans for navigating the COVID-19 impact on our employees, clients and stakeholders are forward-looking statements intended to qualify for the 'safe harbor' under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding COVID-19 and the effects of government and other measures seeking to contain its spread, risks related to an economic downturn or recession in India, the United States and other countries around the world, changes in political, business, and economic conditions, fluctuations in earnings, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, our ability to manage growth, intense competition in IT services including those factors which may affect our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, industry segment concentration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks or system failures, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which Infosys has made strategic investments, withdrawal or expiration of governmental fiscal incentives, political instability and regional conflicts, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our industry and the outcome of pending litigation and government investigation. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our United States Securities and Exchange Commission filings including our Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2021. These filings are available at www.sec.gov. Infosys may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that may be made from time to time by or on behalf of the Company unless it is required by law.

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LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Homebuilder Redrow Plc. (RDW.L) Wednesday said it has signed the U.K. Government's proposed building safety pledge regarding the remediation of life critical fire safety issues on high rise buildings.



With the pledge, the company will be remediating all the buildings in which it was involved, whether or not it constructed them, going back 30 years.



For this purpose, the company expects to record an exceptional provision of 164 million pounds in fiscal 2022. This is in addition to the existing provision for fire safety in high rise buildings of 36 million pounds.



The company said it previously had urged housebuilding industry to play its part in resolving the issue of legacy fire safety in such buildings and that the financial burden should not be borne by leaseholders.



Rt Hon Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations, in January announced his intention to approach developers to fund the remediation of life critical fire safety issues on buildings over 11m with which they had any involvement in the development, going back 30 years.



The Home Builders Federation and Redrow, along with many others in the industry, have been engaged with Government with regard to this matter.



The Government has now sent the proposed voluntary pledge to all individual developers.



The pledge is in addition to the Residential Property Developer Tax of 4 percent of pre-tax profit which came in to effect on April 1, 2022.



In London, Redrow shares were trading at 513.67 pence, down 2.16 percent.







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STOCKHOLM, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Zinzino, the global health and wellness brand from Scandinavia, has acquired the Swiss companies Enhanzz Global AG and Enhanzz IP AG, including their skincare brand HANZZ+HEIDII and multifunctional nutrition label YU. This is a strategic and important step in Zinzino's growth plans, with a focus on enhancing personal health and wellness on a global level with cutting-edge biotechnology and a groundbreaking product portfolio distributed through direct sales.

Enhanzz is an innovative direct sales company from Switzerland specializing in exclusive, natural and vegan skincare products. The trademarked HANZZ+HEIDII range is based on biotechnology using plant stem cells from Edelweiss and snow algae. The brand portfolio also features YU; a series of all-natural, multifunctional food supplements intended to support a healthy, happy and active lifestyle.

A visionary mindset, tech first perspective and a strong position to benefit from current trends will shape the foundation of the acquisition of Enhanzz and the brand HANZZ+HEIDII. Since acquiring VMA Life in 2020, Zinzino has been looking for more powerful investments to maintain its sustainable, profitable growth, strengthen its distribution power, access new markets and leverage the product portfolio within new consumer areas. The acquisition of Enhanzz creates obvious synergies between both product lines and distribution organizations. Enhanzz operates within a booming market within natural skincare based on the proven fundamentals of science and nature. The products will very well complement as well as expand Zinzino's all-natural product portfolio.

- Individual consultations and customized solutions are the future, and not only within the health and wellness space, says Dag Bergheim Pettersen, CEO at Zinzino. Together we have more than 100 years of combined industry experience and will spearhead the modern, personalized shopping experience through direct sales.

- We've been wanting to increase our skincare offer for a long time and team up with people who share our empowering, customer-centric approach and ambition to create a holistic product experience in our global direct selling community, says Dag Bergheim Pettersen. I'm thrilled to reveal that that we've finally found our perfect match. Enhanzz promotes an inclusive, happiness driven social culture serving a common cause that resonates extremely well with our overall purpose to inspire change in life and bring the world back into balance.

Zinzino acquires the company Enhanzz IP AG including IP rights to its brands HANZZ + HEIDII and YU. Enhanzz Global AG with its distributor organization and merchandise on hand are also part of the acquisition. The business, which reported sales of approximately EUR 3 million in the previous year, is expected to create strong growth through the synergies that arise in the shared networks. The gross margins in the business are good and great profitability is expected from utilizing ZInzino's existing technical platform and organization.

Zinzino will pay a fixed purchase price of EUR 1 million upon entry, divided into 75% cash and 25% newly issued Zinzino shares. There are also additional conditional purchase prices based on the sales development generated by the acquired distributor organization in the period 2022-2027. The total additional purchase consideration is estimated to amount to EUR 2.5 million, but may, in case of a maximum outcome, amount to EUR 6.5 million which shall be 100% settled with newly issued Zinzino shares. The cash part of the purchase price is financed with own cash.

For more information:

Dag Bergheim Pettersen CEO Zinzino +47 (0) 932 25 700, zinzino.com

Fredrik Nielsen CFO Zinzino +46 707 900 174, fredrik.nielsen@zinzino.com

Pictures for publication free of charge:

marketing@zinzino.com



Certified Adviser: Erik Penser Bank Aktiebolag, +46 (0) 8 463 83 00, email: certifiedadviser@penser.se

Zinzino AB (publ) is obliged to publish this information in compliance with current EU regulations governing market abuse. The information was provided by the contact person mentioned above for publication at 09:30 the 6th of April, 2022.

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LONDON, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Hive Learning -- the peer learning platform specialising in delivering culture change at scale -- have progressed in the Core Challenger zones of both the 2022 Fosway 9-Grid for Learning Systems and the 2022 Fosway 9-Grid for Digital Learning, following another record year of growth, learner-driven product development, and customer advocacy.

Fosway Group - Europe's #1 HR industry analyst - describes vendors in the Core Challenger Zone as "mid performing solutions with a strong core suite of solutions capability, strong customer advocacy and good performance in enterprise customers".

The Fosway 9-Grid is a multi-dimensional model used to understand the position of vendors in the UK and European markets based on their performance, potential, market presence, total cost of ownership and future trajectories.

The Fosway 9-Grid for Learning Systems assesses a solution's core technical capability, while the Fosway 9-Grid for Digital Learning assess the strength of their platform, content, and services. Hive Learning's position in both grids recognises an ever-growing set of capabilities in all areas.

Hive Learning is also identified as a specialist in the Collaborative category for the third year in a row, as they continue to deepen expertise in the science of peer learning to accelerate the speed that culture change can move through an organisation. In 2021, Hive Learning developed their own

Major milestones for Hive Learning over the past year include:

Adding an additional 14 languages including Russian, Mandarin, and Spanish to its capability set for its award-winning Inclusion Works programme suite which is now available in six editions; recent builds include versions for Senior Leaders, Frontline Workers, and or Global Audience

Achieving record customer advocacy in picking up multiple awards, notably 'Best use of social and collaborative technologies' with Legal & General at the 2021 Learning Technologies Awards, Learning Platform of the Year with Babcock at the Learning Awards, and Best Advance in DEI Innovative with Sun Life at the Brandon Hall Excellence in Technology Awards

Signing a record number of new customers including Regeneron Inc and Chivas Brothers

Expanding its campaign management capability making it easier than ever for enterprise customers to deploy strategic learning programmes programmatically and at scale

Launching new features that make it easier than ever for learners to embed healthy habits you can measure, including a new tool for scheduling and prompting reminders to complete actions or behaviours

Julia Tierney, CEO at Hive Learning, said of the placement:

"I always find Fosway's analysis of the learning systems market valuable and many of the trends they outline in this year's Fosway 9-Grid mirror what we are seeing across the market. As a business, we are very impact-led and customer-centric, and pride ourselves on putting the learner experience first.

"We have been thinking hard over the past year about what creates a powerful learning experience and both our feature releases and product roadmap have focused on making it easier than ever for our overwhelmed workforces to put new habits into practice (in a way we can measure), easily access learning from wherever they spend their day (within the Microsoft Suite), and find easy ways to collaborate with their peers on strategic learning programmes now we're no longer face-to-face. We look forward to sharing some exciting product releases with you all over the course of the next year."

"Hive Learning's peer learning platform and commitment to enabling organisations to create lasting change around topics such as diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging, as well as leadership, are real differentiators," said David Wilson, CEO, Fosway Group. "There position as Core Challenger demonstrates a wider potential to empower transformation for individuals, teams or entire organisations through purposeful and actionable peer learning."
The startup and Israel's power corporation recently signed a technological collaboration agreement, and PrismaPower, which alerts to a range of faults on the power transmission system, will be implemented in Israel Electric Corporation's grid.

TEL AVIV, Israel, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- This morning, Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) announced a strategic investment in Prisma Photonics six months after the companies' first-of-a-kind collaboration in Israel. Through this collaboration, the national power transmission grid will be monitored by Prisma Photonics, using its optical fiber sensing technology. By leveraging IEC's optical fiber network, PrismaPower monitors 100 km of grid for electrical faults, physical damage to power towers and transmission lines, and extreme weather conditions. The system tracks faults and events right down to the power tower closest to the source of the problem.

Prisma Photonics is an Israeli startup whose proprietary solutions monitor critical infrastructures without installing additional sensors. Instead, its solutions use the optical fibers network deployed alongside those infrastructures, using fibers as a monitoring tool to alert for any problems, damages, or any abnormal behavior from the regular operation of the infrastructure, whether in power transmission lines, leaks in oil and gas pipeline, breaks in subsea cables, or any other issue in infrastructure with an optical fiber running along with it.

"IEC seeks to position itself among the most advanced power operators in the world through the continuous adoption of advanced technologies that help us meet the larger missions ahead," said Ofer Bloch, IEC's CEO,

"Prisma Photonics offers a novel, field-proven paradigm that transforms everything we have known about critical infrastructure monitoring. Our investment in Prisma Photonics is another step in IEC's immersion in innovation and high technology. In addition, the collaboration with an Israeli company adds further to our pride in this deal."

"Having your strategic customer as your strategic partner is the strongest vote of confidence a company can hope for," added Dr. Eran Inbar, Prisma Photonics' CEO. "As an innovative corporation, IEC started collaborating with us six months ago. The current investment supports its commitment to advancing Israel's power supply industry through innovation. To date, our system has transformed the optical fiber infrastructure deployed on IEC's high-voltage grids into a sequence of extremely sensitive sensors that identify issues and track their precise location down to the nearest power tower level in real-time and with no need for placing additional sensors along the transmission lines."

The Prisma Photonics system is based on a groundbreaking technology anchored in several patents. Having won several technological contests worldwide, infrastructure operators have already used its technology globally. PrismaPower is the world's first fiber optics based electrical overhead powerline monitoring solution. Its deployment by IEC reflects a significant upgrade of the relationship between the companies and the importance that IEC attached to advancing novel technologies that ensure the safety and integrity of the transmission system side by side with environmental accountability.

As part of the collaboration with IEC, the Prisma Photonics system was deployed on IEC's transmission grid. It identifies safety incidents such as compromising or climbing power towers, electrical issues, short circuits, and partial electric discharges. It also alerts for unusual weather events such as strong winds, lightning hits near the lines, etc. In addition, the electro-optical fiber monitoring further protects against physical cyber-hacking of the communication infrastructure.

About Prisma Photonics

Prisma Photonics helps keep the most critical large-scale infrastructure up & running. Introducing a quantum leap in utility monitoring for smarter, safer, and more efficient operations in power, oil&gas, subsea, rail, and more. We enable our customers to take responsibility for their assets with real-time actionable insights. Featuring an innovative pay-as-you-grow model, we combine pioneering Hyper-Scan Fiber Sensing technology with machine learning responding to safety, efficiency, and security scenarios.

Founded in 2017 by an expert team with a proven track record of building and scaling companies in the lasers and deep-tech domain - Prisma Photonics enables response-ability at scale.

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Eficode earns the Atlassian Partner award now for the eight time

HELSINKI, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Atlassian today named Eficode, the company creating the future of software development in Europe, the Atlassian Partner of the Year 2021: Services, EMEA.

In 2021, Eficode continued to grow Atlassian services' adoption, both in managed services, and through professional services. In 2021, customers running Atlassian Cloud were able to use Eficode ROOT to integrate with applications from other vendors. Eficode also productized four most popular consulting services: ITSM launch package, Workshop assessment, Cloud assessment and Cloud migration.

"Atlassian would like to congratulate this year's Partner of the Year award recipients," said Ko Mistry, Atlassian's Head of Global Channels. "Our partners go above and beyond for our customers and play an instrumental role in our customers' success. We are excited to spotlight some of our top partners who provide cutting edge solutions and Atlassian services to our Customers."

Eficode is an Atlassian Platinum Partner in all Scandinavian countries, in Finland, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, and a Silver partner in Germany. Today Eficode has over 750 Atlassian customers, and Atlassian solutions are a prominent part of Eficode ROOT, a DevOps platform as a managed service.

Atlassian was a main partner in The DEVOPS Conference organized by Eficode, reaching over 10,000 registered individuals. As an Atlassian Training Partner we offer customers training for Insight, a Jira-native asset management solution. We have also developed our training portfolio with two new courses for Advanced Roadmaps and Jira Align.

Therese Lindepil, Head of Atlassian consultants at Eficode says: "The Atlassian Partner of the Year award is exciting news - time after time. We have developed our consulting services, and we view this Services award as a proof for our innovative and unique consulting competences. We continue to grow our new Atlassian services, training and offers. I want to thank our fantastic teams, partners and customers for this outstanding achievement - again."

Recently, Eficode held a webinar regarding the transition of Atlassian services to the cloud.

CONTACT:

Lauri Palokangas, Chief Marketing Officer, Eficode. lauri.palokangas@eficode.com, +358 50 486 4918

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The first virtual sommelier is now available online - Combivino is the smart app that pairs 2,000 recipes to hundreds of wine labels and over 70 types of craft beers.

ROME, ITALY / ACCESSWIRE / April 6, 2002 / Combivino, the leading app that enables the pairing of wine and beer with food, is now available in English and all over the world.

Combivino is the first app that pairs wine and craft beers with food simultaneously via smart matching: there are almost 2,000 regional and international recipes, over 900 types of wine and 76 beer styles. The application is free to download from Google Play and the App Store and enables everyone to discover the basics of wine tasting.

A success that stems from Italy and numbers over 1 million interactions including clicks and internal searches with an increasing number of downloads on the Italian market alone. A boom of downloads is expected for the English version.

The global wine and beer market reaches astonishing figures. According to Statista, the wine segment is set to reach $366 billion in 2022 while that of beer will reach $643 billion, with an estimated growth ratio of around 7% for the next few years.

Combivino is a 'Virtual Sommelier' ideal for consulting the wine list in a restaurant or choosing the right bottle in the wine shop or supermarket. But the app is also a great opportunity to 'flaunt' your knowledge with business partners, partner or friends. The app is also useful for sector experts to learn more about pairings with little known wines and beers in their multiple nuances and geographical indications.

Federica Zevi explains: "our wine classification system is based on the body and prevailing organoleptic note. The body goes hand in hand with the texture of the food, while the organoleptic note matches the tactile and aromatic characteristics. Combivino also has two special functions exclusive to our pairing system: the Multi-course pairing, which enables the finding of pairings suitable for multiple courses, and the Tasting option, which recommends wines according to the correct tasting order based on intensity and persistence."

The Italian start-up set up the project three years ago thanks to a team of sommeliers and technology experts made up of Alessio Papasergio, founder of the project, Federica Zevi, co-founder and pairing manager for food and wine, and Salvatore Cosenza, professor and expert craft beer taster. The aim was to complete a map of the leading global wine-producing regions and pair hundreds of grape varieties and appellations with international dishes.

Since the app was first presented in Italy, Combivino has registered tens of thousands of searches every month, with peaks of consultations and downloads at lunchtime and at dinner depending on the time zones of the various nations and mainly at weekends and holiday periods. Combivino was in fact developed to be easily used when faced with a restaurant wine list or the choice of the right bottle to open at home.

And these figures are destined to grow thanks to the continuous additions of pairings and content and thanks to attending international events and the kind collaboration of foreign sales offices and local promotional bodies. The challenge is even more ambitious with the international launch, as Combivino must supply pairing options useful for all kinds of users and cuisines as well as representing lesser-known production areas.

Alessio Papasergio, founder of Combivino: "The outstanding results of the project, which are growing constantly, depend on our team's culture and passion for good food and good wine. Now the objective is to promote Combivino all over the world involving companies, the media and sector organizations. In the meantime, I can say we are working on lots of related projects. Mixology is getting more and more popular and, after wine and beer, we are thinking about adding pairings with cocktails and spirits. We have also been working for months on a prototype of Virtual Sommelier for the big retail chain, which is based on our classification and pairing system. How would the purchase experience in supermarkets improve if we could suggest the pairing of the right bottle with the products in the trolley? As happened with Combivino, it is a service that is currently not available on the market."

About Combivino

Combivino is an app developed by Portale Chef S.r.l., an Italian company experienced in consultancies for the restaurant industry, and which selects food & beverage products for restaurants, e-commerce sites and purchasing groups.

Media Contact

Katia Giorgi

k.giorgi@combivino.com

+39 349 494 1392

SOURCE: Portale Chef S.r.l.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/696313/New-App-Combivino-Pairs-over-900-Types-of-Wine-and-76-Styles-of-Beer-with-2000-Recipes-English-Version-Launched-Worldwide
Cardior Pharmaceuticals, a clinical-stage biotech company developing non-coding RNA (ncRNA)-based therapeutics for patients with cardiac diseases, today announced the appointment of Dr. Russell Greig, as independent Chairman of its Board of Directors. Dr. Greig brings more than 35 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry from GlaxoSmithKline, with knowledge and expertise in research and development, strategic transactions and commercial operations as well as a significant track record as the leader of SR One, GlaxoSmithKline's corporate venture capital fund. He joins Cardior as it prepares to enter mid-stage clinical development and further advance its broad pipeline of ncRNA therapeutics for cardiac diseases. Dr. Markus Hosang, General Partner and Managing Director at BioMedPartners, will step down from his current position as Chairman but will remain on the Board as its Vice Chairman.

"Gaining the leadership for our Board from an executive of Russell's extensive experience and trans-Atlantic network is an important milestone in our development into a more mature organization. His perspective from his career at GlaxoSmithKline and as a corporate investor in innovative biotech companies as well as his wealth of transactional leadership makes him an inspired addition. His commitment to creating value for both shareholders and patients aligns with our vision for delivering on Cardior's potential," said Dr. Claudia Ulbrich, CEO of Cardior. "And I would also like to thank Markus for his dedication and guidance as Chair during the last three years, and we appreciate that he will remain on Cardior's Board as its Vice Chairman."

Dr. Russell Greig added: "It is exciting to join Cardior at this particular time as the company continues to establish itself as a global leader in ncRNA therapeutics for the treatment of cardiac diseases, which remains one of the leading causes of death worldwide. The transformative potential of their technology is immense and I am happy to be closely working with the Board and the management team to support their growth trajectory."

"Cardior's therapeutic approach is based on their extensive scientific understanding of ncRNAs which allows them to tackle the roots of heart failure. The company has made tremendous progress in a short amount of time and I am delighted to pass on the baton and welcome Russell as the new Chair," said Dr. Markus Hosang, General Partner and Managing Director at BioMedPartners and previous Chairman of Cardior's Board

Dr. Russell G. Greig graduated from the University of Manchester, UK with a BSc and PhD in Biochemistry and built a substantial career at GlaxoSmithKline for three decades, most recently as President of SR One, GlaxoSmithKline's corporate venture group. Prior to joining SR One, he served as President of GlaxoSmithKline's Pharmaceuticals International from 2003 to 2008 and Senior Vice President of worldwide development from 2000-2003, as well as on the GlaxoSmithKline corporate executive team. Over the last decade, Dr. Greig has served as Chairman and board member for a range of innovative biopharmaceutical companies in the US and in Europe including overseeing a number of successful exits.

About Cardior

Cardior Pharmaceuticals is a leading clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company pioneering the discovery and development of RNA-based therapeutics designed to prevent, repair and reverse diseases of the heart. Cardior's therapeutic approach uses distinctive non-coding RNAs as an innovative platform for addressing the root causes of cardiac dysfunctions. The company aspires to bring transformative therapeutics and diagnostics to patients and thereby make a lasting impact on the treatment of cardiac diseases worldwide.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220406005055/en/

Contacts:

Contact for Cardior

Dr. Claudia Ulbrich Barbara Gaertner-Rupprecht

Cardior Pharmaceuticals GmbH

Tel: +49 511 33 85 99 30



Media Inquiries

Trophic Communications

Eva Mulder or Charlotte Spitz

Phone: +49 (0) 171 35 12 733

cardior@trophic.eu
BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) -- China's Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) on Wednesday announced that a special campaign has been launched to strengthen judicial assistance to women in need, including those who are victims of abduction and human trafficking.

Jointly initiated by the SPP and the All-China Women's Federation, the campaign began in March and will run until the end of this year.

The initiative covers women who are victims of crimes such as domestic violence, sexual assault, abduction and trafficking, as well as those who are disabled or seriously ill.

Women who bear the responsibility of raising children or supporting the elderly but whose family's breadwinner has died or lost their ability to work due to criminal conduct are also eligible for assistance.

In addition, elderly women who have no one to support them can also receive assistance under this campaign.

The Chinese government is weaving an even stronger protection net for women and children in the aftermath of an alleged case of abuse against a woman in east China that recently garnered widespread attention.

Other stringent measures include a 10-month nationwide operation, starting from March 1, to crack down on the abduction and trafficking of women and children to better protect these groups. 
Consumer insights providers partner with leading French TV channel and radio station, M6 and RTL, in advance of Presidential and Legislative elections

Toluna, the leading consumer insights provider and parent company of Harris Interactive and KuRunData, today announced a joint initiative with Harris Interactive in service of the French Presidential and Legislative elections.

The companies are conducting weekly polling to measure French citizens on their preferred candidates, voting intention, and out-of-polling-station results. Harris Interactive has historically led this polling effort. However, this year, Harris Interactive is officially partnering with its sister company, Toluna, to cover the events. This year's efforts include over 50 pre-election surveys with over 100,000 people interviewed, as well as 5,000 interviews on election day.

Harris Interactive and Toluna will also partner with leading French TV channel and radio station, M6 and RTL, throughout their coverage of the French elections. Harris Interactive and Toluna experts will first provide estimates of their weekly polling for the first and second rounds of the Presidential election, held Sunday, April 10, 2022, and Sunday, April 24, 2022.

The coverage will be live on M6 and RTL and will also be shared on Toluna and Harris Interactive social media networks from 12:00 PM CEST each election day and continuing throughout the day. The timeline will be as follows:

12:00 PM: Initial analysis of voter turnout

5:00 PM: Estimates of voter turnout

8:00 PM: Initial estimate of Presidential election results

8:30 PM onwards: Exclusive insights from "Voting Day" survey fielded by Harris Interactive and Toluna to understand voter motivations and abstentions

Later in the evening: Refined results in real time

Following the Presidential election, Harris Interactive and Toluna will again work with M6 and RTL to deliver weekly polling for the French Legislative elections on June 12, 2022 and June 19, 2022, providing exclusive analysis and estimations of the French National Assembly's composition.

The coverage will again feature live on M6 and RTL, available online throughout the evening, as well as on multiple social media channels, including:

Harris Interactive: harris-interactive.fr @HarrisInt_FR

harris-interactive.fr @HarrisInt_FR Toluna: tolunacorporate.com @TolunaCorporate

tolunacorporate.com @TolunaCorporate M6: groupem6.fr/ @M6, @M6Info, @M6Pro

groupem6.fr/ @M6, @M6Info, @M6Pro RTL: rtl.fr @RTLFrance

Toluna CEO Frederic-Charles Petit, said: "We are thrilled to bring Toluna and Harris Interactive together to deliver our on-demand, real-time insights as part of this critical initiative in France's political calendar. This is a great honor, and we look forward to delivering the accurate data the public desires."

"Citizens today are bombarded with massive amounts of information during the election cycle, and it is essential that they have access to quality data as they evaluate candidates and results. For more than 20 years, Harris Interactive has been proud to deliver some of the most accurate measures of French election results, and we look forward to continuing this tradition in partnership with Toluna," commented Jean-Daniel Levy, Senior Vice President of Harris Interactive France and Director of Politics and Opinion Department.

About Toluna

Toluna delivers real-time consumer insights at the speed of the on-demand economy. Harris Interactive simplifies complex decisions with critical consumer intelligence. By fusing Harris's sector expertise and award-winning research with Toluna's innovative tools and technology, we strive to push market research toward a better tomorrow.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220406005266/en/

Contacts:

Media Contact

Articulate Communications for Toluna

Audra Tiner

toluna@articulatecomms.com
FRAUENFELD, Switzerland, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The solid-state battery from Swiss Clean Battery AG is extremely durable, non-combustible and at least 50% better in terms of environmental performance than conventional lithium-ion batteries.

Solid-state batteries are regarded as the successor technology to conventional lithium-ion batteries. Intensive research is being carried out worldwide - and Switzerland is now the first country to go into series production with this technology.

Rapidly rising energy costs, the energy turnaround and the security of supply of countries can only be solved via renewable energies. And efficient electricity storage systems are a key prerequisite for this.

With production scaling from 1.2 GWh to 7.6 GWH, SCB AG will serve both the Swiss domestic and international markets with sustainable battery storage from 2024.

SCB AG has learned from the Corona crisis, the chip crisis and the Ukraine crisis and is consistently implementing the lessons learned: All machines as well as chemicals are sourced regionally from Switzerland and Germany. Short distances, minimized logistics costs and security of supply are the primacy of our actions.

The newly founded production company SCB AG from Switzerland is revolutionizing the global battery market with its serially produced solid-state battery. Swiss Clean Battery AG, headquartered in Frauenfeld, is convinced that it will leave the international competition behind with its environmentally friendly, safe and extremely powerful product.

The energy transition to renewable energies requires electricity storage, especially in view of the rapidly increasing electricity consumption and the exploding energy costs. However, conventional battery technologies create serious resource and waste problems. SCB AG is treading a new path with the production of a new and sustainable basic technology, the "green solid-state battery".

Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionized the battery world. But now that their production and use are soaring to astronomical heights, the dark side of this development is becoming apparent: Raw materials are needed whose long-term availability is not guaranteed and some of which are extracted under inhumane conditions. There are safety risks, as the batteries can lead to fires and explosions that are difficult to extinguish. And, above all, there will be a huge mountain of waste in the near future. This is because the lifespan of conventional lithium-ion batteries is very limited. They reach the end of their life after a few thousand charging cycles at the latest.

The solid-state battery produced by SCB lasts almost indefinitely and has a 50% better environmental balance than conventional lithium-ion batteries. Furthermore, it is incombustible and therefore safe to use, contains no critical raw materials such as cobalt, and is resistant to deep discharge and fast charging.

Solid-state batteries have been regarded for years as a promising successor technology to conventional lithium-ion batteries. Accordingly, they are the subject of research in numerous laboratories around the world. So far, however, it has not been possible to develop high-performance batteries with solid ion conductors:

A central technical problem is to bring the fixed ion conductor in the battery cells into a stable connection with the electrodes. Many research projects are based on a "modular design" in which individual components are combined outside the cell and then inserted into the housing. This leads to problems with the transfer of ions at the material boundaries between the electrodes and the fixed ion conductor. After more than 30 years of basic research, it has been possible to solve this problem: In this new approach to solving the problem, the fixed ion conductor is formed in the battery cell itself, similar to a multicomponent adhesive. This overcomes the transition problems compared to modular construction.

Swiss Clean Battery AG was founded in February 2022 in Frauenfeld in the canton of Thurgau:

The CEO is Mr. Roland Jung, the CFO Mr. Peter Koch and the COO Dr. Thomas Lutzenrath. He is also the COO of High Performance Battery AG, the licensing technology company. The production facility will be scaled from 1.2 GWH to 7.6 GWH:

In the first production phase of 1.2 GWH, SCB AG is planning sales of CHF 318 million. For this, 246 million CHF investment volume in the machinery is planned. In this first stage, SCB AG employs 181 people. A production area of 20,000 m2 will be built in order to manufacture 7.2 million battery cells per year.

The enterprise value in this first stage is CHF 1.3 billion, with a conservative multiple of 18. In addition to debt financing of the production facility, an initial public offering (IPO) is targeted for October 2022 on the Zurich Stock Exchange.

In the final phase, SCB AG is to produce 7.6 GWH, with an investment sum of CHF 775 million and a turnover of over CHF 2 billion. Approximately 100,000 m2 of production area will be built for this purpose. At this stage of expansion, SCB AG will produce nearly 48 million battery cells per year with 1061 employees. The company will then be worth CHF 8.6 billion.

Media contact:

Swiss Clean Battery AG

Bahnhofstrasse 56

CH-8500 Frauenfeld

+41(0)525114020

info@SwissCleanBattery.ch

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Nuclear AMRC Midlands prepares for a flurry of collaborative projects with UK industry

DERBY, England, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Arrival of a new research centre on Infinity Park Derby (IPD), projected to generate 71m over the first five years, will help future-proof industry supply chains.

The 15m, 46,728 sq. ft Nuclear AMRC Midlands facility, planned for completion by early 2023, next to Rolls-Royce, and within 20 minutes' drive of global manufacturers Toyota, Alstom and JCB, will enable companies of all sizes to adopt carbon neutral technologies for energy resilience planning.

In its' first five years, the Infinity Park facility is projected to involve at least 35 collaborative projects involving high value sectors such as aerospace, automotive and rail, with 100 companies set to benefit from a Fit For Nuclear supply chain development programme.

The Government-backed IPD partnership, including the University of Derby, Derby City Council, Wilson Bowden, Peveril Securities, Harpur Crewe Estate and Rolls-Royce, with over 9m from D2N2, will accelerate technological innovations using advancements in robotics, automation and artificial intelligence, in partnership with the UK's leading scientists.

With skills shortages cited as a barrier to industry seeking to build dynamic supply chains for the green industrial revolution, the University of Derby and Nuclear AMRC Midlands will support upskilling opportunities to facilitate industry-wide adoption.

Andrew Storer, CEO, Nuclear AMRC said: "The new Nuclear AMRC Midlands facility will play a vital role in helping manufacturers seize the opportunities and tackle the challenges of the national transition to net zero emissions. A new generation of nuclear power is at the heart of the UK's plans for a secure low-carbon energy mix, and we will work closely with companies of all sizes to help them join the supply chains for technologies such as small modular reactors, fusion power, and clean hydrogen generation."

Mark Bielby, of March Developments, development managers for IPD LLP said: "With energy prices at historic highs, industry faces increasing pressure to plan ahead. The government Levelling Up White Paper clearly stated the critical role decarbonisation will play in the future, and we are delighted to be able to deliver an advanced facility on Infinity Park for Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, which is a beacon of industry excellence."

Media Contact

Clare Pabla

Senior PR

pressoffice@infinityparkderby.co.uk

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

https://infinityparkderby.co.uk/

https://namrc.co.uk/

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1780739/Infinity_Park_Derby.jpg
Top universities in 51 disciplines revealed

LONDON, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- QS Quacquarelli Symonds - the international higher education think-tank - released the twelfth edition of the QS World University Rankings by Subject : an independent comparative analysis of the performance of 15,200 individual university programs?taken by students at?1543 universities in?88 locations across the world,?across 51 academic disciplines.

They are part of the annual QS World University Rankings portfolio, which was consulted over 147 million times in 2021 on TopUniversities.com and covered 96,000 times by media and institutions.

QS World University Rankings by Subject 2022

Number of top-10 programs United States 239 United Kingdom 131 Switzerland 31 Singapore 23 Canada 19 The Netherlands 15 Australia 13 Hong Kong S.A.R. 7 France 6 Italy 6 China (Mainland) 4

Global Highlights

US institutions lead in 28 of the 51 subjects ranked. Harvard University and MIT remain the strongest-performing institutions, ranking number one in twelve subjects.

 Fifteen subject tables are topped by a British university, with the University of Oxford leading in six.

 ETH Zurich is continental Europe's top university, achieving number-one spots in three subjects. Moreover, based on its share of top-10 ranks, Switzerland is the world's third-best higher education sector.

Australiais the fourth most represented country for the number of entries

China(Mainland) ranks fifth globally for the number of programs (100), achieving a top-50 rank.

 No university has a larger number of top-50 than Canada's University of Toronto (46).

 The National University of Singapore - Asia's best-performing university - is the world's best for Petroleum Engineering. NUS ranks among the top-10 in sixteen disciplines.

 Japanese higher education is still in relative decline after decades of underfunding for research and PhD students.

 Universidad de Chile achievesLatin America'shighest rank, 8th globally in Engineering - Mineral & Mining, followed by UNAM (Mexico) 13th in Modern Languages and Universidade de Sao Paulo (USP) 15th in Dentistry.

 The University of Cape Town remains Africa's most competitive institution, placing 9th globally in Development Studies.

 King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, 6th globally for Petroleum Engineering, achieves the Arab region's highest rank.

Ben Sowter, QS Research Director, said: "Observing performance trends across over 15,000 university departments enables us to see which factors influence success. First, an international outlook - both in terms of faculty body and research relationships - correlates strongly with improved performance. Second, rising universities received targeted investment from governments for over a decade. Third, strengthening relationships with industry correlates with better employment, research, and innovation outcomes."

Methodology

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VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Calibre Mining Corp. (TSX: CXB; OTCQX: CXBMF) ("Calibre" or the "Company") is pleased to announce operating results for the three months ended March 31, 2022 (all amounts in United States dollars).



Q1 2022 Highlights

Successful completion of the acquisition of Fiore Gold on January 12, 2022 creating a diversified, Americas focused, growing, mid-tier gold producer;

Consolidated gold production of 51,900 ounces , and gold sales of 52,290 ounces ; Nicaragua gold production of 42,897 ounces: 401,215 tonnes milled, 3.79 g/t, 90.1% recovery; Nevada gold production of 9,003 ounces: 15,064 ounces placed, 1,006,540 tonnes at 0.48 g/t 1 ;

, and gold sales of ; Nicaragua Mineral Reserves increased to 1,013,000 ounces of gold, at a record grade of 4.62 g/t gold 2 ;

; Nicaragua Indicated Mineral Resources increased to 1,806,000 ounces of gold 2 ;

; Drill results from the Pan Mine in Nevada demonstrate resource expansion and higher-grade potential;

Commenced a 170,000 metre drill program across our assets including a 85,000 metre discovery and emerging resource program in Nicaragua and a 85,000 metre resource growth and conversion program in Nevada;

Calibre launched its multi-year sustainability strategy.



Darren Hall, President & Chief Executive Officer of Calibre, stated: "The integration of our Nevada assets continues Calibre's journey of creating shareholder value as the Company solidifies its position as a diversified, Americas focused, growing, mid-tier gold producer. I am very pleased with the teams first quarter performance, delivering a record 51,900 ounces, positioning the company well to deliver full year consolidated guidance of 220,000 - 235,000 ounces. Q1 results included expected lower production from Pan resulting from fewer ounces placed in Q4 2021 and the shortened quarter due to the January 12, 2022 transaction closing date."

"Additionally, we commenced leveraging the commercial strength of the consolidated entity with the successful negotiation of new Nevada drilling contracts which resulted in securing rigs for the full years program at approximately 20% favorable unit rates."

"We are well positioned to continue self-funding growth, exploration and mine development and with multi-rig exploration drill programs across each of our assets we remain committed to reinvesting to expand resources, make new discoveries and grow production organically."

Operating Overview

Calibre completed the acquisition of Fiore Gold on January 12, 2022, establishing the company as a multi-asset, multi-jurisdictional gold producer. Our Q1 production of 51,900 ounces was higher than expectation, positioning the company well to meet full year gold production guidance of 220,000 - 235,000 ounces. Nicaraguan gold production is forecasted to increase quarter over quarter and is expected to be approximately 20% higher in the second half of the year due to increased grades and mine sequencing. As a result, the Company expects lower Total Cash Costs3 and All-in Sustaining Costs ("AISC"3) during the second half of the year.

The Company will continue to optimize its consolidated mine and process plans to maximize value from our integrated asset base.

Q1 2022 Financial Results and Conference Call Details

First-quarter financial results will be released after market close on Tuesday, May 3, 2022, and management will be hosting a conference call to discuss the results and outlook in more detail.

Date: Wednesday, May 4, 2022 Time: 10:00 a.m. (EDT) Dial-in: +1 (866) 221-1882 or +1 (470) 495-9179 (International) Webcast Link: https://edge.media-server.com/mmc/p/pmkzndus (https://edge.media-server.com/mmc/p/pmkzndus) Conference ID: 1776837

The live webcast can be accessed here (https://edge.media-server.com/mmc/p/pmkzndus) or at www.calibremining.com (http://www.calibremining.com) under the Events and Media section under the Investors tab. The live audio webcast will be archived and made available for replay at www.calibremining.com (http://www.calibremining.com). Presentation slides that will accompany the conference call will be made available in the Investors section of the Calibre website under Presentations prior to the conference call.



Qualified Person

Darren Hall, MAusIMM, President and Chief Executive Officer of Calibre Mining Corp., is a "qualified person" as set out under NI 43-101 and has reviewed and approved the scientific and technical information in this press release.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

"Darren Hall"

Darren Hall

President and Chief Executive Officer

For further information, please contact:

Ryan King

Vice President, Corporate Development & IR

T: 604.628.1010

E: calibre@calibremining.com (mailto:calibre@calibremining.com)

W: www.calibremining.com (http://www.calibremining.com)

About Calibre Mining Corp.

Calibre is a Canadian-listed, Americas focused, growing mid-tier gold producer with a strong pipeline of development and exploration opportunities across Nevada and Washington in the USA, and Nicaragua. Calibre is focused on delivering sustainable value for shareholders, local communities and all stakeholders through responsible operations and a disciplined approach to growth. With a strong balance sheet, no debt, a proven management team, strong operating cash flow, accretive development projects and district-scale exploration opportunities Calibre will unlock significant value.

Notes

(1)Q1 2022 includes Nicaragua production plus 10 weeks of gold production from the Pan mine effective on the transaction closing date of January 12, 2022 (see Calibre News Release dated January 12, 2022).

(2)TECHNICAL REPORTS

Technical Report on the New La Libertad Complex dated March 31, 2022 and effective December 31, 2021 prepared by SLR Consulting (Canada) Ltd., in accordance with NI 43-101 as filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com (http://www.sedar.com) and available on the Company website at www.calibremining.com (http://www.calibremining.com)

Technical Report on El Limon Complex, Leon and Chinandego Departments, Nicaragua dated March 30, 2021 and effective December 31, 2020 prepared by SLR Consulting (Canada) Ltd., in accordance with NI 43-101 as filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com (http://www.sedar.com) and available on the Company website at www.calibremining.com (http://www.calibremining.com)

Annual Information Form ("AIF") for year ended December 31, 2021 as filed on Sedar at www.sedar.com (http://www.sedar.com) and available on the Company website at www.calibremining.com

(3)NON-IFRS FINANCIAL MEASURES

The Company believes that investors use certain non-IFRS measures as indicators to assess gold mining companies, specifically Total Cash Costs per Ounce and All-In Sustaining Costs per Ounce. In the gold mining industry, these are common performance measures but do not have any standardized meaning. The Company believes that, in addition to conventional measures prepared in accordance with IFRS, certain investors use this information to evaluate the Company's performance and ability to generate cash flow. Accordingly, it is intended to provide additional information and should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for measures of performance prepared in accordance with IFRS.



Total Cash Costs per Ounce of Gold : Total cash costs include mine site operating costs such as mining, processing, and local administrative costs (including stock-based compensation related to mine operations), royalties, production taxes, mine standby costs and current inventory write downs, if any. Production costs are exclusive of depreciation and depletion, reclamation, capital, and exploration costs. Total cash costs per gold ounce are net of by-product silver sales and are divided by gold ounces sold to arrive at a per ounce figure.

All-In Sustaining Costs per Ounce of Gold : A performance measure that reflects all of the expenditures that are required to produce an ounce of gold from current operations. While there is no standardized meaning of the measure across the industry, the Company's definition is derived from the AISC definition as set out by the World Gold Council in its guidance dated June 27, 2013 and November 16, 2018. The World Gold Council is a non-regulatory, non-profit organization established in 1987 whose members include global senior mining companies. The Company believes that this measure will be useful to external users in assessing operating performance and the ability to generate free cash flow from current operations. The Company defines AISC as the sum of total cash costs (per above), sustaining capital (capital required to maintain current operations at existing levels), capital lease repayments, corporate general and administrative expenses, exploration expenditures designed to increase resource confidence at producing mines, amortization of asset retirement costs and rehabilitation accretion related to current operations. AISC excludes capital expenditures for significant improvements at existing operations deemed to be expansionary in nature, exploration and evaluation related to resource growth, rehabilitation accretion and amortization not related to current operations, financing costs, debt repayments, and taxes. Total all-in sustaining costs are divided by gold ounces sold to arrive at a per ounce figure.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward Looking Information

This news release includes certain "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. All statements in this news release that address events or developments that we expect to occur in the future are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are identified by words such as "expect", "plan", "anticipate", "project", "target", "potential", "schedule", "forecast", "budget", "estimate", "intend" or "believe" and similar expressions or their negative connotations, or that events or conditions "will", "would", "may", "could", "should" or "might" occur. Forward-looking statements necessarily involve assumptions, risks, and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond Calibre's control. For a listing of risk factors applicable to the Company, please refer to Calibre's annual information form for the year ended December 31, 2021, available on www.sedar.com (http://www.sedar.com). This list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect Calibre's forward-looking statements.

Calibre's forward-looking statements are based on the applicable assumptions and factors management considers reasonable as of the date hereof, based on the information available to management at such time. Calibre does not assume any obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or management's beliefs, expectations or opinions should change other than as required by applicable securities laws. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, and actual results, performance or achievements could differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, these forward-looking statements. Accordingly, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements.
Financing accelerates company's global growth and development of its platform to enrich HCP messaging solutions on endemic and point-of-care networks for life sciences companies

LONDON, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Doceree Inc, the first global network of physician-only platforms for programmatic messaging, today announced the completion of $11 million Series A funding round led by Eight Roads Ventures, a global investment firm backed by Fidelity. F-Prime Capital and Alkemi Growth Capital also participated in the round.

Doceree will use the funds to scale its global operations, expand partnerships, augment its product portfolio and advance the platform's measurement and behavior lift capabilities to bring greater transparency to results. It will also help it embolden healthcare professional (HCP) communications for pharma and life sciences brands, agencies and health information technology platforms.

"It is critical for industry players like life sciences companies and HCP-only platforms to understand and react to the digital touchpoints and behaviors of HCPs for delivering messages they resonate with," saysHarshit Jain, M.D., Founder & Global CEO, Doceree. "Our identity resolution technology and tailored products for different markets that adhere to the country-specific regulations and guidelines make it easy for life sciences brands to engage with HCPs on digital mediums, while enabling publishers to improve engagement on their platforms with relevant medical information from pharmaceutical and life sciences brands."

Doceree's industry-first solutions, powered by proprietary identity-resolution technology, ESPYIAN, enable messaging and targeting of HCPs on endemic (sites physicians visit for knowledge, professional enhancement or to connect with their peer group) and point-of-care (platforms where physicians tend to their patients) platforms. The platform enhances engagement between life sciences companies and their target audience through its global publisher network in a fast-evolving digital pharma marketing ecosystem.

Founded in 2019 by Harshit, a former physician who transitioned into the healthcare marketing space, Doceree empowers life sciences brands and media agencies with solutions that seamlessly reach HCPs on professional HCP networks and within their digital workflow to achieve better patient health outcomes. The company has refined HCP communications through its programmatic messaging capabilities to help marketers with more efficient, effective and transparent messaging campaigns.

"Doceree is transforming the way digital interactions between pharmaceutical brands and prescribers are facilitated," says Ashish Venkataramani, Partner, Eight Roads Ventures. "Pharma marketers navigate significant complexity across point-of-care systems and health information systems. Doceree's technology platform seeks to disrupt the fragmented value chain for digital messaging to physicians, and will be at the forefront of this promising sector."

On the back of massive interest of pharma brands and publishers towards Doceree's custom-built product offerings within the programmatic pharma marketing space, the company expanded to key international locations, such as emerging markets in the UK & Europe, within two years of the platform's launch in the U.S. The sophistication of Doceree's platform capabilities has created enormous opportunities for marketers and publishers in these geographies as it transforms the way pharma brands communicate with HCPs globally on physician-only platforms. Currently, Doceree is working with eight of the top 10 global pharma brands and the company currently engages more than 1 million HCPs across the globe.

"Doceree has identified a largely overlooked white space in digital pharma marketing and is delivering innovative solutions to address some of the most critical challenges that pharma companies face today," saysCarl Byers, Partner, F-Prime Capital. "We were drawn to the company's vision and are looking forward to our partnership and continued support as they evolve into their next stage of growth."

Doceree's AI-powered solutions facilitate hyper-targeting of HCPs based on multiple triggers and at various touchpoints that enrich marketing initiatives digitally. The platform can precisely identify HCPs on professional platforms based on their behavior traits, diagnoses they carry out, prescriptions they write, and the procedures they perform to deliver relevant messaging from life sciences brands in a regulatory compliant manner.

Doceree Perform, the company's latest product, provides exceptional measurement proficiency for life sciences companies to evaluate campaign performances and to improve script lift with data-driven messages in the U.S. In India, the U.K. and the EU, ESPYIANTM enables marketers to target HCPs at a specialty level, allowing pharma brands to reach them at scale based on their area of expertise. The company is set to introduce behavioral lift measurement offerings globally.

"For pharma, life sciences companies and publishers, having access to data-driven, actionable insights to strategize and implement communication initiatives is critical to reaching HCPs," saysRahul Gupta, Board Member, Doceree. "Doceree has proven the ability to efficiently connect stakeholders and is well-positioned to serve the needs of the pharma industry."

"In a world that has embraced online channels for virtual care during the last two years, reaching HCPs within digital point-of-care and endemic networks is having a resounding impact on communications for life sciences market," says Alka Goel, Founder, Alkemi Growth Captial. "Doceree's solutions are set to fuel adoption of programmatic messaging in the pharma marketing space."

About Doceree

Doceree is the first global network of HCP-only platforms for programmatic messaging. Doceree facilitates messaging between life sciences brands and healthcare professionals (HCPs) through an extensive global network of digital endemic and point-of-care platforms to programmatically deliver at scale accurate and transparent messages to HCPs. To learn more, visit doceree.com

About F-Prime Capital

F-Prime Capital, formerly Fidelity Biosciences and Devonshire Investors, is a global venture capital firm investing in life sciences, healthcare and technology. Since 1969, F-Prime has worked closely with entrepreneurs and academics to create innovative solutions to some of the world's most significant challenges in healthcare and technology. https://fprimecapital.com/

About Eight Roads Ventures

Eight Roads Ventures is a global venture capital firm managing $8bn of assets across offices in the UK, China, India, Japan, and the US. Our 50-year history of investing includes partnerships with over 300 companies such as Alibaba, AppsFlyer, BlackDuck, Cazoo, Chewy, Devoted Health, Flywire, Gloat, Hibob, Icertis, Kensho, Letgo, Made.com, Neo4j, Paidy, Ping Identity, Pony.ai, Toast, Wallapop, WuXi PharmaTech, and Xoom.

www.eightroads.com

About Alkemi Growth Capital

Alkemi Growth Capital is a growth investment firm that seeks to invest in healthcare and consumer wellness industry. The firm was founded in 2018 and is based in New Delhi, India. https://www.alkemivp.com/

Media Contacts:

Kanchan Dass

kanchan.dass@doceree.com

Priyanka Bhasin

priyanka.bhasin@doceree.com

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1758952/Doceree_Logo.jpg
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.
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Oil prices advanced on Wednesday after having fallen sharply the previous day, largely in response to the White House's plan to release 180 million barrels of crude oil from the SPR and signs of a prolonged Covid lockdown in Shanghai, the Chinese financial hub. Benchmark Brent crude futures climbed 1.5 percent to $108.26 per barrel, while U.S. crude futures were up 1.7 percent at $103.72. Supply concerns persisted as markets await fresh sanctions to punish Moscow over alleged atrocities in Ukraine, something Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky described as 'war crimes'. The European Commission has already proposed new sanctions including banning Russian coal imports, raising worries about a new global supply challenge. Meanwhile, the American Petroleum Institute (API) estimated on Tuesday a surprise U.S crude oil inventory build of 1.08 million barrels for the week ended April 1. The API also reportedly showed a weekly inventory decline of 543,000 barrels for gasoline, while distillate stockpiles rose by 593,000 barrels. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) publishes its weekly numbers on crude oil, gasoline and distillate stockpiles later in the day. Copyright(c) 2022 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved 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.
Fresco Connects Dots in the Kitchen to Make Cooking Effortless

DUBLIN, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Drop, the leading smart kitchen platform, today unveiled a new name - Fresco - and a new brand identity, reflecting the company's priority to connect dots in the kitchen between appliances, home cooks and recipes to make cooking effortless.

Drop has evolved from the most simple connected scale, to bringing connectivity to appliances, to building a platform for any appliance. The new Fresco name was chosen to evoke the feelings that come from al fresco dining, with people coming together and connecting over food. Likewise, Fresco brings the company's brand vision to life by connecting the dots in the kitchen and celebrating the journey of cooking, dining with family and friends, and the tools that make culinary cravings a reality.

"Drop was a great name for a physical product, but we pivoted to become a smart kitchen platform, providing end-to-end solutions to make appliances connected, from firmware development to IoT expertise and an app that pulls all the appliances together. As a result, we needed a brand that better represented this," said Fresco co-founder and CEO Ben Harris. "Fresco reconciles our messaging to consumers and partners into one coherent and powerful brand, and focuses on our promise to create an unbeatable connected cooking experience."

Elements of Fresco's new brand evolution include a new logo, which reflects the "Connect the Dots" motif; a new color palette with rich, warm and vibrant colors to represent the foods we see in our kitchen; and new graphic elements that emulate the actions we do when preparing food.

"The new brand identity is rich, lively and encapsulates the joyful energy of cooking," said Fresco co-founder and Head of Brand, Jonny McCauley. "We're excited to bring the Fresco experience to life in as many households as possible. The new "connects with Fresco" on appliances will signal to consumers that they are about to enjoy seamless connected cooking."

Fresco develops technologies that empower appliance manufacturers and consumers to bridge the gap between intention and action around cooking. Since the company was founded in 2012, Fresco has evolved into an essential ingredient for every smart kitchen, bringing connectivity to more than 100 different appliances from the top manufacturers in the world including GE Appliances, Bosch, Kenwood, Panasonic, Instant Brands and Thermomix.

For more information visit www.frescocooks.com.

About Fresco

Founded in 2012, Fresco is the only neutral, cross-brand platform that seamlessly brings appliances, home cooks and recipes together. More than 100 different appliance models from brands like Bosch, Electrolux, GE Appliances, Kenwood, LG Electronics and Thermomix can be controlled from the Fresco KitchenOS platform. With offices in Dublin, Ireland, and Zaragoza, Spain, Fresco's mission is to spread the love of home cooking by using technology to empower home chefs in the kitchen. To learn more visit www.frescocooks.com.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1781060/Fresco.jpg
CDL's newest site is in Estonia, where integrated digital services are the status quo

Toronto, Canada; Tartu, Estonia, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Creative Destruction Lab is announcing a new site and program stream in Estonia, a country known as a startup's paradise with the most technologically-advanced government on Earth.

The new Digital Society stream at the University of Tartu will integrate Creative Destruction Lab's worldwide network of mentors, investors and entrepreneurs with Estonia's globally renowned business and technology ecosystem.

"Estonia is already home for 1,300 startups, which is kind of absurd for a country of 1.2 million people. As a society, we've considered things like ubiquitous digital signatures and secure, paperless governance a comfortable norm for several decades - while still so many business environments dream of this as science fiction. Being open to the world and giving back is a strong part of our entrepreneurial ethos. Estonian academia, founders and state coming together and actively plugging into the fantastic global CDL network is a natural way how to share our learnings with budding startups from anywhere," said Sten Tamkivi, partner at Taavet+Sten and founding partner of CDL-Estonia.

Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) delivers an objectives-based, nine-month mentorship program for massively scalable science- and tech-based startups. Since its founding at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto in 2012, the program has now expanded to 11 sites in five different countries.

There could not be a better location for CDL's newest site than Estonia. The country in Northern Europe is a global leader in digital governance, with ubiquitous, easy-to-use digital identity and private key infrastructure. These systems offer real-world benefits to citizens, who can vote and pay their taxes online in mere minutes, and to entrepreneurs, who can register new businesses seamlessly. They also offer a world of opportunity for startups working in the digital governance space.

"Estonia's business environment and digital ecosystem are at the forefront of the world, and as a result, Estonia is today a world leader in numbers of unicorn companies per capita. The success of our technology sector is a major opportunity for Estonia, for which we must continue to contribute, to keep up with the rapid developments in the world of technology," said Andres Sutt, the Estonian Minister of Entrepreneurship and IT. According to the Minister, important steps have been taken in Estonia in recent years, to bring business and science closer together and to increase co-operation between companies and universities. "It's a win-win situation - universities help give expert knowledge to growing start-ups and the technology sector offers opportunities for universities, funding or possibility to put research into practice. Therefore, I am very pleased to see that the CDL program has arrived in Estonia in cooperation with the University of Tartu. CDL gives our growing start-ups access to world-class mentors and their knowledge, as well as to international capital. My goal is to have 25 Estonian unicorns by 2025, and I believe that together with the CDL, we will take a big step closer to achieving that," minister Sutt said.

Estonia boasts the highest ratio of startups per capita on the globe, with startups making up one per cent of the country's total employment and three per cent of its entire GDP. The country has produced ten unicorns in 15 years - including Skype, Wise, Bolt, Pipedrive, Veriff and Glia - a per capita rate comparable only to the San Francisco Bay Area and Israel.

The University of Tartu is another draw for CDL-Estonia, with its four centuries of experience providing higher education. Founded in 1632, the university is the oldest and largest institution of its kind in Estonia, attracting many of the country's top minds. The school is home to the Estonian Biobank, a genotyped database of about 20 per cent of the country's adult population, and the Center of IT Impact Studies, an integrated teaching and research center that uses big data generated by Estonian public e-services to study the impact of those services and to design new e-governance solutions.

One of the University of Tartu's strategic goalsis to be an accelerator of the smart economy. The university stokes a spirit of enterprise in its students, and fosters a constructive environment for start-ups and cooperation with businesses. "Joining CDL is an excellent way to boost this commitment, with its rigorous program and superb network of professionals," said vice rector for research Kristjan Vassil. "CDL's strong network will perfectly complement the research strengths of UT, and the strengths of Estonia's digital governance community."

For participating ventures, CDL-Estonia is providing an unprecedented opportunity to access global capital and expertise. CDL offers the chance to connect with seasoned mentors and investors in the United States, Canada and across Europe, increasing the visibility and impact of the ideas taking shape in Estonia.

CDL-Estonia's Digital Society stream is designed for founders who are exploring commercial opportunities predicated on creatively, securely and responsibly fusing data from public and private digital registries, in order to create business models that accelerate the digitization of human societies.

The Digital Society stream is particularly suited to startups working in the fields of governance, health, genomics, elections, privacy, data science and regulation. Participating founders at CDL-Estonia will have an opportunity to develop and pilot their business models on real data produced by its digital government ecosystem. The program's three focus areas are smart state, cybersecurity, and citizen genomics.

CDL-Estonia's founding partners include:

Estonian entrepreneurs and investors Taavet+Sten: Taavet Hinrikus (https://www.linkedin.com/in/taavethinrikus/?originalSubdomain=uk), formerly Skype's first employee and the co-founder of fintech giant Wise, and Sten Tamkivi (https://tamkivi.com/), also a former Skype employee, co-founder of Teleport and former entrepreneur in residence at Andreessen Horowitz,

Vabamu, the largest active non-profit museum in Estonia.

And Estonia's Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications (https://www.mkm.ee/en).

"Vabamu's mission is to promote freedom. Economic development and connections to the global economy are important ways to help expand the benefits of freedom to more Estonians who seek to participate in entrepreneurship. CDL-Estonia is a superb opportunity for our country to join one of the pre-emminent global networks that supports the growth of innovative technology-based start-ups," said Karen Jagodin, director of Vabamu.

Estonia is the place to create solutions-focused ventures in digital governance. And now is the time. Cities around the world are competing for tech investment and talent. Recent developments in data science, big data analysis and AI are accelerating the digitalization of societies.

"There's a growing need for the type of innovation that has transformed Estonia into the world's most digitally advanced society," said Sonia Sennik, executive director of Creative Destruction Lab. "We are so pleased to be welcoming University of Tartu to the global CDL community; our structured objectives-focused model will offer the mentorship and capital that startups need to share this innovation with the world."

Are you interested in digital governance and digital societies? Learn more about CDL-Estonia. Get in touch with cdl-estonia@creativedestructionlab.comat CDL-Estonia or applyfor CDL-Estonia's inaugural 2022/23 program.

About Creative Destruction Lab

Creative Destruction Lab(CDL) is a nonprofit organization that delivers an objectives-based program for massively scalable, seed-stage, science- and technology-based companies. Its nine-month program allows founders to learn from experienced entrepreneurs, increasing their likelihood of success. Founded in 2012 by Professor Ajay Agrawal at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, the program has expanded to 11 sites across five countries. Participating ventures have created $19 billion (CAD) in equity value.

About Vabamu

Vabamu is the largest active non-profit museum in Estonia. Vabamu's mission is to educate the people of Estonia and its visitors about the recent past, sense the fragility of freedom, advocating for justice and the rule of law. It was founded by Olga Kistler-Ritso, an Estonian-American refugee, in partnership with the Estonian government, to support her wish that Estonia never again be occupied by a foreign power. Vabamu's Patron, President Lennart Meri, declared Vabamu to be "Freedom's House". https://www.vabamu.ee/

About University of Tartu

The University of Tartu

About Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications

The objective of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications is to increase the competitiveness of Estonian companies and thus the prosperity of people. https://www.mkm.ee/en

Attachment
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban (Front) waves to supporters at a rally in Budapest, Hungary, on April 3, 2022. (Photo by Attila Volgyi/Xinhua)

Orban's government and the EU have been at odds in recent years over a series of issues, ranging from the "rule-of-law" to minority rights.

BUDAPEST, April 5 (Xinhua) -- The Hungarian government has asked the European Commission(EC) "not to punish the Hungarian voters" who allowed a new victory for Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Sunday's parliamentary elections, with the suspension of funds.

The EC is set to trigger a new, powerful disciplinary procedure allowing the disbursement of European Union (EU) funds to be suspended, it formally notified Budapest on Tuesday.

Orban's government and the EU have been at odds in recent years over a series of issues, ranging from the "rule-of-law" to minority rights.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban arrives for the meeting of European Union (EU) leaders in Brussels, Belgium, March 24, 2022. (European Union/Handout via Xinhua)

Orban's conservative Fidesz party won a fourth consecutive super-majority in the general elections held on Sunday.

In response to the EU executive's announcement, Gergely Gulyas, Orban's chief of staff, urged the Commission "not to punish Hungarian voters" for expressing an opinion "that Brussels does not like."

"The fundamental rules of democracy must be accepted by the Commission," he said, urging it to "return to common sense and dialogue."

The procedure could ultimately deny Orban's government more than 40 billion euros (43.6 billion U.S. dollars) in EU funding.

Photo taken on March 29, 2019 shows the Berlaymont Building, the European Commission headquarters, in Brussels, Belgium. B(Xinhua/Zhang Cheng)

However, it is likely to still take months to complete. The ultimate decision will rest with the Council of the EU, composed of representatives from each member state. 
MONTREAL, QC / ACCESSWIRE / April 6, 2022 / Critical Elements Lithium Corporation (TSX-V:CRE)(US OTCQX:CRECF)(FSE:F12) ("Critical Elements" or the "Corporation") is pleased to announce an exploration program for 2022.

The Corporation is preparing an aggressive exploration program for 2022 with the following objectives:

Expand the main Rose Lithium-Tantalum (" Rose ", " Project", "Rose Project ") deposit by drilling

", " ") deposit by drilling Drill test several satellite showings proximal to the Rose deposit

Drill the Lemare Lithium project targeting delineation leading to an initial Mineral Resource Estimate

Conduct an extensive surface exploration program including compilation, artificial intelligence (AI) targeting, prospecting, mapping, rock sampling, and soil sampling with the goal of finding new lithium mineralization warranting follow up drilling

Prospect and sample the targets identified by the Goldspot Discoveries AI system in 2021 (see press release dated September 7, 2021 for more details)

The Corporation is working to secure diamond drill rigs for the full year with a program of up to 25,000 meters divided between the Corporation's projects:

10,000 meters for the expansion of the Rose Lithium-Tantalum deposit

7,000 meters to delineate an initial Mineral Resource Estimate at the Lemare Lithium project

8,000 meters to explore for and test new targets identified

Figure 1: James Bay projects location map

Figure 2: Goldspot probability Li-Ta, Cu-Ni, Au target map

Corporate update

Permitting

In August 2021, Critical Elements announced that the Federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change had rendered a favorable decision in respect of the proposed Rose Project. In a Decision Statement, which included the conditions to be complied with by the Corporation, the Minister confirmed that the Project is not likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects when mitigation measures are taken into account (see press release dated August 11, 2021 for more details).

The Rose Project is also subject to the provincial environmental and social impact assessment and review procedure pursuant to the Quebec Environment Quality Act in accordance with Chapter 22 of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement ("JBNQA"). This process runs parallel to the federal process. The review of the impact study is conducted jointly by the Cree Nation Government and the Government of Quebec under the Environmental and Social Impact Review Committee ("COMEX").

As noted in the Press Release of February 17, 2022, the provincial assessment is well advanced and has undergone several rounds of questions from COMEX that have been answered by Critical Elements in the normal course of the assessment process. At this time, Critical Elements has received no further questions from COMEX and remains confident in a positive outcome given the stated support for lithium project development in the Province of Quebec. Global recognition of Quebec's appeal is manifest in the recent announcements of significant investments in the EV battery supply chain by BASF and General Motors - POSCO Chemical in the Province.

Once a recommendation decision is made by the COMEX, the recommendation is then transmitted to the Minister of the Environment and the Fight Against Climate Change of Quebec, who may then issue a Certificate of Authorization allowing the Rose Project to proceed. This process may yet take several weeks if a decision was made without further questions.

First Nations Relationship

In July 2019, Critical Elements announced that the Cree Nation of Eastmain, the Grand Council of the Crees (Eeyou Istchee), the Cree Nation Government and the Corporation had signed an impact and benefit agreement, referred to as the Pikhuutaau Agreement (the "Pikhuutaau Agreement"), concerning the development and operation of the Rose Project.

The Pikhuutaau Agreement is a binding agreement that governs the long-term working relationship between the parties while respecting Cree traditional activities and ensuring the promotion of Cree economic and social development based on mutual trust and respect during all phases of the Project through a sustainable development approach. It provides for training, employment, and business opportunities for the Crees and particularly the Crees of Eastmain at the Project, as well as for the cooperation and involvement of the Cree parties with Critical Elements in the environmental monitoring during all phases of the Project. The Pikhuutaau Agreement also ensures financial benefits for the Cree parties on a long-term basis, consistent with the Cree Nation Mining Policy and with Critical Elements' approach to develop the Project while ensuring the promotion of Cree economic and social development in a mutually beneficial manner.

Despite the isolation imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Critical Elements has maintained its relationship with the Cree community. Certain initiatives contemplated in the Pikhuutaau Agreement have already commenced. We are proud of this relationship and look forward to working with the Cree community through project development and operation.

Engineering Studies

As announced in the Press Release of June 7, 2021, Critical Elements retained the services of Metso Outotec and WSP in Canada ("WSP") to prepare an engineering study for a chemical plant to produce high quality lithium hydroxide monohydrate for the electric vehicle and energy storage system battery industries. The end-product of the plant would be battery grade lithium hydroxide monohydrate (LMH, >56.5%). It is anticipated that the plant capacity would be approximately 27,000 tpa of LMH, as Lithium Carbonate Equivalent (LCE). Supportive pilot plant work has been ongoing, processing samples from the Rose Project. It is expected that the results of the chemical plant engineering study will be released in the second quarter of 2022.

In the Press Release of February 17, 2022, Critical Elements announced the retention of Bumigeme Inc., WSP, and Golder Associates Ltd to prepare front-end engineering design work for the process plant and related infrastructure and the detailed design of the co-disposal facility for the waste rock and filtered tailings at the Rose Project. In addition, an update to the 2017 Feasibility Study for the Rose Project mine and concentrated will be completed. The Updated Feasibility Study will include a review of pricing for spodumene concentrates, and a review of the capital and operating costs. We expect results from the Updated Feasibility Study to be released in the second quarter of 2022.

Potential Catalysts

Looking forward, Critical Elements recognizes the importance of a timely and positive recommendation from COMEX and the receipt of a Certificate of Authorization from the Quebec Minister of the Environment and the Fight Against Climate Change. We expect that these events may catalyze long-standing discussions regarding offtake and concurrent strategic project and/or corporate investments, which may in turn catalyze completion of project financial engineering. Delivery in the second quarter of 2022 of the engineering studies referenced above, may support a Final Investment Decision by the Corporation and commencement of construction for the Rose Project mine and concentrator targeting commencement of production in 2024, based on the timeline outlined in the 2017 Feasibility Study.

Critical Elements is committed to communicating material events to the market in a timely manner. Through the first quarter of 2022, the Corporation has been actively participating in multiple face-to-face and virtual initiatives reaching thousands of shareholders and investors, highlighting the competitive advantages of the Rose Project and its home jurisdiction, Quebec. Market participants also recognize the importance of the completion of the Quebec permitting process and its potential as a market catalyst.

Qualified persons

Paul Bonneville, Eng., is the qualified person that has reviewed and approved the technical contents of this news release on behalf of the Corporation.

About Critical Elements Lithium Corporation

Critical Elements aspires to become a large, responsible supplier of lithium to the flourishing electric vehicle and energy storage system industries. To this end, Critical Elements is advancing the wholly owned, high purity Rose lithium project in Quebec. Rose is the Corporation's first lithium project to be advanced within a land portfolio of over 700 square kilometers. In 2017, the Corporation completed a feasibility study on Rose for the production of spodumene concentrate. The internal rate of return for the Project is estimated at 34.9% after tax, with a net present value estimated at C$726 million at an 8% discount rate. In the Corporation's view, Quebec is strategically well-positioned for US and EU markets and boasts good infrastructure including a low-cost, low-carbon power grid featuring 93% hydroelectricity. The project has received approval from the Federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change on the recommendation of the Joint Assessment Committee, comprised of representatives from the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada and the Cree Nation Government; The Corporation is working to obtain similar approval under the Quebec environmental assessment process. The Corporation also has a good, formalized relationship with the Cree Nation.

For further information, please contact:

Patrick Laperriere

Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Development

514-817-1119

plaperriere@cecorp.ca

www.cecorp.ca

Jean-Sebastien Lavallee, P. Geo.

Chief Executive Officer

819-354-5146

jslavallee@cecorp.ca

www.cecorp.ca

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is described in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary statement concerning forward-looking statements

This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian Securities legislation. Generally, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "scheduled", "anticipates", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "scheduled", "targeted", or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "occur" or "be achieved". Forward-looking information contained herein include, without limitation, statements relating to the completion of the 2022 exploration program and its related objectives, the completion of the provincial permitting process and its potential positive effects on the Corporation and the Project, the completion of engineering study for a chemical plant to produce high quality lithium hydroxide monohydrate, the preparation of the front-end engineering design work for the process plant and related infrastructure, the update to the 2017 Feasibility Study, off-take agreements and purchasers for the Corporation's products, securing sufficient financing on acceptable terms and continued positive discussions and relationships with local communities and stakeholders. Forward-looking information is based on assumptions management believes to be reasonable at the time such statements are made. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information.

Although Critical Elements has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from expected results described in forward-looking information include, but are not limited to: results of the Corporation's 2022 exploration program and effects on the Corporation's stated objectives, results of the engineering study for a chemical plant to produce high quality lithium hydroxide monohydrate, issues encountered in connection with the front-end engineering work, impact of the Updated Feasibility Study on the Project, Critical Elements' ability to secure sufficient financing to advance and complete the Project, uncertainties associated with the Corporation's resource and reserve estimates, uncertainties regarding global supply and demand for lithium and tantalum and market and sales prices, uncertainties associated with securing off-take agreements and customer contracts, uncertainties with respect to social, community and environmental impacts, uncertainties with respect to optimization opportunities for the Project, as well as those risk factors set out in the Corporation's year-end Management Discussion and Analysis dated August 31, 2021 and other disclosure documents available under the Corporation's SEDAR profile. Forward-looking information contained herein is made as of the date of this news release and Critical Elements disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws.

SOURCE: Critical Elements Lithium Corporation

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/696274/Critical-Elements-Lithium-Announces-Exploration-Plans-for-2022-Including-Up-to-25000-Meters-of-Drilliing
AmmPower Corp. CEO Gary Benninger, and Maarten Mobach, President AmmPower Maritime, visit Porto Central in Brazil

TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / April 6, 2022 / (CSE:AMMP) (OTCQB:AMMPF) (FSE:601A) AmmPower Corp. (the "Company" or "AmmPower") is pleased to announce the completion of a successful business trip to Brazil, where senior management of the Company visited Porto Central, a new industrial port complex under development in Brazil, as well as several potential partners for the green ammonia facility at the site location of Porto Central.

Mr. Benninger and Mr. Mobach visited the site location of the port in the southern end of the State of Espirito Santo in the Municipality of Presidente Kennedy and met during the roadshow with business leaders connected to green energy suppliers, offtakers, local institutions and high-ranked government officials. Espirito Santo State has favorable conditions for the development of renewable energy projects and the potential to play an important role in the national and global production of green hydrogen and green ammonia, generating business opportunities in the state and in the country.

Mr. Benninger stated, "We would like to thank the team at Porto Central, headed by Jose Salomao Fadlalah, CEO, and supported by Jessica Chan, Commercial Manager, for ensuring a successful roadshow that will be key to the success of our project".

Porto Central is a multipurpose private industrial port complex that is under development in a strategic location at the center of the Brazilian east cost in the Southeast Region of Brazil. It consists of a total area of approximately 2,000 hectares or 4,900 acres. With up to 25 meters draft, Porto Central will be able to receive the largest and most modern ships in the world. In addition, when operational, Porto Central will be one of the most innovative ports and a major green energy hub, offering green hydrogen, along with green ammonia and green fertilizer production.

Mr. Mobach commented, "AmmPower's large-scale green ammonia and hydrogen facility plans to be powered by renewable energy sources, both wind and solar, for which conditions are favorable in the region around Porto Central. AmmPower's facility in Brazil would not only create carbon free fuel for shipping, offering to the market a global marine fuel bunkering station, but also facilitate the domestic demand of Brazil for green energy and global export of green energy."

Figure 1. Gary Benninger, AmmPower CEO, and Maarten Mobach, President AmmPower Maritime, at the project site location, future home of Porto Central and AmmPower's planned green ammonia production facility.

During the trip, Mr. Benninger and Mr. Mobach participated in an event for the business community of Espirito Santo promoted by the Federation of Industries of Espirito Santo (FINDES) with the theme "Opportunities for Hydrogen and Green Ammonia in Espirito Santo together with Porto Central". The event was part of a movement to disseminate the theme, as green hydrogen and green ammonia emerge as one of the main paths for global decarbonization, mobilizing efforts by countries and companies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and, consequently, the socio-environmental and economic impacts on the planet.

Figure 2. Salomao Fadlalah, CEO Porto Central, Renan Chiepe, President Fetransportes - Federation of State Transport Companies, Cris Samorini, President FINDES - Federation of Industries of Espirito Santo, Gary Benninger, CEO AmmPower, and Maarten Mobach, President AmmPower Maritime.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors

Gary Benninger

Chief Executive Officer

About AmmPower

AmmPower is a clean energy company focused on the production of green ammonia. The Company is based in Toronto, Ontario, with a research and manufacturing facility in Southeast Michigan. The company is active in all facets of green ammonia production, including the production of green fertilizers, carbon free shipping fuel, and the 'cracking', or moving of green hydrogen as ammonia. The company is working on the development of proprietary technologies to produce green ammonia and green hydrogen at scale, including the investigation of unique catalytic reactions to bring down costs and to take advantage of carbon credits in the renewable energy space. AmmPower currently holds several LOIs with ports in Brazil, the United States, and is currently completing its IAMM prototype to create green ammonia for the agricultural industry. The company also holds a lithium exploration property in the James Bay/Eeyou Istche region of Quebec and an option on the Titan Property located in Klotz Lake area in Northwestern Ontario.

For More Information:

www.ammpower.com

+1 248-662-5565

invest@ammpower.com

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release includes forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties, including with respect to the planned construction of an ammonia production facility in Espirito Santo, Brazil, the expected output of such planned facility, and the ability of the Company to obtain funding, regulatory approvals, customers and partners for such planned facility. All statements within, other than statements of historical fact, are to be considered forward-looking. The Company provides forward-looking statements for the purpose of conveying information about current expectations and plans relating to the future and readers are cautioned that such statements may not be appropriate for other purposes. By its nature, this information is subject to inherent risks and uncertainties that may be general or specific and which give rise to the possibility that expectations, forecasts, predictions, projections, or conclusions will not prove to be accurate, that assumptions may not be correct, and that objectives, strategic goals and priorities will not be achieved. These risks and uncertainties include but are not limited to, the risk that the planned ammonia production facility in Espirito Santo, Brazil may not be built or developed as planned, or at all, including due to the Company's inability to obtain funding, regulatory approvals, customers or partners for such facility, either as contemplated or at all, and those risks identified and reported in the Company's public filings under the Company's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events, or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise unless required by law.

The Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) has not reviewed, approved, or disapproved the contents of this press release.

SOURCE: AmmPower

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/696127/AmmPower-Corp-Senior-Management-Visits-Porto-Central-in-Brazil-to-Discuss-Next-Steps-on-Port-Project
Integrated Finance and HR systems will automate day-to-day and routine operations

BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Oracle today announced that Azerconnect, a leader in the field of IT services, communication, and high technologies in the Republic of Azerbaijan, has selected Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications for financial management and human capital management.

Azerconnect is the first B2B company operating in the dynamically developing ICT and high technologies sectors in the country. Launched in 2013, the company provides a wide range of ICT services in line with international standards. Implementing Oracle Fusion services, the company was aiming for the unification and standardization of business processes, improvement of control and compliance processes, optimization of the back office, and acceleration of efficiency growth.

Azerconnect has deployed Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM). With the new solutions, Azerconnect can automate day-to-day and routine operations, such as preparing reports, analyzing data, closing periods, preparing and disclosing reports, hiring and training employees, managing their effectiveness, assessment, and motivation. As a result, the company employees can now devote more time to solving strategic business problems.

"Transformation of back-office functions is becoming a trend for large telecom companies all over the world. Azerconnect has been consistently implementing an ambitious program aimed at the digitalization of its business in order to provide customers with even more convenient and modern services. Thanks to the cloud solution, from now on, all possible updates and changes to services will occur much faster, and our company will gain quick access to innovation, knowledge, and collective experience" - said Emil Masimov, Chief Executive Officer of Azerconnect.

"We have implemented this ambitious transformation project in less than a year - with the integration of Oracle Cloud ERP and launch of Oracle Cloud HCM. As a result, HR and Finance functions can operate more efficiently, with our employees now able to focus their expertise on analysis and driving our business forward. The changes made it possible for the employees of the departments to do their work easier and more efficiently, to focus on analysis, financial and HR expertise" - commented Orkhan Najafov, Chief Financial Officer of Azerconnect.

"Implementation of cloud services such as Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM has significantly increased the efficiency of Azerconnect's IT, Finance, Procurement, and HR departments. As a result, HR and Finance systems are connected on a secure, single data platform, and Azerconnect can benefit from the latest, automatic updates on a regular basis" - noted Waleed Abdel Hamid, Vice President on Applications-Mid Market, ECEMEA (Eastern and Central Europe, Middle-East and Africa) at Oracle.

About Azerconnect:

Azerconnect is part of NEQSOL Holding, an international group of companies with business areas covering energy, telecommunications, high-tech, and construction industries in the UK, the USA, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan, the UAE, and more.

About Oracle:

Oracle offers suites of integrated applications plus secure, autonomous infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud. For more information about Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), please visit us at www.oracle.com.

Trademarks

Oracle, Java, and MySQL are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation.

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1766551/Oracle_Logo_Logo.jpg


BERLIN (dpa-AFX) - Germany factory orders declined for the first time in four months in February largely driven by the fall in foreign demand, data from Destatis revealed on Wednesday.



Factory orders decreased 2.2 percent on a monthly basis in February, in contrast to the 2.3 percent increase in January. Economists had forecast a marginal fall of 0.2 percent. This was the first decrease since October 2021.



At the same time, annual growth in overall new orders eased sharply to 2.9 percent from 8.2 percent in January.



New orders from foreign countries decreased 3.3 percent from January. Within this foreign demand, orders from eurozone were down 3.3 percent and that from non-eurozone economies slid 3.4 percent. At the same time, domestic orders logged monthly fall of 0.2 percent.



Data showed that the producers of capital goods recorded a decrease of 2.8 percent. Producers of intermediate goods saw new orders fall 1.9 percent. Regarding consumer goods, orders went up 0.7 percent.



Further, data showed that domestic turnover fell 1.4 percent in February, reversing a revised 1.6 percent increase in January.



The economy ministry said the outlook for factory orders is currently muted due to the uncertainty caused by the war in Ukraine.



Elsewhere, Germany's construction Purchasing Managers' survey showed that the sector registered a sharp slowdown in activity growth in March as Ukraine war dampened demand, prices as well as supply.



The S&P Global construction Purchasing Managers' Index fell to 50.9 in March from a two-year high of 54.9 in February. A score above 50.0 indicates expansion in the sector.







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SARNIA, ON / ACCESSWIRE / April 6, 2022 / Aduro Clean Technologies Inc. ("Aduro", or the "Company") (CSE:ACT)(OTCQB:ACTHF)(FSE:9D50), a Canadian developer of patented water-based technologies to chemically recycle plastics and transform heavy crude and renewable oils into new-era resources and higher-value fuels, today announced that it will be presenting at the GCFF Virtual Conference Event 22 - Investing in Innovation on Thursday, April 21, 2022. Ofer Vicus, CEO of Aduro will be hosting the presentation and answering questions from investors.

To access the live presentation, please use the following information:

GCFF Virtual Conference Event 22 - Investing in Innovation

Date: Thursday, April 21, 2022

Time: 11:30 AM Eastern Time

8:30 AM Pacific Time

5:30 PM Central European Time

Please Register to Attend

Webinar: https://nai500.com/events/gcff-virtual-2022-investing-in-innovation/

Global Chinese Financial Forum

Organized by NAI Interactive, the Global Chinese Financial Forum (GCFF) is the most prominent series of bi-lingual financial functions in both North America and China. Established in 2000, GCFF's mandate is to provide a world-class platform connecting both the China and North American financial markets. We bring together companies, financial institutions and investors who are interested in exploring new investment opportunities.

With an extensive network covering both the North American and Chinese markets, GCFF is supported by a strong foundation of financial resources. This enables GCFF to organize resourceful financial events that facilitate business growth and networks among financial institutions, public companies, private companies, and investors of all levels

About Aduro Clean Technologies

Aduro Clean Technologies Inc. is a developer of patented water-based technologies to chemically recycle waste plastics; convert heavy crude and bitumen into lighter, more valuable oil; and transform renewable oils into higher-value fuels or renewable chemicals. The Company's Hydrochemolytic technology activates unique properties of water in a chemistry platform that operates at relatively low temperatures and cost - a game-changing approach that converts low-value feedstocks into 21st-century resources. With funding and support from Bioindustrial Innovation Canada, the Company has developed a pre-pilot reactor system to upgrade heavy petroleum into lighter oil.

For further information, please contact:

Ofer Vicus, CEO

ovicus@adurocleantech.com

Abe Dyck, Investor Relations

ir@adurocleantech.com

+1 604-362-7011

Investor Cubed Inc.

Neil Simon, CEO

nsimon@investor3.ca

+ 1 647 258 3310

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking statements. All statements, other than statements of historical fact that address activities, events, or developments that the Company believes, expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future, are forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements reflect management's current expectations based on information currently available and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause outcomes to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that the assumptions inherent in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and, accordingly, undue reliance should not be put on such statements due to their inherent uncertainty. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations include adverse market conditions and other factors beyond the control of the parties. The Company expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law.

The CSE has not reviewed, approved, or disapproved the content of this news release.

SOURCE: Aduro Clean Technologies Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/696306/Aduro-to-Present-at-the-GCFF-Virtual-Conference-Event
VINIA sales orders grew 112% compared to Q1 2021 to reach USD 787k

Reiterating guidance for year-on-year sales orders growth of 2.5-3.5X to reach USD 5M - 7M

Started the transition of VINIA production at new 20 tons/year facility enabling the scaling of VINIA sales and conversion of current 2 tons/year facility to Cannabis

Produced a unique Cannabis composition in large industrial scale Bioreactors enabling the commercialization and sales of Cannabis products in H2 2022

Vancouver, British Columbia and Rehovot, Israel--(Newsfile Corp. - April 6, 2022) - BioHarvest Sciences Inc. (CSE: BHSC) (OTC PINK: CNVCF) (FSE:8MV) ("BioHarvest" or "the Company") today announced Q1 2022 sales of its flagship VINIA product reached USD 787k, representing 112% growth compared to the same quarter of last year.

BioHarvest also had a strong quarter in R&D execution, highlighted by a March 23 declaration of successful completion of its Cannabis R&D program with production of Cannabis biomass in large-scale industrial bioreactors - signaling the start of commercialization of the Cannabis product. BioHarvest is in the process of transitioning the current R&D license to a production license ahead of launching a unique Cannabis composition into the market in H2 2022.

"I am very proud of our Q1 results, which demonstrate another dimension of our capabilities," said CEO Ilan Sobel. "BioHarvest continues to validate its leadership in plant-based bio-technology."

The company managed the total VINIA sales orders in line with production constraints of its existing 2 ton/year facility and accordingly chose to reduce marketing spend in the US in order to avoid out-of-stock occurrences and customer dissatisfaction. The production capacity constraints are being alleviated by a fast transition to a new 20 ton/year facility - a transition which started successfully in March and will positively impact the H2 2022 scale-up of VINIA production and sales. BioHarvest is therefore reiterating its 2022 sales orders guidance of USD 5M -7M representing a 2.5-3.5X growth over 2021.

The careful management of the VINIA inventory in the US resulted in Q1 sales order in the US (where pilot sales began in May 2021) reaching USD 335k (representing 2% growth over Q4 2021). The Israeli market delivered USD 452k (22% growth over Q1 2021 and a 10% decline from Q4 2022). Sales in Israel were heavily impacted in Q1 by an extraordinary outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in January and February, when approximately 25% of the population contracted the virus. March sales in Israel have significantly recovered and April sales so far support BioHarvest's growth trajectories and are in line with the provided guidance.

In early Q3 2022, BioHarvest expects VINIA  inventory to reach levels that enable significant scaling of the business. US sales metrics in Q1 2022 continue to be very encouraging: VINIA  has achieved a best-in class verified customer rating of 4.8 out of 5, demonstrating a high level of customer satisfaction, and subscription revenue in Q1 2022 increased 40% compared to Q4 2021.

The second half of the year marketing plan includes the addition of influencer endorsements, customer referral programs and affiliate programs as well as a focused approach addressing key lucrative market segments such as the Christian evangelical market.

"We were able to manage our sales growth despite inventory constraints and keep our overall customer satisfaction intact, and we enjoy fantastic growth prospects given the commencement of manufacturing at our new VINIA production facility," Sobel said. "I am equally excited by the completion of the Cannabis development program and the highly differentiated composition which we will be bringing to the market in H2 2022."

Q1 2022 Shareholder Update

BioHarvest invites all interested investors and media to our next Shareholders Update, to be held at 11 am PDT, April 7th, 2022. The online meeting will be hosted by CEO Ilan Sobel and will feature a live Q&A session. Free registration to the event is available here: https://app.livestorm.co/st-financial/q1-2022-bioharvest-sciences-shareholder-update?type=detailed.

About BioHarvest Sciences Inc.

BioHarvest Sciences Inc. (CSE: BHSC) is a fast-growing Biotech firm listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange. BioHarvest has developed a patented bio-cell growth platform technology capable of growing the active and beneficial ingredients in fruit and plants, at industrial scale, without the need to grow the plant itself. This technology is economical, ensures consistency, and avoids the negative environmental impacts associated with traditional agriculture. BioHarvest is currently focused on nutraceuticals and the medicinal cannabis markets. Visit: www.bioharvest.com.

BioHarvest Sciences Inc.

Ilan Sobel, Chief Executive Officer

For further information, please contact:

Dave Ryan, VP Investor Relations & Director

Phone: 1 (604) 622-1186

Email: dave@bioharvest.com

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

YouTube

Forward-Looking Statements

Information set forth in this news release includes forward-looking statements that are based on management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions, and expectations, and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. There is no assurance that strong sales metrics experienced to date will result in future demand or that proposed additional marketing expenditures will result in increased sales. Markets for nutraceuticals are unpredictable and subject to changes in consumer tastes and trends as well as economic factors beyond our control. Delays and cost overruns may result in delays achieving our objectives obtaining market acceptance, and regulatory approvals for geographic expansion is subject to risk and cannot be guaranteed. There is no assurance that the Company sales revenue for 2022 will reach USD 5 to 7 million and there is no assurance that the Company cash flow breaking point will be achieved in 2023. There is no assurance of commercial availability of our Cannabis product in 2022 or that the Company achieves the conversion of the two tons VINIA facility to Cannabis production in 2022. These things are subject to construction and approval delays and uncertainties that may be beyond the control of BioHarvest. Projected sales of Cannabis will require the Company to obtain production and/or export licensing which cannot be assured.

All forward-looking statements are inherently uncertain and actual results may be affected by a number of material factors beyond our control. Readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. BHSC does not intend to update forward-looking statement disclosures other than through our regular management discussion and analysis disclosures.

Readers are cautioned that sales growth and revenue alone do not give an accurate picture of the financial position of the Company and should be read in the context of the Company's annual and quarterly financial statements.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/119445
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 6, 2022) - Idaho Champion Gold Mines Canada Inc. (CSE: ITKO) (OTCQB: GLDRF) (FSE: 1QB1) ("Idaho Champion" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that the Company has begun an internal strategic review of its Cobalt property package ("Cobalt Properties") located in the heart of the Idaho Cobalt Belt, and its 100%-owned Baner Gold Project ("Baner") located in Idaho County, Idaho.

The decision to undertake an internal strategic review of both properties was made based on recent developments in the commodities market and renewed interest in exploration investments in Idaho. The strategic review will consider, evaluate, and compare options with the intention to best maximize value to Idaho Champion shareholders.

All interested parties are encouraged to contact the Company directly at info@idahochamp.com for details of the strategic review.

Jonathan Buick, Idaho Champion's CEO, commented: "Cobalt as a commodity has been performing well as a result of growing demand for electric vehicles, the shift towards zero-emission economy by 2030, and limited commodity supply. While originally not a core asset for the Company, our cobalt property portfolio now offers a sigificant value proposition, boosted by its strategic location in the region that hosts the US' newest cobalt producer Jervois Mining, whose ICO Project is scheduled to commence production this year.

Similarly, the Baner Gold Project is located 5 km north of, and on strike with, Idaho's most recent gold producer operated by Endomines AB. We will conduct a thorough review and determine what the best and most accretive step will be for the Champion shareholders."

Idaho Champion Cobalt Properties Overview

The Champion Cobalt Properties are comprised of 622 mineral claims located along strike and within proximity of well-developed cobalt projects along the Cobalt Belt (see Figure 1):

Victory Project DUP Claims: ~6 km south of the Blackbird Mine

Fairway Project SC Claims: ~3 km east of the town of Cobalt and 1 km north of the Blackpine copper occurrence

Twin Peaks Project TP & Badger Claims: Located on the Twin Peaks Copper Mine, 3 km from Electra Battery Metals' Iron Creek

Ulysses Project IP & GS Claims: ~ 2 km north of the Ulysses mine

Figure 1: Cobalt Belt and Property Package Location

To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/8681/119470_e788002af44938c2_001full.jpg

Baner Gold Project Overview

The Baner Project is located 8 km southwest of Elk City, Idaho (See Figure 2), in the heart of the historical Orogrande-Elk City Mining District. Elk City is a historic gold mining region, dating back to the 1860s, that once supported more than 20 underground mines and extensive placer operations. During the 1930s, there were three cyanide mills along the Crooked River processing open pit and underground sulfide ore. Exploration in the district was conducted by Cyprus Amax, Kinross Gold, and Bema during the 1980s and 1990s.

Baner is located within the Orogrande Shear Zone (OSZ), a 20-kilometre long and up to 1-kilometre wide regional shear zone located in Central Idaho. The OSZ is a transpressional shear zone composed of metamorphosed Proterozoic sedimentary rocks of the Belt Supergroup and granitic rocks of the Cretaceous Idaho Batholith, which is intruded by Tertiary rhyolites and dacitic dikes. Hydrothermal alteration is spatially associated with the OSZ consisting of silicification, sericitization, and chloritization. Different types of mineral systems occur in the OSZ and along sympathetic structures in the area, most likely of Cretaceous or Tertiary ages. Mineralization may include disseminated bulk-mineable precious metal mineralization associated with sheeted or stockwork veins, hydraulic breccias and with extensive widespread alteration; but high-grade gold also occurs within discreet, structurally-controlled quartz veins and silicified zones.

Premium Exploration conducted extensive soil sampling, airborne and surface geophysics, and drilling during the period around 2010. In 2020, Endomines AB brought the Friday Gold Project into production based on a reported Measured and Indicated Resource of 462,000 tonnes grading 6.54 g/t gold and mined 6,600 tonnes of ore with a 3.52 g/t head grade (see Endomines AB Annual Reports for 2019, 2020). The Friday Gold Project is located within the OSZ approximately 8 km south of the Baner Project.

Qualified Person

The technical information in this press release has been reviewed and approved by Peter Karelse, P.Geo., a consultant to the Company, who is a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101. Mr. Karelse has more than 30 years of experience in exploration and development.

Figure 2: Baner Project Location

To view an enhanced version of Figure 2, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/8681/119470_e788002af44938c2_002full.jpg

About Idaho Champion Gold Mines Inc.

Idaho Champion is a discovery-focused exploration company that is committed to advancing its 100%-owned highly prospective mineral properties located in Idaho, United States. The Company's shares trade on the CSE under the trading symbol "ITKO", on the OTCQB under the trading symbol "GLDRF", and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the symbol "1QB1". Idaho Champion is vested in Idaho with the Baner Project in Idaho County, the Champagne Project located in Butte County near Arco, and four cobalt properties in Lemhi County in the Idaho Cobalt Belt. Idaho Champion strives to be a responsible environmental steward, stakeholder and contributing citizen to the local communities where it operates. Idaho Champion takes its social license seriously, employing local community members and service providers at its operations whenever possible.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

"Jonathan Buick"

Jonathan Buick, President and CEO

For further information, please visit the Company's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com or the Company's corporate website at www.idahochamp.com.

For further information, please contact:

Nicholas Konkin, Marketing and Communications

Phone: (416) 567- 9087

Email: nkonkin@idahochamp.com

THIS PRESS RELEASE DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN OFFER TO SELL OR THE SOLICITATION OF AN OFFER TO BUY ANY SECURITIES IN ANY JURISDICTION, NOR SHALL THERE BE ANY OFFER, SALE, OR SOLICITATION OF SECURITIES IN ANY STATE IN THE UNITED STATES IN WHICH SUCH OFFER, SALE, OR SOLICITATION WOULD BE UNLAWFUL.

Cautionary Statements

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its regulation services provider has reviewed or accepted responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release This press release may include forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation, concerning the business of the Company. Forward-looking information is based on certain key expectations and assumptions made by the management of the Company, including suggested strike extension. Although the Company believes that the expectations and assumptions on which such forward-looking information is based on are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking information because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date of this press release. The Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise, other than as required by applicable securities laws.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/119470
In November 2021 Asahi Kasei, a diversified Japanese multinational company, conducted its third "Automotive Interior Survey" together with Cologne, Germany-based market research institute SKOPOS in the four major automotive markets: the USA, Germany, China and Japan. 1,000 car users of varying income levels in each market responded to questions regarding their car purchasing behavior, understanding of automotive sustainability and preferences for the automotive interior. This survey supports the importance of Asahi Kasei's Healthy Car Portfolio to help OEMs satisfy the needs of the end user.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220406005066/en/

Figure 1 shows statistics regarding the Buying Behavior and desire for Car Ownership for current car owners in the USA, Germany, China and Japan. Figure 2 shows statistics regarding current car owners' interest in a variety of features when purchasing a vehicle. "I put a great emphasis on the cleanliness of my car" resonated the most with all audiences. (Graphic: Business Wire)

Consumers still want to own a vehicle

Whether new or used, survey respondents prefer to continue to pursue ownership in the future. Car sharing or not having a car were not attractive options (Fig.1).

84% of car users in China prefer to buy, finance or lease a new car, and they are willing to spend an average of 31% more on their next car. With a 7% increase compared to the costs of their current car, the overall willingness of German car users to spend more money on their next car is significantly lower compared to the USA (+19%) and Japan (+10%). In addition, over half of car users prefer to purchase a new car over a used car.

Brand loyalty is still a concern for OEMs

In addition, the results regarding brand loyalty confirm the findings of our surveys from 2019 and 2020, that consumers are willing to change brands quite easily. When it comes to purchasing a new car, on average only half of the car users in Germany would choose the same brand as the current car. However, while car users in the USA and Japan saw a similar trend to Germany, there was a stark contrast in China. In the world's biggest automotive market 72% of car owners will consider a different car brand for their next purchase.

These figures convey that a significant share of car users are not loyal to a single brand and must be convinced when shopping for their next car.

Cleanliness continues to play a major role in the interior

While fuel/power consumption, drivetrain technology, running costs and driving performance remain as dominating decision factors, the interior design has been exponentially gaining importance in recent years. One of every two car users in the four main markets will take interior design into account for their next car purchase. With growing electrification and automation, it is expected that the interior will become the main differentiating factor in upcoming years and its importance in the car purchasing process will further increase.

A key finding of the first survey from 2019 showed that car users worldwide highly value the cleanliness inside their car. Also, in 2021 64% of car users in Germany put a great emphasis on the cleanliness of their car, trumping intuitive operation (38%) and personalization (46%) (Fig. 2). A similar trend was seen in China (78%), Japan (72%) and the USA (62%).

Car users see high benefit in repellent and easy-to-maintain surfaces

Whether it is a dirty floor, stains and scratches on the interior surfaces, or smell, the general understanding of cleanliness differs among the regions. While car users in China are clearly annoyed by "unpleasant odors" (48%) and the so-called "new car smell" (23%), the share of car users annoyed by these factors is significantly lower in the other regions (Fig. 3). In contrast, "scratches on visible surfaces" are bothering one of every four car users in Germany (25%). This share has further increased compared to 2020 (21%). The same can be observed in the USA, with 29% of the car users being annoyed by scratches (2020: 19%). "Stains on fabrics" are also an annoyance factor for 30% of car users in Germany (2020: 26%) and 32% in the USA (2020: 26%).

A major share in all regions sees a benefit in "water and dirt repellent surfaces," with 74% in China, 70% in the USA, 65% in Japan and 63% in Germany. "Surface and seating materials that are easy to wash" was also in high regard, especially in the USA (81%) and in China (80%).

Heiko Rother, General Manager Business Development Automotive at Asahi Kasei Europe, comments, "Cleanliness was highly valued by car users even before the pandemic. The last two years have further fueled this desire, and the definition of 'cleanliness' has broadened."

Mike Franchy, Director of North American Mobility at Asahi Kasei America, continues, "With the cost of vehicles increasing consumers have their vehicles longer and want surfaces that are highly durable, easy to clean and continue to look new over time. In addition, our Healthy Car portfolio of anti-microbial textiles and plastics, along with technology to ensure interior air quality, we have solutions for the OEMs to address these needs of the market."

Changing perception of sustainability

The findings of the survey show "Sustainability" is no longer only defined by the drivetrain technology, but also by the choice of materials. For example, roughly half of the car users in Germany, China and the USA characterize a sustainable car based on "materials made from highly recyclables." (Fig. 4). In contrast, car users in Japan prioritized hybrid drivetrains to recyclables when characterizing sustainable automobiles.

This growing awareness towards sustainability in automobiles is also reflected in the car user's willingness to spend more money on a sustainable vehicle. In China, two out of three car users would pay more, in the USA and Japan every third, and in Germany every fourth.

Heiko Rother concludes, "The definition and the perception of sustainability in automobiles is changing. Car users are looking more into the materials being used electrification alone is not enough anymore. More sustainable interior surface materials that are also good-looking, durable, easy-to-maintain and clean will get more attention from car users. In the end, a 'long-lasting' material quality is being recognized as more sustainable."

Mike Franchy adds, "With our extensive product line of engineered plastics from Asahi Kasei Plastics North America, textiles from Sage Automotive Interiors and UVC LED technology from Crystal IS for interior air purification, we can collaborate with OEMs as a trusted partner to develop the interior functions and features the consumers demand."

About this survey

This survey is the global continuation of the "Asahi Kasei Europe Automotive Interior Survey" from 2019. In 2021 we asked 1,000 car users in each of the four automotive core markets Germany, China, USA and Japan regarding sustainability and their preferences towards materials and features around the future automotive interior. To learn more about the past surveys please visit https://automotive.asahi-kasei.eu/stories-interior-story-2019/ and https://automotive.asahi-kasei.eu/interior-story

About the SKOPOS GROUP

SKOPOS is a is a broad-based group of companies and, thanks to its six specialized units, has been offering bundled market research expertise for over 25 years. Digital and innovative. From employee surveys to UX research and mystery shopping. From classic market research and community research to customer experience and data science, we cover all relevant topics and methods. In addition to various other industries, automotive market research has been one of the most important pillars of SKOPOS GROUP for decades.

About the Asahi Kasei Corporation

The Asahi Kasei Group contributes to life and living for people around the world. Since its foundation in 1922 with ammonia and cellulose fiber businesses, Asahi Kasei has consistently grown through the proactive transformation of its business portfolio to meet the evolving needs of every age. With more than 44,000 employees around the world, the company contributes to a sustainable society by providing solutions to the world's challenges through its three business sectors of Material, Homes, and Health Care. Its Materials sector, comprised of Environmental Solutions, Mobility Industrial, and Life Innovation, includes a wide array of products from battery separators and biodegradable textiles to engineering plastics and sound solutions. For more information, visit www.asahi-kasei.com.

Asahi Kasei is also dedicated to sustainability initiatives and is contributing to reaching a carbon neutral society by 2050. To learn more, visit https://www.asahi-kasei.com/sustainability/.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220406005066/en/

Contacts:

North America:

Asahi Kasei America

Jonathan Todd

800 Third Ave, 30th Floor, New York, NY 10022

aka-info@ak-america.com



Europe:

Asahi Kasei Europe GmbH

Sebastian Schmidt

Fringsstrasse 17, 40221 Dusseldorf

+49 (0) 211-3399-2058

sebastian.schmidt@asahi-kasei.eu
The latest version of the company's open-source Suricata-based threat detection and hunting platform is available for download immediately

INDIANAPOLIS and PARIS, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Stamus Networks , a global provider of high-performance network-based threat detection and response systems, today announced the general availability of SELKS 7 - a major upgrade to the turnkey system based on the Suricata intrusion detection/prevention (IDS/IPS) and network security monitoring (NSM) system with a built-in network threat hunting console and graphical ruleset/threat intelligence feed manager.

SELKS is now available either as a portable Docker Compose package or as turnkey installation images (ISO files). Each option includes five key open-source components that comprise its name - Suricata, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana and Scirius Community Edition (Suricata Management and Suricata Hunting from Stamus Networks). In addition, SELKS includes components from Arkime, EveBox, and Cyberchef which were added after the acronym was established.

"We are excited to make SELKS 7 officially available and in a package that makes it possible to quickly deploy on any Linux or Windows OS in either a virtual or cloud environment," said Peter Manev, co-founder, and chief strategy officer of Stamus Networks. "The improved threat hunting interface and incident response dashboards along with new Docker package, make SELKS even more accessible to folks who want to explore the power of Suricata without an investment in a commercial solution."

First introduced in 2014, the release of SELKS 7 represents the latest incarnation of the open-source system from Stamus Labs , the threat intelligence and open-source division of Stamus Networks. This version includes several enhancements over its predecessors, including:

Docker package. In addition to pre-packaged Debian Linux-based ISO images, SELKS is now available as a Docker Compose package that allows SELKS to be installed on virtually any Linux or Windows system, without requiring a heavy installation process. And the docker-based architecture makes it faster and easier to deploy a new SELKS machine with specific versions of each component.

In addition to pre-packaged Debian Linux-based ISO images, SELKS is now available as a Docker Compose package that allows SELKS to be installed on virtually any Linux or Windows system, without requiring a heavy installation process. And the docker-based architecture makes it faster and easier to deploy a new SELKS machine with specific versions of each component. Fully automated PCAP replay. Allows SELKS to easily ingest and replay PCAP directly, allowing for fast detailed analysis in training or educational applications.

Allows SELKS to easily ingest and replay PCAP directly, allowing for fast detailed analysis in training or educational applications. Improved threat hunting filter sets. Thirty-eight (38) new or updated ready-to-use threat hunting filters that help the user quickly search the Suricata alert and NSM data for shadow IT, policy violations, and suspicious activity.

Thirty-eight (38) new or updated ready-to-use threat hunting filters that help the user quickly search the Suricata alert and NSM data for shadow IT, policy violations, and suspicious activity. Integrated Cyberchef. Allows the user to apply Cyberchef encoding, decoding, and data analysis to the events, protocol transactions, and flow records created by Suricata.

Allows the user to apply Cyberchef encoding, decoding, and data analysis to the events, protocol transactions, and flow records created by Suricata. Additional Kibana Dashboards. Six (6) new dashboards for network visibility and hunting with new support for the following protocols: SNMP, RDP, SIP, HTTP2, RFB, GENEVE , MQTT, and DCERPC. In addition, there is a new dashboard to help those working to solve SANS Institute challenges .

SELKS is a Stamus Networks contribution to the open-source community and is released, at no cost, under the GNU GPLv3 license as ISO images, Docker package, or as source code.

Kelley Misata, PhD, President and Executive Director of the Open Information Security Foundation (OISF) also believes SELKS 7 represents important advancements for the Suricata user community. "We are thrilled to see the continued evolution of this important Suricata showcase platform. For many years, we have used SELKS in our training courses because of its ability to showcase the power of Suricata for IDS and introductory network threat hunting based on protocol transaction and flow data," said Misata. "And we are excited for the Stamus team to bring it to the global Suricata community."

To download SELKS 7 and find additional information, visit the SELKS page on the Stamus Networks web site: https://www.stamus-networks.com/selks .

About Stamus Networks

Stamus Networks believes in a world where defenders are heroes, and a future where those they protect remain safe. As organizations face threats from well-funded adversaries, we relentlessly pursue solutions that make the defender's job easier and more impactful. A global provider of high-performance network-based threat detection and response systems, Stamus Networks helps enterprise security teams know more, respond sooner and mitigate their risk with insights gathered from cloud and on-premise network activity. Our solutions are advanced network detection and response systems that expose serious and imminent threats to critical assets and empower rapid response. For more information visit: stamus-networks.com .

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1781256/SELKS_7_Stamus_Networks.jpg

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1781381/stamus_Logo.jpg
BERLIN, April 6 (Xinhua) -- A German consumer organization announced on Wednesday it is suing U.S. technology giant Google over its use of cookie banners.

The design of the cookie banners on the German domain google.de violates national regulations, as well as European Union (EU) guidelines, according to the consumer organization North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW).

Due to Google's banner design, "refusing to process cookies is considerably more onerous than granting comprehensive consent," the organization said. It has filed its lawsuit with the Berlin Regional Court.

Although cookie banners should provide transparency about personal data, the German consumer watchdog complained that so-called "dark patterns" are encouraging consumers to give the most comprehensive consent possible regarding use of their data.

In Google's case, users only had to click once to accept all cookies. However, in order to reject the settings, consumers were redirected to a second level of the banner, and had to select multiple categories.

In response to a request from the Hamburg information safety officer Thomas Fuchs, Google informed the German authority it would add a "reject all" button to its cookie banners across Europe. The new feature will first be introduced in France, Fuchs said on Wednesday.

In December last year, fines were imposed on Google and Facebook in France due to their cookie policy. Both companies have their headquarters in Germany, and thus fall under the responsibility of Fuchs, who has already announced he will approach Facebook next. 
Best-Of-Breed AI-Based Providers Collaborate to Deliver

an Integrated Saas Solution for the Fintech Market

NEW YORK and TEL AVIV and LUXEMBOURG, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- ThetaRay, a leading provider of AI-powered transaction monitoring technology, today announced it is partnering with next-gen sanctions screening company Screena . Through the alliance, Screena's cloud-based AI-driven screening system will be fully integrated into ThetaRay's SONAR SaaS transaction monitoring solution, providing fintechs and banks with a holistic view of transactional and sanctions list risks.

ThetaRay's SONAR is the industry's most advanced financial crime prevention solution for global payments. Screena's real-time, AI-powered solution uses proprietary algorithms and risk analysis to screen transactions against financial sanctions watchlists with a high degree of precision. The combined transaction monitoring and integrated screening solution can be deployed within weeks.

"The financial world is facing the unprecedented challenge of implementing sanctions that require high-level automation and accuracy, yet ensure the smooth flow of transactions," said Cedric Iggiotti, CEO of Screena. "Screening is the first line of defense against sanctioned countries, individuals, groups, and companies, which are being added around the clock by various global authorities. However, speed and precision are major necessities today. Financial institutions cannot afford 2-5 days for the compliance department to investigate; customers will not stand for it."

SONAR uses an advanced form of AI called "artificial intelligence intuition" to analyze transactions, risk indicators and client data to detect suspicious activities across complex, cross-border transaction paths -- including the use of shell people and companies.

"The only way to accurately monitor the financial activities of sanctioned entities without causing pain to ordinary people is by leveraging advanced AI-powered capabilities," said Mark Gazit, ThetaRay CEO. "ThetaRay and Screena are partnering to help establish a new level of trust in the global financial system. We are committed to enabling unimpeded business and the flow of currencies while preventing money launderers and sanctioned parties from exploiting banks and payments fintechs for illegal activities. We know that the bad guys are using AI, so it is our responsibility to use the most advanced machine learning capabilities available to defend our banking system against them."

The ThetaRay system can identify sophisticated attempts to circumvent economic and trade sanctions and helps governments and financial institutions maintain smooth and uninterrupted global banking activities.

"ThetaRay has teamed up with Screena as the perfect partner to deliver value to our customers through one effective platform that accelerates the investigation process into suspected financial crimes and sanctions violations," said Dagan Osovlansky, Chief Product Officer, ThetaRay. "Cloud-based AML and screening enables fintechs especially to ramp up quickly and grow business opportunities in the financial ecosystem while instilling a new level of trust for global payments."

For more information, visit thetaray.com .

For more information on Screena, please visit https://screena.ai/ .

About Screena

Screena empowers banks, fintechs, and digital businesses to quickly and easily integrate name screening and entity resolution with any customer onboarding or payment platform. Screena's innovative technology stops wrongdoers without afflicting legitimate parties, allowing smooth customer registration and fast payment operations. Screena's AI-driven algorithms surface true positives with unrivaled precision and de-risk financial organizations from regulatory fines, personal liability, and reputational damage. Screena can be integrated with third-party systems in a matter of days. Its API-first solution combines extreme configurability and scalability to keep ahead of changing regulation while drastically reducing the cost of financial crime compliance.

About ThetaRay

ThetaRay's AI-powered SONAR transaction monitoring solution, based on "artificial intelligence intuition," allows banks and fintechs to expand their business opportunities through safe and reliable cross-border payments. The groundbreaking solution also improves customer satisfaction, reduces compliance costs, and increases risk coverage. ThetaRay's technology is the only SaaS offering that analyzes SWIFT traffic, risk indicators and client/payer/payee data to detect anomalies indicating money laundering activity across complex, cross-border transaction paths in a single unified platform. Financial organizations that rely on highly heterogeneous and complex ecosystems benefit greatly from ThetaRay's unmatchable low false positive and high detection rates.
Seasoned leader will add critical expertise surrounding the management and enhancement of Elemica's technology-helping to continue to drive a culture of innovation.

WAYNE, Pa., April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Elemica, the world's leading digital supply chain network, announced today that it has appointed Sam Addeo as their Chief Technology Officer effective April 4th of 2022. Addeo will be responsible for overseeing the continued development of Elemica's solutions to ensure that Elemica stays on the cutting edge of digital supply chain technologies.



"I'm excited about the future of our technology with Addeo at the helm," notes Elemica CEO David Muse. "We want to continue to have an industry leading solution and continued innovation is the best way to ensure our client's success. I have confidence that Sam will lead our development and continue to provide our client's avenues to the future of supply chain."

Prior to joining Elemica, Sam Addeo most recently served as the Chief Technology Officer of BluJay Solutions, a provider of transportation and customs compliance software acquired by E2open in 2021. Prior to that he was Chief Development Officer at Aptos, a leading retail and eCommerce software company. Previous experience also includes software leadership positions at Intelligrated (now part of Honeywell) and Manhattan Associates.

"This feels like the perfect opportunity," says Addeo. "Personally, I am looking forward to joining a team with a such a strong history of innovation. Aside from the state-of-the-art technology and industry leading network, I am very impressed with the talented team members that make up this organization. This position couldn't be a better fit."

Sam holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Michigan State University, graduating with highest honor as a member of the MSU Honors College.
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 6, 2022 / Gold Terra Resource Corp. (TSXV:YGT); (FSE:TX0); (OTCQX:YGTFF) ("Gold Terra" or the "Company") is pleased to announce assay results for three (3) holes to test the Yellorex zone. Drill hole GTCM22-030 intersected 6.41/t gold over 26.50 metres including 9.05 g/t over 4.00 metres and including 10.66 g/t gold over 3.0 metres and including 14.15 g/t gold over 5.50 metres. The hole was drilled along strike on the Campbell Shear for metallurgical testing required for the Company's upcoming updated resource estimate on the project. The Yellorex zone is situated on the Con Mine Property recently optioned from Newmont Canada FN Holdings ULC and Miramar Northern Mining Ltd., both wholly owned subsidiaries of Newmont Corporation (see November 22, 2021 press release). Holes GTCM22-027 and GTCM22-028 were drilled to test the Yellorex zone at depth of 400m below surface with GTCM22-028 intersecting 6.21g/t gold over 1.5 metres and GTCM22-027 intersecting 2.43 g/t gold over 1.0 metre.

Chairman and CEO, Gerald Panneton, commented, "The latest drilling on the Yellorex zone was completed in preparation for our updated mineral resource estimate by year-end as the core from Hole 30 will be used for metallurgical testing. Our updated mineral resource estimate is expected to add ounces from the Yellorex zone."

The location of holes GTCM21-027,28 and 30 is shown in the following Figure 1:

Figure 1: Location of holes GTCM22-027, 28 and 30.

Drilling Results

Hole GTCM22-030 was drilled as an 'off-angle' hole obliquely to the strike of the Campbell Shear to confirm the interpreted geometry of the Yellorex deposit's strike and plunge. The interpreted zone orientation was confirmed, and three high-grade lenses were intersected consisting of smoky quartz veins with arsenopyrite and pyrite with minor sphalerite and stibnite. The sericite alteration halo surrounding the high-grade lenses is intensive and extends from 237 to 587 metres along the hole. The recognition of an extensive alteration halo signature extending for more than 200 metres along strike around a high-grade mineralized zone is significant for the future exploration of the Campbell Shear. This will allow Gold Terra to test the shear at a larger (200-metre) spacing using the signature alteration halo as a tool to vector into high grade lenses such as Yellorex. The excellent intersection of 26.5 metres of ore typical of the Campbell shear in hole GTCM22-030 will provide more core volume for the metallurgical testing. The historical recovery of more than 5 million ounces of gold at the Con Mine averaged around 90% over the years it was in production.

Holes GTCM22-027 and GTCM22-028 tested the Yellorex deposit at depth and are believed to be off the main plunge of hole GTCM21-014 which intersected 5.22 g/t over 17.86 metres including 11.2 g/t gold over 4.57 metres (press release September 7, 2021). Both holes intersected the Campbell Shear at about 400 to 500 metres and minor mineralized zones consisting of arsenopyrite and pyrite stringers within a sericite alteration zone. Both holes intersected the alteration halo surrounding the Yellorex main deposit, which contains anomalous gold values in the 100ppb range over a width of approximately 100 metres. These holes are consistent with previous intersections just outside of the main high-grade plunge, typical of the Campbell shear zone.

A table of significant drill intersections for holes GTCM22-027, 028 and 030 are shown in Table 1:

Table 1: GTCM21-027, 028 and 030 intersections

DDH # Easting Northing Azimuth Dip From (m) To (m) Length (m) Au (g/t) GTCM21-027 635630 6922632 112 -65 503.50 506.65 3.15 1.06 GTCM21-027 551 552.00 1.00 2.43 GTCM21-028 635630 6922713 110 -60 463.25 464.25 1.00 1.08 GTCM21-028 479.6 480.40 0.80 1.61 GTCM21-028 536.25 537.75 1.50 6.21 GTCM22-030 636034 6922779 212 -49 243.50 270.00 26.50 6.41 including 249.25 252.25 3.00 10.66 including 256.50 260.50 4.00 9.05 including 264.50 270.00 5.50 14.15 GTCM22-030 320.50 322.00 1.05 1.11 GTCM22-030 480.70 485.00 4.30 1.73 GTCM22-030 582.00 583.00 1.00 1.20

Figure 3: Yellorex Zone

The 2021 drill program of 26 holes totaling 12,687 metres was completed on December 18th targeting the Campbell Shear over a strike length of 3 kilometres immediately south of the former Con Mine (1938-2003). The Campbell shear target and gold mineralization were intersected in all the holes of the 2021 program illustrating the continuity of the structure and identifying typical gold zoning similar to the former Con Mine gold mineralization.

The Company intends to drill approximately 40,000 metres in 2022 with the objective to delineate a high-grade gold mineral resource to add to the Company's current 1.2 million inferred ounces (See the technical report, titled "Technical Report on the 2021 Updated Mineral Resource Estimates, Northbelt Property, Yellowknife City Gold Project, Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada" with an effective date of March 14, 2021, which can be found on the Company's website at https://www.goldterracorp.com and on SEDAR at www.sedar.com) and ultimately advance towards an economic study.

Technical Appendix

This news release reports the assay results from three (3) drill holes from which 679 core samples were assayed. Results include final assays from holes GTCM-027, 028 and 030 for 1,918 meters of drilling, Assay results range from non-detectable gold to a highest assay of 30.0 g/t Au. The Company inserts certified standards and blanks into the sample stream as a check on laboratory Quality Control (QC). Drill core samples are cut by diamond saw at Gold Terra's core facilities in Yellowknife. A halved core sample is left in the core box. The other half core is sampled and transported by Gold Terra personnel in securely sealed bags to ALS preparation laboratory ("ALS") in Yellowknife. After sample preparation, samples are shipped to ALS's Vancouver facility for gold analysis. Gold assays of >3 g/t are re-assayed on a 30 g split by fire assay with gravimetric finish. Samples with visible gold are additionally assayed using a screen metallic method. ALS is a certified and accredited laboratory service. ALS routinely inserts certified gold standards, blanks and pulp duplicates, and results of all QC samples are reported.

Drill holes GTCM22-027 and 028 were drilled at right angles to the structure hosting the mineralization and dip angles of holes were designed to intersect the zones as close to normal as possible. Zones reported here are interpreted to be approximately 90 percent true thickness. Hole GTCM22-030 was drilled obliquely to the interpreted strike of the mineralization to test the interpreted geometry of the mineralized zone, and for metallurgical testing purpose.

The technical information contained in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Joseph Campbell, Chief Operating Officer, a Qualified Person as defined in National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects.

About Gold Terra's Yellowknife City Gold Project

The YCG project encompasses 800 sq. km of contiguous land immediately north, south and east of the City of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. Through a series of acquisitions, Gold Terra controls one of the six major high-grade gold camps in Canada. Being within 10 kilometres of the City of Yellowknife, the YCG is close to vital infrastructure, including all-season roads, air transportation, service providers, hydro-electric power, and skilled tradespeople. Gold Terra is currently focusing its drilling on the prolific Campbell shear, where 14 Moz of gold has been produced, and most recently on the Con Mine Option claims immediately south of the past producing Con Mine (1938-2003).

The YCG lies on the prolific Yellowknife greenstone belt, covering nearly 70 kilometres of strike length along the main mineralized shear system that host the former-producing high-grade Con and Giant gold mines. The Company's exploration programs have successfully identified significant zones of gold mineralization and multiple targets that remain to be tested which reinforces the Company's objective of re-establishing Yellowknife as one of the premier gold mining districts in Canada.

Visit our website at www.goldterracorp.com.

For more information, please contact:

Gerald Panneton, Chairman & CEO

gpanneton@goldterracorp.com

Mara Strazdins, Manager of Investor Relations

Phone: 1-778-897-1590 | 604-689-1749 ext 102

Strazdins@goldterracorp.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information

Certain statements made and information contained in this news release constitute "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation ("forward-looking information"). Generally, this forward-looking information can, but not always, be identified by use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events, conditions or results "will", "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "occur" or "be achieved" or the negative connotations thereof.

All statements other than statements of historical fact may be forward-looking information. Forward-looking information is necessarily based on estimates and assumptions that are inherently subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance, or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. In particular, this news release contains forward-looking information regarding the current drilling on the Campbell Shear on the Newmont Con Mine Option potentially adding high grade ounces to the Company's current YCG mineral resource, future planned drilling on the Con Mine Option area and the Company's objective of re-establishing Yellowknife as one of the premier gold mining districts in Canada.

There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as the Company's actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in this forward-looking information as a result of the factors discussed in the "Risk Factors" section in the Company's most recent MD&A and annual information form available under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com.

Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that would cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. The forward-looking information contained in this news release is based on information available to the Company as of the date of this news release. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. All of the forward-looking information contained in this news release is qualified by these cautionary statements. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information due to the inherent uncertainty thereof. Except as required under applicable securities legislation and regulations applicable to the Company, the Company does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update this forward-looking information.

SOURCE: Gold Terra Resource Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/696303/Gold-Terra-Intersects-641t-Gold-over-2650-metres-Including-1415-gt-over-550-meters-on-Yellorex-Zone-Yellowknife-NWT-as-Drilling-Continues-on-Con-Mine-Property
MONTREAL, QC / ACCESSWIRE / April 6, 2022 / Vior Inc. ("Vior" or the "Corporation"), (TSX-V:VIO, OTC PINK:VIORF and FRANKFURT:VL51) is pleased to announce the results of its Phase I (December 2021) drill program at its district-scale Belleterre gold ("Au") project ("Belleterre" or "Project") in the Abitibi-Temiscamingue region of Quebec (Figure 1). The objective of the Phase I program was to test the continuity of multiple gold-bearing veins at depth and better define the geological framework of the historic Belleterre mine trend, which has seen limited historic drilling below 200 metres ("m") vertical depths. Drilling successfully intersected the down-dip projections of multiple historically mineralized vein structures including a highlight intercept of 55.2 grams per tonne ("g/t") Au over 0.5 m in drill hole BV21-001. Drilling also intersected other previously unrecognized gold-bearing quartz veins and structures with additional details of the program highlighted below.

The Corporation's 4,000 m Phase II drill program is currently in-progress (see March 3, 2022 press release HERE) and comprises a mix of confirmation and step-out drilling along the projected extensions of multiple past producing gold bearing vein structures of the historic Belleterre gold mine.

Mark Fedosiewich, Vior's President and CEO commented, "Five core holes were drilled in Vior's Phase I maiden drill program, four of them returned gold intercepts including two narrow high-grade gold and three thick intercepts of lower-grade gold-bearing quartz veins. Our team is very encouraged by the strength of the gold system, which not only shows exceptional continuity over 350 meters down-dip of the historic Aubelle Mineralized Zone (AMZ) and the Conway vein, but also suggests these zones are increasing in thickness with depth. This initial drill program was a big step towards de-risking the Belleterre gold project, and the structural data obtained from this program will be critical in helping our team vector towards higher-grade vein shoots."

Mr. Fedosiewich continues, "In addition, we are very encouraged by the progress of our ongoing Phase II drill program, where we are focused on validating high-grade gold feeder structures surrounding the historic Belleterre gold mine. Several veins on the 12W horizon have been intersected with select samples being rushed for assay. We look forward to these results in the coming weeks and months."

Phase I Highlights:

Bonanza grade intercept of 55.2 g/t Au over 0.5 m (BV 21-001, Figure 2) 1.58 g/t Au over 8.0 m (BV21-002, Figure 2, 3 & 4) 6.37 g/t Au over 1.0 m within 0.65 g/t Au over 18.5 m (BV 21-005, Figure 2 & 3)

Two principal styles of vein mineralisation have been recognised: Strongly schistose basalt, altered in chlorite, biotite, carbonate and quartz, locally brecciated and intruded by lamprophyre & quartz (QZ) veining containing 3-20% pyrite ("PY")-pyrrhotite("PO") with trace sphalerite("SP") chalchopyrite ("CP") and; QZ vein injected in a chloritized gabbro, mineralized by stringer and blebs of PY (3-5%), CP (3%), SP (1%) and galena ("GN") (1%)

Drilling validated gold continuity at depth on two of the main structures hosting the AMZ and the Conway vein, with thickness of mineralized envelopes appearing to increase with depth (Figure 2 & 3). The intersection of these ore shoots remains open in all directions.

Identification of new mineralized structures including a parallel vein system located between the AMZ and Conway zone which returned low-grade gold over 12.5 m including 1.16 g/t Au over 3 m. (Figure 2 & 3)

This news release comprises the results of five (5) holes completed in the Phase I drill program totalling over 3,857 m (Figure 1 and Table 1 & 2). Phase I results were very encouraging with evidence of high-grade gold grading up to 55.2 g/t Au over 0.5 m, as well as wider, lower-grade intercepts ranging from 8.0 to 18.5 m at an average vertical depth of 500 m. Vior's technical team is especially encouraged by the wider mineralized intercepts, which suggest the gold-bearing structures may be getting thicker at depth. Vein-hosted gold deposits of the Abitibi greenstone belt typically exhibit exceptional vertical continuity with many deposits extending over 1,000+ m down-dip. Meanwhile, the Belleterre district is highly underexplored with historical drilling typically restricted to 100-300 m from surface, which highlights the untapped exploration potential at depth across the district.

Figure 1: Plan view map showing the Belleterre project as well as Phase I drill holes and highlight assay results.

Figure 2: Isometric cross-section A-A' of the Aubelle Mineralized Zone (AMZ) and the Conway vein showing high-grade gold intercepts in BV 21-001.

Figure 3: Schematic cross-section B-B' of the AMZ & Conway vein system.

Figure 4: Drill core photo's showing mineralization and gold distribution in drill hole BV21-002.

Table1: Phase I significant drill intercepts results.

Table 2: Phase I drill collar coordinates.

New Technical Advisor

Vior is pleased to announce that Chad Peters, P.Geo., B.Sc.in Geology and Earth Sciences, has joined Vior as a Technical Advisor and will assist Vior's highly experienced technical and management teams in advancing the Corporation's portfolio of projects, with the priority being on the flagship Belleterre project. Mr. Peters has significant exploration and underground mining experience in orogenic vein-hosted deposits in Archean Greenstone belts, similar to the geology at Belleterre. Prior to co-founding Ridgeline Minerals in 2018, Mr. Peters was a managing member of the Premier Gold Mines Ltd. exploration team, responsible for the discovery of 10+ Moz of gold, including two large deposits in Canada, with the largest being the 8+ Moz Hardrock Project discovery (now the Greenstone Project) owned by Equinox Gold Corp. Mark Fedosiewich, President & CEO of Vior welcomes Chad to the team in Vior's pursuit of the next significant gold discovery in Quebec.

The Belleterre Project

The property is located near the town of Belleterre in the Abitibi-Temiscamingue region of Quebec, 95 km south of Rouyn-Noranda, QC. The property consists of 551 claims over 30,258 hectares (302.6 sq km), forming a district-scale exploration package that extends over a strike length of 37 km. The Project includes the option to acquire the former high-grade Belleterre Gold Mine that produced over 750,000 oz. gold at 10.73 grams per tonne and 95,000 oz silver (Ag) at 1.73 g/t between 1936 and 1959 (Source: Sigeom MERN). The property has been under-explored for the past 60 years and has never been the subject of such significant consolidation until now. More on Belleterre can be found HERE.

Vior Inc.

Vior is a hybrid junior mining exploration company based in Quebec, whose corporate strategy is to generate, explore and develop high-quality projects in proven and favourable mining jurisdictions in North America. Through the years, Vior's management and technical teams have demonstrated their ability to discover several gold deposits and many high-quality mineral prospects.

QA/QC Controls

Vior has implemented a Quality Assurance and Quality Control (QA/QC) program to ensure sampling and analysis of all exploration work is conducted in accordance with industry best practices, including certified reference material (CRM) standards and blank material inserted every 20 samples. Sample preparation and gold analyses were performed either at Activation Laboratories Ltd (Actlabs) in Sainte-Germaine-Boule, QC or by SGS Canada Inc., with a preparation of samples performed at the SGS Val-d'Or with analysis of samples performed at the SGS Burnaby site in BC. All samples were analyzed for gold by fire-assays (50g) with an atomic absorption finish or ICP-AES technic. Repeats were carried out by fire-assay (50g) followed by gravimetric testing on each sample containing more than 3.0 g/t Au. Selected samples are also analyzed for multi-elements, including silver, using a four-acid digestion finish ICP-MS method.

Qualified Persons

The technical content disclosed in this press release was reviewed and approved by Laurent Eustache, Vior's Executive Vice-President and Christian Blanchet, Operations Manager for Vior, both Qualified Persons as per National Instrument 43-101.

For further information, please contact:

Mark Fedosiewich

President and CEO

613-898-5052

mfedosiewich@vior.ca

Laurent Eustache

Executive Vice-President

514-442-7707

leustache@vior.ca

www.vior.ca

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its regulation services provider (as that term is defined in the Policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking statements. All statements, other than of historical facts, that address activities, events or developments that the Corporation believes, expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future including, without limitation, the planned exploration program on the Belleterre project, the expected positive exploration results, the timing of the exploration results, the ability of the Corporation to continue with the exploration program, the availability of the required funds to continue with the exploration and the approval from the Ministere de l'energie et des ressources naturelle ("MERN") of the request for abandonment of the two mining concessions filed by 9293-0122 Quebec Inc. are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are generally identifiable by use of the words "will", "should", "continue", "expect", "anticipate", "estimate", "believe", "intend", "to earn", "to have', "plan" or "project" or the negative of these words or other variations on these words or comparable terminology. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the Corporation's ability to control or predict, that may cause the actual results of the Corporation to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations include, among other things, failure to meet expected, estimated or planned exploration expenditures, the possibility that future exploration results will not be consistent with the Corporation's expectations, general business and economic conditions, changes in world gold markets, sufficient labour and equipment being available, changes in laws and permitting requirements, unanticipated weather changes, title disputes and claims, environmental risks, the refusal by the MERN to approve the request for abandonment of the two mining concessions held by 9293-0122 Quebec Inc. as well as those risks identified in the Corporation's annual Management's Discussion and Analysis. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should assumptions underlying the forward-looking statements prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described and accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Although the Corporation has attempted to identify important risks, uncertainties and factors which could cause actual results to differ materially, there may be others that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. The Corporation does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update these forward-looking statements except as otherwise required by applicable law.

SOURCE: Vior, Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/696318/Viors-Maiden-Drill-Program-Confirms-High-Grade-Gold-Veins-On-The-Historic-Belleterre-Mine-Trend
London Finance & Investment Group Plc - Disposal of Shares in Finsbury Food Group Plc

6 April 2022

London Finance & Investment Group PLC.

(Incorporated in England with registered number 201151)

LSE code: LFI

JSE code: LNF

ISIN: GB0002994001

("Lonfin" or "the Company")

London Finance & Investment Group PLC

Disposal of shares in Finsbury Food Group PLC ("Finsbury")

The Company announces that, on 6 April 2022, it sold 300,000 ordinary shares of 1 pence each in the capital of Finsbury.

Following this transaction, the Company holds 3,900,000 shares which represents less than 3.00% of Finsbury's issued share capital.

The information communicated within this announcement was previously deemed to constitute inside information as stipulated under the Market Abuse Regulations (EU) No. 596/2014. Upon the publication of this announcement, this information is considered to be in the public domain.

The Directors of the Company accept responsibility for the contents of this announcement.

United Kingdom

6thApril 2022

For further information, please contact:

London Finance & Investment Group PLC: 020 7796 9060

(David Marshall/Edward Beale)

Johannesburg Sponsor:

Questco Corporate Advisory Proprietary Limited
LONDON, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- POLLING of the British public has revealed that 77 percent believe that further research should be urgently undertaken to establish the harm caused to human health by plastic.

This survey from Common Seas, follows the recent revelation from a scientific paper commissioned by the social enterprise and published in March, showing micro plastics have entered the blood of almost 8-in-10 humans studied.

Scientists who conducted this research at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam are concerned that the presence of plastic has the potential to introduce and host pathogens and harmful chemicals into the body.

In light of this publication, almost 60 percent of the population are concerned about what the presence of these microplastics in human blood will mean for their health.

Revelations from this survey highlighting public concern about the impact of plastic on human health further supports Common Seas' Blood Type Plastic Campaign calling on the UK Government to introduce a new 15 million National Plastic Health Impact Research Fund.

"Last week we found out the majority of us had plastic in our blood and our polling shows the public want more research conducted," explains Common Seas CEO Jo Royle. "This vital area of research is critically underfunded.

"We have a right to know what all this plastic is doing to our bodies and the public are demanding to know more. With plastic production on track to double within the next 20 years the risk to the global population is only going to increase. The need for further research is urgent. If the government were to assign 15m, just 0.1 percent of the UK's annual R&D funding, for dedicated research into the matter we'd have a much greater understanding of what this means for human health."

For more information, and to sign the petition for the National Plastic Health Impact Research Fund which has 55,000 signatures, visit commonseas.com.
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 6, 2022 / Core Assets Corp., ("Core Assets" or the "Company") (CSE:CC)(FSE:5RJ)(OTCQB:CCOOF) is pleased to announce the discovery of a mineralized copper occurrence observed during a property accessibility assessment carried out in late March of 2022 at the Laverdiere Project (the "Project"); eastern Blue Property (the "Property"), Atlin Mining District of NW British Columbia.

Highlights

The Laverdiere Project was accessed via snowmobile from Atlin Lake in late March 2022. This historic Cu-Fe Skarn-Porphyry Target is located approximately 50km southwest, or a 45-minute ride, from the town of Atlin, BC.

This historic Cu-Fe Skarn-Porphyry Target is located approximately 50km southwest, or a 45-minute ride, from the town of Atlin, BC. During the Property visit, multiple previously unsampled showings were identified at the Project - confirming the existence of Cu-Fe mineralization between historic adits. Currently, the length of known surficial mineralization at Laverdiere measures 3.9km (Figures 1-3).

- confirming the existence of Cu-Fe mineralization between historic adits. Representative samples of two target lithologies were collected and consisted of potassic altered granodiorite containing disseminated chalcopyrite and magnetite, as well as Cu-Fe Skarn, comprised of fine-grained magnetite and chalcopyrite in marble with abundant malachite staining.

Prominent ridgeline and outcrop at the Project are snow free and Core Assets remains optimistic for an early June start to the 2022 diamond drilling program.

Geophysical interpretations and drill targeting for the historic Laverdiere Project, as well we the Silver Lime Project (which includes the Jackie Target and the 2021 Discovery Zone) are currently underway.

Core Assets attended the 2022 Atlin Exploration Job Fair on March 25 th to engage with the community and seek local applicants for various employment and skills training opportunities available for the 2022 exploration season.

Core Assets' President and CEO Nick Rodway comments, "Visiting the Blue Property in late March was a game changer. We now have a better understanding of how easily accessible the Property is during winter months. The Laverdiere Project was reached effortlessly via a 45-minute snowmobile trip from Atlin, demonstrating how cost-effective mobilizing materials to the Blue Property will be during consecutive exploration programs."

Figure 1: a) Cu-Fe Skarn mineralization in marble at the Laverdiere Project, March 2022; b) Malachite staining along fractures in potassic altered granodiorite at the Laverdiere Project, geologist at bottom for scale, March 2022.

Figure 2: Location Map of the Laverdiere Project of the Blue Property, highlighting the locations of historic adits, drill collars, and surficial samples in reference to the unsampled outcrop observed in March 2022.

About the March 2022 Property Visit

During the last week of March 2022, Core Assets' Chief Executive Officer and Senior Project Geologist travelled to the Laverdiere Project (eastern Blue Property) to begin drill placement planning and to gauge property accessibility during winter months. The Laverdiere Project was accessed via snowmobile by traveling southwest from the town of Atlin, BC for 45 minutes. Multiple unsampled exposures of magnetic, copper-stained lithologies were identified along a 3.9-kilometre mineralized corridor coinciding with the Llewellyn Fault. Rock units identified during the property visit consisted of medium-grained granodiorite and fine-grained Cu-Fe Skarn mineralization hosted in marble (Figure 3). The granodiorite unit exhibits locally intense potassic alteration in the form of potassium feldspar and shreddy, fine-grained biotite after hornblende. This lithology also contains minor fine-grained, disseminated chalcopyrite and magnetite (locally altered to hematite) throughout, with more generous amounts of disseminated chalcopyrite and malachite staining observed along internal fractures. Representative Cu-Fe Skarn samples are composed of fine- to very fine-grained magnetite with abundant malachite staining and traces of disseminated chalcopyrite.

Figure 3: a) Representative sample of malachite-stained Cu-Fe Skarn mineralization in marble from the Laverdiere Project, March 2022; b) Representative sample of potassic altered granodiorite from the Laverdiere Project, March 2022.

Both units described above were intersected during historic drilling efforts carried out at the Laverdiere Project in 1971 (Hobo Creek Copper Mines Ltd., 1971). The most significant result obtained during this drill campaign included 46 meters of 1.76% Cu from surface in hole HC-1. Additionally, disseminated and fracture-coating chalcopyrite and molybdenite mineralization hosted in potassic altered granodiorite was observed at the bottom of three out of the five drill holes completed in 1971. HC-5, the deepest drill hole completed by Hobo Creek Copper Mines that season, intersected 65 meters of potassic altered granodiorite and an increase in sulphide (cpy-moly) mineralization was noted with increasing depth. Reported assay values from HC-5 ranged from 0.20% to 0.51% Cu between 111.25- and 117.95-meters depth (End of Hole) and indicate the presence of a Cu-Mo Porphyry link to the high-grade Cu-Fe Skarn mineralization at the Laverdiere Project.

National Instrument 43-101 Disclosure

Nicholas Rodway, P.Geo, (License# 46541) (Permit to Practice# 100359) is President, CEO and Director of the Company, and qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Rodway supervised the preparation of the technical information in this news release.

About Core Assets Corp.

Core Assets Corp. is a Canadian mineral exploration company focused on the acquisition and development of mineral projects in British Columbia., Canada. The Company currently holds 100% title ownership in the Blue Property, which covers a land area of109,994.4 ha (~1,010 km). The project lies within the Atlin Mining District, a well-known gold mining camp located in the unceded territory of the Taku River Tlingit First Nation and the Carcross/Tagish First Nation. The Blue Property hosts a major structural feature known as The Llewellyn Fault Zone ("LFZ"). This structure is approximately 140km in length and runs from the Tally-Ho Shear Zone in the Yukon, south through the Blue Property to the Alaskan Panhandle Juneau Ice Sheet in the United States. Core Assets believes that the south Atlin Lake area and the LFZ has been neglected since the last major exploration campaigns in the 1980's. The LFZ plays an important role in mineralization of near surface metal occurrences across the Blue Property. The past 50 years have seen substantial advancements in the understanding of porphyry, skarn, and carbonate replacement type deposits both globally and in BC's Golden Triangle. The company has leveraged this information at the Blue Property to tailor an already proven exploration model and believes this could facilitate a major discovery. Core Assets is excited to become one of Atlin Mining District's premier explorers where its team believes there are substantial opportunities for new discoveries and development in the area.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors

CORE ASSETS CORP.

"Nicholas Rodway"

President & CEO

Tel: 604.681.1568

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

Statements in this document which are not purely historical are forward-looking statements, including any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations, or intentions regarding the future. Forward looking statements in this news release include the Company's future objective of becoming a premier explorer; that the Company's exploration model can facilitate a major discovery on the Blue Property; that the Blue Property is prospective for copper, zinc and silver; that Core Assets will undertake additional exploration activity on the Blue Property; and that the Blue Property has substantial opportunities for a discovery and development; . It is important to note that the Company's actual business outcomes and exploration results could differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. Risks and uncertainties include that further permits may not be granted timely or at all; the mineral claims may prove to be unworthy of further expenditure; there may not be an economic mineral resource; certain exploration methods that we thought would be effective may not prove to be in practice or on our claims; economic, competitive, governmental, geopolitical, environmental and technological factors may affect the Company's operations, markets, products and prices; our specific plans and timing drilling, field work and other plans may change; we may not have access to or be able to develop any minerals because of cost factors, type of terrain, or availability of equipment and technology; and we may also not raise sufficient funds to carry out or complete our plans. Additional risk factors are discussed in the section entitled "Risk Factors" in the Company's Management Discussion and Analysis for its recently completed fiscal period, which is available under Company's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com . Except as required by law, the Company will not update or revise these forward-looking statements after the date of this document or to revise them to reflect the occurrence of future unanticipated events.

SOURCE: Core Assets Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/696356/CORRECTING-and-REPLACING-Core-Assets-Discovers-Additional-Mineralized-Copper-Occurrence-During-Successful-Winter-Accessibility-Assessment-at-the-Blue-Property
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 6, 2022 / Lucky Minerals Inc.(TSXV:LKY) (OTC PINK:LKMNF) (FRA:LKY) ("Lucky" or the "Company") is pleased to announce it has received assay results for trenches T-17, T-18 and T-19 from its ongoing work at the Wayka epithermal gold discovery at its 100% owned Fortuna Property ("Fortuna") in southern Ecuador. This Cluster of trenches is located approximately 75 metres south of the combined trenches T-5 and T-6 where an average of 1.67 g/t gold was reported over 61 metres (please see November 9, 2021 News Release).

Francois Perron, President and CEO of Lucky stated, "Our investigation of the area identified by T-10 and T-11 has exposed a structure of scale with T-17 reporting at least 36 metres of mineralization. The fact that this structure is in relatively close proximity to previous work where the 61 metres of mineralization was reported, highlights the potential for multiple mineralized structures in close proximity. We are eager to find out what lies between the areas that we were able to trench, as there is potential for discovery of other structures. The upcoming drill program will better determine how all these structures manifest in 3D."

Trench Geology & Alteration Map

Trenches T-17 and T-18 are mineralized along east north-east trending lenses hosted in silicified meta-granites. It has been observed that because of its brittle behavior the meta-granites appear to be a better host rock in contrast to schists that have a ductile behavior. Hydrothermal solutions appear to have penetrated preferentially along the rock foliation and at the intersection of NW, NE and EW trending faults and fractures. Lucky has retained the services of SRK Consulting (Toronto office) to complete a structural analysis of the mineralized structures at Wayka.

Table 1: Trench 17 gold assay results

Table 2: Trench 18 gold assay results

Table 2 shows gold assay results in Trench-18 across three silicified lenses each 3.0 metres wide in silicified meta-granites.

Table 3: Trench 19 gold assay results

Table 3 shows gold assay results in Trench-19 across a width of 12 metres of silicified schists and with an average of 0.16 g/t gold.

In both rock types (meta-granites & schists) the wall rock alteration is mainly advanced argillic (kaolinite, alunite & pyrophyllite) type.

Wayka - Next Steps

Work including drill hole targeting continues in preparation for the upcoming first 3,000 metres phase of drilling.

Targeting will be informed by the following:

Soils (just completed); Alteration mapping of Wayka project area (just completed); geophysics (just completed, finalizing inversions); trenches (ongoing); Structural analysis of Wayka area (field work completed awaiting final report); Prospecting on anomalous areas.

Preparation work for mobilization of drilling equipment is underway.

QA/QC Protocols

All exploration work is completed following QA/QC protocols and include the insertion of a coarse blank, a standard and duplicate sample on every batch of 25 samples.

A total of 191 soil samples were submitted to ALS Chemex Labs in Quito for preparation work, and the analytical work was completed at their lab facility in Lima, Peru. ALS Chemex is an ISO certified and accredited laboratory. A total of 836 soil samples were submitted to Bureau Veritas Labs in Quito for preparation work, and the analytical work was completed at their lab facility in Lima, Peru. Bureau Veritas is an ISO certified and accredited laboratory.

Further analytical results will be released as they are received.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

"Francois Perron"

Chief Executive Officer

About Lucky

Lucky is an exploration and development company targeting large-scale mineral systems in proven districts with the potential to host world class deposits. Lucky owns a 100% interest in the Fortuna Property.

The Company's Fortuna Project is comprised of twelve contiguous, 550 km2 (55,000 Hectares, or 136,000 Acres) exploration concessions. Fortuna is located in a highly prospective, yet underexplored, gold belt in southern Ecuador.

Covid-19 Safety Protocols

Lucky has strict rules in place for all workers arriving to and from field sites. All personnel are tested upon arriving and leaving and are tested every two weeks. All personnel are following COVID protocols with permanent disinfection procedures in place and are following correspondent social distancing while being isolated from the surrounding communities.

Qualified Person

Victor Jaramillo, M.Sc.A., P.Geo., Lucky's Exploration Manager and a qualified person in accordance with National Instrument 43-101, is responsible for supervising the exploration program at the Fortuna Project for Lucky Minerals and has reviewed and approved the technical information contained in this news release.

Further information on Lucky can be found on the Company's website at www.luckyminerals.com and at www.sedar.com, or by contacting Francois Perron, President and CEO, by email at investors@luckyminerals.com or by telephone at (866) 924 6484.

Or by contacting:

Renmark Financial Communications Inc.

Kerry Schacter: kschacter@renmarkfinancial.com

Tel: (416) 644-2020 or (514) 939-3989

www.renmarkfinancial.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary Statement Regarding Adjacent Properties and Forward-Looking Information

This news release contains forward-looking statements relating to the future operations of the Company and other statements that are not historical facts. Forward-looking statements are often identified by terms such as "will", "may", "should", "anticipate", "expects" and similar expressions. All statements other than statements of historical fact, included in this release, including, without limitation, statements regarding the future plans and objectives of the Company are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to: uncertainties related to exploration and development; the ability to raise sufficient capital to fund exploration and development; changes in economic conditions or financial markets; increases in input costs; litigation, legislative, environmental and other judicial, regulatory, political and competitive developments; technological or operational difficulties or inability to obtain permits encountered in connection with exploration activities; and labor relations matters. This list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect the Company's forward-looking information. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations also include risks detailed from time to time in the filings made by the Company with securities regulators.

The reader is cautioned that assumptions used in the preparation of any forward-looking information may prove to be incorrect. Events or circumstances may cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted, as a result of numerous known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Company. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking information. Such information, although considered reasonable by management at the time of preparation, may prove to be incorrect and actual results may differ materially from those anticipated. Forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date of this news release and the Company will not update or revise publicly any of the included forward-looking statements unless required by Canadian securities law.

SOURCE: Lucky Minerals Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/696188/Trench-T-17-Assays-086-GT-Gold-Across-36-Metre-Width
Initial Phase 1 results included 2,369 g/t (83.6 oz/ton) AgEq over 1.01 m within a broader intercept of 361.8 g/t (12.76 oz/t) AgEq over 8.37 m in Hole NOR-21-004

Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 6, 2022) - Silver Dollar Resources Inc. (CSE: SLV) (OTCQX: SLVDF) ("Silver Dollar" or the "Company") is pleased to report that Phase 2 exploration drilling is underway at the La Joya Silver Project (the "Property") located in the state of Durango, Mexico.





Figure 1: Drilling in progress at the La Joya Project on hole NOR 22-012

To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7232/119385_0f7c40c734dfdb78_001full.jpg

Phase 2 drilling will remain focused on the underexplored Noria portion of the Property and new targets that were identified in the results received to date from the Phase 1 drilling program.

As previously reported, a new discovery that is of primary interest is a shallow high-grade gold zone that was unexpectedly hit in hole NOR-21-004. The hole, which deviated significantly to the south of the intended target, encountered high-grade gold in multiple intervals that included 19.2 grams per tonne (g/t) (0.677 oz/ton) gold (Au) over 3.00 metres (m) starting from a depth of 126 m downhole and 29.0 g/t (1.023 oz/ton) Au over 1.01 m starting from a depth of 164.61 m downhole.

The Phase 1 program consisted of 11 holes for a total of 2,424 m of drilling. Sample assay results for the first seven holes were reported on March 24, 2022 (See news release), and results for the remaining holes are expected shortly. For Phase 1 drill hole collar locations, see plan map.

"We are fully funded for Phase 2 drilling and excited to commence follow up on the new gold discovery," said Mike Romanik, president of Silver Dollar. "We are expecting the balance of the Phase 1 drill results shortly and will tailor and expand the program as additional targets become more clearly defined."

Mike Kilbourne, P.Geo., an independent Qualified Person as defined in NI 43-101, has reviewed and approved the technical contents of this news release on behalf of the Company.





Figure 2: Click on the image above to view a two-minute video introducing the La Joya Project

If you cannot view the video above, please visit:

https://vimeo.com/497779460

About the La Joya Project

The La Joya Project is situated approximately 75 kilometres directly southeast of the state capital city of Durango in a prolific mineralized region with past-producing and operating mines including Grupo Mexico's San Martin Mine, Industrias Penoles's Sabinas Mine, Pan American Silver's La Colorada Mine, and First Majestic's La Parrilla and Del Toro Silver Mines. For additional information on the Project click on the satellite map above to watch a two-minute video.

About Silver Dollar Resources Inc.

Silver Dollar is a mineral exploration company that completed its initial public offering in May 2020 and is fully funded for 2022 with approximately $9 million in the treasury. The Company's projects are located in two of the prolific mining jurisdictions in the world and include the advanced exploration and development stage La Joya Silver Project in the state of Durango, Mexico; and the discovery-stage Pakwash Lake and the Longlegged Lake properties in the Red Lake Mining District of Ontario, Canada. The Company has an aggressive growth strategy and is actively reviewing potentially accretive acquisitions with a focus on drill-ready projects in mining-friendly jurisdictions internationally.

For additional information, you can download our latest presentation by clicking here and you can follow us on Twitter by clicking here.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

Signed "Michael Romanik"

Michael Romanik,

President, CEO & Director

Silver Dollar Resources Inc.

Direct line: (204) 724-0613

Email: mike@silverdollarresources.com

179 - 2945 Jacklin Road, Suite 416

Victoria, BC, V9B 6J9

Forward-Looking Statements:

This news release may contain "forward-looking statements." Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date of this news release and, except as may be required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/119385
Red Light Holland's Sarah Hashkes' article titled "A Precise Definition of Microdosing Psychedelics is Needed to Promote Equitable Regulation" is currently available on the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School's online platform

Hashkes to participate in an Online Webinar, A Macro View of Microdosing, with Industry Leaders on April 13th, 2022 organized by Harvard's Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR) at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School aiming to advance evidence-based psychedelics law and policy

Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 6, 2022) - Red Light Holland Corp. (CSE: TRIP) (FSE: 4YX) (OTC Pink: TRUFF) ("Red Light Holland" or the "Company"), an Ontario-based corporation engaged in the production, growth, and sale of a premium brand of magic truffles, is pleased to announce Sarah Hashkes, the company's Chief Technology and Innovation Officer (CTIO) will be participating in Harvard Law School's online webinar and symposium titled 'A Macro View of Microdosing'. The online webinar scheduled for April 13, 2022, 12:30 PM EDT will gather experts on the science, law, and business of microdosing for a panel discussion accompanied by a digital symposium on the Bill of Health, Harvard's online platform for readers interested in news, commentary, and scholarship in the fields of health law policy, biotechnology, and bioethics. After a keynote address by Dr. James Fadiman, a longtime microdosing scholar and advocate, the event will turn to a panel discussion of the promise, risks, and future of microdosing psychedelics.

"This is a great initiative I'm proud to be part of," said Sarah Hashkes, CTIO of Red Light Holland. "I'm excited to be able to share my expertise on the intersection of psychedelic science, commerce, and regulations with these expert thought leaders. I hope to share some of the anonymized information our users of Red Light Holland's iMicroapp consented to share as well as our market research data from Oregon and a review of the latest scientific publications around microdosing - all in hopes of promoting responsible legal access to naturally occurring Psilocybin."

"Red Light Holland is extremely grateful for all of Sarah Hashkes' hard work. Our iMicro App which collects consensual data, including usage, dosage and biometric movement data of end consumers of Red Light Holland's products in The Netherlands is essential to learn about people's actual experiences with microdosing. It's great that Sarah will get to share our preliminary findings, unique voice and self-regulatory approach to responsible use and legalization with other respected industry leaders and an intrigued online audience," said Todd Shapiro, CEO and Director of Red Light Holland. "We are also grateful for Harvard's Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation for facilitating these important discussions and promoting expert knowledge on microdosing."

The event is organized by Harvard's Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR), a three-year initiative to examine the ethical, legal, and social implications of psychedelics research, commerce, and therapeutics. Launched in summer 2021 with a generous grant from the Saisei Foundation, the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR) at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School aims to advance evidence-based psychedelics law and policy.

Sarah Hashkes's article titled "A Precise Definition of Microdosing Psychedelics is Needed to Promote Equitable Regulation" can be found at this link: https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/04/05/microdosing-psychedelics-definition/

To register for the Harvard's Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR) free online webinar go to: https://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/eventReg?oeidk=a07ej1bbcdn85bb5c3f&oseq=&c=&ch=

About Red Light Holland

Red Light Holland is an Ontario-based corporation engaged in the production, growth and sale (through existing Smart Shops operators and an advanced e-commerce platform) of a premium brand of magic truffles.

For additional information on the Company

Todd Shapiro

Chief Executive Officer & Director

Tel: 647-643-TRIP (8747)

Email: todd@redlight.co

Website: www.RedLight.co

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Market Regulator (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward Looking Information

This press release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. These statements relate to future events or future performance. The use of any of the words "could", "intend", "expect", "believe", "will", "projected", "estimated" and similar expressions and statements relating to matters that are not historical facts are intended to identify forward-looking information and are based on the Company's current belief or assumptions as to the outcome and timing of such future events. The forward-looking information and forward-looking statements contained herein include, but are not limited to, statements regarding: the ability of the Company to deliver products to retail shops; the safety of the Company's products; the uses and potential benefits of the Company's products; the Harvard Law School's Online webinar, keynote address, and the ensuing panel discussion proceeding as scheduled; and the CTIO of the Company to be able to attend and present the webinar to promote the responsible legal access to naturally occurring Psilocybin.

Forward-looking information in this news release are based on certain assumptions and expected future events, namely: continued approval of the Company's activities by the relevant governmental and/or regulatory authorities; the continued growth of the Company; the Company meeting their anticipated timeline and process for growth, sales, production and commercialization; the Company's products being safe and providing their anticipated benefits; the Harvard Law School's Online webinar, keynote address, and the ensuing panel discussion proceeding as scheduled; and the CTIO of the Company to be able to attend and present the webinar to promote the responsible legal access to naturally occurring Psilocybin.

These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements, including but not limited to: the potential inability of the Company to continue as a going concern; risks associated with potential governmental and/or regulatory action with respect to the Company's operations; competition within the markets that the Company operates in; risks with respect to the safety of the Company's products; the risk that there is no potential benefit of the Company's products; risk that the Company will be unable to develop its products; risk that the Harvard Law School's Online webinar, keynote address, and ensuing panel discussion will be canceled or rescheduled; and risk that the CTIO of the Company to be unable to attend and present the webinar and/or unable to promote the responsible legal access to naturally occurring Psilocybin.

Readers are cautioned that the foregoing list is not exhaustive. Readers are further cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, as there can be no assurance that the plans, intentions or expectations upon which they are placed will occur. Such information, although considered reasonable by management at the time of preparation, may prove to be incorrect and actual results may differ materially from those anticipated.

Forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement and reflect the Company's expectations as of the date hereof and are subject to change thereafter. The Company undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, estimates or opinions, future events or results or otherwise or to explain any material difference between subsequent actual events and such forward-looking information, except as required by applicable law.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/119459
Photo taken on Jan. 8, 2021 shows freight trains at Erenhot Port in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. (Photo by Guo Pengjie/Xinhua)

HOHHOT, April 6 (Xinhua) -- The land port of Erenhot in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region saw its freight transport export volume increase 41.4 percent year on year in the first quarter of this year, local authorities have said.

In the first three months, 642,000 tonnes of freight were exported via the port, according to the Erenhot station under the China Railway Hohhot Group Co., Ltd.

During the period, the port logged 734 China-Europe freight trains, up 25.7 percent year on year, said Yun Zhijun, director of the Erenhot station's dispatch desk.

Currently, 57 China-Europe freight train routes pass through Erenhot Port, the largest land port on the China-Mongolia border. 
FN Media Group Presents USA News Group News Commentary

VANCOUVER, BC, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- In response to rising gas prices, the Biden administration has announced it will release 1 million barrels of oil per day from reserves. At its core, the government's plan is to increase domestic production, starting with 1 million barrels per day this year, and nearly 700,000 barrels per day more next year. However, the White House statement also pointed fingers at companies for not stepping up production, and is calling on Congress to make companies pay fees on wells from their leases that haven't been used in years. The reality is, producing more domestic oil is currently quite difficult. In order to meet some of these domestic production expectations, it's going to take a wave of efforts from across the petroleum industry, including from Petroteq Energy, Inc. (OTCPK:PQEFF), ConocoPhillips (NYSE:COP), Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE:XOM), Devon Energy Corporation (NYSE:DVN), and Pioneer Natural Resources Company (NYSE:PXD).

One new proven breakthrough technology that could drastically impact future energy security in the US is known as Clean Oil Recovery Technology (CORT) from developers Petroteq Energy, Inc. (OTC:PQEFF).

CORT comes with significant environmental advantages over historical production methods, by enabling production from oil sands without using water during the extraction process. As a result, neither wastewater nor tailings ponds are created. Last September, Petroteq proved CORT could produce from oil sands ore.

Petroteq's system is closed loop in nature, meaning that +95% of the solvents used in the extraction process are recovered, recycled, and reused while roughly 5% remain within the oil that's extracted.

Third-party economic analysis of CORT focused on the markets available for the sale of the three categories of by-product sands. Analysis from Broadlands noted that an extraction plant producing 5,000 bpd is estimated by Petroteq to be capable of yielding 6,000 tons of sand per day or 1,860,000 tons per year (based on 310 operating days per year and operating 24 hours per day), and that silica flour is postulated to be 15% of the saleable product, fracking quality sand 55%, and bulk sand 30%. The economic forecast is based on 20 years of sales from such a 5,000 bpd operation, following two years for construction and start-up of the extraction plant and sands processing facility and related infrastructure.

"Broadlands evaluation report provides the potential economic benefit from the sale of sands is significant and provides an attractive enhancement to the value of the extraction process further enhances the forecast value of the Petroteq extraction technology," said Petroteq's CTO and Interim CEO, Dr. Vladimir Podlipsky. "The Petroteq operation can produce "green" energy with high quality oil extraction, while also remediating the oily sand and turning it into a useable, marketable resource."

A cash flow analysis was run on a pre-income tax basis, at discount rates of 0.0, 7.5 and 15%; the results show potential economic benefit in the base case of a Net Present Value (NPV) of $1.285 billion, $602 million, and $341 million, respectively.

The CORT process has drawn plenty of outside interest, including that of ESG-focused equity firm Viston United Swiss AG, which made an offer which gave the company a valuation more than 10x higher than its 52-week volume weighted average was prior to the offer.

The offer itself is valued at a considerable premium over the market price, with a 100% all-cash consideration of ?C$0.74 ?per common share.

Meanwhile, through its US shares on the OTC under the PQEFF symbol, shares of Petroteq are trading around US$0.375(C$0.474) on March 30, 2022. At that price point, the C$0.74 still represents a potential 56% premium over the more current trading price.

Originally made in April 2021, Viston's premium price offer gave a valuation of Petroteq stock with a 1,032% premium over that 52-week volume weighted average while also giving approximately 279% higher than the closing price of the Common Shares on the TSX Venture Exchange on August 6, 2021.

"We are particularly pleased with the recognition this shows of our technology which we have taken from inception to commercial viability as a one of its kind in oil sands eco-friendly, green extraction," said former Petroteq Chairman and CEO, Dr. Gerald Bailey, who retired in January. "We had always forecast a great future. However, we respect the value of this offer to shareholders and if it can be achieved it will reward our many dedicated supporters."

The Viston offer has been favorably across the Petroteq team. Its Board Members have shared their unanimous intention to tender their shares through the offer. Now the company's Founder, Former Chairman and CEO Alex Blyumkin has announced his support for the takeover bid.

In response to the White House's proposals, the reaction from big oil hasn't been very positive.

For example, Ryan Lance, CEO of ConocoPhillips (NYSE:COP) already told CNBC that if his company decided to pump more oil today, the first drop of that new oil wouldn't hit the market for at least eight to 12 months.

"The longer term is really a question of, what are we doing to do for the next six months? What are we going to do for the next year?" said Lance said. "Are we planning enough to say, what are the scenarios that could develop over that period of time and what are we going to do to ensure energy security as a country and as a globe? Releases out of the [strategic petroleum reserve] for a month or two or three, they'll help the short term and they're necessary to do that, but they don't answer this longer-term question."

Another meeting involving the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee was scheduled to include the CEOs of multiple oil companies, including Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE:XOM), Devon Energy Corporation (NYSE:DVN), and Pioneer Natural Resources Company (NYSE:PXD).

In the case of Exxon Mobil, increasing output from their US assets was already set into place, but initially it was to offset declines at older sites around the world-giving less optimism over making any overall impact on global supplies.

As well, Exxon Mobil is also stating that pulling out of currently embargoed regions may cost the company $4 billion.

"In light of the ongoing situation the Company is proceeding with efforts to discontinue operations at the Sakhalin-1 project ("Sakhalin") and is developing steps to exit the venture," it said in a statement.

The Sakhalin-1 project was designed to harvest the huge reserves of natural gas. ExxonMobil has been working on it for years, agreeing to the production-sharing agreement in 1996 and drilling the first well in 2003. Meanwhile, due to surging prices, the company also recently took its biggest profit in 13 years.

The same goes for Devon Energy which has had a successful year so far.

"We have learned our lesson," said Devon Energy CEO Rick Muncriefin mid-February. Devon is a darling of Wall Street. Its stock has risen from $16 a share to trading at around $60 now.

The company has gone on to pledge up to $20 million in aid towards humanitarian efforts in areas impacted by recent conflicts.

"I am proud that Devon and our employees are doing what we can to help those desperately in need," said Rick Muncrief, President and CEO. "[This humanitarian crisis] calls upon the global community - governments, businesses, and individuals - to act in solidarity."

Pioneer Natural Resources recently announced an amended services agreement with ProPetro Services Inc. to provide pressure pumping services, to continue to improve completions performance in the Permian Basin. ProPetro will deliver and dedicate hydraulic fracturing fleets to provide fracture stimulation pumping services and provide associated products in connection with such services.

"This amendment to our existing agreement with ProPetro reflects Pioneer's desire for continuous improvement in completions performance as demonstrated through the material progress achieved since our partnership began," said Rich Dealy, President and Chief Operating Officer of Pioneer.

For more information go to: https://usanewsgroup.com/2022/03/25/this-quick-turnaround-takeover-is-the-kind-of-play-smart-investors-snap-up-in-a-heartbeat/

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USA News Group is Source of all content listed above. FN Media Group, LLC (FNM), is a third party publisher and news dissemination service provider, which disseminates electronic information through multiple online media channels. FNM is NOT affiliated in any manner with USA News Group or any company mentioned herein. The commentary, views and opinions expressed in this release by USA News Group are solely those of USA News Group and are not shared by and do not reflect in any manner the views or opinions of FNM. FNM is not liable for any investment decisions by its readers or subscribers. FNM and its affiliated companies are a news dissemination and financial marketing solutions provider and are NOT a registered broker/dealer/analyst/adviser, holds no investment licenses and may NOT sell, offer to sell or offer to buy any security. FNM was not compensated by any public company mentioned herein to disseminate this press release.

This release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended and such forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. "Forward-looking statements" describe future expectations, plans, results, or strategies and are generally preceded by words such as "may", "future", "plan" or "planned", "will" or "should", "expected," "anticipates", "draft", "eventually" or "projected". You are cautioned that such statements are subject to a multitude of risks and uncertainties that could cause future circumstances, events, or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements, including the risks that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, and other risks identified in a company's annual report on Form 10-K or 10-KSB and other filings made by such company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You should consider these factors in evaluating the forward-looking statements included herein, and not place undue reliance on such statements. The forward-looking statements in this release are made as of the date hereof and FNM undertakes no obligation to update such statements.

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MOSCOW (dpa-AFX) - The Biden administration will announce new sanctions Wednesday in coordination with G7 nations and the European Union in response to Russian forces committing war crimes in Ukraine. There will also be a ban on all new investment in Russia, reports quoting an administration official say. The next round of US sanctions will target Russian government officials, their family members, Russian-owned financial institutions and state-owned enterprises, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at a news conference. The European Union will impose additional sanctions on Russia, likely on gas and oil, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the European Parliament Wednesday. The EU Commission is proposing a ban on coal exports as European Union ambassadors are meeting Wednesday to decide on a wide-ranging fifth package of sanctions. Thousands of people are fleeing Donbas as Russian forces stepped up their offensive after shifting the focus of attacks to eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian authorities are calling on people to evacuate the eastern Luhansk region, with five humanitarian corridors out of the area planned today. Russian forces now occupy most of Luhansk and more than half of Donetsk, reports say. Heavy fighting and Russian airstrikes have continued on the besieged southern port city of Mariupol. In an emotionally charged address to the UN Security Council Tuesday, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky questioned the very mandate of the council. He demanded that Russia must be expelled from the Council or the Council itself should be dissolved. Copyright(c) 2022 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved 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.
Latest version helps architects and designers create more engaging visuals and improve design workflows

KARLSRUHE, Germany and NEW YORK, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Enscape, a leading provider of real-time visualization, 3D rendering, and virtual reality technology for the global AEC industry, today announced it has released Enscape 3.3.

The past few years have challenged architects and designers to develop new ways of working and sharing their designs. Many of them have turned to visualization technology. Enscape has seen a 50 percent annual growth despite the pandemic, demonstrating that designers have realized the value and potential of integrating new technology into design workflows.

Enscape's latest release will help architects and designers improve their design workflow even further and create even more impressive real-time visualizations and immersive experiences. New features allow users to import building surroundings into renderings, improve visualizations of glass and water surfaces, add new educational assets and materials into scenes, and more. Full language support is also now available in Japanese.

"We're always looking for new ways to support our customers' design workflows," said Petr Mitev, VP Visualization Product Group at Enscape. "With today's release, we've automated some processes so designers can spend more time making the right decisions and less time gathering the data needed to do it. We will also continue to improve our core visualization and sharing platforms based on community feedback."

Enscape 3.3 new features include:

Site Context - Users can now import a project's surroundings into renderings by utilizing OpenStreetMap data. Simply open Site Context to enter an address or coordinates and then choose to import all surroundings, or select to import building and landmarks, streets and sidewalks, or topography.

- Users can now import a project's surroundings into renderings by utilizing OpenStreetMap data. Simply open Site Context to enter an address or coordinates and then choose to import all surroundings, or select to import building and landmarks, streets and sidewalks, or topography. Transparent Materials in Reflections - Transparent materials will appear in reflections, improving visualization of rendered glass and water surfaces. The use of a graphics card that supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing, such as NVIDIA RTX series and AMD RX6xxx series, is required.

- Transparent materials will appear in reflections, improving visualization of rendered glass and water surfaces. The use of a graphics card that supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing, such as NVIDIA RTX series and AMD RX6xxx series, is required. Education Assets and Materials - New high-quality education-themed assets and materials are now available and include classroom furniture, toys, musical instruments, playground equipment, acoustic panels, and more to use in education scenes. The asset package also includes a large collection of new 3D people.

- New high-quality education-themed assets and materials are now available and include classroom furniture, toys, musical instruments, playground equipment, acoustic panels, and more to use in education scenes. The asset package also includes a large collection of new 3D people. Alpha Channel Export - The new export feature allows users to easily add transparent backgrounds to rendered images.

- The new export feature allows users to easily add transparent backgrounds to rendered images. Pin Enscape on Top - Users can pin the Enscape rendering window, together with the menus that open with the renderer, to the top of their modeling window. This allows users who may not use two screens or more to work in the modeling software and immediately see changes in the overlayed Enscape window, which is always on top when this function is activated.

- Users can pin the Enscape rendering window, together with the menus that open with the renderer, to the top of their modeling window. This allows users who may not use two screens or more to work in the modeling software and immediately see changes in the overlayed Enscape window, which is always on top when this function is activated. Material Overwrite - Exchanging Enscape materials from within the Material Editor has become much easier with Material Overwrite. You can now replace Enscape material files without the need to manually import and export them.

- Exchanging Enscape materials from within the Material Editor has become much easier with Material Overwrite. You can now replace Enscape material files without the need to manually import and export them. Camera Sync Optimization - Revit users can now enjoy camera synchronization for the perspective and orthographic view, including Field of View sync for the perspective view. There is also a camera roll around the line of vision. For Archicad users, camera synchronization is now enabled for the orthographic view.

- Revit users can now enjoy camera synchronization for the perspective and orthographic view, including Field of View sync for the perspective view. There is also a camera roll around the line of vision. For Archicad users, camera synchronization is now enabled for the orthographic view. Upload Migration - An Enscape Account allows users to manage uploads and licenses online and provides additional functionality such as creating Panorama Galleries and the sharing and un-sharing of links. Users who are not yet using an Enscape Account can easily migrate previous uploads.

- An Enscape Account allows users to manage uploads and licenses online and provides additional functionality such as creating Panorama Galleries and the sharing and un-sharing of links. Users who are not yet using an Enscape Account can easily migrate previous uploads. Enscape Support for SketchUp 2022 - Enscape is now compatible with the latest version of SketchUp.

- Enscape is now compatible with the latest version of SketchUp. Japanese Language Support - Full language support is now available in Japanese in addition to new Japanese-themed assets.

"Enscape is simple and approachable while at the same time offers deeper levels of creativity, furthering design expression and overall visual communications," states Joe Tubb, Senior 3D Visualization Specialist at ASD|SKY. "Enscape is remarkably fast and enables designers to be more confident in their design choices while allowing them to explore and experiment multiple solutions."

Watch the new features in this video.

Read more in this blog post.

Get a 14-day free trial of Enscape 3.3 to experience real-time visualization first-hand.

About Enscape

Enscape develops high-quality real-time rendering, visualization, and virtual reality software for the global AEC industry that integrates design and visualization workflows into one. Enscape gives designers the power to create realistic renderings based on their existing planning data and easily produce videos, panoramic images, and VR simulations. Enscape software is compatible with Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, Archicad, and Vectorworks and is used by renowned architecture firms in over 150 countries.

In 2022, Enscape merged with Chaos, a developer of visualization technologies that empower artists and designers to create photorealistic imagery and animation across all creative industries. Together, the newly-combined company is creating an end-to-end ecosystem of 3D visualization tools accessible to everyone.
Out-of-the-box integration provides Lightico customers with Wolters Kluwer eOriginal market-leading eVaulting technology, ensuring seamless and compliant auditing, securitization and transfer of Digital Originals

Wolters Kluwer Compliance Solutions and Lightico are collaborating to leverage the capabilities of Wolters Kluwer's eOriginal product suite of digital lending tools, including its eVaulting technology, to enhance Lightico customer transactions. The alliance strengthens Lightico's next-generation digital completion platform, which supports millions of insurance, automotive, telecom and financial interactions.

With native integration between the platforms complete, customers using Lightico's Digital Completion Cloud for end-to-end customer interactions now have access to industry-leading eVaulting capabilities, critical for ensuring that digital loans are compliant for all parties involved in the initial transaction-and trusted by the secondary market ecosystem for whole loan sale, collateralization and securitization.

"As digital interactions across the financial services industry grows, complete solutions are more important than ever to ensure a smooth, easy journey for consumers and a compliant and flexible platform for businesses," said Steve Meirink, Executive Vice President and General Manager for Wolters Kluwer Compliance Solutions. "We're excited to partner with Lightico, bringing our proprietary technology that enables Digital Originals into its system and providing best-in-class eVaulting inside a fast and efficient digital process. These capabilities ultimately help them better serve their lending customers."

The integration allows users of Lightico's Digital Completion Cloud to easily and seamlessly manage authoritative copies of digital assets such as eContracts stored in eOriginal's eVault offering. The Digital Completion Cloud enables B2C companies to complete processes such as auto loan originations and servicing, insurance claims and opening of new financial accounts in a quick and seamless fashion. The no-code, mobile-first platform unifies eSignature, document collection, identification and verification, payment and more to enable B2C interactions to be completed in a highly convenient and efficient multi-purpose channel.

"To successfully digitize your processes, speed and efficiency are just as important as the ability to store documents in a fully compliant fashion, which is why this partnership with Wolters Kluwer eOriginal is key to further bolstering Lightico's offering for its clients," said Zviki Ben Ishay, CEO and co-founder of Lightico. "Furthermore, this partnership fills a critical need for many financial institutions on secondary financial market transactions."

Lightico's Digital Completion Cloud is used by leaders in banking, lending, insurance and telco including Capital One, BT, Metlife and more.

Wolters Kluwer Compliance Solutions is a market leader and trusted provider of risk management and regulatory compliance solutions and services to U.S. insurers, banks and credit unions, and securities firms. The business, which sits within Wolters Kluwer's Governance, Risk Compliance (GRC) division, helps these financial institutions efficiently manage risk and regulatory compliance obligations, and gain the insights needed to focus on better serving their customers and growing their business.

Wolters Kluwer's GRC division provides an array of expert solutions to help financial institutions manage regulatory and risk obligations. Wolters Kluwer Compliance Solutions' eOriginal suite of purpose-built, digital lending solutions, for example, helps lenders digitize their transactions and features electronic signatures, collateral authentication and an electronic vault. Compliance Solutions' OneSumX for Regulatory Change Management tracks regulatory changes and organizes them to create structured, value-added content through a single data feed that is paired with an easy-to-use software solution. Wolters Kluwer Finance, Risk Regulatory Reporting (FRR), meanwhile, is a global market leader in the provision of integrated regulatory compliance and reporting solutions. The division's legal solutions businesses are Wolters Kluwer CT Corporation and Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions.

About Wolters Kluwer Governance, Risk Compliance

Governance, Risk Compliance is a division of Wolters Kluwer, which provides legal and banking professionals with solutions to help ensure compliance with ever-changing regulatory and legal obligations, manage risk, increase efficiency, and produce better business outcomes. GRC offers a portfolio of technology-enabled expert services and solutions focused on legal entity compliance, legal operations management, banking product compliance, and banking regulatory compliance.

Wolters Kluwer (WKL) is a global leader in professional information, software solutions, and services for the healthcare; tax and accounting; governance, risk and compliance; and legal and regulatory sectors. We help our customers make critical decisions every day by providing expert solutions that combine deep domain knowledge with specialized technology and services. Wolters Kluwer reported 2021 annual revenues of 4.6 billion. The group serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries, and employs approximately 19,800 people worldwide. The company is headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands.

About Lightico

Lightico is an award-winning SaaS platform that empowers businesses to accelerate their customer journeys through automated workflows. With the Lightico Digital Completion Cloud, companies leverage no-code workflows to easily collect customer eSignatures, documents, and payments, and authenticate ID in real time straight from the customer's smartphone. By unifying the previously siloed steps of customer-facing processes, businesses enjoy faster and shorter sales and servicing cycles, boost NPS, and significantly improve their completion rates. Hundreds of enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies in highly regulated industries such as finance, insurance, and telecommunications, rely on Lightico to make their customer journeys more efficient and streamlined.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220406005008/en/

Contacts:

Media Contacts for Wolters Kluwer GRC

(Including Wolters Kluwer Compliance Solutions; Wolters Kluwer Finance, Risk Regulatory Reporting; Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, and Wolters Kluwer CT Corporation)



Paul Lyon

Global Corporate Communications Director

Governance, Risk Compliance Division

Wolters Kluwer

Office +44 20 3197 6586

Paul.Lyon@wolterskluwer.com



David Feider

Corporate Communications Manager, Banking Regulatory Compliance

Governance, Risk Compliance Division

Wolters Kluwer

Tel: +1 612-852-7966

David.feider@wolterskluwer.com

On Twitter: @davidafeider



Media Contact for Lightico

Eytan Morgenstern

Director Media Communications

Lightico

US (917) 688-4314

eytan@lightico.com
As her third collection launches on FabriikX, the curation-focused NFT marketplace experience, Diddy Wheldon, co-founder of Women of BSV, talks about the inspiration behind the collection and how she came to the world of NFTs.

TORONTO, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ --

Tell us a little more about the collection:

Landscapes is my third collection for FabriikX. My inspiration comes from one of my great loves - camping and the great outdoors. There are 11 images in the Landscape series all of which are inspired by the places I have visited and the colours of nature. I start with exploring colours and then the idea and shape of each piece comes from there. My first ever job was as a lighting and sound technician in the theatre - this is what started my fascination with light, colour, sound and frequencies, and how it can make you feel. Each of the 11 NFTs comes with a physical acrylic canvas board - they are all various sizes for this drop - and I also have a video of me painting every single one as proof of work (POW).

Have you always been an artist?

I don't really think of myself as an artist - well, not when it comes to painting on canvas, I'm definitely a novice acrylic artist in my head. But I'm more established when it comes to digital art. My career morphed from technical theatre, into that of a model and an actress, but when I was a child, I would get books from the library and draw faces and parts of faces, but I haven't studied art - I just enjoy drawing.

I had worked in Theatre for most of my career and across every department from lighting and sound to staging, production, building and painting of props and sets to costume and hair and makeup. I later went into teaching performing art courses at Bilborough College, Nottingham, and was the Course Administrator at Midland's Academy of Dance and Drama (MADD) - we had some incredibly successful and famous students.

I was also Show Manager at the American Adventure theme park where I did some amazing stuff - all the lighting, pyrotechnics and show management. I later moved onto working on a Cruise Ship as a Production Manager with my own 500 seat Theatre. It was my dream job to run my own theatre, and it was and still is my favourite job ever.

I started drawing on the iPad after I saw a programme about David Hockney; he was the first acclaimed artist I had seen using an iPad. I started with portraits, but I haven't sold these - they are more personal. My real passion, going back to childhood, is drawing Hollywood movie stars. And I have always loved drawing landscapes, from the camping trips I used to go on around the British Isles.

Having started on iPad I moved onto canvases, but it was initially only because the tech gave up on me! This is the first set of canvases that I have done and shared publicly.

What is different for you about drawing on canvas v iPad?

The iPad is extremely versatile in respect of it being portable - it makes a fantastic on-the-go canvas. But canvas, brushes, paints are very different things entirely. I can take an iPad anywhere not so easy with canvas, brushes, and paints. I must admit though nothing compares to getting messy with actual paints.

What have your previous FabriikX collections been about?

The last collection was called Mountain Aura. This was based on one original board canvas. The NFT of the original painting includes the physical canvas artwork with the NFT. The collection also features 10 colour variation NFTs, which come with a gallery-framed physical print.

I have been studying Metaphysic Sciences and recently completed my degree and my Masters, I am now studying for my PhD and my university is based near the mountains in Ecuador. The collection was inspired by a longing I have to travel to Ecuador and visit the mountains and just breathe in the freshness of the air. I have always wanted to visit the Galapagos Islands and see the Giant Tortoise (I had a tortoise as a kid, I think they are really cute!)

What was the first FabriikX NFT you minted/sold?

It's a collection called 'X marks the spot'. There are 10 of each of these pieces with one original canvas which the NFTs are taken from. Then the others are digital colour variation NFTs which all include the physical artwork in a frame.

What led you to create an NFT collection? / Why NFTs?

The move to NFTs came about, like many changes of direction did, during the pandemic. Being in theatre there was no work around and I was already pretty knowledgeable about blockchain and BSV.

Because I was already into art and music, getting into NFTs just made sense but it took a while for me to get my work minted. I wanted to be sure about the security and legal side and ensure that my artwork was protected and couldn't be plagiarised.

I heard about FabriikX from my contacts in the BSV community, plus I had a Fabriik Money Button account, so I was aware of the history of the company. I looked into it and did a bit of a test and it felt right for me so when they approached me, I jumped at the chance. I liked the curation and the fact that the artist or creator retains control. I am particularly excited about music NFTs - music is really my first love, then the countryside, and then art and acting! I have music NFTs too on Jamify.xyz. With art, there are already quite a few ways you can sell your work, such as art fairs or online galleries, but with music you've always got to upload to a platform, that takes a cut. Whereas NFTs allow you to get 100% of what you sell it for and with the resale/secondary market, which Fabriik X offers, I can always receive royalties from my work. So, if my work gets re-sold after a sale, I - as the artist - still earn a royalty for my work, pretty much like the music and film industry.

What first got you interested in digital currencies and bitcoin?

I've been interested in it since around 2016. I watched The Theory of Bitcoin on YouTube twice and did lots of research around Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) and the history of Bitcoin. I just found it fascinating and really started researching it and reading a lot of Dr Craig Wright's work.

From there I became endorsed in an article by CoinGeek as a Female Leader in the space - there just aren't that many women involved yet, although that is starting to change. I had been asked to get a group of women together for a show on the BitcoinSV Channel with Shem Booth-Spain, the CEO of Blarecast. This formed the start of what is now known as the Women of BSV.

What is Women of BSV?

It is a group of females - 26 in total at the moment - in the BSV space that come together to exchange ideas and discuss matters of mutual interest.

Ruth Heasman (an amazing graphic artist) and I are the co-founders. We have a YouTube channel where we interview entrepreneurs about what they do and how they use or incorporate BSV into their business. All the members have different strengths, and we pool these together, to help promote BSV and the technology. We help guide, teach, and advise those who want to know more about BSV or just want a female perspective on things.

You can find all the interviews on our YouTube channel; we also have a website and merch store and we've had 2 NFT drops.

How do you feel about being a woman in tech?

Excited, blessed and sometimes a little mind blown at the sheer number of opportunities that are emerging and available. Blockchain has and is proving to be an extremely valuable resource for so many businesses, and it's not just men who are behind the technology. Women have been, and are, an integral part of shaping the entire industry and, although it is still largely male dominated at the moment, I can only see the interest and involvement of women multiplying exponentially. It is so important for more women to be a part of the conversation, to lead it and to be involved in this new and evolving economy because they are, and will be creating value, as well as benefiting from its potential future growth. Women have been prominent in a number of tech start-ups; several have had female founders or women in their founding team. Some of those leading the way in BSV include Angela Holowaychuk, CMO at TAAL; Rae Brady, founder of Molly Match; Bitcoin Association for BSV ambassador Robin de Lisser; Eva Porras, Managing Director at SmartLedger and the author of Bitcoin and Ethics in a Technological Society; Meike Krautscheid, COO of SmartLedger and Ticket Mint; and Osmin Callis, COO at Satoshi Block Dojo.

How do you see tech evolving for women?

Women have long been pioneers in the fields of STEM, finance and computer programming, for example Ada Lovelace published the first ever computer programming language algorithm in 1883 for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.

So, it's no surprise that they are starting to create a movement in the world of blockchain technology with some vibrant new, fresh and exciting ideas. Numbers are rising but there is always room for improvement when it comes to gender equality. Some women may have at times felt a little overwhelmed or intimidated with all the tech talk or that blockchain just isn't right for them; but I do feel that this is why it is really important and necessary that we all work together to ensure that there are many more female voices involved in the conversation, once you can see the potential in BSV Blockchain and how it could be of huge benefit to not only business but your day to day life, it's very hard to ignore. I do feel that women do bring a more harmonious and heart centred approach to communication, which is actually also a very positive way of welcoming more women into bitcoin and blockchain, especially as we know the opportunities are immense.

About the artist

Diddy Wheldon is the co-founder of Women of BSV as well as being an artist, actress, model, and musician she is also the project manager for BetheBroadcast.com. She is based in the UK.

About FabriikX

FabriikX is a new kind of NFT marketplace built on the power of the BSV blockchain. It offers curated-focused, exclusive NFTs from top creators within arts, sports, and music, as well as content from the best creative minds in the digital collectibles' community. To Fabriik, NFTs are much more than just digital collectibles; they are experiences that connect collectors with the creators and communities they care about most.

FabriikX offers a secondary marketplace so customers can buy, sell, and re-sell NFTs directly with other collectors and get paid instantly. Plus, there are no minting or transfer fees, and all data lives directly on-chain.

More from Fabriik

Fabriik is a new kind of digital financial services company passionate about making crypto safely and easily available to anyone, anywhere.

We're focused on creating innovative financial services that empower people and businesses to discover, buy, sell, and trade digital assets, confidently and securely.

Fabriik offers an easy way to trade top cryptocurrencies in 3 simple steps or just a few minutes. With its Weave widget, you can trade from US$5 to US$1000 in crypto per day. Fabriik's crypto swap product is also available through the Fabriik Money Button wallet.
DGAP Post-admission Duties announcement: Haier Smart Home Co.,Ltd. / Third country release according to Article 50 Para. 1, No. 2 of the WpHG [the German Securities Trading Act]

Haier Smart Home Co.,Ltd.: Announcement on Shareholding Information of the Top Ten Shareholders and the Top Ten Shareholders without Selling Restrictions in relation to the Share Repurchase



06.04.2022 / 15:05

Dissemination of a Post-admission Duties announcement according to Article 50 Para. 1, No. 2 WpHG transmitted by DGAP - a service of EQS Group AG.

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.





Third country release according to Article 50 Para. 1, No. 2 of the WpHG

Announcement on Shareholding Information of the Top Ten Shareholders and the Top Ten Shareholders without Selling Restrictions in relation to the Share Repurchase

Qingdao / Shanghai / Frankfurt / Hongkong, 06 April 2022 - Haier Smart Home Co., Ltd. (the "Company" or "Haier Smart Home", D-share 690D.DE, A-share 600690.SH, H-share 06690.HK) today published a mandatory announcement in accordance with applicable trading rules of the Shanghai Stock Exchange and applicable PRC laws in relation to shareholding information of the top ten shareholders and the top ten shareholders without selling restrictions in relation to the share repurchase.

The announcement is fully available at:

http://smart-home.haier.com/en/dggg/P020220406693208342239.pdf?appdesc=Announcement%20on%20Shareholding%20Information%20of%20the%20Top%20Ten%20Shareholders%20and%20the%20Top%20Ten%20Shareholders%20without%20Selling%20Restrictions%20in%20relation%20to%20the%20Share%20Repurchase

and on the "D Share Announcement" Section on the Company's website:

https://smart-home.haier.com/en/ggyxw/?id=dggg&spm=inverstor.31558_pad.irheader_20200506_3.2



IR Contact:

Haier Smart Home Hong Kong

T: +852 2169 0000

Email: ir@haier.hk

Press Contact:

CROSS ALLIANCE communication GmbH

Sara Pinto

Sven Pauly

pi@crossalliance.de

T: +49 (0) 89 1250903 35

About Haier Smart Home Co., Ltd.:

Haier is one of the world's leading manufacturers of household appliances with a focus on smart home solutions and customized production. Haier Smart Home Co., Ltd. develops, produces and distributes a wide range of household appliances. These include refrigerators, freezers, washing machines, air conditioners, water heaters, kitchen appliances as well as small household appliances and an extensive range of intelligent household appliances. The Company distributes its products through leading household brands such as Haier, Casarte, Leader, Candy, GE Appliances, AQUA and Fisher & Paykel. Haier Smart Home Co., Ltd. has launched Smart Home Experiential Cloud, which connects homes, users, enterprises and ecosystem partners, and facilitates the integration of Haier's online, offline and micro-store businesses and supports user interaction to further optimize the user experience.

06.04.2022 The DGAP Distribution Services include Regulatory Announcements, Financial/Corporate News and Press Releases.

Archive at www.dgap.de


DOYLESTOWN, PA / ACCESSWIRE / April 6, 2022 / Neuropathix, Inc. ("Neuropathix" or the "Company") (OTCQB:NPTX), a socially responsible pain management life sciences company, announced today that its CEO Dean Petkanas has issued a letter to its shareholders, providing commentary on the Company's recently achieved milestones, updates on its research and financial positioning. Please see the contents of the letter below including a summary.

Summary:

Neuropathix continues to experience shareholder base growth and further support from long-term investors, including a recent bridge financing.

In the past decade, pharmaceutical companies have been reluctant to re-address pain treatments following the opioids crisis. However, we see a change on the horizon.

Neuropathix has designated proprietary, cannabinoid-derivative compound KLS-13019 as lead drug candidate for the treatment of neuropathic pain, a viable alternative to opioids.

Neuropathix wholly owned subsidiary, Kannalife Sciences, Inc. received a $2.97 million grant from the National Institutes of Health HEAL program for IND enabling studies and the furtherment of its clinical program for KLS-13019.

The NIH grant was awarded based on a priority impact score of 20 by peer reviewing scientists, denoting the exceptional and novel potential of KLS-13019's non-addictive properties seen through advanced pre-clinical studies for the treatment of chemotherapy induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN).

Neuropathix continues to move forward in preparation of an IND filing for the use of KLS-13019 in CIPN. The next two major steps in 2022 will be the successful completion of the first leg of commercial scale up and a drug discrimination study in animals.

Year two of the grant funding should enable the Company to move KLS-13019 into animal toxicity studies by early 2023, as the next steps towards IND submission with the US FDA.

To read the Letter to Shareholders in full, please visit: https://neuropathix.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Neuropathix-Inc.-Shareholder-Letter-220406.pdf

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute Of Neurological Disorders And Stroke (NINDS) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under Award Number R42NS120548.

The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

About KLS-13019

KLS-13019 is Neuropathix patented lead clinical compound for the potential treatment of a range of inflammatory, neurodegenerative and neuropathic pain disorders, beginning with chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN). KLS-13019 is a monotherapeutic non-opioid cannabinoid derivative that has been shown to prevent and reverse neuropathic pain in pre-clinical animal studies. KLS-13019 has not been reviewed or approved for patient use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or any other healthcare authority in the world. Its safety and efficacy have not been confirmed by FDA-approved research.

About Neuropathix, Inc.

Neuropathix is a biopharmaceutical company focused on the research and development of a pipeline of next generation, socially responsible pain management and neuroprotective therapeutics to treat patients with significant unmet medical needs. Over the past ten years, Neuropathix has discovered, developed, and patented a global intellectual property estate, led by its lead clinical target, KLS-13019, as novel, new therapeutic agents designed to prevent and reverse neuropathic pain, reduce oxidative stress, and act as anti-inflammatory neuroprotectants. The Company's family of patented monotherapeutic molecules focuses on treating oxidative stress-related diseases, chronic pain management, and neurodegenerative disorders. The therapeutic targets include chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN), a chronic neuropathy caused by toxic chemotherapeutic agents; hepatic encephalopathy (HE), a neurotoxic brain-liver disorder caused by excessive concentrations of ammonia and ethanol in the brain; mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), a disorder associated with single and repetitive impact injuries; and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a disease associated with highly repetitive impact injuries in professional and amateur sports. Neuropathix conducts its research and development efforts at the Pennsylvania Biotechnology Center of Bucks County in Doylestown, PA. For more information about Neuropathix, visit www.neuropathix.com and the Company's Twitter page at @neuropathix.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may contain certain forward-looking statements and information, as defined within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and is subject to the Safe Harbor created by those sections. This press release contains statements about expected future events, the Company's business plan, plan of operations, the viability of the Company's drug candidates, the targeted beneficial effects of KLS-13019, the Company's position, and/or financial results that are forward-looking in nature and subject to risks and uncertainties. Such forward-looking statements, by definition, involve risks and uncertainties. The Company does not sell or distribute any products that are in violation of the United States Controlled Substances Act.

CONTACTS:

Public Relations:

Kyle Porter

CMW Media

P: 858-221-8001

E: nptx@cmwmedia.com

www.cmwmedia.com

Investor Relations:

Louie Toma

Managing Director

CORE IR

P: 516-222-2560

E: louie@coreir.com

www.coreir.com

SOURCE: Neuropathix, Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/696244/Neuropathix-Inc-CEO-Issues-New-Letter-to-Shareholders-Updates-Market-on-Milestones-in-Research-and-Funding
Twitter co-founder and Block Co-Founder, CEO, and Chairman Jack Dorsey, donates $1 million through his philanthropic initiative, StartSmall, to support Ukraine and deliver critical humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

Following the russian invasion, Ukrainian-American non-profit, Razom, which means "together" in Ukrainian, quickly mobilized an emergency response to deliver critical humanitarian aid including tactical medical supplies, hospital supplies, and tech-enabled emergency response supplies that facilitate the delivery of this aid. This generous donation will help to continue supporting Ukraine during this critical time.

Since russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Razom has sent close to 200+ tons of tactical medical equipment and critical medical supplies to Ukraine, with many more on the way. Razom volunteers have made a total of 14 trips carrying tactical medicine cargo to various volunteer civilian defense corps prioritizing cities and regions where Ukrainians are actively repelling russian occupiers. These regions include Zhytomyr, Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Dnipro, Zaporizhia, Mykolaiv, and Odessa.

Razom has scaled its operations significantly since February and continues to expand its capabilities in delivering critical humanitarian aid. To deliver aid in Ukraine, Razom collaborates with partners on the ground such as Kryla Nadiyi (Wings of Hope), Euromaidan-Warszava, and Ukrainian Education Platform.

Here's an overview of some of Razom's impact in the first 30 days of the war in Ukraine:

Razom spent more than $10.5M with over $5.8M going towards procuring and delivering tactical medicine and tacmed equipment. Razom procures, on average, 10,000 tourniquets per week (worth over $250,000/week) from the most reputable suppliers buying CAT, SOF-T and/or SAM brands. In life-or-death situations, tourniquets stop arterial bleeding so the quality of this single-use device matters. They continue to be the most sought-after and requested forms of aid across Ukraine. Thanks to Razom's strong ties to communities and professionals on the ground in Ukraine, Razom has been able to learn of exact needs quickly and act on specific requests that can make a big difference. For example: SAM splints. Razom procured over 3,100 of them for $56,100, designed for immobilizing bone and soft tissue injuries in emergency settings. Purchased over 10,300 chest seals for over $58,000, procured through Ukrainians in the U.S. and Canada, as the supply of chest seals has been completely depleted in North America, through July. Razomers found contacts in Australia and the U.K to buy over 6,000 chest seals. A group of about 15 volunteers worked around the clock to sort and pack aid for shipment overseas. In one week's time, they put together 3,000+ IFAKs in Razom's New Jersey warehouse, in partnership with Meest-America. These first aid kids are designed to treat traumatic injuries and severe bleeding.

Procured a defibrillator, insulin, and other important medicines like metformin, glimepiride, levothyroxine that was delivered to the Ukrainian Diabetes Association in Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Luhansk regions. Razom accomplished this in partnership with volunteers at AWO Ortsverein Reischach AG and Ukraine-HILFE Berlin e.V.

in Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Luhansk regions. Razom accomplished this in partnership with volunteers at AWO Ortsverein Reischach AG and Ukraine-HILFE Berlin e.V. Delivered 100 drones across the Polish border that will be used to ensure the safe delivery of medical and tactical medical supplies by Razom volunteers traveling across hotspot areas in Ukraine.

Evacuated 32 different families (making up 91 individuals) from ten cities and regions of Ukraine.

Ran and/or hosted hundreds of events in support of Ukraine in the United States and Canada and conducted hundreds of advocacy interviews in the US and Canadian press.

"Donations come in many forms, both large and small, and we are beyond grateful to Jack Dorsey and StartSmall for this incredible contribution. We're also excited to see support for a number of organizations we've been working with for years, including Sunflowers of Peace and Nova Ukraine, who are doing critically important work in Ukraine. Our emergency response and mission right now is focused on one thing: to save lives in Ukraine, and this contribution has already helped us do just that," said Dora Chomiak, President of Razom.

Razom has focused most of its efforts during this time on delivering aid where it is needed most on the ground in Ukraine. Razom's overall mission is to build a more prosperous Ukraine.

ABOUT RAZOM

Razom, which means "together" in Ukrainian, is committed to building a prosperous Ukraine. The organization believes deeply in the enormous potential of dedicated volunteers around the world united by a single mission: building a more prosperous Ukraine. Established in the United States, the non-profit organization works towards that mission by creating spaces where people meet, partner and do. In this time of need, they have created the Razom Emergency Response which is focused on purchasing medical supplies for critical situations like blood loss and other tactical medicine items, hospital supplies, and tech enabled emergency response supplies that facilitate the delivery of this aid. Razom's procurement and logistics teams are made up of a trusted volunteer network they've nurtured since 2014 and partner organizations worldwide. Razom is also working with governments and embassies on helping to establish humanitarian corridors.

ABOUT STARTSMALL

StartSmall is Jack Dorsey's philanthropic initiative to fund global COVID-19 relief, girls health and education, and efforts towards Universal Basic Income. Dorsey transferred $1 billion (28% of his wealth) to StartSmall in 2020.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220405005534/en/

Contacts:

Press

Nonna Tsiganok

Media Relations, Razom

nonna@razomforukraine.org
Seventy-nine percent of CEOs state customer empathy fuels financial performance

UserTesting (NYSE: USER), a leader in video-based human insight, today released the findings of a survey, in partnership with the FORTUNE Brand Studio, titled The ROI of Customer Empathy. The survey looks at the role CEOs play in building a culture of customer understanding and the impact customer empathy has on driving innovation, digital transformation, financial performance, and ultimately business success.

In a business world where customer sentiment and loyalties can shift overnight, the C-suite has quickly realized that getting customers to stay long-term with their companies now requires an authentic demonstration of customer empathy. Today's CEOs are realizing that being empathetic to their customers is now a key to their organization's success.

The ROI of Customer Empathy survey revealed several key trends including:

CEOs agree that attention must be paid to customer empathy

A key takeaway noted that CEOs recognize the impact that empathy has on the customer experience (CX) with just over half (55 percent) stating acknowledging that high-quality in-person experiences are the top priority for them as leaders. Although priorities across industries differ, the research shows there is a clear recognition that securing strong personal relationships and supporting empathetic interactions are top of mind for business leaders. The CEOs surveyed acknowledged that accountability starts at the top. Forty percent indicated that they are personally responsible for ensuring that customer understanding underlies the entire process, everything from designing products, through taking them to market, to building great experiences. Additionally, 90 percent understand that they will need to make better use of empathy to interpret customer information and drive customer-facing processes.

Designing better products and experiences takes deep customer understanding

The survey found that CEOs consider customer understanding to be critical for teams involved in marketing/brand-building (38%), operations/production and design/prototyping (38%), and product ideation (26%). To win new consumers and maintain existing customers, organizations need a deep understanding of customer needs, expectations, and feelings. Leaders keenly attuned to the customer journey can glean more than just transactional material from the information they gain from tracking that journey; they can use it to design more successful products and services.

Direct interaction is the best way to gain customer insights

The level of a company's CX maturity was shown to have a direct impact when it comes to selecting the most important means of helping employees demonstrate customer empathy. The research found that CEOs with mature CX organizations think beyond data capture and more frequently turn to technologies for sharing customer information and insights across the organization. The CEOs surveyed ranked direct interaction with customers as most important overall at 45 percent, followed by customer feedback reports and market research reports, tied at 35 percent.

"The research reflects what we see every day with our customers. Empathy is having a greater and greater impact on overall business outcomes," said Andy MacMillan, CEO of UserTesting. "CEOs must lead the effort to make sure every employee has access to the human insights they need to truly understand their customers. As we see from the findings of this report, CEOs need to be the stewards of customer empathy and foster a company culture ingrained in customer feedback."

To access The ROI of Customer Empathy report, click here.

Methodology

FORTUNE Brand Studio and UserTesting conducted an online survey of 200 CEOs in October 2021. All respondents were located in North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region. Of these, 60% were CEOs of small-and medium-sized companies (up to 250 employees and 251 to 1,000 employees, respectively), and 40% led large enterprises with more than 1,000 employees.

About UserTesting

UserTesting (NYSE: USER) has fundamentally changed the way organizations get insights from customers with fast, opt-in feedback and experience capture technology. The UserTesting Human Insight Platform taps into our global network of real people and generates video-based recorded experiences, so anyone in an organization can directly ask questions, hear what users say, see what they mean, and understand what it's actually like to be a customer. Unlike approaches that track user behavior then try to infer what that behavior means, UserTesting reduces guesswork and brings customer experience data to life with human insight. UserTesting has more than 2,300 customers, including more than half of the world's top 100 most valuable brands according to Forbes. UserTesting is headquartered in San Francisco, California. To learn more, visit www.usertesting.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220406005476/en/

Contacts:

UserTesting, Inc.

Chris Halcon

415-699-0553

chalcon@usertesting.com
Companies will showcase combined solution at American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2022

Stilla Technologies, the multiplex digital PCR company, and Promega Corporation today announced a co-marketing agreement that combines sample preparation with the latest Maxwell systems and digital PCR on the six-color naica system. With this partnership, the companies will offer an optimized workflow for a wide range of applications including liquid biopsy, sentinel pathogen testing, infectious disease assays, overall cancer research and drug discovery. Representative data of the liquid biopsy workflow will be presented at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2022 on April 10, 2022.

"The strategic partnership with Promega enhances our value proposition by bringing a fully-validated sample-to-answer solution for biomarker testing," said Philippe Mourere, President and CEO, Stilla Technologies. "Promega has demonstrated exceptional quality of results from samples processed with their proven reagents on Maxwell systems, which have been adopted globally for liquid biopsies. I am truly excited about the combined reach and strength that we can bring to the market through a strategic partnership."

The 6-color naica platform is being quickly adopted, with end-users developing high multiplex dPCR assays that have been previously unattainable. This adds to the growing body of evidence for the need to study more molecular targets per sample to provide actionable insights.

"In liquid biopsy clinical research, we see a desire to conduct more near-patient testing with faster time to results, lower costs, higher sensitivity, and a highly standardized process from sample preparation to results," said Tom Livelli, VP, Life Sciences Products Services, Promega Corporation. "This new end-to-end solution, pairing the Maxwell system with the naica system, will facilitate the move of highly multiplex genomic signatures from liquid biopsies, typically performed through NGS in centralized labs, to decentralized testing."

At the AACR Annual Meeting 2022, the companies will present data demonstrating ultrasensitive 32-plex detection from liquid biopsy samples of EGFR mutations in non-small cell lung cancer, in addition to PIK3CA mutations and HER2 amplification in breast cancer. These data will be presented during the following session on April 10, 2022, 1:30 PM 5:00 PM:

Poster #527 2 A streamlined workflow for liquid biopsy extraction and highplex digital PCR analysis using the Maxwell system and 6-color Crystal Digital PCR

The Stilla and Promega teams will also showcase their combined solution to the scientific community at booths #1807 (Stilla) and #730 (Promega) throughout the AACR Annual Meeting from April 10-13, 2022, in New Orleans. Further data will be released covering a broader range of application areas over the coming months.

About Stilla Technologies

Stilla Technologies is the multiplex digital PCR company transforming complex genomic data into actionable insights across a wide range of research and clinical applications including cancer and liquid biopsy studies, cell and gene therapies, infectious disease detection, and food and environmental testing. Stilla's groundbreaking Crystal Digital PCR solution, the naica system, is the industry's first digital PCR system featuring six fluorescent channels, providing biomedical researchers and clinicians the highest multiplexing and detection capacity available on the market. Stilla has U.S. headquarters in Boston, MA, European headquarters in Paris, France, and strategic distribution and business partnerships in China and throughout EMEA. To learn more, visit www.stillatechnologies.com and connect with Stilla on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220406005421/en/

Contacts:

Media

Rachel Huff

Stilla Technologies

rachel.huff@stillatechnologies.com
HOUSTON, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Republican governor of south central U.S. state of Texas, Greg Abbott, said on Wednesday that he has directed state law enforcement to send apprehended migrants by charter buses to Washington, D.C. while announcing more actions to deter migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border into the state.

"With the Biden administration ending Title 42 expulsions in May, Texas will be taking its own unprecedented actions this month to do what no state in America has ever done in the history of this country to better secure our state, as well as our nation," Abbott said at a news conference.

According to Department of Homeland Security projections, Abbott said, there will be as many as 18,000 daily crossings once Title 42 expires, roughly triple the daily average in February.

Abbott also announced plans to deploy boat blockades along the southern border, place razor wire along heavily trafficked low-water crossings, and start more aggressively inspecting vehicles as migrants cross the southern border into Texas.

Named for a 1940s public health law, Title 42 has allowed U.S. border officials to rapidly expel migrants without allowing them to apply for asylum.

The policy was introduced after the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 by then Republican President Donald Trump's administration and has reportedly been used roughly 1.7 million times by the current federal authorities.

A termination of the policy will be implemented on May 23, 2022, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced in a statement on Friday. The White House has stated that most of those who cross the border will not be able to remain in the United States, even with the lifting of Title 42.

Crossings at the southwest border of the United States have been peaking in recent weeks, and homeland security officials were said to have been bracing for those numbers to rise higher with the rescission of Title 42. 
PENTICTON, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 6, 2022 / EastWest Bioscience Inc. ("EastWest" or "Company") (TSXV:EAST), announced that it has filed its Quarterly Financials and MD&A under its profile on SEDAR with a material change in its profit numbers.

During the year ended July 31, 2021, the Company added self-storage to its already diverse revenue streams through a new subsidiary, 1290185BC dba Spare Room Co ("Spare Room") is an early-stage company intending to build high-quality self-storage facilities across western Canada. The inception of this subsidiary was initiated by the Company's need to leverage its Penticton facility, which has been underutilized.

November 4, 2021, the Company closed a non-brokered financing round through Spare Room. Spare Room received aggregate proceeds of $4,915,300 from the issuance of 9,830,600 common shares of Spare Room at C$0.50 per share. Spare Room is using the net proceeds from the Offering for the acquisition and construction of new self storage facilities, and general corporate purposes.

As a result of the non-brokered financing, the Company lost majority control of Spare Room and the Company had to derecognized the assets and liabilities of Spare Room from its consolidated statement of financial position, recorded its interest retained in Spare Room at fair value as an investment in associate at $5,824,999, and recognized a gain from deconsolidation of $2,874,625 associated with the loss of control. The Company consolidated Spare Room's profit or loss up to November 4, 2021.

Update on Operations of Spare Room

Since its inception in the spring of 2021, Spare Room has had two locations under construction: Penticton, British Columbia, and Oliver, British Columbia.

The Oliver location, which is an outdoor site, has had all the necessary site infrastructure improvements completed and is awaiting the connection of electrical to its site. The initial order of containers has arrived on site and has been installed. The site is on track to open early April and is anticipating customer purchase to begin immediately.

The Penticton location, which is also located in the 2nd floor of the Company's Head Office, will house an indoor storage site. Spare Room has received locker systems for the site and is currently awaiting the necessary permits from the City of Penticton.

Additionally, Spare Room has signed three Letters of Intent (LOI) for additional sites which are in the final stage of negotiations. It is anticipated that these negotiations will close over the next quarter.

The Canadian market for storage is expected to be robust as the market for self-storage is vastly underserved compared to the US market. As part of its growth strategy, Spare Room continues to focus its efforts on smaller markets where the demand for storage is underserved.

About the EastWest Bioscience Group of companies

EastWest Bioscience is a vertically integrated wellness company with a multitude of business units and assets that allow for seed-to-sale supply chain management. We source our raw material, process, manufacture, test, brand, market, and distribute our products to our customers in Canada, the United States, and beyond. The Company owns and operates retail and manufacturing subsidiaries.

The Company's retail subsidiary is the award winning, Canadian natural health retail franchise - Sangster's Health Centres - with over 40 years of legacy in the health and wellness industry. Sangster's goal is to provide natural choices through quality products and educated advice for a healthy lifestyle. Sangster's Health Centres occupies a unique position in the industry, the stores provide vast knowledge and safe natural remedies for the prevention and treatment of disease and ailments. Sangster's introduction and development of over 202 exclusively labeled products (vitamins, mineral, herbs, proteins, natural body care and organic foods) catapulted Sangster's name and product into a large number of Canadian households. From a solid base in Saskatchewan, Sangster's has become a national brand name with franchise stores located across Canada.

Orchard Vale Naturals is the Company's manufacturing arm that is certified with a Health Canada Site License and has GMP Certified NHP Manufacturing capabilities. Orchard Vale Naturals specializes in custom blends and production runs of all sizes, small to large, for top-quality products with quick turnaround times. Orchard Vale Naturals operates out of a 34,000 sq. ft. Health Canada licensed facility in Penticton, British Columbia owned by EastWest Bioscience, which acts as the Head Office for all of EastWest's Canadian operations.

The Company's subsidiary 1290185 B.C. LTD dba Spare Room Co Self Storage ("Spare Room") is building a network of automated self-storage sites in British Columbia. The subsidiary's business model is designed to be low capex with highly scalable logistics. It is focused on secondary markets, consumer automation and innovative land partnerships, allowing it to move into new regions quickly, at scale and with minimal risk. EastWest hopes to build Spare Room into a household name across Canada.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF

EASTWEST BIOSCIENCE INC.

"Rodney Gelineau"

Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Director

For Further Information:

Company Website: www.eastwestbioscience.com

Contact: Rodney Gelineau on 1-800-409-1930 or investors@eastwestscience.com

NEITHER THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.

CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION: This news release includes certain "forward-looking statements" under applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to the matters disclosed herein. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause the actual results and future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to: general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties; and delay or failure to receive board, shareholder or regulatory approvals. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The Corporation disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

SOURCE: EastWest Bioscience Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/696272/EastWest-Bioscience-TSXVEAST-Reports-Material-Increase-in-Earning-Recognition-Due-to-deconsolidation-of-Subsidiary
CAIRO, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Board of Directors of African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) on 31 March 2022 approved the launch of the Ukraine Crisis Adjustment Trade Financing Programme for Africa (UKAFPA), a programme of credit facilities that the Bank has developed to manage the impacts of the Ukraine crisis on African economies and businesses. The programme amounts to US$ 4 billion.

The Russia-Ukraine crisis which escalated on 24 February 2022 has had a significant effect on the global economy. Given the importance of both Russia and Ukraine as sources of crude oil and gas, raw materials and grains, the outbreak of the conflict has wider repercussions on a global scale, including adversely affecting African economies, especially those that rely heavily on grain, fertilizer and fuel imports. The UKAFPA programme has the following objectives:

Import Re-Order Cost Adjustment Financing, to help countries to meet immediate import price increases pending domestic demand adjustments





to help countries to meet immediate import price increases pending domestic demand adjustments Oil and Metals Buy-Back Financing to refinance over-collateralized loans in the context of the current high oil and metal prices, and thereby release more free cashflow for use in meeting other urgent needs, eg. food and fertilizer imports and servicing rising cost of debt





to refinance over-collateralized loans in the context of the current high oil and metal prices, and thereby release more free cashflow for use in meeting other urgent needs, eg. food and fertilizer imports and servicing rising cost of debt Commodity Export Revenue Stabilisation to help countries and companies to structure and enter derivative contracts at today's high commodity prices and stabilise future export earnings





to help countries and companies to structure and enter derivative contracts at today's high commodity prices and stabilise future export earnings Tourism Revenue Deficit Financing to be extended to Central Banks of tourism dependent economies to cover foreign exchange revenue shortfalls arising from a decline in tourism arrivals from Russia and Ukraine





to be extended to Central Banks of tourism dependent economies to cover foreign exchange revenue shortfalls arising from a decline in tourism arrivals from and National Export Revenue Acceleration Facility to be used to accelerate the completion of impactful export-oriented projects by expediting access to foreign currency for use in importing critical equipment, technology, and expertise, for project completion

Since its establishment, Afreximbank has built a track record and earned a reputation for introducing and implementing various emergency intervention programmes, with embedded strong risk mitigations to respond to various crises on a global scale and impacting Africa. Recent examples include the Pandemic Trade Impact Mitigation Facility (PATIMFA) through which Afreximbank disbursed over US$7 billion in support of African economies in their fight against the Covid 19 pandemic. That facility expired in March. Previously, in 2015, the Bank introduced its Countercyclical Trade Liquidity Facility (COTRALF) that provided a platform for the disbursement of over US$10 billion to African commercial and central banks making it possible to avert large scale trade debt payment defaults at the height of the commodity crisis. Both facilities achieved their respective goals and were deemed vitally important and successful interventions.

UKAFPA is a response to an urgent call for emergency intervention by member states of the Bank. UKAFPA - compliant financing requests received from across Africa already exceeds US$15 billion. There is some urgency to meet these requests to avoid catastrophic social conditions across Africa and reduce the risk of their morphing into political challenges.

Afreximbank looks forward to working with partner banks and institutions to urgently meet the need of African countries in terms of ensuring static and dynamic food security, adequate fuel supplies and averting fertilizer and agricultural input shortages, against a backdrop of renewed economic nationalism worldwide.

Beyond the financing, Afreximbank plans to work with the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), the African Union Commission (AUC) and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat to launch the Intra-African Supply Chain Coordination Group whose aim will be to enable alignment of production and consumption ensuring that what is produced in Africa is prioritised to meet African requirements, while reaching out to other entities in other parts of the world to lend support.

Speaking after the board meeting held in Abidjan, Cote D'Ivoire, Professor Benedict Oramah, President and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Afreximbank commented:



"I am delighted that our Board has approved the introduction of the UKAFPA, once again demonstrating their responsiveness to the needs of African member states and their citizens. This initiative will contribute immensely to averting social anxiety and upheaval that may arise from looming food shortages and high costs of fertilizer and petroleum products.



"Following African Union's endorsement, Afreximbank shareholders approved a US$6.5 billion General Capital Increase on 2021 to boost the capacity of the Bank to deliver on its mandate, deal with the Covid-19 pandemic, and support AfCFTA implementation. We must now add the consequences of the ongoing Ukraine crisis to the catalogue of emergencies a strong Afreximbank has to contend with. We are very grateful to member states and shareholders who have already paid in their subscriptions giving the Bank the flexibility to respond swiftly to prevailing challenges. I call upon those who have not acted to do so urgently as we will once again learn that in times of major crises we can only count on our own institutions to lead the way before others follow."

H.E. Macky Sall, President of the Republic of Senegal and current Chairperson of the African Union expressed his support for the UKAFPA initiative, saying: " I welcome the renewed energy of African institutions that have led our coordinated and successful response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Africa now faces the socio-economic challenges posed by a global context of conflict. Afreximbank has once again shown the way forward by enabling the continent to tackle the impact of the crisis head-on through financing solutions tailored to the specific pressure points facing our member countries. I hope that UKAFPA will play a major role in building resilience in nutrition and food security on the African continent, in line with the theme of the 36th AU Summit."

Dr. Vera Songwe, United Nations Under Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa welcomed this new initiative and added that:

"The New facility is timely and will support countries build resilience as they face yet another exogenous shock. The facilities approved by Afreximbank are also core tools needed to continue strengthing the continental financial architecture as countries look to rebuild their economies and take advantage of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement."

About Afreximbank:

African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) is a Pan-African multilateral financial institution mandated to finance and promote intra-and extra-African trade. Afreximbank deploys innovative structures to deliver financing solutions that support the transformation of the structure of Africa's trade, accelerating industrialization and intra-regional trade, thereby boosting economic expansion in Africa. The Bank has a rich history of intervening in support of African countries in times of crisis. Through the Pandemic Trade Impact Mitigation Facility (PATIMFA) launched in April 2020, Afreximbank has disbursed more than US$7 billion to help member countries manage the adverse impact of the financial, economic, and health shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. A stalwart supporter of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), Afreximbank has launched a Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) that was adopted by the African Union (AU) as the payment and settlement platform to underpin the implementation of the AfCFTA. Afreximbank is working with the AU and the AfCFTA Secretariat to develop an Adjustment Facility to support countries in effectively participating in the AfCFTA. At the end of 2020, the Bank's total assets and guarantees stood at US$21.5 billion, and its shareholder funds amounted to US$3.4 billion. Afreximbank disbursed more than US$42 billion between 2016 and 2020. The Bank has ratings assigned by GCR (international scale) (A-), Moody's (Baa1), Japan Credit Rating Agency (JCR) (A-) and Fitch (BBB-). The Bank is headquartered in Cairo, Egypt.

For more information, visit: www.afreximbank.com .

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Contact: Amadou Labba Sall, asall@afreximbank.com

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Notice is hereby given that on the initiative and by the resolution of the Board of NEO Finance, AB, legal entity code 303225546, with the registered office at A. Vivulskio str. 7, Vilnius (hereinafter - the Company), ordinary General Meeting of Shareholders of the Company will be held on 29 April 2022 at 10:00 a.m. The meeting will be held in the Company's office at A. Vivulskio str. 7, Vilnius in the administrative office of the Company. Agenda of the meeting: -- Approval of consolidated set of annual financial statements of the Company for the period between 01/01/2021 and 31/12/2021; -- Approval of the Company's profit (loss) distribution for 2021; -- Regarding the appointment of the auditor to audit consolidated financial statements of the Company for the financial year which will end in 31/12/2022; -- Approval of the 2021 internal audit report of the Company; -- Approval of of internal audit regulations; -- Approval of the 2022 internal audit plan of the Company; -- Approval of internal management, risk and control management policy and strategy; -- Approval of risk appetite framework and tolerance limits; -- Election of a member of the Board. Drafts of decisions with related documentation and further information shall be published separately by supplementing this notice. Other important information: The natural person's authorization shall be notarized. An authorization issued in a foreign state shall be translated into the Lithuanian language and legalized under the procedure prescribed by the laws). A shareholder or his proxy shall have the right to vote in writing in advance by filling in a general ballot paper. At the request of the shareholder, the Company shall send a general ballot paper to the shareholder by registered mail free of charge at least 10 days before the meeting. The filled-in general ballot paper and the document attesting the voting right shall be submitted to the Company no later than until the meeting, sending by registered mail or providing them at the address of the registered office of the Company indicated in the notice. The shareholders who hold shares carrying at least 1/20 of all the votes may propose additions to the agenda of the general meeting of shareholders by submitting with every proposed additional item of the agenda a draft resolution of the general meeting of shareholders or, when no resolution is required, an explanation. Proposals on addition to the agenda shall be submitted in writing or sent by e-mail. Written proposals shall be submitted to the Company on business days or sent by registered mail at the address of the registered office of the Company indicated in the notice. Proposals submitted by e-mail shall be sent to the following e-mail: info@paskoluklubas.lt. The agenda shall be supplemented if the proposal is received no later than 14 days before the Ordinary General Meeting of Shareholders. If the agenda of the general meeting of shareholders is supplemented, the Company shall notify on the additions no later than 10 days before the meeting in the same ways as in the case of convocation of the meeting. The shareholders, who hold shares carrying at least 1/20 of all the votes, at any time before the general meeting of shareholders or during the meeting, may propose new draft resolutions on items which are or will be included in the agenda of the meeting. The proposals may be submitted in writing or sent by e-mail. Written proposals shall be submitted to the Company on business days or sent by registered mail at the address of the registered office of the Company indicated in the notice. Proposals submitted by e-mail shall be sent to the following e-mail: info@paskoluklubas.lt. The shareholders shall have the right to submit to the Company in advance questions relating to the items on the agenda of the meeting. The shareholders may submit their written questions to the Company on business days or send by registered mail at the address of the registered office of the Company indicated in the notice no later than 3 business days before the meeting. The Company will reply to the questions by e-mail or in writing before the meeting, except the questions which are related to the Company's commercial (industrial) secret, confidential information or which have been submitted later than 3 business days before the meeting. The Company does not provide the possibility of participating and voting at the meeting by means of electronic communications. The shareholder shall have the right to authorize through electronic communications means another person (natural or legal) to participate and vote in the meeting on behalf of the shareholder. No notarization of such authorization is required. The shareholder must confirm the proxy issued through electronic communications means by an electronic signature developed by a secure signature-creation device and approved by a qualified certificate effective in the Republic of Lithuania. The shareholder shall inform the Company on the proxy issued through electronic communications means to the following e-mail: info@paskoluklubas.lt no later than until the last business day before the meeting at 10:00 a.m. The proxy and the notice must be issued in writing. The proxy and the notice to the Company shall be signed with the electronic signature but not the letter sent by e-mail. By submitting the notice to the Company, the shareholder shall include the internet address from which it would be possible to download software free of charge to verify the shareholder's electronic signature. The record date of the meeting shall be 22 April 2022 (only those persons who will be shareholders of the Company at the close of the record date of the general meeting of shareholders or their authorized persons, or persons with whom an agreement on assignment of the voting right has been executed, may participate and vote at the general meeting of shareholders). The shareholders of the Company may familiarise with the draft resolution of the meeting, the form of the general ballot paper under the procedure prescribed by the laws on the Company's website at www.neofinancegroup.com. Head of Adminstration Paulius Tarbunas Email: paulius.tarbunas@neofinance.com
Shareholders to benefit from greater transparency and improved liquidity

ESCONDIDO, CA / ACCESSWIRE / April 6, 2022 / CB Scientific. Inc. (OTCQB:CBSC) ("CBSC" or the "Company"), a designer, manufacturer, and distributor of non-invasive ambulatory cardiac monitoring products and services, today announces its successful uplisting from the OTC Pink Sheets to the OTCQB Venture Market (the "OTCQB"). The Company will commence trading on the OTCQB with the market open on April 6, 2022, under the symbol "CBSC."

"Trading on OTCQB is an important achievement for our Company, providing increased transparency and improved liquidity to both existing and prospective shareholders," said Charles Martin, Chief Executive Officer of CB Scientific, Inc. "In combination with plans underway for ongoing corporate growth through the balance of the year, we believe listing on the OTCQB will allow our story to reach a wider investor audience, a key objective for the Company in 2022."

OTCQB is operated by OTC Markets Group, Inc. and is designed for early-stage and developing companies in the United States and abroad. To be eligible for OTCQB quotes, companies must be current in their disclosure filings, have audited financial statements, and undergo an annual validation and management certification process. Companies must also meet minimum bid testing and other financial terms. OTCQB is recognized as an established public market by the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") and provides current public information to investors in need of securities analysis, valuation, and trading.

"Realizing this significant accomplishment represents another major milestone in the Company's pursuit of planned business objectives," said Paul Danner, Chairman of CB Scientific, Inc. "We are now positioned to move forward with our plans to implement a corporate name change which more accurately describes our business direction and future growth potential, and relocation of our corporate domicile to Nevada which provides superior tax laws and corporate regulations."

As additional new developments occur, CB Scientific, Inc. plans to make timely announcements through press releases and regulatory filings to keep its shareholders, industry participants, and the public markets informed.

About CB Scientific, Inc.

CB Scientific, Inc., through its domestic and international subsidiaries, provides innovative products and services in the ambulatory non-invasive cardiac monitoring space. Our FDA and CE cleared EKG devices, interactive cloud-based acquisition software, and smartphone apps for both iOS and Android platforms provide improved compliance for patients at risk of abnormal heart rhythms, as well as more accurate information for physicians.

Company Contact Information:

Telephone: (888) 225-0870

Email: General Inquiries: info@cbscientificinc.com

Investor Inquiries: Robert Hesse - dorchco.bh@gmail.com

Follow CBSC: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Newsletter

This information disclosure may contain forward-looking statements covered within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements relate to, among other things, plans and timing for the introduction or enhancement of our services and products, statements about future market conditions, supply and demand conditions, and other expectations, intentions, and plans contained in this press release that are not historical fact and involve risks and uncertainties. Our expectations regarding future revenues depend upon our ability to develop and supply products and services that we may not produce today and that meet defined specifications. When used in this press release, the words "plan," "expect," "believe," and similar expressions generally identify forward-looking statements. These statements reflect our current expectations. They are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, changes in technology and changes in pervasive markets. This release includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 27E of the Securities Act of 1934. Statements contained in this release that are not historical facts may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that forward-looking statements are inherently uncertain. Actual performance and results may differ materially from that projected or suggested herein due to certain risks and uncertainties, including, without limitation, the ability to obtain financing and regulatory and shareholder approval for anticipated actions.

SOURCE: CB Scientific, Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/696363/CB-Scientific-Inc-Announces-Uplist-to-the-OTCQBR-Venture-Market
Viva Wallet POS app enables you to turn any Android device with NFC into a card terminal with contactless technology

This initiative supported by Mastercard intends to boost local businesses and facilitate the lives of citizens and tourists, who can now make contactless payments easily and safely

LISBON, Portugal, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Viva Wallet, with the support of Mastercard, will assist the digital transformation in the city of Evora, enabling local merchants to adopt contactless payments in their stores.

The initiative is intended to encourage SMEs from local businesses to join the acceptance of contactless payments, through Tap On Phone technology, which is provided by the Viva Wallet POS app, thus allowing customers to pay easily, safely and hassle-free, even with international cards. With this innovative technology, merchants can transform any Android NFC-enabled smartphone, tablet or other device into a contactless card terminal, saving the costs associated with dedicated terminals, by simply downloading the application to the merchant's smartphone.

This digital transformation project kicks off with a campaign to promote and advertise the service, encouraging more than 1,000 local businesses, including restaurants, to join digital payments, improving the shopping experience of their customers, especially tourists, who are not always able to use their cards in traditional national card terminals.

This Viva Wallet initiative in Evora, with the support of Mastercard, aims to educate and raise awareness among merchants, as well as encourage the local population, students and tourists to use contactless payments.

The campaign started on April 4 and will be present in several digital media but also physical media such as billboards and large format, static and mobile, as well as displays in local shops and restaurants and social networks.

Pedro Saldanha, Country Manager Portugal at Viva Wallet, says that "the Tap On Phone solution, available to all merchants, brings a new paradigm to the payment landscape. The old and bulky payment card terminals, only focused on payments, will soon become obsolete. Viva Wallet is leading the digital transformation of SMEs with the latest technology available. Now, any business can benefit from the Viva Wallet POS app, and turn an Android phone (or tablet) with NFC into a card terminal. Our solution is not only highly innovative but can also be easily integrated with third party applications. And best of all: there are no monthly fees or limitations on the number of "card terminals" a merchant can have!".

Maria Antonia Saldanha, Country Manager at Mastercard, states that "It is the right time for us to support the digital transition of cities, giving more quality of life to its residents and visitors. Using a contactless card in daily routines is a good example. Mastercard, with Viva Wallet and local stakeholders, wants to make Evora a contactless city, by using a set of innovative services that we have implemented in several cities around the world. It is this global experience that we want to share with the city of Evora, with the people of Evora, with local commerce and businesses, and with all those who visit the city. With this project we are responding to the challenges of tourism and to the dynamization of the local economy, through scalable technological solutions, essential for the future of smart cities."

About Viva Wallet

Viva Wallet is the first European neo-bank, entirely cloud-based, with offices in 23 European countries. Created to change the way businesses pay and get paid, Viva Wallet offers businesses of any size the acceptance of 24 card payment methods, using technology for card present (CP) or card not present (CNP), along with commercial accounts with Portuguese IBAN and debit card issuance.

www.vivawallet.com

About Mastercard

Mastercard (NYSE: MA), www.mastercard.com, is a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to connect and drive an inclusive digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions secure, simple, smart and affordable. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions enable us to help individuals, financial institutions, governments and businesses achieve their greatest potential. Our Decency Quotient, or DQ, is a tool to drive our culture and everything we do inside and outside our company. With connections to more than 210 countries and territories, we are building a sustainable world that opens up Priceless possibilities for all. Mastercard is the only corporate donor to the Mastercard Impact Fund.

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NOIDA, India, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- A comprehensive overview of the global Wind Turbine Operations and Maintenance Market is recently added by UnivDatos Market Insights to its humongous database. The report has been aggregated by collecting informative data from various dynamics such as market drivers, restraints, and opportunities. This innovative report makes use of several analyses to get a closer outlook on the Wind Turbine Operations and Maintenance Market globally. This report offers a detailed analysis of the latest industry developments and trending factors that are influencing the market growth. Furthermore, this statistical market research repository examines and estimates the global Wind Turbine Operations and Maintenance Market at regional and country levels. The Global Wind Turbines Operation and Maintenance Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of ~12% from 2021-2027.

Market Overview

Wind turbine operations and maintenance refer to the services of maintaining the smooth working of the wind turbines. Wind energy means a renewable form of energy that is widely available on the surface of the earth. Wind power is one of the fastest-growing renewable energy technologies and owing to the decrease in the cost of wind power technology had positively influenced the usage of wind power worldwide. According to International Renewable Energy Agency, global installed wind-generation capacity onshore and offshore has increased by a factor of almost 75 in the past two decades, jumping from 7.5 gigawatts (GW) in 1997 to some 564 GW by 2018. In addition, in 2020, record growth was driven by a surge of installations in China and the US - the world's two largest wind power markets - who together installed nearly 75% of the new installations in 2020 and account for over half of the world's total wind power capacity. However, offshore wind power plants need to install at a higher rate by 2050 to stay on a net-zero pathway and avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

With increasing electricity demand, wind energy is growing at an influential rate owing to its high efficiency and declining cost component. In addition to this as compared to other renewable power sources, it has a low maintenance cost. Further, reaching net-zero will require bold actions by many sectors, wind power is placed to be one of the cornerstones of green recovery to play an important role in accelerating the global green energy transition. For instance, Green Wind Energy Council (GWEC) expects that over 469 GW of new onshore and offshore wind capacity will be added in the next five years that is until 2025.

Request Sample Copy of this Report @https://univdatos.com/get-a-free-sample-form-php/?product_id=18157

COVID-19 Impact

In 2020, some major regions worldwide had seen growth in offshore wind power turbines. For instance: According to Global Wind Energy Council, 2020 was the best year in history for the global wind industry with 93 GW of new capacity installed - a 53 percent year-on-year increase. In 2020, record growth was driven by a surge of installations in China and the US. Whereas in Latin America, Brazil continues to lead the way for wind power in the region with 2.3 GW of new capacity installed in 2020 followed by Argentina (1 GW) and Chile (684 MW). Similarly, Europe now has 220 GW of installed wind power capacity: 194 GW onshore and 25 GW offshore, in which the Netherlands installed the most wind capacity in 2020, most of its offshore wind.

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Global Wind Turbine Operations and Maintenance Market report is studied thoroughly with several aspects that would help stakeholders in making their decisions more curated.

By Type, the market is primarily bifurcated into:

Offshore

Onshore

Based on Type, the market is bifurcated into offshore and onshore. Currently, the offshore structure is expected to capture considerable market growth during the forecast period. It is mainly owing to a rising scope for relishing the projects in deep water, where the high wind speed creates a much more favorable environment for operation, thereby driving the installation of offshore wind turbines. The expected increase in the deployment of wind turbines in more complex and challenging environments, such as farther offshore, coupled with the growing capacity of the wind turbine capacity, has put additional pressure on the operating components of the wind turbine. Therefore, it requires regular maintenance for smooth operations of the turbines.

Global Wind Turbine Operations and Maintenance Market Geographical Segmentation Includes:

North America ( United States , Canada , Rest of North America )

( , , Rest of ) Europe ( Germany , UK, France , Italy , Spain , Rest of Europe )

( , UK, , , , Rest of ) Asia-Pacific ( China , Japan , India , Australia , Rest of APAC)

( , , , , Rest of APAC) Rest of World

For a better understanding of the market adoption of offshore wind, the market is analyzed based on its worldwide presence in the countries such as North America (United States, Canada), Europe (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, and Rest of Europe), Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, India, Australia, and Rest of APAC), and Rest of World. APAC region is expected to witness the fastest growth during the forecast period mainly due to the surging offshore wind technology adoption and wind farm development in the region. Furthermore, with the explosive growth of wind turbine installations in China, Asia Pacific continues to take the lead in global wind power development during the forecast period.

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The major players targeting the market includes:

Nordex SE

Enercon GmbH

Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy SA

GE Renewable Energy

Xinjiang Goldwind Science & Technology Co. Ltd.,

Vestas Wind Systems A/S

Suzlon Energy Ltd

ABB Ltd

Mistras Group

Integrated Power Services LLC

Competitive Landscape

The degree of competition among prominent companies has been elaborated by analyzing several leading key players operating globally. The specialist team of research analysts sheds light on various traits such as global market competition, market share, most recent industry advancements, innovative product launches, partnerships, mergers, or acquisitions by leading companies in the global Wind Turbine Operations and Maintenance Market. The major players have been analyzed by using research methodologies for getting insight views on market competition.

Key questions resolved through this analytical market research report include:

What are the latest trends, new patterns, and technological advancements in the Global Wind Turbine Operations and Maintenance Market?

Which factors are influencing the global Wind Turbine Operations and Maintenance Market over the forecast period?

What are the global challenges, threats, and risks in the global Wind Turbine Operations and Maintenance Market?

Which factors are propelling and restraining the global Wind Turbine Operations and Maintenance Market?

What are the demanding global regions of the global Wind Turbine Operations and Maintenance Market?

What will be the market size in the upcoming years?

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WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - President Joe Biden has issued a memorandum directing the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to coordinate a new effort across the federal government to develop and issue the first-ever interagency national research action plan to address the long-term effects of Covid.



The effort will advance progress in preventing, diagnosing, treating, and providing services, supports, and interventions for patients experiencing Long Covid and associated conditions.



HHS will lead a government-wide interagency coordinating council, which will involve experts from the Department of Defense, Veterans Administration, the Labor Department, and many entities across government to coordinate both public- and private-sector work to advance the understanding of Long Covid.



The Presidential Memorandum also directs HHS to issue a report outlining services and supports across federal agencies to assist people experiencing Long COVID, individuals who are dealing with a COVID-related loss, and people who are experiencing mental health and substance use issues related to the pandemic.



This report will specifically address the long-term effects of COVID-19 on high-risk communities and efforts to address disparities in access to services and supports.



Millions of people in the U.S. continue to report prolonged illness from Coronavirus infection, known as 'Long COVID.' Lingering health effects range from things that are easier to notice, like trouble breathing or irregular heartbeat, to less apparent but potentially serious conditions related to the brain or mental health.



Meanwhile, a federal program that reimbursed doctors, pharmacists and other providers for vaccinating the uninsured had to be closed Tuesday due to a lack of funds.



Senate Republicans Tuesday voted down consideration of a much-needed bill to purchase Covid vaccines, boosters, and life-saving treatments.



White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki warned of consequences for Congress failure to fund the government's Covid Response.



'America's supply of monoclonal antibodies that are effective at keeping people out of the hospital will run out as soon as late May. Our test manufacturing capacity will begin ramping down at the end of June. Today's Senate vote is a step backward for our ability to respond to this virus,' she said in a statement.



New national estimates released Tuesday show that the Omicron sublineage BA.2 is now projected to account for 72 percent of circulating variants nationally, with all regions of the country reporting that BA.2 is now the dominant variant.



The high level of immunity in the population from vaccines, boosters, and previous infection will provide some level of protection against BA.2, CDC director Dr.Rochelle Walensky said in a news conference.



As positive cases remain relatively low compared to earlier stages of the pandemic, 95 percent of counties in the United States are reporting low COVID-19 community levels, that represent over 97 percent of the U.S. population.



With 29521 new cases reporting on Tuesday, total U.S. Covid cases increased to 80,209,361, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University. With 457 additional deaths, U.S. Covid casualties reached 982,558.



4106 additional deaths were reported globally on Tuesday, taking the total number of people who lost their lives due to the pandemic so far to 6,159,827.







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Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 6, 2022) - District Copper Corp. (TSXV: DCOP) ("District Copper", "District", or the "Company") is pleased to announce the appointment of Marion McGrath as Corporate Secretary. Also, the Company has added to its land package at the Copper Keg property by staking an additional 962 hectares immediately adjacent to the existing claims. The Copper Keg porphyry copper project is located approximately 55 kms west of Kamloops British Columbia. The property covers approximately 4,235 ha and is located at the north end of the Guichon Creek batholith.

Ms. McGrath has been actively engaged in the securities industry for over 35 years specializing in corporate governance and compliance of publicly traded issuers listed on the TSX Venture Exchange and the Canadian Securities Exchange. Ms. McGrath has been self-employed since 2001 and is the owner of iO Corporate Services Ltd. Prior to organizing iO Corporate, Ms. McGrath was a senior paralegal with a Vancouver-based securities law firm.

Mr. Jevin Werbes, President and Chief Executive Officer of District Copper, stated "We would like to welcome Marion to the Company. We are excited to have her decades of experience and knowledge available to District Copper and look forward to a long prosperous relationship."

Qualified Person

Chris M. Healey, P.Geo., Chief Geologist, and a Director of District Copper Corp., is the qualified person under NI 43-101 guidelines who is responsible for the technical content of this release, and consents to its release.

About District Copper

District Copper is a Canadian company engaged in the exploration for porphyry copper deposits in south-central British Columbia.

For further information, please visit www.districtcoppercorp.com to view the Company's profile or contact

Jevin Werbes at 604-363-3506.

_________________________________

Jevin Werbes, President & CEO

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to sell any of the securities described herein in the United States. The securities described in this news release have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to U.S. Persons unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or an exemption from such registration is available. This news release is not for distribution in the United States or over United States newswires.

Cautionary Statement on Forward-Looking Statement

Certain information contained in this news release, including information as to our strategy, projects, plans or future financial or operating performance and other statements that express management's expectations or estimates of future performance, constitute "forward looking statements". Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such statements. All statements, other than historical fact, included herein, including, without limitations statements regarding future production, are forward-looking statements that involve various risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements.

In connection with the forward-looking information contained in this news release, District Copper has made numerous assumptions regarding, among other things: the geological advice that District Copper has received is reliable and is based upon practices and methodologies which are consistent with industry standards and the reliability of historical reports. While District Copper considers these assumptions to be reasonable, these assumptions are inherently subject to significant uncertainties and contingencies.

Additionally, there are known and unknown risk factors which could cause District Copper's actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking information contained herein. Known risk factors include, among others: the dimensions and shape of the mineralized areas may not be as estimated; the mineralization may not represent sediment hosted intrusion related style gold mineralization; uncertainties relating to interpretation of the outcrop sampling results; the geology, continuity, and concentration of the mineralization; the financial markets and the overall economy may deteriorate; the need to obtain additional financing and uncertainty of meeting anticipated program milestones; and uncertainty as to timely availability of permits and other governmental approvals.

A more complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties facing District Copper is disclosed in District Copper's continuous disclosure filings with Canadian securities regulatory authorities at www.sedar.com. All forward-looking information herein is qualified in its entirety by this cautionary statement, and District Copper disclaims any obligation to revise or update any such forward-looking information or to publicly announce the result of any revisions to any of the forward-looking information contained herein to reflect future results, events or developments, except as required by law.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/119509
A2W Pharma Ltd, a pharmaceutical company based in Malta, celebrates the opening of its new facility during a launch event on its premises today. The event is addressed by Hon. Miriam Dalli Minister for Environment, Energy and Enterprise, H.E. Yu Dunhai Ambassador of China to Malta, Peter Paul Farrugia A2W Pharma Director, Antonio Sommei Amino Chemicals CEO, and Kurt Farrugia Malta Enterprise CEO, along with representatives from Malta Medicines Authority.

A2W provides full end to end processing from raw material to bottling with chemical and stability testing capabilities. The company has begun validating materials and methods, and is expecting to receive its EU-GMP certification this summer. Its long-term vision centres around the development of botanical active substances for pharmaceutical and nutraceutical product development.

"The opening of A2W Pharma is part of our strategic vision to extend the capabilities of our operations in Malta to support our partners in the development of pharmaceutical formulations," says Antonio Sommei.

The mother company, ABA Chemicals Corp (Shenzen Stock Exchange 300261-CN:Shenzhen) has invested more than 6 million, through its API facility, Amino Chemicals Ltd, to address an immediate demand for EU-GMP certified extracts. Amino, also based in Malta, has 30 years of experience developing pharmaceutical APIs and lends its commercial and regulatory expertise.

"The discoveries related to the active substances found in the cannabis plant, and their therapeutic effects, represent a shift in the way patients suffering from various ailments can be treated. A2W's vision is to increase access to these substances, whilst utilising 30 years of experience in pharmaceutical development to ensure adherence to the strictest of regulatory requirements," says Tony Cai, ABA Chemicals Chairperson.

A2W's long-term strategy centers around developing pharmaceutical products for therapeutic areas where there is a critical need to advance patient care. The medical cannabis industry, globally valued at USD 22 billion, is expected to continue its tremendous growth as more countries legalize prescription use to treat neurological and immunological conditions. Industry growth can be attributed to physician education and patient awareness regarding the benefits of medical cannabis.

"We are fortunate to have the support and expertise of ABA and Amino to help us achieve our goal of entering this new sector of pharmaceutical development, which we aim to enhance with our experience and capabilities," says Peter Paul Farrugia.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220406005057/en/

Contacts:

Peter Paul Farrugia, Director A2W Pharma

peterpaul.farrugia@a2wpharma.com

+356 99540055
ROAD TOWN, British Virgin Islands, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Good day and God's blessing to All. On 4th April 2022, His Excellency the Governor John J. Rankin CMG kindly informed me of his receipt of the Commission of Inquiry (COI) report from Sir Gary Hickinbottom. I thanked the Governor for his update.

I have not received a copy of the report, but in our meeting this morning, Governor Rankin assured me that I, and the relevant persons, would have an opportunity to review the report before having initial discussions with him on its content. Following my administration's review, we will submit a comprehensive written response to the report.

I agree with Governor Rankin that a period of review is needed to review the lengthy and detailed document in order to properly consider its findings and recommendations before the report is released to the public.

At our meeting, I also reiterated that my Administration has never been against a COI. We have always advocated that it should be transparent, objective and yield a just outcome. That is why we fully cooperated with the COI.

I also emphasised to Governor Ranking that my Administration remains committed to Good Governance and stands ready to discuss the findings and recommendations of the report after review, so that together we can consider any further steps needed to further strengthen the systems of Government in the Virgin Islands in the best interest of the people of the Territory.

I also previously shared this position with the United Kingdom Minister for the Overseas Territories, The Right Honourable Amanda Milling, MP during her visit.

Good progress is already being made, and has been ongoing, as we implement several pieces of Good Governance legislation that my Administration promised to deliver in our 2019 election manifesto.

Prior to the announcement of the COI on 18 January 2021 and continuing thereafter, my Government, on our own initiative, has introduced and passed legislation in the House of Assembly to further strengthen Good Governance in the Virgin Islands. These legislations included the Contractor General Act, Integrity in Public Life Act, Ministerial Code of Conduct, Whistleblower Act, and the Public Procurement Act.

Other Good Governance measures have also been in the works, inclusive of setting up of the Human Rights Commission and introducing additional legislation including but not limited to the Freedom of Information Act and Amendments to the Registrar of Interests Act.

I am pleased that Governor Rankin and I are working closely in this regard.

I look forward to reviewing the COI report once received and having initial discussions with Governor Rankin on its contents. I very much appreciate the Governor's openness to engagement.

Additionally, I look forward to travelling to the United Kingdom to have discussions with Minister Milling on the report, which I first proposed at the Joint Ministerial Council last year, and again during her recent visit to the Territory.

I thank the Minister for her openness to receiving me when I travel. It is also very appropriate for Governor Rankin to be present for those discussions.

As the review of the COI report commences, I would like to restate what I have previously said, my Administration remains committed to Good Governance and will continue to further strengthen the systems of Government, and we look forward to engaging the United Kingdom in this regard.

Restoring the modern partnership between the British Virgin Islands and the United Kingdom continues and I am confident that by continuing to work together we will achieve the balance needed to see the continued growth and development of the Territory.

I will make a follow-up statement at the appropriate time.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1781882/Premiers_Office_Government_of_the_Virgin_Islands.jpg
UNITED NATIONS, April 6 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday welcomed the news that trucks with food assistance and fuel have reached Tigray and Afar following the declaration of the humanitarian truce.

Through a statement, the top UN official called on all parties "to keep the momentum" and to follow through on their commitments to facilitate the provision of humanitarian assistance to all people in need.

He reiterated his call for "the restoration of public services" in Tigray, including banking, electricity and telecommunications, as well as commercial access.

"The United Nations reiterates its unwavering commitment to support a peaceful and prosperous future for all Ethiopians," the statement said. 
April 6, 2022

Today the Company held its Annual General Meeting. This release contains the results of that meeting as well as a Company update related to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Company update related to geopolitical events

Considering the conflict between Russia and Ukraine which started in February 2022, the Company confirms it does not have any significant business activity in Ukraine nor Russia. However, over time, the conflict could have direct and indirect economic and financial consequences.

The company is closely monitoring its exposure, including the uncertainties and risks associated with the crisis, but at this point it is too early to assess any impacts.

2022 Annual General Meeting Resolutions

SBM Offshore is pleased to announce that all resolutions were adopted as proposed during the Annual General Meeting of April 6, 2022. The adopted resolutions include the appointment of ivind Tangen as member of the Management Board and Hilary Mercer as member of the Supervisory Board as well as the re-appointment of Roeland Baan and Bernard Bajolet as members of the Supervisory Board.

Shareholders also voted in favor of the proposed all cash dividend of US$1 per ordinary share. Dividends will be paid in Euros using an exchange rate of 1.0944, which will result in a payout of 0.9137 per ordinary share. The cash dividend is payable on May 4, 2022 to all shareholders of record as at April 11, 2022 through the bank or broker administering the shares.

ABN AMRO is responsible for executing the dividend payment on behalf of SBM Offshore and offers the Company's shareholders the option to participate in a Dividend Reinvestment Plan (DRIP). By participating in this program, shareholders can reinvest their net dividend into shares of the Company. Further information regarding the DRIP will be made available by ABN AMRO to all financial intermediaries.

Further details on the adopted resolutions can be found on the Company's website.



CorporateProfile

SBM Offshore designs, builds, installs and operates offshore floating facilities for the offshore energy industry. As a leading technology provider, we put our marine expertise at the service of a responsible energy transition by reducing emissions from fossil fuel production, while developing cleaner solutions for renewable energy sources.

More than 5,000 SBMers worldwide are committed to sharing their experience to deliver safe, sustainable and affordable energy from the oceans for generations to come.

For further information, please visit our website at www.sbmoffshore.com .

The Management Board

Amsterdam, the Netherlands, April 6, 2022

Financial Calendar Date Year First Quarter 2022 Trading Update May 12 2022 Half Year 2022 Earnings August 4 2022 Third Quarter 2022 Trading Update November 10 2022 Full Year 2022 Earnings February 23 2023 Annual General Meeting April 13 2023







For further information, please contact:

Investor Relations

Bert-Jaap Dijkstra

Group Treasurer and IR

Mobile: +31 (0) 6 21 14 10 17 E-mail: bertjaap.dijkstra@sbmoffshore.com Website: www.sbmoffshore.com

Media Relations

Vincent Kempkes

Group Communications Director

Mobile: +377 (0) 6 40 62 87 35 E-mail: vincent.kempkes@sbmoffshore.com Website: www.sbmoffshore.com

Market Abuse Regulation

This press release may contain inside information within the meaning of Article 7(1) of the EU Market Abuse Regulation.

Disclaimer

Some of the statements contained in this release that are not historical facts are statements of future expectations and other forward-looking statements based on management's current views and assumptions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results, performance, or events to differ materially from those in such statements. These statements may be identified by words such as 'expect', 'should', 'could', 'shall' and similar expressions. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties. The principal risks which could affect the future operations of SBM Offshore N.V. are described in the 'Risk Management' section of the 2021 Annual Report.

Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results and performance of the Company's business may vary materially and adversely from the forward-looking statements described in this release. SBM Offshore does not intend and does not assume any obligation to update any industry information or forward-looking statements set forth in this release to reflect new information, subsequent events or otherwise.

Nothing in this release shall be deemed an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities. The companies in which SBM Offshore N.V. directly and indirectly owns investments are separate legal entities. In this release "SBM Offshore" and "SBM" are sometimes used for convenience where references are made to SBM Offshore N.V. and its subsidiaries in general. These expressions are also used where no useful purpose is served by identifying the particular company or companies.

"SBM Offshore", the SBM logomark, "Fast4Ward", "emissionZERO" and "Float4WindTM" are proprietary marks owned by SBM Offshore.

Attachment
Finsbury Growth & Income Trust Plc - Transaction in Own Shares

For immediate release

6 April 2022

FINSBURY GROWTH & INCOME TRUST PLC

(the "Company")

MARKET PURCHASE OF COMPANY'S OWN SHARES

The Company announces that it has today purchased 50,000 of its own shares ("Ordinary Shares") at a price of 833.93p per Ordinary Share. Such shares will be held in treasury by the Company.

The transaction was made pursuant to the authority granted at the Annual General Meeting of the Company held on 9 February 2022.

Following this transaction, the total number of Ordinary Shares held by the Company in treasury is 1,760,421; the total number of Ordinary Shares that the Company has in issue, less the total number of Ordinary Shares held by the Company in treasury following such purchase, and therefore, the total number of voting rights in the Company is 223,230,882.

The figure of 223,230,882 may be used by shareholders as the denominator for calculations of interests in the Company's voting rights in accordance with the FCA's Disclosure Guidance and Transparency Rules.

For and on behalf of

Frostrow Capital LLP

Company Secretary

For further information, please contact:

Victoria Hale

Frostrow Capital LLP

Tel: 020 3 170 8732
Considering the establishment of strong governance in recent years, PAREF's Board of Directors approved the corporate governance report for fiscal year 2021, which consolidates the group's capabilities :

On February 17, 2022, the Board of Directors accepted the resignation of Mr. Mingtao Liu from his position as Chairman of the Board of Directors in consideration of his responsibilities within Fosun Group. However, Mr. Mingtao Liu will remain a director of PAREF until the end of his term of office, which expires at the 2025 Ordinary General Meeting.

The Board of Directors has unanimously decided to combine the functions of Chief Executive Officer and Chairman, as it believes that this new arrangement will enhance the responsiveness and effectiveness of PAREF's strategic management. Accordingly, Mr. Antoine Castro, Chief Executive Officer since July 2017, has been appointed to the position of Chairman.

The Chairman and Chief Executive Officer will continue to be able to rely on the 8 directors - 3 of whom are independent - and the 3 committees that emanate from them, which will inform decisions in the areas of investment, audit and appointments & remuneration.

The Board of Directors would like to express its gratitude to Mr. Liu for his contribution to the sound management and governance of the group under his chairmanship.

"I am honored by the confidence that the Board of Directors has placed in me by appointing me as Chairman and look forward to continuing the work of my predecessor. I will do my utmost to carry out this function with commitment in order to enable the group to meet the challenges it faces and to accompany it in achieving its growth ambitions", declared Mr. Antoine Castro.

Michaela Robert, independent Director and Chairwoman of the Nominations and Remuneration Committee, added: "The balance struck by the Board of Directors is excellent, enabling PAREF to seize excellent opportunities in the current economic climate, which requires agility and speed of movement and execution. We look forward to working even more closely with Antoine Castro in his new role as Chairman of the Group."

IX - Financial agenda

April 28, 2022: Financial information as of March 31, 2022

May 19, 2022: Annual General Meeting of shareholder

About PAREF Group

PAREF operates in two major complementary areas: (i) investments owned by SIIC PAREF primarily in commercial real estate in the Paris region (0.2 bn asset as of December 31, 2021) and (ii) Management on behalf of third parties via PAREF Gestion (1.8 bn funds under management as of December 31, 2021), an AMFcertified management company, and via PAREF Investment Management (0.7 bn as of December 31, 2021).

PAREF is a company listed on Euronext Paris, Compartment C, under ISIN FR00110263202 - Ticker PAR.

More information on www.paref.com

Contacts Presse

Groupe PAREF

Raphaelle Chevignard

01 40 29 86 86

raphaelle.chevignard@paref.com

Citigate Dewe Rogerson

Tom Ruvira

07 60 90 89 18

Paref@citigatedewerogerson.com

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Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 6, 2022) - LevelJump Healthcare Corp. (TSXV: JUMP) (OTCQB: JMPHF) (FSE: 75J) ("LevelJump" or the "Company"), a Canadian leader in B2B telehealth solutions, is pleased to announce that it will be conducting a non-brokered private placement financing of up to 13,333,333 units at $0.15 per unit (a "Unit") for gross proceeds of up to $2,000,000 (the "Offering").

Each Unit will consist of one common share of Leveljump and one common share purchase warrant ("Warrant"). Each Warrant will entitle the holder to acquire one additional common share of Leveljump at an exercise price of $0.20 with an expiry date of March 31, 2024.

The Offering is only open to residents of Canada who are "accredited investors" as defined under applicable securities legislation. It is the intention that the principal subscribers will include strategic investors made up of private investment funds and high net worth investors in support of the long-term vision of the Company.

The net proceeds from the financing will be used towards acquisitions and for general working capital purposes.

The Offering is expected to close in April 2022. The Offering is conditional upon receipt of all required regulatory approvals, including the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. The securities to be issued under the Offering will have a hold period of four months and one day from the closing date of the Offering in accordance with applicable securities laws.

About LevelJump Healthcare

LevelJump Healthcare Corp., (TSXV: JUMP) is building a national medical diagnostic imaging company and brand, primarily by providing teleradiology (remote radiology) services to its client hospitals and imaging centers. Additionally, JUMP plans to expand through the acquisition of independent healthcare facilities focused on diagnostic imaging as well as acquiring new disruptive imaging technologies.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF

LEVELJUMP HEALTHCARE CORP.

Mitchell Geisler, Chief Executive Officer

info@leveljumphealthcare.com

(833) 840-2020

CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION

This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws relating to the Company's business plans and the outlook of the Company's industry. Although the Company believes, in light of the experience of its officers and directors, current conditions and expected future developments and other factors that have been considered appropriate, that the expectations reflected in this forward-looking information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on them because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Actual results and developments may differ materially from those contemplated by these statements. The statements in this press release are made as of the date of this release and the Company assumes no responsibility to update them or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances other than as required by applicable securities laws. The Company undertakes no obligation to comment on analyses, expectations or statements made by third-parties in respect of the Company, Canadian Teleradiology Services, Inc., their securities, or their respective financial or operating results (as applicable).

Neither the Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

The securities being offered have not been, and will not be, registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") or any U.S. state securities laws, and may not be offered or sold in the United States or to, or for the account or benefit of, United States persons absent registration or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act and applicable U.S. state securities laws. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy securities in the United States, nor in any other jurisdiction.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/119541
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 6, 2022) - Tudor Gold Corp. (TSXV: TUD) (the "Company") is pleased to announce that further to its news release dated March 10, 2022, it has closed its previously announced brokered private placement offering (the "Offering"), with a non-brokered portion of the offering (the "Non-Brokered Portion") for aggregate gross proceeds to the Company of approximately $12.9 million. The Offering was led by Research Capital Corporation as the lead agent and sole bookrunner, on behalf of a syndicate of agents, including, PI Financial Corp., Roth Canada, ULC, and Canaccord Genuity Corp. (collectively, the "Agents"). In connection with the Offering and the Non-Brokered Portion, the Company issued:

2,942,500 units of the Company (the "Units") at a price of $2.00 per Unit. Each Unit consists of one common share of the Company (a "Common Share") and one-half of one Common Share purchase warrant (each whole warrant, a "Warrant"); and 2,914,678 flow-through units of the Company (the "FT Units") at a price of $2.40 per FT Unit. Each FT Unit consists of one Common Share that will qualify as "flow-through shares" within the meaning of subsection 66(15) of the Income Tax Act (Canada) (the "Tax Act") (each, a "FT Common Share") and one-half of one Warrant.

Each Warrant entitles the holder thereof to purchase one Common Share (a "Warrant Share") at an exercise price of $2.80 per Warrant Share at any time up to 24 months from April 6, 2022 (the "Closing Date").

Eric Sprott, through 2176423 Ontario Ltd, a corporation beneficially owned by him, subscribed for 1,250,000 Units in the Offering for gross proceeds of $2.5 million to the Company.

The net proceeds from the sale of Units will be used for the Company's ongoing exploration drilling program, working capital requirements and other general corporate purposes. The gross proceeds from the sale of FT Units will be used to incur eligible "Canadian exploration expenses" ("CEE") that are "flow-through mining expenditures" (as such term is defined in the Tax Act) related to exploration expenses on the Company's Treaty Creek flagship property, located in Golden Triangle of northwestern British Columbia, as permitted under the Tax Act to qualify as CEE. The Company will renounce such CEE to the purchasers of the FT Units with an effective date of no later than December 31, 2023.

In connection with the Offering, the Agents received an aggregate cash fee of $539,513.63. In addition, the Company granted the Agents non-transferable compensation warrants (the "Compensation Warrants") entitling the Agents to purchase 234,780 Common Shares. Each Compensation Warrant entitles the holder thereof to purchase one Common Share at an exercise price of $2.00 per Common Share for a period of 24 months following the Closing Date.

The securities described herein have not been, and will not be, registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act"), or any state securities laws, and accordingly, may not be offered or sold within the United States except in compliance with the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities requirements or pursuant to exemptions therefrom. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any securities in any jurisdiction.

The Units and FT Units and securities underlying the Compensation Warrants to be issued under the Offering will have a hold period of four months and one day from the Closing Date.

Mr. Sprott is an insider of the company and as such, his participation in connection with the private placement is a related-party transaction under the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange and Multilateral Instrument 61-101 -- Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions. The company is relying on exemptions from the minority shareholder approval and formal valuation requirements applicable to the related-party transactions under sections 5.5(a) and 5.7(1)(a), respectively, of MI 61-101, as neither the fair market value of the shares to be purchased on behalf of Mr. Sprott nor the consideration to be paid by him exceeds 25 per cent of the Company's market capitalization.

About Tudor Gold Corp.

Tudor Gold Corp. is a precious and base metals exploration and development company with properties in British Columbia's Golden Triangle (Canada), an area that hosts producing and past-producing mines and several large deposits that are approaching potential development. The 17,913 hectare Treaty Creek project (in which TUDOR GOLD has a 60% interest) borders Seabridge Gold Inc.'s KSM property to the southwest and borders Pretium Resources Inc.'s Brucejack property to the southeast. In April 2021 Tudor published their 43-101 technical report, "Technical Report and Initial Mineral Resource Estimate of the Treaty Creek Gold Property, Skeena Mining Division, British Columbia Canada" dated March 1, 2021 on the Company's SEDAR profile. The Company also has a 100% interest in the Crown project and a 100% interest in the Eskay North project, all located in the Golden Triangle area.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF TUDOR GOLD CORP.

"Ken Konkin"

Ken Konkin

President and Chief Executive Officer

For further information, please visit the Company's website at www.tudor-gold.com or contact:

Chris Curran

Head of Corporate Development and Communications

Phone: (604) 559 8092

E-Mail: chris.curran@tudor-gold.com

or

Carsten Ringler

Head of Investor Relations and Communications

Phone: +49 151 55362000

E-Mail: carsten.ringler@tudor-gold.com

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-looking Information

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. "Forward-looking information" includes, but is not limited to, statements with respect to the activities, events or developments that the Company expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future, including the expectation that the Offering will close in the timeframe and on the terms as anticipated by management. Generally, but not always, forward-looking information and statements can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates", or "believes" or the negative connotation thereof or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "occur" or "be achieved" or the negative connation thereof.

Such forward-looking information and statements are based on numerous assumptions, including among others, that the Company will complete Offering in the timeframe and on the terms as anticipated by management. Although the assumptions made by the Company in providing forward-looking information or making forward-looking statements are considered reasonable by management at the time, there can be no assurance that such assumptions will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements.

Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's plans or expectations include risks relating to the failure to complete the Offering in the timeframe and on the terms as anticipated by management, market conditions and timeliness regulatory approvals. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking information or implied by forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that forward-looking information and statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated, estimated or intended. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements or information.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/119546
With this move, government hospitals across India can now access the geko device to prevent life threatening blood clots, address complications related to swelling following orthopaedic surgery and the healing of chronic wounds (leg ulcers).

DARESBURY, England, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Sky Medical Technology Ltd (Sky), a UK-based medical device manufacturer and parent company of Firstkind Ltd, today announced the availability of its flagship product, the geko device, on the Government of India e-Marketplace (GeM) procurement portal, under the Product ID 8778588-83575686384, Gem Catalogue ID 5116877-12688567087

Launched in August 2016, the GeM portal is an online market platform to facilitate procurement of goods and services by various Ministries and agencies of the Government. It aims to enhance transparency, efficiency, and speed in the public procurement of goods and services.

The wearable, clinically proven geko device - now listed on GeM - is a small, battery powered, disposable, neuromuscular electro-stimulation therapy, that is applied non-invasively to the skin over the common peroneal nerve at the side of the knee. Small electrical pulses gently stimulate the nerve, once every second, activating the calf and foot muscle pumps resulting in increased blood flow in the deep veins1 of the calf, at rate equal to 60% of continuous walking2 without a patient having to move. The increase in blood flow prevents venous thromboembolism3 (VTE - blood clots), reduces post-operative and trauma-based swelling4,5 and promotes wound healing (leg ulcers)6.

Across India, the incidence of VTE is comparable to that in Western countries. The risk is especially high in hospitalized patients, in a majority of whom VTE is clinically silent and one of the commonest causes of unplanned readmission and preventable death7. Oedema, the medical term for swelling, is also a silent burden with few tools to address the complication, which can delay surgical fixation, impede wound closure, decrease muscle strength and stall rehabilitation.8,9 Arguably the greatest burden, however, and considered a silent epidemic, is chronic wounds. It is difficult to correctly assess the magnitude of suffering generated by leg ulcers in a country of over 1.2 billion people. One study, however, estimated the prevalence to be 4.5 per 1000 in the population10.

"We are thrilled that government hospitals across India can now enjoy streamlined geko device procurement through GeM, to address these significant medical challenges" says Bernard Ross, Sky Founder and CEO. "GeM listing marks the beginning of a very-exciting journey for Sky. The online platform is a vibrant e-marketplace, providing transparency, efficiency and speed. It is heartening to know that thousands of patients who visit government hospitals can now gain from the prescribed use of the geko device for better clinical outcomes and enhanced recovery.

About Sky Medical Technology Ltd

Sky Medical Technology, the parent of Firstkind Ltd, is a UK-based medical devices company. Through its innovative mechanism of neuromuscular electrostimulation, Sky has developed a non-invasive, ground-breaking technology platform, OnPulse, embedded in its industry-leading brand, the geko device. Sky's products are tailored to different medical application areas, selling through strategic partnerships or distributors in each clinical application area. Clinical areas of focus include prevention of life-threatening blood clots, complications related to swelling before and after general and orthopaedic surgery and vascular conditions related to wound healing (leg ulcers). The goal in each pathway is to partner with healthcare professionals for better patient outcomes and patient care whilst saving health system resources. www.skymedtech.com

Media contact

Sue Davenport

sue.davenport@firstkindmedical.com

Sky Medical Technology Ltd

Hawk House

Peregrine Business Park

Gomm Road

High Wycombe

Bucks

HP13 7DL

References:

A Nicolaides, M Griffin. Measurement of blood flow in the deep veins of the lower limb using the geko neuromuscular electro-stimulation device. Journal of International Angiology August 2016-04. Tucker A, et al. Augmentation of venous, arterial and microvascular blood supply in the leg by isometric neuromuscular stimulation via the peroneal nerve. The International journal of angiology: official publication of the International College of Angiology, Inc. 2010 Spring;19(1): e31-7. Natarajan I, et al. The use of the geko device (a neuromuscular electrostimulation device) and the resulting activation of the foot and calf muscle pumps for the prevention of venous. thromboembolism in patients with acute stroke. University Hospital of North Midlands NHS Trust. Poster. Published on the geko device. Mahmood et al, Neuromuscular Electrostimulation Device Reduces Preoperative Edema and Accelerates Readiness for Theater in Patients Requiring Open Reduction Internal Fixation for Acute Ankle Fracture the foot and ankle journal, published online, March 2020. Wainwright TW et al. A Feasibility Randomised Controlled Trial to Evaluate the Effectiveness of a Novel Neuromuscular Electro-stimulation Device in Preventing the Formation of Oedema Following Total Hip Replacement Surgery. Heliyon 18 Jul 2018- Volume 4, Issue 7. Jones N I & Harding K G. Neuromuscular electrostimulation on lower limb wounds. British Journal of Nursing. Vol 27, No. 20. Published Online: 12 Nov 2018 . Agarwal S. et al. Venous thromboembolism: A problem in the Indian/Asian population? Indian Journal of Urology: IJU: Journal of the Urological Society of India, 01 Jan 2009, 25(1):11-16 DOI: 10.4103/0970-1591.45531 PMID: 19468423 PMCID: PMC2684304. Kluga K, et al. Improving Orthopedic-Related Postoperative Edema Management in a Rehabilitative Nursing Setting. Rehabil Nurs. May/ Jun 2019 ;44(3):151-160. doi: 10.1097/rnj.0000000000000104. VA US Department of Veterans Affairs website: https://www.va.gov/health/aboutvha.asp. Vijay Langer . Leg ulcers: An Indian perspective. lndian Dermatology Online Journal. 2014 Oct-Dec; 5(4): 535-536. doi: 10.4103/2229-5178.142559. PMCID: PMC4228669. PMID: 25396157.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1781947/The_geko_device.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1781948/The_geko_device_on_the_leg.jpg

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1340942/Sky_Medical_Logo.jpg

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1395567/Geko_Logo.jpg
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 6, 2022) - Silk Energy Limited (the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has received conditional approval from the Canadian Securities Exchange (the "CSE") for listing of the common shares of the Company (the "Common Shares"). The listing is subject to satisfaction of the following conditions:

Delivery to the CSE of an updated legal opinion from the Company's legal counsel in Kazakhstan confirming that the LLP, in which the Company has an indirect 50% participating interest through UnionField Group (" UnionField "), has the exclusive right to explore, develop and sell oil produced from the Ustyurt Property and has received the required licenses, permits and approvals to carry out its operations;

Certain financing arrangements with Bowview Pte. Ltd. (the " Singapore Facility ") having been finalized prior to listing with the first tranche of the Equity Component (as defined below) in the amount of $9,875,000 having been provided to the Company by that time;

The Concurrent Convertible Debenture Placement (as defined below) having been completed prior to listing; and

Completion of any and all outstanding CSE application documentation and payment of fees pursuant to the CSE's policies.

A date for trading will be determined upon confirmation of the above conditions being satisfied.

Background

The Company, through its wholly-owned Norwegian subsidiary Silk Energy AS, intends to operate as an oil and gas exploration company engaged in the identification, exploration and, if warranted, development of oil and gas fields in Kazakhstan. The Company's primary project is the Ustyurt Property, in the Mangystau region, covering more than 6,400 km2. The Ustyurt Property will be developed through a Kazakhstani limited liability partnership (the "LLP") comprised of two limited partners, each holding a 50% participating interest: KazMunayGas National Company JSC, Kazakhstan's state-owned vertically integrated oil and gas company, and UnionField, a British Virgin Islands company which is 100% owned by Silk Energy AS.

Pursuant to the terms of the Singapore Facility, Bowview Pte Ltd. ("Bowview") is to (a) purchase $18,900,000 in Common Shares of the Company (the "Equity Component"); and (b) provide a debt facility of up to $7.5 million pursuant to which Bowview has agreed to advance funds in exchange for the issuance of convertible debentures (the "Debt Component"). All shares issuable pursuant to the Singapore Facility will be priced at $0.35 per share and the convertible debt under the Debt Component will be convertible at $0.35 per share. The Equity Component will consist of three tranches. The first $9,875,000 tranche of the Equity Component (out of an eventual total of $18,900,000) will entail the issuance of 28,214,285 Common Shares of the Company at a price of $0.35 per share.

The Concurrent Convertible Debenture Placement is an arm's length, non-brokered private placement of an unsecured convertible debenture to be issued to an existing shareholder of the Company raising gross proceeds of USD 5 million. The convertible debenture will bear interest at a rate of 6% per annum, has a term, if not first converted, of 24 months from the date of issue, and is convertible during the term into an aggregate of 17,857,143 Common Shares at a price of $0.35 per Common Share at the option of the Company. Although denominated in USD, the convertible debenture established that for purposes of determining the number of Common Shares issuable on conversion, the exchange rate applicable to the principal amount of the debenture will be USD 1: CAD 1.25. Interest earned on the debenture is not convertible. The Company has contractually committed to use the proceeds from the Concurrent Convertible Debenture Placement solely for purposes of drilling the Salken Prospect on the Ustyurt Property.

For further information, please contact Steve Kappella, Chief Executive Officer of the Company, at info@silk-energy.com.

Neither the CSE nor its Market Regulator (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.

Forward Looking Information

This press release contains forward-looking statements based on assumptions, uncertainties and management's best estimates of future events. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to the Company's application for listing on the CSE, completion of the CSE's conditional listing conditions including with respect to obtaining the legal opinion from the Company's legal counsel in Kazakhstan, the finalization of the Singapore Facility and the provision of the funds to the Company pursuant to the first tranche of the Equity Component, the completion of the Concurrent Convertible Debenture Placement, the completion of any and all outstanding CSE application documentation and payment of fees, and the Company's oil and gas exploration activities in Kazakhstan. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated. Investors are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to the Company's inability to: (i) satisfy any or all of the CSE's listing conditions; (ii) changes in general economic, business and political conditions, including changes in the financial markets, changes in applicable laws and regulations both locally and in foreign jurisdictions; and (iii) compliance with extensive government regulation and the costs associated with compliance. The Company has no intention to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be required by applicable law.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/119543
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 6, 2022 / The Power Play by The Market Herald has announced the release of new interviews with Trillion Energy and Surge Battery Metals Inc. on their latest news.

The Power Play by The Market Herald provides investors with a quick snapshot of what they need to know about the company's latest press release through exclusive insights and interviews with company executives.

Trillion Energy (CSE:TCF) reports spike in gas sales price

Trillion Energy (TCF) saw a 40-per-cent hike in the price of natural gas during a recent sale. The sale, from the company's SASB gas field, went for US$17.93/mcf. The company attributes the price increase to seasonal demand, cancellation of the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline from Russia to Europe and the ongoing war in Ukraine.CEO Art Halleran spoke with Dave Jackson about what the price increase means for the company moving forward.

For the full interview with Art Halleran and to learn more about Trillion Energy's news, click here.

Surge Battery Metals Inc. (TSXV:NILI) announces additional soil geochem results from its Nevada North Lithium Project

Surge Battery Metals (NILI) has announced additional soil geochem results from its Nevada North Lithium Project (NNLP) in Elko County, Nevada. Rangefront Mining Services collected 445 samples on lines spaced 100 meters apart. Results from this exploration work ranged from 29.1 to 5,120 ppm Li with a median value of 244 ppm Li. Results included 89 samples with 1,000 or more ppm Li. Greg Reimer, President & CEO sat down with Dave Jackson to discuss the results.

For the full interview with Greg Reimer and to learn more about Surge Battery Metals' news, click here.

Interviews for The Power Play by The Market Herald are released daily. To learn more about the companies featured in The Power Play or to explore our other interviews visit The Power Play by The Market Herald.

About The Market Herald

The Market Herald Canada is the leading source of authoritative breaking stock market news for self-directed investors. Our team of Canadian markets reporters, editors and technologists covers the entire listed company universe in Canada. We cover over 3,985 businesses, their people, their investors, and their customers. We write the stories that move the Canadian capital markets.

DISCLAIMER: Report Card Canada Media Ltd. ("Report Card") is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Market Herald Limited, an Australian company ("Market Herald"). Report Card is not an advisory service, and does not offer, buy, sell, or provide any other rating, analysis or opinion on the securities we discuss. We are retained and compensated by the companies that we provide information on to assist them with making information available to the public. All information available on themarketherald.ca and/or this press release should be considered as commercial advertisement and not an endorsement, offer or recommendation to buy or sell securities. Report Card is not registered with any financial or securities regulatory authority in any province or territory of Canada, will not be performing any registerable activity as defined by the applicable regulatory bodies and do not provide nor claim to provide investment advice or recommendations to any visitor of this site or readers of any content on or originating from themarketherald.ca. Market Herald and/or its affiliates and/or their respective officers, directors or employees may from time to time acquire, hold or sell securities and/or commodities and/or commodity futures contracts in certain underlying companies mentioned in this site and which may also be clients of Market Herald's affiliates. In such instances, Market Herald and/or its affiliates and/or their respective officers, directors or employees will use all reasonable efforts to avoid engaging in activities that would lead to conflicts of interest and Market Herald and/or its affiliates will use all reasonable efforts to comply with conflicts of interest disclosures and regulations to minimize any conflict. All the information on this document and/or the website - themarketherald.ca - is published in good faith and for general information purpose only. Report Card does not make any warranties about the completeness, reliability, and accuracy of this information. Any action you take upon the information you find on this document and/or website (themarketherald.ca) is strictly at your own risk. Report Card will not be liable for any losses and/or damages in connection with the use of our website. From our website, you can visit other websites by following hyperlinks to such external sites. While we strive to provide only quality links to useful and ethical websites, we have no control over the content and nature of these sites. These links to other websites do not imply a recommendation for all the content found on these sites. Site owners and content may change without notice and may occur before we have the opportunity to remove a link which may have gone 'bad'. Please be also aware that when you leave our website, other sites may have different privacy policies and terms which are beyond our control. Please be sure to check the Privacy Policies of these sites as well as their "Terms of Service" before engaging in any business or uploading any information.

CONTACT:

The Market Herald

Brianna Anthony

brianna.anthony@themarketherald.ca

themarketherald.ca

SOURCE: The Market Herald

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/696418/The-Power-Play-by-The-Market-Herald-Releases-Interviews-with-Trillion-Energy-and-Surge-Battery-Metals-Inc
Calgary, Alberta--(Newsfile Corp. - April 6, 2022) - Zedcor Inc. (TSXV: ZDC) (the "Company" or "Zedcor") is pleased to announce the closing of its previously announced brokered private placement of 700,000 units ("Units") of the Company at a price of $0.50 per Unit for aggregate gross proceeds to the Company of $350,000 (the "Private Placement").

Each Unit consisted of one common share of the Company (a "Common Share") and one-half of one Common Share purchase warrant of the Company (each whole Common Share purchase warrant, a "Warrant"), with each Warrant entitling the holder thereof to acquire one Common Share at a price of $0.70 for two years from the closing date of the Private Placement.

The Private Placement was led by Paradigm Capital Inc. (the "Lead Agent") and Canaccord Genuity Corp. (together with the Lead Agent, the "Agents"). In consideration for the services performed by the Agents pursuant to the terms of an agency agreement dated March 24, 2022 among the Company and the Agents, the Company paid the Agents a cash commission of $28,000.00, which represents 8.0% of the gross proceeds raised under the Private Placement. The Units were offered and sold by private placement in Canada to "accredited investors" within the meaning of National Instrument 45-106 - Prospectus Exemptions. The underlying Common Shares and Warrants will be subject to applicable hold periods imposed under applicable securities legislation, including a hold period of 4 months and 1 day from the date of issuance.

The Company intends to use the net proceeds of the Private Placement primarily to support growth initiatives, reduce indebtedness under its credit facility which was incurred to expand its fleet of MobileyeZ security towers, and for general working capital purposes.

The securities described herein have not been registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") and may not be offered or sold in the United States or to, or for the account or benefit of, U.S. Persons (as defined in Regulation S under the U.S. Securities Act) absent registration or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy securities in any jurisdiction, nor will there be any offer or sale of the securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful.

About Zedcor Inc.

Zedcor Inc. is a Canadian public corporation and parent company to Zedcor Security Solutions Corp. Driven by its guiding principles of being pioneers and innovators, Zedcor is engaged in providing technology based security & surveillance services in Western and Central Canada. The Company is disrupting the security industry with its three main service offerings to customers across all market segments: 1) rental, service and remote monitoring of its proprietary MobileyeZ security towers; 2) live monitoring of fixed site locations; and 3) security personnel. The Company trades on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "ZDC".

Forward-Looking Statements and Information

Certain statements included in this press release constitute forward-looking statements or forward-looking information. Forward-looking statements or information can be identified by terminology such as "anticipate", "believe", "expect", "plan", "intend", "estimate", "propose", "budget", "should", "project", "may be", or similar words suggesting future outcomes or expectations. In particular, forward-looking statements and information contained in this press release, include, but are not limited to the use of the net proceeds of the Private Placement. Although the Company believes that the expectations implied in such forward-looking statements or information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on these forward-looking statements or information because the Company can give no assurance that such statements or information will prove to be correct. Forward-looking statements or information are based on current expectations, estimates and projections that involve a number of assumptions about the future and uncertainties, including general market and economic conditions, current forecasts and utilization. Although management of the Company believes these expectations and assumptions reflected in these forward-looking statements or information to be reasonable, there can be no assurance that any forward-looking statements or information will be proved to be correct, and actual results may differ materially from those anticipated in such statements or information. For this purpose, any statements or information contained herein that are not statements or information of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements or information and readers should not place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements or information. The forward-looking statements or information contained in this press release are made as of the date hereof and the Company assumes no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statements or information, whether as a result of new contrary information, future events or any other reason, unless the Company is required by any applicable securities laws. The forward-looking statements or information contained in this press release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement.

For further information, please contact:

Todd Ziniuk

President and Chief Executive Officer

Zedcor Inc.

P: 403-930-5432

E: tziniuk@zedcor.ca

Amin Ladha

Chief Financial Officer

Zedcor Inc.

P: 403-930-5435

E: aladha@zedcor.ca

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/119437
CUMMING, GA / ACCESSWIRE / April 6, 2022 / Waterside Capital Corporation (OTC PINK:WSCC) (the "Company"), today announced that it has raised $1.1 million in funding from equity investors to launch a web3 enterprise.

The Company has three areas on which it will focus:

Liquidity Provider - In decentralized finance (DeFi), the ability to trade assets from one to another is facilitated by Liquidity Pools (LPs) which generally contain a 50/50 balance between both underlying tokens. The Company will invest substantially in LPs to generate ongoing revenue. We expect that this revenue will fuel our other initiatives as we build the Company.

Staking - Like LPs, staking can provide potential passive revenue to the Company. Purchasing large blocks of lucrative Proof of Stake (PoS) assets to grow the passive income portfolio is expected to be a major cornerstone to our success. This is a much greener approach to the traditional Proof of Work model, which is used by Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ethereum 2.0 is expected to be on PoS in the near future and we want to eventually become a validator on the network.

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) - The Company intends to build a World Class NFT project research team that will guide the strategic investments for the overall portfolio. We anticipate that our portfolio will contain digital assets known as NFTs, including digital real estate in multiple metaverse platforms such as The Sandbox and the upcoming Otherside from Yuga Labs. These assets are expected to be used for licensing and royalty income. NFT assets have multiple use cases in addition to the potential appreciation in the underlying digital asset. We believe that we can harness the power of acquired assets through the metaverse to grow our portfolio faster and stronger than traditional asset acquisitions typically allow.

The Company may release material information via the Company's official Twitter handle (@metavesco), and via the Twitter handle of Ryan Schadel (@cryanschadel), the Company's President and CEO.

The Company's website, www.metavesco.com, is currently under development and is expected to go live following approval by FINRA of the Company's name change to Metavesco, Inc.

Safe Harbor Statement

This press release contains statements that constitute forward-looking statements. These statements appear in a number of places in this press release and include all statements that are not statements of historical fact regarding the intent, belief or current expectations of the Company, its directors or its officers with respect to, among other things: (i) financing plans; (ii) trends affecting its financial condition or results of operations; and (iii) growth strategy and operating strategy. The words "may", "would", "will", "expect", "estimate", "can", "believe", "potential", and similar expressions and variations thereof are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the Company's ability to control, and that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors. More information about the potential factors that could affect the business and financial results is included in the Company's filings on sec.gov.

CONTACT:

info@metavesco.com

(678) 341-5898

SOURCE: Waterside Capital Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/696223/Waterside-Raises-11-Million-to-Launch-Web3-Enterprise
Blinken's Mideast tour unlikely to contribute to regional peace: analysts

Xinhua) 14:43, April 06, 2022

CAIRO, April 6 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken's recent Mideast tour, which was aimed at addressing U.S. allies' concerns before reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, enlisting regional countries' support for sanctions against Russia and strengthening Israel's relations with Arab countries, is unlikely to contribute to the region's long-term stability and peace, analysts have said.

The willingness of the United States to seek long-term peace and stability in the Middle East remains doubtful, as maintaining animosity among Mideast countries and dividing the region serve U.S. interests both economically and strategically, analysts have argued.

ISRAEL VISIT NOT SUBSTANTIVE

The revival of the Iran nuclear pact, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), is currently the top priority of the United States in the Middle East, according to analysts.

By reaching an agreement with Iran, Washington hopes to limit Iran's nuclear capability as well as the development of other sectors such as defense and economy, while pumping more Iranian oil into the international market to meet the demands of European consumers, who have cut Russian gas supplies, said Lu Jin, a research fellow with the Institute of West-Asian and African Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

An important goal of Blinken's Mideast tour was to address the concerns of Israel, a close U.S. ally and an arch enemy of Iran, who worries that easing sanctions will bolster the Islamic republic militarily and economically, added Lu.

During Blinken's visit to Israel, where he took part in a two-day conference with the participation of foreign ministers from Israel and four Arab states, namely, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Morocco and Egypt, the top U.S. diplomat vowed that his country will continue to work together with its allies to confront "common security challenges and threats, including those from Iran and its proxies."

Despite Blinken's remarks, Israel would maintain its posture against Iran, since Iran remains the most powerful country in the Middle East region to challenge Israel, analysts said, adding Blinken's visit to Israel is mostly symbolic rather than substantive and will have little impact on the improvement of ties between Israel and Iran.

FAILURE TO BUILD "UNITED FRONT"

"The U.S. is eager to press Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Gulf oil-producing countries to increase their production capacity in order to relieve the European Union's burden of high energy costs and the bloc's reliance on Russia's energy supply," said Ma Xiaolin, dean of the Mediterranean Institute at Zhejiang International Studies University.

The Gulf Arab states, primarily Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have largely stayed put despite Washington's repeated calls for increased oil output. Senior officials from both countries have pledged to follow the plan for progressively increasing oil production as adopted by the OPEC+, of which Russia is a member.

While meeting with Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi of the UAE Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan during his visit to Morocco, Blinken told the UAE leader that Washington is determined to help the Gulf state fend off attacks from the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen, apparently in response to the UAE's concerns about the declining U.S. commitment to the region's security.

The top U.S. diplomat revealed in Algeria, the last leg of his Mideast tour, that energy was not a focus of his talks with the UAE leader, even though Washington wanted Gulf nations to increase production to temper soaring crude prices, which are partially caused by the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

One day after Blinken left the Middle East, the OPEC+ only agreed on a modest oil output increase, ignoring Western pressure to significantly increase production. After the OPEC+ refused to bend, the United States opted to tap its strategic reserves to keep prices from rising too high.

The message was that Blinken's Mideast tour did not bridge the rift between Washington and its Gulf allies, and that his goal of uniting the stance against Russia had obviously failed, said analysts.

"For the time being, it's very difficult for the United States to seek Mideast countries' support for sanctions against Russia, because it might hurt their interests," said Li Weijian, vice president of the Chinese Association of Middle East Studies and researcher at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies.

Given what the United States has done in the Middle East, countries in the region have learned lessons from the past and begun to pursue an independent foreign policy, he said, adding Russia's growing influence in the region makes siding with the United States now an "unwise choice."

PALESTINIAN ISSUE

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has hailed the conference of foreign ministers between Israel and four Arab countries as "making history," as it marks the first time that Israel hosts a meeting with Arab foreign ministers.

However, the absence of Jordan, which made peace with Israel in 1994 but did not join the conference, shows that the Palestinian issue is not forgotten.

On the day of the Israeli conference, Jordan's King Abdullah arrived in Ramallah for the first time in years to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

"Arab normalization meetings are nothing but an illusion and a free reward for Israel unless the occupation ends," Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Ishtaye reportedly told his Cabinet on the day of the conference.

Although the reconciliation between Israel and some Arab countries is supposed to ease some tensions in the Middle East, it could also further marginalize the Palestinian issue, said Wu Bingbing, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Peking University.

"Closer relations between Israel and several Arab countries will help the United States transfer its commitment to ensure their security partially through a regional arrangement including Israel, who is happy to do so because the move will improve its own security situation," said Wu.

If the conference between Israeli and Arab foreign ministers is successful in becoming an annual regional forum, it will have a long-term impact on the Middle East and may provoke moves from Turkey, Iran, and other countries, said Li, the researcher at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies.

He emphasized that the conference's impact must be assessed further because it is still unclear whether it would serve as a long-term mechanism.

However, the Palestinian issue will remain as a sensitive one for Arab countries for a long time to come, and the United States, which tries hard to portray itself as a peace-maker in the Middle East, has done little to address the root cause of the issue as illustrated by Blinken's reiteration of Washington's "ironclad commitment" to Israel, analysts observed.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
KIEV, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that talks between Ukraine and Russia will continue despite the evidence of "atrocities carried out by the Russian military", the Ukrinform news agency reported on Wednesday.

"In any case, we must find even small opportunities for the negotiation process. Without this, I think it is difficult to end the war," Zelensky was quoted as saying in an interview with Turkey's Haberturk television channel.

Zelensky emphasized the importance of the mediation mission of other countries, including Turkey, in the talks.

At least 280 people, including children, were found dead in Bucha, some 28 km northwest of Kiev after the Ukrainian army retook control of the town from the Russian military.

Zelensky earlier called the killings of civilians in Bucha a "war crime".

The Russian Defense Ministry on Sunday refuted Kiev's accusation of alleged killing of civilians in the settlement of Bucha in Ukraine's Kiev region.

"All photographs and video materials published by the Kiev regime, allegedly evidencing some kind of 'crimes' committed by Russian military personnel in the city of Bucha, Kiev region, are another provocation," the ministry said in a statement.

It said that during the time the settlement was under control of the Russian forces, not a single local resident suffered from any violent actions, adding that "all Russian units completely withdrew from Bucha on March 30." 
Surrey, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 6, 2022) - Desert Gold Ventures Inc. (TSXV: DAU) (FSE: QXR2) (OTCQB: DAUGF) ("Desert Gold" or "the Company") announces that, subject to exchange approval, it will conduct a non-brokered private placement of 9,583,333 units at a price of CAD $0.12 per unit (the "Unit") to raise up to CAD $1,150,000 (the "Financing"). Each Unit will consist of one common share in the equity of the Company and one common share purchase warrant (the "Warrant"). Each Warrant entitles the holder to purchase one additional common share of the Company at a price of CAD $0.18 per common share for a period of two (2) years from the closing of the Financing.

The Company may pay a finder's fee to qualified individuals in respect to the Financing on the proceeds of the Units found. Securities issued as a result of the Financing will be subject to a statutory hold period.

The proceeds of the Financing will be used primarily for drilling at the Company's flagship Senegal Mali Shear Zone Project (the "SMSZ Project") in Western Mali and for general working capital purposes.

Should any directors and officers of the Company acquire Units under the Financing such participation is considered to be a related party transaction as defined under Multilateral Instrument 61-101 Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101"). The transaction will be exempt from the formal valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements of MI 61-101 if neither the fair market value of any securities issued to or the consideration paid by such persons will exceed 25% of the Company's market capitalization.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

"Jared Scharf"

___________________________

Jared Scharf

President & CEO

ABOUT DESERT GOLD

Desert Gold Ventures Inc. is a gold exploration and development company which holds 2 gold exploration permits in Western Mali (SMSZ Project and Djimbala) and its Rutare gold project in central Rwanda. For further information please visit www.SEDAR.com under the company's profile. Website: www.desertgold.ca

CONTACT

Jared Scharf, President & CEO

Email: jared.scharf@desertgold.ca

This news release contains forward-looking statements respecting the Company's ability to successfully complete the Offering. These forward-looking statements entail various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those reflected in these forward-looking statements. Such statements are based on current expectations, are subject to a number of uncertainties and risks, and actual results may differ materially from those contained in such statements, including the inability of the Company to successfully complete the Offering. These uncertainties and risks include, but are not limited to, the strength of the capital markets, the price of gold; operational, funding, and liquidity risks; the degree to which mineral resource estimates are reflective of actual mineral resources; and the degree to which factors which would make a mineral deposit commercially viable are present; the risks and hazards associated with mining operations. Risks and uncertainties about the Company's business are more fully discussed in the company's disclosure materials filed with the securities regulatory authorities in Canada and available at www.sedar.com and readers are urged to read these materials. The Company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from such statements unless required by law.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its regulation services provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy the securities described herein in the United States. The securities described herein have not been and will not be registered under the united states securities act of 1933, as amended, and may not be offered or sold in the united states or to the account or benefit of a U.S. person absent an exemption from the registration requirements of such act.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/119570
Strong Overall Performance with 2021 Results One Year Ahead of Plan1

2022 Outlook confirmed: Low-teens Revenue Growth and continued improvement in Adjusted EBIT2 after exceeding own expectations in 2021

Full-year results for 2021 exceeded Plan 1 published in July 2021, with 145 million Cash Surplus 2

Zegna One Brand strategy in full swing; Thom Browne maintains strong momentum

2022 outlook confirmed, with low-teens revenue growth expected, continued improvement to Adjusted EBIT2 over the better-than-guidance 2021 basis, and higher Cash Surplus

Ermenegildo Zegna N.V. (NYSE:ZGN) ("Zegna Group," "the Group," or "the Company"), the first Italian luxury fashion house listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and owner of the Zegna and Thom Browne brands, today filed its Annual Report on Form 20-F with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), reporting Adjusted EBIT2 of 149 million, with an incidence on revenues of 11.5%, above the guidance of "around 10%" published on February 1, 2022. Diluted Loss per share2 was 0.67 and Adjusted diluted earnings per share2 was 0.33. Adjustments from the reported Loss for the year of 128 million to the Adjusted Profit of 75 million relate to net charges of 203 million, mostly non-cash accounting adjustments, of which 205 million related to the December 2021 Business Combination3. As reported on February 1, 2022, the Group's overall performance exceeded the Plan1 shared last year ahead of the start of public trading, with revenues up 27% year-over-year, totaling approximately 1,292 million.

Ermenegildo "Gildo" Zegna, Chairman and CEO of the Zegna Group, said: "2021 was an epic year for the Zegna Group, and I am very proud of the journey that has brought us here today. I am also especially proud that we continue to achieve significant milestones while staying true to our roots and the heritage of sustainability my grandfather instilled in the Company 111 years ago. The Zegna brand continues to strengthen its position as a global leader in the luxury industry, and our continued focus on luxury leisurewear ca. 50% of the brand's revenues enhanced by the One Brand strategy, now in full swing, and by a further increase in pricing in-season, has proven to be successful with both recurring and new customers. In addition to the strength shown by our namesake brand, I am extremely pleased by the growth of Thom Browne, and the significant appeal this iconic brand has among younger consumers around the world."

"I am deeply saddened by the tragic events in Ukraine, which all of us are following closely and with great concern. Zegna Group joined forces with the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana and provided a significant donation to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees at the onset of this tragedy. We also committed to integrate as many as 30 Ukrainian refugees in our factories beginning in April 2022.

"However," he added, "ours is a multi-year journey and as we continue to monitor the ongoing developments of the COVID-19 pandemic around the world, especially the recent spike in China, we are already ahead of our Plan and remain positive about our growth in 2022. I am particularly excited to see our US and UAE business continue to grow while our business in Europe continues to see a post-lockdown rebound. We remain vigilant, but our 2021 results and our flexibility give me confidence that we are on the right track to reaching the targets set out in our Plan last year and the Group's longer-term ambitions even sooner than we anticipated."

Key Highlights from 2021

Net Revenues: For the year ended December 31, 2021, Zegna Group posted revenues of 1,292 million, up 27% from 2020. This strong performance was driven by a continued rebound of the Zegna segment, whose revenues increased 23% year-over-year to 1,035 million. The other primary driver was the exceptional performance of the Thom Browne segment, whose revenues were up 47% over 2020, reaching 264 million.

(Loss)/Profit for the year and Adjusted Profit/(Loss) 2The Group's 2021 Loss for the year was 128 million due to mostly non-cash accounting adjustments, including of 205 million related to the December 2021 Business Combination3. Adjusted Profit was 75 million. For additional information regarding Adjusted Profit/(Loss), which is a non-IFRS measure, please see page 4.

Adjusted EBIT 2The Group's Adjusted EBIT for the year was 149 million, up more than 7 times from 20 million recorded in 2020. Adjusted EBIT percentage incidence on revenues for the year exceeded the Group's prior guidance thanks to higher full-price sales in the mix and higher realized efficiencies. Adjusted EBIT for the Zegna segment was 111 million. As a percentage of revenues, Adjusted EBIT was 10.7% compared to 7.8% in 2019. This was driven by better sales mix, cost efficiencies and positive operating leverage. For the Thom Browne segment, Adjusted EBIT2 was 38 million, more than doubled from 16 million in 2019 due to a lower pace of cost growth in the 2019-2021 period, compared to the 64% increase in sales in the same period. Compared to 2020, Adjusted EBIT in 2021 grew 31% from 29 million. As a percentage of revenues, Adjusted EBIT was 14.4%, down slightly from the level of 16.1% in 2020. The strength in Thom Browne's top line was partly offset, as expected, by an increase in costs driven by higher volumes and growth-related expenses, including costs for expanding the direct-to-consumer store network and investments to improve central administrative functions and processes. For additional information regarding Adjusted EBIT, which is a non-IFRS measure, see page 4.

Net Financial Indebtedness/(Cash Surplus), Trade Working Capital and Capital Expenditure: Cash Surplus2 was 145 million as of December 31, 2021, with 139 million in proceeds from the Business Combination3, compared to Net Financial Indebtedness2 of 7 million as of December 31, 2020. Trade Working Capital2 at year-end was 276 million, 21% of revenues, compared to 27% on December 31, 2020. Capital expenditure for 2021 totaled 48 million4, up from 39 million in 2020, reflecting mainly investments in the store network, the IT and production areas. For additional information regarding Net Financial Indebtedness/(Cash Surplus), Trade Working Capital and Capital Expenditure, which are non-IFRS measures, see page 4.

Fiscal Year 2022 Outlook

The start of 2022 has been marked by considerable geopolitical uncertainty, adding to the volatility of the ongoing global health crisis. Assuming no further deterioration or geographic extension of the war in Ukraine, a normalization of the COVID-19 pandemic in Greater China before the summer, and no other unforeseen events, the Group is forecasting revenue growth in the low-teens. The Group also expects to continue to see improvement in its Adjusted EBIT building on the accelerated expansion achieved in 2021, when the Group delivered an Adjusted EBIT of 11.5% as a percentage of revenues, exceeding its own guidance of "around 10%".

Annual Report on Form 20-F

The Form 20-F, including financial statements for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2021, can be downloaded from the Company's website (www.zegnagroup.com) under the section Investors Financials SEC Filings, or from the SEC's website (www.sec.gov). Shareholders may request a hard copy of complete audited financial statements contained in the Form 20-F, free of charge, through the contacts below.

Investor Day on May 17

The Company will host an investor day on May 17, 2022, at Oasi Zegna, where it expects to unveil its sustainability strategy and its medium- to long-term financial goals.

Conference Call

As previously announced, at 8:00 a.m. ET (2:00 p.m. CET), the Company plans to host a webcast and conference call. A live webcast of the conference call will also be available on the Company's website at ir.zegnagroup.com. To participate in the call, please dial:

Italy dial-in number (Local): 39 069 450 0327

United States: 1 844 200 6205

United States (Local): 1 646 904 5544

United Kingdom (Toll Free): 44 808 189 6484

All other locations: +1 929 526 1599

Access code: 512734

An online archive of the broadcast will be available on the website shortly after the live call and will be available for twelve months. An online archive of the broadcast will be available on the website shortly after the live call and will be available for twelve months.

______________________________

1 The Zegna Group's Plan was published at the time of the announcement of the business combination between the Company and Investindustrial Acquisition Corp. ("IIAC"). The Group's Plan was also disclosed in the Company's registration statement on Form F-4 filed with the SEC (File No. 333-259139), under "Certain Unaudited Zegna Prospective Financial Information".

2 Adjusted EBIT, Adjusted Profit/(Loss), Net Financial Indebtedness/(Cash Surplus), Adjusted Basic Earnings per Share, Adjusted Diluted Earnings per Share, Trade Working Capital and Capital Expenditure are non-IFRS financial measures. See the Non-IFRS Financial Measures section starting on page 4 of this communication for the definition of such non-IFRS measures and a reconciliation of such non-IFRS measures to the most directly comparable IFRS measures.

3 "Business Combination" means the business combination between Zegna and Investindustrial Acquisition Corp., which was completed on December 17, 2021.

4 Excludes the purchase of the building in New Bond Street, London that was subsequently part of the Disposition of certain of Zegna's businesses, completed on November 1, 2021 through the statutory demerger under Italian law to a new company owned by its then existing shareholders.

Non-IFRS Financial Measures

Zegna's management monitors and evaluates operating and financial performance using several non-IFRS financial measures including: adjusted earnings before interest and taxes ("Adjusted EBIT"), adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, Adjusted Profit/(Loss), Adjusted Basic Earnings per Share and Adjusted Diluted Earnings Per Share, Net Financial Indebtedness/(Cash Surplus), Trade Working Capital and Capital Expenditure. Zegna's management believes that these non-IFRS financial measures provide useful and relevant information regarding Zegna's financial performance and financial condition, and improve the ability of management and investors to assess and compare the financial performance and financial position of Zegna with those of other companies. They also provide comparable measures that facilitate management's ability to identify operational trends, as well as make decisions regarding future spending, resource allocations and other strategic and operational decisions. While similar measures are widely used in the industry in which Zegna operates, the financial measures that Zegna uses may not be comparable to other similarly named measures used by other companies nor are they intended to be substitutes for measures of financial performance or financial position as prepared in accordance with IFRS.

Adjusted EBIT

Adjusted EBIT is defined as profit or loss before income taxes plus financial income, financial expenses, exchange losses/(gains), result from investments accounted for using the equity method, impairments of investments accounted for using the equity method, adjusted for income and costs which are significant in nature and that management considers not reflective of underlying operating activities, including, for one or all of the years presented, costs related to the Business Combination, severance indemnities and provision for severance expenses, impairment of property, plant and equipment and right-of-use assets, certain costs related to lease agreements and certain other items.

The following table sets forth a reconciliation of (Loss)/Profit for the year to Adjusted EBIT for the periods indicated.

(Euro thousands) For the year ended December 31, 2021 2020 2019 (Loss)/Profit for the year (127,661) (46,540) 25,439 Income taxes 30,702 14,983 43,794 Financial income (45,889) (34,352) (22,061) Financial expenses 43,823 48,072 37,492 Exchange losses/(gains) 7,791 (13,455) 2,441 Result from investments accounted for using the equity method (2,794) 4,205 1,534 Impairments of investments accounted for using the equity method 4,532 Costs related to the Business Combination (1) 205,059 Costs related to lease agreements (2) 15,512 3,000 Severance indemnities and provision for severance expenses (3) 8,996 12,308 9,777 Impairment of property, plant and equipment and right-of-use assets (4) 8,692 19,725 8,858 Other (5) 4,884 7,535 Adjusted EBIT 149,115 20,013 107,274

(1) Costs related to the Business Combination include: a) 114,963 thousand relating to share-based payments for listing services recognized as the excess of the fair value of Zegna ordinary shares issued as part of the Business Combination and the fair value of IIAC's identifiable net assets acquired. This amount is recorded within the line item "other operating costs" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss and it is related to Zegna segment. b) 37,906 thousand for the issuance of 5,031,250 Zegna ordinary shares to the holders of IIAC class B shares to be held in escrow. The release of these shares from escrow is subject to achievement of certain targets within a seven-year period. This amount is recorded within the line item "other operating costs" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss and it is related to Zegna segment. c) 34,092 thousand for transaction costs related to the Business Combination incurred by Zegna, including costs for bank services, legal advisors and other consultancy fees. This amount is recorded within the line item "purchased, outsourced and other costs" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss and it is related to Zegna segment. d) 10,916 thousand for the Zegna family's grant of a one-time 1,500 gift to each employee of the Zegna group as result of the Company's listing on NYSE completed on December 20, 2021. This amount is recorded within the line item "personnel costs" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss and it is related to Zegna segment for 10,120 thousand and to Thom Browne segment for 796 thousand. e) 5,380 thousand relating to grant of performance share units, which each represent the right to receive one Zegna ordinary share, to the Group's Chief Executive Officer, other Zegna directors, key executives with strategic responsibilities and other employees of the Group, all subject to certain vesting conditions. This amount is recorded within the line item "personnel costs" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss and it is related to Zegna segment for 5,141 thousand and to Thom Browne segment for 239 thousand. For additional information please refer to Note 42 Related party transactions of the Consolidated Financial Statements. f) 1,236 thousand related to the fair value of private warrants issued, pursuant to the Business Combination, to certain Zegna non-executive directors. This amount is recorded within the line item "personnel costs" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss and it is related to Zegna segment. g) 566 thousand related to the write-off of non-refundable prepaid premiums for directors' and officers' insurance. This amount is recorded within the line item "personnel costs" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss and it is related to Zegna segment. (2) Costs related to lease agreements for the year ended December 31, 2021, are related to Zegna segment and include (i) 12,192 thousand of provisions relating to a lease agreement in the US following an unfavorable legal claim judgment against the Group (recorded within "write downs and other provisions" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss), (ii) 1,492 thousand of legal expenses related to a lease agreement in Italy (recorded within "other operating costs" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss) and (iii) 1,829 thousand in accrued property taxes related to a lease agreement in the UK (recorded within "write downs and other provisions" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss). Costs related to lease agreements for the year ended December 31, 2020 include 3,000 thousand for legal expenses related to a lease agreement in the UK, incurred in the second half of 2020 (recorded within the line item "write downs and other provisions" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss). (3) Zegna incurred costs for severance indemnities of 8,996 thousand, 12,308 thousand and 9,777 thousand for the years ended December 31, 2021, 2020 and 2019, respectively. These amounts are recorded within the line item "personnel costs" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss and are related to Zegna segment. (4) Primarily includes impairments of right-of-use assets for 5,981 thousand, 15,716 thousand and 7,980 thousand for the years ended December 31, 2021, 2020 and 2019 respectively, and impairments of property plant and equipment for 654 thousand, 4,011 thousand and 817 thousand for the years ended December 31, 2021, 2020 and 2019, respectively. In particular, the impairment of right-of-use assets and property, plant and equipment primarily relates to the impairment of DOSs of Zegna segment. Impairments were higher in 2020 as a result of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Group's operations. (5) Other adjustments for the year ended December 31, 2021 are related to Zegna segment and include 6,006 thousand related to losses incurred by Agnona subsequent to the Group's sale of a majority stake in Agnona in January 2021, for which the Group was required to compensate the company in accordance with the terms of the related sale agreement, as well as 144 thousand relating to the write down of the Group's remaining 30% stake in Agnona (both of which are recorded within the line item "write downs and other provisions" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss), partially offset by other income of 1,266 thousand relating to the sale of rights to build or develop airspace above a building in the United States (this amount is recorded within the line item "other income" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss). Other adjustments for the year ended December 31, 2020 are related to Zegna segment and include (i) donations of 4,482 thousand to charitable organizations in Italy and abroad to support initiatives related to the COVID-19 pandemic (this amount is recorded within the line item "other operating costs" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss), (ii) impairment on assets held for sale of 3,053 thousand in 2020, of which 988 thousand is recorded within the line item "write downs and other provisions" and 2,065 relates to the write down of inventories and is recorded within the line item "cost of raw materials and consumables" in the consolidated statement of profit

Adjusted Profit/(Loss)

Adjusted Profit/(Loss) represents profit or loss adjusted for income and costs (net of tax effects) which are significant in nature and that management considers not reflective of underlying activities, including, for one or all of the years presented, costs related to the Business Combination, severance indemnities and provision for severance expenses, impairment of property, plant and equipment and right-of-use assets, certain costs related to lease agreements, gains on the Thom Browne option realized in connection with the exercise of the option, impairment of equity method investments and certain other items (as further described below), as well as the tax effects of the adjusting items (calculated based on the applicable tax rates of the jurisdictions where the adjustments relate).

The following table sets forth a reconciliation of (Loss)/Profit for the year to Adjusted Profit for the periods indicated.

(Euro thousands) For the year ended December 31, 2021 2020 2019 (Loss)/Profit for the year (127,661) (46,540) 25,439 Costs related to the Business Combination (1) 205,332 Costs related to lease agreements (2) 15,512 3,000 Severance indemnities and provision for severance expenses (3) 8,996 12,308 9,777 Impairment of property, plant and equipment and right-of-use assets (4) 8,692 19,725 8,858 Gain on Thom Browne option (5) (20,675) Impairment of investments accounted for using the equity method (6) 4,532 Other (7) 4,884 7,535 Tax effects on adjusting items (8) (19,758) (5,312) (1,027) Adjusted Profit/(Loss) 75,322 (4,752) 43,047

(1) Costs related to the Business Combination include: a) 114,963 thousand relating to share-based payments for listing services recognized as the excess of the fair value of Zegna ordinary shares issued as part of the Business Combination and the fair value of IIAC's identifiable net assets acquired. b) 37,906 thousand for the issuance of 5,031,250 Zegna ordinary shares to the holders of IIAC class B shares to be held in escrow. The release of these shares from escrow is subject to achievement of certain targets within a seven-year period. c) 34,092 thousand for transaction costs related to the Business Combination incurred by Zegna, including costs for bank services, legal advisors and other consultancy fees. d) 10,916 thousand for the Zegna family's grant of a one-time 1,500 gift to each employee of the Zegna group as result of the Company's listing on NYSE completed on December 20, 2021. e) 5,380 thousand relating to grant of performance share units, which each represent the right to receive one Zegna ordinary share, to the Group's Chief Executive Officer, other Zegna directors, key executives with strategic responsibilities and other employees of the Group, all subject to certain vesting conditions. For additional information please refer to Note 42 Related party transactions of the Consolidated Financial Statements. f) 1,236 thousand related to the fair value of private warrants issued, pursuant to the Business Combination, to certain Zegna non-executive directors. g) 566 thousand related to the write-off of non-refundable prepaid premiums for directors' and officers' insurance. h) 273 thousand related to the deal contingent option entered in November 2021. The amount was recorded within the line item "foreign exchange gains/(losses)" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss. (2) Costs related to lease agreements for the year ended December 31, 2021, include (i) 12,192 thousand of provisions relating to a lease agreement in the US following an unfavorable legal claim judgment against the Group (recorded within "write downs and other provisions" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss), (ii) 1,492 thousand of legal expenses related to a lease agreement in Italy (recorded within "other operating costs" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss) and (iii) 1,829 thousand in accrued property taxes related to a lease agreement in the UK (recorded within "write downs and other provisions" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss). Costs related to lease agreements for the year ended December 31, 2020 include 3,000 thousand for legal expenses related to a lease agreement in the UK, incurred in the second half of 2020 (recorded within the line item "write downs and other provisions" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss). (3) Zegna incurred costs for severance indemnities of 8,996 thousand, 12,308 thousand and 9,777 thousand for the years ended December 31, 2021, 2020 and 2019, respectively. These amounts are recorded within the line item "personnel costs" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss. (4) Primarily includes impairments of right-of-use assets for 5,981 thousand, 15,716 thousand and 7,980 thousand for the years ended December 31, 2021, 2020 and 2019 respectively, and impairments of property plant and equipment for 654 thousand, 4,011 thousand and 817 thousand for the years ended December 31, 2021, 2020 and 2019, respectively. In particular, the impairment of right-of-use assets and property, plant and equipment primarily relates to the impairment of DOSs. Impairments were higher in 2020 as a result of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Group's operations. (5) Reflects the financial income relating to options related to a gain of 20,675 thousand recognized following the purchase of an additional 5% of the Thom Browne Group on June 1, 2021. This amount is recorded within the line item "financial income" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss. (6) Relates to an impairment of 4,532 thousand in the Group's investment in Tom Ford, which was recognized following a reported net loss by TFI that management considered as an indication of impairment. (7) Other adjustments for the year ended December 31, 2021 include 6,006 thousand related to losses incurred by Agnona subsequent to the Group's sale of a majority stake in Agnona in January 2021, for which the Group was required to compensate the company in accordance with the terms of the related sale agreement, as well as 144 thousand relating to the write down of the Group's remaining 30% stake in Agnona (both of which are recorded within the line item "write downs and other provisions" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss), partially offset by other income of 1,266 thousand relating to the sale of rights to build or develop airspace above a building in the United States (this amount is recorded within the line item "other income" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss). Other adjustments for the year ended December 31, 2020 includes (i) donations of 4,482 thousand to charitable organizations in Italy and abroad to support initiatives related to the COVID-19 pandemic (this amount is recorded within the line item "other operating costs" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss), (ii) impairment on assets held for sale of 3,053 thousand in 2020, of which 988 thousand is recorded within the line item "write downs and other provisions" and 2,065 relates to the write down of inventories and is recorded within the line item "cost of raw materials and consumables" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss. (8) Includes the tax effects of the aforementioned adjustments.

Adjusted Basic Earnings per Share and Adjusted Diluted Earnings per Share

Adjusted Basic Earnings per Share and Adjusted Diluted Earnings per Share represent basic earnings per share and diluted earnings per share adjusted for income and costs (net of tax effects) which are significant in nature and that management considers not reflective of underlying activities, including, for one or all of the years presented, costs related to the Business Combination, severance indemnities and provision for severance expenses, impairment of property, plant and equipment and right-of-use assets, certain costs related to lease agreements, gains on the Thom Browne option realized in connection with the exercise of the option, impairment of equity method investments and certain other items (as further described below), as well as the tax effects of the adjusting items (calculated based on the applicable tax rates of the jurisdictions where the adjustments relate).

Zegna's management uses Adjusted Basic Earnings per Share and Adjusted Diluted Earnings per Share to understand and evaluate Zegna's underlying performance. Zegna's management believes this non-IFRS measure is useful because it excludes items that it does not believe are indicative of its underlying performance and allows it to view operating trends, perform analytical comparisons and benchmark performance between periods. Accordingly, management believes that Adjusted Basic and Diluted Earnings per Share provides useful information to third party stakeholders in understanding and evaluating Zegna's operating results.

For the calculation of both Adjusted Basic Earnings per Share and Adjusted Diluted Earnings per Share, basic earnings per share and diluted earnings per share the number of ordinary and potential ordinary shares outstanding for all periods reflects the share split performed as part of the Business Combination.

The following table sets forth the calculation of Adjusted Basic and Diluted Earnings per Share and provides a reconciliation of (Loss)/Profit for the year to these non-IFRS measures for the periods indicated.

(Euro thousands) For the year ended December 31, 2021 2020 2019 (Loss)/Profit for the year (127,661) (46,540) 25,439 Costs related to the Business Combination (1) 205,332 Costs related to lease agreements (2) 15,512 3,000 Severance indemnities and provision for severance expenses (3) 8,996 12,308 9,777 Impairment of property, plant and equipment and right-of-use assets (4) 8,692 19,725 8,858 Gain on Thom Browne option (5) (20,675) Impairment of investments accounted for using the equity method (6) 4,532 Other (7) 4,884 7,535 Tax effects on adjusting items (8) (19,758) (5,312) (1,027) Adjusted Profit/(Loss) 75,322 (4,752) 43,047 Impact of non-controlling interests (9) 8,669 4,063 3,720 Adjusted Profit/(Loss) attributable to shareholders of the Parent Company 66,653 (8,815) 39,327 Weighted average number of shares for basic earnings per share 203,499,933 201,489,100 201,561,100 Adjusted Basic Earnings per Share 0.33 (0.04) 0.20 Weighted average number of shares for diluted earnings per share 204,917,880 201,489,100 201,561,100 Adjusted Diluted Earnings per Share 0.33 (0.04) 0.20

(1) Costs related to the Business Combination include: a) 114,963 thousand relating to share-based payments for listing services recognized as the excess of the fair value of Zegna ordinary shares issued as part of the Business Combination and the fair value of IIAC's identifiable net assets acquired. b) 37,906 thousand for the issuance of 5,031,250 Zegna ordinary shares to the holders of IIAC class B shares to be held in escrow. The release of these shares from escrow is subject to achievement of certain targets within a seven-year period. c) 34,092 thousand for transaction costs related to the Business Combination incurred by Zegna, including costs for bank services, legal advisors and other consultancy fees. d) 10,916 thousand for the Zegna family's grant of a one-time 1,500 gift to each employee of the Zegna group as result of the Company's listing on NYSE completed on December 20, 2021. e) 5,380 thousand relating to grant of performance share units, which each represent the right to receive one Zegna ordinary share, to the Group's Chief Executive Officer, other Zegna directors, key executives with strategic responsibilities and other employees of the Group, all subject to certain vesting conditions. For additional information please refer to Note 42 Related party transactions of the Consolidated Financial Statements. f) 1,236 thousand related to the fair value of private warrants issued, pursuant to the Business Combination, to certain Zegna non-executive directors. g) 566 thousand related to the write-off of non-refundable prepaid premiums for directors' and officers' insurance. h) 273 thousand related to the deal contingent option entered in November 2021. The amount was recorded within the line item "foreign exchange gains/(losses)" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss. (2) Costs related to lease agreements for the year ended December 31, 2021, include (i) 12,192 thousand of provisions relating to a lease agreement in the US following an unfavorable legal claim judgment against the Group (recorded within "write downs and other provisions" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss), (ii) 1,492 thousand of legal expenses related to a lease agreement in Italy (recorded within "other operating costs" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss) and (iii) 1,829 thousand in accrued property taxes related to a lease agreement in the UK (recorded within "write downs and other provisions" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss). Costs related to lease agreements for the year ended December 31, 2020 include 3,000 thousand for legal expenses related to a lease agreement in the UK, incurred in the second half of 2020 (recorded within the line item "write downs and other provisions" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss). (3) Zegna incurred costs for severance indemnities of 8,996 thousand, 12,308 thousand and 9,777 thousand for the years ended December 31, 2021, 2020 and 2019, respectively. These amounts are recorded within the line item "personnel costs" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss. (4) Primarily includes impairments of right-of-use assets for 5,981 thousand, 15,716 thousand and 7,980 thousand for the years ended December 31, 2021, 2020 and 2019 respectively, and impairments of property plant and equipment for 654 thousand, 4,011 thousand and 817 thousand for the years ended December 31, 2021, 2020 and 2019, respectively. In particular, the impairment of right-of-use assets and property, plant and equipment primarily relates to the impairment of DOSs. Impairments were higher in 2020 as a result of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Group's operations. (5) Reflects the financial income relating to options related to a gain of 20,675 thousand recognized following the purchase of an additional 5% of the Thom Browne Group on June 1, 2021. This amount is recorded within the line item "financial income" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss. (6) Relates to an impairment of 4,532 thousand in the Group's investment in Tom Ford, which was recognized following a reported net loss by TFI that management considered as an indication of impairment. (7) Other adjustments for the year ended December 31, 2021 include 6,006 thousand related to losses incurred by Agnona subsequent to the Group's sale of a majority stake in Agnona in January 2021, for which the Group was required to compensate the company in accordance with the terms of the related sale agreement, as well as 144 thousand relating to the write down of the Group's remaining 30% stake in Agnona (both of which are recorded within the line item "write downs and other provisions" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss), partially offset by other income of 1,266 thousand relating to the sale of rights to build or develop airspace above a building in the United States (this amount is recorded within the line item "other income" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss). Other adjustments for the year ended December 31, 2020 includes (i) donations of 4,482 thousand to charitable organizations in Italy and abroad to support initiatives related to the COVID-19 pandemic (this amount is recorded within the line item "other operating costs" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss), (ii) impairment on assets held for sale of 3,053 thousand in 2020, of which 988 thousand is recorded within the line item "write downs and other provisions" and 2,065 relates to the write down of inventories and is recorded within the line item "cost of raw materials and consumables" in the consolidated statement of profit and loss. (8) Includes the tax effects of the aforementioned adjustments. (9) Represents the (Loss)/Profit for the year attributable to non-controlling interests plus the impact of non-controlling interests on the adjusting items.

Net Financial Indebtedness/(Cash Surplus)

Net Financial Indebtedness/(Cash Surplus) is defined as the sum of financial borrowings (current and non-current), derivative financial instruments and bonds, loans and certain other financial liabilities (recorded within other non-current financial liabilities in the consolidated statement of financial position), net of cash and cash equivalents, derivative financial instruments and certain other current financial assets.

The following table sets forth the calculation of Net Financial Indebtedness/(Cash Surplus) as of the dates indicated:

(Euro thousands) At December 31, 2021 2020 Non-current borrowings 471,646 558,722 Current borrowings 157,292 106,029 Derivative financial instruments Liabilities 14,138 13,192 Other non-current financial liabilities (bonds and other)(*) 7,976 8,065 Total borrowings, other financial liabilities and derivatives 651,052 686,008 Cash and cash equivalents (459,791) (317,291) Derivative financial instruments Assets (1,786) (11,848) Other current financial assets (securities)(**) (334,244) (350,163) Total cash and cash equivalents, other current financial assets and derivatives (795,821) (679,302) Net Financial Indebtedness/(Cash Surplus) (144,769) 6,706

Includes only the "bonds" and "other" components of the "Other non-current financial liabilities" line item from Zegna's consolidated statement of financial position. Includes only the "securities" component of the "Other current financial assets" line item from Zegna's consolidated statement of financial position.

Trade Working Capital

Trade Working Capital is defined as current assets less current liabilities adjusted for derivative assets and liabilities, tax assets and liabilities, cash and cash equivalents, assets and liabilities held for sale, borrowings, lease liabilities, and other assets and liabilities.

The following table sets forth the calculation of Trade Working Capital at December 31, 2021 and 2020:

(Euro thousands, except percentages) At December 31, 2021 2020 Current assets 1,384,531 1,239,156 Current liabilities (702,316) (535,454) Working capital 682,215 703,702 Less: Derivative financial instruments 1,786 11,848 Tax receivables 14,966 15,611 Other current financial assets 340,380 350,163 Other current assets 68,773 66,718 Cash and cash equivalents 459,791 317,291 Assets held for sale 17,225 Current borrowings (157,292) (106,029) Current lease liabilities (106,643) (92,842) Derivative financial liabilities (14,138) (13,192) Other current financial liabilities (33,984) Current provisions for risks and charges (14,093) (8,325) Tax liabilities (28,773) (33,362) Other current liabilities (124,356) (76,637) Liabilities held for sale (16,725) Trade Working Capital 275,798 271,958 of which trade receivables 160,360 138,829 of which inventories 338,475 321,471 of which trade payables and customer advances (223,037) (188,342)

Capital Expenditure

Capital expenditure is defined as the sum of cash outflows that result in additions to property, plant and equipment and intangible assets.

The following table shows a breakdown of capital expenditure by category for each of the years ended December 31, 2021, 2020 and 2019:

(Euro thousands, except percentages) At December 31, 2021 2020 2019 Payments for property, plant and equipment 79,699 27,630 46,113 Payments for intangible assets 14,627 11,524 13,392 Capital expenditure 94,326 39,154 59,505

About Ermenegildo Zegna Group

Founded in 1910 in Trivero, Italy by Ermenegildo Zegna, the Zegna Group designs, creates and distributes luxury menswear and accessories under the Zegna brand, as well as womenswear, menswear and accessories under the Thom Browne brand. Through its Luxury Textile Laboratory Platform which works to preserve artisanal mills producing the finest Italian fabrics the Zegna Group manufactures and distributes the highest quality fabrics and textiles. Group products are sold through over 500 stores in 80 countries around the world, of which 297 are directly operated by the Group as of December 31, 2021 (245 Zegna stores and 52 Thom Browne stores). Over the decades, Zegna Group has charted Our Road: a unique path that winds itself through era-defining milestones that have seen the Group grow from a producer of superior wool fabric to a global luxury group. Our Road has led us to New York, where the Group has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange since December 20, 2021. And while we continue to progress on Our Road to tomorrow, we remain committed to upholding our founder's legacy one that is based upon the principle that a business's activities should help the environment. Today, the Zegna Group is creating a lifestyle that marches to the rhythm of modern times while continuing to nurture bonds with the natural world and with our communities that create a better present and future.

Forward Looking Statements

This communication, including the section "Outlook", contains forward-looking statements that are based on beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to the Company. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by the following words: "may," "will," "could," "would," "should," "expect," "intend," "plan," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "predict," "project," "potential," "continue," "ongoing," "target," "seek" or the negative or plural of these words, or other similar expressions that are predictions or indicate future events or prospects, although not all forward-looking statements contain these words. Any statements that refer to expectations, projections or other characterizations of future events or circumstances, including strategies or plans, are also forward-looking statements. These statements involve risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from the information expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that it has a reasonable basis for each forward-looking statement contained in this communication, the Company cautions you that these statements are based on a combination of facts and factors currently known and projections of the future, which are inherently uncertain. In addition, risks and uncertainties are described in the Company's filings with the SEC. These filings may identify and address other important risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Most of these factors are outside the Company's control and are difficult to predict. In light of the significant uncertainties in these forward-looking statements, you should not regard these statements as a representation or warranty by the Company and its directors, officers or employees or any other person that the Company will achieve its objectives and plans in any specified time frame, or at all. The forward-looking statements in this communication represent the views of Zegna as of the date of this communication. Subsequent events and developments may cause that view to change. However, while Zegna may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company disclaims any obligation to update or revise publicly forward-looking statements. You should, therefore, not rely on these forward-looking statements as representing the views of the Company as of any date subsequent to the date of this communication.

FY 2021 Summary Tables

Ermenegildo Zegna N.V. CONSOLIDATED STATEMENT OF PROFIT AND LOSS for the years ended December 31, 2021, 2020 and 2019 (Euro thousands) For the years ended December 31, 2021 2020 2019 Revenues 1,292,402 1,014,733 1,321,327 Other income 8,260 5,373 7,873 Cost of raw materials and consumables (309,609) (250,569) (309,801) Purchased, outsourced and other costs (353,629) (286,926) (371,697) Personnel costs (367,762) (282,659) (331,944) Depreciation, amortization and impairment of assets (163,367) (185,930) (177,068) Write downs and other provisions (19,487) (6,178) (1,017) Other operating costs (180,836) (30,399) (49,034) Operating (Loss)/Profit (94,028) (22,555) 88,639 Financial income 45,889 34,352 22,061 Financial expenses (43,823) (48,072) (37,492) Foreign exchange (losses)/gains (7,791) 13,455 (2,441) Result from investments accounted for using the equity method 2,794 (4,205) (1,534) Impairments of investments accounted for using the equity method (4,532) (Loss)/Profit before taxes (96,959) (31,557) 69,233 Income taxes (30,702) (14,983) (43,794) (Loss)/Profit for the year (127,661) (46,540) 25,439 Attributable to: Shareholders of the Parent Company (136,001) (50,577) 21,749 Non-controlling interests 8,340 4,037 3,690 Basic earnings per share in Euro (0.67) (0.25) 0.11 Diluted earnings per share in Euro (0.67) (0.25) 0.11

Ermenegildo Zegna N.V. CONSOLIDATED CASH FLOW STATEMENT for the years ended December 31, 2021, 2020 and 2019 (Euro thousands) For the years ended December 31, 2021 2020 2019 Operating activities (Loss)/Profit for the year (127,661) (46,540) 25,439 Income taxes 30,702 14,983 43,794 Depreciation, amortization and impairment of assets 163,367 185,930 177,068 Financial income (45,889) (34,352) (22,061) Financial costs 43,823 48,072 37,492 Exchange losses/(gains) 7,791 (13,455) 2,441 Write downs and other provisions 19,487 6,178 1,017 Write downs of the provision for obsolete inventory 29,600 37,735 6,691 Result from investments accounted for using the equity method (2,794) 4,205 1,534 Impairments of investments accounted for using the equity method 4,532 Losses arising from the sale of fixed assets 1,153 1,091 970 Other non-cash expenses/(income), net 230,812 (27,698) (6,420) Change in inventories (27,554) (39,486) (5,400) Change in trade receivables (12,294) 35,675 (8,377) Change in trade payables including customer advances 31,426 (38,485) (11,002) Change in other operating assets and liabilities 19,973 (10,031) (11,285) Interest paid (17,487) (21,023) (26,872) Income taxes paid (63,300) (36,425) (30,907) Net cash flows from operating activities 281,155 70,906 174,122 Investing activities Payments for property plant and equipment (79,699) (27,630) (46,113) Proceeds from disposals of property plant and equipment 3,791 1,125 Payments for intangible assets (14,627) (11,524) (13,392) Payments for investment property (325) Proceeds from disposals of non-current financial assets 1,536 45,979 Payments for purchases of non-current financial assets (4,431) (6,987) Proceeds from disposals of current financial assets and derivative instruments 92,021 253,201 327,422 Payments for acquisitions of current financial assets and derivative instruments (76,058) (166,334) (167,308) Acquisition of Investments at equity method (313) Business combinations, net of cash acquired (4,224) (2,245) (9,336) Net cash flows (used in)/from investing activities (82,004) 92,572 83,961 Financing activities Proceeds from borrowings 123,570 265,352 130,841 Repayments of borrowings (160,210) (221,029) (272,851) Repayments of non-current financial liabilities (4,287) Payments of lease liabilities (100,611) (90,699) (110,460) Purchase of own shares from Monterubello (455,000) Proceeds from issuance of ordinary shares upon Business Combination 310,739 Proceeds from issuance of ordinary shares to PIPE Investors 331,385 Payments of transaction costs related to the Business Combination (48,475) Cash distributed as part of the Disposition (26,272) Payments for acquisition of non-controlling interests (40,253) Sale of shares held in treasury/(Purchase of own shares) 5,959 (945) (94) Dividends paid to non-controlling interests (548) (1,731) (14,922) Dividends to owners of the parent (102) Net cash flows used in financing activities (64,105) (49,052) (267,486) Effects of exchange rate changes on cash and cash equivalents 7,454 (7,761) 1,698 Net increase/(decrease) in cash and cash equivalents 142,500 106,665 (7,705) Cash and cash equivalents at the beginning of the year 317,291 210,626 218,331 Cash and cash equivalents at the end of the year 459,791 317,291 210,626

Ermenegildo Zegna N.V. CONSOLIDATED STATEMENT OF FINANCIAL POSITION at December 31, 2021 and 2020 (Euro thousands) At December 31 2021 2020 Assets Non-current assets Intangible assets 425,220 387,847 Property, plant and equipment 111,474 244,127 Right-of-use assets 370,470 351,646 Investments at equity method 22,447 21,360 Deferred tax assets 108,210 71,901 Investment property 49,754 Other non-current financial assets 35,372 49,263 Total non-current assets 1,073,193 1,175,898 Current assets Inventories 338,475 321,471 Trade receivables 160,360 138,829 Derivative financial instruments 1,786 11,848 Tax receivables 14,966 15,611 Other current financial assets 340,380 350,163 Other current assets 68,773 66,718 Cash and cash equivalents 459,791 317,291 1,384,531 1,221,931 Assets held for sale 17,225 Total current assets 1,384,531 1,239,156 Total assets 2,457,724 2,415,054 Liabilities and Equity Share capital 5,939 4,300 Retained earnings 498,592 893,236 Other reserves 96,679 (295,772) Equity attributable to shareholders of the Parent Company 601,210 601,764 Equity attributable to non-controlling interest 43,094 43,270 Total equity 644,304 645,034 Non-current liabilities Non-current borrowings 471,646 558,722 Other non-current financial liabilities 167,387 220,968 Non-current lease liabilities 331,409 314,845 Non-current provisions for risks and charges 44,555 39,956 Employee benefits 42,263 29,347 Deferred tax liabilities 53,844 70,728 Total non-current liabilities 1,111,104 1,234,566 Current liabilities Current borrowings 157,292 106,029 Other current financial liabilities 33,984 Current lease liabilities 106,643 92,842 Derivative financial instruments 14,138 13,192 Current provisions for risks and charges 14,093 8,325 Trade payables and customer advances 223,037 188,342 Tax liabilities 28,773 33,362 Other current liabilities 124,356 76,637 702,316 518,729 Liabilities held for sale 16,725 Total current liabilities 702,316 535,454 Total equity and liabilities 2,457,724 2,415,054

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220405006206/en/

Contacts:

Investor Relations

Francesca Di Pasquantonio

francesca.dipasquantonio@zegna.com

+39 335 5837669



Media

Ermenegildo Zegna Group

Domenico Galluccio

domenico.galluccio@zegna.com

+39 335 538 7288



Brunswick Group

Brendan Riley Lidia Fornasiero Marie Jensen

briley@brunswickgroup.com lfornasiero@brunswickgroup.com mjensen@brunswickgroup.com

+1 (917) 755-1454 +39 335 718 7205 +33 (0) 6 49 09 39 54
CALGARY, AB, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Pembina Pipeline Corporation ("Pembina" or the "Company") (TSX: PPL) (NYSE: PBA) announced today that its Board of Directors has declared a common share cash dividend for April 2022 of $0.21 per share to be paid, subject to applicable law, on May 13, 2022 to shareholders of record on April 25, 2022. The common share dividends are designated "eligible dividends" for Canadian income tax purposes. For non-resident shareholders, Pembina's common share dividends should be considered "qualified dividends" and may be subject to Canadian withholding tax.

For shareholders receiving their common share dividends in U.S. funds, the April 2022 cash dividend is expected to be approximately U.S. $0.1687 per share (before deduction of any applicable Canadian withholding tax) based on a currency exchange rate of 0.8031. The actual U.S. dollar dividend will depend on the Canadian/U.S. dollar exchange rate on the payment date and will be subject to applicable withholding taxes.

Pembina's Board of Directors also declared quarterly dividends for the Company's preferred shares, Series 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23 and 25. Series 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 21 preferred share dividends are payable on June 1, 2022 to shareholders of record on May 2, 2022. Series 15, 17 and 19 preferred share dividends are payable on June 30, 2022 to shareholders of record on June 15, 2022. Series 23 and 25 preferred share dividends are payable on May 16, 2022 to shareholders of record on May 2, 2022.

Series Dividend Amount Preferred Shares, Series 1 (PPL.PR.A) $0.306625 Preferred Shares, Series 3 (PPL.PR.C) $0.279875 Preferred Shares, Series 5 (PPL.PR.E) $0.285813 Preferred Shares, Series 7 (PPL.PR.G) $0.273750 Preferred Shares, Series 9 (PPL.PR.I) $0.268875 Preferred Shares, Series 15 (PPL.PR.O) $0.279000 Preferred Shares, Series 17 (PPL.PR.Q) $0.301313 Preferred Shares, Series 19 (PPL.PR.S) $0.292750 Preferred Shares, Series 21 (PPL.PF.A) $0.306250 Preferred Shares, Series 23 (PPL.PF.C) $0.328125 Preferred Shares, Series 25 (PPL.PF.E) $0.325000

Confirmation of Record and Payment Date Policy

Pembina pays cash dividends on its common shares in Canadian dollars on a monthly basis to shareholders of record on the 25th calendar day of each month (except for the December record date, which is December 31st), if, as and when determined by the Board of Directors. Should the record date fall on a weekend or a statutory holiday, the effective record date will be the previous business day. The dividend payment date is the 15th calendar day of the month following the record date. Should the payment date fall on a weekend or on a statutory holiday, the business day prior to the weekend or statutory holiday becomes the payment date.

Dividends on the preferred shares Series 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 21 are payable on the first calendar day of March, June, September and December in each year, if, as and when declared by the Board of Directors to shareholders of record on the first calendar day of the preceding month, or, if such payment or record date is not a business day, the next succeeding business day after the weekend or statutory holiday. Dividends on the preferred shares Series 15, 17 and 19 are payable on the last calendar day of March, June, September and December in each year, if, as and when declared by the Board of Directors to shareholders of record on the 15th calendar day of the same month, or, if such payment or record date is not a business day, the next succeeding business day after the weekend or statutory holiday. Dividends on the preferred shares Series 23 and 25 are payable on the 15th day of February, May, August and November in each year, if, as and when declared by the Board of Directors to shareholders of record on the last business day of the preceding month, or, if such payment or record date is not a business day, the next succeeding business day after the weekend or statutory holiday.

Conference Call and Webcast Details for First Quarter 2022 Results

Pembina will release its first quarter 2022 results on Thursday, May 5, 2022 after markets close. A conference call and webcast have been scheduled for Friday, May 6, 2022, at 8:00 a.m. MT (10:00 a.m. ET) for interested investors, analysts, brokers and media representatives.

The conference call dial-in numbers for Canada and the U.S. are 647-792-1240 or 800-437-2398. A recording of the conference call will be available for replay until May 13, 2022 at 11:59 p.m. ET. To access the replay, please dial either 647-436-0148 or 888-203-1112 and enter the password 1397681.

A live webcast of the conference call can be accessed on Pembina's website at www.pembina.com under Investor Centre, Presentation & Events, or by entering:

https://produceredition.webcasts.com/starthere.jsp?ei=1501650&tp_key=057312b160 in your web browser. Shortly after the call, an audio archive will be posted on the website for a minimum of 90 days.

About Pembina

Pembina Pipeline Corporation is a leading energy transportation and midstream service provider that has served North America's energy industry for more than 65 years. Pembina owns an integrated network of hydrocarbon liquids and natural gas pipelines, gas gathering and processing facilities, oil and natural gas liquids infrastructure and logistics services, and a growing export terminals business. Through our integrated value chain, we seek to provide safe and reliable infrastructure solutions which connect producers and consumers of energy across the world, support a more sustainable future and benefit our customers, investors, employees and communities. For more information, please visit pembina.com.

Purpose of Pembina:

To be the leader in delivering integrated infrastructure solutions connecting global markets:

Customers choose us first for reliable and value-added services;

choose us first for reliable and value-added services; Investors receive sustainable industry-leading total returns;

receive sustainable industry-leading total returns; Employees say we are the 'employer of choice' and value our safe, respectful, collaborative and inclusive work culture; and

say we are the 'employer of choice' and value our safe, respectful, collaborative and inclusive work culture; and Communities welcome us and recognize the net positive impact of our social and environmental commitment.

Pembina is structured into three Divisions: Pipelines Division, Facilities Division and Marketing & New Ventures Division.

Pembina's common shares trade on the Toronto and New York stock exchanges under PPL and PBA, respectively. For more information, visit www.pembina.com.

Forward-Looking Information and Statements

This news release contains certain forward-looking information and statements (collectively, "forward-looking statements"), including forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of applicable securities legislation, that are based on Pembina's current expectations, estimates, projections and assumptions in light of its experience and its perception of historical trends. In some cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as "continue", "anticipate", "schedule", "will", "expects", "estimate", "potential", "planned", "future", "outlook", "strategy", "protect", "trend", "commit", "maintain", "focus", "ongoing", "believe" and similar expressions suggesting future events or future performance.

In particular, this news release contains forward-looking statements relating to: future dividends which may be declared on Pembina's common shares and preferred shares; the timing and the amount of such dividend payments; and the expected tax treatment thereof. The forward-looking statements are based on certain assumptions that Pembina has made in respect thereof as at the date of this news release regarding, among other things: the success of Pembina's operations and growth projects; prevailing commodity prices, margins, volumes and exchange rates; that Pembina's future results of operations will be consistent with past performance and management expectations in relation thereto; the availability of capital to fund future capital requirements relating to existing assets and projects; future operating costs; that all required regulatory and environmental approvals can be obtained on the necessary terms in a timely manner; prevailing regulatory, tax and environmental laws and regulations; maintenance of operating margins; and the availability of coverage under Pembina's insurance policies (including in respect of Pembina's business interruption insurance policy).

Although Pembina believes the expectations and material factors and assumptions reflected in these forward-looking statements are reasonable as of the date hereof, there can be no assurance that these expectations, factors and assumptions will prove to be correct. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to a number of known and unknown risks and uncertainties including, but not limited to: the regulatory environment and decisions; Indigenous and landowner consultation requirements; the impact of competitive entities and pricing; reliance on third parties to successfully operate and maintain certain assets; the strength and operations of the oil and natural gas production industry and related commodity prices; non-performance or default by counterparties to agreements which Pembina or one or more of its affiliates has entered into in respect of its business; actions by governmental or regulatory authorities; the ability of Pembina to acquire or develop the necessary infrastructure in respect of future development projects; fluctuations in operating results; adverse general economic and market conditions in Canada, North America and worldwide; risks relating to the current and potential adverse impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic; the ability to access various sources of debt and equity capital; changes in credit ratings; counterparty credit risk; and certain other risks and uncertainties detailed in Pembina's management's discussion and analysis and annual information form, each for the year ended December 31, 2021, and from time to time in Pembina's public disclosure documents available at www.sedar.com, www.sec.gov and through Pembina's website at www.pembina.com.

This list of risk factors should not be construed as exhaustive. Readers are cautioned that events or circumstances could cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted, forecasted or projected. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release speak only as of the date hereof. Pembina does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements or information contained herein, except as required by applicable laws. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement.

Investor Relations, Scott Arnold, (403) 231-3156, 1-855-880-7404, e-mail: investor-relations@pembina.com, www.pembina.com
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 6, 2022) - Royal Road Minerals Limited (TSXV: RYR) (the "Company") announces that it has granted an aggregate of 4,000,000 options to purchase common shares of the Company exercisable at a price of $0.35 per common share for a period of two (2) years to directors, officers and consultants of the Company. The common shares issuable upon exercise of the options are subject to a four month hold period from the original date of grant.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Quality Assurance and Quality Control:

Cautionary statement:

This news release contains certain statements that constitute forward-looking information and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws (collectively, "forward-looking statements") describing the Company's future plans and the expectations of its management that a stated result or condition will occur. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company, or developments in the Company's business or in the mineral resources industry, to differ materially from the anticipated results, performance, achievements or developments expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include all disclosure regarding possible events, conditions or results of operations that is based on assumptions about, among other things, future economic conditions and courses of action, and assumptions related to government approvals, and anticipated costs and expenditures. The words "plans", "prospective", "expect", "intend", "intends to" and similar expressions identify forward looking statements, which may also include, without limitation, any statement relating to future events, conditions or circumstances. Forward-looking statements of the Company contained in this news release, which may prove to be incorrect, include, but are not limited to the Company's exploration plans.

The Company cautions you not to place undue reliance upon any such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date they are made. There is no guarantee that the anticipated benefits of the Company's business plans or operations will be achieved. The risks and uncertainties that may affect forward-looking statements include, among others: economic market conditions, anticipated costs and expenditures, government approvals, and other risks detailed from time to time in the Company's filings with Canadian provincial securities regulators or other applicable regulatory authorities. Forward-looking statements included herein are based on the current plans, estimates, projections, beliefs and opinions of the Company management and the Company does not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements should assumptions related to these plans, estimates, projections, beliefs and opinions change.



For further information please contact:

Dr. Timothy Coughlin

President and Chief Executive Officer

+44 (0)1534 887166

info@royalroadminerals.com

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/119563
Sudbury, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 6, 2022) - Transition Metals Corp (TSXV: XTM) ("Transition", "the Company") is pleased to announce the results of the Annual and Special General Meeting of Shareholders held on February 24, 2022 (the "Meeting").

Results of Annual and Special General Meeting

A total of 15,888,519 common shares were represented in person or by proxy at the Meeting, representing 27.82% of the Company's issued and outstanding common shares. All directors nominated as listed in the Management Information Circular dated January 19, 2022 (the "Circular"), were re-elected, as shown in the following table below:

Nominee Votes For Votes Withheld Thomas Atkins 14,349,342 95.61% 658,999 4.39% Jon Baird 14,843,092 98.90% 165,249 1.01% Jason Marks 14,422,275 96.10% 586,066 3.91% Scott McLean 14,948,342 99.60% 59,999 0.40% Brian Montgomery 14,942,092 99.56% 66,249 0.44% William Pearson 14,843,092 98.90% 165,249 1.10%

At the Meeting, the shareholders of the Company also approved:

The re-appointment of McGovern Hurley LLP, Chartered Professional Accountants as the auditor of the Company for the ensuing year and authorized the directors to fix their remuneration;

the Company's Omnibus Equity Incentive Compensation Plan as described in the Circular;

Matters Voted Upon Voted For Withheld or Against Appointment of the Auditors 15,888,519 100.00% 0 0.00% Remuneration of the Auditors 15,008,341 100.00% 0 0.00% Omnibus Equity Incentive Compensation Plan 14,186,012 94.52% 822,329 5.48%

Transition Metals Corp

Transition Metals Corp (TSXV: XTM) is a Canadian-based, multi-commodity project generator that specializes in converting new exploration ideas into discoveries. The award-winning team of geoscientists has extensive exploration experience which actively develops and tests new ideas for discovering mineralization in places where others have not searched, often allowing the company to acquire properties inexpensively. Joint venture partners earn an interest in the projects by funding a portion of higher-risk drilling and exploration, allowing Transition to conserve capital and minimize shareholder's equity dilution.

Cautionary Note on Forward-Looking Information

Except for statements of historical fact contained herein, the information in this news release constitutes "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian securities law. Such forward-looking information may be identified by words such as "plans", "proposes", "estimates", "intends", "expects", "believes", "may", "will" and include without limitation, statements regarding estimated capital and operating costs, expected production timeline, benefits of updated development plans, foreign exchange assumptions and regulatory approvals. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate; actual results and future events could differ materially from such statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include, among others, metal prices, competition, risks inherent in the mining industry, and regulatory risks. Most of these factors are outside the control of the Company. Investors are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking information. Except as otherwise required by applicable securities statutes or regulation, the Company expressly disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Further information is available at www.transitionmetalscorp.com or by contacting:

Scott McLean

President and CEO

Transition Metals Corp.

Tel: (705) 669-1777

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/119593
8base, a Miami, FL-based low-code development platform for building digital products, internal applications and more, closed a $10.6m Series A funding round.

The round was led by Foundry Group, with participation by Techstars, Firebrand Ventures, MongoDB PaaS Accelerator, 11 Tribes Ventures, Argonautic Ventures, LAGO Innovation Fund and Strawberry Creek Ventures, an Alumni Ventures fund. In conjunction with the funding, Chris Moody, Partner at Foundry Group, joined 8bases board of directors.

The company will use the funds to continue the rapid expansion of its product capabilities while ramping up its go-to-market team.

Led by Albert Santalo, founder and CEO, 8base provides a low code dev develop platform to create applications by continually removing redundant and low-value-add work from the dev life-cycle. The system includes tools for building data models, custom logic, APIs, connections to external systems, cloud-based hosting, security, authentication, and frontend applications.

8base is an alum of Techstars Austin 2020.

FinSMEs

06/04/2022
PHNOM PENH, April 6 (Xinhua) -- The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) free trade deal and bilateral free trade agreements(FTAs) will bring a lot of benefits to Cambodia in the long term, Asian Development Bank (ADB) acting country director for Cambodia Anthony Gill said on Wednesday.

In addition to the RCEP free trade deal, Cambodia has bilateral free trade agreements with China and South Korea.

The RCEP is a mega trade pact between 10 ASEAN member states and its FTA partners, namely China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

Both the RCEP and the Cambodia-China FTA took effect on Jan. 1 this year, as the Cambodia-Republic of Korea FTA is expected to enter into force in the near future.

Gill said Cambodia by and large is in a very good position to expand its trade with diverse neighboring partners.

"These free trade agreements bring a lot of benefits to the country, other than job creation, further innovation, and more investment. So we believe that these are very positive measures for Cambodia," he said during a video press conference on the launch of the ADB outlook on Cambodia's economy in 2022.

However, he said Cambodian businesses really need to optimize the benefits of these agreements, try to improve their business environment, skills, and innovation, and strengthen their competitiveness.

Released during the press conference, the ADB outlook indicated that Cambodia's economy is forecast to grow 5.3 percent in 2022 and 6.5 percent in 2023 thanks to strong merchandise exports and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows.

"Widespread vaccination against COVID-19 has enabled the country to reopen its borders for trade and tourism, leading to positive economic prospects for this year and 2023," Gill said.

He added that reopening the economy and the high level of vaccination coverage will allow for a gradual recovery in tourism, which will, in turn, support demand for accommodation, food, transportation, and other in-person services.

Despite the pandemic, FDI inflows into Cambodia remained strong, with China still topping the list of foreign investors in the Southeast Asian nation.

ADB economist for Cambodia Sophie Duong T. Nguyen said FDI has been benefiting Cambodia in terms of economic growth, stability, and job creation.

"Even during the pandemic, FDI inflows into Cambodia have been very resilient and this is very encouraging," she said. "We hope that FDI from China and other countries in the region will continue to flow into Cambodia in the coming years." 
On March 30, 2022, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi held talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who came to China to attend the Third Foreign Ministers' Meeting on the Afghan Issue Among the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan, in Tunxi, Anhui Province.

Wang Yi said, China-Russia relations have withstood the new test of evolving international landscape, remained on the right course and shown resilient development momentum. Both sides are more determined to develop bilateral relations and more confident in advancing cooperation in various fields. China is ready to work with Russia to act on the important consensus reached by the two heads of state, and promote China-Russia relations in the new era to higher levels.

Lavrov said, at the critical moment of the development of the international situation, the heads of state of Russia and China have maintained strategic communication and played important roles in advancing the steady development of Russia-China relations and promoting greater multipolarity in the world. Russia is ready to work with China to take solid steps to implement the important consensus reached by the two heads of state, continuously strengthen high-level strategic cooperation and deepen mutually beneficial cooperation between the two sides in various fields. At the same time, in the international and multilateral arena, the two sides should actively advance the process toward greater multipolarity, oppose hegemonism and power politics, and safeguard the purposes and principles of the UN Charter.

Lavrov briefed Wang Yi on the Russia-Ukraine talks, saying that Russia is committed to de-escalating the tensions, and will continue peace talks with Ukraine and maintain communication with the international community.

Wang Yi said, the international situation has entered a period of turbulence and transformation, with the world experiencing profound changes unseen in a century. China has always supported greater multipolarity in the world and greater democracy in international relations, always advocated safeguarding the purposes of the UN Charter and the basic norms governing international relations, always upheld objectivity and fairness in international affairs, and always stood on the right side of history. The Ukraine issue has a complicated historical context. It is both an outburst of long built-up tensions over Europe's security problems, and an outcome of Cold War mentality and bloc confrontation. Under the current situation, we support Russia and Ukraine in overcoming the difficulties to continue with the peace talks, support the positive outcomes reached in the negotiations so far, support the de-escalation of tensions on the ground, and support the efforts made by Russia and other parties to prevent a large-scale humanitarian crisis. In the long run, lessons should be learned from the Ukraine crisis. The legitimate security concerns of all parties should be addressed based on the principles of mutual respect and indivisible security, and a balanced, effective and sustainable European security architecture needs to be built through dialogue and negotiation so as to achieve enduring stability in Europe.

The two sides also exchanged views and coordinated positions on the Asia-Pacific situation, the Korean Peninsula, the BRICS mechanism, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia, and other multilateral affairs.
On March 30, 2022, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with Turkmen Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov, who came to China to attend the Third Foreign Ministers' Meeting on the Afghan Issue Among the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan, in Tunxi, Anhui Province.

Wang Yi conveyed President Xi Jinping's cordial greetings to former President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov and President Serdar Berdymukhamedov. He said that no matter how the international situation may change, China will always be Turkmenistan's reliable brother and reliable partner. China is full of confidence in China-Turkmenistan relations and stands ready to work with Turkmenistan to promote sustained, smooth and stable development of cooperation in various fields and open up brighter prospects.

Meredov conveyed cordial greetings and best wishes from former President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov and President Serdar Berdymukhamedov to President Xi Jinping, saying that under the leadership of the two heads of state, Turkmenistan-China relations have developed rapidly and cooperation in various fields has gained momentum. Natural gas cooperation is a priority set by the two heads of state and is of great strategic significance. Turkmenistan regards China as its main energy partner and will not change its established position. Turkmenistan is ready to enhance the synergy between the revival of the ancient Silk Road and the Belt and Road Initiative so as to push bilateral relations to a new level.

Wang Yi said China will unswervingly advance energy cooperation with Turkmenistan and always be Turkmenistan's most reliable partner and stable export market. China is ready to enhance the synergy between the development strategies of both sides, expand cooperation across the energy industry chain, and increase the volume and scale of energy cooperation. China is also ready to tap cooperation potential in green energy, natural gas utilization, technology and equipment, and expand cooperation in new areas such as transportation, vocational education, medical treatment and health care and people-to-people exchanges.

The two sides exchanged views on cooperation between China and the five Central Asian countries, expressed support for Kazakhstan in hosting the "China+Central Asia" Foreign Ministers' Meeting this year, and expressed respective willingness to explore the establishment of a summit mechanism to jointly safeguard regional security, peace and stability.

The two sides exchanged views on the Afghan issue. Wang Yi briefed Meredov on his visit to Afghanistan. Meredov expressed support for Afghanistan to draw a clear line with terrorist organizations and resolutely fight against all terrorist forces including the East Turkistan Islamic Movement.

The two sides agreed to strengthen mutual support and coordination in multilateral affairs.
On March 31, 2022, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with Tajik Justice Minister Muzaffar Ashurion, who came to China to attend the Third Foreign Ministers' Meeting on the Afghan Issue Among the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan, in Tunxi, Anhui Province.

Wang Yi said, President Xi Jinping and President Emomali Rahmon have established deep friendship and strong mutual trust, and the strategic guidance of the two heads of state has provided the most important political guarantee for the development of bilateral relations. China firmly supports Tajikistan in safeguarding its independence, sovereignty and security, and in achieving its development goals. China will be Tajikistan's trustable and reliable strategic partner.

Wang Yi said, China is ready to work with Tajikistan to jointly advance Belt and Road cooperation with high quality and help Tajikistan accelerate industrialization and agricultural modernization. China is ready to run Luban Workshop well to provide talent support for Tajikistan and enhance friendly exchanges among the youths. China is ready to strengthen cooperation with Tajikistan to fight against COVID-19 and speed up the construction of a China-Tajikistan center for traditional medicine.

Ashurion extended congratulations on the positive outcomes of the series of meetings on the Afghan issue. He said that President Rahmon cherishes the friendship with President Xi Jinping and Tajikistan is also a reliable partner of China. Tajikistan is committed to expanding all-round cooperation with China and is ready to deepen Belt and Road cooperation and strengthen cooperation in investment, energy and production capacity. He thanked China for its strong support for Tajikistan's fight against the pandemic and expressed his willingness to strengthen bilateral cooperation in traditional medicine.

The two sides agreed to deepen cooperation in the security field, firmly crack down on the "three evil forces" of terrorism, extremism, and separatism and transnational organized crimes, and maintain respective and regional security and stability.

The two sides agreed to strengthen coordination and cooperation in multilateral institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia.
On April 4, 2022, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi held talks with visiting Panamanian Foreign Minister Erika Mouynes in Tunxi, Anhui Province.

Wang Yi said, China and Panama enjoy time-honored friendship, and share similar historical experiences and common struggles against colonization and hegemony. The two sides are both old acquaintances and new friends. Five years ago, China and Panama opened a new chapter in bilateral relations as the two sides formally established diplomatic relations on the basis of confirming the one-China principle. At present, China-Panama relations are developing smoothly with increasingly deepening mutual trust and steady progress in cooperation, bringing tangible benefits to the two peoples. This fully proves that the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Panama conforms to the fundamental interests of both sides, and opens up broad prospects for mutually beneficial cooperation between the two countries. China is ready to work with Panama to build China-Panama relations into a model of mutual respect between large and small countries, solidarity and cooperation among developing countries, and exchanges and mutual learning among different civilizations.

Wang Yi said, China is ready to take the fifth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between China and Panama as an opportunity to take stock of experience and make renewed efforts to realize the "four-wheel drive" of political mutual trust, pragmatic cooperation, cultural and people-to-people exchanges and multilateral coordination between the two countries, so as to create more "propellers" for China-Panama friendship. The two sides should seek greater synergy between development strategies and formulate a plan for high-quality Belt and Road cooperation. Efforts should be made to give full play to Panama's unique geographical advantages and strengthen canal cooperation. The two sides should expand youth, subnational, medical and health cooperation to promote people-to-people ties. China is ready to share development opportunities with Panama, help Panama achieve diversified development, and welcome expanding exports of Panama's quality products to China.

Mouynes said, I'm very glad to be the first foreign minister of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries to visit China since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and China is also the first stop of my trip to Asia, which fully demonstrates the great importance Panama attaches to developing relations with China. The Panamanian people always remember the Chinese people's support for Panama's just cause of resuming the exercise of sovereignty over the Panama Canal, and always remember the Chinese people's contributions to Panama's railway and canal projects in the early years. She thanked China for its strong support for Panama in fighting the pandemic. The economies of Panama and China are highly complementary, with pragmatic cooperation yielding fruitful results. Panama welcomes Chinese investment and will provide a sound investment environment for Chinese enterprises.

Mouynes stressed, facts have proved that the establishment of diplomatic relations between Panama and China is a completely correct decision. Panama cherishes the mutual trust with China and will firmly adhere to the one-China principle. Wang Yi expressed appreciation for this, stressing that China is ready to jointly safeguard this cornerstone of bilateral relations and continue to firmly support each other in safeguarding core interests and national dignity.

Both sides believe that China-Panama relations enjoy broad prospects and great potential for cooperation, and are ready to deepen cooperation in various fields, release more positive information, and turn the right decision of establishing diplomatic ties between the two countries into more concrete results. The two sides are willing to actively consider restarting negotiations on the free trade agreement and strive to reach a high-level and mutually beneficial agreement at an early date. Efforts should be made to deepen cooperation in the Colon Free Trade Zone, and enhance connectivity between the two countries. Efforts should be made to strengthen cooperation in agriculture and grain, so as to help Panama build a regional agricultural center.

The two sides exchanged views on China-LAC relations. Wang Yi said, China supports the building of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), and supports LAC countries in independently exploring development paths in line with their own national conditions and formulating foreign policies according to their own needs. China is ready to implement the important outcomes of President Xi Jinping's five visits to LAC countries and jointly foster a China-LAC relationship for a new era characterized by equality, mutual benefit, innovation, openness, and benefits for the people. Mouynes said, Panama firmly adheres to the principle of non-interference in internal affairs, and LAC countries are not the "backyards" of any country. Central American and Caribbean countries should transcend differences in ideology and work together for common development.

The two sides had in-depth communication on multilateral affairs. Wang Yi said, it's China's consistent position that all countries, big or small, are equal, and China stands ready to work with Panama to safeguard fairness and justice, as well as the basic norms governing international relations. Panama is welcome to participate in the Global Development Initiative (GDI) and accelerate the realization of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Mouynes appreciated the fact that China has consistently acted on the principle of sovereign equality, and said that Panama attaches great importance to the important GDI put forward by President Xi Jinping and stands ready to promote the strengthening of the synergy between Central American and Caribbean countries and China in this regard.

The two sides also exchanged views on the Ukraine issue, among others. Mouynes said, the current geopolitical conflict further highlights the important value and strategic significance of the Panama Canal. Panama does not subscribe to imposing unilateral sanctions willfully in the international arena, stays committed to maintaining the permanent neutrality of the canal, and hopes to gain the support of China. Wang Yi stressed, China respects and recognizes the permanent neutrality of the Panama Canal, and is ready to work with developing countries including Panama to act on true multilateralism, jointly resist unilateralism and oppose bullying practices.
On April 4, 2022, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi had a phone conversation with Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto at the latter's request.

Wang Yi first conveyed Chinese leaders' congratulations on the Fidesz party's re-winning parliamentary elections under the leadership of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, saying that the election result shows that the independent policy pursued by the Hungarian side is in line with the country's national conditions and the common interests of the Hungarian people, and has won broad and firm support. China wishes the Hungarian side greater achievements under the correct leadership of Prime Minister Orban.

Wang Yi said, as the world finds itself in a new period of turbulence and transformation, it is particularly valuable and important not only for Hungary, but also for other countries in Europe and the rest of the world to stand by independence. As comprehensive strategic partners, China and Hungary should deepen cooperation, cement the political foundation, enhance the capacity to jointly resist risks and challenges, and safeguard respective sovereignty, security and development interests. Noting that Hungary has the resilience and will to overcome difficulties, Wang Yi said that China will continue to firmly support Hungary in maintaining the development path it has independently chosen.

Szijjarto conveyed Prime Minister Orban's thanks to Chinese leaders. Szijjarto said, he is glad that his phone conversation with the Chinese foreign minister is the first of its kind after the election, fully demonstrating the mutual trust and friendship between Hungary and China and the high level of bilateral ties. The Fidesz party's victory indicates the Hungarian people's trust in the party's domestic and foreign policies. Hungary will continue to firmly safeguard legitimate national interests, and is ready to constantly deepen cooperation with China in various fields and elevate the Hungary-China comprehensive strategic partnership to new heights.

The two sides exchanged views on relations between China-European Union (EU) relations. Wang Yi said, the Chinese side will follow the important views elaborated by President Xi Jinping when meeting with EU leaders via video link, work with the EU to tackle global challenges and implement the consensus reached during the China-EU Leaders' Meeting, so as to promote the sound and steady development of China-EU relations. Szijjarto said, Hungary firmly supports EU-China friendship and will continue to play a constructive role in the development of EU-China relations with respect and a pragmatic attitude.
CANBERRA, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Australia's national science agency has launched a citizen science program to help monitor native plants in the wake of extreme weather events.

The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), a collaboration between the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), museums and governments, on Wednesday launched Flora Connections.

The new project aims to harness amateur botanists to monitor native flora's recovery from bushfires and floods.

Erin Roger, the Citizen Science Program Lead for the ALA, said recent weather events were having significant impacts on important native plants.

"As extreme fires and floods become more common, plants, which are vital to keeping our ecosystems healthy, also need to recover," she said in a media release.

"Through Flora Connections, we want to better-understand how our native plants are recovering post-fire and flood, and that means boots on the ground.

"That's why we're urging Australians who love getting out into nature to get involved, to help us collect the information we need while they're exploring."

Citizen participants in the project will be able to access information, documentation forms and data-gathering material through the Flora Connections website.

"After the information is submitted to Flora Connections, it will then be made available by the Atlas of Living Australia, our national biodiversity data infrastructure, which will be of huge value to support the science of bushfire impacts on plants," Roger said.

It has been funded under the federal government's 200 million Australian dollar (151.5 million U.S. dollar) Bushfire Recovery Program for wildlife and their habitats, which is being coordinated by the ALA. 
News

District 4 race centers on infrastructure, public safety in Galveston

Michael Mikey Bouvier

GALVESTON

Two people new to politics are campaigning to become the next District 4 representative on the Galveston City Council.

Michael Mikey Bouvier and Alexander Nelson, both businessmen, are vying to represent the primarily residential district.

The winner will replace Councilman Bill Quiroga, who died from COVID-19 complications in February, after almost two years in the position.

An island native, Nelson has a background in coastal planning and operates a shuttle company and Porretto Beach, a parking and rental company on a beach owned by his family.

Bouvier, who has lived in Galveston for 10 years, retired a couple of years ago as the owner of Hey Mikeys Ice Cream.

Both Bouvier and Nelson plan to focus on infrastructure and public safety.

Although Galveston is doing a good job of tackling infrastructure, the city could improve its project management, Nelson said.

We could be doing better, Nelson said. We could get those projects done cheaper and faster.

The city should also diversify the companies it uses for infrastructure projects, he said.

Nelson wants specifically to focus on the flooding that plagues many District 4 streets, he said.

Bouvier, who worked in the construction industry for 30 years before moving to Galveston, also wants to see improved project management, he said.

The city is going in the right direction with infrastructure, but Bouvier also would like to see better project management, he said.

I think we could pay a little more for street lights, Bouvier said. Thats a big thing.

Both Bouvier and Nelson said theyre focused on public safety and pointed out that the police department has said its short roughly 30 officers.

Bouvier wants to get more money for public safety to hire more police officers and acquire newer fire equipment, he said.

I want to make sure everybody has the proper equipment to do their jobs, has the proper manpower to do their jobs, Bouvier said.

He also wants to set up a task force to focus on issues related to the fentanyl crisis, he said.

I dont think this islands really experienced a lot of it yet, Bouvier said. Its coming across the border.

Nelson wants to focus on bringing down the crime rate in Galveston by putting more money into incentivizing officers to come to and stay in Galveston.

We should strive to be one of the safest cities in America, Nelson said. Its a tall order, but why not?

Nelson also wants to increase public participation in local government and enhance the citys accountability by making information clearer and more available to residents, he said.

People dont feel heard at city hall, Nelson said.

I would like to see a residents-first approach, Nelson said. The residents in my district feel underrepresented, unheard and unaccounted for.

Bouvier emphasized he wants to listen to residents and vote on what they consider the most important issues.

He wants to focus on creating a small business task force to ensure businesses dont face hurdles to opening in Galveston, on building the Pelican Island bridge and on balancing tourism with residents.

As summertime hits, thats when we make our money, Bouvier said. I think tourism and the community have to be looked at the same.

Early voting starts April 25. Election Day is May 7.
An Albany man was charged in Linn County Circuit Court on Tuesday afternoon, April 5, with sex crimes against a girl younger than 12.

Jose Luis Virgen Ruiz, 44, was accused of first-degree rape, first-degree sodomy, first-degree unlawful sexual penetration and first-degree sex abuse.

Senior Judge Daniel Murphy set his bail at $100,000 based on the serious nature of the charges.

The crimes allegedly occurred between December 2012 and December 2014, and the Albany Police Department investigated the case, according to court paperwork.

Michael Paul, Linn County deputy district attorney, asked for security of $200,000 in the case, adding that three of the charges were Jessicas Law crimes which bring a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years in prison. He said that Virgen Ruiz was a flight risk and high bail would protect the safety of the accuser.

There were likely more events that have not been charged yet, Paul said.

Defense attorney Rex White stressed that Virgen Ruiz had no criminal history, owned a local business, and had numerous relatives in the area. White asked Murphy to depart from the typical $50,000 minimum bail for such a serious offense and consider a conditional release, without security.

Quality journalism doesn't happen without your help Support local news coverage and the people who report it by subscribing to the Albany Democrat-Herald.

Defense attorneys Erik Moeller and Patricia Lulay were assigned to Virgen Ruizs case.

White handled Tuesdays session of brief teleconference arraignments, and Virgen Ruiz appeared from the Linn County Jail.

Virgen Ruiz told Murphy that English was his second language, and requested an interpreter. Murphy responded that an interpreter wasnt available for the Tuesday hearing but would be for future court appearances.

The next hearing in the matter was scheduled for April 18.

Kyle Odegard can be contacted at 541-812-6077 or kyle.odegard@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter via @KyleOdegard.

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A Siamese crocodile fitted with satellite tag is released into the wild in Koh Kong province, Cambodia, March 7, 2022. The largest ever release of critically endangered Siamese crocodiles into Cambodia's wild last month has raised hope for the long-term reptile conservation and survival, conservationists said on Wednesday. (Jeremy Holden/FFI/Handout via Xinhua)

PHNOM PENH, April 6 (Xinhua) -- The largest ever release of critically endangered Siamese crocodiles into Cambodia's wild last month has raised hope for the long-term reptile conservation and survival, conservationists said on Wednesday.

Siamese Crocodile, or Crocodylus siamensis, is listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List as critically endangered, with roughly 250 individuals estimated to be surviving in the rivers of Cambodia.

Pablo Sinovas, flagship species manager with Fauna & Flora International (FFI)'s Cambodia program, said conservationists from the FFI and its partners in Cambodia freed 25 Siamese crocodiles at the Chhay Reap area in the Sre Ambel River in southwestern Cambodia's Koh Kong province earlier in March.

"Three crocodiles have been fitted with satellite tags and all 25 were fitted with acoustic transmitters, the first time the species has been tracked in this way, allowing conservationists to collect vital data about the species' range and behavior," he told Xinhua.

"It was the biggest ever release of captive bred Siamese crocodiles into the wild and is a major step forward in our efforts to boost the recovery of this critically endangered species in one of its last remaining strongholds," he said.

Sinovas said the carefully managed release of 25 crocodiles represented a massive boost to the survival chances of a critically endangered reptile, which was feared extinct until its rediscovery in the remote Cardamom Mountains two decades ago.

He said the success of this ground-breaking conservation breeding and release program, which has now seen over 136 crocodiles released into the wild, is underpinned by the effectiveness of community-led monitoring and anti-poaching activities at key breeding sites in Cambodia.

"The Siamese crocodile is still on the critical list, but the intensive care that this species has received from FFI, the Cambodian government and local communities in the two decades since its rediscovery is beginning to pay real dividends," he said. "Community wardens continue to play a pivotal role in the success of the Cambodian Crocodile Conservation Project."

Sinovas said tagging and health checks before release took place at the Phnom Tamao conservation breeding facility, managed by FFI in partnership with the Cambodian Forestry Administration.

"At the start of the 21st century, these crocodiles were thought to be extinct in the wild. Two decades on, we're able to use the latest technology to help us monitor their population and aid their recovery," he said.

"It's an exciting moment for conservationists but also for all of Cambodia. Step by step, one of the world's rarest reptiles is being brought back from the brink of extinction," he added.

Keo Omaliss, director general of Cambodia's Forestry Administration, said the release of wild crocodiles is playing an important role in securing wild populations, although it is a slow process.

"Success comes from the commitment of all stakeholders, especially local communities," he said. "Importantly, as part of these efforts, we are also protecting other wildlife that share the habitat with Siamese crocodiles." 

A conservationist releases a Siamese crocodile into the wild in Koh Kong province, Cambodia, March 7, 2022. The largest ever release of critically endangered Siamese crocodiles into Cambodia's wild last month has raised hope for the long-term reptile conservation and survival, conservationists said on Wednesday. (Jeremy Holden/FFI/Handout via Xinhua)

The underwater photo taken on March 7, 2022 shows a conservationist releasing a Siamese crocodile into the wild in Koh Kong province, Cambodia. The largest ever release of critically endangered Siamese crocodiles into Cambodia's wild last month has raised hope for the long-term reptile conservation and survival, conservationists said on Wednesday. (Jeremy Holden/FFI/Handout via Xinhua)

Pablo Sinovas, flagship species manager with Fauna & Flora International (FFI)'s Cambodia program, releases a Siamese crocodile fitted with satellite tag into the wild in Koh Kong province, Cambodia, March 7, 2022.

The largest ever release of critically endangered Siamese crocodiles into Cambodia's wild last month has raised hope for the long-term reptile conservation and survival, conservationists said on Wednesday. (Jeremy Holden/FFI/Handout via Xinhua)
The Linn County Sheriffs Office is asking for the publics help in identifying the body of a man left at a rural cemetery in the Harrisburg area.

The body was discovered at about 11:45 a.m. on Thursday, March 31, at the Masonic Cemetery off Powerline Road, Capt. Brandon Fountain said.

Deputies responded to a report of a suspicious wooden box at a cemetery in the 24000 block of Powerline Road, and discovered that the box appeared to be a hand-built casket left behind a tree, according to a news release.

Investigators spoke with members of the board of directors for the cemetery, who stated there were no scheduled burials and they could not explain why a casket was left at the location, the news release states.

The mans body had no obvious signs of trauma, and he was recently deceased, Fountain said. The casket had been left there recently, as well, Fountain added.

The unidentified man is described as a white adult between 30 to 60 years old, 5-foot-10, weighing 350 pounds with brown and gray hair. He wore size 10.5 shoes and had a healed surgery scar on his lower back.

Fountain said that he couldnt think of a similar incident in his 14 years of working with LCSO.

Quality journalism doesn't happen without your help Support local news coverage and the people who report it by subscribing to the Albany Democrat-Herald.

Thats definitely a unique case, he said.

Fountain added that it was unclear exactly why someone would leave a body at the cemetery in that manner.

Were all scratching our heads, too, as far as the thought process behind what happened, he said. We wont know until we identify him and talk to the people who are closest to him.

The investigation is ongoing. Linn County detectives are working with the Oregon State Medical Examiners Office to determine the identity and cause of death of the man.

Those with information about the case should contact the LCSO detectives division at 541-967-3950.

Kyle Odegard can be contacted at 541-812-6077 or kyle.odegard@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter via @KyleOdegard.

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This is an ode, a tribute, a flick of the peak of your lime green visor.

It's going out to the backbone of the streetwear scene of the early to mid-2000s, targeted at working-class families: Planet 8.

Fast fashion was as deadly as ever in the mid-2000s. Were talking Dickie belts, Flexi Fit Caps, fat tongue sk8 shoes and dutty 3/4 zip-off pants.

There was no end in sight to the evolution of the streetwear scene. Dressing the youth that listened to Alien Ant Farm's smash hit remake of 'Smooth Criminal' and ate raw Maggi Chicken Noodles was no mean feat.

SMP. WORLD INDUSTRIES. VON DUTCH. ETNIES. GALLAZ.

It was a f**king blood bath at the top, every high-end brand was out to rinse our parent's wallets of all petty cash that was there for the taking. Trends switched up faster than you at bullrush after youd been on the back end of a tropical Raro sachet.

It was brutal, and no one felt this more than the humble skuxx of the working-class family.
BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) -- China calls on all parties to practice restraint and avoid making groundless accusations before the investigation into the Bucha incident concludes, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said on Wednesday.

"The reports and images of civilian deaths in Bucha are deeply disturbing. The truth and cause of the incident must be ascertained," Zhao told a regular news briefing.

Media reports state that at least 280 people, including children, were found dead in Bucha, a town outside Kiev. The Russian Defense Ministry on Sunday refuted Kiev's accusation of the killing of civilians in the settlement of Bucha.

Zhao said that China pays close attention to the humanitarian situation in Ukraine and the suffering of civilians.

"Humanitarian issues should not be politicized and any charge should be based on facts," he said.

China supports all proposals and measures to ease the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and will work with the international community to prevent any harm to civilians, he said. 
MIAMI, March 15, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The CEO of Harvest Trading Cap, Jairo Gonzalez MA, visited this March 4, 2022, the main headquarters of the political party Nuevas Ideas, where he was received by the politician Xavier Zablah Bukele, currently president of the party. It is worth mentioning that the aforementioned is a cousin of the current president of El Salvador Nayib Bukele, who has shown great interest and contributions in the advances and evolution of New Financial Technologies in El Salvador.



The visit of Jairo Gonzalez and his team to El Salvador has been with a specific purpose (to contribute to the economic, educational and social welfare) of the country, which has been fulfilled in each of the meetings and meetings that Harvest Trading Cap and his entourage have had with each entity that has met.

In the meeting with Xavier Zablah Bukele, the most important topics and focus for Harvest Trading Cap executives were discussed. They talked about the training to the population through the Jerusalem Foundation with academic scholarships offered by Harvest Trading Cap Academy; Jairo Gonzalez also mentioned about the basic course of trading and knowledge of new technologies, ecosystem of Harvest Trading Cap in the use of new technologies, multiplication of Bitcoin state, NFT technology and social projects.

The representatives of Harvest Trading Cap were very happy and grateful for this wonderful meeting due to the treatment provided by Xavier Zablah Bukele, who in turn was grateful to Jairo Gonzalez and his entire team for what they are doing in their country.

Photos accompanying this announcement are available at



https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/2e163c31-482a-45c4-8210-86c91d776daf

https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/a520aa53-b85e-4436-b460-0b6def80cd05
Vijoice is first approved treatment to specifically address the root cause of PROS conditions in select patients 2 years of age and older 1





PROS is a spectrum of rare conditions and is characterized by atypical overgrowths and anomalies in blood vessels, the lymphatic system and other tissues 2,3





Approval based on real-world data from EPIK-P1 study, which showed patients treated with Vijoice experienced reduction in the size of PROS lesions and improvement of PROS-related signs and symptoms





Novartis to offer robust patient support program that includes assistance to access medication, financial resources for eligible patients and continued education

Basel, April 6, 2022  Novartis today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated approval to Vijoice (alpelisib) for the treatment of adult and pediatric patients 2 years of age and older with severe manifestations of PIK3CA-Related Overgrowth Spectrum (PROS) who require systemic therapy.1 Vijoice is the first FDA-approved treatment for PROS, a spectrum of rare conditions characterized by overgrowths and blood vessel anomalies impacting an estimated 14 people per million.2,3 In accordance with the Accelerated Approval Program, continued approval may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit from confirmatory evidence.

Todays approval of the first treatment for PROS offers hope for a better quality of life to patients and families affected by these rare conditions, said Kristen Davis, Executive Director of CLOVES Syndrome Community. PROS conditions can be debilitating and disabling and can result in disruptions to everyday activities. Until today, often the only treatment options for patients were surgical or interventional radiology procedures.

PROS conditions can affect quality of life and pose a range of physical, emotional and social challenges for patients and their families, ranging from functional impacts and developmental delays to chronic pain, mobility issues, and feelings of isolation.3-6 PROS management can be challenging, requiring collaboration from a multidisciplinary team, and patients and physicians have only had access to interventions focused on symptom management.6,7

I am proud of this outstanding achievement for the PROS community. The EPIK-P1 study results build on our earlier pre-clinical findings and demonstrate the efficacy of Vijoice for select PROS conditions, effectively reducing PROS growths, said Guillaume Canaud, MD, PhD, Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital  AP-HP, the Paris Descartes University, Inserm (INEM Institute Necker Enfants Malades  Centre for Molecular Medicine). This is a significant advancement in therapy for PROS with the potential to positively change the treatment trajectory and outcomes for patients.

FDA approval was based on real-world evidence from EPIK-P1, a retrospective chart review study that showed patients treated with Vijoice experienced reduced target lesion volume and improvement in PROS-related symptoms and manifestations. The primary endpoint analysis conducted at week 24 showed 27% of patients (10/37) achieved a confirmed response to treatment, defined as 20% or greater reduction in the sum of PROS target lesion volume. Nearly three in four patients with imaging at baseline and week 24 (74%, 23/31) showed some reduction in target lesion volume, with a mean reduction of 13.7%, and no patients experienced disease progression at time of primary analysis. Additionally, at week 24, investigators observed patient improvements in pain (90%, 20/22), fatigue (76%, 32/42), vascular malformation (79%, 30/38), limb asymmetry (69%, 20/29), and disseminated intravascular coagulation (55%, 16/29). These improvements were observed in subsets of patients across the study population (n=57) who reported symptoms at baseline and at week 24.1,2



The approval of Vijoice marks a turning point for patients who, until now, have not had an approved therapy to specifically address their disease, said Victor Bulto, President, Novartis Innovative Medicines US. We are grateful to the physicians, patients and families who participated in the EPIK-P1 trial. We are continuing to invest in studies to advance the scientific understanding of PROS conditions and to understand the full potential of Vijoice.

In EPIK-P1, the most common adverse events (AEs) of any grade were diarrhea (16%), stomatitis (16%), and hyperglycemia (12%). The most common grade 3/4 AE was cellulitis (4%); one adult case was considered treatment-related.1

Novartis is committed to providing patients with access to medicines, as well as resources and support to address a range of needs. The Novartis Oncology Patient Support Program is available to help guide eligible patients through the various aspects of getting started on treatment, from providing educational information to helping them understand their insurance coverage and identify potential financial assistance options. Patients or providers can call 800-282-7630 or visit Patient.NovartisOncology.com or HCP.Novartis.com/Access to learn more about eligibility and to enroll.

About PIK3CA-Related Overgrowth Spectrum (PROS)

The PROS classification was proposed by researchers and parent representatives of patient-family support and advocacy organizations at a National Institutes of Health workshop in 2013 to unite a group of rare overgrowth conditions caused by PIK3CA mutations.4,6 Specific conditions associated with PROS include KTS, CLOVES syndrome, ILM, MCAP/MCM, HME, HHML, FIL, FAVA, macrodactyly, muscular HH, FAO, CLAPO syndrome and epidermal nevus, benign lichenoid keratosis, or seborrheic keratosis.4,6 The estimated prevalence of PROS conditions is approximately 14 people per million.3

About Vijoice

Vijoice (alpelisib) is a kinase inhibitor that treats rare overgrowth conditions caused by the effects of PIK3CA mutations in adults and children with PIK3CA-Related Overgrowth Spectrum (PROS). Vijoice works by inhibiting the PI3K pathway, predominantly the PI3K-alpha isoform.1 Vijoice is the first FDA-approved treatment for PROS conditions. Vijoice is not approved for use outside the United States.

FDA approval of Vijoice is based primarily on real-world evidence from the EPIK-P1 study. To further understand the long-term efficacy and safety of alpelisib in PROS, Novartis is conducting additional clinical trials. EPIK-P2 is a prospective Phase II multi-center study with a randomized, double-blind, upfront 16-week placebo-controlled period, and extension period to evaluate the safety, the efficacy and pharmacokinetics of alpelisib to treat pediatrics and adults with PROS. EPIK-P3 is a Phase II study to assess long-term safety and efficacy of alpelisib in people with PROS who participated in EPIK-P1.

Disclaimer

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements can generally be identified by words such as potential, can, will, plan, may, could, would, expect, anticipate, seek, look forward, believe, committed, investigational, pipeline, launch, or similar terms, or by express or implied discussions regarding potential marketing approvals, new indications or labeling for the investigational or approved products described in this press release, or regarding potential future revenues from such products. You should not place undue reliance on these statements. Such forward-looking statements are based on our current beliefs and expectations regarding future events, and are subject to significant known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. There can be no guarantee that the investigational or approved products described in this press release will be submitted or approved for sale or for any additional indications or labeling in any market, or at any particular time. Nor can there be any guarantee that such products will be commercially successful in the future. In particular, our expectations regarding such products could be affected by, among other things, the uncertainties inherent in research and development, including clinical trial results and additional analysis of existing clinical data; regulatory actions or delays or government regulation generally; global trends toward health care cost containment, including government, payor and general public pricing and reimbursement pressures and requirements for increased pricing transparency; our ability to obtain or maintain proprietary intellectual property protection; the particular prescribing preferences of physicians and patients; general political, economic and business conditions, including the effects of and efforts to mitigate pandemic diseases such as COVID-19; safety, quality, data integrity or manufacturing issues; potential or actual data security and data privacy breaches, or disruptions of our information technology systems, and other risks and factors referred to in Novartis AGs current Form 20-F on file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Novartis is providing the information in this press release as of this date and does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this press release as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

About Novartis

Novartis is reimagining medicine to improve and extend peoples lives. As a leading global medicines company, we use innovative science and digital technologies to create transformative treatments in areas of great medical need. In our quest to find new medicines, we consistently rank among the worlds top companies investing in research and development. Novartis products reach nearly 800 million people globally and we are finding innovative ways to expand access to our latest treatments. About 108,000 people of more than 140 nationalities work at Novartis around the world. Find out more at https://www.novartis.com.

Novartis is on Twitter. Sign up to follow @Novartis at https://twitter.com/novartisnews

For Novartis multimedia content, please visit https://www.novartis.com/news/media-library

For questions about the site or required registration, please contact media.relations@novartis.com

References

Vijoice: Prescribing Information. East Hanover, New Jersey, USA: Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation; April 2022 Canaud G, et al. EPIK-P1: Retrospective Chart Review Study of Patients With PIK3CA-Related Overgrowth Spectrum Who Have Received Alpelisib as Part of a Compassionate Use Programme. Presented at the 2021 ESMO Congress; September 17-21, 2021. Data on file. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp; 2020. Keppler-Noreuil KM, Sapp JC, Lindhurst MJ, et al. Clinical delineation and natural history of the PIK3CA-related overgrowth spectrum. Am J Med Genet A. 2014;164A(7):1713-1733. Parker VER, Keppler-Noreuil KM, Faivre L, et al. Genet Med. 2019;21(5):1189-1198. Mirzaa G, Conway R, Graham JM Jr, Dobyns WB. PIK3CA-related segmental overgrowth. In: Adam MP, Ardinger HH, Pagon RA, et al., eds. GeneReviews [Internet]. Seattle, WA: University of Washington, Seattle; 1993-2019. Hughes M, Hao M and Luu M. PIK3CA vascular overgrowth syndromes: an update. Current Opinion in Pediatrics. 2020;32(4):539-546.

# # #

Novartis Media Relations

E-mail: media.relations@novartis.com





Anja von Treskow

Novartis External Communications

+41 79 392 86 97

anja.von_treskow@novartis.com







Julie Masow

Novartis US External Communications

+1 862 579 8456

Julie.masow@novartis.com



Dan Connelly

Novartis Oncology Communications

+1 862 210 0217

daniel.connelly@novartis.com

Novartis Investor Relations

Central investor relations line: +41 61 324 7944

E-mail: investor.relations@novartis.com
English Dutch

Corbion has published its agenda for the upcoming Annual General Meeting of Shareholders (AGM) to be held on 18 May 2022.

The full AGM agenda together with explanatory notes is available on Corbion's website under Investor relations --> Shareholder information --> Shareholder meetings.

Attachment
Dublin, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "United States 2021 Focus Series: ACA - Lessons Learned and the Path Ahead" report from Conning, Inc has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.



This industry report focuses on some of the main topics addressed in the ACA, their history, as well as data from 2014 to 2020. Additionally, this industry report looks at how insurers have fared over the past ten years from financials to new entrants.

Finally, the author looks at what the next few years may look like, especially as the White House and both houses of Congress have changed to Democrat control beginning in January 2021.



Key Topics Covered:



1. Review of the Affordable Care Act



2. Individual and Group Market Reforms

a. Individual Mandate: Failure to Launch

b. Insurance Exchanges: Diverse Paths to the Same End

c. Individual & Group Comprehensive

d. ACA Protections

e. Lawsuits & Regulations



2. Medicaid Expansion

a. Work Requirements

b. Future of Medicaid



3. U.S. Insurance Coverage Rates

a. Uninsured Rate by State

b. Uninsured Rate by Demographic



4. Reduction in Health Care Costs

a. Health Insurance Costs

b. Costs to Health Insurers - Health Insurer Fee

c. Personal Health Care Expenditures as a Percentage of GDP



5. How Have Insurers Fared Over the Past Ten Years?

a. Introduction of Competitors

b. Historical Results and Projections



6. What Does the Future Look Like?

a. Legal Challenges to the ACA

b. 2020 Election

c. Insurers



7. Appendix



Companies Mentioned

Oscar Health

Bright Health

Anthem

Cigna

CVS Health

Aetna

Molina

Humana

UnitedHealth

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/856c11



Source: Conning, Inc
Dublin, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "User Research Repositories Software Market Forecast to 2028 - COVID-19 Impact and Global Analysis By Type and Application (Government, Retail and eCommerce, Healthcare and Life Sciences, BFSI, Transportation and Logistics, Telecom and IT, Manufacturing, and Others)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.



The user research repositories software market is expected to grow from US$ 106.04 million in 2020 to US$ 364.00 million by 2028; it is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 17.1% from 2021 to 2028.



Growing digitalization and rising internet penetration worldwide influence businesses to accelerate their digital transformation and take necessary steps to deliver an engaging Digital Experience (DX). Nearly half of the tech companies comment that improving customer experience and satisfaction were among the leading factors to start a digital transformation. Large enterprises offering digital experiences, such as Amazon and Google, rely on a considerable amount of customer feedback data that provides a foundation for improving their digital product.

The UX data requires to be easily accessible to all stakeholders engaged in product development to streamline the process of user research. The user research repositories software provides a platform to store the vast pool of customer/user-based data and collaborate it with product developers, marketers, and researchers to deduce useful insight using analytics tools. The growing need to keep the user experience at the priority of product development has resulted in an increase in the amount of feedbacks and surveys taken from the customers. Therefore, the advent of a vast amount of research data pertaining to user's digital experience is creating ample opportunities for key players in the user research repositories software market.



Progress in COVID-19 vaccination programs and businesses reopening is fuelling the demand for user research repository software in the coming years. While the first half of 2020 witnessed reduced sales revenue due to the lockdown and halted operations of several industries, online sales were surged significantly in the second half of 2020. Market players are investing in customer experience management technologies to boost sales and generate revenues. There is an increasing trend of using artificial intelligence, cloud technology, edge computing, machine learning, and IoT technology in North America. Further, the advent of 5G technology, combined with IoT, is expected to create lucrative opportunities in maximizing efficiency and minimizing wastage of resources across various industry verticals. Thus, post the COVID-19 pandemic, the user research repositories software market is expected grow at a significant pace.



The user research repositories software market is segmented on the basis of type, application, and geography. Based on type, the market is bifurcated into cloud-based and on-premises. Based on application, the user research repositories software market is segmented into government, retail and e-commerce, healthcare and life sciences, BFSI, transportation and logistics, telecom and IT, manufacturing, and others. Geographically, the market is broadly segmented into North America (the US, Canada, and Mexico), Europe (France, Germany, Italy, the UK, Russia, and the Rest of Europe), Asia Pacific (Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and the Rest of APAC), Middle East and Africa (South Africa, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the Rest of MEA), and South America (Brazil, Argentina, and the Rest of SAM).



Crayon Bits, LLC; Usertimes Solutions GmbH; Tetra Insights, Inc.; Savio Technology Inc.; Reveall B.V.; Productboard, Inc.; UserZoom; Dovetail Research Pty. Ltd.; Condens Insights GmbH; and Aurelius Lab, LLC. are among the key players operating in the global user research repositories software market and profiled in the market study.



Reasons to Buy

Save and reduce time carrying out entry-level research by identifying the growth, size, leading players and segments in the global User Research Repositories market

Highlights key business priorities in order to assist companies to realign their business strategies

The key findings and recommendations highlight crucial progressive industry trends in the global User Research Repositories market, thereby allowing players across the value chain to develop effective long-term strategies

Develop/modify business expansion plans by using substantial growth offering developed and emerging markets

Scrutinize in-depth global market trends and outlook coupled with the factors driving the market, as well as those hindering it

Enhance the decision-making process by understanding the strategies that underpin commercial interest with respect to client products, segmentation, pricing and distribution

Key Topics Covered:



1. Introduction

2. Key Takeaways



3. Research Methodology



4. User Research Repositories Software Market Landscape

4.1 Market Overview

4.2 PEST Analysis

4.2.1 North America

4.2.2 Europe

4.2.3 Asia Pacific

4.2.4 MEA

4.2.5 SAM

4.3 Ecosystem Analysis

4.4 Expert Opinions



5. User Research Repositories Software Market - Key Market Dynamics

5.1 Key Market Drivers

5.1.1 Growing adoption of software to Streamline Research Process

5.1.2 Rising Demand from UX-Centric Tech Start-ups

5.2 Key Market Restraints

5.2.1 Concerns Related to Privacy and Data Access

5.3 Key Market Opportunities

5.3.1 Rise in User's Digital Experience Data

5.4 Future Trends

5.4.1 Use of AI and Automated Analytics

5.5 Impact Analysis of Drivers And Restraints



6. User Research Repositories Software - Global Market Analysis

6.1 Global User Research Repositories Software Market Overview

6.2 Global User Research Repositories Software Market Revenue Forecast and Analysis

6.3 Market Positioning - Five Key Players



7. User Research Repositories Software Market Analysis - By Type

7.1 Overview

7.2 User Research Repositories Software Market, By Type (2020 and 2028)

7.3 Cloud-based

7.3.1 Overview

7.3.2 Cloud-based: User Research Repositories Software Market - Revenue and Forecast to 2028 (USD Million)

7.4 On-Premises

7.4.1 Overview

7.4.2 On-Premises: User Research Repositories Software Market - Revenue and Forecast to 2028 (USD Million)



8. User Research Repositories Software Market Analysis - By Application

8.1 Overview

8.2 User Research Repositories Software Market, By Application (2020 and 2028)

8.3 Government

8.3.1 Overview

8.3.2 Government: User Research Repositories Software Market - Revenue and Forecast to 2028 (USD Million)

8.4 Retail and eCommerce

8.4.1 Overview

8.4.2 Retail and eCommerce: User Research Repositories Software Market - Revenue and Forecast to 2028 (USD Million)

8.5 Healthcare and Life Sciences

8.5.1 Overview

8.5.2 Healthcare and Life Sciences: User Research Repositories Software Market - Revenue and Forecast to 2028 (USD Million)

8.6 BFSI

8.6.1 Overview

8.6.2 BFSI: User Research Repositories Software Market - Revenue and Forecast to 2028 (USD Million)

8.7 Transportation and Logistics

8.7.1 Overview

8.7.2 Transportation and Logistics: User Research Repositories Software Market - Revenue and Forecast to 2028 (USD Million)

8.8 Telecom and IT

8.8.1 Overview

8.8.2 Telecom and IT: User Research Repositories Software Market - Revenue and Forecast to 2028 (USD Million)

8.9 Manufacturing

8.9.1 Overview

8.9.2 Manufacturing: User Research Repositories Software Market - Revenue and Forecast to 2028 (USD Million)

8.10 Others

8.10.1 Overview

8.10.2 Others: User Research Repositories Software Market - Revenue and Forecast to 2028 (USD Million)



9. User Research Repositories Software Market - Geographic Analysis



10. User Research Repositories Software Market - Covid-19 Impact Analysis

10.1 Overview

10.2 North America: Impact Assessment of Covid-19 Pandemic

10.3 Europe: Impact Assessment of Covid-19 Pandemic

10.4 Asia Pacific: Impact Assessment of Covid-19 Pandemic

10.5 Middle East & Africa: Impact Assessment of Covid-19 Pandemic

10.6 South America Impact Assessment of Covid-19 Pandemic



11. Industry Landscape

11.1 Overview

11.2 Market Initiative

11.3 Merger and Acquisition

11.4 New Development



12. Company Profiles

12.1 Crayon Bits, LLC

12.1.1 Key Facts

12.1.2 Business Description

12.1.3 Products and Services

12.1.4 Financial Overview

12.1.5 SWOT Analysis

12.1.6 Key Developments

12.2 Usertimes Solutions GmbH

12.2.1 Key Facts

12.2.2 Business Description

12.2.3 Products and Services

12.2.4 Financial Overview

12.2.5 SWOT Analysis

12.2.6 Key Developments

12.3 Tetra Insights, Inc.

12.3.1 Key Facts

12.3.2 Business Description

12.3.3 Products and Services

12.3.4 Financial Overview

12.3.5 SWOT Analysis

12.3.6 Key Developments

12.4 Savio Technology Inc.

12.4.1 Key Facts

12.4.2 Business Description

12.4.3 Products and Services

12.4.4 Financial Overview

12.4.5 SWOT Analysis

12.4.6 Key Developments

12.5 Reveall B.V.

12.5.1 Key Facts

12.5.2 Business Description

12.5.3 Products and Services

12.5.4 Financial Overview

12.5.5 SWOT Analysis

12.5.6 Key Developments

12.6 Productboard, Inc.

12.6.1 Key Facts

12.6.2 Business Description

12.6.3 Products and Services

12.6.4 Financial Overview

12.6.5 SWOT Analysis

12.6.6 Key Developments

12.7 UserZoom

12.7.1 Key Facts

12.7.2 Business Description

12.7.3 Products and Services

12.7.4 Financial Overview

12.7.5 SWOT Analysis

12.7.6 Key Developments

12.8 Dovetail Research Pty. Ltd.

12.8.1 Key Facts

12.8.2 Business Description

12.8.3 Products and Services

12.8.4 Financial Overview

12.8.5 SWOT Analysis

12.8.6 Key Developments

12.9 Condens Insights GmbH

12.9.1 Key Facts

12.9.2 Business Description

12.9.3 Products and Services

12.9.4 Financial Overview

12.9.5 SWOT Analysis

12.9.6 Key Developments

12.10 Aurelius Lab, LLC

12.10.1 Key Facts

12.10.2 Business Description

12.10.3 Products and Services

12.10.4 Financial Overview

12.10.5 SWOT Analysis

12.10.6 Key Developments



13. Appendix

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/juv2ao

Attachment
Dublin, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Border Security Systems - Global Market Trajectory & Analytics" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.



Global Border Security System Market to Reach $51.4 Billion by 2024

The global market for Border Security System is projected to reach US$51.4 Billion by 2024, registering a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.3% over the analysis period.

United States represents the largest regional market for Border Security System, accounting for an estimated 46.1% share of the global total. The market is projected to reach US$24.2 Billion by the close of the analysis period. China is expected to spearhead growth and emerge as the fastest growing regional market with a CAGR of 10.4% over the analysis period.

With the world witnessing a consistent threat of terrorism, countries are focusing efforts on protecting national boundaries. The rising geopolitical tensions and increasing territorial disputes are also enhancing the need for ensuring security of the international borders. All of these factors are driving demand for a range of highly efficient border security systems that will enable border security agencies to address various threats emerging at the borders.

Driven by the growing need to prevent terrorist activities and cross-border disturbances, the border security systems market is witnessing high growth with military sector and border control agencies emerging as the most widespread users of border security systems.

Technological advancements in border security systems have been playing a critical part in enabling more effective and efficient monitoring and surveillance of international borders. The development of advanced security systems with greater product features and better features for border security agencies to benefit from is driving market growth.

North America represents the leading regional market for border security systems. The country is using advanced border security systems for border security monitoring and surveillance purposes in the country and in conflict areas such as Libya and Syria. The growing investments being made to bolster surveillance capabilities at borders in countries such as China and India are contributing towards the region`s high growth.

The increasing skirmishes at the border areas over territorial disputes between China and India, the influx of immigrants from Myanmar into neighboring nations, and the illegal immigration from Bangladesh into India are also leading to intensified internal security concerns in these nations, driving the governments to focus on better surveillance along the border areas.



The market for Air-based border security systems is forecast to witness high growth over the analysis period. Air-based border security systems, in particular, unmanned aerial systems for border surveillance and security purposes is experiencing high demand. Aerial security systems are used for performing reconnaissance, intelligence and security operations using airborne vehicles.

Air-based security systems are intended to help in border management by monitoring and reporting any security-related emergencies, detecting people and vehicles and tracking from the skies to detect less observable objects on the land, sea and in the air.



Key Topics Covered:



I. METHODOLOGY

II. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. MARKET OVERVIEW

Border Security Systems: Protecting Borders against Illegal Movement of People, Weapons, Drugs & Contraband

Ground-based Border Security Systems Segment Leads the Global Market

Unmanned Vehicles Leads the Global Market, Biometrics Spearheads Future Growth

Developed Markets Lead, Developing Regions to Witness High Growth in the Global Border Security Systems Market

2. FOCUS ON SELECT PLAYERS(Total 50 Featured)

BAE Systems Plc

Canon Inc.

Cobham Plc

Elbit Systems Ltd.

FLIR Systems Inc.

General Atomics

Leonardo DRS

Lockheed Martin Corporation

Northrop Grumman Corporation

Raytheon company

Thales SA

3. MARKET TRENDS & DRIVERS

Growing Geopolitical Conflicts and Territorial Disputes Enhance Investments into Border Security Systems

Continued Threat of Terrorism Drives the Focus on Surveillance as Counterterrorism Response

Consistent Rise in Defense Budget Allocations in Developed and Developing Economies Spurs Spending on Border Security Measures

Increased Defense Spending Bodes Well for Border Security Market

Radar Systems: An Important Technology for Securing International Borders

Biometric Systems: Poised for High Adoption in Border Control Security

Facial Recognition Technology Gains Prominence in Immigration Control

Rising Prominence of Iris Biometrics Travel & Immigration Control

Automated Border Control Systems (eGates) for Faster Processing at Border Checkpoints

Proportion of Airports Worldwide Implementing e-Gates in Comparison to Other Security Self-Service Applications

Thermal Cameras: An Important System for Securing Borders

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Set to Transform Border Security

Healthy Military Spending Worldwide Provides a Fertile Environment for the Growth of Drone Technologies in Border Security Applications

Increasing Use of Drones in the Battlefield Pushes Up the Need for Counter-Drone Systems

Autonomous Border Security Systems Increasingly Find Favor among Border Agencies

Staff Shortage Gives Rise to Need for Automated and Autonomous Border Security Systems

Introduction of Innovative Solutions Drives Market Growth

4. GLOBAL MARKET PERSPECTIVE



III. REGIONAL MARKET ANALYSIS



IV. COMPETITION

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/1hamt9
Norways first Radisson RED & Radisson hotel land at Oslo Airport

The first Radisson RED & Radisson hotel in Norway have landed at Oslo Airport. The new dual-branded opening will be the largest hotel at the airport, offering more than 500 rooms and a new conference center, situated just a few steps from the airport terminals.





Radisson RED Oslo Airport and Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre Oslo Airport provide guests with the opportunity to enjoy both the Radisson RED brands playful twist on conventional hotel stays - injecting new life into hotels through a warm and vibrant social scene, standout design and exquisite photography - with the Radisson brands Scandinavian design, natural warm spaces, and thoughtfully considered details.

The hotel offers a synergy of two iconic brands, with the two hotels and their shared public spaces treating guests to an exciting array of services to suit every lifestyle and schedule. Refurbished rooms and facilities provide a harmonious and comfortable stay from the minute guests check-in with soothing natural materials and airport runway views. On the Radisson RED Oslo Airport side of the property, a bold and vibrant look draws in a younger crowd with 214 urban guest rooms with luxe touches, on-demand services, and a hip lounge area designed for work and play. Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre Oslo Airport on the other side, presents 300 rooms featuring soft, neutral tones, natural materials and harmonious designs inspired by the Scandinavian way of life. In both hotels, stunning airport runway views and high-quality standards make every stay an experience.





At the heart of the hotel, guests can discover the hotels lively restaurant and bar, GAMO, perfect to meet with colleagues, business partners or friends for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or locally brewed beer in the lounge. The globally inspired menu includes international favorites with a twist of Norwegian cultural heritage. The chefs take great pride in sourcing the best possible local Norwegian produce to provide guests with a taste of true Nordic hospitality and flavors. Signature dishes using local ingredients include elk sausage in a brioche bun and grilled fillet of salmon and local Norwegian cheeses. The menu also has a varied vegan selection.





Offering a twist on the normal with statement design, Radisson RED Oslo Airport is partnering with Norways Kistefos Art Museum for a collaboration that will lead to favorable synergies for both brands and target groups. The collaboration will enhance the Radisson RED brands core values and brings the connection between the local art scene and the guest experience, both in-hotel and on digital platforms. Offering guests a playground for art and culture, the collaboration between Radisson RED Oslo Airport and Kistefos will further enhance this by bringing the local art scene closer and highlight places to experience art around the area. With a unique location in the Norwegian woods, 45 minutes drive from Oslo Airport, Kistefos offers world-class architecture, industrial history, art exhibitions, and an impressive sculpture park in scenic surroundings. The award-winning gallery The Twist, is a gallery, a bridge over the river and a sculpture all in one and named a must-see cultural destination by the New York Times.

We are proud to present Radisson RED Oslo Airport and Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre Oslo Airport, introducing both brands to Norway for the first time at such a significant location. This marks the second Radisson RED and Radisson dual-branded property in Northern & Western Europe following the successful opening of Radisson RED London Heathrow and Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre London Heathrow. With this new opening, we are pleased to offer 1250 guest rooms spread over four different brands at Oslo Airport with 500 guest rooms and Radisson Blu Airport Hotel, Oslo Gardermoen, 233 rooms at Park Inn by Radisson Oslo Airport Hotel West and the new hotel with a total of 514 guest rooms. says Tom Flanagan Karttunen, Area Senior Vice President for Radisson Hotel Group in Northern & Western Europe.

Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre Oslo Airports conference center features 52 well-equipped flexible meeting rooms including boardrooms, different sized spaces with flexible seating, smart design details, state-of-the-art audiovisual equipment, and free, fast Wi-Fi. The meeting and event area is divided into three sections with separate break out areas which can also be used for different events. In addition, the 236sqm ballroom with 480 sqm of pre-function space has a capacity for up to 220 guests.





Radisson RED Oslo Airport and Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre Oslo Airport have their own pathway between the hotel and the airport terminal and are only a few minutes from both the terminals and the airport express train, which transports guests to Oslo city center in less than 20 minutes.

Jorgen Ljunggren, General Manager of Radisson RED Oslo Airport and Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre Oslo Airport comments: Radisson RED and Radisson are designed to fit the needs of our guests by giving them endless opportunities to tune in and out, switching effortlessly between business and pleasure. Across public areas, guests are treated to a dual experience of both brands and can get the most out of their stay by enjoying signature features such as the Radisson-branded meeting suites, as well as the vibrant lobby with its RED-style urban interior and art.

With the health and safety of guests and team members as its top priority, Radisson RED Oslo Airport and Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre Oslo Airport are implementing the Radisson Hotels Safety Protocol program. The in-depth cleanliness and disinfection protocols were developed in partnership with SGS, the worlds leading inspection, verification, testing and certification company, and are designed to ensure guest safety and peace of mind from check-in to check-out.

Media contacts:

Natasha Linden, PR & Communications Manager Northern Europe, Radisson Hotel Group

natasha.linden@radissonhotels.com

Sophie Clarke, Global Director of Social Media & Consumer PR, Radisson Hotel Group

sophie.clarke@radissonhotels.com

ABOUT RADISSON RED :



Radisson RED is an upscale hotel brand that presents a playful twist on the conventional. Radisson RED injects new life into hotels with its vibrant social scene thats waiting to be shared and bold design that kick-starts the fun. Radisson RED hotels are in dynamic, urban locations, and offer guests endless opportunities to tune in and out  switching effortlessly between business and leisure. Guests and professional business partners can enhance their experience with Radisson RED by participating in Radisson Rewards, a global loyalty program offering exceptional benefits and rewards.

Radisson RED is a part of Radisson Hotel Group, which also includes Radisson Collection, Radisson Blu, Radisson, Radisson Individuals, Park Plaza, Park Inn by Radisson, Country Inn & Suites by Radisson, and prizeotel brought together under one commercial umbrella brand Radisson Hotels.

For reservations and more information, visit our website. Or connect with Radisson RED on:

LinkedIn | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube

ABOUT RADISSON :



Radisson is an upscale hotel brand that offers Scandinavian inspired hospitality, which enables guests to focus on a work/life balance and find harmony in their travel experience. With nature-inspired design, and unexpected delights, Radisson inspires the art of being in the moment. Committed to building meaningful relationships with guests, Radisson has a Yes I Can! service attitude to ensure the satisfaction of every guest. Radisson hotels can be found in suburban and city settings, near airports and leisure destinations. Guests and professional business partners can enhance their experience with Radisson by participating in Radisson Rewards, a global loyalty program offering exceptional benefits and rewards.

Radisson is part of Radisson Hotel Group, which also includes Radisson Collection, Radisson Blu, Radisson RED, Radisson Individuals, Park Plaza, Park Inn by Radisson, Country Inn & Suites by Radisson, and prizeotel brought together under one commercial umbrella brand Radisson Hotels.



For reservations and more information, visit our website. Or connect with Radisson on:

LinkedIn | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube

ABOUT RADISSON HOTEL GROUP :



Radisson Hotel Group is one of the world's largest hotel groups with nine distinctive hotel brands, and more than 1,600 hotels in operation and under development in 120 countries. The Groups overarching brand promise is Every Moment Matters with a signature Yes I Can! service ethos.

The Radisson Hotel Group portfolio includes Radisson Collection, Radisson Blu, Radisson, Radisson RED, Radisson Individuals, Park Plaza, Park Inn by Radisson, Country Inn & Suites by Radisson, and prizeotel brought together under one commercial umbrella brand Radisson Hotels.

Radisson Rewards is our global rewards program that delivers unique and personalized ways to create memorable moments that matter to our guests. Radisson Rewards offers exceptional loyalty benefits for our guests, meeting planners, travel agents and business partners.

Radisson Meetings provides tailored solutions for any event or meeting, including hybrid solutions placing guests and their needs at the heart of its offer. Radisson Meetings is built around three strong service commitments: Personal, Professional and Memorable, while delivering on the brilliant basics and being uniquely 100% Carbon Neutral.

More than 100,000 team members work at Radisson Hotel Group and at the hotels licensed to operate in its systems. For more information, visit our corporate website. Or connect with Radisson Hotels on:

LinkedIn | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube

Attachments
TORONTO, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As Ontario faces a sixth wave of COVID infections and restrictions are being lifted, workers in low-wage and precarious employment are still being abandoned without protections. A new report from the Decent Work and Health Network documents how government inaction on workplace protections, like decent wages and paid sick days, is undermining Ontarios pandemic recovery.



The evidence in this report clearly shows that the governments failure to improve working conditions has widened existing health inequities, says Dr. David Fisman, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Toronto. The lack of paid sick days and precarious work have been major contributors to disease spread since the get-go. If people cant stay home when theyre sick, and cant speak up about unsafe work conditions for fear of job loss, that is just going to pour gasoline on the fire in terms of disease spread, adds Dr. Fisman.



Workers are still relying on temporary and inadequate paid sick days through the Worker Income Protection Benefit. This scheme provides workers with just three days to stretch over 468 days, and is set to expire in July. Throughout the pandemic, health workers have been repeatedly calling for 10 permanent paid sick days, plus 14 additional days during public health outbreaks. Their calls have been consistently ignored by the provincial government.



Making matters worse, lack of just cause protection from wrongful dismissal and precarious immigration status undermines workers ability to access paid sick days. Evidence shows that racialized workers are more likely to report being punished or fired for taking sick leave. Several workers quoted in the report cite fear of reprisal or job loss for speaking up about unhealthy or unsafe conditions, or even for taking time off when they are sick. The situation is worse for migrants, particularly those on employer-restricted work permits for whom job loss also means homelessness, inability to work at another job, and deportation.



We know when immigrant workers jobs are threatened, they are silenced because they need to be able to put food on the table, says Birgit Umaigba, an ICU nurse in the Greater Toronto Area. If we're not allowed to talk about bad working conditions, then it not only compromises our own lives, but also the lives of the people we're looking after. We need freedom to speak up at work because everyone's lives are at stake when that doesn't happen.



Yesterday the Ministry of Labour announced that the cost of living adjustment that is required to take effect annually will bring the minimum wage to $15.50 on October 1, 2022. Debra Slater, who works as a personal support worker at a long-term care facility, says this not enough. We're not getting what we're worth, she says, We spend our money to go to school to learn and train for this job. Employers and management make personal support workers feel like if we speak up, we will lose our jobs. And, many workers don't have any other way of making a living. We need a minimum wage floor of at least $20 an hour. Evidence also shows that with higher wages comes the health protection of nutritious food, safe housing, lower rates of illness, and better access to care.



The report released today entitled Prescriptions for a healthy recovery: Decent work for all, concludes with evidence-based recommendations to improve working conditions as an urgent matter of public health. This includes raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour; equal pay for equal work so that part-time, contract and temporary workers receive the same pay as their full-time coworkers; at least 10 permanent paid sick days; full and permanent immigration status for all; and  crucially  just cause protection.



If we ignore the lessons of the pandemic, we are doomed to repeat it  racialized, women and migrant workers are paying the price with their health and with their lives, adds Umaigba.





The full report "Prescription for a healthy pandemic recovery: Decent work for all" is available here . A summary of the report is available here .



For more information or to arrange interviews, contact: Sarah Shahid, Organizer, Decent Work and Health Network at sarah@decentworkandhealth.org | 514-415-4666
Pune, India, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The US acne treatment market size was USD 4.27 billion in 2021. The market is expected to grow from USD 4.50 billion in 2022 to USD 6.12 billion in 2029, exhibiting a CAGR of 4.5% during the forecast period. The rising prevalence of acne and adoption of cosmeceuticals for treatment products is expected to propel market development. Fortune Business Insights provides this information in its report titled US Acne Treatment Market, 2022-2029.

Acne treatment cures skin conditions that occur due to the plugging of sebum, dead skin cells, dirt, oil and hair follicles. The rising prevalence of acne is expected to boost the adoption of the treatment procedure in the region. For example, as per the information provided by the American Academy of Dermatology Association, acne is a commonly diagnosed skin disorder in the US and affects nearly 50 million Americans yearly. Further, the adoption of cosmeceuticals for treatment products is expected to bolster the adoption of the acne treatment procedure. These factors may propel the US acne treatment market share in the coming years.





Request a Sample Copy of the Research Report: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/enquiry/request-sample-pdf/u-s-acne-treatment-market-106565





Industry Development

September 2021- Zelira Therapeutics Ltd. announced its initial line of products, RAF FIVE, through the subsidiary brand Ilera Derm LLC.

Launch of Novel Acne Products to Propel Market Development

The rising prevalence of acne procedures is expected to propel the adoption of the product from the region. The rising demand for effective medical procedures may increase acne treatment procedures. For example, as per the information provided by the American Academy of Dermatology, acne vulgaris is the most commonly diagnosed disorder in the US and affects more than 50 million individuals, including 85% adults and teenagers. Furthermore, the rising government initiatives are expected to drive the US acne treatment market growth.

However, the side effects of acne treatment products are expected to hinder the markets progress.





Report Scope & Segmentation

Report Coverage Details Forecast Period 2022 to 2029 Forecast Period 2022 to 2029 CAGR 4.5 % 2029 Value Projection USD 6.12 billion Base Year 2021 Market Size in 2022 USD 4.50 billion Historical Data for 2018 to 2020 No. of Pages 97 Segments covered By Product Type (Retinoids, Antibiotics, Isotretinoin, and Others), By Treatment Modality (Oral and Topical) Growth Drivers Accelerated Product Sanctions for Treatment to Fuel Market Growth Prominent Strategies Applied by Key Players Set to Boost Market Growth Modest Demand for Drugs amid COVID-19 Assisted by Increasing Acceptance of Telehealth





Adoption of Online Platforms to Bolster Market Progress

This market is expected to be impacted positively during the COVID-19 pandemic because of the adoption of online selling. The sudden spike in COVID patients led to the closure of offline stores, thereby increasing the dependence upon e-commerce platforms. Furthermore, adopting part-time shifts, reduced capacities, and automated production strategies may foster industry growth. Manufacturers outsource e-commerce websites to sell products and goods and expand their market presence globally. These factors may propel market development during the pandemic.





Click here to get the short-term and long-term impact of COVID-19 on this market.

Please visit: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/u-s-acne-treatment-market-106565





Segments

By product type, the market is segmented into retinoids, antibiotics, isotretinoin, and others. As per treatment mobility, it is bifurcated into oral and tropical. By age, it is classified into 10 to 17, 18 to 44, 45 to 64, and 65 and above. Based on distributional channel, it is clubbed into hospital pharmacies and retail pharmacies.

Report Coverage

The report provides a detailed analysis of the top segments and latest trends in the market. It comprehensively discusses the driving and restraining factors and the impact of COVID-19 on the market. Additionally, it examines the regional developments and strategies undertaken by the market's key players.

Major Players Implement Partnerships to Boost Brand Image

The prominent companies operating in the market implement partnerships to boost their brand image. For example, Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. partnered with Cassiopea SpA to obtain exclusive distribution rights of Winlevi (clascoterone cream 1%) in Canada and the US in August 2021. This development may enable the company to boost its brand image. Furthermore, the adoption of novel products, mergers, acquisitions, and expansions is expected to boost its market position.





Quick Buy - US Acne Treatment Market Research Report: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/checkout-page/106565





List of Key Players Profiled in the Report

Bausch Health Companies Inc. (Canada)

GALDERMA (Switzerland)

Pfizer Inc. (US)

Johnson & Johnson Services, Inc. (US)

GlaxoSmithKline Plc. (U.K.)

Allergan (Ireland)

Mayne Pharma Group Limited (Australia)

Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (India)

Reckitt Benckiser Group PLC. (U.K.)

Padagis (US)

Almirall, S.A (Spain)





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Table of Contents

Introduction Research Scope Market Segmentation Research Methodology Definitions and Assumptions

Executive Summary

Market Dynamics Market Drivers Market Restraints Market Opportunities

Key Insights Incidence & Prevalence of Acne, US (2021) New Product Launches Pipeline Analysis Key Industry Developments Current Unmet Medical Needs Treatment Algorithm for the Management of Acne Vulgaris in Adolescents & Young Adults Impact of COVID-19 on US Acne Treatment Market Regulatory & Reimbursement Scenario, US

US Acne Treatment Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast, 2018-2029 Key Findings / Summary Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Product Retinoids Antibiotics Isotretinoin Others Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  Treatment Modality



Oral Topical



Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  Age Group



10 to 17 18 to 44 45 to 64 65 and above Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Distribution Channel



Hospital Pharmacies Retail Pharmacies

Competitive Analysis

Key Industry Developments US Market Share Analysis (2021) Company Profiles (Overview, Product, SWOT Analysis, Recent Developments, Strategies, financials (Based on Availability))



Bausch Health Companies Inc. GALDERMA Pfizer Inc. Johnson & Johnson Services, Inc. GlaxoSmithKline Plc. Allergan Mayne Pharma Group Limited Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. Reckitt Benckiser Group PLC.



Padagis Almirall, S.A



TOC Continued.!





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TORONTO, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hylands International Holdings Inc. (TSXV: HIH; Hylands or the Company) announced today changes to its board of directors and executive management team.



Hang Peng, Tianxiang Sun, Guoquing Li and Zhengfu Zhu have resigned as directors of the Company. Hang Peng has also resigned as Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of the Company and Zebin Yang has resigned as Secretary of the Company. Subject to regulatory approval, Mr. Rana Vig and Ms. Marie-Josee have been appointed to the board of directors of the Company joining incumbent director Jing Peng, and Robert Suttie has been appointed as President, Chief Executive Officer and Secretary of the Company. Mr. Victor Hugo, the incumbent Chief Financial Officer, remains in that position. All current directors are independent as defined in Canadian securities laws and each has been appointed as a member of the audit committee of the board of directors. The Company wishes to thank the outgoing directors and officers for their contributions to the Company during their respective tenures.

Mr. Robert Suttie presently serves as the President of Marrelli Support Services Inc. (MSSI), a national provider of financial accounting and reporting services to public and private companies in Canada. Mr. Suttie has more than twenty years of experience in public accounting and advisory services and is regularly involved in initial public offerings, business combinations and asset carve-out and spin-out transactions. Mr. Suttie serves as Chief Financial Officer to a number of junior public companies listed on Canadian stock exchanges, as well as for several non-listed companies.

Mr. Rana Vig has over 30 years of business experience and since 2010 has served as a director and/or senior officer of a number of public companies in Canada, including Blue Lagoon Resources Inc., where he currently serves as a director and President and CEO. Mr. Vig is also active in a number of charitable and community organizations in Canada as a director and advisor.

Ms. Marie-Josee Audet, CPA, MBA is a Senior Financial Analyst at MSSI where she has provided financial services primarily to junior public companies for the past thirteen years. Prior to joining MSSI, Ms. Audet worked in public accounting where she acquired auditing experience primarily with junior exploration companies. Ms. Audet holds a Masters of Business Administration with specialization in management of small and medium business.

In conjunction with the management changes, amounts owing to former directors, officers and other service providers of approximately $325,000 were extinguished at no cost to the Company.

For additional information please contact:

Robert Suttie

President & CEO

Tel: 416-848-6865

E-mail : rsuttie@marrellisupport.ca

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Pune, India, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The global satellite bus market size was USD 27.67 billion in 2020. The market is projected to grow from USD 30.08 billion in 2021 to USD 54.33 billion in 2028 at a CAGR of 8.81% in the 2021-2028 period. This information is provided by Fortune Business Insights, in its report, titled, Satellite Bus Market, 2021-2028.

Based on the research conducted by our analysts, the production of the spacecraft bus mainly concentrates on three prime aspects such as payload carrying capacity, heat dispersal of the spacecraft bus, and payload lifting power allocation.

List of Key Players Covered in the Satellite Bus Market Report:

Airbus (Netherlands)

Boeing (U.S.)

Centum (India)

Honeywell International Inc. (U.S.)

IAI (Israel)

L3Harris Technologies, Inc. (U.S.)

Lockheed Martin Corporation (U.S.)

Maxar Technologies (U.S.)

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (Japan)

Northrop Grumman (U.S.)

OHB SE (Germany)

Thales Group (France)

Request a Sample PDF Brochure:

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COVID-19 Impact

High Demand for Small Satellite amid Pandemic to Impact Market Growth Moderately

The current COVID-19 pandemic has majorly affected the space industry, but the market research has displayed average growth in 2020 and is predicted to grow during the forecast period.

The budget of governmental or commercial satellite bus market players intended for space industry development or space launches has deteriorated, owing to distribution of the budget toward curbing the spread of the novel coronavirus and associated infrastructure expenditure.

Segments

Size, Subsystem, Application, and Region are Studied

Based on size, the market is segregated into small satellite, medium satellite, and heavy satellite. The small satellite segment held the highest share in 2020 and is estimated to show remarkable growth during the forecast period.

On the basis of subsystem, the market is segmented into structures and mechanisms, thermal control system, electric power system, altitude control system, telemetry tracking & control (TT&C), flight software, and propulsion system.

In terms of application, the satellite bus market is categorized into Earth observation & meteorology, communication, scientific research & exploration, surveillance & security, and mapping & navigation.

Geographically, the global market is classified into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the rest of the world.

Report Coverage

The report offers a rounded review of the market along with present trends and upcoming predictions to institute approximate investment gains. A well-rounded examination of any forthcoming occasions, jeopardies, competitions, or growth factors is also stated in the report. A thorough, methodical regional review is offered. The COVID-19 impact on this market has been mentioned in the report to aid investors and business owners to understand the prevailing threats in a better manner. The key players in the market are acknowledged, and their tactics to bolster the market growth are shared in the report.

Browse Detailed Summary of Research Report with TOC:

https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/satellite-bus-market-102608

Drivers

Augmented Satellite Launches owing to Huge Adoption Rate across Commercial and Military Sectors to Fuel Market Growth

Space systems and infrastructure of satellites necessitate numerous satellite components to deliver imaging solutions, signals, communications as well as other solutions that upgrade the satellites' competencies. Since the introduction of micro, nano, and small spacecraft buses, the conventional satellite components for medium and large satellites have turned out to be more expensive than earlier. It also needs more space infrastructure such as ground monitoring stations and related components. This development is projected to drive the satellite bus market growth at a reasonable rate. Therefore, this is anticipated to bolster the demand for satellite bus.

Regional Insights

North America led the satellite bus market in 2020 and was worth USD 12.15 billion. This region held the largest satellite bus market share. The growth is attributed to the augmented expenditure on the space sector and surging satellite launching contracts between the U.S. Department of Defense and the space agency.

Asia Pacific is predicted to display significant growth during the forecast period. The growth is accredited to increasing expenditure from the governments of China, South Korea, and India on the space sector.

Europe is estimated to register considerable growth during 2021-2028. The growth is attributed to the rising expenditure from space agencies.

Competitive Landscape

Inventive Product Launches by Crucial Players to Boost Market Growth

The important players implement numerous tactics to upsurge their position in the market as leading companies. One such key strategy is procuring companies to thrust the brand value among users. Another effective strategy is intermittently unveiling groundbreaking satellite bus products with a detailed study of the market as well as its target audience.

Key Industry Development:



September 2021  Aegis Aerospace Inc. awarded a new contract to develop and operate the STPSat-7 satellite for the United States Space Forces (USSF) Space Systems Commands (SSC) Space Test Program (STP). The company will develop STPSat-7 and utilize its M-1 satellite bus and ground systems developed for the STPSat-4 mission.

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DETAILED TABLE OF CONTENT:

Introduction Research Scope Satellite bus market Segmentation Research Methodology Definitions and Assumptions

Executive Summary

Market Dynamics Market Drivers Market Restraints Market Opportunities

Key Insights Key Industry Developments  Key Contracts & Agreements, Mergers, Acquisitions and Partnerships Latest technological Advancements Porters Five Forces Analysis Supply Chain Analysis

Quantitative Insights-Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Global Satellite Bus Market Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Global Satellite Bus Market Steps Taken by Industry/Companies/Government to Overcome the Impact Potential Opportunities due to COVID-19 Outbreak

Global Satellite Bus Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast, 2017-2028 Key Findings / Definitions Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Size Small Medium Heavy Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Subsystem Structures & Mechanisms Thermal Control System Electric Power System (EPS) Attitude Control System Telemetry Tracking & Command (TT&C) Flight Software Propulsion System Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Application Earth Observation & Meteorology Communication Scientific Research & Exploration Surveillance & Security Mapping & Navigation Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Region North America Europe Asia Pacific Rest of the World



TOC Continued...!

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Dublin, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "E-Cigarette Market: Global Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast 2022-2027" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.



The global e-cigarette market reached a value of US$ 20.4 Billion in 2021. Looking forward, the publisher expects the market to reach US$ 30 Billion by 2027, exhibiting at a CAGR of 4.5% during 2022-2027. Keeping in mind the uncertainties of COVID-19, we are continuously tracking and evaluating the direct as well as the indirect influence of the pandemic. These insights are included in the report as a major market contributor.



E-cigarettes are battery-powered devices that are considered less toxic than traditional cigarettes. Also known as e-cigs, e-vaping devices, vape pens and electronic cigarettes, these cigarettes consist of three main components, namely, a heating coil, battery and an e-liquid cartridge. These components help in delivering dosages of vaporized nicotine or flavored solutions to the users. E-cigarettes are gaining popularity, especially among young adults and adolescents, due to the rising awareness about the harmful effects of traditional tobacco-based cigarettes. However, researchers are still assessing the impact of e-cigarettes on the human body, which is not yet known.



Market Drivers:

The willingness of consumers to quit smoking tobacco products and their perception of e-cigarettes as a safer alternative to traditional cigarettes have led to the increased demand for these devices across the globe. In line with this, the manufacturers are introducing new-generation e-cigarettes which offer different strengths of nicotine and allow the users to refill the cartridge.

Moreover, the leading manufacturers are acquiring or entering into partnerships with small and domestic vendors. For instance, Japan Tobacco International (JTI) acquired the UK-based e-cigarette brand E-Lites to develop new products and to commercialize its vaporizers worldwide. These players are also introducing an extensive range of flavors, such as tobacco, fruits and botanicals, in response to the evolving consumer preferences. Further, they are developing the designs of and technology used in e-cigarettes to improve their functioning.



Key Market Segmentation:

The publisher provides an analysis of the key trends in each sub-segment of the global e-cigarette market, along with forecasts at the global and regional level from 2022-2027. Our report has categorized the market based on product, flavor, mode of operation and distribution channel.



Breakup by Product:

Modular E-Cigarette

Rechargeable E-Cigarette

Next-Generation E-Cigarette

Disposable E-Cigarette

Next-generation e-cigarettes currently represent the most popular product type in the market as they provide significant technology upgrades and extended battery life.



Breakup by Flavor:

Tobacco

Botanical

Fruit

Sweet

Beverage

Others

Amongst these, tobacco is the most preferred flavor among consumers since it offers a similar taste as that of conventional cigarettes.



Breakup by Mode of Operation:

Automatic E-Cigarette

Manual E-Cigarette

At present, automatic e-cigarettes dominate the market since these cigarettes have emerged as a user-friendly option for smokers and gives them the feel of an actual cigarette.



Breakup by Distribution Channel:

Specialist E-Cig Shops

Online

Supermarkets and Hypermarkets

Tobacconist

Others

Presently, e-cigarettes are majorly distributed through specialty e-cigarette shops as the majority of customers are individuals who have quit smoking. The staff of these shops plays a central role in providing customers with product information and many provide smoking cessation advice.



Breakup by Region:

Asia Pacific

Europe

North America

Middle East and Africa

Latin America

Region-wise, North America enjoys the leading position in the market, accounting for majority of the total global market.



Competitive Landscape:

The competitive landscape of the market is characterized by the presence of several manufacturers who compete in terms of price and quality.

Some of the key players are:

Philip Morris International Inc.

Altria Group Inc.

British American Tobacco PLC

Japan Tobacco, Inc.

Imperial Tobacco Group

International Vapor Group

Nicotek LLC

NJOY Inc.

Reynolds American Inc.

VMR Products LLC

MCIG Inc.

ITC Limited

J WELL France

Key Questions Answered in This Report:

How has the global e-cigarette market performed so far and how will it perform in the coming years?

What are the key regional markets in the global e-cigarette industry?

What has been the impact of COVID-19 on the global e-cigarette market?

What is the breakup of the market based on the product?

What is the breakup of the market based on the flavor?

What is the breakup of the market based on the mode of operation?

What is the breakup of the market based on the distribution channel?

What are the various stages in the value chain of the global e-cigarette industry?

What are the key driving factors and challenges in the global e-cigarette industry?

What is the structure of the global e-cigarette industry and who are the key players?

What is the degree of competition in the global e-cigarette industry?

What are the profit margins in the global e-cigarette industry?

Key Topics Covered:



1 Preface



2 Scope and Methodology



3 Executive Summary



4 Introduction

4.1 Overview

4.2 Key Industry Trends



5 Global E-Cigarette Market

5.1 Market Overview

5.2 Market Performance

5.3 Impact of COVID-19

5.4 Market Breakup by Product

5.5 Market Breakup by Flavor

5.6 Market Breakup by Mode of Operation

5.7 Market Breakup by Distribution Channel

5.8 Market Breakup by Region

5.9 Market Forecast



6 Market Breakup Product

6.1 Modular E-Cigarette

6.1.1 Market Trends

6.1.2 Market Forecast

6.2 Rechargeable E-Cigarette

6.2.1 Market Trends

6.2.2 Market Forecast

6.3 Next-Generation E-Cigarette

6.3.1 Market Trends

6.3.2 Market Forecast

6.4 Disposable E-Cigarette

6.4.1 Market Trends

6.4.2 Market Forecast



7 Market Breakup by Flavor

7.1 Tobacco

7.1.1 Market Trends

7.1.2 Market Forecast

7.2 Botanical

7.2.1 Market Trends

7.2.2 Market Forecast

7.3 Fruit

7.3.1 Market Trends

7.3.2 Market Forecast

7.4 Sweet

7.4.1 Market Trends

7.4.2 Market Forecast

7.5 Beverage

7.5.1 Market Trends

7.5.2 Market Forecast

7.6 Others

7.6.1 Market Trends

7.6.2 Market Forecast



8 Market Breakup by Mode of Operation

8.1 Automatic E-Cigarette

8.1.1 Market Trends

8.1.2 Market Forecast

8.2 Manual E-Cigarette

8.2.1 Market Trends

8.2.2 Market Forecast



9 Market Breakup by Distribution Channel

9.1 Specialist E-Cig Shops

9.1.1 Market Trends

9.1.2 Market Forecast

9.2 Online

9.2.1 Market Trends

9.2.2 Market Forecast

9.3 Supermarkets and Hypermarkets

9.3.1 Market Trends

9.3.2 Market Forecast

9.4 Tobacconist

9.4.1 Market Trends

9.4.2 Market Forecast

9.5 Others

9.5.1 Market Trends

9.5.2 Market Forecast



10 Market Breakup by Region



11 SWOT Analysis



12 Value Chain Analysis



13 Porters Five Forces Analysis



14 Price Analysis

14.1 Price Indicators

14.2 Price Structure

14.3 Margin Analysis



15 Competitive Landscape

15.1 Market Structure

15.2 Key Players

15.3 Profiles of Key Players

15.3.1 Philip Morris International

15.3.2 Altria Group Inc.

15.3.3 British American Tobacco PLC

15.3.4 Japan Tobacco, Inc.

15.3.5 Imperial Tobacco Group

15.3.6 International Vapor Group

15.3.7 Nicotek Llc,

15.3.8 Njoy Inc.

15.3.9 Reynolds American Inc.

15.3.10 Vmr Flavours Llc.

15.3.11 MCIG Inc.

15.3.12 ITC Limited

15.3.13 J Well France

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/mhdesl

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NEWTON, Mass. and TEL AVIV, Israel, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cybersecurity company Hunters today announced the formation of its Partner Certification Program to extend the value of its growing ecosystem and create new opportunities for partners. As part of the rollout of the Hunters Partner Certification Program, the company also launched its new Hunters Partner Hub , an online portal that provides an all-in-one partner experience.



Hunters SOC Platform empowers security teams to automatically identify and respond to incidents that matter across the entire attack surface. Global enterprises, including leading Fortune 500 companies in financial services, media, retail and manufacturing choose Hunters as their main SOC platform, replacing their SIEM. Hunters recent Series C round of funding helped the company focus on accelerating its partner strategy.

When it comes to SOC platforms that can cover the entire attack surface of a global enterprise organization, Hunters is second to none. Their ability to mitigate threats at speeds faster than what is typically seen in todays market is impressive, said Quentin Thomas, Global Sales Director at Tomahawk, a Hunters' partner. We are excited about our partnership with Hunters as they are one of the strongest weapons we have in our portfolio of offerings. The new Partner Certification Program will enhance our ability to go to market with Hunters and provide a revolutionary approach to security operations to our customers.

Our new Partner Certification Program is one of the first building blocks that we are implementing to help our partners build their Hunters expertise and become trusted security advisors to their customers, said Chris Sullivan, Head of Alliances & Partners for Hunters.

The Hunters Partner Certification Program, which includes both a sales and a technical sales certification, provides hands-on training so partners are better equipped to sell, position and demo the Hunters SOC Platform and win new customers.

Partners need to be able to track their business with vendors. We are enabling our partners by giving them the power to manage their Hunters business through a single console where they can view their open opportunities, pipeline and deals won, while at the same time accessing all the needed sales and marketing resources, said Sullivan.

Register at the Hunters Partner Hub to begin the certification process.

About Hunters

Hunters SOC Platform empowers security teams to automatically identify and respond to security incidents across their entire attack surface. We enable vendor-agnostic data ingestion and normalization at a predictable cost. Built-in detection engineering, data correlation and automatic investigation helps teams overcome volume, complexity and false positives. Hunters mitigates real threats faster and more reliably than SIEMs, ultimately reducing customers' overall security risk.

Hunters was recognized as the SC Media 2021 Trust Award Finalist for Best Threat Detection Technology and winner of the CISO Choice Awards: Security Analytics and Security Operations. Hunters is backed by leading VCs and strategic investors including Stripes, YL Ventures, DTCP, Cisco Investments, Bessemer Venture Partners, U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), Microsofts venture fund M12, Blumberg Capital, Snowflake Ventures, Databricks and Okta. Learn how enterprises like Booking.com, Snowflake, Netgear and Cimpress leverage Hunters SOC Platform to empower their security teams at https://hunters.ai.

Media Contact:

Montner Tech PR

Deb Montner

dmontner@montner.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/6274b819-1789-47d6-9214-8eab7eacbb26
LAS VEGAS, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Asia Broadband Inc. (OTC: AABB) (AABB or the Company) is pleased to announce that the Company has began production on its mining property in the Tequila region of Mexico. The processing mill on site is currently operating at 50 tons per day (tpd) maximum capacity and a retrofit upgrade program is underway to increase production capacity to 100 tpd. Additionally, the Company is planning a large-scale expansion of its production and processing facilities to begin installation sometime this year. Utilizing the advances in mining equipment automation and efficiency, the larger scale facilities will have significantly increased throughput and metals extraction. The added production volume at a lower cost per ton is expected to have a substantial impact on the Companys gross profit margin going forward.



We are on point and thrilled with our production schedule beginning in early 2022, as we had planned from our new property acquisitions in 2021. The Company is very focused on its mining operations growth initiative, which is our core business segment. We are continuing to pursue further high-grade gold property acquisitions and production expansions to increase gold holdings and the circulation of our AABBG token," expressed Chris Torres, the Company President and CEO.

Additionally, AABB has several geological reports in progress, by a qualified professional person, for both the Tequila and Bonanza properties in Mexico. The Bonanza report was expected last month, but was delayed intentionally to further explore strong mineral indications that were discovered near the time of planned submission of the drill cores.

AABB continues to implement its mining property acquisition strategy to optimize development capital utilization by focusing operations in regions of Mexico where AABB has a comparative advantage of development resources and expertise readily available for rapid expansion and duplication of the Companys previous gold production success.

About Asia Broadband

Asia Broadband Inc. (OTC: AABB) is a resource company focused on the production, supply and sale of precious and base metals, primarily to Asian markets. The Company utilizes its specific geographic expertise, experience and extensive industry contacts to facilitate its innovative distribution process from the production and supply of precious and base metals in Mexico to client sales networks in Asia. This vertical integration approach to sales transactions is the unique strength of AABB that differentiates the Company and creates distinctive value for shareholders. Additionally, the Company has added a digital assets business segment and released its AABBG freshly minted mine-to-token gold-backed cryptocurrency within its AABB Wallet and a proprietary digital exchange AABBExchange. AABB expects its token to become a world-wide standard of exchange that is stable, secured and trusted with gold backing, while having the added benefit of demand based price appreciation. These are unique and outstanding qualities relative to other cryptocurrencies.

Contact the Company at:

General Email: ir@asiabroadbandinc.com Exchange Support: https://aabbexchange.com/faq/ Token Support: https://aabbgoldtoken.com/faq/aabb-wallet/ www.AABBGoldToken.com/support/ Company Websites: www.asiabroadbandinc.com www.AABBExchange.com www.AABBGoldToken.com Phone: 702-866-9054

Forward-Looking Statements are contained in this press release within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based on the Asia Broadband Inc.s (the Company) expected current beliefs about the Companys business, which are subject to uncertainty and change. The operations and results of the Company could materially differ from what is expressed or implied by the statements made above when industry, regulatory, market and competitive circumstances change. Further information about these risks can be found in the annual and quarterly disclosures the Company has published on the OTC Markets website. The Company is under no obligation to update or alter its forward-looking statements as future circumstances, events and information may change.
Pune, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The latest global Merchant Cash Advance Market research report 2022 provides detailed information about the market overview, modern trends, demand, and recent development affecting the market growth during the upcoming year. Merchant Cash Advance Market report also covers the new business development, price, revenue, gross margin, market size, share, potential growth and upcoming market strategy followed by leading players. This report also gives the knowledge of major company profiles within the market. The report focuses on the Merchant Cash Advance Market size, segment size (mainly covering product type, application, and geography), competitor landscape, recent status, and development trends. Moreover, Merchant Cash Advance Market forecast by regions, type, and application, with sales and revenue, from 2022 to 2030. And also report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. Finally, the feasibility of new investment projects is assessed and overall research conclusions are offered.

Get a Sample PDF of the report - https://www.marketreportsworld.com/enquiry/request-sample/20488246

Moreover, the research report gives detailed data about the major factors influencing the growth of the Merchant Cash Advance market at the national and local level forecast of the market size, in terms of value, market share by region, and segment, regional market positions, segment and country opportunities for growth, Key company profiles, SWOT, product portfolio and growth strategies.

Covid-19 Impact On Merchant Cash Advance Industry:

Moreover, the impact of COVID-19 is also concerned. Since outbreak in December 2019, the COVID-19 virus has spread to all around the world and caused huge losses of lives and economy, and the global manufacturing, tourism and financial markets have been hit hard, while the online market/industry increased. Fortunately, with the development of vaccine and other effort by global governments and organizations, the negative impact of COVID-19 is expected to subside and the global economy is expected to recover.

This research covers COVID-19 impacts on the upstream, midstream and downstream industries. Moreover, this research provides an in-depth market evaluation by highlighting information on various aspects covering market dynamics like drivers, barriers, opportunities, threats, and industry news & trends. In the end, this report also provides in-depth analysis and professional advices on how to face the post-COIVD-19 period.

Get a Sample Copy of the Merchant Cash Advance Market Research Report 2022

This report gives a detailed description of all the factors influencing the growth of these market players as well as profiles of their companies, their product portfolios, marketing strategies, technology integrations, and more information about these market players. Some of the key players are as follows:

The Major Key Players Listed in Merchant Cash Advance Market Report are:

Fundbox

Credibly

American Express

Fora Financial

PayPal Working Capital

Square Capital

National Funding

Stripe Capital

Lendio

Kabbage

CAN Capital

FINOVA CAPITAL

Social Finance

National Business Capital

Global Merchant Cash Advance Market: Drivers and Restrains

The research report has incorporated the analysis of different factors that augment the markets growth. It constitutes trends, restraints, and drivers that transform the market in either a positive or negative manner. This section also provides the scope of different segments and applications that can potentially influence the market in the future. The detailed information is based on current trends and historic milestones.

A thorough evaluation of the restrains included in the report portrays the contrast to drivers and gives room for strategic planning. Factors that overshadow the market growth are pivotal as they can be understood to devise different bends for getting hold of the lucrative opportunities that are present in the ever-growing market. Additionally, insights into market experts opinions have been taken to understand the market better.

Inquire more and share questions if any before the purchase on this report at - https://www.marketreportsworld.com/enquiry/pre-order-enquiry/20488246

On the whole, the report proves to be an effective tool that players can use to gain a competitive edge over their competitors and ensure lasting success in the global Merchant Cash Advance market. All of the findings, data, and information provided in the report are validated and revalidated with the help of trustworthy sources. The analysts who have authored the report took a unique and industry-best research and analysis approach for an in-depth study of the global Merchant Cash Advance market.

Global Merchant Cash Advance Market: Segment Analysis

The research report includes specific segments by region (country), by company, by Type and by Application. This study provides information about the sales and revenue during the historic and forecasted period. Understanding the segments helps in identifying the importance of different factors that aid the market growth.

By Type:

Online Cash Advance

Offline Cash Advance

By Application:

Banks

Credit Card Companies

Others

By Sales Channel

Direct Channel

Distribution Channel

Geographic Segment Covered in the Report:

The Merchant Cash Advance report provides information about the market area, which is further subdivided into sub-regions and countries/regions. In addition to the market share in each country and sub-region, this chapter of this report also contains information on profit opportunities. This chapter of the report mentions the market share and growth rate of each region, country and sub-region during the estimated period.

North America (United States, Canada and Mexico)

Europe (Germany, UK, France, Italy, Russia and Spain etc.)

Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India, Australia and Southeast Asia etc.)

South America (Brazil, Argentina and Colombia etc.)

Middle East & Africa (South Africa, UAE and Saudi Arabia etc.)

Key questions answered in the report:

What is the growth potential of the Merchant Cash Advance market?

Which product segment will take the lions share?

Which regional market will emerge as a pioneer in the years to come?

Which application segment will experience strong growth?

What growth opportunities might arise in the Merchant Cash Advance industry in the years to come?

What are the most significant challenges that the Merchant Cash Advance market could face in the future?

Who are the leading companies on the Merchant Cash Advance market?

What are the main trends that are positively impacting the growth of the market?

What growth strategies are the players considering to stay in the Merchant Cash Advance market?

Purchase this report (Price 2500 USD for a single-user license) - https://www.marketreportsworld.com/purchase/20488246

Detailed TOC of Global Merchant Cash Advance Market Report 2022

Chapter 1 Merchant Cash Advance Market Overview

1.1 Merchant Cash Advance Definition

1.2 Global Merchant Cash Advance Market Size Status and Outlook (2016-2030)

1.3 Global Merchant Cash Advance Market Size Comparison by Region (2016-2030)

1.4 Global Merchant Cash Advance Market Size Comparison by Type (2016-2030)

1.5 Global Merchant Cash Advance Market Size Comparison by Application (2016-2030)

1.6 Global Merchant Cash Advance Market Size Comparison by Sales Channel (2016-2030)

1.7 Merchant Cash Advance Market Dynamics (COVID-19 Impacts)

1.7.1 Market Drivers/Opportunities

1.7.2 Market Challenges/Risks

1.7.3 Market News (Mergers/Acquisitions/Expansion)

1.7.4 COVID-19 Impacts

1.7.5 Post-Strategies of COVID-19

Chapter 2 Merchant Cash Advance Market Segment Analysis by Player

2.1 Global Merchant Cash Advance Sales and Market Share by Player (2019-2021)

2.2 Global Merchant Cash Advance Revenue and Market Share by Player (2019-2021)

2.3 Global Merchant Cash Advance Average Price by Player (2019-2021)

2.4 Players Competition Situation & Trends

2.5 Conclusion of Segment by Player

Chapter 3 Merchant Cash Advance Market Segment Analysis by Type

Chapter 4 Merchant Cash Advance Market Segment Analysis by Application

Chapter 5 Merchant Cash Advance Market Segment Analysis by Sales Channel

Chapter 6 Merchant Cash Advance Market Segment Analysis by Region

Chapter 7 Profile of Leading Merchant Cash Advance Players

Chapter 8 Upstream and Downstream Analysis of Merchant Cash Advance

Chapter 9 Development Trend of Merchant Cash Advance (2022-2030)

Chapter 10 Appendix

Continued.

Browse the complete table of contents at - https://www.marketreportsworld.com/TOC/20488246#TOC

About Us: 

Market Reports World is the Credible Source for Gaining the Market Reports that will provide you with the Lead Your Business Needs. The market is changing rapidly with the ongoing expansion of the industry. Advancement in technology has provided todays businesses with multifaceted advantages resulting in daily economic shifts. Thus, it is very important for a company to comprehend the patterns of the market movements in order to strategize better. An efficient strategy offers the companies a head start in planning and an edge over the competitors.
NEW YORK, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The New York Youth Elite Association (NYYEA) hosted a fundraiser for New York State Governor candidate and Congressman Tom Suozzi at the Penn Club on March 30. Over 50 attendees spanning political, business, and academic sectors gathered together and discussed with Suozzi his views and insights on political and social issues.

Suozzi thanked those in attendance and emphasized that he would be improving matters such as public safety, taxes, and education.

"My biggest number one issue is to make people feel safe in New York City," Suozzi said, with immediate and booming applause from the audience.

Suozzi was elected as a congressman of New York's 3rd district in 2016. He was previously the Mayor of Glen Cove, New York, in 1993 and was elected Nassau County Executive in 2001, a position previously held by Republicans for 30 years.

During his tenure as the County Executive of Nassau County -- which is more significant than 11 states and has the 12th largest police department in the country -- it had the lowest crime rate of all communities with over 500,000 people. The current New York City Police Commissioner, Keechant Sewell, was a police officer promoted by Suozzi when she was serving in the Nassau County Police Department.

Suozzi also turned down New York City Mayor Eric Adams to become his Deputy Mayor.

"I'm not going to be your Deputy Mayor," Suozzi said. "I'm running for Governor... I can do more to help you from the Governor I can be than as your deputy mayor."

Suozzi also said he is willing to work with everybody, regardless of their political affiliation. He also pointed out that the recently passed infrastructure bill was due to bipartisan efforts, a belief he strongly champions. He also supports tax reduction.

"I will always be a commonsense Democrat," Suozzi said. "I will work with anybody. I will work with Democrats or Republicans, and I will work with progressives, I will work with moderates, I will work with conservatives, I will work with anybody.

"I won't abandon my values, but I will work with anybody to solve problems that surely help people."

NYYEA President John JD Liu said the current downward trend of public safety and hate crimes against the Asian community is a priority of immediate attention. Liu also said he would back Suozzi for his governorship bid, which would also benefit the overall interest of the local Chinese community.

NYYEA is a nonprofit organization that seeks to assemble and serve as a platform for the young elites across various industries and fields. It aims to facilitate the exchange of ideas, consolidate resources and in turn, heighten the positive impact the group can achieve collectively.

Some of the attendees include NYYEA members John JD Liu, Eva Cai, Chrissy Ding, and Ivy Wu; Suozzi's running mate for Lieutenant Governor Diana Reyna; former New England Patriots Executive Vice President Charles Sullivan; Kayla Rockefeller of the Rockefeller family; Brooklyn community leaders Rosita Pei and Susan Weng; Lina Li and Janet C. Salazar from FSUN; New York Chinese Business Association Honorary Chairman James Liu; James Newman from the Elite Prep Academy; and Faith Group CEO Young Liu.

Contact:

Tel: 516-858-8899

yea@nyyea.org

Website: www.nyyea.org

Related Images











Image 1: The New York Youth Elite Association hosted a fundraiser for Tom Suozzi









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Dallas, Texas, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- WaterPure International, Inc. (OTC Pink: WPUR) today announced the company is working with Alternet Systems, Inc. (OTC Pink: ALYI) to support ALYIs recently announced expansion into Latin America and beyond.

WPUR is a recently reorganized business targeting the market for sustainable water and electric utilities management solutions. The company has launched a number of innovative and scalable pilot programs with plans to expand the projects to deliver greater impact. The companys innovative pilots have initially all been focused on delivering benefit to the African continent. Now the company will expand into Latin America to support ALYI.

ALYI recently announced being engaged in replicating its African electric motorcycle model in Latin America, starting in Brazil.

In Brazil, ride-hailing apps such as Uber have already deployed solutions for motorcycle ride-sharing.

See - Uber expands ride-hailing services with motorbikes in Brazil .

ALYI is building an EV Ecosystem that includes organic and partner solutions for all aspects of the growing EV transportation system.

ALYI has established the nucleus of its EV Ecosystem in East Africa where it has already begun to rollout a comprehensive electric motorcycle enterprise. ALYI is deploying electric motorcycles into the robust motorcycle taxi market.

ALYI is actively delivering on a $2 million electric motorcycle order in Kenya executed Q4 2021 and anticipated to be included in the companys upcoming 2021 annual report (The company filed an extension and intends publish the 2021 annual report within the extension period).

In conjunction with the coming 2021 annual report, the company plans to publish a shareholder update that will include details on ALYIs plan for repeating the business model around its $2 million electric motorcycles in Kenya into new regions starting with Brazil.

WPUR is already working with ALYI on launching an off-grid, clean electric energy production, storage, and electric vehicle (EV) charging solution. That initiative will expand into Latin America.

The off-grid technology has been built in a lab and will now be scaled into a pilot in advance of a larger rollout.

To learn more about WPUR, visit https://www.wpurinc.com/ .

To learn more about ALYI, visit www.alternetsystemsinc.com .

Disclaimer/Safe Harbor: This news release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Litigation Reform Act. The statements reflect the Company's current views with respect to future events that involve risks and uncertainties. Among others, these risks include the expectation that any of the companies mentioned herein will achieve significant sales, the failure to meet schedule or performance requirements of the companies' contracts, the companies' liquidity position, the companies' ability to obtain new contracts, the emergence of competitors with greater financial resources and the impact of competitive pricing. In the light of these uncertainties, the forward-looking events referred to in this release might not occur.



Contact:

Alternet Systems, Inc.

Randell Torno

info@lithiumip.com

+1-800-713-0297
English French

THIS NEWS RELEASE IS NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES.



MONTREAL, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MONARCH MINING CORPORATION (Monarch or the Corporation) (TSX: GBAR) (OTCQX: GBARF) is pleased to announce that it has closed its previously announced private placement for aggregate gross proceeds of C$14,400,000 (the Offering). The Offering was conducted on a best efforts private placement basis pursuant to the terms and conditions of an agency agreement entered into among the Corporation, and Stifel GMP and Sprott Capital Partners LP, as co-lead agents and joint bookrunners (collectively, the Co-Lead Agents), and Desjardins Securities Inc. and Laurentian Bank Securities Inc. (together with the Co-Lead Agents, the Agents). The Offering includes the exercise by the Agents of their over-allotment option for additional gross proceeds of C$2,400,000. The Offering consisted of the issuance of 24,000,000 units of the Corporation (the Units) at a price of C$0.60 per Unit.

Each Unit consists of one common share in the capital of the Corporation (a Common Share) and one transferable common share purchase warrant of the Corporation (a Warrant). Each Warrant entitles the holder thereof to acquire one Common Share (each, a Warrant Share) at a price of C$0.95 per Warrant Share for a period of 60 months following the date of issuance thereof.

The net proceeds of the Offering are expected to be used by the Corporation to fund development expenditures at the Corporations Beaufor Mine and Beacon Mill, and for general corporate purposes, including working capital purposes.

All securities issued pursuant to this Offering are subject to a restricted period of four months and a day, ending on August 7, 2022, under applicable Canadian securities legislation. The Offering remains subject to the final approval of the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Alamos Gold Inc. (Alamos) has agreed to participate in the Offering with a subscription for 1,666,667 Units, for aggregate consideration of C$1,000,000.20. Prior to the closing of the Offering, Alamos held 8,793,640 Common Shares and no common share purchase warrants of the Corporation, being 10.36% of the issued and outstanding securities on a non-diluted basis at that time. Following the closing of the Offering, Alamos holds, as of the date hereof, 10,460,307 Common Shares and 1,666,667 Warrants, for a security holding percentage of 10.97% on a partially diluted basis, which represents an increase of 0.61%. Alamos acquired the Units for investment purposes, which will be evaluated and may be increased or decreased from time to time at Alamos' discretion. A copy of Alamos early warning report is available on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com or can be requested by contacting Scott Parsons, Vice-President, Investor Relations, at SParsons@alamosgold.com, 416-368-9932 (ext. 5439) or by mail at Brookfield Place, 181 Bay Street, Suite 3910, Toronto, Ontario M51 2T3.

Insiders of the Corporation, including Alamos, have subscribed for an aggregate of 1,866,667 Units under the Offering, representing 7.78% of the Units issued under this Offering.

This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of the securities in any state in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful. The securities being offered have not been, nor will they be, registered under the U.S. Securities Act and may not be offered or sold to, or for the account or benefit of, persons in the United States or U.S. persons absent registration or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws. United States and U.S. person are as defined in Regulation S under the U.S. Securities Act.

About Monarch

Monarch Mining Corporation (TSX: GBAR) (OTCQX: GBARF) is a fully integrated mining company that owns four projects, including the Beaufor Mine, which has produced more than 1 million ounces of gold over the last 30 years. Other assets include the Croinor Gold, McKenzie Break and Swanson properties, all located near Monarchs wholly owned 750 tpd Beacon Mill. Monarch owns 29,504 hectares (295 km2) of mining assets in the prolific Abitibi mining camp that host a combined measured and indicated gold resource of 478,982 ounces and a combined inferred resource of 383,393 ounces.

Forward-Looking Statements

All statements, other than statements of historical fact, contained in this press release including, but not limited to, those relating to the intended use of proceeds of the Offering, the receipt of final approval of the Toronto Stock Exchange in connection with the Offering and generally, the above About Monarch paragraph which essentially describes the Corporations outlook, constitute forward-looking information or forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws, and are based on expectations, estimates and projections as of the time of this press release. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by the Corporation as of the time of such statements, are inherently subject to significant business, economic and competitive uncertainties and contingencies. These estimates and assumptions may prove to be incorrect. Many of these uncertainties and contingencies can directly or indirectly affect, and could cause, actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statements and future events, could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. A description of assumptions used to develop such forward-looking information and a description of risk factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward looking information can be found in Monarchs disclosure documents on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com.

By their very nature, forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties, both general and specific, and risks exist that estimates, forecasts, projections and other forward-looking statements will not be achieved or that assumptions do not reflect future experience. Forward-looking statements are provided for the purpose of providing information about managements endeavors to develop the Corporations mining properties and, more generally, its expectations and plans relating to the future. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements as a number of important risk factors and future events could cause the actual outcomes to differ materially from the beliefs, plans, objectives, expectations, anticipations, estimates, assumptions and intentions expressed in such forward-looking statements. All of the forward-looking statements made in this press release are qualified by these cautionary statements and those made in our other filings with the securities regulators of Canada. The Corporation disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements or to explain any material difference between subsequent actual events and such forward-looking statements, except to the extent required by applicable law.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Jean-Marc Lacoste 1-888-994-4465 President and Chief Executive Officer jm.lacoste@monarchmining.com Mathieu Seguin 1-888-994-4465 Vice President, Corporate Development m.seguin@monarchmining.com Elisabeth Tremblay 1-888-994-4465 Geologist and Communication Manager e.tremblay@monarchmining.com

www.monarchmining.com
Visiongain has published a new report entitled the Top 25 Military Electro - Optical and Infrared (EOIR) Systems 2022-2032. It includes profiles of Top 25 Military Electro-Optical and Infrared (EOIR) Systems and Forecasts Market Segment by Sensor Technology, (Staring Sensors, Scanning Sensors) Market Segment by System, (Targeting System, Electronic Support Measure, Imaging System) Market Segment by Technology, (Uncooled Technology, Cooled Technology) Market Segment by Platform, (Naval, Air, Land) Market Segment by Imaging Technology, (Hyperspectral, Multispectral) PLUS COVID-19 Impact Analysis and Recovery Pattern Analysis (V-shaped, W-shaped, U-shaped, L-shaped) Profiles of Leading Companies, Region and Country.

The global Top 25 Military Electro-Optical and Infrared (EOIR) Systems market was valued at US$15,789 million in 2021 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 5.0% during the forecast period 2022-2032.

Download Exclusive Sample of Report @ https://www.visiongain.com/report/top-20-military-eo-ir-systems-companies-2022/#download_sampe_div

Recent Activities in the Global Market

On 11 Jan 2022, Northrop Grumman UK Ltd has reaffirmed its commitment as a military friendly employer supporting the UK military personnel, reservists, veterans and their families, signing the Armed Forces Covenant.

Lockheed Martin is actively collaborating with Microsoft on 5G.MIL solutions to rapidly advance reliable connections for U.S. Department of Defense systems capable of spanning air, land, sea, space and cyber domains. Through a new corporate agreement, the two companies will test how to effectively expand and manage 5G networking technology for Joint-All Domain Operations (JADO) defense applications using Microsofts 5G and Microsoft Azure services for Lockheed Martins Hybrid Base Station, essentially a military-grade ruggedized multi-network gateway and cell tower in a box.

The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has awarded Pratt & Whitney, a Raytheon Technologies business, a contract for a ground test demonstration program for a novel architecture using a rotating engine detonation concept to be jointly executed by Pratt & Whitney, Raytheon Missiles & Defense, and Raytheon Technologies Research Center.

How this Report Will Benefit you?

Visiongains 253-page report provides 189 tables and 145 charts/graphs. Our new study is suitable for anyone requiring commercial, in-depth analyses for the global Top 25 Military Electro-Optical and Infrared (EOIR) Systems market, along with detailed segment analysis in the market. Our new study will help you evaluate the overall global and regional market for Top 25 Military Electro-Optical and Infrared (EOIR) Systems. Get the financial analysis of the overall market and different segments including, Sensor Technology, System, Technology, Platform and capture higher market share. We believe that high opportunity remains in this fast-growing Top 25 Military Electro-Optical and Infrared (EOIR) Systems market. See how to use the existing and upcoming opportunities in this market to gain revenue benefits in the near future. Moreover, the report would help you to improve your strategic decision-making, allowing you to frame growth strategies, reinforce the analysis of other market players, and maximise the productivity of the company.

Get Detailed TOC @ https://www.visiongain.com/report/top-20-military-eo-ir-systems-companies-2022/#download_sampe_div

Competitive Landscape

The major players operating in the Top 25 Military Electro-Optical and Infrared (EOIR) Systems market are Northrop G, Lockheed Martin Corporation (America), Raytheon Technologies Corporation (America), Leonardo S.p.A (Italy), Thales Group (France) , Elbit Systems Ltd. (Israel), L-3 Harris Technologies Inc. (America) , General Dynamics Corporation (America), BAE Systems plc (England), Saab AB (Sweden), Teledyne FLIR, Textron Inc, Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd, Boeing, Cornings, CONTROP Precision Technologies, Hensoldt, Rockwell Collins, Inc., Moog Inc, Leidos Holdings Inc, ManTech International, Apie Group, Rheinmetall, Kollmorgen, Aselsan A.S., Airbus, These major players operating in this market have adopted various strategies comprising M&A, investment in R&D, collaborations, partnerships, regional business expansion, and new product launch.

Find quantitative and qualitative analyses with independent predictions. Receive information that only our report contains, staying informed with this invaluable business intelligence.

To access the data contained in this document please email contactus@visiongain.com

Information found nowhere else

With this new and exclusive report, you are less likely to fall behind in knowledge or miss out on opportunities. See how our work could benefit your investment, research, analyses, and decisions. Visiongain's study is for everybody needing commercial analyses for the EOIR System market and leading companies . You will get the most recent data, opportunities, trends, and predictions.

Find more Visiongain research reports on Defence Electronics Sector click on the following links:

Do you have any custom requirements we can help you with? Any need for a specific country, geo region, market segment or specific company information? Contact us today, we can discuss your needs and see how we can help: catherine.walker@visiongain.com

About Visiongain

Visiongain is one of the fastest growing and most innovative, independent, market intelligence around, the company publishes hundreds of market research reports which it adds to its extensive portfolio each year. These reports offer in-depth analysis across 18 industries worldwide. The reports cover a 10-year forecast, are hundreds of pages long, with in depth market analysis and valuable competitive intelligence data. Visiongain works across a range of vertical markets, which currently can influence one another, these markets include automotive, aviation, chemicals, cyber, defense, energy, food & drink, materials, packaging, pharmaceutical and utilities sectors. Our customized and syndicated market research reports means that you can have a bespoke piece of market intelligence customized to your very own business needs.

Contact:

Catherine Walker

PR at Visiongain Inc.

Tel: + 44 0207 336 6100

USA Tel: + 1 718 682 4567

EU Tel: + 353 1 695 0006

Toll Free: 00-1-646-396-5129

Email: catherine.walker@visiongain.com

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SOURCE Visiongain Limited.
NEW YORK, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Bringing innovation and people together is what makes Peter Daneyko a serial entrepreneur, with expertise in sales, product development in several markets: technology, advertising, compliance and communication among others. These respectable experiences are available to develop strong partnerships and trail a safe path in the private capital market world.

As a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), Peter works closely with the KoreTeam to implement not only the best strategies to bring clients and KorePartners together but also to improve user experience, turning investing, capital raising and new partnerships into a simple, one-click experience within KoreConX All-In-One Platform. Mr. Daneyko will lead a team composed of KoreClient Success, KorePartners and KoreSales teams, aggregating clients and sales representatives to identify their needs, recommend customized KoreConX solutions and offer the best experience for investors, companies and partners.

"It is thrilling to lead such a great KoreTeam as we make dreams come true. That is actually a great part of our job, as Regulation A+ (RegA+) and Regulation CF (RegCF) are growing more and more important in the whole business ecosystem. Our KorePartners and KoreClients are the reason we do it all. Empowering private capital markets, making businesses grow, turning dreams into reality and making investments a mainstream topic," remarks Peter.

Raising capital in a safe and compliant way is also an important issue for Oscar A. Jofre, Co-founder and CEO at KoreConX. "With a distributive KoreTeam spread all around the world with the best talents and advisors with such a broad view of the world economy, KoreConX has all the tools to grow and, better yet, make KorePartners and KoreClients grow together."

About KoreConX

Founded in 2016, KoreConX is the first secure, All-In-One platform that manages private companies' capital market activity and stakeholder communications. With an innovative approach and to ensure compliance with securities regulations and corporate law, KoreConX offers a single environment to connect companies to the capital markets and now secondary markets. Additionally, investors, broker-dealers, law firms, accountants and investor acquisition firms, all leverage our eco-system solution. For investor relations and fundraising, the platform enables private companies to share and manage corporate records and investments: it assists with portfolio management, capitalization table and shareholder management, virtual minute book, security registration, transfer agent services, and virtual deal rooms for raising capital. Visit our website: https://www.koreconx.com

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Media Contacts:

KoreConX

Rafael Goncalves

rafael@koreconx.com

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Charlottetown, P.E.I., April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, Protein Industries Canada announced a new project to grow the plant-based foods ecosystem in Atlantic Canada. The project will see the Eastern Canada Oilseed Development Alliance (ECODA) work with Dalhousie University and the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) to explore and quantify the value of plant-protein food and ingredients in the Atlantic Region, while also increasing awareness about the sector.

The government firmly believes in Canadas plant-based food and ingredient ecosystem, said the Honourable Francois-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry. Through the Protein Industries Supercluster, we are supporting projects from coast to coast to coast, and by partnering with ECODA, Dalhousie University and UPEI for this project, we will help the industry grow and prosper in Atlantic Canada for years to come.

As Canadians and people around the world start eating more plant-based foods and ingredients, our Government is supporting this fast-growing industry in the Atlantic region to harness the global potential. With this project, we will see expansion of opportunities for plant-based crops and ingredients while helping to create a strong industry across Canada, said the Honourable Marie-Claude Bibeau, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food.

Plant-based food and ingredients is one of the largest growth sectors that global agriculture has experienced in the last decade. The global market demand is projected to reach $250 billion CDN by 2035. Protein Industries Canada, along with the national ecosystem, have developed a plan for Canada to have the sector valued at $25 billion by 2035. This project is key to developing a strong national sector by developing regional ecosystems and connecting them to the larger industry.

When people think about plant protein, their first thoughts is usually the Prairies  with images of fields of canola, wheat, peas and lentils, CEO of Protein Industries Canada Bill Greuel said. But Canadas agrifood sector is truly national in scope  from the farmers and ingredient processors in the Prairies, to the food manufacturers in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. Now with this project, we are strengthening the plant-based ecosystem of Atlantic Canada  connecting the value chain from coast-to-coast, and further strengthening Canadas position as a global leader in plant-based food and ingredients.

The $350,000 project will lay the groundwork for the future development of the Atlantic sector, by focusing on opportunities to increase economic return, improve diversity and sustainability, and increase the production of plant-based crops and ingredient processing in Atlantic Canada. The project partners will work with communities and businesses, including Indigenous-led, to determine challenges in the plant-protein sector and build networks in the supply chain, leading to an increased understanding of value-added opportunities for the plant-protein ecosystem coast-to-coast. The project will do this through three main areas of work: asset mapping, value chain analysis and food system literacy and awareness about careers in agri-food. This foundational work will lead to increased production, processing, and adding value to pulses, oilseeds, and grains in the Atlantic region, and further exploration into plant-protein value chain opportunities.

Over the past decade, ECODA has served an important role in convening partnerships among academic institutions, researchers, and industry to enhance innovation in agricultural crop supply chains, said Rory Francis, ECODA President. This project will identify and align regional partners that are essential to accelerating economic impact for plant protein production and added-value in Atlantic Canada.

We will need all our bright minds working together to drive success in addressing the global demand for food security and plant-based proteins, said David Gray, Faculty of Agriculture at Dalhousie Universitys Dean and Campus Principal. This collaboration with Protein Industries Canada, ECODA and with our colleagues at UPEI will go a long way to fortify our plant-based ecosystem in Atlantic Canada.

The University of Prince Edward Island is pleased to contribute to the development of the plant-based protein sector in Atlantic Canada, said Dr. Kathy Gottschall-Pass, University of Prince Edward Islands Interim Vice-President Academic and Research. With the ongoing growth in the worlds population, access to sustainable sources of high-quality protein is essential, and expansion of the sector in this region will further strengthen that access.

Protein Industries Canada is one of Canadas five innovation Superclusters. As an industry-led organization, Protein Industries Canada works to position Canada as a global source of high-quality plant-based food, feed and ingredients. Over the past three years, Protein Industries Canada has co-invested into 40 projects with more than $451 million committed to advancing Canadas plant-based foods sector through investment into projects focused on research and development of new plant-based ingredients and food and to build capacity within the ecosystem. This is Protein Industries Canadas first co-investment into Atlantic Canada.

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About Eastern Canada Oilseed Development Alliance (ECODA)

Established in 2009, the Eastern Canada Oilseeds Development Alliance (ECODA) is a private, non-profit based in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. By facilitating oilseed supply chain partnerships to drive innovation, manage risk, and capitalize on economic value, ECODA benefits oilseed growers, processors, and exporters in Eastern Canada. This work contributes to Canadas ability to maintain and strengthen our global market share for soybeans, canola, other oilseeds and related plant protein, oils, and value-added products.

About Dalhousie University

At the core of Dalhousies research and innovation are world-leading researchers working in labs, studios and in the field. Building on our legacy of ground-breaking research and outstanding scholarship, we are focused on providing a unique, interactive and collaborative environment that supports our researchers to achieve excellence.

About the University of Prince Edward Island

The University of Prince Edward Island is committed to assisting students reach their full potential in both the classroom and community. With an excellent reputation for academic excellence and research innovation, UPEI offers a wide range of programs and degrees to undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students. Home to Canada Research Chairs, a UNESCO Chair, endowed and sponsored research chairs, and 3M National Teaching Fellows, UPEI offers its students access to exceptional faculty, researchers, and staff. Students come from local, regional, national, and international locations to study and learn at UPEI, the only degree-granting institution in the province. UPEI is proud to be a key contributor to the growth and prosperity of Prince Edward Island, the Atlantic region, and Canada.
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FOUNTAIN INN, S.C., April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- KYOCERA AVX, a leading global manufacturer of advanced electronic components engineered to accelerate technological innovation and build a better future, has released an interactive digital twin design tool for battery-powered, 5G and Massive IoT solutions. Powered by Deutsche Telekom IoT and offered in partnership with KYOCERA AVX, the IoT Solution Optimizer provides customers with a comprehensive, all-in-one design platform that allows them to quickly, accurately, and cost-effectively model and validate NarrowBand IoT and LTE-M devices equipped with KYOCERA AVX antennas and optimized for high-reliability IoT applications in the commercial, industrial, telecom, datacom, medical, automotive, transportation, and consumer electronics markets.

The IoT Solution Optimizer accelerates proof-of-concept and testing cycles, saving developers and service providers both time and money and enabling them to meet pressing market demands. Available under several different licensing options, the intuitive online tool provides enterprises with a step-by-step guide to configure and virtually test unlimited IoT device and deployment configurations, allowing them to quickly compose their design, benchmark hundreds of components and devices from the IoT industry, and optimize their applications battery life in mere minutes. Customers can also evaluate existing KYOCERA AVX antenna products, identify optimum antenna placement locations for maximum performance, or define custom specifications to meet requirements that arent satisfied by standard solutions. Furthermore, enterprises can assess the impact of various deployment conditions, mobile operator network feature configurations across the globe, and different clouds and application protocols.

Unlike traditional simulation tools, our IoT Solution Optimizer allows customers to evaluate and test their IoT device designs using virtual models of readily available components including wireless communication modules, batteries, and antennas while also taking the size of the device and the defining the behavior of the use case into account. This helps customers quickly identify and sufficiently account for any risks and ensures a proper integration in just minutes instead of days or weeks, which can make an enormous difference in terms of time-to-market, said Carmen Redondo, Director, Global Marketing Antennas, KYOCERA AVX.

The IoT Solution Optimizer connects enterprises to Deutsche Telekom IoTs global ecosystem of industry-leading hardware and service partners, said Miguel Rodriguez, Senior Manager, IoT Device Verification and Engineering, Deutsche Telekom IoT. The cloud-based planning tool digitalizes IoT productization, integrates a growing catalog of components and devices, and enables businesses to optimize their IoT solutions for a superior business case. We are pleased to partner with KYOCERA AVX and add their wide portfolio of antennas to the product shelf.

The IoT Solution Optimizer allows customers to simulate the performance of its NB-IoT and LTE-M antennas, helping companies visualize how antenna placement translates coverage performance and the latters impact on battery life. Customers can also use this tool to request custom KYOCERA AVX antennas. Ideal applications that can be designed include smart home and city solutions, smart grid and lighting systems, smart meters, fleet and asset tracking solutions, building monitoring and construction equipment, agricultural sensors, security systems, medical devices, payment and retail terminals, and consumer electronics devices.

The IoT Solution Optimizer is the result of two years of close collaboration with our strategic partner Deutsche Telekom IoT, and we are both proud of the wide-ranging capabilities it offers and the impactful benefits it provides for an ever-growing number of engineers engaged in developing IoT designs, said Redondo. The IoT Solution Optimizer is a comprehensive, intuitive, and interactive online tool that allows customers to model, test, and validate their IoT designs with just a few clicks, and enables them to quickly and cost-effectively choose the best full-chain components at the beginning of their design cycle, hastening their time-to-market and potentially even improving their profitability. In addition, its partner license option invites suppliers to integrate their proprietary products and testing data into the tool to further enhance its utility.

The IoT Solution Optimizer is available to KYOCERA AVX customers as a licensed tool with three different subscription options. The test license from Deutsche Telekom IoT allows customers to create an unlimited number of projects as part of a free, three-month trial that provides full access to the tool. The renewable customer license is ideally suited for customers who already have several design ideas or builds in progress and need access for at least 12 months. The partner license allows customers to integrate their devices onto the shelf for a global promotion, as well as leverage own-brand white labeling and a six-hour training on the tool.

The IoT Solution Optimizer is currently live on the KYOCERA AVX website, and KYOCERA AVX and Deutsche Telekom IoT invite customers and distributors to join them for a jointly hosted webinar introduction to the innovative IoT design platform on April 28, 2022, from 11:00am  12:00pm EDT.

For more information about the IoT Solution Optimizer for KYOCERA AVX customers, please visit https://www.kyocera-avx.com/design-tools/antenna-tools/iot-solution-optimizer/ or register for the introductory webinar hosted by KYOCERA AVX and Deutsche Telekom at 11:00am EDT on April 28, 2022. To purchase a license, please visit https://www.kyocera-avx.com/design-tools/antenna-tools/iot-solution-optimizer/iso-request-form/. For all other inquiries, please visit https://www.kyocera-avx.com/, email inquiry@kyocera-avx.com, follow them on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, like them on Facebook, call 864-967-2150, or write to One AVX Boulevard, Fountain Inn, S.C. 29644.

About KYOCERA AVX

KYOCERA AVX is a leading global manufacturer of advanced electronic components engineered to accelerate technological innovation and build a better future. As a wholly owned subsidiary of Kyocera Corporation structured to capitalize on shared resources and technical expertise, KYOCERA AVX has an expansive global footprint comprised of several dozen research, development, and manufacturing facilities spanning more than 15 countries and staffed with talented personnel dedicated to innovation, component quality, customer service, and enabling a brighter future through technology. KYOCERA AVX designs, develops, manufactures, and supplies advanced capacitors, antennas, interconnects, circuit protection and timing devices, sensors, controls, filters, fuses, diodes, resistors, couplers, and inductors optimized for employment in the international 5G, IoT, aerospace, automotive, consumer electronics, industrial, medical, and military markets.

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CHEYENNE, WY, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Marketing Worldwide Corporation (OTC PINK: MWWC), ('the Company'), is interviewing two PR Marketing Firms recommended by the BlockchainX team as the official $MNS launch date announcement approaches.

Marketing Worldwide is interviewing (2) PR Marketing Firms that will be responsible for the #MINOSIS Community build-out, ahead of the Crowdsale (pre-sale) and Global Launch of the $MNS Token.

Company name: Expevo - India

https://www.expevo.com/

Name: Padmanabhan

Telegram : https://t.me/expevo

Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/pkpadmanabhan/

Company name: Luna PR - Dubai

https://www.lunapr.io/

Name: Nisheta Sachdev

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-nisheta-sachdev-33974885/

The PR Firm Scope-of-Work will include:

Set up a Telegram room and have active Mods present to answer questions Set up a Discord community page for general chat, announcements, milestones and giveaway contests. Take over control of Twitter Marketing through private channels Build brand and community awareness Continued and on-going support services

Cypher-Shield Crowdsale Audit Results:

Cypher-Shield, the third party auditor for the Minosis Token has just completed its Crowdsale Audit ahead of the pre-sale offering to provide additional confidence to new investors.

A copy of the Audit can be viewed here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7ldgd4intuxtgvs/Cypher-Shield%20Audit%20Report.pdf?dl=0

The closer we get to the official launch of the Minosis token, the closer we are to triggering that first buy-back feature, which will prove to our shareholders just how committed we are to supporting our own stock by buying it back off the open market, stated CEO Jason Schlenk.

Contact Information

Twitter: @MWWCOfficial

Email: LetsConnect@marketingworldwide.co

Website: www.marketingworldwide.co

Forward Looking Statements:

This press release contains forward-looking statements. The words 'believe,' 'may,' 'estimate,' 'continue,' 'anticipate,' 'intend,' 'should,' 'plan,' 'could,' 'target,' 'potential,' 'is likely,' 'will,' 'expect' and similar expressions, as they relate to us, are intended to identify forward-looking statements. The Company has based these forward-looking statements largely on our current expectations and projections about future events and financial trends that we believe may affect our financial condition, results of operations, business strategy and financial needs. Some or all of the results anticipated by these forward-looking statements may not be achieved. Any forward-looking statement made by us herein speaks only as of the date on which it is made. Factors or events that could cause our actual results to differ may emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for us to predict all of them. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise, except as may be required by law.

SOURCE: MARKETING WORLDWIDE CORPORATION (MWWC)

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Henderson, NV, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Legends Business Group, Inc. (OTC Pink: LGBS) has acquired land for the development of 42 lots worth $4.2 million in Boise, Idaho. We are very excited with another acquisition giving the company 103 lots that will help us accelerate our expansion giving us a strong presence in the real estate market well into 2023. The Company continue to grow our business with the goal of becoming a successful real estate land developer, and we are starting to see the many achievements making us a very successful and attractive business to be in. We plan on having a long-term presence in real estate. The Company is committed to building shareholder value.

Paul Bakajin CEO/President Stated: The Company has successfully positioned itself as a real estate land developer taking advantage of the current real estate inventory shortfall. We have successfully completed three acquisitions, giving the company positive growth and a better future. I look forward to putting out many more updates very soon.

Currently, the only media outlet is the companys Twitter account: http://twitter.com/Legendsbusiness .

We constantly monitor our website to effectively communicate with our shareholders, therefore, please email us at Info@legendsbusinessgroup.com . The Companys website: https://legendsbusinessgroup.com . All information can be verified at https://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/LGBS/profile

Disclaimer: The Company relies upon the Safe Harbor Laws of 1933, 1934 and 1995 for all public news releases. The company may make forward-looking public statements concerning its expected future operations, performance and other developments. Such forward-looking statements are estimates that reflect the companys best judgment based upon current information. All investments involve risks and uncertainties, and there can be no assurance that other factors will not affect the accuracy of such forward-looking statements. It is impossible to identify all such factors. Factors which could cause actual results to differ materially from those estimated by the company include, but are not limited to, government regulation; managing and maintaining growth; the effect of adverse publicity; litigation; competition; and other factors which may be identified from time to time in the companys public announcements.
TORONTO, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Crown has been named one of Canada's Top 100 Small and Medium Sized Employers of 2022 by Mediacorp Canada Inc. The company was chosen for putting its employees futures first with subsidies for ongoing employee education and training, enjoyable and fair work-life balance in a motivating work environment. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) account for over 99% of Canadian businesses and we are thrilled to be recognized as a top employer amongst some of Canadas most innovative, enterprising and forward-thinking.



Now in its 8th year, Canadas Top Small & Medium Employers recognizes organizations with less than 500 employees offering the nations best workplaces and forward-thinking human resources policies. Employers are evaluated by the editors at Canadas Top 100 Employers using the same criteria as the Top 100 competition: physical workplace; work atmosphere and social; health, financial and family benefits; vacation and time off; employee communications; performance management; training and skills development; and community involvement.

Id like to share a sincere thank you to our amazing team, says Crowns Managing Partner and CEO, Les Miller. By bringing your commitment, your ideas, and your passion to Crown, each and every one of our team members plays an integral role in achieving our unified vision to create great workspaces for our tenants while adding value, every step of the way.

Crowns growth from five employees to over 140 over our twenty-plus year history is a testament to a dedicated team that continues to contribute to Crowns success in unique and important ways. The companys slogan, More than square footage began as a differentiator of our creative approach to office space in the commercial office market, but today it is engrained in our approach to work, personal development and the spirit of entrepreneurship in all that we do.



Its an honour to be recognized as one of Canadas Top Small and Medium Employers, says Rainu Singh, Crowns Manager, People and Culture. An important part of Crowns culture is providing a work experience that helps our team members build meaningful careers. This achievement affirms that we continue to work towards achieving this goal. From seasonal corporate functions to team building events, Crown finds ways to bring our employees together to build a sense of team and create stronger bonds. Crown also supports multiple charities that give back to the communities in which we operate.

We are continually looking to grow our amazing team. If youre interested in joining Team Crown, please visit https://www.crownrealtypartners.com/company/careers/.

For further information, please contact:

Rainu Singh

Manager, People and Culture

rsingh@crp-cpmi.com

647.729.2605

#topSME #topemployers2021

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/020fb224-db1b-4f7c-8f8b-0eab76c19c1a
Fort Wayne, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Polar King International, Inc. announces Kevin Wilson has been named director of engineering, research & development and refrigeration. Wilson, who has close to forty years of experience in cooling technology, will direct quality control, assist in new product and business development and work with managers to improve labor and production efficiency, according to Dave Schenkel, President of Polar King International.

The Polar King family is thrilled to welcome Kevin aboard. His background, management skills and proven capability in advancing cold storage technology make him an ideal fit, says Schenkel. We are confident Kevin will play a significant role in promoting growth, introducing substantial product breakthroughs and driving our business forward.

Wilson has amassed a breadth of industry expertise over his 37 years in the business. He recently spent four years as the managing director-North America of Tecumseh Products Companys condensing unit division. Before that, he served for a decade as the vice president of sales with Everidge, managing the international cold storage business. He was also the vice president of operations at Master-Bilt and plant manager at Carrier. Wilson has a bachelor's degree in industrial technology and education from Western Illinois University.

As a former Polar King competitor and vendor, Im delighted to join a company I have admired for so long, says Wilson. There is a true entrepreneurial spirt here, with a leadership team willing to invest to remain on the leading edge. He adds, Polar King management has developed a culture in which everyone is passionate, dedicated and constantly striving to make the company better.

Wilson says he believes in a hands on management style. I like to be close to the action, he explains. Under Wilsons direction, Polar Kings weekly R&D, engineering and operations team meetings have been on the factory floor. I feel that the closer you are to where everything is going on, the more effective you are at solving problems. When you see needs firsthand and feel the sense of urgency, challenges are more easily conquered and our product enhancements happen, he explains.

According to Wilson, his short-term focus will be reducing lead times, due to ongoing supply chain issues. Long-term, he says, it is all about technologies and product development, in terms of controls, monitoring or refrigerants that tie into energy savings. Along the way, we want to become more efficient and streamline some of our processes so we can continue delivering a great Polar King product to our customers.

Wilson is joining Polar King in a year in which it is celebrating 40 years in business. The foundation is there, and Polar King has a tremendous footprint, Wilson says. I look forward to being a part of the continued growth and evolution of this great brand.

About Polar King Walk-In Refrigeration and Freezer Units

Polar Kings 100% seamless fiberglass design utilized for all walk-in refrigeration and freezer units provides a continuous surface with rounded insulated corners to promote a sanitary environment. The durable, NSF-approved non-slip flooring system greatly reduces the risk of slips and falls. Operators can use a hose to quickly clean units and restore an as-new look without damaging insulation.

Polar King uses fiberglass to reduce the potential for rusting, denting or corroding. The many innovative design features of these units cut operating costs, lower power bills, decrease maintenance/repair expenses and eliminate construction and replacement costs.

Polar King structures offer the industrys lowest lifetime cost of ownership. In doing its part to reduce food waste, by way of temperature-controlled preservation, Polar King is positively impacting the global food chain.

About Polar King International

The introduction of the Polar King outdoor walk-in freezer into the foodservice industry was the result of three generations of walk-in refrigeration technology and experience. Polar Kings fiberglass, one-piece walk-in cooler is the natural evolution of the walk-in cold storage industry from the conventional metal panel constructed unit. In early 1982, Polar King began operations by constructing and shipping walk-ins from a modest 12,000 sq. ft. facility in New Haven, Indiana. As demand grew for outdoor fiberglass commercial walk-in coolers and commercial walk-in freezers grew, production was moved to a 204,000 sq. ft. facility located in Fort Wayne, Indiana. For 40 years, Polar King has provided thousands of walk-ins to single unit operators, chain restaurants, schools, health care facilities, government agencies and many other industries requiring dependable outdoor walk-in refrigeration. For more information, visit polarking.com or contact Polar King, 4424 New Haven Ave, Fort Wayne, IN 46803 USA at

(877) 224-8674.

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Pune, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The global disposable syringes market is driven by technologically advanced products & introduction of new cost effective products in the market, and rise in number of diabetes and chronic diseases patients. Similarly, rising adoption of biologics is anticipated to further contribute to the global disposable syringes market in the coming times. However, high cost related to disposable syringes, and presences of other drug delivery techniques are few of the factors likely to restrain the market to a certain extent.

Disposable Syringes Market by Regions

The global Disposable syringes market can be segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of World (ROW). North America dominated the market of disposable syringes, followed by Europe and Asia Pacific. North America will continue to dominate the global disposable syringes market in the forecast period owing to rising prevalence of diabetes and increasing adoption of biologics and availability of technology advanced drug delivery devices. However, Asia Pacific is expected to witness the highest CAGR, with the growth in this market centered at China, India, and Japan. Factors such as high number of diabetic patient India and China and growing healthcare industry is likely to boost the market in coming years.





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COMPANY PROFILES (Business Overview, Products/Services Offered, Financial Performance, R&D Intensity, Marketing & Sales Intensity, Recent Developments, Analyst Corner)*

Smiths Medical Star Syringe Limited B. Braun Medical Inc. Baxter TERUMO CORPORATION Retractable Technologies BD Gerresheimer AG Fresenius Kabi AG UltiCare

Vendor Assessment

Vendor assessment includes a deep analysis of how vendors are addressing the demand in the Disposable Syringes Market. The MDC CompetetiveScape model was used to assess qualitative and quantitative insights in this assessment. MDC's CompetitiveScape is a structured method for identifying key players and outlining their strengths, relevant characteristics, and outreach strategy. MDC's CompetitiveScape allows organizations to analyze the environmental factors that influence their business, set goals, and identify new marketing strategies. MDC Research analysts conduct a thorough investigation of vendors' solutions, services, programs, marketing, organization size, geographic focus, type of organization and strategies.

Technology Assessment

Technology dramatically impacts business productivity, growth and efficiency.Technologies can help companies develop competitive advantages, but choosing them can be one of the most demanding decisions for businesses. Technology assessment helps organizations to understand their current situation with respect to technology and offer a roadmap where they might want to go and scale their business. A well-defined process to assess and select technology solutions can help organizations reduce risk, achieve objectives, identify the problem, and solve it in the right way. Technology assessment can help businesses identify which technologies to invest in, meet industry standards, compete against competitors.

Speak to Our Research Analyst https://www.marketdatacentre.com/analyst/33





Business Ecosystem Analysis

Advancements in technology and digitalization have changed the way companies do business; the concept of a business ecosystem helps businesses understand how to thrive in this changing environment. Business ecosystems provide organizations with opportunities to integrate technology in their daily business operations and improve research and business competency. The business ecosystem includes a network of interlinked companies that compete and cooperate to increase sales, improve profitability, and succeed in their markets. An ecosystem analysis is a business network analysis that includes the relationships amongst suppliers, distributors, and end-users in delivering a product or service.

Regions and Countries Covered

North America (US, Canada), Europe (Germany, UK, France, Spain, Italy, and Rest of Europe), Asia-Pacific (Japan, China, Australia, India, Rest of Asia-Pacific), and Rest of the World (RoW)

Report Coverage

Disposable Syringes Market Dynamics, Covid-19 Impact on the Disposable Syringes Market, Vendor Profiles, Vendor Assessment, Strategies, Technology Assessment, Product Mapping, Industry Outlook, Economic Analysis, Segmental Analysis, Disposable Syringes Market Sizing, Analysis Tables





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Vendor Profiles Covered

All Major Tier-1, Tier-2, and Tier-3 companies are covered in this Disposable Syringes Market report (25 Vendor Profiles)

Additional vendors profiles can be added based on client business requirements

At MDC Research, we offer research solutions to help businesses break the barriers of doubt or uncertainties when they plan to expand their growth. Our researchers compile data and information that help chief executive officers decide which growth opportunities in a market to pursue.

MDC Research is known for conducting well-researched reports, and the expertise of our researchers contributes to the outstanding quality of our reports. MDC Research enables businesses to make impactful decisions by blending innovation and analytical thinking. Our unique blend of these two skills assures you access to the most complete and up-to-date information about your industry.

MDC Research has a wealth of experience using the latest methodologies to develop reports for a wide range of clients in diverse markets. Our commitment to delivering high-quality research and creating innovative reports is one of the reasons why MDC Research is such a trusted name in the business world today.





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Key Questions Answered in This Report:

What is the potential of the Disposable Syringes Market?

What is the impact of COVID-19 on the global Disposable Syringes Market?

What are the top strategies that companies adopting in Disposable Syringes Market?

What are the challenges faced by SMEs and prominent vendors in Disposable Syringes Market?

Which region has the highest investments in Disposable Syringes Market?

What are the latest research and activities in Disposable Syringes Market?

Who are the prominent players in Disposable Syringes Market?

What is the potential of the Disposable Syringes Market?

About MDC:

Market Data Centre (Subsidiary of Yellow Bricks Global Services Private Limited)

Market Data Centre offers complete solutions for market research reports in miscellaneous businesses.These decisions making process depend on wider and systematic extremely important information created through extensive study as well as the most recent trends going on in the industry.The company also attempts to offer much better customer-friendly services and appropriate business information to achieve our clients ideas.




Dallas, Texas, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Center for BrainHealth, a pioneering leader in the emerging scientific field of brain health, recently received the largest single donation in its 22-year history. The multi-year gift from Sammons Enterprises will turbo-charge the Centers ability to pioneer, test and deliver novel metrics that assess gains in brain health and performance.

The Sammons BrainHealth Imaging Center at UTD

In recognition of this transformational investment in the future of BrainHealth, the Centers state-of-the-art imaging facility will be named the Sammons BrainHealth Imaging Center. This facility houses two 3-Tesla MRI scanners, considered the gold standard for human brain research. This timely investment will power the centers intellectual capital, the discovery and dissemination of radically new approaches, and the integration of innovative imaging techniques, big data analytics and data visualization to drive new thinking and protocols to advance brain health breakthroughs with urgency.

The gift will fuel three key areas of work:

Brain physiology: cutting-edge imaging techniques that open a window to view brain systems as they are working, assess their efficiency and explore the effects, positive or negative, of therapeutics and cognitive trainings over time

Neuroinformatics: leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence to achieve precision, personalized brain health with the ability to predict an individuals brain health trajectory and proactively address early concerns

Data visualization: creating a visual interface that brings to life the remarkable, dynamic nature of changes in the brain and allows individuals to have a visible validation of their brain becoming more efficient and with increased synchrony across networks

Information from these three areas will be utilized to develop predictive modeling for prevention and early detection, and to trigger proactive capacity-building interventions.

The pandemic has brought brain-related challenges into stark reality, creating a global brain health crisis as never before witnessed, said Sandra Bond Chapman PhD, chief director of the Center for BrainHealth and distinguished professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas. We must act boldly and urgently, not only to create awareness, but also to provide ready access to proven, proactive steps to benefit people from all walks of life. This timely investment will help us achieve bold milestones in record time so that every woman, man and child can begin to realize their fuller brain potential.





The men and women of Sammons Enterprises are pleased to support the leading-edge, science-backed work of the Center for BrainHealth, whose team is showing the world how to shift focus from problem identification to opportunity capitalization that will lead to healthier outcomes, better quality of life and strong societal benefits, said Heather Kreager, CEO of Sammons Enterprises.

A Milestone of the LIMITLESS Comprehensive BrainHealth Campaign

With the Sammons gift, the UTD Center for BrainHealth has reached more than 60% of the $50 million goal for its comprehensive campaign, currently in its silent phase. The Limitless Campaign offers a bold vision to transform how people take charge of caring for their brains. BrainHealths research and educational mission advances science and translates rapidly emerging brain health discoveries into actionable strategies for people to measurably strengthen and build brain capacity. The campaign will announce its public phase in coming weeks.

Our brain health drives our well-being, clarity of thinking, and social resilience, continued Dr. Chapman. Caring for the brain is the cornerstone of our ability to thrive in a constantly changing world. We must tackle brain health with unprecedented focus, determination, and funding to double peak brain years to match our longer lifespan, which has been achieved thanks largely to the doubling of heart health. We are only beginning to understand and truly harness the techniques, strategies and technologies that are most effective for each of us in our unique individual context to make sure our best brain years are ahead of us. We are enormously grateful to Sammons Enterprises and believe their magnanimous humanitarian leadership will motivate other major philanthropic investors to join BrainHealths urgent, world-improving efforts.

Contributing to New Dimensions Campaign for UT Dallas

Contributions to the Limitless BrainHealth campaign simultaneously help UT Dallas get closer to the $750 million goal of the universitys comprehensive campaign, New Dimensions. This campaign, which is already one third of the way to reaching that goal, supports three broad objectives: to transform lives by attracting the best and brightest students through accessible, affordable and rigorous academic programs; to enhance lives and shape the future through transformative, integrated research; and to transform the arts on campus by becoming the hub of a new arts district for North Texas. As a dynamic, young university, this campaign ensures that UT Dallas is strategically poised for a future of promise and innovation.

About Sammons Enterprises, Inc.

Founded in 1938, Sammons Enterprises, Inc. (SEI) is a diverse holding corporation that owns and operates companies in four core business sectorsfinancial services, industrial equipment and services, real estate and infrastructure. The Company also pursues a broad range of opportunistic investments. The people of Sammons are dedicated to building the worlds premier ESOP-owned company through a commitment to high ethical standards, industry-leading businesses, solid financial performance and a true values-based culture, where every person makes a difference.

Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, with assets over $100 billion, Sammons Enterprises is one of the largest privately-held companies in the US, consistently ranking in the top 100 on Forbes Americas Largest Private Companies list.

For more information, visit SammonsEnterprises.com.

About the Center for BrainHealth

The Center for BrainHealth, part of The University of Texas at Dallas, is a translational research institute committed to enhancing, preserving and restoring brain health across the lifespan. Major research areas include the use of functional and structural neuroimaging techniques to better understand the neurobiology supporting cognition and emotion in health and disease. This leading-edge scientific exploration is translated quickly into practical innovations to improve how people think, work and live, empowering people of all ages to unlock their brain potential. Translational innovations build on Strategic Memory Advanced Reasoning Tactics (SMART), a proprietary methodology developed and tested by BrainHealth researchers and other teams over three decades.

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Dallas, Texas, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Priority Aviation, Inc. (OTC Pink: PJET) (PJET) plans to launch its Student Housing By Owner (SHBO) Application (APP) later this month.

PJET management explains its SHBO APP as the VRBO or Airbnb for student housing. Management plans to evolve the relationship with the students into a lifelong relationship that extends beyond graduation, providing a more socially conscious Amazon alternative.

PJET will publish a shareholder update in conjunction with the coming 2021 annual report (The company filed an extension and intend to file the annual report within the extension period). The update will include details on the plan to evolve the SHBO APP into a global Amazon-like marketplace serving the 500 million global college students beyond graduation. The update will outline the companys revenue model for the APP.

Overall, the update will serve as a progress report and update to the companys 2022 strategic overview presentation published in January this year introducing the soon to be launched Student Housing By Owner (SHBO) Application (APP).

The SHBO APP is a proprietary technology custom designed by PJET that will carry intellectual property value recorded on the balance sheet and generate revenue. PJET is getting hands on experience in the student life marketplace by investing in the construction and operation of a multi-unit student residence building serving a small university in Texas. The building will add balance sheet asset value and generate revenue in addition to providing a source of real-time data for the ongoing development and evolution of the SHBO APP.

PJET has also partnered with Alternet Systems, Inc. (OTC Pink: ALYI) in a pilot program to bring ALYI electric motorcycles and scooters to college campuses. The shareholder update to be published in conjunction with the 2021 annual reports will include an update on the project with ALYI.

Company Website  www.pjet-info.com

Disclaimer/Safe Harbor: This news release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Litigation Reform Act. The statements reflect the Company's current views with respect to future events that involve risks and uncertainties. Among others, these risks include the expectation that any of the companies mentioned herein will achieve significant sales, the failure to meet schedule or performance requirements of the companies' contracts, the companies' liquidity position, the companies' ability to obtain new contracts, the emergence of competitors with greater financial resources and the impact of competitive pricing. In the light of these uncertainties, the forward-looking events referred to in this release might not occur.
CALGARY, Alberta, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Spartan Delta Corp. (Spartan or the Company) (TSX:SDE) announces the resignations of Elliot S. Weissbluth and Steve Lowden as directors of the Company effective today.



Messrs. Weissbluth and Lowden were appointed to the board of the Company in March 2021 as the nominees of ARETI Energy S.A. ("ARETI"), which became a shareholder of Spartan as a part of, and concurrent with, the acquisition by Spartan of Inception Exploration Ltd., a private oil and gas company with operations in the Gold Creek area of north-west Alberta.

ARETI recently announced the sale of a portion of its common shares of Spartan, resulting in ARETI holding less than 10% of the issued and outstanding common shares of the Company. In connection with the share sale, the agreement entered into between Spartan and ARETI in March 2021 which gave ARETI the right to nominate directors to Spartan's board has been terminated.

The Company wishes to thank Messrs. Weissbluth and Lowden for their contributions, efforts and service to the Company over the past year and wishes them all the best in the future.

ABOUT SPARTAN DELTA CORP.

Spartan is committed to creating a modern energy company, focused on sustainability both in operations and financial performance. The Companys ESG-focused culture is centered on generating Free Funds Flow through responsible oil and gas exploration and development. The Company has established a portfolio of high-quality production and development opportunities in the Deep Basin and Montney. Spartan is focused on the execution of the Company's organic drilling program, delivering operational synergies in a respectful and responsible manner to the environment and communities it operates in. The Company is well positioned to continue pursuing immediate production optimization, responsible future growth with organic drilling, opportunistic acquisitions and the delivery of Free Funds Flow. Further detail is available in Spartan's investor presentation, which can be accessed on its website at www.spartandeltacorp.com.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:
The strategic partnership provides unique consumer access and value to cannabis brands with revenue, marketing, and exposure opportunities yet to be explored in the space

Los Angeles, California, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- High Times, the most well-known brand in cannabis, announced today a partnership with Ginger Commerce for direct-to-consumer (DTC) delivery. The partnership combines Gingers proprietary e-commerce software and brand-forward business model with High Times expansive delivery network throughout California to create the largest DTC offering in the state of California.

Direct-to-consumer delivery in the cannabis industry has quickly grown into a dominating revenue channel for businesses, and some of Californias top brands such as THC Design, Beezle, and Tyson 2.0, are using the Ginger platform to enable their DTC service. With DTC, brands have unprecedented access and ownership of their customers' data, and receive significantly better margins than in the traditional retail environment, or on 3rd party marketplace delivery websites.



Ginger is excited to partner with one of the most well known and respected brands in our industry. Combining Gingers innovative tech and High Times reach across California, we know that were bringing tremendous value to brands and making DTC more accessible for consumers, stated Roie Edery, founder/CEO of Ginger. With their renowned media outlet and Cannabis Cup events, High Times reach enhances Gingers offering to its client brands by providing them exciting new channels to reach more customers. Were looking forward to the impact our unique partnership will have on the industry as we pursue our mission to become the largest DTC company in the U.S.

Unlike other DTC companies, who operate a competitive internet marketplace alongside their customer brands DTC website, Ginger is the competition-free direct-to-consumer e-commerce solution available in the state to date.

"At THC Design, we've wanted to offer DTC sales for some time, but we struggled to find a viable solution that would give us full control over our sales funnel as well as complete ownership of our data-- until we found Ginger. But what originally looked like the perfect solution to our DTC conundrum somehow just got better. With this new partnership with High Times, we'll now be able to offer our products on-demand to nearly everyone in California, and that's a huge win for us, Ryan Jennemann, Founder / CEO of THC Design.

Were witnessing a huge shift in the industrys ability to communicate with their consumers. While quality delivery has been an important part of our foundation since we decided to directly touch the plant, we believe by partnering with Ginger Commerce, were able to provide a whole new world of value to our partners, enhancing brand offerings from every angle. states Paul Henderson, CEO of High Times. Were confident this partnership will redefine the standards of direct-to-consumer offerings for the entire cannabis industry.

About High Times:

For more than 46 years, High Times has been the worlds most well-known cannabis brand - championing the lifestyle and educating the masses on the benefits of this natural flower. From humble beginnings as a counterculture lifestyle publication, High Times has evolved into a rapidly growing network of cannabis dispensaries, the host and creator of industry-leading events like the Cannabis Cup, the producer of globally distributed merchandise, benefactor of international licensing deals, and provider of content for millions of fans and supporters across the globe. In the world of cannabis, High Times is the most trusted arbiter of quality.

About Ginger:

Ginger is the pure play direct-to-consumer e-commerce solution built for regulatory complex industries. Serving over 40 brands in California, Gingers proprietary technology is a suite of tools designed to unlock revenue potential with e-Commerce software, direct-to-consumer delivery, industry-specific features, and marketing tools. Ginger allows brands to nurture their loyalists and create new ones daily. Learn more at: www.gingercommerce.com

Media Inquiries

mediateam@hightimes.com
CLEARWATER, Fla., April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Advanced Manufacturing International (AMI) Inc. is proud to announce that it will receive the Manufacturing Leadership Council award under the category "Collaborative Ecosystems" for the project "Improving Small & Medium Manufacturer Productivity with IoT Driven Smart Manufacturing". The AMI project, funded in part by the Smart Manufacturing Institute CESMII, demonstrates how a low-cost, easy-to-implement, and secure Internet of Things (IoT) platform based on open standards can enable two diverse Small- to Medium-sized Manufacturers (SMM) to adopt Smart Manufacturing technology.

"AMI is grateful to be recognized by the Manufacturing Leadership Council for this important lighthouse project to advance the digital transformation of small- to medium-sized manufacturers," said Dr. Dean Bartles, CEO of the Manufacturing Technology Deployment Group (MTDG) and parent company of AMI. "Helping these manufacturers become smart factories will allow them to leverage their data to become more efficient, productive, sustainable and competitive."

"This year's winners are exemplary for their compelling use of technology, innovative approach to problem-solving and overall commitment to furthering the progress of Manufacturing 4.0," said Manufacturing Leadership Council (MLC) Co-Founder, Vice President, and Executive Director David R. Brousell. Presented by the MLC, a division of the NAM, the awards recognize excellence in digital manufacturing.

AMI will be honored at the Manufacturing Leadership Awards Gala on Wednesday, June 29, 2022, at the JW Marriott Marco Island Beach Resort in Florida. The gala is the closing event for Rethink: The Manufacturing Leadership Council Summit. Details about the awards are available at https://www.manufacturingleadershipcouncil.com/leadership-awards/.

About AMI

Advanced Manufacturing International, Inc. (AMI) is a non-profit organization with a clear mission - to accelerate the digital transformation of small and medium manufacturers. At AMI, our goal is to enable small to medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) everywhere to collaborate, innovate, and thrive. AMI provides innovative low-cost solutions appropriate for smaller companies at any phase of their digital journey. The Smart Manufacturing Leadership Consortium (SMLC), an AMI business unit, cultivates trusted and mutually beneficial collaborative activities for member organizations of all sizes by sharing successes and challenges related to the adoption of smart manufacturing technologies and 4th Industrial Revolution digital technologies. AMI is part of the Manufacturing Technology Deployment Group, Inc. (MTDG). For additional information, visit AMI at www.advmfg.org and SMLC at www.smlconsortium.org.

Media Contact: Dan Nagy, 724-972-0178, info@advmfg.org

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Image 1: AMI to Receive MLC Award





AMI to receive prestigious recognition at awards dinner held by NAM's Manufacturing Leadership Council.









This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com.

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HORSHAM, Pa., April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Grupo Bimbo and Bimbo Bakeries USA, Inc. have earned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ENERGY STAR certification for 18 of its bakeries, the highest number in the baking industry and in any industrial sector with production facilities in the U.S. This certification signifies that the bakeries perform in the top 25 percent for energy efficiency among similar facilities nationwide and meet strict energy efficiency performance levels set by the EPA. This year marks the sixth consecutive award for several of these bakeries, reflecting a legacy of sustainability leadership.



The bakeries that have earned EPA's 2021 ENERGY STAR certification include: Auburn (NY), Dubuque (IA), Escondido (CA), Fergus Falls (MN), Gastonia (NC), Kent (WA), La Crosse (WI), London (KY), Oconomowoc (WI), Olean (NY), Phoenix (AZ), Placentia (CA), Reading (PA), Salt Lake City (UT), San Luis Obispo (CA), Zanesville Bimbo QSR Airport (OH), Zanesville Bimbo QSR Eastpointe (OH), and Viceroy (Concord, Ottawa) issued by the Natural Resources Canada (NRCAN).

In addition to the certification, 2 of the companys bakeries  Atlanta, GA and La Crosse, WI  achieved the ENERGY STAR Challenge for Industry. These bakeries have achieved the Challenges goal to reduce their energy intensity by 10 percent within 5 years. The Atlanta bakery reduced its energy intensity by 17.8 percent and La Crosse by 10.3 percent within two years. This is the Atlanta bakerys second time meeting this goal.

"We strive to be leaders in sustainability and recognize our obligation to protect and preserve our planet for the next generation, said Ramon Rivera, Senior Vice President of Operations, Bimbo Bakeries USA. "Were honored that our efforts have again been recognized by the EPA and proud that we are setting the standard for energy efficiency at manufacturing locations.

Energy efficiency contributes to greater economic development, greater competitiveness and a healthy environment while helping organizations meet their health, environmental and cost reduction goals, said Jean Lupinacci, Chief of the ENERGY STAR Commercial & Industrial Branch.

Earning an ENERGY STAR certification reinforces Grupo Bimbos Net Carbon Zero commitment and highlights the companys Purpose  Nourishing a better world. It also positions Bimbo Bakeries USA within the top 25 percent of commercial bakeries in the nation regarding energy performance. Bimbo Bakeries USA improved its energy performance by managing energy strategically across the entire organization and by making cost-effective improvements to its plants.

ENERGY STAR was introduced by the EPA in 1992 as a voluntary, market-based partnership to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through energy efficiency. To date, tens of thousands of buildings and plants across all fifty states have earned the ENERGY STAR certification.

For more information about ENERGY STAR Certification for Industrial Facilities: energystar.gov/plants

About Bimbo Bakeries USA

Bimbo Bakeries USA is a leader in the baking industry, known for its category-leading brands, innovative products, freshness and quality. Our team of 20,000 U.S. associates operates 59 manufacturing locations in the United States. Over 11,000 distribution routes deliver our leading brands such as Entenmanns, Stroehmann, Maiers, Sara Lee, Thomas, Bimbo, Marinela, Barcel, Boboli, Arnold, Artesano, Ball Park, Bimbo, Boboli, and Brownberry. Entenmann's, Little Bites, Marinela, Mrs Bairds, Oroweat, Sara Lee, Stroehmann, and Thomas'. Bimbo Bakeries USA is part of Mexicos Grupo Bimbo, S.A.B de C.V., the world's largest baking company with operations in 33 countries.

About ENERGY STAR

ENERGY STAR is the government-backed symbol for energy efficiency, providing simple, credible, and unbiased information that consumers and businesses rely on to make well-informed decisions. Thousands of industrial, commercial, utility, state, and local organizationsincluding more than 40 percent of the Fortune 500rely on their partnership with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to deliver cost-saving energy efficiency solutions. Since 1992, ENERGY STAR and its partners helped save American families and businesses nearly 4 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity and achieve over 3 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas reductionsall through voluntary action. In 2017 alone, ENERGY STAR and its partners helped Americans avoid $30 billion in energy costs. More information about ENERGY STAR can be found at: https://www.energystar.gov/about and energystar.gov/numbers.

CONTACT: Annie Speer

Annie.Speer@BuchananPR.com

610.228.0832
New York, NY, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hanzo, a technology pioneer in preserving, collecting, reviewing, and exporting dynamic, complex collaboration and web-based data, announces today two C-level executive appointments and several other key personnel changes. Paul Suh was named President and Robert Hirst will advance to Chief Technology Officer (CTO). In addition, the company announced that Dave Ruel will be Head of Product, Evan Gumz was promoted to Director of Account Management, Mariana Rosario is the new Director of Sales, and Sarena Regazzoni has been promoted to Senior Director of Communications.

Paul and Rob have shown transformative leadership in helping Hanzo scale its delivery of innovative solutions to address the growing need for complex data management for enterprise legal, investigatory and compliance functions, said Julien Masanes, CEO of Hanzo. They have earned the respect and trust of the entire organization and will continue to position Hanzo as the leading technology partner that helps enterprises organize their complex collaboration data.

Mr. Suh, based in the US, was the former CFO of Hanzo. As President, Paul will oversee all company operations. Suh is a seasoned finance and operations executive with expertise in SaaS platforms, fintech, digital media, gaming, and payments. His well-rounded experience includes leading finance departments, operations, product, marketing, HR, legal and corporate development for rapidly growing startups. His appointment will enable Hanzos CEO to focus on strategic partnerships and investment to accelerate the pace of growth.

Im thrilled to be taking on this new role. I see Hanzo at a major inflection point poised for tremendous growth with several factors contributing to our tailwinds, the most exciting of which is the launch of our new AI and ML capabilities that help our enterprise clients proactively stay ahead of potential litigation. Most of all, Im humbled to be among such a talented group of next-generation new leaders here at Hanzo.

Mr. Hirst, based in the UK, is a technology and software development veteran with multiple senior leadership roles in developing market-leading solutions for B2B, B2C, retail, fintech, insurance, SME, and corporate sectors. As CTO, his primary responsibilities will include overseeing Hanzos product roadmap of innovative technology solutions to organize and gain understanding from complex collaboration and SaaS tech stacks. Hell also oversee the engineering, security, and service, delivery teams.



I am very pleased to take on the CTO role at Hanzo and use my experience to lead our excellent group of forward-thinking technologists, who are well-positioned to drive Hanzo to new levels of excellence," said Rob Hirst. "The team's work to date has positioned Hanzo as a market leader in innovative multi-approach data capture, management, and insight delivery for complex enterprise SaaS applications and other collaborative sources that are at the cutting edge of ediscovery, legal, and compliance software. It's an honor to lead and collaborate with world-class engineering, security, and service delivery teams at Hanzo."

As the company has doubled, Hanzo also is pleased to be living up to its value of developing talent from within. Executive management is delighted to welcome the next generation of company leaders to serve on the senior leadership team with the following promotions.

Dave Ruel, formerly Senior Product Manager advances to Head of Product who will oversee the product strategy and work hand in hand with the product development team on innovative new enterprise solutions.

Evan Gumz, formerly, a Senior Account Manager takes on the role of Director of Account Management, to address the increasing needs of a rapidly growing customer base.

Mariana Rosario, formerly, Enterprise Account Executive, will assume the Director of Sales to lead Hanzos growing go-to-market initiatives.

Sarena Regazzoni, formerly Director of Communications, becomes Senior Director of Communications to lead corporate strategy and execution for internal and external messaging, communications, and brand.





About Hanzo

Hanzo helps global enterprises manage and reduce legal risk wherever work gets done. Capture data for investigations, litigation, and compliance wherever employees collaborate  including hard-to-capture sources like Slack, Jira, project management, collaboration platforms, and internal SaaS systems. Hanzo's software empowers defensible preservation, targeted collection, and efficient review of dynamic content. Hanzo is SOC 2 Type 2 certified, demonstrating its commitment to data security and serving large corporations worldwide. Learn more at hanzo.co and follow updates on Twitter: @gethanzo or on LinkedIn.

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Syracuse, New York, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Syracuse University today announced the official launch of Syracuse University Global, a virtual and extended campus that integrates and elevates the Universitys broad range of digital and place-based learning opportunities to students around the globe. Regardless of location or life circumstances, undergraduate students, graduate students and lifelong learners have access to relevant, challenging and innovative courses, programs and non-credit credentials in a range of fields, from cybersecurity to health care to business.

Syracuse University Global takes many of the high-quality academic programs available, along with new programs in high-demand fields, and expands their reach beyond the borders of our campus, says Chancellor Kent Syverud. Syracuse University Global removes barriers to obtaining degrees, credentials and knowledge that create opportunities for career advancement and professional success for students. Making a Syracuse University education accessible to a wide array of learners supports our mission of advancing academic excellence in a university welcoming to all.

Attending the University through Syracuse University Global positions traditional and non-traditional students to grow, kickstart and accelerate their professional, academic and personal aspirations. Syracuse University Global provides students who are unable to engage with the University full-time or on campus with transformational educational opportunities, combined with integral support services, in pursuit of a Syracuse University degree, credential or certificate.

Over the past four yearsand as we rapidly adapted to the challenges of a global pandemicwe developed innovative and robust learning platforms to meet the needs of students who are not physically on campus, says Vice Chancellor for Strategic Initiatives and Innovation J. Michael Haynie. Syracuse University Global takes the excellence of the University to a new level, offering online degrees, executive and professional education, credentialing programs and more. We are meeting students where they are, with what they need.

Syracuse University Global is designed to engage and educate a wider range of students from any location who are at different points and paths in their lives, making a Syracuse University education more accessible.

Syracuse University has a proud history of serving students who, for many reasons, could not attend campus classes full time, says Vice Chancellor and Provost Gretchen Ritter. Back in 1918, when the University launched its first evening session for part-time adult students, through decades of innovation at University College and now, as the College of Professional Studies, this university has found new ways to meet people where they arein their lives and in their careersand help them advance.

The flexibility of digital learning is especially important for students like Edward Furcinito 22, who works during the day for his familys construction company. In the evenings, he joins a diverse cohort of classmates, including some serving overseas in the military, who connect across continents and time zones to learn together and share their interests in the emerging field of knowledge management. Knowledge management prepares me to work in any sector, because every company has data and people, Furcinito says. The focus on data-driven skills appealed to me as I believe in an education that not only prepares you for today's job market, but for the future.

College of Professional Studies Dean Michael Frasciello says its students like Furcinito who the University had in mind when building this global initiative.

The strength of Syracuse University Global is the result of extraordinary collaboration among deans, department chairs, faculty and staff who brought this vision to life, Frasciello says. Our students are directly and immediately benefiting from the creativity, energy, commitment and excitement generated by their work. Together, we are redefining and reimagining transformative education through unbound access.

Syracuse University Global also offers students flexible access to a suite of support services, including individual counseling and advising on personalized academic pathways and career development. More than 60 degrees and credit certificate programs are offered. They are delivered digitally, and faculty are available to students on flexible schedules.

As a global institution, we send students abroad to live and learn, and we bring students here from around the world to live and learn on campus, adds Ritter. Now, through Syracuse University Global, we are connecting high-quality opportunities for advancement to individuals regardless of how and where they learn.

About Syracuse University

Syracuse University is a private research university that advances knowledge across disciplines to drive breakthrough discoveries and breakout leadership. Our collection of 13 schools and colleges with over 200 customizable majors closes the gap between education and action, so students can take on the world. In and beyond the classroom, we connect people, perspectives and practices to solve interconnected challenges with interdisciplinary approaches. Together, were a powerful community that moves ideas, individuals and impact beyond whats possible.

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CALGARY, Alberta, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Total Energy Services Inc. (Total Energy) (TSX:TOT) will conduct a conference call and webcast following the release of its financial results for the three months ended March 31, 2022. The financial results will be released prior to the conference call. Daniel Halyk, President and CEO will host the call.



Open to: Shareholders and other interested persons Date: May 12, 2022 Time: 9:00 a.m. (Mountain Time) Call: (800) 319-4610 or (416) 915-3239

A live webcast of the conference call will be accessible on Total Energys website at www.totalenergy.ca by selecting Webcasts.



Shortly after the live webcast, an archived version will be available on Total Energys website. A recording of the conference call will also be available until June 12, 2022, by dialing (855) 669-9658, passcode 8790.

Headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Total Energy provides contract drilling services, equipment rentals and transportation services, well servicing and compression and process equipment and service to the energy and other resource industries from operation centers in North America and Australia. The common shares of Total Energy are listed and trade on the TSX under the symbol TOT.

For further information, please contact Yuliya Gorbach, Vice-President Finance and Chief Financial Officer at (403) 216-3920 or by e-mail at: investorrelations@totalenergy.ca or visit our website at www.totalenergy.ca.

The TSX has neither approved nor disapproved of the information contained herein.




Salt Lake City, Utah, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CenExel Clinical Research, Inc., (CenExel) is one of only seven nominees for this years Best Clinical Trial Site at the 15th annual Vaccine Industry Excellence (VIE) Awards, hosted by the World Vaccine Congress, April 19 in Washington DC.

CenExels nomination is a result of dedicated vaccine trial support across several Centers of Excellence, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. CenExel sustained nearly 50 vaccine research studies in 2021, enrolling more than 3,200 volunteers. All of CenExels Centers of Excellence maintain an enrollment rate exceeding 100% of contracted goals, and expert staff are cross-trained and flexible to assist with screening and enrollment needs. CenExel also has unparalleled retention rates, typically above 95%.

CenExel enrollment speed is bolstered by the demographic diversity of the subjects. More than 60 million people live within 50 miles of a CenExel Center of Excellence, which partly explains the ethnic diversity of CenExels volunteers for vaccine studies:

Caucasian: 38%

Hispanic/Latinx: 29%

Black/African American: 26%

Asian: 7%

CenExels board-certified physician Principal Investigators and expert researchers have extensive experience in a wide range of vaccine clinical trials, from complex Phase I (first-in-human) through Phase III, requiring pediatric, adolescent, adult, or elderly populations. These studies cover a broad array of infectious and biodefense indications, including seasonal and pandemic influenza, COVID-19, Pneumococcal, ZIKA, Ebola, HIV, Cholera, Smallpox, Men B, Staph aureus, C. difficile, Typhoid, Botulism, Anthrax, Rabies, West Nile virus, RSV, Noro Virus, HPV, HSV-2, CMV, and many others.

With four labs supporting peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) isolation and plans for more PBMC labs to be established at other Centers of Excellence, CenExel maximizes efficiency in evaluating the cellular immune response on-site. CenExel is also an active participant in VaxCorps, the premier vaccine site consortium, which is nominated for the Best Clinical Trial Network Award at the same event.

At CenExel, weve successfully completed over 350 vaccine trials, focusing on rapid and diverse recruitment, explains Casey Orvin, CenExel Chief Commercial Officer. Vaccine research is one of our core therapeutic areas of expertise. We offer our volunteers respect, kindness, and reliability to ensure compliance with study visits and expectations.

CenExel was formed in 2018, and since its formation, CenExel has enthusiastically pursued both organic growth and acquisitions of state-of-the-art research centers around the U.S. The network now includes 13 of the most proficient clinical research sites in the country, with special emphases on Neurology, Pain, Psychiatry, Vaccines/Immunology, Dermatology, Ethnic-bridging, Sleep studies, and Clinical Pharmacology. The CenExel research units have outstanding records of assisting pharmaceutical sponsors with protocol development, study design, and conducting Phase I-IV trials to develop new therapeutics for improved patient care. The mission of CenExel is to work with trial Sponsors and CROs to reduce costs and development times for innovative therapies while advancing patient care.

About CenExel Clinical Research

CenExel Clinical Research (www.CenExel.com) provides unparalleled medical and scientific support in the design and execution of clinical trials. Our therapeutic area focus, attention to detail, and auxiliary services assure quality, reliable results and help CenExel consistently achieve and exceed patient recruitment goals. CenExel Centers of Excellence have conducted thousands of studies, the variety and complexity of which have resulted in a vast depth of experience and insight for the Principal Investigators and research staff in each facility. The CenExel Centers of Excellence deliver the engagement, expertise, and results to ensure that their clients achieve their clinical research goals.

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OGDEN, UTAH, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Eight small businesses will come together from across the United States for the Ogden Catalyst Accelerators inaugural cohort focused on Digital Data Strategies for the US Air Forces Digital Transformation Office (DTO).

The Ogden Catalyst Accelerator, powered by the Air Force DTO, was developed to promote technology advancement for the warfighter and guide technology transfer for the government to industry and vice versa. Digital Data Strategies are focused on creating a digital governance structure and facilitate ongoing and new digital acquisition transformation activities across the enterprise.

The Digital Data Strategies cohort will meet every other week for 3 months beginning May 2nd. Each company will collaborate with subject matter experts, work with government and commercial Sherpas, and complete an intensive customer discovery process. The cohort will conclude with a Demo Day on July 25th where companies will pitch their technology to government and industry partners.

Jess Rees, Program Director for the Ogden Catalyst Accelerator, stated, We are so excited to kick off our first Ogden Accelerator and to work with local and out of state Subject Matter Experts to help these companies understand the government problem statement and how to do business with the government. We have some incredible teams from Hill AFB, who will be participating with these businesses as key stakeholders to build our National Defense Ecosystem in Ogden, UT.

The Ogden Catalyst Accelerator team, with technical advisement from both military and industry experts, selected the following small businesses to participate in the upcoming Digital Data Strategies cohort:

Cymantix builds tools such as Publication Access Through Tiered Interaction & Exploration (PATTIE) to enable analysts to search, explore, interact, and visualize high-dimensional unstructured data (e.g., audio transcriptions, OSINT, etc.) through a spatial-semantic user interface. Their primary innovation behind this paradigm is the application of information foraging theory and scatter/gather for browsing large document collections through a visual metaphor.

https://www.cymantix.com

DARE Venture Group brings together the very best technology talent, and teams to bring groundbreaking capabilities directly to the hands of our countrys warfighters. DARE is committed to remaining dynamic, agile, and high-powered to conquer their customers toughest problems. Their focus is on the criticality of the merger between warfighters and emerging technologies. They take pride in the fact that their customers are top tier and their support to them will be unencumbered by traditional government boundaries.

https://dareventuregroup.com

DataCrunch Lab is on a mission to modernize maintenance planning through analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and automation. Analytics to gather and analyze data quickly, AI to anticipate needs, and automation to assist in procuring parts, schedule skilled labor and create work orders. Their goal is to maximize operational availability, expedite maintenance operations, and reduce operational costs.

https://www.datacrunchlab.com

KANA Systems brings Aloha Spirit and grit to government contracting. Their expertise is delivering data excellence to enable warfighters and leaders to make timely, better decisions. They partner with customers committed to modernization, leaders who fear the status quo more than they fear change, and people who seek help and are eager to collaborate. Their technology, the Kokua Hub, makes it simpler, faster, and cheaper for organizations to leverage the value in their data to optimize decision-making.

https://www.kana.systems

Programs Management Analytics & Technologies (PMAT) is disrupting the way we share and visualize domain awareness data for military, commercial and humanitarian efforts. Their talented team is building a microservices led collaborative awareness data engine that links structured and unstructured multi-INT data to provide a shared situational awareness picture no matter the platform or location. With an extensible architecture and the ability to operate in bandwidth restricted areas at near real time, PMAT offers the next wave in ISR mission capabilities. A future that is built for speed, mission interoperability and distributed operations.

https://pmatinc.com

Polysentry is a technology company, based in San Francisco and Washington DC, that provides artificial intelligence (AI) enabled software platforms for analyzing large datasets. Their platforms transform how organizations use their data by removing the barriers between back-end data management and front-end data analysis. The companys solutions are built to support operations and intelligence-focused data analytics and decision support functions for both commercial and government customers. Their core product has already been successfully commercialized, providing decision makers with the ability to analyze large structured and unstructured data sets.

https://www.polysentry.com

Securboration is a high technology company founded on the belief that Security and Collaboration will have a significant impact on the evolution of software architecture across a variety of domains. As such, they are focused on developing and transitioning innovative technologies that address current mission problems facing the DoD spanning areas from intelligence operations, mission planning, effects-based assessment, adversarial modeling, cybers operations, and digital engineering.

https://www.securboration.com

MSB.AI enables you to set up simulations in minutes, with a Universal Interface for Simulation called GURU. Three verticals they focus on are: 1) Computer-aided engineering, 2) Trajectory and mission planning and 3) Virtual world immersive training. They have been awarded two Phase II SBIRs so far with DAF + MDA for threat trajectory simulation and DAF for digital engineering. Right now, only 1% of engineers use simulation in their day-to-day work. GURU will make it 100!

https://microsurgeonbot.com

About Catalyst Campus for Technology and Innovation

Catalyst Campus for Technology and Innovation (CCTI, a Colorado 501(c)3) in partnership with the United States Space Force and the US Air Force is a collaborative ecosystem where industry, small business, entrepreneurs, startups, government, academia, and investors intersect with Colorados aerospace and defense industry to create community, spark innovation, and stimulate business growth.

CCTI, is expanding into Ogden, UT to drive the National Defense Innovation Ecosystem into the area and to support the missions of Hill, AFB. The Ogden Catalyst Accelerator is a semi-residential, 3-month program for small businesses with innovative, dual-use technologies to meet with industry subject matters experts, government teams, funding opportunities, and business development coaches to accelerate their technology into the hands of our warfighters.

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NEW CITY, N.Y., April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- BCM One, a leading provider of NextGen Communications and Managed Services for IT leaders and resellers, announced today that Paula Como Kauth, the company's Chief Marketing Officer, has been selected by Channel Futures as a 2022 Circle of Excellence award winner.

Debuting in 2014, the Circle of Excellence program recognizes ICT channel leaders who are helping their partners create business value for customers. The Circle of Excellence honors executives for their vision, innovation, and advocacy of the indirect channel during a time of transition and convergence.

"We're thrilled that Paula's vision and dedication are being recognized by Channel Partners. She is a clear leader in the industry and we are happy to have her on our executive team," stated Geoff Bloss, CEO of BCM One. "The company has a strong focus on and commitment to the channel, and she plays a key role in ensuring the success of our partners, which is a priority as we continue our growth."

Como Kauth has been with BCM One for six years, overseeing marketing communications, product marketing, and marketing operations across the entire BCM One family of brands, as well as contributing to M&A strategy and post-acquisition integration plans.

"It's an honor to receive the Circle of Excellence award from Channel Partners," stated Como Kauth. "It's particularly gratifying to be recognized now as we have expanded our offerings and partner base both organically and through multiple acquisitions over the past couple of years."

Circle of Excellence Winners will be honored during a special dinner at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo, April 11-14 at the Venetian in Las Vegas.

###

ABOUT BCM ONE

Founded in 1992, BCM One is the leading NextGen Communications and Managed Services provider. Serving over 18,000 customers worldwide and 5,000+ channel partners, BCM One offers a variety of solutions supporting businesses' critical network infrastructure including: UCaaS/Hosted Voice, SIP Trunking, Managed SD-WAN, Microsoft Teams, Technology Expense Optimization and Global Managed Connectivity solutions. BCM One prides itself on its long-standing client relationships backed by their mission statement, "To Provide a World-Class Experience with Every Human Interaction." To learn more about BCM One, visit www.bcmone.com.

For Media Inquiries:

Paula Como Kauth, Chief Marketing Officer, BCM One

Office: 212.906.7255 | pckauth@bcmone.com

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Image 1: Channel Futures Circle of Excellence Award





Paula Como Kauth of BCM One, Circle of Excellence Winner









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Philadelphia, PA, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NBME congratulates Steven J. Durning, MD, PhD, as the recipient of its 2022 John P. Hubbard Award in recognition of his extensive contributions to the field of assessment in medical education through leadership, scholarship and service.

Im very humbled by this prestigious award, Dr. Durning said. Im extremely grateful that the work of the people that I have had the honor of working with is being recognized as excellent.

Dr. Durning currently serves as Professor of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine (USUHS). Recognized internationally as a preeminent scholar in medical education, he is credited with over 400 peer-reviewed publications, 50 invited chapters and seven edited textbooks, and has received more than $15 million in funding over the years.

NBME President and CEO Peter Katsufrakis believes that Dr. Durning has made an incredible impact on the assessment field.

Dr. Durnings work to advance our field is both broad and deep. It focuses not only on assessing learners, but also on the processes of learning and reasoning, the impact that medical education processes and experiences have on learners, and the professional development and identity formation of physicians, Dr. Katsufrakis said. Steve exemplifies the best traits of our profession. It is an honor to recognize him and his accomplishments.

Danny Takanishi, Jr., MD, chaired the 2022 Hubbard Award Committee, which is responsible for identifying the recipient following a global nomination process.

In the true spirit of a dedicated and consummate educator, Dr. Durning has been a valued and respected mentor and collaborator to many who seek to follow in his path. This legacy ensures the perpetuation and dissemination of leading-edge scholarship in the domain of assessment in medical education for years to come," Dr. Takanishi said.

When Dr. Durning looks to the future, he believes receiving the Hubbard Award will inspire him to increase his contributions.

The Hubbard Award provides reassurance that the work the teams that I am part of are doing is really meaningful and important, Dr. Durning said. So, I think Ill be bolder with the projects that Ill pursue.

He also considers the effect the award will have on his mentoring of young scholars. It further strengthens my desire to make sure that I, to the best of my ability, can help the next generation of individuals who will be conducting research in this area and others to be able to fulfill what society needs, Dr. Durning said.

The 2022 Hubbard Award Committee also included Agata Butler, PhD; Monica Cuddy, PhD; David Kountz, MD, MBA; Judy Shae, PhD; Kimberly Swygert, PhD; and Colin West, MD, PhD.

Other recent positions held by Dr. Durning include Director of the USUHS Center for Health Professions Education (CHPE); founder and Principal Investigator of the USUHS Long-Term Career Outcome Study (LTCOS); Deputy Editor of Academic Medicine; and was the first individual from the U.S. to be on the executive committee for the Association for Medical Education in Europe (AMEE). He earned his MD from the University of Pittsburgh and his PhD from Maastricht University, addressing the influence of contextual factors on clinical reasoning.

Established in 1983, the Hubbard Award recognizes individuals for their outstanding contributions to the pursuit of assessment excellence within medical education. Dr. Durning joins the ranks of the distinguished individuals whom NBME has honored over the years with this award, which celebrates John P. Hubbards 25-year tenure as NBMEs chief executive.

About NBME

NBME offers a versatile selection of high-quality assessments and educational services for students, professionals, educators, regulators, and institutions dedicated to the evolving needs of medical education and health care. To serve these communities, we collaborate with a diverse and comprehensive array of practicing health professionals, medical educators, state medical board members, test developers, academic researchers, scoring experts and public representatives. Learn more at NBME.org.

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CHALK RIVER, Ontario, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL), Canadas premier nuclear science and technology organization, is pleased to announce that the results of a recent public attitude survey show strong public confidence and awareness in CNL operations and activities, including the Near Surface Disposal Facility (NSDF) project. With a majority of respondents stating that they are confident that CNL can safely construct and operate the NSDF, the survey results reflect CNLs commitment to public engagement and represent good news for CNL as it nears the final regulatory hearing on the proposed project.



Conducted by Nanos Research to gauge public attitude towards CNL, the survey was commissioned by CNL and completed randomly by phone with more than 500 residents within Renfrew and Pontiac counties. Among the key findings, a majority of respondents are confident that the regulatory process for the NSDF has been followed by CNL staff; there is broad awareness about CNL in the community; and there is growing awareness about work being conducted at the Chalk River Laboratories, including site revitalization, the NSDF project, and CNLs small modular reactor (SMR) program.

CNL has made it a priority to better engage the public on the work we are doing at the Chalk River Laboratories, and it is clear that these efforts have paid off, commented Joe McBrearty, CNLs President and CEO. In particular, we appreciate the public confidence in our work to safely construct and operate the NSDF, a project that allows us to clean up historic waste on the site, better protect the local environment, and position the campus for the future. The NSDF team has worked incredibly hard to maintain open and honest dialogue with local residents about the project, and that commitment is reflected in these results.

The survey results also provide CNL with insight into the effectiveness of its ongoing public engagement program and evolving public perceptions since 2018, when CNL last conducted a similar attitude survey. Among the improvements in public awareness and confidence, results show an increase in awareness of the Chalk River Laboratories, CNLs activities to revitalize the campus, CNLs NSDF project, and in CNLs SMR program.

But the most interesting results relate to CNLs NSDF project, which would establish an engineered disposal facility for low-level radioactive waste at the Chalk River Laboratories, owned by a federal Crown corporation, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL). The proposed project is under review by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) and is subject to federal assessment, which has been underway since 2017, under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. As CNL approaches a final public hearing and decision from the CNSC, the survey results show that a clear majority of local residents have confidence that the staff at the Chalk River Laboratories site have followed the necessary regulatory review process in developing their proposal for the NSDF and in their capabilities to safely construct and operate the facility.

With respect to the NSDF, I think that local residents understand that CNL is taking this project very seriously, and that our employees are committed to protecting the environment, especially the Ottawa River, commented Zack Smith, CNLs Vice-President of Environmental Remediation Management. CNL is also committed to providing members of the public and Indigenous communities with the opportunity to participate fully in the evaluation of the proposed facility.

The CNSC is scheduled to consider CNLs NSDF application at a final public hearing that begins on May 31, 2022. As part of this process, a public comment period is now open that allow Indigenous communities, the public and other stakeholders to submit their written feedback on the NSDF project to the CNSC. At the hearing, interested parties will also have the opportunity to present their views to CNSC Commissioners directly.

To learn more about the NSDF, and how to participate in the CNSCs regulatory review process as an intervenor, please visit www.engagewithcnl.ca/nsdf. To view the complete report on the findings from the public attitude survey conducted by Nanos Research, please visit https://engagewithcnl.ca/nsdf/review-and-studies-reports/.

About CNL

Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is a world leader in nuclear science and technology offering unique capabilities and solutions across a wide range of industries. Actively involved with industry-driven research and development in nuclear, transportation, clean technology, energy, defence, security and life sciences, we provide solutions to keep these sectors competitive internationally.

With ongoing investments in new facilities and a focused mandate, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is well positioned for the future. A new performance standard reinforced with a strong safety culture underscores every activity.

For more information on the complete range of Canadian Nuclear Laboratories services, please visit www.cnl.ca or contact communications@cnl.ca.

CNL Contact:

Patrick Quinn

Director, Corporate Communications

1-866-886-2325

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/02e54c9b-ecf6-4d18-87fe-deb8c9ea07db
Pune, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As per the report published by The Brainy Insights, the global beer processing market is expected to grow from USD 552.72 billion in 2020 to USD 911.20 billion by 2028, at a CAGR of 5.95% during the forecast period 2021-2028.



Market trend of beer industry is shifting towards the premium beers and valued based brands. In the mature market such as U.S., Western European countries, and Australia, the demand for premium beer is increasing rapidly.



Request Sample PDF Brochure: https://www.thebrainyinsights.com/enquiry/sample-request/12550



Thus, innovation has become the one of the most important priority for the companies to gain the major share in the market. Innovation in the factors such as product test, packaging, and distribution channel is projected to offer the various growth opportunities in the market.



Market trend of beer industry is shifting towards the premium beers and valued based brands. In the mature market such as the U.S., Western European countries, and Australia, the demand for premium beer is increasing rapidly. Thus, innovation has become one of the most important priorities for the companies to gain a significant share in the market. Innovation in the factors such as product test, packaging, and distribution channel is projected to offer the various growth opportunities in the market.



The beer processing refers to the process for obtaining beer by the fermentation of malted cereal grains. The process of beer making contains various steps and a series of chemical reaction to make high-quality beer. It involves malting, milling, mashing, hop addition, fermentation, cooling, ageing of beer, and packaging of beer. Malt is one of the essential ingredients of beer and beer processing industry is the largest consumer of malt grain. Malt supplies the fermented sugar, which is then converted into alcohol by yeast.



Browse the full report with Table of Contents and List of Figures: https://www.thebrainyinsights.com/report/beer-processing-market-12550



Global beer processing market is witnessing a rapid growth owing to increasing demand for craft beer across the globe. In addition to his, growing disposable income of the people, further boosting the market growth. The growing shift towards the consumption of low alcohol or no alcohol beer is projected to offer the various growth opportunities in the market. Increasing innovation in the beer product to gain a competitive advantage, also positively influencing the market growth of beer processing. However, stringent government regulation on beer processing and environment hurdle are some of the factors that may hamper the growth of the market over the forecast period.



Major players in the global beer processing market are Anheuser-Busch InBev, Carlsberg Group, Heineken, Asahi Group Holdings, Ltd, Molson Coors Brewing Company, Tsingtao Brewery Co. Ltd, Alfa Laval, GEA Group, Krones Group, and Paul Mueller among others. The key players of global beer processing market are majorly focusing on adoption of various strategies such as new product development, joint venture, collaboration, technological integration, product innovations, mergers & acquisitions, and partnerships to gain the significant market share in the industry.



 In July 2019, Anheuser-Busch InBev announced the launch of non-alcohol beer segment in India withits first non-alcohol beer, Budweiser 0.0. The goal of introduction of this segment is to ensure the companys aim to produce the 20% nonalcoholic beer of their total production.

 In January 2020, Paul Mueller and Springfield Brew co. announced the partnership for expansion of USD 1 million project at Market Ave. facility, with the installation of eight new stainless steel fermenting tanks from Paul Mueller.

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The macro brewery segment accounted for the major market share of 39.67% in the year 2020



The type segment includes macro brewery, craft brewery, microbrewery, brewpub, and others. The macro brewery segment accounted for the major market share of 39.67% in the year 2020. Increasing beer processing of mass-producing beers, boosting the growth of the market. In addition to this, the rising number of macro brewery across the globe, also positively influencing the growth of the market.

The lager beer dominated the global beer processing market and held the 60% market share in the year 2020



The beer type segment includes lager, ale & stout, speciality, and low alcohol. The lager beer dominated the global beer processing market and held the 60% market share in the year 2020. The lager beer refers to the beer, which is fermented using years at very low temperature. High adoption of lager beer around the world, driving the growth of the market.

Off-trade segment is the fastest-growing distribution channel and growing at the CAGR of 6.3% over the forecast period



The distribution channel segment classified into on trade and off-trade. Off-trade segment is the fastest-growing distribution channel and growing at the CAGR of 6.3% over the forecast period. Increasing trend of off-trade channels driving the growth of the market.

Regional Segment Analysis of the Beer Processing Market



 North America (U.S. , Canada, Mexico)

 Europe (Germany, France, U.K., Italy, Spain, Rest of the Europe)

 Asia-Pacific (China, Japan India, Rest of APAC)

 South America (Brazil and Rest of South America)

 Middle East and Africa (UAE, South Africa, Rest of MEA)



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The Asia Pacific region dominated the global beer processing market and vales at USD 229.71 billion in the year 2020. Increasing popularity of beers among the consumers in Asia Pacific region is one of the primary driver for the growth of market. In addition to this, increasing demand for premium beers in the countries such as India and China, further offering the growth opportunities for the vendors in the Asia Pacific region. On the other hand, the North America region projected to grow at the highest CAGR of 7.2% over the forecast period. Increasing consumption of beer and rising trend of non alcohol or low alcohol beers are some of the primary factors driving the growth of market in North America region.



About the report:



The global beer processing market is analyzed on the basis of value (USD Billion). All the segments have been analyzed on global, regional and country basis. The study includes an analysis of more than 30 countries for each segment. The report offers in-depth analysis of driving factors, opportunities, restraints, and challenges for gaining the key insight of the market. The study includes porter's five forces model, attractiveness analysis, and competitor position grid analysis.



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ARLINGTON, Va., April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Shining a strong spotlight of interest on fusion with its recent White House energy summit, the U.S. government is backing American industry to win the 21st century's most pivotal technological race. Kronos Fusion is positioning itself to give the USA dominance in this transformation through its powerful quantum computing algorithms.

Besides its nearly boundless energy, the promise of fusion lies in its cleanliness and environmental benefits compared to fission. Fusion doesn't produce radioactive waste, since the byproduct of its operation is instead helium. Fusion tokamak reactors will free humanity from the looming shadow of lethal nuclear disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima. They can be shut down in seconds and the chain reaction leading to a meltdown is impossible in a fusion device.

Fusion generators are fueled by very small amounts of deuterium and tritium - both of which are hydrogen isotopes. Fission, opposingly, needs large amounts of extremely radioactive enriched uranium fuel rods to power its reaction. Fission waste then needs to be isolated in long-term shielded containment like that offered by deep geological repositories located far underground. Fusion sweeps away the problem of radioactive waste and with it all, the danger and expense of storing lethal nuclear pollutants for decades or centuries.

Kronos is working to usher in the fusion age because fusion power is good for the Earth and for humanity. Besides eliminating the hazardous waste and potential disasters of fission, it will generate the nearly endless energy needed to run our advancing technological civilization for centuries to come. More ecologically sound than any other power generation method, fusion will make coal-fired power plants and similar operations completely obsolete, slashing energy costs, greenhouse gases, and particulate pollution simultaneously.

Fusion will also help end the use of fossil fuels as its cornucopia of power supports electric cars, aircraft, and even a zero-emission, clean-energy military. This practical, decisive solution to 100% clean energy will ensure our planet remains a pleasant, fruitful, beautiful place for us and future generations to live into the remote future.

Kronos Fusion Energy is dedicated to a clean, green future and a safer, healthier world for humanity, but it's also excited about the potential for fusion energy to enable people in the immediate future. Kronos' launch of its Fusion Energy Simulation Center will create hundreds of U.S. jobs as it runs its deep learning simulations.

The benefits to Americans won't end there. Hundreds of businesses will build the precisely tolerance factored components needed to construct Kronos' first tokamak reactor. Once this is a proven success, even more entrepreneurs, experts, and companies stand to gain from extending and maintaining a new fusion reactor network across America. Finally, the rollout of this limitless source of clean, eco-friendly energy will enable generations of Americans to realize their dreams and participate in the fusion-driven flowering of the United States' economy through the 21st century.

More Information:

www.KronosFusionEnergy.com

PR Contact - Erin Pendleton - pr@kronosfusionenergy.com

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Attachment
Meeting Scheduled for April 8, 2022 at 9:00 AM ET

NEW YORK, NY, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Enzo Biochem, Inc. (NYSE: ENZ) (Enzo or the Company), a leading biosciences and diagnostics company, held its Annual Shareholder Meeting (the Annual Meeting) on March 31, 2022 with 89% of the total 48.5 million shares voted. Out of four proposals presented to shareholders for a vote at the Annual Meeting, the polls were closed at the Annual Meeting with respect to all proposals except Proposal One.

While many of the proposals required a majority of the shareholder vote for approval (Proposals Two, Three and Four each received the requisite affirmative votes for approval and the polls for such proposals were closed at the Annual Meeting on March 31, 2022), Proposal One requires the affirmative vote of the holders of at least 80% of the combined voting power of the outstanding shares of stock entitled to vote. As of March 31, 2022, the Company received proxies representing approximately 76% of the shares outstanding as of the record date, 99% of which voted FOR Proposal One. Thus, the requisite number of shares for the approval of Proposal One was not present. To allow more time to solicit additional votes for the approval of Proposal One from shareholders of record as of February 25, 2022, Enzo adjourned the Annual Meeting, solely with respect to Proposal One, until 9:00 a.m. (ET) on Friday, April 8, 2022. This meeting will be held virtually over the internet using the following link:

www.virtualshareholdermeeting.com/ENZ2022 .

Any shareholder of record who submits a proxy card retains the right to revoke such proxy card by: (i) submitting a written notice of such revocation to the President of the Company so that it is received no later than 5:00 p.m., ET on April 7, 2022; (ii) submitting a duly signed proxy card bearing a later date than the previously signed and dated proxy card to the President of the Company so that it is received no later than 5:00 p.m., ET on April 7, 2022; or (iii) attending the Annual Meeting virtually and voting thereat the shares represented by such proxy card. Attendance at the Annual Meeting will not, in and of itself, constitute revocation of a completed, signed and dated proxy card previously returned. All such later-dated proxy cards or written notices revoking a proxy card should be sent to Enzo Biochem, Inc., 527 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022, Attention: Barry W. Weiner, President. If you hold shares of Common Stock in street name, you must contact the firm that holds your shares to change or revoke any prior voting instructions. Since the polls have closed with respect to Proposals Two, Three, and Four, any such revocation of a proxy would only be effective with respect to Proposal One and such revocation may be effected up until the closing of the polls for such proposal at the adjourned Annual Meeting or any further adjournment thereof.

Among the proposals (from Proposal One) to be voted on at the Meeting Scheduled for April 8, 2022 at 9:00 AM ET:

 A proposal to de-classify the Companys current staggered board structure so that every board seat is voted on each year and all directors are held directly accountable for the companys performance.

 A proposal to change the required shareholder vote for approval of mergers, asset sales, and dissolution from two-thirds vote to majority vote.

 A proposal to change the required shareholder vote for amendments to the Certificate of Incorporation to a majority vote.

If Proposal One is approved, Enzo will benefit from a de-classified board, market standard vote requirements for various shareholder approvals, and a simplified accounting period and corporate purpose.

These initiatives are resoundingly shareholder-friendly and reflective of the recently refreshed management and boards commitment to building long-term shareholder value and adopting a corporate governance profile in line with established best practices.

While these types of proposals are generally deemed by the investment community to be in the best interests of all shareholders, there is an extraordinarily high vote threshold on Proposal One requiring support from 80% of all outstanding shares to gain approval. As a result, the Company has adjourned the Meeting to allow adequate time for shareholders to fully consider and vote on the Proposal One.

Enzo strongly urges all shareholders to vote.

IF YOU ARE A SHAREHOLDER OF RECORD AS OF FEBRUARY 25, 2022, WE URGE YOU TO VOTE NOW BY CALLING KINGSDALE ADVISORS TOLL-FREE AT 1-888-518-1554 or collect at 1-416-867-2272 AND ONE OF THEIR AGENTS WOULD BE HAPPY TO HELP YOU VOTE OVER THE PHONE.

About Enzo Biochem



Enzo Biochem is a pioneer in molecular diagnostics, leading the convergence of clinical laboratories, life sciences and intellectual property through the development of unique diagnostic platform technologies that provide numerous advantages over previous standards. A global company, Enzo Biochem utilizes cross-functional teams to develop and deploy products, systems and services that meet the ever-changing and rapidly growing needs of health care today and into the future. Underpinning Enzo Biochems products and technologies is a broad and deep intellectual property portfolio, with patent coverage across a number of key enabling technologies.

For more information, please visit www.Enzo.com or follow Enzo Biochem on Twitter and

LinkedIn .

Forward-Looking Statements

Except for historical information, the matters discussed in this release may be considered "forward-looking" statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Such statements include declarations regarding the intent, belief or current expectations of the Company and its management, including those related to cash flow, gross margins, revenues, and expenses which are dependent on a number of factors outside of the control of the Company including, inter alia, the markets for the Companys products and services, costs of goods and services, other expenses, government regulations, litigation, and general business conditions. See Risk Factors in the Companys Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended July 31, 2021. Investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could materially affect actual results. The Company disclaims any obligations to update any forward-looking statement as a result of developments occurring after the date of this release.

###



Enzo Biochem Contacts

For: Enzo Biochem:

David Bench, CFO

212-583-0100

dbench@enzo.com

For Media:

Lynn Granito

Berry & Company Public Relations

212-253-8881

lgranito@berrypr.com

For Investors:
RADNOR, Pa., April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The law firm of Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP (www.ktmc.com) informs investors that the firm has filed a securities class action lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois against AbbVie, Inc. (AbbVie) (NYSE: ABBV) on behalf of all persons and entities who purchased or otherwise acquired AbbVie securities between April 30, 2021, and August 31, 2021, inclusive (the Class Period). This action is captioned Calvin T. Nakata v. AbbVie, Inc., et al., Case No. 1:22-cv-01773.



Important Deadline Reminder: Investors who purchased or otherwise acquired AbbVie securities during the Class Period may, no later than June 6, 2022, seek to be appointed as a lead plaintiff representative of the class.

CANNOT VIEW THIS VIDEO? PLEASE CLICK HERE

CLICK HERE TO SUBMIT YOUR ABBVIE LOSSES. YOU CAN ALSO CLICK ON THE FOLLOWING LINK OR COPY AND PASTE IN YOUR BROWSER: https://www.ktmc.com/new-cases/abbvie-inc?utm_source=PR&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=abbvie&mktm=r

LEAD PLAINTIFF DEADLINE: JUNE 6, 2022

CLASS PERIOD: APRIL 30, 2021 through AUGUST 31, 2021

CONTACT AN ATTORNEY TO DISCUSS YOUR RIGHTS:

James Maro, Esq. (484) 270-1453 or Email at info@ktmc.com

ABBVIES ALLEGED MISCONDUCT

AbbVie is one of the worlds largest pharmaceutical companies. The companys revenues will come under significant pressure in the coming years when its best-selling drug, Humira, will lose patent protection in 2023. Accordingly, AbbVies future revenue and earnings depend in large part on its ability to develop new sources of revenue to offset Humiras lost sales. Rinvoqan anti-inflammatory drug manufactured by AbbVie and used to treat rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and other diseases by inhibiting Janus kinase (JAK) enzymeswas touted as one such drug. Rinvoq was initially approved in the United States to treat only moderate to severe RA. However, AbbVie was actively pursuing additional treatment indications and, in 2020, asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve Rinvoq for the treatment of several other diseases.

As is relevant here, Rinvoq is similar to other JAK inhibitor drugs, including Xeljanz, manufactured by Pfizer Inc. When the FDA approved Xeljanz in 2012 for the treatment of RA, it required an additional safety trial to evaluate Xeljanzs risk of triggering certain serious side effects. Beginning in February 2019, the FDA repeatedly warned the public that the safety trial indicated that Xeljanzs use could lead to serious heart-related issue, cancer, and other adverse events. Notwithstanding the similarities between Rinvoq and Xeljanz, during the Class Period, Defendants assured investors that Rinvoq was far safer than Xeljanz and not subject to the same regulatory risks.

However, investors began to learn the truth about Rinvoqs significant risks on June 25, 2021, when AbbVie revealed that the FDA was delaying its review of expanded treatment applications for Rinvoq due to the safety concerns associated with Xeljanz. On this news, the price of AbbVie common stock declined $1.76 per share, or approximately 1.5%, from a close of $114.74 per share on June 24, 2021, to close at $112.98 per share on June 25, 2021.

Then, on September 1, 2021, the FDA announced that final results from the Xeljanz safety trial established an increased risk of serious adverse events, even with low doses of Xeljanz. As a result, the FDA determined that it would require new and updated warnings for Xeljanz and Rinvoq because Rinvoq share[s] similar mechanisms of action with Xeljanz and may have similar risks as seen in the Xeljanz safety trial. The FDA also indicated that it would further limit approved indications for Rinvoq as a result of these safety concerns. On this news, the price of AbbVie common stock declined $8.51 per share, or more than 7%, from a close of $120.78 per share on August 31, 2021, to close at $112.27 per share on September 1, 2021.

After the Class Period, on December 3, 2021, AbbVie announced that the FDA had updated Rinvoqs label to require additional safety warnings and limit marketing of Rinvoq to only its use after treatment with other drugs has failed. On January 11, 2022, Defendants admitted that these changes to Rinvoqs label would negatively impact sales, forcing the Company to reduce its long-term guidance for Rinvoqs sales in 2025.

The complaint alleges that, throughout the Class Period, the Defendants made materially false and/or misleading statements, about the companys business and operations. Specifically, Defendants misrepresented and/or failed to disclose that: (1) safety concerns about Xeljanz extended to Rinvoq and other JAK inhibitors; (2) as a result, it was likely that the FDA would require additional safety warnings for Rinvoq and would delay the approval of additional treatment indications for Rinvoq; and (3) therefore, Defendants statements about the companys business, operations, and prospects lacked a reasonable basis, As a result of the Defendants wrongful acts and omissions, and the significant decline in the market value of AbbVies securities, AbbVie investors have suffered significant damages.

WHAT CAN I DO?

AbbVie investors may, no later than June 6, 2022 , seek to be appointed as a lead plaintiff representative of the class through Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP or other counsel, or may choose to do nothing and remain an absent class member. Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP encourages AbbVie investors who have suffered significant losses to contact the firm directly to acquire more information.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR THE CASE

WHO CAN BE A LEAD PLAINTIFF?

A lead plaintiff is a representative party who acts on behalf of all class members in directing the litigation. The lead plaintiff is usually the investor or small group of investors who have the largest financial interest and who are also adequate and typical of the proposed class of investors. The lead plaintiff selects counsel to represent the lead plaintiff and the class and these attorneys, if approved by the court, are lead or class counsel. Your ability to share in any recovery is not affected by the decision of whether or not to serve as a lead plaintiff.

ABOUT KESSLER TOPAZ MELTZER & CHECK, LLP

Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP prosecutes class actions in state and federal courts throughout the country and around the world. The firm has developed a global reputation for excellence and has recovered billions of dollars for victims of fraud and other corporate misconduct. All of our work is driven by a common goal: to protect investors, consumers, employees and others from fraud, abuse, misconduct and negligence by businesses and fiduciaries. For more information about Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP please visit www.ktmc.com.

CONTACT:

Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP

James Maro, Jr., Esq.

280 King of Prussia Road

Radnor, PA 19087

(484) 270-1453

info@ktmc.com

A video accompanying this release is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/38a4bbc2-8ead-4e8e-a78f-270020753b6c
DENVER, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ibotta, the company that disrupted the 100 year-old paper coupon industry with digital cash back rewards, announced plans to dramatically change the advertising landscape with the Ibotta Performance Network (IPN). The IPN is an industry-leading publisher and retail network that will soon reach more than 120 million shoppers in the US. This expanded platform gives advertisers unprecedented scale to launch pay for sale performance marketing campaigns.



Ibotta has been a trailblazer since its launch more than 10 years ago. The company consistently delivers industry leading ROI and data analysis to advertisers and retailers. Founder Bryan Leach started Ibotta with the belief that the best way for ad campaigns to drive conversion, from awareness to purchase, is by cutting the consumer in on the deal. That belief paid off with more than 40 million Ibotta app downloads to date and more than $1.1 billion (USD) in cash back reward offers redeemed. Unlike success metrics like gross impressions and click-through, each Ibotta offer is tied to the completed sale of an advertised product or service.

With the launch of the new IPN, Ibotta expands its scope to deliver B2B Rewards as a Service (RAAS) solutions to retailers, publishers, and advertisers in the CPG space and beyond. Since the day we launched, Ibotta has looked to strengthen the connections between advertisers, retailers, and consumers, said Bryan Leach, founder and CEO of Ibotta. As we built our reputation with consumers, the relationships we made with advertisers and retailers kept getting stronger and stronger, producing a flywheel effect. We listened to their needs and realized we absolutely had the technology to provide solutions to their biggest challenges."

E-commerce is expected to account for 21.5% of all grocery sales within five years, according to a study by Mercatus and Incisiv, with 43% of shoppers purchasing groceries online in 2020 compared to just 24% in 2018. During the pandemic, population groups of 45 years and older made dramatic shifts to online shopping, with 46% adopting curbside pickup and 35% of shoppers ordering groceries online for the first time. More recently, 43% of all grocery shoppers cite shopping online in the last six months. This shift in consumer behavior means more shoppers than ever will be available to consider digital cash back reward offers prior to purchase.

Retailers benefit from increased traffic and the ability to create closed loop rewards programs, encouraging loyalty with consumer savings that are redeemable on future store trips. This summer Walmart joins the IPN, enabling advertisers to give brands high-profile exposure with purchase-ready shoppers at the nations largest retailer.

IPN campaigns are easy for advertisers to create, plug into the network and manage. Ibotta becomes the one-stop-shop to access the entire network and handles all the RAAS heavy lifting, including program setup and targeting, content delivery, purchase data ingestion, rewards adjudication, cash out and payments, billing and budgeting, anti-stacking and fraud prevention, reporting and analytics. Advertisers monitor performance and adjust strategies as needed using the easy-to-navigate IPN dashboard.

Ibotta Debuts New Brand Campaign

To support the launch of the expanded IPN, Ibotta will launch its first B2B brand identity campaign, including print, digital, and experiential ads built around the idea that promotions will never be the same. The recent and upcoming changes by Apple and Google, and the continued focus on privacy, signal the end of digital marketing as we've known it, said Rich Donahue, Chief Marketing Officer for Ibotta. Advertisers are wondering, whats next? We created this campaign to showcase the opportunities that Ibotta and the IPN can offer at scale, a full spectrum of performance marketing services to help advertisers and retailers navigate the changing landscape of advertising.

The B2B campaign and visuals feature the Ibotta brand colors as a spectrum of services. Each one represents unique opportunities for advertisers and retailers to partner with Ibotta. From at-scale opportunities in promotions (cash back offers distributed across the IPN), to the unique capabilities of the Ibotta properties (the Ibotta app, browser extension, and Ibotta.com), to data, insights and media, Ibotta has proven solutions to help advertisers and retailers navigate this challenging digital advertising ecosystem.

The initial campaign will showcase all colors and speak to the value of the entire network, while subsequent executions will be more targeted for the unique capabilities Ibotta can offer and be laser-targeted towards specific B2B audiences.

About Ibotta

Headquartered in Denver, Colo., Ibotta ("I bought a...") is a free-to-use cash back rewards platform that has delivered more than $1.1 billion in cumulative cash rewards to its users for making purchases in-store, on mobile apps, or online. Launched in 2012, Ibotta has more than 40 million downloads and is one of the most frequently used shopping and rewards platforms, offering cash back on purchases from more than 2,700 leading brands and retail partners. In addition to its owned properties, Ibotta also powers closed loop rewards programs for top retailers and makes its offer content available on a number of leading websites, social media platforms, and apps through the Ibotta Performance Network.

Focused on creating an open, and inclusive work environment, Ibotta has also been named as a Top Workplace by The Denver Post for four consecutive years.

Press Contact

Jennifer Belongia-Barak

Head of Public Relations, Ibotta

Jennifer.Belongia-Barak@ibotta.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/af743c44-381d-4b06-85fc-f033e6c26d88
NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWS WIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES



VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- FIREWEED ZINC LTD. (Fireweed or the Company) (TSXV: FWZ; OTCQB: FWEDF; FSE: 20F) is pleased to announce that it has closed the first tranche of the previously announced non-brokered private placement (the Offering). This tranche consists of 5,586,444 Common Shares at a price of CAD$0.70 per share and 7,200,000 flow-through common shares at a price of CAD$0.99 per share (Flow-Through Shares) for total proceeds of $11,038,511. Remaining orders will be closed once all necessary subscription agreements and filings are complete.

The proceeds from the Offering will be used for exploration and development of the Companys Macmillan Pass Project in Yukon, Canada, and for general working capital purposes. The gross proceeds from the issuance of all Flow-Through Shares will be used to incur Canadian Exploration Expenses (CEE) and will qualify as flow-through mining expenditures under the Income Tax Act (Canada), which will be renounced to the purchasers of Flow-Through Shares with an effective date no later than December 31, 2022 in an aggregate amount no less than the proceeds raised from the issue of the Flow-Through Shares.

Closing of the Offering is subject to certain customary conditions, including, but not limited to, the receipt of all necessary regulatory approvals and acceptance of the TSX Venture Exchange. All securities issued under the Offering will be subject to a statutory hold period of four months plus a day following the date of closing. The Company may pay finders fees on a portion of the Offering, subject to compliance with the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange and applicable securities legislation.

About Fireweed Zinc Ltd. (TSXV: FWZ): Fireweed Zinc is a public mineral exploration company focused on zinc-lead-silver and managed by a veteran team of mining industry professionals. The Company is advancing its district-scale 940 km2 Macmillan Pass Project in Yukon, Canada, which is host to the 100% owned Tom and Jason zinc-lead-silver deposits with current Mineral Resources and a PEA economic study (see Fireweed news releases dated January 10, 2018, and May 23, 2018, respectively, and reports filed on www.sedar.com for details) as well as the Boundary Zone, Tom North Zone and End Zone which have significant zinc-lead-silver mineralization drilled but not yet classified as mineral resources. The project also includes large blocks of adjacent claims (MAC, MC, MP, Jerry, BR, NS, Oro, Sol, Ben, and Stump) which cover exploration targets in the district where previous and recent work identified zinc, lead and silver prospects, and geophysical and geochemical anomalies in prospective host geology.

In Canada, Fireweed (TSXV: FWZ) trades on the TSX Venture Exchange. In the USA, Fireweed (OTCQB: FWEDF) trades on the OTCQB Venture Market for early stage and developing U.S. and international companies. Companies are current in their reporting and undergo an annual verification and management certification process. Investors can find Real-Time quotes and market information for the Company on www.otcmarkets.com. In Europe, Fireweed (FSE: 20F) trades on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

Additional information about Fireweed Zinc and its Macmillan Pass Zinc Project including maps and drill sections can be found on the Companys website at www.FireweedZinc.com and at www.sedar.com.

ON BEHALF OF FIREWEED ZINC LTD.

Brandon Macdonald

CEO & Director

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary Statements

Offering Disclosure Statements

This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities in the United States. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act"), or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to U.S. Persons unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or an exemption from such registration is available.

Forward Looking Statements

This news release may contain forward-looking statements and information relating to the Company and the Macmillan Pass Project that are based on the beliefs of Company management, as well as assumptions made by and information currently available to Company management. There is no assurance the Company will be able to complete the Offering on the terms as outlined above, or at all. The Company does not undertake to update forwardlooking statements or forwardlooking information, except as required by law.

Contact:

Brandon Macdonald

Phone: (604) 646-8361
Dublin, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "2021 Cloud Technology Research Review" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global cloud-based contact centers market should reach $43.3 billion by 2026 from $14.0 billion in 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25.3% for the forecast period of 2021 to 2026.

The global video conferencing market should reach $27.3 billion by 2026 from $12.5 billion in 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.9% for the forecast period of 2021 to 2026.

The global VoIP services market should reach $102.5 billion by 2026 from $85.2 billion in 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.8% for the forecast period of 2021 to 2026.

We live in an era when knowledge-based economies are the norm. Information is a precious asset nowadays, and how we disseminate it affects how successful we are. We've come a long way in terms of how we communicate and trade information. Even so, the introduction of cloud technology solutions has been a game changer.



Cloud technology, or cloud computing, has revolutionized the way we store and distribute data. It has given users the ability to bypass the limitations of needing a physical device to share information, and it has opened a whole new world of online possibilities.



Cloud technology allows users to access and store data via the internet rather than a physical hard drive. Google Drive, iCloud or Dropbox are a few cloud technology services. These cloud-based services keep all the data solely on the internet, which allows users to save up space on devices and imparts other advantages in terms of facilitating data sharing and collaboration. Cloud hosting is made possible by cloud technology. As the name implies, companies that specialize in cloud computing host their own cloud service.



Research Reviews provide market professionals with concise market coverage within a specific research category. This 2021 Research Review of cloud technology provides a sampling of the type of quantitative market information, analysis, and guidance. This Research Review includes highlights and excerpts from the following reports published in 2021 -

IFT239A Global Cloud-Based Contact Center Market.

IFT234A Video Conferencing: Global Markets to 2026.

IFT237A VoIP Services Market.

IFT232A Global Data Warehouse as a Service Market.

Key Topics Covered:



Chapter 1 Foreword



Chapter 2 Global Cloud-Based Contact Center Market (IFT239A)

Overview

Study Goals and Objectives

Reasons for Doing This Study

Scope of Report

Methodology and Information Sources

Geographic Breakdown

Summary and Highlights

Market Overview

Introduction

Future of Cloud-Based Contact Centers

Market Dynamics

Impact of COVID-19 on the Global Market for Cloud-Based Contact Centers

Market Breakdown by Component

Overview

Solutions

Services

Market Breakdown by Deployment Mode

Overview

Public Cloud

Private Cloud

Hybrid Cloud

Market Breakdown by Organization Size

Overview

Large Enterprises

Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Chapter 3 Video Conferencing: Global Markets to 2026 (IFT234A)

Introduction

Study Goals and Objectives

Scope of Report

Reasons for Doing the Study

Intended Audiences

Information Sources

Methodology

Geographic Breakdown

Summary and Highlights

Market Overview

Introduction

Current Market and Future Expectations

Evolution of Video Conferencing Technology

Impact of COVID-19 on the Market for Video Conferencing

Market Dynamics

Video Conferencing Technology Trends

Video Conferencing Advanced Protocols and Codecs

Implementation of Video Conferencing Using WebRTC

Patent Analysis

Video Conferencing Architecture

Some Video Conferencing Use Cases

Market Breakdown by Solution

Introduction

Hardware

Software

Services

Market Breakdown by Deployment Mode

Introduction

On-premise

Cloud

Hybrid

Market Breakdown by System

Introduction

Integrated System

Telepresence System

Desktop System

Service-based Video Conferencing Systems

Market Breakdown by Application

Introduction

Corporate Communications

Training and Development

Marketing and Client Engagement

Chapter 4 VoIP Services Market (IFT237A)

Introduction

Study Goals and Objectives

Reasons for Doing This Study

Scope of Report

Information Sources

Methodology

Intended Audience

Geographic Breakdown

Summary and Highlights

Summary

Study Highlights

Market Overview and Background

Market Overview

What is VoIP?

How Does It Work?

Evolution of VoIP

Main Features of VoIP

Comparison of PSTN vs. VoIP

Advantages and Disadvantages of VoIP

Advantages of Using VoIP Services for Businesses, Consumers and Service Providers

VoIP Classification

Regulatory Challenges

Market Dynamics

Trends in VoIP Services

COVID-19 Impact Analysis

Market Breakdown by Call Type

Introduction

International VoIP

Domestic VoIP

Market Breakdown by Access Type

Introduction

Computer to Computer

Computer to Phone

Phone to Phone

Market Breakdown by Service Type

Introduction

SIP Trunking

Hosted IP PBX

Managed IP PBX

Market Breakdown by Medium

Introduction

Fixed

Mobile

Chapter 5 Global Data Warehouse as a Service Market (IFT232A)

Introduction

Study Goals and Objectives

Reasons for Doing This Study

Scope of Report

Information Sources

Methodology

Intended Audience

Geographic Breakdown

Summary and Highlights

Summary

Market and Technology Background

Evolution of the Data Warehouse Industry

Key Trends in Data Warehouse as a Service

Platform Comparison Chart

Benefits of Data Warehouse as a Service

Geographic Location of the Data Warehouse

Market Drivers

Market Restraints

Market Opportunity

Impact of COVID-19 on Data Warehouse as a Service Market

Regulatory Bodies for Data Warehouse as a Service Market

Market Breakdown by Type

Overview

Enterprise Data Warehouse

Operational Data Warehouse

Market Breakdown by Deployment Model

Overview

Public Cloud

Private Cloud

Hybrid Cloud

Market Breakdown by Application

Overview

Customer Analytics

Fraud Detection and Threat Management

Supply Chain Management

Asset Management

Others

Market Breakdown by Service

Overview

Data Integration and Migration

Data Cleaning

Administration, Support and Maintenance

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/y7zmrk
Wang Yi's visit lends credence to strength of China-India ties

15:01, April 06, 2022 By Rabi Sankar Bosu ( People's Daily Online

Visiting Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi (L) talks with Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar in New Delhi, India, March 25, 2022. Photo:Xinhua

China and India should be partners for mutual success instead of adversaries of mutual attrition, this was the key message on the India-China relationship delivered by Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi at a press conference on the sidelines of the country's 2022 Two Sessions on March 7. Quoting an Indian proverb, he further said, Help your brother's boat across, and your own boat will reach the shore. His eloquent message is a clear indication that the two close neighbors  China and India  should cooperate with each other and engage in dialogue to resolve the several hotspot issues affecting bilateral ties.

The bloody memories of the incident in the Galwan Valley at the western section of the China-India boundary, which occurred in June 2020 between the Indian and Chinese militaries, have not faded yet. There is no denying that the untoward incident has visibly fragmented the Sino-Indian relationship, tearing both countries apart and significantly affecting the socio-economic dimensions of two Himalayan neighbors for the past two years.

Against this backdrop, and as part of a pan-South Asian tour to Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nepal, Wang Yi paid a visit to India on March 25 in a bid to advance mutually beneficial cooperation and in order to put an end to the diplomatic frostiness between the two Asian powers.

Wang Yi is the highest-level Chinese official to visit India since the border clashes at the Galwan Valley. The duration of Wangs stay in New Delhi was short but the canvas of his visit was of great symbolic significance at a time when Sino-Indian relations seem to be in a very difficult phase, which has arisen from a long-standing military standoff.

Indian and Chinese national flags flutter side by side at the Raisina hills in New Delhi, India, in this file photo. [Photo/Xinhua]

Wang Yis New Delhi visit can be seen as an icebreaker. His visit demonstrated that the two countries are ready to make some course corrections in their approach to each other as bilateral cooperation  particularly in the areas of trade and economic partnership and people-to-people relations  has suffered to a large degree as a result of the ongoing border dispute.

In a statement, the Chinese Foreign Minister said that the two sides should not allow the border dispute to define their relationship or to affect the overall development of bilateral ties. China does not pursue a so-called unipolar Asia and respects India's traditional role in the region. China is ready to explore China-India Plus cooperation in South Asia and forge a sound model for interaction so as to achieve mutual benefit and win-win results at a higher level and in a wider range, Wang said, according to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

It has been reported that during the meetings both sides also exchanged their views on the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, the Afghan issue, COVID-19 responses and other multilateral issues.

US-India Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

The Ukraine crisis has offered both India and China a chance to stand together against the United States, which is merely using Ukraine as a pawn. India didnt join the U.S.-led western camp to impose sanctions against Russia, for which the U.S. has already put India at some pressure. So far, both India and China abstained on Ukraine-related resolutions at the UN Security Council and Human Rights Council. It is an opportune time, therefore, for the two close neighbors to speak out in one voice against the U.S. for its failure to assume due responsibility, including how the U.S.-backed NATO alliance in Europe ignored Russias security concerns as well.

The essence of Wang Yi's visit has demonstrated that both sides are determined to enhance mutual trust and focus on cooperation while properly managing differences in a bid to take the bilateral relationship to a new level.

It is unrealistic to expect that India and China will have no differences and all unresolved issues will disappear in the near future, but bilateral dialogue will go a long way to help reset testy India-China ties on the basis of mutual respect. On the whole, Wangs visit will surely have lent some credence to the strength of China-India ties while offering a heightened promise and stronger confidence in the trade and economic patterns that characterize the dance of the Dragon and the Elephant, providing more benefits to the two peoples residing on either side of the Himalayas.

Rabi Sankar Bosu is founder and secretary of New Horizon Radio Listeners' Club, a Sino-India friendship club based in West Bengal, India.

The opinions expressed in the article reflect those of the author, and not necessarily those of People's Daily Online.

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The Formula 1 drivers are getting ready for the third race weekend, but for Sebastian Vettel it is different. The German had to miss the first two Grands Prix due to an infection by the coronavirus. However, he will be back in Australia.

Vettel decided to leave Ferrari in late 2020 and signed a contract with Aston Martin. At the racing stable, he hoped to raise the level, but only partially succeeded. With the new regulations, Vettel wanted to change that this season, only he faced several disappointments.

Vettel had to be patient

Not only did the car not turn out to be good enough to finish in the top ten in Bahrain or Saudi Arabia, Vettel also had to deal with corona. It resulted in Nico Hulkenberg having to take over his duties twice and Vettel only starting his season this coming weekend.

"After testing positive and missing the first two races, it feels a bit like arriving late to school, so Im really keen to get going again," Vettel revealed to Formula1.com. "For me, after nearly a month out of the car, it will be important to learn throughout the practice sessions, and I hope we can take some steps forward in what is usually an exciting and unpredictable race."

Read more How Lawrence Stroll turned a formula for success into a weaker team
Valtteri Bottas has been under contract to Alfa Romeo since this season. Whereas the team was happy with the points last year, the Finnish driver hopes to achieve more with the racing stable this season.

Bottas tried for years at Mercedes to compete with Lewis Hamilton for the world title, but fell short of his rival. At the end of last season, Mercedes and the driver parted ways, after which Bottas embarked on a new adventure with Alfa Romeo.

The new season started hopeful for Bottas. In the opening race in Bahrain, he managed to finish sixth. Although he was forced to retire early a week later in Saudi Arabia due to problems with his car, he knows what he has to do in the coming months.

Ambitious Bottas expresses expectations

Partly due to the new regulations, Alfa Romeo has managed to compete with the subtop. It means that Bottas can suddenly take the fight to his old team. Ahead of the Australian Grand Prix, he tells Formule1.nl that he hopes to finish in the top five every race: "That should be the goal for now."
Fernando Alonso is upbeat about the speed of his Alpine A522. According to the two-time world champion, he should have been higher in the standings. In Saudi Arabia, Alonso did not score any points because he crashed out with technical problems.

Alpine F1 Team is starting the 2022 Formula One season reasonably strongly. In Bahrain both cars managed to finish in the points and in Saudi Arabia Esteban Ocon finished in a neat sixth place. A place where Alonso could have finished if he didn't have problems.

Alonso wants to be higher

"We deserve to be much higher in the standings after two races. Our car has been good and the performance has also been good over the weekends," Alonso says in a press release from his team.

In Jeddah, Alonso seemed to be on his way to a sixth overall finish, but then his car stalled with technical problems. The 40-year-old driver says he is frustrated by missing out on points, but remains positive about the pace the A522 had on Sunday. Currently, Alonso's stands in thirteenth place in the drivers standings with just two points behind his name.
General Motors and Honda plan to expand the two companies relationship by codeveloping a series of affordable electric vehicles based on a new global architecture using next-generation Ultium battery technology.

The companies are working together to enable global production of millions of EVs starting in 2027, including compact crossover vehicles, leveraging the two companies technology, design and sourcing strategies. The companies will also work toward standardizing equipment and processes to achieve world-class quality, higher throughput and greater affordability.

The compact crossover segment is the largest in the world, with annual volumes of more than 13 million vehicles.

GM and Honda also will discuss future EV battery technology collaboration opportunities, to further drive down the cost of electrification, improve performance and drive sustainability for future vehicles.

GM is already working to accelerate new technologies such as lithium-metal, silicon and solid-state batteries, along with production methods that can quickly be used to improve and update battery cell manufacturing processes. Honda is making progress on its all-solid-state battery technology which the company sees as the core element of future EVs. Honda has established a demonstration line in Japan for all-solid-state batteries and is making further progress toward mass-production.

GM and Honda will share our best technology, design and manufacturing strategies to deliver affordable and desirable EVs on a global scale, including our key markets in North America, South America and China. This is a key step to deliver on our commitment to achieve carbon neutrality in our global products and operations by 2040 and eliminate tailpipe emissions from light duty vehicles in the US by 2035. By working together, well put people all over the world into EVs faster than either company could achieve on its own. Mary Barra, GM chair and CEO

The progress we have made with GM since we announced the EV battery development collaboration in 2018, followed by co-development of electric vehicles including the Honda Prologue, has demonstrated the win-win relationship that can create new value for our customers. This new series of affordable EVs will build on this relationship by leveraging our strength in the development and production of high quality, compact class vehicles. Shinji Aoyama, Honda senior managing executive officer

Our collaboration with Honda and the continuing development of Ultium are the foundation of this project, utilizing our global scale to enable a lower cost foundation for this new series of EVs for millions of customers. Our plans include a new all-electric product for North America positioned at a price point lower than the upcoming Chevrolet Equinox EV, building on the 2 million units of EV capacity the company plans to install by the end of 2025. Doug Parks, GM executive vice president, Global Product Development, Purchasing and Supply Chain

GM and Honda have developed a close working relationship over many years, including several projects in recent years focused on electric and autonomous vehicle technologies.

In 2013, the two companies began working together on the co-development of a next-generation fuel cell system and hydrogen storage technologies. In 2018, Honda joined GMs EV battery module development efforts. In 2020, GM and Honda announced plans to codevelop two EVs, including the Honda Prologue, to be launched in early 2024, soon followed by Acuras first EV SUV. Further, the companies have an ongoing relationship with Cruise and are working together on the development of the Cruise Origin, one of the first purpose-built fully autonomous vehicles designed for driverless ride-hail and delivery.
The federal government has requested a five-year sentence for a former Vermont ski resort executive accused in a failed plan to build a biotechnology plant using tens of millions of dollars in foreign investors money raised through a special visa program.

William Stenger, 73, the former president of the Jay Peak Ski Resort, is requesting a sentence of home confinement when he is sentenced next week, according to a court filing from his lawyers on Tuesday that says both Stenger and his wife have significant health problems.

Stenger and Miami businessman Ariel Quiros, the former owner of Jay Peak and Burke Mountain ski resorts, and two other men were indicted in 2019 over the failed plan to build the AnC Bio plant in Newport, Vermont, using millions raised through the EB-5 visa program that encourages foreigners to invest in U.S. projects that create jobs in exchange for a chance to earn permanent U.S. residency.

Stenger pleaded guilty last August to providing false documents. The government dropped nine fraud charges.

Government lawyers say Stenger came up with the idea for the AnC Vermont EB-5 project and championed it despite evidence that it did not legitimately qualify as an EB-5 project, according to their sentencing recommendation filed Monday. They say Stenger lied to investors, the Vermont Regional Center, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the Securities and Exchange Commission about the revenue and job prospects and was responsible for raising over $80 million from investors based on lies and deceit."

They also accused Stenger of authorizing tens of millions of dollars in cost overruns on two earlier EB-5 projects at Jay Peak and authorizing the misuse of investor funds to pay those overruns.

"The criminal conduct committed by Stenger and his co-defendants caused more widespread harm than any criminal case in this districts history," assistant U.S. attorneys Paul Van de Graaf and Nicole Cate wrote.

Stenger's lawyers say his primary motivation has always been to develop and improve the economy of the rural northeastern corner of Vermont, known as the Northeast Kingdom, and he thought the EB-5 program "presented an unparalleled opportunity to create good high-paying jobs," according to court documents. They said Stenger received very little money for participating in the EB-5 matter, $20,000 compared to the millions Quiros and his advisor realized.

Not an hour goes by that Mr. Stenger does not think about his mistakes or feel regret for his actions, Brooks McArthur and David Williams wrote. He feels he will never recover from the devastation and heartbreak he caused the EB-5 investors, the employees of Jay Peak and Burke Mountain, the Northeast Kingdom community, and his family.

In 2016, the federal Securities and Exchange Commission and the state of Vermont alleged that Quiros and Stenger took part in a massive eight-year fraudulent scheme. The civil allegations involved misusing more than $200 million of about $400 million raised from foreign investors for various ski area developments through the EB-5 visa program in Ponzi-like fashion.

Quiros and Stenger settled civil charges with the SEC, with Quiros surrendering more than $80 million in assets, including the two resorts. Quiros has pleaded guilty to criminal charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering and the concealment of material information in the failed plant plan and is awaiting sentencing.
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GREENWICH  The first glimpse of the future home of Central Middle School is expected to be prepared by the end of the month. But before putting pen to paper, Construction Solutions Group staff members drove from East Hartford to Greenwich to hear the communitys thoughts on the new building.

Some attendees of the forum on the CMS educational specifications remarked that the turnout was low, but those who came to the schools auditorium were prepared to share opinions about the design of the new school.

Were just trying to have as much outreach as possible because were on a very quick pathway to get our ed specs so that we can get a building committee and get started, Greenwich Public Schools superintendent Toni Jones said.

She said she plans to send a survey to families and community members to hear from those who could not attend Tuesday night.

Its Central Middle School first, but its also a very lively community building. So were making sure that the community has what they need as well, CMS principal Tom Healy said. Were all working together to that consensus to have a great new opportunity with this facility.

The school board had planned to replace the aging middle school building in the future, but moved up the timetable after it was closed for nearly three weeks after it was deemed unsafe for occupancy on Feb. 4. An engineering assessment by Diversified Technology Consultants outlined significant structural concerns, and town inspectors shut down the school after a walk-through.

CMS students were moved to three other schools while the town shored up the buildings degrading wall ties. Crews installed custom scaffolding, or sidewalk bridging, around the gym and breezeway to the science building to make the building safe to reopen.

The consultants from CSG have met with school staff, elected bodies and public works in recent days to hear how the space will be used. A few teachers even drew up what they would like their classrooms to look like, Healy said. The sketches were beyond the scope of educational specifications, which give an overview of the schools needs for an architect to use during the design phase.

The district will submit the educational specifications to the state for its grant application. CSG Vice President Chris Cykley said it takes a year to get approval, but the district can carry out the design process during that time.

The community comments that were offered often extended beyond educational specifications and into the building design and even hours of construction.

Please keep the entrance where it is now. Were currently set; this is our neighborhood in our community. It would be a huge disservice to have the building circle enter and exit on Orchard Street, neighbor and CMS parent Katie Novak said. Please be cognizant that these are peoples homes.

Some neighbors sought to solve traffic congestion and said they hoped the new school would find a better flow.

The district put up large pieces of paper with categories such as fields and parking and traffic in rooms near the auditorium. Participants had an opportunity to write suggestions on sticky notes and place stickers on ideas they agreed with.

Another common suggestion was to forgo a turf field. The sticky notes suggesting natural grass received the most stickers of agreement.

Adrian, an eighth grade student, asked for improved wireless connectivity and room-by-room heating.

In the increasingly digital world we live in, it can really slow down our ability to, say, load Google Docs, or log into Zoom. Id also like to advocate for heating that can be controlled per room, because right now, often in some rooms, its like 90 degrees and in some rooms like 60, he said.

His mother Frances Wu Nobay also spoke. The whole idea of having a hybrid learning experience when needed to be able to either Zoom with your students that might be at home sick or in quarantine or across the country or across the world  thats the type of space that needs to be supported, she said. So a room of three rows of five desks each isnt the type of space that Im imagining for the future CMS.

We wouldnt be talking about hybrid five or six years ago; weve changed, you know, CSG education specialist Fran DiFiore said. You can say what you want about COVID, but it changed the way we look at things. We changed the way we look at education.

She said new considerations of wellness have been discussed.

We talked about wellness, and we talked about mental health. And we had an extensive conversation, extensive conversation with the special ed staff here. We talked about whats important and those areas for kids to chill, DiFiore said. There are so many important conversations that take place now that we know times have changed.

Despite constant innovation, some aspects of school construction remain steady, she said. In her 35 years of experience in education, they have learned from mistakes, such as not putting bathrooms close to public spaces like the gymnasium.

One problem with the current CMS building is a media center that is far from the technology, arts and music centers, Healy said. His vision is to foster project-based learning in the new environment, which requires hands-on departments to be placed near similar areas of study.

The CSG consultants said some of the problems with the current building, such as a lack of ADA accessibility, will be resolved because the new structure must conform to current building standards. The new middle school building is set to for completion in January 2026.

The Board of Education approved a $150,000 expenditure in late February for educational specifications and an environmental impact study for the new CMS building.

CMS is a polling location, and also hosts meetings of the Board of Education and the Representative Town Meeting.

This is a school that has community use, so it is important to hear from them, DiFiore said. She said CSG is always looking for input but doesnt commonly hold a meeting such as Tuesdays forum.

annelise.hanshaw@hearstmediact.com
ERIE, Pa. (AP)  A juvenile suspect being sought in a shooting that injured another student inside a northwestern Pennsylvania high school has turned himself in to police, authorities said.

Earlier today, the suspect in yesterdays school shooting turned himself in to the Erie police department," Erie city officials said in a social media post Wednesday evening.

Erie police earlier said the suspect left the school after multiple shots were fired just after 9:20 a.m. Tuesday in a hallway at Erie High School. The injured student was taken to a hospital and was said to be in stable condition.

Mike Nolan, deputy chief of the Erie police department, said investigators were confident that it was what he called an isolated targeted incident and not a random act of violence. He declined to discuss a possible motive but said both victim and suspect were students at the high school.

Nolan said juvenile allegations had already been filed. District Attorney Elizabeth Hirz indicated that the suspect would face only juvenile charges because the persons age is younger than 15. Nolan said the 9mm weapon used hadnt been recovered and the exact number of shots fired hadnt yet been confirmed.

The school district has said there would be no school for Erie High School students for the remainder of the week, with the annual spring break to be observed next week. Officials said counselors would be available for students, staff and parents at an adult education school.

Officials said they would release detailed information in the coming days about the plan for a return to school and vowed to take every measure possible" to ensure the safety of students and staff.
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PEMBROKE, Ga. (AP)  After violent storms blamed for killing at least three people, Southerners cleared fallen trees from roadways Wednesday and began cleaning up debris from homes and buildings smashed by suspected tornadoes as forecasters warned more violent weather was likely on the way.

In southeast Georgia, residents of Bryan County had barely begun recovery efforts after a likely tornado touched down Tuesday evening, killing one woman and injuring several other people, when local officials urged them to halt work by mid-afternoon Wednesday and take shelter for the night.

The National Weather Service said another round of tornadoes was possible Wednesday, with heightened risk across a three-state area that included the cities of Atlanta; Birmingham, Alabama; and Knoxville, Tennessee.

Gov. Brian Kemp on Wednesday declared a state of emergency following Tuesday's storms, which were blamed for killing people in Louisiana and Texas. The move effectively frees up state resources to be used in storm recovery and response efforts.

Louisiana state police said Gene Latin, a 65-year-old correctional officer, was killed early Tuesday when he crashed into a tree that had fallen across a highway as storms blew through Webster Parish. And in east Texas, 71-year-old W. M. Soloman died when storm winds toppled a tree onto his home in Whitehouse, said Mayor James Wansley.

In Bryan County, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) west of Savannah, a woman was found dead Tuesday night amid the shredded wreckage of her mobile home in the unincorporated community of Ellabell, said Bryan County Coroner Bill Cox.

It was just completely ripped to pieces, Cox said Wednesday. Its like it exploded.

Cox said the dead womans husband was taken to a hospital with injuries. He did not give her name, saying relatives were still being notified.

A motorists cellphone video taken in Bryan County showed a large funnel cloud crossing Interstate 16 as drivers braked and pulled to the side of the roadway.

In the county seat of Pembroke, large sections of roof got torn off the courthouse and the entryway to a government building across was demolished. The storm destroyed at least 18 homes in the county and left more than 10 others with major damage, according to the Georgia Emergency Management Agency. Several people were injured, said Matthew Kent, a Bryan County government spokesperson.

Kemp toured the destruction Wednesday and said it was fortunate the twister did not stay on the ground very long, or the damage and loss of life would likely have been much worse. Places where it did touch down, he said, got hit hard.

It is literally total devastation for some homes, Kemp said. We walked through a house where theres no wood left on that house. Its nothing but a foundation with a water heater sitting there.

In South Carolina, about a dozen homes were destroyed or heavily damaged Tuesday in rural Allendale County. Tractors and other equipment were flipped and twisted on a number of farms in South Carolinas least populated county. Other storms caused damage to solar panels near Bowman and flipped vehicles and shopping carts in a Walmart parking lot in Manning.

National Weather Service forecasters planned to survey damage from several possible tornadoes in Georgia and South Carolina, but said that effort could be interrupted by the potential for more storms Wednesday.

In Alabama, the weather service said it was sending survey teams to examine potential tornado damage in the Wetumpka area.

More than 7,000 customers in Texas and more than 3,000 in Georgia remained without power Wednesday afternoon, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks outages nationwide.
KYIV, Ukraine - Inside a warehouse, in a bustling section of this capital, the incessant cracking sound of gunfire echoed off walls. Men in olive-colored camouflage were training for war. Most wore helmets and bulletproof jackets. Some wore high-top sneakers. All clutched AK-47 rifles and waited for their turn to shoot at a round target 50 yards away.

It was centered with Russian President Vladimir Putin's face - and peppered with bullet holes.

Invisible, yet palpable, was the shadow cast over this new regiment, like every unit of the Azov Battalion. Alexi Suliyma knew about its ugly past, but he joined anyway. Two friends were in the force, and he felt the Azov would best train him to defend his motherland.

"These are guys who simply love their country and Ukrainian people," said Suliyma, 23, a former construction worker. "I never knew them to be Nazis or fascists, never heard them make calls for the Third Reich."

Of all the Ukrainian forces fighting the invading Russian military, the most controversial is the Azov Battalion. It is among Ukraine's most adept military units and has battled Russian forces in key sites, including the besieged city of Mariupol and near the capital, Kyiv. With Russian forces withdrawing from areas north of Kyiv last week and possibly repositioning in southern and eastern Ukraine, which Moscow has declared as its primary focus, the Azov forces could grow in significance.

But the battalion's far-right nationalist ideology has raised concerns that it is attracting extremists, including white supremacist neo-Nazis, who could pose a future threat. When Putin cast his assault on Ukraine as a quest to "de-Nazify" the country, seeking to delegitimize the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian nationalism as fascist, he was partly referring to the Azov forces. While they are now fighting for a Jewish president whose relatives were killed fighting the Nazis, they have continued to be fodder for Russian propaganda as Putin seeks to convince Russians that his costly invasion of Ukraine was necessary.

Yet interviews with Azov fighters and one of its founders, as well as experts who have tracked the battalion from its beginnings, provide a more nuanced picture of its current state, which is more complex than what is conventionally known.

The battalion's own leaders and fighters concede that some extremists remain in their ranks, but it has evolved since its emergence in 2014 during the conflict in eastern Ukraine against Russian forces and Moscow-backed separatists.

Under pressure from U.S. and Ukrainian authorities, the Azov battalion has toned down its extremist elements. And the Ukrainian military has also become stronger in the past eight years and therefore less reliant on paramilitary groups. Moreover, today's war against Russia is far different than in 2014, fueled less by political ideology than a sense of patriotism and moral outrage at Russia's unprovoked assault on Ukraine, especially its civilian population. Extremists do not appear to make up a large part of the foreigners who have arrived here to take up arms against Russia, analysts said.

"You have fighters now coming from all over the world that are energized by what Putin has done," said Colin P. Clarke, director of research at the Soufan Group, an intelligence and security consulting firm. "And so it's not even that they're in favor of one ideology or another - they're just aghast by what they've seen the Russians doing."

"That certainly wasn't the same in 2014," he added. "So while the far-right element is still a factor, I think it's a much smaller part of the overall whole. It's been diluted, in some respects."

Analysts also noted that Ukraine's far-right movement is not just small in Ukraine, but also is dwarfed by far-right movements in other parts of Europe.

In an interview, the force's co-founder and top commander, Col. Andriy Biletskiy, did not dispute his far-right ultraconservative leanings or the presence of some extremists in his units. But he rejected the allegations of Nazism and white supremacist views, describing such charges as Russian propaganda.

"We don't identify ourselves with the Nazi ideology," said Biletskiy, 41. "We have people of conservative political views, and I see myself as such. But, as any person, I don't want my views to be defined by others. I'm not a Nazi. We completely reject it."

Michael Colborne, who monitors and researches the far right and wrote a book about the Azov, said that he "wouldn't call it explicitly a neo-Nazi movement."

"There are clearly neo-Nazis within its ranks," said Colborne, author of "From the Fires of War: Ukraine's Azov Movement and the Global Far Right."

"There are elements in it who are, you know, neo-fascist and there are elements who are maybe more kind of old-school Ukrainian nationalist," he said. "At its core, it's hostile to liberal democracy. It's hostile to every everything that comes with liberal democracy, minority rights, voting rights, things like that."

The Azov rose up initially in the spring of 2014 as a volunteer force launched by the ultranationalist Patriot of Ukraine and the extremist Social National Assembly. Both groups engaged in xenophobic assaults on migrants, the Roma community and other minorities.

Biletskiy, who served as the leader of both groups, said in 2010 that Ukraine's purpose was to "lead the white races of the world in a final crusade . . . against Semite-led Untermenschen [inferior races]," according to local reports. His supporters called him "Bely Vozd" - "White Ruler."

Biletskiy denied the allegations of xenophobia, saying that Azov forces have attracted Jews from the Israeli Defense Forces as well as Muslim Chechens, which "doesn't really go along with white supremacy." Still, Biletskiy has been quoted in the past expressing white supremacist beliefs; he has denied making those statements.

In 2014, Biletskiy was elected to parliament, where he remained a lawmaker until 2019. In 2016, he created the far-right National Corps party, made up largely of Azov veterans.

The paramilitary unit was initially funded by wealthy Ukrainians and assisted by the nation's then-interior minister, and the investment soon paid off. After the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Azov fighters fended off Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region and kept the strategic port city of Mariupol in Ukrainian hands. "These are our best warriors," Ukraine's then-president, Petro Poroshenko, said publicly at the time.

Transnational support for Azov has been wide, and Ukraine has emerged as a new hub for the far right across the world. Both the Ukrainian and Russian sides have attracted neo-Nazis and far-right extremists, although Moscow's use of them has attracted far less attention in the Western media. Men from across three continents, including members of American and European extremist groups, have been documented to join the Azov units to seek combat experience, engage in similar ideology and as a training ground for operations in their home countries.

Hans-Jakob Schindler, senior director at the Counter Extremism Project, an independent group following extremist organizations, said the war's allure for far-right volunteer fighters is not surprising.

"There's nothing shocking about it," he said. "It's the only conflict you can join." He added: "Where you want to go? To Syria, where Muslims killing Muslims, to West Africa, where Black people kill Black people? As you're a Nazi, that's not the conflict you want to join."

Biletskiy disputed this, describing stories about foreign fighters as "strongly exaggerated." Azov's forces are between 95% to 98% Ukrainian, he said, adding that most foreigners are from Georgia and Belarus with some Americans, Europeans and Canadians. They include, he said, "military adventurists," "devoted anti-communists" and Americans and Europeans of Ukrainian origins fighting for "their ancestors' motherland."

Despite their military successes, the Azov continued to be criticized as adherents to neo-Nazi ideology. Even as they have consistently denied any Nazi affiliations, their uniforms and tattoos on many their fighters display a number of fascist and Nazi symbols, including swastikas and SS symbols. In 2015, Andriy Diachenko, the spokesperson for the regiment at the time, told USA Today that 10 to 20 percent of Azov's recruits were Nazis.

In the following years, U.N. human rights officials accused the Azov regiment of violating international humanitarian laws; both the United States and Canada declared that its forces would not train the Azov fighters due to the unit's links to neo-Nazis, though Washington has since lifted the ban. Some U.S. lawmakers have continued to urge for Azov to be designated a foreign terrorist organization.

Facebook, too, designated the Azov as a "dangerous organization" and banned it from its platforms two years ago. But after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, Facebook reversed its ban, saying it would make "a narrow exception for praise of the Azov regiment strictly in the context of defending Ukraine, or in their role as part of the Ukraine national guard."

The social media giant stressed that it had not lifted the ban on "all hate speech, hate symbolism, praise of violence, generic praise, support, or representation of the Azov regiment." Today, the Azov battalion is getting much praise for strong stand against Russia in Mariupol. The battalion's various Telegram channels post news of their exploits in addition to battlefield videos, detailing their victories in gruesome detail.

The battalion has more than a thousand fighters in Kyiv, Kharviv and Dnipro, and smaller units in six other cities and towns across the nation, said Biletskiy, who estimated the total number of Azov forces at little more than 10,000. In Mariupol alone, he said last week, there were roughly 3,000 fighters taking on 14,000 Russian troops "fighting on the ground, on water and in the Navy SEALs."

Unlike them, the broader Azov political movement, which has a stronger extremist bent, is far less popular, judging by their performance in Ukraine's last elections. Despite slickly produced videos that gave the impression of a massive movement, National Corps, the Azov political arm, won only about 2% of the vote, even though they ran on a united slate with other far-right parties. Most experts put the figures of their core adherents in the hundreds.

The Azov battalion is also not what it was in 2014. Ever since it was incorporated into Ukraine's National Guard late that year, they "had to purge a lot of those extremist elements," said Mollie Saltskog, a senior intelligence analyst at the Soufan Group. "There was much more control exerted over who is affiliated with the battalions."

In contrast to the earlier conflict, many recruits are processed through the official conduit of the newly formed International Legion, where Ukrainian officials said they are properly vetted and asked to respond to questions about their ideology and political leanings.

The war in Ukraine today is also different than it was in 2014. It is attracting volunteers of all political stripes, including from the far left as well as the far right. For even the more hardcore elements in the Azov regiments, ideology has taken a back seat for the moment, analysts said.

"I honestly don't see them pushing a hard line right now," says Colborne. "They want people who know how to fight, and that's going to include some people on the far right and some who don't come from far-right backgrounds."

The Azov forces today, said Biletskiy, now include writers and other liberals, even members of the extreme left and antifascists. "We are at war for the very existence of Ukraine at the moment," he said. "In the past month, I have never asked a person that came to join us about his political views. Today, Ukrainians have only one option of political orientation: for or against Ukraine."

Russia, too, has a long history of supporting or turning a blind eye to neo-Nazi groups and individuals, and far-right figures in the United States and elsewhere have praised Putin since the invasion began. Putin has provided safe haven for the Russian Imperial Movement, a white supremacist militant organization that previously helped Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine, according to the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation. Members of the Wagner Group, a secretive Russian mercenary organization, also have neo-Nazi leanings and are now widely believed to be operating in Ukraine.

If the war drags on, the extremists' presence and influence among the Ukrainians, however minute it is now, could grow, analysts said. Foreigners who joined the fight for other reasons could become radicalized from fighting alongside extremist individuals, the effects of post-traumatic stress syndrome or frustration at Western countries for not doing more to help Ukraine.

"Do these people go back to their countries of origin, particularly in Europe, with a newfound anger against their host nation governments?" asked Clarke of the Soufan Center.

Kyrylo, 35, a bespectacled soldier who wears an Azov patch on his sleeve, said he joined the nationwide call to arms because he wanted to protect his home city of Dnipro. He enlisted in Azov because he shared its far-right nationalist ideology. Before the war he gave "private historical lectures" for the group and previously served on Dnipro's city council, he said.

"People who come to us already have a specific set of values," he said, but he claimed that Azov is not neo-Nazi. "Would Nazis be fighting for the liberal democratic government in Ukraine?"

The pride of the Azov is its special forces battling in Mariupol, as Russian troops have put the city under weeks of siege, choking off supplies and cutting communications, water and electricity. Since Russian forces broke through their front lines earlier this month, they've been waging a guerrilla war against the Russian forces in the city.

"The guys are holding strong against the enemy and will never capitulate," said Andriy, 26, who joined Azov when he was 18 years old and has a "Valhalla Awaits" tattoo stamped on his neck and now commands a unit. "They will fight to their last bullet and their last breath."

Some desperate civilians who arrive in battered cars to the safety of Zaporizhzhia, 135 miles northwest, hailed Azov as "heroes" for holding the lines.

In Kyiv, Suliyma described the Nazi accusations as propaganda peddled by Russia. He said the only convictions that's shared by all Azov fighters was to defeat Moscow. He and his unit, he said, had already engaged in clashes outside of Kyiv, including in Moshchun, a village north of the capital where they pushed the Russians out.

"Moshchun is Ukrainian now," Suliyma said with pride.

Biletskiy said they are trying to weed out the neo-Nazi tattoos and other symbols among Azov fighters, but in the current war he cannot afford to lose any soldier because of political ideology, left or right.

"Every soldier that fights for Ukraine is of value now," he said. "And of value to the Western world, because if Ukraine will break, the next in trouble will be the collective West."

- - -

The Washington Post's Elizabeth Dwoskin in San Francisco contributed to this report.
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WASHINGTON (AP)  Kyiv was a Russian defeat for the ages. The fight started poorly for the invaders and went downhill from there.

When President Vladimir Putin launched his war on Feb. 24 after months of buildup on Ukraine's borders, he sent hundreds of helicopter-borne commandos  the best of the best of Russia's spetsnaz special forces soldiers  to assault and seize a lightly defended airfield on Kyiv's doorstep.

Other Russian forces struck elsewhere across Ukraine, including toward the eastern city of Kharkiv as well as in the contested Donbas region and along the Black Sea coast. But as the seat of national power, Kyiv was the main prize. Thus the thrust by elite airborne forces in the war's opening hours.

But Putin failed to achieve his goal of quickly crushing Ukraines outgunned and outnumbered army. The Russians were ill-prepared for Ukrainian resistance, proved incapable of adjusting to setbacks, failed to effectively combine air and land operations, misjudged Ukraines ability to defend its skies, and bungled basic military functions like planning and executing the movement of supplies.

Thats a really bad combination if you want to conquer a country, said Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel and professor of military history at Ohio State University.

For now at least, Putin's forces have shifted away from Kyiv, to eastern Ukraine. Ultimately, the Russian leader may achieve some of his objectives. Yet his failure to seize Kyiv will be long remembered  for how it defied prewar expectations and exposed surprising weaknesses in a military thought to be one of the strongest in the world.

Its stunning, said military historian Frederick Kagan of the the American Enterprise Institutes Critical Threats Project, who says he knows of no parallel to a major military power like Russia invading a country at the time of its choosing and failing so utterly.

On the first morning of the war, Russian Mi-8 assault helicopters soared south toward Kyiv on a mission to attack Hostomel airfield on the northwest outskirts of the capital. By capturing the airfield, also known as Antonov airport, the Russians planned to establish a base from which to fly in more troops and light armored vehicles within striking distance of the heart of the nation's largest city.

It didnt work that way. Several Russian helicopters were reported to be hit by missiles even before they got to Hostomel, and once settled in at the airfield they suffered heavy losses from artillery fire.

An effort to take control of a military airbase in Vasylkiv south of Kyiv also met stiff resistance and reportedly saw several Russian Il-76 heavy-lift transport planes carrying paratroopers downed by Ukrainian defenses.

Although the Russians eventually managed to control Hostomel airfield, the Ukrainians' fierce resistance in the capital region forced a rethinking of an invasion plan that was based on an expectation the Ukrainians would quickly fold, the West would dither, and Russian forces would have an easy fight.

Air assault missions behind enemy lines, like the one executed at Hostomel, are risky and difficult, as the U.S. Army showed on March 24, 2003, when it sent more than 30 Apache attack helicopters into Iraq from Kuwait to strike an Iraqi Republican Guard division. On their way, the Apaches encountered small arms and anti-aircraft fire that downed one of the helos, damaged others and forced the mission to be aborted. Even so, the U.S. military recovered from that setback and soon captured Baghdad.

The fact that the Hostomel assault by the Russian 45th Guards Special Purpose Airborne Brigade faltered might not stand out in retrospect if the broader Russian effort had improved from that point. But it did not.

The Russians did make small and unsuccessful probes into the heart of Kyiv, and later they tried at great cost to encircle the capital by arcing farther west. Against enormous odds, the Ukrainians held their ground and fought back, stalling the Russians, and put to effective use a wide array of Western arms, including Javelin portable anti-tank weapons, shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and much more.

Last week the Russians abandoned Hostomel airfield as part of a wholesale retreat into Belarus and Russia.

A sidelight of the battle for Kyiv was the widely reported saga of a Russian resupply convoy that stretched dozens of miles along a main roadway toward the capital. It initially seemed to be a worrisome sign for the Ukrainians, but they managed to attack elements of the convoy, which had limited off-road capability and thus eventually dispersed or otherwise became a non-factor in the fight.

They never really provided a resupply of any value to Russian forces that were assembling around Kyiv, never really came to their aid, said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. The Ukrainians put a stop to that convoy pretty quickly by being very nimble, knocking out bridges, hitting lead vehicles and stopping their movement.

Mansoor says the Russians underestimated the number of troops they would need and showed an astonishing inability to perform basic military functions. They vastly misjudged what it would take to win the battle for Kyiv, he says.

This was going to be hard even if the Russian army had proven itself to be competent, he said. Its proven itself to be wholly incapable of conducting modern armored warfare.

Putin was not the only one surprised by his armys initial failures. U.S. and other Western officials had figured that if the invasion happened, Russias seemingly superior forces would slice through Ukraines army like a hot knife through butter. They might seize Kyiv in a few days and the whole country in a few weeks, although some analysts did question whether Putin appreciated how much Ukraine's forces had gained from Western training that intensified after Putin's 2014 seizure of Crimea and incursion into the Donbas.

On March 25, barely a month after the invasion began, the Russians declared they had achieved their goals in the Kyiv region and would shift focus to the separatist Donbas area in eastern Ukraine. Some suspected a Putin ploy to buy time without giving up his maximalist aims, but within days the Kyiv retreat was in full view.

Putin may yet manage to refocus his war effort on a narrower goal of expanding Russian control in the Donbas and perhaps securing a land corridor from the Donbas to the Crimean Peninsula. But his failure in Kyiv revealed weaknesses that suggest Russia is unlikely to try again soon to take down the national capital.

I think they learned their lesson, said Mansoor.
It took the state 12 years  the same amount of time a student can pass from first grade to college  to conclude that the town of Manchester owed it nearly $5 million due to ineligible costs in a state-financed reconstruction of its middle school, Bennet Academy.

The good news for Manchester is that the auditors worked for the Office of School Construction Grants & Review, the same office that initially signed off on the spending. After an appeal to the offices director, Kostantinos Kosta Diamantis, he agreed to waive the debt.

Luckily, Kosta agreed with our argument, said Kimberly Lord, the towns finance director, who said the states initial finding didnt take into account special legislation that altered the reimbursement rate.

The Manchester case, one of 80 reviewed by the Connecticut Mirror, exposes some of the issues now being reviewed by forensic audits commissioned by the administration of Gov. Ned Lamont: audits were woefully late, and the decision to waive some of the overpayments to towns essentially rested with one man  Diamantis.

The audits, obtained by CT Mirror through a Freedom of Information request, were completed between 2018-2020 and will be part of the forensic audit initiated by the state after the federal government launched an investigation of school construction grants overseen by Diamantis.

The federal investigation began last October, shortly before Diamantis was fired from his position as deputy secretary of the Office of Policy and Management and simultaneously retired from his job as head of OSCG&R. The Lamont administration then moved the school construction grant program, which was transferred to OPM when Diamantis was appointed deputy secretary, back to the Department of Administrative Services.

DAS Commissioner Michelle Gilman and Deputy Commissioner Noel Petra announced last month that the agency is hiring an outside firm to audit the auditors who were on Diamantis school grants team.

Hunting for old records

The CT Mirrors review of the audits reveals a dysfunctional system for examining and managing billions of dollars in school construction projects.

The records show OSCG&R was years behind in auditing school projects, mainly because municipalities werent submitting the proper form, called an ED049F, to close out their construction projects and auditors werent properly tracking the projects.

The review also found 15 projects, including the Bennet Academy job, in which auditors determined the municipality owed the state money. While a few paid the bill, some municipalities got the costs waived and at least one town inquired how to pay back the state but never got a response from OSCG&R, the audits show.

Many of those audits were conducted at least a decade after projects were completed, requiring local officials to hunt for old records to prove they spent the states money correctly.

We had to go back and try to retrace everything and we discovered there had been special legislation passed that altered what the reimbursement rate should have been, said Lord.

The Manchester middle school cost about $14 million to build, but auditors determined the state should only cover about $9 million and that the rest were ineligible costs. Lord said the special legislation should have negated the auditors findings.

Nine months after getting the bill, Manchester officials presented their case to Diamantis.

In a January 2020 e-mail to Manchester officials, Michelle Dixon, an education consultant on Diamantis 15-member school construction grant team, wrote that the state would grant an ineligible costs waiver that effectively reduces ineligible construction costs typically due projects of this type with Director (Diamantis) approval.

In an interview Tuesday, Diamantis said that, as director, he had the ability to issue an ineligible cost waiver during the audit process.

I get recommendations from my team and if they agree we should waive a cost then I can do that, Diamantis said.

While most of the audits were directed to the DAS commissioner, Diamantis and other members of his team, three audits were sent directly to Diamantis and not to the commissioner. One of those three was for the Birch Grove Primary School project in Tolland, which is part of the federal investigation into how OSCG&R and Diamantis, in particular, may have influenced school building contracts.

The federal grand jury has subpoenaed not only Tolland officials for documents related to their communication with Diamantis about that project, but also the general contractor, DAmato Construction of Bristol, and the construction manager, Construction Advocacy Professionals (CAP)  both of which were hired through no-bid contracts.

Diamantis said the Birch Grove audit may have come directly to him because it was only for the portion of the project that was 100% funded by the state. There were other parts of the project that the state funded 89%, he said.

That would have just been a desk audit because the project was fully funded so there really was nothing to audit or review, Diamantis said.

In a written response last week to questions from the CT Mirror, DAS spokeswoman Lora Rae Anderson confirmed that when OSCG&R was moved to OPM, the audit unit reported directly to Diamantis. She said that structure was changed when OSCG&R moved back to DAS in late October 2021.

The school construction audit division has a separate reporting chain through the DAS Business Office and not to the Director of OSCG&R, Anderson said. This change was meant to separate out the audit function from grants and plan review program.

At a press conference in early March to discuss the agencys legislative priorities, Petra said changing the auditing process was a clear priority when they began reviewing the program last October.

One of the first things we did when OSCG&R came back to DAS was to remove the internal auditors from that team and put them at an arms length distance over in the business office, Petra said. And then we followed up with a meeting where I made it very clear to them that they no longer had any reporting to me or the director of OSCG&R at all.

Petra added that he told audit team that  if any problems come up, if there was any question that made them concerned or raised any concerns at all, they were to go directly to the commissioner.

But Diamantis disputed that the auditors reported to him directly and said he welcomed the states forensic audit.

When I got there we had projects that were still open from 1998 that the state had never bothered to close out and audit, Diamantis said. I made it clear to any town that wanted more money for a new school project that if you dont complete the paperwork on your old ones first, there would be no more money. I think theyll find a lot more projects got closed out after I got there.

Mostly formulaic

The state received a federal grand jury subpoena seeking all emails, text messages and attachments involving Diamantis and a broad range of construction projects on Oct. 20, eight days before he was fired from his OPM position and retired from his job as school construction grants director.

A second request for documents containing certain search words made it clear federal authorities were investigating Diamantis oversight of the OSCG&R program and how it doled out state funding for school projects.

Diamantis team included at least four auditors and a supervisor, Robert Ficeto, who was copied on every audit, as were Diamantis and Dixon, the education consultant on the team, according to the Memorandum of Understanding created when Diamantis moved to OPM.

At the time the MOU was signed by then-DAS Commissioner Josh Geballe and then-Secretary of OPM Melissa McCaw, there were three vacancies on the audit team, which some municipal officials believe delayed the grants team from completing the audits on a more timely basis.

The audits were usually addressed to the DAS commissioner, which was initially Melody Currey but then shifted to Geballe after he assumed leadership of the agency in 2019.

However, a few were addressed directly to Diamantis. None were addressed to McCaw even though she oversaw Diamantis and the grant program until he was fired.

The audits are mostly formulaic - five- or six-page documents that list ineligible costs for every project - but in many cases give little detail as to their findings.

Some audits reference municipalities not giving contracts to the lowest bidder, but there is no indication of how the state responded, if at all, to that finding.

For example, a March 22, 2019 audit of the New Haven Amistad High School project noted that the Local Education Authority (LEA) didnt utilize the lowest possible bidder without specifying who the contractor was or how much they were paid.

But a Feb. 1, 2019 audit of multiple Bridgeport school projects found that a $24,000 contract with an architectural firm was not properly bid and the state wouldnt pay the bill.

About a quarter of the audits indicated that bid documents were missing, some of which exceeded the states $50,000 no-bid threshold. And more than half of the audits listed unsubstantiated change orders, meaning that state officials did not approve the change order and therefore the municipality must cover the costs.

Anderson, the DAS spokeswoman, said once a local school board certifies a project has been completed, it has one year to file a report with OSCG&R, kick-starting the audit process.

Often, this report is incomplete and OSCG&R works with the district to get the required information, Anderson said.

A preliminary audit is then completed by OSCG&R and sent to the municipality for review.

The district has an opportunity to weigh in on the draft audit report and possibly provide additional information. Once the final audit report is complete, it is transmitted back to OSCG&R for either a release of the retainage or a collection of overpayment, Anderson said.

No response

Overall, school construction auditors found 15 projects in which local officials owed the state money because they had used funding to pay for unauthorized expenses, such as employee salaries or insurance payments.

Manchester had two of those projects. The first was the middle school, for which state auditors initially determined the town owed nearly $5 million.

In the second case, a July 9, 2019 audit found that the city owed the state $148,000 for the Highland Park Elementary School project. After reviewing the states claims, Manchester officials agreed to refund the money but have been unable to do so, according to Lord, the citys finance director.

Lord sent an email to the state on October 18, 2021 acknowledging the city owed the money and asking how they should pay it.

Based upon the audit results, we owe the State $148,575. We have this booked as a liability in our financial software; we still owe you this money. Will the State send us an invoice eventually, or will this amount be automatically deducted from another State payment, such as ECS, or a progress payment on a current project? Lord wrote in the e-mail shared with the Mirror.

No one from OSCG&R has ever responded, she said.

DAS did not respond to a question about this audit.

$4 million typo

Not all of the delays in completing audits are the fault of the OSCG&R team. In some cases, audits were delayed because local officials failed to submit proper documentation to the state when their project was completed.

Anderson said the school construction grant process requires the local Board of Education (BoE) to certify the project is complete before OSCG&R auditors start their work.

This is a local process, and in some cases, that can take many years, Anderson said. For example, prior to 2011, there was no time limit on the submission of change orders which meant that a district may have received its Certificate of Occupancy without completing a review of all change orders. The review of change orders, however, is necessary for a BoE to certify the project as complete.

The audit for the Rogers International School in Stamford wasnt completed until 2019, a decade after the school was built. But Stamford Finance Director Karen Cammorata said the city was partially to blame because they didnt submit the ED049F form until 2017.

Cammorata said it took the state two years to complete the audit, at which point they informed the city it owed the state $2 million.

City officials started hunting down documents and receipts to determine how that could be when they noticed the audit contained a typo.

The preliminary audit stated the city owed the state $2 million, instead of what it should have said, which is the city is owed $2 million. The missing word meant Stamford was actually owed $2 million, which the state paid.

Its a little bit on both sides. The municipality has to submit the documents in a timely fashion and then they have to do the audit and I think that they were short-handed for awhile, Cammorata said, adding that state auditors said part of the reason for the delay was due to staff vacancies.

State officials have acknowledged the auditors on OSCG&R were not tracking projects in a timely manner and they are trying to address it with new legislation.

As part of a comprehensive school grant bill currently before the legislatures Education Committee, DAS officials want to require each town or regional school district to submit a notice of project completion within three years from the date of the issuance of a certificate of occupancy for the school building project by the town or regional school district.

The bill also states that if the school district doesnt meet the three-year timeline to submit the CO, the commissioner shall deem such project completed and conduct an audit of such project.
The green chile fried chicken sandwich. Photo: DeSean McClinton-Holland

On a recent weekday, Eric See was sitting outside Ursula, the tiny Crown Heights cafe he opened in the fall of 2020, wondering what would happen to it. Ursula is, by all outward appearances, as successful as any business can be: praise rolling in, lines regularly stretching out the door, its cheerful workers serving as many people as the space can physically handle. But now things must change. In January, See posted a GoFundMe campaign outlining the situation: Ursula Brooklyn has to find a new home, he wrote, setting a target of $50,000, which is quite a bit of money, objectively, and also very little money in the world of New York City real estate.

In some ways, this necessary move couldnt have come at a worse time. Ursula is currently nominated for the James Beard Foundations Best New Restaurant award, a big honor for such a small business. (Past winners include Frenchette, Le Coucou, and David Changs Momofuku Ko.) A victory for Ursula would mean the kind of national acclaim that tends to ensure longevity within a notoriously fickle industry, even if the restaurant, in its current form, was never designed to stick around.

Ursulas days at its current home, 724 Sterling Place, were numbered from the start. See closed his previous restaurant, the Awkward Scone, in the summer of 2020 and wasnt looking to make long-term commitments. He drove around the country with his Doberman. He thought about moving out of New York until he got a deal on an apartment  a friend leaving the city grandfathered him into her old lease  so he signed on and started to think seriously about his next moves.

Eric See. Photo: DeSean McClinton-Holland

He had met restaurateur Claire Sprouse through mutual-aid work, and theyd worked together on a pop-up at her bar, Hunky Dory. See knew that Sprouse had signed the lease at 724 Sterling for a wine-bar project that, because of the pandemic, was put on indefinite hold. I was like, Claire, I want to be here for a year. What are you doing with that space? He had an idea he wanted to try. If it works out, he told her at the time, then it works out, and I move on to a new space. And if it doesnt, then at least it wasnt a big space I had to dump a ton of money into.

Ursula is a celebration of the hyperregional cuisine that See grew up eating. Its a bit of a love letter to my childhood, he reflects. And also just me wanting to introduce Brooklyn to New Mexican food, which goes far beyond the breakfast burrito. There are breakfast burritos, obviously, as well as sopapillas, fried pastry dough stuffed with beans and rice or meat and bathed in red chile; green chile fried chicken sandwiches; sweets like blood orangealmond pastelitos and blue corn-pine nut chocolate chip cookies; and a rotating list of specials, often developed by his staff. The idea was that this was going to be a journey for me, says See. Kind of going back through my familys heritage. Every few weeks, his parents in Albuquerque ship him another batch of beans.

By design, it is modest. Nothing on the menu costs more than $15. The restaurant is open Wednesday to Sunday, from 8 a.m. until 4 or 5 p.m., and has no indoor seating, no phone number, and no burritos past noon. We were very fortunate to have a line the day that we opened, says See.

Eric See and staff members Nick Blankenship and Elihu Jones prep orders. Photo: DeSean McClinton-Holland

One year turned into two. Sees staff grew from 4 people to 14. Now to support that team at the rate See feels is ethical ($18 to $22 an hour for the kitchen; $15 to $16 plus tips for baristas), he says, We need to sell a lot more food or sell alcohol, and there is no way to sugarcoat it: Were at our maximum. The tiny walk-in makes storage difficult and buying in bulk nearly impossible, and the kitchen is too small for the volume of food theyre already churning out. We physically cant move any faster or sell anymore food than we already are, See concludes. Im ready to put food on plates. My staff is ready to put food on plates. We cant do it here. I dont have the space to put plates anywhere. There is fundamentally only so much you can do with a restaurant that See estimates is maybe 600 square feet before theres nowhere else to go.

Not that any of this is a surprise. It was always the understanding that Claire was going to take the space back at some point, See reiterates, and besides, its time for Ursula to go. He wants to do dinner service. He wants some indoor seating. There are whole swaths of New Mexican cooking hed like to explore but hasnt touched at Ursula 1.0: We dont have a big enough business for lunch for me to want to invest the money into playing with game meats like elk and bison, he says wistfully. Thats absolutely something I want to implement.

He also wants to ensure he wont lose the essence of what he has built. How do you grow and stay true to who and what you are? With Ursula, the little version, See has been trying to build a model that is fundamentally humane, paying staff livable wages, giving them consistent schedules  I am very, very cognizant of trying not to alter their hours whatsoever  and offering them a real creative outlet. They jump in on developing the specials or are able to impart some of their ethnic or national background or, like, how they grew up, he says. Ursula has also become known for its queer pop-up series, in which See hands over the kitchen to a rotating roster of up-and-coming chefs.

A selection of pastries made in-house. See and Blankenship chat with a contemplative guest. See prepping green chile cheeseburgers. Sopapillas  a New Mexican staple and a rarity in New York. The finished cheeseburger. Photographs by DeSean McClinton-Holland

Many of the decisions he has made so far would not necessarily be the choices you would make if your goal, above all else, was to maximize profits. You might sell your incredibly successful burritos all day long, for example. But that wouldnt be creatively fulfilling, so at Ursula, that isnt what they do.

To grow, See knows hell have to take on investors, which is something he has never done before, but which, it has become clear to him, is necessary now. Youve got to have $40,000 up front just to sign the lease, he says, and then there are fees (legal, architectural), plus the cost of the build-out. I mean, my family doesnt have that, he concedes. I dont, and thats not in my friend group. Were all a little scrappy.

Then there is the issue of actually finding the space. So far, See hasnt had any luck, and the prestige of a James Beard nomination doesnt carry as much weight with potential landlords as he might have hoped. Recently he made an offer on a space; the broker, he recalls, was very excited about the nomination: She was like, Oh my fucking God, you have to put that on your application. Thats so exciting. That was three weeks ago; he hasnt heard back about the lease.

In the meantime, See is preparing his first pitch deck. He has had interest; there are meetings. And hes still trying to figure out how to make everything work on his terms. He wants investors who can contribute skills and knowledge that he doesnt have  You can look at it like finding mentors, he reasons  or alternatively, silent partners who arent going to try to dabble or tell you what to do. In many ways, Ursulas charm stems from the fact that See steadfastly avoided building the kind of business that Ursula could now become. He is committed to making sure that doesnt happen, that whatever happens next stays true to the original spirit of the place: Im not looking for somebody whos gonna lend me their money on the contingency of selling burritos all day.

Ursula on Sterling Place. Photo: DeSean McClinton-Holland
Regulating quarrying activity on Guam can be tricky, given that theres no definition of what exactly a quarry is, according to Guam Environmental Protection Agency chief engineer Brian Bearden.

Bearden spoke Wednesday during a hearing called by Speaker Therese Terlaje on mineral extraction regulations. Businesses have been approaching the CHamoru Land Trust and Ancestral Lands Commission to open up quarrying operations above the islands northern aquifer, according to Terlaje, particularly along the backroad in Yigo.

The goal will eventually be to ensure best practices for private industry and appropriate government processes to mitigate any potential negative impacts, Terlaje said.

Bearden said some businesses were carrying out what Guam EPA believed to be quarrying activity without permitsscraping and clearing land and then using the material for backfillbut were arguing that they were not in fact operating a quarry.

Prior to 2019, Guam EPA only required applicants to submit a quarry permit from the Department of Land Management, which Guam EPA would then review.

We received a complaint from a resident who lived right next to one of these quarry facilities that had vertical walls, and it was a safety hazard. We reviewed that, again with our legal counsel, he said, and started requiring approval from the Guam Land Use Commission for any activity that appeared to be a quarry or was taking scraped land and moving it elsewhere.

Several permit applications were since denied because the land use commission didnt approve them, but applicants argued they were not actually running quarries.

We received a lot of pushback and complaints from the applicants, and even from (Land Management) saying, Well, you know, we dont know what a quarry is, and who decides what a quarry is? Bearden said.

Having no definition meant a number of projects couldnt get approved for land use, according to Bearden. He said he previously worked in the CNMI, where similar problems would come from applicants who claimed they were not building quarries but grading for farm plots or housing subdivisions.

Other local issues include a lack of engineering standards for how steep the slopes on a quarry wall were, Bearden said. Guam EPA doesnt allow the walls of a quarry to be scraped until they are completely vertical, unless an engineer signs off on the structure being safe.

I have seen those come through our office where an engineer will just pick the values to make it work for their clients. And we need to make sure that were holding the engineers accountable because a vertical slope, I think you could talk to any geotechnical engineer on Guam, I think theyll all tell you that thats not safe, even the limestone, he said.




Haiti - FLASH : The USA maintains the maximum level 4 alert Do not travel to Haiti





The United States Department of State maintains Haiti in Maximum Alert Level 4 "Do not travel to Haiti"



"{...]



Do not travel to Haiti due to kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and COVID-19. U.S. citizens should carefully consider the risks of traveling to, or remaining, in Haiti in light of the current security situation and infrastructure challenges [...]



The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a Level 4 Travel Health Notice for Haiti, indicating a very high level of COVID-19 in the country [Note HL: Ministry of Health figures obviously not taken seriously]. Your risk of contracting COVID-19 and developing severe symptoms may be lower if you are fully vaccinated with an FDA authorized vaccine. Before planning any international travel, please review the CDC's specific recommendations for vaccinated and unvaccinated travelers. Visit the Embassy's COVID-19 page for more information on COVID-19 in Haiti.



Country Summary :



Kidnapping is widespread, and victims regularly include U.S. citizens. Kidnappers may use sophisticated planning or take advantage of unplanned opportunities, and even convoys have been attacked. Kidnapping cases often involve ransom negotiations and U.S. citizen victims have been physically harmed during kidnappings. Victims families have paid thousands of dollars to rescue their family members.



Violent crime, such as armed robbery and carjacking, is common. Travelers are sometimes followed and violently attacked and robbed shortly after leaving the Port-au-Prince international airport. Robbers and carjackers also attack private vehicles stuck in heavy traffic congestion and often target lone drivers, particularly women. As a result, the U.S. Embassy requires its personnel to use official transportation to and from the airport.



Protests, demonstrations, tire burning, and roadblocks are frequent, unpredictable, and can turn violent. The U.S. government is extremely limited in its ability to provide emergency services to U.S. citizens in Haiti  assistance on site is available only from local authorities (Haitian National Police and ambulance services). Local police generally lack the resources to respond effectively to serious criminal incidents.



If you decide to travel to Haiti :



See the U.S. Embassy's web page regarding COVID-19 https://ht.usembassy.gov/covid-19-information/ ;



Visit the CDCs webpage on Travel and COVID-19 https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/International-Travel-Country-Information-Pages/Haiti.html#ExternalPopup ;



Avoid demonstrations and crowds. Do not attempt to drive through roadblocks ;



Arrange airport transfers and hotels in advance, or have your host meet you upon arrival ;



Do not provide personal information to unauthorized individuals (i.e. people without official uniforms or credentials) located in the immigration, customs, or other areas inside or near any airports ;



If you are being followed as you leave the airport, drive to the nearest police station immediately ;



Travel by vehicle to minimize walking in public ;



Travel in groups of at least two people ;



Always keep vehicle doors locked and windows closed when driving ;



Exercise caution and alertness, especially when driving through markets and other traffic congested areas ;



Do not physically resist any robbery attempt ;



Purchase travel insurance and medical evacuation insurance ahead of time ;



Review information on Travel to High-Risk Areas https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/go/TraveltoHighRiskAreas.html ;



Enroll in the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) to receive Alerts and make it easier to locate you in an emergency https://step.state.gov/;



Follow the Department of State on Facebook and Twitter.



Review the Country Security Report on Haiti https://www.osac.gov/Content/Browse/Report?subContentTypes=Country%20Security%20Report ;



Prepare a contingency plan for emergency situations. Review the Travelers Checklist https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/go/checklist.html ;

"

HL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - Diaspora Covid-19 : Daily Bulletin #747





GLOBAL SITUATION 2019-2022:

Epidemiological situation:

On Wednesday April 6, 2022 the number of people infected worldwide with the Covid-19 coronavirus and its variants since the start of the pandemic (March 11, 2020) amounts to 494,219,286 cases (+1,341,827 in 24 hours ), the day before (+1,047,887)



Number of infected countries: 225



*Healings: 429,813,307 people have been cured of Covid-19 worldwide (+1,536,427), the day before (+1,486,268)

*Deaths: 6,183,665 people have died of Covid-19 worldwide since the start of the pandemic (+4,202 in 24 hours), the day before (+3,217)

*Active cases (less deaths and recoveries) in the world is currently 58,222,314 cases (-198,802 in 24 hours), the day before (-441,598)



Average cure rate in the world: 86.96% (+)



Average mortality rate in the world: 1.25% (=)



World: Number of daily confirmed cases





(Day-1)



Vaccination: 11.39 billion doses of vaccine injected (+20 million doses injected in 24 hours. Update April 5, 2022 (latest data available).



HAITI:

Warning: The Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP) did not make available after March 30, 2022 daily data on the Covid-19 situation in Haiti. Accordingly, the data below on the situation in Haiti is the latest available.



According to the Ministry of Public Health, +22 new cases of Covid-19 and its variants have been confirmed in Haiti as of March 30, 2022 (latest partial data available ) for a total of 30,567 confirmed cases throughout the national territory (48.7% women and 51.3% men), since the first case (March 19, 2020 https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-30319-haiti-health-origin-of-the-first-2-cases-of-covid-19-in-haiti.html ). Previous update (+16 cases as of March 26, 2022).



Healings: 28,745 (+314)



Cure rate: 94.03% (+)



Deaths: 833 deaths (+0) ()



Death rate: 2.72% (=)



5th Wave (Omicron Dominant):

Total of the 5th wave (starting December 27, 2021) 4,573 confirmed cases and 67 deaths



Screening since the start of the pandemic: 189,314 tests (+1,302 in 4 days) since March 19, 2020, latest data available. Note that the very small number of people screened every day at the national level out of a population estimated at 11.6 million citizens, does not statistically allow us to make a representative estimate of the situation in Haiti, which translates into a < B>number of daily confirmed cases largely underestimated.



TOP 5 of the most affected municipalities in the West (2022):

Delmas: 741 (+1); Petion-ville 624 (+0); Port-au-Prince 407 (+1); Tabarre 288 (+1); Croix-des-Bouquets 240(+1)



Confirmed cases by department (2022 / 2021 / 2020):

West: 2022: 2,558 cases; (2021: 9.890); (2020: 6,945 cases)

North: 2022: 269 cases; (2021: 664); (2020: 677 cases)

Center: 2022: 230 cases; (2021: 1.001); (2020: 508 cases)

Artibonitis: 2022: 186 cases; (2021: 855); (2020: 593 cases)

Northeast: 2022: 148 cases; (2021: 404); (2020: 314 cases)

Southeast: 2022: 263 cases; (2021: 768); (2020: 274 cases)

South: 2022: 215 cases; (2021: 891); (2020: 262 cases)

North West: 2022: 259 cases; (2021: 383); (2020: 229 cases)

Grand'Anse: 2022: 175 cases; (2021: 861); (2020: 176 cases)

Nippes: 2022: 39 cases; (2021: 249) (2020: 149 cases)



Cumulative deaths by department (2022-2021):

West: 295 deaths (2020: 104 deaths)

North: 54 deaths (2020: 34 deaths)

Center: 79 deaths (2020: 13 deaths)

Artibonite: 42 deaths (2020: 39 deaths)

North East: 7 deaths (2020: 6 deaths)

South: 51 deaths (2020: 6 deaths)

Southeast: 15 deaths (2020: 9 deaths)

North West: 15 deaths (2020: 12 deaths)

Grand'Anse: 7 deaths (2020: 13 deaths)

Nippes: 27 deaths (2020: 5 deaths)



Distribution of deaths by age (since the start of the epidemic):

0-9 years: 15 deaths

10-19 years: 10 deaths

20-29 years: 31 deaths

30-39 years: 56 deaths

40-49 years: 80 deaths

50-59 years: 134 deaths

60-69 years: 187 deaths

70-79 years: 183 deaths

80 years and over: 137 deaths



Vaccination:

163,369 Haitians (1.4% of the population) +2,205 in 6 days have received a 1st dose of vaccine since July 16, 2021, date of the first injection through 149 open vaccination centers and 111,914 Haitians are fully vaccinated (2 doses, 0.96% of the population) +1.585 in 6 days. Update March 22, 2022 latest information available (source MSPP).



List of the 149 Vaccination Centers open in Haiti (and hours) by department:

(updated October 20, 2021, latest information available)

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-35051-haiti-covid-19-list-of-149-vaccination-centers-open-in-the-country.html



DIASPORA:

Epidemiological situation :



USA:

*Cases since the first case (February 29, 2020): 81,900,012 cases (+32,049 in 24 hours), the day before (+35,351)

*Healings: 65,968,467 healings (+127,189 in 24 hours), the day before (+164,764)

National Cure Rate: 80.54% (+)

*Deaths: 1,009,390 deaths (+711 in 24 hours), the day before (+481)

National death rate: 1.23% (=)

*Active cases (less deaths and recoveries): 14,922,155 (-95,851 in 24 hours), the day before (-129,894)



USA: Trend active cases: (minus recoveries and deaths)





(Day-1)



Vaccination: 563.01 million doses of vaccine injected since December 14, 2020, the date of the first injection in the United States (+430,000 doses in 24 hours). Update April 5 (latest data available).



DOMINICAN REPUBLIC:

Confirmed cases since March 1, 2020: 578,253 cases (+44 in 24 hours) the day before (+30 in 24 hours). First case (March 1, 2020)

Healings: 573,723 healings (+20 in 24h), the day before (+103)

National Cure Rate: 99.21% (-)

Deaths: 4,375 deaths (+0), previous (+0)

Death rate: 0.75% (=)

Positivity rate over 4 epidemiological weeks: 0.88% (-)

Active cases: (excluding deaths and recoveries) 155 cases (+24 in 24 hours) the day before (-73)



Dominican Republic: Trend of active cases: (minus recoveries and deaths)





(Day-1)



TOP 5 Provinces with the most new cases in the last 24 hours:

Distrito Nacional: +18 new cases in 24 hours (+)

San Pedro de Mcoris: + 7 new cases in 24 hours ()

Maria Trinidad Sanchez: +6 new cases in 24 hours (+)

Santiago: +3 new cases in 24 hours (-)

ALtagracia: +3 new cases in 24 hours (=)



Vaccination: 15.52 million doses of vaccine injected since February 16, 2021, date of the first injection in the Dominican Republic (+10,000 doses injected in 24 hours). Update April 2, 2022 (latest data available).



QUEBEC:

Confirmed cases since the first case (February 27, 2020): 981,539 (+2,615 in 24 hours), previous (+7,973 in 72 hours)

Healings: 940,386 people (+1,975 in 24 hours) previous (+6,611 in 72 hours)

Cure rate: 95.80% (-)

Deaths: 14,441 (+31 in 24h) previous (+29 in 72h)

Death rate: 1.47% (=)

Active cases: (excluding death and recovery) 26,711 cases (+609 in 24 hours), previous (+1,333 in 72 hours)



Quebec: Trend of daily confirmed cases





(average weekly trend)



Vaccination: 18,730,313 doses of vaccine injected since December 14, 2020, date of the first injection (+13,012 doses in 24 hours), latest data available - MSSS as of April 5, 2022)



FRANCE:

*Confirmed cases since the first case (January 24, 2020): 26,228,521 cases (+203,021 cases in 24 hours), previous (+27,648)

*Healings: 23,615,663 healings (not available), previous (+225,301)

National Cure Rate: 90.03% (+)

Deaths: 142,784 (+129 in 24h), previous (+149)

Death rate: 0.54% (=)

Active Cases: 2,470,074 (+202,892 in 24h), previous (+197,802)



France: Number of daily confirmed cases





(Day-1)



Vaccination: 141.97 million doses of vaccine injected since December 27, 2020, date of the first injection in France (+10,000 doses injected in 48 hours. Update April 5, 2022 (latest data available)



Previous bulletin : https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-36353-haiti-diaspora-covid-19-daily-bulletin-746.html



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-30319-haiti-health-origin-of-the-first-2-cases-of-covid-19-in-haiti.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-30165-haiti-flash-first-case-of-covid-19-in-the-dominican-republic.html





HL/ HaitiLibre


















China's northernmost province increases support for ice, snow industries

Xinhua) 16:17, April 06, 2022

HARBIN, April 6 (Xinhua) -- China's northernmost Heilongjiang Province will allocate an annual fund of no less than 200 million yuan (31.4 million U.S. dollars) to develop its ice and snow industries, local authorities said Wednesday.

The province has introduced incentives for setting up company headquarters and new projects in the ice and snow industries, as well as the transformation of spare real estate into indoor skating rinks, said Chen Zhe, head of the provincial culture and tourism department.

Heilongjiang Province is a popular destination for winter tourism in China. The provincial capital, Harbin, has gained international attention for the International Ice and Snow Festival, which was first held in 1985 and features massive, elaborate ice sculptures, competitions and winter sports.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
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The Content posted by users via the Web Site (User Content) is the intellectual property of the specific users of the Web Site who post such User Content and their licensors, if any. HOMEMAKERS does not claim any ownership rights in such User Content. By posting User Content via the Web Site, however, you hereby grant to HOMEMAKERS a limited, transferable, nonexclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, edit, adapt, publish, translate, display, distribute, sell, sublicense and create derivative works and compilations incorporating such User Content.

In the event you would like to remove your User Content from the Web Site, please contact us. Please note however, that your User Content may not be completely removed or may otherwise still be available to others in the following circumstances: (a) your User Content has been incorporated into derivative works or compilations created by HOMEMAKERS or other parties; (b) such User Content has been retained in HOMEMAKERS data backup systems or for archival purposes; or (c) to the extent such User Content has been sold to other persons and such persons retain your User Content.

HOMEMAKERS collects, stores and uses data collected from you in accordance with HOMEMAKERS Privacy Policy. The terms and conditions of the Privacy Policy are hereby expressly incorporated into these Terms of Use.

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HOMEMAKERS may allow users to place Orders for products and/or services via the Web Site. Order shall mean any order placed by a user for products and/or services via the Web Site that is accepted by HOMEMAKERS. In the event that you are a user placing an Order to purchase products and/or services, you are subject to the additional terms of this section. Please note that in some cases, you may be directed to a third-party web site make purchases. In such an event, the purchase terms in this section do not apply, and your purchase will be governed by the terms of such third-party web site. By making such purchases, you hereby agree that HOMEMAKERS has no responsibility, and shall have no liability, for any claim related to your purchases on such third-party web sites.

Upon placing an Order, you shall pay to HOMEMAKERS the purchase price as set forth in the Shopping Cart. HOMEMAKERS or its third-party affiliates may utilize the services of certain third-party payment processors to process payments of credit cards and other accepted methods of payment. Your purchase is subject to any additional terms and conditions imposed by such third-party payment processors. The purchase price and any applicable fees or taxes shall be applied to your chosen method of payment upon submission of your order.

Prices and availability of products are subject to change without notice. Errors will be corrected where discovered, and HOMEMAKERS reserves the right to revoke any stated offer and to correct any errors, inaccuracies or omissions including after an order has been submitted and whether or not the order has been confirmed and your payment method accepted and charged. In the event your payment method has been accepted and charged, HOMEMAKERS will issue you the appropriate credit within a reasonable time after your order has been revoked.

In the event you purchase a product that must be shipped to you, such products will be shipped by HOMEMAKERS and/or its third-party contractors within a reasonable time after processing of your order. Shipment time will vary depending on the shipping method and service you select. HOMEMAKERS does not guarantee delivery at any certain time and is not responsible for shipping delays.

In the event you purchase products that embody or otherwise contain Content owned by HOMEMAKERS or other parties, you agree to the following restrictions regarding such products and the Content or other information contained or embodied therein: (a) you may not resell any Content or otherwise profit from its use or display; (b) you may not, nor will you allow any other party to, reproduce, modify, edit, adapt, publish, translate, display, distribute, sell, sublicense or create derivative works or compilations incorporating such Content without the express permission of the owner of such Content; (c) you will not otherwise violate any additional legal or contractual restrictions governing use of the Content; and (d) you will not obscure or remove any proprietary rights notices contained in or on the Content.

In the event a product ordered by you is damaged upon receipt, HOMEMAKERS, at its sole option, may provide a replacement product or refund the purchase price. Damaged products which HOMEMAKERS will accept for return or refund include products that are missing, torn or physically damaged or inoperable.

SRP is a reference point calculated internally by Homemakers based on a survey of our competition to ensure that we offer the best prices. Homemakers does not sell products at SRP, and other retailers may sell the same product or similar products at, above, or below SRP.

You hereby represent and warrant to HOMEMAKERS that: (a) you (i) are over the age of eighteen (18), (ii) are an emancipated minor under the laws of your state of domicile and/or residence or (iii) otherwise have the power and authority to enter into and perform your obligations under this Agreement; (b) all information provided by you to HOMEMAKERS is truthful, accurate and complete; (c) you are an authorized signatory of the credit or debit card or other method of payment that you provide to HOMEMAKERS or it third-party payment processor to pay the purchase price and any applicable fees or taxes related to your purchases of products and/or services via the Web Site; (d) you will comply with the terms and conditions of these Terms of Use and any other agreement to which you are subject that is related to your use of the Web Site; (e) you have provided and will maintain accurate and complete registration information with HOMEMAKERS, including, without limitation, your legal name, address, email address, and any other information HOMEMAKERS may reasonably require; (f) your access to and use of the Web Site and/or purchase and use of any products or services will not constitute a breach or violation of any other agreement, contract, terms of use or any law or regulation to which you are subject; and (g) you will immediately notify HOMEMAKERS in the event that you learn or suspect that your registration information, username or password has been disclosed or otherwise made known to any other person.

In the event that you post any User Content via the Web Site, you hereby make the following additional representations and warranties to HOMEMAKERS: (1) you are owner of such User Content or otherwise have the right to grant HOMEMAKERS the licenses granted pursuant to this Agreement; (2) you have secured any and all consents necessary to post the User Content and to grant the foregoing licenses; (3) the User Content does not violate the rights of any third party, including, without limitation, the intellectual property, privacy or publicity rights of any third party, and such User Content does not contain any personally identifiable information about third parties in violation of such parties rights; (4) the use of any User Content will not result in harm or personal injury to any third party; and (5) all factual information contained in the User Content is true and accurate.

You are solely responsible for any and all acts and omissions that occur under your account or password, and you agree not to engage in unacceptable use of the Web Site or the User Content that you may sell or purchase via the Web Site, which includes, without limitation, use of the foregoing to: (a) post or store material or information that, is or to a reasonable person may be unlawful, harmful, tortuous, abusive, obscene, pornographic, defamatory, libelous, harassing, invasive of anothers privacy, offensive, vulgar, threatening, malicious, hateful or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable; (b) post or store files, graphics, software or other material or information that actually or potentially infringes the rights of any person, including, without limitation, the copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret or other intellectual property rights, or privacy, moral or publicity rights, of any person; (c) interfere, disrupt or attempt to gain unauthorized access to other accounts on the Web Site or any other computer network; (d) post or store viruses, Trojan horses or any other malicious code or program designed to interrupt, destroy or limit the functionality of any computer software, hardware, system or telecommunications equipment; (e) post or store any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, junk mail, spam, chain letters, pyramid schemes or other fraudulent schemes, or any other form of solicitation; or (f) engage in any activity that, as determined by HOMEMAKERS, may intentionally or unintentionally violate these Terms of Use, violate any applicable laws or regulations or conflict with the spirit or intent of these Terms of Use.

HOMEMAKERS uses reasonable efforts to maintain the Web Site, but HOMEMAKERS is not responsible for any defects or failures associated with the Web Site or any User Content posted using the Web Site, or any damages (such as lost profits or other consequential damages) that may result from any such defects or failures. The Web Site may be inaccessible or inoperable for any reason, including, without limitation: (a) equipment malfunctions, (b) periodic maintenance procedures or repairs which HOMEMAKERS may undertake from time to time, or (c) causes beyond the control of HOMEMAKERS or which are not foreseeable by HOMEMAKERS. In addition, HOMEMAKERS makes no guarantees as to the web sites and information located worldwide throughout the Internet that you may access as a result of your use of the Web Site, including as to the accuracy, content, or quality of any such sites and information.

HOMEMAKERS does not control the User Content posted by its users, nor does it have any obligation to monitor such User Content for any purpose. Despite the fact that it has no monitoring obligations, HOMEMAKERS reserve the right to remove any and all material that it feels is actually or potentially inappropriate, offensive, illegal or harmful any respect or which may violate these Terms of Use. Because the User Content offered via the Web Site is provided by other users, and because HOMEMAKERS does not monitor or exercise control over the User Content, HOMEMAKERS does not make any warranties or representations regarding any of the User Content offered via the Web Site or the quality thereof. HOMEMAKERS does not necessarily approve, endorse, sanction, encourage, verify or agree with any message posted by its users or otherwise embodied in the Content. You understand that by using the Web Site, you may be exposed to Content that may be offensive, indecent, vulgar, defamatory or otherwise objectionable, and that in no way shall HOMEMAKERS be liable under any theory for such exposure.

HOMEMAKERS is not a backup service for storing User Content, and HOMEMAKERS shall have no liability regarding any loss of User Content. You are solely responsible for creating backups of any User Content you post using the Web Site.

THE WEB SITE, ANY USER CONTENT AND ANY PRODUCTS OR SERVICES PROVIDED VIA THE WEB SITE ARE PROVIDED AS IS AND AS AVAILABLE, AND AT YOUR SOLE RISK. HOMEMAKERS EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR USE OR PURPOSE, TITLE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.

WITHOUT LIMITATION, HOMEMAKERS MAKES NO WARRANTY THAT THE WEB SITE, ANY USER CONTENT OR ANY PRODUCTS OR SERVICES PROVIDED VIA THE WEB SITE WILL MEET YOUR REQUIREMENTS, THAT USE OF THE FOREGOING WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, TIMELY, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE, THAT THE RESULTS OBTAINED FROM THE USE OF THE FOREGOING OR ANY INFORMATION FOUND ON THE WEB SITE WILL BE ACCURATE OR RELIABLE, OR THAT THE QUALITY OF ANY USER CONTENT, PRODUCTS, SERVICES, INFORMATION OR OTHER MATERIAL OBTAINED THROUGH THE WEB SITE WILL MEET YOUR EXPECTATIONS.

ANY USER CONTENT OR MATERIAL DOWNLOADED OR OTHERWISE OBTAINED THROUGH THE USE OF THE WEB SITE IS DONE AT YOUR SOLE RISK, AND YOU WILL BE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE TO YOUR COMPUTER SYSTEM OR LOSS OF DATA THAT RESULTS FROM THE DOWNLOAD OF ANY SUCH MATERIAL.

FURTHER, PLEASE NOTE THAT NO ADVICE OR INFORMATION, OBTAINED BY YOU THROUGH THE WEB SITE OR ANY PRODUCT SHALL CREATE ANY WARRANTY NOT EXPRESSLY PROVIDED FOR IN THESE TERMS OF USE.

YOU EXPRESSLY UNDERSTAND AND AGREE THAT HOMEMAKERS SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF PROFITS, GOODWILL, USE, DATA, LOSS OF OR INJURY TO LIFE OR OTHER INTANGIBLE LOSSES (EVEN IF HOMEMAKERS HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES), RESULTING FROM: (A) THE USE OR THE INABILITY TO USE THE WEB SITE, THE USER CONTENT, OR ANY PRODUCTS OR SERVICES PURCHASED VIA THE WEB SITE; (B) THE COST OF PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES RESULTING FROM ANY PRODUCTS, DATA, INFORMATION OR SERVICES PURCHASED OR OBTAINED OR MESSAGES RECEIVED OR TRANSACTIONS ENTERED INTO THROUGH OR FROM THE WEB SITE OR OTHERWISE; (C) UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO OR ALTERATION OF YOUR TRANSMISSIONS, USER CONTENT OR DATA; OR (D) ANY OTHER MATTER RELATING TO THE WEB SITE, THE USER CONTENT OR THE PURCHASE OF HOMEMAKERSS PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. IN NO EVENT SHALL HOMEMAKERS TOTAL LIABILITY TO YOU FOR ALL DAMAGES, LOSSES, AND CAUSES OF ACTION (WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, NEGLIGENCE) OR OTHERWISE) EXCEED THE AMOUNT PAID BY YOU, IF ANY, FOR ACCESSING THE WEB SITE, SELLING OR PURCHASING CONTENT OR HOMEMAKERS PRODUCTS OR SERVICES OR ANY AMOUNT RETAINED BY HOMEMAKERS FOR PROVIDING THE SERVICES.

SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OF CERTAIN WARRANTIES OR THE LIMITATION OR EXCLUSION OF LIABILITY FOR INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES. ACCORDINGLY, SOME OF THE ABOVE LIMITATIONS MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.

You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless HOMEMAKERS, its officers, members, directors, employees and agents from and against any and all claims, liabilities, damages, losses or expenses, including attorneys fees and costs and expenses, arising out of or in any way connected with (a) your access to or use of the Web Site, (b) any User Content you post via the Web Site, (c) a breach or alleged breach by you of any of your representations, warranties, covenants or obligations under this Agreement, (d) infringement or misappropriation of any intellectual property or other rights or third parties by you, (e) any negligence or willful misconduct by you, (f) any other claim related to your performance under this Agreement, or (g) any services or products provided by HOMEMAKERS.

The parties and their respective personnel are and shall be independent contractors, and neither party by virtue of this Agreement shall have any right, power or authority to act or create any obligation, express or implied, on behalf of the other party.

You acknowledge and agree that any expenses that you incur in furtherance of this Agreement are voluntary in nature and are made with the knowledge that this Agreement may be terminated as provided herein. You shall not make a claim against HOMEMAKERS, and HOMEMAKERS shall not be liable with respect to the recoupment of any expenditures or investment made by you in anticipation of the continuation of this Agreement beyond the term hereof.

The parties agree that breach of the provisions of this Agreement would cause irreparable harm and significant injury to HOMEMAKERS which would be both difficult to ascertain and which would not be compensable by damages alone. As such, the parties agree that HOMEMAKERS has the right to enforce the provisions of this Agreement by injunction (without necessity of posting bond), specific performance or other equitable relief without prejudice to any other rights and remedies HOMEMAKERS may have for your breach of this Agreement.

The validity and effect of these Terms of Use shall be governed by and construed and enforced in accordance with the laws of the State of Iowa, USA, without regard to its conflicts or choice of laws principles. ANY SUIT, ACTION OR PROCEEDING CONCERNING THE WEB SITE, ITS USE, THESE TERMS OF USE, CONCERNING ANY SALE OR CONCERNING ANY OTHER PRODUCT, SERVICE, POLICY OR PROCEDURE OF HOMEMAKERS, MUST BE BROUGHT IN A COURT OF COMPETENT JURISDICTION IN POLK COUNTY, IOWA, AND YOU HEREBY IRREVOCABLY CONSENT TO THE JURISDICTION OF SUCH COURT (AND OF THE APPROPRIATE APPELLATE COURTS THEREFROM) IN ANY SUCH SUIT, ACTION OR PROCEEDING; AND YOU IRREVOCABLY WAIVE, TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, ANY OBJECTION WHICH YOU MAY NOW OR HEREAFTER HAVE TO THE LAYING OF VENUE OF ANY SUCH SUIT, ACTION OR PROCEEDING IN ANY SUCH COURT OR THAT ANY SUCH SUIT, ACTION OR PROCEEDING WHICH IS BROUGHT IN ANY SUCH COURT HAS BEEN BROUGHT IN AN INCONVENIENT OR IMPROPER FORUM.

If any action at law or in equity is necessary to enforce the terms of this Agreement, the prevailing party will be entitled to reasonable fees of attorneys, accountants and other professionals, and costs and expenses in addition to any other relief to which such prevailing party may be entitled.

The captions and headings of this Agreement are included for ease of reference only and will be disregarded in interpreting and construing this Agreement.

If the performance of any part of this Agreement by either party (other than payment of money) is prevented, hindered, delayed or otherwise made impracticable by reason of any flood, riot, fire, judicial or governmental action, labor disputes, act of God, telecommunications failure or any other causes beyond the control of either party, that party shall be excused from such to the extent that it is prevented, hindered or delayed by such causes.

This Agreement, including any other agreements or additional terms referenced herein, constitutes the complete and exclusive statement of the Agreement between the parties with respect to the Web Site and products and services offered via the Web Site, and, unless otherwise expressly provided herein, it supersedes any and all prior or contemporaneous communications, representations, statements and understandings, whether oral or written, between the parties concerning the Web Site and products and services sold via the Web Site. If any provision of this Agreement is found unlawful or unenforceable in any respect, the court shall reform such provision so as to render it enforceable or, if it is not possible to reform such provision so as to make it enforceable, then delete such provision. As so reformed or modified, the court shall fully enforce this Agreement. The provisions of this Agreement that by their content are intended to survive the expiration or termination of this Agreement, including, without limitation, provisions governing ownership and use of intellectual property, representations, disclaimers, warranties, liability, indemnification, governing law, jurisdiction, venue, remedies, rights after termination and interpretation of this Agreement, will survive the expiration or termination of this Agreement for their full statutory period.

The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods and the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act shall not apply to this Agreement.

HOMEMAKERS makes no representation that Content or other material or information on the Web Site is appropriate to or available in locations outside of the United States. You may not use the Web Site or export Content in violation of United States export laws, regulations or restrictions. If you access the Web Site from outside of the United States, you are responsible for compliance with all applicable laws.

HOMEMAKERS respects the intellectual property of others, and we ask our users to do the same. If you believe that your work has been copied in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, please provide HOMEMAKERS Copyright Agent the following information:
The first Radisson RED & Radisson hotel in Norway have landed at Oslo Airport. The new dual-branded opening will be the largest hotel at the airport, offering more than 500 rooms and a new conference center, situated just a few steps from the airport terminals.

Radisson RED Oslo Airport and Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre Oslo Airport provide guests with the opportunity to enjoy both the Radisson RED brand's playful twist on conventional hotel stays - injecting new life into hotels through a warm and vibrant social scene, standout design and exquisite photography - with the Radisson brand's Scandinavian design, natural warm spaces, and thoughtfully considered details.

The hotel offers a synergy of two iconic brands, with the two hotels and their shared public spaces treating guests to an exciting array of services to suit every lifestyle and schedule. Refurbished rooms and facilities provide a harmonious and comfortable stay from the minute guests check-in with soothing natural materials and airport runway views. On the Radisson RED Oslo Airport side of the property, a bold and vibrant look draws in a younger crowd with 214 urban guest rooms with luxe touches, on-demand services, and a hip lounge area designed for work and play. Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre Oslo Airport on the other side, presents 300 rooms featuring soft, neutral tones, natural materials and harmonious designs inspired by the Scandinavian way of life. In both hotels, stunning airport runway views and high-quality standards make every stay an experience.

At the heart of the hotel, guests can discover the hotel's lively restaurant and bar, GAMO, perfect to meet with colleagues, business partners or friends for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or locally brewed beer in the lounge. The globally inspired menu includes international favorites with a twist of Norwegian cultural heritage. The chefs take great pride in sourcing the best possible local Norwegian produce to provide guests with a taste of true Nordic hospitality and flavors. Signature dishes using local ingredients include elk sausage in a brioche bun and grilled fillet of salmon and local Norwegian cheeses. The menu also has a varied vegan selection.

Offering a twist on the normal with statement design, Radisson RED Oslo Airport is partnering with Norway's Kistefos Art Museum for a collaboration that will lead to favorable synergies for both brands and target groups. The collaboration will enhance the Radisson RED brand's core values and brings the connection between the local art scene and the guest experience, both in-hotel and on digital platforms. Offering guests a playground for art and culture, the collaboration between Radisson RED Oslo Airport and Kistefos will further enhance this by bringing the local art scene closer and highlight places to experience art around the area. With a unique location in the Norwegian woods, 45 minutes' drive from Oslo Airport, Kistefos offers world-class architecture, industrial history, art exhibitions, and an impressive sculpture park in scenic surroundings. The award-winning gallery 'The Twist', is a gallery, a bridge over the river and a sculpture all in one and named a "must-see cultural destination" by the New York Times.

"We are proud to present Radisson RED Oslo Airport and Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre Oslo Airport, introducing both brands to Norway for the first time at such a significant location. This marks the second Radisson RED and Radisson dual-branded property in Northern & Western Europe following the successful opening of Radisson RED London Heathrow and Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre London Heathrow. With this new opening, we are pleased to offer 1250 guest rooms spread over four different brands at Oslo Airport with 500 guest rooms and Radisson Blu Airport Hotel, Oslo Gardermoen, 233 rooms at Park Inn by Radisson Oslo Airport Hotel West and the new hotel with a total of 514 guest rooms." says Tom Flanagan Karttunen, Area Senior Vice President for Radisson Hotel Group in Northern & Western Europe.

Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre Oslo Airport's conference center features 52 well-equipped flexible meeting rooms including boardrooms, different sized spaces with flexible seating, smart design details, state-of-the-art audiovisual equipment, and free, fast Wi-Fi. The meeting and event area is divided into three sections with separate break out areas which can also be used for different events. In addition, the 236sqm ballroom with 480 sqm of pre-function space has a capacity for up to 220 guests.

Radisson RED Oslo Airport and Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre Oslo Airport have their own pathway between the hotel and the airport terminal and are only a few minutes from both the terminals and the airport express train, which transports guests to Oslo city center in less than 20 minutes.

Jorgen Ljunggren, General Manager of Radisson RED Oslo Airport and Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre Oslo Airport comments: "Radisson RED and Radisson are designed to fit the needs of our guests by giving them endless opportunities to tune in and out, switching effortlessly between business and pleasure. Across public areas, guests are treated to a dual experience of both brands and can get the most out of their stay by enjoying signature features such as the Radisson-branded meeting suites, as well as the vibrant lobby with its RED-style urban interior and art."

With the health and safety of guests and team members as its top priority, Radisson RED Oslo Airport and Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre Oslo Airport are implementing the Radisson Hotels Safety Protocol program. The in-depth cleanliness and disinfection protocols were developed in partnership with SGS, the world's leading inspection, verification, testing and certification company, and are designed to ensure guest safety and peace of mind from check-in to check-out.

Hotel website
Taking over as General Manager at One&Only Desaru Coast is Jerome Pichon, who re-joins Kerzner after most recently being the General Manager of the Arts Club Dubai. In his previous role as Director of Global Operations and Resort Openings at Kerzner, Jerome was intrinsically involved in developing concepts for new resorts and supporting the pre-opening operational teams, in particular for the successful openings of One&Only Gorilla's Nest and One&Only Nyungwe House in Rwanda, which were both named #1 and #2 Resorts in Africa by the readers of Conde Nast Traveller. Before joining Kerzner, Jerome held senior management roles in Dubai at Armani Hotel, The Palace Hotel and The Ritz-Carlton, as well as several key positions in the US and Europe.

One&Only Desaru Coast

Desaru Coast

Malaysia Website
Since Mr. White joined MCR in January 2016, he has been an integral member of the management team, serving as a Senior Vice President of Acquisitions and Development based in the company's New York City office. In that role, Mr. White led the company's New York City hotel operations, overseeing day-to-day management as well as the acquisition of The Lexington Hotel, Autograph Collection, and the Royalton Hotel New York. Mr. White also oversaw the firm's acquisition of two software companies  StayNTouch, a cloud-based hotel property management system, and Optii, a software platform that transforms hotel operations. In his new role, Mr. White will lead MCR's finance function, including accounting, fund administration, tax, treasury and human resources.

Lisa Ross, previously the Senior Vice President of Finance and Accounting, has been named Chief Accounting Officer and will report to Mr. White. Ms. Ross joined MCR in 2019 and has held a variety of senior finance-related roles at MCR and at Lionstone Investments, Hudson Advisors and The Hampstead Group.

Prior to MCR, Mr. White worked for the New York City Economic Development Corporation, where he analyzed opportunities for a portfolio of New York City development properties. He is a graduate of Harvard University.
IDeaS, a SAS company, the worlds leading provider of hospitality revenue management software and services, announced today Loews Hotels & Co will pilot the total revenue forecasting module in IDeaS RevPlan, a cloud-based tool that streamlines forecasting and budgeting processes for rooms, food and beverage, and other income.

Loews has already successfully leveraged RevPlans automated financial forecasting capabilities for guest rooms, gaining significant time savings across its portfolio. The company will now move to the next phase of its RevPlan rollout by piloting automated food and beverage and other income forecasting and budgeting to drive greater efficiency and profitability.

Agile revenue forecasting  Loews utilized IDeaS RevPlan for regular operational forecasting and re-forecasting throughout the pandemic. As demand returns, the company continues to appreciate the ease of use and flexibility RevPlan offers with the ability to analyze data from a variety of sources to produce quick and precise forecasts.

 Loews utilized IDeaS RevPlan for regular operational forecasting and re-forecasting throughout the pandemic. As demand returns, the company continues to appreciate the ease of use and flexibility RevPlan offers with the ability to analyze data from a variety of sources to produce quick and precise forecasts. A food and beverage breakthrough  The hospitality industry has long been challenged to forecast food and beverage accurately and efficiently, often leading to under- or over-staffing. RevPlan will solve this issue by enabling Loews to budget and plan for its food and beverage operations based on more scientific forecasting methods.

 The hospitality industry has long been challenged to forecast food and beverage accurately and efficiently, often leading to under- or over-staffing. RevPlan will solve this issue by enabling Loews to budget and plan for its food and beverage operations based on more scientific forecasting methods. Total profit optimization  IDeaS RevPlan will empower Loews Hotels & Co to increase the profitability of all its revenue streamsfrom guest rooms to food and beveragewith automated forecasting for more precise planning and operational efficiencies.

Monica Xuereb, chief revenue officer, Loews Hotels & Co, said: IDeaS RevPlan has become a vital tool for our revenue team, saving us time each month, which used to be spent creating and managing forecast spreadsheets. With the success we have had with RevPlans rooms forecasting, the team is confident the food and beverage forecasting module is the next step in taking us toward a scientific total revenue forecast and closer to our goal of total profit optimization.

Sanjay Nagalia, co-founder, chief operating officer and chief technology officer, IDeaS, said: Hoteliers face many challenges when it comes to planning and budgeting their total business. Thats why we developed RevPlan for our clients like Loews. RevPlan enables Loews to make tactical and strategic operational decisions based on data they can trust, and now the day is finally here when a hotels food and beverage forecast can be as accurate and precise as a rooms forecast.

About Loews Hotels & Co

Headquartered in New York City, Loews Hotels & Co is rooted in deep heritage and excellence in service. The hospitality company encompasses branded independent Loews Hotels, and a solid mix of partner-brand hotels. Loews Hotels & Co owns and/or operates 26 hotels and resorts across the U.S. and Canada. For reservations or more information about Loews Hotels, call 1-800-23-LOEWS or visit: www.loewshotels.com.

About IDeaS

IDeaS, a SAS company, is the world's leading provider of revenue management software and services. With over 30 years of expertise, IDeaS delivers revenue science to more than 18,000 clients in 145 countries. Combining industry knowledge with innovative, data-analytics technology, IDeaS creates sophisticated yet simple ways to empower revenue leaders with precise, automated decisions they can trust. Results delivered. Revenue transformed. Discover greater profitability at ideas.com.

Kim Dearborn

+1 909 455 4316

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New Publication.

AP Asia Pacific Hotel Operator Guide (HOG) is the most established publication in the industry in Asia Pacific to guide investors and owners in understanding the scale, presence, and capabilities of hotel operators in the region. HOG highlights geographic distribution and brand presences of the existing properties and pipeline supply, as well as management structure by operators. To read more about the publication, please click here for the excerpt.

Transactions that matter.



1. Hotel Clover Jalan Sultan, Singapore

Hong Kong-based Weave Living announced its joint acquisition of 88-key Hotel Clover in Jalan Sultan with Singapore-based property developer SLB Development at SGD 74.8 million (USD 55 million) or USD 627,000 per key . The property consists of 17 conservation shophouses in Kampong Glam Area, and it is on a 99-year leasehold starting 2008.

. The property consists of 17 conservation shophouses in Kampong Glam Area, and it is on a 99-year leasehold starting 2008. Marked as the first acquisition outside its home city, Hong Kong, Weave Living would rebrand the property as Weave Suites providing furnished rental accommodation and multi-functional shared space, the co-living space is set to open by early 2023. This would also be the first co-living project invested by SLB Development for income diversification besides their portfolio in residential, industrial and commercial sectors.

The co-living market in Singapore is catching investors and operators attentions on both long-term and short-term offerings. Caliwoo, a co-living brand developed by Singapore-based LHN Group, grows its portfolio across Singapore through asset acquisition and redevelopment; the brand also launches its own hotel concept in March, and currently owns and operates over 800 units citywide. Lyf, a co-living concept developed by Singapore-based The Ascott Limited, expands their footprint rapidly with 18 properties in 9 countries, including 3 in Singapore.

2. Ambassador Hotel Hsinchu, Taiwan

The 257-key Ambassador Hotel Hsinchu and adjacent buildings are acquired by Trans Globe Life Insurance from the sellers, Ambassador Hotel and HCT Logistics at TWD 4.2 billion (USD 147 million) in total. Opened in 2001, the mixed-use development project also came with retail space and parking space. Ambassador Hotels agrees with a 20-year leaseback from the buyer after the transaction, while the plan for retail space remains unclear after the lease was ended back in 2018.

Ambassador Hotel Hsinchu and adjacent buildings are acquired by Trans Globe Life Insurance from the sellers, Ambassador Hotel and HCT Logistics at in total. Opened in 2001, the mixed-use development project also came with retail space and parking space. Ambassador Hotels agrees with a from the buyer after the transaction, while the plan for retail space remains unclear after the lease was ended back in 2018. Aside from the sale-leasebacks transaction, Ambassador Hotels is actively seeking for redevelopment opportunities for its two owned properties in Taipei and Kaohsiung. The property in Taipei is scheduled for a mixed-use redevelopment scheme including one hotel tower and 2 residential towers, and the hotel would be managed by Palace Hotel Group under a hotel management agreement in the future. On the other hand, the property in Kaohsiung is likely to be redeveloped as branded residences in partnership with local developers and investors.

Notable transactions in the Taiwanese hotel market are driven by a perspective of investment diversification or redevelopment amid COVID-19 pandemic. The acquisition of Sunworld Dynasty Hotel Taipei by Fubon Life Insurance and Hotel Indigo Hsinchu by Shin Kong Life Insurance are both acquired by insurance groups for long-term investment.

3. Hotel Lindrum, Australia

Australian developer Time & Place takes over the 59-key Hotel Lindrum from experienced property developer, Robert Magid in an AUD 50 million (USD 37 million) deal. Operated under Accors MGallery, the boutique hotel is named after billiard champion Walter Lindrum. Situated in eastern end of Melbourne CBD, the property is within walking distance to various leisure attractions and public transportation.

from experienced property developer, Robert Magid in an deal. Operated under Accors MGallery, the boutique hotel is named after billiard champion Walter Lindrum. Situated in eastern end of Melbourne CBD, the property is within walking distance to various leisure attractions and public transportation. Robert Magid acquired the property together with Harbour Rocks Hotel in Sydney from fund developer Cbus Property in 2008. In addition to the revamp of the asset, Hotel Lindrum also secured a permit for redevelopment of a 30-level mix-used project comprising hotels rooms and residential units. This is likely to be the Melbournes first major revitalization project in 2022, and the potential perspective of redevelopment pushes the property value to USD 633,500 per key.

Transactions that matters. Photo by AP Hospitality Advisors

COVID news that matter.



China

Starting in late March China is going through one of the largest lockdowns in Shanghai to tackle the spread of Omicron. The lockdown is taking place in two stages starting from the eastern side of the city. Although the fully vaccinated population has reached over 87% in China, the government remains mute on reopening the border, instead tightening border controls on all international and cross-regional arrivals. The zero-COVID (or dynamic zero") strategy is faced with small outbreaks in China two years after the pandemic started, and even a small number of cases might trigger lockdowns of entire cities.

The strict entry control between different cities and provinces has stimulated more local tourism and excursions. The ski season in northern China ended in late March while more indoor ski resorts emerge after the Winter Olympics this year. According to the report released by China Tourism Academy, travelers from warmer cities in southern China are increasingly eager to spend on winter sports, and cities like Hangzhou and Shenzhen are seeing more indoor facilities providing related experiences even during summer. Other popular activities include flower viewing, cultural experiences and lesser-known destinations are trends observed during the 3-day spring break in China.

Indonesia

Starting 22 March, quarantine requirements for international air travelers arriving at operating airports across Indonesia was waived after a successful two-week quarantine-free travel trial in Bali, Batam, and Bintan. While Bali opened its door to international travelers in October last year, only 45 international arrivals were recorded in the whole year. The government also granted inbound travelers from 25 countries visa on arrival, such as China, Japan, Korea, and all ASEAN members starting in late March.

Meanwhile, the government continues the development of Super Priority Destinations across Indonesia, the 5 existing focal points include Lake Toba, Borobudur, Labuan Bajo, Mandalika and Likupang. Despite the lesser popularity compared with Bali, these five destinations have their advantages and potential in becoming world-class destinations. For example, Borobudur is named as one of the UNESCO cultural heritages, and Lake Toba is the largest lake in Southeast Asia with abundant natural resources.

Singapore

Starting from April 1, Singapore lifted all quarantine requirements and entry restrictions for fully vaccinated travelers with valid pre-departure tests and travel insurance. The number of daily new cases has dropped from over 20,000 in February this year to around 6,000 at the end of March. The city-sate is also loosening related social distancing measurement at the same time, including optional mask wearing in outdoor area, greater capacity for events and gatherings, and sale of alcohol at F&B outlets in late evenings. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and the team announced that Singapore would move towards a new phase of living with Covid-19. The new measurements are expected to boost the arrival of both leisure and business travelers more effectively than the VTLs with certain countries enacted in the past months.

While the number of visitor arrivals would take some time to bounce back to 2019s level, the city state stays optimistic for its leisure and hospitality development. Two integrated resorts operator, Marina Bay Sands (MBS) and Resorts World Sentosa (RWS), both announced their expansion plan this year. MBS currently undergoes a USD 3.3 billion expansion scheduled to be completed in 2026, and the plans including renovation on existing assets and adding a 4th tower and a 15,000-seat arena. RWS, on the other hand, would start its USD 3 million expansion of Universal Studio and aquarium in Q2 2022, while the renovation of its hotel properties will take place in multiple phases.

Reopening status in Asia Pacific.

Starting from earlier this year, more and more countries commenced opening up their borders to international travelers after vaccination rates reached the level of 'herd immunity' in the country. Instead of featuring the vaccination progress in Asia Pacific, the AP newsletter will henceforth indicate the reopening status of different countries and regions. While each might require booster or PCR test results as part of their respective entry requirements, the majority of the destinations have completely or partially removed the quarantine requirement on visitor arrivals. Additionally, leisure travel is expected to gradually return with the resumption of international travel in Asia Pacific.

Reopening status in Asia Pacific. Photo by AP Hospitality Advisors

Anchi Liu

Analyst

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AP Hospitality Advisors

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PARIS, FRANCE / NEW YORK / SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA  International hospitality innovators Dream Hotels has welcomed designer fashion house KARL LAGERFELD bath and beauty into its global portfolio. The luxury boutique hotel group will be offering a highly exclusive range of premium KARL LAGERFELD skincare products, marking a worldwide first for guests staying at any Dream Hotels location.

The contemporary, forward-looking spirit of KARL LAGERFELD fuses effortlessly with the upscale, energy-fueled hospitality of Dream Hotels. Guests of the lifestyle-led brand will be the first to experience the KARL LAGERFELD Argumes et Vetiver line of amenities as a signature element of their stay.

The five-piece collection of soaps, shampoos and lotions combines top notes of citrus fruits with warm base notes of vetiver wood and musk to create a refreshing earthy scent. Select locations will also extend luxurious KARL LAGERFELD extension items including lip balm, eye cream, face cream, face wash, hand cream and bath salts.

DREAM HOTEL GROUP Chief Executive Officer, Jay Stein said: Dream Hotels has been committed to pushing the expectations for what a hotel stay should be since inception. For more than thirty years weve been creating icons of style by reimagining landmark buildings and creating new beacons of design to delight our guests. At Dream, our hotels are more than just a place to rest your head; they are a destination for guests to explore and be inspired  welcoming KARL LAGERFELD amenities is a perfect extension of this philosophy. We are thrilled to be pushing the boundaries alongside the iconic KARL LAGERFELD brand.

Distributed exclusively via luxury hotel amenity provider VANITY GROUP, incorporating vegan formulations, as well as the use of OceanBound Material, the new line of KARL LAGERFELD hotel bath and beauty products further supports Dream Hotel Groups eco-friendly initiatives to do better by the planet and its people.

VANITY GROUP Founder and CEO, Paul Tsalikis said: From the moment we partnered with KARL LAGERFELD, we knew Dream Hotels was its hospitality alter ego. Both brands are distinctively beautiful and pride themselves on creating unforgettable experiences  and whats more memorable than seeing KARL LAGERFELD lining the hotel bathroom vanity? Its a proud moment to see Dream Hotels welcoming this iconic brand into their guest rooms.

The KARL LAGERFELD Argumes Et Vetiver Hotel Collection rolls out in all Dream Hotels locations across the U.S., including Dream Hollywood (CA), Dream Nashville (TN), Dream South Beach (FL), Dream Downtown (NY) and Dream Midtown (NY), in April 2022, and will launch as part of the luxury amenities package at the highly anticipated Dream Doha hotel in Qatar, set to open in Fall 2022.

About KARL LAGERFELD

The House of KARL LAGERFELD shares the iconic vision and design aesthetic of its founder, Karl Lagerfeld, fused with a contemporary, forward-looking spirit. The brand celebrates his colossal legacy and breathes his passion, intuition and inexhaustible creativity into the core of its DNA. Featuring Parisian-inspired classics with a rock-chic attitude, the KARL LAGERFELD portfolio includes ready-to-wear for women, men and kids, plus bags, small leather goods, footwear, fragrances, eyewear and more. The Maisons creative vision is led by Design Director Hun Kim; additional members of the KARL family include Style Advisor Carine Roitfeld, brand ambassador Sebastien Jondeau and collaborator Amber Valletta, amongst others. KARL LAGERFELD connects with consumers at more than 200 stores worldwide, with key locations in Paris, London, Munich, Moscow, Dubai, and Shanghai. The brand also has a premium wholesale network and robust digital presence in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, while the KARL.COM flagship store reaches 96 countries. In 2019, KARL LAGERFELD joined the Fashion Pact, a global sustainability initiative seeking to transform the fashion industry through objectives in three areas: climate, biodiversity, and ocean protection.

About Dream Hotels

Dream Hotels are individually curated properties that together comprise a unique narrative. The brand is underwritten by a design philosophy that is both surreal and contemporarily chic. Located in the United States and abroad, the design of each property is informed by its locale and taken to Dream status by a pool of world-renowned architects and interior designers. The result is a stay experience well-suited to the discerning traveler who seeks comfort in a truly cosmopolitan atmosphere. For more information about Dream Hotels, please visit www.dreamhotels.com and follow @dreamhotels on Instagram.

About Dream Hotel Group

Dream Hotel Group is a hotel brand and management company with a rich, 35-year history of managing properties in some of the world's most highly competitive hotel environments, including New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Bangkok and most recently Nashville. Home to its Dream Hotels, Unscripted Hotels, The Chatwal and new By Dream Hotel Group brands, Dream Hotel Group encompasses three business lines: Proprietary Brands, Hotel Management, and Dining & Nightlife. The company is committed to the philosophy that forward-thinking design, service and guest experiences should be available across all market segments. Dream Hotel Group is dedicated to offering travelers an authentic connection to their chosen destination through a truly original approach. For more information on Dream Hotel Group and its brands, visit www.DreamHotelGroup.com and follow @dreamhotelgroup on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About VANITY GROUP
WASHINGTON (AP)  The Biden administration has charged a Russian oligarch linked to the Kremlin with violating U.S. government sanctions, and disrupted a cybercrime operation that was launched by a Russian military intelligence agency, officials said Wednesday.

The actions came as the Justice Department said it was accelerating efforts to track down illicit Russian assets and as U.S. prosecutors helped European counterparts gather evidence on potential war crimes committed by Russia during its war on Ukraine.

FBI and Justice Department officials announced the moves on the same day that the U.S. separately revealed sanctions against the two adult daughters of Russian President Vladimir Putin and sanctions that blocked two key Russian banks.

We have our eyes on every yacht and jet. We have our eyes on every piece of art and real estate purchased with dirty money and on every bitcoin wallet filled with proceeds of theft and other crimes, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said, adding that "our goal is to ensure that sanctioned Russian oligarchs and cyber criminals will not find safe haven.

The indictment against Konstantin Malofeyev, a Russian media baron and founder of Russian Orthodox news channel Tsargrad TV, is the first of an oligarch since Russia's war with Ukraine began in February. Malofeyev has trumpeted the invasion as a holy war" and has supported Russia-aligned separatist groups in Ukraine.

He was sanctioned by the Treasury Department in 2014 for financing Russians promoting separatism in Crimea. Though those sanctions barred him from doing business with U.S. citizens, prosecutors say Malofeyev evaded those restrictions by hiring an American television producer to work for him in television networks in Russia and Greece and enlisted his help in trying to acquire a TV network in Bulgaria. It was all part of an effort to spread pro-Russia propaganda throughout Europe, the Justice Department said.

Jack Hanick, a former CNBC and Fox News employee, was arrested last month for his work as a television producer for Malofeyev. That case is pending.

Malofeyev is not in custody and is believed to be in Russia. It was not immediately clear if he had a lawyer to speak on his behalf. The two sanctions charges each carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.

The Justice Department said it is seeking the seizure of a $10 million investment that Malofeyev had illegally transferred to a business associate in Greece.

Federal authorities also announced that they had taken down a botnet  a network of hijacked computers typically used for malicious activity  that was controlled by the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU. The botnet, which in this case involved thousands of infected network hardware devices, was dismantled before it could do harm, said FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Wednesday's announcements came two days after U.S. officials seized a huge yacht in Spain belonging to a Russian oligarch, Viktor Vekselberg, with close ties to Russian President Putin.

After the war began, the Justice Department set up a task force to enforce sanctions against Russian oligarchs and target ill-gotten proceeds.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said Wednesday that Justice Department prosecutors were also helping international efforts to uncover potential war crimes committed by Russia. U.S. officials have met with European prosecutors to develop a plan for gathering evidence, he said.

We have seen the dead bodies of civilians, some with bound hands, scattered in the streets. We have seen the mass graves. We have seen the bombed hospital, theater, and residential apartment buildings," Garland said. "The world sees what is happening in Ukraine. The Justice Department sees what is happening in Ukraine.
U.S. refineries are reaching their capacity for the first time since the pandemic started, pushing up fuel costs already at record highs after Russia invaded Ukraine and roiled global oil markets.

Refineries in the United States are operating at 92 percent of capacity, according to data from the Energy Information Administration, meaning most of their refining units are full.

(Refiners) are looking at ways to put more barrels through, said John Auers, executive vice president of refining at energy consultancy Turner, Mason & Co. And theyre going to do that. But right now theyre full.

The industry lost significant capacity during the pandemic as refineries closed permanently  a reckoning forced by mounting costs and declining future prospects for gasoline as the energy transition accelerated.

Now theyre having to do more with less as the global market loses gasoline and diesel from Russia, which had been a major exporter of refined products to Europe. With refineries nearing capacity, its more difficult for the U.S. to fill the gap left by the loss of Russian products, which comes as demand for fuel recovers from the pandemic, analysts said.

Refinery closings have stripped 3 million barrels per day from the global market since January 2020, including 1 million barrels a day in the U.S, according to the industry trade group American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers.

Even if refineries hadnt closed and even if stocks were at more normal levels, thered have been a price spike just because of how much supply  Russian export  is being removed from the market, said Rob Smith, director of global fuel retail at S&P Global. But it likely wouldnt have been as severe or as long lasting as the one we will deal with now.

The diminished refining capacity is more palpable for diesel and jet fuel, of which Russia was a major supplier, Smith said. Not coincidentally, thats the product family thats really skyrocketed, he said, referring to the rise in demand for those products.

The tight refining market is a far cry from the early days of the pandemic, when the first stay-at-home orders hit and the rate of refinery utilization plunged to its lowest level since at least the early 1980s. Utilization rates fell to 70 percent in April 2020 from 93 percent in December 2019, according to the EIA.

As the pandemic kept people home and off freeways, it accelerated the energy transition and hastened the closures of some refineries.

Shell closed its Convent refinery in Louisiana last year, taking 240,000 barrels per day of capacity from the market as part of a company effort to reduce carbon emissions. Also last year: multiple years of hurricane damage cemented Phillips 66's decision to close its Alliance refinery in Lousiana, which processed 255,000 barrels of crude per day.

amanda.drane@chron.com
WASHINGTON  For the second time in six months top executives from some of the world's largest oil companies are being called before Congress, this time to answer questions about rising fuel prices and the profits they are generating for oil companies.

In a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee entitled, "Gouged at the gas station: Big oil and America's pain at the pump," executives including Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods and BP America President David Lawler will be taking questions Wednesday from a Democratic majority increasingly agitated by fuel prices that are at their highest level in 14 years.

"Persistently high gasoline prices are a financial challenge for many Americans and disproportionately impact lower-earning Americans," House Energy and Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone wrote in a memo Monday. "Oil companies, on the other hand, are making significant profits, with the six companies testifying at this hearing collectively generating more than $76 billion in profit in 2021."

RELATED: Biden approves historic release of 1M barrels per day as gas prices continue to surge

High fuel prices and their trickle over effect on the wider economy have become a growing point of tension in Washington, as Democrats and Republicans square off on the cause of the spike.

Democrats blame Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the uncertainty within oil markets about the future of Russian oil exports, the world's largest. Republicans, along with their allies in the oil sector, have blamed President Joe Biden's climate policies as discouraging oil and gas drilling, requiring the United States to import more crude oil from abroad.

At a hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee Tuesday, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, pointed out prices were rising before the Ukrainian invasion, blaming, "Green New Deal zealots in the Biden administration."

"They told the American people they would do this and they kept their promise," he said. "And now Democrats discovered they have a problem."

Oil demand has risen sharply over the past six months, as nations worldwide lift public health restrictions for Covid-19 and economies come back to life. But the drop off in investment during the pandemic, when oil prices fell to historic lows, means that production has yet to catch up.

Biden announced last week he would release 1 million barrels a day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for the next six months to bridge the gap until supply increases. And he called on Congress to charge fees to oil companies that own federal leases for oil and gas but are not producing.

In the House, that message is being taken up by Democrats, with members calling on oil companies to suspend stock buyback programs and dividends while the war in Ukraine is ongoing.

"Many oil companies have elected to distribute their profits to shareholders in the form of dividends and repurchasing programs rather than investments in production," Pallone wrote in his memo.

Also scheduled to appear in Wednesday's hearing are Chevron CEO Michael Wirth, Devon Energy CEO Richard Muncrief, Pioneer Natural Resources CEO Scott Sheffield, Gretchen Watkins, president of Shell USA, and H.R. McMaster, former national security advisor in the Trump administration and now a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will warn on Wednesday that the war in Ukraine threatens to inflict enormous economic repercussions globally, just as governments impose fresh sanctions on Russia and economists cut growth forecasts.

Russias actions, including the atrocities committed against innocent Ukrainians in Bucha, are reprehensible, represent an unacceptable affront to the rules-based global order, and will have enormous economic repercussions for the world, Yellen will tell the House Financial Services Committee, according to a copy of her prepared remarks.

U.S., European Union and Group of Seven officials are coordinating new sanctions on Russia, including a U.S. ban on investment in the country and an EU ban on coal imports, following the discovery of civilian murders and other atrocities in Ukrainian towns abandoned by Russian forces.

Meantime, the International Monetary Fund is preparing to cut its forecasts for global growth, having previously predicted a 4.4% expansion this year. Deutsche Bank AG economists said on Tuesday that they now expect a recession in the U.S. in the next two years.

Yellen will say the work of international financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank have become more important in the wake of the war.

They will be critical partners in rebuilding Ukraine, alongside bilateral donors, and they also will provide vital support to neighboring countries welcoming refugees, she will tell lawmakers.

Development banks will also be called upon to help with spillovers from the invasion, including food insecurity, Yellen will say, highlighting the out-sized role Russia and Ukraine play in global wheat exports.

The institutions can also help build energy security, in shifting countries away from Russian oil and gas and from fossil fuels generally, she will say, according to the remarks.
Federal funding that covers the cost of hospitalizing uninsured COVID-19 patients has run out, leaving hospitals that serve the poor worried about how theyll bear the expense should another surge in coronavirus infections roll across the region and nation.

Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement Monday on a scaled-back $10 billion COVID relief bill that does not include money to reimburse hospitals for the cost of admitting and treating uninsured patients. The loss of the funding would have the biggest effect on so-called safety net hospitals, such as the Harris Health System, that treat large numbers of the poor and uninsured.

Harris Health, a public system for Harris County residents, received about $100 million a year in reimbursements to care for hospitalized COVID patients. Nearly half the systems COVID-19 patients were uninsured.

To assume were going to just carry on with $100 million less is unrealistic, said Dr. Esmaeil Porsa, CEO of Harris Health. We are not in a position to just replace this funding by charging more to our insured patients.

Safety net hospitals say they will continue to provide treatment regardless of a patients ability to pay. With COVID cases low, the loss of hospitalization funding and other trims in COVID relief wont have an immediate effect, providers said. But public health experts and policy analysts worry about what will happen if a new variant of the coronavirus emerges and leads to a jump in hospitalizations, as the delta variant did last summer and the omicron variant did this year.

Some epidemiologists have expressed concerns about a summer surge. In several countries, including Britain, France and Germany, case numbers are climbing as a contagious subvariant of omicron, known as BA.2, spreads.

Weve been continually caught off guard during this pandemic, and somewhat unprepared. You want to be building up resources when cases and community spread is low in case there is another surge, said Jen Tolbert, an associate director for the Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured for the Kaiser Family Foundation. Otherwise, youre responding in the moment, and thats not an ideal position to be in.

On HoustonChronicle.com: What is stealth omicron? Heres what you need to know about the latest COVID variant BA.2

During the delta surge, local hospitalizations jumped more than eight times from 400 in July to 3,500 in August. When omicron hit, they climbed nearly sixfold to 2,900 from about 500. In August, nearly every bed in the intensive care unit of the Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital in northeast Houston was filled with a COVID patient, Porsa said. Across the entire system of two hospitals and dozens of clinics, COVID infections accounted for 60 percent of patients at the peak.

Scaling back federal COVID funding could be especially problematic in Texas, which has the highest uninsured population in the country, with about 1 in 5 people living without health insurance. Harris County also has a particularly high uninsured rate: nearly 1 in 4 people under age 65 are uninsured, according to Harris County Public Health. The county is also home to an estimated 500,000 undocumented individuals, who typically have difficulty accessing health care.

Without the federal funding, another surge in COVID hospitalizations could eventually force Harris Health to reduce beds in its two hospitals, cut services and close clinics, Porsa said, or seek additional taxpayer funding. In addition to dealing with a high caseload throughout the pandemic, Harris Health and other hospitals have had to absorb higher costs for labor, equipment and supplies, from masks to gloves to alcohol swabs.

At some point, if these costs continue to accumulate and if were not reimbursed, we will face a situation where we have to curtail services, Porsa said. And thats a very scary thought.

The $10 billion in the Senate compromise plan is less than half the $22.5 billion sought by President Joe Biden. Its unclear how the lower funding will affect outpatient clinics that serve the uninsured. Although the proposed package will reimburse for tests and vaccines, health policy experts say its unclear how long that funding will last.

Leaders at federally qualified health centers, which serve the uninsured and underinsured, have said they can tap other funding mechanisms, such as government grants and private sector donations, to fund vaccine and testing. But they added that their resources may be stretched thin in a surge.

On HoustonChronicle.com: As COVID drags on, a never-ending cycle of burnout is worsening the health care worker shortage

For the time being, Vecino Health Centers, a clinic that serves north Houston, is prepared to absorb any costs of testing or vaccinations, said Dr. Enjoli Benitez, the chief medical officer. The most expensive service is a PCR test, which cost about $78 for the kit and about $100 when including the staff needed to administer and process it. Benitez said it wont be as easy for the clinic to pay for those tests if COVID cases spike.

Thats the part we have yet to see, Benitez said. How long this is sustainable is definitely something on our minds.

Julian Gill contributed to this report.
When Adam Armour and his family stepped into a Buc-ee's in Alabama while on a recent road trip, they likened it to a nightmare.

Throngs of customers  roughly 17,000 people by his exaggerated estimate  were snatching up gas, hunting supplies and barbecue at the Buc-ee's in Leeds, Alabama, on that day.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Katy joins list of Houston-area neighborhoods hit with racist flyers

After walking into the gas station, Armours wife, Mandy, said: I just stepped into my nightmare.

At least thats what Armour thought he heard her say as the couple attempted to keep their 5-year-old daughter from being trampled or wandering off into the sea of people. In a Sunday column in the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, Armour recounted his experience.

For Armour, the main issue was throngs of people filing into the sprawling compound that, in his mind, was what you got if a Loves mated with a Walmart and gave birth to a small theme park which was then exposed to a blast of gamma radiation.

Michael Miller/San Antonio Express-News

Inside and outside, people seemed to move about the store with no sense of purpose other than to create anarchy, Armour wrote.

He added: Its as if the store drained any sense of personal space from anyone who entered, leaving its customers to careen haphazardly toward whatevers caught their attention at a given moment.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Heroic German Shepherd protects lost 5-year-old boy found wandering along Houston train tracks

Armour said he would have turned around but stayed because his family had already traversed roughly 153 miles to specifically visit the Buc-ee's in Alabama. It was a why-the-heck-not day trip on a Sunday afternoon, he wrote.

He added: Neither of us were quite ready to admit wed undertaken a fools errand and turn tail without first picking up a few nonessentials with which to memorialize our pointless journey.

At one point, his wife saved their 5-year-old daughter from being trampled by a nearby "family of oblivious gawkers hellbent on crushing tiny, equally oblivious children."

On HoustonChronicle.com: The doctor who delivered a baby Selena was presidential hopeful Ron Paul

After that encounter, Armour said he headed toward the heart of the store for a brisket sandwich.

The Texas-based convenience store is planning to expand its footprint in Alabama  a state that already has two Buc-ee's. One of those stores is along Interstate 10 just outside of Mobile.

As Buc-ee's has looked to expand outside of Texas, it has faced some backlash in states like North Carolina. Residents of Orange County were vehemently opposed to the construction of the store, according to Texas Monthly.

A Georgia-based writer, who took issue with the stores size, recently lambasted new stores in the state.

timothy.fanning@express-news.net
Lieutenant Gov. Dan Patrick wants Texans to know about some recent changes to his social life.

I AM DONE WITH DISNEY! he declared Monday, in the subject line of an email.

He continued, again in all caps, but let me spare you: Disney has violated their sacred trust with parents as they actively plan to indoctrinate and sexualize their children.

Whats going on here, exactly? Disney last month came out in opposition to a new Florida law restricting how teachers can talk about sexual orientation or gender identity in the classroom  or barring them from even alluding to those topics, according to critics.

Our goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts, a company spokesman said in a statement, adding that Disney is committed to supporting state and national LGBTQ groups that are working toward the same goal.

In doing so, Disney elicited the wrath of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Trump wannabe whos taken issue with what he calls corporate wokeness. The corporate giant also drew fire from the likes of Christopher J. Rufo, a conservative writer whos been leading the charge against critical race theory.

We are waging moral war against Disney, Rufo tweeted March 30. We are directly targeting their public reputation. We are turning half of their customers against them.

Hes been doing so by releasing video clips of various employees talking optimistically about their work, including the companys Reimagine Tomorrow initiative, which launched six months ago with the goal of amplifying underrepresented voices and untold stories.

Conservatives across the country have concluded that Disney  you know, The Walt Disney Company  is a leading threat to the innocence of Americas children.

Disney wants to completely take your children and they want to indoctrinate them into sexual immoral filth," says Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican who vivifies the pitfalls of partisan redistricting. You may recall she was recently seen heckling President Joe Biden during his State of the Union address and speaking at an event organized by a white nationalist.

Now Patrick, the bombastic former radio talk show host, wants in on the action. The 72-year-old Republican has until recently been a habitue of the Magic Kingdom, apparently. He grew up on Disney productions, he explains in the email, and just returned from a Disney theme park a month ago  a trip he now rues.

If I had known then how they would respond to the Florida law and if I had seen those videos, they would not have gotten one penny from me, he says in the email, with a link to the clips Rufo distributed.

He wants the Texas Legislature to pass its own version of the Florida law, and declares that such a measure will be a top priority in the next legislative session. He also called on Texans to boycott Disney in the interim, as hes done by selling the few shares of Disney stock he owned.

People must see what has been going on behind the Mickey curtain, Patrick said. I know your kids and grandchildren will be disappointed and may not understand. But, would you rather have them indoctrinated by Disney radicals?

It was virtually inevitable that Patrick would call for a Texas version of Floridas Dont Say Gay bill, as opponents call it. He rarely skips out on a good culture war skirmish  especially if it involves micromanaging our public schools or the children attempting to learn in them.

But whats striking here is that Patricks diatribe is focused on Disney, not Texas public schools.. He says nothing about how the law hes calling for would serve Texas. Patrick doesnt even make a case for the Florida law, beyond asserting that it simply says schools cannot sexualize children in elementary school.

Overall, the email gives the impression that Patricks priority is to punish Disney, not to protect children. Of course, Democrats have long contended that laws like the one in question are not actually intended to protect children. But its unusual to hear a politician tacitly admit to seeing Texas children as pawns to be used in the latest culture-war battle.

Unfortunate, too. Patrick probably doesnt have to worry about losing much political support, or many campaign checks, by taking a stand against this particular company.

Still, he risks looking hypocritical. Silly, too.

Conservatives have been sounding the alarm about cancel culture for years now, generally contending that theyre the ones being stifled by corporate America as part of a greater push, on the left, for ideological conformity. But here, conservatives are seemingly trying to silence Disney because of a statement the company made. A rather measured statement, incidentally, and one issued only after weeks of pressure from customers and employees.

Ah, well. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, to paraphrase Emerson. And Patricks mind, clearly, is expansive enough to contain all manner of idle thoughts  including this non sequitur salvo against Disney.

But thats where the silly factor comes in.

For DeSantis to mount a theatrical attack against Disney makes a certain amount of political sense. If he does have his eye on higher office, hell need to distinguish himself from the rest of the GOP field, which may include former President Donald J. Trump.

Can the lieutenant governor of Texas say the same, though? Patrick is boycotting a company thats headquartered in another state and has nothing to do with him.

We have plenty of real problems in Texas that deserve the attention of our state leaders, including ones that are taking a toll on our most vulnerable children. Disneys efforts to be more inclusive surely are not chief among them.

erica.grieder@chron.com
An on-duty Harris County sheriff's deputy was involved in a crash Tuesday night in which the driver of another vehicle sustained fatal injuries, officials said.

The deputy was traveling northbound on the 12300 block of Jones Road , west of the Willowbrook area, when they collided with a Nissan Altima, according to Sheriff Ed Gonzalez. Deputies responded shortly after 10 p.m. to the northwest Harris County scene.
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Accounts of defendants leaving jail on the lowest of bail fees only for some to then be on the hook for costly payment plans concerns Houston Police Chief Troy Finner.

The payment plans are especially worrisome, the chief said Tuesday, when violent offenders are forced to scrape together funds for their bail bondsmen by any means possible. That sometimes includes committing more crimes, he said.

The chiefs remarks touched on bail and pleas for Harris County criminal justice stakeholders to be part of the solution against violent crime during a 20-minute sit-down with the Chronicle. Finner took over the department in April 2021 amid a growing backlog of criminal cases and a spike in violent crime.

It makes no sense when judges are doing the right thing, Finner said. They set the proper bail and then you get to a bail bonding company and they say, Im going to set up a payment program  Im going to let you out with 1 or 2 percent. Thats just not right and its not helping us fight violent crime.

Bail bondsmen have, at times, turned to payment plans to make up for the amount not paid on lower than 10 percent surety fees, the Chronicle has found. Examples of payment plans are mentioned in court from time-to-time. One strapped-for-cash defendant in the 177th District Court recently asked the judge to waive his GPS monitoring fees in order to make good on a payment plan for a $20,000 bond.

Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

The reliance on payment plans stem from Harris Countys evolving bail landscape. Diminishing profits in Harris County after the adoption of misdemeanor bail reform have promoted bondsmen to pad their business with more felony cases, some requiring higher bonds and more risk of defendants skipping court.

County officials in March tried to require local bail bondsmen to collect a 10 percent minimum from defendants accused of violent crimes  but the measure failed with opposition from two Harris County Bail Bond Board members. Three judges were absent from the vote, and a justice of the peace and a Harris County District Attorneys Office representative abstained.

District Attorney Kim Ogg said the language of the motion considered by the board was not strong enough, and she had concerns about its enforcement.

The measure is expected to back on the Bail Bond Boards April 13 agenda.

After the failed vote, State Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, announced he would push for a state law to require bail bondsmen in Texas to collect a 10 percent minimum from some defendants.

Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Finner declined to comment on the county representatives who abstained from the vote.

I dont want personal attacks or anything  but youre part of this system: Be part of the solution, the chief said. Stand up and do what we have to do. Sometimes its controversial, sometimes it may not be popular  but do the right thing.

The chief acknowledged that local efforts may not be enough.

Things just cant be county-wide or local  it needs to be, first of all, statewide, he said.

A backlog in the countys courts also has created havoc on the criminal justice system, with Finner blaming Hurricane Harvey for the initial damage. The pandemic exasperated the issue to a degree that he has not seen elsewhere in the country, he said.

Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

He suggested for more plea bargains on some offenses to alleviate the number of pending cases, which in February stood at nearly 49,000 felonies, according to county records. That number has dropped from the more than 52,600 pending cases last July.

If somebody wants to plea out on something, they may get lesser time. But were reducing the backlog, Finner said.

By the end of 2021, marking Finners first eight months in office, the citys homicide per capita rate ticked up to 20 deaths per 100,000 people, still below the homicide rate of 36 per 100,000 the police department recorded in 1990, statistics show. Violent crime, police officials said, has diminished since the worst of the pandemic increases.

Finner expressed regret for the loss of life from those homicides,citing his experience from two relatives killed during acts of violence over the past decade.

Ive been there as a family member, he said.

nicole.hensley@chron.com
Kim Kardashian is speaking out about Texas death row inmate Melissa Lucio as the Harlingen mother of 14 nears her April execution date.

In a now-deleted tweet, Kardashian told her 72 million followers that the death of Lucio's 2-year-old daughter was a "tragic accident" that Lucio should not be executed for it. Kardashian, who is studying law in California, has spoken out against the death penalty and prison reform for the last several years.

Twitter screenshot

In a series of tweets, Kardashian urged Gov. Greg Abbott and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to stop the execution and called on her millions of followers to sign an online petition from the Innocence Project supporting her release.

More from Rebecca Hennes: Melissa Lucio could be the first Latina executed in Texas. Family members say her crime was a tragic accident.

Kardashian's media representative did not immediately respond to a request Wednesday morning for comment on the deleted tweet.

Later Wednesday night, Kardashian made another plea to her Twitter followers about Lucio's case, sharing a letter Lucio's children signed asking that Abbott and the Board spare her life.

"This is one of the many reasons why I am against the death penalty - and why I pray her childrens wish is granted and their mothers life is spared," Kardashian continued.

Lucio has spent the last 15 years on death row following a conviction of capital murder in the 2007 death of her toddler Mariah. Lucio's family says there is no evidence that a murder actually happened. They say Mariah accidentally fell down a rickety flight of stairs while the family was moving out of a Harlingen apartment. Two days later, they say she died in her sleep during a nap.

Investigators argued at the time that significant bruises found on Mariah's body indicated she'd been a victim of child abuse. But new forensic evidence points to other explanations, including the theory that Mariah likely suffered head trauma from the fall, which could explain the bruising all over her body.

Texas prison officials are set to execute Lucio on April 27. If she is not granted a reprieve, she would be the first Latina in Texas to be executed in the modern era, and the first Texas woman executed in nearly a decade.

The last woman to be put to death in Texas was Lisa Coleman in 2014, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Coleman was convicted of beating and starving her girlfriend's 9-year-old son to death.

Cameron County has sent five people to death row, according to the latest available data from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Since 1982, Cameron County has executed six inmates, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Harris County, long-known as one of the "killingest" counties in Texas, has sent 73 people to death row, according to TDCJ data, and the state has executed 130 inmates since 1982, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Lucio's lawyers argue her case was clouded in corruption, unexplored evidence and bias. They point to a former district attorney, who is now incarcerated for corruption, as one of the many culprits behind her unfair prosecution and sentencing. They say police coerced her confession during a late-night interrogation the night of Mariah's death while Lucio was pregnant with twins. They also state she was inadequately represented during trial by a defense attorney who later earned a top position with the DA's office, and that her background as a victim of repeated sexual and domestic abuse was never presented to a jury.

Courtesy/The Innocence Project Courtesy/The Innocence Project Melissa Lucio's execution date is scheduled for April 27. If she is not granted a reprieve, she would be the first Latina in Texas history to be executed in the modern era, and the first Texas woman in nearly a decade. (Courtesy) Melissa Lucio's execution date is scheduled for April 27. If she is not granted a reprieve, she would be the first Latina in Texas history to be executed in the modern era, and the first Texas woman in nearly a decade. (Courtesy)

With her execution date looming, Lucio has become the focus of media attention with advocates, lawmakers and clergy members banding together to bring attention to her case. A 2020 Hulu documentary that argues she may be innocent has generated online support, and more than 80 Texas lawmakers have chimed in, asking she be granted clemency or a new trial.

Lucio's lawyers with the Innocence Project have filed a mountain of motions on her behalf, including a recent clemency motion packed with evidence they say proves her innocence. The petition also includes a list of Texas lawmakers, medical and forensic experts from across the state, anti-domestic violence organizations, faith leaders in Texas, people wrongfully convicted of a crime and death row exonerees who have joined the effort to seek clemency for her.

LUCIO CASE: Catholic leaders urge Abbott to stop execution of Hispanic mother in childs death

Also included in the petition are statements from five jurors from Lucio's capital murder trial in 2008 who voted for Lucio to be sentenced to death. These jurors say they would have delivered a different verdict had they been presented with the evidence Lucios lawyers say was not presented by her lawyer. One of those jurors wrote an Op-Ed in the Houston Chronicle, saying he felt pressured to vote for a death sentence but now he regretted it.

"Even at the time of trial, when it seemed to me that Lucios defense lawyers were hardly making a case for her life, I did not want to sentence her to death," the juror wrote.

Lucio's family has been touring the state, holding rallies and asking Texas residents to watch the documentary and sign the online petition to save her from the death chamber. In partnership with Death Penalty Action, they've also held daily prayer vigils outside the Cameron County courthouse, pleading with the current district attorney, Luis Saenz, to withdraw Lucio's death warrant.

Yi-Chin Lee, Photographer / Staff photographer Yi-Chin Lee, Photographer / Staff photographer Family of Melissa Lucio, the first Latina woman facing execution in Texas this April, ask Gov. Greg Abbott to stop her execution Friday, Feb. 18, 2022, across the street from Harris County Criminal Justice Center in Houston. (Yi-Chin Lee, Photographer / Staff photographer) Family of Melissa Lucio, the first Latina woman facing execution in Texas this April, ask Gov. Greg Abbott to stop her execution Friday, Feb. 18, 2022, across the street from Harris County Criminal Justice Center in Houston. (Yi-Chin Lee, Photographer / Staff photographer)

Lucio's oldest son, John Lucio, stopped Saenz outside the courthouse on March 23 and told him of the jurors who have expressed concerns over their verdict. After years of silence on the case, Saenz was seen on video telling John Lucio he "would be glad to take a look" at his mother's case.

Saenz's power to order the death warrant be withdrawn and a reinvestigation of the case is the "best and fastest path to freedom for Melissa" according to officials with Death Penalty Action. Saenz's office did not immediately respond to a Wednesday morning request for comment.

If the state board does make a recommendation to slow or stop the execution, it would not come until two days before Lucio's execution date.

John Lucio said during a Death Penalty Action live stream on Tuesday that his mother was in good spirits when he visited her earlier in the day, and that Kardashian's support was a welcome bit of good news.

Yi-Chin Lee, Photographer / Staff photographer

"She was excited, she just freaked out," John Lucio said of his mother. "She couldn't believe it. She was really just in disbelief," that Kardashian would take a position on her case.

John Lucio said Melissa is grateful for all of her supporters and has hope for the future.

My mother doesn't see no execution date. She tells me she is coming home," John Lucio said. "When my momma comes home, shes got a lot of cooking for us to do."

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has given prosecutors and the trial judge until April 11 to respond to their defense request to file additional challenges.

rebecca.hennes@chron.com
Explainer: How will China consolidate poverty alleviation feats?

Xinhua) 16:21, April 06, 2022

BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) -- A new report showed China has raised nearly 800 million people out of poverty over the past four decades based on the 1.9 U.S. dollar per day global poverty line, accounting for about 75 percent of the global poverty reduction during the period.

After declaring the eradication of absolute poverty in early 2021 and setting an example for the rest of the world, China has pledged to make more efforts in consolidating poverty alleviation achievements and preventing a mass return to poverty.

What has China done to consolidate such fruits? What still needs to be done? Here is what you need to know:

-- What did China do after eliminating absolute poverty?

In 2021, a number of measures were rolled out to consolidate the achievements in poverty eradication.

A dynamic monitoring and support mechanism to prevent the once poor population from falling back into poverty was established, and nearly 70 percent of those monitored are now risk-free, said Liu Huanxin, head of the National Rural Revitalization Administration.

Last year, the central government allocated 156.1 billion yuan (24.5 billion dollars) in subsidies to promote rural vitalization, an increase of 10 billion yuan over the previous year, Liu said.

The per capita net income of those having been lifted out of poverty reached 12,550 yuan, up 16.9 percent from 2020.

-- What will China do to further help people who had been lifted out of poverty?

At present, the income level of people in some areas is still relatively low, and natural disasters, diseases and accidents may cause people to fall back into poverty, said Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Tang Renjian.

The monitoring and support mechanism for key groups should be optimized, Tang said, noting that rural households at risk of returning to poverty should be carefully monitored, while social assistance and health care services should be provided as soon as possible.

Measures will be taken to shore up weak links for supported rural industries in terms of technology, facilities and marketing, and create more job opportunities for people who had been lifted out of poverty, Tang said.

Technical, educational and medical personnel will assist with relevant development projects in key counties supported in rural vitalization, while the infrastructure and public services of relocation communities will be improved, said the minister.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
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A man was shot dead early Wednesday at an apartment in Houston's Northshore neighborhood by a masked gunman, police said.

Officers were dispatched shortly after 2 a.m. to an apartment complex at 12200 Fleming Drive where they found the slain man at an upstairs apartment, said Lt. R. Willkens of the Houston Police Department.
Houston ISD Superintendent Millard House II on Wednesday said he is scrapping a plan that would have centralized the funding of specific positions and programs and instead asking administrators to come up with a plan that would let campus principals maintain control over their budgets while requiring they staff key positions and provide critical services.

I have asked the leadership team to present a revised funding model that will create a more equitable baseline education for all students and maintain HISDs commitment to campus-based budgeting that meets the specific needs of each unique student population, House said in a letter to the Houston Independent School District community. We will set clear expectations and hold each campus accountable for improving educational outcomes and eliminating achievement gaps for all students they serve.

The letter says schools that have not had the money to invest in those key staff positions will receive additional funding to do so.

All schools will be expected to provide a baseline education experience to all students beginning in the 2022-2023 school year, the letter states.

The development, which House called a compromise, came two days after Houses Chief of Schools Denise Watts told principals the administration would be revisiting the budget and staff allocation strategy.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Houston ISD may reconsider plan to re-centralize part of its budget

In Wednesdays letter, House said his decision was the result of hearing from trustees and many of you.

We believe the new model will maintain HISDs commitment to school autonomy and need-based funding, while still allowing us to improve educational outcomes for all students, House said. We hope this compromise proposal is something that we can build consensus around and move forward with so that we can begin to tackle the other critical commitments in the strategic plan and begin the important work ahead of us.

More HISD news: Houston ISD has 276 schools, nearly 200,000 students  and only 58 librarians

The budget changes were presented to help launch a five-year strategic plan that aims to ensure certain positions are staffed at all campuses  such as librarians, nurses and counselors  and that certain programs are offered to all students, regardless of which school they attend. The plan also calls for raising salaries of teachers and other employees, which rank below those of neighboring districts.

I anticipated further conversation with Superintendent House around what the revised model looked like. Im hopeful that the proposed budget continues to prioritize equity in every corner of the district, said Jackie Anderson, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers. I hope that salary increases that were proposed are at the forefront of the newly proposed budget. Our teachers are some of the lowest paid in the area. We will be looking at a mass exodus if our teachers and support staff are not acknowledged and respected for the work that they do everyday in HISD.

The proposed changes were met with concern by several trustees who questioned whether they would make the district more equitable.

I do appreciate that the administration is reassessing impact on campuses and alignment to board policy, Trustee Sue Deigaard said Wednesday.

Others, however, have noted the district offers vastly different experiences to students in different parts of the city as it currently operates. House said campuses would continue to receive a student needs-based allocation, referred to as the PUA or per-unit allocation in which schools receive a base amount of money for each student, plus weights for students who need additional resources for their education.

The way we have done things for the last 30 years does not make schools that are under-resourced more equitable, said Ruth Kravetz, a founder of Community Voices for Public Education, a grass-roots advocacy group. To presume that a switch back to PUA is a victory for equity is a hollow claim and isnt born by the realities of the past, the needs we have right now.

More education news: TEA adds 24 teachers to task force studying educator shortages after initially having only two

Maria Fernandez, parent of a student at Bellaire High School, said she hopes the administration makes good on ensuring certain positions  nurses, librarians and counselors among them  are staffed at all schools and that administrators take a hard look at right-sizing areas that have an abundance of admins at the central office and campus levels.

The issue is the schools are all deciding how they want to run things, Fernandez said. If you spent all the time and all those listening sessions  and within two weeks you abandon it, what does that mean? What is your vision?

Trustee Dr. Patricia Allen said Wednesday she remained optimistic.

Im still feeling positive. I know principals can do it, Allen said. I hope that the schools that were getting extra positions dont feel slighted. Our goal is equity. Everything is for the children.

alejandro.serrano@chron.com
Two people were killed when a small plane that took off from Houston Executive Airport crashed Tuesday in Central Texas.

The FAA said two people were on the Cessna T206H, which crashed around 12:40 p.m. near Marlin Airport, about 31 miles southwest of Waco. The six-seat craft had been en route to Waco Regional Airport, according to the FAA.

The plane crashed about 70 yards from the end of the airports lone runway, Marlin City Manager Cedric Davis said.

The cause of the crash was not immediately apparent, officials said.

FREEWAY FRACAS: Flash mob turns I-45 into parking lot as drivers do donuts for social media stunt

Texas Department of Public Safety Sgt. Ryan Howard, who is based in Waco, confirmed that a man and a woman died.

The identities of those who died were not immediately available.

Andrew Perry, executive director of the Houston Executive Airport, said the plane departed around 10:40 a.m., and airport authorities found out around mid-afternoon that something happened.

The airport is heartfelt to the families, Perry said. He said he could not release either victim's name, but described the pilot as a very good guy. Everybody liked him."

The FAA and National Transportation Safety Board will investigate, a statement from the FAA said. The NTSB will be in charge of the investigation and will provide additional updates.\

Located near Broookshire in Waller County, Houston Executive Airport is a general use airport that caters to businesses in Houstons Energy Corridor.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

leah.brennan@chron.com
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Guillermo De La Rosa remembers a time when he could not get healthcare simply because he had no identification to show the doctors. The 38-year-old was paralyzed in an accident in 2003, but because he was not in the country legally and could not show a valid ID, De La Rosa struggled to get basic treatment.

With the introduction last month of the Harris County Enhanced+ Library Card, De La Rosa hopes those days are behind him.

Itll make things easier for us because in a lot of official places, when you show your (foreign) consular ID, youre basically telling people youre undocumented because youre not showing a Texas ID, De La Rosa said in Spanish.

The Houston Police Department accepts some consular identification cards, including those issued by the consulates of Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua, but people from those countries may be hesitant to provide them to police out of fear of revealing their immigration status. The new Harris County library cards are intended to change that.

Hopefully, this will help us live a little bit more peacefully, without fear that we cant show an ID when someone asks for it, said Guillermos older sister, Maria De La Rosa.

Local community groups celebrated the new library cards Tuesday morning outside the Fairbanks Branch Library in northwest Houston, the latest step in an ongoing campaign to make IDs more accessible to Harris Countys most vulnerable residents.

The cards are meant to help homeless people, undocumented immigrants, recently released inmates and others obtain basic services. Like a drivers license or passport, the new photo IDs include the persons name, date of birth, address and gender.

The next step, organizers say, is to convince government agencies, businesses and nonprofits to accept the cards as a valid form of identification. The Texas Organizing Project held a demonstration in February to urge Houston police to recognize the enhanced library cards, following a successful push in San Antonio to adopt a similar initiative.

We must continue to advocate and push for our community and law enforcement departments like Houston police to accept the new, enhanced library card as a form of ID, to decrease the criminalization, mass incarceration and deportation of Black and Latino people, said Damaris Gonzalez, immigration rights director at the Texas Organizing Project at the event Tuesday.

Houston and Harris County officials did not immediately respond to questions of whether their agencies would recognize the new library cards.

Registering for a Harris County Enhanced+ Library Card requires documentation that proves the applicant is a resident of Harris County, although the list of acceptable documents to qualify has been broadened from those for traditional forms of ID to open eligibility up to anyone  regardless of age or immigration and housing status. For example, homeless people can provide a letter from a shelter or social service agency signed on official agency letterhead to verify their identity.

A full list of documents that can be used to get the enhanced card can be found on the county library's website.

Over a dozen Harris County residents filled out applications Tuesday morning at the Fairbanks Branch Library, where employees took their photos in front of a blue backdrop and said applicants could expect their new enhanced library card in the mail soon.

For some, just applying for the card felt like a milestone, and provided a sliver of hope that a longtime burden soon could be lifted off their shoulders.

Whenever theres a police patrol, people are scared that theyre going to get arrested or turned over to immigration, said Noe Ramirez, 53, after he got his card. So, this card is a huge achievement.

sam.kelly@chron.com
Attempts to start the process of replacing Harris Countys embattled elections administrator stalled Wednesday, when members of the election board differed on whether they should accept Isabel Longorias resignation before they post her position.

By a 3-2 vote, the five-member commission adjourned before discussing any posted items, citing the lack of an item on the agenda to accept Longorias resignation. Though she announced on March 8 her intent to resign, effective July 1, the election board has yet to accept her departure, simply because it never has been asked to.

That made three members of the commission  Harris County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth, Tax Assessor-Collector Ann Harris Bennett and Harris County Republican Party Chairwoman Cindy Siegel  reluctant to begin the work of replacing her.

I believe we have not been transparent about this entire process, Hudspeth said. I would like an agenda for us to move forward that includes accepting the resignation.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Dems reject call to fire Harris County elections chief Longoria before resignation takes effect

The other two members of the board, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Democratic Party Chairman Odus Evbagharu, strenuously argued for moving ahead with the hiring of a search firm and posting Longorias position.

The clock is ticking to get this appointment moving, Hidalgo said. You are delaying all these things.

She said the reasons for the delay  after county lawyers told them they could  were unclear.

Guys, we have got to move past the politics on this, Hidalgo said. I would plead we not delay because we need to get this process started.

Evbagharu called it a delay tactic aimed at eroding trust in the local election process.

This is no different than essentially giving us a two-week notice before she departs, he said. Its the responsibility of the Election Commission to provide a timeline to the public and make this process as transparent as possible. Today, we failed the public.

Siegel said the failure was not immediately sacking Longoria. In order to plan for her replacement adequately, the board should discuss that first, then proceed with finding a suitable elections administrator.

Until we have had this discussion at this table, I do not think we should be here, having these discussions today, Siegel said of posting the position to start in July.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Longoria resigns as Harris County elections chief, takes the blame for bungled primary elections

Whether to wait for the resignation action or press forward with hiring a search firm to solicit potential replacements and officially post the job hinged on whether or not state procedures require an election board to have a resignation in place before seeking a replacement.

Texas code says a an appointment to fill an anticipated vacancy arising from a resignation to take effect at a future date may be made at any time after the resignation is accepted.

What it does not say, however, is that work on that replacement cannot start prior to the resignation.

Jonathan Fombonne, a first assistant county attorney, said the election board could proceed with hiring a search firm and posting the position. Then Longorias resignation could be approved at a later date.

There is nothing in the code that requires you to accept the resignation today, Fombonne said.

Longoria announced her decision to resign shortly after the calamitous March primary election, in which some voters complained that low staffing at polls keeping them from voting and the Tuesday election night count dragged on until 1 a.m. on Thursday. The breakdown made Harris County the only county to not report election results within the state-required 24 hour timeframe.

Two days later, election officials acknowledged they failed to include 10,000 mail-in ballots, the last in a series of missteps that led to swift criticism of Longorias less than 18 months on the job.

Longoria announced her resignation three days later, saying responsibility for the Election Day issues fell to her as the countys chief elections officer. She said her departure was timed to avoid a change in leadership as the county prepares for elections in May and June.

Meanwhile, condemnations of her performance have not ceased. In a fiery public comment on Tuesday, activist Tomaro Bell  who criticized the decision to create an elections administrator position and take ballot responsibility from the clerk and tax assessor, said Longoria was unable to count to ten without taking off her shoes, and keeping her would be a mistake.

Elected officials, since early March, have agreed.

Lets go ahead and send election administrator Longoria home, Precinct Three Commissioner Tom Ramsey said Tuesday.

Expediting Longorias exit, however, is unlikely. She only can be dismissed by the elections board if four members approve it, per state code, a decision that would then need the approval of commissioners court. With Hidalgo and Evbagharu in favor of her remaining through June, getting four votes is all but impossible.

Siegel, who has sought Longorias immediate removal since Election Day, said moving ahead with the process of hiring a new administrator needs to happen quickly, but not necessarily on Longorias promised timeline.

If Longoria were to be removed immediately, Siegel said, that immediately would impact the timeline that is before us.

dug.begley@chron.com
Houston ISD will host its first LGBTQ+ summit for students in sixth through 12th grades this weekend, district officials announced Tuesday, two weeks after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton criticized Austin ISD for holding a Pride Week.

The virtual summit, scheduled for Saturday at 11 a.m., will focus on issues faced by LGBTQ+ youngsters, according to HISD. Superintendent Millard House II will be present, as will members of various district departments.

The purpose of the summit is to ensure that attendees gain the tools necessary to either navigate life as an LGBTQ+ student or support an LGBTQ+ student, the district said in a statement announcing the event.

Students and their parents or caregivers can sign up for the summit on the district's website.

William Solomon, HISDs executive director of innovation and student enrollment, said the district wanted to have the event last summer but did not due to COVID-19 surges. With its launch, the district hopes to make it an annual occurrence.

We know that our LGBTQ+ students are less likely to feel accepted, Solomon said. This is HISD coming forward and making sure we are providing that additional, intentional layer of support.

More education news: Texas has seen a surge in requests to pull books from schools. Here are Houston's numbers so far

Attorney General Ken Paxton last month urged Austin ISD to rethink its Pride Week, telling the district it was breaking state law and writing, The Texas Legislature has made it clear that when it comes to sex education, parents  not school districts  are in charge.

The festivities in Austin continued as planned, according to the Texas Tribune.

That was the latest controversy ignited by a state official regarding LGBTQ matters and schools. Gov. Greg Abbott has called for getting rid of pornography in school libraries while Rep. Matt Krause, R-Fort Worth, chair of the Houses General Investigating Committee, launched a probe of school libraries books on race and sexuality.

The efforts have raised concern among childrens advocates who say it is important for youth to have access to literature and materials that may represent them.

HISDs event for Saturday will feature a keynote speaker, a panel with representatives from various organizations and resource centers and breakout rooms for different groups in attendance. Additionally, there will be live simultaneous interpretations for attendees whose first language may not be English.

Already, some 100 individuals have signed up, Solomon said.

As a district we have an obligation to make sure students are receiving a high-level education and that nothing is inhibiting them, Solomon said. While this is the first it will certainly not be the last.

alejandro.serrano@chron.com
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Following an internally prompted review, a committee found that Holocaust graphic novels Maus and Maus II are appropriate for students in middle and high school.

The district has not yet specified what prompted the review of the Pulitzer-Prize winning book and its sequel by Art Spiegelman. The school system confirmed the books, which use black-and-white cartoons of anthropomorphized animals to depict the the Holocaust, were under review last month.

KISD Media Relations Manager Maria Corrales DiPetta this week confirmed the review concluded the books were appropriate for junior high and up.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Katy ISD students organize to distribute books about racism, LGBTQ+ issues

According to an explanation of the internal review process provided by the district, if a book is reviewed for a higher grade level and a librarian still feels it is appropriate for lower grade levels, they may submit a request for inclusion. A review subcommittee made up of teachers or librarians then will review it for age appropriateness at the lower grade level.

Within seven business days, the subcommittee will read the work, review it and vote on whether it should be included in lower grade-level libraries.

NEWSLETTERS Join the conversation with HouWeAre We want to foster conversation and highlight the intersection of race, identity and culture in one of America's most diverse cities. Sign up for the HouWeAre newsletter here.

In order for a book to be included in any Katy ISD Junior High or Elementary collection, it must receive four or more votes, the district policy states.

Any book under internal review remains in district libraries through the process. For formal reviews, Katy ISD pulls all copies of the books from all school libraries until a decision is made, a practice that librarians in the state say is not the norm in most districts.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Texas has seen a surge in requests to pull books from schools. Here are Houston's numbers so far

In December, Katy ISD announced it was launching a broad review of school library books that may be considered pervasively vulgar and encouraged parents to report concerns about material through a new online portal.

As a result, the school system has banned 10 books for pervasive vulgarity since October. Three of those removals began with internal reviews, according to the district. Critics of the district who say the recent reviews are concerning acts of censorship argue books about issues of race and LGBTQ+ experiences are disproportionately being targeted.

Maus, first published in 1986, is based on interviews with Speigelmans father about his experience during the Holocaust as a Polish Jew. It is an age-appropriate vehicle for youth to learn about the generational consequences of genocide, according to many literary reviews.

The books were thrust into a national debate over book bans in schools across the nation earlier this year after a Tennessee school board decided to remove Maus. The McMinn County School Board voted to ban the book, which only was being used in the districts eighth grade curriculum, because of its use of profanity, a depiction of a naked woman, as well as violence and suicide.

Anti-censorship activists and leaders of the Anti-Defamation League said last month the districts review of the graphic novels was concerning.

A group of Katy ISD students organized to distribute more than 100 copies of Maus and Maus II, along with dozens of other titles, to their peers last month in reaction to recent book bans in the district.

Cameron Samuels, one of the students leading the effort, applauded the decision to keep the two books available to students.

It is imperative that students have access to affirming literature and uncensored history through school libraries. said Samuels. We remain disappointed in politically-motivated efforts of unnecessary censorship nationwide.

hannah.dellinger@chron.com
A computer shutdown that halted Harris County court and jail operations last month was the result of an attempt to update the systems, as well as the policies and the loss of experienced employees in the county department that oversees online operations, a cadre of elected officials said Tuesday.

This was a catastrophic systemwide failure, District Clerk Marilyn Burgess told Commissioners Court.

The outage led to the release of nearly 300 people awaiting probable cause hearings from the jail between March 24 and 26. Systems used by authorities to file charges and then relied on as prosecutors and judges seek to jail and release inmates crashed as the Harris County Universal Services Department prepared an update to the systems bandwidth capacity. That work broke the link between two data centers used by the county, making the entire system inaccessible to courts and prosecutors.

The loss of the online system meant courts could not hold probable cause hearings within the required 24 hours, so admissions to the jail stopped and arrestees stacked up at the countys joint processing center.

We released many, many offenders, District Attorney Kim Ogg said.

The outage came as arrests and bookings into the jail typically increase for the weekend.

During the hourlong outage, phone and internet service at several county sites were affected, including a 911 call center for 30 minutes.

The problems continue to affect proper operations, officials said.

In a seven-page letter sent Monday and in two hours of discussion Tuesday morning in front of Commissioners Court, the officials excoriated Rick Noriega, chief information officer for Harris County Universal Services, for what they said was an inexcusable outage that brought jail bookings and the filing of charges to a halt.

The letter was signed by Burgess, Ogg, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, District Court Administrator Richard Woods and Ed Wells, court administrator of the countys criminal courts. It was a rare case of five department heads  including three elected Democrats  raising concerns about another county department.

A pattern of uncooperative, silo-like business decisions exhibited by (Universal Services), in tandem with ongoing recovery work resulting from the March 24 outage, leave justice community stakeholders skeptical of our collective reliance on HCUS for ensuring the availability of systems we and the citizens of Harris County depend on, the officials wrote.

Noriega blamed many of the issues on maintaining an aging system that has no backup. He said his technical staff worked around the clock to address the problems, including rebuilding the databases of criminal charges on which the system relies.

The lack of a backup predates Noriega, who began working for the county in September 2020. Prior to working for the county, he served five terms in the Texas House of Representatives.

The systems have failed before, Noriega noted, saying the expectations for change need to be focused on what to do when they go offline and how to upgrade or replace them in the future.

As is typical, court members had differing reactions to the concerns raised and where to focus potential remedies. Precinct 3 Commissioner Tom Ramsey called it a major problem and sided with critics who said the Universal Services Departments lack of experience with the system indicated that other departments  the district attorneys office and courts  should manage it.

I dont think we have that technical depth that we need, Ramsey said.

Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis said the letter outlines concerns but may be premature in assessing exactly what went wrong, despite the unanimity of the five officials who signed it.

That did get my attention, but I would not be so quick to say since a letter came out the system is broken, Ellis said. Lets take some time to sort it out and see.

Commissioners Court approved a resolution asking the various departments to return in 30 days with a more detailed assessment of what went wrong and possible changes that can be made to avoid a repeat of last weeks problems or a complete loss of the system that would shut down courts and jail intake.

According to the letter, officials said the relationship between the other departments and Universal Services will need mending. Among the concerns, the letter said, was Noriegas department withholding access to the IT systems that rely on court information. Court officials and prosecutors said that by law, they are the true custodians of that data.

The letter also pointed out that Noriega told Commissioners Court in January that he would, if directed, shut off county websites that are not controlled by his department.

Threats of this nature, especially in such a public setting, may be good theater, but do not engender a spirit of cooperation, collaboration, or mutual trust and respect, the letter said.

The failure of the database highlighted the reliance prosecutors and jailers have on computer databases that, like the courts, work around the clock. Accepting that some outages are inevitable, officials questioned why a paper backup system is not in place for problems.

Mechanical things break, Noriega said. When they do, you pull out your tablet and your No. 2 pencil.

A paper backup is available but was never deployed because of the assurances that the systems were working or would be online soon, Wells said.

At every turn, we kept being told systems were up, he said.

Paper, meanwhile, comes with problems of its own.

The paper system is its own burden, Wells said. It takes people away from the efforts to get things back online.

dug.begley@chron.com
Courtesy of city of Missouri City

Four months after hiring a city manager following an extensive search process, the city council of Missouri City this week placed Charles Jackson on paid administrative leave pending an investigation into undisclosed allegations.

The city council discussed the matter during a closed session at a Monday night special meeting. Shortly after 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, the council reconvened in public and approved the motion to place Jackson on leave with pay for no more than 60 days. The measure passed by 6-1.
Tenant advocates from across the nation called for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to take action against one of the largest operators of the departments subsidized housing complexes, the Millennia Companies, in an open letter sent Monday to Secretary Marcia L. Fudge.

Millennia was the subject of a Houston Chronicle investigation showing that a failure of government oversight produced a housing system across the U.S. in which those with no other options were often forced to live in substandard conditions. Until recently, the company owned and managed Sandpiper Cove, a 192-unit complex in Galveston; the property was sold at HUDs request, said Millennia.

Two dozen tenant advocate groups, including Texas Housers, the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, National Housing Law Project, Chicago Housing Initiative and Memphis Tenants Union, signed the letter, which argued that Millennias management practices had disproportionately impacted Black residents, an allegation that Millennia called false.

LIVING HELL: A failure of government oversight produced a housing system across the U.S. that hurts the people who need it the most

We urge HUD to investigate Millennia, wrote the groups in their open letter, which called some of Millennias properties hazardous and said those with high percentages of Black residents were more likely to be in poor condition.

Our investigation has led us to conclude that Millennias properties in Black neighborhoods and those that have high populations of Black residents have a much higher incidence of unresolved health and safety violations than Millennia properties in neighborhoods with higher populations of white residents, they said.

NEWSLETTERS Join the conversation with HouWeAre We want to foster conversation and highlight the intersection of race, identity and culture in one of America's most diverse cities. Sign up for the HouWeAre newsletter here.

A Millennia spokesperson sent a lengthy statement denying allegations and bringing attention to many of its properties that have received passing scores in HUD inspections.

In response to the allegation that the company has operated for years with hazardous conditions with HUDs full knowledge, we vehemently deny this accusation, the statement read in part. Since 1995 (Millennia) has proven to be a responsive and responsible owner and manager of apartment communities, having preserved more than 13,000 units of affordable housing.

In response to the letters claim of a pattern of health and safety violations bearing correlation with the race of the tenants, Millennia said, This is false and unsubstantiated.

A spokesperson said in an email that HUD had received the letter. However, we have no further update at this time.

'MY HOME IS CRUMBLING': HUD to look into Millennia, company that makes millions in contracts, after tenants protest

In their letter, the tenants groups alleged HUD had failed to follow through on a promised investigation into Millennia. HUD declined to confirm whether an investigation is planned, but Millennia said it was unaware of a broad investigation but that after Fudge visited Kansas City, HUD conducted a unit of every unit in an apartment complex there called Gabriel Towers, participated in tenant meetings, and conducted an inspection on June 23, 2021. HUDs inspection gave the towers a passing score.

Tenants groups also called HUDs inspection scoring system inadequate, saying it failed to identify or remediate serious health and safety violations in a timely manner.

They urged HUD to look into and address such violations in properties owned by Millennia.

It is inexcusable that, in 2022, HUD continues to allow families (to) continue to live in terrible housing conditions and fails to use existing tools at its disposal to keep families safe, said Bridgett Simmons, a staff attorney at the National Housing Law Project, in a release.

HUDs toolbox of steps it could take to address properties with poor housing conditions include requiring new management, imposing financial penalties, abating rent and transferring the property-based housing voucher contract to another project or owner.

rebecca.schuetz@chron.com | Twitter: @RASchuetz
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OKLAHOMA CITY (AP)  The Oklahoma House gave final legislative approval on Tuesday to a bill that would make performing an abortion a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

With little discussion and no debate, the Republican-controlled House voted 70-14 to send the bill to Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, who has previously said he'd sign any anti-abortion bill that comes to his desk.

The bill is one of several anti-abortion measures still alive in Oklahomas Legislature this year, part of a trend of GOP-led states passing aggressive anti-abortion legislation as the conservative U.S. Supreme Court is considering ratcheting back abortion rights that have been in place for nearly 50 years.

The Oklahoma bill, which passed the Senate last year, makes an exception only for an abortion performed to save the life of the mother, said GOP state Rep. Jim Olsen, of Roland, who sponsored the bill. Under the bill, a person convicted of performing an abortion would face up to 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine.

The penalties are for the doctor, not for the woman," Olsen said.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Women are finding other means to abortion despite Texas crackdown

Similar anti-abortion bills approved by the Oklahoma Legislature in recent years have been stopped by the courts as unconstitutional.

The bills passage came on the same day as more than 100 people attended a Bans Off Oklahoma rally outside the Capitol in support of abortion rights.

These legislators have continued their relentless attacks on our freedoms," said Emily Wales, interim president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes. These restrictions are not about improving the safety of the work that we do. They are about shaming and stigmatizing people who need and deserve abortion access."

Wales said Planned Parenthood's abortion clinic in Oklahoma has seen an 800% increase in the number of women from Texas after that state passed the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the U.S. in decades.

The Texas law that took effect last year bans abortion once cardiac activity is detected, usually around six weeks of pregnancy, without exceptions in cases of rape or incest.

Also Tuesday, the Oklahoma House adopted a resolution to recognize lives lost due to abortion and urge citizens to fly flags at half-staff on Jan. 22, the day the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in its landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade.

___

This story has been updated to correct the spelling of state Rep. Jim Olsen's name.
Regarding Opinion: Pause HISDs plan to centralize school funding, (April 4): I agree with authors Jessica Swanson and Marguerite Roza that distributing more funds to schools with greater numbers of economically disadvantaged students makes sense. But with such a high percentage of economically disadvantaged students in HISD, nearly 80 percent, further redistribution is difficult. It would be necessary to reduce funding by $400 for each non-economically disadvantaged student to increase funding, on average, to each economically disadvantaged student by only $100.

I would also like to point out that, according to online data published by the Texas Education Agency, average operations expenditures per pupil in HISD is $9,380. For the same year, that number for Dallas ISD is $10,252 per pupil. Why such a large difference? Dallas ISD taxes itself more. The same TEA source (Snapshot 2020) shows that the total tax rate for HISD for the 2018 tax year was 1.207; for Dallas ISD, it was 1.412.

The most important factor in improving HISD is solid leadership by the superintendent, which will inspire solid leadership by principals as well, assuming public confidence in both. Hear the new superintendent out. Beyond that, Houston civic and business leaders should show the same gumption as those in Dallas and provide Houston ISD with the same level of financial support that is received by Dallas ISD.

Larry Toenjes, Clear Lake Shores

Mixed feelings

Regarding World: Ceremony stirs up Falklands claim, (April 3): This note brought back memories of my fifth grade in the small town of Dorrego, Argentina in the late 1940s. Our homework assignment was Las Malvinas son argentinas  the Malvinas (Falklands) are Argentine. This was, of course, much earlier than the short but disastrous war of 1982. Our entire classroom was moved by our teachers fervor when explaining that this archipelago was an extension of our land through the water. I remember the drawing I made of a rocky desert-like terrain with some sheep and no trees. I also definitely recall the title: Las Malvinas son argentinas.

In January 2000 my husband and I took a Norwegian cruise going down to Tierra del Fuego and around to Valparaiso, Chile that I can only describe as wonderful. The ship had to make a short stop in Uruguay because we were also going to stop in the Malvinas and the ship could not go directly there for legal reasons, they said. It was heartbreaking to see the group of mothers who lost some of the 649 Argentines  many of them raw or ill-equipped soldiers get on the boat to approach the island for the first time. The land looked just like the pictures we had seen in school: sad, dry, grey. That whole day and experience was very somber. The rest of the trip, at least for us, was a dream come true and a beautiful memory.

Toy Brando Halsey, Houston

Fundraising for a futile fight

Regarding Gala fundraiser takes aim at voter fraud, (April 02): Im really disappointed with your headline editors. What fraud? It only gives credence to The Big Lie, while the Chronicle itself has documented well the meager results and waste of taxpayer dollars of Attorney General Ken Paxtons Election Fraud Unit. The Chronicle is better than this.

David Kelly, Spring

Thanks for the hearty chuckle on Saturday morning. Looks like Steve Hotze and a whole host of voter fraud warriors are going to gird up their loins and hunt down that elusive dragon. Hotze calls himself the tip of the spear, but even the raiding of a dastardly A/C repair truck showed him that there is likely nothing to impale. Perhaps its good that Mike Lindell is joining in the quest  they will need pillows for a lot of sleepless nights filled with frustration about the futility of their search. Maybe the tooth fairy can point them in the right direction. Good grief.

Brenden McBride, Katy

It boggles the mind to read that people who are otherwise ostensibly intelligent are trying to raise funds to support investigations into largely non-existent voter fraud. Steven Hotze and Mike Lindell are successful businessmen who obviously can't accept the fact that the outcome of the 2020 presidential election has long been settled and their preferred candidate came up short. This effort is nothing short of insanity.

Bill Bentley, La Porte

Weve spent millions of dollars investigating cases of potential voter fraud in Texas. Now theres a fundraising gala so we can find two or three more cases. My wish is that some of that support from such conscientious people be directed toward our Texas foster care efforts, where there really is a problem.

Margaret Hansen, Houston
Twice before, just when it began to look as if we were past the worst of the pandemic, a new strain of the coronavirus sent us back home, looking for our masks as hospitals filled. With cases rising in parts of the country once more, some health officials are warning that another season of danger could be just ahead.

Thats why Senate negotiators decision this week to strip $5 billion in funding for international vaccinations from a COVID relief bill is so alarming. That money is needed to maintain the nations important work to slow the spread of the virus by helping some of the worlds poorest countries speed up efforts to vaccinate their residents.

Scientists have made clear that the omicron and delta variants that did so much to put the nation back on pandemic alert originated in countries with low vaccination rates at the time before traveling to America. The lessons couldnt have been clearer: As long as large portions of the globe remain essentially defenseless in the face of the virus, it will continue to threaten every nation.

Thats why the United States led the effort to inoculate the world. After a slow start, during which rival nations exported their own vaccines, President Biden admirably pledged an arsenal of vaccines to end the pandemic. The U.S. Agency for International Development has provided $9.3 billion to fight COVID worldwide, partnering with COVAX, the global vaccine facility, to administer roughly 500 million vaccines to more than 110 countries.

But that money is fast running out, as USAID has been telling the White House for months. To replenish those resources, the Biden administration had asked Congress for $5 billion as part of a $22 billion COVID relief package. Lawmakers instead whittled the bill down to $10 billion, money that will be used for domestic testing, vaccination and treatment efforts. But money set aside for funding the global vaccination effort? Nixed.

Thats a mistake  on humanitarian and pragmatic grounds.

The delta variant, which inflicted so much disruption and death to the United States this summer, originated in India, when few of its roughly 1.4 billion residents were fully vaccinated. Omicron was discovered in South Africa, where less than a third of the population is fully vaccinated. And global health officials are tracking other variants in nations across the globe with low vaccination rates.

People around the world are dying because they dont have access to the life-saving vaccines that so many of us take for granted. Thats precisely the kind of wide-scale suffering that cries out for intervention from a world superpower like the United States, especially when the solution is so near at hand.

The reality is if you want to get big global projects done it always falls to the U.S. to take the lead, and it doesnt look like its happening now, Dr. Peter Hotez told Politico.

But as the lessons of the previous resurgences in the COVID cases shows us, spending big on international vaccination efforts is also very much about protecting ourselves.

Will another strain of the virus send us back to mask mandates and virtual classrooms? Lets hope not. But rising case numbers in some parts of the country are already sounding alarms. Philadelphia officials this week warned residents its time to take precautions. Its not required yet, but Philadelphians should strongly consider wearing a mask while in public indoor spaces, the citys health commissioner said in a statement.

What we can say for sure is until international vaccination rates are higher, the billions of people around the globe without protection will continue to be breeding grounds for new strains of the virus. Roughly 60 percent of the world population is fully vaccinated against COVID-19, while 66 percent have received at least one dose. But those numbers, while still not high enough, hide stark differences. Vaccination rates in some countries in Africa and the Middle East are still in the single digits.

Some of those gaps are being filled in, thankfully. The Corbevax vaccine developed in Houston by Hotez and Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi, co-director of the Texas Childrens Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, was approved for use in Botswana last week, marking the fourth country in Africa to approve the vaccine, following Bangladesh, India and Indonesia. The vaccine is cheaper to make and store than earlier vaccines, and has the potential to save many lives.

Congress should be looking for ways to help get this vaccine and the others already widely in use into the arms of the billions of people across the globe still not vaccinated. One reason it matters, of course, is that so many Americans have yet to be vaccinated. With 66 percent of the adult population vaccinated here, were just barely above average. The more opportunities the virus has to mutate overseas, and the more likely it will arrive here ready to wreak havoc.

Fortunately, while Senate negotiators have proposed cutting the $5 billion for international vaccination efforts, the legislation has yet to be voted on. Senators should restore the funding before passage. If that doesnt work, itll be up to the House to insist on this prudent investment.
Youve seen it in every newspaper and cable TV channel for weeks  the dazed eyes of a pregnant woman carried on a stretcher from a bombed-out maternity hospital. The sagging scaffolding of buildings dusted the ashen color of apocalypse. The crime scene of bloated bodies  faces down in the dirt, hands bound  strewn throughout a town called Bucha, giving little doubt that an enemy intent on stealing its neighbors sovereignty has now resorted to murderous war crimes to achieve its goal.

That, dear reader, is what an invasion looks like.

It is bloody and violent and, in the case of Russias invasion of Ukraine, executed by a military at the whim of a tyrannical autocrat.

It is not a scattered stream of desperate men and women, including moms and dads, sometimes with children in tow, risking life and limb on journeys of hundreds of miles for a distant shot at freedom, opportunity and mere survival. These people are called migrants. Or immigrants. Or asylum-seekers. Not invaders.

Yes, there have been crises at the Texas-Mexico border. No, not every border-crosser meets the qualifications for asylum  and that certainly includes the occasional criminal and drug-trafficker in the mix. Yes, the Biden administration needs to step up, especially now as he plans to end a Trump-era rule barring entrance, and provide the resources to shelter and process the claims of new arrivals, who, for better or worse, still see America as a shining refuge from violence, war and persecution.

But we strain to convey our disgust at the idea being perpetuated by former Trump administration officials that Gov. Greg Abbott should combat the humanitarian challenges at the border by declaring an invasion, an act intended to broaden the governors power to take war-like actions against migrants.

Tom Homan, the former acting director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump, floated this idea at a border security conference in San Antonio last week. Homans plan involves a novel interpretation of an obscure clause of the U.S. Constitution that would allow the National Guard or state police to forcibly send migrants to Mexico, without regard to immigration laws and law enforcement procedures.

Ken Cuccinelli, a former Homeland Security official under Trump, endorsed this idea, arguing that states are entitled to defend themselves from immediate danger under the constitutions states self-defense clause, which says states cannot engage in warlike actions or foreign policy unless invaded.

Basically, in Homan and Cuccinellis war games fantasy, Abbott would play Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the heroic Ukrainian president, defending the Lone Star State from a Putin-esque foreign enemy intent on burgling American sovereignty.

But who would they have play Vladimir Putin? A gaggle of unarmed migrant families from nations throughout the Caribbean and Central and South America whose primary offense is seeking a better way of life?

Alas, this is no Hollywood war epic, but a real-life policy prescription that may have legs. Homan has reportedly been in Abbotts ear pushing this preposterous notion as a response to the Biden administrations announcement that it would stop turning away asylum seekers at the border under a Trump-era public health order, known as Title 42. The Trump administration issued the controversial health order in 2020, arguing it was necessary to combat the spread of COVID-19. It remained a key tool in Bidens efforts to handle record numbers of border crossings during his term, used to expel migrants 1.2 million times since he took office.

Ending Title 42 is the right thing to do. Even if its prompt processing and ejection protocols deterred some people from coming, the policy has had dire consequences, with organizations such as Human Rights Watch tracking thousands of kidnappings, rapes and violent assaults against asylum seekers expelled to or blocked at the U.S.-Mexico border since Biden took office.

Tens of thousands more asylum seekers have waited months or years to exercise their legal right to seek protection. Federal data show the policy actually led to more border encounters, not less, since single adults who are expelled dont suffer financial consequences and many simply return to try and cross again.

Yet its also true that ending the policy will have consequences for our already over-taxed immigration system. Border Patrol officials are bracing for as many as 18,000 arrivals daily once Title 42 expires in May. Last week, about 7,100 migrants per day were coming to the southern U.S. border.

Were encouraged to see the Biden administration thinking proactively, establishing a Southwest Border Coordination Center in February and transferring hundreds of agents from northern and coastal borders to support its operations. The administration will also implement long-delayed plans to provide COVID-19 vaccines to migrants taken into custody.

In our own fantasy, nobody declares war on migrants or yells invasion but instead, Abbott worked with Biden and together theyd find a way to humanely process the expected influx of migrants.

Now that the Republican primary has passed, we hope Abbott can resist the seduction and perhaps even arm-twisting by immigration hard-liners such as Homan and Cuccinelli. So far, according to Homan, Abbott has been non-committal. Thats good news for migrants and also Texas taxpayers, since weaponizing this rarely used constitutional clause will almost certainly lead to costly litigation.

Abbott only has himself to thank for the uncomfortable position these extreme border hawks have put him in. The governor spent months beating his chest about the thousands of National Guard and Department of Public Safety troopers on the border carrying out Operation Lone Star, who jailed migrants on state trespassing charges and erected border fencing on privately owned land. Only after his border mission was exposed as a $2 billion boondoggle has he started to rein in his rhetoric.

Color us surprised and hopeful that Abbott seems lately to be acknowledging what this editorial board and seemingly every immigration expert has been saying for years: immigration is the federal governments responsibility.

Actually, now he may be hammering home that point a little too zealously with his announcement Wednesday to literally bus migrants to Washington D.C., presumably a symbolic and very real effort to hand off responsibility for the immigrants to the feds.

Abbotts unsavory theatrics as the tough-talking border governor are no substitute for federal action, including comprehensive immigration reform, more judges and resources for backlogged immigration courts and increased diplomatic efforts on the ground in troubled home countries.

If Abbott has really seen the error of his ways he should outright reject the absurd invasion suggestions from Homan and Cuccinelli. He should send the National Guard troops back to their families and lead an effort to work with the Biden administration to develop a sensible border and immigration policy and brace for the expected post-Title 42 surge in migrants. They are not foreign invaders threatening our sovereignty and our lives; they are the huddled masses drawn to this land by Americas storied promise of liberty and refuge.
Northwest Houston resident Donna Hackemack Bryant thought she had done her due diligence when she voted by mail in last months Democratic primary election. She even checked her status on the Harris Votes website, which said the ballot had been received.

But Bryant, who is 70 and the president of the Cy-Fair Area Democrats, received a letter last week notifying her that her vote never counted. Shed forgotten to include an ID number, a new Republican-backed requirement that tripped up many Texas voters and led to unusually high rejection rates statewide.

Bryant was one of nearly 25,000 voters whose ballots were rejected during the March 2022 primary, new data shows.

I was highly incensed, and thats putting it without expletives, Bryant said. A lot of the candidates I voted for didnt make it. Im wondering: How many of those rejected ballots did it mean would have voted for those same people like I did?

The overall rejection rate was 12.4 percent statewide, with a slightly more pronounced rate in Democratic primaries, at 12.9 percent compared to 11.8 percent of Republican ballots, according to figures released Wednesday by the Texas Secretary of State. More than 3 million ballots were cast in this years primary  about 2 million on the Republican side and 1 million on the Democratic side.

Texas' largest counties by rejection rate According to data from the secretary of state's office, these are the state's 10 largest counties ranked by their rejection rates of mail ballots submitted for the March 1 primary election. Bexar County: 22% Harris County: 19% Hidalgo County: 19% El Paso County: 17% Denton County: 15% Collin County: 13% Fort Bend County: 12% Tarrant County: 8% Dallas County: 7% Travis County: 8% See More Collapse

By comparison, Texas rejected just under 1 percent of mail ballots in the November 2020 election in which more than 11 million people voted, according to federal data. Sam Taylor, a spokesman for the secretary of state, said the 2020 data is based on self-reporting from Texas counties, and the office hasnt verified its accuracy.

The data released Wednesday did not specify how many Texas voters ended up voting in person after receiving notice a mail-ballot had been rejected.

MAIL BALLOT DO-OVERS: Texas woman recounts her mail ballot hassle: 3 forms, 28 days, lots of guesswork

Local election officials say the problem stems from the new requirement that absentee voters include either a drivers license number or the last four digits of the voters Social Security number on the ballot. The number submitted by voters often did not match what the county had on file or they forgot to provide a number altogether, requiring them to hustle to correct their applications in time for their ballots to be counted.

Texas Democrats and voting rights advocates on Wednesday denounced the unusually high rejection rate as unacceptable.

A 12-factor jump in the number of votes by mail rejected from 2020 is absolutely disastrous, and this new ID requirement was totally unneccessary, said James Slattery, a senior state attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project. It does nothing to make our elections more secure and now we know the primary effect on Texas elections was just to desenfranchise voters on a massive scale.

State Rep. Jessica Gonzalez, vice-chair of the House elections committee, said the figures released Wednesday confirmed her fears prior to the bills passage.

Democrats warned in committee and on the House Floor that new SB1 requirements would disenfranchise voters, Gonzalez said in a tweet. Now we are seeing it in action.

Republican lawmakers who supported the legislation have said voters troubles are part of a normal learning curve that will eventually improve over time with education.

Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican who helped craft the voting bill, said his office is checking in with county election offices to figure out why some fared better than others. He is also looking to get more data on how many people were still able to vote, either by canceling their mail ballot and voting in person, or by voting provisionally in person.

What I know for sure is weve got an application rejection rate of 3.35 percent (statewide), and now weve got this 12 percent number, Bettencourt said. So Im spending my time understanding why is there a difference between the two of that magnitude.

Harris and Bexar counties rejection rates were among the highest of large counties. In San Antonios Bexar County, about 22 percent of more than 18,000 mail ballots were rejected.

The nearly 7,000 ballots rejected in Harris County far exceeded the 135 mail ballots rejected during the 2018 primary.

Of more than 7,700 mail ballots flagged there due to confusion over new ID requirements, less than 11 percent of voters resubmitted ID information and got their ballots corrected, officials said. This came despite efforts by Harris County that included sending letters instructing them how to correct their ballots and doubling the number of staff assigned to help handle voter questions.

TEXAS TAKE: Get the latest news on Texas politics sent directly to your inbox every weekday

Slattery said the effects of a rejection should not be underestimated.

I think we underappreciate how damaging the message is to voters when they have their ballot or application rejected wrongly, he said. For many voters who go through this, the clear message is the government doesnt want to hear your voice, and its not interested in helping you participate in the democratic process.

The secretary of states office says it plans to make the ID field stand out more by putting bold red lines around it on ballots going forward. The office launched its VoteReady education campaign on Feb. 7 with radio, digital, billboards and grassroots advertising and plans to continue that through the runup to the general election in November.

Taylor said the office received $500,000 less this year from the Legislature to educate voters about voter ID requirements.

Bryant, who suffers from back, hip and knee pain and has voted by mail the last three years, said she wont go back to absentee voting again in the next election.

I will drag myself to the nearest polling place rather than risk the mail ballot process again, she said. I dont want to do this again. I dont think I trust the process.
Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday that Texas will begin busing and flying migrants to Washington, D.C in response to the Biden administrations plan to lift a Trump-era policy used to turn away more than a million asylum seekers at the border.

The move is intended to help local officials whose communities are overwhelmed by hordes of illegal immigrants, Abbott said at a news conference. State troopers are also planning to step up vehicle inspections near immigration checkpoints, a move the governor acknowledged would dramatically slow traffic from Mexico into Texas.

Abbott said the inspections would help crack down on cartels, which routinely use commercial trucks to smuggle people and drugs across the border.

Texas will be taking its own unprecedented actions this month to do what no state in America has ever done in the history of this country to better secure our state, as well as our nation, the Republican governor said.

Federal immigration officials have projected as many as 18,000 daily crossings once the Trump-era rule, called Title 42, expires  roughly triple the daily average in February.

But while Abbott suggested it would be open season for cartels without Title 42, immigration advocates applauded the move, arguing the policy had been a boon for cartels that target migrants expelled to Mexico. Critics of Title 42 also note there has been a massive spike in repeat border crossings since Trump began enforcing the rule, which they argue has inflated border numbers.

The evidence is clear: Title 42 is neither a meaningful public health measure nor a successful deterrent, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior policy counsel for the American Immigration Council, testified at a congressional committee hearing Wednesday.

The busing and inspection policies are a further expansion of Texas already ramped-up border security operations, which critics deride as an infringement on the federal governments near-exclusive power to enforce U.S. immigration laws. Both new measures are an extension of Abbotts border initiative, known as Operation Lone Star, through which he has deployed thousands of state troopers and National Guard soldiers to the border since last March.

IN-DEPTH: Gov. Abbott is extending border arrest program into three new South Texas counties

Stationed along parts of the southern border, state authorities have apprehended and turned over to federal authorities more than 200,000 migrants and arrested thousands more on state criminal charges. Abbott and officials with the Department of Public Safety have insisted they are merely enforcing state laws while playing no role in federal immigration enforcement.

Abbott also announced plans Wednesday to deploy boat blockades along the Rio Grande, install razor wire at heavily trafficked areas on the river, including low-water crossings, and place lighting at prominent smuggling areas to more easily detect activity. He teased plans to roll out additional border security measures next week, without providing any details.

Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said troopers began conducting the enhanced vehicle inspections at 4 p.m. Wednesday along each of the states more than 20 roadway ports of entry that border Mexico. He noted that vehicles are already subject to these inspections, all of which take place on Texas land, away from federal property such as international bridges.

Meanwhile, state officials will begin busing migrants to Washington, D.C. Thursday morning, said Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd, those agency is overseeing the operation. Abbott, asked where the apprehended migrants will be dropped off, said, The first location will be the steps of the United States Capitol.

Later Wednesday, Abbott clarified that Texas would only transport migrants to Washington if they wanted to go there  as well as other destinations outside of Texas  after they have been processed by federal authorities and released.

Abbotts announcement came a day after leaders of the Texas Military Department told a state Senate committee that Operation Lone Star was blowing well past its initial budget and would need an injection of more than $500 million to continue through August, when Texas fiscal year ends.

The governor said his newly announced policies would not cost any additional money, though he acknowledged the overall operation comes with a high pricetag.

Thats the reality. Securing the border does not come cheap," Abbott said.

Abbott is running for re-election this year and faces Democrat Beto O'Rourke, a former congressman, in November. ORourke called Abbotts new border policies a stunt and said the governor had failed to achieve real progress on border security and immigration while in office.

jasper.scherer@chron.com
The Hispanic community has become antagonistic toward the Democratic Party, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said during a pit stop in San Antonio.

He vowed to win more than half of the Hispanic vote in the upcoming gubernatorial election to applause Tuesday at the Texas Latino Conservative Lunch.

Abbott said most Hispanic people are in favor of securing the southern border and funding law enforcement agencies such as the police  in contrast with most Democrats, including his opponent Beto ORourke.

MORE: Former Trump officials press Gov. Greg Abbott to declare an 'invasion' along the U.S.-Mexico border

With your help, we will keep Texas red, he said to an audience of about 150 at the Witte Museums Mays Family Center. We will ensure that we turn South Texas red.

Data indicate the numbers are trending upward for Republicans in Bexar County, where about 60 percent of the population is Hispanic.

In March 2018, 69,695, about 44 percent, of voters cast a ballot in the Republican primary, compared with 89,015, about 48 percent in this years primary.

CAMPAIGNING IN TEXAS: Beto ORourke fires back at Abbott donors defamation lawsuit

Samuel Delgado Jr., who attended the luncheon with his wife at the invitation of their friend Bexar County District Attorney candidate Marc LaHood, agreed with Abbotts assessment, noting many of his Latino friends have become disenchanted with the Democratic Party and its policy stances.

Were definitely going that way, toward the Republicans, Delgado, 47, said.

Delgado, a business owner, thinks the Democrats are misguided on key issues such as border security and policing.

NEWSLETTERS Join the conversation with HouWeAre We want to foster conversation and highlight the intersection of race, identity and culture in one of America's most diverse cities. Sign up for the HouWeAre newsletter here.

I do think that we do need to take care of us before (immigrants trying to enter the United States), he said.

During his remarks, Abbott denounced Democratic politicians, referring to some by name. Invoking U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has become a popular punching bag for the right, he lamented what he saw as the devolution of the Democratic Party.

There was a time when they used to be Democrats, and then they became liberals, and then they became progressives. Now they are socialists. They are representing and articulating and advancing the policies of Ocasio-Cortez, Abbott said, later promising to fire (Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives) Nancy Pelosi.

He concluded by firing up the crowd with a promise to save America from Biden and Beto and keep Texas the greatest state in the greatest nation in the history of the world. He received a standing ovation.

Not all attendees were of Hispanic descent. Wearing a cowboy hat, program manager Ed Olszanowski, 55, who described himself as white, said the event had opened his eyes to changes occurring within the Latino voting bloc.

Hearing some of the statistics, its pretty impressive how things are kind of shifting, he said.

Like Delgado, Olszanowski listed border security and policing as examples of political issues close to his heart. While he didnt necessarily believe a wall was the end-all-be-all solution to preventing illegal immigration, he said the problem was a pressing one affecting the San Antonio community. Something needed to be done about it.

People are coming across the border. We dont know who they are anymore, he said. We even see it in San Antonio  the gang wars that are going on on the South Side of San Antonio, the gang lords that live here and are allowed to stay here. Theres no security anymore. I think there really needs to be a focus on that.

Both Delgado and Olszanowski had previously voted for Abbott. Having seen him in person now, would they do so again in 2022?

Yes, they agreed.

caroline.tien@hearst.com
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Man's 40-Year Conviction Vacated Over Jury's Anti-Semitic Bias



Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington agreed with the findings of the Innocence Project and vacated the conviction of Barry Jacobson. PITTSFIELD, Mass.  A New York man who spent more than 40 years trying to clear his name has had his arson conviction thrown out because of jury bias.

Barry Jacobson, of White Plains at the time, had been accused of torching his Richmond vacation home in 1982 for insurance money and found guilty by a jury in Superior Court. He was sentenced to six months in prison and a $10,000 fine.

But two jurors later came forward to state that anti-Semitic statements had been made repeatedly by the foreperson and others during deliberations.

The judge denied a motion for a new trial based on the remarks but, two years ago, Jacobson's counsel asked the district attorney for a full review and filed a motion for post-conviction release. The conviction was dismissed on Jan. 31.

"Upon review of the court record, I was struck by the credibility of those jurors who came forward to record these anti-Semitic statements. And it was clear to me that this verdict was tainted by stereotypes and bias and that there was absolutely no way that my office could ethically or morally defend Mr. Jacobson's conviction," said District Attorney Andrea Harrington during a Zoom press conference on Tuesday.

"As a prosecutor, I have a legal ethical and moral obligation to ensure that jury verdicts are rendered free from bias. ... The right to an impartial jury trial is fundamental to our system of justice and to the public's faith in the fairness of the criminal legal system."

Harrington was joined by Jacobson's counsels, Robert Cordy of McDermott Will & Emery LLP and Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, and Robert Trestan, New England regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. Jacobson was not in attendance.

"I began representing Mr. Jacobson about 26 years ago, and have witnessed the suffering and anxiety he has long endured as a result of this wrongful conviction," said Cordy. "He is a man who has spent his life helping other people. A pardon was within his grasp time and again, in the 1990s, in light of all the contributions he had made to his community over the years, but only if he would confess to a crime that he did not commit. And he could not bring himself to do that."



Attorney Robert Cordy, above, and Barry Scheck, attorney and co-founder of the Innocence Project, speak at Tuesday press conference.

Two months after the trial, one of the jurors contacted Jacobson's attorney and told him that the foreperson had "repeatedly made references to Mr. Jacobson as being 'one of those New York Jews who think they can come up here and get away with anything.' Other similar anti-Semitic remarks were made by her and others throughout the deliberations."

Her sworn statement was confirmed by alternate juror, who said she overheard "one of those ladies say to the other, 'Well this is not going to take very long. ... All those rich, New York Jews come up here and think they can do anything and get away with it.'"

Jacobson appealed for a new trial, which was denied and upheld by the Appellate Court, which backed the original judge, who found no statements constituting bias. The foreperson denied she had made any prejudicial remark and other jurors denied, couldn't remember or weren't sure.

"Every person charged with a crime is entitled to have all of the jurors be impartial, and without prejudice, not a majority of them, or most of them, all of them. And so when one or two jurors are clearly in the wrong category. That's enough. And that's important," said Cordy.

Trestan said the anti-Semitic bias was "brazenly displayed in this case" and defies the American legal system's basic principle of judging people on what they do, not who they are.

"While this injustice occurred in the 1980s, we know that anti-Semitism continues to this day, both hidden and in plain view," he said. "In the 40 years since his wrongful conviction, Barry Jacobson has worked tirelessly to clear his name and expose the anti-Semitism that contributed to this merit this miscarriage of justice. The case remains a vivid reminder of the danger posed by anti-Semitism and the need for greater education efforts at all levels."

Scheck said one of the "telltale signs" he's found over the years and many clients of the Innocence Project is the refusal to admit guilt to get out on parole.

"You know, when that happens, when you hear people taking those kinds of stands, it's time to pay attention," he said.

There were other aspects of the trial that also didn't hold up, Scheck said, including what he described as "junk science" related to arson investigations at the time. One questionable bit of evidence was an unsealed vial with gasoline residue that purportedly was squeezed out of the rug near where the fire started; the vial disappeared for a time before being found for the grand jury a year later.

Harrington said her office had received the new motion during an internal review of its responsibility to eliminate racism and bias in prosecutions.

"We have implemented a policy to end the asking of race-based jury questions during the jury selection process," she said. "We have seen a shocking rise of hateful incidents over recent years targeting Jewish, Black and Latino communities here in Berkshire County and the need to stand against anti-Semitism is every bit as relevant today as it was in 1983."

Cordy said Jacobson had had to work through a lot of trauma  his business relationships in real estate were disrupted and financing for projects fell through  "he's a very strong person, a very committed person."

Jacobson did not wish to participate in the press conference but provided a statement through the ADL.

"Nearly 40 years ago I was wrongfully convicted for a crime I didn't commit. Anti-Semitism infected the prosecution and the jury deliberations. I am grateful that District Attorney Andrea Harrington recognized this injustice and helped my lawyer Bob Cordy, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Innocence Project finally clear my name," he said. "This wrongful conviction has cast a painful shadow over my life. I am thankful to God, family, and friends. The evils of antisemitism and racism in our legal system must be fought relentlessly."
PITTSFIELD, Mass  The Lantern Bar & Grill has been a landmark on North Street for more than a century. But the eatery's closing its doors again for the second time in recent years.

The first time it was shuttered for nearly two years before new owner Bjorn Somlo brought it back to life in 2019. But a decline in business, exacerbated by the pandemic, means the historic restaurant will close again by the end of April.

Somlo had been a customer and a friend of former owner Mark Papas. He said the Lantern created an open and friendly atmosphere that brought strangers together over burgers.

"I was a decent customer. I liked the burgers and eating out of the counter. And you make good friends," he said.

The investment firm Mill Town Capital purchased the building and later sold the tavern business to Somlo. Tim Burke, principal of Mill Town, thought bringing the owner of Nudel Bar in Lenox to downtown Pittsfield would keep the Lantern alive.

The Lantern underwent a six-month renovation to update the infrastructure but keep the interior authentic. The restaurant reopened in 2019 with a recrafted menu and improved plumbing, electric, a new hood for the grill, and handicapped access.

The Lantern's chef Raymond Stalker hoped to make the same impact that Lucas Confectionery and Wine Bar had in Troy, N.Y. Prior to opening the Confectionery, Troy was a rough city but Stalker said the restaurant sparked development throughout its downtown.

But the dreams for the Lantern did not become a reality and, for the last two years, the restaurant's popularly declined as the pandemic lingered.

"The pandemic really has been an exhausting experience. In my heart of hearts I believe that the Lantern is ripe, ready and bursting at the seams to be something wonderful," Solmo said. "I personally do not have the energy to give it the love it needs right now in combination with some family health issues.

"And you know, just the personal toll of the pandemic as well, I think it's nothing but opportunities and I don't want to see it go to waste."

Stalker has plans to move on and work as a chef for Cantina 229 in New Marlborough . Without his help with the restaurant, Solmo chose to close.

Solmo feels he does not have the energy needed to make the Lantern thrive but believes that the restaurant is prepped and ready for its next adventure with new occupants.

"My plans for the future is to get through April and say goodbye. Hopefully in a way that is celebratory and excited. Hope to find someone that's just going to take what we started and run with and just have amazing success," he said.

Solmo wants to make sure that the staff find a place that will make them happy and if not the same, at least better. Stalker said there has been a big outreach from local restaurants offering the staff jobs.

"Everybody's pretty sad but I've had a lot of local restaurants reach out to me about employment for my staff. I don't think they will love it as much as they love the Lantern. I think it is their home as well, but we're definitely getting them jobs," Stalker said.

Stalker has been cooking for 20 years and has been working at the Lantern since it reopened in 2019. Prior to that, he was chef at the Nudel Bar for two years and the chef de cuisine for five. During his time at the restaurant, he built close relationships with his co-workers and feels that they have grown to be a close family.

"The hardest part for all of us is not working together on a daily basis," Stalker said.

Solmo wants to make this last month a celebration of the restaurant's history and is hopeful of what is to come in the future.

With all the renovations and effort he has put into improving the space and bringing it up to code, he believes that the next restaurateur that takes up residence has the potential to thrive

"I released the information so early as we're hoping this whole month ... we're hoping that people that really remember enjoying it get to make a last trip out. ... I am so excited to say that we are leaving it really primed for the next person to skyrocket." Solmo said.

Somlo said he did not have plans to run multiple restaurants but often joked about purchasing the Lantern one day with Papas. The joke turned into reality when Papas decided to retire and sell the restaurant due to the hefty cost he would need to renovate the old building. Somolo went to work to attempt to save what he considered a great piece of Pittsfield's history.

"[The Lantern was] one of the few last standing pieces of the arc of the Pittsfield story. I think very few people understand just how incredible the city Pittsfield was in its heyday and how it was part of a global city and what was being done and how fast it was growing," Somolo said. "Effectively, electricity itself. And it's becoming commercialized really started in cities like Pittsfield, so they were just the center of the world in a lot of ways."

"And there was this amazing city, and there's these amazing jobs and all these people. And this is one of those things that lasted through the turn of what happened next in America's story. And I got to come upon it at a time in my life where I just got to enjoy something that was genuine, and original and honest. Real through and through. As a cook first, that's all you ever want."

Somlo hopes to find a buyer and said the landlord is very interested in seeing something that has the potential to thrive in the space.
BCC to Hold Info Session on Cannabis Industry Certificate

PITTSFIELD, Mass.  Berkshire Community College (BCC) will hold a virtual information session about its new Cannabis Industry Certificate program on Wednesday, April 20 at 4:20 pm. The session will be held via Zoom.

The Cannabis Industry Certificate is designed to provide students with applicable skills and knowledge to work professionally in the areas of cannabis cultivation, processing, preparation, retail and outreach. Courses in the program include business, communication, biopsychology and botany, along with an onsite industry practicum.

Students must be least 21 years of age at the time of enrollment.

In Massachusetts, medical cannabis was legalized in 2012, followed by the legalization of recreational cannabis in 2016. Today, it is a $1.4 billion business in the Commonwealth, with salaries in the industry averaging $67,878.
Berkshire County Organizations Receive Travel and Tourism Recovery Grants

BOSTON  The Baker-Polito Administration, along with the Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development and the Massachusetts Office of Travel & Tourism (MOTT), announced $4 million in awards to 80 tourism organizations, chambers of commerce, and municipalities as part of the Travel and Tourism Recovery (TTR) Grant Program.

Funds from the TTR Grant Pilot Program are dedicated to marketing projects that support the My Local MA campaign, enhance tourism recovery, and have the potential to increase non-resident visitation.

"The tourism and hospitality industries are key contributors to the Commonwealth's vibrancy and economic well-being," said Governor Charlie Baker. "With the impact of the pandemic these industries have felt over the past two years, we are pleased to continue our support for their recovery through this important grant program."

In Berkshire County, five organizations received Level 1 Grants.

The Berkshire Scenic Railway Museum will receive $8,000 to use to increase Hoosac Valley Train Ride ridership in the summer season through targeted marketing to expand and enhance tourism activity in Northern Berkshire County.

ProAdams will receive $49,000 Attract tourists to downtown Adams through a combination of improved website content, signage, literature creation and distribution, and search and social media marketing.

The Southern Berkshire Chamber of Commerce received $35,000 to launch two new tourism and economic recovery projects in 2022: Tour the Berkshires and Southern Berkshire Pay-per-View. Develop marketing content, increase the reach of marketing campaigns, and support implementation including website integration.

The Clark Art will receive $45,000 for a dedicated marketing campaign in Montreal and Quebec to attract visitors from these nearby markets to travel to enjoy vacation experiences in Western Massachusetts. Advertising will focus on the Clark's upcoming exhibition, Rodin in the United States.

The Williamstown Chamber of Commerce will receive $49,000 to create video ads that will be used to promote Williamstown and the Northern Berkshires across multiple platforms this spring/summer. They will also develop a targeted campaign to reach households within a three-hour drive radius of Williamstown.

Berkshire Regional Planning Commission received a Level 3 $140,000 grant for the Berkshire County Collaborative Campaign. The campaign is focused on 3 themes: downtown shopping/dining, outdoor recreation, and Cultural Districts. Facets include Digital Retargeting, Social Media Promoted Posts, and Lead Generation, all leading to a landing page on berkshires.org with a My Local MA message.

Our Administration is committed to providing the resources necessary to continue supporting the momentum the tourism and hospitality industries have built toward their recovery, said Lt. Governor Karyn Polito. Through these grants and thanks to the partnerships with our tourism councils, municipal leaders, and regional and local chambers of commerce, together we can continue to make progress as we approach the peak season for travel and the economic impacts that follow.

In addition, the Administration also announced a new offering, the Travel and Tourism Season Extension (TTSE) Grant Program, a $6 million program funded through the U.S. Department of Commerces Economic Development Agency, that focuses on promoting the visitor off-season, November through April, in Massachusetts.

We want to ensure the Commonwealths economic recovery is both equitable and statewide, and this grant program is key to making progress toward both those goals, said Housing and Economic Development Secretary Mike Kennealy. By design, this program allows us to make targeted investments in travel and tourism, while empowering the grant recipients to leverage their own expertise to develop plans to attract visitors and the economic activity that follows.

Funded through the Tourism Trust Fund, the TTR Grant Program was open to any public, nonprofit agency, 501(c)3, or 501(c)6 that has been in operation in Massachusetts for at least two consecutive years since January 2019, and is in good standing with taxes and licenses/registrations in the Commonwealth.

The TTR and TTSE programs are in alignment with the Baker-Polito Administrations Partnerships for Recovery Plan to help stabilize and grow the Massachusetts economy.

Through Partnerships for Recovery, the Administration has awarded more than $705 million to small businesses and has opened new grant programs to revitalize downtowns, create winter community spaces, support cultural institutions and foundations, and fund regional economic development organizations.
Name: Adam Sypniewski

Company: Deepgram

Job title: CTO

Date started current role: June 2016

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Adam Sypniewski has designed artificial intelligence systems for autonomous vehicles and built next-gen technology for The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He earned his Ph.D. in experimental astrophysics from the University of Michigan, where he used machine learning to understand dark energy.

What was your first job? I worked as a paperboy when I was eleven years old, making 10.2 cents for every paper I delivered. I saved all the money I earned so that I could buy my very first Compaq PCyou can only imagine how many papers it took before I had saved enough!

I started my first corporate job while I was finishing graduate school at the University of Michigan. I was looking for careers in software engineering and science, and there was a local company called Soar Technology. I applied and started working at the company part-time until I finished my Ph.D and then I transitioned to working there full-time. Initially, I was an AI Engineer, and eventually I became a Research Scientist where I worked primarily on unmanned and autonomous vehicle systems that used AI to help communicate with, or improve the effectiveness of, humans.

Did you always want to work in IT? I actually didnt. Growing up, I enjoyed science, technology and electronics, and anticipated that I would pursue an undergraduate career in electrical engineering. I knew I liked programming, but I didnt necessarily anticipate working in IT.

What was your education? Do you hold any certifications? What are they? I have a Bachelor of Science from the Alma College where I pursued a double-major in mathematics and physics and received honours in mathematics. I also have a Masters degree and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Michigan.

Explain your career path. Did you take any detours? If so, discuss. Originally, I applied to the University of Michigans electrical engineering program but was turned down because I was home-schooled during high school; at the time, there wasnt much support for students who were home-schooled, so I had to look around at other schools. I ended up applying and going to Alma College, a small liberal arts college in Michigan that had a 3 + 2 programwhere I was able to go to school for three years at Alma College and then transfer for an additional two years of school at University of Michigan to finish with a Bachelors and Masters in engineering. Alma College didnt offer an engineering program, so I had to complete my undergraduate degree in physics until I could transfer to the University of Michigan for my graduate studies in engineering.

What ended up happening, however, is that I discovered that I enjoyed physics much more than I had ever enjoyed engineering. In fact, to this day, I dont enjoy electrical engineering at all. I didnt have a career path in mind, but I decided to follow my passion and continue my studies in physics. I received my Masters in Physics from the University of Michigan and, upon completion, I applied to its PhD program.

What type of CTO are you? Im a big fan of taking new or risky technologies and trying to think about: does this change the way we think about things, and can it do what we need it to? If so, does it push ones assumptions about the universe or is it a hard constraint that we cant push up against? As a CTO, I am very fond of taking a chance on the so-called riskier endeavours and technologies that can help us as a company optimise the way we work in a constraint based world.

Which emerging technology are you most excited about the prospect of? I think that the work being done in development and silicone is very interesting. We have CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, as well as more refined machines for doing targeted specific calculations quickly. The more general the tool is for a particular job or task, the less efficient it will be on that same, particular task. This is because these technologies are designed to solve a lot of problems and so they have more general instructions. GPUs for example, are more specific, and are designed to tackle a specified issue incredibly well, because that is all they are designed for. Specialised computing opens up many doors in order for companies to do things cheaper and more effectively.

Im also excited by the prospect of nuclear fusion as a power source. For example, how do we push the boundaries of space and what people can do? Nuclear fusion provides an inexhaustible supply of energy. Its an efficient technology and I think it will relieve a lot of pressure on the energy market.

Are there any technologies which you think are overhyped? Why? I think that blockchain is overhyped. At its core, these are new applications of existing technologies, but people are trying to shoehorn blockchain wherever they can possibly find it. Rather than thinking about the actual applications of blockchain, I think that people are caught up on the idea of blockchain as a buzzy trending technology and often I see it used as a marketing buzz word or a way to entice investors.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can often be overhyped as well. At Deepgram, we have a whole research branch and are dedicated to making AI and ML part of our company DNA. Oftentimes, though, AI and ML can be used as a marketing buzzword for new companies looking to remain competitive and it can be hard to differentiate which companies are putting in the time and research and energy to develop these types of emerging technologies and which companies arent putting in the necessary work.

What is one unique initiative that youve employed over the last 12 months that youre really proud of? Over the last twelve months, weve made an all-in commitment to using safer programming technologies, specifically the Rust programming language. Were using it for speed, low-level computation and to drive our GPUs. Very few companies are doing this at all, let alone in Rust, and it has made a huge impact on the stability and speed of our systems. As programming languages, Rust and Elm have a strong emphasis on correctness and are regarded positively amongst programmers.

At Deepgram, our front-end technologies (for example the UIs we build in a web browser) are frequently built in Rust and leverage Elm as well. This shows Deepgrams interest in and ability to adopt novel technologies, even when theyre not widely adopted across the industry. Over the last twelve months, I have seen extraordinary excitement by the team at Deepgram about our use of Rust.

Are you leading a digital transformation? If so, does it emphasise customer experience and revenue growth or operational efficiency? If both, how do you balance the two? No, not necessarily. Were actually moving backwards. What I mean by that is that we are physically going out to data centres with real GPUs that we at Deepgram are physically maintaining, rather than investing significantly in cloud services. If something goes wrong with the equipment, one of our engineers will take care of it.

What is the biggest issue that youre helping customers with at the moment? At Deepgram, we believe that voice is the future of the enterprise, and we help companies capitalise on their audio data. We use a patented deep learning model that allows companies to get faster, more accurate transcriptions, resulting in a more affordable and more scalable path to releasing new speech-driven products.

How do you align your technology use to meet business goals? Deepgram is a foundational technology company. We provide a fundamental API that customers can use for speech recognition. All of the business we do is centred around the technology that we have built. Our speech recognition technology provides the right solution to their problemcompanies turn to Deepgram looking to uncover actionable insights hidden within their speech data, Deepgram offers an easy, affordable and scalable solution.

Do you have any trouble matching product/service strategy with tech strategy? Typically, that sort of friction comes up when there are unrealistic or naive expectations about how the technology will work. You have to be careful when youre in a deep tech company, or when you have interesting and novel technology, because people will make all sorts of assumptions about how it works, what can or cannot be done, how easy your solution is to use, etc. To avoid these issues, your internal communications have to be really good. The way that you describe your own product solution has to be very honest so that your product and marketing team can work together to build and market exactly what youre working to achieve.

You can also see friction between the product and tech strategy when you try and think too big. You want to be laser-focused on the value-add that you bring to the market. Its easy to get distracted from that initial focus, especially when building a product, because you want to keep building and thinking about the next big thing that your customers are demanding. But, you also have to learn to say no and focus on the core proficiency of your company and first ensure that youre doing that exceptionally well.

What makes an effective tech strategy? I think that its important to be able to forecast the technology or solution that is going to make a difference and then challenge the assumptions of what can and cannot be done. Ask yourself why your particular tech strategy will make a difference and why it hasnt been done before, and go from there.

What predictions do you have for the role of the CTO in the future? I think the CTO role will become more focused on using the right tools for the job, and less focused on picking the right off-the-shelf solution. CTOs will be more focused on making strategic technology-focused decisions, looking at how the market is going to change, and what that means for the technology that you should be adopting now. Customers will also undergo similar technological shifts, so its critical to anticipate what your customers will need or will likely ask for down the line and build that technology now in order to support them better.

What has been your greatest career achievement? I would say that building Deepgrams speech engine has been my greatest career achievement to date. We built several versions, and it didnt happen overnight. Ultimately, Scott Stephenson (the CEO and co-founder) and I discovered that the tools available to us just werent working and we needed a better solution.

Looking back with 20:20 hindsight, what would you have done differently? Very little honestly. Things worked out so well that, by and large, 80-90% of the decisions we made were exactly right. With the knowledge I have now, I likely would have made the same decisions. In terms of what I would have done differently, I would have started a data operations initiative sooner. We implemented one several years ago, but if we had made the decision 6-12 months earlier, we would have benefitted from it 6-12 months sooner, and that would have been really big for the company.

Also, we were slow to throw it out and start again. Looking back, it would have been beneficial to recognise when we needed to start over from scratch and not try to continue to make something work.
The recent decision of the Taliban regime to block the broadcast of international media has been a major blow for press freedom and public access to information in Afghanistan, according to a survey carried out by the Afghanistan's National Journalists Union (ANJU) supported by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). The IFJ calls for immediate action to restore the broadcast of international media, key for Afghan people to receive information about their country.

The Taliban-led government in Afghanistan banned the broadcasts of international media outlets being transmitted via local media, including the BBC, Voice of America News and DW, among others.

The targeting of international media follows the imposition of extremely tight restrictions on national and local Afghan media and journalists work and comes amid growing efforts by the government to crack down on civil liberties in the country.

The latest ANJU survey revealed that the ban on international media is a final blow to the right of Afghan people to access information.

The lack of access to information, self-censorship, fear of reprisals and a severe economic crisis have diminished the capacity of national and local media to operate as it used to, making the international media the only way for Afghan citizens to be informed, despite the availability challenges.

The survey shows that 52% of respondents said they were following international media over local and national media since the Afghan government collapse. The study also found massive support and confidence towards international media, with 89% of respondents saying they trust international outlets operating in Afghanistan.

On the other hand, trust in national and local media remains high among Afghans, with 67% of respondents showing confidence in them despite the continuing restrictions on their freedom of work and the closure of hundreds of media outlets.

Surveyed Afghan journalists and civil society leaders said that an atmosphere of fear and panic is the biggest concern for journalists, as authorities de facto close media outlets or detain journalists for doing their job.

According to a previous survey conducted by ANJU and the IFJ, just 305 of the 623 media which were active before the Taliban took control are still operating. The collapse of media sector threats against journalists means just 2334 journalists are still working from a pre-Taliban high of 5069. Most of the journalists who have lost their jobs are women.

IFJ General Secretary, Anthony Bellanger, said: Afghan people are being systematically denied their right to access to independent journalism under the passive gaze of the international community, which has failed to put pressure on the Taliban to respect the most basic rights. We urge the Taliban to reverse this decision and allow the broadcasting of all international media without restrictions.

This report is the latest in a series of surveys being compiled thanks to the development of a new media monitoring programme by ANJU, supported by the IFJ and the Norwegian Journalists Union (NJU).
Wednesday 6 April 2022, 11:12 - Last update: 17:19

How long will the war in Ukraine last? The specter of Vietnam , if not Afghanistan , is already visible. The issue is much debated in these hours, precisely in view of the change of strategy of Vladimir Putin 's troops. "The Russians will concentrate their efforts to the south-east near the Donbass and to the south with the completion of the conquest of Mariupol and the continuation of the effort on Odessa. The duration of the conflict will depend on the result of this change in gravitation on the Russian side": this is the analysis on the prospect of the conflict made by General Luigi Chiapperini , former commander of the multinational NATO contingent in Afghanistan, also involved in the Kfor mission in Kosovo and member of the Army Study Center. If Moscow is successful it could shorten the time of the conflict. Otherwise we will presumably have to expect a long war of attrition - continues Chiapperini - with frequent movements of the front line as, for example, happened in Korea in the early 1950s. In that case the war lasted three years and in the end there was the division of the country in two, with negative repercussions on international stability that we still see today after seventy years ".

Stop importing coal from Russia: the complete list of sanctions imposed so far

Ukraine, Putin's new strategy

Those who expected the lightning-fast take of Kiev and the main Ukrainian cities are now forced to come to terms with reality. Russia appears to have abandoned the initial invasion objectives, but is still persisting with attacks to the east and south. Even under this " plan B " , forced by the Ukrainian resistance and the military setbacks of the Russian army, Moscow has multiple objectives that risk prolonging the conflict and causing even more death and destruction.

According to the AFP agency, the next phase of the war for Moscow could be to buy time. The invasion proved extremely costly for Russia, in terms of both human casualties and destruction of military equipment, thanks to Ukrainian resistance which was much more massive than anticipated.

Military analysts noted that troop changes began in the spring. Moscow now seems to want to avoid that conscripts are not sent to Ukraine, but it needs a change among soldiers and therefore there is the possibility that it will send people who are now advanced in age to war, at least until the young are well trained. The war is far from over. Further offensives are yet to come confirms Gustav Gressel, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), adding that soldiers are the key resource that Moscow is in short supply.

However analysts reiterate that a long war of attrition would also be dangerous for Russia, given the success of Ukrainian guerrilla tactics in recent weeks. "If this ultimately becomes a protracted war of attrition, Ukraine appears to have a more favorable position overall," said Michael Kofman, director of the Russian Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analysis in the United States.

At this point, however, the path becomes very narrow. And a lot, on the duration and outcome of the war, may depend on the choices of the Americans. Without more powerful weapons, Zelensky's army could be overwhelmed relatively quickly, perhaps within weeks.

It would be a defeat not only for Ukraine, but also for the Western side which, albeit to varying degrees, has so far supported it. Everything suggests, therefore, that in the end Zelensky will have more or less the means he asks for. If well equipped, then, the army of Kiev could break the advance of the Russian columns, more or less as happened in recent days in the Kiev area. At that point the dynamics of the war would be reversed. The Ukrainians would have their rear free to receive supplies and ammunition from Western partners, pivoting on the Dnipro railway hub and perhaps even reactivating the airport. They could also extend the line of trenches, building a kind of fortified arch from the Donbass to Kharkiv. In those conditions they might be able to stop the Russians for months. Of course we don't know how long Putin would insist on the offensive. The Americans are not ruling out that the Russian leader could double the indiscriminate bombing of cities, even those outside the south-eastern quadrant. And unfortunately the use of chemical or bacteriological devices cannot be excluded. The most optimistic, however, think that Putin, having acknowledged the second failure, could finally decide to start serious negotiations for peace.

The risk of a war of attrition like in Vietnam or Afghanistan

Furthermore, the Russian Bear may also be able to annihilate the Ukrainians and install a puppet government. But then? Ukraine is a state of 40 million inhabitants; it is larger than France; has fewer connections; how do you control it, also considering that the NATO countries would take action, to activate outbreaks of revolt? According to the historian Eugenio Di Rienzo, interviewed by La Verita, it is not difficult to hypothesize that a "Stay Behind" organization has existed for some time in Ukraine, created, financed and supplied with the latest generation of weapons from the USA, the United Kingdom and Poland. A "Gladio" certainly more efficient than the one established in Italy in the years of the Cold War flanked by trainers from these nations and formations of Foreign Fighters, of neo-Nazi extraction, recruited in Sweden, Norway, and by Russophobic elements from the Baltic republics. Even if a new Vietnam were avoided - concludes the expert -, there would always be the specter of a new Afghanistan and overturned parts of a new Iraq .

It must also be said that Putin cannot afford to lose, and will want to exhibit something resembling a victory, at least by May 9, when Russia celebrates its victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. "Putin is obsessed with symbolic dates and history, so he desperately needs an image of victory before May 9," said Alexander Grinberg , analyst at the Jerusalem Institute for Security and Strategy (JISS). Sergei Karaganov, honorary president of the Moscow think tank Council for Foreign and Defense Policy and former Kremlin adviser. The stakes of the Russian elite are very high, for them it is an existential war".

So, the solution for the Kremlin could be the conquest of the territory which includes the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Lugansk - recognized as independent entities by Russia in February -. Moscow has insisted that their breakaway governments should have full administrative authority and their full control appears to be a key objective of the war. War that "is far from over and it could still change in favor of Russia if the Russian army manages to launch an operation in its favor in eastern Ukraine, is the thesis of the analysts of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). Russia launched attacks on Odessa's western port over the weekend and Western sources have never ruled out an amphibious attack on the city, although this appears less likely. If a ceasefire is imposed on the principle "keep what you already own", Putin could maintain his control over several new parts of Ukraine".

Another of the tsar's main objectives is to try to divide the West. The longer the war lasts, the more the Kremlin should exercise one of its favorite tactics of creating ideological conflicts between states that want to take a tougher line against Moscow and those that have more conciliatory positions. Last Monday, Putin was quick to congratulate one of his closest allies within the EU, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, after his party won the elections and Orban won his fourth term. All this while US President Joe Biden made it clear that Putin should not remain in power, even as French President Emmanuel Macron retorted by arguing that such rhetoric would not benefit peace. In short, the scenario does not seem too comforting.
The showrunner behind Hulu's new miniseries on Elizabeth Holmes is hoping you'll see a new side to the disgraced Silicon Valley wunderkind's story.

Liz Meriwether is the showrunner for The Dropout, which airs its final episode on Hulu on April 7. The series chronicles the meteoric rise and fall of Theranos, the blood testing startup that Holmes falsely claimed could complete an extensive range of tests with diminutive quantities of blood. Amanda Seyfried plays the Theranos CEO and Naveen Andrews plays Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, Holmes's boyfriend who also served as both chief operating officer and president at the now-defunct company.

Meriwether's interest in Holmes stems from a Vanity Fair article published in 2016 which focused on the crumbling empire of the Theranos CEO. Though Holmes fascinated Meriwether, she wouldn't revisit the founder's story until 2018, when Searchlight Pictures optioned a podcast called The Dropout.

Meriwether says that she felt like she could dig deeper into the emotion of the whole project -- well beyond the world's image of Holmes in her signature black turtleneck.

"I wanted to tell this story on a human level about the people involved because I felt like it was such a layered, complex story," she explains, adding that Theranos's demise affected many people on a deep level.

And in her own way, Meriwether could relate to Holmes. Beyond sharing a first name, Meriwether found herself in a position of power relatively early on when she created the hit sitcom New Girl at the age of 29.

"I could sort of try to put myself in her shoes and tell the story from her point of view," she says. "And that, you know, became my guiding principle -- just, like, trying to dig deeper into her and into the sort of emotional logic of the story."

But by no means is Holmes an easy character to portray: Meriwether concedes that it's difficult to write a character that's such a mystery. Holmes did not collaborate in the making of the show.

The mystery might be part of the show's appeal. As viewers watch the show, they'll immediately tune into some of Holmes's awkward characteristics and her steadfast pursuit of success -- a quest she pursued at all costs, and one that ultimately bled out.

There are some important takeaways for those in the startup world who tune into the show. In an email, Paul English, the co-founder of the Stamford, Connecticut travel platform Kayak, noted the key reminder: Don't lie. Not only is it a poor way to treat others, but there's also reputational damage to consider if a lie is uncovered. English added that it's OK to make mistakes and fail -- but during Holmes's trial, prosecutors pointed out that she had chosen fraud over failure.

The culmination of that fraud won't play out in the program, however. After a roughly four-month-long trial, Holmes received a guilty verdict at the start of the year. But The Dropout does not dive deep into the trial; Meriwether says that she intentionally chose to end the series with the company's collapse since she didn't feel like it was her place as a storyteller to get into the trial. That's because, in her view, the series follows the story of the company itself. It also didn't help that she was writing the show at the same time as the trial was unwinding.

The Dropout completes a trifecta of so-called "bad founder" shows airing now. There's WeCrashed, which aired on AppleTV in March and looks at WeWork's rise and fall, and Super Pumped, which is about Uber. The latter premiered on Showtime and Paramount+ at the end of February. The collective releases aren't something that Meriwether planned, though she's noticed people are starting to ask more critical questions about what's going on with Silicon Valley, as opposed to seeing it as a place that's going to save us all.
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BOYERTOWN, Pa., April 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- ClimeCo, a leader in developing and managing environmental commodities, announces a partnership with YAKOPI (Yayasan Konservasi Persisir Indonesia) and PUR Projet for the reforestation of 6,000 acres of vital mangroves in the Aceh and North Sumatra Regions of Indonesia. Mangroves sequester three to five times the amount of carbon as regular forests. Indonesia is home to over 20% of the world's mangroves. Over the past three decades, 40% of Indonesia's mangroves have been lost due to shrimp and fish aquaculture, leaving many former shrimp ponds abandoned and local communities with little access to economic opportunities. The North Sumatra region has lost 60% of its pristine mangroves due to aquaculture, putting coastal resilience, biodiversity, and wildlife habitats at enormous risk. In the Aceh region, a substantial amount of its mangroves were lost due to a tsunami in 2004. ClimeCo will fund the reforestation of these mangroves by selling the resulting third-party verified carbon credits and implementing the project through their local partnerships with YAKOPI and PUR Projet. This investment supports gender-equitable employment, ecosystem services payment to local communities, ecotourism business development, and a pilot program for locals to implement silvofisheries - a form of sustainable aquaculture. "The improved livelihoods of the local communities and the long-term success of this mangrove reforestation project are interdependent, and this project achieves both," says ClimeCo Program Development Manager David Chen. About our Partners: * YAKOPI is a local Indonesia group dedicated to restoring mangroves and providing employment opportunities for local women and youth. Directed by Eling Tuhono, YAKOPI are experts and local leaders in mangrove restoration and will be responsible for managing many logistical aspects of the program on the ground. * PUR Projet is a certified B Corporation that specializes in designing and implementing agroforestry projects, nature-based solutions, and sustainable supply chain interventions. As an on-the-ground project developer, PUR Projet will manage components of the carbon offset certification, help navigate local culture/politics and advise on reforestation efforts. About ClimeCo ClimeCo is a respected global advisor, transaction facilitator, trader, and developer of environmental commodity market products and related services. We specialize in voluntary carbon, regulated carbon, renewable energy credits, plastics credits, and regional criteria pollutant trading programs. Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1227498/ClimeCo_Horizontal_12in_AI_Logo.jpg
1. 'Will You Do Anything Than Pray?', Jacqueline Fernandez Trolled For Post On Sri Lanka Crisis

AFP

While some supported her, there were others who trolled Jacqueline Fernandez asking her to contribute, donate and do more than just pray sitting in India. Here's what they wrote in the comments section.

Indiatimes

Hrithik Roshan and Saba Azad made their first public appearance together at the airport last night. Saba was apparently blushing and Hrithik walked holding her hand.

3. Despite Kickass Debut At 30 & Plethora Of Strong Roles, Shreyas Talpade Is Still Underutilised

Instagram

"I found out that there are certain actors who are insecure about sharing screen space with me and dont want me in a film. I have done certain films for friends only keeping their interests in mind but then I have been back-stabbed by the same friends. Then there are friends who go ahead and make films without including me, which makes one question if they are even friends at all."



4. 'Saw Bodies Frozen Due To Being Burned', Ram Charan Shares RRR's 'Naatu Naatu' Was Shot In Kyiv

YouTube

Ram Charan has recently revealed that he is in touch with Rusty, who was in charge of his security there. The situation, he says, is getting worse day by day. Rusty keeps sending him videos that leave him shattered. "He burst out crying, and he said that the situation is bad."

5. Are You Prepared? Squid Game Director Says His Next Film Will Be More Violent Than Netflix Show

Netflix

He says it will be another "controversial project" and "will be more violent than Squid Game". Without revealing much about the film, he only said that it is inspired by a novel penned by Umberto Eco, the late Italian author and philosopher. The movie is tentatively titled KO Club.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, the team of SS Rajamouli's RRR flew to Kyiv to shoot for the hit dance number Naatu Naatu which is making waves all over the nation. Sadly, Kyiv is now a war zone.

YouTube

Ram Charan has recently revealed that he is in touch with Rusty, who was in charge of his security there. The situation, he says, is getting worse day by day. Rusty keeps sending him videos that leave him shattered.

"He burst out crying, and he said that the situation is bad."

"He sent me ground-level videos, which have not been seen in any of the television coverage. They were dreadful," Charan told Variety.

AFP

"I have seen bodies frozen, not in ice, but frozen due to being burned. If you touch it, probably they will turn into ashes."

Rusty is fighting for his country. Ram Charan is helping him not only financially but also emotionally.

Ram Charan sent medicines, money and other essentials. He, in turn, lauded him and thanked him.

#RamCharan has helped a security officer in Kyiv, Ukraine, who previously operated as his personal security member during #RRRs shoot in Ukrainian @AlwaysRamCharan pic.twitter.com/kAi4OmmIZd  BA Raju's Team (@baraju_SuperHit) March 19, 2022

"Ram Charan was here to shoot for his movie and I worked as his bodyguard during his stay in our country. He called me as soon as the war broke out. I did mention about my wife's sickness and lack of medicines," he said.

He added, "You can't engineer a pan-India film. Those films that have actually travelled across India are the ones that were rooted and made for one market. If you try to do a 'pan-India' film, try to appeal to all audiences for different markets, it will not belong anywhere. So, you make your film as rooted as it can be, tell the story of that land and mount it bigger, cast it differently and maybe put in a few familiar faces from different markets. I get all of that but I don't think you should lose the sensibilities or the culture of that particular story."










(Trigger Warning: The story contains graphic details and photographs of violence, which could be triggering for some readers.)

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the UN Security Council on Tuesday, detailing the atrocities committed by Russian troops.

In his, yet another fiery speech, he alleged that the atrocities by Russian troops are no different from terrorists like the Islamic State extremists as he demanded immediate action to bring the Kremlin's forces to justice for "war crimes."

bucha ukraine

In his first address to the UN Security Council, Zelenskyy said,

Twitter

"Yesterday, I returned from our city of Bucha, recently liberated from Russian troops not far from Kiev. There is not a single crime that they would not commit there. The Russian military searched for and purposefully killed anyone who served our country,"



Sharing a detailed account of brutalities conducted by the Russian forces, he said,

Agencies

"this is no different from other terrorists such as Daesh who occupied some territories. And here it is done by a member of the United Nations Security Council, destroying internal unity, borders, and countries."



"We are dealing with a state that is turning the veto in the UN Security Council into the right to die," he said in his impassioned address to the UNSC. He added, "This undermines the whole architecture of global security. It allows them to go unpunished."

Zelenskyy asserted that the UN system must be reformed immediately so that the veto is not the right to die.

Reuters

"The Russian military and those who gave them orders must be brought to justice immediately for war crimes in Ukraine," he said, adding that anyone who has given criminal orders and carried them out by killing "our people will be brought before the tribunal which should be similar to the Nuremberg tribunals."



After his address, he asked for a video to be played in the Security Council that showed horrific images of corpses lying on the streets, charred bodies, and pictures of mass graves across various Ukrainian cities.

ukraine russia

Some of the dead had their hands tied behind their backs and mouths gagged, including children.

Ukraine's Bucha killing | AFP

In his nearly 20-minute video address to the Council meeting on Ukraine, being attended by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Zelenskyy questioned where is the security that the Security Council needs to guarantee.



AFP

"It's not there, although there is a Security Council but where is the peace, he said.



Zelenskyy further demanded maximum access for journalists and involvement of the International Criminal Court for transparency, complete truth, and full accountability to ensure that war crimes do not go unpunished.

"Those who consider themselves privileged and believe that they can get away with anything," he said, adding that all the other potential war criminals in the world should be shown how they will be punished. "If the biggest one is punished, then everyone is punished."

Demanding reform of the Council, he said it is obvious that the key institution of the world that must ensure international peace and security "simply cannot work effectively."

Zelenskyy added that if the war and brutality continue, then nations will have to depend only on the power of their own arms to ensure their security and not on international law and institutions.

Agenices

"The United Nations can be simply closed. Are you ready to close the UN? Do you think that the time of international law is gone? If your answer is no, then you need to act immediately. The UN Charter must be restored immediately," he said.



He said the massacre being witnessed in Bucha is "unfortunately only one of many examples of what the occupiers have been doing on our land for the past 41 days.

The Ukrainian leader said he knows that Russia will blame everyone just to justify their own actions and even say that the videos showing corpses strewn across the streets in Bucha are staged but this is 2022 and there is conclusive evidence, satellite images, and we can conduct a full and transparent investigation.

Zelensky asserted that it is time to transform the system, the United Nations and proposed to convene a global conference in Kyiv to determine how we will reform the world security system.

AFP/Getty

"It is now clear that the goals set in San Francisco in 1945 for the creation of a global security international organization have not been achieved, and it is impossible to achieve them without reform," he said.



Zelenskyy asserted that we need decisions from the Security Council for peace in Ukraine."

timesofisrael

He demanded the council to punish Russia or 'dissolve yourself altogether.' He noted,

If you do not know how to make this decision, you can do two things. Either remove Russia as an aggressor and a source of war so it cannot block decisions about its own aggression, its own war. And then do everything that we can do to establish peace. Or the other option is, please show how we can reform or change, dissolve yourself and work for peace. Or if there is no alternative and no option, then the next option would be to dissolve yourself altogether."

(With inputs from PTI)

For more on news and current affairs from around the world please visit Indiatimes News.






As Ukraine continues to bear the wrath of Russian Troops, an image that has resurfaced online is breaking hearts. A photograph of a dog sitting close to a man laid dead allegedly by the Russian Troops is going viral.

Representational Image

The picture published by a European media organization mentioned that Russian forces killed the dog's owner. Since his owner died, the dog reportedly sat beside him, refusing to abandon his friend.



The dog does not leave its owner, who was killed by the #Russian invaders. #Kyiv region. pic.twitter.com/dnVV1X7XLG  NEXTA (@nexta_tv) April 4, 2022

A deceased man, possibly the dogs owner, laid on the pavement alongside a toppled bicycle in the picture.

The image reminded many of a classic Hollywood movie Hachiko, which told the remarkable story of a man's bond with his dog.

Pinterest

The picture has reportedly been taken in Bucha, a city on the capital's outskirts, Kyiv. The photograph shared by the Ukrainian animal rights organization UAnimals is a tear-jerking depiction of how dogs are indeed a man's best friend.

The photo of real-life Hachiko has left the internet in tears.

Its excruciatingly painful watching the atrocious pictures time and again but that is exactly why I will keep retweeting #RuSSianwarcrimes. People must know and see for themselves crimes committed by #Putinwarcriminal and the #RuSSianarmy. Only then those guilty will be punished https://t.co/u6CpxApHr6  Sjoerd Nolf (@SjoerdNolf) April 5, 2022

My emotions exceed my ability to comprehend this brutality... https://t.co/UOJXLlMK3l  khaneli (@pixi_kh) April 5, 2022

The saddest picture of the war...where does the dog go now? https://t.co/R0R7hdHfkb  Jean Beaugeste (@jeanloh12) April 5, 2022

When you think it can't get sadder https://t.co/76xod4co9f  Rita Diniz (@RitaRedPT) April 5, 2022

These dogs have understood since ancient times that they recognized humanity as their fateful partner.

Well, the dogs are enlightened without talking... #RussiaUkraineWar https://t.co/zc5Mdm6J8a  jeanne maiko arayan (@JeanneMaiko) April 5, 2022

According to reports in UK media, it isn't confirmed that the deceased man was the dog's owner.

Another photo shows how the dog stood up as the dead man's body was being taken away by the rescuers.

The Internet also dug out many such heartbreaking stories of pets.

Putin knows that the bond between Ukrainian people & pets has inspired the world so his troops are being ordered to kill the dogs as they withdraw. This is evil war on human & animal rights #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/DWwvY6KnWD  dominic dyer (@domdyer70) April 4, 2022

During heavy fighting in Ukraine, this dog was separated from his owner.

For days, his owner thought he'd lost him forever.



What he didn't know was that soldiers had found him and were looking after him.



This is the moment they were reunited.



 pic.twitter.com/gaa9T3QHbK  Goodable (@Goodable) April 5, 2022

Good news - #UAnimals has shared that a police officer, Alexei, found an exhausted dog in a destroyed car. She's now a member of his family.

We know from our long-running work in #Ukraine that many kind officers have a history of adopting the animals they rescue. 

UAnimals pic.twitter.com/xcu9i2IpEc  Naturewatch Foundation (@Naturewatch_org) April 5, 2022

A Ukrainian soldier hugs a dog that was abandoned by the owners, inside a house that the residents left, on the front line near Kyiv Ukraine March 29, 2022. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/SeItpWjrGM  dominic dyer (@domdyer70) March 29, 2022

As Ukraine continues to face the atrocities, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has strongly accused Russia of genocide.



bucha-ukraine

Several disturbing footage and photos have emerged on social media that show piles of dead dogs at an animal shelter in Borodyanka, Ukraine.

Dogs are victims of war as well as people #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/Mj07NPf0YZ  dominic dyer (@domdyer70) March 31, 2022

According to the charity UAnimals, the shelter's 485 dogs have stayed locked in their cages from the beginning of the war in late February.



I have no words. Russians even killed dozens of dogs in Kyiv region. WHY??#RussiansWarCrimes pic.twitter.com/tvotxGUThs  Oleksandra Matviichuk (@avalaina) April 3, 2022

In April, after Russian soldiers left Borodyanka, the charity volunteers finally managed to return to the shelter.



The biggest animal shelter in #Ukraine is in complete blockade.



3,383 dogs and cats are cut off from food. Volunteers can not reach them to bring more supplies. Animals are starving already.



Photo was made before the invasion.#StopPutinNOW pic.twitter.com/6f8wfvweGT  Oleksandra Sasha Ustinova (@SashaUstinovaUA) March 6, 2022

The charity volunteers reported that the dogs were left without food or water. Unfortunately, by the time the volunteers could gain access to the building on April 1, 150 of the 485 animals had already died of starvation.



(For more trending stories, click here.)


Following the trend for cloud solution providers to provide a one-stop platform for all data, Google Cloud has released new tools that enable enterprises not only to generate business insights but also to perform data engineering operations.

According to the company, one of the many challenges that enterprises face today is managing data across disparate lakes and warehouses, which creates silos and increases risk and cost, especially when data needs to be moved.

To address this challenge, the company has released a new tool, dubbed BigLake.

BigLake allows companies to unify their data warehouses and lakes to analyze data without worrying about the underlying storage format or system, which eliminates the need to duplicate or move data from a source and reduces cost and inefficiencies, said Gerrit Kazmaier, vice president of database, data analytics, and Looker at Google Cloud.

With BigLake, customers gain access controls, with an API interface spanning Google Cloud and open file formats like Parquet, along with open-source processing engines like Apache Spark, Kazmaier added.

According to Constellation Researchs Doug Henschen, Google is responding to the trend toward combined lake and warehouse (or Lakehouse) data platforms that promise to support analytics associated with SQL-based querying against warehouses as well as the data-science and data engineering associated with the semi-structured and unstructured information held in data lakes.

Previously, Google Cloud offered Big Query, a data warehouse service, and DataProc, a Hadoop/Spark-based data lake service, separately.

Cloudera, Databricks, Microsoft, Oracle, Snowflake, and SAP all have combined lake/warehouse offerings. And Amazon Redshift Spectrum has long been aligned with AWS Lake Formation capability for building lakes based on S3 object storage, Henschen said.

Henschen added that enterprises need to understand to what degree each of these offerings really satisfy their analytics and data science or data engineering requirements. In general, the warehouse-rooted offerings cater more to analytics requirements and the lake-rooted offerings have better depth and functionality on the data science and data engineering side, Henschen said.

BigLake, which is on preview, is now available for enterprises to try, Google said.

GCP introduces Change Data Capture

With the aim to make the latest data and datasets available to teams across an enterprise, Google Cloud has showcased a new Change Data Capture (CDC) feature.

Called Spanner Change Streams, the new tool will allow an enterprise to do real-time CDC (update, insert or delete data) for their Google Cloud Spanner database, Sudhir Hasbe, director of product management at Google Cloud, said.

According to Henschen, Spanner Change Streams will make it possible for enterprises to get change streams out of Google Cloud Spanner into other destinations to meet low-latency requirements in contrast to just supporting bringing change data from other databases into Spanner.

Easing machine learning operations

Google has been working to ease machine learning (ML) operations with the launch of the Vertex AI platform in May 2021, followed by the introduction of collaborative development environment Vertex AI Workbench in October.

Vertex AI Workbench, which is now generally available, brings data and ML systems into a single interface so that teams have a common toolset across data analytics, data science, and machine learning. This capability enables teams to build, train, and deploy an ML model five times faster than the traditional notebooks, said June Yang, vice president of Cloud AI and Industry Solutions at Google Cloud.

According to the company, the integrated development environment, which runs as a Google managed notebook service, can access data across multiple services such as Dataproc, BigQuery, Dataplex, and Looker.

In addition, the company released a new feature dubbed Vertex AI Model Registry, which is currently in select preview. The Model Registry is aimed at making it easier for enterprises to manage the overhead of ML model maintenance, Yang said, adding that the feature provides a central repository for discovering, using, and governing machine learning models including those in BigQuery ML.

According to Henschen, the new feature solves a critical problem for enterprises. Registries help with model lifecycle management, a challenge that only gets tougher as the numbers of collaborators and the numbers of models grow. This helps data scientists, primarily, but also data engineers, the developers that put models into production and monitor and revise them as model performance degrades, Henschen explained.

Amazons SageMaker and Azures Machine Learning Service already have this capability, the analyst said.

Looker gets two new features

New Looker features, Connected Sheets for Looker and the ability to access Looker data models within Data Studio, bolster and streamline Google Clouds analytics offerings, says Henshen.

Customers now have the ability to interact with data whether it be through Looker Explore, or from Google Sheets, or using the drag-and-drop Data Studio interface. This will make it easier for everyone to access and unlock insights from data in order to drive innovation, and to make data-driven decisions with this new unified Google Cloud business intelligence platform, Kazmaier said.

The Data Cloud Alliance and other partnerships

Google has formed a Data Cloud Alliance in partnership with Accenture, Confluent, Databricks, Dataiku, Deloitte, Elastic, Fivetran, MongoDB, Neo4j, Redis, and Starburst to make data more portable and accessible across disparate business systems, platforms, and environments.

Data Cloud Alliance members will provide infrastructure, APIs, and integration support to ensure data portability and accessibility between multiple platforms and products across multiple environments, the company said, adding that each member will also collaborate on new, common industry data models, processes, and platform integrations to increase data portability and reduce complexity associated with data governance and global compliance.

To help enterprises with migration of their databases, Google Cloud has partnered with system integrators and consulting firms such as TCS, Atos, Deloitte, HCL, Kyndryl, Infosys, Wipro, Capgemini, and Cognizant.

Other initiatives include the launch of Google Cloud Ready  BigQuery, a new validation program that recognizes partner solutions like those from Fivetran, Informatica, and Tableau that meet a core set of functional and interoperability requirements.

Today, we already recognize more than 25 partners in this new Google Cloud Ready  BigQuery program that reduces costs for customers associated with evaluating new tools while also adding support for new customer use cases, Kazmaier said.
Inmarsat and Deutsche Telekom are celebrating the third anniversary of their award-winning European Aviation Network (EAN) inflight broadband being offered commercially by airline customers. To date, more than 50 million passengers have enjoyed access to the advanced, high-speed connectivity solution on over 420,000 flights across the continent with British Airways, Iberia, Vueling and AEGEAN.

As Europes fastest inflight broadband service, EAN allows passengers to seamlessly browse the internet, stream videos, check social media, enjoy real-time interactive applications such as gaming, and more. It has marked a paradigm shift in the airline experience, with incomparable speeds, uninterrupted coverage and significantly lower latency than any other inflight Wi-Fi network in the continent.

EAN has now been activated on more than 265 aircraft, including the entire British Airways short-haul fleet. These numbers will continue to grow in the coming years, as final roll-out progresses with Iberia and Vueling  both members of the International Airlines Group (IAG) alongside British Airways  in addition to all of Greek national carrier AEGEANs existing and new Airbus A320 and A321 aircraft.

EANs popularity reached new heights last year, with record usage as passengers returned to the skies. This aligns with Inmarsats latest Passenger Confidence Tracker, the largest global survey of its kind, which found that 41% of the 10,000 respondents believed inflight Wi-Fi had further increased in importance post pandemic. The results also indicated digital solutions that keep passengers connected and minimise their contact with cabin crew and fellow travellers are helping to boost travel confidence.

Philippe Carette, President of Inmarsat Aviation, said: Back in March 2019, British Airways became the first airline to make our EAN inflight broadband service commercially available to passengers. It has since been joined by Iberia, Vueling and most recently AEGEAN, which have all been able to delight passengers with the highest standard of connectivity on short and medium haul flights. EAN has played an important role in enhancing their onboard experience, unlocking new revenue opportunities for airlines and instilling greater confidence in air travel following the pandemic. Were delighted to celebrate this anniversary with our partners and customers, especially at a time when passenger usage of EAN is now higher than ever before, showing an increased desire to stay connected post Covid-19.

Rolf Nafziger, Senior Vice President, Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier and Global Business, said: EAN is Europes leading inflight connectivity service for good reason, offering reliable, uninterrupted, high-speed broadband on par with services on the ground. Now, airlines are fighting hard to win back customers, and EAN is the best solution available to meet the needs of their passengers, who want to be connected and entertained onboard. Our joint EAN service with Inmarsat means we can continue to help airlines put their passengers first, by providing the fastest and most reliable connectivity available.

As the worlds first inflight broadband solution that combines dedicated satellite coverage with a complementary LTE-based ground network, EAN has been developed by Inmarsat, the world leader in global, mobile satellite communications, and Deutsche Telekom, in partnership with leading European companies such as Thales, Nokia, Airbus, Cobham and Eclipse Technics. Specifically designed to meet the needs of European aviation, it delivers the fastest speeds over one of the worlds most congested airspaces, plus the quickest installation times and easy scalability to meet growing demand in the future.
TCM, proved effective against COVID-19, is recommended by WHO

CGTN) 16:24, April 06, 2022

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is found to be effective against COVID-19 by experts from the World Health Organization (WHO), which recommended combining TCM with existing treatments in a report.

The report, published on WHO's website after an expert meeting to evaluate TCM's effectiveness in treating COVID-19, suggests TCM is a safe approach and can reduce the risk of progression from mild-moderate to severe cases.

The three-day meeting was held online, and 21 international experts participated. They reviewed the results of 12 randomized controlled trials related to the TCM treatment, and then wrote the report.

Further data shows TCM may shorten the time for viral clearance, and early application may result in better clinical outcomes. But evidence on the benefit for severe cases is limited and further evaluation is needed.

The report recommended TCM interventions to the COVID-19 control system of WHO members. China's way of combining TCM with modern medicine is also recommended.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
So far since the Champlain Tower collapse in July 2021, two other condominium buildings have been inspected, failed, and evacuated (Crestview Towers and Bayview 60) in Miami, Florida. In the meantime, the Florida legislature failed to take definitive action to require any kind of inspection of aging large structures.

Whether you agree or disagree that legislative action is the best possible way to fix this problem is not important since the state couldnt come to any kind of agreement on how to require these inspections. Even if its a good solution, it will be fall before the next iteration of the bill can go before a committee and the process starts all over again. Please refer back to Schoolhouse Rock, Im Just a Bill

At least Miami-Dade County has taken action to require that buildings get recertified (40 years after construction and every 10 years after that), which is how these other two buildings were identified and evacuated. While this may not be the best possible solution either at least somethings getting done. The county gets a little money and buildings get inspected.

This is an incomplete system and requires another partner in it, the insurance companies.

Given the current state of property insurance in Florida, it would seem to be a matter of survival for those insurers that are insuring any large structure in Florida, especially since many of them were first built 40 or more years ago.

Since insurance is built on the idea of analyzing and assessing risk, insurance companies should never take for granted that the risk that they took on is the risk that they are currently writing.

Early in my insurance days, as an underwriter for different states around the country, underwriting the property insurance wasnt the biggest deal. It was generally a relatively low premium as a part of the whole and in most states at the time, the risks werent that significant, even when the limits were.

However, none of the buildings that I was underwriting were large condominium structures that includes dozens of living units, spread over five or more stories, standing on the edge of an ocean.

Insurers that are involved in writing insurance on large buildings such as these must begin to ask more questions, seek more documentation, write smarter policies, and price more aggressively. Most commercial insurers are going to ask some of the right questions. They want to know what construction materials were used in the building (frame, masonry, non-combustible, etc.). They will also ask when the building was built. Depending on the age of the building, they may ask when the last time the roof, the HVAC, electrical, or plumbing were replaced or updated. Theyll also ask questions about the occupancy of the building, how often there are short-term rentals and how much of the building is used for short-term rentals.

Even the homeowners insurers might ask some of those questions, maybe. Some of the insureds might be using the latest and greatest app-based insurance product, which promises to write an insurance policy for them within 12.5 seconds without asking a lot of questions. We know that they are going to rely on the public data that are available to them, whether or not thats complete or accurate is another story. They also rely on their marketing that they are charging significantly less than other companies will so theres that, too. We will find out how that worked out for them in their next round of funding.

All in all, there is a human toll on these problems. If the buildings arent properly inspected and cared for, the people who suffer the most are the people who live in them. At best, nothing happens and they live their lives enjoying the Florida condo life (whatever that means). Lately, it means that they get a phone call at work telling them that they have 24 hours to gather up as much as they can because their building is dangerous, but dont worry, well give you $150 for up to three nights in a hotel in Miami (hint: you probably dont want to stay in any hotel in Miami that you can stay in for $150 for three nights). And we know what the worst-case scenario looks like. This is why I look at this as a problem where insurance companies can help make these risks better. Heres the plan.

Ask better questions.

Theres only so much information that you can glean from the standard property questions. Dont get me wrong. We need to know how big the building is when it was built, and its construction class. We need to know whats going on in the building. Its good to know if there are sprinklers or fire alarms in place. Finding out when the sprinkler system was last purged or tested isnt a bad question, either. But when were dealing with multimillion-dollar buildings housing dozens (if not hundreds) of families, you need to get things right.

It isnt enough to know what it was built from. You need to be asking questions about maintenance records. Have there been any signs of settling or cracking? Have there been any emergency maintenance issues that caused any part of the building to be shut down, closed off, or evacuated? Is there a parking structure under the building, or under the pool? Who were the developer and general contractor when it was built?

There are some questions that you should ask the internet as well. I remember back when I first became an underwriter that we were told not to rely on the internet for underwriting decisions. That just isnt the case anymore. There is more reliable information available online than ever before. Even if the information isnt fully reliable, looking at it and asking the insured about it will help to guide decisions and build a better underwriting profile of the individual building.

The internet will tell you when the last permit was pulled for the building and what it was for. There are more permits than just replacing or repairing a roof. The internet will tell you what former residents have to say about the association or management company that runs the place. Again, maybe its fully reliable. Maybe it isnt. But when you can show the insured that they have 75 reviews online that all say that there are maintenance issues in the building, they at least have to answer as to whether or not thats true and why.

Get better inspections.

Commercial buildings require different inspections than single-family dwellings do. Its more than just a four-point inspection. We arent just looking to make sure that the roof doesnt leak, how old the HVAC is, or when the last time the plumbing or electrical were upgraded. It needs to be about what condition the whole building is in. That might mean going the extra step to have an engineer inspect the building.

In 1866, the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company opened its doors to inspect and insure steam boilers. Those inspections have served as both the basis of ensuring the insurability of the steam boilers (these days, it includes other equipment in an equipment breakdown policy) and getting the required inspections of those machines. The inspection for the insurance company served to meet a local requirement.

The insurance company can coordinate the inspector, who performs an inspection that would meet the requirements of any state or local law requiring a certification of the structural integrity of the building. If the building doesnt pass, it doesnt get insurance and it doesnt get its certification by the city, county, or state.

Do more frequent inspections.

Miami-Dade County has an ordinance that requires the first certification of a building after its been standing for 40 years. Perhaps its worth considering shortening that time frame. Buildings can change in 20 years, especially if the building has been neglected at all, including any deferred maintenance.

Once that initial inspection is done, dont wait 10 years. This should be done in five-year increments. More frequent inspections means that there are closer eyes on potential problem areas. Some part of buildings, like support pillars under a pool, or in a parking garage can be watched closely so that rather than having an emergency in 10 years, there is something that needs to be watched closely.

If an item is identified at an inspection as a watch item, that gives the association time to find out whats really happening, what it will take to fix the problem, and how much that will cost. Before an emergency happens, you have the information that you need to follow up at the next inspection.

Also, make those inspections public information so that when the insured decides to change insurance companies, the new company will have access to the past inspections so that they can follow up on the deferred maintenance or trouble spots that were reported in the last inspection.

Charge more money.

No one wants to hear it, but can we just be honest with each other for a minute? Sometimes underwriters and agents have conversations about the cost of insurance and the goal is to get the insured to pay less for more coverage. I get it. No one likes to pay more. But when you consider that we are dealing with large buildings that appear to have a higher risk of something going wrong with them, we have to consider the possibility that were just not charging enough.

Theres a bit more to the conversation than just charge more. I get that and not every risk needs to be charged as much more than other risks. I understand that Florida has some of the highest insurance rates in the country, but thats because of the unique insurance needs here. We need to find that place of balance where the correct premium is charged for the risk assumed.

Im not 100% for everyone paying more for their insurance, but with one building collapsed and two others evacuated because they failed a safety inspection, thats a pattern. Until there is a significant effort to get buildings inspected and certified as still safe after all these years, all uninspected buildings need to pay a higher premium.

That does three things. It motivates building owners to get their buildings inspected (and pass those inspections) quicker. Knowing that their insurance company is charging them a 35% higher premium because their building is 45 years old and doesnt have a safety certification on file might just make them request the certification.

If a building owner knows that their deferred maintenance might cost them an extra 40-50% in insurance premiums, that might motivate them to handle their maintenance rather than defer it. If condo unit owners or tenants are required to pay similarly high insurance rates for the same reason, they are going to apply pressure to the building owners to get the inspections and repairs done.

Expand coverage.

The other side of the coin when we raise rates is that we need to give insureds something for those higher rates. So rather than some piece of junk, like the little paper calendars with magnets, how about something meaningful, especially for those risks that end up paying more because the whole market is artificially deflated.

One area of coverage that could stand to be broadened is in Loss of Use. Loss of Use coverage applies to homeowners type policies. We would be looking specifically at the ISO HO-6 (or equivalent). Heres how we start to determine if there is coverage for the Loss of Use.

If a loss by a Peril Insured Against under this policy to covered property or the building containing the property makes the residence premises not fit to live in, 

So the key is to determine if there has been any damage by a peril insured against. In the case of a building being deemed unsafe by a certification inspector, there may not have been any damage yet. If there was damage, then the insured would need to show that the damage occurred because of one of the Perils Insured Against, which is a list of 16 named perils. Spoiler: deemed unsafe by inspection is not on the list.

If you like to read policies, you might be familiar with a paragraph labeled, Civil Authority Prohibits Use. That might be a good place to look, but dont get your hopes up. Heres the sentence.

If a civil authority prohibits you from use of the residence premises as a result of direct damage to neighboring premises by a Peril Insured Against, we cover the loss as provided in 1. Additional Living Expense and 2. Fair Rental Value above for no more than two weeks.

So, yes. There is coverage if a civil authority requires the residents to move out, but that coverage is limited to times when a neighboring building is damaged by a Peril Insured Against, which also doesnt cover the idea that the city forced people out because their building was unsafe.

For the additional premium that we already discussed, lets expand the Civil Authority Prohibits Use coverage to something like this.

If a civil authority prohibits you from use of the residence premises as a result of direct damage to neighboring premises by a Peril Insured Against, or as a result of the buildings failure of any certification inspection, whether mandated by the civil authority or by any insurance company insuring the building, we cover the loss as provided in 1. Additional Living Expense and 2. Fair Rental Value above for no more than four weeks.

This new wording (or similar wording) would give the residents help for an unforeseen event (they cant live at home because their building isnt safe) for a period of time thats long enough to find out how long they wont be able to live in their homes and make informed decisions about what they want to do next. Four weeks wont be enough to cover the time needed to repair the building, but it does give them more coverage then they currently have, which is none.

Coordinate coverage layers.

Its possible that some companies wont want to cover the whole building. Who wants to insure a $100 million structure that might collapse because there hasnt been proper inspections or maintenance in the last 20 years? Thats right. No one does. Thats not really accurate, because there are some carriers that will write them, especially when they take my advice and get hard on their underwriting and pricing. So if there are primary and excess property policies in place, they should all share in at least a portion of the available information, which should primarily include recent imagery and inspection data.

History tells us that back in the day, fire departments were departments and divisions within the fire insurers. Their jobs were to protect the buildings that the insurer was covering. It was a help to the customer and to the company. Its time to consider more ways that companies can help to mitigate risk, rather than simply financing risk.
New Hampshire released an expanded list Tuesday of police officers who it determined may have credibility concerns due to a range of infractions from excessive force to lying.

The list of 174 officers, released following legislation passed last year, aims to improve transparency by tracking officers whose credibility may be called into question during a trial because of something in their personnel records. There are officers on the list who worked for more than 90 different law enforcement agencies in New Hampshire, including the state police. It was unclear how many are still working for their department or anywhere in the state.

Prosecutors are required to turn the information over to defendants before trial, but public access has been limited to heavily redacted versions of the list.

The disclosure of this information is vital, aid Gilles Bissonnette, the state legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, which was one of several groups including several media outlets that sued in 2018 for access to what is known as the Laurie List.

We give police officers a badge and a gun and we need to be able to trust them with it, he said. When it comes to ensuring police in New Hampshire live up to the high expectations we have for them, the answer is more transparency, not less.

Salem Police Det. Michael Geha, who is president of the New Hampshire Police Association, said his group was closely monitoring the process.

We hope it will strike a balance between the need for transparency with these types of incidents against individuals rights of officers who stand accused of wrong doing, he said. We have to this right.

Beyond the names of the officers and who they worked for, there is still plenty of information withheld from the public. The list does not include details of why the officer is on the list other than to list vague descriptions like truthfulness, falsifying records, dereliction of duty and criminal conduct. There were 12 on there for excessive force.

There are also more than 70 additional officers who have filed lawsuits challenging being added to the list.

There is also a related push by the American Civil Liberties Union to gain access to misconduct records of officers, some of whom are on the list. A hearing involving the records of a former state trooper is happening Thursday morning in Merrimack Superior Court.

The first batch of 80 names from the list was made public in December, along with brief descriptions of the officers alleged wrongdoing. More names are expect to be release in the weeks ahead.

The new laws provisions match a recommendation by the Commission on Law Enforcement Accountability, Community and Transparency that was established in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Its also part of a broader push across the country among civil liberty groups and reform-minded district attorneys to make the system more transparent by publishing these lists.

The New Hampshire lists official title is the exculpatory evidence schedule. It is often called the Laurie List after Carl Laurie, whose murder conviction was overturned in 1995 after a court determined that defense attorneys were not told about poor behavior by a detective involved in his confession.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics New Hampshire
Many more Russian-flagged vessels than usual switched their flags to other countries in March, possibly to conceal their ties to Moscow and avoid being caught up in sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine, according to maritime consultancy Windward Ltd.

A total of 18 ships, including 11 cargo vessels from the same fleet, changed to non-Russian flags last month, Tel Aviv-based Windward said. Thats more than three times the monthly average for Russian vessels. Its also the first time the figure has hit double-digits, based on data going back to January 2020.

Some of these instances may point to bad actors intentionally disguising their identity to conduct business that would not be allowed under the new sanctions, Windward said in a report shared with Bloomberg News.

The flag switches come as Russian vessels from oil tankers to multimillion-dollar yachts owned by oligarchs have gone dark, turning off identification and location transmitting systems that should always be on while at sea. The practice helps avoid detection and can pose risks to maritime safety.

The U.S., UK and other allies have ramped up sanctions against Russia because of its invasion of Ukraine that began in late February. U.S. President Joe Biden issued an executive order on March 8 banning imports of Russian oil and gas, while the UK said it will phase out oil imports by the end of the year. Both countries, along with Canada, have also barred Russian ships from their ports.

Foreign companies have different motivations for moving from the Russian flag, they want their vessels to be able to operate everywhere without restrictions and, in some cases for moral reasons, said Windward product manager Gur Sender.

Of the 18 vessels, three are tankers  two of which transport oil, according to Windward. Five that changed flags in March are connected directly to Russian owners. Eleven cargo ships are from the same fleet owned by a United Arab Emirates company, and they all switched flags to the Marshall Islands. Three vessels changed to Saint Kitts and Nevis flags.

Switching flags isnt necessarily unusual  it sometimes happens due to a change in ownership or area of operation, Sender said. The monthly average for Singapore vessels in 2021 was 17 flag changes, while Japan averages five per month this year. Those numbers remain consistent, however. Changes in Russias 3,300-strong fleet suddenly jumped, having never exceeded more than nine in any month going back to January 2020, Windward data show.

What makes flag changes interesting is when they are taking place in correlation with trade restrictions against a specific country, especially when one of the management or ownership companies is in fact registered in that same restricted country, Sender said.

In an advisory last May on deceptive shipping practices, the U.S. Treasury warned that bad actors may falsify the flag of their vessels to mask illicit trade. They may also repeatedly register with new flag states (flag hopping) to avoid detection.

The practice is likely to become more common if the war in Ukraine continues, said Ian Ralby, chief executive of I.R. Consilium, a maritime law and security consultancy. Ships flying the flags of the Marshall Islands and the Caribbean nation St. Kitts and Nevis are less likely to draw attention and scrutiny.

Its all a clear attempt by Russian ship owners and operators to try to obscure the identities of the vessels, he said. They want to avoid detection.

Top photograph: Oil tanker MS Sikinov, operated by Sikinos II Shipping Corp, refuels at a fuel storage facility at the Big Port of Saint-Petersburg in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on Monday, Oct. 17, 2016. Photo credit: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg.

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.

Topics Russia
A Dominica-flagged cargo ship sank on Tuesday in the besieged southern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol after being targeted by Russian missile strikes, the vessels flag registry said.

The Azburg was believed to have been without cargo and at berth in Mariupol when it was initially hit by two missiles on April 3, the Dominica Maritime Administration said.

Global Insurance Losses From Russia-Ukraine War Could Range From $16B to $35B

On April 4, around 2240 LT (local time) the vessel was heavily fired upon by Russian armed forces after intentionally shelling the vessel twice a day earlier, the registry said in a statement.

Specific characteristics of firing on the vessel remain unknown, crew reported shelling, bombing and repeated hits by missiles, causing a fire in the engine room.

One of the 12 crew members required medical treatment while the remaining crew were evacuated onto nearby vessels, the Dominica registry said.

Russian officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Moscow has said that it is not targeting civilians in what it calls a special operation to demilitarize Ukraine.

Ukraine said this week that it was bracing for about 60,000 Russian reservists to be called in to reinforce Moscows offensive in the east, where Russias main targets have included Mariupol and Kharkiv, the countrys second-largest city.

Eric Dawicki, deputy administrator of maritime affairs with the registry, said the vessel sank early on Tuesday.

He said the registry assumed the sinking would create some environmental impediments.

It certainly will create navigational impediments at the dock and we are certainly concerned, he told Reuters.

The indiscriminate shelling of a merchant vessel with a civilian crew with no place to seek refuge is the lowest of lows, Dawicki added.

Dawicki said the information was received by the vessels operator which was in email contact with the crew.

A senior official with Ukraines Maritime Administration said earlier on Tuesday that the ship had been hit by a Russian navy missile, according to initial information.

Reuters was unable to independently verify the details of the sinking.

The vessel arrived in Mariupol on Feb. 23 and was unable to leave Ukrainian waters because of the closure of the port, according to British security company Ambrey Intelligence and the registry.

Russias military took control of waterways around Ukraine when it invaded on Feb. 24.

Two seafarers have been killed and five other merchant vessels hit by projectiles  which sank one of them  off Ukraines coast since the start of the conflict, shipping officials say.

UN shipping agency the International Maritime Organization (IMO) said there were 86 merchant ships still stuck in Ukrainian ports and waters as of March 30, with around 1,000 seafarers unable to sail.

Maritime officials have said supplies are running low onboard the ships, which also face multiple perils including missiles and floating mines.

As well as the dangers arising from bombardment, many of the ships concerned now lack food, fuel, fresh water, and other vital supplies, the IMO said.

The situation of the seafarers from many countries is becoming increasingly untenable as a result, presenting grave risks to their health and wellbeing.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Tuesday Ukraines efforts to push back Russian troops from Mariupol were facing difficulties and the military situation was very difficult.

(Reporting by Jonathan Saul; editing by Nick Macfie and Rosalba OBrien)

Topics Trucking Ukraine
With institutional investors providing the bulk of the capital, RenaissanceRe Holdings has announced the creation of a new joint venture dedicated to casualty and specialty risks.

Launched with $475 million of capital, the ventureFontana Holdings L.P.targets institutional investors, who contributed $325 million. RenRe provided the remaining capital.

In conjunction with the launch, Fontana has assumed a whole account quota share of RenaissanceRes global casualty and specialty book of business, including the credit portfolio, with the opportunity to raise additional capital and increase in scale over time, RenRe said in a media statement.

Fontana is regulated by the Bermuda Monetary Authority and is expected to be consolidated into RenaissanceRes financial statements.

Kevin J. ODonnell, president and chief executive officer of RenaissanceRe, said, Fontana builds on our long legacy of innovation in matching desirable risk with owned and partner capital. Without identifying the investors, ODonnell described them as highly respected institutional investors who will benefit from RenRes deep expertise in underwriting casualty and specialty risks.

We also believe that Fontana will enhance shareholder value by providing a steady source of fee income while enhancing our gross-to-net strategy, he continued.

Christopher S. Parry, senior vice president and global head of RenRes ventures business, Capital Partners, said that Fontana represents the next step in the evolution of our Capital Partners strategy.

As our first joint venture focused on casualty and specialty risk, Fontana extends the suite of insurance-linked securities and reinsurance strategies that we offer our third-party capital partners.

Source: RenaissanceRe

This article first was published in Insurance Journals sister publication, Carrier Management.

Topics Excess Surplus New Markets Casualty
Former McDonalds workers who alleged rampant sexual harassment at their Michigan restaurant have reached a $1.5 million settlement agreement with the restaurants former owner.

The American Civil Liberties Unions Womens Rights Project, which helped represent the employees, announced the settlement deal Monday. It must still be approved by a federal judge.

Former McDonalds worker Jenna Ries sued the Michigan-based franchisee, which operated under the names MLMLM Corp. and Maaks Inc., and Chicago-based McDonalds Corp. in 2019.

Ries, who worked at a Mason, Michigan, McDonalds for three years, alleged that a general manager ignored her male co-workers repeated harassment of her and other female workers, including groping, physical assault and verbal epithets.

Ries said she often cried on her way to work and felt physically ill. Eventually she transferred to another location, but the co-worker who allegedly harassed her remained at the original location.

Ries said she sued so that other women wouldnt have to go through what she endured.

No one should have to put up with sexual harassment to get a paycheck, Ries said in a statement.

Last year, a federal judge granted class-action status to the lawsuit, based on evidence showing that the same male worker consistently and severely harassed approximately 100 women and teen girls who worked at the store. If the settlement is approved, workers will be eligible to claim an average award of $10,000 depending on the extent of the harassment they endured.

Ries initially sought at least $5 million in damages for herself and other female employees. But McDonalds Corp. successfully argued that it didnt employ the women directly. Around 95% of McDonalds 14,000 U.S. stores are owned and operated by franchisees.

Attorneys for Ries said they had hoped McDonalds would accept more responsibility.

It is unconscionable that McDonalds continues to say `not it when it comes to sexual harassment of workers at its franchise locations, said Darcie Brault, an attorney for Ries and other plaintiffs.

Email and phone messages seeking comment were left with attorneys for the franchisee, who no longer owns the Mason, Michigan, restaurant.

McDonalds said it had no comment on the proposed settlement.

The lawsuit came amid a larger reckoning for McDonalds over sexual harassment in its stores and corporate offices.

Since 2016, at least 100 formal complaints and lawsuits have been filed alleging workplace harassment in McDonalds restaurants, the ACLU said. In 2019, the company also fired its former CEO Steve Easterbrook for violating a policy forbidding relationships between supervisors and their subordinates.

Last April, the company announced that it would mandate worker training and reporting procedures to combat harassment, discrimination and violence in its restaurants worldwide starting this year.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Michigan
Vanyo Named General Counsel of Marsh

Marsh McLennan announced the appointment of Mikhail Misha Vanyo as general counsel of Marsh. Based in New York, Vanyo will lead all legal and compliance strategy for Marsh globally.

He succeeds Katherine Brennan, who was named senior vice president and general counsel of Marsh McLennan earlier this month. Vanyo will report to Brennan and to Martin South, president and CEO of Marsh.

Vanyo joined Marsh McLennan as the firms chief competition counsel in 2017, later taking on the role of Marshs chief counsel for Global Placement and Specialty. Prior to joining Marsh McLennan, he served as federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice, focusing on antitrust, fraud, and other white collar crime, and as an associate at the global law firms Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and OMelveny & Myers.

Lockton Names Faylo as U.S. Cyber & Technology Leader

Insurance broker Lockton has named Michelle Faylo as its U.S. Cyber & Technology leader.

A 20-year veteran of the insurance industry, Faylo joins Lockton from AIG, where she most recently was North America head of Cyber & Professional Liability. In this role, she managed a team of more than 60 specialists focused. Before joining AIG in 2006, she worked as a client advocate at Willis.

Hersch Named Leader of Deloittes U.S. Insurance Sector

Karl Hersch has been named the leader of advisory firm Deloittes U.S. insurance sector within the organizations financial services industry practice.

In this role, Hersch will oversee more than 3,200 practitioners providing services to organizations across the insurance industry. Hersch, a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP, will be responsible for leading the overall insurance sector strategy, bringing practice areas together to serve Deloittes portfolio of insurance clients.

Hersch has 30 years of experience and has held numerous leadership roles, serving as the U.S. insurance consulting practice leader since 2019. Hersch has served many of the Deloittes largest financial services clients, and he was the insurance finance transformation practice leader as well as the financial services industry enterprise performance practice leader. He has served insurance clients in the U.S. and globally.

Hersch will succeed Gary Shaw, who will continue to focus on the organizations largest accounts. During his tenure, Shaw oversaw the exponential growth of the U.S. insurance practice, while also serving as the lead client service partner for a major global insurance company.

Deloittes insurance group brings together specialists from actuarial, risk, strategy, operations, technology, tax and audit.

Topics Cyber Lockton AIG
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday eliminated one of the hurdles facing individuals looking to sue for being falsely accused of crimes.

In Thompson v. Clark, a majority (6-3) of the high court not only acknowledged a claim for malicious prosecution under the Fourth Amendment when an individual is held by law enforcement without probable cause but also ruled that claimants must show only that the underlying criminal charges brought against them were terminated in their favor. They need not show that the underlying prosecution ended with an affirmative indication of innocence.

The ruling reverses a U. S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit opinion and resolves a split among federal appeals courts over how to apply the favorable termination requirement to a Fourth Amendment claim for malicious prosecution.

The opinion includes a reminder that police officers are still protected by the requirement that a plaintiff show the absence of probable cause and by qualified immunity.

The case before the court involved Larry Thompson, who was living with his fiancee (now wife) and their newborn baby in an apartment in Brooklyn, New York. Thompsons sister-in-law, who apparently suffered from a mental illness, called 911 to report that Thompson was sexually abusing the baby. When Emergency Medical Technicians arrived, Thompson denied that anyone had called 911.

When the EMTs returned with four police officers, Thompson told them that they could not enter without a warrant. The police nonetheless entered and handcuffed Thompson. EMTs took the baby to the hospital where medical professionals examined her and found no signs of abuse. Meanwhile, Thompson was arrested and charged with obstructing governmental administration and resisting arrest. He was detained for two days before being released.

The charges against Thompson were dismissed before trial without any explanation by the prosecutor or judge.

Thompson sued the police officers under an 1871 federal civil rights law known as Section 1983 that created a federal tort liability for individuals to sue state and local officers for deprivations of constitutional rights. Thompson claimed that the officers had violated the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable seizures.

Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, noted that the law in 1871 did not require more than dismissal of charges to overcome the requirement of a favorable termination.

The parties to this case, as well as the lower courts, disagree about what a favorable termination entails. That is, is it sufficient to show that Thompsons prosecution ended without a conviction or must he also show that his prosecution ended with some affirmative indication of innocence, such as an acquittal or a dismissal accompanied by a statement from the judge that the evidence was insufficient?

In this case, as in others, Thompson could not put forth any substantial evidence that would explain why the prosecutor had moved to dismiss the charges or why the trial court had dismissed the charges. The prosecutor and trial court did not explain their decisions.

Since there was no evidence, the district court ruled that Thompsons criminal case had not ended in a way that affirmatively indicated his innocence and granted judgment to the defendant officers on that Fourth Amendment claim. The U. S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed the dismissal of Thompsons Fourth Amendment claim.

In explaining the courts agreement that the 1871 tort law did not require a plaintiff to show an affirmative indication of innocence, Kavanaugh wrote:

The question of whether a criminal defendant was wrongly charged does not logically depend on whether the prosecutor or court explained why the prosecution was dismissed. And the individuals ability to seek redress for a wrongful prosecution cannot reasonably turn on the fortuity of whether the prosecutor or court happened to explain why the charges were dismissed.

In addition, Kavanaugh noted, requiring a plaintiff to show that his prosecution ended with an affirmative indication of innocence is not necessary to protect officers from unwarranted civil suits since, among other things, officers are still protected by qualified immunity and the plaintiff must show a absence of probable cause.

Thompsons lawyer, Amir Ali of the MacArthur Justice Center, told the Associated Press that the court had removed an unjust barrier and his client will now get the opportunity to prove his malicious prosecution claim inn court.

In a dissent, Associate Justice Samuel Alito argued that a malicious prosecution is not the same as an unreasonable search as cited in the Fourth Amendment. A comparison of the elements of the malicious prosecution tort with the elements of a Fourth Amendment unreasonable seizure claim shows that there is no overlap, he wrote. He was joined in dissent by Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas.

Topics Lawsuits
It appears there were more tornadoes across the U.S. this year in the month of March than ever before  possibly by a large margin.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center, there were more than 250 tornadoes reported in March throughout the U.S. but mostly in the states of Mississippi, Texas, Iowa, Alabama, and Florida. Louisiana also saw strong tornadoes.

Some work needs to be done to confirm the reported twisters and exclude duplicate reports, but experts indicate the record of 192 tornadoes in March 2017 will likely be broken. There were 191 tornadoes in March in 2021, though that number remains preliminary. Record-keeping of tornadoes began in 1950.

Severe convective storms  which include tornadoes, straight-line winds, lightning, and hailcan be a significant driver of losses for insurers. According to catastrophe modeler RMS, the combined average annual insured loss is over $18 billion in the U.S. and Canada.

Severe convective storms caused $26.7 billion in losses in 2021, according to Aon. There were 1,376 tornadoes in the U.S. in 2021 compared with 1,075 in 2020, according to preliminary data from NOAA.

Though tornadoes can occur at any time of year, the spring typically spawns the most twisters because conditions in the atmosphere are ripe. Like hurricanes, warm sea water help tornadoes and convective storms form, even far from the ocean. AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter said higher-than-normal water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico contributed to the tornado count in March.

Related:

Topics Catastrophe Natural Disasters USA Windstorm
A data breach at the Texas Department of Insurance (TDI) early this year affected approximately 1,800,000 Texans, according to the Data Security Breach Reports from the Office of the Attorney General.

TDI announced in March that the department had become aware on January 4 of a security issue with a TDI web service application that manages workers compensation information. TDI said it immediately took the application offline, quickly fixed the issue, and started an investigation to determine the nature and scope of the event.

The data breach exposed peoples name, address, social security number information and medical information, the Data Security Breach Reports page said.

TDI said worked with a forensics company to search the web for evidence of misuse of the information and no evidence had been found.

TDI said it was working with a forensic company to investigate the nature and scope of the event, reviewing and enhancing policies, procedures, and security efforts, offering 12 months of credit monitoring and identity protection services at no cost to those who may have been affected. These services include fraud consultation and identity theft restoration.

Topics Cyber Texas Data Driven
South Carolina authorities have charged 17 people in whats being called a major insurance fraud ring that staged vehicle collisions and filed false claims over a one-year period.

The alleged fraud took place from August 2020 through October 2021 and netted a total payout from insurers of $93,700, the South Carolina Department of Insurance reported Wednesday.

The alleged ringleader is Tyburious Marquis Heyward, who orchestrated some of the claims while he was in prison in the state until his release in April 2021, the DOI said. Heyward is the only member of the fraud ring that has yet to be apprehended.

The other 17 defendants have been charged with presenting false claims, sometimes using fake or altered medical documents and wage-loss records, authorities said.

The case will be prosecuted by Special Assistant Attorney General Joshua Underwood, director of the Insurance Fraud Division at the DOI.

Topics Auto Fraud
For all Californias nation-leading attempts to regulate firearms, the state has not found a way to deter those happy to skirt the laws with stolen or homemade and increasingly prevalent ghost guns.

In just two recent examples, police say the first weapon recovered after gunmen killed six people and wounded 12 in downtown Sacramento early Sunday had been stolen. The homemade assault weapon a father used a month ago and a few miles away to kill his three daughters, their chaperone and then himself was unregistered.

People argue that weve got the toughest gun laws in the nation. But theyre clearly not tough enough, Democratic state Sen. Robert Hertzberg said Monday.

The latest mass shooting in a nightclub area blocks from the state Capitol renewed calls for tougher firearms laws from President Joe Biden. Biden called for Congress to take many of the steps nationwide that California already has in place  imposing background checks, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and outlawing ghost guns.

The most populous state will consider an innovative new approach Tuesday when Hertzberg, at the urging of Gov. Gavin Newsom, expects to take the first step to advance a bill allowing private citizens to sue anyone who distributes illegal assault weapons, parts that can be used to build weapons, guns without serial numbers, or .50 caliber rifles.

The penalty: at least $10,000 in civil damages for each weapon, plus attorneys fees.

But the bill would not bar anyone from possessing or using the weapons, though theyre illegal under other laws. And it would not include stolen weapons unless they are otherwise made illegal, for instance by filing off the serial number.

Its going to have hopefully a chilling effect on folks with ghost guns or assault weapons, Hertzberg said. Youve got to have millions of eyeballs looking for these guns. If someone flashes one, talks about it, all of a sudden theres an incentive among the public in a way that theres never been before to try to pull them off the street.

Yet, Hertzbergs bill is patterned after a similar Texas law allowing citizens to go after those who provide or assist in providing abortions. And even if it becomes law, Hertzbergs bill will automatically be invalidated if the Texas law is eventually ruled unconstitutional.

This is tit for tat political gamesmanship, which is the worst reason to be passing some kind of a bill, said Chuck Michel, president of the California Rifle and Pistol Association and an attorney who wrote a book about Californias complicated gun laws. Youre going to deputize a bunch of amateurs  non-lawyers, non-cops  to judge a neighbors actions and then give them the right to drag them into court over it.

Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which generally favors firearms restrictions, hasnt taken a position on the bill.

The centers state policy director, attorney Ari Freilich, said it would essentially bring more enforcement oversight to some specific criminal laws in California.

Its not something thats really been tried before, Freilich said.

He wouldnt predict if it would be effective, but said the proposal has some potential challenges. Among them is encouraging civil actions to punish crimes, and establishing a bounty to be collected by those who havent been directly harmed.

His organization is backing other bills, including one that would make it easier for people to sue gun companies for liability in shootings that cause injuries or death. Two other bills also target firearm parts and guns without serial numbers, and those made with 3D printers.

Legislative analysts also raised concerns, including that Californias bill might be seen as legitimizing Texas approach.

Much like the Texas law, the analysts said Hertzbergs legislation is written so broadly that it might ensnare, for instance, a taxi driver that takes a person to a gun shop, though Hertzberg said that is not the intent.

Parts use to make weapons are not themselves illegal, but a California law taking effect July 1 will require that they be sold only through licensed firearms dealers.

Sen. Tom Umberg, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a Democrat like Hertzberg and Newsom, said he expects Hertzbergs bill to clear his committee in order to continue the conversation about the absurdity of the Texas law.

Umberg said he supports Hertzbergs goal, though he recognizes that the enforcement mechanism is susceptible to challenge.

The bill would then have to clear two other committees before getting a full Senate vote. It would also have to pass the Assembly before going to Newsom.

Hertzberg said he thinks his bill could also help root out dangerous domestic abusers like David Mora. Investigators said Mora used a homemade semiautomatic rifle-style weapon with an illegal 30-round ammunition magazine to kill his daughters at a Sacramento church Feb. 28 despite a restraining order barring him from possessing weapons.

I think this will have bigger teeth, sharper teeth than a court order, Hertzberg said. This goes to somebodys bank account. You win this case, you seize their bank account. Their world changes.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits California
iowa state daily logo Interested candidates for summer jobs should contact Amber Mohmand at amber.mohmand@iowastatedaily.com for more details. Those interested in a

Local media across the country has been facing an enormous hurdle: money.

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, over 100 local newsrooms have shut down. Some newsrooms have merged with larger ones, but this merger means that the specialized coverage of their communities is nearly completely gone. Over 65 million Americans live in counties that have one local newspaper  or zero.

Students at Iowa State and residents of Ames are lucky enough to not reside in one of those counties. Both the Ames Tribune and the Iowa State Daily provide coverage for our communities.

The Daily has a unique opportunity in the fact that we are a student-run newspaper. We are students, which means that we provide perspectives that others cannot. We know the ins and outs of Iowa State and we know what needs to be covered. In addition, we have the ability to connect with sources within the university because we are also members of the university community.

But, we are facing the same struggle that every other newsroom has been, and is currently facing.

The pandemic put a strain on our budget, as it has put a strain on everyones finances. Our students have been working double-time to produce the content you see in your inbox every day while trying to keep up on schoolwork.

The students who put out this content do it for very little in return. If they get paid at all, its a small amount. They dont receive any glory. Being a student journalist is a thankless job.

We do it because we care.

We want to inform you about what is going on in our community. Over our 130 years of serving Iowa States campus, weve done all we can to be stewards for this community and to be watchdogs for the entire campus.

Whether you read our stories everyday or not, we think we provide an important resource to you and we need your support.

On March 23, senators of the Iowa State Student Government Senate introduced a bill to terminate the Iowa State Dailys contract for the purpose of renegotiating.

Our contract accounts for student enrollment fluctuations and allows for mutually agreed upon changes. If the Student Government is receiving less money from students, then they have less money to give out. We have met the metrics and have been in good faith discussions in regard to potential amendments. We have demonstrated nothing but openness and willingness to discuss possible changes.

Staff at the Iowa State Daily were told that some senators felt we were uncooperative in terms of discussing our contract. This is untrue, as Daily leadership met with Student Government in September regarding this topic, open to discussions.

In February, the Dailys editor-in-chief gave a presentation to the Senate that explained how the money was allocated throughout the Iowa State Daily. The Senate has a representative on ISDs board that can view financials and be included in discussions regarding the organization as a whole.

Additionally, a point was made that there would be an appreciation for greater oversight over the Daily. However, it is unclear whether it was about the content or financial oversight. Over the last eight years, the Daily and Student Government have developed a collaborative relationship, operating well together. The Daily has been transparent with how the funds provided by the Student Government are utilized. Students tasked with managing the relationships have been excellent partners but are often sidelined due to Senators, who are on a crusade to defund the Daily.

If it was in reference to the Senate having a say in our content, this would be a slippery slope and we would lose all credibility as a journalistic organization.

There is a rock bottom that our organization can hit a point at which we can no longer function. If that happens, students, faculty and staff will lose a resource that delivers curated and pertinent information right to them. Since 1890, we have been the record-keepers of Iowa State. Without us, there will not be an outlet for our campus community to have their voices heard and objective accountability will be lost.

We will continue to work with Student Government, as we have always indicated we would be willing to do, regardless of whether or not the Senate votes to advance this bill or not. The only thing this bill does is create unnecessary tension between the Iowa State Daily and Student Government.

Student Government and the Daily are two of the largest and most influential student-run voices on campus and we want nothing more than to work together to make our campus the best it can be.

If you would like to support the Daily, please send an email to your senator encouraging them to vote against this bill.
The Russian rouble has wiped out the steep losses it incurred in the weeks after President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine, but the cost of insuring Russias government debt surged to signal a record 99% chance of default within the year.

The currency advanced past 81.16 per dollar, the level it closed at on February 23  the day before President Putin launched his attack. Its a recovery that comes at an ironic moment, as sweeping sanctions cripple Russias economy and send the government teetering on the edge of default.

The EU and the US are attempting to coordinate a new raft of financial sanctions against Russia, while the Russian finance ministry said its attempt to service debt in dollars had been blocked, potentially moving the country closer to its first external default in about a century.

The rouble went into a nosedive immediately after the invasion on February 24 amid international sanctions that effectively ended its time as a freely traded currency. But tough capital controls  including a ban on foreigners selling Russian assets as well as mandated hard currency sales by exporters  have helped the rouble regain ground.

President Putin has also demanded that overseas buyers of Russian natural gas switch to making payments in the local currency. For now, though, Russia may be continuing to benefit from cash inflows as it sells natural gas and oil at high prices.

At current prices, Europe is sending around $450m (411m) per day to Russia for crude oil and refined products, around $400m per day for gas, and roughly $25m for coal, according to thinktank Bruegel.

Russia slipped closer to a technical default after foreign banks declined to process about $650m of dollar payments on its bonds, forcing it to offer rubles instead.

While the finance ministry said that it considers it fulfilled its obligations in full, neither of the securities involved allowed payment in roubles, according to bond documents. Both notes have a 30-day grace period, data compiled by Bloomberg show. The cost of insuring Russias government debt now signals a record 99% chance of default within a year.

Car sales

There was more evidence of the fallout on the Russian economy. New car sales in Russia fell 63% year-on-year in March, contracting for a ninth straight month, as the industry encountered an acute shortage and soaring prices.

The Association of European Businesses (AEB) said new car sales in Russia amounted to 55,129 vehicles in March, around half the number sold in February. Sales of Lada cars by Russia's largest automaker AvtoVaz fell 64% in March from a year earlier, AEB data showed.

The Russian car market had counted among the most promising globally until 2014, encouraging foreign carmakers to build their factories there.

Meanwhile, GlaxoSmithKline said its consumer arm has stopped shipments of supplements and vitamins to Russia as a result of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine and would prioritise the supply of over-the-counter medicines for basic needs.

Bloomberg and Reuters
Irish landowners have largely resisted grant aid offers of 6,220 per hectare to establish agroforestry.

Only 18 agroforestry grant aid applications, comprising 42 hectares, have been approved and planted since 2015.

The Department of Agriculture received 90 applications, for 334ha, but some were withdrawn by the applicants before the approval process was finished.

About one-third were approved, but many have not yet progressed to planting, and 22 agroforestry applications are currently being processed, comprising an area of 122ha.

The best year for agroforestry has been 2020, with the establishment of 24.95 ha.

Agriculture Minister Charlie McConalogue has suggested that the reduced number of annual premiums available is the main barrier preventing increased take-up.

Only five premiums are on offer, compared to 15 in the other 11 categories of the national Afforestation Grant and Premium Scheme.

EU State Aid Guidelines

The restriction of premiums for agroforestry is in accordance with EU State Aid Guidelines.

Agroforestry is a combination of trees and pasture. Silage and hay production is also permitted.

The current forestry programme (extended to the end of 2022) is the first to include agroforestry, with a target of establishing 195ha of agroforestry between 2015 and 2020, however planted and grant-aided areas were under 6.84ha per year, except for 2020.

Agroforestry is promoted as positive for animal welfare, biodiversity, drainage, off-setting emissions from other farming practices, enhanced landscapes, and preventing nutrient runoff when planted in strategic locations.

In addition, it is possible to grow veneer quality timber with little impact on existing agricultural production.

Minister McConalogue said increasing options and incentives for agroforestry on farms will be an important consideration in the design of the next forestry programme, when he answered a Dail question from Cavan-Monaghan Sinn Fein TD Matt Carthy last week.

Grant-aided agroforestry allows planting of 400 to 1,000 trees per hectare, but the plot must be at least half a hectare, and at least 20 meters wide.

Enabling grass growth

The trees are thinned later, to reduce them to between 160 and 250 per hectare, to allow enough light for continued grass growth.

Trees must be protected against browsing animals with tree shelters, fencing, or both.

Along with being offered only five premiums, those interested in agroforestry may have held back from applying for grants for the same reasons behind the overall decline in afforestation grant applications in recent years.

The applications fell from 17,594 hectares in 2014 to 4,606 hectares in 2021.

Mr McConalogue has said: There are a variety of reasons why there has been a decline in the number of afforestation applications in recent years."

Answering a Dail question from Wexford Fine Gael TD Paul Kehoe, he said: Interest in afforestation has been impacted by the complexity of the legal and administrative system, judicial decisions, the efficiency of the forestry licensing system, the appetite among landowners to convert land to afforestation usage and, in some areas, complex societal attitudes and responses to afforestation.

He said the licensing situation is improving, with 4,050 licences issued in 2021, and a target of 5,250 in 2022, including more than doubling the number of afforestation licences, to 1,040.

20m hectares of agroforestry in Europe

Meanwhile, Ireland lags well behind other EU countries for agroforestry; it is estimated at around 20m hectares in the EU, equivalent to almost 12% of the utilised agricultural area, which compares to the organic area which is 8.5%.

However, nearly 90% of the European grassland area, and more than 99% of the arable land, has potential for agroforestry.

It could be said that the pastureland featuring a network of hedgerows in Ireland is an old form of agroforestry that was abandoned in much of the EU with the modernisation and intensification of agricultural production and forestry since the 1960s.

Now the more prominent EU examples of agroforestry are sheep grazing beneath cork oaks in Portugal and Spain, or tall fruit trees under which crops are grown or livestock grazed, in central Europe.
Ukrainian refugees remaining in emergency hotel accommodation heading into the summer season is neither good for refugees nor good for tourism, Failte Ireland boss Paul Kelly has warned.

Speaking before an Oireachtas Committee on Tourism on Wednesday, Failte Irelands CEO said that if core summer tourism accommodation stock is taken out of the system to house Ukrainian refugees, there will be significant knock-on impacts elsewhere.

He said that currently, 4,000 hotel bedrooms are being used to accommodate Ukrainian refugees, about 5% of total stocks, with the number of refugees in need of accommodation set to become an awful lot larger.

For every euro that a visitor spends on accommodation, they spent two-and-a-half euros in other parts of the economy. If you have significant tourism accommodation stock coming out of the market across the summer it will make it very difficult for pubs, restaurants, activity providers and visitor attractions that rely on that visitor. If they can't get a bed, they won't come, he said.

Those in the tourism industry are looking to this summer as crucial to the post-pandemic recovery, as Mr Kelly said summer air travel is set to return to 93% of what it was in 2019, and overseas visits are projected to return to 100% of pre-pandemic levels by Q3 of this year.

The conflict in Ukraine poses a threat to the recovery of the tourism and hospitality sector not only by way of accommodation shortages but also through soaring costs of operations for businesses.

President of the Restaurants Association of Ireland, Mark McGowan, who is also the Managing Director of Scholars Townhouse Hotel and Peggy Moores Pub in Drogheda, said that the outlook is currently bleak among business owners for the months ahead.

He said:

Obviously, the situation in Ukraine is devastating but it causes all kinds of problems, were being squeezed, left, right and centre.

We're very, very concerned about rising energy costs in particular, but everything that needs to run a business like a hotel, all the costs have been exasperated. Most are trying to just keep their head above water until the summertime to see if there's an increase in business, but obviously, then there's a concern that theyre going to be able to staff it when the summer does come along were going to have an awful time, he added.

Research from Failte Ireland estimates that there is currently an unprecedented skills shortage of 40,000 people in tourism and hospitality.

A quarter of vacancies are for senior positions, and a loss of skills post-pandemic is evident from the fact that a third of people now working in the tourism industry are new to the sector. Of the 1,000 businesses surveyed in 2021, 30% said they face closure if recruitment challenges are not resolved.

Patsy Sheehan (right), from Limerick, joins Ukrainian citizens outside Leinster House as President Zelenskyy of Ukraine addresses the Oireachtas. Photo: Brian Lawless/PA

The Restaurant Association of Ireland recommended to the committee as a matter of urgency that the government and Failte Ireland engage with the industry on targeted recruitment drives both within and outside the EU for hospitality and tourism staff to save the summer season.

Tim Fenn, Chief Executive of the Irish Hotels Federation (IHF) added that the dysfunctional and slow system of granting work permits for non-EU workers needs to be improved absolutely immediately, as there's no way the domestic market can help us completely fill the job requirements we have.

Eoin Quinn, Director of Member Services at the IHF, told the committee that they are currently in the early stages of exploring how Ukrainian refugees with appropriate skills could be matched with employers to meet skill shortages in the tourism and hospitality sector, and allow them to integrate more into society here.
A concerted European response is demanded because of Russias invasion of Ukraine, President Michael D Higgins has said.

Speaking in Austria, he said every glimmer of hope through diplomacy must be seized.

As members of the European Union, it is with shock and horror that we look to the aggression that has been unleashed against Ukraine and its people, he said.

The humanitarian crisis resulting from Russias immoral, unjustified war against its neighbour demands a concerted European response, adding: We must not allow ourselves to be mired in militarism.

Speaking at a lunch hosted by Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen, President Higgins said that at an international level as neutral countries, the shared values of Ireland and Austria are evident in our support for multilateralism and the United Nations, our commitment to the pursuit of peaceful resolution of conflicts and our respective records of involvement in UN peacekeeping.

He said the partnership between Ireland and Austria has grown in strength, too, as leading voices for human rights and staunch advocates for disarmament.

He said this return to war in Europe, such abuse by the powerful of its neighbour, the flagrant violations of the principles of the United Nations, brings into sharp focus our shared values, tests our resolve, our solidarity and our common humanity.

President Michael D Higgins (second right) and his wife Sabina Higgins (second left) are welcomed by Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen and his wife Doris Schmidauer during an official welcoming ceremony with military honours as part of his visit to Vienna. Picture: GEORG HOCHMUTH/APA/AFP via Getty Images)

Every glimmer of hope through diplomacy must be seized, he said. We must not allow ourselves to be mired in militarism. These times, however challenging, are times for multilateralism and our international institutions, he added.

Ireland and Austria, he noted, have a deep and longstanding relationship dating to at least medieval times, with Irish missionaries having played important roles in Austrian education.

Ireland and Austria today share a common perspective on many issues at European level, including the importance we attach to the challenging but necessary work of envisaging the future of Europe in all its cultural diversity and the role of arts and culture in that task, he said.

Our planet burns. Global hunger is rampant among those dispossessed by the effects of climate change. We are being distracted from so much that is important, including reaching our sustainable development goals.

As to our shared future and the cultivation of what might constitute a mind of Europe, we Europeans are challenged to define inclusively, to recognise diversity, be generous, genuinely international as to the outlines of the union that we now seek.

President Higgins said the developed world cannot afford to miss the chance to build a European Union that speaks to all citizens in a post-pandemic world.

"We cannot afford to squander this unique opportunity, as we set about rebuilding our societies and economies in the aftermath of the pandemic, to build on the vision of Spinelli, Schumann, Monnet and others, to construct a European Union that speaks to its citizens in their entirety, in the fullness of their possibilities, in their glorious diversity of origin and expression, a Union resolute in its vindication and protection of the most vulnerable, a Union that will offer a European-led transition to a just and sustainable future free from conflict."
Ireland needs to better help Moldova support the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees arriving into the country and honour its commitment to take 500 vulnerable people, the chairman of the joint committee on EU affairs has said following a visit to the area.

Nearly 400,000 refugees have so far fled into Moldova to escape the Russian invasion.

The Irish Government agreed in mid-March to take a group of refugees, including some elderly people and people with disabilities who had arrived in Moldova.

However, the group has yet to arrive in Ireland, Fine Gael TD Joe McHugh and other committee members heard from Moldovan authorities during a two-day visit.

Members of the committee on EU affairs at Palanca border crossing between Ukraine and Moldova: Joe McHugh, Brendan Howlin, John Brady, Regina Doherty, Darren Kelly, with ambassador of Ireland to Romania Paul McGarry and Moldova And Head of Border Police Rosian Vasiloi (with translator).

We have committed to 500 vulnerable people  as far as I am aware they have been identified on this side, he said, speaking to the Irish Examiner at the Palanca border crossing on Wednesday.

Theres still a bit of work to be done on the Irish side. Ill certainly be bringing back the message we need to fast-track that as well.

"I think we need to act very, very quickly on that commitment.

Some of the arriving refugees travel on to Romania, Austria, and other countries, but many remain.

Its an incredible, generous thing for a very, very poor country in Moldova  there is maybe between 90,000-100,000 Ukrainians today availing of their services, which were already under pressure, he said.

They need help from the likes of ourselves and the European Union.

Fine Gael senator Regina Doherty described Moldova as incredibly poor money-wise, and yet so rich and proud in the response they have given.

She also called for more progress on Irish commitments.

Ukrainian youth comfort each other as they wait to get for a bus at Palanca-Maiaky-Udobne border crossing point between Moldova and Ukraine.

Im embarrassed as a country we have offered so little, she said.

The Justice Department have agreed to take 500 refugees that are already in Moldova who have special needs because of their age or disabilities, but yet we havent got around to taking them in yet.

What is keeping us?

Those arriving included one young woman travelling with her elderly mother and carrying her two-year-old son. Helen Vinorovna said as they fled her husband phoned her from Mykolaiv about an attack on the city.

Head of the Moldovan Border Police, Rosian Vasiloi, told the group that 1,700 people are crossing on a daily basis, down from a peak of 12,000. He said three elderly people died while waiting in line to cross.

He said if Odesa were to come under sustained attack, the numbers arriving could soar to 100,000 daily.

Sinn Fein TD John Brady said: There is a lot of goodwill there, but it is putting their services under a lot of pressure, so they are appealing for a lot of assistance, in particular finance.

They need money to put into their health service and wherever it is needed.

The politicians, who travelled with Irish ambassador for Romania and Moldova Paul McGarry and honorary consul to Molodva Suzanne O'Connell, were moved by the refugees' plight, with some women crossing into the county carrying children, pets, and small bags before receiving assistance.

An Ukrainian refugee enters the Republic of Moldova with her dogs at Palanca-Maiaky-Udobne border crossing point between Moldova and Ukraine, on March 30, 2022. Picture: Daniel Mihailescu/AFP via Getty

They also met with Ukrainian refugees in Chisinau, and Labour TD Brendan Howlin highlighted how some volunteers they met at support centres were young people from Odesa now helping newer arrivals.
Children with disabilities are being failed and damaged by an inhumane, disorganised health system, parents and school principals have told the Minister for Disabilities.

Minister Anne Rabbitte agreed that disabled childrens human rights are not currently protected at a parents forum in Cork, which ran until midnight. The parents' forums will be held by the Minister in each county, but five have been scheduled for Cork where problems are particularly acute.

Ms Rabbitte acknowledged that Corks Community Healthcare Organisation was the worst in the country for helping children with disabilities. What we have at the moment is a system that is not working, she said.

Harrowing stories about the cruel realities of life as a disabled child in Ireland were heard at the meeting.

Children are left crushed and in pain in wheelchairs for years after theyve outgrown them due to unnecessary Health Service Executive red tape, parents repeatedly said.

Skye, a My Canine Companion autism service dog, at the meeting. Picture: Jim Coughlan

Children are also missing early intervention  proven to be crucial in aiding a childs mental and physical development - due to inexcusably long waiting lists for therapies like physiotherapy and speech and language therapy.

If families have the money, they can pay for care privately and see their children thrive. But if they cant afford it, they are forced to watch their children suffer and regress.

Families are also being left alone with aggressive, strong teenagers who have caught their mothers by the throat, dragged them from bed at night by the hair and forced their heads through plaster walls in the house.

One man, who asked not to be named but who works in disability services, said it was a miracle that many parents and workers he knew in understaffed services had not been killed by intellectually disabled teenagers.

He called on the Minister to provide funding to families to source the care or life-changing technologies that their children so desperately need privately, instead of waiting for years on HSE lists that often go nowhere.

Although the HSE had been invited to attend the meeting, representatives declined, citing prior engagements, sparking further anger from parents gathered at Corks Vienna Woods hotel.

Parents repeatedly called for an end to the Progressing Disability Services (PDS) programme, finalised under Ms Rabbittes tenure. They said that this system was regressing disability services in Ireland, robbing schools of vital therapists and not replacing them elsewhere.

Since the PDS was implemented, one primary school principal who spoke at the meeting said that up to 60 therapists  including occupational therapists, speech and language therapists and physiotherapists - had been removed from Cork schools.

Sharon Galvin and Fiona Walsh, both with Parents Cork Advocacy Network (Parents CAN), at the Disability Services Forum in Cork on Wednesday. "They say early intervention is key but it doesnt exist." Picture: Jim Coughlan

Ms Rabbitte said that the HSE had given her a figure of 14.5 therapists (whole-time equivalents) removed from Cork schools but accepted that this may not be the reality.

Exhausted and over-stretched parents are also now being told to attend training courses so they can carry out therapies on their own children trapped on long waiting lists. Some 34,000 children are on community health waiting lists.

We love our children, we will do anything for our children, but we cant do everything for our children. We are not therapists, Susan Beecher, a mum of two children with disabilities told the emotionally charged meeting.

Services are non-existent in Cork. They say early intervention is key but it doesnt exist. There are just waiting lists.

My son is diagnosed four years and hes yet to receive any services through the service provider. His sister then has a physical disability and shes not received any services since 2016. There are no services.

Katie Healy Nolan has been campaigning for disability rights since the birth of her daughter Penelope, who has an extremely rare variant of a degenerative condition called pontocerebellar hypoplasia.

My child is palliative. She is dying. Ive done everything to get her what she needs, to give her comfort.

We raised 25,000 ourselves for Penelope, for a wheelchair.

Penelope is the love of my life. Shed light up any room. She is a gift to this world. But were watching her die.

She said that she has to fight for her daughter constantly because she would get no help before her death otherwise. Despite being at risk of sepsis, she has been left for some time on an urgent list for a catheter.

One father raised Ireland's disability problems as a human rights issue and asked the Minister when Ireland would ratify the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

This would allow disabled children to take a case to the UNCRPD if they think their rights have been breached after they have been through the Irish court system. Ms Rabbitte replied that she did not believe disabled childrens human rights were being protected in Ireland by any manner or means.

Leonne McCarthy, Joanne Hegarty, both parents with children in St Paul's Special School Montenotte and Susan Beecher, parent of children attending the School of the Divine Child, Ballintemple, at the meeting. Picture: Jim Coughlan

She said that she and Minister for Children Roderick OGorman were committed to implementing the optional protocol but did not give a timeline to ratify it.

Lack of communication between the departments of Education and Disabilities was also criticised with parents calling for much more input from Minister Josepha Madigan. Many children are facing into September with no school place secured as not enough schools have the resources to care for them.

Ms Rabitte said that her departments annual budget of 2.1bn was sizeable but that it was not translating to services on the ground.

She said that only 3% of that budget was ringfenced for therapy services while 1.5bn was spent on residential care and 500m was spent on day services.

Fiona Walsh, mum of Zoe, said that Cork is the worst county in Ireland, statistically, for children with disabilities.

Down Syndrome Ireland did a survey, about 68% of kids in Cork have had no therapy yet. These are kids who have lost two years of therapy anyway due to Covid at a vital stage of their development.

I cant work because I have to drive my child to school and appointments so its impacting us financially and we have to pay if we want services.

We were living in Australia where there were so many supports. Now, I can see another little girl with Zoes condition thriving over there.

Shes going to achieve more than my daughter ever could. She gets two hours of occupational therapy, one hour of physiotherapy, one hour of speech and language therapy. She gets AUS$4,000 to spend on adaptive communication devices per year and she gets four intensive therapy sessions a year of OT and speech and language therapy or physio. She gets three hours a day for three weeks.

I have one hour of OT once a month and I do physio twice a month and whatever I can fund privately.
A fire in the Covid-19 ward of a hospital in northern Greece has left one person dead and two seriously injured, firefighters said.

The fire department said it had evacuated 34 patients from the ward at the Papanikolaou Hospital in Thessaloniki.
Ukrainian authorities identified bodies and pored over the grisly aftermath of alleged Russian atrocities around Kyiv as both sides prepared for an all-out push by Moscows forces to seize Ukraines industrial east.

Western governments are set to toughen sanctions against Russia and send more weapons to Ukraine, after President Volodymyr Zelensky pointedly accused the world of failing to end Moscows invasion of his country and what he said was a campaign of murders, rapes and wanton destruction by its forces.

In scarred and silent streets of ruined towns around Ukraines capital that Russian recently troops left, investigators collected evidence documenting what appeared to be widespread killings of civilians, some apparently shot at close range, others with their hands bound or their flesh burned.

Specialists cleared mines from the areas as Moscow focused its sights on a new assault on Ukraines east and south at the end of the wars sixth week.

In Andriivka, a small village about 40 miles west of Kyiv, two police officers from the nearby town of Makariv came on Tuesday to identify a dead man, whose body was left in a field beside tank tracks.

Captain Alla Pustova said officers had found 20 bodies in the Makariv area.

Andriivka residents said the Russians arrived in early March and took locals phones.

Some residents were detained and then released, while others met unknown fates.

Others described sheltering for weeks in musty, cramped cellars normally used for storing vegetables and pickles for the winter.

Now the soldiers are gone, and Russian armoured personnel carriers, a tank and other vehicles sat destroyed on Wednesday on both ends of the road running through the village.

The recent news from #Ukraine, reports new atrocities, like the massacre in Bucha: ever more horrendous cruelty done even against defenseless civilians, women and children.  Pope Francis (@Pontifex) April 6, 2022

Several buildings have been reduced to mounds of bricks and corrugated metal.

Residents are struggling without heat, electricity or cooking gas.

First we were scared, now we are hysterical, said Valentyna Klymenko, 64. She said she, her husband and two neighbours weathered the siege by sleeping on stacks of potatoes covered with a mattress and blankets.

We didnt cry at first. Now we are crying.

In towns around the capital, Mr Zelensky said civilians had been tortured, shot in the back of the head, thrown down wells, blown up with grenades in their apartments and crushed to death by tanks while in cars.

He told the UN Security Council on Tuesday that those responsible should face war crimes charges in front of a tribunal like the one established at Nuremberg after the Second World War.

Where is the peace that the United Nations was created to guarantee? he asked.

A Ukrainian soldier stands against the background of an apartment house ruined in the Russian shelling in Borodyanka, Ukraine (Efrem Lukatsky/AP)

Ukrainian authorities have said the bodies of at least 410 civilians have been found in towns around Kyiv, and Associated Press journalists in one, called Bucha, counted dozens of corpses in civilian clothes and interviewed Ukrainians who told of witnessing atrocities.

The Ukrainian president challenged the UN to kick Russia off the Security Council and do everything that we can do to establish peace.

Barring that, he told the council: Dissolve yourself.

Thwarted in their efforts to take the capital and forced to withdraw to Belarus or Russia to regroup, Russian President Vladimir Putins forces are now pouring into Ukraines industrial eastern heartland of the Donbas, where the Ukraine military has said is it bracing for a new offensive.

Overnight, Russian forces attacked a fuel depot and a factory in Ukraines Dnipropetrovsk region, just west of the Donbas, the regions governor, Valentyn Reznichenko, said on the messaging app Telegram early on Wednesday.

In the Luhansk region, which lies in the Donbas, shelling of Rubizhne on Tuesday killed one person and wounded five more, regional governor, Serhiy Haidai, said on Telegram.

Ukrainian forces have been fighting Russia-backed rebels in Luhansk and the other Donbas region of Donetsk since 2014.

(PA Graphics)

Ahead of its February 24 invasion, Moscow recognised the regions as independent states.

Ukrainian officials have stepped up calls for civilians to evacuate from towns in the east near the frontline ahead of an anticipated Russian offensive, and some essential services were being moved away.

Deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk said regional governors in Luhansk, Donestk and Kharkiv had advised people to leave.

Local authorities in Sloviansk, the scene of fierce fighting back in 2014, warned on Wednesday that the postal and pensions infrastructure was being moved out, and bank branches in the town are shutting down.

Over the past few days, grisly images of civilians apparently killed by Russian forces in Bucha and other towns before they withdrew from the outskirts of Kyiv have caused a global outcry.

At an audience on Wednesday, Pope Francis kissed a battered Ukrainian flag that was brought to him from Bucha and called again for an end to the war.

In the wake of the killings, western nations have expelled scores of Moscows diplomats and are expected to roll out more sanctions on Wednesday, including potentially a ban by the European Union (EU) on Russian coal imports, amid a flurry of meetings of Nato, Group of Seven and EU diplomats.

An elderly woman walks by an apartment building destroyed in the Russian shelling in Borodyanka (Efrem Lukatsky/AP)

Measures will also include a ban on all new investment in Russia, a senior US administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the upcoming announcement.

Mr Zelensky said western sanctions must go much further.

After the things the world saw in Bucha, sanctions against Russia must be commensurate with the gravity of war crimes committed by the occupiers, he said in his late-night address.

Russia has insisted its troops have committed no war crimes.

Moscows UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, said not a single local person suffered from violence while Bucha was under Russian control.

Using a tactic Russian officials have often relied on in the face of accusations of atrocities, he said scenes of bodies in the streets were a crude forgery staged by the Ukrainians.

On Wednesday, China, which has so far refused to criticise Moscow over the war, called for a probe into the killings, saying said images of civilian deaths are deeply disturbing but that no blame should be apportioned until all facts are known.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks from Kyiv (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office/AP)

Elsewhere in Ukraine, the aid group Doctors without Borders said its staff witnessed an attack on Monday on a cancer hospital in a residential district of the southern city of Mykolaiv.

The group said on Wednesday it was the third known strike in recent days on a hospital in the port city, whose capture is key to giving Russia control of the Black Sea coast.

It said it had no overall death toll, but its team saw one dead body.

The group said its team saw numerous small holes in the ground, scattered over a large area, that suggested the use of cluster bombs.

Russia has denied accusations from rights group that it is using cluster munitions in Ukraine.

Use of cluster bombs itself does not violate international law but using them against civilians can be a violation.

Attacks on medical facilities and workers are deemed war crimes, and Russia has been accused of striking multiple medical facilities during the conflict, including a maternity hospital in the besieged southern port city of Mariupol, scene of some of the worst suffering of the war.

A Ukrainian serviceman walks past an abandoned Russians army military vehicle in a road near Chernobyl, Ukraine (Oleksandr Ratushniak/AP)

British defence officials said on Wednesday that 160,000 people remain trapped by Russian air strikes and heavy fighting in that city, without electricity, communication, medicine, heat or water.

A team from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been trying to enter Mariupol since Friday and got within 12 miles of the besieged city, but the organisation said security conditions made it impossible to enter.

Instead, the ICRC said that on Wednesday it led a convoy of buses and private cars carrying more than 500 people who had fled Mariupol on their own to the safer city of Zaporizhzhia.

Its clear, though, that thousands more civilians trapped inside Mariupol need safe passage out and aid to come in, said Pascal Hundt, the ICRCs head of delegation in Ukraine.

Negotiators from Russia and Ukraine have been discussing ways to end the fighting.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that those talks continue despite the allegations of war crimes against civilians in Bucha.
Burma Arakan Army Threatens War With Myanmar Junta

Arakan Army chief Major General Tun Myat Naing. / The Irrawaddy

The Arakan Army (AA) has called on Myanmars regime not to interfere in its administration in Rakhine State, saying it will spark an armed conflict.

AA spokesman Khaing Thukha told an online press conference on Tuesday: Tensions are rising between Myanmars military and the Rakhine peoples authority led by the AA. We have been talking through intermediaries to ease tensions and avoid confrontation.

But if the junta continues to interfere, we cant guarantee peace. So the regime needs to be careful, he added.

The AA was established in 2009 in Kachin State with the support of the Kachin Independence Army and in 2014 it began returning to its Rakhine homeland.

Its increased presence in Rakhine and growing popularity resulted in fierce fighting with Myanmars military after late 2018. An unofficial ceasefire was agreed ahead of the November 2020 general election.

The United League of Arakan (ULA), the political wing of the AA, has since built a parallel administration in Rakhine with a judiciary, revenue department, public security offices and other governmental institutions, while Myanmars junta was busy fighting the resistance movement that followed its takeover in February last year.

The regime has complained about the administrative and judicial development of the ULA and is putting military pressure on the AA, said Khaing Thukha.

Troops have disrupted ULA courts in Kyaukphyu, Taungup and Ramree townships, he claimed.

Khaing Thukha accused the regime of hampering the AAs efforts to build ethnic harmony between Buddhist and Muslim communities in Rakhine. The regime has formally complained about the AA meeting Rohingya in Rathedaung and Buthidaung, he said.

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Burma Myanmar Junta Detains Nine Anti-Coup Activists in Mandalay Raids

The young activists who have been detained in Mandalay / CJ

Nine young activists belonging to an anti-coup protest group in Mandalay were detained on Monday evening, according to their colleagues in Mandalays Pyigyitagun Township.

U Aggavumsa, the leading organizer of anti-coup protests in Pyigyitagun, said: After we lost contact with them, we issued an alert so that others involved could flee. We can now confirm that they have been detained. Two safe houses were raided and six men and three women were detained.

Another organizer of anti-coup protests in Mandalay said the young activists were detained in Amarapura Township when safe houses were raided after one protester was arrested on a street.

We had contact with one protester, and we noticed from his words that something was wrong. So, we assumed that he had been detained, and we issued an alert, he said.

The whereabouts of the detained activists are still unknown, and family members still cant contact them.

U Aggavumsa said he is concerned that the detainees might have been tortured during the raid and during interrogation. As they [the regime] havent issued a press release about their detention, it appears that they are searching for other people involved.

More than one year after the coup, more than a dozen groups of anti-coup protesters continue to stage flash mob protests against the military regime in Mandalay despite crackdowns and arrests.

The regime has also stepped up its arrest of anti-coup protesters and urban guerilla resistance fighters and is holding them incommunicado, according to anti-coup protesters.

Ko Philips, an anti-coup protester, was beaten in public and detained by junta security forces on March 27. His whereabouts is still unknown.

On March 2, two university students including the chairman of the Mandalay District Students Union and a striking teacher were detained during a junta raid in Amarapura Township.

At least 17 young people were detained when around 500 junta security forces combed wards and villages in Patheingyi Township on March 22-23.

In Yangon, an urban guerilla resistance fighter died and six others from resistance group Free Tiger Ranger were arrested when junta soldiers raided their apartments in Kyimyindaing Township on March 26. Junta security forces fired shots as they raided the apartments, the resistance group said.

Four men and two women aged between 18 and 35 were detained and are being held for interrogation at the Myanmar militarys Division 44 in Shwepyithar Township, according to the Free Tiger Ranger.

Junta soldiers did not return the body of the resistance fighter who was shot dead during the raid.

Free Tiger Ranger is an urban guerilla resistance group that targets military informants, military-linked businesses and the junta administrative mechanism in Yangon. In their latest attack, the group said it killed a local administrator in Hlaing Tharyar Township on March 24.

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Burma Myanmar Military Never Forgave Suu Kyi for State Counselors Role

Myanmars State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in 2019. / State Counselors Office

Tensions between Myanmars military and the National League for Democracy (NLD) were already building six years ago.

Among the disagreements were military-appointed lawmakers rejection of the vice-presidential nominee by the NLD and the State Counselor Bill, which was submitted to the Parliament to allow NLD leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to run the newly elected government.

The NLD-dominated parliament approved the bill despite objections from military-appointed lawmakers.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who is barred from the presidency under the military-drafted 2008 Constitution, was appointed to the newly created post of state counselor on April 6, 2016. She became the de-facto prime minister of the elected government following her landslide victory in the November 2015 general election.

It became clearer after the February 2021 coup that the military had always been deeply unhappy with the State Counselor Law.

Junta chief Min Aung Hlaing told his cabinet and state and regional chiefs on April 6 last year that the NLD bent the law to enact the law.

The state counselor position was ranked second after the president in the state protocol of the NLD government and was officially a higher rank than the military chief, who is ranked eighth. In reality, the commander-in-chief was always the most powerful government figure, controlling the key ministries of defense, home affairs and border affairs and holding a veto over constitutional changes.

While the constitution specifies a set of qualifications for the president and the vice-presidents, the NLD bent the law and created the state counselor position, which ranked between the president and vice-presidents, Min Aung Hlaing told his appointees.

Article 59(f) of the 2008 Constitution bars anyone whose spouse or children are foreign nationals from taking the presidency.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi demonstrated leadership skills during the COVID-19 pandemic, providing moral support and sharing health advice with the public online.

Min Aung Hlaing told the Russian news agency RIA last June that the State Counselor Law was enacted unlawfully and that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi did not meet the criteria to assume the presidency.

The NLDs legal advisor U Ko Ni was credited with creating the position of state counselor for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

The position was crafted out of Article 217 of the Constitution, which allowed the Union Parliament to confer functions and powers upon any body or person.

U Ko Ni was assassinated in a plot involving ex-military officers in daylight outside Yangon International Airport in 2017. Many believe his assassination is related to the creation of the role of state counselor for the NLD.

The mastermind behind the assassination was former colonel Aung Win Khaing, who was last seen in Naypyitaw and remains at large.

Min Aung Hlaing was not the only person unhappy with the creation of the state counselors position.

During his meeting with military personnel and their families in Taunggyi, Shan State, after the coup, deputy junta leader Soe Win said the NLD democratically bullied military MPs and enacted the State Counselor Law despite the militarys objections.

Former admiral U Soe Than was a powerful minister in the military proxy U Thein Sein administration which lost power to the NLD. He was a parliamentarian for the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party when the NLD was in power.

In his book The Second Democratic Government and Myanmar, he writes that he had longed for military intervention since a few days after the NLD took office because he was angered by the partys parliamentary activity, including enacting the State Counselor Law.

The NLD won a second overwhelming majority in the 2020 general election. Had Min Aung Hlaing not seized power on Feb. 1 last year using alleged electoral fraud as an excuse, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi would have remained the state counselor. Instead, she is detained in a secret location near Naypyitaw and faces an array of charges.

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Hubify announced that it has executed a business sale deed with Connected Intelligence to acquire its managed services and telco business effective 1 April 2022.

Hubify says the acquisition will contribute $2.6m in revenue and $0.87m EBITDA on an annualised basis based on calendar year 2021 results and will be highly earnings accretive for it. Connected Intelligence will be acquired for $3m, implying a 3.4x EBITDA acquisition multiple, and will be funded by an up-front cash payment of $1.7m and a 2-year deferred payment comprising 50% cash and 50% Hubify (HFY) scrip.

Hubify says the Connected business comprises 25 customers billing $2.6m annually of which 90% is contracted recurring revenue, increasing Hubify's annualised recurring revenue by 13% to $19.5m.

Hubify added that Connected is an established Managed Services Provider with presence in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Connected offers its clients a full range of managed services including: private cloud; back up & disaster recovery; IP telephony; connectivity; cloud & SaaS and; Managed Security.

In FY21 total revenue was $2.6m of which over 90% was from Managed Service Contracts with an average customer tenure of 4.5 years.

Connected shares the same upstream suppliers and platforms as Hubify, which allows for a seamless integration of technologies and systems, the company stated. Connected has an established team of expert system and technical engineers who are remaining in the business and have signed new employment agreements with Hubify.

Hubify says that it has experience working with Connected having utilised the business for overflow technical support and pre-sales.

Hubify Limited CEO Victor Tsaccounis said, "Im really excited about this acquisition and welcoming the Connected Intelligence customers and staff over the coming weeks. Connected is a high-quality recurring revenue business with good margins and long-term customers, which is why its a great fit for Hubify.

"This latest addition to Hubify further enables the company to execute on its growth strategy in enterprise managed services and supports our growing pipeline of prospects in this space.

"Positively also, organic growth in the core HFY business remains strong and we continue to work through our acquisition pipeline, and I look forward to updating the market as we continue to close out that pipeline, Tsaccounis concluded.
SES has ordered SES-26, a software-defined geostationary satellite from Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture between Thales and Leonardo.

SES-26 will maintain and expand content delivery and connectivity services to broadcasters, media companies, telco operators, internet service providers, and government organisations in Europe, Africa, Middle East, and Asia Pacific.

Equipped with Ku-band and C-band frequencies, SES-26 will replace the NSS-12 satellite at 57 degrees East, SES orbital position.

From this location, SES will continue to deliver content and connectivity solutions to fast-growing markets.

Facilitating connections from Europe, Africa, and Middle East, SES-26 will be integral to support government communications solutions in the region and is aligned with the companys acquisition of DRS GES.

The position is also home to the Ethiosat platform, a diverse free to air neighbourhood supporting 10 million TV households across Ethiopia.

The order forms part of a three-satellite commitment to Thales Alenia Space and incorporates two satellites that will be deployed at SESs orbital location, 19.2 degrees East from which SES serves 118 million TV households across Europe.

SES is the first commercial customer for Thales Alenia Spaces Space Inspire (INstant SPace In-orbit REconfiguration), a product line featuring telecommunication mission and services reconfiguration, instant in-orbit adjustment to the demand and flexibility for video broadcasting and broadband connectivity services.

For over 20 years, satellites at 57 degrees East have been at the centrepiece of our connectivity network bridging Europe to Africa, the Middle East and Asia. From broadcasting video content across Europe and Africa to delivering connectivity services for aviation, maritime and government, SES-26 underlines our commitment to the growth of our business and to our customers, says SES CEO Steve Collar.

We are honoured that SES has renewed its confidence in Thales Alenia Space and our Space Inspire software-defined solution. This new contract follows the recent order to build Astra 1P and Astra 1Q and strengthens the strong partnership between SES and Thales Alenia Space, concludes Thales Alenia Space CEO Herve Derrey.

This first appeared in the subscription newsletter CommsWire on 29 March 2022.
Telstra announced a boost in the support it offers customers in regional, remote and outer-metro areas by increasing the number of local on-the-ground experts as well as boosting support for community organisations and events.

Speaking at the National Farmers Federation (NFF) National Conference in Canberra, Telstra CEO Andrew Penn said, Put simply, our Connected Communities program means more boots on the ground in regional Australia.

We will double the number of locally-based Regional Engagement Managers to work with their communities to improve the customer experience, provide information about coverage, performance and management of outages and build connectivity literacy and digital capability.

We will triple the number of highly-experienced Regional Network Advisors to work with customers to address complex network issues to help our network work as hard as possible for our customers.

For the first time we will appoint a Remote Community Advocate, responsible for monitoring the performance of our network, communicating recovery times to impacted communities, and responding to the needs of these communities.

The Remote Community Advocate will be part of a new Telstra Customer Advocate Council to report directly to me. This Council will ensure our regional, rural and remote customers have an even louder voice at the table. The Council members will also include our Chief Customer Advocate, Chief First Nations Advocate and our Chief Regional Advocate.

As part of the Telstra Connected Communities program, Telstra said it will also:

Triple its annual investment in community engagement activities and support organisations such as chambers of commerce and other local groups; and

Collaborate closely with NBN Local to improve digital inclusion and community technology solutions as well as partner on emergency response and preparedness.

Telstra added that this comes on top of recent initiatives to improve customer service including:

Customer calls being answered in Australia by the end of June this year, with recruitment for Australian-based contact centre agents well underway.

Increasing agents trained in regional connectivity issues to help answer calls from customers located more than 100km from a Telstra store. This is in addition to the First Nations Connect contact centre in Darwin.

Bringing all local retail stores back under Telstra ownership to give customers a better integrated experience instore and online.

Telstra also said it welcomed the Federal Governments investments, announced last week, in response to the 2021 Regional Telecommunications Independent Review Committee (RTIRC) report.

Telstra added that it will invest $75 million from the part sale of the Telstra InfraCo Towers business to address some of the recommendations made by the RITRC report. This is on top of $200 million over four years for co-investments with governments and local communities that will extend regional coverage, including expanding 4G and 5G coverage in regional Australia by 100,000 square kilometres by June 2025.

Telstra has also committed $150 million to improve regional mobile network customer experience. This includes addressing areas of network congestion by upgrading over 180 3G sites, augmenting capacity at selected 4G sites with high traffic, and further 4G site optimisations to better balance 3G/4G traffic and address localised customer demand, the company stated.

Penn said that Connected Communities and the ongoing investment in infrastructure showed Telstra was working to build the connectivity that all Australians needed to keep pace with the evolving digital economy, regardless of where they live or work.

Every regional, rural and remote community in Australia is unique and we understand that there is no one size fits all approach, he said.

By having the right support on the ground, continually investing to upgrade our network, and responding to the connectivity needs of all Australians  we continue to show our support for regional communities.
Johnson City, TN (37604)

Today

Thunderstorms, some strong this evening will give way to steady rain overnight. Damaging winds and large hail with some storms. Low 54F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 100%..

Tonight

Thunderstorms, some strong this evening will give way to steady rain overnight. Damaging winds and large hail with some storms. Low 54F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 100%.
Today

Thunderstorms, some strong early, then partly cloudy after midnight. Damaging winds and large hail with some storms. Low near 55F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 70%.

Tonight

Thunderstorms, some strong early, then partly cloudy after midnight. Damaging winds and large hail with some storms. Low near 55F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 70%.

Tomorrow

Partly cloudy early followed by increasing clouds with showers developing later in the day. High 68F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50%.
Security forces and their allies in a disputed part of conflict-hit northern Ethiopia committed abuses against Tigrayans that amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity, two rights groups said Wednesday.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Tigrayan civilians had been targeted in a relentless campaign of ethnic cleansing in the long-contested western Tigray region since the outbreak of Ethiopias war in November 2020.

Over the ensuing months, several hundred thousand Tigrayans were forcibly expelled from western Tigray in a coordinated manner by security forces and civilian authorities through ethnically-motivated rape, murder, starvation, and other serious violations.

These widespread and systematic attacks against the Tigrayan civilian population amount to crimes against humanity, as well as war crimes, Amnesty and HRW said in a joint report titled We Will Erase You From This Land.

Over 15 months, HRW and Amnesty interviewed more than 400 people including refugees who fled into Sudan, and witnesses to the violence still living inside western Tigray and elsewhere in Ethiopia.

They documented the sexual enslavement and gang rape of Tigrayan women, including a victim whose attackers said they were purifying her blood.

They also gathered testimony about the death of Tigrayans in overcrowded prisons, and the summary execution of dozens of men by a river.

The atrocities were blamed on newly-appointed civilian administrators in western Tigray, and regional forces and irregular militias from the neighbouring Amhara region.

Gizachew Muluneh, a spokesman for Amharas regional government, told AFP the findings were lies and the report irresponsible and biased.

None of our forces are involved in such crimes as stated by the report, he said.

Gizachew accused the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF), the former ruling party in Tigray that once dominated Ethiopian politics, of subjecting Amharas to such abuses for decades.

Amharas and Tigrayans are two of Ethiopias largest ethnic groups, and both lay historic claim in full to the vast fertile expanse of western Tigray that stretches from the Tekeze River to Sudan.

 Shocking crimes 

But the rights watchdogs also pointed the finger at Addis Ababa, accusing the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of covering up abuses and severely restricting independent access to western Tigray.

The atrocities there unfolded with the acquiescence and possible participation of Ethiopian federal forces, the report said.

Ethiopian authorities have steadfastly denied the shocking breadth of the crimes that have unfolded and have egregiously failed to address them, said Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW.

Seventeen months ago Abiy sent troops into Tigray after accusing the TPLF of orchestrating attacks on federal army camps.

Western Tigray was swiftly captured by federal and Amhara forces, and a new administration appointed.

HRW and Amnesty said local officials banned the Tigrayan language from use, displayed signs around towns ordering Tigrayans to leave, and denied access to farmland and humanitarian aid.

Eritrean troops  allied with Ethiopia in the fight against the TPLF  joined Amhara forces in looting crops and livestock, and driving Tigrayans from their homes, the rights groups said.

Thousands were rounded up and held in grim detention camps where deaths occurred: Some died as a result of torture, denial of medical care, and lack of food and water; guards killed others, the report said.

In early 2021, the United States warned that acts of ethnic cleansing were taking place in western Tigray.

Abiy promised a swift end to the conflict but it dragged on, with the frontline shifting many times and fighting expanding beyond Tigray.

Untold numbers of civilians have died, millions are in need of aid, and fighters on all sides have been accused of grave atrocities.

Addis Ababa declared a humanitarian truce last month, while the rebels agreed to a cessation of hostilities on the condition that aid reach Tigray.

Some supplies has since reached the stricken region but humanitarian groups say it is nowhere near enough given the hundreds of thousands facing starvation across Tigray.
Sudanese protesters are gearing up for mass anti-coup rallies Wednesday to mark the anniversaries of historic events that toppled Sudanese autocrats, most recently president Omar al-Bashir three years ago.

The planned demonstrations will come as political and economic turmoil have deepened in Sudan following an October 25 military coup led by army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.

The protests have been planned for April 6, which coincides with the anniversary of a 1985 popular uprising that toppled president Jaafar Nimeiri after years of harsh rule.

It also marks the third anniversary of the beginning of a mass encampment outside the army headquarters in Khartoum, the culmination of months of protests demanding an end to Bashirs three decades in power.

Bashir was ousted on April 11, 2019 by senior military officials.

Protesters then kept up the sit-in to demand civilian rule, but in June that year it was violently dispersed by men in military fatigues.

At least 128 people were killed in a crackdown that lasted for days, according to medics.

Civilian and military leaders later agreed on a transition toward civilian rule, but Sudans latest coup in October upended those plans.

 Defeat the coup 

Sudanese protesters have since been taking to the streets seeking to bring down the coup. In recent weeks, activists have ramped up online calls for Wednesdays protests, using hashtags such as the storm of April 6 and the earthquake of April 6.

It is an important day so we expect many to take to the streets despite the heat and Ramadan, said Badwi Bashir, a protester from Khartoum. We just want to bring down the coup and end the prospect of any future coups.

Jaafar Hassan, a spokesman for the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC)  an umbrella civilian alliance whose representatives were ousted from positions of power in the October coup  said April is the month of victories for the Sudanese.

We have to defeat the coup We have to get out of this crisis, Hassan told a press conference last week.

Since the takeover, military leaders have been moving to tighten their grip on power, rounding up prominent civilian leaders and reversing appointments made during the transition.

We want a unified front, said Hassan. We have tried a partnership with the military and it failed, ending in this coup, and we shouldnt do this again.

On Saturday, Burhan said he will only hand over power to an honest, elected authority, accepted by the all the Sudanese people.

At least 93 people have been killed and hundreds wounded in the crackdown on the anti-coup protests, according to medics.

 Economy in nosedive 

Since the coup, Sudans already ailing economy has suffered severe blows, as Western donors cut crucial aid pending the restoration of a transition to civilian rule.

Prices of food, fuel and basic commodities have soared, in large part due to the deepening economic crisis since the military takeover.

Crime and lawlessness have increased as violence in remote areas of Sudan has intensified, particularly the restive Darfur region, according to the United Nations.

On Thursday, clashes between Arab and non-Arab tribes left at least 45 people killed in South Darfur state.

Darfur was the scene of a bitter conflict in 2003 under Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court over accusations of atrocities in the region.

On Tuesday, the ICC began the trial of Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, an ally of Bashir, over his role in the conflict.

The UN has warned of growing humanitarian needs and food insecurity in Sudan.

Last month, the World Food Programme said that the number of Sudanese facing acute hunger would double to more than 18 million by September 2022.

On Friday, Burhan threatened to expel UN special representative Volker Perthes, accusing him of interference in the countrys affairs after Perthes warned of the deepening crisis in Sudan during a UN Security Council briefing.

Perthes mission, UNITAMS, along with the African Union and the regional bloc IGAD, have agreed on joint efforts to facilitate Sudanese-led talks in a bid to resolve the crisis.
The United States was expected to announce tough new sanctions on Russia Wednesday, including a ban on new investments, a day after Ukraines president showed the UN Security Council harrowing images of violence and accused Moscow of widespread atrocities.

The sanctions come after an outcry over the discovery of dozens of bodies in civilian clothing in areas from which Russian troops have withdrawn around Ukraines capital, including the town of Bucha.

Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky likened Russias actions to Nazi atrocities in an impassioned speech by videolink to the 15-member UN Security Council on Tuesday.

They cut off limbs, slashed their throats, women were raped and killed in front of their children, Zelensky said.

He demanded stronger action from Western powers and called for Russias exclusion from the Council, where it holds veto power.

Later in his nightly address, a frustrated Zelensky said Russia was blocking the UN from carrying out the functions for which it was created.

The UN Security Council exists, and security in the world doesnt, he said.

In an interview with the BBC, the US ambassador to the UN admitted that no one can question (Zelenskys) frustration with the Council and how the Council operates.

But she insisted that the Council was holding Russia to account, and that Moscow was isolated within it.

 Push to isolate Moscow 

The killings in Bucha and elsewhere have galvanised support for Ukraine, with Washington announcing another $100 million in military aid, and produced new momentum for additional sanctions on Moscow.

We had already concluded that Russia committed war crimes in Ukraine, and the information from Bucha appears to show further evidence of war crimes, a US source familiar with the planned measures said.

On Wednesday, Washington, in coordination with the G7 and the European Union, is expected to announce measures including a ban on all new investments in Russia.

You can expect that they will target Russian government officials, their family members, Russian-owned financial institutions, also state-owned enterprises, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told a briefing on Tuesday.

A new sanctions package being prepared by Europe, meanwhile, is set to include oil and coal, Frances foreign minister said at EU talks in Luxembourg.

And Britain said it has so far frozen some $350 billion in assets from President Vladimir Putins war chest.

As part of the push to isolate Moscow, Spain, Italy, Denmark and Slovenia expelled dozens of Russian diplomats suspected of being intelligence operatives on Tuesday, following similar moves in France and Germany  a total of some 180 expulsions in 48 hours.

The Kremlin called it a short-sighted move that would complicate efforts to negotiate an end to the hostilities.

Putin also warned of reprisals for recent European measures targeting Russian gas giant Gazprom  and said Moscow would monitor its food exports to hostile nations, raising the spectre of shortages and price spikes.

 Kremlin denials 

The Kremlin has denied any civilian killings, claiming the images emerging from Bucha and other sites are fakes produced by Ukrainian forces, or that the deaths occurred after Russian soldiers pulled out.

At the Security Council meeting, Moscows ambassador rejected Zelenskys claims, saying the ungrounded accusations are not confirmed by any eyewitnesses.

But satellite photos taken while Bucha was still under Moscows control show what appear to be bodies lying in streets where the dead were later found by Ukrainian forces and seen by journalists.

And multiple Bucha residents told AFP they had seen Russian soldiers killing civilians.

Right in front of my eyes, they fired on a man who was going to get food at the supermarket, said 43-year-old Olena, who declined to give her family name.

During a grim cleanup, the remains of partially burned bodies in black bags were lifted into a van, with officials telling journalists dozens of bodies remained in apartments and in nearby woods.

Western nations have given short shrift to Russias denials.

What weve seen in Bucha is not the random act of a rogue unit. Its a deliberate campaign to kill, to torture, to rape, to commit atrocities, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, who will visit Kyiv this week, has offered the blocs assistance in documenting proof of war crimes.

 Cluster bombs 

Ukrainian authorities have warned that others areas may have suffered even worse fates than Bucha.

Scenes of devastation have met those venturing into areas from which Russian forces have withdrawn.

In the northern city of Chernigiv, which was besieged from the early days of the invasion, a charred childrens hospital, full of bullet and shrapnel holes, served as a shelter.

In the dank basement, children painted on walls  tiny handprints, a smeared rainbow, a fluttering Ukrainian flag.

Cluster bombs were flying, we have traces of these bombs, said 51-year-old Olena Makoviy. The injured were brought to the childrens hospital, both adults and children.

City officials estimate around 350 civilians have been killed in Chernigiv, with fellow residents digging mass graves to bury them.

It was very scary here from the first days of the war, said Makoviy. They brought guys, handsome, young, but no longer alive,

 We are ready 

The Russian withdrawal from areas around Kyiv and the north is part of a shift of focus towards Ukraines southeast, in a bid to create a land bridge between occupied Crimea and Moscow-backed separatist statelets in Donbas.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance expects a Russian push in coming weeks to try to seize the entire Donbas.

In the village of Krasnopillia there, Ukrainian forces were preparing to counter that push.

We know the Russians are reinforcing and are getting ready to attack, a senior Ukrainian officer on the ground told AFP. We are ready weve planned some surprises for them along the way.

Civilians have been asked to evacuate west and on Tuesday a line of cars stretching three kilometres was waiting to pass a checkpoint, while thousands of other residents boarded trains to leave.

And violence has continued elsewhere, with Ukraines prosecutor general saying Tuesday that bombing around Kyiv had killed 12 people.

Peace talks between the sides have so far gone nowhere, though Moscow says it is ready to continue.

Ukraine has proposed an agreement where other countries would guarantee its security in return for Kyiv accepting a neutral and non-nuclear status, not joining NATO and refusing to host foreign military bases.

The proposal would also see Russia accept Kyivs admission to the European Union.

burs-reb/je

GAZPROM
Pope Francis on Wednesday hit out at the ever more horrendous cruelty in Ukraine, after the murder of civilians in the town of Bucha near the capital.

The recent news about the war in Ukraine, instead of bringing relief and hope, instead attests to new atrocities, such as the Bucha massacre, the pope said during his weekly general audience at the Vatican.

Ever more horrendous cruelties, also perpetrated against defenceless civilians, women and children. These are victims whose innocent blood cries out to heaven and begs for mercy, he said.

Francis, 85, then stood and held up a flag he said comes from the war. From that martyred city Bucha.

He then folded the flag and kissed it.

The discovery of dozens of bodies in mass graves or littering the streets in Bucha over the weekend has sparked global outrage.

Francis also deplored the powerlessness of international organisations in the face of the Russian aggression.

After the Second World War, attempts were made to lay the foundations for a new history of peace, but unfortunately the old history of competing great powers continued, he said.

And in the current war in Ukraine, we are witnessing the powerlessness of international organisations.

The Ukrainian army retook control of the key commuter town outside Kyiv just a few days ago and said it had found the bodies, some with their hands bound behind them, after Russian forces pulled out.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called the killings war crimes and genocide and Western countries have ramped up sanctions against Russia in reaction to the deaths.

But the Kremlin has denied the accusations and claimed the images emerging from Bucha and other towns are fakes produced by Ukrainian forces, or that the deaths occurred after Russian soldiers pulled out.
China on Wednesday called reports of civilian deaths in the Ukrainian city of Bucha deeply disturbing, as international condemnation grows over what Kyiv has described as genocide carried out by Russia.

Beijing has throughout refused to condemn Moscows invasion, now into its fifth week, as it treads a diplomatic tightrope between backing its close ally and maintaining ties with the West.

But when asked about the reported discovery of dozens of bodies in mass graves or littering the streets in Bucha over the weekend, China said the reports and images of civilian deaths in Bucha are deeply disturbing.

Foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian also said any accusations should be based on facts as he said any humanitarian situation should not be politicised.

Before the investigation results are out, all sides should maintain restraint and avoid baseless accusations, he told reporters at a regular press briefing.

The Ukrainian army retook control of the key commuter town of Bucha outside Kyiv just a few days ago and said it had found dozens of bodies after Russian forces pulled out.

The reported events in Bucha have sparked global outrage, including from the Pope and the US, which has called for a war crimes trial over the alleged atrocities.

The Kremlin has denied the killings and claimed the images emerging from Bucha are fakes produced by Ukraine.

Zhao added Wednesday that China pays very close attention to the harm suffered by civilians, and is willing to continue working with the international community to avoid any civilian harm.

His statement echoed earlier remarks by Chinas ambassador to the UN, Zhang Jun, at a Tuesday meeting of the Security Council.

At the same session Ukraines President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the killings in the town reclaimed from Russian troops as a genocide and urged the UN Security Council to expel Russia as a permanent member.

Zelensky called on the 15-member council  which aims to ensure international peace and security  to expel Russia so it cannot block decisions about its own aggression, its own war.

If there is no alternative and no option, then the next option would be to dissolve yourself altogether, Zelensky continued.

China has so far provided humanitarian aid worth around $2.3 million to Ukraine, an amount dwarfed by the contributions of many other countries.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky Wednesday condemned hesitancy in Europe over barring Russian energy imports, arguing some leaders were more worried about business losses than about war crimes.

New rhetoric about sanctions had emerged, he told the Irish parliament, but I cannot tolerate any indecisiveness after everything we have gone through in Ukraine and everything that Russian troops have done.

We still need to convince Europe that Russian oil cannot feed the Russian military machine with new sources of funding, Zelensky added, calling also for the total exclusion of Russian banks from Western finance.

The only thing we are lacking is the principled approach of some leaders  political leaders, business leaders  who still think that war and war crimes are not as horrific as financial losses, he said, speaking through an interpreter.

The European Union is poised to implement a fifth round of sanctions cutting off Russian coal imports, while NATO and G7 foreign ministers are gathering in Brussels for further steps on coordinated action.

Some EU countries, notably Germany, have been reluctant to hit all Russian energy exports because of the damage it would do to their own economies.

But pressure has been building following reports of mass civilian deaths in Bucha and other places in Ukraine formerly held by Russian troops.

The EU must impose oil and gas sanctions on Russia sooner or later, European Council chief Charles Michel told MEPs in Strasbourg.

Zelenskys video address to the Irish parliament was his latest to foreign lawmakers appealing for economic, military and diplomatic support against Russia.

He detailed incessant Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine including in the devastated city of Mariupol, where he said even melt snow was no longer available for people to use as drinking water.

Through its bombardment and siege tactics, Russia was using hunger as a weapon against Ukrainians and by extension against countries in North Africa and Asia that relied on imports of cereals from Ukraine.

The country doing this doesnt deserve to be in the circle of civilised countries, Zelensky said.

Russia hasnt yet abandoned their plans, he added. They are still looking to subdue and occupy all Ukraines people.
Indias foreign minister said Wednesday he was deeply disturbed by civilian deaths in the Ukrainian city of Bucha but stopped short of blaming Russia, calling for an independent probe.

New Delhi has historically close ties with Moscow and has refrained from condemning its invasion of its ex-Soviet neighbour, abstaining in several UN votes and hosting Russias foreign minister for talks in India last week.

The discovery of hundreds of civilians found dead in areas from which Russian troops have withdrawn has sparked global outrage, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky describing them as war crimes and genocide.

Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar told parliament Wednesday that India was deeply disturbed and strongly condemned the killings.

This is an extremely serious matter and we support the call for an independent investigation, he added.

The Kremlin has said that the images were fakes produced by the Ukrainian army or that the deaths occurred after its soldiers pulled out.

India, the worlds largest democracy, has been under intense Western pressure to take a tougher line on Russia, with US President Joe Biden calling Delhi somewhat shaky.

Last week saw a flurry of diplomatic visits to India, including Washingtons chief sanctions strategist and Britains foreign secretary.

On Tuesday Jaishankar spoke by phone with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov visited New Delhi last Thursday and Friday, praising India for not taking a one-side approach.

Western financial sanctions aimed at isolating Russia have reportedly made it difficult for India to pay Russia for imports and the two are reportedly working on a rupee-ruble mechanism to facilitate trade.

Harsh V Pant, a New Delhi-based analyst, told AFP that there has been a gradual evolution in Indias position on the invasion.

While earlier India was only talking about a diplomatic resolution, it is now asking to fix responsibility for specific actions, Pant said.

Manoj Joshi with the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi said that the latest comments could be interpreted as a slight shift in Indias position.

But given the humanitarian situation in Ukraine it was the most logical reaction. They couldnt have said anything else publicly, Joshi told AFP.

India, however, is in a tricky spot since the Ukraine crisis has pushed Russia closer to China.

Delhi shares Western alarm over Chinas growing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific region, and is a member of the so-called Quad alliance with the United States, Japan and Australia.
Sri Lanka, which is struggling with its worst economic crisis in memory and mounting anti-government protests, announced on Tuesday a default on its $51 billion foreign debt.

Here are five things to know about the South Asian island nation, which emerged from a brutal civil war in 2009.

 Mostly Buddhist 

The teardrop-shaped island off the southern tip of India is separated from the Indian sub-continent by a shallow strip of sea that is about 20 kilometres (12 miles) wide at its narrowest point.

The island has a population of 21.9 million, according to the World Bank in 2020.

Seventy percent are Buddhist, mostly ethnic Sinhalese. Around 12 percent are Hindus, mostly Tamils, who mainly live in the north and northeast of the island.

Muslims make up 10 percent of the population and Christians about seven percent.

 Formerly Ceylon 

A strategic point on early maritime trade routes, the Indian Ocean island was controlled by Portugal (1505-1656) then the Netherlands (1656-1796) before becoming a British colony called Ceylon in 1815.

The last Sinhalese king reigned from 1798 to 1815.

After more than 130 years of British rule, the island gained independence in 1948.

In 1972, it became a republic and adopted the name Sri Lanka.

 Tamil Tigers 

In 1972, Tamil rebels launched an armed struggle for a separate homeland that triggered a 37-year civil war estimated to have claimed up to 100,000 lives.

Suicide bombers from the main insurgent group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, killed former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993.

After a ceasefire failed, the government crushed the Tigers in an all-out military offensive in 2009, killing their founder and leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.

The operation was criticised for its brutality, with troops accused of killing at least 40,000 ethnic Tamil civilians.

Todays president Gotabhaya Rajapaksa was the top defence official when the rebels were defeated under his brother  former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, who is now prime minister.

The United Nations Human Rights Council has demanded an independent investigation into possible war crimes, which Sri Lankas government denies.

 Jihadist attacks 

Sri Lanka was about to mark a decade since the end of the conflict when its capital was struck by new terror attacks on Easter Sunday in 2019.

A series of suicide bombings on three packed churches and three luxury hotels on April 21, 2019 killed 279 people, including at least 45 foreigners, and injured more than 500 people.

The jihadist Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attacks, which reinforced resentment against the Muslim minority on the island.

 Debt default 

The Easter bombings battered the paradise islands crucial tourism industry and the Covid-19 pandemic made things worse, drying up remittances from abroad.

The government imposed drastic currency restrictions and banned numerous imports to try to conserve its dwindling foreign currency reserves and use them to service its debt.

But the resulting food and fuel shortages, combined with long electricity blackouts, sent demonstrators into the streets calling for the government to resign.

On Tuesday, the finance ministry announced it was suspending payments on its $51 billion external debt as a last resort ahead of talks with the International Monetary Fund on a bailout.
Western powers were readying new sanctions against Russia on Wednesday after Ukraines president called for tougher action and accused Moscow of atrocities during the six-week war.

The measures follow an international outcry over hundreds of civilians found dead in areas from which Russian troops have withdrawn around Ukraines capital, including the town of Bucha.

In a video address to the UN Security Council on Tuesday, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky showed harrowing images of corpses  including of children  that he said were victims of Russian atrocities.

They cut off limbs slashed their throats. Women were raped and killed in front of their children, he said, after earlier comparing Russias assault to the 1937 Nazi bombing of the town of Guernica.

The Kremlin has denied any civilian killings, claiming the images emerging from Bucha and other sites are fakes produced by Ukrainian forces, or that the deaths occurred after Russian soldiers pulled out.

Zelensky called for Russias exclusion from the UN Security Council, where it is one of five members with veto power, saying it was blocking the UN from carrying out the functions for which it was created.

On Wednesday, Pope Francis  who has repeatedly called for peace, while not naming Russia or President Vladimir Putin  also deplored the powerlessness of international organisations.

At his weekly audience at the Vatican, the 85-year-old pontiff kissed a flag he said had come from that martyred city Bucha, condemning ever more horrendous cruelties in Ukraine.

The UN General Assembly announced later it would vote Thursday on suspending Russia from the bodys Human Rights Council, after moves by the US and Britain to have it excluded.

 Push to isolate Moscow 

Thousands of people have been killed and more than 11 million displaced as refugees or within Ukraine since Russias invasion on February 24.

Western powers have already pummelled Russia with debilitating economic sanctions, which forced Moscow Wednesday to make foreign debt payments on dollar-denominated bonds in rubles.

But the killings in Bucha and elsewhere have galvanised support for Kyiv, with Washington announcing another $100 million in military aid, and produced new momentum for additional sanctions on Moscow.

Washington, in coordination with the G7 and the European Union, is expected on Wednesday to announce measures including a ban on all new investments in Russia.

You can expect that they will target Russian government officials, their family members, Russian-owned financial institutions, also state-owned enterprises, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told a briefing on Tuesday.

The EU meanwhile was poised to implement a fifth round of sanctions cutting off Russian coal imports  and European Council chief Charles Michel said that sooner or later, it must also impose oil and gas sanctions.

Condemning war crimes in Russia, he said: There must be, and there will be, severe consequences for all those responsible.

But addressing the Irish parliament Wednesday, Zelensky condemned the indecisiveness on the part of EU nations, which are dependent on Russian energy.

We still need to convince Europe that Russian oil cannot feed the Russian military machine with new sources of funding, Zelensky added, calling also for the total exclusion of Russian banks from Western finance.

In Britain, which says it has so far frozen some $350 billion in assets from Putins war chest, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said what happened in Bucha doesnt look far short of genocide to me.

He said the international community will be moving again in lockstep to impose more sanctions and more penalties on Vladimir Putins regime.

In other moves to isolate Moscow, a string of EU countries including Germany, France, Italy and Spain have expelled more than 200 Russian diplomats and staff between them this week.

The Kremlin called the mass expulsions a short-sighted move that would complicate efforts to negotiate an end to the hostilities.

Putin also warned of reprisals for recent European measures targeting Russian gas giant Gazprom  and said Moscow would monitor its food exports to hostile nations, raising the spectre of shortages and price spikes.

 Kremlin denials 

At the Security Council meeting, Moscows ambassador rejected Zelenskys claims, saying the ungrounded accusations are not confirmed by any eyewitnesses.

But satellite photos taken while Bucha was still under Moscows control show what appear to be bodies lying in streets where the dead were later found by Ukrainian forces and seen by journalists.

And multiple Bucha residents told AFP they had seen Russian soldiers killing civilians.

Right in front of my eyes, they fired on a man who was going to get food at the supermarket, said 43-year-old Olena, who declined to give her family name.

During a grim cleanup, the remains of partially burned bodies in black bags were lifted into a van, with officials telling journalists dozens of bodies remained in apartments and in nearby woods.

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, who will visit Kyiv this week, has offered the blocs assistance in documenting proof of war crimes.

 Cluster bombs 

Ukrainian authorities have warned that other areas may have suffered even worse fates than Bucha.

Scenes of devastation have met those venturing into areas from which Russian forces have withdrawn.

In the northern city of Chernigiv, which was besieged from the early days of the invasion, a charred childrens hospital, full of bullet and shrapnel holes, served as a shelter.

In the dank basement, children painted on walls  tiny handprints, a smeared rainbow, a fluttering Ukrainian flag.

Cluster bombs were flying, we have traces of these bombs, said 51-year-old Olena Makoviy. The injured were brought to the childrens hospital, both adults and children.

City officials estimate around 350 civilians have been killed in Chernigiv, with fellow residents digging mass graves to bury them.

It was very scary here from the first days of the war, said Makoviy. They brought guys, handsome, young, but no longer alive,

 We are ready 

The Russian withdrawal from areas around Kyiv and the north is part of a shift of focus towards Ukraines southeast, in a bid to create a land bridge between occupied Crimea and Moscow-backed separatist statelets in Donbas.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance expects a Russian push in coming weeks to try to seize the entire Donbas.

We know the Russians are reinforcing and are getting ready to attack, a senior Ukrainian officer in the village of Krasnopillia told AFP.

We are ready weve planned some surprises for them along the way.

Civilians have been asked to evacuate west and on Tuesday a line of cars stretching three kilometres was waiting to pass a checkpoint, while thousands of other residents boarded trains to leave.

Russian strikes on Wednesday killed at least two people and wounded five others near a humanitarian distribution point in the east Donetsk region, the regional governor said.

Meanwhile shells and rockets were landing at regular intervals in the industrial city of Severodonetsk, the easternmost city held by Ukrainian forces on the eastern frontline.

Peace talks between the sides have so far gone nowhere, though Moscow says it is ready to continue.

Ukraine has proposed an agreement where other countries would guarantee its security in return for Kyiv accepting a neutral and non-nuclear status, not joining NATO and refusing to host foreign military bases.

The proposal would also see Russia accept Kyiv joining the European Union.

burs-ar/yad

GAZPROM
KAMPONG CHAM, Cambodia, April 5 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese Embassy to Cambodia on Tuesday paid homage to two Chinese peacekeepers martyred in the United Nations mission in the Southeast Asian country in 1993.

The event, which was held on the occasion of China's traditional Tomb-Sweeping Day, was attended by more than 30 people including Chinese diplomats and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) experts who are working here to assist in Cambodia's fight against COVID-19.

The visitors laid wreaths at a memorial monument in Kampong Cham province to honor the Chinese peacekeepers who lost their lives in a UN peacekeeping mission.

Wu Guoquan, the embassy's economic and commercial counselor, said the two Chinese peacekeepers were killed in a mid-night explosion on May 21, 1993, and that they were among about 800 Chinese peacekeepers arriving in Cambodia in 1992 to perform the UN peacekeeping mission.

Wu said the life sacrifice of the Chinese peacekeepers for peace as well as the efforts devoted by Chinese personnel for the development of Cambodia have both contributed to the longstanding China-Cambodia friendship.
The German government said on Wednesday that satellite pictures from last month provided strong counterevidence against Russian denials of involvement in civilian deaths in the Ukrainian town of Bucha.

Government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit told reporters that the evaluation of satellite images led Berlin to conclude that Russian declarations that images of civilian deaths were posed scenes or that they were not responsible for the murders are in our view not tenable.

Ukrainian officials say hundreds of civilians were found dead in areas vacated by Russian troops and images of bodies in streets sparked global outrage. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described the killings as war crimes and genocide.

The Kremlin has denied the accusations of mass killings and claimed the images emerging from Bucha and other towns are fakes produced by Ukrainian forces, or that the deaths occurred after Russian soldiers pulled out.

When asked if the satellite images viewed by German officials were from allies or media sources, Hebestreit replied: These are our findings but as you know we do not comment on the origin or evaluation of intelligence matters.

He said that images at Berlins disposal covered the period from March 10-18 and led to the conclusion that the victims whose images we all saw were lying there since at least March 10.

Reliable evidence shows that Russian fighting and security forces were deployed in this area from March 7 until the 30th, he said.

They were involved in the interrogation of prisoners who were later executed. That is the information we have.

Hebestreit said targeted killings by Russian armed forces are evidence that the Russian president and commander in chief (Vladimir) Putin at the least tacitly approved of human rights violations and war crimes.

Speaking earlier in parliament, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also pushed back against the Kremlins denial, calling it a cynical claim and lies.

The perpetrators and their superiors must be brought to justice  we support all efforts to minutely document such atrocities and relentlessly get to the bottom of them, he said.
The value of global trade fell 2.8% in February-March as Russias invasion of Ukraine led to a sharp drop in container ship traffic between the two countries, according to the Kiel Institute for World Economic Research.

This data Research from a German research institute shows for the first time how much the conflict in Ukraine and widespread Western sanctions on Russia have affected global trade since the invasion began on February 24.

The biggest impact was on trade with Russia, as the countrys imports fell 9.7% in March from the previous month, while exports fell 5%, according to the Kiel Institute. Its metrics track shipping data from 500 ports in real time, seasonally adjusting import and export values ??to provide a measure of trade activity.

The actual distortions caused by Russias invasion of Ukraine and sanctions imposed by the West, as well as the high level of uncertainty among companies with ties to Russia, are significantly hindering trade in March, said Vincent Star, head of trade indicators at Kiel said Vincent Stamer.

Container traffic at Russias three busiest container ports, St Petersburg, Vladivostok and Novorossiysk, has halved in the past month due to sanctions imposed on the country and the withdrawal of many Western brands, the institute said. . Odessa, the main port of Ukraine It added that the Black Sea is virtually isolated from international maritime trade.

The Ukraine war had a chilling effect on EU trade, with EU exports falling 5.6% and imports falling 3.4% in March. The impact on the United States was more modest, with exports down 3.4% and imports down 0.6%.

By contrast, the impact on China was minimal, with exports falling 0.9% last month while imports rose 0.9%. Beijing is more supportive of Russias invasion of Ukraine than the West and does not support international sanctions on Moscow.

Chinas virus-free lockdown has so far had little impact on port traffic in cities like Shanghai, but they do increase congestion on container ships, the institute said. About 12 percent of all cargo shipped globally is stranded on stationary ships  a figure just over two months last year.

The figures are in line with separate monthly data compiled by JPMorgan and ratings firm Standard & Poors, which showed the global export purchasing managers index fell to 48 in March from 51 the previous month, the lowest level since July 2020 , at a time when many countries had severe coronavirus outbreaks with restrictions in place.

It was also below the 50 mark, suggesting that most businesses reported a contraction in exports compared to the previous month.

The slump in global manufacturing exports was widespread geographically, with two-thirds of countries surveyed reporting contractions, the Purchasing Managers Index showed.

war disrupted Supply of major resources and commodities Examples include corn, wheat, potash, neon, nickel and palladium from Russia and Ukraine, the worlds two largest producers of these commodities, driving up energy and food prices and suppressing production at several auto and truck makers .

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Trade pressure is likely to increase as the United States and the European Union prepare to impose a new round of sanctions on Russia in response to allegations of atrocities committed by the Russian military in Ukraine, including in towns near Kyiv.

EU plan Targeting Russian coal importsexpanding restrictions on the countrys banking sector and imposing a 10 billion export ban in areas such as quantum computers and advanced semiconductors, and a 5.5 billion ban on products such as wood, cement, seafood and alcohol.

Washington is coordinating action against Moscow with other G7 and EU nations, preparing to ban new investments in Russia while tightening sanctions on the countrys financial institutions, state-owned companies and government officials.
Home care provider Help at Home has acquired two New York-based home care companies as part of its strategy to grow in various markets.

Edison Home Healthcare and New York Preferred Home Care provide traditional care through licensed home care providers and Medicaids consumer-directed personal assistance program, which will be included in Help at Homes offerings, the company said Wednesday.

Help at Home declined to disclose terms of the deal.

The New York market, with its focus on managed care organizations and value-based care, is really the perfect place for us to expand our care coordination model, said Help at Home President Tim ORourke.

ORourke said the acquisition expands Help at Homes footprint to New York, laying the foundation for the company to grow organically through expansion and innovation.

The two organisations have a long history of market leadership and a strong commitment to caregiver, staff and customer experience, he said.

Together, Edison Home Health Care and Preferred Home Care bring an additional 10,500 customers and 12,000 employees to dozens of counties in New York and Pennsylvania.

Before the acquisition, Chicago-based Help at Home had 70 locations in 12 states and provided in-home community services to approximately 52,000 seniors and people with disabilities each month. The organization employs more than 30,000 paramedics.

While increasing from 2020, M&A in home health continues below pre-pandemic levels.
"Bulgasal: Immortal Souls" actor Lee Jin Wook and "Reunited World" star Lee Yeon Hee work together for the first time in the forthcoming Kakao TV romance series "Marriage White Paper"!

Lee Jin Wook, Lee Yeon Hee To Showcase Marriage Jitters in 'Marriage White Paper'

Two sterling actors Lee Jin Wook and Lee Yeon Hee are set to decorate the upcoming romance drame "Marriage White Paper" (literal title) this year!

The Kakao TV drama depicts the story of two 30-year-olds who are busy fussing over their upcoming marriage-including its unexpected mountains of preparations, tears and frustrations.

"Marriage White Paper" stars Lee Jin Wook and Lee Yeon Hee as Seo Joon Hyung and Kim Na Eun, respectively, a couple who dated for two years and are now ready to tie the knot.

Seo Joon Hyung is a smitten groom-to-be who is willing to do anything for his fiancee. He is honest, bright and optimistic.

He grew up in a well-off family, attended a good college and has a job without a lot of difficulties. Because of his outgoing personality, he's often depicted as immature.

Meanwhile, bride-to-be Kim Na Eun is a well-grounded woman full of affection, laughter and determination. She's the envy of every woman for she has it all-a high-paying job, competitive career and a healthy relationship with her partner.

While the couple expects a married life straight out of a fairy tale, the reality of marriage will surprise the couple with its very daunting topics.

Lee Jin Wook and Lee Yeon Hee's realistic portrayal of their characters, as well as their chemistry, are expected to captivate viewers' attention and support.

Lee Jin Wook, Lee Yeon Hee on 'Marriage White Paper'

Actor Lee Jin Wook diversified his filmography after appearing in various dramas in 2021, such as "Sweet Home," "Voice," "Bulgasal: Immortal Souls" and "A Year-End Medley," Lee Jin Wook's transformation as a quirky husband-to-be is anticipated.

Lee Jin Wook aims to deliver a meaningful story through the drama, which will discuss the intimate and realistic story of love, relationships and marriages that everyone can surely resonate with.

On the other hand, "Reunited Worlds" actress Lee Yeon Hee promises to give comfort to people who are also going through the processes of marriage preparations, and also to married viewers.

'Marriage White Paper' Release Date and Time

Kakao TV's "Marriage White Paper" consists of a total of 12 episodes, with 30 minutes running time each.

Currently, the drama is in the process of filming. Lee Jin Wook and Lee Yeon Hee's drama is slated to air in the first half of the year on Kakao TV.

KDramaStars owns this article.

Written by Elijah Mully.
Raise your hand if you're a sucker for happy endings! Fans and viewers had their hearts broken by Kim Tae Ri and Nam Joo Hyuk's "Twenty Five, Twenty One" finale. That's why, they are tuning in to THIS drama to mend their broken hearts!

'Twenty Five, Twenty One' Viewers Obsessed With Kim Sejeong, Ahn Hyo Seop's 'A Business Proposal'

tvN's "Twenty Five, Twenty One" and SBS TV's "A Business Proposal" are two of the most popular K-Dramas today, dominating both domestic and international scenes!

The two series also reign at the top of other K-Dramas with its all-time high and double digit ratings.

On Sunday, April 3, Kim Tae Ri and Nam Joo Hyuk's "Twenty Five, Twenty One" released its much anticipated final episode, which tore fans and viewers' hearts after the main characters Na Hee Do and Baek Yi Jin didn't end up together.

Although some fans were satisfied with the drama's ending, some couldn't just accept the fate of Na Hee Do and Baek Yi Jin's relationship, saying that it was "too realistic" and heartbreaking.

With that, the "Twenty Five, Twenty One" viewers who also follow Kim Sejeong and Ahn Hyo Seop's "A Business Proposal" couldn't wait to see the drama's conclusion.

"A Business Proposal" follows the chaotic love story between a regular office employee and the company's CEO who pretend to be in a relationship, not knowing that they both fell for real.

Through the SBS drama, they hope to see a fairy tale-like ending that will feed their romantic imagination, and mend their aching hearts.

'A Business Proposal' Finale Release Date, Time and Where To Watch

The romance comedy series "A Business Proposal" delivered a worthwhile K-Drama watching experience, all thanks to the actors' versatility and chemistry.

Now that the drama is ending, the production unit of the drama hopes to continue its all-time high ratings and double digit rating streak.

They also wish to surpass the previously recorded drama ratings, and achieve a new personal best through its final episode.

"A Business Proposal" episode 12 airs on Tuesday, April 5 at 10:00 p.m. KST on SBS TV.

It will also be available on Netflix with English subtitles at 11:30 p.m. KST.

What To Expect From Kim Sejeong, Ahn Hyo Seop

After the drama ends, Ahn Hyo Seop and Kim Sejeong will jump onto new projects! The two stars are eager to widen their acting roles, and deliver new works for fans to enjoy.

Ahn Hyo Seop is set to star in the upcoming drama "In Your Time" with Jeon Yeo Bin and Kang Hoon.

The sci-fi melodrama follows the story of a young woman who travels back in time after her heart gets broken due to her boyfriend's sudden demise.

She finds herself as a high school student and meets a friend who resembles her ex-boyfriend a lot. Things get complicated after a new figure comes into the picture.

"Into Your Time" is a remake of the Taiwanese drama "Someday or One Day."

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE THIS: Kim Sejeong, Ahn Hyo Seop Sing 'A Business Proposal' OST To Celebrate Double Digit Ratings

On the other hand, Kim Sejeong will pair up with Nam Yoon Su in "Today's Webtoon," a South Korean remake of the Japanese manga "Sleepeeer Hit!."

In the drama, Kim Sejeong transforms into a judo athlete-turned-webtoon artist, who tries to live life while facing unexpected difficulties, challenges and mishaps.

The two new dramas are slated to air in the second half of the year on Netflix and SBS TV, respectively.

KDramaStars owns this article.

Written by Elijah Mully.
Ahn Hyo Seop, Kim Sejeong, Kim Min Gyu and Seol In Ah's much-awaited "A Business Proposal" Episode 12 finally graced the small screen! While fans and viewers wish for a happy ending, the two couples' relationships get compromised due to unexpected challenges.

Will the two couples overcome life's unexpected hurdles? Keep on reading to know what happened in the finale.

'A Business Proposal' Episode 12: Kang Tae Mu Meets Shin Ha Ri's Parents

After spending the night together, Kang Tae Mu (Ahn Hyo Seop) sends Shin Ha Ri (Kim Sejeong) home. Unfortunately, he is welcomed by Ha Ri's fuming parents. He then explains himself and his intentions with their daughter.

Tae Mu asks Ha Ri's parents' approval for their relationship and confesses that he intends to marry Ha Ri in the future.

Meanwhile, Jin Young Seo's (Seol In Ah) father showed his true colors and asked Cha Sung Hoon (Kim Min Gyu) to break up with his daughter.

Jin Young Seo Plans To Create Own Legacy

After hearing about her father's plans, she goes to his office and submits her resignation letter as his director and successor. She swears to prove she can stand on her own, without her power-hungry father's help and big name.

With the help of Sung Hoon, Young Seo builds a new life free from her father's scrutiny and tight hold.

On the other hand, Tae Mu worries about his grandfather's declining health.

Shin Ha Ri Tries To Win Kang Da Goo's Heart

In hopes to win Kang Da Goo's (Lee Deok Hwa) heart, Ha Ri asks Tae Mu to let her nurse his grandfather at the hospital.

Ha Ri tends to Chairman Kang's needs in spite of the latter's refusal.

Unbeknownst to Ha Ri, the chairman liked her the first time around. However, he's just frustrated at the fact that she and his grandson fooled him with fabricated details about Ha RI.

In "A Business Proposal" episode 12, Tae Mu learns about his grandfather's poor health that can't be helped by surgery.

Kang Tae Mu Flies To America

To receive proper treatment, Tae Mu and his grandfather fly to the United States.

Tae Mu asked Ha Ri to come with them, but the former refused in order to avoid many rumors and gossip about the two of them.

While Tae Mu works abroad, Ha Ri does her job properly in South Korea.

Tae Mu and Ha Ri spend their days missing each other, and satisfying their longing through video calls.

A year later, Young Seo built her own company with Sung Hoon's guidance. But Tae Mu is still away while Ha Ri misses him.

Kang Tae Mu Asks Shin Ha Ri's Hand For Marriage

Ha Ri sees ridiculous news about Tae Mu's engagement with a foreign cellist.

Frustrated, she books a flight to America to confront her cheating boyfriend. To her surprise, Tae Mu patiently waits for her in their street, looking really great than ever.

Tae Mu reassures Ha Ri that the rumor is pure nonsense, and that she's the only one he loves.

With that, Tae Mu fishes out a couple rings from his pocket and asks for Ha Ri's hand in marriage.

Even if Ha Ri doesn't say it out loud, the love and connection they share already answer Tae Mu's proposal.

This time around, Ha Ri is more than willing to marry Tae Mu and spend her life with him.

KDramaStars owns this article.

Elijah Mully wrote this.
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A train derailment is shown near Field, B.C., Monday, Feb. 4, 2019. Defendants in lawsuits filed by families who lost loved ones in the train derailment are denying any wrongdoing in the deaths of three Canadian Pacific Railway employees.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh
Harmandeep Kaur, shown in a family handout photo, died after being attacked last weekend at the Okanagan campus of the University of British Columbia, where she worked as a security guard. THE CANADIAN PRESS-HO
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It was not too long ago, but it seems like decades when traveling for a CME conference was a routine part of being a physician as looking up articles on UpToDate or giving patients bad news. But like so many other things in life, the reality of CME conferences has changed.

Most training programs give allowance to physicians for CME conferences on a yearly basis. After training, you have to keep yourself updated in your specialty, and ongoing learning is indispensable to any medical career. In most hospital-employed positions, physicians get days off and financial allocation for CME. In private practices, which are dying slowly as large hospital systems are engulfing them mercilessly, allowances for CME learning are factored into clinical practice and overhead expenses.

It used to be very exciting to look forward to attending the CME conferences. Most physicians attend the annual CME conferences held by their respective professional societies. It comes with a great sense of pride and achievement if your paper gets accepted to be presented in front of an international audience. Others will choose to go to conferences that review board exam preparation materials or other such lectures that help you bridge the gaps in areas of knowledge base that are getting rusty.

Visiting such a professional conference is a wholesome experience. The feeling of being in a room full of experts from around the world in your chosen-for-life field is full of joy. As they walk up to the podium and deliver their talks about cutting-edge research, the speakers are given celebrity-like respect and applause. You get a chance to ask questions and enjoy the debates that ensue when discussing controversial grey areas. You get a chance to hang out with the specialist celebrity of your choice and pick their brains about individual cases. In breaks and in the evenings, you network with colleagues from other institutions. You attend the pharmaceutical industry expositions and marvel at the financial aspect of medical care. You attend alumni happy hours and excursions. You return brimming with the latest knowledge, having made new contacts and refreshed by breaking the monotony of daily clinical life.

A few years ago, it was time for me to start planning to go to a CME conference. Id be lying to you if I didnt tell you that the pursuit of academics is not the only intent for attending such conferences. This is also a long weekend or a couple of days off with most of the expenses paid by the employer! My mind kept coming up with questions that I was too shy to ask anybody else. Why would you not want to go to an exotic place? Why would you not think of it as a mini-vacation as well? Is it bad to think of a CME trip that way? Am I being unprofessional? Is it that in my own eyes, I fail myself that I am using an educational opportunity, partially, to satiate my recreational desires? Not finding a clear answer and concluding that my mind was ridden with professional guilt, I moved on.

I was between specialties. I had finished internal medicine training and was not interested in a conference in that field. I wanted to go into hematology/oncology but had not yet been matched for a fellowship, so I did not want to start going to hematology/oncology conferences either. I opened the web browser and started searching randomly, and I stumbled upon a search engine called CME Finder. I also found CME Cruises and CME Exotic Vacations. I couldnt help smiling to myself at the thought that I was not the only one thinking along those lines. There might be enough physicians out there who may also be looking for a two-in-one deal like me. At least enough that there are multiple search engines just for that purpose. I started looking, and you could search by cruise type and exotic location, among other options. If you wanted a specific region, they would list the names of conferences in that area, and you could choose a conference of your interest held at your desired location.

I came across a conference at an exotic beach resort location that was about medical ethics and malpractice. This was being conducted by an institute of revered reputation. I browsed the faculty list, and there was a very interesting combination of not only doctors but lawyers from across the country, all highly qualified and accomplished and well respected in their areas of expertise. I patted myself on my back for the excellent selection of a conference both in the learning content and the exotic potential of the location and the fanciness of the resort.

My experience of attending the conference was even better than I expected. I learned so much about medical ethics and different approaches toward clinical cases, not only from a physicians perspective but also from the attorneys viewpoint. I realized how pigeon-holed we have all become in our respective specialties. Gaining some knowledge in a different specialty gives a new perspective and way of thinking about your own area of expertise. I decided that I would not rule out attending medical conferences outside of my own specialty in the future.

Then the COVID pandemic happened. All the major world events got canceled. This included all CME conferences.

Zoom became a new sensation, and like everything else, all CME conferences also were changed to virtual. We are at the two-year anniversary of the beginning of the pandemic and although a few conferences are back to being held in-person but they are few and far between and poorly attended. Although there are hybrid versions of these conferences but looks like virtual conferences are here to stay.

Dont get me wrong. The virtual conferences are supremely convenient. You can attend via your laptop or your cellphone. You can listen to the talks in your car on your way to work or on your lunch break while youre having a sandwich. You can watch on your own time and replay if you missed a point from a lapse in attention. But there is no denying that the excitement and the joy of the in-person conferences are lost.

Now I go to my office and lock the door. I sit alone. I watch the screen and the monotony of one speaker after another, who is also sitting at his/her office desk, making it hard to remain attentive. My thoughts often drift to the pictures and books on the wall behind the speaker and wonder if they are wearing suit pants or pajamas. How does their choice of background reflect on their personality? There is no applause, no spontaneous laughter, or exclamations. Between two talks, I might get up to get a coffee and use the restroom, but there is no one to talk to or share the excitement of a new point that I have learned. It is hard enough to sit through a few hours of continuous zoom talks, let alone several consecutive days of back-to-back lectures.

I hope that as the pandemic recedes, professional organizations put extra effort into conducting these CME conferences in-person again. I hope that virtual conferences do not become the new norm. There is already talk about employers cutting down on the number of CME days allowances and financial reimbursement for airfare and lodging. Why take a few days off to travel to listen to some talks when you can do it on your own time and from the comfort of your office chair, they say. Classical medicine has already lost a lot of its charm by miring doctors into the web of incessant maintenance requirements of the electronic health record, which like laundry, never ends. Ending in-person conferences will be another nail in the coffin of the joys that used to be associated with this beloved profession of ours.

Farhan S. Imran is a hematology-oncology physician who blogs at Did I Ask?

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
The Foreign Affairs Minister has said the government would keep further expulsions of Russian officials from Ireland under consideration.

But Minister Simon Coveney said that keeping diplomatic efforts open was important.

It comes a week after four senior Russian officials were asked to leave Ireland because their activities had not been in accordance with international standards of diplomatic behaviour, according to the Irish government.

The UN Security Council meets today to discuss Russias ongoing invasion of Ukraine Russia must immediately end its war and remove its forces from Ukraine. Civilians must be protected pic.twitter.com/3kEO9wS17i  Irish Foreign Ministry (@dfatirl) April 5, 2022

The decision came following security advice received last Monday.

The Russian ambassador was summoned to a meeting at the department of foreign affairs last week and the four officials were given days to leave.

Minister Coveney said the government would keep an open mind and would keep further expulsions under consideration.

He added: I have made it clear that I think it makes sense to have diplomatic channels open and to have a Russian embassy here despite the fact that I understand fully that Irish people are incredibly angry with what is happening at the moment and they rightly point the finger at Russia in terms of being the cause of all of this.

But even when a war is taking place and you have a fundamental difference of opinion, keeping diplomatic efforts open, in terms of finding a basis for peace is important.

It is also important in terms of being able to protect and represent Irish people who live in Russia, who live in Ukraine, who live in Belarus in terms of the future.

We will keep an open mind and will keep further expulsions under consideration.

We made a decision to ask four senior members of the Russian embassy to leave Ireland, we may go beyond that but I am not in a position to announce anything further on that today.

Speaking in Dublin yesterday (Tuesday April 6), Mr Coveney also said that he feared that more evidence of Russian atrocities in Ukraine would emerge.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is to make an historic address to the Dail today (Wednesday April 6).

Mr Coveney said he expected Mr Zelensky to emphasise the brutality of what had been witnessed in some of the parts of Ukraine that were occupied by Russian forces, including Bucha.

Certainly, my conversation with the Ukrainian foreign minister earlier this week was a very sobering and difficult conversation, Mr Coveney added.

He was very graphic and detailed and very emotional in terms of what has happened to his people, in terms of murder, rape and brutality and torture of civilians in Bucha.

Of course, the big fear is that we are going to see more scenes like that in towns which Russian troops have been driven out of.

I think that is part of the reason why the commission has brought forward a very strong package of sanctions. I think we will hear tomorrow the need for stronger deterrents, accountability also.
There has been a plea for help from the Russian Embassy in Ireland as it faces a fuel shortage.

Diplomats have complained that Irish oil companies have refused to deliver supplies to their Dublin property due to the invasion of Ukraine.

The embassy has become the focal point for Irish anger over the war raged by Vladimir Putin.

The Irish Daily Mirror reported that the embassy has written a letter to Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveneys department about the issue.

They have urged the Irish Government to intervene in what they have termed as a clearly discriminatory case.

Asked about the matter on Tuesday, Irelands deputy premier Leo Varadkar said that, while he does not have sympathy for the Russian Embassy, there are rules in which Ireland must follow when hosting international diplomats.

There are particular rules under the Vienna Conventions as to how were supposed to treat diplomats and diplomatic commissions in our country so I think they have to be followed, the Tanaiste said.

I actually didnt have the chance to read that article so I dont know the details.

The embassy has been the scene of demonstrations by those opposed to the invasion of Ukraine.

Since the invasion began, protests have been staged across the city and the country as both Irish people and Ukrainians living in Ireland gathered to express outcry at the war.

The Irish Government has also face repeated calls to expel the Russian Ambassador to Ireland, Yury Filatov.

Last month a man was charged with criminal damage and dangerous driving after his lorry rammed the embassy gates on Orwell Road in the south of the city.

On Tuesday evening the embassy had not confirmed whether it had managed to secure fuel supply.

Meanwhile Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is set to address the two houses of the Irish Parliament on Wednesday.
Shenandoah, IA (51601)

Today

Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low 48F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low 48F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph.
Boone County voters chose to approve a proposed use tax Tuesday, while Columbia residents also approved the city's own use tax.
The US announced new sanctions on Russian financial institutions and individuals, including Russian President Vladimir Putin's two adult daughters, as it aims to increase economic pressure on Russia and Putin himself following horrific images from the Ukrainian city of Bucha.
KOMSCO CEO Bahn Jahng-Shick, left, shakes hands with Kyrgyzstan's Minister of Digital Development Talantbek Imanov, after signing an MOU in Kyrgyzstan. Courtesy of KOMSCO





By Yoon Ja-young







The state-run Korea Minting, Security Printing & ID Card Operating Corp. (KOMSCO) has signed an MOU with the Kyrgyzstan government to cooperate in the latter's e-government project, which will pave the way for the export of KOMSCO's technologies in digital identification cards and authentication.







According to KOMSCO, Wednesday, its CEO Bahn Jahng-Shick signed an MOU with Kyrgyzstan's Minister of Digital Development Talantbek Imanov, and suggested joint projects, including the issuance of mobile identification cards and the digitization of tax payment stamps.







KOMSCO, which offers advanced technology in mobile identification cards, has been supplying the Kyrgyzstan government with chip-embedded resident cards since 2017, through an official development assistance (ODA) program. Following the MOU, the Korean company is expected to cooperate with the Kyrgyzstan government in its project to upgrade the resident cards into mobile ones.







KOMSCO also plans to export its authentication technology to Kyrgyzstan, so that liquor and tobacco products circulating in the country can have authentication labels on them to prevent tax evasion and forgery.







The Central Asian country has been putting efforts into digitization, also cooperating closely with the Korean government in ICT. KOMSCO has been designated by the Korean government as an organization in charge of mobile identification cards, and has been testing the issuance of mobile driver's licenses in Seoul and Daejeon.







Bahn said the MOU will provide an opportunity for the company to present its digital identification card and anti-forgery technologies abroad.







"We will expand our exports to the digital sector from the traditional areas of security paper and ink," he said.


gettyimagesbank





The Constitutional Court has ruled that it is constitutional to punish those who bring marijuana into the country, regardless of how they end up possessing the substance, officials said Wednesday.







In a unanimous decision, the court dismissed a constitutional petition filed against the Narcotics Control Act that stipulates heavy punishment for those possessing and bringing in marijuana even if they did not purchase it.







Under the law, violators can be sentenced to between five years and life imprisonment unless they have received approval from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety to bring in the drug for medical, academic or public purposes.







The petition was filed by a woman who was sentenced to prison for having five cannabis cartridges in her baggage while entering Korea from Vietnam in 2019. She claimed they belonged to her foreign husband and were lawfully purchased.







The Constitutional Court said that how she came to possess the marijuana was not an important element to consider as long as the act of bringing it in increased the possibility of its distribution and harm to society.







All acts of bringing marijuana into the country from abroad are considered imports, even if the drug was not purchased by the possessor, the court said. (Yonhap)








By Lee Kyung-hwa





"We choose to go to the moon" said John F. Kennedy in 1961. In 1969, the United States achieved the first successful Apollo 11 moon landing. And not long ago, Tesla founder Elon Musk announced that he was accepting tourists for his private lunar travel project, "Dear Moon."







Throughout human history and up to the present age, we have looked to the moon as a source of inspiration and aspiration. The moon: humanity's only hope.







At the current historical juncture, even pleasant phenomena may be cause for dismay. The warmth of the sun reminds us of climate change. The cool water droplets falling from the clouds make us think of acid rain.







Philosopher Bruno Latour wrote: "Now it is one moon in the night sky. It is the only object we can look at without feeling any discomfort." Current climate change and ecological issues, the war in Ukraine, the division and isolation experienced during and after COVID-19, and the economic crisis that has resulted  all these are the situation we are in now.







In 1984, Nam June Paik released his satellite art show, "Good Morning Mr. Orwell." This project, which has been referred to as a "moonlight sonata in the electronic age," transmitted to the world through an artificial satellite mimicking the moon in the sky. This work featured Beatles music videos, celebrities, and artists from around the world, including John Cage, Joseph Beuys, Charlotte Moorman, Yves Montand and Laurie Anderson.







At the time, George Orwell's novel "1984" predicted a dystopia and Paik responded cheerfully with humor and satire. He proposed a reality in which high-tech media and humans could coexist and be connected through art.







An important aspect of this connection is Paik's coalescence of Eastern and Western thought with scientific and technological principles. He channeled his insight to envision art as a means of multifaceted communication, exclaiming, "For the first time in human history, the result of weakness overcoming power!"







I have recently been drawn to symbols of this phenomenon in the natural world. One such symbol is exemplified by Shuya Abe's work, "Solar Eclipse," imagery from which I sampled in a video I made a while back. During a solar eclipse, the moon moves in front of the sun, creating a temporary and beautiful phenomenon.







In the 1960s, a young, physically unimpressive Asian artist posed an eclipse of his own: a bold and shocking challenge to the eurocentric art world. This artist was Nam June Paik. After studying aesthetics and music at the University of Tokyo during the 1950-53 Korean War, he moved to Germany and the United States to establish video art.







Paik's video art relies on multiple monitors. Conceptually, his work connects sound, electron movement, media and entails the harmonization of disparate elements. From a Western perspective, it is a festival. The delightful artistry of Paik has given rise to a network of interconnected minds and brings the future into the present, converting the crises of the world into a celebration.







In Korean history, we have traditionally been a nation of singing and dancing. The phenomenon of BTS' K-pop culture can be seen as a modern resurgence of this. Just as BTS has now become the hope of young people around the world, Paik had already captured the hearts of people around the world through art at that time.







In the Neolithic age, the moon was the equivalent of the television of the 20th century. With the emergence of the internet and the smartphone in the 21st century, the metaphor may now even extend to the metaverse.







Paik, who said that the role of an artist is to think about the future, was a true genius. At the current historical moment, we have witnessed non-eurocentric histories supplanted and minimized by the colonization of Western-centrism for centuries, as well as occasions of renewal.







In East Asian Buddhism and philosophy, the moon is often compared to a woman's womb, which symbolizes Buddha's compassion and vitality. In the poem, "Electronical Moon," King Sejong points to the Buddha-nature that is reflected and thus resides in all waters throughout the earth.







The screen of a TV monitor with electron beams flowing through it is like the surface of the water illuminated by the moonlight on a dark night.







The scan lines on a TV monitor are a metaphor for the ripples of every water surface on earth. When the water flows, the moon flows with it; when the water stops flowing, the moon stops with it and when the water swirls, the moon swirls with it.







The moon has long been an image of vision and connection to the future. The famous bra composed of television sets, worn by Charlotte Moorman as she played the cello in "TV Bra for Living Sculpture," showed the first American astronaut landing on the moon in 1969. If Paik were alive today, he might have aired footage in which billionaires such as Elon Musk go on a trip to the moon.







Now, as Bruno Latour suggests, our hope is the moon. When Pandora broke the taboo and opened her box, all the evils within  disease, sadness, poverty, war, hatred  broke free, and the last thing that remained was hope. Humanity has always kept this hope.







I would like to suggest Paik, an unimposing young man from the East who took on this challenge in the 20th century, as the most important writer to be reexamined in the 21st. In a world troubled by chaos and darkness, the spirit of his work, which addressed issues such as technology, the environment and human rights, will shine brightly like the moonlight.







) is a globally renowned artist director and designer. She is international director of the Nam June Paik Cultural Foundation.











Lee Kyung-hwa ( kyunghwaleeart@gmail.com
By Choe Chong-dae





Greece, officially known as the Hellenic Republic, is recognized as the cradle of Western civilization with its profound philosophical traditions, literary and theatrical genius, and foundational scientific and mathematical contributions. Greece is also the birthplace of the Olympic Games and democracy. The modern universal values of human rights, freedom, justice, fairness and the rule of law originate from ancient Greece.



A great number of Korean archeological artifacts excavated in Gyeongju, such as glassware, stone human figures and clay dolls exhibit influences of Hellenic, Persian and Arabian cultures. Remarkably, the faces of the two stone warriors standing guard in front a royal tomb of Silla have Western or Arabian features, suggesting that the ancient Unified Silla Dynasty of Korea engaged in cultural and trade with the Middle East and the West through the Silk Road. They expose contact with India, China, Rome and Hellenized Mediterranean culture.



Greece dispatched troops to Korea as part of the United Nations Allied Forces soon after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Thanks to their exemplary philanthropic spirit, more than 10,000 Greek Expeditionary Forces helped defend Korea's freedom and democracy.



Although Greece is far from Korea geographically, the countries have become closer thanks to an exhibition titled "Raiment of the Soul."



On March 25, I had the great pleasure of being invited to tour the exhibition with a select group of guests. The tour was led by Ms. Ekaterini Loupas, Greece's ambassador to Korea. I was fortunate to enjoy detailed explanations of the craftsmanship of traditional Greek costumes by the ambassador herself. The exhibition is open to the general public until June 3 at KF Gallery in central Seoul, organized by the Embassy of the Hellenic Republic in Seoul and the Korea Foundation (KF).



The photographs on display highlight distinctive works of artistic inspiration that honor the history of Greece through its most iconic garments.



Featured at the exhibition are unique and impressive portraits by visionary photographer Vangelis Kyris. He was inspired by the exquisite costume collection at the National Historical Museum of Athens to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution of 1821. That revolution resulted in the foundation of an independent Greek state after four centuries of Ottoman Empire rule. Embroidery artist Anatoli Georgiev transformed the printed canvases by embellishing colorful pigments with masterful needlework, employing golden, silver, silk and cotton threads.



Crafted during the 18th and 19th centuries in various regions of Greece, these costumes belonged to prominent figures of the Greek revolution such as courageous warriors of freedom, heroes and patriots including Otto, the first king of Greece. The bridal and festive costumes are sophisticated works of art that represent the collective modern Greek soul. They come from various regions of the Hellenic world which are historic crossroads of cultures. They symbolize the history of each locale. Each garment has distinctive fabrics and motifs influenced by both the Christian West and the Ottoman East. The costumes have unique expressions that are different yet complement each other. Reality is portrayed through a completely creative perspective.



I was most impressed by the photograph titled "Costume of Kyra Frosyni" representing 18th-century Ioannia. It is an innovative, hand-finished embroidery using gold cords, stitching and metal sequins on printed, cotton canvas.



As a significant encounter between Greek history, traditional culture and contemporary art, this special exhibition will raise our awareness of the beauty of elaborate Greek costumes that symbolize love, strength and the abundance of the soul of historic Greek culture itself.





Choe Chong-dae is a guest columnist of The Korea Times. He is president of Dae-kwang International Co., and director of the Korean-Swedish Association. He can be reached at choecd@naver.com




By John J. Metzler





As Ukraine's conflict rolls on, most countries remain fixated on the deadly clash between the Russian invaders and heroically spirited Ukrainian defenders. This war in Europe has reawakened political and strategic attention along the old East-West axis.



Yet thousands of miles beyond the widening tragedy in Ukraine, a new threat has reemerged on the Korean Peninsula with a provocative long range missile test by communist North Korea. I'm speaking of course about dictator Kim Jong-un's theatrically staged and successful launch of a long range Hwasong-17 ICBM missile, which is estimated to be capable of hitting the United States mainland.



Not to be overshadowed by the Ukraine war, or possibly to divert attention away from it, the North Korean government is continuing its old strategy. This year alone, the quaintly titled Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has fired off short, medium and long range missiles on eight different dates. The reactions beyond East Asia have been characterized mostly by ambivalence.



The current test was swiftly condemned by the United States, Japan and South Korea. Indeed South Korea's outgoing President Moon Jae-in said the firing violated Pyongyang's prior self-imposed ICBM moratorium, adding that the situation is "urgent and serious."



Recall that a mere five years ago the U.S. and East Asia stood on the brink of war; North Korea's leader had threatened to nuke Japan, Guam, Hawaii and even the U.S. mainland. U.S. former President Donald Trump sternly warned North Korea that any such actions would bring immediate "fire and fury" upon Kim's regime.



The world watched with trepidation but Kim Jong-un soon blinked. Before long, then-President Trump held unprecedented diplomatic negotiations to defuse North Korea's reckless future antics. The June 2018 Singapore Summit, held between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, with the strong support of South Korea's President Moon, brought an unexpected lull to the nuclear crisis.



The negotiations in Singapore stopped the clock with the moratorium on North Korea's missile testing but it did not totally solve the wider North Korean nuclear crisis.



Since 2018, the DPRK had not fired any long range missiles  until now.



"This year alone, 13 ballistic missiles have been launched across 10 sets of tests, each a violation of Security Council resolutions. We are deeply concerned by the increased tempo of these launches and the growing capability they represent," British U.N. Ambassador Barbara Woodward told the Security Council.



Given the escalating situation, for the first time since 2017, the U.N. Security Council met to discuss the DPRK's widening missile proliferation and testing. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield warned delegates, "It's not a regional issue. It's an issue for all of us. The DPRK's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and its ballistic missile delivery systems poses a threat to every member of the global community."



So, amid multiple global conflicts and wars, is the U.N. returning again to the North Korea crisis? Already Kim's regime is heavily sanctioned economically and isolated politically.



Yet realistically, is the current showdown with the Pyongyang regime political coincidence or possibly in political connivance with North Korea's allies, China and Russia? In other words, is there any direct coordination between Beijing and Moscow to divert attention from Russia's military stalemate in Ukraine?



Viewed in the wider context, Harry Kazianis, the director of Korean Studies at the Center for the National Interest in Washington, stated somberly, "North Korea's testing of an ICBM was an event that never had to happen." He added, "Had the Biden Administration decided to make the North Korea issue a priority, and not ignored the Kim regime's build-up of nuclear weapons technology that can kill millions of people in minutes, at least some measure of progress could have been made."



It seems that the North Korea portfolio was put on the back burner by the incoming Biden team.



Seoul's The Korea Times stated in an editorial March 25, "North Korea seems to have tried to make the most of the unstable international security situation following Russia's sweeping invasion of Ukraine." The crisis has reemerged while the U.S. is focused on the Ukraine war.



There are many moving political parts here; the Biden team's relative indifference to Korea has suddenly been jolted, South Korea's new president-elect, Yoon Suk-yeol, will soon take office with his promise to be tougher on the Pyongyang regime, and of course, North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, who craves the diplomatic spotlight. Equally, there are China and Russia, which see the strategic Korean Peninsula as a nexus of their own geopolitical interests in East Asia.



Despite the Ukraine crisis, events in East Asia have reasserted themselves.





John J. Metzler (jjmcolumn@earthlink.net) is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of "Divided Dynamism  The Diplomacy of Separated Nations: Germany, Korea, China."








Kori Nuclear Power Plant in Busan Korea Times file



By Lee Kyung-min



The incoming Yoon Suk-yeol administration will likely extend the lifespan of 10 aging nuclear reactors to realize the president-elect's campaign pledge to make nuclear power account for up to 35 percent of the country's energy source, up from the current 29.4 percent, according to the presidential transition committee Wednesday.



The extension of the old reactors is essentially the only viable option, since the construction of new ones will take a considerable amount of time due to identifying suitable locations, which almost always should be preceded by government feasibility studies.



This is also evidenced by periodic safety reviews conducted by the state-run Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power (KHNP) with the Nuclear Safety and Security Commission, a nuclear safety regulatory and policy-making body, Monday, concerning the planned closure of Kori 2, a 40-year-old nuclear reactor in Busan. Had the state-run energy firm not submitted its request, Kori 2 would have been closed April 8, 2023.



Ten old nuclear reactors are scheduled for closure by 2030. But they are expected to function as a key energy source to facilitate the low-carbon initiative, following strengthened maintenance work for safety.



The extension was also one of the top policy priorities submitted April 24 in a report to the transition committee by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy.



"We maintain that no particular reactors should be excluded from the continued operation of the entire nuclear power facilities," said Choi Ji-hyun, a senior spokesperson for the presidential transition committee.



The move effectively puts an early end to the years-long nuclear phase-out policy spearheaded by the Moon Jae-in administration, and is the first step in turning the country into a global leader in nuclear technology. It is expected to resume its focus on the development and export of small modular reactors (SMRs), the next-generation nuclear reactors that are smaller and produce less output. Yoon said during the campaign that his administration will export 10 nuclear reactors and create 100,000 related high-end jobs by 2030.



The Kori 2 reactor will be able to operate for 10 more years from 2023, upon the approval of the Nuclear Safety and Security Commission and the Korea Institute of Nuclear Safety.



Placing greater emphasis on the use of the much-blasted energy source was embraced by Prime Minister-nominee Han Duck-soo.



"We need to make a more effective use of nuclear power that produces little greenhouse gas," he told reporters, April 3.



"Nuclear energy should play a crucial role. If the function of the Nuclear Safety and Security Commission is called into question, we should create a more independent body."



Seoul National University economist Lee In-ho said the reactor's extension is a step in the right direction.



"A stable supply of nuclear energy backed by strengthened safety protocols will help reduce both industrial production costs and living expenses for the public at least for the time being, amid extreme volatility in the global energy commodity prices sparked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine."


Angola, IN (46703)

Today

Cloudy with light rain this evening. Low around 45F. Winds NE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

Cloudy with light rain this evening. Low around 45F. Winds NE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%.
Fred Wooley is a naturalist, writer and land preservation/restoration enthusiast. He lives on part of an old farm overlooking an extensive fen in northern Steuben County. He can be reached at fwooley@frontier.com.
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Super Junior held the fan event "SUPER JUNIOR Japan Special Event 2022 Return of the KING" at Saitama Super Arena, Japan for 3 days from April 2 to 4, and built special memories with fans.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Super Junior Leeteuk Posts Message From Someone Pretending to Be Him + Warns Fans
Controversial YouTuber Sojang accused NMIXX member Sullyoon of dating a male idol. Keep on reading to learn the truth about the situation.

NMIXX Sullyoon Reportedly Dating Male Idol

On April 4, controversial South Korean YouTuber Sojang uploaded a video alleging NMIXX member Sullyoon is dating a male idol.

On March 31, Sullyoon was photographed on her way home following NMIXX's appearance on "M Countdown." In the photo, Sullyoon's background could be seen as she clutched her phone.

Upon further inspection, a person's photo can be seen on the screen. Sojang claimed the picture was definitely of a man.

The photos were taken by a fansite named Homma. The images were previews they shared online. However, after speculations that the picture was of a man Sullyoon could be dating, Homma deleted the photos. They most likely deleted the images due to overwhelming backlash from the fans.

Sojang claimed that the male in the photo is an idol and named several stars it could be.

NCT Dream member Jisung, who is known for his sharp nose, was one of the idols named. They claimed his nose matches the nose of the person in the photo.

MONSTA X member Shownu was also named. They claimed that he was seen wearing the same outfit in a place with a similar background in the past.

Sojang claims it is more plausible that the male idol in the photo is Shownu. Jisung has not been seen in a similar place as the male in Sullyoon's photo.

Sojang also mentions that Sullyoon could simply like Shownu as a fan or that the male in the image is not an idol at all.

Check out Sojang's video here:

The Truth Behind NMIXX Sullyoon's Dating Rumors

As the rumors of her dating started circulating online, Sullyoon indirectly shut down all the rumors by sharing a photo on Instagram.

The idol revealed the photo that Sojang and many internet users were trying to decipher. It turns out the picture is not of a male idol at all. The photo is actually a side profile image of herself!

Sojang shared the photo on Instagram, revealing that the alleged male in the image is just her with brown hair and bangs. With that, Sullyoon effectively shut down dating rumors. It is most likely the idol is single.

What do you think of the situation? Tell us in the comments below!

For more K-Pop news and updates, always keep your tabs open here on KpopStarz.

KpopStarz owns This

Written by Alexa Lewis
If you were looking for the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee website and ended up here, try this





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KATHMANDU, April 5 (Xinhua) -- Teams led by Nepal Army will be collecting waste on four mountains including Mt. Qomolangma, the tallest peak in the world.

General Prabhu Ram Sharma, chief of the Army Staff, announced the commencement of the Clean Mountain Campaign and handed over a banner that reads "An Endeavour to Save the Himalayas."

Three teams are mobilized for the cleaning campaign with a view to collecting 35 tons of waste left by climbers on Mt. Qomolangma (8,848.86m), Mt. Lhotse (8,516m), Mt. Kanchenjunga (8,586m) and Mt. Manaslu (8,163m), and they will set off in two batches on Wednesday and April 16.

"A total of 92 people, including Nepal Army personnel, doctors and the Sherpa guides, are mobilized for the campaign," Himansu Khadka, a Nepal Army brigadier general, said at a press meet.

The waste collected will be segregated as biodegradable and non-biodegradable, and they will be buried and recycled respectively.

The teams have accepted acclimatization training from February 28 to March 29, and the cleaning campaign is scheduled to end in late May.

The Nepal Army has been leading the clean campaign since 2019 amid waste piling up on the tall mountains that attract climbers from around the world.

The teams collected 10 tons of waste in 2019, and the amount went up to 27.6 tons in 2021. The campaign was postponed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

April to May is the main season to summit the Himalayan mountains on Nepal's side, in particular Mt. Qomolangma which straddles Nepal and China.
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A group seeking to donate for tornado relief in western Kentucky surpassed its goal on the first day of its fundraiser.

Lake Geneva Middle Schools SOUL Club hosted its Cash After Chaos fundraiser from March 21 through 24.

The SOUL club set a goal of $700 for their fundraiser, with hopes of having each student and staff member donate at least one dollar. On Day One, the club raised over $821.

Two sixth grade students were large contributors to surpassing the fundraising goal.

Michael Braun and Josiah Dame raised over $429 for the fundraiser.

Without prompting from their parents or the school, the boys decided to do a bake sale. They met every day at home after school and baked on their own for four afternoons.

Dame had won a $25 gift card during a contest at youth group and opted to use that to pay for the baking supplies. Braun and Dame then had a bake sale outside downtown Lake Geneva on March 19 and 20.

We are so thankful for the support of all of our LGMS families. The goal of this fundraiser was to remind our middle school students that giving money is not just about making a donation but making a difference, said Jennifer Kinney, Lake Geneva Middle School SOUL Club Advisor. We are so proud of Michael and Josiah. They took the initiative to go above and beyond and truly helped to make a difference.

Over the course of the entire week, the Cash After Chaos fundraiser raised a total of $1,362.87.

The Cash After Chaos funds will be donated to the Western Kentucky Tornado Relief program.
The high-level Sri Lanka delegation attending the 49th session of the Human Rights Council led by the Minister of Foreign Affairs Prof. G.L. Peiris, met with the delegations of Pakistan, Palestine, South Africa, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, 1 March, 2022.

At the meeting with the Foreign Minister of Palestine, Rizad Al Maliki, Foreign Affairs Minister Peiris observed that the relations between Palestine and Sri Lanka was one of the pillars of the foreign policy of Sri Lanka. He stated that Palestine was a trusted and reliable friend of Sri Lanka and expressed appreciation for the close and cordial ties between the two countries. The Foreign Minister of Palestine also expressed his appreciation on the longstanding friendship and support extended by Sri Lanka in the international fora. The two Ministers further discussed bilateral cooperation in many areas including in the context of human rights.

During the meeting with the Federal Minister for Human Rights of Pakistan, Shireen M Mazari, Foreign Affairs Minister Peiris expressed appreciation on the longstanding and steadfast friendship and the multifaceted relations between Sri Lanka and Pakistan which encompassed education, culture and trade. The Foreign Affairs Minister also discussed Sri Lankas engagement with the UN Human Rights Council and expressed Sri Lankas sincere appreciation for Pakistans consistent support. The Federal Minister of Pakistan commended Sri Lanka's achievements on the domestic process in the human rights context. She also appreciated Sri Lankas initiatives in the tourism sector.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sri Lanka and the delegation also held a productive meeting with the Minister of International Relations of South Africa, Dr. Naledi Pandor during which Sri Lanka's ongoing efforts towards reconciliation, unity and learning from the rich experience of South Africa's truth seeking and reconciliation mechanisms, were discussed. The South African Minister of International Relations appreciated the developments in Sri Lanka and expressed South Africa's readiness to cooperate with Sri Lanka's efforts on reconciliation.

Foreign Minister Peiris also held discussions with the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs of Egypt, Khaled El Bakry during which the Egyptian Vice Minister expressed understanding on the position articulated by Prof. Peiris during his statement earlier in the day, at the High Level segment of the Human Rights Council.



Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Colombo

03 March, 2022

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Minister of Foreign Affairs Professor G.L. Peiris held wide ranging discussions with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet at her office in the Palaise des Nations in Geneva.

He was accompanied by Minister of Justice, Ali Sabry, State Minister of Production, Supply and Regulation of Pharmaceuticals, Prof. Channa Jayasumana and Secretary to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Admiral Jayanath Colombage.





Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Colombo

03 March, 2022

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Washington, April 6: Shanna Moakler expressed heartfelt greetings to her ex-husband Travis Barker for his surprise wedding to reality TV star Kourtney Kardashian in Las Vegas. People magazine reached out to Moakler, 47, following the news that Barker and Kardashian had tied the knot early Monday at One Love Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. Kourtney Kardashian And Travis Barker Marry In Las Vegas After The GRAMMYs  Reports.

"Congratulations to the happy couple. I wish them the best that life has to offer on their journey together," said Moakler who was married to Barker from 2004 to 2008 and shares two children daughter Alabama, 16, and son Landon, 18 with him. Moakler is also mother to 23-year-old daughter Atiana De La Hoya who she shares with ex-beau and former pro boxer Oscar De La Hoya.

For the unversed, TMZ reported on Tuesday that Travis Barker and Kourtney Kardashian eloped at a Las Vegas chapel at approximately 1:30 am local time on Monday. Insiders told TMZ that Kardashian and Barker did not allow the venue to take pictures and had their own photographer and security instead. They reportedly asked for an Elvis Presley impersonator to officiate the ceremony. Also, the duo might have tied the knot in Las Vegas after Sunday's 2022 Grammy Award ceremony but there is nothing legal about it, as they have not received a marriage license, sources told Page Six.

After initially sparking dating rumours back in December 2020, the couple confirmed their romance on Instagram in February 2021. They got engaged just eight months later, when Travis popped the question in a dreamy, beachside proposal at the Rosewood Miramar hotel in Montecito, California.

This is Kourtney's first marriage, although she has three children with ex-boyfriend Scott Disick. Meanwhile, her rocker beau has been married twice before. First to Melissa Kennedy from 2001 to 2002 and Shanna Moakler from 2004 to 2008. He shares son Landon and daughter Alabama with Moakler, as per Page Six.

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Chandigarh, Apr 6 (PTI) Fourteen quintals of adulterated food items were seized by the health department teams in Punjab, officials said on Wednesday.

Punjab Health Minister Dr. Vijay Singla said the teams seized 7.80 quintals of spurious cheese in Mohali district and 6.20 quintals in Samana town of Patiala district.

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Besides, the inter-district teams of the health department have also collected 110 samples of milk, cheese, 'khoya', powdered milk, 'ghee' and other food items in 13 districts in two days, which were being sent to the state food lab for testing, according to an official release.

Singla said complaints were pouring in regarding the supply of substandard cheese in Mohali and acting on a tip off, a team set up check posts in different areas.

Also Read | Reliance Industries Sets Up Free EV Charging Infrastructure for Employees in Mumbai.

The stock of cheese was seized after taking samples from the vehicle which was carrying it for supply.

The team also raided a cheese making unit. Apart from this, the team also collected eight more samples of milk products and sweets with artificial colours from different factories in Mohali, it said.

"No one will be allowed to play havoc with the health of the people of the state by selling adulterated or spurious food products", said the minister.

The Punjab government has adopted zero tolerance towards adulteration of food items in the state, said the minister.

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Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], April 6 (ANI): The Union Health Ministry on Wednesday said that said present evidence does not suggest the presence of XE variant of COVID denying media reports that claimed that a case of the new mutant was reported in Mumbai.

"Hours after report of detection of XE variant of Coronavirus in Mumbai,

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@MoHFW_INDIA has said present evidence does not suggest the presence of the new variant," PIB Maharashtra said in a tweet.

It referred to the Health Ministry clarification on the reported case of COVID XE Variant in Mumbai.

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The Health Ministry said FastQ files in respect of the sample, which is being said to be #XEVariant were analysed in detail by genomic experts of INSACOG who have inferred that the genomic constitution of this variant does not correlate with the genomic picture of 'XE' variant".

The ministry said the individual who had tested positive for #XEVariant is a fully vaccinated 50-year-old woman with no comorbidity and asymptomatic.

"She had come from South Africa on February 10 and had no prior travel history. On arrival, she had tested negative for the virus," it said.

Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation had said earlier in the day that one out of the 230 samples had tested positive for the XE variant in Mumbai under the COVID genome sequencing.

The World Health Organisation had recently said that a new COVID mutant 'XE' has been found in the UK and noted that it may be more transmissible than the BA.2 sublineage of COVID-19. However, the virologists in India have said that it is not clear that the variant is strong enough to cause another COVID wave in the country even as they advised to exercise caution and follow COVID-appropriate behaviour.

XE is recombinant of Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 sublineages of COVID-19."The XE recombinant (BA.1-BA.2), was first detected in the United Kingdom on January 19 and >600 sequences have been reported and confirmed since," the WHO had said. (ANI)

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Patiala (Punjab) [India], April 6 (ANI): Kabaddi player Dharminder Singh was shot dead after a group clash outside a university in Punjab's Patiala on Tuesday night, police said.

According to police, Singh was shot allegedly due to some personal enmity.

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"We have registered a case in the matter and looking for the accused. The deceased and accused both are the residents of Daun Kalan village in Patiala district," said Superintendent of Police, Patiala, Harpal Singh.

The deceased's brother said, "My brother was a Kabaddi player and used to organize Kabaddi matches as well."

Also Read | Meta Now Allow Users To Share Videos From Third-Party Apps Directly to Facebook Reels.

A video of the incident has also gone viral on social media.

Earlier on March 14 this year, international Kabaddi player Sandeep Nangal Ambia was shot dead in Jalandhar. (ANI)

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New Delhi, Apr 6 (PTI) Prime Minister Narendra Modi has suggested to secretaries of the central government to hand-hold the private sector to give impetus to manufacturing and job creation, and to take immediate steps to fill up existing vacancies in ministries and departments, Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba said.

The prime minister, in his meeting with the secretaries on April 2, also stressed that employment should be the focus of all government interventions in the public and private sectors.

Also Read | Rajasthan Cabinet Approves Film Tourism Promotion Policy 2022.

Gauba wrote to the secretaries requesting them to "initiate immediate action" on the prime minister's suggestions.

Listing the prime minister's suggestions, Gauba wrote, "It is imperative to hand-hold the private sector to give impetus to manufacturing and job creation and help Indian companies become world leaders."

Also Read | QS World University Rankings 2022: IIT-Delhis Electrical Engineering Programme Ranked 56th Globally.

He stated the government should act as a "facilitator" and "catalytic agent" for economic development.

The letter, dated April 4, also mentioned "decriminalisation of minor offences and violations on mission mode". "All such provisions need to be reviewed and action taken accordingly to repeal/amend these provisions, in a time-bound manner," the letter stated.

Underlining that employment should be given "high priority", the Cabinet Secretary wrote it should be the focus of government interventions across public and private sectors.

"Every Ministry/Department should immediately take steps to fill up existing vacancies against sanctioned posts," the letter reads.

Categorically stating that tendency of working in silos should be "eschewed", Gauba wrote, "Important issues should be addressed through whole of government approach."

The letter also mentions fiscal discipline for states which was suggested by the prime minister and says its importance at the states' level needs to be suitably communicated.

"In this regard, the long term fiscal implications of policy measures/decisions should be analysed and shared with state governments," Gauba said in the letter.

In the meeting with Modi, several secretaries said populist schemes started by states were not economically viable and could take them down the path of Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka is currently experiencing its worst economic crisis in history.

Modi held the four-hour-long meeting with secretaries of all departments at his camp office at 7, Lok Kalyan Marg, on Saturday.

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New Delhi [India], April 6 (ANI): Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday lauded the "rich level of debate" in Lok Sabha on the Ukraine situation and evacuation of Indian citizens through Operation Ganga and said there is bipartisanship on matters of foreign policy which augurs well for India at the world stage.

The Prime Minister, who made a series of tweets, said the government will leave no stone unturned to ensure people do not face any troubles in adverse situations.

Also Read | XE Variant in India: South African Costume Designer First to Test Positive for New Omicron Variant of COVID-19 in Mumbai.

"Over the last few days, Parliament has witnessed a healthy discussion on the situation in Ukraine and India's efforts to bring back our citizens through Operation Ganga. I am grateful to all MP colleagues who enriched this discussion with their views," PM Modi said.

"The rich level of debate and the constructive points illustrate how there is bipartisanship when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Such bipartisanship augurs well for India at the world stage. It is our collective duty to care for the safety and well-being of our fellow citizens and the Government of India will leave no stone unturned to ensure our people do not face any troubles in adverse situations," he added.

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Four union ministers - Hardeep Singh Puri, Kiren Rijiju, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Gen VK Singh - who went to countries neighbouring Ukraine as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's special envoys during the evacuation effort also took part in the debate.

Congress members talked of the relevance of principles of non-alignment in the complex geopolitical situation created by the Ukraine-Russia crisis.

In his reply to the debate, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said India is "first and foremost" strongly against the conflict.

He said no solution can be arrived at by shedding blood, and at the cost of innocent lives and in this day and age, dialogue and diplomacy are the right answers to any dispute.

The minister said the contemporary global order has been built on the UN Charter, on respect for international law, and for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states.

"If India has chosen a side, it is the side of peace, and it is for an immediate end to violence. This is our principled stand, and it has consistently guided our position in international forums and debates including in the United Nations," Jaishankar said.

Participating in the debate, several members lauded the efforts of the government to bring back Indian students from Ukraine.

National Conference leader Farooq Abdullah said India "is a neutral country and never took sides". (ANI)

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Kochi, Apr 6 (PTI) The Kerala High Court has acquitted a man whom a trial court convicted of raping his lover. The High Court held that sex on promise to marry will amount to rape only if the accused has violated the decisional autonomy of the victim.

Also Read | Madhya Pradesh Typographical Error: 'Dead', 'Retired' Police Officers Among Those Transferred By Home Department.

Allowing an appeal filed by the 35-year-old man, Justices A Muhamed Mustaque and Kauser Edappagath held that this was not a case of forcible sexual act as against her will but a sexual act on a promise to marry where the consent is implicit.

Setting aside the life imprisonment awarded by the trial court, the High Court, in its March 30 order, said the victim and the accused were in a relationship for more than 10 years and the sexual act only occurred just before the preparation for the marriage was made. He had sexual intercourse with the victim on three occasions.

Also Read | Mumbai: 75-Year-Old Man Drowns While Fishing in Creek in Thane.

"The prosecution evidence itself would show that there was resistance from the parents of the accused to accept the marriage without dowry. That would show that the sexual act committed by the accused was with real intention to marry the victim and he could not hold on to his promise due to resistance from his family," the court said.

It said in the absence of any other evidence on the side of the prosecution, the conduct of the accused can only be treated as a breach of promise. "In light of the discussions, we are of the view that the accused is entitled to benefit of doubt as the prosecution has failed to prove the sexual act was on a false promise to marry or the consent was obtained by non-disclosure of material facts," the court said. Noting that the prosecutrix had not stated anything in evidence to constitute the foundational facts for attracting the presumption under Section 114-A of the Evidence Act, the High Court said, "Merely for the reason that the accused contracted another marriage immediately after the sexual act with the victim cannot give rise to the presumption of lack of consent. We cannot ignore the social circumstances of the parties." The court said the lack of consent has to be stated by the prosecutrix. The trial court had sentenced the man to undergo imprisonment for life and to pay a fine of Rs 50,000. The court was hearing an appeal moved by a man against the order of a trial court which had convicted him of offence under Section 376 (punishment for rape) of the IPC and sentenced to undergo imprisonment for life and to pay a fine of Rs 50,000.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
New Delhi [India], April 6 (ANI): Congress president Sonia Gandhi met Maharashtra Congress MLAs at 10 Janpath in Delhi on Tuesday to discuss the political situation of the state.

The meeting was held before NCP chief Sharad Pawar's dinner and after Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut's high tea meet.

Also Read | Heat Wave Conditions to Continue in Northwest, West and Central India: IMD.

More than 22 MLAs were present in the meeting that lasted for almost one hour today.

Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar has invited Maharashtra MLAs for dinner on Tuesday, as the leaders from all the parties are here for a training program in the Parliament. The training program is for all the first-time MLAs as per the parliamentary system of the country.

Also Read | Parliament Passes Bill to Include Bhogta and Other Communities in Jharkhands ST List.

Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut also invited Maharashtra MLAs for High-tea at his Delhi residence.

Suresh Narayan Dhanorkar Congress leader from Maharashtra after the meeting with Sonia Gandhi, said, "Sonia Gandhi ji gave us time, she spoke to all of us, development fund which comes should be equally distributed."

On being asked about MLAs' meeting with Sanjay Raut and Sharad Pawar, Suresh Dhanorkar said, "It's important to take everyone along."

Speaking to ANI, Congress MLA from Maharashtra Kunal Patil said, "Rahul Gandhi is travelling to different states and meeting the State leaders, MLAs. Last week, he went to Karnataka for three days and held many meetings with leaders of the states."

"He is taking this step to strengthen the party. In Maharashtra, he will visit next week this is what we have been informed, Rahul Gandhi will meet every leader and MLA in person," Patil said.

He also said, "After the meeting with Sonia Gandhi ji every MLA here is happy. I think we will again take Congress to heights in Maharashtra."

While Congress MLA Vikas Thakre said, "The meeting held with Sonia Gandhi was based on the present political situation of Maharashtra, and how to strengthen the party."

"It was a good meeting with Sonia Gandhi ji, discussion on present political situation held with her," said MLA Amin Patel.

Sources said that Maharashtra Congress MLAs wanted to meet Sonia Gandhi and discuss the political situation of the state. (ANI)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Indore, Apr 6 (PTI) The National Automotive Test Tracks (NATRAX), which tests the strength of vehicles on different parameters, has recorded a 70 per cent rise in revenue to Rs 22 crore in FY22, an official said on Wednesday.

National Automotive Testing and R&D Infrastructure Project (NATRiP) Additional Director N Karuppiah told PTI that NATRAX had earned a revenue of Rs 13 crore in 2020-21 amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

Also Read | Vivo Pad Specifications Leaked via Geekbench; Launch Expected on April 11, 2022.

NATRiP is a project under the Union Ministry of Heavy Industries.

Karuppiah said that before launching the vehicles in the market, automobile companies test them on different parameters on 14 special tracks of NATRAX.

Also Read | Honor MagicBook X 14, MagicBook X 15 Laptops Launched in India.

"We are testing private and commercial vehicles as well as ambulances, tractors and electric vehicles at NATRAX," Karupaiah said.

According to officials, the Union Ministry of Heavy Industries had formally launched NATRAX in 2018.

It was constructed over 2,960 acres at a cost of about Rs 1,320 crore in Pithampur Industrial Area, Indore, Madhya Pradesh.

NATRAX, which the government claims to be the largest in Asia, provides solutions for research and development, testing, evaluation and certification of vehicles and their parts.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Actor Naga Chaitanya is set to star in filmmaker Venkat Prabhu's upcoming film, the makers announced on Wednesday. The untitled film, which will be the actor's 22nd project, will be in Tamil and Telugu and is billed as a "commercial entertainer". The movie will be produced by Srinivasaa Chitturi and presented by Pavan Kumar. NC22: Naga Chaitanya Teams Up With Venkat Prabhu For A Bilingual Film.

Prabhu, who directed the blockbuster sci-fi thriller "Maanaadu", said he has prepared a "winning script" for the 35-year-old star, best known for hits like "Bangarraju", "Majili" and "Love Story". "I am aware of Naga Chaitanya's strengths and the sensibilities of Telugu audiences and hence I have prepared a winning script for the movie. It is an out and out commercial entertainer.

The film will not only have many noted actors but also have signed some popular technicians who will take care of different crafts," Prabhu said in a statement. The official Twitter account of production house Srinivasaa Silver Screen shared also announced the project and shared pictures of the filmmaker with the "Venky Mama" star. Bangarraju: Nagarjuna and Naga Chaitanya Kickstart Shooting for Their Next; Check Out New Poster!

Check Out The Tweet Below:

"This one will be special. Get ready for the fun ride," the post read. The film will be Chaitanya's first Tamil project and also marks the debut of Prabhu in Telugu. Chaitanya will soon make his debut in Hindi cinema with superstar Aamir Khan's upcoming "Laal Singh Chaddha", scheduled to release in August.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (File Photo)

Washington [US], April 6 (ANI): US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday spoke with External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar to review regional and global priorities, including the situation in Ukraine.

US State Department statement said both agreed to remain closely coordinated on developments and looked forward to meeting again soon.

Also Read | UN Agencies Say Over 500 Iraqi Children Killed by Explosive Ordnance in 5 Years.

"Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke with Indian External Affairs Minister Dr. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar today to review regional and global priorities, including the situation in Ukraine. They agreed to remain closely coordinated on developments and looked forward to meeting again soon," said State Department spokesperson Ned Price.

Taking to Twitter, Jaishankar earlier said that they discussed the latest developments pertaining to Ukraine.

Also Read | Russia-Ukraine War: US Envoy Julianne Smith to NATO Says Alliance Gathering Evidence to Hold Vladimir Putin Accountable for War Crimes in Ukraine.

"Spoke to @SecBlinken ahead of our 2+2 consultations. Discussed bilateral issues and latest developments pertaining to Ukraine," Jaishankar tweeted.

India and United States are scheduled to hold a 2+2 dialogue in Washington on April 11.

Jaishankar and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh will meet their counterparts Blinken and US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Jaishankar and Rajnath Singh will also have other meetings scheduled on the sidelines. (ANI)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Lviv (Ukraine), Apr 6 (AP) Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said French President Emmanuel Macron has agreed to provide technical and expert support for an investigation into crimes committed by Russian troops in Bucha and elsewhere.

Zelenskyy said Tuesday that he also asked Macron to help the people trapped in the besieged southern city of Mariupol.

Also Read | UN Agencies Say Over 500 Iraqi Children Killed by Explosive Ordnance in 5 Years.

In an interview with Turkey's Haberturk television in Kyiv, Zelenskyy accused Russia of trying to hide its actions in Mariupol and didn't want humanitarian aid to enter the city until they clean it all up.

Zelenskyy spoke following the discovery of bodies of civilians in towns around Kyiv that were recaptured from Russian forces.

Also Read | Russia-Ukraine War: US Envoy Julianne Smith to NATO Says Alliance Gathering Evidence to Hold Vladimir Putin Accountable for War Crimes in Ukraine.

Zelenskyy said he also expects European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell to visit Kyiv soon.

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KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR:

 In Bucha, Ukraine, burned, piled bodies among latest horrors

 Ukraine president Zelenskyy at UN accuses Russian military of war crimes

 EU proposes Russian coal ban in new sanctions.  US official: US, allies, to ban new investments in Russia

 Harvard students' site helping Ukraine refugees find housing

 Japan's top envoy brings back 20 Ukrainians from Poland

 Go to https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine for more coverage

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OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:

LVIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russian forces still are trying to push deep into Ukraine in the east, but the Ukrainian army is holding them back.

In his daily night-time video address to the nation late Tuesday, Zelenskyy said Ukraine was aware that Russia was gathering up reinforcements for another offensive.

Zelenskyy also said Ukraine is outnumbered both in troops and equipment.

We don't have a choice  the fate of our land and of our people is being decided, he said. We know what we are fighting for. And we will do everything to win.

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LVIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late Tuesday that he and Western leaders have discussed a new round of sanctions against Russia.

After what the world saw in Bucha, the sanctions against Russia must be commensurate with the gravity of the war crimes committed by the occupiers, Zelenskyy said in his daily night-time video address to the nation.

In coordination with the European Union and Group of Seven nations, the U.S. will roll out more sanctions against Russia on Wednesday. That reportedly will include a ban on all new investment in the country.

Also, the EU's executive branch has proposed a ban on coal imports from Russia in what would be the first time the 27-nation bloc has sanctioned the country's lucrative energy industry over the war.

The coal imports amount to an estimated 4 billion euros ($4.4 billion) per year.

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KYIV, Ukraine  A Ukrainian official says Russian troops have allowed 1,496 civilians to evacuate the besieged city of Mariupol by private vehicle but blocked a convoy of evacuation buses from entering.

Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said the Russian forces stopped the buses accompanied by workers of the International Committee of the Red Cross from traveling to the Sea of Azov port on Tuesday. The civilians who were able to leave in their personal vehicles traveled to Zaporizhzhia.

Mariupol has been besieged by Russian forces for a month, cut off from food, water and energy supplies and has faced relentless artillery barrage and air raids that killed thousands.

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LVIV, Ukraine  A regional official in western Ukraine says a Russian missile hit fertilizer tanks, polluting ground water.

Ternopil region Gov. Volodymyr Trush said Tuesday that the Russian missile strike destroyed six reservoirs filled with fertilizers, resulting in an ammonia leak into ground water and the Ikva River.

Authorities are advising residents not to use water wells and stop fishing and officials have organized drinking water deliveries. Trush say the environmental situation is expected to stabilize in a few days.

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MOSCOW  The Russian foreign minister is accusing Ukraine's government of sabotaging talks on ending the fighting in Ukraine, warning that Moscow will not play cat and mouse. Sergey Lavrov specifically warns that Moscow will not accept the Ukrainian demand that a prospective peace agreement include an immediate pullout of Russian troops to be followed by a referendum in Ukraine on accepting the deal.

In televised remarks Tuesday, he says that if the peace deal fails to win approval in a referendum, a new deal will have to be negotiated. He says that we don't want to play such cat and mouse.

Lavrov pointed at a 2015 peace deal for eastern Ukraine signed in Minsk, Belarus, that was brokered by France and Germany but never implemented. He says that we don't want a repeat of the Minsk agreements. He also says Ukraine is sabotaging the talks by stonewalling Russian demands for demilitarization and denazification of the country.

The tough statements from Lavrov contrasted with optimistic signals made by both Ukrainian and Russian representatives after the latest round of talks in Istanbul, Turkey, on March 29.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged all Spanish companies to completely halt business with Russia and called for tougher Western sanctions against Moscow that would include a ban on Russian oil imports.

Speaking in a video address to the Spanish Parliament on Tuesday, Zelenskyy denounced the Russian atrocities against civilians in Ukrainian cities, saying they represented war crimes for which Russian officers should face an international tribunal.

Zelenskyy said the sanctions must be really powerful.

How can it be allowed that Russian banks generate incomes even as the Russian military tortures ordinary civilians to death in Ukrainian cities, how can European companies engage in trade with the state that deliberately destroys our people? he asked.

In an emotional speech, he drew parallels between the Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities and the 1937 bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by Nazi aircraft during the Spanish Civil War.

Zelenskyy said the fate of the entire European project, the values that unite us all is being decided in Ukraine, and urged Spanish lawmakers to do even more to force Russia to start searching for peace and respect the international law.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Speaking in a video address to the Spanish Parliament on Tuesday, Zelenskyy denounced the Russian atrocities against civilians in Ukrainian cities, saying they represented war crimes for which Russian officers should face an international tribunal.

Zelenskyy said the sanctions must be really powerful.

How can it be allowed that Russian banks generate incomes even as the Russian military tortures ordinary civilians to death in Ukrainian cities, how can European companies engage in trade with the state that deliberately destroys our people? he asked.

In an emotional speech, he drew parallels between the Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities and the 1937 bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by Nazi aircraft during the Spanish Civil War.

Zelenskyy said the fate of the entire European project, the values that unite us all is being decided in Ukraine, and urged Spanish lawmakers to do even more to force Russia to start searching for peace and respect the international law.

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LONDON  British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has issued a direct appeal to the Russian people, urging them to seek the truth about a war he called a stain on the honor of Russia.

In a video message, Johnson said Russians were being kept in the dark about the invasion of Ukraine because Russian President Vladimir Putin knows that if you could see what was happening, you would not support his war.

Johnson said Russian authorities were hiding the truth of sickening slayings of civilians and other crimes, which betray the trust of every Russian mother who proudly waves goodbye to her son as he heads off to join the military.

He told Russians they only needed an online VPN connection to gain access to independent information from around the world.

Switching from English to Russian, Johnson said: Your president stands accused of committing war crimes. But I cannot believe he's acting in your name.

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WASHINGTON  The U.S. and its European allies will impose stiff new sanctions, including a ban on new investments in Russia on Wednesday, a U.S. official says, in retaliation for Russia's war crimes in Ukraine.

The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview the announcement.

The joint action will include a ban on new investment in Russia, toughened sanctions on its financial institutions and government-owned enterprises, and more sanctions on Russian government officials and their family members.

The official said they would further Russia's economic, financial and technological isolation from the rest of the world as a penalty for its attacks on civilians in Ukraine.

- AP writer Aamer Madhani contributed to this report.

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ANKARA, Turkey  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said everyone in the Russian leadership and army who is involved in the war is responsible for war crimes committed in Ukraine.

In an interview with Turkey's Haberturk television in Kyiv on Tuesday, Zelenskyy also accused Russia of trying to hide its actions in the besieged southern city of Mariupol and did not want humanitarian aid to enter the city until they clean it all up.

Zelenskyy spoke following the discovery of bodies of civilians in towns around Kyiv that were recaptured from Russian forces.

The Russian military political leadership and everyone involved in the planning of this war and everyone who gave this order, committed war crimes in my opinion, Zelenskyy said in comments translated into Turkish.

We are not dealing with a situation where only one person can be prosecuted and be found guilty.

On the situation in Mariupol, Zelenskyy said thousands may have been killed or injured there.

I think Russia is afraid that we will successfully send humanitarian aid to Mariupol and the whole world will see what's going on there, he said. Russia doesn't want anything to be seen until they take control of the city (and) until they clean it all up.

Zelenskyy said Turkish ships were involved in efforts to evacuate injured civilians from Mariupol, but would not elaborate.

-

BUCHAREST, Romania  Authorities in Romania said Tuesday that the country is expelling 10 diplomats from Russia's embassy in Bucharest.

Romania's foreign ministry said the actions of 10 embassy workers, who have been declared persona non grata, contravene the provisions of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relationships.

The move by Romania follows a string of expulsions of Russian officials across the 27-nation European Union following a wave of criticism and shock after Russian troops are accused of committing war crimes in Ukraine.

As of Tuesday, more than 200 Russian diplomats or employees had been expelled from at least a dozen countries, including Germany, France and Italy.

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PROVIDENCE, R.I.  Ukrainian officials are renewing pressure on Chinese consumer drone-maker DJI to block a tool that they say is enabling Russian troops to find and attack Ukrainian drone operators.

Ukraine's top cybersecurity official Victor Zhora told reporters Tuesday during a press call that DJI's drone detection tool AeroScope has been sharing information on Ukrainian drones to Russians.

Both sides of the war have flown small consumer drones to monitor troop movements and help target attacks. But Ukrainian officials said Tuesday they have evidence that DJI's tool for detecting the location and flight information of nearby drones is working for Russians and not Ukrainians. A government report called for blocking all DJI products operating in Ukraine that were purchased and activated in other countries such as Russia.

DJI has previously denied such claims, saying in March that it doesn't apply preferential treatment but also can't switch off the AeroScope tool. It has expressed openness to using technology that could ground its drones in the war zone if Ukraine made a formal request but the no-fly zone would apply to both Ukrainian and Russian drones and some would still be able to fly.

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RICHMOND, Va.  Ukraine's top cybersecurity official says cyberattacks against his country have increased in the last two weeks and there's evidence that Russian military hackers that tried to break into Ukrainian state agencies also attempted to hack Latvian officials' email accounts.

Victor Zhora told reporters Tuesday that a major Ukrainian telecommunications provider, Ukrtelecom, suffered an attack on March 28, but was able to restore most of the affected service within a day.

Kirill Goncharuk, Ukrtelecom's chief information officer, said hackers used compromised credentials of an employee in Russian-occupied territory occupied to break in to his company's network. He said the employee was okay but couldn't disclose additional details for safety concerns.

Zhora said hackers had also recently gained access to the emails of staff at Ukraine's foreign ministry. He said despite the increased hacking attempts in recent days, he's not seen any successful complicated attacks on any Ukrainian critical infrastructure targets.

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UNITED NATIONS  Ukraine's president told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday that the Russian military must be brought to justice immediately for war crimes, accusing invading troops of the worst atrocities since World War II.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, making his plea via video, cited reported atrocities against civilians carried out by Russian forces in the town of Bucha on the outskirts of the capital Kyiv, saying they are no different than other terrorists like the Islamic State extremist group.

Images of slain bodies on the ground, particularly from the town of Bucha, have stirred global revulsion and led to demands for tougher sanctions and war crime prosecutions against Russia.

Zelenskyy, making his first appearance before the U.N.'s highest body, stressed there are more places in Ukraine that have suffered similar horrors. He called for a tribunal to be established that is similar to the Nuremberg tribunal set up to try war criminals after World War II.

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WARSAW, Poland  Britain's foreign secretary says her country will urge the G-7 group to impose more sanctions on Russia, saying that current sanctions have already had a crippling effect.

Liz Truss said in Warsaw that sanctions have already frozen $350 billion of Putin's war chest, saying that makes more than 60% of Russia's $604 billion in currency reserves unavailable.

Our coordinated sanctions are pushing the Russian economy back to the Soviet era, she said at a news conference with her Polish counterpart Zbigniew Rau.

She observed that Poland had seen more clearly the threat that Moscow posed in past years, even as Western countries embraced doing business with Russia.

Poland has always been clear-eyed about Russia. You have understood Putin's malign intent. You were right, she said.

Truss said Britain will encourage the other G-7 countries to ban Russian ships from its ports, crack down on Russian banks, set a timetable to eliminate imports of Russian oil and gas, and try to prevent Russia from using gold to fund its war effort.

-

UNITED NATIONS -- The United Nations chief says it is more urgent by the day to silence the guns in Ukraine, citing rising deaths and a new U.N. analysis indicating that 74 developing countries with a total population of 1.2 billion people are especially vulnerable to spiking food, energy and fertilizer prices.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday that as a result of the global impact of Russia's full-fledged invasion on several fronts of Ukraine, he said we are already seeing some countries move from vulnerability into crisis and signs of serious social unrest.

The flames of conflict are fueled by inequality, deprivation and underfunding, he said. With all the warning signals flashing red, we have a duty to act.

On food, Guterres urged all countries to keep markets open, resist unjustified export restrictions, make reserves available to countries at risk of hunger and famine and fund humanitarian appeals.

On energy, he said that using strategic stockpiles and reserves could help ease the energy crisis in the short-term but the only medium- and long-term solution is to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy.

On finance, he said international financial institutions must go into emergency mode. He urged the world's 20 leading economies, the G-20, and international financial institutions to increase liquidity and fiscal space so that governments can provide safety nets for the poorest and most vulnerable.

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BERLIN  Germany's foreign minister has spoken out in favour of providing Ukraine with additional weapons to defend itself against Russia.

Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Tuesday that we are looking at what solutions there are, together with the EU, NATO and in particular the G-7 partners.

She dismissed criticism that Germany wasn't doing enough to arm Ukraine, saying there aren't many other countries that have supplied more (weapons).

Baerbock spoke following a conference in Berlin on support for Moldova, a poor, small eastern European nation bordering Ukraine that has been strongly affected by the conflict.

Participants agreed to take in 12,000 Ukrainian refugees currently in Moldova, provide 71 million euros in aid and almost 700 million euros in loans to the country, and support its efforts to fight corruption and decrease its energy dependence on Russia.

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MOSCOW -- Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that any move by foreign countries to nationalize Russian stakes in companies would be a double-edged sword.

We are already hearing statements from officials about a possible nationalization of some of our assets, he said. How far will that get us? Let no one forget that it is a double-edged sword.

Putin also bemoaned what he said was administrative pressure on our company Gazprom in some European countries. Germany on Monday put a government agency in charge of a longtime German subsidiary of Gazprom, the Russian state-controlled energy giant.

The move falls short of nationalisation because the German state has not taken ownership of the shares, and it is a temporary change of administration through September.

Gazprom said last week it had cut ties with the unit but Germany says that was invalid because the identity of any new owners is unclear and the deal happened without the required government approval.

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JERUSALEM -- Israel's prime minister says he is shocked by the gruesome images emerging from the Ukrainian town of Bucha, but he stopped short of accusing Russia of being responsible or calling the atrocities a war crime.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told reporters Tuesday that we are, of course, shocked by the harsh scenes in Bucha. Terrible images, and we strongly condemn them.

He said that the images are extremely horrible. The suffering of the citizens of Ukraine is huge and we are doing everything we can to help.

With Israel one of the few countries to have good relations with both Russia and Ukraine, Bennett has emerged as a mediator in efforts to end the war.

In order to preserve his relationship with Vladimir Putin, Bennett has been measured in his criticism of the Russian president. Instead, he has allowed Foreign Minister Yair Lapid to voice harsher condemnations.

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BRUSSELS  NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg says he expects more atrocities to come to light in Ukraine as Russian troops continue to retreat from areas around Kyiv.

Stoltenberg said Tuesday that we haven't seen everything that has taken place because Russia still controls most of these territories around the capital. But when and if they withdraw their troops and Ukrainian troops take over, I'm afraid they will see more mass graves, more atrocities and more examples of of war crimes.

Stoltenberg rejected Russian assertions that the atrocities were staged.

He said that these atrocities have taken place during a period in which Russia controlled these areas. So they are responsible. Second, we have information from many different sources.

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BRUSSELS  The European Union's executive branch has proposed a ban on coal imports from Russia in what would be the first sanctions targeting the country's lucrative energy industry over its war in Ukraine.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Tuesday that the EU needed to increase the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin after what she described as the heinous crimes carried out around Kyiv.

Von der Leyen said the ban on coal imports is worth 4 billion euros (USD 4.4 billion) per year. She added that the EU has already started working on additional sanctions, including on oil imports.

Von der Leyen didn't mention natural gas. A consensus among the 27 EU member countries on targeting gas that's used to generate electricity, heat homes and power industry would be more difficult to secure.

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MOSCOW -- Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says the expulsions of Russian diplomats by European countries will prompt a response from Moscow and will complicate international relations.

Germany, France, Italy and Spain are among the countries which have expelled diplomats since Monday.

Peskov said that we view negatively, we view with regret this narrowing of possibilities for diplomatic communication, diplomatic work in such difficult conditions, in unprecedent crisis conditions.

He added that it is short-sighted and a step which firstly will complicate our communication, which is required in order to seek reconciliation. And secondly it will inevitably lead to reciprocal steps.

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PARIS  French prosecutors say they're opening investigations into possible war crimes committed against French nationals in Ukraine since Russian troops invaded.

The national prosecutors' office that specializes in terrorism cases said it launched three war crimes investigations on Tuesday, against suspects yet to be identified.

French law allows prosecutors to investigate suspected war crimes committed outside of France if they involve French victims or suspects who are French or who reside in France.

The three French probes will look into suspected suspected crimes in Mariupol, Chernihiv and Hostomel.

The prosecutors' statement said the suspected crimes could include deliberate attacks against civilians and deliberately withholding the essentials they needed to survive, physical assaults, and the deliberate destruction of civilian installations.

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GENEVA  The U.N. migration agency now estimates that more than 11 million people have fled their homes in Ukraine since Russia's invasion.

The International Organization for Migration, in its first such full assessment in three weeks, reported Tuesday that more than 7.1 million had been displaced within Ukraine as of April 1. That comes on top of the figure of more than 4 million who have fled abroad, reported by the U.N. refugee agency.

IOM said more than 2.9 million others are actively considering leaving their place of habitual residence due to war.

Ukraine had a pre-war population of 44 million. (AP)

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(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Singapore, Apr 6 (PTI) Indian Army chief General M M Naravane visited a key maritime security facility in Singapore on Wednesday and also shared his experience on professional military education at a premier training institute of the Singapore Armed Forces.

The Chief of Army Staff, who is on a three-day visit to the city-state, on Tuesday held talks with top Singaporean military leadership and discussed the roadmap to further enhance bilateral military cooperation.

Also Read | Ramzan 2022: Saudi Arabia To Use Mobile App To Facilitate Pilgrimage to Mecca During Ramadan.

"General MM Naravane COAS visited the Regional HADR Coordination Centre RHCC & Information Fusion Centre IFC at Singapore. COAS was briefed about the Coordination of a Multi-Nation HADR Response Mechanism & measures to enhance Maritime Security," the Indian Army's Additional Directorate General of Public Information (ADG PI) tweeted.

Naravane also delivered a speech at the Goh Keng Swee Command and Staff College's Distinguished Speaker's Dialogue titled "India's Strategic Perspective" on Wednesday.

Also Read | Pakistan President Arif Alvi Asks Election Commission To Propose Dates for General Elections.

"General MM Naravane COAS visited Goh Keng Swee Command & Staff College GKSCSC, Singapore. The COAS also interacted with the officers of GKSCSC & shared his experience on Professional Military Education," ADGPI said in another tweet.

On Tuesday, Gen Naravane had called on Singapore Defence Minister Dr Ng Eng Hen.

During their meeting, Dr Ng and Gen. Naravane reaffirmed the strong and long-standing bilateral defence relationship between Singapore and India and discussed regional geopolitical developments.

"His visit reaffirms the strong and long-standing bilateral defence relationship between Singapore and India," the Ministry of Defence here said in a tweet.

Gen. Naravane, on the first day of his tour on Monday, visited the Kranji war memorial in Singapore and paid tributes to those who laid down their lives in the line of duty during World War II. He also visited the Battle Box Bunker at Fort Canning, an authentic World War II secret Command Centre built 9 metres underground in late 1936 by the British forces.

On Tuesday, he visited the Infantry Gunnery and Tactical Simulator Centre at Pasir Laba Camp. The Army chief witnessed the state-of-the-art simulators, which enable troops to hone their weaponry skills and commanders to improve tactical decision-making abilities.

His visit underscores the strong and long-standing bilateral defence relations between Singapore and India. The Singapore Army and the Indian Army interact regularly through bilateral exercises, professional exchanges, visits and cross-attendance of courses.

These mutually beneficial interactions have deepened the bilateral defence relationship, enhanced mutual understanding and strengthened the cooperation between the two armies, Singapore's defence ministry said in a statement.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Washington [US], April 6 (ANI/Sputnik): US technology company Intel, one of the world's largest manufacturers of computer components and electronic devices, said it has suspended its activities in Russia over the situation in Ukraine.

"Effective immediately, we have suspended all business operations in Russia," the company said.

Also Read | Earthquake in China: Quake of Magnitude 5.1 Hits Sichuan Province.

"We are working to support all of our employees through this difficult situation, including our 1,200 employees in Russia. We have also implemented business continuity measures to minimize disruption to our global operations," it said.

Russia launched a special military operation in Ukraine on February 24 in response to calls from the Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics for protection against intensifying attacks by Ukrainian troops. The Russian Defense Ministry said the special operation, which targets Ukrainian military infrastructure, aims to "demilitarize and denazify" Ukraine.

Also Read | Uyghurs Commemorate Baren Revolution, Urge World To Act Against Chinese Genocide.

Moscow has said it has no plans to occupy Ukraine. Western nations have imposed numerous sanctions on Russia. (ANI/Sputnik)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
By Amit Kumar

Amsterdam [Netherlands], April 6 (ANI): King of Netherlands Willem Alexander on Tuesday hosted a State Banquet in Honour of President Ram Nath Kovind and the First Lady Savita Kovind at Royal Palace Amsterdam.

Also Read | UN Agencies Say Over 500 Iraqi Children Killed by Explosive Ordnance in 5 Years.

President Ram Nath Kovind in his speech during the state banquet thanked the Netherlands King for the cordial welcome and warm hospitality. "I am deeply touched by the kind reception accorded to me and to my delegation," President Kovind said in his banquet speech.

"This year marks a milestone in our bilateral journey as we are jointly celebrating the 75th anniversary of our diplomatic relations that reflects the depth of India-Netherlands partnership," he added.

Also Read | Russia-Ukraine War: US Envoy Julianne Smith to NATO Says Alliance Gathering Evidence to Hold Vladimir Putin Accountable for War Crimes in Ukraine.

President Kovind said that this year, India is also celebrating 75 years of its independence and reminded how the Netherlands was among the first nations to recognize independent India. "After seven decades, it remains one of the foremost reliable partners of India."

"It is my pleasure to be here in your beautiful country, the land of tulips; the birthplace of famous painters, scholars and explorers; and a fulcrum of modern trade and commerce. As the saying goes, 'God made the world and the Dutch made the Netherlands'. The unique ability of the Dutch to plan and prepare for future challenges as reflected in your motto of 'Meten is Weten' is worthy of high praise," he said.

Ram Nath Kovind further said that as two thriving democracies and two economic giants, India and the Netherlands are natural partners. We share a common outlook on multilateral solutions to global challenges. "Pluralism, inclusiveness, respect for cultural diversity and rule of law are a part of our common ethos."

"The Netherlands is an important player in the Indo-Pacific and EU. As key advocates for a free and open Indo-Pacific, we share a common commitment to work for global peace, security and prosperity. The Netherlands can also play a pivotal role in strengthening India-EU ties in areas of connectivity, energy transition and trade & investment," President said.

President, in his speech, said that the history of India-Netherlands relations dates back more than four centuries. "While the paintings of Rembrandt show the creative influence of Indian miniature art, Marius Bauer captured impressions of India in his paintings. Professor Hendrik Kern one of the leading Indologists in the Netherlands taught Sanskrit to Dutch students in the mid-nineteenth century. Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda and Jiddu Krishnamurti were hosted by the Dutch with great enthusiasm and have inspired many."

"In recent years, we have witnessed strong momentum in our bilateral relations. We were honoured to receive Your Majesties in India in 2019. I recall our discussions covering diverse areas of cooperation," he further said.

President Kovind appreciated the role of the Netherlands, especially in bilateral cooperation.

He said that the bilateral cooperation between the two countries is extensive and diverse, covering trade and investment; science and technology; water, agriculture and health; renewable energy and space, among others. "Robust trade and investments form the bedrock of our bilateral relations. Dutch companies have long been household a name in India. With an investment of USD 38 billion, the Netherlands has consistently been among the largest investors in India."

President also thanked the Netherlands for its solidarity with India during the COVID-19 pandemic. "Our mutual support during the pandemic has highlighted the synergy in the area of healthcare and has shown that we can partner to develop and produce vaccines for the world."

"Today, the Netherlands is home to the largest Indian diaspora in mainland Europe. They form a living bridge between our countries and include the Surinami-Hindustani community that represents a unique synthesis of Indian traditions and Dutch values. It includes professionals as well as Indian students who are making a positive contribution to the Dutch economy and society," he added.

President said that he is confident that strong bonds of friendship and multifaceted partnership between the two countries will continue to flourish. "I thank the Dutch leadership for devoting personal attention to strengthening our partnership. Together we can achieve common goals."

President Kovind is on a three-day visit to the Netherlands at the invitation of King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima. This is the first presidential visit to the Netherlands in 34 years since the visit of President R Venkataraman in 1988. (ANI)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Hague [Netherlands], April 6 (ANI): Saying that parliamentary exchanges between the two countries would help in promoting mutual understanding and exchange of ideas, President Ram Nath Kovind on Wednesday extended an invitation to the Netherlands to send a parliamentary delegation to India.

The remarks came during President Kovind's interaction with the President of the Netherlands Senate Jan Anthonie Bruijn and the President of the House of Representatives Vera Bergkamp.

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President Kovind is on a three-day visit to the Netherlands.

There is a need for more regular exchanges between our two Parliaments, the President said, adding that, India would be happy to receive a visit by a parliamentary delegation from the Netherlands and a similar goodwill delegation could visit the Netherlands at a mutually convenient time.

Also Read | Israeli PM Naftali Bennett Loses Majority After Ruling Coalition Whip Quits Over Religious Ground.

"Both our countries are vibrant parliamentary democracies with rich parliamentary cultures and traditions. India is the world's largest democracy with a strong tradition of debate and discussion. The Netherlands is a natural democracy and is a strong voice in Europe," a Rashtrapati Bhavan statement said.

The Dutch side appreciated the growing importance of India on the global stage and also sought a larger global role for India.

Dutch House of Representatives said that the Netherlands has made India the focus country for the next three years and there is a growing interest in India in the Netherlands.

Later, President Kovind was hosted by Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte for lunch.

"During the one-to-one meeting with Prime Minister Rutte, the President congratulated him on his remarkable leadership and continuing fourth term in office. He said that it demonstrates the faith of the people of the Netherlands in his leadership. He noted that in the past 11 years, the Indo-Dutch bilateral relationship has gone from strength to strength," the Rashtrapati Bhavan statement said.

President Kovind also called for a 'new-age partnership' with the Netherlands to combine the resources, expertise and knowledge of the two countries with the skill to address contemporary challenges, add strategic direction to the cooperation, and maximize benefits for both countries.

Earlier on Tuesday, the King of the Netherlands hosted dinner in Royal Palace Amsterdam in honour of President Kovind who is on a state visit to the Netherlands from April 4 to April 7. (ANI)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Washington [US], April 6: The United States, along with the G7 nations and European Union (EU) has imposed severe and immediate economic costs on Russia for its "atrocities in Ukraine, including in Bucha".

As per an official statement from the White House, as a part of mechanisms to hold Russia accountable for its actions in Ukraine, the US has announced economic measures to ban new investment in Russia and imposed severe financial sanctions on Russia's largest bank and several of its most critical state-owned enterprises and on Russian government officials and their family members.

These sweeping financial sanctions follow our action earlier this week to cut off Russia's frozen funds in the United States to make debt payments, read the statement. First Case of Omicron XE Variant in Mumbai: 'No COVID XE Variant in India', Say Government Sources Denying Media Reports.

In the new economic cost, the US has announced full blocking sanctions on Russia's largest financial institution, Sberbank, and Russia's largest private bank, Alfa Bank. This action will freeze any of Sberbank's and Alfa Bank's assets touching the US financial system and prohibit US persons from doing business with them.

The US has also prohibited new investment in the Russian Federation as President Joe Biden will sign a new Executive Order (E.O.) that includes a prohibition on new investment in Russia by US persons wherever located, aimed at isolating Russia from the global economy.

Further, full blocking sanctions on critical major Russian state-owned enterprises have been imposed, aimed at prohibiting any US person from transacting with these entities and freezing any of their assets subject to US jurisdiction.

The US has also imposed full blocking sanctions on Russian elites and their family members, including sanctions on Russian President Putin's adult children, Foreign Minister Lavrov's wife and daughter, and members of Russia's Security Council including former President and Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

The US Treasury has also prohibited Russia from making debt payments with funds subject to US jurisdiction. However, sanctions do not preclude payments on Russian sovereign debt at this time, provided Russia uses funds outside of US jurisdiction.

However, the US has expressed its commitment to exempting essential humanitarian and related activities from its sanctions.

Meanwhile, Biden on Tuesday authorized an additional USD 100 million in security assistance to Ukraine to meet a need for additional anti-armor systems. This brings the total US security assistance commitment to Ukraine to more than USD 1.7 billion since the beginning of Russia's military operation in the war-torn country, according to the US state department.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
SNAP benefits in California, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or CalFresh, are being distributed for the month of April.

CalFresh distributes monthly food benefits through the Golden State Advantage Electronic Benefits Transfer card to qualified low-income individuals and families in California, according to Go Banking Rates report.

EBT cards can be used just like credit or debit cards, with it being refilled monthly and funds can be used to purchase fresh food items at retail stores and farmer markets that accept EBT cards as payment.

California distributes SNAP benefits over the first 10 days of the month, and the day when your benefits are deposited onto your EBT depends on the last digit of the recipients' case number.

If recipients' case numbers end with one, their EBT card should be full with SNAP benefits in April.

For eligible recipients with a case number 2, SNAP benefits will be deposited to their EBT cards on the second of the month.

For those with a case number ending in 3, they can get their SNAP benefits on the 3rd of the month, and so on.

Emergency allotments will be available on EBT cards in Humboldt County no later than April 17, according to a Food for People website.

Benefits are also available on weekends and holidays.

READ NEXT: SNAP Benefits 2022: Schedule of April Payments in Texas; $318 Million Budget Revealed

SNAP Benefits California: How to Apply

CalFresh benefits can be given to those who receive CalWORKS or General Relief; have low-income or no income; have limited property; is a U.S. citizen or legal resident; an immigrant that meets certain qualifications; and currently receive Supplemental Security Income or State Supplementary Payment.

To file for SNAP benefits in California, the minimum requirements order to fill in the applicant's full name; household's address, unless homeless, district address is acceptable; and signature of the Head of household, any adult household member, or a responsible household member.

On Oct. 1, 2021, California announced that all CalFresh recipients will see an increase in their monthly benefits due to the Thrifty Food Plan 2021.

Those who want to apply can do so through an online application, which is available in English and Spanish languages.

They can also call CalFresh Info Line, which is available in English, Spanish, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Russian.

SNAP Benefits

The Congress and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have temporarily modified SNAP eligibility and benefits in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In August 2021, USDA announced a revised version of the Thrifty Food Plan, raising SNAP benefit levels starting in October 2021.

The determining factors for eligibility include gross monthly income, net income, and assets, according to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities website.

The Gross monthly income of the households hoping to qualify for SNAP must be at or below 130 percent of the poverty line.

The poverty line used to calculate SNAP benefits in the fiscal year 2022 for a family of three is $1,830 a month.

Assets must also fall below certain limits. For households without a member who is elderly or who has a disability, they must have assets of $2,500 or less.

Households with such a member must have assets of $3,750 or less.

SNAP benefits can be used to buy fruits and vegetables; meat, poultry, and fish; dairy products, bread, cereals, and other produce food for the household.

SNAP benefits cannot be used for liquor, cigarettes, live animals, and other non-food items.

READ MORE: SNAP Benefits 2022 Schedule for California, Florida, Texas and More: When to Get Food Assistance Each Month

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Written by: Mary Webber

WATCH: CalFresh program losing millions per month to organized crime - from KCRA News






Former U.S. President Donald Trump has admitted that he did not win the Presidential Election 2020 after claiming for years to have won a second term in the White House.

Trump admitted his defeat during an interview with a panel of presidential historians working on a book about his presidency. The interview was published on Monday by The Atlantic, according to a Newsweek News report.

The former president has defended his leadership during the interview as his claims that the Presidential Election 2020 was stolen continue to affect U.S. politics.

Princeton Professor and editor of the upcoming "The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment," Julian Zelizer, convened the interview with a panel of presidential historians.

Zelizer said that when Trump learned about the book, the former president reached out to its author hoping to offer his perspective on his presidency.

Trump said during the call that the book "is a very important book." He added that rather than being critical, he would rather have the group hear him out, according to a People News report.

Trump said during the interview that he did not win the election, which contracted his repeated claims of the Presidential Election 2020 being stolen from him.

Elsewhere in the interview, Trump described the 2020 election as being "rigged and lost."

READ NEXT: Donald and Melania Trump Marriage: How Do the Former White House Couple Manage to Stay Together for Over a Decade

Donald Trump's Interview With Presidential Historians

The former president described the presidential historians assembled by Zelizer as "tremendous group of people," adding that he appreciates that the group heard him out, according to The Guardian News report.

Zelizer wrote that Trump "seemed to want the approval of historians," without any knowledge of how historians collect evidence or render judgments.

Zelizer also noted that shortly after the session with the presidential historians, the former president said that he would give no more interviews for books about his presidency.

In July 2021, Trump earlier said that meetings with authors of the "ridiculous" number of books being written about him are a "total waste of time."

He added at the time that those writers are "often bad people" who write whatever "fits their agenda."

Trump said that those being written about him have "nothing to do with facts or reality."

Presidential Election 2020

Trump has repeatedly claimed that there were fraudulent votes in states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia that change the result of the election, according to The Hill report.

However, experts and election officials have not found any evidence to support Trump's claims of fraudulent votes.

In December 2020, former Attorney General William Barr has turned down Trump's claims. He said that the Justice Department had not discovered any widespread voter fraud.

He acknowledged his defeat on Jan. 7, 2020, a day after the Capitol riot. He recognized that U.S. President Joe Biden would take office on Inauguration Day.

Many of Trump's Republican allies have continued to prompt such narrative about the Presidential Election 2020, namely Reps. Jim Jordan, Jim Banks, Paul Gosar, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

READ MORE: Donald Trump Mocks Joe Biden After Being Sanctioned by Russia, Says He Could Talk to Vladimir Putin to Prevent World War III

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Written by: Mary Webber

WATCH: Trump admits defeat after Congress certifies Joe Biden's victory - from ANI News






Another Sacramento mass shooting suspect has been arrested in connection with the mass shooting in Sacramento, California that left six people dead and wounded a dozen others.

Police arrested Smiley Martin, 27. He was charged with possession of a firearm by a prohibited person and possession of a machine gun.

Thirty-one-year-old Daviyonne Dawson was also arrested late Monday and was booked on suspicion of being a prohibited person in possession of a firearm, according to a San Francisco Chronicle report.

Dawson was allegedly seen "carrying a gun in the immediate aftermath" of the shooting incident. Police said that they do not believe it was used in the shooting.

Sacramento police said that Dawson is currently not charged with crimes directly related to the shootings. The police department added that detectives are continuing to investigate the crime and identify additional suspects.

Dawson posted $500,000 bail and was released on Tuesday, according to an unnamed source.

Meanwhile, Martin was among the dozen people seriously wounded at the mass shooting. He is set to be transferred to the county jail once his medical care is complete, according to The Washington Post News report.

Martin was the older brother of Dandrae Martin, 26, who is also a suspect in the mass shooting.

The younger Martin is charged with assault and illegal possession of a firearm.

Officials noted that none of the charges filed as of Tuesday were for homicide related to Sunday's shooting.

READ NEXT: Sacramento Mass Shooting: 1 Suspect Taken to Custody, But Police Expects More Arrests Over Heartbreaking Tragedy

Sacramento Mass Shooting

A law enforcement official said that Martin had taken a live video on Facebook hours before the shooting had waved a handgun.

Investigators are working to identify whether the weapon was used in the shooting, according to a USA Today News report.

Officials investigating the matter believe that the brothers possessed stolen guns and are working to review their financial documents, call records, and social media messages to know how and when they acquired the weapons.

Investigators are currently looking at hundreds of pieces of evidence and reviewing more than 170 videos and photos shared through an online portal that was created for the public.

District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said in a statement that she expected more arrests.

Schubert described the incident as "highly complex involving many witnesses," with videos of several types and significant physical evidence.

Sacramento Police Chief Kathy Lester did not note what kind of handgun was used in the crime. She added that officials are not yet certain whether the victims were targeted.

Twelve people were wounded, with at least four suffering critical injuries. At least seven of the wounded have been already released from hospitals.

Meanwhile, the Martin brothers have criminal histories that include violent crimes.

The older Martin was ordered to remain in prison when he was up for early release amid a 10-year sentence for domestic violence and assault with great bodily danger a year ago.

A Sacramento prosecutor said that the 27-year-old Martin's criminal conduct is violent in lengthy, adding that he has committed several felony violations.

READ MORE: Sacramento Mass Shooting: 6 Dead, 12 Injured in 'Senseless Tragedy'

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Written by: Mary Webber

WATCH: Multiple suspects wanted in Sacramento mass shooting that left 6 dead, 12 injured - from CBS Los Angeles






El Salvador has deployed police and military forces in some areas to conduct a gang crackdown, but there have been reports on the use of "excessive" force by authorities.

In a statement released on Tuesday, Liz Throssell, spokeswoman for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), said police and military officers deployed to gang strongholds in El Salvador under a state of emergency had resorted to "unnecessary and excessive use of force."

Throssell said "more than 5,747" suspected gang members had been detained without an arrest warrant since the state of emergency was adopted in late March, Al Jazeera reported.

She noted that some have also been "subjected to alleged cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment." Throssell said they recognize the challenges presented by gang violence in El Salvador and the State's duty to ensure security and justice. However, she noted that it must be done in compliance with international human rights law.

On March 27, El Salvador's parliament has approved a "state of exception" in light of more than 80-weekend killings. The government has pinned the blame on criminal gangs. In a single day, 62 people were killed, which was reportedly the highest one-day tally in decades.

READ NEXT: El Salvador: Thousands of Women March for Abortion Rights, High Femicide Rates

El Salvador State of Emergency

In declaring the state of emergency, El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele said the country had a new spike in homicides, an issue they "had worked so hard to reduce."

Bukele blamed it on the Mara Salvatrucha gang, also known as MS-13. This week, the president noted that 6,000 suspected gang members had been arrested since the order came into force.

Bukele insisted that the detainees were all gang members and would not be released, according to The Guardian News report.

Police forces claim to have captured the MS-13 leaders who ordered the killings. However, there is growing evidence that ordinary people who live or work in gang-operated areas have also been arbitrarily arrested.

Thirty-three-year-old Carmen Rodriguez said she does not know why her husband, brother, and nephew were arrested a week ago while unloading a truck. When they asked the police why they were taking them, Rodriguez noted that "they just insulted us."

UN Human Rights on El Salvador's Gang Crackdown

In a statement, Tamara Taraciuk Broner, acting Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said Bukele's government should take serious and rights-respecting steps to address gang violence in El Salvador.

Broner noted that instead of protecting Salvadorians, the broad state of emergency becomes a "recipe for disaster that puts their rights at risk."

The Human Rights Watch said El Salvador has virtually no independent institutions left as a check on executive power.

According to the group, the pro-Bukele majority in the Legislative Assembly packed the Supreme Court, replaced the attorney general with an administration ally, and dismissed hundreds of low-level judges and prosecutors in recent months.

Based on article 29 of the Salvadoran Constitution, the emergency law allows the Legislative Assembly to suspend some constitutional rights in extreme circumstances, such as "serious disturbances of public order" or a foreign invasion.

The Legislative Assembly has suspended the constitutional rights to freedom of assembly, privacy in communication, the right to be informed about the reason for arrest, remain silent, legal representation, and the requirement to take anyone detained before a judge within 72 hours in declaring a state of emergency.

The Human Rights Watch said Salvadoran authorities have not detailed what measures they will take in connection with the "state of emergency. However, Bukele earlier tweeted that the measures "will be adopted by the relevant institutions" and "informed only when necessary."

READ MORE: El Salvador Travel: Best Tourist Attractions to Visit as the Central American Country Sees a Tourism Boom

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Written by: Mary Webber

WATCH: El Salvador Declares State of Emergency as Gang Violence Soars - From Al Jazeera English






The White House has slammed Senate GOP for blocking an effort to move forward on a $10 billion COVID aid package on Tuesday, arguing that the spending bill should have a provision that would keep the Title 42 expulsion policy in place.

In a statement released Tuesday night, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said it was disappointing that Senate GOP voted down "consideration of a much-needed bill to purchase vaccines, boosters, and life-saving treatments" for Americans.

"As we have repeatedly said, there are consequences for Congress failing to fund our COVID Response. The program that reimbursed doctors, pharmacists and other providers for vaccinating the uninsured had to end today due to a lack of funds," Psaki added.

According to the Daily Mail, the Senate GOP decided against beginning a debate on the $10 billion COVID aid bill in a 47-52 vote on Tuesday. Democrat Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has joined the Republicans.

Democrats reportedly need at least 10 Republicans on board to move forward with the $10 billion COVID relief package. However, it could now be delayed for weeks since the Senate will be on a two-week break beginning April 11.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer warned GOP lawmakers not to take the COVID package "hostage" by pushing on a vote to amend the bill with a provision to keep Title 42, The Hill reported.

"The bottom line is this is a bipartisan agreement that does a whole lot of good for the American people: Vaccines, testing, therapeutics... It was negotiated in good faith. It should not be held hostage to extraneous, unrelated issues," Schumer noted.

READ NEXT: U.S.-Mexico Border: 110 Migrants Rescued in Separate Smuggling Attempts in Texas; DHS Announces End to Title 42 Expulsions

GOP Lawmakers Want Title 42 Title 42 Amendment in Exchange for Allowing Covid Aid Funding to Pass

Every Republican senator decided against beginning the debate on the spending bill after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell threatened to withhold support unless Democrats included a provision that will keep the Trump-era border policy, Title 42, in place.

"There would have to be an amendment on Title 42 in order to move the bill," McConnell told reporters on Tuesday, as The Daily Mail reported.

McConnel noted that Republicans and Democrats in the Senate "need to enter into some kind of agreement to process these amendments in order to go forward with the bill."

However, McConnell did not mention if he would push the threshold for adopting the amendment to be set at 60 votes or 50. It has a better chance of becoming part of the relief package if the adoption of the amendment is set at a 50-vote threshold.

Biden Administration to Rescind Title 42 Expulsion Policy

Last week, the Biden administration announced that the Title 42 policy, which is used to rapidly expel immigrants on the southern border, would expire by May 23.

On Monday, Republican-led states, namely Arizona, Missouri, and Louisiana, filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration over its plans to rescind Title 42.

The suit listed some 20 defendants, including nearly every agency involved with either public health or the border.

Department of Homeland Security officials said they are bracing for a migrant influx of more than 170,000 after the end of Title 42.

New York Representative John Katko noted that the daily migrant encounters would increase to 18,000, higher from the present 8,000 daily encounters at the border.

Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Chris Magnus also admitted that ending Title 42 will cause a rise in migrant encounters. However, he noted that they are doing everything to prepare for the increase.

READ MORE: Republicans Call on Elon Musk to Reinstate Donald Trump's Twitter Account After Tesla CEO Becomes Largest Shareholder

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Written by: Joshua Summers

WATCH: 'A Broken Immigration System': Homeland Security Secretary Defends Ending Title 42 - From CNN
Nearly $400 million worth of cocaine found in a shipment of bananas from Colombia has been seized by authorities in the United Kingdom.

In a joint operation, the Border Force and the National Crime Agency (NCA) officers discovered the packages of cocaine in five of the 20 pallets of bananas that arrived at Southampton Docks from Colombia on March 17.

The banana shipment, which arrived before being inspected, has reportedly been marked for examination. According to Daily Mail, wrapped packages of white powder were discovered in five pallets and tested positive for cocaine hydrochloride, a substance used to make crack cocaine.

Officers reportedly uncovered 3.7 tonnes of cocaine hydrochloride that was worth around 302 million (US$395 million) at current street prices.

According to Home Secretary Priti Patel, this was the largest seizure of cocaine in the U.K. since 2015. Patel said it should serve as a warning to anyone trying to smuggle illegal drugs into the country "that we are out to get them."

Patel noted that a key focus of the government's Beating Crime Plan was to "disrupt the supply chain and relentless pursuit of the criminals peddling narcotics, making the drugs market a low-reward, high risk, enterprise."

She added that the police and Border force have her "100 percent" backing to "use all available powers to stop devastating drugs" from coming into the neighborhoods and destroying lives.

Peter Stevens, NCA regional head of investigations, said this was a monumental seizure of cocaine, adding that the organized crime group behind the importation has been denied massive profits.

The NCA's latest strategic threat assessment showed that the U.K.'s cocaine market is estimated to be worth more than 25.7 million (US$33 million) daily in England, Scotland, and Wales, Sky News reported.

READ NEXT: Texas CBP Officers Confiscated $3 Million Worth of Methamphetamine Along U.S.-Mexico Border

Other Cocaine Seizures in U.K.

In September 2021, British authorities arrested six people after discovering drugs with an estimated street value of $221 million on a Jamaican-flagged yacht sailing from the Caribbean, NDTV News reported.

One British man was arrested on suspicion of drug trafficking with five Nicaraguans. NCA deputy director Matt Horne said there was no doubt that those drugs would have been sold into communities across the U.K.

In December 2021, cocaine with a street value of more than $117 million was found in a banana shipment from Costa Rica during an armed raid at a Kent airport.

BBC reported that six men, including a security guard, were arrested after 100 officers stormed the Sheerness port. A seventh man was arrested in Hertfordshire, which led the raid. Authorities said at least 1.2 tonnes of cocaine were seized at the port.

Colombia's New Drug-Trafficking Strategy

Last February, Colombia, the United States' main ally in the drug war, announced the launch of a new strategy to fight drug trafficking.

According to Colombian Defense Minister Diego Molano, the strategy was to govern cyberspace to combat criminal groups involved in the cocaine trade and block their financial transactions.

The "Esmeralda" initiative, which was launched in the Caribbean city of Cartagena, would get its support from 36 countries, including the U.S.

At the III International Anti-Drugs Congress in February, Molano said he hopes to develop new and innovative tactics in the coming years to "fight against the global scourge of drugs."

Molano added that artificial intelligence would also be used to monitor the selling and trafficking of chemical ingredients used in drug making.

Colombia is known to be the world's leading cocaine producer. Illegal armed groups heavily influence the production and trafficking of drugs, including leftist guerrillas and criminal gangs developed from right-wing paramilitaries.

According to the United Nations, the South American nation reduced the number of coca plantations, the main ingredient in cocaine, by 7 percent in 2020, but potential output increased by 8 percent to 1,228 tonnes per year.

READ MORE: Cocaine Found in Christmas Cards Bound for New York at Guyana Post Office

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Written by: Mary Webber

WATCH: 23 Tons of Cocaine Seized in Europe | Cocaine in Europe | Paraguay | Latest English News - From WION






A food safety alert linking Salmonella poisoning to Kinder Surprise eggs has now been extended to other kinder products.

The list includes Kinder Schokobons, Kinder Mini Eggs and Kinder Surprise Eggs with best before dates other than those mentioned in the earlier recall.

Kinder Surprise Eggs had been recalled last weekend due to possible presence of Salmonella after a number of children fell ill.

The FSAI, together with the Health Protection Surveillance Centre of the HSE, is investigating the ongoing food poisoning outbreak which is affecting Ireland, the UK and a number of other European countries.

At the weekend the FSAI said there have been ten cases in Ireland with the same strain of Salmonella responsible for the UK outbreak. A number of these Irish cases have involved young children, all of whom have fully recovered.

The FSAI is warning consumers who may have the recalled products at home not to eat them. The warning has now been extended to cover other subjects including Easter eggs.

The original warning Food Safety Authority of Ireland(FSAI) said Ferrero is recalling Kinder Surprise 20g and Kinder Surprise 20g x 3 with best before dates between 11th July 2022 and 7th October 2022 due to the possible presence of Salmonella.

Point-of-sale recall notices will be displayed in stores supplied with the implicated products, the FSAI said.

People infected with Salmonella typically develop symptoms between 12 and 36 hours after infection, but this can range between six and 72 hours. The most common symptom is diarrhoea, which can sometimes be bloody, according to the FSAI.

Other symptoms may include fever, headache and abdominal cramps. The illness usually lasts four to seven days. Diarrhoea can occasionally be severe enough to require hospital admission. The elderly, infants, and those with impaired immune systems are more likely to have more severe illness, the FSAI stated.

Consumers are advised not to eat the implicated products. Instead, please contact the Ferrero consumer careline on +44 (0)330 053 8943 Ireland to obtain a full refund.
The Dower House Gallery in Emo Court is hosting the first solo exhibition of abstract artworks by young artist Ellie Dunne.

Ellies abstract work is striking and graphic, with an exceptional sense of colour and a strong sense of pattern. She is an intense, focused worker - it is as if her art emerges from deep within. Her ambition is to work at an ever-increasing scale.

Amongst the artists who inspire her are Anni Albers, William Crozier, Richard Gorman, Keith Haring, Mainie Jellett, Agnes Martin, Bridget Riley, and Sean Scully.

Last year Ellie collaborated with Miriam Cushen, a sixth-generation weaver from the family-owned Cushendale Woollen Mills in Co Kilkenny, to produce a limited edition of blankets using indigenous Irish wool from the fleece of the protected Galway sheep. She is currently working on designs for more blankets to be released later this year.

Ellie has been drawing and painting for more than a decade, but during Covid lockdown she had the opportunity to devote more time to her art, and to experiment with new paints and materials.

She was born in Dublin in 1999 and lives in Dublin City Centre. She is currently a student on the Art Portfolio course at Stillorgan College and she hopes to progress to art college in the future.

The Office of Public Works were delighted to announce the first solo exhibition of abstract artworks by Ellie, who has Down Syndrome. The exhibition runs until Sunday, May 29.
Laois local Cassia ONeill was among a number of migrants who recently graduated from the Migrant Leadership Academy.

The Migrant Leadership Academy, run by the Immigrant Council of Ireland, is aimed at increasing migrant representation in society.

The Portlaoise graduate was presented with a certificate by Minister of State at the Department of Rural and Community Development, Joe OBrien, at the event which took place at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum, Dublin.

Also in attendance were some of the political representatives who mentored migrant interns as part of the Migrant-Councillor Internship Scheme, including Mayor of Galway Colette Connolly, Dublin City Cllr Anne Feeney, Cork County Cllr Gearoid Murphy and Leitrim County Cllr Sean McGowan.

Minister of State Joe OBrien said I am honoured to have presented the 26 participants with their certificates. The work that the Immigrant Council does in promoting diversity and inclusion across all aspects of Irish life, especially politics, is important for an everchanging Irish society. Its vital that those marginalised in society see themselves represented and have a voice in politics and the programmes being run by the Immigrant Council facilitate this.

Having previously worked in the area of migrant rights, I am passionate about creating a society that is welcoming to all. More than ever, Ireland needs an organised movement of migrants, refugees and allies to build a truly diverse and inclusive society. I look forward to seeing the graduates on a political stage in the future. With more migrant involvement in politics and in their local communities, we will see diversity in representation, and a truer reflection of the society we live in today.

Immigrant Council of Ireland Integration Manager, Teresa Buczkowska, said: Ireland is an increasingly diverse society, with one in eight of us coming from a migrant background. The reality, however, is that us migrants dont see ourselves represented in many key sectors of Irish society, including the social justice sector. Migrants in Ireland should be included in conversations on issues affecting us, from housing, education and discrimination to immigration policy reform and more. Both the Migrant Leadership Academy and the Migrant Councillor Internship Scheme equip participants with the skills to begin to use their voice to enact change.

Many migrants and refugees are doing great work in their local communities championing issues and effecting positive change, but their hard work is often overlooked. We want to celebrate what the participants in both schemes have achieved during their time on the programmes and we wish them every success in the next step on their journey.
Laois Minister Pippa Hackett has denied the micro generation system where people get paid for electricity is failing miserably.

Earlier this week Laois TD Carol Nolan recently said constituents had expressed disappointment that the Micro Generation Support Scheme is still not available despite being announced in December.

Deputy Nolan explained that farms and families who had invested in solar panels had yet to see any return as they werent receiving any payment for the electricity being fed into the national grid.

Minister Hackett said that homeowners can be earning credit for the excess energy their solar panels are generating now. This credit could convert to a back payment from June onwards, depending on which utility contract a homeowner has.

The Clean Export Guarantee will allow customers with registered microgeneration devices to sell any excess electricity back to Ireland's electricity grid in return for payment. Energy companies are currently announcing their tariffs.

Some energy companies have confirmed the payment for excess energy, not used by the household, will be back dated to 15th February when the Clean Export Guarantee came into effect, she said.

The Minister called this a win-win for homeowners and renewables. She referenced the address of Ukraine President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to the joined Houses of the Oireachtas and said that microgeneration of renewables was one step in shutting down Russias fossil fuel funding stream.

It allows families reduce utility bills while being paid for excess energy. And people can also avail of the SEAI grants to help install Solar PV panels on homes, said Minister Hackett.

However, she mentioned her frustration that similar schemes for non-domestic users, such as schools and farms, is taking longer. One barrier is the current need for planning permission for solar panels, over a given threshold, on roofs, she said.

This is something my Green Party colleagues here in the Seanad have worked hard to progress, and I hope the Department of Housing will move to complete this legislative change.

In my own constituency, some public representatives have tried to claim the entire policy is failing miserably. This is disappointing, and it is untrue. We will solve the issue, and we have proven we can do it with the domestic scheme. I look forward to hearing the same public representatives herald Green policy when payments begin for non-domestic users in the coming months.
A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind.
A Portarlington based TD has called for Irish anti-tank rockets sent from the Curragh Camp to Ukraine soldiers to fight the Russian invasion ordered by Vladimir Putin.

Dr Cathal Berry who is a former member of the elite Army Ranger Wing, told the Dail that the Ukrainian army needed the defensive weapons to repelattacks by Russia.

While Ireland is militarily neutral, the former soldier called for the country to release unused weapons.

"One hour's drive from here in the Curragh Camp, there are hundreds of anti-tank rockets nearing the end of their shelf life that could very easily be transferred to the Ukraine defence forces.

"The reason that is so important is that we know the Russians are preparing a massive offensive in the east at the moment and that this offensive is likely to be successful but it does not have to be this way.

"We have learned from the successful defence of Kyiv that the future is not written in stone. It has yet to be decided and it will be determined not just by fate but by decisions and actions of the people in this Chamber over the next few days.

"For precisely those reasons, I urge the Taoiseach to send protective, defensive weapons to Ukraine in order that we stop the Russian advance, that we drag Russia to the negotiating table and that together we alter the course of history," he said.

Dr Berry represents some 12,000 Laois and Offaly people around Portarlington, Killenard and Ballybrittas which are part of the Kildare South constituency.

He was speaking in Leinster House after Ukraine President Volodymr Zelensky addressed TDs and Sentators in the Dail chamber on Wednesday, April 6.
Steps being taken by smartphone developers to produce devices that are easier to repair have been welcomed.

Samsung has become the latest big tech company to announce plans to help owners to fix their phones, following similar moves by Apple.

The news comes as the European Parliament prepares to vote on Right to Repair legislation this week, designed to help consumers choose longer lasting and more sustainable electronic products.

Ireland South MEP Deirdre Clune has welcomed the moves. The fact that people will be able to purchase spare parts for certain phones, repair tools and access step by step guides is a step in the right direction.

"We are still relying on individual companies to make these available though, and practices such as non-removable displays, batteries, and camera modules are still widespread," she said.

"As a member of the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee, we have put forward proposals that will require phone makers to design more durable and modular products," Ms Clune said.

The MEP said phones must have removable and replaceable parts, and consumers should have better information about estimated lifespan, availability of parts and software updates.

"These rules will help people keep their electronic products for longer, make them more cost efficient and environmentally friendly.

"The Right to Repair is seen as a key to the EUs plans to achieve climate neutrality, by providing products that are sustainable and resource-efficient," Ms Clune said.
Five Laois students represented their county at the annual Dail na nOg recently.

The students from five different secondary schools took part in debates on issues most important to young Irish people.

They also played a part in voting the year's topic for the national executive, choosing "a more inclusive relationships and sexuality education" as the most pressing issue.

Emily Costigan, Mountmellick CS, Anna McWey, Heywood CS, Ava Pendergast, Scoil Chriost Ri, Lucy Doyle, Dunamase College and Jack Bowe, Portlaoise College attended the event in the Convention Centre Dublin on March 26.

Laois Comhairle na nOg is one of 32 in Ireland attending Dail na nOg, representing young people in every local authority area.

Anna McWey was also a youth facilitator and she told the Leinster Express about the day.

"It was such an amazing opportunity to be able to attend Dail na nOg. The chosen topic was equality which is such an important aspect of our everyday lives at the moment. I was a youth facilitator for Dail na nOg which is not something I would have been able to challenge myself to do before.

"I enjoyed being able to lead the workshops. It was very empowering to hear the views shared by other members of Comhairle na nOgs across the country.

"This event is crucial to improving the government's policies for us and future generations because it allows us to have a say. It was great to be able to meet everyone in person as the event was originally scheduled for last December which meant it would have had to be a virtual gathering.

"Myself and my fellow Laois Comhairle na nOg members were delighted with how the day went. We got to vote on the topic for the incoming national executive which is a more inclusive relationships and sexuality education. We also got to listen to an esteemed panel answer our questions and share their experiences with equality.

"Facilitating and being a delegate at Dail na nOg was definitely one of the most amazing opportunities I have experienced during my time as a member of the Laois Comhairle na nOg," Anna said.
A 95 year old grandmother from Laois is knitting to help Ukrainian children.

Kay Cullen from Mountmellick loves to spend her time knitting.

Kay wanted to help, in some small way, when she saw the plight of Ukrainian civilians.

For a number of weeks now she is knitting blue and yellow coloured beanies for Ukrainian children.

I really wanted to do something for them and as I knit every day I decided to knit the little caps for them and in their country colours. My daughter Pam finished them of with the tossels. I also knitted little baby cardigans for them," she said.

They have been donated to the Ukrainian Shopping Hub which is due to open shortly in St Pauls Parish Hall Mountmellick.

Kay buys a few balls of wool most weeks and Pam is her shopper.

Her daughter Gemma Butler also living in Mountmellick said her mother has always enjoyed knitting.

"From knitting Aran sweaters, Icelandic jumpers etc for her eight children and everything from baby jumpers to kiddie jumpers for her 18 grandchildren and 14 great grandchildren. She believes in always keeping busy when shes sitting down," Gemma said.

Her advice to people who want to help the Ukrainian families is simple.

"Every little helps, so please donate what you can, no matter how small. They need our help badly," Kay said.
A councillor has called on Kildare County Council (KCC) to ask Irish Water on his behalf for a report relating to the capacity of wastewater systems.

The systems in question are situated in a number of housing developments.

The request was made at the latest Clane-Maynooth Municipal District (MD) meeting, which was held on Friday, April 1, by Fine Gael councillor Brendan Wyse.

The housing developments Cllr Wyse referred to are in Allenwood, Coill Dubh, Derrinturn, Johnstownbridge, Kilmeague and Robertstown, which would would have their wastewater systems inspected.

However, he placed particular emphasis on the developments in Allenwood and Derrinturn, saying that they are 'both at a standstill.'

KCC replied to Cllr Wyse by saying that the Water Services have already forwarded this motion to the Local Representatives Desk in Irish Water.

They added that they will update the MD as soon as the report is ready.

Prosperous

Social Democrats Cllr Aidan Farrelly also asked KCC to consider adding the treatment plant at Prosperous to its list of wastewater systems to be inspected.

Cllr Wyses colleague, Tim Durkan, also supported the request.
The National Gallery of Ireland is seeking applications from Kildare artists, children and young people for this years Zurich Portrait Prize and Zurich Young Portrait Prize from today.

For the Zurich Portrait Prize, the competition showcasing contemporary portraiture, the Gallery invites submissions from across the island of Ireland, and from Irish artists living abroad, while the Zurich Young Portrait Prize, now in its fourth year, is open to young people aged 18 and under.

Sean Rainbird, Director of the National Gallery, said, "The Zurich Portrait Prize and the Zurich Young Portrait Prize at the National Gallery of Ireland continue to go from strength to strength.

"Our aim is to encourage an interest in contemporary portraiture and were thrilled to have Zurich partnering with us once again as we do so.

He added: "This year, we look forwarding to learning about how artists and young people have been inspired in recent times as we welcome submissions from all age groups, from artists here in Ireland and Irish artists abroad."

Neil Freshwater, CEO of Zurich, also said: "Since 2018 Zurich has held the honour of supporting these competitions, which showcase talented artists of all ages from the island of Ireland and from Irish artists based abroad.

"We look forward each year to seeing that creativity and energy housed amongst the greatest artists in the National Gallery."

FURTHER DETAILS

The Zurich Portrait Prize aims to encourage interest in contemporary portraiture and to showcase the National Portrait Collection at the National Gallery.

The winner of the Zurich Portrait Prize will receive a cash prize of 15,000 and will be commissioned to create a work for the national portrait collection, for which they will be awarded a further 5,000.

Two additional awards of 1,500 will be given to highly commended works.

The Zurich Young Portrait Prize, which aims to foster and support creativity, originality and self-expression in children and young people returns for its fourth year in 2022.

The competition is split into four age categories and is open to young people of all abilities aged up to 18 from across the country. Winners in each age category and an overall winner will be chosen from a shortlist of 20 works: winners will receive a bespoke art box and a cash prize.

The closing date for entries to the Zurich Portrait Prize and Zurich Young Portrait Prize is 22 June 2022.

Exhibitions featuring shortlisted works in both competitions run at the National Gallery of Ireland between 26 November 2022 and 2 April 2023.

The exhibitions will then travel to Donegal where they will run at Regional Cultural Centre in Letterkenny from 3 June 2023 to 2 September 2023. This is the first time that the competition exhibitions will be on display in Ulster.

Highly commended artists and an overall winner for the Zurich Portrait Prize, as well as category winners and an overall winner for the Zurich Young Portrait Prize, will be announced in early December 2022, after the exhibitions have opened at the Gallery.

Find out more at www.nationalgallery.ie.
Tens of thousands of euro is expected to be raised for Ukraine with a sale of over 50 calves at Kilcullen Mart on April 20.

Kildare & West Wicklow IFA has organised the Calves for Ukraine event with 100% of all proceeds going to the Irish Red Cross which is working with citizens of the war-torn country.



Kilcullen Mart is owneed by Leinster Marts co-operative society which also has marts in Carlow, Kilcullen and Borris.

Patricia Lawler of Kilcullen Mart said: At the moment we have farmers offering over 50 calves  but this could increase.

Beef calves can currently fetch prices of between 400 and 500  which could see up to 25,000 raised at the event.

Patricia added: If you can bring a fundraising idea to farmers, there is no better sector to come in behind you and support it.

Thats the great thing about the farming community, and this is a very generous gesture by all the farmers donating calves.



Free of charge

Patricia said that 100% of the proceeds of the sale will go to the Irish Red Cross Ukraine Fund as Mart staff are volunteering their services free of charge and there is no charge for use of the facilities is also free.

Kilcullen is currently the only livestock mart in County Kildare following the closures over the years of facilities in Naas, Maynooth and Athy.

For more information, see kilcullen.marteye.ie.
Kildare South TD and the Dail's Ceann Comhairle Sean O Fearghail has told the Ukrainian president that the war in his country is barbaric and horrendous.

The Kildare native was speaking as leader Volodymyr Zelensky made a historic speech to TDs and Senators gathered in the Dail chamber this morning.

Addressing Mr Zelensky, the Ceann Comhairle said: "As Ukrainian people continue to die, we must act. What we have seen in recent days and the extent of the barbaric actions visited upon the people of Ukraine is simply horrendous. We need international courts to give a transparent and fair reckoning for the bloodshed in these heinous crimes."

Mr O Fearghail also saluted the personal bravery of Mr Zelensky over the past weeks and added: "We salute the outstanding bravery and resilience of the Ukrainian people in the face of unprovoked aggression."

He added: "While Ireland is a militarily neutral country, we are not politically neutral. We do not stand idly by. We will not, as W.B. Yeats might have said, forsake the little streets hurled upon the great.

"We will continue to offer practical, on-the-ground support to our Ukrainian friends. We will also continue to welcome those forced to leave Ukraine seeking safety on foreign shores.

"Mr. President, we Irish are aware of the pain of separation and the loss of our people to distant lands.

"At this challenging time, those forced to leave Ukraine are welcome here in Ireland and they will be supported and assisted until such time as they are free to return to rebuild their damaged homeland, an exercise we will help you with."

Mr Zelensky said he noted that Ireland has decided not to remain neutral on the disaster that Russia has inflicted on his country - and that he was grateful to every citizen of Ireland and for the country's support of sanctions against Russia.
Kildare South TD Cathal Berry has called on the Taoiseach to send anti-tank rockets from the Curragh to war-torn Ukraine.

The former member of the elite Army Ranger Wing told the Dail that the Ukrainian army needed the defensive weapons to repel new attacks by Russia.

Mr Berry was speaking after Volodymyr Zelensky made a historic to TDs and Senators gathered in the Dail chamber.

The TD said: "One hour's drive from here in the Curragh Camp, there are hundreds of anti-tank rockets nearing the end of their shelf life that could very easily be transferred to the Ukraine defence forces.

"The reason that is so important is that we know the Russians are preparing a massive offensive in the east at the moment and that this offensive is likely to be successful but it does not have to be this way.

"We have learned from the successful defence of Kyiv that the future is not written in stone. It has yet to be decided and it will be determined not just by fate but by decisions and actions of the people in this Chamber over the next few days.

"For precisely those reasons, I urge the Taoiseach to send protective, defensive weapons to Ukraine in order that we stop the Russian advance, that we drag Russia to the negotiating table and that together we alter the course of history. Slava Ukraini."
A new inspection and monitoring programme of public acute hospitals and rehabilitation and community inpatient healthcare services has been announced by the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA).

HIQA will carry out inspections across healthcare services to monitor against the National Standards for Safer Better Healthcare and assess the standard and quality of care in services as Ireland enters the next phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Director of Healthcare Regulation, Sean Egan, said: Healthcare services have faced numerous challenges in the past few years, most notably COVID-19, the cyberattack and capacity issues. These have all had a lasting impact on the health service, and major efforts are still required to enable services to fully recover.

"HIQAs new monitoring programme aims to monitor and publicly report on the quality and safety of healthcare services, as they continue this recovery process and adapt to new realities.

The inspections will focus on leadership, governance and management of services, and how services ensure the rights of patients using them are properly respected.

"We will also focus on service safety, assessing the key areas of infection prevention and control, medication safety, transitions of care, and care for patients with deteriorating conditions, such as sepsis. During these inspections, we will also review the conditions in which care is provided in emergency departments, as well as in other key clinical areas.

All public acute hospitals and rehabilitation and community inpatient healthcare services in Ireland will be inspected as part of this programme. All services will receive a minimum of two inspections in each three-year cycle, with risk-based inspections carried out as required in response to risk.

The programme aims to drive quality improvement, while also allowing flexibility to respond to concerns as they arise. HIQA has published a guide to an assessment judgment framework which provides detail on the new inspection programme, including on lines of enquiry and how compliance will be judged, for the services being inspected.

Sean Egan continued: This monitoring programme places an emphasis on driving quality improvement while also continuing to respond to concerns as they arise. It is also adaptable, and can be applied to all potential services HIQA will monitor in future as our role expands.

Currently, HIQAs remit is to monitor healthcare services provided or funded by the Health Service Executive (HSE); however, we continue to anticipate the enactment of key pieces of legislation which would extend our powers to monitor private healthcare facilities, to receive and respond to notifiable patient safety incidents and to regulate post-mortem practices.
LIMERICK artists have generously donated their art for Incognito 2022 in aid of the Jack and Jill Childrens Foundation.

26 artists have donated their work for Ireland's biggest online art sale, and what makes Incognito different to other art sales, is that the buyer has no idea who the artist is until after the sale closes.

Among the Limerick artists taking part this year are Clare Hartigan from Castleconnell, Deirdre Mungovan McNamara from Limerick city, Nell Madden from Pallaskenry, and David Murphy from Kilteragh.

Funds raised from Incognito 2022 will help provide specialist home nursing care, respite support and end-of-life care for 19 children with highly complex medical and life-limiting conditions across the county.

A total of 3,200 artworks will go up for sale on the day with a host of famous faces getting involved this year including Ronnie Wood, Andrea Corr, Christy Dignam, Samantha Mumba, Lyra, Damien Dempsey and Robert Grace.

CEO of the Jack and Jill Childrens Foundation, Carmel Doyle said Incognito is a very special fundraiser for artists, for art lovers and for Jack and Jill families.

She said: "Theres something very special about Incognito which turns art into a real currency for care. On the one hand, we have hugely talented artists who are so generous in donating their art to Jack and Jill.

"On the other hand, we have members of the public who really want to purchase that art and to support our families at the same time.

"Each piece of art is part of a bigger story and leaves behind an extraordinary legacy. This year, we are proud to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of Jack and Jill and today we are supporting more families than at any time in our history.

"This fundraiser means that as a charity Jack and Jill keeps going by funding and providing care for the children we support at home, in their community, where they belong."

The postcard-sized works of art are priced at 65 each and prospective purchasers can check out the art now online where they can register ahead of the sale which takes place on Thursday, April 21 from 9.30am.
A SPECIAL ceremony of remembrance and reflection to mark the impact of covid-19 will be held in Limerick this coming weekend.

The Mayor of the City and County of Limerick, Cllr Daniel Butler will host the ceremony in the courtyard of Merchants Quay this Sunday, April 10 at 1pm.

The ceremony will remember those who lost their lives during the Covid-19 pandemic and pay tribute to those who contributed to the fight locally and nationally against the virus.

Representatives from all sectors who had to work through the pandemic will be in attendance and the public are also invited to attend.

This ceremony will represent an opportunity for the people of Limerick to pause and reflect on all those who have been affected by, or lost their lives, during the pandemic.

The ceremony will also include contributions from the main faiths across Limerick, a special wreath laying ceremony and reflective readings and song and an address from the Mayor.

Mayor Daniel Butler said: "The past two years has been a very difficult time for many. We have lost many people and our lives have been severely hampered due to the pandemic.

"This ceremony is a time for us to reflect on the past two years and how our lives have changed as a result and how we came together as communities to help each other.

"It also gives us an opportunity to pay tribute to all the frontline workers across all sectors of society for their dedication and hard work throughout the pandemic and indeed now as we learn to live with the virus."
GARDAI have confirmed they are investigating an alleged assault in Limerick city centre - footage of which has been widely shared on WhatsApp and social media.

The incident happened outside a fast-food restaurant near the Milk Market in the early hours of last Sunday morning.

"Gardai are investigating an assault that took place on Cornmarket Row, Limerick, at approximately 1.30am on Sunday, April 3, 2022," a spokesperson told the Limerick Leader.

In the footage, an altercation involving a number of people can be seen breaking out near the entrance to the business premises.

One man is then punched and knocked to the ground while another man appears to be struck with a frying pan as the fracas spills into the middle of the road.

The incident lasts for less than a minute before others intervene and break it up. None of those involved appear to have sustained serious injures.

Gardai at Roxboro Road, who are investigating, say no arrests have been made and that investigations are ongoing.
A LIMERICK-based artist is in shock after learning that Michael Buble received her framed print of popular Limerick haunt Chicken Hut.

Jane Hogan, who has been selling her illustrations of iconic Limerick buildings, was shocked to learn that the Canadian superstar was presented with one of her best-selling pieces.

The framed photo of Limericks legendary chicken hut was handed over to the King of Christmas by Ballyclough native and Today FM presenter and comedian Dermot Whelan.

It doesnt feel real, I am just in complete shock that Michael Buble has one of my prints, she told the Limerick Leader.

The philosophy of her work has always been to get a piece of Limerick into peoples homes, and now in what she described as a pinch me moment, the Crazy Love artist will hang his up in his North American home.

A huge fan, the LSAD graduate said that each year she listens to Michael Buble as she potters around her Corbally home, putting up her Christmas decorations.

As soon as it happened, my phone started going nuts. Aine, from Chicken Hut, broke the news to me. So many people have got in touch with kind words since, its just amazing, she added.

The big question is, how would the Feeling Good star feel about a gravy chip?

Chicken Hut is so iconic. For Michael Buble to even be saying it and attempting his best Limerick accent with Dermot adds to it all.

Firstly, he would have to decide on how to ask for a gravy chip or superchip. It would have to be after a night out, preferably Costellos, to give him the full Limerick experience.

We would have to get Michael to say: Forks in the bag you gowl! when he visits, she concluded.

Visit janey.me to check out her work.
Russia's actions in Ukraine will never be forgotten and will never be forgiven.

Tanaiste Leo Varadkar made the statement in a rousing speech given during a joint sitting of the Oireachtas today (Wednesday April 6).

It follows a historic address by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who spoke from Kyiv via video link with the aid of a translator.

President Zelensky thanked the Irish public for supporting Ukraine and its people "from the very first days" of Russia's invasion.

He said, "You did not doubt starting helping us, you began doing this right away and although you are a neutral country, you have not remained neutral to the disaster and to the mishaps that Russia has brought to Ukraine."

The Tanaiste spoke following the conclusion of the president's speech and said Ireland knows "what it is like to be invaded and to have the very existence of our national identity questioned".

He said, "For these reasons we feel for the idealism of the Ukrainian people, their defiance and their determination to face down a new evil empire."

In his speech, Minister Varadkar spoke of Ireland's anger at Russia's "appalling human rights abuses" and promised to do everything possible to aid Ukraine by sheltering its people and standing by them "in their greatest hour".

He said, "The abolitionist and civil rights leader, Frederick Douglass, liked to quote our own civil rights leader, Daniel OConnell, who he met here in Dublin. He said that the history of the Irish people could be traced like a wounded man through a crowd. By the blood. Today the history of Ukraine can be traced through its villages and towns and cities by the suffering of its children, its women and its men. By the blood."

In a message for Russian president, Vladimir Putin, his government, diplomats, collaborators and apologists, the Tanaiste said, "Over the past 42 days you have violated the human rights of another sovereign people, your neighbours, your friends, your so-called Slavic brothers. You have raped and defiled the very principles of common humanity which bind us together in peace and harmony.

"You have betrayed your own people and your own countrys rich history and culture, your own resistance to oppression over many centuries.

"We here have no quarrel with the people of Russia. We particularly admire those extraordinarily brave people who continue to oppose and protest this war on the streets of Moscow and St Petersburg, despite brutal repression.

"But for those responsible for this conflict, we have a simple message from this House. Your actions will never be forgotten, they will never be forgiven. Thanks to the power of modern media, weve seen what youve done. You have made yourselves outcasts in the international community. Youve strengthened Ukrainian national identity. Youve united Europe and the west. And youve made our values shine brighter ever still."

He continued: "We are a small country, but we have a voice. And today we say to the world that Ireland stands with Ukraine. Our hopes, our thoughts, our prayers, are with the men, women and children of Ukraine, today and tomorrow and forever. We know you will prevail. Slava Ukraini."

The newest leader of the Labour party, Ivana Bacik, paid special tribute to the Ukrainian Ambassador to Ireland, Larysa Gerasko, for her "steadfast advocacy on behalf of her country".

She said, "Ambassador, as the brutal Russian invasion of your democratic European country continues, we learn this week about the carrying out of war crimes in Bucha, about the ongoing siege of Mariupol and the atrocities that have been committed by Russian forces in other cities and communities.

"These reports have horrified us all and now show the need for an intensification of our collective response.

"While we in Labour welcome the news of a fifth round of EU sanctions, and also welcomed the expulsion of diplomatic staff from the Russian embassy in Dublin last week, we believe that greater sanctions and a stronger stance against Putins aggression and criminality are needed."

Deputy Bacik called on the government to take further measures against Russia, including the expulsion of the Russian Ambassador from Ireland, a full embargo on Russian oil and gas, and the "urgent initiation" of investigations and prosecutions into Russian war crimes against civilians.

She said, "Lets be clear. Putin wants to wipe Ukraine off the map. Ambassador, he wants to abolish your culture, your history. Putin must fail. Putin will fail."
The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland has rejected at least 35 complaints related to Covid-19 segments on national and local radio and television since last October, a new report has revealed.

In its decision on broadcast complaints published this week, the BAI rejected all but one complaint. That complaint related to a Red FM segment on traveller accommodation. A complainant on behalf of the Cork Traveller Womens Network claimed that the Neil Prendivlle show piece breached the BAI Code of Practice.

The complainant said "the broadcast contained inaccurate and misleading information and was presented in a manner that was not objective or impartial."

The BAI Compliance Committee upheld the complaint saying they "found the presenter had failed to sufficiently challenge the contributors views and the broadcast did not provide a wide variety of views on the subject or reflect the views of those who chose not to participate in the programme."

The Compliance Committee also dealt with 22 complaints relating to Covid-19 segments dating back to October last year when it met in January. The Compliance Committee rejected all 22 complaints while the Executive Complaints Forum of the BAI rejected a further 13 Covid-19 related complaints.

The vast majority of the complaints related to vaccination segments with the same complainants often submitting complaints about more than one show.

16 of the complaints related to one episode of the Claire Byrne Live show on RTE television which was aired on October 18, 2021.

Most of the complaints concern an interview on that show with journalist Joe OShea about people choosing not to have

a Covid-19 vaccination and possible public policy options in relation to this.

One complainant stated that in this discussion with presenter Claire Byrne, the interviewee made specific reference to those

who choose not to be vaccinated because of their young age or religious beliefs. The complainant believes that such a reference may be construed as indirect discrimination in the context of lower rates of Covid-19 vaccine uptake among groups protected under equality law such as ethnic minorities, certain religious affiliations, people with specific disabilities, pregnant women and younger age cohorts.

The complainant believes the interviewees reference to people who cannot or choose not to get vaccinated as hardcore cranks is highly insulting.

They claimed that the interviewees statement that people who are not vaccinated pose a risk to society was misleading and lacked supporting scientific evidence. The complainant believed the presenter did not correct such statements by the interviewee and ought to have done so.

The complainant believes the interview openly attacked a cohort of Irish citizens and claims that the interviewees reference to locking people who are not vaccinated out of society could be seen as inciting hatred towards these people.

RTE said it believes the discussion on vaccination and those not availing of vaccination was editorially legitimate, particularly given the consensus of public health advice that vaccination helps reduce the severity of illness and potential mortality from Covid-19 infection.

They stressed that they were rightly, like other broadcasters, giving "due weight to the consensus of scientific, medical, and public knowledge on issues such as this."

In rejecting the complaint, the BAI Compliance Committee said: "The Committee was satisfied the opinions of the interviewee were clearly presented as such and the presenter appropriately challenged these views and sought the opinions of another contributor on them. The Committee did not believe the audience would have been misled on the issues under discussion and was satisfied the subject was presented in an objective and impartial manner, which was fair to all interests concerned."

The Committee considered whether references to young people or people of religious beliefs in the broadcast had infringed the above provisions of the Code of Programme Standards, as claimed in the complaint. The Committee noted the interviewees reference to young people was in the context of explaining why some people may be choosing not to be vaccinated.

The interviewee said, We have to start compelling people, because a lot of them seem to think that because its not affecting me directly, because maybe Im young or maybe Im healthy or maybe I believe some post that Ive seen on Facebook saying Bill Gates wants me to get vaccinated so he can turn me into a robotthat we have to start making their lives complicated as well.

The Committee noted the interviewees reference to religious beliefs related to people refusing to believe the evidence and advice of scientific and medical experts in relation to Covid-19 vaccines.

The interviewee said, there are no scientific arguments to be made for not getting vaccinated. Im not a virologist but the anti-vaxxers arent virologists either. Theres no debate because you cant debate somebody who believes in a religious belief almost, a cult-like thing of, you know, well, Im 39 just not going to get vaccinated and Im not going to listen to my doctor, Im not going to listen to the overwhelming evidence and opinion of the worlds leading scientists. You cant debate

with them. At this stage, were talking about almost hard-core cranks.

The Committee said it "found no grounds to believe the above references to young people and religious beliefs amounted to stigmatising, supporting or condoning discrimination or inciting hatred against these groups in society."

The Committee considered whether the language used by the interviewee infringed the requirements of the Code of Programme Standards, in particular the reference to hardcore cranks. The Committee noted the interviewee did not use this term to describe all unvaccinated people, as suggested in the complaint, but just those who do not believe in the evidence and advice of scientific and medical experts in relation to the vaccines.

The Committee added that "these people do not constitute a group in society offered specific protection by equality legislation or the Code of Programme Standards.

"The Committee accepted the term may have caused offence to the complainant but did not believe it caused undue offence, considering the moderate manner in which the interview was conducted and taking into account the nature of the programme and audience expectations."

Further complaints were made on similar grounds against The Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk but again these were rejected.

These complaints concerned an interview with the Tanaiste in relation to people who have not had a Covid-19 vaccination.

One complainant believed the presenters comments and line of questioning in relation to restrictions for people who are not vaccinated were an expression of the presenters own views and were discriminatory, derogatory and incited hatred. The complainant believed the presenter is either unaware of the facts in relation to vaccinated people transmitting Covid-19 or is deliberating choosing to ignore them.

Newstalk said it believes that the presenters line of questioning was legitimate in the context of the interview and did not amount to the presenter expressing his own views.

The broadcaster stated that "it is an important part of the presenters role in a current affairs programme to ask critical questions and to reflect the views of those who cannot or choose not to participate, which sometimes involves conveying critical views and asking robust questions. The broadcaster believes the presenter played this role in the interview."

The BAI largely agreed and rejected the complaints. In their decision, they said: "The Committee observed that it is entirely appropriate for a current affairs presenter to question a member of Government about Government policy and decisions and to account for those policies and decisions.

"The Committee was of the opinion the presenter was carrying out this role in this interview and noted that he allowed the interviewee ample time to respond to his questions. The Committee believed the line of questioning was appropriate to the subject matter discussed and found no evidence of discriminatory or derogatory content or incitement to hatred."
NEW DELHI : Viewership of English language and Hindi film TV channels saw a steep decline at 18% and 20%, respectively, in 2021 as compared to 2019, said a recent report by Ficci_EY. Overall, film channel viewership fell 9% in 2021 as compared to 2019.

Media experts said direct-to-digital release of films during two years of the pandemic has resulted in longer windows for satellite TV premieres, leading to lower audience interest. The price of film rights for satellite TV itself has fallen 30-40% in the past two years as even broadcasters who have streaming platforms like to release new films on OTT first. Foreign platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, too, shell out big bucks for digital premieres.

To be sure, regional language films such as Bhojpuri and Marathi also saw a 13% and 14% dip in viewership. The report said that as the top 120-150 million Indians who own TV sets also have access to both cinema halls and OTT platforms, viewership of film channels will become more mass. So for better monetization of a film, the gap between its release in theatres and digital platforms versus its premier on satellite TV may increase.

Calendar year 2021 was especially tough for television movie channels because there were a large number of films premiering directly on digital platforms which paid hefty amounts for exclusive rights. When there is a window of eight to 12 weeks before satellite TV premiere can take place, the film loses relevance," Karan Taurani, senior vice-president at Elara Capital Ltd said.

He said there is a structural shift in audiences moving towards movie-viewing on OTT platforms and television viewership witnessing a downfall. Especially as OTT subscriptions increasingly become available in attractive bundled packages, the trend is set to accelerate, he said.

Independent trade analyst Sreedhar Pillai said with the exception of Sun TV Network that still airs big-ticket movies on TV first, all companies now opt for quick OTT premieres after theatrical release. The last resort for broadcasters now is to bank on their dubbed south Indian film libraries for which there is a loyal fan base in tier-II and tier-III towns.

However, Manish Shah, director, Goldmine Telefilms that owns Dhinchaak, a TV channel for dubbed films, had told Mint in an earlier interview that the films he shows are getting big viewership numbers on his YouTube channel. Any company not moving online will be out of business."

Shah did not respond to Mints queries on the latest numbers for the film channel category. Networks like Sony, Viacom18 and Star didnt respond to queries either.

Viewers also complain of TV channels peddling the same fare repeatedly with movies like Sooryavansham and Anil Kapoors Nayak: The Real Hero, being aired as frequently as once a month. While broadcasters point to the need for family entertainers that can appeal to the lowest common denominator, the contrast with OTT services that offer a variety of options, is stark.

Amit Wadhwa, CEO, dentsu Creative India, agreed that the big reason behind the fall in viewership of film channels has to be the strong emergence of OTT which has two key advantages going for them  appointment viewing versus view at ones convenience and releases of films almost immediately on these platforms. Having said that, I still feel film channels do have a strong audience because one, it is hugely economical versus OTT and secondly if they can work out prior release dates, they can certainly manage some kind of a reversal. Also, not all OTT platforms have all films and only a few selected ones allow multiple members in one subscription. Hence, the relevance is not going out for film channels," Wadhwa said.

Yet broadcasters remain optimistic on the continuing reach of television. This is a point in time study and the time period is more of an exception. In 2020, the pandemic limited the number of Hollywood movie releases by over 50% and that reduced the number of TV releases in 2021. Since the movie genre depends heavily on new releases for growth in viewership, this data should not be seen as a trend. In fact, we have been seeing a positive uptake on the viewership of premieres," said Amit Shah, cluster headnorth, west and premium channels, ZEE Entertainment Enterprises Ltd.

He added that the networks premiere of Monster Hunter on ZEE channels saw a cumulative reach upwards of 34 million. Since theatres have started opening up, there has been a positive uptake in box office numbers, with Hollywood offerings like Venom 2 and Spider-Man: No Way Home, setting the cash registers ringing in India.
As matters regarding the Azaan-Hanuman Chalisa row escalated in Maharashtra, Karnataka chief minister Basavaraj Bommai weighed in speaking about the use of loudspeakers for the the Islamic call to prayer.

Bommai said, "This is a high court order. It's not forced. Everything has to be done by talking and explaining to people."

The Karnataka CM's comments came a day after Karnataka minister KS Eshwarappa said "a solution should be found to address the concerns over the use of loudspeakers in mosques in the state".

Bommai further clarified: "It is not only for Azaan, it is for all loudspeakers. So, we will take a call." Last year, the high court had curbed the use of loudspeakers in religious places.

Eshwarappa on Monday was reacting to MNS chief Raj Thackeray's comments on the use of loudspeakers in mosques, when he said: The attempts by Raj Thackeray or Sri Rama Sene against the use of loudspeakers at mosques have to be naturally done by taking the Muslim community into confidence. There have been complaints for a long time that it disturbs students and patients during morning and evening hours."

However, Eshwarappa's comments were sharper. This is not a competition for us to play Hanuman Chalisa loudly on speakers to counter them. I have no objections to you (Muslims) offering prayer but because of your using loudspeakers, if prayers are offered at temples and churches also in a similar way, it will lead to conflict between communities."

Last year in March 2021, in an order with far-reaching implications, the Karnataka State Board of Auqaf has issued a circular to all the mosques and dargahs (mausoleums) in the state, prohibiting the use of loudspeakers between 10 pm and 6 am during Azaan.

Karnataka is already dealing with a controversy over Hijabs after headscarves - worn by girls and women of Muslim community - which were banned in classrooms. Following that with the loudspeaker comment has sparked far outcry nationwide.

Hanuman Chalisa vs Azaan row in Maharashtra

The row that was started by Maharashtra Nirman Sena (MNS) where they played Hanuman Chalisa in public places to oppose Azaan being played on loudspeakers has escalated where a BJP leader has offered to bankroll loudspeakers to play the Hanuman Chalisa in public places, fanning a fractious campaign against the Azaan - the Islamic call to prayer - championed by right-wing political leaders.

"Anyone who needs a loudspeaker to install it in a temple can ask us for free! All Hindus should have one voice! Jai Shri Ram! Har Har Mahadev!" Mohit Kamboj, a billionaire bullion trader and among the richest BJP leaders, tweeted.

MNS chief, Raj Thackeray last week said he is not against any religion but his party workers will play Hanuman Chalisa in front of mosques if the state government does not remove loudspeakers outside mosques.

But other Maharashtra leaders did not support his comments. "People thought it was a BJP event. The law of the land prevails in Maharashtra. The home minister will do everything as per the law," ruling Shiv Sena's Sanjay Raut was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.

Maharashtra minister Dilip Patel also took a balanced view of the situation and said that "some people were trying to create a divide in the society."
Ukraine urged civilians to leave the eastern Kharkiv, Donetsk and Luhansk regions as it braced for a major new Russian offensive following Moscows withdrawal from the north of the country.

You need to evacuate now, while this possibility still exists," Ukraines deputy prime minister and minister for occupied territories, Iryna Vereshchuk, said in a Ukrainian TV appearance Wednesday. Later, people will be under fire and under threat of death. We wont be able to help because it will be practically impossible to cease fire."

Following heavy losses, Russia pulled its troops from the vicinity of Kyiv and from the northern Chernihiv and Sumy regions last week, in a strategy shift that the Kremlin says will allow it to focus on seizing the parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, collectively known as Donbas, that remain under Ukrainian control.

In the besieged city of Mariupol, the second-largest in Donbas, Mayor Vadym Boychenko said on Telegram that Russian troops that are engaged in fierce urban combat with Ukrainian defenders have started using mobile crematoriums to dispose of the bodies of Ukrainian civilians. Mr. Boychenko, who put the death toll at 5,000 civilians last week, said he now believes tens of thousands of Mariupol residents could have been killed. There was no independent confirmation of his assessment.

As heavy clashes continued in and near Donbas, Russia pressed on with its campaign of long-range missile strikes, targeting fuel depots across Ukraine and an industrial facility in the eastern city of Novomoskovsk, local officials said.

The clashes in the east and south contrasted with the north, where a Russian withdrawal has led to the return of relative normalcy. Turkey, which has supplied Ukraine with weapons such as Bayraktar TB2 armed drones while also maintaining close relations with Russia, became the first major nation to send diplomats back to Kyiv now that it is no longer under threat of being shelled or overrun. Turkey has served as the venue for the latest round of peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, and is involved in efforts to transport civilians and wounded soldiers by sea from Mariupol.

The Turkish Embassy, which had relocated to the western Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi, reopened in Kyiv and will resume consular services, it said on social media. The U.S., by contrast, currently doesnt have any diplomatic presence on Ukrainian soil, with embassy staff operating from Poland. Several Western leaders have visited Kyiv to show solidarity in recent weeks, including European Parliament President Roberta Metsola and the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia. Lithuania is planning to send its ambassador back to Kyiv as soon as Thursday, according to Lithuanian officials.

While Russias withdrawal from northern Ukraine has relieved pressure on Kyiv and lifted the siege of the cities of Sumy and Chernihiv, it has also allowed Moscow to focus on seizing the entirety of Donbas and trying to encircle the large Ukrainian military contingent there. Heavy battles continued Wednesday south of the eastern Ukrainian city of Izyum, in the Kharkiv region, as Russian forces attempted to break through and link up with Russian troops trying to push north from Mariupol.

Russia in February recognized the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples Republics, proxy statelets that were established in 2014, as independent. Their claimed borders, recognized by Russia, are two-thirds of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that were controlled by Kyiv at the time.

The enemys main effort is on preparing an offensive to establish full control over the Donetsk and Luhansk regions," Ukraines General Staff said in Wednesdays briefing. Ukrainian forces in the southern Kherson region have seized three villages, pushing Russian forces further away from the major city of Kryvyi Rih, President Volodymyr Zelenskys hometown, the military added.

The mayor of the town of Rubizhne in the Luhansk region, where some neighborhoods have been seized by Russian forces, has switched sides and is now working with the occupation forces, the regional government said. The mayor, Serhii Khortiv, released a video repeating Russian propaganda points about the war. In another area under Russian control, the town of Vovchansk in the Kharkiv region, the mayor was filmed under Russian detention saying Glory to Russia," according to videos released by pro-Kremlin social-media channels.

Overnight, Russia carried out a series of missile strikes, once again targeting fuel depots as it sought to deprive Ukrainian forces of fuel. Ukrainian demining teams, meanwhile, continued removing unexploded ordnance, land mines and booby traps left behind by Russian forces in the liberated areas, including the town of Bucha, where discoveries of mass graves and bodies in the street after the withdrawal of Russian forces have prompted allegations of war crimes.

Mr. Zelensky on Wednesday told Irish lawmakers that the strikes on fuel facilities just as Ukrainian farmers start the spring sowing season aim to destroy the countrys civilian infrastructure and cause widespread hunger.

For them, hunger is also a weapon, a weapon against us ordinary people as an instrument of domination," he said in an address to members of Irelands Parliament.

In the latest in a series of speeches to international legislatures, Mr. Zelensky said the food shortages caused by Russian attacks on Ukrainian agriculture and its blockade of the countrys ports would be felt around the world, and particularly in North Africa, which has traditionally relied on Ukrainian wheat.

There will be a shortage of food and prices will go up," he said. This is reality for millions of people who are hungry and it will be more difficult for them to feed their families."

As the Russian army withdrew from the north to focus on the east, a senior commander characterized the move as the end of a successful phase in its combat operations. Col. Gen. Aleksandr Lapin, the commander of Russias Central Military District, said during a medal-awarding ceremony that the first phase of what Moscow calls its special military operation" had been successfully completed.

Soldiers, sergeants and officers demonstrated resilience, courage and valor in completing their mission," said Gen. Lapin, as Russian officials continued to deny evidence of a massacre of Ukrainian civilians in towns near Kyiv that were occupied by Russian forces until last week.

Pope Francis on Wednesday deplored the killing of civilians in Ukraine, particularly in Bucha.

Ever more horrendous cruelties, even against civilians, women, and helpless children. They are victims whose innocent blood cries out to heaven and implores," the pope said in his weekly public audience at the Vatican.

Pope Francis has repeatedly called for an end to the war and lamented the suffering of Ukraine, though he hasnt named Russia as the aggressor.

Mr. Zelensky addressed the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday, saying Russia should be removed from it or it be dissolved, after warning that newly uncovered atrocities following the withdrawal of Russian forces near Kyiv could be worse than those in Bucha.

It is difficult to find a war crime that the occupiers have not committed," Mr. Zelensky said during a virtual appearance at the councils chamber in New York. He has previously said that more than 300 civilians had been tortured or killed in Bucha.

Mr. Zelensky said civilians were crushed by tanks in civilian cars in the middle of the roadfor fun" as well as raped and killed in front of their own children."

Mr. Zelenskys speech came as the U.S. and European Union prepared to impose broad new packages of sanctions on Moscow, with Washington planning a ban on all new investment in Russia and the European Commission proposing a ban on imports of Russian coal and sanctions on two of President Vladimir Putins daughters. The Biden administration is preparing to impose a second round of sanctions this week, including on two of Russias biggest banks and on Mr. Putins daughters, U.S. officials said.

The U.S. is expected to announce as soon as Wednesday sanctions on Sberbank, Russias largest lender, and Alfa Bank, one of the countrys top private banks, the officials said.
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HBO Maxs new series One Perfect Shot is a masterclass in filmmaking. Ava DuVernay hosts and executive produces the series, inspired by the Twitter account of the same name.

Patty Jenkins, Aaron Sorkin, Kasi Lemmons, Jon M. Chu, Malcolm D. Lee and Michael Mann are among the featured filmmakers who share their obstacles, challenges, lessons and triumphs as they talk about that one perfect shot. In the case of Chu, he discusses Crazy Rich Asians and the path to making a film that would herald a new moment in storytelling for AAPI representation in Hollywood.

Chu is joined by production designer Nelson Coates and costume designer Mary Vogt. As they recall the epic wedding scene, Vogt tells Chu how she worked with the extras and locals from Singapore to bring your couture dresses and real diamonds  and thats how the team pulled off a $40 million dollar wedding scene on a $35 million film budget.

Below, Vogt breaks down the key looks worn by Michelle Yeohs Eleanor Young, including her stunning wedding outfit.

Eleanor meets Rachel Chu

This is our first real introduction to Nicks (Henry Golding) mother and family. Eleanor is playing host to the creme de la creme of Singapore. Its also the first time she gets to meet her sons girlfriend, Rachel (Constance Wu).

Says Vogt, Eleanor needed to look really strong, which she does  she would look strong in a bathrobe. This is a very regal dress. It was mostly to intimidate Constances character, the girlfriend. To have the mother in this very regal strong color; the cape in the back makes her look like a queen. Shes lording over all the people working in the kitchen in this queenly way. It has this slightly Grecian, queen and goddess look all at the same time. Michelle put it on, and she looked regal  it was from Valentino.

Vogt continued, Its a simple clean dress, but its very strong. Michelle brought a lot of strength to it. We got this giant emerald pin because Michelle felt like her character would never wear fake jewelry. She would never wear costume jewelry, so that is real emerald. Michelle has lots of friends in the jewelry world. She said, Ill just call my friend and pick up something. We picked up this million-dollar emerald brooch for her to wear in this scene.

Eleanor to Rachel: You will never be enough

In this scene, Eleanor and a few members of the family gather around the dining room table to make dumplings, a family tradition. As Rachel excuses herself to use the bathroom, Eleanor follows her and confronts her, telling her that as an American, Rachel will never be enough for her or her son.

For this ensemble, Vogt put Yeoh in white pants and a green top. Vogt says, Michelle is very physical and she works out constantly. When we shot the scene, the whole house was green, and that was something Jon really wanted, that green for her. I was afraid too much green would fade into the background. So, we gave her the white pants. When she played that scene with Constance on the stairs, it was kind of scary because Michelle was so powerful. I thought she was going to knock her down the stairs. It was a slip top from Diane Von Furstenberg, and I think the pants were Dior. She could wear something from JC Penney and make it look like a regal outfit.

A $40 million dollar wedding

The Asian wedding of the century, it was a display of wealth and decadence as societys finest gathered under a Gothic-inspired chapel. Coates turned the aisle into water so the bride, Araminta, walks on water. Literally.

For the wedding dress, Vogt says the brides dress was made in Malaysia by designer Carven Ong, and over 30 women spent three weeks bedazzling it.

Eleanor was decked in Ellie Saab. It has a cape, Vogt says. Most of her clothes have a regal quality to them because she is the queen of this family. This was gold and light blue. When it came in, it was completely sheer. So, we ran out and luckily we were able to get a nude-colored nightgown that we put underneath the dress. The day of shooting, we put the belt on. Her brooch was this $2 million thing that she had gotten from a friend in Hong Kong, made from white and yellow diamonds.

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Sean Penn spoke to cable viewers across the political spectrum on Tuesday night, appearing on both the right-leaning Fox News and left-leaning MSNBC within the span of two hours to discuss support for Ukraine amid the countrys invasion by Russian military forces.

Penn began the evening with an in-person appearance on the N.Y.-based Hannity, engaging in a conversation with Fox News conservative commentator Sean Hannity. Hannity began the segment by recounting how the comparatively liberal Penn decided to come onto the program.

I made the first phone call to you, Hannity began. Do you remember what you first said to me?

I said I dont trust you,' Penn responded. But we have to get on with life We all talk about how divisive things are, how divided things are here. When you step into a country of incredible unity, you realize what weve all been missing. I dont think Ive got time to indulge my lack of trust, which becomes a petty thing. These people are fighting for the dreams and aspirations of all of us Americans.

Penn went on to explain the documentary he was filming in Ukraine before the invasion began, and how his relationship with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy evolved as the conflict escalated.

In him, I saw something Id never seen before, Penn said. It is clear to me that the Ukrainians will win this. The question is at what cost.

Penns conversation with Hannity was followed by an appearance on MSNBCs The Last Word With Lawrence ODonnell in which he extended further praise for President Zelenskyy. It is somewhat rare for an individual outside of the cable news rotation to make appearances on two different networks on the same night, especially two with traditionally opposing partisan sensibilities.

[Zelenskyy] is the face of so many Ukrainians. And yet, its not conceivable that he couldve known the day before that he would really be able to rise up, Penn told ODonnell. This is leadership that we aspire to. This is freedom of thought and true leadership that is just so moving. Its the kind of moving that we need to be able to get [to the United States], which is borderline a kind of populist lap dance of a nation at this point. Weve got to get back on track together and realize that Ukraine, with all its diversity, has a unity weve never seen in modern times with the challenge it has.

Sean Penn has started to make more cable news appearances in the time since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in February. The actor and activist has devoted himself to operations around the geopolitical conflict in recent weeks. In February, Penn was on the ground in Ukraine filming a documentary for Vice Studios. Penns nonprofit organization CORE is also actively raising funds to assist Ukrainian refugees.

At the end of last month, Penn made an appearance on CNN and vowed to Jim Acosta that he would publicly smelt his Oscar statuettes if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences didnt invite President Zelenskyy to speak during the awards ceremony telecast.

I pray thats not whats happened, Penn told Acosta. I pray there have not been arrogant people, who consider themselves representatives of the greater good in my industry, that have [decided against checking] with leadership in Ukraine. So Im just going to hope that thats not whats happened. I hope [every attendee] walks out if it is.

While Zelenskky did not appear during the Oscars broadcast, he did appear in a pre-taped message at the Grammy Awards on Sunday. It remains unclear whether the Oscars team elected against inviting Zelenskyy to speak during the show or if the President instead declined.

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In Monster Scripteds seven-episode series Afterglow, hailing from Norway, Ester  mother, wife and a friend  finds out she has cancer. But instead of giving in to pain, she demands joy, actress Nina Ellen degard told Variety at Canneseries after its premiere in main competition. REinvent handles sales.

She gets desperate, in a way, and I find it so true, she says about her spirited character who refuses to be victimized. degard, also a regular in supernatural Nordic noir Seizure, embraced  and loved  Esters failings.

After seeing the first episodes again, I thought: I am so rude! But we wanted to show her being as human as possible, so that others can hopefully recognize themselves in her struggle. I havent experienced illness [knocks on wood], but when I became a mother, I was also obnoxious to my friends. I always felt like I didnt have enough time. Once you experience something life-changing, you do become a bit greedy.

Afterglow, created by Atle Knudsen and Kjetil Indregard (who co-wrote the show with Mads Lken), hit close to home for Knudsen, however, who went through a similar experience after his wife, journalist Vera Micaelsen, was also diagnosed with cancer.

The first thing that happened was that Monster sent Atle and me to a spa, as they do, to write a relationship drama, says Indregard.

We couldnt come up with anything and then Atle said: What about a story about a guy who might lose his wife to cancer? Which was exactly the position he was in at that moment. I thought this might be the most important thing I would ever work on as a writer. Its about life and death, its real, painful and beautiful. I remember Atles wife saying that one day you will die, but all the other days you will live.

Despite all the heartbreak it was important to look for the light in the show.

Thats what Ester wants. She says [to her family and friends]: We have to do something cool, have to keep seeing each other. The whole series is about that. About trying to find that hope, adds Knudsen, who also directs, pointing out that while Ester is the star, Afterglow is very much an ensemble, populated with quirky, lovable characters.

Because of what happens to her, everyone else takes a closer look at their own existence. What am I doing? How do I bring happiness into my life? There are so many humorous moments that come from it, he says, with producer Ida Handlykken Kvernstrm adding that while Esters friends finally acknowledge they will be gone one day, it pushes them to live their life to the fullest.

Kvernstrm, also behind dramedy series Prni, about a single mom trying her best to survive daily dramas, reflected on another complex female character coming from Monster Scripted.

Maybe there are many female leaders at Monster and they have a strong voice? Or maybe thats the vibe in Norway right now, this combination of sadness and laughter? she wondered.

Esters relationship with her astrophysicist husband (Vikings Thorbjrn Harr) was also crucial.

Nina and Thorbjrn, they told us: Their love is the protagonist of the show, says Indregard.

Thats so beautiful and we didnt even think of that  the actors did. Their love is the protagonist and cancer is the antagonist, trying to take it away. I am so annoyed we cant take credit for it.

But while the shows tender approach to a difficult subject echoes Laura Linney starrer The Big C, the team was set on telling their own story.

We just worked with our hearts and tried to find the truth. Thinking that if it will feel true to us, then maybe it will be unique, says Knudsen, describing the whole process as full of joy. But Afterglow could still rub one group of people the wrong way: the combative members of BeyHive, aka Beyonces fans, all thanks to one risque joke.

I wrote it. I am sorry, says Indregard.

I love Beyonce! Maybe I should start posting about it right now, wonders degard.

All jokes aside, its important for these characters to not be politically correct all the time. No one here is just good or bad: they are all human. To me, that was the most important thing.

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The 2022 Academy Awards featured a landmark night for the Deaf community.

During the event, the first deaf actor in history won an Academy Award as Troy Kotsur was named best supporting actor for CODA. And the accolades continued when CODA  or Child of Deaf Adults  took home the best picture award and best adapted screenplay honors.

After CODA won best picture, the audience waved their hands in the air in the American Sign Language version of applause to show respect for the deaf community and the film.

Many around the country watched, Laredo included. And local deaf education teachers stated that this was great for inclusiveness.

In the city, Dr. Leo Cigarroa High School has a full program dedicated to helping the communitys deaf students by teaching them how to communicate effectively and also have a good academic career. As well, the program helps teach students of hearing about sign language as well.

CODA winning best picture has had a positive impact on the deaf teens of the Regional Day School Program for the Deaf at Cigarroa High School, said Jose Mendoza, a deaf education certified teacher for the Laredo Independent School District. For example, the actors who portrayed deaf individuals are actually deaf. The film motivates students and lets them know that the sky is the limit and deaf individuals can do anything hearing people can.

For example, it is common to see hearing actors play deaf people on television shows or films. CODA features real deaf actors, and the young Laredo Deaf community of CHS acknowledges that.

Mendoza believes that the film also allows the acknowledgment that the Deaf community exists and that at CHS, the faculty, staff and students always make sure that they have the same opportunities as everyone else.

We currently have deaf students who are in distinguished career pathways and in extracurricular activities, Mendoza said. Deaf students participate in cheerleading, cross country, health science, accounting and robotics.

In the wake of these accomplishments, Mendoza still states that there is more that needs to be done as the community seeks for inclusiveness.

Mendoza states that the Deaf Laredo Peppers  part of the local Deaf community whose moderators are Mariana Saldivar, Marco Coronado, Jesus Casso and others  have expressed their concern about the importance of bringing awareness to the City of Laredo.

Although Laredo does not have a large Deaf community such as bigger cities like San Antonio or Houston, the Deaf Laredo Peppers have been able to get together in small cafes and city parks to hold their monthly deaf chats and to promote Deaf culture and bring light to the Deaf community, Mendoza said.

Even in Laredo, while the city is not the size of large Texas metros, LISD Special Education Director Raul Gomez Jr. states that there isnt much awareness of the Deaf community locally. But Gomez does state that their school program receives many students from other local school districts and tries to forge more awareness for them within all districts to ensure they are able to communicate better with their peers whether they are of hearing or not.

Laredo ISD is the fiscal agent for Regional Day School Program for the Deaf, Gomez Jr. said. We service approximately 105 students from the following school districts: Laredo ISD, United ISD, Webb Consolidated ISD, Jim Hogg County ISD and Zapata County ISD.

Mendoza states that learning sign language is something that many people should consider, especially young students. Results at Cigarroa High School have demonstrated that learning sign language has had a positive result between not just the deaf students but also those who are not deaf, as more communication between these students has been achieved.

CHS does offer American Sign Language as a course, Mendoza said. The course assists students in acquiring the two foreign language credits required to graduate. Since the introduction of ASL classes to the students of Cigarroa High, many hearing students are able to communicate with deaf students. This has a positive impact on deaf students and makes CHS a much more deaf-friendly environment.

One thing that Mendoza does want to stress is that sign language is not a universal language, as each country has its own sign language. For example, ASL became prominent in the United States in the 1800s thanks to Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet.

He wanted to help his neighbors deaf daughter, so he traveled to Europe and studied ways to communicate with deaf people, Mendoza said. From there, he met Laurent Clerc, who was deaf and who attended the famous school for the deaf in Paris.

Even though films like CODA do bring attention to this community and their issues with complete inclusiveness, Mendoza states that the Deaf community continues to struggle in this regard, such as during live broadcasts as there are many news channels that do not have a sign language interpreter. This is counter to other countries such as Mexico who do have these options.

This is a topic that has been brought up at the national level, Mendoza said. The National Association of the Deaf has lobbied and asked for interpreters during live broadcasts.

As these issues are fought nationally, Mendoza states that a lot can be done to create more inclusiveness at the local level and with the deaf community that already lives in the city.

When you see a deaf person, try to communicate, Mendoza said. Dont be shy. In my experience, the Deaf community is very accepting and will not turn away anyone trying to learn ASL. Other ways of inclusiveness include taking an ASL course at your local college or university. Gallaudet University has free interactive sign language classes online.
Hitting out at the family-led political parties, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday said that they never allowed the youth to progress.

Addressing the BJP workers on the 42nd foundation of the party, Modi said that while for others it is 'parivar bhakti', for the BJP it is 'rastra bhakti'.

"Some political parties are working for the interest of one family. They are present in different states but cover up corruption and misdeeds of each other.

"Country has suffered huge losses due to family-led political parties. Family-led parties have never allowed the youths of the country to progress. They have always betrayed youth. And today BJP is the only party which has alerted the country about this and made a political issue. Today everyone understands that family-led parties are against democracy," Modi said.

Referring to political violence and killing of BJP workers in opposition-ruled states, Prime Minister Modi said, "BJP workers are fighting and losing lives. I assure that our fight will continue till we restore the democratic values in those states."

The Prime Minister told the party leaders and workers that the BJP is working day and night for the upliftment of poor, downtrodden, women and backwards, these are core values of the party.

He claimed that several political parties indulged in vote bank politics for decades and the BJP has been successful in countering these unfair practices

Starting his address, Modi said, "Today is the fifth day of Navratri. Today we worship Maa Skandamata. We've seen that she sits on a Lotus throne and holds Lotus flowers in both her hands. I pray for her blessings."

He told the party leaders and workers that from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, Kutch to Kohima, the BJP is continuously strengthening the resolve of one India -- 'Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat'.

"This year's foundation day has become very important due to three reasons. We are celebrating 75 years of Independence and this is a major occasion for inspiration for us. Second, rapidly changing global order and new opportunities are coming up for India continuously. Third, BJP's double engine government has formed once again in four states and after three decades a party has touched the mark of 100 members in Rajya Sabha," Modi said.

He claimed that today India is firmly standing for its interests without any fear or pressure. "When the entire world is divided into two rival factions, India is being viewed as a nation that can firmly speak about humanity," he said.

He also said that there was a time when the people had accepted that be it a government of any party, nothing will be done for the country. "Today, every citizen of the country is proudly saying that the nation is changing," Modi said.

He mentioned that recently the country achieved its target of reaching $400 billion in exports.

"Our government is working keeping the national interest at forefront. Today the country has decision-making power as well as the determination to enact its decisions. Therefore, today while we are setting goals, we are also fulfilling them," he added.
MUNCIE, Ind. (AP)  A correctional officer at the Delaware County jail has been fired after allegedly firing a PepperBall into a cellblock, striking a prisoner with the projectile, authorities said Wednesday.

The officer discharged a PepperBall launcher with inert powder from the jails control room into one of the cellblocks," Jeff Stanley, chief deputy of the Delaware County Sheriffs Office, said in a news release.
SAN ANTONIO (AP)  Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday delivered new orders along the U.S.-Mexico border and promised more to come as former Trump administration officials press him to declare an invasion and give state troopers and National Guard members authority to turn back migrants.

The two-term Republican governor did not say whether he supports such a concept, which constitutional scholars say is legally dubious, nearly unprecedented and would almost certainly face swift court challenges.

But for now, Abbott said state troopers would begin stopping and inspecting commercial vehicles that come across the border, which he acknowledged would dramatically slow vehicle traffic near U.S. ports of entry. He also said bus charters to Washington, D.C., would be offered to migrants who volunteer for them, in a dig at President Joe Biden and Congress, who Abbott has criticized for not doing enough.

Abbott said the inspection stops would occur on Texas roadways and follow the law. But of course, everyone always files a lawsuit," he said.

The new directives amount to the unprecedented actions that Abbott promised in response to the Biden administration winding down a public health law  now set to expire in May  that has limited asylum-seekers in the name of preventing the spread of COVID-19. When that happens, it is expected to draw more migrants to the southern border.

Texas officials also said they would begin increased military activity on the border and install razor wire at some low-water along the river to deter migrants from crossing.

The orders further expand a multibillion-dollar Texas border security mission that Abbott, who is running for reelection in November, has made the cornerstone of his administration. Already, Texas has deployed thousands of troopers and National Guard members, installed new border barrier and jailed migrants on trespassing charges.

Still, the efforts do not go far enough for some former Trump administration officials, who want Abbott to essentially bestow on troopers and Guard members enforcement powers that have been a federal responsibility.

Border Patrol officials say they are planning for as many as 18,000 arrivals daily once the health policy, known as the Title 42 authority, expires in May. Last week, about 7,100 migrants were coming a day to the southern U.S. border.

But the way former Trump immigration officials see it, Texas and Arizona can pick up where the federal government leaves off. Their plan involves a novel interpretation of the U.S. Constitution to have the National Guard or state police forcibly send migrants to Mexico, without regard to immigration laws and law enforcement procedures. Border enforcement has always been a federal responsibility, and in Texas, state leaders have not been pushing for such a move.

Tom Homan, the former acting director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump, told an audience in San Antonio last week that he had spoken with Abbott about the idea.

Weve had discussions with his attorneys in his office, Is there a way to use this clause within the Constitution where it talks about invasion? Homan said during the Border Security Expo.

Homan said those talks took place about three months ago and described the governor's office as noncommittal but willing to listen.

In Arizona, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey has also been under pressure within his party to declare that the state is being invaded and use extraordinary powers normally reserved for war. But Ducey, who is term-limited and not on the ballot in 2022, has not embraced the theory and has avoided commenting directly on it.

Driving the effort on the right is the Center for Renewing America, a conservative policy think tank led by former Trump administration officials. It includes Ken Cuccinelli, an immigration hard-liner and former Homeland Security official under Trump. He argued states are entitled to defend themselves from immediate danger or invasion, as it is defined by the invasion clause, under the states self-defense clause.

Cuccinelli said in practice, he envisions the plan would look similar to the enforcement of Title 42, which circumvented U.S. obligations under American law and international treaty to provide asylum. He said he has not spoken with Abbott and said the current Texas border mission, known as Operation Lone Star, has put little dent in migration. The mission has also drawn criticism from Guard members over long deployments and little to do, and some arrests have appeared to have no connection to border security.

Until you are actually returning people to Mexico, what you are doing will have no effect, Cuccinelli said.

Emily Berman, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Houston, said the invasion clause cited by proponents is tucked into a broader constitutional assurance that the U.S. must defend states from invasion and domestic violence. Additionally, she said, the state self-defense clause says states cannot engage in warlike actions or foreign policy unless invaded.

Berman said she hasn't seen the constitutional clauses used since the 1990s, when the courts ruled that they did not have jurisdiction to decide what qualified an invasion, but believed that one could only be done by another governmental entity.

For example, Berman said, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia can be qualified as one because it is an outside government breaching another countrys boundaries with the use of military force.

"Just because the state says that it is an invasion that doesnt necessarily make it so, it is not clear to me what additional legal authority that conveys on them, Berman said, adding that state officials can enforce state laws, but the line is drawn at what the federal law allows.

U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat whose district includes the Texas border, has criticized the Biden administration over border security and ending Title 42. But he does not support states trying to use new powers that would let them do whatever they want."

I think it should be more of a partnership instead of saying, Federal government, we dont think youre doing enough, and why dont we go ahead and do our own border security? he said.

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Coronado is a corps members for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Associated Press reporter Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix and Nomaan Merchant in Washington contributed to this report.
Local, state and federal authorities apprehended more than 30 migrants and seized about $1.8 million in marijuana after shutting down a stash house in west Laredo, according to the U.S. Border Patrol.

The incident unfolded Tuesday, when Laredo South Station agents, Air and Marine Operations, Homeland Security Investigations, the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Webb County Precinct 2 Constables Office Precinct 2 discovered a suspected stash house on Salinas Avenue.
CAIRO (AP)  Thousands of Sudanese marched in the capital of Khartoum and other cities Wednesday in new protests against an October military coup that plunged the African country into political turmoil and aggravated its economic woes.

Security forces shot dead at least one person when they violently dispersed protesters, a medical group said.

It was the latest in efforts to pressure the ruling generals, whose takeover has triggered near-daily street protests demanding civilian rule. Called by pro-democracy groups, the demonstrators marched in Khartoum and its twin city of Omdurman amid tight security around the presidential palace, which has seen violent clashes in previous protests.

Security forces fired live ammunition and tear gas to disperse protesters in Khartoum and Omdurman, according to the Legitimate Doctors Union, which is part of the pro-democracy movement. It said one protester died from gunshots in his stomach while taking part in a march in Khartoum.

There were also rallies elsewhere, including in Qadarif and Port Sudan in the east and war-ravaged Darfur region in the west. Footage on social media, which corresponded with The Associated Press reporting, shows young people setting tires on fire and blocking roads.

The army's takeover upended Sudans transition to democracy after three decades of repression and international isolation under autocratic President Omar al-Bashir. It also sent the country's already fragile economy into free fall, with living conditions rapidly deteriorating. A popular uprising forced the military to remove al-Bashir and his Islamist government in April 2019.

Since the coup, a crackdown on protesters has killed more than 90 people, mostly young men, and injured thousands, according to a Sudanese medical group.

Western governments and world financial institutions suspended their assistance to Sudan in order to pressure the generals to return to civilian-led government.

The U.N. envoy for Sudan warned last month that the country was heading for an economic and security collapse unless it addresses the political paralysis following the coup.

Wednesdays marches were called for by the Sudanese Professionals Association and the so-called Resistance Committees, which were the backbone of the uprising against al-Bashir and have also spearheaded the ongoing anti-coup protests. They demand an immediate handover to a fully civilian government, the removal of the generals behind the coup and holding them accountable in swift and fair trails.

Those generals should be prosecuted before revolutionary courts, and the military should return back to its barracks, said Taha Awad, a protest leader with the Resistance Committees in Khartoum.

The generals insist they will hand over power only to an elected government; elections are scheduled for next year.

A rebel alliance, the Sudan Revolutionary Front, allied with the military, offered a roadmap forward in a meeting Tuesday with Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, head of Sudans ruling sovereign council and the coup leader. The roadmap calls for the generals to release detained protest leaders, end violence against protesters and lift the state of emergency as trust-building measures before engaging in a dialogue about a technocrat Cabinet.

Ossama Said, a spokesman for the rebel alliance, said Burhan welcomed the initiative but did not elaborate.

The U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price on Tuesday urged Sudan's military rulers to allow peaceful protests to continue without fear of violence.

President Joe Bidens administration last month imposed sanctions on Sudans Central Reserve Police, which it described as a militarized unit of the countrys police forces, for using violence against pro-democracy protests.

The latest protests come on the third anniversary of the beginning of a sit-in outside the military headquarters in Khartoum that accelerated the removal of al-Bashir.

They also come on the 37th anniversary of the overthrow of President Jaafar al-Nimeiri in a bloodless coup in 1985 after a popular uprising. At the time, the military quickly handed power to an elected government.

However, the dysfunctional administration lasted only a few years until al-Bashir  a career army officer  forged an alliance with Islamist hard-liners and toppled it in a 1989 coup.
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Two men were arrested following a report of a stabbing at a north Laredo apartment, authorities said.

Laredo police officers responded to a report of an injured person at about 3:30 a.m. Tuesday at an apartment in the 100 block of West Del Mar Boulevard. Police said that a 24-year-old Hispanic male had multiple stab wounds.
A woman expected a payment of $3,000 for smuggling one migrant through a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint, according to an arrest affidavit.

Kenya Elizabeth Rodriguez, 18, was arrested and charged with smuggling of a person by criminal conspiracy.
A Mediterranean-style waterfront palace originally commissioned for NASCAR great Jeff Gordon raised the bar when it was sold last month for $36 million.

The sale price set a record for the town of Highland Beach, FL.

Inspired by the luxurious resorts in Cap dAntibes, the estate offers 24,468 square feet of lavishly designed living space and 120 feet of beach frontage.

Gordon purchased a 1-acre parcel in 1996 for $2.4 million and built the estate in 1999. Fittingly for a NASCAR great, there's a tree-lined motor court that can accommodate 20 vehicles and a covered garage for seven additional cars.

Gordon sold the eight-bed, 11-bath property in 2003 for $13.3 million, and it's changed hands a couple of times over the years, most recently in 2014 for $12.5 million.

The buyer in 2014 was also a car enthusiast, and he added an entire wing with an auto museum to showcase six very special cars.

Designed for NASCAR great Jeff Gordon Realtor.com

120 feet of beach frontage Realtor.com

Seven-car garage Realtor.com

Auto showroom Realtor.com

The main residence features a mahogany front door, a rotunda foyer encased in Macedonian stone, and three-story windows with ocean views.

Great room with three-story, beach-view windows Realtor.com

Hungry and thirsty guests are never far from sustenancethere's a chefs kitchen, two catering kitchens, a butlers pantry, a wine room, a kitchen wine vault, a sit-down bar, and an alfresco dining loggia with a kitchen and fireplace alongside the pool.

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Watch: The Priciest Home in Indiana Belongs to NASCAR's Tony StewartSee Inside

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Family kitchen Realtor.com

Catering kitchen Realtor.com

Dining loggia with a kitchen Realtor.com

There's even a juice bar in the wellness center, which also includes a sauna, massage room, and gym.

Massage room in the wellness center Realtor.com

Fully equipped gym Realtor.com

The wing with the primary suite resembles a high-end hotel.

It boasts arched windows, a double-sided fireplace, a sitting room, and a bathroom with surfaces of gold, marble, velvet, and crystal.

Primary suite Realtor.com

Primary suite sitting room Realtor.com

Primary bath Realtor.com

Other high-end spaces include a magnificently appointed office/library, billiard room, home theater, and children's playroom with a red-curtained stage.

Office/library Realtor.com

Billiard room Realtor.com

Home theater Realtor.com

The home was listed at the end of 2021 for $42 million, and a deal was sealed just a couple of months later at a 14% discount.

Beach in the backyard Realtor.com

Carmen DAngelo and Gerard Liguori of Premier Estate Properties represented the seller. Marcy F. Javor with Signature International Real Estate represented the buyer.

The post NASCAR Star Jeff Gordon's Former Florida Estate Zooms Off With a Record Sale appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com.


Prime Minister Narendra Modi and NCP chief Sharad Pawar on Wednesday held a one-on-one meeting, creating a buzz in Maharashtras political circles. The meeting, which was held in Parliament, comes in the backdrop of the Enforcement Directorate going after the ruling Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) leaders in Maharashtra, especially those from Pawars NCP and Shiv Sena. The meeting lasted for 20-25 minutes. Though the NCP has not put out an official statement so far, Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar downplayed the meeting, saying not much should be read into it. More to follow.




Liam Cosgrove reports on the official opening of Edgeworthstown's new, state of the art co:worx digital hub

Edgeworthstown is fast becoming the county's "home of innovation after a new, state of the art digital remote working hub was officially opened last Thursday.

That was the overarching message as the eyes and ears of the wider public were given the chance to catch a first glimpse of co:worx, a 1m enterprise centre in the heart of the mid Longford town.

Cathaoirleach of Longford County Council Cllr Peggy Nolan said the end result was indicative of a community and urban centre that was very much on the crest of an economic wave.

"They have got a committee together of people that are like minded and who sees the value of what their town has to offer," she said of a band of local volunteers who helped bring the project to fruition.

"This is the home of innovation and a can do attitude, the home of people who won't let go and who will knock on every door possible to achieve what they want for the people that live in this town."

Cllr Nolan also singled out the part played by Longford County Council and a "forward thinking" executive spearheaded by its Chief Executive Paddy Mahon.

The volunteer led project which is close to five years in the making will be able to cater for up to 38 remote workers and start-up entrepreneurs.

Alongside affordable workspaces with a mix of offices, the newly opened facility will provide hot-desking capabilities, meeting rooms as well as an event space and a POD/VOD cast studio.

Junior Enterprise Minister Robert Troy said the decision taken to purchase what was the town's former Ulster Bank premises in 2017 and transform it into the modern day and spacious facility it is today could not be understated.

"This is a special day for Edgeworthstown, a day when you bring to realisation an initiative and work that has been ongoing for the last number of years," he said.

The Longford-Westmeath TD also drew laughter among those watching on from the floor as he joked about how his presence might be viewed among his own constituency colleagues.

Micheal Carrigy wants to see more of me, Joe Flaherty doesnt want to see me in Longford at all, he said to widespread amusement.

"It's a day which sees bringing back to life what was an economic hub in the form of a bank, now a state of the art building which will be an economic hub for many years into the future," he remarked.

"What you have done and achieved is magnificent.

"It's a great example of what can be achieved when you have collaboration between all the key stakeholders of community groups, Enterprise Ireland, local authority in working together to deliver for a community."

Hugh Quinn, Chairperson of Edgeworthstown Enterprise Hub Clg, the group behind the seven figure project said the move was as much about the town's last remaining bank as it was about enticing greater numbers to live and work in Edgeworthstown.

"In 2017 the Ulster Bank closed branch and 100 plus people were getting on the train every morning leaving to work elsewhere so we put our development heads together and came up with idea of turning this building into a remote working hub," he said.

Mr Quinn said the day's proceedings was one he had been relishing for some time as he namedropped his fellow committee members, Clare McEnroe, Carmel Noone, Padraig Jones, Dolores Courtney, David Murphy, Michael Nevin and Carl Grant.

I could not overstate the amount of work this board has put in and in the professional way they have gone about, week after week and month after month on a purely voluntary basis for the good of Edgeworthstown, he added. It is critical insofar as possible that our town and area continues to be an attractive and secure place for families. It's also and just as important that infrastructure and facilities are in place to attract new families and new businesses.

Longford County Council chief executive Paddy Mahon said the upshot of last week's opening would be evident for decades to come, describing the new centre as a "really, really significant" milestone in Edgeworthstown's economic future.

Pictured above at last Thursday's official opening of co:worx in Edgeworthsown were: Longford County Council Senior Executive Officer Terry Rooney; Longford County Council Director of Services Barbara Heslin; Longford County Council Broadband Officer Christine Collins; Longford County Council Cathaoirleach Cllr Peggy Nolan; ; Longford County Council Chief Executive Paddy Mahon; Longford Local Enterprise Office Head of Enterprise Michael Nevin; Edgeworthstown Enterprise Hub Clg Chairperson Hugh Quinn; Minister of State Robert Troy TD; Carmel Noone, Edgeworthstown Enterprise Hub Clg; Dolores Courtney, Edgeworthstown Enterprise Hub Clg; Clare McEnroe, Edgeworthstown Enterprise Hub Clg; Padraig Jones, Edgeworthstown Enterprise Hub Clg; David Murphy, Edgeworthstown Enterprise Hub Clg and Longford County Council Regeneration Officer Lorraine OConnor Picture: Shelley Corcoran
A man charged with claiming over 6,000 from social welfare has been fined a total of 200 with six months to pay.

Viktor Mshar of 7 Beechwood Park, Granard, Co Longford, appeared before last weeks sitting of Longford District Court charged with theft and fraud offences.

His solicitor, Brid Mimnagh, informed Judge Bernadette Owens that, when her client came to the attention of Gardai, he admitted everything.

He has been getting his wife and daughter, who have been living in Ukraine, to send him money and has paid off 1,500 so far, said Ms Mimnagh.

Now, obviously things have changed. His wife and daughter have just arrived from Ukraine yesterday and got PPS numbers. He couldnt work until he got a PPS number, which he got last week.

To add to his misfortune, he got a letter recently that he was going to be deported to Ukraine. His taxes were all paid at all times, albeit under a false name, and he has received no money from the state since.

Mr Mshar was charged with stealing 1,207.70 from the Minister of the Department of Social Protection in July 2007, contrary to section 4 of the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001.

He was further charged with stealing 1,591.30 in February 2008, a total of 376 in April 2015, a number of sums amounting to 1,9,39.60 in 2017, and a total of 1,116.50 in 2020.

I spoke to Gda Donaldson and he was impressed with how he tried to pay it back, said Ms Mimnagh.

He even helped him as much as possible to get a PPS number.

The court heard that the balance Mr Mshar has yet to pay amounts to 4,900 but that he was getting absolutely nothing from the state.

Most people would borrow from Peter to pay Paul, Ms Mimnagh noted.

Judge Owens, having heard the facts, noted that Mr Mshar had paid back 1,500 to the state, which in relative terms is a significant amount for him in his personal circumstances.

But its a serious charge to impersonate someone else for such a long time, she said.

Judge Owens proceeded to fine Mr Mshar 100 on two of the charges, with six months to pay, taking all other charges into consideration.

On a separate note, I am pleased for him that his family has arrived safely in Ireland, she said.

Im sure it was a huge concern for him, as it is for anyone in Ireland who has family in Ukraine.
By Senior Colonel Wu Qian, Director General of the Information Office of the Ministry of National Defense (MND) and Spokesperson for the MND

Senior Colonel Wu Qian, spokesperson for the Ministry of National Defense (MND) of the People's Republic of China (PRC), answers reporters' questions at a regular press conference on March 31, 2022.(Photo:mod.gov.cn)

(The following English text of the press conference is for reference. In case of any divergence of interpretation, the Chinese text shall prevail.)

I have a piece of news at the top.

General Liu Zhenli, Commander of the PLA Army, and Lt. General Hun Manet, Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces and Commander of the Royal Cambodian Army, held a video conference on March 31. The two sides had an in-depth exchange of views and signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on Cooperation between the Chinese PLA Army and the Royal Cambodian Army.

China and Cambodia are close neighbors and iron-clad friends. In recent years, the Chinese and Cambodian militaries have deepened their practical cooperation in fields such as strategic communication, joint exercises and training, intercollegiate exchanges, and personnel training. The Chinese side stands ready to work with the Cambodian side to implement the important consensus reached by our state leaders, advance the state-to-state and mil-to-mil relations, and continue to build the China-Cambodia community of shared future with strategic significance.

Question: Recently, while attending a plenary meeting of the delegation of the PLA and PAP at the fifth session of the 13th National Peoples Congress (NPC), President Xi pointed out that running the military in accordance with the law is the fundamental approach of the Communist Party of China in building and running the military and is essential for achieving the Party's goal of strengthening the military in the new era. He called for implementing the strategy of running the military in accordance with the law and enhancing the rule of law in national defense and military development, so as to provide a strong legal guarantee for advancing the cause of strengthening the military. What arrangements has the Chinese military made to implement President Xis important speech and the spirit of the fifth session of the 13th NPC?

Answer: The fifth session of the 13th NPC is an important meeting held at a key juncture when China embarks on the new journey of building a modern socialist country in all respects and marching toward the second centenary goal. On the afternoon of March 7, President Xi attended the plenary meeting of the delegation of PLA and PAP at the fifth session of the 13th NPC and delivered an important speech. Speaking from a strategic and big-picture perspective in consideration for the development of the time, President Xi recognized the progress made in national defense and military development in the past year and especially emphasized the importance of implementing the strategy of running the military in accordance with the law. He reviewed the great progress made in fulfilling the strategy of running the military in accordance with the law since the 18th CPC National Congress, systematically expounded the strategys profound connotations, and made arrangements for the implementation of the strategy going ahead.

The General Office of the Central Military Commission recently issued a notice stressing the study of the spirit of the fifth session of the 13th NPC, especially the spirit of President Xis speech should be included in the theoretical study program of the party committees of all military units at and above regiment level, incorporated in the political education of the troops and taken as part of the teaching contents of political theories at military academies, with the aim of aligning the thinking and action across the military.

First, focusing on embracing the 20th CPC National Congress and studying and implementing the spirit of the 20th CPC National Congress, the Chinese military will comprehensively strengthen the Partys leadership and Party building by guiding the troops to have in-depth understanding of the decisive significance of establishing Comrade Xi Jinpings core position on the Party Central Committee and in the Party as a whole and defining the guiding role of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era; strengthen their consciousness of the need to maintain political integrity, think in big-picture terms, follow the leadership core, and keep in alignment with the central Party leadership; stay confident in the path, theory, system, and culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics; uphold Comrade Xi Jinpings core position on the Party Central Committee and in the Party as a whole and uphold the Central Committees authority and its centralized, unified leadership; and implement the CMC chairman responsibility system.

Second, the Chinese military will closely follow the development and changes in security situations at home and abroad, promote military development and combat readiness together with military struggles, and conduct military struggles in a firm and flexible way.

Third, seizing the window for military development, the Chinese military will make strenuous efforts to implement the 14th Five-year Plan, deepen reform and innovation, strengthen strategic management, and strive to develop at a faster pace with higher quality.

Fourth, following the requirement of the strategy of running the military in accordance with the law, the military will consolidate the legal guarantee for ensuring the Partys absolute leadership over the military, and regularize various activities concerning military training and preparedness according to the law, accelerate the fundamental transformation in the way of running the military, ensure that the armed forces are highly centralized, unified, secure and stable, and greet the successful convening of the 20th CPC National Congress with concrete actions.

Question: It is reported that in the National Defense Strategy transmitted by the US Department of Defense recently to the Congress, China was regarded as the "most consequential strategic competitor" for the US. Adm. John C. Aquilino, Commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, recently patrolled the South China Sea on a P-8A Poseidon plane, and said that Chinas construction on relevant islands and reefs there has damaged regional stability and threatened nearby nations. He added that Washingtons main objective in disputed regions is to prevent war through deterrence. If deterrence fails, the second task is to get ready for combat and win. Another news report said that the US Navys Expeditionary Sea Base (ESB) ship USS Miguel Keith had entered the South China Sea days ago. Please comment on that.

Answer: On March 18, President Xi Jinping had a video call with US President Joe Biden at the request of the latter. The US side reiterated that the US does not seek a new Cold War with China; it does not aim to change Chinas system; the revitalization of its alliances is not targeted at China; the US does not support Taiwan independence; and it has no intention to seek a conflict with China. China believes that what the US has done is seriously inconsistent with President Bidens statement and we are firmly opposed to that.

China has indisputable sovereignty over the South China Sea islands and their adjacent waters. Chinas deployment of necessary defense facilities is not only the legitimate right of a sovereign state, but also a necessary measure to deal with Americas provocations. It is in full compliance with relevant international law and practice. The label of militarization of the South China Sea should not be put on China but the US. When Adm. Aquilino flew over the South China Sea, he must have seen not just a scattering of islands and reefs, but also a number of American warships and planes throwing their weight around. They have come all the way to the South China Sea to stir up troubles. Regional countries know exactly what they want. Facts have proven that the US is the biggest instigator of the militarization of the South China Sea, and the biggest destroyer and troublemaker to the regional peace and stability.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Shanghai Communique. As two major countries in the world, China and the US stand to gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation. Standing at a new historical starting point, we hope the US side will work with China to draw experience and wisdom from history, and steer the relations between the two countries and two militaries back to the right track of healthy and steady development as soon as possible, so as make greater contributions to world peace and stability.

Question: It is reported that the US Pacific Air Forces Commander recently said we got relatively close to the J-20s along with our F-35s in the East China Sea. They are flying the J-20s pretty well and were relatively impressed with the command and control associated with the J-20. Some of their very long range air to air missiles are aided by the KJ-500. Being able to interrupt that kill chain is something that interests me greatly. Could you please comment on his remarks?

Answer: Weve noticed the remarks from the American side. In recent years, the Chinese military has made great progress in developing its weapons and equipment, including main battle equipment of the air force. However, we are fully aware that there is still much room for improvement.

For a long time, America has dispatched its military vessels and aircraft to carry out large-scale and frequent close-in reconnaissance and provocative and deterrent operations against China, which has seriously damaged the mutual trust between the two militaries and endangered the safety of both sides vessels, planes and personnel. China is strongly opposed to such actions.

The PLA Air Force shoulders the sacred duty of defending national security in the airspace. It must be emphasized that when it comes to defending national sovereignty and security, the PLA will always be ready and capable of wielding its sword.

Senior Colonel Wu Qian, spokesperson for the Ministry of National Defense (MND) of the People's Republic of China (PRC), answers reporters' questions at a regular press conference on March 31, 2022.(Photo:mod.gov.cn)

Question: According to the spokesperson of the delegation of the PLA and PAP participating in the fifth session of the 13th National Peoples Congress, the defense budget for 2022 allocated by national finance is 7.1 percent higher than the actual expenditure of last year. The Associated Press claimed that Chinas massive military spending over the years is challenging the U.S. militarys dominance in the Indo-Pacific region. The Chief Cabinet Secretary of Japan expressed his hope for China to be more transparent with its defense policy and spending. By the way, according to U.S. media reports, the White House recently submitted to Congress a draft defense budget for the fiscal year 2023. Please comment on that.

Answer: Every time China announces its defense budget, there are always some officials and media from the US-led West making vicious accusations. China is firmly opposed to that.

The truth that China is a socialist country, its strategic choice to take the path of peaceful development, its independent foreign policy of peace and the Chinese cultural tradition that values peace and harmony  all these have determined that China will unswervingly adhere to a national defense policy thats defensive in nature. Our defense development is aimed at protecting Chinas security and contributing to world peace. The growth of Chinas military strength is a growth of the force for peace in the world. In contrast, the U.S. military spending  the largest in the world all these years  is equivalent to about 1/4 of the worlds total and to the combined military expenditure of the nine countries trailing it. Days ago, the White House submitted to Congress a draft defense budget totaling 813 billion dollars for the fiscal year 2023. The world knows clearly its purpose. In addition to conventional forces, the U.S. is also home to the worlds largest and most advanced nuclear arsenal and is the only country with a stock of chemical weapons. In the past decades, the U.S., in blatant violation of the principles and purposes of the UN Charter as well as the norms of international law, has waged wars against Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries, causing dire civilian casualties and property losses, and huge humanitarian disasters. Facts have proven that the U.S. is the biggest culprit and backstage manipulator in undermining world peace and stability.

Chinas military expenditure is open and transparent. China actively participates in the UN system on military expenditure transparency and has been submitting reports about its military spending for the previous fiscal years to the UN since 2008. Japans hype of the so-called lack of transparency over Chinese military expenditure is just an excuse for expanding its own military forces and breaking the post-WWII international order. In recent years, Japan has continuously increased its defense budget, stepped up funding in new combat domains including aerospace, cyberspace, and electromagnetic technologies, strengthened military deployments in its southwest, and developed high-end weapons and equipment. These dangerous moves have created tension in the region and put the international community on high alert. We urge the Japanese side to truly learn lessons from history and be very cautious with its words and deeds regarding military security.

Question: In early March, Minister of National Defense General Wei Fenghe held talks via video link with his South African counterpart. Please share more details on the talks, and what are the expectations of the Chinese side for the bilateral military relations?

Answer: General Wei Fenghe, State Councilor and Defense Minister, recently held video talks with South African Minister of Defense and Military Veterans Thandi Modise. The two sides had an in-depth exchange of views on China-South Africa military relations, anti-pandemic cooperation, and international and regional situations.

China and South Africa are good friends and partners with profound friendship and mutual trust. Under the strategic guidance of the two heads of state, the two militaries have seen fruitful results in cooperation in military training, medical and health care, equipment and technology, and personnel training. The Chinese military is willing to further deepen the cooperation in international peacekeeping operations, maritime security, joint exercises and training, and military medicine with the military of South Africa, and further grow the military relations.

Question: Recently, the Chinese and Indian militaries held the 15th round of China-India Corps Commander Level Meeting. US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner said that India is facing a severe situation from the Chinese side along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), to which the US keeps close attention. Please tell us more about the meeting, and what is your comment on the relevant remarks from the US?

Answer: On March 11, the Chinese and Indian militaries held the 15th round of China-India Corps Commander Level Meeting at the Moldo/Chushul border meeting point on the Indian side. The two sides held discussions on settling relevant issues in the area along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the Western Sector of the China-India border. The meeting was positive and constructive. The two sides reiterated that the settlement of the remaining issues would help restore peace and tranquility in the area along the LAC in the Western Sector and advance bilateral relations. They agreed to continue to maintain security and stability on the frontline in the Western Sector and maintain dialogue via military and diplomatic channels to reach a mutually acceptable solution to the remaining issues as soon as possible.

The China-India boundary question is a matter between the two countries. The two sides have agreed to properly handle the border situation through negotiation and consultation. There is no room for interference from a third party.

Question: According to reports, the Pakistan Air Force recently held a ceremony for receiving the Chinese J-10CE fighter jets. As commented by the Pakistan Prime Minister, the China-made aircraft would play an important role in correcting the security imbalance in the region. On March 23, the J-10CE fighter jets appeared in the military parade to mark the Pakistan Day. Whats your comment on this? Could you please brief us more on the China-Pakistan military relations?

Answer: The Chinese embassy in Pakistan has released the information about the ceremony by the Pakistan Air Force for receiving the J-10CE fighter jets. It should be pointed out that China and Pakistan are all-weather strategic cooperative partners, true friends and iron brothers that share weal and woe. China is willing to work with Pakistan to accelerate the building of a closer China-Pakistan community of shared future in the new era.

The military-to-military relations, serving as the mainstay of the China-Pakistan friendship, have played an important role in the development of bilateral relations for a long time. The two militaries have achieved fruitful results in fields such as high-level visits, joint training and exercises, anti-pandemic cooperation, equipment and technology, constantly enriching the connotation of bilateral strategic cooperation. Going forward, under the guidance of the leaders of the two countries, the Chinese and Pakistan militaries stand ready to expand practical cooperation in various fields to a new level and inject a new impetus into the all-weather strategic cooperative partnership between the two countries, so as to make a new contribution to maintaining regional peace and stability.

Question: Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said before the election that with American and British assistance, Australia plans to establish a nuclear-powered submarine fleet and build a nuclear submarine base on its east coast. He also announced an AUD 38 billion plan to expand Australias military. The Australian media commented that China's military buildup is one of the main reasons for Australias increase in defense spending. According to its Assistant Minister for Defense, Australia has to get prepared for the PLAs possible actions in Taiwan and elsewhere. Whats your comment on these, please?

Answer: Recently, some politicians in Australia have intensively hyped up the China-related issues for their own selfish interests, and repeatedly made erroneous remarks on bilateral relations and Taiwan, to which the Chinese side has expressed strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition.

The nuclear submarine cooperation among the US, the UK and Australia violates the objectives and purposes of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), undermines the global nuclear non-proliferation regime as well as the regional peace and stability. It is widely opposed by the international community. However, the Australian side, in disregard of these facts, has maliciously hyped up the so-called China military threat to significantly expand its military strength and increase its military budget. China is strongly dissatisfied with and firmly opposed to this.

Australia's erroneous remarks on the Taiwan question are very dangerous. China sternly warns the Australian side that Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinese territory, and the Taiwan question is purely Chinas internal affairs, which brooks no external interference. If Australia insists on taking its own course, it has to be prepared to pay a heavy price for interfering in Chinas internal affairs.

Senior Colonel Wu Qian, spokesperson for the Ministry of National Defense (MND) of the People's Republic of China (PRC), answers reporters' questions at a regular press conference on March 31, 2022.(Photo:mod.gov.cn)

Question: According to reports, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said recently that Russia's special military operation in Ukraine is an act that shakes the foundation of the international order, and Japan would not allow this kind of change to the status quo by force to happen in East Asia. Peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait is of great significance to the security of Japan and the stability of the international community. In view of the situation in Ukraine, Japan is considering revising its National Security Strategy to comprehensively strengthen its defense forces. Kishida also said that the Japanese government has no intention of discussing the nuclear sharing policy under which the US nuclear weapons will be deployed on Japanese territory for joint use, but there is no problem for the political parties and even Japanese nationals to discuss the matter. Whats your comment, please?

Answer: Taiwan belongs to China and has nothing to do with Japan. Its no good for the Japanese side to stretch its arms too long. The Taiwan question is fully and completely an internal affair of China. It is fundamentally different from the Ukraine issue.

For some time, individual political forces in Japan have been seeking various ways to create excuses to break through the post-war international order, and engage in military expansion. Lately, there have been repeated dangerous calls in Japan that contravene the three non-nuclear principles, which give its Asian neighbors and the international community strong reasons to be on high alert. Japan, as a non-nuclear-weapon state party to the NPT, should earnestly fulfill its non-proliferation obligations. China always opposes the deployment of nuclear weapons by nuclear-weapon states on other countries territories. We urge Japan to deeply reflect on its history, respect the security concerns of its Asian neighbors, and stay committed to the path of peaceful development, not the other way around.

Question: It is learned that commanders of Chinese and Thai navies held a video conference recently. Could you please give us more details on this?

Answer: On March 16, Commander of the PLA Navy Admiral Dong Jun held a video conference with Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Thai Navy Admiral Somprasong Nilsamai at request. The two sides exchanged views on the bilateral naval exchanges and cooperation.

China and Thailand are one family. Over the years, the Chinese and Thai militaries have maintained close exchanges, and the relationship between the two militaries has developed in a healthy and stable manner, with fruitful results achieved. China is willing to work with Thailand to implement the important consensus reached by the leaders of the two countries, improve mechanisms, strengthen communication at all levels, promote practical cooperation, and jointly maintain regional security and stability.

Question: According to reports, a poll in Taiwan shows that only 35% of the respondents believed that if a conflict breaks out across the Taiwan Strait, the US would send troops to Taiwan, a sharp drop of 30.5% from October last year. The former head of the Taiwan defense department said that if the two sides of the Taiwan Strait went to war, the PLA would be able to end the fighting within one day or two. According to other reports, the Taiwan region recently signed an arms procurement contract with the US to purchase a Field Information Communications System. Joseph Wu, head of the Taiwan external affairs department, said that the US would provide Taiwan with defensive weapons in accordance with the so-called Taiwan Relations Act, and further arms sales will be announced soon. Whats your comment on this, please?

Answer: Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinas territory. The Taiwan question is purely Chinas internal affair and brooks no foreign interference. China firmly opposes the US selling arms to Taiwan and any form of official exchanges and military contacts between the US and Taiwan.

The future of Taiwan lies in national reunification, and the wellbeing of Taiwan compatriots is linked to national rejuvenation. Those bad checks from external forces are ultimately unreliable. If Taiwan is willing to be a chess piece in others power game, it ultimately cannot escape the fate of being abandoned. From Kabul to Ukraine, for something that those countries could not get from certain foreign countries, how could Taiwan be possibly getting it? There is no way out for Taiwan to bank on foreign support, and rejecting reunification by force is but a dead end. When it comes to defending national sovereignty and territorial integrity, the PLA is always trustworthy.
Ukraine has figured in US Secretary of State Antony Blinken's talks with India's External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar ahead of the ministerial-level meeting of the defence and foreign affairs leaders of the two countries in Washington on Monday, according to State Department Spokesperson Ned Price.

He said that during their conversation on Tuesday -- the second in less than a week -- they reviewed "regional and global priorities, including the situation in Ukraine".

"They agreed to remain closely coordinated on developments and looked forward to meeting again soon," he added.

Jaishankar tweeted that they "discussed bilateral issues and latest developments pertaining to Ukraine".

Blinken had called Jaishankar on Wednesday last week on the eve of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's visit to New Delhi and spoke about "the worsening humanitarian situation in Ukraine", Price said.

In diplomatic overtures to India, US Deputy National Security Adviser Daleep Singh visited New Delhi last week and the Ukraine situation and the US sanctions on trade with Russia came up in his discussions with the Indian officials.

And a week before that Victoria Nuland, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, came to India with Deputy Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Amanda Dory for Foreign Office Consultations at which they discussed regional issues of South Asia, the Indo-Pacific region, and the Middle East, and the situation in Ukraine with Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla and other officials, the Ministry of External Affairs said.

The 2+2 meeting is to take place every year alternating between the capitals, but last year's meeting -- the fourth -- expected to be held in December was postponed because of Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to India around that time.

Putin will be the unseen presence casting a shadow over the meeting of Jaishankar and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh with Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin with their countries differing in their approaches to Ukraine.

While the US has been pressing India -- and all countries -- to join in unequivocally condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine, New Delhi has taken a neutral stance, abstaining at the United Nations on seven votes relating to Ukraine.

But on Tuesday, India made what is likely its strongest statement on the Ukraine situation so far as it "unequivocally condemned" the killings of civilians in Bucha in Ukraine from where the occupying Russian troops withdrew.

"We unequivocally condemn these killings and support the call for an independent investigation," T.S. Tirumurti, India's Permanent Representative to the UN, told the Security Council, but without naming Russia.

The US has also publicly shown understanding of the difficult Indian position because of its dependence on Russian armaments.

Amid criticism of India for its oil purchases from Russia, President Joe Biden's spokesperson Jen Psaki clarified on Monday to the media that its imports were a minuscule 1 to 2 per cent and energy payments to Moscow did not come under American sanctions.

Pentagon Spokesperson John Kirby pointed out at his briefing on Monday that India was diversifying its defence purchases and added, "We'll continue to have that conversation with the Indians."

India's purchases of oil and defence equipment are likely to figure in the 2+2 meeting, besides the Ukraine situation.

The US has offered to help India with its energy needs and also in diversifying its defence needs to lessen the dependence on Russia.

A significant item on the meeting's agenda will be the Indo-Pacific, where India as a member of the Quad, has a crucial role in the US strategy for the region where China has stepped up its aggressive activities.

The Quad, made up of India, the US, Japan and Australia, has been expanding its humanitarian role while also having an eye on strategic affairs.
A man in his 20s is in garda custody tonight after being arrested in connection to an alleged stabbing in Longford town earlier today which left another man in hospital.

He was arrested by officers investigating the circumstances behind an incident at a fast food restaurant along the county town's main street at around 3pm today.

The male victim, who is aged in his early 20s, was attacked inside the doors of Luigis on main street at around 3pm.

The man, who is from the Longford town area, sustained a number of wounds to his upper body and face during the incident.

Two ambulances, gardai and members from the Armed Support Unit (ASU) arrived on the scene in minutes.

A number of eye witnesses and bystanders gathered outside as paramedics tended to the stricken man inside for several minutes before being taken to Mullingar's Midland Regional Hospital for treatment.

The restaurants owner Peter Vocella could be seen wiping away blood from his arms after rushing to the aid of the man inside.

Giving his reaction outside, he said the incident underlined the growing level of unease which was very much evident in a town which has succumbed to an ever increasing rise in feud related incidents over the past number of weeks.

I am 30 years and I have never seen it as bad as this, he said.

I cant help this, I always done my best (as a businessperson).

A number of members of the victims family attended the scene soon afterwards, some of whom became visibility upset in the process.

One eyewitness told of how two men could be seen grappling seconds before the victim attempted to flee in behind the restaurants counter to escape his alleged assailant.

I was up at the counter ordering a meal for my friend and next thing all of a sudden these two boys came in, he said.

There was a man with the lad that got stabbed and next thing these two boys came in and said take it out of your pocket.

He didnt say it was a knife and the next thing the man went for him. He went for him outside and then the man (victim) ran under the counter to get away from him and he followed him in.

The male suspect, who detectives arrested and brought to Granard garda station, is currently being held under section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act and can be held for a period of 24 hours.
Gardai have arrested a woman in her 20s in connection to an alleged stabbing in Longford town yesterday that left a man with serious injuries in hospital.

She is the second person to be detained by detectives after a man in his early 20s sustained a number of wounds to his upper body during an incident at Luigis fast food restaurant shortly after 3pm.

Gardai later arrested the woman before bringing her to Roscommon garda station for questioning.

BREAKING: Man seriously injured in Longford stabbing A man has been seriously injured after being stabbed in a fast food restaurant in Longford town.

That came after a man in his 20s was arrested yesterday evening and brought to Granard garda station.

Both are being held under section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act and can be held for a period of 24 hours before they can be released or charged.

The victim, who is aged in his early 20s and from Longford town, is still being treated at Mullingar's Midland Regional Hospital for his injuries.

Man (20s) arrested over alleged stabbing inside Longford fast food restaurant A man in his 20s is in garda custody tonight after being arrested in connection to an alleged stabbing in Longford town earlier today which left another man in hospital.

Details of yesterday's incident represented the latest in a long line violent incidents to have spilled out onto the streets of Longford in recent weeks.

Local councillor and former Joint Policing Committee (JPC) chairman Seamus Butler said the only way to solve the recent upsurge in feud related incident was through greater police visibility, tougher sentencing and additional resources being made available to gardai.

"This is not just feuding, this is serious criminal violence," he said.

"These people need to be removed from the streets of Longford for as long as possible and the judiciary have a huge role to play in that."

"What we and this town needs is more resources and what's required is foot patrols to be carried out every working day in Longford."
On 30 March 2022, Air New Zealand announced the launch of a 2 for 1 pro rata renounceable rights offer (Rights Offer) of new fully paid ordinary shares in Air New Zealand (New Shares) to raise $1.2 billion as part of its recapitalisation plan.

Air New Zealand is now pleased to invite eligible shareholders to apply to participate in this Rights Offer which opens today and closes at 5.00pm (NZST) / 3.00pm (AEST) on 2 May 2022.

Under the Rights Offer, for each existing share held in Air New Zealand at 7.00pm (NZST) / 5.00pm (AEST) on 5 April 2022 an eligible shareholder will receive one right to subscribe for 2 New Shares at the offer price of NZ$0.53 per New Share (or A$0.49 per New Share) (a Right). Eligible shareholders who take up their Rights in full also have the opportunity to apply for additional New Shares in a shortfall bookbuild process, as described in the Offer Document.

Applications by eligible shareholders in New Zealand and Australia can be made using the online application form at https://airnz.rightsoffer.co.nz or by returning an acceptance form and following the payment instructions set out on that form. Eligible shareholders in certain other jurisdictions will be contacted directly by Air New Zealand with further information.

Further details on the Rights Offer and the shortfall bookbuild, including key dates and how to apply, are set out in the Offer Document, which is available online along with the Investor Presentation at https://airnz.rightsoffer.co.nz. Eligible shareholders are encouraged to read the Offer Document and Investor Presentation carefully, and if in any doubt about whether or not to apply for New Shares under the Rights Offer or the shortfall bookbuild, to consult with a financial or other professional advisor.

Ends.

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(Alliance News) - The following is a round-up of share dealings by London-listed company directors and managers announced on Wednesday and not separately reported by Alliance News:

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Symphony International Holdings Ltd - strategic investment company - On Monday, Director Anil Thadani purchases 1.04 million shares at a price of USD0.45 each, totalling USD470,105. On Tuesday, buys 93,223 shares for USD0.4589 per share, totalling USD42,780. Over the period, Thadani purchases USD512,885 in stock.

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Shepherd Neame Ltd - Faversham, Kent-based brewer and pub chain - Chair Richard Oldfield purchases 15,000 shares at a price of 835.35 pence each, totalling GBP125,302 on Wednesday.

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Intercede Group PLC - cybersecurity software firm with offices in Virginia, US and Leicestershire, England - Chief Executive Officer Klass van der Leest purchases 104,700 shares at an average price of 48.1 pence each, totalling GBP50,360, on Tuesday. Now holds 168,106 shares in total, reflecting a 0.3% interest in the company.

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International Personal Finance PLC - Leeds, England-based company which offers small, unsecured cash loans - Joanna Thompson, a person closely associated with Chief Financial Officer Gary Thompson, purchases 50,000 shares at a price of 104.5 pence each, totalling GBP52,000 on Tuesday.

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By Dayo Laniyan; dayolaniyan@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2022 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Cambridge Cognition Holdings PLC- Cambridge-based neuroscience technology company - Appoints Stephen Symonds as chief financial officer with effect "in due course".

Symonds's most recent role was as chief financial officer at pre-clinical services provider Envigo, where he spent four years in the role and nine years at the company since 2013.

In addition, Director of Research & Innovation Francesca McCormack has been appointed as chief scientist, while current Chief Scientific Officer Jenny Bartnett steps down at the end of April to focus on Cambridge Cognition spin out Monument Therapeutics.

Current stock price: 176.55 pence, down 3.3% on Wednesday

12-month change: up 79%

By Dayo Laniyan; dayolaniyan@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2022 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Vesuvius PLC - London-based molten metal flow engineering - and Chemring Ltd - Romsey, Hampshire-based technology supplier to the aerospace and defence industry - Both announce Chemring Chair Carl-Peter Forster will become chair of Vesuvius on December 1, after joining its board on November 1. Current Vesuvius Chair John McDonough steps down from the board on December 1.

Forster will remain as chair of Chemring and as senior independent director at Babcock International Group PLC. However, he will step down as chair of Hella KGaA and some board positions in smaller non-UK companies, Chemring explains. Hella KGaA on Monday announced Forster will resign on September 30.

Current Vesuvius stock price: 344.00 pence, up 0.5% on Wednesday

12-month change: down 39%

Current Chemring stock price: 331.50 pence, up 0.9% on Wednesday

12-month change: up 23%

By Tom Budszus; tombudszus@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2022 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
(Alliance News) - Imperial Brands PLC on Wednesday backed annual guidance and added it forecasts a "broadly flat" first-half revenue performance, with tobacco market struggles in Europe offset by progress elsewhere.

The company owns the Rizla rolling papers brand, Gauloises cigarettes and the Blu e-cigarettes range.

Imperial said net revenue for the six months ended March 31 is expected to be broadly flat annually on a constant currency basis, in line with expectations.

"This reflects a weaker tobacco performance in Europe, which offsets growth in other regions. Europe's performance has been driven by the return to pre-Covid purchasing patterns as Northern Europeans resume international travel, as well as price phasing in some markets. However, price increases during the latter part of the first half will support a stronger revenue performance in the second half," the FTSE 100 listing explained.

Interim adjusted operating profit is expected to grow by around 2% on a constant currency basis, benefiting primarily from reduced losses in the Next Generation Product range, which includes Blu. The tobacco performance, meanwhile, will be weighted to the second half.

In the first half of financial 2021, it reported net revenue of GBP3.57 billion. For the whole of that year, it reported revenue of GBP7.59 billion, as well as an organic adjusted operating profit of GBP3.57 billion.

Imperial said it was on track to deliver full-year results in line with revised guidance issued in March. It forecasts a full-year net revenue performance ranging from flat to 1% growth on a constant currency basis. It expects adjusted operating profit growth of around 1%.

"Focused investment in our top-five combustible markets, which account for around 70% of adjusted operating profit, has driven an increase in aggregate market share for those markets. Gains in the US, UK and Australia more than offset declines in Germany and Spain. These share gains were achieved while maintaining strong pricing discipline, and overall tobacco volumes are in line with expectations," the company said.

At current exchange rates, it forecasts a 2% foreign exchange hit to interim earnings per share, and 1% for the full-year.

In addition, Imperial Brands said consumers have responded positively to the pilot launches of its Pulze heated tobacco system in Greece and the Czech Republic and improved consumer marketing for its Blu vapour product in the US.

"We are making good progress against our strategic objective of building a sustainable, consumer-centric Next Generation Product business and we will provide an update on our next steps at the interim results. First-half NGP revenues are expected to be slightly ahead of the prior period, driven by growth in Europe," the company said.

In addition, it said it is continuing talks with a "local third party" about transferring Imperial's Russian assets and operations.

It plans to report results for the first half on May 17.

Shares in the company were up 2.6% at 1,658.65 pence each in London on Wednesday morning.

By Eric Cunha; ericcunha@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2022 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Caracal Gold PLC/ Index NSE / Market: Main / GEMS

06 April 2022

Caracal Gold plc ('Caracal' or the 'Company')

Update on Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) Listing

Caracal Gold plc, the gold producer with operations in East Africa, is pleased to give an update on the proposed listing of the Company on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE).

The Company intends to list on the NSE via an introduction of the Company's shares to the Growth Enterprise Market Segment (GEMS) of the NSE (the NSE Listing).

The Company, with its advisers Faida and VSA, has made progress with the pre-listing requirements, with the only pending item being the updating of the latest consolidated accounts for Caracal Gold PLC, and the NSE Listing is expected to complete in the second quarter of 2022.

Following the NSE Listing, the Company plans to host a breakfast introduction for high-net-worth individuals and asset managers to Caracal Gold in Nairobi as well as a planned visit to tour the Kilimapesa mining site in Lolgorian, Trans Mara, Narok County, Kenya.

The successful listing on the Nairobi Securities Exchange will make Caracal, the first gold and related minerals mining company to be listed on the NSE. The Company believes that the NSE Listing will provide Kenyan investors with the opportunity to participate in the future growth of the Company and its activities in Kenyas mining sector. The upcoming listing will also make Caracal Gold the second only company hold a dual listing on both the NSE and LSE.

Chief Executive Officer of Caracal Gold Plc, Robbie McCrae, said:

The upcoming listing on the NSE is an exciting step for Caracal Gold PLC and for mining in Kenya. The support from both the Government of Kenya as well as the financial industry in Kenya has been fantastic.

**ENDS*

For further information visit www.caracalgold.com or contact the following:

Caracal Gold plc Gerard Kisbey-Green Jason Brewer info@caracalgold.com Faida Investment Bank Joint Broker Mercy Vella + 254 (0) 20 760 6026-35 VSA Capital Ltd Financial Adviser and Joint Broker Andrew Raca +44 203 005 5000 Clear Capital Markets Limited Joint Broker Keith Swann / Jon Critchley +44 203 897 0981 / +44 203 869 6086 St Brides Partners Ltd Financial PR Oonagh Reidy / Charlotte Page / Isabelle Morris caracal@stbridespartners.co.uk DGWA, the German Institute for Asset and Equity Allocation and Valuation European Investor and Corporate Relations Advisor Stefan Muller / Katharina Lockinger info@dgwa.org

Notes

Caracal Gold plc is an emerging East African focused gold producer with a clear path to grow production and resources both organically and through strategic acquisitions. Its aim is to rapidly increase production to +50,000oz p.a. and build a JORC compliant resource base of +3Moz within 12-18 months from its listing in August 2021.

Caracal is executing its growth strategy beyond its 100% owned Kilimapesa Mine in Kenya by acquiring additional assets in Tanzania in order to grow group resources. Its experienced team, with proven track record in successfully developing and operating mining projects throughout Africa continues to review other complementary and strategically located projects in East Africa.

Caracal is a responsible mining and exploration company and supports the positive social and economic change that it contributes to the communities in the regions that it operates. It is a proudly East African-focused company: it buys locally, employs locally, and protects the environment and its employees and their families' health, safety, and wellbeing.

Caracal's shares are quoted on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange (LON: GCAT) and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (FSE: 6IK); a listing on the Nairobi Securities Exchange is underway.

About NSE

The Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) is the principal securities exchange in Kenya. It offers a world class trading facility for local and international investors and issuers looking to gain exposure to Kenyas and Africas economic growth. NSE plays a vital role in the growth of Kenyas economy through mobilization of domestic resources and international capital. The NSE is a founder member of the African Securities Exchanges Association and the East African Securities Exchanges Association. It is a full member of the World Federation of Exchanges and the Association of Futures Markets, and a partner Exchange in the United Nations Sustainable Stock Exchanges Initiative (SSE). NSE operates under the jurisdiction of the Capital Markets Authority of Kenya.
If they do not get an election at this time, the social wave that has arisen supporting them will gradually wane. Dreams will all be blurred.

Editorial

This is nothing new to them. Betrayal is something that many people in our country have inherited from habit. Anura Kumara Dissanayake (Comrade Anura as his followers called him) leaving the House at the end of yesterday's session made a peculiar statement in front of the protesters. His political colleague who accompanied him was Dr Harini Amarasuriya. During Anura's natter, one of the protesters wearing a helmet enters through the back door of his cab. Then, the vehicle carrying Anura and the group left the venue closing one striking scene in this manufactured tragicomedy. This incident proves clearly that Anura Kumara Dissanayake is directing groups representing his political party to protest.



Comrade Anura

In response, Comrade Anura told the House today that he had asked his security guard to wear a helmet before entering his vehicle. We are glad he got a story to tell. However, this is something he should be ashamed of personally as well as a leader of a political party. He and his team are currently striving to make the most of the popular protests that are stirring the emotions of the public. Shouldn't those who are protesting against the current government, regardless of political affiliation, beware of these disguised demons?

It is clear that various political groups are scheming to manipulate this apolitical protest. The crocodile tears shed by some members in Parliament yesterday show just how capable they are of pretending. People in the area he represents continue to accuse one of them of being involved in heroin trafficking. Another was involved in the ethanol racket and was charged with several financial frauds. It is also clear that Anura Kumara Dissanayake and his team are desperately trying to grab the public protest for their political nihilism. But, they do not have the skills to solve the serious social problem in the country. This group, which is only good at empty criticism, has no sense of national responsibilities. Therefore, an all-party national government is not important to them at this moment. What matters to them is a general election. Because at the moment, Jathika Jana Balawegaya (National People's Power - NPP), the political alliance represented by the JVP is at its peak. For them, prevailing public attention must be taken advantage of before it disappears. Taking advantage of this trend, they know that by holding a general election they can use this as an opportunity to increase their three seats in Parliament to a maximum level. But if they do not get an election at this time, the social wave that has arisen supporting them will gradually wane. Dreams will all be blurred.

However, holding an election is not the answer to the current social crisis, but it will deepen the economic calamity. Comrade Anura and his group are pursuing anger and hatred against their opponents without a proper understanding of national responsibilities. They act in such a way that they already rule the country. But if he has a sincere desire to be a true national leader, he must act with far-sighted wisdom that goes beyond rhetoric. Anyone can create hypotheses about future victories based on the reactions of society, but true people's victories cannot be grabbed. This is the reality that the NPP has not always been able to grasp. They closed that failure by destroying the country's university system and pushing the country into anarchy. Our history taught us through ground experiences that people with such selfish and hateful traits do not have the qualities needed for desired governance. The NPP is plotting to claim ownership of the struggle for their desires and betray the public sentiments in a despicable manner. To them, the blood of you and your children is the equivalent of tasting the cheapest Scottish whiskey sold in countries like Ireland in the winter. We, therefore, urge the people of the country to beware of opportunists who conspire to rob your polite and innocent civilized protest. They know how and when to hijack your sentiments for their benefit.
Greg Sukiennik has worked at all three Vermont News & Media newspapers and was their managing editor from 2017-19. He previously worked for ESPN.com, for the AP in Boston, and at The Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Mass.
U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., is former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, now a member. Leahy made this statement on April 4 as the committee prepared to vote on Judge Jacksons nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. The committee approved the nomination, which now moves to the full chamber for approval.
Pep Guardiola had a gameplan and so did Diego Simeone, they both knew it and we all knew it, and everyone got it right after a fascinating 1-0 victory for Manchester City in Tuesday's Champions League quarter-final against Atletico Madrid.

Manchester City were set up to attack, retain possession and break down the visitors, whilst Simeone had set his team up to form an impenetrable defensive structure, designed to keep the tie alive ahead of the second leg at the Estadio Wanda Metropolitano.

It could be seen from space just how the two teams wanted to play on Tuesday, yet the rather handy heat maps from the first half give an indication just how Atleti were setup at the Etihad Stadium.

Atletico were instructed to defend in a low block with two lines of midfield and defence very close together, and this virtually equated to the lesser-seen 5-5-0 formation.

The first half showed Atletico refusing to budge from their shape, with the heat maps showing a team that were consciously keeping to one designated area of the pitch and simply refusing to move up field beyond the halfway line.

It worked flawlessly

In the opening 45 minutes, the Spanish champions didn't concede a single clear chance to their Premier League opponents, and in truth they barely suffered at all.

Jan Oblak had the most touches of the defence, but he didn't have to make a single save, Atleti were comfortable in their work and it was City who appeared to be growing the more frustrated.

Possession at half-time was 74% in favour of the hosts, with City making 380 passes to just 106 made by the visiting side, yet the impression coming off the pitch at the break was that Atletico Madrid had performed their gameplan better and were more comfortable.
After the attack on Chris Rock at this year's Oscars, Will Smith will seek expert help to deal with stress at a celebrity rehab clinic. The American actor was the star of the Academy Awards night when he slapped the comedian after he made a joke about the shaved hair of the actor's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who suffers from alopecia.

This moment had such repercussions that, as reported by the British newspaper 'The Sun', the artist will spend some time in a rehabilitation clinic. "The impact of the backlash has hit Will hard, so he will be getting help on dealing with stress," explained the newspaper.

Will Smith slaps Chris Rock at Oscars 2022

"It will be a high-level retreat"

"This is unquestionably the battle of his career. It will be a high-end retreat used by the rich and famous and he will be doing a lot of soul searching and working out how he can move forward," continued telling' The Sun'.

Will Smith hopes, according to the newspaper's source, to return in time to save his career and reputation. Recall that, after the official apology, the actor has already been dismissed from the Academy of Motion Picture Oscars after the assault.

"I resign my membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and will accept any other consequences that management deems appropriate," Will Smith said in a statement.

For its part, the awards organization opened a disciplinary file against the performer for "inappropriate physical contact, abusive or threatening conduct and compromising the integrity of the Academy."

Has Will Smith been cancelled?

Will Smith may have won the Best Actor prize at the Oscar for his performance in 'King Richard', but there is going to be a meeting on Friday by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to determine whether it should be stripped from him following the debacle involving Chris Rock at the Oscars ceremony.

Old clip may prove Jada Pinkett Smith's psychological abuse on Will Smith

In fact, the last time that the Academy decided to rescind an award was over 50 years ago, as the documentary 'Young Americans' won an award in 1969 but had actually been released in 1967. It is also worth bearing in mind that Will Smith has already resigned from the Academy.

One knock-on effect of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock is that Netflix and Sony have suspended the production of two films that the former 'Fresh Prince of Bel-Air' star was shooting: 'Fast and Loose' and 'Bad Boys 4'.

"His brand is currently damaged goods worldwide," public relations expert Mike Paul told The New York Times when asked about Will Smith. It could be a while before we see Will Smith appearing in another film.
The UN Human Rights Office on Tuesday said it is closely following developments in Sri Lanka and urged the authorities to engage in a meaningful dialogue with political parties and civil society to find a solution to the deepening economic crisis.

Spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Liz Throssell said Public frustration had been rising in recent months with largely peaceful demonstrations taking place across the country and the situation has worsened over the past two weeks amid sudden shortages in fuel, cooking gas and some essential food items, as well as power cuts.

The Spokesperson said Human Rights Office is concerned over the measures taken by the government declaring a state of emergency, curfew and internet ban and police violence against protesters.

We are concerned that such measures are aimed at preventing or discouraging people from legitimately expressing their grievances through peaceful protests, and that they frustrate the exchange of views on matters of public interest, she said.

After a demonstration outside the presidents residence on 31 March, the Government declared a state of emergency on 1 April, announced a 36-hour curfew from 6pm on 2 April and shut down social media networks for some 15 hours on 3 April. There have also been reports of excessive and unwarranted police violence against protesters. We remind the Sri Lankan authorities that measures related to states of emergency must comply with international human rights law, should be limited to the extent strictly required by the situation and be proportionate to it, and should not be used to stifle dissent or hinder peaceful protest.

The Spokesperson said the UN Human Rights Office will continue to closely watch developments.

As the High Commissioner for Human Rights Michele Bachelet noted in her recent report to the Human Rights Council in February, the drift towards militarization and the weakening of institutional checks and balances in Sri Lanka have affected the States ability to effectively tackle the economic crisis and ensure the realization of the economic, social and cultural rights of all people in Sri Lanka.

The High Commissioner has also previously voiced her concern that the Government responds to criticism and dissent in ways that undermine civic space, and we reiterate these concerns today.

We urge the Government, political parties and civil society to engage in immediate, inclusive and meaningful dialogue to find a solution for the pressing economic and political challenges that Sri Lanka faces and to avoid further polarization of the situation, Spokesperson for the High Commissioner said.
As part of his series on whisky heroes, Ian Buxton looks at the life of a man who transformed whisky and made the world domination of blended Scotch possible, Aeneas Coffey, inventor of the first practical and efficient continuous still.

I was attacked by about 50 men they fractured my skull, left my whole body one mass of contusion and gave me two bayonet wounds, one of which completely perforated my thigh and to this day I feel bad effects from them, which I never expect entirely to get rid of.

Life wasnt easy for Irish excise officers in the early part of the nineteenth century. They were collecting duty on behalf of the British crown and, perhaps understandably, their work was resented and, as in this case, very actively resisted.

Aeneas Coffey (1780  1852)

But this particular incident, which took place near Culdaff in Donegal in November 1810 would be long forgotten if the unfortunate victim, one Aeneas Coffey (1780  1852), had not gone on to enduring fame as an inventor who changed the course of the whisky industry forever. However, before moving on, its only fair to note that the excise officers frequently gave as good as they got, resulting in an exchange of angry correspondence in the pages of the then highly influential Edinburgh Review. In that Coffey, by then Inspector General of Excise for Ireland, was required to respond to the claims of abuse levelled by the Rev. Edward Chichester in his Oppressions [and] Cruelties of Irish Revenue Officers.

Whether it was the lasting effects of his injuries or perhaps he found the strain of defending his junior colleagues intolerable, we may only speculate but in 1824 Coffey resigned from the Government service and set up as a distiller, first at the Dodder Bank Distillery and subsequently at the Dock Distillery in Grand Canal Street, Dublin.

Developing continuous distillation

This allowed him to develop his earlier work on continuous distillation. But he was not the first to experiment with this technique  basic continuous stills had been developed by Sir Anthony Perrier, Jean-Baptiste Cellier-Blumenthal, the Dutch sugar trader Armand Savalle, Jean-Jacques Saint Marc of the Belmont Distillery in Vauxhall and others, most notably Robert Stein, proprietor, along with the Haig family, of the very large Kennetpans and Kilbagie distilleries in Clackmannanshire. Stein had applied for various patents and by May 1830 a still of his design was operating at Cameronbridge in Scotland (today, a major Diageo operation).

The Coffey design proved superior however, producing spirit at a greater purity and considerably reduced cost compared to other designs. It was markedly more efficient than the traditional pot stills then favoured by the Irish industry, which hitherto had dominated the whisky market.

How a Coffey still works

According to Richard Seale of the Foursquare rum distillery in Barbados, the success of the Coffey still was really due to the evolution of the original design which had been little more than an improved Cellier-Blumenthal still. By 1840, the Coffey still would have copper piping, copper plates (trays) perforated with bubble caps and the still was split into two columns  analyzer (or stripping) column and the rectifying column. This separation of stripping and rectifying would be the foundation of nearly every spirit still in operation today. The use of perforated copper plates (trays) would be a marked improvement on the Stein continuous still which did not have contacting plates and the wash needed to be misted to ensure good liquid / vapour mixing. Even the Haig family would install a Coffey still.

However, the greater purity of the spirit produced by Coffeys design meant that it was rejected by the overwhelming majority of the Irish industry, who styled it silent spirit, considering that its blending with pot still spirit amounted to adulteration and a fraud on the public. Irish resistance to the continuous still was considerable, causing Coffey to relocate his business to London by 1839.

Move to London

Scotch whisky distillers and London gin producers had proved more receptive to the continuous still and his business, by then styled Aeneas Coffey & Sons, grew following the initial sale to William Young & Cos Grange distillery in Burntisland (Fife) in 1834, followed by installations at Inverkeithing, Bonnington and Cambus. Though the Burntisland distillery closed in 1927 it was a substantial concern  commentator Alfred Barnard noting in the 1880s that the distillery was producing 650,000 gallons (nearly 3m litres) of whisky annually. By 1876, seventeen newly installed Coffey stills would be making whisky in Scotland.

Such scale demonstrates the impact on the Irish distillers who stubbornly continued with pot still distillation: one factor among many which led to the rapid decline of that industry in the late 19th and early 20th century. The Scots, meanwhile, enthusiastically adopted blending where the grain whisky produced by the Coffey still proved ideal for increasingly popular brands such as Walkers, Haig, Dewars, Pattisons and many others lost in the mists of time.

Not just whisky

Rum distillers were also enthusiastic adopters of the Coffey still in Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana, St Vincent, St Lucia and Grenada. Some of the original designs remain in operation to this day, most notably the Enmore still at Demerara Distillers Diamond complex in Guyana.

Coffey had transferred control of the business to his son Aeneas Jnr around 1839 and, following his fathers death, the company was sold to their long time foreman John Dore. His company, John Dore & Co Ltd, continues in operation to this day in Guildford, supplying distillery plant and engineering services.

Aeneas Coffey  it is not clear if the senior or his son  was honoured by the medal For Excellence awarded following participation in 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, London. Our hero died on 26 November 1852 and is buried in Tower Hamlets.

Today he is remembered by a grateful industry and in Nikkas Coffey Grain whisky. Perhaps think of this pioneering whisky hero next time you raise a glass of that particular dram or indeed any blended whisky.
What is the law of war? And how does one criminalize a war crime?

by Dr. Ruwantissa Abeyratne in Montreal

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.  Thomas Mann

CNN reported on Tuesday 5 April 2022:  President Joe Biden on Monday said the atrocities allegedly committed by Russian forces in Bucha, Ukraine, are a "war crime" and called for a trial to take place against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

So, what is a war crime?

When simplistically put the definition is: a war crime is a violation of the law of war. Such a violation must be criminalized under criminal law. It helps if criminalized conduct at war has been recognized as such historically.

It is reported that the first war crime trial goes back to the fifteenth century where in 1474, an ad hoc tribunal of the Holy Roman Empire convicted Peter von Hagenbach for being in command of soldiers in a military force whose criminal conduct could have been prevented by him in his capacity as a knight. The Tribunal rejected his argument that he had merely been following orders of his superiors.

So, what is the law of war? And how does one criminalize a war crime?

One could say that a war crime is a crime against humanity committed during war. One succinct example is Article 165 of the Military Code of The Republic of Congo (2002) which provides that crimes against humanity are grave violations of international humanitarian law committed against any civilian population before or during war.

Italian jurist and renowned international law scholar Antonio Cassese defines a war crime as a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by the combatants, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hostages, unnecessarily destroying civilian property, deception by perfidy, wartime sexual violence, pillaging, the conscription of children in the military, committing genocide or ethnic cleansing, the granting of no quarter despite surrender, and flouting the legal distinctions of proportionality and military necessity.

German Jurist L.F.L. Oppenheim, in his celebrated thesis on international law says there are four different kinds of war crime: violations of recognized rules of warfare by enemy armed forces, if carried out without orders; hostilities committed by individuals not members of the enemy armed forces; espionage and war treason; and marauding acts.

The Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 and their Additional Protocols I and II of 1977, and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 consider war crimes to be serious breaches of international humanitarian law committed against civilians or enemy combatants during an international or domestic armed conflict, for which the perpetrators may be held criminally liable on an individual basis.

The most exhaustive list of war crimes is contained in Article 8 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice of which just a small portion is as follows: grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, namely, any of the following acts against persons or property protected under the provisions of the relevant Geneva Convention: wilful killing; torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments; wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health; extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly; compelling a prisoner of war or other protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile Power; wilfully depriving a prisoner of war or other protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial; unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement; and taking of hostages.

The International Law Commission in 1991provisionally adopted a Draft Code of Crimes Against the Peace and Security of Mankind which provides for individual criminal responsibility with regard to aggression; genocide; any crime against humanity; any crime against the United Nations and associated personnel; and war crimes. In this context individual responsibility and State responsibility may be considered as mutually exclusive on a case-by-case basis. For example, with regard to the situation in Somalia in the early 1990s The United Nations By Resolution 794 (1992) and Resolution 814 (1993) unanimously condemned breaches of humanitarian law that could be attributed to individuals who were considered individually responsible for such breaches.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has interpreted the various principles pertaining to war crimes as: persons not engaged in combat and those who do not take part in hostilities are entitled to respect for their lives and physical and moral integrity; it is forbidden to kill or injure an enemy who surrenders or who is not engaged in combat; the wounded and sick should be collected and cared for; captured combatants and civilians are entitled to respect for their lives; and everyone should be entitled to fundamental judicial guarantees.

This is where it gets complicated. As authors Oona A. Hathaway, Paul K. Strauch, Beatrice A. Walton, Zoe A. Y. Weinber say in the Yale Journal of International Law in 2019: As international criminal liability continues to spread, this its a war crime if its been criminalized approach is likely to yield a plethora of disconnected criminal statutes with little underlying rhyme or reason guiding them. When existing international tribunals, including most notably the International Criminal Court (ICC), add new war crimes to their statutes or prosecute for the first time those already included in their statutes, the apparent need to prove that the offenses have been criminalized may produce inconsistent results and uncertainty about the corpus of war crimes. When domestic courts and prosecutors are called to assess whether a particular act mentioned in a domestic statute amounts to an international war crime, the current approach fails to provide clear guidance on where to look for confirmation.

With regard to domestic jurisprudence The United States offers some examples of adjudication. In the 1985 case of Sanchez-Espinoza v. Reagan where the United States support of the Contra guerillas in Nicaragua fighting against the government of that county, The Court of Appeals held that in considering domestic legislation i.e. The Alien Tort Claims Act, customary international law did not cover violations by U.S. officials of domestic and international law, as the statute only covered private non-governmental acts and customary international law did not cover private conduct. The Act therefore covered official State acts against which sovereign immunity would apply to preclude liability.

In the 1995 case of Kadic v. Karadzic where certain violations of international law were concerned such as genocide, war crimes and other violations The U.S. Court of Appeals confirmed that The Alien Tort Act would apply to both State and non-State actors with regard to such acts but when torture and summary execution were not committed within genocide or war crimes such reprehensibility would devolve upon only State officials or those who perform such acts under color of law.

Finally, it is worthy of note that although 123 countries are members of the International Criminal Court located in the Hague, Russia, the United States and Ukraine are not part of it, but Ukraine has accepted the Courts jurisdiction. It must also be noted that the ICC considers its jurisdiction as territorial: in other words, the Court focuses on the territory that is subject to aggression or offence rather than State membership.
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The deal will decarbonize the steel production process at Jindal Shadeeds steel manufacturing plant, the German green energy firm Hydrogen Rise said.

The partners of the agreement will assess...
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THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP)  A fire Wednesday in the COVID-19 ward of a hospital in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, left one patient dead and two seriously injured, firefighters said.

The fire department said it evacuated 34 patients from the COVID-19 ward of the Papanikolaou hospital. The blaze was quickly extinguished.

Four of the uninjured patients who were evacuated had already been in serious condition due to the coronavirus, and were under increased monitoring, authorities said. The body of one patient was found on the second floor, the fire department said.

Several fatal fires in COVID-19 hospital wards in several countries have been linked to the large quantities of oxygen with which patients are linked up  and which although not flammable causes a fire to burn much faster and more intensely.

Health Minister Thanos Plevris said the cause of the blaze was not immediately clear. Video footage from the site showed thick black smoke billowing out of two windows on a lower floor of the facility and firefighters clambering up to the windows.

The danger was from the oxygen supply to the patients. That could have made the situation much worse, Plevris told reporters outside the hospital after the fire was put out.

The supply was cut off quickly and the response from the fire department was swift, he added.

He said other wards on the hospital had not been affected and COVID-19 patients had been moved to other parts of the building and were put back on oxygen.
TEHRAN, Iran (AP)  Iran on Wednesday said it supplied the United Nations nuclear watchdog with documents explaining the discovery of suspect enriched uranium traces, state media reported, the first acknowledgement from Tehran that it had answered the agency's long-standing demands.

The head of Iran's civilian Atomic Energy Organization, Mohammad Eslami, said Iran sent the requested explanations on March 20 about several former undeclared sites in Iran where there was evidence of past nuclear activity.

The deadline came as part of an agreement announced last month to resolve the problem of undeclared uranium particles in Iran by June  long a source of tension between Tehran and the U.N. atomic watchdog.

The thorny issue is separate from now-stalled talks to revive Tehran's nuclear deal with world powers, which collapsed four years ago when former President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the accord and imposed crushing sanctions on Iran. In the meantime, Iran has vastly expanded its nuclear work.

As the fate of a renewed nuclear deal hangs in the balance, long-sought answers about Iran's old but undeclared nuclear sites would improve trust and solve a major sticking point in its negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Eslami told reporters that Iran had handed over documents to the U.N. watchdog about the three requested sites in Iran, without elaborating. He expected agency inspectors to visit Iran to review the answers" and finish a report on the subject by late June, he added.

The Vienna-based IAEA declined to comment on Eslamis remarks.

The IAEA in 2019 first discovered the traces of man-made uranium that suggested they were once connected to Irans nuclear program. U.S. intelligence agencies, Western nations and the IAEA have said Iran ran an organized nuclear weapons program until 2003. Iran has long denied ever seeking nuclear weapons.

As a member of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Iran is obligated to explain the radioactive traces and to provide assurances that they are not being used as part of a nuclear weapons program. The IAEA has staked its credibility on finding information about the sites, with its chief, Rafael Grossi, routinely lambasting Iran for its failure to answer where the radioactive particles came from and where they are now.

Eslami on Wednesday claimed that one of the particles discovered by IAEA inspectors does not exist in Iran, without offering evidence or details. He blamed regional archenemy Israel for sowing doubts about the nature of Iran's nuclear program. Israel has said it believes Iran would pursue a nuclear weapon, despite Western intelligence assessments indicating otherwise.

Tehran currently enriches uranium up to 60% purity  its highest level ever and a short technical step from weapons-grade levels of 90% and far greater than the nuclear deals 3.67% cap.

Its stockpile of enriched uranium continues to grow as nuclear talks in Vienna flounder, worrying nuclear nonproliferation experts that Iran could be closer to the threshold of having enough material for an atomic weapon if it chose to pursue one.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  The mass killing that left six people dead and 12 wounded outside bars just blocks from Californias Capitol last weekend was a gunfight involving at least five shooters from rival gangs, Sacramento police said Wednesday.

Police said they identified at least five gunmen but there may have been more. Only two suspects  both brothers wounded by gunfire  have been arrested in connection with the shooting and, so far, only face firearms charges.

We're still working through ... who the actual shooters are in the case, Sgt. Zach Eaton said.

Until Wednesday's announcement, police had been silent on what led to the shooting that erupted early Sunday as bars were letting out. Rapid-fire bursts of over 100 gunshots echoed through the streets as terrified patrons ran for their lives and others were hit by bullets.

Police said at least two gangs were involved. They declined to provide more details or name the gangs involved or the affiliation of any suspects.

Experts said that if gangs were to blame, it would mark an unusually bloody feud.

In 20 years of researching gangs in Los Angeles, Alex Alonso said he cant remember a gang-related shooting with such a high body count.

Its extremely rare that a gang shooting happened as the way this one is being characterized, Alonso said. Its extremely rare to have that happen in a public place with so many victims.

Gregory Chris Brown, a criminal justice professor at California State University, Fullerton, said gangs often target rivals in drive-by shootings with fewer victims, though innocent bystanders are sometimes also struck.

The location of the Sacramento shooting  in a bustling area of watering holes near the entertainment district  was incidental to whatever fueled the fight.

If rival gang members see each other it doesnt matter if theyre in the Capitol of the United States of America, Brown said. If you see a rival gang member and youre going to attack them, it doesnt matter where they are.

The large number of casualties was the result of high-capacity weapons in a crowded area, he said.

Berry Accius, founder of Voice of the Youth who leads gun intervention and prevention programs and offered his services to counsel families who lost loved ones in the shooting, criticized police for characterizing the crime as gang-related, which he said will lead some to think Black people.

He said people will see the photos of the Black women and men who were shot, assume they were in a gang and wonder why gang members are downtown.

Thats the narrative we dont need at this particular time, Accius said. "This idea that were going to put blame to one demographic of folks and blame them for the violence that ensued.

Bill Sanders, a criminologist at Cal State LA, said he wanted to see more evidence the shooting was gang-related, a term police often use to drum up support. He said gang shootings are more mundane and most occur in what are considered gang neighborhoods.

If you looked at a map of gang homicides in the city  or any city  over time, youd see the same areas lighting up  meaning thats where they occur. If these guys were white, this wouldnt be considered gang related  not even for a minute.

Authorities credited witnesses who contributed nearly 200 videos, photos and other tips with helping the investigation.

Police were trying to determine if a stolen handgun found at the crime scene was used in the massacre. It had been converted to a weapon capable of automatic gunfire.

They are also investigating whether a gun one of the brothers, Smiley Martin, 27, brandished in a video was used in the shooting, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press. The official was briefed on the investigation but was not authorized to publicly discuss details and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Martin and his brother were among those wounded in the gunfire that erupted about 2 a.m. Sunday as bars closed and patrons filled the streets.

The Sacramento County coroner identified the three women killed as Johntaya Alexander, 21; Melinda Davis, 57; and Yamile Martinez-Andrade, 21. The three men killed were Sergio Harris, 38; Joshua Hoye-Lucchesi, 32; and Devazia Turner, 29.

Ten people were wounded in addition to the Martin brothers. At least two remained hospitalized with gunshot wounds.

Smiley Martin faces charges of possession of a firearm by a prohibited person and possession of a machine gun. He remained hospitalized and it wasnt clear if he had an attorney who could speak for him.

His brother, Dandrae Martin, 26, was arrested as a related suspect and appeared briefly Tuesday in Sacramento Superior Court on a charge of being a convict carrying a loaded gun.

He did not enter a plea and his attorney said she would wait to see if prosecutors brought more serious charges before deciding whether to seek his release.

Both men have criminal records. Smiley Martin was released from prison in February after serving about half of a 10-year prison sentence for beating a girlfriend. He was denied parole last year after prosecutors said he clearly has little regard for human life, documents show.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg questioned why the brothers were on the streets.

Those questions need to be answered and they will be answered over the days ahead, Steinberg said.

A 31-year-old man seen carrying a handgun immediately after the shooting was arrested Tuesday on a weapons charge. Police said they dont believe his gun was used in the shooting.

___

This version corrects that Smiley Martin served about half of a 10-year prison sentence, not about two years of the term.

___

Melley reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Stefanie Dazio, Christopher Weber in Los Angeles, Don Thompson in Sacramento, Michael Balsamo in Washington, Jacques Billeaud in Phoenix and News Researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York City contributed to this report.
RENO, Nev. (AP)  A single, desperate cry for help went through to family members too late to save a womans husband after the Indiana couple had been lost in Nevadas high-desert wilderness for more than a week.

37.757753, -117.809568. Help.

It was a delayed text with GPS coordinates from Beverly Barker, 69, who survived the ordeal and was reported in good shape at a Reno hospital Wednesday, the day after rescuers found her and the body of her husband, Ronnie, 72.

Their nephew, Travis Peters, said in a Wednesday Facebook post that he can only assume that as his aunt was being airlifted to the hospital  or perhaps her belongings were being brought down the mountain  her phone came into cell range and the message was sent late Tuesday.

Now we know it arrived too late, wrote Peters, who has been highly critical of law enforcement for what he says was too little too late in terms of a search for the Barkers.

The couple was found Tuesday in the mountainous, forested high-desert in the remote Silver Peak area of Esmeralda County about 177 miles (284 kilometers) northwest of Las Vegas, west of Goldfield and east of the California line.

Both were with the Kia passenger car they had been towing behind a 32-foot (9.8-meter) motor home before the RV got stuck in mud. They apparently decided to try to continue on in the car before it too got stuck.

Because of rough roads in the area, authorities opted to have Beverly Barker airlifted to a Reno hospital to be checked out, Mineral County Undersheriff Bill Ferguson told The Associated Press.

She had melted snow for water and the car provided shelter from temperatures that dipped into the 30s (-1.1 C) at night, he said Wednesday. She would get out and go for little walks.

Family members who reported the Barkers missing have said in numerous social media posts they left on a cross-country trip last month and were expected to return this week to their home in Indianapolis. They said the couple departed Albany, Oregon, on March 27 and planned to meet with friends in Tucson, Arizona, on March 29.

One of four aircraft that had been searching for the couple with the Civilian Air Patrol spotted the RV from the air about midday on Tuesday.

Due to the remote area where the motorhome was located it took several hours for (search and rescue) teams to reach it, the Esmeralda County sheriff's office said in a statement Wednesday.

After a search of the motorhome, it was determined foul play was not involved, it said. It said the teams then found tire tracks they were able to follow to the Kia about 2 miles (3 km) away.

Esmeralda County sheriff's officials haven't responded to requests for additional information.

Ferguson said he has no idea how the couple ended up where they did.

What led them down that path, I dont know. I dont know if it was GPS or Google. I dont know why they were there," Ferguson said.

It was just one bad decision after another," he said. At some point I would have thought they would have stopped sooner and disconnected the car. They probably lost their direction, took a wrong turn and then the car became stuck.

Ferguson said the couple had video that indicated they were in the Silver Peak area since March 27, but he didnt have information on when Ronnie Barker died or the cause of his death.

Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity, who has been in the area numerous times as his group protests a planned lithium mine where an extremely rare desert wildflower grows, said a single graded road crosses the mountain range in that area coming west out of Silver Peak.

Getting an RV towing a vehicle up that road would be insane, but within the realm of possibility, he said Wednesday.

Peters, the couple's nephew who lives in Indiana, directed most of his criticism about the handling of the search at Esmeralda County Sheriff Kenneth Elgan, who did not immediately respond Wednesday to phone calls or emails seeking comment.

Peters said in his social media posts that "my sorrow is just overshadowed by the fact that they didnt get to them in time.

He said his uncle might still be alive if a search had been initiated in a more timely manner (not 3+ days after we reported them missing).

Peters told KVVU-TV in Las Vegas the death creates a hole in the family that will never be filled.

Hes just a bigger-than-life personality, he said. Thank God that Beverly is alive, because she will be able to fill in those blanks that we dont know. Why did they go up the mountain? What happened? She's going to be able to tell us."

___

Davenport reported from Phoenix, Arizona
Scheurer Health President and CEO Terry Lerash is retiring, the Pigeon-based health care system announced Wednesday morning.

Lerash will be succeeded by Mike Nanzer, vice president and chief operating officer of Livonia-based Rainbow Rehabilitation Centers, which operates nine treatment centers and 35 community-based inpatient residential facilities.

Under Lerash's stewardship, which began in 2016, Scheurer expanded with a new primary care location in Bad Axe and Scheurer Health FastCare inside of the Bad Axe Meijer store. Scheurer also upgraded its electronic medical record system, developed new services like urogynecology and podiatry, with a second suite built at Scheurer Specialty Care, and opened a new primary care clinic in Sebewaing.

Lerash also oversaw a rebranding of the entire organization from Scheurer Hospital to Scheurer Health, established two additional school wellness clinics in Bad Axe and USA Schools, expanded chemotherapy and infusion therapy services and led Scheurer Health through the COVID-19 pandemic. The organization also implemented "The Scheurer Way," a program dedicated to the customer and employee experience, during Lerash's tenure.

Reflecting on his five-decade career, Lerash said his time at Scheurer was a source of pride and the organization was well-positioned to continue providing a high level of service to its customers in the Upper Thumb.

"As Scheurer Health's president and CEO, I often think about how proud I am of the accomplishments we have made together," Lerash said. "The successes, along with the high quality of care and service, would not be possible without our outstanding team of employees, medical staff and board of trustees. After nearly 50 years in health care, I will always cherish this final chapter in my career. I look forward to the future of Scheurer as they continue to provide better health and better life to members of our communities."

A native of the Bad Axe area, Lerash's career has spanned a variety of specialties in health care for almost 50 years. After graduating from Bad Axe High School, he joined the armed forces as a medical corpsman for the U.S. Army before enrolling at Saginaw Valley State University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in nursing.

Lerash first worked at the Veterans Administration Hospital and St. Luke's Hospital in Saginaw, which led to management roles with Covenant HealthCare, including director of nursing, human resources and vice president of clinical operations. Lerash earned a masters in administration from Central Michigan University. He later would become president and CEO of Synergy Medical Education Alliance, a position he would hold for 10 years. After returning to Covenant and overseeing its department of innovation, he became just the fourth chief executive at Scheurer.

Brian Keim, board chairman of Scheurer Health, said Lerash provided a steady hand as the organization navigated the COVID-19 pandemic and was instrumental in the organization's expansion in recent years.

"Terry brought a sharp business acumen with him that was very timely for some of the things we have faced as an organization during his tenure, including the accountable care movement, expansion of our facilities into the Bad Axe area, and navigating the COVID-19 pandemic," Keim said. "We appreciate all Terry has done for the organization and wish him nothing but the best as he transitions into retirement."

Prior to his latest role at Rainbow Rehabilitation Centers, Nanzer was the interim chief operating officer during his time at Sanai Grace Hospital, part of Detroit Medical Center. Nanzer holds bachelor's degrees from both Michigan State University and the University of Michigan, a doctorate in physical therapy from the University of Michigan, a Master of Business Administration from Wayne State University and a graduate certificate in strategic management from Harvard University.

Nanzer said he is looking forward to assuming his new role at Scheurer and building upon the work of Lerash and his predecessors.

"I have been very fortunate to be in some positions that have allowed me to grow as a leader," Nanzer said. "I am very excited about joining Scheurer Health, and I believe my career experience will help bring a lot of positive things to the organization. The fact that Scheurer is so engrained into the community is very important to me."

Keim said Nanzer's extensive experience both as a physical therapist and administrator made him a perfect fit for the top job at Scheurer.

"Mike Nanzer comes to us with an impressive resume of experience as a practitioner and frontline leader in a variety of health care organizations," Keim said. "Our search team was very impressed with his knowledge of the health care industry and even more so with his reputation for collaborating with employees and community partners to grow the organizations he has been part of. We are excited for him to begin his work with Scheurer."

Lerash will see through the remainder of the Scheurer Health fiscal year, which ends June 30, allowing for a transition to bring Nanzer on board, according to a press release.
New Britain Police / Contributed

NEW BRITAIN  Investigators on Wednesday continue to probe a fatal shooting in a building on Court Street over the weekend, according to police.

Around 10:30 p.m. Sunday, officers responded to the 60 block of Court Street for a report of gunfire inside the building, police said.
Whether youre out enjoying the spring sunshine or dodging pesky pollen indoors, Connecticuts bevy of writers has been churning out new books to read this spring. From memoirs about a life on stage, theories about new ways to think, murder mysteries and forays into the past, these 14 new titles have something for everyone.

Broadway actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein published a memoir about his life as an openly gay man and theatrical career last month. In his book I Was Better Last Night: A Memoir the Ridgefield resident lays out his life on the page as he opens up about his life on and off the stage.

'Split the Pie: A Radical New Way to Negotiate,' Nonfiction

New Haven resident and Yale professor Barry Nalebuff shares his theories on the best negotiation practices in his book Split the Pie: A Radical New Way to Negotiate. His book was published last month.

'This Book Wont Make You Happy,' Self-Help

Ridgefield author Niro Feliciano published her book This Book Wont Make You Happy earlier this month. As an author and psychotherapist Feliciano uses her expertise to advise people to search for contentment instead of happiness, arguing that folks are adding stress to their lives by striving for happiness. Her book features eight steps to help readers find contentment.

'The Resilience Workbook for Kids,' Child Psychology

Earlier this month Greenwich author Rebecca Comizio published The Resilience Workbook for Kids. Comizio is a school psychologist in New Canaan and a practicing psychologist in Greenwich. Her workbook is targeted for children ages 7-12 to provide activities to help children process and handle stress.

Penguin Random House/ Contributed photo

'When We Fall Apart,' Fiction

Stamford author Soon Wiley will publish his debut novel When We Fall Apart on April 26. His book follows the story of a Korean-American mans efforts to find answers after his girlfriends mysterious death while he reconciles with his own identity.

'Lost and Found in Paris,' Fiction

Southport native Lian Dolan paints a tale of heist and adventure in her latest novel Lost and Found in Paris. The book, which was published earlier this month, follows a woman who books a trip to Paris after her life falls apart to act as an art courieronly to later discover the artwork shes bringing to a prospective buyer has been stolen and her deceased fathers sketch has been left in its place. Now she has to dig into her own past as she tracks down the art thief.

'Crazy to Leave You,' Fiction

Avon author Marilyn Simon Rothsteins upcoming new book, Crazy to Leave You tells the story of a bride jilted at the altar as she tries to figure out how to proceed with her life after her former fiance blew apart their wedding as she deals with work, her biological clock ticking down and emotional eating. Her new title will be published May 24.

'Wicked Blood,' Fiction

Last month Woodbury author E.C. Hanson published his novella Wicked Blood. The story follows three orphaned siblings living on a farm. When two of the siblings begin to display violent tendencies the third sibling finds herself trying to control their behavior while risking her own safety.

Courtesy of HarperCollins

'Sister Stardust,' Historical Fiction

Trying her hand for the first time with historical fiction, Westport author Jane Green published her Talitha Getty-inspired tale of the heady atmosphere of the 1960s in Sister Stardust. The story follows a young woman named Claire who is whisked away to Morocco with a band of rock stars where they introduce Claire to Talitha, who instantly captivates Claire. Her book was published earlier this month.

Courtesy of Severn House

'Dead Wind,' Mystery

In the third installment of her Shana Merchant series, Dariens Tessa Wegert examines the secrets that lurk in small towns in Dead Wind. When a body surfaces just across the border in Canada, Detective Shana Merchant finds herself investigating the puzzling death at a wind farm as she hopes it isnt connected to her ongoing investigation into serial killer Blake Bram. Her book was published earlier this month.

Courtesy of John Searles

'Her Last Affair,' Thriller

Monroe native John Searles published his latest thriller, Her Last Affair last month. The book follows four individuals whose lives intersect. One woman is grieving the loss of her long-time spouse after a freak accident. Another is renting a room while carrying on a virtual affair with an old flame, while the last character wonders whether or not to track down an ex while traveling for work.

'Almost Like Praying,' Fiction

Avon author and journalist Joel Samberg aims to showcase the story behind the story in his upcoming book Almost Like Praying. Publishing April 28, Sambergs new novel follows the story of how a womans life and her childrens lives didnt turn out how she expected them to, and how those plans veered off course.

'The Sons of Santorelli,' Fiction

New Haven native Tony Taddei's latest book "The Sons of Santorelli" follows three generations of men from an Italian family spanning 80 years through a series of short stories. The author's book is set in his hometown of New Haven and will be published April 12.

'Alias Anna,' Middle-grade

Fairfield author Susan Hood shares the true story of how a of Jewish Ukrainian musician used their piano skills to hide from the Nazis in plain sight during World War II in Alias Anna. The middle-grade story is based on the experiences of Zhanna, and Hood co-wrote the story with Zhannas son Greg Dawson. The book was published last month and features photos and letters from the Dawson family.
Regular Press Conference of the Ministry of National Defense on March 31

EditorChen Zhuo Time2022-04-06 15:53:01

By Senior Colonel Wu Qian, Director General of the Information Office of the Ministry of National Defense (MND) and Spokesperson for the MND

Senior Colonel Wu Qian, spokesperson for the Ministry of National Defense (MND) of the People's Republic of China (PRC), answers reporters' questions at a regular press conference on March 31, 2022.(Photo:mod.gov.cn)

(The following English text of the press conference is for reference. In case of any divergence of interpretation, the Chinese text shall prevail.)

I have a piece of news at the top.

General Liu Zhenli, Commander of the PLA Army, and Lt. General Hun Manet, Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces and Commander of the Royal Cambodian Army, held a video conference on March 31. The two sides had an in-depth exchange of views and signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on Cooperation between the Chinese PLA Army and the Royal Cambodian Army.

China and Cambodia are close neighbors and iron-clad friends. In recent years, the Chinese and Cambodian militaries have deepened their practical cooperation in fields such as strategic communication, joint exercises and training, intercollegiate exchanges, and personnel training. The Chinese side stands ready to work with the Cambodian side to implement the important consensus reached by our state leaders, advance the state-to-state and mil-to-mil relations, and continue to build the China-Cambodia community of shared future with strategic significance.

Question: Recently, while attending a plenary meeting of the delegation of the PLA and PAP at the fifth session of the 13th National Peoples Congress (NPC), President Xi pointed out that running the military in accordance with the law is the fundamental approach of the Communist Party of China in building and running the military and is essential for achieving the Party's goal of strengthening the military in the new era. He called for implementing the strategy of running the military in accordance with the law and enhancing the rule of law in national defense and military development, so as to provide a strong legal guarantee for advancing the cause of strengthening the military. What arrangements has the Chinese military made to implement President Xis important speech and the spirit of the fifth session of the 13th NPC?

Answer: The fifth session of the 13th NPC is an important meeting held at a key juncture when China embarks on the new journey of building a modern socialist country in all respects and marching toward the second centenary goal. On the afternoon of March 7, President Xi attended the plenary meeting of the delegation of PLA and PAP at the fifth session of the 13th NPC and delivered an important speech. Speaking from a strategic and big-picture perspective in consideration for the development of the time, President Xi recognized the progress made in national defense and military development in the past year and especially emphasized the importance of implementing the strategy of running the military in accordance with the law. He reviewed the great progress made in fulfilling the strategy of running the military in accordance with the law since the 18th CPC National Congress, systematically expounded the strategys profound connotations, and made arrangements for the implementation of the strategy going ahead.

The General Office of the Central Military Commission recently issued a notice stressing the study of the spirit of the fifth session of the 13th NPC, especially the spirit of President Xis speech should be included in the theoretical study program of the party committees of all military units at and above regiment level, incorporated in the political education of the troops and taken as part of the teaching contents of political theories at military academies, with the aim of aligning the thinking and action across the military.

First, focusing on embracing the 20th CPC National Congress and studying and implementing the spirit of the 20th CPC National Congress, the Chinese military will comprehensively strengthen the Partys leadership and Party building by guiding the troops to have in-depth understanding of the decisive significance of establishing Comrade Xi Jinpings core position on the Party Central Committee and in the Party as a whole and defining the guiding role of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era; strengthen their consciousness of the need to maintain political integrity, think in big-picture terms, follow the leadership core, and keep in alignment with the central Party leadership; stay confident in the path, theory, system, and culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics; uphold Comrade Xi Jinpings core position on the Party Central Committee and in the Party as a whole and uphold the Central Committees authority and its centralized, unified leadership; and implement the CMC chairman responsibility system.

Second, the Chinese military will closely follow the development and changes in security situations at home and abroad, promote military development and combat readiness together with military struggles, and conduct military struggles in a firm and flexible way.

Third, seizing the window for military development, the Chinese military will make strenuous efforts to implement the 14th Five-year Plan, deepen reform and innovation, strengthen strategic management, and strive to develop at a faster pace with higher quality.

Fourth, following the requirement of the strategy of running the military in accordance with the law, the military will consolidate the legal guarantee for ensuring the Partys absolute leadership over the military, and regularize various activities concerning military training and preparedness according to the law, accelerate the fundamental transformation in the way of running the military, ensure that the armed forces are highly centralized, unified, secure and stable, and greet the successful convening of the 20th CPC National Congress with concrete actions.

Question: It is reported that in the National Defense Strategy transmitted by the US Department of Defense recently to the Congress, China was regarded as the "most consequential strategic competitor" for the US. Adm. John C. Aquilino, Commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, recently patrolled the South China Sea on a P-8A Poseidon plane, and said that Chinas construction on relevant islands and reefs there has damaged regional stability and threatened nearby nations. He added that Washingtons main objective in disputed regions is to prevent war through deterrence. If deterrence fails, the second task is to get ready for combat and win. Another news report said that the US Navys Expeditionary Sea Base (ESB) ship USS Miguel Keith had entered the South China Sea days ago. Please comment on that.

Answer: On March 18, President Xi Jinping had a video call with US President Joe Biden at the request of the latter. The US side reiterated that the US does not seek a new Cold War with China; it does not aim to change Chinas system; the revitalization of its alliances is not targeted at China; the US does not support Taiwan independence; and it has no intention to seek a conflict with China. China believes that what the US has done is seriously inconsistent with President Bidens statement and we are firmly opposed to that.

China has indisputable sovereignty over the South China Sea islands and their adjacent waters. Chinas deployment of necessary defense facilities is not only the legitimate right of a sovereign state, but also a necessary measure to deal with Americas provocations. It is in full compliance with relevant international law and practice. The label of militarization of the South China Sea should not be put on China but the US. When Adm. Aquilino flew over the South China Sea, he must have seen not just a scattering of islands and reefs, but also a number of American warships and planes throwing their weight around. They have come all the way to the South China Sea to stir up troubles. Regional countries know exactly what they want. Facts have proven that the US is the biggest instigator of the militarization of the South China Sea, and the biggest destroyer and troublemaker to the regional peace and stability.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Shanghai Communique. As two major countries in the world, China and the US stand to gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation. Standing at a new historical starting point, we hope the US side will work with China to draw experience and wisdom from history, and steer the relations between the two countries and two militaries back to the right track of healthy and steady development as soon as possible, so as make greater contributions to world peace and stability.

Question: It is reported that the US Pacific Air Forces Commander recently said we got relatively close to the J-20s along with our F-35s in the East China Sea. They are flying the J-20s pretty well and were relatively impressed with the command and control associated with the J-20. Some of their very long range air to air missiles are aided by the KJ-500. Being able to interrupt that kill chain is something that interests me greatly. Could you please comment on his remarks?

Answer: Weve noticed the remarks from the American side. In recent years, the Chinese military has made great progress in developing its weapons and equipment, including main battle equipment of the air force. However, we are fully aware that there is still much room for improvement.

For a long time, America has dispatched its military vessels and aircraft to carry out large-scale and frequent close-in reconnaissance and provocative and deterrent operations against China, which has seriously damaged the mutual trust between the two militaries and endangered the safety of both sides vessels, planes and personnel. China is strongly opposed to such actions.

The PLA Air Force shoulders the sacred duty of defending national security in the airspace. It must be emphasized that when it comes to defending national sovereignty and security, the PLA will always be ready and capable of wielding its sword.

Senior Colonel Wu Qian, spokesperson for the Ministry of National Defense (MND) of the People's Republic of China (PRC), answers reporters' questions at a regular press conference on March 31, 2022.(Photo:mod.gov.cn)

Question: According to the spokesperson of the delegation of the PLA and PAP participating in the fifth session of the 13th National Peoples Congress, the defense budget for 2022 allocated by national finance is 7.1 percent higher than the actual expenditure of last year. The Associated Press claimed that Chinas massive military spending over the years is challenging the U.S. militarys dominance in the Indo-Pacific region. The Chief Cabinet Secretary of Japan expressed his hope for China to be more transparent with its defense policy and spending. By the way, according to U.S. media reports, the White House recently submitted to Congress a draft defense budget for the fiscal year 2023. Please comment on that.

Answer: Every time China announces its defense budget, there are always some officials and media from the US-led West making vicious accusations. China is firmly opposed to that.

The truth that China is a socialist country, its strategic choice to take the path of peaceful development, its independent foreign policy of peace and the Chinese cultural tradition that values peace and harmony  all these have determined that China will unswervingly adhere to a national defense policy thats defensive in nature. Our defense development is aimed at protecting Chinas security and contributing to world peace. The growth of Chinas military strength is a growth of the force for peace in the world. In contrast, the U.S. military spending  the largest in the world all these years  is equivalent to about 1/4 of the worlds total and to the combined military expenditure of the nine countries trailing it. Days ago, the White House submitted to Congress a draft defense budget totaling 813 billion dollars for the fiscal year 2023. The world knows clearly its purpose. In addition to conventional forces, the U.S. is also home to the worlds largest and most advanced nuclear arsenal and is the only country with a stock of chemical weapons. In the past decades, the U.S., in blatant violation of the principles and purposes of the UN Charter as well as the norms of international law, has waged wars against Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries, causing dire civilian casualties and property losses, and huge humanitarian disasters. Facts have proven that the U.S. is the biggest culprit and backstage manipulator in undermining world peace and stability.

Chinas military expenditure is open and transparent. China actively participates in the UN system on military expenditure transparency and has been submitting reports about its military spending for the previous fiscal years to the UN since 2008. Japans hype of the so-called lack of transparency over Chinese military expenditure is just an excuse for expanding its own military forces and breaking the post-WWII international order. In recent years, Japan has continuously increased its defense budget, stepped up funding in new combat domains including aerospace, cyberspace, and electromagnetic technologies, strengthened military deployments in its southwest, and developed high-end weapons and equipment. These dangerous moves have created tension in the region and put the international community on high alert. We urge the Japanese side to truly learn lessons from history and be very cautious with its words and deeds regarding military security.

Question: In early March, Minister of National Defense General Wei Fenghe held talks via video link with his South African counterpart. Please share more details on the talks, and what are the expectations of the Chinese side for the bilateral military relations?

Answer: General Wei Fenghe, State Councilor and Defense Minister, recently held video talks with South African Minister of Defense and Military Veterans Thandi Modise. The two sides had an in-depth exchange of views on China-South Africa military relations, anti-pandemic cooperation, and international and regional situations.

China and South Africa are good friends and partners with profound friendship and mutual trust. Under the strategic guidance of the two heads of state, the two militaries have seen fruitful results in cooperation in military training, medical and health care, equipment and technology, and personnel training. The Chinese military is willing to further deepen the cooperation in international peacekeeping operations, maritime security, joint exercises and training, and military medicine with the military of South Africa, and further grow the military relations.

Question: Recently, the Chinese and Indian militaries held the 15th round of China-India Corps Commander Level Meeting. US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner said that India is facing a severe situation from the Chinese side along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), to which the US keeps close attention. Please tell us more about the meeting, and what is your comment on the relevant remarks from the US?

Answer: On March 11, the Chinese and Indian militaries held the 15th round of China-India Corps Commander Level Meeting at the Moldo/Chushul border meeting point on the Indian side. The two sides held discussions on settling relevant issues in the area along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the Western Sector of the China-India border. The meeting was positive and constructive. The two sides reiterated that the settlement of the remaining issues would help restore peace and tranquility in the area along the LAC in the Western Sector and advance bilateral relations. They agreed to continue to maintain security and stability on the frontline in the Western Sector and maintain dialogue via military and diplomatic channels to reach a mutually acceptable solution to the remaining issues as soon as possible.

The China-India boundary question is a matter between the two countries. The two sides have agreed to properly handle the border situation through negotiation and consultation. There is no room for interference from a third party.

Question: According to reports, the Pakistan Air Force recently held a ceremony for receiving the Chinese J-10CE fighter jets. As commented by the Pakistan Prime Minister, the China-made aircraft would play an important role in correcting the security imbalance in the region. On March 23, the J-10CE fighter jets appeared in the military parade to mark the Pakistan Day. Whats your comment on this? Could you please brief us more on the China-Pakistan military relations?

Answer: The Chinese embassy in Pakistan has released the information about the ceremony by the Pakistan Air Force for receiving the J-10CE fighter jets. It should be pointed out that China and Pakistan are all-weather strategic cooperative partners, true friends and iron brothers that share weal and woe. China is willing to work with Pakistan to accelerate the building of a closer China-Pakistan community of shared future in the new era.

The military-to-military relations, serving as the mainstay of the China-Pakistan friendship, have played an important role in the development of bilateral relations for a long time. The two militaries have achieved fruitful results in fields such as high-level visits, joint training and exercises, anti-pandemic cooperation, equipment and technology, constantly enriching the connotation of bilateral strategic cooperation. Going forward, under the guidance of the leaders of the two countries, the Chinese and Pakistan militaries stand ready to expand practical cooperation in various fields to a new level and inject a new impetus into the all-weather strategic cooperative partnership between the two countries, so as to make a new contribution to maintaining regional peace and stability.

Question: Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said before the election that with American and British assistance, Australia plans to establish a nuclear-powered submarine fleet and build a nuclear submarine base on its east coast. He also announced an AUD 38 billion plan to expand Australias military. The Australian media commented that China's military buildup is one of the main reasons for Australias increase in defense spending. According to its Assistant Minister for Defense, Australia has to get prepared for the PLAs possible actions in Taiwan and elsewhere. Whats your comment on these, please?

Answer: Recently, some politicians in Australia have intensively hyped up the China-related issues for their own selfish interests, and repeatedly made erroneous remarks on bilateral relations and Taiwan, to which the Chinese side has expressed strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition.

The nuclear submarine cooperation among the US, the UK and Australia violates the objectives and purposes of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), undermines the global nuclear non-proliferation regime as well as the regional peace and stability. It is widely opposed by the international community. However, the Australian side, in disregard of these facts, has maliciously hyped up the so-called China military threat to significantly expand its military strength and increase its military budget. China is strongly dissatisfied with and firmly opposed to this.

Australia's erroneous remarks on the Taiwan question are very dangerous. China sternly warns the Australian side that Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinese territory, and the Taiwan question is purely Chinas internal affairs, which brooks no external interference. If Australia insists on taking its own course, it has to be prepared to pay a heavy price for interfering in Chinas internal affairs.

Senior Colonel Wu Qian, spokesperson for the Ministry of National Defense (MND) of the People's Republic of China (PRC), answers reporters' questions at a regular press conference on March 31, 2022.(Photo:mod.gov.cn)

Question: According to reports, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said recently that Russia's special military operation in Ukraine is an act that shakes the foundation of the international order, and Japan would not allow this kind of change to the status quo by force to happen in East Asia. Peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait is of great significance to the security of Japan and the stability of the international community. In view of the situation in Ukraine, Japan is considering revising its National Security Strategy to comprehensively strengthen its defense forces. Kishida also said that the Japanese government has no intention of discussing the nuclear sharing policy under which the US nuclear weapons will be deployed on Japanese territory for joint use, but there is no problem for the political parties and even Japanese nationals to discuss the matter. Whats your comment, please?

Answer: Taiwan belongs to China and has nothing to do with Japan. Its no good for the Japanese side to stretch its arms too long. The Taiwan question is fully and completely an internal affair of China. It is fundamentally different from the Ukraine issue.

For some time, individual political forces in Japan have been seeking various ways to create excuses to break through the post-war international order, and engage in military expansion. Lately, there have been repeated dangerous calls in Japan that contravene the three non-nuclear principles, which give its Asian neighbors and the international community strong reasons to be on high alert. Japan, as a non-nuclear-weapon state party to the NPT, should earnestly fulfill its non-proliferation obligations. China always opposes the deployment of nuclear weapons by nuclear-weapon states on other countries territories. We urge Japan to deeply reflect on its history, respect the security concerns of its Asian neighbors, and stay committed to the path of peaceful development, not the other way around.

Question: It is learned that commanders of Chinese and Thai navies held a video conference recently. Could you please give us more details on this?

Answer: On March 16, Commander of the PLA Navy Admiral Dong Jun held a video conference with Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Thai Navy Admiral Somprasong Nilsamai at request. The two sides exchanged views on the bilateral naval exchanges and cooperation.

China and Thailand are one family. Over the years, the Chinese and Thai militaries have maintained close exchanges, and the relationship between the two militaries has developed in a healthy and stable manner, with fruitful results achieved. China is willing to work with Thailand to implement the important consensus reached by the leaders of the two countries, improve mechanisms, strengthen communication at all levels, promote practical cooperation, and jointly maintain regional security and stability.

Question: According to reports, a poll in Taiwan shows that only 35% of the respondents believed that if a conflict breaks out across the Taiwan Strait, the US would send troops to Taiwan, a sharp drop of 30.5% from October last year. The former head of the Taiwan defense department said that if the two sides of the Taiwan Strait went to war, the PLA would be able to end the fighting within one day or two. According to other reports, the Taiwan region recently signed an arms procurement contract with the US to purchase a Field Information Communications System. Joseph Wu, head of the Taiwan external affairs department, said that the US would provide Taiwan with defensive weapons in accordance with the so-called Taiwan Relations Act, and further arms sales will be announced soon. Whats your comment on this, please?

Answer: Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinas territory. The Taiwan question is purely Chinas internal affair and brooks no foreign interference. China firmly opposes the US selling arms to Taiwan and any form of official exchanges and military contacts between the US and Taiwan.

The future of Taiwan lies in national reunification, and the wellbeing of Taiwan compatriots is linked to national rejuvenation. Those bad checks from external forces are ultimately unreliable. If Taiwan is willing to be a chess piece in others power game, it ultimately cannot escape the fate of being abandoned. From Kabul to Ukraine, for something that those countries could not get from certain foreign countries, how could Taiwan be possibly getting it? There is no way out for Taiwan to bank on foreign support, and rejecting reunification by force is but a dead end. When it comes to defending national sovereignty and territorial integrity, the PLA is always trustworthy.
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MIDDLETOWN  The husband-and-wife owners of a downtown Middletown Tibetan restaurant will be moving the business to New Haven this fall after operating the venture for over 10 years.

After shuttering for a time during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Tibetan Kitchen, at 574 Main St., has been offering a to-go menu through various food delivery services, such as DoorDash and GrubHub, Sherab Gyaltsen said.

It has been very well-received, and an easy way for the small family-run business to serve customers, according to Gyaltsen, who operates the culinary venture with his wife, chef Tsering Yangzom.

That success, combined with difficulties retaining staff, led to the decision, he said. Those they have brought aboard and trained for a couple of months often leave for other opportunities, Gyaltsen said.

Its even more difficult to find workers familiar with Tibetan food. For them to learn and be perfect, it takes about two, three months, the co-owner said.

Yangzom and Gyaltsen expect to move to the new location, at 1127 Chapel St., in early September, near Yale University and Tandoor New Haven, which serves Indian fare. Tibetan Kitchen, a smaller, more intimate space, will mostly be a grab-and-go operation with a slimmed-down menu and daily specials.

At first, they tried to find another, smaller and manageable location in Middletown equipped with a kitchen, but were unsuccessful.

With the new endeavor, the idea is to be able to manage the restaurant between the two of them if they have to, Gyaltsen said.

Fans will be pleased to learn that the couple found a friend of a friend, who operated an eatery in New York, to fill the gap, and be a consistent presence. We thought a lot about it, Gyaltsen said.

Also, the lease will be up soon. It was the right time, he added.

The couple does robust business in the city.

Everything was perfect for us, said Gyaltsen, who, with his wife, bought a house in Woodbridge to be close to the New Haven location. We have been back and forth from there. Thats why I cant operate a business in Middletown properly. We wanted to downsize a little bit, he said.

The couple prioritizes their downtime and shuts the restaurant down every August for 45 days of vacation. We wanted to work at the same time, we wanted to have a quality of life, so we thought the small restaurant, takeout, delivery, is best for us.

A good number of their customers are Yale and Wesleyan university students, and the couple hopes they will frequent the new location.

Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, a lifelong Middletown resident, is a big fan.

My family and I have enjoyed many delicious meals at Tibetan Kitchen, and we will miss having them here in Middletown, she said. We decided to first visit after hearing it was one of Jacques Pepins favorite restaurants in Connecticut.

Tibetan Kitchen was reviewed by the New York Times in Oct. 2014 in a story, A Taste of the Himalayas, Near Sea Level, by Sarah Gold.

The tiny, crimson-hued dining room of Tibetan Kitchen, with 24 seats grouped at lacquered tables, is humble, but the ambiance is both cheery and authentic, Gold said in the article.

Surrounded by trendier, flashier-looking places that cater to the Wesleyan University community, Tibetan Kitchen, with its understated yellow sign and entryway hung with faded prayer flags, makes a modest first impression, she wrote.

The new owners are in the process of developing a menu, said Gyaltsen, who declined to name who they are until they an official announcement is made.

I am delighted to learn that a new Tibetan family will be filling the space, Bysiewicz said. Now both Middletown and New Haven will have the chance to try some amazing Tibetan cuisine, like my favorite, vegetable momos and avocado potato salad!

She and her husband wish the couple every success in their future, she added.

Presently, dine-in is offered by appointment only. For information, visit Tibetan Kitchen on Facebook or the website at tibetankitchen.us.
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MIDDLETOWN  The Buttonwood Tree Performing Arts Center has a number of musical acts playing concerts later this month.

Their repertoires range from folk and punk rock to the blues and jazz. Charlie Diamond, the Giosa Brothers, and Kris Allen and Noah Baerman will perform at the 605 Main St. venue beginning next weekend.

Diamond, who will appear April 16 from 8 to 10 p.m., plays a unique blend of folk revival with some punk rock edge, according to a press release.

He drives all over New England for shows. From the tip of Vermont to the shores of Rhode Island; the Catskill Mountains to the Berkshires to the Hudson River Valley, he just hops in his truck with his dog and hits the road, the venue said.

Diamond has performed at farms, barns, hayrides, boats, graveyards, coffee shops, ice cream shops, art spaces, trees, rivers, diners and dinners. You name it and he has played it, the news release said.

Tickets are $15.

The Giosa Brothers, featuring Frank Varela and Rudi Weeks, will appear April 23 from 8 to 10 p.m.

Morgan Giosa is a blues guitarist and visual artist from Windsor. From an early age, he was raised around music and the arts, the Buttonwood said in the statement. Many of Morgans friends and peers are gigging musicians. As such, Morgan has naturally discovered his own passion in blues guitar and the visual arts through this frequent exposure to creativity.

Alex Giosa is a drummer/percussionist, also from Windsor, and substitute drummer for the Broadway show, Hamilton: An American Musical. In addition, he has performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., playing the drum kit for Center Stages production of In The Heights, the release said.

Varela attended Berklee School of Music and is an accomplished guitar player and composer.

Weeks has been a professional musician and teacher of music for over 45 years. He has performed with such 60s greats as The Contours, The Crests, and Ronnie Spector, and folk and bluegrass legends Tom Paxton and Tony Trischka.

Tickets are $12 in advance; $15 on the day of the show, and $10 for students.

Allen and Baerman will celebrate the birthday of Duke Ellington during their April 29 concert, running from 8 to 10 p.m.

Allen is an American saxophonist, composer, educator and recording artist. His latest release, Beloved, is his second album for the Truth Revolution Recording Collective.

In the company of his working band, Allen calls upon the musical languages of not only his mentor Jackie McLean, but also Young, Parker, Mingus, Ellington, Powell, Rollins, Coltrane, Coleman and Kirkland to spin a unique sound narrative, the Buttonwood said.

Jazz pianist and composer Baermans tenacity and his cutting-edge yet soulful music have made him an inspiring figure to a growing legion of admirers.

Over 10 years after nearly walking away from the piano due to his struggles with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, an incurable connective tissue disorder with which he was born, the artist is playing and composing with more authority than ever, the statement said.

These challenges and his experiences as a foster parent have deepened his already fierce commitment to message music, as evidenced by his powerful 2014 release Ripples and his position as founder and artistic director of the nonprofit Resonant Motion, the venue said.

Tickets are $20.

For information, visit buttonwood.org or call 860-347-4957.
Quentin Williams / Contributed photo

MIDDLETOWN  State Rep. Quentin Williams, D-Middletown, will host a community session along with the Connecticut Justice Alliance to discuss the states juvenile justice system and the impact it has on local neighborhoods. The event is planned for Thursday from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Community Health Center at 675 Main St.

Williams is looking for community input as it relates to their experiences, thoughts, concerns, and recommendations for the Connecticut Juvenile Training School, according to a press release.
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NEW YORK (AP)  A man who moved into his daughter's college dorm and charmed her schoolmates with claims of influence and wisdom was convicted Wednesday of charges that he exploited the close-knit group, using threats and violence to enrich himself with millions of dollars as he ruined their lives.

Lawrence Ray, 62, was convicted at a trial where weeks of testimony chronicled his psychologically manipulative relationship with young people he met in fall 2010 at Sarah Lawrence College, a small New York liberal arts school. Ray moved into his daughter's dorm after finishing a prison stint for a securities fraud conviction.

Sentencing was set for Sept. 16 on charges including racketeering, conspiracy, forced labor, sex trafficking and obstruction of justice. Ray, who stood with his arms at his side and faced the Manhattan jury as guilty verdicts were returned on 15 counts, could face up to life in prison. One charge carries a mandatory minimum 15-year term.

After the verdict was read, Ray was returned to custody, where he had been since his early 2020 arrest.

His lawyers declined comment outside court and did not return email messages seeking comment.

In a statement, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said Ray had changed a group of friends who had their whole lives ahead of them.

For the next decade, he used violence, threats, and psychological abuse to try to control and destroy their lives, Williams said. He exploited them. He terrorized them. He tortured them. Let me be very clear. Larry Ray is a predator. An evil man who did evil things. Todays verdict finally brings him to justice.

Jurors concluded deliberations less than a day after receiving the case following a monthlong trial that featured testimony from numerous victims who usually referred to Ray just as Larry. Some testified that Ray had made them believe they had poisoned or otherwise harmed him and they needed to pay him back.

One woman testified that she became a sex worker to try to pay reparations to Ray after becoming convinced that she had poisoned him. She said that, over four years, she gave Ray $2.5 million in installments that averaged between $10,000 and $50,000 per week.

Another woman who was educated at Harvard and Columbia and was about to become a medical doctor in 2012 testified that her career and life were derailed when she met Ray and became romantically involved with him. She said he sometimes demanded that she have sex with strangers and film it for him.

Ray's lawyers maintained he was victimized by former friends who fabricated their stories.

Ray did not testify. Twice, the trial was interrupted as he was taken to the hospital in an ambulance for undisclosed illnesses.

Several students testified that they were drawn into Ray's world as he told them stories of his past influence in New York City politics, including his role in ruining the career of former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik after serving as the best man at his wedding years earlier. Ray had, in fact, been a figure in the corruption investigation that derailed Kerik's nomination to lead the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Some of the students agreed to live with Ray in the summer of 2011 at his Manhattan one-bedroom apartment, where his sinister side emerged as he started to claim that the students had poisoned and harmed him or his property.

To make amends, they testified, they did what he asked, including turning over money. One man said he gave Ray over $100,000.

Prosecutors said the money was never enough. Through threats and violence and videotaped confessions, Ray tightened his hold on the young people, including forcing them to do landscaping and other work at the Pinehurst, North Carolina home of his stepfather for weeks in 2013, they said.

The abuse culminated in October 2018 when Ray for hours repeatedly abused the woman who gave him her proceeds from sex work, forcing her to be tied naked to a chair while he berated her, choked her with a leash and made her fear for her life by putting a bag over her head, prosecutors said.

Ray carried out his crimes with help from his daughter and Isabella Pollok, a woman who has pleaded not guilty to criminal charges, prosecutors said. Her trial is set for later this year. The daughter has not been charged.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The Supreme Court on Wednesday reinstated for now a Trump-era rule that curtails the power of states and Native American tribes to block pipelines and other energy projects that can pollute rivers, streams and other waterways.

In a decision that split the court 5-4, the justices agreed to halt a lower court judges order throwing out the rule. The high courts action does not interfere with the Biden administrations plan to rewrite the rule. Work on a revision has begun, but the administration has said a final rule is not expected until the spring of 2023. The Trump-era rule will remain in effect in the meantime.

The courts three liberal justices and Chief Justice John Roberts dissented. The courts other conservative justices, including three nominated by President Donald Trump, voted to reinstate the rule.

Writing for the dissenters, Justice Elena Kagan said the group of states and industry associations that had asked for the lower courts ruling to be put on hold had not shown the extraordinary circumstances necessary to grant that request.

Kagan said the group had failed to demonstrate their harm if the judges decision were left in place. She said the group had not identified a single project that a State has obstructed in the months since the judges decision and had twice delayed making a request, indicating it was not urgent.

Kagan said the courts majority had gone astray in granting the emergency petition and was misusing the process for dealing with such requests. That process is sometimes called the courts shadow docket because the court provides a decision quickly without the full briefing and argument. The liberal justices have recently been critical of its use.

As is typical, the justices in the majority did not explain their reasoning.

Kagan wrote that her colleagues decision renders the Courts emergency docket not for emergencies at all.

The Biden administration had told the justices in a court filing that it agreed that the U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup lacked the authority to throw out the rule without first determining that it was invalid. But the administration had urged the court not to reinstate the rule, saying that in the months since the Alsups ruling, officials have adapted to the change, reverting to regulations in place for decades. Another change would cause substantial disruption and disserve the public interest, the administration said.

Alsup was nominated to the bench by President Bill Clinton.

EPA spokesman Tim Carroll said in an email that the agency is reviewing the Supreme Courts order as well as moving forward with rulemaking to restore state and Tribal authority to protect water resources that are essential to public health, ecosystems, and economic opportunity.

LeRoy Coleman, a spokesman for the National Hydropower Association, one of the groups that had sought to halt the lower court judge's order, said in a statement that the court's decision will ensure that the Biden administration properly considers this important rule as it considers changes promulgated by the Environmental Protection Agency less than two years ago.

The section of federal law at issue in the case is Section 401 of the Clean Water Act. For decades, it had been the rule that a federal agency could not issue a license or permit to conduct any activity that could result in any discharge into navigable waters unless the affected state or tribe certified that the discharge complied with the Clean Water Act and state law, or waived certification.

The Trump administration in 2020 curtailed that review power after complaints from Republicans in Congress and the fossil fuel industry that state officials had used the permitting process to stop new energy projects. The Trump administration said its actions would advance then-President Donald Trumps goal to fast-track energy projects such as oil and natural gas pipelines.

States, Native American Tribes and environmental groups sued. Several mostly Republican-led states, a national trade association representing the oil and gas industry and others have intervened in the case to defend the Trump-era rule. The states involved in the case are: Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, West Virginia, Wyoming and Texas.

___

Associated Press reporter Matthew Daly in Washington contributed to this report.
In 2003, when the Pentagon announced that Tyndall Air Force Base near the beaches of Panama City, Florida, would become the home of the F-22 Raptor fighter jet, local politicians and leaders rejoiced at the unique distinction it would bring to their community.

But when Hurricane Michael caused billions of dollars in damage to the military installation in 2018, priorities at the base shifted, as did the Department of Defense's focus on the F-22 itself.

Now, in the Air Force's latest budget request, the service hopes to retire the oldest F-22s at Tyndall, leaving none at the base and ending what was once a unique identity for the Panama City community.

Related: Defense Secretary Fires Back at GOP Lawmaker Charging Pentagon with Bad Call on Ukraine and 'Woke-ism'

"I was there when they landed the first tail numbers," Tom Neubauer, president of Florida's Bay Defense Alliance -- a group of area leaders focused on helping with economic growth around the city's military bases -- told Military.com. "We'll miss the F-22. We love that plane, and the community has a long history with it."

The oldest F-22s have been in America's arsenal for nearly two decades. New production of the fighter jet stopped back in the 2010s as the Air Force began to turn its attention to the F-35A Lightning II.

Tyndall's 33 F-22s are just a fraction of the nearly 300 aircraft retirements built into this year's Air Force budget request. The cost of maintaining and upgrading those fighter jets to be ready for combat would be nearly $2 billion. While the F-22s at Tyndall would all be retired, others in the fleet would be shuffled to other bases as the Air Force tries to save money.

"We have to get rid of what I'll call our 'legacy equipment' in order to have the resources to modernize," Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told reporters during a March 25 roundtable.

Despite the nostalgia he knows Floridians have for Tyndall's F-22s, Neubauer said it would be too expensive to maintain the aging fleet.

"It made a lot of sense for the Air Force to do that," he said. "It's going to ultimately save the taxpayers a lot of money."

Tyndall Air Force Base has fallen on hard times since Hurricane Michael's Category 5 winds caused an estimated $4.7 billion in damage. Seventeen F-22s had to be left behind during evacuation, but ultimately were able to be repaired and flown again.

Base housing was in unlivable condition, and many of the 11,000 airmen and families received permanent change of station orders.

"It's fair to say it will be years to make Tyndall look like what it did before the hurricane hit," Brig. Gen. John Allen, director of civil engineering for the Air Force, told reporters in 2018.

F-22s have been training and flying out of nearby Eglin Air Force Base since Michael hit.

Since the relocation, there have been some notable mechanical headaches with those F-22s.

Late last month, an F-22's nose cone was buried in the ground after an apparent landing mishap at Eglin. It was the latest in a wave of landing gear mishaps.

An almost identical incident happened with an F-22 at Eglin last year, when a pilot experienced an in-flight emergency and the front landing gear didn't operate properly, causing the nose cone to dip into the ground on the runway.

After that mishap, the F-22 Raptors at Eglin -- and 10% of the fleet at other bases -- were inspected. Air Combat Command found that one in five of those jets had incorrectly rigged landing gear. Nearly 40 of those had to be fixed, while others remained unchecked.

Air Force Safety Center data shows that five Raptors had accidents in 2021, costing taxpayers upward of $600,000 each.

Additionally, Neubauer said many of the service members at Tyndall have been commuting from the Panama City area to Eglin, causing a strain for military families.

The Air Force's remaining fleet of 153 F-22s will be spread out between Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia; Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska; and Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said in an email.

None will remain at Eglin, but the rebasing plan for the F-22s has yet to be finalized.

In the wake of Hurricane Michael, the Pentagon promised to rebuild Tyndall to make it the "Installation of the Future." Neubauer said the base is on track to receive its first F-35 in the fall of 2023 as the base works toward becoming fully operational again.

-- Thomas Novelly can be reached at thomas.novelly@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @TomNovelly.

Related: F-22 Raptor Mishap at Eglin Highlights Air Force's Landing Gear Issues
Military bases in remote locations outside the contiguous United States have seen a slightly higher proportion of suicide attempts than bases on the mainland but lower rates of suicide deaths, a government watchdog said Wednesday.

Pentagon officials are attributing the lower deaths to the fact that service members outside the contiguous United States, or OCONUS, have limited access to non-military issued firearms, Brenda Farrell of the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, told a Senate hearing as she previewed the findings of an upcoming report from her office.

"Suicide deaths and attempts within the military are devastating events for families," Farrell told the Senate Armed Services Committee's personnel subcommittee during a hearing on suicide prevention. "Remote OCONUS installations may pose challenges that increase suicide risks."

Read Next: All of Tyndall Air Force Base's Remaining F-22s Would Be Retired Under Latest Budget Proposal

The GAO's report on suicide risks at remote bases was called for in last year's defense policy bill amid concerns about a spike in suicides among soldiers in Alaska.

At least 11 soldiers died by suicide in Alaska last year, while another six deaths remain under investigation.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently established an independent commission, mandated by Congress, that will study suicides at three Alaska bases, as well as six other bases and units.

For its report, the GAO looked at bases in Alaska and Hawaii, as well as those outside the United States that have been designated by the Pentagon as remote for the purpose of morale, welfare and recreation funding; are identified as a hardship duty pay location; or have a less than standard tour length due to quality-of-life factors.

From 2016 to 2020, the Pentagon recorded 98 suicide deaths and 609 suicide attempts among active-duty service members at those remote locations, according to Farrell's written testimony.

In its analysis, the GAO found that about half of service member suicide deaths in the contiguous United States involved non-military issued firearms, she said. By contrast, just one-quarter of suicide deaths outside the contiguous United States involved non-military issued firearms.

Still, Alaska and Hawaii were comparable to the contiguous states, with 46% of suicide deaths in those two states involving non-military issued firearms, according to the written testimony.

Defense officials interviewed by GAO investigators idenitified suicide risk factors at the remote locations including less access to mental health services, increased social isolation and extreme weather conditions, Farrell testified.

But the Pentagon does not have a process to systematically assess suicide risk at these installations, she added.

"Establishing such a process could enhance related suicide prevention efforts," she said.

Farrell cited staffing shortages for behavioral health personnel and gaps in training for commanders on responding to suicide deaths and attempts as contributing to the problems at remote posts.

Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, expressed concern at the hearing about the difficulty of attracting behavioral and mental health staff to work in remote places such as his state, saying he's heard of soldiers having to wait 60 days for appointments.

"A lot of times, these people, these great young Americans, don't have 60 days," he said.

Chris Ford, CEO of Stop Soldier Suicide, told Sullivan that commanders in Alaska have asked for help from his organization, resulting in a digital ad campaign launched March 22 to alert service members and their families of the organization's telehealth services. Since the ad, at least one new person has signed up to be a client, Ford added. The organization is also relocating a clinician from Colorado to Alaska.

"It's a tough environment. I can't solve all of that through telehealth -- the darkness, the long days, the frigidity -- but we're doing everything we can as a community-based provider to offer care," Ford said.

If you are a service member or veteran who needs help, it is available 24/7 at the Veterans and Military Crisis Line, 800-273-8255 (press 1), by texting 838255, or through the online chat function at www.veteranscrisisline.net.

-- Rebecca Kheel can be reached at rebecca.kheel@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @reporterkheel.

Related: Alaska Army Leaders Scramble for Help After Spike in Suicides
CHARLESTON, S.C.  South Carolina Republican congressional candidate Katie Arrington wants the Department of Defense to hand over all public records that discuss the suspension of her security clearance so that she can "expose the misconduct and inappropriate actions" taken by the federal agency where she previously worked.

Arrington filed a lawsuit Tuesday demanding the release of these documents in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The suit is separate from a since-settled lawsuit Arrington filed last fall against the federal government.

Like the previous lawsuit, the new complaint continues to claim "there was no reason for DoD to suspend Arrington's Top Secret security clearance."

Questions surrounding Arrington's final months at the Pentagon have come up repeatedly on the campaign trail ever since the former state lawmaker entered South Carolina's 1st Congressional District race, where she is challenging U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, R- Daniel Island, for her Lowcountry U.S. House seat.

Arrington was placed on leave from the department in May 2021, following allegations that she disclosed classified information. The day after Arrington resigned from her senior role at the Department of Defense in late February, she announced she was running for Charleston's seat in congress.

In a series of tweets about the latest lawsuit, Arrington's attorney Mark Zaid said the complaint will force the U.S. government to reveal documents that show "what led to its decisions & what we viewed as frivolous (even political in nature) security clearance action."

"It will presumably reveal that the decision was baseless, and that there was no violation other than, at worst, an inadvertent one, which happens all the time," Zaid said in an interview Tuesday evening with The State newspaper.

Zaid also said the withdrawal of Arrington's security clearance was not consistent with the way the Department of Defense has handled similar matters in the past. After filing the first lawsuit on Arrington's behalf in October, Zaid said the Department of Defense then issued its statement of reasons as to why Arrington's clearance was withdrawn.

"And it was probably the worst statement of reasons I have read from the DoD in over 20 years," Zaid said, in explaining why his client wants these records.

Before being placed on administrative leave, Arrington was the chief information security officer for the Pentagon's Acquisition and Sustainment Office. In that role, one of her most ambitious initiatives was spearheading a cybersecurity initiative for defense contractors, known as the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program.

"The NSA's action to allege Arrington committed any type of security violation was baseless and/or exaggerated and normally would not serve as the grounds to immediately suspend an individual's clearance access. The decision was designed to interfere with the cyber security activities that Arrington was running through DoD, which NSA did not support," the complaint claims. "Nor did certain high-ranking DoD officials want Arrington serving in a senior position within the Biden Administration due to her close previous ties with President Trump and they used NSA's decision as a pretext to remove her."

Zaid confirmed this latest lawsuit is a public fact-finding mission for Arrington, who claims she has not gotten a satisfactory or timely answer from the government about why she lost her security clearance.

The lawsuit said Arrington filed Freedom of Information Act/Privacy requests, or FOIPAs, with five federal agencies regarding her alleged security violations but has yet to hear back. The federal agencies are the National Security Agency, the Office of Inspector General, Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, the Consolidated Adjudications Facility and the Department of Air Force's Office of Special Investigations.

Arrington's campaign did not immediately return a request for comment about the lawsuit. On Twitter, Arrington shared two tweets sent by her attorney. One announced the filing of the lawsuit, and in the other Zaid said Arrington was not fired from the Department of Defense, did not have her security clearance revoked and did not leak classified information.

"Anyone who claims otherwise is either misinformed, ignorant or intentionally lying," Zaid wrote.

Arrington has accused Mace of doing just that.

A campaign issue

During a Berkeley County Republican Party candidate forum Saturday, Arrington took aim at Mace for her comments about this matter.

"My opponent likes to lie about me and say that I got fired and I lost my clearance. That's not true. I actually won the exceptional civilian employee of the year for the Department of Defense," Arrington said. "I've actually had more time up on the Hill working in Washington than Ms. Mace."

At the same candidate forum, Mace doubled down on the issue.

"I can be trusted with our nation's secrets. I've never had my top secret security clearance revoked like my opponent. The military said that she put our our U.S. national secrets in grave danger," Mace said.

Arrington's departure from the Pentagon is also the subject of a website created by the Mace campaign that calls Arrington "crooked" and features an out-of-context, looped clip of former President Donald Trump at a Cincinnati campaign rally, where the crowd begins chanting, "Lock her up!"

While Zaid said he is staying out of the politics of the lawsuit, he also said it is up to Arrington as to whether she wants to use it for her political race.

Arrington is one of two Republicans challenging Mace for her seat in Congress. Lynz Piper-Loomis, an advocate for military veterans, is also running for the GOP nomination.

Whoever wins the June 14 Republican primary will face Democrat Annie Andrews in the November general election.

And whoever is elected to represent South Carolina's 1st Congressional District in Washington will be entitled to access classified information by virtue of the constitutional offices they hold.

___

(c)2022 The State (Columbia, S.C.)

Visit The State (Columbia, S.C.) at www.thestate.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Many countries have begun to study digital currencies, which will have little impact on world PTFE prices in 2021

The Bank of Japan plans to start empirical experiments on digital currencies in the spring of 2021. The idea is divided into 3 stages. Among them, the main work of the first stage is to establish basic functions. The second stage is to carry out functional tests under more complex conditions. The third stage is to discover problems in actual operation, make up for loopholes, and continuously improve. It is still in the initial stage and has little effect on the prices of industrial products such as PTFE.

South Africa has great potential for digital currency applications. In recent years, the South African Reserve Bank (Central Bank) has carefully tested the central bank\'s digital currency to improve the efficiency of the financial system, enhance security and stability, and incorporate more customers into the financial system. In 2016, the South African Intergovernmental Fintech Working Group was established to study the feasibility of issuing central bank digital currencies. Currently, the working group is discussing with potential solution providers. South African scientific and technological workers do not study much in the field of PTFE, so it will affect the price of PTFE.

The President of the European Central Bank said a few days ago that he hopes to make the digital euro a reality within five years. This statement is equivalent to the European Central Bank\'s "policy announcement". The introduction of the digital euro is already on the line and has to be issued. For many years, Europe has been hesitant to use and promote electronic payments and is even more cautious about digital currencies. In 2018, the European Union issued the "Fifth Edition of the Anti-Money Laundering Order", recognizing that the development of digital currencies is an inevitable trend. There are many PTFE manufacturers in Europe, but they all exchange traditional currencies, so they have no effect on the price of PTFE.

South Korea officially began to promote substantial preparations for digital currency in early 2020. As soon as the preparatory work started, South Korea immediately turned on the "acceleration" mode. At present, most of the preparatory work has been completed. However, active preparation does not mean that South Korea is eager to put digital currency into use. The Bank of Korea\'s attitude towards digital currency is more inclined to "need not discuss it, but have it yourself." South Korean digital currency is not in a hurry to use, so the few with PTFE have almost no impact.

Affected by digital currency research and development and the new crown epidemic, as a professional PTFE supplier manufacturer, Luoyang Tongrun achieved a 150% growth in performance in 2020, and hired twice as many people for the research and development and application of PTFE. According to research, the current PTFE production capacity is quite stable, the supply of PTFE raw materials is sufficient, and the PTFE market price is stable, but due to the influence of traditional Chinese holidays, the delivery date will be delayed by 1-2 weeks.

"We will continue to serve the global market while maintaining price stability", said Luo Zhang, general manager of TRUNANAO.

For more PTFE products, please visit their website nanotrun.com

At the same time about PTFE technology: sales1@nanotrun.com
After a long hiatus from the music scenes, award-winning Nigerian rapper MI Abaga has announced an upcoming album.

Born, Jude Lemfani Abaga, MI believes the upcoming album will be a success.

The optimistic rapper believes the album may attract Grammy nominations since he is married and now focused on his music.

And now that that is all over music coming soon. Now I can focus so I release this album properly.. because it is a classic. Might win a Grammy. I appreciate your patience, he tweeted.

MI Abaga is one of the leading Nigerian artists who shot to fame in 2006.

His contributions to Nigerian music together with some other artists made their industry a force to reckon with internationally.
Ghanaian- American Navy Sailor, Petty Officer 2nd Class, Eugene Bosomtwi currently serving at Naval Air Station Sigonella in Italy is living proof of the American Dream.

Eugene Bosomtwi, a 2006 graduate of St. Augustine's College in Cape Coast, Ghana serves the U.S. Navy as a utilitiesman at the Public Works Department operating out of Sigonella in eastern Sicily, Italy.

For Bosomtwi, originally from Akim Oda in the eastern region of Ghana, joining the U.S. Navy marked the realization of his American Dream.

In a press statement on April 4, from the Navy Office of Community Outreach in Millington, Tennessee, USA- Eugene Bosomtwi said: I came to the U.S. from Ghana in July 2012 and joined the Navy in 2014. As an immigrant, I was poised to live the American Dream and I wanted to serve our great country and also start a better life for myself and my family. That decision has been the best decision of my life.

Bosomtwi emphasized that he relies on skills and values learned in Ghana to succeed in the Navy. Always treat everyone with respect and kindness. Always learn something positive from the mistakes you make in life. Never give up on yourself, and always believe in yourself, he added.

The U.S. Navy has many opportunities for a Seabee (member of U.S. Navy construction battalions) like Bosomtwi to excel as a Sailor, so he takes great pride in serving his country (the US) and the Navy. It means everything to me to be a Seabee. We provide humanitarian assistance in the event of natural disasters and also during Operation Allies Refuge where we received more than 4,300 evacuees from Afghanistan, he stressed.

Naval Air Station (NAS) Sigonella is an Italian Air Force base, and a U.S. Navy installation at Italian Air Force Base Sigonella in eastern Sicily, Italy. The (NAS) base provides consolidated operational, command and control, administrative, logistical and advanced logistical support to U.S. and other NATO forces. NAS also supports a rotation of various squadrons and multi-service, multi-national transient aircraft.

The prosperity and security of the US depend on a strong and ready Navy. Fact is, more than 90 percent of all trade traveling by sea, and 95 percent of the worlds international phone and internet traffic carried through fiber optic cables lie on the ocean floor.

The Navy Office of Community Outreach in Millington, Tennessee, USA travels around the globe to collect photos of sailors, to share with their hometown media.
Majority Leader in Parliament, Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu has taken a swipe at former President John Dramani Mahama for his continuous absence at state events where President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is the speaker.

The MP says the absence of the former President at the recent State of the Nation's Address in Parliament brings to seven, the number of such events boycotted by John Mahama.

Conspicuously absent [during the recent State of the Nation Address] was former President John Dramani Mahama. That certainly is not a good account of the immediate past President and [former] Presidential candidate. Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo did not attend the SONA presented by John Mahama in 2013 because the NPP at the time was contesting the legitimacy of the President. The NPP parliamentary group boycotted the 2013 events accordingly. But it is worth commending that former President John Agyekum Kufuor attended the swearing-in of President Mahama in 2013 in his capacity as a former President, he said.

Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu made those remarks when he was adding his voice to the debate on the State of the Nation Address presented to Parliament by the President last week.

He said the action by the former president does not speak well of him.

The matter was settled by the Supreme Court in the second half of 2013 in favour of President Mahama. The NPP minority group subsequently attended the events in 2014 because the case had been decided. Nana Akufo-Addo did not attend the 2014 event because he had travelled outside the country. In 2015, he had returned to the country and accordingly attended the event. It is instructive to note that [former] President Mahama has not attended any of the seven events that had President Akufo-Addo as the key personality. The people of this country will not forget.

President Akufo-Addo presented a message on the State of the Nation to Parliament on Wednesday, March 30, 2022.

The presentation was postponed after it was scheduled earlier in the month.

It was previously announced that the President's sessional address would be delivered on March 3.

The postponement led to some criticism of the Akufo-Addo administration over the delay as it wrestled with a general economic downturn.

The sessional address is constitutionally sanctioned to be delivered in the first meeting of every session of the house.

The address sets out the government's key policy objectives and deliverables for the year.

It gave President Akufo-Addo the opportunity to highlight the achievements of his government, challenges faced, and also outline developmental measures for the coming financial year.
Some female students of the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ) have suggested a castration sentence for the four men who allegedly defiled a 10-year-old girl at Ebura Adumfa in the Ebura Aseibu Kwamankese district of the Central Region.

In a conversation on GIJ campus with this freelance blogger and an online student journalist, the angry ladies condemned the act.

They are pleading with the court to give harsh sentence such as castration to rapists to deter others from engaging such acts.

Castrate such men, they dont deserve to have feelings anymore. That will even serve as an example to those who are planning on rapping or defiling girls, they told this reporter.

A story by GHONE on Monday, April 4, 2022, reveals that four men allegedly defiled a 10-year-old class 3 pupil at Abura Edumfa in the Abura Aseibu Kwamankese district, central region.

The story noted that the victim indicated that the four men, 39-year-old Yaw Raga, 63-year-old Ofa Yaw, and two others continuously defiled her and cautioned her not to disclose it to anyone.

They dragged me into the room defiled me and cautioned me not to disclose it to anybody, I kept it to myself because I feared they will harm me, said the victim.

According to the report, the girl has been facing stigmatization from her peers after the incident.

By: Isaac Donkor(Distinguished) student of the Ghana Institute of journalism.
Concerning a petition to the Ghana Armed Forces by a Civil Society Organization, Anchoring Democracy Advocacy Movement Ghana ADAM-GH, the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) V/ADM SETH AMOAMA has on March 28, 2022 met the executives of ADAM-GH at Burma Camp Accra.

The advocacy group revealed this at a press conference addressed by the Director of Operations of the group, Mr. Ibrahim Adams Mumuni in Accra on March 5th, 2022.

He said during the meeting, three issues were discussed which included the petition to the President on 20th October 2021 concerning the eight (8) repatriated soldiers from Lebanon, another petition to the President, copied Minister for Defence and Chief of Defence Staff which also concerned irregular appointments in the Ghana Armed Forces (Commanding Officer of the Forces Pay Regiment).

On 17th March 2022, ADAM-GH issued a press release condemning the Ghana Armed Forces for deploying some Mamprusi soldiers to Bawku which led to the Buabula incidents.

According to him, the CDS indicated that indeed, the issues raised in the petitions did happen in the GAF and took his time to explain the issues one after the other.

He revealed that on the issue of the eight repatriated soldiers the CDS explained how their refusal to take the Covid-19 vaccine at that time posed a danger to their colleague soldiers on the peacemaking mission which influenced the decision to repatriate them.

According to him, the CDS stated that GAF intended to release the eight repatriated soldiers when they disobeyed the directives given by the CDS to the Commanders on peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.

The CDS stated that since the repatriated soldiers decided to battle the GAF in the law court, it was not appropriate, in accordance with GAF regulations, to still keep them in the military barracks while the court process is ongoing.

He further indicated that the court process will continue to finality notwithstanding the easing of the Covid-19 restrictions.

On the issue of irregular appointments, the CDS explained that appointments at the senior officers level is based on competence, good records, integrity and trust, especially when it comes to being Commanding Officer of the Forces Pay Regiment who is in charge of the salaries of all the soldiers in the GAF.

He said that position is not a reward based on seniority in the Army adding that this is a normal criterion and a regular practice in every Armed Force across the globe.

Touching on the issue of the Buabula-Bawku brutalities, the CDS stated categorically that the GAF has no interest in the Bawku conflict and will never have interest in any tribal conflict in Ghana.

The CDS admitted that one of the injured soldiers, was Mamprusi by tribe, but indicated that there was an unavoidable error in his deployment to Bawku as the soldier was born in Tamale and was believed to be Dagomba.

He added that had his records suggested that he was Mamprusi, he would not have been deployed to Bawku.

This, the CDS emphasized that the soldier was not deployed to Bawku with any bad intention from his Commanders.

He stated that the unfortunate casualties was a collateral damage following the attack on the soldiers, who are also mandated to defend themselves when they come under attack.

The CDS called on Civil Society Organizations to work hand in hand with the GAF and the Police to bring lasting peace to Bawku and its environs as well as all the conflict areas in Ghana.

The CDS further stressed that the military stands firmly by the Commander-in-Chief of the GAF, the President of the Republic of Ghana, His Excellency Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in enforcing the court ruling on the Bawku chieftaincy dispute.

He indicated that since the President has emphasised on several occasions to the Bawku Naba that he was the legitimate Paramount Chief of Bawku Traditional Area, the GAF had no interest in doing anything to the contrary. He added that the Chieftaincy and Religious Affairs Minister and the Minister of Interior have also echoed same.

He called on the people of Bawku to build good relationships with the soldiers and help them restore absolute peace to the area instead of seeing the military as enemies. He said it was the only way to avoid future clashes.

The CDS expressed his disappointment how some Ghanaians have developed the habit of castigating the GAF without finding out the actual details of issues before commenting. Similar emphasis was made by the senior officers at the meeting.

The secretary of the National Peace Council, Mr. George Amoah, commended the CDS for choosing the path of peaceful engagement under such provocative circumstances and also ADAM-GH executives committee for their comportment during the discussion.

He added that ADAM-GH and other Civil Society Organizations should collaborate fully with the GAF and other security agencies to help them provide security for the country.

Mr. Azubila Emmanuel Abdul-Salam, Executive Secretary of ADAM-GH thanked the CDS for his exceptional leadership on how he personally invited the group to discuss the concerns raised.

Mr. Azubila in his submission said ADAM-GHs intention in all the petitions was to seek clarification and make sure that the integrity, morale and respect for Ghana Armed Forces are protected and continue to remain the bragging rights of Ghanaians.

Mr. Azubila said the GAF as an Institution needs to be protected by all Ghanaians.

He admonished the CDS and the senior officers to ensure that the high integrity, morale and respect that our forebears earned for the GAF, as a noble institution, is not compromised in their regime.

He added that ADAM-GH, as a CSO, is ever ready to collaborate with the CDS and his team in any form within their power to help protect and defend the image of the GAF.

"As a responsible CSO, ADAM-GH is hereby urging the general public to have confidence in the military and will do everything humanly possible to protect the citizenry" Azubila noted.

He called on Ghanaians to look beyond the minor lapses in the operations of the GAF and rather support them to execute their mandate adding that ADAM-GH as usual, will take this opportunity to also call on Zugraan, the Paramount Chief of Kusaug Traditional Area and the Bawku Naba, Abugrago Asigri Azoka II to ensure that peace is restored in Bawku.

He entreated the leaders to urge their subjects to cease fire and build good relationships with our security agencies in order to restore absolute peace in Bawku.

The authorities who matter in this Country he said have made a categorical statement that there is no Chieftaincy dispute in Bawku.

He urged the people of Bawku to report any criminal action to the security agencies and allow the security agencies to enforce the laws instead of engaging in needless conflicts.

"Zug-raan we plead with you to collaborate with the security agencies to clamp down on any criminality in Bawku to return peace to your paramountcy. We also take this opportunity to caution our colleague Civil Society Organisations against jumping in to discuss issues related to the conflict in Bawku without having in-depth knowledge of the situation".

This he said can be more dangerous than those in the conflict adding that as CSOs, we must always do our research, seek clarifications and make sure we are well informed before discussing such sensitive issues regarding the conflicts.

The group he said thanked the Security Services for their dedicated service and commitment in ensuring peace in conflict areas in Ghana and pray for the conflict in Bawku to end.

We plead with the Government to find some compensation package for the family of the innocent victims in Buabula, especially the 12 years old boy, the 15 years old girl who lost their lives and the two years old boy who is still in the hospital and wish the injured soldiers a speedy recovery.

The meeting was attended by the Executive Secretary Mr. Azubila Emmanuel Abdul-Salam, Director of Operations Ibrahim A Mumuni, Deputy Organizer of the group, Carl Owuo-Empesika and two associate members of the group including a legal team member

Ghana Armed Forces side was represented by the Chief of Defence Staff, V/Adm Seth Amoama, the Chief of Air Staff, AVM Frank Hanson, the Chief of Naval Staff, R/Adm Issah Yakubu and the Acting Chief of Army Staff/GOC Southern Command, Brig. Gen. Amoah Ayisi.

Also present were the Chief of Staff General Headquarters, Major Gen. NP Andoh, Major Gen. AY Nsiah, AVM MK Appiah-Agyekum, Capt (GN) SB Nyam, Military Assistant to CDS, Col. BZ Ayorrogo, Major Dela Dornyoh and the Secretary of the National Peace Council, Mr George Amoah.
Security forces and their allies in a disputed part of conflict-hit northern Ethiopia committed abuses against Tigrayans that amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity, two rights groups said Wednesday.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Tigrayan civilians had been targeted in "a relentless campaign of ethnic cleansing" in the long-contested western Tigray region since the outbreak of Ethiopia's war in November 2020.

Over the ensuing months, several hundred thousand Tigrayans were forcibly expelled from western Tigray in a "coordinated" manner by security forces and civilian authorities through ethnically-motivated rape, murder, starvation, and other serious violations.

"These widespread and systematic attacks against the Tigrayan civilian population amount to crimes against humanity, as well as war crimes," Amnesty and HRW said in a joint report titled "We Will Erase You From This Land".

Map showing the Tigray region of Ethiopia. By AFPFile

Over 15 months, HRW and Amnesty interviewed more than 400 people including refugees who fled into Sudan, and witnesses to the violence still living inside western Tigray and elsewhere in Ethiopia.

They documented the sexual enslavement and gang rape of Tigrayan women, including a victim whose attackers said they were "purifying" her blood.

They also gathered testimony about the death of Tigrayans in overcrowded prisons, and the summary execution of dozens of men by a river.

The atrocities were blamed on newly-appointed civilian administrators in western Tigray, and regional forces and irregular militias from the neighbouring Amhara region.

Amharas and Tigrayans are two of Ethiopia's largest ethnic groups, and both lay historic claim in full to the vast fertile expanse of western Tigray that stretches from the Tekeze River to Sudan.

The United States in March 2021 said "acts of ethnic cleansing" were taking place in western Tigray. Amhara authorities dismissed the accusations as "propaganda".

'Shocking' crimes

But the rights watchdogs also pointed the finger at Addis Ababa, accusing the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of covering up abuses and severely restricting independent access to western Tigray.

The atrocities there unfolded "with the acquiescence and possible participation of Ethiopian federal forces", the report said.

"Ethiopian authorities have steadfastly denied the shocking breadth of the crimes that have unfolded and have egregiously failed to address them," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW.

Seventeen months ago Abiy sent troops into Tigray after accusing the region's former ruling party, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), of orchestrating attacks on federal army camps.

Western Tigray was swiftly captured by federal and Amhara forces, and a new administration appointed.

HRW and Amnesty said local officials banned the Tigrayan language from use, displayed signs around towns ordering Tigrayans to leave, and denied access to farmland and humanitarian aid.

Eritrean troops -- allied with Ethiopia in the fight against the TPLF -- joined Amhara forces in looting crops and livestock, and driving Tigrayans from their homes, the rights groups said.

Thousands were rounded up and held in grim detention camps where deaths occurred: "Some died as a result of torture, denial of medical care, and lack of food and water; guards killed others," the report said.

Abiy promised a swift end to the conflict but it dragged on, with the frontline shifting many times and conflict expanding beyond Tigray.

Untold numbers of civilians have died, and fighters on all sides have been accused of grave atrocities against civilians.

Addis Ababa declared a "humanitarian truce" last month, while the rebels agreed to a "cessation of hostilities" on the condition that aid reach Tigray.

Some supplies has since reached the stricken region but humanitarian groups say it is nowhere near enough given the hundreds of thousands facing starvation across Tigray.
A court in Burkina Faso will on Wednesday hand down the long-awaited verdict in the prosecution of 14 men accused of assassinating revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara, crowning a six-month trial marked by grim testimony and disrupted by a military coup.

Revered among pan-Africanist radicals, Sankara was an army captain aged just 33 when he came to power in a coup in 1983.

The fiery Marxist-Leninist railed against imperialism and colonialism, often angering Western leaders but gaining followers across the continent and beyond.

Burkina Faso. By AFP

He and 12 colleagues were gunned down by a hit squad on October 15, 1987, at a meeting of the ruling National Revolutionary Council.

The massacre coincided with a coup that took Sankara's erstwhile comrade Blaise Compaore to power.

Throughout his 27-year reign, Compaore clamped a tight lid on the circumstances of Sankara's demise, fuelling speculation that he was the mastermind.

The historic trial into Sankara's death opened last October, more than 34 years after his death.

Tried in absentia

Prosecutors at a military court in the capital Ouagadougou have demanded a 30-year jail term for Compaore, who now lives in exile in neighbouring Ivory Coast.

Sankara was an army captain aged just 33 when he came to power. By DOMINIQUE FAGET AFP

Compaore is being tried in absentia on counts of attacking state security, concealing a corpse and complicity in a murder.

He denies the charges.

The prosecution is also seeking 30 years for Hyacinthe Kafando, who is suspected of having led the hit squad. Kafando, who later commanded Compaore's presidential guard, is also being tried in absentia.

It is calling for a 20-year sentence for Gilbert Diendere, one of the commanders of the army during the 1987 coup and the main defendant present at the trial.

He is already serving a 20-year sentence over an attempted military coup in 2015.

In its closing statement, the prosecution recounted in grim detail the day Sankara was killed.

Sankara's former comrade-in-arms, Blaise Compaore, has always denied any involvement in his assassination. By Eric CONGO AFPFile

As Sankara headed to the National Revolutionary Council meeting, "his executioners were already there," it said.

After Sankara entered the meeting room, the hit squad burst in, killing his guards, the prosecution said.

"The squad then ordered president Sankara and his colleagues to leave the room. They would then be killed one by one."

Ballistics experts told the trial Sankara had been shot in the chest at least seven times by assassins using tracer rounds.

But the defendants said the victims died in a botched attempt to arrest Sankara after he and Compaore fell out over the direction the country's revolution was taking.

'Asking for justice'

The trial was briefly suspended after a coup on January 24 that deposed the elected president, Roch Marc Christian Kabore.

One of the world's poorest countries, Burkina has a long history of political turmoil, but was a relative oasis of peace until jihadist insurgents encroached from neighbouring Mali in 2015.

Their campaign has claimed some 2,000 lives and displaced some 1.8 million people.

The trial resumed after new military strongman Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba restored the constitution and swore an oath.

The case was disrupted after Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba seized power in January -- the coup briefly raised questions about the trial's constitutionality. By - Burkina Faso PresidencyAFPFile

Compaore, who was deposed by a popular uprising in 2014, has boycotted what his lawyers dismiss as a "political trial."

Prosper Farama, the lawyer representing the Sankara family, said that, as the trial nears its end, the families were finally feeling some relief -- even though "during this trial, no-one confessed or repented. No-one!"

"We ask the court to give the families justice," he said. "We don't want revenge, we're simply asking for justice."
Sudanese protesters are gearing up for mass rallies demanding an end to military rule on Wednesday, the historic anniversary of events leading to the toppling of autocrats including Omar al-Bashir.

The planned demonstrations come as Sudan grapples with fallout from an October 25 military coup led by army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan that has hammered its economy.

Security forces sealed off bridges connecting Khartoum with other major cities in the morning and deployed around the presidential palace and army headquarters in the capital, witnesses said.

The protest was organised to coincide with the anniversary a 1985 popular uprising that ousted president Jaafar Nimeiri after years of harsh rule.

April 6 also marks the third anniversary of the beginning of a mass sit-in demonstration outside the army headquarters, the culmination of months of protests calling for an end to Bashir's iron-fisted three decades in power.

Generals bowed to the pressure from the street to remove Bashir five days later, but the protesters stayed at their encampment to press for civilian rule, only to be dispersed violently in June that year by men in military fatigues.

At least 128 people were killed in an ensuing crackdown that lasted for days, according to medics.

Civilian and military leaders later agreed on a transition to civilian rule, but Sudan's latest coup in October upended those plans.

Protesters have since been taking to the streets seeking to end military rule.

In recent weeks, activists have ramped up online calls for Wednesday's protests, using hashtags such as "The storm of April 6" and "The earthquake of April 6".

'Defeat the coup'

The government has declared Wednesday a public holiday, in a brief statement.

After Bashir's ouster, Sudanese protesters maintained demonstrations for months, demanding civilian rule. By OZAN KOSE AFPFile

"It is an important day... so we expect many to take to the streets despite the heat and Ramadan," said Badwi Bashir, a protester from Khartoum.

"We just want to bring down the coup and end the prospect of any future coups."

Jaafar Hassan, a spokesman for the Forces of Freedom and Change, the main civilian bloc which was ousted after the coup, said April was "the month of victories for the Sudanese".

"We have to defeat the coup... We have to get out of this crisis," Hassan told a news conference last week.

Since grabbing power, the military leaders have moved to tighten their grip, rounding up prominent civilian leaders and reversing appointments made during the transition.

"We want a unified front," said Hassan. "We have tried a partnership with the military, and it failed, ending in this coup, and we shouldn't do this again."

General Burhan said on Saturday he would only "hand over power to an honest, elected authority, accepted by the all the Sudanese people".

At least 93 people have been killed and hundreds wounded in the crackdown on the latest anti-coup protests, according to medics.

Economy in nosedive

Since the coup, Sudan's already ailing economy has suffered severe blows, as Western donors cut crucial aid pending the restoration of a transition to civilian rule.

Sudanese protesters staged a mass encampment on April 6, 2019 outside the army headquarters in Khartoum, demanding an end to Omar al-Bashir's three-decade rule. By - AFPFile

Prices of food, fuel and basic commodities have soared and crime and has spiked.

Violence has intensified in remote areas of Sudan, particularly the restive Darfur region, according to the United Nations.

On Thursday, clashes between Arab and non-Arab tribes left at least 45 people killed in South Darfur state.

Darfur was the scene of a bitter conflict in 2003 under Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court over accusations of atrocities in the region.

On Tuesday, the ICC began the trial of Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, an ally of Bashir, over his role in the conflict.

The UN has warned of growing humanitarian needs and food insecurity in Sudan.

Last month, the World Food Programme said the number of Sudanese facing acute hunger would double to more than 18 million by September.

Late Tuesday, Burhan welcomed an initiative for talks to resolve the political crisis by the Sudanese Revolutionary Front, an alliance including ex-rebel groups allied with the military.

Burhan last week threatened to expel UN special representative Volker Perthes, accusing him of "interference" in the country's affairs after Perthes warned of the deepening crisis in Sudan during a UN Security Council briefing.

Perthes' mission, UNITAMS, along with the African Union and the regional bloc IGAD, have agreed on joint efforts to facilitate Sudanese-led talks in a bid to resolve the crisis.
African leaders, opposition figures and social influencers are stepping up their support for the Kremlin even as Russia's image elsewhere is being shredded by the war in Ukraine.

Some of Russian President Vladimir Putin's most vocal defenders are pan-Africanists -- advocates of the doctrine of African unity and anti-imperialism that flowered at the height of the Cold War.

Putin "wants to get his country back," Kemi Seba, a Franco-Beninese pan-Africanist, declared in early March.

"He doesn't have the blood of slavery and colonisation on his hands," Seba argued.

"Putin is not my Messiah but I prefer him to all the western presidents and all the damned African presidents who are under the thumb of western oligarchy."

Putin supporter: Muhoozi Kainerugaba. By PETER BUSOMOKE AFP

In Uganda, the powerful son of veteran leader Yoweri Museveni, Lieutenant-General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, is another fervent Putin supporter.

"The majority of mankind (that are non-white) support Russia's stand in Ukraine," he tweeted in late February. "Putin is absolutely right!"

Historical ties

Many African countries showed their support for Russia, or at least their diplomatic ambivalence, at an early stage in the crisis.

On March 2, members of the UN General Assembly voted massively to condemn the invasion of Ukraine.

But out of the 35 countries that abstained, nearly half -- 16 -- were in Africa. Added to that is Eritrea, which voted against the resolution, while another eight African countries did not cast their vote.

"Generally, the countries which abstained were either authoritarian regimes or countries which have had historical ties with Russia, often military ones, since the Soviet era," said Mahama Tawat, a researcher at the University of Malmo in Sweden.

Sympathy for Russia in Africa has roots dating back to the 1950s and 60s, when the Kremlin backed anti-imperialist and anti-colonial movements and helped the fight against apartheid.

Malema says Moscow supported South Africa's struggle against apartheid 'when it was not fashionable to be there'. By RODGER BOSCH AFP

At a rally on March 21 -- the anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre at the height of white-minority rule -- South African radical leader Julius Malema declared: "We are here to say to NATO, we are here to say to America, 'we are not with you, we are with Russia'.

"Today we want to say to Russia, 'thank you for being there when it was not fashionable to be there, and do not doubt our support, Russia. Teach them a lesson, we need a new world order -- we are tired of being dictated to by America'."

There have also been pro-Russian rallies in the Sahel, where Moscow is pushing its influence at the expense of France, the region's former colonial power and traditional ally.

Mali's junta, as well as the beleaguered government in Central African Republic (CAR), have turned to hundreds of Russian paramilitaries to provide support.

The Malian armed forces last week received two Russian combat helicopters and radars to help its fight against a decade-old jihadist insurgency.

Soft power

The Kremlin's soft power is being amplified by social media and other outlets.

"There's a proliferation of YouTube channels which disseminate destabilising messages. They create a rift between the West and African regimes and thus help Russia's interests," said Tawat.

In Cameroon, the pan-Africanist TV channel Afrique Media frequently hosts pro-Kremlin commentators, including Seba.

The discussion section on its Facebook page has subjects such as "Plans for assassinating Vladimir Putin -- where will the West draw the line?"

Putin 'doesn't have the blood of slavery and colonisation on his hands,' says pan-Africanist Kemi Seba. By STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN AFPFile

Fake news on social media typically plays up the claimed legitimacy of the invasion of Ukraine and extols Russia's military might.

The French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), in a report last April, said Russia took a two-pronged approach on its attempt to sway opinion.

"Anti-Muslim, anti-migrant and xenophobic narratives are aimed at a European audience, while calls for decolonisation and the end of Western imperialism target sub-Saharan Africa and the Muslim world," it said.
Constitutionalism in Ghana does not depend on an exclusive conventional political understanding of the quality of the law, its limitation and the test of legality.

Under the framework of our current Constitution, His Lordship Justice Yonny Kulendi, Justice of the Supreme Court said constitutionalism must be independent of any parochial understanding of what law is and how the law limits the official actions of the country.

This, he noted, is the basic position on the principles of constitutionalism and must remain the collective aspirations to be upheld and enforced by the court of law.

Arguing in essence that Law is the best safeguard against abuses of state power and elements of constitutional must be apprehended.

"Popular sovereignty, separation of powers with checks and balances, the rule of law, responsible and accountable government, an independent judiciary, independent media, respect for individual rights and freedoms, respect for self-determination, civilian control of the military, police govern by law and judicial control, judicial review of all actions. If one of the above elements is bridged, undermind or neglected to be applied to or disregarded constituted a cheap to the layers and quality of the concept of constitutionalism. It is immaterial that some sense of these principles is observed as a matter of principle, it is important that the sense of the elements observed is sufficient to balance the healthy existence of the need to exercise official governmental power or authority for the public and the protection of individual rights and freedoms".

Justice Yonny Kulendi

His Lordship Justice Yonny Kulendi made this observation at the 2nd SRC public lecture and launch of the 62nd law week at Ghana School of Law, Greenhill Campus on the topic "Constitutionalism: The Case of Ghana".

He further stated that "Judicial duty properly performed should not deform citizens' hope and optimism of the Republic in the protection of fundamental human rights and freedoms. Again judicial duty should not deform negative, the reality of good governance in the state. Hope for truth actualization of true constitutionalism is in all of us and we must stay alive to its callings and demands".

Mr. Philip Jude Mensah, Deputy Commissioner in charge of Legal Affairs, Treaties and Compliance at the Ghana Revenue Authority speaking on behalf of Commissioner-General Rev. Dr Ammishaddia Owusu-Amoah advised the law students to turn an eye to the practice of taxation.

He said only few lawyers are practising taxation in the country which calls for the need for law students to practice taxation.
US-based Ghanaian professor and private legal practitioner, Kwaku Asare has questioned the law being used in the case against embattled Assin North MP, James Gyakye Quayson to take away his seat.

According to the private legal practitioner, the case against the Assin North lawmaker is not that he is a dual citizen but rather, the legislator did not compel the Canadian officials to process his renunciation application quickly.

The US-based Professor also called on the countrys courts and the entire nation, to do better to eschew the political savagery that has engulfed the country.

In a Facebook post on Tuesday, 5 April 2022, the US-based Professor said: The case against the Assin North MP is not that he is a dual citizen. The undisputed facts are that he filed for the renunciation of his Canadian citizenship in December 2019, a full year ahead of the 2020 general elections. The processing of the application was delayed by the pandemic but was granted in November 2020. It normally takes 3 months.

Professor Asare noted that: The EC inspected his certificate of renunciation pursuant to a letter of 24 November 2020 and cleared him to run for his seat on December 7, 2020.He was elected on December 7, 2020 and duly sworn in as an MP on January 7, 2020.So the case against him is that he did not compel the Canadian officials to process his renunciation application quickly enough such that even if the renunciation became effective before the elections and was accepted by the EC, he must be forced to vacate his post for a bye-election that he is fully eligible to compete in.

I cannot support this line of reasoning and I reject it. What is the law that is being used to take his seat from him? It is Article 94(2)(a).That law says that a person shall not be qualified to be a member of Parliament if he owes allegiance to a country other than Ghana. Notice that this law does not talk about dual citizenship. However, that is a complex issue, for the current purpose, so let us assume it does. The law does not say anything about when this disqualification applies.

Is it at the time of filing for party primary, national election, voting day, or on the first day of Parliament?A high court judge cannot rely on Wikipedia to insert a date into Article 94(2)(a). But even it wants to do so in a petition that calls for setting aside election results, he should be guided by PNDCL 284(20)(d), which reminds us that voters wishes must be respected and the ground for cancelling an election results is that the candidate was at the time of his election a person not qualified or a person disqualified for election.So the only question the high court judge should ask is that on December 7, 2020, at the time of his election, had he applied to renounce (the subjective test) or if you want to use an objective test had his renunciation become effective?

The US-based Professor further questioned the usual deference that is accorded to the Electoral Commission (EC) in such matters by the Court.

How difficult is this to figure out? Did this same court system not answer an analogous question in the Dr Zanetor case not too long ago? How does this clear error become invisible to the appellate courts? How does the appellate system not see that a high court judge has interpreted allegiance and inserted its own dates in article 94(2)(a), disregarded PNDCL 284 20(d), and has applied an objective standard to allegiance, which is a subjective concept?

The EC reviewed the Assin North MPs papers, including his renunciation certificate, and applied the law to say he is qualified. Why is this call by the EC not subject to the usual deference that the Courts give to the EC in these matters? Those who want to disqualify him and apparently the courts have set aside section 20(d) of PNDCL 284 and inserted their own deadline in article 94(2)(a).

He added: We must do better as a nation! There is just too much political savagery. And the courts must do much much much better!!Is it now the law that the time that Canada (other countries) acts on renunciation applications decides who qualifies to be a Ghanafuo MP?

Will Ghanaians be permanently barred from running as MP if Canada passes a law that it no longer allows renunciation of Canadian citizenship?

The Supreme Court will deliver its ruling on the injunction application filed by a private citizen, Michael Ankomah Nimfah refraining Mr Quayson from performing his duties as a Parliamentarian, Wednesday, 13 April 2022.

Mr Quayson is in court after a Cape Coast High Court in July 2021 annulled his election as Assin North MP for owing allegiance to another country other than Ghana at the time of filing his nomination forms to contest the polls.

The MP is appealing the ruling at the Court of Appeal.

However, Mr Nimfah want the embattled lawmaker to be restrained from performing Parliamentary duties while they await the decision of the Court of Appeal.

Source: classfmonline.com
A fire outbreak at a residence in Meduma in the Kwabre East Municipality of the Ashanti Region has burnt to death an 11-year-old girl.

The teenager identified as Tunteya Salmu was trapped in the six-bedroom house.

The unfortunate incident occurred on Tuesday, April 5, 2022.

According to the spokesperson of the Ghana National Fire Service in the region, DO III Peter Addai, firefighters arrived on the scene at a time the fire was at a fully developed stage.

Although the firefighters would eventually manage to douse the fire, the teenage girl, unfortunately, could not make it out alive.

We had a distress call at about 1:57pm that there was a fire at Meduma 80, near the Komfo Anokye Senior High School.

We swiftly responded to the call and when we got there, the fire had engulfed the entire house and it was at its fully developed stage. We managed to put it under control and finally extinguished it, DO III Peter Addai told Asaase Radio in an interview.

He confirmed, An 11-year-old girl lost her life as a result of the fire.

The body of the deceased has since been handed over to the Mampongteng District Police Command with investigations ongoing to ascertain the cause of the fire outbreak.
Former Member of Parliament of Ledzokuku Constituency has indicated that he agrees there are challenges with the economy leading to high cost of living in Ghana but Ghanaians should undermine the impact of COVID-19 pandemic.

Just as the president stated from his SONA, I also appreciate some of the challenges the people are going through. I buy fuel myself and even with my 1.2 CC V4 Vehicle, I have realized the fuel I used to buy has doubled, he told Alfred Ocansey on 3FM Sunrise Morning Show.

He added Power was not stable before the NPP came into office in 2017, there was no Free SHS, and the government was not employing. Even the very advanced economies of the world are struggling with the impact of COVID 19. We should be careful not to undermine the essence of government interventions because of the challenges associated with them.

The fact that we are in a crisis doesn't mean we should go and create a crisis elsewhere. Nobody should make a mistake to say let's abandon Free Senior High School.

If anybody in this country decides to talk about the economic challenges in our country without considering the impact of COVID economically, that is unfair. Largely we have come through this crisis and the government is doing everything possible to better the economy.

His comments come after some leading members of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) including Deputy National Youth Organizer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Edem Agbana have said the challenges facing the country currently cannot be blamed on the outbreak of the coronavirus.

In the view of Agbana, the country is struggling due to the incompetence of the Akufo-Addo administration in managing the economy.

Agbana was reacting to a comment by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to the effect that he does not know of any economy around the world that is doing well in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and the geopolitical tension between Russia and Ukraine.

Mr Akufo-Addo said economies around the world are all struggling owing to these two main factors.

Speaking in an interview with BBC's Peter Okwoche on Monday, April 4, he said we have also the opportunity to have industries set up not just for Ghana [but also] for the ECOWAS market and also for the African market.

We now have an African Continental Free Trade Area agreement which is up and operating. Ghana is the gateway to its market of 1.2billion people. Imagine the opportunities that we are presenting.

He added I don't know the economy in the world that is doing well.

The Cedi has begun to firm up. The world is going through a difficult [moment], Ghana is no exception, Nigeria is no exception. There is no country in the world that is escaping the ravages of Covid-19 and also the impact of the [Russia-Ukraine conflict].

He added, In Ghana, the recovery programme that we have is considered very credible and it is what is going to give us the opportunity to come out of this period stronger, it is that future we are looking at.

But speaking on the New Day show with Johnnie Hughes on TV3 Tuesday April 5, Edem Agbana said we have a leadership that is refusing to accept that it is because of their incompetence and mismanagement of the economy that is why we are where we are today.

Assuming without admitting that indeed, all the countries the economy is not doing well, why must we be part of the worst performing?

Did Covid not hit Togo, Benin? If the economy was resilient as they wanted us to believe, we will not have been here today.

3news.com
The Friends of Democracy (FoD) Ghana, a Civil Society Organisation (CSO), has expressed grave concerns over what it describes as unprofessional conduct of the Daily Guide newspaper in recent times.

The FoD Ghana noted that the conduct of the newspaper in publishing what it termed as false publications about the Speaker of Parliament, Rt. Hon. Alban S. K. Bagbin, had the tendency to mar the democratic credentials of the country if not checked.

Mr Abubakari Nurideen Kotia, the convener of the group, expressed the worry at a press conference in Wa on Tuesday on the incessant attack on the personality and reputation of the Speaker of Parliament by the Daily Guide newspaper.

He said headlines such as Bagbin snubs deputies, appoints NDC man as speaker, Bagbin blows 1.1million Dollars in Dubai, Bagbib requests for 50K from Dubai and Bagbin snubs deputies again, were without facts and aimed to tarnish the reputation of the Speaker of Parliament and the countrys democracy.

The daily guide newspaper has in recent times unfortunately reduced itself to a propaganda tool for some political class by reserving its front page and banner headlines for the publication of malicious stories and hateful lies against the revered Speaker of Parliament in an incompetent attempt to falsely portray the Speaker as wasteful and dictatorial, he alleged.

While recognizing the media as an unalienable partner in sustaining and promoting the countrys democracy, Mr Kotia stressed the need for utmost professionalism of the media in order not to derail the democratic gains of the country.

Talking on Mr Bagbins visit to Dubai for medical review, he observed that it was a constitutional provision for some public office holders including the Speaker of Parliament and that the publication by Daily Guide newspaper was a mere allegation against the Speaker.

 the Daily Guide newspaper has thrown its hat into the ring to be used as the hatchet group to lead and propagate a media war against the Rt. Hon. Speaker of Parliament regardless of What it takes to do this difficult task which will not succeed, he explained.

The FoD-Ghana said it would do all things possible within its power to jealously safeguard the democratic foundation and institutions of the country at all times including the high office of the Speaker of Parliament.
A road crash at Banana InnMango Down near Dansoman in the Ablekuma South sub-metro has left a police officer with a severe injury.

The accident, which happened at about 2200 hours on Tuesday, involved a police motorbike with registration number: GP 2527 and a Toyota Vitz taxi with registration numbers GX 4321-19.

Narrating the incident to Ghana News Agency (GNA), Elisha Tamakloe, an eyewitness, said the policeman, who was riding the motorbike was pursuing two commercial motor okada riders.

He said upon reaching an intersection at Banana InnMango Down, a taxi driver who was about to take a turn, crossed them.

The two okada riders swerved the taxi but the policeman was unfortunate, crashing his motorcycle into a side of the taxi, he added.

When the GNA got to the scene around 2210 hours, the police had arrived to assess the incident and moved the motorcycle and the taxi to the Dansoman Police Station.

The injured police officer was rushed to the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital.

Data from the Motor Traffic and Transport Department (MTTD) indicate that more than 230 lives perished and 1,237 people sustained varied degrees of injury through road crashes in January this year alone in the country.

Also, a total of 461 motorcycle-related crashes led to the loss of 93 lives and 362 injuries while a total of 707 commercial vehicles were involved in the crashes leading to 95 deaths and 620 injuries.

GNA
The Private Health Facilities Association of Ghana has urged government to reinstate the toll levy, direct revenue realised to support the Free Senior High School programme, instead of using the National Health Insurance Levy.

The Association says by doing this, would reduce the transfer of National Health Insurance Levy (NHIL) revenue to the programme and healthcare service providers would be paid their claims on time.

Government release of only GH127million out of the total revenue of GH2billion generated through the NHIL is very disappointing and a clear testament of Government's lack of sympathy and total disregard for the plight of healthcare service providers.

Mr Richard Frank-Torblu, General Secretary, PHFAoG, at a press conference in Accra also called on the government to release funds to National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) for immediate payment of claims to the healthcare service providers of all arrears up to the month of December 2021, including outstanding payments owed some health facilities for the period 2017 to 2020.

We demand that the authority expedites the review of the medicine and service tariffs to reflect current market variables to enable health facilities to provide expected healthcare as envisioned by the NHIA. Advisedly, the review committee should have a fair representation from the Private Health Facilities Association to guarantee the quality of review outcome.

The Association also requests a formal engagement with the Ministry of Health and the various health facility regulators to review or amend the credentialing threshold on staffing requirements and the possible allocation of health staff to private facilities.

Failure on the part of the Authority to comply with the set timelines, we will not at all hesitate to partially withdraw services to NHIS clients across the nation. At any point in time from today, we might trigger that action, because looking at our circumstances there is nothing we can do.

The General Secretary noted that since the inception of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) as a pro-poor intervention programme in 2003, the private healthcare sector has remained consistent and unfailing in augmenting efforts by successive governments to promote quality and accessible healthcare to Ghanaians and by extension, contributing immensely towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goal 3.

He said the recent unprecedented governmental interference in the administrative practices and the operations of the NHIA was significantly eroding the gains made over the years.

He said currently, delays in payment of claims to service providers currently stood at between four to nine months, thus from July-August, 2021 to February 2022, coupled with isolated cases of indebtedness to some health facilities spanning the period 2017 to 2020, and the development put service providers in an agonizing situation since over 90 per cent of revenue emanates from the scheme.

This unfortunate trend of delays in claims payment has triggered an action from Ghana Chamber of Pharmacy to make an emphatic decision to cut the supply of drugs to health facilities, charge interest of 1% on debt owed them by health facilities and the engagement of legal services to prosecute defaulters

Mr Frank-Torblu added that another challenge of the private health facilities was the unrealistic tariffs, which apply to tariffs for services as well as those for medicines.

Health facilities have continued to render services to the sick at a loss as our checks indicate most drugs on the NHIS medicines list are between 40 per cent to 60 per cent below current market prices.

Mr Frank-Torble said the scarcity of human resources in this era and increasing demand by regulators were also major challenges.

He said the Government continued to post skilled professionals to public health institutions where many were usually redundant, precluding any chances of private health facilities ever gaining access to such professionals to employ.

Basic requirements stipulated by the foremost regulator (HeFRA) and the NHIA are being increased which has become a major challenge to us in spite of dwindling numbers of these professionals in the private health sector coupled with the persistent demands by the regulators, he added.

He said private insurance companies have also become very terrible in terms of claims reimbursement and advised the public who subscribed to them to be extremely careful, as some had collapsed with huge sums of claims unpaid and some of the existing ones were on the verge of collapse because of their erratic nature of claims reimbursement to the providers.

The General Secretary noted that the Association portends doom for the NHIS as it found itself in a very precarious situation and in a serious state of financial distress that needed an immediate lifeline if it would survive as the only healthcare intervention serving the ordinary Ghanaian.

GNA
A military court in Burkina Faso on Wednesday handed down a life term to former president Blaise Compaore over the 1987 assassination of revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara.

Applause erupted in the courtroom as the long-awaited verdict was read out, bringing the curtain down on a case that has afflicted the impoverished and volatile state for 34 years.

The court also issued life terms to Hyacinthe Kafando, an officer suspected of having led the hit squad, and General Gilbert Diendere, an army commander at the time of the assassination, which coincided with a coup that brought Compaore to power.

Compaore, who lives in exile in Ivory Coast after being toppled by public protests in 2014, and Kafando, who has been on the run since 2016, were tried in absentia.

Burkina Faso. By AFP

The six-month trial was avidly followed by many in the landlocked Sahel nation, for whom Sankara's bloody death remains a dark blot on the country's history.

A fiery Marxist-Leninist who blasted the West for neo-colonialism and hypocrisy, Sankara was shot dead on October 15 1987, little more than four years after coming to power as an army captain aged just 33.

He and 12 colleagues were killed by a hit squad at a meeting of the ruling National Revolutionary Council.

Discussing the leftwing icon's death was taboo throughout the 27-year reign of Compaore, Sankara's comrade-in-arms.

The court in the capital Ouagadougou found Compaore, Kafando and Diendere all guilty of harming state security.

Grim details

Sankara was an army captain aged just 33 when he came to power. By DOMINIQUE FAGET AFP

Compaore and Diendere were also found guilty of complicity in murder, and Kafando of murder.

Their sentences exceeded the request of military prosecutors.

They had sought 30 years for Compaore and Kafando and 20 years for Diendere, who is already serving a 20-year term over an attempted military coup in 2015.

Eight other accused were given jail terms ranging from three to 20 years, while three defendants were acquitted.

In its closing statement, the prosecution recounted in grim detail a plot to ambush Sankara and his closest followers.

Sankara's former comrade-in-arms, Blaise Compaore, has always denied any involvement in his assassination. By Eric CONGO AFPFile

Sankara headed to the National Revolutionary Council meeting for a rendezvous with death, for "his executioners were already there," it said.

After Sankara entered the meeting room, the hit squad burst in, killing his guards, the prosecution said.

"The squad then ordered president Sankara and his colleagues to leave the room. They would then be killed one by one."

Ballistics experts told the trial Sankara had been shot in the chest at least seven times by assassins using tracer rounds.

But the defendants said the victims died in a botched attempt to arrest Sankara after he and Compaore fell out over the direction the country's revolution was taking.

Unstable country

Compaore boycotted what his lawyers dismissed as a "political trial," while an attorney for Diendere said his client's life term was "excessive" given that he had attended the trial and contributed to proceedings, while the two other chief accused were absent.

Sankara's widow, Mariam Sankara, who attended the trial throughout, hailed the outcome.

"The judge has handed down his verdict in line with the law, and everyone appreciates this," she said.

"It is something that we had requested -- justice and truth," she said.

"Our goal was for the political violence we have in Burkina Faso to come to end. This verdict will give many people cause for thought."

The case was disrupted after Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba seized power in January. By - Burkina Faso PresidencyAFPFile

One of the world's poorest countries, Burkina has a long history of political turmoil since it gained independence from France in 1960.

Reminders of that instability came during the trial, when proceedings were briefly suspended after a coup on January 24 that deposed the elected president, Roch Marc Christian Kabore.

Kabore was toppled by rebel officers angered over his failure to roll back a nearly seven-year-old jihadist insurgency.

The campaign has claimed some 2,000 lives and displaced some 1.8 million people.

The trial resumed after new military strongman Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba restored the constitution and swore an oath.
An Accra Circuit Court has caged two brothers into Police custody for allegedly assaulting and stabbing their neighbour.

Sylvester Tackie and Emmanuel Tackie have denied assaulting and stabbing Samuel Ankrah.

The Court presided over by Madam Susanna Eduful asked them to make their next appearance on April 8.

Police Chief Inspector Samuel Ahiabor told the Court that the Complainant, Mr Ankrah was a Plumber while Sylvester was a Carpenter and Emmanuel, a Dispensing Assistant.

They live at Old Dansoman with Mr Ankrah.

Chief Inspector Ahiabor said on March 6, 2022, there was a misunderstanding between the siblings' father, one Akuffo and the Complainant.

The Court heard that the accused person's father informed the suspects about the misunderstanding leading to the alleged attack on the Complainant in the presence of a witness.

The prosecution said they subjected the Complainant to severe beatings and in the process, Sylvester allegedly stabbed the Complainant with an object.

Chief Inspector Ahiabor said a report was made to the police leading to their arrest and after investigations, they were charged with the offence.

GNA
Dr Donald Agumenu, a Project Management expert, has called for the establishment of an independent monitoring and evaluation agency to validate all infrastructural projects in the country.

He said that was the only way to ensure quality assurance and get value for money invested in such projects.

Speaking in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) on the poor state of some roads in the country, Dr Agumenu said it was unfortunate that infrastructural projects, especially roads began to deteriorate a few months after construction, causing motorists huge discomfort and carnages.

He said such an agency would serve as a clearinghouse for projects, especially at this moment where the cost of infrastructure is growing at an alarming rate.

The Project Management expert lamented the poor nature of the Denu-Ho Road in the Volta Region and said it needed immediate attention.

He noted that roads in that region, especially those adjoining entry points to Togo, were the conduits for haulage trucks loading from the Lome Port and for onward transit movements to Cote D'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger.

However, Dr Agumenu said the roads had been ignored by successive governments over the years posing danger to users and giving the country a bad image.

For instance, the road connecting from Ketu North through Akatsi North on the Dzodze-Xevi stretch and that from Weta to Xevi through Kpetoe have become death traps. The same applies to Akatsi-Dakpa and many others across the country. As for Ho-Accra's main road, it is horrifying!

It is important at this moment for us to make our roads a top priority so that we can mitigate road crashes and improve trade, he stated.

Dr Agumenu said: It is gratifying to underscore the fact that the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Corridor Road connecting to Akanu and Aflao is in attractive shape. However, a few kilometres from Aflao Police Station to the Diamond Cement factory, serving the sub-regional market is a complete shame.

Beyond the debates, I think the time is riper to embark on a national monitoring and evaluation campaign to access the health status of the already existing roads, newly constructed ones and works in progress, he stated.

I am respectfully appealing to the Minister of Roads, the Parliamentary Select Committee on Road and Chairman of the Road Fund to take a tour among other things on some critical roads in the country, including those in the Volta Region as a matter of urgency, to reduce road crashes, promote trade and grow the local economy, Dr Agumenu said.

GNA
Fresh fighting erupted on Wednesday in the DR Congo's troubled east between army troops and the M23 rebel group after a week of relative calm, local sources said.

"The army attacked all the M23 positions in Musongati, Tchanzu and Runyoni" that the rebels took last week, Damien Seburazane, a representative of civil society groups, told AFP.

Colonel Muhindo Lwanzo, the chief aide to the territory's military administrator, said the rebels had retreated from the strategic hill of Bugusa close to the highway linking the city of Goma to the Ugandan border, "before the army arrived in the area."

The fighting has been taking place in Rutshuru territory in North Kivu province -- the epicentre of a resurgence by a group that was dormant for several years.

The M23 was born among former members of a Congolese Tutsi militia that was once supported by Rwanda and Uganda.

The rebels had been incorporated in the Congolese army under a peace deal signed on March 23, 2009.

In 2012, they mutinied, saying the deal had not been upheld and named their group the March 23 (M23) Movement.

Becoming one of the scores of armed groups that roam eastern DR Congo, the M23 briefly seized the city of Goma before being defeated and forced out of the country.

After its defeat, the M23 eventually signed an accord with Kinshasa that included provisions for its fighters to reintegrate into civilian society.

But the group has again accused the government of reneging on the deal and resumed fighting last year.

Re-emergence

In January, more than 20 soldiers were killed in Nyesisi, near the Virunga National Park, a UNESCO-listed world heritage site home to endangered mountain gorillas.

On March 28, the M23 moved out of strongholds in the high hills to attack army positions in Rutshuru.

After two days of fighting, tens of thousands of villagers fled, many of them to neighbouring Uganda.

Witnesses described seeing troops retreating fast in the face of the advancing rebels, with hundreds of panic-stricken civilians in their wake.

A helicopter with the UN peacekeeping mission crashed last week while on reconnaissance over the area, killing eight peacekeepers. The cause is being investigated.

The government admitted what it called "a failure... in command in the operational sector of North Kivu," and said the commander there had been replaced. The army also dispatched reinforcements to the region.

The M23 has declared what it calls a unilateral ceasefire, saying it seeks a "peaceful settlement in the crisis with the government."

DR Congo's deputy police chief, General Patience Mushid Yav, has also urged villagers to return, but many people have told AFP they are too afraid.

"On Thursday, the authorities sent vehicles so that we could return to our villages. Can you imagine that -- instead of helping us with food, they want us to go back into the arms of the rebels?" Doncira Karikumutima, a woman aged 50, said at the weekend.

"They want us to go back to our villages which are occupied by the rebels. The troops and police can go there first," said Ntamugabumwe Sebishimbo, 65.
Troops and rangers in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park in eastern DR Congo have carried out attacks on indigenous Pygmies living in the famed wildlife haven, a rights watchdog said on Wednesday

Violence broke out in 2018 between park rangers and members of the Batwa community, who are accused of illegally settling in the reserve, cutting down trees to make charcoal and opening fire on rangers, killing and wounding a number of them.

The British watchdog Minority Rights Group (MRG), in a report on Wednesday, alleged that soldiers and Kahuzi-Biega guards carried out attacks against the Pygmies living in the park.

"The attacks were well-planned, targeted civilian populations," the group said.

"The research team obtained direct evidence of the deaths of at least 20 individual Batwa community members in connection with this three-year campaign of forced expulsion," it added.

"The research team obtained direct evidence that 15 Batwa women were forcibly group-raped by park guards and soldiers during the July and November-December 2021 operations," the watchdog said.

The 6,000-square-kilometre (2,300-square-mile mile) reserve lies close to the Rwandan border near Bukavu, in one of the most troubled areas of the vast country.

Legal limbo

Dominated by the extinct volcanoes of Kahuzi and Biega, the park's tropical forests are a redoubt for one of the last populations of eastern lowland gorillas, made up of about 250 primates, according to its website.

Since the 1990s, the haven has been listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in danger because of the presence of armed groups and settlers, poaching and deforestation.

A number of Pygmies charge that their land was confiscated when the national park was expanded and want to recover what they say is theirs.

The MRG report, based on on-site investigation and dozens of witnesses, said the park rangers received financial and technical support at the time from the governments of Germany and the United States, as well as international conservation organizations such as the Wildlife Conservation Society.

An investigation has recently been launched by the park's overseers, the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN), to probe alleged violations.

The panel has been in Bukavu since April 4 and will travel to the scene of the alleged crimes, Georges Muzibaziba, who heads the ICCN's human rights section.

There is a lack of legal clarity between DR Congo's laws that protect the national park and those guaranteeing the rights of the Pygmy populations.

On April 7, 2021, a bill to protect and promote the rights of indigenous people was adopted by the DR Congo parliament.

It guarantees among other things recognition of the rights to land and natural resources of the indigenous Pygmy people to possess, occupy and use traditionally.

The Senate has been reviewing the bill for the last year.
Thousands protested in Sudan against military rule on the anniversary Wednesday of previous popular uprisings, most recently against autocrat Omar al-Bashir three years ago.

In the capital Khartoum, where hundreds took to the streets, security forces fired tear gas at the crowd, said witnesses.

The security forces also "stormed al-Jawda hospital and fired tear gas inside, scaring patients and health workers and causing suffocation among some of them," said the independent Central Committee of Sudan Doctors.

Sudan has grappled with an October 25 coup led by army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan that has derailed a political transition period and hammered the economy of one of the world's poorest countries.

Pro-democracy activists have warned online of a people power "earthquake of April 6" -- a momentous day in Sudan's history that was key in bringing down earlier strongmen.

In 1985, the day saw a popular uprising that ousted president Jaafar Nimeiri. In 2019 it marked the start of a mass sit-in outside army headquarters, after months of protests, against Bashir's three decades in power.

"It is an important day... so we expect many to take to the streets despite the heat and Ramadan," the Muslim month of fasting, said one Khartoum protester, Badwi Bashir.

Map of the Sudanese capital of Khartoum.. By AFP

"We just want to bring down the coup (leadership) and end the prospect of any future coups."

Sudan's latest putsch has "set fire to all aspects of life, turning our country into an arena of crises," said the civilian alliance Forces of Freedom and Change, or FFC.

As protesters started to gather in the capital, security forces sealed off key bridges and deployed around the presidential palace and army headquarters.

In Khartoum's twin city of Omdurman, they set up barbed wire blockades on streets leading to the parliament building.

Hundreds marched in the eastern state of Gedaref with banners that read "No to military rule" and "Away with the government of hunger", said one witness, Ahmed Salah.

A demonstration was also held in Nyala, South Darfur, according to witness Mahdi Adam.

'Defeat the coup'

Five days after the start of the 2019 sit-in, generals bowed to the pressure on the streets to remove Bashir.

In this file photo taken on April 23, 2019 protesters from the city of Atbara, atop a train, cheer upon arriving at the Bahari station in Sudan's capital Khartoum. By OZAN KOSE AFPFile

But the protesters stayed on to press for civilian rule, only to be dispersed in a crackdown in June that year by men in military fatigues that claimed 128 lives according to medics.

Sudan's civilian and military leaders later agreed on a transition of power, which promised greater international engagement for the country as well as foreign aid and investment.

But last October's coup upended those plans, leading to the current wave of protests. At least 93 people have been killed and hundreds wounded in the crackdown since, medics say.

"We have to defeat the coup," FFC spokesman Jaafar Hassan said last week.

"We have tried a partnership with the military, and it failed, ending in this coup, and we shouldn't do this again."

Burhan said last Saturday he would only "hand over power to an honest, elected authority, accepted by the all the Sudanese people".

The United States on Wednesday warned against "the use of any violence" and demanded Sudanese authorities "keep their word and hold accountable those responsible for abuses."

Since the coup, Sudan's already ailing economy has suffered severe blows, as Western donors cut crucial aid pending the restoration of a transition to civilian rule.

After Bashir's ouster, Sudanese protesters maintained demonstrations for months, demanding civilian rule. By OZAN KOSE AFPFile

Prices of food, fuel and basic commodities have soared and crime has spiked. Violence has intensified in remote areas, particularly the restive Darfur region, the UN says.

Burhan last week threatened to expel UN special representative Volker Perthes, accusing him of "interference" in the country's affairs after Perthes warned of the deepening crisis in Sudan during a UN Security Council briefing.
Several shops at the Timber market at Tema in the Greater Accra Region have been destroyed by fire.

According to information gathered, the fire started around midday and managed to spread to several other structures at the Timber market.

After razing through several shops, the fire destroyed properties said to be worth thousands of Ghana cedis.

Firefighters from the Ghana National Fire Service are reported to have struggled before dousing the fire and bringing the situation under control.

Todays incident means that two different markets have suffered fire outbreaks.

A fire outbreak at the makeshift Takoradi market early this week saw properties worth thousands of Ghana cedis being destroyed.

The fire outbreak which occurred in the early hours of Monday, April 4, 2022, left market women traumatised.

According to the Head of Public Affairs at the Ghana National Fire Service, Mr. Ebo Bonney, the fire at the Takoradi makeshift market is the biggest they have had to deal with in so many years."

This is the biggest fire outbreak we have had in a very long time. We mobilized fire tankers to be able to douse the fire. In all, we had eight fire tenders to control the fire. So far eighty-seven shops have been burnt, Mr. Ebo Bonney told 3FM in an interview.
The Ghana National Council of Private Schools (GNCOP) has called for an independent probe into the marking of scripts of BECE candidates from private schools in the country.

Candidates in private schools often do much better than their counterparts in public schools, but the Council argued that private school candidates are being deliberately marked down in the BECE to give candidates from public schools an upper hand.

The President of GNACOP, Enoch Gyetuah, in an interview on the Citi Breakfast Show, said the alleged discrimination has resulted in the challenges many parents whose wards registered for the BECE with private schools are facing.

Most of the private school students have been marked down, and we are calling for re-marking and even calling for an independent body to go into that. [Theres even discrimination in the aspect of placement]. Government has reserved 30% allocation to people in the public schools so meaning that if we write the same exam, and I am coming from a public school, I will be placed before someone from a private school irrespective of the grades we have, he said.

He also observed that parents of private schools enrol their wards in public schools for their final examinations to avoid discrimination.

Some of the public school heads even canvass [for private school kids]. They move from school to school for the students we have given good [academic] foundation and register them in their schools. If you look at the trend, you will realize that we have an enrolment of about 40% at Class 6 but as they transit to JHS, the number reduces drastically because parents have realized that government has this allocation of 30% to public schools.

Mr. Gyetuah, therefore, called for transparency in the school placement, which he said has been skewed to benefit persons from public schools.

He further lamented that the GES school placement resolution centre was only taking action for category C and D schools, hence complaints associated with category A & B schools are not being resolved.

---citinewsroom
Mr Yaw Opoku Mensah, Deputy Spokesperson for the Ministry of Education, says the Ministry has been able to resolve more than 80 per cent of complaints received since the commencement of the 2022 Senior High School (SHS) self-placement process.

The exercise is going smoothly as we expect with the pace, we have set for ourselves. Achieving 80 per cent of the complaints which comes across the length and breadth of the country gives a clearer indication that we are on top of our business, he said.

Mr Mensah said this in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) on the sidelines of the SHS self-placement ongoing at the GNAT Hall in Accra.

He assured parents and guardians that the over 555,000 students would get their place of choice in terms of the placement for second cycle education.

The Deputy Spokesperson entreated them to remain calm, saying, they would ensure that the last person got to school before the process ended.

He advised them against paying monies to go-betweens for the placement of their wards.

This process is free and fair with team of officers from the Ghana Education Service, TVET service and the Free SHS secretariat who are here to offer services. So, you do not need to bypass these platforms and go looking for someone to solve the issues for you at a fee, he said.

Madam Nana Afrah Sika, Deputy Coordinator of Free SHS, said they were not able to reach some parents via phone because the contact numbers they provided were not effective.

She said some students also did not come with their real parents and advised parents to accompany their wards to the Centre themselves and not through intermediaries.

Madam Afrah Sika said another challenge was students with poorer grades wanting to be placed in first class schools.

She said as of Saturday, April 02, 2022, majority of 2,425 students at the placement Centre were placed in schools.

Meanwhile, some parents and students in an interview with the GNA were happy with the smooth running of the process.

Alfred Asante, a parent, said his ward had been placed in a school in the Central Region but they lived in Accra, so he wanted the school to be changed to Accra.

Madam Sarah Sarpong, another parent, also wanted a change in school for her ward due to distance.

Nicholas Mensah said he had three wards, two of them had been made day students, whereas, one had not been placed and wanted those placed to be made boarders and the other, placed in the school of his choice.

According to the Ministry of Education, out of the total number of 571,892 registered candidates, 555,353 candidates qualified to be placed.

The Ministry said 367,811 candidates had been automatically placed in one of their choices, adding that, 187,542 of qualified candidates would have to do self-placement to select from available schools since they could not be matched with any of their choices.

GNA
06.04.2022 LISTEN

Your sentence today, April 5, 2022, for blasphemy in the 21st century by the Nigerian court will only weaken those who sentenced you when posterity reviews the reason you were sentenced.

You were charged not for terrorism, arson, or any other violation of Nigerian law, but for holding a different viewpoint on religion than the laid down views. You were sentenced to 24 years, having been unjustifiably detained in a remedial cell for around two years.

You are the leader of the Humanist Association of Nigeria and became a celebrity in 2020 following your capture by a section of the authorities for religious lewdness.

I read some online publications where you were quoted as having admitted you were guilty while being sentenced. Some people would say if you were not guilty of the charges, you wouldn't have done so.

But I see you as a peaceful man who wouldn't want to continue to delay your handlers, hence your current position, while at the same time not shying away from your stance on humanity.

They call you an atheist. In their definition of that word, it means someone who doesn't know the Abrahamic God, but you are one of the godliest people I have ever read about in my time. You were not disturbed by their human judgment on you.

You were brave and wanted to show them how a man could accept the supreme price of death without an iota of fear or regret. I would want to say that any person or organization that can't accept the evolution of the human mind is a true blasphemer.

Man was not meant for static theories and mantras. This is the reason I tell people, especially those of my Christian brothers and sisters, that Jesus knew he was God, but many people following him have refused to wake up and find out who they are.

You probably found who you were that resonated with your Inner Man just as Socrates of old found who he was and taught people, but the empires and emperors that were so against his teachings as heretics poisoned him with an opium called hemlock.

Galileo was also beheaded by the ruinous empires and emperors for removing the cobwebs that were in the people's eyes because they were following the Roman doctrines awkwardly. So, it is not new that there will continue to be human bondages against the enlightened minds of this world.

My goodness, there are people who want to be like you, but for fear of sharing in the fate you have chosen to face today. Such people who are hypnotized by fear of human laws against their innate qualities are truly the ones in perpetual prison. Yours in 24 years! It will also come to pass.

In our different localities, they want people to be lawyers, doctors, and so on, and the hierarchical leaders of those localities do not see people's choices of professions as blasphemy, but immediately one talks about religion different from the status quo, his head is called for.

While religious adherents are enmeshed in the doctrines of the proponents of those religions, one wonders why they are not, by religious rules, forced to be like their masters and operate within the ambit of their masters' professions.

You were blasted and misunderstood where you stood by trappers of the progressive human mind, but you knew your position wasn't in error, hence your admitting guilt.

There was no reason to spur you to pray for forgiveness other than a man who wanted to find himself free from what he was taught to believe in. While you pay for the private judgment of those possessed by religious brag, history will judge and vindicate you as someone who possessed conscience liberty and the right to free inquiry.

What does it mean to make a free request when, for example, a writer risks being fined or imprisoned for showing any contention for examination concerning the divine or political expert in a particular society? Be firm, Mubarak, and understand that blasphemy is a label applied to sound judgment by a wacky ideology.

It is distressing that men have been deeply tainted by religious and transitory biases from the dawn of time, and that they will never be able to rid themselves of them. They are completely polluted by religious ideology and declarations of faith.

The unwitting attitude that the average believer has toward religion is quirky and never-changing. He scorns the awakened mind for being a highbrow at one point and blames him at another for irreverently corrupting his religion at another. Nevertheless, when Mubarak Bala's name is spoken, he slips into a state of overwhelming devotion. When the believer takes a breath and thinks about it, he realizes that Mubarak has influenced the entire atmosphere of the world in which he lives.

A bit more in-depth thinking reveals that the philosophy of Mubarak's influence extends far further, coloring the entire mental outlook of today's acculturated man on the world. The accounts men have prepared in the Abrahamic God's name have upset him (God) because this God has never been able to influence sibling rivalries or persuade tribes to hold grudges against one another. This God does not prefer those who love him over those who despise him.

Certainly, the fear of the godly response that Mubarak's brand made certain to arouse made the prospect of participating in such procedures as blatant obstructive judgment appear to be both risky and ineffective. Maintain your composure, Mubarak Bala, while carrying out your sentence with less dread than when it was handed to you.

When everyone sees what you've seen today, the opportunity will present itself by tomorrow.

 ODIMEGWU ONWUMERE

is a Poet, Writer, Consultant, and an Award-winning Journalist based in Rivers State, Nigeria. Mobile: +2348032552855. Email: [email protected]
The sentencing of 13 activists to one year in prison in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo for speaking out against the government-imposed state of siege is an example of the curtailing of freedom in the public space, according to activists and human rights experts.

The conviction of these 13 activists solely for exercising their right to freedom of peaceful assembly is yet another outrageous and shameful attempt to root out dissent in the DRC, said Flavia Mwangovya, deputy director of Amnesty International for East Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes Region.

Thirteen members of Lucha, or Struggle for Change, a pro-democracy group, were arrested in Beni, North Kivu, last November. They had gathered for an unauthorized protest of an extension of the government-imposed state of siege.

The government edict was imposed last May, but has not curtailed the violence carried out by a number of armed groups in the Ituri and North Kivu regions, where Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) operates and which claims to be an affiliate of Islamic State (IS).

This provides yet another example of curtailing human rights, according to opposition leader Martin Fayulu, head of the Engagement for Citizenship and Development party in the DRC.

When I heard the news, I thought it was just an April Fools, says Fayulu. The sentence was handed down in a military tribunal on 1 April.

Their fault was to say 'no' to the extension of the state of siege in North Kivu and Ituri. We don't know what is going on because they have restricted the human rights of all Congolese in those regions, Fayulu told RFI.

The group, founded in 2012, has been at the forefront of apolitical, non-violent campaigning for change and accountability in the country. They also participated in protests against former president Joseph Kabila in 2019. President Felix Tshisekedi succeeded him.

The 13 Lucha activists convicted were also given fines of 110 euros. Their attorney Jean Pie Mbayo said he would appeal the sentence.

Setting the stage for 2023 elections

A number of Congolese political actors have voiced concern that quashing human rights and freedom of speech could have an impact on the 2023 presidential elections.

We really have to sit down and discuss the upcoming electionsit will take place next year, and if Tshishekedi doesn't do that, we won't leave him alone, says Fayulu, who had run against the president for the top job in 2018.

Fayulu appealed to the international community to come to the aid of the Congo.

To help Congo is like they're helping Ukraine. This is the same, because people are dying every day here, he says, citing six million internally displaced people within the country, not to mention the millions who have fled as refugees.

And yet, Congo is the country where you have cobalt, coltan, copper, and so on. And this is just because we don't have good leadership, he adds.
06.04.2022 LISTEN

A military bus carrying some military personnel has been involved in an accident on the Tema motorway this afternoon.

In a statement issued by the Ghana Police Service, it confirms that the accident occurred between the Ajei-Kojo and Tema Abattoir stretch of the motorway.

Accra bound military bus carrying some military personnel has been involved in a single accident between Ajei-Kojo and Tema Abattoir stretch of the Kwame Nkrumah Motorway (N1). Police accident(MTTD) Personnel are currently at the scene managing traffic flow, parts of a statement from the Ghana Police Service have said.

In addition, the Road Safety Management Services Limited has also reported to the scene of the accident to recover and tow the bus.

This should immediately allow the flow of traffic on the Kwame Nkrumah Motorway, especially between the Ajei-Kojo and Tema Abattoir stretch.

In the meantime, all Accra-bound approaching motorists are advised to exercise patience and comply with Police directions.
The Agona West Municipal Assembly in the Central Region has presented dual desks and tables to the Municipal Directorate of the Ghana Education Service (GES) for distribution to schools in the Municipality.

The presentation of the furniture follows a request made by the Municipal Directorate to ease congestion in the various classrooms due to overpopulation.

The furniture made up of dual desks, teacher's chairs and tables, library chairs and tables books shelves and others, was expected to enhance effective teaching and learning.

Presenting the items at Agona Swedru last Tuesday, the Agona West Municipal Chief Executive Hon, Evans Addison Onomah Coleman disclosed that the Assembly was committed to improving the academic standard of schools in the area and would do everything within its power to achieve the set target for the Municipality.

"We are determined to address all the shortfalls in the educational sector by ensuring that the needed infrastructure and logistics are provided to the Directorate.

"As part of my duty to fulfill the pledge of His Excellency Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo led NPP Government to enhance education in the country and Agona West Municipality to eliminate the discomfort of pupils sharing fewer tables and chairs, I helped to facilitate this presentation.

"Again, we are poised to provide durable materials that would last longer than expected. The Assembly is considering reviewing it budget for education so as to improve standard of education to extend logistics distribution to schools.

"Every school in our operational area would be equipped with the needed logistics, to that effect, we have decided to provide modern type of furniture for the schools. We have changed our ways of doing things altogether. If it must done, it must be done well," the MCE noted.

On the culture of maintenance, Hon. Evans Addison Onomah Coleman expressed the hope that the Municipal Director and his officers would monitor closely to ensure that the furniture given is not mishandled in the classrooms.

The Agona West Municipal Director of the Ghana Education Service (GES), Mr. Bismark Mfaafo Offei receiving the furniture thanked the Assembly for the quick response to their 'Save Our Souls' (SOS) request.

According to the Municipal Director, the Directorate was in dire need of logistics to facilitate its operations in the Municipality describing the presentation as a timely intervention.

"Am happy about today's presentation because most of our schools lack tables and chairs so it has come at the right time.

"These 180 durable dual desks would be distributed fairly well, half would be for Lower Primary with the other half going for Upper Primary. The library and teacher's tables and chairs would also be given to the needed schools.

"We needed over 3,000 tables and chairs for our Primary schools alone, this explains why am happy today. This will go a long way to enhance effective teaching and learning."

The Municipal Director tasked Headteachers of the beneficiary schools to take proper care of the furniture to meet the purpose for which they were given.

He hinted that Headteachers would be made to sign a Memorandum of Understand to ensure that the items given would be properly kept and maintained safely.

The Agona West Municipal Coordinator, Mr. Ishmael Ogyefo noted that the Assembly would continue to meet the demands of every sector of the economy to enable them contribute their quota towards national development.
06.04.2022 LISTEN

With a global Shea butter market expected to reach USD 3 billion by 2027, African countries are competing against each other to gain market share. In Ghana, the largest exporter of unrefined Shea butter, both public and private players have been pooling their efforts to develop strategies aimed at spurring growth in this sector, which employs more than 600,000 women. At the core of these strategies, are two key imperatives: improving farmers livelihoods and preventing deforestation.

Ghanas exports of Shea butter and its by-products have experienced strong growth in recent years, reaching USD 90 million in 2018. As a source of employment and income for a large part of the rural female population, Shea butter farming has benefited from various support programs in the last decade.

An industry that has seen interest from various stakeholders

Vice President Bawumias announcement on the launch of the Ghana Shea Landscape Emission Reductions Project (GLSERP) on 11th February came as a relief for those involved in the sector. With an endowment of USD 54.5 million, this project aims at mitigating the effects of climate change on the fragile ecosystem of the Northern Savannah landscape, as well as improving the Shea value chain in the country.

The launch of this much awaited initiative complements projects that have been developed over time by stakeholders such as the Global Shea Alliance. Since 2011, this non-profit association based in Accra, has established local partnerships with a view to introducing more sustainable practices in Shea farming. Helping to drive this momentum towards more sustainable production of Shea, is Prang Agro Resources, a subsidiary of Agri Resources Group (the agricultural arm of Monaco Resources Group ).

Prang Agro Resources - how Shea farming can become sustainable

A member of the Global Shea Alliance, Prang Agro Resources, has been working closely with local communities in agro-related activities since starting its Ghanian activities in 2017. The companys latest initiative, part of its CSR policy, and in collaboration with local chieftains, focuses on the development of a Shea industry in Prang and the empowerment of local communities - in particular women, who are the majority workforce involved in the Shea industry. Women's empowerment is an important part of our work. After mapping the trees on the concession, we realized the socio-economic and environmental potential of developing a Shea butter production and processing industry here in Prang. This led us to launch this initiative locally in Prang. said Kodwo Osei Sarfoh, General Manager of Prang Agro Resources. For the launch of this initiative, Prang Agro Resources will start with the training of one hundred women. The company plans to recruit a Shea certificated officer who will be responsible for providing them with training in good agricultural practices.

One of the bottlenecks hampering the Shea value chain improvement in the country is the access to certification. To access international markets and offer competitive products, local producers must be able to certify their production. Most of the producers have not sought such certification because of the significant time and cost associated with achieving this. However, Prang Agro Resources has engaged in a process of obtaining certifications, guaranteeing that the Shea butter sold is produced in an organic way, and in accordance with good agricultural practices. Our commitment will not stop there. We also plan to organize workshops to raise awareness about the preservation of Shea trees. The launch by the government of the GLSERP is in this sense an initiative to be commended. added Kodwo.

The various public and private initiatives of the past few years suggest that there will be significant improvements in the way Shea butter is grown in Ghana. Along with the programs it initiates, the government must encourage the launch of projects such as the one in Prang which creates economic opportunities for local communities whilst also taking into account key environmental imperatives. Combining the two will allow Ghana to maintain its position as a top ranking exporter, and also to be a leader in sustainable Shea farming.
The Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolitan Assembly has denied speculations of the reinstatement of the suspended Metropolitan Chief Executive (MCE), Abdul-Mumin Issah.

The MCE was suspended by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in February, following his alleged assault on a police officer.

"On the instructions of the President, the Metropolitan Chief Executive for Sekondi-Takoradi Assembly, Mr. Abdul Mumin Issah has been suspended from office with immediate effect pending an inquiry into his encounter with the Police on February 3, 2022, a statement signed by the Minister of Local Government, Decentralisation and Rural Development, Dan Botwe said at the time.

Today, rumours on social media has it that the suspended MCE has been reinstated by the President.

Speaking to Citi News on the speculations, Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolitan Assembly Public Relations Officer (PRO) John Laste has said there is no truth in the rumours.

As at the time we were leaving the office [today] we had not received any information to that effect so we treat it as a rumour.

What I can say is that officially we have not received any communique of that sort, the PRO shared.

Since his suspension, the work of Mr. Abdul Mumin Issah has been taken over by the Western Regional Minister, Hon. Kwabena Okyere Darko-Mensah.
The Nzema youth have appealed to President Akufo-Addo to set up a Commission of Enquiry to probe the shooting incident that happened at the forecourt of the Nkroful Magistrate Court, which left one person killed and four others critically injured.

They are demanding justice for Andrews Donkor, a native of Teleku-Bokazo, who was shot and killed by a soldier and the injured persons.

This was at a joint press conference organized by the Nzema Koyele Eku, Sharp Africa and Teleku-Bokazo Youth Association at Teleku-Bokazo in the Ellembelle District of the Western Region.

Mr Clement Clinton Blay, Executive Director of Sharp, said they found it deeply troubling that the IGP during his fact-finding mission to the area, showed no concern for the life lost and the life-threatening injuries suffered by the four persons.

He was only interested in the damage caused to the Esiama Police Station, something they find unfortunate.

We trust the IGP for his highly earned reputation and therefore call on him to listen to both sides of the story and review his comments for a peaceful conflict resolution without prejudice.

A soldier shot into a group of young people, who had gathered at the forecourt of the Nkroful Magistrate Court to show solidarity with 40 illegal small-scale miners arrested for allegedly entering the mining concession of Adamus Resources Company, to dig for gold on Friday, April 01.

The youth were said to have protested when one of the security officers, a soldier, started taking video of them, resulting in a scuffle and subsequent firing into the crowd.

Mr Blay said the IGP's visit did not help matters, the IGP's visit instead of bringing calm and restoring peace, added salt to the injury of the people than to calm them and restore peace.

He added that ever since Adamus Resources Company started its mining activities at Teleku-Bokazo and Anwia communities, the people have never known peace and they have also been deprived of their source of livelihood.

He spoke of a litany of brutalities perpetrated by security personnel engaged by the mining company some of which ended in fatalities.

He made a reference to an incident that happened on December 22, 2021, when one Michael Dery alias Budu, a 27-year old physically challenged person was doused in petrol and set on fire by the security personnel of the company.

They could not understand why the people of Teleku-Bokazo should continue to be brutalized and treated as slaves in their own land.

They said the investigation by the Commission should also kill Michael Dery, the damages at Esiama Police Station and all other brutalities meted out to the people.

We wish to state that one institution, the Ghana Police Service, cannot be a player and a referee. We believe that the Commission of Enquiry will take a neutral position and ensure that there is justice.

GNA
The Supreme Court will on Wednesday, April 13, rule on the motion seeking to stop Mr James Gyakye Quayson from holding himself as the Member of Parliament for Assin North.

Mr Frank Davis, the Counsel for Michael Ankomah-Nimfah, said his client had established grievous breaches of the 1992 Constitution, and the other electoral laws against the MP.

He said it would enforce the decision of the High Court that he, the MP, was not fit to be a Member of Parliament and he could not be an MP.

If he continues to be in Parliament, he will be in breach of the High Court decision, he said.

He said our submission is that the people of Assin North have been saddled with an unqualified person who need not be in Parliament.

Mr Tsatsu Tsikata, Counsel for Mr Quayson, said they had filed preliminary objection to the motion, which purported to come under CI 47 of the High Court.

Emmanuel Addae, the Counsel for the Electoral Commission, who are the second defendant opposed to the application, saying the Commission had obtained judgement at the High Court.

Mr Godfred Dame Yeboah, the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, said the preliminary objection was grossly erroneous and that the Court had settled cases relating to the grant of interlocutory injunction in Constitutional matters.

He said the invocation of CI 47 did not make the injunction incompetent.

The Cape Coast High Court in the Central Region had declared the 2020 parliamentary election held in the Assin North Constituency as null and void because Mr. Quayson breached the provisions of the Constitution regarding dual citizenship.

Mr. Quayson subsequently appealed the judgment at the Court of Appeal in Cape Coast.

Article 94 (2) of the Constitution says a person shall not be qualified to be a member of Parliament if he owes allegiance to a country other than Ghana.

Michael Ankomah-Nimfa, a resident of Assin Bereku in the Central Region, filed a petition at the Cape Coast High Court seeking to annul the declaration of Mr. Quayson.

GNA
The Africa Centre for Disease Control (CDC) has today handed over two genome sequencing equipment to the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research (NMIMR).

The ceremony which took place at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research was attended by stakeholders and representatives from the Africa CDC as well as the African Society for Laboratory Medicine (ASLM).

In her remarks at the handing over ceremony, Director of the institute, Professor Dorothy Yeboah Manu said the equipment would enhance the mandate of the institution.

She noted that the institute was the research hub in the sub-region and was in charge of five countries such as Ghana, Togo, Benin, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

She indicated that the equipment would allow the institute to research more into variants not only COVID-19, but diseases like Tuberculosis and future pandemic that may hit the world.

Professor Dorothy Yeboah Manu stated, this is the equipment we are going to be using for all our TB isolates and currently we are working on the ones that are resistant. What are the genomic mutations leading to drug resistance? When we understand such information what is allows us to do is to contribute to the development of rapid diagnostics that are DNA based that could quickly determine the mutations that lead to drug resistance.

Speaking to the programme lead for pathogen genomics at the Africa CDC, Dr. Sofonias Tessema, he indicated that, Noguchi was the response center to COVID-19 in the sub-region hence was necessary to build its capacity. He added that the addition of this new equipment was not solely for Noguchi, but would serve the sub-region and Africa as a whole.

He told ModernGhana News that, the Africa CDC established a continental programme to strengthen laboratories and to support sequencing. This support to Noguchi is part of a bigger plan we have, what we call The African Pathogen Genomics Initiative.

He continued, the vision is to strengthen laboratories to do sequencing locally and with that approach, the for Noguchi is not only strengthening the capacity in Ghana it enabled the Ghana Health Service to be able to identify variants and monitor the circulation of variants and understand how the viruses evolve in Ghana.

Noguchi has been the center for response for countries in the region including Togo, Liberia, Benin and Sierra Leonne and so this support is not only for Ghana its for the region and in the bigger picture for the continent.

The new equipment comes some six years according to Prof. Yeboah Manu, after the University of Ghana donated some MiSeq equipment to the institute to support its mandate.

Noguchi with its previous equipment solely sequenced some 4,000 genomes from all five countries it covers and with the new equipment; more sequencing not only on COVID-19 variants but other diseases.
Dr. Sujith Jayaprakash

06.04.2022 LISTEN

BlueCrest University College Ghana announces Dr. Sujith Jayaprakash as the new Rector for the Institution Starting April 2022.

Until his appointment, he was the Director and Business Head of Open labs Ghana (Formely NIIT Ghana).

Dr. Sujith is a tech-savvy education director with almost 15 years of expertise in higher education brand building and collaborations across many continents.

He stated, I'm thrilled to be taking on the job of Rector, and my objective is to incorporate technology into every element of education. I'm constantly interested in technical advancements and how, throughout history, technology has had a good influence on everyone's lives. The goal is not to hinder innovation, but to ensure that we use it in ways that are consistent with what education should be doing.

Dr. Sujith Jayaprakash began his career as a software developer before moving into academia to pursue his passion for teaching. He began his career as a lecturer, but he never lost sight of his drive to progress his expertise in technology via continuous learning and development. He was one of the founding members of BlueCrest University College. He began as the Head of the Department of Information and Communications Technology before being elevated to the position of Registrar.

He was influential in the introduction of various undergraduate programs at BlueCrest College during his time as Registrar. "I have good memories of working at BlueCrest University College, and I'm sincerely thrilled to have returned to work there in a new position," he said. "BlueCrest's concept of being a technology-enabled institution has always captivated me, and it aligns with my life's goal of empowering people via technology and driving forth change in society."

He is someone who thrives on enthusiasm and creativity, and has promised to continue to support investment in people, technology, and innovation, which provide the school competitive advantage.

In light of the necessity for technological improvement in today's education sector, BlueCrest University College advocates for a new learning strategy and cutting-edge teaching methodologies through its new Campaign tagline for 2022, 'Transforming Education.'

The college has always been a trailblazer when it comes to incorporating technology into all parts of teaching. For example, BlueCrest School of Fashion and Design was the first institution to teach digital fashion to its students using computer-aided design software and equipment. Regardless, the College works with a number of technology partners, including IBM, Microsoft, and Google for Education, to provide free digital skill training to its students.

During the pandemic, the college also formed a relationship with Coursera to provide its students with free online courses. Africa is changing, and so are people's lives. Future generations will benefit from a more suitable learning environment.

BlueCrest University College is nestled within the very heart of Accra. It's student-centered educational program aims to help students reach their full potential and prepare them for future success. "We are committed to each student's achievement, assisting them in achieving their academic and career objectives so that they may go above and beyond what is required of them and attain true greatness."
In an endeavour to help the airline industry overcome its climate quandary- Eveliina Huurre, Senior Vice President (SVP), Sustainability at Finnair has called for a solution to the climate challenges of flying in the aviation industry.

Finnair, the flag carrier and largest airline in Finland has signed a letter of intent for a commitment to cooperate with the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) to bring carbon (CO2) emissions reduction targets in line with the UN Paris Climate Agreement.

In a media note from Finnair on April 1, Eveliina Huurre said: The climate challenges of flying need to be solved, so that the social and economic benefits of aviation can continue. Finnair has ambitious emissions reduction targets: by the end of 2025, we intend to halve the level of net emissions from 2019 and achieve carbon neutrality latest by the end of 2045. Commitment to the CO2 reduction path SBTi has developed for aviation aligns our targets with the Paris Climate Agreement.

To mitigate its climate impact, she noted that Finnair uses extensive tools which include reducing the weight of aircraft, developing fuel-efficient flight methods, using sustainable fuels (SAF) and offsets, and engaging customers in reducing aviation emissions.

According to her, Finnair is also actively exploring the possibilities of introducing new technologies into its operations.

"The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) is a global body enabling businesses to set ambitious emissions reductions targets in line with the latest climate science. It is focused on accelerating companies and financial institutions across the world to halve emissions before 2030 and achieve net-zero emissions before 2050. The initiative is a collaboration between CDP, the United Nations Global Compact, World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and one of the We Mean Business Coalition commitments."
06.04.2022 LISTEN

Amma Serwaa, a Ghanaian fashion designer and actress, has advised men to learn how to read their partner's menstrual cycle.

Speaking with Adwen the Love Doctor on Ghanas favourite adult edutainment show, In Bed with Adwen which is aired on eTV Ghana, Miss Serwaa said it was imperative for men to learn their partners cycle.

When youre with a woman, you need to study her cycle because there are days that she will be moody. Theres also the pre-menstrual syndrome (PMS) which comes with a whole lot of stress, so if you dont know about this as a man, it may affect your sexual life with your partner.

According to her, when men do not know about their partners menstrual cycle, it can strongly affect their sexual life negatively because they wouldnt know which days are safe for sex.

Miss Serwaa further disclosed that some women have suicidal thoughts when they are nearing their menstrual period because of the pain and the hormonal changes that occur in the body. At that moment, they start to feel like theyre useless or worthless and everyone hates them. Most men think that menstruation is all about bleeding and getting cramps but depression is also very high during that period, she added.

The actress advised that this among other things is why men need to learn about their partners menstrual cycles so that they know how to treat the woman at every point in time.
Chris Sattlberger/Getty Images/Tetra images RF

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality released its 2022 Governors Texas Environmental Excellence Award winners in a press release on April 4. The city of Midland was the winner in the water conservation category for its water pollution control plant secondary treatment upgrades. The city partnered with oil and natural gas company Pioneer Natural Resources for the upgrades.

The awards have been an annual program since 1993 and recognize achievements in environmental preservation and protection, the release said.
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BILLINGS, Mont. (AP)  A subsidiary of one of the largest U.S. providers of renewable energy pleaded guilty to criminal charges and was ordered to pay over $8 million in fines and restitution after at least 150 eagles were killed at its wind farms in eight states, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

NextEra Energy subsidiary ESI Energy was also sentenced to five years probation after being charged with three counts of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act during a court appearance in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The charges arose from the deaths of nine eagles at three wind farms in Wyoming and New Mexico.

In addition to those deaths, the company acknowledged the deaths of golden and bald eagles at 50 wind farms affiliated with ESI and NextEra since 2012, prosecutors said. Birds were killed in eight states: Wyoming, California, New Mexico, North Dakota, Colorado, Michigan, Arizona and Illinois.

NextEra, based in Juno Beach, Florida, bills itself as the worlds largest utility company by market value. It has more than 100 wind farms in the U.S. and Canada and also generates natural gas, nuclear and solar power

Almost all of the eagles killed at the NextEra subsidiary's facilities were struck by the blades of wind turbines, prosecutors said. Some turbines killed multiple eagles and because the carcasses are not always found, officials said the number killed was likely higher than the 150 birds cited in court documents.

Prosecutors said the company's failure to take steps to protect eagles or to obtain permits to kill the birds gave it an advantage over competitors that did take such steps  even as ESI and other NextEra affiliates received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal tax credits from the wind power they produced.

NextEra spokesperson Steven Stengel said the company didn't seek permits because it believes the law didn't require them for unintentional bird deaths. The company said its guilty plea will resolve all allegations over past fatalities and allow it to move forward without a continued threat of prosecution.

The criminal case comes amid a push by President Joe Biden for more renewable energy from wind, solar and other sources to help reduce climate changing emissions. It also follows a renewed commitment by federal wildlife officials under Biden to enforce protections for eagles and other birds under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Criminal prosecutions had been halted under former President Donald Trump for birds killed inadvertently by industry.

Its illegal to kill or harm eagles under the migratory bird act. However, a wide range of industries  from energy firms to manufacturing companies  have lobbied for years against enforcing the law for accidental bird deaths.

The bald eagle  the U.S. national symbol since the 1700s  saw its populations widely decimated last century due to harmful pesticides such as DDT and other problems. Following a dramatic recovery, it was removed from protection under the Endangered Species Act in 2007. Biologists say more than 300,000 bald eagles now occupy the U.S., not including Alaska.

Golden eagles have not fared as well, with populations considered stable but under pressure from wind farms, collisions with vehicles, illegal shootings and poisoning from lead ammunition.

Most of the eagles killed at the ESI and NextEra wind farms were golden eagles, according to court documents.

There are an estimated 31,800 golden eagles in the Western U.S. with an estimated 2,200 killed annually due to human causes, or about 60% of all deaths, according to a study released last week by leading eagle researchers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other entities.

The study concluded that golden eagle deaths will likely increase in the future because of wind energy development and other human activities.

Companies historically have been able to avoid prosecution under the century-old Migratory Bird Treaty law if they take steps to avoid deaths and seek permits for those that occur.

Charging documents said company representatives, including ESI's president, were warned that eagles would be killed if the company built two wind farms in central and southeastern Wyoming, and also knew about a risk to eagles when they authorized the repowering of a New Mexico wind farm, about 170 miles (274 kilometers) from Albuquerque.

The company proceeded anyway and at times ignored further advice from federal wildlife officials about how to minimize the deaths, according to court documents.

For more than a decade, ESI has violated (wildlife) laws, taking eagles without obtaining or even seeking the necessary permit, said Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Departments Environment and Natural Resources Division in a statement.

ESI agreed under a plea deal to spend up to $27 million during its five-year probationary period on measures to prevent future eagle deaths. That includes shutting down turbines at times when eagles are more likely to be present.

Despite those measures, wildlife officials anticipate that some eagles still could die. When that happens, the company will pay $29,623 per dead eagle under the plea deal.

NextEra President Rebecca Kujawa said collisions of birds with wind turbines are unavoidable accidents that should not be criminalized. She said the company is committed to reducing damage to wildlife from its projects.

We disagree with the government's underlying enforcement activity, Kujawa said in a statement. Building any structure, driving any vehicle, or flying any airplane carries with it a possibility that accidental eagle and other bird collisions may occur.

___

On Twitter follow Matthew Brown: @MatthewBrownAP
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It is always nice to hear that Midland ISD is giving more to those working in the school district. Every employee will receive a $2,000 stipend. Thats something most people in Midland can appreciate.

The stipends are a $6 million gesture from the school board to its employees. The stipend is possible because of a 2021-22 budget surplus and through the states recent action to adjust in-person attendance funding for this school year. The stipend will be paid at the end of May, according to the district.

It is exciting that the district continues to give to its staff. Superintendent Angelica Ramsey also told the Reporter-Telegram on Monday that a budget proposal for the 2022-23 also includes another salary hike for teachers and support staff.

In the proposal, starting teacher pay would increase to $58,500. Support staff pay would start at $13.50 an hour.

It is important to note that Ramsey continues the work by former Superintendents Ryder Warren and Orlando Riddick in boosting the salaries of teachers and support staff.

Since 2010, the starting salary for an entry level teacher has increased from around $40,050 to $57,500 during the 2021-22 school year. That is an increase of 43.57 percent. And when the starting pay increases, the pay for every teacher increases

Increasing the minimum support staff pay to $13.50 would be a considerable accomplishment for a district that was paying a minimum level of $10 an hour in 2020.

This financial boost for teachers and staff is a win for education in Midland. Higher salaries increase the chances Midland ISD staff will have more candidates for positions, and thats a good thing.

The hope here is Midland ISD beats Ector County ISD to become the first West Texas school district to pay starting teachers $60,000 a year. That would be an accomplishment that speaks volumes about how much our community values its teachers. It also would be strong message to teachers looking to start their career that Midland is serious about an academic turnaround. Midland already has a higher average teaching salary when compared to other districts around the region. The list is Midland ISD ($62,208), ECISD ($59,080), Greenwood ISD ($57,091), Abilene ISD ($53,761), Lubbock ISD ($51,764) and San Angelo ISD ($50,186).

The point here is Midland needs to be able to recruit the best teachers possible to fulfill the mission of preparing students for college and career, and a potential $58,500 starting salary would not only likely continue to be the highest in West Texas but would be competitive around the state.

Consider Midlands average apartment rent is more than $1,000 below the average around the state, according to ApartmentList.com, and that compensation package looks that much more attractive.

There are some who will say MISD is still lagging, and yes, the Midland ISD board will not make every single person happy. However, the metrics showed Midland ISD has made great strides  not only this week but over the past 12 years.

Midland ISD deserves credit here for showing teachers the respect they deserve.
RTHK: US targets Putin's daughters in wave of new sanctions

The United States on Wednesday announced sanctions targeting Russian President Vladimir Putins two adult daughters and said it was toughening penalties against Russian banks in retaliation for war crimes in Ukraine.

Britain and the European Union were also set to take additional steps, including a ban on new investment in Russia and an EU embargo on coal. The moves follow evidence of atrocities emerging in the wake of the retreat by Russian forces from areas around Kyiv, including the town of Bucha.

The US acted against two of Russia's largest banks, Sberbank and Alfa Bank, prohibiting assets from going through the US financial system and barring Americans from doing business with those two institutions.

In addition to sanctions aimed at Putins adult daughters, Mariya Putina and Katerina Tikhonova, the US is targeting Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, the wife and children of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and members of Russias Security Council, including Dmitry Medvedev, a former president and prime minister.

The penalties cut off all of Putins close family members from the US financial system and freeze any assets they hold in the country.

President Joe Biden called the latest round of sanctions devastating.

I made clear that Russia would pay a severe and immediate price for its atrocities in Bucha, he said in a tweet.

Biden was expected to sign an executive order that would ban new investment in Russia by Americans no matter where they are living. The US Treasury Department is also preparing more sanctions against major Russian state-owned enterprises, according to the White House.

Videos and images of bodies in the streets of Bucha after it was recaptured from Russian forces have unleashed a wave of indignation.

The European Commissions proposed ban on coal imports would be the first EU sanctions targeting Russias lucrative energy industry over its actions in Ukraine.

EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said energy was key to Russian President Vladimir Putins war coffers.

A billion euros is what we pay Putin every day for the energy he provides us since the beginning of the war. We have given him 35 billion euros. Compare that to the one billion that we have given to Ukraine in arms and weapons, Borrell said.

After several European countries announced the expulsion of Russian diplomats, the European Commission proposed a fifth package of sanctions, including a ban on coal imports, that could be adopted as soon as Wednesday once unanimously approved by the 27-nation bloc's ambassadors.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the coal ban would be worth 4 billion euros per year and that the EU had already started working on additional sanctions, including on oil imports.

She didnt mention natural gas. Agreement on targeting the fuel would be difficult to secure amid opposition from gas-dependent members such as Germany, the blocs largest economy. European Council President Charles Michel said the bloc should keep up its pressure on the Kremlin, however, and suggested an embargo on gas imports may be required at some point in the future.

The new package includes a ban on coal imports, Michel said on Wednesday. I think that measures on oil, and even gas, will also be needed, sooner or later.

The new package of measures proposed by the commission also includes sanctions on more individuals and four key Russian banks, among them VTB, the second-largest Russian bank. The bloc would also ban Russian vessels and Russian-operated vessels from EU ports. (AP)

This story has been published on: 2022-04-06. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
The Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi chairs the Third Foreign Ministers Meeting on the Afghan Issue Among the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan in Tunxi, Anhui Province on March 31, 2022. (Photo\Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

By Wang Jinguo and Zhang Lihui

On March 31, 2022, the Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi chaired the Third Foreign Ministers Meeting on the Afghan Issue Among the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan in Tunxi, Anhui Province. This is yet another major effort made by China for the peace, stability and development in Afghanistan amid the turbulent international situation, exerting far-reaching effects on preserving regional security.

The meeting brought together the foreign ministers or representatives from Afghanistans neighboring countries, including China, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. An extended meeting of the China-US-Russia consultation mechanism on the Afghan issue was held on the sidelines of the meeting. Given the current international situation, the meeting already accomplished a great feat by getting senior officials of Russia, the US and Afghanistan to sit at the same table.

The meeting sent a clear signal to the world, that is, the international community should not be so occupied by the Ukraine crisis as to ignore the Afghan issue. Instead, it should continue to increase the efforts and resources devoted to Afghanistan to help its people get through the trying times now. Although the security situation in the country has turned for the better, the Afghan people are still faced with multiple challenges both internally and externally.

The stern sanctions slapped by the US-led western bloc on the interim government of Afghanistan since its founding have not in any way mitigated the regional security situation, but increased uncertainties. Solving the Afghan issue would be a long, systematic and complicated process, which requires dialogue and communication rather than pressure and sanction. Chinas proposition on solving the Afghan issue, including Afghanistan creating a more open and inclusive political architecture, implementing mild and sound internal and external policies, and cutting all ties with all terrorist forces such as ISIS and East Turkistan Islamic Movement, has in a way gained international recognition. It will be an effective way to solve the issue at root.

Essentially, the US has been a destructive force in both the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the Afghan issue, and its actions are still aggravating the two crises. Its worth noting that all participating foreign ministers and representatives spoke highly of Chinas efforts to set up a platform of dialogue between Afghanistan and the neighboring countries, saying the dialogue has helped regional countries, especially Afghanistans interim government and the neighbors, to understand each other, and will facilitate the converging of consensus and provision of more substantial aid for Afghanistan.

The meeting yielded bountiful outcomes by issuing two important documents, Joint Statement of the Third Foreign Ministers Meeting on the Afghan Issue Among the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan, and Tunxi Initiative of Afghanistans Neighboring Countries on Supporting Afghanistans Economic Reconstruction and Practical Cooperation. The two documents reflected the neighboring countries common political stance and decision to provide Afghanistan with substantial support in a range of key areas, including humanitarian aid, interconnectivity, economy and trade, agriculture, energy and electric power, and capacity building.

The meeting on the Afghan issue is an important step taken by neighboring countries to jointly step up the support and aid to Afghanistan, and a meaningful attempt by the international community to search for a new way of resolving hotspot issues. Lets hope the unwavering efforts by all concerned parties will give the Afghan people a bright future.

(Wang Jinguo, professor at the School of Politics and International Relations and the Institute for Central Asian studies of Lanzhou University; Zhang Lihui, doctoral candidate at School of Marxism, Lanzhou University)

Editor's note: This article is originally published on haiwainet.cn, and is translated from Chinese into English and edited by the China Military Online. The information, ideas or opinions appearing in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn.
Members of the House leadership conduct a press conference in the House chamber on March 30, 2022. From left, Reps. Leila Staffler, Tina Sablan, Corina Magofna, Speaker Edmund S. Villagomez, Vice Speaker BJ Attao, Reps. Donald Manglona and Sheila Babauta.
WASHINGTON (AP)  Attorney General Merrick Garland has tested positive for COVID-19 and will quarantine at home for five days, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

Garland is the second Cabinet official to announce a positive test result on Wednesday. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo also tested positive for the virus using an at-home antigen test.

The two officials are among more than a dozen attendees of the Gridiron Club dinner to test positive for the virus in the past few days. Saturday night's white-tie society affair was attended by some of the nations most prominent political leaders, journalists and media executives. Guests had been asked to show proof of vaccination but were not required to be tested for the virus and many mingled around without masks during the event.

Tom DeFrank, the president of the Gridiron Club, said the group knew of 14 guests who had attended and then tested positive. Many of the cases involve guests who were seated at three tables, he said.

There is no way of being certain about when they first contracted COVID, DeFrank said. But they did interact with other guests during the night, and we have to be realistic and expect some more cases.

The announcement from the Justice Department comes hours after Garland held a news conference in Washington, standing side-by-side with the deputy attorney general, FBI director and other Justice Department officials.

The Justice Department says Garland asked to be tested after learning that he may have been exposed to the virus. Officials say he is not experiencing symptoms, is fully vaccinated and has received a booster.

The Justice Department said Garland would isolate at his home for at least five days and work remotely. The department said it would also conduct contact tracing in line with guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Raimondo's office said she was experiencing mild symptoms and was sharing the news out of an abundance of transparency."

The nations capital appears to be experiencing an outbreak, hitting not only Cabinet officials but also members of Congress, staffers in the White House and members of the media.

Reps. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Joaquin Castro, D-Tex., have also announced they tested positive for the virus. Both had attended the Gridiron dinner.

Other members of Congress including Reps. Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Scott Peters of California, both Democrats, have also said they tested positive.

The White House on Wednesday also said Jamal Simmons, the communications director for Vice President Kamala Harris, had also tested positive and that Simmons was in close contact with Harris. Harris' office said she would follow CDC guidelines and consult with her doctor but planned to continue with her schedule.

The CDC says people vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19 are much less likely to suffer adverse outcomes, including serious illness and death, from the virus compared to those who are unvaccinated.

___

Associated Press writer Zeke Miller contributed to this report.
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."  Reinhold Niebuhr, Serenity Prayer.

Harry Truman understood Reinhold Niebuhrs Serenity Prayer. Because of this, NATOs founder would surely resist NATO expansion. In 1947, Truman was confronted with what is to us a familiar challenge: Soviet (Russian) aggression. Breaking wartime accords, the Soviets occupied Eastern Europe and schemed to overtake the Western half. This was a strategic challenge of the highest order, which seemingly posed a binary choice: appeasement or war.

Recalling Neville Chamberlain, Truman refused appeasement. He also realized a bloody war to roll back Soviet aggression did not serve the national interest. But Truman knew his Niebuhr. Made famous by 12-step programs, Niebuhr originally penned his plea for war-weary Americans. But the philosopher-theologians prayer came to encapsulate early Cold War philosophy to counter Soviet aggression while avoiding full-fledged war.

Rejecting both combat and concession, Trumans middle way was the 12-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A collective security pact, NATO was the foundation of Americas postwar containment policy. Via NATO, the West contained Soviet expansion until it would collapse from internal contradictions. Hardly the stuff of action movies, NATO and containment were stolid, sober and serious answers to Soviet imperialism. It also worked. Despite strategic blunders and inter-alliance tensions, NATO held firm and the Soviet Union crumbled from within.

Seventy-five years later, the West is confronted with a reprise of Russian imperialism. Like our forbearers, there are those so filled with understandable umbrage and outrage that they seek an aggressive, affirmative response: NATO expansion. In the heat of the moment, we must keep our heads and remember Niebuhr and Trumans sage example. Both understood that America had to restrain its inner-Yosemite Sam and thread a political needle by countering aggression without spiraling into an atomic conflagration. NATO expansion into Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and even Finland are needlessly provocative measures, which could also undermine the alliance.

NATOs current united stand against Russian aggression resulted from decades of slow-gestating security, economic, political and cultural integration. In theory, NATO is open to those nations that meet certain economic and political criteria and contribute to Euro-Atlantic security. Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine simply do not meet those standards. In addition to lagging economic development, all three bring with them pre-existing conflicts, which could drag the alliance into war.

Realists have bemoaned NATO expansion into Poland (1999) and the Baltics (2004) for sparking Russias ire and the present conflict. These specialists are, to some extent, correct. But their analysis misses the point. First, Poland and the Baltic states are sovereign nations equipped to make security considerations that run counter to Russian desires. Moreover, Russia did not heatedly object, which meant expansion did not bring with it an imminent threat of war.

But 2022 is not the late 1990s and early 2000s. Today, adding Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and even Finland invites further conflict with a humiliated and nuclear-armed Russia. This is no time for provocations on Russian borders.

NATO is only as strong as its members commitment to Article V. The Three Musketeers proviso pledges each member state to consider an attack on one as an attack on all. It is wholly foreseeable that a NATO state could deem a conflict with Russia over far-flung Moldova, for instance, as outside its security interests and refuse to invoke Article V. Such a scenario could be the alliances undoing and Putins ultimate fantasy.

A wise response is one that salvages Ukrainian sovereignty, severely punishes Russia, forestalls a wider war, and prevents future conflict. Be prepared. There is no quick and easy solution to this foreign policy crisis. The West must accept it cannot end Putins aggression in one fell swoop. It is a challenge that must be managed, confronted and thwarted. This is no time for dramatic gestures. Trumans example and Niebuhrs Serenity Prayer point the way.
A genuinely realistic assessment of the NATO expansion process of the previous decades was that it did not go far enough, was not militarily serious enough, and that, while offering Moscow an open-ended opportunity to be part of the West, the alliance was prepared to return to the containment policies of the Cold War. Russia, not NATO, was on trial, and, as Ronald Reagan might have said: the alliance was prepared to trust but verify.

Vladimir Putin is now exacting a particularly Russian kind of price for the Wests failure to bring in Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. And while additional forces have begun to flow toward the new Eastern Front, these are late to arrive, too few in number, widely dispersed, lack sufficient combat power or logistics infrastructure, and consume an unsustainable proportion of shrunken American and allied militaries.

Perhaps even more important, with the rise of a revisionist China and the trauma of lost wars in the greater Middle East, the United States has developed a kind of strategic tunnel vision, increasingly unable to see its global role.

In addition, the mechanisms of the Atlantic alliance have become dangerously rusty and perhaps corrupted. In his powerful pitch to the Congress, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky bruited the idea of a sort of League of the Geopolitical West, for the defense of at-risk front-line states like Ukraine or Taiwan. Zelensky rightly noted that Japan, for example, is liberal and Western in ways that some current NATO members may not be. Russian subversion and Chinese Belt-and-Road debt-trap diplomacy may have crippled NATO as an instrument of containment.

While current sympathy for Ukraines plight is in the news, a geopolitical Realism and the impulse to blame the West first have become too deeply rooted in current political discourse to expect the Ukraine shame to change such minds for long.

There has been quiet conversations about how to halt this conflict by creating an off-ramp for Putin that would allow him to be able to declare mission accomplished and end the worst of the slaughter. Even if the first principle of any such deal is likely to force Kyiv to give up its desire to join the institutional West and the Atlantic alliance.

Still, the brutality of the Russian campaign in Ukraine has, at least for the moment, muffled the claims of national conservatives, political science Realists and populist demagogues of the Tucker Carlson variety that Putins invasion was a response to NATO enlargement, an attempt to re-establish a legitimate sphere of influence or strategic depth.

Even Donald Trump has dialed down his bromance with the genius of Moscow.

Not even Putins own declarations that Ukraine was an inalienable part of Russias spiritual space can counter the Realist conviction that the attack is just the working of a simple bloodless national interest. Neither does the constant striving of Ukrainians, against great odds, to fight the Russians and their proxies. The Ukrainians who are the central actors in this drama, cannot realistically be regarded as puppets of the West.

Regardless of political beliefs and NATOs flaws, the Ukraine war makes plain that Putin is building a new Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe. It is critical for the United States, for the peace of Europe and the durability of geopolitical liberalism that this curtain stands as far east as possible, and that the West initiate a strategy to undermine its foundations and eventually to tear it down. This is an epoch-defining challenge to the NATO alliance, a second bite of the post-Cold-War apple.

It is likewise a moment that will define the United States as a genuinely global power.
An overnight fire on Monday that heavily damaged a small Southeast Texas town's high school also destroyed copies of the state's standardized exit exam students had taken last week.

Investigators believe the blaze was not accidental. No injuries were reported.

The fire destroyed about 20 percent of the high school, damaging the principal's office, about 20 classrooms, the library, science wing and cafeteria.

High school Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS tests taken by students last week also burned up in the fire.

"We were going to send them to Austin today," said Needville Independent School District Superintendent Curtis Rhodes. "We're talking with the (Texas Education) Agency to see what to do now."

Texas law requires students to pass the tests in order to graduate.

Classes throughout the school district were canceled Monday.

Rhodes said classes for pre-kindergarten through eighth grade were scheduled to resume Tuesday. High school classes would resume next week with staggered schedules _ freshmen and sophomores in the morning, juniors and seniors in the afternoon.

"We'll finish strong, rebuild and come back next year," Rhodes said.

The district's school buildings are grouped on the same campus as the fire-ravaged main high school building, which was built in the 1940s.

Needville is a town of about 3,300, located about 40 miles southwest of Houston.
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP)  A subsidiary of one of the largest U.S. providers of renewable energy pleaded guilty to criminal charges and was ordered to pay over $8 million in fines and restitution after at least 150 eagles were killed at its wind farms in eight states, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

NextEra Energy subsidiary ESI Energy was also sentenced to five years probation after being charged with three counts of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act during a court appearance in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The charges arose from the deaths of nine eagles at three wind farms in Wyoming and New Mexico.

In addition to those deaths, the company acknowledged the deaths of golden and bald eagles at 50 wind farms affiliated with ESI and NextEra since 2012, prosecutors said. Birds were killed in eight states: Wyoming, California, New Mexico, North Dakota, Colorado, Michigan, Arizona and Illinois.

NextEra, based in Juno Beach, Florida, bills itself as the worlds largest utility company by market value. It has more than 100 wind farms in the U.S. and Canada and also generates natural gas, nuclear and solar power

Almost all of the eagles killed at the NextEra subsidiary's facilities were struck by the blades of wind turbines, prosecutors said. Some turbines killed multiple eagles and because the carcasses are not always found, officials said the number killed was likely higher than the 150 birds cited in court documents.

Prosecutors said the company's failure to take steps to protect eagles or to obtain permits to kill the birds gave it an advantage over competitors that did take such steps  even as ESI and other NextEra affiliates received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal tax credits from the wind power they produced.

NextEra spokesperson Steven Stengel said the company didn't seek permits because it believes the law didn't require them for unintentional bird deaths. The company said its guilty plea will resolve all allegations over past fatalities and allow it to move forward without a continued threat of prosecution.

The criminal case comes amid a push by President Joe Biden for more renewable energy from wind, solar and other sources to help reduce climate changing emissions. It also follows a renewed commitment by federal wildlife officials under Biden to enforce protections for eagles and other birds under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Criminal prosecutions had been halted under former President Donald Trump for birds killed inadvertently by industry.

Its illegal to kill or harm eagles under the migratory bird act. However, a wide range of industries  from energy firms to manufacturing companies  have lobbied for years against enforcing the law for accidental bird deaths.

The bald eagle  the U.S. national symbol since the 1700s  saw its populations widely decimated last century due to harmful pesticides such as DDT and other problems. Following a dramatic recovery, it was removed from protection under the Endangered Species Act in 2007. Biologists say more than 300,000 bald eagles now occupy the U.S., not including Alaska.

Golden eagles have not fared as well, with populations considered stable but under pressure from wind farms, collisions with vehicles, illegal shootings and poisoning from lead ammunition.

Most of the eagles killed at the ESI and NextEra wind farms were golden eagles, according to court documents.

There are an estimated 31,800 golden eagles in the Western U.S. with an estimated 2,200 killed annually due to human causes, or about 60% of all deaths, according to a study released last week by leading eagle researchers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other entities.

The study concluded that golden eagle deaths will likely increase in the future because of wind energy development and other human activities.

Companies historically have been able to avoid prosecution under the century-old Migratory Bird Treaty law if they take steps to avoid deaths and seek permits for those that occur.

Charging documents said company representatives, including ESI's president, were warned that eagles would be killed if the company built two wind farms in central and southeastern Wyoming, and also knew about a risk to eagles when they authorized the repowering of a New Mexico wind farm, about 170 miles (274 kilometers) from Albuquerque.

The company proceeded anyway and at times ignored further advice from federal wildlife officials about how to minimize the deaths, according to court documents.

For more than a decade, ESI has violated (wildlife) laws, taking eagles without obtaining or even seeking the necessary permit, said Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Departments Environment and Natural Resources Division in a statement.

ESI agreed under a plea deal to spend up to $27 million during its five-year probationary period on measures to prevent future eagle deaths. That includes shutting down turbines at times when eagles are more likely to be present.

Despite those measures, wildlife officials anticipate that some eagles still could die. When that happens, the company will pay $29,623 per dead eagle under the plea deal.

NextEra President Rebecca Kujawa said collisions of birds with wind turbines are unavoidable accidents that should not be criminalized. She said the company is committed to reducing damage to wildlife from its projects.

We disagree with the government's underlying enforcement activity, Kujawa said in a statement. Building any structure, driving any vehicle, or flying any airplane carries with it a possibility that accidental eagle and other bird collisions may occur.

___

On Twitter follow Matthew Brown: @MatthewBrownAP
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Saturday will be a busy one in Plainview.

This weekend will be the monthly second Saturday celebration and there are a few activities planned for the occasion while the Contemporary Art Museum of Plainview opens its next exhibit down the street.

PAPER is a collection of works from multiple artists  all teachers from universities across the state. The exhibit is curated by Kelly Moran. It will be open through the end of May.

Featured artists include Carlos Hernandez, Richard Ricky Armendariz, Sangmi Yoo, Ryan OMalley, Liv Monique Johnson, Jesse Shaw and Xenia Fedorchenko.

The artists come from a variety of backgrounds with several credits to their name.

Theyve worked with collections across the world. For example, Armendariz has work featured in South Korea, Bethlehem, Tel Aviv, Germany and India. OMalleys work has been displayed in Estonia, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Italy and China, to name a few. Shaw has been featured in exhibitions in New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Florida, etc.

The local art museum strives to host at least three major exhibitions each year highlighting a variety of talented artists from around the world.

The museum is also a service organization.

Those interested in taking a browse through the museum can do so every Friday through Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. The museum is free to enter and open to everyone.
Courtesy of DeLorean Motor Company

DeLorean Motor Company teased everyone with an image of its electric vehicle that will be built here in San Antonio, but it won't be unveiled in the Alamo City. About a month after DeLorean announced its plans to revive its headquarters in San Antonio at Port SA, the company released an image of the new electric vehicle on Monday, April 4.

The vehicle will be built in San Antonio with plans to unveil it officially on August 18, according to a news release. Except, it won't be unveiled here. DeLorean plans to unveil the vehicle on the Awards Ramp at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance during Monterey Car Week in Northern California. The vehicle will sit at Pebble Beach for three days.
After slumbering in his tin for two years, Jesse Mata will be officially crowned "His Royal Heinous King" King Anchovy LV at Fiesta San Antonio's annual Cornyation event. The self-proclaimed raunchiest, cheapest event with a purpose, will cook up campy satire in the kingdom of San Antonio this week with six shows.

More than a king  Anchovy is San Antonio's leading jester. For the unfamiliar, Cornyation serves to poke fun at local fat cats, politicians, and cultural events that were major players in the zeitgeist of the past year.

Since the spectacle hasn't been staged at the Charline McCombs Empire Theatre since Fiesta 2019, there are several years of back-logged content to sift through. It goes without saying that the Cornyation cast, filled with seasoned performers, artists and local fixtures, have an ambitious task ahead of them.

"If it was a marquee story over the past three years, it will probably be there," Mata shares with MySA. Of course this includes the big Texas freeze of February 2021, local political stories, and unavoidably  the pandemic.

As for his role, instead of simply introducing himself (since he's been waiting in the King Anchovy queue for so long) Mata will be "sitting in judgment of everything that's been happening" as he embodies a sort of "mystical Walter Mercado-like figure."

Mata also teases appearances from the two establishment kings of Fiesta, King Antonio XCIX (Barton Tinsley Simpson) and Rey Feo LXIII (Augie Cortez) during Wednesday performances.

File photo

After growing up in San Antonio and leaving to attend college at Baylor University, Mata was exposed to his first Cornyation celebration when he returned to the city around 2001. He was immediately taken. "I had just moved back and was trying to start my life here. I always loved Fiesta as a kid and decided that I wanted to kind of explore it, you know, get involved in as many ways as I could."

During those days, according to Mata, the Painted Lady Bed and Breakfast on Broadway would host Fiesta viewing parties. From Cornyation and the Battle of Flowers Parade, they'd head to the Bonham Exchange night club.

"That's where all of queer gay San Antonio would end up," explains Mata." In going to those events, that's how I kind of learned about Cornyation and its history in town. It was just something that I knew I wanted to be a part of. So that's how my love for it started and then in participating, it just you know, got a lot deeper."

By 2003, he began helping out by designing props and the Cornyation badge  made of glitter, rhinestones and various baubles. The following year, he was driving back from the coast when his good friend Rod Gonzalez intervened with a call and delegated him the duty of designer. The topic at hand was the Martha Stewart prison scandal. The final look was a dancing Martha donning a bird cage and prison orange ensemble.

Billy Calzada /San Antonio Express-News Billy Calzada /Staff file photo A snapshot of Cornyation's 2018 show. B. Kay Richter

"My role just kind of morphed from there to script writer to board member, working with Ray to kind of putting the show together and now finally, King Anchovy," says Mata, who shares he doesn't personally particularly care for the salty fish.

Cornyation had its first run through the 1950s and 1960s, led by founding fathers Russell Hill Rogers and Joe Salek, former Director of the San Antonio Little Theater, according to a book on the event by Trinity professor Amy L. Stone. At the time, the show was performed to family audiences at the Fiesta event A Night in Old San Antonio (NIOSA). In the early days, it explicitly served to mock the Coronation of the Queen of the Order of the Alamo, a Fiesta-season debutante pageant. During the '60s, the cast began behaving more provocatively by incorporating criticism of national and local politicians into the act. Then, in 1965, the family-oriented Fiesta event cut ties with Cornyation for being too vulgar. Unanchored, it obsolesced.

It was revived in the 1980s, by two gay former costume designers Ray Chavez and Robert Cotham "Bob" Jolly. For eight years, it was performed in the Bonham Exchange. With the venue change allowing for more envelope pushing than ever before, it became the cool place to be during Fiesta. In 1990, it was relocated to its current venue, and around this time began amassing a wider following. During the 90s, the show also began raising funds to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Fabian Villa, for mySA.com

"The fact of the matter is, a large part, a large number of the folks who put the show on every year are queer, or gay, lesbian, trans, what have you. It's been a place where we can gather and have a creative outlet and a place where drag is celebrated by the entire community and, you know, so is creativity, and visual art and all that kind of stuff," adds Mata. "So yeah, it's been a valuable space over the decades and I would like to be there for decades more to help it through."

To this day, the event is a major fundraiser, racking up $3 million since its revival. This year they are raising money for the San Antonio AIDS Foundation, the Black Effort Against the Threat (BEAT) of AIDS, Thrive Youth Center, the LGBTQ homeless youth center, and the Robert Rehm Theater Arts Scholarship. One fundraiser unique to Mata's reign, is an the inaugural anchovy art auction, featuring work from local artists. "Anybody who knows me knows I'm an art collector. I'm an art nut. And so I had to incorporate that somehow," says Mata.

Over the years, Cornyation has developed as the de facto winking Fiesta event attended by all, including the same prominent local figures that are the subject of its jokes. For many, it's uniquely reflective surface has served as a necessary piece of the puzzle in Fiesta as a whole, originally established as a commemoration of Texas' win at the Battle of the Alamo and San Jacinto.

"Especially in the last 20 years, there's been  I don't wanna call it backlash  but like, almost a pragmatic view of what Fiesta is celebrating. People rightfully say, you know, this is like, a colonialist holiday, or it's you know, a celebration of oppression or theft of land. And I will just say that at Cornyation we are irreverent, right, like, we speak truth to power, we take on everybody. It's an equal hand, and I think people appreciate that," says Mata, King Anchovy LV.

"They appreciate the ability to go to a Fiesta event that kind of like takes an honest, funny, hard look at everything that's going on in the world. And, you know, we're able to have a good time and all laugh at each other and ourselves."

Tickets are still on sale for Fiesta San Antonio's official Cornyation: The Court of the Resilient (?) Magnificence. Shows will run twice a night from Tuesday, April 5 to Thurday, April 7, at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Get them here.
The story of Yellowbird, the current No. 1 hot sauce sold by Whole Foods/Amazon, celebrating its 10th year with a Hot Ones collaboration, is a triumphant one. But it's no fun to start there.

In the beginning, it was very bad. So bad that folks couldn't even keep it down.

It was 2012 and Yellowbird co-founder George Milton had been experimenting with hot sauces at home. He entered the annual Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival as an individual with his latest recipe. As he walked around sampling from each unmarked ramekin, he figured out which one was his and parked himself nearby to gauge the reaction among attendees.

"The facial expressions were 100 percent negative," he says.

Milton cringed inside as one after another hot sauce lover cringed on the outside. He even saw a couple people spit out his creation onto the pavement.

"That was definitely one place where I could have ended my hot sauce journey," Milton says. " It was a great learning experience."

We know that he learned from that experience (don't put bell peppers in hot sauce, not everyone likes fermented food) because the Austin-based brand is everywhere: H-E-B, on Hot Ones, on the table at your favorite restaurant. Let's go with another failure before we get there, though.

How about the time Milton sent out a bottle of fermented sauce that exploded in a local chef's car?

Milton was busy, as he says, like a mad scientist working on various hot sauces, including one with a Champagne yeast. He killed the yeast  or so he thought  which is a good thing in the world of fermented hot sauces. He gave it to a chef at Whip In, and when she opened the cap, it turned into a gruesome scene: pureed peppers on the ceiling, on her clothes, everywhere. She called and jokingly asked if Milton was trying to kill her.

"We popped some of those bottles in our backyard and it literally shot up like 15, 20 feet in the air," he says. Link laughs.

They can laugh about it now. In 2013, the fledgling company sold just 4,200 bottles of hot sauce. Last year, that number was 2.4 million. The only way to get there was by messing around and making mistakes.

Yellowbird

Milton and co-founder (and IRL partner) Erin Link moved to Austin in 2012. Both spicy food lovers and athletes, they were dismayed by the amount of sugar and artificial ingredients present in commercial hot sauces. Link grew peppers in the backyard, and Milton would transform them into various spicy concoctions. Before long, Milton landed on a habanero-based sauce with, among typical ingredients like garlic and salt, tangerine juice and carrots.

They started taking the product to local farmers markets and passing it out to friends, but it wasn't until Milton, a musician, started hearing more buzz about his habanero sauce than his latest album that he realized that they had a hit on their hands. Now they just needed to get it into bottles for distribution  and a name. Milton had an idea, but Link, who specializes in design and branding, wouldn't agree on the name Yellowbird unless her partner could prove the concept to her.

Milton's reasoning was that some little birds in Thailand are immune to capsaicin  the component in a pepper that produces a burning sensation  and also Tweety. The yellow Looney Tunes canary was, "always sweet and approachable, seemingly," Milton says, "but would drop an anvil on your head if you crossed them."

It worked, and Link got to work on the exterior of the bottle while Milton figured out the interior. Spicy but approachable was the simple credo.

"We thought it would be really cool to move away from the male-centric, inaccessible past of hot sauces," Milton says. "Hot sauces are traditionally marketed in a very male way: skulls and crossbones and ... "

"Pain." Link finishes his sentence, explaining their decidedly un-macho philosophy on heat, "that spice is more of a euphoric feeling than it is a painful feeling."

Yellowbird

The pair began producing the thick habanero sauce in small batches for small Austin-based grocers like Thom's Market and Wheatsville Co-op in 2013. That same year, the duo entered the habanero sauce into the Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Fest  and won. From worst to first, as they say.

The following year, Milton got a phone call from Whole Foods. At that point, his cell number was on every label of Yellowbird, and an interested party at the grocery giant, still in its pre-Amazon period, wanted to stock it at the flagship Austin store.

"We had we had some misses there too," Link says.

In an effort to scale up to meet demand, Yellowbird began using a third-party manufacturer, who they discovered was watering down the product without telling the owners.

"We ended up having to take a bunch of product out of Whole Foods," she says. "We just learned a bunch of really hard, really expensive lessons that way. Well, certainly expensive for a self-funded company."

Since fixing the quality control issue by taking manufacturing back into their own hands  Yellowbird makes everything in San Marcos with ingredients sourced from small and mid-sized farms  the company has taken off, now available in H-E-Bs across Texas and in grocery stores nationwide.

Yellowbird

The duo also chalk up a lot of their success to serendipity.

Part of their marketing strategy in the early days was education-based: showing up at Wheatsville or Whole Foods and passing out free samples to customers. One day, Link happened to give one to a writer from Thrillist, who casually mentioned that they were going to write about the growing hot sauce brand. Little did they know that the piece ended up being a showdown taste test with the best-selling hot sauce in America, Huy Fong Sriracha. The old red standby narrowly edged out the newcomer, but the closeness between the two brands earned Yellowbird nationwide publicity.

"That was a lot of luck," Link says. "A lot of being in the right place at the right time with the right products."

Yellowbird

Today, Yellowbird is a company of 30, and has the capacity to produce 20,000 bottles of its sauce per day in San Marcos. The full line includes, in addition to the classic habanero, jalapeno, serrano, blue agave sriracha, and ghost pepper varieties, organic versions of many of those, and a limited-edition line, which includes Bliss & Vinegar, released to coincide with Hot Ones Season 16.

Milton explains that, of course he likes to experiment  that's how Yellowbird came to be in the first place  but for the first three years, he and Link only sold the habanero condiment. It wasn't broke, so they didn't fix it, plus, the bright orange bottle stood out in a crowded field of reds and greens. Since then, though, they've been branching out, and for the last two years, Milton has been work-shopping a sauce for Hot Ones. Link was an original donator to the show's Kickstarter back in 2015, and for years fans have been asking them to make a sauce for the show.

"My name is on their plaque in their store," Link says. "We've known them for a while."

First We Feast

Milton's ideas would get kicked back as too hot or too mild or too out there. The one that wound up making it onto the show, Bliss & Vinegar, is one that might make hot sauce purists balk. With a red serrano base, the flavor profile is filled out with strawberries and coconut for an oddly satisfying, acidic kick.

The people have spoken, too. On Amazon, it has an average of 4.5 out of 5 stars with almost 300 reviews, some that read "Best. Sauce. Ever." and "Aqui Hay Sabor!!"

"It's about doing something that you really love to do and love to get lost in," Link says. "A lot of it is just making sure that we're still doing a lot of the stuff that we love every day instead of ... you know, grinding all the time."

Yellowbird

As popular as Yellowbird is, they've found a number of imitators, particularly those who have tried to copy the bottle and cap design. Link and Milton say it's flattering, and that what they do isn't much of a secret. Once, Redditors started a thread focused on trying to crack the code on making Yellowbird habanero sauce at home. Milton chimed in and gave them the entire recipe. Even though shelf space is at a premium considering the increase in hot sauce brands over the last decade, they welcome the competition in an industry that is expected to nearly double in size to $4.38 billion in 2028.

"We really don't want the hot sauce market to get less crowded," Milton says. "In general, I think if anything, I would just hope that it gets less crowded with bad stuff."
Call it divine intervention, meant to be, or simply the universe serving your happily ever after on a silver platter. For one San Antonio woman, she planned her engagement even before meeting the man she would soon spend the rest of her life with. Little did she know, a version of her soon-to-be husband showed up in a dream.

Alexis Porter-Elliott comes from an aviation family. Flying is in their blood. She tells MySA she had no interest in pursuing a life in the sky. Shes studying to become a registered dietician and has already launched her own business, Fly High Nutrition, LLC which she describes as helping the aviation community sustain a healthy lifestyle while flying.

But suddenly, she had the itch to get in a cockpit and log the miles. It wasnt until she signed up for flight school at the U.S. Aviation Academy in Denton that she would meet her groom.

I had a dream about him before I even met him, Porter-Elliott says. I started flying February 2021. I had a dream November, December of 2020 of a guy in a uniform, and I saw his outline, but I didnt see his face. When I walked in (into the academy), I said to myself oh my gosh, thats the man from my dreams.

Courtesy, Alexis Porter-Elliott

That flight instructor was Matthew Stabler, a Houston native now training to become a commercial pilot. Unbeknownst to him, his future was already mapped out and soon about to become a revelation.

After finishing at the academy, Porter-Elliott didnt waste any time securing the life she dreamt. She mustered up the courage and made a very bold move.

I just walked up to him and kissed him. I told him, You dont know it yet, but youre gonna become my husband, she says.

It wasnt until December 2021 that the happy couple would seal the deal in an extravagant and well-thought-out proposal at the San Antonio Zoo during its popular Zoo Lights event. Friends and family had created a walk down memory lane for Porter-Elliott on cards, sharing some of her first thoughts about Stabler.

Courtesy, Alexis Porter-Elliott

Surrounded by the people she loves most, and with a little help from the zoos lions, Stabler got down on one knee and asked her to be his forever co-captain.

It was magical. It exceeded my expectations. I was not expecting that, Porter-Elliott remembers.

Courtesy, Alexis Porter-Elliott

She had wanted an engagement at the zoo because of her love for cats as a professed "crazy cat lady," and because of the work the San Antonio Zoo does to help animals. There's also a running joke about Stabler portraying the antics of actor Leonardo DiCaprio in his 2002 film Catch Me If You Can. Porter-Elliott referred to Stabler as her Leo, which is Latin for lion.

The couple now plan to wed this December at her parents hangar, which is being built in New Braunfels.
Being an avid hiker now, I'm part of several Facebook hiking groups in San Antonio. Fellow nature lovers share the beauty they see while out on the local trails. So, when I saw someone post about a hidden reading nook at a San Antonio park, I had to take on the challenge.

It wasn't easy, and I won't tell you where it is, as the thrill of finding it kept me wondering about the nearly endless trails at Bamberger Nature Park on 12401 Babcock Road. Thanks to the adventure, I stumbled across several gems when searching for the reading nook placed in the park by the Warbler Creek Secret Book Club. The club placed the little library in the park in August 2021.

Priscilla Aguirre, MySA.com

Priscilla Aguirre, MySA.com

When I started my journey more than a month ago, I parked in the small lot offered at Bamberger Nature Park, believing my scouting skills would somehow come to the surface and I'd find the reading nook easily. I didn't. In my first attempt, I jogged about four miles before giving up that day. It wasn't all lost. I found a beautiful bridge overlooking a dry creek, but no area where I could grab a book and read on a nice hammock.

You see, Bamberger Nature Park may seem small at first glance. However, the 70-acre park connects to the Leon Creek Greenway system, which is part of the city-wide 82-mile Howard W. Peak Greenway Trail System. It has several different pathways that lead to dirt and paved trails.

Priscilla Aguirre, MySA.com

The Leon Creek Greenway North (7.7 miles) is the longest trail at the park, while the shortest is the Babcock Connector Trail at 0.2 miles.

J. David Bamberg donated the tree-filled natural area at no cost to the city for an expressed designation to be called a nature park. Former San Antonio Mayor Howard W. Peak signed the ordinance on December 18, 1997, according to the city's parks and recreation department.

On my second visit weeks later, I visited the same path I trekked the previous time but went further in hopes of something I missed in my previous route. However, I only passed abandoned cars, shady trees, and lots of litter among the trails. By then, I already walked about seven miles in the park.

Priscilla Aguirre, MySA.com

Priscilla Aguirre, MySA.com

Some birdy in my hiking groups must have told the organizer at Warbler Creek Secret Book Club about my endeavors because someone from its Instagram page reached out to me and offered me a hint. If it wasn't for that hint, I don't think I would have found the reading nook on my third visit. Along the route, I also stumbled upon a nice bench with a heavy amount of graffiti overlooking the creek.

My friend and I walked about two miles before we found the cute reading nook hidden in the middle of the park. It was a great sense of accomplishment, even if I had help from the book club. When I walked up, I found two red chairs, the little library, and a hammock.

Priscilla Aguirre, MySA.com

Priscilla Aguirre, MySA.com

Inside the library, there were several books in all genres, including children's books. I also found hand sanitizer, bandages, and a guests list. After reading the sign-in list, I'm glad I wasn't the only one who traveled miles and miles searching for the gem.

While I won't give a hint (sorry, I can't give it away), I know you nature lovers will have just as much fun as I did when trying to find all these gems inside Bamberger. Happy hiking.
As early primary voting began in the Midwestern battleground state of Ohio on Tuesday, social media users questioned the authenticity of a photo used in a campaign ad by U.S. Senate candidate Josh Mandel. In the ad, the former state treasurer invokes Martin Luther King Jr. and his own time as a Marine to vocally oppose critical race theory.

The 30-second advertisement promoting his run in the states heated Republican primary features photographs of Mandel in Iraq, including one of him standing in the middle of a group of five Black soldiers set to a voiceover saying, I didnt do two tours in Anbar province, fighting alongside Marines of every color, to come home and be called a racist. Theres nothing racist about stopping critical race theory and loving America.

Social media users shared the photo falsely suggesting the image was digitally altered to insert Mandels face over the body of a Black soldier.

Heres a closer look at the claim that has spread widely online.

CLAIM: Mandel inserted his face over that of a Black soldier in an image used in a campaign advertisement.

THE FACTS: A campaign spokesperson and a representative for the agency that created the advertisement said the image of Mandel with the soldiers is authentic. Both representatives denied that the photograph had been altered to superimpose Mandels face onto someone elses body.

A Twitter user shared a screenshot of the frame in which the candidates hands appeared visibly darker than the rest of his body, writing: To prove he isnt racist  Ohio U.S. Senate candidate @JoshMandelOhio put a photo of himself standing with black soldiers in his latest campaign ad. Problem is he forgot to Photoshop the hands that clearly show he put his face on the body of a black soldier.

Campaign spokesperson Scott Guthrie provided a photograph of the original image to The Associated Press which shows the tone of Mandels hands is lighter and more evenly matches his face. There are no other indications, such as blurs, distortions or inconsistencies in the background, on either version of the photo that would demonstrate the image was manipulated to add new elements.

Its obvious that Joshs head was not photoshopped, Guthrie wrote in an email, referencing the original photo.

Fred Davis, CEO of the Hollywood-based agency that created the video, said no outside images were added to the photo and no skin features were intentionally darkened.

Davis said a vignette effect  which darkens the corners of images  was added to make white text at the bottom stand out, which may have also affected Mandel's hands in the lower part of the frame.

Nothing photoshopped on that ad, Davis said. What made the bottom of the whole picture darker was the editor darkened just that little bit to make sure that joshmandel.com showed up, which was white type on camouflage. It didn't show up too well. Nothing else was done to it.

The advertisement drew broader criticism Tuesday for using civil rights movement imagery and the legacy of Martin Luther King to support Mandel's message that opposing critical race theory is not racist.

The opening scene of the ad was filmed against the backdrop of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, the site of the Bloody Sunday voting rights march, and in the video, Mandel walks toward the camera saying, Martin Luther King marched right here so skin color wouldnt matter.

Critical race theory is a way of thinking about Americas history through the lens of racism. There is little to no evidence that the theory itself is being taught to K-12 public school students, though some ideas central to it have been, including the lingering consequences of slavery. Still, some opponents argue against teaching certain concepts to schoolchildren, such as white privilege, systemic inequality and inherent bias.

Kings daughter, Bernice King, responded to the advertisement on Twitter, saying it was in opposition to nonviolence and to much of what my father taught," adding: I encourage you to study my father/nonviolence in full.

Candidates running opposite Mandel have accused him of racism in the past. After debating Mandel in February, Democratic U.S. Sen. candidate Morgan Harper, who is Black, tweeted a fundraising video describing him as displaying what weve come to expect: racism, sexism, xenophobia." During another debate, Mandel described Black Lives Matter protesters as thugs.

Mandel is running in one of the most contentious and expensive Senate primaries in the nation this cycle, and one Democrats are eyeing as a possible pickup.

Mandel faces six other Republicans in Ohios May 3 primary, all seeking to succeed Republican Sen. Rob Portman, who announced his retirement last year. On Monday, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz endorsed Mandel, offering a potentially critical campaign boost just as early voting began.

___

Associated Press writer Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

___

This is part of APs effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.
Sherburne County Jail

A Boerne Boogaloo Bois member has been sentenced for his actions in the 2020 George Floyd riots in Minneapolis. Ivan Hunter, 24, was sentenced on Tuesday, March 5 to 52 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release for rioting during the 2020 civil unrest, according to a U.S. Attorneys Office news release.

According to court documents, Hunter admitted to traveling from San Antonio to Minneapolis with the intent to participate in a riot. Hunter is a self-described member of the Boogaloo Bois, a loosely connected group of far-right individuals who espouse violent anti-government sentiments. The term Boogaloo references the groups belief in an impending second civil war in the United States that includes a violent uprising against the government, according to the release.
Maskot/Getty Images/Maskot

Two students have been charged after threatening violence at two Kerrville ISD schools. The first incident happened on Thursday, March 31 at Tivy High School and the second one happened at Hal Peterson Middle School on Monday, April 4, according to a Kerrville Police Department news release.

The Kerrville police department's criminal investigations unit, along with the school resource officers and school staff, were able to identify the suspects and determine the threats were not viable, according to the release.
A new drone delivery service from Wing is launching in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. It's promise? To fly in cold Blue Bell ice cream on hot summer day to your doorstep.

Wing, a California-based subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet Inc., is launching its drone delivery service in the smaller communities of Frisco and Little Elm on Thursday, April 7, according to a blog post from Chief Technology Officer Adam Woodworth.

The service will deliver goods from Walgreens, prescription pet medications from easyvet, first aid kits from Texas Health, and ice cream through a special partnership with Blue Bell Creameries. Woodworth says that ice cream will stay cold through delivery even when it's hot.

Wing is already operating in Christiansburg, Virginia, Helsinki in Finland, as well as Canberra and Logan in Australia. Customers will never interact with the drone after making an order through the OpenSky app. Instead, it will hover about 23 feet outside the residence and lower the product to the ground via a tether.

Wing's drones will deliver to "tens of thousands" of suburban homes in Little Elm and Frisco, the company states. Woodworth says residents in the area should watch their inbox to see which neighborhoods will be invited to the pilot program first.

"I do want to set clear expectations: not everyone who lives within range of our drones will be able to order on Day 1," Woodworth writes. "Were going to invite customers in groups to make sure everyone has a good first experience with drone delivery."

Residents in the area can sign up to Wing's newsletter here for more information.
Zeke Escobedo

San Antonio musician Zeke Escobedo is asking for the public's help searching for the people who stole his trailer filled with more than $18,000 worth of equipment on Tuesday, April 5 on the city's far Westside. The white TC Trecker trailer housed drums, guitars, amplifier speakers, and more, Escobedo, a full-time musician, tells MySA.

About 75% of the equipment belonged to Escobedo, but the rest was the property of the other four members of his country band, Burgundy. Escobedo has managed Burgundy for over 30 years, playing gigs around San Antonio and the surrounding cities.
ERIN SCHAFF, STF / NYT

San Antonio Congressman Joaquin Castro announced he has tested positive for COVID-19 for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic started in March 2020. Castro wrote in a tweet on Tuesday, April 5 that he's avoided the positive test for two years.

"Unfortunately, after avoiding COVID-19 for two years, I've come down with it," Castro tweeted. "I tested negative yesterday & last Thursday, but positive today."
Monte Bach/San Antonio Express-News

North East ISD and San Antonio police are looking into allegations of "inappropriate" behavior in a high school boy's locker room. Here's what you need to know.

Churchill High School Principal Todd Bloomer sent a letter to parents Friday, April 1, saying that district police and the San Antonio Police Department were looking into the inappropriate behavior that happened in the showers, the Express-News reported. The district reached out to the parents of the boys involved in the alleged behavior.
Even if you were born and raised in San Antonio, you may know very little or nothing at all about the city's red light district, or the women behind it. A new Texas Public Radio podcast seeks to change that with a deep dive into the history of sex work in San Antonio. Running Red-Lights was created and hosted by Bri Kirkham and Kathleen Creedon.

They dive into San Antonio's most well-known sex work figure, Fannie Porter, who ran a brothel downtown that served the infamous gang known as the Wild Bunch. That's only the first episode of Running Red-Lights.

But neither Kirkham, a digital editor, and Creedon, a digital producer, knew any of this. Both coming from backgrounds in print journalism, they underwent audio training at TPR during the COVID-19 pandemic and were tasked with pitching a feature at the end.

Ideas were thrown around. Their news director recommended tackling important women in history. Kirkham knew that their pitch could be more interesting.

One weekend, Kirkham says she had Facebook live videos playing in the background when listened to video from Travis Park Church in December 2020. The video told the story of Madame Mary Volino, who turned her brothel into a San Antonio rescue home for women that would later become the Methodist Mission Home.

She texted Creedon.

Courtesy of Texas Public Radio

"There's this screenshot of me texting her saying, 'OK. Hear me out. What about a limited series podcast on the history of sex work in San Antonio?'" Kirkham says.

Creedon replied, "Yeah, that's it. Let's, let's do it."

"It's cool to see these historical figures really being like, 'No, this is my business,'" Creedon says. "For there to be women who are owning businesses that were with other women. I think there's something kind of revolutionary in that."

The series looks at these women who had a lot of autonomy like Porter through that historical and revolutionary lens. But it's history they had to dig for since a lot of those records were almost nonexistent.

"There's so much of the history that wasn't kept or that wasn't saved, whether that's out of embarrassment, even on the city's behalf," Kirkham says. "Documents are gone or hard to find."

The first episode, which dropped on Friday, April 1, doesn't just focus on women. Creedon and Kirkham also talk about Billie Keilman, a former police officer who opened in the Beauty Saloon in San Antonio and published the blue book, a tourists guide for brothels, saloons and gambling dens.

There are four episodes planned for Running Red-Lights and Kirkham is excited for the second episode. Why? She wouldn't give much details, but says it's a testimony to anyone who has tried to find historical records in San Antonio within the last decade.

Running Red-Lights premieres every Friday with the first episode, "Long nights, slow burn," available now. You can listen to it at the TPR website, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Creedon and Kirkham also encourage listeners to visit the TPR website for extra tidbits to the episodes.

Correction: This article has been corrected to reflect the correct date of when Bri watched the Travis Park Church video and Mary Volino's last name.
San Antonio is in the thick of the hottest day of the week. The sweltering temperatures are nearing a 74-year-old record on Tuesday, April 5.

The National Weather Service's San Antonio and Austin office believes the temperature could come close to or break the 1948 record for the day, which is 94 degrees. The local high is expected to reach 93 degrees. At 2 p.m. it was at 89.

"Today is the hottest day of the week," NWS forecaster Orlando Bermudez tells MySA. "There's a good chance to come really close to that record or break it."

The potentially record-breaking temperatures coincide with the opening day of Night in Old San Antonio, a headliner of the Fiesta schedule. While NIOSA early birds may want to take a portable fan and plenty of water for the first night of the party, Bermudez expects the weather to cool off for the remainder of San Antonio's signature celebration.

NWS also says a few strong to sever thunderstorms are possible early Tuesday evening. The storms could crop up along and south of the Eagle Pass to San Antonio Cuero line.

He says a cold front is moving in and will be felt throughout the city the morning of Wednesday, April 6 around 7 or 8 a.m. The front will cool off the area with highs in the low 80s on Wednesday, 78 on Thursday, April 7, and 81 on Friday, April 8. Weekend highs are 86 on Saturday, April 9 and 84 on Sunday, April 10.

Bermudez says the front will make for chilly mornings on Thursday with a high of 52 and on Friday with highs in the mid-40s. The cool temperatures will be a respite for Battle of Flowers Parade-goers,who usually watch the floats pass while sitting under umbrellas, fanning themselves.

Some sort of heat protection should still be part of your Fiesta prep. While the weather may not be as hot as some years, the sun will still be out in full force.
Getty Images

More book bans were sought in 2021 than any previous year recorded by the American Library Association, according to the organization's State of America's Libraries Report 2022. The ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom, which has been tracking book bans for 20 years, tracked 729 challenges to library, school, and university materials and services last year, resulting in more than 1,597 individual book challenges or removals.

We support individual parents' choices concerning their child's reading and believe that parents should not have those choices dictated by others," said ALA President Patricia Patty Wong. "Young people need to have access to a variety of books from which they can learn about different perspectives. So, despite this organized effort to ban books, libraries remain ready to do what we always have: make knowledge and ideas available so people are free to choose what to read.
Yves here. On the one hand, these authors no doubt performed their supply chain analysis and largely wrote their paper before the Ukraine war and its sanctions onslaught. On the other, it illustrates how experts and participants have blind spots about the potential for paradigm shifts, in large measure because they have strong incentives to preserve the existing status quo, no matter how creaky it has gotten. In ECONNED, we called this process paradigm breakdown:

Paradigm breakdown, meaning key elements of the current system are no longer viable, but that is a possibility that no one is prepared to face, since the old system seemed to work well for a protracted period. Thus the authorities reflexively put duct tape on the machinery rather than hazard a teardown.

Covid disruptions, bird flu, and pre-war fertilizer shortages were already creating serious food price increases in the US. But the sanctions on Russia are creating an entirely different and more durable changes, not mere disruptions or shocks, given the near-certainty that the US will not roll them back, even if Zelensky agrees to a peace treaty with Russia. The West is going to suffer lasting shortages of key materials, such as palladium, nickel, aluminum, steel, copper and platinum. Ukraine is a major supplier of neon, necessary to chip-making. Russia provides several important inputs to fertilizer, so food will become more scarce and costly. And thats before we get to the impact of wheat shortages (and the West being a less-preferred customer) and higher energy prices (which emergency reserve releases can moderate for only a matter of months).

Papers like this remind me of Keynes observation about bankers:

A sound banker, alas! is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.

Making Russia more of an autarky, which Russia can survive, is going to force the rest of the world in that direction. Very few seem willing to get in front of that developmentsave the serious gloom and doom types, aka preppers, who are generally seen as extremists, and may well be.unless they are eventually proven right.

By Richard Baldwin, Professor of International Economics at The Graduate Institute, Geneva; Founder & Editor-in-Chief of VoxEU.org; ex President of CEPR and Rebecca Freeman, Trade Associate, Centre for Economic Performance (LSE). Originally published at VoxEU

Supply disruptions caused by systemic shocks such as Brexit, Covid, and Russia-Ukraine tensions have catapulted the issue of risk in global supply chains to the top of policy agendas. In some sectors, however, there is a wedge between private and social risk appetite, or increased risks due to lack of supply chain visibility. This column discusses the types of risks to and from supply chains, and how supply chains have recovered from past shocks. It then proposes a risk-reward framework for thinking about when policy interventions are necessary.

The past couple of years have been rife with upheaval  whether we are speaking of peoples day-to-day lives, disruptions to business-as-usual, or international trade flows. The Brexit shock in Britain sparked initial concerns about the impact on global supply chains (GSCs). This was followed by the much larger and wider shock from the Covid-19 pandemic. The current political situation between Russia and Ukraine, including many countries sanctions and bans on the import of Russian products, is likely to perpetuate the spectre of broad and long-lasting shocks to multiple economies.

What should be done about this? Noting many challenges to global supply chain resilience, Seric et al. (2021) examine how firms involved in global supply chains can help mitigate the effects of supply disruptions. Further, recent research on global supply chain risks has shown that inventory management helps firms mitigate global supply chain shocks (Lafrogne-Joussier et al. 2022).

This column, based on Baldwin and Freeman (2021), (1) examines how the literature has thought about sources of shocks, risk and resilience in the context of global supply chains, including whether a shift in the thinking around risk is called for; and (2) offers a brief discussion on how to apply our proposed framework to policy discussions and future work on the topic.

Sources of Shocks

GSCs are composed of firms and firms face risks. Some of these risks are exogenous supply and demand shocks, other shocks emanate from other firms or transportation disruptions.

Supply shocks include classic disruptions such as natural disasters, labour union strikes, suppliers going bankrupt, industrial accidents, and so on (Miroudot 2020), as well as disruptions from broader sources like trade and industrial policy changes, and political instability. They can be concentrated (e.g. the 2011 Japan earthquake) or broad (e.g. the Covid-19 pandemic).

Transportation is part of the services sector, and thus potentially subject to different shocks than goods.

Demand shocks confront firms with risks stemming from damage to product and company reputation, customer bankruptcy, entry of new competitors, policies restricting market access, macroeconomic crises, and exchange rate volatility.

Another important dimension of risk concerns the idiosyncratic-versus-systematic nature of shocks. Most firms involved in global supply chains are aware of idiosyncratic shocks  those which affect single sectors or factories in single nations. These are frequent. Systemic shocks are a different matter.

From the 1990s until recently, shocks rarely involved many sectors/nations simultaneously. This is really what was new about the Covid-19 shocks to global supply chains, which were pervasive, persistent, and affected multiple sectors at once. And while many firms do have contingency strategies in place, few firms engaged in global supply chains  not even the most sophisticated multinationals  had prepared for systemic shocks. This is a real change.

The Business Continuity Institute Supply Chain Resilience Report 2021, which surveyed 173 firms in 62 countries, found that over a quarter of firms experienced ten or more disruptions in 2020, while the figure was under 5% in 2019. Firms cited Covid-19 for most of the rise in disruptions, although Europe-based firms also pointed to Brexit as an important source of shocks.

There are two other likely sources of systemic shocks: climate change and geostrategic tensions. In short, systemic shocks may become the norm and thus require changes to business models worldwide.

Even though the pandemic waxed and waned regionally, it has been global in nature. Because of this, the impact was felt in almost all goods producing sectors. We cannot know how frequently future pandemics or disruptive global events will occur, but it is likely that Covid-19 will continue to be disruptive for many months or years.

Economic Analysis of GSC Risks, Resilience, and Robustness

The literature has focused on three aspects of global supply chain risks:

The propagation of micro into macro shocks

Whether global supply chains amplify the trade impact of macro shocks

The costs and effects of delinking/decoupling from GSCs (e.g. through reshoring).

Our paper reviews these three literatures, but for the sake of space, we concentrate on policy issues here. Before doing so, we touch upon the critical distinction between resilience (ability to bounce back quickly after a shock) and robustness (ability to continue production during the shock). To ensure resilience, much of the focus is on designing the supply chain with an eye to the riskiness of locations overall. In contrast, robustness strategies focus more on ensuring redundancy of external suppliers or having multiple production sites for internally produced inputs (Martins de Sa et al. 2019, Brandon-Jones et al. 2014).

Do We Need New GSC Policies?

A touchstone principle of the social market economy is that government intervention is merited if there are gaps between the private and public evaluations of costs, benefits, and/or risks. When it comes to GSC policy, we argue that policy may improve market outcomes when there is a wedge between private and social evaluations of risk.

We illustrate this for global supply chains with a wedge diagram (Figure 1). The diagram, styled on classic optimal-portfolio analysis, has risk and reward on the y-axis and the x-axis, respectively. Firms like cost-savings and dislike risk (as shown by the indifference curves), but their choices are constrained by the fundamental risk-reward frontier shown. The frontiers take their shape since putting all production in the cheapest location increases risk by decreasing geo-diversification.

Where does the wedge come from? Public versus private risk appetite. In the GSC world, divergences in public-private risk preferences can arise from a range of mechanisms whereby individual firms do not internalise the full risk of their actions. Private firms optimally choose point P given their preferences. In some sectors, many governments have preferences that give greater weight to risk reduction, so the public trade-off leads to a lower-risk optimum, creating a wedge between public and private risk evaluations. This divergence is clear in sectors such as banking where, in the past, government provided guarantees when the risk went wrong, and in food production where individual producers underinvest in anti-famine actions.

Misperception of the location of the frontier. Another market failure can arise due to information asymmetries. Modern global supply chains are massively complex and even the most sophisticated firms can be unaware of the location of their third-tier suppliers and beyond (Lund et al. 2020). As a result, private firms may face more risk than they know. This situation is depicted as the actual risk-reward trade-off taking place above the perceived trade-off, which would also result in a wedge. When this is the case, private firms are at point P when they think they are at P.

Figure 1 The public-private wedge analysis of GSC risks

Source: Baldwin and Freeman (2021).

Policies to Mitigate Risk

Risk mitigating policies  such as those in banking and agriculture  are clearly warranted when such a public-private wedge exists. Banking is the classic sector with a wedge, but food has one as well given that it is almost universally considered too critical to national wellbeing to be left to the market. Most nations have policies that promote domestic production create buffer stocks to smooth demand and supply mismatches, or both. These typically involve large scale outlays such the US Farm Bill and the EUs Common Agricultural Policy.

It seems likely that critical sectors, including medical supplies and semiconductors, will be viewed more like agriculture and banking going forward than they have been, since the perception is that they are marked by a public-private wedge. Policies that tackle the wedge can be usefully classified into tax/subsidy measures, regulatory measures, and direct governmental control. And, as firms are more likely to shift production structures when they perceive a permanent policy shift (Antras 2020), we speculate that these sectors are most likely to restructure and reorganise their GSCs. On the policy side, there have been clear moves to evaluate critical sectors. For example, the Biden administration has established a Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force to address the challenges arising from a pandemic-affected economic recovery (White House 2022).

A Target-Rich Research Environment

We end our paper, and this column, with a call for research. On the trade theory side, almost no analyses had delved into the role of risk in GSCs when we started circulating our paper in 2021. For example, in the received wisdom literature (Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg 2008), the basic trade-off turns on separation costs versus cost-saving gains in a model without risk. As the discussion of the International Business literature in our paper makes clear, the risk-GSC nexus serves up a rich menu of un-modelled, yet important phenomena. Of course, risk considerations are not entirely new (Costinot et al. 2013), but the theory has largely assumed away risk for convenience, and this has been echoed in the empirics.

On the empirical side, the possibilities are even greater. Nothing helps econometricians more than truly exogenous shocks. The years 2020 and 2021 were bursting with exogeneity. Because of this, coupled with the availability of massive, high-frequency, online data, and headline-grabbing importance, we conjecture that there is a great deal of impactful empirical research to be done on risk and the shape and nature of GSCs. Overall, we see exciting times ahead for GSC researchers. Things have, as they say, changed so much that not even the future is what it used to be. It is riskier than we thought!

See original post for references
Yves here. Lambert thought I should hoist this comment from NYC-based reader jr into a post. I find the later part of his story, where the fellow tenants refused to do anything about intolerable (and correctable) noise levels to be remarkable. New York City actually has very strong pro tenant laws. And now it is not hard to download apps that measure decibel levels. If the noise was in the dangerous to hearing level, this would be a slam dunk for a complaint. There might also be building regulations that specify maximum levels which are sure to be somewhat below the dangerous level. I cant fathom this demonstration of learned helplessness, particularly in a city where complaining, including the formal sort, is almost a sport. But as Frederick Douglass wrote:

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.

In any event, this level of resignation does not bode well for any sort of collective action. If you cant get citizens to address immediate concerns, how can you possibly move them to tackle bigger, less in your face problems?

PS. I had a rat in restaurant incident many years ago similar to jrs roach story, but I will spare you.

By reader jr, from Links 4/22/2022

So I was recently told to try out a new pita joint here in Brooklyn by a good friend. I love me some falafel etc. so I hiked across town to pick up the order I called in. I was gargled and N95ed up, nose rinse in my pocket, but apparently everyone but me was under the impression that COVID was over. So I hung out outside, the place was busy and I knew it would be a wait.

The line inside shortened and I took my chance. The food looked good, people were chowing down with gusto, and the phone was falling off the hook. Seamless orders everywhere. They even had my favorite soda. I was excited to find a new place.

Thats when, in the full view of everyone in line, a plump cockroach decided to take the stage, ambling leisurely across the countertop. I froze and waited to see the reactions of the people around me. I was already turning to the door.

No one blinked an eye. They couldnt have missed the fu(king thing if they were blind. Everyone went into Im not seeing that. mode, I could tell because everyone kind of locked up but kept staring straight ahead or turned away or whatever. Only I actually watched the thing makes its way down behind the counter. The owner of the store was leaning right over it and didnt even flinch. A suspension of belief.

Walking home, empty handed and grossed out, a memory came back to me. Before I left Manhattan, my partner and I had moved into a small apartment from our even smaller one for just a few months. This was two winters back. My partner had gone to her mothers house out of state for a solid three month stretch to care for her after a serious surgery. I was alone in the place. Some of you may remember my comments were fairly wild around that time, something about Steve Pinker and voodoo fetishes made from human hair. I was lonely and stressed out.

Which was nothing compared to my mental state when the noise started. As the weather grew colder, an exhaust vent on the roof belonging to a restaurant downstairs began to squeal. The colder it got, the worse it got. I called the landlords, who pretended not to know that they were the landlords of the restaurant downstairs. I called the city, who pretended to send out inspectors who then wrote reports about how they found nothing during their pretend inspections. I put an app on my phone that registers decibel levels, it told me I had the equivalent of a Shop-Vac running outside my window 24/7. I stuffed a yoga mat, comforters, foam padding, etc. into the windows and it STILL was mind numbing. I really started to lose my $hit, as in manic episodes and talking to myself.

So I decided to get the other tenants on my side. The noise out in the hallway was even worse than inside my apartment, it literally rang in your ears. It had to be driving everyone else nuts, right?

Wrong. Everyone claimed they couldnt hear a thing. One neighbor looked surprised when I mentioned it. Another said she had never noticed it until I brought it up, even as we stood in the hallway with the air vibrating around us from the force of it. Someone else said something to the effect of they dont spend a lot of time at home anyway. No one was even vaguely interested in doing anything about it, I mentioned calling the city in a non-pushy way and got lots of non-committal looks and nods.

Only one little old lady on the first floor knew, or admitted she knew, what I was talking about. She said it had been going on for years, that it would never get fixed because it would cost the landlords tens of thousands of dollars to tear out the ancient vent system etc. and replace it. She was pretty safe from it on the first floor but she didnt know how anyone else lived with it. She had used to live on a higher floor but it, and some other problems, had driven her down to the first floor.

I consider myself fairly jaded and cynical and I was blown away by this behavior. I couldnt process it. When my partner got home, the noise was beginning to subside and she didnt think much of it until I removed the stuffing in the windows and then she was like D@mn. The bottom line is that people can ignore almost anything, can justify almost anything, can believe almost anything, if it will allow them to maintain their illusions of stability. Their sense of normalcy. Their prime location digs.

Which bodes ill for the troubles ahead. No one will do a thing to help themselves or others if it means breaking through the illusions they pay so much to inhabit. Did I mention all of my neighbors, minus the little old lady, were firmly in the PMC? Someone above mentioned how they can ignore the fact that Biden is a shambling corpse who blurts out nuclear war initiating non sequiturs. I think they are going to ignore a lot more than that until it really hurts, then they will lash out at the nearest target. When they get hungry or thirsty and UberEats stops answering the phone.
Yves here. Yours truly is not in a position to say much about the coming French elections, except to make a few pedestrian observations: Macrons reelection bid look hopeless until the Ukraine war rescued him. The left goes from bad to worse for reasons I cannot fathom, except from afar that it seems as if there are strong enough doctrinal splits to prevent them from coalescing around a single candidate. Plus social democrats across Europe, and those even further left, have been struggling for a while to come up with compelling messages. Which seems really odd, given how ordinary workers have been taking it on the chin.

And the big story is that Marine Le Pen is actually within striking distance of winning the elections, even though Macron is still ahead and the favorite.

Thats a long-winded way of saying I find it odd that this piece makes no mention whatsoever of economic issues. How can those be totally absent in the election calculus? Lets start with the fact the political scientists have documented that voters move to the right in the wake of financial crises (with America in the New Deal a noteworthy exception, due mainly to muscular labor unions flanked by a rising Communist movement). So its powerful secretive billionaires that are the cause of Frances move to the right, as opposed to them being able to take advantage of the response to the crisis clearly favoring banks and the wealthy, leaving plenty of resentment among the lower orders?

By Adam Ramsay, openDemocracys main site editor, a member of the Scottish Green Party, a board member of Voices for Scotland and an advisory committee member for the Economic Change Unit and the journal Soundings. You can follow him at @adamramsay. Originally published at openDemocracy

To understand the coming French election, we need to start not with the incumbent president Emmanuel Macron, nor with any of his rival candidates, but with a billionaire called Vincent Bollore.

Like many oligarchs, he started out by inheriting a family business founded by his ancestors  in this case, in the 1820s. These days, the eponymous Bollore is one of the 500 biggest companies in the world, and has a stranglehold on West African trade, controlling 16 major ports down the coast from Mauritania to Congo-Brazzaville.

The firm doesnt just have its claws in Frances old colonies. In 2015, Bollore took control of the French media giant Canal Plus, with Vincent himself taking over as chair. In 2017, the company relaunched its 24-hour news channel as a sort of French equivalent of Fox News, now called C+.

Often leading its headlines with law and order stories and moral panics about migrants, it became famous for its raging debates between far-Right regulars. With its new, controversialist format, it doubled its audience, and it is now the second most watched news channel in the country.

Its star commentator, editing and appearing on its daily panel show France a lInfo, was the writer and now presidential candidate Eric Zemmour, who became prominent through his column in the tabloid Le Figaro. Which connects him to a second oligarch.

Le Figaro is owned by the Dassault group, plaything of the billionaireLaurent Dassault, who inherited it from his grandfather. The main thing the Dassault Group does is manufacture military jets, selling them around the world.

Historically, these oligarch families have been linked to the traditional Right-wing party Les Republicains  Laurent Dassaults brother Olivier was a Republicans MP until he died in a helicopter crash last year. Vincent Bollore is good friends with the disgraced former Republicans president Nicholas Sarkozy, who was sentenced to jail late last year for illegal campaign financing.

But with Frances old parties floundering, there is space for political entrepreneurs  as Emmanuel Macron demonstrated last time round.

Now Zemmour has stepped into that space, announcing his candidacy last year.

Zemmour is famous for pushing the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which claims that Frances elite is trying to replace the white population with people of colour, and which has motivated white nationalist terrorism in New Zealand and the US. He has also argued that womens and LGBTQ rights have feminised France, leading to its decline; and been convicted of incitement to racial or religious hatred three times.

But Zemmour is merely a product of his patrons  without them, he would just be another angry bigot raving in some bar. And they are merely products of their ancestors  with success built on wealth inherited from a previous era of French history.

As with Britain, mountains of capital left lying around from the age of empire gravitationally warp French politics. Zemmour wont win the election. But he  and, more significantly, the oligarch-owned networks that promoted him and his ideas  have already dragged France into their poisonous wasteland. They have conjured a sense of French decline, the memory of a time when the country got rich from the plunder of its colonies, to sell a retrograde vision of a more racist, chauvinist, and bigoted age. And those ideas are like noxious fumes.

In the first round of their candidate selection, members of Les Republicains put Eric Ciotti at the top of their ballot. Ciotti is from the far Right of the party, and is described by academic Philippe Marliere as a carbon copy of Zemmour on immigration and Islam. Ultimately, the party selected former minister Valerie Pecresse as its candidate. Supposedly more reasonable, even she has used the words Great Replacement, and has attacked migrants and Muslims in her speeches. She has criticised those who are French on paper but not in their hearts  following the billionaires bully boy down the path of bigotry.

The biggest beneficiary of Frances rush to the Right, though, has been the royal family of French fascism, represented for the last decade by Marine Le Pen. With the debate tipping onto her turf  she has vilified Muslims, called for a ban on the veil, and pushed for a referendum on migration  she has thrived. When Russia invaded Ukraine, she had to quickly shred a million leaflets showing a photo of her with Putin calling her a woman of conviction, but shes managed to benefit from the war and its impact on the French economy. Mixing her hardline xenophobia with a gentler note of economic nationalism at a time when energy costs are rising, she has soared in the polls.

Not only is she currently looking like shell easily make it to the second round, but some have her running Macron close when she gets there.

Macron Too

Just as a leechs veins are filled with the blood of whatever species it suckles, this is the era of French politics on which Emmanuel Macron has come to parasite.

In 2018, he sought to placate Frances fascists by praising the First World War bravery of Philippe Petain, the leader of the Nazi-collaborating regime during the Second World War. In 2019, he gave an interview to the far-Right magazine Valeurs Actuelle.

Along with his ministers, M. Le President has spent much of this presidency giving speeches and making public statements denouncing Islam and trying to attack the French Left for not being anti-Muslim enough. Last year, Macrons higher education minister demanded an investigation into so-called Islamo-Leftists at French universities, a direct threat to academic freedom and an assault on the worlds second-biggest religion.

After French teacher Samuel Petty was murdered by a Chechen Muslim for showing his class cartoon images of the prophet Mohammed, the French president went further, reaching out to Vladimir Putin in an attempt to build an Islamophobic alliance with the Kremlin.

In an election debate last year, Macrons interior minister Gerald Darmanin even accused far-Right leader Le Pen of being too soft on Muslims.

These capitulations to the far Right have only aided Macrons opponents. After all, if he means what he says about Islam, why not support mass deportations of Muslims, with a candidate like Zemmour? When politics becomes an argument about the boundaries of national identity rather than a discussion about how to live together, the far-Right always thrives.

But Macron has also suckled from the Left. Most of his vote in the 2017 election came because the traditional social-democratic party, the Parti Socialiste, collapsed  going from winning the 2012 election with Francois Hollande to coming fifth, with just over 6% of the votes.

We had a [Parti Socialiste] government from 2012 to 2017 and it was pathetic, says French activist Arthur Vincent, who organises in migrant communities in the northern suburbs of Paris. It was a social democrat lie of pretending theyre Left-wing during the campaign and basically having Right-wing policies all along. It was totally pathetic  it destroyed the Left.

[Parti Socialistes] lead on the Left was made a thing of the past, and the centre-Left all went for Macron, he adds.
MBABANE  As parents prepare their children for school, some residents of LaMgabhi Etiyeni spent almost nine hours waiting for a royal kraal stamp at Ndabazabantu Office.

Information gathered was to the effect that the office of Ndabazabantu was unoccupied for the better part day as the Kings Liaison Officer Godvolwendlovu Magagula was reportedly indisposed. Some of the affected residents informed this publication that they had been to the office since morning. They stated that they were stranded, along with the representative from the areas royal kraal, who was there to approve the stamping of documents required for the OVC Grant application at the Deputy Prime Ministers Office.

whereabouts

We have been here since morning, trying to get the royal kraal stamp and we have not been assisted. The office of Ndabazabantu is unoccupied and we are getting different versions about his whereabouts. We have been told that he has not returned to office since he left for the Marula Festival. Some officers are not clear about his whereabouts, said Shadrack Makhanya who was among the frustrated residents. He also stated that the royal kraal stamp was removed from the royal kraal after the demise of the late Chief Mabhedla Hlophe. The area has been without a chief since the death of Mabhedla who died about 30 years ago. It is common practice that royal kraals stamps are returned to the office of Ndabazabantu, pending the installation of the new chief. The new chief only gets the royal kraal stamp after receiving a blessing from the King. When asked about his whereabouts, Magagula stated that he was at home as he was not feeling well. He also mentioned that apart from his illness, he was on another assignment.

delegated

I have delegated powers to the regional secretary to stamp documents on my behalf. The last time I spoke to him, he told me that he was on his way to the office and I hope he has started helping them, Magagula said at 3:03pm. Magagula also mentioned that an arrangement had been made to replace him with Kings liaison officer, from Piggs Peak as of tomorrow pending his recovery. When called after the interview with Magagula, the parents confirmed that they had started receiving assistance from the regional secretary. The Principal Secretary Bhekithemba Gama had announced that lessons should commence yesterday.

perfect

Gama said the call for the start of lesson did not mean government was perfect but was aimed at ensuring that pupils did not miss out as they were expected to sit for their final examinations in October and November 2022. However, some parents and teachers objected to the call for the start of lessons, stating they needed some time to prepare their children for class. Some parents suggested that schools should reopen after Easter holidays.
(Natural News) Fake president Joe Bidens new Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice (DoJ) has sent a letter to every states attorney general warning them that all doctors must drug and surgically mutilate children upon request or else be guilty of discrimination.

Kristen Clarke, who also believes that black people are superior to white people, wrote that transgender youth must be chemically neutered and/or surgically mutilated whenever they please as part of the Biden regimes new policies covering gender-affirming care.

Last year, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under Biden re-interpreted Section 1557 of Barack Hussein Obamas Affordable Care Act (ACA) to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation and gender identity, the latter being a completely made-up concept that serves as an excuse to destroy the bodies of children while sexually perverting them into transgenders.

The move will force hospitals to give transgender people gender-affirming healthcare if they receive federal funding, reported 100percentfedup.com about the implications of the letter.

Author Abigail Schrier tweeted about this, warning that the Biden regime is in hot pursuit of underage children  and are we really surprised that this is all coming from the Pedophile-in-Chief and his hidden handler Obama?

The Biden Administration has now determined that gender affirming care  including puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries  is a right of trans youth and appropriate and necessary for their health, Shrier wrote.

The Biden Justice Department will come after states that disagree.

Biden wants your sons genitalia to be removed; girls breasts to be sliced off

Many of our readers will remember just a decade ago the Cult of LGBT promised that all it ever wanted was to be accepted, and that it had no other agenda beyond that. Fast-forward to today and now the Cult of LGBT is demanding that doctors perform sex changes on minors or else lose their careers.

In Clarkes memo doctors who refuse to comply with a sex change procedure on a child, toddler or baby can be prosecuted through Bidens (In)justice Department with haste.

When a state or recipient of federal funds criminalizes or even restricts a type of medical care predominantly sought by transgender persons, an intent to disfavor that class can readily be presumed,' Clarke wrote in her memo to all 50 states attorneys general.

For instance, a ban on gender-affirming procedures, therapy or medication may be a form of discrimination against transgender persons, which is impermissible unless it is substantially related to a sufficiently important governmental interest. This burden of justification is demanding.'

The memo goes on to state that parents have a right to seek and follow medical advice in order to safeguard the health of their children  but the meaning of this is not what you think.

In Clarkes view, safeguarding the health of children means cutting off their private parts, adding new ones, administering puberty-blocking pharmaceuticals and dressing them up in garish rainbow attire on demand.

A state or local government must meet the heavy burden of justifying interference with that right since it is well established within the medical community that gender-affirming care for transgender youth is not only appropriate but often necessary for their physical and mental health, Clarke alleged.

Following the HHS mandate from last year, America First Legal sued the federal agency for its unconstitutional and far-reaching order. President Stephen Miller further called it dangerous and destructive to the country, as it erases biological sex from health care.

More stories about Bidens obsession with the sexualization and perversion of Americas underage children can be found at Evil.news.

Sources include:

100percentfedup.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) The University of Waterloo in Ontario has fired 49 staff members for not complying with its mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policy, even as the institution relaxes its virus-related rules for other people on campus.

CTV News reports that the 49 staff members were terminated last week over their unwillingness to get the jab. The move came after the province of Ontario dropped all of its COVID-19 mandates and other schools announced they would be phasing out their own policies soon.

The schools vice president of university relations, Nick Manning, said: We have an obligation under the Health and Safety Act to protect our employees, and the employees have the obligation to comply.

All of those who werent able to be compliant after progressive measures faced the ultimate result of termination, he added, referring to progressive measures used against these employees that included both paid and unpaid leave.

Manning also told the outlet that 170 employees and students had been given an accommodation for religious or medical grounds.

The school recently posted on its COVID-19 informational website and social media accounts that although it will stop enforcing mask and vaccine mandates beginning May 1 for entry to campus, its injection policy will remain in place for all members of our community. They added that the vaccine and mask requirements for visitors may be brought back on short notice depending on how the pandemic continues to play out.

In their posting, they stated: To ensure we can minimize any disruption to work and learning if this happens, we will maintain a requirement for all members of our community to provide information on their up to date vaccination status.

They went on to recommend that everyone get their third and fourth doses when eligible and ensure they have access to proof of vaccination.

Other Canadian universities plan to welcome back employees who chose not to get vaccinated

Although the University of Waterloo is diverging from the governments stance, several other schools have taken a more accepting view of those wishing to exercise their health freedom. The University of Toronto, the University of Guelph, Wilfrid Laurier University and Ryerson University have all recently announced that people who had been placed on leave over their vaccination status will be able to return to their jobs later this spring when the mandates are lifted.

At the University of Waterloo, the vast majority of the 49 employees terminated last week are believed to be non-faculty members. However, at least one faculty member, a chemistry professor, was recently fired, while at least two other professors and one lecturer were also said to be facing termination.

In contrast to the University of Waterloos hardline stance, neighboring institution Wilfrid Laurier University has not terminated a single employee under its mandatory vaccination policy; those employees who did not comply were given an unpaid leave of absence instead. However, they will be pausing the proof of vaccination requirement after May 1, when all staff and faculty with active contracts will be invited to return to working in-person.

It is disappointing but not surprising to see universities remaining steadfast in these requirements, even as growing evidence shows that vaccine mandates are not effective in tackling the virus. Many experts have expressed concerns that the potential harm caused by these jabs outweigh the benefits for many people given the millions of injuries and thousands of deaths that have been reported related to the vaccine and the viruss high survivability among most groups of people, along with the minimal risk of asymptomatic spread.

Sources for this article include:

LifeSiteNews.com

UWaterloo.ca

Kitchener.CTVNews.com

TheRecord.com
MBABANE - There were no lessons taking place in most schools on the first day of the new academic year despite the Principal Secretary (PS) in the Ministry of Education, Bhekithemba Gama, stating that teaching lessons were expected to begin yesterday.

The delay in the release of the Grade VII and Form III results led to schools continuing with the registration of pupils. Parents together with their children were found in some school premises around Mbabane waiting for school head teachers to attend to them. In all the schools visited yesterday, both primary and high, pupils were found moving up and down around the school while others were seated inside their classrooms.

Discussions

The schools that were visited yesterday morning included Mbabane Central High, St Francis High, St Francis Primary, MDS High, MDS Primary, Woodlands High and KaBoyce High Schools. Some teachers were found in groups having discussions concerning their teaching environment. They argued that the Ministry of Education and Training was supposed to postpone the opening of schools until next week, as there was a lot of confusion going on. When some head teachers were asked on whether lessons had begun, some responded by saying there was no way teachers would start the teaching process unless the registration was complete. They said registration would be complete by coming Friday with lessons starting next week.

St Francis High School Head teacher, Sisana Simelane said they were done with the registration of continuing classes (Form II, III and V). She said this was done a week ago. She mentioned that all went well while registering those pupils and teaching had already begun. The teaching of ongoing classes has begun as we speak. This is because we started the registration of continuing students last week Wednesday, she explained. She further said that they were currently busy with the registration of the other classes. She noted that they had limited space at the moment for Form I. Simelane indicated that it was possible that the registration period would be finalised by the end of this week. Sibusiso Gumedze, a parent looking for a place in Form I for his child at St Francis High School said the head teacher told them to put the results of their children inside a box and the admission team would decide on who gets the space. He said they were patiently waiting for any possible outcome. We are still waiting for the admission team to get back to us, said Gumedze.

Woodlands High School Deputy Head teacher, Faith Makhubu said they were busy with registration. She said it was difficult to teach, as most students were still being admitted. She also indicated that teachers were parents and, therefore, had to make sure that their children were admitted in school as well. We are still busy with our registration at the moment. We are trying by all means that before the end of this week, the whole registration process would be complete, said Makhubu. Ka-Boyce High School Deputy Head teacher, Khanyisile Dlamini said there were so many complications they faced on the first day of the opening of schools. She said parents were still hanging around the school to make sure that their children got admitted. She further stated that some parents were still struggling with the payment of fees, hence some of the pupils had not returned.
(Natural News) While Disney makes headlines for its support of LGBTQ+ kids and condemns Florida lawmakers for their recently-passed anti-grooming bill, its important to remind the public of Disneys history of covering up pedophilia within their company. It seems to be on-trend that they want to perpetuate the sexual grooming of children.

(Article by Amber Crawford republished from 100PercentFedUp.com)

Back in 2014, a Disney Cruise Line steward, 36-year-old Ahmed Sofyan, was charged with two counts of molestation and one count of false imprisonment after holding a 13-year-old girl in an unoccupied cabin and molesting her. When this story was released, an ex-Disney Cruise officer spoke out, reporting a similar instance of child molestation that Disney authorities ordered her not to report just two years prior.

Dawn Taplin, the first female security officer at Disney and second in the entire cruise line industry, was on the cruise ship where this occurred. In 2014, she revealed Disneys previous molestation cover-up.

In 2012, a Disney cruise ship employee was caught on camera molesting an 11-year-old girl in an elevator. Disney authorities allegedly did not allow security to report the incident.

Taplin interviewed the young victim after she and her grandmother reported the crime to Guest Services. The security officer, who had 17-years of experience as a police officer, found the surveillance footage extremely troubling.

The molestation occurred while the cruise ship was still docked at Port Canaveral in Florida while passengers were still boarding. Taplin recalls that they werent going anywhere for another two hours or so. Since they were still on U.S. land, Taplin notified the ships second-in-command and offered to call her FBI contact. However, she did not get the response she anticipated.

I was ordered not to make any phone calls, do anything at all. Nothing. Period, recalled Taplin. She said that she was told, Just keep your mouth shut.

If a crime is committed while youre hooked up anywhere here, it is an American, it is a United States, it is a Florida crime, said Taplin.

The ship then departed that afternoon with the suspected perpetrator, Milton Braganza, still on board, leaving other children at risk of falling victim to the same employee. Disney had put its reputation ahead of the childrens safety.

The following day, after the cruise ship had left U.S. waters, the Disney Cruise Line finally notified the Port Canaveral police and the U.S. Coast Guard. However, the case was passed on to the Royal Bahamas Police Force.

In my professional and personal opinion, I think they wanted to get outside the United States limits and get him off the ship in the Bahamas and just leave it alone, Taplin said.

Once the ship arrived in Nassau, Braganza admitted to the act he was accused of, but the victims grandmother chose not to prosecute. It is unclear why the family chose to step away from this case.

Later, Braganza was flown back to his home country of India at the expense of Disney. The company both arranged and paid for his flight.

The former Security Officer believes that Disney wouldnt have gotten away with it if they were Americans.

One week after this incident, Taplin resigned from the Disney Cruise Line after working with them for nine months.

Disney has shown us that it will put its reputation above all else, a trait most recently exhibited by CEO Bob Chapek. Chapek recently gave in to Left-wing pressure and condemned Floridas anti-grooming bill, which is meant to protect young children from woke adults who want to teach kindergarteners about sexual orientation and convince them that they might be a different gender than they think.

What the public is seeing more and more is that Disney will set aside moral judgment and prioritize its public image above all else.

Read more at: 100PercentFedUp.com
(Natural News) A confidante of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Tony Fauci has been exposed for offering to secretly delete a research paper exposing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) erasure of an entire database containing information about the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19).

Kristian Andersen, who received millions of dollars in grant money from Fauci, made the suggestion during a Zoom call with the NIAID director and former NIH Director Francis Collins. Jesse D. Bloom, the author of the incriminating database paper in question, also participated in the call.

Bloom is an evolutionary biologist who recovered a number of early SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences that were erased by the NIH at the request of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and researchers at the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

The Zoom call in which he participated was arranged two days after Bloom sent a preprint of the report that he compiled to both Fauci and Collins. Collins then invited Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute, and fellow virologist Robert Garry to participate as well.

Both Andersen and Garry have taken in millions from Fauci.

That it was shaping up like an old-fashioned duel with seconds in attendance did not cross Blooms mind at the time. But six months after that meeting, he remained so troubled by what transpired that he wrote a detailed account, which Vanity Fair obtained, reported Vanity Fair, which broke the story.

How deep does the corruption go?

In Blooms recounting of the Zoom call, he described it as extremely contentious. It was revealed that Andersen opposed the report, which provided evidence that the CCP was attempting a coverup with regard to the early days of the plandemic and how the virus was spreading.

This came months after Andersen had privately emailed Fauci about how some of the characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 made it (potentially) look engineered.

That email, which was released via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, was sent on Jan. 31, 2021, roughly five months before Bloom recovered the deleted database.

Thats when Andersen made a suggestion that surprised Bloom, Vanity Fair reported.

He said he was a screener at the preprint server, which gave him access to papers that werent yet public. He then offered to either entirely delete the preprint or revise it in a way that would leave no record that this had been done. Bloom refused, saying that he doubted either option was appropriate, given the contentious nature of the meeting.'

During the call, Andersen and another participant reportedly began yelling at each other over the deeply troubling revelations contained in the preprint.

If the Chinese scientists wanted to delete their sequences from the database, which NIH policy entitled them to do, it was unethical for Bloom to analyze them further, he claimed, Vanity Fair reported.

Emails provided by Bloom to Vanity Fair further show two call participants describing Andersens conduct during the call itself.

Despite the guilt trip that Kristian was trying to put you on (not 100 percent sure why), I think what you are doing is the correct scientific approach, wrote Sergei Pond, an evolutionary biologist who was invited by Bloom to participate in the call as a guest.

That was a very difficult situation, but I think you handled it extremely well, wrote another.

Following the offer to secretly remove the paper, Fauci and Collins reportedly distanced themselves from the situation. Fauci also insisted that just for the record, I want to be clear that I never suggested you delete or revise the pre-print.

The latest news about the Fauci Virus can be found at Pandemic.news.

Sources include:

TheNationalPulse.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) Fetal deaths caused by the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines were almost 2,000 percent greater compared to those associated with other vaccines, Dr. Peterson Pierre of Americas Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) said.

Pierre made this assertion during a March 28 episode of Frontline Flash on the AFLDS website. He showed statistics from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) to highlight the effects that these shots have on the unborn.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there have been 550 million COVID-19 shots injected into peoples arms. Meanwhile, VAERS data showed 3,725 fetal deaths connected to the COVID-19 vaccine. Upon computation, one fetal death occurred for every 147,651 COVID-19 vaccine doses administered.

Pierre compared this with VAERS data between 2006 and 2019. Of the four billion doses of non-COVID vaccines injected during that period, there were only 1,369 fetal deaths linked to those. This reflected one fetal death for about every three million non-COVID vaccines administered.

So if you do the math, you realize that since COVID-19 shots have been available, theres been a 1,925 percent increase in fetal deaths.

Given the statistics, the AFLDS doctor issued a warning to pregnant women: Now, expecting moms, it doesnt matter what that Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the CDC says. It doesnt even matter what your doctor says. Because in spite of this data, the recommendation to get [COVID-19] shots has not changed.

True enough, the public health agencies still recommend that pregnant women get vaccinated and stay up-to-date with their COVID-19 vaccines, including getting a COVID-19 booster shot when its time to get one.

They insist that scientists have not found an increased risk for miscarriage among people who received an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine just before and during early pregnancy, [i.e.] before 20 weeks of pregnancy. However, VAERS data cited by Pierre shows otherwise. (Related: Pfizers COVID vaccine causes miscarriages, stillbirths.)

You need to look out for your own kids. You are their protector. You have a lot to think about. That decision rests with you, not with anyone else, concluded Pierre.

Deaths, injuries from COVID vaccines in VAERS surpass those from other shots

On the same day as the Frontline Flash video with Pierre was posted, Health Impact News (HIN) also touched on the increase of vaccine deaths and injuries attributed to the COVID-19 vaccines. HIN founder Brian Shilhavy cited VAERS data published as of March 18 to bolster his claim.

According to the reporting system, the COVID-19 vaccines were responsible for 26,059 fatalities  which was almost three times the 9,066 deaths in VAERS attributed to other vaccines. The COVID-19 shots also caused permanent disabilities in 48,342 people  more than twice the 20,096 people who suffered permanent disabilities after being injected with non-COVID vaccines.

VAERS data also revealed that 143,198 individuals were hospitalized after getting the COVID-19 vaccines, almost twice the 76,992 individuals hospitalized after other vaccines. Meanwhile, 29,443 individuals suffered life-threatening injuries after getting the COVID-19 shots, more than twice the 13,572 who were hospitalized as a result of getting non-COVID shots.

Shilhavy also pointed out the marked increase in vaccine injuries ever since the COVID-19 vaccines were granted emergency use authorizations (EUAs).

From 104 reports of stroke on VAERS attributed to non-COVID vaccines, this number increased to 2,992 following the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. Reports of cardiac inflammation in VAERS linked to the COVID-19 shots rose to 21,340, from just 1,162 instances linked to non-COVID vaccines.

One does not have to look very far to see the damaging effects of COVID-19 vaccines. There [have been] unprecedented increases in recorded deaths and injuries since they were issued EUAs as compared to all FDA-approved vaccines for the previous 30 years. The majority of cases now found in the history of VAERS are from after Dec. 1, 2020, when the FDA granted EUA for the COVID-19 vaccines. This is mass murder and genocide, concluded Shilhavy.

VaccineDeaths.com has more stories about fatalities linked to COVID-19 shots.

Watch the March 28 edition of Frontline Flash below where Dr. Peterson Pierre talks about fetal deaths from the COVID-19 vaccines.

This video is from the GalacticStorm channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

Matrixxx Groove: COVID vaccine is a bioweapon that is killing kids.

VAERS data show COVID vaccine deaths SURPASS those caused by other shots.

VAERS records overwhelming adverse events from COVID-19 vaccines in first two months of 2022

KILLING BABIES: Death of infant linked to Pfizer Covid vaccine that mother took while breastfeeding.

Sources include:

LifeSiteNews.com

CDC.gov

HealthImpactNews.com

Brighteon.com
(Natural News) There is growing speculation that Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, who died at the age of 50, may have succumbed to Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine-induced myocarditis.

Hawkins was also a drug user, but Steve Kirsch said the evidence he pieced together from both public and private sources, including people who knew the drummer personally, do not rule out the possibility of a jab-induced death.

The evidence is consistent with the primary cause being vaccine-induced myocarditis. It fits the facts like a glove, Kirsch wrote. No other hypothesis Im aware of can explain the evidence. His drug use, which as far as I have been able to determine was limited to smoking weed [sic], played only a minor role.

Cannabis, of course, has never killed a single person, so the only real elephant in the room were the Fauci Flu injections that Hawkins and his band received. Remember when Foo Fighters would only play shows were concertgoers had to show proof of injection in order to enter?

Hawkins heart was double the size of a normal heart for a man his age

What we know so far is that Hawkins was found dead in his hotel room on March 25 after complaining about chest pains. The media reported that he died of cardiac arrest.

That is really important, Kirsch says. The vaccine causes death by cardiac arrest.

Other than chest pains, Hawkins was in normal health prior to his death. None of his other vices appear to have played any role in his sudden and untimely death, which is something we have seen with other cases of post-injection death.

Hawkins was not suicidal, taking great passion in both his music and his family. He had been happily married for 17 years with three children.

An autopsy on Hawkins body revealed that his heart weight at least 600 grams. This is roughly double the size of a normal heart for a man his age.

How can this be? Kirsch explained that COVID injections can cause a heart to double in size before killing the victim. This can occur within as little as five days after the jab.

One of the most public examples of this is the death of the son of Ernest Ramirez, Kirsch said. His son dies just five days after his first dose of Pfizer and his heart was double in size at the time of his death.

Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the worlds top cardiologists, agreed that COVID jabs can cause the heart to double in size, just like what happened to Hawkins right before he died.

Interestingly, Hawkins was personally very opposed to masks, lockdown and COVID injections, according to an insider who spoke with him. Even so, Hawkins was pressured by Dave Grohl and the bands manager to take the injections anyway.

Hawkins more than likely became damaged after his first injection when he just found out that he had a big heart. After his second and third, it enlarged even further.

Those involved in physically demanding activities (such as a drummer in a band) are going to be more likely to get myocarditis due to catecholamine release interaction with the vaccine, Kirsch wrote, suggesting that it took about a month after Hawkins third injection for death to occur.

Unfortunately, I dont think there will ever be an autopsy by a competent pathologist who knows how to spot vaccine injury (or embalming by a vaccine aware embalmer), so well never know for sure, but all of the evidence is consistent with the vaccine hypothesis. It fits all the facts like a glove.

More related news about COVID-19 vaccines can be found at ChemicalViolence.com

Sources include:

SteveKirsch.substack.com

Deadline.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) A group of scientists claimed that chemicals sprayed on apples to keep them fresh may be responsible for the rise of a drug-resistant pathogen.

Researchers from India and Canada put forward this possibility in a study published March 31 in mBio. They wrote that since apples and other fruits are treated with fungicides to prevent post-harvest spoilage, they could serve as a possible selective force for, and a transmission reservoir of, antifungal-resistant isolates of pathogenic yeasts. The researchers focused on Candida auris, which they found in several apples they examined.

They scrutinized the surfaces of 84 different fruits sold in northern India, including 62 apples. Forty-two of these apples were picked up from a market in the city of Delhi, while 20 apples were freshly picked from orchards. Upon examination, the study authors found C. auris in eight apples from the 42 market-purchased apples. The freshly-picked ones did not have the pathogen.

Fungicide treatment on the apples was meant to kill fungal pathogens. However, the study authors mentioned that these fungicides could be helping drug-resistant C. auris strains thrive. The chemicals work on other pathogens on fruits but fail to affect drug-resistant ones.

As expected, a broad range of fungicides were detected in the screened apples. In addition, high levels of antifungal resistance are common among these environmental [C. auris] isolates from apples. Indeed, large amounts of fungicides are used worldwide in apple cultivation to control fungal disease on apples.

The researchers also cited several factors that contribute to the development of drug-resistant C. auris strains on fruits. These include the edible wax coating that protects apples from water loss and bruises, the hands of workers contaminated with C. auris that process the fruits and the low-temperature environments where fruits are stored. (Related: Shed and spread: Study finds drug-resistant superbug Candida auris can spread through skin shedding.)

Study co-author Jianping Xu from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada said: When we look at human pathogens, we tend to look at whats immediate to us. But we have to look at it more broadly. Everything is connected, the whole system. Fruit is just one example.

C. auris not only impacts fruit health, but also human health

First identified in 2009, C. auris has spread throughout the U.S., the U.K., Canada, South America and Europe. It has also been spotted in South Africa and India.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), C. auris presents a serious global health threat due to three main reasons: It resists treatment from multiple kinds of antifungal drugs, it is difficult to identify with standard laboratory materials and it has caused outbreaks in hospitals and other medical facilities.

Healthcare facilities in several countries have reported that  C. auris has been causing severe illness in hospitalized patients. In some patients, this can enter the bloodstream and spread throughout the body, causing serious invasive infections, said the CDC.

The pathogen has been found to cause infections in wounds, the ears and the bloodstream. However, it remains unclear if it causes infections in the lung or bladder.

According to the public health agency, patients who have been hospitalized for a long time  including those with a central venous catheter or other lines or tubes attached to their body  are at highest risk of C. auris infection. Those who have previously received antibiotics or antifungal drugs are also at highest risk of contracting the pathogen.

Around 30 to 60 percent of people who caught C. auris have died, but the CDC remarked that many of them had other serious illnesses that the infection exacerbated.

It is important to quickly identify C. auris in a hospitalized patient so that healthcare facilities can take special precautions to stop its spread, said the agency.

Watch Dr. Edward Group III explaining C. auris and its dangers below.

This video is from the Dr. Edward Group channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

MEDICAL ALERT: Hospitals are releasing deadly superbug fungi into the open air, colonizing the population with dangerous pathogens that have a 41%  88% fatality rate.

Scary, infectious SUPERBUG just spread to five more U.S. states, including some in the Midwest.

Ohio hospital spreading deadly infectious disease through its water systems.

Sources include:

DailyMail.co.uk

Journals.ASM.org

CDC.gov

Brighteon.com
(Natural News) Children two to four years old in New York City (NYC) have to wear masks under a new Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) mask mandate from Mayor Eric Adams, which was initially ruled unconstitutional by a judge. However, another judge overturned the ruling just hours later, allowing the mask mandate to stay.

Richmond County Supreme Court Judge Ralph Porzio ruled on April 1 that the mask mandate by Adams was arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable. He also issued a permanent injunction against it. Adams promised to appeal Porzios ruling and was successful in doing so.

The NYC mayor took to social media to announce his successful appeal. A judge has ruled in favor of the administration and, this evening, stayed the order on masks for two- to four-year-olds. Every decision we make is with our childrens health and safety in mind. Children between two and four [years old] should continue to wear their masks in school and daycare come Monday, [April 4.]

Adams and NYC Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan announced the mask mandate for children during an April 1 press conference, arguing that lifting mask mandates amid rising levels of COVID-19 cases would be an irresponsible move. (Related: Medical professionals, students decry mask mandates and other Covid measures in schools.)

Thats why we are recommending to wait a bit longer to make masks optional for this age group, Vasan said. They will continue to rise over the next few weeks  and its likely that over these weeks, we will move into a different level of overall risk across the city.

The NYC mayor, meanwhile, said: Due to the rise in cases that were seeing, our plans were to take a week to assess the numbers before removing masks with [children] two to four years old. Out schools have been among the safest places for our children since the beginning of the pandemic. Ive said it before: Im with NYC parents, and New Yorkers can trust this administration to continue to make the proper public health decisions to keep our kids safe.

Adams decision widely criticized on social media

Both parents and officials in The Empire State were outraged by the NYC mayors announcement, with some expressing their discontent on social media.

Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) called to unmask our toddlers in a tweet, adding that NYC should not appeal Porzios ruling or keep this unscientific, abusive mandate for children. All remaining COVID-19 mandates must end today, he added.

Daniela Jampel, a founding member of the Keep NYC Schools Open coalition, wrote: I am frankly stunned that [Adams and Vasan are] keeping the toddler mask mandate. Cases are rising, so we are keeping masks on toddlers and only toddlers? She exhorted other NYC parents to refuse to mask their toddlers on Monday, April 4 as the law is on our side.

If there was any doubt the NYC toddler mask mandate is a [government] power trip, just look at how [Adams] decided not to lift it just because a judge ruled against it, filmmaker and podcast host Eric Olson tweeted.

Troy Olson of the New York Young Republican Clubs Veterans Caucus, meanwhile, wrote that those who voted for the incumbent NYC mayor better not be whining about how far behind kids are in 10 to 15 years, because its your own decisions and preferences like this one will lead to more inequality.

Outside of social media, more than 100 parents and their children also gathered in front of the City Hall demanding that Adams unmask our toddlers. Protesters chanted slogans such as my kid, my choice and follow the science. Others carried signs that urged the mayor to rescind the mask mandate for toddlers.

Visit MedicalTyranny.com for more news about COVID-19 mask mandates.

Watch this video below that touches on NYC Mayor Eric Adams mask mandate.

This video is from the Cynthias Pursuit to Truth channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

New Jersey state senators argue mask mandate for children is NOT supported by science.

NY Supreme Court strikes down Hochuls statewide mask mandate.

VICTORY: Pennsylvania court throws out school mask mandate.

St. Louis County Council votes to overturn mask mandate.

Montana governor lifts statewide mask mandate.

Sources include:

BigLeaguePolitics.com

Twitter.com

DailyMail.co.uk

Brighteon.com
(Natural News) Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) remains difficult to treat due to its resistance to antibiotics. With this in mind, Chinese researchers looked into oriental penthorum (Penthorum chinense Pursh), a plant used in Traditional Chinese Medicine, to see whether it could be used to fight MRSA.

More commonly known in China as guan huang cao, oriental penthorum is traditionally used by the Miao ethnic minority as a functional food and folk medicine. The Miao prepare meals with young P. chinense leaflets and drink P. chinense wine to prevent alcohol hangover symptoms.

Clinically, P. chinense has also been used to treat hepatic viral diseases, including acute hepatitis viral infection, showing positive effects in such cases.

A prior study had already demonstrated that P. chinense extract could inhibit the growth of certain bacteria, including Pseudomas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus epidermidis and S. aureus in vitro. However, little is known about which compounds from P. chinense exhibit antibacterial activity.

To address this, researchers from the Zhejiang Chinese Medical University investigated P. chinense to identify which of its components can treat MRSA infection. (Related: Cypress essential oil found to inhibit MRSA.)

The results of their study were published in the journal BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Testing P. chinense compounds against S. aureus

To identify the antibacterial compounds in P. chinense, the researchers dried the plants stems and turned them into powder. The powdered stem was then filtered and reflux extracted twice with a 1.5 liter (L) solution of 70 percent ethanol.

To prepare a pinocembrin-7-O residue-rich fraction from P. chinense (PGF), the crude extract was concentrated in a rotary vacuum evaporator, then fractionally extracted with petroleum ether, ethyl acetate, 1-butanol and water. All of the fractions were vacuum dried, and the concentration of flavonoids was determined through chromogenic reaction. In addition, pinocembrin-7-O residue components were identified using electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS).

To determine the antibacterial activities of PGF and isolated components, the researchers separately dissolved each in DMSO or ddH 2 O (water-soluble fraction) before using them for susceptibility screening against bacterial strains. Susceptibility was recorded by measuring inhibition zone diameters (IZDs) resulting from growth inhibition. A microbroth dilution method was also used to determine the minimum inhibitory concentrations of PGF and the isolated compounds. Vancomycin was used as a positive control.

The researchers also conducted a kinetic time-kill experiment using two standard S. aureus strains  ATCC 25923 and ATCC 43300. As with the other tests, bacteria cultured in an equivalent volume of vancomycin was used as a positive control.

Compounds from P. chinense extract can kill S. aureus and MRSA

After extraction, the researchers found that PGF and three isolated components, namely, S1, S2 and S3, all demonstrated anti-S. aureus activities. They were also effective against clinically isolated MRSA strains. All four presented an identical MIC against the bacteria.

Meanwhile, the time-kill assay showed that the bacterial S. aureus clones did not survive for 24 hours under PGF and S3 treatment, though the concentrations of each differed.

Finally, they observed that PGF demonstrated post-antibiotic effects (PAE) against S. aureus. The researchers noted, however, that the PAE of PGF on certain strains was concentration-dependent.

Based on these results, the researchers proposed that PGF and S3 from P. chinense were good candidates for the development of a bactericide against S. aureus. That said, they admitted that more research needs to be done and that the mechanisms by which these compounds work still need to be studied.

Sources include:

En.CNKI.com.cn

BMCComplementMedTherapies.BioMedCentral.com
(Natural News) As the humanitarian situation in Ukraine declined, UN officials briefed the Security Council on 7 March. Vasily Nebenzya, the Russian Federation Permanent Representative, argued that safety for civilians in Ukraine is not a problem for Russia, because we are not bombarding them, but rather it is the Ukrainian radicals and neo-Nazis who were holding civilians hostage in cities and using them as human shields, not allowing them to leave, despite the fact that there were humanitarian corridors.

(Article by Rhoda Wilson republished from DailyExpose.uk)

As it has been in the past, we think that UNICEFs views should be based on reliable tried and tested information, Nebenzya began, and asked the council to consider the dangers of the proliferation of small arms and light weapons many of which have fallen into the hands of radical elements including those who have been deliberately freed from prison. An irresponsible step by Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the number of civilian victims at the hands of the radicals was increasing day by day, he noted.

There is an information war going on, more likely a disinformation war, and we would say that in the West  in the free world  where Russian information resources are being turned off and where any information which contradicts your version of events is not allowed to be broadcast.

He emphasised that safety for civilians in Ukraine was not a problem for Russians because Russians were not bombarding them but rather it was Ukrainian radicals and neo-Nazis who were holding hostage whole towns and cities and were making use of citizens as human shields. They were not allowing civilians to leave cities despite the fact that there were humanitarian corridors and that Russian units had declared a ceasefire.

Nebenzya explained that an agreement was reached that on 5 March a humanitarian corridor would be opened from Mariupol but the radicals in Mariupol violated this agreement.

A radio conversation that was intercepted between two commanders of the nationalist battalion Azov  the radicals there were told to shoot at the legs of those who were heading for the humanitarian corridors. Those who risked life and limb to try and leave Mariupol, when they reached the checkpoints to exit the city, were shot on site by Ukrainian Nazis. Theres a great deal of video evidence of this. In Mariupol alone there were some 200 000 civilians who are in the crosshairs of the of the forces there, he said.

The Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk called the proposal to open humanitarian corridors towards Russia absurd and unacceptable, Nebenzya told the council, it is clear to us that the Kiev regime is making use of all available and unavailable methods to wholeheartedly stop the exit of those citizens who wish to leave, and also foreigners who wish to go to Russia, because theyre scared that once these people are free they will tell the truth about the actions of Ukrainian radicals.

He quoted a statement made that day by the Mayor of Sumy, Alexander Lysenko, together with the commander of the national battalion: There will not be any green corridors. No civilians will leave to Russia and those who try to will be shot dead.

We are also particularly concerned that the Ukrainian radicals are continuing to hold hostage, as human shields, more than 1500 foreigners in a range of cities  we are shocked by news of the inhumane attacks by nationalists on student accommodation which has among other things caused the death of Indian students.

Nebenzya pointed out that the cowardly practice of using the civilian population as hostages is not just deeply immoral but also violates the norms of international humanitarian law including articles 57 and 58 of the first additional protocol to the Geneva Convention of 1949.

United Nations: Ukraine, Security Council, Humanitarian Situation, 7 March 2022 (Start 51:56 mins)

Ukrainian Forces Using Civilians as Human Shields Continues

On 23 March the Russian State Duma Deputy Artyom Viktorovich Turov made a statement saying a Military Tribunal needed to be created that would investigate cases of using civilians as a human shield. You can watch the video, HERE. The video is in Russian and although its description is in English, it is without English subtitles. Below, we have copied the Russian transcript from YouTube and translated it into English using Google translate.

Russian transcript: ? ?????? ? ????????? ???????? ?????-????????????? ??? ???????????? ??????? ????????? ??? ????????? ?????? ??? ??????????? ???????? ??? ??? ???? ?????????? ??????? ?? ????? ?? ????? ?? ?????????? ????????? ? ??? ??? ?????? ???? ?????????? ??? ??????? ????????????? ???????? ??????? ? ????? ?? ??????? ??? ?????????? ? ??????????? ????????? ??? ?? ????? ?????? ??????? ??????? ????? ???? ????? ??? ?? ????? ????? ?? ????? ???????? ? ????? ?? ??????? ????????? ? ??? ?? ???????? ? ??? ????? ? ????? ???????? ????? ??? ?????????? ???? ??? ???????? ????? ?? ????? ??????? ????? ?????????? ??????????? ??? ?? ??? ??? ?????? ?? ? ????????? ????? ????? ??????????? ? ?????????? ? ?????????????????? ?????? ??????? ??????? ?? ? ???????????? ??????? ????? ??? ??? ???????????? ? ?? ??????? ??? ?? ??????????? ??????? ??????????? ????? ??????? ???????? ?? ???? ??????? ????????

English transcript using Google translate:  and began with colleagues to collect video confirmation of the crimes that were committed over the battalions, finding everything under the guise of residents of certain settlements, not allowing them to go out through the culinary corridors and this is how. An example, I can tell the whole story of a nine-year-old boy who in one of their accommodation points in Novoazovsk told how their family was simply locked by locking the doors so that they could not leave their apartment in one of the districts of Mariupol and above their apartment in this time in a residential apartment also where people were located was placed a long time ago from the points of firing points of the Ukrainian armed forces. On all this data we will also record and transfer to law enforcement agencies which of course will necessarily investigate all this and we are sure that those criminals war criminals will be found convicted they are waiting for a military tribunal.

On 30 March Jack Posobiec, editor of Human Events, tweeted:

Alexei Arestovich, adviser to Zelensky, argued that international humanitarian laws or the laws of war dont apply in this conflict when discussing why the UAF place military equipment in civilian areas, per WaPo  Jack Posobiec ? (@JackPosobiec) March 30, 2022

Additionally, a statement by Alexey Arestovich, shown in the video below, has been circulating on social media. Although its not clear when the video was made, he states Russia strikes exclusively at military targets. This is in total contradiction of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and President Joe Biden, wrote Terri Jackson, member secretary to Principia Scientific.

The caption accompanying the video states: The only reason he is saying this is to keep people in the city  Kyiv  in their homes, around which the Ukrainian military positions are placed. As such, perpetuating the human shield tactics.

Arestovich, Zelenskyys advisor, admits Russia only hits military targets

If the clip of Arestovichs statement is removed from YouTube you can watch it HERE.

Last week, in two of his reports  one on Monday and one on Thursday  Patrick Lancaster interviewed residents of Mariupol. In Mondays report residents described how civilians are being used as human shields and how only women and children are permitted through the humanitarian corridors, watch HERE.

In Thursdays report residents describe how the majority of shooting was by Ukrainian forces and how the Ukrainians are placing their tanks near schools, kindergartens and in residential areas.

Patrick Lancaster: Asking Mariupol Residents About Russian Attacks on Civilian areas, 31 March 2022 (15 mins)

Ukraines cities  and civilian areas  have become the crucible of the war, wrote The Washington Post and quoted William Schabas, an international law professor at Middlesex University in London: I am very reluctant to suggest that Ukraine is responsible for civilian casualties, because Ukraine is fighting to defend its country from an aggressor. But to the extent that Ukraine brings the battlefield to the civilian neighbourhoods, it increases the danger to civilians.

Consortium News noted that according to Richard Weir, a researcher in Human Rights Watchs crisis and conflict division, the Ukrainian military has a responsibility under international law to either remove their forces and equipment from civilian areas, or to move the civilian population from the areas where military personnel and equipment are being stored.

If they dont do that, Weir said, that is a violation of the laws of war. Because what they are doing is they are putting civilians at risk. Because all that military equipment are legitimate targets.

Click on the image below to watch the video on Rumble.

RT: Ukraine defends use of residential buildings amid claims of using civilians as human shields, 31 March 2022 (2 mins)

Information, or Disinformation, War Continues

The NATO narrative is that Azovstal  one of Europes biggest iron and steel works  was nearly destroyed by the Russian Army and its allied Donetsk forces who lay siege to Mariupol, Great Game India reported on Friday. Their report continued:

The true story is that the neo-Nazi Azov battalion took scores of Mariupol civilians as human shields since the start of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, and retreated to Azovstal as a last stand. After an ultimatum delivered last week, they are now being completely exterminated by the Russian and Donetsk forces and Chechen Spetsnaz.

On Sunday RT reported that graphic footage from Bucha, a town to the northwest of Kiev, emerged over the weekend, showing multiple bodies clad in civilian clothing scattered around. Kiev was quick to blame the Russian military for the incident, with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba alleging it was a deliberate massacre. RTs report continues:

Top Western politicians were quick to back and amplify Kievs claims, with NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg branding the incident a brutality against civilians we havent seen in Europe for decades.

Moscow, however, has firmly rejected any involvement, accusing Kiev of staging the whole affair to frame Russian troops. The countrys Defence Ministry said Russian troops pulled out of the town on March 30, with the local mayor confirming this in a video address a day later without mentioning any local residents laying shot in the streets.

The purported evidence of the incident emerged only four days after the withdrawal, when Ukrainian intelligence and representatives of Ukrainian television arrived in the town, the military added, stressing that multiple inconsistencies show that the affair has been staged by the Kiev regime for Western media.

Moscow will convene an extraordinary meeting of the UN Security Council over the incident in Bucha.

Read more at: DailyExpose.uk
(Natural News) Dr. Laura Rosser of Prescribing Life talked about neural therapy during the March 31 episode of the Health Ranger Report on Brighteon.TV with host Mike Adams.

Our nervous system has the ability to create new neural pathways and to heal itself as well. So thats one of the parts and thats why its called neural therapy  because its really based on the nervous system. At the same time, we are giving it the ability to heal if there is an issue. And usually with chronic pain, what is happening is that your body is not able to heal itself, and that usually is linked to chronic inflammation, explained Rosser. (Related: Scientists shocked to discover the human body is full of mini brains that function without using the Central Nervous System.)

So when we are dealing with chronic inflammation, we need to figure out why is that happening, and usually its because there is chronic toxicity. But we try to deal with it in different ways. And with neural therapy, we identify the inflammation and through the application of local anesthesia, we are diminishing the inflammatory response in our body. And were also increasing the amount of blood, or the circulation, that is going to certain places. So we are increasing the amount of oxygen and nutrition.

Rosser, who has a masters degree in Preventive Medicine, Anti-Aging and Longevity, also gave a brief historical background of neural therapy, which is a therapy that started almost 100 years ago in Germany and was founded by brothers Ferdinand and Walter Huneke.

The Huneke brothers were trying to help their sister because she was having chronic pain. They found that through neural therapy they can help her get relief from chronic migraines and fibromyalgia.

Neural therapy is a treatment system to relieve chronic pains and illnesses through the injection of local anesthetics into scars, peripheral nerves, autonomic ganglia, trigger points, glands and other tissues. Treatment is based on normalizing the dysfunctional autonomic nervous system, which initiates or propagates many chronic ailments. It has been widely used by European physicians for over 50 years.

Rosser, a specialist in Integrative Medicine, said the nervous system is a network of information, and this is evident in how the central nervous system, which consists of the brain, the spinal cord and all the nerves in the human body that are all connected, works.

Neural therapy combines Western and Eastern medicine to treat chronic pain

Rosser noted that everything that is happening in a specific area in the body is going to affect everything else. Traditional Chinese medicine sees it that way because it looks into energetic pathways that are all interconnected and can affect other organs of the body.

Neural therapy, which combines Western and Eastern medicine, identifies the problem from an anatomical point of view and sees how the nervous system anatomically extrapolates to some points in the body.

We also use something that is called dermatome map which is used by neurologists, neurosurgeons and us, neuro-therapists, to identify those neural pathways. And its just so great to see how something that started a hundred years ago can also be linked to traditional medicine that has been around for thousands of years, said Rosser, whose company conducts a telemedicine virtual consultation with their patients first before they are given treatment compatible with them.

The BioNeuroEmotion specialist said that aside from looking into their patients medical history in an orthodox and holistic way, they also look into traumatic events that may have affected their patients  such as fractures, surgeries or scar tissues, which she said can be major clues to identify chronic pain in certain areas.

The medical specialist mentioned they use a very low concentration of lidocaine  a local anesthesia  and saline. She said local anesthesia is not just a great numbing agent for minor surgery, but is also a great anti-inflammatory agent. Rosser added that it can open up blood vessels and increase the concentrations of oxygenation and nutrition in specific areas that have been depleted.

Follow BackPain.news to discover more effective alternative treatments for chronic pain.

Watch the full March 31 episode of the Health Ranger Report below. Health Ranger Report airs every weekday at 3-3:30 p.m. on Brighteon.TV.

More related stories:

Hunger makes you better: Neural circuits in the brain drive improved physical performance and heightens motivation.

Scientists develop brain stimulation techniques using light therapy that offer mental health benefits.

Adding nuts to your diet has brain benefits  study.

Sources include:

Brighteon.com

PrescribingLife.com

NAANT.org

PubMed.NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov
(Natural News) There is trouble in communist paradise as the Chinese governments latest Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown measures in Shanghai are backfiring bigtime.

According to an expert from the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Shanghais new lockdown protocols are destroying the city and pushing it to the brink of collapse.

The PCR testing scheme alone is creating mass chaos as nobody seems to know what they are doing or why. The Shanghai CDC had to issue a notice demanding that staff members answer public inquiries in line with the policy because of conflicting information.

Area residents are complaining about their test results as well, which are coming in negative on their mobile phones but positive from the CDC. There does not appear to be any rhyme or reason as to why the results are inconsistent.

According to reports, Shanghai adopted an app called Healthcare Cloud that serves as its integrated Internet and Healthcare services platform. Locals were told to register for a PCR test through the app, and after that await test results on their cell phones.

This created mass confusion as many people received negative test results on their phones, only to be later told by the CDC that they had tested positive and now need to quarantine.

The plandemic has become a political issue, confirms Shanghai CDC expert

A recently leaked recording of a CDC expert responding to a caller on the Shanghai CDCs flooded hotline reveals how the system is completely overloaded and on the verge of total collapse.

We have received hundreds of calls every day, but our jobs are epidemiological investigations, the expert is heard saying. We cant solve your problem.

Let me tell you the facts: Theres no ward, the quarantine sites are filled, and theres no ambulance.

A male is then heard complaining:

But we have no way to address our issue, even Weibo is blocked.

The expert, a female, then responds back:

I have brought this up too many times; as an expert, I have suggested that the mild to no symptom patients stay at home. Does anyone listen? No!

Let me reiterate, she continued, do not bother checking your health cloud, its all a negative result. Only we will notify you when you have tested positive.

So what we see is all fake? the man then asks in return.

Thats right, the expert confirms, encouraging the man to go public with the recording, which he apparently did.

Shanghais health care system is consequently in a free fall as an overworked staff struggle to keep up with all the complaints and inconsistencies. In her rant, the Shanghai CDC expert continued to reveal that the whole thing is basically a sham, and that the city is being destroyed because of it.

This pandemic has become a political issue thats consuming so much manpower, resources, and money, just to solve this flu-like disease, she explained. What other country do you think is doing this kind of epidemic prevention now?

The answer is that only China is still harping on about what amounts to a cold or flu virus that is really no different than any other cold or flu virus at this point.

This Shanghai CDC expert was later confirmed to be Zhu Weiping, director of the Infectious Disease Prevention and Control Section of the Shanghai Pudong New Area CDC. She is now drawing criticism from apologists of the communist regime who claim that she is guilty of committing an aggressive attack on the party and sabotaging and shaking the anti-epidemic deployment.

The latest news about the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) plandemic can be found at Pandemic.news.

Sources include:

TheEpochTimes.com

NaturalNews.com
MBABANE  We have no record of this kind of support from our neighbours.

This was governments response to reports of a share of R1 billion sent allegedly sent by South Africa (SA) to assist Mozambique and Eswatini on the crises which had befallen these two countries. A South African Rand is equivalent to the countrys Lilangeni. The response was made by Acting Government Spokesperson Thabile Mdluli. Reiterating governments response was Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation Thuli Dladla, who said the ministry was not aware of an amount of R1 billion distributed among Eswatini and Mozambique by SA. This comes after a news ticker which was displayed on broadcasting channel eNCA, horizontally in the lower third of the screen space with the words SA sent R1bn to assist Mozambique and Eswatini raised eyebrows from members of the public who questioned whether the country had indeed received these funds.

Summit

Minister Dladla said they were yet to receive information of this nature and if in fact the information presented by eNCA was true, then they would soon find out at the SADC Extraordinary Summit which was due for April 15 and was to be attended by the Prime Minister, Cleopas Dlamini. The minister was questioned on whether the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) would make such a commitment or whether SA, independently, would make this sort of contribution. If SADC has in fact made this contribution, then we would have to wait until April 15 to figure out whether this is in fact possible. However, for now it has not been communicated to my office. If it is a SADC funding or contribution, a summit is needed for this amount to be approved, therefore, it is safe to wait for feedback from that event to see whether this is in fact true, said Dladla.

The South African news broadcasting station attached this news ticker during an interview with SA Minister of Foreign Affairs, International Relation and Cooperation Naledi Pandor, after the SADC Troika ministerial meeting in preparation and formulation of recommendations for the extraordinary summit. During the interview, Pandor was speaking on the biggest obstacles when it came to deploying troops in Mozambique, stating that these obstacles were cost and preparedness. In her remarks, during the ministerial meeting, Pandor said SADC sincerely believed that all the efforts made by member States were absolutely necessary and not in vain. The biggest obstacles in intervention is cost, to deploy forces is very expensive in any country, because you have to meet a number of areas of costs. The second obstacle is preparedness for confronting fairly sophisticated well-armed and seemingly well-funded terrorist groups, she said, when questioned about obstacles of deploying troops to Mozambique.

Contacted

The SA Ministry of Foreign Affairs was also reached for comment, however, when Minister Pandor was called, another woman answered the phone, indicating that indeed the ministry had been contacted, however, when this reporter stated the reason for the call she hung up. Recently, government denied reports that the King had allegedly removed Eswatini on the summits agenda as an agenda of the summit. Daily Maverick, a South African news publication, alleged that His Majesty King Mswati III made a last minute move, which it claimed raised concerns that he could be determined to conduct the proposed national dialogue on his own terms, despite his agreement with SA President Cyril Ramaphosa last year. The publication further alleged that Pandor did not explain why Eswatini had been removed from the original agenda of the ministerial meeting but that sources had said it was done at the Kings request.

Acting Government Spokesperson Thabile Mdluli said there was no truth to the circulating reports. Instead, she said the Summit of the SADC Organ Troika Plus Mozambique and Eswatini was announced a few weeks ago and as a country, Eswatini was requested to provide a report on the civil situation.
(Natural News) Health officials in the city of Shanghai defended their policy of isolating children who test positive for the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) from their parents. The policy came amid Chinas adherence to a zero-COVID policy to stem rising infections.

Wu Qianyu of the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission confirmed the eastern Chinese citys COVID-19 policy on April 4. If the child is younger than seven years old, those children will receive treatment in a public health center. For older children or teenagers, we are mainly isolating them in centralized [quarantine] places, she said.

The health official added that the policy applies to children who test positive for COVID-19, but whose parents and family members do not. Wu also clarified that both children and parents who return a positive COVID-19 test result would be able to stay together as a family.

Under current COVID-19 protocols, anyone who tests positive  even if they are asymptomatic or show mild symptoms  must be isolated from non-infected people. She pointed out that Shanghais policy is in line with Beijings zero-COVID stance.

The COVID-19 policy confirmed by Wu has triggered a wave of anxiety and outrage across the city. Footage of babies and young children in state-run facilities that went viral on Chinese social media contributed to the tension.

Several parents also took to social media to voice out their discontent toward Shanghais draconian policy. Parents need to meet conditions to accompany their children? Thats absurd. It should be their most basic right, wrote one commenter on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter.

Wus remarks came as Shanghai, Chinas largest city and financial center, battles a wave of COVID-19 outbreaks. The eastern port city, which is now the countrys COVID-19 epicenter, locked down its approximately 25 million residents to curb rising infections. (Related: To keep its residents safe from covid, Shanghai officials are starving people to death in their homes with new citywide lockdown.)

Authorities admit failure while Shanghai residents starve

Authorities in Shanghai initially promised not to lock down the entire city, instead sealing off specific compounds or districts through localized lockdowns. However, they admitted defeat with the targeted strategy as COVID-19 cases spiked and proceeded to impose a blanket lockdown. The blanket lockdown was initially set to last four days to enable mass testing for residents in Shanghais eastern and western portions.

Under the plan, the blanket lockdown was supposed to be lifted on April 5. However, Shanghais local government posted on its official WeChat account that the lockdown will remain in place due to the high number of COVID-19 cases. The announcement added to the frustrations of residents unable to obtain food supplies and leave their homes.

Several residents shared their stories to the Epoch Times. Fifty-six-year-old Wan Wenying, who lives in Shanghais Baoshan district, mentioned how local community officials refused to help her after she ran out of food. One official even told her to have cooked meals delivered to her residence, which she cannot do given her lack of income and ineligibility to receive social benefits.

Our residential compound has been sealed off for four days. The government doesnt care if its people are alive or dead. I dont have any money, and Im stuck at home, Wan lamented.

Another Shanghai resident who went by the pseudonym Yang Lei, who lives in the Jingan district, told the Epoch Times that local food prices had dramatically increased. Yang was still able to go out of her home, but some of her neighbors can no longer do so. She added that two buildings in her neighborhood had been sealed off after one resident in each building returned a positive COVID-19 test result.

Pandemic.news has more stories about the COVID-19 lockdowns in Shanghai.

Watch the EWTN news report below about Shanghai extending its lockdown.

This video is from the andamon channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

Forced covid lockdowns in China are starving people to death.

Shanghai residents rush to stock up as Chinese officials place half the city under strict COVID-19 lockdown.

Shanghai covid lockdown to exacerbate supply chain crisis, making shipping containers nearly impossible to source.

Chinese propaganda showing well-stocked citizens during lockdown BACKFIRES as people complain about LACK of food.

Sources include:

France24.com

TheEpochTimes.com

Brighteon.com
(Natural News) We must evaluate the timing of the Bucha false-flag, which is of great importance and will give us major clues as to the real unfolding of events behind the curtain. It is no coincidence that the single largest mass surrender of the conflict so far occurred literally in the latter part of the same day as the false-flag. There is a clear connection.

(Article republished from TheSaker.is)

Heres the surrender video for those who havent seen it: https://www.bitchute.com/video/aEanhNSwYPoR/

In short, Ukrainian command and the western Intel services that control it, are getting desperate. The fall of Mariupol would mean the beginning of a long chain of events that will start a domino effect of collapse for the AFU (Armed Forces of Ukraine). The Ukrainian elite obviously knew that one of the last remaining contingents holding Mariupol together at the seams was ready to fall and they needed an event that would somehow disrupt the momentum Russia was soon to have from the upcoming fall of Mariupol. Because it is now clear the battle for Mariupol is nearing its end  the fall of the 501st special marine battalion today was like a giant edifice crumbling from the face of a barely standing building.

The powers that be know that once Mariupol falls, the Russian, Chechen, and DPR forces therein will be freed to immediately begin Phase 2 of the operation. And all indications from my analysis points to the fact that Phase 2 will be much more brutal and swift than what weve seen so far, for the following reasons:

Particularly after the pullbacks from Kiev, Sumy, Chirnihiv regions, and the injection of freed Mariupol forces, Russia will have more forces than ever concentrated on a much smaller area of operations. This will have a big compounding effect.

Freed from the constraints of large urban warfare, where the Russian forces are at a disadvantage, they will instead be facing the open plains of the western Donbass and Dnieper regions which favor the Russian force disposition in every way imaginable. Not only are civilians much easier to evacuate from the small villages and settlements but Russia can much more freely use its big guns like the Msta 2S19 self propelled 152mm artillery, the various MLRS including Tos-1 thermobarics, and its fleet of attack choppers  all of which have been completely locked out of the urban battles in Mariupol and Kiev for the reasons of preventing mass civilian death and civil infrastructure destruction. Weve had a taste already of how a more unrestricted Russian attack can look in the battle of Volnovakha and it was not pretty. I wont needlessly post the photos/videos but Ukrop forces were brutally gored there.

The Ukr command are desperately trying to forestall these events. They know they stand no chance without some major escalation from NATO and unwilling European friends have been dragging their feet and noncommital about providing the types of arms that would allow Ukraine to stand a chance in Phase 2, in short  things like actual good light armor / tanks. Germany has supposedly agreed to give ancient 1960 BMP-1s from the GDR era, but even if it manages to effect this the delivery to the frontlines would take time and this is exactly why they need to forestall as much as possible with these false flags.

Also theres now reports Czech Republic has sent many T-72s and BMP-1 equivalent (the Czech copies/versions)

https://twitter.com/CT24zive/status/1511315385173393415

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/czech-republic-sends-tanks-ukraine-czech-tv-reports-2022-04-05/

And on the topic of urban vs. open warfare. One thing thats important to mention is, a lot of people claim Russias initial strategy of seizing cities was a failure of intel because Russia hoped these cities would lay down their arms and embrace Russia and that didnt happen. But if you really examine the opening more closely, its clear that Russias plan DID work to a large part  they seized several of their most important key cities in the exact way they wanted, without firing a shot nor destroying the cities in urban warfare. These are: Kherson, Melitopol, Energodar, Berdiansk. The ones they hoped would give up but failed were Kharkov, Kiev, and arguably Nikolayev. Its obviously a partial success, and more so for the fact that the ones that fell were in the important region that Russia is likely to incorporate in one way or another into its sphere of control anyway. So how can one claim the strategy was a failure when Russia now controls this belt of important cities and life there has returned to normal, and the cities are being fully integrated into the Russian economy. New reports show how Kherson and Energodar have created economic commissions which are now coordinating trade economies with Crimea, and fiber internet from Crimea has also now been established linking Kherson directly to the RF and cutting it from the Ukraine.

But back to the first point: we still dont know the exact objectives of Phase 2, and most of us just assume by far the main thrust will be to close the Great Cauldron in Donbass. But there are some indications that Phase 2 will in fact either include or even favor an initial focus on Nikolayev and Kharkov. These are only rumors, but simply something to keep in mind. Western/Ukrainian intel sources and chirps from their upper command claim that Russia is set to attack Kharkov, and there is an obvious RF force accumulation towards the Nikolayev axis.

One possibility is that Russia continues to play maneuver warfare and keep Kiev guessing to throw them off and strike them where theyre weak. Everyone fully expected the cauldron to be next and Kiev announced the sending of large reinforcements there, but Russia may instead choose to focus a powerful thrust onto a lesser defended Nikolayev instead, as an example.

Anyway, though there is mostly an operational pause on the ground, at least for the RF side while they regroup, reposition and wait for Mariupol to fall so that they can begin Phase 2, there are still some gains and frontline changes we can speak of.

Reinforcements continue pouring in: https://twitter.com/Suriyakmaps/status/1510996693487177732

https://twitter.com/Suriyakmaps/status/1510300795039883264

The DPR continue to break through the defensive line in NW Donetsk. There are very gruesome videos of Ukrainian trenches being overrun, littered with the UAF dead.

In the Izyum direction, UAF command has announced the loss of Brazhkivka, which is a town on the way towards Barinkove. Dovenkhe which can be seen here is under attack by RF forces as they appear to be pushing a possible two pronged direction towards Barinkove and Slavyansk.

In the LPR, it appears Ukrainian forces withdrew from the rest of Rubizhnoe and as is their usual tactic (remember the coke factory detonation when they withdrew from NW Donetsk?) they blew up a big chemical plant which now threatens large civilian populations with all sorts of toxic acid.

https://www.rt.com/russia/553347-ukraine-attack-chemical-plant-casualties/

On the Mariupol front, there appears to be more surrenders, exact numbers not confirmed yet but I heard 30+. As I said previously, Mariupol appears to be crumbling and speeding up.

Video: https://www.bitchute.com/video/NVHaU2dBHaY1/

Also there are several new videos of self-propelled artillery for seemingly the first time being brought in to the frontline. One of the suppositions is that, since the Azov militants are holed up in the factories, the allied forces now feel more comfortable being able to shell them with indiscriminate artillery without inflicting civilian casualties.

https://twitter.com/RWApodcast/status/1511365185965019141

Also, for those that havent seen it yet, a beret of some sort of French foreign legion or mercenary, as well as a pin were found by Semyon Pegov in Mariupol: https://www.bitchute.com/video/o0OLrq0fZTRv/

And there continues to be reports that French mercenaries are still trapped in Mariupol and have not yet been evacuated in those previously failed helicopter rescues.

Unconfirmed reports like this: NATO officers from France, Germany, Britain and neutral Sweden got stuck at Azovstal in Mariupol. Right now they are getting in touch with the Russian troops with a request to help them leave, to organize a corridor for the exit.  journalist German Vladimirov.

Now there are new reports at the time of this writing that RF forces have shot down 2 new Mi-8 helicopters in Mariupol, sources such as Colonel Cassad are reporting. Someone is getting extremely desperate to evacuate some VIPs there it seems. The choppers were allegedly coming over the Azov sea and were shot down on approach and fell into the sea, so were unlikely to see crash photos this time, but well see how this report pans out.

Meanwhile Russian marines and DPR troops pour in towards the final frontlines near the factories:

Elsewhere in Dnipro, Ukrainian troops have been filmed committing monstrous brutality against civilians https://www.bitchute.com/video/9zqkSC40IuUw/ These are the glorious heroes that were supposed to believe are the ones protecting civilians like in Bucha and elsewhere? Time and time again we see the absolute brutality of Ukrainian troops on civilians. There are countless videos of them shooting civilians from the start of the war. And in general civilians do not seem to be greatly valued in Ukrainian society as the Volkssturm terror wave continues unabated throughout the country, in fact recently its spread to taping children, old women, etc, to poles indiscriminately.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/w1zvj2TAyWhL/

https://www.bitchute.com/video/VMS5cET98HOU/

One thing that must be noted and expounded upon. What were seeing is a shift in Ukrainian tactics from actual, ostensible warfare to psychological warfare almost exclusively. What this means is, Ukraine has ceased even trying to win in the sense of operable offensives / counter-offensives and real strategic battlefield victories. Rather they have now devolved into a strategy where only psyops, intimidation, and propaganda aimed at reducing morale is their chief and primary weapon against RF forces.

There hasnt been a single recorded victory of any sort from the Ukrainian side in a long time against actual Russian troops. They are retreating and losing manpower virtually everywhere apart from the places Russia willfully pulled back. But this is a huge difference between being forced to retreat due to suffering losses, and a reorientation in strategy. For instance, in every single place where Russia pulled back, they were actually gaining ground and taking victories against Ukrainian forces. Example: in west Kiev, Russia had captured several new towns and was pushing towards Byshiv and other areas SW of Kiev. But then they simply stopped and pulled back due to the decisions of high command. Same goes in areas like Chernuhiv where we know Russia had just recently made major gains, captured the town of Slavutych and encircled the city of Chernuhiv. Ukrainian forces on the other hand are being brutally driven back and killed en masse as many videos in my possession attest.

So the point is, Ukraine has shifted to conducting only a psychological war as its last resort. From Bucha, to the POW tortures/killings, to the pointless but showy strike on Belgorod, which did nothing more than attempt to deal a psychological strike to the Russian morale. Remember, Russia is drowning in oil/fuel, that is the least of their problems. An attack targeting a minor, insignificant oil depot in a small backwater town is strategically irrelevant. The fact that Ukraine risked such a daring operation shows the shift into psychological war rather than actual strategically effective war against real targets. It is a sign of an enemy who is losing and desperate.

The Ukraine is now fighting a war primarily in the electronic/cyber/abstract sphere of influence, rather than the real objective sphere of physical battle and direct warfare. In short, they are doing anything possible to take the attention away from their own massive strategic losses on the real, physical battlefield. This is effectively a shift to a psychological operation rather than physical operation on their behalf. The types of attacks and victories we are likely to see from them from this point on will be things of this nature  small strategically insignificant but showy and designed for psychological effect  and of course a likely initiative switch to increasing the scale and frequency of false flags of all types we will see from this point onward.

Now, I dont want to paint an overly rosy picture. The RF continues to experience some losses as well but they are typically of an asymmetrical nature. UAF is not winning any battles whatsoever or even engagements. They are merely bleeding our forces here and there with small guerilla attacks that manage to take out one or two vehicles from a supply convoy, or as seen recently, take a helicopter or plane every once in a while.

This takes me to the final topic, yes it appears true that after suffering little to no air losses for a couple weeks now, we have suddenly seen the shoot down of an Su-35 and a Mi-28. It is claimed that a new Wunderwaffen from UK called the Starstreak manpad was used for these shootdowns. I can confirm having viewed the videos that it is possible the Starstreak was used, as opposed to just propaganda. The reason is, the most notable characteristic of the system is its exorbitantly high speed, Mach 3-4 of the projectile, which is much greater than most/standard manpad systems. In the Mi-28 video in particular, the projectile does appear to come ridiculously fast nor has a smoke plume that is characteristic of typical rocket-engined manpads. The Starstreak has a rocket stage that falls off, sending a trio of metal penetrator rods at the target. This is exactly what I seemed to see in the video and if true, this weapon system does appear to be quite a problem because the DIRCM systems in use by Russia (or anyone in the world for that matter) cannot possibly consistently stop such a system. The simple fact of its speed means it takes less than a second or two for it to go from the launch to the hit, which makes a response nearly meaningless (depending on the height of the aircraft, but in this case the helicopter was low, as most RF choppers are as per their operating standard in these areas).

The Su-35 on the other hand seemed to fall straight down in a strange way that could be indicative of a hit from these metallic penetrator rods that would have severed the empenage causing a catastrophic fall. A typical manpad strikes with a smaller explosion that often just damages the engine and/or wings, causing the plane to fall in a characteristic pattern more in line with rapid forward descent, not catastrophic straight down flat stall.

And by the way, the pilot of the Su-35 was apparently captured by Ukrop forces, as I saw a photo of the bleeding tied up pilot who will likely now be tortured. But the Mi-28 pilots fortunately not only survived but were successfully evacuated by our retrieval forces.

So what can Russia do against such advanced anti-air systems? Not much really. The fact is, NO country can do much against them. If these same Starstreaks were used against the U.S. airforce, they would have the same exact problems as Russia is having. There is simply no real way to effectively and consistently stop them. The only difference might be that the U.S. has a far greater drone capability and the U.S. would likely cease using its airforce in the area and would instead hunt these targets with drones nonstop. But of course, the U.S. has never gone against a near-peer enemy of this sort that is supplied with such advanced weapon systems. Even in Iraq going against an enemy who literally lacked manpads at all and used only much larger and easier to spot/kill ancient legacy soviet anti-aircraft systems, the U.S. still suffered massive aircraft losses. Heres a list of many of their air losses just to give you an idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_shootdowns_and_accidents_during_the_Iraq_War

The list is equally as long for Afghanistan.

But my point isnt to make fun or imply the U.S. couldnt have done a better job, but simply to illustrate that air losses are an undeniable mainstay of combat. You simply cannot stop them entirely without completely withdrawing your airforce from action. There is only stopgap measures you can use to minimize the threat as much as possible, which are already being used  like flying at low altitudes and rapid speed, or conversely flying at extremely high altitudes out of the manpads range. But you can never get rid of the threat entirely and no electronic counter measure on earth is 100% effective against them but merely reduce the chances of the manpad functioning depending on a multitude of factors, such as the aircrafts vector, velocity, atmospheric conditions, manpad range to target, number of simultaneous manpads fired, etc, etc. I have several videos showing the neutralization of enemy manpads by Russian counter-measure systems.

With that said, RF airforce is conducting a large amount of sorties daily, and their losses in the past few weeks have been extremely minimal for this level of conflict, and in fact videos appear all the time showing the effectiveness of the Ka-52 and Mi-28s strikes on enemy positions.

Ill finish with a map of current Mariupol. Time is ticking and the desperate rescue attempts are increasing, there cant be much time left for Mariupol.

Read more at: TheSaker.is
(Natural News) In order to increase Great Britains transgender population, the government there is paying off doctors to perform sex-change therapy on patients.

Whenever a family doctor in the United Kingdom agrees to administer hormone-damaging pharmaceuticals in the form of cross-sex hormone therapy) to their patients, the British government will give a cash incentive of 178 ($233) per year to the physician.

If the patient also agrees to undergo annual health checks as a transgender, non-binary, or intersex being, then the U.K. government will throw in another 91 ($119) per year as a bonus.

No mental health care requirements are included in the scheme, which is so disturbing that even The New York Times raised concerns about it. Biological males will be given strong estrogen medications while biological females are given strong testosterone medications, and nobody will be providing any mental health consultations throughout the process.

Many who have already gone through this loose process of turning trans now regret it. Others who do not, but who recognize the need for proper mental health care, are also concerned about this new U.K. policy.

When I transitioned, I had an hour with a therapist every week for months, says Debbie Hayton, a transgender advocate who underwent a medical transition back in 2012.

Thats what I needed to understand myself. An annual review is a pale shadow of that.

Transgender clinics say business has increased 240 percent over the past five years

The Times gained access to a document suggesting that the trial scheme in Sussex is not designed to promote the initiation of hormonal treatment in general practice, but that it will be at the discretion of the individual GP (general practitioner).

The only qualification to participate is a two-and-a-half-hour online training session, which will run in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, and West Sussex for the next three years.

The stated purpose of the financial incentive component of the program is to encourage more doctors to take on transgender sex therapy cases. This, in turn, will lighten the load for dedicated gender clinics such as the Tavistock Centre in London.

Despite the incredible risks the new program presents to patients, the far-left LGBTQ activist group Stonewall is praising the bribery program, calling it progress (Related: Many feminists are opposed to transgenderism because they see it as biological men in drag encroaching on their territory).

With enough capacity and training, schemes like this could ensure trans people can access the specialist care they need in their local community and without the lengthy wait, a statement from Stonewall reads.

A spokeswoman for Sussex Commissioners echoed this with her own praise for the new program:

Transgender, non-binary and intersex (TNBI) people experience significant health inequalities  something we are committed to tackling.

Over the past five years, interest in genital mutilation and hormone damaging pharmaceuticals has increased by about 240 percent, according to gender clinics that focus on destroying peoples natural biology.

This rise in popularity is especially prominent among young people and has been especially pronounced since the beginning of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) plandemic.

Since the beginning of the lockdowns in 2020, there has been a 20 percent increase in minors seeking to cut off their body parts and reprogram their hormones with pharmaceuticals.

Many doctors are opposed to this trend, but too few of them are willing to speak out against it. Sadly, many are falling in line just to keep their careers, and performing procedures that they otherwise would not do were they not facing constant persecution from the Cult of LGBTQ.

To keep up with the latest news about the Wests push for everyone to become transgender, be sure to check out Gender.news.

Sources include:

En-Volve.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) The head of United States Strategic Command is warning American lawmakers about Chinas breathtaking expansion of its strategic nuclear arsenal.

In a prepared written testimony posted on the website of the House Appropriation Subcommittee on Defense, Adm. Charles Richard said that Chinas first test of a new type of intercontinental ballistic missile in July 2021 was a technological achievement with serious implications for strategic stability. (Related: China pushes for expansion of its nuclear arsenal, braces for nuclear showdown with US military.)

In the July test, Beijing used a DF-17 medium-range ballistic missile launcher equipped with a DF-ZF hypersonic glide vehicle. The glide vehicle was launched into low-orbit space before it detached. It then flew 25,000 miles for more than 100 minutes, circling the globe before striking within two dozen miles of its test target.

The DF-ZF can be used to perform precision strikes anywhere in the world with a conventional payload, like an anti-ship ballistic missile. But it could also be used to deliver nuclear weapons.

This test, according to Richard, has the distinction of having the greatest distance and longest flight time of any land attack weapon system of any nation to date.

Richard explained that the Department of Defenses plans to ward off potential strikes from rising threats like China and Russia rest on the assumption that strategic deterrence, and in particular nuclear deterrence, will hold.

But with Chinas recent massive investments into its nuclear capabilities, it now has the capability  along with Russia  to unilaterally escalate a conflict to any level of violence, in any domain, worldwide, with any instrument of national power, and at any time, said Richard. Americas armed forces no longer have the luxury of assuming the risk is always low, particularly during a crisis.

If strategic or nuclear deterrence fails, integrated deterrence and no other plan or capability in the DOD will work as designed, said Richard.

China to double its nuclear arsenal by 2027

China currently has a nuclear warhead stockpile somewhere between 200 to the low 300s. In late 2021, the Pentagon published a report on Chinas military power and the department noted that Beijing is planning to accelerate the development and expansion of its strategic nuclear arsenal.

By 2027, China hopes to double its current warhead stockpile and amass around 700 warheads. By 2030, it wants to nearly triple it and have 1,000 warheads.

This would more than double the Pentagons 2020 estimate regarding the expansion of Chinas nuclear capabilities.

The Pentagon noted that China is also investing in and expanding its ability to deliver nuclear warheads by land, sea and air, and constructing the infrastructure necessary to support this major expansion of its nuclear forces.

Our number-one pacing challenge is the Peoples Republic of China, noted Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby last year.

At the core of the communist states investments are hypersonic weapons that can deliver nuclear payloads anywhere in the world and directed energy weapons technology with global strike capabilities and capable of defeating an enemy nations missile defense systems and its anti-satellite, anti-missile and anti-drone capabilities.

Beijing has also provided more funding for the construction of nuclear missile fields in the sparsely populated western regions of China. Each known nuclear missile field has around 120 missile silos, which would give the country a robust array of ballistic missiles capable of reaching the continental United States.

Other Chinese advancements in the last year, according to Richard and the Pentagons intelligence, include ground-based, large phased array radars and at least one geostationary satellite, both of which are capable of detecting incoming threats to the Chinese state, including ballistic missiles and stealth aircraft.

Learn more about the threat that China poses to America at NationalSecurity.news.

Watch this clip of China parading its medium-range and intercontinental ballistic missile launchers, which pose a significant threat to the United States.

This video is from the Worlds Best channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

U.S. military head says country faces substantial nuclear threat from Russia, China.

US faces nuclear threats from China, Russia as never before: US Admiral.

Head of U.S. Strategic Command issues dire warning about nuclear war with Russia, China.

WAR ALERT: China setting stage for NUCLEAR WAR with Taiwan, Australia, Japan, India and the USA.

STRATCOM commander sounds the alarm bell, says nuclear war very real possibility with Russia or China.

Sources include:

BloombergQuint.com

ArmsControl.org

Brighteon.com
(Natural News) Dennis Carroll, the former head of the U.S. Agency for International Developments (USAID) PREDICT program, a plandemic threat assessment and management scheme, reportedly funneled taxpayer money meant for the program into his own private endeavors.

Money that was supposed to go to PREDICT, which funds laboratory equipment at the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China, ended up being siphoned into the Global Virome Project, which Carroll co-founded, according to reports.

U.S. federal law strictly prohibits the use of official resources for private gain, but this is exactly what Carroll did by redirecting the cash to his own little pet project, according to proof uncovered by investigative journalist Paul Thacker.

While at USAID, Dennis Carroll oversaw a federal program called PREDICT, from which funds were used to launch another organization called the Global Virome Project, Thacker wrote. After leaving USAID, Carroll then became chair of the Global Virome Projects board.

When shown emails made public by the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know (USRTK) group, Craig Holman of Public Citizen said that it appears as though Carroll violated federal law by taking the money and using it to promote himself and his own private endeavors.

Official resources  including government means of communications, government-funded travel or even the use of ones official title  may not be used to promote private interests, such as the Global Virome Project, Thacker further wrote.

Theres so much criminality in every level of government

USRTK obtained the incriminating documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, revealing that Carroll first designed the PREDICT program as a proof of concept for the Global Virome Project while receiving six-figure paychecks from USAID.

While on the government dole, Carroll promoted and raised funds for the Global Virome Project, in some cases using USAID funding to do so. Read more about how the Global Virome Project is connected to Jeffrey Epstein and the Ukrainian biolabs run by the Pentagon.

Among the contractors funded through USAID PREDICT was Peter Daszaks EcoHealth Alliance, which also violated the law. In early March of 2022, several members of Congress sent a letter to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) asking for an investigation into EcoHealth for potential contract irregularities and anonymous private donations, in violation of federal statute.

Meanwhile, the Global Virome Project was launched to supposedly hunt down and catalogue previously unknown viruses. The project is currently trying to secure $1.2 billion in funding to identify more than one million viruses obtained from wildlife, supposedly to see which ones might be infectious to humans.

USRTK and Thacker have both confirmed that USAID was funding overseas travel and promoting and fundraising for the Global Virome Project using money from the PREDICT program. And this was all taking place while Carroll was still the head of USAID.

Carrolls apparent goal while in this position was to build credibility for the Global Virome Project in order to get it off the ground. He exploited many opportunities to push for more funding in direct violation of the law.

The law is clear that officials cannot use government resources to benefit themselves or prospective employers, says Kedric Payne, senior director of ethics at the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center.

If Carroll was involved in decisions benefitting GVP while he was at USAID, it is likely that he needed approval from the agencys ethics officials. The public has a right to know if their public officials comply with conflict of interest laws.

Scott Amey, general counsel for another watchdog group called the Project on Government Oversight, agreed. Theres [sic] numerous conflict of interest laws that should be investigated here to ensure that Carroll didnt violate the laws on the books, Amey wrote.

The latest news about plandemic fraud can be found at Pandemic.news.

Sources include:

DailyExpose.uk

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently went from describing alleged war crimes and atrocities committed by the Russian troops to shifting the narrative to climate change.

Zelensky said Russias aggression against Ukraine and the rest of Europe is strengthening the need to accelerate green transformation on the continent. Europe must give up Russian oil, give up as soon as possible because it is the crazy income from energy resources that allows the Russian leadership to be bold, violate generally accepted rules, promote hatred against other nations, against us, and destroy the lives of neighboring countries, he said.

In reality, however, Europe has been increasing its reliance on green energy sources while limiting the use of coal, giving Russia more control over the energy market.

It is also important to note that the goal of climate change promoters is not an energy system that changes the global climate. They are instead moving to create Carbon Tax Trading Systems, a new financial control and monitoring mechanism and a global taxation program to control all human activity at a global level.

The Ukrainian presidents message is similar to that of a recent statement by Klaus Schwab, where he said that there will be systemic and structural changes and that global supply chains, energy and food systems will be deeply affected.

Zelenskys push to increase green energy funding and output would also help companies like Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas corporation where President Joe Bidens son, Hunter Biden, sat on the board. (Related: Journalist exposes medias collusion to protect Hunter Biden.)

The younger Biden is currently facing a federal investigation for his connections with shady foreign corporations after he was subpoenaed at the end of 2020. There had been media pundits and politicians who believe that Biden was providing access to his father in exchange for money.

Burisma co-founded an initiative in 2016 to push for energy security and focus on the popularization of alternative energy sources in Europe and worldwide. With the company standing to profit from the increased reliance on natural gas, it brings to question whether or not the Bidens were simply getting ahead of the curve by getting in on the corporations actions before the war broke out.

There is also the possibility that the Biden administration allowed or even instigated the conflict to usher in a new era of green energy and to finally put an end to the reliance on Russian energy.

Regardless, it seems that the only ones who benefit from this green energy are the companies and liberal politicians.

Trump urges Putin to hand over dirt on Hunter Biden

While the Russian invasion of Ukraine is ongoing, former president Donald Trump urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to hand over documents that may include Hunter Bidens dealings with Russian oligarchs.

Trump said he was particularly interested in the alleged $3.5 million payment from the former mayor of Moscows widow to a company co-founded by Biden.

Why did the mayor of Moscows wife give the Bidens $3.5 million? Thats a lot of money. She gave him $3.5 million. So now I would think Putin would know the answer to that. I think he should release it. I think we should know the answer, Trump said.

Trump also accused Biden of a conflict of interest after he was sanctioned by Moscow, along with other U.S. officials and his son.

Further, Trump alleged that Biden failed to react more strongly to Putins invasion of Ukraine because of the payments made to them from the late mayors wife.

Days after Trumps accusations came, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was questioned over why Baturina had not been sanctioned by the U.S. over Russias attack despite apparent ties to the Kremlin. Questions also arose regarding Bidens involvement in the matter.

While Biden himself was not implicated in the report released in September 2020, it did argue that Hunter Bidens time working on the board of the Burisma could have presented a conflict of interest for the Obama administration. As Obamas vice president, Biden was leading the anti-corruption efforts in Kyiv at the time. (Related: The plot thickens: Hunter Biden investment firm funded Ukraine biolabs.)

Watch the video below for more information on Hunter Bidens involvement with biolabs and Ukrainian businesses.

This video is from The Resistance 1776 channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

Burisma admits in court that it bribed Joe and Hunter Biden.

Tom Cotton to Big Tech after censorship of Biden-Burisma report: Winter is coming.

US confirms existence of bioweapons labs in Ukraine, says Russian attack may target them.

US violated UN treaties on biological weapons by funding bioweapons labs in Ukraine.

Hunter Biden had links with questionable personalities during his fathers tenure.

Sources include:

InfoWars.com

TruthTalk.uk

DailyMail.co.uk

Brighteon.com
Rationing of gas is being planned in Germany. France's power system operator is urging people to use less electricity. Protests are erupting in the United Kingdom over the latest energy price spike, which has put millions of people in "fuel stress," according to one local think tank. Europe is facing a major energy crisis.

On-Going Issue

The issue has existed for years, and it reflects European governments' constant belief that no matter what happens, there will always be gas from Russia. After all, even during the Cold War, Russia supplied Europe with billions of cubic meters of gas. Things are different now, and it isn't simply because of the Ukraine conflict.

For a few years, Europe has been working hard to reduce its reliance on all fossil fuels, not just Russian gas. According to the EU, renewable energy sources will account for 37.5 percent of gross power consumption in 2022, with wind and hydro accounting for two-thirds of total renewable energy output. Why, therefore, does Germany have to prepare for gas rationing while France asks its inhabitants to reduce their power consumption? That has anything to do with the conflict in Ukraine. The dispute appears to have driven EU nations - and Downing Street - into a frenzy, attempting to distance themselves from Russia in whatever way they can, including restricting Russian gas supplies.

Also Read: In a Historical First, Renewable Energy Produced 10% of World's Electricity

Ceasing Trade

The three Baltic republics have already indicated that they will cease buying Russian gas on April 1. Russian President Vladimir Putin's demand for payment in rubles for the gas Russia delivers appears to have only fueled European countries' determination to abandon the gas. For the time being, they are relying on gas from storage. Later, either LNG will arrive at the Klaipeda terminal in Lithuania, or an interconnector with Poland will be built. Lithuania is urging the rest of the European Union to follow its lead. Surprisingly, the Baltics do not appear to have replaced their reliance on gas with reliance on wind and solar.

The same may be said of the remainder of the European Union. Bloomberg reported earlier this year that renewables were "crowding out" natural gas across the EU. The story quoted research by Ember, an environmental think organization, in which the principal author stated:

"These are turning points and paradigm changes in which governments and corporations begin to take this considerably more seriously." Alternatives exist, are less expensive, and are likely to become even more affordable and competitive in the future. "Renewables are now a benefit, not an expense," said Charles Moore.

So, why is there such a fight for gas now? Why not ramp up the development of new wind and solar farms to demonstrate to Putin what Europeans can do? This is one of the most perplexing topics of our day. The solution must involve references to the prices of copper, steel, polysilicon, and virtually every other metal and mineral product. Furthermore, constructing these facilities takes time, which is longer than, say, switching to LNG (assuming you have import terminals) or coal.

Indeed, in a newly revealed plan to cut Russian gas use and oil and coal, the European Commission relied heavily on additional gas and coal rather than wind and solar.

Replacing Gas

The EU would strive to replace 50 billion cubic meters of yearly Russian gas use with LNG from other sources and another 10 billion cubic meters with pipeline gas from other sources, according to a breakdown of the plan reported by German Die Welt. That's a total of 60 billion cubic meters of Russian gas consumed a year, out of 155 billion cubic meters. According to the idea, another 20 billion cubic meters might be replaced by utilizing additional coal, according to, Industry and Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton.

This is the same Europe advocating for the abolition of coal, the same Europe that intended to close all of its coal-fired power facilities by 2030 to satisfy the Paris Agreement's emissions reduction objectives. To replace another 10 billion cubic meters of Russian gas, same Europe is counting on replacing natural gas with fuel oil.

The European Commission appears to be seeking to substitute other fossil fuels for more than half of its Russian gas use. Wind and solar power are estimated to replace 22.5 billion cubic meters of Russian gas, with wind contributing 10 billion cubic meters and solar contributing 12.5 billion cubic meters. That's not much for an area on track to become the greenest globally shortly.

Not Enough

As the EU finds itself in a gas pickle, the reality of energy supply and use is reasserting itself. If its strategy calls for so much greater fossil fuel usage, fossil fuels must be easier - and faster - to get by and perhaps even cheaper than wind and solar.

Related Article: Resurgence of Coal Mining May Direly Affect Global Climate Goals

For more environmental news, don't forget to follow Nature World News!
The United States the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved subsequent supplemental shots of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna's COVID-19 immunizations.

Participants aged 50 years old and above, as well as selected vulnerable adults aged 12 and older, are eligible for this authorization.

Second Booster Doses For COVID-19 Approved By FDA

The executive of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, stated in an interview with LiveScience that second boosters are paramount for many of those 65 years or older, as well as those adults over the age of 50, who have serious healthcare circumstances that significantly raise their incidence of serious illness from COVID-19.

The New York Times also argued as to the possible outcome of acquiring booster. Therefore, assuming that folks apply for a second booster, is it worthwhile to look for one immediately? Or are there potential drawbacks to taking the injection today?

The FDA stated that anybody aged 50 years and over can get a subsequent supplementary treatment of any mRNA vaccine such as the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna, if it has been at least four months following their initial thruster administration of whichever licensed or recommended COVID-19 vaccine.

Moreover, the Israeli Department of Health submitted the FDA a synopsis of medical monitoring information gathered from approximately 700,000 patients, predominantly over the age of 60, who got second thruster treatments of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at least 4 months after their initial thruster treatments.

Current research suggests that, the subsequent booster dosage may not provide as spectacular a spike in antigens or as big an enhancement in immunological response as the earlier thruster medication.

Young adults, from the age group of 12 and above for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and age group of 18 for the Moderna vaccine could potentially receive further vaccinations if they also have disorders that limit their protective immunity.

Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California blog stated on his article that if it's been more than 4 to 6 months after patients' previous supplement dosage and they are above the age of 50, one must receive the vaccine immediately.

However, because these trials were conducted on wildlife, it needs to be observed if an omicron-specific thruster may provide individuals with any additional advantage over a standard vaccine, as per Topol.

Also read: Scientists Finally Map an Entire Human Genome with Roughly Three Billion Letters in Human DNA

Why People Should Get Booster Shot of COVID-19 Vaccines

Certain persons might well be apprehensive that receiving a secondary enhancer over the initial variant of SARS-CoV-2 may undermine their immunological scheme's efforts to combat emerging coronavirus strains.

While according to clinical research scientist Derek Lowe in his statement in Science Magazine's In The Pipeline blog, he stated that his personal belief is that if a variety develops through time that is quite horrible to demonstrate significant antigen presentation, that same quality could render it something that a modern vaccine enhancer is inclined to attack advantageously.

Now the question as to if primordial immunological impurity, commonly referred as immunological encoding or antigen patterning, affect how the antibodies reacts to subsequent SARS-CoV-2 mutations and modified version thrusters?

The FDA said that the effectiveness of the Moderna subsequent thruster vaccination were inspired by history with said Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine as well as security data provided from an autonomously performed trial.

This tiny trial comprised 120 grownup volunteers who underwent their initial Pfizer-BioNTech enhancer dosage and subsequently a secondary Moderna thruster treatment.

Related article: New Research Says Some Types of Asthma could Protect Us Against Severe COVID-19
An animal shelter in Borodyanka, Ukraine was left for dead during the Russia-Ukraine war, an invasion that has triggered Europe's largest refugee crisis since World War II, where more than 4.2 million Ukrainians left the country and a quarter remain displaced.

Over 485 dogs in the shelter remained locked in cages from the start of the war, without any food or water, according to the charity UAnimals. When volunteers finally gained access to the building on April 1, more than 300 dogs were found dead, CBC News reported.

A footage uploaded by Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Center for Civil Liberties, has emerged on social media showing bodies of hundreds of dogs on the floor. A separate video posted by Ukrainian Interior Ministry advisor Anton Gerashchenko on Telegram shows the surviving dogs from the Borodyanka shelter barking and crying for help, while volunteers walk around the carcasses.

"I have no words. Russians even killed dozens of dogs in Kyiv region," says Matviichuk with tears.

Dogs in Ukraine War

The UAnimals organization have been helping animal shelters financially and providing them with food since the beginning of the Russian attack. According to the group, their volunteers have now fed the dogs that survived and had 27 of the animals treated in private clinics.

While the charity has picked up some of the surviving dogs themselves, UAnimals offers 50,000 hryvnias - approximately $1,700 - to reward anyone who's willing to take what the charity described as the heaviest surviving dogs.

The Ukrainian news site Visegrad 24 also posted a video of Russian soldiers killing people's pets before they withdrew from the Ukrainian village of Velyka Dymerka, near Kyiv. "Why? Is this something they consider "fun"?" the news site said.

As Ukrainians have retaken control over several areas around the Kyiv region, they were left with relatively large aftermath left behind by retreating Russian forces.

Also read: New Paper Suggests That T. Rex Had Short Arms to Avoid Being Bitten Off

Animal Protection in Wartime

Russia's invasion, now in its sixth week, had left victims dead in streets. Ukrainian prosecutors investigate possible war crimes by Russia, describing the scenes as "genocide - the elimination of the whole nation and the people," Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said in an exclusive interview.

The war in Ukraine had also demonstrated the need for protection of other species in wartime. With people desperately fleeing out of the country, many animals are abandoned in their homes left to die. In a 2014 estimate, Ukraine shelters some 750,000 dogs and 5.5 million cats, now many of those are left behind, especially larger dogs, according to Vox.

"We cannot judge because we don't know how people feel when there is a real risk that you can be killed," Olga Chevganiuk of UAnimals. The animal welfare group, among others, are working around the clock to save stray animals and keep shelters running, but that "devotion can come with a cost", as some volunteers died during rescue.

It has also been a challenge to reach some places where animals suffer from starvation, cold, and stress because of danger and difficulty getting there.

Related article: Spider Monkeys' Fondness of Boozy Fruits Could Explain Why Humans are Fond of Alcohol
After Russian missile assaults devastated cages, animals at Ukraine's oldest zoo will be tragically euthanized.

Because it is only 64 kilometers from the Russian border, Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-biggest city, has been hard struck by enemy troops.

The zoo sits on the city's northern outskirts, considerably closer to Russia.

Oleksandr Feldman, a member of parliament and the creator of the Kharkiv ecopark, believes there is no way to save them from the devastating zoo grounds.

Euthanasia of the animals in the zoo

After the Russian bombardment, a devastated Ukrainian zoo is putting all of its animals to sleep, as per Mirror.

The huge animals will be put down, according to an MP and the proprietor of an ecopark in Kharkiv, because there is no way to save them after the zoo was damaged.

According to Feldman, the Russian bombardment destroyed the attraction.

Because there is no way to remove or transfer large animals, they will be put to sleep.

According to the zoo's website, it houses about 6,000 animals.

In a video message, he delivered the heartbreaking news of what had occurred, as well as the terrible news that a rescue is doubtful.

He stated, "There is no longer an Ecopark."

He can say that the park has already been nearly entirely destroyed as a result of yesterday's bombardment.

Animal cages have been demolished, as has all infrastructure, yet tigers and lions have somehow survived. Their enclosures have been severely damaged, and they are free to go at any time.

The structure in which the bears dwell is in a bad state. they'll have to make a decision today. He told them they had until the evening to decide whether to euthanize them or relocate them.

The zoo's director stated that there was nowhere else they could take the animals, but that they planned to rescue some of them by adopting younger large cats.

However, he said that all adult animals would most likely be euthanized because they cannot be salvaged or re-homed.

One month after Kyiv zookeepers created a modern-day Noah's Ark to avoid the invasion, the painful choice to destroy the animals was made.

The animals were rescued from a shelter in Kyiv, Ukraine's capital, and have safely arrived in Poland after a terrible six-day journey.

Also Read: Beavers Saved From Euthanization Are Restoring Rivers in Utah Desert

Animal Euthanasia

The phrase "euthanasia" refers to a technique of death that reduces the animal's suffering, anguish, and worry before it loses consciousness.

Due to situational limits, techniques utilized in situations like pest management, slaughter, or depopulation may not always fit the requirements for euthanasia.

Animal slaughter, depopulation, and compassionate killing vary from euthanasia in that they are carried out for purposes other than relieving an animal of unresolvable pain or anguish.

Animal euthanasia is a routine operation done by veterinarians; yet, due to the importance of the deed, it demands careful consideration.

The killing of healthy animals when no other option for their treatment can be found is one of the most difficult euthanasia choices that veterinarians must make.

Related article: 3-Year Old Lion at Denver Zoo Euthanized After Severe Medical Condition
The newest epidemic of tornadoes and other extreme storms is advancing across the South, taking down trees and power lines, turning vehicles over, and ripping roofs off homes, from a deadly disaster in Texas to a tornado alert in South Carolina and devastation in numerous states.

The tornado emergency

According to weather.com meteorologist Chris Dolce, a tornado warning with a "tornado emergency" is the rarest and is only issued in the most catastrophic of circumstances.

The NWS says this is only issued "when there is a serious threat to human life and catastrophic damage from an approaching or continuing tornado," as was the case this afternoon near Allendale, South Carolina.

A tornado warning can be issued in the event of a verified tornado sighting or one that has been confirmed by radar.

While the majority of the power disruptions occurred in Texas and Louisiana this morning, they had spread to Georgia by this evening.

As of 7:40 p.m., nearly 22,000 homes and businesses in Georgia were without electricity. EDT,

The county has dispatched disaster response teams to Allendale, where a severe thunderstorm warning was issued at 4 p.m.

We don't know the extent or magnitude of this storm, sadly, but a twister emergency isn't something the meteorological service, at least in this part of the country, issues very frequently, Derrec Becker, a representative for the national disaster management department, told The Weather Channel around 7 p.m. EDT.

As of 6:45 p.m., there have been at least 38 tornado reports. Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia are all in the Eastern Daylight Time zone.

Damage reports are rolling in from those same places.

Because certain tornadoes might be reported many times, the number of reports does not equal the number of genuine tornadoes. The ultimate figure will be determined by National Weather Service surveys.

Also Read: Tornado Kills Multiple People in the Des Moires Area, Iowa

One killed in east Texas

Early this morning in East Texas, the weather turned deadly, and one person was killed in the town of Whitehouse.

W.M. was recognized as the victim on Tuesday afternoon. According to local officials, Soloman is still missing.

Whitehouse Mayor James Wansley stated, "Our sympathies are with the friends and relatives of Mr. Soloman, who we lost earlier today when the weather knocked a tree down onto his home."

In the center of Whitehouse, the storm also pulled down power lines, impeded traffic, and caused damage to property.

Several agencies assisted in the aftermath, including first responders, the American Red Cross, and road and electricity crews.

Weather forecast for the week

The storms will form west of Dallas-Fort Worth at about 3 p.m. and move eastward around 6 p.m., according to Davies.

By 2 a.m., it should be clear. According to the prediction, Tuesday is the day, as per The Dallas Morning News.

Storm conditions in the DFW metroplex will be calm during rush hour and early evening, according to the meteorological service, the main threats will be damaging winds and hail, tornadoes are a remote probability.

Prior to the inclement weather, temperatures were anticipated to peak near 80 degrees on Monday. Davies predicted a dry day with a high of 90 degrees on Tuesday.

WEDNESDAY: Sunny, windy, and cooler. High: 73. Wind: N 15-25 mph.

THURSDAY: Sunny, windy, and cool. Low: 47. High: 69. Wind: N 20-25 mph.

FRIDAY: Sunny, windy, and cool. Low: 45. High: 69. Wind: NW 10-15 mph.

SATURDAY: Sunny, breezy, and warmer. Low: 43. High: 82. Wind: SW 10-20 mph.

SUNDAY: Partly cloudy, windy, and warmer. Low: 60. High: 84. Wind: S 20-25 mph.

Related article: US Meteorologist Issues Warning for Tornado 'Threat Area' Expansion
Animal bait was apparently used by a 52-year-old woman to lure unsuspecting animals along High Street in Armadale, a suburb of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia.

A witness claimed that the woman that bait consisted of pieces of meat.

Animal Bait

On Tuesday night, April 5, the police were alerted of the situation and arrived at High Street to arrest a woman who allegedly placed the meat baits in 19 different spots between Glenferrie Road and Orrong Road, as per 9 News Australia.

The suspect was taken to the Malvern Police Station before being released with a pending court summons.

It is unclear at this time regarding the specific motive of the suspect. Local sources have not reported any animal fatalities from the incident.

Also Read: New Research: Most of Australia's 'Wild Dog' Problems Turn Out to be Dingoes

Suspected Food Poisoning

The police were first notified when a member of the public reported the woman from Prahran placing pieces of meat along High Street.

Dog owners have also seen the meat chunks across the streets in Melbourne.

Similar baits were also found in the Melbourne suburbs of South Yarra and Richmond.

Several pet owners reportedly took to social media to express their concerns about finding the baits, whom some believe to be containing poison.

The police have retrieved the animal baits and have been conducting an examination to determine on whether the pieces of meat contain harmful substances or not.

Safety Precautions

The Stonnington City Council last week announced it was also carrying out an investigation regarding the suspected animal baiting.

The local council said it has increased security patrols in the area, as cited by 9 News Australia.

Local authorities have also warned residents to remain vigilant while walking their pets in public and requested to prevent them from eating anything on the ground.

Growing Cases of Animal Baiting

An unspecified number of cases linked to the alleged meat baiting has been increasing for the past several weeks in different suburbs in Victoria, as per the Brisbane Times.

Aside from Armadale, South Yarra, and Richmond, the hotspots of the incidents are confined to the southeast suburbs of Melbourne, including Montmorency, Cremorne, Malvern, North Caulfield, East St. Kilda, and City of Knox.

In South Yarra, similar fresh meat baits were found along Cromwell Road, Surrey Road, Simmons Street, and Howitt and Hobson Street, according to The National Tribune Australia.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) was also aware of the allegations of poisonous baits in some council areas of Melbourne.

According to Michelle Green, the RSCPA Victoria inspector team leader, an incident is purportedly an act of animal cruelty that has a detrimental impact on animal welfare, as cited by Brisbane Times.

Symptoms from Harmful Baits

The so-called ongoing animal baiting is likely intended for dogs, cats, and other animals in the Melbourne area, as per Australian local media reports.

As a result, local authorities have not only issued safety measures but also provided knowledge in case their pets become a victim of poisonous baits.

The RSPCA reportedly highlighted that the following symptoms of food poisoning for animals are coughing, difficulty in breathing, loss of coordination, and sudden lethargy.

Related Article: Photographer Fined in Singapore for Baiting Birds, Act Raises Issue on Wildlife Photography and Ethics
by Xinhua writers Tian Ye, Li Rui

CAIRO, April 6 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken's recent Mideast tour, which was aimed at addressing U.S. allies' concerns before reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, enlisting regional countries' support for sanctions against Russia and strengthening Israel's relations with Arab countries, is unlikely to contribute to the region's long-term stability and peace, analysts have said.

The willingness of the United States to seek long-term peace and stability in the Middle East remains doubtful, as maintaining animosity among Mideast countries and dividing the region serve U.S. interests both economically and strategically, analysts have argued.

ISRAEL VISIT NOT SUBSTANTIVE

The revival of the Iran nuclear pact, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), is currently the top priority of the United States in the Middle East, according to analysts.

By reaching an agreement with Iran, Washington hopes to limit Iran's nuclear capability as well as the development of other sectors such as defense and economy, while pumping more Iranian oil into the international market to meet the demands of European consumers, who have cut Russian gas supplies, said Lu Jin, a research fellow with the Institute of West-Asian and African Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

An important goal of Blinken's Mideast tour was to address the concerns of Israel, a close U.S. ally and an arch enemy of Iran, who worries that easing sanctions will bolster the Islamic republic militarily and economically, added Lu.

During Blinken's visit to Israel, where he took part in a two-day conference with the participation of foreign ministers from Israel and four Arab states, namely, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Morocco and Egypt, the top U.S. diplomat vowed that his country will continue to work together with its allies to confront "common security challenges and threats, including those from Iran and its proxies."

Despite Blinken's remarks, Israel would maintain its posture against Iran, since Iran remains the most powerful country in the Middle East region to challenge Israel, analysts said, adding Blinken's visit to Israel is mostly symbolic rather than substantive and will have little impact on the improvement of ties between Israel and Iran.

FAILURE TO BUILD "UNITED FRONT"

"The U.S. is eager to press Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Gulf oil-producing countries to increase their production capacity in order to relieve the European Union's burden of high energy costs and the bloc's reliance on Russia's energy supply," said Ma Xiaolin, dean of the Mediterranean Institute at Zhejiang International Studies University.

The Gulf Arab states, primarily Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have largely stayed put despite Washington's repeated calls for increased oil output. Senior officials from both countries have pledged to follow the plan for progressively increasing oil production as adopted by the OPEC+, of which Russia is a member.

While meeting with Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi of the UAE Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan during his visit to Morocco, Blinken told the UAE leader that Washington is determined to help the Gulf state fend off attacks from the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen, apparently in response to the UAE's concerns about the declining U.S. commitment to the region's security.

The top U.S. diplomat revealed in Algeria, the last leg of his Mideast tour, that energy was not a focus of his talks with the UAE leader, even though Washington wanted Gulf nations to increase production to temper soaring crude prices, which are partially caused by the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

One day after Blinken left the Middle East, the OPEC+ only agreed on a modest oil output increase, ignoring Western pressure to significantly increase production. After the OPEC+ refused to bend, the United States opted to tap its strategic reserves to keep prices from rising too high.

The message was that Blinken's Mideast tour did not bridge the rift between Washington and its Gulf allies, and that his goal of uniting the stance against Russia had obviously failed, said analysts.

"For the time being, it's very difficult for the United States to seek Mideast countries' support for sanctions against Russia, because it might hurt their interests," said Li Weijian, vice president of the Chinese Association of Middle East Studies and researcher at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies.

Given what the United States has done in the Middle East, countries in the region have learned lessons from the past and begun to pursue an independent foreign policy, he said, adding Russia's growing influence in the region makes siding with the United States now an "unwise choice."

PALESTINIAN ISSUE

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has hailed the conference of foreign ministers between Israel and four Arab countries as "making history," as it marks the first time that Israel hosts a meeting with Arab foreign ministers.

However, the absence of Jordan, which made peace with Israel in 1994 but did not join the conference, shows that the Palestinian issue is not forgotten.

On the day of the Israeli conference, Jordan's King Abdullah arrived in Ramallah for the first time in years to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

"Arab normalization meetings are nothing but an illusion and a free reward for Israel unless the occupation ends," Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Ishtaye reportedly told his Cabinet on the day of the conference.

Although the reconciliation between Israel and some Arab countries is supposed to ease some tensions in the Middle East, it could also further marginalize the Palestinian issue, said Wu Bingbing, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Peking University.

"Closer relations between Israel and several Arab countries will help the United States transfer its commitment to ensure their security partially through a regional arrangement including Israel, who is happy to do so because the move will improve its own security situation," said Wu.

If the conference between Israeli and Arab foreign ministers is successful in becoming an annual regional forum, it will have a long-term impact on the Middle East and may provoke moves from Turkey, Iran, and other countries, said Li, the researcher at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies.

He emphasized that the conference's impact must be assessed further because it is still unclear whether it would serve as a long-term mechanism.

However, the Palestinian issue will remain as a sensitive one for Arab countries for a long time to come, and the United States, which tries hard to portray itself as a peace-maker in the Middle East, has done little to address the root cause of the issue as illustrated by Blinken's reiteration of Washington's "ironclad commitment" to Israel, analysts observed. 
MBABANE - Who is fighting who if you also have your property burnt.

This was a question posed to PUDEMO Secretary General (SG) Wandile Dludlu by police officers upon arrival at the scene. The cops had been called after Dludlus car was set alight by unknown arsonists on Monday night. The police officers, including those from the Scenes of Crime Unit, attended to Dludlu at around noon. They arrived at the scene in two vans and assessed the extent of damage on Dludlus vehicle. While inspecting the motor vehicle, the police officers asked Dludlu who was fighting who if progressive leaders properties were also set on fire.

We thought we were the only target, but the arson attacks have extended also to progressive leaders. Can you tell us the truth, what is really going on here? Since you are here, can you tell us why police officers are a target to arsonists because they are not involved in the ongoing politics? We are only government employees who provide services as and when necessary. We have police officers who were deployed at Ngwenya where there have never been protests actions but they were attacked just for being police officers, said the officers of the law. In response, Dludlu said he was not sure who the attacks were really directed to but he mentioned that the struggle was aimed at forcing those in authority to listen to the people and do the right thing. He said it was painful to have a few individuals who made decisions which frustrated the people without even giving them a chance to have a say.

All we want is for those in authority to listen to the people. We believe that once we elect our prime minister, he will do things according to the will of the people, Dludlu said. He added that at times, police officers came down hard on protesters who then resorted to violence. Chief Police Information and Communications Officer Superintendent Phindile Vilakati said her office had not received anything concerning the incident.
MBABANE  Leaders of progressive movements are not immune from the ongoing arson attacks across the country.

This is according to the Secretary General (SG) of the Peoples United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO), Wandile Dludlu, who said the burning of his motor vehicle was a clear sign that the country was heading for imminent peril as everyone was in a mess. Dludlus white Colt bakkie was set alight by arsonists, while parked less than 20 metres away from his house at Corperation in Mbabane. The arsonists remain unknown as no one has claimed responsibility for it. In an interview yesterday, Dludlu said the burning of his car was a clear indication that no one was immune from the ongoing arson attacks on private and public properties across the country.

Struggle

Worth noting is that, Dludlu is one of the progressive leaders, who are actively involved in the ongoing calls for change. It should be noted that some of those claiming to be involved in the struggle had on numerous occasions claimed on social media that the burning of properties was one of their tools to intensify the struggle. Questioned about the burning of his property yet he was one of the active leaders in the ongoing struggle, Dludlu said he had no clue as to how the burning of his motor vehicle came about. He said he could not even speculate who was behind the arson attack, stating that a lot was happening in the country. He said the burning of properties belonging to progressive leaders should serve as an eye-opener to emaSwati that anyone, be it progressive leaders or loyalists to the regime, could be attacked.

Asked what he could say to anyone planning to set properties on fire, following what had befallen him, Dludlu said the countrys authorities should provide a solution to the problems facing emaSwati. He said the solution did not lie with individuals. Dludlu said the unfortunate thing was that the individuals behind the arson attacks were unknown, hence he could not confront them. We do not know the people behind the arson attacks so we can call and ask them to stop the burning of properties. The bottom line is that the country is in a hostile environment and the authorities are seemingly refusing to provide a solution. We need to deal with the fundamental issues in order to come out of the problems the country was facing, Dludlu said.

Probed on how he expected the King to provide a solution, Dludlu stated that there was nothing else than allowing a genuine political dialogue. When asked to clarify on the genuine political dialogue, Dludlu said he meant allowing those in exile back to the country to participate in the dialogue. He said he meant that the King should seek an independent mediator for the political dialogue, for fairness and transparency. I mean the hostile laws such as the terrorism laws should be scrapped. We want ordinary citizens to be elected into committees as opposed to the appointment of those linked to royalty. The appointment of those linked to royalty has seen individuals having four jobs which attract more than one cheque. We have long been saying that an undemocratic process will never give birth to a democratic product, he said.

When the SG was asked about the laws which sought to deal with fugitives of the law, he said according to his understanding, people were pushed out of the country for standing up and calling for the truth. He said Eswatini would not be the first country to bring back exiled people, stating that the same happened in South Africa when the apartheid regime surrendered power to the people. Worth noting was that Dludlu has been the third progressive leader to have his property set on fire since the beginning of the political unrest in the country. Other incidents included the alleged attempted bombing of Swaziland Liberation Movement (SWALIMO), President Mduduzi Gawuzela Simelanes house in Manzini. Another bombed property belonged to PUDEMOs Pennuel Malinga.
Bank Nizwa, a leading bank in Oman, recently inaugurated its Jalan Bani Bu Ali branch, expanding its branch network to cover all strategic and remote locations across the country.



Khaled Al Kayed, CEO of Bank Nizwa said: This is Bank Nizwas first branch in Jalan Bani Bu Ali and we are eager to start serving the local community in the region. The new branch comes as a realisation of the banks ambitious strategy that is aimed at establishing its presence throughout the Sultanate so as to extend its innovative, Sharia-compliant financing solutions to various segments of society.



As part of Bank Nizwas long-term vision, we seek to consistently expand our reach to better serve our customers and make the banks services and products more easily accessible and readily available. The opening of the Jalan Bani Bu Ali branch is a reflection of our continuous efforts in furthering our expansion plans, forming stronger connections with our growing customer base, and creating awareness about the benefits of Islamic finance."



The full-fledged branch, strategically located to provide convenient access for all, offers the distinct Bank Nizwa environment that is geared at meeting the customers' every banking and financial need by offering a comprehensive suite of products and services. Striking the right balance between incorporating the latest technologies and maintaining a personal touch, the branch will focus on efficient, effective, and hassle-free processing of services while delivering the exceptional level of customer service the bank has always taken great pride in.



With a team of expert professionals who reserve the necessary product knowledge and also understand the needs, sentiments, and values of the local community, Bank Nizwa seeks to pave the way to further advocate Sharia-compliant compliant financing in the region.



A prospering commercial town and tourist destination, the wilayat of Jalan Bani Bu Ali has seen significant developments in recent years. As a bank dedicated to the socio-economic progress of the country, the new branch of Bank Nizwa in the wilayat will, apart from providing standard banking services, also give an impetus to the local businesses and SMEs by providing them the needed financial advisory services and other credit facilities.



Through innovative Sharia-compliant solutions, the bank will be able to cater to the needs and demands of its evolving customer base while helping boost the demand for Islamic finance.  TradeArabia News Service
Our County Editor

Dave Hinton is editor of The News-Gazette's Our County section and former editor of the Rantoul Press. He can be reached at dhinton@news-gazette.com.
Pritzker: The sponsors of House Resolution 824 "are some of the people who voted with Bruce Rauner to undercut that agency. You need to provide a budget or there is no budget at all for that agency. As a result of that, what I was left with, what the current General Assembly was left with, was a lot of rebuilding that needed to take place. It's not something that you can snap your fingers and have happen overnight.
Reporter

Mary Schenk is a reporter covering police, courts and breaking news at The News-Gazette. Her email is mschenk@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@schenk).
Gulf Coca-Cola Beverages said that Coca-Colas bottlers in UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman have been certified as a Great Place to Work in all four countries, with the UAE placed in the top 15% of large companies for the 2021-22 rankings.



Ranking 17th on the list the UAE entity, Coca-Cola Al Ahlia Beverages Company (CCABC) was one of 125 organizations in UAE, seven in Bahrain, 23 in Qatar and four in Oman to be certified.



The certification was received after a thorough and independent analysis conducted by Great Place to Work Middle East, and results were based on direct feedback from employees, provided as part of an extensive and anonymous survey about the workplace experience.



Mohamed Akeel, CEO of CCABC said: 2021 is the first year that CCABC has applied to be certified as a Great Place to Work, and we are extremely proud to get listed across the four markets we operate in and to be among the top 20 best places to work is a proud moment for us all. This certification is a testament to the great work we are doing in the Middle East. We value a workplace culture that is not only diverse and inclusive but allows everyone to thrive, everywhere we do business.  TradeArabia News Service
Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

Showers early, then cloudy overnight. Low near 45F. Winds N at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Showers early, then cloudy overnight. Low near 45F. Winds N at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 50%.
In the weeks before Navin Jones died, DCFS had investigated his parents for taking him from his legal guardian and had received a hotline call reporting that the child didnt go to school and was berated, bruised and starved.
The value of Bahrains exports of national origin increased by 121% to BD417 million ($1.1 billion) during February 2022, compared to BD189 million for the same month of the previous year, said the Information &eGovernment Authority (iGA) in a new report.



The top 10 countries in terms of the value of exports of national origin purchased from Bahrain accounted for 75% of the total value, with the remaining countries accounting for 25%, according to iGAs foreign trade report of February 2022, which encompasses data on the balance of trade, imports, exports (national origin), and re-exports.



The US ranked first among countries receiving Bahraini exports of national origin, importing BD78 million from Bahrain. Meanwhile, The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was second with BD65 million and Italy third with BD54 million.



Unwrought aluminium alloys emerged as the top products exported during February 2022 with BD167 million, Agglomerated iron ores and concentrates alloyed was second with a value of BD56 million and Urea third with BD27 million.



The total value of re-exports decreased by 32% to reach BD42 million during February 2022, compared to BD62 million for the same month of the previous year. The top 10 countries accounted for 88 % of the re-exported value, while the remaining countries accounted for the 12%. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia ranked first with BD11 million, and the United Arab Emirates second with BD10 million, and Singapore third with BD5 million.



Parts for aircraft engines is the top product re-exported from Bahrain with BD4 million, and mountings and fitting for vehicles came in second place with BD2.3719 million, and wristwatches precious metal came third with BD2.3716 million.



The trade balance, the difference between exports and imports, recorded a deficit totalling BD9 million during February 2022 compared to BD178 million for the same month of the previous year, an improvement of the trade balance by 95%, That is reflected positively in the value of the trade balance.



The value of imports increased by 9%, reaching BD469 million during February 2022 compared to BD429 million for the same month of the previous year. The top 10 countries accounted for 70% of the value of imports, with the remaining countries accounting for 30%.



According to the report, China ranked first when it came to imports to Bahrain, with a total of BD76 million, Brazil was second with BD54 million, and Australia was third with BD45 million.



Non-agglomerated iron ores and concentrates emerged as the top product imported into Bahrain with a total value of BD58 million, while aluminium oxide was second with BD44 million, and gold ingots third with BD10 million.  TradeArabia News Service
In recent years, subcortical small-vessel disease has become an increasingly common cognitive diagnosis. Researchers at University of Gothenburg have now shown that it is possible to identify patients with the disease by combining two biomarkers that are measured in spinal fluid and blood, increasing the potential for both treatment and development of medication.

Subcortical small-vessel disease is one of the most common cognitive diseases, along with Alzheimer's disease and mixed dementia, which is a form in which Alzheimer's disease occurs together with vascular damage in the brain.

Petronella Kettunen, associate professor in neurobiology at the University of Gothenburg and project manager for the Gothenburg Mild Cognitive Impairment study, is the article's lead author:

"Up to now, we have had no markers for subcortical small-vessel disease, which means that the disease could not be easily identified by testing samples of spinal fluid or blood. We have now opened up an opportunity to identify the disease, enabling help for this patient group in the form of lifestyle changes and blood pressure-reducing medication," she says.

In the study, researchers at the University of Gothenburg examined several biomarkers, measured in samples of both spinal fluid and blood, to see whether they could be used to distinguish between these three common cognitive diseases. A total of 170 patients are included in the study, including control subjects.

Identifies subcortical small-vessel disease

The study confirms that a biomarker for vascular injury, based on the ratio of the protein albumin in spinal fluid and blood, was significantly higher in patients with subcortical small-vessel disease. The study also presents a new biomarker, a fragment of the amyloid precursor protein (APP) in spinal fluid, which was lower in patients with subcortical small-vessel disease.

When we combined the biomarker for vascular injury with the protein fragment we identified, the potential for separating patients with subcortical small-vessel disease from control subjects, patients with Alzheimer's disease and patients with mixed dementia was improved." Petronella Kettunen, associate professor in neurobiology, University of Gothenburg

Well-defined research basis

The findings also improve the possibilities for refining patient cohorts during clinical trials for new drugs. Diagnosing patients with these diseases is important for identifying the correct patient groups for each disease that in turn enable future treatment studies.

"For a treatment study for Alzheimer's disease, for example, you need to know that all of the patients are suffering from Alzheimer's and not from another cognitive disease, otherwise the result will not be accurate."

The results have been published in the US Alzheimer's Association scientific journal Alzheimer's & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring.
A team led by UTSW researchers has identified a molecule produced by male parasitic worms called schistosomes that prompts sexual maturity in females of these species. The findings, reported in Cell, help answer a century-old mystery and could lead to new treatments for one of the most important neglected tropical diseases called schistosomiasis, which kills up to 200,000 people a year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Schistosomiasis not only affects people who are poor, it keeps them poor by preventing them from living up to their full potential. Our findings show how understanding biological processes in these worms could one day offer hope for the hundreds of millions of people infected with these parasites." James Collins, Ph.D., Study Leader, Associate Professor of Pharmacology, UT Southwestern

The WHO estimates that about 220 million people have schistosomiasis  mostly children in Africa, Asia, and South America. The flatworm parasites that cause this disease have a complicated life cycle that involves stages in both freshwater snails and mammals. Dwelling in mammalian hosts' circulatory system, schistosomes feed on blood and lay copious numbers of eggs, which lodge in tissues and organs to cause an array of symptoms including abdominal pain, diarrhea, bloody stool, or blood in the urine.

Dr. Collins explained that unlike most flatworm species, which are hermaphrodites, schistosomes have male and female sexes. Nearly a century ago, researchers discovered that females must be in physical contact with males to become and stay sexually mature and to lay the eggs responsible for schistosomiasis' symptoms and propagation. However, the mechanism behind this unusual route to puberty has been unknown.

To better understand this phenomenon, graduate student Rui Chen, then-postdoctoral fellow Jipeng Wang, Ph.D., in the Collins lab, and their colleagues searched for changes in gene activity when male and female schistosomes came into contact. They soon discovered that a gene called gli1 appeared to be pivotal in males to prompt female sexual maturity. When the researchers deleted gli1 in males, the females' sexual organs remained immature and they never laid eggs.

Because gli1 is a transcription factor responsible for controlling the activity of numerous genes, the researchers sought out other genes directed by gli1 in males that could be key for female sexual maturity. Their search identified a gene that they named Schistosoma mansoni nonribosomal peptide synthetase (Sm-nrps), which strings amino acids together into short peptides. After showing that Sm-nrps in males is also essential for launching and maintaining sexual maturity in females, further research showed that the key product made by this gene is a small peptide called b-alanyl-tryptamine. Dosing female schistosomes with just that peptide was enough to start and continue sexual maturity, even without a male present.

Dr. Collins noted that because schistosome eggs are the root cause of health problems stemming from schistosomiasis and propagate its spread, blocking any part of this pathway could offer a new way to fight this disease. In addition, although many animals have genes similar to Sm-nrps, none have been reported to have roles in chemical signaling, suggesting the discovery of a previously unrecognized type of communication between animals. Dr. Collins said that he and his colleagues plan to continue investigating this pathway in various schistosome species and search for similar pathways in other animals.
Almost half of the U.S. adult population has high blood pressure - or hypertension - and about 20% of these patients have treatment-resistant hypertension. The reason why some people are resistant to treatment has been a mystery, but new study results show that a certain gut bacterium may be an important factor.

Today, doctors treat resistant hypertension by adding or substituting medications, which can contribute to overdoses, more side effects and noncompliance. A better understanding of the relationship between gut microbes and drug efficacy could lead to new treatment approaches for people who don't respond to blood pressure medication. This could include new drugs or modulating gut microbiota with probiotics, antibiotics and other methods." Tao Yang, PhD, assistant professor, University of Toledo

By studying the gut microbes of rats, Yang and colleagues discovered that a bacteria known as Coprococcus comes contributes to resistance to ACE inhibitors, one of the primary drug classes used to treat high blood pressure.

Yang will present the new research at the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics annual meeting during the Experimental Biology (EB) 2022 meeting, to be held April 25 in Philadelphia.

"Our ultimate goal is to find a link between gut microbial composition and enzymatic activity and drug response effectiveness because this will provide a foundation for applying precision medicine to treat resistant hypertension," Yang said.

Research has shown that the microorganisms in our gut -; collectively known as the gut microbiota -; contain a variety of enzymes that can affect drug metabolism.

To find out if gut microbiota might play a role in resistance to blood pressure medicine, Yang and colleagues administered a single dose of the ACE inhibitor quinapril to rats with high blood pressure. They found that quinapril was more effective at lowering blood pressure in hypertensive rats with a lower gut microbiota load. When they analyzed the composition of the gut microbiota, C. comes emerged as an important player.

Through additional experiments, the researchers found that C. comes can actually break down quinapril. They also observed that giving C. comes and quinapril to hypertensive rats reduced blood pressure less than administering quinapril alone.

"We are still in the early stages of determining the interactions between gut bacteria and antihypertensive medications," said Yang. "However, our current findings suggest that the same drug may not be appropriate for everyone because each person has a unique gut microbial composition with a unique profile of enzymatic activities."

The researchers are now performing similar experiments using other types of gut bacteria and additional blood pressure medications to further explore how the gut microbiota modulates the effectiveness of antihypertensive drugs.

Tao Yang will present this research on from 10 a.m.12 p.m., Tuesday, April 5, in Exhibit/Poster Hall A-B, Pennsylvania Convention Center (Poster Board Number B166) (abstract). Contact the media team for more information or to obtain a free press pass to attend the meeting.
Indiana University researchers are working with communities in Indiana and North Carolina to help test for lead in household dust, soil and water. The goal is to develop a tool that can predict which residential households are at risk of lead exposure and provide actionable insights to lower that risk.

Even low levels of lead exposure can cause intellectual disabilities and behavioral disorders in children, as well as cardiovascular issues in adults.

In the United States, state and local agencies typically rely on the detection of lead in children's blood tests or the age of a home to determine which households need interventions to address environmental lead hazards.

The current approach uses children as lead sensors; households typically are only tested after elevated levels of lead are found in a child's blood during a visit to their pediatrician. Lead causes irreversible health effects, so there is no safe level of lead exposure for children or adults. Our vision is to create a 21st-century approach that prevents lead exposure before it ever happens by predicting houses where lead is most likely to be a problem." Jacqueline MacDonald Gibson, professor and chair, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, IU School of Public Health-Bloomington

The study is led by MacDonald Gibson and co-principal investigators Emmanuel Obeng-Gyasi of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and Jennifer Hoponick Redmon and James Harrington of nonprofit research institute RTI International.

Funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the study will use machine-learning techniques and public data on residential lead exposure risks to create a website and mapping tool to predict lead exposure for Indiana and North Carolina households.

The researchers are asking communities in each state to help them test and improve their predictive model by signing up to collect and ship water, dust, and soil samples for laboratory analysis.

Selected residents in Allen, Delaware, Marion, St. Joseph and Vanderburgh counties in Indiana and Guilford County in North Carolina will receive postcards inviting them to participate in the study. Participants will receive test kits and simple instructions in the mail to collect and ship their samples. Each participant will receive personalized and confidential results, along with actionable recommendations on how to decrease lead exposure, if needed.

Partner organizations also involved with the study include the cities of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Greensboro, North Carolina, the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority, nonprofit advocacy organization NC Child and the NC Housing Finance Agency.

What they're saying:

"We look forward to the valuable tools that will develop from this study because they will help us help more families to reduce their lead exposure risk. We encourage the communities to take advantage of this great resource and opportunity to reduce lead hazards in their homes." -- Samantha Spergel, director of real estate strategic initiatives and engagement, Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority

"Whether you are pregnant or have young children at home, lead exposure is a serious concern. This study will help families in our state understand the level of lead risk in their home and get rid of it before exposure occurs. And that's a win for all North Carolina kids." -- Vikki Crouse, policy analyst and project director at NC Child

"There are various potential environmental hazards in every home but the thing with lead is this: We have lots of data confirming it is a serious hazard and years of practice at reducing the hazards. What is often lacking in communities are more methods of citizen education, low-cost-private investigation as well as financial support to reduce any identified hazards. I am excited to be allowed to provide my view from the low-income housing community for this project as it seeks to look at all three elements: education, investigation and hazard reduction in the participating communities." -- Donna Coleman, senior housing rehabilitation officer, NC Housing Finance Agency
Expression of a pro-lymphangiogenic growth factor after heart injury activates the lymphatic system, spurring leukocytes to help clear away dying cells, according to a Northwestern Medicine study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

The findings cement the lymphatic system's role in repair after heart attack and has both theoretical and practical therapeutic implications, according to Edward Thorp, PhD, associate professor of Pathology in the Division of Experimental Pathology and co-senior author of the study.

"We've identified a new target that may help clear away dead tissue," said Thorp, who is also a professor of Pediatrics. "This could mitigate reperfusion injury and some future studies will test therapeutic principles of this strategy."

This paper brings together lots of interesting data and conclusively demonstrates the important functional role of lymphatics in this process." Guillermo Oliver, PhD, the Thomas D. Spies Professor of Lymphatic Metabolism and co-senior author of the study

Cardiac CD68 positive macrophage cells (red) with LYVE1 lymphatic cells (green).

After a heart attack, immune cells called macrophages help dispose of dead cells, engulfing and digesting them in a process called efferocytosis. Previous studies have observed increases in leukocyte activity after a heart attack, with some dead material being shuttled towards draining lymph nodes  raising the question of interaction between macrophages and the lymphatic system.

Kristofor Glinton, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in the Thorp laboratory (left), and Edward Thorp, PhD, associate professor of Pathology in the Division of Experimental Pathology and of Pediatrics (right), were co-lead and co-senior authors of the study.

In the study, investigators prevented efferocytosis after an experimental heart attack in mice, observing that this modification caused less lymphatic activity and reduced expression of the pro-lymphangiogenic growth factor vascular endothelial growth factor C (VEGFC). VEGFC is a protein that promotes lymphatic vessels formation, a process that appears to improve cardiac repair after heart attack.

These findings show that macrophages must digest dead heart cells to trigger expression of this growth factor.

"Previous studies showed that VEGFC was associated with improved heart function after injury, but the source of VEGFC was unknown," said Wanshu Ma, PhD, former postdoctoral fellow in the Oliver laboratory and co-lead author of the study. "This work identifies the link between macrophage efferocytosis and VEGFC production."

VEGFC is also important for lymphatic activity; experimentally removing VEGFC from mice reduced lymphatic activity and also increased harmful inflammation after heart injury.

"Mice without VEGFC had fewer lymphatic cells at the border regions of the heart injury," said Kristofor Glinton, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in the Thorp laboratory and co-lead author of the study. "Fewer lymphatics also meant less lymphatic drainage."

Wanshu Ma, PhD, former postdoctoral fellow in the Oliver laboratory, was co-lead author of the study.

Boosting clearance of dead cells could help reduce reperfusion injury, the tissue damage caused when blood supply returns to tissue after a period of hypoxia. Restoring circulation can cause an inflammatory response, and reducing the concentration of dead cells through better lymphatic drainage could reduce intensity of the inflammation, according to the authors.

Further, this macrophage-lymphatic cross-communication may be present in other areas of the body, according to Oliver.

"This mechanism may not be unique to the heart  lymphatics are present in every injury and repair mechanism  so I am eager to expand our study to other organs and injury models," said Oliver, who is also a professor of Medicine in the Division of Nephrology and Hypertension, director of the Center for Vascular and Developmental Biology at the Feinberg Cardiovascular and Renal Research Institute and a member of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University.
Findings from a new study are providing important insights into the spread of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which is transmitted from dogs to people through ticks. The new data are being used to create models that could help predict, and possibly prevent, future outbreaks.

If not treated within the first five days, Rocky Mountain spotted fever can cause serious organ damage in humans that may lead to death. It can cause serious illness in dogs if not treated during the early stages.

Although the disease is usually carried by the American dog tick or Rocky Mountain wood tick, the brown dog tick was identified as a new vector -; or carrier -; during a 2003 outbreak in Arizona. Since then, the Rickettsia rickettsii bacteria that causes the disease has spread to brown dog ticks across the American Southwest and parts of Mexico. Although the tick is present across the entire U.S., only those in Arizona and the surrounding regions are known to carry R. rickettsii.

To better understand why the brown dog tick emerged as a new vector, researchers led by John VandenBrooks, PhD, from Midwestern University in Glendale, Ariz., performed a detailed analysis of brown dog ticks, canine and human infections, and climatic data in Arizona, New Mexico, California and Mexico.

"Our results indicate that the spread of Rocky Mountain spotted fever involves a combination of factors and that the vectoring capacity of the brown dog tick may be spreading outside of the region," said Kayla Allwardt, a veterinary student in the VandenBrooks lab. "This could put a much larger portion of the country at risk. Identifying the highest risk regions is essential to protecting canine and human health."

Allwardt will co-present the new research with veterinary student Nicolette Roe at the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology annual meeting during the Experimental Biology (EB) 2022 meeting, to be held April 25 in Philadelphia.

To carry out the new study, the research team applied what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call a One Health approach, which recognizes the interconnection between people, animals and the environment. The researchers collected ticks and dog serum samples from 25 sites for genetic analysis and mapped relevant environmental factors.

We found three genetically distinct populations of ticks, which vary in the percentage of ticks that carry the R. rickettsii bacteria. These differences are a major contributor to the variation in Rocky Mountain spotted fever cases we see across the region." Nicolette Roe, veterinary student

They also found that of the 16 U.S. counties surveyed, two were at high risk for an outbreak, 10 were at medium risk and only four were at low risk. Importantly, they also found high rates of Rocky Mountain spotted fever infection in dogs in areas where no human cases had been reported.

The researchers incorporated the data into a model that can be used to determine where new outbreaks might occur. This could allow resources such as tick collars or prevention kits to be sent to critical areas. They have also been working to incorporate the data into a model that can determine whether a canine vaccine, which would need to be developed, could feasibly stop future spread.

The investigators plan to expand their research to examine more areas across the U.S. to determine how far infected brown dog ticks have spread. This data can then be used to develop more complete models to help predict and prevent future outbreaks.

Kayla Allwardt and Nicolette Roe will present this research from 12:301:45 p.m. Tuesday, April 5, in Exhibit/Poster Hall AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center (Poster Board Number A222) (abstract). Contact the media team for more information or to obtain a free press pass to attend the meeting.
If you've been to a clinic for a vaccine or COVID test during the past two years, you've likely interacted with a chatbot. Chatbots are computer programs designed to simulate conversation with human users. Scalable to answer thousands of questions simultaneously, easily accessible to the public, and enabling social distancing, chatbots were ubiquitous during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But not all chatbots are created equal, according to Elena Karahanna, University of Georgia Distinguished Research Professor in the department of management information systems at the Terry College of Business. Karahanna, who studies the use of chatbots and social media in health care settings, published an analysis of how chatbots were used in response to COVID-19.

"A lot of out-of-the-box tools developed during the pandemic offer customization options so organizations and agencies can tailor them to their needs," said Karahanna, who also serves as the C. Herman and Mary Virginia Terry Distinguished Chair of Business Administration. "Our study informs what should be prebuilt and what customization options would be useful for the next pandemic or public health crisis."

The paper, co-authored with former Terry Ph.D. student Parham Amiri, catalogs the novel ways chatbots were deployed in the public health response to this pandemic and offers strategies to answer future health crises. "Chatbot use cases in the COVID-19 public health response" appeared in the February edition of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

What are chatbots used for?

Chatbots have helped health departments answer questions patients might be too embarrassed to ask in person, provide health care education, or schedule appointments. But there wasn't a wide scale deployment of chatbots to address the same health challenge until 2020, when health departments, hospitals and government agencies stood up chatbots to assess risk and quickly disseminate accurate information.

Karahanna and Amiri analyzed the use of public health response chatbots presented in English language research papers in 2020 and 2021. Their sample included 61 COVID-specific chatbots in 30 countries. They weren't looking to take a census of all chatbots used but to take a snapshot of the ways they were being used.

They found bots being used in a few common ways.

One of the things chatbots are good at is handling a lot of parallel questions at the same time from thousands and thousands of users. With the fast-shifting landscape of information about the virus during the pandemic, there was confusion and a huge need for information.  Doctors' offices and public health agencies were overtaxed with phone calls. Chatbots expanded their capacity by offloading some of those repetitive questions from humans to a machine so humans could handle more complicated tasks." Elena Karahanna, University of Georgia Distinguished Research Professor

Hospitals and public health organizations used bots to risk assess and triage patients to prevent exposed individuals from flooding emergency rooms. They also collected broad symptom data to pinpoint hotspots, while others allowed patients to schedule tests or vaccines. The fourth group of bots connected doctors, nurses and public health officials in rural areas with their country's central health ministry.

One thing distinguishing bots across countries was the anonymity of the user. Some cultures place less of a premium on privacy, and bots in these countries provide more follow-up services because the interactions weren't anonymous. This would not work everywhere, Karahanna said.

Decisions about anonymity are made on an agency-by-agency basis because using a chatbot that violates privacy expectations could result in an unused tool.

This wide-ranging experimentation with chatbot use during this pandemic helps the public health establishment prepare for the next health crisis.

"The content is pandemic specific, but we now know what will work," Karahanna said. "We can provide guidelines as to what we need to build."

Knowing what's needed for a response may also minimize duplication efforts and enhance the bot's quality.

"Chatbot technology is improving, but during the pandemic many of these were built very quickly to address pressing needs, and they were not as user-friendly or sophisticated," Karahanna said. "We can learn what we need and possibly develop modules that can be customized for different organizations so we're not having to reinvent the wheel next time."
Leading pan-African e-commerce platform Jumia has joined forces with the world's premier package delivery company UPS to help expand its delivery services for businesses and consumers across the continent.

Leveraging the Jumia infrastructure in Africa, UPS will offer its customers an extended range of delivery solutions, including door to door package delivery and collection, with a variety of payment options.

This partnership will also allow UPS to leverage the extensive network of Jumia drop-off and pick-up stations to expand the UPS reach and coverage across more towns and cities in Africa, said the statement from Jumia.

The collaboration will initially cover Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, with plans for expansion to Ghana and Ivory Coast, and thereafter to the remaining African countries where Jumia operates, it added.

"At the beginning of our journey, 10 years ago, logistics infrastructure was one of the most challenging aspects of our operating environment. This challenge was a catalyst for us to build an unparalleled logistics platform in Africa offering our sellers and consumers reliable, convenient and cost-effective delivery services," remarked Apoorva Kumar, Senior Vice President Logistics, Jumia.

"Today, we are helping other businesses overcome these infrastructure challenges by giving them access to our logistics platform. We are delighted and humbled by the opportunity to partner up with UPS, a global logistics leader, to offer them last mile solutions in Africa," explained Kumar.

"We view this as a validation of the strength of our logistics platform as well as an incentive to double down on our efforts to further enhance our services and build a world-class logistics business in Africa," he added.

Gregory Goba Ble, VP (Engineering and Operations) for Indian subcontinent, Middle East and Africa, at UPS, said: "This partnership will help small and medium-sized businesses in Africa that make up 90 percent of all businesses on the continent and are the backbone of the economy."

"UPSs asset-light approach, like the Jumia partnership, offers a pathway for businesses to quickly and reliably connect to new customers around the world through our global network, potentially accelerating their revenue growth," he added.
An addiction treatment facility, highly regarded by North Carolina lawmakers, sits in a residential neighborhood here and operates like a village in itself. Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers, better known as TROSA, hosts roughly 400 people a day on a campus with rows of housing units, cafeterias, a full gym, and a barbershop.

The program, which began in 1994, is uniquely designed: Treatment, housing, and meals are free to participants. And TROSA doesn't bill insurance. Instead, residents work for about two years in TROSA's many businesses, including a moving company, thrift store, and lawn care service. Program leaders say the work helps residents overcome addiction and train for future jobs. Of those who graduate, 96% of individuals remain sober and 91% are employed a year later, the program's latest report claims.

Impressed with such statistics, state lawmakers recently allotted $11 million for TROSA to expand its model to Winston-Salem. It's the largest amount in the state budget targeted to a single treatment provider and comes on the heels of $6 million North Carolina previously provided for its expansion, as well as $3.2 million TROSA has received in state and federal funds annually for several years.

This latest influx of taxpayer dollars  coming at a time when overdose deaths are surging and each dollar spent on treatment is crucial  is drawing criticism. Advocates, researchers, and some former employees and participants of TROSA say the program takes advantage of participants by making them work without pay and puts their lives at risk by restricting the use of certain medications for opioid use disorder. Although those who graduate may do well, only 25% of participants complete the program  a figure TROSA leaders confirmed.

"If I had known about this funding, I would have been the first person on the mic to [tell lawmakers], 'I don't think you all should do this,'" said K.C. Freeman, who interned at TROSA in 2018 and later spent two months on staff in the medical department. "You can't look at the small number of people who had success and say this works. It's not the majority."

The dispute over TROSA's funding comes amid national conversations about how to allocate billions of dollars available after landmark opioid settlements with drug companies. Two flashpoints in the North Carolina debate may provide a window into heated conversations to come. First: Are work-based rehabs legal or ethical? And second: Should every facility that receives public funding allow participants to use all medications for opioid use disorder?

Work as treatment

Work-based rehabs are widespread across the country. The investigative news outlet Reveal identified at least 300 such facilities, including some that place participants in dangerous jobs at oil refineries or dairy farms with no training and exploit workers to bolster profits.

Many of these programs use a portion of their revenue to sustain the rehab and offer residents free housing or meals. That can make them attractive to state legislators, said Noah Zatz, a UCLA law professor who specializes in employment and labor law.

"Because essentially they're running businesses off of people's uncompensated labor, there is a built-in funding mechanism," he said. "If the state doesn't have to pay full freight to run a program  that might be a reason to like it."

TROSA's annual reports indicate more than half of its multimillion-dollar budget is funded through its businesses at which residents work, as well as goods and services that are donated to the program. About 30% of its funding comes from government grants and contracts.

Although TROSA and its leaders report no significant campaign donations, they spend upward of $75,000 a year on lobbying. In presentations, they often share a 2017 study  conducted by an independent research institute at TROSA's request  which found TROSA saves the state nearly $7.5 million annually in criminal justice and emergency care costs.

The program's self-financing aspect is part of its appeal for North Carolina Sen. Joyce Krawiec, a Republican who represents part of Forsyth County, where TROSA is building its new site.

"The good thing about TROSA: They raised most of their own funds," she said in a phone interview.

It's reasonable that residents don't get paid for their work, she added, since they're already receiving free treatment and housing. Other rehabs can be prohibitively expensive for many families, so TROSA provides a much-needed option.

But being a bargain doesn't necessarily make it legal, Zatz and other labor experts said. A previous U.S. Supreme Court ruling suggests nonprofits that run businesses without paying employees could violate the Fair Labor Standards Act.

But TROSA administrators say they are not an employer; they are a therapeutic community. Clear policies guard against the exploitation of anyone, said Keith Artin, president and CEO. The jobs provide residents with structure and an opportunity to change their behaviors.

"The work-based element is essential to recovery," Artin said. "We're teaching people how to live."

Toward the end of residents' two-year stays, TROSA assists them in job-hunting and allows them to live on campus for several months while they work at a newfound job and build savings.

Diverging work experiences

TROSA's model has widespread support among lawmakers and families affected by addiction. Benjamin Weston said it was "a blessing."

Weston said he started using cocaine as a teenager and struggled with addiction for years. At 22, he entered TROSA. He said he was grateful for two years of free treatment.

After brief assignments in TROSA's thrift store and moving company, Weston transitioned to the development office, where he solicited donations from local businesses. "It was meaningful work that also taught me a lot of good job skills," he said.

Since graduating in 2016, Weston has worked in development for Hope Connection International, a nonprofit his mother started to support survivors of abuse and addiction.

Other graduates interviewed for this article talked about using the moving skills or commercial driving licenses they gained to obtain full-time jobs. Some said they're buying houses and starting families  successes they credit to their experience in the program.

But not every resident finds the work model therapeutic. Several described working 10 to 16 hours a day, six days a week, in physically demanding moving or lawn care businesses. Several said there was little time for therapy and, with only a handful of counselors for hundreds of residents, wait times for a session could span weeks.

Freeman, the former TROSA employee who has a master's in social work, said he thought residents rarely had an opportunity to process the trauma that made them use drugs in the first place. Although Freeman did not counsel clients  his role at TROSA focused on ordering and stocking medications  he said he noticed many graduates returned repeatedly to the program, struggling to stay away from substances once they left campus.

Richard Osborne first heard of TROSA while incarcerated on drug and theft-related charges. Like 38% of TROSA residents, he chose to attend the program as a condition of his probation.

One day in 2017, Osborne and other residents working with the moving company were unloading large boards of plywood from a trailer, when a board fell and smashed him against the trailer, he said. His vision became blurry and he worried about having a concussion, he said.

As he remembers it, no one suggested medical care. "The next day, they told me I had to get back to work," he claimed.

That's when Osborne said he decided to leave.

Today, Osborne, 31, said he has not used drugs in about four years, holds a steady job, and has a loving family. But it's no thanks to TROSA, he said.

"They're taking advantage of people at their low points in life," he said. The moving company brings in $4 million a year, yet residents who work for it are not even allowed to keep tips, he added.

TROSA leaders confirmed the tips policy but said they could not comment on an individual residents' experience. In general, CEO Artin wrote in an email, "when a resident is injured we ensure that they receive immediate medical attention and would never knowingly put a resident at risk."

As a nonprofit, TROSA funnels revenue from its businesses back into the treatment program, he added.

The program's 2020 tax documents show its top five employees combined earned over $750,000 in salary and benefits.

Medication hesitancy

TROSA provides psychiatric care through a contract with Duke Health and offers group or individual counseling to residents who request it. The program employs four full-time counselors and partners with local providers who donate physical therapy, dental care, and other medical services.

But TROSA does not provide access to some of the most effective treatments for opioid use disorder: methadone and buprenorphine. Both medications activate opioid receptors in the brain and reduce opioid withdrawal and cravings. It's been well documented that these medications greatly reduce the risk of opioid overdose death, and the FDA-approved drugs are considered the "gold standard" for treatment.

Right now, TROSA leaders say the only medication for opioid use disorder the program offers is naltrexone, an injectable medication that works differently than the other two because it requires patients to fully detox to be effective. Because of this, some experts are hesitant to use it, saying it puts people at higher risk of overdose death.

About one-third of TROSA participants report opioids are their primary drug of choice.

TROSA leaders said they've discussed adding the other addiction treatment medications but face logistical barriers. All medications at TROSA are self-administered, and leaders worry about diversion of oral methadone and buprenorphine, which are classified as controlled substances. They say they'd consider injectable buprenorphine, but it's costly for their mostly uninsured participants.

"People choose to come here because it is a behavior modification program," said Lisa Finlay, lead clinical counselor at TROSA. "They know that we don't offer buprenorphine or those medications. We have people who have tried those medications in the past and believe that they actually led them back to using."

Evidence suggests that people using medications for opioid use disorder have the best outcomes when they have access to other recovery support services, such as housing, employment, counseling, and a community. But while clinicians across the country have embraced these medications, leaders of residential treatment programs founded in the more traditional 12-step, abstinence-based recovery model have pushed back.

Some old-school recovery leaders claim the use of medications is simply replacing one drug with another, which has created stigma around this form of treatment.

A 2020 study found that about 40% of residential programs surveyed in the U.S. didn't offer opioid use disorder medications and 20% actively discouraged people from using them. In North Carolina, there are 62 licensed long-term residential treatment facilities, according to the SAMHSA treatment locator, and fewer than half accept patients who take these medications. Only 12 facilities are licensed to prescribe buprenorphine.

This has resulted in tough conversations with patients for Kate Roberts, a clinical social worker on a UNC Health team that treats people with severe IV drug-related infections. Once patients are stabilized, many start buprenorphine, she said. Some say they want to go to a residential program for structure, job training, and to learn coping skills. Roberts recalled one patient saying to her: "I need to go to residential treatment and I need this medication because I fear I'll die."

"Thats really heartbreaking to hear a patient clearly articulate what it is that they need  which is in line with the [research] literature," she said. "And that you know there are very few places in the state that offer that."

Doctors and public health experts nationwide are pushing for lawmakers to fund rehab facilities that allow these medications, saying they're the best way to combat the opioid crisis. Some medical and legal experts have said it's in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act to deny recovery services such as housing to people using medications for opioid use disorder. Health experts say that funding abstinence-based addiction programs could also inadvertently cause more overdoses if people leave the program and return to using drugs with a much lower tolerance, especially as fentanyl is rampant in the street drug supply.

These conversations will become only more important as opioid settlement funds arrive, said Bradley Stein, director of the national Rand Opioid Policy Center.

"The goal isn't just to get people into treatment; it's to get people doing better," he said. "You want to make sure that you're using the money effectively."

The conversations have begun in North Carolina. When Rep. Graig Meyer (D-Durham) tweeted his support for TROSA late last year, clinicians reached out to him explaining their concerns about the program not allowing participants to use methadone or buprenorphine.

Although Meyer still believes it's an effective program, he said, "I also have concerns from what I learned about TROSA's approach to treating opioid addiction in particular. I'd like to see TROSA consider what their current practices are."
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, may manifest neurological symptoms.

A new study published in Nature Communications investigates SARS-CoV-2-infected non-human primates (NHPs) to understand the neurological symptoms associated with "long COVID."

Neurological manifestations of COVID-19

Many patients with COVID-19 report neurological symptoms. Severe COVID-19 can affect the brain and manifest as stroke, meningoencephalitis, and hemorrhagic necrotizing encephalopathies. Mild symptoms like dizziness or headache can be a part of the neuropathology associated with the disease. However, the origin and development of COVID-19 affecting the nervous system are unclear.

This study used two NHPs, the Rhesus macaques (RM) and African green monkeys (AGMs), as SARS-CoV-2 infection models to assess brain pathology.

Brain inflammation

Four RMs and four AGMs were infected with SARS-CoV-2, 2019-nCoV/USA-WA1/2020 strain, a near-wildtype strain. Two RMs and two AGMs were infected via an aerosol challenge, and two RMs and two AGMs were infected via multiple mucosal routes. In addition, two RMs and two AGMs were controls that were mock-infected with growth media. All exposed animals developed an infection within the first week of exposure, irrespective of the infection method.

Two AGMs had to be euthanized because they manifested severe symptoms. Brain inflammation was observed in all animals, but it was more significant in SARS-CoV-2 infected animals.

H&E examination of infected animals revealed microhemorrhages, as demonstrated in cerebellum (AGM1 a), brainstem (AGM2 b, AGM4 c), and basal ganglia (RM4 d), which tended to be larger and packed with red blood cells, as compared to non-infected controls, (RM6 brainstem e, AGM5 cerebellum f). Erythrocyte extravasation into the brain parenchyma is indicated by black arrows. Asterisks denote tissue injury around damaged blood vessels. A dotted line outlines the vessel lumen in each panel. H&E was performed and assessed twice on all brain regions. The number of microbleeds/mm2 was assessed in all brain regions (g) and found to be significantly greater in the basal ganglia (h, *p = 0.0263), where n = 4 biologically independent samples in the control group and n = 8 biologically independent samples in the infected group. Statistics were performed with a two-tailed MannWhitney U test. *p  0.05. Data are expressed as mean  SEM. Source data are provided as a Source Data file. Abbreviations: C control, I infected, AGM African green monkey, RM Rhesus macaque. Scale bars = 100 m except outset of b where scale bar = 500 m.

Apoptosis

There were significant changes in neuronal morphology. Neuronal degeneration was observed. To identify the mechanism of degeneration, the brain regions were assessed for the presence of cleaved caspase 3, a marker for programmed cell death or apoptosis. Except for one AGM, all infected animals had cleaved caspase 3 positive cells in at least one region of the central nervous system (CNS). One RM and two AGMs had cleaved caspase 3 positive cells in more than one brain region. One RM had cleaved caspase 3 positive cells in all brain regions. The mock-infected animals had a few or no cleaved caspase 3 positive cells in the brain.

One AGM that was euthanized did not show caspase 3 positive cells in the CNS. This suggests that apoptosis in the CNS may occur in the later stages of the disease.

Microhemorrhages

Microhemorrhages or microbleeds in the brain tissue were observed in all animals but the infected animals had larger bleeds. Infected animals had a higher number of microbleeds.

Microhemorrhages occur with aging, possibly due to an age-related decline in elasticity of the blood vessels and an increase in blood pressure. These microbleeds can promote blood clotting that can stop the bleed but they can also cause a stroke. The presence of clots was examined by an accumulation of CD61. Multiple blood vessels were CD61 positive in all animals, irrespective of microbleeds. More clots were observed in infected animals. Thus, during SARS-CoV-2 infection leakage of blood vessels without injury occurs more frequently.

Hypoxia

The brain has a high energy demand. It requires oxygen and glucose. A reduction in blood flow causes a decrease in oxygen and glucose that can affect neuronal vitality and cause neurotoxicity and inflammation.

One AGM that was euthanized had several microbleeds in the brain that may have been the reason for the animal's rapid decline. Possibly, the AGM's lung deterioration contributed to the microbleeds. This needs to be investigated further.

All infected animals had SpO2 levels between 89 and 99%. The SpO2 levels were mostly below 95% for most infected animals over the study course. These low blood oxygen levels (hypoxia) are not alarming, but they reflect impaired gas exchange in the lungs. Minor declines in oxygen levels may promote neuronal injury. Cells that are vulnerable to hypoxia and nearby cells were degenerate or undergoing apoptosis. Hypoxia was assessed by staining the oxygen-regulated alpha subunit of hypoxia-inducible factor-1 (HIF-1a). The regions of the brain that showed the most significant injury were assessed for hypoxia. Compared to mock-infected controls, the brains of infected animals showed higher HIF-1a levels.

Viral presence

The brain pathology that is observed in this study could be due to SARS-CoV-2 infecting the brain cells or an indirect consequence of the disease.

The presence of the virus in the brain samples was assessed by staining for the viral nucleocapsid protein or in situ hybridization. Staining showed rare SARS-CoV-2 infection in the brain, which appeared to be restricted to the blood vessels. In situ hybridization also showed viral presence in the brains of infected animals. Viral infection was observed in the brain-associated endothelial cells in deep brain structures. Viral presence was observed even in the absence of severe disease or obvious neurological symptoms.

Conclusion

NHPs can act as a viable model for addressing SARS-CoV-2-associated neuropathology. Conclusions drawn from this model can be translated to human disease.

Neuroinflammation, microhemorrhages, brain hypoxia, neuronal degeneration, and apoptosis are observed in SARS-CoV-2 infected NHPs. Notably, neuropathology is observed in infected animals that do not manifest severe respiratory symptoms. In addition, rare viral presence is detected in brain endothelial cells, but it does not correlate with the severity of brain injury.

This study suggests that long COVID patients need a long-term neurological follow-up.
insights from industry Dr. Zhang Lin Lin Technical Specialist Sino Biological Europe

In this interview, Dr. Linlin Zhang, technical specialist for Sino Biological Europe, discusses how Sino is expanding its product offerings into the European market and outlines its process for developing and manufacturing custom recombinant antibodies for its clients.

Could you briefly introduce your background and role at Sino Biological?

I am currently a technical specialist at Sino Biological, Europe, based on my research background in protein structural biology. I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Lubeck in 2017, where I then stayed to study for my postdoc. Subsequently, I got promoted to project leader for a few years.

My research mainly focuses on developing small-molecule compounds based on structural biology by targeting nonstructural proteins of emerging or re-emerging viruses. For instance, the famous coronaviruses, enteroviruses and flaviviruses.

Last September, I joined Sino, taking charge of technical assistance at our sales and marketing department on recombinant protein and antibody products.

Could you share a little bit of the history of Sino Biological as a company with us?

Sino Biological, Inc. Play

Video credit: Sino Biological

Sino Biological was founded in 2007 in Beijing, China, after its founders realized the increasing demand for high-quality, fully active recombinant proteins for research and diagnostics development.

Our CEO, Dr. Liangzhi Xie (an MIT graduate), specializes in recombinant protein expression using mammalian cells. This focus is the core technique at our company.

The company also manages a team that specializes in antibody development. Based on the above facts, we successfully went public last year and raised 4.98 billion RMB during this initial public offering for the companys continuous development.

In addition to business development in the Chinese market, Sino Biological has broadened its worldwide physical presence by establishing two subsidiaries in the United States and Europe.

As the only official data company in Europe, we are currently located in Frankfurt with our local sales and service team, including our product inventory division. Additionally, besides the domestic and overseas branches, a network of distributors supports our product sales distributors in the North American, European, and Asian markets.

Presently, Sino has 30 distributors, and our products are available in more than 90 countries. Furthermore, our products have been well distributed and are widely used.

What kind of product(s) does Sino Biological provide to its clients, and what are the main application fields for the products?

Sino Biological is an internationally leading reagent manufacturer and service provider. All of Sinos products are independently developed and produced. These products include recombinant proteins, antibodies and cDNA clones.

Furthermore, Sino currently manufactures and sells more than 46,000 products in stock, including more than 6,000 recombinant proteins, of which 3,800 proteins expressed by human cells are close to natures structure and property. We also have a comprehensive collection of drug targets, cytokines and their receptors, FC receptor proteins and viral proteins among these products.

Similarly, we can provide 12,000 antibodies, including 4,600 monoclonal antibodies, and featured products covering a broad range, including primary antibodies, secondary antibodies, tag antibodies, neutralizing antibodies, control antibodies, etc. Additionally, these antibodies can be used in various areas, including ELISA, western blotting, immunofluorescence staining, immunohistochemistry, immunoprecipitation pursuit, viral infection, in vivo studies, etc.

Hence, all our products cover multiple research areas in the life sciences.

Sino Biological can also provide a one-stop-shop for research reagents and technical services for basic scientific research, including molecular biology, cell biology, immunology, developmental biology, stem cell research and innovative drug research and development.

Therefore, Sino Biological offers pharmaceutical companies and biotechnology firms preclinical product technology services for hundreds of monoclonal antibody drug candidates.

If clients have special or custom requirements for a product not in the catalog, do you also have a customized service? Also, can you tell us a bit about how that works? Finally, what kind of service do you provide, and what is the typical lead time for a customized product versus a catalog one?

We have excellent CRO services that attend to clients' recombinant production of proteins and antibody development. The complete service starts from gene cloning and synthesis to protein characterization. In Sino, we also have four main platforms for recombinant expression, including the mammalian cell system. This platform is in addition to the insect cell and yeast expression systems and particular expression systems, for instance, the E. coli expression system.

Sino Biological also provides recombinant antibody production services and a rich experience. We are committed to producing all the four subtypes of IgG and IgM in boosting pentameric and hexameric forms.

Similarly, we have a lot of experience producing different shapes of antibodies, such as the Fabs or scFvs, Fc-fusion proteins, chimeric antibodies, bispecific antibodies and circulating antibodies, in addition to a comprehensive animal immunization platform, antibody generation platform, screening platform and other safe platforms to identify the most suitable leads based on our antibody development services.

Our experience covers not only classical mouse monoclonal antibody development using hybridoma but also single B cells based on antibody development platforms. Several services for developing antibodies against the specific post-translational modification, for instance, phosphorylation, and for generating anti-idiotypic antibodies are also provided.

Our customers are particularly interested in the fast lead time. Typically, using E. coli, we start from gene synthesis to delivery of the final product. The process usually takes approximately four to eight weeks. However, the insect cell expression system takes a little longer, around 10 weeks, because it has two integral virus package processes.

The antibody protein expression in mammalian cells also takes about six to eight weeks to complete because generating antibodies as the immunogen preparation can take a while. It can also take time to develop a sufficient immune response, after which they can be moved to the antibody selection process.

Alternatively, it commonly takes about four to six months to generate the number of monoclonal antibodies in our antibody generation service. However, we have a fast immunization reading system, which combines our unique immunization strategy and AR events to expedite this process, allowing us to finish a project in about three to four months.

We understand that time is sensitive when conducting research, and we try to work as quickly as possible.

Could you describe a typical workflow for the first few weeks of a customer project? Could you also share a success story or a case study of a particular project that went well?

Once our sales team receives a CRO inquiry from a client, our professional CRO team will extensively analyze the project to ensure that the client gets timely feedback. Then, after in-depth communication with the client, we will use our solid internal infrastructure to outline the details of the deliverables.

After the project assessment process has been completed, a standard service package is offered for cases with no conflicting data. However, if the project is more complex than a simple antibody expression or a normal protein expression, we provide some nonstandard service packages.

There are more procedures involved after this stage. First, we finalize the details of the project and identify the projects scope so that we are clear on the specifics of the deliverables.

If the client is satisfied with our proposal, payment is issued in the form of a purchase. Other payment information is also confirmed, then we can begin the project.

Our client is typically notified once the project is initiated and upon each milestone as the project progresses. Finally, a shipment process with the invoice certificate of analysis is provided when the project is finished. We also offer a complete project report.

I will briefly discuss a project we conducted for a client who wanted to develop an antibody using the single B-cell sorting technique.

After sorting the B cell, we identified 380 antigen-specific B cells and generated about 142 sequence pairs. This protein also yielded 46 clones, among which 8 were better than the control antibodies. These were then made commercially available.

It took us about 26 days to complete the project, from immunization to antibody characterization. The B-cell sorting platform is an expedited method to generate customized antibodies.

As a leading manufacturer of biological agents, what would you say are the most cutting-edge products or platforms, or what are the particular technical strengths that make Sino Biological a leader in this field?

First, our independently developed cutting-edge products are widely used in infectious disease research, therapeutic antibodies, evaluation, immunodiagnostic, SC and vaccine development studies.

The viral protein bank also features an exclusive coronavirus catalog, a comprehensive collection of influenza antigens and many other hard-to-find viral proteins, such as the Zika virus, RSV, Ebola, etc., including over 1,000 antigens from 90 virus types, subtypes and 350 strains.

In particular, this catalog includes the recombinant spike protein of the wider type of SARS COVID 2 and the Omicron variant, which our company was the first to launch worldwide. Additionally, we have a Sino milling chip, a multiplex acid platform for high throughput. Therefore, serological studies continue to use many of our upper respiratory virus antigens.

Second, rapid monoclonal antibodies developed using our phage display and single B-cell platforms exhibit higher sensitivity and specificity than mouse monoclonal antibodies. These features reduce the need for antigen retrieval and pretreatments in some applications.

Additionally, rapid monoclonal antibodies can recognize more novel epitopes in a highly diverse range of B-cell lymphomas, useful for antigens with weak immunogenicity or those derived from rodents.

We also have experience producing antibodies of different shapes and formats, including bispecific, tri-specific and multivalent antibodies, nanobodies, antibody fragments, antibody fusion proteins, etc.

Sino Biological is now expanding into Europe with its Frankfurt office. How does the European market differ from the areas that the company has operated in globally? Where are you more established? Also, do Sino Biological Europes services differ from what it offers elsewhere?

The services and products we offer in the European market are similar to those in other global markets, both in product range and quality control criteria.

However, the European market does have some differences compared to our national market because it is uniquely characterized by its culture and regional factors, including logistics, customs, currency, etc. Therefore, we consider these factors. For example, here in Germany, we have our local sales and service team and a protein inventory department in the European subsidiary.

Although the products are delivered directly from Germany to our clients, saving them a lot of effort with importing procedures, we still have to deal with product export challenges in this market, such as aligning the Swiss and UK prices of different currencies, including the Euro, the British pound and more. Occasionally, we have included additional language services to bridge some of these gaps.

You mentioned the COVID-19 pandemic, and how Sino has supported research efforts by providing antibodies for scientists developing vaccines and other treatments. How has the pandemic imparted the way Sino Biological operates internally? Furthermore, has that changed its workflow or how colleagues work in the office or the laboratory?

Sino Biological has been a front-line worker, delivering rapid responses against public health crises, such as the famous COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, being the first company to express the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and its variants means that our SARS-CoV-2 products are well accepted and distributed globally.

Additionally, as a leading manufacturer in recombinant proteins, Sino Biological has been recognized for its highly comprehensive recombinant protein production and antibody development platforms, even before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Specifically, we use this platform to develop reagents against different infectious diseases known to affect humans. As a result, we have an extensive collection of recombinant proteins from SARS-CoV-1 and other coronaviruses, influenza viruses, HIV, Ebola and others in our recombinant viral protein bank.

This platform has allowed us to familiarize ourselves with the process and develop techniques to prepare us for future pandemics better.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, a significant part of our research and development and our production capacity was quickly switched to the development and production of SARS-CoV-2 reagents. This shift supported the industrial, academic and community efforts in stopping the pandemic. As a result, we developed a wider range of proteins.

Subsequently, we are constantly trying to create a panel of recombinant protein variants. For example, when working with the SARS-CoV-2 variants, we built a template for the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and segments of the spike protein, meaning that whenever a variant or variants are encountered, we can quickly produce these recombinant proteins and supply them worldwide.

We have also developed a range of stock antibodies that can be deployed quickly for immunological assay development once a familiar or existing virus arises. For instance, COVID-19 was similar to the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak that occurred around a decade ago. Hence, the SARS antibodies were useful at the beginning of the pandemic to develop a rapid serological assay and support the companies working in vaccine development.

Notably, these companies used these antibodies as detection reagents, resulting in the encouraging results observed during that period. Therefore, this process favors vaccine efficacy. Furthermore, we are constantly developing specific antibodies targeting the spine or other relevant proteins of SARS-CoV-2 and its variants to ensure that we offer timely and high-quality services to our clients.

However, customers are beginning to require significant quantities of proteins, meaning that the platforms capacity is stretched. Nevertheless, we have a high throughput common antibody expression platform with which we aim to create recombinant antibody libraries for clients. Due to these efforts, long-term collaboration has been established with many vaccine and rapid test developers. Meanwhile, a flexible infrastructure has also been maintained to allow the continuous provision of non-COVID-19 products and services.

We are ready to switch entirely to normal production when the virus is under control, and the pandemic ends

The information and opinions provided by speakers as well as Sino Biological employees during podcast series are solely of their own and Sino Biological assumes no responsibility or liability for this content.

About Dr. Zhang

Dr. Zhang is a technical specialist at Sino Biological Europe.Her research experience spans academia and industry. Dr. Zhang worked as a project leader in the University of Lubeck before she joined Sino Biological Europe. Her research interests fall into the fields of protein structural biology, antiviral therapy, and virus-host interaction mechanisms. A highlight of her scientific career was determination of the crystal structure of the unliganded main protease of SARS-CoV-2, as well as its complex with an alpha-ketoamide peptidomimetic compound named 13b (Zhang et al., Science, 368, 409-412 (2020)).

About Sino Biological Inc.

Sino Biological is an international reagent supplier and service provider. The company specializes in recombinant protein production and antibody development. All of Sino Biological's products are independently developed and produced, including recombinant proteins, antibodies and cDNA clones. Sino Biological is the researchers' one-stop technical services shop for the advanced technology platforms they need to make advancements. In addition, Sino Biological offers pharmaceutical companies and biotechnology firms pre-clinical production technology services for hundreds of monoclonal antibody drug candidates.

Sino Biological's core business

Sino Biological is committed to providing high-quality recombinant protein and antibody reagents and to being a one-stop technical services shop for life science researchers around the world. All of our products are independently developed and produced. In addition, we offer pharmaceutical companies and biotechnology firms pre-clinical production technology services for hundreds of monoclonal antibody drug candidates. Our product quality control indicators meet rigorous requirements for clinical use samples. It takes only a few weeks for us to produce 1 to 30 grams of purified monoclonal antibody from gene sequencing.
Boys were more likely to be born with genital birth defects if their fathers took the commonly prescribed diabetes drug metformin in the three months before conception, according to a new study by Stanford Medicine investigators and their collaborators in Denmark.

The finding adds to a limited but growing understanding of how paternal factors can affect the health of children.

For women, we know a lot about risk factors. There's a list of medications that women are not supposed to take when they're pregnant, for example. Given that men contribute half the DNA to a child, it makes sense that there could be some effects that travel through paternal pathways as well." Michael Eisenberg, MD, professor of urology at Stanford and senior author of the study

In fact, the magnitude of the risk associated with metformin in the new study is on par with more well-known maternal contributors to birth defects, such as pregnancy after age 45  a comparison that Eisenberg calls "sobering."

Using health-registry data from Denmark that tracked more than 1 million births, the researchers linked men's use of metformin during sperm development to higher rates of genital birth defects in their sons. It's notable that the genital birth defects occurred only in boys, and these fathers were less likely to have boys than girls compared with the general population.

These results suggest that metformin affects men's reproductive health in a way that can harm their sons, though the mechanisms are still unclear.

A paper describing the study was published March 28 in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The lead author is Maarten Wensink, MD, PhD, associate professor of public health at the University of Southern Denmark.

Disease or treatment?

While poorly managed diabetes in pregnant women has been associated with birth defects, little is known about how diabetes in men impacts their babies.

"Inherent in health is the question of whether it's the disease or the treatment that could cause risks," Eisenberg said.

Metformin, an oral medication, is an increasingly popular treatment option for Type 2 diabetes, but it is known to have effects on the reproductive system.

Eisenberg and colleagues set out to evaluate whether metformin use in men affects the rate of birth defects in their children.

Data from birth and patient registries in Denmark allowed the team to compare all live births from 1997 to 2016. They excluded babies born to mothers who had been diagnosed with diabetes or hypertension.

Because sperm takes about three months to fully mature, fathers who filled a prescription for a diabetes drug during the three months before conception were considered to have exposed their offspring to the drug.

Of the 1,116,779 babies included in the study, 3.3% had at least one major birth defect and 51.4% were boys. Among the 1,451 babies exposed to metformin, 49.4% were male and the rate of birth defects was 5.2%. In particular, genital birth defects were more common and occurred only in boys.

These rates mean that, in Denmark, where today approximately 120 babies per year are exposed through their fathers, metformin use may account for two additional babies born with birth defects every year.

Homing in on metformin

One of the things that scientists like to do is try to disprove their own finding, Eisenberg said. We try to determine that what we found didnt just occur by chance or from other factors.

In their statistical analysis, the researchers controlled for variables that may have skewed the outcome, including birth year, paternal age, income, education, maternal age, tobacco use and education.

To further shore up their findings, the researchers compared exposure to metformin with exposure to two other common diabetes drugs, insulin and sulfonylureas. Exposure to insulin affected neither the rate of birth defects nor sex ratio. Among the 647 babies exposed to sulfonylureas, 5.1% had birth defects and 49.3% were boys  numbers that trend in the same direction as metformin exposure. But these numbers did not reach statistical significance, Eisenberg explained, and lacked a consistent pattern. The sulfonylureas trends were neither specific to the three-month sperm development window nor to genital defects, for example.

Men who filled metformin prescriptions before or after the three-month period of sperm development did not have offspring with a higher incidence of birth defects, the study found.

It wasnt just taking metformin at any time in a mans life; it really has to do with taking it in that window when the sperm that is going to become the child is being developed, Eisenberg said. And its not just diabetes because the man likely had diabetes before and after that point.

Finally, the researchers compared exposed babies to their unexposed siblings and found the siblings did not have increased rates of birth defects, showing that the effect didnt track with individual fathers.

Although its not clear how metformin exposure leads to birth defects, Eisenberg noted that studies in mice have shown that the drug can cause reproductive harm. Pregnant mice given metformin, for example, have male offspring with smaller testicles. We tried to tackle it in as many ways as possible to home in on the particular medication and then the particular time point when that exposure is critical, Eisenberg said.

The decreased ratio of boys to girls could be due to severe cases of harm. In some cases, the effect of exposure may be so potent that it even leads to fetal demise, specifically in male and not female offspring, and that could be why you see fewer male offspring being born, Eisenberg said.

Dont forget the father

Should men aspiring to fatherhood avoid this particular drug? I think that its a single study, so its hard to change clinical practice based on that, Eisenberg said. But for somebody considering fatherhood, this study emphasizes the importance of a fathers health on the health of a child.

Eisenberg said it will be important to uncover the biological mechanisms at work and to expand the study beyond the relatively homogenous population of Denmark. Ultimately, before you change guidelines, this should be studied and validated in other populations as well, he said.

Eisenbergs previous studies have shown that American fathers, like mothers, keep getting older. That likely means parents are also less healthy, and diseases like diabetes increasingly need to be considered in reproductive health.

When we think about reproduction, we still mostly think about maternal factors, so this study brings further awareness that paternal factors can make a difference, Eisenberg said. Dont forget the father.

Other Stanford co-authors of the study are professor of biomedical data science Ying Lu, PhD; professor of biomedical data science Lu Tian, PhD; and professor of pediatrics Gary Shaw, Dr.PH.

Researchers from the University of Southern Denmark and Copenhagen University also contributed to the research.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grants HD096468 and 1UL1TR003142) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Pregnancy, long reproductive span, and older age at menopause are associated with a lower risk of dementia in women, according to a study publishing April 5th in the open access journal PLOS Medicine. Inversely, hysterectomy, younger age of first birth, and younger or older than average age at first period were associated with greater dementia risk. The study suggests that reproductive and hormonal factors may be involved in dementia risk, but observed a similar association between the number of children and dementia risk in women and men, suggesting that the physical experience of childbearing may not account for risk variation.

Dementia rates are increasing around the world, with some studies reporting a higher incidence in women than men, yet there is a limited evidence base on reproductive factors and the risk of dementia. Jessica Gong at The George Institute for Global Health, Australia, and colleagues used data from the UK Biobank to examine the risk of all cause dementia and reproductive factors in 273,240 women as well as the number of children in those women and in 228,965 men.

After controlling for age, socioeconomic status, smoking, body mass index (BMI), and other elements, certain events related to shorter cumulative exposure to internally produced estrogen  such as older than average age at first period, younger than average age at menopause, and having a hysterectomy  were associated with higher dementia risk. Pregnancy, even aborted pregnancy, longer reproductive span, older age at menopause, and use of contraceptive pills were associated with a lower risk of all-cause dementia. For both men and women, compared with having two children, having no children or four or more were apparently associated with greater risk of dementia.

The study has limitations including the retrospective reporting on reproductive factors that can be subject to bias, and the fact that UK Biobank is a relatively healthy cohort of affluent people of white British ancestry so may not be representative of a broader population.

Reproductive events related to shorter exposure to endogenous estrogen in women were associated with higher dementia risk, and these findings highlight the vulnerability in dementia risk pertaining to women. However, the similar association between the number of children and dementia risk observed for women and men indicates that the risk variation in women may be more related to social and behavioral factors in parenthood, rather than biological factors involved in childbearing." Jessica Gong, The George Institute for Global Health, Australia
Leonardo, a global leader in aerospace, defence and security sector, said it has successfully delivered

the last of the six upgraded naval vessels after completing successfully all the integrated sea acceptance test (ISAT).

The leading Italian industrial major handed over the Al Taweelah ship at a grand ceremony held last week at Royal Bahrain Navy Head Quarter in Mina Salman.

This important milestone was achieved following a deal signed in 2015 with Bahrain Defence Forces, said the statement from the Italian company.

As per the agreement, Leonardo was responsible for upgrade of the sixth naval unit Al Taweelah and equip it with state-of-the-art systems including the new Leonardos Combat Management Systems (CMS) that can integrate and co-ordinate in real time all information coming from various sensors installed on board.

As for the previous units, the Al Taweelah upgrade includes a new weapon control system, training services and logistic support.

"Thanks to Leonardo's new Combat Management System (CMS), an example of the high technological level expressed by the company, the ship is now able to integrate and coordinate in real time all information coming from various sensors installed on board. The CMS enabling the automatic coordination of weapons systems in terms of threat assessment, operation planning and control of armaments during combat," said a company spokesman.

The achievement reflects Leonardos commitment in supporting Bahraini Defence Armed Forces and its excellence in the naval domain, he noted.

Today more than 70 international Navies have chosen Leonardo systems and technologies to equip over 1,000 vessels, he added.

"For naval missions Leonardo's work ranges from turn-key combat management systems for maritime surveillance and security to naval guns, ammunition and underwater systems for all classes of military vessels, manned and unmanned vehicles and sensors," said the spokesman.

It includes the most advanced naval training and maintenance offer and satellite systems and services for Earth observation and geo-location, for marine environmental monitoring and maritime security, he stated.

"Bahrain, as well as other countries in the Gulf region, can be further supported by Leonardos expertise in the naval field, where the company has a track-record in the upgrade of corvettes, offshore patrol vessels and frigates, and in the land sector, where the company offers fully integrated solutions, warfare systems and cost-effective overhaul programmes," he added.-TradeArabia News Service
(Newser)  Update: A Chinese biophysicist jailed in China for his role in helping to create the world's first gene-edited babies is a free man once more. The release of He Jiankui, who was convicted and sentenced to three years behind bars in December 2019 on charges of practicing medicine illegally, was verified to MIT Technology Review by "people familiar with the situation." "It's not convenient to talk right now," He said to the publication when reached by phone. He said basically the same when contacted by the South China Morning Post. It's not clear if the Stanford-trained scientist plans to return to scientific research, either in China or abroad. Meanwhile, two bioethicists have asked China's government to create an initiative to keep tabs on the health of the three so-called CRISPR babies. Our original story from December 2019 follows:

Three researchers involved in the births of genetically edited babies have been convicted and sentenced for practicing medicine illegally, Chinese state media said Monday. Xinhua reports that lead researcher He Jiankui was sentenced to three years in prison and fined 3 million yuan ($430,000). Two other people received lesser sentences and fines. Zhang Renli was sentenced to two years in prison and fined 1 million yuan. Qin Jinzhou received an 18-month sentence, but with a two-year reprieve, and a 500,000 yuan fine. He, the lead researcher, shocked the scientific world when he announced in November 2018 that he'd helped make the world's first genetically edited babiestwin girls born that month.

The announcement sparked a global debate over the ethics of gene editing, the AP reports. He said he'd used a tool called CRISPR to alter a gene in embryos to try to help them resist infection with the AIDS virus. The Xinhua report, citing court documents, said the researchers were involved in the births of three gene-edited babies to two women. The court said the three researchers hadn't obtained qualification as doctors to practice medicine, pursued fame and profits, deliberately violated Chinese regulations on scientific research, and crossed an ethical line in both scientific research and medicine. It also said they'd fabricated ethical review documents. (Read more CRISPR stories.)
(Newser)  A majestic site in eastern Virginia has been returned to the Rappahannock Tribe more than 350 years after they were forced from their ancestral lands by English settlers. Some 465 acres of land was officially returned to the tribe Friday, including a stretch of Rappahannock River frontage known as Fones Cliffs, the Washington Post reports. The Chesapeake Conservancy environmental group bought the land for $4 million with help from donors and gave the land title to the tribe, reports the Smithsonian.

The sitewhich had been earmarked for a luxury housing developmentis an important nesting site for bald eagles, which are sacred to the tribe. Conservancy president Joel Dunn says he calls the "stunningly beautiful" site the "Yosemite of the Chesapeake." The tribe plans to place the land in trust with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and make it accessible to the public. The tribe plans to "create trails and a replica 16th-century village, where Tribal members can educate the public about their history and Indigenous approaches to conservation," the Interior Department said in a statement. The tribe encountered English explorer at the site in 1608.

The tribe, which was federally recognized in 2018 and has around 300 members, once dominated the area. The tribe encountered English explorer at the Fones Cliff site in 1608. Rappahannock Chief Anne Richardson says the site will be used to teach traditional skills like canoeing to the tribe's youth. "We were 11,000 years on the river, she tells the Post. "When John Smith came here, he could walk on sturgeon in the water. So that will just tell you the abundance of natural resources that were here due to our conservation methods." (Read more Native Americans stories.)
(Newser)  An aggressive fox that had apparently been attacking people on the grounds of the Capitol is now in custody, police say. Capitol Police said Tuesday that they had received reports of "individuals being attacked or bitten by a fox" and there are "possibly several fox dens on Capitol Grounds," per the Hill. "We have received several reports of aggressive fox encounters on or near the grounds of the US Capitol," Capitol Police tweeted Tuesday. "For your safety, please do not approach any foxes." Hours later, they had an update: "Captured," the force said, sharing photos of a fox being taken away in a cage.

Capitol Police said at least six people have been bitten or nipped in recent days, though it's not clear whether more than one fox was responsible. Authorities said the captured fox had a den in a bed of mulch near the Dirksen Building and animal control officers are searching for more dens, reports Fox 5. Democratic Rep. Ami Bera tells the Washington Post that a fox nipped the back of his leg on Capitol grounds around 5pm Monday. He says the bite apparently didn't break the skin, but doctors recommended a series of shots just in case. "Yesterday was probably my most unusual day on the Hill in 10 years," he says. (In February, a "nervous" chicken was captured at a Pentagon checkpoint.)
(Newser)  An 18-year-old man arrested in a home-invasion robbery in which a Las Vegas woman was killed left his high school homework in the getaway car, police said. Math homework bearing Kamari Oliver's name was found in a backpack in the vehicle after the victim's boyfriend saw several robbers leaving the home and rammed their vehicle with his own into a nearby wall on March 25, according to a newly released police report. The getaway car's occupants ran from the scene and Oliver was arrested March 28 after he arrived at a high school, police said, per the AP.

The school's name was redacted from the report and Clark County School District officials have declined to provide information about Oliver , the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports. The police report said officers also found $5,000 in the getaway car and that the boyfriend of the slain woman, Natalie Manduley, 24, was known for selling high-end jewelry on Instagram. Manduley was killed in a shootout with the robbers, police said. According to court records, charges against Oliver include murder, robbery, kidnapping, and home invasion while in possession of a firearm or deadly weapon.

(Read more Las Vegas stories.)
(Newser)  Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi took home Oscars in 2012 and 2017 in the best international feature category. His 2021 film, A Hero, managed to win the grand prize at Cannesbut also land him in court to fend off allegations of plagiarism. The director has been accused by former film student Azadeh Masihzadeh of ripping off the premise of her own documentary, All Winners All Losers. The BBC reports that the plot of Farhadi's film centers around a man named Rahim, who's imprisoned in Iran over an unpaid debt and, while on a two-day temporary release, returns a gold-coin-filled bag to its owner, winning widespread praise. "However, he soon begins to come under suspicion," notes the BBC.

Masihzadeh's documentarywhich ABC News reports she started working on during a 2014 workshop led by Farhadiconcerns the case of Mohammad Reza Shokri. He's a now-former prisoner who did indeed find a backpack full of money during an off-prison day and worked to find its rightful owner "in order to redeem his character and leave prison for good," as Salon puts it. Alexandre Mallet-Guy of Memento Production, which co-produced Farhadi's film, expressed its confidence in a statement, saying Masihzadeh "cannot claim ownership on matters in the public domain given that the prisoner's story has been disclosed in both press articles and TV reports years before Ms. Masihzadeh's documentary was published."

Per The Hollywood Reporter, Masihzadeh counters that the coverage at the time amounted to little more than local reports, and that she did extensive research on her own. Her film played at a 2018 Iranian film festival. Farhadi has denied the plagiarism allegation and filed a suit accusing Masihzadeh of defamation; she then countersued. The THR notes the defamation suit was tossed on Monday, and the court ruled there was enough evidence for the plagiarism case to continue. It will now move to a second judge. (Read more plagiarism stories.)
(Newser)  All criminal charges against three employees involved in a deadly 2018 duck boat accident have been dropped. Kenneth Scott McKee, the captain; Charles Baltzell, the manager on duty; and Curtis Lanham, general manager, had all been charged with involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment in the tragedy in Branson, Missouri, that left 17 of the passengers dead. State and local prosecutors, who collaborated on the case, said the employees should not have taken the boat out on Table Rock Lake because a storm was approaching, and that they should have made the passengers wear flotation devices. But in his ruling, the judge said intent needs to be shown to prove the charges, and the prosecutors did not present sufficient evidence that the men acted knowingly or recklessly, the Branson News reports.

"In hindsight, it is evident that the defendants did not have enough weather information to appreciate the threat of high winds," the judge wrote in his ruling, noting that the weather tool they used had not shown the strong winds they ended up encountering, and that they likely believed the boat could avoid the oncoming storm, which was 20 miles behind the unanticipated "gust front" that preceded it. The water was calm when they set out. The judge also found there's no evidence the captain had "an affirmative duty" to require flotation devices be worn, the New York Times reports. The judge dismissed all charges without prejudice, meaning they can be refiled. A spokesperson for the attorney general's office says the office hopes to do just that. Neglect and misconduct charges against the three employees were dismissed in 2020. (Read more Missouri stories.)
(Newser)  Sam Bankman-Fried wants FTX, the Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange he co-founded, to become the "biggest source of financial transactions in the world." In the meantime, he has a plan for the fortune he's already raking in: He wants to give most of it away. The 30-year-old tech entrepreneur, dubbed the "Robin Hood of crypto" by the Sydney Morning Herald, recently spoke with Zeke Faux at Bloomberg about his plans to keep about $100,000 annually1% of his earningsand donate the rest. "You pretty quickly run out of really effective ways to make yourself happier by spending money," Bankman-Fried tells the outlet. "I don't want a yacht." USA Today notes that FTX was valued by investors at $18 billion last year, while Bankman-Fried himself has a net worth of about $24 billion, according to stats from Forbes, which has previously reported on his generosity plan.

Per Faux, Bankman-Fried "lives like a college student perpetually cramming for finals," puttering around in a Toyota Corolla, holing up in a luxury apartment in Nassau with nearly a dozen roommates, and sleeping on a beanbag. He's already started opening up his wallet, donating $50 million last year to various causes, including climate programs and aid to India to deal with the pandemic. But Bankman-Fried's "earning to give" philosophyin which one exploits a Wall Street-driven system to rack up as much money as possible, then donates much of itis controversial in itself, as that system props the super-rich up as saviors without addressing poverty's underlying causes, and "perpetuates inequality and undermines whatever good might be done by donations," Faux writes.

For instance, the $50 million Bankman-Fried donated in 2020 pales in comparison to what he's spent lately on various other ventures, including a $30 million Super Bowl ad starring Larry David, as well as naming rights for the Miami Heat's arena, with a price tag of $135 million over 19 years. He's also made lots of political contributions to both sides of the aisle, including more than $5 million in 2020 to a super PAC supporting Joe Biden. "As by far the richest person to emerge from the effective-altruism movement, Bankman-Fried is a thought experiment from a college philosophy seminar come to life," Faux notes of the "capitalist monk," before posing the question: "Should someone who wants to save the world first amass as much money and power as possible, or will the pursuit corrupt him along the way?" Much more here. (Read more uplifting news stories.)
(Newser)  New York Times journalists got to Borodyanka, Ukraine, Tuesday for the first time since Russian forces withdrew, and the newspaper describes what they found there as "shocking." Four apartment buildings that were completely flattened by bombs, and more than two miles of devastation along the main street of the town near the capital city of Kyiv. Underneath the rubble, at least 200 are missing and presumed dead. Families are searching for their bodies. Images from the town also show ransacked homes and bodies that show signs of having been tortured, CNN reports. Some victims have gunshot wounds to the head.

Borodyanka is a few miles further out from Kyiv than Bucha, where similar devastation was unveiled after the Russian pullout. Ukraine is warning the civilian toll in Borodyanka could end up even worse than in Bucha, EuroNews reports. New video from Bucha shows Russian armored vehicles firing on a cyclist as he dismounts and rounds the corner of a street occupied by the soldiers, reports the New York Times, which independently verified the February footage. A mangled body in civilian clothes matching the cyclist's was later filmed in the same location following the Russian withdrawal. Meanwhile, 15 female Ukrainian soldiers captured by Russian forces say they were stripped naked and tortured while in captivity. They were released Friday. (Read more Russia-Ukraine conflict stories.)
Leading global law firm Baker McKenzie said two of its major partners in the Mena region - Lamyaa Gadelhak (from Cairo office) and Fatima Alhasan (Bahrain) - have made it to the IFLR1000's Women Leaders 2022 - an elite ranking category reserved for the most prominent women lawyers across the world working in the areas of law IFLR1000 researches.

For Gadelhak, Partner and co-head of the Banking & Projects Practice Group at Helmy, Hamza & Partners, Baker McKenzie's Cairo office, the ranking this year was extra special as she was chosen as one of IFLR1000's Women Leaders for both Middle East and Africa in 2021 as well.

Alhasan, Partner in the Bahrain office of Baker McKenzie, made it to the coveted list in the Middle East category.

Commending the duo on their achievements, Baker McKenzie said Gadelhak and Alhasan both belonged to BakerWomen, a group that aims to improve the progression of female professionals in its workplace.

According to IFLR1000, this is an exclusive group of lawyers with outstanding reputations within their markets who either have expertise and experience of working on complex deals, or who have risen to hold leadership roles with their firms or their practices. For some individuals, both these things are true.

Lauding the achievement, IFLR 1000 said: "Gadelhak has gained a strong reputation in the market for her work in both real estate finance and project financing matters, where she works on multibillion dollar financings. She also has worked to expand the firms expertise throughout Africa, serving on the Baker McKenzie Africa Initiative Steering Committee."

On Alhasan's feat, IFLR 1000 said: "She had developed a strong presence in her market by leading a plethora of deals across corporate, Islamic and project financing as well as restructurings. One of her many notable recent deals includes SR$4.357 billion real estate financing for a mixed-use development in Makkah."

"Women Leaders" is a supplement by IFLR1000, an annual guide to the world's leading financial and corporate law firms, whose rankings are based on market analysis and detailed interviews with both practitioners and clients.

In February this year, Baker McKenzie was named International Law Firm of the Year for Women in Law by LexisNexis Middle East at their inaugural Women in Law Awards in the GCC, held in Dubai.

The company also won top recognition for its commitment to the advancement of female talent across the GCC.
(Newser)  A man has died after crashing a car filled with flammable substances into the Russian embassy in the Romanian capital of Bucharest, according to police. A video showed the silver hatchback "engulfed in flames" while wedged in the embassy's gate around 6am local time Wednesday, before firefighters arrived, the AP reports. The case prosecutor on the scene told reporters that the vehicle held several containers of flammable substances. Authorities said they were able to put out the flames but the driver, whose identity has not been released, died at the scene.

The vehicle did not enter the compound itself and the embassy confirmed no employees were injured. It also offered condolences to the driver's family, saying "there is no doubt that he committed this act under the influence of an explosion of anti-Russian hysteria" tied to the dead and apparently tortured bodies of civilians discovered in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, Ukraine, after Russian forces pulled back. The embassy referred to this as "a staged provocation," though there is evidence to the contrary. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described a "war crime" in Bucha during an address to Romania's parliament on Monday.

A day later, Romania announced it would expel 10 Russian diplomats for violating international rules, as many other European countries have done recently, per Reuters. Russia's ambassador to Romania, Valery Kuzmin, noted the embassy has "repeatedly" received threats by email in an interview with Russian state news agency Tass. "The atmosphere that has been gradually forming here is very tense," he said, per the AP. Some 624,860 Ukrainians have fled to neighboring Romania since Russia invaded their country on Feb. 24, with about 80,000 of those remaining in Romania, per Reuters. (Read more Bucharest stories.)
(Newser)  It's been more than 20 years since Andrea Yates drowned her five young childrenNoah, 7; John, 5; Paul, 3; Luke, 2; and 6-month-old Maryone by one in a bathtub, which ultimately landed her in a Texas mental hospital. She's still therebut not against her will. As People reports, Yates has declined to sit for a hearing to determine whether she's competent to leave Kerrville State Hospital each year since she was committed in January 2007. She'd been found not guilty of the 2001 murders by reason of insanity the previous year, after her lawyers successfully overturned a 2002 conviction for capital murder.

Experts testified that she suffered from postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis, and schizophrenia. Before the drownings, she'd been admitted to psychiatric hospitals and attempted suicide. Since arriving at Kerrville, Yates has never been evaluated for release because she annually waives her right to a hearing, as KTRK reported last year. "She's where she wants to be. Where she needs to be," her former defense attorney and friend George Parnham told the outlet. "And I mean, hypothetically, where would she go? What would she do?" Her former husband, Rusty Yates, secured a divorce in 2004, though he still visits his ex, per the Houston Chronicle.

She "has now spent a third of her life institutionalized," per KTRK. When not undergoing treatment, the 57-year-old makes aprons, cards, and other crafts, which are sold to benefit the Yates Children Memorial Fund. The charity, founded by Parnham and his wife, works to improve women's mental health, with a focus on new mothers. If there's an upside to the case, it is perhaps "a greater understanding among OB-GYN pediatricians that perinatal mental illness is common and treatable and needs to be addressed," Dr. Sherry Duson, a licensed therapist whose knowledge of the case inspired her to open Houston's Center for Postpartum Family Health, told the Chronicle last year. (Read more Andrea Yates stories.)
(Newser)  Initial predictions that Russia could quickly take Ukraine, perhaps in a matter of days, haven't come to fruition, and now some are speculating the war will be a long-extended one. Joining that latter camp: Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and America's top military official, who on Tuesday gave the House Armed Services Committee his prediction on a timeline. "I do think this is a very protracted conflict, and I think it's measured in years," said Milley, who was testifying on a defense budget request, per the Hill. "I don't know about [a] decade, but at least years for sure." CBS Newswhich notes this was the first appearance for Milley in front of the committee since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24reports that National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan made similar remarks Monday during a White House press briefing, noting that the war's next phase "may very well be protracted."

As for the US' part, Milley added on Tuesday: "I think that NATO, the United States, Ukraine, and all of the allies and partners supporting Ukraine will be involved in this for quite some time." He said that he envisions an increased presence of US troops in Europe over the long haul, with service members rotating in cycles in and out of permanent bases. CBS notes there are now about 100,000 American troops stationed in Europe, said to be the largest number since 2005. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had his own time at the Tuesday hearing, during what ABC News describes as a "fiery exchange" with GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz over what Gaetz called strategic missteps due to "wokeism."

The congressman from Florida accused the Pentagon of making bad predictions on Russia's invasion, then complained more generally about the Defense Department's competence. "While everyone else in the world seems to be developing capabilities and being more strategic, [we've] got time to embrace critical race theory at West Point, to embrace socialism at the National Defense University, to do mandatory pronoun training," Gaetz said. A visibly exasperated Austin replied, "This is the most capable, the most combat-credible force in the world." He then added to Gaetz: "The fact that you are embarrassed by your country, by your military, I'm sorry for that." Gaetz retorted, "No, I'm embarrassed by your leadership." (Read more Mark Milley stories.)
(Newser) 

An anti-abortion group on Tuesday gave an explanation for the five fetuses found last week in a member's home: They say they were medical waste being disposed of by a Washington, DC, abortion clinicand part of a larger group of 115 fetuses. Their group is the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, and members Terrisa Bukovinac and Lauren HandyHandy had the fetusestold WUSA9 they visited the Washington Surgi-Clinic on March 25 and spotted a Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services parked at the building. They said they had a conversation with the truck driver about the possibility the boxes he was retrieving from the clinic contained fetal remains, and that he allowed them to take a waist-high box.

They say 115 aborted fetuses were in plastic containers inside. The women claim 110 of them were buried, but the five that appeared to be the most late-stage were withheld in hopes they could be autopsied to confirm whether the clinic was conducting late-stage abortions in violation of the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Act (third-trimester abortions are legal in DC, notes the AP). They say that after being unable to find an independent pathologist willing to conduct the autopsies, they contacted the Metropolitan Police Department last week to pick up the fetuses from Handy's home. Police did so a day after Handy and eight others were charged with blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic in 2020.

The DC medical examiner's office has, so far, declined to perform any autopsies on the fetuses. Ashan Benedict, MPD's executive assistant chief of police, told reporters last week that the fetuses appeared to have been aborted "in accordance with DC law." Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services tells WUSA9 that under company policy it does not handle the transport of fetal remains and denies giving the women any box under its care. "Any allegations made otherwise are false," the company said in a statement.

(Read more fetus stories.)
(Newser)  A Massachusetts couple say they underwent several unsuccessful attempts at in vitro fertilization before learning they were pregnantwith someone else's baby. The couple identified as Jane and John Doe are suing the New York Fertility Institute in the US Southern District Court of New York, claiming they had to abort the female fetus six months into the pregnancy in December as a result, the Washington Post reports. They say testing meant to highlight genetic disorders in the fetus revealed there was no chance that the couple were the biological parents. A fertility specialist at the clinic allegedly blamed an error with the genetic test, despite a second test confirming the initial result.

Fearing a potential custody battle, the couple chose to terminate the pregnancy "days before it would have been illegal to do so," the Post reports. The lawsuitwhich names embryologist Michael Femi Obasaju and fertility specialists Khalid Sultan and Majid Fatehclaims the clinic hasn't accounted for Jane Doe's embryos, leaving the couple "to worry about whether their embryos were transferred to another unwitting couple, and whether they have another child or children out in the world whom they have never met." The clinic hasn't commented on the suit, which further claims Sultan tried to explain away the results by suggesting that Jane Doe had a rare condition in which a person carries two sets of DNA.

It's unclear if that condition, mosaicism, has been ruled out. However, Obasaju does have "a history of mistakenly implanting a stranger's embryo into the wrong patient," as the suit notes. In 1999, a state inquiry concluded the embryologist knew that the wrong embryos were implanted into a white patient who ultimately gave birth to a Black son, "but failed to tell anyone at the time or to act to correct his error," as the New York Times reported. A 2020 lawsuit accused the same clinic of failing to properly store and label embryos, per Good Morning America. Viewing the latest allegations "with the utmost concern," the state's health department has opened an investigation into the clinic, a rep tells the New York Post. (Read more in vitro fertilization stories.)
(Newser)  That a novelist who once wrote an essay titled "How to Murder Your Husband" was accused of doing that very thing led to a sea of headlines in 2018. More than three years later, Nancy Crampton Brophy is on trial in the June 2, 2018, death of husband Daniel Brophy. But as KGW reports, a judge on Monday ruled the essay couldn't be used as evidence, citing its age, that it was written for a writing seminar, and its prejudicial nature. More on the trial in Oregon's Multnomah County Circuit Court:

The accusation: Chef Daniel Brophy, 63, was shot dead at the Oregon Culinary Institute early one morning while preparing for the workday. There were no security cameras, and nothing was stolen from Brophy. His wife was arrested that September; traffic cameras allegedly captured her minivan in the area at the right time. Senior Deputy DA Shawn Overstreet says she would have had 13 minutes to carry out the murder.

The alleged motive. Overstreet alleges money was at the root of things, saying that between life insurance, worker's comp, and home equity, Crampton Brophy would have gained more than $1 million. "Well over a thousand dollars a month was being paid into [life insurance] policies at a time when they were struggling to pay their mortgage," he alleged.

Overstreet alleges money was at the root of things, saying that between life insurance, worker's comp, and home equity, Crampton Brophy would have gained more than $1 million. "Well over a thousand dollars a month was being paid into [life insurance] policies at a time when they were struggling to pay their mortgage," he alleged. The defense. Defense attorney Lisa Maxfield countered that her client's financial situation actually worsened, as she wasn't on the deed to the couple's home and she was so distraught she couldn't return to work. She explained the insurance policies by saying Crampton Brophy had worked in insurance policy sales at various times and purchased them to show her faith in the product and because she was incentivized to do so, reports the Oregonian. And the big reason why she didn't do it, per Maxfield? Love.

Defense attorney Lisa Maxfield countered that her client's financial situation actually worsened, as she wasn't on the deed to the couple's home and she was so distraught she couldn't return to work. She explained the insurance policies by saying Crampton Brophy had worked in insurance policy sales at various times and purchased them to show her faith in the product and because she was incentivized to do so, reports the Oregonian. And the big reason why she didn't do it, per Maxfield? Love. The gun. The allegations are pretty involved, so it's best to read KGW's take for the nitty-gritty, but all sides agree Crampton Brophy did buy a Glock pistol at a gun show (her lawyer says it was for research). It's known that she also bought a slide and barrel. Prosecutors accuse her of switching the parts to thwart the forensic investigation.

The allegations are pretty involved, so it's best to read KGW's take for the nitty-gritty, but all sides agree Crampton Brophy did buy a Glock pistol at a gun show (her lawyer says it was for research). It's known that she also bought a slide and barrel. Prosecutors accuse her of switching the parts to thwart the forensic investigation. Tuesday testimony. Clarinda Perez, the student who first found Brophy's body, took the stand. KOIN reports she said she was working as a medical assistant and immediately began CPR. She didn't realize he had been shot and said she saw no blood initially. Sobbing, she said, "His chest was really squishy and I thought I had broken a rib because as I continued to do compressions, my hands started getting full of blood."

Clarinda Perez, the student who first found Brophy's body, took the stand. KOIN reports she said she was working as a medical assistant and immediately began CPR. She didn't realize he had been shot and said she saw no blood initially. Sobbing, she said, "His chest was really squishy and I thought I had broken a rib because as I continued to do compressions, my hands started getting full of blood." More background. Crampton Brophy, who also wrote 2015's The Wrong Husbandwhich tells of a woman who escapes her abusive spouse and falls in love with another manpreviously described how her life inspired her fiction on her website. "You dig deep and unearth portions of your own life that you've long forgotten or had purposely buried deep," she wrote, adding that "my stories are ... about the joy of finding love and the difficulty of making it stay."

Crampton Brophy, who also wrote 2015's The Wrong Husbandwhich tells of a woman who escapes her abusive spouse and falls in love with another manpreviously described how her life inspired her fiction on her website. "You dig deep and unearth portions of your own life that you've long forgotten or had purposely buried deep," she wrote, adding that "my stories are ... about the joy of finding love and the difficulty of making it stay." Details. The trial is slated to last seven weeks, and Crampton Brophy is expected to take the stand.

(Read more murder stories.)
(Newser)  An Iowa man who "faked his own death" to avoid standing trial on child pornography charges has been arrested some six years after the fact, authorities say. "The arrest of Jacob Greer after six years is a testament to the tenacity of Deputy US Marshals and our investigative partners," Ted Kamatchus, US marshal for the Southern District of Iowa, says in a release, per the Washington Post. "Even though the case went cold, they would not quit." The 28-year-old Greer had been out on bond for a month, living with his grandmother in Des Moines, when authorities say he removed his ankle monitor on May 31, 2016.

Authorities eventually came upon his car, with what looked to be a suicide note inside. But they weren't convinced Greer was dead. A federal arrest warrant was issued and within a week, investigators discovered Greer had fled the state "with money, a bow, arrows and a backpack full of survival gear," according to the release. Investigators also "learned Greer was a survivalist and had plans to live off the land in remote areas of the upper western states or southern Canada, hiding out in abandoned cabins."

They traced another of his vehicles to a secluded campground in northern Montana, not far from the US-Canada border and a Walmart where Greer had been spotted on June 3, 2016, per the AP. But it was nearly six years before the man himself was ultimately found. He was arrested Monday in Spanaway, Wash., just south of Tacoma, according to the US Marshals Service. He's now being held at a federal detention center in Seattle ahead of his extradition to Iowa, where he is to stand trial on charges that he knowingly received child pornography between June 2013 and November 2014. (Read more faked death stories.)
(Newser)  The US on Wednesday announced sanctions targeting Vladimir Putin's two adult daughters and said it was toughening penalties against Russian banks in retaliation for "war crimes" in Ukraine. Mariya Putina and Katerina Tikhonova are daughters Putin had with former Aeroflot flight attendant Lyudmila Putina, reports the Wall Street Journal; that marriage ended in 2013. The Journal notes "the two women have kept such a low profile that many Russians don't know what they look like." In addition to the women, the US is targeting Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin; the wife and children of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov; and members of Russia's Security Council, including Dmitry Medvedev, a former president and prime minister.

The penalties cut off all of Putin's close family members from the US financial system and freeze any assets they hold in the United States, reports the AP. The moves against Sberbank and Alfa Bank prohibit assets from touching the US financial system and bar Americans from doing business with those institutions. Meanwhile, the EU is set to put in place an embargo on coal as soon as Wednesday. It would be the first EU sanctions targeting Russia's lucrative energy industry. EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said energy was key to Russia's war coffers. "A billion euro is what we pay Putin every day for the energy he provides us since the beginning of the war. We have given him 35 billion euro. Compare that to the one billion that we have given to the Ukraine in arms and weapons," Borrell said.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the coal ban is worth $4.4 billion per year and that the EU has already started working on additional sanctions, including on oil imports. She didn't mention natural gas, with consensus among the 27 EU countries on targeting the fuel used to generate electricity and heat homes difficult to secure amid opposition from gas-dependent members like Germany, the bloc's largest economy. Separately, the Treasury Department moved Tuesday to block any Russian government debt payments with US dollars from accounts at US financial institutions, making it harder for Russia to meet its financial obligations.

(Read more sanctions stories.)
(Newser)  A Minneapolis SWAT team entered an apartment on a no-knock warrant about 6:48am on Feb. 2, and in less than 10 seconds, 22-year-old Amir Locke had been fatally shot. Prosecutors on Wednesday announced Mark Hanneman, the 34-year-old police officer who killed Locke, will not be charged. "After a thorough review of all available evidence ... there is insufficient admissible evidence to file criminal charges in this case," Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman and Attorney General Keith Ellison said in a statement, per the Star Tribune. Video from the scene showed officers entering the apartment while calling out "Search warrant!" Locke was on a couch with a blanket and his gun.

Locke wasn't connected to the warrant, but Freeman and Ellison's statement said the gun was "raised ... in the direction of Officer Hanneman," which "constitutes a specifically articulable threat ... and to which the officers had to respond without delay." The statement also discusses the specifics of the decision, Locke and his family, and the no-knock warrant; the use of such warrants were sharply curtailed in the city this week. Three standout portions, per the Star Tribune and CNN:

"Specifically, the State would be unable to disprove beyond a reasonable doubt any of the elements of Minnesota's use-of-deadly-force statute that authorizes the use of force by Officer Hanneman. Nor would the State be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt a criminal charge against any other officer involved in the decision-making that led to the death of Amir Locke."

"Amir Locke's life mattered. He was a young man with plans to move to Dallas, where he would be closer to his mom andhe hopedbuild a career as a hip-hop artist, following in the musical footsteps of his father."

"Amir Locke is a victim. This tragedy may not have occurred absent the no-knock warrant used in this case. County Attorney Freeman and Attorney General Ellison met with the Locke family this morning and once again send their deepest condolences to them during this incredibly difficult time."

(Read more Amir Locke stories.)
(Newser)  In what academics say is just one example of a much bigger problem, UCLA recently advertised an assistant adjunct professor position that required extensive qualifications in return for a salary of nothing. "Applicants must understand there will be no compensation for this position," said the ad on an internal recruitment website, which invited people with a PhD in chemistry or biochemistry and a strong record of teaching at the college level to apply, the New York Times reports. The ad was pulled after a backlash on social media, but the controversy drew attention to the issue of underpaidand unpaidfaculty at universities nationwide.

Union officials and academics say it's not uncommon for institutions to persuade people with PhDs struggling to find work to teach in return for experience and "prestige," though the roles rarely lead to tenured positions. Union president Mia McIver told the Los Angeles Times last month that the $0 UCLA job, which also required at least three letters of recommendation, may have been an attempt to get around a contract the UC-AFT union won for thousands of lecturers (but not assistant adjuncts) last fall that requires them to be paid. "My fear is that UC managements addiction to cheap teaching labor is so strong that our new contract is not going to be honored," she said.

UCLA spokesman Steve Ritea says the job post "contained errors" and UCLA always offers "compensation for classroom teaching." McIver, however, says the number of unpaid teachers seems to be rising. "From my perspective it doesnt matter whether someone had another job or another position, or is a retired professor who wanted to come back and teach, or a refugee scholar who needed a position, or a postdoc doing research who wanted or needed to teach," McIver tells the Times. "Ultimately, all of that doesnt matter because anyone who teaches at a university or any school, let alone the University of California, should be paid for their labor." (Read more higher education stories.)
The Dubai Government Workshop (DGW) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Al Futtaim Auto Centres to enhance services by creating a warehouse at the DGW headquarters to store spare parts, tyres and batteries.

The strategic move has been aimed at ensuring swift and superior services and enhancements for vehicles and vehicle spare parts.

Fahad Ahmed Al-Raeesi, CEO of DGW highlighted the importance of facilitating agreements with the private sector, especially with established companies like Al Futtaim Auto Centres, whose collaboration can ensure more effective creative and technical vehicle maintenance. He further emphasised how the MoU was an extension of a successful relationship between the two companies.

Fast and easy delivery

Al Raeesi further added: The establishment of a warehouse for Al-Futtaim Auto Centres within the DGW Headquarters will allow fast and easy delivery of high-quality services, spare parts, and many other technical elements. This strategic relationship entails both technical and logistic cooperation in vehicle maintenance and repair. We are confident about the success of this agreement and will continue to seek new ways to advance our relationship with Al Futtaim Auto and strengthen our service quality to suit client needs.

Jawahar Ganesh, Managing Director, After-sales, at Al-Futtaim Auto Centres, said: Our cooperation with the DGW is the result of a strong and longstanding relationship. We are constantly working towards expanding this relationship and wish to further enhance the services we provide to our clients. We are very delighted by the signing of this MoU and the benefits it is set to bring to all key stakeholders.

The joint initiative between DGW and Al Futtaim Auto Centres is intended to facilitate collaborations between the private and public in the vehicle maintenance and technical repairs sector. It is in line with the workshops strategic vision to offer services of the highest quality to its clients.-- TradeArabia News Service
(Newser)  Gathering so many top government officials for an evening of nonpartisan satire and laughter might have been dangerous. Members of Congress and the Cabinet have tested positive for the coronavirus since Saturday's Gridiron Dinner, an annual white-tie event in Washington. Attorney General Merrick Garland added his name to the list Wednesday afternoon, the Washington Post reports. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Joaquin Castro had already announced their positive test results. President Biden addressed the event remotely.

The White House doesn't consider Garland a close contact of Biden's, per CNBC. Still, the toll goes beyond those four people. Many more officials, aides and journalistsincluding some at the White Househave said, often privately, that they've caught the virus recently, per Politico. There were 630 people at the dinner, where there was little masking or social distancing; the guests sat at long, narrow tables for hours, per the Post, then wrapped up the evening by holding hands and singing "Auld Lang Syne," a Gridiron tradition. The crowd included military and diplomatic officials also, as well as businesspeople. The servers wore masks.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, attended the dinner, as did Ukrainian Ambassador Oksana Markarova. Fauci later said he wore a mask except when eating. The outbreak puts the similar but larger White House Correspondents Association dinner later this month in doubt; Biden hasn't said yet whether he plans to attend. It also could imperil congressional business. Senators were at the dinner, and Democrats plan a vote on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's Supreme Court nomination this week. Experts said that though COVID-19 restrictions have been eased, such breakouts can happen. "We're trying to see whats a tolerable level of risk, but when you have a big outbreak, that makes everybody pause," one said. (Read more COVID-19 stories.)
Charlie Dexter is a professor of applied business emeritus at the UAF Community and Technical College. He can be reached at cndexter@alaska.edu. This column is brought to you by the UAF Department of Applied Business.
Fairbanks, AK (99707)

Today

Mostly cloudy skies. High 54F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Cloudy skies early, then off and on rain showers overnight. Low around 35F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%.
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

Mutton merchants at Manama Central Market yesterday returned fresh mutton deliveries to wholesale traders in an act of protest following a row over wholesale prices.

They alleged that the wholesale traders have been in efforts to exploit them during the Holy Month by increasing prices.

The merchants also claimed that fresh mutton shipments, mainly from Kenya, Tanzania and Romania, were illegally stocked by the wholesale traders to create artificial shortage of supply with an aim to increase prices.

Speaking to The Daily Tribune, Bahraini mutton merchant Hussein Al Khasab requested the immediate intervention from the part of the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism to halt this act of acute injustice from the part of wholesale traders towards retail merchants.

The ministry should ensure that the wholesale price of mutton stocks remain the same across the Kingdom. They cannot sell mutton to us at a higher price while lowering the prices for supermarkets and other meat shops.

Another mutton merchant said the merchants have taken a unanimous decision to return mutton deliveries at the market back to wholesale traders until the authorities fix the issue.

Generally, one container imported contains 3,000 mutton sheep. And what they are doing now is illegally stocking a large share of imported mutton in order to increase the prices.

Until the beginning of Holy Month, mutton stocks were delivered to us at a rate of BD2.2 per kilogram. Now they are asking us to pay BD2.6 to BD2.8 per kilogram citing the shortage of supply. If we buy stocks for BD2.8, we will be forced to sell them for at least BD3, which would naturally make the customers angry.

Many upset customers yesterday warned us of filing complaints with authorities thinking we are the culprits behind this price rise.

We are innocent and this fraudulent act is being committed by the wholesale traders, mainly three traders, who, to a large extent, control the Kingdoms mutton market. Owing to existing annual contracts, supermarkets and meat shops outside the Central Market are buying mutton from these wholesale traders for BD2.2 while we are being exploited to the fullest possible extent by asking to pay higher prices.

The mutton merchants said the fraudulent act from the part of wholesale traders has resulted in higher prices for mutton at the Central Market as supermarkets continue to sell at lower prices. Customers think we are frauds, deceiving them by increasing the prices during the Holy Month. We have no answers when they question us as to why we are selling mutton at a price much higher than those at supermarkets.

We are losing our customers as we are forced to sell mutton at higher prices imposed on us by these wholesale traders.

This row over prices comes amid the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism frequently vowing tough checks on Ramadan prices of food items. The ministry has said that it is closely monitoring the prices of all food products in the local markets to ensure there is no price rise during the Holy Month.

The prices of all basic food products including fruits and vegetables are being monitored, it had said earlier. The ministry has been carrying out many periodic inspection campaigns to ensure that traders are not stocking excess fruits and vegetables with an aim to increase their prices after heavy demand during the Holy Month.

Action was taken against many traders who would stock surplus quantities of fruits and vegetables. Legal measures were taken against the violators on the basis of Law No 35 of 2012.
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

Staff Reporter

Bahraini youth have been urged to explore career options in the pearling sector in line with Bahrains rich legacy in pearl trade.

This came as the Chief Executive of Bahrain Institute of Pearls and Gemstones DANAT, Noora Jamsheer, welcomed at the headquarters of the Institute several professors of the College of Science, University of Bahrain, led by the Dean of the College, Prof Mohammed El Hilo.

They discussed strengthening joint cooperation between the university and the institute in many areas, including educating students at the College of Science on DANAT efforts and achievements in the field of pearls and gemstones, as well as performing and publishing research on topics of mutual interest.

Ms Jamsheer emphasised that investing in the national capacities of young Bahraini cadres is an integral part of the national plan to revive the pearl sector in Bahrain and intensify the Kingdoms leading position in the world in the fields of pearl extraction, trade, and examination, expressing pride in the institutes highly qualified and competent Bahraini cadres in this field.

The delegation was given a tour of the institute and learned about the services provided by its laboratory for evaluating pearls and gemstones. Ms Jamsheer briefed the visiting team on the Institutes efforts to develop and solidify Bahrains image as a leading center in pearls and gemstones on a regional and worldwide scale.

She also showcased the efforts of DANAT in conducting scientific field research. Ms Jamsheer discussed with the visiting delegation the possibility of establishing a permanent cooperation program between DANAT and the University of Bahrain, intending to qualify and train students and encouraging them to pursue careers in this important field, as well as integrate them into the Institute activities such as programs, courses and workshops.

A highly successful Bahraini in the field, Ms Jamsheer is a certified Rough Diamond and Polished Diamond Grader having completed her training at the International Gemological Institute Belgium and Gemological Institute of America United States of America respectively.

She has also monitored and worked with various governments in developing the synergies to combat conflict diamonds and minerals. Prof Mohammed El Hilo expressed the University of Bahrains gratitude to the DANAT Institute for its exceptional hosting, praising the Institutes efforts and emphasising the College of Sciences desire to organise more of these informative visits in the future.

The Bahrain Institute for Pearls and Gemstones (DANAT) is a world-class gemmological laboratory, education and research centre, specialising in the testing and study of natural pearls as a reflection of Bahrains ancient pearling history and desire to protect and advance Bahrains pearling heritage.

DANATs expert team of gemmologists supports clients and students from around the world through pearl, gemstone and diamond identification services, as well as teaching a range of educational courses and internationally recognised gemmological qualifications.

As a result, DANAT plays a vital role in upholding public trust in the jewellery and gemmological community. DANATs specialist gemmological research and commitment to innovative technologies enable DANAT to make meaningful contributions to gemmological fields of study.

Established in 2017, under the aegis of HRH Prince Salman bin Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, the Crown Prince and Prime Minister, DANAT is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company (Mumtalakat), the sovereign wealth fund of the Kingdom of Bahrain.

DANAT evolved from the Pearl and Gem Testing Laboratory of Bahrain, the first laboratory of its kind in the Gulf region established in the year 1990.
Perus participation in Expo 2020 Dubai culminated in a major achievement at Expo 2020 with its pavilion winning the Gold for Self-Built Pavilion in Category B (between 1,750 and 2,500 sq m).

This top prize rewarded the Timeless Peru concept, an exciting synthesis of Perus historical, multicultural and mega-diverse richness, reported the Commission for the Promotion of Exports and Tourism, Promperu.

The BIE Day Awards Ceremony, held in the Jubilee Park of the Dubai Expo, was organised by the International Exhibitions Bureau. A total of 51 Gold, Silver and Bronze Awards were handed out and Peru was the only South American country in the event awarded with the Gold.

International jury

The selection of the winners of the Official Participants Awards fell to an international jury of nine international and Emirati experts, who made two visits to each of the national pavilions, in January and March 2022. These awards celebrate those who have made significant contributions to the success of the Universal Exhibition, said Antoine Bourdeix, director of communications at the BIE.

The 2,500 m of built area of the Peruvian pavilion were visited by influencers, Emirati television, and international reporters, who were pleasantly surprised by the compendium of Peruvian culture and biodiversity.

A report from CNN highlighted the valuable concept of the Peru pavilion and the cultural and musical expressions of the country embodied by the Ayacucho guitar and the scissors dance.

Positive comments

Likewise, Peru led the positive comments among Latin American countries in the official mobile application of Expo Dubai used by the visitors to rate their experiences in the national pavilions.

The participation of Peru was organised by the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism (Mincetur) through Promperu, and had the commitment of talented Peruvians, as well as the support of DP World, Pisco 1615, Flo Trading, Modenart Peru, Terracota Lab and Adolf Finseth.-- TradeArabia News Service
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the Crown Prince and Prime Minister, has highlighted the Bahrain Chamber of Commerce and Industrys role in representing the Kingdoms industrial and commercial sectors.

This came as HRH Prince Salman received Bahrain Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI) Chairman Sameer Abdullah Nass and members of the Board of Directors at Riffa Palace. His Royal Highness congratulated them on their success in the recent elections and exchanged greetings on the occasion of the Holy Month of Ramadan.

He commended the role of the BCCI and its committees in meeting local market needs and stabilising the prices of goods in partnership with the private sector.

Nass and the Board of Directors members expressed their gratitude for the opportunity to meet with His Royal Highness and noted HRHs commitment to strengthening the private sector and supporting the Chambers efforts.

Present in the meeting were His Highness Shaikh Mohammed bin Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Finance and National Economy Minister Shaikh Salman bin Khalifa Al Khalifa and the Minister of Industry, Commerce and Tourism, Zayed bin Rashid Al Zayani.

HRH Prince Salman noted the private sectors contribution to the Kingdoms development process, reiterating that economic sectors should contribute to the national economy and the Economic Recovery Plans progress, led by His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.

He highlighted the Kingdoms positive economic indicators, which are a promising sign for the Kingdoms future success. He stressed the importance of developing the Kingdoms public-private partnerships and strengthening the private sectors role as a driver of the economy.

HRH the Crown Prince and Prime Minister also highlighted the importance of creating investment opportunities and developing legislation that facilitates business operations and services, adding that communication channels are always open for the private sector to discuss the Kingdoms economic development.

He also noted that cooperation is key to success and turning challenges into opportunities. His Royal Highness highlighted the private sectors pivotal role in Bahrains effective COVID-19 response.
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

The High Criminal Court has postponed the hearing of an Asian man accused of murdering his European lover until April 11, in order to allow his lawyer to obtain a copy of the official documents.

According to court files, the suspect had been in a relationship with the victim for two years after meeting her at an Adliya restaurant. They allegedly used to meet in her Mahooz apartment. However, issues obscured their love affair, and their disagreements worsened after they both lost their jobs.

On the day of the incident, they allegedly met at a party and drank excessively before returning to the womans apartment. They then had a fight following which he flung her out the apartment window of the fifth floor. She died as a result of the fall. He was charged with murder.
PARIS (AP)  Luxury fashion brand Chanel says it has stopped selling its clothes, perfumes and other luxury goods to Russian customers abroad if they plan to take the products back home  a bold response to Moscows invasion of Ukraine that some say goes too far.

The move, which some Russians have decried, comes after the Parisian company shuttered its boutiques in Russia. Many companies across all industries have halted business in the country in response to the war.

This further step, Chanel said Wednesday, is simply a case of complying with trade sanctions imposed on Russia by the European Union, Switzerland and others that prohibit transactions with designated individuals.

The most recent EU and Swiss sanction laws include a prohibition on the sale, supply, transfer or export, directly or indirectly, of luxury goods to any natural or legal person, entity or body in Russia or for use in Russia,' Chanel said in a statement.

It concerns products valued at over 300 euros ($328)  which is the majority of Chanel's design output.

We have rolled out a process to ask clients for whom we do not know the main residency to confirm that the items they are purchasing will not be used in Russia, Chanel said, without elaborating on what that process looks like.

Its a difficult measure to enforce, yet some Russian social media influencers have already said they are being asked for identification and denied the ability to buy goods at Chanel boutiques from Paris to the United Arab Emirates.

Russian socialite Anna Kalashnikova said last week that she had seen Russophobia in action after not being allowed to purchase earrings and a Chanel bag in an outlet in Dubai.

Fashion insiders say the brand's decision would not have been easy because they are set to take a financial hit.

Its bold for Chanel  this is almost unprecedented. The house is putting its principles above the buck, said Long Nguyen, a prominent fashion critic.

Russia is one of their biggest luxury markets, and Chanel is certain to suffer financially from this choice," he said. But its also political for the brand  as it wants to appeal to Gen Z clients who are largely opposed to the war.

Nguyen said Chanel's move represents more than a mere application of the sanction laws.

Qing Wang, professor of marketing and innovation at Warwick Business School and a luxury brands expert, said, Taking a bold political stand like this is not without risks.

She cited research by PR firm Clutch that found consumers mainly think brands should stay silent on political issues.

Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed (63%) said they were likely to continue shopping at businesses that stayed silent on issues they care about," Wang said in a statement. Peoples true opinion on whether Chanels actions are appropriate, or a step too far that borders on Russophobia (which could be damaging to the brand), remain to be seen."

Luxury giants Kering and LVMH did not immediately respond to requests for comment about whether they also plan to curb sales to Russians.
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DANBURY  The citys plan to borrow $208 million for various school projects, including the career academy, is officially set to go to voters in June.

With little discussion, City Council gave the plan its final approval on Tuesday evening and set a referendum date for Tuesday, June 7. The councils vote followed several meetings and other approvals on the projects.

This means itll be up to voters to decide whether the city should borrow $164 million for a new middle and high school, as well as another $43.9 million for various other school projects.

The academy and these projects are seen as key to help address rapid enrollment growth and improve school facilities. City Council and the school board have backed the projects throughout the process, even as the location for the career academy moved from the Summit development to the former Cartus Corp. property.

I hope youll continue to support this bond and vote tonight and work to earn the vote of the citys residents in referendum, school board member Kate Conetta said before the councils unanimous approval.

The largest chunk of the plan goes to the $164 million career academy, which will serve about 1,400 middle and high school students. This should cover the cost to acquire an about 30-acre property where Cartus Corp. was located and all other work to retrofit the building into a school. The academy is expected to open in fall 2024.

This new location not only addresses the space needs for the career academy, but also offers a campus for potential future expansions, Conetta said.

As part of the academy, students at that school and Danbury High School will study various career pathways and get hands-on experience in fields they could pursue after graduation. The program is modeled after schools in Nashville that officials have said have been a success.

I cannot wait to see what this program will do for Danbury, Conetta said.

Some of the $43.9 million is expected to go to a pre-kindergarten academy at Great Plain Elementary School that would include 16 classrooms. That project is estimated to cost $27 million to $28 million.

At Danbury High School, several projects are planned to address issues cited in the New England Association of Schools & Colleges accreditation report. This includes updates, renovations and code compliance improvements to science laboratories, the nurse suite and bathrooms, as well upgrades related to HVAC equipment and duct evaluation.

Other projects on the list would help bring Danbury High School and Hayestown Avenue Elementary School in compliance with the the Americans with Disabilities Act. King Street Primary Schools roof would also be replaced.
Ned Gerard / Hearst Connecticut Media

DANBURY  A Danbury man pleaded guilty in federal court Tuesday after driving from Connecticut to Illinois to pick up and sexually abuse a 14-year-old girl, according to federal prosecutors.

Wayne Marcell, 36, of Danbury, was chatting with the minor on video game and social media platforms. While they communicated, the minor, who was originally from Georgia, was living with another man who was producing sexually explicit images of the victim in Lubbock, Texas, according to Leonard Boyle, the United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut.
JERUSALEM (AP)  A lawmaker quit Israels ruling coalition on Wednesday after a dispute over religious observance during the Passover holiday, throwing the fragile alliance into disarray without a majority in parliament and raising the prospect of a new round of elections.

Backbencher Idit Silman had recently objected to the government allowing bread to be brought into public hospitals, counter to the Jewish religious practice of refraining from bread and other leavened foods during Passover. Hospitals cater to patients of all religions.

But there were also indications that Silman, a religious lawmaker with strong nationalist views, had been uneasy sitting in Israel's diverse coalition and had been plotting her exit for some time.

Key values in my worldview are inconsistent with current reality, Silman wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, adding that she could no longer stand to see those unspecified values harmed as a member of the coalition.

She urged him to acknowledge the truth: we tried. The time has come to think of a new course. To try to form a nationalist, Jewish, Zionist government.

Her decision raises the possibility of new parliamentary elections, less than a year after the government took office. While Bennetts government remains in power, it is now hamstrung in the 120-seat parliament and will likely struggle to function.

Defense Minister Benny Gantz tweeted Wednesday evening that he had spoken to Bennett and we will work and try to preserve the government.

Bennett's coalition of eight political parties, ranging from Islamists to hard-line nationalists and dovish liberals, now holds 60 seats in the Knesset, Israel's parliament.

The coalition came together last June, bound by little more than a shared opposition to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Despite the differences among the coalition, it has managed to pass a budget, navigate the coronavirus pandemic and strengthen relations with both the Biden administration and Israel's Arab allies. Although Bennett has ruled out peace talks with the Palestinians, he has tried to take steps to improve living conditions in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and contain tensions following a series of Palestinian attacks that killed 11 Israelis.

But some members of Bennetts Yamina party, which promotes a religious, nationalist agenda, have been uncomfortable with the union with Islamist and liberal parties since the government's inception in June. One party member broke ranks rather than be part of it. Silman followed suit on Wednesday.

Israeli media reported that Bennett sought to rally members of his party at a meeting on Wednesday, saying other parties in the coalition remain onboard.

Earlier in the week, Silman feuded with Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz, head of the dovish and secular Meretz Party, over his determination that hospitals uphold the law and not bar people from bringing bread in during Passover.

The Knesset is currently in recess, and it remains unclear if the opposition will now have enough support to hold a no-confidence vote and send Israelis to the polls for the fifth time in just over three years.

To topple the government, opposition lawmakers would need to secure 61 votes in favor of dissolving parliament  or as many in favor of the formation of an alternate governing coalition.

Netanyahu, who led Israel for the previous 12 years, has been working as opposition leader to unravel the coalition by trying to lure members of Bennett's party. Netanyahu and other opposition politicians called on other members to follow Silman in order to achieve that aim.

To friends still sitting in this coalition, I say: come home, Netanyahu said. Join Idit Silman, join us, and together we will return Israel to the track of success, achievement, security and peace.

While the Passover dispute had garnered headlines in recent days, Israeli media say Silman had been planning to leave the coalition for a while.

The Israeli daily Haaretz said Justice Minister Gideon Saar, a veteran politician, had warned Bennett last Thursday that he feared Silman was on the way out. The report said that Silman's husband helped plot her exit with Betzalel Smotrich, a hard-line ultranationalist opposition figure. In the properties section of Wednesday's resignation letter, Smotrich's name appeared as the author.

Israel has held four elections in two years in a protracted political crisis over Netanyahu's fitness to rule while on trial for corruption. The deadlocked elections were finally broken in June, when Bennett and his allies ousted Netanyahu by cobbling together a coalition of unlikely allies.

Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute think tank, said that while Silmans departure didn't bring down the government, it does bring the country back to political crisis mode.

Bennetts government loses its majority in parliament and its degree of freedom to maneuver, to pass legislation, to gain majority for its decisions, Plesner said.
HONOLULU (AP)  A U.S. Navy officer stationed in Hawaii said in a lawsuit that he can't get a gun permit because he sought counseling for feeling depressed and homesick.

Michael Santucci's lawsuit is the latest challenge to Hawaii's gun ownership restrictions. His lawsuit focuses on a state law that allows access to an applicant's medical records in determining whether someone should be allowed to own a gun, which his lawyers say is unique to Hawaii.

Santucci, a cryptologic warfare officer from Fort Myers, Florida, saw a medical provider at a military hospital for feelings of depression and homesickness a few months after arriving in Hawaii last year, according to his lawsuit, filed Sunday.

He wasn't diagnosed with any disqualifying behavioral, emotional or mental disorder, the lawsuit said.

He later filled out forms to register his firearms with the Honolulu Police Department and indicated that he had been treated for depression, but noted is was not serious.

Hawaii law requires registration of all firearms. Prior to acquiring a gun, an applicant must apply for a permit. When applying, the applicant signs a waiver allowing the chief of police of the county issuing the permit access to any records that have a bearing on the mental health of an applicant, the lawsuit said.

Santucci received a letter from the police department saying that in order to process his application, he needs written certification from a psychologist or doctor documenting he's no longer affected by any mental disorder, the lawsuit said.

Governmental physicians, such as Department of Defense personnel, are forbidden from writing such statements, Santucci's lawyers said.

The lawsuit noted that the Navy approves of Santucci possessing firearms.

Alan Beck, one of Santucci's attorneys, said it's unconstitutional to require a medical evaluation to exercise a fundamental right when there's no evidence of mental illness.

We're challenging the process, Beck said.

A spokesperson for the state attorney general's office declined to comment Wednesday because they had not yet been formally served with the complaint.

Representatives for the city and county of Honolulu, also named as a defendant, didn't immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

As a practical matter, the City makes the applicant disprove a negative  I am not incompetent  which is expensive and burdensome especially considering that virtually all Hawaii doctors refuse to write the waivers the City requires as proof of mental competency," Santucci's lawyers said in a motion for a preliminary injunction.
NEWTOWN  A state judge has ruled against Newtown Savings Bank in a lawsuit accusing the bank of allowing more than $67,000 to be fraudulently wired.

Shelton-based Precision Computer Services alleged in a complaint filed in 2018 that the bank refused to reimburse the company for the lost funds.

In a judgment filed in Milford Judicial District Court, Judge W. Glen Pierson wrote that the bank failed to accept and execute the payment order in a way that comported with the plaintiff's reasonable expectations, as established by reasonable commercial standards of fair dealing.

Newtown Savings Bank declined to comment on the judgment.

For nearly five years, Newtown Savings Banks leadership did not reimburse our company for the fraudulent wire transfer that it failed to authenticate, Michael FitzSimons, who owns PCS with his wife, said in a statement Tuesday. Im deeply saddened that I put my trust in the leadership of my hometown bank that, in the end, failed to protect one of its longtime customers.

The issue stemmed from a scam that changed one letter in FitzSimons email address, according to the judgment. The bank thought it received authorization for the wire transfer from FitzSimons, but did not properly authenticate that he sent the email, the judgment stated.

However, the judgment states a person who is an employee at PCS did confirm the wire transfer.

On June 14, 2017, officials at the bank received an email that appeared to be from FitzSimons, according to court filings. The email asked the bank to process a wire transfer for $67,560 to an entity in Hungary for legal services, assistance and strategic advice, the filings state.

The bank officials replied saying they would need authorization from the person emailing purporting to be FitzSimons, who wrote in another email, Please process the attached wire transfer, the judgment states.

However, the emails purporting to be from FitzSimons had been sent from an address that swapped the letter g for a q, according to the judgment. The letters resemble closely one another in the typeface used for the email communication, the court filing states.

In a response to the complaint, the banks attorney argued the payment order was authorized because it was received from a party, who was authorized by the plaintiff and was, therefore, an authorized transfer pursuant to state law.

But Pierson ruled that even though an authorized individual at PCS had confirmed the wire transfer, it violated the security procedure agreed to by the two parties because it originated by an imposter purporting to be Michael FitzSimons.

This violates the plain terms of the security procedure established by the agreement and is not an authorized order... of a person identified as the sender, because Michael FitzSimons did not authorize the order, Pierson wrote.

An expert witness for the company wrote in an affidavit that the imposter employed a character substitution fraud to spoof the email address of Michael FitzSimons, leading to a transfer of the plaintiff's funds to Hungary, the judgment states.

By June of 2017, the existence of this type of fraud was well known in the banking industry, the judgment stated.

The expert also noted that such schemes are one of the easiest types of fraud for a person to spot with minimal training, because they only require the recipient to read the email address from the sender. The bank should have been even more careful, the judgment notes, citing the expert witness, because Hungary is a known destination of fraudulent transfers.

Pierson wrote in his judgment that for most commercial banking customers, contemporary reasonable commercial standards of fair dealing require multifactor authentication.

The procedure that the defendant asks the court to sanction is, in essence, a single-factor procedure that would shift liability for fraud to the defendant's customer, the judge wrote. Multifactor authentication is the lodestar of reasonableness in wire transfer transactions.
"I'm so proud that Bell is once again leading the way in delivering faster Internet speeds for our customers. With total speeds three times faster than cable, our customers can now get download speeds of 3 gigabits per second and upload speeds of 3 gigabits per second. We look forward to continuing to deliver the speed and reliability that our customers need so that they can do what they need to do online even faster."

- Blaik Kirby, Group President, Consumer and Small and Medium Business

Many customers have multiple devices connected throughout the home and in use at the same time. Bell's unlimited pure fibre package comes with the Home Hub 4000 with Wi-Fi 6, the latest Wi-Fi technology on the market. Wi-Fi 6 enables customers to stream, share, learn, work from home, conduct video calls, game and do everything they need to do on their devices simultaneously, without sacrificing speed and performance.

Unlimited pure fibre 3 gigabits per second is now available in eligible areas of Toronto and will soon roll out in more regions across the country. For full details, please visit Bell.ca/fastertotalspeed

Quick facts

Bell pure fibre now has 3 times faster total speeds than cable with download speeds of 3 Gbps and upload speeds of 3 Gbps

Bell is the first major Internet service provider to offer 3 Gbps in Canada

3 gigabits per second pure fibre Internet available now in most areas of Toronto

Connecting more Canadians with the fastest ranked Internet service

Bell is undertaking its most aggressive fibre buildout ever in 2022, with plans to reach up to 900,000 more homes and businesses across much of Canada with direct fibre connections. This is part of Bell's historic two-year capital expenditure program of almost $10 billion,now in its second year, to accelerate the rollout of its broadband fibre, 5G and rural networks. This capital acceleration is in addition to the approximately $4 billion in capital expenditures Bell typically invests in broadband network infrastructure and expansion each year.



Last year, Bell was named the Best Gaming Internet provider among Canada's major providers in PCMag Best Gaming ISPs 2022 report. This award is in addition to its ranking as fastest major Internet provider in Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada according to the PCMag Fastest ISPs 2021 Canada report.

About Bell

Bell is Canada's largest communications company, providing advanced broadband wireless, TV, Internet, media and business communication services throughout the country. Founded in Montreal in 1880, Bell is wholly owned by BCE Inc. To learn more, please visit Bell.ca or BCE.ca.

Through Bell for Better, we are investing to create a better today and a better tomorrow by supporting the social and economic prosperity of our communities with a commitment to the highest environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards. This includes the Bell Let's Talk initiative, which promotes Canadian mental health with national awareness and anti-stigma campaigns like Bell Let's Talk Day and significant Bell funding of community care and access, research and workplace leadership initiatives throughout the country. To learn more, please visit Bell.ca/LetsTalk.

Media inquiries

Caroline Audet

[email protected]

Investor inquiries

Richard Bengian

[email protected]

Caution Concerning Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements made in this news release are forward-looking statements, including statements relating to our network deployment plans and anticipated capital expenditures as well as the benefits expected to result therefrom, including our two-year increased capital expenditure acceleration program for the deployment of our broadband fibre, 5G and rural networks, our business outlook, objectives, plans and strategic priorities, and other statements that are not historical facts. All such forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the "safe harbor" provisions of applicable Canadian securities laws and of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are subject to inherent risks and uncertainties and are based on several assumptions which give rise to the possibility that actual results or events could differ materially from our expectations. These statements are not guarantees of future performance or events, and we caution you against relying on any of these forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release describe our expectations at the date of this news release and, accordingly, are subject to change after such date. Except as may be required by applicable securities laws, we do not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements contained in this news release, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Our network deployment plans and anticipated capital expenditures and the benefits expected to result therefrom are subject to risks and, accordingly, there can be no assurance that our network deployment plans will be completed, that our anticipated capital expenditures will be made or that the benefits expected to result therefrom will be realized. The completion of our network deployment plans assumes, among others, the availability of sufficient equipment, labour and capital and the value of our planned capital expenditures assumes our ability to access or generate the necessary sources of capital. However, there can be no certainty that the required equipment, labour and sources of capital will be available with the result that our actual network deployments and capital expenditures could materially differ from current expectations. For additional information on assumptions and risks underlying certain of our forward-looking statements made in this news release, please consult BCE Inc.'s (BCE) 2021 Annual MD&A dated March 3, 2022 and BCE's news release dated February 3, 2022 announcing its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2021, filed by BCE with the Canadian provincial securities regulatory authorities (available at Sedar.com) and with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (available at SEC.gov). These documents are also available at BCE.ca.

SOURCE Bell Canada
OTTAWA, ON, TRADITIONAL UNCEDED ALGONQUIN TERRITORY, April 6, 2022 /CNW/ - CrownIndigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada

The Government of Canada has committed to addressing the ongoing violence against Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people. The Federal Pathway to Address Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ People (Federal Pathway) outlines ways to support families and survivors in addressing the root-causes of this violence. As part of the Federal Pathway, Canada is providing support for Indigenous-led data projects that will improve and expand culturally-informed data collection on missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people.

The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls called upon all governments (in Calls for Justice 5.24, 16.16, 16.31, 16.44, 17.2, 18.3 and 18.4) to collect and provide disaggregated and distinctions-based data to address the root causes of violence.

Today, the Honourable Marc Miller, Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, announced funding of approximately $1 million has been allocated to 19 Indigenous organizations this year for Indigenous-led data projects that will develop methodologies to better understand the issue of violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people.

Supported projects include initiatives to create qualitative, population-specific and distinctions-based indicators that improve data collection, analysis and interpretation.

In addition to improving and expanding upon existing data on missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people, the projects will also address gaps of other demographic groups in existing data.

These Indigenous-led projects will provide a better understanding of specific underserviced or underrepresented groups and will inform future programs and policy decisions to address the root causes of this national tragedy.

Quotes

"As part of the Federal Pathway, we have committed to supporting data initiatives that will help identify the solutions needed to end systemic violence towards Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people. The support being provided for these Indigenous-led projects is the first step in addressing critical data gaps and as a result, shaping more effective solutions to end this national tragedy."

The Honourable Marc Miller

Minister of CrownIndigenous Relations

Quick facts

The Federal Pathway was supported with historical investments of over $2.2 billion in Budget 2021.

in Budget 2021. On August 12, 2021 , CIRNAC announced $180 million for four programs under the Federal Pathway to help address the root causes of violence against Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people, including through an Indigenous-led Data Research Projects program.

, CIRNAC announced for four programs under the Federal Pathway to help address the root causes of violence against Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people, including through an Indigenous-led Data Research Projects program. The program is funded for a total of six years, starting in 2021-2022. The next call for proposals will be issued in the spring of 2022.

Related products

Indigenous-Led Data Research Projects Program: list of 2021-2022 funding recipients

Associated links

The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ National Action Plan

The Federal Pathway to Address Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ People

Budget 2021 provides for over $2.2 billion dollars to support the Federal Pathway to Address Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ People

CIRNAC announces $180 million for programs under the Federal Pathway to Address Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ People

CIRNAC's launched four calls for proposals to fund programs to support families, survivors and Indigenous communities.

Stay connected

Join the conversation about Indigenous Peoples in Canada:

Twitter: @GCIndigenous

Facebook: @GCIndigenous

Instagram: @gcindigenous

You can subscribe to receive our news releases and speeches via RSS feeds. For more information or to subscribe, visit www.cirnac.gc.ca/RSS

SOURCE Indigenous Services Canada

For further information: media may contact: Justine Leblanc, Press Secretary, Office of the Honourable Marc Miller, Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, [email protected]; CIRNAC Media Relations: Email: [email protected], Phone: 819-934-2302
TORONTO, April 4, 2022 /CNW/ - Precipitated by recent global crises and in line with its activist global citizenship principles, Centennial College is allocating $110,000 of financial assistance per year for refugees and persons displaced by war and political strife.

During the first year, the college's focused financial outreach entails support for four Ukrainian students who wish to continue their studies in Canada, as well as full relocation support for an additional student in partnership with World University Service of Canada (WUSC). While the current priority is to support displaced persons from Ukraine, in subsequent years funding will be distributed based on geopolitical circumstances and needs.

In addition, Centennial will work closely with internal partners and external settlement agencies in the GTA to provide students with comprehensive supports related to language, socio-cultural transition, financial and employment needs to fulfill a critical role in the successful resettlement of this vulnerable population.

"Our hearts go out to all those whose lives have been disrupted by the war in Ukraine and many other regions of the world that have experienced political upheaval and violence," says Dr. Craig Stephenson, President and CEO, Centennial College. "We want to assist those seeking a post-secondary education, but for reasons beyond their control, find their dreams thwarted and their futures uncertain."

In addition, Centennial recently collected 10,000 pounds of essential food items to support the people of Ukraine in partnership with the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, the Ukrainian Canadian Medical Association, Toronto Police Divisions 41, 42 and 43, and faculty, student and staff volunteers from Centennial's School of Community and Health Studies. Donated by college community members, GTA residents and local grocery stores, the non-perishable food items will be forwarded to the Red Cross to ship directly to eastern Europe. Some of the donated items will also be prioritized for Ukrainian refugees as they arrive in Canada.

A number of publicly funded colleges across Ontario have made a joint donation of $200,000 to UNICEF's Ukraine emergency fund. Others, like Centennial, have opted to make significant contributions by way of tuition relief programs, new scholarships, counselling programs, community partnerships, and more, to those from Ukraine and other regions impacted by geopolitics.

About Centennial College

Established as Ontario's first public college in 1966, Centennial College primarily serves the Greater Toronto Area with five campuses. It is known for its exemplary teaching, innovative programming and extensive partnership building. Centennial offers more than 400 diploma, certificate, graduate certificate, apprenticeship and degree programs in business, media, arts, community and consumer services, engineering technology, health care, hospitality/tourism and transportation. These programs, delivered in class and online, promote experiential learning with laboratory instruction, co-op education and industry placements. Centennial enrols 25,000 full-time students and 18,000 part-time learners annually.

SOURCE Centennial College

For further information: Media contact: Mark Toljagic, Senior Communications Officer, Centennial College, 416-605-6012; [email protected]
Robert Guice, CEO of Citron Hygiene, said, "We are committed to combating period poverty. We help businesses, companies and institutions in Canada, USA and UK satisfy the basic needs of females and other menstruators who use their public washrooms by providing them free menstrual products for emergency use and proper, safe disposal units for them. By partnering with Aunt Flow and ISTG, we extend our support of period dignity to Ukraine."

"Periods don't stop for pandemics or wars", said Claire Coder, CEO and Founder of Aunt Flow. "By donating these period products to affected Ukrainians, we hope this will be a small but meaningful way to help. With so much going on, menstruators should not need to worry about how to access essentials like tampons or pads. We're so grateful to Citron Hygiene and ISTG for partnering with us to make this donation possible to support the health, hygiene, and safety of those in Ukraine and globally."

Join Citron Hygiene and Aunt Flow in combating period poverty around the globe by donating what you can to ISTG and other organizations committed to this cause.

About Citron Hygiene LP

Citron Hygiene LP is a leading global company that provides washroom hygiene services and products to businesses that seek to enhance their brand by providing their customers and employees with an elevated washroom experience. Citron Hygiene, founded in 1996, is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, and has service locations throughout Canada, US, and the United Kingdom. Citron Hygiene is a private portfolio company of Birch Hill Equity Partners, a Canadian mid-market private equity firm. To learn more, visit www.citronhygiene.com

About Aunt Flow

Aunt Flow is committed to ensuring that everyone has access to period products. Claire Coder founded Aunt Flow after getting her period in public without the supplies needed. At 18-years-old, she dedicated her life to developing a solution to ensure businesses and schools could sustainably provide high-quality menstrual products for free in bathrooms. Now, 900+ companies have joined the menstrual movement with Aunt Flow, providing free-vend dispensers stocked with 100% organic tampons and pads. For every 10 tampons and pads sold, Aunt Flow donates 1 to a menstruator in need. We call this people helping people. PERIOD. For more information and to join the menstrual movement, visit www.goauntflow.com.

SOURCE Citron Hygiene

For further information: Joyce Telmo-Kanti, [email protected]
The Company also Endorses the SEC's Ground-Breaking Proposal to Implement a Rule that Would Require all Public Companies to Report Their Carbon Emissions

CALGARY, AB, April 6, 2022 /CNW/ - DeepMarkit Corp., ("DeepMarkit" or the "Company") (TSXV: MKT) (OTC: MKTDF) (FRA: DEP), a company focused on democratizing access to the voluntary carbon offset market by minting credits into non-fungible tokens ("NFTs"), is pleased to announce attendance at the 19th annual North American Carbon World 2022 conference ("NACW" or the "Conference") hosted by Climate Action Reserve in Anaheim, California from April 6-8th. NACW will take place at the Westin Anaheim and represents the largest North American event addressing the most pressing issues in climate policy and innovation.

DeepMarkit representatives will network through face-to-face collaboration with other attendees in the form of registries, credit holders, project champions, climate technology innovators government leaders, academics, non-profits and other offset-related contacts. The Company will also be providing direct exposure to its MintCarbon.io platform through networking meetings and breakout sessions. DeepMarkit is pioneering the use of NFTs to unlock liquidity and transparency in historically opaque carbon markets. The Company is working to launch the MintCarbon.io platform imminently, which will offer users the opportunity to successfully mint verified credits into NFTs on the secure blockchain.

The Conference annually brings together leaders in the environmental, social and governance community to collaborate and achieve climate solutions, as well as raise ambition to reduce emissions at scale and with urgency. Its focus is on learning up-to-date information, connecting with leaders, showcasing products and services as well as gaining insights and opportunities across the carbon industry. Fresh off the momentum of COP26, continued and amplified efforts throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico are working to achieve climate solutions, but more policy, action, and innovation are required to raise ambition and reduce emissions at the scale and urgency required.

"NACW represents a terrific opportunity for our team to build relationships and create interest in the launch of our MintCarbon.io platform amongst the preeminent stakeholders in the climate sector. The Conference will address some of the immediate issues surrounding credit pricing and the illiquidity of verified carbon credits. We aim to position our platform as the ideal solution to these issues by offering people around the world easy access to a secure and transparent market, as well as offering new projects exposure to a broader audience. We can't wait to show industry leaders at NACW how MintCarbon.io is being designed to transform the way that people buy and sell carbon credits," said Ranjeet Sundher, CEO of DeepMarkit.

Proposed SEC Rule on Carbon Emissions Disclosure

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") recently proposed a rule that would require all public companies report their carbon emissions. The rule would increase the reporting transparency of public corporations and help investors know more about how climate risks affect their investments. Climate risks are becoming essential for investors to make informed decisions. The information will also show which companies are reducing their carbon footprint. The rule would make the SEC the leading enforcer of climate-related financial disclosures and the draft proposal is expected to be finalized before the end of 2022.1

DeepMarkit endorses the SEC's ground-breaking proposal. Company management believes that a rule of this nature would go beyond simply raising the bar of corporate disclosure. Once implemented, it could heighten the general awareness of carbon emissions and the source and pricing of offset credits as well as accelerate the evolution of carbon credit trading. DeepMarkit and its MintCarbon.io platform are well positioned for the proposal to become a formal rule and is available to work with carbon credit holders to help them mint their offsets into NFTs to be utilized by corporate entities pursuing a net-zero emissions position or by retail investors in the voluntary market.

ABOUT DEEPMARKIT

DeepMarkit Corp. is a company focused on democratizing access to the voluntary carbon offset market by minting credits into non-fungible tokens ("NFTs"). Its common shares are listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the "MKT" stock symbol. DeepMarkit's wholly owned subsidiary, First Carbon Corp. ("FCC"), is a software infrastructure company operating in the tokenization vertical of the blockchain. FCC's primary asset, MintCarbon.io, is a web-based, software-as-a-service platform that facilitates the minting of carbon credits into NFTs (based on the ERC-1155 standard) or other secure tokens (based on the ERC-20 standard). MintCarbon.io is currently undergoing testing and FCC anticipates an official launch of the platform in the near future.

On behalf of:

DEEPMARKIT CORP.

"Ranjeet Sundher"

Ranjeet Sundher, Interim CEO

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.

CAUTIONARY STATEMENT

Statements in this news release may contain forward-looking information. Any statements that are contained in this news release that are not statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the Company's business and corporate plans. The reader is cautioned that assumptions used in the preparation of any forward-looking information may prove to be incorrect. Events or circumstances may cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted, as a result of numerous known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of DeepMarkit. Various factors can cause the actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking information.

The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date of this news release and DeepMarkit does not undertake any obligation to update publicly or to revise any of the included forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by securities law.

ENDNOTES

"SEC Proposed Rule on Carbon Emissions Disclosure", CarbonCredits.com, accessed March 22, 2022 , https://carboncredits.com/sec-carbon-emissions/

SOURCE DeepMarkit Corp.

For further information: Ranjeet Sundher, Interim CEO, Tel: 403-537-0067, Email: [email protected]; Web: www.deepmarkit.com; Twitter: @DeepMarkit
OTTAWA, ON, April 6, 2022 /CNW/ - Exceptional circumstances such as feed shortages due to drought and delays stemming from the global pandemic and the war in Ukraine have disrupted supply chains and increased input costs for Canadian farmers, including for fuel and fertilizer. In these challenging times, it is important that farmers have the support they need to ensure a successful 2022 planting season.

Today, the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, the Honourable Marie-Claude Bibeau, announced a change to the Advance Payments Program that will increase cash flow to producers this spring to help with these high input costs. There will be a temporary waiving of the requirement for pre-production advances to be issued in two installments, 60 per cent upfront and 40 per cent after seeding is confirmed. This change will allow producers to receive 100 per cent of their 2022 advance immediately when they apply.

Under the Advance Payments Program, producers are provided with easy access to affordable credit through cash advances of up to $1 million based on the expected value of their agricultural product, of which the first $100,000 in each crop year is interest free. Access to additional cash flow at the start of the production cycle will ensure farmers can purchase important inputs such as fuel, fertilizer and seed, in order to maintain full production this growing season. Pressure on world food supplies continues to increase due to the conflict in Ukraine. Canada is prepared to help fill the gap in world production.

Given the significant increase to input costs, in December 2021 Farm Credit Canada proactively offered credit limit increases of 30 per cent for crop input financing to customers that met specific pre-approval criteria, ensuring they have access to the capital they need for the upcoming growing season.

The Government of Canada remains committed to supporting Canada's agriculture sector to ensure farmers and businesses have the tools they need to ensure a continuous supply of safe and nutritious food for Canada and the world.

Quote

"Canada's agricultural producers are facing an increase in the cost of raw materials, including fuel and fertilizer, a situation exacerbated by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In these uncertain times, it is more important than ever that our farmers are able to maximize their production to feed Canadians and the world. This temporary change to the Advance Payments Program comes in time for the planting season and will help farmers purchase the inputs needed for sustainable food production."

- The Honourable Marie-Claude Bibeau, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food

Quick Facts

Cash advances are calculated based on up to 50% of the anticipated market value of the eligible agricultural products that will be produced or are in storage.

The APP is delivered through 30 industry led associations.

In 2021, the APP provided $2.39 billion in advances to 17,430 producers across Canada .

Additional Links

Advance Payments Program

Farm Credit Canada

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn

Web: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

SOURCE Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

For further information: Contacts: Marianne Dandurand, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, [email protected], 343-541-9229; Media Relations: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, 1-866-345-7972, [email protected]
Saint-Hyacinthe-based multiservice centre receives a total of $3,840,000 in financial support from CED.

SAINT-HYACINTHE, QC, April 6, 2022 /CNW Telbec/  Supporting innovative agri-food organizations contributes to Quebec's regional economic development. That is why the Honourable Pascale St-Onge, Member of Parliament for BromeMissisquoi, Minister of Sport and Minister responsible for CED, today announced non-repayable contributions totalling $3,840,000 for Cintech agroalimentaire.

Minister St-Onge recently visited this Saint-Hyacinthe-based multiservice centre along with the Honourable Marie-Claude Bibeau, Member of Parliament for ComptonStanstead and Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food. This CED financial assistance will enable the organization to enhance the performance of Quebec businesses in the agri-food processing sector and ensure they are sustainable.

An important player in its industry, Cintech agroalimentaire manages a college centre for technology transfer (CCTT) affiliated with the Cegep de Saint-Hyacinthe. This CCTT, which focuses on raising awareness among sector businesses of the benefits of waste recovery, received an initial $800,000 from CED. This contribution will enable it to acquire and install equipment to develop methods to recover the by-products generated by sector businesses.

With an additional $3,040,000 in support, the CCTT will also be able to acquire and install equipment to facilitate the development of new food sources high in plant protein and improve their sensory properties with a view to promoting food self-sufficiency.

Through its innovative projects, Cintech agroalimentaire has been supporting the development of agri-food processing businesses since 1986 and aims to enhance innovation and competitiveness across the sector in Quebec.

The Government of Canada recognizes and supports businesses and organizations that are a source of pride in their communities. Quebec's economic recovery relies, among other things, on the adoption of green technologies and the fight against climate change. Businesses that leverage clean technologies are major contributors to growth with a smaller ecological footprint, as well as key assets in rebuilding a greener, stronger, more resilient, and more just economy for all.

Quotes

"The climate crisis represents one of the greatest challenges of our time, and our government has taken concrete steps to help businesses leveraging innovation, new technologies, and the green shift. By supporting Cintech agroalimentaire, that is exactly what we are doing today. Our assistance for these two projects by this CCTT will help make food processing businesses more competitive and foster a green, sustainable recovery for Canada. Investing in the development of a circular economy is helping to reduce our ecological footprint and attests to our desire to build healthier communities."

The Honourable Pascale St-Onge, Member of Parliament for BromeMissisquoi, Minister of Sport and Minister responsible for CED

"Plant protein is an innovative and rapidly expanding industry. Initiatives such as this one by Cintech are helping to keep Canada at the forefront of agri-food processing research and development and to limit the industry's environmental impact. Reducing food waste is also at the heart of our strategy for ensuring food security for a growing global population."

The Honourable Marie-Claude Bibeau, Member of Parliament for ComptonStanstead and Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food

"Cintech agroalimentaire is delighted to be able to count on this financial support from CED in the amount of $3,840,000, on top of the $960,000 we have invested in this project. This investment will enable us to acquire state-of-the-art technology, positioning us at the cutting edge in sectors such as plant protein. Everything will be done with a constant focus on recovering by-products in order to generate maximum spinoffs with minimal losses. Processing businesses, producers and other research centres will all be able to benefit from these significant acquisitions to innovate, make a name for themselves, and thereby foster Canada's food self-sufficiency. Particular attention will be paid to including future users, both vegetarians and flexitarians, as well as consumers curious about alternative products."

Jean Lacroix, President and Director General, Cintech agroalimentaire

Quick facts

The funds have been granted under CED's Regional Economic Growth through Innovation program. This program targets entrepreneurs leveraging innovation to grow their businesses and enhance their competitiveness, as well as regional economic stakeholders helping to create an entrepreneurial environment conducive to innovation and growth for all, across all regions.

SMEs represent 99.7% of Quebec businesses and contribute to 50% of the province's GDP.

businesses and contribute to 50% of the province's GDP. CED is a key federal partner in Quebec's regional economic development. With its 12 regional business offices, CED accompanies businesses, supporting organizations and all regions across Quebec into tomorrow's economy.

Associated links

Stay connected

Follow CED on social media

Consult CED's news

SOURCE Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions

For further information: Media Relations: Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions, [email protected]; Ariane Joazard-Belizaire, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Sport and Minister responsible for Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions, [email protected]a
Kili Teke is a significant advanced exploration porphyry gold-copper project with an existing mineral resource, and potential for further re-optimization and discoveries to increase overall value.

Highlights:

Matthew Salthouse, CEO of KRL, commented:

KRL to acquire 100% of the Kili Teke project from HGEL:



advanced exploration Au-Cu project in premier region of PNG;



has an existing defined Inferred Mineral Resource of 237Mt @ 0.34% Cu (=0.8Mt Cu), 0.24g/t Au (=1.8Moz Au) and 168ppm Mo (=0.04Mt Mo), with an effective date of 30 June 2021 ;

@ 0.34% Cu (=0.8Mt Cu), 0.24g/t Au (=1.8Moz Au) and 168ppm Mo (=0.04Mt Mo), with an effective date of ;

over 36,000m of drilling completed to date;

of drilling completed to date;

significant exploration resource upside, with near surface, high-grade Au skarn mineralisation not yet included in the defined Mineral Resource;



potential for re-optimisation, bringing Kili Teke significantly closer to production as an open-pit mine to increase economic returns;

Terms of Agreement:



initial cash consideration of US$1 million , payable in two instalments: US$500,000 on closing (targeted for May 31, 2022 ); and US$500,000 on receipt of post-closing regulatory approvals (expected in late 2022 or early 2023);

, payable in two instalments: on closing (targeted for ); and on receipt of post-closing regulatory approvals (expected in late 2022 or early 2023);

KRL intends to work towards a Preliminary Economic Assessment ("PEA"), then a Feasibility Study. If KRL views the Project positively at each step, KRL to make further payments to HGEL of US$3 million and US$4 million respectively;

and respectively;

KRL to pay HGEL a 1.5% net smelter royalty from future mine revenue;



potential for Harmony to become a strategic investor in KRL under the Transaction, with HGEL to be issued warrants equal to 9.9% of the issued share capital of KRL on closing (with each warrant exercisable at C$0.28 per share or a 25% premium to the KRL 30-day VWAP to April 5, 2022 ).

"We are delighted to announce the acquisition of Kili Teke which aligns with our strategy of building shareholder returns by executing value accretive acquisitions. In this regard, our extensive due diligence indicates Kili Teke will be a transformative and accretive acquisition for KRL and will elevate our asset portfolio, adding an established gold copper resource which has potential for significant growth."

"The Project lies on the highly prospective Papuan Fold Belt which hosts world class projects, such as Ok Tedi, Frieda River and Porgera. We look forward to exploring and developing another potential world class project for the region."

"This transaction moves KRL from a greenfield high potential explorer into being a resource development company with upside. For a junior to achieve this after a year of listing is a testament to the team's vision on growing KRL via accretive transactions in combination with on-going field work.

HGEL has already made excellent progress to date in developing the Project, delineating an impressive copper gold resource of 800Kt copper and 1.8Moz gold; with the deposit remaining open to the southeast and down depth. Through the grant of warrants to acquire equity in KRL of up to 9.9%, HGEL has an option to engage further."

"KRL will continue to deliver on our strategic objectives with Kili Teke a key catalyst in driving shareholder value as we develop as an Asia Pacific gold-copper mining company."

Johannes van Heerden, CEO for Harmony South East Asia and senior executive for New Business at Harmony Gold Mining Company Limited commented:

"Harmony remains focused on permitting and delivering the much anticipated Wafi-Golpu project alongside its existing Hidden Valley mine life extension project. In addition to these on-going projects, Harmony has identified additional potential growth opportunities in and around the Hidden Valley mine. These multiple workstreams demonstrate our long-term commitment to Papua New Guinea, and will require significant investment and management resources over the next 5 years. We believe it makes strategic sense for the Kili Teke exploration project to continue with dedicated focus, allowing further value to be unlocked for all stakeholders in Papua New Guinea."

Definitive Agreement

KRL and HGEL have executed a definitive agreement for KRL to purchase Kili Teke by way of an asset acquisition. The acquisition is inclusive of the transfer of the Exploration Licence 2310 ("EL 2310") and all associated assets and know-how, such as drill core, logs and data used to support the Mineral Resource.

The initial acquisition price payable by KRL is US$1 million, payable by two instalments of (i) US$500,000 on closing of the transaction and (ii) $500,000 on receipt of post-closing regulatory approvals (expected in late 2022 or early 2023).

Closing of the transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange (the "TSX-V"), PNG regulatory approval and registration of the sale agreement and all schedules to it, and KRL (at its discretion) raising financing of up to US$1 million. The parties are targeting closing of the transaction by May 31, 2022, at which point KRL will assume 100% ownership of the Project.

In future years, as the Project is advanced, KRL will move to complete a PEA. If KRL publishes a PEA (at KRL's discretion), then the Company will pay US$3 million to HGEL within six months of publication and move to complete a Preliminary Feasibility Study or Feasibility Study.

If KRL completes and publishes such Preliminary Feasibility Study or Feasibility Study (at KRL's discretion), then a further and final payment of US$4 million will be made to HGEL within six months of publication.

In addition to the cash payments, KRL will grant HGEL a 1.5% net smelter royalty upon the commencement of commercial production in the future.

KRL will also grant HGEL common share purchase warrants on closing of the Transaction exercisable for up to 9.9% of the Company's issued share capital as of closing the Transaction, with each warrant being exercisable at an exercise price of C$0.28 per share, representing a 25% premium to KRL's 30-day VWAP to April 5, 2022. HGEL has also been granted anti-dilutions rights with respect to future financings of KRL to maintain its equity ownership in KRL.

The definitive agreement also contains other terms and conditions as are customary for a transaction of this nature.

Strategic Rationale

The acquisition of Kili Teke will provide KRL with immediate ownership of a quality exploration project in a region well known to KRL management and stakeholders. The Company views the acquisition as transformational for KRL, given the clear development nature of Kili-Teke (beyond early-stage greenfield exploration).

Amongst other objectives, the Transaction:

Project Overview

allows KRL to incorporate a sizeable Au-Cu resource into the Company's asset base, potentially enabling a re-rating of KRL in due course;

increases exposure to Cu as well as Au (in addition to KRL's other exciting projects in Kainantu and May River);

moves KRL's overall portfolio further along the development curve, given Kili Teke's advanced stage; and

provides upside potential to KRL, with identified exploration targets and options to re-optimise the preliminary mining approach.

The Project comprises of EL 2310 and is located approximately 40km west-northwest of the Porgera Gold Mine, in the Koroba-Kopiago District of Hela Province, PNG. EL 2310 was granted to HGEL in May 2014 and has been renewed three times. The EL remains in good standing and is currently subject to a further renewal application at the end of the current term in May 2022. Pending renewal, the EL remains on foot with KRL entitled to continue to explore the project as is customary under PNG mining law.

An Inferred Mineral Resource of 237Mt @ 0.34% Cu (=0.8Mt Cu), 0.24g/t Au (=1.8Moz Au) and 168ppm Mo (=0.04Mt Mo), with an effective date of 30 June 2021 has been established by Harmony for the Project in accordance with the South African Code for the Reporting of Exploration Results, Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves (SAMREC, 2016 Edition) (www.samcode.co.za), which is recognised and accepted for the purposes of National Instrument 43-101, Standards of Disclosure for Mineral projects ("NI 43-101"). As part of the Transaction, KRL intends to file with applicable Canadian securities regulators and the TSX-V, within 45 days of this news release, an NI 43-101 compliant technical report in respect of the project.

In developing the Project, HGEL drilled 54 holes (for 36,325m), at an estimated cost of US$20 million. With multiple work streams ongoing in PNG, Harmony has taken a strategic decision to sell the Project to KRL as a credible junior explorer to allow exploration on the project to continue with a dedicated focus.

Regional and Local Geology

The Project lies within the Papuan Fold Belt, a mixed terrane of limestone and clastic sediments which have been strongly folded and thrusted during the evolution of the New Guinea magmatic island arc, on the northern margin of the Australian tectonic plate.

Numerous felsic and intermediate plutons, generated from the subducting Australian plate, are intruded into these sediments, and several are host to, or are associated with, large porphyry Au-Cu and epithermal Au deposits, respectively, including Ok Tedi (3.4Mt Cu, 12.5Moz Au*), Frieda River (12.9Mt Cu, 21.1Moz Au), Porgera (10.4Moz Au), and Mt Kare (2.1Moz Au). *Pre-production figures.

These world-class ore deposits are all located close to major deep-seated transfer faults which accommodate lateral slip between adjacent segments of the Australian plate, as it moves northwards. Kili Teke is located on the strike extension of a transfer fault and is highly prospective, as shown in Figure 1.

Kili Teke is hosted by a late Miocene (3.590.5Ma to 3.500.04Ma) multi-phase, intermediate-composition, intrusive complex (including diorite, microdiorite and hornblende porphyry lithologies), and associated breccias and skarns, as indicated in Figure 2. The latter occur both within (along structures), and on the margins of the intrusive complex, in limestone host rock.

Mineralisation is exposed at surface. This is of particular interest to KRL, as it indicates the upper part of the deposit could be mined via an open pit, even though part of the deposit is covered by a limestone cap.

Studies indicate the strongest mineralisation is developed as disseminated and vein infill chalcopyrite, with lesser bornite, pyrite, gold and molybdenum, in two classic, porphyry-style stockworks: the Northern and Southern Stockwork Zones (NSZ and SSZ). Both of these high-grade zones are offset at depth by post-mineralisation faulting. A single drill intercept, from KTDD013, reported [email protected]% Cu & 0.57g/t Au, which demonstrates that this is a significant deposit, with high-grade potential.

Several zones of high-grade skarn mineralisation are also recognised, but the drill density is insufficient to confirm continuity at this stage and they have been excluded from the current Mineral Resource estimate. In due course, a priority for KRL will be further investigation of this skarn mineralisation.

The dominant alteration is an early potassic assemblage, composed of pervasive fine-grained biotiteK-feldsparmagnetitesulphide (py+cp+mo). This is overprinted in turn by a secondary potassic event, restricted to breccia zones, pervasive phyllic alteration (sericitequartzsulphide), and late-stage argillic to intermediate argillic alteration (kaolinitesmectite clays), also restricted to major fault zones.

Importantly, the controls on high-grade mineralisation have not been defined. There remains residual upside potential to expand high-grade zones.

Potential Upside to the Mineral Resource Estimate

Since acquiring the Project in June 2014, HGEL has drilled 54 holes (for 36,325m), including 7 (for 3,683m) to test exploration targets. Using all currently available data, an Inferred Mineral Resource of 237Mt @ 0.34% Cu (=0.8Mt Cu), 0.24g/t Au (=1.8Moz Au) and 168ppm Mo (=0.04Mt Mo) has been defined for the Project.

Importantly, and as noted above, this defined Mineral Resource excludes all high-grade skarn intercepts because the drill density was considered insufficient to prove the continuity of these mineralised zones: see Figure 3, indicating the high-grade skarn area. These remain a viable exploration target, and an opportunity to increase the metal inventory significantly. (The inclusion of skarn mineralisation in a previously reported Mineral Resource potentially added 11% and 10% more Cu and Au metal, respectively, to that estimate.)

In addition to the deposit drill-out, in 2016 HGEL drill-tested 3 exploration targets close to Kili Teke. Of interest is the Ridge Gold Anomaly (RGA) target, located within 1km of the main resource, which has not been adequately explored as yet. This target was defined by surface geochemistry in stream sediments, and has subsequently been confirmed in soils and bedrock, via trench sampling ([email protected]/t Au & 0.77% Cu) and anomalous rock chips (up to 3.5g/t Au). The bedrock anomaly potentially extends beneath a limestone cap cover sequence, which means that RGA may be a much larger target than has been considered before. This will be another area of focus for KRL with the likelihood of further drilling at this target.

Concept Mining Study

A conceptual mining study has been completed for the Project (completed by Advisian, a consulting business of the WorleyParsons Group) to investigate the economic potential of an open pit and underground block cave development. This study was independently reviewed by AMC in 2017. KRL is keen to test the viability of an open pit operation. Compared to Harmony as a smaller operator, KRL will consider ways to re-optimise the Project with a focus on higher grades and lower through-puts, with an open-pit approach as one way to potentially optimise economic value.

To date, desk top studies by KRL suggest that an open pit operation is potentially viable (with a robust economic return) on the definition of more high-grade ore. In due course, this would require further infill drilling, focused initially on the two high-grade stockwork zones (NSZ and SSZ) and the marginal skarns; and any other features that can be targeted if the controls of mineralisation can be determined. KRL expects further investigation on the viability of these options are part of the intended work towards a PEA and Feasibility Study.

Infrastructure, Logistics and Community Relations

Local infrastructure to support a new mine at Kili Teke is favourable. The Hides gas power station, which supplies power to the Porgera Gold Mine, is 50km south of Kili Teke; and the largest sealed airstrip in PNG, at Komo, is 80km to the south (and there are dirt strips much closer, at Auwi and Tari). The government has announced funding to build sealed roads between the local towns of Komo, Tari, Korobo and Mendi, all of which would serve a future mine at Kili Teke.

KRL stakeholders have significant experience operating in the Hela District where the Project is located. Based on initial discussions with relevant community groups, KRL is confident it can develop a viable community programme at Kili Teke.

Next Steps

KRL will continue to work co-operatively with the management of HGEL to obtain all necessary regulatory approvals to close the acquisition and consolidate the Project into KRL.

Although KRL remains fully funded in order to complete the Transaction in the short term, closing of the Transaction is subject to KRL raising financing of up to US$1 million (or waiving this condition).

Qualified Person

The scientific and technical information disclosed in this release has been reviewed and approved by Graeme Fleming, B. App. Sc., MAIG, an independent "qualified person" as defined under National Instrument 43-101, Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects.

About KRL

Kainantu Resources 'KRL' is an Asia-Pacific focused gold mining company with three highly prospective gold-copper projects, KRL South, KRL North and the May River Project. All projects are located in premier mining regions in PNG.

Both KRL North and KRL South show potential to host high-grade epithermal and porphyry mineralisation, as seen elsewhere in the high-grade Kainantu Gold District. The May River project is in close proximity to the world-renowned Frieda River Copper-Gold Project, with historical drilling indicating the potential for significant copper-gold projects. KRL has a highly experienced board and management team with a proven track record of working together in the region; and an established in-country partner.

For further information please visit https://kainanturesources.com/

Neither the TSX-V nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX-V) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Disclaimer and Forward-Looking Information Mineralization hosted on adjacent and/or nearby properties is not necessarily indicative of mineralization hosted on the Company's property. The data disclosed in this release relating to drilling results is historical in nature. Neither the Company nor a qualified person has yet verified this data and therefore investors should not place undue reliance on such data, and no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made by the Company, its affiliated companies, or any other person as to its fairness, accuracy, completeness, or correctness. This release contains forward-looking statements, which relate to future events or future performance and reflect management's current expectations and assumptions. Such forward-looking statements reflect management's current beliefs and are based on assumptions made by and information currently available to the Company. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements or information. Forward-looking statements or information in this news release relate to, among other things: expectations regarding completion of the Acquisition and the terms thereof, including timing, the results of Preliminary Economic Assessments and Feasibility Studies, further exploration activities or development programs on the Project, receipt of necessary regulatory approvals and the formulation of plans for drill testing; the effect of the Acquisition on KRL and its portfolio; further growth of the Project; timing of the renewal of EL 2310; the ability of the Company to raise financing; the description and viability of the Project; the preparation and filing of a NI 43-101 Technical Report; and the ability of the Company to deliver on its strategic objectives and create shareholder value. These forward-looking statements and information reflect the Company's current views with respect to future events and are necessarily based upon a number of assumptions that, while considered reasonable by the Company, are inherently subject to significant operational, business, economic and regulatory uncertainties and contingencies. These assumptions include; success of the Company's projects; prices for gold remaining as estimated; currency exchange rates remaining as estimated; availability of funds for the Company's projects; capital, decommissioning and reclamation estimates; prices for energy inputs, labour, materials, supplies and services (including transportation); no labour-related disruptions; no unplanned delays or interruptions in scheduled construction and production; all necessary permits, licenses and regulatory approvals are received in a timely manner; and the ability to comply with environmental, health and safety laws. The foregoing list of assumptions is not exhaustive. The Company cautions the reader that forward-looking statements and information involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements or information contained in this news release and the Company has made assumptions and estimates based on or related to many of these factors. Such factors include, without limitation: fluctuations in gold prices; fluctuations in prices for energy inputs, labour, materials, supplies and services (including transportation); fluctuations in currency markets (such as the Canadian dollar versus the U.S. dollar); operational risks and hazards inherent with the business of mineral exploration; inadequate insurance, or inability to obtain insurance, to cover these risks and hazards; our ability to obtain all necessary permits, licenses and regulatory approvals in a timely manner; changes in laws, regulations and government practices, including environmental, export and import laws and regulations; legal restrictions relating to mineral exploration; increased competition in the mining industry for equipment and qualified personnel; the availability of additional capital; title matters and the additional risks identified in our filings with Canadian securities regulators on SEDAR in Canada (available at www.sedar.com). Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated, described, or intended. Investors are cautioned against undue reliance on forward-looking statements or information. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and, except as required under applicable securities legislation, the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances.

SOURCE Kainantu Resources Ltd.

For further information: Kainantu Resources: Matthew Salthouse, Chief Executive Officer (Tel: + 65 8318 8125); Callum Jones, Corporate Development Co-ordinator (Tel: + 61 450 969 697); Email: [email protected]; IR / Financial PR: Camarco, Gordon Poole / Charlotte Hollinshead / Tessa Gough-Allen, Tel: +44(0) 20 3757 4980; Financial PR North America: Jemini Capital, Kevin Shum / Jerry Huang [email protected]: +1 (212) 219-4680 | +1 (647) 725-3888 ext 702
After Tamil Nadu CM, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday.

During his visit he urged PM Modi to alter Andhra Pradeshs credit limit, citing the states massive revenue loss as a result of the states bifurcation and the Covid outbreak.

According to Jagan Mohan Reddy, Covid cost the state Rs 33,478 crore in revenue, with an extra Rs 7,130 crore spent on infection prevention and treatment. Therefore, he urged that the updated estimates for the Polavaram project, which is valued at over Rs 55,000 crore, be approved by the Centre.

Apart from the Polavaram project, the chief minister raised concerns about the Kadapa Steel Plant and requested site clearance approval for Bhogapuram International Airport near Visakhapatnam, which had expired, as well as beneficiary identification under the National Food Security Act, which he described as flawed and unjust to the state.




The Delhi Jal Board rescinded the directive, which gave all Muslim employees a two-hour respite every day during Ramzan

The Delhi Jal Board rescinded the directive, which gave all Muslim employees a two-hour respite every day during Ramzan, with immediate effect on Tuesday (April 5).

On Monday, the DJB announced that it has decided to grant Muslim employees short leave (roughly two hours per day). According to DJB, During Ramzan, that is, April 3 to May 2 or until the date of Idul fitr is declared, subject to the condition that they complete their work during the remaining office hours so that the office work does not suffer.

On Tuesday, a circular stated, On April 4, 2022, a circular was published allowing Muslim employees to take short leave (about two hours per day) during Ramzan. The Competent Authority has now decided to revoke the above-mentioned Circular with immediate effect.
On April 28, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit Assam to open a new cancer facility at the Assam Medical College and Hospital in Dibrugarh.

In addition to Prime Minister Modi, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh is expected to visit Assam on April 23.

Confirming PM Modis visit, Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma tweeted,  Inspected Cancer Hospital being built at Dibrugarh under Cancer Care Foundation. It will be inaugurated by Adarniya PM Shri Narendra Modi ji on April 28. From Dibrugarh. Honble PM will inaugurate 7 Cancer Hospitals out of 10 in Assam & lay foundation for 7 more Cancer Hospitals.

Inspected Cancer Hospital being built at Dibrugarh under Cancer Care Foundation. It will be inaugurated by Adarniya PM Shri @narendramodi ji on April 28. From Dibrugarh. Hon'ble PM will inaugurate 7 Cancer Hospitals out of 10 in Assam & lay foundation for 7 more Cancer Hospitals. pic.twitter.com/KXbUnvX9cL  Himanta Biswa Sarma (@himantabiswa) April 3, 2022

In addition, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma will travel around 32 districts of the state for a month starting from May 11 to June 11. This visit will be held to commemorate his governments one-year anniversary.

The Assam Chief Minister will inaugurate and dedicate numerous projects to the people of the state, in addition to hosting public interactions and meetings.
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NORWALK  Heres the common wisdom that we hear repeated in the supermarket, at dinner parties and even on TV: Kids these days dont know anything about history. They cant even find the U.S. on a map, never mind knowing anything about our government or the constitution.

But some middle schoolers in Norwalk are proving the pundits wrong. They have become experts on Supreme Court cases, events like the Cuban missile crisis and the fight for womens suffrage, even the Peace Corps and the AIDS epidemic.

In the recent National History Day competition for middle schools in Fairfield County, Norwalk student projects received nine of the 25 awards given by the judges. All of these projects will now move on to the state competition on April 30.

This is a very academically rigorous competition, said Lori Liebowitz, assistant education administrator for Norwalks gifted and talented program. Students pick something they are interested in, sustain that interest over time, and then produce something of high caliber in a major project.

Nathan Hale eighth-grade students Camila Fernandez and Melanie Tanner produced a 10-minute documentary about the womens suffrage movement. Their film, which included music and voice-over narration, was filled with primary sources such as photos and pamphlets from the early 1900s.

In a documentary, we needed real information, not just what others wrote, Fernandez said.

They plotted out their movie, minute by minute  what questions to ask, the answers and the pictures that would visualize the answer.

Nathan Hales gifted and talented program teacher Bryan Kirby loves this project. It relies so heavily on research skills, he said. The competition causes kids to look critically at primary and secondary sources, synthesize information, and prove their thesis in an interesting way.

All of his 130 students in grades six, seven and eight produce National History Day projects, and he teaches research skills in all three grades, each year teaching a more sophisticated way of taking notes  writing note cards in sixth grade, using Google Docs in seventh grade, and creating Google Slides in eighth grade.

Eighth-graders Ian Mills, Roy Roc, Steve Charles, Emi Anderson and Xavier Myles researched Engel v. Vitale, the Supreme Court case that ended religious prayer in public schools. Their project won third place in the group exhibit category.

I spent a lot of time looking for 15 different sources, Roc said. His group read newspaper accounts of the case, listened to audio recordings, and read the actual ruling.

Some words were a bit mature, Charles admitted. They divided the work load: Some members looked for good sources and others took notes.

But National History Day requires more than facts and information: Students must create an engaging way to communicate their knowledge.

One group of eighth-graders researched the Cuban Missile Crisis. Because it was a more recent event, the students said it wasnt too hard to find good sources.

The group  Daniel Guo, Marianne Joy Montenegro, Anna Kvashchuk, and Olivia Papadopoulos  was not sure what their virtual presentation should look like. But they got an idea after reading lots of news reports about the event.

Making it look like a newspaper was the inspiration, Kvashchuk said. Their project has three panels with text, pictures, a timeline, and maps. Each panel looks like a series of newspaper pages with headlines and grayish coloring.

I searched for parchment paper, then played around with color as an overlay, and formatted the text and changed the color, she said. Their project won second place in the group exhibit category.

Sixth-graders Kenley Herzog, Audra Lacomis, Morgan Bleakley and Delaney OBrien researched the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Their project, a more traditional poster board presentation, was designed to look like the Twin Towers: The middle panel was a typical poster board, but the two side panels were twice as tall as the center. Their teacher helped them figure out how to stabilize those panels, which were almost four feet tall.

Sometimes, the students in the group were not even in the same class. The five students that researched the prayer in the schools case were in three different classes. When they worked on the project during class, they wrote notes for the others in their progress sheets that stayed in the classroom. Sometimes they texted each other. Often, they would get on a call together at home.

Communication has to be there for the project to be at its best, Roc said.

I learned a lot about the government, but I learned more about work ethic, Charles said. Sometimes there was some slacking, but we learned how to stay on a group work ethic, and it benefited all of us.

Kirby said some of the groups worked so well together, he could have gone out for lunch and they would have kept on working. Others, he said, needed some group mediation on how to best work together.

Id rather they learn how to get along than they make the best project in the world. Students first; curriculum second, he said.

When students evaluated themselves, most wrote about what they learned about themselves and about working in a group.

Eighth-grader Ian Mills summed it up neatly: I learned about history and the Supreme Court. I learned how to make a good presentation. I learned about how to work with other people.
The United States and European allies are again escalating sanctions on Russia after the discovery of evidence that Russian troops executed civilians in a town near Kyiv.

New penalties moved even closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin, targeting two of his adult daughters. The U.S., United Kingdom and the European Union prepared other steps including an embargo against Russian coal.

Pressure in the West for new sanctions rose in recent days after videos and photographs emerged of bodies laying in the streets of Bucha after Ukrainian forces regained control from retreating Russians. Some of the victims had their hands bound and were shot in the head, and satellite images indicated they had been in the streets since mid-March, when the Russian military still occupied the town.

I made clear that Russia would pay a severe and immediate price for its atrocities in Bucha, President Joe Biden said in a tweet after the White House said he will sign an executive order banning all new investment in Russia.

Sanctions imposed since Russia invaded Ukraine in February have damaged Russias economy but failed to stop the war.

Heres a look at some of the sanctions now in place. Combined, they add up to some of the toughest penalties imposed on any nation short of military action.

LATEST MOVES

The United States on Wednesday announced sanctions targeting Putins two adult daughters  cutting off all of his close family members from the U.S. financial system and freezing any assets they might hold in the U.S. The same measures were taken against Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, the wife and children of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, former President Dmitry Medvedev and others.

Washington also acted against two of Russias largest banks, Sberbank and Alfa Bank, and the U.S. and its allies plan to ban all new investment in Russia. Earlier this week, the U.S. Treasury Department moved to block any Russian government debt payments with U.S. dollars from accounts at American financial institutions  a step designed to make it difficult for Russia to meet financial obligations.

NEXT STEPS?

In Brussels, the European Commission proposed a ban on coal imports from Russia. If adopted, it would be the first EU sanctions to target Russias critical energy industry.

The United States has already banned Russian oil and natural gas, but Europe has hesitated  it is far more dependent than the U.S. on Russian energy, and sanctions are likely to drive up costs on European consumers and businesses. Germany has long opposed a ban on Russian natural gas. So has Hungary and its president, a Putin ally who is bending to Russian demands to pay for gas imports with rubles.

The EU's foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, said Europe is paying Russia a billion euros ($1.09 billion) a day for energy, helping finance Russia's war effort and dwarfing the aid that Europe is giving Ukraine.

Europe is also considering banning Russian ships from EU ports  Russian aircraft are already barred from European airspace  and banning the export to Russia of quantum computers, advanced semiconductors and other machinery and high-tech equipment.

Some European leaders say the proposals don't go far enough. Lithuania's foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, tweeted that a coal ban, sanctions against a few banks, and barring Russian ships is not really an adequate sanctions package to the massacres that are being uncovered. A feeble response is just an invitation for more atrocities.

OLIGARCHS

Also Wednesday, the Biden administration charged a Russian oligarch with violating earlier sanctions that the U.S. imposed after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, which included barring U.S. citizens from working for or doing business with Russian media baron Konstantin Malofeyev. Officials said that Malofeyev used co-conspirators to secretly acquire media organizations across Europe in hopes of spreading pro-Russia propaganda.

A former CNBC and Fox News employee was arrested last month in London for working as a television producer for Malofeyev.

Previous sanctions had targeted other people close to Putin, including Alisher Usmanov, one of the wealthiest people in Russia, and Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov.

The Justice Department recently announced the creation of a team of federal agents and prosecutors to pursue wealthy Russians or anyone else who aids Russias invasion of Ukraine or uses cryptocurrency to help Russia evade sanctions. The team, called Task Force Kleptocapture, was set up to seize assets belonging to oligarchs.

On Monday, in the Mediterranean port of Palma de Mallorca, U.S. agents and Spains Civil Guard seized a 254-foot (78-meter) yacht owned by an oligarch and Putin ally whom the Justice Department accuses of violating laws on bank fraud, money laundering and sanctions. A boating website called Superyachtfan.com valued the ship, called Tango, at $120 million.
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LAS VEGAS (AP)  After a day of did they or didn't they speculation, Kourtney Kardashian confirmed Wednesday on Instagram that her Las Vegas wedding was just for fun and she's not legally hitched to Travis Barker.

Once upon a time in a land far, far away (Las Vegas) at 2am, after an epic night and a little tequila, a queen and her handsome king ventured out to the only open chapel with an Elvis and got married (with no license). Practice makes perfect, Kardashian wrote under photos of the two at One Love Wedding chapel.

They requested an Elvis impersonator and chapel owner Marty Frierson told The Associated Press that he drummed one up after somebody booked the gig and paid online. Frierson said he served as a witness when the small group rolled in after the Grammys on Sunday with security and a photographer of their own.

Word of the marriage spread quickly Tuesday, but no marriage license could be found. Kardashian and representatives for the Blink-182 drummer did not return emails that day seeking clarification, and the PDA-loving couple was mum until Kardashian's Instagram post.

Frierson was cagey Tuesday when he took on the media swarm.

They came and got married and they paid for it, he said about the ceremony at his small business in an old Las Vegas home a few blocks from the Clark County Marriage License Bureau. He said the ceremony cost about $600 and took about 30 minutes.

Im not showing you the paperwork, Frierson said. They came in with a white envelope. They paid.

He never laid eyes on a marriage license. A county spokesman, Dan Kulin, said Kardashian and Barker did not obtain a license in Las Vegas, but could have wed using documents obtained in any county in Nevada.

The two requested an Elvis officiant, Frierson said. They arrived in a limousine with four others. He said he and staff members were barred from recording or taking photos. The Elvis impersonator sang three songs, but Frierson said he couldnt remember which ones. He provided Kardashian with a small bouquet of red roses that she tossed for photos afterward in a driveway.

No worries, Kourt and Trav fans. Much ado in the way of wedding celebrations is planned for later, TMZ said.

Barker, 46, popped the question in October, beachside with a ring of red roses and white candles at a Montecito, California, hotel. But no wedding date had been announced. The couple's penchant for PDA has been legendary since they hooked up.

The two went Instagram official with their relationship in February 2021.

The 42-year-old Kardashian never wed the father of her three children, Scott Disick. Barker has been married twice. His first marriage, to Melissa Kennedy, lasted nine months. His last divorce, from Shanna Moakler, came in 2008. The two wed in 2004 and share two teenage children.

____

Italie reported from New York.
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NEW HAVEN  The case of Qinxuan Pan, accused of the slaying of Yale graduate student Kevin Jiang, was continued again Wednesday, allowing Pan and his attorneys to review evidence in the case.

Attorney Kevin Smith, representing Pan, said discovery had been completed in the case. With the evidence in hand, the proceedings potentially now can move along at greater speed, he said.

The case was continued to June 2.

Jiang was shot to death on Lawrence Street in the citys East Rock neighborhood Feb. 6, 2021.

Born in Seattle and raised in Chicago, Jiang served as an environmental scientist/engineering officer and tank operator in the Army and National Guard and graduated from the University of Washington before coming to Yale. He was a certified fitness trainer and ran his own studio after serving in the military.

Those who knew Jiang have described him as a person of faith and energy, including his parents, speaking during his funeral at Trinity Baptist Church in New Haven.

Jiang lived full-heartedly, enthusiastically, like a ray of sunlight, his mother, Linda Liu said. He led his friends and family to faith; he had grown as a person while serving in the military. He was a good communicator; he loved science and nature. He had taken care of her, showing his thoughtfulness, reassuring her about the future, she said.

Kevins life was short but colorful, and brought so much joy, happiness and positivity to those around him, said his mother. As a mother, I will always miss Kevin, and treasure the blessings he brought me. Although Kevin is gone from us now, Kevin is the most wonderful gift God has ever given me on Earth.

His father, Mingchen Jiang, said his son had spoken to him a lot about faith as he walked his journey in life; they grew and matured together.

I realize, now, that Kevin himself is an angel. His mission to this world is to deliver love, said Mingchen Jiang. Love is the word Kevin used most often.

Jiang became engaged to Zion Perry, also a graduate student at Yale, about a week before his slaying. Photos later emerged online appearing to show Perry and Pan together at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology dance in 2020. Perry and Pan were friends on Facebook, where she posted about the engagement.

New Haven police obtained a warrant charging Pan with Jiangs slaying in late February. The department had named him as a person of interest in the case Feb. 10.

Affidavit: The guns, cars and DNA that led police to arrest Qinxuan Pan in slaying of Yale grad student.

Pan allegedly stole a GMC Terrain on Feb. 6 and changed his cellphone number before coming to Connecticut, according to a police report from Mansfield, Mass.

North Haven police stopped Pan that evening as he drove onto railroad tracks near Sims Metal Management.

According to an affidavit from that community, town officers had received a different description for the New Haven homicide suspect, so they let Pan go.

On the day after the interaction with Pan, North Haven police were called to the Arbys at 267 Washington Ave., where employees reported finding a bag containing a firearm and ammunition, along with other items, according to the North Haven affidavit.

A preliminary analysis of the cartridge casings found at the scene of Jiangs death, conducted through the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, indicated they were associated with four other incidents of shots being fired in New Haven, including one on Osborn Street Feb. 5 and another about an hour before Jiangs death on Shepherd Street in Hamden on Feb. 6, one in January and one in December, according to an affidavit from New Haven police.

In a request for a search warrant to obtain OnStar data from the Terrain, Detective David Zaweski wrote in the New Haven affidavit that Pan had rented, and kept overnight, a different vehicle on the day of each shooting associated with the cartridge casings found at the scene of Jiangs death.

The Ruger .911 found at Arbys turned up no NIBIN connection to the cartridge casings found at the scene, according to the New Haven affidavit. Police still were searching for the firearm used in the slaying when the affidavit was written.

Fingerprints determined to match Pans were found on the Ruger, according to the New Haven affidavit. Residue consistent with gunfire was found on a yellow coat found at Arbys.

Pan, formerly a graduate student at MIT, was not arrested until May 13 in Montgomery, Ala., following a search by U.S. marshals and others.

His bail was set at $20 million on May 20 as he was arraigned on a charge of murder.

Pan subsequently filed a petition for the Connecticut Supreme Court to review his bond, arguing it was disproportionately high. Pattis Wednesday noted that they were waiting on that decision. That review, started in September, remains in progress.

Under the state constitution, defendants have the right to be released on bail upon sufficient security; the justices considered the meaning of that phrase during a Sept. 8 hearing.

During that hearing, Pattis raised the example of Peter Manfredonia, accused of two killings, kidnapping, home invasion and other crimes, in which bail initially was set at $5 million.

The Pan family wonders whether this is Yale, the shadow of Yale, cast on the criminal courts, said Pattis. Every case involving Yale seems to acquire a special gravitas.

Senior Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Sugrue argued that the court should uphold the bond, which he said took into account the totality of factors, including nature of the alleged crime, the likelihood of flight and the possibility of harm coming to the community, as well as Pans alleged resources.

The state is obligated to offer some bond to the defendant, Sugrue said, but in this case believes there is no amount that reasonably could assure he would reappear in court if released from custody.

If hes out, hes gone, said Sugrue. Hes a serious and acute flight risk.

william.lambert@hearstmediact.com
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DERBY  Police on Monday said that investigators believe the dog found shot twice last week in Derby is named Thunda.

Police said Thunda is recovering well and remains under 24-hour care by the staff at VCA Shoreline in Shelton.

He is making improvements every day, eating on his own and taking his medicine, police said. He has a long road ahead, but, according to their staff, he is a fighter.

Police said the option to foster Thunda is on a temporary hold, pending some legal matters in the criminal case against the dogs owners.

We are working diligently to move things along, police said. Thank you to everyone who has reached out offering to help.

Police said it will provide updates on Thunda as they receive new information.

Thunda was found by officers responding to a 911 call around 2 a.m. Friday for a reported injured German shepherd at Coon Hollow Park. Officers found the dog nearby.

The 911 caller  later identified as 28-year-old Stranja Perrin  and 27-year-old Anthony Singletary were found in her car with Perrins two minor children at the park, Derby Police Lt. Justin Stanko said.

Investigators determined Perrin and Singletary were the owners of the dog, despite them both denying owning a dog, Stanko said.

Surveillance footage from a nearby camera captured Perrins vehicle pull into the park about an hour before the 911 call. Officers found 10 shell casings nearby, which were consistent with ammunition Perrin had with two 9mm handguns she was legally licensed to carry, Stanko said.

He said multiple people told police Perrin and Singletary were recently experiencing homelessness and had been living in the vehicle they were found in. Perrin and Singletary were taken into custody by police. Perrins minor children were placed with family members.

The couple were arraigned Monday at Superior Court in Derby.

Perrin appeared on charges of conspiracy to commit unlawful discharge of a firearm, conspiracy to commit cruelty to animals, conspiracy to commit first-degree reckless endangerment and two counts of risk of injury to a child.

Singletary appeared on charges of criminal possession of a firearm, conspiracy to commit unlawful discharge of a firearm, conspiracy to commit cruelty to animals, conspiracy to commit first-degree reckless endangerment and two counts of risk of injury to a child.

Judge H. Gordon Hall ordered Singletary held on a $125,000 bond, while Perrins was set at $75,000. The prosecutor identified Singletary as the alleged shooter, and said at least one of Perrins children witnessed the shooting.

Stanko said neither of them had prior animal cruelty charges. The judge ruled if they post bond, they are not allowed to have any pets or domestic animals while their cases are pending. They are both expected in court again on their charges on May 12.

Shelton resident Renee Warner organized a GoFundMe campaign to help cover costs of the dogs surgery and recovery. The fundraiser was established on behalf of the Shelton Animal Shelter, which is overseeing the dogs care at this time. In an update to the fundraiser Saturday, Warner said the dog underwent surgery Friday and had to have his leg and shoulder blade amputated.

More than 300 people have donated over $14,000 to cover the dogs medical bills as of Tuesday, according to the GoFundMe.
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NEW HAVEN  It may come as no surprise that the Board of Alders, as of this week, is now on record against Russian military aggression in Ukraine, officially praying for peace and independence for Ukraine and in support of Ukrainian American residents in New Haven, many of whom are directly affected by the war.

But a resolution the alders overwhelmingly passed vote did not come without debate.

The debate centered Monday night on an amendment to more specifically point out the multi-cultural nature of world ethnic conflict.

The original resolution, drafted by local Ukrainians and introduced by Upper Westville Alder Darryl J. Brackeen Jr., says that New Haven is the proud home of a vibrant, strong Ukrainian American community rich in culture and history.

It points out that a significant number of New Havens Ukrainian community have friends and family who are in danger in their home country, says Ukraine is facing unprovoked military aggression from the Russian Federation and New Haven recognizes the horrors and the humanitarian crisis that war will bring upon the people of Ukraine.

The amendment, approved overwhelmingly but not unanimously on a voice vote, was introduced by Fair Haven Alder Sarah Miller, D-14. It adds that there are people of color in Ukraine who report discrimination in seeking to escape the conflict.

It also adds that New Haven is a sanctuary city that embraces immigrants and refugees from around the world and the Ukrainian refugee crisis is layered atop the plight of approximately 84 million other conflict refugees worldwide, who have been forcibly displaced as a result of persecution, violence, or human rights violations.

Miller told the alders the amendment addresses a couple of gaps that came up in conversations and acknowledges that there are some people in Ukraine who have experienced discrimination in a time of conflict. It also acknowledges that there are many displaced people and refugees around the world, Miller said.

Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison, D-22, spoke in support of the amendment, saying, We have to make sure that we look at all the issues that are happening, to all people.

Passing the amended resolution gives us an opportunity to recognize the fact that things arent just happening just in Ukraine and just to Ukrainians, but its happening throughout the world, Morrison said. So this statement of support I think should go forward, because you never know who is being affected, and because we know that others outside of Ukrainians are being affected.

Fair Haven Heights Alder Rosa Ferraro Santana, D-13, voted against the both the amendment and the amended resolution  and spoke out, saying she could support it.

The original resolution was involving language that was created by the Ukrainian people and the amendment was taken out of context, Santana said. It should be just the Ukrainian people.

Brackeen, who said he has many Ukrainian Americans in his district, said the resolution was authored a few weeks ago by many individuals in the Ukrainian community, more than 400 of whom attended the rally, many of whom live in New Haven.

The idea of the resolution is to offer support in this crucial time, said Brackeen, one of several people seeking the Democratic nomination for secretary of the state being vacated by incumbent Denise Merrill.

The resolution was drafted after a March 6 rally in which members of the Board of Alders, along with members of various religious faiths and the broader community, stood together on the New Haven Green in solidarity with our Ukrainian brothers and sisters to pray for peace, independence, and an end to Russian aggression, it states.

At the rally, the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag was raised on the New Haven Green as a show of support to our Ukrainian-American community, the resolution states.

The resolution states that the New Haven Board of Alders calls upon the international community, Ukrainian government and humanitarian organizations to ensure equitable access to refugee transport and other support services for all persons in Ukraine regardless of race, ethnicity, or nationality.

It also calls upon our community to consider the nations and groups with which we choose to stand in solidarity, and those about which we are silent, and to extend all available support to all peoples impacted by conflict.

It also encourages ... residents to support verified charities and organizations that are working to ease the humanitarian crises caused by Russian military aggression in Ukraine and other conflicts around the world.

mark.zaretsky@hearstmediact.com
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WASHINGTON (AP)  A sweeping overhaul of the U.S. Postal Service meant to shore up the popular but beleaguered agency's financial future and cement six-days-a-week mail delivery was signed into law Wednesday by President Joe Biden.

The legislation cleared Congress last month after fully a dozen years of discussion that took on a new sense of urgency amid widespread complaints about mail service delays. Officials had repeatedly warned that without congressional action, the Postal Service would run out of cash by 2024.

The Postal Service is central to our economy and essential to rural America, Biden said. He added that mailmen and women deliver 4 million prescriptions per day, along with letters, consumer goods and even live animals, often to parts of the country that private carriers can't or won't or aren't required to reach.

The final legislation achieved rare, bipartisan support by scrapping some of the more controversial proposals and settling on core ways to save the service. Delivering the mail is among the most popular things the government does, with 91% of Americans having a favorable opinion of the Postal Service, according to a Pew Research Center poll released in 2020.

The bill signing came the same day the Postal Service announced it plans to raise rates effective July 10. Under the proposal submitted to the Postal Regulatory Commission, the cost of a first-class Forever stamp would increase by 2 cents to 60 cents.

The Postal Service said the increase, which is less than the annual rate of inflation, will help the agency implement Postmaster General Louis DeJoys 10-year plan to stabilize agency finances.

Lawmakers from both parties attended the signing ceremony and the mood was jovial, a big improvement from Kansas Republican Sen. Jerry Moran previously saying the service was in a death spiral that was particularly hard on rural Americans.

The Postal Service Reform Act lifts budget requirements that have contributed to the agency's red ink, and spells out that mail must be delivered six days a week, except for federal holidays, natural disasters and some other situations.

Postage sales and other services were supposed to sustain the Postal Service, but it has suffered 14 straight years of losses. Growing worker compensation and benefit costs, plus steady declines in mail volume, have exacerbated losses, even as the service delivers to 1 million additional locations every year.

The new law ends a requirement that the Postal Service finance workers health care benefits ahead of time for the next 75 years  an obligation that private companies and federal agencies do not face. Biden said that rule had stretched the Postal Service's finances almost to the breaking point."

Now, future retirees will enroll in Medicare, while other health plans and the Postal Service cover only current retirees actual health care costs that arent paid for by the federal health insurance program for older people,

In recent years we saw how unfair policies forced this treasured institution to cut costs and delayed the delivery of medication, financial documents and other critical mail, Michigan Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, who helped write the legislation, said in a statement. These long overdue reforms will undo these burdensome financial requirements.

To measure the agency's progress in improving its service, the law requires it to set up an online dashboard that would be searchable by ZIP code to show how long it takes to deliver letters and packages.

Dropped from the package as it neared actual legislation were efforts to cut back mail delivery. Also set aside  for now  were other proposals that have been floated over the years to change operations, including to privatize some services.

Criticism of the Postal Service peaked in 2020, amid the COVID-19 crisis and ahead of the presidential election, as cutbacks delayed service at a time when millions of Americans were relying on mail-in ballots during the pandemic. Then-President Donald Trump acknowledged he was trying to financially pinch the service to limit its processing ability for an expected surge of mail-in ballots, which he worried could cost him the election he eventually lost.

Dominated by Trump appointees, the agencys board of governors had tapped DeJoy, a major GOP donor, as postmaster general. He proposed a 10-year plan to stabilize the services finances with steps like additional mail slowdowns, cuts in some offices hours and perhaps higher rates.

Biden said Wednesday that more needs to be done to reform the Postal Service, including investing in an electrified vehicle fleet that could save money while helping combat climate change. The House Committee on Oversight and Reform is examining a Postal Service contract to replace its huge fleet of mail-delivery trucks with a mix of gas and electric vehicles, which the Environmental Protection Agency and Democratic lawmakers argue has too few electric vehicles.

Today we enshrine into law our recognition that the Postal Service is fundamental to our economy, to our democracy, to our health and the very sense of who we are as a nation," Biden said.
A 25-year-old Connecticut woman was trying to fund her drug addiction when she committed dozens of car burglaries and was involved in an attempted grocery store theft before trying to evade authorities by smashing into their police cruisers during a pursuit through several towns over the weekend, according to officials and incident reports.

Brookfield resident Hannah Casperson is facing seven counts of assault on a police officer, three counts of conspiracy to commit assault on a police officer, and numerous motor vehicle offenses in connection with Sundays chase from Waterbury to Monroe, court records show.

She was also charged with reckless endangerment, interfering with an officer and use of drug paraphernalia in connection with an incident Friday in Wolcott.

Casperson and Thomas Crawford, 31, were suspected in a number of thefts in the Waterbury area over the past month, officials said during a press conference Monday. Police claim both were involved in 41 motor vehicle burglaries early Friday in Wolcott.

Casperson has not been charged in connection with the Wolcott car burglaries.

Casperson and Crawford are being represented by public defenders who could not be reached Tuesday for comment. They remain in custody and police said their relationship with each other is unclear.

Authorities believe the Wolcott car burglaries did not yield as much as Casperson and Crawford had hoped, so they attempted to steal from a local grocery store later Friday to fund their drug addiction.

By that time, police said they already had a description of the white Hummer Casperson had been driving and a description of Crawford.

As police said they closed in on them, Casperson fled the grocery store parking lot, leaving Crawford behind with a cart filled with meat.

Police said Crawford was arrested at the store and has been cooperating with their investigation. Police initially pursued Casperson, but ended the chase Friday because she was not wanted for a violent crime.

On Sunday morning, Waterbury police spotted the white Hummer and thought they had Casperson blocked in a dead-end street. However, Casperson smashed into the police cruiser to escape, according to police and body camera footage of the incident.

After police said she crashed into eight police cruisers and injured seven officers, Casperson was apprehended a short time later in Monroe.

Heres a timeline of how police say the case unfolded:

Friday

4-5:30 a.m., Wolcott: Police said Casperson and Crawford broke into 41 motor vehicles in the area of Wolfs Hill, Munson and Brooks Hill roads  an area near an assisted living facility and apartments for older adults. Wolcott Police Chief Edward Stephens said Casperson and Crawford werent familiar with the neighborhood and had expected to steal more from the cars.

Stephens said when Crawford was later arrested, they found a device for smashing windows and glass in his pocket. He said Crawford told investigators he did not try to open the car doors because he feared it could trigger an alarm, instead resorting to smashing the windows and rummaging around inside.

11:30 a.m., Pats IGA in Wolcott: Waterbury police informed authorities in Wolcott that the white Hummer sought in the car burglaries was spotted and headed north back into Wolcott. Cameras and a Wolcott animal control officer spotted the vehicle in the area of Pats IGA, a grocery store of Route 69, police said.

Police said Casperson fled in the Hummer when she spotted officers approaching the store. Police said Crawford, who was wearing the same coat he was seen in during the car burglaries, was arrested as he was trying to leave the store with a cart full of meat.

They werent too successful with what they got from the cars, Stephens said. Not enough to support their habit I would say, so thats why they came back into town and they were gonna go and get the meat and probably sell it.

The chief said police briefly pursued the Hummer that morning before terminating the chase.

Sunday

8:30 a.m., Rutledge Street, Waterbury: Police in Waterbury said they received a tip that the Hummer was on Rutledge Street, a dead-end road off East Main Street.

A Waterbury police officer responded, blocking off the end of Rutledge Street with his cruiser, before approaching the white Hummer on foot.

According to police and body camera footage, Casperson took off when the officer tried to open the door to the SUV. The officer pulled his gun and ordered Casperson to stop, but the video shows her smashing into his cruiser to get away.

After the incident on Rutledge, Casperson drove west on East Main Street to the Brass Mill Way intersection, where she struck another officers cruiser, police said.

Police said she then continued down Brass Mill Way and got on Interstate 84 west, and then on to Route 8 south. Police pursued her down the highway into the town of Monroe.

At some point, the officers got off of Route 8 into Monroe and ended up on Monroe Turnpike, Waterbury Police Chief Fernando Spagnolo said.

9:43 a.m., Route 111, Monroe: Police in Monroe reported on Facebook there had been a serious accident on Route 111 near Wheeler Road.

Waterbury police said Caspersons vehicle made a U-turn on Route 111, striking a number of police vehicles while trying to flee in the opposite direction. Spagnolo said the Hummer veered off of the eighth police vehicle it struck, causing Caspersons SUV to flip and crash, severing a utility pole.

Spagnolo said Casperson then tried to run away, but was apprehended a short distance away.
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NEW HAVEN  There were 86 complaints of sexual misconduct reported by Yale University from July 1-Dec. 31, 2020, the fewest number since spring semester 2017, when there were 82, according to a recently released Title IX report.

The report, issued a year later than normal, listed 26 percent of complaints as sexual assault, 39 percent sexual harassment, 12 percent intimate partner violence, 8 percent stalking and 12 percent other.

The delay in the report was related to the pandemic, according to the university.

The sexual assaults included four cases of sexual penetration without consent. Complaints may be made to the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct, to the Title IX coordinator or to Yale police.

The report notes that it differs from reporting under the federal Clery Act, which requires colleges and universities to report additional crimes that occur on or close to college campuses and buildings, including burglaries and non-sexual assaults. Yales Title IX report uses a more expansive definition of sexual assault and includes cases from a broader geographic jurisdiction than in the Clery report, it states.

Most complaints resulted in counseling, including referrals to the Sexual Harassment and Assault Response and Education Center. There were five arrests: three of people not affiliated with Yale, a Yale staff member and a post-doctoral trainee. The report also listed 34 cases in which the complainants wanted no further action taken.

Whenever possible, it is the complainant who decides whether or not to pursue a complaint, and in what venue, the report, written by Dr. Stephanie Spangler, says. In rare circumstances, such as those involving risks to the safety of individuals and/or the community, the University may take additional action independently of the wishes of an individual complainant.

In reported sexual assaults, 73 percent of both complainants and respondents were undergraduates. For sexual harassment, 59 percent of complainants were undergraduates, while 32 percent of respondents were undergrads, 21 percent were graduate or professional students and 12 percent were faculty.

In intimate partner violence, four of 10 complainants were undergrads, three were graduate or professional students. Four respondents were undergrads and three were non-Yale affiliated.

In stalking, three of seven complainants were undergrads, three were graduate or professional students. Two respondents were undergrads and two were non-Yale affiliated.

When broken down by gender, 56 of the 86 complainants were female. Twenty-nine of the respondents were male and 27 were of unknown gender.

The semi-annual reports have been issued since fall 2011 and the number of complaints began to spike in fall 2017, reaching a peak of 169 complaints in spring 2019. That semester, 52 percent of complaints were for sexual harassment and 22 percent for sexual assault.

The reduced number since then, especially in 2020, may have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, when fewer students were on campus. During the fall 2020 semester, sophomores were restricted to remote learning.

Yale spokeswoman Karen Peart said of the delay in the fall 2020 report, The Title IX Office is working to complete reports from the 2021 calendar year in the coming months and are also assessing the best way to deliver this important information to the Yale community going forward.

edward.stannard@hearstmediact.com; 203-680-9382
As the 2023 general elections draw nearer, the Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike, alongside other presidential aspirants under the platfo...

As the 2023 general elections draw nearer, the Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike, alongside other presidential aspirants under the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party met behind closed doors in Port Harcourt on Wednesday.

The former Vice President and presidential hopeful under the PDP, Atiku Abubakar, was, however, absent from the meeting.

A media aide to the Rivers state governor said those at the closed-door meeting included the Governor of Bauchi State, Senator Bala Mohammed, and Sokoto State Governor, Aminu Waziri Tambuwal.

Others present were the former Senate President, Bukola Saraki, and the former Managing Director of FSB International Bank, Dr Mohammed Hayatu-Deen.

The host, Governor Wike, while speaking to journalists after the meeting, said their interest was to ensure the consolidation of unity in the party.

Wike also expressed their interest in making Nigerians happy by developing a formidable strategy that would enable the PDP coast to victory in the 2023 presidential election.

He said, Our interest is the unity of the party. Our interest is to make Nigerians happy by making sure that by 2023, PDP takes over the reins of government because Nigerians are patiently waiting.

And I can assure you that we are going to work as a team to make Nigerians happy, Wike stated.

On his part, the leader of the delegation, Senator Bukola Saraki said their discussion centred on identifying the best available ways to ensure that all concerned party members embrace unity, as there is strength in unity as proverbially said.

Saraki stated, We are here to have a discussion and we just finished talking about the best way for us to reunite our party, bring unity among all those who are aspiring to lead this country under PDP.

We all realise the importance of this and PDP is the only option ready to redirect this country in the right direction and bring progress and provide a better future for our people.

We have been to some of the other states and today we are here with the Governor of Rivers State  a key stakeholder of this party to discuss frankly. He has given us his views and made some suggestions and we will continue to work with that as we move away from here.

But the key thing is unity; the key thing is to put the country first and put the party first, Saraki affirmed.
A former Governor of Imo State, Rochas Okorocha, has hit back at the General Overseer of Citadel Global Community Church, formerly known a...

A former Governor of Imo State, Rochas Okorocha, has hit back at the General Overseer of Citadel Global Community Church, formerly known as Latter Rain Assembly, Pastor Tunde Bakare, for saying Igbos cannot rule Nigeria, because they are under a curse.

Okorocha, who is now a senator representing Imo West, insisted that Igbos are an asset to the country and that they are not the problem of the country.

He stated this on Tuesday at his Unity House Campaign office in Abuja, when he was visited by the National Youth Leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Mr Dayo Israel.

In a viral video, Bakare said: Why should anyone in this country say the Igbo man cannot be president of Nigeria? I was at Imo State and I told them the reason why the Igbo cannot rule Nigeria and I want to remove the curse today.

However, Okorocha reacting to those comments, said: When I listened to Bakare mention that the Igbos are cursed in the cause of his preaching, I think that is an overstatement and unwarranted preaching.

I must state here categorically that Igbos are not cursed and they will never be cursed.

Okorocha admitted that although Igbos may not be good politicians, they are a great asset to this country. They are not the problem.
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) National Reconciliation and Strategy Committee (NRSC) has urged the partys National Working Committee (N...





The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) National Reconciliation and Strategy Committee (NRSC) has urged the partys National Working Committee (NWC) to adhere to the principles of equity, justice, fairness, good conscience and inclusiveness in the 2023 general elections.





Chairman of the PDP NRSC, immediate past President of the Senate, Dr Abubakar Bukola Saraki who made the request this Wednesday while submitting the committees reports also charged the party leaders to scrutinise the process in the selection of the people who will be sent to go and conduct the 2023 primary elections.





Recall that the National Reconciliation and Strategy Committee (NRSC) was created on November 23rd, 2020 after a resolution approving its Terms of Reference was passed at the 90th meeting of the National Executive Committee (NEC).





He explained that NRSC was established against the backdrop of the poor state of the party as demonstrated by the intra-party conflict in many state chapters, disillusionment with the party by many members, the Nigerian populace, and the inability to attract new members, and the loss of key stakeholders.





According to him, the committee was able to work with stakeholders in several state chapters like Borno, Ogun, Ondo, Niger and Plateau to resolve the crisis that had plagued the party for years.





Saraki said, In other states like Cross Rivers and Yobe, we have been able to work with stakeholders to rebuild the firm foundation of our party after some members defected.





And in some states, while we may not have been able to completely resolve the crises, we have been able to get contending factions to engage in dialogue and set them on a sure path to genuine reconciliation, he said.





The former president of the Senate said they discovered that the conduct of primaries to elect candidates for various offices in the 2023 general election to represent the party has been a source of great intra-party conflict and friction in the past, resulting in the PDP being severely weakened and hampering its chances of success in previous elections.





On that basis, the Saraki led committee recommended that the party leadership should at all times adhere to the principles of equity, justice, fairness, good conscience, and inclusiveness.





 The leadership should always be transparent in taking decisions such that those not favoured by the decision can at least see that they have been given a fair hearing and those whose cases prevail can see that they won on merit, therefore having to be magnanimous in victory.





We urge you, Mr Chairman, and other members of the NWC to ensure a thorough and extensive scrutiny process in the selection of the people who will be sent to go and conduct the primary elections in the various states as we prepare for the 2023 elections.





They must be people who will be fair to all and adhere strictly to democratic tenets. Sanctions should be meted out to those of them who by their actions create a crisis in any state.





In his remarks, PDP National Chairman, Iyorchia Ayu assured that the party will go through the reports meticulously and submit to the National Executive Committee (NEC).





Ayu who affirmed that the reports will strengthen the party added that it will be difficult to unite the party if the state chapters are not working together.





PDP is poised to rescue Nigeria, the All Progressives Congress (APC) administration is doing nothing when bandits in their 20s,30s are raiding communities, Nigerians should not despair, but be hopeful as the PDP is poised to rescue the country, he said.
A former Governor of Lagos State, Bola Tinubu, said on Tuesday that Nigeria is bleeding as a result of the spate of killings across the co...

A former Governor of Lagos State, Bola Tinubu, said on Tuesday that Nigeria is bleeding as a result of the spate of killings across the country.

The National Leader of the All Progressives Congress urged all and sundry to join hands in the fight against banditry in the land.

This is as Governor Nasir el-Rufai said that Nigeria is at a crossroads and needed to make a difficult decision to pick a leader, come 2023 that would take Nigeria out of its sundry challenges.

Tinubu, who was in Kaduna on a condolence visit over the terror attack on a Kaduna bound train from Abuja, which occurred on Monday, March 28, donated N50 million to assist the state government to rehabilitate and care for the victims.

The APC national leader said, We are facing the current challenges seriously and we have to do more. Nigeria bleeds on behalf of everybody.

We need to fight terrorism with all our energy and whatever we have. Its not shameful for people to be poor, but its unacceptable to accept poverty as a norm.

Its shameful to be callous, wicked and be a bully or terror to instil fear in humanity and its not acceptable.

Im here on a condolence visit to Kaduna to sympathise with the Governor and people of Kaduna and entire Nigeria. What happened to the people on the Abuja to Kaduna train on Monday for all of us.

In his response, el-Rufai commended Tinubu for cancelling his 70th-anniversary colloquium as a mark of honour for the victims of the attack.

This visit preempted my planned visit to Asiwaju to thank him for solidarity with the people of Kaduna for cancelling his colloquium the day it was to take place.

This gesture by Asiwaju is a show of powerful leadership, empathy and concern for the lives and property of Nigerians. Its unprecedented in our history in Nigeria.

The government and people of Kaduna State will never forget this gesture. We are very grateful to you for the service, sacrifice and commitment to the unity and that of our country.

We appreciate your call for people to contribute to enable us to rehabilitate the victims of this tragedy.

We are aware of your aspiration to be president of this country, we look forward to further engagement so that we can progress that aspiration.

Nigeria is at a crossroads, a critical crossroads, and we must take very difficult decisions to get the right leaders that would take us out of the multiple quagmires that we are going through, the governor said.
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Gibraltar Then & Now Book Raises Funds for Prostate Cancer

A book by Robert Santos focusing on Gibraltars landscape and streetscapes and how these have changed over the years is due to be launched in May.

The initiative supported by Gibraltar Cultural Services will raise funds for the Prostate Cancer Gibraltar Charity. The retired senior civil servant explains his original interest was piqued during his time working in the Building Control Section. Since, he has been posting photographic comparisons of different areas of Gibraltar online over the years and was inspired to write the book after support and encouragement.

This illustrated book is divided into sections covering the entire territory of Gibraltar with a complete chapter on Main Street. Another section focuses on the bygone bars, restaurants and nightclubs of the Rock which are part of our social history.

Robert has researched historical landmarks and elaborated on them to generate interest and includes curious historical facts which he has discovered during this process. The author believes some of the anecdotal content will surprise some people and amuse others, with some Yanito terms included.

The book will be available for purchase as from Wednesday 11th May from the John Mackintosh Hall Reception, and the Gibraltar National Museum priced at 20.

To pre-order a copy please contact 20075669 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
A pre-pandemic plan to bring a renowned New York bar to the French Quarter is moving forward, according to a report from the New York Times.

Back in 2019, The Dead Rabbit, located in Manhattan's Financial District, confirmed plans to open a second location at 616 Conti St., with a target date sometime in 2020. Obviously, 2020 had other plans in store, but now the new bar is slated to open in 2023, according to the Times report.

The Dead Rabbit gained world acclaim for its blend of the past and the contemporary. The drinks annual spirits industry ranking The World's 50 Best Bars listed the Dead Rabbit at No. 1 in 2016.

The New Orleans-based industry event Tales of the Cocktail gave the bar awards for both Worlds Best Cocktail bar and Worlds Best Cocktail Menu in 2015, among other honors.

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Its New Orleans expansion will occupy a three-story building adjacent to Exchange Place, the picturesque pedestrian mall, and facing the Louisiana Supreme Court. The building dates to the 1830s, according to the Historic New Orleans Collections French Quarter property survey. The property has long been vacant.

The Dead Rabbit was founded in 2013 by two Irish expats, Jack McGarry and Sean Muldoon, the Dead Rabbit was conceived as an evocative ode to drinking history (the name comes from a New York street gang of the 1800s).

The bar's ground level, dubbed the Taproom, has a floor strewn with sawdust and a specialty in Irish coffee, beer and batched cocktails; the second floor is a cocktail lounge with a drinks list that weaves a narrative through cocktail evolution.

The New Orleans location part of a national expansion for the Dead Rabbit in other cities, including Austin, Texas, the Times reported, while it will develop a sister bar called Hazel and Apple in Charleston, S.C.
Ten gunmen kidnapped Sister Suellen Tennyson from her bed in the west African nation of Burkina Faso and destroyed almost everything in the house where she lived, but left four other women unhurt, a Louisiana official for her order said Wednesday.

Tennyson, 83 was taken late Monday "from her room in her pajamas - no shoes, no glasses, no phone, no medicine," Sister Ann Lacour, U.S. congregational leader for the Marianites of Holy Cross in Covington said. Lacour provided additional details of the kidnapping a day after the AP reported it.

Lacour said Tennyson takes blood pressure medicine and she is not sure how the abducted nun would fare without it. "I do know without her glasses she'd be totally disoriented," she said in a phone interview from the order's worldwide headquarters in Lemans, France.

Two other nuns, one from Canada and one from Burkina Faso, and two young Burkinabe women who were living in the same house in Yalgo are now safely at the Kaya Diocese headquarters, even though the gunmen shot up their new truck so they couldn't use it, Lacour said. Yalgo is roughly 62 miles northeast of Kaya.

Lacour thinks Tennyson was taken because she's American, but the kidnappers have not been in touch with the order. Without Tennyson's phone, she said, they might not have the phone numbers to do so.

"Was she targeted? We don't really know that," Lacour said.

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Tennyson had been a missionary in Burkina Faso since 2014, supporting Sister Pauline Drouin, a nurse from Lake Magantic in Canada, and Sister Pascaline Tougma, a midwife from Burkina Faso, Lacour said.

The once peaceful West African nation has seen a great deal of violence linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group over the past six years. Activist Daouda Diallo has documented more than 1,000 extrajudicial killings by security forces and jihadis over that period.

Jihadi groups linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State in the Sahel, the vast expanse south of the Sahara Desert, have been taking hostages for ransom to fund operations and expand their presence. Twenty-eight foreigners have been abducted in the Sahel since 2015 and six, including two Americans, are still captive, said Heni Nsaibia, a senior researcher at the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. In addition to Tennyson, aid worker Jeffrey Woodke was kidnapped in Niger in 2016, he said.

Yalgo is in the north, near the province of Soum, where two attacks in November killed almost 70 people, and not far from the nation of Mali, where Human Rights Watch said more than 100 civilians have been killed in recent months.

Tennyson, a native of Kenner, worked in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans for many years, Archbishop Gregory Aymond said.

+3 83-year-old New Orleans nun kidnapped in West Africa by armed men, diocese says A Marianite nun and Kenner native was kidnapped in West Africa by armed men during a Monday night raid, according to the Archdiocese of New Orleans.

Associated Press reporter Sam Mednick in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, contributed to this report.
A Metairie-based renewable energy and carbon sequestration company says it has picked out sites in Louisiana and Mississippi for three solar energy projects that should generate 390 megawatts annually.

NuQuest Energy LLC said it has leased three sites total, located in southwest Louisiana and central Mississippi, for the solar power plants. The average home uses about 10.7 megawatt hours  or the number of megawatts used continuously in one hour  each year, according to the Energy Information Administration. Louisiana homes lead the nation with an average use of 14.4 megawatt hours per year.

Alex Guitart, the companys co-founder, said NuQuest has submitted paperwork for the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO, for a regulatory review. MISO is the nonprofit organization that operates the power grid across 15 U.S. states, including most of Louisiana and part of Mississippi.

Guitart said NuQuest hopes the projects, once approved by MISO, could be operation in three to five years.

After several months of advanced analytical analyses of the electrical grids in both Louisiana and Mississippi, were excited to have secured our foundational projects with large developmental capacity, Guitart said in a statement. We look forward to advancing these projects and to generate value for all parties in our local community.

NuQuest said it plans to build a portfolio of renewable energy facilities that can generate 1 gigawatt annually.

Our technology-focused approach has enabled us to select and secure sites with high probabilities of reaching operational status NuQuest co-founder Kirk Barrell said in a statement. "Our proprietary technological system leverages decades of mapping and analytics experience to pinpoint high-quality locations for renewables development.
By the time New Orleans police found the lifeless body of Milton Womack in Gentilly a decade ago, hed already agreed to a federal plea deal that his former business associate, Louis Age Jr., allegedly feared would expose how he'd bilked the government out of millions through a Medicare fraud scheme.

Womack's killing didn't derail that fraud trial. Age Jr. was convicted in 2013 of conspiracy to commit health care fraud, among other crimes, and sentenced to 15 years behind bars.

But on Tuesday, Age Jr. was back in federal court with three other defendants, facing down prosecutors who laid out what they said was a murder-for-hire plot he orchestrated in a failed effort to escape punishment for his white-collar crimes.

In opening statements delivered in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Privitera described Age Jr. as a patriarch who taught his family that fraud, corruption and ultimately violence were necessary to keep him insulated and protected from the fallout of his fraud.

Age Jr.s greed and arrogance ran so deep, Privitera said, that nothing and no one, including Milton Womack, would get in his way.

Prosecutors say he enlisted his son, Louis Age III, to help organize the killing of Womack, 60. Age III allegedly turned to Ronald Wilson Jr., who they say served as a go-between.

Wilson allegedly reached out to the Young Mafia Fellaz, or YMF, gang, and Stanton Guillory, then an 18-year-old YMF gang member, allegedly shot and killed Womack on July 27, 2012 on Verbena Street in Gentilly.

Age Jr., Age III, Wilson Jr. and Guillory are charged with a litany of offenses related to Womacks slaying, including murder for hire and conspiracy to commit murder for hire. Each could spend life in prison if convicted.

The federal trial, held in the courtroom of Judge Barry Ashe, is expected to run over the next several weeks.

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Defense attorneys for the four men said Tuesday that prosecutors will fail to prove their case.

Instead, they said, what jurors will see are witnesses motivated to lie to reduce their own criminal sentences and a lack of evidence directly tying their clients to Womacks slaying, let alone the planning of his death.

Separate attorneys are representing the four defendants, a situation that led to a quartet of opening statements on Tuesday as each raised questions about the testimony of likely witnesses and their clients' alleged culpability.

Richard Bourke, Age Jr.s defense attorney, said he expected at least seven witnesses will admit on the stand to testifying in the hopes of reducing their own sentences in exchange.

How are you going to assess the credibility of witnesses who are testifying to get a reward? he asked.

Anna Friedberg, defense attorney for Wilson, predicted that witnesses testimony will be ever changing, and that Wilson  who allegedly vouched for a partial payment from the Age family to Guillory for the hit  will never be connected in a definitive way to any money.

Nicholas Trenticosta, who represents Age III, pointed out that his client has no criminal record, and was rarely involved in his fathers health care company, South Louisiana Home Health Care, which was at the center of the Medicare fraud scheme.

And Alysson Mills, Guillorys defense attorney, said that the gun used to kill Womack was found not on her client, but in the possession of one of his friends  a witness who will testify against him in the trial.

This [case] has some big things that wont ever make sense unless theyre by someone elses design, Mills told the jury.
New Orleans police said a man they arrested last week for armed robbery and other alleged crimes had ties to the man who allegedly carjacked and dragged a woman pumping gas at Costco in February.

Police arrested Tevis J. Stanton Jr., 20, in the 1500 block of St. Philip Street on Thursday. They booked him into the New Orleans jail on four counts of armed robbery, one count of possession of crack cocaine and one count of illegal carrying a weapon while in possession of controlled substances.

Bond was set at $310,000.

Stanton wasn't booked on charges related to the Costco carjacking, a crime that sparked broad outrage after the victim spoke out about her ordeal.

But police say the suspect in that incident, Tyrese Harris, 19, worked with Stanton on a failed carjacking attempt just a few weeks earlier in the Central Business District.

On Jan. 18 at about 8:12 p.m., police allege that Stanton and Harris attempted to steal a man's vehicle in the 700 block of Howard Avenue near the traffic circle. According to police, one of the two men got into the 44-year-old man's vehicle and tried to force him out at gunpoint.

The man grabbed his own weapon, and the suspect allegedly fired at him while fleeting. The man wasn't injured. Police didn't say whether they believed Stanton or Harris was the trigger man, but both were booked on attempted armed robbery and attempted armed robbery with a firearm.

Harris was also booked with aggravated criminal damage to property, illegal use of weapons and illegal carrying of a weapon, police said. In a separate crime unrelated to the carjackingthe shooting death of a 12-year-old Derrick Cash on Jan. 3Harris was booked with second-degree murder.

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Stanton was also booked for an armed robbery on March 22 in the Carrollton neighborhood. Police say Stanton approached three men at around 8:31 p.m. in the 1200 block of Fern Street, flashing a gun in his waistband and demanding their property before fleeing in a silver 2016 Ford F-150.

"We are identifying violent offenders and targeting them with intentionality as well as purpose," Police Superintendent Shaun Ferguson said at a news conference Monday to announce the arrest in a different case.

This was not Stanton's first arrest. In August 2020, he was booked on illegal possession of stolen things and resisting an officer.

District Attorney Jason Williams refused the case in November, court records show. First Assistant Ned McGowan said there wasn't enough evidence to move forward with a prosecution.

In March, 2019, he was booked with one count of simple burglary, three counts of attempted simple burglary and one count of aggravated assault with a firearm. District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro refused those charges.
A man was taken to the hospital Tuesday night after someone attacked him near Audubon's property on Magazine Street, New Orleans police said.

The injury was reported to police at 9:22 p.m. at 6500 Magazine Street (map), which is the address for the zoo, the park and the Fly. Authorities did not clarify where the interaction happened.

Police initially said the man had been shot, but later said they determined someone "struck the victim with an object." The man hadn't been shot, police said, but they didn't give any details about the nature of his injuries.

No other details were immediately available, including the man's condition. Anyone with information is asked to call Crimestoppers at (504) 822-1111.
New Orleans police arrested a 13-year-old boy who they believe shot 14-year-old Christopher Speed Jr. to death in the 10000 block of Almonaster Avenue on Thursday.

Police did not release the suspect's identity because he is a juvenile. Working in tandem with the St. Bernard Parish Sheriffs Office to execute a warrant, NOPD arrested the teen Wednesday at a residence in Chalmette and booked him at the Juvenile Justice Intervention Center with one count of second-degree murder.

Speed was found on the ground in the 10000 block of Almonaster Avenue just before 7 a.m. Thursday, police said. He had been shot multiple times and died at the scene.

At a news conference Monday about a different case involving a teen suspect, Police Superintendent Shaun Ferguson said it is "heart-wrenching" to witness young offenders and victims caught in a cycle of violent crime.

"These kids are our future. We never, ever want to deal with our kids on this end," Ferguson said. "There are things we need to do differently as a society for addressing and engaging our youth, and it's going to take the whole community."

Anyone with information is asked to call NOPD Homicide Detective Miles Guirreri at (504) 658-5300 or Crimestoppers at (504) 822-1111.

Carlie Kollath Wells contributed to this report.
The New Orleans Planning Commission refused Wednesday to endorse Mayor LaToya Cantrells controversial proposal to legalize small apartments within single-family houses and lots, voting 6-2 against the recommendation of commission staffers.

The citys zoning laws currently prohibit converted sheds, carriage apartments and other types of secondary residences, except those historically used as separate living spaces. Most of the grandfathered accessory dwelling units, commonly known as mother-in-law suites, are in wealthier neighborhoods, according to a Planning Commission staff report.

Staff reasoned that allowing accessory units in all residential areas would be a simple way to put a dent in New Orleans' shortage of affordable rentals, estimated by the nonprofit HousingNOLA at more than 16,000 units. Staffers pointed to a trend of allowing accessory units across the country, including in Portland, Ore., where these apartments now account for more than 10% of new housing.

More short-term rentals?

A handful of residents and housing advocates agreed with the proposal from the Cantrell administration and the commission staff. But they were dwarfed by energized opponents, who said it would destroy neighborhoods and result in more short-term rentals.

Commissioner Kelly Brown said the proposal undermined single-family land use designations in New Orleans' 2010 master plan, which she said was approved after an exhaustive and inclusive process.

Its important we remain faithful to it, Brown said.

'Rent at the highest rates'

Staff recommended banning short-term rentals in accessory units. But Commissioner Robert Steeg said he feared the ban would be on paper only, given the Cantrell administrations failure to enforce short-term rental regulations. Even the accessory units dedicated to long-term tenants would do little to address the affordable housing crisis, as most would require new construction, Steeg said.

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Thats going to lead to construction costs, and thats going to lead developers - or individuals - to rent at the highest rates they can rent for, Steeg said.

Planning Commission votes are advisory, and the City Council may still choose to take up the proposal. But councli members' appetite for doing so amid intense opposition is unclear.

'Unintended consequences'

The accessory unit proposal is the second in recent months aimed at boosting affordable housing through small-scale development. The City Council in December approved new fourplex construction in most parts of New Orleans' historic core, after a heated debate in which opponents expressed many of the same concerns as they did Tuesday over accessory units.

But the fourplex measure included a minimum affordability requirement along with development incentives that small builders said would make the cost feasible. Council members later added a short-term rental ban for most new fourplex construction.

Commissioner Kathleen Lunn voted for Wednesday's accessory dwelling proposal, while acknowledging it would lead to unintended consequences involving short-term rentals. She said zoning laws throttle multifamily development to an outrageous degree; only about 11% of New Orleans' land is zoned for multifamily housing, according to a Planning Commission report.

There is no question that we need to incrementally begin to address how this city serves people who actually do live and work here, Lunn said.

EDITOR'S NOTE: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported the percentage of New Orleans land zoned for multifamily housing. The incorrect number was cited in an inaccurate Planning Commission report. A subsequent Planning Commission report cited the correct percentage, which is now reflected in this article.
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Centier Bank recently named a new officer of the bank.

Michael Schrage, CEO and chairman of the Merrillville-based family-owned bank, promoted Lauren Staten to officer, the largest privately owned financial institution in Indiana with 60 branches and 900 employees across the state.

Staten joined Centier Bank in 2015 and currently serves as branch manager at the Hobart Strack and Van Til in-store branch.

Our clients mean the world to me, Staten said. They look to me for guidance, and it is my honor to serve them. The relationships Ive cultivated here at Centier are so meaningful. Working for a company that truly treats you like family makes it easy to come to work every day.

Centier Bank Regional Sales Manager Carla Houck said Staten embodies the bank's philosophy of servant heart leadership.

I want to congratulate Lauren on her continued growth at Centier, because she is so deserving of an officers role, Houck said. I know that her dedication to her team and her clients will continue to inspire others at Centier.

Centier has branches in 11 counties across Indiana and leads Northwest Indiana in market share, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

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It's not the warmer part of the year in Northwest Indiana without iron ore freighters and other ships moving slowly off in the distance in Lake Michigan.

The Great Lakes Seaway Partnership is celebrating the start of the Great Lakes shipping season by running a photo contest. Boat enthusiasts are encouraged to submit their best photos depicting Great Lakes shipping.

Winners can take home a cash prize of up to $500, a gift package and recognition online and in social media.

Last year's winners include Adam Bjornberg's photo of the Gardno anchored outside of the Duluth ship canal, David Schauer's picture of the Paul R. Tregurtha departing from Duluth and Bjornberg's photo of "an evening arrival of the Floragracht in Duluth amid a pink horizon."

This year, the Great Lakes Partnership wants photographers to focus on "highlighting the people who make Great Lakes shipping possible  whether thats on the docks or on a ship," according to a news release.

The intention is to highlight the trade of more than 160 million metric tons a year of commercial cargo across the Great Lakes region, which is home to 107 million people and 40% of the trade between the United States and Canada. The region encompasses eight states in the United States and two provinces in Canada and would be the third-largest economy in the world with an annual gross domestic product of $5.5 trillion if it were its own country.

Shipping across the Great Lakes generates $35 billion in economic activity a year, supporting 237,868 jobs, according to the Great Lakes Seaway Partnership. It generates $14.2 billion in wages and $6.6 billion in tax revenue to federal, state and local governments.

For more information or submission guidelines, visit greatlakesseaway.org/resources/photo-contest/.

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US Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra unveiled a new push by the Biden administration Tuesday to accelerate its efforts to prevent, detect and treat long Covid.

Long Covid is associated with a host of lingering symptoms from Covid-19 involving multiple body systems. Estimates of the frequency of long-term symptoms and conditions following an acute Covid-19 infection range from 5% to 80%, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The World Health Organization's estimates range from 10% to 20%.

President Joe Biden is issuing a presidential memorandum Tuesday directing Becerra to "coordinate a new effort across the federal government to develop and issue the first-ever interagency national research action plan on Long Covid."

"HHS will lead a government-wide interagency coordinating council, which will involve experts from the Department of Defense, Veterans Administration, the Labor Department and many entities across government to coordinate both public and private sector work to advance our understanding of long Covid, and to accelerate efforts to prevent, detect and treat it," Becerra said at Tuesday's Covid response team briefing.

He continued, "In real time, we will share lessons on how to prevent, detect and treat long Covid. And this coordinated effort will help ensure our research is being directed toward the people who need care the most."

Becerra also announced other actions to deliver high-quality care for Americans experiencing long Covid, making services and support available for those individuals and advancing the nation's understanding of long Covid.

The actions will include a $20 million investment through the President's fiscal year 2023 budget to "investigate how health care systems can best organize and deliver care for people with long Covid, provide telementoring and expert consultation for primary care practices, and advance the development of multispecialty clinics to provide complex care," a fact sheet from the White House said. The effort will expand and strengthen clinics, promote provider education and bolster health insurance coverage for long Covid care.

The administration is also working to raise awareness of long Covid "as a potential cause of disability" and will ensure that people will have access to call centers that can provide information and support.

The National Research Action Plan on Long Covid, which is part of the presidential memorandum, "will advance our understanding of long Covid, foster the development of new treatments and care models, and inform services, support, and interventions for individuals experiencing long Covid." There are provisions to accelerate enrollment in the RECOVER Initiative, a $1.15 billion National Institutes of Health initiative announced last year that will conduct studies and clinical trials, among other efforts.

These moves come as bipartisan negotiators, led by GOP Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, have reached a deal on additional Covid funding, which would provide $10 billion in aid "paid for by repurposing funds" from the Covid relief package passed last year. The Senate could vote on the package as soon as this week.

The bill includes funding for vaccines and therapeutics, as well as testing capacity and research. But it notably does not include any funding for global Covid response, falling short of the initial $22.5 billion requested by the administration. It also does not replenish the program to test, treat and vaccinate the uninsured.

"We need more for our domestic response: To stay up to date on vaccines, to procure monoclonal antibody treatments and antiviral pills, to provide protection for the immunocompromised, and to sustain our testing capacity. And it is a real disappointment that there's no global funding in this bill," White House Covid-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients said during Tuesday's briefing.

Without that funding for global Covid aid, Zients warned, "We won't have resources to help get more shots in arms in countries in need. We will lack funding to provide oxygen and other life-saving supplies. And our global genomic sequencing capabilities will fall off and undermine our ability to detect any emerging variants around the world."

The US has delivered more than 500 million vaccines to 114 countries, per the White House, with 1.2 billion doses pledged to be donated abroad. Officials have warned of the need to help get those shots into arms through additional funding for assistance. It remains unclear whether and when Congress will act to increase aid for these programs. The doses for 5- to 11-year-olds will be part of the 1.2 billion vaccines the US has pledged to send abroad and will account for "100 million or more," per Zients.

Zients also announced Tuesday that the US will become the first country to donate "tens of millions of pediatric Covid-19 vaccines to low- and lower-middle income countries for free with no strings attached."

More than 20 such countries have asked the US for vaccines for children, Zients said.

"We're now ready to answer their call. It's the right thing to do. ... Getting more people vaccinated is one of the best ways to protect people here at home and around the world. Today, we're making clear that the US will continue to lead and pioneer the global effort to get both adults and children vaccinated," Zients said.

In an interview with CNN+ host Chris Wallace, Dr. Anthony Fauci said the lack of funding in the bill for global vaccine was a "big" problem.

"I'm really disappointed in that. Because what you said is absolutely correct. When you're dealing with a global pandemic, you have to have a global response. It's folly to think with a global pandemic, you can have a regional response," Fauci told Wallace.

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DAR ES SALAAM, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Tanzanian immigration authorities on Tuesday announced a week-long country-wide crackdown on illegal immigrants.

The commissioner general for the Tanzania Immigration Services Department, Anna Makakala, told a press conference in Morogoro region that the force will leave no stone unturned in detecting the aliens.

Makakala warned Tanzanians against involvement in human trafficking, saying culprits will face the full force of the law.

"Tanzanian human traffickers are hugely contributing to the rising number of illegal immigrants that enter into the country without valid travel documents," said Makakala shortly after she had inaugurated a workshop for the Tanzania Immigration Services Department.

She said the immigration authorities have secured a permit to employ 820 new immigration officials that will play a major part in cracking down on illegal immigrants in the future. 
Police departments across Northwest Indiana are taking part Thursday in a nationwide effort to combat texting and other forms of distracted driving.

"Motorists can expect to see increased roving and high-visibility patrols by deputies on high-alert for hands-free violations," according to the Connect 2 Disconnect campaign.

The second annual program is taking place during Distracted Driving Awareness Month and is designed to reduce traffic crashes and fatalities.

"According to the latest data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), distracted driving claimed the lives of 3,142 people, or more than 8% of all traffic fatalities, in the U.S. in 2020," the program said.

The additional enforcement is funded by NHTSA with grants administered by the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute.

"Were sending a clear message that driving with anything less than your full attention is dangerous and unacceptable," LaPorte County Police Capt. Derek J. Allen said.

"Distracted driving kills and is completely preventable," he said. "Its important to keep that in mind the next time you feel the need to send a text or check your email when behind the wheel."

Distracted driving is any activity that diverts attention away from safely operating a vehicle, according to program organizers. Distractions include eating, applying makeup and trends such as video blogging.

Young drivers, ages 16 to 24, have been observed using handheld electronic devices while driving at higher rates than older drivers since 2007, according to researchers at the NHTSA.

"Theres a time and a place for everything, and when youre driving isnt the right time to be recording a video or taking a selfie," ICJI Executive Director Devon McDonald said. "If your eyes are off the road, youre putting yourself and others at risk. Its like driving blindfolded."

Indiana took aim at distracted driving in 2020 when it passed the hands-free device driving law, which prohibits the use of holding a mobile device while driving, organizers said. Since then, law enforcement agencies have been working overtime to educate motorists about the law, issuing more than 6,000 hands-free citations and almost twice as many warnings last year alone.

For more information on distracted driving, visit distraction.gov, or for more information about Indianas hands-free device driving law, visit HandsFreeIndiana.com.

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VALPARAISO  A judge denied a request Wednesday morning for a mistrial in a Valparaiso murder case after the defense attorney accused prosecutors of failing to disclose threats made by one witness to another.

Porter Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Clymer did leave the door open for the alleged threats to be presented to jurors if the "rules of evidence apply."

In the motion for sanctions for violation of discovery, filed at 1:56 a.m. Wednesday, defense attorney Mark Chargualaf said a third party made him aware of the alleged threats at 2:15 p.m. Tuesday  the first day of evidence in the trial against his client, John Williams.

Chargualaf said he was told a male witness twice drove to the home of a female witness and engaged in arguments, including making the comment, "I hope you die."

He also reportedly confronted the female witness at a Valparaiso grocery store, the motion claims. The female would reportedly say she felt fear if asked, the defense said.

Chargualaf said prosecutors and police knew of these claims while preparing for the trial during the week of March 28, but he only learned of them Tuesday afternoon and through a third party.

He said he wrote an email to prosecutors Tuesday night and received a prompt response confirming the allegations, but prosecutors replied the alleged confrontations amounted to chance encounters and the female witness does not feel fear.

Chargualaf said the news impacts his ability to defend his client at trial.

Porter County Deputy Prosecutor Christopher Hammer said during a hearing on the motion Wednesday morning that the allegations amounted to "rantings" and not threats by the male witness.

He said he disclosed the information when asked and does not feel it detrimental to the case.

Porter Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Clymer said the allegations amount to hearsay since the defense was informed by a third party.

Clymer denied the request for a mistrial, saying the witnesses in question have not yet testified.

Clymer granted a request by Chargualaf to interview the male witness before he testifies and the judge said he would consider allowing testimony on the topic based on the applicable rules of evidence.

Hammer presented his own complaint Wednesday morning, saying telephone logs from the county jail show calls this week between Williams and the female witness in question. Such contact would be a violation of the order for separation of witnesses, he said.

Williams, 29, of Valparaiso, faces charges of murder, two counts of robbery resulting in serious bodily injury, two counts of robbery resulting in bodily injury, aggravated battery when assault poses a substantial risk of death, two counts of robbery and one count of battery resulting in serious bodily injury.

He is accused of planning and carrying out a violent robbery Jan. 29, 2020, in Valparaiso that resulted in the death of Travis Thompson, 36, of Valparaiso.

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CROWN POINT  A Lake Criminal Court judge ordered a man released to home detention as he continued to await trial on charges he intentionally ran over a Hammond business owner and attempted to hit a state trooper in 2020.

Javonte J. Miles, 21, has schizophrenia but was deemed competent to stand trial by two mental health professionals in 2021, attorneys said.

He has been in custody since July 2020 on charges he ran over a then-66-year-old car lot owner, attempted to carjack a driver on Interstate 80/94, rammed an Indiana State Police car and drove at a state trooper in a series of alleged crimes during a single day.

Miles jumped over an interstate wall during the confrontation with the trooper, fell 20 feet and suffered a leg injury as a result.

Judge Gina Jones granted a motion filed by Miles' public defender, Joshua Malher, to release Miles to home detention after staff at ICU Monitoring verified and approved the home where he's planning to live.

Lake County Deputy Prosecutor Judith Massa objected to Miles' release, in part because he's been hospitalized due to his mental health six times, has a history of homelessness and has lived in eight states.

Malher said Miles is being held in isolation for 23 hours a day at the Lake County Jail, and he cannot prepare an adequate defense without more access to his client.

Jones said that she understood the state's concerns but that she didn't want to continue to hold Miles in jail because of his illness.

"I will tell Mr. Miles: This is a very short leash," Jones said. "You only get one shot with me."

Jones granted Massa's request to schedule Miles' trial for the week of Oct. 24. She set a status hearing for June 20.

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INDIANAPOLIS  For more than 30 years, the family of a woman who was sexually assaulted and killed while working an overnight shift at a Merrillville hotel has lived with the heightened state of awareness that comes from knowing there is evil in this world.

On Tuesday, the family of Margaret "Peggy" Gill and two other women killed by the same man in 1989 learned his identity.

Law enforcement officials also thanked a fourth woman, who survived an attack by the man in 1990, for her assistance and said her case was critical to solving the homicides committed by the "Interstate 65 Killer," also known as "the Days Inn Killer."

Harry Edward Greenwell, who was identified as the suspect using modern DNA analysis, died from cancer Jan. 31, 2013, in Iowa at the age of 68, said Sgt. Glen Fifield, spokesman for the Indiana State Police Lowell post.

Greenwell, who was born in Kentucky, was known to travel frequently through the Midwest and had an extensive criminal history, police said. He served time in prisons in Kentucky and Iowa and escaped from custody twice in 1982.

A possible link was found in the FBI's Combined DNA Index System in 2010, but investigators did not have a specific suspect until 2019. That's when Indiana State Police requested the assistance of the FBI's Gang Response Investigative Team, which is based in Northwest Indiana.

Greenwell was identified as the killer using investigative genetic genealogy, which combines DNA analysis with traditional genealogy research and historical records, Fifield said.

The technique involves uploading a DNA profile from a crime scene to one or more genetic genealogy databases in an attempt to identify a suspect's relatives and locate the suspect within their family tree.

Authorities used this process to find a match to one of Greenwell's close family members, and subsequent testing at a state police lab determined the probability of Greenwell being the killer was 99%, Fifield said.

DNA evidence and ballistics testing have now linked Greenwell to the homicides of Vicki Heath, 41, on Feb. 21, 1987, at a Super 8 motel in Elizabethtown, Kentucky; Gill, 24, on March 3, 1989, at a Days Inn in Merrillville; and Jeanne Gilbert, 34, also March 3, 1989, at a Days Inn in Remington, Indiana. All three women were robbed, sexually assaulted and shot to death.

The fourth woman was robbed, sexually assaulted and left for dead Jan. 2, 1990, at a Days Inn in Columbus, Indiana, but she survived. She initially helped officials create a composite sketch of the suspect, and DNA in her case was later found to match DNA in the Heath and Gilbert homicides.

Investigators are continuing to look into whether Greenwell committed other crimes, because police have long suspected the Interstate 65 Killer may have been responsible for other homicides, rapes, robberies and assaults in the Midwest, Fifield said.

'This shaped my entire life'

After police announced Greenwell's identity during a news conference in Indianapolis, Gill's family said she was a good person who loved 1980s music, decorating cakes and cross-stitching. She grew up in unincorporated Merrillville, where Gill's parents, her two uncles and their families all lived next door to each other.

"She was very quiet, very easygoing," said Rene Parobek, Gill's sister. "You just don't expect this to happen to your family. And then it does."

Gill's cousin Karen Spoor, who was an 18-year-old high school senior when "Peggy" was killed, said they did everything together.

"It really got me," Spoor said. "And it still does."

Gill's mother, Anna Gill, said she was glad her daughter's killer was dead because the family would not have to experience going to his court hearings.

Another cousin, Diana Curin, was just 8 years old when Gill was killed.

"This shaped my entire life," Curin said. "This told me the world was bad."

Curin said her cousin's homicide forced her to live her life fully aware of her surroundings all the time.

When she was a teenager, she worked at a Dairy Queen across the street from Days Inn where Gill was killed. She recalled locking up at the restaurant each night and running to her car or making sure someone else was with her.

"It changes the way you look at everybody in the world," she said. "You don't trust people. You have zero trust for anybody."

Spoor said she felt the same way.

"You have to earn your trust," she said.

Families will never know why

Kim Gilbert Wright, Jeanne Gilbert's daughter, thanked those who took part in genealogy searches, including individuals who consented to allowing their DNA profiles to be added to a law enforcement data bank.

"Closure and justice may seem apparent or obvious in these cases now, but in many ways these concepts are only beginning to take shape for those of us who have led our lives and had our lives turned upside down at the hand of this killer," Gilbert Wright said.

Some may feel Greenwell's death was justice. Others may feel angry, because justice for them is seeing a killer convicted and sent to prison to think about the damage he's caused.

"In our case, we'll never know what the killer was thinking," she said. "We'll never learn any of the whys of his actions."

Gilbert Wright said she hoped all of the victims' family members can now begin the healing process knowing that the killer has been "brought out of the darkness into the light."

However, she asked them to consider Greenwell's family and friends, who also have become victims of his crimes.

"While no one would ever think to blame them for what their husband, father, brother or friend did, they will now likely feel judged in the court of public opinion for his deeds," she said. "And we must feel for them, as they likely never knew the person that he truly was, nor of the horrific acts that he was capable of."

Gilbert Wright said she and her family continue to talk about her mother in the present tense, because she's still in their hearts.

Jeanne Gilbert's last words to Gilbert Wright and Gilbert Wright's brother were, "I love you. I'll see you tomorrow."

"I didn't see her that tomorrow, but I see her every day," she said. "I see her in me. I see her in my brother. I see her in my family."

Police: 'We're going to find you'

Indiana State Police Superintendent Doug Carter said multiple generations of police officers never gave up on the case.

"The message is: You might be able to hide for a while, but we're going to find you," he said. "Even if you're not here."

It was not for lack of trying that Greenwell wasn't identified soon, he said.

Cooperation from the victims' families and technological advances created an opportunity to change the future of policing, he said.

"This technology  it gives us tremendous capacity as we look into the future," Carter said.

Herbert Stapleton, special agent in charge for the FBI's Indianapolis field office, said law enforcement understood that the families of Health, Gill and Gilbert have never forgotten the pain of their losses.

"I know that this announcement can't take away the pain that you've felt," he said. "But what we hope is that through today's information and revelation, this provides some answers that may aid you in your healing process that you go through every single day and bring you some sense of peace."

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GARY  A Lake County woman has been reported missing after police responded to an accident scene near Interstate 65 on Saturday, police said.

Gary Police officers were dispatched to a report of a suspicious vehicle on Saturday and discovered a vehicle had left I-65 and crashed below the expressway, Gary Police Lt. Dawn Westerfield said.

Indiana State Police took control of the accident scene and are investigating it as a hit-and-run, Westerfield said. State police identified the vehicle as a Chevrolet Traverse and said the accident scene was located at the 261 mile marker near the Interstate 80 overpass.

The registered owner of the vehicle told police Ariana Taylor, 23, was supposed to be the last person in possession of the vehicle, Westerfield said.

A foot search by Gary officers and a Gary K-9 was conducted, along with an air search by the Lake County Sheriff's Department helicopter, Westerfield said, but Taylor was not found.

A missing persons report was filed with the Lake County Sheriff's Department on Saturday and with the Gary Police Department on Sunday, Westerfield said.

"Officer foot searches, K-9 searches, helicopter, ATV and dive searches have been conducted with no results," Westerfield said, adding that local hospitals were contacted, also with no results.

Taylor's friends and family have organized searches for her and have circulated flyers with pictures of her. According to police, Taylor is approximately 5-foot-6 and 200 pounds, and was last seen wearing a red sweater, cut-up blue jeans and red and white Nike Air Force 1 sneakers.

Anyone who has seen Taylor or knows of her whereabouts is encouraged to contact Gary Det. Sgt. Mark Salazar at 219-881-1209, call the Crime Tip Line at 866-CRIME-GP or call 911.

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LANSING  Two were injured in a shooting following a domestic dispute Sunday, the Lansing Police Department said.

Police responded to an open 911 call, with yelling in the background, at approximately 2 p.m. Sunday. Upon arrival, two gunshot victims were located and transported to the hospital.

Police officers were able to speak with the victims and witnesses on the scene. Both victims are in stable condition.

Willie Riley, 49, of Lansing, the boyfriend of one of the victims, was taken into custody in Dixmoor. Riley was charged with two counts of attempted murder, and additional charges are pending.

Riley was transported to the Markham Courthouse for a bond hearing, where he received a $250,000 D Bond.

Lansing police and Illinois State Police Crime Scene Investigators processed the scene.

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Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte speaks during the unveiling of the China-gifted Binondo-Intramuros Bridge in Manila, the Philippines on April 5, 2022. (Xinhua/Rouelle Umali)

MANILA, April 5 (Xinhua) -- Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte led the unveiling of an iconic China-gifted bridge that connects two busy districts in Manila City on Tuesday.

"I thanked, and with gratitude, the People's Republic of China for the confidence and for being a partner in enhancing key infrastructure projects in our country," Duterte said at the unveiling ceremony.

Despite the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, Duterte said China remained devoted to connecting people and places by completing the bridge.

"In doing so, our people are given a chance to experience economic growth and enhance productivity. Our nation is working together towards greener, more sustainable, and climate change resistance infrastructure," Duterte said.

The Philippine leader hoped that "present and future generations will enjoy enhanced mobility and connectivity through the innovative physical integration."

As a modern state-of-the-art bridge connecting two busy districts in Manila City, the Binondo-Intramuros Bridge is one of the two China-gifted bridges under the "Build, Build, Build" program. With a total length of 680-meter, the project involves the construction of a four-lane 70-meter long and 21.65-meter wide basket-handle tied steel arch bridge connecting Metro Manila's busiest districts.

Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Huang Xilian said the new bridge is the 16th government-to-government project completed between China and the Philippines since Duterte came to power in 2016.

Huang said the bridge is another milestone for the synergy between China's Belt and Road Initiative and the "Build, Build, Build" program of the Duterte administration.

"For the time to come, surely more cooperation projects would be harvested, bringing more benefits to the people," Huang added. He stressed the need to "further cherish regional peace and stability, and value the hard-earned momentum of our relations" amid the turbulent global situation.

"China and the Philippines are good neighbors and close friends. From the Binondo-Intramuros Bridge, we can see our cooperation fruits and the bright future of our relations," Huang said.

Philippine Public Works Acting Secretary Roger Mercado said the bridge can cater to 30,000 motorists daily. It also has a sidewalk for pedestrians and joggers separated by safety railings and a marked lane for bikers to encourage the non-motorized mode of transport.

The new bridge that illuminates at night is expected to be a new landmark and tourism attraction for those seeking a picturesque view of Manila.

Befitting its handle steel design, Mercado said the iconic structure, dubbed "the friendship bridge," will remind the Philippines' close ties with China.

The first of the two projects, the Estrella-Pantaleon Bridge, which connects the cities of Makati and Mandaluyong, was completed in 2021. The four-lane bridge caters to 50,000 motorists daily. 

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte (C, front) talks with Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Huang Xilian (2nd L, front) during the unveiling of the China-gifted Binondo-Intramuros Bridge in Manila, the Philippines, April 5, 2022. (Xinhua/Rouelle Umali)
After four major waves of coronavirus infections, including some of the earliest known cases of the Omicron variant, the authorities in South Africa are hopeful that rising vaccination rates in the country will ease the burden on its health care system. Just over one-third of South Africas population is fully vaccinated, according to Our World in Data  a high rate for Africa, though still well below that of many developed nations.

In a precursor to Mondays announcement, Mr. Ramaphosa described a new era in South Africas response to Covid-19 in a speech last month, when he cited data showing that 60 percent of South Africans had acquired some level of immunity through vaccination, getting over an infection, or both.

South Africas government announced a state of disaster  akin to what many other countries call a state of emergency  on March 15, 2020, soon after the first known case of Covid was reported in the country. Early on, the restrictions included limits on the types of clothing and shoes  like sandals  that people could buy, a regulation intended to keep them from leaving their homes. The restrictions also included bans on the purchase of alcohol and cigarettes; violators could be arrested and fined.

Those restrictions were gradually eased, but limits on large gatherings remained, and masks were required throughout the state of disaster. Those and other remaining restrictions will now be phased out over the next 30 days. Indoor and outdoor venues that require patrons to show proof of vaccination or a negative test no more than 72 hours old will be allowed to admit up to 50 percent of capacity.

Travelers entering South Africa will still be required to show proof of vaccination or a recent negative test, and if they test positive while visiting South Africa, they will still be required to isolate for 10 days.
Writing a novel is daunting. Where to begin? And then how possibly to finish? With REFUSE TO BE DONE: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts (156 pp., Soho Press, paper, $15.95), the author and professor Matt Bell presents a generously packed guide to this undertaking that effectively balances literary thinking with actionable advice, drawn from his own experiences and those of luminaries from Francine Prose to Samuel Delany.

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Theres no one right way to read this book, Bell advises; he encourages us to roam and to take only whats useful. But he structures the book around what he calls the novels three provisional drafts: generative revision, narrative revision and polishing revision.

The abundant first chapter, outlining the basics of the exploratory initial draft, is carefully elucidated, if admittedly all about chaos. In the second and third chapters, Bell attends to structure and style, guided by two principles. The first: One should rewrite instead of revise. How to tell the difference? The presence of new typing  and the absence of merely copying and pasting. Second: One must simply refuse to be done. Where a less capable teacher might leave us wondering how, Bell holds us accountable with an exhaustive list of editing approaches, from pulling up widows to reading aloud to identifying weasel words.
Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen plans on Wednesday to warn of major consequences for the global economy as a result of Russias invasion of Ukraine, with both the conflict and global sanctions imposed in response to Russias aggression disrupting the flow of food and energy around the world.

The comments by Ms. Yellen, who will appear before a House committee on Wednesday, come as the United States and the European Union are poised to announce another round of sanctions on Russian financial institutions, government officials and state-owned enterprises as the war in Ukraine shows no sign of abating.

Russias actions represent an unacceptable affront to the rules-based, global order, and will have enormous economic repercussions in Ukraine and beyond, Ms. Yellen will say at a Financial Services Committee hearing, according to her prepared remarks.

Ms. Yellen will make clear that the United States has no intention of easing the economic pressure it is exerting on Russia through sanctions on its central bank, financial institutions and leaders. Ms. Yellen plans to emphasize that more than half of the world economy is united in the effort to impose sanctions on Russia and that the Biden administration is working to ensure that Russia does not benefit from financing available through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
A New York State judge whose home was searched by law enforcement authorities last month against the backdrop of the federal prosecution of one of his former clients killed himself on Tuesday, one of his lawyers said.

The judge, John L. Michalski, an acting justice of the State Supreme Court, was found dead at his home in Amherst, N.Y., a Buffalo suburb, shortly before noon, said the lawyer, Terrence Connors.

Its difficult to explain what a tragedy this is, said Mr. Connors, a longtime friend of Justice Michalskis, adding that it would be difficult to find a judge who was more respected in the Western New York legal community.

The Amherst police were not able to provide information about Justice Michalskis death late Tuesday. Early Wednesday, Lucian Chalfen, a spokesman for the state court system, said the police had advised officials there of Justice Michalskis death. Mr. Chalfen referred other questions to the police. Justice Michalski was named to the Court of Claims in 2006 and as an acting Supreme Court justice the same year, according to his official court biography.
In 2006, the Los Angeles makeup artist Gina Brooke designed diamond-studded mink lashes for Madonnas disco-themed Confessions tour, eventually selling similar ones for $28 a pair at Neiman Marcus. These days, she prefers a less ostentatious look for herself; her standby is Lashify, the Los Angeles-based brand founded in 2018 by Sahara Lotti, a former actress, screenwriter and DJ who holds multiple patents for her unique underlash system, which has a cult following among beauty enthusiasts. Individual clusters called Gossamers are attached under the top lids lashes near the roots, rather than teetering on top, with a mascara-like bonding glue. Its a game-changer, Brooke says of the brand. The lashes look very natural, not heavy, and you can use different sizes and shapes for a customized effect. They also stay put better than other innovations, including magnetic strips, which Brooke once tested out on a boat ride. The wind blew them right off my eyes, she says, and they ended up in my hair.

The New York City-based makeup artist Nam Vo also counts herself among Lashifys devotees, and finds that the offerings are particularly well-suited for smaller eyelids. I dont have a lot of eye real estate, so I cant handle a big lash with dramatic volume  it just looks ridiculous, she says. Vo also likes to experiment with Lilac St., a line of feathery lashes made with 100 percent premium Korean silk PBT fibers, which can be layered for subtle results. The patterns are not quite as beautiful as Lashifys, she says, but the lashes are $7 versus $20. Another affordable option is Bvcklash Beauty, a line of cruelty-free mink pairs that cost about $30 but can be reused up to 30 times.

While silk and synthetic materials are the norm, the Toronto-based Velour offers plant-fiber lashes derived from hemp, which feel remarkably soft and fluffy, and Ardell, the classic brand thats been around since 1971, now has natural fiber lashes packaged in biodegradable paper cartons for $6 in drugstores. The plethora of options is part of the thrill, says Lyons, who every now and then still likes to go Old Hollywood with a dramatic, Monroe-inspired lash. It just makes me feel a little flirtier than normal, she says.
Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Tuesday that her agency really would encourage people who are over 50 who have underlying medical conditions and those over the age of 65 to get a second booster shot.

Her remarks at a White House briefing were her clearest statement to date on who should get what for most people amounts to a fourth shot against the coronavirus.

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration authorized a second booster of Pfizer-BioNTech or Modernas vaccines for everyone over 50 and many immunocompromised people, four months after the first booster. At the time, Dr. Walensky said that the option was especially important for those over 65, as well as for those over 50 with chronic health problems, such as diabetes or obesity. Still, before Tuesdays briefing, some health experts said they were unsure whether to recommend the second booster for those groups.

I think there is confusion, said Dr. Jose Romero, Arkansass health secretary who chairs the C.D.C.s outside expert advisory committee on vaccine policy. He said leaders of some other state health departments had voiced the same reaction.
It will require, I think, several amendments in order to get across the floor, said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader. So if the majority leader tries to move forward, well have to have a discussion about a reasonable amendment process.

While Republicans have pushed for other amendments, the most politically fraught provision they hoped to put to a vote would bar the Biden administration from ending the Trump-era pandemic restrictions at the border, which have granted officials the ability to turn away migrants, including those seeking asylum.

In announcing plans on Friday to end the order in late May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cited current public health conditions and an increased availability of tools to fight Covid-19. But Republicans argued that it was contradictory for the administration to implement that policy change while asking Congress to approve more pandemic aid.

Getting that money replenished is significantly complicated by announcing in the same week that youre going to determine that Section 42 of this effort to fight this disease is no longer necessary because the disease is no longer the same kind of problem it was, said Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri. Its clearly a big issue with our members.

Multiple Democrats, including senators facing tough re-election contests in November, have said they have concerns about the decision to roll back the policy, given that it is expected to draw thousands more migrants to the southwestern border, where stations are already backed up and overcrowded. On Tuesday, Senator Jon Tester of Montana became the latest Democrat to ask the administration to provide a comprehensive plan on how it will address the increased strain on our immigration system and increased security needs.

Some of those Democrats, including Senators Mark Kelly of Arizona and Raphael Warnock of Georgia, declined to say whether they would support a Republican amendment, given that text has not been released. But if even one Democrat were to back it, the amendment could pass the evenly divided Senate. That would most likely kill the funding package in the House, where most Democrats have cheered the Biden administrations decision to end the immigration rule.

Democrats in both chambers have also grumbled over the decision to jettison $5 billion for global vaccination efforts, which was removed from the funding package after senators could not agree on how to pay for it. Republicans refused to back any new money for responding to the pandemic, so negotiators had to agree on repurposing funds Congress already approved in previous legislation.
WASHINGTON  For a few hours on Tuesday on Capitol Hill, attention turned briefly from the issues of the day  coronavirus aid, the war in Ukraine and the first Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court  to an urgent question.

Have you seen the Capitol fox? a reporter yelled at Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, as he departed a televised news conference.

It was around that time that uniformed animal control officers pulled up outside the Capitol in a white van, armed with a net, a catchpole and a cage, in search of a wild fox  or foxes  that had been spotted on the grounds. They were responding to multiple reports of fox sightings around the seat of American government, where lawmakers, staff members and reporters had been attacked  roughly six of them bitten, according to the Capitol Police  by what appeared to be a red fox that had become something of a celebrity.

Fox News. Red. Aggressive. Roaming the Capitol, read the Twitter bio of a user calling itself Capitol Fox.
Representatives Joaquin Castro of Texas, Adam Schiff of California and Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida each said they tested positive for the coronavirus on Tuesday, adding to a string of recent cases of prominent Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the White House.

The three House members each said on Twitter that they were fully vaccinated and boosted.

Ms. Wasserman Schultz, the former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee and a breast cancer survivor, said she was experiencing manageable symptoms.

Mr. Schiff, who is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and rose to national prominence as the lead manager of Donald Trumps first impeachment, is feeling fine, he said.

Mr. Castro, a former chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus who also was an impeachment manager in 2021, reported only mild symptoms.
The first time Sun Ra and his Arkestra played Carnegie Hall, in April 1968, they were shrouded in darkness for most of the show. The critic John S. Wilson, reviewing for The New York Times, was flummoxed. Wilson considered himself a Sun Ra fan, but he couldnt fathom why, on the countrys most prestigious stage, the cosmic keyboardist, bandleader and philosopher was keeping his ensembles wondrous array of odd instruments and colorful costumes out of view.

The messages in Ras music, and his riddle-like public statements, couldve helped Wilson understand. On this planet, it seems, it has been very difficult for me to do and be of the possible things, Ra said in an interview for DownBeat magazine in 1970. As I look at the world today and its events and the harvest of possible things, I like the idea of the impossible more and more. Perhaps the most appealing impossibility, for Ra, was to escape  to disappear.

The Arkestra returned to Carnegie Hall in February, almost three decades after Ras death, to help kick-start the halls first-ever Afrofuturism festival, a series of concerts on its major stages, with satellite events held in smaller venues across New York, around the country and online. Those programs included screenings of sci-fi films made by Black directors, comics lectures and panels on social theory.
KIEV/MOSCOW, April 5 (Xinhua) -- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday visited the town of Bucha outside Kiev, where hundreds of murdered civilians were allegedly found after Russian forces withdrew, the Ukrinform news agency reported.

"It is very important for us that the press is here, the journalists -- this is the most important thing. We really want you to show the world what was happening here, what the Russian forces were doing, what the Russian Federation was doing in peaceful Ukraine," Zelensky told reporters at the site.

At least 280 people, including children, were found dead in Bucha, some 28 km northwest of Kiev after the Ukrainian army retook control of the town from the Russian military.

Zelensky earlier called the killings of civilians in Bucha a "war crime".

The Russian Defense Ministry on Sunday refuted Kiev's accusation of alleged killing of civilians in the settlement of Bucha in Ukraine's Kiev region.

"All photographs and video materials published by the Kiev regime, allegedly evidencing some kind of 'crimes' committed by Russian military personnel in the city of Bucha, Kiev region, are another provocation," the ministry said in a statement.

It said that during the time the settlement was under control of the Russian forces, not a single local resident suffered from any violent actions, adding that "all Russian units completely withdrew from Bucha on March 30."

Produced by Xinhua Global Service
LONDON  Ed Sheeran did not steal from another songwriter when he wrote his 2017 megahit Shape of You, according to a highly anticipated court ruling here on Wednesday.

Justice Zacaroli, the judge overseeing the case, said Mr. Sheeran neither deliberately nor subconsciously copied the track Oh Why, by the British songwriter Sami Chokri, who records as Sami Switch.

There was no more than speculative evidence that Mr. Sheeran had even ever heard Oh Why, Justice Zacaroli added, dismissing Mr. Chokris claim of copyright infringement.

The plagiarism case was only the latest involving a prominent songwriter, but recording industry executives have been watching the case closely, because of its potential to bolster other claims. Mr. Sheeran still faces a pending trial in New York over another of his hits, Thinking Out Loud, which won song of the year at the 2016 Grammys; some of the owners of the rights to Marvin Gayes song Lets Get It On accuse Mr. Sheeran of copying it.
Local and federal leaders have recently taken a variety of measures to protect and promote clubbing. Last year, Germanys Parliament changed zoning rules to reclassify clubs as equal to concert halls and better protect them from encroaching gentrification. The Free Democrats, a pro-business party that is a member of the governing coalition, has also backed an initiative to have techno music declared an item of intangible heritage by UNESCO. Politicians in several cities, including Berlin and Leipzig, have moved to protect clubs on a local level.

But MOMEM appears to be the first time a German municipality has financed the construction of an institution of this kind. Housed in Frankfurts former Childrens Museum, MOMEM is the newest addition to the citys famous Museumsufer, a string of high-profile cultural institutions near the River Main that include the Stadel Museum and the house where Goethe was born. Aside from providing the location free of charge, the city has cofinanced the project with a starting loan of 500,000 euros, around $550,000, and allowed the museum to hold its opening party in the Paulskirche, one of the countrys most historically significant churches.

Ina Hartwig, the citys head of cultural affairs, said in an email that the city had supported MOMEM in the hope it would be a cultural magnet that would draw international visitors to Frankfurt.

For its opening exhibition, MOMEM is dedicating its entire space to an exhibition about Sven Vath, one of Germanys best-known D.J.s. Curated by Tobias Rehberger, an artist who won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2009, the exhibition includes records from Vaths collection, virtual-reality recordings of his D.J. sets and dangling headphones on which visitors can listen to his original music. One area features a D.J. booth  set up as specified in Vaths tour rider  at which visitors can play records of their choosing.
Tokyo Vice arrives on HBO Max wrapped in layers of nostalgia, beginning with its title, which sounds like a come-on from Cinemaxs late-night heyday. Its a reasonably tasty hand roll of yakuza drama and turn-of-the-millennium American coming-of-age tale, and it is generous with the condiments that combination promises: full-body tattoos and missing fingers, point-and-shoot cameras and bonding over the Backstreet Boys.

It also indulges in a full measure of Western fetishizing of Japanese cool and the notion of Tokyo as the worlds most stylish den of sin, in a way that occasionally recalls the movie Lost in Translation, which came out around the time the series is set. Hostess and host clubs, love hotels, picturesque alleys around the corner from shimmering seas of neon  you know the drill.

And like Lost in Translation, with its voluptuous, melancholy romanticism, Tokyo Vice finesses its exoticism by asserting a distinctive style  in this case the moody, atmospheric naturalism of Michael Mann, who directed the pilot (one of three episodes premiering on Thursday) and helped set the look and rhythms of the series.
MESSY ROOTS: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American, by Laura Gao. (Balzer + Bray, cloth, $22.99; paper, $14.99.) The author-illustrator Gao traces her childhood move from Wuhan, China, to Coppell, Texas, and describes her adolescence in the United States. This funny debut graphic memoir grapples with queerness, anti-Asian racism and self-discovery as a diaspora kid.

KEEPING TWO, by Jordan Crane. (Fantagraphics, $29.99.) When his girlfriend is late coming home from running errands, a man is struck by his fear of losing her. He sets out to find her, setting off an elaborate and emotionally charged chain of events in Cranes beautifully rendered nighttime shadows of suburbia.

HAKIMS ODYSSEY: Book 2: From Turkey to Greece, by Fabien Toulme. Translated by Hannah Chute. (Graphic Mundi, $29.95.) In this second volume of Toulmes gut-wrenching series, Hakim and his son are separated from their family in Istanbul and are forced to embark on a perilous journey toward France by boat.

TWO HEADS: A Graphic Exploration of How Our Brains Work With Other Brains, by Uta Frith, Chris Frith and Alex Frith. Illustrated by Daniel Locke. (Scribner, $30.) Two neuroscientists, a childrens book author and a graphic novelist team up to consider the mental benefits of collaboration.
The asset freezes on the additional banks arent nothing, but this isnt the most significant tranche weve seen to date, said Daniel Tannebaum, a partner at Oliver Wyman who advises banks on sanctions.

Other American agencies are joining the effort to exert pressure on Russia.

In a news conference on Wednesday, officials from the Justice Department and the F.B.I. also announced a series of actions and criminal charges against Russians, including the takedown of a Russian marketplace on the dark web and a botnet, or a network of hijacked devices infected with malware, that is controlled by the countrys military intelligence agency.

Justice Department officials also celebrated the seizing of the Tango, a superyacht owned by the Russian oligarch Viktor F. Vekselberg, and charged a Russian banker, Konstantin Malofeev, with conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions. Mr. Malofeev is one of Russias most influential magnates and among the most prominent conservatives in the countrys Kremlin-allied elite. (The indictment renders his surname as Malofeyev.)

At the hearing, Ms. Yellen told lawmakers that she believed Russia should be further isolated from the geopolitical system, including being shut out of international gatherings such as the Group of 20 meetings this year, and should be denounced at this months meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. She added that the United States might not participate in some G20 meetings that are being held in Indonesia this year if Russians attended.

Ms. Yellen, whose department has been developing many of the punitive economic measures, rebutted criticism that the penalties leveled so far had not been effective, in part because there are some exceptions to allow Russia to sell energy.

Unfortunately, many of our European partners remain heavily dependent on Russian natural gas, as well as oil, and they are committed to making the transition away from that dependence as rapidly as possible, Ms. Yellen said. The Treasury secretary downplayed the rebound of Russias currency, the ruble, which cratered after the sanctions were imposed in February but has since regained its value. Ms. Yellen said that the rubles apparent recovery was the result of currency controls that Russia had put in place and that its exchange rate did not reflect its true value.

The Russian economy is really reeling from the sanctions that we put in place, Ms. Yellen said, adding, You shouldnt really infer anything from the value of the currency.
ELURU, India  When her baby started struggling to breathe, Stella Praveen had a terrible feeling that something was gravely wrong with her 14-month-old daughter, Ellen.

She ran barefoot to a nearby clinic, but the doctors there said the child needed to see a specialist right away. Without an ambulance, she jumped on the back of a motorcycle and rode 35 miles to a childrens hospital in another town, where Ellen remained in intensive care for 12 days.

Two weeks later, Ms. Praveen learned that her daughter, who had never been able to lift her neck nor roll over, was suffering from spinal muscular atrophy, a rare condition often fatal by age 2.

We had not even heard of this disease, Ms. Praveen said as tears rolled down her face. She was misdiagnosed many times.
European leaders, seeking to punish Russia for reports of atrocities carried out in Ukraine, on Thursday approved a ban on Russian coal, the imported energy source that would be the easiest to replace.

Initially expected to arrive on Wednesday but delayed by extended deliberations among European Union officials, the latest round of sanctions from the bloc included a plan for cutting off Russian coal over four months. The original proposal had suggested a shorter, three-month withdrawal.

The slight slowdown in the decision-making process reflected the challenges of reaching agreement among all 27 member nations on the penalties, particularly given that some countries in the bloc are more reliant on Russian energy than others. Sanctions need to be approved by all member states.

And there were concerns that cutting off coal supplies could cause more harm to the European Union than to Russia. Though the European Union depends on Russian coal, the bloc could replace it more easily with imports from other countries than it could replace natural gas and oil. But banning coal from Russia could send energy prices soaring for European consumers, given the existing shortages in the bloc, according to Rystad Energy, a consulting firm. Carlos Torres Diaz, a senior vice president at Rystad, called the potential sanctions a double-edged sword.
Russias finance ministry said on Wednesday that it had used rubles to pay about $650 million in dollar-denominated debt obligations after the U.S. government blocked access to dollars held in American banks. The move pushed the country closer to a default.

Credit rating agencies have indicated that payments in a currency different from the one the debt was sold in would count as a default once the grace period expired. Russias debt payments that were due on Monday have a 30-day grace period and had no provision for repayment in any currency other than dollars. It would be Russias first default on foreign currency debt in more than a century.

On Monday, the U.S. Treasury Department tightened its restrictions on Russian financial transactions and said it had blocked Russia from making debt payments using dollars held in American banks. The department said it wanted to force Russia to either deplete the foreign currency reserves it has in the country or spend dollars from new revenue to avoid a default.

Last week, Russia bought back in rubles three-quarters of the bond that matured on Monday, which was worth about $2 billion. But it said $552 million, plus the final interest payment, still needed to be paid. A coupon payment for a different bond was also due on Monday.
In a statement, a C.M.S. spokeswoman, Beth Lynk, said in February that coverage criteria could be re-evaluated for subsequent monoclonal antibodies. C.M.S. intends to be nimble and respond to new evidence as it is made available  especially related to the clinical benefit of future therapeutics, she said.

Mr. Johns, who said that he recently attended three meetings with C.M.S. officials, including one with the agencys administrator, indicated in the interview that the association wouldnt be satisfied if Medicares restrictions applied only to Aduhelm, saying, We absolutely believe there is sufficient evidence to provide coverage for the first approved treatment.

Advocacy groups efforts have gotten some lawmakers attention.

Recently, a bipartisan group of 40 House members wrote asking C.M.S. to provide broad coverage.

Earlier, 78 House Republicans sent a letter criticizing C.M.S.s proposal, quoting the Alzheimers Association and UsAgainstAlzheimers. Both advocacy groups were described on Senator Susan Collinss website as supporting a letter she and another Republican, Senator Shelley Moore Capito, wrote.

Some lawmakers, including Democrats, have tweeted a version of the associations language.

But other lawmakers praised Medicares proposal, including Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney and Frank Pallone, Democrats who chair committees investigating the F.D.A.s approval of Aduhelm.

Mr. Johns said he didnt know of any lawmakers who had switched from supporting to opposing Medicares proposal. But he said the associations congressional meetings have had positive outcomes, even for people who might still have a different opinion. There is at least a different level of understanding.

He declined to provide the number of tweets, letters or other measures of the campaigns reach, saying: There are those who are working against access. We are not inclined to share details of our tactical approaches with them. Our activities will be measured by outcomes that grant those with Alzheimers disease access to current and future F.D.A.-approved treatments without unnecessary barriers.
Mr. Ray compared himself to the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius, according to testimony, and described an approach to life called Quest for Potential. Former students said he regaled them with dramatic stories about his supposed military exploits and connections to law enforcement.

In Mr. Rays telling, he was a patriot with powerful enemies, several witnesses said, someone unjustly imprisoned after exposing corruption by his onetime friend, Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner. Several former followers said Mr. Ray spoke often about Mr. Kerik and others who he believed were out to sabotage him and cause his downfall.

Prosecutors said Mr. Ray psychologically manipulated his victims while living with them in New York, North Carolina and New Jersey, controlling where they went, to whom they spoke, what they ate and when they slept.

He accused his followers of damaging his property and poisoning him, according to evidence from the government. Witnesses testified that he extracted false confessions from them during hourslong interrogations, then used those admissions as leverage to demand hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation for imagined infractions.

Mr. Ray threatened to dismember one student while standing over him holding a knife, prosecutors said, and threatened to shatter anothers skull with a hammer. He was also accused of forcing a young woman into prostitution. Years later, she said, he tightened a plastic bag over her head while she fought for breath. About six months after that, she fled New York and Mr. Ray.

He used the threatening displays of violence both to create fear and maintain control over his victims, a prosecutor, Mollie Bracewell, said during her closing statement to the jury. His victims would be too terrified to say no to his demands.

Defense lawyers argued that Mr. Ray had become caught up in a group delusion created by his daughters friends and roommates, some of whom suffered from mental illness. Those young people, the defense said, embellished some of Mr. Rays tales of intrigue about Mr. Kerik and other topics, creating a fantastic conspiracy targeting Mr. Ray and leading him to collect confessions as evidence.
A woman steps out of a booth at London Book Fair in London, Britain, April 5, 2022. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

LONDON, April 5 (Xinhua) -- The first in-person London Book Fair, one of the world's biggest publishing trade fairs, kicked off here on Tuesday after suspensions due to the COVID-19 pandemic since 2019.

The Fair, which was launched in 1971, is set to run until Thursday with more than 900 exhibitors.

The event was canceled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and was offered in virtual format last year.

"It makes a big difference to see people as you don't get quite the same buzz in a Zoom meeting. This will lead to far more business," said children's publisher Janetta Otter-Barry.

"Publishing is a creative industry and you thrive off learning from other people. We're excited to get back and network with writers and publishers," said Jane Rowland from the publisher Troubador.

Guo Guang, general manager of China Youth Press International Ltd., told Xinhua that he has noticed a growing international demand for books on Chinese art, history and modern-day development.

This year, more than 60 Chinese publishers participated in the event. 

A man reads a book at a booth at London Book Fair in London, Britain, April 5, 2022. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

A man talks at a booth of Chinese books at London Book Fair in London, Britain, April 5, 2022. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

A man walks past a booth at London Book Fair in London, Britain, April 5, 2022. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

People talk at a booth of Chinese books at London Book Fair in London, Britain, April 5, 2022. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

Photo taken on April 5, 2022 shows a scene of London Book Fair in London, Britain. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

Photo taken on April 5, 2022 shows a scene of London Book Fair in London, Britain. (Xinhua/Li Ying)
Gun violence hit historic lows in 2018 and 2019. Even with recent increases, rates of shootings, felony assaults and overall major crimes are similar to or below the levels of the late 2000s and early 2010s. There have been nine fewer murders this year compared with the same period last year.

This years first three months have also seen rises in crimes like burglaries, robberies and grand larcenies compared to the same periods in 2020 and 2021, though experts warn against short-term comparisons, particularly during the statistic-skewing pandemic.

New York isnt the only city struggling to check crime amid the pandemic. In Houston, at least 473 homicides were recorded last year; New York saw only 15 more, with nearly four times the total population. And just 90 minutes south, Philadelphia saw 559 murders in 2021, in a city with just 1.5 million residents.

But fresh anxieties have driven warnings about a return to New Yorks bad old days, when there were many years with more than 2,000 murders. To some, the resemblance between the periods lies not in the crime or the data, but in the coverage.

It reminds me of the 1990s, in the sense that every incident of violence becomes a major news story, said Jeffrey Butts, director of the research and evaluation center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Some of these things are just shocking, he said. But its also important to remember that these things have always happened, and still been fairly infrequent incidents. But they stay with you for so long and stick in your memory.

Some types of crime have risen significantly since the pandemic began.

Shootings are twice as high as in the years preceding the pandemic, and the burden falls primarily on Black and Latino neighborhoods. More than 1,800 shootings were reported annually in the past two years after dropping under 900 in 2018. Attacks against Asian New Yorkers have spiked, with over 130 hate-crime complaints filed to the police last year, after just one reported in 2019.
But the advertisement experiment, the apparent effectiveness of just highlighting Trumps pro-vaccine rhetoric to receptive audiences, is an example of a different kind of creativity. Republican vaccine skepticism was hardly monolithic: Most Republicans got the vaccines, many prominent conservatives  politicians, Fox News figures, more  urged people to take them, and plenty of figures on the right insisted they were pro-vaccine, anti-mandate. All this could have been material for more Republican-friendly and therefore more persuasive forms of advertisement and outreach than what the Biden administration, with its mandates-and-misinformation focus, ultimately delivered.

Or so I tend to think. But in the end, its Republicans themselves  officeholders, media personalities, Trump  who had the best opportunity to do outreach to their own vaccine-hesitant supporters, to cut the ads and hold the events and otherwise break down the more understandable and sincerely motivated forms of skepticism. And so its within conservatism that the failure of the past year was the clearest.

The best way to understand that failure is to connect it to the things that conservatives got right, or partly right, during the course of 2020 and 2021. In particular, as we look back over the pandemic era, the right-wing doubts about the various mitigation strategies  mask mandates, school closures, lockdowns, social distancing  now have a certain amount of data to support them.

For instance, there was a lot of talk throughout 2020 about how quick-to-reopen red states were killing their residents while blue states were protecting them. But as my colleague David Leonhardt has pointed out, by the end of Covids first year in the U.S., the virus had swept across the country, and there was no significant partisan divide in deaths. More recently, as Omicron swept through the country, he noted that it was hard to discern a clear difference in infection rates between liberal and conservative counties, even though liberal areas were still implementing more mitigation measures. Or to step outside the United States: A study published last month in The Lancet looking at excess death rates worldwide in the Covid era found that two European countries often critiqued for being too lax relative to their neighbors, Sweden and Britain, didnt have notably worse outcomes relative to their peers.

These trends are suggestive; they dont mean that all nonpharmaceutical interventions were in vain. But they do imply that they were often oversold, their capital-S Scientific basis emphasized at the expense of reasonable doubts. Combine this reality with the manifest harms of some interventions, school shutdowns especially, and you get the fact pattern that made a figure like Ron DeSantis into a conservative folk hero for resisting many of these measures.
Thats the approach organizers took last year in Bessemer, Ala., where Amazon workers overwhelmingly rejected a vote to join a national retail union founded in 1937. (After concluding that Amazon violated election labor laws, the National Labor Relations Board mandated a revote that is still in progress.)

The A.L.U., however, is completely independent. It was started by Christian Smalls, a former Amazon employee, and his co-worker Derrick Palmer. When Smalls planned a walkout over the warehouses safety conditions at the beginning of the pandemic, the company fired him and accidentally leaked a PR strategy to smear him as not smart, or articulate. After he was forced out, Smalls, Palmer and a group of colleagues spent $120,000 that they raised through GoFundMe on the union effort.

In addition to striking out on their own, A.L.U. leaders decided to buck traditional organizing methods. Professional union strategists, such as Jane McAlevey, often argue that successful union campaigns require visits to workers homes so that conversations can be had without employer supervision. They also stress the need to persuade a supermajority of workers  typically 70 percent or more  to sign authorization cards, which often function as a preliminary statement of interest in union membership before an official election.

The A.L.U., on the other hand, filed for an election with authorization cards from just 30 percent of eligible workers, the legal minimum. And instead of doing house calls, Smalls, Palmer and their fellow organizers built bonfires at a bus stop outside the warehouse to warm colleagues waiting to go home, made TikTok videos to reach workers across the city and held barbecues with signs that read Free Weed and Food.

This is an astounding result, John Logan, a professor of labor studies at San Francisco State University, told Vice. Amazon is the most important company in the global economy and its the most fearsome anti-union company in terms of its wealth, sophistication, and its efforts to keep unions out. With A.L.U., it also does seem to turn all of the conventional organizing wisdom on its head. They did it without a huge union or experienced organizers.
Time to hold industry responsible. And time for government to allocate sufficient funding to end a preventable disease affecting our most vulnerable citizens  our children.

Anita Weinberg

Chicago

The writer is a clinical professor of law and social justice, Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

To the Editor:

How has my familys exposure to lead paint affected our lives? Did it lead to my being tossed out of elementary school and my lifelong struggle with A.D.D.? While my wife and I had the lead pipes replaced before moving into our home 55 years ago, the two of us stripped most of the lead paint from its interior while our two sons were infants. What effect did this have on the four of us?

What can I do about this? The obvious answer is to pressure elected officials to pass legislation that prevents insurance companies from shielding themselves from liability in lead-poisoning cases and to prohibit building owners and real estate brokers from selling and renting properties that havent proven to be lead-free.

John Casson

Brooklyn

To the Editor:

Thank you for drawing attention to the continuing catastrophe of lead poisoning. If Black kids lives really mattered, and of course they do, we as a society would spend the money to abate the lead-based paint in all the housing built before 1978.
Delivering justice  collecting the evidence, securing an indictment, holding a fair trial  is hard, time-consuming and expensive. As such, few instances of war crimes lead to punishment. Though the I.C.C. can initiate prosecution on any act of genocide, crime against humanity or war crime on its own, a charge of the crime of aggression  the one most applicable to Mr. Putin and his lieutenants  would have to be initiated by the United Nations Security Council, where it would face a certain Russian veto. In addition, Russia does not recognize the I.C.C. and would not surrender suspects.

Ukraine also is not party to the treaty that established the court but has allowed it jurisdiction over crimes committed on Ukrainian soil. The United States, for its part, has its own history of hostility to the I.C.C., and when accusing Mr. Putin of war crimes, Mr. Biden did not make clear what forum should be responsible for prosecution.

Yet none of these hurdles should preclude a search for justice. Even if the process is difficult and stretches into months and years, it is important that history be left a forensic, credible, verified and judicially processed record of the specific crimes in Ukraine. Those responsible should be named, their actions specified, and if at all possible, the guilty should be locked away. The very fact that Russia is arguing that the atrocities were all concocted requires a detailed and incontrovertible judicial response.

The Biden administration and its allies have done an admirable job of puncturing the Kremlins propaganda with accurate intelligence. An authoritative record of war crimes would serve the same purpose for the future.

It would be good for the Biden administration to find a way to cooperate with the I.C.C. in collecting evidence, even if it is precluded by law from helping to finance the effort. There are other options: A special tribunal could be established without a U.N. endorsement, and several nations, including the United States, could claim universal jurisdiction and hold their own trials. But too many investigations would dilute the public impact of the legal process, and no tribunal carries the authority or mandate of the I.C.C.

However it is done, seeking justice against Mr. Putin and others responsible for war crimes in Ukraine is a goal for the longer term. Russia is not retreating. It is repositioning its forces for an assault in the east. And Russias participation in sputtering peace talks is looking increasingly like a ploy. The horrors of Bucha have prompted talk of offering Ukraine deadlier weapons and imposing yet more sanctions. These must be the focus of the Wests efforts to help Ukraine.

But it is also imperative to make sure that the horrific evidence of criminal atrocities on display in Bucha and so many other places is promptly collected while it is still there and that witnesses are questioned while their memories are still raw. Posterity must know what really happened. Justice must be given a chance.
The F.D.A. had initially approved the use of mifepristone, the first of a two-pill regimen to terminate a pregnancy, in 2000, but required it to be provided in person. As the coronavirus pandemic pushed up demand for telemedicine, and in the face of a lawsuit from medical groups, the agency lifted a ban on obtaining the pills through a remote appointment with a doctor. It authorizes only a limited group of providers to prescribe the pills  which are taken 24 to 48 hours apart  and allows the medication to be used only in pregnancies up to 10 weeks.

In January, Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion advocacy group that publishes an annual playbook for like-minded legislators, declared legislation against medication abortion as the first among its most pressing priorities for 2022.

Already, 19 states prohibit pills from being prescribed by telemedicine or delivered through the mail. Nine additional states are proposing to do the same.

The shift in priorities reflects the change in how most abortions are carried out. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, 54 percent of abortions in 2020 were by pills.

About half the states are expected to outlaw abortion if the Supreme Court overturns or weakens Roe v. Wade, and bans on abortion apply to medication and surgical abortion alike. On Tuesday, the Oklahoma Legislature passed what could become the nations most restrictive law, an outright ban on abortion except to save the life of a mother suffering a physical disorder or illness. Abortion providers who violated the law would risk a 10-year prison sentence and a $100,000 fine.

Telemedicine requires doctors to follow the law of where the patient is, so doctors in other states cannot prescribe or provide pills to women in any state that has a ban.

Many of the new bills layer criminal penalties on top of the existing prohibitions, on the assumption that women will procure the pills illegally.
In a region still shaken by the murder of Mr. Floyd, as well as the police killing of Daunte Wright, a Black man, in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center last year, the killing of Mr. Locke reopened wounds in the community that were still raw.

Mr. Lockes killing also brought renewed scrutiny to a department that is still depleted from the exodus of hundreds of officers in the aftermath of Mr. Floyds murder, and one that is still struggling to enact reforms and rebuild trust with the community.

During the investigation of the raid, Mark Hanneman, the officer who killed Mr. Locke, told investigators that when he saw Mr. Lockes gun, he feared for his life, and that he had acted quickly because he felt his life was in jeopardy. Mr. Hanneman, 34, was placed on administrative duty after the shooting but has since returned to his regular job, according to the Police Department.

Mr. Ellison, while stressing that the law did not support criminal charges in the case, used the news conference on Wednesday to push for more legislation to overhaul policing, and he expressed exasperation at the slow pace of change, especially in the wake of Mr. Floyds death.

The problems involving policing and communities of color in Minneapolis are longstanding, and everyone knows it, yet it feels like nothing is ever done about it, he said.

He urged residents who have been pushing for police reform not to let up.

This is not the time for people to feel like theres no hope, Mr. Ellison said. There is. People should carry forward and continue to try to make the system one we can all be proud of.

The decision not to file criminal charges does not mean the end of the matter. The Locke family, which met with the prosecutors on Wednesday morning, has hired Benjamin Crump, the civil rights lawyer, to pursue a lawsuit against the city and to push the city to make changes to its Police Department.
After nearly six years on the run, an Iowa man who slipped out of an ankle monitor and faked his own death has been arrested 1,700 miles from his grandmothers home, where he had been awaiting trial on child sexual abuse imagery charges, the authorities said.

The man, Jacob Channce Greer of Des Moines, was found on Monday and arrested in Spanaway, Wash., the U.S. Marshals Service said in a statement.

Mr. Greer, 28, who was described by the authorities as a survivalist, was being held at the Federal Detention Center in Seattle until he could be taken to Des Moines for his trial. It was not immediately clear on Wednesday whether Mr. Greer had a lawyer.

The arrest of Jacob Greer after six years is a testament to the tenacity of deputy U.S. marshals and our investigative partners, Ted G. Kamatchus, U.S. marshal for the Southern District of Iowa, said in the statement. Even though the case went cold, they would not quit.
A grand jury this week indicted a nurse but declined to indict five former detention officers in the death of a Black inmate who repeatedly exclaimed I cant breathe as the officers tried unsuccessfully to remove his handcuffs at a North Carolina jail.

All six had been charged by the Forsyth County district attorney in July 2020 with involuntary manslaughter in the death of the man, John Neville, 56. He had been booked into the Forsyth County jail in Winston-Salem, N.C., on Dec. 1, 2019, on a charge of assaulting a woman, according to the authorities.

But after the case was presented to a Forsyth County grand jury, the panel on Monday declined to indict the officers, opting instead to indict only the on-call nurse, Michelle Heughins, 46, who was employed by a private contractor, the authorities said.

Image John Neville Credit... Natasha Martin

Mr. Nevilles son, Sean, said in a statement that the family appreciated the efforts of the district attorney, Jim ONeill, in submitting the case to a grand jury. However, Sean Neville added, it was disheartening that the videos of our father gasping for air and begging for mercy while he was bound and suffocated do not seem to have gained any purchase with Forsyth County or Wellpath, Ms. Heughinss employer at the time.
WASHINGTON  The Justice Department said on Wednesday that it had charged a Russian oligarch with violating U.S. sanctions and unveiled additional measures intended to counter Russian money laundering and disrupt online criminal networks in an effort to enforce financial penalties on Moscow.

The moves came as the United States has ratcheted up pressure on the Kremlin and some of the wealthiest Russians in light of growing evidence of atrocities in Ukraine and as Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said the United States was helping its European partners investigate potential war crimes.

The oligarch, Konstantin Malofeev, 47, is widely considered one of Russias most influential business moguls  he is said to have deep ties to President Vladimir V. Putin  and is among the more prominent conservatives in the countrys Kremlin-allied elite. (The indictment renders his surname as Malofeyev.)

The actions demonstrated the reach of a task force created last month to find and seize the assets of wealthy Russians who violate U.S. sanctions on Russia, and the penalties appeared meant to enforce the far-reaching economic sanctions that the United States has imposed along with European allies.
BEIRUT, April 5 (Xinhua) -- Several wheat mills in southern Lebanon have halted operation, threatening 50 percent of the Lebanese market's flour supply, local media reported Tuesday.

Head of Bakeries Syndicate in Mount Lebanon Antoine Seif told Lebanon's MTV channel on Tuesday that three mills stopped working after a shipment of wheat from Ukraine was exposed to moisture.

"The mills have to put the wheat in warehouses for the Ministry of Agriculture to take test samples," he was quoted by the TV network as saying.

Several mills in Lebanon face a shortage of wheat while some others were ordered to halt operation due to legal violations, the National News Agency reported, citing Ali Rammal, a mill agent and flour distributor in the south.

Rammal said the affected mills supply more than 50 percent of the Lebanese market's needs and the wheat flour stock is sufficient only for the market demand for 25 days, according to the report.

Lebanon's Minister of Economy and Trade Amin Salam earlier announced that the Ukraine-Russia conflict has hampered Lebanon's access to sufficient wheat supply, adding that his ministry was trying to secure other sources of the commodity. 
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Wednesday that they had tested positive for the coronavirus, the latest in a series of prominent Democrats, lawmakers and Biden administration officials to say they had been infected.

Also Wednesday, Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the assistant House speaker, and Representative Scott Peters of California announced their own positive tests.

The Justice Department said in a statement that Mr. Garland, 69, asked to be tested after learning that he may have been exposed. Mr. Garland, who is vaccinated and boosted, was not experiencing symptoms and planned to work from home for at least five days, the department said. He will not return to the office before he tests negative at the end of that period.

The announcement about Mr. Garland came just hours after he delivered a news briefing at the Justice Department at 10 a.m., where he stood unmasked next to several other officials, including Christopher A. Wray, the director of the F.B.I. The Justice Departments statement announcing the test result followed several hours later.
These create a threat that we dont have a response for, said James Cowan, who leads the HALO Trust, a British American charity that clears land mines and other explosive remnants of war to help countries recover after conflicts. The group began removing unexploded munitions from the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine in 2016, after Russian-backed separatists started fighting the Ukrainian government.

Well need to find some donors to procure robotics that can allow us to deal with these threats at some distance, Mr. Cowan added.

The POM-3 is typically launched by a rocket and falls back to earth by parachute before sticking into the ground  where it waits, according to CAT-UXO, an online resource for military and civilian bomb technicians. When the mine senses a person, it launches a small explosive warhead that detonates midair, producing fragments that are lethal up to about 50 feet away.

Mr. Cowan, a retired British Army major general, said his staff of 430 Ukrainians clearing unexploded munitions in Donbas had been unable to continue working since Russia launched a full invasion of the country in late February, with many staff members temporarily relocating in Ukraine. He anticipates that in the future, HALOs operation across the country will require about 2,500 workers, given that many areas outside Donbas are now contaminated with unexploded munitions as well.

U.S. government officials have said Russia appears to be moving troops to consolidate its hold on Donetsk and Luhansk, which could mean that even more weapons like the POM-3 will be used in the war.
Twenty states and the District of Columbia, along with environmental groups, had challenged the regulation, saying it was at odds with federal law. After President Biden took office, the Environmental Protection Agency said it would revise the rule and asked three judges presiding over challenges to return them to the agency.

Notably, though, the E.P.A. did not ask the judges to vacate the regulation while it worked on a new one. Two judges, in South Carolina and Pennsylvania, did what the agency asked.

But Judge William H. Alsup, of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, vacated the regulation. The move was justified by the lack of reasoned decision-making and apparent errors in the rules scope of certification, the indications that the rule contravenes the structure and purpose of the Clean Water Act, he said, and the fact that the E.P.A. itself has signaled it could not or will not adopt the same rule.

After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, refused to block Judge Alsups ruling while an appeal moved forward, Louisiana and other states led by Republicans, along with industry groups, filed an emergency application asking the Supreme Court to revive the regulation. They said that Judge Alsup had acted without considering administrative procedures or finding that the regulation was unlawful.

Writing on behalf of the E.P.A., Elizabeth B. Prelogar, the U.S. solicitor general, urged the Supreme Court to deny the emergency application. Judge Alsups ruling, she wrote, merely reinstated the old regulation, which had been in place for a half-century. The 2020 regulation, she added, would most likely be replaced by next year.

Ms. Prelogars brief included a significant concession. The federal respondents, she wrote, agree with applicants that the district court lacked authority to vacate the 2020 rule without first determining that the rule was invalid. But she said that was not reason enough to block his ruling.

In her dissent, Justice Kagan wrote that the courts ruling was a solution in search of a problem.

The request for a stay rests on simple assertions  on conjectures, unsupported by any present-day evidence, about what states will now feel free to do, she wrote. And the application fails to show that proper implementation of the reinstated regulatory regime  which existed for 50 years before the vacated rule came into effect  is incapable of countering whatever state overreach may (but may not) occur.
Despite its strict gun laws, California is by no means spared from the pains of gun violence.

In 2022, the state has already experienced 13 mass shootings, defined as a single event in which at least four people were shot, according to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive.

The deadliest of these came over the weekend, when six people were killed and a dozen wounded in a crowded late-night strip of downtown Sacramento. The tragedy has fueled a push to further clamp down on guns in California.

Were standing right outside our great Capitol building, just blocks away from the horrific scene of the worst mass shooting in Sacramento history, State Senator Robert Hertzberg said in a news briefing Tuesday afternoon. The alarm bells are blazing. We could not have a clearer call for action on gun violence.
Sacramentos gang structure has splintered in the past two decades away from the traditional Crips and Bloods rivalry, researchers say. Several groups have since sprouted around the region, forming subsets of gangs in which confrontations are more personal and less about turf.

Its street politics, said Freddie Dearborn, a former gang member who founded and now leads a local intervention program for youth gun violence.

Specific motives for the recent shooting could be any number of things, law enforcement officials said. But the widespread availability of firearms amplified the deadliness of the dispute. The police said on Monday that they had recovered more than 100 shell casings from the scene, which was just a few blocks from the Capitol grounds.

Different cliques see each other, and it could be a destructive thing, unfortunately, because of the politics, Mr. Dearborn said. Theres certain things you do and you dont do. It could be about anything  money, people you mess with, jail.

Law enforcement officials in Sacramento say they have not ruled out the possibility that some of the victims in the firefight were also gunmen. One of the victims, Sergio Harris, has been identified in previous cases as a gang member from Del Paso Heights, a north Sacramento community.
In a previous book, Dr. Berry said, he has a page listing all the terms that have been used for contingent faculty: One of them is uncompensated.

The union representing contingent faculty at the University of California has been fighting the uncompensated positions for years, said Mia McIver, the president of the union, which represents about 7,000 members. The fact that it is common does not excuse it, she said.

The union suspects that the number of uncompensated teachers at the university is increasing, said Dr. McIver, who is also a lecturer in the U.C.L.A writing program. As of March 2019, we had identified 26 faculty members at U.C.L.A. alone, she said.

In the California system, the trend seemed to have begun with the financial crisis of 2008, Dr. McIver said. By 2010, she said, We became aware of people who had been laid off and who were teaching for free in the hopes, without any commitment from the university, that if the work came back they would be hired back to teach for pay.

The union won a settlement with the administration in 2016 requiring compensation for lecturers, who are mostly part-time and make up a majority of contingent faculty, Dr. McIver said. But while lecturers are now unionized, adjuncts are not, allowing the university to have adjunct positions known as zero percent appointments, meaning that they are unpaid.

A spokesman for U.C.L.A., Steve Ritea, said that before the settlement, the people who taught for free were often full-time professionals with other income. He said he could not comment on the number of zero percent appointments without seeing the documents the union was relying on. But he said that a typical example of a zero percent adjunct is a tenured professor at another institution who has a formal affiliation with U.C.L.A. that might include mentoring students or serving on committees. Or someone who has moved to another university but wants to finish out a grant or a project.
TIJUANA, Mexico  More than 2,000 Ukrainians have made their way to the U.S. border from Mexico over the past 10 days, joining desperate migrants from around the world in what officials expect could become a major border surge as pandemic restrictions are lifted and the continuing fallout from Russias invasion of Ukraine reaches Americas shores.

The sudden arrivals in Tijuana present an immediate challenge to U.S. border officials, who are already bracing for a flood of unauthorized migration from countries such as Honduras and Haiti when the United States eases its emergency Covid-19 border rules next month. Now, the United States must also find a way to accommodate thousands of people fleeing a murderous Russian invasion halfway around the world.

Im troubled. Im tired. We have been here more than two days, said Nataly Yankova, 48, who fled Ukraine with two adolescent daughters, one in a wheelchair, and two nephews and planned to join her brother who is living in Chicago.

They were among 15 Ukrainian families sitting in folding chairs on a chilly spring night this week, beside a coiled-wire fence that separates Mexico from the United States. It had taken most of them three days to reach the front of the line from which U.S. officials were calling in Ukrainians for entry interviews.
For decades, Blaise Compaore, the president of Burkina Faso, preferred to avoid the subject of Thomas Sankara, his predecessor and one-time friend who was brutally killed in 1987 by soldiers who gunned him down outside his office.

On Wednesday, a military tribunal confirmed longstanding, widespread suspicions that Mr. Compaore, now in living in exile, was in fact behind the killing.

After six months of hearings, a heavily protected courtroom in the capital, Ouagadougou, erupted in applause after judges convicted Mr. Compaore in absentia and declared a sentence of life imprisonment  the climax of a much anticipated attempt to deliver justice for one of Africas most infamous political assassinations.

This is a relief, said Paul Sankara, the slain presidents younger brother, speaking by phone about the verdict. Its been a long wait.
El Salvadors Congress passed a measure late Tuesday to punish anyone who shares information about gangs with up to 15 years in prison, a move that observers say could lead to the censorship of journalists and more mass detentions.

The change to the penal code comes amid a state of emergency that has allowed security forces to detain civilians, without evidence, under suspicion for being involved in a gang. Security forces have detained about 6,000 people since the state of emergency was approved last week.

The measure appears intended to criminalize the relaying of gang messages. But critics say that the new law is so vague that it could be used to charge virtually anyone who speaks generally about the gangs, such as describing their territorial control or sharing gang graffiti, signs or messages in public or private communications.

Paired with the governments new ability to intercept the correspondence and communications of Salvadoran citizens without a court order  a measure passed under the state of emergency  the change could see thousands more detained.
DALIAN, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Closed-off management was implemented at Dalian University of Finance and Economics due to a resurgence of COVID-19 in Dalian, China.

Students at the university held a "balcony concert" last weekend to cheer up each other.

Produced by Xinhua Global Service
One extraordinary document from 1588 described the concerns of the Spanish invaders who feared the Indigenous people of the region were planning to leave Cusco and reoccupy a site they called Huayna Picchu, according to the researchers article.

The findings are not a surprise, said Bruce Mannheim, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the research but knows both authors and who once taught Professor Bauer.

Theyre two leading, very distinguished scholars who are very careful researchers, Professor Mannheim said. I take anything that they write seriously.

Anthropologists and historians who have studied documents about the region have come across writings that revealed the original name of the town, he said. But scholars had not written about the name or pressed the issue before.

There is no percentage in correcting tour operators, Professor Mannheim said. Wed effectively be policing other peoples use of language and nobody really wants to do that.

Still, it is good to document the original name in a scholarly record, he said.

Dr. Amado Gonzales said it would be an exaggeration to say that it was a mistake to call the town Machu Picchu all these years.

The city, the Inca town, is in the jurisdiction of Huayna Picchu, he said. But Machu Picchu is not a term Bingham invented  it is the Quechuan name of the larger mountain peak that flanks the ancient site to the south. Huayna Picchu is the name of the smaller peak to the north.
HONG KONG  John Lee rose through the ranks of Hong Kongs security services, earning a reputation as a hard-liner by crushing the citys 2019 protest movement and curbing dissent as the citys No. 2 official.

Now, he is widely expected to be Beijings choice to take over as Hong Kongs leader, an appointment that would reflect the central governments emphasis on reinforcing its grip on the once-restive city, even at the expense of its status as a global financial center.

Mr. Lee said Wednesday he had submitted his resignation as Hong Kongs chief secretary and that he planned to run for chief executive if Beijing accepted his notice.

It signifies he is confident that he can get the support of Beijing, otherwise you would not take the risk of resigning from your post, said Lau Siu-kai, an adviser to Beijing on Hong Kong affairs.
SEOUL  When Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in the 1990s, experts debated whether the decision would make the country safer or more vulnerable to an invasion from Moscow, its nuclear-armed neighbor.

Now, as Russia pounds Ukrainian cities while being accused of committing atrocities against civilians, many in South Korea say there is no more room for debate.

Since the conflict began, South Koreans have flooded online chat rooms with discussions about their countrys need to have nuclear weapons to prevent an invasion from North Korea, their own nuclear-armed neighbor. On Tuesday, North Korea warned that it would use its nuclear weapons at the outset of war, should one with the South ever start.

Like Ukraine, South Korea once had nuclear weapons within its borders. And Seoul abandoned its own covert nuclear program in the 1970s in exchange for security guarantees from the United States. But as they watch Ukrainians battle Russian forces and plead for outside military assistance, many South Koreans fear that was a mistake.
European regulators concluded on Wednesday that it is too early to administer second booster shots of a coronavirus vaccine to the general population in the European Union, but added that the extra doses could be given to adults aged 80 and older.

The European Medicine Agency and European Center for Disease Prevention and Control said that data from Israel indicated that there was an increased risk of severe illness among people 80 and older, as well as a lower immune response following vaccination.

Israeli data also suggested that a second booster, given at least four months after the first, saw antibody levels replenished without raising further safety concerns, European officials said.

But for most adults with healthy immune systems, the officials added, there was no clear evidence that protection against severe disease afforded by vaccines was diminishing.
LUBMIN, Germany  Past a nudist beach and a sleepy marina, a gigantic mesh of metallic pipes rises from the pine forest behind the tiny village of Lubmin on Germanys Baltic coast.

If few people have heard of Lubmin, from Berlin to Washington almost everyone seems to know the name of the two gas pipelines arriving here directly from Russia: Nord Stream 1, which carries almost 60 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year to keep Europes biggest economy humming. And Nord Stream 2, built to increase that flow but abruptly shuttered in the run-up to Russias attack on Ukraine.

The pair of pipelines has become a twin symbol of Germanys dangerous dependence on Russian gas  and the countrys belated and frenzied effort to wean itself off it  with calls growing for the European Union to hit Moscow with tougher sanctions as atrocities come to light in Ukraine.

On Tuesday, the European Commission, the E.U.s executive branch, proposed banning imports of Russian coal and soon, possibly, its oil. But Russian gas  far more critical to Germany and much of the rest of Europe  was off the table. At least for now.
It was not immediately clear what caused the fire, but initial testimony by other patients in the ward suggested that a man had set fire to his clothes, though it was unclear whether this had been accidental, Mr. Vathrakoyiannis said.

The head of the ward, Diamantis Chloros, said he was in his office when the on-duty doctor alerted him. I heard her shouting, Fire! Quick! and then saw smoke billowing out of the ward like there had been an explosion, he said. I tried to go out into the corridor. There was thick smoke coming into my office.

There was no fire detection system at the clinic, which is typical of old hospitals, he said.

There are oxygen tanks in the clinic and a lot of flammable material, sheets, blankets, plastic, so this would have really fueled the fire, he said and added that some patients were given oxygen in the hospital yard after they were evacuated.

In what appears to have been the most serious fire at a ward treating coronavirus patients, at least 92 people died in July at a hospital in the city of Nasiriya in southern Iraq. There were also deadly fires last year at hospitals in Romania, India and North Macedonia.
Residential areas of Ukraines Black Sea port of Mykolaiv have been under near constant bombardment for days, according to local officials, the latest escalation in a southern city as Russian forces have increasingly shifted focus to the region and the east of the country.

Last week, a missile blasted a hole in the side of a government building in Mykolaiv, killing dozens. On Sunday, deadly strikes injured a 15-year-old, among several others. On Monday, at least 11 people were killed and 61 wounded in attacks, the regional governor said.

Shelling in the city has continued nearly every day for weeks, but civilian infrastructure and homes have increasingly been targeted, local officials and soldiers say. Russian forces have struck residential buildings, a hospital, an orphanage and schools in recent days, Oleksandr Senkevych, the mayor of Mykolaiv, said.

The assault on the city and others in Ukraines south comes as Russian forces refocus after withdrawing from positions in the north and northeast. Mykolaiv is a main target because of its location along the Black Sea coast between Russian forces in the east and Odesa, the headquarters of the Ukrainian Navy and the countrys largest civilian port, in the west.
When The Interpreter first launched, our editors used to joke that the purpose of this column was to offer smart answers to dumb questions.

That never became an official tagline. But I actually still stand by the basic concept: Often, the best way to decide what to write about is to look for questions that seem kind of obvious, but whose widely accepted answers dont tell the whole story.

It can feel a little silly to ask those questions  after all, it seems like theres already an obvious answer!  but it often turns out that if I look a little deeper, something interesting and informative can be found lurking beyond the conventional wisdom.

Thats the approach that led to this weeks column, which began with a question from a Times editor: Why is Poland willing to be so extraordinarily generous to Ukrainian refugees, who are arriving in huge numbers and putting a significant strain on the countrys resources, even though Polands right-wing government has been extremely hostile to far smaller groups of refugees in the past?
Ivan Kononov, a senior lieutenant in the Russian marines, loved to cook. He made Italian food for his unit in the field, his brother said, and traded rations for spices when he was serving in Syria.

The brother, Aleksandr Kononov, last saw him at the military hospital morgue in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don in March. Lieutenant Kononov had died in a firefight for a steel plant in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol. He was 34. Walking to the morgue, Mr. Kononov recalled, he passed the open gate of a warehouse and glimpsed dozens of black body bags lined up on the floor.

It was only with his brothers death, Mr. Kononov, 32, said in a phone interview, that he started paying attention to the war raging just over 50 miles from his home. And he realized, he said, that his brother had died in a war that no one needs.

If everyone learns everything, there will be protests, Mr. Kononov, who works in a freight business, said, referring to the awareness of the Russian public at large. And I think that would be for the best. Because this war has to stop. There ought to be no wars at all.
The senior Western intelligence official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said the number of Russian spies expelled since Russias February invasion of Ukraine is even larger than the 2018 effort. While the diplomatic expulsions wont stop Russian intelligence activities in Europe or the United States, this is the best limiting factor we can do, the official said.

Almost every country has some spies and intelligence officers stationed inside its various embassies around the world. Intelligence officers working from embassies usually operate under official cover as diplomats, offering them a degree of immunity. Spies operating in a country who pose not as diplomats but as business executives or other roles have little or no protection if they are caught stealing secrets.

Russia has three large intelligence services, and stations far more operatives in foreign capitals than most nations. Officials said the expulsions would move Russia far closer to parity, meaning it would have the same number of intelligence operatives in European capitals as those countries have in Moscow. Nevertheless, Russia is expected to respond, diplomats said.

The removal of the intelligence officers from Europe will cause Moscow problems over the long term, but in the short term President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia can get the information he wants about Western intentions through the open news media, according to former officials.

Its disruptive, they will have to find other ways to meet their sources and conduct the operations, said Dan Hoffman, a former C.I.A. officer. This is a good thing to do, but it is not going to turn the tide of the war.
HONG KONG, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Carrie Lam urged the public on Wednesday to keep vigilant against the COVID-19 outbreak despite the recently declining number of confirmed cases.

Lam told a press conference that the number of COVID-19 cases in Hong Kong decreased from more than 14,000 cases recorded on March 21 to 3,254 cases on Tuesday, noting that it is a good trend that the numbers reported through nucleic acid tests and rapid antigen tests (RAT) are very close.

Lam said the public might be relieved to see the number of COVID-19 cases on the decline, but in terms of absolute figure, the number now is still very high throughout Hong Kong's two-year fight against COVID-19, as the highest daily count of COVID-19 cases was less than 150 before the fifth wave of the pandemic.

She added that data showed an increased number of people participating in outdoor activities recently and reminded the public to comply with social distancing measures.

Lam urged all people in Hong Kong again to do an RAT for COVID-19 each day on April 8-10.

On Wednesday, Hong Kong registered 1,489 new COVID-19 cases by nucleic acid tests, and 1,288 additional cases through self-reported rapid antigen tests, official data showed. 
Among the distressing pictures of dead bodies in Bucha, the Kyiv suburb where Russian forces are accused of carrying out atrocities against Ukrainian citizens, one in particular stood out to Anastasiia Subacheva, a makeup artist from the nearby city of Gostomel.

In it she recognized a perfectly manicured hand with red and white nail polish  one that she had seen many times holding a brush or lipstick, or spreading foundation or eye shadow during her makeup lessons.

Now, it lay lifeless on a street, covered in dirt.

When I saw it, I felt physically like my heart started to break, Ms. Subacheva said in a telephone call on Wednesday from the city of Kropyvnytskyi, to which she had fled with her family.

Ms. Subacheva, who has been a makeup artist in Bucha for five years, said she knew a lot of women there because she did the makeup for many of them.
The evidence of apparent atrocities in Ukraine, with civilians executed in the suburbs of Kyiv, brings to mind another European horror: the bloody Balkan wars of the 1990s and the sometimes fraught, yearslong effort to bring those responsible to justice.

In 1999, Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia and the architect of a decade of war that took more than 200,000 lives and tore the country apart, became the first sitting head of state to be charged with war crimes. Three years later, he became the first former head of state to stand trial for genocide for the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as for crimes against humanity and violations of the Geneva Conventions for the wars in Croatia and Kosovo.

Recalling the significance of the trial, Human Rights Watch, the advocacy group, observed in a 2006 report that bringing the former president before an international criminal tribunal marked the end of the era when being a head of state meant immunity from prosecution.

Since then, it noted, other former heads of state, including the former Liberian prime minister Charles Taylor and the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, have been brought to justice.

Mr. Taylor was sentenced to 50 years in prison for his role in atrocities committed during Sierra Leones civil war in the 1990s. Mr. Hussein was convicted in 2006 by an Iraqi special tribunal for crimes against humanity for the brutal repression of a Shiite town in the 1980s and sentenced to death by hanging.

Mr. Milosevic died in his prison cell in The Hague in 2006, denying his victims the closure of a final judgment, but the public airing of his heinous crimes was nevertheless an important moral and legal reckoning.

While the circumstances in Ukraine and the Balkan wars differ in fundamental ways, including the scope and scale of the bloodshed, some parallels jump out  not least of which is Russias obfuscation and denial. In the face of graphic evidence that Ukrainian civilians in the suburb of Bucha, some with hands bound, were killed by Russian soldiers, Moscow has claimed it is all a hoax.

Mr. Milosevic, too, responded with a fanciful conspiracy theory when he was accused of complicity in the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica, in Bosnia, during which some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed, many with their hands tied behind their backs. He said the people really responsible for the worst bloodbath in Europe since World War II were French intelligence operatives, Muslim officials from Bosnia and mercenaries.

The wartime massacre of civilians at a Sarajevo market was not done by Serbs but staged by Muslims with bodies from a morgue, he claimed.

It is all lies, he said, as his trial began.

Whatever the echoes, legal experts say that bringing the Kremlin to account would be far more difficult than it was with Mr. Milosevic.

In the first place, no sitting president has ever been handed over to an international court. While President Vladimir V. Putin has significant public support and leads a nuclear power, Mr. Milosevic had already been ousted from power by the time he was sent to The Hague in June 2001.

And Russia is not Serbia.

Mr. Putin is an authoritarian leader with vociferous antagonism toward the West and its legal structures.

Russia-Ukraine War: Key Developments Card 1 of 4 Victory Day concerns. Officials across Ukraine issued urgent warnings about the threat of stepped-up Russian missile strikes over the weekend, amid fears that President Vladimir V. Putin might use Russias Victory Day holiday on May 9 to intensify attacks and turn what he calls a special military operation in Ukraine into explicit, all-out war. In Mariupol. In the ruined city, where fighting continued to rage, an evacuation convoy was dispatched again to the Azovstal steel plant, where about 200 civilians are believed to be trapped underground, along with the last Ukrainian soldiers defending the city. The Russian bombardment of the factory continued overnight. On the ground. Ukrainian soldiers are trying to drive Russian forces back from outside the two strategically important cities of Kharkiv and Izium. Russia appears to have escalated its attempts to trap and destroy Ukrainian units farther south. Russian oil embargo. The European Union unveiled a plan to halt imports of Russian crude oil in the next six months and refined oil products by the end of the year. If approved as expected, it would be the blocs biggest and costliest step yet toward ending its own dependence on Russian fossil fuels.







The Serbian prime minister in power when Mr. Milosevic was handed over for trial, Zoran Djindjic, was eager for a rapprochement with the West, while $30 billion in foreign aid to rebuild Serbias devastated economy was at stake.

The burden of proof for war crimes, moreover, is very high.

Even with the Serbian governments reluctant cooperation after Mr. Djindjic was assassinated in 2003, the task was difficult because of Mr. Milosevics obstructionism. A defiant Mr. Milosevic refused to recognize the U.N. war crimes tribunal, lied, dissembled and called in sick when insider witnesses materialized.

War crimes prosecutors are sometimes fortunate enough to have real-time evidence of atrocities at their disposal, but they still face enormous challenges. Many dots must be connected.

In the case of Mr. Putin, prosecutors would have to demonstrate that he issued specific orders that led to specific atrocities or that he knew about the crimes or did nothing to prevent them. Prosecutors would also have to show that Russian commanders had intentionally targeted civilian structures, or struck them during attacks that failed to discriminate between civilian and military targets.

Experts say the International Criminal Court in The Hague offers the best chance for real accountability for Russia. It was established in 1998 after separate United Nations tribunals that prosecuted mass atrocities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia demonstrated the need for a standing judicial body to handle such cases.

The United States is not among the Hague courts 123 member nations, and Mr. Putin recently instructed his government to withdraw from the treaty that created the court. His government assailed the tribunal as ineffective and one-sided.

By contrast, the tribunal that tried Mr. Milosevic was created by the United Nations Security Council in 1993 to track down and punish those responsible for the horrific violence against civilians during the breakup of Yugoslavia. As such, it had some political muscle behind it.
JERUSALEM  Israels fragile government was thrown into crisis on Wednesday after a senior lawmaker quit the coalition, leaving it without a majority in Parliament and auguring a return to the political instability that has hobbled the country in recent years.

Idit Silman, the chairwoman of the governing coalition and effectively its chief whip, said in a letter to Prime Minister Naftali Bennett that she was resigning because coalition colleagues had failed to compromise and that the governments direction did not reflect the values of the right-wing voters who brought their party, Yamina, to power. She said it was time to change course and to try to form a new national, Jewish, Zionist coalition with right-wing lawmakers.

The move followed prolonged tensions among leftist, secular, Arab and right-wing members of the coalition, a fractious group of eight parties that agreed to work together only last June after four inconclusive elections in two years had left the country without a functional government or a state budget.

The coalition crisis comes at a delicate time after a series of deadly terrorist attacks that had already put pressure on the government. Israels security forces remain on high alert amid fears of more unrest and violence over the next month, when the rare convergence of Ramadan, Passover and Easter is expected to raise tensions further between Israelis and Palestinians.
A 31-year-old woman was recently sentenced to 2 years in prison for impersonating a physician and then an ophthalmologist for years without any medical training.

It all started in 2018, when Sonia, a 31-year-old woman from Meaux, in northern France, decided to try her luck as a physician, without undergoing any medical training. Sonia had a bachelors degree in real estate management, but she didnt let that get in the way of attaining a lucrative job as a general physician. The woman forged a bunch of diplomas from the Faculty of Strasbourg and a false certificate on the board of the Order of Physicians, and not only got the job, but saw patients for three years before anyone noticed she had no business being a doctor.

The woman not only practiced medicine for almost three years until being exposed in October of 2021, but she then moved on to the next best professional career, this time becoming an ophthalmologist. To make matters worse, for most of her time as a physician, Sonia wore a tagging bracelet around her ankle, for crimes committed previous to her appointment as a GP.

France Live reports that the 31-year-old woman had been convicted of a breach of trust in 2019, but since companies didnt check her credentials, she had no problem posing as a medical professional. After using the identities of two actual doctors who happened to share her name, Sonia was able to earn nearly 70,00 0 euros from her fake career.

During the three and a half years that she worked as a doctor, Sonia performed around 20 vaccinations against Covid19, and prescribed various medications, despite not knowing what she was prescribing.

During her recent trial, the mother of three children explained that she was driven by the need for money. She was sentenced to three years in prison, two of which represent hard time, without the possibility of parole.
Kristina Schake

Kristina Schake has joined Walt Disney Co. as executive VP-global communications as she wrapped up a 10-month stint as the Biden administrations COVID-19 public education campaign director.

She took that post in the Department of Health and Human Services after serving as communications specialist for Barack and Michelle Obamas Higher Ground Productions.

Schake also was deputy communications director for Hillary Clintons 2016 presidential campaign and communications director for First Lady Michelle Obama.

Between political stints, Schake worked as head of global communications at Instagram and chief communications officer at LOreal.

At Disney, which will celebrate its 100th anniversary this year, Schake reports to Geoff Morrell, chief corporate affairs officer.

He said Schakes experience in political and corporate campaigns will help him integrate communications with government relations, public policy and corporate social responsibility into a new corporate affairs team.
Iuliia Mendel

Iuliia Mendel, who served as press secretary for Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky from 2019 to 2021, will release a book called The Fight Of Our Lives in September, published by Simon & Schusters One Signal Publishers.

It will cover the many meetings between Zelensky and Putin that Mendel attended, fielding media inquiries about phone calls between Zelensky and Donald Trump that led to his first impeachment and visiting the front lines in Donbas, which Russia invaded in 2014.

Mendel, 35, will shed light on Zelenskys effort to transform Ukraines economy, battle corrupt oligarchs and counter misinformation from the Kremlin.

She will also detail life in 2012 under Russian bombardment and saying goodbye to her fiance as he departed to join the Ukrainian military effort.

Mendel worked as a print and TV journalist for 14 years and has contributed to the New York Times, Washington Post, Vice and Politico Europe.
Jeff Bezos

Amazons ham-handed PR was among the reasons why it suffered one of the biggest defeats in recent labor history, as workers on Staten Island voted to join the newly created Amazon Labor Union, which was the brainchild of 30-year-old fired warehouse worker Chris Smalls.

Hes not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position, wrote David Zapolsky, Amazon general counsel in a note that was leaked to Vice. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Amazon spent millions to defeat the ALU and hired the well-connected Democratic Global Strategy Group PA shop to torpedo the union drive.

GSG has some explaining to do, especially since it worked for the Biden campaign. Joe Biden is the most pro-union US president in years.

In a sharp contrast, GoFundMe donations funded Smalls grassroots PR campaign of texts, emails and meetings with the more than 8,000 Staten Island workers.

That effort also included volunteer support and guidance from the Communications Workers of America, UNITE HERE, United Food and Commercial Workers, Office and Professional Employees International Union, and Workers Assembly Against Racism.

Smalls told National Public Radio on April 6 that hes been contacted by more than 50 Amazon facilities in the US, Canada, UK, South Africa and India about organizing their workplaces.

That should convince Amazon founder Rocket Man Jeff Bezos to spend more time dealing with his restless workforce, rather than on his space dreams.

Amazon on April 4 announced the largest deal in the commercial space industry as it signed an agreement with United Launch Alliance (Boeing/Lockheed Martin partnership), Europes Arianespace and Bezos Blue Origin for 83 launches for its Project Kuiper internet satellites.

Theres trouble brewing in Earth's biggest store, Jeff.

Though Donald Trump watches a heckuva lot of television, hes been pretty quiet about the images of brutality, carnage, mangled bodies, corpses with hands tied behind their backs and wanton destruction transmitted from Ukraine to screens throughout the world.

The silence of the former president leads one to wonder whether he is angling for his own slot on Antifake, a new program on Russias most-watched TV network.

On April 5, Antifake featured a panel that dismissed scenes of dead civilians lying on the streets of Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, as stunts staged by the non-existent Nazis of Ukraine and their allies in the west. Antifake drove home that propaganda point by running FAKE across the TV screen.

Since Trump is the guy who popularized the use of fake news, he would feel right at home at Antifake.

He could even have his buddy, Vladimir Putin, call in to rage at his perceived enemies, just like Trump does at Fox News.

Real Chemistry keeps on gobbling up acquisitions, though some signs of heartburn have started to appear.

The San Francisco-based healthcare PR firm, which prefers to call itself a global innovation company committed to making the world a healthier place for all," announced the acquisition of ConversationHealth on April 5.

ConversationHealth is the 10th acquisition for Real Chemistry since the company unveiled its partnership with NewMountain Capital in 2019.

The deal comes as Real Chemistry trimmed its workforce by about 50 people due to redundancies and overlap partly due to its aggressive acquisition spree.

McKinsey & Co. alum Shankar Narayanan assumed the helm of Real Chemistry in January from founder Jim Weiss.

CPAC loves Putin-lite. The Conservative Political Action Conference will hold its May meeting in Budapest and feature Hungarys right-wing nationalist leader Viktor Orban, who just won another term as prime minister, as a keynoter.

Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson is a big fan of Orban, a close ally of Putin.

Budapests Center for Fundamental Rights invited CPAC to stage its first Continental Europe conference in Hungary.

Founded in 2013, The Center says preserving national identity, sovereignty and Christian social traditions" is its mission, especially amongst the 21st centurys heightened process of "globalization, integration, geopolitical and technological changes, affecting the field of law as well.

In short, the Center wants to counter todays overgrown human rights fundamentalism and political correctness that have been affecting numerous aspects of our everyday life." It wants to turn back the hands of time to the Middle Ages.

CPAC might want to extend an invite to Putin to appear alongside his acolyte Orban. Tucker would be thrilled.
The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) welcomed over 2,500 attendees to the SEAI Energy Show, which took place in the RDS on March 30-31, after a two-year absence. The event showed the vibrancy of the energy sector and the pace of innovation, as new energy saving technologies were revealed over the two-day event.

Central to this innovation was Grant Engineering from Birr which won the Best Renewable Product Award for HVO Biofuel Grant Vortex, an innovative, A-rated biofuel-compatible condensing boiler.

Paul Martin, Programme Manager at SEAI who chaired the judging panel commented: I want to congratulate this years winners of the Best Renewable Product Award. The Government has set ambitious targets over the next ten years and beyond to reduce energy-use in our homes and our dependence on fossil fuels and the product and expertise that Grant Engineering provide are an important facet of that transition.

"For many years, the Product of the Show Awards has championed innovative product development. Considerable investment in R&D, coupled with rapidly changing technology, has seen a wave of pioneering products and systems featured at the Show. The winners all share a passion for a clean energy future and are providing businesses and consumers with exciting new energy products that will help us use less and use clean.

Other winners included:

Mitsubishi Electric for the QAHV CO2 monobloc commercial heat pump which is designed specifically to produce high-temperature sanitary hot water using CO2 as a refrigerant.

Grundfos for MIXIT which is a smart mixing loop solution for heating and cooling systems in commercial and large residential buildings.

EnergyElephant for their energy and sustainability data platform with imbedded AI.

Expert Leisure with SportsArt G690 Verde Treadmill which converts human generated energy into utility grade electricity.

TaskLED with Cree Syrius, a unique street lighting featuring Wavemax Technology that provides decreased LED source luminance.

Grant Engineering with HVO Biofuel Grant Vortex which is an innovative, A-rated biofuel-compatible condensing boiler.

In addition to the 150 exhibitors in the RDS, the Show featured; an extensive electric vehicle showcase with free test drives, live retrofit demonstrations, a new lighting pavilion, expert seminars and multiple networking events.
A man accused of murdering teacher Ashling Murphy has been served with a book of evidence and sent forward for trial to the Central Criminal Court.

Jozef Puska, 31, with an address of Lynally Grove, Mucklagh, Co Offaly, was initially held following a court hearing in Tullamore on January 19.

He is accused of killing the 23-year-old primary school teacher who was attacked after she went for a run along the Grand Canal near Tullamore on January 12.

The Slovakian national faced his seventh hearing at Cloverhill District Court on Wednesday morning.

Four weeks ago, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) confirmed he would face trial on indictment in the Central Criminal Court.

At that stage, the State's book of evidence was still in preparation, and Judge Blake had said prosecutors must make every effort to expedite its completion.

On Wednesday, he noted that it was complete and had been brought to the court.

Mr Puska, dressed in a grey tracksuit, entered and stood behind a glass barrier at the side of the courtroom.

Judge Blake's requested that he introduce himself.

The accused turned toward the judge and replied in English, "Hello, my name is Jozef Puska.

Detective Sergeant David Scahill served the book of evidence on him which Mr Puska then passed on to his solicitor Eoin Lysaght.

Mr Puska standing with his hands clasped in front listened to proceedings with the help of an interpreter.

State solicitor Sarah Jane McGuinness told Judge Blake the DPP consented to the matter being returned for trial to the next sittings of the Central Criminal Court on the one charge in the book of evidence.

Following a pause for translation, Mr Puska nodded.

Judge Blake warned him that he must notify the prosecution within 14 days if he intended to rely on an alibi in his defence. The judge then asked if he understood.

Replying through the interpreter, the accused nodded and said, "Yes, I understand".

Accordingly, Judge Blake said he was making an order sending him forward for trial to the Central Criminal Court.

A specific date was unavailable for his appearance there, but it will occur in the following legal term, which commences after Easter.

Judge Blake added: "I do not have to deal with the question of bail in the district court, so the accused will be sent forward for trial in custody.

Following a request by his solicitor, Judge Blake granted legal aid to include representation of junior and senior counsel at this trial.

He also directed gardai to hand over copies of interview videos to the defence.

Judge Blake ordered the translation of the book of evidence into Slovakian and an interpreter to be provided for his legal consultations and trial.

Mr Puska nodded again at the end of the proceedings before leaving the courtroom.

Detective Sergeant Scahill gave evidence of arrest, charge and caution at Mr Puska's first hearing on January 19.

He had said that when asked if he had anything to say in response to the charge, the accused replied: "No".

The High Court only can consider a bail application in a murder case.
DAMASCUS, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Two Syrians were wounded on Wednesday when an explosive device ripped through their vehicle in the capital Damascus, state news agency SANA reported.

The explosion occurred on the southern highway in Damascus, said SANA, accusing "terrorists" of planting the explosive device in the car.

Meanwhile, the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights revealed that the person targeted by the attack is not a civilian and was seriously injured. 
Twitter has confirmed it will trial a long-awaited feature: the ability to edit tweets.

While the news was first teased by Twitter on April Fools Day last week, the official announcement followed shortly after the social media giant said it would be welcoming controversial Tesla CEO Elon Musk to its board.

Jay Sullivan, Twitter's head of consumer products, said in a tweet the company had been working since last year on building an edit option, 'the most requested Twitter feature for many years.'

Editing posts to correct typos or add further information has been available on other social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

The South African-born entrepreneur asked Twitter users about an edit button after disclosing his 9.2 per cent stake in the company on Monday.

The poll had more than 4.2 million votes yesterday, with nearly three quarters (73.5 per cent) supporting the feature.

Mr Sullivan added that it will actively seek 'input and adversarial thinking in advance of launching Edit.'

Twitter also said that it will start testing the feature within its Twitter Blue Labs premium subscription service in the coming months in order to 'learn what works, what doesn't, and what's possible.'
A planned evaluation examining the expansion of the School Meals Programme has been announced by the Minister for Social Protection.

The programme, which currently supports approximately 1,500 schools at a cost of 65million - comes in a number of forms including breakfasts, lunches, dinners, cold meals and hot meals.

News of the upcoming evaluation was announced today (Wednesday April 6) by Minister Heather Humphreys TD, who said she was "absolutely determined" to continue the programme's expansion.

Speaking at a visit to Scoil Treasa Naofa primary school in Dublin, she said, "I am delighted that my Department is able to support over 230,000 children nationwide through the School Meals Programme.

"Before we make any dramatic changes [sic], I want to hear directly from Schools like here at Scoil Treasa and also from the various Childrens Representative Groups on what their views are on how we can improve the programme and ensure that it is delivering maximum benefit for children.

"The Hot School Meals in particular has proven hugely popular and I am pleased to have increased the number of schools receiving Hot School Meals ten-fold since I became Minister, from a small pilot of just 30 schools to almost 300."

According to the minister, anecdotal evidence from teachers and parents points to students preferring the hot meal option.

She said, "I know from my own experience that a child is more likely to sit down and eat a good hot meal whereas a cold sandwich can always be shoved into the bottom of the school bag."

Key stakeholders including schools and child representative groups will be consulted as part of the evaluation.

Whether or not the programme is meeting its aims will also be examined, as well as the practicalities for schools of moving to a hot meals option, ways the programme can be better delivered, and to what extent the programme has improved school attendance and educational achievement.
elpify Community Ukraine is calling on individuals in Offaly to join its Europe-wide volunteer network to assist those fleeing the war in Ukraine. The not-for-profit, online platform aims to ease the burden for refugees by connecting those in need of help with a nearby volunteer who can meet their request. This might include travel or legal advice, transport, medical needs, short-term accommodation, translations or pet care. The site is available in English, Ukrainian, Polish, French and Dutch.

Olena Leontieva, a Ukrainian national living in Ireland and Helpify Community Ukraine spokesperson explains, The Helpify Community is about holding Ukrainians hands through every step of their journey  from their homes to the border and onward to their ultimate destination. Like so many people when the war broke out, we felt helpless. There were thousands of asks for help per hour on social media, most of them going unanswered. We wanted to find a way to connect the people who need help with those who can provide it.

People fleeing their homes dont have the time or headspace to scroll for information on government websites or figure out complicated travel itineraries. Helpify takes the burden off the refugees. All the work is done by volunteers and the only ask of Ukrainians is to raise a mission.

Helpify Community was established in Belgium during the pandemic to connect those in lockdown with volunteers who could help with dog-walking, pharmacy runs and other needs. When the Ukraine invasion began, Olena Leontieva and her team partnered with Helpify to repurpose the platform for global use and translate it into Ukrainian and Polish. It was active in just five days.

Olena Leontieva added, Every day, people in Ireland are asking me how they can help. Registering as a volunteer for Helpify Community Ukraine is a way for everyone to do what they can, whether thats driving a family from the airport to their destination, offering advice, providing clothes or short-term accommodation. Over 300 volunteers in Ireland have already joined Helpify but with up to 100,000 Ukrainian nationals expected here, we need all the help we can get.

How it works:

The Helpify Community website has two simple options: join as a volunteer from any country in the world, or request for help.

Those joining as volunteers complete a simple profile including location and the type of support they can provide.

Volunteers are asked to upload proof of identification which is vetted by the Helpify team to ensure the safety of those using the platform.

When someone looking for help logs a mission, nearby volunteers receive an alert with details of the mission. Those who can help accept the mission and are connected with the person in need.
Images of civilian bodies strewn across streets have surfaced from Bucha, a suburb of the Ukraine capital Kyiv. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky said the UN Security Council was useless if it could not find a way to hold the perpetrators to account.
SeattlePI.com 23 Apr 2022

NEW YORK (AP)  Nearly two months into the Russian-Ukraine war, the Kremlin has taken extraordinary steps to blunt an economic..
UN Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo (C, front) speaks during a Security Council's briefing on Ukraine at the UN headquarters in New York, April 5, 2022. (Xinhua/Xie E)

UNITED NATIONS, April 5 (Xinhua) -- China is strongly committed to de-escalating and ending the conflict in Ukraine as soon as possible, an envoy said on Tuesday.

"De-escalation and putting an early end to the conflict in Ukraine is the earnest expectation of the international community and the strong desire of China," China's permanent representative to the United Nations Zhang Jun told the UN Security Council's briefing on Ukraine.

Zhang said that the Russian Federation and Ukraine have had rounds of negotiations and China welcomes the two sides to stick to the general direction of peace negotiations, overcome difficulties and differences, and continue to build conditions for a comprehensive settlement of the crisis.

"The international community should create favorable conditions and environment for negotiations between the two sides, open up space for political settlement, and should not set up obstacles for peace, let alone add fuel to the fire in aggravation of confrontations. Every effort should be made to prevent the escalation of the local conflict," Zhang said.

Speaking of the humanitarian issue, Zhang said that China attaches great importance to this issue in Ukraine and supports all initiatives and measures conducive to alleviating the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.

"As the conflict continues, we call on the parties to abide by international humanitarian law, protect the safety of civilians and civilian facilities, minimize civilian casualties, ensure safe and smooth humanitarian corridors for evacuees and humanitarian assistance, and guarantee the basic rights of women, children, and wounded and detained fighters. Humanitarian issues should not be politicized," he said.

On the protection of civilians, the ambassador said that "civilians should be spared of any forms of violence in armed conflicts."

"Attacks against civilians are unacceptable and should not occur," he said, noting that "the reports and images of civilian deaths in Bucha are deeply disturbing."

"The relevant circumstances and specific causes of the incident should be verified and established. Any accusations should be based on facts. Before the full picture is clear, all sides should exercise restraint and avoid unfounded accusations," he stressed.

Echoing the views of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Zhang said that "the spillover effects of the Ukraine crisis is having a major impact on the world, developing countries in particular."

Referring to sanctions imposed, the ambassador said that "sanctions are not an effective means to solve the problem, but will instead accelerate the spillover of the crisis, and bring new and complex problems."

"Today, with the deep development of globalization and the closely linked community of mankind, the implementation of all-dimensional and indiscriminate sanctions is tantamount to politicizing, instrumentalizing and weaponizing the world economy, triggering a serious crisis in the fields of global economy and trade, finance, energy, food, industrial chain, and supply chain, endangering decades of development gains of the international community, and making people of all countries pay a hefty price," he said.

Zhang underscored the fact that the vast number of developing countries are not parties to the conflict, and should not be involved in this confrontation, let alone be forced to bear the consequences of geopolitical conflicts and great power competition.

"The world's major economies should be responsible for managing the risk of spillover of the crisis, and maintaining the stability of global markets and the momentum of global economic recovery," said the envoy.

Talking about sovereignty and territorial integrity, Zhang said that more than 30 years after the end of the Cold War, such a geopolitical tragedy taking place in Europe now "deserves our profound reflection."

"The sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries should be respected, and small- and medium-sized countries should not be pushed to the forefront of confrontation between great powers. All countries have the right to decide their foreign policy independently, and should not be forced to take sides," he said.

"The security of all countries is indivisible, and the security of one country cannot be achieved at the expense of the security of others. We call upon the United States, NATO, and the European Union to engage in comprehensive dialogues with Russia to face head on their differences accumulated over the years, find solutions to the problem, and promote the building of a balanced, effective and sustainable regional security framework," added the ambassador.

Zhang pointed out that on the issue of Ukraine, China does not seek geopolitical self-interest.

"It is not our mindset to watch the situation indifferently from the side line, let alone do anything to add fuel to the fire. There is only one goal we sincerely look forward to, and that is peace. China will continue to promote peace talks and play a constructive and responsible role in helping resolve the crisis in Ukraine," he concluded.

The secretary-general provided introductory remarks at the briefing. Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo also briefed the council in person, while Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths briefed via video link. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a speech via video link as well.

Britain, April's Security Council president, initiated this meeting with the aim of providing a comprehensive update on the political and humanitarian aspects of the conflict in Ukraine.

The speakers called for an immediate end to the conflict and expressed deep concerns over the humanitarian crisis caused by it. They stressed the importance of dialogue and negotiation in resolving the crisis.

They also addressed a number of other issues, such as food and energy shortages and price hikes, while calling for the protection of civilians, especially women and children, as well as humanitarian workers and the protection of the basic rights of prisoners of war, civilian infrastructure and cultural relics.

Griffiths urged council members and all powerful member states to work together for peace and to alleviate the humanitarian disaster. 

UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths speaks via video link during a Security Council's briefing on Ukraine at the UN headquarters in New York, April 5, 2022. (Xinhua/Xie E)

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (C, front) speaks during a Security Council's briefing on Ukraine at the UN headquarters in New York, April 5, 2022. (Xinhua/Xie E)

China's permanent representative to the United Nations Zhang Jun (C, front) speaks during a Security Council's briefing on Ukraine at the UN headquarters in New York, April 5, 2022. (Xinhua/Xie E)
The president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, spoke to DW soon after her return from Kyiv. She said this week could be decisive for Ukraine and the country needs weapons to continue the fight.
New drone footage from the Ukrainian town of Bucha, where Russia is being accused of war crimes, appears to show two of their military vehicles shooting towards a cyclist.
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After what the world saw in Bucha, the sanctions against Russia must be commensurate with the gravity of the war crimes committed by the occupiers, Ukraine's President Zelenskyy said in his latest video address.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Germany would send weapons to Ukraine from its stores that are "rapidly available and effective." He added that the West's goal must be that "Russia does not win this war." DW has the latest.
Ukrainian Governor of Mykolaiv Oblast Vitaliy Kim released security footage on Tuesday showing the moment an ambulance parked outside a hospital was damaged by a strike.
In every barrel of oil, there is Ukrainian blood, a member of Ukraine's parliament told Euronews. He added that that the situation in Mariupol could be worse than what took place in Bucha.
Wibbitz Top Stories 06 May 2022

Threat of Nuclear War , Between U.S. and China , Exacerbated by War in Ukraine.

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In the midst of the Russia-Ukraine war, the US has urged India not to reduce its dependency on the former's equipment.
BRUSSELS, April 5 (Xinhua) -- The European Union (EU) has declared a number of Russian diplomats working in Brussels "persona non grata" and ordered them to leave host nation Belgium, the bloc's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Tuesday.

"Today, I decided to designate persona non grata a number of officials of the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the EU for engaging in activities contrary to their diplomatic status," Borrell said in a statement.

The Russian Ambassador to the EU was summoned to communicate this decision, according to Borrell, EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

Several EU member states also announced on Tuesday their decision to expel Russian diplomats. 
A 50-year-old South African costume designer, who arrived in Mumbai, in February has become the first known case of the Omicron-XE variant of Covid-19 in the country. The XE variant has raised concerns across the globe as it is supposed to be more transmissible than all the other variants of coronavirus discovered so far.
The European Union has announced plans via the European Commission to impose new sanctions on Russia targeting Moscow's coal exports. The decision was made after the atrocities in Bucha, Ukraine, were revealed and showed civilians lying dead on the streets.
Part of National Grid will be returned to public ownership under a new plan to help Britain reach its climate targets.
Sister Suellen Tennyson, a member of the Congregation of the Marianites of Holy Cross, who was abducted in Burkina Faso April 4, 2022. / Diocese of Kaya.



Kaya, Burkina Faso, Apr 5, 2022 / 13:08 pm (CNA).



Prayers are being sought for the safe release of Sister Suellen Tennyson, 83, an American Catholic nun who was reportedly kidnapped in Burkina Faso the night of April 4.



On the night of Monday 4 to Tuesday 5 April 2022, Unidentified Armed Men (UAM) visited the community of nuns in Yalgo Parish of the Diocese of Kaya. They abducted Sister Suellen Tennyson, from the Congregation of Marianite Sisters of the Holy Cross, Bishop Theophile Nare of Kaya said in an April 5 statement shared with ACI Africa.



The bishop added, Sr. Suellen Tennyson was taken to an unknown destination by her kidnappers who, before leaving, vandalized rooms (and) damaged the community vehicle, which they attempted to take with them.



Until the search for her is successful, we remain in communion of prayer for the release of Sr. Suellen Tennyson, Bishop Nare stated.



The Burkinabe bishop continued, We also pray for her sisters, for her congregation, as well as for the pastoral agents and the faithful of Yalgo Parish located some 110 kilometers from Kaya.



Sister Tennyson has been serving in the Diocese of Kaya since October 2014.



Burkina Faso, located in West Africa, has seen an increase in Islamist violence in recent years.



A coup took place in the country in January, and the new president has emphasized the importance of restoring security.



The new head of the Burkinabe armed forces, David Kabre, said Feb. 9, My taking over command coincides with a badly degraded security situation marked by the resurgence of terrorist attacks in several parts of the country, AFP reported.



A minor seminary near Fada Ngourma was attacked and damaged in February.



Several churches were attacked in 2019, and last year the body of a missing priest was found in a forest.



In December 2019 Bishop Justin Kientega of Ouahigouya said one such church attack was part of an attempt by radical Islamists to "provoke a conflict between the religions in a country where Christians and Muslims have always lived peaceably side by side."



About 60 percent of the Burkinabe population is Muslim, 23 percent is Christian (most of whom are Catholic), and 15 percent follow traditional indigenous beliefs.
Tamworth Herald 06 Apr 2022

A judge has ruled that the singer-songwriter did not rip off part of his hit Shape of You
Police officers in the Ukrainian town of Bucha on Wednesday had the gruesome task of inspecting the bodies of killed people, as outrage rises over alleged atrocities carried out by Russian forces in areas near Kyiv. (April 6)


Deutsche Welle 06 Apr 2022

Authorities said the driver died after he rammed his car into the gate of the Russian Embassy. It is unclear whether it was an..
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has condemned hesitancy in Europe over barring Russian energy imports, arguing some leaders were more worried about business losses than about war crimes.
Several European countries expelled more than 73 Russian diplomats following the release of horrendous images of the alleged Russian army's mass killings of civilians in Ukraine.
"We will erase you from this land," a trader says he was told by Amhara security forces.
A medical worker administers a dose of COVID-19 vaccine to a girl in Bangalore, India, March 16, 2022. (Str/Xinhua)

"A future in which we are to respond to the next Disease X with new vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics in just 100 days is possible - but it will take vision, political will, and commensurate financial investments from governments around the world," said Richard Hatchett, CEO of CEPI.

WASHINGTON, April 5 (Xinhua) -- The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and three other global organizations on Tuesday urged the allocation of 15 billion U.S. dollars in grants this year to fight pandemics and strengthen health systems both domestically and overseas.

The IMF, in partnership with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), the Global Fund, and Wellcome Trust, published "A Global Strategy to Manage the Long-term Risks of COVID-19" working paper, which calls for a more "comprehensive" and "integrated" pandemic response from the international community.

"It is now evident that COVID-19 will be with us for the long term, and there are very different scenarios for how it could evolve, from a mild endemic scenario to a dangerous variant scenario," the working paper noted.

"This realization calls for a new strategy that manages both the uncertainty and the long-term risks of COVID-19," it continued.

"Overall, health security is economic security," said IMF's First Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath, who previously served as the Fund's chief economist. "The international community should recognize that its pandemic financing addresses a systemic risk to the global economy."

Gopinath noted that the IMF's January World Economic Outlook Update estimated the cumulative losses from the pandemic to reach 13.8 trillion dollars from 2020 to 2024. "The cost of inaction - for all of us - is very high. We need to act - now," she said.

A medical staff member adjusts a sign in the wind at a fast COVID-19 test screening tent in Paris, France, April 1, 2022. (Xinhua/Gao Jing)

Echoing her remarks, Jeremy Farrar, director of Wellcome Trust and a renowned medical researcher, said "now is not the time to ease up," noting that the virus' next move is "anything but certain" and the risk of new variants remains high.

"We need to set our sights on developing next generation vaccines that can block transmission and won't require endless boosters, strengthening genomic surveillance globally so we can identify and track new variants and improving global access to vaccines, treatments and tests," Farrar said. "Leaving any countries unprotected puts us all at risk."

The newly released working paper laid out four policy implications: achieve equitable access beyond vaccines to encompass a comprehensive toolkit; monitor the evolving virus and dynamically upgrade the toolkit; transition from the acute response to a sustainable strategy toward COVID-19, balanced and integrated with other health and social priorities; adopt a unified risk-mitigation approach to future infectious disease threats beyond COVID-19.

Accordingly, the international community should allocate additional funding to fight pandemics and strengthen health systems both domestically and overseas, the paper argued. This will require about 15 billion dollars in grants this year and 10 billion dollars annually after that.

"This price tag is substantial, but failure to invest now - and build on the gains made in the response to COVID-19 - will result in human and economic costs that will reverberate for generations," said Richard Hatchett, CEO of CEPI.

A boy wearing a face mask poses for photos with a COVID-19 vaccination "passport" after being vaccinated outside a vaccination site in Toronto, Canada, on Dec. 12, 2021. (Photo by Zou Zheng/Xinhua)

"A future in which we are to respond to the next Disease X with new vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics in just 100 days is possible - but it will take vision, political will, and commensurate financial investments from governments around the world," Hatchett said.

Peter Sands, executive director of Global Fund, believed that the next phase of the fight against COVID-19 will be different. "We are in for a long fight against a virus that continues to evolve. So we must shift to a more sustainable response that recognizes the linkages between responding to COVID-19, tackling the earlier pandemics of HIV, TB (Tuberculosis) and malaria, and preparing for future pandemic threats," he said.

The working paper also showed that one of the dangerous legacies of the COVID-19 pandemic, exacerbated by the consequences of Russia-Ukraine war, is weakened capacity in developing countries to invest in their people (including in health) combined with lower appetite for grant support for development as countries prioritize their economies.

"This means the fundamental problem of weak health systems in developing countries and under-investment in global health threats will remain - unless securing resilience is recognized as a common goal and its financing is taken up as a global priority," according to the paper. 
NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said there was no sign Russian President Vladimir Putin had dropped "his ambition to control the whole of Ukraine" and the war could last for years.
We look at the fallout from Russian attacks in Borodyanka, a suburb of the Ukrainian capitol of Kyiv. Ukrainian officials accuse Russian forces of indiscriminately attacking civilians there.
Laxman Pai, Opalesque Asia:

With three US-based companies-Cruise, Robinhood, and Databricks-collectively attracting $12.8 billion worth of venture capital (VC) funding, the USA dominated the list of the global top five VC-funded companies in 2021, said a study.

According to a report by GlobalData, advancements in emerging technologies have boosted global VC investors' confidence in US-based companies.

Autonomous vehicles, fintech, electric batteries, e-commerce, and artificial intelligence (AI) found the most favor with VC investors in 2021, the report said.

"The US, which has several companies working in such emerging areas, managed to dominate the list of top five VC funded companies during the year. The list also featured one company each from China and India," said Aurojyoti Bose, Lead Analyst at GlobalData.

US-based autonomous vehicles firm Cruise raised the highest amount of VC funding during 2021 among all of the companies on the list with $6.5 billion.

The cruise was followed by fintech firm Robinhood, which raised $3.7 billion, and AI firm Databricks, which raised $2.6 billion.

Other companies on the list of top five VC-funded companies in 2021 included China-based electric batteries manufacturer Honeycomb Energy and Indian e-commerce company Flipkart Internet, which recorded disclosed funding values of $3.7 billion and $3.6 billion, respectively.

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New York, NY, 2022-Mar-28 With the uproar of sustainable fashion, an increasing number of brands have come into the spotlight because of their eco-friendly collections. FARAH NAZ New York is a leading fashion brand that has now joined the revolution of sustainable fashion. The founder of the company, Farah Naz started the fashion brand in 2018 and has had the vision to adopt sustainable practices ever since. Today, the brand 
TEHRAN, April 5 (Xinhua) -- The imposition of new sanctions by the United States amid transparent negotiations in Vienna on the restoration of a 2015 nuclear deal indicates Washington's ill will and lack of seriousness in the talks, the Iranian government spokesman said on Tuesday.

Making the remarks at a weekly press conference, Ali Bahadori Jahromi said the imposition of such kinds of sanctions is clearly indicative of U.S. animosity toward the Iranian people, according to the official news agency IRNA.

On March 30, the U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions on an Iran-based procurement agent and his network of companies for providing assistance to Iran's ballistic missile program.

The U.S. Treasury said the new sanctions target the companies that procured ballistic missile propellant-related materials for a unit of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) that is responsible for the research and development of ballistic missiles.

On the next day, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh slammed the newly-imposed sanctions as another sign of Washington's ill intent on the Iranian nation, saying the move shows America would not miss any opportunity to exert pressure on the country.

Iran signed the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with the world powers in July 2015. However, former U.S. President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the agreement in May 2018 and reimposed Washington's unilateral sanctions on Tehran, prompting Iran to reduce some of its nuclear commitments under the agreement in retaliation.

Since April 2021, several rounds of talks have been held in the Austrian capital between Iran and the remaining JCPOA parties, namely China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany, to revive the deal.

Iran insists on obtaining guarantees that the succeeding U.S. administrations would not drop the deal again and calls for the lifting of the sanctions in a verifiable manner. 
RIYADH, April 5 (Xinhua) -- Saudi Arabia will use a mobile application to facilitate visitors' pilgrimage to Mecca during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the Ministry of Hajj and Umrah said on Tuesday.

Travelers observing Umrah, a form of pilgrimage to Mecca, can book their Umrah ritual via the application Eatmarna and enjoy a smoother and safer experience, said the ministry.

Eatmarna, which translates as "let's perform Umrah," was originally developed to manage visits during the COVID-19 pandemic when social distancing regulations were in place.

The application's success in ensuring equal access for all worshippers and providing a smooth, seamless experience has led the ministry to continue its use after the lifting of restrictions.

In March, Saudi Arabia announced removing all COVID-related travel restrictions. Travelers no longer need to provide PCR tests or proof of vaccination to enter the country and institutional quarantine requirements have been removed. 
The following list includes recent reports from the Midland County Sheriffs Office and the Midland Police Department. Compiled by reporter Collin Periatt.

Monday, April 4

10:35 p.m.  Deputies made contact with a 33-year-old man and his 31-year-old wife regarding a domestic assault in Homer Township. No injuries. Parties were separated upon arrival.

9:27 p.m.  Deputies responded to a verbal dispute at a Homer Township residence between a 39-year-old man and his 15-year-old son. The two parties decided to work it out without further assistance.

8:15 p.m.  A deputy responded to a Lee Township residence regarding a juvenile runaway. A 37-year-old woman said her 14-year-old son ran away from home. The 14-year-old was located and was returned home after speaking with his probation officer.

7:25 p.m.  A deputy was asked to contact a woman from Genesee County regarding assistance in getting her son's medication back from his Warren Township father. Contact was made with the father, who agreed to cooperate with the mother to return their son's medication.

7:08 p.m.  A deputy made telephone contact with a Genesee County man who was trying to retrieve his property from his employer. The employer was not refusing to give the man his property, but wanted an itemized list of items so other employees' items would not be stolen. The Genesee County man was directed to the courts for further assistance.

5:01 p.m.  Deputies were dispatched to Lincoln Township regarding an 89-year-old man being reported missing. The man was later found and taken to the hospital for evaluation without further incident.

2 p.m.  Officers investigated a case of retail fraud on Joe Mann Boulevard.

1:11 p.m.  Deputies responded to a single-vehicle property damage crash that occurred on private property in Greendale Township. Upon investigation, deputies found the 20-year-old driver did not have a driver's license and there was a warrant for their arrest. The driver was arrested on the warrant and cited for driving without a license.

6:50 a.m.  Deputies were dispatched to a Lee Township residence for reports of breaking and entering. Deputies made contact with a 51-year-old Lee Township man, who said his brother, a 42-year-old Lee Township man, attempted to break into his residence. Contact was made with the 42-year-old man, who was taken into custody and was transported to the Midland County Jail.
The following editorial was published by the New York Daily News:

Eighteen states all over the physical and political map - including California, Arizona, Virginia, Michigan, Montana, Illinois, Oregon, Nevada, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York - now permit the recreational use of cannabis.

Those states are opting to regulate and collect taxes from adult use of the substance rather than continue to treat it as a problem to be contained through cops, courts, jails and prisons.

Thirty-seven states have made medical marijuana legal.

Yet the federal government still lists the weed as a Schedule I narcotic with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse, classifying it among the most dangerous substances in America.

Anyone who isnt under the influence can see theres something very, very wrong with this picture.

Fortunately, the U.S. House Friday did something about the biggest current disconnect in American politics, passing a bill  authored by New Yorks own Jerry Nadler  to remove marijuana from the Drug Enforcement Administrations naughty list; impose a 5% tax, which would rise to 8%, on cannabis products; let some pot convictions get expunged; and urge review of sentencing for weed-related crimes  while making small businesses that sell the weed eligible for federal loans and services for which any other enterprise can apply.

Washingtons backwardness isnt just a moral and criminal justice problem. It amounts to an unfair tax on a budding industry.

Because of the federal prohibition, many financial institutions wont touch cannabis clients with a 10-foot pole. Nor can marijuana travel efficiently across state lines like almost every other product.

Nadlers MORE Act, which also passed the House two years ago, has some Republican support, but its seen as a dead letter in the Senate, where, despite Chuck Schumers best efforts, it will struggle mightily to get near 60 votes. Schumer is working on his own legalization bill, with plans to unveil it later this month.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress, battling 20% approval ratings, should have no fear of doing what 68% of Americans, including 50% of Republicans and 71% of independents, say they want.

Legalize it.
MASON COUNTY -- Michigan State Police are investigating alcohol as a factor in a single-vehicle rollover crash that left one man in serious condition and injured three others on Tuesday on U.S. 31 in Mason County.

The crash occurred around 3:39 p.m. on Tuesday in Pere Marquette Township. The left passing lane of southbound U.S. 31 was closed for about an hour while law enforcement officials investigated.

A preliminary investigation by the troopers from the Michigan State Police Hart Post found that a 2006 Pontiac Torrent was occupied by a family of four from Holland.

The vehicle, driven by 28-year-old woman, was traveling northbound on the U.S. 31 freeway in the left passing lane south of the Pere Marquette Highway off-ramp (Exit 166), according to MSP.

"The female drivers 29-year-old husband, who was the front seat passenger, reached over and grabbed the steering wheel causing the vehicle to lose control, cross over two lanes of traffic, and run off the roadway right," reads a news release in part. "The female driver attempted to regain control of the vehicle but was unable to as the vehicle veered back across the same two lanes of traffic, drove into the muddy median, and rolled two times."

Police said that the vehicle "narrowly missed" other motorists on the freeway.

A 3-month-old was in the left rear passenger seat and a 4-year-old was in the right rear passenger seat, along with the family dog.

When the vehicle rolled, the front seat passenger was ejected through the moonroof, according to MSP, and the car landed on top of him.

"The 3-month-old, along with the rear-facing car seat she was riding in, was also ejected from the vehicle," reads the news release.

The driver and two children were transported to Spectrum Health Ludington Hospital for non-life-threatening injuries. The passenger was transported to Mercy Health in Muskegon and is in serious condition. The dog was not injured but was transported to the Mason County Animal Control facilities.

Police said alcohol is possibly a contributing factor in the traffic crash; the installation of the car seat is also being investigated.

Troopers at the scene were assisted by the Mason County Sheriffs Office, MCSO Accident Reconstruction Unit, Mason County Animal Control, MSP Grand Rapids Post, along with advanced first responders from the Pere Marquette Fire Department and Ludington Fire Department, and Life EMS.

The crash remains under investigation. Anyone with information about the crash should contact the MSP Hart Post at 231-873-2171.
MANISTEE -- PFLAG Manistee will meet in person this weekend for the first time in over two years.

PFLAG is an acronym for Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer individuals as well as Straight folks. PFLAG has been a part of the Manistee/Ludington area since 2010.

The meeting will be held at 1 p.m. on Sunday at Holy Trinity Church, located at 410 Second St. in Manistee. This meeting replaces the usual third Sunday of the month since the third Sunday of April is Easter and meetings are not held on important holidays.

The group will hold one more Zoom meeting, on May 15, before returning to regular in-person meetings.

Everyone is welcome to attend meetings: members, non-members, those who are interested, those who are curious, those with questions and those who would like to help in the group's commitment to support, educate and advocate for LGBTQ+ people and their families in this part of Michigan.

"In addition to re-uniting with each other after such a long delay, discussion will continue on how we can support LGBTQ individuals in senior living communities," reads a news release in part. "Sharing ideas for two new summer projects is also on the agenda."

For more information, call 313-670-2613 or email pflagmanistee@gmail.com.




BIG RAPIDS  Officers with the Big Rapids Department of Public Safety responded to the following calls. All calls may not be reported. All suspects are assumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

A civil matter was reported in the 1300 block of Catherine Street. Caller was upset that her ex-boss keeps calling to her to get money she owes him. Ex-boss advised he would stop calling her and pursue the matter in civil court.

Officers conducted a traffic stop for expired plate near Elm and South Michigan. Vehicle had valid insurance and was released from the scene.

Found property was returned to owner.

Two scooters were found in the 300 of block North Second.

A traffic stop in the 200 block of North Warren led to passenger being cited for open intoxicant in a motor vehicle.

Police responded to an alarm in the 100 block of Maple Street. Unfounded.

Saturday, April 2

Officers were dispatched for a report of breaking and entering that had occurred in the 1700 block of South State Street earlier in the morning.

Officers dispatched to a 2-vehicle personal injury crash in the 1200 block of Perry Avenue. One driver was taken to hospital due to being pregnant.

Officers responded to assist the Mecosta County Sheriff's Office with a fatal one-vehicle crash on northbound U.S. 131 near mile marker 139. While responding, officers were advised that the crash was a one-vehicle personal injury and that the vehicle was on fire.

A traffic stop near Second and Maple led to driver being cited for driving while license suspended.

Officers assisted Michigan State Police with TruNarc.

Sunday, April 3

Officers were dispatched to an alarm in the 100 block of Maple Street and found the building secure. Keyholder responded and advised that she would work with management and the alarm company to fix the ongoing unfounded alarm issues.

A suspicious situation was reported in the 1200 block of Perry Avenue. Officers were dispatched to a suspicious complaint involving an unknown person putting something under the steel cover that protects the light post bolts. The investigation revealed this was a part of a game, possibly geocaching, that was being played. A note within a pill bottle with peoples names and dates on it was found.

A traffic stop near North State and East Bridge led to the driver being cited for DWLS, unregistered motor vehicle, and no insurance. Curries towed the vehicle.

A domestic situation was reported in the 500 block of Rust. Police said a female was highly intoxicated and upset that mom wouldn't turn her child over to her due to her intoxication. The female allegedly pushed her mothers head while she was on video call with her other children and refused many attempts to get her to go to with aunt to sleep it off. Police said she had a stungun in her purse.
JERUSALEM, April 5 (Xinhua) -- Israel, Greece and Cyprus will continue to cooperate on natural gas projects, including exporting gas to Europe, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said Tuesday.

Lapid made the remarks after holding a trilateral meeting in the Greek capital Athens with Greece's Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias and Cyprus' Foreign Minister Ioannis Kasoulides, Lapid's office said in a statement.

The Israeli top diplomat said the war in Ukraine is changing the structure of the European and Middle Eastern energy markets. "There are risks here, but there are also opportunities which we must examine together," he was quoted as saying.

Israel, Greece and Cyprus are "examining additional economic cooperation, with an emphasis on the energy market," Lapid said.

The three states are also looking at ways to cooperate in a series of fields, first and foremost in regional security, to fight "terrorism in the region," he said.

In 2020, Israel, Greece and Cyprus agreed to build the 1,900-km-long Eastern Mediterranean pipeline called EastMed that would export natural gas from the Levantine Basin to Europe to reduce Europe's dependency on Russian energy supplies. But the United States withdrew its support for the project in January 2022, citing that it is not seen as economically viable or environmentally friendly. 
Tax season is the peak time for frauds. To help senior citizens be smart and safe, Greater Midland Community Center is hosting a presentation at 11 a.m. Wednesday, April 20 at the 50+ Center. Midland Police Officer Brennon Warren will discuss common scams, warning signs, financial safety and internet safety.

This is a free event for seniors. A light snack will be provided.
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Customers, elected officials and business alliance representatives opened their arms to welcome back Sanfords only bank during Huntington Bank's grand opening Tuesday evening.

Ive had a smile on my face all day, said Huntington Bank Great Lakes Bay and Northern Michigan Region President Seth Perigo.

Sanford Village President Dolores Porte said the bank has been in Sanford for a really long time and is a cornerstone in the community. The bank came back after the flood and continued investing in the future. They remained here to support a small town.

When the bank did a soft opening in early March, some residents said they were happy to see some staff members who were familiar faces. Five of the original eight staff members returned to the Sanford branch.

The new bank, at 256 West Saginaw Road, closed as Chemical Bank and reopened as Huntington. The former Chemical Bank building was demolished last summer. The building was flooded in May 2020 due to the dam failures and had to be razed and rebuilt. Within a short span of time, Chemical Bank was bought by TCF, which then soon merged with Huntington Bank, based in Columbus, Ohio.

Midland Business Alliance President and CEO Tony Stamas said many people invested in the project and many alliance ambassadors attended the ceremony.

It's great to have the staff back and be able to see the familiar faces, said Meridian Church of God Rev. Kevin Tippin, who also praised the beautiful new building.

Huntington Sanford Branch Manager Chris Bloom, who cut the ribbon for the grand opening, said its been a joy to be back.

OMG, lots of hugs, lots of welcome backs, Bloom said. Its so exciting to see the customers walk through our doors again.

Perigo talked about how after the dam breach, the Sanford branch staff would meet in a Midland office and call their customers. Bloom said that was to let them know they were being thought of and that the bank would come back.

The people here are what makes this branch special, said customer Jenee Velasquez.

Theyve been through the tough times with us, she added. They are people that stick with you when times are tough.

Perigo said looking out for people is a cornerstone of Huntington Bank. He said the bank is dedicated to helping better peoples lives, and he is proud of the support the bank and the employees provided in the aftermath of the dam breach.

This is our opportunity to do our part to move Sanford forward, Perigo told the Daily News.

This is just the beginning, he added. Were out in the community and our staff is eager to help them with their future.
The GOP no longer argues that free markets, rather than government, should choose "winners and losers."

In today's Republican Party, the primary economic role of the state is not to get out of the way. It is, instead, to reward friends and crush political enemies.

Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham expressed the new ethos in a recent monologue threatening companies that advocated for LGBTQ rights, ballot access, racial justice and sundry other political stances that are anathema in today's GOP.

"When Republicans, they get back into power, Apple and Disney need to understand one thing: Everything will be on the table," Ingraham warned. "Your copyright, trademark protection. Your special status within certain states. And even your corporate structure itself. The antitrust division at Justice needs to begin the process of considering which American companies need to be broken up once and for all for competition's sake, and ultimately for the good of the consumers who pay the bills."

This might have been an unusually eloquent articulation of Republicans' punitive new approach to economic policy, but it is hardly unique to Ingraham.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, is furious that Disney has publicly criticized his new law prohibiting classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity (nicknamed the "Don't Say Gay" law); beyond using his bully pulpit to rail against Disney's supposed indecency, he has threatened to cancel Disney's half-century-old special status under Florida law that enables the company to effectively govern itself on the grounds of its theme parks. In other states, such as Georgia, GOP politicians have punished private companies for taking supposedly "woke" stands on issues such as gun violence.

Republicans in Congress have likewise tried to use antitrust enforcement and other government levers to punish companies whose public stances on voting rights or internal policies on content moderation they dislike. This approach to governance was expertly modeled by Donald Trump, who as president frequently used the power of the state to reward friends and punish enemies.

He did this through tax law, tariff policy and other proposed subsidies that chose winners and losers according to their political allegiances. He selectively enforced energy policies, such as allowing offshore drilling, to dole out favors to friends. He allegedly attempted to block a government contract to Amazon because its founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post; he also tried to raise the prices the retail giant pays for U.S. Postal Service shipping. He launched a bogus antitrust investigation into car companies that had opposed his lax emissions standards. He threatened to revoke the "licenses" of broadcast media firms whose coverage he disliked.

Beyond their halfhearted complaints, Trump's fellow partisans did little to restrain him. Now his instincts have infected the rest of the right, from the Republicans in the federal government and Fox News on down.

This is far scarier than the "cancel culture" phenomenon Republicans so often decry.

Cancel culture, however ill-defined, generally refers to the use of voluntary social pressure to punish those whose views are deemed somehow unacceptable - through public rebukes, boycotts, shunnings, firings or other refusals to engage with some persona non grata in the public square. Republicans (like Democrats) have of course engaged in all these behaviors and worse: Trump himself frequently called for boycotts and firings, including over the peaceful expression of political speech.

But now his party is attempting codify these responses into law, using the power and weapons of the state against those who disagree with them.

Last fall, as this evolution of the Republican Party and its open warfare with the business community became increasingly apparent, I urged Democrats to take advantage - to position themselves as the new party of political and economic freedom and the rule of law, and to embrace the prosperity that such values can engender. Instead they have been letting their own populist instincts guide them toward rhetoric and policies that emphasize their own punitive treatment of disfavored companies.

It's not too late for Democrats to correct course. Someone has to.

Catherine Rampell is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post. Email her at crampell@washpost.com
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WASHINGTON (AP)  More than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. health officials are beginning to grapple with how to keep the vaccines updated to best protect Americans from the ever-changing coronavirus.

On Wednesday, a panel of vaccine advisers to the Food and Drug Administration spent hours debating key questions for revamping the shots and conducting future booster campaigns. They didn't reach any firm conclusions.

The questions facing the experts included: How often to update the vaccines against new strains, how effective they should be to warrant approval and whether updates should be coordinated with global health authorities.

Last week, the FDA authorized a fourth dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines for anyone 50 or older and for some younger people with severely weakened immune systems. Its an effort to get ahead of another possible surge.

But the FDA's vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks acknowledged at the meeting we simply cant be boosting people as frequently as we are. He called the latest booster update a stopgap measure to protect vulnerable Americans while regulators decide whether and how to tweak the current vaccines.

Marks cautioned that waning vaccine protection, new variants and colder weather in the fall could raise the risk of more surges.

Our goal here is to stay ahead of future variants and outbreaks and ensure we do our best to reduce the toll of disease and death due to COVID-19, said Marks, adding that he expects more meetings of the vaccine panel in coming months.

Some of the key questions the panel discussed:

HOW SHOULD THE U.S. DECIDE WHEN TO LAUNCH FUTURE ROUNDS OF BOOSTER SHOTS?

One area where experts appeared to agree is that vaccines should be judged on their ability to prevent severe disease that leads to hospitalization and death.

We need to focus on the worst case, which is severe disease, and we need to change strains when were losing that battle, said Dr. Mark Sawyer of the University of California, San Diego.

By that measure, the current vaccines have held up remarkably well.

During the last omicron-driven surge, two vaccine doses were nearly 80% effective against needing a breathing machine or death  and a booster pushed that protection to 94%, federal scientists recently reported.

But only about half of Americans eligible for a third shot have gotten one. And many experts said it was unsustainable to continue asking Americans to get boosted every few months.

A panelist from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that the 80% protection from severe disease could become the standard for evaluating the vaccines.

"I think we may have to accept that level of protection and then use other alternative ways to protect individuals with therapeutics and other measures, said Dr. Amanda Cohn, CDC's chief medical officer.

Presentations at the meeting by government health officials and independent researchers underscored the challenges of predicting when the next major COVID-19 variant might appear.

Trevor Bedford, a disease modeler with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said a major new strain like omicron could emerge anywhere from every 1.5 years to once a decade, based on currently available data. Given that unpredictability, researchers will need methods to quickly determine whether current vaccines work against emerging variants.

WHATS THE PROCESS FOR UPDATING VACCINES TO ADDRESS NEW VARIANTS?

All three COVID-19 vaccines now used in the U.S. are based on the original coronavirus version that emerged in late 2019. Updating the vaccines will be a complex task, likely requiring coordination between the FDA, manufacturers and global health authorities.

To speed the vaccines to market, the FDA relied on research shortcuts to judge effectiveness, mainly looking at their early impact on the immune system's antibody levels. A number of panelists said Wednesday they wanted more rigorous data from studies that track patients over time to see who gets sick or dies.

But that approach would likely be too time consuming.

Were looking at a conundrum here in that its going to be hard to generate all the data we want in short order when a new variant emerges, said Dr. Ofer Levy of Harvard Medical School.

A representative for the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority laid out the narrow window that manufacturers could face to reformulate, study and mass produce an updated vaccine by September.

If youre not on your way to a clinical trial by the beginning of May, I think its going to be very difficult to have enough product across manufacturers to meet demand, said Robert Johnson, deputy assistant secretary of BARDA.

The process for updating annual flu vaccines offers one possible model, as laid out by a representative from the World Health Organization.

Twice a year, WHO experts recommend updates to flu vaccines to target emerging strains. The FDA then brings those recommendations to its own vaccine panel, which votes on whether they make sense for the U.S., setting the stage for manufacturers to tweak their shots and begin mass production.

But COVID-19 hasnt yet fallen into a predictable pattern like the flu. And as the coronavirus evolves, different strains may become dominant in different regions of the world.

Several experts said they would need more meetings with more data and proposals from the FDA to decide on a strategy.

Weve never been here before. Were all working together to do the best we can and its very complex, said Oveta Fuller of the University of Michigan's Medical School.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Mombasa, Kenya (PANA) - Unknown gunmen shot and wounded Ali Mwatsahu, a local politician aspiring to represent Mvita constituency in Mombasa at the Kenyan coast, in what is believed to be a failed assassination attempt, the local media reported Wednesday
BEIJING, April 5 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Tuesday held a phone conversation with Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly at the latter's request.

During their conversation, Wang said that the people of China and Canada have enjoyed long-term friendly exchanges, noting that Canada is one of the first Western countries to establish diplomatic ties with the People's Republic of China.

However, in recent years, China-Canada relations have suffered a serious setback due to the Meng Wanzhou case, which is something we do not want to see, Wang said.

The essence of this case lies in the U.S. suppression over Chinese high-tech enterprises by coercion, a shameful behavior that everyone could see clearly, Wang said.

No country should act as a facilitator of such unilateral bullying, and all countries have the right to make necessary responses, he added.

Noting that China always views and handles China-Canada relations from a strategic and long-term perspective, Wang said the current situation of bilateral relations is not in the interests of both countries, calling on Canada to face up to the problems and cooperate with China. He further put forward three proposals in this regard.

Firstly, Canada should view China positively and objectively with a steady and pragmatic China policy.

China's political system and development path are the Chinese people's own choices, which have inevitable historical logic and are in line with China's national conditions and its people's needs, said Wang.

China's development and progress are not only the legitimate right of its 1.4 billion people, but also an important part of the modernization of all mankind, he said.

China and Canada have no historical disputes or real conflict of interest. China hopes that Canada, in line with the goal of mutual benefit and win-win results, will do more to enhance mutual trust and promote bilateral relations, Wang said.

Secondly, the two countries should respect each other's core interests and not create new obstacles to the development of bilateral relations.

The one-China principle is the political foundation of China-Canada relations, Wang said, adding that if the Taiwan question is not handled properly, China-Canada relations will suffer fundamental damage.

China hopes Canada will adopt a correct attitude and position on issues concerning China's core interests, he said.

Thirdly, Canada should uphold its independence and eliminate unnecessary external interference.

Noting that the elder generation of leaders of the two countries broke through resistance and made a decision to establish diplomatic ties, Wang said there are many good stories and traditions in China-Canada exchanges that should be cherished and carried forward.

China hopes Canada will work with China to eliminate external interference, overcome difficulties and realize sound, stable and sustainable development of bilateral relations, he said.

The two sides also exchanged views on the Ukraine issue.

Noting that Chinese President Xi Jinping has made a comprehensive and authoritative elaboration about China's position on the issue, Wang said China calls on all parties to think calmly and rationally, create opportunities for peace and open up prospects for negotiations. 
Bamako, Mali (PANA) - The Malian Armed Forces (FAMAs) have rejected accusations of exactions in Moura, in the Mopti region, in the centre of the country, where more than 200 jihadists were neutralized on 23 -31 March, said a statement issued by the Armed Forces General Staff (EMGA)
New York, US (PANA) - The UN chief on Tuesday, together with the Security Council, strongly condemned an attack by suspected militia members on peacekeepers serving in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which left one Nepali blue helmet dead
Photo: (Photo : Anastasia Vlasova/Getty Images)

A new pilot study has found that pregnant women exposed to cannabis products that contained CBD and THC were more likely to have children with increased blood sugar levels and fat mass at the age of five, according to a report by CNN.

Brianna Moore, the study author and an assistant professor at the Colorado School of Public Health in Aurora, Colorado, said that there is this misconception that cannabis is safe. Moore said that some women might use cannabis during pregnancy, thinking that these products offer a safe alternative to other medicines and even prescribed medications.

Moore begs to differ, with studies showing connections between marijuana use during pregnancy, low birth weight in babies, and behavioral problems later in childhood. Moore added that there might also be links between using marijuana by pregnant women to their children being obese and having higher blood sugar levels.

More women using cannabis during pregnancy in the United States

These findings are interesting, with more and more pregnant women using cannabis in the United States and other countries such as Canada in recent decades. Over 450,000 American women participated in a 2019 study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, with the federal institution finding cannabis use more than doubled among pregnant women between 2002 and 2017.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, past studies have shown the use of cannabis by pregnant women is linked to attention issues, abnormal neurological development, hyperactivity and autism, and other cognitive and behavioral issues in their children.

Expectant mothers who participated in the study were recruited in Colorado through Healthy Start, a national program designed to improve health outcomes before, during, and after pregnancy.

Out of the 103 women tested during pregnancy, 15 percent of them had detectable levels of various cannabinoids in their urine. Among the constituents found was THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), a chemical that is the main psychoactive compound in marijuana and is responsible for creating a "high" among users.

Read Also: Premature Births in Ukraine Rise as Russian Invasion Enters the Second Month

Cannabis use during pregnancy resulted in babies with low birth weight

Moore said they measured this during mid-pregnancy, meaning that the women knew they were very much pregnant and already past the first trimester, wherein cannabis is often used for their morning sickness.

Levels of CBD (cannabidiol) were also found in the urine of the women tested. The chemical CBD is being marketed online and over the counter as a safe and nonpsychoactive option for users to help them with their sleep, pain, anxiety, nausea, depression, and more. Many CBD products are derived from industrial hemp, which is a type of cannabis plant that has little THC, according to the US Food and Drug Administration.

The new study, recently published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, found expectant mothers who tested positive for cannabis use were more likely to have babies with low birth weight. Moore said that being underweight at birth puts these babies in danger of postnatal catch-up growth.

Related Article: Newborn Baby Brings Hope to Ukraine Maternity Ward in the Middle of War; Mykolaiv Sees Baby Boom
Photo: (Photo : JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images)

The Court of Appeals in Arizona has reversed the punishment laid out against a mom accused of child neglect because she used medical marijuana during her pregnancy.

Mom Lindsay Ridgell earns the favor of Judge Randall Howe, who stated in his ruling that the mother is entitled to use medical marijuana since she has a state-issued card that protects her against arrest, denial of services, and other penalties under the 2010 Arizona Medical Marijuana Act (AMMA).

Ridgell also obtained a prescription from a licensed doctor to help her manage her nausea and morning sickness. The prescription precludes that the mother's use of cannabis was under her doctor's guidance, per a report from Yahoo!

Read Also: Overdosing on Marijuana Edibles on the Rise Among Children

Lindsay Ridgell's Name in the Central Registry

Ridgell obtained her medical marijuana card early on to help with her irritable bowel syndrome. When she got pregnant in 2018, Ridgell was diagnosed with hyperemesis gravidarum or extreme morning sickness, and was in the emergency room for treatments quite a few times.

However, in 2019, Department of Child Safety (DCS) Director Mike Faust ordered to add Ridgell's name to the Central Registry as she allegedly harmed her baby with her medical marijuana use, per the AZ Central.

After Ridgell gave birth to a baby boy, the nurses observed that her newborn exhibited "jitteriness" and was ordered for transfer to the Phoenix Children's Hospital for further tests. The test results showed that the baby was positive for marijuana, which required the hospital to inform the DCS.

The Central Registry consists of a list of people who have neglected or abused children. Their names' inclusion, which would remain for 25 years, was meant to serve as a warning for future employers, especially for work linked to vulnerable communities or kids.

Lindsay Ridgell Was Right, Says Lawyer

In the U.S., about 10 percent of babies are born with some exposure to illicit drugs, especially in vulnerable communities. However, medical marijuana use in Arizona has been legalized since 2010. Ten years later, the state also voted to legalize recreational marijuana use. The state laws also indicate that a mom may be liable for child neglect only if the baby born with substance exposure was not under the guidance of a medical professional, but this was not the case for Ridgell.

Ridgell's lawyer, Julie Gunnigle, hailed the decision of the Court of Appeals. She said that the mother was right to fight for the reversal of her conviction, despite years of litigation.

According to High Times, Ridgell is happy and relieved that a "weight has been lifted off her shoulders" with Howe's ruling. Aside from clearing her name, she could now return to her social work with underprivileged kids.

Her case has also earned support from the Academy of Perinatal Harm Reduction and the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, who said that many mothers are in the same boat as Ridgell and fear the repercussions from the state, despite marijuana's legalization. The advocates believe that as medical marijuana use has been decriminalized, some people find ways to target pregnant mothers.

Related Article: Doctors Advise Parents What to Do if Their Children Accidentally Eat Marijuana Edibles
Photo: (Photo : Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)

The parents of an eight-year-old Central Illinois boy have been arrested after their son died, weighing just 30 pounds. Authorities from Peoria, Illinois, announced that Brandon Walker, 40, and Stephanie Jones, 35, have both been charged with first-degree murder for the death of their son, Navin Jones.

Their bond has been set at $1 million each, and they could both face life in prison. Peoria Police found 8-year-old Navin unresponsive and not breathing inside their home on Tuesday, March 29. Navin was later pronounced dead at a hospital, with the Peoria County Coroner saying that he died due to physical abuse and neglect in a statement issued on March 30.

According to ABC affiliate WHOI, the coroner said that this is one of the worst neglect cases he has ever seen. The doctor who conducted the child's autopsy reported that he was exceedingly malnourished with a weight of just 30 pounds. Officers said the young boy was extremely malnourished to the point where they could see his bones.

Bruises found all over Navin's body

Navin also had bruises all over his body when police found him. Apart from the bruises, he also had scrapes, abrasions, and scars on his body. Both of Navin's wrists also appeared to suffer from ligature injuries.

According to the Independent, Navin was put in state care back in December 2013 after being born with narcotics in his system. Following interviews with Navin's parents, they were arrested by police on charges of endangering the life or health of a child. The probable cause affidavit says that Jones found her son Navin in a bathtub, brought the child downstairs, and put him in a shower to "warm him."

While searching the property, police officers found a rope on the doors to Navin's bedroom and closet. The police said that the child's mother, Stephanie, told them that the rope was to keep Navin out of the closet, but officers said the closet smelled of feces.

Read Also: Mother of Sacramento Mass Shooting Victims Calls for Justice as Hunt for Gunmen Continues

DCFS involved with Navin Jones' family until his death

According to the affidavit, the last time anyone saw the kid healthy was when Navin's grandmother gave him to his parents in early November of last year. Walker and Jones both claimed they did not have legal guardianship of Navin.

The couple also claimed that the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) was at fault for the incident, saying the department did not give them the appropriate paperwork or tell them how to handle the health of Navin.

According to a report by WCBU, records show that the DCFS was involved with the family until the day of Navin's death. In April 2017, Navin's paternal grandmother was able to obtain legal custody of the eight-year-old boy and his 12-year-old sibling. Both children, however, have been living with their parents recently. DCFS was helping both of them get temporary guardianship back in February and March.

Related Article: Angry Mom Crashes Event of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, Wants Toddler Mask Mandate to End
Photo: (Photo : HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images)

On Monday, April 4, Shanghai health officials defended their controversial policy of separating parents from babies and young children who tested positive for COVID-19. The move comes as frustration with the Chinese city's tough virus controls mounts.

France24 reported that around 25 million people in China's largest city and financial center remain locked down as authorities try to put out the country's most severe coronavirus outbreak since the end of the first COVID-19 pandemic wave in the early part of 2020.

Under China's strict virus controls, anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 must be isolated from non-infected people. That is the case even for asymptomatic people or only have a mild infection.

Parents and guardians voice their anger on social media

That also includes children who are found to be positive but whose family members are not. Wu Qianyu, an official from the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission, issued a statement about the policy, saying, "If the child is younger than seven years old, those children will receive treatment in a public health center."

Wu added that they are mainly isolating them from older children or teenagers in centralized (quarantine) places. Parents and guardians voiced their anger on social media at the policy, which has spread outrage and anxiety across the sprawling city of Shanghai.

One unnamed commenter asked, "Parents need to meet 'conditions' to accompany their children?" on the social media platform Weibo. The person said that is absurd, claiming that parents being with their children should be their most fundamental right.

Concerns about the policy grew in recent days after unverified videos of babies and young children in state-run wards went viral. According to a report by CNBC, Wu maintained the policy is necessary to halt the spread of the coronavirus, saying that it was integral to virus prevention and control work. Wu added that children and parents who test positive for COVID-19 would be able to stay together as a family while they get treatment.

Read Also: Terry Wayne Wallis, The Man Who Said 'Mom' After Waking Up From 19-year Coma, Has Died at Age 57

New virus cases rising in Shanghai as lockdown extended

Frustration is mounting among the citizens in Shanghai, which has become the epicenter of China's COVID-19 outbreak. The city recorded 9,000 new virus cases on Monday, putting more pressure on officials to stop its spread.

Chinese authorities had initially promised not to lock down the whole city of Shanghai, targeting virus clusters with localized lockdowns of specific districts or compounds instead. With case numbers growing in the past weeks, city officials admitted that their tactics in containing the COVID-19 outbreak failed.

Officials introduced a two-stage lockdown, which they said at the time would only last four days each. The confinement was set to be lifted in theory on Tuesday, April 5, but the Shanghai government announced on its official WeChat account that the lockdown would stay in place due to the high number of positive COVID-19 cases detected in the area. Reuters reported that the lockdown in Shanghai will now cover all of the city despite growing anger over quarantine rules.

Related Article: No Child Neglect Charges Filed Against Parents of J.J. Rodriguez in Spencer Dog Mauling Incident
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OUAGADOUGOU, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Burkina Faso's former president Blaise Compaore was sentenced to life imprisonment for the assassination of his predecessor Thomas Sankara in 1987, a military tribunal ruled Wednesday after a trial that started on October 11, 2021.

The tribunal also sentenced General Gilbert Diendere and Hyacinthe Kafando, a security chief, to life imprisonment.

Compaore, who lives in exile in Cote d'Ivoire after being toppled by public protests in 2014, and Kafando, who has been on the run since 2016, were tried in absentia.

Eight other accused were sentenced to terms ranging from three to 20 years in prison. Three defendants were acquitted.

They were prosecuted for various offences, mainly attack against state security, assassination and concealment of corpses.

Thomas Sankara seized power in Burkina Faso following a military coup on August 4, 1983, as part of a military revolution that changed the name of the country Haute Volta (Upper Volta) to Burkina Faso.

On October 15, 1987, Sankara was assassinated in a coup that brought to power Blaise Compaore, a key member of the military revolution. 
U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Chad E. Meacham announced this week that the perpetrators of a $1.5 million Apple gift card scheme have been sentenced to a combined eight years in federal prison.

Syed Ali, 29, and his co-conspirator, Jason Tout-Puissant, 27, both pleaded guilty to wire fraud in 2019. Mr. Ali was sentenced in October 2021 by U.S. District Judge David Godbey to 37 months in federal prison; Mr. Tout-Puissant was sentenced today by the same judge to 60 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $1.26 million in restitution to Apple.

According to plea papers, Mr. Tout-Puissant admitted that he stole multiple Apple point-of-sale devices  nicknamed Isaacs  from an Apple store in Southlake, Texas, then sat outside the store, logged onto the stores Wi-Fi network, and loaded thousands of dollars of fraudulent store credits onto gift cards.

He then loaded the gift cards onto Apple Passbook, an application that generates QR codes for the value of gift cards, and sent screenshots of those codes to Mr. Ali.

According to the indictment, the conspiracy involved more than $1.5 million in fraudulently obtained Apple gift cards. For more on this, read the full Department of Justice press release here.
THE CHOICE 2008

ADDITIONAL LESSON IDEAS: The Vice Presidency

The vice presidential nominations have received unprecedented attention in campaign 2008. Invite students to research the vice presidency

First, direct them to the United States Senate Web site to learn more about the history and responsibilities of vice presidents in the United States.

Then, have a class discussion.



What does the vice president do?



How many vice presidents have gone on to become president?



Later, in small groups or as a class, read the campaign biographies of Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. Joe Biden.



What strengths do these politicians bring to the McCain and Obama campaigns?



What are some reasons why these politicians have received so much media attention?

Internet Resources

Vice President of the United States Richard B. Cheney

Gov. Sarah Palin

Sen. Joe Biden
Global Media Alliance, organizers of the Ghana Beverage Awards (GBA) has expressed its readiness to host the sixth edition of the prestigious awards, initially scheduled on Friday, April 8 2022 at the Kempinski Gold Coast City Accra.



According to the organizers, this years edition promises patrons a night full of thrills and heavy laden with never seen experiences. Departing from the virtual awards ceremony organized for the immediate past two events, the newly packaged and improved GBA will provide an interactional platform for industry players and relevant stakeholders while rewarding excellence in the Ghanaian beverage Industry.



Speaking ahead of the event, Chief Executive Officer for Global Media Alliance, Ernest Boateng commended the participating beverage companies for their high level of participation in all activities that were earmarked to build some excitement among patrons in a lead up to the main event.



As organizers, we followed with keen interest the high levels of energy and enthusiasm that was channelled into the various activities held to herald the main event and I must say that years participation has been exceptional. We would to express our sincerest gratitude for your commitment and we make a solemn promise to innovate and make GBA always worth looking forward to, he said.



He expressed gratitude for patrons for their patience and understanding in the event of the rescheduling of the event.

Were most grateful for our patrons for their loyalty and support when we had the reschedule the awards from March 25 2022 to coming Friday due to some unforeseen circumstances. Your support during such a period really meant a lot to us.



Ghana Beverages Awards, currently in its sixth year, is organized under the theme Inspiring Excellence in Ghanas Beverage Industry. In the last five years, the awards scheme has been instrumental in putting the spotlight on the local beverage industry while promoting both local and foreign beverages as well as the participation of small-scale beverage enterprises in Ghana.



Again, it has remained a force to reckon with through its contribution ensuring that beverage-manufacturing companies are compliant with the highest standards of practice in the production and delivery of their products.



GBA is proudly supported by the Food and Beverage Association of Ghana (FABAG), Consumer Protection Agency (CPA), Food Research Institute (FRI) under CSIR, Perception Management International (PMI) ,Ministry of Trade and Industry, Ministry of Tourism, Arts & Culture and the Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA).Its media partners are: Citi FM, Happy FM, YFM, Akonoba FM, Neesim FM Bolga Neesim FM Tamale, eTV Ghana, Net 2 TV, Oman FM,Mx 24, Business and Financial Times, Daily Guide and Ghanaweb.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









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Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.
The emergence of COVID-19 since March 2020 has affected all countries, with very few exceptions.

The disruption of health services which affected all persons, especially the most vulnerable, including women and children, has exposed the need to strengthen national and local capacities to respond effectively to health emergencies.



Although the pandemic remains a threat, supporting the continuity of essential health services to tackle malaria, AIDS, tuberculosis and Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) will be critical if Ghana is to attain the Sustainable Development Goal Three (SDG 3) of ending these epidemics by 2030.



Recognising the singular importance of supporting the countrys effort towards the continuity of essential health services during this pandemic, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Ghana, with funding from the Government of Japan, is implementing a project aimed at strengthening community health system to support the continuity of essential services to the vulnerable during and post-COVID-19 pandemic.



The project focuses on strengthening the capacities of communities and vulnerable groups such as women, children, persons living with HIV, persons with Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) and slum dwellers for the uptake of health services during the post-COVID-19 pandemic, while strengthening the capacities of health facilities to continue essential service provision and the management of COVID-19 and future pandemics.



The project also seeks to equip five under-resourced health facilities and urban Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) in Ga Central and Accra Metro with relevant medical equipment to enhance service delivery.



At a short ceremony on April 1 in Accra to hand over one of the container structures to the Chorkor Chemuena CHPS in Accra Metro, the Deputy Representative of UNDP, Mr Sukhrob Khoshmukhamedov, said: UNDP believes that health and development are inextricably linked, and strengthening capacities of communities and individuals to improve community health outcomes makes development sense.



He said the facility was constructed and equipped as part of the project essential health services provision at Chorkor Chemuena under the Ablekuma South sub-metro.



As part of this intervention, UNDP, in collaboration with GHS, is also strengthening the capacity of other health facilities and CHPS zones in Accra Metro and Ga Central to ensure continued essential health services provision to underserved communities.



We hope that the CHPS facility being handed over would strengthen access and quality of community health service provision and ultimately contribute to better health outcomes within Chorkor and its immediate environs, Mr Khoshmukhamedov said.



Appreciation



The Sub-Metro Director of Health Service for Ablekuma South, Dr Charlotte Alberta Cato, expressed appreciation to UNDP and the Japanese government for the kind gesture.



She gave an assurance that the facility would be utilised well to improve the health of the people of Chorkor Chemuena and advised the health personnel working there to work effectively towards the delivery of quality health care.



She said with the CHPS compound now in place, the people of the community, especially pregnant women, would no longer travel long distances to the general hospitals to seek health care.









Source: graphiconline.com









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The 'gunman' who was recently seen brandishing a pistol in a video that has gone viral has been identified as a Police Sergeant.



According to the Ghana Police Service he is stationed at the Central Regional Police Command.



Speaking in an interview on Peace FM's morning show 'Kokrokoo', the Director-General of Public Affairs at the Ghana Police Service, DCOP Kwesi Ofori said the officer has been interdicted and criminal investigation is ongoing.



"In line with our rules and regulations, he has been interdicted for investigations to continue. Police Professional Standards Bureau (PPSB) is looking at the administrative conduct of the officer and CID is pursuing the criminal aspect of it," he said.



Meanwhile, a statement issued by the Police Service says Preliminary findings show that the person who was seen wielding the weapon is a police Sergeant stationed at the Central Regional Police Command. The said policeman has been interdicted to make way for a full investigation into the matter.



Investigation further indicates that the Police Sgt. lodged a complaint of assault against his assailants alleging that he was attacked by a group of persons one of whom was wielding a cutlass.







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 State is to file the witness statement of its last witness in the case involving Alhaji Collins Dauda, a former Minister of Works and Housing and four others.



The prosecution delayed the filing of the witness statement because the witness was out of the jurisdiction.



The case has been adjourned to May 11, 2022.



Alhaji Dauda accused in the US$200 million Saglemi Housing Project scandal, has been admitted to self-recognizance bail by Criminal Court Four (High Court Division) in Accra.



The court presided over by Justice Mrs. Comfort Tasiame then ordered Alhaji Dauda to deposit his passport with the Courts registry.



Four other accused persons standing trial with Alhaji Dauda have also been admitted to bail in a total sum of US$322 million or its Ghana Cedi equivalent.



Mr Kwaku Agyeman-Mensah also a former Minister of Works and Housing and Alhaji Ziblim Yakubu, a former Chief Director of the Ministry, were admitted to bail in the sum of US$65 million with three sureties each.



The Court further directed the two to also deposit their passports with the Court registrar.



Mr Andrew Clocanas, Executive Director of Contructora OAS Ghana Limited, was also admitted to US$179 million bail with three sureties each. One of the sureties must be a public or civil servant and he is also ordered to deposit his passport with the court registrar.



Mr Nouvi Tetteh Angelo was admitted to bail in the sum of $13 million with three sureties. The sureties are to provide two landed properties situated in Accra.



This was after all five accused persons have pleaded not guilty to charges of willfully causing financial to the State.



Dauda, Member of Parliament for Asutifi North, has been additionally charged for intentionally misapplying public property.



Dauda, together with Kwaku Agyeman-Mensah, Alhaji Ziblim Yakubu, Andrew Clocanas and Nouvi Tetteh Angelo, is also facing the charge of issuing a false certificate.



Clocanas and Tetteh have been additionally and jointly charged for dishonestly causing financial loss to the State.



The facts of the case as read out by the Attorney General, Mr Dame, Dauda, a Member of Parliament, was a Minister of the Ministry of Water Resources, Works, and Housing (MWRWH) from February 2013 to March 2015, whilst Agyeman-Mensah was also a Minister of the MWRWH from April 2015 to January 2017.



Yakubu was the Chief Director of MWRWH from July 2009 to April 2017, with Clocanas being the Executive Chairman of Construtora OAS Ghana Limited and Tetteh, a director and majority shareholder of Ridge Management Solutions DWC-LLC as well as director of VHM Ghana Limited.



In August 2012, former President John Dramani Mahama, granted executive approval to the Ministry for the construction of 5,000 affordable housing units (the Saglemi Affordable Housing Project) for sale to workers through mortgage arrangements provided by Ghana Home Loans to be implemented by Construtora OAS Limited.



The project was to be funded by a Buyers Credit of US$200million provided by Messrs Credit Suisse International (Credit Suisse).



On 31st October 2012, Parliament granted approval for the government to secure a facility of US$200 million from Credit Suisse for the project, following a joint memorandum to Parliament by the then Minister for MWRWH, Mr Enoch Teye Mensah and the then Minister for Finance and Economic Planning, Dr. Kwabena Duffour.



On January 4, 2013, a Facility Agreement was signed between the Ministry of Finance, as borrower, and Credit Suisse, as creditor, for a facility of $200 million for the project and same day, MWRWH through the then Minister, Mr E.T Mensah, signed an Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) Agreement with Construtora OAS Ghana Ltd represented by 4th accused of the construction of affordable housing units at Saglemi in the Greater-Accra Region.



The project, which was to be executed in four phases on 2,172 acres of land was at a contract price of US$200million, including consultancy services, an Escrow Management Agreement, a condition precedent to the release of the facility to the borrower, was also signed pursuant to the Facility Agreement and the EPC Agreement, between the Ministry of Finance (Borrower), the MWRWH (Account holder), the Bank of Ghana (Account holding bank) and Construtora OAS (Contractor).



The purpose of the agreement was to ensure that the $200 million facility would be properly applied towards the development of the 5,000 housing units.



The agreement, therefore, required payments under the contract to be effected only when specific works had been duly executed, verified, and certified by the consultants of the project, the Architectural and Engineering Services Limited (AESL).



The EPC Agreement provided for an advance payment of 40 percent of the contract price to the contractor within five working days of the receipt of the facility in the Escrow Account, where the advance payment was to be applied towards specific works set out in the contract.



The remaining amount of the contract price was to be paid to the contractor based on the fulfilment of specific project milestones and the contractor was required under the agreement to set out the details of the achieved project milestones, which had to be verified and certified by the consultants before payment was done.



On January 9, 2013, Credit Suisse disbursed an amount of US$198,450,000, representing US$200 million less fees and transaction expenses into the Escrow Account and on February 27, 2013, an amount of US$80 million representing 40 percent of the contract sum was transferred to Construtora OAS as advanced payment.



However, the contractor allegedly failed to apply the amount towards the purpose for, which the payment was made, thus, on February 27, 2014, Dauda who had assumed office as the new Minister, without any parliamentary approval, allegedly reviewed the original EPC and signed the first and restated agreement with Construtora

OAS, represented by its Executive Chairman, the 4th accused, and in the process, changed the scope of works and the application of the US$200million approved by Parliament for the construction of 5000 housing units.



The new agreement required the contractor to execute the project in three phases over a site of 1,272 acres whilst the $200million was now to be applied towards the execution of only the first phase of the project comprising just about 1,502 housing units, contrary to the executive and parliamentary approvals as well as the Facility and Escrow Management Agreements.



As a result, on April 15, 2013, the AESL signed a contract with Vito Hugo-Coordenaca Gestao De Projectos (VHM) subcontracting its consultancy services under the EPC agreement to the company for US$500,000,000 over a period of 24 months.



This was the amount provided under the EPC Agreement for consultancy services for the 5000 housing units.



Under the agreement between AESL and VHM, a maximum amount of US$2,000,000. was to be paid to AESL and not more than US$2,987,750 was to be paid to VHM for their services.



This contract also provided for 40 percent advanced payment.



In April 2015, when AESL and the VHM were still providing consultancy services under the contract, the MWRWH, allegedly entered another contract for consultancy services with Ridge Management Solutions DWC-LLC (RMS), represented by its director and majority shareholder, Tettey, for three months at a contract sum of US$5.6million.



This was at a time RMS allegedly was not registered in Ghana as a company.



Once again, the MWRWH was required to make an advance payment of 40 percent of the contract sum.



This contract was said to be completely outside the EPC Agreement.



Investigations revealed that Tettey, the majority shareholder of RMS, is also a Director of VHM Ghana Limited, allegedly.



In August 2016, Agyeman-Mensah entered into yet another consultancy agreement with RMS, this time, for what was referred to as marketing implementation services for a sum of US$2,502,198 and again, the Ministry was required to make an advanced payment of 40 percent of the contract sum, when all that while, AESL and VHM were purportedly performing the same consultancy services for the project, their consultancy agreements having been extended at various times by Mensah and Yakubu.



On December 21, 2016, Yakubu without recourse to Parliament allegedly reviewed the First and Restated Agreement and signed the Second and Restated Agreement, which led to a further reduction in the scope of works to 1,412 housing units at a revised contract price of US$181,018,000 and extended the completion period of the contract to July 31, 2017, without any basis.



Between March 2014 and January 2015, an amount of $46,131,153.41 was paid to the contractor, Construtora OAS, whilst a total of $3,386,916.08 was paid to AESL and VHM when no works had been duly executed by the contractor, with the payments allegedly authorized and approved by Dauda and Yakubu without any evidence of specific project milestones achieved by the contractor as required under the EPC Agreement.



It is also argued that there was no justification for the advanced payment of $80 million earlier made, but between June 2015 and January 2017, a further amount of $54,066,768.16 was paid to the contractor of the project when no work had been duly executed.



Again, though there were no milestone reports supporting the payments, Mensah and Yakubu allegedly ordered for further payments to be made to the three consultants; AESL, VHM and RMS, far more than the $5,000,000 stated as consultancy fees in the original EPC Agreement without any evidence of work.



There were no verification and certification of actual work done by the contractor as required under the EPC Agreement through a total amount of $196,428,891.66 had been spent on the Saglemi Affordable Housing Project, with the contractor having been paid $179,904,757.78, allegedly.



Investigations revealed that the cost of works executed on the site, including consultancy services, is about $64,982,900.77.



Only 651.75 acres of land out of the 2,172 acres of land made available by the MWRWH to the contractor for the project has been developed.



Investigations further revealed that only 668 housing units were completed by the contractor.



The houses are, however, not habitable so not a single house under the project has been sold and the facility remains unpaid, resulting in huge financial loss to the Republic of Ghana.

















Source: GNA









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South Africa has announced the ending of Covid restrictions, two years after they were imposed.



In a televised address, President Cyril Ramaphosa said the national state of disaster would end at midnight on Monday.



Masks will still be required indoors for another month.



He said although the pandemic was not over, he was confident that there were only better times ahead.



Mr Ramaphosa said it was important to boost the economy and create jobs.



South Africa has recorded far more coronavirus cases than any other African country, accounting for almost a third of infections across the continent.



It has officially registered over 100,000 deaths.

Source: BBC









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Authorities in Ghana say they have increased security alert levels in the country to counter possible attacks.



National Security Minister Albert Kan-Dapaah warned MPs that separatists in south-eastern Ghana could be planning a new wave of attacks in the region as part of their campaign for a breakaway state of Western Togoland.



The authorities also fear ethnic tensions in northern Ghana could be exploited by armed groups to perpetrate violence, and there are concerns that militants could cross over from neighbouring Burkina Faso, where armed groups linked to the so-called Islamic State and al-Qaeda have recently stepped up attacks.



Mr Kan-Dapaah told MPs that the country must be proactive in the wake of rising insecurity in West Africa, and said security agencies have been adequately equipped to combat any threats - including beefing up security measures along the countrys border with Burkina Faso.



Ghana is one of the most stable countries in West Africa but it has several volatile neighbours.

Source: BBC









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MOGADISHU, April 6 (Xinhua) -- More than 60 aid agencies operating in Somalia on Wednesday appealed to the international community to work to avert a possible famine in Somalia in 2022 due to worsening drought conditions.

The country directors of aid agencies including World Vision, Save The Children, Norwegian Refugee Council and ActionAid said in a joint letter to the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that the humanitarian situation is deteriorating rapidly with about 4.5 million people in need of urgent assistance.

"We request you to urge donors and the Member States to commit additional resources to enable immediate scale-up of humanitarian response in Somalia to avert a possible famine and save lives," the agencies said in their letter.

They warned that more than 1.4 million children, nearly half of the country's under-five population, are likely to suffer from acute malnutrition with 329,500 of them likely to be severely malnourished.

"What we are now seeing is an impending famine similar to that which occurred in 2010/2011 in which more than a quarter of 1 million people died -- including 133,000 children under the age of five," the agencies said.

The agencies said although some donors have committed to funding Somalia's Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) which seeks 1.5 billion U.S. dollars, not even 4 percent of the funding required to meet Somalia's humanitarian needs has been allocated.

The organizations said there are already an estimated 2.9 million internally displaced persons in Somalia and total drought displacement may reach 1.4 million by mid-2022 if no emergency aid is delivered.

Weather experts forecast unprecedented fourth consecutive below-average rains during the long rainy season of April to June across most of the country.

They said the current drought is a regional crisis and has affected countries in the Horn of Africa, but the Somali people are facing the brunt of it, with increasing numbers of people crossing to neighboring countries.

"We are running out of time. It is time to keep the promise of 'never again' that was made during the 2017 drought when the immediate action of the humanitarian community led to lives being saved. The window to avert a famine is closing fast. If we don't want to see history repeating itself, we cannot delay action any longer," the agencies said. 
The Supreme Court will on April 13 decide whether or not to order the NDC Member of Parliament for Assin North, James Gyakye Quayson, from holding himself as a legislator until a suit challenging him is decided.

A resident of Assin Breku, Michael Ankomah-Nimfah, who secured a judgment from the Cape Coast High Court nullifying Mr Quaysons election on the basis that he held a Canadian citizenship, wants an injunction from the Supreme Court, restraining him from holding himself out as an MP.



A seven-member panel of the highest court of the land on Tuesday fixed a date for ruling on the injunction after hearing arguments from lawyer for Mr Quayson - Mr Tsatsu Tsikata, lawyer for Mr Ankomah -Nimfah - Frank Davies, lawyer for the Electoral Commission - Emmanuel Addai and the Attorney-General (A-G) - Godfred Yeboah Dame.



Arguments



Mr Davies argued that Mr Quayson was defiling the 1992 Constitution by still parading himself as an MP when the High Court had ruled that he was unqualified as at the time he contested the Assin North seat.



Mr Tsikata made a submission that the application for injunction was against the rules of the Supreme Court and decided cases.



According to him, the process for injunction were not part of the rules of the Supreme Court but the High Court rules.



In view of that, he said the applicant should had sought permission from the court before using the High Court rules.



The A-G supported the injunction application and argued that the Supreme Court had held in many cases that it had the jurisdiction to grant injunctions in constitutional cases.



Background



Mr Quayson polled 17,498 votes as against 14,793 by the New Patriotic Party's (NPP's) Ms Abena Durowaa Mensah in the December 7, 2020 parliamentary election.



On December 30, 2020, a resident of Assin North, Mr Ankomah-Nimfah, filed a parliamentary election petition at the Cape Coast High Court challenging the eligibility of Mr Quayson to be an MP.



On July 28, 2021 following that petition by Mr Ankomah-Nimfah, the Cape Coast High Court declared Mr Quaysons election as void, on the basis that he owed allegiance to another country other than Ghana, contrary to Article 94(2) of the 1992 Constitution.



It was the considered view of the court that as of the time Mr Quayson filed to contest the MP position, he had not renounced his Canadian citizenship and, therefore, he was not qualified to become a legislator.



The court, presided over by Justice Kwasi Boakye, ordered the EC to organise a new election in the constituency.



Mr Quayson filed an appeal at the Court of Appeal challenging the judgment of the Cape Coast High Court.



The appeal was last two weeks struck out by the Court of Appeal.

Source: graphiconline.com









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UNICEF Ghana has called on corporate organisations and employers to establish breastfeeding areas at workplaces and further make arrangements for regular breaks to enable breastfeeding employees who decide to bring their babies there to breastfeed them.

The Nutrition Officer of UNICEF Ghana, Jevaise Aballo, who made the call, said when such a facility was available at the workplace, the breastfeeding employees may even decide to come along with their caretakers to take care of the babies in the facility, while they were working or the employer may decide to employ somebody to take care of those babies in the facility while the mothers were in their offices working.



"It is done elsewhere outside the country and it is doable within our contest. Within this country, there are examples. It is very important they create space at workplaces to enable mothers to bring their babies there while working," he stated.



Mentioning the benefits of such a facility in the work place, Mr Aballo, who was speaking in an interview after a workshop on nutrition and nurturing care for media personnel, said studies had shown that employers who provided such a facility at the workplace did not see much absenteeism from employees and that meant increase output.



"Absenteeism comes at a cost to the employer. If you are able to create such a facility for mothers to breastfeed their babies, the breast milk will protect the babies from falling sick frequently which might cause the employe to absent themselves from work," he explained.



He added that knowing that their babies were close by for which reason they could check up on them from time to time helped employees to have the sound mind to work.



Earlier during his presentation at the workshop, Mr Aballo said the percentage of infants aged zero to six months receiving only breast milk in the country had reduced from 52 per cent in 2014 to 43 per cent in 2017, while that of newborns put to breast within an hour of birth also declined from 56 per cent in 2014 to 52 per cent in 2017.



Furthermore, he said the percentage of children six to 23 months that received foods from at least five of eight food groups also declined from 28 per cent in 2014 to 23 per cent in 2017.



"The prevalence of underweight among children under five years of age has increased from 11 per cent in 2014 to 13 per cent in 2017.



Prevalence of wasting among children under five years increased from five per cent in 2014 to seven per cent in 2017," he noted.



Economic benefits of breastfeeding



The Nutrition Officer mentioned the economic benefits of breastfeeding to the country to include prevention of 3,774 deaths of babies within the neonatal period (0-28 days) each year, saving the nation over US$5.8million and generates more than US$594 million for the economy.



In her presentation, the Greater Accra Regional Nutrition Officer of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Faustina Vimariba Tour, said from field data, they have observed that complimentary feeding was a challenge, especially for nursing mothers in the city as they are unable to transit from exclusive to complimentary feeding.



As a result of this, she said some Ghanaian babies were eating just one type of food which would give them only one nutrient, adding that this was one of the causes of under-five anaemia.



Nutrition



In a welcome remark, the Chief of Communication and Advocacy of UNICEF Ghana, Eulette Ewart, said nutrition played a critical role in the development and wellbeing of children, adding that children needed to receive adequate nutrition for their continual development and transition from childhood to adulthood.



She said in terms of education, nutrition deficiencies affected the cognitive development of the child.



Earlier the UNICEF team and the media visited the Child Welfare Clinic of the Greater Accra Regional Hospital (Ridge) where they interacted with the women who had come for postnatal and antenatal clinics, as well as the health personnel who attended to them.



The Deputy Director, Nursing Services at the hospital, Scholastical Dery, mentioned some of the education they gave the women who attend the clinic as nutrition, how to take care of their babies and how to breastfeed babies properly.









Source: graphiconline.com









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Mr Alban S.K Bagbin, Speaker of Parliament, has warned parliamentary personnel against leaking confidential documents to the press.



He explained that such conduct tarnished the legislatures reputation and what it represented in the eyes of citizens.



To that end, the Parliamentary Service Board has made some far-reaching decisions to ensure an efficient, non-partisan, innovative, and professional Parliamentary Service through holistic staff welfare and empowerment.



Mr Bagbin, who stated this during a staff durbar in Accra urged all staff to work as a committed team to ensure that Ghana's Legislature achieved its vision of becoming a model parliament worthy of emulation by other countries.

Source: GNA









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There appears to be turmoil in the camp of the Convention Peoples Party (CPP) following the alleged interdiction of three key officers of the party.



The interdiction of the three,the first National Vice Chairman, Onzy Nkrumah; the General Secretary, Nana Yaa Akyempim Jantuah and the National Youth Organiser, Osei Kofi Acquah last Friday, had been described as unconstitutional by eight elected national party executive members.



Interdiction



At a press briefing last Friday, the Communications Director of the party, Sylvester Sarpong Soprano, said the Central Committee of the party took the decision to interdict the three individuals as their actions and inactions contravened the partys constitution.



According to Mr Soprano, the interdicted persons had consciously and consistently thwarted all efforts by the Central Committee (CC) to carry out its mandated duties.



Rebuttal



However, a statement signed on behalf of the eight elected national executive members by the National Organiser, Mr Yirimambo Moses Ambing, said the Chairperson, Nana Akosua Frimpomaa Sarpong-Kumankumah, was a subject matter in court to prevent her from holding herself out as the chairperson of the CPP or from involving herself in any official activities of the party.



It must be put on record that the illegal meeting on April 1, 2022 was without the knowledge or consent of any of the duly elected eight national executive of the Convention Peoples Party, it stated.



On the alleged out of court settlement, the statement said the settlement was entered into without the notice of functional national leadership.



All eight national officers unanimously rejected the terms of settlement and decided to set aside the settlement in the court of law, it stated.



May 5 application



Meanwhile, the Accra High Court will on May 5 this year hear an application filed by Nana Akosua Sarpong-Kumankumah asking the court to dismiss a suit challenging her eligibility as party chairman, reports Justice Agbenorsi.



At the hearing in court yesterday, counsel for Nana Sarpong-Kumankumah, Mr George Mensah, notified the court of the motion for the dismissal of the suit.



However, Mr Wayoe Ghanamannti, counsel for the plaintiff, Onsy Nkrumah, indicated that neither he nor the Court had been served.



Mr Ghanamannti had wanted to move an injunction application against Nana Sarpong-Kumankumah but it was the considered view of the High Court that moving the injunction was not apt since the motion for the dismissal of the suit had not been heard.



The court, therefore, fixed May 5 for the lawyers for Nana Kumankuma to move the motion praying the court to dismiss the case against her.



Background



Mr Nkrumah in March this year filed a suit challenging the constitutionality of the Chairmanship position.



The suit was on the grounds that Nana Sarpong-Kumankuma did not poll the mandatory 50 per cent +1 vote during the August 22, 2020 elections.



According to him, the Chairman polled 43 per cent, making her ineligible to be declared winner of the top race.

Source: graphiconline.com









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From the street with the hustle life to the project life, Ghanaian sensational musician, Joseph Luminary Adzrago, known in music circles as Luminary DMR on the first day of April 2022, donated to his hometown people of Adidome in the Volta region of Ghana as the man known for his high character of reputable antecedents embarked on yet another charitable journey of giving.



Lumi-DMR, known for his philanthropic routines, proceeded on a donation dubbed Donate and Support for Brilliant Students aimed at supporting the much less-privileged in complicated occasions embarked on his charitable activities to the small town of Tswala Adidome in the North Volta of Ghana where he hails from.



The artiste/songwriter, philanthropist and CEO of Development Means Reform Records (DMR Records) seemed to have a resounding success in rapidly improving the music system and championing youth empowerment as he was recently honored with an award by the ECOWAS YOUTH COUNCIL as an ECOWAS Youth Ambassador for his philanthropic gesture in May 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown in Ghana.



One of which was when he partnered with media houses to give out and donate relief items and food to the less privilege and vulnerable through his Lumi-DMR Foundation.



The skilled entrepreneur and musician is known for his hit songs, AGYEIWAA, CANABIS, BOBOBO and a lot more. His latest song titled I DEY BUY ALL features young legendary Afrobeat musician, Tic, which is equally enjoying massive rotation on both radio and television following his 5 years distribution deal with Universal Music Group.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









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This Feb. 6, 2022, booking photo provided by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation shows Smiley Allen Martin, two days before he was released to Sacramento County probation for his sentence on charges of corporal injury and assault likely to cause great bodily injury. Martin was arrested Tuesday, April 5, 2022, in connection with a mass shooting that killed six people in Sacramento, Calif. Martin is the brother of Dandrae Martin, the first suspect taken into custody in the investigation. (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via AP)
Artist Johann Wesselss painting of Munson Mountain that now adorns the Peach on the Beach in this 2021 file photo by Mark Brett. Under the leadership of LocoLanding, The Peach often changed its appearance for short periods of time including Halloween, Easter, April Fool's Day and, of course, Christmas.
UNITED NATIONS, April 5 (Xinhua) -- The economic crisis and erratic rainfall are pushing humanitarian needs in Sudan to unprecedented levels, where 18 million people within months face acute food insecurity, a UN spokesman said on Tuesday.

The World Food Programme (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) expect the number of people in Sudan facing acute food insecurity to nearly double by September, said Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

Last year 9.8 million people in Sudan faced acute food insecurity, he said. Some 18 million are threatened to be in the category by September.

"Crop and livestock production has dropped by up to half in 14 states across Sudan when compared to the last five-year average," Haq said. "The domestic cereal production can only cover the needs of less than two-thirds of the population, leaving many reliant on humanitarian food assistance."

He cited the Ukraine conflict as causing further spikes in food prices. The price of wheat skyrocketed by 180 percent compared to the same period last year.

"Our partners are appealing for more than 1.9 billion U.S. dollars to help 14.3 million people in Sudan this year," the spokesman told a regular briefing. "To date, the plan is 9 percent funded."

Haq said humanitarian partners of the world body were able to reach more than 8.1 million people with life-saving assistance, including food, livelihood, clean water, and healthcare, despite limited funding. 
We are looking for a Medical Writer in Madrid with experience in writing and reviewing Clinical Trials, our client is an important pharmaceutical company dedicated to medical devices. 1. Stay Current with Medical Literature and Advancements. 2. Collaborate in the design of clinical trials. 3. Write, Review and Adapt clinical trials related documen...
Amazing Astedt Wins Fifth Super MILLION$; Ties All-Time Record

April 06, 2022 Matthew Pitt Editor

Niklas Astedt secured his fifth Super MILLION$ title and $430,646 in prize money at GGPoker on April 5. The amazing Swede came from the middle of the pack to take down the $10,300 buy-in event and tie with Australian superstar Michael Addamo in terms of Super MILLION$ titles won.

Almost as impressive as Astedts fifth victory was the fact former champion Aleks Ponakovs came from a 10.2 big blind starting stack to finish second for a $332,073.

Super MILLION$ Season 2 Episode 37 Final Table Results

Place Player Country Prize 1 Niklas Astedt Sweden $430,646 2 Aleks Ponakovs Latvia $332,073 3 Pablo Silva Brazil $256,063 4 Joao Vieira Brazil $197,452 5 Aliaksei Boika Mexico $152,256 6 TTP_poker Taiwan $117,405 7 Roland "Gwriden" Rokita Austria $90,532 8 pedrinhoOo Austria $69,809 9 Isaac Haxton Canada $53,830

Isaac Haxton was the first of the nine finalists heading for the showers. He opened to 110,000 with ace-jack from late position with blinds at 25,000/50,000/6,000a only for Pablo Silva to three-bet to 260,000 from the cutoff. The action folded back to Haxton who shoved for 857,859 in total, and Silva snapped him off with the dominating ace-king. Silvas king-kicker was good enough to win the pot and bust Haxton.

Ponakovs scored two full doubles, first with queens versus the ace-king of Aliaksei Boika, then with ace-king versus Roland "Gwriden" Rokitas king-queen. The latter hand left Rokita with only three big blinds but he was not the next player out of the door, that dubious honor went to "pedrinhoOo." They opened to 340,144 at the 50,000/100,000/12,500a level leaving themselves only 200,000 chips behind. "TTP_poker" made it 647,140 from the next seat across, folding out everyone except the initial raiser who called all-in. It was ace-jack for pedrinhoOo and ace-king for TTP_poker. An eight-high board reduced the player count by one.

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Rokita saw his tournament end in seventh place, a finish worth $90,532, the last five-figure haul of the final table. Rokita open-shoved for less than four big blinds from the cutoff with ace-eight. Silva called in the big blind with king-ten and proceeded to flop a ten.

The final six became five with the exit of TTP_poker. Everyone folded to Silva in the small blind and he raised enough to put TTP_poker to their test for their 6.5 big blind stack. TTP_poker called with eight-seven offsuit and needed some help to beat Silvas ace-king. TTP_pokers gutsy call saw them spike a seven on the flop but an ace on the river sent them to the rail.

Blinds increased to 100,000/200,000/25,000a and the largest stack contained only 25 big blinds so something had to give. It did when Boika ripped it in for 4,349,076 from the small blind with ace-eight and Astedt called from the big blind with pocket tens. Astedt turned a full house to take a commanding lead into four-handed play.

Joao Vieira finished in fourth place

Joao Vieira busted in fourth in a monster pot. Ponakovs min-raised to 500,000 with ace-jack, Vieira three-bet shoved from the small blind with pocket fours for 5,158,761, only for Astedt to four-bet all-in for 8,502,629 with pocket kings! Ponakovs ducked out of the way, Astedts kings held, and the Super MILLION$ was down to three players.

Astedt held more than 14.2 million chips, more than double the combined stack of his final two opponents. The rich got richer when Silva open-shoved for 18 big blinds with ten-eight of hearts only for Astedt to snap-call with pocket jacks! The five community cards brought no drama, and Astedt progressed into heads-up holding a colossal 17,726,914 to 3,573,086 chip lead over Ponakovs.

PokerNews is an advocate of responsible gambling but you would wager your house on Astedt winning from this position, which is exactly what happened. The final hand of a short one-on-one battle saw Astedt limp in and Ponakovs check his option. A eight-jack-trey flop saw Ponakovs check-call a 250,000 bet, leading to a nine on the turn. Ponakovs checked again, Astedt bet 530,000, and Ponakovs check-raised all-in for 2,668,086 which Astedt instantly called. Ponakovs flipped over jack-seven which was in a world of pain against Astedts aces. The river improved Astedt to an unnecessary top set, and he became only the second player in GGPoker history to win the Super MILLION$ five times. What a guy!
Boika Leads Super MILLION$; Silva and "TTP_poker" Go Back-To-Back

April 06, 2022 Matthew Pitt Editor

The latest Super MILLION$ final table is set at GGPoker and one of the nine players who have navigated their way to that final table will see $430,646 wing its way to their GGPoker account. Aliaksei Boika is the man in pole position when the cards are back in the air from 6:00 p.m. BST on April 5, but a Boika victory is far from a done deal because there are some fantastic players in the chasing pack.

Some 213 players bought into this weeks Super MILLION$ but only 25 receive a slice of the $2,130,000 prize pool. Brazilian Felipe Ketzer was the unfortunate bubble boy, his elimination locking in a min-cash of $21,300 for the surviving players.

Such stars as Yuri Dzivielevski, Dylan Linde, Ivan Luca, Adrian Mateos, and Ole Schemion all saw returns on their investments yet fell shy of the star-studded finale.

Super MILLIONS Season 2 Episode 37 Final Table

Place Player Country Chips big Blinds 1 Aliaksei Boika Mexico 4,915,703 98.3 2 Joao Vieira Brazil 4,190,915 83.8 3 Pablo Silva Brazil 3,940,428 78.8 4 Roland "Gwriden" Rokita Austria 2,471,145 49.4 5 Niklas Astedt Norway 2,062,634 41.3 6 TTP_poker Taiwan 1,187,464 23.7 7 Isaac Haxton Canada 1,105,859 22.1 8 pedrinhoOo Austria 918,144 18.4 9 Aleks Ponakovs Latvia 507,708 10.2

Watch All The Final Table Action Here Click here!

Boika returns to the action with 4,915,703 chips in his arsenal, the equivalent of 98.3 big blinds. Boika has never won this tournament despite being a finalist on five occasions. Should Boika finish fourth or better at his sixth Super MILLION$ final table, his winnings from this event will top $1 million.

Second place at the restart belongs to Joao Vieira courtesy of his 4,190,915 stack (83.8 big blinds). Tonight is the ninth time Vieira has graced a Super MILLION$ final table with his presence but a maiden victory still eludes him. This could be Vieiras best chance yet of becoming a Super MILLION$ champion because he has a healthy stack and will be second-last when it comes to choosing where he sits for the final table action.

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Pablo Silva is back for another bite at the Super MILLION$ cherry after finishing in second place last week. Silva collected $561,386 when he lost to Conor Beresford heads-up and narrowly missed out on a WSOP Circuit ring. Silva is another finalist who can break through a landmark earnings total. Finishing higher than fifth sees his Super MILLION$ cashes tip the scales at more than $2 million. He sits down with 3,940,428 chips (78.8 big blinds)

Super MILLIONS Season 2 Episode 37 Final Table Payouts

1st - $430,646

2nd - $332,073

3rd - $256,063

4th - $197,452

5th - $152,256

6th - $117,405

7th - $90,532

8th - $69,809

9th - $53,830

The popular Roland "Gwriden" Rokita takes his seat with a 2,471,145 stack (49.4 big blinds) and will have a huge rail hoping he can get his hands on the $430,646 top prize. This is because Rokita sold 75% of his action at 1.03 mark-up via the in-built staking software at GGPoker. Rokita quickly sold out. The Austrian will double his Super MILLION$ winnings by progressing to fifth place or deeper.

Niklas Astedt is hunting for a fifth Super MILLION$ title

Niklas Astedts record in this event is incredible. The uber-talented Swede has now played in 79 Super MILLION$ events, reached 17 final tables, and has four victories. Only fellow Swede Joakim Andersson and Artur Martirosian have won more than the $4,270,538 enjoyed by Astedt. Victory today sees Astedt tie with Michael Addamo, on five, for the most Super MILLION$ title won. He starts his quest for glory in the middle of the pack with 2,062,634 chips (41.3 big blinds).

Fresh from a fifth-place finish worth $257,396 last week, "TTP_poker" returns for a back-to-back Super MILLION$ final table appearance. Last weeks final table was the first time TTP_poker had bought into the Super MILLION$ and they kept up their 100% cashing and final table figures this week. The Taiwanese grinder has 1,187,464 chips (23.7 big blinds) at their disposal, enough for sixth place at the restart/

Isaac Haxton has plenty of work ahead of him if he is to secure what will be his fourth Super MILLION$ title. Haxton returns in seventh place with a stack of 1,105,859 chips (22.1 big blinds). That stack is not extremely short, but it does not give Haxton much room to manouever, not that the superstar makes many, if any mistakes, when he is on the biggest stage. This is Haxtons 13th Super MILLION$ final table, tying him with the aforementioned Andersson as the second-most final table appearances.

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Just below Haxton, with 918,144 chips (18.4 big blinds), is where you find Austrian "pedrinhoOo." They have only played in one Super MILLION$ prior to this and they finished outside the money places. pedrinhoOo has more than made up for those shortcomings by reaching a final table at their second attempt. They have a shade over $202,000 in GGPoker winnings, a sum they will more than double if they make a comeback from seventh-place and finish third or higher.

Former Super MILLION$ champion Aleks Ponakovs is the player bringing up the rear when play resumes. Ponakovs is armed with 507,708 chips meaning he only has 10.2 big blinds to play with. While that is far from ideal, it does make his decision making much simpler. In addition, an early double puts Ponakovs back in the thick of it with a similar stack to the three opponents currently above him.
On April 4, Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the Russian State Dumas International Affairs Committee, joined other Russian officials in denying that Russian forces were guilty of atrocities against civilians in the town of Bucha, Ukraine.

Slutsky lashed out at Britain, which holds the presidency of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), after Russia failed to get a meeting about its charge that Ukraine was the party responsible for provocation in Bucha.

Slutsky claimed that images of dead civilians in areas from which Russian soldiers had withdrawn were staged.

The so-called evidence of mass death of local civilians emerged only after agents of the Ukrainian security service SBU entered the city. Isnt this reminiscent of the White Helmets faked chemical attacks in Syrias Douma and the Western countries subsequent refusal to probe into the real details of what happened? Slutsky said.

That is false.

Independent investigators and media reports have assessed that the April 2018 chemical attack in the Syrian city of Douma likely did take place.

In addition to his Duma post, Slutsky is a senior member of Russia's negotiating team with Ukraine. In 2014, the U.S. government imposed sanctions on him in connection with Russias forced annexation of Crimea.

Slutsky referenced the White Helmets because of Russias long propaganda war against the group, particularly the co-founder James Le Mesurier, a British veteran. Le Mesurier was found dead outside his apartment in Turkey in 2019. Turkish police said they suspected he had committed suicide.

The White Helmets, or Syrian Civil Defense, is a first-responder team that has focused on both search and rescue and documenting war crimes during the Syrian civil war. In 2017, a documentary on the White Helmets won an Oscar.

Syrian and Russian media have nonetheless demonized the group, accusing its members of staging chemicals weapons attacks and collaborating with terrorist groups. Syrian government forces have directly targeted the group, and members of its staff have been killed in several attacks.

The White Helmets played a role in both conducting search and rescue and documenting the chemical attack on Douma. The April 2018 incident occurred during the final standoff between Syrian President Basar Assad's regime and rebel groups near the capital, Damascus.

Three rebel groups controlled separate enclaves in eastern Ghouta's Rif Dimashq governorate. Rebels in two of the enclaves were facing defeat and negotiated evacuation, but Jaish al-Islam, which controlled Douma, refused to relinquish control of the city.

After a round of failed negotiations, Syrian war planes bombarded Douma. The Violations Documentation Center (VDC), an independent monitoring gruop, reported on two incidents in which bombs containing toxic substances were dropped. Two yellow cylinders carrying chemical gas were found on a buildings rooftop and in a bedroom in a different building.

The White Helmets issued a statement demanding a ceasefire and called for an investigation by teams from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a treaty group.

Reporters from the Russian media outlets RT and TV Zvezda immediately claimed the attacks were staged and that the cylinders had been carried to the locations, not dropped by aircraft from Syrian regime-controlled airspace.

Forensic Architecture, an organization that uses architectural techniques to investigate human rights violations, said that reconstructed models from the two sites supported the conclusion that the cylinders were dropped from the air.

A separate investigation by The New York Times in 2018 also found that the Assad regime was responsible for the chemical attack in Douma. According to the Times, which obtained a leaked United Nations report, 49 people died, including 11 children, from exposure to a chlorine-like substance.

The Syrian regime denied the accusations that it had used chemicals, and Russia has consistently alleged the Douma attack was staged.

Backing its ally, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared a few days after the incident: Irrefutable evidence that this was yet another attack, staged with the participation of special services of one state that is striving to be at the forefront of the Russophobic campaign.

An OPCW fact-finding mission investigated the allegations that Syrian government forces had used chemical weapons during the countrys civil war. In 2019, the mission issued its final report regarding the chemical attack on Douma. It stated that reactive chlorine, which does not exist in nature, was found in samples taken at the site.

The mission has also investigated two locations where, according to the Syrian regime, rebels produced chemical weapons. The mission said it did not find raw materials or equipment at these locations that could be used to make chemicals weapons  specifically, nerve gas.

There was no indication of either facility being involved in the production of chemical warfare agents or toxic chemicals to be used as weapons, the mission said.

In a briefing to the United Nations on March 10, the U.N.s High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, Izumi Nakamitsu, said the OPCW had not received an explanation from the Syrian government authorities on a number of issues, including undeclared types and amounts of a nerve agent found at a former chemical weapons production facility and the unauthorized movement and destruction of two cylinders linked to the Douma attack.

As has been stressed repeatedly, due to the identified gaps, inconsistencies and discrepancies that remain unresolved [] at this stage, Syrias declaration cannot be considered accurate and complete in accordance with the Chemical Weapons Convention, Nakamitsu said.

At the briefing, Russia accused the OPCW of bias.

OPCWs work has been politicized, and its illegitimate Investigation and Identification Group repeatedly reaches deliberately biased conclusions, said Vassily Nebenzia, Russias U.N. ambassador.

In December 2018, Britains The Guardian newspaper reported that the Russian government was supporting conspiracy theorists, anti-imperialist activists and internet trolls to spread misinformation about the White Helmets.

According to the newspaper, Russias campaign against the White Helmets began after Moscow in 2015 intervened militarily to support Assads government.

Gaming the social media algorithms with a flood of content, boosted by bots, sock-puppet accounts and a network of agitators, propagandists are able to create a manufactured consensus that gives legitimacy to fringe views, The Guardian wrote.

Although he remains a powerful figure, Slutskys political star has been tarnished with allegations of corruption and sexual misconduct.

In 2018, four female journalists covering the Duma, which is the lower chamber of Russia's legislative assembly, accused him of sexual harassment. The Dumas ethics commission, however, later said it found no evidence of inappropriate behavior.

A Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) investigation in 2021 found that Slutsky, who had declared an annual income of $77,000, lived a lavish lifestyle well beyond his means. (RFE/RL is one of several U.S.-funded news networks including the VOA.)

Citing data gleaned from the social media accounts of Slutskys 11-year-old daughter and other sources, RFE/RL reported that she attends an $88,000-a-year private school in Switzerland and that the family spends time in a posh villa in a Turkish resort.

In 2018, Kremlin opposition figure Aleksey Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation documented that Slutskys wife bought a Bentley Mulsanne, a car that sells for more than $300,000.
TUNIS, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Tunisian Foreign Minister Othman Jerandi summoned the Turkish ambassador on Tuesday evening, over the Turkish president's comments on his Tunisian counterpart's decision to dissolve parliament, Tunis Afrique Presse (TAP) reported Wednesday.

During a phone conversation with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu, Jerandi denounced the statement from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as "unacceptable" interference in the internal affairs of his country.

On late Monday, Erdogan expressed his "regret" that the Tunisian parliament was dissolved and an inquiry was launched against the deputies who attended an online session to revoke the decrees issued by Tunisian President Kais Saied.

On the same day, Saied decided to dissolve the parliament "to preserve the state and its institutions." 
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PEMBROKE, GA.  Following violent storms blamed for killing at least three people, Southerners cleared fallen trees from roadways Wednesday and began cleaning up debris from homes and buildings smashed by suspected tornadoes as forecasters warned more violent weather was likely on the way.

In southeast Georgia, residents of Bryan County had barely begun recovery efforts after a likely tornado touched down Tuesday evening, killing one woman and injuring several other people, when local officials urged them to halt work by mid-afternoon Wednesday and take shelter for the night.

The National Weather Service said another round of tornadoes was possible Wednesday, with heightened risk across a three-state area that included the cities of Atlanta; Birmingham, Alabama; and Knoxville, Tennessee.

Tuesday's storms were blamed for killing people in Louisiana and Texas.

Louisiana state police said Gene Latin, a 65-year-old correctional officer, was killed early Tuesday when he crashed into a tree that had fallen across a highway as storms blew through Webster Parish. And in east Texas, 71-year-old W. M. Soloman died when storm winds toppled a tree onto his home in Whitehouse, said Mayor James Wansley.

In Bryan County, about 30 miles west of Savannah, a woman was found dead Tuesday night amid the shredded wreckage of her mobile home in the unincorporated community of Ellabell, said Bryan County Coroner Bill Cox.

"It was just completely ripped to pieces," Cox said Wednesday. "It's like it exploded."

Cox said the dead woman's husband was taken to a hospital with injuries. He did not give her name, saying relatives were still being notified.

A motorist's cellphone video taken in Bryan County showed a large funnel cloud crossing Interstate 16 as drivers braked and pulled to the side of the roadway.

In the county seat of Pembroke, large sections of roof got torn off the courthouse and the entryway to a government building across was demolished. Several people in nearby neighborhoods were injured as their homes were damaged, said Matthew Kent, a Bryan County government spokesperson.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp toured the destruction Wednesday and said it was fortunate the twister did not stay on the ground very long, or the damage and loss of life would likely have been much worse. Places where it did touch down, he said, got hit hard.

"It is literally total devastation for some homes," Kemp said. "We walked through a house where there's no wood left on that house. It's nothing but a foundation with a water heater sitting there."

In South Carolina, about a dozen homes were destroyed or heavily damaged Tuesday in rural Allendale County. Tractors and other equipment were flipped and twisted on a number of farms in South Carolina's least populated county. Other storms caused damage to solar panels near Bowman and flipped vehicles and shopping carts in a Walmart parking lot in Manning.

National Weather Service forecasters planned to survey damage from several possible tornadoes in Georgia and South Carolina, but said that effort could be interrupted by the potential for more storms Wednesday.

In Alabama, the weather service said it was sending survey teams to examine potential tornado damage in the Wetumpka area.

More than 7,000 customers in Texas and more than 3,000 in Georgia remained without power Wednesday afternoon, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks outages nationwide.
Moncks Corner, SC (29461)

Today

Thunderstorms, some strong early, then partly cloudy after midnight. Damaging winds and large hail with some storms. Low 63F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

Thunderstorms, some strong early, then partly cloudy after midnight. Damaging winds and large hail with some storms. Low 63F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 90%.
Afternoon commercial airline flights at Charleston International Airport will have two 20-minute windows each day to land and take off during this weekend's Air Expo.

The show at Joint Base Charleston, which owns the runways at the airport, runs from noon until 5 p.m. with a practice day on April 8 for military families and public displays on April 9-10.

Commercial airlines will be allowed to land and take off during a 20-minute break at 1 p.m. and another at 2:55 p.m. Friday through Sunday, according to the air show schedule.

Airline flights before noon and after 5 p.m. won't be affected, said Joint Base Charleston spokeswoman Diana Cossaboom.

She said commercial carriers were contacted in advance to coordinate their flights during afternoon breaks.

Travelers might experience slight delays as some flights could be in a holding pattern until given clearance to land or take off, depending on airline schedules and air show demonstrations, Cossaboom said.

For instance, Breeze Airways has a flight from Norfolk, Va., that's supposed to land in Charleston at 2:40 p.m. on April 10, according to its schedule. It won't be able to land until 15 minutes later.

Charleston International's terminal will not be closed during the show, but with the runways open for commercial flights only at certain times during the afternoon, passengers could experience slight delays, airport spokesman Spencer Pryor said.

The biennial Air Expo is returning to Charleston for the first time since 2018 after being called off in 2020 because of the COVID-19 outbreak.

If you go When: April 9-10. Gates open at 9 a.m.; inbound traffic lanes close at 1:30 p.m. What: Charleston Air Expo Where: Joint Base Charleston Admission and parking are free, but parking passes are required and must be reserved in advance. More details and links to reserve parking passes can be found online at jbcharleston.com/airexpo.

Flight demonstration teams, including the Navy's famed Blue Angels, will take to the skies over the North Charleston military installation.

The event is free, but parking passes per vehicle, not per person, must be reserved in advance, an effort to avoid the long lines waiting to get onto the base four years ago. They are valid for one day only.
Charleston, SC (29403)

Today

Thunderstorms during the evening will give way to partly cloudy skies after midnight. A few storms may be severe. Low near 65F. Winds WSW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

Thunderstorms during the evening will give way to partly cloudy skies after midnight. A few storms may be severe. Low near 65F. Winds WSW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%.
Second State Coffee owners Jayme Scott and Ross Jett have known each other since middle school, and they became close friends while attending the University of Virginia.

After graduating, the college roommates moved into separate careers  Scott worked on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., and Jett found a job in renewable energy. During the workday, they would catch up over Google Chat.

Their discussions usually involved coffee.

We first became interested in coffee and higher grade coffee when we were working office jobs, Jett said. Towards the end of our office careers, (we) started to joke around that it would be really fun to open a coffee shop.

Eventually, these conversations became more serious. When a mutual friend suggested they consider Charleston for their dream venture, the duo took the plunge and moved south.

February marked 10 years since they opened their first coffee shop at 70 Beaufain St. in downtown Charleston. After adding two more shops since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, Scott and Jett are the proud owners of four Charleston area coffee cafes, each of which serve a varying crowd and offering.

All our shops are unique. Its great to have every neighborhood shop have their own vibe, Scott said. I love having four different stores that kind of do their own thing.

Shops are located in Mount Pleasant (I'On and Oyster Park), West Ashley and downtown Charleston.

The journey started with that very first downtown Charleston shop, which opened as Black Tap Coffee in 2012. Mayor John Tecklenburg, a real estate agent at the time, helped them find the quaint space four blocks away from Colonial Lake.

We sort of just pieced together what we had seen in other cities and coffee shops  what worked  and kind of just threw together a bar design and a shop design, Scott said. The first summer was like dead, and then it was that next fall that things started to trickle up.

In 2014, the duo started roasting their own coffee. Three years later, they took over Collective Coffee Co. in Mount Pleasant, adding a second location. One year after that, they changed the name of both shops to Second State Coffee  a name that quite literally ushered in the second state of their company.

We wanted to convey the ideals of growth and transformation, Jett said, discussing their branding. The owl (logo) sort of symbolizes wakefulness and foresight and wisdom. Those are the things that we hope to impart to the brand over time.

While Jett says the brand is still developing, its clearly well established in the Charleston market, thanks in part to the wholesale side of Second State Coffee. Local restaurants like Daps Breakfast & Imbibe, Indaco and many more are proud to serve Second States Heavyweight blend, the coffee that about 90 percent of the companys 30 to 40 wholesale accounts order regularly.

What sets Second State apart is its coffee quality and roasting process, which takes place at a production facility on James Island. While each shops food menu varies, the same six to 10 coffees, which rotate frequently, are served at each of the four locations.

Scott and Jett source specialty grade coffee," meaning they work with fresh crop coffees that were carefully sorted and harvested at the peak window of freshness.

Its sort of the closest that a coffee purveyor can take to a farm-to-table approach, Jett said. Were only working in the specialty grade of coffee, so really high-end coffee. We do try to take the approach of quality meets approachability.

To maintain freshness, Second State offers a seasonally changing coffee menu, much like many restaurants do. Coffees arrive from different parts of the world, depending on the time of year. Currently, East African coffees are starting to arrive at the shops.

When it comes to food, youll find specialty items at each Second State location. In West Ashley, Scott and Jett have kept a waffle tradition carried over from previous tenant Broom Wagon Coffee alive and well. Patrons can order seven types of waffles, including churro and lemon blueberry.

All of the pastries are made at the 766 South Shelmore Blvd. shop in the I'On neighborhood of Mount Pleasant, where chef Caitlin Holbrook serves an expansive menu of breakfast bowls, burritos and toasts. Farther south toward Sullivans Island, Second State Oyster Park focuses on more healthy food options and serves smoothies.

Roasting coffee and running four different shops sounds like a big undertaking  and it is  but there is always room for more growth, according to Jett, whether that means adding more shops or simply serving a higher quality cup of joe.

Always have a growth mindset because if youre not growing, youre stagnating, Jett said. As long as we have good people and the right team, theres always an opportunity to grow.
After 425 years of popularity, it's safe to say William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" has certainly established itself as a cultural phenomenon.

The tragic story of young lovers from rival families is assigned reading for many in college or high school; and is widely influential across many different mediums. Beyond that, its part of a Shakespearian repertoire that has its fair share of aficionados that specialize specifically in the playwrights' works.

And with the University of South Carolina's April 8-15 production of the play, they're bringing in two veteran experts in staging Shakespeare, director Carolyn Howarth and fight choreographer Geoffrey Kent.

Howarth, whose directing credits include productions at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, and California's Foothill Theatre Company (where she was artistic director), comes to Columbia by way of the Orlando Shakespeare Theatre, where University professor and current department chair Jim Hunter has visited as a frequent scenic and lighting designer.

Holding callbacks via Zoom, Howarth said that "something about them made me go, 'yeah thats a Tybalt' or 'theres my Juliet.' They all went after the role they wanted. Thats a compliment to their training and their teachers. They were well prepared."

While "Romeo and Juliet" depicts a forbidden romance between impetuous teenagers that has struck an emotional chord with audiences for centuries, the play is also remembered for vigorous fight scenes that drive much of the resulting storyline.

Leading that choreography is Geoffrey Kent, an actor, director and fight choreographer. He is currently the resident Fight Director at Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Its not Kents first go with Shakespeare at all  his website notes that he only has three Shakespearian plays left that he hasnt directed fights in.

It cheekily notes that there have been 350+ murders safely staged.

"Staging swordplay with actors new to the process requires patience," observed Kent, "You throw a lot of information at them quickly, and then just guide them slowly until it all starts to coalesce after a few rehearsals. Swordplay can take a little while to move from short term memory to long term memory."

He explained the crucial part that action scenes can play, pointing to the character of Juliet's cousin Tybalt as "a true fight role."

"I mean the character has very few lines, three fights, kills someone and dies," Kent said, apologizing for any 425-year-old spoilers. "So Tybalt doesnt really get to act much until the fight director shows up. The fights are Tybalt's dialogue.

Also in the cast are faculty members Erica Tobolski, Marybeth Gorman Craig, and Dustin Whitehead, as well as guest artist Darion McCloud. Mercutio and Juliet are played by Cameron Giordano and Carly Siegel, both veterans of 2021's outdoor campus production of "The Compleat Wrks of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged)," while Romeo is portrayed by Anthony Currie.

While Howarth has spent seven weeks with her cast, double the amount of time she might have for a professional production, she says that shes treated them just as she does her professional casts.

Both she and Kent found working with the eager students an energizing experience.

"Frankly its been great for me. Ive been doing this so long, Im a bit jaded. Their young enthusiasm has been so refreshing and kind of inspiring, Howarth concluded.

The legendary play has had several notable adaptations before this as well. There hasopera, ballet and film, including Baz Luhrmann's splashy 1996 cinematic version featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes and Paul Rudd in modern dress.

And as recently as two weeks ago, Ariana Debose walked away with an Oscar for her performance in the Stephen Spielberg remake of "West Side Story," a modern retelling of the central "Romeo and Juliet" romance.
GEORGETOWN  Liberty Steel's request for a preliminary injunction to keep the city of Georgetown from taking zoning action against it was denied, city Board of Zoning Appeals chairwoman Ede Graves confirmed to Georgetown Times.

The board is set to take up on April 6 Liberty Steel's appeal of a February zoning decision declaring the company's Georgetown mill was out of compliance and had to close. Efforts to reach Liberty's lawyers were not successful.

Liberty Steel filed a lawsuit against the city of Georgetown on March 25, less than two weeks after the city sent a second letter saying the mill triggered a zoning change by being closed for more than a year.

Liberty alleges in the lawsuit that Georgetown cannot file another letter arguing the plant should close while the first appeal with the city is underway.

A 2018 ordinance changes the zoning of the 50-acre site on the Sampit River from industrial to commercial if the plant is not operating for a year. The commercial zoning would prevent the mill from reopening and would open the site for hotels, stores and restaurants meant to draw visitors to the states third-oldest city.

The Georgetown Board of Zoning Appeals will meet at 6 p.m. in the Georgetown municipal courtroom, 2222 Highmarket St.
HOHHOT, April 6 (Xinhua) -- The land port of Erenhot in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region saw its freight transport export volume increase 41.4 percent year on year in the first quarter of this year, local authorities have said.

In the first three months, 642,000 tonnes of freight were exported via the port, according to the Erenhot station under the China Railway Hohhot Group Co., Ltd.

During the period, the port logged 734 China-Europe freight trains, up 25.7 percent year on year, said Yun Zhijun, director of the Erenhot station's dispatch desk.

Currently, 57 China-Europe freight train routes pass through Erenhot Port, the largest land port on the China-Mongolia border. 
Kingstree, SC (29556)

Today

Thunderstorms, some strong this evening, then skies turning partly cloudy after midnight. Damaging winds and large hail with some storms. Low around 60F. Winds WSW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%..

Tonight

Thunderstorms, some strong this evening, then skies turning partly cloudy after midnight. Damaging winds and large hail with some storms. Low around 60F. Winds WSW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%.
A class-action lawsuit has been filed against the African Methodist Episcopal Church in an effort to recover millions of dollars in pension savings due to nearly 5,000 eligible retirees.

The AME Church lost at least $90 million  about 70 percent of its retirement fund  because of irresponsible investments, according to the suit.

The financial disaster has many retired and active pastors, bishops and others worried that they can no longer rely on pension checks owed to them. Church officials halted payouts earlier this year and now are seeking ways to restore them, at least partially.

The lawsuit, prepared by the firm Kantor & Kantor of California in partnership with the AARP Foundation, was filed in U.S. District Court in Maryland.

Defendants include Jerome V. Harris, former executive director of the churchs Department of Retirement Services, and South Carolina Bishop Samuel L. Green, former chairman of Retirement Services board of trustees. Also named as defendants are the churchs general board and council of bishops, which have broad control over church affairs.

Harris previously had been sued in July 2006 by Dorsey McCullough for alleged mismanagement of annuity funds, but the case was dismissed on a technicality in U.S. District Court in Tennessee.

Green assumed the helm of the AME Churchs 7th Episcopal District, which oversees nearly 600 churches throughout South Carolina, in 2016. An email sent to his account requesting comment went unanswered.

The AME Church first reported to church members that it had discovered a material loss in the value of one or more of its departmental investments on Oct. 7. Specifics were not provided. And church officials have continued to withhold details, citing an ongoing investigation.

The Wall Street Journal in March reported that the church had suspended retirement payments and initiated an investigation into missing funds that included federal law enforcement. The church considered the problem a possible financial crime, according to the Journal.

As many as 5,000 people are directly impacted by the sudden freeze in retirement payments. Active pastors also are affected since they have not been able to submit hardship requests, which enable them to draw a portion of their pension savings to pay for housing, education, medical procedures or other necessities.

The class-action suit alleges that Harris had been granted sole authority to invest tens of millions of AMEC clergys and other Church servants retirement savings in a questionable and potentially unlawful purchase of undeveloped land in Florida, a promissory note to an Illinois installer of solar panels, and an even more foolish investment in a now non-existent capital venture outfit.

The result of these imprudent, extraordinarily risky investments was the loss of more than $90 million in retirement savings, affecting all Bishops, General Officers, College Presidents, Deans of Theological Seminaries and Itinerant Elders and ordained individuals with pastoral assignments, the suit stated.

At a General Board meeting held on Jan. 31 this year, officials reported that just seven months earlier the pension plan account had a value of nearly $127 million, that more than $90 million had gone missing, and that only Harris knew the details, according to the suit. Church officials at this meeting also announced that Harris had emptied his office and disappeared.

A criminal investigation soon ensued to examine how and why tens of millions of dollars were transferred from Symetra annuity investments into the venture capital company Motorskill Ventures Group and the Financial Freedom Fund, and into a questionable land deal in Key Marco Island, Fla.

On March 30, the Rev. Jeffery B. Cooper, general secretary and chief information officer of the AME Church, distributed a statement from the Department of Retirement Services updating members on the devastating news that the AME Church ... may have been the victim of a financial crime. The message contained few details and little new information, citing the federal investigation, but assured investors that current funds are secure and new contributions are held in an escrow account.

In addition, the Department of Retirement Services resumed certain distributions to fund participants in early March 2022, including IRS required minimum distributions and payments for hardships, retirement, and designated beneficiaries, Cooper wrote.

An email requesting comment was sent to Cooper on April 5 but got no response.

Dara Smith, senior attorney for the AARP Foundation, said the lead plaintiff is retired Presiding Elder Cedric Alexander of Maryland but that all eligible retirees are part of the class unless they purposefully opt out.

What were seeking is full restoration of the retirement fund, plus enrolling anyone who should have been enrolled, Smith said. We just want to make people whole. ... The goal here is just to get people what they were promised.

The AME Church retirement plan requires the institution to contribute 9 percent of each participants total wages, not to exceed $20,000 a year. Each participant can make an additional 9 percent contribution with no limitation.

Smith said church retirement plans generally are exempt from federal law, including any requirement to secure federal pension insurance, though they can choose to do so.

In this case, it appears the AME Church did opt to adhere to the requirements of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, she said. Its pension plan documents state that the plan shall be consistent with and comply with all requirements of ... ERISA.

The 1974 federal law sets standards of protection for participants of private retirement plans, including provision of details about plan managers and their decisions, a grievance and appeals process, and the right to sue in case of breaches of fiduciary duty.

ERISA generally does not apply to churches, according to the Department of Labor. Should the court determine that the AME Church is not bound by the laws rules, attorneys will resort to Tennessee state law, where the AME Church is headquartered, Smith said.

The class action, filed on March 22, now must be reviewed and approved by the court in order to proceed with the lawsuit.
Arthur Lawrence has lived on the West Side long enough to see Charlestons sins catch up with it.

In the 1950s, the city planted a landfill between his predominately African American neighborhood and the Ashley River. As Lawrence grew up, so did the dump, expanding to the river and into the neighborhood, swallowing the marsh and choking a network of tidal streams  including one that locals call Gadsden Creek.

It was an eyesore, a health hazard  sometimes the landfill actually caught fire because of all the chemicals dumped there. Everything that didnt burn seeped into the ground because, of course, there was no liner.

The environment wasnt much of a concern then.

By the 1970s, the city closed the landfill, capped it and started building on top of it  roads, ballfields, parks and hotels. All that has had consequences.

Nowadays, Lawrence watches his neighbors regularly wade through floodwaters that overwhelm Hagood Avenue and Fishburne Street anytime it rains  and sometimes even when it doesnt.

People are walking through a toxic soup, Lawrence says. They keep getting flooded out, and its all cause and effect.

Hes absolutely right, but his idea of a remedy might surprise some people.

Earlier this week, the Charleston Area Justice Ministry  a collection of local church congregations that lobby local institutions on various issues  asked city officials to restore Gadsden Creek while preventing tidewater from flooding the neighborhood.

The group opposes the plans of WestEdge, a mixed-use development steered by the city and MUSC, to fill the remnants of Gadsden Creek as part of a $15 million flood mitigation program. The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control approved the plan, but one environmental group has challenged the ruling. An administrative law court hearing is scheduled for June.

That outrage is unsurprising  what happened to the West Side is inexcusable, and few people besides developers typically think filling wetlands is a good idea. But this is complicated.

The West Side Neighborhood Association, of which Lawrence was president for more than 20 years, signed off on WestEdges plan. The Coastal Conservation League, which never shies away from a fight with the city, doesnt oppose the project. City Council voted unanimously in favor.

Councilman William Dudley Gregorie, whose family has lived on the West Side since the 1800s, said some folks are fighting for something that no longer exists.

What we are looking at now is not Gadsden Creek, Gregorie says. Its the remnants of the creek. Speaking of environmental justice, that dump burned, and that landfill burned 24/7. So, in terms of a neighborhood that has struggled with environmental justice for a very, very, long time, to me, Im getting a little tired of kicking this can down the road.

Lawrence agrees. He says by the time he came up, Gadsden Creek was in fast decline.

People used it to get their boats out to the river, but Ive never seen anyone fishing in that creek, because we didnt eat anything out of it, he says. It was polluted.

Thats a shame, and Lawrence has spent his life fighting to right the wrongs of the world and his city. But theres no going back. Its more important today to save his community from the incessant onslaught of flooding: Thats the biggest thing.

The ditch that was Gadsden Creek carries tidewater into the neighborhood, and even when it doesnt rain, a king tide brings enough to flood the streets, stranding people or leaving them wading through water contaminated by the refuse buried beneath them. Solving that problem, he says, is more important than reconnecting the community to the water. I have waterfront property all the time, Lawrence says with a sarcastic laugh.

What the West Side ultimately needs, he says, is a Low Battery-like sea wall that stretches north of Brittlebank Park. And it would defeat the purpose to let tidewater flow through it  a fact so obvious engineers rarely point it out.

The Spring-Fishburne deep tunnel drainage system will mitigate flooding on the upper peninsula, but it wont help most of the West Side  not as long as tidewater flows into the neighborhood.

Allowing that water into the system would simply overwhelm the tunnels capacity, pumping water into the river only to have it pour back in.

What happened to Gadsden Creek is the definition of environmental injustice. But for Lawrence, the future is more important than a past thats already gone.

Its a bad situation, and theres liability there, but the city doesnt have the money to clean all that out, Lawrence says. Theres only one solution. We voted for what WestEdge is going to do. I still support that effort.
SYDNEY, April 6 (Xinhua) -- COVID-19 cases have spiked sharply in Australia's most populous state of New South Wales (NSW), with daily case numbers up almost 10,000 in two days.

On Wednesday, the state reported 24,151 new COVID-19 cases and 15 deaths. Daily cases have mounted at an alarming rate, with 19,183 new cases reported on Tuesday and 15,572 on Monday.

There are 1,444 COVID-19 patients in NSW hospitals, 51 of whom require intensive care.

Some schools in the state are either closed or operating with minimal staff due to the spread of COVID-19, forcing teachers or students to miss attendance at schools.

The Independent Education Union (IEU) revealed to the local media that 25 percent of public school students were not in class on Monday because they were sick, self-isolating or were told to study online.

Under the pressure of staff shortage, NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell told local radio station 2GB on Wednesday that the potential easing of isolation rules for teachers as essential workers "is something that is on the table".

Meanwhile, the state of Queensland reported 8,534 new COVID-19 cases and one death. The state has 468 people with COVID-19 in hospital, 14 of them in intensive care.

Despite the increase, from 1:00 a.m. April. 14, the state will ease COVID-19 restrictions ahead of the Easter holiday. Queenslanders will no longer need to check-in or show vaccination status at venues and events, although vaccine requirements will still apply to visitors and workers in vulnerable settings.

In the state of Victoria, there were 12,150 new COVID-19 cases and three deaths reported on Wednesday. Victoria currently has 331 patients at the hospital with the virus, including 16 in intensive care. 
I have been saying for a long time that the supposed anti-covid measures undertaken by governments would do more damage in the long run than the virus. That conclusion is now emerging clearly from the data. Kevin Roche does a retrospective on Minnesota, which no doubt is typical of most, if not all, states:

What is particularly noticeable is that extra drug and alcohol deaths in younger people far outweigh supposed CV-19 deaths during the epidemic. Lockdowns kill, much more than CV-19, for this group. And the homicide increases are also attributable to CV-19 lockdowns in part. Note that Minnesota, like other states, continues to call deaths CV-19 ones, even if it clearly had nothing to do with the death, like a homicide that happened to have a positive test within the prior 30 days.

The post consists mostly of charts, which are worth studying in detail. Causes of death are broken down by age category. I would focus particularly on two of them. First, mortality among those age 65 and up:

Older people basically die from natural causes. As you can see, the covid epidemic did add somewhat to mortality among the elderly, although not to anything like a catastrophic degree. And my own study of Minnesotas mortality data (which are amazingly comprehensive) tells me that covid deaths overwhelmingly consist of old people who were already very, very sick.

Now take a look at the same data for the age group 19 to 30. Young people rarely die from covid or other diseases, but look what happened to accidental deaths in this age group in 2020 and 2021. Drug overdoses are classified as accidental:

These numbers are consistent with research done by my colleague Martha Njolomole, who found that in 2020, individuals aged 15-24were 40 times more likely to die from an overdose than from COVID-19. Meanwhile, individuals aged 25-34 were 18 times more likely to die from overdose than from COVID-19. Overdose deaths in those age groups skyrocketed during the covid shutdowns.

In short, what we have done to our young people, in an inefficient and largely futile effort to protect the very sick elderly, is a crime. And we have barely begun to see the effects of the emotional damage to young children caused by forced mask-wearing.
It is hard to think of a recent policy issue on which American public opinion has been so unified: just about everyone is pro-Ukraine, but hardly anyone wants American troops to fight on the ground.

Despite this apparent consensus, various public figures, including Donald Trump, have been vilified as pro-Russia. It light of recent revelations about Russian atrocities, it is safe to assume that essentially no onecertainly no politician or major public figureis currently in the Russian camp.

Which doesnt mean that we shouldnt try to understand the Russian perspective on the Ukraine conflict, and on Euro-Asian geopolitics in general. This interview of Sergey Karaganov, adviser to both Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and author of the Karaganov Doctrine, is a good place to start:

Bruno Macaes: Why did Russia invade Ukraine? Sergey Karaganov: For 25 years, people like myself have been saying that if Nato and Western alliances expand beyond certain red lines, especially into Ukraine, there will be a war. I envisioned that scenario as far back as 1997. In 2008 President Putin said that if Ukraines membership of the alliance became a possibility then there will be no Ukraine. He was not listened to. So the first objective is to end Natos expansion. Two other objectives have been added: one is the demilitarisation of Ukraine; the other is denazification, because there are people in the Russian government concerned with the rise of ultra-nationalism in Ukraine to the extent that they think it is beginning to resemble Germany in the 1930s. There is also an aim to free the Donbas republics of eight years of constant bombardment. There was also a strong belief that war with Ukraine was inevitable  maybe three or four years from now  which could well have taken place on Russian territory itself. So probably the Kremlin decided that if you have to fight, lets fight on somebody elses territory, the territory of a neighbour and a brother country, once a part of the Russian Empire. But the real war is against the Western expansion.

You dont have to buy thatI dontto find it interesting. But I really want to focus on Karaganovs view of Article 5 of the NATO treaty. Pretty much everyone seems to assume that Article 5 is an iron-clad guarantee that all NATO members will come to the military aid of any member that is attacked by a foreign power. That is the interpretation that Joe Biden implicitly adopts when he vows that the U.S. will fight to defend every inch of NATO territory.

But, as I wrote here, that is not what Article 5 actually says. This fact has not escaped the notice of Russias rulers:

BM: You talked about demilitarisation of Ukraine, but it seems that such a goal would not be achieved if the West continues to provide Ukraine with weapons. Do you think Russia will be tempted to stop that flow of arms, and does this risk a direct clash between Nato and Russia? SK: Absolutely! There is a growing probability of a direct clash. And we dont know what the outcome of this would be. Maybe the Poles would fight; they are always willing. I know as a historian that Article 5 of the Nato treaty is worthless. Under Article 5  which allows a state to call for support from other members of the alliance  nobody is obliged to actually fight on behalf of others, but nobody can be absolutely sure that there would be no such escalation. I also know from the history of American nuclear strategy that the US is unlikely to defend Europe with nuclear weapons. But there is still a chance of escalation here, so it is an abysmal scenario and I hope that some kind of a peace agreement between us and the US, and between us and Ukraine, can be reached before we go further into this unbelievably dangerous world. BM: If Putin asks for your advice, would you tell him that Article 5 is to be taken seriously or not? I understand from your words that it is not to be taken seriously in your view. SK: It might be that Article 5 works, and countries rally to the defence of another. But against a nuclear country like RussiaI wonder? Put it this way: if the US intervenes against a nuclear country, then the American president making that decision is mad, because it wouldnt be 1914 or 1939; this is something bigger. So I dont think America could possibly intervene, but we are already in a much more dangerous situation than several weeks ago. And Article 5 does not presume automatic obligations.

The critical factor in any deterrence strategy is credibility. Does Great Power A believe that Great Power B will actually respond to a provocation as threatened? Here, unpredictability is an asset. The most effective American presidents are the ones deemed cowboys by foreign governments. Will President Reagan/GW Bush/Trump actually retaliate as he says? I dont know. He just might.

So, is Joe Biden credible when he vows to defend every inch of NATO territory? One might ask, is Joe Biden ever credible, about anything? But here is a more specific answer from a Kremlin insider:

BM: What was your reaction to President Bidens comment that President Putin cannot stay in power? SK: Well, President Biden often makes all kind of comments. [Afterwards,] he was corrected by his colleagues, so nobodys taking the statement seriously.

I think it is fair to say that nobody is taking Joe Biden seriously. That is a bad thing when our foreign policy is based on deterrence and we are dealing with a nuclear power.
In a message posted on Instagram, his daughter, Rumer Willis, said that the condition was impacting his cognitive abilities.

Swathi Kiran, director of the Aphasia Research Laboratory at Boston University, explains what aphasia is and how it impairs the communication of those with the condition.

What is aphasia?

Aphasia is a communication disorder that affects someones ability to speak or understand speech. It also impacts how they understand written words and their ability to read and to write.

It is important to note that aphasia can take different forms. Some people with aphasia only have difficulty understanding language  a result of damage to the temporal lobe, which governs how sound and language are processed in the brain. Others only have difficulty with speaking  indicating damage to the frontal lobe. A loss of both speaking and comprehension of language would suggest damage to both the large temporal lobe and frontal lobe.

Almost everyone with aphasia struggles when trying to come up with the names of things they know, but cant find the name for. And because of that, they have trouble using words in sentences. It also affects the ability of those with the condition to read and write.

What causes aphasia?

In most cases, aphasia results from a stroke or hemorrhage in the brain. It can also be caused by damage to the brain from impact injury such as a car accident. Brain tumors can also result in aphasia.

There is also a separate form of the condition called primary progressive aphasia. This starts off with mild symptoms but gets worse over time. The medical community doesnt know what causes primary progressive aphasia. We know that it affects the same brain regions as in cases where aphasia results from a stroke or hemorrhage, but the onset of symptoms follow a different trajectory.

How many people does it affect?

Aphasia is unfortunately quite common. Approximately one-third of all stroke survivors suffer from it. In the U.S., around 2 million people have aphasia and around 225,000 Americans are diagnosed every year. Right now, we dont know what proportion of people with aphasia have the primary progressive form of the condition.

There is no gender difference in terms of who suffers from aphasia. But people at higher risk of stroke  so those with cardiovascular disabilities and diabetes  are more at risk. This also means that minority groups are more at risk, simply because of the existing health disparities in the U.S.

Aphasia can occur at any age. It is usually people over the age of 65 simply because they have a higher risk of stroke. But young people and even babies can develop the condition.

How is it diagnosed?

When people have aphasia after stroke or hemorrhage, the diagnosis is made by a neurologist. In these cases, patients will have displayed a sudden onset of the disorder  there will be a huge drop in their ability to speak or communicate.

With primary progressive aphasia, it is harder to diagnose. Unlike in cases of stroke, the onset will be very mild at first  people will slowly forget the names of people or of objects. Similarly, difficulty in understanding what people are saying will be gradual. But it is these changes that trigger diagnosis.

What is the prognosis in both forms of aphasia?

People with aphasia resulting from stroke or hemorrhage will recover over time. How fast and how much depends on the extent of damage to the brain, and what therapy they receive.

Primary progressive aphasia is degenerative  the patient will deteriorate over time, although the rate of deterioration can be slowed.

Are there any treatments?

The encouraging thing is that aphasia is treatable. In the non-progressive form, consistent therapy will result in recovery of speech and understanding. One-on-one repetition exercises can help those with the condition regain speech. But the road can be long, and it depends on the extent of damage to the brain.

With primary progressive aphasia, symptoms of speech and language decline will get worse over time.

But the clinical evidence is unambiguous: Rehabilitation can help stroke survivors regain speech and the understanding of language and can slow symptoms in cases of primary progressive aphasia.

Clinical trial of certain types of drugs are under way but in the early stages. There do not appear to be any miracle drugs. But for now, speech rehabilitation therapy is the most common treatment.

Swathi Kiran, Professor of Neurorehabilitation, Boston University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
SYDNEY, April 6 (Xinhua) -- After a short reprieve from record rainfall in the month of March, residents of Sydney and surrounding areas have been put on alert for the severe weather from Wednesday morning.

The Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) forecast up to 140 mm of rain for the eastern coast of the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) on Thursday with wet weather continuing until a weakening over the weekend.

Areas north of Sydney that are still recovering from severe flooding could also be impacted. The BoM also issued a warning for flash flooding in parts of metropolitan Sydney.

BoM senior hydrologist Ailsa Schofield told local news outlet Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that due to the large amount of rainfall filling up dams and water catchments, many areas in the state were highly vulnerable to flooding.

"The catchments are very wet and it won't take much rainfall for us to see flash flooding and river rises," said Schofield.

"We potentially expect dangerous road conditions and the potential for further landslides."

This warning came after two people died and two more were injured in a landslide event triggered by wet weather in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney on Monday.

The Blue Mountains National Park was closed from 9:00 a.m. Wednesday as a significant rainfall event is predicted later this week. 
Nollywood actress, Funke Akindele-Bello has revealed why she keeps her childrens faces away from the eyes of the public.

The 45-year-old actress was previously married to Adeola Kehinde but divorced in July 2013, due to irreconcilable differences.

However, she is currently married to Nigerian rapper JJC Skillz. In December 2018, the union was blessed with twin boys.

Mrs Akindele-Bello has a strong social media presence as her fans are well abreast with trending updates on the actresss personal life. Although she is in the habit of posting personal content and behind-the-scenes footage of her life, her fans are eager to see one thing which they have not yet  her childrens faces.

During an interview with TVC, the Mrs Akindele-Bello explained the reasons behind her decision not to showcase her childrens faces to her fans, she said:

I keep my family private? Ah ah, you see my house. Dont you see my home? Dont you know my husband? Dont you see the back of my children? How is that one private? Ah ah. Its not private oh, you see everything.

Okay, the childrens face, is that what youre trying to say? No. When theyre old enough, they should show their face. If they want to, they should show their face. But for now, I dont want them to show their faces. I want them to have their life, and enjoy it. Their dad and I are already in the public eye. They are children, dont forget. They are children. Theyre vulnerable so you have to just keep them away, keep them safe. Let them go to school, let them enjoy their life without Ah! Thats Jenifas son. Thats JJCs son. Ah see his leg, see his face. Leave them private!

Three things you didnt know about Funke Akindele-Bello

Asides from the identity of her children, the actress also revealed three things fans might not be aware of.

She said, Three things my fans dont know about me? I dont like to go out. I love my space. I love to work so if Im not working, Im sleeping, Im watching TV series, Im playing with my children, chit-chatting with the family. Im not really an outgoing kind of person but once in a while, I try to go out.

Second thing: I dont like to eat meat. I like to eat bones. If you give me goat meat or chicken, its too much flesh. I just take small pieces of flesh.

Then the third one? Ha. I think they know everything!

Mrs Akindele-Bello, who is also a lawyer, is one of the most successful Nollywood actresses in contemporary times. She starred in the sitcom I Need to Know from 1998 to 2002. She, however, rose to fame for her role in the movie titled Jenifa, which earned her the nickname Jenifa.

She has hit series like Jenifas Diary, My Siblings and I, Aiyetoro Town and hit movies like the record-breaking Omo Ghetto: The Saga, , ll coming from her production company, Scene one Productions.
The zoning committee of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has recommended that the presidential ticket of the party in the 2023 elections be thrown open to all zones of the country, Punch newspaper is reporting.

The decision to throw open the ticket was part of the resolutions it reportedly made during its meeting in Abuja on Tuesday

If the recommendation is adopted by the National Executive Committee (NEC), aspirants from any of the six geopolitical zones could run for any elective position, including the presidency.

This is against the calls and expectations that the party should zone the presidential ticket to the South  ahead of the 2023 general election.

The panel, chaired by Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State, reportedly cited the exigency of time as its reason for throwing open the ticket to all interested aspirants.

While the committee noted that zoning in the party is affirmed, it said the ticket is thrown open this time around due to exigency of time.

Our party is encouraged to always make the issue of zoning very clear at least six months before sales of forms. Our party should commend the efforts of some of our contestants on the issue of consensus candidacy; the efforts should be seen to a peaceful and logical conclusion.

Unanimous resolution

Although he did not mention it when he addressed journalists after the meeting on Tuesday, Mr Ortom said they have unanimously adopted a position that will be sent to the National Executive Committee of the party.

The good news for teaming supporters of the PDP and Nigerians is that we have resolved and every one of us-the 37 members, unanimously adopted the position that we are going to present to NEC.

The resolutions by the panel will, hopefully, put to rest, controversies surrounding the zoning principle ahead of next years polls.

The party had in March inaugurated the committee with the aim of recommending a zoning formula for the various elective offices ahead of next years polls.

The discord in the party  in the past weeks  over zoning stands between two groups  the pro-zoning group and the anti-zoning group

The first is mostly made up of southern leaders who believe it is the turn for the South to produce the next president having had a northern president rule for the past eight years and the late Musa Yar Adua as the partys last candidate.

The anti-zoning group is mostly northern leaders who want the ticket thrown open because they believe they stand a chance of winning the primaries and eventually the election. They also say their stance is because in the last 16 year-rule of the PDP, two southern presidents  Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan  ruled for the most part of it.

Some members of the panel who support an open ticket have, however, argued that aspirants should be allowed to either test their strength and popularity at the partys primary or adopt a consensus candidate.

While inaugurating the committee on March 24, the National Chairman of the PDP, Iyorchia Ayu, said the party has a zoning tradition that it will stick to.

He advised those who may not benefit from the zoning formula to be adopted for the 2023 polls to wait for another time.

Array of aspirants

Although the PDP has not officially made its decision on the zoning of the presidential ticket known, several members of the party have already indicated their intention to contest for the nations highest political office on its platform.

They include former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, Governors Nyesom Wike of Rivers State, Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto State and Bala Mohammed of Bauchi State.

Others are former Governors Peter Obi of Anambra State, Ayo Fayose of Ekiti State, former Senate President Pius Anyim and Bukola Saraki.

Also in the race are the Publisher of Ovation magazine, Dele Momodu, renowned pharmacist Sam Ohuabunwa and former Chairman/CEO of FSB International Bank PLC, Mohammed Hayatu-Deen.
A mild skirmish on Tuesday occurred between soldiers of the 32 Artillery Brigade, Akure, and operatives of the Ondo State Security Network, known as Amotekun Corps, over the latters seizure of 100 cows in Akure.

They reportedly seized the cows for breaching the anti-open grazing law of the state.

The Amotekun operatives reportedly held the cows after acting on distress calls from farmers.

The farmers, who called from the Oke Aro area of Akure, complained that the cows had grazed and destroyed their crops.

While officers of the corps were on hand to enforce the law, soldiers from the Artillery Brigade stormed the area to prevent them from taking the cows away.

The soldiers reportedly made claims that the cows arrested belonged to their officers in the barracks.

The soldiers took away two of the operatives, according to witnesses, after a fisticuff and gunshots.

As the Amotekun personnel were marching the arrested cows to their office at Alagbaka area of the state, soldiers numbering about ten stormed the area with Hilux vehicle and prevented the arrest of the cows, a source who witnessed the incident told reporters.

The soldiers insisted that the Amotekun men would not go away with the cows because they belonged to their officers from the military barrack.

The Corps Commander, Adetunji Adeyeye, confirmed the incident.

He described the clash as a minor disagreement between the two groups.

It has been resolved amicably, he said while responding to inquiries from journalists.

It was the arrested herders that hid under the soldiers to cause misunderstanding between the security outfits.

I can confirm to you that the cows have been released to us.

Recently, army authorities withdrew their men from checkpoints in the state after an alleged misunderstanding between the two security agencies.

They resolved the issue after several months, and the soldiers returned to the checkpoints.

The Amotekun was set up by governments in South-western states mainly to check nomadic herding and the activities of armed herders and kidnappers.

PREMIUM TIMES reported that violent clashes between herders and farming communities have reduced in Ondo and Ekiti states since the setting up of the Amotekun in those states.
President Muhammadu Buhari has signed Executive Order 11 on the maintenance of national public buildings.

Mr Buhari signed the document Wednesday morning before the commencement of the cabinet meeting holding at the Council Chambers of the State House, Abuja.

Speaking shortly before signing, the Nigerian leader directed all Ministries, Departments and Agencies of government (MDAs) to set up maintenance departments in line with the provisions of the new Executive Order.

He said the order now gives legal backing to the countrys national maintenance policy, following its earlier approval by the Federal Executive Council.

He added that government had already started utilising the policy to give face lift to some of its buildings like the federal secretariat, Abuja, and 24 others spread across the country.

Since the approval of the policy by the Federal Executive Council, the federal government has consciously started the implementation of maintenance of strategic facilities like the federal secretariat Abuja and federal secretariats in 24 states of the federation, where at least 40 people are now daily employed in each of those 24 secretariats.

The office of the Head of Civil Service of the Federation has approved the establishment of a department of federal public assets maintenance as a vital step in support of the implementation of this national policy, which is unprecedented in our history and approach to maintenance.

In order to ensure the fullest implementation and impact of the policy, it is my pleasure to sign this Executive Order that ties maintenance direct to our economy. By this Order, I expect Ministries, Departments and Agencies to set out and ensure the operation of their maintenance departments and make necessary procurements for their maintenance in accordance with the provisions of the public procurement act, he said.

After the signing, President Buhari presided over the cabinet meeting. Among those who attended the meeting are Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, Secretary to Government of the Federation Boss Mustapha, Chief of Staff to the President Ibrahim Gambari, and Head of the Civil Service of the Federation Folashade Yemi-Esan.

Others are the Ministers of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed; Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed; Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola; Science and Technology, Ogbonnaya Onu; Women Affairs, Pauline Talen and Water Resources, Suleiman Adamu.

Details later..
The Nigerian government on Wednesday lifted the nationwide midnight curfew earlier imposed to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

Restrictions on parties, concerts, and other crowded activities have also been lifted.

This was contained in a statement issued by the Presidential Steering Committee (PSC) on COVID-19 and titled; Implementation Guidelines for Easing COVID-19 Restrictions.

The PSC said the social restriction recommendations were revised in line with the three established thematic areas of movement, industry and labour, as well as community activities.

It explained that the decision followed the reduced risk of importation of new variants, availability of vaccines and the increasing number of people vaccinated in Nigeria and globally.

The government had on May 10,2021 imposed a nationwide curfew of 12 a.m. to 4 a.m. to limit the spread of the virus.

It also reduced gatherings of religious groups and social functions, among others, to 50 per cent attendance, while official engagements, meetings, and conferences were mandated to continue to hold virtually.

As of Tuesday evening, Nigeria has recorded 255,516 COVID-19 infections according to an update published by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC). The virus has killed 3,142 persons in the country.

New guidelines

The government urged everyone to comply with existing safety protocols like the use of face masks, regular hand washing and social distancing to limit spread of the virus.

Patients with underlying ailments are advised to uphold the use of universal precaution which includes the use of face masks, avoid crowds, and frequent use of hand sanitisers, the new guideline states in part.

The government also said the safety protocols provide a baseline from which state governments could further build to strengthen their responses based on their local circumstances.

It advises states to continue to consider them as the minimum guidelines required to ensure an acceptable level of epidemic control nationwide.

The new guidelines indicated that there are no limitations on air travels  both domestic and international flights.

The government urged both international and domestic travellers to abide by all existing protocols, including the use of face masks while onboard and taking personal precaution measures; and all arriving international passengers must register on the Nigeria International Travel Portal.

No limitations on inter or intra-state travel; all vendors and service providers must abide by stated stipulations from the Federal Ministry of Transportation; all passengers and commuters must wear face masks once on board, as well as continue to observe personal precautionary measures, PSC added.
The Federal High Court in Abuja, on Wednesday, ordered the federal government to enforce the National Gender Policy by allotting 35 per cent of appointments in the public sector to women.

A nongovernmental organisation, Women in Politics Forum (WIPF), filed the suit against the Nigerian government, seeking the implementation of the 35 per cent Affirmative Action in appointments of women into public office.

Delivering his judgement on the suit on Wednesday, the judge, Donatus Okorowo, agreed with the plaintiff that Nigerian women had been subjected to various forms of discrimination concerning appointments into key positions of government.

The judge dismissed the preliminary objection of the federal governments lawyer, Terhemba Agbe, who had argued that the plaintiffs case did not disclose any cause of action.

Referencing Section 42 of the Nigerian constitution as it relates to the suit, the judge upheld the plaintiffs contention to the effect that of all the 44 ministries, there are only about six female gender, and that the situation is worse in other MDAs and agencies.

Mr Okorowo noted that the defendant, by its conduct, insinuates that there are no competent and reliable women that should be appointed to stop the apparent male dominance as witnessed in the appointments of men into key government positions.

I agree with their (plaintiff) contention that this cannot be possible out of 70 million women in Nigeria, Mr Okorowo said.

The judge held that the Attorney-General of the Federation (Abubakar Malami) who was the sole defendant in the case, failed to disprove the material allegations contained in the affidavit, and led no credible evidence to debunk material evidence of the plaintiff.

The plaintiff has led cogent, verifiable evidence backed by incontrovertible depositions in their affidavit evidence contrary to the objections raised by the defendant, the judge said.

The court held, These violations with impunity and reckless abandon were projected by the plaintiff, adding the defendant merely based their arguments on the grounds that the plaintiffs demands are not justiceable.

In a stern tone, the judge held, dismantling barriers to womens participation in public spheres has been achieved through progressive interpretation of municipal laws and international obligations and treaties.

Formulating Policies based on sex, stereotyping and feudal and patriarchal traditions will no longer be tolerated due to the supremacy of constitutional values, he noted.

Mr Okorowo said the court was duty-bound to uphold the 2006 Affirmative Action for women.

This court is not expected to achieve less for Nigerian women, since the constitutional obligation of this court is to apply the law.

The two issues for determination are resolved in favour of the plaintiff, the judge declared.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how the court conducted the final hearing on the suit in January and fixed March 30 for judgement. The court later rescheduled the verdict for today, Wednesday.

Plaintiffs arguments

WIPF had filed the suit through its lawyer, Funmi Falana, who argued during hearing that women were being discriminated against as a result of the belief that women were inferior to men.

She noted that the National Gender Policy (NGP) which provides that women should be allocated 35 per cent of all appointments was being violated.

The predominant appointment of men to decision-making positions, especially ministerial positions, with the exclusion of women is discriminatory against women and is in violation of sections 147 and 42 of the Nigerian constitution and article 19 of the African charter, Mrs Falana, counsel for the group, argued in her written address filed on September 29, 2021.

The lawyer added, Only seven of Nigerias 36 ministers are female. In the eyes of the law, 36 and 7 are not equivalent. Only four of the 37 members of the Federal Character Commission are women. This is ridiculous and insulting.

She cited section 14(3) of the Nigerian Constitution to back her call for the enforcement of the NGP.

She noted that the provision mandates that the composition of the government of the federation or any of its agencies, and the conduct of its affairs shall reflect the federal character of Nigeria, promote national unity and also to command national loyalty.

The provision, according to her, also seeks to ensure that there shall be no predominance of persons from a few states or from a few ethnic or other sectional groups in that government or in any of its agencies.

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She said the provision is in line with Article 19 of the African Charter, which specifies that no predominance in appointment of any set of people shall exist.

Mrs Falana said the provision provides a basis for female gender inclusion in government, adding that section 42 specifies that no one should be discriminated against because of their gender.

We are, therefore, saying, my lord, that the preponderance of men in ministerial and other decision-making positions is discriminatory, which may be summarised as anything that is disadvantageous to a person, Mrs Falana added.

She added that beyond the constitution, the international universal declaration of human rights 1948, international convention of social economic act and the convention of the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women states that women and men are equal and there shall be no discrimination.

She said Nigeria is a signatory to all these convention which means these laws are binding on Nigeria.

Mrs Falana recalled that the National Gender Policy states that women should be allocated 35 per cent of all appointments.

This, she noted, is a by-product of Nigerias signing of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

She said the government had refused to follow through on this strategy.

The defendant has argued that the policy is not a law. But the court has ruled that government is bound by their policies and they will be extolled for denying the people of the benefit of such policies, Mrs Falana argued.

She also disputed the defendants claim that the plaintiffs lacked locus standi to suit.

She stated that, with the scope of meaning of locus standi having been broadened in various court decisions, anyone or any non-governmental organisation has the ability to go to court in instances involving public interests.

Defence

The defence lawyer, Terhemba Agbe, in his address, urged the court to dismiss the suit on the grounds that it did not disclose any cause of action.

He said the policy can be lobbied to be passed into law by the National Assembly, and not by the court.

He added that the Nigerian Constitution in section 147, gave the president a guideline for appointments of ministers, and in doing that, the president should ensure there is a minister from every state and not from all sexes.

No matter how sentimental the plaintiffs are, ministerial appointment or appointment of any government parastatals is not guided by sex but on qualifications or on who the president thinks can deliver the job. This is guided by the constitution, Mr Agbe said.

Further reply by plaintiff

Mrs Falana replied the defences argument that when a provision under chapter 2 can be linked to any provision under chapter 4 or any other provision in the constitution, it becomes incidental and justiciable.

The right to health is not justiceable until it is linked to right to life, Mrs Falana added.

WIPF

WIPF is a non-partisan forum for women used for addressing womens marginalisation in politics and decision-making. It also recognises the significance of unity.

The forum which was created in 2011 is also working to increase the voice and capabilities of female politicians, groups, and individuals working to influence and advocate womens participation in the political process, in order to achieve a more equitable society and democratic governance for women.

Women group applaud verdict

Meanwhile, as the judge receded to chambers after delivering the verdict on Wednesday, some gender balance activists burst into a jubilant mood, hugging one another and chanting solidarity songs.

Mufuliat Fijabi of Nigerian Women Trust Fund and Ebere Ifendu, led other womens rights activists in jubilation outside the courtroom.

I am so happy that we get to witness todays judgement in our lifetime in Nigeria, elated Ms Fijabi told journalists shortly after the judgement was delivered.
Iniubong Umorens alleged rapist and killer, Uduak Akpan, has denied ever meeting her.

Mr Akpan said this on Wednesday at the State High Court in Uyo, while opening his defence in his trial for murder and rape of the late woman.

My Lord, I do not know Miss Iniubong Umoren. I only came to know that name when I was served with the proceedings of this trial at the Prison, Mr Akpan said during cross-examination by the prosecution.

He also said: For the second charge of rape, my Lord, I do not know anything about rape. I have never raped anybody.

I pleaded guilty because I had fever on that day and my IPOs influence in the court.

Mr Akpan was evasive while in the dock. He rambled each time the prosecution asked him a question.

The judge, Bassey Nkanang, in the proceedings, advised Mr Akpans lawyer to bring his client back to the case that brought him to court.

The prosecution counsel refused to cross-examine him further, while Mr Akpans lawyer, Samson Adula, said he had one more witness to present.

The case was adjourned to April 11 for continuation of trial.

Major victory for prosecution

Mr Akpans denial may not be helpful to him in the case, anyway.

The court had admitted as exhibits his three confessional statements.

The suspect had admitted raping and killing Miss Umoren, in his confessional statements, to the anti-kidnapping unit of the State C1D, the homicide section of the police, and the State Security Service (SSS), Akwa Ibom State.

An SSS officer, Ama Okeke, in his evidence before the court in a previous proceeding, said Mr Akpan had confessed that when he overpowered Miss Umoren, she begged him to use a condom if he must rape her.

The first accused person (Akpan) also told the investigation team that in the process of having sex with the deceased, he removed the condom and the deceased started struggling with him again. He said while he was still on top of the deceased, she carried an iron, and hit him on the forehead.

He said that, in order not for the deceased to shout, he, Uduak-Abasi (Akpan), now collected a black cloth, stuffed (it) into her mouth, and tied her mouth. He said he then used a standby stabiliser and hit her on the abdomen. From that point, the first accused said the deceased had started bleeding profusely. He told us he became afraid, as if she had already died.

The first accused also said he used the jeans-trouser of the deceased to strangle her completely, the officer said.

Mr Akpan, in his evidence during Wednesdays proceeding, named the Chairman of Uruan Local Government Area, Iniobong Ekpenyong and Kufre Effiong as his cousins.

He said the two met him the day he came back from Calabar, Cross River State, shortly before his arrest by the police.

But both men, Messrs Ekpenyong (PW1) and Effiong (PW2), in their testimonies before the court, said the suspect admitted to them in the council chairmans house that he killed Miss Umoren.

Mr Effiong told the court how he slapped Mr Akpan on the face and accused him of bringing shame to their family when he admitted to the crime.

Mr Akpan, before now, had pleaded guilty to the charges of murder and rape. He had also confessed to the crime during a press briefing by the police.

Background

Mr Akpan allegedly raped and killed Miss Umoren in April last year on the outskirts of Uyo after he lured her with a fake job offer.

Her remains were buried in a shallow grave in Mr Akpans family house, where the crime took place.

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The Attorney General of Akwa Ibom State, Uko Sam, is leading the prosecution team.

The defence counsel, Mr Adula, is the Akwa Ibom State coordinator of the Legal Aid Council, a statutory body which provides free legal services to low-income Nigerians who cannot hire a lawyer.
Gunmen on Tuesday killed Sale Auta, a popular businessman in the Kankara local government area of Katsina State during a night attack on Gidan Daudu village.

During the night attack, the gunmen, who are commonly referred to as bandits, also kidnapped Mr Autas teenage daughter, Aisha, and several others, local sources told PREMIUM TIMES.

Mr Auta, a merchant and philanthropist, is believed to be one of the wealthiest persons in the town.

A resident of Kankara, Magaji Basiru, said the bandits arrived on motorcycles, dragged him outside and promptly killed him.

It was a little after 9 p.m. when we heard of the attack. Alhaji Sale Auta was at home with some of his associates when the bandits stormed his house and picked him up, he said.

Mr Basiru said the locals believe the attack was planned to get at the local trader.

You know, I was in Kankara when the village was attacked but what I heard as of today (Wednesday) is that aside from Aisha (the daughter) seven others were also abducted. But I also heard that the number of those abducted has reached 10, he said.

The spokesperson of the police in Katsina, Gambo Isa, told our reporter that he would check and revert but he was yet to do so as of the time of filing this report.

Katsina State, like most of the states in the North-west of the country, is plagued by violence led by gunmen who attack communities and travellers.

Thousands have been killed since the gunmen became active in 2018. The bandits have also abducted several people.
The Nigeria Customs Service Board (NCSB) says it has approved the promotion of 3,466 general duty and support staff officers.

According to a statement issued Tuesday in Abuja by Deputy Comptroller Timi Bomodi, the NCS public relations officer, the approval was done on March 29 during the boards 54th regular meeting.

Ms Bomodi said the meeting was presided by the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning and Chairman NCS Board, Zainab Ahmed.

She highlighted the importance of discipline and engendering a work ethics based on transparency and an all-encompagssing reward system.

According to Ms Bomodi, Ms Ahmed commended the management of NCS for breaking new grounds in trade facilitation and revenue generation in 2021.

She urged the newly promoted officers to redouble their efforts in achieving the goals of the service in 2022.

The statement said that Comptroller Officers promoted included SA Bomoi, AA Anthony, BO Olumo, CK Niagwan, MM Tilleygyado, MC Ugbagu, CD Wada, A Bako, AM Adegbite, KI Adesola, NP Umoh, OO Orbih and RC Nwankwo.

It further said that officers whose promotion had January 1, 2021, as their effective date are Deputy Comptroller to Comptroller of Customs (GD)  (31), Deputy Comptroller to Comptroller of Customs (SS)  (3).

Others included Assistant Comptroller of Customs to Deputy Comptroller of Customs (GD)  (84), Assistant Comptroller of Customs to Deputy Comptroller of Customs (SS)  (1), Chief Superintendent of Customs to Assistant Comptroller of Customs (GD)  (212).

Chief Superintendent of Customs to Assistant Comptroller of Customs (SS)  (3), Superintendent of Customs to Chief Superintendent of Customs (GD)  (196) ,Superintendent of Customs to Chief Superintendent of Customs (SS)  (6).

Deputy Superintendent of Customs to Superintendent of Customs (GD)  (668) , Deputy Superintendent of Customs to Superintendent of Customs (SS)  (16).

Assistant Superintendent of Customs 1 to Deputy Superintendent of Customs (GD)  (1,258), Assistant Superintendent of Customs 1 to Deputy Superintendent of Customs (SS)  (39), Assistant Superintendent of Customs II to Assistant Superintendent of Customs 1 (GD)  (759).

Assistant Superintendent of Customs II to Assistant Superintendent of Customs 1 (SS)  (48), Inspector of Customs to Assistant Superintendent of Customs II (GD)  (109) nd Inspector of Customs to Assistant Superintendent of Customs II (SS)  (33), the statement said.

(NAN)
The Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu, says the countrys renewable energy and energy efficiency sector has continued to grow rapidly, heightening the need for a skilled workforce to support the sector.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Mr Aliyu spoke at Energise- First Career Fair for the Clean Energy Sector on Tuesday in Lagos.

The Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency AssociationsAlliance (REEEA-A) in collaboration with the Nigerian Energy Support Programme (NESP), European Union and the German Government organised the fair.

Over 25 companies in the renewable energy and energy efficiency sector and 115 professionals, seeking to advance their careers in the clean energy sector, took part in the fair.

Represented by Mr Abubakar Ali-Dapshima, Director, Renewable and Rural Power Access, Ministry of Power, Aliyu said the fair facilitated the matching of competencies with opportunities within the countrys clean energy sector.

According to him, with the push for cleaner sources of energy, renewable energy is one of the fastest-growing, high-technology sectors in the global economy.

He said the growth of the renewable energy sector had heightened the need for a skilled workforce that would help support the strengthening of power and energy access initiatives of the government, sector actors and partners.

The minister noted that renewable energy was one of the ways government was providing electricity to Nigerians in the rural areas not connected to the national grid.

He said the government had been developing solar mini-grids and remains committed to achieving a carbon net-zero by 2060.

Earlier, the Head of Programme, NESP, Duke Benjamin, emphasised the commitment of the programme to reinforcing the skills and capacity force in the sector.

Mr Benjamin, represented by Olumide Fatoki, Head of Unit, Sustainable Energy Access, (NESP) said the renewable energy sector was growing in the country and need about 30,000 young Nigerians to fill the gap in the sector.

He commended the efforts of the funding and implementation partners of the career fair, adding that it was the first step towards establishing a skill-matching collaboration platform for the clean energy sector.

The Deputy Director, Energy Commission of Nigeria and a member of the REEEA-A Steering Committee, Aminu Isa, highlighted the importance of collaborations as a key driver of the expected growth in the energy sector.

As an Alliance of associations within the Renewable Energy (RE) and Energy Efficiency (EE) sector, we are very much interested in this synergy.

This is aimed at improving the quality and standards of RE and EE technologies while also strengthening capacity in terms of knowledge generation and skills distribution, he said.

In a goodwill message, the Head of Section, Green and Digital Economy at the EU Delegation to Nigeria and ECOWAS, Inga Stefanowicz, said youth and job creation were major Key Performance Indicators for EU in the country.

We are happy to support the implementation of this activity that contributes to multiple Sustainable Development Goals in one go, particularly the creation of decent work within the RE and EE sector to foster economic growth in the country, she said.

NAN reports that the Abuja leg of the fair is scheduled to hold on April 12.

NAN also reports that over 100 professionals are expected to physically take part in the Abuja event, with capacity provided for an additional 250 to take part virtually.

(NAN)
SEOUL, April 6 (Xinhua) -- The South Korean government of President Moon Jae-in on Wednesday approved reserve fund for President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol's plan to relocate the presidential office.

The spending of 36 billion won (30 million U.S. dollars) in reserve fund was approved in an extraordinary cabinet meeting, presided over by Prime Minister Kim Boo-kyum after President Moon's instruction of a swift approval for the relocation budget.

President-elect Yoon, who is scheduled to take office on May 10, has pushed to relocate the presidential office into the defense ministry compound in Yongsan, the central district of Seoul.

Yoon's office estimated the relocation cost at about 49.6 billion won (40.7 million U.S. dollars) to move the defense ministry to the Joint Chiefs of Staff building in the same compound, remodel the defense ministry building into the presidential office, and remodel the residence of the Army chief of staff into the presidential residence.

Additional relocation budget will be discussed later in consideration of the construction of security-related facilities. 
A lawmaker from Israels ruling Yamina alliance has unexpectedly stepped down from the coalition, meaning that the government of Naftali Bennett has lost its razor-thin majority.

Israeli media unanimously reported Wednesday that Idit Silman had resigned from office.

Bennetts government was sworn in in June last year, ending a long-lasting political crisis in Israel that saw four elections in two years.

The coalition was formed of eight parties from the left  to right-wing spectrum  including an Arab party for the first time.

Silman, the coalition chairperson, reportedly resigned because of a dispute over the religious matter of whether leavened food (chametz) should be allowed to be brought into hospitals during the Jewish festival of Passover.

Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu praised Silmans decision.

ALSO READ: Israeli forces arrest family members of escaped Palestinian prisoners

The move does not have any immediate concrete impact.

Israels parliament, the Knesset, is in recess until May 8.

Even after Silmans resignation, the opposition would not have the necessary majority for an effective vote of no confidence.

It is, therefore, still unclear if and when the government could collapse and prompt new elections.

(dpa/NAN)
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) said on Wednesday that that it had started investigating a suspect allegedly caught with illegally refined petroleum products.

The commission said the 2 Brigade, Nigerian Army, in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, handed over the suspect, Endurance Asuquo, to its zonal office in Uyo on Tuesday, April 5, 2022.

EFCCs spokesperson, Wilson Uwujaren, who disclosed this in a statement, said the Naby arrested the suspect alongside a Sino Truck with registration number  DRK 700XA, loaded with illegally refined petroleum products.

The products caught with the suspect, according to EFCC, are 5000 litres of illegally- refined Automated Gas Oil( AGO) and Dual Purpose Kerosene (DPK).

The products, the commission said, were concealed in reinforced plastic bags tucked in many sac bags.

Nigeria has lost so much to oil theft which continues to thrive in many of the oil-bearing states.

Some of the suspects arrested end up being given a light sentence.

Previous arrests

In January this year, EFCC said it quizzed 22 suspected oil thieves caught with a vessel: MT. TIS IV handed over to its Port Harcourt zonal command by the Nigeria Navy.

It said its operatives quizzed the suspects in connection with alleged illegal dealing in petroleum products.

The suspects were arrested by the Nigerian Naval Ship, (NNS) Soroh, Naval Base, Camp Porbeni, Yenagoa along Akassa Rivers, Bayelsa state, on December 6, 2021 and handed over to the EFCC on Friday, January 7, 2022.

The suspects include: Levi Jonathan; Eze Kenneth; Enemari Peter James; Sunday Ereku; Emmanuel Ogbonna; Timi Amos; Fatai Kareem; Chuks Egbo, Tony Atawo and Saviour Martin.

Others are: Yoosu Alex; Isac Iboro; Bassey Okon; Kingsley Edet; Taye Poto; Saturday Sobere; Alfred Atiemie; Owei Ibolo; Felix Onome; Odus Osita, Etim Edet and Mudashird Tarheed.

Representative of Nigeria Navy, Navy Commander P. E Effah, who handed over the suspects and the vessel MT. TIS IV to the EFCC, said they were arrested for alleged involvement in illegal oil bunkering activities. At the time of arrest, the vessel was laden with about 700,000 litres of products suspected to be illegally sourced crude oil.

EFCC Press Release

EFCC Grills Suspected Oil Thief in Uyo

Operatives of the Uyo Zonal Command of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, have commenced investigations of a suspected illegal petroleum dealer handed over to the Command by the 2 Brigade, Nigerian Army, Uyo.

The dealer: Endurance Asuquo was handed over to the EFCC on Tuesday, April 5, 2022, upon his arrest by the Army, along Itu  Calabar Road on February 27, 2022.

He was arrested alongside a Sino Truck with registration number  DRK 700XA, loaded with about five thousand (5000) litres of products, suspected to be illegally- refined Automated Gas Oil( AGO) and Dual Purpose Kerosene( DPK). The products are concealed in reinforced plastic bags tucked in many sac bags.

The suspect would be charged to court as soon as the investigation is concluded.

Wilson Uwujaren

Head, Media & Publicity

6 April, 2022
Popular Nigerian online socialite, Ismaila Mustapha, also known as Mompha, is having plea agreement talks with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) over the fraud charges instituted against him.

The prosecution and the defence teams confirmed the ongoing talks when the matter came up at the Special Offences Court in Ikeja, Lagos, on Wednesday.

The defence team led by Gboyega Oyewole had earlier informed the court on March 28 that his client, who faces charges involving about N5.9 billion in suspicious transactions, intended to engage the prosecution on the possibility of securing a plea agreement.

Most important, my lord, is that the defendant wants to engage the prosecution on the charges, Mr Oyewole had said.

At Wednesdays proceedings, the prosecuting counsel, S.I. Suleiman informed the court that both parties were in the process towards a plea bargain, the EFCCs spokesperson, Wilson Uwujaren, said in a statement.

In response, Kolawole Salami, who stood in for Momphas lead defence counsel, Mr Oyewole, on Wednesday, confirmed the position.

The defendant wants his peace of mind and still maintains his no-guilty plea, he added.

Mompha had been attending court proceedings from prison due to his inability to meet the conditions of the bail granted him by the court as far back as January.

Only last month, following an application by defence lawyers for the reduction of the bail conditions, did the judge, Mojisola Dada, reduce the bail sum from N200 million to N25 million, but still with two sureties in like sum.

The judge, under the reviewed conditions, also ordered that one of the sureties must own a property worth N50 million in Lagos instead of N100 million worth of property earlier ordered.

A plea agreement is a legal mechanism in criminal proceedings that enables the defence to get a lighter punishment by pleading guilty and saves the prosecution the time and resources that a full blown trial would ordinarily require.

Mompha had earlier pleaded not guilty to the eight charges of fraud filed against him. But his talks with the EFCC may be an indication of his readiness to change his plea from not guilty to guilty in exchange for a lighter punishment.

The judge, Ms Dada, on Wednesday, adjourned the matter until June 2, after the parties sought more time for the talks over the proposed plea agreement.

EFCC is prosecuting Mompha on eight counts of fraud.

One of the charges reads: Ismaila Mustapha, Ahmadu Mohammed (at large) and Ismalobafter-partiestment Limited, sometime in 2016, in Lagos, within the jurisdiction of this Honourable Court, conspired amongst yourselves to conduct financial transactions to the tune of N5,998,884,653.18 ( Five Billion Nine Hundred and Ninety-eight Million Eight Hundred and Eighty-four Thousand Six Hundred and Fifty-three Naira Eighteen Kobo) with the intent of promoting the carrying on of specified unlawful activities to wit: Obtaining by false pretence.
Dangote Cement is on course to approach the capital market to raise new debt through bonds after its board agreed to the move, aimed at financing its operations and some expansion projects, Nigerias second biggest company by market capitalisation said Wednesday.

The cement giant said it would first observe market conditions closely to know the right time for entry even though it assured the bonds will be issued soon.

The Company had submitted an application to the Securities and Exchange Commission in respect of the bonds, and relevant approvals have now been received, Dangote Cement said in a regulatory filing seen by PREMIUM TIMES.

Last May, the firm issued N50 billion Series 1 Fixed Rate Senior Unsecured Notes with varying coupon rates of 11.25, 12.50 and 13.50 per cent for the three, five and seven year tranches in that order under its N300 billion multi-instrument debt issuance programme.

The capital was planned to facilitate Dangote Cements export strategy across Africa, where it operates in 10 markets.

It raised in August debt worth N150 billion by way of commercial paper to meet obligations including working capital and general corporate purposes, bringing the total so far issued to N200 billion.

No mention has been made of how much it will source this time around. Part of the new capital will go to refinancing existing short-term debt and for general corporate purposes.

Dangote Cement has issued an aggregate of 450 billion in Commercial Papers since 2018, Chief Executive Officer Michel Puchercos said in a press release in 2021.

Dangote Cement, Africas biggest cement-maker with a nameplate capacity of 48.6 million tonnes per year, reported an almost one-third jump in profit to N364.4 trillion last year as sales touched a record N1.4 trillion.

Its share price closed at N273.50 on Lagos Customs Street on Wednesday recording no movement.
Suspected political thugs on Wednesday attacked the campaign train of the governorship candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Segun Oni, inflicting injuries on supporters and damaging vehicles.

The hoodlums interrupted Mr Onis rally at Efon Alaaye, in Efon Local Government Area where he had gone for his campaign.

Efon is the hometown of the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, Bisi Kolawole.

The Director of Publicity, Segun Oni Campaign Organisation, Jackson Adebayo, said the hoodlums besieged the venue of the rally, shot sporadically into the air and wounded many.

Mr Adebayo said the hoodlums brandished guns, cutlasses, sticks, and stones, but were confronted by security officials, who averted bloodshed.

Mr Adebayo said the campaign train had successfully toured nine local governments since Monday and received a large turnout of party members and supporters.

He said the thugs attacked them at the centre of the town around 3.30 p.m.

Shortly after the Efon Local Government members and supporters of the SDP had converged at the venue to wait for the arrival of the partys governorship candidate, Segun Oni, the thugs started shooting and attacked the supporters with sticks and cutlasses.

Some supporters were badly injured and vehicles in the convoy were damaged by thugs before the arrival of a detachment of police, who overpowered the thugs.

An officer of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps was not spared by the thugs as they attempted to snatch his gun, though he was wounded, but refused to surrender his gun.

The police spokesperson in Ekiti State, Sunday Abutu, confirmed the attack.

Yes, the hoodlums came to the venue with dangerous weapons to disrupt the consultation process of the SDP candidate, Engr Segun Oni, but our men were able to put the situation under control, said Mr Abutu.

The police have begun investigation and arrest will be made and those behind it will surely have a case to answer.

The attack is the first major incident of electoral violence ahead of the June 18 governorship election, and a pointer to what will be expected in the coming weeks.

Mr Oni is a formidable candidate and a major contender for the office being a former governor popular among the lower strata of society.

Some local analysts in the state say he is more experienced than the candidates of the PDP and APC.

The former governor had defected from the APC to the PDP in search of the governorship ticket. He finally settled in the SDP, where he clinched the ticket.
The Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, on Tuesday, said that he earned political relevance through debates against his opponents.

Mr Fashola, a two-term governor of Lagos State, spoke at the 12th anniversary symposium of a civil society organisation, Enough is Enough Network (EiE), in Abuja.

The theme of the symposium was Debates and Democracy.

He said he joined the governorship race in 2007 as a rookie but made himself known through debates against his opponents.

He said he participated in no less than 18 debates in the run up to his first election in 2007 and his re-election in 2011 as governor of the state.

He also recounted that he decided to vote for Moshood Abiola against Bashir Tofa in the 1993 presidential election after watching their debate.

In 2007, people didnt know who I was politically. People who knew me were the judges and the lawyers in the court, and they said where did you bring this candidate from. And it was clear to me that the only way I was going to connect to the people was during that debate, Mr Fashola said in one of the panel sessions.

The minister underscored the need to properly engage vice-presidential candidates in debates owing to the economic, social and security roles they play in every government.

On election day, what youre probably likely to see is a ballot paper with the signs, symbols, possibly the names of the candidates, but doesnt tell you what they do about your life, what they care about, how you feed them, doesnt tell you whether they are God-fearing, whether they have empathy.

So it is platforms like this that help you test ahead of making a choice, what kind of persons you are entrusting the most serious jobs either in your local government, your state or in your country. And that became very defining for me as a much younger person in 1993, he further said.

Mr Fasholas views were also shared by the Executive Secretary of Nigerian Elections Debate Group, Edward Emessiri; a veteran TV host, Ngozi Alaegbu; and a former presidential spokesman, Olusegun Adeniyi, who served as a moderator of the session.

Beyond the reality of money politics, religious and ethnic sentiments that often characterised elections in Nigeria, the panelists agreed that there was a need to rigorously subject candidates at all levels of government to series of public debates to assess their suitability before election.

This, according to many of the speakers, including the executive director of EiE, Yemi Adamolekun, will promote a culture of good governance and public accountability of elected officers across boards.

In its bid to promote debate and public awareness about elections processes, Ms Adamolekun said the EiE has hosted and co-hosted over 25 debates in various forms in over ten years.

Some of the debates include the 2019 presidential and vice presidential debate, Osun 2018 and Anambra 2017 and 2021 governorship debates.
Governor Charles Soludo of Anambra State has set up a 15-man Truth, Justice and Peace Committee to help address rising cases of agitation, insecurity and other challenges in the state.

A renowned human rights activist, Chidi Odinkalu, is the chairman of the committee, while Bianca Ojukwu, the widow of the late Biafra leader, Odumegwu Ojukwu, is the secretary.

Some notable figures from other states in the South-east are also members of the committee.

The Secretary to the Anambra State Government announced this in a statement made available to journalists on Wednesday in Awka.

The committee has six months to complete its assignment, according to the statement.

Mr Chukwulobelu said the committees terms of reference include seeking a restorative justice approach to truth telling or actual facts, for the healing of the victims of the violence.

The committee is to identify the remote and immediate causes of the agitations, restiveness, violence, and armed struggle in the South-east since 1999.

They are to document victims and circumstances of death, brutality, and incarceration.

The committee is also to identify people and groups who have played critical roles in the agitations and conflicts, their capabilities and demands.

They are to address any other issues that may be germane to unravelling the extent of the crisis and chart a roadmap for the future, and make recommendations for sustainable peace and security in Anambra state and the South-east.

Others members of the committee include Joe Nwaorgu, Udenta Udenta, Uju Agomoh, Jerome Madueke, Okechukwu Obi-Okoye and Charles Oputa (Charly Boy).

Others are: John Otu, Ngozi Odumuko, Onyeka Onwenu, Joe Abah, Chukwuma Okpalaezeukwu, Sam Egwuatu and Joseph Ikechebelu.

Several people have been killed and properties destroyed in the South-east because of Biafra agitation.

Police officers and officials of other security agencies have been the target of deadly attacks in the region.

The separatist group, IPOB, has been linked to the attacks.

IPOB is leading the agitation for the creation of an independent state of Biafra which they want carved out from the South-east and some parts of the South-south.

The groups leader, Nnamdi Kanu, has been detained in Abuja where he is standing trial for alleged treasonable felony and terrorism.

(NAN)
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) imposed monetary sanctions on Stanbic IBTC Bank, Access Bank for permitting crypto transactions by customers in breach of a directive from the regulator last year, forbidding such deals, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.

While Access Bank, the commercial banking division of the countrys biggest lender Access Holdings, which converted to a holding company this February, got N500 million in fine, Stanbic IBTCs penalty was N200 million, according to the news outlet, which cited a disclosure at a virtual investor call arranged by the latter on Tuesday in Lagos.

CBN, sometime last February, embargoed cryptocurrency trading, going ahead to instruct banks to disallow transactions in it, noting they could trigger an exposure of the financial system to danger.

Wole Adeniyi, Stanbic IBTCs chief, stated his bank heeded the order but admitted the two deals for which it is being punished is more of negligence than infringement as the transactions were processed through its system without the lender discovering it.

The industry watchdog spotted the transactions and their details, by way of an ultramodern surveillance technology currently exclusive to it.

United Bank for Africa, one of Nigerias five largest banks in asset terms, also shared in the regulators wrath, incurring a penalty of N100 million.

ALSO READ: Why crypto is booming in Nigeria despite govt ban

Adeniyi said lenders are in talks with the CBN to give them leave to use the software.

It doesnt seem that they are going to entertain a refund, but they are now sharing intelligence with us to be able to kind of deter clients, he said.

Apart from the United States, Nigeria, Africas biggest economy, is responsible for the biggest size of digital currency deals in the world, according to Paxful, which runs a platform for trading in Bitcoin.

The country is also home to the biggest proportion of retail users with transactions below $10,000, according to Chainalysis.
The Federal High Court in Abuja on Wednesday rescheduled the judgement on a suit filed against Governor Ben Ayade of Cross River State over his last years defection from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the All Progressives Congress (APC).

The judge, Taiwo Taiwo, who had earlier fixed Wednesday for his judgement, postponed it till Thursday to consider the latest significance of the latest of the decision of the Court of Appeal in Enugu, Enugu State, on the implication of the defection of a governor and his deputy.

In the decision formally brought to the attention of the judge on Wednesday, the Court of Appeal in Enugu dismissed the legal action seeking to remove Governor David Umahi and his deputy, Kelechi Igwe, from office on the account of their dumping the PDP for the APC last year.

Weeks ago, parties to the case filed by the PDP against Mr Ayade and his deputy had closed their arguments and the judge adjourned for judgement.

But barely 72 hours to the scheduled judgement on the suit, APCs lawyer, Mike Ozekhome, on Monday, filed an application to draw the attention of the judge, Mr Taiwo, to the latest decision of the Court of Appeal on the issue.

Mr Ozekhome, in the application, urged Mr Taiwo to consider the decision of the Court of Appeal in Enugu in arriving at his decision that was scheduled to be delivered on Wednesday.

At Wednesdays proceedings, the judge asked lawyers to the parties to the suit to address the court on the decision of the Court of Appeal on Mr Umahis case.

PDPs arguments

Meanwhile, PDPs lead counsel, Emmanuel Ukala, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, argued at the hearing thay the facts and circumstances of Mr Umahis case were different from Mr Ayades.

The PDP lawyer contended that the reliefs in the Court of Appeal judgement were three, and different from the reliefs in this case.

Mr Ukala said the Court of Appeal in its decision made a sweeping statement that the only way a governor could be removed from office was through impeachment by parliament.

The core issues we are asking this court to interpret were absent in that case of the Appeal Court.

My Lord, a defection constitutes a vacation of office by the governor and his deputy, Mr Ukala said, adding this decision (of the Court of Appeal) cannot stand as a judicial precedence in deciding this (Mr Ayades) matter.

APCs arguments

Responding, Mr Ozekhome contradicted Mr Ukalas argument, saying the entire reliefs and questions for determination in this case before the court are exactly the same as the subject matter [ff thecase at the Court of Appeal.

Mr Ozekhome, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), told the court that after a governor and his deputy took oath of office, they can no longer be removed on account of defecting to another political party.

Citing Section 40 of the Nigerian constitution, Mr Ozekhome noted that Mr Ayade exercised his right to freedom of association as enshrined in the Nigerian constitution by joining the APC.

After listening to the lawyers arguments, the judge slated Thursday for judgement on the matter.

It was the second time the judge would be postponing the judgement. The court earlier rescheduled it on March 25 till today on the account that it was not ready.

Background

The PDP had sued Mr Ayade and 20 state legislators, its former members, over their defection to the All Progressives Congress (APC) in May 2021.

The PDP had urged the court to declare their seats vacant on the account of their defection.

Last month, Mr Taiwo granted the plaintiffs prayers in one of the suits by sacking the Cross River State House of Assembly Speaker and 17 of his colleagues alongside two members of the House of Representatives for defecting to the APC.

The judge held that there (were) no justifiable reasons for their defection.

But the court had fixed March 25 for its decision on the defection of Mr Ayade and his deputy.

On March 25, however, the court rescheduled the judgement to Wednesday (April 6), on the grounds that the verdict was not ready.

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After the rescheduling of the judgement, the Court of Appeal in Enugu, Enugu State, on Friday, delivered its verdict on the defection of Governor David Umahi of Ebonyi State and his deputy, both of whom had similarly dumped the PDP for the APC last year.

The Court of Appeals decision came some weeks after the Federal High Court in Abuja sacked Mr Umahi and his deputy over their defection. The governor and his deputy have since appealed the judgement but the Court of Appeal in Abuja has yet to fix a date for the hearing.

Messrs Umahi and Igwe had in November 2020 defected to the APC from the PDP

Following their defection, the candidate of the APC in the 2019 governorship election, Sonni Ogbuoji, and his deputy, Justin Mbam, approached an Ebonyi State High Court seeking the sack of the governor and his deputy.

They lost at the High Court and further appealed to the Court of Appeal in Enugu, which also dismissed their case on Friday.

The appellate court, in the decision agreed that the immunity clause in the Nigerian constitution does not shield the president, the vice president, governors or deputy governors, from being sued on issues which may become spent once they leave office.

But it held that the Nigerian constitution does not make a provision for the category of the heads of the executive arm of government to lose their seats on the account of their defection from a political party on whose platform they win their election to another party.
Benue State Governor, Samuel Ortom, has dismissed reports that the zoning committee of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), decided that the partys presidential ticket should be thrown open.

Mr Ortom said the committee only adopted a unanimous position to be presented to the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the party.

The governor said this in a statement by his Chief Press Secretary, Nathaniel Ikyur, on Wednesday.

The statement did not, however, disclose what the panel recommended.

The governors comments come barely 24 hours after some members of the panel disclosed to journalists that the committee unanimously decided to open the ticket.

Mr Ortom, however, did not also mention it when he addressed journalists after the committees meeting on Tuesday.

The committee will present the report to NEC. It is NEC that has the final authority on the zoning of positions.

As far as the committee was concerned, there were arguments that the presidential candidate should go to the South. While some said it should go to the Northern part of the country.

There were others who were of the opinion that it should be thrown open for the best candidate who will be able to deliver good governance and make Nigerians feel like human beings again.

As the chairman of the committee, we did not say that. So it is very wrong for anyone to insinuate that we have thrown the presidential ticket open. I am still repeating that, whatever we did, we have submitted our report to NEC. And like I said, NEC is the final authority on deciding where this position will be zoned to, he said.

In the end, the major goal of the PDP is to bring the economy and security situation of the country back to normalcy, the statement said.

While the party is yet to officially announce its stand on the presidential ticket, over 10 members have indicated interest in the ticket.

They include former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, Governors Nyesom Wike of Rivers State, Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto State and Bala Mohammed of Bauchi State.

Others are former Governors Peter Obi of Anambra State, Ayo Fayose of Ekiti State, former Senate President Pius Anyim and Bukola Saraki.

Other who had shown interest are the Publisher of Ovation magazine, Dele Momodu, renowned pharmacist Sam Ohuabunwa and former Chairman/CEO of FSB International Bank PLC, Mohammed Hayatu-Deen.

The National Chairman of the PDP, Iyorchia Ayu, had on March 24 inaugurated the 37-member committee to work out an acceptable zoning formula for the party ahead of 2023 elections.

Read the full Statement

ZONING: WE DID NOT THROW OPEN PRESIDENTIAL TICKET, ORTOM

Benue State Governor and Chairman, Zoning Committee of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Samuel Ortom has dismissed insinuations in the media that the committee has thrown the presidential ticket of the party open.

He insisted that the committee was being quoted on what it did not say.

The governor who bared his mind Wednesday, April 6th, 2022 while appearing on the Morning Show an AriseTV prime time programme querried why those who were not part of the meeting of the committee would want to force words into the committees mouth.

The governor who frowned at the caption on the news bar while the interview lasted quipped: I want to clear the insinuation that the zoning committee has thrown open the presidential ticket. I did inform the media yesterday (Tuesday, April 5, 2022) that the committee has adopted a unanimous position to be presented to the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the party. Where did I say that the committee has thrown open the presidential ticket?

He maintained that The committee will present the report to NEC. It is NEC that has the final authority on the zoning of positions.

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He explained that, As far as the committee was concerned, there were arguments that the presidential candidate should go to the South. While some said it should go to the Northern part of the country. There were others who were of the opinion that it should be thrown open for the best candidate who will be able to deliver good governance and make Nigerians feel like human beings again.

He continued: As the chairman of the committee, we did not say that. So it is very wrong for anyone to insinuate that we have thrown the presidential ticket open. I am still repeating that, whatever we did, we have submitted our report to NEC. So it is wrong for the media to come out with a position despite the fact that they were not members of the committee.

I came out to brief the media. So it is wrong completely. I did not say that. And like I said, NEC is the final authority on deciding where this position will be zoned to.

Governor Ortom recalled that, when the party positions were being zoned before the national convention, NEC directed us that in zoning these positions, go and do it rightly without minding where the president will come from yet. That when the time comes for the presidential, a mandate will be giving to people and NEC will take a decision. That is what what we have done.

The governor then implored the media not to, Crucify us. Dont kill us before you get the answer because PDP have not brought up a report, insisting,  that will be done by NEC.

He said the party leadership is Consciously working towards ensuring that the party gets it right thing this time. I believe that at the end, the right thing will be done, stressing however that, Preempting the committees work and NEC decision is not correct. I want to appeal that NEC will soon invite us to a meeting and then we can move on from there, the governor stated.

Governor Ortom maintained that At the end of the day, the most important thing to the PDP is what the party can do to bring the economy and security situation back to normalcy, because If nothing drastic is not done about the present situation in the country, a time will come when even the Presidential Villa and other government houses will be taken over by the terrorists. They are already closing in on us and we seem to be helpless. Everyone must team up to fight for justice, equity and fairness, he stated.

Nathaniel Ikyur

Chief Press Secretary,

April 6th, 2022
Demonstrators shout slogans in downtown Athens, Greece, on April 6, 2022. Tens of thousands of Greeks walked off the job across the country on Wednesday to join a 24-hour general strike over soaring heating, electricity and housing costs. Public services and transport were disrupted. (Xinhua/Marios Lolos)

ATHENS, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Tens of thousands of Greeks walked off the job across the country on Wednesday to join a 24-hour general strike over soaring heating, electricity and housing costs. Public services and transport were disrupted.

Approximately 10,000 demonstrators participated in a rally organized in front of the Parliament by umbrella labor unions for civil servants and private sector workers.

"Wages are small, bills are huge, we demand solutions," they chanted.

"Today's nationwide strike is an important step in escalating the struggle of workers' movement against the big front of huge living costs," Dimitris Koutsoumpas, general secretary of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), told journalists.

The ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict has sent energy and food prices skyrocketing and households and businesses find it increasingly difficult to make ends meet, the labor unions said in press statements, demanding more support measures, like substantial salary increases, from the state.

The government has recently allocated about four billion euros (4.37 billion U.S. dollars) to ease the burden on Greek society and the real economy, but much more is needed, they said.

"We are here today to protest against the increase in energy and fuel prices, which affects us as professionals, but also our clients. Some of them are already on the brink of collapse," tax consultant Apostolos Dalas told Xinhua.

"Today we are asking for immediate measures to help the average income employees, the low-wage earners, the unemployed. Something must be done so that we do not pay for this crisis," hotel employee Yannis Sozos told Xinhua.

Between 2010 and 2018, Greece experienced an acute debt crisis coupled with harsh austerity measures. The economy had just started to return to growth when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Today, Greeks once again feel their incomes squeezed by the effects of the conflict in Ukraine. (1 euro = 1.09 U.S. dollars) 

Demonstrators shout slogans in downtown Athens, Greece, on April 6, 2022. Tens of thousands of Greeks walked off the job across the country on Wednesday to join a 24-hour general strike over soaring heating, electricity and housing costs. Public services and transport were disrupted. (Xinhua/Marios Lolos)

Demonstrators shout slogans in downtown Athens, Greece, on April 6, 2022. Tens of thousands of Greeks walked off the job across the country on Wednesday to join a 24-hour general strike over soaring heating, electricity and housing costs. Public services and transport were disrupted. (Xinhua/Marios Lolos)
A Burkinabe court has sentenced former President Blaise Compaore to life imprisonment for the murder of his predecessor, Thomas Sankara, Al Jazeera is reporting.

The long-awaited verdict on Wednesday brought to close, a six-month trial about the murder of Mr Sankara, who was assassinated during a coup led by his friend and comrade-in-arms, Mr Compaore, on October 15, 1987.

Military prosecutors in Burkina Fasos capital, Ouagadougou, had requested a 30-year sentence for Mr Compaore, who was being tried alongside 13 others.

Two other main suspects were also handed life imprisonment sentences. They are Gilbert Diendere, one of the leaders of the 1987 putsch and leader of the 2015 coup, as well as Hyacinthe Kafando, leader of Mr Compaores guards at the time.

Mr Compaore, who was unseated in a 2014 uprising, fled to neighbouring Cote dIvoire where he was given citizenship. He was tried in absentia, like Mr Kafando but unlike Mr Diendere who is in custody.

Mr Sankara, a pan-Africanist leader who had taken power in 1983, was killed at 37 along with 12 other government officials.

Mr Compaore became his successor, ruling until his 2014 ouster.
The gunmen who abducted the managing director of the Nigerian Bank of Agriculture, Alwan Hassan, have reportedly released him.

Mr Hassan, who was kidnapped by the gunmen who attacked a Kaduna-bound train last week Monday, was released alongside some other passengers who were abducted during the attack on the train.

The gunmen who used explosives to derail the train before spraying its occupants with bullets killed eight persons and injured several others during the attack.

A family source who wished to remain anonymous told PREMIUM TIMES a ransom was paid on Tuesday evening.

Ive spoken with him today. And I know that ransom was paid but I dont know how much. Im not in the position to tell you that. All I know is that I am happy for him and the family. When he was abducted, many people thought it was me, the source said.

He declined to make further comments.

Another victim dies

Another victim of the train attack, Haruna Funtua, a retired military sergeant, has died from injuries he sustained during the attack.

A family source said Mr Funtua, who was a one time State Chairman of the Nigeria Union of Road Transport Workers in Katsina, died Tuesday morning at 44 Nigerian Army Reference Hospital Kaduna where he was being treated.

He has been buried today according to Islamic rites in Funtua, Ismail Muhammad, a relative of Mr Funtua told PREMIUM TIMES.

Mr Funtuas death brings the number of people who died during the attack to nine.

During a visit to the scene, the transportation minister, Rotimi Amaechi, said the attack could have been averted if the security surveillance solution equipment he proposed to the Federal Executive Council were procured.
The House of Representatives has set up an ad hoc committee to review the status of ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) of the federal government.

The committee, headed by Victor Mela (APC, Gombe), was set up by the Speaker, Femi Gbajabiamila, with the mandate to investigate the process of merger and scrapping of some of the MDAs.

The House resolved to set up the committee following a motion moved by Mohammed Monguno (APC, Borno), in March.

Mr Gbajabiamila announced the members of the ad hoc committee on Wednesday.

It is unclear if the investigation by the House will unveil anything different from the Oronsaye Report.

In 2011, former President Goodluck Jonathan set up the presidential committee on the reformation of government agencies chaired by Steven Oronsaye.

At the inauguration of the Oronsaye Committee, its terms of reference included, among others, examining the enabling Acts and mandates of all the federal agencies, parastatals and commissions to determine areas of overlap or duplication of functions.

The committee, in its report, recommended that of the 541 Statutory and Non-Statutory Federal Government Parastatals, Agencies and Commissions, 263 statutory agencies should be reduced to 161, 38 agencies should be abolished, 52 agencies should be merged, and 14 should revert to Departments in Ministries.

However, the federal government is yet to implement the report of the committee.

In 2021, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Boss Mustapha, had announced the creation of two committees to look into the report.

The first subcommittee is headed by Goni Aji, a former Head of Service, with the mandate to advise the government on the implementation of the report within one year.

The other sub-committee headed by Ama Pepple has the mandate to review the report.

Speaking to journalists on Wednesday, Mr Mela dismissed the argument that mergers will lead to job loss. He stated that certain times require drastic measures.

Nigeria is at a time where drastic measures glass to be taken, he said.

He added that some were for specific interventions, but still exist even at the expiration of the main reasons they were created.

There are a lot of agencies, parastatal and commissions that have duplicated functions. Some of them, are not supposed to exist. Some of them were made for intervention and after intervening they are still existing? And the government is still spending money to keep these agencies of government.

Speaking on the Oronsaye report, Mr Mela said the committee will invite relevant parties to explore all options to reduce the wage bill.

The Oronsanye report is wonderful. We are going to look into it. We are going to invite people during the public hearing to make a presentation to the nation. It is not about losing a job, it is about moving the country forward to the sacrifice of others, the lawmaker said.
The Federal Executive Council (FEC) has approved the issuance of provisional licences for the establishment of 12 private universities across the country.

Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, disclosed this to State House correspondents at the end of the council meeting, presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari, on Wednesday in Abuja.

He said the affected universities would be located in Kano, Niger, Gombe, Sokoto, Delta, Abia, Anambra and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.

He said: Council approved the memo for the issuance of provisional licences for the establishment of 12 proposed private universities.

The proposed private universities are Pen Resource University Gombe, Gombe State, Al-Ansar University, Maiduguri, Borno State, Margaret Lawrence I -University, Delta State and Khalifa Ishaku Rabiu University Kano, Kano State.

Sports University Idumuje Ugboko, Delta State, Bala Ahmed University Kano, Saisa University of Medical Sciences and Technology, Sokoto State, Nigerian-British University Hasa, Abia State and Peter University Acina-Onene, Anambra State as well as Newgate University, Minna, Niger State, European University of Nigeria in Duboyi, Abuja and the North-West University Sokoto. 

Mr Mohammed said the Minister of State, Education, Chukwuemeka Nwajiuba, presented the memo on behalf of the National Universities Commission and it was approved by the cabinet.

According to him, each of the new universities will be mentored by the old universities nearer to them.

He argued that establishment of additional universities for an over 200 million-populated country was necessary if the policy of educating a larger percentage of youngsters was to succeed.

Similarly, FEC gave approval to the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, to revise the estimated total cost of the contract for the extension of the inner southern expressway, from the outer southern expressway to the southern parkway.

Mr Mohammed, who stood in for the Minister of the FCT, said the augmentation was in the sum of N1.4 billion.

He explained that the augmentation would raise the contract sum from over N17 billion to over N18.5 billion, to be completed in 12 months.

The Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola also revealed that the Council approved N36.1 billion for the rehabilitation of Keffi-Nasarawa-Toto road in Nasarawa State.

He said: The Ministry of Works and Housing presented a memorandum to council for a contract for the rehabilitation of 118.9 Keffi-Nasarawa-Toto road in Nasarawa State and the memo was approved for the award of the contract for N36.130 billion.

The Minister also explained that the new Executive Order 11 signed by Mr Buhari would help improve the life span of all public buildings.

According to the minister, Nigerians stand to gain a lot from the Executive Order, adding that this was the first time the Nigerian government is making maintenance a matter of national policy.

(NAN)
The Federal Executive Council (FEC) on Wednesday in Abuja has approved N35 billion for various projects in the aviation sector.

The projects include increased cost of construction of terminal buildings at Akanu Ibiam International Airport Enugu State and the airport at Asaba.

The Minister of Aviation, Hadi Sirika, made this known after Wednesdays cabinet meeting presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari.

He said N5.6 billion of the money was approved for the maintenance of the nations new international building terminals in Abuja and Port Harcourt.

There were five memoranda from civil aviation, which were all approved, starting from the one for contract for the maintenance of Nigerias new international terminal buildings in Abuja and Port Harcourt.

This is in line with governments policy to ensure that public buildings are well maintained so that they will remain as they are.

In this case, contract was approved for the two terminal buildings at a total coat of N5,653,341,729.07, including 7.5 per cent VAT, for a period of three years, he said.

Mr Sirika added that the council also approved N14.2 billion as increase in the cost of the construction of terminal buildings at Akanu Ibiam International Airport Enugu State and at the Asaba Airport.

The second memo is the approval for increase in the cost of construction of new terminal building at perishable cargo airports in Enugu and Asaba.

That of Asaba is not a Federal Government airport, but we are putting in a cargo terminal building there.

This is funded through the federal budget. Recall that the remaining four terminal buildings in Kano, Lagos, Port Harcourt and Abuja are funded through Chinese loans.

The Enugu airport is funded through our appropriation including the cargo terminal therein and also the cargo terminal at Asaba.

The increased cost for these procurements is N14,242,808,433.17 with 12 months additional completion period, Sirika said.

He said the Ministry also got approval of N 469.4 million for the procurement of an X-ray machine and maintenance support services.

The other one is approval for the award of contract for the procurement of L3 X-ray machine parts and maintenance support services.

This procurement is in the sum of N469,679,484 with 7.5 per cent VAT to be supplied in a period of 12 months, he added.

Mr Sirika also announced that the cabinet approved increased cost for the procurement, configuration, and delivery and commissioning of transportable radars.

According to him, this is co-mounted with another radar and tower control centre for enhancement of the Northeast surveillance safety of air navigation operations and for the airport at Maiduguri to run for 24 hours daily.

The minister said N14.7 billion was approved for the construction of clinics at Abuja, Kano, Port Harcourt, and Lagos Airports as well as the replacement of elevators and excavators at Wings `D and `E at the old Lagos Airport.

(NAN)
The good news is that Ghana now has a golden opportunity to develop a comprehensive and context-specific plan for navigating the global energy transition. In response to COP26 and Ghanaian CSOs demands for a national energy transition policy, the government launched the National Energy Transition Committee (NETC) in December 2021. The committee is tasked with developing a national policy document on steps the country can take to successfully navigate the global energy transition.

All countries have a vital role and interest in avoiding catastrophic climate impacts and safeguarding a livable planet. Like the citizens of most developing countries, Ghanaians are increasingly affected by climate change, despite bearing little responsibility for the emissions that are causing it.

At the COP26 climate conference last year, governments reaffirmed their commitment to the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C. Achieving this will require a colossal and unprecedented shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources like wind and solar  as well as the provision of clean, affordable and reliable energy for the nearly one billion people currently living without it.

The wealthiest countries that have polluted the most should hold the primary responsibility for tackling climate change, both in cutting their emissions first and fastest, and in providing climate finance and support to countries like Ghana. Ghanas President Nana Akufo-Addo emphasised this responsibility during COP26 when he called for a fair and equitable solution that recognises the historical imbalances between the high emitters and low emitters.

To date, however, wealthy countries have under-promised and underdelivered. They have yet to reduce emissions to the extent necessary to avoid warming beyond 2C, let alone 1.5C. And, as President Akufo-Addo also mentioned, they have failed to honour their 2010 promise of $100 billion per year to support developing countries responses to climate change. Tragically, the consequences will be felt by all for decades to come.

Ghanas agency in the energy transition

Despite this compound injustice and these broken promises, Ghanas future ultimately depends on its own leadership and effective planning. Ghana is still a resource-dependent country, with more than a quarter of its export earnings coming from oil and gas alone. Over the past decade, the oil sector has contributed around $6.5 billion of direct revenue to Ghanas budget. Without a plan to respond to the global energy transition, a significant decline in oil revenues could plunge Ghana into a deep crisis.

In the last decade, the government has allocated $2 billion to the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC). These investments have financed equity stakes in exploration, development and general operations in oil-producing fields. NRGIs Risky Bet report shows that, globally, oil and gas projects currently in the pipeline and worth an estimated $400 billion, run the risk of not breaking even.

At a minimum, the government should avoid making bad decisions  those that threaten the countrys economic and fiscal outlook. But Ghanas record does not inspire confidence. In the last decade, the government has allocated $2 billion to the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC). These investments have financed equity stakes in exploration, development and general operations in oil-producing fields. NRGIs Risky Bet report shows that, globally, oil and gas projects currently in the pipeline and worth an estimated $400 billion, run the risk of not breaking even. Against the backdrop of the global energy transition, GNPCs ambitions of becoming an operator are risky.

In July 2021, Ghanas Ministry of Energy and GNPC declared their intention to sink an additional $1.65 billion of public money into shares of Aker Energys oil project  yet another risky bet given the increasing pace of the global energy transition, which would result in poor returns on such a large-scale investment. Furthermore, such a decision would divert precious capital that the government could invest in more socially beneficial programmes, such as education or cheaper and more diverse energy sources, that could power development in Ghana. Thankfully, after severe criticism from civil society organisations, the public and industry oversight bodies in Ghana, the government paused its investment plans in the Aker shares.

No doubt, Ghanas economic and fiscal outlook is uncertain. The 2018/19 oil licensing round remains unconcluded and oil production is projected to decline. International companies are redirecting their investments, and projects have been delayed. State oil revenues peaked in 2018, at 10 per cent of total government revenue, and dropped to seven per cent in 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic. The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine and the related global energy crisis now present huge uncertainties for the oil sector, including the prospect of a global recession.

The good news is that Ghana now has a golden opportunity to develop a comprehensive and context-specific plan for navigating the global energy transition. In response to COP26 and Ghanaian CSOs demands for a national energy transition policy, the government launched the National Energy Transition Committee (NETC) in December 2021. The committee is tasked with developing a national policy document on steps the country can take to successfully navigate the global energy transition. The NETC is also tasked with conducting a nationwide consultation on Ghanas energy transition. At the first regional forum organised by the Ministry of Energy on behalf of the NETC, Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia said the NETCs nationwide consultations are key to success: We need to develop plans and implement options that people can relate to. He also stressed the importance of equal opportunities for all citizens to enjoy the benefits of the energy transition and ensure social justice in the process.

The transition plans must address Ghanas growing energy needs. Decisions about energy sources and related services should be based on analysing different solutions over the long term, mindful of the likelihood that many factors (such as the competitiveness of renewables and gas) may change quickly over the coming decade. Accordingly, the NETC should review the role of fossil gas over the course of the transition

Essential elements for Ghanas approach

The establishment of the NETC is an important and valuable first step. The following recommendations, if adopted, would put the committee on track to deliver a successful energy transition plan:

Include all voices. Ghanas plan should be inclusive and leave no citizen behind. The plan should address how government will support local economies with relevant training, technology and finances to take advantage of the new opportunities in the transition;

Enlist experts. The NETC should engage sector experts working on the energy transition to help ensure that the plan is informed by data and technical analysis;

Promote open dialogue. Open and honest engagement between all relevant stakeholders will help build consensus and ownership around a transition pathway that is widely considered by citizens as viable and necessary. A shared understanding of the risks and opportunities of the energy transition is critical to agree on a shared strategy;

Plan in harmony and coordination with existing policies. The energy transition plan should harmonise existing policy objectives and remedy the systemic inefficiencies in existing policy implementation;

Improve governance of climate finance. The Ministry of Finance should spell out the role of international climate finance in energy transition planning and interrelate the energy transition plan with Ghanas (conditional) nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement. Across the board, this requires building the states capacity to receive and deploy international climate finance;

Take a critical and dynamic approach to energy options. The transition plans must address Ghanas growing energy needs. Decisions about energy sources and related services should be based on analysing different solutions over the long term, mindful of the likelihood that many factors (such as the competitiveness of renewables and gas) may change quickly over the coming decade. Accordingly, the NETC should review the role of fossil gas over the course of the transition  not assume from the outset that gas will be a constant;

Assess implications for existing institutions. Ghanas energy transition plan should consider the role of existing institutions such as GNPC in light of the long-term, macro pathway, rather than starting with assumptions about their purpose and role. Making the right investment decisions will require transparency and robust risk assessment.

Nafi Chinery is the West Africa (Anglophone) regional manager at the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI).

This article was originally published as a post on the blog of the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) on April 4.
We are not doomed to a non-choice between these parties that are not even two sides of a coin but a cheat coin with the same sides. There are elements of what it can take to win from a non-mainstream party, with a review of Soludos win of the Anambra gubernatorial election last year  albeit through a party with some track record at the State and national levels. Emmanuel Macrons win in 2017 also gives us a study of what a combination of luckfocused partnerships, consistent messaging and an energised electorate can achieve.

PDP does not deserve the votes of Nigerians in 2023 and there are at least three reasons why.

The last ten days have been bad for Nigeria. Actually, the headlines have been no more depressing and scarier than over the last few years, when it comes to murder and the loss of lives, but the audacity of terrorists is escalating. First, the attack on the Kaduna airport on March 25, which accounts suggest were aimed at hijacking planes, with passengers still on the tarmac. Then the attack on the Abuja-Kaduna train three days later, with at least eight dead, 26 injured and 21 missing persons reported. Unfortunately, that is not the full picture, because we might never know the complete number of people kidnapped or how many were actually on the train that night. Why? Although the train has a capacity for 840 passengers, only 362 tickets were validly sold and there might have been as many as 970 people on it. Only another day in the mindless theft of public resources, with serious implications for accountability.

Yet, our leading opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is unable to be the type of opposition we need  vocal, clear on recommendations and leading the charge to empathise with those who are suffering. This is the first reason why the party should be boycotted. Despite the consistency of the onslaught on Nigerians, socially, economically and politically, as a result of APCs unthinking policies and unbridled state capture, asides from a few statements, PDP has not engaged the public half as well as APC did when it was Nigerias leading opposition party. PDPs comatose posture might be a testament to the care that APC has taken to close the civic space and muzzle dissent, but it is also an indication that PDP has learnt nothing from its 2015 defeat: the party and its members were out of touch with Nigerians.

Another reason to boycott PDP in 2023 is that 11 months to an election with promise, where the incumbent in Aso Rock is not on the ballot, PDP is still undecided what zone its presidential candidate is going to come from. Section 7(3)(c) of PDPs constitution provides that in furtherance of the partys objectives it will adhere to the policy of rotation and zoning of party and public elective offices. There are at least three permutations that contribute to the difficulty the party faces: One, that PDPs last president (2011-2015) was from the South and as such the presidency should be zoned to the North. Another is that President Jonathan, as the partys presidential candidate in 2011, created a break with zoning and third, that since Nigerians have endured eight years of a president from the North (regardless of party), PDPs presidential candidate should be from the South.

APC and PDP do not deserve our votes in 2023 and there are logical reasons why. However, it will be near impossible to shake them up and out with our votes, without massive concerted effort. This is not only because Nigeria has been evolving towards a two-party system (represented now by these two platforms) but in addition, there are deep subliminal and popular beliefs about not wasting votes on outliers

For onlookers, this situation that PDP is grappling with has been inevitable since the 2019 presidential election results were announced. This means PDP has had seven years to determine this question. However, instead of resolving the question of zoning early and definitively, to give its presidential candidate time enough to win the hearts and minds of Nigerians and convince sceptics who see no difference between the PDP and APC, we have, at the last count, at least 13 contenders  five from the North and eight from the South, with only one woman so far. A party that boasted, at the height of its reign, that it would stay in power for 60 years, should have learnt from the last two election cycles and worked hard to preempt this situation. The inability to be focused and think strategically about the internal workings of the party, indicates a lack of political will to tackle Nigerias challenges, as we have witnessed over 16 years of the PDP presidency. PDPs avoidance of their zoning question also signals that the ruling members have no sense of justice and equity and are prepared to ignore rules, even theirs, to get what they want; the same way they indulge themselves at the expense of the public, when it comes to managing public resources.

Finally, those who represent PDP have no sense of rectitude. During a week of ASUU strike, no-end-in-sight fuel scarcity and nationwide power outage, Governors Wike and Obaseki took the edge off our pain with distracting drama. The trade in words was a show that should induce shame but Nigerians, from impoverishment of the soul and the pocket, no longer think much of shame; it has no purchasing power and it is not required to capture and wield political power. Again, like the attempted coup within the APCs national executive team in the run up to the APC convention, the squabble between the two governors is about control of the party and how the PDP primaries will be determined. Nothing to do with us and the trials of Nigerians.

APC and PDP do not deserve our votes in 2023 and there are logical reasons why. However, it will be near impossible to shake them up and out with our votes, without massive concerted effort. This is not only because Nigeria has been evolving towards a two-party system (represented now by these two platforms) but in addition, there are deep subliminal and popular beliefs about not wasting votes on outliers and candidates that do not fit the profile of abusive use of power, and then there are those invested in strengthening narratives about the inevitability of the victory of the APC and PDP at the polls.

A lot of work is required but voting in candidates not from the two main parties is not impossible. The louder the voices telling us we have no choice, except those two, the more determined we should be to prove them wrong because there are enough ethical, competent Nigerians to fill all the elective and appointive positions in Nigeria  we need to keep repeating this until it sinks in and becomes our reality.

We are not doomed to a non-choice between these parties that are not even two sides of a coin but a cheat coin with the same sides. There are elements of what it can take to win from a non-mainstream party, with a review of Soludos win of the Anambra gubernatorial election last year  albeit through a party with some track record at the State and national levels. Emmanuel Macrons win in 2017 also gives us a study of what a combination of luck (acts of God or in our case the man-made incompetence of the APC administration and the history of PDPs governance, which when used strategically could be a tsunami of disadvantage), focused partnerships, consistent messaging and an energised electorate can achieve.

There are no examples of oppressive systems reforming themselves without a demand  how we vote in 2023 will signal our determination that we deserve and want better. If we vote for either party in 2023, we will be rewarding ineffectiveness and entrenching the sense of entitlement  unless and this is a big exception, the parties give us candidates who are a deviation from the norm.

A lot of work is required but voting in candidates not from the two main parties is not impossible. The louder the voices telling us we have no choice, except those two, the more determined we should be to prove them wrong because there are enough ethical, competent Nigerians to fill all the elective and appointive positions in Nigeria  we need to keep repeating this until it sinks in and becomes our reality.

Ayisha Osori, author of Love Does Not Win Elections, will be writing for the Nigeria Decides 2023 series every 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the month.
In my Fathers Parsonage takes one through the dusty roads of Ute and Owo in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to portray the Olupona ancestries. It takes back farther than the 1957 dateline advertised in the preface, apparently to avail readers of the pedigrees of the principal subject. Its renditions of the transition of the would-be priest to adulthood, his sojourn as headteacher at a primary school in Ondo, evoke a sweet fragrance from a past when things worked well in Nigeria.

St. Peters Church, Ile-Oluji was like the city on a hill, drawing all and sundry from every direction. It was where they took you at infancy to get sprinkled at the baptistery. The solitary water pillar stood at the main entrance of the church. You probably first heard about Jesus there, how he loved children like you and craved their company. In adolescence, you were there every Sunday until you overgrew your place on Christs lap and secretly envied the little boy in the Sunday school pictorial still perched on Christs lap, untouched by age.

There was orderliness in the church, and the solemnity was enthralling. The Sunday procession and its hallowed cast were the most beautiful, the empty cross and its sobre bearer, the choristers and their bright liveries. The clergies often came at the end, in studied silence, regal in their cassocks. Life shone brilliantly at St. Peters Church, Ile-Oluji, like the Vicars cassock.

The church defined life in its terms, and the church was about the only thing happening in town in the 1960s. It defined for you the ethereal, before you could even tell physical apart from ethereal. The church practically held proprietary over the schools in town, perching itself in the centre as if to erase any doubt about its suzerainty.

St. Peters Primary, the first school on its proprietary list, was located west to the church. St. Andrews Primary, its sequel, perched eastward. The crown jewel, Gboluji Grammar School, lay on vast acres to the south. The splendour of the Grammar School still testifies to a bygone era when churches faithfully served communities.

They brought people for burial at St. Peters cemetery in the fullness of time. Then the Vicar wore a sullen face on his black cassock. He would bend over in studied motion to pick a piece from a freshly dug earth and toss it down on the lowered casket as he intoned earth-to-earth. You knew the time was not as full for the dead one when a minor about your age also tossed the fresh earth into the casket, amid renewed wailings of the adults. Yet, to grasp the meaning of life and death, the poor little fellow often wouldnt know if to laugh or cry at the internment of the parent.

They demolished the old church and its simple parsonage several years ago, after erecting the new church building that is now a cathedral. I recall contemplating the casual manner we like to demolish our past. But the memories flooded back when Steinar Nja, my friend and work partner from the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, took me to see his village across the fjords in Stavanger in 2003. The church there told stories across many centuries about the community, and its rustic opulence brought back memories of the old St. Peters Church building at Ile-Oluji.

Memories of my old church flooded back again in 2019, when I visited John Bunyan Museum in Bedford, England. I had arrived before business hours and waited in the dreary weather to catch a glimpse of Bunyan and his 17th Century England. I climbed up the old pulpit from where the pious author of The Pilgrims Progress preached sermons some 300 years back and left wondering what happened to the other pulpit cast in similar moulds of solid woods at the old St. Peters Church in my hometown.

Jacob Kehinde (JK) Oluponas book, In my Fathers Parsonage, stirred the memories again but in a refreshingly different style. Venerable Michael Olupona, the books subject, was the authors father. The Venerable enjoyed a good reputation in Ile-Oluji, where he had his first stint as vicar at St. Peters Church.

The Vicars son, now a professor at Harvard University, hinted that the book is a catharsis, written to enable him heal when his father suddenly passed in 1983. The elder Olupona passed away that year shortly after the son attained a PhD at Boston University.

According to the author, the biographical prose, a 227-page affair, is to present a portrait of the priest and his wife, Mrs Henrietta Olupona, in the comfort and discomfort of various ages, where they lived as missionaries from 1957 to 1983. It indeed delivers on the promise. It tells about the priests life in the various vicarages. It also tells about life outside the perimeters of the vicarages at the periods. In addition, the author opened a personal memory vault in my childhood by illuminating some dimly lit paths.

In my Fathers Parsonage takes one through the dusty roads of Ute and Owo in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to portray the Olupona ancestries. It takes back farther than the 1957 dateline advertised in the preface, apparently to avail readers of the pedigrees of the principal subject. Its renditions of the transition of the would-be priest to adulthood, his sojourn as headteacher at a primary school in Ondo, evoke a sweet fragrance from a past when things worked well in Nigeria.

You will perceive the fragrant smell of that bygone era from the pages; on the circumstances that led the elder Olupona into pastoral work in the Anglican Communion, and on the political and social workings at Ile-Oluji, Igbara-Oke, Idanre, Gbongan, Ife and Ibadan, where Olupona served as vicar from 1957 to 1983.

The Vicars son has an intense memory, considering his clinical recollections of events from that past. You could discern that the author also had a wandering spirit as a child, that not even the high walls of his fathers parsonages, could cloister his inquisitive mind.

Pamela Stephenson cautioned that we shouldnt attempt to look for perfect objectivity in an autobiography, no matter the writer. The actress, also known as Lady Connolly, meant that all biographers walk on thin ice between history and hagiography  the former compels him to deal with facts, the latter tempts him to fawning adulations. I guess it is more difficult if you are telling the story of your parents.

JK Olupona impressively navigates the thin ice. Take his narration on Canon Oluponas 1957 posting to St. Peters Church Ile-Oluji, his first stint as Vicar, the author admits the hand of God, and the hands of men wrought the appointment. He sketched many instances of the young vicar sailing into stormy waters, how good counsels intervened for the priest still learning the ropes in church administration.

Venerable Michael Oluponas name still evokes deep affection in Ile-Oluji, 55 years after he had moved on from the church. It speaks of the vicars quality service to the church and the community.

In my Fathers Parsonage leaves some sour taste in the mouth at the denouement. The author rues the episcopal attitudes toward Venerable Olupona at the end of his sterling career. The younger Olupona wore the garb of a don and logically denounced the politics and episcopal horse-trading at the dusk of his fathers career. JK Olupona infers that the church and the world had somehow coalesced. So, you came out of the book understanding why Jesus wielded the cudgel at the synagogue in Jerusalem.

Wole Akinyosoye is a Member of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA).
The Kaduna State Government has faulted the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) report for the four quarters of 2021, which included the state among the 24 states that failed to attract any Foreign Direct Investment last year.

In a statement issued by the Executive Secretary of the Kaduna Investment Promotion Agency (KADIPA), Khalil Nur Khalil, on Tuesday, the government said the states capital importation for the year 2021 was not captured in the report.

Mr Khalil argued that the state attracted Zipline, a United States-based medical drone supply company, whose business address is in Lagos State but operates in Kaduna State.

In the report, the NBS said the value of capital importation into Nigeria dropped from $9.68 billion in 2020, to $6.7 billion in 2021.

According to the report, the 24 states which did not attract FDI include Adamawa, Bauchi, Bayelsa, Benue, Borno, Cross River, Ebonyi, Edo, Enugu, Gombe, Imo, Jigawa, Kaduna, Katsina, Kebbi, Kogi, Nasarawa, Niger, Ondo, Plateau, Sokoto, Taraba, Yobe and Zamfara.

But the Kaduna investment promotion official faulted the claim, saying we are not really supposed to be on that list, given that government attracted Zipline to the state, which is $1.5 million worth of investment.

On its website, Zipline described itself as an American medical product delivery company that is headquartered in South San Francisco, California, and which designs, manufactures, and operates delivery drones.

So, going by the NBS report, we are ahead of Akwa Ibom which had $0.74 million, Ekiti ($0.50 million), Kwara ($0.23) million and Abia ($0.01 million), while Rivers and Delta had a $1.0 million investment each in 2021, Mr Khalil said.

The Executive Secretary disclosed that Zipline will be operating in three sites when it rolls out fully, arguing that the sites will serve the entire health facilities in the three senatorial districts of Kaduna state.

According to him, Zipline, when operational, will minimize bottlenecks like bad roads, expiry of products due to overstocking, unavailability of medical commodities at health facilities during emergencies and products not getting to remote areas.
The House of Representatives has rejected a motion asking it to investigate the invasion of the Federal High Court, Uyo, Akwa-Ibom State by police officers.

The motion moved by Sergius Ogun (PDP, Edo) was rejected when it was put to voice vote on Tuesday.

The decision of the House to reject the motion may not be unconnected with the altercation between Mr Ogun and the deputy speaker, Idris Wase, who presided over the session.

Mr Wase had skipped the Mr Oguns motion on the order paper. He accused the lawmaker of noise-making while plenary was ongoing.

Mr Ogun had raised a point of order, protesting the skipping of his motion on the order paper. My motion is the next listed, Im here to take it. Mr Speaker, I know you have the power not to take it, Mr Ogun had said.

Responding to the protest, the deputy speaker said he skipped the motion because Mr Ogun was disturbing the House in presence of a delegation of the Ghanaian Parliament which was on a visit to observe its proceedings.

After the comment, Mr Ogun apologised to the deputy speaker.

However, the Chief Whip, Mohammed Monguno (APC, Borno) called for the sanctioning of Mr Ogun.

According to Mr Monguno, an apology is not enough, accusing his colleague of speaking anyhow to the presiding deputy speaker.

Mere sorry cannot suffice. We have to call him to order. We have to invoke disciplinary measures. This is an institution, not a jungle. He must be called to order for speaking anyhow to the Speaker, he said.

However, Mr Wase refused to accept the recommendation of the Whip, instead, he urged Mr Ogun to be cautious of his utterances.

Consequently, Mr Ogun was allowed to move his motion.

The motion

In the motion, Mr Ogun informed the House that armed men invaded the courtroom of Justice Toyin Adegoke of Federal High Court in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, to arrest a defendant.

According to him, the defendant, who was taken away by the invading police personnel is a police officer who was accused of trafficking in persons in case No. FHC/07C/2022 between the Federal Republic of Nigeria and Patience Victor Eyibo & Anor.

He stated that the police had invaded the court to protect their colleague accused of involving in trafficking.

Mr Ogun, therefore, prayed that the House should urge the Inspector General of Police, Usman Alkali, to produce the officer.

Also, he prayed the House to direct the House Committee on Police Affairs to investigate the invasion.

When the deputy speaker put the motion to question, it was unanimously rejected by members.
BEIRUT, April 5 (Xinhua) -- Germany on Tuesday signed a financial cooperation agreement with Lebanon to provide the latter with 50 million euros (54.5 million U.S. dollars) in aid, the National News Agency reported.

The agreement was signed by Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib and German Ambassador to Lebanon Andreas Kindl.

The aid will be spent on several projects on building schools, launching water and sanitation programs for communities hosting refugees, as well as adopting measures necessary to confront the COVID-19 pandemic in Lebanon.

Hit by years of political chaos and the pandemic, Lebanon has been suffering from an unprecedented financial crisis that has plunged over 74 percent of the population into poverty. 
An Ikeja Domestic Violence and Sexual Offences Court on Tuesday sentenced a man, Collins Okechukwu, to life imprisonment for raping and robbing a 25-year-old student (name withheld) at the University of Lagos (UNILAG).

Delivering judgement, Justice Abiola Soladoye, who described Mr Okechukwu as a pathological liar, held that the prosecution proved the charges of rape and robbery against him beyond reasonable doubt.

The judge sentenced Mr Okechukwu to life imprisonment for rape, and 21 years for robbery.

The judge, however, ordered that the two sentences should run concurrently.

She said, The testimony of the defendant portrayed him as a pathological liar in the sense that he claimed that the University of Lagos (UNILAG) Guest House was fully booked and the survivor was sex starved, which made them have sex on bare floor.

This is unbelievable and watery.

The defendant lured the survivor into the Admin Block, brought out a pistol, raped her and robbed her of her valuables thereafter.

The claim of the defendant to have met the survivor (UNILAG student) at the guest house and she agreed to have sex with him was consistently laced with irregularities and found unreliable.

The defendant is found guilty as charged, of the two offences, and thereby sentenced to life imprisonment in respect to rape and 21 years jail term for robbery.

The sentences shall run concurrently.

He should have his name entered in the Sex Offenders Register of the Lagos State Government.

Justice Sholadoye also cautioned female students in tertiary institutions against giving out their telephone numbers to strangers.

What manner of a woman is the victim herself? She should desist from giving out her numbers for unnecessary frolicking, the judge said.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that four witnesses testified at the trial and three exhibits tendered.

According to prosecution counsel, Peter Owolabani, the convict committed the crimes on Dec. 17 , 2017, at 9.00 p.m. behind the Faculty of Arts Building, UNILAG.

He said that the convict also robbed the survivor of her phones, money and a gold chain.

He also submitted that the survivor met the convict one year after the incident, invited him to her supposed birthday party and got him arrested.

(NAN)
The Lagos State government says it has shut down a hospital following a report of alleged incompetence in the death of a 28-year-old lady during childbirth.

The government disclosed this in a statement Tuesday through the Health Facility Monitoring and Accreditation Agency (HEFAMAA).

Akin Abayomi, Commissioner of Health, who posted the statement on his Twitter page, said the government temporarily sealed Medville Global Health Centre because of a lack of compliance with set medical standards.

Report

A Twitter user, Trimple Mchaty, had on Sunday shared how his pregnant wife died in the hospital on March 29.

He said his wife had been attending antenatal in their state of residence in Anambra before she went to Lagos to live with his elder sister because he was out of town.

She was undergoing antenatal in the (Lagos-based) hospital till on Sunday 28th March 2022. She did all the scans and tests required of her and everything was perfect, Mr Mchaty, an IT consultant, wrote.

On Sunday noon, 28th March she chatted me that water had dropped off her leg so she called the hospital to inform them.

They asked her to come over to the hospital. On getting there, they induce her to speed up labour.

The IT consultant said that after 10 hours of labour, his sister called him that his wife was weak and the doctor wanted to carry out a caesarean section on her.

He said he consented and around 2 a.m. they called him that she needed a blood transfusion.

Mind you, I was in Enugu while all this was happening.

Mr Mchaty said the hospital had no blood bank or ambulance in case of emergencies.

So I started looking for an Uber to take my sister to General Hospital, Isolo, to go get blood at midnight, he said.

I succeeded in getting about five pints of blood. Around 3 a.m., they called me saying that they wanted to cut off her womb and that she was bleeding. I was shocked because this is her first child and she is 28 yrs old.

Mr Mchaty said that he again received a call from the hospital that they needed more blood. So, around 3:30 a.m., his sister again went on a blood search.

He said that by morning he called the hospital to speak with his wife but he was asked to wait for 20 minutes for her to be dressed and taken to the ward.

Unrelenting, he said he called his sister, who told him that the consultant who carried out the operation was called back to open her again because of complications.

He said his 28-year-old wife died, but the baby survived.

I rushed down to Enugu Airport and boarded a flight down to Lagos, (on) getting to the hospital, I found my wifes lifeless body in one old-looking operation room, he said.

I was so heartbroken, they gave me an exorbitant bill to pay before I could carry her dead body, over 500k.

Right now, I took my son to another hospital. He is in the ICU now. We are doing different kinds of scans, tests, Xray and co. He is using oxygen at the moment.

The bills are excess, I am just hoping he can survive.

I need justice for my wife @followlasg @PoliceNG_lagos @FMHDSD.

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Shut down

HEFAMAAs secretary, Abiola Idowu, said in the statement that the agency deployed its officials to investigate the facility which is at Ago Palace Way, Okota.

She said they found out that the medical centre was not registered with HEFAMAA.

She described the operation of the facility as illegal, adding that the team also discovered that the hospital had inadequate personnel.

The Chairman, Dr Mrs Solanke Koya Esq., has ordered a full-scale investigation to uncover the facts of the death, she said.

Ms Idowu said the government sealed up the facility in furtherance of public protection pending the outcome of ongoing investigations.
Burgess joined Ferguson Partners in 2007 and has developed a global acumen, originally based in Ferguson Partners' London office, and then transitioning to oversee its New York City office before taking on responsibility for the U.S. search business and then, most recently, the global search business. In her current role as President, Burgess has been instrumental in positioning Ferguson Partners as the go-to firm for executive talent and management solutions. As a recognized leader in executive search, Burgess is also a staunch advocate for DE&I and was responsible for creating the inaugural diversity partnership in 2020 with Real Estate Executive Council (REEC) and continues to be an active participant with the association.

Clients can expect a seamless transition and continued industry-leading services. "Gemma's transition reflects the culmination of a well-planned multi-year succession planning project. She has built an excellent partnership with Jeremy Banoff, Vice Chairman, and is supported by a best-in-class global leadership team. During this period, Gemma has strongly demonstrated her ability to maintain the Ferguson Partners standard of excellence while implementing her vision to evolve the business. Her experience and impact across industries in addition to her broad, global background and perspective make her uniquely qualified for the role and absolutely the right leader to take Ferguson Partners into the future," said William J. Ferguson.

Senior Managing Director and Head of Europe Serena Althaus shared, "After working beside Gemma for more than 15 years, I can't think of a better person to lead Ferguson Partners to its next exciting chapter with a clear focus on DE&I and real assets." Robert Langer, Lead Independent Director added, "On behalf of the entire board, we are thrilled to welcome Gemma as the firm's new CEO and look forward to leveraging her extensive knowledge and value throughout the organization."

"I am incredibly excited for the future of our firm," said Burgess. "With confidence we will continue to grow our global platform and uphold the Ferguson Partners standard of excellence. I will continue to be hands-on with our clients who, as always, can expect our signature tailored, attentive approach to their unique needs."

Burgess' appointment comes as the firm plans an expansion of its corporate leadership team, with future announcements to follow.

About Ferguson Partners

Founded in 1989, Ferguson Partners has built a reputation as the premier firm dedicated to serving the talent management and organizational consulting needs of the real estate and related industries. With offices in Charlotte, Chicago, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, and Toronto, Ferguson Partners is unique in its global reach but executes its work with a boutique touch and highly specialized approach across four main business lines. The firm's website can be found at fergusonpartners.com .

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1781223/Ferguson_Partners_Gemma_Burgess_1.jpg

SOURCE Ferguson Partners
President Tsai Ing-Wen said in her speech that the Net-Zero 2050 target is not only a challenge for the world, but also for Taiwan. She stressed that despite a number of tough challenges, it behooves Taiwan to boost its net-zero transformation by way of a four-pronged approach: first, research into new energy sources such as hydrogen and forward-looking green energy must be undertaken to maintain the energy transition; second, industrial transformation from process optimization to the use of renewable energy must be accelerated to meet changing market conditions; third, a transition to low-carbon public buildings and net-zero emission transportation is a necessary lifestyle change that must be adopted; and fourth, fairness is a must for public engagement in society transformation.

The summit also invited global experts to present an ESG development roadmap to corporate leaders and investors. Key speakers included Robert N. Stavins, A. J. Meyer Professor of Energy & Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, who spoke about his insights into post-COP26 climate policies, and Todd Cort, co-director at Yale Center for Business and the Environment, who elaborated on the carbon trading market after COP26. The two speeches were delivered online.

From the standpoint of financial companies, Wing Fung Financial Group chairman Sih-Kuan Chen pointed out that Climate Action has emerged as the most widespread global consensus of all time, and that companies need to integrate four "imperatives" into their net-zero strategies: compliance, optimization, reinvention and leadership. Wing Fung is committed to realizing net-zero emission goals from operations by 2030 and from the whole asset portfolio by 2050.

Ying-Chou Chen, head of Sustainability Services Group, Deloitte & Touche, said that there are two ways to cope with climate change: on the one hand by operational procedures and/or production facilities are modified to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while, at the same time, energy efficiency is enhanced by developing new carbon reduction technologies, on the other hand, by taken precautionary measures to protect the enterprise from the impact of climate change in the future.

China Petrochemical Development Corporation (CPDC) chairman Ruey-Long Chen noted that in response to future industrial demand, the priority of the current existing green power supply should be to improve carbon output from the process side and upgrade existing equipment to reduce energy consumption. He further added that the amount of water vapor being used by the petrochemical industry is excessive, and that its use should be curtailed or even cut to zero.

Alex Araujo, fund manager of global equities at M&G Investment, mentioned that the influx of money into sustainability funds has led to an overvaluation of clean and renewable energy businesses, and, should the current boom falter, investors are likely to face huge losses.

Taiwan Depository & Clearing Corporation (TDCC) president Hsiu-Ming Lin pointed out that TDCC is the world's first IR platform to provide ESG ratings of individual and institutional investors, a measure that has become highly valued by foreign investors. The platform has become one of the region's key ESG data sources.

Taiwan Housing Group president Pei-Ye Peng said that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) act as the backbone of Taiwan's economy, and what they can bring to the table is something we need to think about. Taiwan Housing is now promoting a 10-year tree-planting initiative, as a way of demonstrating to employees that the company they work for is operating with a long-term perspective.

Pension Fund Association chairperson Professor Li-Ling Wang noted that the ESG investment market has continued to expand and that, post pandemic, investors have been paying more attention to ESG. Over 90% of large institutional investors and pension funds have increased their ESG investments, showing the importance of ESG in future investing decisions.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1777565/ESG.jpg

SOURCE Business Today Magazine
BERLIN, April 6 (Xinhua) -- German investigators were cracking down on suspected right-wing extremists in a countrywide operation against neo-Nazis, the Federal Public Prosecutor General said on Wednesday.

Four suspected members of a right-wing extremist criminal organization were arrested and a total of 50 suspects were searched on suspicion of right-wing extremist crimes, according to a statement by the office of the Public Prosecutor General.

The four arrested men, who are German nationals, were believed to be leaders of the right-wing extremist martial arts group "Knockout 51," according to the statement.

The group would "attract young, nationalistically minded men under the disguise of joint physical training, deliberately indoctrinate them with right-wing extremist ideas and train them for street fights," the statement said.

Further investigations were directed at alleged members of the right-wing extremist association "Combat 18 Germany," which was banned and dissolved in late 2020 because of its orientation against the constitutional order and cultural exchange.

According to the Public Prosecutor General, 21 individuals were suspected of having "secretly maintained the organizational cohesion of the association" after the legal ban of the group. 
Reimbursement for the MolecuLight procedure was granted by the Ministry of Health and Welfare of Korea, as per the notification number 259-858 . This was announced based on Reimbursement data from the Korea New Medical Technology - Stability and Effectiveness Evaluation.

MolecuLight is exclusively distributed in South Korea by KOVE, Inc., a company specializing in providing novel products that assist in the treatment of diabetes foot ulcers in Korea including medical devices that assist with the diagnosis and treatment of wounds. KOVE's team of clinical and technical support specialists have more than 30 years of experience in medical devices and wound care. KOVE also performs clinical research with many university hospitals in Korea.

The South Korean market for wound care is significant and can be understood through the pervasiveness of diabetes and diabetic foot ulcers. There are over 5 million Koreans with diabetes1, or 1 diabetic in every 30 adults. 25% of all diabetics also have a diabetic foot ulcer.

"The market for the MolecuLight device is significant in South Korea as there is a comprehensive and progressive health care system that quickly adopts new and clinically useful technologies", says JUNHYOUNG LEE, CEO of KOVE, Inc. "Because of the high national insurance coverage for medical procedures, Korean patients readily visit hospitals to treat ailments and physicians are motivated to treat and monitor wounds until they are fully healed. The MolecuLight technology provides real-time actionable information on wound bioburden and allows clinicians to make bedside decisions quickly. It will be well-received by the South Korean medical community. Significant demand for the MolecuLight device has been verified through market research conducted over the last 12 months as part of the registration and reimbursement process."

"We are most impressed with KOVE, Inc., with their very experienced and responsive team and with their close relationship with the wound care community in South Korea", says Anil Amlani, MolecuLight's CEO. "We believe that the speed with which the MolecuLight i:X received both registration and reimbursement shows the quality of our clinical evidence and the proven clinical outcomes that clinicians can achieve using the MolecuLight device. We are confident that South Korea will become a major market for MolecuLight".

MolecuLight's broad body of clinical evidence includes 55+ peer-reviewed publications, including over 1,400 patients under study, showing the significant benefit of the MolecuLight i:X to wound care clinicians in all care settings.

To request a quotation or a clinical demonstration of the MolecuLight i:X in South Korea, please email junhglee1211@gmail.com or call +82.55.384.2600.

References:

1Korea National Statistical Office

About MolecuLight Inc.

MolecuLight Inc. is a privately-owned medical imaging company that has developed and is commercializing its proprietary fluorescent imaging platform technology in multiple clinical markets. MolecuLight's suite of commercially released devices, including the MolecuLight i:X and DX fluorescence imaging systems and their accessories, provide point-of-care handheld imaging devices for the global wound care market for the real-time detection of wounds containing elevated bacterial burden (when used with clinical signs and symptoms) and for digital wound measurement. MolecuLight procedures performed in the United States can benefit from an available reimbursement pathway including two CPT codes for physician work to perform "fluorescence imaging for bacterial presence, location, and load" and facility payment for Hospital Outpatient Department (HOPD) and Ambulatory Surgical Center (ASC) settings through an Ambulatory Payment Classification (APC) assignment. The company is also commercializing its unique fluorescence imaging platform technology for other markets with globally relevant unmet needs including food safety, consumer cosmetics and other key industrial markets.

About KOVE, Inc.

KOVE, Inc. is a company specializing in the diagnosis and treatment of diabetic foot ulcers and wound-related medical devices. It has been conducting continuous clinical research and presentations with many university hospitals in Korea.

Download for Image:

https://moleculight.box.com/s/03xcwbw0lwd777yt8jyy50bl72w3cbv4

MolecuLight i: X being used by 2 wound care clinicians on 2 patients in a wound care centre to assess whether their patients' wounds have elevated bacterial burden.

MolecuLight being used by 2 wound care clinicians on 2 patients in a wound care centre to assess whether their patients' wounds have elevated bacterial burden. https://moleculight.box.com/s/jbbcbb3hx8pmtbykl2vqkp3q11r6065m

MolecuLight i:X also has the benefit of engaging patients in their own wound care.

For more information, contact: Rob Sandler JUNHYOUNG LEE Chief Marketing Officer CEO MolecuLight Inc. KOVE, Inc. T. +1.647.362.4684 Tel: 82.55.384.2600 rsandler@moleculight.com junhglee1211@gmail.com www.moleculight.com http://kovekorea.com/

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1780902/MolecuLight_MolecuLight_i_X__Receives_Regulatory_Clearance_and_R.jpg

SOURCE MolecuLight Inc.
The initiative is intended to encourage SMEs from local businesses to join the acceptance of contactless payments, through Tap On Phone technology, which is provided by the Viva Wallet POS app, thus allowing customers to pay easily, safely and hassle-free, even with international cards. With this innovative technology, merchants can transform any Android NFC-enabled smartphone, tablet or other device into a contactless card terminal, saving the costs associated with dedicated terminals, by simply downloading the application to the merchant's smartphone.

This digital transformation project kicks off with a campaign to promote and advertise the service, encouraging more than 1,000 local businesses, including restaurants, to join digital payments, improving the shopping experience of their customers, especially tourists, who are not always able to use their cards in traditional national card terminals.

This Viva Wallet initiative in Evora, with the support of Mastercard, aims to educate and raise awareness among merchants, as well as encourage the local population, students and tourists to use contactless payments.

The campaign started on April 4 and will be present in several digital media but also physical media such as billboards and large format, static and mobile, as well as displays in local shops and restaurants and social networks.

Pedro Saldanha, Country Manager Portugal at Viva Wallet, says that "the Tap On Phone solution, available to all merchants, brings a new paradigm to the payment landscape. The old and bulky payment card terminals, only focused on payments, will soon become obsolete. Viva Wallet is leading the digital transformation of SMEs with the latest technology available. Now, any business can benefit from the Viva Wallet POS app, and turn an Android phone (or tablet) with NFC into a card terminal. Our solution is not only highly innovative but can also be easily integrated with third party applications. And best of all: there are no monthly fees or limitations on the number of "card terminals" a merchant can have!".

Maria Antonia Saldanha, Country Manager at Mastercard, states that "It is the right time for us to support the digital transition of cities, giving more quality of life to its residents and visitors. Using a contactless card in daily routines is a good example. Mastercard, with Viva Wallet and local stakeholders, wants to make Evora a contactless city, by using a set of innovative services that we have implemented in several cities around the world. It is this global experience that we want to share with the city of Evora, with the people of Evora, with local commerce and businesses, and with all those who visit the city. With this project we are responding to the challenges of tourism and to the dynamization of the local economy, through scalable technological solutions, essential for the future of smart cities."

About Viva Wallet

Viva Wallet is the first European neo-bank, entirely cloud-based, with offices in 23 European countries. Created to change the way businesses pay and get paid, Viva Wallet offers businesses of any size the acceptance of 24 card payment methods, using technology for card present (CP) or card not present (CNP), along with commercial accounts with Portuguese IBAN and debit card issuance.

www.vivawallet.com

About Mastercard

Mastercard (NYSE: MA), www.mastercard.com, is a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to connect and drive an inclusive digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions secure, simple, smart and affordable. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions enable us to help individuals, financial institutions, governments and businesses achieve their greatest potential. Our Decency Quotient, or DQ, is a tool to drive our culture and everything we do inside and outside our company. With connections to more than 210 countries and territories, we are building a sustainable world that opens up Priceless possibilities for all. Mastercard is the only corporate donor to the Mastercard Impact Fund.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1781779/Viva_Wallet_1.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1781780/Viva_Wallet_2.jpg

SOURCE Viva Wallet
Kevin O'Leary, aka Mr. Wonderful, announces an exclusive partnership with digital marketing's secret weapon

BOISE, Idaho, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- C Squared Social proudly announces their exclusive partnership with Kevin O'Leary, the celebrated entrepreneur, author and television personality. The digital advertising startup caught O'Leary's attention after their impressive work boosted franchise sales for Wicked Good Cupcakes, a company O'Leary backed on his popular show Shark Tank.

Kevin O'Leary Partners with C Squared Social

"The demand for digital advertising is insatiable  targeted advertising even more. C Squared Social is a company I trust to get sharper focus and better yields, even with today's data and privacy challenges," says O'Leary.

"We couldn't be more excited to develop a partnership with Kevin O'Leary. At C Squared Social, we've always taken a results-driven, no-BS approach when it comes to our marketing services. We feel that Kevin represents a lot of those same qualities. In addition, we're both committed to helping small- and medium-sized businesses succeed. It's a perfect match!" says C Squared Social co-owner Cassidy Crail.

This news comes in the wake of many recent accomplishments of C Squared Social, including:

#612 inc 5000

#3 San Diego Fastest Growing

#264 GrowJo Fastest Growing Companies

Established in 2012, C Squared quickly became one of the top 50 fastest-growing marketing agencies in the nation. What started with a pair of ambitious brothers has evolved into a boundary-pushing agency with over 60 employees and offices in Carlsbad, CA and Boise, ID. C Squared recently announced a website development financing option, which furthers their mission to make top-tier design and marketing strategy available to businesses of all sizes.

"Stop wasting your money on bad marketing. Partner up with the specialists at C Squared Social. I have. They will measurably grow your business with results-driven, epic marketing. Check them out," says O'Leary.

C Squared Social creates ads, content and customized campaigns that help businesses reach targeted audiences across all of today's most popular online platforms. Their team of specialists, in-house graphic designers, copywriters and web developers delivers measurable, actionable, wonderful results.

To learn more about C Squared Social, visit www.csquaredsocial.com .

Media Contact:

C Squared Social

Tina Frost

Director of Internal Development

[email protected]

858-879-9248

SOURCE C Squared Social
OAKLAND, Calif., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Alameda Health System and Alameda County Public Health Department's BElovedBIRTH Black Centering program will celebrate Black Maternal Health Week with a local, public screening of On the Pulse of Life, a documentary by local filmmaker Jessica Jones. The film explores the Black birthing experience through the lens of the birth justice movement.

According to the California Department of Public Health, Black moms in the Bay Area are three to four times as likely to die from childbirth than their white counterparts, and Black babies are two to three times more likely to be born too soon or too small, or to die before their first birthday.

On the Pulse of Life dreams of a future where the first breaths of every baby are equally precious and protected. It features original footage of mothers and babies, women who are about to give birth or have just given birth, and an interview with BElovedBIRTH Program Director Jyesha Wren. The film premiered at the Smithsonian Arts + Industries Museum last Fall as a part of the Futures We Dream exhibit and will remain on display there through Fall 2022.

"I conceptualized this film when I was seven months pregnant," said Jones. "I wanted to work through my feelings about bringing a child into this world. Feelings of elation and joy, but also a kind of responsibility that I had never experienced before to keep this child of mine safe and create a space for her to flourish. I felt bombarded by the inequities Black mothers experience in the birthing space. I wanted to create a film that humanized this experience, talked about these issues, and celebrated Black mothers."

Jones produced On the Pulse of Life in collaboration with BElovedBIRTH Black Centering, a prenatal and postpartum care program by, for, and with Black people developed in partnership with Alameda Health System and the Alameda County Public Health Department. As a co-leader and program implementer of BElovedBIRTH, the Alameda County Public Health Department supports raising greater awareness of the prenatal and postpartum health program and Black maternal health.

"This film addresses the unacceptably high rates of black infant and maternal deaths. Our partnership with Alameda Health System will help to facilitate healthy births for Black families in Alameda County," said Daphina Melbourne, Perinatal Equity Initiative Coordinator, Alameda County Public Health Department.

"BElovedBIRTH Black Centering is redefining perinatal care in the Black community," said Wren. "We're all about providing a table for Black women and birthing people to put our heads together to address the crisis of racism-based birth disparities. Together, we're creating and implementing a model of perinatal care that can honor and celebrate Black women. Working with Jessica Jones has been a joy and privilege. We're grateful to have had this storytelling opportunity with such a talented filmmaker."

"In essence, BElovedBIRTH is a wraparound service for pregnant Black women and birthing people within an intentional Black-centric community context. So far, it has evolved as anticipatedreproductive-age Black women and birthing people electing and participating in a continuum of care rooted in a community-based birth justice framework," said Dana Cruz Santana, EmbraceHer Program Manager.

The documentary screening and dinner will take place on April 11, 2022, at 6:30 pm at 7th West in Oakland, a family and child-friendly venue with arcade games and outdoor space. It will be followed by a panel discussion with Jessica Jones, Jyesha Wren, and the three BElovedBIRTH moms featured in the film. The event will also feature a Birth Justice Coloring Campaign and a mini marketplace of Black mama makers.

This free event is open to the public. AHS and ACPHD employees are especially welcome. Attendees will include BElovedBIRTH community members and their families, birth workers and healthcare providers, advocates, policymakers, funders and artists. RSVP to attend by registering online.

BElovedBIRTH is the prenatal service period within Alameda County Public Health Department's EmbraceHer program. After the postpartum phase, participants are offered additional groups focused on early child development, social support, and trauma recovery. Learn more here.

Alameda County Health Care Services Agency (HCSA) is the local health jurisdiction (LHJ) for the County, holding responsibility for various state and federal health mandates. HCSA employs over 1,600 staff across four departments, each of which operates multiple divisions, units, and programs: Office of the Agency Director, Public Health, Behavioral Health, and Environmental Health. HCSA manages a broad range of services and programs that promote the health and wellbeing of Alameda County residents. The Agency centers equity in its work and is committed to reducing health disparities and improving outcomes for under-resourced communities.

ALAMEDA HEALTH SYSTEM (AHS) is a leading public health care provider and medical training institution recognized for its world-class patient and family-centered system of care. The heart of its mission is to promote wellness and eliminate disparities within the diverse communities of Alameda County, California. As a regional and national leader in health care excellence and safety, AHS upholds a steadfast commitment to providing services to all in need of health care. As one of Alameda County's 15 largest employers, AHS is a major economic power providing more than 4,500 jobs and contributing nearly $560 million annually in salaries, wages and benefits. AHS is also home to more than 1,100 physicians across the nine facilities within the health system.

Media Contact

Eleanor Ajala, Manager, Media and Communications

Alameda Health System

[email protected]

510-421-9222

SOURCE Alameda Health System
The LUNABOTICS competition is a NASA Artemis Student Challenge designed to educate college students in the NASA Systems Engineering Process, cultivate a high-tech workforce and provide NASA with innovative solutions for future Artemis mission challenges. Allied provides the CSU team with monetary support, components and access to engineering experts.

FORT COLLINS, Colo., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Allied Electronics & Automation is sponsoring Colorado State University's (CSU's) NASA Robotic Mining Competition (RMC) Team in the 2022 LUNABOTICS competition, providing the team with a monetary grant and access to critical components as well as expert advice from Allied's highly experienced engineering team. This year marks Allied's fifth consecutive year of support for the team's participation in the annual LUNABOTICS competition, a NASA Artemis Student Challenge designed to educate college students in the NASA Systems Engineering process, cultivate a workforce optimized for high-tech industries including terrestrial and extraterrestrial mining and construction and provide NASA with innovative prototype solutions to the many challenges inherent in future Artemis missions, which are intended to establish the first long-term presence on the moon and leverage the knowledge acquired there to send the first astronauts to Mars.

The LUNABOTICS competition is a comprehensive, multi-semester, university-level engineering exercise that allows students to gain practical experience in the full engineering lifecycle process spanning concept development to system closeout and supports NASA's Moon to Mars trajectory by requiring teams to participate in four events. The rules for the LUNABOTICS competition evolve annually to account for new NASA mission objectives and advances in commercially available technology, but each year participating teams use the NASA Systems Engineering process to design, construct, and compete a prototype robot devised to mine icy regolith beneath a layer of "lunar" sand in a simulated off-world mining mission. The other three events teams compete in include performing public outreach targeting underserved, underrepresented grade K  12 students in their communities and submitting a public outreach project report detailing their efforts, submitting a project management plan and a systems engineering paper and presenting their robot and their design philosophy at the competition.

"Allied is a proud proponent of STEM education and technological innovation and is honored to have the opportunity to foster tomorrow's high-tech workforce by contributing to technical and professional development programs," said Ken Bradley, President of Allied Electronics and Automation Americas. "Sponsoring CSU's NASA Robotic Mining Competition Team in the LUNABOTICS competition is an effective and exciting way for us to support the future leaders of high-technology industries, encourage sustainable innovation and enhance the intellectual and economic strength of the American electronics industry. We are very excited to see how this year's team employs our components, and we wish them the very best of luck in this year's on-site event."

CSU's NASA RMC Team hails from the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering and has spent more than four years building and refining a robotic vehicle designed to ruggedly withstand harsh moon mining operations and perform efficient and effective autonomous operations, including geolocating itself without the aid of GPS, avoiding obstacles, extracting material from the lunar surface, and transporting it to an official deposit point. Recent robotic refinements include improving the vehicle's mechanical systems, upgrading its sensors and autonomy software, and replacing its previous auger mining system with a system of buckets on a ladder belt that scoop material from the ground and deposit it into a storage container that actuates like a dump truck.

"Our NASA Project Management Plan placed third in October 2021, earning us a spot in the on-site mining competition, which we're all very excited about. The annual LUNABOTICS competition requires an immense amount of work in addition to significant expense, so we are incredibly grateful to Allied for its continued support of our team," said Carissa Vos, a senior student and project manager for CSU's NASA Robotic Mining Competition Team. "We completed the final robot design in CAD and began manufacturing all the parts this January. In March, we'll assemble our robot using the parts we've manufactured, as well as components including hinges, hooks and rubber edging provided by Allied Electronics, and imbue it with basic teleoperated functionality via remote control. On April 22, we'll deliver our systems engineering and outreach papers, presentation and demonstration during CSU's Engineering Days (E Days) event and in May we'll perform an autonomy overview and robot chassis testing prior to the on-site competition."

"The on-site mining competition will consist of two 15-minute runs in a simulated lunar environment with a start zone, obstacle region and excavation zone featuring gravel situated 30 centimeters below the sand to represent icy regolith. Our plan is to maximize our points by maximizing the amount of regolith we mine in the excavation area, efficiently navigating the arena's obstacles and effectively depositing our mined materials in the collection sieve," said Vos.

"The LUNABOTICS competition teaches students to employ the NASA Systems Engineering process, which is utilized in many high-tech industries, and challenges students to devise and develop solutions to the same problems that NASA engineers are actively working on, which is especially empowering since NASA uses this competition to gather and evaluate design and operational data for future robotic excavators and builders and identify clever solutions to the many challenges inherent in future Artemis missions. But advances in off-world mining and construction also offer new possibilities for the same activities here on Earth. So, the skills students develop by participating in the LUNABOTICS competition over a series of semesters directly contribute to their professional development and career opportunities," said Dr. Jianguo Zhao, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Technical Advisor for the NASA RMC Team. "Allied's generous monetary grant and donation of both components and expertise is key to providing our students with access to this unique educational and professional development opportunity, and all of us in the department and on the team are grateful for Allied's continued support."

This year's LUNABOTICS Artemis Student Challenge Robotic Mining Competition will take place at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Cape Canaveral, Florida, May 2227. Teams will be split into two groups that will each have three days to compete. The competition will culminate in two on-site mining runs and awards will be conferred for excellence demonstrated throughout the competition. Teams are competing to win the Phase I Design It Challenge, Efficient Use of Communications Power Award, Judges' Innovation Award, six Caterpillar Autonomy Awards, three Systems Engineering Paper Awards, a Systems Engineering Leaps and Bounds Award, three Presentation and Demonstration Awards, three Outreach Project Report Awards, three Robotic On-Site Mining Awards, and the Joe Kosmo Award for Excellence. Prizes are awarded in the form of scholarships ranging from $250 to $5,000.

About Allied Electronics & Automation

We are a part of Electrocomponents plc, an FTSE 100 global leader in omni-channel distribution of products and services for industrial equipment and operations that also includes the RS Components, RS PRO, OKdo, DesignSpark, IESA, Synovos, Needlers and Liscombe brands. With sales offices across the Americas, a focus on digital customer experience and more than 3.5 million parts available for purchase online, engineers, designers, maintainers and purchasers trust Allied to provide a wide range of solutions across the entire product lifecycle. Connect with us at www.alliedelec.com or via social media on Facebook , Twitter , and LinkedIn .

About CSU's Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering

The Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering trains students to engage the global environmental challenges of the day through research, education, innovation and outreach. Among its many accolades as an ABET-accredited institution are a top-ranked graduate program in Atmospheric Science and cutting-edge research that provides students hands-on learning in chemical, civil, electrical, mechanical and biomedical engineering. Visit engr.colostate.edu to learn more.

Image Download:

https://bit.ly/3BJEkQ3

Media Inquiries:

Karen Gavenda

Allied Electronics & Automation

[email protected]

SOURCE Allied Electronics & Automation
KANSAS CITY, Mo., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- To better serve investors seeking the possibility of greater capital appreciation inherent in small cap stocks but with an income mandate, $230 billion* global asset manager American Century Investments announces the launch of American Century Small Cap Dividend Fund (AMAEX).

"We're excited to add Small Cap Dividend Fund to our lineup because it's a way to offer clients the experience of our American Century Global Value Equity team and a history of small cap income investing, but in a mutual fund," said American Century Chief Investment Officer Victor Zhang. "The U.S. Small Cap Income strategy launched in Oct. 2017, and we are pleased to expand this investment opportunity to more clients. Helping investors and responding to their needs is what drives us, so we are constantly thinking about how we can better serve them."

The fund, co-managed by Jeff John, CFA and Ryan Cope, CFA, invests primarily in U.S. smaller cap companies that the team feels are attractively valued and offer securities paying either a dividend or income. The strategy seeks to invest in 65-85 companies with strong balance sheets, quality management and sustainable competitive advantages.

The investment team believes the use of non-common equities** enhances yield and lowers volatility.

John and Cope also manage the American Century Small Cap Value Fund (ASVIX).

Following is information on share classes and expenses:

Share class Investor I A R R6 G Expense ratio 1.09% 0.89% 1.09% 1.09% 0.74% 0.00% Ticker AMAEX AMAFX AMAHX AMAJX AMAKX AMALX

"We believe this fund launch is timely, given our clients' evolving desire for income-producing investment options," Zhang said.

American Century's value investment lineup began in 1993 with the launch of American Century Value Fund (TWVLX). Today, the firm's value discipline comprised $54.7 billion in assets under supervision as of 12/31/21.

About American Century Investments

American Century Investments is a leading global asset manager focused on delivering investment results and building long-term client relationships while supporting breakthrough medical research. Founded in 1958, American Century Investments' 1,400 employees serve financial professionals, institutions, corporations and individual investors from offices in New York; London; Frankfurt; Hong Kong; Sydney; Los Angeles; Santa Clara, Calif.; and Kansas City, Mo. Jonathan S. Thomas is president and chief executive officer, and Victor Zhang serves as chief investment officer. Delivering investment results to clients enables American Century Investments to distribute over 40 percent of its dividends to the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, a 500-person, non-profit basic biomedical research organization. The Institute owns more than 40 percent of American Century Investments and has received dividend payments of $1.8 billion since 2000. For more information about American Century Investments, visit www.americancentury.com.

*Assets under supervision as of 3/21/22

You should consider the funds' investment objectives, risks, and charges and expenses carefully before you invest. The funds' prospectus or summary prospectus which can be obtained at americancentury.com, contains this and other information about the fund and should be read carefully before investing.

If the stocks purchased by the fund do not continue dividend payments, the value of the fund's shares may decline, even if stock prices generally are rising.

**Non-common equities are preferred stocks and convertible securities related to the company being purchased.



Historically, small cap stocks have been more volatile than the stock of larger, more-established companies. Smaller companies may have limited resources, product lines and markets, and their securities may trade less frequently and in more limited volumes than the securities of larger companies.

American Century Investment Services, Inc., Distributor

2022 American Century Proprietary Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.

Contact:

Laura Kouri

(816) 516-7729

SOURCE American Century Investments
TEL AVIV, Israel, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- A plane filled with Ukrainian Jewish refugees  sponsored by American Jewish Committee (AJC) and organized by Jewish Agency for Israel  has arrived in Israel from Budapest, Hungary.

"For Jews facing uncertain safety in their homes, Israel is a lifeline, a sanctuary, and a haven," said AJC CEO David Harris. "Whether they are still living in Ukraine or have fled the violent Russian invasion to neighboring countries, these Jews know they have a home in the State of Israel, where they can build their lives anew because of the warm welcome they receive."

AJC is the only advocacy organization to have sponsored two Jewish Agency for Israel flights for Ukrainian Jews to Israel, the earlier one originating in Warsaw, Poland.

Accompanying the 141 Ukrainian Jews on board were Curtis Lane, AJC Board of Trustees, New York; and Aldona Zawada and Barnabas Turai, staff members of AJC Central Europe. AJC Jerusalem Director Avital Leibovich was on hand at Ben Gurion Airport to greet the newest Ukrainian immigrants to Israel.

Funds for the AJC-chartered plane came from AJC's emergency #StandWithUkraine Fund. AJC has raised more than $2.1 million to date for organizations providing direct relief to Ukrainian refugees and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine. Twelve organizations have so far received #StandWithUrkaine grants. Additional grants will be announced soon.

SOURCE American Jewish Committee
In its second year, the program will continue to provide the tools and resources for up-and-coming Black female-identifying entrepreneurs with a chance to win $100,000

SKILLMAN, N.J., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Aveeno brand has announced its second year of the Aveeno Skin Health Startup Accelerator Pitch Competition in collaboration with ESSENCE.1 Through this program, Aveeno recognizes the power of Black female-identifying entrepreneurs in offering new solutions for all skin and hair types. Dedicated to helping create a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable skincare industry, the program's website provides Black female-identifying business owners with the education and resources to help grow their businesses.

Aveeno is inviting up-and-coming Black female-identifying entrepreneurs with a product, brand, or technology that meets the skin or hair care needs of Black consumers to pitch themselves and their business. This year's Skin Health Startup Accelerator winner will receive $100,000 to help their business and a trip to ESSENCE Fest, a high visibility forum where the winners will be recognized. The award will also include hands-on business guidance and mentorship from the best and brightest thought-leaders in everything from package design, marketing, accounting, and more.

In 2021, Aveeno awarded the Grand Prize to the Founder of Alodia Hair Care, Dr. Isfahan Chambers-Harris, and Runner-Up Prize to the Founder of Look Good Live Well, Ariane Turner. Both women received funding to grow their businesses, ongoing mentorship, and a feature in ShopEssence  ESSENCE's e-commerce portal. These two beauty entrepreneurs have applied the resources offered by the competition leading Dr. Isfahan Chambers-Harris Founder of Alodia Hair Care to have her biggest year ever, doubling revenue year-over-year. Ariane Turner Founder of Look Good Live Well used the resources to support the ecosystem of Black-women owned businesses by investing in a gentle rebrand. This allowed Ariane to dig deeper into her customer psychographics to better connect with her customers. She was also able to use the funds to begin the process of creating a proprietary blend of ingredients, uniquely designed to address the specific needs of melanin-rich skin.

"As a brand that started from humble beginnings, like many others before us, we feel an innate responsibility to pay forward the support and guidance we received along the way to these inspiring Black women entrepreneurs who are working so hard to break into the industry," says Steve Reis, Senior Brand Manager of Aveeno, Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc. "Dr. Isfahan Chambers-Harris and Ariane Turner are savvy leaders with a clear vision for the type of change they want to drive, and we're humbled to be helping them pursue their ambitions. We're fortunate that ESSENCE shares this vision with us and have high hopes for year two of the Skin Health Startup Accelerator program's enduring commitment to creating equitable opportunities in the skincare industry."

To enter, follow the steps by submitting directly on the entry page:

Hit the ENTER NOW button and fill out the form. Entries close at 11:59 PM EST on April 30, 2022. Tell us your WHY. Create a 1-2-minute video introducing yourself, your business, and WHY you got started. Explain how natural ingredients play a key role in your product(s) and your business. Lean into modern video storytelling and provide a vertical video if you'd prefer. Upload your video, review required information, and submit!

"ESSENCE is the place 31 million Black women unapologetically call home, 'in the skin they are in.' Another year of collaboration with Aveeno on the Skin Health Startup Accelerator Pitch Competition is demonstration of the equitable attention necessary to service Black skin health," said ESSENCE CEO, Caroline Wanga. "At ESSENCE, we believe that economic inclusion is a human right. We are committed to ensuring that we build Black entrepreneurial growth and generational wealth through supporting Black businesses with purpose, access, capital, and expertise through our New Voices Fund and Foundation, in addition to our comprehensive portfolio of programs and products. I am cheerfully anticipating how this continued partnership will elevate the next generation of Black-owned skin health enterprises."

Media Contact:

Holly Derrick

Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health

[email protected]

Kristin Adomaitis

Golin

[email protected]

About Aveeno: For the past 70 years, dermatologist-recommended Aveeno has unlocked the power of science and nature for healthy, beautiful skin. Aveeno is committed to developing breakthrough product formulations with new and existing natural ingredients, many of which deliver clinically proven results. The Aveeno Brand offers products for face, body, baby, hair, and sun protection. For more information about the Aveeno Brand and its product offerings, visit aveeno.com or follow us on Facebook at Facebook.com/Aveeno or Instagram at Instagram.com/AveenoUS.

1ESSENCE is a paid media partner for the Aveeno Skin Health Startup Accelerator.

Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc. 2022

SOURCE Aveeno
SAN FRANCISCO, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Aventi Group, LLC, Silicon Valley's premier on-demand product marketing agency, is pleased to announce the addition of Will Scott as an Aventi partner.

Will brings a wealth of experience in B2B technology marketing for companies of all sizes and offerings, making him a valuable new asset to the team at Aventi.

Jeff Thompson, President and Co-founder of Aventi Group, says, "We are excited to have Will join as Aventi partner because he brings excellent credentials as a former CMO and senior leader in blue chip tech firms. Will has an outstanding ability to map business outcomes and marketing strategy to granular, actionable execution plans. Will's strategic vision and skills make a powerful combination with the amazing people and resources we have here at Aventi."

A seasoned executive with 25 years of international experience, Will has led B2B technology marketing and product management teams across hardware, software, services, and SaaS companies. A native of the UK, Will now resides in Austin, Texas, where he ran his own boutique B2B marketing consulting business for nearly ten years. He is a program leader at Kellogg School of Management in their executive Digital Marketing and Product Strategy programs. Prior to becoming a consultant, Will held senior positions with Cisco, Navisite, and Capgemini along with a range of full-time and fractional CMO positions.

Will is looking forward to bringing this expertise to new clients with Aventi Group. He says, "One of the reasons I joined Aventi was that I was genuinely impressed with the quality of the people. They have a clear selectiveness about the people they pick to work with, and I have never seen such a group of high caliber marketing professionals brought together in one organization, spanning all the skill sets needed for modern product marketing while maintaining the highest of standards. It's a great honor to have them ask me to join as a partner."

About Aventi Group, LLC

Aventi Group is an on-demand product marketing agency dedicated to bringing world-class go-to-market execution talent to high-tech B2B clients. We have an extensive team of product marketing professionals  giving our clients fast access to an on-demand, scalable team with broad domain expertise. Our experts have run high performance teams at every level, in every category  from startups to mid-sized firms and large enterprises. Clients include SAP, Adobe, HPE, Malwarebytes, ServiceNow, Okta, Palo Alto Networks and Zendesk. Founded in 2008, Aventi Group is based in Silicon Valley, California. Visit www.aventigroup.com and follow us on LinkedIn .

For more information, send a message or call 415-890-5434.

SOURCE Aventi Group
"The Saucery by Rao's Homemade transports guests to an Italian marketplace through an immersive experience that celebrates quality ingredients, authentic Italian heritage and the delicious flavors that set our products apart," said Risa Cretella, Executive Vice President, Group General Manager for Rao's Homemade. "Much like a winery, The Saucery by Rao's Homemade will honor the ingredients and process of creating a perfectly balanced, delicious pasta sauce, and we hope consumers leave The Saucery by Rao's Homemade with more knowledge and even more love for our brand."

To celebrate the opening of its first pop-up marketplace, Rao's Homemade partnered again with brand-fan, actress and foodie Busy Philipps to develop an exclusive "Saucery" recipe. Consumers can learn more about the inspiration for the recipe and purchase ingredients at The Saucery by Rao's Homemade.

"Rao's Homemade is my go-to Italian sauce when I'm cooking at home, and with the launch of The Saucery by Rao's Homemade, everyone will get a behind-the-scenes look at the fresh ingredients that make the brand so beloved," said Busy Philipps. "This is the second time the brand and I have come together for a delicious partnership, and I can't wait for everyone to visit the pop-up and try out all of the amazing products the brand has to offer."

In addition to products from the full Rao's Homemade portfolio, which will be available for 15% off their original price, guests will have the opportunity to purchase items from the Rao's Homemade Limited Reserve collection, an exclusive line made using only the finest ultra-premium Italian ingredients, with offerings such as White Truffle Marinara, Ligurian Olive Oil, and more. Guests can also purchase unique, luxury merchandise such as rose gold "Saucy" jewelry and rhinestone-encrusted sauce jars that are only available for purchase at The Saucery by Rao's Homemade.

Those not based in New York City will also have the chance to explore The Saucery by Rao's Homemade through either the virtual Saucery or by entering Rao's Homemade's special giveaway. Rao's Homemade is giving away the chance to win a trip for two to New York City to visit The Saucery by Rao's Homemade in person. Simply enter at https://www.raos.com/pages/saucery-nyc and Rao's Homemade will provide round-trip airfare, a two-night stay at a hotel, a $600 shopping spree at the pop-up and much more! For those interested in exploring virtually, Rao's Homemade created a fully rendered virtual store with a 360-degree view of the pop-up store. Starting on April 20, consumers can visit https://experience.raos.com/virtual-saucery/ to digitally travel through the virtual store with the ability to experience the NYC pop-up and purchase Rao's Homemade products directly!

The Saucery By Rao's Homemade will donate 100% of all proceeds to Jersey Cares , a local nonprofit and longtime partner of Rao's Homemade, that is dedicated to recognizing community-identified needs and leading change by organizing various events, collection drives, and other volunteer opportunities.

"Rao's Homemade has been an incredible partner to Jersey Cares, starting with the #Sauce4Cause program in 2020," said Michelle Dee, Chief Operating Officer at Jersey Cares. "We are thrilled to continue our partnership on an even larger scale with the opening of The Saucery by Rao's Homemade."

Starting today, people can reserve their spot to visit The Saucery by Rao's Homemade located in the Soho neighborhood of New York City at 579 Broadway. To reserve your spot, visit https://thesaucerybyraoshomemade.rsvpify.com/ . Admission is free for all, but guests must sign up for a timeslot ahead of time.

About Rao's Homemade

Rao's Homemade offers authentic sauces made with whole Italian tomatoes and other Italian specialty foods, including premium frozen entrees, slow-simmered soups and bronze die cut pastas. Each product is made with simplicity in mind, using high-quality ingredients. Find out more at www.raos.com.

About Sovos Brands

Sovos Brands is a food company with a mission to acquire, build and grow a portfolio of one-of-a-kind brands that bring today's consumers delicious food for joyful living. Sovos Brands invests in brands that have exciting growth potential, combining industry expertise with fresh thinking to bring its products into more homes across America. The brands in its portfolio include Rao's Homemade, a line of premium pasta sauces, frozen entrees, soups, and pasta; noosa, a producer of thick, velvety whole milk yoghurt; Birch Benders, a fast-growing producer of delicious, better-for-you pancake and waffle mixes, toaster waffles, and pancake and baking cups; and Michael Angelo's, a leading producer of authentic frozen Italian entrees.

SOVOS, RAO'S, RAO'S HOMEMADE, NOOSA, BIRCH BENDERS and MICHAEL ANGELO'S are trademarks of Sovos Brands. Find out more about Sovos Brands at www.sovosbrands.com , Rao's Homemade at www.raos.com , noosa at www.noosayoghurt.com, Birch Benders at www.birchbenders.com , and Michael Angelo's at www.michaelangelos.com .

Follow us:

Instagram: @raoshomemade

Twitter: @raoshomemade

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/raoshomemade/

For Media Inquiries:

Claire Hayes

[email protected]

SOURCE Sovos Brands
WASHINGTON, April 5 (Xinhua) -- An "aggressive fox" was captured on Capitol Hill on Tuesday after biting at least a U.S. congressman and a reporter.

"We have received several reports of aggressive fox encounters on or near the grounds of the U.S. Capitol," the Capitol Police tweeted on Tuesday afternoon.

"For your safety, please do not approach any foxes," the tweet warned. "Animal Control Officers are working to trap and relocate any foxes they find."

Hours later, the police tweeted four pictures of a detained red fox.

U.S. Congressman Ami Bera of California was reportedly nipped on the leg by a fox on his walk into the office Monday.

"What does the fox say? Last night, I found out," Bera joked in a tweet.

"Joking aside, animal bites are extremely serious," he wrote Tuesday afternoon. "In the case of an encounter, please speak with a physician immediately."

A spokesperson for Bera said the lawmaker went to Walter Reed Hospital on Monday night where he received shots for rabies and tetanus as well as immunoglobulins, "out of an abundance of caution."

Politico reporter Ximena Bustillo also revealed that she had been bitten.

"That feel when you get bit by a fox leaving Capitol cause that's of course something I expect in THE MIDDLE OF DC," Bustillo tweeted on Tuesday afternoon.

Senate Minority Leader and Republican Mitch McConnell was asked during a press conference if he'd seen the fox.

Red foxes are not uncommon in Washington, D.C., whose Rock Creek Park is home to a number of mammals.

There are also numerous fox den sites on the National Mall but their locations may change from year to year, according to the National Parks Service.

Red foxes live throughout the continental United States, though the foxes on the National Mall may spend their entire lives here, the agency noted. 
- Developed with National Urban League and UNCF, Scholarship Helps Black Students Pursue Food Industry Careers -

CHICAGO, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Mars Food's BEN'S ORIGINAL brand has opened the application site for its U.S. SEAT AT THE TABLE Fund scholarship. Developed in partnership with the National Urban League and UNCF (United Negro College Fund), the scholarship supports Black students who aspire to build careers in food-related industries get education and mentorship opportunities they deserve.

"We're thrilled to offer the scholarship for the second year as we continue to work towards our overarching purpose to create opportunities that offer everyone a seat at the table," said Mars Food North America President, Denis Yarotskiy. "This year, we are hoping to award at least 20 students with scholarships to help them pursue their dreams of working in food-related industries."

Last year, the brand awarded the inaugural SEAT AT THE TABLE Fund scholarships to eight recipients from six states, all enrolled in four-year university programs, including Alabama Agriculture and Mechanical University, Florida Agriculture and Mechanical University, Johnson & Wales, Howard University and North Carolina Agriculture and Technical State University. Their areas of study span the spectrum of the food ecosystem: food science, baking and pastry arts, nutrition and wellness, culinary arts and animal sciences and agriculture.

"Last year's scholarship recipients are truly remarkable candidates and students," said Marc H. Morial, National Urban League President and CEO. "We encourage anyone who qualifies to apply for the U.S. SEAT AT THE TABLE Fund scholarship, as together with BEN'S ORIGINAL, we want to positively affect the pathway to employment of Black people within the food industry."

The U.S. SEAT AT THE TABLE Fund scholarship is open to Black high school seniors, Black college students, and Black adults interested in certifications in the food industry. The renewable, need-based scholarship covers education-related expenses up to $25,000 per scholarship, per year, towards the completion of either a food science or culinary arts certificate, associate's or bachelor's degree. Interested applicants can apply at https://scholarships.uncf.org/ToProgram/Seatatthetable until May 26, 2022.

"We're excited to continue our important work with BEN'S ORIGINAL and the National Urban League," said Maurice E. Jenkins, Jr., UNCF's Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer. "It is important we continue to bridge the funding and knowledge gap for Black students interested in food-related careers. The commitments linked with the SEAT AT THE TABLE Fund scholarship set an important precedent for impacting students' lives and bettering the food industry across the United States."

This year will mark the second of a five-year, $2 million commitment from BEN'S ORIGINAL as part of its mission to create opportunities that offer everyone a seat at the table.

Later this year, the SEAT AT THE TABLE Fund scholarship will expand into Canada where BEN'S ORIGINAL brand will provide $200,000 of funding over two years to students who identify as Black, Indigenous or Persons of Colour, to help them successfully complete their culinary education. The brand is partnering with four of the nation's top culinary programs  Vancouver Community College (BC), Humber College (ON), Centennial College (ON) and Institut de tourisme et d'hotellerie du Quebec (QC)  who will administer the awards directly. The application process will open this summer for the September 2022 semester  details will be announced later this spring.

For additional information about Mars Food's BEN'S ORIGINAL efforts in supporting education  including those in Greenville, MS, where the brand has been produced for 43 years  please visit bensoriginal.com.

About Mars Food

Mars Food is a fast-growing mealtime food business, making tastier, healthier, easier meals that bring the world to the dinner table. With North American headquarters in Chicago, Ill. and global headquarters in London, Mars Food US's portfolio of leading brands includes BEN'S ORIGINAL, SEEDS OF CHANGE, and TASTY BITE. Our purpose Better Food Today. A Better World Tomorrow. drives our business to be a leader in health and wellbeing and sustainability. Mars Food is a segment of Mars, Incorporated. For more information about the BEN'S ORIGINAL Brand and its purpose initiatives, visit bensoriginal.com/ or mars.com/.

Contact: Sara Schulte

Mars Food

(312) 489-9880

[email protected]

SOURCE Mars, Incorporated
This acquisition places Brook + Whittle at the forefront of digital transformation in the label industry. Tweet this

"We are excited to accelerate our growth in joining the Brook + Whittle team," said Andy Johnson, President of the Cenveo Custom Labels Group. "Their coast-to-coast platform and broad portfolio of capabilities will bring additional value to our client base and my team, and I look forward to bringing our expertise, industry-leading turnaround times, and outstanding product quality to the Brook + Whittle business."

Robert G. Burton, Jr., CEO of Cenveo said, "First and foremost I would like to thank our remarkable employees for their commitment and excellence. We are proud of the business we have built and are pleased the Cenveo Custom Labels Group will be joining the team at Brook + Whittle. This transaction delivers great value to our shareholders and demonstrates the success of our strategic plan. Going forward, Cenveo is in an advantageous position as we look forward to our continued standing as North America's leading envelope manufacturer."

David Golde, Managing Director at Genstar, said, "Cenveo's Custom Labels Group is a fantastic business that fits squarely into Genstar and Brook + Whittle's thesis of expanding the capabilities of Brook + Whittle to drive increased value for its customers. Genstar is excited to continue supporting Brook + Whittle's impressive growth through meaningful internal investments, as well as continued M&A to broaden and strengthen the company's portfolio of products and services."

Credit Suisse served as financial advisor to Cenveo on the transaction. AlixPartners acted as carve-out and operational advisor to Cenveo. Credit Suisse is providing committed financing in support of the transaction. Wells Fargo Securities and O'Melveny & Myers advised Brook + Whittle and Genstar.

The transaction is expected to close in Q2 2022.

About Brook + Whittle

Brook + Whittle is a leading North American manufacturer of premium prime label solutions with highly differentiated capabilities, entrusted by some of the most well-known brands. The company provides pressure-sensitive labels, shrink sleeves and flexible packaging, with a focus on sustainable solutions, complex decoration, and digital printing. With a heritage rooted in product development and comprehensive in-house manufacturing, the company draws on its wide variety of specialized printing expertise, including flexographic, rotogravure, and digital. Brook + Whittle operates nine production facilities across the US. To learn more about Brook + Whittle, visit www.brookandwhittle.com

About Genstar Capital

Genstar Capital (www.gencap.com) is a leading private equity firm that has been actively investing in high quality companies for over 30 years. Based in San Francisco, Genstar works in partnership with its management teams and its network of strategic advisors to transform its portfolio companies into industry-leading businesses. Genstar currently has approximately $35 billion of assets under management and targets investments focused on targeted segments of the financial services, industrials, healthcare, and software industries.

About Cenveo

Cenveo is a leading North American manufacturer of envelopes and custom labels with over 100 years of experience. Headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, Cenveo's team of more than 2,900 employees is focused on delivering quality products and service to some of the world's most recognized brands. Cenveo operates 20 facilities nationwide with a commitment to producing world-class products that foster a more sustainable future. For more information, please visit us at www.cenveo.com

Contacts

Brook + Whittle:

Daryl Northcott

[email protected]

Genstar Capital :

Chris Tofalli

Chris Tofalli Public Relations

914-834-4334

Cenveo:

Cenveo Communications

[email protected]

(203) 595-3660

SOURCE Brook + Whittle
In the newly released blueprint, McLean & Company's approach guides HR through developing a compensation philosophy that supports organizational goals and is relevant to the operating environment. The blueprint is intended for HR leaders to explore internal and external factors influencing compensation and build the compensation philosophy.

McLean & Company outlines that a compensation philosophy provides decision makers with guidance to ensure that compensation practices are consistent and aligned across the organization. To ensure consistency, the compensation philosophy needs to be driven by the organization's strategy and support the achievement of strategic objectives.

Employee compensation often comprises the majority of an organization's ongoing operating expenses. However, few companies have plans in place to sustainably direct and control this expenditure. Due to a missing or outdated compensation philosophy, many experience an inconsistent application of compensation programs due to a missing or outdated compensation philosophy. The result is internal and external inequities that can easily become organizational issues, such as:

Competing organizations in the labor market are offering more attractive compensation packages.

Employees are paid differently for the same job, and there is no clear rationale or justification.

Turnover that is too low, which can lead to stale ideas or the retention of employees with a poor organizational fit.

Additionally, the right compensation philosophy will also outline the organization's target market position and its total target compensation, which will drive the selection of base and variable pay for each employee segment.

According to McLean and Company, pay inequity is the basis for most compensation-related discrimination claims. A well-designed compensation philosophy clearly articulates the organization's high-level approach to paying for each of its employee segments, including its target competitive position. As a result, it is good practice to evaluate the internal equity of compensation practices at a minimum every year.

To see the full blueprint, download McLean & Company's Craft a Compensation Philosophy research.

To learn more about McLean & Company and to download all the latest research, visit hr.mcleanco.com and connect via LinkedIn and Twitter.

Media professionals are encouraged to register for McLean & Company's Media Insiders program for more research and insights. This complimentary program provides unrestricted, on-demand access to HR, IT, and software industry content and the ability to speak with subject-matter experts from a group of more than 200 research analysts and thought leaders. To register for access, contact [email protected].

About McLean & Company

Through data-driven insights and proven best-practice methodologies, McLean & Company offers comprehensive resources and full-service assessments, action plans, and training to position organizations to meet today's needs and prepare for the future.

McLean & Company is a division of Info-Tech Research Group.

SOURCE McLean & Company
The Hessjgruva project provides Capella with a potential near-term development asset which complements the Company's ongoing exploration activities at the adjacent Kjli project. Both Hessjgruva AS and local government / communities will benefit directly from the successful advancement and development of the Hessjgruva project, with copper and cobalt also being key metals required for zero-carbon energy transmission and for battery/energy storage.

Highlights

Capella to acquire a 100% interest in the advanced-stage Hessjgruva Cu-Zn-Co project.

Hessjgruva's current mineral inventory (non-Canadian National Instrument NI 43-101 compliant mineral resource) is 3MT @ 1.7% Cu + 1.4% Zn 1,2 ( or 2.2% Cu equivalent 3 ) , based on 12,139m / 68 holes of diamond drilling completed by previous operators in the 1970's. Historical assaying was focused principally on copper and zinc (but not cobalt).

or , based on / 68 holes of diamond drilling completed by previous operators in the 1970's. Historical assaying was focused principally on copper and zinc (but not cobalt). The Cu-Zn-Co mineralization at Hessjgruva is massive-sulfide ("VMS")-type, identical to the mineralization type being targeted at Kjli. The Hessjgruva mineralization occurs primarily in three lenses (A-C, with Lens A hosting most of the high-grade mineralization; Figures 2-4), all of which extend from surface to > 400m vertically below surface and all remain open down-dip. Mineralization is dominated by chalcopyrite, pyrite/pyrrhotite, and sphalerite, with Cu content observed to increase with depth in the deposit.

vertically below surface and all remain open down-dip. Mineralization is dominated by chalcopyrite, pyrite/pyrrhotite, and sphalerite, with Cu content observed to increase with depth in the deposit. The average thickness of the highest-grade Lens A is approximately 10m 1 , with the thickest and highest-grade intercept reported from the historical drilling being 14.5m @ 4.35% Cu + 1.3% Zn ( or 4.8% Cu equivalent 2 ) (approximate true thickness) from 455.5m to 470m downhole in DDH-312. This Cu-Zn-Co mineralization remains open down dip.

, with the thickest and highest-grade intercept reported from the historical drilling being or (approximate true thickness) from to downhole in DDH-312. This Cu-Zn-Co mineralization remains open down dip. As part of a due-diligence process, the Company completed a systematic resampling program of the Hessjgruva drill core stored at the NGU storage facility in Lkken. A total of 113 quarter core samples were taken for analysis and confirmed: i) the reliability of copper and zinc grades reported from historical drilling, and ii) the existence of elevated cobalt concentrations (ranging from below detection limit to 0.1% Co) within the re-assayed core intervals.

The combined Hessjgruva and Kjli projects provide Capella with both a potential near-term development project as well as significant exploration upside within the past producing Rros Mining District of central Norway .

1 Geological Survey of Norway Report 2007.023; The Hersj ore deposit, evaluation of ore potential. 2 Reader is also referred to "Disclosure Relating to Historical Estimate" section. 3 Copper equivalent grades have been calculated using 2022 Year-to-Date average copper and zinc prices of USD 9,900/T and USD 3,700/T, respectively, with no adjustment having been made for metallurgical recovery as these are unknown at this time (metal price data: London Metal Exchange, www.lme.com).

Eric Roth, Capella's President and CEO, commented: "The acquisition of the advanced-stage Hessjgruva copper-zinc-cobalt project provides Capella with a potential near-term growth platform in the broader Kjli district. The advancement of Hessjgruva will also bring significant tangible benefits to both Hessjgruva AS and local communities / government, all of which have been strongly supportive of our exploration activities at Kjli. Our partnership with Hessjgruva AS will also provide Capella with significant local knowledge and operating "know how"'.

Our strict compliance to ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) principles will also ensure that we continue to work with net zero-carbon emission standards and with maximum respect towards both local communities and the environment.

We expect our first priority to be the completion of an NI 43-101 compliant mineral resource for the project, which is expected to also lead to further infill and step-out drilling. Subsequently, we expect to initiate some of the development-related studies (such as metallurgical testwork) that a scoping-level mining study would require. I look forward to keeping all stakeholders updated as the Hessjgruva project moves forward."

2022 and Beyond Work Program at Hessjgruva

The Company's expected work plans for the Hessjgruva project commencing immediately are:

i) The completion of a Canadian National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101") compliant Mineral Resource Estimate ("MRE"). In addition to producing a formal MRE, this study would identify those areas where infill drilling is required (in order to potentially upgrade the category of the existing mineral inventory) in addition to determining where step-out drilling would have the highest probability of extending known mineralization.

ii) Subsequent to the completion of the MRE and further recommended drilling, Capella would initiate a Preliminary Economic Assessment in order to evaluate potential mining, mineral processing, and infrastructure requirements of the project.

Terms of the Hessjgruva Acquisition

Capella may acquire a 100% interest in the Hessjgruva Cu-Zn-Co project in return for:

i) Capella managing and funding exploration / development activities on the project.

ii) Capella paying Hessjgruva AS a one-time amount of Euro 500,000 upon completion of a positive Bankable Feasibility Study.

iii) Capella providing Hessjgruva AS with a 2.5% Net Smelter Royalty ("NSR") on all future metal production from the project, retaining an option to buy-back 0.5% of this NSR at any time prior to the commencement of commercial production for Euro 1,000,000.

iv) Capella to cover the cost of annual property payments and basic administration costs.

Quality Assurance / Quality Control (QA/QC)

Capella utilizes industry-standard exploration sampling methodologies and techniques. All soil, stream, and rock (including drill core) samples are collected under the supervision of the Company's geologists and in accordance with best industry practices. Drill core samples taken as part of the Hessjgruva due diligence were quarter core and were cut from half core stored at the NGU's covered core storage facility at Lkken. All samples were sent to ALS Laboratory's ("ALS") sample preparation facility in Mala, Sweden (ALS code PREP-31Y), and subsequently dispatched to ALS's analytical facilities in Loughrea, Ireland, for multi-element geochemical analysis (ALS codes ME-MS61 and PGM-ICP23). All geochemical assays are subject to quality assurance / quality control programs using a combination of internationally recognized standards, duplicates, and blanks, as provided by both ALS and the Company.

Disclosure Relating to Historical Estimate

In accordance with Section 2.4 of National Instrument 43-101  Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101"), an issuer may disclose an historical estimate, using the original terminology, if the disclosure identifies the following:

Source and date of the historical estimate, including any existing technical reports

 Information relating to this historical estimate is summarized from a 2007 technical report prepared for the Geological Survey of Norway ("NGU") by Terje Bjerkgard ("Report 2007.023: The Hersj ore deposit, evaluation of ore potential").

Relevance and reliability of the historical estimate:

 The historical estimate for Hessjgruva was derived from drilling undertaken by three mining companies - Rros Kobberverk AS, AS Sydvaranger, and Killingdal Grubelskap AS - up until 1977. Whilst Capella does not consider the historical estimate to have been completed in accordance with current NI 43-101 standards, it is considered relevant to reporting on the project.

Key assumptions, parameters and methods used to prepare the historical estimate:

Original (pre-1977) technical reports relating to the calculation of the historical estimate and outlining the assumptions / parameters used have not been sighted by Capella.

Resource category used:

As the historical estimate is not believed to have been completed in accordance with current NI 43-101 standards, Capella utilizes the terminology "mineral inventory" rather than either mineral resources or mineral reserves to classify the known mineralization.

More recent estimates or data available to the issuer:

No more recent estimates are currently available to the issuer. A study completed during 2016 (Geometric and Qualimetric Modeling of the Hessj deposit; Nrsett, S.J.; NTNU M.Sc. Thesis) confirmed most aspects of the geometry of the Cu-Zn-Co mineralization and distribution of Cu-Zn-Co grades as utilized in the historical estimate.

Work needed to be done to upgrade or verify the historical estimate as current mineral resources or mineral reserves:

An independent Qualified Person ("QP") has not yet done sufficient work to review the historical data and historical estimate to determine what further work would be required to prepare a technical report in accordance with NI 43-101. Capella is in the process of engaging a QP with suitable experience in the deposit style being evaluated in order to prepare a technical report in accordance with NI 43-101.

Capella is not treating the historical estimate as current mineral resources or reserves. At this time, a Qualified Person has not done sufficient work on behalf of Capella to classify this historical estimate as current mineral resources or reserves. Investors should not rely on the historical estimate as a current mineral resource estimate until it has been verified and supported in a technical report in accordance with NI 43-101.

Qualified Persons and Disclosure Statement

The technical information in this news release relating to the Hessjgruva copper project has been prepared in accordance with Canadian regulatory requirements set out in NI 43-101, and approved by Eric Roth, the Company's President & CEO, a Director, and a Qualified Person under NI 43-101. Mr. Roth holds a Ph.D. in Economic Geology from the University of Western Australia, is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (AusIMM) and is a Fellow of the Society of Economic Geologists (SEG). Mr. Roth has 30 years of experience in international minerals exploration and mining project evaluation.

On Behalf of the Board of Capella Minerals Ltd.

"Eric Roth"

___________________________

Eric Roth, Ph.D., FAusIMM

President & CEO

About Capella Minerals Ltd

Capella is engaged in the acquisition, exploration, and development of quality mineral resource properties in favourable jurisdictions with a focus on high-grade gold and copper(-zinc-cobalt) deposits. The Company also holds 1,000,000 common shares (on a post-consolidation basis) in Prospector Metals Corp. (formally Ethos Gold Corp.), providing Capella shareholders with indirect exposure to exploration success at both the Savant Lake JV Project and elsewhere within Prospector's extensive Canadian project portfolio.

The Company's copper(-zinc-cobalt) focus is currently on the discovery of high-grade VMS-type deposits within 100%-owned, district-scale land positions around the past-producing Lkken, Kjli, and now Hessjgruva copper mines in central Norway. The Company's precious metals focus is on the discovery of high-grade gold deposits on its recently acquired Finnish properties (Katajavaara, Aakenus), the 100%-owned Southern Gold Line Project in Sweden, and its active Canadian Joint Ventures with Prospector Metals Corp (TSXV: PPP) at Savant Lake (Ontario) and Yamana Gold Inc. at Domain (Manitoba). The Company also retains a residual interest (subject to an option to purchase agreement with Austral Gold Ltd) in the Sierra Blanca gold-silver divestiture in Santa Cruz, Argentina.

Cautionary Notes and Forward-looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. Forward-looking information is typically identified by words such as: believe, expect, anticipate, intend, estimate, postulate and similar expressions, or are those, which, by their nature, refer to future events. Such statements include, without limitation, statements regarding the future results of operations, performance and achievements of Capella, including the timing, completion of and results from the exploration and drill programs described in this release. Although the Company believes that such statements are reasonable, it can give no assurances that such expectations will prove to be correct. All such forward-looking information is based on certain assumptions and analyses made by Capella in light of their experience and perception of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments, as well as other factors management believes are appropriate in the circumstances. This information, however, is subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking information. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ from this forward-looking information include those described under the heading "Risks and Uncertainties" in Capella's most recently filed MD&A. Capella does not intend, and expressly disclaims any obligation to, update or revise the forward-looking information contained in this news release, except as required by law. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information.

Neither the TSXV nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSXV) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

SOURCE Capella Minerals Limited
SHENZHEN, China, April 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Chinese leading logistics and energy equipment supplier China International Marine Containers (Group) Ltd posted approximately 163.7 billion yuan ($25.7 billion) in operating revenue in 2021, a 74-percent growth year-on-year, marking the first time for the company to hit the 100-billion-yuan line.

It also represents the fastest growth the company has made in nearly 10 years. Operating revenue of CIMC stood at 94.2 billion yuan in 2020.

Its operating profit increased 81 percent on a yearly basis to reach 13.47 billion yuan in 2021, breaking the historical record.

The company plans to distribute a full-year dividend of 0.69 yuan per share to its shareholders, with total cash payment of about 2.48 billion yuan, accounting for 38.22 percent of its net profit.

According to the Fortune Global 500 between 2018 and 2021, minimum operating revenue of companies on the list ranged from $24 billion to $25.3 billion, which translates into about 150 billion yuan to 160 billion yuan. Based on the current foreign exchange rate, that means CIMC could join the Fortune Global 500 club this year.

Six major segments of business -- container; vehicles; energy, chemical and food equipment; airports, firefighting and automated logistics equipment; offshore; logistics -- accounted for over 90 percent of CIMC's total operating revenue in 2021. Among them, container manufacturing, the company's core business, contributed roughly 40 percent of the total.

The container business achieved an operating revenue of 65.97 billion yuan in 2021, surging 197.64 percent compared with a year earlier. Net profit of the business segment soared 469.94 percent year-on-year to hit 11.33 billion yuan. The significant growth was driven by the dual impact of COVID-19 pandemic and cycle of shipping industry.

Mai Boliang, chairman and CEO of CIMC, said global container market was not in a normal situation in 2021 due to external factors. He expected global demand for containers to contract this year compared with the size of last year, but still larger than that of previous years.

Mai added that traditional container business is not expected to see rapid growth rate. But combined with some strategic emerging businesses that extended from the traditional business, such as cold-chain logistics, Mai said he is fully confident in the growth of the company's overall container business in the future.

SOURCE CIMC
Recently featured as a metaverse pioneer by the Wall Street Journal and CNBC, The Sandbox is a metaverse where users can create and monetize their own distinct worlds and game experiences on LANDs, which are non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that represent virtual real estate in The Sandbox.

Having spent the pandemic period focusing on building customer loyalty with the trial launch of subscription products and a new iteration to be announced in the coming weeks, citizenM is now focusing on building loyalty in the online world.

As with all of its hotels, citizenM will bring art to the forefront by showcasing and selling future NFT collections that will be commissioned with growing talent in the digital art space. Once the LAND is purchased, citizenM aims to finance the build of a hotel in the virtual world through the sale of an exclusive collection of NFTs with real-world rewards (utilities) attached.

Each of the 2000 NFTs will be priced equally, however purchasers will at random be assigned one of three levels: 1500 "regular" citizens, 450 "special" citizens and 50 "legendary" citizens. The utilities will take the form of discounts, free drinks and more with the specifics of the rewards being determined by the level of NFT assigned to the purchaser. The rewards will be redeemable at any of citizenM's growing portfolio of hotels in the real world.

"We are thrilled to be the first hospitality company to build in the Metaverse," Robin Chadha, CMO of citizenM, shares. "As a brand that has always pushed the boundaries and challenged traditional models, this new venture in The Sandbox fits not only with our brand strategy but also the commitment we have to the creative community and to our guests both online and in the real world. We're excited to further explore opportunities in the Metaverse in the years to come."

Once the virtual hotel - a location for avatars visiting The Sandbox to Work, Sleep & Play - is built, citizenM will collaborate with an additional roster of digital artists to create and sell NFTs that can be purchased in the digital space.

Eventually, the brand plans to use these profits, as well as the incorporation of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), to fully finance a physical, real-life property where token holders will vote on the location. In line with the brand's ethos, citizenM will ultimately build a hotel for the people, by the people.

About citizenM

citizenM was launched in 2008 with a purpose  to disrupt the traditional hotel industry. Rattan Chadha  the founder of the global fashion brand Mexx  was inspired by his employees to create a hotel for the modern travellers, giving them everything they need and nothing they don't. This means central locations in the world's most exciting cities, but at an affordable price. Not just a place to sleep, but somewhere to work, relax and play  just like home. Somewhere with superfast free Wi-Fi, tech that makes life easy, and a great bed to crash in at the end of a long day. Rattan Chadha called this philosophy 'affordable luxury for the people'.

The first citizenM opened at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport in 2008. Today, citizenM's portfolio includes 24 hotels in 16 exciting cities: London, Glasgow, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Paris, Copenhagen, Zurich, Geneva, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Washington DC, Taipei and Kuala Lumpur.

www.citizenM.com

@citizenM

SOURCE citizenM
The 1000 th endocrine tumor surgery was a thyroid cancer performed by Dr Gary Clayman and Dr Rashmi Roy of the Clayman Thyroid Center. The Clayman Thyroid Center is America's highest volume thyroid surgery center, performing nearly 2,000 thyroid operations annually. Their reputation means patients from all over the US and many foreign countries travel to Tampa for their thyroid surgery.

"It's incredible to have hit this milestone in less than 3 months from the new hospital opening," said Dr. Gary Clayman. "More than half of our patients live in other states or other countries, showing that they are prioritizing their health and traveling to see best-in-class surgeons at an amazing specialty hospital dedicated to the treatment of thyroid cancer. It was very fitting that our 1000th patient was a young woman from New Mexico suffering from papillary thyroid cancer. It is now the fastest growing cancer among young women, but it's extremely curable if treated buy an expert thyroid surgeon."

Amanda, a young mother recently diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer, traveled across the country to have surgery at the new hospital. After her diagnosis, Amanda did her research and considered every option available to her.

"I'm young," she said. "I have a 6-month-old and I couldn't believe the diagnosis of cancer. When you have a baby and you hear the word cancer Your mind goes a million miles an hour. You're thinking, 'am I going to see my son grow up'?"

She and her husband met with local surgeons and looked into other major hospitals and universities around the country, willing to go wherever they believe she would have the best outcome.

"We looked at MD Anderson, we looked at the Mayo Clinic, and we looked at Cleveland Clinic," Amanda's husband said. "None of their websites had enough information on this disease, their procedures and who their surgeons were. All of their surgeons do multiple different types of surgerythey don't sub-specialize and do high volume like they do at the Hospital for Endocrine Surgery. We just did not feel comfortable with them."

They ultimately found the information they were looking for at www.thyroidcancer.com, the Clayman Thyroid Center's website.

"The website is really helpful because I had all the information I needed all in one spot," Amanda said. "I didn't have to visit 20 different websites. To be quite honest, after we found that website, we didn't really look anywhere else. I learned everything I needed to know about my disease in one place."

Of course, the young family faced some anxiety about traveling with a baby and gave some consideration for staying local and not traveling to seek the best surgical care.

"I'm on a lot of hiring panels at work and I know we are not supposed to put bias into our decision. We make decisions based on objective criteria such as experience and past success," Amanda said. "Once I got into that mindset, it was an easy decision. Dr. Clayman is extremely high volume and has been doing this for 30 years. You simply can't compete with that. After I looked at it that way, I stopped letting emotion drive me toward convenience and made the decision that was best for my health and overall outcome."

"Trying to figure out which surgeon to go tothe one close by, or the one across the country was a big decision," Amanda said. "We prayed about it, we talked to our friends, we talked to our priest, trying to take everything into account- physically, mentally, spiritually. We talked with a friend of ours who had the same type of cancer I had about 20 years prior, and she really affirmed my decision. She wasn't able to do this type of in-depth research back then, she just went to the local doctor she was referred to, and she ended up having complications because they didn't get all of her cancer out during the first surgery."

Unfortunately, recurrent thyroid cancer occurs quite frequently for a variety of reasons. First, expert ultrasound evaluation of the entire neck is required of all patients prior to thyroid surgerysomething that is not done routinely by most surgeons and hospitals. Second, most thyroid surgeons are quite inexperienced performing less than 10 thyroid cancer operations per year. Finally, nearly half of all patients with thyroid cancer will not know their diagnosis of thyroid cancer until their first operation is completed. By then it's too late to do a better "cancer" operation and the patient is at high risk for the cancer to recur, and thus need a second operation.

"The other thing that put us at ease is that they have someone from pathology right there in the operating room who is able to tell you right then and there if they got all the cancer out or if they need to take out more," said Amanda's husband. "That got me thinking about if we got the surgery elsewhere, do they assume they got it all out and then 10 years down the road we find out they didn't?"

As a patient, you have direct control the quality of your thyroid surgery by selecting the best, most experienced thyroid surgeon, thereby greatly decreasing the chance of obtaining the wrong or incomplete thyroid operation. The Clayman Thyroid Center's surgeons are some of the most experienced thyroid surgeons in the world, performing nearly 2,000 thyroid operations annually. Operating out of the Hospital for Endocrine Surgery, the Center is a full-service thyroid surgery practice, offering the most advanced forms of thyroid surgery for all types of thyroid tumors, from small thyroid nodules to complex recurrent thyroid cancers.

The Clayman Thyroid Center moved into its new home at the Hospital for Endocrine Surgery in January 2022, joining the surgeons of the Norman Parathyroid Center, Scarless Thyroid Surgery Center and Carling Adrenal Center. Combined, these specialized centers make up the highest volume endocrine surgery practice in the world by almost two-fold.

"I came to Tampa 6 years ago from MD Anderson Cancer Center with the dream of building something unique in all of medicinea surgical practice and a hospital where excellence is the only acceptable outcome. We now operate out of an amazing new facility designed with thyroid cancer patients in mind. Within this fantastic building are housed the best equipment and the best peopledoctors, nurses and techs who have dedicated their careers to treating and curing endocrine tumors and cancers. I can honestly say there is no other hospital like this in all the world. Patients around the world come here for treatment, and will set the standard for outcomes for patients with thyroid cancers, parathyroid and adrenal tumors."

"We walked in and we said, this doesn't look like a hospital," said Amanda. "It's so modern and comfortable. The staff is so fantastic, and the experience was so personalized. You're traveling across the country because you have cancer, but when you arrive here it doesn't feel like that. I don't like hospitals and I'm sure lots of people don't, so it was a really different experience."

About the Clayman Thyroid Center:

Founded by one of the nation's best-known thyroid surgeons, the Clayman Thyroid Center is the highest volume thyroid cancer referral center in the United States. The Center boasts the most experienced thyroid surgeons in the US who provide personalized care allowing the greatest opportunity for cancer cure, wellness, and cosmetic and functional outcomes via all types of thyroid surgery from minimal incision to scarless thyroid surgery to advanced cancer care.

www.thyroidcancer.com | (813) 940-3130

Contact: Julie Canan, Director of Marketing

[email protected]

941 468 3002

SOURCE Clayman Thyroid Center
Company Executive Travels to Lviv to Personally Train Ukrainian Medevac Personnel

BROOMFIELD, Colo., and WASHINGTON, April 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- In partnership with the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and their Federal Emergency Management organization, Vita Inclinata (Vita), a privately-held developer and producer of helicopter and crane load stabilization and precision hardware, has donated their Vita Rescue System (VRS) to assist the Ukrainian Army with medevac operations. The VRS, valued at approximately $500,000, will be accompanied by a Vita executive who will train Ukrainian medevac crews in a Mil Mi-8, a medium twin-turbine helicopter originally designed by the Soviet Union and now produced by Russia, in the region of Lviv and Kyiv.

Who: Vita Inclinata company executive.

What: Donates Vita Rescue System to Ukrainian medevac personnel to make airlift rescues faster, safer, and more precise.

Where: Training will take place in the region of Lviv and Kyiv.

When: Training takes place April 11th - 12th.

How: Training in a Mil Mi-8 transport helicopter.

Why: Vita is standing up new military capabilities for Ukraine. Because of the current situation, the Ukrainian troops cannot conduct medical evacuations. With the VRS donation and training, Vita can bring a whole new capability to the Ukrainian Army, which will save civilian and military lives.

View a U.S. Army simulated medevac rescue using the VRS at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLi1y0b447M&t=369s.

About Vita Inclinata

A friend's death during a rescue operationwith a helicopter close but unable to stabilize due to weather and terrainwas the genesis of Vita Inclinata. Founded in 2015 as a way to solve a real problem, Vita today controls chaotic swinging and spin, and adds safety and precision for rotor-wing and fixed-wing aircraft and cranes. With the mission of "Bring them home, every time," Vita's technology changes the narrative while saving lives, time, and money across industries, including search and rescue, military, firefighting, public safety, construction, wind energy, and oil and gas. The company is headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado, with offices in Washington, DC, and Huntsville, Alabama. For more information, please visit www.vitatech.co .

For more information or to schedule an interview, please contact:

Betsey Rogers

BridgeView Marketing

603-821-0809

[email protected]

Michael Emerton

BridgeView Marketing

603-766-3688

[email protected]

SOURCE Vita Inclinata
Cookies in exclusive partnership with Gage Cannabis in Michigan market

ANN ARBOR, Mich., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- On April 8, 2022, Gage Cannabis Co. ("Gage") will open Cookies Ann Arbor, a new flagship cannabis provisioning center in the heart of Ann Arbor, with a monumental grand opening celebration. Cookies, the leading lifestyle and cannabis brand in North America, will be located at 2460 W. Stadium Blvd., Ann Arbor.

Based in the Bay Area, Cookies' Co-Founder and CEO Berner is a prolific rapper and entrepreneur along with his partner, Jigga, a highly respected cannabis cultivator and breeder. Berner will be in Ann Arbor for the April 8 grand opening with his signature blue Cookies bus and a group of VIP friends.

"To me, Michigan is one of the biggest markets next to California," said Berner, Co-Founder and CEO of Cookies. "Not only is it a big market, Michigan is a very educated market when it comes to herb and hash. Michigan smokers are spoiled just like us in Cali. I spent a lot of time in Ann Arbor on my off days during my music tour and I love the vibe there. I look forward to bringing our customer journey and new flavors to one of my favorite towns."

The Cookies store will carry the entire family of Cookies products including, but not limited to the Cookies, Lemonnade, Runtz, PowerzzzUp, Minntz and Grandiflora lines. The store will be operated by Gage in an exclusive partnership with Cookies.

A special grand opening weekend will include music, a gaming trailer, food trucks and special giveaways. Berner's signature blue Cookies bus will also be on site.

"Gage is excited for this next step in our flourishing partnership with Berner and his Cookies brand," said Gage's President Mike Finos. "Launching a Cookies store right next to the University of Michigan campus is sure to be another big hit. Ann Arbor is a sophisticated cannabis town, and they deserve the best brands."

The 3,939 square-foot Cookies store will employ 25 Ann Arbor residents with good paying jobs and benefits. Gage also has in place a social equity program through which it will share quarterly grants with social equity participants in cities disproportionately impacted by marijuana prohibition. The company plans to give up to $50,000 to a prospective cannabis business owner in any of the 19 social equity cities initially designated by the Michigan Marijuana Regulatory Agency.

In addition to the new Cookie's provisioning center, Gage will dedicate significant shelf space to the display and sale of Cookies products in their nine current Gage locations in Adrian, Battle Creek, Burton, Ferndale, Grand Rapids, Jackson, Kalamazoo, Lansing, and Traverse City.

More information can be found at www.cookiesmichigan.com or on Instagram @cookies.annarbor

ABOUT COOKIES

Cookies, founded in 2010 by Billboard-charting rapper and entrepreneur Berner and Bay Area breeder and cultivator Jai, is the most globally recognized cannabis company in the world. Cookies values the power of the plant and focuses on creating game-changing genetics.The company offers a collection of over 70 proprietary cannabis cultivars and more than 2,000 products. Cookies also actively works to enrich communities disproportionately impacted by the War on Drugs through advocacy and social equity initiatives. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company opened its first retail store in 2018 in Los Angeles and has since expanded to over 40 retail locations in 17 markets across four countries. Cookies was named one of America's Hottest Brands of 2021 by AdAge; the first cannabis brand to ever receive this accolade. Learn more at cookies.co

Instagram: @cookiesenterprises

Twitter: @cookiesglobal

Facebook: @cookiesenterprises

ABOUT GAGE

Gage is innovating and curating the highest quality cannabis experiences possible for cannabis consumers in the state of Michigan and Canada, and bringing internationally renowned brands to market. Through years of progressive industry experience, the firm's founding partners have successfully built and grown operations with federal and state licenses, including cultivation, processing and retail locations. For more information about the company., visit www.gagecannabis.com

Instagram: @gagecannabis

Facebook: @gageusa

Twitter: @gagecannabisco

MEDIA CONTACT: Colleen Robar, 313-207-5960, [email protected]

SOURCE Gage Cannabis
VANCOUVER, BC, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Deep-South Resources Inc. ("Deep-South") (TSXV: DSM) and its affiliate Koryx Copper BV (together, the "Companies") announce the appointment of King & Spalding LLP as international legal counsel. The mandate of King & Spalding is to review the Companies' options under international law in relation to the Namibian government's handling of the Haib Copper Exploration and Prospecting License and the government's refusal to renew the License.

King & Spalding is an international law firm with 1,200 lawyers in 22 countries. The firm specializes in international dispute resolution. King & Spalding's international arbitration practice is consistently ranked among the top arbitration practices in the world. In 2022, the firm's practice is again ranked number one in Global Arbitration Review's "GAR 30" guide to the world's leading international arbitration practices. Global Arbitration Review has praised King & Spalding's track record in obtaining strong results for its clients. Further information is available on: https://www.kslaw.com

About Deep-South Resources Inc

Deep-South Resources is a mineral exploration and development company. Deep-South's growth strategy is to focus on the exploration and development of quality assets in significant mineralized trends and in proximity to infrastructure in stable countries. In using and assessing environmentally friendly technologies in the development of its copper project, Deep-South embraces the green revolution.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Caution Regarding Forward-Looking Information

Information contained in this news release which are not statements of historical facts may be "forward-looking information" for the purposes of Canadian securities laws. Such forward-looking information involves risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results, performance, prospects and opportunities to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward looking information. The words "believe", "expect", "anticipate", "contemplate", "plan", "intends", "continue", "budget", "estimate", "may", "will", "schedule", "understand" and similar expressions identify forward-looking information. These forward-looking statements relate to, among other things: the Minister's refusal to renew the Company's Licence, the Company's intention to contest the Minister's decision before the Courts of Namibia and the outcome of such proceedings.

Forward-looking information is necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by Deep-South, are inherently subject to significant technical, political, business, economic and competitive uncertainties and contingencies. Known and unknown factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking information. Factors and assumptions that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations include, among other things: political risks associated with the Company's operations in Namibia; the failure of the Namibian Government to comply with its continuing obligations under the Act to allow for the renewal of the Licence; the impact of changes in, or to the more aggressive enforcement of, laws, regulations and government practices; the inability of the Company and its subsidiaries to enforce their legal rights in certain circumstances. For additional risk factors, please see the Company's most recently filed Management Discussions & Analysis available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

There can be no assurances that forward-looking information and statements will prove to be accurate, as many factors and future events, both known and unknown could cause actual results, performance or achievements to vary or differ materially from the results, performance or achievements that are or may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements contained herein or incorporated by reference. Accordingly, all such factors should be considered carefully when making decisions with respect to Deep-South, and prospective investors should not place undue reliance on forward looking information. Forward-looking information in this news release is made as at the date hereof. The Company assumes no obligation to update or revise forward-looking information to reflect changes in assumptions, changes in circumstances or any other events affecting such forward-looking information, except as required by applicable law.

SOURCE Deep-South Resources Inc.
Financing accelerates company's global growth and development of its platform to enrich HCP messaging solutions on endemic and point-of-care networks for life sciences companies

PARSIPPANY, N.J., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Doceree Inc, the first global network of physician-only platforms for programmatic messaging, today announced the completion of $11 million Series A funding round led by Eight Roads Ventures, a global investment firm backed by Fidelity. F-Prime Capital and Alkemi Growth Capital also participated in the round.

Doceree will use the funds to scale its global operations, expand partnerships, augment its product portfolio and advance the platform's measurement and behavior lift capabilities to bring greater transparency to results. It will also help it embolden healthcare professional (HCP) communications for pharma and life sciences brands, agencies and health information technology platforms.

"It is critical for industry players like life sciences companies and HCP-only platforms to understand and react to the digital touchpoints and behaviors of HCPs for delivering messages they resonate with," says Harshit Jain, M.D., Founder & Global CEO, Doceree. "Our identity resolution technology and tailored products for different markets that adhere to the country-specific regulations and guidelines make it easy for life sciences brands to engage with HCPs on digital mediums, while enabling publishers to improve engagement on their platforms with relevant medical information from pharmaceutical and life sciences brands."

Doceree's industry-first solutions, powered by proprietary identity-resolution technology, ESPYIAN, enable messaging and targeting of HCPs on endemic (sites physicians visit for knowledge, professional enhancement or to connect with their peer group) and point-of-care (platforms where physicians tend to their patients) platforms. The platform enhances engagement between life sciences companies and their target audience through its global publisher network in a fast-evolving digital pharma marketing ecosystem.

Founded in 2019 by Harshit, a former physician who transitioned into the healthcare marketing space, Doceree empowers life sciences brands and media agencies with solutions that seamlessly reach HCPs on professional HCP networks and within their digital workflow to achieve better patient health outcomes. The company has refined HCP communications through its programmatic messaging capabilities to help marketers with more efficient, effective and transparent messaging campaigns.

"Doceree has identified a largely overlooked white space in digital pharma marketing and is delivering innovative solutions to address some of the most critical challenges that pharma companies face today," says Carl Byers, Partner, F-Prime Capital. "We were drawn to the company's vision and are looking forward to our partnership and continued support as they evolve into their next stage of growth."

On the back of massive interest of pharma brands and publishers towards Doceree's custom-built product offerings within the programmatic pharma marketing space, the company expanded to key international locations, such as emerging markets in the UK & Europe, within two years of the platform's launch in the U.S. The sophistication of Doceree's platform capabilities has created enormous opportunities for marketers and publishers in these geographies as it transforms the way pharma brands communicate with HCPs globally on physician-only platforms. Currently, Doceree is working with eight of the top 10 global pharma brands and the company currently engages more than 1 million HCPs across the globe.

"Doceree is transforming the way digital interactions between pharmaceutical brands and prescribers are facilitated," says Ashish Venkataramani, Partner, Eight Roads Ventures. "Pharma marketers navigate significant complexity across point-of-care systems and health information systems. Doceree's technology platform seeks to disrupt the fragmented value chain for digital messaging to physicians, and will be at the forefront of this promising sector."

Doceree's AI-powered solutions facilitate hyper-targeting of HCPs based on multiple triggers and at various touchpoints that enrich marketing initiatives digitally. The platform can precisely identify HCPs on professional platforms based on their behavior traits, diagnoses they carry out, prescriptions they write, and the procedures they perform to deliver relevant messaging from life sciences brands in a regulatory compliant manner.

Doceree Perform, the company's latest product, provides exceptional measurement proficiency for life sciences companies to evaluate campaign performances and to improve script lift with data-driven messages in the U.S. In India, the U.K. and the EU, ESPYIAN enables marketers to target HCPs at a specialty level, allowing pharma brands to reach them at scale based on their area of expertise. The company is set to introduce behavioral lift measurement offerings globally.

"For pharma, life sciences companies and publishers, having access to data-driven, actionable insights to strategize and implement communication initiatives is critical to reaching HCPs," says Rahul Gupta, Board Member, Doceree. "Doceree has proven the ability to efficiently connect stakeholders and is well-positioned to serve the needs of the pharma industry."

"In a world that has embraced online channels for virtual care during the last two years, reaching HCPs within digital point-of-care and endemic networks is having a resounding impact on communications for life sciences market," says Alka Goel, Founder, Alkemi Growth Captial. "Doceree's solutions are set to fuel adoption of programmatic messaging in the pharma marketing space."

About Doceree

Doceree is the first global network of HCP-only platforms for programmatic messaging. Doceree facilitates messaging between life sciences brands and healthcare professionals (HCPs) through an extensive global network of digital endemic and point-of-care platforms to programmatically deliver at scale accurate and transparent messages to HCPs. To learn more, visit doceree.com

About F-Prime Capital

F-Prime Capital, formerly Fidelity Biosciences and Devonshire Investors, is a global venture capital firm investing in life sciences, healthcare and technology. Since 1969, F-Prime has worked closely with entrepreneurs and academics to create innovative solutions to some of the world's most significant challenges in healthcare and technology. https://fprimecapital.com/

About Eight Roads Ventures

Eight Roads Ventures is a global venture capital firm backed by Fidelity, managing $6 billion of assets across offices in China, India, Japan, and Europe. Our 50-year history of investing includes partnerships with over 300 healthcare and technology companies. Eight Roads Ventures India healthcare portfolio includes Ashish Life Science, Caplin Steriles, Carestack, Cipla Health, Core Diagnostics, Doceree, eKincare, Eywa Pharma, Immuneel Therapeutics, Laurus Labs, Medwell Ventures, NOCD, Plasmagen Biosciences, Proximie, OZiva, PharmEasy, Richcore Lifesciences, Specsmakers, Toothsi, Trivitron Healthcare and Ujjala Cygnus.

www.eightroads.com

About Alkemi Growth Capital

Alkemi Growth Capital is a growth investment firm that seeks to invest in healthcare and consumer wellness industry. The firm was founded in 2018 and is based in New Delhi, India. https://www.alkemivp.com/

Media Contacts:

Kanchan Dass

[email protected]

Richard Krueger

[email protected]

SOURCE Doceree Inc.
CRANBURY, N.J., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- dvm360, an MJH Life Sciences company, and the industry-leading multimedia platform for animal health professionals, is proud to announce the addition of dvm360 Live!, an all-new web-based talk show for veterinary professionals to its extensive animal health multimedia portfolio.

dvm360 Live!, a magazine-style talk show, hosted by Adam Christman, DVM, MBA will blend clinical conversations with uplifting lifestyle stories featuring insightful guests and advocates from the animal health community, expert opinions, and a clinical focus for each episode.

"By adding dvm360 Live! to our multimedia portfolio that includes The Vet Blast Podcast, dvm360 Magazine, dvm360.com, dvm360 Flexour newest online continuing education learning platform, and more, we are catering to our audience's growing preferences for consuming news and information in multiple ways," said Mike Hennessy Jr., president and CEO of MJH Life Sciences, parent company of dvm360.

Dr. Adam Christman, dvm360's Chief Veterinary Officer, who is also a national animal health advocate, speaker, and social media influencer with thousands of TikTok and Instagram followers is excited to introduce dvm360 Live! as a new platform to amplify the innovation and good work of veterinary professionals and supporters in communities everywhere.

"I'm pleased to host dvm360 Live! to the veterinary community and can't wait to engage in some of the most relevant conversations from veterinary professionals who are doing outstanding work in animal health care in ways never thought of before," said Adam Christman, DVM, MBA.

dvm360 Live! will be produced at MJH Studios in Cranbury, New Jersey. dvm360 Live! is scheduled to premiere on April 7, 2022 and can be viewed at dvm360.com and on all dvm360 social media channels. Veterinary professionals who are interested in becoming a guest speaker should make inquiries to Adam Christman, DVM, MBA at [email protected].

About dvm360

dvm360 is the leading multi-media provider of animal health care communications, education, and research for veterinary professionals for over 50 years. We engage audiences with top-of-the-line, in-depth digital and print news, medical information, and veterinary resources focusing on every aspect of a veterinary professional's life. With our online learning platform, dvm360 Flex, we also deliver a 360 solution for continuing educationprint, digital, in-person, and on-demand. dvm360 is a brand of MJH Life Sciences, the largest privately held, independent, full-service medical media company in North America. MJH Life Sciences dedicated to delivering trusted health care news across multiple channels.

SOURCE dvm360
SAN FRANCISCO, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The global eHealth market size is expected to reach USD 878.6 billion by 2030, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. The market is expected to expand at a CAGR of 17.4% from 2022 to 2030. The transition of the healthcare industry into a digital healthcare system for management and analysis of patient health is expected to be the most vital driver of the market growth.

Key Insights & Findings from the report:

The diagnostics segment is expected to witness the fastest CAGR of above 15.0% over the next seven years, owing to the increasing number of patients with at least one chronic condition and the rising prevalence of infectious diseases.

According to the CDC, more than 50% population of the U.S.-accounting for about 117 million people-suffers from at least one chronic condition requiring routine monitoring.

mHealth is expected to be the largest and the fastest-growing segment. Favorable government initiatives and increasing collaboration of several healthcare institutions with manufacturers are driving the growth of this segment. For instance, American Telemedicine Association (ATA) collaborated with Philips for increasing the implementation and adoption of telehealth services during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

North America is expected to dominate the market throughout the forecast period. The presence of a tech-savvy population base and various current initiatives by the American Health Information Community (AHIC) is expected to be the drivers of this growth GE Healthcare and Microsoft expanded their long-standing partnership in April 2020 to introduce a cloud-based COVID-19 patient monitoring software for health systems, which will further boost the e-health sector growth.

Read 180-page market research report, "eHealth Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Product (Big Data For Health, EHR, mHealth, Health Information Systems), By Services, By End Use, By Region, And Segment Forecasts 2022 - 2030", published by Grand View Research.

eHealth Market Growth & Trends

The increasing prevalence of chronic diseases and technological advancements in this field are some of the other driving factors. The rising use of mobile technologies and the internet along with the increasing adoption of home care by patients is expected to propel the market growth during the forecast period.

Furthermore, expanding the scope of IT companies in the development of real-time applications and software catering to the healthcare industry is expected to drive demand during the forecast period. Federal agencies such as the European Coordination Committee of the Radiological, Electromedical and Healthcare IT Industry (COCIR), to encourage and popularise eHealth, formulated various policies.

The American Health Information Community (AHIC) was chartered in the U.S. to make recommendations leading to the development of eHealth to the Secretary of the U.S. Health Department. Based on these recommendations, efforts are being made to increase awareness levels for currently available mobile applications and wearable remote monitoring devices. The eHealth market products and services are encouraging higher demand for round-the-clock care service, wider and faster access to patient information, reduction of administrative and medical errors, self-monitoring and management by patients, and centralization of the entire healthcare industry chain.

In addition, e-health providers have taken on the duty of giving a global overview of the COVID-19 e-health solutions. On the internet, solution suppliers, consultants advising the healthcare system, and healthcare professionals have been urged to submit COVID-19 solutions. The increase in IoT and technological breakthroughs increased desire for mobile technology and the internet, and rising demand for population health management are all factors contributing to the e-health market growth.

eHealth Market Segmentation

Grand View Research has segmented the global eHealth market based on product, service, end-use, and region:

eHealth Product Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2017 - 2030)

Big Data for Health

Electronic Health Record (EHR)

Health Information Systems (HIS)

mHealth

Telemedicine

eHealth Service Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2017 - 2030)

Monitoring Services

Vital Sign Monitoring



Specialty Monitoring



Adherence Monitoring



Accessories



Sensors





Others

Diagnosis Services

Healthcare Strengthening

Others

eHealth End-use Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2017 - 2030)

Providers

Insurers

Healthcare Consumers

Government

eHealth Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2017 - 2030)

North America

U.S.



Canada

Europe

U.K.



Germany



France



Italy



Spain



Russia



Denmark



Sweden



Netherlands

Asia Pacific

China



India



Japan



Australia



Singapore

Latin America

Brazil



Mexico

Middle East & Africa

& South Africa



Saudi Arabia

List of Key Players of eHealth Market

Motion Computing Inc.

Epocrates Inc.

Telecare Corporation

Medisafe

SetPoint Medical

IBM

Doximity

Lift Labs

Apple

Check out more related studies published by Grand View Research:

mHealth Market - The global mHealth market size is expected to reach USD 130.6 billion by 2030. Increasing adoption of mHealth apps and technologies by physicians and patients and rise in penetration of internet and smartphone connectivity are among the major factors expected to drive the growth of the market.

The global mHealth market size is expected to reach by 2030. Increasing adoption of mHealth apps and technologies by physicians and patients and rise in penetration of internet and smartphone connectivity are among the major factors expected to drive the growth of the market. Telehealth Market - The global telehealth market size is expected to reach USD 787.4 billion by 2028, registering a CAGR of 36.5% over the forecast period, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc.

- The global telehealth market size is expected to reach by 2028, registering a CAGR of 36.5% over the forecast period, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. Smart Healthcare Market - The global smart healthcare market size is anticipated to reach USD 528.9 billion by 2027, registering a CAGR of 16.2%, as per the new report by Grand View Research, Inc.

Browse through Grand View Research's Healthcare IT Industry Research Reports.

About Grand View Research

Grand View Research, U.S.-based market research and consulting company, provides syndicated as well as customized research reports and consulting services. Registered in California and headquartered in San Francisco, the company comprises over 425 analysts and consultants, adding more than 1200 market research reports to its vast database each year. These reports offer in-depth analysis on 46 industries across 25 major countries worldwide. With the help of an interactive market intelligence platform, Grand View Research Helps Fortune 500 companies and renowned academic institutes understand the global and regional business environment and gauge the opportunities that lie ahead.

Contact:

Sherry James

Corporate Sales Specialist, USA

Grand View Research, Inc.

Phone: 1-415-349-0058

Toll Free: 1-888-202-9519

Email: [email protected]

Web: https://www.grandviewresearch.com

Grand View Compass | Grand View Pipeline

Follow Us: LinkedIn | Twitter

SOURCE Grand View Research, Inc.
Preference for Endoscopic Bariatric Surgeries to Boost Endoscopy Operative Devices Sales by US$ 16.2 Bn by 2032

Fact.MR's latest report on global endoscopy operative devices market provides a detailed analysis on the key trends fueling the growth over the upcoming decade. It also highlights the key factors promoting the demand for endoscopy operative devices in the market through various segments including product type, application, and regions.

NEW YORK, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The overall sales of endoscopy operative devices is estimated to reach a valuation of US$ 16.2 Bn by 2032, growing at a CAGR of 5.8% during the forecast period (2022-2032).

Growing prevalence of obesity across the U.S., the U.K., and China will propel the demand for endoscopic bariatric surgeries. Another factor driving the sales in the market include rising demand for advanced and superior visualization systems in healthcare sector.

Apart from this, these devices are increasingly being used in surgical procedures such as colonoscopy and laryngoscopy for the diagnosis of colorectal, lung, and breast cancers. This is likely to fuel the sales of endoscopy operative devices.

For Critical Insights on this Market, Request for More Info at:

https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=7186

With growing incidence of chronic diseases such as cancer, demand for biopsies to detect and diagnose the disease at early stage is burgeoning. Driven by this, the sales of endoscopy operative devices are expected to surge.

Similarly, preference for minimally invasive and advanced endoscopic operating devices due to less post-operative complications will create bankable growth prospects in the market.

Besides this, digestive problems among the all demographic population is increasing due to unhealthy eating habits. This is driving the need for gastrointestinal procedures and advanced therapeutics, thereby, propelling demand for endoscopy operative devices.

Report Attributes Details Base Year Value (2021A) US$ 8.7 Bn Projected Year Value (2032F) US$ 16.2 Bn Global Growth Rate (2022-2032) CAGR 5.8%

Key Takeaways:

Based on application, the gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy segment is expected to exhibit growth at 6.3% CAGR through 2032.

In terms of product type, access devices segment grew at a CAGR of 5.2% during the historic period (2017-21) and the trend is likely to continue through 2022 & beyond.

North America is the expected to dominate the market, creating an absolute $ opportunity of US$ 2.7 Bn in 2022.

in 2022. Endoscopy operative devices sales are projected to increase by 1.8X , reaching nearly US$ 16.2 Bn by 2032.

Asia Pacific is anticipated to exhibit fastest growth rate owing to the increasing prevalence of chronic diseases such as cancer across India and China .

Growth Drivers:

Prevalence of gastrointestinal disorders across the U.S., China , and India is estimated to create lucrative opportunities for the market.

, and is estimated to create lucrative opportunities for the market. Growing demand for endoscopy operative devices in the cancer centers, hospitals, oncology specialty clinics, and other healthcare facilities will increase the sales in the market.

Restraints:

Lack of skilled professionals in Brazil , Indonesia and other underdeveloped regions might hinder the market growth.

, and other underdeveloped regions might hinder the market growth. High cost of the endoscopy operative devices and related procedures is likely to limit sales in the market.

Get Customization on this Report for Specific Research Solutions

https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=RC&rep_id=7186

Competitive Landscape:

Leading players operating in global endoscopy operative devices market are incorporating advanced technologies such as automated software and hardware to gain a competitive edge. They are also forming alliances through novel agreements with other key companies to expand their customer base.

For instance,

In June 2019 , Karl Storz , a subsidiary of Medtronic collaborated with the parent company in an attempt to incorporate 3D vision technology of Karl Storz into Medtronic's robotic surgical platform.

, , a subsidiary of Medtronic collaborated with the parent company in an attempt to incorporate 3D vision technology of into Medtronic's robotic surgical platform. In March 2019 , Olympus Corporation introduced PowerSpiral, which uses motorized parts to diagnose and treat gastrointestinal conditions. This device gently comes in contact with the gastrointestinal mucosa before performing the endoscope of the small intestine.

Key Companies Profiled by Fact.MR

Olympus

Medtronic

Cook Medical Inc.

Karl Storz

Boston Scientific Corporation

Stryker

Ethicon Endo-Surgery, Inc.

Richard Wolf GmbH

CONMED Corporation

Fujifilm Holdings Corporation

More Valuable Insights on Endoscopy Operative Devices Market, Ask Our Analyst

https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=AE&rep_id=7186

Fact.MR, in its latest study, provides unbiased analysis on the endoscopy operative devices market. It also provides insights into the key drivers, latest trends, and opportunities anticipated to trigger the growth of the endoscopy operative devices market through detailed segmentation as follows:

By Product Type:

Energy Systems

Access Devices

Suction & Irrigation Systems

Hand Instruments

Wound Retractors

Snares

By Application:

Gastrointestinal (GI) Endoscopy

Laparoscopy

Obstetrics/Gynecology Endoscopy

Arthroscopy

Urology Endoscopy (Cystoscopy)

Bronchoscopy

Mediastinoscopy

Otoscopy

Laryngoscopy

Other Applications

By Region:

North America

Latin America

Europe

East Asia

South Asia & Oceania

& Oceania Middle East & Africa

Key Questions Covered in the Endoscopy Operative Devices Market Report

At what rate will the global endoscopy operative devices market grow until 2032?

What is the forecast market size of endoscopy operative devices market in 2022?

Which are the factors limiting the sales of endoscopy operative devices?

Which are the factors bolstering the growth in the global endoscopy operative devices market?

Who are the dominating players profiled in the global endoscopy operative devices market?

Explore Fact.MR's Coverage on the Healthcare Domain

Endoscopy Devices Market: The overall sales of endoscopy devices are expected to increase owing to the rising prevalence of age-related ailments such as gastrointestinal disorders, cancers, and hearing loss. In addition to this, growing preference for minimally invasive surgeries over standard surgeries is anticipated to surge the sales in the market.

Endoscopy Ultrasound Market: Growing demand for early diagnosis and treatment of gastrointestinal disorders and cancers will propel the demand for endoscopy ultrasound market. Also, increasing use of endoscopy ultrasound in the hospitals and other healthcare facilities is likely to bolster the growth in the market.

Disposable Endoscopes Market: Demand for disposable endoscopes is projected to rise on the back of growing incidence of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) due the use of infected endoscopes. Furthermore, the clearance of disposable endoscopes by various regulatory bodies is estimated to create lucrative opportunities for the market.

About Fact.MR

Fact.MR is a market research and consulting agency with deep expertise in emerging market intelligence. Spanning a wide range  from automotive & industry 4.0 to healthcare, chemical, and materials, to even the most niche categories. 80% of Fortune 1000's trusts us in critical decision making.

Contact:

Mahendra Singh

US Sales Office

11140 Rockville Pike

Suite 400

Rockville, MD 20852

United States

Tel: +1 (628) 251-1583

E: [email protected]

SOURCE Fact.MR
Fresenius Medical Care Named to Circle of Excellence by the American Society of Transplantation for Benefit Increase

WALTHAM, Mass., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Fresenius Medical Care North America (FMCNA), the nation's leading provider of kidney care products and services, today announced an increase in its paid leave program with six weeks of full paid time off to give the gift of life through living organ donation. The newly expanded benefit for eligible employees will provide full pay during the time needed to undergo a qualified organ donation or bone marrow transplant procedure and fully recover.

Today, on Donate Life Living Donor Day, the company has been named to the American Society of Transplantation's Circle of Excellence, an achievement given to companies that support employees who choose to be living donors. The Living Donor Circle of Excellence Program was launched by the American Society of Transplantation in 2020 to honor employers who execute policies that provide salary support to their employees who choose to be a living organ donor. The company has also become a supporting partner of the American Society of Transplantation with a financial contribution at the Platinum level.

"By increasing our paid donor leave benefit, we are increasing support for employees who selflessly choose to save lives through living organ donation," said Brian Silva, Chief Human Resources Officer and Senior Vice President, Administration for Fresenius Medical Care North America. "We recognize that transplant is a life-saving treatment for people living with kidney disease and our employees work tirelessly to provide superior care to patients. It was only natural for us to evolve this benefit which helps our employees while also improving the lives of those impacted by kidney disease."

The Circle of Excellence recognizes companies that give employees at least four weeks of time off at 80 percent of their usual salary. FMCNA has exceeded that minimum standard in providing employees with six weeks off, fully paid.

"The best outcome for our patients is receiving the gift of life through transplantation, and we know that there is a crucial need for more living organ donors," said Dr. Ben Hippen, Head of Transplant Medicine for Fresenius Medical Care's Global Medical Office. "We are proud to support our employees who are ready to become organ donors and help those in urgent need of transplant."

"We are thrilled to welcome Fresenius Medical Care as a Supporting Partner of the Living Donor Circle of Excellence," said John Gill, MD, President of the American Society of Transplantation. "By joining, they will eliminate a significant barrier to living donation for their 68,000 employees. As the largest provider of dialysis in the United States, this partnership directly demonstrates their support for living kidney donors and their commitment to work with the transplant community to improve the care of patients living with kidney failure by removing barriers to transplantation."

Nearly 90,000 patients are currently awaiting a life-saving kidney, but of the transplants performed in 2021, living donors accounted for only 24 percent of kidney transplants. Financial disincentives are a barrier for many potential living organ donors. Living organ donation typically includes a four-to-six-week recovery period, and many donors have to use their vacation time or take unpaid absences. Fresenius Medical Care recognizes the importance of supporting those who want to give this gift of life and is proud to be included in the Living Donor Circle of Excellence.

If you are interested in learning more about living kidney donation visit our Kidney Donation page.

About Fresenius Medical Care North America

Fresenius Medical Care North America (FMCNA) is the premier healthcare company focused on providing the highest quality care to people with renal and other chronic conditions. Through its industry-leading network of dialysis facilities and outpatient cardiac and vascular labs, Fresenius Medical Care North America provides coordinated healthcare services at pivotal care points for hundreds of thousands of chronically ill customers throughout the continent. As the world's largest fully integrated renal company, it offers specialty pharmacy and laboratory services, and manufactures and distributes the most comprehensive line of dialysis equipment, disposable products, and renal pharmaceuticals. For more information, visit the FMCNA website at https://fmcna.com/.

About the American Society of Transplantation

Founded in 1982, the American Society of Transplantation (AST) is a non-profit, 501(c)3 organization dedicated to advancing the field of transplantation and improving patient care by promoting research, education, advocacy, organ donation, and service to the community. The society is the largest transplant organization in North America (consisting of more than 4,000 professional members) and is recognized as the premier society for transplantation. AST members are sought out as transplant experts and advocates. Other transplant organizations, policy makers, regulatory agencies, payors, academic institutions, and the general public look to the AST for guidance, research, and resources related to transplantation. To learn more, visit www.myast.org.

Media Contact:

Brad Puffer

Fresenius Medical Care North America

781-699-3331

[email protected]

SOURCE Fresenius Medical Care Holdings, Inc.
The announcement came from Benjamin Aidoo and the meme's characters, who are set to hold the auction as a show of support for Ukraine. Previously, the Foundation platform, where the auction will take place, has already held auctions of famous Internet memes. Nyan Cat was sold for 300 ETH Feb 19, 2021, DisasterGirl was sold for 180 ETH Apr 18, 2021, and Attached Girlfriend was sold for 200 ETH Apr 4, 2021.

"This battle is not only for Ukraine, but the whole of free Europe. If Ukraine does not hold out, the world may be on the verge of a third world war," Benjamin Aidoo said in a video, which showed the other Ghanian pallbearers sitting next to him.

On February 24, Russian troops poured over the border of Ukraine, where Russian planes and missile launchers attacked cities and airports in Ukraine.

The attack, which the Ukraine government called "a full-scale attack from multiple directions," spanned much of the nation.

The group's appeal was posted on the Matthew "DigiNeko" Ordrick YouTube channel, the same platform where this meme was born.

"Together with the Ukrainian PR community, we are putting all our global popularity on the NFT auction of our meme Coffin Dance (Dancing Pallbearers) on April 7, 2022, in order to help stop death in Ukraine and help the people of Ukraine who are having a hard time," the post states.

COVID-19 has spawned hundreds of memes, but none as all-pervasive and ubiquitous as the "dancing coffin" group from Ghana. The dancing pallbearers seen in the macabre yet humorous memes popularized by COVID are sound tracked in almost every video posted by a decade-old track from Russian composer Tony Igy, popularly known as "Astronomia."

In 2020, the meme was shared by former US President Donald Trump on his official Facebook page, which mocked a controversial statement made by his Democratic rival, Joe Biden.

"Our dance has always been cheerful, and we have tried to give a smile to this world amid the difficult time. We do not consider death to be something good. It is very bad. And throughout our dance, we are trying to heal the soul and hearts of loved ones and relatives," explains Benjamin Aidoo.

By buying an NFT token with the famous image, those interested can be sure that they are the official owner of the meme, which will be released in a single copy. This status also includes unlimited royalty-free commercial use of the photo and its elements, as well as the use of the visual image of Dancing Pallbearers for merch production in any country of the world.

The group said 25% of the funds from the sale of the meme would be transferred to the Ukrainian charitable foundation "Come Back Alive" in a bid to support the Ukrainian army and its heroic people.

The same part will be transferred to the support of the group's Ukrainian friends  employees of a large Ukrainian advertising agency, who lost their income, and many of whom were forced to leave their homes to begin a new life due to the war. Benjamin Aidoo said the report would be on his Instagram account at the end of the auction. The other half will provide an opportunity for new creativity and the development of the African culture of music and dance by the team of Benjamin Aidoo.

"We have almost no profit from our popularity before. All meme videos were monetized by the music label. We need ur support for further creative development, as well as help from Ukraine. We can do a lot if we finally have the resources to develop our creativity, this will also give an ever-increasing value to our world fame put up for auction" - said Benjamin Aidoo

Those who want to learn more about the auction may check out the video on the "DigiNeko" Ordrick YouTube channel, the Benjamin Aidoo Twitter account and the Bads Agency website for more information.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoQ-wb1AMAk

SOURCE Coffin Dance Team
NEW DELHI, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The study conducted by Astute Analytica foresees a tremendous growth in revenue of the Global Bearing Market from US$ 80,523.6 Mn in 2021 to US$ 1,20,054.1 Mn by 2027. The market is registering a CAGR of 6.7% during the forecast period 2022-2027.

Market Snapshot

Bearings are highly engineered, precision-made components which enable a machinery to move at extremely high speeds and carry remarkable loads with ease and efficiency. It is a part of a machine that allows one part to rotate in contact with another part with as less friction as possible. Bearings are used in every kind of equipment or machinery, ranging from automobile parts, farm equipment, and household appliances to defense and aerospace equipment.

Request a Sample Report of Global Bearing Market: https://www.astuteanalytica.com/request-sample/bearing-market

Market Dynamics

Drivers:

The growing impetus of the market is attributed to factors such as rising utilization of bearing in motor, demand of automotive electrification, government initiatives to drive the manufacturing sector, and increasing demand for bearings in energy-efficient cars. Bearings are used in automobile to ensure smooth running of cars, electric vehicles (EVs), and other type of vehicles such as light weight commercial vehicles and heavy vehicles such as trucks. Therefore, the demand for bearing increases with the rise in the production of automobiles. On an average, a passenger automobile has 35 bearings, which vary substantially depending on the model of the vehicle and the widely used technology. Further, a rise in utilization of bearing in railways, electric vehicles, & rolling mills is accelerating the market demand. Several features that are associated with the comfort, safety and fuel-efficiency of a vehicle rely on automotive bearings that adhere to the strict criteria for performance, function and design of the application. Moreover, the governments of different countries are pushing the growth of manufacturing sector in their country. For instance, Indian government's initiatives such as 'Make in India' and 'Aatmanirbhar Bharat', aimed at reviving the manufacturing sector, in turn increases the demand for bearings. Similarly, the Chinese government's 'Made in China' is reviving the manufacturing sector in China.

Restraints:

Counterfeit is growing rapidly globally. Bearing is one of the popular counterfeiting items. Companies such as SKF and NSK are among the companies that are more prone to this threat. Such fake bearings are dangerous due to the possible design failures that may occur, leading to machine damage and injuries. When counterfeiters sell a product that looks the same as the original but at a lower price, the authentic brand will lose sales. Therefore, the counterfeit products pose a great challenge to the bearing market.

Opportunities:

The rising demand of bearings in wind turbines and rising concern about green vehicles is estimated to provide a lucrative opportunity for the market growth.

Impact of COVID-19

The global automobile industry weakened in the first quarter of 2020. The pandemic has severely impacted automotive production and sales. Further, the supply chain disruptions also negatively affected the bearings market. However, many countries across the globe have expanded significantly from third quarter of 2020. Considering this factor, a substantial growth is expected in the Global Bearing Market post the pandemic.

Regional Analysis of the Global Bearing Market:

The US is the highest shareholder region in North America bearing market in 2021 and is further estimated to continue its dominance over the forecast period. Based on end-use industry, the industrial segment has the highest share in the North America bearing market. Under industrial segment, the machine tools hold the highest share in the market in 2021.

bearing market in 2021 and is further estimated to continue its dominance over the forecast period. Based on end-use industry, the industrial segment has the highest share in the bearing market. Under industrial segment, the machine tools hold the highest share in the market in 2021. Europe is the second highest shareholder region in the Global Bearing Market in 2021. The growing sales and production of electric and hybrid vehicles, along with the growth and development of automotive and automobile industries is propelling market growth in Europe . Germany is the highest shareholder country in the bearings market of Europe . Based on product type, the ball bearings have the highest market share in 2021.

is the second highest shareholder region in the Global Bearing Market in 2021. The growing sales and production of electric and hybrid vehicles, along with the growth and development of automotive and automobile industries is propelling market growth in . is the highest shareholder country in the bearings market of . Based on product type, the ball bearings have the highest market share in 2021. Asia Pacific dominated the Global Bearings Market in 2021 and is also registering the highest CAGR over the forecast period. China is one of the major markets in APAC, and the sale in the country is expected to catapult over the foreseeable years stimulated by the rapid expansion of machinery and motor vehicle production. In terms of material, the specialty alloy segment has the highest share in the APAC bearing market in 2021

dominated the Global Bearings Market in 2021 and is also registering the highest CAGR over the forecast period. is one of the major markets in APAC, and the sale in the country is expected to catapult over the foreseeable years stimulated by the rapid expansion of machinery and motor vehicle production. In terms of material, the specialty alloy segment has the highest share in the APAC bearing market in 2021 Brazil is the highest shareholder country in South America bearing market in 2021, whereas, Argentina is registering the highest CAGR over the projection period. Based on end-use industry, the industrial segment has the highest share in the bearings market of South America in 2021. Under industrial segment, machine tools occupy the highest market share in 2021 followed by aerospace industry.

is the highest shareholder country in bearing market in 2021, whereas, is registering the highest CAGR over the projection period. Based on end-use industry, the industrial segment has the highest share in the bearings market of in 2021. Under industrial segment, machine tools occupy the highest market share in 2021 followed by aerospace industry. South Africa dominates the Middle East & Africa bearing market in 2021 and is further estimated to continue its dominance over the forecast period. In terms of product type, roller bearings have the highest share in the MEA bearing market. Further, based on material, the specialty alloy has the highest market share in 2021, whereas the ceramics segment is estimated to have the highest annual growth rate over the projection period.

Directly Purchase a copy of report with TOC @ https://www.astuteanalytica.com/request-sample/bearing-market

Report Attribute Details Market Size Value in 2021 US$ 80,523.6 Million Market Outlook for 2027 US$ 1,20,054.1 Million Expected CAGR Growth 6.7% from 2022  2027 Base Year 2021 Forecast Period 2022-2027 Top Market Players SKF, Schaeffle AG, The Timken Company, NSK Ltd., IKO International, ISB Industries, NTN Corporation, and JTEKT Corporation among others. Segments Covered By Product, By Size, By Material, By Industry, By Industrial, By Region Geographies Covered North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa, South America Customization Options Get your customized report as per your preference. Ask for customization

Competitive Insight

The key players in the Global Bearing Market are SKF, Schaeffle AG, The Timken Company, NSK Ltd., IKO International, ISB Industries, NTN Corporation, and JTEKT Corporation among others. Through extensive research, it is found that big players have adopted various competitive strategies such as merger & acquisition in order to have a grip in the stabilized Japanese market. Furthermore, leading companies are expanding their geographical boundaries by acquiring small brands and domestic companies.

Segmentation Overview

The following are the different segments of the Global Bearing Market:

By Product segment of the Global Bearing Market is sub-segmented into:

Ball Bearings



Deep Groove Ball Bearings





Self-Aligning Ball Bearings





Angular-Contact Ball Bearings





Thrust Ball Bearings



Roller Bearings



Tapered Roller Bearings





Spherical Roller Bearings





Cylindrical Roller Bearings





Needle Roller Bearings



Mounted Bearings



Linear Bearings



Slide Bearings



Jewel Bearings



Frictionless Bearings



Others

By Size segment of the Global Bearing Market is sub-segmented into:

30 to 40 mm



41 to 50 mm



51 to 60 mm



61 to 70 mm



70 mm & above

By Material segment of the Global Bearing Market is sub-segmented into:

Specialty Steel Alloys



Plastic



Ceramics

By Industry segment of the Global Bearing Market is sub-segmented into:

Automotive



OEM





Aftermarket



Industrial



Agriculture





Railway





Mining





Aerospace





Machine Tools





Exports





Others

By Industrial segment of the Global Bearing Market is sub-segmented into:

OEM's



Aftermarket

By Region segment of the Global Bearing Market is sub-segmented into:

North America



The U.S.





Canada





Mexico



Europe



The U.K.





Germany





France





Spain





Russia





Rest of Europe



Asia Pacific



China





India





Japan





Australia & New Zealand

&



ASEAN





South Korea





Rest of Asia Pacific



South America



Argentina





Brazil





Rest of South America



Middle East & Africa



UAE





Saudi Arabia





South Africa





Israel





Rest of Middle East & Africa

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For Additional Information OR Media Enquiry, Please Mail Us At: [email protected]

About Astute Analytica

Astute Analytica is a global analytics and advisory company which has built a solid reputation in a short period, thanks to the tangible outcomes we have delivered to our clients. We pride ourselves in generating unparalleled, in depth and uncannily accurate estimates and projections for our very demanding clients spread across different verticals. We have a long list of satisfied and repeat clients from a wide spectrum including technology, healthcare, chemicals, semiconductors, FMCG, and many more. These happy customers come to us from all across the Globe. They are able to make well calibrated decisions and leverage highly lucrative opportunities while surmounting the fierce challenges all because we analyze for them the complex business environment, segment wise existing and emerging possibilities, technology formations, growth estimates, and even the strategic choices available. In short, a complete package. All this is possible because we have a highly qualified, competent, and experienced team of professionals comprising of business analysts, economists, consultants, and technology experts. In our list of priorities, you-our patron-come at the top. You can be sure of best cost-effective, value-added package from us, should you decide to engage with us.

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Email: [email protected] Website: www.astuteanalytica.com Follow US: LinkedIn | Twitter

SOURCE Astute Analytica
DUBLIN, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Cell Harvesting - Global Market Trajectory & Analytics" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Global Cell Harvesting Market to Reach $359.2 Million by 2026

The global market for Cell Harvesting estimated at US$233.2 Million in the year 2020, is projected to reach a revised size of US$359.2 Million by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 7.3% over the analysis period.

Cell harvesting is a next-generation technique that involves collection of stem cells from the culture media for R&D and therapeutic applications. Growth in the global market is spurred by of increasing investments in clinical, cell-based and regenerative medicine research.

The technique is likely to gain from rising incidence of infectious and chronic diseases coupled with continuous expansion of the biotechnology and biopharmaceutical industries. Stem cell research is estimated to witness fastest growth as stem cells derived from the bone marrow hold potential to advance stem cell biology, regenerative medicine and stem cell-based therapies.

Stem cells are one of the latest entrants joining the race for COVID-19 cure. The therapy involves intravenous administration of MSCs derived from the human placenta to COVID-19 patients for boosting the immune response and helping the body in fighting the infection. The approach is being investigated by various researchers in the US and China, with some of them observing positive outcomes.



Manual, one of the segments analyzed in the report, is projected to record 7.9% CAGR and reach US$284.4 Million by the end of the analysis period. After a thorough analysis of the business implications of the pandemic and its induced economic crisis, growth in the Automated segment is readjusted to a revised 5.6% CAGR for the next 7-year period. The Manual segment dominates market share owing to extensive adoption of these systems as a result of their affordable and user-friendly nature.



The U.S. Market is Estimated at $78.8 Million in 2021, While China is Forecast to Reach $32.1 Million by 2026

The Cell Harvesting market in the U.S. is estimated at US$78.8 Million in the year 2021. China, the world`s second largest economy, is forecast to reach a projected market size of US$32.1 Million by the year 2026 trailing a CAGR of 10.4% over the analysis period.

Among the other noteworthy geographic markets are Japan and Canada, each forecast to grow at 6.1% and 7% respectively over the analysis period. Within Europe, Germany is forecast to grow at approximately 6.6% CAGR. The US dominates market share due to increasing R&D investments and favorable government policies.

The US FDA has approved cord blood-based blood-forming stem cells for use in the US. These cells along with stem cells derived from the bone marrow are widely used in medical transplant procedures for treatment of cancer along with diseases related to the immune system and blood.

The Asia-Pacific market expansion is being driven by increasing R&D spending to develop new treatments, government policies favoring stem cell research, and public-private efforts to foster stem cell-based treatments.



Key Topics Covered:



I. METHODOLOGY

II. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. MARKET OVERVIEW

Influencer Market Insights

World Market Trajectories

Impact of Covid-19 and a Looming Global Recession

Cell Harvesting - A Prelude

With Stem Cells Holding Potential to Emerge as Savior for Healthcare System Struggling with COVID-19 Crisis, Demand for Cell Harvesting to Grow

Select Clinical Trials in Progress for MSCs in the Treatment of COVID-19

Lack of Antiviral Therapy Brings Spotlight on MSCs as Potential Option to Treat Severe Cases of COVID-19

Stem Cells Garner Significant Attention amid COVID-19 Crisis

Growing R&D Investments & Rising Incidence of Chronic Diseases to Drive the Global Cell Harvesting Market over the Long-term

US Dominates the Global Market, Asia-Pacific to Experience Lucrative Growth Rate

to Experience Lucrative Growth Rate Biopharmaceutical & Biotechnology Firms to Remain Key End-User

Remarkable Progress in Stem Cell Research Unleashes Unlimited Avenues for Regenerative Medicine and Drug Development

Drug Development

Therapeutic Potential

A Prelude to Genetic Testing

2. FOCUS ON SELECT PLAYERS (Total 30 Featured)

ADS Biotec Inc.

Argos Technologies Inc.

Arthrex, Inc.

Avita Medical

Bertin Bioreagent

BRAND GMBH + CO KG

Biomedical Research & Development Laboratories Inc. (Brandel)

( USA )

) Connectorate AG

Cox Scientific Ltd

PerkinElmer Inc.

SP Industries

Terumo BCT Inc.

TOMTEC Imaging Systems GmbH

3. MARKET TRENDS & DRIVERS

Development of Regenerative Medicine Accelerates Demand for Cell Harvesting

The Use of Mesenchymal Stem Cells in Regenerative Medicine to Drive the Cell Harvesting Market

Rise in Volume of Orthopedic Procedures Boosts Prospects for Stem Cell, Driving the Cell Harvesting

Increasing Demand for Stem Cell Based Bone Grafts: Promising Growth Ahead for Cell Harvesting

Spectacular Advances in Stem Cell R&D Open New Horizons for Regenerative Medicine

Stem Cell Transplants Drive the Demand for Cell Harvesting

Rise in Number of Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation Procedures Propels Market Expansion

Growing Incidence of Chronic Diseases to Boost the Demand for Cell Harvesting

Fatalities by Heart Conditions: Estimated Percentage Breakdown for Cardiovascular Disease, Ischemic Heart Disease, Stroke, and Others

Ageing Demographics to Drive Demand for Stem Cell Banking

Global Aging Population Statistics - Opportunity Indicators

High Cell Density as Major Bottleneck Leads to Innovative Cell Harvesting Methods

Advanced Harvesting Systems to Overcome Centrifugation Issues

Sophisticated Filters for Filtration Challenges

Innovations in Closed Systems Boost Efficiency & Productivity of Cell Harvesting

Enhanced Harvesting and Separation of Micro-Carrier Beads

4. GLOBAL MARKET PERSPECTIVE

III. REGIONAL MARKET ANALYSIS

UNITED STATES

Cell Harvesting Market Presence - Strong/Active/Niche/Trivial - Key Competitors in the United States for 2022

for 2022 Increasing Research on Stem Cells for Treating COVID-19 to drive the Cell Harvesting Market

Rising Investments in Stem Cell-based Research Favors Cell Harvesting Market

A Strong Regenerative Medicine Market Drives Cell Harvesting Demand

Arthritis

Percentage of Population Diagnosed with Arthritis by Age Group

Rapidly Ageing Population: A Major Driving Demand for Cell Harvesting Market

Increasing Incidence of Chronic Diseases Drives Focus onto Cell Harvesting

CVD in the US: Cardiovascular Disease* Prevalence in Adults by Gender & Age Group

Rising Cancer Cases Spur Growth in Cell Harvesting Market

CANADA

JAPAN

CHINA

EUROPE

FRANCE

GERMANY

ITALY

UNITED KINGDOM

REST OF EUROPE

ASIA-PACIFIC

REST OF WORLD

IV. COMPETITION

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/mig5z

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]

For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900

U.S. Fax: 646-607-1904

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SOURCE Research and Markets
SYDNEY, April 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- HEAL Partners, an Australia and Cayman based global Growth and Follow-On Fund specialising in Health, Education and Lifestyle sector investments ("HEAL"), today announced it has signed a Strategic Relationship Agreement with affiliates of Elliott Investment Management L.P. ("Elliott"). HEAL will launch its US$ 350-500 million Fund II in H1 2022. As part of the Strategic Relationship, Elliott is expected to contribute a significant anchor commitment to HEAL's Fund II.

This Strategic Relationship follows Elliott's January 2021 investment in Removery, the world's largest tattoo removal business and a HEAL portfolio company founded by HEAL Partners' Mark Evans, Chris Chambers and Peter Chapman. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Removery has 90 studios across U.S., Canada and Australia and plans to open a further 200 studios during the next two years.

Removery founder and HEAL Partner Mark Evans said "Elliott has been a great partner at Removery and we are excited to build on this strong relationship through our future HEAL funds". On behalf of Elliott, Isaac Kim said, "We are pleased about this Strategic Relationship with the HEAL team. We believe HEAL's focus on bringing operational expertise and follow-on growth investment into strong business models, many of which the team has created, is genuinely differentiated. Our work together through Removery underscores our confidence in HEAL's active management approach and ability to generate significant deal flow."

HEAL's Investment Partners are Mark Evans and Chris Chambers from Normanby Capital, Peter Chapman and Martin Dalgleish from Asia Principal Capital and Martin Robinson.

HEAL is also backed by pre-eminent industry leaders in the Health and Education sectors, including Chris Rex (Former CEO of Ramsay Healthcare), Stuart Giles and Cathie Reid (Co-founders of Icon Group and Epic Pharmacy), and Rod Jones (Founder and Executive Chairman of Navitas), Dr Andrew Meikle, (Dental Corp Canada and The Fertility Partners) and Jonathan Sudharta (Halodoc) alongside other industry luminaries.

HEAL's Investment and Advisory Committees have collectively created more than $19bn of shareholder value in the targeted HEAL sectors of Health and Education.

HEAL launched Fund I in August 2020 with three cornerstone investments, demonstrating the calibre of high growth opportunities available to the Fund: Edge Early Learning Centres (Australia), Removery (Tattoo Removal, USA) and Fertility Partners (IVF, Canada) and has made several further investments across the U.S, Australia and Asia. Fund I has closed heavily oversubscribed with A$140 million of commitments, surpassing its initial target of A$100 million. HEAL Partner, Martin Robinson, said, "We are very pleased with the composition and performance of our Fund 1 portfolio companies. We have committed the majority of our funds to date, with the remainder to be deployed into the existing portfolio over the next six months or so. We have seen several third party investments across our portfolio companies at significant premiums to our initial entry prices".

HEAL targets Health, Education and Lifestyle assets that are high-growth and globally and/or regionally scalable and has a strong commitment to ESG. Aside from founding its own opportunities, HEAL invests in later stage rounds where it can be an active and engaged participant in the management and operation of the underlying asset.

"Since launching HEAL, we have been impressed with the large number of high quality and investible opportunities we have evaluated that demonstrates the seismic shifts underway across the HEAL sectors. For Fund II, we have a strong pipeline of exciting new opportunities in addition to the follow-on opportunities available in several of our Fund I portfolio companies", concluded Robinson.

NOTES:

About HEAL Partners

HEAL is an early growth stage acceleration investment vehicle focused on revenue generating growth businesses in the health, education and lifestyle sectors with the potential for global scale or industry disruption. Led by a team of proven founders, investors, portfolio managers and operators, we are focused on capitalising on opportunities created by new specialties in developed markets.

Visit: www.healpartners.com

About Elliott

Elliott Investment Management L.P. manages approximately $51.5 billion of assets. Its flagship fund, Elliott Associates, L.P., was founded in 1977, making it one of the oldest funds under continuous management. The Elliott funds' investors include pension plans, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, foundations, funds-of-funds, high net worth individuals and families, and employees of the firm.

SOURCE HEAL Partners
Integrity Growth Partners, along with UCHealth's CARE Innovation Center, CU Healthcare Innovation Fund, and 25m Health, invest in Eon to accelerate rapid growth and expansion.

DENVER, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Eon, a leading provider of incidental findings and screening patient management software, announced today that it received a significant minority equity investment led by Integrity Growth Partners ("IGP"). The investment marks the first time Eon has raised an institutional round of outside capital; Eon will remain independent and founder-led.

The partnership with IGP, which includes participation from UCHealth's CARE Innovation Center ("UCHealth"), CU Healthcare Innovation Fund, and 25m Health, will enable accelerated growth in key business areas.

Eon Healthtech leader Eon partners with Integrity Growth Partners to advance Eon's mission to make patients healthier and healthcare affordable.

Eon provides a cloud-based patient management platform with solutions for many disease states, enabling hospitals and health systems to capture and longitudinally track patients at risk for future catastrophic diagnoses, creating a stage shift in the early detection of cancer and possible prevention of ruptured aneurysms. Eon's platform leverages computational linguistics, an advanced form of linguistics under the artificial intelligence umbrella, and robust data science models to accurately capture incidental findings in radiology reports. Eon's solution also provides care navigators with intuitive workflows for patient outreach, ensuring that at-risk patients don't "slip through the cracks" and are adherent to recommended follow-up exams and procedures. Today, Eon is used by over 45 health systems and 400 hospital facilities across the U.S. Notable partner health systems include LifePoint Health, HCA Healthcare, Ascension, Cleveland Clinic, and SCL Health. UCHealth, in conjunction with their investment, will also begin using Eon at all of their hospitals and imaging centers through a phased implementation.

Dr. Aki Al-Zubaidi, Eon Founder & co-CEO, is an Interventional Pulmonologist who founded Eon in 2015 to solve a clinical problem he experienced first-hand  lung cancer was most often diagnosed at a late stage where the likelihood of survival for those diagnosed was low. He knew that by tracking patients with lung nodules found early on regular radiology exams, he could diagnose lung cancer at earlier stages. The Eon executive team raised this round to power the next phase of growth, and Dr. Aki states, "We believe that IGP's investment and knowledge will help us continue to execute on our mission to make patients healthier and healthcare affordable." Dr. Aki continues, "Our comprehensive platform allows us to deliver tremendous value to our health system partners as they work to optimize patient outcomes and reduce patient leakage. We are thrilled to be working alongside the team at IGP, along with our other partners, and we look forward to further establishing ourselves as the leader in incidental patient management."

Historically, Eon has focused efforts on growth and revenue as a source of funding, rather than traditional fundraising partnerships, which fits IGP's investment strategy of investing in founder owned and operated companies. "We are incredibly proud of the industry-leading software platform we have built, and the work we have done to make incidental management a higher priority in healthcare. In choosing a partner, it was important for us to find one who not only understands our mission but can provide meaningful support and strategic insight as we continue to evolve; we found that in IGP," said Christine Spraker, co-CEO of Eon.

"We could not be more excited to lead the first institutional investment in Eon and to partner with Aki, Christine, and the rest of the amazing team at Eon," said Ryan Anderson, Partner at IGP. "Through its industry-leading solution, Eon not only helps hospitals address the growing need to more effectively capture and manage care of at-risk patients  many of which have historically 'slipped through the cracks'  but more importantly helps providers deliver the best patient care possible, ultimately leading to improved patient outcomes."

UCHealth, an innovative, nonprofit health system based in Colorado that focuses on improving health through innovation, was evaluating Eon as a partner for their early detection of lung cancer program, when they learned of the investment opportunity. This investment, alongside sister fund CU Healthcare Innovation Fund, represents the 13th company the system has invested in.

"We are excited about the possibilities that this innovative technology may provide for our patients," said Dan Rieber, UCHealth's Chief Financial Officer. "We hope our investment in Eon technology will help improve patient outcomes by allowing hospitals to track patients at high risk for developing serious medical conditions, like cancer, heart disease or even an aneurysm."

About Eon

Eon is a data science company that reduces variation in care and ensures adherence through patient capture, engagement, management, and tracking. We are on a mission to ensure the right data reaches the right people at the right time to make patients healthier and healthcare affordable. We believe together we can defy disease.

For more information, please contact Christine Spraker or [email protected] and follow Eon on LinkedIn and Twitter.

About Integrity Growth Partners

Based in Los Angeles, Integrity Growth Partners is a growth private equity firm focused on investing in lower middle market software and tech-enabled services businesses led by exceptional management teams. IGP targets investments in high-growth companies with established products and business models, bringing to bear a differentiated combination of investing and operating experience. For more information, visit www.integritygp.com.

About UCHealth

UCHealth is an innovative, nonprofit health system that delivers the highest quality medical care with an excellent patient experience. UCHealth includes 25,000 employees, 12 acute-care full-service hospitals and hundreds of physicians across Colorado, southern Wyoming and western Nebraska. With University of Colorado Hospital on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus as its academic anchor and the only adult academic medical center in the region, UCHealth is dedicated to providing unmatched patient care in the Rocky Mountain West. Offering more than 150 clinic locations, UCHealth pushes the boundaries of medicine, providing advanced treatments and clinical trials and improving health through innovation.

Contacts:

Eon

Christine Spraker

303.870.4042

[email protected]

Integrity Growth Partners

Ryan Anderson

310.689.5193

[email protected]

Doyl Burkett

310.689.5191

[email protected]

UCHealth

Kelli Christensen

303.956.0160

[email protected]

SOURCE Eon




NINGBO, April 4 (Xinhua) -- In China, the Qingming Festival is for families to visit their ancestors' tombs and make ritual offerings.

The steamed Qingtuan, a sweet green rice ball, is not only the carrier of craftsmanship but also the ceremony for thousands of families to convey their sincere feelings of reunion and the hope for spring.

In the past, eating Qingtuan was a tradition in south and east China. In recent years, the recipe is more well-known both domestically and internationally.

Produced by Xinhua Global Service
TEL AVIV, Israel, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Authomize, the first Cloud Identity Access Management (IAM) Security Platform, announced today the appointment of executives over the past quarter for Customer Success, Strategic Channel Partners, and Business Operations.

As Authomize continues to expand its go-to-market motion in North America, the company has appointed Daphni Eissing as Head of Customer Success, Stacy Miller as Director of Strategic Channels, and Elenur Lanphar as Director of Business Operations.

"We are excited to continue executing on our growth plan in the US and grateful to add seasoned leaders to our team," says Dotan Bar Noy, CEO and co-founder of Authomize. "These appointments reflect our commitment to our customers as we continue to drive forward with our customer-centric approach. These strong leaders are key to our strategic plans to develop and grow with partners, making sure it is easy to do business with us as we build out the foundation for our exponential growth."

"Bringing on customer success early on reflects Authomize's customer-centric approach," says Eissing who comes to Authomize after building and leading customer success teams in BigID and SailPoint. "My goal is to show our customers how much we care, listen, and want to build genuine long-lasting partnerships."

"Building the Partner program during the early stages of a startup shows that the organization values the partner community and understands the impact they can have with customers and prospects," says Miller whose long career in customer success and consulting roles for security and data product integrations saw her play critical roles in building the Strategic Partnerships efforts at SailPoint, Auth0, and later Okta. "I am thrilled to work with partners and add Authomize to their portfolio of security offerings so they can better secure their clients."

"I am excited to join Authomize and looking forward to working with the internal teams to further develop our already extensive business operations," says Lanphar, who previously led Sales Operations at Tavant and will support the development and implementation of the corporate operational strategy, translating business objectives into efficient processes. "I feel at home here at Authomize due to the shared values on customer-first approach and the continuous aim to keep up the positive work environment for all employees."

The recent growth has extended Authomize's North American footprint to 10 US states and Canada.

"We continue to rapidly expand in the US, and continue executing on our aggressive hiring plan," says Amit Begleiter, Authomize's Head of HR. "Being a customer-centric company begins with being an employee-centric company built around collaborative culture and growth opportunities while providing a top-notch benefits package and flexibility around remote work. We are grateful for our diverse and talented team and continuing to grow the Authomize family."

Authomize is continuing to hire for positions across North America. For more information, please visit our careers page.

About Authomize

The first Cloud IAM Security Platform, Authomize continuously monitors identities, access privileges, assets, and activities to secure apps and cloud services. Our full-stack yet granular visibility across IaaS, SaaS, and Data environments enables organizations to understand how their access privileges are being used and ensure effective control over the security of their assets. Backed by Innovation Endeavors, Blumberg Capital, Entree Capital and Microsoft's M12, Authomize is headquartered in Tel Aviv. Learn more at www.authomize.com and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for news and updates.

MEDIA CONTACT

Cole Christy

Gregory FCA on behalf of Authomize

[email protected]

+1 619-972-9836

SOURCE Authomize
New facilities to boost waste treatment and maximize energy and resource recovery



DALLAS, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Jacobs (NYSE:J) was appointed by PUB, Singapore's National Water Agency, to provide professional engineering services for the development of the new greasy waste (GWTF) and food waste treatment facilities (FWTF) to maximize energy and resource recovery at the Changi Water Reclamation Plant (CWRP).

To be co-located with the CWRP, the new facilities will boost Singapore's waste treatment capabilities while harnessing synergies from co-digesting greasy waste, food waste and used water sludge  a by-product of the water reclamation process  to increase biogas yield. The additional biogas can be used for electricity generation to power CWRP, thereby reducing its carbon footprint.



Jacobs will provide preliminary and detailed design and engineering services for the new GWTF, as well as site supervision during construction, testing and commissioning of the project. Jacobs will also conduct the preliminary design study for the FWTF and will review additional modification works to the existing facilities at CWRP to support the co-digestion process.

"With the addition of treatment facilities at Changi and also Tuas, Singapore's greasy waste treatment capacity is expected to double by 2025," said Jacobs Asia Pacific & Middle East Senior Vice President and General Manager Keith Lawson. "The project will meet the nation's long-term needs and help decarbonize the water treatment process. We're excited to continue our partnership with PUB in delivering forward-looking technologies that bring climate response to the forefront of the water treatment process. And in the process, we are combining our knowledge, experience and lessons learned from both CWRP and Tuas Water Reclamation Plant to deliver the best outcome on this project."

When completed, the GWTF will treat up to 12,000 cubic meters of waste a month  the equivalent of over 75,000 barrels of oil product.

"By co-locating both waste treatment facilities with CWRP, PUB will be able to reap the synergies from processing both types of waste with used water sludge. This will boost PUB's quest to enhance water sustainability and contribute to a low-carbon future," said PUB Water Reclamation (Plants) Department Director Mr. Ooi Kian Eng.

At Jacobs, we're challenging today to reinvent tomorrow by solving the world's most critical problems for thriving cities, resilient environments, mission-critical outcomes, operational advancement, scientific discovery and cutting-edge manufacturing, turning abstract ideas into realities that transform the world for good. With $14 billion in revenue and a talent force of approximately 55,000, Jacobs provides a full spectrum of professional services including consulting, technical, scientific and project delivery for the government and private sector. Visit jacobs.com and connect with Jacobs on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Certain statements contained in this press release constitute forward-looking statements as such term is defined in Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and such statements are intended to be covered by the safe harbor provided by the same. Statements made in this release that are not based on historical fact are forward-looking statements. We base these forward-looking statements on management's current estimates and expectations as well as currently available competitive, financial and economic data. Forward-looking statements, however, are inherently uncertain. There are a variety of factors that could cause business results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the emergence and spread of variants of COVID-19, the efficacy and availability of vaccines and treatments, and the related reaction of governments on global and regional market conditions and the company's business. For a description of some additional factors that may occur that could cause actual results to differ from our forward-looking statements, see the discussions contained under Item 1 - Business; Item 1A - Risk Factors; Item 3 - Legal Proceedings; and Item 7 - Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations in our most recently filed Annual Report on Form 10-K, ,and Item 2 - Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations; Item 1 - Legal Proceedings; and Item 1A - Risk Factors in our most recently filed Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, as well as the company's other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company is not under any duty to update any of the forward-looking statements after the date of this press release to conform to actual results, except as required by applicable law.

For press/media inquiries:

Kerrie Sparks

214.583.8433

SOURCE Jacobs
New Firm Provides a Trusted Network of Vendors to Complete New Build and Renovation Projects with Oversight and Highest Quality

SUFFIELD, Conn. and OBIDOS, Portugal, April 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- JACS21 is a new design and build consulting firm dedicated to helping individuals and families design and build their dream home or commercial building in Portugal . The company will facilitate locating the perfect property or land, design a renovation or new build, and oversee the project.

JACS21 Launches to Help Families Design and Build Their Dreams in Portugal

JACS21 is based in Obidos, Portugal and Suffield, CT in the United States, and maintains an extensive network of providers in Portugal. The company started as the result of its founder's, Joe Santos', experience remodeling a home in central Portugal where he encountered delays and sub-par work. Santos realized he needed a stronger local presence in Portugal because at the time he was not able to travel frequently to Portugal or the job site. Santos formed a strong team of local providers resulting in a beautiful, high-quality and comfortable home overlooking a verdant valley.

"Having gone through the design and build process myself in Portugal a number of times, I saw a need to have a trusted network of vendors to work with, as well as someone to help oversee the project, especially since I did not live in Portugal full time," said Joe Santos, CEO and Founder of JACS21. "There is an immense amount of talent and craftsmanship available in Portugal to give families the ability to truly design their dream home, and I hope that my team and I can help fulfill those dreams."

JACS21 knows that every project is unique, and has the knowledge and network to help anyone achieve their dream home no matter what stage the project is in  starting from scratch or renovating an existing project.

JACS21 Services Include:

Architectural Services

Architectural and Engineering

Build

Design

Golden Visa*

Licensing and Registration

Renovation

Reconstruction

Residency

"We have a positive teamwork approach, and our goal is to create an enjoyable experience with our clients when renovating or building their dream home," added Santos. "I understand the challenges of building in Portugal and we are committed not only to designing, building and/or renovating projects, but to do it ethically, professionally, and through ongoing communication to the client."

Request a free consultation by visiting www.jacs21.com or emailing [email protected] .

Golden Visa services are provided by law firms, but jacs21 can give general information and links to legal providers.

About JACS21

JACS21 is a design/build consulting firm dedicated to helping individuals and families create their dream home in Portugal. Through a strong team of local providers, the JACS21 team provides relationships for everything from architecture and design services, to licensing, visa and construction services. For more information, visit www.jacs21.com.

PRESS CONTACT

NAME

Angela Simoes

PHONE

415-302-2934

WEBSITE

https://www.jacs21.com/

SOURCE JACS21
OSLO, Norway, April 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Lytix Biopharma AS (Lytix), a clinical-stage company with an in situ vaccination technology platform targeting cancer indications, notes that the first patient has been dosed in Verrica Pharmaceuticals Inc.'s Phase II study evaluating LTX-315 for the treatment of basal cell carcinoma (skin cancer). This triggers a USD 1 million milestone payment to Lytix in accordance with the licensing agreement between the parties.

Verrica Pharmaceuticals Inc ("Verrica") has an exclusive worldwide license agreement with Lytix to develop and commercialize LTX-315 for dermatologic oncology conditions.

"We are delighted to see Verrica doses the first patient in its Phase II trial evaluating LTX-315 as a non-surgical treatment option for patients with basal cell carcinoma. Non-melanoma skin cancers, including basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas, are the most common form of cancer in the U.S., with over 5 million diagnoses each year, and there is a high unmet need for new treatments. We look forward to following the development of our novel oncolytic molecule as a potential new treatment for non-melanoma skin cancer," said ystein Rekdal, CEO of Lytix Biopharma.

LTX-315 is a first-in-class oncolytic molecule representing a new and superior in situ therapeutic vaccination principle, and in August 2020, Lytix licensed LTX-315 to Verrica for the treatment of dermatologic oncology indications.

Under the terms of the agreement, Lytix is entitled to receive an upfront payment, contingent regulatory milestones based on achievement of specified development goals, and sales milestones, with aggregate payments of up to USD 111 million, including the mentioned milestone. In addition, Lytix is entitled to receive tiered royalties based on worldwide annual sales. There are approximately 3-4 million patients diagnosed with basal cell carcinomas in the U.S. each year, with a high unmet need for new treatment options.

To view the full announcement from Verrica, please visit https://verrica.com/press_release/verrica-pharmaceuticals-announces-first-patient-dosed-in-phase-2-study-of-ltx-315-a-potential-first-in-class-oncolytic-peptide-based-immunotherapy-for-the-treatment-of-basal-cell-carcinoma/

For information about Verrica's clinical trial, please visit www.clinicaltrials.gov.

For more information about Verrica, please visit www.verrica.com.

For further information please contact:

ystein Rekdal (CEO),

Telephone: +47 975 73 358

E-mail: [email protected]

About Lytix Biopharma AS

Based in Oslo, Norway, Lytix Biopharma is a clinical-stage biotech company developing novel cancer immunotherapies, an area within cancer therapy that is aimed at activating the patient's immune system to fight cancer. The Company's technology is based on pioneering research in "host defense peptides"  nature's first line of defense towards foreign pathogens. Lytix Biopharma's lead product, LTX-315, is a first-in-class oncolytic molecule representing a new and superior in situ therapeutic vaccination principle to boost anti-cancer immunity, with the potential to be the ideal combination partner with other types of immunotherapies. LTX-315 target cancer cells and disintegrate their cell membranes, causing immunogenic cell death and release of a patient's tumor specific antigens. This mode of action allows cytotoxic T cells to recognize, infiltrate, and attack cancer cells. The Company was listed on Euronext Growth in Oslo in June 2021, following a private placement covered by investors such as PBM Capital, a U.S. based, healthcare-focused investment firm. For more information, visit www.lytixbiopharma.com.

About LTX-315

LTX-315 is a potential first-in-class oncolytic molecule administered directly into a tumor to induce immunogenic cell death, which may offer a non-surgical option for patients suffering from skin cancer. The technology is based on pioneering research in "host defense peptides"  nature's first line of defense towards foreign pathogens. LTX-315 has demonstrated positive tumor-specific immune cell responses in multi-indication Phase I/II oncology trials.

About in situ vaccination

In situ vaccination stimulates a patient's immune system by injecting drugs with the ability to kill cancer cells straight into the tumor environment. Lytix Biopharma has applied this approach with its first-in-class oncolytic molecules, representing an alternative and unique approach to cancer vaccination. Importantly, this approach generates an immune response against a broad antigen repertoire without pre-identifying the antigens, which in turn can save considerable costs and valuable time.

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/lytix-biopharma-as/r/lytix-biopharma-receives-milestone-payment-from-verrica-pharmaceuticals-inc--triggered-by-first-pati,c2839791

SOURCE Lytix Biopharma AS
All the available city forest carbon credits in the country were purchased in a landmark transaction.

SEATTLE, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Regen Network, a technology company developing a global marketplace for earth's ecosystem assets, services, and data, has purchased all the city forest carbon credits currently available in the United States.

The purchase is the largest and first-of-its-kind transaction and represents the carbon stored in 13 urban forestry projects across the country.

Regen Network purchased credits representing over 31,000 metric tons of carbon for a total purchase price exceeding $1 million. The price per credit was between $34 and $45 per metric ton. Regen Network intends to digitize the credits and offer them for sale through their blockchain platform in the coming months.

The sale price is among the highest ever paid for forest carbon credits. The most recent published pricing for global forest carbon credits in 2020 was between $2 and $10 per credit.

"The extraordinarily high price paid for these credits demonstrates the immense value of our city forests," said Doug McPherson of Otium Business Consulting who represented the projects in the sale. "This single purchase of all the currently available U.S. credits establishes these and future urban forest carbon credits, with their many impacts and their presence in cities, as a must-have component of any sustainability or carbon portfolio. Additional urban forest credits from these and other projects will be available in 2022 and future years."

Regen Network's mission is to align economics with ecology to reverse climate change through carbon removal that regenerates ecosystems.

"We were impressed with the rigor and transparency of the carbon protocols that underpin these credits," said Sarah Baxendell, Director of Business Development at Regen Network. "As a blockchain-enabled company, we see the immediate potential of making these credits available to our partners in a fully transparent, efficient way. The direct environmental and social impacts give the credits a human face and story and we are confident they will be attractive to consumers seeking unique carbon offsets."

The landmark transaction offers more than just environmental benefits.

Jad Daley, CEO of American Forests, the oldest national nonprofit conservation organization, said, "Urban forests stand at the center of carbon removal, social equity, public health, biodiversity, and positive community impacts where millions of people live, work, breathe, and recreate. These credits are a critical step toward financing equitable city forests for everyone."

The projects are in communities reaching over 20 million Americans. In Richmond, Virginia, two historic African American cemeteries will use proceeds from the sale to fund volunteer restoration activities that help strengthen the community's understanding of the importance of its slave route past. In Des Moines, Iowa, the proceeds will support the planting of trees in formerly redlined communities with very little tree canopy and a workforce training program for local teenagers and young adults. In Chicago, the two projects are pilots in a regional carbon program being designed by the Chicago Region Trees Initiative.

Nature-based Climate Initiatives, a national provider of technical assistance in nature-based climate solutions, advised on the sale. "City and County budgets are just not able to keep up with tree loss. This national sale provides critical funding and a new funding strategy for local governments and nonprofits that are on the front lines of making communities both green and equitable," said Brett KenCairn, Executive Director of Nature-based Climate Initiatives."

The credits were issued by City Forest Credits, a non-profit 501(c)(3) carbon registry dedicated solely to urban forest carbon. City Forest Credits and its national scientists and stakeholders have developed carbon protocols for both tree planting and tree preservation projects in cities and towns.

The funding from the carbon credit transaction will support city forest planting and preservation projects organized by these organizations and government entities:

Allegheny Land Trust, Pittsburgh, PA

City of Issaquah , Issaquah, WA

, Enrichmond Foundation, Richmond, VA

Kendall County Forest Preserve District, Kendall County, IL

King County , King County, WA

, Lake County Forest Preserve District, Lake County, IL

Lookout Mountain Conservancy, Chattanooga, TN

Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust , Shoreline, WA

Treasure Valley Canopy Network, Boise, ID

TreeFolks, Travis County, TX

Trees Forever, Des Moines, IA

Western Reserve Land Conservancy, Cleveland, OH

Western Reserve Land Conservancy, Mansfield, OH

About Regen Network:

At Regen Network, our community's goal is to build foundational fintech infrastructure for ecological claims and data. This means serving as the 'Layer 0' upon which other projects and protocols may build upon and harness to execute their own climate-focused business models. Using a distributed ledger and modern remote sensing technology, our team is creating new tools for how humanity relates to its environment.

About Otium Business Consulting:

Otium Business Consulting is a professional services consulting firm specializing in structuring, negotiating, and executing carbon transactions, and providing strategic advice to companies in the renewable energy and technology sectors. Owner Douglas McPherson is an experienced business adviser and attorney with over 25 years of transactional experience, including serving as a board member for numerous alternative energy and emerging technology companies.

SOURCE Regen Network
DALLAS, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Mandatly Inc. announces the launch of Forever Free Edition of its Privacy Management Software Solution to help companies meet and demonstrate privacy compliance for GDPR, CCPA, LGPD and other global privacy laws.

It is becoming impossible to comply with privacy regulations without an automated system that analyzes and manages regulatory requirements across the organization. Mandatly Enterprise-Grade level software solution offers the following benefits for companies to timely and efficiently comply with global privacy laws.

Automates privacy management program and ensures compliance by automating complex or high volumes of activities.

Built-in intelligence to analyze and assess risks, provide recommendations.

Enhanced dashboard and reporting capabilities provide visibility and enable decision-making.

Forever Free Edition is a great benefit for small and growing businesses to comply with the privacy regulations without a spend, while medium and large enterprises can use the Free Edition as a starting point and upgrade later if needed, said Mickey Shah, Co-Founder and CTO, Mandatly Inc.

Mandatly Privacy Compliance software provides substantial functionality, user experience, and ease of use for customers. Features and benefits of Privacy Management Software include:

Cookie Compliance

Scans website to detect all cookies and trackers. Configurable cookie banner to generate consent records.

Data Subject Request (DSR) Management

Predefined process to manage Data subject requests enabled with automated data discovery, workflow-driven response in a secured customer portal.

Data Inventory and Mapping

Establishes an inventory of systems and provides visibility into data elements, classification, mapping, and flows.

Assessment Automation

Predefined assessments and workflow-enabled built-in process, resulting in increased efficiency, accuracy, and audit trail.

A free version of Privacy Management Software Solution can be upgraded to paid version anytime. For more information on Mandatly solutions overview and pricing, visit Mandatly overview

About Mandatly Inc.

Mandatly provides a comprehensive and up-to-date Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that will help companies of all sizes confidently and efficiently comply with complex data privacy regulatory requirements. As consumer information is shared across different segments, compliance requirements and legal obligations can become costly for businesses, which will negatively affect consumer trust and relationships with the businesses over time. We believe an integrated, comprehensive, and process-driven technology solution is required and best delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS) due to the dynamic and continuously evolving landscape of privacy laws.

There are many privacy software solutions available in the current market that offers incomplete and fragmented solution; however, companies are looking for a one solution to manage all phases of privacy program management. Mandatly integrated, comprehensive and end-to-end privacy management solution builds a solid foundation for privacy program management, allowing companies to address current privacy regulatory requirements and prepare for emerging privacy laws without duplication of efforts. Headquartered in Dallas, TX, and backed by a global team, Mandatly helps customers worldwide demonstrate privacy compliance, reduce risk, and build trust.

Contact:

Michael Smith

Public Relations Manager

+1 972 277 1417 (US)

[email protected]

www.mandatly.com

SOURCE Mandatly Inc.
Award-winning Actress/Comedian/Director/Producer Amy Schumer, Emmy-nominated Actress/Comedian Cecily Strong, President/CEO of Desert Star Family Planning Dr. DeShawn Taylor to be Honored for their Continuous Support of Reproductive Freedom

NEW YORK, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Institute for Reproductive Health (NIRH) and NIRH Action Fund is proud to announce the honorees for its annual Champions of Choice awards luncheon to be held Wednesday, April 27, 2022, from 12:00pm  2:00pm ET at Ziegfeld Ballroom (141 W 54th St.) in New York City. Known as the New York's premiere reproductive rights events and attended by more than 500 prominent leaders in philanthropy, business, media, and politics, this year's event will recognize three individuals for their ongoing commitment and use of influence to advocate for reproductive health, rights, and justice. The program will be emceed by media personality Aisha C. Mills, a member of the NIRH Action Fund Board of Directors.

Champions of Choice

The 2022 honorees include actress/comedian/director/producer Amy Schumer, Emmy-nominated actress/comedian Cecily Strong and President/CEO of Desert Star Family Planning Dr. DeShawn Taylor.

Champions of Choice is co-chaired by board members Dr. Cailin Fiss, Dr. Elizabeth Comen and filmmaker Dawn Porter. Honorary Chairs include Amy Brenneman (actress, writer, producer, activist), Kate Walsh (actress, entrepreneur, activist), Alysia Reiner (actress, producer), Merrin Dungey (actress, producer), Bonnie Fuller (CEO/editor of Hollywood Life), Lysa Heslov (director/producer), Lara Marcon (philanthropist), Nancy Silverman (philanthropist) and Lola C. West (financial advisor, change-maker).

"In 2022, reproductive freedom is being threatened like never before, with the Supreme Court set to overturn Roe v. Wade and multiple states having already banned abortion," says Andrea Miller, President of the National Institute for Reproductive Health and NIRH Action Fund. "None of us can fight this battle alone  that's why we're thrilled to come together with abortion providers, activists, advocates, philanthropists, elected officials, and cultural leaders willing to use their platforms to destigmatize abortion care and speak truth to power."

The National Institute for Reproductive Health (NIRH) and the National Institute for Reproductive Health Action Fund (NIRH Action Fund) are advocacy groups that fight for just and equitable access to reproductive health care and build political power for reproductive freedom. NIRH and its Action Fund launch campaigns, change policy, and elect candidates, all by working hand-in-hand with reproductive health, rights, and justice organizations in states and cities across the country. What makes NIRH unique is their approach of going on the offense to pass laws to ensure people get the care they need, while putting protections in place to counter efforts to further erode access to abortion, contraception, and maternal health care. NIRH's approach to advocacy, policy, and politics strives to center the people who are most impacted by barriers to care, historically underserved, and often under-represented -- Black women and Black communities, Indigenous and other communities of color, low-income people, young people, and immigrants.

In past years, NIRH has honored important policymakers including Representative Ayanna Pressley, United States Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, NYS Senator & Majority leader Andrea Stewart Cousins, NYS Assembly member & Speaker Carl E. Hastie, and former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; those in popular culture and the media who have made it a priority to speak out on these issues, including Joanna Coles, Whoopi Goldberg, Kate Walsh, and Lizz Winstead; and courageous independent abortion providers such as Kwajelyn Jackson and Amy Hagstrom Miller.

Tickets for the Champions of Choice luncheon are $500 per person and can be purchased at www.nirhealth.org. Sponsorship opportunities are still available and can be directed to Shannon Carey at [email protected] .

About NIRH and NIRH Action Fund

The National Institute for Reproductive Health (NIRH) and the National Institute for Reproductive Health Action Fund (NIRH Action Fund) are advocacy groups that fight for just and equitable access to reproductive health care and build political power for reproductive freedom. We launch campaigns, change policy, and elect candidates, all by working hand-in-hand with reproductive health, rights, and justice organizations in states and cities across the country. We work in the communities the need is great and we can make a difference, so the fabric of reproductive freedom is harder to tear apart. www.nirhealth.org .

Contact:

Daphne Ortiz

Statement PR

323.864.9890

[email protected]

SOURCE National Institute for Reproductive Health
SAN FRANCISCO, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The global precision farming market size is anticipated to reach USD 20.84 billion by 2030, registering a CAGR of 12.8% over the forecast period, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. Precision farming, also known as site-specific crop management or satellite farming, is a farm management concept that uses information technology to ensure optimum health and productivity of crops.

Key Insights & Findings from the report:

Increasing government support for adopting modern agricultural techniques and the growing need for efficiently monitoring the health of crops are expected to drive market growth.

The cloud-based software model is anticipated to gain a significant share of the market over the projected period as it reduces energy consumption and provides storage for a large amount of data while facilitating cost saving.

Innovations in GPS mapping and related farming applications are enabling farmers to operate more efficiently and increase their profit margins.

Demand for drones is expected to grow in the agriculture field as they are increasingly used to monitor irrigation systems.

Yield monitoring is expected to continue leading the application segment in terms of revenue share. It is widely used in soil monitoring since it detects soil qualities that may be used to increase yields.

The digital revolution in the agricultural sector, along with government financial incentives to farms, is likely to drive demand for precision farming in Europe in the forthcoming years.

in the forthcoming years. Asia Pacific is expected to showcase the fastest growth owing to the availability of the largest agricultural land, which provides growth opportunities in countries such as China , India , Australia , and Japan .

is expected to showcase the fastest growth owing to the availability of the largest agricultural land, which provides growth opportunities in countries such as , , , and . Key players in the precision agriculture market include AgEagle Aerial Systems Inc. (Agribotix LLC); Deere and Company; Proagrica (SST Development Group, Inc.); Farmers Edge, Inc.; and Granular, Inc.

Read 150 page market research report, "Precision Farming Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Offering (Hardware, Software, Services), By Application (Yield Monitoring, Weather Tracking, Field Mapping, Crop Scouting), By Region, And Segment Forecasts, 2022 - 2030", published by Grand View Research.

Precision Farming Market Growth & Trends

The precision farming technique largely depends on specialized equipment such as sensing devices, antennas and access points, and automation and control systems. It also includes maintenance and managed services. The process also incorporates a broad range of technologies such as bio-engineering, robotics and automation, imagery and sensors, and big data.

The growing number of applications for telematics in agriculture is anticipated to supplement the growth of the market. Telematics services include tracking devices that deploy the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) to show the position of the equipment for management purposes. Major agriculture equipment manufacturers are adopting telematics services for their equipment to improve farm efficiency, thereby reducing the cost of agricultural operations and maximizing profitability. Improved management can also help reduce environmental impact.

Telematics technology is used to capture and transfer data from the farm equipment through sensors installed on tractors and other field monitoring equipment. The increasing adoption of telematics systems by agricultural equipment companies is expected to drive the growth of the market during the forecast period.

Furthermore, with GPS guidance and automation advancements, drones are poised to transform the agriculture industry in the forthcoming years. The ability of drones to precisely analyze the soil at the beginning of the crop cycle and detect a plant infected with bacteria or fungus is anticipated to propel the growth of the drone segment.

However, the low rate of technology adoption among farmers is likely to hamper market growth during the study period. This may be due to factors such as the absence of stringent standards and limitations on the exchange of data. Furthermore, farmers lack independent consulting and advisory services owing to the absence of validated agronomic models for Variable Rate Technology (VRT) to make decisions on investments. In addition, independent services are not linked to co-operatives, government bodies, and farmer associations where farmers can get additional information to make better decisions.

Precision Farming Market Segmentation

Grand View Research has segmented the global precision farming market based on offering, application, and region:

Precision Farming Offering Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2017 - 2030)

Hardware

Automation & Control Systems



Drones





Application Control Devices





Guidance System





GPS







GIS





Remote Sensing





Handheld







Satellite Sensing





Driverless Tractors





Mobile Devices





VRT





Map-based







Sensor-based





Wireless Modules





Bluetooth Technology







Wi-Fi Technology







Zigbee Technology







RF Technology





Sensing Devices





Soil sensor







Nutrient Sensor









Moisture Sensor









Temperature Sensor







Water Sensor







Climate Sensor







Others





Antennas & Access Points

Software

Web-based



Cloud-based

Services

System Integration & Consulting



Maintenance & Support



Managed Services



Data Services





Analytics Services





Farm Operation Services



Assisted Professional Services



Supply Chain Management Services





Climate Information Services

Precision Farming Application Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2017 - 2030)

Yield Monitoring

On-farm



Off-farm

Field Mapping

Crop Scouting

Weather Tracking & Forecasting

Irrigation Management

Inventory Management

Farm labor Management

Precision Farming Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2017 - 2030)

North America

U.S.



Canada



Mexico

Europe

Germany



U.K.



France



Russia



Italy

Asia Pacific

China



India



Japan



Australia



Singapore

South America

Brazil

Middle East & Africa

List of Key Players of the Precision Farming Market

Ag Leader Technology

AgJunction, Inc.

CropMetrics LLC

Trimble, Inc.

AGCO Corporation

Raven Industries Inc.

Deere and Company

Topcon Corporation

Check out more related studies published by Grand View Research:

Precision Harvesting Market - The global precision harvesting market size is estimated to reach USD 22.9 billion by 2027, registering a CAGR of 8.6% over the forecast period, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. Precision harvesting, also known as modern agricultural cultivation technique, includes using cameras and sensors to detect appropriate period for cultivation for maximum crop production. This technique helps increase crop efficiency and reduces waste by monitoring the temperature, soil, humidity, and other environmental factors. It includes a wide range of technologies such as robotics, automation, sensors, imagery, and big data.

The global precision harvesting market size is estimated to reach by 2027, registering a CAGR of 8.6% over the forecast period, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. Precision harvesting, also known as modern agricultural cultivation technique, includes using cameras and sensors to detect appropriate period for cultivation for maximum crop production. This technique helps increase crop efficiency and reduces waste by monitoring the temperature, soil, humidity, and other environmental factors. It includes a wide range of technologies such as robotics, automation, sensors, imagery, and big data. Precision Viticulture Market - The global precision viticulture market size is expected to reach USD 2.55 billion by 2027, registering a CAGR of 9.2% from 2020 to 2027, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. The increasing focus of farmers on ensuring farm productivity coupled with the rising need to monitor grape quality is the key factor driving the adoption of advanced technology solutions at vineyards. Moreover, the demand for high-quality grapes from vine manufacturing companies is further encouraging vineyard owners to adopt precision viticulture technologies at vineyards.

- The global precision viticulture market size is expected to reach by 2027, registering a CAGR of 9.2% from 2020 to 2027, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. The increasing focus of farmers on ensuring farm productivity coupled with the rising need to monitor grape quality is the key factor driving the adoption of advanced technology solutions at vineyards. Moreover, the demand for high-quality grapes from vine manufacturing companies is further encouraging vineyard owners to adopt precision viticulture technologies at vineyards. Supply Chain Analytics Market - The global supply chain analytics market size is expected to reach USD 22.46 billion by 2030, registering a CAGR of 17.6% from 2022 to 2030, according to a new study by Grand View Research, Inc. Supply chain analytics is becoming popular as the demand for managing vast volumes of company data and its insights for strategic applications grows. As the demand for automation technologies and investment from technology developers grows, so does the demand for cognitive computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The growing awareness among businesses about the advantages of Supply Chain Analytics (SCA) in terms of improved visibility across the whole supply chain is fueling the demand for analytics solutions.

Browse through Grand View Research's Next Generation Technologies Industry Research Reports.

About Grand View Research

Grand View Research, U.S.-based market research and consulting company, provides syndicated as well as customized research reports and consulting services. Registered in California and headquartered in San Francisco, the company comprises over 425 analysts and consultants, adding more than 1200 market research reports to its vast database each year. These reports offer in-depth analysis on 46 industries across 25 major countries worldwide. With the help of an interactive market intelligence platform, Grand View Research Helps Fortune 500 companies and renowned academic institutes understand the global and regional business environment and gauge the opportunities that lie ahead.

Contact:

Sherry James

Corporate Sales Specialist, USA

Grand View Research, Inc.

Phone: 1-415-349-0058

Toll Free: 1-888-202-9519

Email: [email protected]

Web: https://www.grandviewresearch.com

Grand View Compass | Grand View Pipeline

Follow Us: LinkedIn | Twitter

SOURCE Grand View Research, Inc.
New Software Solution Provides Animated View of Lung Function Using Legacy X-Ray Technology

ORANGE, Calif., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Doctors at Providence St Joseph Hospital in Orange, Calif., today announced the first commercial use of 4DMedical's unique XV imaging solution to help clinicians better understand lung conditions. 4DMedical, an Australian medical technology company, provided the FDA-cleared, patented, four-dimensional lung imaging solution used to gain insight into regional lung performance of two patients, one with asthma and another with COPD.

"With this new imaging tool, physicians can detect areas of high and low ventilation with pinpoint accuracy across all parts of the lung, in all phases of the breath," said Ray Casciari, MD, a pulmonary physician with more than 40 years of experience at Providence St Joseph Hospital, Orange. "The resulting ventilation report is extremely clear and easily understood by providing clinicians with a color-coded and dynamic visualization of the patient's breathing lung, enhanced with four-dimensional animation."

Doctors are considering the use of four-dimensional scans in treatment plans for patients with long-term COVID.

"Until now, much of the attention to COVID has been around the epidemiology of its spread, and more recently regarding the effect of vaccines," said Andreas Fouras, PhD, CEO of 4DMedical. "Health authorities are increasingly focusing on how to assess, understand and manage the lingering effects of those expressing long-term COVID."

4DMedical's XV Technology is a cloud subscription service and can be implemented immediately with no capital expenditure by using existing hospital and clinical infrastructure. Imaging departments electronically transmit radiographic images collected with existing fluoroscopy equipment to 4DMedical. The XV Technology software automatically analyzes and applies its proprietary algorithms to identify and quantify regional functional impairment in both lungs. The resulting report numerically quantifies and graphically displays the regional impairments, which can then be used by clinicians to better understand the patient's current functional state and assess the most effective therapeutic action.

"The potential for 4DMedical's XV Technology to play a role in surveillance of lung function is unprecedented, along with the capacity to monitor the effectiveness of pharmaceutical and other interventions for the treatment of those diseases," said Jeremy Zoch, PhD, MHA, FACHE, chief executive of Providence St Joseph. "Doctors have never been able to see lungs with this level of richness and detail before. We're proud of our commitment to bring the latest in life-changing technology to our doctors, patients and community."

About Providence St. Joseph Hospital:

Providence St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, California is a nationally recognized, 463-bed, not-for-profit Catholic hospital founded in 1929 by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange. Fully accredited by The Joint Commission and designated as a Magnet hospital for nursing excellence, St. Joseph Hospital's reputation for clinical excellence and compassionate, family-centered care draws patients from all over the United States. St. Joseph Hospital is part of Providence, a health system serving in 52 hospitals with a comprehensive range of services across Alaska, California, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas and Washington. For more information visit www.providence.org/StJoseph.

About 4DMedical:

4DMedical (founded in 2013) changed name to 4DMedical in May 2020. 4DMedical is a medical technology company aiming to deliver the global gold standard in respiratory diagnostics for all lung disorders including: coronavirus, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), cystic fibrosis and cancer.

The unique 4DMedical technology accurately and quickly scans lung function as the patient breathes, to provide sensitive, early diagnosis and to monitor changes over time. Our Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) scans deliver much more complete results, showing even subtle variations in lung function down to the finest details, using lower levels of radiation than traditional methods.

Respiratory diagnosis is a $30 billion per annum global industry. Through its technology 4DMedical provides clinicians with greater insights into diseases of the lung. 4DMedical is focused on providing better information to doctors and patients about lung function. Better information means better decisions, and better outcomes.

Contact:

Jay Geer

Miller Geer & Associates

(562) 883-0375

[email protected]

SOURCE 4DMedical
Brian Wilson joins RainFocus to oversee the company's customer advocacy and success programs

LEHI, Utah, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- RainFocus, provider of the next-generation enterprise event marketing platform, today announced its latest leadership hire, Brian Wilson as chief customer officer. In his new role, he will partner with employees across the organization and enable teams to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Recognizing important industry trends, including the digital transformation of event strategies and the convergence of events and marketing, this announcement ensures the proper support for RainFocus' customers as the industry continues to grow.

Wilson joins RainFocus from Experity, the national leader in on-demand care solutions, where he was chief customer officer. Wilson brings over 20 years of profound leadership experience and has scaled teams to deliver notable customer programs in multiple high-growth, global SaaS environments.

"Customer-centricity is at the core of an organization's successful growth strategy," Wilson said. "I'm eager to play a critical role at RainFocus and introduce new ways of delivering unparalleled experiences while continuing to exceed customer expectations. RainFocus does a phenomenal job propelling their customers' journeys forward, and I'm thrilled to be a part of this innovative team."

"Brian has incredible versatility within the industry, having worked in various verticals including healthcare, e-commerce, human capital management, and more," said Doug Baird, president of RainFocus. "His experience solving demanding problems with technologies and his achievements in the space make him the ideal individual to understand our customers' needs and deliver unprecedented results."

Hiring its first chief customer officer supports RainFocus' continued commitment to its client partners, as they are at the center of the company's operations. Some of the world's most innovative brands look to RainFocus to unlock the power of unified experiences in their marketing efforts, and Wilson's role amplifies that.

Wilson resides in Minneapolis with his wife and six children. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time with his family and friends, getting outdoors to hike and bike, and cheering on the Green Bay Packers.

About RainFocus

RainFocus is a next-generation event marketing platform built from the ground up to capture, analyze, and harness an unprecedented amount of data for significantly better events and conferences. As a true SaaS platform, RainFocus simplifies event registration, content management, and exhibitor activation seamlessly across physical, virtual, and hybrid experiences, all from a single dashboard. For more information, visit www.rainfocus.com .

Additional Resources

Join the conversation with RainFocus on Facebook , Twitter , LinkedIn , and Instagram .

, , , and . Visit RainFocus.com to learn more about our event marketing and management platform. If you're ready to get started, request a demo .

. Discover powerful insights and solutions for event delivery and network with peers, thought leaders, and industry experts at RainFocus INSIGHT. Learn more .

. Are you interested in joining the RainFocus Partner Program? Apply today .

. Grow your career and help reshape the events industry at RainFocus. Apply here .

Media contact:

Jessica Johnson

[email protected]

SOURCE RainFocus
BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Tuesday held a phone conversation with Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly at the latter's request.

During their conversation, Wang said that the people of China and Canada have enjoyed long-term friendly exchanges, noting that Canada is one of the first Western countries to establish diplomatic ties with the People's Republic of China (PRC).

However, in recent years, China-Canada relations have suffered a serious setback due to the Meng Wanzhou case, which is something we do not want to see, Wang said.

The essence of this case lies in the U.S. suppression over Chinese high-tech enterprises by coercion, a shameful behavior that everyone could see clearly, Wang said.

No country should act as a facilitator of such unilateral bullying, and any country targeted by the U.S. approach has the right to make necessary responses, he added.

Noting that China always views and handles China-Canada relations from a strategic and long-term perspective, Wang said the current situation of bilateral relations is not in the interests of both countries, calling on Canada to face up to the problems and cooperate with China. He further put forward three proposals in this regard.

Firstly, Canada should view China objectively and maintain a steady and pragmatic China policy.

China's political system and development path are the Chinese people's own choices, which have inevitable historical logic and are in line with China's national conditions and its people's needs, said Wang.

China's development and progress are not only the legitimate right of its 1.4 billion people, but also an important part of the modernization of all mankind, he said.

China and Canada have no historical disputes or real conflict of interest. China hopes that Canada, in spirit of mutual benefit and win-win, will do more to enhance mutual trust and promote bilateral relations, Wang said.

Secondly, the two countries should respect each other's core interests and not create new obstacles to the development of bilateral relations.

The one-China principle is the political foundation of China-Canada relations, Wang said, adding that if the Taiwan question is not handled properly, China-Canada relations will suffer fundamental damage.

China hopes Canada will adopt a correct attitude and position on issues concerning China's core interests, he said.

Thirdly, Canada should uphold its independence and eliminate unnecessary external interference.

Noting that the elder generation of leaders of the two countries surmounted obstacles to reach the decision to establish diplomatic ties, Wang said there are many good stories and traditions in China-Canada exchanges that should be cherished and carried forward.

China hopes Canada will work with China to eliminate external interference, overcome difficulties and realize sound, stable and sustainable development of bilateral relations, he said.

Joly said Canada is one of the first countries to recognize the PRC, and Canada-China relations enjoy a solid foundation, adding that Canada respects China's sovereignty, system and the choices made independently by the Chinese people, and positively recognizes China's great achievements in development, especially in reducing poverty.

Canada-China relations during this period of time, he said, are at a difficult stage, and Canada is willing to treat China with sincerity and respect and take a forward-looking approach so as to push bilateral ties back on track and build a more resilient bilateral relationship.

Canada appreciates China's important contributions to the global anti-pandemic fight, and is willing to strengthen cooperation with China on climate change, environmental protection and the fight against COVID-19, he added.

The two sides also exchanged views on the Ukraine issue.

Noting that Chinese President Xi Jinping has made a comprehensive and authoritative elaboration about China's position on the issue, Wang said China calls on all parties to think with calm and rationality, create opportunities for peace and open up prospects for negotiations.

The negotiations are now facing setbacks and difficulties, but as long as the talks persist, there will be a possible cease-fire, hence a hope of peace, said Wang, adding that China will continue to play a constructive role to this end in an objective and just manner.

Joly said the Canadian side is ready to maintain communication with the Chinese side. 
TORONTO, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Restaurant Brands International Inc. (TSX: QSR) (NYSE: QSR) (TSX: QSP) will release its first quarter 2022 financial results on Tuesday, May 3, 2022 and will host an investor conference call that morning at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time.

The earnings call will be webcast on the company's investor relations website (http://rbi.com/investors) and a replay will be available for 30 days following the release. Investors may also access the conference call via the following dial-in numbers: (844) 200-6205 for U.S. callers, (833) 950-0062 for Canadian callers, and (929) 526-1599 for callers from other countries. For all dial-in numbers please use the following access code: 016518.

The company will also host a Tim Hortons Canada Investor Day on Tuesday, May 3, 2022, starting at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time. The event will provide investors an opportunity to hear the Tim Hortons Canada leadership team discuss the brand's business strategy and growth in detail. A live webcast of the investor day will be available on the company's investor relations website and will be available for 30 days following the event.

About Restaurant Brands International Inc.

Restaurant Brands International Inc. ("RBI") is one of the world's largest quick service restaurant companies with approximately $35 billion in annual system-wide sales and over 29,000 restaurants in more than 100 countries. RBI owns four of the world's most prominent and iconic quick service restaurant brands  TIM HORTONS, BURGER KING, POPEYES, and FIREHOUSE SUBS. These independently operated brands have been serving their respective guests, franchisees and communities for decades. Through its Restaurant Brands for Good framework, RBI is improving sustainable outcomes related to its food, the planet, and people and communities. To learn more about RBI, please visit the company's website at www.rbi.com.

SOURCE Restaurant Brands International Inc.
NEW YORK, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Rivery, a leading data management company, today announced that it has successfully achieved Google Cloud Ready - BigQuery , a designation geared to help our mutual customers use our complimentary platforms with full confidence.

By earning this designation, Rivery has proven their products have met a core set of functional and interoperability requirements when integrating with BigQuery. This designation enables customers to discover and have confidence that Rivery products they use today work well with BigQuery or save time on evaluating them. In addition, being part of the program, Rivery will cement its partnership with Google Cloud as a partner, getting more opportunities to collaborate closely with Google Cloud engineering and BigQuery teams to develop joint initiatives.

Google Cloud Ready - BigQuery is a partner integration validation program created to increase customer confidence in partner integrations into BigQuery . As part of this initiative, Google engineering teams validate partner integrations into BigQuery in a three phase process. Firstly, Google runs a series of data integration tests and compares results against benchmarks. Secondly, it works closely with partners to fill any gaps. Thirdly, documentation is refined for our mutual customers.

Since 2020, Google Cloud customers can directly access Rivery via Google Cloud Marketplace, making it incredibly simple to connect both platforms and get started right away. In addition, with the 2021 launch of Rivery Kits , Google Cloud users have access to pre-engineered data workflows for popular use cases such as Marketing Analytics, Social Media Analytics and Google Analytics . All these initiatives help data teams create their perfect data stack without wasting time or resources trying to access and align data from numerous sources.

"Recognizing Rivery's platform as Google Cloud ready - BigQuery indicates that their integrations with BigQuery deliver excellent experiences and value for customers," said Manvinder Singh, Director, Partnerships at Google Cloud. "Businesses are increasingly bringing partner platforms like Rivery together with BigQuery to form their data stacks, and we're delighted to partner with Rivery to make it very easy for these customers to bring data into BigQuery for analysis and to inform decision-making."

Limor Fledel, Rivery's Head of Product said: "Ensuring Google Cloud users can enjoy Rivery's full product suite with confidence is key for them to create the perfect modern data stack. Anyone using Google Cloud can access Rivery with a single click via Google Cloud Marketplace. In addition, it's an opportunity for Rivery to collaborate with Google Cloud in the development of joint product roadmaps. "

About Rivery:

Rivery is the end-to-end data platform that gives organizations control over their data through the ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and management of their data. Moving beyond the traditional ETL, Rivery speeds up the entire DataOps workflow with automation and process simplification in a single SaaS platform. The world's leading companies, including Bayer, BuzzFeed, and American Cancer Society trust Rivery with their data.

Learn more about Rivery at https://rivery.io/

SOURCE Rivery
To be honored at Simmons Leadership Conference

BOSTON, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Simmons University announced today that Co-Founder and CEO of Proof of Learn and Founder of Care.com Sheila Lirio Marcelo is the recipient of the 2022 Helen G. Drinan Visionary Leader Award. The award will be presented at the Simmons Leadership Conference on April 13.

Named in honor of Simmons University President Emerita Helen G. Drinan, this annual award recognizes distinguished women leaders who demonstrate exceptional commitment, compassion, and vision.

"It's an honor to be recognized with this award in a forum that connects inspiring and innovative global leaders who are committed to the betterment of workplaces and communities," Marcelo said.

Marcelo founded Care.com in 2006 and served as CEO until 2020. Care.com is the world's largest online destination for finding and managing reliable family careaddressing the needs of 35 million people in 20 countries. In 2021, Marcelo co-founded Proof of Learn, an online education platform. Born and raised in the Philippines, she graduated from Mount Holyoke College and earned an MBA and JD from Harvard University.

"With her courage, bold vision, and authenticity, Sheila has helped millions of women make meaningful connections with dependable caregivers, allowing them to remain in the workplace. She embodies the theme of this year's conference, Cultivating Courage and Connection," said Susan MacKenty Brady, CEO of the Simmons University Institute for Inclusive Leadership.

"The mission of Simmons is to empower and educate the next generation of women leaders. Sheila, through Care.com, has helped elevate the careers of women around the world," said Dr. Lynn Perry Wooten, President of Simmons University. "Sheila stands as a role model and inspiration for our students."

"Sheila's work connecting families and caregivers has empowered women to be their best selves both at home and in the workplace. Her latest endeavor to make high-quality education accessible in all corners of the globe makes her an obvious choice as the recipient of this year's award," said Helen G. Drinan.

The Simmons Leadership Conference is the nation's premier women's leadership forum. This year's event features America's first youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman, the world's most decorated gymnast Simone Biles, researcher and bestselling author Brene Brown, and others .

CONTACT: Laura Wareck | [email protected] | 978-660-9587

SOURCE Simmons University
This global competition continues to help connect us and offer an exclusive insight into the universal language of food culture. Also new this year supporting the North American category is regional judge Daren Mazzucca, Senior Vice President, Group Publisher of Dotdash Meredith.

The winners will be announced on April 26 2022 at 7:30pm (check for local time zones) in an exciting global event on the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year YouTube channel. The Awards Film, hosted by a very special celebrity Master of Ceremonies, will be shown live across the world, allowing everyone to enjoy the show from the comfort of their own homes.

This year's global judging panel, chaired by legendary food photographer, David Loftus, includes Fiona Shields, Head of Photography, Guardian News & Media, NA Risong, Art director and curator of Inter Art Center Gallery, Beijing, Nik Sharma, Cookbook author, Photographer, Columnist, Tasneem Alsultan, Investigative and National Geographic Photographer, Phillip Prodger, Executive Director, Curatorial Exhibitions, LA and former Head of Photographs, National Portrait Gallery, London and Rein Skullerud, Head of Photo Unit, World Food Programme.

To view the full shortlist, please visit https://www.pinkladyfoodphotographeroftheyear.com/pink-lady-food-photographer-of-the-year-shortlist-2022/

For more information on Pink Lady America apples, please visit pinkladyamerica.org

SOURCE Pink Lady America
A new book for homeowners explains everything they need to know about the end of single-family zoning in California, including what the new laws allow property owners and developers to build on single-family parcels across the state. The book was written for owners of California's 7,000,000 single-family homes to help them decide: Stay in the house or sell the house now?

The book is available for download at https://TheEndofZoning.com/. It is free to download the book.

Single-family zoning ended in California on January 1, 2022, when the state's new density mandate for single-family zoned properties took effect.

"There's been some attention to the laws, but not nearly enough given how they impact homeowners, people renting or sharing homes who may be displaced by redevelopment, and neighborhoods," says Cary Brazeman, author of "The End of Single-Family Zoning in California: How to Protect Yourself and Profit from Permissive New Upzoning Laws."

New California laws SB 9 and SB 10 allow multi-unit and multi-story buildings on single-family lots. SB 9, which overrides local control of zoning, is particularly controversial. A majority of Californians opposed the law, as did hundreds of California cities. The left-leaning Los Angeles City Council also objected. So did right-leaning Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Homeowners who read the new book will learn:

What developers are now allowed to build in single-family neighborhoods

What can be done to stop them

What local governments can and cannot do in response

How homeowners can protect themselves from the redevelopment of neighborhoods

How homeowners can cash in -- if they decide to -- by selling their own houses to investors or redeveloping their properties themselves

The book also illuminates how the laws can be exploited to destroy historic resources and produce dense housing in high-risk fire zones. Read the book to learn:

Changes affecting the demolition of historic properties

Changes affecting the development of hillsides, canyons and coastal areas

Whether it's necessary to include any affordable units in the new buildings, or pay any impact fees in order to develop single-family properties at higher densities

How the new laws will lead to increased Wall Street ownership of California homes

"Ending single-family zoning is a red herring," Brazeman says. "It's not the problem in California." In the book, he lays out a better way to create more housing and, in the process, create new equity opportunities for people to build wealth through housing ownership. Brazeman's plan includes commercial boulevard revitalization, with significant multifamily residential construction in commercial zones, in Los Angeles and around the Bay Area.

About the Author



Cary Brazeman is the author of "The End of Single-Family Zoning in California: How to Protect Yourself and Profit from Permissive New Upzoning Laws."

Cary is a real estate expert and neighborhood advocate from Los Angeles. He has a warning for California homeowners: "Get familiar with the new laws and decide for yourself whether to stay in your home, or sell your home before it is potentially devalued as a result of changes now allowed in your neighborhood."

"The End of Single-Family Zoning in California: How to Protect Yourself and Profit from Permissive New Upzoning Laws" is available for free download.

SOURCE Cary Brazeman
Solar tracker firms are gathering steam due to the development of robotic devices that aid in the upkeep of solar trackers while they are in use

Despite unfavorable market attitudes, work-from-home trends, increase in the number of stay-at-home parents, and online learning are expected to generate long-term development potential

ALBANY, N.Y., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The global solar trackers market registered 6,998.8 MW in 2020. The global market is expected to rise at a CAGR of 16.4% during the forecast period, from 2021 to 2031. The global solar trackers market is anticipated to reach 37,196.86 MW by 2031. The growth of the global solar trackers market is supported by rising government incentive programs, rising feed-in tariffs (FIT), and photovoltaic (PV) demand. In addition, rising power prices are likely to boost the demand for photovoltaic, which is expected to fuel the global solar tracker market even more. Additionally, tracking systems are expected to improve the efficacy of solar cells, which is projected to have a favorable influence on the market. On the other side, the market's expansion is expected to be constrained over the next few years due to capital-intensive technologies.

In order to maintain business continuity despite the prevailing coronavirus pandemic, firms in the global solar trackers market are serving mission-critical applications in the utilities as well as non-utility industries. Solar trackers, on the other hand, have been observed to require more servicing than permanent systems.

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Key Findings of Market Report

Each application has its own set of functions, such as reducing the incident angle between the incoming sunlight and photovoltaic panel in PV applications and aligning the optics in CSP and CPV systems. Due to advantages it provides, CPV is now one of the most promising technologies in the solar energy industry. The CPV technology's cheap production cost aids in low-cost energy generation. Due to the use of aluminum and glass as raw materials, solar panels can be reused in the range of 85% to 90%.

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With regard to a product, single axis trackers are more commonly used in solar PV systems than dual axis trackers due to their lower cost and higher power output

Europe dominated the global market in 2020, accounting for more than 60% of the market, depending on the yearly installed capacity. North America followed Europe , representing for 26% of the overall market that year. Solar trackers are most popular in Spain , Greece , Italy , and Germany in Europe . Spain , in Europe , and China , in Asia Pacific , are expected to develop at a rapid pace amongst all countries, due to government assistance for renewable energy production.

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Solar Trackers Market: Growth Drivers

In North America , the non-utility business has been hampered by declining FIT (Feed-in Tariff) tariffs and incentive schemes. This was complemented by government incentives to create huge solar tracker installations in Canada and the US. The growth of the global solar trackers market is projected to be fueled by a change in direction toward utility-scale projects.

, the non-utility business has been hampered by declining FIT (Feed-in Tariff) tariffs and incentive schemes. This was complemented by government incentives to create huge solar tracker installations in and the US. The growth of the global solar trackers market is projected to be fueled by a change in direction toward utility-scale projects. Due to considerable improvements in the renewable energy industry, the market in Asia Pacific is predicted to grow tremendously during the forecast period, from 2021 to 2031

Global Solar Trackers Market: Key Players

Some of the key market players are

SmartTrak Solar Systems Pvt. Ltd.

Frontier Technology Group Ltd.

Ideematech Deutschland GmbH

Haosolar Co. Ltd

Energia Ercam S.A.

Amonix, Inc.

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Global Solar Trackers Market: Segmentation

Technology

Solar PV

Concentrated Photovoltaic [CPV]

Concentrated Solar Power [CSP]

Product

Single Axis

Dual Axis

Fixed Solar Systems

Application

Utility

Non-utility

Energy & Natural Resources Industry battles Tangible Impact of Economic and Cultural changes, Explore Transparency Market Research's award-winning coverage of the global Energy & Natural Resources:

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Recognized for solving complex digital transformations for enterprise organizations across the globe

CHICAGO, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Spaulding Ridge, global cloud advisory and implementation firm, has been named an Anaplan Global Strategic Partner, the highest available Anaplan Partner status. The award-winning firm has also been named the recipient of Anaplan's 2022 AMER Partner of the Year, which is awarded to one Anaplan partner every year.

Jay Laabs, Spaulding Ridge CEO, says, "Our continued global expansion has enabled us to bring our multi-cloud strategy, solutions, and client-centric values to enterprise businesses, functioning as their trusted advisor for connected planning and value mapping. Together, we've been able to accelerate the business goals of hundreds of organizations across the globe. The Anaplan Global Strategic Partner tier accurately represents Spaulding Ridge's breadth and capabilities, and we are honored to have received this year's AMER Partner of the Year Award."

"Spaulding Ridge continues to deliver customer value through innovative solutions and a customer-first mindset," said Carla Moradi, SVP, Global Partner & Alliances Organization at Anaplan. "As Anaplan enters a new phase of hypergrowth, we are excited to collaborate with Spaulding Ridge as a Global Strategic Partner and together help our customers strengthen business agility and performance."

Spaulding Ridge has continued to scale, with the Anaplan practice growing to over 175 consultants and experiencing 521% revenue growth since 2018. The firm is known as a trusted advisor to global enterprise CFOs and CROs across all industries, including high-tech, retail, CPG, and utilities, delivering connected planning and sales performance management (SPM) solutions and implementations that enable data-driven decision making.

About Spaulding Ridge

Spaulding Ridge is an award-winning cloud advisory and implementation firm, deploying Best-in-Cloud solutions on a global scale. They enable organizations to accelerate operational efficiency, drive digital transformation, and increase competitive advantage.

Spaulding Ridge partners with digitally savvy companies to help:

Finance gain control: Increase top-line revenue, gross margins, and profits through better insight. Connect financial planning to strategy and automate financial close processes.

Increase top-line revenue, gross margins, and profits through better insight. Connect financial planning to strategy and automate financial close processes. Sales increase productivity: Manage quota and territories more consistently and effectively, automate customer contracts and onboarding.

Manage quota and territories more consistently and effectively, automate customer contracts and onboarding. Operations drive efficiency: Improve supply chain agility, automate strategic sourcing and purchasing, deliver superior customer service experiences.

To learn more, visit spauldingridge.com.

SOURCE Spaulding Ridge, LLC
Vendor Insights

Specialty Coffee Shops Market is fragmented and the vendors are deploying various organic and inorganic growth strategies to compete in the market.

The growing competition in the market is compelling vendors to adopt various growth strategies such as promotional activities and spending on advertisements to improve the visibility of their services. Some vendors are also adopting inorganic growth strategies such as M&As to remain competitive in the market.

The report analyzes the market's competitive landscape and offers information on several market vendors, including:

Barista Coffee Co. Ltd.

Global Orange Development LLC

BLUE BOTTLE COFFEE Inc.

Brew Berrys Hospitality Pvt Ltd.

Caffe Nero Group Ltd.

Coffee Day Enterprises Ltd.

Costa Ltd.

Doutor Coffee Co. Ltd.

Dutch Mafia LLC

Ediya Co. Ltd.

Gloria Jeans Coffees International Pty Ltd.

Grupo Herdez SAB de CV

Inspire Brands Inc.

JAB Holding Co. Sarl

McDonald Corp.

MTY Food Group Inc.

Redroaster Coffee Co.

Starbucks Coffee Co.

International Coffee and Tea LLC

Restaurant Brands International Inc.

Find additional highlights on the growth strategies adopted by vendors and their product

offerings, Read Free Sample Report .

Geographical Market Analysis

During the projection period, North America will account for 42 percent of market growth. In North America, the primary markets for specialty coffee shops are the United States and Canada. The market in this region will increase at a quicker rate than the markets in Europe and South America.

Over the projected period, the hectic lifestyles of the working population and students would aid the expansion of the specialty coffee shops market in North America.

Furthermore, countries such as the US, Canada, China, UK, and Germany are expected to emerge as prominent markets for Specialty Coffee Shops Market during the forecast period.

Know more about this market's geographical distribution along with a detailed analysis

of the top regions. Download Free Sample Report.

Key Segment Analysis

The independent coffee shops sector will gain considerable market share in specialty coffee shops. Gourmet coffee shops are becoming increasingly popular among urban residents, prompting vendors to extend their operations to serve the population of industrialized countries. Independent coffee businesses are finding it tough to compete with aggressively growing global brands. During the projected period, the strong threat of chain coffee shops is expected to considerably limit the segment's expansion. As a result, the independent coffee shops sector of the global specialty coffee shops market is likely to increase at a faster rate during the forecast period.

View FREE Sample: to know additional highlights and key points on various market

segments and their impact in coming years.

Key Market Drivers & Challenges:

One of the major factors driving the expansion of specialized coffee businesses is rising coffee consumption. The increased demand for coffee has resulted in more opportunities for market merchants to expand. In order to improve profits, suppliers are focusing on product diversification, the introduction of new tastes, and brand extensions. Coffee consumption in developing countries such as China, India, and Brazil has also been rising at a rapid pace. As a result, demand for specialty coffee shops is likely to rise during the predicted period as global coffee consumption rises.

However, fluctuating prices of coffee beans is one of the factors hindering the specialty coffee shops' market growth.

Download free sample for highlights on market Drivers & Challenges affecting the

Specialty Coffee Shops Market.

Customize Your Report

Don't miss out on the opportunity to speak to our analyst and know more insights about this market report. Our analysts can also help you customize this report 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.

We offer USD 1,000 worth of FREE customization at the time of purchase. Speak to our

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Specialty Coffee Shops Market Scope Report Coverage Details Page number 120 Base year 2021 Forecast period 2022-2026 Growth momentum & CAGR Accelerate at a CAGR of 13.02% Market growth 2022-2026 $ 68.59 billion Market structure Fragmented YoY growth (%) 12.33 Regional analysis North America, Europe, APAC, Middle East and Africa, and South America Performing market contribution North America at 42% Key consumer countries US, Canada, China, UK, and Germany Competitive landscape Leading companies, Competitive strategies, Consumer engagement scope Key companies profiled Barista Coffee Co. Ltd., Global Orange Development LLC, BLUE BOTTLE COFFEE Inc., Brew Berrys Hospitality Pvt Ltd., Caffe Nero Group Ltd., Coffee Day Enterprises Ltd., Costa Ltd., Doutor Coffee Co. Ltd., Dutch Mafia LLC, Ediya Co. Ltd., Gloria Jeans Coffees International Pty Ltd., Grupo Herdez SAB de CV, Inspire Brands Inc., JAB Holding Co. Sarl, McDonald Corp., MTY Food Group Inc., Redroaster Coffee Co., Starbucks Coffee Co., International Coffee and Tea LLC, and Restaurant Brands International Inc. Market dynamics Parent market analysis, Market growth inducers and obstacles, Fast-growing and slow-growing segment analysis, COVID 19 impact and recovery analysis and future consumer dynamics, Market condition analysis for forecast period Customization purview If our report has not included the data that you are looking for, you can reach out to our analysts and get segments customized.

Table of Contents

1 Executive Summary

1.1 Market overview

Exhibit 01: Executive Summary  Chart on Market Overview



Exhibit 02: Executive Summary  Data Table on Market Overview



Exhibit 03: Executive Summary  Chart on Global Market Characteristics



Exhibit 04: Executive Summary  Chart on Market by Geography



Exhibit 05: Executive Summary  Chart on Market Segmentation by Type



Exhibit 06: Executive Summary  Chart on Incremental Growth



Exhibit 07: Executive Summary  Data Table on Incremental Growth



Exhibit 08: Executive Summary  Chart on Vendor Market Positioning

2 Market Landscape

2.1 Market ecosystem

Exhibit 09: Parent market



Exhibit 10: Market Characteristics

3 Market Sizing

3.1 Market definition

Exhibit 11: Offerings of vendors included in the market definition

3.2 Market segment analysis

Exhibit 12: Market segments

3.3 Market size 2021

3.4 Market outlook: Forecast for 2021-2026

Exhibit 13: Chart on Global - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 14: Data Table on Global - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 15: Chart on Global Market: Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 16: Data Table on Global Market: Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

4 Five Forces Analysis

4.1 Five forces summary

Exhibit 17: Five forces analysis - Comparison between 2021 and 2026

4.2 Bargaining power of buyers

Exhibit 18: Bargaining power of buyers  Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026

4.3 Bargaining power of suppliers

Exhibit 19: Bargaining power of suppliers  Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026

4.4 Threat of new entrants

Exhibit 20: Threat of new entrants  Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026

4.5 Threat of substitutes

Exhibit 21: Threat of substitutes  Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026

4.6 Threat of rivalry

Exhibit 22: Threat of rivalry  Impact of key factors in 2021 and 2026

4.7 Market condition

Exhibit 23: Chart on Market condition - Five forces 2021 and 2026

5 Market Segmentation by Type

5.1 Market segments

Exhibit 24: Chart on Type - Market share 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 25: Data Table on Type - Market share 2021-2026 (%)

5.2 Comparison by Type

Exhibit 26: Chart on Comparison by Type



Exhibit 27: Data Table on Comparison by Type

5.3 Independent coffee shops - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

Exhibit 28: Chart on Independent coffee shops - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 29: Data Table on Independent coffee shops - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 30: Chart on Independent coffee shops - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 31: Data Table on Independent coffee shops - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

5.4 Chain coffee shops - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

Exhibit 32: Chart on Chain coffee shops - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 33: Data Table on Chain coffee shops - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 34: Chart on Chain coffee shops - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 35: Data Table on Chain coffee shops - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

5.5 Market opportunity by Type

Exhibit 36: Market opportunity by Type ($ million)

6 Customer Landscape

6.1 Customer landscape overview

Exhibit 37: Analysis of price sensitivity, lifecycle, customer purchase basket, adoption rates, and purchase criteria

7 Geographic Landscape

7.1 Geographic segmentation

Exhibit 38: Chart on Market share by geography 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 39: Data Table on Market share by geography 2021-2026 (%)

7.2 Geographic comparison

Exhibit 40: Chart on Geographic comparison



Exhibit 41: Data Table on Geographic comparison

7.3 North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 42: Chart on North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 43: Data Table on North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 44: Chart on North America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

Exhibit 45: Data Table on North America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.4 Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 46: Chart on Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 47: Data Table on Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 48: Chart on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

Exhibit 49: Data Table on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.5 APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

Exhibit 50: Chart on APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 51: Data Table on APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 52: Chart on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 53: Data Table on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.6 Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 54: Chart on Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 55: Data Table on Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 56: Chart on Middle East and Africa - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

and - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

Exhibit 57: Data Table on Middle East and Africa - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.7 South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 58: Chart on South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 59: Data Table on South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 60: Chart on South America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

Exhibit 61: Data Table on South America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.8 US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

Exhibit 62: Chart on US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 63: Data Table on US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 64: Chart on US - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 65: Data Table on US - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.9 UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

Exhibit 66: Chart on UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 67: Data Table on UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 68: Chart on UK - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 69: Data Table on UK - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.10 China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 70: Chart on China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 71: Data Table on China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 72: Chart on China - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

Exhibit 73: Data Table on China - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.11 Canada - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 74: Chart on Canada - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 75: Data Table on Canada - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 76: Chart on Canada - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

Exhibit 77: Data Table on Canada - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.12 Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 78: Chart on Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 79: Data Table on Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 80: Chart on Germany - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

Exhibit 81: Data Table on Germany - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.13 Market opportunity by geography

Exhibit 82: Market opportunity by geography ($ million)

8 Drivers, Challenges, and Trends

8.1 Market drivers

8.2 Market challenges

8.3 Impact of drivers and challenges

Exhibit 83: Impact of drivers and challenges in 2021 and 2026

8.4 Market trends

9 Vendor Landscape

9.1 Overview

9.2 Vendor landscape

Exhibit 84: Overview on Criticality of inputs and Factors of differentiation

9.3 Landscape disruption

Exhibit 85: Overview on factors of disruption

9.4 Industry risks

Exhibit 86: Impact of key risks on business

10 Vendor Analysis

10.1 Vendors covered

Exhibit 87: Vendors covered

10.2 Market positioning of vendors

Exhibit 88: Matrix on vendor position and classification

10.3 Barista Coffee Co. Ltd.

Exhibit 89: Barista Coffee Co. Ltd. - Overview



Exhibit 90: Barista Coffee Co. Ltd. - Product / Service



Exhibit 91: Barista Coffee Co. Ltd. - Key offerings

10.4 Brew Berrys Hospitality Pvt Ltd.

Exhibit 92: Brew Berrys Hospitality Pvt Ltd. - Overview



Exhibit 93: Brew Berrys Hospitality Pvt Ltd. - Product / Service



Exhibit 94: Brew Berrys Hospitality Pvt Ltd. - Key offerings

10.5 Caffe Nero Group Ltd.

Exhibit 95: Caffe Nero Group Ltd. - Overview



Exhibit 96: Caffe Nero Group Ltd. - Product / Service



Exhibit 97: Caffe Nero Group Ltd. - Key offerings

10.6 Coffee Day Enterprises Ltd.

Exhibit 98: Coffee Day Enterprises Ltd. - Overview



Exhibit 99: Coffee Day Enterprises Ltd. - Business segments



Exhibit 100: Coffee Day Enterprises Ltd. - Key offerings



Exhibit 101: Coffee Day Enterprises Ltd. - Segment focus

10.7 Costa Ltd.

Exhibit 102: Costa Ltd. - Overview



Exhibit 103: Costa Ltd. - Product / Service



Exhibit 104: Costa Ltd. - Key offerings

10.8 Inspire Brands Inc.

Exhibit 105: Inspire Brands Inc. - Overview



Exhibit 106: Inspire Brands Inc. - Product / Service



Exhibit 107: Inspire Brands Inc. - Key offerings

10.9 McDonald Corp.

Exhibit 108: McDonald Corp. - Overview



Exhibit 109: McDonald Corp. - Product / Service



Exhibit 110: McDonald Corp. - Key news



Exhibit 111: McDonald Corp. - Key offerings

10.10 MTY Food Group Inc.

Exhibit 112: MTY Food Group Inc. - Overview



Exhibit 113: MTY Food Group Inc. - Business segments



Exhibit 114: MTY Food Group Inc. - Key offerings



Exhibit 115: MTY Food Group Inc. - Segment focus

10.11 Restaurant Brands International Inc.

Exhibit 116: Restaurant Brands International Inc. - Overview



Exhibit 117: Restaurant Brands International Inc. - Business segments



Exhibit 118: Restaurant Brands International Inc. - Key news



Exhibit 119: Restaurant Brands International Inc. - Key offerings



Exhibit 120: Restaurant Brands International Inc. - Segment focus

10.12 Starbucks Coffee Co.

Exhibit 121: Starbucks Coffee Co. - Overview



Exhibit 122: Starbucks Coffee Co. - Business segments



Exhibit 123: Starbucks Coffee Co. - Key news



Exhibit 124: Starbucks Coffee Co. - Key offerings



Exhibit 125: Starbucks Coffee Co. - Segment focus

11 Appendix

11.1 Scope of the report

11.2 Inclusions and exclusions checklist

Exhibit 126: Inclusions checklist



Exhibit 127: Exclusions checklist

11.3 Currency conversion rates for US$

Exhibit 128: Currency conversion rates for US$

11.4 Research methodology

Exhibit 129: Research methodology



Exhibit 130: Validation techniques employed for market sizing



Exhibit 131: Information sources

11.5 List of abbreviations

Exhibit 132: List of abbreviations

About Us:

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

Contact

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Media & Marketing Executive

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UK: +44 203 893 3200

Email: [email protected]

Website: www.technavio.com/

SOURCE Technavio
Ohio outpaces national average in agricultural R&D investment, engineers and food specialists; Pandemic and war in Ukraine highlight the importance of Ohio's robust food industry

COLUMBUS, Ohio, April 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- As the national supply chain and food industries continue to see increased strain, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian attack on Ukraine, new research released today finds that Ohio's food and agribusiness industry could be part of the solution.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Innovative Food Technology and JobsOhio, " Ohio's Food Industry, " a series of four new white papers authored by TEConomy Partners, highlight that Ohio has been a leader in research and innovation in the food industry, which is a primary economic driver for the state. This enables the food industry to be adaptable, flexible, and nimble to overcome the challenges it faces.

Employing nearly 126,000 people across the state and investing over $100 million in food-related research and development (R&D), Ohio's food industry sectors include food and beverage machinery and packaging; food and beverage processing and manufacturing; and food and beverage wholesale and warehousing.

With a commitment to innovation, Ohio's food industry performs 43% more R&D than the national average, and hires more high-skill workers to advance the sector. For instance, Ohio's broad food packaging, processing, manufacturing, and distribution sector boasts 60% more engineers than the U.S. average, 40% more engineering technicians, and 38% more food scientists and technologists.

"Innovation is the key to avoiding a repeat of the bare shelves from the supply chain shortages we saw during the pandemic," said J.P. Nauseef, President and CEO of JobsOhio. "The reports show that Ohio is already out ahead, investing into the R&D needed and hiring more engineers and food scientists to accomplish tomorrow's technological advancements for our state's growing food and agribusiness."

As the report highlights, innovation in the food industry is not just a matter of economic importance, but also an issue that is critical for the longevity and security of the nation. With Ohio remaining a primary supporter of the national supply chain, Ohio is a net exporter of food industry products, processing, packaging, and equipment, where export sales totaled $42.2 billion in 2020. Additional findings from the report include:

$114 million in food-related R&D expenditures

in food-related R&D expenditures 43% more food industry R&D than the nation

1,207 patent records, including 580 issued patents

60% more engineers than the U.S. average and 40% more engineering technicians, and

38% more food scientists and technologists than the U.S. average, with growth outpacing the nation.

The report notes that Ohio's end-to-end supply chain gives the state a distinct advantage in being part of the food system.

"Ohio is a major U.S. producer of corn, bean, and soft red winter wheat and home to a significant commodity processing sector," said Tim Derickson, JobsOhio's Senior Director of Food & Agribusiness. "Before we even imagined that there would be an attack on Ukraine - which has led to wheat shortages - we were using innovative programs, like H2Ohio, to encourage sustainable farming practices. This year alone, Ohio farmers increased by 20% the production of soft wheat, used for cookies and cakes."

The new research also finds that innovation in the food industry will further insulate the longevity and security of the state's supply chain. Researchers note that it is imperative that public policy be enacted, and public-private partnerships be developed that seek to strengthen the food industry sector to help ensure a sustainable future for Ohio. The four white papers cover:

Why the Food Industry Matters : A report on the high value of the food and agribusiness industry as a key economic driver.

: A report on the high value of the food and agribusiness industry as a key economic driver. State of the Industry : A critical review of the current and future realities of the industry.

: A critical review of the current and future realities of the industry. Disruptive Technologies : An informative report on the technologies transforming the food and agribusiness industry.

: An informative report on the technologies transforming the food and agribusiness industry. Executive Summary: A high-level overview of Ohio's burgeoning food and agribusiness sector.

About JobsOhio:

JobsOhio is a private nonprofit economic development corporation designed to drive job creation and new capital investment in Ohio through business attraction, retention, and expansion. The organization also works to seed talent production in its targeted industries and to attract talent to Ohio through Find Your Ohio . JobsOhio works with six regional partners across Ohio: Dayton Development Coalition , Ohio Southeast Economic Development , One Columbus , REDI Cincinnati , Regional Growth Partnership and Team NEO . Learn more at www.jobsohio.com . Follow us on LinkedIn , Twitter and Facebook .

About the Center for Innovative Food Technology

The Center for Innovative Food Technology is a developer and provider of technical innovations and solutions for the food processing, agribusiness and agricultural sectors.

About TEConomy Partners, LLC

TEConomy Partners, LLC, is a global leader in research, analysis, and strategy for innovation-driven economic development. TEConomy is experienced in developing innovation/entrepreneurial ecosystems, and has worked with numerous regions and states to develop strategic action plans to generate results. The experts at TEConomy also work with clients to assess scientific and technological core competencies and develop strategic roadmaps that leverage science and technology assets. TEConomy extensively practices economic analytics and applies this expertise to in-depth economic and functional impact analysis for government, higher education institutions, academic medical centers, industry associations, and other client groups.

SOURCE JobsOhio
JAKARTA, Indonesia and TORONTO, April 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - PT Sun Life Financial Indonesia (Sun Life Indonesia), a subsidiary of Sun Life Financial Inc. (TSX: SLF) (NYSE: SLF), and PT Bank CIMB Niaga Tbk (CIMB Niaga; IDX: BNGA) announced today that they are deepening their existing partnership in Indonesia.

Sun Life Indonesia currently offers insurance solutions to CIMB Niaga customers through digital and out-of-branch channels. This new agreement makes Sun Life Indonesia the provider of insurance solutions to CIMB Niaga customers through all channels for a term of 15 years starting in January 2025. It also extends the term of the existing relationship by six (6) years to 2039.

This partnership combines Sun Life Indonesia's comprehensive range of insurance solutions and expert Client care across all life stages with CIMB Niaga's extensive distribution network of 427 branches serving seven (7) million customers across Indonesia. Established in 1955, CIMB Niaga is the second largest private bank by total assets in Indonesia as of December 31, 2021. Sun Life is also the exclusive bancassurance partner for CIMB Group in Malaysia.

The Indonesian market is the largest economy in Southeast Asia and offers significant growth potential, reflecting a young, emerging middle class with low insurance penetration rates. This deepening partnership will accelerate Sun Life's long-term strategy to grow its distribution capacity, supported by bancassurance. It will also enhance the value proposition for CIMB Niaga customers and provide them with a comprehensive range of protection and long-term savings solutions to address their evolving needs.

"We are delighted to deepen our regional partnership with CIMB to help millions more Clients in Indonesia achieve lifetime financial security and live healthier lives," said Ingrid Johnson, President of Sun Life Asia. "It will also extend Sun Life's reach in a market with tremendous potential for further growth with a partner that shares our focus on building a brighter, more sustainable future for Clients, employees and communities."

"We are pleased to deepen our partnership with Sun Life Indonesia. This partnership marks another step in CIMB Niaga's continued efforts to be the bank of choice for Indonesian consumers and businesses. CIMB Niaga and Sun Life Indonesia have highly complementary strengths and a shared focus on providing an extraordinary experience for our customers. Together, we foresee that this partnership will help us create significant lasting value for our customers and key stakeholders," said CIMB Niaga President Director Lani Darmawan.

"As one of Indonesia's leading banks, our customers rely on us to deliver best-in-class products and services. By deepening our partnership with Sun Life Indonesia, we are reaffirming our commitment to provide high-quality solutions across wealth and insurance products to serve customers' needs today and in the future," said Noviady Wahyudi, Chief of Consumer Banking CIMB Niaga.

"It is a great honour to strengthen the partnership between Sun Life Indonesia and CIMB Niaga. CIMB Niaga is a quality bank with a well-known brand and has been a trusted partner to Sun Life Indonesia since 2009. During that time, we have developed a lasting partnership as we worked together to build a comprehensive range of protection and financial solutions for Indonesians at every life stage," says Elin Waty, President Director of Sun Life Indonesia.

Visit www.sunlife.com for slides and more information related to this announcement.

About Sun Life

Sun Life is a leading international financial services organization providing asset management, wealth, insurance and health solutions to individual and corporate Clients. Sun Life has operations in a number of markets worldwide, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, India, China, Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia and Bermuda. As of December 31, 2021, Sun Life had total assets under management of $1.44 trillion. For more information please visit www.sunlife.com.

Sun Life Financial Inc. trades on the Toronto (TSX), New York (NYSE) and Philippine (PSE) stock exchanges under the ticker symbol SLF.

About Sun Life Indonesia

Sun Life Indonesia is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sun Life Financial Inc. It offers a variety of protection and financial management products, from life insurance, education insurance, health insurance, and retirement plans. Sun Life Indonesia partners with leading financial institutions, both national and international, to serve multi-channel distribution strategies and provide wider access to our insurance solutions.

For more information please visit www.sunlife.co.id

About CIMB Niaga

CIMB Niaga was established under the name PT Bank Niaga in 1955. Approximately 92.5% of CIMB Niaga's shares (including the 1.02% owned by PT Commerce Kapital) are owned by CIMB Group. As the second largest private bank in Indonesia by assets, CIMB Niaga offers a comprehensive portfolio of conventional and shariah banking services, including consumer banking, SME banking, commercial and corporate banking, treasury and capital markets, and transaction banking services, supported by nationwide 427 branch offices, 4,481 ATM units, branchless banking networks, as well as 12,217 employees (consolidated) as of December 31, 2021.

Sun Life Press Contacts

Shierly Ge

Chief Marketing Officer

Sun Life Indonesia

T: +62 21 5289 0000

[email protected] Sun Life Investor Relations Contacts

Yaniv Bitton

Vice-President, Head of Investor Relations

& Capital Markets

T: +1 (416) 979-6496

[email protected]



Sarah James

Head of Communications

Sun Life Asia

T: +852 6021 5797

[email protected] David Mathews

Assistant Vice-President,

Investor Relations & Capital Markets

T: +1 (416) 979-6464

[email protected]



Rajani Kamath

Associate Vice-President

Corporate Communications

Sun Life

T: +1 (647) 515-7514

[email protected]





CIMB Niaga Press Contact

Deddy T. Hasibuan

Media Relations and Reputation Group Head

CIMB Niaga

T: +62 21 270 0555 CIMB Niaga Investor Relations Contact

Graha CIMB Niaga

Jl. Jend Sudirman Kav. 58

Jakarta 12190, Indonesia

T: +62 21 250 5252, 250 5353

Website: www.cimbniaga.co.id

[email protected]

SOURCE Sun Life Financial Inc.
Yesterday, the sheikh of the Al-Walda clans, Sheikh Hamed Al-Faraj, joined a special program through ANHAs agency, to talk about the wall separating Shengal and north and east Syria, which is being implemented by the Iraqi government, and the dangers of this wall, and the position of Arab tribes on it.

An apartheid Wall and the Arab clans stand against it

Sheikh Hamed Al-Faraj began his speech by saying: "The Iraqi regime and those with it are building this wall in response to foreign agendas known to everyone, and the Arab clans have a clear position against this wall because we call it a racial separation wall that separates the components of the region, and this is something that the clans never accept and we from the beginning we denied it."

He added, "The Iraqi army is not an elite army, and it does not express all Iraqis and follows its allegiance to well-known agendas as well, which drive it, and they want to create disputes and problems between the components within Iraq and transfer them to areas inside Syria, and this is what we will not accept."

We support the demonstrations, and we will demonstrate, too

Regarding the demonstrations that took place in Shengal against this wall, Sheikh Hamed said: "We support the demonstrations against this wall and we will also demonstrate against it and we will never accept it. We are not separated by borders, all these borders are artificial, so that there are no natural barriers. The Apartheid Wall this is like the wall between north and east Syria and Turkey, as if it is an extension of the Turkish wall and an implementation of a Turkish Erdogan agenda that wanted to isolate northern Syria from northern Iraq.

Dirty Turkish Agenda

Regarding the goal, Sheikh Hamed Al-Faraj said: "Unfortunately, they are implementing the agendas of other countries. The Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government KRG must be aware of what they are doing and that they are committing a crime against our region and our geography in Syria and Iraq, and this we will never accept, and they are implementing a dirty Turkish agenda and even North Almost all of Syria has become part of a barrier between us and Turkey. Basically, the lands behind the wall are our lands, and they are Syrian lands."

Sheikh Hamid Al-Faraj questioned the interest of both Baghdad and Erdogan in this, saying: "If Turkey does anything against our regions, it is a historical enemy. As for the government of Iraq and the Kurdistan region, why this action? For Turkey and Erdogan to be satisfied with you?!!! With everything we can, this wall is rejected, because there are people in Syria and Iraq who are against this wall, and we are always with our brothers in Iraq and the Kurdistan region to remove this wall, which we must call an apartheid wall.

Sheikh Hamed Al-Faraj stressed that "the experience of the Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria AANES is a distinctive and ideal experience for the whole region." He wondered why they want to make this wall? So that this experiment does not transfer to neighboring countries, and this is a mistake, they should benefit from this pioneering democratic experiment and consider it the first in the region, and it depends on the cooperation of all components, as if they want to surround this experiment from all directions so that it does not spread, but they will not be able to close the space. And no matter how much they set up ground fortifications and others, our thought will spread everywhere, and this pioneering experiment will spread to all regions.

Regarding the position of the Baghdad and Hewler governments on the Turkish plans, Sheikh Hamed Al-Faraj said: "Why is this disregard by the Baghdad and Kurdistan region about what Turkey is doing? We hear daily about Turkish bombing of areas in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region, and they do not even protest against that. Is it Failure in front of the Turks, or do they want to implement these agendas."

At the end of his speech, Sheikh Hamed Al-Faraj sent a message to the Arab clans, saying: "In the name of the Al-Walda clans in Syria and Iraq, I call on all the clans in Syria, Shengal and Iraq in general, to stand against this wall and destroy it at all costs. We are ready to do everything in order not to Executing and removing this wall.

ANHA
The Chemotherapy Induced Anemia market is expected to grow owing to the disease awareness and the emergence of new products in the pipeline. In addition, persistently rising cases of Chemotherapy Induced Anemia in the forecast period will help increase the Chemotherapy Induced Anemia market size.

LAS VEGAS , April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- DelveInsight's Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Market Insights report provides a comprehensive understanding of current treatment practices, Chemotherapy Induced Anemia emerging drugs, market share of individual therapies, and current and forecasted Chemotherapy Induced Anemia market size from 2019 to 2032, segmented into 7MM (the United States, the EU5 (the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, France, and Germany), and Japan.

Key Takeaways from the Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Market

As per DelveInsight's estimates, the Chemotherapy Induced Anemia market size was USD 1,061.9 million in 2021 which is further expected to increase by 2032 in the 7MM.

in 2021 which is further expected to increase by 2032 in the 7MM. Among the 7MM, the US accounted for the maximum Chemotherapy Induced Anemia market size in 2021.

Key Chemotherapy Induced Anemia companies such as Astellas, FibroGen, AstraZeneca, Aileron Therapeutics, Zydus Cadila , and others are working proactively in the Chemotherapy Induced Anemia market.

and others are working proactively in the Chemotherapy Induced Anemia market. The Chemotherapy Induced Anemia drugs in the pipeline include Roxadustat (FG-4592), ALRN-6924, Desidustat, and others.

and others. The increase in the number of Chemotherapy Induced Anemia cases is likely to contribute directly to the market growth during the forecast period.

For further information on how the emerging therapies would shift the Chemotherapy Induced Anemia market landscape download the sample @ Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Market Outlook

Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Overview

Chemotherapy Induced Anemia is caused by malignant invasion of normal tissue, which results in blood loss, bone marrow infiltration with disruption of erythropoiesis, and functional iron deficiency as a result of inflammation. The pathogenesis of Chemotherapy Induced Anemia is complex and frequently difficult to identify, and it is usually multifactorial.

Anemia can cause a wide range of symptoms in cancer patients, affecting almost every organ. The severity of such symptoms is determined by the degree of anemia, the rate at which it manifests, and any existing comorbidities.

The symptoms range from mild to severe, including dizziness, palpitation, dyspnea, anorexia, and difficulty concentrating. Fatigue, one of the most common Chemotherapy Induced Anemia symptoms in cancer patients, has a negative impact on their quality of life.

Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Epidemiology Segmentation

As per DelveInsight, the total Chemotherapy Induced Anemia incident cases were approx 1.6 million cases in the 7MM in 2021.

Among EU5 countries, Germany has the highest number of Chemotherapy Induced Anemia incident cases in 2021.

The Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Market Report proffers epidemiological analysis for the study period 2019-2032 in the 7MM segmented into:

Incident Cases of Chemotherapy Induced Anemia

Severity-specific Cases of Chemotherapy Induced Anemia

Incidence of Chemotherapy Induced Anemia per chemo cycles

Know how the epidemiological trends are going to look like in 2032 for the 7MM by downloading @ Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Epidemiological Insights

Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Treatment Market

The two main goals of Chemotherapy Induced Anemia treatment are to relieve symptoms and improve quality of life. Failure to treat Chemotherapy Induced Anemia contributes to a suboptimal response to chemotherapy, and correcting anemia in patients is associated with improved chemotherapy responses. Packed red blood cell transfusions, erythropoietin stimulating agents (ESAs), and iron supplementation are currently used for Chemotherapy Induced Anemia treatment.

The goal of red blood cell transfusion is to maintain or improve the blood's capacity to carry oxygen so that oxygen can be delivered to tissues. Iron supplementation is an underutilized Chemotherapy Induced Anemia therapy that has traditionally been administered orally. Unlike the oral form, which is hampered by hepcidin, intravenous iron is directly absorbed by macrophages and is not hampered by a disrupted absorption system in an inflammatory setting.

Discover more about Chemotherapy Induced Anemia guidelines, marketed drugs, and the current treatment options at Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Treatment Guidelines

Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Pipeline Therapies and Key Companies

Roxadustat: Astellas/FibroGen/AstraZeneca

ALRN-6924: Aileron Therapeutics

Desidustat: Zydus Cadila

Discover more about therapy set to grab substantial Chemotherapy Induced Anemia market share at Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Drugs

Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Market Dynamics

The increase in the number of cancer cases, the Chemotherapy Induced Anemia incidence is likely to rise in the coming years thereby increasing the need for Chemotherapy Induced Anemia treatment, which further increases the Chemotherapy Induced Anemia market size. The challenges in treating anemic patients have given rise to a novel class of agents  HIF-PH inhibitors that can change the existing anemia treatment paradigm. Moreover, with the availability of new IV iron supplementation, anemia has become more manageable and thus drives the Chemotherapy Induced Anemia market growth.

However, the diversity of patient presentation and symptomatology can act as a hurdle for Chemotherapy Induced Anemia market growth. In addition, significant undertreatment of Chemotherapy Induced Anemia, cost implications of the Chemotherapy Induced Anemia management can also limit the Chemotherapy Induced Anemia market growth.

Know more about which pharma player in the Chemotherapy Induced Anemia market is set to emerge as the trendsetter at Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Companies

Scope of the Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Market Report

Study Period: 2019-2032

2019-2032 Coverage: 7MM [ The United States , EU5 ( Germany , France , Italy , Spain , and the United Kingdom ), and Japan ]

7MM [ , EU5 ( , , , , and the ), and ] Key Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Companies: Astellas, FibroGen, AstraZeneca, Aileron Therapeutics, Zydus Cadila, and others

Astellas, FibroGen, AstraZeneca, Aileron Therapeutics, Zydus Cadila, and others Key Pipeline Therapies : Roxadustat (FG-4592), ALRN-6924, Desidustat, and others

: Roxadustat (FG-4592), ALRN-6924, Desidustat, and others Therapeutic Assessment: Chemotherapy Induced Anemia current marketed and emerging therapies

Chemotherapy Induced Anemia current marketed and emerging therapies Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Market Dynamics: Chemotherapy Induced Anemia market drivers and barriers

Chemotherapy Induced Anemia market drivers and barriers Competitive Intelligence Analysis: SWOT analysis, PESTLE analysis, Porter's five forces, BCG Matrix, Market entry strategies

SWOT analysis, PESTLE analysis, Porter's five forces, BCG Matrix, Market entry strategies Unmet Needs, KOL's views, Analyst's views, Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Market Access and Reimbursement

Discover more about the future Chemotherapy Induced Anemia market share of treatment therapies at Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Treatment Market

Table of Contents

1. Key Insights 2. Report Introduction 3. Overview at a Glance 4. Executive Summary 5. Disease Background and Overview 6. Epidemiology and Patient Population 7. Patient Journey 8. Emerging Drugs 9. Other Assets 10. 7MM Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Market Analysis 11. Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Market Drivers 12. Chemotherapy Induced Anemia Market Barriers 13. KOL Views 14. SWOT 15. Unmet Needs 16. Appendix 17. DelveInsight Capabilities 18. Disclaimer 19. About DelveInsight

Get in touch with our Business executive at Healthcare Due Diligence Services

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About DelveInsight

DelveInsight is a leading Business Consultant, and Market Research firm focused exclusively on life sciences. It supports Pharma companies by providing comprehensive end-to-end solutions to improve their performance. Get hassle-free access to all the healthcare and pharma market research reports through our subscription-based platform PharmDelve.

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SOURCE DelveInsight Business Research, LLP
DUBLIN, April 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Pet Food Market by Pet Type, Food Type and Sales Channel: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast 2021-2030" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global pet food market was valued at $87,268.2 million in 2020, and is projected to reach $133,430.9 million by 2030, registering a CAGR of 4.6% from 2021 to 2030.



The global pet food market is booming, owing to increased pet ownership across the globe due to rising consumers' disposable income. The consumers are increasingly treating their pets like their own family members, therefore, the demand for organic and nutritional pet food is likely to exhibit the highest CAGR.



Rise in trend of nuclear families, rapid humanization of pets, and increase in awareness about pet health is presently driving the growth of pet food market. Additionally, increase in pet ownership in developing nations and rise in e-commerce sales act as an opportunity for the global pet food market. However, increase concerns toward pet obesity and pet food recalls are likely to restrict the market growth.



Pet food is one of the most strongly regulated food categories in the food & beverage sector. Pet food need to strictly scrutinized in developed countries at every stage. The regulations imposed by government on manufacturing of pet food can limit the growth of the pet food market. Furthermore, in some developing countries, a lack of acceptance of premium and high-priced pet food might hinder the pet food market growth.



The global pet food market is classified on the basis of pet type, food type, sales channel, and region. By pet type, the market is segmented into dogs, cats, and other pets. Based on food type, the pet food market is segregated into dry food, wet food, treats & snacks, and others. By sales channel, the market is categorized into supermarkets & hypermarkets, specialized pet shops, online sales channel, and others. Region wise, the market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and LAMEA. North America contributed the highest revenue in 2020 and is expected to dominate the pet food market during the forecast period.



Dry food was the highest revenue generating food type because it is one of the most convenient types of food, easy to store, requires no refrigeration, and is available at affordable prices as compared to other types of food. Rising trend of nuclear families and their need to keep dogs for companionship and security resulted into highest revenue generation in 2020. North America and Europe would provide lucrative growth opportunities until 2030, owing to considerable increase in pet food production and increasing global pet population.



The impact of COVID-19 on global pet food market had both positive and negative impact. The people during the lockdown were forced to stay at homes. This resulted in growing emergence of adopting pets for companionship, which had a positive outlook on the market.



Competitive intelligence on prominent manufacturers of pet food provides key insights in terms of strategies implemented to gain significant share in the global pet food market. The key players profiled in global pet food market includes Mars Petcare Inc., The Hartz Mountain Corporation, Big Heart Pet Brands, Nestle Purina PetCare, Diamond Pet Foods, Hill's Pet Nutrition, Deuerer, WellPet, Blue Buffalo, and Heristo AG.



Key Benefits

This report provides a quantitative analysis of current trends, estimations, and dynamics of the global pet food market from 2021 to 2030 to identify the prevailing market opportunities.

Porter's five forces analysis highlights the potency of the buyers and suppliers to enable stakeholders to make profit-oriented business decisions and strengthen their supplier-buyer network.

In-depth analysis of the market segmentation assists to determine the prevailing market opportunities.

Major countries in each region are mapped according to their revenue contribution to the global industry. The market player positioning segment facilitates benchmarking while providing a clear understanding of the present position of key market players.

The report includes analyses of the regional as well as global market, key players, market segments, application areas, and growth strategies.

Key Market Segments

By Pet Type

Dogs

Cats

Others

By Food Type

Dry Food

Wet Food

Treats & Snacks

Others

By Sales Channel

Supermarkets & Hypermarkets

Specialized Pet Shops

Online Sales Channel

Others

By Region

North America

U.S.

Canada

Mexico

Europe

UK

France

Netherlands

Germany

Turkey

Rest of Europe

Asia-Pacific

China

Japan

India

South Korea

Australia

Rest of Asia-Pacific

LAMEA

Brazil

South Africa

UAE

Rest of LAMEA

Key Topics Covered:



CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION



CHAPTER 2: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY



CHAPTER 3: MARKET OVERVIEW

3.1. Market definition and scope

3.2. Key findings

3.2.1. Top investment pockets

3.3. Porter's five forces analysis

3.4. Top player positioning, 2020

3.5. Market dynamics

3.5.1. Drivers

3.5.1.1. Rise in trend of nuclear families

3.5.1.2. Rapid humanization of pets

3.5.1.3. Increase in awareness about pet health

3.5.2. Restraints

3.5.2.1. Increase in pet obesity

3.5.2.2. Pet food recalls

3.5.3. Opportunities

3.5.3.1. Increase in pet ownership in developing nations

3.5.3.2. Rise in e-commerce sales

3.6. Impact of COVID-19

3.7. Top impacting factors

3.7.1. Rising trend of nuclear families

3.7.2. Rapid humanization of pets

3.7.3. Increasing awareness about pet health

3.7.4. Increase in obesity

3.7.5. Pet food recalls

3.8. Estimated pet population region-wise

3.9. Supply chain analysis

3.10. Parent-peer market outlook



CHAPTER 4: PET FOOD MARKET, BY PET TYPE

4.1. Overview

4.1.1. Market size and forecast

4.2. Dogs

4.2.1. Overview

4.2.2. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities

4.2.3. Market size and forecast

4.3. Cats

4.3.1. Overview

4.3.2. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities

4.3.3. Market size and forecast

4.4. Others

4.4.1. Overview

4.4.2. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities

4.4.3. Market size and forecast



CHAPTER 5: PET FOOD MARKET, BY FOOD TYPE

5.1. Overview

5.1.1. Market size and forecast

5.2. Dry food

5.2.1. Overview

5.2.2. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities

5.2.3. Market size and forecast

5.3. Wet food

5.3.1. Overview

5.3.2. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities

5.3.3. Market size and forecast

5.4. Treats/snacks

5.4.1. Overview

5.4.2. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities

5.4.3. Market size and forecast

5.5. Others

5.5.1. Overview

5.5.2. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities

5.5.3. Market size and forecast



CHAPTER 6: PET FOOD MARKET, BY SALES CHANNEL

6.1. Overview

6.1.1. Market size and forecast

6.2. Supermarkets/hypermarkets

6.2.1. Overview

6.2.2. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities

6.2.3. Market size and forecast

6.3. Specialized pet shops

6.3.1. Overview

6.3.2. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities

6.3.3. Market size and forecast

6.4. Online sales channel

6.4.1. Overview

6.4.2. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities

6.4.3. Market size and forecast

6.5. Others

6.5.1. Overview

6.5.2. Key market trends, growth factors, and opportunities

6.5.3. Market size and forecast



CHAPTER 7: PET FOOD MARKET, BY REGION



CHAPTER 8: COMPETITION LANDSCAPE

8.1. Top winning strategies

8.2. Product mapping

8.3. Competitive dashboard

8.4. Competitive heat map

8.5. Key developments

8.5.1. Partnership

8.5.2. Business expansion

8.5.3. Product launch

8.5.4. Investment

8.5.5. Acquisition

8.5.6. Agreement



CHAPTER 9: COMPANY PROFILES

9.1. BLUE BUFFALO CO., LTD. (General Mills, Inc.)

9.1.1. Company overview

9.1.2. Key executives

9.1.3. Company snapshot

9.1.4. Operating business segments

9.1.5. Product portfolio

9.1.6. R&D Expenditure

9.1.7. Business performance

9.1.8. Key strategic moves and developments

9.2. COLGATE-PALMOLIVE COMPANY

9.2.1. Company overview

9.2.2. Key Executives

9.2.3. Company snapshot

9.2.4. Operating business segments

9.2.5. Product portfolio

9.2.6. R&D Expenditure

9.2.7. Business performance

9.2.8. Key strategic moves and developments

9.3. FARMINA PET FOODS

9.3.1. Company overview

9.3.2. Key Executives

9.3.3. Company snapshot

9.3.4. Product portfolio

9.4. HERISTO AG

9.4.1. Company overview

9.4.2. Key Executives

9.4.3. Company snapshot

9.4.4. Operating business segments

9.4.5. Product portfolio

9.4.6. Key strategic moves and developments

9.5. MARS, INCORPORATED

9.5.1. Company overview

9.5.2. Key Executives

9.5.3. Company snapshot

9.5.4. Operating business segments

9.5.5. Product portfolio

9.5.6. Key strategic moves and developments

9.6. NESTLE PURINA PETCARE (Nestle S.A.)

9.6.1. Company overview

9.6.2. Key Executives

9.6.3. Company snapshot

9.6.4. Operating business segments

9.6.5. Product portfolio

9.6.6. R&D Expenditure

9.6.7. Business performance

9.6.8. Key strategic moves and developments

9.7. SCHELL & KAMPETER, INC.

9.7.1. Company overview

9.7.2. Key Executives

9.7.3. Company snapshot

9.7.4. Product portfolio

9.7.5. Key strategic moves and developments

9.8. THE J. M. SMUCKER COMPANY

9.8.1. Company overview

9.8.2. Key Executives

9.8.3. Company snapshot

9.8.4. Operating business segments

9.8.5. Product portfolio

9.8.6. R&D Expenditure

9.8.7. Business performance

9.8.8. Key strategic moves and developments

9.9. TIERNAHRUNG DEUERER GMBH

9.9.1. Company overview

9.9.2. Key Executives

9.9.3. Company snapshot

9.9.4. Product portfolio

9.10. WELLPET LLC

9.10.1. Company overview

9.10.2. Key Executives

9.10.3. Company snapshot

9.10.4. Product portfolio

9.10.5. Key strategic moves and developments

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/wt10tt

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SOURCE Research and Markets
VANCOUVER, BC, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Trilogy Metals Inc. (TSX: TMQ) (NYSE American: TMQ) ("Trilogy Metals" or "the Company") announces its financial results for the first quarter ended February 28, 2022. Details of the Company's financial results are contained in the interim unaudited consolidated financial statements and Management's Discussion and Analysis which will be available on the Company's website at www.trilogymetals.com, on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and on EDGAR at www.sec.gov. All amounts are in United States dollars unless otherwise stated.

Selected Results

The following selected financial information is prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP.





in thousands of dollars,







except for per share amounts





Three months ended Selected expenses February 28,

2022 $ February 28,

2021 $ General and administrative 397 401 Investor relations 99 154 Professional fees 245 229 Salaries 414 439 Salaries and directors expense  stock-based

compensation 1,922 2,148 Total Expenses 3,115 3,423 Share of loss on equity investment 1,910 1,120 Comprehensive loss for the period (5,023) (4,516) Basic and diluted loss per common share (0.03) (0.03)

For the three-month period ended February 28, 2022, overall cash costs related to general and administrative expenses, investor relations, professional fees and salaries were primarily tracking to budget. For the three-months period ended February 28, 2022, Trilogy reported a net loss of $5.0 million (or $0.03 basic and diluted loss per common share). For the comparable period in 2021, we reported a net loss of $4.5 million (or $0.03 basic and diluted loss per common share). This difference is primarily due to the Company's equity pickup of Ambler Metals' comprehensive loss, offset by a reduction in stock-based compensation. Our 50% pro rata share of Ambler Metals' comprehensive loss increased by $0.8 million when compared to the prior year comparative as the current quarter includes pre-development costs for the Ambler Access Project for which there are no prior year comparatives. Salaries and directors expense - stock based-compensation decreased by $0.2 million in comparison to the prior year comparative mainly due to a reduction of 0.9 million units in overall stock-based awards granted during the current quarter.

Ambler Access Project ("AAP")

In a press release dated February 23, 2022, the Company announced that the United States Department of the Interior ("DOI") filed a motion on February 22, 2022 to remand the Final Environmental Impact Statement ("FEIS") and suspend the right-of-way permits issued to the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority ("AIDEA") for the Ambler Access Project. The DOI stated that the suspension of the road permits will allow it to carry out additional supplemental work on the FEIS. The motion also indicated that the DOI has requested that the lawsuits filed in 2021 against the DOI by a coalition of national and Alaska environmental non-government organizations be suspended. The lawsuits had been filed in response to the United States Bureau of Land Management's ("BLM") issuance of the Joint Record of Decision ("JROD"), that authorized a right-of-way across federally managed lands for AIDEA and the Ambler Access Project.

The Company has commenced discussions with its partners, including NANA Regional Corporation, Inc. ("NANA"), AIDEA, the Northwest Arctic Borough, the State of Alaska and South32 Limited to understand the potential impact of the above decision by the DOI on AIDEA's proposed plan and budget for the 2022 summer field season activities that were previously announced.

In mid-March 2022, the BLM and the DOI suspended the right-of-way grant and the right-of-way permit ("ROW permits") to AIDEA relating to the Ambler Access Project over federal land while the DOI conducts further analysis and consultation. While the suspension decisions are in place: AIDEA may not conduct any activities that rely on the authority of the ROW permits; the terms and conditions of the ROW permits are tolled; and all rental fee obligations are suspended. The suspension does not preclude AIDEA from applying for special use permits to conduct activities on the lands subject to the ROW permits or granted pursuant to applicable law or authority other than the suspended ROW permits.

On March 22, 2022, the Intervenor Defendants (the State of Alaska, NANA, AIDEA, and Ambler Metals LLC ("Ambler Metals")) filed briefs in opposition to the DOI's motion for a voluntary remand. In its brief, Ambler Metals stated that it does not oppose the voluntary remand motion subject to the following conditions: (i) no vacatur or termination of the permits; (ii) the remand must be completed within nine months; (iii) that there must be status updates to the court every 60 days during the remand period; and (iv) the federal defendants (DOI) must lodge the administrative record within 30 days of issuing any new decision. Also on March 22, 2022, the plaintiffs filed a motion asking the court to deny the motion for voluntary remand without vacatur of the permits and either allow merits briefing to proceed or simply vacate the Federal Defendants reviews and decisions.

On April 5, 2022, the Federal Defendants responded to the plaintiffs' arguments against voluntary remand and argued that vacatur of the decisions was not appropriate. Federal Defendants also argued that the court should retain jurisdiction, but disagreed with arguments requesting a court-imposed schedule. The Federal Defendants propose filing a status report every 90 days.

Liquidity and Capital Resources

We expended $1.5 million on operating activities during the first quarter of 2022 which is consistent with the prior year comparative. The majority of cash spent on operating activities during the quarter was on corporate salaries, annual fees paid to the Toronto Stock Exchange and the NYSE American Exchange and professional fees related to our annual regulatory filings with the American and Canadian securities commissions.

At February 28, 2022, we had $4.8 million in cash and cash equivalents and working capital of $4.3 million. The Company continues to manage its cash expenditures through its working capital. Management has begun a review of the fiscal 2022 budget for cash preservation opportunities and has reduced cash expenditures where feasible, including but not limited to, reductions in marketing and investor conferences and office expenses. The Company's Board of Directors are considering taking of the cash component of their fees in shares of the Company in an effort to preserve cash and increase share ownership. The Company's senior management team are also considering taking a portion of their base salaries in shares or other equity based compensation of the Company to preserve cash. Management believes that these cost reduction efforts will result in sufficient cash to fund the Company's operations for the next twelve months.

All project related costs are funded by the joint venture. Amber Metals is well funded to advance the UKMP with $58.2 million in cash and a $53.2 million loan receivable from South32 as at February 28, 2022. There is sufficient funds at the joint venture to fund the previously announced budgets for the UKMP of $28.5 million and the Ambler Access Project of $15.4 million for fiscal 2022. Trilogy does not anticipate having to fund the activities of Ambler Metals until the initial contribution of $145 million is expended.

Qualified Persons

Richard Gosse, P.Geo., Vice President Exploration for Trilogy Metals Inc., is a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Gosse has reviewed the technical information in this news release and approves the disclosure contained herein.

About Trilogy Metals

Trilogy Metals Inc. is a metals exploration and development company which holds a 50 percent interest in Ambler Metals LLC which has a 100 percent interest in the UKMP in northwestern Alaska. The UKMP is located within the Ambler Mining District which is one of the richest and most-prospective known copper-dominant districts. It hosts world-class polymetallic volcanogenic massive sulphide ("VMS") deposits that contain copper, zinc, lead, gold and silver, and carbonate replacement deposits which have been found to host high-grade copper and cobalt mineralization. Exploration efforts have been focused on two deposits in the Ambler mining district - the Arctic VMS deposit and the Bornite carbonate replacement deposit. Both deposits are located within land package that spans approximately 172,636 hectares. The Company has an agreement with NANA Regional Corporation, Inc., a Regional Alaska Native Corporation that provides a framework for the exploration and potential development of the Ambler mining district in cooperation with local communities. Our vision is to develop the Ambler mining district into a premier North American copper producer.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release includes certain "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian and United States securities legislation including the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein, including, without limitation, perceived merit of properties, expectations regarding the 2022 field seasons and budgets for the UKMP and Ambler Access Project, the Company's intention to provide updates on the Ambler Access Project permitting situation and the timing thereof, potential outcomes of discussions between Ambler Access Project stakeholders and the DOI, the willingness of the Company's director and executives to receive their compensation in equity, the Company's plans to look for opportunities to reduce its cash spend for the year, Management's expectations regarding the effects of cash conservation efforts and the sufficiency of cash for the next twelve months and the Company's plans to provide further updates and the timing thereof are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are frequently, but not always, identified by words such as "expects", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "potential", "possible", and similar expressions, or statements that events, conditions, or results "will", "may", "could", or "should" occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements involve various risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations include the uncertainties involving our assumptions with respect to the impact of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and other risks and uncertainties disclosed in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended November 30, 2021 filed with Canadian securities regulatory authorities and with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and in other Company reports and documents filed with applicable securities regulatory authorities from time to time. The Company's forward-looking statements reflect the beliefs, opinions and projections on the date the statements are made. The Company assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements or beliefs, opinions, projections, or other factors, should they change, except as required by law.

SOURCE Trilogy Metals Inc.
A Focus on the Impact of Pandemic

LOS ANGELES, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism and the Internet Brands/WebMD Impact Fund today announced a new partnership to support the Center's commitment to deepening reporting and public understanding of the mental and developmental health challenges of children and youth and the potentially lifelong effects of pandemic-related societal changes.

At the centerpiece of the partnership is the establishment of the Kristy Hammam Fund for Health Journalism, named in honor of WebMD's former Senior Vice President and Editor in Chief, who died in 2021.

"The Center for Health Journalism is honored to partner with the Internet Brands/WebMD Fund at this pivotal moment," said Michelle Levander, founding director of the Center for Health Journalism. "Mental health challenges for young people have been exacerbated by the pandemic. This partnership will support our efforts to provide essential knowledge to our nation's journalists, at a time when thoughtful, in-depth, investigative and explanatory reporting is more critical than ever."

The Kristy Hammam Fund for Health Journalism will support a professional journalist affiliated with the Center's National Fellowship program with funding, training and mentoring over six months on the issues of health equity and the well-being of America's children, youth and families. The partnership also will include support of the Center's Health Matters webinar series.

Health Matters webinars deliver meaningful, actionable insights from leading public health experts, policy researchers and distinguished journalists to a broad range of reporters from rural communities to major cities. This initiative will support webinars on the urgent issues of child and youth mental health and development. The Health Matters series has an overarching focus on health equity and health disparities, including explorations of systemic racism in health systems and community health, and the potential for meaningful change.

"As the largest health information platform, WebMD is acutely aware of the combined impact that the pandemic and health inequities have had on the nation's children and youth, and we share USC Annenberg's commitment to elevate awareness of these issues," said Leah Gentry, WebMD Group Vice President of Content. "By leveraging the power of health journalism to not only inform, but to inspire engagement and action, we have the potential to bring meaningful change that can transform the lives of a generation scarred by the pandemic."

About USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism

The USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, founded in 2004 at the Annenberg School of Journalism, is the leading national health journalism organization focused on health equity and health disparities. It helps journalists investigate health challenges and solutions in their communities with fact-based, rigorous reporting that serves as a catalyst for change. The Center advances "Impact Reporting" that combines powerful narratives, unassailable data and engagement with communities who journalists serve. The Center has partnered with more than 1,200 journalists and their newsrooms to produce impactful journalism on health and health equity that has changed laws and policies and sparked new community conversations. Its Health Matters webinar series bolsters coverage and build capacity among journalists, bringing top-notch insights, context and expert advice on urgent health and social welfare issues to time-pressed journalists at their desks. You can learn more about Center initiatives here.

About WebMD Health Corp.

WebMD, an Internet Brands company, is at the heart of the digital health revolution that is transforming the healthcare experience for consumers, patients, healthcare professionals, employers, health plans and health systems. Through public and private online portals, mobile platforms, and health-focused publications, WebMD delivers leading-edge content and digital services that enable and improve decision-making, support and motivate health actions, streamline and simplify the healthcare journey, and improve patient care.

The WebMD Health Network includes WebMD Health, Medscape, Jobson Healthcare Information, MediQuality, Frontline, Vitals Consumer Services, Aptus Health, Krames, PulsePoint, The Wellness Network, SanovaWorks, MedicineNet, eMedicineHealth, RxList, OnHealth, Medscape Education, and other owned WebMD sites. WebMD, Medscape, CME Circle, Medpulse, eMedicine, MedicineNet, theheart.org and RxList are among the trademarks of WebMD Health Corp. or its subsidiaries.

About Internet Brands

Headquartered in El Segundo, Calif, Internet Brands is a fully integrated online media and software services organization focused on four high-value vertical categories: Health, Automotive, Legal, and Home/Travel. The company's award-winning consumer websites lead their categories and serve more than 250 million monthly visitors, while a full range of web presence offerings has established deep, long-term relationships with SMB and enterprise clients. Internet Brands' powerful, proprietary operating platform provides the flexibility and scalability to fuel the company's continued growth. Internet Brands is a portfolio company of KKR and Temasek. For more information, please visit www.internetbrands.com.

SOURCE WebMD Health Corp.
Funding Supports Product Innovation to Enable More Companies to Harness, Measure and Leverage Digital Experience Insights

SAN FRANCISCO, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- UserZoom, the pioneer of the Digital User Experience (UX) Insights category, today announced the closing of its strategic growth investment from Thoma Bravo, a leading software investment firm. The investment, which values UserZoom at $800 million, will be used to accelerate innovation and growth for UserZoom's proprietary insights system. UserZoom founders and management, as well as current investor Sunstone Partners, will remain significant shareholders.

Since its founding in 2007, UserZoom has brought UX research out of the laboratory and into the digital age. UserZoom brings together mixed-method research capabilities, world-class UX consultancy, a sophisticated participant recruitment engine, and the measurement and reporting tools necessary to demonstrate business impact. The investment will let even more customers be infused into the product and design experiences shaping their companies  allowing end users to remain at the forefront of digital innovation.

"This is a huge milestone in UserZoom's journey to becoming the most valued brand in user experience insights," said Alfonso de la Nuez, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of UserZoom. From our research consulting roots in the late 2000s, we have designed our products and services to power exceptional digital experiences for our customers and our central role in this industry has never been more vital.

"Every company is a digital experience company. The industry is rapidly evolving, and our customers demand high quality, rigorous insights that match the speed and scale of their growing businesses. We also know that proving the impact of insights on revenue targets, is critical to future UX investment.

"This partnership gives us the resources to serve our customers with the rapid insights they need, without sacrificing quality, throughout the entire product development lifecycle. With Thoma Bravo's support, we will continue innovating to solve the increasing demand for strategic design investments and build exceptional digital products that drive measurable ROI."

"As companies increasingly digitize and interact with their customers online, capturing and quickly executing on real-time UX data is critical for customer retention and business results," said A.J. Rhode a Senior Partner at Thoma Bravo. "Alfonso and his team are leading the charge in digital experience research and testing, and we believe this UX insights category has tremendous growth potential. We look forward to applying our software and operational expertise to support UserZoom's continued product innovation and market expansion."

UserZoom was advised on the transaction by Houlihan Lokey and Gunderson Dettmer LLP. Thoma Bravo was advised by DBO Partners and Goodwin Procter LLP.

Inquiries:

UserZoom:

Douglas Keighley

[email protected]

+44 (0) 7830 144613

Thoma Bravo:

Megan Frank

Thoma Bravo Communications

[email protected]

(212) 731-4778

Abigail Farr

Finsbury Glover Hering

[email protected]

(646) 957-2067

About UserZoom:

UserZoom is the leading Digital User Experience Insights System. Its all-in-one platform, participant recruitment engine and professional services provide the in-depth quantitative and qualitative insights essential to testing, measuring and improving digital product experiences at speed and scale throughout the product development lifecycle. UserZoom helps businesses connect insights to their most important performance metrics, so they can make confident, customer-focused decisions that drive growth and deliver competitive advantage. With operations in North America and Europe, the company helps global brands such as Google, Oracle, Aetna, Santander, Kimberly-Clark, and half of the Fortune 100 raise the bar for an outstanding digital experience. To learn more, visit www.UserZoom.com.

About Thoma Bravo:

Thoma Bravo is one of the largest private equity firms in the world, with more than $103 billion in assets under management as of December 31, 2021. The firm invests in growth-oriented, innovative companies operating in the software and technology sectors. Leveraging the firm's deep sector expertise and proven strategic and operational capabilities, Thoma Bravo collaborates with its portfolio companies to implement operating best practices, drive growth initiatives and make accretive acquisitions intended to accelerate revenue and earnings. Over the past 20 years, the firm has acquired or invested in more than 375 companies representing over $190 billion in enterprise value. The firm has offices in Chicago, Miami and San Francisco. For more information, visit: www.thomabravo.com.

SOURCE UserZoom
This new development, which is still in the early planning stages and subject to appropriate approvals, is expected to include more than 1,300 units and will be constructed by a third-party affordable housing developer on Disney's land near its Central Florida theme parks. The development will offer residents a variety of home choices that are affordable and attainable, located in close proximity to schools and the new and expanding Flamingo Crossings Town Center retail and dining complex. It will offer a variety of amenities to foster a strong community.

Known for building industry-leading theme parks and resort hotels around the world, Disney will engage the developer to bring that same innovation, expertise and attention to detail to this initiative. The development will be available for qualifying applicants from the general public, including Disney cast members.

"We are invested in working together with our community to solve complex issues," said Jeff Vahle, president of Walt Disney World Resort. "The lack of affordable housing is affecting many people across our country, including right here in Central Florida. With this initiative, we're lending a hand to make a real and meaningful impact in our community by tapping into the best of our company's strengths. This is the right opportunity and the right time to take action."

More details about this initiative will be released at a later date as the company continues due diligence work with a prominent affordable housing developer. Disney's initiative will play an important role as leaders in the community  including Orange County Mayor Jerry L. Demings  continue to prioritize finding lasting solutions to affordable housing in Central Florida.

This new initiative in Central Florida will join additional investments Disney is making in affordable housing. Several years ago, Disneyland Resort led an effort to revitalize the Orange County Housing Trust that provides "last mile" funding for affordable housing projects in Anaheim. This made the Buena Esperanza project  a converted studio apartment community for veterans and homeless individuals with mental illness  a reality. In addition to providing them a place to live, the community offers job placement and mental health and wellness support to residents. As a result of Disney's investment a second project, Finamore Place, in Anaheim is under construction with an expected completion date of early summer 2022. It will provide over 100 additional housing units. Disneyland Resort will continue to show support for these and other such worthy endeavors.

These initiatives are among the many ways Disney is strengthening its communities, including hundreds of millions of dollars provided in philanthropic donations to local nonprofits, the Disney VoluntEARS program, contributions to local foodbanks and more. Walt Disney World Resort also recently donated $3 million to important causes in the community, including organizations on the front lines of the affordable housing issue.

For additional details about Disney's community initiatives in Central Florida, please visit DisneyWorldGivesBack.com.

SOURCE Walt Disney World Resort
Shift to a leaner operation will also reduce environmental footprint

VANCOUVER, BC, April 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - West Fraser Timber Co. Ltd. ("West Fraser" or the "Company") (TSX andNYSE: WFG) announced today that it will permanently reduce capacity at its pulp mill in Hinton, Alberta ("Hinton Pulp") by the end of this year. One of Hinton Pulp's two production lines will shut, and the remaining line will produce Unbleached Kraft Pulp ("UKP") rather than Northern Bleached Softwood Kraft Pulp ("NBSK").

"Hinton Pulp has been in operation since 1956 and these changes are necessary to simplify our operation, reduce capital requirements and greenhouse gas emissions, and better align with consumer expectations," said Ray Ferris, President & CEO, West Fraser.

The capacity reduction will see staffing levels transition from 345 positions to 270. West Fraser expects to mitigate the impact on employees through natural attrition, retirements and by offering employment opportunities at other West Fraser operations.

"Our Hinton Pulp team has been engaged in a comprehensive review process and I want to thank them for their creativity and commitment to the mill, our customers and the environment. We remain strongly committed to the community of Hinton, the future of the plant, and to our neighbouring lumber operation, Hinton Wood Products," said Ferris.

The environmental benefits of moving to a single UKP production line include:

an estimated 35% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions ("GHGs"), which is equivalent to taking approximately 19,900 cars off the road per year

an estimated 25% reduction in water use, air emissions and waste generation, and

elimination of chlorine dioxide emissions

As the world moves away from single-use plastics, UKP is now used increasingly in a wide variety of everyday items including cardboard packaging, grocery bags, fibre-cement board and specialty products.

Since late 2021, the mill has undertaken several product trials and received positive initial customer feedback as to the quality and strength of the pulp produced. Currently, mill employees are preparing for the transition after satisfying all existing customer commitments for NBSK.

It is anticipated that an impairment charge of approximately US$13 million will be recorded in West Fraser's first quarter 2022 results associated with the write-down of equipment that will be decommissioned permanently as part of the transition to UKP.

About West Fraser

West Fraser is a diversified wood products company with more than 60 facilities in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. From responsibly sourced and sustainably managed forest resources, the Company produces lumber, engineered wood products (OSB, LVL, MDF, plywood, and particleboard), pulp, newsprint, wood chips, other residuals, and renewable energy. West Fraser's products are used in home construction, repair and remodelling, industrial applications, papers, tissue, and box materials. For more information about West Fraser, visit www.westfraser.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking information or forward-looking statements (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including those relating to the Company's plans to reduce the capacity at Hinton Pulp through decommissioning and transition from NBSK to UKP by the end of the year and our ability to meet the related objectives including simplifying operations, reducing capital requirements and GHG emissions and better aligning consumer expectations, expectations around the reduction of Hinton Pulp's environmental footprint and related environmental benefits, expectations on employee staffing levels and related mitigation strategies, and expectation around the financial impact in West Fraser's first quarter 2022 results of the decommissioning and transition to UKP. Any such forward-looking statements are based on information currently available to us and are based on assumptions and analyses made by us considering our experience and our perception of historical trends and current conditions and are subject to inherent risks and uncertainties including our ability to undertake the required capacity reductions within the time period specified, and realize the expected benefits therefrom described in the news release, including achieving the environmental benefits. Readers should also refer to the risk factors set forth in the Company's annual information form and management's discussion and analysis for the year ended December 31, 2021, each dated February 15, 2022, available at SEDAR (www.sedar.com) and EDGAR (www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml). There can be no assurance that the plans, intentions, or expectations upon which forward-looking statements are based will be realized. Actual results may differ, and the difference may be material and adverse to the Company and its shareholders. Except as may be required by law, the Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements.

SOURCE West Fraser Timber Co. Ltd.
The Ukrainian Brand Continues to Support its Employees During Conflict

NEW YORK, April 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- XDar, a world-renowned Ukrainian vodka, has safely resumed production at its distillery in this time of unrest. Translated to "gift of grain," XDar was created to celebrate the special moments of life, inspiring warm memories in the company of your dearest ones, and is doing its best to live up to that claim in their business too. Celebrating their 20th anniversary this year is a bittersweet milestone for the brand.

When conflict broke out in mid-February, XDar was forced to halt vodka production but continued to pay employees. Their staff totals upwards of 4,400 some of whom are currently serving to protect their country in the Ukrainian army.

"The people at XDar are committed to their employees," said Natalya Kolosok of Liquorum Imports, Inc., the US importer of XDar. "They are some of the strongest people in the world. The employees, while grateful for the assistance, don't just want a check, they want purpose. They want to work, which is why, as safely as possible, XDar opened up their facility to resume production."

The modern, high-tech XDar Distillery was built in 2005 in Cherkassy region, where the largest supply of mineral and freshwater resources is concentrated. XDar has created more than 100 signature recipes of distilled beverages and continues to innovate past the 18 unique patents already in place. Prior to the invasion by Russian forces, the factory was capable of producing over 150 million bottles per year. In 2021, the brand sold upwards of 8 million cases worldwide.

Bayadera Group is one of the largest alcohol holding companies in Eastern Europe, with 30 distribution offices nationwide. Currently, the company exports brands such as XDar to 45 countries, and has officially donated more than $150,000 in support of Ukrainian troops.

XDar has also seen support from its partners in the US. Royal Wine Corp, distributor of XDar vodka in the New York and New Jersey markets, is donating all proceeds from sales during March to Ukrainian relief efforts, with more than $100,000 raised already.

"Knowing how much our simple gesture means to the Ukrainian people is very humbling," commented Mordy Herzog, CEO of Royal Wine Corp. "The drive and determination of the Ukrainian people in the face of adversity is truly amazing, and we look forward to raising awareness for this incredible company."

"The amount of support we've seen has been incredible," added Kolosok. "People want to do what they can to help, and the more vodka we sell, the more people we can bring back to work."

XDar is made from ecologically pure artesian well water and premium grain harvested from black soil, so there is no need for additional purification or artificial enrichment. The vodka rests for 24 hours to ensure the best spirit and water dissolution before being processed through eight meticulous filtration stages. ABV 40%. $16 on Drizly and shop.royalwinemerchants.com.

ABOUT XDAR

XDar symbolizes and maintains such age-old values as family, friends, relatives and national traditions. The product is created according to the classic technology of blending the finest alcohol and artesian water. Xdar Wheat Vodka is created with natural ingredients and according to the unique technology. Vodka is a chameleon and blends seamlessly with just about anything. This is no accident: While there are no universal rules for producing the spirit, the final product is supposed to be colorless, odorless and tasteless. With that said, vodka isn't completely neutral, and a number of distillers actually leave in a good amount of flavor. Made in accordance to the traditional Ukrainian recipe. It is based on artesian water and "Lux" class alcohol from the best wheat varieties. This vodka is created for those who appreciate real vodka taste.

Media Contact:

Tina Carletto

Vice President, KLG Public Relations

[email protected]

SOURCE XDar
MCLEAN, Va., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- 22nd Century Technologies Inc (TSCTI), a leading Cybersecurity Services Provider and Systems Integrator has announced plans to establish a dedicated cyber business unit with its 700+ Cleared, Certified Cybersecurity SMEs. It has appointed Jason Hill, a Cybersecurity veteran, and a transformative leader to lead its Cybersecurity Practice. Jason comes to 22nd Century from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), where he spent the last nine years building and running CISA Cyber Assessments for Federal, State and Local Governments, and Critical Infrastructure Private Sector companies. Jason also spent 23 years as a cyber soldier in the 91st Cyber Brigade in the Virginia Army National Guard, where he honed his skills in the cyber community. 22nd Century looks forward to Jason's leadership and cyber experience as it moves forward in this everchanging landscape, to achieve its mission of securing the nation. Jason has brought the same attention to detail and passion that allowed him to become a well trusted cybersecurity industry leader, to 22nd Century Technologies.

In today's challenging cybersecurity landscape, TSCTI seeks to streamline state and local government's access to cybersecurity resources by establishing 3 Security Operation Centers (SOC) to provide Managed Security Services (MSS). They also have several SLED Cooperative purchasing programs and contract vehicles, to procure cybersecurity services. With the $1B grant from congress for cybersecurity, local governments can request funding to bolster their current cyber posture. 22nd Century looks to be the leader in this area, helping local governments navigate the funding request process, and providing the much-needed cyber services to our Nation's local governments who need them.
NEW YORK, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- O'Dwyers, a leading public relations industry publication, has officially released its annual PR rankings, naming 5WPR the fifth-largest, privately-held public relations agency in the New York City Metro Area.

"5WPR has seen tremendous growth this year, expanding to new areas of practice, welcoming industry leading clients, recruiting top talent, and opening our Miami office," said 5WPR Co-CEO, Dara A. Busch.

"For the past 20 years, 5W has worked to be seen as an industry leader, and it is very rewarding for our incredible work to be recognized. We look forward to continuing this growth year after year," said 5WPR Co-CEO, Matthew Caiola.

For the last 52 years, O'Dwyer's has been ranking PR agencies based on their fees, which are verified by reviewing PR firm income statements.

In addition to this ranking, 5WPR was recently awarded top Public Relations Company by The Manifest, named to the 2021 Clutch 1000 list, and recognized with numerous industry accolades including the Grand Stevie Award for Most Honored Public Relations Agency in the 19th Annual American Business Awards.

About 5WPR

5W Public Relations is a full-service PR agency in NYC known for cutting-edge programs that engage with businesses, issues and ideas. With more than 250 professionals serving clients in B2C (Beauty & Fashion, Consumer Brands, Entertainment, Food & Beverage, Health & Wellness, Travel & Hospitality, Technology, Nonprofit), B2B (Corporate Communications and Reputation Management), Public Affairs, Crisis Communications and Digital Marketing (Social Media, Influencer, Paid Media, SEO). 5W was awarded 2020 PR Agency of The Year and brings leading businesses a resourceful, bold and results-driven approach to communication.

SOURCE 5W Public Relations
Chrysler is "paws-ing" to profess its love for furry family members with National Pet Day just around the corner on April 11. The brand is highlighting pet-appropriate features and available Mopar accessories that make the Chrysler Pacifica the "purr-fect" home away from home for four-legged passengers.

Pet-friendly features of the 2022 Chrysler Pacifica, which earned a TOP SAFETY PICK+ rating from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and is the most awarded minivan over the last six years, include:

Rear-seat reminder : New for 2022 and standard on Pacifica, the rear-seat reminder recognizes when rear doors are opened and closed prior to ignition start, then alerts the driver with a chime and cluster message after trip completion to check rear seats for passengers and pets

: New for 2022 and standard on Pacifica, the rear-seat reminder recognizes when rear doors are opened and closed prior to ignition start, then alerts the driver with a chime and cluster message after trip completion to check rear seats for passengers and pets FamCAM interior camera: Provides a view of occupants in the rear and even allows those up front to zoom in to keep a watchful eye on precocious pets

Provides a view of occupants in the rear and even allows those up front to zoom in to keep a watchful eye on precocious pets Stow 'n Go seating: The only minivan with available all-wheel drive and Stow 'n Go seating, plus second- and third-row seats fold flat into the floor, providing ample space for pet kennels or for pets to roam when the vehicle is in park

The only minivan with available all-wheel drive and Stow 'n Go seating, plus second- and third-row seats fold flat into the floor, providing ample space for pet kennels or for pets to roam when the vehicle is in park Stow 'n Go in-floor storage bins: Pet food or accessories can be stored under the floor and out of sight

Pet food or accessories can be stored under the floor and out of sight Stow 'n Vac: Pets can be messy  Pacifica's available Stow 'n Vac system offers easy interior clean ups

Pets can be messy  Pacifica's available Stow 'n Vac system offers easy interior clean ups Hands-free sliding doors/liftgate: Hands-free access to the Pacifica is as simple as a kick under the door or liftgate, making it easier to juggle pets and personal items when entering the vehicle

Hands-free access to the Pacifica is as simple as a kick under the door or liftgate, making it easier to juggle pets and personal items when entering the vehicle Pet kennel: Lightweight Mopar pet kennel allows for safe transportation of pets and folds flat when not in use

Chrysler Brand

The Chrysler brand has delighted customers with distinctive designs, craftsmanship, intuitive innovation and technology since the company was founded in 1925. The Chrysler Pacifica continues to reinvent the minivan, a segment Chrysler invented, with an unprecedented level of functionality, versatility, technology and bold styling and the most advanced available all-wheel-drive system in its class. The available innovative hybrid powertrain takes this revolutionary vehicle a step further. It's the first electrified vehicle in the minivan segment and achieves more than 80 MPGe in electric-only mode, has an all-electric range of more than 30 miles and a total range of more than 500 miles. Chrysler Voyager offers fleet owners a budget-friendly minivan that also provides a well-equipped, exceptional driving experience. The Chrysler 300 lineup delivers on the brand's promise of iconic and elegant design executed with world-class performance, efficiency and quality  all at an attainable value. Chrysler is part of the portfolio of brands offered by leading global automaker and mobility provider Stellantis. For more information regarding Stellantis (NYSE: STLA), please visit www.stellantis.com.

Follow Chrysler and company news and video on:

Company blog: http://blog.stellantisnorthamerica.com

Media website: http://media.stellantisnorthamerica.com

Chrysler brand: www.chrysler.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/chrysler

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chrysler

Twitter: www.twitter.com/chrysler or @StellantisNA

YouTube: www.youtube.com/chrysler or https://www.youtube.com/StellantisNA

SOURCE Stellantis
JACKSON, Miss., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- With tax-filing season a prime time for identity theft scammers to prey on unsuspecting consumers, AARP Mississippi and AARP Fraud Watch Network are offering a series of events to help Mississippians protect themselves and their families.

Telephone Town Hall  April 6

AARP Mississippi will present a telephone town hall, Avoiding Government Impostor Scams, at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, April 6. Scammers posing as IRS agents or Treasury Department officials call and try to convince taxpayers that they owe back taxes.

The telephone town hall will feature Amy Nofziger, Director of Fraud Victim Support for AARP Fraud Watch Network and Christine Footit, Brand Chief for Tax Outreach, Partnership and Education at the Internal Revenue Service. Listeners will be able to ask questions. To receive a call to join this telephone town hall, register at access.live/AARP-MS.

Shred Events

Reserve your spot for a free drive-through contactless shredding event sponsored by AARP Mississippi and AARP Fraud Watch Network. The shred events will be held in Holly Springs and Jackson.

In Jackson, the shred event will be held on April 20 at the Jackson Revival Center Church  Downtown, 4655 Terry Road. To register, visit www.aarp.org/ms.

In Holly Springs, the shred event will be held on April 27 at Holly Springs Main Street Chamber, 148 East College Ave. To register, visit www.aarp.org/ms.

These events are designed to help the 50-plus and their families protect themselves from fraud and scams. For more information, visit www.aarp.org/ms.

AARP is the nation's largest nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to empowering people 50 and older to choose how they live as they age. With a nationwide presence and nearly 38 million members, AARP strengthens communities and advocates for what matters most to families: health security, financial stability and personal fulfillment. AARP also produces the nation's largest circulation publications: AARP The Magazine and AARP Bulletin. To learn more, visit www.aarp.org, www.aarp.org/espanol or follow @AARP, @AARPenEspanol and @AARPadvocates, @AliadosAdelante on social media.

Contact: Ronda Gooden

601-898-5417, [email protected]

SOURCE AARP Mississippi
The ACM Prize in Computing recognizes early-to-mid-career computer scientists whose research contributions have fundamental impact and broad implications. The award carries a prize of $250,000, from an endowment provided by Infosys Ltd.

Early in his career, Abbeel developed new apprenticeship learning techniques to significantly improve robotic manipulation. As the field matured, researchers were able to program robots to perceive and manipulate rigid objects such as wooden blocks or spoons. However, programming robots to manipulate deformable objects, such as cloth, proved difficult because the way soft materials move when touched is unpredictable. Abbeel introduced new methods to enhance robot visual perception, physics-based tracking, control, and learning from demonstration. By combining these new methods, Abbeel developed a robot that was able to fold clothes such as towels and shirts  an improvement over existing technology that was considered an important milestone at the time.

Abbeel's contributions also include developing robots that can perform surgical suturing, detect objects, and plan their trajectories in uncertain situations. More recently, he has pioneered "few-shot imitation learning," where a robot is able to learn to perform a task from just one demonstration after having been pre-trained with a large set of demonstrations on related tasks.

Another especially promising area where Abbeel has made important contributions is in deep reinforcement learning for robotics. Reinforcement learning is an area of machine learning where an agent (e.g., a computer program) seeks to progress towards a reward (e.g., winning a game). While early reinforcement learning programs were effective, they could only perform simple tasks. The innovation of combining reinforcement learning with deep neural networks ushered in the new field of deep reinforcement learning, which can solve far more complex problems than computer programs developed with reinforcement learning alone.

Abbeel's key breakthrough contribution in this area was developing a deep reinforcement learning method called Trust Region Policy Optimization. This method stabilizes the reinforcement learning process, enabling robots to learn a range of simulated control skills. By sharing his results, posting video tutorials, and releasing open-source code from his lab, Abbeel helped build a community of researchers that has since pushed deep learning for robotics even further  with robots performing ever more complicated tasks.

Abbeel has also made several other pioneering contributions including: generalized advantage estimation, which enabled the first 3D robot locomotion learning; soft-actor critic, which is one of the most popular deep reinforcement learning algorithms to-date; domain randomization, which showcases how learning across appropriately randomized simulators can generalize surprisingly well to the real world; and hindsight experience replay, which has been instrumental for deep reinforcement learning in sparse-reward/goal-oriented environments.

"Teaching robots to learn could spur major advances across many industries  from surgery and manufacturing to shipping and automated driving," said ACM President Gabriele Kotsis. "Pieter Abbeel is a recognized leader among a new generation of researchers who are harnessing the latest machine learning techniques to revolutionize this field. Abbeel has made leapfrog research contributions, while also generously sharing his knowledge to build a community of colleagues working to take robots to an exciting new level of ability. His work exemplifies the intent of the ACM Prize in Computing to recognize outstanding work with 'depth, impact, and broad implications.'"

"Infosys is proud of our longstanding collaboration with ACM, and we are honored to recognize Pieter Abbeel for the 2021 ACM Prize in Computing," said Salil Parekh, Chief Executive Officer, Infosys. "The robotics field is poised for even greater advances, as innovative new ways are emerging to combine robotics with AI, and we believe researchers like Abbeel will be instrumental in creating the next great advances in this field."

Abbeel will be formally presented with the ACM Prize in Computing at the annual ACM Awards Banquet, which will be held this year on Saturday, June 11 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

Biographical Background

Pieter Abbeel is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and the Co-Founder, President and Chief Scientist at Covariant, an AI robotics company. Abbeel earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, as well as M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Abbeel's honors include a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, a National Science Foundation Early Career Development Program Award, and a Diane McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching. Additionally, Abbeel was named a Top Young Innovator Under 35 by the MIT Technology Review and received the Dick Volz Best U.S. Ph.D. Thesis in Robotics and Automation Award. He is a Fellow of IEEE.

About the ACM Prize in Computing

The ACM Prize in Computing recognizes an early to mid-career fundamental innovative contribution in computing that, through its depth, impact, and broad implications, exemplifies the greatest achievements in the discipline. The award carries a prize of $250,000. Financial support is provided by an endowment from Infosys Ltd. The ACM Prize in Computing was previously known as the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences from 2007 through 2015. ACM Prize recipients are invited to participate in the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, an annual networking event that brings together young researchers from around the world with recipients of the ACM A.M. Turing Award, the Abel Prize, the Fields Medal, and the Nevanlinna Prize.

About ACM

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field's challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession's collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

About Infosys

Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. We enable clients in 46 countries to navigate their digital transformation. With over three decades of experience in managing the systems and workings of global enterprises, we expertly steer our clients through their digital journey. We do it by enabling the enterprise with an AI-powered core that helps prioritize the execution of change. We also empower the business with agile digital at scale to deliver unprecedented levels of performance and customer delight. Our always-on learning agenda drives their continuous improvement through building and transferring digital skills, expertise, and ideas from our innovation ecosystem.

Contact:

Jim Ormond

212-626-0505

[email protected]

SOURCE Association For Computing Machinery, Inc.
CAIRO, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Board of Directors of African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) on 31 March 2022 approved the launch of the Ukraine Crisis Adjustment Trade Financing Programme for Africa (UKAFPA), a programme of credit facilities that the Bank has developed to manage the impacts of the Ukraine crisis on African economies and businesses. The programme amounts to US$ 4 billion.

The Russia-Ukraine crisis which escalated on 24 February 2022 has had a significant effect on the global economy. Given the importance of both Russia and Ukraine as sources of crude oil and gas, raw materials and grains, the outbreak of the conflict has wider repercussions on a global scale, including adversely affecting African economies, especially those that rely heavily on grain, fertilizer and fuel imports. The UKAFPA programme has the following objectives:

Import Re-Order Cost Adjustment Financing, to help countries to meet immediate import price increases pending domestic demand adjustments





to help countries to meet immediate import price increases pending domestic demand adjustments Oil and Metals Buy-Back Financing to refinance over-collateralized loans in the context of the current high oil and metal prices, and thereby release more free cashflow for use in meeting other urgent needs, eg. food and fertilizer imports and servicing rising cost of debt





to refinance over-collateralized loans in the context of the current high oil and metal prices, and thereby release more free cashflow for use in meeting other urgent needs, eg. food and fertilizer imports and servicing rising cost of debt Commodity Export Revenue Stabilisation to help countries and companies to structure and enter derivative contracts at today's high commodity prices and stabilise future export earnings





to help countries and companies to structure and enter derivative contracts at today's high commodity prices and stabilise future export earnings Tourism Revenue Deficit Financing to be extended to Central Banks of tourism dependent economies to cover foreign exchange revenue shortfalls arising from a decline in tourism arrivals from Russia and Ukraine





to be extended to Central Banks of tourism dependent economies to cover foreign exchange revenue shortfalls arising from a decline in tourism arrivals from and National Export Revenue Acceleration Facility to be used to accelerate the completion of impactful export-oriented projects by expediting access to foreign currency for use in importing critical equipment, technology, and expertise, for project completion

Since its establishment, Afreximbank has built a track record and earned a reputation for introducing and implementing various emergency intervention programmes, with embedded strong risk mitigations to respond to various crises on a global scale and impacting Africa. Recent examples include the Pandemic Trade Impact Mitigation Facility (PATIMFA) through which Afreximbank disbursed over US$7 billion in support of African economies in their fight against the Covid 19 pandemic. That facility expired in March. Previously, in 2015, the Bank introduced its Countercyclical Trade Liquidity Facility (COTRALF) that provided a platform for the disbursement of over US$10 billion to African commercial and central banks making it possible to avert large scale trade debt payment defaults at the height of the commodity crisis. Both facilities achieved their respective goals and were deemed vitally important and successful interventions.

UKAFPA is a response to an urgent call for emergency intervention by member states of the Bank. UKAFPA  compliant financing requests received from across Africa already exceeds US$15 billion. There is some urgency to meet these requests to avoid catastrophic social conditions across Africa and reduce the risk of their morphing into political challenges.

Afreximbank looks forward to working with partner banks and institutions to urgently meet the need of African countries in terms of ensuring static and dynamic food security, adequate fuel supplies and averting fertilizer and agricultural input shortages, against a backdrop of renewed economic nationalism worldwide.

Beyond the financing, Afreximbank plans to work with the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), the African Union Commission (AUC) and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat to launch the Intra-African Supply Chain Coordination Group whose aim will be to enable alignment of production and consumption ensuring that what is produced in Africa is prioritised to meet African requirements, while reaching out to other entities in other parts of the world to lend support.

Speaking after the board meeting held in Abidjan, Cote D'Ivoire, Professor Benedict Oramah, President and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Afreximbank commented:



"I am delighted that our Board has approved the introduction of the UKAFPA, once again demonstrating their responsiveness to the needs of African member states and their citizens. This initiative will contribute immensely to averting social anxiety and upheaval that may arise from looming food shortages and high costs of fertilizer and petroleum products.



"Following African Union's endorsement, Afreximbank shareholders approved a US$6.5 billion General Capital Increase on 2021 to boost the capacity of the Bank to deliver on its mandate, deal with the Covid-19 pandemic, and support AfCFTA implementation. We must now add the consequences of the ongoing Ukraine crisis to the catalogue of emergencies a strong Afreximbank has to contend with. We are very grateful to member states and shareholders who have already paid in their subscriptions giving the Bank the flexibility to respond swiftly to prevailing challenges. I call upon those who have not acted to do so urgently as we will once again learn that in times of major crises we can only count on our own institutions to lead the way before others follow."

H.E. Macky Sall, President of the Republic of Senegal and current Chairperson of the African Union expressed his support for the UKAFPA initiative, saying: " I welcome the renewed energy of African institutions that have led our coordinated and successful response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Africa now faces the socio-economic challenges posed by a global context of conflict. Afreximbank has once again shown the way forward by enabling the continent to tackle the impact of the crisis head-on through financing solutions tailored to the specific pressure points facing our member countries. I hope that UKAFPA will play a major role in building resilience in nutrition and food security on the African continent, in line with the theme of the 36th AU Summit."

Dr. Vera Songwe, United Nations Under Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa welcomed this new initiative and added that:

"The New facility is timely and will support countries build resilience as they face yet another exogenous shock. The facilities approved by Afreximbank are also core tools needed to continue strengthing the continental financial architecture as countries look to rebuild their economies and take advantage of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement."

About Afreximbank:

African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) is a Pan-African multilateral financial institution mandated to finance and promote intra-and extra-African trade. Afreximbank deploys innovative structures to deliver financing solutions that support the transformation of the structure of Africa's trade, accelerating industrialization and intra-regional trade, thereby boosting economic expansion in Africa. The Bank has a rich history of intervening in support of African countries in times of crisis. Through the Pandemic Trade Impact Mitigation Facility (PATIMFA) launched in April 2020, Afreximbank has disbursed more than US$7 billion to help member countries manage the adverse impact of the financial, economic, and health shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. A stalwart supporter of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), Afreximbank has launched a Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) that was adopted by the African Union (AU) as the payment and settlement platform to underpin the implementation of the AfCFTA. Afreximbank is working with the AU and the AfCFTA Secretariat to develop an Adjustment Facility to support countries in effectively participating in the AfCFTA. At the end of 2020, the Bank's total assets and guarantees stood at US$21.5 billion, and its shareholder funds amounted to US$3.4 billion. Afreximbank disbursed more than US$42 billion between 2016 and 2020. The Bank has ratings assigned by GCR (international scale) (A-), Moody's (Baa1), Japan Credit Rating Agency (JCR) (A-) and Fitch (BBB-). The Bank is headquartered in Cairo, Egypt.

For more information, visit: www.afreximbank.com .

Follow us on Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Instagram

Contact: Amadou Labba Sall, [email protected]

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1781775/Afreximbank_Logo.jpg

SOURCE African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank)
STOCKHOLM, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Stockholm-based Digital Therapeutics (DTx) company Alex Therapeutics today announces it has secured a 3.5M funding round, led by European life science venture fund Hadean Ventures and joined by Scale Capital and Bonit Capital.

Alex Therapeutics aspires to become the global go-to partner for pharma, and other life-science companies seeking to develop and launch DTx solutions. These digital health products are validated in clinical trials and prescribed by a doctor, similar to traditional therapeutics. This funding round will be used to accelerate Alex's growth in Europe and the US and to develop novel DTx products alongside both new and existing partners, including Pfizer.

The round was led by Hadean Ventures, a European specialist life science venture fund, with participation from Scale Capital and Bonit Capital, the Leksell (founder of medical device company Elekta) family office. The new investors provide cross-disciplinary expertise in successfully developing medical devices and scaling global B2B tech platforms. Existing investors, the King (Candy Crush) founders through their fund Sweet Studio, also participated in the round.

Alex Therapeutics uses its AI-powered digital therapeutics platform "Alex DTx Platform" to develop and launch prescription digital therapies, typically in partnership with pharmaceutical companies. The DTx products are clinically validated and approved medical devices, prescribed by doctors and reimbursed by healthcare systems. The platform combines evidence-based psychology, primarily Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), with AI and Machine Learning to provide personalized treatments that address the needs of patients worldwide.

We're overwhelmed by the interest from the investor community and are glad to welcome some incredible institutional investors to join us as we take the next major leap with Alex. We're looking forward to learning from their many years of experience in developing medical devices and scaling Nordic tech platforms internationally. They perfectly complement our current investors, who have a unique perspective on building engaging consumer technology.

John Drakenberg Renander, co-founder and CEO at Alex Therapeutics

We've been following the digital therapeutics space for a long time and are now seeing major markets such as Germany and the US open up for prescription and reimbursement of digital therapies. Alex Therapeutics' impressive track record, dedication to developing treatments with and for patients, combined with their utilization of advanced technology make them an attractive partner for companies seeking to launch digital therapeutics.

Dr. Ingrid Teigland Akay, MD, MBA, Managing Partner at Hadean Ventures

Alex Therapeutics' journey has been incredible, and we're proud to have supported them from day one. Looking back, it's astonishing what John, Oliver and their team have accomplished in such a short period of time. With partners such as Pfizer, and now institutional investors with a strong track record in life science and international expansion, there's no limit to what they can do.

Anders Frostenson, Founder & MD at Sweet Studio (King/Candy Crush founders fund)

Announced strategic commercial partnership with Pfizer earlier this year

Alex Therapeutics recently announced a strategic commercial partnership with the global pharmaceutical company Pfizer. The initial focus of the partnership is a digital therapy called Eila treating nicotine addiction.

Read the full press release here

Press

Alex Therapeutics

COO

Sebastian Blendow

+46 70-822 11 57

Upplandsgatan 7, 11123 Stockholm, Sweden

E-Mail: [email protected]

Website: www.alextherapeutics.com

About Alex Therapeutics

Alex Therapeutics is a digital therapeutics (DTx) company based in Stockholm which designs and develops Software-as-a-Medical-Devices (SaMDs). With the proven "Alex DTx Platform", expertise in artificial intelligence and evidence-based psychology, Alex Therapeutics is uniquely positioned to deliver cutting-edge and reliable DTx products. The company has treated tens of thousands of patients, has experience with clinical validation, and overwhelmingly positive patient testimonials. For more information, visit www.alextherapeutics.com or follow us on LinkedIn.

About Hadean Ventures

Hadean Ventures is a European life science venture capital fund manager with c. 200m assets under management. Hadean Ventures has offices in Oslo, Norway, and Stockholm, Sweden, as well as a presence in Germany, Austria and the UK. Hadean invests across all healthcare verticals and stages with a focus on pharmaceuticals & biotech, medical devices, diagnostics and digital health. With a local European presence in regions that regularly produce world-class science, yet historically have been under-ventured, Hadean looks to find top opportunities with the flexibility to invest in great ideas no matter what vertical.

For more information, please visit www.hadeanventures.com or follow us on LinkedIn.

About Scale Capital

Scale Capital is an early stage venture fund investing in digitization and disruptive technologies within business-to-business. Scale Capital primarily invests in companies in the Nordic region with the potential and ambition to win in the US market. We focus on delivering impact through technology that creates positive changes to the planet and people's lives. We are headquartered in Copenhagen and have offices in New York and Silicon Valley.

About Bonit Capital

Bonit Capital is a family-owned investment company within the life science and healthcare sector. Based in Stockholm, Bonit takes an active ownership approach by providing capital, industry expertise and access to an international network  focusing on the areas of digital health, medical technology, diagnostics and population health.

For more information, please visit: https://bonitcapital.com

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/alex-therapeutics/r/alex-therapeutics-raises--3-5m-in-oversubscribed-financing-round-from-top-tier-vc-investors-to-advan,c3540439

The following files are available for download:

https://mb.cision.com/Main/21311/3540439/1559980.pdf Press release (PDF)

SOURCE Alex Therapeutics
An industry first, this new capability will provide significant privacy enhancements to

implementations that require deduplication and biometric lookups, a key step towards a future

with no data breaches and no central honeypots of personal data

NEW YORK and TEL AVIV, Israel, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Anonybit , the pioneer in decentralized biometrics, today announced the addition of one to many identification capabilities to its decentralized biometrics cloud. Anonybit will support fully decentralized deduplication and lookup functionalities for biometrics which enables significant enhancements from a privacy by design perspective to a wide range of use cases. This capability is the first of its kind for the cybersecurity industry.

The company's award-winning technology breaks down biometrics into anonymized bits and distributes them over a wide network where they are encrypted, stored, and processed for matching. With Anonybit's unique approach, there is no need to assemble the components to conduct a biometric match, eliminating the risk of a data breach.

"Our goal is to cut off the oxygen that feeds identity thieves by giving them nothing to find and nothing to steal, even if they do manage to break into a network," said Frances Zelazny, Anonybit co-founder and chief executive officer. "By eliminating central honeypots while still enabling strong authentication of biometrics, we are ushering in a new era for privacy and security, enabled by our innovative decentralized biometrics infrastructure. The one to many capability is a cornerstone to creating this future, allowing governments, enterprises, and other entities to ensure a privacy-first system of record for individuals based on their biometrics. This creates an anchor of trust that supports all other types of deployments, like verifiable credentials, online account access, time and attendance systems, payments and others."

There have been multiple attempts by the biometric industry to secure biometric data. Any successes have been limited to 1:1 matching which is used for more simple functions like logging into an online service. With today's breakthrough, we are now one step closer to eliminating centralized honeypots of biometrics entirely, even for complex, large-scale deployments, like access control or government ID applications.

The Anonybit infrastructure supports third-party biometric modalities and algorithms including facial, fingerprint, iris, and voice biometrics. Biometric industry providers can apply their technologies to the Anonybit decentralized biometric cloud and build privacy-by-design solutions that meet the highest standards for data protection in accordance with GDPR, CPRA, and other privacy regulations.

In addition to offering the 1:N capability to biometric solution providers, Anonybit will apply it as an add-on option to its turnkey decentralized authentication product. The decentralized authentication product includes liveness detection, decentralized storage, decentralized 1:1 matching and integration into orchestration platforms. By adding on 1:N matching at the time of enrollment, enterprises will be able to ensure there are no duplicates in their system, critical for time and attendance, payroll and other similar applications.

Anonybit recently announced a $3.5 million seed funding round, in addition to several implementations and partnerships including Aware, to address biometric data security, Abine , powering the first decentralized password manager; FacePhi Biometria to allow its customers to sidestep questions on where to store identity data that is being collected for digital onboarding purposes; and DropVault , where Anonybit provides users strong authentication for their B2B encrypted document sharing vault.

To learn more about Anonybit and see the technology in action, please visit anonybit.io .

About Anonybit

Anonybit is the first fully decentralized biometrics infrastructure used by embedded partners and enterprises to deliver privacy-by-design solutions to the market. Supporting all biometric modalities and other sensitive personal data types and secrets in multiple use cases across the identity management lifecycle, Anonybit easily integrates into existing workflows. For more information, visit anonybit.io .

SOURCE Anonybit
NEW YORK, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- ATSG, a leading, tech-enabled managed services and solutions company, announced today that CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, will feature ATSG on its 2022 Tech Elite 250 list. This list recognizes solution providers across the U.S. and Canada that have earned the highest level of technical certifications from leading technology suppliers. Companies chosen for the Tech Elite 250 list have distinguished themselves as dedicated and passionate solution providers willing to go above and beyond for their customers by ensuring they have the training and technical know-how necessary to provide expert-level service.

Tech Elite 250 solution providers recognize that their customers depend on their training and expertise to help them overcome today's IT challenges and achieve full digital transformation across the enterprise. To provide that expert service and care, solution providers must maintain consistently high levels of training and certification from IT partners and achieve the highest tiers within those partner programs.

ATSG's strategy continues to place its commitment to its customers at the core of its offerings, bringing a world-class level of technological enablement and service innovation to the market. Its laser focus on providing optimized, secure customer experiences delivered through its Technology Solutions as a Service (TSaaS) business model, allows customers to consume and scale their technology services with their business. ATSG's targeted acquisition model has also continued to accelerate its digital transformation priorities, with rapid integration for unified lifecycle experiences through its Ai automation platform.

"ATSG is honored to be recognized by CRN on the Tech Elite 250 list for the third consecutive year," said Anthony J. D'Ambrosi, Chief Executive Officer, ATSG. "ATSG's strategy of innovation and dedication to our customers' exceptional experiences are at the heart of our global success and growth as a tech-enabled Managed Services Provider. We are excited to showcase our ability to unify and further automate our world-class technology expertise to rapidly deliver tangible benefits to our customers."

"CRN's annual Tech Elite 250 list recognizes solution providers that have earned top-level certifications from key technology suppliers and proven their ability to consistently meet the high standards of their customers and partners," said Blaine Raddon, CEO of The Channel Company. "Solution providers featured on this list have maintained a consistent focus on innovation and have built a comprehensive understanding of the ever-evolving technologies and practices that enable ongoing success in the IT channel. We're proud to honor them in this manner."

Coverage of the Tech Elite 250 will be featured in the April issue of CRN Magazine and online at www.CRN.com/techelite250.

About ATSG

ATSG is a global tech-enabled managed services and solutions company focused on innovative solutions to enhance today's digital enterprise and end-user experiences. ATSG provides Intelligent IT through Technology Solutions as a Service (TSaaS) to a variety of customers; leveraging an offerings portfolio of rediTech, rediManage, rediCloud, rediSecure, dinCloud, and Optanix which delivers reliable, elastic, dynamic infrastructure, collaboration, applications, as well as world-class IT operations.

Headquartered in Manhattan, New York, ATSG is a portfolio company of RunTide Capital, a private equity firm focused on building tech-enabled growth companies.

ATSG is a privately held company headquartered in Manhattan, New York. For more information on ATSG, please visit us on the web at http://www.atsg.net/, like us on LinkedIn, follow us on Twitter, or become a fan on our Facebook page. #AboutATSG

About The Channel Company

The Channel Company enables breakthrough IT channel performance with our dominant media, engaging events, expert consulting and education, and innovative marketing services and platforms. As the channel catalyst, we connect and empower technology suppliers, solution providers, and end-users. Backed by more than 30 years of unequaled channel experience, we draw from our deep knowledge to envision innovative new solutions for ever-evolving challenges in the technology marketplace. www.thechannelcompany.com

2022. CRN is a registered trademark of The Channel Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Press Contact:

Elizabeth Kubycheck

[email protected]

SOURCE ATSG, Inc.
NEW YORK, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Ascend Wellness Holdings, Inc. ("AWH" or the "Company") (CSE: AAWH.U) (OTCQX: AAWH), a multi-state, vertically integrated cannabis operator focused on bettering lives through cannabis, today announced its participation in the following upcoming conferences:

BTIG Global Cannabis Conference: CEO, Abner Kurtin , will participate in a fireside chat with BTIG analyst, Mackenzie Boydston , on Thursday, April 7 th at 11:20 am ET . Additionally, company management will host one-on-one investor meetings. Contact your BTIG representative for more information.





CEO, , will participate in a fireside chat with BTIG analyst, , on at . Additionally, company management will host one-on-one investor meetings. Contact your BTIG representative for more information. Benzinga Cannabis Capital Conference: CEO, Abner Kurtin , and VP of Investor Relations, Rebecca Koar , will be available for one-on-one investor meetings on April 20 th to 21st at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach, Florida .

About AWH:

AWH is a vertically integrated operator with assets in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. AWH owns and operates state-of-the-art cultivation facilities, growing award-winning strains and producing a curated selection of products. AWH produces and distributes Ozone branded products. For more information, visit www.awholdings.com.

The CSE has not reviewed, approved or disapproved the content of this news release.

SOURCE Ascend Wellness Holdings, LLC
"President Chrite personifies our strong belief in the power of business to create solutions to human problems," said Bentley Trustee Chair J. Paul Condrin '83, P'19 '22. "For much of his career, he has dedicated himself to improving business education, developing market-based economies and expanding economic opportunities for organizations and people around the world. President Chrite is a shining example of the type of leader we hope all of our students aspire to be  using knowledge, wisdom, compassion and a strong business mindset to change the world."

Chrite has more than 25 years of leadership experience in higher education. Before Bentley, he was the president of Bethune-Cookman University, an iconic historically Black college in Florida. He also served as dean of the University of Denver's Daniels College of Business and of the Feliciano School of Business at Montclair State University and in academic and senior leadership roles at the University of Arizona's Eller College of Management and the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

In a tradition-steeped ceremony at the Bentley Arena, Chrite walked to the stage as part of an academic procession of more than 200 delegates, many from other colleges and universities who were lined up precisely based on the year of their founding, from Harvard University (1636) and Yale (1701) to William James College (1974) and Olin College of Engineering (1997). The delegates wore satin-lined hoods and brightly colored cassock-like gowns reflecting the college that awarded their highest degree and the field in which it was earned  beige for Accounting and Business, copper for Economics, purple for Law.

As he rose and stepped to the podium, Chrite looked over an audience that included his wife Phyllis, children Elrie, Adriana and Jordan, and friends from across the country. Blue inauguration pennants waved throughout the crowd, and many students wore inauguration T-shirts with "Chrite - 9" on the back to welcome and honor the university's ninth president.

Chrite said he and Phyllis were "deeply moved by the outpouring of support, goodwill and generosity expressed here this afternoon." He said Bentley's greatest strength is its ability to empower the next generation of students and business leaders to realize their full potential.

"The American Dream includes the possibility that all citizens have the opportunity to move up  or down  the economic ladder," he said. "In a society that is neither fully meritocratic nor egalitarian, higher education in general and places like Bentley in particular represent a vital gateway to mobility.

"Mobility, access and opportunity are ideas that were central to our university at its founding," he said.

Bentley was founded by Harry C. Bentley in 1917 to prepare a new generation of students for professional careers in business, and the university has been reinventing business education for more than a century. Chrite, the university's first Black president, has worked to develop the private sector and spur development and economic opportunities for residents around the world, including in Afghanistan, Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East.

Trustee Nick Stavropoulous '79, in remarks read in his absence by fellow trustee Lebone Moses '02, praised Chrite as "a leader who may look unlike any we've ever had but whose commitment to using business to do good in the world represents every single one of us."

Chrite started as Bentley's president on June 1, 2021, but asked that his inauguration be delayed so the university could focus on students last fall and a full return to operations after the pandemic.

Debora Spar, PhD , Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo Professor of Business Administration and senior associate dean of business and global society at Harvard Business School, said she observed three successful leadership traits in Chrite: common sense, heart and the ability to make tough decisions.

Spar, who also serves as a university trustee, said in her keynote address that Chrite was the type of educational leader who remains "perpetually willing to seek and revel in the magic that education can, and should, bring."

"Brent is that kind of leader," she said. "He has seen the transformative power of education in his own life and has dedicated his life to bringing that same transformation to others."

B. Joseph White, PhD , president emeritus at the University of Illinois, has known Chrite for 30 years since they worked together at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. He said a university president has many jobs, including setting the school's direction, raising money and being chief HR person for the faculty  but those aren't the most important.

"The most important job is creating an environment in which young adults with the guidance of the faculty can learn, develop and thrive. Find their way. Nail down their values. Experience achievement. Overcome adversity. Prepare for the future," White said in his keynote address. "Brent will deliver that leadership: firm and friendly, with clarity and consensus, through diligence and deliberation."

Others spoke of the connections Chrite had quickly made with the Bentley community. Since arriving on campus, he has become a popular and often-seen fixture working out at the Dana Center gym, participating in on-campus events or just walking around campus with his backpack from meeting to meeting.

"I see President Chrite as the president of the masses," said Hiral Mehta MSBA '22, MBA '22. "Through my interactions with him both formally or informally, at graduate events or at the gym, what stuck with me is his rigor and passion to make a difference and create a strong, diverse and engaging community."

After the keynote addresses were finished, Board Chair Condrin stepped to the podium and called Chrite forward for the moment all had been waiting for. Condrin lifted the university's presidential medallion  a chain symbolizing the authority of the office that includes the names of every past Bentley president  over Chrite's head and placed it onto his shoulders. "We are confident that your enthusiasm for Bentley University's mission, vision and core values; your wise and collaborative leadership style; and your belief in the power of business to create solutions to human problems will enable the institution to fulfill its great promise for years to come," Condrin said. "On behalf of the board of trustees, I welcome you as president of Bentley University. You have our full confidence and unwavering support to lead this institution through the next chapter in its history."

Bentley University is more than just one of the nation's top business schools. It is a lifelong-learning community that creates successful leaders who make business a force for positive change. With a combination of business and the arts and sciences and a flexible, personalized approach to education, Bentley provides students with critical thinking and practical skills that prepare them to lead successful, rewarding careers. Founded in 1917, the university enrolls 4,000 undergraduate and 1,000 graduate and PhD students and is set on 163 acres in Waltham, Massachusetts, 10 miles west of Boston. For more information, visit bentley.edu.

SOURCE Bentley University
Blue Origin passenger Jim Kitchen chose the circul+ to gather health data on his historic commercial space flight aboard New Shepard NS-20. The data from the ring will be presented to Mr. Kitchen's students at the University of North Carolina.

LOS ANGELES , April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- BodiMetrics announced today that the Prevention circul+ wellness ring flew aboard the most recent Blue Origin flight on the finger of passenger Jim Kitchen, an entrepreneur and professor at the University of North Carolina. Mr. Kitchen chose to collaborate with BodiMetrics as the Prevention circul+ is the only smart device on the market that can accurately measure heart rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygen, and finger temperature.

Video and picture of Jim Kitchen wearing the Prevention circul+ during his flight

Blue Origin Passenger Jim Kitchen wears the Prevention circul+ Prevention circul+ ring and app

"Lifting off with one of the first commercial space flights ever is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," said Blue Origin passenger and University of North Carolina professor Jim Kitchen. "I wanted the best tool I could find to monitor my health metrics in real-time. Exhaustive search led me to the Prevention circul+ by Bodimetrics. Because of its continuous measurement, this was really the only device that would allow students at UNC's Astronomy Department to monitor my heart rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygen, and finger temperature as I traveled into space."

"When Jim called me about his space flight, I knew this was a perfect opportunity to showcase the uniqueness of our ring," said BodiMetrics cofounder Niel Friedman. "He wanted an efficient and accurate way to measure his body's stress response as he experienced space flight for the first time. We couldn't be happier taking the ride with Jim and Blue Origin on this historic mission."

About BodiMetrics: BodiMetrics is dedicated to empowering consumers with products, services, and solutions that will allow them to take charge of their healthcare, lower overall costs, and improve their well-being. All BodiMetrics products are tested by independent third-party labs to clinical standards as well, where indicated, approved by the FDA. For more information, visit www.BodiMetrics.com .

CONTACT: Ben Cooke

[email protected]

310-720-1214

SOURCE BodiMetrics
VANCOUVER, BC, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Bold Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, announced that will be presenting research supporting the use of BOLD-100 in combination with a wide range of anticancer therapies in the treatment of numerous cancer types at the AACR Annual Meeting 2022 on April 8-13, 2022 in New Orleans.

BOLD-100s Broad Potential Featured at the AACR Annual Meeting 2022 Dr. Walter Berger

Bold Therapeutics' BOLD-100 is a first-in-class ruthenium-based small molecule therapeutic that (1) alters the unfolded protein response (UPR) through selective GRP78 inhibition; and (2) induces reactive oxygen species (ROS) which causes DNA damage and cell cycle arrest. Collectively, these effects result in cell death in both sensitive and resistant cancers, giving BOLD-100 the potential to significantly improve outcomes in a wide range of both solid and liquid tumors in combination with other anticancer therapies ranging from traditional chemotherapies to targeted therapies to immuno-oncology agents. BOLD-100 is currently being studied in a multinational Phase 2 trial in the treatment of advanced gastrointestinal cancers actively enrolling at 13 clinical sites: six in Canada; two in the U.S.; and five in South Korea. The Phase 1b trial results showed that BOLD-100 was generally safe and well-tolerated in combination with FOLFOX and suggested a clinically meaningful improvement in PFS over FOLFOX alone in a difficult-to-treat refractory patient population.

Bold Therapeutics' poster presentation titled "Utilization of cancer cell line screening and bioinformatic analyses to identify optimal developmental pathways for the novel anticancer agent BOLD-100" (Poster# 5489, Session: Small Molecule Therapeutic Agents) highlights key findings of an unbiased approach to identify promising drug combinations and indications for future clinical development. Bladder cancer and esophageal cancer are two indications that emerged as particularly sensitive to both BOLD-100 monotherapy and BOLD-100 in combination with standard-of-care treatments. In parallel, pharmacogenomic analysis revealed critical pathways, with BOLD-100's alteration of ribosomal biogenesis being particularly noteworthy.

Concurrently, The University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna published a joint manuscript, "The Anticancer Ruthenium Compound BOLD-100 Targets Glycolysis and Generates a Metabolic Vulnerability towards Glucose Deprivation" (PMCID: PMC8875291), which provides further insight into BOLD-100's unique mechanism-of-action, including deregulation of carbohydrate metabolism. Dr. Walter Berger, senior author, stated "In oncology, metabolic perturbations are often linked to drug resistance, with increased glycolytic activity playing a key role in the survival of cancer cells. We found that BOLD-100 enhances cancer cell glucose dependency, suggesting that BOLD-100 drug-drug combinations that inhibit glycolysis could be particularly promising therapeutically."

Mark Bazett, Ph.D., Director, Preclinical Development at Bold Therapeutics added, "BOLD-100 is an exciting therapeutic due to the potential breadth and depth of its utility. While the industry focuses on targeted therapies that are easily evaded by pathway redundancy, BOLD-100's broad and unique mechanism-of-action is proving increasingly robust, with the potential to significantly improve outcomes in some of the most difficult-to-treat cancers that are refractory to conventional treatments. We are particularly excited about further exploring some of the highly synergistic combinations recently identified."

For more information, please visit the Company's website at www.bold-therapeutics.com or the AACR conference website https://www.aacr.org/meeting/aacr-annual-meeting-2022/

SOURCE Bold Therapeutics Inc.
This recognition comes as a result of the tremendous success of the varioPRINT iX-series , ColorStream 8000 series and the ProStream 1800 , sold through Canon Solutions America., a wholly owned subsidiary. These three inkjet devices have helped print providers from coast to coast push the boundaries of print to meet changing customer demands. Designed with top-of-the-line innovation in mind, each device was carefully designed to meet the current and future production challenges of corporate and public sector in-plants, direct mail and print communication service providers, as well as book printers and specialized commercial printers, helping to build efficient operations and increased business opportunities.

"At Canon Solutions America, we are focused on investing in our production inkjet product portfolio to offer our customers solutions that help them to improve efficiencies, expand their application possibilities, meet customer demands, and grow their business," said Francis A. McMahon, executive vice president, Production Print Solutions, Canon Solutions America, Inc. "With that in mind, we are confident that our technology, combined with premium service and support, sets us apart from our competition and boosts customer confidence when investing in Canon's inkjet presses. We take great pride that Canon has once again been acknowledged as the market leader for total production inkjet."

To further demonstrate its leadership in the inkjet technology industry, Canon Solutions America is proud to be a Keynote Sponsor at the Inkjet Summit 10th anniversary event. Produced annually by PRINTING United Alliance, Printing Impressions, and In-plant Impressions, this year's event will be hosted at the Hyatt Lost Pines in Austin, Texas, from April 11-13.

In celebration of its 10-year anniversary, the Inkjet Summit will bring together a special group of top business leaders, including senior managers and business executives who are passionate about learning and understanding top industry trends as well as future predictions for the direction of production inkjet printing technology, software and solutions. All attendees can expect a lively and informative event, including strategic-level insights into what printing industry leaders should do to improve and optimize their business.

"We are honored to be a part of the 10-year anniversary Inkjet Summit event as a keynote sponsor and look forward to the opportunity to engage and share ideas on education and thought leadership with key members in our industry through 1:1 meetings, various sessions, and networking opportunities," said McMahon. "We have witnessed firsthand what recent developments in inkjet technology and solutions can do to improve business outcomes for our customers, and we emphasize to our customers on a regular basis to research and understand the various options and applications available that can benefit their business to be as efficient and productive as possible. We are excited to interact with customers and stakeholders to gain a deeper understanding of their goals."

The Inkjet Summit is designed to give senior managers and print executives strategic-level insights into what they must do to grow, improve, and optimize their businesses. The event will feature keynote presentations from thought leaders in the industry, panel discussions featuring businesses that have successfully adopted production inkjet, interactive case studies highlighting innovative applications and implementations in the field, and in-depth 1:1 meetings.

For additional details on the Inkjet Summit, please visit ijsummit.com.

For further insight on Canon Solutions America's product and service offerings, please visit www.csa.canon.com.

About Canon Solutions America, Inc.

Canon Solutions America, Inc. provides industry leading enterprise, production, and large format printing solutions, supported by exceptional professional service offerings. Canon Solutions America, Inc. helps companies of all sizes discover ways to improve sustainability, increase efficiency, and control costs in conjunction with high volume, continuous feed, digital and traditional printing, and document management solutions. A wholly owned subsidiary of Canon U.S.A., Inc., Canon Solutions America, Inc. is headquartered in Melville, NY and has sales and service locations across the U.S. For more information on Canon Solutions America, please visit csa.canon.com .

Editorial Contact: Canon Solutions America, Inc. Website: Nicole Esan csa.canon.com 631-330-2139 For sales info/customer support: [email protected] 1-844-443-INFO (4636)

Canon is a registered trademark of Canon Inc. in the United States and elsewhere. All other referenced product names and marks are trademarks of their respective owners.

 2022 Canon Solutions America, Inc. All rights reserved.

SOURCE Canon Solutions America, Inc.
KFAR-SABA, Israel and IRVINE, Calif., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- CathWorks, an original equipment manufacturer (OEM), and Quest International, a global service support provider to the OEMs, announced today they have signed a post-sales technical service support agreement that Quest International becomes the preferred technical service delivery partner for end-to-end service support of CathWorks' fast-growing install-base of customers globally. CathWorks plans to leverage Quest's capabilities to accelerate its commercial operations and expand its geographic footprint.

"In pursuit of our mission of partnering with physicians to transform how cardiovascular disease is diagnosed and treated, we have become partners with Quest International because of their deep industry expertise and their ability to provide comprehensive services including depot repairs, field services, supply-chain logistics and other professional services. Quest's global coverage and scalable resources will augment CathWorks' growing global commercial footprint while enhancing our customers' overall experience," said Ramin Mousavi, President and CEO of CathWorks.

"Having served Fortune 500 companies since 1982, Quest is dedicated to meeting the needs of its OEM customers with a comprehensive suite of services and solutions. Partnering with CathWorks perfectly fits our OEM services offering and provides CathWorks and its end-users a global and reliable one-stop shop for all the CathWorks FFRangio System service needs," said Shawn Arshadi, President and CEO of Quest International.

In addition to growing global presence, both companies have their US headquarters in Irvine, California, an unmatched strategic destination for technology and life science companies. Quest and CathWorks see this partnership as their continued commitment of local economic growth. Both organizations have a long history of partnership with local organizations such as the Greater Irvine Chamber of Commerce and Octane Orange County.

ABOUT CATHWORKS

CathWorks is the leader in digital health innovations that can improve the lives of patients globally. The CathWorks FFRangio System combines advanced computational science and artificial intelligence, transforming how cardiovascular disease is diagnosed and treated. It provides physicians access to objective drug-free and wire-free intraprocedural multi-vessel physiology guidance that is practical for every patient. For more information, visit www.cath.works and follow us on Twitter @CathWorks.

ABOUT QUEST INTERNATIONAL

Quest International is a leading global post-sales service support partner for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) across multiple industries including healthcare, industrial, aviation and government as well as IT Solutions provider for large and small enterprises. Having served Fortune 500 companies since 1982, Quest offers a robust suite of new services and solutions throughout its three business units: OEM Services, IT Services and Technology Solutions. Quest is ISO 9001, 13485, 14001, and ANSI/ESD S20.20 Certified with over 30 operation centers worldwide.

Corporate headquarters are located at 60-65 Parker, Irvine, CA 92618. For more information call 800-231-6777 or visit www.questinc.com.

Quest International and the Quest logo are registered trademarks of Quest International Inc.

Contact

CathWorks

Media: Natalie Sickler [email protected]

Investors: Mike Feher [email protected]

Quest International Inc.

Brian Grotz [email protected]

SOURCE CathWorks
"The healthcare industry is undergoing rapid transformation, driven by innovations in digital health technology and demand for alternative care models. This year's Top 25 Innovators not only have the courage to try new ideas and approaches, but they also have the vision to turn them into tangible improvements in patient outcomes and experiences, population health, efficiency and cost-effectiveness," Fawn Lopez, Publisher shares. "Their innovative leadership serves as a model to aspire to, and we congratulate them for their achievements."

ChenMed CEO, Christopher Chen, M.D. says, "Our amazing clinicians and care teams are truly empowered by the visionary and intuitive technologies created and continuingly enhanced by Hernando Celada and his highly regarded Curity software team. Constant innovation with resolute focus on helping doctors transform care of the neediest populations makes it possible for ChenMed to fuel vital hyper growth while maintaining best in primary care patient satisfaction and health outcomes."

Celada is responsible for leading the innovation arm that identifies and creates new lines of business for ChenMed, and he also drives enterprise-wide strategic initiatives. In addition, Hernando leads Curity, ChenMed's software company that has developed a technology platform which includes the electronic health record (EHR) used in nearly 100 ChenMed centers operating in 12 states. Before joining ChenMed, Celada worked at several Fortune 1000 companies, beginning his career in technology. He has a proven track record of creating business value and building a great company culture.

"Our 'everyone wins' approach makes Curity technology careers really special," explains Celada, noting that he's currently working to fill several challenging and rewarding roles from software engineering to product management, all with the goal of enhancing technology to drive the best outcomes for our providers and patients. "We are excited to be helping Miami become a destination for the nation's best technology professionals seeking unrivaled opportunities for career growth (watch 2022 Cafecito Tech Talk with Miami Mayor Francis Suarez). Curity offers unparalleled opportunities to help reshape healthcare in America."

This year's honorees are profiled in the April 4 issue of MH magazine and online at Modernhealthcare.com/awards/top-25-innovators-2022

About ChenMed:

ChenMed, headquartered in Miami, is a privately owned medical, management and technology company that delivers the high-touch and personalized primary care Medicare-eligible seniors need to enjoy better health. The company operates nearly 100 senior medical centers in 12 states. Named a Fortune 2020 "Change the World" company , a "Most Loved Workplace" by Newsweek Magazine, and a certified Best Place to Work by the Best Place to Work Institute, ChenMed brings concierge-style medicine and better health outcomes to the neediest populations. ChenMed brands include Chen Senior Medical Center, Dedicated Senior Medical Center and JenCare Senior Medical Center. Thanks to its nimble and growing software entity, Curity, ChenMed also was recently named "A Best Place to Work in IT" by IDG's Insider Pro and ComputerWorld.

Contact for information or questions on the Top Innovators recognition program: Carly Rick, [email protected].

SOURCE ChenMed
Latest financing round led by Acrew Capital and BNY Mellon, with continued investments from Goldman Sachs and Fidelity Investments.

New funding will bolster the company's new crypto data intelligence product innovation and propel expansion into international markets.

Coin Metrics has emerged as the clear market leader in the institutional space because it offers a comprehensive suite of institutional quality crypto intelligence products while maintaining open values.

BOSTON, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Coin Metrics, the leading provider of crypto financial intelligence, today announced that it raised $35 million in Series C financing, led by Acrew Capital and BNY Mellon. Goldman Sachs, Fidelity Investments, Highland Capital Partners, Avon Ventures and Morningside Technology Ventures are also continuing their investments in the company after participating in previous fundraising rounds. They are joined by new investors Cboe Global Markets, JAM FINTOP Blockchain, Mubadala Investment Company and Brevan Howard Digital.

Coin Metrics provides network data, market data, indexes and network risk solutions to the most prestigious institutions touching cryptoassets. This financing will bolster the company's new product innovation and help the company expand into adjacent spaces, elevating their ability to usher the world's premier financial institutions into crypto markets.

"Coin Metrics serves as a critical nexus for institutions in the digital asset space and has the potential to scale much further," said Tim Rice, co-founder and CEO of Coin Metrics. "This financing will enable us to accelerate both our business and product roadmap, including through continued investment in new novel risk, DeFi and other Dapp metrics, and in our world-class infrastructure. The quality of our crypto data and intelligence has generated tremendous interest from the growing number of premier financial institutions engaging in cryptoassets, prompting us to expand our customer success and growth efforts globally. We have assembled an experienced team of top crypto, data and financial services experts, and I am proud of the industry-leading work they continue to produce."

Following the completion of the company's $15 million Series B in 2021, Coin Metrics received SOC 2 Type 1 accreditation from Deloitte. Setting itself apart from other crypto data providers, Coin Metrics has emerged as the clear market leader in the institutional space because it offers a comprehensive suite of services  including on-chain data, a universal block explorer, market data and metrics, indexes and network risk management  while maintaining our core values of open, pioneering, elucidating and neutral.

"Developing a robust risk management framework is critical to our roadmap as we work toward launching digital asset services," said Katey Neate, Chief Risk Officer of BNY Mellon Asset Servicing & Digital. "Our strengthened alignment with Coin Metrics is another example of how we are leveraging leading technology solutions to develop this critical capability. With Coin Metrics, we have the opportunity to advance the capabilities and conversation, and ultimately raise the bar on risk management for digital assets as an industry."

"Given the complex, fragmented and decentralized nature of the crypto data space today, data providers that can organize this information in a transparent and accessible way are invaluable," said Mark Kraynak, Founding Partner of Acrew Capital. "Coin Metrics provides critical intelligence and superior crypto data insights to facilitate the path towards mainstream adoption of cryptoassets as more financial services firms and traditional investors look to enter this space. We are excited to be leading the company's Series C, which will help them continue to build out their institutional quality infrastructure."

Additional investors in previous fundraising rounds include Castle Island Ventures, Coinbase, Digital Currency Group, Communitas Capital, Dragonfly Capital, The Raptor Group, BlockFi, Animal Ventures and Collab+Currency.

With increased capital, the company will be able to make continued enhancements to infrastructure and reliability while scaling the business for greater international adoption. Coin Metrics' elite team of cryptonative experts and financial industry veterans will position the company to cement its reputation as the most trusted global provider of end-to-end crypto intelligence for institutions.

ABOUT COIN METRICS

Coin Metrics is the leading provider of crypto financial intelligence, offering network data, market data, indexes and network risk solutions to the most prestigious institutions touching cryptoassets. The company was founded in 2017 as an open-source project to determine the economic significance of public blockchains. Today, we expand on that original purpose to empower people and institutions to make informed crypto financial decisions. We aim to usher the world's premier financial institutions into crypto with the most trusted data and insights. For more information, visit www.coinmetrics.io .

Media Contact: Jamie Lovegrove

[email protected]

(301) 529-5085

SOURCE Coin Metrics
'We are delighted that Jonathan has joined our team." Said Jennifer Porter, chief operating officer for Commonwealth Hotels. "It is a pivotal time of growth for Commonwealth Hotels."

Prior to joining The Springhill Suites by Marriott Cincinnati Midtown, Carlisle served in various leadership roles for Columbia Sussex Corporation including catering manager for the Marriott Sanibel Harbour Resort and Spa, sales and catering administrative assistant for the Hilton Clearwater Beach Resort and Spa, and restaurant manager for the Doubletree Cincinnati Airport. Carlisle holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication Studies with a minor in Music Performance and Music Composition from Northern Kentucky University.

About Commonwealth Hotels, LLC

Commonwealth Hotels, LLC was founded in 1986 and is a proven partner in providing hotel management services with superior financial results. The company has extensive experience managing premium branded full service and select service hotels. Commonwealth Hotels currently manages 61 properties with nearly 7,600 rooms. Additional information may be found at www.commonwealthhotels.com.

Contact

Barbara E. Willen Commonwealth Hotels, LLC [email protected]

859.392-2254

SOURCE Commonwealth Hotels, Inc.
GOLDEN, Colo., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Pamela D Wilson, the caregiving expert, understands that family caregivers from their teens to nineties have vast life experiences and unanswered questions. Unfortunately, professionals in the healthcare industry looking in from the outside can be unintentionally insensitive to family caregiver needs that they have not personally experienced.

Pamela D Wilson Answers Caregiver Questions on YouTube Conversations With Family Caregivers

Caregiving discussions and family support are crucial to respond to the ongoing care needs of elderly loved ones. A twenty-year career in the healthcare and aging field gives Wilson a unique perspective and the ability to share both sides of care stories.

Her conversations with family caregivers validate feelings, empathize with the challenges, and explain the losses experienced by aging loved ones who grieve the decline in control over life events. Family caregivers find comfort in videos that mirror their care experiences and offer insight into situations that others have been unable to provide.

Wilson's YouTube Channel Features Hundreds of Conversations With Family Caregivers

Pamela D Wilson shares more than 20 years of expertise with family caregivers and persons interested in planning for aging on her YouTube Channel. Wilson's ongoing communication with grandchildren, adult children, spouses, and friends through social media, caregiver support groups, individual consultations, and speaking engagements serve as the foundation for honest and open discussions.

Hundreds of videos on Wilson's YouTube channel respond to questions and concerns from caregivers ranging from initiating care conversations with aging parents to planning end-of-life care. Because non-caregivers often shame family caregivers for their feelings, Wilson is fearless in openly discussing uncomfortable subjects.

Family Caregivers Seek Understanding

Family caregivers relate to videos titled, Caregiving Ruined My Life, I Don't' Want to Care for Elderly Parents, Why Being a Caregiver Sucks and Caring for My Elderly Mother is Killing Me. Finding a place where caregivers know that their experiences are understood instead of being judged creates a place for caregivers to seek answers and find appreciation for their efforts.

According to Wilson, "the ability to speak openly and honestly allows caregivers to receive validation of their feelings and find a path forward to create solutions to care for loved ones. It is a blessing to have a career where my life and personal experience benefit caregivers of all ages and care situations."

Shared Family Experiences

Caregiving is a role that has no defined roadmap, which is why so many family members struggle. Wilson acknowledges the challenges she experienced as a young caregiver for parents who died more than 25 years ago. "When you don't know what you don't know, it's easy to make mistakes because you don't know the questions to ask."

Having a reliable and trustworthy source of information gives family caregivers peace of mind. Wilson's website features a caregiver library, blog, and online caregiver courses. Caregivers searching for help on the Internet in the middle of the night find answers in Wilson's videos that become a source of hope, help, and support.

More about Wilson's Livestream Caregiver Events, online webinar courses, individual elder care consultations, caregiver speaking engagements on-site and virtual, and brand collaborations are on her website www.PamelaDWilson.com or by calling Pamela directly at +1 303-810-1816/ [email protected]

SOURCE Pamela D Wilson
VANCOUVER, BC, April 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Copper Mountain Mining Corporation (TSX: CMMC) (ASX: C6C) (the "Company" or "Copper Mountain") announces a revised date for its first quarter 2022 conference call and the release of its earnings results due to an ASX public holiday. The Company will now be hosting a conference call on Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at 7:30 am (Pacific Time) for senior management to discuss its first quarter 2022 results. The Company will be releasing its first quarter 2022 financial and operating results before markets open on Tuesday, April 26, 2022.

Dial-in information:

Toronto and international: 1 (416) 764 8650

North America (toll-free): 1 (888) 664 6383

Webcast: https://produceredition.webcasts.com/starthere.jsp?ei=1540119&tp_key=3297d7e2a6

Replay information:

Toronto and international: 1 (416) 764 8677, Passcode: 910085#

North America (toll-free): 1 (888) 390 0541, Passcode: 910085#

The conference call replay will be available until 8:59 pm (Pacific Time) on May 3, 2022. An archive of the audio webcast will also be available on the company's website at http://www.cumtn.com.

About Copper Mountain Mining Corporation

Copper Mountain's flagship asset is the 75% owned Copper Mountain Mine located in southern British Columbia near the town of Princeton. The Copper Mountain Mine currently produces approximately 100 million pounds of copper equivalent per year. Copper Mountain also has the development-stage Eva Copper Project in Queensland, Australia and an extensive 2,100 km2 highly prospective land package in the Mount Isa area. Copper Mountain trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol "CMMC" and Australian Stock Exchange under the symbol "C6C".

Additional information is available on the Company's web page at www.CuMtn.com.

On behalf of the Board of

COPPER MOUNTAIN MINING CORPORATION

"Gil Clausen"

Gil Clausen, P.Eng.

President and Chief Executive Officer

Website: www.CuMtn.com

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This news release may contain forward-looking statements and forward-looking information (together, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable securities laws. All statements, other than statements of historical facts, are forward-looking statements. Generally, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of terminology such as "plans", "expects", "estimates", "intends", "anticipates", "believes" or variations of such words, or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might", "occur" or "be achieved". Forward-looking statements involve risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results, performance and opportunities to differ materially from those implied by such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements include the risks set out in Copper Mountain's public documents, including in each management discussion and analysis, filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Although Copper Mountain believes that the information and assumptions used in preparing the forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on these statements, which only apply as of the date of this news release, and no assurance can be given that such events will occur in the disclosed time frames or at all. Except where required by applicable law, Copper Mountain disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

SOURCE Copper Mountain Mining Corporation
NEW YORK, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- On April 1, 2022, Credit Suisse declared a Coupon Amount for the Credit Suisse S&P MLP Index ETN (the "ETN").

ETN Ticker ETN Name Ex-Date Record Date Coupon Payment Date Coupon Amount

per ETN Coupon

Frequency Current Yield* MLPO Credit Suisse S&P

MLP Index ETN 4/12/22 4/13/22 4/21/22 $0.1838 Quarterly 6.09%





* The "Current Yield" equals the current quarterly Coupon Amount, annualized and divided by the Closing Indicative Value of the ETN on March 31, 2022.



 The Current Yield, which is based on the ETN's Coupon Amount, is not indicative of future quarterly Coupon Amounts, if any, on the ETNs. The quarterly Coupon Amount (if any) is variable and dependent on the most recent distributions of the MLPs included in the index, and such amount does not represent a fixed periodic interest payment. There can be no assurance that the MLPs included in the index will make any distributions in any future period. Any payment on the ETN is subject to Credit Suisse's ability to pay its obligations as they become due. For more information regarding the ETN's coupon payments, please refer to the ETN's pricing supplement.

Press Contact

Andre Rosenblatt, Credit Suisse, [email protected]

Credit Suisse ETNs

Telephone +1 800 320 1225, ET[email protected]suisse.com

The ETNs may not be suitable for all investors and should be purchased only by knowledgeable investors who understand the potential consequences of investing in the ETNs. The ETNs are subject to the credit risk of Credit Suisse. You may receive less, and possibly significantly less, than the principal amount of your investment at maturity or upon repurchase or sale. Investors will not have any partnership interests or other rights in the MLPs included in the index. Coupon Amounts on the ETNs will vary and could be zero. An investment in the ETNs involves significant risks. For further information regarding risks, please see the section entitled "Risk Factors" in the applicable pricing supplement.

Credit Suisse

Credit Suisse is one of the world's leading financial services providers. Our strategy builds on Credit Suisse's core strengths: its position as a leading wealth manager, its specialist investment banking capabilities and its strong presence in our home market of Switzerland. We seek to follow a balanced approach to wealth management, aiming to capitalize on both the large pool of wealth within mature markets as well as the significant growth in wealth in Asia Pacific and other emerging markets, while also serving key developed markets with an emphasis on Switzerland. Credit Suisse employs approximately 50,110 people. The registered shares (CSGN) of Credit Suisse Group AG, are listed in Switzerland and, in the form of American Depositary Shares (CS), in New York. Further information about Credit Suisse can be found at www.credit-suisse.com.

Disclaimer

This document was produced by and the opinions expressed are those of Credit Suisse as of the date of writing and are subject to change. It has been prepared solely for information purposes and for the use of the recipient. It does not constitute an offer or an invitation by or on behalf of Credit Suisse to any person to buy or sell any security. Any reference to past performance is not necessarily a guide to the future. The information and analysis contained in this publication have been compiled or arrived at from sources believed to be reliable but Credit Suisse does not make any representation as to their accuracy or completeness and does not accept liability for any loss arising from the use hereof.

Credit Suisse has filed a registration statement (including a prospectus) with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, for the offering to which this press release relates. Before you invest, you should read the applicable Pricing Supplement, the Prospectus Supplement dated June 18, 2020, and the Prospectus dated June 18, 2020 that Credit Suisse has filed with the SEC for more complete information about Credit Suisse and this offering. You may obtain these documents without cost by visiting EDGAR on the SEC website at www.sec.gov or clicking the hyperlink below:

Pricing Supplement dated November 9, 2020:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1053092/000089109220012081/e11689-424b2.htm

Alternatively, Credit Suisse, Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC or any agent or any dealer participating in this offering will arrange to send you the applicable pricing supplement, prospectus supplement and prospectus if you so request by calling 1-800-320-1225.

This document was produced by and the opinions expressed are those of Credit Suisse as of the date of writing and are subject to change.

Copyright  2022, CREDIT SUISSE GROUP AG and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

SOURCE Credit Suisse AG
DALLAS, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Cross Timbers Royalty Trust (NYSE: CRT) today announced that the Special Meeting of the Trust's unitholders scheduled for April 5, 2022 for the purpose of obtaining approval of the appointment of Argent Trust Company as successor trustee of the Trust, was adjourned due to the lack of the requisite quorum. The Special Meeting has been adjourned until Wednesday, May 4, 2022 at 12:00 p.m., Central Time, at Shady Oaks Country Club, 320 Roaring Springs Road, Fort Worth, TX 76114.

The Trust's proxy materials, which were previously filed and mailed to the unitholders on or about February 11, 2022, remain unchanged. The record date for unitholders entitled to vote at the Special Meeting remains the close of business on February 4, 2022. Unitholders who have already voted on the proposals do not need to take any further action. Unitholders who have not voted as of yet are strongly encouraged to submit their votes.

Forward-looking Statements

Any statements in this Current Report on Form 8-K and the exhibits filed or furnished herewith about plans for the Registrant, the expected timing of the completion (if any) of the proposed resignation of the Trustee or appointment of a successor trustee, and other statements containing the words "estimates," "believes," "anticipates," "plans," "expects," "will," "may," "intends" and similar expressions, other than historical facts, constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Factors or risks that could cause the Registrant's actual results to differ materially from the results we anticipate include, but are not limited to the inability of the Trustee to resign or Argent Trust Company to assume duties as successor trustee due to the failure to obtain necessary unitholder or court approval or the failure to satisfy other conditions to the Trustee's resignation set forth in the Trustee's notice of resignation and definitive proxy statement.

Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements. In addition, the forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Trustee's views as of the date hereof. The Trustee anticipates that subsequent events and developments may cause its views to change. However, while the Trustee may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, it specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Trustee's views as of any date subsequent to the date hereof.

SOURCE Cross Timbers Royalty Trust
SAN PEDRO GARZA GARCIA, Mexico, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Cydsa, S.A.B. de C.V. ("Cydsa") (BMV: CYDSASA) announced today that it has commenced a "modified Dutch auction" tender offer to purchase for cash (the "Tender Offer") up to an aggregate principal amount of its 6.250% Senior Notes due 2027 (the "Notes") that will not result in the Aggregate Purchase Price (as defined below) for the Notes validly tendered (and not validly withdraw) and accepted for purchase pursuant to the Tender Offer to exceed U.S.$40.0 million (such amount, as may be modified by Cydsa in its sole discretion, the "Maximum Amount"). The Tender Offer is being made pursuant to the terms of an Offer to Purchase dated April 6, 2022 (as may be amended or supplemented from time to time, the "Offer to Purchase"), and is subject to certain conditions.

The Tender Offer will expire at 11:59 p.m., New York City time, on May 3, 2022, unless extended or earlier terminated by Cydsa in its sole discretion (such time and date, as the same may be extended, the "Expiration Time"). In order for holders of Notes to be eligible to receive the Total Consideration (as defined below) for their Notes, such holders must validly tender (and not validly withdraw) such Notes at or prior to 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on April 19, 2022, unless extended by Cydsa in its sole discretion (such time and date, as the same may be extended, the "Early Tender Time"). Holders that tender Notes after the Early Tender Time but at or prior to the Expiration Time will only be eligible to receive the Tender Offer Consideration (as defined below), which does not include the Early Tender Payment (as defined below). If any Notes are purchased in the Tender Offer, Notes tendered at or prior to the Early Tender Time with a Bid Price (as defined below) equal to or less than the Clearing Price (as defined below) will be accepted for purchase in priority to other Notes validly tendered in the Tender Offer after the Early Tender Time. Accordingly, if the Maximum Amount is reached in respect of tenders made at or prior to the Early Tender Time, no Notes tendered after the Early Tender Time will be accepted for purchase.

The consideration for each U.S.$1,000 principal amount of Notes validly tendered (and not validly withdrawn) at or prior to the Early Tender Time and accepted for purchase pursuant to the Tender Offer (the "Total Consideration") will be equal to the Clearing Price, as determined pursuant to a "modified Dutch Auction" procedure described below, which Total Consideration includes a payment equal to U.S.$50.00 per U.S.$1,000 principal amount of Notes validly tendered (and not validly withdrawn) and accepted for purchase pursuant to the Tender Offer (the "Early Tender Payment"). Holders who tender (and do not validly withdraw) their Notes after the Early Tender Time but at or prior to the Expiration Time will be eligible to receive consideration (the "Tender Offer Consideration"), equal to (i) the Total Consideration minus (ii) the Early Tender Payment, on the Final Settlement Date (as defined below). The Total Consideration and the Tender Offer Consideration will be payable in cash in U.S. dollars. Holders will also receive accrued and unpaid interest from the last interest payment date up to, but not including, the applicable Settlement Date (as defined below) for the Notes accepted for purchase (the "Accrued Interest"). The aggregate amount of Tender Offer Consideration and Total Consideration that holders of Notes are entitled to receive, excluding Accrued Interest, for Notes that are validly tendered (and not validly withdrawn) and accepted for purchase by Cydsa is referred to as the "Aggregate Purchase Price." The following table describes certain terms of the Tender Offer:

Title of Securities

CUSIP/ISIN

Outstanding

Principal Amount

Early Tender

Payment(1)

Total Consideration

(Accepted Bid Price Range)(1)(2) 6.250% Senior Notes due 2027

232553AA5 / US232553AA57 (Rule 144A);

P3R26HAA8 / USP3R26HAA81 (Reg S)

U.S.$450,000,000

U.S.$50.00

U.S.$955.00 to U.S.$995.00

_____ (1) Consideration in the form of cash per U.S.$1,000 principal amount of Notes that are validly tendered (and not validly withdrawn) at or prior to the Early Tender Time. (2) Excludes Accrued Interest, if any, which will be paid in addition to the Total Consideration or Tender Offer Consideration, as applicable. Includes the Early Tender Payment. Holders who tender (and do not validly withdraw) their Notes after the Early Tender Time but at or prior to the Expiration Time will not be eligible to receive the Early Tender Payment.

Whether and to what extent tendered Notes of a holder are accepted for purchase in the Tender Offer will depend upon how the Bid Price specified by such holder compares to Bid Prices specified by other tendering holders. Specifically, at the Early Tender Time, Cydsa will compare all the Bid Prices received at or prior to the Early Tender Time to calculate a single Clearing Price for the Tender Offer. Under the "modified Dutch Auction" procedure, Cydsa will accept Notes validly tendered (and not withdrawn) in the Tender Offer in the order of the lowest to the highest Bid Prices specified or deemed to have been specified by tendering holders at or prior to the Early Tender Time, and will select the single lowest Bid Price so specified that will enable Cydsa to purchase the maximum principal amount of Notes validly tendered (and not validly withdrawn) at or prior to the Early Tender Time such that the Aggregate Purchase Price for such Notes would not exceed the Maximum Amount (or, if a single Bid Price as applied to the purchase of all Notes validly tendered (and not withdrawn) in the Tender Offer at or prior to the Early Tender Time would result in an Aggregate Purchase Price less than the Maximum Amount, then Cydsa will select such Bid Price), which is referred to as the "Clearing Price."

This means that if a holder of Notes elects to participate in the Tender Offer at or prior to the Early Tender Time, it must specify the minimum purchase price (its "Bid Price") that such holder would be willing to receive as the Total Consideration in exchange for each U.S.$1,000 in principal amount of Notes it chooses to tender in the Tender Offer. A holder's specified Bid Price for each U.S.$1,000 in principal amount of Notes must be in increments of U.S.$2.50 and must be at least U.S.$955.00 (the "Minimum Price") but not greater than U.S.$995.00 (the "Maximum Price") (such range, the "Accepted Bid Price Range").

Holders who tender Notes at or prior to the Early Tender Time without specifying a Bid Price will be deemed to have specified the Minimum Price as their Bid Price. If any Bid Price is not submitted in a whole increment of U.S.$2.50, such Bid Price will be rounded down to the nearest U.S.$2.50 increment. In addition, tenders of Notes outside of the Accepted Bid Price Range will not be accepted and will not be used for purposes of determining the Clearing Price. Any Bid Price specified by a tendering holder with respect to Notes validly tendered after the Early Tender Time but at or prior to the Expiration Time shall be disregarded and not used for purposes of calculating the Clearing Price, and holders who so tender shall be (i) deemed to have tendered with a Bid Price equal to the Tender Offer Consideration (regardless of the Bid Price submitted by such holder) and (ii) eligible to receive only the Tender Offer Consideration (and not the Early Tender Payment), subject to proration. This may result in Notes being accepted for purchase at a lower price than a holder intended. Acceptance of tendered Notes may be subject to proration.

Cydsa will pay the same Total Consideration or Tender Offer Consideration, as applicable, for all Notes validly tendered (and not validly withdrawn) with Bid Prices at or below the Clearing Price (including Bid Prices deemed to be the Minimum Price or the Tender Offer Consideration as described in the prior paragraph) and accepted for purchase, upon the terms and subject to the conditions of the Tender Offer, taking into account the Maximum Amount and proration. Accordingly, any holder whose Notes are validly tendered (and not withdrawn) at or prior to the Early Tender Time and accepted in the Tender Offer will receive no less than the Bid Price specified by such holder (or deemed to be specified). Holders who tender after the Early Tender Time will not receive the Early Tender Payment and may receive less than their Bid Price.

On any business day following the Early Tender Time and before the Expiration Time, Cydsa will have the right, but not the obligation, to accept for purchase any Notes validly tendered (and not validly withdrawn) at or prior to the Early Tender Time (the settlement date of such purchase being referred to as the "Early Settlement Date"), subject to the Maximum Amount and proration. The Early Settlement Date with respect to the Tender Offer will be determined at Cydsa's option, subject to all conditions to the Tender Offer (including a financing condition) having been either satisfied or waived by Cydsa. Regardless of whether Cydsa exercises its option to have an Early Settlement Date with respect to the Tender Offer, Cydsa will purchase any remaining Notes that have been validly tendered at or prior to the Expiration Time and that Cydsa chooses to accept for purchase, subject to all conditions to the Tender Offer (including a financing condition) having been either satisfied or waived by Cydsa, within three business days following the Expiration Time or as promptly as practicable thereafter (the settlement date of such purchase being referred to as the "Final Settlement Date"; the Final Settlement Date and the Early Settlement Date, each being referred to as a "Settlement Date"), subject to the Maximum Amount and proration.

Tendered Notes may be withdrawn in accordance with the terms of the Tender Offer prior to 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on April 19, 2022, unless extended by Cydsa in its sole discretion (such time and date, as the same may be extended, the "Withdrawal Deadline"), but not thereafter. The Early Tender Time and/or Expiration Time Offer can be extended independently of the Withdrawal Deadline (as defined below) for such Offer and the Early Tender Time, Expiration Time or Withdrawal Deadline with respect to any other Offer.

Cydsa's obligation to accept for purchase, and to pay for, any Notes validly tendered and not validly withdrawn pursuant to the Tender Offer is conditioned upon the satisfaction or, when applicable, waiver of certain customary conditions, which are more fully described in the Offer to Purchase, including, among others, a financing condition as described in the Offer to Purchase.

In addition, subject to applicable law, Cydsa reserves the right, in its sole discretion, at any time (i) to waive any condition to the Tender Offer, (ii) to amend any of the terms of the Tender Offer, (iii) to terminate the Tender Offer; (iv) to increase or modify the Maximum Amount, (v) to extend the Withdrawal Deadline, (vi) to extend or amend the Early Tender Time or the Expiration Time, or (vii) to modify the Tender Offer Consideration or the Early Tender Payment, in each case (other than clause (v)) without extending the Withdrawal Deadline or otherwise reinstating withdrawal rights of holders.

Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC and Scotia Capital (USA) Inc. are acting as the dealer managers for the Tender Offer and can be contacted with questions regarding the Tender Offer at the following telephone numbers: Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC: +1 (800) 828-3182 (toll-free) and +1 (212) 357-1452 (collect); and Scotia Capital (USA) Inc. +1 (212) 225-5501 (collect).

Copies of the Offer to Purchase are available to holders of Notes from D.F. King & Co., Inc., the information agent and the tender agent for the Tender Offer. Requests for copies of the Offer to Purchase should be directed to D.F. King at +1 (800) 669-5550 (toll free), +1 (212) 232-3233 (collect) or [email protected].

Neither the Offer to Purchase nor any related documents have been filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, nor have any such documents been filed with or reviewed by any federal or state securities commission or regulatory authority of any country. No authority has passed upon the accuracy or adequacy of the Offer to Purchase or any related documents, and it is unlawful and may be a criminal offense to make any representation to the contrary.

The Tender Offer is being made solely on the terms and conditions set forth in the Offer to Purchase. Under no circumstances shall this press release constitute an offer to buy or the solicitation of an offer to sell the Notes or any other securities of Cydsa or any of its affiliates. The Tender Offer is not being made to, nor will Cydsa accept tenders of Notes from, holders in any jurisdiction in which the Tender Offer would not be in compliance with the securities laws of such jurisdiction. No recommendation is made as to whether holders should tender their Notes with respect to the Notes. Holders should carefully read the Offer to Purchase because it contains important information, including the various terms and conditions of the Tender Offer.

About Cydsa

Cydsa is a Mexico-based holding company, headquartered in San Pedro Garza Garcia, Nuevo Leon, operating through subsidiaries located in nine cities throughout Mexico, engaged in the industrial sector. Since the incorporation of the Company in 1945, Cydsa has grown into a diversified company and Cydsa's current products and services range from edible salt to specialty chemicals for diverse industries to clean energy alternatives and hydrocarbon storage. Cydsa sells over 100 different products in more than 15 countries, including Mexico, the United States, Canada, Central America, South America and Europe. As part of Cydsa's strategy, it offers the first system in Mexico and Latin America dedicated to processing and underground storage of hydrocarbons in salt caverns, offering clean, efficient and safe storage of hydrocarbons, while helping reduce the hydrocarbon storage deficit in Mexico. Cydsa currently operates through its chemical manufacturing and specialties business group and its energy processing and logistics business group.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements. Statements that are not historical facts, including statements about Cydsa's perspectives and expectations, are forward-looking statements. All statements that express belief, expectation, estimates or intentions, as well as those that are not statements of historical facts, are forward-looking statements. Such statements use forward-looking words such as "proposed," "anticipate," "project," "potential," "could," "should," "continue," "estimate," "expect," "may," "believe," "will," "plan," "seek," "outlook" and other similar expressions that are intended to identify forward-looking statements, although some forward-looking statements are expressed differently. Cydsa cautions you not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. Although the expectations in the forward-looking statements are based on Cydsa's current beliefs and expectations, caution should be taken not to place undue reliance on any such forward-looking statements because such statements speak only as of the date hereof. Except as required by federal and state securities laws, Cydsa undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or any other reason.

Contact: Oscar Abundio Casas Kirchner

Corporate Finance Director

[email protected]

+52 (81) 8152-4500

SOURCE Cydsa, S.A.B. de C.V.
LONDON, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- DataTracks, a global leader in compliance reporting solutions, has successfully helped many leading listed businesses to prepare and file compliance reports to regulators. With its robust, error-free and dependable tagging service, DataTracks seamlessly integrates with the full reporting services provided by UK agency, Friend Studio. Working closely together, the teams recently provided the ESEF tagging solution for the UK's first mandatory filing  for Standard Chartered, a UK-based multinational bank.

DataTracks leads in the UK ESEF Reporting for multinational banks

Under the ESEF mandate, listed companies in the EU and UK have faced many challenges submitting their annual financial reports in the iXBRL format and complying with the new filing rules. DataTracks and Friend Studio's experience in mandatory XBRL filings, and their Europe-wide perspective, offers companies a proven, experienced solution, allowing the company's reporting team to focus on their core responsibilities.

DataTracks and Friend Studio helped Standard Chartered to file two fully-designed, high-quality ESEF Annual reports simultaneously with their results announcements and completed in record time  making these the UK's first mandatory ESEF reports.

Friend Studio is an award-winning team of corporate reporting, communications and branding specialists in London, delivering strategic, creative and innovative communications across all media. For the past 5 years, Friend Studio has been integrating XBRL reporting into its services, alongside partners like DataTracks.

Rob Riche, Friend Studio's Digital Reporting Lead, said: "I can't thank the DataTracks team enough for all the support and hard work to get these filings completed at speed, and at the highest quality. It is hugely appreciated, and we will do our best to make it an even better process next year. To publish and file the first mandatory ESEF report in the UK, for one of the UK's largest companies, and at the same time as the prelims is an amazing achievement! Well done to everyone in the team, and we look forward to further projects together."

Balaji Muthukrishnan, COO, DataTracks, said: "It was a fruitful partnership with Friend Studio in processing this high-profile bank's ESEF filing, involving complex, rich design. The team rose to the occasion and helped deliver high quality results without any compromise or delay. We were able to reap the 17+ years of regulatory filing experience worldwide and easily apply those best practices to ESEF regulation. By working in tandem with the Friend Studio team, we provided the solution to the challenges that the client faced with ESEF."

He further added: "The team worked really hard to cater to the client's business needs and provide them with the most efficient solutions within very tight deadlines to make the early filing possible. By making the customer satisfied with the end results, DataTracks has proved itself to be an expert in regulatory reporting solutions and a trustworthy ESEF provider. We will make sure to maintain healthy business relationships with partners like Friend Studio and provide maximum support and assistance in the future as well."

About DataTracks

As a pioneer in providing disclosure management software for 17 years, DataTracks serves more than 21,500 business enterprises in 26 countries. DataTracks has a commendable experience of preparing more than 2,20,000 compliance reports so far for filing with regulators such as ESMA in the European Union, HMRC in the United Kingdom, ACRA in Singapore, CIPC in South Africa, SSM in Malaysia, SEC in the United States, and MCA in India.

For more information, visit the website @ https://www.datatracks.com/eu/

For Business Enquiries:

Email: [email protected]

Ph: +31202253702

Media contact: [email protected]

SOURCE DataTracks
To remain true to his mission and working-class roots, Emil set out to meticulously cultivate a company culture that redefines the modern-day law firm through a welcoming, creative, family-like atmosphere to establish trust while eliminating the typical law-firm intimidation factor.

The feeling that DLaw is a different type of law firm is evident the minute one steps into the central entry plaza of the 4,500 square foot brick building in the heart of Glendale's business district. The 3-arch, bowstring truss structure, multi-hued perimeter ceiling lighting, widespread use of floor to glass walls for 15 interview rooms and offices, central open work area, creates an airy, inviting atmosphere for the 50-plus person team of legal professionals and guests alike.

The inviting atmosphere is amplified by a living-room style waiting area where guests are greeted with a big screen 4K TV, video games, and even a popcorn machine. The "welcoming and caring" theme continues to the main conference room where a wall-to-ceiling open shelf system houses literary favorites from DLaw staffers grouped around a centrally located neon heart. All of this aims to fulfill Emil's mission of easing tensions around what is typically an intimidating, stress-filled process for working-class individuals seeking legal help.

To bring his vision of DLaw's HQ to life, Emil joined forces with Rick Corsini, LA native, Harvard graduate, and Principal of the Award-Winning Corsini Stark Architectural firm. Corsini's 25 years of excellence across Custom Residential, Creative Workplaces, Historic Preservation, and Adaptive Reuse projects were a perfect fit for Emil's disruptive vision. You can find more imagery here .

When Emil purchased the property, his mission was to maintain the heritage and history of the building while disrupting stereotypes around the modern law firm as we know it. "I wanted DLaw to be a breath of fresh air compared to the old-school ivory tower law firms that people are used to. I wanted to create a warm, inviting, down-to-earth place that is fitting for everyday people, all while celebrating architecture."

"DLaw is not your traditional law firm by any means," said Rick Corsini. "The space as it stood originally was interesting and spatially elegant, and we wanted to stay away from traditional and conservative images that law offices have. Each area across DLaw elicited a different set of ideas and strategies to execute. It's rare to see designs fitting for a multi-faceted creative agency and residential setting used for a law firm. Law offices traditionally prefer the old-school layout with corner offices, it was refreshing to hear that kind of organization was not applicable for us. Years ago, that idea might have seemed far-fetched."

Corsini developed Emil's vision and paid particular attention to lighting, furniture, and finishes to introduce process and organization around a digital, predominantly paperless space. The building's underground parking created a platform that raised the floor level several feet above the street. The split-level arrangement yielded amazing design opportunities, so Corsini cleared the old clutter and allowed for the volume of the space to be prominently featured.

"We listened to what Emil had in mind with the distinct vision for helping California's working class. He had a great sense of how things can work. It was easy to come up with a concept that was going to work for him, his staff, and their clients. There was a lot of trust involved around design as well as office space and organization. He had a practical standpoint and a strong eye for aesthetics. All considered, it made him an ideal partner to work with," said Rick Corsini.

For Emil and his team, the project was creatively and intellectually stimulating because it allowed the entire DLaw team to get to the core of how to build a better working environment while appealing to the firm's working-class clientele.

"It's been an amazing journey completing the project and seeing the promise and potential becoming a reality," said Emil Davtyan. "We come to work every day with the energy and enthusiasm to help California's working class."

DLaw is a member of the California Lawyers Association, California Employment Lawyers Association, National Employment Lawyers Association. The firm is a 4.5+ star consumer-rated firm with A+ Accreditation by BBB. The firm is driven by the mission of "Champion for California's Working Class." To fulfill its mission, DLaw provides free, no-obligation consultation and case evaluation services.

Contact: Armen Petrosyan, [email protected]

SOURCE Davtyan Law Firm, Inc.
Investment will enable Eaglebrook to scale and accelerate product development to meet rapidly increasing market demand and support customer growth

MIAMI, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Eaglebrook Advisors, Inc. ("Eaglebrook"), the largest crypto separately managed account ("SMA") platform, announced today the closing of a strategic investment from Franklin Resources, Inc. (NYSE: BEN), a global investment management organization operating as Franklin Templeton. This investment by Franklin Templeton is in addition to the total $22M capital raised before this, which also includes the $20M Series A funding round announced earlier this year, led by Castle Island Ventures and Brewer Lane Ventures, along with additional investors in the round.

The financing will enable Eaglebrook to accelerate technology and product development to serve financial advisors and the wealth management industry in response to market demand, as well as continue to provide best in class service for its fast-growing digital asset SMA platform.

"We are thrilled to partner with Franklin Templeton to bring digital asset SMAs to the advisor channel and believe this will help accelerate the adoption of digital asset SMAs and Eaglebrook's platform as the solution for financial advisors investing in the digital asset market," said Christopher King, CEO and Founder of Eaglebrook Advisors. "This partnership signals that the acceleration and adoption of digital assets among the broader wealth management industry uniquely positions Eaglebrook as the partner of choice for wealth management firms and their clients."

Eaglebrook's SMA platform allows financial advisors to seamlessly allocate to professionally managed digital asset investment strategies. Digital assets held in Eaglebrook's SMAs are secured in an offline, institutional-grade custody account at Gemini Trust Company, a qualified custodian. Eaglebrook's digital asset SMA platform is fully integrated with the major portfolio management and reporting systems used by RIAs and independent advisors. The firm's solution allows advisors to model, onboard, bill, and advise on their clients' bitcoin and digital asset holdings within a secure, unified technology ecosystem. Eaglebrook also provides advisor training and education on digital assets, performance reporting to third-party platforms, and executes tax-loss harvesting for end investor clients.

"We are excited about this partnership and our shared vision for the future of advised solutions in the digital asset class," said Roger Paradiso, Head of Product Solutions at Franklin Templeton. "We look forward to bringing these innovative solutions to our partner firms, advisors and clients."

Since the company was founded in 2019, Eaglebrook's digital asset SMA platform has grown to serve more than 60 RIAs and 500 financial advisors across the United States. Key partnerships include Mariner Wealth Advisors, Dynasty Financial Partners, and Halbert Hargrove Global Advisors, among others.

About Eaglebrook Advisors

Eaglebrook Advisors, Inc. is a SEC-registered investment adviser that operates the largest SMA Platform in the crypto market. The firm has created the first bitcoin and crypto separately managed accounts (SMAs), which are designed to seamlessly integrate with an advisor's current portfolio management systems and workflows. The company is backed by leading wealth management executives and financial institutions.

For more information about Eaglebrook, its products, services and for important disclosures, please visit www.eaglebrookadvisors.com and follow us on LinkedIn .

About Franklin Templeton

Franklin Resources, Inc. [NYSE:BEN] is a global investment management organization with subsidiaries operating as Franklin Templeton and serving clients in over 155 countries. Franklin Templeton's mission is to help clients achieve better outcomes through investment management expertise, wealth management and technology solutions. Through its specialist investment managers, the company offers boutique specialization on a global scale, bringing extensive capabilities in equity, fixed income, multi-asset solutions and alternatives. With offices in more than 30 countries and approximately 1,300 investment professionals, the California-based company has 75 years of investment experience and approximately $1.5 trillion in assets under management as of February 28, 2022. For more information, please visit franklinresources.com .

Media Contacts

Meredith Zaritheny, Prosek Partners

[email protected]

646.818.9251

SOURCE Eaglebrook Advisors
Building upon its successes in Canada's diverse markets, including openings in British Columbia and northern Ontario in 2021, Edo will work with DonerNorth to further establish the brand as a household name as it expands into new regional markets.

"Edo Japan is an incredible brand that many people haven't heard of  yet" says Catherine Marcolin, President of DonerNorth. "We are honoured to help introduce them to more of Canada through our unique approach to creating big, unifying ideas that are designed to connect and convert consumers from the start."

"We are looking forward to partnering with DonerNorth as we progress into this new chapter of growth at Edo," says Jessica Pellow, Vice President, Marketing at Edo Japan. "We are proud of our accomplishments as a franchise over our 43-year history and believe this partnership will help us bring our great story to new customers while solidifying Edo's position as a leader in the QSR industry."

Edo Japan has experienced consistent success expanding into new Canadian markets in recent years, including openings in British Columbia, Manitoba, and Ontario in 2021. With the pandemic driving exponential growth in their online and delivery sales, Edo sought a partner that could make a splash with audiences not only in new markets, but also in the digital space.

"Our omnichannel approach to serving customers makes it easy for them to order a meal, find a restaurant or see our menu  from wherever they are," says Pellow. "DonerNorth demonstrated a true understanding of customer insights, localized marketing strategy and our overall brand vision. We will work with DonerNorth to deepen our connection with customers by making the Edo brand stand out across all channels."

"We're thrilled that Edo Japan has connected with our way of mining strategic and consumer insights," says Marcolin. "They're also great people, with a professional culture we admire, so we're looking forward to developing our partnership and making great work together."

Prior to this win, both UNION and 6Degrees had individually racked up a series of recent new business, including WSIB, Arterra Wines, and Cadillac Fairview.

DonerNorth's first project for Edo Japan is expected to launch later this year.

About DonerNorth

DonerNorth is (www.donernorth.com) is Stagwell's unique creative commerce offering in Canada and part of the Doner Partners Network of agencies including Veritas, Meat & Produce, Doner and most recently, Dyversity Communications. Based in Toronto and Montreal, the agency crafts insightful, award-winning big ideas that engage and convert by blending brand advertising, digital and shopper marketing. In today's connected world, DonerNorth is modeled on how people actually fall in love with and buy brands in real life. It's what a modern full-service agency should be. For more information, visit donernorth.ca.

About Stagwell

Stagwell is the challenger network built to transform marketing. We deliver scaled creative performance for the world's most ambitious brands, connecting culture-moving creativity with leading-edge technology to harmonize the art and science of marketing. Led by entrepreneurs, our 10,000+ specialists in 20+ countries are unified under a single purpose: to drive effectiveness and improve business results for their clients. Join us at www.stagwellglobal.com.

About Edo Japan

Headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Edo Japan serves Japanese-inspired teppanyaki-style meals made fresh and by hand with a signature teriyaki sauce. First opened in 1979 at Southcentre Mall in Calgary, the Canadian-owned and operated franchise has grown to more than 160 restaurants in suburban shopping centres and food courts across Canada. With its reputation for high-quality ingredients, freshly prepared meals, friendly staff and convenient ordering options with My Edo App, Edo Japan has quickly become a popular option in the quick-service restaurant industry and serves more than 10 million meals annually. For more information, visit edojapan.com.

For more information, please contact:

Bora Caglayan

Doner Partners Network

647-920-2201

[email protected]

Alisha Samnani

Director, Brand Marketing & PR

Edo Japan

P: 403-554-9757

E: [email protected]

SOURCE Stagwell Inc.
Strong partnership support through new investments by Repsol and Monarch and additional investments from Avenue and other existing shareholders

Financial data is expressed in Canadian dollars

MONTREAL, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Enerkem, a world leader in the production of low-carbon intensity biofuels and circular chemicals from waste materials, announces the closing of a new financing totaling $255 million.

Repsol invests $170 million, of which $75 million is in Enerkem's equity. In doing so, Repsol joins existing shareholder Suncor Energy as a strategic shareholder to accelerate the adoption and deployment of Enerkem's technology and to develop new projects in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal).

In addition, Monarch Alternative Capital, a new investor, is contributing $30 million to the round while Avenue Capital Group is reinvesting $30 million. Finally, there is $25 million reinvested by some existing shareholders.

Repsol becomes a strategic partner to accelerate Enerkem's deployment in Europe

Repsol is a global multi-energy company operating in 24 countries and leading the energy transition with its ambition of achieving zero net emissions by 2050. For Repsol, this partnership is a natural fit with the technological solution developed by Enerkem.

Since last year, the company has partnered with Enerkem and Agbar to build Ecoplanta Molecular Solutions in El Morrell, near Tarragona, Spain. The plant, scheduled to be operational in 2026, will use Enerkem's technology to process some 400,000 tonnes of non-recyclable solid waste per year and produce close to 240,000 tonnes of methanol. Among over 300 projects submitted by major European industrial groups last year, Ecoplanta Molecular Solutions was one of seven projects selected for financial support from the European Commission, with a confirmed grant of up to 106 million.

"We are pleased to welcome Repsol as a shareholder," said Dominique Boies, Chief Executive Officer of Enerkem. "Repsol is a global multi-energy supplier that will greatly assist in accelerating the deployment of our technology in new markets. Repsol's equity investment in Enerkem strengthens our position as a leader in the renewable fuels and chemicals sectors and in building a circular economy."

"At Repsol, we are truly proud to become a shareholder in Enerkem thus supporting its development to consolidate as a leader in waste gasification technology to produce renewable fuels and chemicals," added Juan Abascal, Executive Director for Industrial Transformation and Circular Economy of Repsol. "We anticipate that its cutting-edge technology, recently recognized by the EU Innovation Fund, will be key to the decarbonization and circularity of the chemical and fuel industry. Enerkem has several projects in different stages of development that will help Repsol accelerate its circular economy initiatives and open new paths for production of low-carbon fuels, synthetic fuels, and renewable chemical products."

Additional support from Monarch Alternative Capital and Avenue Capital Group

Monarch Alternative Capital, a leading investment firm with approximately US$9.5 billion of assets under management, is a new $30 million investor in Enerkem, attracted by the potential of Enerkem's technology to have a tangible impact on greenhouse gas reduction.

"We believe Enerkem's team and technology are uniquely positioned to provide a compelling, scalable solution to some of the world's hardest to decarbonize sectors," said Joseph Citarrella, Managing Principal at Monarch Alternative Capital. "Through our experience in and focus on reducing the carbon footprint of fuels and chemicals, we are delighted to partner with Enerkem and its investors to advance its important strategic objectives."

As an investor in Enerkem since 2020, Avenue Capital Group, through the Avenue Sustainable Solutions Fund, is reinvesting over $30 million. The fund promotes investments in private companies and projects with the goal of generating positive and measurable environmental and social impacts as well as financial returns.

"Enerkem continues to be a natural fit with our mission to drive measurable environmental impact," said John Larkin, co-manager of the Avenue Sustainable Solutions Fund and Head of Impact Investments. "We are excited to continue to back Enerkem's vision of decarbonizing industrial chemicals while offering a solution to municipal solid waste. Both are critical solutions in a sustainable future. "

These new investors are a great complement to the support of existing Enerkem investors such as Rho Ventures, Braemar Energy Ventures, Investissement Quebec, Cycle Capital, Fonds de solidarite FTQ, Fondaction and Suncor Energy.

"We are privileged to have high-calibre international investors supporting our vision and the deployment of our disruptive technology. These endorsements confirm the added value of our technology in the efficient and sustainable management of residual waste and forest biomass, transforming them into circular chemicals and advanced biofuels for road, air and sea transportation. In this way, we will contribute to decarbonizing sectors of activity that have a large environmental footprint. The geographic expansion of our investor base will help position Enerkem as a leading provider of technology to improve the global environment. We hope that this financing round will have a significant ripple effect on other Quebec and Canadian investors to stimulate innovative clean technologies," concluded Dominique Boies.

J.P. Morgan Securities LLC served as exclusive placement agent to Enerkem Inc. in connection with the financing.

About Enerkem

Enerkem has developed and is marketing its breakthrough technology to produce, from non-recyclable waste, circular chemicals and advanced biofuels intended for hard to decarbonize sectors, such as sustainable aviation and marine fuels. Headquartered in Montreal, Quebec (Canada), Enerkem operates a full-scale commercial demonstration plant in Edmonton, Alberta, as well as an innovation centre in Quebec. A large-scale commercial facility is currently under construction in Varennes, Quebec (Canada) which will use Enerkem's technology. This also applies to agroforestry waste that, like urban waste, can be recycled into new products. Such technology can therefore diversify energy and chemical portfolios, as well as produce greener everyday products. It also provides a smart and sustainable alternative to landfilling and incineration. For more information, visit www.enerkem.com, follow us on Twitter @Enerkem or visit our LinkedIn or Facebook page.

About Repsol

Repsol is a global multi-energy supplier that facilitates the transition to a lower-emission energy model. It owns low-emission electricity generation assets and is developing several photovoltaic and wind renewable energy projects. Repsol has set itself the ambitious goal of being a company with zero net emissions by 2050 and has had a circular economy strategy in place since 2016, which it applies throughout the company's value chain, from obtaining raw materials to marketing products and services.

Focused on the circular economy, the company's chemical business will also make a decisive contribution to a more decarbonized economy and is committed to the efficiency of its industrial chemical processes. Its products are used to manufacture everyday objects that improve people's quality of life, well-being, and safety. Its wide range of chemical products extends from base petrochemicals to derivatives, and includes a wide range of polyolefins, all of which are 100% recyclable. The company also has three large petrochemical facilities in Europe where differentiated high value-added products are developed.

For more information, please visit: www.repsol.com

About Monarch Alternative Capital

Monarch Alternative Capital is a global investment firm founded in 2002 with approximately US$9.5 billion in assets under management. Monarch focuses primarily on opportunistic situations across corporate debt, real estate, capital solutions, and other market segments. Monarch draws on the skills and experience of its employees across offices in New York and London. For more information, visit www.monarchlp.com.

About Avenue Sustainable Solutions

The Avenue Sustainable Solutions Fund, L.P. seeks to provide creative financing solutions to high-growth companies that can demonstrate a measurable, positive environmental outcome alongside competitive financial returns. For additional information on Avenue Capital Group, which is a global investment firm with assets estimated to be approximately US$11.8 billion as of February 28, 2022, please visit www.avenuecapital.com.

SOURCE Enerkem Inc.
Latest version helps architects and designers create more engaging visuals and improve design workflows

KARLSRUHE, Germany and NEW YORK, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Enscape, a leading provider of real-time visualization, 3D rendering, and virtual reality technology for the global AEC industry, today announced it has released Enscape 3.3.

The past few years have challenged architects and designers to develop new ways of working and sharing their designs. Many of them have turned to visualization technology. Enscape has seen a 50 percent annual growth despite the pandemic, demonstrating that designers have realized the value and potential of integrating new technology into design workflows.

Enscape's latest release will help architects and designers improve their design workflow even further and create even more impressive real-time visualizations and immersive experiences. New features allow users to import building surroundings into renderings, improve visualizations of glass and water surfaces, add new educational assets and materials into scenes, and more. Full language support is also now available in Japanese.

"We're always looking for new ways to support our customers' design workflows," said Petr Mitev, VP Visualization Product Group at Enscape. "With today's release, we've automated some processes so designers can spend more time making the right decisions and less time gathering the data needed to do it. We will also continue to improve our core visualization and sharing platforms based on community feedback."

Enscape 3.3 new features include:

Site Context  Users can now import a project's surroundings into renderings by utilizing OpenStreetMap data. Simply open Site Context to enter an address or coordinates and then choose to import all surroundings, or select to import building and landmarks, streets and sidewalks, or topography.

 Users can now import a project's surroundings into renderings by utilizing OpenStreetMap data. Simply open Site Context to enter an address or coordinates and then choose to import all surroundings, or select to import building and landmarks, streets and sidewalks, or topography. Transparent Materials in Reflections  Transparent materials will appear in reflections, improving visualization of rendered glass and water surfaces. The use of a graphics card that supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing, such as NVIDIA RTX series and AMD RX6xxx series, is required.

 Transparent materials will appear in reflections, improving visualization of rendered glass and water surfaces. The use of a graphics card that supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing, such as NVIDIA RTX series and AMD RX6xxx series, is required. Education Assets and Materials  New high-quality education-themed assets and materials are now available and include classroom furniture, toys, musical instruments, playground equipment, acoustic panels, and more to use in education scenes. The asset package also includes a large collection of new 3D people.

 New high-quality education-themed assets and materials are now available and include classroom furniture, toys, musical instruments, playground equipment, acoustic panels, and more to use in education scenes. The asset package also includes a large collection of new 3D people. Alpha Channel Export  The new export feature allows users to easily add transparent backgrounds to rendered images.

 The new export feature allows users to easily add transparent backgrounds to rendered images. Pin Enscape on Top  Users can pin the Enscape rendering window, together with the menus that open with the renderer, to the top of their modeling window. This allows users who may not use two screens or more to work in the modeling software and immediately see changes in the overlayed Enscape window, which is always on top when this function is activated.

 Users can pin the Enscape rendering window, together with the menus that open with the renderer, to the top of their modeling window. This allows users who may not use two screens or more to work in the modeling software and immediately see changes in the overlayed Enscape window, which is always on top when this function is activated. Material Overwrite  Exchanging Enscape materials from within the Material Editor has become much easier with Material Overwrite. You can now replace Enscape material files without the need to manually import and export them.

 Exchanging Enscape materials from within the Material Editor has become much easier with Material Overwrite. You can now replace Enscape material files without the need to manually import and export them. Camera Sync Optimization  Revit users can now enjoy camera synchronization for the perspective and orthographic view, including Field of View sync for the perspective view. There is also a camera roll around the line of vision. For Archicad users, camera synchronization is now enabled for the orthographic view.

 Revit users can now enjoy camera synchronization for the perspective and orthographic view, including Field of View sync for the perspective view. There is also a camera roll around the line of vision. For Archicad users, camera synchronization is now enabled for the orthographic view. Upload Migration  An Enscape Account allows users to manage uploads and licenses online and provides additional functionality such as creating Panorama Galleries and the sharing and un-sharing of links. Users who are not yet using an Enscape Account can easily migrate previous uploads.

 An Enscape Account allows users to manage uploads and licenses online and provides additional functionality such as creating Panorama Galleries and the sharing and un-sharing of links. Users who are not yet using an Enscape Account can easily migrate previous uploads. Enscape Support for SketchUp 2022  Enscape is now compatible with the latest version of SketchUp.

 Enscape is now compatible with the latest version of SketchUp. Japanese Language Support  Full language support is now available in Japanese in addition to new Japanese-themed assets.

"Enscape is simple and approachable while at the same time offers deeper levels of creativity, furthering design expression and overall visual communications," states Joe Tubb, Senior 3D Visualization Specialist at ASD|SKY. "Enscape is remarkably fast and enables designers to be more confident in their design choices while allowing them to explore and experiment multiple solutions."

Watch the new features in this video.

Read more in this blog post.

Get a 14-day free trial of Enscape 3.3 to experience real-time visualization first-hand.

About Enscape

Enscape develops high-quality real-time rendering, visualization, and virtual reality software for the global AEC industry that integrates design and visualization workflows into one. Enscape gives designers the power to create realistic renderings based on their existing planning data and easily produce videos, panoramic images, and VR simulations. Enscape software is compatible with Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, Archicad, and Vectorworks and is used by renowned architecture firms in over 150 countries.

In 2022, Enscape merged with Chaos, a developer of visualization technologies that empower artists and designers to create photorealistic imagery and animation across all creative industries. Together, the newly-combined company is creating an end-to-end ecosystem of 3D visualization tools accessible to everyone.

For more information, visit enscape3d.com and chaos.com .

SOURCE Enscape
BOSTON, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- ENSEM Therapeutics Inc. (ENSEM), a Boston-based biotechnology company focusing on high value and difficult-to-drug oncology targets, announced today the closing of a series A2 financing. Incubated by CBC group since 2021, the financing is led by GGV Capital, with participation from Pavilion Capital, Cenova Capital, Mitsui & Co. Global Investment, Inc., and CBC Group, bringing the series A total to $67 million.

"The pharma/biotech industry has been facing a severe bottleneck imposed by a limited number of druggable targets and the slow pace at which new discoveries can be advanced to clinical trials." said Sean Cao, CEO of ENSEM and Managing Director of CBC Group. "The ENSEM team is made up of veteran drug hunters with extensive experience in advancing novel medicines into clinical trials and regulatory approvals. We will combine new tools coupled with AI and machine learning to break these barriers."

"Biomolecules such as proteins and RNAs are in constant motion, with an ensemble of conformations that govern their functions. Traditional approaches have been ineffective in productively capturing these dynamic states due to experimental and computational limitations," said Shengfang Jin, Ph.D., President and Chief Scientific Officer of ENSEM. "Our team has developed Kinetic EnsembleTM, a novel multi-tiered platform integrating molecular simulation, AI deep learning, and advanced experimental validation by state-of-the-art macromolecular dynamic techniques. We expect many of these programs will reveal non-obvious binding sites as drug targets and create novel classes of small molecule therapeutics."

"ENSEM has made remarkable progress in a short time," said Joshua Wu, Partner of GGV Capital. "The rich industry and technical expertise of this founding team and its unique platform are the core assets of an exciting AI drug discovery company. We believe ENSEM's differentiated technologies will enable a new generation of drug targets. We are excited to co-lead the series A2 financing and partner with the ENSEM team to accelerate its growth."

Proceeds will be used to further advance the company's Kinetic EnsembleTM platform and accelerate R&D pipeline.

About ENSEM Therapeutics

ENSEM is a pioneering drug discovery and development company that leverages its unique Kinetic EnsembleTM platform to develop innovative small molecule precision medicines for oncology, with potential expansion into genetic disorders and other disease areas. ENSEM integrates computational and AI deep learning methodologies with advanced experimental techniques to identify non-obvious binding pockets and accelerate structure-based drug design, with a focus on high-value and difficult-to-drug targets.

For more information, please visit www.ensemtx.com.

About CBC Group

CBC Group, Asia's largest healthcare-dedicated investment firm, is committed to creating value and integrating global resources. Partnering with the world's top entrepreneurs and scientists, its unique investor-operator approach has empowered global leading healthcare companies to widen access to affordable medical care, catalyze innovations, and improve efficiency in fulfilling unmet medical needs worldwide. Founded in 2014, CBC has a leading team of investment, industry and portfolio management professionals headquartered in Singapore with offices in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong and New York, and presences in Boston, San Diego, San Francisco, and Tokyo. CBC focuses on platform-building, buyout, credit and growth-focused opportunities across multiple core areas within the healthcare sector, including pharmaceutical and biotech, medical technology and healthcare services.

For more information, please visit www.cbridgecap.com.

About GGV

GGV Capital is a global venture firm that invests in local founders. With $9.2 billion under our management, we have investments in the United States, Canada, China, Southeast Asia, India, Latin America, and Israel. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV Capital invests in seed-to-growth stage companies across three sectors: Social/Internet, Enterprise Tech, and Smart Tech. Over the past two decades, we have backed more than 400 companies around the world, including Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Big Commerce, Boss Zhipin, Grab, HashiCorp, Hello, JD MRO, Keep, Kujiale, Manbang, NIU, Opendoor Technologies, Peloton, Poshmark, Qunar/Ctrip, Slack, Square, StockX, Udaan, Wish, Xpeng, Zendesk, and more.

About Pavcap

Pavilion Capital International Pte. Ltd. (Pavilion) is an investment company established in Singapore in 2012. Pavilion focuses on private equity/venture capital funds and direct investments in companies that leverage on the economic growth and transformation of North Asia and Southeast Asia. Pavilion seeks investment opportunities across different sectors, particularly in technology and healthcare.

Pavilion is an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Temasek Holdings.

About Cenova

Cenova Capital is one of the earliest healthcare funds dedicated to early and growth-stage investments in the life sciences and healthcare sectors. Since inception in 2010, Cenova Capital now has six funds under management with investments in over 80 companies in pharmaceuticals, medical devices, healthcare services and digital health. Cenova Capital's investors are mainly large international institutional investors including Asian sovereign wealth investors, insurance companies, financial institutions and multinational companies.

About Mitsui & Co. Global Investment, Inc.

Mitsui & Co. Global Investment, Inc. (MGI), a 100% subsidiary of Mitsui & Co. Ltd., was established in 1996, with its headquarters in Silicon Valley and branches in Tokyo and Beijing. MGI has been engaging in investments in startups and focus areas covering IT and communication, healthcare and biotech and industrial opportunities. Since its establishment, MGI has invested in and managed over 100 portfolio companies. Our vision is to leverage Mitsui's global network and provide portfolio companies support to build their business and guide them onto the global stage.

Contacts

EMAIL

[email protected]

PHONE

781-874-2500

SOURCE CBC Group
By implementing new technology and amplified training, APS is setting the precedent.

SEAL BEACH, Calif., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- All Protection Solutions Corp. (APS), a security services company serving Riverside, Orange Counties and surrounding areas in Southern California, expands with an intensified rebranding launch. From implementing new security technology, APS-Trax, real-time reporting for clients, establishing the highest standards in security guard training, and providing new, on-site security vehicles, APS is setting new security standards in their Southern California market.

With over 23 years of industry experience, Ernesto Arellano, Founder & CEO of APS, is determined to lead his company with great advancements. Arellano says, "We used the Covid Pandemic as a time to assess the industry and evaluate the security needs of Southern California." He continues, "After time of great due diligence, we created a maximum approach to security."

APS-Trax - A top-rated security guard management solution, APS-Trax allows clients to have personal security processes, all trackable in real-time. From Checkpoint Scanning, GPS & Geofencing, Incident Reporting, Daily Activities Reports, Parking Management, Task Management and 2-way Communication, APS-Trax is sure to impress.

APS Training - APS prides themselves in maintaining a highly trained and experienced team. With rigorous and ongoing premier education, the APS Training includes:

Code of conduct and code of ethics

Assessment of access control and threat potential

Fire safety and other dangerous conditions

Report writing

Legal powers/limitations of a security guard

The use of portable radios and other principles of patrol

Safe handling of hazardous biological and chemical materials

Public relation and communication skills

More about All Protection Solution Corp

All Protection Solution Corp (APS) is a security services company serving Riverside and Orange Counties and other areas in Southern California. APS is licensed, bonded, and insured to provide a wide variety of services to both residential and commercial clients. APS prioritizes employing highly trained and effective officers. APS offers Armed and Unarmed Security Mobile Patrol, Special Events, Fire Watch, Executive Protection & Loss Prevention. For more information, visit https://www.aps-protection.net/.

Media Contact:

Anthony Rumore

(623) 282-1778

Photos:

https://www.prlog.org/12911350

Press release distributed by PRLog

SOURCE All Protection Solutions Corp
Vijoice is first approved treatment to specifically address the root cause of PROS conditions in select patients 2 years of age and older1

PROS is a spectrum of rare conditions and is characterized by atypical overgrowths and anomalies in blood vessels, the lymphatic system and other tissues2,3

Approval based on real-world data from EPIK-P1 study, which showed patients treated with Vijoice experienced reduction in the size of PROS lesions and improvement of PROS-related signs and symptoms

Novartis to offer robust patient support program that includes assistance to access medication, financial resources for eligible patients and continued education

EAST HANOVER, N.J., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Novartis today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated approval to Vijoice (alpelisib) for the treatment of adult and pediatric patients 2 years of age and older with severe manifestations of PIK3CA-Related Overgrowth Spectrum (PROS) who require systemic therapy.1 Vijoice is the first FDA-approved treatment for PROS, a spectrum of rare conditions characterized by overgrowths and blood vessel anomalies impacting an estimated 14 people per million.2,3 In accordance with the Accelerated Approval Program, continued approval may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit from confirmatory evidence.

Experience the interactive Multichannel News Release here: https://www.multivu.com/players/English/9015251-fda-approves-novartis-vijoice-as-treatment-for-pros

"Today's approval of the first treatment for PROS offers hope for a better quality of life to patients and families affected by these rare conditions," said Kristen Davis, Executive Director of CLOVES Syndrome Community. "PROS conditions can be debilitating and disabling and can result in disruptions to everyday activities. Until today, often the only treatment options for patients were surgical or interventional radiology procedures."

PROS conditions can affect quality of life and pose a range of physical, emotional and social challenges for patients and their families, ranging from functional impacts and developmental delays to chronic pain, mobility issues, and feelings of isolation.3-6 PROS management can be challenging, requiring collaboration from a multidisciplinary team, and patients and physicians have only had access to interventions focused on symptom management.6,7

"I am proud of this outstanding achievement for the PROS community. The EPIK-P1 study results build on our earlier pre-clinical findings and demonstrate the efficacy of Vijoice for select PROS conditions, effectively reducing PROS growths," said Guillaume Canaud, MD, PhD, Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital  AP-HP, the Paris Descartes University, Inserm (INEM Institute Necker Enfants Malades  Centre for Molecular Medicine). "This is a significant advancement in therapy for PROS with the potential to positively change the treatment trajectory and outcomes for patients."

FDA approval was based on real-world evidence from EPIK-P1, a retrospective chart review study that showed patients treated with Vijoice experienced reduced target lesion volume and improvement in PROS-related symptoms and manifestations. The primary endpoint analysis conducted at week 24 showed 27% of patients (10/37) achieved a confirmed response to treatment, defined as 20% or greater reduction in the sum of PROS target lesion volume. Nearly three in four patients with imaging at baseline and week 24 (74%, 23/31) showed some reduction in target lesion volume, with a mean reduction of 13.7%, and no patients experienced disease progression at time of primary analysis. Additionally, at week 24, investigators observed patient improvements in pain (90%, 20/22), fatigue (76%, 32/42), vascular malformation (79%, 30/38), limb asymmetry (69%, 20/29), and disseminated intravascular coagulation (55%, 16/29). These improvements were observed in subsets of patients across the study population (n=57) who reported symptoms at baseline and at week 24.1,2

"The approval of Vijoice marks a turning point for patients who, until now, have not had an approved therapy to specifically address their disease," said Victor Bulto, President, Novartis Innovative Medicines US. "We are grateful to the physicians, patients and families who participated in the EPIK-P1 trial. We are continuing to invest in studies to advance the scientific understanding of PROS conditions and to understand the full potential of Vijoice."

In EPIK-P1, the most common adverse events (AEs) of any grade were diarrhea (16%), stomatitis (16%), and hyperglycemia (12%). The most common grade 3/4 AE was cellulitis (4%); one adult case was considered treatment-related.1

Novartis is committed to providing patients with access to medicines, as well as resources and support to address a range of needs. The Novartis Oncology Patient Support Program is available to help guide eligible patients through the various aspects of getting started on treatment, from providing educational information to helping them understand their insurance coverage and identify potential financial assistance options. Patients or providers can call 800-282-7630 or visit Patient.NovartisOncology.com or HCP.Novartis.com/Access to learn more about eligibility and to enroll.

About PIK3CA-Related Overgrowth Spectrum (PROS)

The PROS classification was proposed by researchers and parent representatives of patient-family support and advocacy organizations at a National Institutes of Health workshop in 2013 to unite a group of rare overgrowth conditions caused by PIK3CA mutations.4,6 Specific conditions associated with PROS include KTS, CLOVES syndrome, ILM, MCAP/MCM, HME, HHML, FIL, FAVA, macrodactyly, muscular HH, FAO, CLAPO syndrome and epidermal nevus, benign lichenoid keratosis, or seborrheic keratosis.4,6 The estimated prevalence of PROS conditions is approximately 14 people per million.3

About Vijoice

Vijoice (alpelisib) is a kinase inhibitor that treats rare overgrowth conditions caused by the effects of PIK3CA mutations in adults and children with PIK3CA-Related Overgrowth Spectrum (PROS). Vijoice works by inhibiting the PI3K pathway, predominantly the PI3K-alpha isoform.1 Vijoice is the first FDA-approved treatment for PROS conditions. Vijoice is not approved for use outside the United States.

FDA approval of Vijoice is based primarily on real-world evidence from the EPIK-P1 study. To further understand the long-term efficacy and safety of alpelisib in PROS, Novartis is conducting additional clinical trials. EPIK-P2 is a prospective Phase II multi-center study with a randomized, double-blind, upfront 16-week placebo-controlled period, and extension period to evaluate the safety, the efficacy and pharmacokinetics of alpelisib to treat pediatrics and adults with PROS. EPIK-P3 is a Phase II study to assess long-term safety and efficacy of alpelisib in people with PROS who participated in EPIK-P1.

Important Safety Information

Indication

VIJOICE (alpelisib) tablets is a prescription medicine used to treat adult and pediatric patients 2 years of age and older with severe manifestations of PIK3CA-Related Overgrowth Spectrum (PROS) who require systemic therapy.

This indication is approved under accelerated approval based on response rate and duration of response. Continued approval for this indication may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit in confirmatory trials.

Important Safety Information

Patients should not take VIJOICE if they have had a severe allergic reaction to alpelisib or are allergic to any of the ingredients in VIJOICE.

VIJOICE may cause serious side effects. VIJOICE can cause severe allergic reactions. Patients should tell their health care provider or get medical help right away if they have trouble breathing, flushing, rash, fever, or fast heart rate during treatment with VIJOICE. VIJOICE can cause severe skin reactions. Patients should tell their health care provider or get medical help right away if they get a severe rash or a rash that keeps getting worse; reddened skin; flu-like symptoms; blistering of the lips, eyes, or mouth; blisters on the skin or peeling skin, with or without a fever. VIJOICE can cause high blood sugar levels (hyperglycemia). Hyperglycemia is common with VIJOICE and can be severe. Health care providers will monitor blood sugar levels before patients start, and during treatment with, VIJOICE. Health care providers may monitor blood sugar levels more often if patients have a history of type 2 diabetes. Patients should tell their health care provider right away if they develop symptoms of hyperglycemia or its complications, including excessive thirst, dry mouth, urinating more often than usual or having a higher amount of urine than normal, increased appetite with weight loss, confusion, nausea, vomiting, fruity odor on breath, difficulty breathing, or dry or flushed skin. VIJOICE can cause lung problems (pneumonitis). Patients should tell their health care provider right away if they develop new or worsening symptoms of lung problems, including shortness of breath or trouble breathing, cough, or chest pain. Diarrhea is common with VIJOICE and can be severe. Severe diarrhea can lead to the loss of too much body water (dehydration) and kidney injury. Patients who develop diarrhea during treatment with VIJOICE should tell their health care provider right away.

Before taking VIJOICE, patients should tell their health care provider if they have a history of diabetes; skin rash; redness of skin; blistering of the lips, eyes, or mouth; peeling skin; are pregnant, or plan to become pregnant, because VIJOICE can harm their unborn baby. Females who can become pregnant should use effective birth control during treatment with VIJOICE and for 1 week after the last dose. Do not breastfeed during treatment with VIJOICE and for 1 week after the last dose. Males with female partners who can become pregnant should use condoms and effective birth control during treatment with VIJOICE and for 1 week after the last dose.

Patients should tell their health care provider about all the medicines they take, including prescription and over-the-counter medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements. VIJOICE and other medicines may affect each other and cause side effects. Know the medicines you take. Keep a list of them to show your health care provider or pharmacist when you get a new medicine.

The most common side effects of VIJOICE are diarrhea, mouth sores (stomatitis), and hyperglycemia.

Please see full Prescribing Information for VIJOICE, available at VIJOICE.com.

Disclaimer

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements can generally be identified by words such as "potential," "can," "will," "plan," "may," "could," "would," "expect," "anticipate," "look forward," "believe," "committed," "investigational," "pipeline," "launch," or similar terms, or by express or implied discussions regarding potential marketing approvals, new indications or labeling for the investigational or approved products described in this press release, or regarding potential future revenues from such products. You should not place undue reliance on these statements. Such forward-looking statements are based on our current beliefs and expectations regarding future events, and are subject to significant known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. There can be no guarantee that the investigational or approved products described in this press release will be submitted or approved for sale or for any additional indications or labeling in any market, or at any particular time. Nor can there be any guarantee that such products will be commercially successful in the future. In particular, our expectations regarding such products could be affected by, among other things, the uncertainties inherent in research and development, including clinical trial results and additional analysis of existing clinical data; regulatory actions or delays or government regulation generally; global trends toward health care cost containment, including government, payor and general public pricing and reimbursement pressures and requirements for increased pricing transparency; our ability to obtain or maintain proprietary intellectual property protection; the particular prescribing preferences of physicians and patients; general political, economic and business conditions, including the effects of and efforts to mitigate pandemic diseases such as COVID-19; safety, quality, data integrity or manufacturing issues; potential or actual data security and data privacy breaches, or disruptions of our information technology systems, and other risks and factors referred to in Novartis AG's current Form 20-F on file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Novartis is providing the information in this press release as of this date and does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this press release as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

About Novartis

Located in East Hanover, NJ Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation  an affiliate of Novartis  is reimagining medicine to improve and extend people's lives. As a leading global medicines company, we use innovative science and digital technologies to create transformative treatments in areas of great medical need. In our quest to find new medicines, we consistently rank among the world's top companies investing in research and development. Novartis employs nearly 15,000 people in the United States. For more information, please visit https://www.novartis.us.

Novartis and Novartis US is on Twitter. Sign up to follow @Novartis at https://twitter.com/novartisnews and @NovartisUS at https://twitter.com/NovartisUS.

For Novartis multimedia content, please visit https://www.novartis.com/news/media-library.

For questions about the site or required registration, please contact [email protected].

References

Vijoice: Prescribing Information. East Hanover, New Jersey , USA: Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation; April 2022 . Canaud G, et al. EPIK-P1: Retrospective Chart Review Study of Patients With PIK3CA-Related Overgrowth Spectrum Who Have Received Alpelisib as Part of a Compassionate Use Programme. Presented at the 2021 ESMO Congress; September 17-21, 2021 . Data on file. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp; 2020. Keppler-Noreuil KM, Sapp JC, Lindhurst MJ, et al. Clinical delineation and natural history of the PIK3CA-related overgrowth spectrum. Am J Med Genet A. 2014;164A(7):1713-1733. Parker VER, Keppler-Noreuil KM, Faivre L, et al. Genet Med. 2019;21(5):1189-1198. Mirzaa G, Conway R, Graham JM Jr, Dobyns WB. PIK3CA-related segmental overgrowth. In: Adam MP, Ardinger HH, Pagon RA, et al., eds. GeneReviews [Internet]. Seattle, WA : University of Washington, Seattle ; 1993-2019. Hughes M, Hao M and Luu M. PIK3CA vascular overgrowth syndromes: an update. Current Opinion in Pediatrics. 2020;32(4):539-546.

Novartis Media Relations

E-mail: [email protected]

Julie Masow Head, US External Engagement +1 862 579 8456 [email protected] Dan Connelly Novartis Oncology Communications +1 862 210 0217 [email protected]

Novartis Investor Relations

E-mail: [email protected]

North America Sloan Simpson +1 862 345 4440







SOURCE Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation
CORNELIUS, N.C., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Financial Independence Group, LLC (FIG), a leading financial services conglomerate and a staple of the Cornelius, North Carolina community since 1998, will build a modern and elegant building and corporate campus that will be an exciting new community landmark on Westmoreland Road in Cornelius. The company will be moving from its current Cornelius headquarters near the corner of West Catawba Avenue and Jetton Road to a 5 acre site located at 8715 Westmoreland Rd. The new campus will be home to Financial Independence Group and three of its affiliate companies; Alphastar Capital Management, Barnabas Capital, and Independent Property and Casualty Group.

Community development has always held an important place in the hearts of FIG's co-founders Bill and Ericka Cain and Co-CEOs Brian Williams, Jim Cooper and Mike Mullan. This core belief of FIG has only strengthened over time as the company and its affiliates experiences sustained and remarkable growth. Because of this, it made sense to chart a new path forward that promotes an exciting workplace environment for the future of the company and its team members.

FIG is grateful to the Town of Cornelius and Mecklenburg County for their support in keeping the company in the community. Mecklenburg County and the Town of Cornelius are supporting the company's $22.3M investment through a Business Investment Program grant. The project will result in the creation of 20 additional jobs in Cornelius over the next 5 years.

As FIG along with three other of its affiliate companies write the next chapter in the company's history, they look forward to the new campus and continuing their community outreach efforts in the Cornelius area. Construction on the facility is expected to break ground in late 2022 or early 2023 and is scheduled to be completed by November 2023.

For media inquiries, please contact FIG Co-CEO Brian Williams at (800) 527-1155 or [email protected].

About Financial Independence Group, LLC

FIG is a financial services conglomerate and national leader in the independent marketing organization (IMO) and field marketing organization (FMO) industry. Privately held and independently owned, FIG's fixed insurance solutions help the independent, licensed financial professional guide their retail investment clients to an optimal retirement plan. FIG has provided solutions for over 45 years, specializing in guaranteed income, asset protection, and multi-generational planning. Over 3,000 professionals across the US access more than 70 top-rated carriers to design fixed index annuity, fixed annuity, life insurance, care planning, and disability income solutions to best fit the interests of their clients. For more information, please visit www.FIGMarketing.com.

CONTACT

Brian Williams

(800) 527-1155

[email protected]

SOURCE Financial Independence Group
With January 2022, FAIR Health's Monthly Telehealth Regional Tracker enters its third year of reporting on the evolution of telehealth from month to month. As before, a free, interactive map of the four US census regions allows the user to view an infographic on telehealth in a specific month in the nation as a whole or in individual regions.

This third year brings notable changes to the Tracker. In the first year, to study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on telehealth, each month in 2020 was compared to the corresponding month in 2019. In the second year, the focus turned to monthly rather than year-over-year changes. The third year adds new features: the top five telehealth specialties and the Telehealth Cost Corner, which presents a specific telehealth procedure code with its median charge amount and median allowed amount.2 Continuing from previous years are the percent change in telehealth's percentage of medical claim lines, the top five telehealth procedure codes and the top five telehealth diagnoses.

Leading Telehealth Specialties

In January 2022, social worker was the leading telehealth specialty nationally and in every region but the West, where primary care physician was the leading telehealth specialty, 0.1 percent ahead of social worker. In every other region and nationally, primary care physician was in second place behind social worker. Nationally, psychiatrist, psychologist and primary care nonphysician were in third, fourth and fifth place, respectively.

Telehealth Cost Corner

For January 2022, the Telehealth Cost Corner spotlighted the cost of CPT3 92507, treatment of speech, language, voice, communication and/or hearing processing disorder. Nationally, the median charge amount for this service when rendered via telehealth was $129.92, and the median allowed amount was $77.64. The costs varied by region. For example, the highest median allowed amount was $88.47 in the Midwest, and the lowest $69.50 in the South.

Top Telehealth Diagnoses

In January 2022, COVID-19 continued to rank at number two or three among the top five telehealth diagnoses nationally and in all regions. Its share of telehealth claim lines, however, fell in all locations but the West, where the share remained the same. Mental health conditions remained in first place nationally and in all regions, but certain other diagnoses changed. Developmental disorders, for example, rejoined the top five diagnoses in the Northeast after a month off the list, and encounter for examination rejoined the top five in the South after a month off that list.

Top Procedure Codes

In January 2022, CPT 90837, one hour of psychotherapy, was in first place among telehealth procedure codes nationally and in every region. CPT 90833, psychotherapy with evaluation and management visit, 30 minutes, rejoined the top five procedure codes nationally and in the Midwest after a month off those lists. It remained in the top five in the Northeast and West but was not on the list in the South in either December or January.

FAIR Health President Robin Gelburd stated: "As the COVID-19 pandemic enters its third year, FAIR Health begins our third year of tracking the evolution of telehealth. Once again, we have modified our Monthly Telehealth Regional Tracker to keep pace with the changing needs of stakeholders for current information about this venue of care."

For the Monthly Telehealth Regional Tracker, click here.

Follow us on Twitter @FAIRHealth

About FAIR Health

FAIR Health is a national, independent nonprofit organization that qualifies as a public charity under section 501(c)(3) of the federal tax code. It is dedicated to bringing transparency to healthcare costs and health insurance information through data products, consumer resources and health systems research support. FAIR Health possesses the nation's largest collection of private healthcare claims data, which includes over 36 billion claim records and is growing at a rate of over 2 billion claim records a year. FAIR Health licenses its privately billed data and data productsincluding benchmark modules, data visualizations, custom analytics and market indicesto commercial insurers and self-insurers, employers, providers, hospitals and healthcare systems, government agencies, researchers and others. Certified by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) as a national Qualified Entity, FAIR Health also receives data representing the experience of all individuals enrolled in traditional Medicare Parts A, B and D; FAIR Health includes among the private claims data in its database, data on Medicare Advantage enrollees. FAIR Health can produce insightful analytic reports and data products based on combined Medicare and commercial claims data for government, providers, payors and other authorized users. FAIR Health's systems for processing and storing protected health information have earned HITRUST CSF certification and achieved AICPA SOC 2 compliance by meeting the rigorous data security requirements of these standards. As a testament to the reliability and objectivity of FAIR Health data, the data have been incorporated in statutes and regulations around the country and designated as the official, neutral data source for a variety of state health programs, including workers' compensation and personal injury protection (PIP) programs. FAIR Health data serve as an official reference point in support of certain state balance billing laws that protect consumers against bills for surprise out-of-network and emergency services. FAIR Health also uses its database to power a free consumer website available in English and Spanish, which enables consumers to estimate and plan for their healthcare expenditures and offers a rich educational platform on health insurance. An English/Spanish mobile app offers the same educational platform in a concise format and links to the cost estimation tools. The website has been honored by the White House Summit on Smart Disclosure, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), URAC, the eHealthcare Leadership Awards, appPicker, Employee Benefit News and Kiplinger's Personal Finance. FAIR Health also is named a top resource for patients in Dr. Marty Makary's book The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Careand How to Fix It and Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal's book An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back. For more information on FAIR Health, visit fairhealth.org.

1 A claim line is an individual service or procedure listed on an insurance claim.

2 A charge amount is the provider's undiscounted fee, which a patient may have to pay when the patient is uninsured, or when the patient chooses to go to a provider who does not belong to the patient's plan's network. An allowed amount is the total fee paid to the provider under an insurance plan. It includes the amount that the health plan pays and the part the patient pays under the plan's in-network cost-sharing provisions (e.g., copay or coinsurance if the patient has met the deductible).

3 CPT  2021 American Medical Association (AMA). All rights reserved.

Contact:

Rachel Kent

Senior Director of Marketing

FAIR Health

646-396-0795

[email protected]

SOURCE FAIR Health
Which of these will be triggered into action if Roe is overturned?

WASHINGTON, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Family Research Council today released an updated map and research showing the status of abortion laws in the states across the nation. The Mississippi abortion case before the Supreme Court could lead to an overturning of Roe v. Wade which would once again allow state legislatures the ability to enact and enforce their own state laws protecting unborn life.

Recent images of five viable babies killed in a late-term abortion facility in D.C. reveal the true horrors of abortion forced upon our nation by Roe. Even if Roe is overturned, abortion at this same late gestational age will still be legal in 20 states. Earlier this week, Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D) signed into law a bill guaranteeing a statutory right to abortion through the entirety of pregnancy and denying that unborn children have independent rights.

However, pro-life laws are gaining momentum across the country. Thirty states have a law protecting unborn life by the point of viability, though many states have enacted even stronger protections. With the recent passage of a strong pro-life law in Wyoming, 18 states have laws that protect unborn life from conception, and another four states have laws that protect unborn children when a fetal heartbeat can be detected. If Roe is overturned it is likely these states will be able to enforce these laws for the first time since 1973.

Mary Szoch, Director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, commented:

"The recent news of the remains of unborn children found in D.C. has driven home the urgent need to pass legislation protecting life in the womb. Right now, twenty states and the District of Columbia do not protect unborn children in the womb at any point up until birth. This is tragic and must change. Every child should be fully protected from the moment of conception. We must work for a country where this is true."

Connor Semelsberger, Director of Federal Affairs for Life and Human Dignity at Family Research Council, added:

"America was and always has been a pro-life nation. Because abortion advocates could not convince the American public to legalize this barbaric practice through laws, they used a single court decision to enshrine legal abortion through all nine months of pregnancy across our nation. The nearly fifty years since Roe are an anomaly, not the norm. This new map reveals America's pro-life story before and after this dreadful decision. It also sketches a clear path forward for what laws protecting unborn life can look like in a world after Roe. We hope that this map will be used by lawmakers to recognize the importance of using the force of law to protect the most innocent among us!"

To see whether your state will protect unborn life if Roe is overturned, check out our interactive map.

To learn more about a Post-Roe America, read our publication.

SOURCE Family Research Council Action
SAN ANTONIO, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- GemCap provided a $4.0 million facility consisting of a working capital revolver, an equipment term loan, and a mortgage for a munitions manufacturer which wholesales and retails its inventory. "This is a high-growth, high-demand industry and we're happy to assist our client's growth," says Richard Ellis, Co-President. "GemCap continues to focus on assisting small and mid-sized businesses across a diverse range of industries"

GemCap, an innovative lending firm, provides senior-secured, commercial asset-based loans and accounts receivable factoring facilities to low and middle market businesses within the United States & Canada, as well as in-transit inventories en route to the United States. Loans range from $1 million to $10 million, and factoring facilities can be as little as $100,000. Collateral groups include: inventories (consumer & industrial), receivables, equipment, real estate and intellectual property.

For inquiries to GemCap, please reach either David Ellis or Richard Ellis at [email protected].

www.gemcapsolutions.com



9901 I.H. 10 West, Suite 800, San Antonio, TX 78230

SOURCE GemCap
The Warsaw Stock Exchange opts for Infor Dynamic Enterprise Performance Management system for the GPW Group. Cogit will be responsible for implementation.

WARSAW, Poland, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Infor, the industry cloud company, announced today that GPW Group, which operates the Warsaw Stock Exchange, has selected Infor Dynamic Enterprise Performance Management (d/EPM) cloud-based software to support its planning and budgeting process. Cogit, one of Infor's leading European partners, is responsible for implementing the software within a year.

"Infor Dynamic Enterprise Performance Management is designed to manage complex business processes. It offers real-time full visibility into a business, allows for reliable planning, reporting, measuring past and current performance, predicting future activities, and much more," explains Barbara Najgebaur, Infor's channel account manager for Poland.

Learn more about Infor Dynamic Enterprise Performance Management (d/EPM): https://www.infor.com/solutions/financials-3/enterprise-performance-management

The GPW has decided to use a multitenant cloud system that integrates closely with the Infor OS (Operating Services) platform. This allows the implementation of new functionalities or innovations without disrupting daily operations. It also offers full reliability and ensures world-class levels of security, which factors are particularly important for financial institutions. The purpose of the new system at the GPW Group is to enable better efficiency and risk management, and to improve the decision-making process across the organization. Key areas supported by Infor's cloud solution include planning, monitoring and reporting, as well as management consolidation and procurement support in an integrated and scalable model.

"Our tasks include comprehensive design, parameterization and configuration of the system, along with its maintenance and development in all companies of the GPW Group. The project anticipates all the crucial processes to be launched this year, so they can be used in preparing GPW Group budget for 2023," explains Radosaw Kozieja, CEO at Cogit.

About GK GPW

The Warsaw Stock Exchange (Gieda Papierow Wartosciowych w Warszawie  GPW) is a leader among stock exchanges in Central and Eastern European by the number of listed companies and the total capitalization of domestic companies. The GPW's share in trading on stock exchanges in the region is 81%. The WSE is the leader of the Three Seas Exchanges initiative and aspires to the role of a regional hub for young, high-potential technology companies, the so-called unicorns. GPW is the most important source of capital for companies and local governments in the region, which contributes to the dynamic development of the Polish economy, new jobs, competitiveness of Polish companies in the international arena and, as a result, an increase in the wealth of the Polish society. The GPW Group operates platforms for trading shares, treasury and corporate bonds, derivatives, electricity and natural gas, and provides indices and benchmarks, including WIBID and WIBOR. In 2018, the FTSE Russell index agency qualified the Polish capital market to the group of developed markets. The markets operated by the GPW Group are the largest in Central and Eastern Europe. Visit https://www.gpw.pl/

About Cogit

Cogit (former Codec Polska) is one of the oldest consulting and implementation companies on the Polish market. It specializes in IT systems that support the use of data in management. Cogit helps teams, boards, managers and controllers to make better decisions and plan for the future based on data. Cogit focuses on effective support of management processes, including planning, budgeting, predicting, reporting, analysis and financial consolidation. Implemented solutions support all departments in an organization, from controlling and finance to sales, logistics and operations. In its work, it combines the knowledge and experience of business and IT experts. Visit https://cogit.global/company/

About Infor

Infor is a global leader in business cloud software specialized by industry. We develop complete solutions for our focus industries, including industrial manufacturing, distribution, healthcare, food & beverage, automotive, aerospace & defense, and high tech. Infor's mission-critical enterprise applications and services are designed to deliver sustainable operational advantages with security and faster time-to-value. We are obsessed with delivering successful business outcomes for customers, and we are continually innovating to quickly solve emerging business and industry challenges. Over 65,000 organizations in more than 175 countries rely on Infor's 17,000 employees and their deep industry expertise to help overcome market disruptions and achieve their business goals. As a Koch company, our financial strength, ownership structure, and long-term view empower us to foster enduring, mutually beneficial relationships with our customers, employees and partners. Visit www.infor.com.

Media contact

Micha Borkowski

Omega Communication

[email protected]

+48 668 298 375

Copyright 2022 Infor. All rights reserved. The word and design marks set forth herein are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Infor and/or related affiliates and subsidiaries. All other trademarks listed herein are the property of their respective owners. www.infor.com

SOURCE Infor
DUBLIN, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Global Aerostructures Market by Material(Composites, Alloys & Superalloys and Metals), Component, End User (OEM, Aftermarket), Platform (Fixed Wing, Rotary Wing, UAVs, Advanced Air Mobility) & Region (North America, Europe, APAC, RoW) - Forecast to 2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The market for Aerostructures is estimated to be USD 49.0 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach USD 75.0 billion by 2026, at a CAGR of 9.0% during the forecast period.



Increasing need new aircraft, new designs and adoption of composites are fueling the fuselage market which is projected to be the highest in the Aerostructures market during the forecast period



Based on component, the fuselage segment is estimated to lead the market during the forecast period, with a share of 39% in 2021. Fuselage controls the position and stabilize the surface with regards to lifting surfaces and ensures maneuverability and stability of the aircraft. Fuselage is an aircraft's main body section. It holds crew, passengers, or cargo. In single-engine aircraft, it will usually contain an engine is mounted on a pylon attached to the fuselage, which in turn is used as a floating hull.



The composites segment is projected to witness the highest CAGR during the forecast period



Based on material, the composites segment is projected to be the highest CAGR rate for the Aerostructures market during the forecast period. Composite materials have played a major role in weight reduction, and hence they are used for both structural applications and components for all spacecraft and aircraft such as fighter planes, space shuttle and passenger airliners. The development of next-generation composite materials with lightweight and high-temperature resistance will help in designing high-performance, economical aircrafts.



The OEM segment is projected to witness the highest CAGR during the forecast period



Based on the end user, the OEM segment is projected to grow at the highest CAGR rate for the Aerostructures market during the forecast period. Technological advancements and the need for better connectivity and communication in the aviation industry are additional factors influencing the growth of the Aerostructures market.



The UAV segment is projected to witness the highest CAGR during the forecast period



Based on aircraft type, the UAV segment is projected to grow at the highest CAGR rate for the Aerostructures market during the forecast period. The increasing applicability of UAVs in the defense sector has boosted the Aerostructures market. UAVs have less demanding flight profiles and environmental standard requirements than manned aircraft, and hence, the antennas used in UAVs are smaller and have lower mass as compared to those used in manned aircraft.



The North American market is projected to contribute the largest share from 2021 to 2025



The key factor responsible for North America leading the Aerostructures market is the high demand for new aircraft in the region. The growing demand for aircraft for commercial applications and their increasing utility in the defense sector to carry out transport and surveillance activities are additional factors influencing the growth of the North American Aerostructures market.



Key Topics Covered:



1 Introduction



2 Research Methodology



3 Executive Summary



4 Premium Insights

4.1 Attractive Growth Opportunities in Aerostructures Market

4.2 Aerostructures Market, by Component

4.3 Aerostructures Market, by Material

4.4 Aerostructures Market, by Country

5 Market Overview

5.1 Introduction

5.2 Market Dynamics

5.3 Drivers

5.3.1 Growing Demand for Air Travel Around the World

5.3.2 Increasing Demand for Outsourced Aerostructure Manufacturing

5.3.3 Rise in Adoption of Composite Aerostructures

5.4 Restraints

5.4.1 Recyclability Issues of Composite Materials

5.5 Opportunities

5.5.1 Adoption of 3D Printing for Aerostructure Manufacturing

5.5.2 Use of Morphing Technologies for Wings

5.5.3 Increasing Adoption of Hybrid-Electric and Evtol Aircraft

5.5.4 Decline in Cost of Composite Materials

5.6 Challenges

5.6.1 High Cost of Transportation and Hurdles in Supply Chain

5.6.2 Uncertainties in Failure Prediction of Composites

5.7 Operational Data

5.8 Range and Scenarios

5.9 Aerostructures Market Ecosystem

5.9.1 Prominent Companies

5.9.2 Private and Small Enterprises

5.9.3 End-users

5.10 Disruption Impacting Customer's Business

5.11 Value Chain Analysis

5.12 Case Study Analysis

5.13 Trade Data Analysis

5.14 Porter's Five Forces Analysis

5.15 Key Stakeholders & Buying Criteria

5.16 Average Selling Price

5.17 Volume Data

5.18 Key Conferences & Events in 2022-2023

5.19 Tariff and Regulatory Landscape

6 Industry Trends

6.1 Introduction

6.2 Emerging Trends

6.2.1 Internet of Things (Iot)

6.2.2 Artificial Intelligence (Ai)

6.2.3 4D Printing

6.2.4 Industry 4.0

6.2.5 Advanced Materials and Manufacturing

6.2.6 Morphing Technology for Wings

6.3 Technology Analysis

6.3.1 Robotics

6.3.2 Additive Manufacturing (Am)

6.4 Innovation & Patent Analysis

6.5 Impact of Megatrend

7 Aerostructures Market, by Component

7.1 Introduction

7.2 Fuselage

7.2.1 Need for New Modern Aircraft Increases Need for Different Fuselage Designs

7.3 Empennage

7.3.1 Increase in R&D of Aircraft Will Lead to New Varieties of Empennages

7.4 Flight Control Surfaces

7.4.1 Increase in New Technologies Drives Flight Control Surfaces Segment

7.5 Wings

7.5.1 Need for Reduced Fuel Consumption Drives Wings Segment

7.6 Nose

7.6.1 Development of Complex Machining Techniques Drives Nose Segment

7.7 Nacelle & Pylon

7.7.1 Demand for New Technologies in Engines Increases Development of Nacelles

7.8 Doors & Skids

7.8.1 Increase in Number of Helicopters Drives Skids Segment

8 Aerostructures Market, by Material

8.1 Introduction

8.2 Composites

8.2.1 Reduction in Weight and Improved Efficiency Drive Use of Composites

8.3 Alloys & Super Alloys

8.3.1 Need for Lightweight and Corrosion-Resistant Material Boost Segment Growth

8.4 Metals

8.4.1 High Strength and High Corrosion Resistance Make Metals Suitable for Aerostructure Manufacturing

9 Aerostructures Market, by End-user

9.1 Introduction

9.2 Original Equipment Manufacturers (Oem)

9.2.1 Increasing Need for New Aircraft Drives Growth

9.3 Aftermarket

9.3.1 Need for Reduced Repair Time and Improved Readiness Increases Need for Aftermarket Refurbishment

10 Aerostructures Market, by Platform

10.1 Fixed-Wing Aircraft

10.1.1 Commercial Aviation

10.1.1.1 Increased Aircraft Orders Drive Segment Growth

10.1.2 Narrow-Body Aircraft

10.1.2.1 Increasing Domestic Air Travel Drives Market for Aerostructures in Narrow-Body Aircraft

10.1.3 Wide-Body Aircraft

10.1.3.1 Wide-Body Aircraft to Lead Market in Terms of Growth Rate

10.1.4 Regional Transport Aircraft

10.1.4.1 Increasing Demand for Short-Distance Transport Fuels Demand for Aerostructures in Regional Jets

10.2 Business & General Aviation

10.2.1 Business Jets

10.2.1.1 Increasing Customization in Jets Increases Need for Aerostructures

10.2.2 Light Aircraft

10.2.2.1 Increasing Use of Light Aircraft for Business Travel Fuels Market

10.2.3 Ultralight Aircraft

10.2.3.1 Increasing Use of Ultralight Aircraft for Training Fuels Aerostructure Demand

10.3 Military Aviation

10.3.1 Fighter Aircraft

10.3.1.1 Increasing Modernization Programs by Militaries Drive Market for Fighter Aircraft

10.3.2 Special-Mission Aircraft

10.3.2.1 Demand for Special-Mission Aircraft Increases Demand for Aerostructures

10.3.3 Transport Aircraft

10.3.3.1 Increasing Need for Transport Aircraft for Military Supplies Fuels Demand for Aerostructures

10.4 Rotary-Wing Aircraft

10.4.1 Commercial Helicopters

10.4.1.1 Demand for Civil Helicopters for Domestic Use Expected to Drive Market

10.4.2 Military Helicopters

10.4.2.1 Increasing Procurement of Military Helicopters by Emerging Economies Boosts Market for Aerostructures

10.5 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (Uav)

10.5.1 Fixed-Wing Uavs

10.5.1.1 Use of Uavs Presents New Market Opportunity for Aerostructure Manufacturers

10.5.2 Fixed-Wing Hybrid Vtol Uavs

10.5.2.1 Long Flight and Large Payload Capacity Drive Segment

10.5.3 Rotary-Wing Uavs

10.5.3.1 Demand for Rotary-Wing Uavs Increases Opportunities for Aerostructure Manufacturers

10.6 Advanced Air Mobility

10.6.1 Air Taxis

10.6.1.1 Countries Eager to Adopt Air Taxis to Cope with Rapidly Expanding Megacities

10.6.2 Air Shuttles & Air Metro

10.6.2.1 Need for Rapid Transportation Vehicles Increases Demand for Aerostructure

10.6.3 Personal Aerial Vehicles

10.6.3.1 Private Air Transport Vehicles Offer Convenience, Speed, and Routing Efficiency

10.6.4 Cargo Air Vehicles (Cav)

10.6.4.1 Development of Cargo Air Vehicles by Key Evtol Aircraft Manufacturers to Boost Aerostructures Market

10.6.5 Air Ambulances & Medical Emergency Vehicles

10.6.5.1 Increasing Developments in Evtol Aircraft Enabling Organ Transport to Drive Segment

10.6.6 Last-Mile Delivery Vehicles

10.6.6.1 Rising Adoption of Autonomous Vehicles Fuels Aerostructures Market

11 Aerostructures Market, by Region

12 Competitive Landscape

12.1 Introduction

12.2 Market Share Analysis, 2020

12.3 Revenue Analysis of Top 5 Market Players, 2020

12.4 Company Evaluation Quadrant

12.4.1 Star

12.4.2 Emerging Leaders

12.4.3 Pervasive

12.4.4 Participants

12.5 Start-Up Evaluation Quadrant

12.5.1 Progressive Companies

12.5.2 Responsive Companies

12.5.3 Starting Blocks

12.5.4 Dynamic Companies

12.6 Competitive Scenario

12.6.1 Deals

12.6.2 Product Launches

12.6.3 Others

13 Company Profiles

13.1 Introduction

13.2 Key Players

13.2.1 Spirit Aerosystems, Inc.

13.2.2 Airbus Se

13.2.3 Saab Ab

13.2.4 Triumph Group

13.2.5 Leonardo S.P.A

13.2.6 Gkn Aerospace

13.2.7 Safran Sa

13.2.8 Arconic

13.2.9 Elbit Systems Ltd.

13.2.10 Facc Ag

13.2.11 Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd.

13.2.12 Products Offered

13.2.13 Collins Aerospace

13.2.14 The Boeing Company

13.2.15 Sonaca Group

13.2.16 St Engineering

13.2.17 Ruag Group

13.2.18 Latecoere

13.3 Other Players

13.3.1 Iai (Israel Aerospace Industries)

13.3.2 The Nordam Group LLC

13.3.3 Aernnova Aerospace S.A

13.3.4 Magellan Aerospace Corporation

13.3.5 Cyient

13.3.6 Aerospace Industrial Development Corporation (Aidc)

13.3.7 Korea Aerospace Industries

13.3.8 Turkish Aerospace Industries, Inc.

13.3.9 Sabca Nv

13.3.10 Mhi Canada Aerospace, Inc.

13.3.11 Daher

14 Appendix

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/ke0e60

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

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For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



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SOURCE Research and Markets
DUBLIN, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Automotive Software Market: Global Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast 2022-2027" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global automotive software market reached a value of US$ 14.27 Billion in 2021. Looking forward, the publisher expects the market to reach a value of US$ 41.76 Billion by 2027 exhibiting a CAGR of 18.50% during 2022-2027. Keeping in mind the uncertainties of COVID-19, we are continuously tracking and evaluating the direct as well as the indirect influence of the pandemic on different end use industries. These insights are included in the report as a major market contributor.

Automotive software is a set of programmable data instructions embedded in the vehicle for upgrading and operating the dashboard to eliminate the risk of accidents and ensure passenger safety. It utilizes its advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) for facilitating telematics, body control, convenience, and communication. Automotive software is further used to schedule appointments, accept bookings, and digitally inspect vehicles. At present, the software is commercially available in varying product types, such as application software, operating system, and middleware.



The rapid expansion in the automotive sector, along with the continual launch of semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles, are some of the key factors primarily driving the market growth. Additionally, the widespread adoption of ADAS as the main component of self-driving technology and the rising demand for various advanced safety features, such as adaptive cruise control and autonomous emergency braking systems, is acting as another major growth-inducing factor.

Moreover, the numerous initiatives undertaken by the regulatory bodies of several countries for reducing road accidents and ensuring road safety are providing an impetus to market growth. Other factors, such as the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud-based solutions for controlling devices and ensuring security, are contributing to the market growth. The market is also driven by the development of smart capabilities in various infotainment systems in automobiles, which is facilitating the utilization of automotive software significantly. Extensive research and development (R&D) activities, rising focus on connected vehicles, increasing demand for passenger vehicles, especially in the developing regions, and significant investments for engineering upgraded solutions represent some of the other factors driving the automotive software market toward growth further across the globe.

Competitive Landscape:

The competitive landscape of the industry has also been examined along with the profiles of the key players being Airbiquity Inc., Autonet Mobile Inc., BlackBerry Limited, Google LLC, Green Hills Software, KPIT Technologies Limited, Microsoft Corporation, MontaVista Software LLC, NVIDIA Corporation, NXP Semiconductors N.V., Robert Bosch GmbH and Wind River Systems Inc. (Intel Corporation).



Key Questions Answered in This Report:

How has the global automotive software market performed so far and how will it perform in the coming years?

What has been the impact of COVID-19 on the global automotive software market?

What are the key regional markets?

What is the breakup of the market based on the product?

What is the breakup of the market based on the vehicle type?

What is the breakup of the market based on the application?

What are the various stages in the value chain of the industry?

What are the key driving factors and challenges in the industry?

What is the structure of the global automotive software market and who are the key players?

What is the degree of competition in the industry?

Key Topics Covered:



1 Preface



2 Scope and Methodology



3 Executive Summary



4 Introduction

4.1 Overview

4.2 Key Industry Trends



5 Global Automotive Software Market

5.1 Market Overview

5.2 Market Performance

5.3 Impact of COVID-19

5.4 Market Forecast



6 Market Breakup by Product

6.1 Application Software

6.1.1 Market Trends

6.1.2 Market Forecast

6.2 Middleware

6.2.1 Market Trends

6.2.2 Market Forecast

6.3 Operating System

6.3.1 Market Trends

6.3.2 Market Forecast



7 Market Breakup by Vehicle Type

7.1 ICE Passenger Vehicle

7.1.1 Market Trends

7.1.2 Market Forecast

7.2 ICE Light Commercial Vehicle

7.2.1 Market Trends

7.2.2 Market Forecast

7.3 ICE Heavy Commercial Vehicle

7.3.1 Market Trends

7.3.2 Market Forecast

7.4 Battery Electric Vehicle

7.4.1 Market Trends

7.4.2 Market Forecast

7.5 Hybrid Electric Vehicle

7.5.1 Market Trends

7.5.2 Market Forecast

7.6 Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle

7.6.1 Market Trends

7.6.2 Market Forecast

7.7 Autonomous Vehicles

7.7.1 Market Trends

7.7.2 Market Forecast



8 Market Breakup by Application

8.1 Safety and Security

8.1.1 Market Trends

8.1.2 Market Forecast

8.2 Infotainment and Instrument Cluster

8.2.1 Market Trends

8.2.2 Market Forecast

8.3 Vehicle Connectivity

8.3.1 Market Trends

8.3.2 Market Forecast

8.4 Others

8.4.1 Market Trends

8.4.2 Market Forecast



9 Market Breakup by Region



10 SWOT Analysis



11 Value Chain Analysis



12 Porters Five Forces Analysis



13 Price Analysis



14 Competitive Landscape

14.1 Market Structure

14.2 Key Players

14.3 Profiles of Key Players

14.3.1 Airbiquity Inc.

14.3.1.1 Company Overview

14.3.1.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.2 Autonet Mobile Inc.

14.3.2.1 Company Overview

14.3.2.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.3 BlackBerry Limited

14.3.3.1 Company Overview

14.3.3.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.3.3 Financials

14.3.3.4 SWOT Analysis

14.3.4 Google LLC

14.3.4.1 Company Overview

14.3.4.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.4.3 SWOT Analysis

14.3.5 Green Hills Software

14.3.5.1 Company Overview

14.3.5.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.6 KPIT Technologies Limited

14.3.6.1 Company Overview

14.3.6.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.6.3 Financials

14.3.7 Microsoft Corporation

14.3.7.1 Company Overview

14.3.7.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.7.3 Financials

14.3.7.4 SWOT Analysis

14.3.8 MontaVista Software LLC

14.3.8.1 Company Overview

14.3.8.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.9 NVIDIA Corporation

14.3.9.1 Company Overview

14.3.9.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.9.3 Financials

14.3.9.4 SWOT Analysis

14.3.10 NXP Semiconductors N.V.

14.3.10.1 Company Overview

14.3.10.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.10.3 Financials

14.3.10.4 SWOT Analysis

14.3.11 Robert Bosch GmbH

14.3.11.1 Company Overview

14.3.11.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.11.3 SWOT Analysis

14.3.12 Wind River Systems Inc. (Intel Corporation)

14.3.12.1 Company Overview

14.3.12.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.12.3 SWOT Analysis

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/ql05sc

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]

For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900

U.S. Fax: 646-607-1904

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

SOURCE Research and Markets
DUBLIN, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Rehabilitation Robots - Global Market Trajectory & Analytics" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Global Rehabilitation Robots Market to Reach $1.8 Billion by 2026

The global market for Rehabilitation Robots estimated at US$566.5 Million in the year 2020, is projected to reach a revised size of US$1.8 Billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 21.7% over the analysis period.

Ever-increasing demand from vulnerable population (disabled, elderly, infirm, paralyzed) as well as acute shortage of healthcare workers is driving growth in the market.

Constantly upping demand for active lifestyle and mobility in aging people, stroke survivors and people with disabilities is rendering rehabilitative assistance critical to the path of recovery. Rapid surge in physiotherapy volumes, coupled with advancement in robotic and prosthetic technologies have paved ways for deployment of robots to handhold patients for novel pain management therapy, gait training and physical rehabilitation assistance.

Major technological companies and universities are tapping into this ever-increasing demand and developing newer and advanced assistive robots, exoskeletons, robotic prosthetics as well as orthotics.



Upper Extremity, one of the segments analyzed in the report, is projected to grow at a 19.4% CAGR to reach US$754.2 Million by the end of the analysis period. After a thorough analysis of the business implications of the pandemic and its induced economic crisis, growth in the Lower Extremity segment is readjusted to a revised 21.9% CAGR for the next 7-year period.

This segment currently accounts for a 24.7% share of the global Rehabilitation Robots market. Upper extremity rehabilitation robots are broadly of two types, namely portable assistive devices or orthoses for the hand or arm, and in-clinic devices used in occupational or physical therapy. Rehabilitation robotic devices for lower extremity include exoskeleton devices, foot orthoses, in-clinic body weight support systems (treadmill gait trainers, stationary gait trainers, foot plate gait trainers, and overground gait trainers).



The U.S. Market is Estimated at $253.1 Million in 2021, While China is Forecast to Reach $268.7 Million by 2026

The Rehabilitation Robots market in the U.S. is estimated at US$253.1 Million in the year 2021. The country currently accounts for a 38.78% share in the global market.

China, the world`s second largest economy, is forecast to reach an estimated market size of US$268.7 Million in the year 2026 trailing a CAGR of 23.2% through the analysis period. Among the other noteworthy geographic markets are Japan and Canada, each forecast to grow at 17.5% and 19.2% respectively over the analysis period.

Within Europe, Germany is forecast to grow at approximately 19.7% CAGR while Rest of European market (as defined in the study) will reach US$331.1 Million by the end of the analysis period. Growth in developed regions is being spurred by prevalence of chronic and infectious diseases, growing number of patients visiting hospitals, and increased need to scale up healthcare operations.

Other major factors favoring the market prospects include higher awareness about various disease conditions among population, consumer affluence supporting the compulsion for care services, and encouraging reimbursement schemes. Among the developed nations, Japan is showing the way in overcoming healthcare workers shortfall with federal government spending nearly one-third of the national budget on developing robots which can take care of elderly.

A host of factors are contributing to rapid uptake of medical robots in developing regions, including an aging population in Asian countries and rising instances of disabilities among adults. Along with the elderly population, rising incidences of physical debilitation induced by traumatic spinal, nerve and orthopedic injuries, arthritis and brain trauma hold key to the growth of assistive robotics in this region.



Full-Body Exoskeletons Segment to Reach $448.2 Million by 2026

In the global Full-Body Exoskeletons segment, USA, Canada, Japan, China and Europe will drive the 25.2% CAGR estimated for this segment. These regional markets accounted for a combined market size of US$94.7 Million in the year 2020.

China will remain among the fastest growing in this cluster of regional markets. Led by countries such as Australia, India, and South Korea, the market in Asia-Pacific is forecast to reach US$45.9 Million by the year 2026.



Key Topics Covered:



I. METHODOLOGY

II. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. MARKET OVERVIEW

Global Key Competitors Percentage Market Share in 2022 (E)

Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic and a Looming Global Recession

Weak Global Economic Environment & Negative Tide in GDP Forecasts Discourage the Market

Robotics Play an Increasingly Important Role in Medical Sector

An Introduction to Rehabilitation Robots

Functional Roles of Rehabilitation Robots

Rehabilitation Robotics: Historical Background

Global Market Prospects & Outlook

Robotics Stride Ahead to Restore Mobility and Supplement Physiotherapist Efforts in Stroke Patients

Developed Regions Lead Market, Developing Economies to Spearhead Future Growth

Competition

World Brands

Recent Market Activity

2. FOCUS ON SELECT PLAYERS (Total 100 Featured)

Bionik Laboratories Corp.

BioXtreme

Corindus, Inc.

CYBERDYNE Inc.

Ekso Bionics Holdings Inc.

Hocoma AG

Parker Hannifin Corp.

Rehab-Robotics Company Limited

ReWalk Robotics Ltd.

Rex Bionics Ltd.

Siemens AG

Tyromotion GmbH

3. MARKET TRENDS & DRIVERS

Rising Prominence of Robotics Technology in Patient Rehabilitation and Therapy

Aging Population with Age-related Conditions Drive Demand for Rehabilitation Robots

Increasing Incidence of Neurological & Musculoskeletal Disorders and Other Chronic Medical Conditions to Propel Market Growth

Rising Significance of Rehabilitation Robots for Physical Therapy of Stroke Survivors

A Glance at Select Population Stroke Rehabilitation Robots

Osteoarthritis & Osteoporosis: Major Health Conditions Affecting Mobility in the Elderly to Drive Market Growth

Rising Incidence of Physical Disabilities: A Grim Reality Driving Significance of Rehabilitation Robots

Percentage of Population with Disabilities by Age Group

Smarter Rehabilitation through Machine Learning and Robotics

Eldercare-Assistive Robots: Enabling Elderly and Disabled to Live Independently

Therapeutic Rehabilitation Robots Market: Providing Assistance to Patients with Motor Disorders

Exoskeleton Robots: Enabling Medical Rehabilitation

Shortage of Home Care Workers and Rising Care Costs for Disabled and Elderly Turn Focus onto Rehabilitation Robots

Shift towards Home Healthcare Augurs Well for the Market

Rehabilitation Robots for Treatment of Post-CNS Sensorimotor Deficits: A Neurophysiological Perspective

Technology Advancements in Rehabilitation Robots to Boost Market Prospects

Handicap Assistance Robots: A Key Opportunity

Rehabilitation Robots and Virtual Reality to Enhance Physical Therapy

Select Innovative Technologies and Devices in Robotic Rehabilitation

Current Areas of Research and Devices

Consistent Rise in Healthcare Spending Worldwide to Support Market Growth

Challenges Confronting Rehabilitation Robots Market

4. GLOBAL MARKET PERSPECTIVE

III. REGIONAL MARKET ANALYSIS



IV. COMPETITION

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/gjyb3x

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

SOURCE Research and Markets
Groups360 provides real-time availability and instant booking capabilities for both hotel room blocks and meeting space, streamlining group travel for organizers, attendees, and hotels alike. The GroupSync platform, which is the Company's proprietary bookings marketplace, delivers greater efficiency for travel organizers and hoteliers. Through the platform, travel organizers have access to enhanced global search capabilities, hotel group inventory and rates, and choice of purchasing method via instant booking or simplified proposal process. Groups360 also provides these capabilities to leading hotels via private label group booking engines.

Over the last 12 months, Groups360 has launched instant booking for group stays at over 7,000 leading hotel properties and booking capabilities at 200,000 hotel properties worldwide via GroupSync. Groups360 recently announced commercial partnerships with Omni Hotels & Resorts, TFE Hotels, and Premier Inn  joining the ranks of Accor, Hilton, IHG Hotels & Resorts, and Marriott International. Groups360 will leverage the financing round to continue to grow its operations and expand further in EMEA and APAC.

"Groups360 is reshaping the hospitality industry in a manner that makes booking groups simple, transparent, and efficient for both hotels and event organizers," said Kemp Gallineau, CEO, Groups360. "Now, with support from our new partners, Groups360 is positioned to more quickly seize the opportunities which lie ahead for improving group travel."

"Event organizers increasingly expect their entire hotel purchase experience to be seamless, instantaneous, and online. Groups360 has built an integrated, intuitive platform that benefits hoteliers and event organizers anywhere in the world", said Dave Eisenberg, Founding Partner at Zigg Capital.

"Groups360 offers a solution that is truly differentiated in the marketplace", said John Stecher, Chief Technology Officer at Blackstone. "The Blackstone Innovations Investments team is focused on identifying, investing in, and partnering with pioneering companies like Groups360 to help take their businesses to the next stage of growth. We believe that Groups360's inventory distribution model and instant booking capability will help drive industry-wide transformation and can create value for Blackstone's real estate portfolio."

Fir Tree Partners Chief Investment Officer and Managing Partner David Sultan said, "With Groups360's innovative platform and unique relationships with some of the largest hotel brands in the world, the company is well-positioned to simplify group bookings for both suppliers and travelers. We see a tremendous opportunity for Groups360 to drive online penetration in a global meetings market that has remained largely offline."

About Groups360:

Groups360 was created with a singular goal  to empower event organizers by bringing innovation, transparency, and simplicity to the decades-old problem of booking groups. The company's integrated technology solution, GroupSync, enables suppliers to distribute inventory, engage with planners, and optimize group revenue. GroupSync also equips planners to search and shop hotels worldwide and to book rooms and space directly, online or through a simplified RFP process. GroupSync is the first distribution channel to offer online booking for both group hotel rooms and meeting space at scale. Groups360 has offices in Nashville, London, and Singapore. Learn more at groups360.com.

About Zigg Capital:

Zigg Capital is a venture capital firm based in New York City that invests globally in technology companies touching the real estate, construction, and retail industries. Over the past decade, Zigg's partners have made early-stage investments in leading companies such as Procore, Matterport, OpenSpace, VTS, Kasa, and Tend. For more information, please visit www.ziggcap.com.

About Blackstone:

Blackstone is the world's largest alternative asset manager. We seek to create positive economic impact and long-term value for our investors, the companies we invest in, and the communities in which we work. We do this by using extraordinary people and flexible capital to help companies solve problems. Our $881 billion in assets under management include investment vehicles focused on private equity, real estate, public debt and equity, infrastructure, life sciences, growth equity, opportunistic, non-investment grade credit, real assets and secondary funds, all on a global basis. Further information is available at www.blackstone.com. Follow @blackstone on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

About Fir Tree Partners:

Based in New York with additional offices in South Miami, Florida, Fir Tree Partners is a privately owned hedge fund sponsor which was founded in 1994. The firm primarily provides its services to pooled investment vehicles and has a broader investment mandate that permits buying in virtually all sectors, including public and private equity, sovereign debt, capital structure arbitrage, special situations, and real estate investments in commercial and residential real estate. Fir Tree manages assets on behalf of leading endowments, foundations, pension funds, and sovereign wealth funds.

SOURCE Groups360
HARRISBURG, Pa., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- To meet the continuing growth of the cannabis industry, HACC, Central Pennsylvania's Community College , has added three new certificate programs that will provide job skills training for those interested in a cannabis career.

HACC is partnering with Green Flower , an on-demand training platform built for cannabis professionals, to provide the programs. The eight-week, fully online programs include Advanced Dispensary Associate Skills Training, Cannabis Manufacturing Agent and Cultivation Technician. Graduates will receive certificates of completion from HACC and Green Flower. In addition, graduates will have access to Green Flower's employer network.

According to the 2022 jobs report by Leafly , a cannabis information firm, cannabis is a $25 billion industry in the United States, creating an average of 280 new jobs per day.

"As demand continues to grow for an educated workforce in the cannabis industry in Pennsylvania and across the country, HACC is responding to the need by contracting with Green Flower to give our students opportunities to qualify for entry-level jobs," said Vic Rodgers, MBA, HACC's vice president of workforce development and continuing education.

"Green Flower is honored to be partnering with HACC to offer our three cannabis industry training courses. As Pennsylvania's first community college and one of its largest, their history and commitment to help working adults find and build new careers is second to none," said Daniel Kalef, Green Flower vice president of higher education.

"As the medical cannabis industry continues to grow significantly, leaders from the College looked to find ways for people in the area and beyond to become highly qualified to work in cannabis retail, manufacturing and agriculture environments and help ensure not only the continued growth of the industry in Pennsylvania, but growth in great part due to a well-trained workforce. Like other highly regulated industries, the need to have expertise in material handling, quality control, patient care, security, transportation, horticulture and more is vital to the success of all aspects of the industry and all things people will learn in these courses. We can think of no better college or group of people in the Commonwealth with whom to partner to offer these courses and are excited to begin offering them to the public," Kalef added.

Students can register for each self-directed cannabis program to fit their schedules. For more information about the programs, please visit cannabiseducation.hacc.edu . For questions, please email [email protected] .

About HACC

HACC, Central Pennsylvania's Community College, is the first and largest of Pennsylvania's 15 community colleges. HACC offers approximately 100 career and transfer associate degree, certificate and diploma programs to approximately 14,211 students. Also, the College serves students at its Gettysburg, Harrisburg, Lancaster, Lebanon and York campuses; through virtual learning; and via workforce development and continuing education training. For more information on how HACC is uniquely YOURS, visit hacc.edu . Also, follow us on Twitter (@HACC_info), follow us on Instagram (@HACC_edu), like us on Facebook (Facebook.com/HACC64) and use #HACCNews.

About Green Flower

Founded in 2014, Green Flower is the industry leader in cannabis education, empowering thousands of consumers, regulators, and professionals with the knowledge they need to succeed in the emerging cannabis industry today. Green Flower's content and technology platform powers the cannabis programs of top universities and colleges across the country, provides customized learning and compliance solutions for cannabis businesses of all sizes, and equips individuals with the skills and credentials necessary to make an impact in the modern cannabis industry.

Contact:

HACC Newsroom

[email protected] or 717-780-2558

SOURCE Green Flower
Celebrate National Tartan Day with Some Scottish Fun Facts

NEW YORK, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- In Scotland, visitors can expect the unexpected. With a fascinating history, legendary tales, and endless quirky experiences, those who venture to Scotland can prepare to be surprised. So, in celebration of National Tartan Day, let's look at some fun facts which will inspire an adventurous traveller's next vacation across the pond...

Year of Stories

1. Scotland's national animal is a unicorn.

Scotland is well known for its love for and long history of myths and legends, therefore, it may be no surprise that this mythical creature is Scotland's beloved national animal. The unicorn representing Scotland is often shown with chains around its body. The unicorn was believed to be the strongest of all animals and the chains are believed to symbolise the power of Scottish Kings, strong enough to tame even a unicorn! Find out more about Scotland's myths and legends here.

2. Robert Burns' most famous poem is about haggis.

One of the most famous poems by Scotland's most famous poet is called "Address to a Haggis", which was written by Burns to celebrate his appreciation for the hearty Scottish dish. This poem is traditionally recited on Burns Night as a toast before the theatrical cutting of the haggis and the celebrating can begin!

3. Scotland boasts more than 60 book and literary festivals throughout the year, from Stornoway to the Borders and from Skye to Aberdeen.

Stories are weaved into the fabric of Scotland's culture, and every community has a different tale to tell. Throughout the year, locations in Scotland celebrate the art of stories and storytelling with events such as the Edinburgh International Book Festival, The Borders Book Festival (known as one of the UK's friendliest book festivals), the Dundee Summer (Bash) Streets Festival, the Wigtown Book Festival, and more! For more information on events taking place across Scotland to celebrate the Year of Stories see here.

Cities

1. Edinburgh is home to two UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Edinburgh is one of the world's most beautiful cities, with an abundance of history, iconic attractions and beautiful green spaces. Its historic heart is one of the most striking and architecturally significant in the world, thanks to the dramatic juxtaposition of its medieval Old Town and the Georgian New Towns, both of which are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. These two UNESCO World Heritage Sites form part of Scotland's UNESCO Trail, a world-first which launched in October 2021.

2. Perth recently became the UK's first UNESCO City of Craft and Folk Art.

Craft is important to the history and heritage of Perth and was known as 'Craftistown' in the 16th century. In modern day, the city hosts some of the most creative talent in Scotland and visitors can immerse themselves in the local art scene. For more information on Perth, see here.

3. Glasgow is one of the UK's most vegan-friendly cities.

In 2020, Glasgow was named as one of the best places in Europe to be vegan and in 2021, Glasgow was ranked the UK's fourth most vegan-friendly city. With such a wide range of restaurants offering vegetarian/vegan options, visitors can limit their meat intake easily without sacrificing choice or quality. A list of vegetarian/vegan restaurants in Glasgow can be found here.

Food & Drink

1. Between 70% and 80% of the UK's gin is produced in Scotland.

Scotland's love affair with gin started in the 1700s when the first bottles were traded in the Port of Leith. Now, the three best-selling gins are made in Scotland: Hendrick's, Gordon's, and Tanqueray. Gin has become so popular, VisitScotland has created a gin map to make finding distilleries and tastings as easy as possible.

2. Scotland is one of the few countries in the world where a locally made soft drink outsells Coca-Cola.

Everyone knows that whisky is Scotland's national drink and biggest export, enjoyed across the globe as well as in Scotland. However, Irn-Bru is considered Scotland's 'other' national drink and is beloved by locals and visitors alike. On a visit to Scotland, expect to see Irn-Bru available in most shops and restaurants outselling Coca-Cola!

3. Haggis is banned in the United States.

Haggis is Scotland's national dish and the crowning glory of a traditional Burns Supper. This popular meal is a type of savoury pudding that combines meat with oatmeal, onions, salt, and spices, often served with a side of bashed neeps and mashed potatoes (or neeps and tatties!). Venture to Scotland and feast upon this famous dish that visitors can't get at home!

Accommodation

1. Scotland is home to more than 1,500 castles.

Scotland is dotted with castles at almost every turn! Many castles lie in ruin, but others are still standing tall, providing unique opportunities for visitors to step back in time and experience Scotland through the ages. In fact, travellers can live the Royal life and spend the night in some of Scotland's most luxurious castles. Find out how to stay in a castle here.

2. Visitors can stay on working farms.

For a taste of authentic farming life in Scotland, a stay on a working farm is the perfect retreat. Farming has deep roots in Scottish culture, from centuries ago until the present day, with generations of farming families basing their lives around their farms and offering accommodation and activities for visitors to enjoy. Find out more about farm accommodation here.

Nature

1. Scotland is home to the highest hedge in the world!

The Meikleour Beech Hedge in Perthshire, which was planted in 1745, stands at a whopping 100 ft high and 530m long. It is thought that the men who planted it were called to fight in the Jacobite Rebellion and none of them returned alive. In tribute, the trees were allowed to grow and the hedge acts as a living landmark to them.

2. Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh and Edinburgh Castle sit on extinct volcanos.

Arthur's Seat is the highest point in Holyrood Park and sits 251m above sea level, giving a breath-taking view of the city. The volcano erupted around 340 million years ago! Edinburgh Castle similarly is built on the plug of a volcano, believed to be around 350 million years old. Now, visitors can safely go to both locations for a unique visit to Scotland's history.

3. Scotland is home to the tallest waterfall in Britain, Eas a' Chual Aluinn.

The waterfall is 658 feet, which is 3 times the height of Niagara Falls. The waterfall can be found in Sutherland and makes for a stunning waterfall walk. At 200m, not only is it possible to see the UK's highest waterfall, but a short detour will take visitors to the hauntingly named Wailing Widow Falls.

Transport

1. Orkney operates the shortest commercial passenger flight in the world.

A visit to Scotland's islands takes forward-planning by ferry or by plane. But did you know Orkney is home to the world's shortest commercial passenger flight? It's possible to catch a flight between Westray and Papa Westray and passengers will be in the air for just two minutes. Only in Scotland can this be experienced!

2. Ever wanted to go husky sledging? You can in Scotland!

Visitors can go on a dog sledge ride when it's cold enough in the stunning region of Perthshire. As adventurous travellers speed along the scenic trails they will experience spectacular views of the Scottish countryside.

Notes to Editors

Scotland is gradually reopening as restrictions ease and new measures are put in place to ensure everyone's safety. However, we continue to live in uncertain times and so, while we are delighted to be providing our media with a regular update once more, we ask that responsible travel is considered paramount for anyone planning a trip to Scotland.

Certain measures and restrictions remain in places across Scotland , for more details visit https://www.gov.scot/coronavirus-covid-19/

, for more details visit https://www.gov.scot/coronavirus-covid-19/ All visitors to Scotland must consult the Scottish Government website at www.gov.scot, VisitScotland's website www.visitscotland.com, the local destination website and contact their accommodation providers, transport providers and any attractions they plan to visit to ensure they are aware of all rules, restrictions and safety procedures relating to Covid-19.

must consult the Scottish Government website at www.gov.scot, VisitScotland's website www.visitscotland.com, the local destination website and contact their accommodation providers, transport providers and any attractions they plan to visit to ensure they are aware of all rules, restrictions and safety procedures relating to Covid-19. International travel restrictions have now ended for travellers arriving from abroad in Scotland . However, visitors are still advised to check travel rules for their departure country and each country they are travelling through https://www.gov.scot/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-international-travel-quarantine/

. However, visitors are still advised to check travel rules for their departure country and each country they are travelling through https://www.gov.scot/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-international-travel-quarantine/ It is advised that those planning on travelling to a Scottish island take a coronavirus test in advance of their trip. Further details can be found here.

When visiting Scotland we urge visitors to enjoy our fabulous country responsibly. VisitScotland encourages visitors to respect local communities and plan ahead with the help of www.visitscotland.com. Helpful guidance can be found in VisitScotland's new Visitor Charter and the Scottish Outdoor Access Code, which offers practical advice for all to #RespectProtectEnjoy Scotland's beautiful countryside.

we urge visitors to enjoy our fabulous country responsibly. VisitScotland encourages visitors to respect local communities and plan ahead with the help of www.visitscotland.com. Helpful guidance can be found in VisitScotland's new Visitor Charter and the Scottish Outdoor Access Code, which offers practical advice for all to beautiful countryside. Find out more about responsible tourism here.

Step forward and tread lightly, find a link to the Scotland is calling 'tread lightly' film: https://www.visitscotland.com/campaign/tread-lightly/

Year of Stories

Scotland's Year of Stories 2022 will spotlight, celebrate and promote the wealth of stories inspired by, written, or created in Scotland .

Year of Stories 2022 will spotlight, celebrate and promote the wealth of stories inspired by, written, or created in . Led by VisitScotland, the Year of Stories 2022 will sustain and build upon the momentum of preceding Themed Years, showcasing a nationwide programme of major events and community celebrations.

From icons of literature to local tales, Scotland's Year of Stories encourages locals and visitors to experience a diversity of voices, take part in events and explore the places, people and cultures connected to all forms of our stories, past and present.

Year of Stories encourages locals and visitors to experience a diversity of voices, take part in events and explore the places, people and cultures connected to all forms of our stories, past and present. Scotland's Year of Stories will encourage responsible engagement and inclusive participation from the people of Scotland and our visitors.

Year of Stories will encourage responsible engagement and inclusive participation from the people of and our visitors. Join the conversation using #YS2022 and #TalesOfScotland.

Following an industry consultation, Themed Years will take place every second year to enable more time for planning and collaboration. The next Themed Year will take place in 2024.

PLEASE NOTE

This copy was correct at the time of going to press. VisitScotland cannot guarantee the accuracy of the information and accepts no responsibility for any error or misrepresentation. All liability for loss, disappointment, negligence or other damage caused by the reliance on the information contained herewith, or in the event of any company, individual or firm ceasing to trade, is hereby excluded.

SOURCE VisitScotland
MIRANDA, New South Wales, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Hudstone Home is an eco-friendly cleaning product company based in Australia. As part of their commitment to protecting the environment, they are today delighted to announce the sponsorship of The Reef Restoration Foundation, a not-for-profit social enterprise committed to regenerating and preserving the Great Barrier Reef.

The sponsorship will see hudstonehome.com dedicate a portion of each eco-friendly cleaning product sale to the foundation; supporting their mission to address the coral bleaching across the Great Barrier Reef, regenerate damaged reefs and educate the public on how they can play their part in saving this globally-significant habitat.

Hudstone Home's cleaning products do not use harmful chemicals or unnecessary plastics that can damage reefs. They believe that through sponsorship, support and advocation of The Reef Restoration Foundation, they can be part of a working solution. This includes encouraging the public to switch to eco-friendly cleaning products and championing the regeneration and preservation of the planet's largest living organism.

Below, we outline the sponsorship from hudstonehome.com and detail the current dangers faced by The Great Barrier Reef:

"The way you do your laundry could help save the Great Barrier Reef"  Steve Davis, co-founder of Hudstone Home

Hudstone Home have already begun their sponsorship of The Reef Regeneration Foundation by dedicating a portion of profits from each eco-friendly cleaning product sale to the social enterprise. To further champion this initiative and the work of the foundation, they have created a new campaign called "Could doing your laundry help save The Great Barrier Reef? This eco-friendly Aussie cleaning brand say yes!"

The campaign will aim to highlight the affect that many supermarket brand cleaning products are having on the Great Barrier Reef, as a result of the harmful chemicals and unnecessary plastics used in the manufacturing process. They believe that everyone has a responsibility to protect the planet and its resources and are actively encouraging fellow Aussies to do their bit in preserving the reefs by switching to eco-friendly cleaning products, such as Hudstone Home's washing powders.

Steve and Liz Davis, co-founders of hudstonehome.com, are excited about the new partnership. "Our lives are health focused, that's why our products are fragrance free, contain no toxic chemicals and are grey-water safe. Customer satisfaction is something we take very seriously. By supporting us, not only are you buying Aussie made and owned, but you're also helping to regenerate our Great Barrier Reef by planting baby corals."

How can the sponsorship help The Reef Regeneration Foundation mitigate and navigate the dangers faced by the Great Barrier Reef?

The Great Barrier Reef has enormous worldwide value, as our planet's largest living organism and a barometer of global environmental well-being. It holds significant cultural significance for Indigenous Australians, who belong to one of the world's oldest extant civilizations. The Great Barrier Reef also contributes significantly to Australia's economy through direct employment of more than 64,000 people.

The reef is in danger due to human activity such as pollution, overfishing and climate change. These activities have caused numerous problems including coral bleaching, which is when the corals lose their colour and eventually die.

Social enterprises, such as The Reef Restoration Foundation Australia, and eco-friendly brands, such as Hudstone Home, are committed to addressing these issues. Through sponsorship programs like this, not only can the cause by supported financially, but more can be done to inform the Australian public on the dangers the Great Barrier Reef is facing and get widespread buy-in to help to preserve and save the reefs.

How to support the regeneration and preservation of The Great Barrier Reef:

Hudstone Home are encouraging Australian's to challenge harmful supermarket brands and make the switch to their safe and environmentally friendly laundry and cleaning products. Although the reefs face many dangers, they believe that a shift to eco-friendly cleaning products could have a dramatic and positive influence on the future of the reefs.

The eco-friendly brand, in partnership with The Reef Regeneration Foundation, are also encouraging Aussies to learn more about the dangers facing the reefs and corals, and to support the fantastic regeneration work already underway.

To learn more about these eco-friendly products, The Reef Regeneration Foundation and how you can play your part, visit: hudstonehome.com or their Instagram @hudstone_home

More Information

Hudstone Home is an eco-friendly, Australian owned and operated cleaning products company. We are passionate about protecting our environment and that's why we only use sustainable, natural ingredients in all of our products that are safe for both your skin and the environment: https://hudstonehome.com/

https://thenewsfront.com/hudstone-home-sponsor-the-reef-restoration-foundation-gifting-a-portion-of-all-eco-friendly-cleaning-product-sales-to-reef-regeneration/

Company: Hudstone Home

Shop 3/176 Parraweena Rd

Miranda NSW 2228

Address: Australia

Email: [email protected]

Website: www.hudstonehome.com

SOURCE Hudstone Home
BOX Pure Air's ( www.boxpureair.com ) commercial-grade products, built in the USA, and its services are listed in the Vendor Selection and Services to address Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) utilizing HEPA filters and Portable Air Purification Systems. The solutions provided by BOX Pure Air are designed, built and certified to US Government standards and enhance existing room ventilation systems, increase the indoor air exchange rate, filter and purify the air to improve Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) for teachers, students and staff. The BOX Pure Air products and services on the Vendor Selection include the following:

Portable Air Purification Unit Apex 2.0

Portable Air Purification Unit Peak

Portable Air Purification Unit Mesa

Replacement HEPA Filter  Peak replace every 4 years, Mesa replace every 2 years.

Replacement Pre-Filter Set - Peak replace every 4 to 6 months, Mesa every 3 months, Apex every 4 to 6 months

Consulting Services (hourly rate) - Training and professional development for staff on sanitation, the use of PPE, and minimizing the spread of infectious diseases

For more information, please visit the California Department of Education website at https://surveys3.cde.ca.gov/s.asp?k=164789404567

American Rescue Plan Act: Emergency Assistance to Non-Public Schools Program Needs Assessment: California Department of Education

A program sponsored under the American Rescue Plan Act to provide funding to Non-Public Private Schools and eligible Non-Public Schools

As part of the ARP 2021, Public Law 117-2, Public Law 117-2, Congress set aside $2.75 billion of the Governor's Emergency Education Relief Fund specifically to provide emergency assistance to students and teachers in non-public schools (NPS), as defined below, through the ARP EANS program. The purpose of the ARP EANS program is to provide services or assistance to NPS that enroll a significant percentage of students from low-income families and are most impacted by the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) emergency.

The Needs Assessment window is from March 25April 8, 2022. All submissions need to be received by 5:00 pm on April 8, 2022.

The survey consists of two parts: Part A: Cover Sheet and Part B: Vendor Selection and Services. A completed spreadsheet will be uploaded as an attachment in Part B as an Excel file

The Vendor Selection and Services Excel file is available from the CDE EANS Program Web page. All questions are required except where it is denoted next to the question in parenthesis.

About BOX Pure Air

BOX Pure Air is a subsidiary of SinglePoint Inc (OTC: SING). The company strives to provide the best products to help clean air through the deployment of high-efficiency air purification technologies. Learn more at www.boxpureair.com

Contact Information

[email protected]

843.936.6649

www.boxpureair.com

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements in this news release may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of Rule 175 under the Securities Act of 1933 and Rule 3b-6 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and are subject to the safe harbor created by those rules. All statements, other than statements of fact, included in this release, including, without limitation, statements regarding potential future plans and objectives of the Company, are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements.

SOURCE BOX Pure Air
Demonstrated significant improvement in six service segments; ranked #2 from overall rank of #7 in 2021

BENGALURU, India , April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Infosys (NSE: INFY) (BSE: INFY) (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting, today announced that it has been ranked #2 in the Everest Group PEAK Matrix IT Service Provider of the Year 2022 Awards. Infosys was distinguished for maintaining excellence and consistency in service delivery while demonstrating significant improvement in digital, data and analytics, cloud and infrastructure, banking and financial services (BFSI), healthcare, life sciences, and enterprise platform segments.

For this sixth edition of the PEAK Matrix Service Providers of the Year Awards, Everest Group recognized the consistency of 141 service providers that were featured across 26 PEAK Matrix IT service evaluations published in 2021. As a consistent top performer across segments, Infosys' tangible jump to #2,from #7 in the 2021 overall ranking, attests to its ability to build a wide array of cloud, data, AI, and modernization capabilities powered by Infosys Cobalt for seamless and time-bound execution of enterprise transformation projects. Infosys has tailored its business strategy to evolve and effectively address the changing IT requirements and market demand. The awards additionally highlighted Infosys' ability to leverage its strong global presence, diverse innovation resources, and extensive global partner ecosystem to deliver segment-specific IT services in an efficient and agile manner.

Infosys was ranked as a Leader in the following PEAK Matrix assessments:

Advanced Analytics and Insights (AA&I) Services

Analytics and AI Services Specialists

Application and Digital Services in Banking: Global and Europe

Application Transformation Services

Cloud Services: Europe and North America

and Data and Analytics (D&A) Services

Enterprise Blockchain Services

Enterprise Quality Assurance Services

Finastra IT Services

Healthcare Analytics Services

Insurance Platform IT Services

Intelligent Automation in Healthcare Solutions

Internet of Things (IoT) Supply Chain Solutions

IT Managed Security Services (MSS)

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Services

Network Transformation and Managed Services

Platform IT services in BFS

SAP S/4HANA Services

Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) services

Temenos IT Services

Veeva Services

Chirajeet Sengupta, Partner at Everest Group, said, "Service Provider of The Year awards bring together service provider performances across our enterprise IT services coverage. Infosys' performance in this year's Service Provider of the Year awards is a function of both a strong performance and impressive year-on-year momentum improvement in the PEAK Matrix evaluations we conducted in 2021."

Ravi Kumar S, President, Infosys, said, "Our ranking, along with the recognition as a star performer by Everest Group strengthens our commitment to transform the IT services landscape by leveraging our unique solutions, global innovation hubs, and a creative pool of talent to address the new cohort of business decision-makers across a wide scale of industry verticals. This recognition is also a testament to our continued investments in the Infosys Cobalt suite of cloud offerings to maximize business value for our clients through extensive IT service capabilities. With the desire to go the extra mile on quality and professionalism, we will continue to provide insights and options for contracting top-notch, future-ready IT services for our clients globally across industry segments at competitive pricing."

A customized version of the Everest Group PEAK Matrix IT Service Provider of the Year, 2022 report can be accessed here: https://www2.everestgrp.com/reportaction/EGR-2022-0-SPR-4989/Toc

About Infosys:

Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. We enable clients in more than 50 countries to navigate their digital transformation. With over four decades of experience in managing the systems and workings of global enterprises, we expertly steer our clients through their digital journey. We do it by enabling the enterprise with an AI-powered core that helps prioritize the execution of change. We also empower the business with agile digital at scale to deliver unprecedented levels of performance and customer delight. Our always-on learning agenda drives their continuous improvement through building and transferring digital skills, expertise, and ideas from our innovation ecosystem.

Visit www.infosys.com to see how Infosys (NSE, BSE,NYSE: INFY) can help your enterprise navigate your next.

Safe Harbor

Certain statements in this release concerning our future growth prospects, financial expectations and plans for navigating the COVID-19 impact on our employees, clients and stakeholders are forward-looking statements intended to qualify for the 'safe harbor' under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding COVID-19 and the effects of government and other measures seeking to contain its spread, risks related to an economic downturn or recession in India, the United States and other countries around the world, changes in political, business, and economic conditions, fluctuations in earnings, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, our ability to manage growth, intense competition in IT services including those factors which may affect our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, industry segment concentration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks or system failures, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which Infosys has made strategic investments, withdrawal or expiration of governmental fiscal incentives, political instability and regional conflicts, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our industry and the outcome of pending litigation and government investigation. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our United States Securities and Exchange Commission filings including our Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2021. These filings are available at www.sec.gov. Infosys may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that may be made from time to time by or on behalf of the Company unless it is required by law.

SOURCE Infosys
DUBLIN, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Copper Foil Market: Global Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast 2022-2027" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global copper foil market reached a value of US$ 5.24 Billion in 2021. Looking forward, the publisher expects the market to reach a value of US$ 8.09 Billion by 2027 exhibiting a CAGR of 7.10% during 2022-2027. Keeping in mind the uncertainties of COVID-19, we are continuously tracking and evaluating the direct as well as the indirect influence of the pandemic on different end use industries. These insights are included in the report as a major market contributor.



Copper foil is a thin sheet of copper with a thickness of a few microns made by electroplating or rolling the copper sheet. It is a versatile material that conducts electricity and heat. As a result, it is widely used in circuit boards, batteries, and solar energy appliances. Besides this, it is utilized in the printed circuit boards (PCBs) that are incorporated into telecommunications equipment, such as personal computers (PCs), mobile phones, current collectors of lithium-ion secondary batteries, and the electromagnetic wave shield material of plasma displays (PDPs).



Copper Foil Market Trends:

The growing sales of electronic devices, such as smartphones, laptops, computers, and tabs across the globe, represent one of the key factors driving the market. Moreover, the improving 5G infrastructure due to the rising need for better connecting solutions is stimulating the growth of the market. In addition, there is a rise in the demand for electric vehicles (EVs) on account of the increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles and the growing environmental awareness among individuals.

This, along with the increasing applications of copper foils in decorative materials, such as monasteries, gold signs, tile mosaic, and handicrafts, is offering lucrative growth opportunities to the end-users and investors. Besides this, the rising application of copper foils in transformers and grid-level energy storage around the world is positively influencing the market. Furthermore, key market players are increasing product differentiation by improving the surface properties of the copper foil, developing new surface treatment coatings, and achieving smaller thickness and weight for numerous applications. These players are also adopting strategies, such as mergers and acquisitions (M&A), to increase their overall sales and profitability.

Competitive Landscape:

The competitive landscape of the industry has also been examined along with the profiles of the key players being Carl Schlenk AG, Chang Chun Group, Furukawa Electric Co. Ltd., ILJIN Materials Co. Ltd., JX Nippon Mining & Metals Corporation (ENEOS Holdings Inc.), LS Mtron Co. Ltd., Mitsui Mining & Smelting Co. Ltd., Nippon Denkai Ltd., Rogers Corporation, SKC Co. Ltd., Sumitomo Metal Mining Co. Ltd., Targray Technology International Inc. and UACJ Corporation.



Key Questions Answered in This Report:

How has the global copper foil market performed so far and how will it perform in the coming years?

What has been the impact of COVID-19 on the global copper foil market?

What are the key regional markets?

What is the breakup of the market based on the product type?

What is the breakup of the market based on the application?

What is the breakup of the market based on the end use industry?

What are the various stages in the value chain of the industry?

What are the key driving factors and challenges in the industry?

What is the structure of the global copper foil market and who are the key players?

What is the degree of competition in the industry?

Key Topics Covered:



1 Preface



2 Scope and Methodology



3 Executive Summary



4 Introduction

4.1 Overview

4.2 Key Industry Trends



5 Global Copper Foil Market

5.1 Market Overview

5.2 Market Performance

5.3 Impact of COVID-19

5.4 Market Forecast



6 Market Breakup by Product Type

6.1 Rolled Copper Foil

6.1.1 Market Trends

6.1.2 Market Forecast

6.2 Electrodeposited Copper Foil

6.2.1 Market Trends

6.2.2 Market Forecast



7 Market Breakup by Application

7.1 Printed Circuit Boards

7.1.1 Market Trends

7.1.2 Market Forecast

7.2 Batteries

7.2.1 Market Trends

7.2.2 Market Forecast

7.3 Electromagnetic Shielding

7.3.1 Market Trends

7.3.2 Market Forecast

7.4 Others

7.4.1 Market Trends

7.4.2 Market Forecast



8 Market Breakup by End Use Industry

8.1 Aerospace and Defense

8.1.1 Market Trends

8.1.2 Market Forecast

8.2 Automotive

8.2.1 Market Trends

8.2.2 Market Forecast

8.3 Building and Construction

8.3.1 Market Trends

8.3.2 Market Forecast

8.4 Electrical and Electronics

8.4.1 Market Trends

8.4.2 Market Forecast

8.5 Industrial Equipment

8.5.1 Market Trends

8.5.2 Market Forecast

8.6 Medical

8.6.1 Market Trends

8.6.2 Market Forecast

8.7 Others

8.7.1 Market Trends

8.7.2 Market Forecast



9 Market Breakup by Region



10 SWOT Analysis



11 Value Chain Analysis



12 Porters Five Forces Analysis



13 Price Analysis



14 Competitive Landscape

14.1 Market Structure

14.2 Key Players

14.3 Profiles of Key Players

14.3.1 Carl Schlenk AG

14.3.1.1 Company Overview

14.3.1.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.2 Chang Chun Group

14.3.2.1 Company Overview

14.3.2.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.3 Furukawa Electric Co. Ltd.

14.3.3.1 Company Overview

14.3.3.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.3.3 Financials

14.3.3.4 SWOT Analysis

14.3.4 ILJIN Materials Co. Ltd.

14.3.4.1 Company Overview

14.3.4.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.4.3 Financials

14.3.5 JX Nippon Mining & Metals Corporation (ENEOS Holdings Inc.)

14.3.5.1 Company Overview

14.3.5.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.6 LS Mtron Co. Ltd.

14.3.6.1 Company Overview

14.3.6.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.7 Mitsui Mining & Smelting Co. Ltd.

14.3.7.1 Company Overview

14.3.7.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.7.3 Financials

14.3.7.4 SWOT Analysis

14.3.8 Nippon Denkai Ltd.

14.3.8.1 Company Overview

14.3.8.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.8.3 Financials

14.3.9 Rogers Corporation

14.3.9.1 Company Overview

14.3.9.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.9.3 Financials

14.3.10 SKC Co. Ltd.

14.3.10.1 Company Overview

14.3.10.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.10.3 Financials

14.3.10.4 SWOT Analysis

14.3.11 Sumitomo Metal Mining Co. Ltd.

14.3.11.1 Company Overview

14.3.11.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.11.3 Financials

14.3.11.4 SWOT Analysis

14.3.12 Targray Technology International Inc.

14.3.12.1 Company Overview

14.3.12.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.13 UACJ Corporation

14.3.13.1 Company Overview

14.3.13.2 Product Portfolio

14.3.13.3 Financials

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/k7mm7k

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

SOURCE Research and Markets
BOSTON, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- National not-for-profit Interise has been awarded one-million dollars to bring insights on systemic barriers to quality job creation at small businesses from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Small Business STRONGER initiative will fund Interise programming designed to create change in the small business ecosystem by assisting BIPOC-owned small businesses and small businesses located in low-income communities support high quality jobs.

The Small Business STRONGER initiative will feature capacity building executive education for small business owners, enacted in four phases; a learning phase, curriculum and resource development phase, and an implementation phase with a continuous monitoring, evaluation, and learning process to better understand the impact of programming on the small business ecosystem that leads to the creation of the quality jobs.

"We are both humbled and grateful to the Gates Foundation for their substantial investment in Interise," said Interise CEO Darrell Byers. "The needs of the small businesses we assist are always evolving, especially in these times, and this generous grant will allow us to expand and scale the scope of our work."

This timely investment will allow Interise to add an element to their work by looking to their constituent groups to create and implement effective practices to boost economic mobility for business owners and their employees through the creation of quality jobs. Through this work, Interise will be able to offer feedback on systemic barriers to good job creation and potential constituent-led solutions that may encourage more successful uptake of effective practices.

About Interise

Interise ( http://www.interise.org ) builds diverse and inclusive local economies through small business development, supporting the growth of BIPOC-owned small businesses and small businesses located in low- and moderate-income communities. Interise contributes to inclusive economic development through its national research on the growth of established small businesses and its award-winning business development programs. As Interise companies grow, they contribute to local job creation and build community wealth. Interise companies historically create new jobs at 5x the rate of the private sector and are responsible for the creation of over 30,000 new jobs. Interise partners with government agencies, anchor institutions, and business associations to offer the StreetWise 'MBA' program in 80+ cities nationwide. Strategic Growth Partners include the Gates Foundation, Kauffman Foundation, the TD Bank Foundation, the Wells Fargo Foundation and the Prudential Foundation.

SOURCE INTERISE
According to Sarah Schmidtlein, owner of the Greater Kansas City Jury Verdict Service, this is the largest verdict in a medical negligence case ever awarded in the Kansas City Metropolitan Area and surrounding counties.

After a two-week trial, a Jackson County jury ruled that Dr. Sandri violated her duty of care and improperly supervised a student doctor with respect to the administration of medication used to speed up labor. There was an overdose of Pitocin, which was apparent on monitoring equipment. The overdose resulted in a loss of oxygen to the baby's brain causing cerebral palsy.

Pitocin has been designated as a "high alert medication" by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations. If misused, it creates the risk of serious injury to the mother and baby.

"Great care must be taken with the use of Pitocin," Dr. Patrick Cullan explained. "If used correctly Pitocin can be safe, but the health care team must watch carefully for signs of overdose."

In this case, the fetal monitoring equipment demonstrated more than six hours of excessive Pitocin administration. This wasn't recognized by the student doctor nor by Dr.Sandri.

"The attending physician delegated the responsibility to the doctor in training, rather than personally attending to the patient as often as required by the standard of care," Dr. Joe Cullan stated. "Hopefully, this verdict will send a message to teaching hospitals that the doctor who is responsible for the patient's care must be actively involved. You cannot teach or supervise a young doctor from a nursing station or doctor's lounge."

According to Cullan & Cullan, the child will need round-the-clock care for the rest of her life. That amounts to many millions of dollars over her lifetime.

The jury awarded $18,972,000 for ongoing medical care and damages for the plaintiffs, as well as $5 million for past and future pain, suffering, and disfigurement. The jury understood what a devastating injury this was, said Joe Cullan. "What an amazing family. Kylie's mother Rachel took her daughter to 184 physician and therapy visits in the last four years. They work every day to improve her life and keep her safe."

This is the latest of Cullan & Cullan's record-setting jury verdicts. The firm recently broke its own record in Nebraska with the $26.1 million verdict Patrick and Joe won for a child who received improper medical care after a fall. That child was left permanently disabled as a result of medical negligence. The previous record, also held by Cullan & Cullan, was a $17 million verdict won for a baby who sustained brain damage because of malpractice.

Cullan & Cullan's doctor-lawyers are nationally recognized as leading advocates for the victims of negligence. Sharing over 40 years of experience and the knowledge that comes with advanced degrees in both medicine, law and engineering, the firm is renowned for its effective representation for their clients. To learn more about Cullan and Cullan please visit https://www.doctorspracticinglaw.com/.

SOURCE Cullan & Cullan
For every $1 Donated, Kinecta will Match $2 up to $50,000. Donations to Address Immediate Humanitarian Needs

MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif., April 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Kinecta Federal Credit Union joins the Worldwide Foundation for Credit Unions, the fundraising and engagement arm of the World Council of Credit Unions (WOCCU), on its Ukrainian Credit Union Displacement Fund campaign. Kinecta is committed to supporting those impacted by the ongoing crisis and asks members and non-members to make donations at any of its locations or online at https://kinecta.ejoinme.org/ukrainianrelief through April 18, 2022. For every $1 donated, Kinecta will match $2 towards Ukrainian relief efforts up to $50,000.

Worldwide Foundation for Credit Unions will primarily direct support to vetted non-governmental organizations that are providing emergency humanitarian assistance in Ukraine and in neighboring European countries hosting Ukrainian refugees. Other collected funds will be donated to mitigate both short- and long-term impacts to Ukraine's credit union system and those that look to it for support, including both employees and members.

"Kinecta is committed to the communities we serve at home and abroad, our hearts go out to the people of Ukraine and everyone affected by the ongoing crisis," said Keith Sultemeier, President and Chief Executive Officer of Kinecta. "Please join us in supporting Worldwide Foundation for Credit Unions' Ukrainian Credit Union Displacement Fund campaign to address immediate humanitarian needs for those still in Ukraine and for more than four million Ukrainian refugees who have fled the country."

Once the situation is stable, WOCCU will work on recovery and rebuilding efforts in collaboration with the Ukrainian American Credit Union Association, which represents 12 credit unions serving the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States. WOCCU acts as the leading voice for global advocacy and development on behalf of the international credit union community, and it continues to promote economic freedom and the sustainable growth of financial cooperatives across the globe through education, collaboration, and community-based development projects.

During 2021, Kinecta, its subsidiaries, and employees donated over $880,000 to charitable causes, volunteered over 5,100 hours, and participated in over 225 community events. To learn more about Kinecta's community outreach programs and activities, visit kinecta.org/community.

About Kinecta Federal Credit Union

Kinecta Federal Credit Union is the country's 35th largest credit union, with assets of $6.6 billion and over 270,000 member-owners. Its 800+ employees serve members from 31 branches, a variety of specialty offices, and highly responsive call centers on both coasts. Banking the Southern California area for more than 80 years, with recent expansion into New York, New Jersey, and Northern California, Kinecta offers its members a full range of financial products through the Credit Union and its subsidiaries, Kinecta Wealth Management and Kinecta Insurance Services. Kinecta has been recognized by the Mortgage Bankers Association as a recipient of its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Residential Leadership Award, and received the Best of Show award granted by the Credit Union National Association (CUNA) Technology Council. Daily Breeze readers have named Kinecta a top credit union for the past 11 years in the South Bay area of Los Angeles. Kinecta supports its communities in a variety of ways, by giving back through the Kinecta Community Foundation as well as serving as the official financial services partner of the LA Galaxy, and sponsor of the Rochester Americans and Rochester Red Wings. To learn more about Kinecta, visit kinecta.org.

About Worldwide Foundation for Credit Unions

Worldwide Foundation for Credit Unions is the fundraising and engagement arm of the World Council of Credit Unions (World Council), the global trade association and development platform for credit unions. World Council promotes the sustainable development of credit unions and other financial cooperatives around the world to empower people through access to high quality and affordable financial services. World Council advocates on behalf of the global credit union system before international organizations and works with national governments to improve legislation and regulation. Its technical assistance programs introduce new tools and technologies to strengthen credit unions' financial performance and increase their outreach. World Council has implemented 300+ technical assistance programs in 90 countries. Worldwide, 86,451 credit unions in 118 countries serve 375 million people. Learn more about World Council's impact around the world at www.woccu.org.

SOURCE Kinecta Federal Credit Union
Proxalutamide demonstrates a significant reduction in hospitalization/death rate with a protection rate reaching 100% for patients treated more than seven days (p <0.02).

Proxalutamide reduced risk of hospitalization or death especially in those with high-risk factors.

Proxalutamide demonstrates significant reduction in COVID-19 viral load and improved coronavirus-related symptoms.

The Phase III multi-regional clinical trial (MRCT) enrolled 99% of patients in multiple centers across the United States .

SUZHOU, China, April 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Kintor Pharmaceutical Limited ("Kintor Pharma", HKEX: 9939), a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing innovative small molecules and biological therapeutics, today announced the top-line results of the Phase III MRCT of proxalutamide in outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19 regardless of vaccination status and risk factors. Data from the study demonstrated that the protection rate of patients in the trial (regardless of age or risk factors) treated with proxalutamide for more than seven days reached 100% (p < 0.02). The treatment with proxalutamide significantly reduced hospitalization or death in COVID-19 patients, especially in the middle-aged and elderly with high-risk factors.

Top-line efficacy and safety data are summarized below:

Efficacy:

Proxalutamide effectively reduced the risk of hospitalization/death

Among all randomized patients with at least one day of treatment (N=730), 8 patients who received placebo were hospitalized (including one death) compared to 4 patients who received proxalutamide (zero death). All hospitalizations were COVID-19-related. Proxalutamide reduced the risk of hospitalization or death by 50% compared to the control group.

Among patients with more than 1 day of treatment (N=721), 7 patients in the control group were hospitalized (including one death) compared to 2 patients (zero deaths) in the proxalutamide group. Proxalutamide reduced the risk of hospitalization or death by 71% compared to the control group.

Among patients with more than 7 days of treatment (N=693), 6 patients who received placebo were hospitalized (including one death) compared to no hospitalization/death in the proxalutamide group. Proxalutamide reduced the risk of hospitalization or death by 100% compared to the control group (p0.02).

Proxalutamide significantly reduced the risk of hospitalization/death in patients with high-risk factors, especially in patients 50 years of age or older and with at least 1 day of treatment.

In the patients aged 50 years or older and with obesity, proxalutamide significantly reduced the risk of hospitalization/death by100% (p0.02), as there was no hospitalization or death in the proxalutamide group.

In the patients aged 60 years or older with or without underlying medical conditions, proxalutamide significantly reduced the risk of hospitalization or death by 100% (p0.02), as there was no hospitalization or deaths in the proxalutamide group.

In the patients with age 60 years or older and with at least one underlying medical condition (such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, etc.), proxalutamide significantly reduced the risk of hospitalization or death by 100% (p0.02), as there was no hospitalization or deaths in the proxalutamide group.

Proxalutamide significantly and continuously reduced SARS-CoV-2 viral load

Proxalutamide significantly and continuously reduced SARS-CoV-2 viral load from Day 3 to Day 28, compared to the control group (p0.01 on Day 3 and Day 28, respectively).

Proxalutamide improved COVID-19 related symptoms

COVID-19 symptoms such as fever, shortness of breath, and cough were improved through Day 28 compared to patients in the control group.

Safety:

Proxalutamide continues to demonstrate a positive safety profile

The study demonstrated that proxalutamide was well tolerated and side effects were manageable in patients with mild to moderate COVID-19. The incidence of treatment-emergent adverse events (TEAEs) was comparable in the control and proxalutamide groups (7.9% and 9.6%, respectively). The majority of TEAEs were mild. The most common adverse event was dizziness (1.1 % in both proxalutamide and control groups). The incidence of any other adverse events was less than 1%. There was no serious adverse event in the study.

Dr. Tong Youzhi, the founder, Chairman, and CEO of Kintor Pharma commented, "The top-line data of this pivotal study demonstrates the clinical efficacy of proxalutamide in the mostly US COVID-19 population with a significant reduction of hospitalization and death rate in patients. It is important to note that proxalutamide has showed COVID-19 viral load reduction against both Delta and Omicron variants, which is important as new variants continue to arise. The continued increase in COVID-19 cases serves as a reminder that the world urgently needs effective and safe oral drugs with different mechanisms of action. Kintor plans to actively apply for emergency use authorization (EUA)/emergency approvals from healthcare authorities in China, the United States, and other countries. Separately, I'd like to thank the patients and doctors who participated in the trial and highlight the tireless work of Kintor's team since the start of the pandemic, their ability to overcome multiple challenges, and to thank them for their continued efforts."

About the Study

The multi-center randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled (1:1) registrational trial (NCT04870606), evaluated the efficacy and safety of proxalutamide in outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19 illness. The study enrolled 733 male and female patients with a positive SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic test and symptoms onset whether vaccinated or not and regardless of risk factors. Ninety-nine percent (99%) of the patients were recruited in the United States. The patients received either proxalutamide 200mg, once daily plus standard of care (SOC)("proxalutamide arm") or placebo plus SOC ("placebo arm") for 14 consecutive days.

The study endpoints included the percentage of patients who did not experience all-cause hospitalization for at least 24 hours, or did not require supplemental oxygen for at least 24 hours in response to SpO2 93% and were alive by Day 28; the proportion of patients with all-cause hospitalization (defined as 24 hours), requiring supplemental oxygen orall-cause death by Day 28, and changes of SARS-Cov-2 viral load frombaseline to Day 28 as well as safety assessments.

About Proxalutamide

Proxalutamide is an ACE2 (angiotensin-converting enzyme 2) and TMPRSS2 (transmembrane protease, serine 2) proteins inhibitor that inhibits the entry of the SARS-CoV-2 virus into host cells. For COVID-19 patients with early symptoms, targeting the ACE2/TMPRSS2 signal axis by proxalutamide could significantly inhibit the entry of the virus into host cells. For severe patients, proxalutamide promotes the clearance of pathogens and decreases inflammation by activating the Nrf2 pathway, which inhibits the over-production of IL-6, proinflammatory cytokines, and chemokines, thus minimizing cytokine storms and tissues damage. In this way, proxalutamide might be well-positioned as an effective drug for COVID-19 patients from early symptoms to hospitalized/severe conditions.

About Kintor Pharmaceutical Limited

Kintor Pharmaceutical Limited is developing and commercializing a robust pipeline of innovative small molecule and biological therapeutics for androgen-receptor-related disease areas with unmet medical needs, including COVID-19, prostate, breast and liver cancers, alopecia and acne. For more information, visit www.kintor.com.cn.

Contact Information

Kintor Pharma

[email protected]

[email protected]

Goby Global

Bob Ai

[email protected]

MessagingLAB

Karl Schmieder

[email protected]

SOURCE Kintor Pharma


Building upon its two-year track record of servicing institutions with a secure, transparent and compliant custody solution, Komainu Singapore will provide a foothold within the APAC region to extend its custody solution to Asia-based institutions within the APAC marketplace.

Henson Orser, President of Komainu commented on today's news, "Opening an operating entity within the APAC region is a major milestone for our organization. We see the APAC market as underserved and with institutions globally looking to add digital assets to their portfolios, there is a need for institutional grade custody providers that understand the complex regulatory landscape. We are excited to initiate our operations within the region and work with institutions and the local regulators to provide clients with ease-of-mind when investing in digital assets."

Komainu is actively expanding its headcount in Singapore to promote its local growth as well as its expansion into the wider APAC region. Working collaboratively with Nomura, one of Komainu's founding partners, Komainu Singapore will provide the governance framework for institutions looking to enter into the digital asset space in Asia.

Sebastian Widmann, Head of Strategy at Komainu, explained that "Singapore is quickly becoming the main financial hub for digital assets in the APAC region, driven by proactive regulatory developments, the presence of global institutions and a strong local talent pool, which will further facilitate Komainu's expansion plans in the region."

About Komainu

Komainu is the first hybrid custodian for institutional digital asset investors created by the Japanese investment bank, Nomura, digital asset manager, CoinShares and digital asset security company, Ledger. Komainu is providing decentralized and secure digital asset custody through a single application-based solution for institutions, offering multi-asset support and regulatory compliance. Headquartered in Jersey, Channel Islands, Komainu merges institutional financial services with leading security standards for the next generation of institutional custody.

For more information, please visit https://www.komainu.com

Media Contact

Peter Padovano

M Group Strategic Communications (For Komainu)

646-859-5953

[email protected]

SOURCE Komainu
ATLANTA, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Krystal , the original home of the slider in the South, is continuing its aggressive growth plans and leveraging its legacy and recent rebranding efforts to drive interest in franchising opportunities. Just a few short months ago, the company relaunched its franchise program by opening the first new franchisee-owned restaurant in fifteen years. Within the first several weeks after, the brand announced multi-unit deals with Victor Cruz for New Jersey, new franchise development in the Jonesboro, AR and Calera, AL, and now a new five-unit deal in Puerto Rico. Continuing to break new ground, Krystal also named icon 2Chainz Head of Creative Marketing for the brand  and the stage is set for even more robust growth.

"Over the past two years, our teams have been focused on taking our Southern-inspired brand into new spaces  geographically and in the consumer mindset. We're striking the balance between spotlighting our long history and staying relevant," said Thomas Stager , President for Krystal Restaurants LLC. "From top to bottom, we've reworked the organization, bringing in leading talents to spearhead our corporate teams, as well as amazing creatives and influencers who will help drive us toward an exciting future that allows us to further connect with our customers and expand our presence. These are truly exciting times for new and existing franchise partners to join us in our journey as we continue to build on an iconic brand."

In addition to the rebranding efforts, Krystal also developed and unveiled a new restaurant prototype that delivers on all the dayparts  breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late-night  while requiring a fraction of the footprint and operating costs.

The Krystal franchising program provides partners with start-up and ongoing support in the form of training, marketing, supply chain guidance, regular meetings with key leadership, and more. The program is also highlighted by the following.

"This is a once in a generation opportunity to invest in a legacy brand and we're seeking those who share in our vision and commitment to delivering on our unique and highly craveable menu, as well as our quality customer service," added Stager. "We've positioned the brand in a way that allows for more partners to invest in our business, grow with us, and expand their own portfolios."

For more information, visit krystal.com or to learn more about franchising opportunities, e-mail [email protected] .

SOURCE Krystal Restaurants, LLC
HARO, LA RIOJA, Spain, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- La Rioja Alta, S.A., the Spanish wine brand of unmistakable quality, was recently named the world's fourth most admired wine brand by Drinks International. The World's Most Admired Wine Brands is a listing of the 50 most prestigious wine companies in the world. The company experienced the highest rise on the list this year, advancing 46 positions and earning the award of "Highest Climber," a testament to their ongoing commitment to honor their exclusive wines, style, and brand.

La Rioja Alta, S.A. La Rioja Alta, S.A.

The accolade comes as La Rioja Alta, S.A. announced their expansion into Rioja Alavesa with the purchase of "old vine" vineyards in excellent locations, primarily on slopes. They call these vineyards, "Vinedos Artesanales," and they have already acquired 35 hectares (86 acres) with a minimum age of 45 years. They plan to continue to increase vineyard acquisition to potentially 75 hectares (185 acres) by the end of 2022.

"We are buying very old vineyards, pruned in the traditional way with very low production, some of which are field blends," said Guillermo de Aranzabal Bittner, 6th Generation of the 131-year-old winery. "One of the key elements for improving quality is to buy the best vineyards, in order to reject more grapes," de Aranzabal continued. "The other key element is technology: R&D, modern soil studies, laboratory improvements and new pruning techniques."

After the last harvest, they fermented the grapes at Torre de Ona under the guidance of their winemakers, Julio Saenz and Alejandro Lopez. They plan to use the wines to improve Gran Reserva 890 and Gran Reserva 904. There is also a possibility that they will launch a new, small portfolio of these single-vineyard wines at Torre de Ona.

La Rioja Alta, S.A. is currently building a small fermentation facility at Torre de Ona to better select grapes from the new vineyards. The facility will feature nine small tanks of 6,000 liters each to better understand each plot and it is expected to be ready for this year's harvest.

As the demand for La Rioja Alta, S.A. wines continues to grow, they have found that the only way to increase production and to meet demand is to start new projects. They continue to achieve the excellence they are known for by combining traditional vineyards with modern technology.

La Rioja Alta, S.A., like others, is running into supply and demand issues, with demand for their exceptional wines higher than ever. But they will not sacrifice quality and sell premature vintages to their consumers. Despite the 30% increase in exports within the last year, they vow to continue on their path to always put their brand values and style first. If a new vintage is not ready and needs more time in the bottle, then the iconic brand and its dedicated clientele, must wait a little longer.

Contact: Janet Mick

IT Public Relations

212.954.5595

[email protected]

SOURCE La Rioja Alta, S.A.
*All-Suite 48-Guest Expedition Ship to Launch in the Galapagos Islands in 2022*

VIDEO

NEW YORK, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Lindblad Expeditions-National Geographic has unveiled the newest addition to their award-winning fleet, National Geographic Islander ll. With just 48 guests, and the spirit and soul of a private yacht, the all-suite ship will make her inaugural voyage in the Galapagos on August 18, 2022 for year-round expeditions in the islands.

"I had the pleasure of being in Galapagos for the first-time last week and you could feel the Lindblad- National Geographic legacy in these iconic islandsfrom the second-generation Galapagos crew aboard, to the locally grown food on the table to stories of the role we have played in supporting conservation in the archipelago," stated Dolf Berle, President and CEO of Lindblad Expeditions. "With the new National Geographic Islander II, we will be able to build on that legacy and offer an even greater connection to Galapagos and its people for just 48 guests.

Formerly the Crystal Esprit, the sleek and elegant National Geographic Islander ll's top-to-bottom refit will elevate the guest experience to an entirely new level. Travelers will find encircling teak decks that gracefully connect the indoor and outdoor spaces, a well-outfitted observation deck, indoor-outdoor dining options, 26 light and airy suites, and new expedition amenities including a marina and Science Hub.

Elegantly appointed, each of the 26 suites feature large windows, convertible king/twin beds, sofa, marble double-sink bathrooms, stocked mini-bar, Wi-Fi, flat-screen TV and ample closets. The four Islander Suites, three of them brand new, have four windows, separate living rooms and bathrooms outfitted with a tub and rain shower. Connecting suites are available, plus four dedicated solo suites and triple options. The Santa Cruz Islander Suite can be reserved as a family suite with a connecting double suite.

The reimagined Cove lounge will be the gathering spot for pre-dinner recaps, crafted cocktails and enriching presentations. Dining will be offered in the newly expanded al fresco Patio Cafe and sophisticated Yacht Club Restaurant.

The ship will celebrate Lindblad's deep connection to the islands, Ecuador, and its people. From the carefully considered food and beverage program that highlights the four regions of Ecuador with locally sourced ingredients, to artwork and decor created by local artists and artisans, on National Geographic Islander II, guests will experience the beauty and wonder of Ecuador on and off the ship.

Guests can expect the same best-in-class expedition experiences and adventures that are at the heart of every Lindblad Expeditions-National Geographic voyage. Designed for active exploration, National Geographic Islander II carries a fleet of kayaks, stand-up paddleboards, a custom-built glass bottom Zodiac and flotilla of versatile Mark V Zodiacs  so that everyone can be out exploring at once.

The new Science Hub  outfitted with an interactive video display, lab benches and seating  will connect guests to the Lindblad-National Geographic legacy of supporting conservation and research. Two Cabins for Conservation Suites, designated exclusively for Galapagos community members, local and international researchers, educators, storytellers, and other experts, will provide guests a deeper connection to people and place.

Named to honor the much-beloved National Geographic Islander that she will replace, the best-in-class expedition ship will offer a 1-1 guest-to-crew ratio, expanding on Lindblad's renowned shipboard services. Her celebrated expedition team will include an expedition leader and four Naturalists, including an undersea specialist, certified photo instructor and trained field educators who run the acclaimed National Geographic Global Explorers family program.

The National Geographic Islander II is a true ocean-going vessel, 280 feet long, 46 feet wide, and is equipped with stabilizers for smooth sailing. The refit of the ship for Galapagos includes key environmental and fuel-efficient upgrades like reduced outdoor lighting, special paint, and recycled water from new air conditioning systems.

For reservations or additional information on Lindblad Expeditions voyages to some of the most beautiful and fascinating places on Earth, visit www.expeditions.com, call 1-800-EXPEDITION (1-800-397-3348) or contact your travel advisor. Find us on Facebook , Twitter, Instagram , YouTube and Pinterest .

For images: From here you can view the images and download high resolution jpgs. Downloaded photos can only to be used in conjunction with promoting Lindblad Expeditions and must include photographer copyright information.

SOURCE Lindblad Expeditions
DENVER, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Lumen Technologies (NYSE: LUMN), will release its first quarter 2022 results on May 4, 2022. The company will broadcast a live conference call on its Investor Relations website at http://ir.lumen.com at 5 p.m. ET.

Additional information regarding the first quarter 2022 results, including the company's earnings release, investor presentation, and related materials will be available on Lumen's Investor Relations website. If you are unable to join the call via the web, the call can be accessed live at +1 877-283-5145 (U.S. Domestic) or +1 312-281-1201 (International).

The call will be archived and available as an audio replay on Lumen's Investor Relations website starting at 8 p.m. ET on May 4, until 8 p.m. ET on Aug. 2, 2022. The replay can be accessed by dialing +1 800-633-8284 (U.S. Domestic) or +1 402-977-9140 (International), reservation code 22017396.

About Lumen Technologies and the People of Lumen:

Lumen is guided by our belief that humanity is at its best when technology advances the way we live and work. With approximately 500,000 route fiber miles and serving customers in more than 60 countries, we deliver the fastest, most secure platform for applications and data to help businesses, government and communities deliver amazing experiences.

Learn more about the Lumen network, edge cloud, security, communication and collaboration solutions and our purpose to further human progress through technology at news.lumen.com/home, LinkedIn: /lumentechnologies, Twitter: @lumentechco, Facebook: /lumentechnologies, Instagram: @lumentechnologies and YouTube: /lumentechnologies. Lumen and Lumen Technologies are registered trademarks in the United States.

SOURCE Lumen Technologies, Inc.
Up to 5,000 meters of angled diamond drill is planned to commence in late April of 2022.

The initial program will focus on 3 high-priority drill targets at La Escarcha, Gaby and Brownfields, where veins between 1 to 5 meters in width have been reported.

Drilling will initially test the depth extension of mineralization at the La Escarcha target.

Craig Hairfield, Chief Executive Officer of the Company, commented, "Our exploration work to date at Golden Hill has allowed us to better define the high priority drill targets and understand grade continuity within the vein system. Greenstone hosted gold systems, such as Golden Hill, are very attractive exploration targets as deposits typically occur in clusters along regional structures over strike lengths of several kilometers and depths of >1 kilometer. Drilling will initially test the depth extension of La Escarcha, centered around historic workings and recent Mantaro exploratory work, followed by testing of other high priority targets that have been delineated in our recent surface programs."

Golden Hill is centered on a broadly north-south trending regional structure (see Figure 1) that hosts the La Escarcha underground mine and the Gabby, Garrapatillia and Brownfields workings and gold-bearing veins in its western hanging wall. The same structure hosts numerous saprolite gold and hard rock gold deposits to the north and south of Golden Hill over a strike length of at least 25 kilometers  underpinning the significant control the structure exerts on gold mineralization.

Second order faults splays host areas of alluvial and saprolitic/hard rock workings to the north of La Escharcha  where Mantaro Geologists are currently rock-chip sampling and mapping. At least six strike kilometers of these structures are known within Golden Hill  in addition to the four kilometers between La Escarcha and Brownfields which have been mapped in detail. Known mineralization and surface anomalism is open along strike on all structures.

Mineralization between La Escarcha and Brownfields is characterized by a series of broadly parallel, north-south trending, very steeply dipping quartz veins that are between 1 to 5 meters wide. Mineralization is hosted in mafic metavolcanics, at the contact of metavolcanics and metasediments, and within metasediments (see Figure 1).

Veins are well exposed in underground workings at La Escarcha where they comprise multiphase white quartz and slivers of wall rock which are fracture oxidized. Veins are up to 5 meters wide and contain significant visible gold. Mine staff have reported that gold grades increase downwards from surface to the 60 m level which is currently under limited development. Most gold appears to be free hosted in fractures within quartz and pyrite.

Qualified Person

Dr. Christopher Wilson, Ph. D., FAusIMM (CP), FSEG, a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed and approved the technical information contained in this news release.

About Mantaro Precious Metals Corp.

Mantaro Precious Metals Corp. is a British Columbia company that holds a diversified portfolio of gold and silver focused mineral properties in Bolivia and Peru. The Company's holds an option to acquire up to an 80% interest in the advanced Golden Hill Property ("Golden Hill"), located in the underexplored, orogenic Bolivia Shield, Bolivia.

The Company also has a 100% interest in the high-grade Santas Gloria Silver Property as well as a 100% interest in each of the San Jose, La Purisima, Cerro Luque and Huaranay Properties (collectively, the "Silver Properties"). The Silver Properties are located in Peru.

Forward-Looking Statements

Information set forth in this news release contains forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions as of the date of this news release. These statements reflect management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations. They are not guarantees of future performance. The Company cautions that all forward looking statements are inherently uncertain and that actual performance may be affected by a number of material factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control. Such factors include, among other things: risks and uncertainties relating to Company's limited operating history and the need to comply with environmental and governmental regulations. Accordingly, actual and future events, conditions and results may differ materially from the estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations expressed or implied in the forward looking information. Except as required under applicable securities legislation, the Resulting Issuer undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise forward-looking information.

The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date of this news release. Except as required by law, the Company disclaims any intention and assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Service Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

SOURCE Mantaro Precious Metals Corp.
WILMINGTON, Del., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Maron Marvel announces its Shareholder Catherine Pyune McEldowney has been appointed Managing Shareholder, President, and Executive Committee Chair of the nationally recognized mass tort litigation firm. This is a milestone for Maron Marvel and the legal community as Cathie is the first woman and Korean American attorney to lead the law firm. According to NALP 2021 Diversity Report, less than 5% of all attorneys practicing law in the United States are Asian Pacific American women, with even a smaller percentage in leadership roles.

Catherine Pyune McEldowney

In her new roles, Cathie oversees the firm's strategic direction and business planning, governance and operations, marketing development programs, client relations, and is the spokesperson for Maron Marvel.

Paul A. Bradley, who previously served as Maron Marvel's Managing Shareholder for over 15 years, is now the firm's General Counsel, an inaugural position for the firm. Paul's proven track record and knowledge of the business of law will be invaluable in his new role. President and Chair of the firm's Executive Committee were previously held by the firm's founder Jim Maron. Since 1996, the firm has grown to over 100 attorneys in 12 offices located throughout the country.

In 2003, Cathie joined the firm to help Jim Maron execute his vision to be the best toxic tort defense firm in the country. Since then, Maron Marvel has combined technology and litigation to elevate the firm's national risk management team and other key practice groups to climb higher, smarter, and faster. "Maron Marvel's national risk management model is rooted in tech-based solutions, cost containment, virtual teaming, and consistent results. It's unique to the Maron Marvel brand and is the future of mass tort risk management," said Cathie.

A trailblazer in her own right, Cathie has been practicing for over 30 years and does not want Maron Marvel to emulate the traditional law firm model. She explains, "Our Next-Gen leadership team is ready to be a catalyst for positive growth and success by empowering our attorneys and staff to be their authentic selves, continue to work smart and hard, and share the firm's passion for excellence and client service."

McEldowney also plans to bolster the firm's diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. "The only thing that separates women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups in our profession is opportunity. Jim Maron gave me that opportunity 19 years ago. I'm honored to carry the torch he lit 25 years ago," states Cathie.

While Maron Marvel will continue to be governed by its Executive Committee, which Cathie will also lead, it added an Operating Committee to manage the firm's daily administrative and operational affairs. Joining Cathie on the firm's new Operating Committee is Shareholder Scott Henry. He assumes the new role of Vice President of Management and oversees the firm's daily operations in addition to maintaining his active practice. Henry led a team of lawyers who joined Maron Marvel in 2017, starting the firm's Midwest practice. Nancy Michener will continue to serve as the firm's Chief Operating Officer, which she has held for six years.

From the beginning, Maron Marvel attorneys had a passion for superior work product, a distinctive culture rooted in mass tort litigation, and an obsession with exceptional client service. These core values have remained at the heart of the firm's brand and endure today. Through an authentic and consistent voice, Maron Marvel builds its relationships with like-minded people and clients who appreciate and respect the firm's approach. The firm has 12 offices in 10 key jurisdictions with 100 litigation and trial attorneys.

Contact:

Sharen Nocella, Marketing Director

[email protected]

601.826.4111

SOURCE Maron Marvel Bradley Anderson & Tardy LLC
Publication highlights company's commitment to employees, subcontractors, homebuyers and the planet

DENVER, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- M.D.C. Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: MDC), parent company to the Richmond American Homes companies, recently announced the release of its first Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Report. The publication highlights the company's environmental initiatives, social practices and corporate governance, and concludes with a performance and impact analysis that will serve as a baseline for future progress.

Environmental Initiatives

M.D.C. Holdings, Inc.s Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Report

The Richmond American companies bring cost-effective, environmentally friendly homes to customers by working to create efficiencies and providing common features, materials and product dimensions across plans when feasible to minimize waste.

Highlights:

Responsible land development practices, including geotechnical investigations, environmental site assessments, geophysical studies, wetland studies and other biological and cultural assessments, as applicable to the site

National average HERS score improved from 65 in 2013 to to 51 in 2021, with a goal to achieve a score of 50 or less by 2025

14,802 ENERGY STAR-qualified new homes built from 2000 through June 2021

Closed on 5,682 homes with solar panels installed through June 2021 , and solar program is expanding

Social Practices

The Richmond American companies prioritize the health and welfare of employees, subcontractors and homebuyers. This is achieved by cultivating a positive and inclusive company culture, as well as establishing policies that protect employees and subcontractors. In recent years, this included measures to help limit the spread of COVID-19.

Highlights:

MDC/Richmond American Homes Foundation, funded by M.D.C. Holdings, Inc., has made more than $20 million in charitable donations

in charitable donations Employee volunteering and charitable match program

Competitive benefits promoting health, wellness and long-term financial stability of employees

Company-wide training and policies that set the standard for creating a positive company culture that's safe, ethical and inclusive

Corporate Governance

Strong company leadership and an engaged board dedicated to ESG are propelling the Richmond American companies forward on sustainability initiatives. A well-established Corporate Code of Conduct and closely governed company policies set the foundation for meeting environmental and social goals in the future.

Highlights:

Increasingly diverse corporate management with an average of 15 years of experience at the company as of February 2022

Expansion of positive impacts in the communities in which the Richmond American companies operate by providing funding to the MDC/Richmond American Homes Foundation

Developed an ESG policy to outline approach to ESG matters and guide business practices

"As we look to the future, we will leverage the core principles that led to our past success, while welcoming new perspectives that allow our organization to meet new challenges. If there is anything the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us, it is that life on our planet is fragile. We will continue to work toward sustainability so we can leave a legacy for the next generation," said Larry A. Mizel, Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors, M.D.C. Holdings, Inc.

For more information on M.D.C. Holdings, Inc.'s ESG initiatives, view the full report at ir.richmondamerican.com.

About M.D.C. Holdings, Inc.

Operating under the name Richmond American Homes, MDC's homebuilding subsidiaries have built more than 220,000 homes since 1977. Among the nation's largest homebuilders, MDC's subsidiary companies have operations in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Washington. Mortgage lending, plus insurance and title services are offered by the following MDC subsidiaries, respectively: HomeAmerican Mortgage Corporation, American Home Insurance Agency, Inc. and American Home Title and Escrow Company. M.D.C. Holdings, Inc. is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "MDC." For more information, visit MDCHoldings.com.

SOURCE M.D.C. Holdings, Inc.
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NEW YORK, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Mechanical Construction Services market will grow at a CAGR of 6.52% by 2026. Prices will increase by 4%- 7% during the forecast period and suppliers will have a moderate bargaining power in this market. This report offers key advisory and intelligence to help buyers identify and shortlist the most suitable suppliers for their Mechanical Construction Services requirements.

Get a Free Access to All This Market's Trends and Drivers
MXR is pleased to announce the signing of a non-exclusive distribution agreement in the United States with Micro-X.

SAN DIEGO, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- MXR Imaging, Inc. is pleased to announce the signing of a non-exclusive distribution agreement in the United States with Micro-X, the leader in cold cathode x-ray technology for health and security markets globally.

Key Points

MXR Imaging signs multi-year distribution agreement of the Rover in the U.S.

MXR Imaging is the largest independent distributor of imaging sales and service in the U.S.

This multi-year non-exclusive distribution agreement with Micro-X is to sell the Mobile DR range of products at a national level within the U.S.

"MXR is excited to partner with Micro-X in introducing the Rover fully integrated digital mobile X-ray system on a National basis," says Zane Phlegar, Vice President of Sales at MXR Imaging. "This lightweight, maneuverable Rover system incorporates ground-breaking Nanotube technology." Phlegar added "For over six decades, MXR has supported manufacturers offering innovative products, and we are thrilled to be working with Micro-X and the advanced technology they bring to the market."

MXR Imaging has received strong interest in the products from our customer base, especially following Micro-X's successful debut at the RSNA conference in late 2021.

Micro-X's Managing Director, Peter Rowland, commented:

"We continue to build the key elements of our US sales network and are excited that the nation-wide strength of MXR Imaging's sales capability will now take this to a new level. Having a distributor of this calibre join the team is a strong testament to the interest we have seen from end-user customers since the Micro-X range of products debuted in Chicago last December."

About Micro-X

Micro-X Limited (the Company) is an ASX listed hi-tech company developing and commercialising a range of innovative products for global health and security markets, based on proprietary cold cathode, carbon nanotube (CNT) emitter technology. The electronic control of emitters with this technology enables x-ray products with significant reduction in size, weight and power requirements, enabling greater mobility and ease of use in existing x-ray markets and a range of new and unique security and defense applications. Micro-X has a fully vertically integrated design and production facility in Adelaide, Australia. A growing technical and commercial team based in Seattle is rapidly expanding Micro-X's US business.

Micro-X's product portfolio is built in four, high margin, product lines in health and security. The first commercial mobile digital radiology products are currently sold for diagnostic imaging in global healthcare, military and veterinary applications. An X-ray Camera for security imaging of Improvised Explosive Devices is in advanced development. The US Department of Homeland Security has selected Micro-X to design a next-generation Airport Checkpoint Portal with self-service x-ray. A miniature brain CT imager for pre-hospital stroke diagnosis in ambulances, is being developed with funding from the Australian Government's Medical Research Future Fund.

MXR Sales Contact:

Zane Phlegar

[email protected]

(412) 719-9163

MXR Media Contact:

David Chandre

[email protected]

(262) 307-7149

Micro-X Limited

Peter Rowland, Manging Director

Kingsley Hall, CFO and Company Secretary

Tel: +61 8 7099 3966

E: [email protected]

Investor Enquiries

David Allen/John Granger

Hawkesbury Partners

Tel: +61 2 9103 9494

E: [email protected]

[email protected]

About MXR Imaging, Inc.

MXR Imaging, Inc. is the largest independent distributor of imaging sales and service in the U.S. As an industry leader, we provide a wide variety of New and Platinum Certified Pre-Owned imaging equipment. Additionally, we offer service support, legacy equipment assistance, equipment relocation, Mobile rentals, parts, training, and radiology consumable/durable goods to the healthcare market. MXR possesses an extensive imaging portfolio which includes: CT, PET/CT, MRI, Ultrasound, General Radiology Imaging equipment, and PACS. Learn more on mxrimaging.com.

PRESS CONTACT

NAME

David Chandre

PHONE

888.278.9933

WEBSITE

https://www.mxrimaging.com/

SOURCE MXR Imaging
Nanoprecise Sci Corp specializes in the delivery of comprehensive, cloud-based solutions for the lifecycle monitoring of equipment, using IoT, AI and Data science applications. Nanoprecise was awarded FIRST Place in the MAIL programme by preventing significant hours of downtime while monitoring critical equipment in the assembly line of the manufacturing plant.

The Nanoprecise Team installed MachineDoctor sensors on the critical cyclo-drives to capture the complex machine health data in ways that could not be done previously by the Maruti Suzuki team. The AI-based software was then able to detect an early-stage fault using acoustic emissions and confirmed the fault progression using vibration analysis. This multi-sensor input approach highlighted the unique capabilities of Nanoprecise. The maintenance team, upon inspection, confirmed serious deterioration in the equipment bearing, corroborating the insights provided by the automated Nanoprecise solution.

"It can be very difficult to monitor the condition of various machines, especially when it involves cyclic-operations. With our AI-based solution, automobile manufacturers can rely on an automated system to monitor the health & performance of machines and equipment sets in near real-time. It offers the capability to detect minor changes in their operational parameters, monitor progression, and provide insights before they impact production or cause downtime. Winning Cohort 5 is a testament to our capability to revolutionize the maintenance sector with technology", says Prashant Verma, Co-founder & Product Head, Nanoprecise Sci Corp.

Nanoprecise emerged as the winner of the programme after a multi-stage and highly competitive shortlisting process over a 6-month period that included detailed presentations and technology demonstration. Nanoprecise is currently implementing extensions to the initial Proof of Concept with MSIL, and the domain experts at Maruti Suzuki are guiding and mentoring the team to accelerate the scale up of application across the Maruti Suzuki.

For more information on MAIL, visit: https://www.marutisuzukimail.com/

About Nanoprecise

Nanoprecise Sci Corp is an automated AI-based predictive maintenance solution provider that facilitates early detection of even small changes in machine operations well before they impact production or cause downtime. Nanoprecise specializes in the implementation of Artificial Intelligence and Industrial IoT technology for predictive asset maintenance and condition monitoring. The AI-based solution offers real-time predictive information about the genuine health and performance of industrial assets. Nanoprecise is headquartered in Edmonton, Canada, and works with companies across various sectors to help drive their Industry 4.0 journey.

To know more about Nanoprecise, visit: www.nanoprecise.io

SOURCE Nanoprecise Sci Corp
The exhibition's North American debut at the National Building Museum takes place on the third anniversary of the 2019 fire that ravaged the cathedral and runs through September 26, 2022. This is the first interactive technology exhibition on display at the Museum.

To navigate the exhibition, each visitor will use a HistoPad, touch-screen tablet developed by Histovery, to provide an immersive and interactive tour transporting visitors back in time. Visitors can explore the cathedral being built in the Middle Ages, the coronation of Emperor Napoleon I, and the iconic Viollet-le-Duc spire being erected.

The exhibition is offered in an immersive physical setting that is visually transporting. Vinyl replicas of the cathedral's flooring, stained-glass transfers on the Museum's historic windows, audio of Notre Dame's organs and tolling bells, as well as a projection of the cathedral's famed rose window, complete the multi-sensory experience.

The exhibition includes large photo panels and models of the cathedral including a full-size chimera and statue. Visitors can scroll a timeline of the cathedral's construction history seeing its complex architectural structure and construction techniques.

The exhibition revisits the tragic fire that ravaged Notre-Dame on April 15, 2019 and provides an up-close look at the brave Paris Fire Brigade who battled for hours working to preserve as much of the building and its treasures as possible.

Current restoration of the building is a major focus of the exhibition as the HistoPads allow visitors to see workers in action reconstructing the elaborate architecture and rebuilding this sacred cathedral including the stabilization required after the fire.

"The National Building Museum is the perfect venue for this exhibition to debut in the U.S." stated Bruno de Sa Moreira, Co-founder and CEO of Histovery. The Museum was established to preserve and celebrate the building arts and its mission is to inspire curiosity about the world we design and build."

Aileen Fuchs, the National Building Museum's President and Executive Director added, "We are thrilled to bring this premier exhibition to the United States, and believe it provides a new way to experience one of the world's most iconic buildings. Visitors will experience how technology can contribute to our understanding of buildings. The unique and immersive virtual nature of the exhibition provides a window into this World Heritage site."

For more information about this exhibition click HERE .

IMAGES are available upon request.

ABOUT THE NATIONAL BUILDING MUSEUM

The National Building Museum inspires curiosity about the world we design and build. Through exhibitions, educational programs, and special events, we welcome visitors of all ages to experience stories about the built world and its power to shape our lives, our communities, and our futures. Public inquiries: 202.272.2448, [email protected], or visit www.nbm.org . Connect with us on Facebook , Instagram , and Twitter .

SOURCE NATIONAL BUILDING MUSEUM
WASHINGTON, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Following is a statement by Jen Judson, President of the National Press Club and Gil Klein, President of the National Press Club Journalism Institute on the killing of Lithuanian documentarian Mantas Kvedaravicius in Ukraine Sunday.

"With the death of Lithuanian documentarian Mantas Kvedaravicius last weekend we count 10 journalists killed during Russia's war on Ukraine  a staggering number. Kvedaravicius was reportedly killed while trying to leave Mariupol. This tragic incident further emphasizes that Russia is firing upon civilians as they attempt to evacuate cities. Deliberate targeting of civilians  including journalists  is a war crime.

"Kvedaravicius's work, 'Mariupolis,' was recognized at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2016 and in 2011 he received an award from Amnesty International for his film on the war in Chechnya: 'Barzakh." We will know less about what happened in Ukraine because of the tragic loss of this talented documentarian."

Founded in 1908, The National Press Club is the world's leading professional organization for journalists. The Club has 3,000 members representing nearly every major news organization and is a leading voice for press freedom in the United States and around the world.

The National Press Club Journalism Institute, the club's non-profit affiliate, promotes an engaged global citizenry through an independent and free press and equips journalists with skills and standards to inform the public in ways that inspire civic engagement.

Contact: Bill McCarren, 202-725-7787 for the National Press Club

SOURCE National Press Club
The establishment of the team sees the organisation's U.S. leadership executives Tish Ramirez, Holly Dean, and Stephanie Glowacki join its existing commercial leadership to establish a cross-functional group with significant sales, marketing, finance, and clinical experience in the hearing healthcare industry. The cross-functional team's strategy will support existing clinical partners to continue achieving successful treatment outcomes through further clinical and commercial initiatives while partnering with key specialist clinicians to introduce Lenire in new markets.

In addition to his role as CEO of Neuromod USA Inc., Neuromod's wholly owned U.S. subsidiary, Eric Timm has been appointed President, Global Commercial Operations to head the newly formed team with global responsibility for the organisation's commercial strategy.

"Since bringing Lenire to market we've achieved significant success by expanding its availability across Europe. Building on that success I am delighted to announce the formation of our global commercial leadership team to further support our healthcare partners in achieving positive outcomes for their tinnitus patients and introduce Lenire to new markets through key partnerships", says Ross O'Neill, Founder and CEO, Neuromod Devices Ltd.

Mr. Timm has more than 35 years' experience holding leadership positions in medical devices and hearing aid companies. He joined Neuromod as CEO of Neuromod USA in 2021 from WS Audiology, one of the biggest hearing aid manufacturers in the world, where he was President and Chief Executive Officer of the company's U.S. wholesale business.

Before that, he was CEO of Sivantos USA when it merged with Widex to become WS Audiology. He had previously been Chief Operating Officer of Sivantos USA. In addition, Eric has held general management, sales, marketing, and corporate strategy leadership positions at Phonak, Cardinal Health, Bristol-Myers Squibb and 3M.

"Since joining Neuromod I have seen first-hand the tremendous outcomes tinnitus patients have achieved using Lenire and I'm looking forward to working with our commercial team to make that a reality for more people living with the condition", says Eric Timm, President, Global Commercial Operations and CEO, Neuromod USA.

The announcement comes following the launch of Lenire into the Spanish market in March as Neuromod continues to expand availability of the device throughout Europe. Earlier in the year the organisation launched Otologie, its clinical service dedicated to tinnitus care.

Florian Elsaesser has been appointed Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer, assuming responsibility for the execution of Neuromod's corporate strategy agenda.

Prior to joining Neuromod in 2020, Mr. Elsaesser held various executive positions for Sivantos and Siemens Audiology. Prior to Siemens Audiology's acquisition by Private Equity fund EQT, Florian held senior financial roles managing global functions in finance and controlling. After the acquisition, Florian went on to hold senior business development and marketing roles in the newly rebranded Sivantos. In these roles, he managed the acquisition and integration of companies and coordinated global sales and marketing functions.

"Florian has been instrumental in our success so far to bring Lenire to as many people with tinnitus as possible and holds critical experience in corporate development that he will bring to our strategic ambitions. I'm delighted to be working with him closely as we look to further support underserved patient populations through our planned corporate agenda", says Ross O'Neill.

"I'm looking forward to working with our dedicated global teams to progress our corporate development agenda to further support patient populations through best-in-class treatment interventions", says Florian Elsaesser, Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer.

Lenire is a bimodal neuromodulation device which has shown in large-scale clinical trials to reduce the symptoms of tinnitus by combining mild electrical pulses to the tongue with sound stimulationi. It's currently available in eight countries in Europe through prescription by qualified healthcare professionals.

For more information please contact:

Neil Doyle

Global Director of Marketing,

Neuromod Devices

[email protected]

00 353 85 822 9021

About Neuromod Devices Ltd

Founded in 2010, Neuromod Devices Ltd. is a medical technology company headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. Neuromod specialises in the design and development of neuromodulation technologies to address the clinical needs of underserved patient populations who live with chronic and debilitating conditions. The lead application of Neuromod's technology is in the field of tinnitus, where Neuromod has completed extensive clinical trials to confirm the efficacy of its non-invasive neuromodulation platform in this common disorder. Neuromod's tinnitus treatment device, Lenire, is currently available throughout Europe. For more information visit www.neuromoddevices.com.

About Lenire

Lenire is the first non-invasive bimodal neuromodulation tinnitus treatment device shown to soothe and relieve tinnitus in a large-scale clinical triali. Lenire has CE-mark certification for the treatment of tinnitus under the supervision of an appropriately qualified healthcare professional in Europe. Further details about Lenire including a list of providers can be found at www.lenire.com.

Connect with Neuromod Devices Ltd

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/neuromod/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NeuromodDevices

Website: https://www.neuromoddevices.com

References

iConlon et al., Sci. Transl. Med. 12, eabb2830 (2020)

SOURCE Neuromod Devices
RICHMOND, Va., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Norfolk Southern Corporation (NYSE: NSC) today announced its donation of the complete collection of historical documents and archives from predecessor company Norfolk and Western Railway to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture (VMHC).

The collection dates to the 1840s and includes thousands of photographs and glass plate negatives, as well as business records, annual reports, blueprints, plans, bridge drawings, advertisements, portraits, and three-dimensional artifacts from predecessor railroads that together provide a fascinating look into the growth of rail transportation across the eastern United States. The company will also donate $750,000 to support the collection in perpetuity.

"The Commonwealth of Virginia has played a pivotal role in our history, and we are incredibly proud of the contributions it has made to our success," said Jim Squires, Chairman and CEO of Norfolk Southern. "This important piece of history belongs in Virginia, and we're confident that our archives will be in excellent hands with the Virginia Museum of History & Culture."

Norfolk and Western originated as a nine-mile single-track line in 1838 to connect Petersburg and City Point (now Hopewell), Virginia. In the years to follow, more than 200 railroad companies were built, merged, reorganized, and consolidated until the company merged with Southern Railway in 1982 to create Norfolk Southern. Since then, Norfolk Southern has grown to become one of the nation's largest freight railroads and premier transportation companies. In total, the archives represent the history of Norfolk and Western and its predecessor companies.

"Railroads have played a critical role in the expansion of both passenger travel and commercial transportation in the United States," said VMHC President & CEO Jamie Bosket. "With the addition of the Norfolk and Western collection, the VMHC now houses one of the most significant railroad archives in the U.S. We're thrilled to preserve this iconic history and to make it publicly available to students and teachers, researchers, and railroad enthusiasts."

The $750,000 grant will allow the VMHC to digitize, catalog and preserve the collection. As part of the donation, Norfolk Southern has created a special fund to allow the VHMC to hire interns from underrepresented communities to support the museum's work annually for the next five years, beginning this coming fall academic semester.

Among the historic materials in the archives are publicity materials including radio program scripts and posters, timetables, and rolling stock records as well as advertisements, contracts, an extensive collection of photographs, and construction plans for rail stations and yards.

About Norfolk Southern

Norfolk Southern Corporation (NYSE: NSC) is one of the nation's premier transportation companies, moving the goods and materials that drive the U.S. economy. Norfolk Southern connects customers to markets and communities to economic opportunity, with safe, reliable, and sustainable shipping solutions. The company's service area includes 22 states and the District of Columbia, every major container port in the eastern United States, and a majority of the U.S. population and manufacturing base.

About the Virginia Museum of History & Culture

The Virginia Museum of History & Culture is owned and operated by the Virginia Historical Society  a private, non-profit organization established in 1831. The historical society is the oldest cultural organization in Virginia, and one of the oldest and most distinguished history organizations in the nation. For use in its state history museum and its renowned research library, the historical society cares for a collection of nearly nine million items representing the ever-evolving story of Virginia.

SOURCE Norfolk Southern Corporation
Current members will also have a chance to win tickets to The Smoker's Club Festival

LOS ANGELES, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Nugg Club , the nation's first cannabis subscription box delivering over $225 worth of personalized, top-shelf products for only $99 a month, today announced a co-branded box collaboration with multi-platinum-selling, GRAMMY Award and Golden Globe Award-nominated recording artist Wiz Khalifa's brand Khalifa Kush , going live on the add-ons menu for purchase by current members on April 11th. The limited edition box features all Khalifa Kush products, including an exclusive Santa Cruz Shredder x Khalifa Kush rolling tray & grinder, and a custom Wiz curated playlist.

One lucky Nugg Club member will win a Rolling Papers vinyl album signed by Wiz. Additionally, Nugg Club is selling 5 additional vinyls exclusively to members and donating all the proceeds to the Michael Thompson Clemency Project joining Cresco's SEED initiative in supporting their mission to alleviate the injustices caused by mass incarceration, racial disparities, and emotional, physical and mental abuse across the criminal justice system.

"Nugg Club is proud to be partnering with Khalifa Kush on this co-branded box," said Alex Milligan, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Nugg Club. "We remain committed to curating the best products on the market and unlocking exclusive access to new product drops and collabs for our members. Wiz Khalifa is an outstanding artist, and the Khalifa Kush brand provides an experience even the most seasoned cannabis lovers will enjoy. We can't wait to get this box into the hands of our members."

"After our recent expansion to the California market, we're excited to launch an exclusive offering to Nugg Club's direct-to-consumer audience, who have come to expect nothing but the finest products," said DJ Saul, CEO of Khalifa Kush. "We've followed the Nugg Club journey since their initial launch, and their commitment to both quality and customer experience makes this collaboration a natural extension of our brand."

Enter to win a Wiz Khalifa signed Rolling Papers vinyl at wizprizeclub.com . Each Nugg Club member who purchases the co-branded box will have a chance to win tickets to see Wiz Khalifa perform at the Smoker's Club Festival on Saturday April 30th at Glen Helen Amphitheater in Southern California.

About Khalifa Kush

Khalifa Kush products were first commercialized in the U.S. in 2015 by global icon Wiz Khalifa. The company has achieved continued growth and success by focusing on high quality and highly sought-after products in legalized cannabis markets. The Khalifa Kush brand offers a growing lineup of flower, pre-rolls, vapes, edibles, and concentrates, powered by proprietary genetics. Khalifa Kush is available in select markets including California, Nevada, Arizona Oregon, and Utah. Learn more about our upcoming launches in Michigan and Florida + shop apparel at KHALIFAKUSH.COM.

About Nugg Club

Nugg Club is California's first subscription cannabis box and helps anyone explore the world of cannabis at 50-60% below retail. The company is redefining the cannabis shopping experience by surprising consumers each month with carefully curated premium products matched to their preferences, and helping brands to connect with thousands of eager customers. Nugg Club was launched in 2020 by the team behind NuggMD , the nation's leading medical cannabis technology platform, serving patients in 13 states. For more information about Nugg Club, visit nuggclub.com .

Media Contact:

Renee Cotsis

MATTIO Communications

[email protected]

Khalifa Kush / Wiz Khalifa Contact:

Dvora Englefield @ [email protected]

Courtni Asbury @ [email protected]

Chris Iacullo @ [email protected]

SOURCE Nugg Club
WASHINGTON, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The following is a statement from Teamsters General President Sean O'Brien on the full Senate's consideration of D.C. Circuit Appeals Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court as the newest associate justice beginning this fall.

"Workers deserve advocates in all branches of government. But as we've seen in recent years, that is lacking on the nation's highest court. Confirming Judge Jackson to the bench is an important step towards making sure the voices of hardworking Americans are heard in matters before the Supreme Court.

"Judge Jackson understands the concerns of the middle class because she grew up a member of it. And her decisions prove it, like the one she wrote on behalf of the federal appeals court in February where it overturned a Trump administration policy directive that restricted the bargaining power of public sector workers. She believes the law supports the rights of workers to join together and bargain for better wages, benefits and working conditions.

"If senators are truly looking out for their constituents, they will vote to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson."

Founded in 1903, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters represents 1.2 million hardworking men and women throughout the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. Visit www.teamster.org for more information. Follow us on Twitter @Teamsters and "like" us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/teamsters.

Contact:

Ted Gotsch, (202) 508-6437

[email protected]

SOURCE International Brotherhood of Teamsters
COLUMBUS, Ohio, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Management Council of the Ohio Education Computer Network (OECN) and Ohio's Information Technology Centers (ITCs) are pleased to announce the launch of the Ohio Education Job Board for K-12 jobs in Ohio. This job board incorporates an intuitive job listing page that includes search function filters and an interactive map.

Built specifically for the education industry, the Ohio Education Job Board is the central hub for K-12 jobs in Ohio. From teachers to bus drivers to support personnel, applicants looking for a position in an Ohio school district can search by zip code, job category, grade level, and/or job type. The interactive map enables prospective applicants to see available job postings in a specific search area making it easy to find open positions in desired locations. By drilling down on the job board map, applicants can identify the type and number of positions that are posted in each district.

"States all across our country are experiencing this shortage in K-12 education personnel," stated Geoff Andrews, Chief Executive Officer of the Management Council. "The Ohio Education Job Board is a compelling recruiting tool that will draw motivated job seekers to our state. This tool will aid school HR officers by promoting job openings, enable school leaders to find candidates they are seeking, offer prospective staff the ability to drill down to focus on the ideal matching criteria, and provide for a seamless applicant experience."

School districts posting open positions to the job board provide applicants with a positive experience through a simple search process and comprehensive offerings. With no need for districts to post positions in multiple places, the Ohio Education Job Board is a one-stop shop for prospective applicants. Find the Ohio Education Job Board at ohiok12jobs.schoolspring.com.

Ohio's Information Technology Centers work together through a statewide network known as the Ohio Education Computer Network (OECN). The Management Council coordinates and supports the collaborative efforts of the OECN, which implements a broad spectrum of academic and administrative technologies across Ohio's PreK-12 education system. For more information, visit managementcouncil.org.

Contact:

Jessica Madison, The Management Council

614.840.9810

[email protected]

SOURCE The Management Council
"OpenSeed's meditation pods can play an important role in facilitating meditation in the workplace, residences, and commercial spaces," said Dr. Deepak Chopra, best-selling author and world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. "The pod is a unique environment that beautifully integrates industrial design, technology, and content that helps ease stress and expand self-awareness. Given the mental health crisis we are facing, OpenSeed may offer the type of solution that could help many people reap the vast benefits of meditation" continued Chopra.

Research Shows OpenSeed Pods Significantly Boost Meditation Effectiveness

Research has shown that meditating in OpenSeed pods significantly increases the effectiveness of meditation. A study conducted in Japan, supervised by Dr. Michihito Sugawara, neurosurgeon and director of Sugawara Neurosurgery Clinic, tested 30 subjects over a period of three weeks and found that isolated and controlled environments have great potential to quickly and effectively quiet the mind, reduce stress and enhance peak performance.

OpenSeed plans on conducting further scientific studies on intentionally designed micro-environments for meditation that include content by Deepak Chopra and leading sound designers, therapists, and meditation teachers.

Iris' Unique Design Integrates Digital with Physical

Yves Behar, founder and CEO of SF-based fuseproject and the product designer behind numerous award-winning products for Herman Miller, Samsung, L'Oreal, and many others said: "Our design for Iris is a womb-shaped pod that aims to quiet the chatter and help us re-focus on our wellbeing. The Iris design is assembled on-site and made with sustainably sourced materials and recycled textiles. A touch screen provides meditation options, and the successful integration of digital with the physical gives the mind and body the rest it needs to heal. Day-to-day stress is unavoidable, but by being present and more aware of our feelings, we might also be able to achieve higher levels of emotional intelligence"

Available for pre-order starting today , the Iris will retail at $16,000 or about $485/month plus a monthly subscription when it launches Q1 2023, with a discount available for those that reserve a pod ahead of time.

Compelling Need for Meditation Pods

Mental health issues have cost individuals and companies billions of dollars in medical bills, lost productivity, and wellbeing. Although approaches exist for employee wellbeing (e.g., corporate retreats, wellness apps, and in-house meditation facilitators), most workplaces don't offer spaces conducive for meditation. According to a research report by JLL, a world leader in real estate services, only 17% of workers have access to relaxation spaces.

To solve this problem, OpenSeed is developing a hardware, software, and content platform that powers a network of pods designed for meditation and wellness experiences. OpenSeed creates environments that are explicitly designed to induce calm and facilitate access to elevated states of mental wellbeing.

"Millions of people already know about the benefits of meditation, yet they find it difficult to start and maintain a consistent practice. We have a solution that was born at the intersection of industrial design, sound, music, technology, and ancient wisdom. It provides a conducive space to learn and practice meditation, even in busy, high-stress environments like the workplace and hospitals" said Jonathan Marcoschamer, OpenSeed's Founder and CEO.

ABOUT DEEPAK CHOPRA

DEEPAK CHOPRA MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation , a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global , a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his 92nd book, Abundance (Harmony Books) provides an enlightening guide to success, fulfillment, wholeness, and plenty, offering practical advice on how to cultivate a sense of abundance in times of fear and insecurity. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as "one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century." www.deepakchopra.com

ABOUT YVES BEHAR AND FUSEPROJECT

fuseproject is an award-winning industrial design and branding firm based in San Francisco. The firm was founded in 1999 by Yves Behar with a fundamental drive to enhance the way people experience and engage with a product. fuseproject works globally and across a wide array of industries that include technology, furniture, fashion, environmental design and consumer goods. wwww.fuseproject.com

ABOUT OPENSEED

OpenSeed develops calm-inducing meditation pods for the workplace and other commercial and residential spaces. Our mission is to positively impact the lives of millions of people by facilitating access to elevated states of awareness, where creativity flows and productivity peaks.

OpenSeed is currently fundraising via equity crowdfunding on Wefunder . Legal Disclosure .

CONTACT

Jonathan Marcoschamer

[email protected]

www.openseed.co

SOURCE Openseed
NEW YORK, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Owl Rock Capital Corporation (NYSE: ORCC) ("ORCC") today announced it will release its financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2022 on Wednesday, May 4, 2022 after market close. ORCC invites all interested persons to its webcast / conference call on Thursday, May 5, 2022 at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time to discuss its first quarter ended March 31, 2022 financial results.

Conference Call Information:

The conference call will be broadcast live at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time on the Investor Resources section of ORCC's website at www.owlrockcapitalcorporation.com. Please visit the website to test your connection before the webcast.

Participants are also invited to access the conference call by dialing one of the following numbers:

Domestic: 1 (888) 440-4182

International: (646) 960-0653

Conference ID: 7406736

All callers will need to enter the Conference ID followed by the # sign and reference "Owl Rock Capital Corporation" once connected with the operator. All callers are asked to dial in 10-15 minutes prior to the call so that name and company information can be collected.

Replay Information:

An archived replay will be available for 14 days via a webcast link located on the Investor Resources section of ORCC's website, and via the dial-in numbers listed below:

Domestic: 1 (800) 770-2030

International: (647) 362-9199

Conference ID: 7406736

About Owl Rock Capital Corporation

Owl Rock Capital Corporation (ORCC) is a specialty finance company focused on lending to U.S. middle-market companies. As of December 31, 2021, ORCC had investments in 143 portfolio companies with an aggregate fair value of $12.7 billion. ORCC has elected to be regulated as a business development company under the Investment Company Act of 1940, as amended. ORCC is externally managed by Owl Rock Capital Advisors LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser that is an indirect affiliate of Blue Owl Capital Inc. ("Blue Owl") (NYSE: OWL) and part of Owl Rock, a division of Blue Owl. Owl Rock, together with its subsidiaries, is a New York based direct lending platform with approximately $39.2 billion of assets under management as of December 31, 2021.

Certain information contained herein may constitute "forward-looking statements" that involve substantial risks and uncertainties. Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors and undue reliance should not be placed thereon. These forward-looking statements are not historical facts, but rather are based on current expectations, estimates and projections about ORCC, its current and prospective portfolio investments, its industry, its beliefs and opinions, and its assumptions. Words such as "anticipates," "expects," "intends," "plans," "will," "may," "continue," "believes," "seeks," "estimates," "would," "could," "should," "targets," "projects," "outlook," "potential," "predicts" and variations of these words and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, some of which are beyond ORCC's control and difficult to predict and could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or forecasted in the forward-looking statements including, without limitation, the risks, uncertainties and other factors identified in ORCC's filings with the SEC. Investors should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which apply only as of the date on which ORCC makes them. ORCC does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements or any other information contained herein, except as required by applicable law.

Investor Contact:

Dana Sclafani

212-651-4705

[email protected]

Media Contact:

Prosek Partners

David Wells / Josh Clarkson

[email protected]

SOURCE Owl Rock Capital Corporation
College partners with Uwill to expand capacity and support diverse needs

PHILADELPHIA, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Uwill, the leading teletherapy solution for colleges and students, today announced a partnership with Peirce College to help meet demand for counseling on campus. As the need for mental health support increases nationwide, Uwill's solution accounts for student preferences to immediately match them with licensed and available counselors.

"As an institution whose primary focus is on serving working adult learners, it's vitally important for us to provide mental health solutions that students can access on their own schedule, without having to worry about wait times or limited availability," said Brad Hodge, Vice President, Enrollment Management & Student Services at Peirce College. "By providing personalized, 24/7 access to teletherapy, Uwill is removing the most persistent barriers to counseling and support  and helping us fulfill our mission to give students all the resources they need to succeed."

Peirce College is launching this new teletherapy solution at a time of increasing mental health challenges reported at campuses nationwide. Prior to 2020, up to 60 percent of college students reported experiencing significant anxiety, and according to recent research, more than eight in 10 college students have seen their mental health negatively affected over the past two years.

"Too often, the availability of counselors and therapists on campus fails to keep up with student need  a challenge that has only increased over the past two years," said Michael London, founder and CEO of Uwill. "This is about expanding the capacity of Peirce College's mental health solution to remove barriers for students to achieve educational success."

Utilizing its proprietary technology and counselor team, Uwill is the only secure student-to-therapist matching platform and wellness environment. The solution offers an immediate connection to an available licensed counselor based on student preferences, all modalities of teletherapy (video, phone, chat, and message), 24/7/365 emergency access, group sessions, live events, detailed reporting and support. Uwill partners with more than 100 institutions worldwide including the University of North Carolina, Fairfield University, University of San Francisco, American Public University System, and the Massachusetts and Michigan state higher education systems to ensure their online mental health and wellness environment meets student needs.

About Uwill

Uwill has become the leading mental health and wellness solution for colleges and students. Utilizing its proprietary technology and counselor team, the company offers users an immediate connection to an available therapist while considering all their preferences. Uwill's secure environment facilitates video, phone, chat and message sessions. In addition, Uwill offers 24/7/365 emergency assistance, and instructor-led events to complement therapy. Its proprietary tool, Ucollaborate, allows for seamless coordination of care and full transparency with campus health centers. Uwill has been described by mental health advocates as the most effective and cost-efficient way to support students. Clients include University of Maryland, Stevens Institute of Technology, Reed College, and University of California, Santa Barbara. Uwill is the teletherapy education partner for NASPA. For more information, visit uwill.com

About Peirce College

Established in 1865, Peirce College is Philadelphia's only institution of higher education dedicated exclusively to serving adults. A private, nonprofit college, Peirce is a pioneer in online education and a leader in the assessment of prior learning. Today, Peirce continues its tradition of serving the unique needs of working adults through stackable, career-focused programs at the undergraduate and graduate level that provide students with academic excellence, flexibility and personalized support. Learn more at www.peirce.edu.

SOURCE Uwill
"Upon first hearing of CartiHeal's groundbreaking technology, we knew of the company's immense potential. In fact, we were CartiHeal's first investors," said Peregrine's Co-founder and Managing General Partner, Boaz Lifschitz . "Over USD 7 billion has been spent worldwide to deliver a cartilage treatment technology which has yielded insufficient treatment options, until now. It has been thrilling to work with Nir Altschuler and his team to help bring to market a cartilage treatment that will improve the quality of life of millions of people around the world."

Over a decade ago, CartiHeal began its journey as part of Peregrine's award-winning "Incentive" Technology Incubator. Here, Peregrine assisted the early-stage company with its business and product development offering creative business solutions and funding connections. Over the course of its partnership with CartiHeal, Peregrine, offered guidance on business operations and assisted with the company's staffing.

Founded by Nir Altschuler in 2009, CartiHeal produces a much-needed, biodegradable treatment for cartilage and osteochondral defects in arthritic and non-arthritic knee-joints. Following a robust clinical study in which 251 patients were enrolled in 26 sites in the US, Europe, and Israel, where the superiority of the Agili-C implant over the current Surgical Standard of Care (SSOC), microfracture and debridement, was confirmed for the treatment of knee joint surface lesions, chondral and osteochondral defects. Previously, the implant was granted Breakthrough Device Designation by the FDA in 2020.

"It is thrilling to receive FDA approval which will allow us to provide quality care for millions of patients that would have otherwise been faced with no viable treatment for degenerative knee cartilage," said Mr. Altschuler, CartiHeal's Founder & CEO. "Through many years of partnership with Peregrine, we achieved a scientific breakthrough. As a former manager at the investment firm, it has been incredible to experience first-hand the commitment Peregrine makes in its portfolio companies, from capital and connections to business development and guidance."

This successful exit follows Peregrine's USD 300 million exit from Cardiovalve, a pioneering transcatheter mitral and tricuspid valve replacement company earlier this year, bringing total proceeds of the deal to USD 1 billion.

ABOUT PEREGRINE VENTURES

Peregrine Ventures, Israel's first dedicate healthcare fund, is committed to improving patients' quality of life by investing in and supporting game-changing healthcare opportunities. For over 20 years, Peregrine has supported its portfolio companies and provided them with the valuable knowledge they need to build winning business strategies, create successful strategic alliances, recruit strong teams, and bring healthcare innovations to life. From seed-stage opportunities to more mature companies, Peregrine's specifically defined funds offer portfolio companies complete, end-to-end investment solutions that bring healthcare innovations to fruition. Peregrine's robust portfolio includes fast growing companies, many of them with a valuation of hundreds of millions of dollars in the fields of pharma-oncology, medical devices, implants, and digital health. To date, Peregrine has had 15 successful exits, with an accumulated value of more than USD 2 billion. For more information, please visit www.peregrinevc.com.

ABOUT CARTIHEAL

CartiHeal, a privately held medical device company headquartered in Israel and New Jersey, develops proprietary implants for the treatment of cartilage and osteochondral defects in traumatic and osteoarthritic joints. For more information, please visit www.cartiheal.com.

PEREGRINE VENTURES

WWW.PEREGRINEVC.COM,

RUBENSTEIN PUBLIC RELATIONS

CONTACT: SARA KLEIN, 212-805-3018

[email protected]

SOURCE Peregrine Ventures
The reimagined LD is now loaded with all-new technology and innovation for 2022

SUMNER, Texas, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- PJ Trailers today announced exciting new updates to their top-selling flatdeck trailer, the Low-Pro Flatdeck with Duals (LD). While the new LD continues to distinguish itself with the same heavy-duty 25,000 GVWR, it now comes standard with upgraded features for improved looks and performance, including an all-new gooseneck design, coupler, frame design, suspension, and more.

PJ Trailers LD Low Pro Flatdeck with Duals

"We've built the new LD for the next generation of hauling," said Jerad Guest, Director of Product Development for PJ Trailers. "The standard features and options we've included are a real testament to PJ Trailers' commitment to innovation and product improvement, and will help the LD continue to bring incredible value to our dealers and the customers they support."

Many of the new standard features, like the Demco EZ Latch Gooseneck Coupler and TwistGuard frame design, make the LD ideal for hauling heavy loads, helping further cement this unique model as a favorite for both heavy construction and hotshot transportation.

Giving the LD an all-new modern look, the ProBeam gooseneck is constructed from a single piece of steel and redistributes stress across the neck's frame for fewer stress points.

The TwistGuard frame design provides T-shaped intersecting pipe supports to reduce frame twist and improve torque control, with testing showing up to a 60% reduction in twist compared to non-torque tube trailer frames.

In another industry-first, the LD is the first gooseneck to feature the Demco EZ Latch Gooseneck Coupler. Designed in a trusted partnership with Demco, this cutting-edge coupler provides easy hitching with help from Demco's EZ Latch system in a custom gooseneck housing.

Other innovative features on the LD now include the Dexter HDSS Adjustable Suspension, Monster Steps with a new retractable design, and new hold-down latches for the optional Monster Ramps providing reduced noise and vibration while in transit.

Learn more about the Low-Pro Flatdeck with Duals (LD) at PJTrailers.com or reach out to your local PJ Trailers Dealer.

About PJ Trailers

Since 1991, PJ Trailers has been driving the trailer industry forward with innovation and technology. PJ manufactures a variety of superbly constructed, prograde trailers, including flatdecks, deckovers, tilts, dumps, car haulers, and utilities. With more than 300 Dealers located throughout the US and Canada, PJ offers unmatched value, services, and support for end-users and dealers alike. PJ Trailers is a brand of ATW, North America's leading manufacturer, distributor, and retailer of professional and consumer grade trailers, truck equipment, parts, and accessories.

Contact

Lauren Andrich

469.607.2484

[email protected]

SOURCE PJ Trailers
CHICAGO, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the report "Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) & Polybutylene Terephthalate (PBT) Resins Market by PET Type, PET Application (Bottles, Films, Food Packaging), PBT Application (Electrical and Electronics, Automotive, Consumer Appliance), Region - Global Forecast to 2026", published by MarketsandMarkets, the global PET resin market size was USD 28.1 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach USD 52.2 billion by 2026. It is anticipated to register a CAGR of 6.1% between 2021 and 2026. PET is the only recyclable polyester and is used in different applications compared to the other thermosetting materials. The global PBT resin market size was USD 3.1 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach USD 5.3 billion by 2026. It is anticipated to register a CAGR of 5.1% between 2021 and 2026. The automotive manufacturers are using PBT materials in their car production to overcome the challenges, such as reducing fuel consumption, CO2 emissions, and lightweight regulations by the European Commission. PBT is lightweight compared to steel and aluminum used in automotive cars. Therefore, it drives the demand for PBT.

Download PDF Brochure: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=261832731

Browse in-depth TOC on "Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) & Polybutylene Terephthalate (PBT) Resins Market"

148  Tables

71  Figures

227  Pages

View Detailed Table Of Content Here: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/pet-pbt-resin-market-261832731.html

The transparent & non-transparent PET segment is estimated to account for the largest share of the PET resin market, by resin, during the forecast period.

Based on PET type, the transparent & non-transparent PET segment accounts for the larger share of the overall PET resin market. APET is increasingly used for packaging carbonated soft drinks (CSD), juices, and water. In the food & beverage industry, the CPET application is used in containers and trays that can be used to reheat in the oven or microwave. Additionally, CPET is also used in bottles made for carbonated soft drinks, alcoholic beverages, and other edibles.

The bottles segment is estimated to account for the largest share of the PET resin market, by application, during the forecast period.

Based on PET Application, the bottles segment is expected to dominate the market. The advantages of conventional packaging plastics have increased engineering plastic products such as PET containers and bottles in the packaging sector. The increased consumption of PET has increased the demand from industries like food and beverage, consumer goods, and others for packing materials.

The electrical & electronics segment is estimated to account for the largest share of the PBT resin market, by application, during the forecast period.

Based on PBT Application, electrical & electronics is projected to register the highest CAGR during the forecast period. There is increasing demand for PBT in manufacturing high-voltage and sensitive electronic sensors in electric vehicles (EVs). This is positively impacting the PBT resin market growth.

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PET & PBT resins market in Asia Pacific is expected to register the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

The Asia Pacific PET & PBT resins market is projected to register the highest CAGR during the forecast period. The Asia Pacific region has a high number of players in industries such as automobile and electrical & electronics which are end users of PET & PBT resins. The Asia Pacific is the highest populated region and also has the highest number of emerging countries which account for the major market growth as emerging countries focus on industrialization.

Leading global companies are shifting their production facilities, establishing sales offices, and expanding their distribution channel to regions, such as China, India, and Southeast Asia, to ensure sustainable demand and increase their market share. The gradual shift of manufacturing facilities to countries having high demand and lower production cost is positively influencing the market growth.

Major players operating in the PET & PBT resins market include Indorama Ventures Limited (Bangkok), Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation (Japan), SABIC (Saudi Arabia), BASF (Germany), Alpek (Mexico).

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Browse Adjacent Market: Resins and Polymers Market Research Reports & consulting

Related Reports:

Recycled PET Market by Type (Flakes, Chips), Grade (Grade A, Grade B), Source (Bottles & Containers, Films & sheets), Application (Bottles, fiber, Sheets, Strapping), and Region (APAC, North America, Europe, MEA, South America) - Global Forecast to 2026

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/recycled-pte-market-248965407.html

Pet Packaging Market by Form (Amorphous PET, Crystalline PET), Pack type (Bottles & jars, Bags & pouches, Trays, Lids/Caps & closures, others), Filling Technology (Hot fill, Cold fill, Aseptic fill, others), Packaging Type (Rigid, Flexible), End-use industry - Forecast to 2021

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/pet-packaging-market-192975723.html

About MarketsandMarkets

MarketsandMarkets provides quantified B2B research on 30,000 high growth niche opportunities/threats which will impact 70% to 80% of worldwide companies' revenues. Currently servicing 7500 customers worldwide including 80% of global Fortune 1000 companies as clients. Almost 75,000 top officers across eight industries worldwide approach MarketsandMarkets for their painpoints around revenues decisions.

Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model  GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors. MarketsandMarkets now coming up with 1,500 MicroQuadrants (Positioning top players across leaders, emerging companies, innovators, strategic players) annually in high growth emerging segments. MarketsandMarkets is determined to benefit more than 10,000 companies this year for their revenue planning and help them take their innovations/disruptions early to the market by providing them research ahead of the curve.

MarketsandMarkets's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "Knowledge Store" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets.

Contact:

Mr. Aashish Mehra

MarketsandMarkets INC.

630 Dundee Road

Suite 430

Northbrook, IL 60062

USA: +1-888-600-6441

Email: [email protected]

Research Insight: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/ResearchInsight/pet-pbt-resin-market.asp

Visit Our Website: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/

Content Source: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/pet-pbt-resin.asp

SOURCE MarketsandMarkets
ATLANTA, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- On January 13, 2022, Practolytics LLC ("Practolytics") provided a media statement related to a data security incident it learned of in November 2021. This subsequent statement provides additional information related to the incident.

Around November 30, 2021, Practolytics discovered that a report generated by a client containing information related to COVID testing conducted by Priority MedExpress, which would normally be deactivated following initial download, remained active. Upon discovery, Practolytics took immediate steps to deactivate and delete the download link to prevent further access or dissemination. Since the discovery of the incident, Practolytics engaged cybersecurity experts to conduct an investigation to determine the source and scope of the incident and ensure a similar incident will not occur in the future.

As part of the investigation, Practolytics confirmed that minor and adult information was accessible in the report, which may have included name, age, gender, address, date of birth, Social Security number, email address, appointment date and type, provider name, and insurance information. Between January 13 and January 18, 2022, 1,125 individuals were notified by USPS first-class mail of the incident and provided with information on how to protect their personal information. A call center has been set up with IDX to answer any questions that individuals may have about the incident and can be reached at 1-800-939-4170 between the hours of 9:00 A.M. to 9:00 P.M. Eastern Time from Monday to Friday.

The security of information is our top priority at Practolytics, and we are committed to safeguarding data and privacy. We deeply regret any worry or inconvenience that this matter may cause.

SOURCE Practolytics LLC
The investment will enable Productsup to pursue product development and M&A activity that will further its global expansion and mission to empower brands, retailers, marketplaces, and service providers to tell a consistent story across all commerce channels and win more customers

BERLIN, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Productsup , the leading P2C software company, today announced a Series B funding round for more than $70 million (65 million) led by Bregal Milestone , a leading European technology growth capital firm, with participation from its existing investor, Nordwind Capital . The investment will enable Productsup to further advance its product development, target merger and acquisition opportunities, strengthen its partner network, and expand to new markets to solidify its position as the leading global solution for commerce success.

"What was once a simple task of bringing products to consumers has become an overwhelmingly complex process for today's businesses," said Vincent Peters, CEO at Productsup. "We're in a new era of commerce where outdated approaches are no longer effective. This funding will allow us to work toward our mission to radically rethink how companies manage their products within the commerce ecosystem, ultimately empowering our customers to turn complexity into a competitive advantage."

With global ecommerce sales projected to reach over $5 trillion by 2022 , the market is ripe with opportunities for commerce businesses to scale. But research shows that more than one-third (37%) of decision-makers are concerned with the consistency of product information being passed through their tech stack. Productsup fills this gap, working with over 900 global brands, retailers, marketplaces, and service providers to help them gain control over their omnichannel strategy in order to gain market share. Processing over two trillion products per month, the Productsup product-to-consumer (P2C) platform is the only solution available that provides a holistic view of data across every product touchpoint. The platform enables companies to tell a consistent product story across more than 2,500 marketing and selling channels, which drives higher conversions and reduces time-to-market.

Productsup has seen a recent acceleration in its business thanks to its unique set of enterprise capabilities, growing net new ARR by over 60% in the last twelve months. Productsup currently boasts a gross revenue retention rate of 90% and a net revenue retention rate of 120%. Beyond financial gains, the company has increased its headcount from 150 to 300 employees, expanded its leadership team, and was named a leader in P2C management by Constellation Research all within the last year.

"Our decision to partner with Productsup was based on its long-term, sustainable trajectory as a mission-critical enterprise-grade commerce solution," said Cyrus Shey, Managing Partner of Bregal Milestone. "Whereas alternative vendors mostly offer point solutions, Productsup uniquely addresses the needs of the evolving commerce market for a single view of all product information value chains and offers seamless, end-to-end product data control  across all global channels and in real-time."

Productsup will work closely with Bregal Milestone's in-house value creation team, Milestone Performance Partners, to identify and invest in various product development initiatives to further accelerate Productsup's growth. As part of the funding round, Bregal Milestone will partner with existing investor Nordwind Capital who initially invested in the company in 2017 and still retains a majority stake in Productsup after the transaction.

"This investment substantiates the effort and work we have put forth into transforming Productsup to be the P2C category leader," said Christian Plangger, Managing Partner of Nordwind Capital. "We are excited to partner with a renowned technology-focused growth capital firm like Bregal Milestone to continue to build on the company's successes and accelerate its growth globally."

"With technology advancements like the metaverse on the horizon, these are exciting times for the commerce world," said Marcel Hollerbach, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Productsup. "We are about to enter a new era of innovation, so it's our priority to ensure companies are equipped to manage the proliferation of shopping channels and experiences to become the disruptors  not the disrupted."

For more information about Productsup, please visit www.productsup.com .

About Productsup

Productsup frees brands, retailers, service providers, and marketplaces from commerce anarchy. The Productsup product-to-consumer (P2C) platform processes over two trillion products a month, empowering long-term business success as the only global, strategic, scalable platform managing all product-to-consumer information value chains across any platform, any channel, any technology. Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Berlin, Productsup has grown to over 250 employees spread out across offices worldwide and works with over 900 brands, including IKEA, Sephora, Beiersdorf, Redbubble, and ALDI. Learn more at www.productsup.com .

About Nordwind Capital (NC Growth Fund)

Nordwind Capital is a German based technology-focused growth capital investor focusing on leading, fast growing technology companies headquartered in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland. Nordwind Capital currently has  500 million assets under management in the main sectors software, eCommerce, media & communications, and tech-enabled services. The firm supports companies with equity investments ranging from 10 to 40 million.

About Bregal Milestone

Bregal Milestone is a leading European technology growth capital firm dedicated to making investments in ambitious, high-growth technology companies. The firm provides growth capital and strategic assistance to support market-leading companies in the technology and technology-enabled services sectors. Bregal Milestone is part of Bregal Investments, a leading global investment firm that has invested over 15 billion to date.

For more information, please visit www.bregalmilestone.com .

CONTACT: Megan Perkins, [email protected]

SOURCE Productsup
Top universities in 51 disciplines revealed

LONDON, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- QS Quacquarelli Symonds  the international higher education think-tank  released the twelfth edition of the QS World University Rankings by Subject : an independent comparative analysis of the performance of 15,200 individual university programs taken by students at 1543 universities in 88 locations across the world, across 51 academic disciplines.

They are part of the annual QS World University Rankings portfolio, which was consulted over 147 million times in 2021 on TopUniversities.com and covered 96,000 times by media and institutions.

QS World University Rankings by Subject 2022

Number of top-10 programs United States 239 United Kingdom 131 Switzerland 31 Singapore 23 Canada 19 The Netherlands 15 Australia 13 Hong Kong S.A.R. 7 France 6 Italy 6 China (Mainland) 4

Global Highlights

 US institutions lead in 28 of the 51 subjects ranked. Harvard University and MIT remain the strongest-performing institutions, ranking number one in twelve subjects.

 Fifteen subject tables are topped by a British university, with the University of Oxford leading in six.

 ETH Zurich is continental Europe's top university, achieving number-one spots in three subjects. Moreover, based on its share of top-10 ranks, Switzerland is the world's third-best higher education sector.

 Australia is the fourth most represented country for the number of entries

 China (Mainland) ranks fifth globally for the number of programs (100), achieving a top-50 rank.

 No university has a larger number of top-50 than Canada's University of Toronto (46).

 The National University of Singapore  Asia's best-performing university  is the world's best for Petroleum Engineering. NUS ranks among the top-10 in sixteen disciplines.

 Japanese higher education is still in relative decline after decades of underfunding for research and PhD students.

 Universidad de Chile achieves Latin America's highest rank, 8th globally in Engineering - Mineral & Mining, followed by UNAM (Mexico) 13th in Modern Languages and Universidade de Sao Paulo (USP) 15th in Dentistry.

 The University of Cape Town remains Africa's most competitive institution, placing 9th globally in Development Studies.

 King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, 6th globally for Petroleum Engineering, achieves the Arab region's highest rank.

Ben Sowter, QS Research Director, said: "Observing performance trends across over 15,000 university departments enables us to see which factors influence success. First, an international outlook  both in terms of faculty body and research relationships  correlates strongly with improved performance. Second, rising universities received targeted investment from governments for over a decade. Third, strengthening relationships with industry correlates with better employment, research, and innovation outcomes."

Methodology

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SOURCE QS Quacquarelli Symonds
Company adds a prominent industry investor as an advisor

AUSTIN, Texas, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Qualtik, a software-as-a-service company that helps community banks and investment funds analyze their commercial real estate loans in real time, has landed Hope Willard Lundt as an advisor.

Hope Willard Lundt

Designed for community banks and commercial real estate (CRE) lenders, Qualtik's software enables deeper and faster analysis of CRE loans. Among other capabilities, the platform provides interactive concentration reports and stress testing. As the market changes, the solution allows banks to analyze scenarios that are important to them and receive instant feedback on the degree of potential risk in their portfolio.

Hope Willard Lundt is an investor in numerous community banks throughout the country and serves on several bank boards. She recently joined Qualtik as an advisor. "Hope not only understands the problems our software is designed to address; she views things through the lens of a bank board member," said Mark Prior, Qualtik Founder, Chairman, and CEO. "Her perspective, network, and knowledge in the space add immediate value. We are very fortunate to have her as a part of our story."

Lundt has seen firsthand the challenges that community banks face when managing and analyzing their CRE portfolios. "The economic and regulatory environment continues to shift for banks," said Lundt. "Resources at community banks are limited and they can't afford to spend their valuable time building and managing spreadsheets. We need our bank leaders to be analyzing their portfolios and making strategic decisions, not collecting and organizing data. I immediately saw how Qualtik helped community banks maximize their talent and time."

Bank boards are tasked with the review of capital ratios, concentration risk, and risk analysis. Qualtik's system allows bank executives to filter and drill in on data and generate intuitive, interactive concentration reports, so they can quickly answer questions from their board and regulators related to those areas.

About Qualtik

Qualtik's software gives CRE lenders real-time analysis with powerful, flexible filtering capabilities. Dually based in Austin and Portland, Oregon, the fintech firm's stress testing software is more configurable than any other tool available today. Stress tests and reports are generated in real time. Qualtik helps CRE lenders accelerate and deepen their portfolio analysis, reporting, and risk management. Website: qualtik.com.

Qualtik media contact:

Mike Fletcher

[email protected]

503-333-4382

SOURCE Qualtik
CONTINUES ITS COVID RELIEF EFFORTS

ANNOUNCES NEW EMPLOYEE INDUCEMENT AWARDS IN CONNECTION WITH RECENT NAVEGATE ACQUISITION

RENTON, Wash., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Radiant Logistics, Inc. (NYSE American: RLGT), a third-party logistics and multimodal transportation services company, today reported that, based upon estimates of its preliminary unaudited results of operations, it expects to report another quarter of record financial results for third fiscal quarter ended March 31, 2022.

"Although our SEC-compliant financial statements have not yet been completed, based on our preliminary unaudited financial statements, we are likely on pace to deliver yet another sequential quarter of record results," said Bohn Crain, Founder and CEO of Radiant Logistics. "Our business remains quite strong across our various service offerings with a particularly strong showing in our project charter business and the first full quarterly contribution from our December 2021 acquisition of Navegate, Inc., whose financial contribution is trending ahead of its historic results of operations. The Navegate acquisition has strengthened Radiant's international services offering, particularly in the areas of customs brokerage, ocean forwarding and drayage services and brings with it a proprietary technology platform to facilitate global trade management. Joe Pelletier, Chad Bickett and the entire Navegate team are doing a fantastic job of servicing our customers in what remains a difficult market environment."

Mr. Crain continued, "We are particularly proud that during the quarter ended March 31, the Radiant team had the opportunity to continue to assist in COVID relief efforts, providing mission critical support to move COVID test kits on behalf of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. The mission, including coordination of cargo at origin, uplift and delivery involved the chartering of 24 aircraft flying 85.4 million COVID test kits into the interior of the US for final mile delivery and ultimate distribution. The program details included over 474,000 cartons of test kits on these 24 flights, followed by the safe and speedy transfer of the kits to over two hundred thirty 53-foot trailers for delivery to strategic centers in the U.S., with the ultimate destination to be into the hands of the American people."

Further regarding its recent acquisition of Navegate, Mr. Crain announced that inducement equity awards were provided to Joseph Pelletier and Chad Bickett, who were each offered a financial incentive as part of their continued employment with Navegate, in the form of the right to purchase 20,000 shares of Radiant's common stock at a price of $6.088 per share, subject to NYSE approval. The inducement awards were granted in accordance with NYSE American Company Guide Section 711(a).

Earnings Call and Webcast Access Information

Radiant Logistics, Inc. will host a conference call to discuss its financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2022 in mid-May and will provide those details closer to the date of that event.

About Radiant Logistics (NYSE American: RLGT)

Radiant Logistics, Inc. ( www.radiantdelivers.com ) is a third-party logistics and multimodal transportation services company delivering advanced supply chain solutions through a network of company-owned and strategic operating partner locations across North America. Through its comprehensive service offering, Radiant provides domestic and international freight forwarding services, truck and rail brokerage services and other value-added supply chain management services, including customs brokerage, order fulfillment, inventory management and warehousing to a diversified account base including manufacturers, distributors and retailers using a network of independent carriers and international agents positioned strategically around the world.

This announcement contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning set forth in United States securities laws and regulations  that is, statements related to future, not past, events. In this context, forward-looking statements often address our expected future business, financial performance and financial condition, and often contain words such as "anticipate," "believe," "estimates," "expect," "future," "intend," "may," "plan," "see," "seek," "strategy," or "will" or the negative thereof or any variation thereon or similar terminology or expressions. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions about us that may cause our actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. We have developed our forward-looking statements based on management's beliefs and assumptions, which in turn rely upon information available to them at the time such statements were made. Such forward-looking statements reflect our current perspectives on our business, future performance, existing trends and information as of the date of this announcement. These include, but are not limited to, our beliefs about future revenue and expense levels, growth rates, prospects related to our strategic initiatives and business strategies, along with express or implied assumptions about, among other things: our continued relationships with our strategic operating partners; the performance of our historic business, as well as the businesses we have recently acquired, at levels consistent with recent trends and reflective of the synergies we believe will be available to us as a result of such acquisitions; our ability to successfully integrate our recently acquired businesses; our ability to locate suitable acquisition opportunities and secure the financing necessary to complete such acquisitions; transportation costs remaining in-line with recent levels and expected trends; our ability to mitigate, to the best extent possible, our dependence on current management and certain of our larger strategic operating partners; our compliance with financial and other covenants under our indebtedness; the absence of any adverse laws or governmental regulations affecting the transportation industry in general, and our operations in particular; the impact of COVID-19 on our operations and financial results; and such other factors that may be identified from time to time in our Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") filings and other public announcements, including those set forth under the caption "Risk Factors" in our Form 10-K for the year ended June 30, 2021 and Form 10-Q for the quarter ended December 31, 2021. In addition, the global economic climate and additional or unforeseen effects from the COVID-19 pandemic amplify many of these risks. With respect to the forward-looking statements regarding our third-quarter results of operations, we have developed such forward-looking statements based on management's assessment of preliminary financial data and internal management prepared unaudited financial statements that have not yet been reviewed by our independent registered public accountants. Accordingly, such statements are inherently uncertain and subject to change as we complete our financial results for the quarter. As we finalize our third-quarter financial statements, we and our independent registered public accountants may identify items that could cause final reported results to be materially different from the preliminary financial estimates presented herein. With respect to other froward-looking statements included within this announcement, All subsequent written and oral forward-looking statements attributable to us, or persons acting on our behalf, are expressly qualified in their entirety by the foregoing. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on our forward-looking statements, as they speak only as of the date made. We disclaim any obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

SOURCE Radiant Logistics, Inc.
The Bolingbrook facility has high-throughput, flexible production lines that will support the production of Real Good Foods' current products, as well as planned innovation platforms including grain-free breaded poultry and zero-sugar Asian entrees. Production capacity will be phased throughout 2022 and is expected to add an additional $200 million in capacity by the end of the year. At full capacity, Bolingbrook is expected to support approximately $250 to $300 million in net sales.

Located only 30 miles outside of Chicago, Bolingbrook is an ideal location for the Company's second manufacturing facility because of the proximity to raw materials and distribution hubs. The highly automated facility is expected to reduce the Company's overall cost structure, increase margins, and accelerate profitability.

"As we continue to work to increase capacity to meet demand for our products, Bolingbrook represents the next step in our growth journey," said Gerard Law, Chief Executive Officer of Real Good Foods. "Opening the Bolingbrook facility within six months of signing the lease demonstrates the speed, agility, and experience of our organization. I am proud of our dedicated team and supplier partners that have worked long hours to open this plant on time and on budget."

Bryan Freeman, Executive Chairman of Real Good Foods, added, "Our mission is to make our craveable, nutritious comfort foods accessible to everyone across the United States and, eventually, throughout the world. Opening Bolingbrook is a significant milestone for the Company as we build capacity and expand our reach."

About The Real Good Food Company

Founded in 2016, Real Good Foods believes there is a better way to enjoy our favorite foods. Its brand commitment, "Real Food You Feel Good About Eating," represents the Company's strong belief that, by eating its food, consumers can enjoy more of their favorite foods and, by doing so, live better lives as part of a healthier lifestyle. Its mission is to make nutritious comfort foods that are low in carbohydrates, high in protein, and made from gluten and grain free real ingredients more accessible to everyone, improve human health, and, in turn, improve the lives of millions of people. Real Good Foods offers delicious options across breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacking occasions available in over 16,000 stores nationwide, including Walmart, Costco, Kroger, and Target, and directly from its website at www.realgoodfoods.com . Learn more about Real Good Foods by visiting its website or on Instagram at @realgoodfoods, where it has one of the largest social media followings of any brand within the frozen food industry today with nearly 420,000 followers.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which statements are subject to considerable risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements include all statements other than statements of historical fact contained in this press release, including statements regarding the demand for the Company's products and the impact of the new facility on its production capacity, cost structure, margins and profitability. The Company has attempted to identify forward-looking statements by using words such as "believe," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "plan," "predict," "project," "should," "will," or "would," and similar expressions or the negative of these expressions.

Forward-looking statements represent management's current expectations and predictions about trends affecting the Company's business and industry and are based on information available as of the time such statements are made. Although the Company does not make forward-looking statements unless it believes it has a reasonable basis for doing so, it cannot guarantee their accuracy or completeness. Forward-looking statements involve numerous known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause its actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements predicted, assumed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Some of the risks and uncertainties that may cause the Company's actual results to materially differ from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements are described in the section entitled "Risk Factors" in its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the period ended December 31, 2021, as well as the other reports it files with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time.

In addition, readers are cautioned that the Company may make future changes to its business and operations in response to the challenges and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, or in response to other business developments, which changes may be inconsistent with the Company's prior forward-looking statements, and which may not be disclosed in future public announcements.

For interviews with Bryan Freeman, Executive Chairman, email [email protected].

Media Contact

Nikole Johnston

[email protected]

Investor Contact

Chris Bevenour

[email protected]

SOURCE Real Good Foods
Keynote speaker Dr. Ira Goldstein will release new research conducted during the pandemic uncovering barriers to homeownership in Pa. for people of color

HARRISBURG, Pa., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency's Housing Forum planned for mid-May includes two keynote speakers, 21 educational sessions, a tour of PHFA's super energy-efficient office extension, and plenty of networking opportunities. PHFA has been leading the Housing Forum biennially for 25 years.

Housing professionals may register now for the May 11 and 12 conference to be held at the Hilton Harrisburg. Feedback from a survey of past forum attendees indicated that people wanted an in-person conference this year if appropriate COVID protocols would be in place. As a result, attendees must show proof of vaccinations or a recent negative COVID test to participate in the forum.

"This year's forum will give housing professionals the chance to meet in person and hear from top-notch experts in the affordable housing field," said PHFA Executive Director and CEO Robin Wiessmann. "We have two excellent keynote speakers planned, as well as a surprise guest speaker at the end of the event. For people working in affordable housing in Pennsylvania, it's a must-attend event."

The opening keynote speaker will be Dr. Ira Goldstein, president of Policy Solutions at Reinvestment Fund in Philadelphia. Dr. Goldstein will unveil findings from the PHFA-sponsored Barriers to Homeownership project. He'll report on his team's extensive research on more than 200 aspirational homebuyers in Pennsylvania, supplemented with in-depth interviews of 40 participants documenting differences in the homebuying experience for Pennsylvanians of varied racial backgrounds. PHFA will use the research to identify ways to improve the homebuying process so that it is more equitable.

The second keynote speaker will be Dr. Elliot Eisenberg, internationally known economist with GraphsandLaughs in Miami. Dr. Eisenberg has spoken at the forum in the past and always gets excellent reviews for his way of making economics relevant and even entertaining. He will review recent economic trends and provide a forecast for the housing economy in Pennsylvania and the country.

The 2022 PHFA Housing Forum offers others benefits for attendees, including:

A wide variety of housing topics covered during 21 educational sessions;

An awards ceremony recognizing some of the state's affordable housing innovators;

An evening networking event for reconnecting with colleagues and meeting new business associates;

A special "Meet and Greet" hour so attendees can get to know some of the PHFA staff with whom they interact but may never have met face-to-face;

A vendor exhibit hall for learning about new housing-related products and services;

A tour of recent additions to PHFA's main office in Harrisburg , which were constructed to Passive House and LEED Platinum standards; and

, which were constructed to Passive House and LEED Platinum standards; and A special closing speaker who will share essential traits for effective leaders.

Early bird pricing for the Housing Forum is only $175 through April 8. After that date, registration increases to $199. The price to attend the Forum on the opening day of the conference is $250.

Detailed information about the 2022 Housing Forum and registration are available at the forum website https://housingforum.phfa.org/. People with questions not answered on the website can contact conference organizer Susan Shermer at [email protected].

About PHFA

The Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency works to provide affordable homeownership and rental housing options for older adults, low- and moderate-income families, and people with special housing needs. Through its carefully managed mortgage programs and investments in multifamily housing developments, PHFA also promotes economic development across the state. Since its creation by the legislature in 1972, it has generated more than $15.9 billion of funding for more than 186,412 single-family home mortgage loans, helped fund the construction of 138,000 rental units, distributed approximately $191 million to support local housing initiatives, and saved the homes of more than 50,520 families from foreclosure. PHFA programs and operations are funded primarily by the sale of securities and from fees paid by program users, not by public tax dollars. The agency is governed by a 14-member board.

Media contact:

Scott Elliott

717-649-6522 (cell)

[email protected]

SOURCE Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency
According to the requirements of epidemic prevention and control, the number of performers for the ceremony was significantly compressed, but the ceremony rituals remained unchanged, fully highlighting the profound connotations of the traditional offering culture.

At 9:50, the memorial ceremony officially started. All the attendees were standing solemnly for the drum beats and bell rings. The 9 bell rings represent the highest etiquette of traditional rituals of the Chinese nation, expressing the infinite admiration and gratitude of all Chinese people to their ancestor, the Yellow Emperor.

During the superb and elegant memorial music and dance performance, Cao Jianming, Vice Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, presented the flower basket to the statue of the Yellow Emperor. Liu Guozhong, Secretary of the CPC Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee and Director of the Standing Committee of the Shaanxi Provincial People's Congress, presented the flower basket on behalf of the representatives of Shaanxi province. Zhao Yide, the governor of Shaanxi Province, delivered the memorial address.

Upon the end of the memorial address, all the attendees made three deep bows to the statue of the Yellow Emperor.

After the memorial music and dance performance, a 56-meter-long Chinese dragon hovered and leaped from the center of the altar, soaring to the sky. The dragon traveled through five thousand years of history, telling the story of the Yellow Emperor ascending to heaven.

As the Memorial Ceremony was completed, the attendees visited the Xuanyuan Hall and the Mausoleum of the Yellow Emperor, they then planted the Qiaoshan cypresses.

Image Attachments Links:

Link: http://asianetnews.net/view-attachment?attach-id=418578

Caption: Renyin (2022) Qingming Festival Memorial Ceremony for the Yellow Emperor was held in Shaanxi.

SOURCE Shaanxi Provincial People's Government
2,800+ equipment items and trucks sold via its automated online bidding system for US$29+ million

SACRAMENTO, Calif, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - More people are shopping online than ever beforeit's the new norm. Time is money and Ritchie Bros. wants to make buying and selling equipment and trucks as easy, efficient, and secure as possible, with a multitude of innovative selling solutions and formats to meet the needs of its customers.

Last week the company sold more than 2,800 items for US$29+ million in its largest-ever automated online Timed Auction event in Sacramento, CA. With the Timed Auction format, buyers place a maximum bid online and the system bids for them up to that amount with regular automated feedback if they are outbidit saves time for buyers and drives strong returns for sellers.

"We introduced Timed Auctions to help us sell attachments and smaller items more efficiently, but over the years we have optimized it to transact items of all sizes and get big returns for our sellers," said Brian Hamre, Regional Sales Manager, Ritchie Bros. "Our Sacramento event last week attracted an average of 37 bids per lot, showcasing the strong buyer demand in the market today. If you have surplus equipment, now is a great time to sell and we have a solution for every situation."

The record-breaking Sacramento Timed Auction event, held March 30, attracted more than 8,250+ bidders from 40+ countries, which is a 25% increase year over year. Approximately 97% of the equipment in the auction was sold to U.S. buyers, including 63% sold to Californians, while the remaining 3% was sold to international buyers from as far away as Guatemala, India, and Australia.

"We are continuously reviewing and updating our technology to ensure we meet the evolving needs of our customers and the industries in which we operate," said Baron Concors, Chief Information Officer, Ritchie Bros. "Our online Timed Auction format provides great convenience and transparency to customers. Timed Auctions provide details on exactly when the item will sell, you're notified if and when you're outbid, we've added item time extensions to allow buyers more time to decide, and you can choose your own language to bid in. We also recently added Timed Auction bidding functionality to our mobile app to make buying online easier than ever."

Big Sellers from Sacramento:

2014 Caterpillar 740B articulated dump truck  US$257,500

articulated dump truck  2005 Kenworth T800 w/ Manitex 28102S 28-ton straight boom truck  US$202,500

2018 Caterpillar 323 hydraulic excavator  US$185,000

2016 Kenworth T800 6x4 twin-axle truck tractor  US$177,500

2018 Peterbilt 367 8x4 tri-axle dump truck  US$157,500

Ritchie Bros. has dozens of upcoming events on its calendar, including weekly IronPlanet and GovPlanet auctions, a three-day Houston, TX auction on April 12  14 with 3,800+ items, and a Timed Auction dealer dismantler event in California on April 22.

About Ritchie Bros.:

Established in 1958, Ritchie Bros. (NYSE and TSX: RBA) is a global asset management and disposition company, offering customers end-to-end solutions for buying and selling used heavy equipment, trucks and other assets. Operating in a number of sectors, including construction, transportation, agriculture, energy, mining, and forestry, the company's selling channels include: Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers, the world's largest industrial auctioneer offering live auction events with online bidding; IronPlanet, an online marketplace with weekly featured auctions and providing the exclusive IronClad Assurance equipment condition certification; Marketplace-E, a controlled marketplace offering multiple price and timing options; Ritchie List, a self-serve listing service for North America; Mascus, a leading European online equipment listing service; Ritchie Bros. Private Treaty, offering privately negotiated sales; and sector-specific solutions GovPlanet, TruckPlanet, and Kruse Energy. The Company's suite of solutions also includes Ritchie Bros. Asset Solutions and Rouse Services LLC, which together provides a complete end-to-end asset management, data-driven intelligence and performance benchmarking system; SmartEquip, an innovative technology platform that supports customers' management of the equipment lifecycle and integrates parts procurement with both OEMs and dealers; plus equipment financing and leasing through Ritchie Bros. Financial Services. For more information about Ritchie Bros., visit RitchieBros.com.

Photos and video for embedding in media stories are available at rbauction.com/media.

SOURCE Ritchie Bros.
SEATTLE, April 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Sea Mar Community Health Centers ("Sea Mar"), a non-profit organization that provides healthcare services to underserved communities in the state of Washington, has learned of additional information involved in a previously-reported data security incident that may have impacted data belonging to current and former Sea Mar patients and other individuals associated with Sea Mar.

On June 24, 2021, Sea Mar was informed that certain Sea Mar data may have been copied from its digital environment by an unauthorized actor. Upon receipt of this information, Sea Mar immediately took steps to secure its environment and commenced an investigation with the assistance of leading, independent cybersecurity experts. Through the investigation, Sea Mar learned that certain data may have been copied from its digital environment between December 2020 and March 2021 and provided notification to individuals known to have been potentially impacted.

In January and March 2022, Sea Mar learned of additional data that may have been copied from its digital environment, and, upon review, identified that such data contained personal and protected health information. The additional data contained the following personal and protected health information: Name, date of birth, and, in some cases, Social Security number and/or driver's license information.

Sea Mar has provided notice of the incident on its website to alert all potentially impacted individuals of this incident and the update related thereto. The notice includes information about the incident and steps that potentially impacted individuals can take to protect their information.

The privacy and protection of personal and protected health information is a top priority for Sea Mar, which deeply regrets any inconvenience or concern this incident may cause. Sea Mar is continuing to work with cybersecurity experts to take steps to prevent a similar incident from occurring in the future. Sea Mar has also established a toll-free call center to answer questions about the incident. Call center representatives are available Monday through Friday from 6:00 am  3:30 pm Pacific Time and can be reached at 1-855-651-2684.

SOURCE Sea Mar Community Health Centers
Apprenticeship Program Seeks to Train a Skilled Workforce and Resolve Labor Shortages

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Snyder Air Conditioning, Plumbing & Electric announces the launch of its new TradeUp Academy, an HVAC Registered Apprenticeship Program. The goal of the program is to help businesses meet the demand for skilled labor during a shortage, while offering workers higher wages and better employment outcomes.

TradeUp Academy is a paid training/apprentice program that offers participants the opportunity to gain experience, learn new skills and support themselves financially while they study and receive on-the-job training. For the trainee, an apprenticeship can offer a cost-effective alternative to the college track. And for the employer, apprenticeship programs are a reliable workforce solution.

"We are excited to launch TradeUp Academy and be a part of the solution to turn around skilled workforce shortages while providing workers with a quality job and competitive living wage," said Brad Kelly, Snyder Air Conditioning, Plumbing & Electric President.

Apprentices in the TradeUp Academy are considered full-time employees of Snyder earning a competitive wage while receiving a minimum of 2,000 hours of firsthand technical training. Snyder is the only company in the Jacksonville market with a 12-month program, making it unique to similar apprenticeships because the trainee moves through the program more quickly. Participants are also eligible for benefits after an introductory period.

TradeUp Academy is geared toward an entry level contractor - no experience required. Participants who do have some industry experience or training are also encouraged to enroll. Trainees follow a path towards certification that starts with online classes for technical studies and in-class lectures from industry experts, then move on to ride-alongs for field observations. Lastly, participants go out into the field in their own truck with support  a system in which the trainee can call in for assistance or request an experienced technician come to their job site for assistance.

TradeUp Academy was recently approved by the Florida Department of Education and is pending approval from the US Department of Labor. A Registered Apprenticeship program ensures a quality education system with notable markers for advancement and employment.

Snyder offers an array of comfort solutions, including HVAC installation, service, and maintenance. Additionally, the company offers residential plumbing and electrical services.

SOURCE Snyder
Leading dental surgical specialty organization continues to strengthen its position in periodontic sector

HOUSTON, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Specialty1a dental surgical specialty organizationis welcoming Capitol Periodontal Group, a Northern California periodontal and dental implant practice with five locations, to its family of partners.

"We are excited to announce a partnership with Capitol Periodontal Group, supporting their periodontal business," said Dr. Daryl Dudum, Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer, Specialty1 Partners. "Their talented group of board-certified periodontists will have access to resources and back-office support to help streamline their practice."

"The importance of comprehensive business and operational support cannot be overstated, as it plays a critical role in a practice's service quality. More than ever, patients want to receive quality care," said Paul P. Towfighi, DDS, MS, of Capitol Periodontal Group. "Our partnership with Specialty1 gives us the opportunity to mitigate administrative work and focus on patient experience with complete visibility."

Headquartered in Northern California, Capitol Periodontal Group features five locations (Sacramento, Elk Grove, Roseville, Folsom, and Davis) offering patients comprehensive and quality periodontal and dental implant care.

"Our partnership with Capitol Periodontal Group exemplifies our commitment to partnering with industry leading dental surgical specialists" said Dr. Matthew Haddad, Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer, Specialty1 Partners.

Like all Specialty1 partner practices, Capitol Periodontal Group will receive operational advantage while remaining in control of their practice's brand, culture, and team. Specialty1 will support the group by implementing business best practices to reduce administrative responsibility, increase efficiency, and prioritize growth.

About Specialty1 Partners

Specialty1 Partners is a leading provider of emergency and essential dental surgical specialty services, with a multi-site, multi-service, scalable platform positioned for growth. Operating across the country, Specialty1 Partners provides comprehensive business and operational support services to its endodontic, oral surgery, and periodontic practices. The company partners with best-in-class dental surgical specialists nationally with the goal to greatly reduce their administrative burden, so they can spend more time at the heart of their practiceproviding high-quality dental care to patients.

For more information, please visit: www.specialty1partners.com.

For Further Information Contact:

Meir Schwarzbaum

305-206-7388

[email protected]

SOURCE Specialty1 Partners
SELKS is now available either as a portable Docker Compose package or as turnkey installation images (ISO files). Each option includes five key open-source components that comprise its name  Suricata, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana and Scirius Community Edition (Suricata Management and Suricata Hunting from Stamus Networks). In addition, SELKS includes components from Arkime, EveBox, and Cyberchef which were added after the acronym was established.

"We are excited to make SELKS 7 officially available and in a package that makes it possible to quickly deploy on any Linux or Windows OS in either a virtual or cloud environment," said Peter Manev, co-founder, and chief strategy officer of Stamus Networks. "The improved threat hunting interface and incident response dashboards along with new Docker package, make SELKS even more accessible to folks who want to explore the power of Suricata without an investment in a commercial solution."

First introduced in 2014, the release of SELKS 7 represents the latest incarnation of the open-source system from Stamus Labs , the threat intelligence and open-source division of Stamus Networks. This version includes several enhancements over its predecessors, including:

Docker package. In addition to pre-packaged Debian Linux-based ISO images, SELKS is now available as a Docker Compose package that allows SELKS to be installed on virtually any Linux or Windows system, without requiring a heavy installation process. And the docker-based architecture makes it faster and easier to deploy a new SELKS machine with specific versions of each component.

In addition to pre-packaged Debian Linux-based ISO images, SELKS is now available as a Docker Compose package that allows SELKS to be installed on virtually any Linux or Windows system, without requiring a heavy installation process. And the docker-based architecture makes it faster and easier to deploy a new SELKS machine with specific versions of each component. Fully automated PCAP replay. Allows SELKS to easily ingest and replay PCAP directly, allowing for fast detailed analysis in training or educational applications.

Allows SELKS to easily ingest and replay PCAP directly, allowing for fast detailed analysis in training or educational applications. Improved threat hunting filter sets. Thirty-eight (38) new or updated ready-to-use threat hunting filters that help the user quickly search the Suricata alert and NSM data for shadow IT, policy violations, and suspicious activity.

Thirty-eight (38) new or updated ready-to-use threat hunting filters that help the user quickly search the Suricata alert and NSM data for shadow IT, policy violations, and suspicious activity. Integrated Cyberchef. Allows the user to apply Cyberchef encoding, decoding, and data analysis to the events, protocol transactions, and flow records created by Suricata.

Allows the user to apply Cyberchef encoding, decoding, and data analysis to the events, protocol transactions, and flow records created by Suricata. Additional Kibana Dashboards. Six (6) new dashboards for network visibility and hunting with new support for the following protocols: SNMP, RDP, SIP, HTTP2, RFB, GENEVE , MQTT, and DCERPC. In addition, there is a new dashboard to help those working to solve SANS Institute challenges .

SELKS is a Stamus Networks contribution to the open-source community and is released, at no cost, under the GNU GPLv3 license as ISO images, Docker package, or as source code.

Kelley Misata, PhD, President and Executive Director of the Open Information Security Foundation (OISF) also believes SELKS 7 represents important advancements for the Suricata user community. "We are thrilled to see the continued evolution of this important Suricata showcase platform. For many years, we have used SELKS in our training courses because of its ability to showcase the power of Suricata for IDS and introductory network threat hunting based on protocol transaction and flow data," said Misata. "And we are excited for the Stamus team to bring it to the global Suricata community."

To download SELKS 7 and find additional information, visit the SELKS page on the Stamus Networks web site: https://www.stamus-networks.com/selks .

About Stamus Networks

Stamus Networks believes in a world where defenders are heroes, and a future where those they protect remain safe. As organizations face threats from well-funded adversaries, we relentlessly pursue solutions that make the defender's job easier and more impactful. A global provider of high-performance network-based threat detection and response systems, Stamus Networks helps enterprise security teams know more, respond sooner and mitigate their risk with insights gathered from cloud and on-premise network activity. Our solutions are advanced network detection and response systems that expose serious and imminent threats to critical assets and empower rapid response. For more information visit: stamus-networks.com .

SOURCE Stamus Networks
"Today, ESI Energy voluntarily entered into an agreement with the Department of Justice related to the accidental fatalities of eagles at certain wind farms owned and/or operated by NextEra Energy Resources and NextEra Energy Partners. We disagree with the government's underlying enforcement policy, which under most circumstances makes building and operating a wind farm into which certain birds may accidentally fly a violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA)  even when the wind farm was developed and sited in a way that sought to avoid avian wildlife collisions. The reality is building any structure, driving any vehicle, or flying any airplane carries with it a possibility that accidental eagle and other bird collisions may occur as a result of that activity.

"Unfortunately, the federal government, at odds with many states and a number of federal court decisions, has sought to criminalize unavoidable accidents related to collisions of birds into wind turbines while at the same time failing to address other activities that result in far greater numbers of accidental eagle and other bird mortalities.

"We have a long-standing and well-earned reputation for protecting our environment and positively co-existing with and supporting wildlife around our facilities, and we have never sited a wind turbine knowing an eagle would fly into it nor have we taken any action in disregard of federal law. In fact, our company makes significant efforts to avoid accidental collisions with bird populations, including eagles. Over the last 20 years, NextEra Energy has invested more than $150 million across the U.S. to support our avian impact mitigation efforts, including taking actions to mitigate avian interaction with our poles, wires and energy generation facilities. We believe that the wind energy industry, including NextEra Energy Resources, voluntarily does more than any other industry in seeking to minimize interactions with avian wildlife.

"However, the most expedient solution was to resolve this dispute and focus our attention on continuing to develop, build, and operate emissions-free wind energy centers for a lower carbon America built by good-paying American jobs. In order to put this issue behind us, ESI Energy agreed to plead guilty to three misdemeanors under the MBTA associated with accidental eagle fatalities at three of our subsidiary wind facilities in Wyoming and New Mexico. The MBTA is a 1918 statute that prohibits individuals and entities from pursuing, hunting, shooting, wounding, killing, trapping, capturing, or collecting most U.S. birds. NextEra Energy Resources has always maintained, and continues to believe, notwithstanding ESI's plea, that this statute was only intended to cover intentional behavior, like hunting and poaching of migratory birds. As recently as last year, the federal government had adopted regulations that codified that accidental collisions did not violate the MBTA.

"Also, as part of the resolution of this matter, ESI has agreed that a number of NextEra Energy Resources' and NextEra Energy Partners' wind facilities will apply for eagle 'take' permits under another federal statute, even though we believe that, like the MBTA, this law does not require a permit to cover unintentional collisions that occur when eagles fly into properly developed wind energy facilities.

"Compliance with the agreements, which includes, among other provisions, payment of a fixed amount and cost caps for compliance with the eagle management plan for a period of at least five years, is not expected to have a material impact on the business, financial condition, results of operations or prospects of NextEra Energy or NextEra Energy Partners. This resolution will resolve all past fatalities and provides a framework that will allow us to move forward without a continued threat related to these statutes.

"NextEra Energy Resources' goal has always been, and remains, to develop our projects in ways that will not damage wildlife populations, including eagle populations, and we hope that our resources committed as part of this resolution will be devoted to optimizing eagle conservation."

NextEra Energy Resources

NextEra Energy Resources, LLC (together with its affiliated entities, "NextEra Energy Resources") is a clean energy leader and is one of the largest wholesale generators of electric power in the U.S., with approximately 24,600 megawatts of total net generating capacity, primarily in 38 states and Canada as of year-end 2021. NextEra Energy Resources, together with its affiliated entities, is the world's largest generator of renewable energy from the wind and sun based on 2021 megawatt hours produced on a net generation basis, and a world leader in battery storage. The business operates clean, emissions-free nuclear power generation facilities in New Hampshire and Wisconsin as part of the NextEra Energy nuclear fleet. NextEra Energy Resources, LLC is a subsidiary of Juno Beach, Florida-based NextEra Energy, Inc. (NYSE: NEE). For more information, visit www.NextEraEnergyResources.com.

NextEra Energy Partners, LP

NextEra Energy Partners, LP (NYSE: NEP) is a growth-oriented limited partnership formed by NextEra Energy, Inc. (NYSE: NEE). NextEra Energy Partners acquires, manages and owns contracted clean energy projects with stable, long-term cash flows. Headquartered in Juno Beach, Florida, NextEra Energy Partners owns interests in geographically diverse wind, solar and energy storage projects in the U.S. as well as natural gas infrastructure assets in Texas and Pennsylvania. For more information about NextEra Energy Partners, please visit: www.NextEraEnergyPartners.com.

Cautionary Statements and Risk Factors That May Affect Future Results for NextEra Energy, Inc.

This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are not statements of historical facts, but instead represent the current expectations of NextEra Energy, Inc. (together with its subsidiaries, NextEra Energy) regarding future operating results and other future events, many of which, by their nature, are inherently uncertain and outside of NextEra Energy's control. Forward-looking statements in this news release include, among others, statements concerning future compliance with the agreements associated with the resolution of the U.S. Department of Justice's investigation into eagle fatalities, including any related impacts to the business, financial condition, results of operations or prospects of NextEra Energy. In some cases, you can identify the forward-looking statements by words or phrases such as "will," "may result," "expect," "anticipate," "believe," "intend," "plan," "seek," "potential," "projection," "forecast," "predict," "goals," "target," "outlook," "should," "would" or similar words or expressions. You should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which are not a guarantee of future performance. The future results of NextEra Energy and its business and financial condition are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements, or may require it to limit or eliminate certain operations. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, those discussed in this news release and the following: effects of extensive regulation of NextEra Energy's business operations; inability of NextEra Energy to recover in a timely manner any significant amount of costs, a return on certain assets or a reasonable return on invested capital through base rates, cost recovery clauses, other regulatory mechanisms or otherwise; impact of political, regulatory, operational and economic factors on regulatory decisions important to NextEra Energy; disallowance of cost recovery based on a finding of imprudent use of derivative instruments; effect of any reductions or modifications to, or elimination of, governmental incentives or policies that support utility scale renewable energy projects or the imposition of additional tax laws, tariffs, duties, policies or assessments on renewable energy or equipment necessary to generate it or deliver it; impact of new or revised laws, regulations, interpretations or constitutional ballot and regulatory initiatives on NextEra Energy; capital expenditures, increased operating costs and various liabilities attributable to environmental laws, regulations and other standards applicable to NextEra Energy; effects on NextEra Energy of federal or state laws or regulations mandating new or additional limits on the production of greenhouse gas emissions; exposure of NextEra Energy to significant and increasing compliance costs and substantial monetary penalties and other sanctions as a result of extensive federal regulation of its operations and businesses; effect on NextEra Energy of changes in tax laws, guidance or policies as well as in judgments and estimates used to determine tax-related asset and liability amounts; impact on NextEra Energy of adverse results of litigation; effect on NextEra Energy of failure to proceed with projects under development or inability to complete the construction of (or capital improvements to) electric generation, transmission and distribution facilities, gas infrastructure facilities or other facilities on schedule or within budget; impact on development and operating activities of NextEra Energy resulting from risks related to project siting, planning, financing, construction, permitting, governmental approvals and the negotiation of project development agreements, as well as supply chain disruptions; risks involved in the operation and maintenance of electric generation, transmission and distribution facilities, gas infrastructure facilities, retail gas distribution system in Florida and other facilities; effect on NextEra Energy of a lack of growth or slower growth in the number of customers or in customer usage; impact on NextEra Energy of severe weather and other weather conditions; threats of terrorism and catastrophic events that could result from terrorism, cyberattacks or other attempts to disrupt NextEra Energy's business or the businesses of third parties; inability to obtain adequate insurance coverage for protection of NextEra Energy against significant losses and risk that insurance coverage does not provide protection against all significant losses; a prolonged period of low gas and oil prices could impact NextEra Energy's gas infrastructure business and cause NextEra Energy to delay or cancel certain gas infrastructure projects and could result in certain projects becoming impaired; risk of increased operating costs resulting from unfavorable supply costs necessary to provide full energy and capacity requirement services; inability or failure to manage properly or hedge effectively the commodity risk within its portfolio; effect of reductions in the liquidity of energy markets on NextEra Energy's ability to manage operational risks; effectiveness of NextEra Energy's risk management tools associated with its hedging and trading procedures to protect against significant losses, including the effect of unforeseen price variances from historical behavior; impact of unavailability or disruption of power transmission or commodity transportation facilities on sale and delivery of power or natural gas; exposure of NextEra Energy to credit and performance risk from customers, hedging counterparties and vendors; failure of counterparties to perform under derivative contracts or of requirement for NextEra Energy to post margin cash collateral under derivative contracts; failure or breach of NextEra Energy's information technology systems; risks to NextEra Energy's retail businesses from compromise of sensitive customer data; losses from volatility in the market values of derivative instruments and limited liquidity in over-the-counter markets; impact of negative publicity; inability to maintain, negotiate or renegotiate acceptable franchise agreements; occurrence of work strikes or stoppages and increasing personnel costs; NextEra Energy's ability to successfully identify, complete and integrate acquisitions, including the effect of increased competition for acquisitions; environmental, health and financial risks associated with ownership and operation of nuclear generation facilities; liability of NextEra Energy for significant retrospective assessments and/or retrospective insurance premiums in the event of an incident at certain nuclear generation facilities; increased operating and capital expenditures and/or reduced revenues at nuclear generation facilities resulting from orders or new regulations of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; inability to operate any of NextEra Energy's owned nuclear generation units through the end of their respective operating licenses; effect of disruptions, uncertainty or volatility in the credit and capital markets or actions by third parties in connection with project-specific or other financing arrangements on NextEra Energy's ability to fund its liquidity and capital needs and meet its growth objectives; inability to maintain current credit ratings; impairment of liquidity from inability of credit providers to fund their credit commitments or to maintain their current credit ratings; poor market performance and other economic factors that could affect NextEra Energy's defined benefit pension plan's funded status; poor market performance and other risks to the asset values of nuclear decommissioning funds; changes in market value and other risks to certain of NextEra Energy's investments; effect of inability of NextEra Energy subsidiaries to pay upstream dividends or repay funds to NextEra Energy or of NextEra Energy's performance under guarantees of subsidiary obligations on NextEra Energy's ability to meet its financial obligations and to pay dividends on its common stock; the fact that the amount and timing of dividends payable on NextEra Energy's common stock, as well as the dividend policy approved by NextEra Energy's board of directors from time to time, and changes to that policy, are within the sole discretion of NextEra Energy's board of directors and, if declared and paid, dividends may be in amounts that are less than might be expected by shareholders; NextEra Energy Partners, LP's inability to access sources of capital on commercially reasonable terms could have an effect on its ability to consummate future acquisitions and on the value of NextEra Energy's limited partner interest in NextEra Energy Operating Partners, LP; effects of disruptions, uncertainty or volatility in the credit and capital markets on the market price of NextEra Energy's common stock; and the ultimate severity and duration of public health crises, epidemics and pandemics, and its effects on NextEra Energy's business. NextEra Energy discusses these and other risks and uncertainties in its annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021 and other Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, and this news release should be read in conjunction with such SEC filings. The forward-looking statements made in this news release are made only as of the date of this news release and NextEra Energy undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

Cautionary Statements and Risk Factors That May Affect Future Results for NextEra Energy Partners, LP

This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Forward-looking statements are not statements of historical facts, but instead represent the current expectations of NextEra Energy Partners, LP (together with its subsidiaries, NEP) regarding future operating results and other future events, many of which, by their nature, are inherently uncertain and outside of NEP's control. Forward-looking statements in this news release include, among others, statements concerning future compliance with the agreements associated with the resolution of the U.S. Department of Justice's investigation into eagle fatalities, including any related impacts to the business, financial condition, results of operations or prospects of NextEra Energy Partners. In some cases, you can identify the forward-looking statements by words or phrases such as "will," "may result," "expect," "anticipate," "believe," "intend," "plan," "seek," "aim," "potential," "projection," "forecast," "predict," "goals," "target," "outlook," "should," "would" or similar words or expressions. You should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which are not a guarantee of future performance. The future results of NEP and its business and financial condition are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause NEP's actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties could require NEP to limit or eliminate certain operations. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the following: NEP's ability to make cash distributions to its unitholders is affected by wind and solar conditions at its renewable energy projects; operation and maintenance of renewable energy projects and pipelines involve significant risks that could result in unplanned power outages, reduced output or capacity, personal injury or loss of life; NEP's business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects can be materially adversely affected by weather conditions, including, but not limited to, the impact of severe weather; NEP depends on certain of the renewable energy projects and pipelines in its portfolio for a substantial portion of its anticipated cash flows; NEP may pursue the repowering of wind projects or the expansion of natural gas pipelines that would require up-front capital expenditures and could expose NEP to project development risks; terrorist acts, cyberattacks or other similar events could impact NEP's projects, pipelines or surrounding areas and adversely affect its business; the ability of NEP to obtain insurance and the terms of any available insurance coverage could be materially adversely affected by international, national, state or local events and company-specific events, as well as the financial condition of insurers. NEP's insurance coverage does not provide protection against all significant losses; NEP relies on interconnection, transmission and other pipeline facilities of third parties to deliver energy from its renewable energy projects and to transport natural gas to and from its pipelines. If these facilities become unavailable, NEP's projects and pipelines may not be able to operate or deliver energy or may become partially or fully unavailable to transport natural gas; NEP's business is subject to liabilities and operating restrictions arising from environmental, health and safety laws and regulations, compliance with which may require significant capital expenditures, increase NEP's cost of operations and affect or limit its business plans; NEP's renewable energy projects or pipelines may be adversely affected by legislative changes or a failure to comply with applicable energy and pipeline regulations; Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) may claim certain immunities under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act and Mexican law, and the Texas pipeline entities' ability to sue or recover from Pemex for breach of contract may be limited and may be exacerbated if there is a deterioration in the economic relationship between the U.S. and Mexico; NEP does not own all of the land on which the projects in its portfolio are located and its use and enjoyment of the property may be adversely affected to the extent that there are any lienholders or land rights holders that have rights that are superior to NEP's rights or the U.S. Bureau of Land Management suspends its federal rights-of-way grants; NEP is subject to risks associated with litigation or administrative proceedings that could materially impact its operations, including, but not limited to, proceedings related to projects it acquires in the future; NEP's operations require NEP to comply with anti-corruption laws and regulations of the U.S. government and Mexico; NEP is subject to risks associated with its ownership interests in projects that are under construction, which could result in its inability to complete construction projects on time or at all, and make projects too expensive to complete or cause the return on an investment to be less than expected; NEP relies on a limited number of customers and is exposed to the risk that they may be unwilling or unable to fulfill their contractual obligations to NEP or that they otherwise terminate their agreements with NEP; NEP may not be able to extend, renew or replace expiring or terminated power purchase agreements (PPA), natural gas transportation agreements or other customer contracts at favorable rates or on a long-term basis; if the energy production by or availability of NEP's renewable energy projects is less than expected, they may not be able to satisfy minimum production or availability obligations under their PPAs; NEP's growth strategy depends on locating and acquiring interests in additional projects consistent with its business strategy at favorable prices; reductions in demand for natural gas in the United States or Mexico and low market prices of natural gas could materially adversely affect NEP's pipeline operations and cash flows; government laws, regulations and policies providing incentives and subsidies for clean energy could be changed, reduced or eliminated at any time and such changes may negatively impact NEP's growth strategy; NEP's growth strategy depends on the acquisition of projects developed by NextEra Energy, Inc. (NEE) and third parties, which face risks related to project siting, financing, construction, permitting, the environment, governmental approvals and the negotiation of project development agreements; acquisitions of existing clean energy projects involve numerous risks; NEP may continue to acquire other sources of clean energy and may expand to include other types of assets. Any further acquisition of non-renewable energy projects may present unforeseen challenges and result in a competitive disadvantage relative to NEP's more-established competitors; NEP faces substantial competition primarily from regulated utilities, developers, independent power producers, pension funds and private equity funds for opportunities in North America; the natural gas pipeline industry is highly competitive, and increased competitive pressure could adversely affect NEP's business; NEP may not be able to access sources of capital on commercially reasonable terms, which would have a material adverse effect on its ability to consummate future acquisitions and pursue other growth opportunities; restrictions in NEP and its subsidiaries' financing agreements could adversely affect NEP's business, financial condition, results of operations and ability to make cash distributions to its unitholders; NEP's cash distributions to its unitholders may be reduced as a result of restrictions on NEP's subsidiaries' cash distributions to NEP under the terms of their indebtedness or other financing agreements; NEP's subsidiaries' substantial amount of indebtedness may adversely affect NEP's ability to operate its business, and its failure to comply with the terms of its subsidiaries' indebtedness could have a material adverse effect on NEP's financial condition; NEP is exposed to risks inherent in its use of interest rate swaps; widespread public health crises and epidemics or pandemics may have material adverse impacts on NEP's business, financial condition, liquidity, results of operations and ability to make cash distributions to its unitholders; NEE has influence over NEP; under the cash sweep and credit support agreement, NEP receives credit support from NEE and its affiliates. NEP's subsidiaries may default under contracts or become subject to cash sweeps if credit support is terminated, if NEE or its affiliates fail to honor their obligations under credit support arrangements, or if NEE or another credit support provider ceases to satisfy creditworthiness requirements, and NEP will be required in certain circumstances to reimburse NEE for draws that are made on credit support; NextEra Energy Resources, LLC (NEER) or one of its affiliates is permitted to borrow funds received by NEP's subsidiaries and is obligated to return these funds only as needed to cover project costs and distributions or as demanded by NextEra Energy Operating Partners, LP (NEP OpCo). NEP's financial condition and ability to make distributions to its unitholders, as well as its ability to grow distributions in the future, is highly dependent on NEER's performance of its obligations to return all or a portion of these funds; NEER's right of first refusal may adversely affect NEP's ability to consummate future sales or to obtain favorable sale terms; NextEra Energy Partners GP, Inc. (NEP GP) and its affiliates may have conflicts of interest with NEP and have limited duties to NEP and its unitholders; NEP GP and its affiliates and the directors and officers of NEP are not restricted in their ability to compete with NEP, whose business is subject to certain restrictions; NEP may only terminate the Management Services Agreement among, NEP, NextEra Energy Management Partners, LP (NEE Management), NEP OpCo and NextEra Energy Operating Partners GP, LLC (NEP OpCo GP) under certain limited circumstances; if the agreements with NEE Management or NEER are terminated, NEP may be unable to contract with a substitute service provider on similar terms; NEP's arrangements with NEE limit NEE's potential liability, and NEP has agreed to indemnify NEE against claims that it may face in connection with such arrangements, which may lead NEE to assume greater risks when making decisions relating to NEP than it otherwise would if acting solely for its own account; NEP's ability to make distributions to its unitholders depends on the ability of NEP OpCo to make cash distributions to its limited partners; if NEP incurs material tax liabilities, NEP's distributions to its unitholders may be reduced, without any corresponding reduction in the amount of the IDR fee; holders of NEP's units may be subject to voting restrictions; NEP's partnership agreement replaces the fiduciary duties that NEP GP and NEP's directors and officers might have to holders of its common units with contractual standards governing their duties and the NYSE does not require a publicly traded limited partnership like NEP to comply with certain of its corporate governance requirements; NEP's partnership agreement restricts the remedies available to holders of NEP's common units for actions taken by NEP's directors or NEP GP that might otherwise constitute breaches of fiduciary duties; certain of NEP's actions require the consent of NEP GP; holders of NEP's common units currently cannot remove NEP GP without NEE's consent and provisions in NEP's partnership agreement may discourage or delay an acquisition of NEP that NEP unitholders may consider favorable; NEE's interest in NEP GP and the control of NEP GP may be transferred to a third party without unitholder consent; NEP may issue additional units without unitholder approval, which would dilute unitholder interests; reimbursements and fees owed to NEP GP and its affiliates for services provided to NEP or on NEP's behalf will reduce cash distributions from NEP OpCo and from NEP to NEP's unitholders, and there are no limits on the amount that NEP OpCo may be required to pay; increases in interest rates could adversely impact the price of NEP's common units, NEP's ability to issue equity or incur debt for acquisitions or other purposes and NEP's ability to make cash distributions to its unitholders; the liability of holders of NEP's units, which represent limited partnership interests in NEP, may not be limited if a court finds that unitholder action constitutes control of NEP's business; unitholders may have liability to repay distributions that were wrongfully distributed to them; the issuance of securities convertible into, or settleable with, common units may affect the market price for NEP's common units, will dilute common unitholders' ownership in NEP and may decrease the amount of cash available for distribution for each common unit; NEP's future tax liability may be greater than expected if NEP does not generate net operating losses (NOLs) sufficient to offset taxable income or if tax authorities challenge certain of NEP's tax positions; NEP's ability to use NOLs to offset future income may be limited; NEP will not have complete control over NEP's tax decisions; and, distributions to unitholders may be taxable as dividends. NEP discusses these and other risks and uncertainties in its annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021 and other Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, and this news release should be read in conjunction with such SEC filings made through the date of this news release. The forward-looking statements made in this news release are made only as of the date of this news release and NEP undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

SOURCE NextEra Energy Resources, LLC; NextEra Energy Partners, LP
Following its successful acquisition by Klarna, leading mobile wallet provider Stocard introduces its new look and feel to over 47 million active consumers in 45 markets, adopting Klarna's award-winning "Smoooth" brand identity across all touchpoints.

The rebranding sets the stage for new product synergies between Klarna and Stocard and introduces Klarna's brand to over 1 million new consumers in the US.

NEW YORK, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Klarna, a leading global retail bank, payments, and shopping service that helps consumers save time and money, be informed and in control, today revealed the new "Klarna-fied" brand identity of Stocard, one of the world's leading mobile wallet providers that enables consumers to gather all of their loyalty cards virtually in one single place and receive personalized offers. The rebranding marks the next step of Stocard's integration into the Klarna ecosystem following its successful acquisition by Klarna in July 2021 and opens up the doors for commercial and technological synergies between the two company's offerings.

David Handlos, Domain Lead and founder of Stocard said: "We could not have imagined a better home for Stocard than Klarna. We both share the same customer obsession and our new look and feel expresses this joint mission superbly. With its high-touch design language and captivating photography, Stocard's new Klarna-fied branding both enhances our user experience and helps us better attract new audiences. And the brand is just the beginning. Our users and retailers can look forward to powerful new features coming their way soon as we tap into Klarna's vast pool of talent and resources."

The Stocard app lets consumers virtually store all of their loyalty cards, collect coupons and rewards, receive personalized offers, and even make mobile payments with a virtual prepaid card*. For retailers, the Stocard app offers a powerful data-based channel to engage consumers, drive traffic, sales and loyalty and understand consumer preferences.

The Stocard app will continue to be available for free to its 47 million active consumers across 45 markets and will be enriched with further features going forward as it integrates deeper with Klarna's platform. At the same time, Stocard's team will carry their domain expertise into Klarna's product teams and develop new features in the Klarna app, the first of which will be revealed in the very near future.

David Fock, Klarna's Chief Product Officer commented: "At Klarna, we want to help consumers save time and money every time they pay, whether that is online or in-store. With its clever mobile wallet solution, Stocard fulfills this very promise, making it the perfect addition to the Klarna family. By putting the consumer at the heart of every interaction, Klarna has flipped the script on how a bank should act, and this is reflected in our "Smoooth" look and feel. With the rebranding of Stocard we are now transporting the "Smoooth" experience to Stocard's consumers and retailers across the globe. Above and beyond significantly broadening Klarna's global footprint by a colossal 47 million consumers across 25 new markets, the acquisition of Stocard also allows us to embed the deep intelligence packed into Stocard's payment and marketing technology into the Klarna app, with exciting new features to be announced very soon."

Alongside Toplooks, HERO, APPRL, Inspirock and, most recently, PriceRunner, the acquisition of Stocard adds a further complementary pillar to Klarna's unparalleled product offering. Spanning from virtual shopping, content creation and dynamic ads to travel planning and mobile wallets, Klarna's acquisitions are delivering on the promise of saving time and money for more than 147 million consumers and helping its 400,000+ retailers engage their target audiences even more effectively. Especially for retailers aiming to seamlessly bridge their online and in-store shopping experience, omnichannel services like the Stocard app have become essential in winning over and retaining a new generation of shoppers.

*Stocard's payment feature is available currently in the UK, IT, FR, DE, and NL.

About Klarna

Since 2005 Klarna has been on a mission to revolutionize the retail banking industry. With over 147 million global active users and 2 million transactions per day, Klarna is meeting the changing demands of consumers by saving them time and money while helping them be informed and in control of their personal finances. Over 400,000 global retail partners, including H&M, Saks, Sephora, Macys, IKEA, Expedia Group, and Nike have integrated Klarna's innovative technology to deliver a seamless shopping experience online and in-store. With over 5,000 employees, Klarna is active in 45 markets and is one of the most highly-valued private fintechs globally, with a valuation of $45.6 billion. For more information, visit Klarna.com

For additional information, please contact:

James Bessenbach

[email protected]

+4915125739880

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

The following files are available for download:

https://mb.cision.com/Public/1740/3540836/b9f2bff6945ee8d6_org.png Stocard Brand - Main https://mb.cision.com/Public/1740/3540836/986ff1b6d6136df8_org.png Stocard Brand - Brand Evolution https://mb.cision.com/Public/1740/3540836/b6b712621af13f0f_org.png Stocard App - Loyalty Cards

SOURCE Klarna Bank AB (publ)
Stronghold Engineering received the award for the company's Huntington Library Tesla Battery Energy Storage System project. It was a fast-paced project, with design beginning in April 2019 and construction beginning in October 2019, with the project ending in December 2019, only two months after construction began. In addition to the electrical work, the project required specific design considerations to keep the integrity of the flora intact. This project also received the ABC Regional (Southern California) Eagle Award for Specialty Contractor, Commercial Electrical Projects Under $2 Million.

Scott Bailey, co-founder and COO of Stronghold Engineering, Inc., said, "We are honored to receive the prestigious Pyramid Award from the ABC National Board. This project was a showcase for our team in battery installations and was completed on a short timeline. We were happy with the final product and pleased to have a satisfied client. A big thank you to the ABC National Board for considering this project as Building Construction Excellence."

"Over the years, ABC has been honored to award outstanding construction projects like Huntington Library Tesla Battery Energy Storage System by Stronghold Engineering," said 2022 National Chair of the ABC Board of Directors Stephanie Schmidt, president, Poole Anderson Construction, State College, Pennsylvania. "Through hard work on this project, Stronghold Engineering shows the value of teamwork, overcoming challenges and creativity on the jobsite." The EIC award honors all construction team members, including the contractor, owner, architect, and engineer. The winning projects are judged on complexity, attractiveness, unique challenges overcome, completion time, workmanship, innovation, and safety.

About Stronghold Engineering, Inc.

Stronghold Engineering, Inc. is a construction and design firm . The company specializes in full-service construction and design support services, and has designed and constructed ground up facilities, as well as completed technically challenging repair and renovations for historical and non-historical facilities, and significant seismic upgrades, as well as large civil, infrastructure, and electrical projects. The tenets that guide Stronghold Engineering's work are quality, safety, teamwork, integrity, and commitment. The company headquarters, built and designed by Stronghold Engineering in 2020, is located in Perris, California.

SOURCE Stronghold Engineering, Inc.
New edtech initiative aimed at young Latinos certified by Arizona State University will begin to close Latino Wealth Gap

LOS ANGELES, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today SUMA Wealth, the leading fintech company for young U.S. Latinos announced that it has added blockchain-based attendance and achievement verification to its Dinero Bootcamp, the signature experience of the company's SUMA Academy. The new program is offered in partnership with Arizona State University, which will offer verified Certificates of Completion to graduates. Certificate recipients will unlock access to additional classes and perks within the SUMA educational system.

"We're meeting young Latinos where they live  online," said Beatriz Acevedo, CEO and co-founder of SUMA Wealth. "We've created an in-culture digital campus in our SUMAverse where they can connect with each other, learn about finance, and earn perks and privileges." She added, "Earning later means learning now. We're building the future of financial education as we build the future of financial technology. This is just the first of our tools to do that."

SUMA's push to eradicate the Latino Wealth Gap by giving Millennial and Generation Z Latinos the financial knowledge needed Tweet this

The new initiative is part of SUMA's push to eradicate the Latino Wealth Gap by giving Millennial and Generation Z Latinos the financial knowledge needed to save, invest and grow wealth for themselves, their families and their communities. SUMA Academy programs provide fundamental financial knowledge in an engaging, culturally relevant way using SUMA's signature mix of content, community and suite of financial technology tools. Participants can join the Dinero Bootcamp free of charge by enrolling here .

Providing financial education to Latinos in a future-forward digital format is critical for them, and for the US economy. They are the engine of economic growth: Latino consumption grew 50% more than non-Latino whites over the last decade, 51% of the population growth came from Latinos, and they launched more businesses than any other group (50% of all net new startups). Connecting with them digitally is the most effective way, as they are the most digital-forward of all Americans  71% of Latinos are early tech adopters vs only 58% of non-Latinos.

"We're thrilled to partner with SUMA Wealth on our shared mission of financial inclusion and access to Latino learners. We are meeting learners where they are, delivering powerful content through innovative channels in digestible formats," said Maria Anguiano, Executive Vice President at Arizona State University's Learning Enterprise. "Validating the educational achievements of SUMA's Dinero Bootcamp Learners creates impactful, upward mobility for learners. They can leverage their certificates in resumes, portfolios and job applications - translating a learning experience into an earning experience."

The first 1000 students of all cohorts to successfully complete the Dinero Bootcamp course will receive "Baller of the Class" badges , which are based on Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). The NFT badges are based on Proof of Attendance Protocol (POAP), which demonstrates attendance and achievement in subjects including budgeting, saving, establishing or improving credit, reducing debt, investing, and building net worth.

Badge recipients unlock access to additional features like 1:1 mentorships; premium access to events and other experiences on the digital campus. The ASU Learning Enterprise- certificates and SUMA's certified badges boost graduate credentials when applying for schools, jobs or credit.

"This is personal for me," said Mary Hernandez, COO and Chief Growth Officer of SUMA Wealth. "Like tens of millions of others from our community, my parents were immigrants who came here to work hard and achieve the American dream. As a kid, I helped them translate, negotiate, read mortgage docs and to this day continue to help them with their finances. SUMA exists to serve everybody in the same situation." She added, "SUMA is a place where Latinos belong, built by us for us."

About SUMA Wealth

SUMA Wealth is the leading financial technology company devoted to increasing prosperity, opportunity, and financial inclusion for young U.S. Latinos. SUMA's innovative approach deploys technology to build financial tools that are engaging, culturally relevant, and useful to the community. SUMA also creates user-centric content and brand-based experiences that inspire, inform and empower the community to build wealth and control their financial future. To learn more, follow us on Twitter and Instagram @wearesuma or visit www.sumawealth.com .

About ASU Learning Enterprise

The ASU Learning Enterprise serves learners of all ages and backgrounds to inspire curiosity, wonder and hope, in alignment with ASU's charter and goals of advancing excellence in education, broadening access, and having a meaningful societal impact in a rapidly evolving, technology-fueled world. Ranked No. 1 "Most Innovative School" in the nation by U.S. News & World Report for seven years in succession, ASU has forged the model for a New American University by operating on the principles that learning is a personal and original journey for each student; that they thrive on experience and that the process of discovery cannot be bound by traditional academic disciplines. Through innovation and a commitment to accessibility, ASU has drawn pioneering researchers to its faculty even as it expands opportunities for qualified students. Learn more at learning.asu.edu .

Media Contact:

Abigail Idiaquez

[email protected]

SUMA Wealth

3000 Olympic Boulevard

Santa Monica CA 90404

https://sumawealth.com/

Email: hola@wearesuma.com

SOURCE SUMA Wealth
GENEVA, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Fluid Finance SA and Merkle Science announce a partnership to create a seamless on- and off-ramp for digital assets, with compliance and security at the forefront.

Fluid Finance offers traditional bank accounts that can be integrated with Web3 wallets, allowing users to easily move their funds into and out of crypto using the firm's on-chain Digital Dollar (DUSD). Merkle Science's best-in-class transaction monitoring platform, Compass, will now secure all in- and outgoing blockchain transactions from Fluid's accounts.

The need to monitor for criminal activity and carefully manage the security of transactions in crypto is only increasing. In 2021, $3.2 billion was stolen in cryptocurrency theft. In the same year, cryptocurrency represented nearly 17% of the $8.6 billion attributed to global money laundering. Merkle Science's suite of easy-to-use tools were created to ensure the safe and healthy growth of the crypto industry by protecting against and supporting investigations into crypto-related crime.

"We are thrilled to support Fluid's revolutionary, DeFi-first approach to banking," said Mriganka Pattnaik, Co-founder & CEO of Merkle Science. "Their mission to help as many people as possible to access digital assets in a safe and secure manner is completely in line with our values and beliefs. We're proud to bring Compass' functionalities to the Fluid Finance platform and accelerate the consolidation of digital assets with the $22 trillion global financial services market."

For the first time ever, users are able to "mint" their own stablecoin: they can create their own Digital Dollars (DUSD) from fiat USD held in their traditional bank account. The USD moves from the user's IBAN account to a treasury account managed by Fluid Finance SA. This transaction is verifiable on-chain, as are the reserves in the treasury. When this transaction is requested, Merkle Science monitors whether the associated Web3 wallet has any exposure to illicit activity. If there are concerns about the account, Merkle Science can provide a rating on the wallet and do a manual check to assess why the wallet has been flagged so that compliance may assess whether the funds from the transaction needs to be frozen and escalated to regulators. From the user perspective, the integration will be seamless and nearly instant.

Fluid Finance founder and CEO Robert Sharratt said of the partnership: "Fluid Finance is driven by giving as much control as possible to our users. At the same time we want to deter bad actors, especially since our integrated bank account + Web3 wallet architecture allows the off-ramping of such large amounts. With Merkle Science, we have found a partner that balances a great user experience and strong regulatory compliance."

SOURCE Fluid Finance SA
Coworker.com, the world's largest online marketplace for coworking, has merged with The Instant Group. Tweet this

Tim Rodber, CEO at The Instant Group, said: "I greatly admire the progress that Coworker made in recent years, expanding the awareness of coworking with 6 million users across the globe. Sam Marks and his team have worked diligently to reflect the choice and variety of service types, experiences and locations for coworking spaces. The Coworker platform and its team are great additions to our organization and will accelerate our goal of creating the largest independent marketplace for flexible workspace."

Coworker was founded in 2015 by Sam Marks; the company has offices in the United States, Canada, Spain, and Thailand. Coworker.com is a leader in its field and will add 20,000 locations in 172 countries to the marketplace. In January 2018, the company acquired Coworking Insights, a blog for coworking industry professionals that publishes the latest trends, data, and news.

Sam Marks, Founder at Coworker added: "The office's role has changed permanently and coworking's role has come into sharp focus to foster social connection, build community and ensure that people feel part of something bigger. Companies of all sizes are seeing the potential to make coworking a key part of their future workspace strategy.

"Scaling our platform as part of The Instant Group will ensure that all our coworking clients feel the benefit of increased client demand. If the wider business community is to truly experience the diversity of the coworking world, then our marketplace has to offer global access and flexibility in choosing a workspace."

The Instant Group's newly enhanced marketplace will serve more than 250,000 businesses in 175 countries, operating 24/7 through an integrated platform in more than 40 languages. It will consolidate more than 30,000 workspaces and will offer a range of services to clients including; membership plans, on-demand, virtual offices, office booking, managed offices and consulting services.

About The Instant Group

The Instant Group has been rethinking workspace since 1999 with over 500 experts working globally across more than 175 countries. Instant's digital platforms constitute the world's largest digital marketplace for flexible workspace listing meeting rooms, virtual offices, flexible office space and coworking memberships. Its global team advises on commercial real estate solutions from serviced offices to fully customised managed offices, and consulting services for portfolio and net zero strategies. Instant's approach enables agility, hybrid working solutions and improved operational resilience for more than 250,000 businesses every year. Clients include Amex, Prudential, Booking.com, Shell, Jaguar Land Rover and GSK. Instant has global offices including London, Paris, New York, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sydney.

www.theinstantgroup.com

www.instantoffices.com

About Coworker.com

Coworker is an online marketplace for discovering, booking, and reviewing coworking spaces around the world. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in both Toronto, Ontario and Barcelona, Spain, Coworker offers end-to-end enterprise office solutions, search and direct workspace bookings, office broker services, and an international pass (Global Pass) for coworking access. Described by the Financial Times as an "innovation to watch," the company's network currently contains 20,000 coworking spaces in 172 countries.

www.coworker.com

SOURCE The Instant Group
LONDON, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The SBAI, an active alliance of institutional investors and alternative asset managers, announced today the launch of its Global Regulatory Committee. The Committee brings together leading institutional investors, asset managers and investment consultants to enhance and support the SBAI's dialogue with regulators around the world. Chris Bowlin, Sr. Compliance Counsel, Teacher Retirement System of Texas has been appointed Chair of the Committee, and Stephen Berger, Managing Director, Citadel, has been appointed Deputy Chair.

Chris Bowlin said: "I am honored to chair the SBAI's Global Regulatory Committee, which will help the SBAI further develop its balanced perspective on regulatory topics, taking account of manager and institutional investor considerations."

Members of the Committee include:

Gaurav Amin , Head of Fintech & Implementation, Albourne Partners

, Head of Fintech & Implementation, Albourne Partners Arthur Bengasino, Portfolio Manager, TelstraSuper

Stephen Berger , Managing Director, Global Head of Government & Regulatory Policy, Citadel; Committee Deputy Chair

, Managing Director, Global Head of Government & Regulatory Policy, Citadel; Committee Deputy Chair Hans Bergstrom, Compliance Officer, AP7

Chris Bowlin, Sr. Compliance Counsel, Teacher Retirement System of Texas ; Committee Chair

Compliance Counsel, Teacher Retirement System of ; Committee Chair Luana DiCandia , Director & Senior Legal Counsel, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan

, Director & Senior Legal Counsel, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Jason Eng , General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer, Dymon Asia Capital

, General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer, Kimberly Hamm , Director, Global Public Policy Group, BlackRock

, Director, Global Public Policy Group, BlackRock David Lau , Chief Compliance Officer, Springs Capital

, Chief Compliance Officer, Springs Capital Brigid Rentoul , General Counsel, Winton Group

, General Counsel, Merel Uittenbogaard , Senior Legal Counsel, Regulatory Team, APG Asset Management

, Senior Legal Counsel, Regulatory Team, APG Asset Management Karl Wachter , General Counsel, Magnetar Capital

, General Counsel, Magnetar Capital Glen Zwicker , Managing Director, Head of Investment Operations, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Mario Therrien, Head of Investment Funds and External Management, CDPQ, and Chair of the SBAI said: "We see regulators increasingly turn to the Standards and the SBAI's work more broadly, as they continue to take notice of the practical solutions the SBAI provides to some of the complex issues the industry faces. We are thrilled to have the members of this Committee support our efforts."

Since its inception, the SBAI, an Affiliate Member of the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO), has engaged proactively on a wide range of regulatory topics, including regulation for alternative investment managers, financial stability, short selling and ESG.

Thomas Deinet, Executive Director, SBAI, said: "We look forward to working with the Committee to provide constructive input into the global regulatory process, supporting efforts to facilitate fair and efficient markets, reduce systemic risk, and help investors make well-informed investment decisions."

The SBAI is an active alliance of over 150 asset managers and over 90 institutional investors dedicated to advancing responsible practices, partnership, and knowledge. The SBAI works to ensure the quality and efficacy of the alternative investment arena through responsible standards and the exchange of ideas. For more information on the SBAI or to join the SBAI community, please contact us at [email protected] or visit our website www.sbai.org.

Contactsmailto:[email protected]:

Zarrina Shakir

[email protected]

SOURCE Standards Board for Alternative Investments
DUBLIN, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Network Forensics Market with Covid-19 Impact Analysis by Component (Solutions & Professional Services), Application (Endpoint Security & Data Center Security), Vertical, Deployment Mode, Organization Size, and Region - Global Forecast to 2027" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global network forensics market size is expected to grow from an estimated value of USD 1.3 billion in 2022 to USD 2.2 billion by 2027, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 11.2% from 2022 to 2027.

The network forensics market is driven by various factors, such as Increasing data thefts and cyberattacks across enterprises, increasing traffic on network systems, and increasing demand for cloud-based network forensics solutions. However, lack of skilled expertise, lack of infrastructure to store all the data packets are some of the factors that are expected to hinder the market growth.



Professional services segment to grow at a higher CAGR during the forecast period



Professional services include consulting, training & education, design and integrations, and maintenance & support. The professionals use the latest techniques, comprehensive strategies, and skills to fulfill the security requirements of the organization. The vendors offer threat intelligence, risk assessment, and forensics analysis, among other services, via industry-defined best practices. With rapid digitalization and changing regulatory norms, customers need continuous guidance from network forensics solution implementation experts. This expertise helps consumers design customized solutions for their business processes and be aware of the return on investment (RoI) made by them in their security platform.



On premise segment to account for a higher market share during the forecast period



The on-premises deployment is the traditional approach in which solutions are implemented and operated from customers' in-house servers across enterprises. On-premises solutions provide organizations with full control over all the platforms, applications, systems, and data, which can be handled and managed by their own IT staff. An organization where user credentials are critical for business operations would have on-premises deployment as the systems are controlled by the organization itself. Due to COVID-19, the demand for cloud-based services has significantly increased due to the highly adopted trend of remote work. This has impacted the revenue generated by the network forensics on-premise solutions. However, on-premises deployment mode plays a significant role in safeguarding a company's crucial information from cyber intruders. Therefore, it is expected to dominate the network forensics market during the forecast period.



Asia Pacific to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period



Asia Pacific: With effective government regulations and technological advancements, the network forensics market is witnessing tremendous growth opportunities in this region. Various developments are taking place in the Asia Pacific region concerning the adoption of forensics technologies, such as network forensics tools, BI compliance tools, cloud, analytics, and rapid infrastructure development. . Increasing advancements in mobility and cloud adoption and growing mandatory compliances with government regulations to resolve data security issues have forced enterprises to adopt network forensics solutions.

Key Topics Covered:



1 Introduction



2 Research Methodology



3 Executive Summary



4 Premium Insights

4.1 Attractive Opportunities in Market

4.2 Market, by Component, 2022

4.3 Market, by Deployment Mode, 2022-2027

4.4 Market, Share of Top Three Verticals and Regions, 2022

4.5 Market, by Organization Size, 2022-2027

4.6 Market, by Vertical, 2022-2027

4.7 Market Investment Scenario

5 Market Overview and Industry Trends

5.1 Introduction

5.2 Market Dynamics

5.2.1 Drivers

5.2.1.1 Increasing Data Thefts and Cyberattacks to Promote Network Security Transformation Across Enterprises

5.2.1.2 Increased Network Traffic and Network Systems' Complexity to Demand Advanced Network Forensics Solutions

5.2.1.3 Increased Demand for Cloud-Based Network Forensics Solutions Across Verticals

5.2.2 Restraints

5.2.2.1 Lack of Skilled Network Forensics Investigators

5.2.2.2 Lack of Data Infrastructure to Support Advanced Technologies to Drive Advanced Network Forensics Tools' Adoption

5.2.3 Opportunities

5.2.3.1 Rise in Demand for Integrated and Next-Generation Network Forensics Solutions

5.2.3.2 Rapid Evolution in Mobile, IoT, and Web Applications

5.2.3.3 Increase in Use of Ai/Ml and Analytics to Provide Better Network Visibility into It Infrastructure

5.2.4 Challenges

5.2.4.1 Issues Associated with Collection and Storage of Huge Data for Investigation

5.2.4.2 Lack of Awareness Related to Network Forensics Tools for Analysis of Data Packets

5.2.5 Impact of Covid- 19 on Market Dynamics

5.2.5.1 Drivers and Opportunities

5.2.5.2 Restraints and Challenges

5.2.5.3 Cumulative Growth Analysis

5.3 Regulatory Implications

5.4 Use Cases

5.4.1 Use Case 1: Palo Alto Networks Enhanced Samaritan Ministries International's Security Operations

5.4.2 Use Case 2: Palo Alto Networks Provided Think Whole Person Healthcare Protection Against Cyberthreats

5.4.3 Use Case: Cisco Helped Lake Trust Credit Union to Secure Distributed Network and Ensure Compliance

5.5 Ecosystem

5.6 Value Chain

6 Network Forensics Market, by Component

6.1 Introduction

6.2 Solution

6.2.1 Solution: Market Drivers

6.2.2 Solution: COVID-19 Impact

6.2.3 Software

6.2.3.1 Intrusion Detection System/Intrusion Prevention System

6.2.3.2 Security Information and Event Management

6.2.3.3 Threat Intelligence

6.2.3.4 Packet Capture Analysis

6.2.3.5 Analytics

6.2.3.6 Firewall

6.2.4 Hardware

6.3 Professional Services

6.3.1 Professional Services: Network Forensics Market Drivers

6.3.2 Professional Services: COVID-19 Impact

6.3.3 Consulting

6.3.4 Training and Education

6.3.5 Design and Integration

6.3.6 Support and Maintenance

7 Network Forensics Market, by Deployment Mode

7.1 Introduction

7.2 Cloud

7.2.1 Cloud: Market Drivers

7.2.2 Cloud: COVID-19 Impact

7.3 On-Premises

7.3.1 On-Premises: Market Drivers

7.3.2 On-Premises: COVID-19 Impact

8 Network Forensics Market, by Organization Size

8.1 Introduction

8.2 Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

8.2.1 Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises: Market Drivers

8.2.2 Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises: COVID-19 Impact

8.3 Large Enterprises

8.3.1 Large Enterprises: Market Drivers

8.3.2 Large Enterprises: COVID-19 Impact

9 Network Forensics Market, by Application

9.1 Introduction

9.2 Endpoint Security

9.2.1 Endpoint Security: Market Drivers

9.2.2 Endpoint Security: COVID-19 Impact

9.3 Data Center Security

9.3.1 Data Center Security: Market Drivers

9.3.2 Data Center Security: COVID-19 Impact

10 Network Forensics Market, by Vertical

10.1 Introduction

10.2 Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance

10.2.1 Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance: Market Drivers

10.2.2 Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance: COVID-19 Impact

10.3 Retail

10.3.1 Retail: Market Drivers

10.3.2 Retail: COVID-19 Impact

10.4 Government and Defense

10.4.1 Government and Defense: Market Drivers

10.4.2 Government and Defense: COVID-19 Impact

10.5 Healthcare

10.5.1 Healthcare: Market Drivers

10.5.2 Healthcare: COVID-19 Impact

10.6 Manufacturing

10.6.1 Manufacturing: Network Forensics Market Drivers

10.6.2 Manufacturing: COVID-19 Impact

10.7 Information Technology & Information Technology-Enabled Services (It and Ites)

10.7.1 Information Technology & Information Technology-Enabled Services: Market Drivers

10.7.2 Information Technology & Information Technology-Enabled Services: COVID-19 Impact

10.8 Telecommunications

10.8.1 Telecommunications: Network Forensics Market Drivers

10.8.2 Telecommunications: COVID-19 Impact

10.9 Transportation

10.9.1 Transportation: Market Drivers

10.9.2 Transportation: COVID-19 Impact

10.10 Other Verticals

11 Network Forensics Market, by Region

12 Competitive Landscape

12.1 Overview

12.2 Market Evaluation Framework

12.3 Company Evaluation Quadrant

12.3.1 Overview

12.3.2 Company Footprint

12.3.3 Stars

12.3.4 Emerging Leaders

12.3.5 Pervasive Players

12.3.6 Participants

12.4 Startup Evaluation Quadrant

12.4.1 Progressive Companies

12.4.2 Responsive Companies

12.4.3 Dynamic Companies

12.4.4 Starting Blocks

12.5 Revenue Analysis

12.6 Market Share Analysis

13 Company Profiles

13.1 Introduction

13.2 Large Players

13.2.1 Fireeye Inc.

13.2.2 Cisco

13.2.3 IBM

13.2.4 Symantec (Broadcom)

13.2.5 Netscout Systems

13.2.6 Rsa Security

13.2.7 Viavi Solutions

13.2.8 Novetta Solutions

13.2.9 Solarwinds

13.2.10 Palo Alto Networks

13.2.11 Sonicwall

13.2.12 Opentext

13.2.13 ManageEngine (Zoho)

13.3 SME Players

13.3.1 Logrhythm Inc.

13.3.2 Niksun

13.3.3 Corelight

13.3.4 Securonix

13.3.5 Vectra Ai

13.4 Startup Players

13.4.1 Liveaction

13.4.2 Vehere Inc.

13.4.3 Cysight.Ai (Ideadata)

13.4.4 Corcystems, Inc.

13.4.5 Graylog

13.4.6 Endace Ltd.

14 Adjacent Markets

15 Appendix

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/flz8hf

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]

For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900

U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

SOURCE Research and Markets
Autonomous Trucking Company Working to Commercialize Self-Driving Trucks Within the Decade

BLACKSBURG, Va., April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Torc Robotics, an independent subsidiary of Daimler Truck, is opening a technology and software development center in Stuttgart, Germany. Torc is a leader in SAE Level 4 self-driving vehicle software for heavy-duty vehicles. Torc Europe GmbH will tap into the available talent pool in one of Germany's prime automotive development regions. The Stuttgart team will support the ongoing development of SAE Level 4 virtual driver for deployment in autonomous trucks in the United States.

Torc Europe GmbH will tap into the available talent pool in one of Germany's prime automotive development regions. Tweet this Daimler Trucks Freightliner Cascadia test truck in front of the Torc Europe Stuttgart office.

"Torc is working closely with Daimler Truck to optimize the entire product stack including the virtual driver, sensing and computer hardware, and the redundant chassis to be the first company to launch a scalable and profitable self-driving product," said Torc Founder and CEO Michael Fleming. "Torc's Stuttgart technology and software development center will leverage the deep automotive and trucking technical and product expertise to make this a reality."

Torc Europe GmbH is an independent entity and a 100% subsidiary of Torc Robotics, Inc. The office is in Unterturkheim, in close proximity to an existing Daimler Truck R&D facility and near the Daimler Truck headquarters. The 18,000 square-foot technology center has an additional 12,000 square feet that will be used as a workshop.

"Stuttgart is known as an area with a wealth of automotive and autonomous vehicle expertise. We hope to leverage this significant talent pool to meet our commercialization goals and support our mission of increased safety and efficiency," said Torc Vice President of Engineering Mike Avitabile. "Collaboration thrives because of the partnership with Daimler Truck, a leader in the trucking industry. Combining Daimler Truck's experience with Torc's expertise in automated vehicle software and automated truck systems will help accelerate bringing our product to market."

Torc and Daimler Truck are collaboratively pursuing a common goal of developing and bringing autonomous trucks for long-haul trucking (SAE Level 4) to the roads within the decade. This pure-play approach is directed at solving what Fleming calls "one of the most complex engineering feats of our generation." The challenge is to reinvent the truck to accommodate a safe, scalable Level 4 product, while integrating with the complex, interconnected freight network to support sustained innovation and efficiency.

In 2019, Daimler Truck invested a majority share in Torc, the first autonomous vehicle (AV) company to enter an integrated partnership with a truck original equipment manufacturer. Torc and Daimler Truck, with its North American entity, are ramping up development and testing in the United States, which requires support in areas such as simulation, machine learning, and infrastructure.

In addition to the facility in Stuttgart, Torc recently opened a 20,000-square-foot facility in Austin, Texas. In 2021, the company added a 28,000-square-foot office space for its workforce in Blacksburg's Corporate Research Center. A fully operational test facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, opened in 2020. The Albuquerque location allows daily, multi-shift runs of Torc's autonomous test trucks on highways in New Mexico and Texas.

The company is growing and is hiring software engineers, data scientists, and architects in the areas of systems, safety, validation, and product development. To learn more about employment opportunities at Torc Robotics, visit the Careers page.

Additional Background

About Torc Robotics

Torc Robotics, headquartered in Blacksburg, Virginia, is an independent subsidiary of Daimler Truck AG, a global leader and pioneer in trucking. Founded in 2005 at the birth of the self-driving vehicle revolution, Torc has 17 years of experience in pioneering safety-critical, self-driving applications. Torc offers a complete self-driving vehicle software and integration solution and is currently focusing on commercializing self-driving trucks. "Trucking is the backbone of the United States economy, delivering food and products to every community in the country," said Torc CEO and Founder Michael Fleming. "Daimler Truck has led innovation in trucking for more than a century, from the first truck, to driver assist technology. Torc is working with Daimler Truck to commercialize self-driving trucks to make our roads safer and better, fulfilling our mission of saving lives."

For high resolution photos:

Daimler Truck's Freightliner Cascadia test truck in front of the Torc Europe Stuttgart office.

A Torc team in action

Media contact: Laura Lawton | [email protected] |(408) 505-5820

SOURCE Torc Robotics
Umpqua is encouraging entrepreneurs in communities it serves to learn more about Kiva and apply for funding. Tweet this

Umpqua is encouraging entrepreneurs in communities it serves to learn more about Kiva and apply for funding.

"Our partnership with Kiva makes it possible for more entrepreneurs to turn support from their communities into a source of capital that would otherwise not be available," said Umpqua's Chief Marketing Communications Officer Eve Callahan. "If individuals believe in and are willing to help finance a local BIPOC or women entrepreneur, Umpqua will triple-match the amount of their financial support so enterprises can more easily and quickly access the financing they need."

How Kiva Works

For any business owner in need of funding to start, sustain or grow, the only collateral needed to access capital through Kiva is the support of the people and community they serve. Typical barriers to access are removed from consideration, including those related to credit history, physical assets for collateral, citizenship or verifiable financial track record.

Kiva works hand-in-hand with entrepreneurs to set a financing goal up to $15,000 and raise contributions from friends, family, and community members on its platform. Kiva also offers access to a global network of lenders interested in supporting businesses. Financial commitments raised are then combined into a 0% interest business loan eventually repaid to supporters over three to five years.

Umpqua, through the Umpqua Bank Managed Loan Fund, will help BIPOC and women entrepreneurs reach financing goals more quickly by effectively quadrupling every dollar they raise towards their financing goal.

How to Apply

To apply for Kiva financing and the triple dollar match through the Umpqua Bank Managed Loan Fund, entrepreneurs in Oregon, Washington, California, and Idaho can visit the Umpqua-Kiva partnership page . The initial application process typically takes between 20 and 30 minutes.

The Kiva partnership is part of Umpqua's Small Business Empowerment Program , which brings together the bank's various initiatives to improve access to funding, products/services and expertise under one strategic umbrella. Along with Kiva, the Small Business Empowerment Program includes partnerships with organizations that are often the first step for entrepreneurs interested in accessing Kiva funds, including: Oregon-based MESO (Micro Enterprise Services of Oregon); Washington-based Business Impact NW ; and California-based Centro Community Partners .

"We are excited to partner with Umpqua Bank as part of its Small Business Empowerment Program to provide additional loans and unlock capital for under-resourced entrepreneurs," said Sarah Marchal Murray, Chief Strategic Partnerships Officer at Kiva. "Ensuring every business owner has equal access to capital and other resources to succeed is important for creating strong and vibrant communities. Partnering with Umpqua, Kiva is honored to extend our platform's reach to more communities across the West Coast."

About Umpqua Bank

Umpqua Bank , headquartered in Roseburg, Ore., is a subsidiary of Umpqua Holdings Corporation, and has locations across Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada. Umpqua Bank has been recognized for its innovative customer experience and banking strategy by national publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Fast Company and CNBC. The company has been recognized for eight years in a row on FORTUNE magazine's list of the country's "100 Best Companies to Work For," and was recently named by The Portland Business Journal the Most Admired Financial Services Company in Oregon for the seventeenth consecutive year. In addition to its retail banking presence, Umpqua Bank also owns Financial Pacific Leasing, Inc., a nationally recognized commercial finance company that provides equipment leases to businesses.

About Kiva

Kiva is a global nonprofit that brings people together to invest in lasting impact. Kiva connects individuals, institutional investors, and corporations with global opportunities to invest in humanitywhen and where it will make the greatest collective impact. With as little as $25, you can help women, refugees and small businesses across the globe build a better future for individuals, their families and communities. Join two million people who have invested $1.7 billion in real dreams and real opportunity around the world.

SOURCE Umpqua Bank
MIAMI, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Miami-based CG1 Solutions (cg1Solutions.com), which specializes in providing engaging technology solutions for a wide variety of clients, has announced the long-awaited launch of a private beta test for Reality Hub, a metaverse training system for hospitals.

Reality Hub will provide training on a wide range of medical equipment using Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) and several major health systems throughout the United States have contacted CG1 about being part of the beta test according to CG1 President Edwin Rivera.

Edwin Rivera, president of CG1 Solutions, demonstrates defibrillator instructions using Augmented Reality. The company has announced the beta test launch of Reality Hub, a metaverse training system for hospitals using both Augmented Reality (AR) and Visual Reality (VR).

"Reality Hub is using AR technology to provide quick and efficient training solutions that hospitals and health care systems have needed," said Rivera, whose CG1 Solutions has worked with clients such as Walmart, West Kendall Baptist Hospital, Scope AR, Disney Consumer Products, Alliance Laundry Systems, Synnova Health, Mitsubishi and iNewton.

According to Rivera, hospitals would 'subscribe' to the Reality Hub content for their training needs on specific pieces of equipment and would receive an iPad already loaded with AR/VR content about that equipment. The hospital personnel simply follow the instructions, points the iPad at the equipment and AR/VR images on the iPad screen allows the personnel to get 'hands-on' training instantly.

One recent hospital executive interested in joining the beta test described the subscription system as 'Netflix for the medical field.'

"That description is pretty accurate," said Rivera, a former Desert Storm Marine whose company has been designated as a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB). "By subscribing to Realty Hub content, hospitals will be able to use the latest technology to get up to speed faster and more efficiently. The old systemshipping the equipment, then having someone install it, then waiting for a company rep to come by to train the personnelis time-consuming and inefficient for today's hospital systems. In addition, by using the Reality Hub method, new personnel joining that department can simply use the iPad content and be brought up-to-speed immediately. No need to wait until another visit from the machine's rep for a second round of training."

For more information on Realty Hub or CG1 Solutions, Rivera can be reached via email, [email protected] or via phone, (786) 699-1452.

Media Contact:

Lewis Matusow

305.775.6575

[email protected]

SOURCE CG1 Solutions
Service now available to Tyler neighborhoods

LUBBOCK, Texas, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Vexus Fiber, a leading fiber service provider in Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico, announced their 100% fiber-to-the-home network is now available to hundreds of homes in the Tyler, Texas community. Before year-end, Vexus is looking to bring service to over ten thousand homes in the Tyler region. As Vexus continues to approach its goal of bringing reliable internet service to homes in Tyler, you can find updates about the construction and its progress at VexusFiber.com/tyler.

"After several months of construction, we're extremely excited to announce that our first set of homes in Tyler are now eligible for our 100% fiber-optic network service," said Cameron Miller, Regional Vice President of East Texas and Louisiana at Vexus. "We're thrilled to be bringing fiber internet into the Tyler community and to be another option for residents. Our future-proof technology provides the citizens of Tyler with reliable, fast, multi-gigabit speeds for all their bandwidth needs."

Unlike outdated cable internet, Vexus provides customers with a network that was built for the future. As many consumers know, technology is ever-changing, and they need a network that was built to handle these upgrades. The equipment and design being used by Vexus are built to scale and update as internet demand in the community continues to rise. This gives consumers a network they don't need to worry about changing or upgrading.

Vexus Fiber plans to open a store located at 4031 S. Broadway in the upcoming months to better serve customers locally in Tyler. Vexus has a 24/7 Texas-based call center focused on outstanding customer experience and service.

"We've heard from community members that with Vexus the construction process has been smooth, and they are happy with their decision to sign up for our services," added Miller. "We are currently on schedule with our construction and service turn-ons, and we look forward to adding thousands of homes over the next few months."

Vexus Fiber currently operates fiber-to-the-home networks in Lubbock, Amarillo, Wichita Falls, Abilene and surrounding areas in Texas, as well as Hammond, Covington and Mandeville areas in Louisiana, and the Santa Fe area of New Mexico. The company is also building new networks in the Rio Grande Valley, San Angelo, Laredo, Nacogdoches and Huntsville, Texas in addition to Lake Charles, Sulphur, West Lake and Alexandria, Louisiana, as well as Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Vexus also participates in the federal Affordable Connectivity Program, which provides eligible households a benefit of up to $30 a month or $75 a month on qualifying tribal lands to reduce the cost of broadband service. Internet speeds start at 150/150 Mbps for as low as $0 for qualifying households.

Interested in signing up for Vexus Fiber? Residents and businesses can visit connect.vexusfiber.com to sign up for services today.

Additionally, Vexus plans to hire local sales, technical and customer service professionals to support the area. For those interested in joining the Vexus Fiber team visit vexusfiber.com/jobs.

About Vexus Fiber

Vexus Fiber is a leading provider of fiber-based communications solutions for both residential and business customers across Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico. As a technology leader in the industry, Vexus Fiber offers an extensive range of internet connectivity over a true fiber-to-the-premise network. Services also include a robust HD Video platform, Voice, TeleCloud services and more. For more information, please visit vexusfiber.com.

Vexus Fiber Contact: Kyle Alcorn 573-481-2732

For Inquiries email: [email protected]

SOURCE Vexus Fiber
AUSTIN, Texas, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Adam T. Muery, senior partner with Muery & Farrell, P.C., released a public statement today regarding Round Rock ISD Board of Trustees' decision to reinstate Dr. Hafedh Azaiez as district superintendent:

"I am legal counsel to Ms. Ruiz, victim of assault and domestic abuse by Hafedh Azaiez, Superintendent of Round Rock ISD. I am writing to provide information pertaining to the Round Rock ISD Board of Trustees decision to re-instate Azaiez.

Succinctly stated, the FACTS were ignored by five of the board members in making this decision and re-instating this man who is so apparently guilty of domestic violence.

As counsel for Ms. Ruiz, I am appalled that five members of the Round Rock ISD Board of Trustees would allow for their decision to be based on political expediency over basic decency. Ms. Ruiz heeded our advice to issue this statement so that her silence would not be construed as giving validity to the false narrative being promulgated by Azaiez, his team of attorneys, and five of the members of the Round Rock ISD Board of Trustees.

For months we have remained silent, at Ms. Ruiz's request, giving the Round Rock ISD Board of Trustees the opportunity to make their decision based on the report of the independent investigator that they empowered to evaluate the allegations against Azaiez. We cooperated with that investigation, allowing the investigator to review my client's agreement with Azaiez, in which he agreed, among other things, to:

a permanent restraining order punishable by criminal contempt forbidding Azaiez to come within 500 feet of Ms. Ruiz, her residence, her place of employment, her place of worship or the place of education of her children





waive any and all rights as a father to his unborn child





neither disparage nor cause anyone to disparage Ms. Ruiz's reputation





maintain the confidentiality of the dealings of the parties

We were informed that the investigation included facts from the restraining order and settlement agreement. The investigator herself was a superintendent with four decades of experience. Despite her clear recommendation of looking at the facts, five of the trustees chose to ignore the facts and reinstate Azaiez.

They made the decision to keep him as superintendent of schools despite knowing there existed a permanent order from a judge threatening Azaiez with up to six months in jail for coming within 500 feet of certain schools or places of worship in Texas.

Despite the non-disparagement and confidentiality agreement, which Azaiez voluntarily entered, he, through his attorney Mary Nix, has continued to victimize Ms. Ruiz through repeated press statements and falsehoods. She has been derided and attacked on social media platforms. Ms. Ruiz has been tormented as she has continuously been followed, stalked and surreptitiously photographed. She has received death threats. She has been repeatedly referred to as a mistress in the press and labeled with the scarlet letter.

And finally,

Mary Nix's previous statement that she had incontrovertible proof that the assault did not occur is false. Azaiez and his attorneys were afraid that we would prevail in meeting our burden of proof that the assault did occur in a contested hearing, and the protective order would be granted. Otherwise, they would not have agreed to a permanent restraining order punishable by criminal contempt. Ms. Ruiz agreed to the restraining order instead of pushing for the protective order because it was the only way she could be assured that Azaiez would never have possession or access to their unborn child.



Azaiez and his team have previously suggested that it was impossible for Ms. Ruiz to be pregnant with Azaiez's child. If that were the case, there would have been no reason for Azaiez to negotiate within the agreement that if he were to be scientifically proven to be the child's father that his child support would be capped to the one-time payment that was meant to cover Ms. Ruiz's legal expenses in pursuing the protective order, something she'd be entitled to by law, and a portion of the expenses related to the pregnancy.



The criminal case by the Travis County Sheriff's office against Hafedh Azaiez was not closed, it was made inactive. At that time Ms. Ruiz could not bear the combined stress of the media attention, the threats against her, and her professional responsibilities. She was assured by the Travis County Sheriff's Office investigator in writing that they could activate the criminal case when Ms. Ruiz provided the needed information.

Ms. Ruiz physically suffered first at the hands of Azaiez, and now is being re-victimized by the actions of five of the members of Round Rock ISD Board of Trustees. They ignored the facts presented by their own investigator, and reinstated this abuser to his job overseeing the education of children, meanwhile actively besmirching the reputation of my client, who herself is a proven leader in the education field. She trusts that the TEA will now take the necessary action with regards to Azaiez.

There are multiple causes of action that we are considering on behalf of Ms. Ruiz and anticipate filing a lawsuit against Azaiez as early as next week."

Media Inquiries

Christine Haas, Haas Communications

[email protected]

(512) 751-1592

SOURCE Muery & Farrell, P.C.
NEW YORK, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- VinFast announces its participation in the New York International Auto Show 2022 (NYIAS 2022) from April 15-24, 2022, and will showcase three models: VF 7, VF 8, and VF 9. In addition, for the first time in the US, VinFast will offer a public test drive to attendees, providing a practical experience of the excellent smart technology integrated into its vehicles.

Five months after launching its concept cars at the Los Angeles Auto Show 2021, VinFast is officially unveiling a drivable EV for customers to experience at NYIAS 2022. The test drive program uses the VF 8 and will be conducted at the EV Test Track on Level 1 at Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.

The coming VF 8 model is a midsize eSUV integrated with several premium features of the Smart Services suite, giving the drivers an experience of smart technologies in work and life. These features illustrate how VinFast proudly and continuously strives to deliver quality and comfort to its customers.

Mr. Emmanuel Bret - VinFast Deputy CEO of Global Sales and Marketing, said: "Offering test drives of the VF 8 after only five months since our Global Premiere clearly demonstrates VinFast's commitment, speed, and determination. We hope that VinFast's premium, smart, and environmentally friendly products will soon be in the garages of American customers while supporting them in their efforts to improve the environment through their vehicle selection. In addition, we hope the VF 8 test drive program will provide a taste of what our cars can offer to potential customers."

At NYIAS 2022, The VF 7, VF 8, and VF 9 will be on display at VinFast's exhibition booth. All models embody VinFast's go-to-market strategy in the US, offering leading technology with a modern and sophisticated design language at an attainable price point. These models will be integrated with ADAS, the Smart Services, and a 10-year warranty. In addition, VinFast offers a unique battery rental program, which ensures reasonable vehicle prices while minimizing customer concerns about battery life and maintenance.

In addition to exhibiting and offering test drives, VinFast will organize several exclusive programs for the media (on the afternoon of April 13), VinFirst customers (during event days), and visitors interested in discovering the unique features of Vietnamese culture and cuisine at VinFast Lotus Session on April, 16, 2022.

At the CES 2022 in early January, VinFast presented its pure electric strategy and its complete electric vehicle product line-up - VF 5, VF 6, VF 7, VF 8, and VF 9. The VF 8 and VF 9 are expected to be delivered to customers in the second half of 2022.

As the company prepares for market expansion, VinFast recently signed a memorandum of understanding to establish its first automotive manufacturing plant in North Carolina. With an investment of up to $2 billion in the first phase and thousands of new jobs created for local workers, the plant will begin construction this year and is expected to become operational in July 2024.

Currently, VF 8 and VF 9 have received approximately 60,000 international reservations since the reservation program launched three months ago. Thus, in observation of the market's ongoing trust and positive feedback, VinFast has decided to continue the VinFirst program for its pioneering customers from international markets until the end of May 30, 2022 (Pacific Standard Time).

Visitors can experience and learn more about VinFast at Booth #610 at the New York International Auto Show. The company's exhibit will be open to the public from April 15-24 on Level 3 of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.

About VinFast

VinFast - a member of Vingroup  envisioned to drive the movement of global smart electric vehicle revolution. Established in 2017, VinFast owns a state-of-the-art automotive manufacturing complex with globally leading scalability that boasts up to 90% automation in Hai Phong, Vietnam.

Strongly committed to the mission for a sustainable future for everyone, VinFast constantly innovates to bring high-quality products, advanced smart services, seamless customer experiences, and pricing strategy for all to inspire global customers to jointly create a future of smart mobility and a sustainable planet. Learn more at: https://vinfastauto.com.

About Vingroup

Established in 1993, Vingroup is one of the leading private conglomerates in the region, with a total capitalization of $35 billion USD from three publicly traded companies (as of November 4, 2021). Vingroup currently focuses on three main areas: Technology and Industry, Services and Social Enterprise. Find out more at: https://www.vingroup.net/en.

SOURCE VinFast Automotive
Award-winning San Cosme mezcal is produced in Oaxaca, Mexico, from 100% espadin agave that is cooked for three days with mesquite wood in a time-honored conical earthen pit oven, before it's shredded with a traditional tahona stone wheel. It's then fermented in oak tanks, double distilled in copper pot stills, and bottled under an eye-catching and contemporary black and white label.

"We have been searching for some time for the perfect agave spirits that align with our high-standards and meticulous focus on the world's top-quality ultra-premium products," says Bill Corbett, CEO of Zamora Company USA. "Without a doubt, San Cosme is one of the finest mezcals in the category, led by an incredibly passionate and talented team in Oaxaca, the premier region in Mexico for mezcal production. We're very proud to represent this world-class brand here in the U.S."

Mezcal San Cosme was founded in 2010 by three childhood friends who shared a goal of creating a handcrafted young mezcal that combines tradition and artisanal craftsmanship, while also showcasing modern Mexico. The name was derived from the mysticism of Saint Cosmas, the patron saint of doctors, who performed miracles curing all who sought his aid.

"We are very excited for this partnership, it's a crucial step in our mission to bring the best of Mexico to the world, and we could not think of a better partner than the Zamora Company to make this dream come to life," says Gernot Allnoch, Co-Founder of Mezcal San Cosme.

Southern Glazer's Wine & Spirits distributes the Zamora Company USA portfolio in 41 markets, and the company works with other top wholesalers such as Horizon Beverage Group in other U.S. states.

In addition to the U.S. and Mexico, San Cosme mezcal is available in more than 30 countries across the globe, including China, the UK, Australia, France, Spain, and Germany.

About Zamora Company USA:

Zamora Company USA, based in Dallas, Texas, has recently brought together their collection of unique luxury brands along with an experienced, passionate, and dedicated team of over 30 people. In addition to San Cosme Mezcal, the organization manages sales, distribution, execution, and marketing of the following brands: Licor 43, Double Cross Vodka, Yellow Rose Whiskey, Don Papa Rum, Martin Miller's Gin, Lolea Sangria, Villa Massa Limoncello, Amaretto, and Vermouth, plus Spanish wines Ramon Bilbao, Cruz De Alba, and Mar de Frades. For more information, please visit zamoracompany.com/usa.

SOURCE Zamora Company USA
Kiev, April 6 : The National Guard of Ukraine has said its divisions have arrived at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) site and taken control of the facility's security.

"The major task of the national guardsmen on the Chernobyl NPP site is ensuring security and defence of its nuclear facilities as well as physical protection of nuclear material," the National Guard said on Facebook this Tuesday.

The safety of the site and its transport infrastructure will be checked by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, it added.

The Russian troops that had been in control of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant since February 24 left the facility on March 31, Xinhua news agency reported.

The Chernobyl nuclear plant, some 110 km north of Kiev, suffered one of the worst nuclear accidents in human history on April 26, 1986.

Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Athens, April 6 : Greece, Cyprus and Israel have pledged in Greek capital Athens on Tuesday to strengthen cooperation in the energy sector in the wake of the Ukraine-Russia crisis.

"Diversifying gas supplies has become a top priority," Greek Foreign Affairs Minister Nikos Dendias said after a trilateral meeting of Foreign Affairs Ministers, Xinhua news agency reported.

The conflict in Ukraine "stands to change the structure of the European and Middle Eastern energy markets," said Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid.

He added, "There are risks here, but there are also opportunities which we must examine together." The three countries "can and should be part of the solution for Europe's quest for diversified, secure and cleaner energy (gas) supply from the Levantine corridor (in the Eastern Mediterranean)," Cyprus' Foreign Minister Ioannis Kasoulides said.
Lucknow, April 6 : More than 100 villages in Uttar Pradesh now have 'house astronomy labs' set up using panchayat funds at local government schools.

These labs are equipped with a telescope, spectrometer and a variety of pedagogical models depicting Newton's laws of motion.

According to the UP government spokesman, charts highlighting various aspects of astronomy have been put up everywhere.

Started as a pilot project on Teacher's Day in 2021 at Sikandrabad (rural) in Bulandshahr, the district has 109 labs set up within a span of six months.

Abhishek Pandey, Chief Development Officer, Bulandshahr, said, "We had proposed this project to roughly 160 gram panchayats and 100 agreed to set up these labs using their own funds. Each lab costs around Rs 2.5 lakh." Pandey has been a champion of 'experiential learning' in schools and communities.

"The astronomy labs being established at primary and upper-primary schools, are built around the New Education Policy and are aimed at stoking space curiosity at the community level. We want to include both children and adults and explore possibilities of 'citizen science'." That means general public engagement in scientific research activities by using tools and resources provided to them, he said.

The labs have generated a great amount of interest in astronomy, both among children as well as adults.

Every evening, village women make a beeline to gaze at the stars.

This endeavour has also led to the emergence of 'khagol doot' (astronomy messengers) among selected school students with a keen interest in science. These messengers act as guides and also help teachers in managing the labs.
Bengaluru, April 6 : Giving a much-needed boost to the Indian startup growth story, leading local language technology platform VerSe Innovation on Wednesday announced that it has raised $805 million from global investors, taking its valuation to $5 billion.

VerSe Innovation, that owns popular short-video platform Josh and local language content platform Dailyhunt, has raised $1.5 billion in the past year.

The investment, said the company, will be focused on strengthening its leadership position as the largest, fastest growing local language AI driven content platform in the country.

"We have raised this significant funding at a time when both private and public markets are facing a slowdown and founders are finding it difficult to raise capital. It is a single-largest investment in any of the startups in India, further validating our work to date and the robust business model," Umang Bedi, Co-founder, VerSe Innovation, told IANS.

VerSe Innovation has proved its worth across key metrics like user growth, engagement, monetisation and scale, and "we are helping millions of creators monetise their content in vernacular languages", Bedi added.

The $805 million funding round was led by Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), along with Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board (Ontario Teachers'), Luxor Capital, Sumeru Ventures and others.

Existing investors Sofina Group, Baillie Gifford and others also participated.

VerSe now plans on both deepening and broadening its AI/ML and data science capabilities to further cement its leadership position across all user, engagement and retention metrics, drive deeper monetisation including influencers, e-commerce and live streaming and forays into Web 3.0 experiences.

It currently has a local language creator base of over 50 million creators as well as its local language content ecosystem which experiences over 80 billion video plays per month.

"India's digital content is experiencing phenomenal growth, and VerSe Innovation is well positioned to be one of the leaders in the fast-growing short video and local language content space," said Frank Su, Managing Director, Head of Private Equity Asia, CPP Investments.

Josh currently has over 150 million MAUs (monthly active users) while Dailyhunt serves over 350 million users every month, offering content in 15 languages from a licensed creator ecosystem of over 100,000 content partners and individual content creators.

Another app 'PublicVibe' from the company serves over 5 million monthly active users (MAUs) and 1 million daily active users (DAUs) and has over 6 million downloads on the Play Store.

"With a strategic focus on video content and building for India, we have seen explosive growth emerging from the next billion users coming out of regional India," said Virendra Gupta, Founder, VerSe.

"It is a big day, not only for us but also for the Indian startup ecosystem, as we create world-class products at the home turf," Gupta told IANS.
New Delhi, April 6 : The Centre is likely to table the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Bill, 2022 in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday.

Union Home Minister Amit Shah is to move the Bill which seeks to authorise "taking measurements of convicts and other persons for the purposes of identification and investigation in criminal matters and to preserve records and for matters connected therewith and incidental thereto, as passed by Lok Sabha, be taken into consideration." Shah is also to move that the Bill be passed.

As per the List of Business of the Upper House of Parliament, the government is also likely to table the Constitution (Scheduled Tribes) Order (Amendment) Bill, 2022. Tribal Affairs Minister Arjun Munda is likely to move the Bill further to amend the Constitution (Scheduled Tribes) Order, 1950 for inclusion of a certain community in the list of Scheduled Tribes in relation to Tripura as passed by the Lok Sabha, be taken into consideration and passing.

Union Minister Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti will make a statement regarding the status of implementation of recommendations contained in the 16th report of the department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Rural Development on 'Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana - Gramin (PMAY-G).

Jyoti will lay a statement correcting the answer given in the Rajya Sabha on March 23 to a question arising out of the answer to unstarred question 2342 regarding 'Programmes for rural poverty alleviation'.

The discussion on the working of the ministry of labour and employment is also likely to conclude in the Rajya Sabha with a reply by the minister.

Jawhar Sircar and John Brittas will lay the statements showing further action taken by the Centre on the reports of the Department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology (2021-22).

A. Vijaykumar and Sukhram Singh Yadav will lay the 13th Report of the Department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Petroleum and Natural Gas on 'Safety and Security of Oil Installations of Public Sector Oil Companies - with specific reference to Western Offshore Mishap during Cyclone Tauktae'.
Lucknow, April 6 : Cities situated on the banks of River Ganga in Uttar Pradesh will now witness increased social and economic activities.

Working on the central government's 'Ghat Pe Haat' scheme, the Yogi Adityanath government has decided to develop the banks of the river for tourism.

Principal secretary of Uttar Pradesh Tourism, Mukesh Meshram, said: "Since this state is home to the biggest part of Ganga and a number of religiously important cities fall on this stretch, we look forward to making the most of this opportunity. A team of competent officers and experts is already working on the proposal demanded by the Namami Gange authorities." Officials at Namami Gange informed that the idea is to build or beautify about 164 ghats across all the cities, besides encouraging farmers to take up natural farming along the river.

The plan also includes formation of District Ganga Committees to address all issues related to the river.

Weekly markets may be allowed on these ghats which will be maintained and cleaned regularly by the committees in place. This will be done with the idea of promoting economic activity along the river.

Meshram said: "In addition to its religious importance, scripted in epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata, Ganga is also a repository of stories, myths and legends besides being witness to history in several ways. This makes it a natural magnet for tourism purposes. We aim to translate this energy into a carefully curated experience." Officials insist beneficiary states have started working on the idea.

The scheme also covers more than two dozen cities across Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal along the 2,520 km long stretch of the Ganga river.

The river conservation is promoted along with development of economic and employment opportunities along the river so that conservation becomes a way of life.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Lucknow, April 6 : Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police (ADCP) Chiranjeev Nath Sinha has become the first police officer in the state to adopt a school.

Sinha has adopted a primary school in Aminabad area after taking due permission from the Basic Shiksha Adhikari.

It is noteworthy that Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had asked state officials to adopt a school and encourage children to enrol under the 'School Chalo Abhiyan'.

"I visited my adopted school on Tuesday and even taught the children for some time. I gave them books, copies, stationery, toffees, biscuits and masks. I will be regularly visiting the school and making efforts to upgrade facilities through my own resources," he told IANS on Wednesday.

Sinha is known to be a passionate animal lover. He had made headlines when he fed stray animals during the Covid lockdowns.

He was also appointed brand ambassador of the Lucknow Zoo and he encouraged the "adopt an animal" scheme. He has been working for environment and animals along with his regular police duties.
Bengaluru, April 6 : The Karnataka police shot at and injured two robbers who sexually assaulted a man after kidnapping and robbing him in Bengaluru.

The accused have been identified as Mohammad Ashiq (22), a resident of Udupi and Issac (21) from Kundapur town. A manhunt has been launched for more persons in this connection.

Kothanur police, who carried out the shootout on Monday evening, stated on Tuesday that they have recovered a car, dagger and ten mobile phones from the possession of the miscreants. On March 26, the accused, along with two others who came in a car, had waylaid the victim who was also travelling in a car.

The accused entered the vehicle of the accused, threatened him at knife point and asked him to drive according to their instructions. They had snatched away his gold finger ring and the ATM card and withdrew money.

Later, they took him to Whitefield and Bellandur, abused him and released him after sexually assaulting him. The victim lodged a complaint in this regard with Kothanur Police in Bengaluru.

Considering the seriousness of the issue, the police department formed a special team. The team had collected CCTV footage and technical evidence and carried out search operations in Udupi, Mangaluru and coastal Karnataka region.

Meanwhile, the police got an information about the movement of the accused in a car. When the policemen asked to surrender, the two accused tried to attack policemen with a dagger and were shot in their legs.

The accused have been involved in extortion, robbery, theft, and burglary and cow theft since childhood. They called themselves 'Team Garuda-900'. The gang committed robbery in Udupi and Mangaluru and other places. They were arrested on many occasions and continued with their involvement in crimes after obtaining bail. As many as 10 warrants were issued on the accused. Further investigation is on.
Kolkata, April 6 : Controversy has erupted within the Trinamool Congress, after the party secretary general and the state commerce & industries minister Partha Chatterjee shared in social media a fake post relating to former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh.

Soon after the post was detected as fake, Chatterjee withdrew it from his Facebook wall.

The controversy started after Chatterjee, late Monday evening, shared in social media a fake post relating to the death of the former prime Minister. Since then the Trinamool Congress secretary and the party spokesman launched scathing attacks against Chatterjee without naming the latter. At around 1 a.m. on Wednesday, Ghosh made a counter post on his Facebook wall on this issue.

"In 2012, when I was sworn in as a Rajya Sabha member, I had a photograph with Dr Manmohan Singh. When I retired in 2018, I clicked with him, when he was on the opposition bench. I have also seen him as a former journalist. I developed deep-rooted respect for him from what I came to know about him. I condemn the action of those who circulated fake news about his death on Tuesday. I also condemn those who acted irresponsibly who shared the same fake news and circulated it more among people. I wish Dr Manmohan Singh good health," Ghosh wrote in his Facebook post.

West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee, too has ridiculed Partha Chatterjee for sharing the post. According to state Congress leaders, Chatterjee has probably "lost his mental balance" because of the ongoing Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) enquiry on employment irregularities in West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) which happened during his tenure as the state education minister.

Chatterjee, so far, has refrained from making any comment on this issue.

Dr Manmohan Singh, 88, suffered from Covid-19 infection last year. Recently, he was also admitted in the hospital because of heart ailments.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Chennai, April 6 : The Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) has constituted a 19-member committee led by its Commissioner Gagan Singh Bedi for a massive drive against the use of banned plastic items.

In a statement, the GCC on Wednesday said that it had inspected 17,582 commercial establishments from March 20 to April 4 and seized 6.4 tonnes of banned plastic items.

The group is now to take this forward to implement the Plastic Waste Management Rules 2016 and act against those involved in using banned plastics.

Besides the Greater Chennai Corporation Commissioner, the committee will have deputy commissioners, a joint commissioner of police, city health officer, city revenue officer, superintending engineer of the solid waste management department, assistant director of the fisheries department, regional director of collegiate education and regional director of food safety department.

The group will be creating major awareness and is planning to rope in movie and television stars as brand ambassadors on a voluntary basis to spread the awareness.

Sources in the GCC told IANS that short films under one-minute duration will be made for which students from the journalism and media studies departments have been roped in on a voluntary basis. The GCC is trying to bring in reputed movie stars and sources said that a top Tamil movie star will be a part of the awareness campaign.
Los Angeles, April 6 : Director-actor Sean Penn recently made an appearance on television channels - both the Right-leaning Fox News and Left-leaning MSNBC within a span of two hours to share his thoughts with cable viewers across the political spectrum, reports 'Variety'.

Penn took to television to discuss support for Ukraine amid the country's invasion by Russian military forces. As per 'Variety', he began the evening with an in-person appearance on the N.Y.-based 'Hannity', engaging in a conversation with Fox News conservative commentator Sean Hannity. Hannity began the segment by recounting how the comparatively liberal Penn decided to come onto the program.

Hannity said, "I made the first phone call to you. Do you remember what you first said to me?" To which Penn responded by saying, "I said 'I don't trust you. But we have to get on with life... We all talk about how divisive things are, how divided things are here. When you step into a country of incredible unity, you realize what we've all been missing. I don't think I've got time to indulge my lack of trust, which becomes a petty thing. These people are fighting for the dreams and aspirations of all of us Americans." He then went on to explain the documentary he was filming in Ukraine before the country was invaded and attacked by Russian forces, and how his relationship with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy evolved as the conflict escalated. He said, "In him, I saw something I'd never seen before. It is clear to me that the Ukrainians will win this. The question is at what cost." After his conversation with Hannity, Penn appeared on MSNBC's 'The Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell' in which he extended further praise for President Zelenskyy. As per 'Variety', he told O'Donnell, "(Zelenskyy) is the face of so many Ukrainians. And yet, it's not conceivable that he could've known the day before that he would really be able to rise up. This is leadership that we aspire to." "This is freedom of thought and true leadership that is just so moving. It's the kind of moving that we need to be able to get [to the United States], which is borderline a kind of populist lap dance of a nation at this point. We've got to get back on track together and realize that Ukraine, with all its diversity, has a unity we've never seen in modern times with the challenge it has", he added.

Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
New Delhi, April 6 : The Supreme Court on Wednesday stayed the Delhi High Court order, which upheld the Additional Rent Controller order directing the eviction of tenant central government officials at the Sujan Park flats, located near the tony Khan market.

A bench headed by Justice Hemant Gupta said: "Stay operation of eviction order". The bench also issued notice to Sir Sobha Singh and Sons Pvt Ltd on a petition filed by the central government.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, representing the central government, submitted that bouncers were being sent to evict the government officers and sought a stay on the operation of the high court order.

Justice Gupta said: "Yes, the order has to be stayed".

A Senior advocate Maninder Singh, representing Sir Sobha Singh & Sons, submitted that the government owes huge arrears and urged the top court not to stay the operation of the order. Singh said his client should be allowed to file the reply in the matter. The bench has sought response in four weeks.

The bench, also comprising Justice V. Ramasubramanian, observed that till it examined the issue, whether the eviction was correct in law status quo should be maintained as on the date when the high court decided the matter.

The central government moved the top court challenging a Delhi High Court, which was passed in January 2020, affirming the decision of the Additional Rent Control Tribunal directing the Centre to make payment of unpaid arrears of rent owed to the respondent, Sir Sobha Singh and Sons P. Ltd.

In 1945, Sir Sobha Singh was granted perpetual lease of 7.58 acres of land by the British in north and south Sujan Singh Park for construction of 84 flats, on a condition that half of the flats would be given to accommodate government officers on concessional rent.

The flats included five single bedroom flats, nine double bedroom flats, 39 servant quarters and 25 garages. In 1959, the estate officer issued notices to the flat owners for alleged violations of the approved construction plan and use of flats for purposes in breach of the lease agreement. In February 2005, the additional rent controller ordered eviction of government officials from the premises.

The Centre's plea said that a bare reading of Section 3 makes it clear that any government property demised in favour of a person in the form of a 'Grant' as per provisions of the Grants Act, will be excluded from the scope of application of the provisions of any other law/statute. It further added that any legislation which is contrary to the notions in the Government Grant, will not apply to a government property granted in favour of a specific person. It is therefore submitted that the provisions of the Grant Act will have an overriding effect over any other law, in force, which is contrary thereto.

The Centre's plea said: "The Tribunal vide order dated 01.09.2007 erroneously held that the contested property was covered under the provisions of the Delhi Rent Control Act (DRCA). Moreover, the Hon'ble High Court affirmed the said finding vide order dated January 8, 2020".

It added, "It is most reverentially submitted that the Grants Act is a special statute and so, it would prevail over other statutes and so, the provisions contained in the Grants Act will have an overriding effect on the provisions contained in the DRCA. Furthermore, it is submitted that the Transfer of Property Act, 1882 has expressly been excluded from the arena of Government Grants."

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Canberra, April 6 : Australia's national science agency has launched a citizen science programme to help monitor native plants in the wake of extreme weather events.

The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), a collaboration between the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), museums and governments, on Wednesday launched Flora Connections.

The new project aims to harness amateur botanists to monitor native flora's recovery from bushfires and floods, Xinhua news agency reported.

Erin Roger, the Citizen Science Programme Lead for the ALA, said recent weather events were having significant impacts on important native plants.

"As extreme fires and floods become more common, plants, which are vital to keeping our ecosystems healthy, also need to recover," she said in a media release.

"Through Flora Connections, we want to better-understand how our native plants are recovering post-fire and flood, and that means boots on the ground.

"That's why we're urging Australians who love getting out into nature to get involved, to help us collect the information we need while they're exploring." Citizen participants in the project will be able to access information, documentation forms and data-gathering material through the Flora Connections website.

"After the information is submitted to Flora Connections, it will then be made available by the Atlas of Living Australia, our national biodiversity data infrastructure, which will be of huge value to support the science of bushfire impacts on plants," Roger said.

It has been funded under the federal government's A$200 million ($151.5 million) Bushfire Recovery Program for wildlife and their habitats, which is being coordinated by the ALA.
New Delhi, April 6: With unending public protests against the government targeting Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, and with the opposition in no mood to support the government, the crisis in the island nation has only aggravated.

Leader of the Opposition, Sajith Premadasa has given a clarion call to do away with the Presidential system. On Tuesday, Premadasa announced in the parliament that it is time to introduce a new electoral system in the country. Speaking in the parliament, he said: "For nearly 20 years every leader promised to abolish the Executive Presidency but only strengthened it... but this time it's different, it seems the people of Sri Lanka will make sure that it gets done".

It is President Gotabaya Rajapaksa who has become the face of the Sri Lankan financial and social crisis. On the streets he is the target of the people while in the parliament, the opposition attacks his position, thereby, the presidential system.

Gulbin Sultana, Sri Lanka expert at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA), told India Narrative that it is difficult to say how will the political crisis pan out. "As of now, it seems President Rajapaksa will not step down. But his party has lost two-thirds majority in the parliament with allies not supporting it. He has said he will not step down but he would hand over the government anyone who can prove simple majority".

It is not just the support of allies and party politicians that Rajapaksa and his brother Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa have lost. What they have also lost is the support of the public. In the last few days-since the financial waters reached the neck, people have clearly vented their ire at the Rajapaksa family through personal attacks and slogans-"Gota go back", "Rajapaksas resign", "Gota, time to quit" and "Save my Sri Lanka".

In violent agitations, people attacked the residence of President Rajapaksa on Thursday night and on Monday evening, they attacked the residence of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa as well. After having braved austerity since last year, the masses have finally shown their prowess to the powers that be in the island nation.

The nationwide state of emergency and the curfew have not deterred the harassed people or the students. Riot police with tear gas and water cannons too have not been able to curb the masses from holding agitations at several different places simultaneously.

The spontaneous protests that broke out in foreign countries against the food and fuel crisis in Sri Lanka have also targeted the Rajapaksas.

How does the country get out of the financial crisis that it has walked into over the past few years. Sultana says that though Sri Lanka has been able to take many loans, it will have to repay all of these to the IMF, China as well as other loans. "Only if the financial assistance comes in the form of grants will it help the country, or if the lenders support by restructuring debt".

(The content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com) --indianarrative

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
New Delhi, April 6: Calling it a "schizoid campaign", Russia's Security Council deputy head Dmitry Medvedev has said that expulsion of diplomats from several countries will be devastating to bilateral relations and invite a symmetrical response from Moscow.

Many European nations, including Sweden, Belgium, Poland, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Ireland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic have announced that they are expelling Russian diplomats due to its ongoing 'special military operation' in Ukraine.

Russian Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov also labeled the move by European nations as a "shortsighted" step.

"We are negative about it, we regret it. It is a shortsighted step to narrow possibilities for diplomatic communication, diplomatic work in such difficult conditions, such unprecedented difficult and crisis conditions. Such a step will complicate our communication, which is needed to try to find a way out, and will inevitable lead to response steps," Peskov was quoted as saying by the Russian state-owned news agency Tass.

Medvedev also slammed Kiev accusations of civilian killings in Bucha, saying that it is another example of Ukraine's fake propaganda.

"An aircraft picture taken from a computer game. A drone downed by a jar of pickles. Dead heroes who surrendered to a Russian warship. A Mariupol maternity home. And now Bucha," the Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council wrote on Telegram today.

"It's all fake news hatched by the cynical imagination of Ukrainian propaganda-makers. Numerous PR agencies and troll factories sponsored by Western governments and their tame non-profits and NGOs get a lot of money for cooking it all up," he added.

The Russian Defence Ministry had on Monday called the accusations of allegedly killing civilians in Bucha, a town about 26 kms northwest of the Ukrainian capital, as "another production by the Kiev regime for the Western media".

Moscow also said that its request for an urgent meeting of the United Nations Security Council on the issue was rejected on Monday by the United Kingdom which holds the monthly Presidency.

Russia said that it has "factual evidence" on Bucha which it intended to present to the Security Council "so that the international community is not misled by the false narrative promoted by Kiev and its Western sponsors".

"Our efforts have been met with the fierce opposition of the UK Presidency with the support of other Western delegations, namely the US, France, Ireland, Norway and Albania. They tried to invent an invalid and lame pretext not to convene this meeting on Monday insisting that it should be postponed to Tuesday," said Vassily Nebenzia, Russia's Permanent Representative at the UN, earlier today.

Russia says that the main aim of circulating photographs and video materials allegedly testifying to certain "crimes" of Russian military personnel in Bucha is to slander its armed forces "in order to achieve the practical goals of the Kiev regime in the international arena".

At a special meeting of the Permanent Council of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) on Tuesday, Moscow lambasted the "monstrous staged provocation" and the "unacceptable" corresponding actions of the Polish OSCE Chairmanship-in-Office.

"Cynical false provocations are used by unscrupulous politicians in Ukraine and in a number of Western countries, primarily in order to spin the spiral of Russophobia. The method is not new. And it has already been used in history," said Alexander Lukashevich, Russia's Permanent Representative to the OSCE in a statement today.

(The content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com) --indianarrative

Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Chennai, April 6 : The opposition AIADMK has locked horns with the ruling DMK in Tamil Nadu over the announcement that property taxes will be hiked.

The AIADMK held protest marches across the state on Tuesday against the rise in property tax with both the Chief Coordinator, O. Panneerselvam, and Joint Coordinator K. Palaniswami leading the marches in Chennai and Tiruchi respectively.

Panneerselvam while speaking to IANS said, "The previous AIADMK government had hiked the property tax but when the then opposition leader M.K. Stalin called for a rollback of the taxes, we had obliged and rolled back in 2019. The government also then had said that the property tax paid would be adjusted with the future bills." The former Chief Minister said that the DMK was showing its double standards by hiking the property tax and that if the government does not roll back the prices, the opposition would conduct regular protest marches across the state against this.

Countering the argument of AIADMK, the Tamil Nadu Municipal administration minister, K.N. Nehru in a statement on Wednesday said that taxes were revised based on the 15th Finance commission's recommendations to fix minimum floor rates for property tax as mandated by the Government of India.

He said that out of the 77.87 lakh houses in the state, only 1.09 lakh (1.4 per cent) will witness a property tax hike of 150 per cent. The minister in the statement said that of the 44.53 lakh households, 58.48 per cent will see an increase of 25 per cent and 24.70 per cent will have a hike of 50 per cent.

He charged the AIADMK with duplicity and said that in 1987, the AIADMK government had increased the property tax by 300 per cent and said that during that time property tax was hiked by 100 per cent for own houses, 200 per cent for rented houses, and 300 per cent for commercial spaces and industries.

K.N. Nehru said that the AIADMK government in 1993 also increased property tax by 50 per cent for own houses, 100 per cent for rented houses, 150 per cent for industries, and 200 per cent for commercial spaces. The Minister said that the DMK government that followed the AIADMK government in 1998 hiked property taxes by 25 per cent for own houses, 50 per cent for rented houses, 100 per cent for industries, and 150 per cent for commercial spaces.

He said that the hike in property taxes will come into effect in the first quarter of the financial year 2022-23 in the state and added that local bodies will have to pass resolutions in this regard.

The minister while speaking to IANS said, "The property tax hike will come into effect in the first quarter of the financial year 2022-23. There is no merit in the opposition AIADMK creating a ruckus over property tax hike as I have told earlier the successive governments had gone for property tax hike. Everyone knows that the property tax in Tamil Nadu is not as high as in several other states of the country."
Thiruvananthapuram, April 6 : Curtains went up at the 23rd Party Congress of the CPI-M that opened here on Wednesday with veteran politburo member S.Ramachandran Pillai unfurling the party flag at the venue in Kannur.

Kannur is the bastion of the CPI-M with the largest number of party workers in any district in the country besides being the home turf of Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan.

On Wednesday morning, Pinaryi arrived at the venue to around 800 eagerly waiting delegates. He was seen greeting every delegate in traditional CPI-M style with his right arm held high.

Kannur city has turned red with the colour red dominating the place. Delegates arriving at the venue included array of invitees from various fields, film stars, writers and others.

For the first time in the history of the state, a sitting CPI-M government has retained office by winning the 2021 April Assembly polls walloping the Congress-led UDF.

Currently, the party is passing through its worst times in Bengal and Tripura.

Politburo member M.A. Baby clarified that the party's agenda is to ensure the BJP is booted out.

"We will not think twice before joining hands with even a demon to oust the BJP. The party Congress will come out with a clear plan against communalism," said Baby.

Ironically, Wednesday is the formation day of the BJP.

One of the agendas of the meeting is to prepare a road map for an alternate agenda for the development of the state and country for which Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K.Stalin and fraternal delegate D.Raja, general secretary of the CPI are also attending the event.

Another keenly watched thing is will veteran Congress leader, a former Union and State Minister K.V.Thomas, be attending the event. The veteran leader's application to participate at a seminar in the event was shot down twice by the Congress party high command.

"Am meeting the media on Thursday at 11 a.m," said Thomas.
Kanpur : , April 6 (IANS) A couple in Kanpur has accused a seer and his disciple in Haridwar of brainwashing their daughter with the help of black magic and keeping her in their ashram forcibly.

The couple appealed to the State Women Commission and has given an application in this regard.

The Kanpur Police Commissioner has entrusted the investigation of the case to ACP Babupurwa.

The businessman and his wife told the State Commission for Women member Poonam Kapoor that their family has been involved in the religious activities of an ashram in Uttarakhand's Haridwar for the past six years.

Their daughter, after completing her studies in Bengaluru, also started accompanying them to the ashram.

The 'Mahamandaleshwar' of the ashram managed to hypnotise their daughter and has kept her in the ashram since the past two years.

The businessman claimed that whenever they went to the ashram in Haridwar, they were not allowed to meet their daughter and instead were threatened with dire consequences.

Poonam Kapoor, member, State Women Commission, told reporters on Wednesday, "We have directed the Police Commissioner to investigate the matter and take suitable action at the earliest."
Tehran, April 6 : One Iranian cleric was killed and two others were wounded in a knife attack at the courtyard of Iran's holy shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, according to a statement by the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC).

The statement said, the assailant, whose identity and nationality have been determined, was immediately arrested by security forces after the incident happened on Tuesday.

The injured clerics were immediately transferred to the hospital for treatment, Xinhua news agency reported.

Mashhad Governor Mohsen Davari said that the assailant had carried out the attack under the impact of Takfiri beliefs and ideas.
Chennai, April 6 : Officials of the Indian space agency will visit Maharashtra to look into the objects that fell from the skies in Pawanpur village in Chandrapur district.

According to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), it has received formal communication from the District Magistrate and District Collector of Chandrapur in Maharashtra.

"It is reported that a metal ring and a cylinder-like object are found in an open field in Pawanpur village. As requested by the district administration, a team of scientists from ISRO is visiting Pawanpur for inspection and further scientific inquiry," ISRO said.

Inputs from several sources were received on the mysterious flashing light seen in the sky during the evening hours on April 2 in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, the space agency said.
London, April 6 : More than 60 per cent of Putin's war chest has been frozen by sanctions but more needs to be done, the UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has said, BBC reported.

The foreign secretary said "crippling" sanctions are pushing the Russian economy back "into the Soviet era".

More than $350 billion of Russia's $604 billion foreign currency reserves are unavailable to the regime, she added, BBC reported.

Truss, who spoke after talks with her Polish counterpart Zbigniew Rau, urged G7 countries to go further in their sanctions ahead of G7 and Nato meetings this week Measures she is calling for include banning Russian ships from their ports, cracking down on Russian banks, going after industries "filling Putin's war chest" such as the gold trade, and agreeing a timetable to eliminate imports of Russian oil and gas.

Truss said the only way to end the war is for Russian President Putin to lose in Ukraine and will stress the urgency of stepping up sanctions, as well as giving weapons to Ukraine to defend itself.

"Although Russian troops have been defeated in their initial assault on Kyiv, there has been no change in their intent and ambition," she said

Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
New Delhi, April 6 : The elders in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday urged the government to provide alternate employments to manual scavengers while demanding stern actions against private contractors who hire them illegally.

Raising the issue during the Zero Hour, Samajwadi Party MP Jaya Bachchan said that recently three people died while engaging in the manual scavenging and one who went inside to save them also lost his life.

"The Manual Scavengers Rehabilitation Act 2013, disallows all kinds of employment that engages practice of removing human excreta manually. As per the National Commission for Safai Karmcharis data, one manual scavenger dies in every two days in the country. So far, as many as 1,470 manual scavengers have lost their lives in past two years," she said.

This, she said, happened due to lack of proper rehabilitation and they are forced to return to manual scavenging in a very inhuman condition for a meagre salary. "Therefore, it is necessary to provide alternative opportunities for them," she added.

Speaking on the issue, the DMK lawmaker T. Siva said that on March 10, three manual scavengers died while cleaning the septic tank in Mumbai. He also said that despite having a law disallowing this, the private contractors hire them, so, there should be strict actions against them.

Shiva also said that these people go to the sewers or septic tanks without any safety gear and they die because of inhaling toxic fumes. "Action should also be made against the law enforcing agency who failed to prevent these accidents".

The other Members also got associated with this issue.
New Delhi/Hyderabad, April 6 : Telangana Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan on Wednesday alleged that the state government is insulting the office of governor.

The Governor, who called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the national capital, is believed to have apprised him of the recent incidents in the state including violation of Governor's protocol and the state government doing away with the Governor's address from the Budget session of the state Legislature.

Talking to reporters after meeting with the Prime Minister, she referred to the recent incidents and said that the Constitutional post of the Governor should be respected.

Soundararajan, however, said she was not feeling offended and was leaving it to people of Telangana to judge how the state government was behaving with her.

"This is an open thing. Even media people, everyone knows. There is no need to report these things," she said when asked if she reported to the Prime Minister about the incidents.

The meeting comes amid the growing chasm between Governor Soundararajan and Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao in recent months.

She said that though she has Constitutional powers, she doesn't want to enforce them. She claimed that she wants to maintain good relations with the government.

She denied that she politicised anything or took any controversial decision. She defended the decision taken on the government's recommendation to nominate P. Kaushik Reddy as member of Legislative Council.

"They can't force me. I have already explained it. It's the Governor's quota and the provision is for the service category. When I am not satisfied with the candidature, it's my right to tell. It's not that everything should be accepted. It's not that I am opposed to everything and I wanted to create a controversy," she said.

Soundararajan argued that it was not a political decision but a Constitutional one.

"When they wanted to have a protem chairman of the Council once again, I pointed out the Constitutional provision as protem chairman is an interim arrangement. It should be accepted with an open heart or it could be discussed. Ministers or Chief Minister can come to Raj Bhavan and discuss. I am for open discussion," she said.

"If something is not accepted it does not mean that the Governor's office should be insulted. Maybe some decisions of the Governor are not accepted. Does that mean the Governor's office should be insulted, Governor's protocol should be violated and Governor is not taken care of when she goes for a tour," she asked.

She pointed out that the district and SP did not receive her when she went to Medaram Jatara, a tribal fair held in February.

She, however, said she didn't care about these protocol violations. "I am concerned about the office of Governor. It should not be repeated. The office of the Governor should be respected. I am here today but somebody else may come tomorrow," she said.

The Governor also mentioned about the Chief Minister and ministers not attending the pre-Ugadi celebrations hosted by her at Raj Bhavan. She said others who were invited but were unable to come called her and explained why they couldn't attend. "Even that response did not come (from the Chief Minister and ministers)," she said.
Los Angeles, April 6 : Sacramento police have announced a third arrest in connection with Sunday's mass shooting in the capital city of California, in which six people were killed and 12 were injured.

Daviyonne Dawson, 31, was arrested late Monday on charges of being a prohibited person in possession of a firearm and a handgun was recovered, said the Sacramento Police Department in a news release, Xinhua news agency reported.

Police detectives identified Dawson in the course of investigation, saying that the suspect was seen carrying a gun immediately after the shooting.

"At this time, Dawson is not charged with crimes directly related to the shootings. Based on the type of firearm recovered, detectives do not believe that this gun was used in the shooting," the department said, adding that detectives are continuing to investigate the incident and identify additional suspects.

Earlier this week, local police already arrested two suspects, a 26-year-old Dandrae Martin and his 27-year-old brother, Smiley Martin.

The shooting that stunned Sacramento is reportedly the deadliest mass shooting in the city's history and is one of the worst mass shootings in the US, this year.

There have been 122 mass shootings so far this year in the US, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines mass shooting as an incident that has a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including any shooter.

Latest data from the nonprofit research group showed that more than 11,100 people have died due to gun violence in the country in 2022.
Chennai, April 6 : Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K.Stalin on Wednesday said the Global Investors Meet will be organised in December 2023.

Announcing this in the state Assembly, Stalin said the investors' meeting will be organised by the government in December 2023 and attract more industrial investments.

He said the government has signed 130 Memorandums of Understanding (MoU) with several investors involving an investment of Rs 68,375 crore.

According to him, the government will spread out the industrialisation in the state.

Stalin said the MoUs signed by his government with the investors will get converted into actual investments providing jobs to several people.
Rome, April 6 : Italy's foreign ministry has announced the expulsion of 30 Russian diplomats for what it called "reasons related to national security".

"This measure, taken in agreement with other European and Atlantic partners, was necessary for reasons related to national security," the ministry said in a statement on Tuesday, Xinhua news agency reported.

Also on Tuesday, Romania decided to expel ten Russian diplomats.

"The Romanian authorities have decided to declare as personae non grata on the territory of Romania ten people working in the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Bucharest, given that their activities and actions are contrary to the provisions of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961," the country's foreign ministry said in a press release.

Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Sonipat, April 6 : Jindal Global Law School (JGLS) of O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU) has once again retained the No.1 position in India while its global ranking this year improved to 70th, a jump of six places from 2021, according to the QS World University Rankings by Subject (Law) 2022 released on Wednesday.

There is no other Indian law school including none of the National Law Schools that have been able to find any place in the top 75 law schools in these prestigious global rankings.

The improvement in Jindal Global Law School's global ranking marks a continuity in its ascent for the past several years. Before making it to the global top 70 in 2022, JGLS was ranked 76th in 2021, and in the 101-150 bracket in 2020. Its domestic ranking as the No.1 law school in India has, however, remained unchanged for the past three years.

Overall, the 2022 QS World University Rankings by Subject analysed over 14.7 million unique papers, producing close to 96 million citations. A total of 1,543 institutions were ranked across 51 subjects in five broad subject areas, creating over 17,700 ranked entries.

For law, QS ranked a total of 340 law schools after evaluating 1,118 institutions in the world in 2022.

Reacting to this remarkable achievement, Naveen Jindal, Founding Chancellor, O.P. Jindal Global University, said, "Congratulations to Jindal Global Law School for once again being ranked for the third year consecutively as India's Number 1 Law School. The improvement in the global ranking of Jindal Global Law School this year goes on to prove that the spirit of excellence with which it was established 12 years ago remains undiminished even in the face of numerous challenges associated with the global pandemic. This has only been possible due to the relentless efforts of the university's leadership and management team, outstanding works of our distinguished faculty members and the hard work of our students. It's the commitment to the greater good that continuously inspires JGLS to scale new heights in academic excellence, legal training and research. To see the name of an Indian university among the 70 best law schools in the world is a matter of immense pride for all of us. I congratulate our Vice-Chancellor, Professor (Dr.) C. Raj Kumar, and each member of the broader JGU community, including its faculty, students and staff for making it happen. I would also like to thank all the partner institutions in the world which have collaborated with JGU to create unprecedented opportunities for our students." To produce the rankings by subject, QS primarily considers academic reputation, employer reputation, citations and h-index, an index that attempts to measure the stability of impact and quality of the work published by the institution's scholars.

On reaching this important milestone, Professor C. Raj Kumar, Founding Vice-Chancellor, O.P. Jindal Global University, said, "The rise of JGLS to the 70th position among the world's top law schools in a span of just 12 years bears tremendous significance as it marks the emergence of India as an important destination for pursuing legal education of global standards and conducting cutting-edge research. Even during the testing times of the Covid-19 pandemic, JGU has not only shown its resilience but has also continued its mission of expanding opportunities for students through interdisciplinary learning, world-class faculty and global collaborations." "One of the major factors that has propelled JGLS to the 70th position in the world in the prestigious QS World University Rankings is the quality of research produced by the faculty members. It is heartening to note that during 2020-21, JGLS faculty members produced over 300+ academic research publications, of which 280+ are indexed in Scopus, which is the largest database of peer-reviewed literature in the world," he added.

"These are not small numbers for a young law school. The 280+ publications signify that JGLS alone has produced double the number of similar Scopus-indexed publications listed by all of India's 23 National Law Universities combined. The persistent efforts of JGLS faculty members are a testament to the commitment and dedication of India's number one ranked law school to ensure high-quality research and scholarship," Professor Raj Kumar said.

Starting its journey with 10 faculty members and 100 students in 2009, JGLS today has nearly 5,000 students and 500 faculty members. It offers a range of undergraduate, post-graduate, masters' and doctoral degrees in law, jurisprudence and legal studies. To offer the best international learning experience to its students, JGLS has forged international collaborations with over 250 leading law schools/universities in the world.

"Providing world-class legal education in Indian soil appeared to be a distant dream just a few years ago. Today we are living with this beautiful reality, thanks to the vision of our founding Chancellor and benefactor, Mr. Naveen Jindal, extraordinary efforts of JGU's faculty members, and sincerity and dedication of our students," Professor Raj Kumar added.

Reflecting on JGU's achievements, Dr. Ashwin Fernandes, Regional Director, Middle East, Africa & South Asia, QS Quacquarelli Symonds observed, "It is a moment of immense pride and glory for India to have O.P. Jindal Global University rise to rank 70th in the world and 1st in India in our 2022 edition of QS World University Rankings by Subject. As the saying goes - Age is no barrier, but a limitation you put in your mind; and this aptly says a lot about JGU achieving great heights in just its 12 years of existence. QS evaluated over 1118 institutions for law globally and ranked 340 of them, making it a very exclusive and elite list of top law schools of the world. My congratulations to all at JGU and a special mention to Prof C Raj Kumar, Founding Vice Chancellor, for his stellar efforts for envisioning and working towards a building a world-class institution in India." Commenting on the accomplishment, Professor S.G. Sreejith, Executive Dean, JGLS said, "To see JGLS standing tall among the world's best law schools is a truly humbling experience. The ingenuity of the vision of our founders has been adequately complemented by the efforts of the world-class faculty members, leading to the establishment of a law school which has now proved to be a class apart in India. It's only because the cause espoused by JGLS has received overwhelming support from students and their parents from across India and different parts of the world that the law school has become what it is today - a global top destination for legal education." Reflecting on the implications of the jump in the global ranking of JGLS, Professor Arjya B. Majumdar, Dean, Office of Benchmarking and Institutional Transformation (ORBIT), O.P. Jindal Global University, said, "Being ranked 70th among the world's best is a reflection of the growing stature of JGLS among the students, academics and employers in the world. The fact that JGLS retained its No.1 position in India and improved its global ranking in a year hugely impacted by the global pandemic speaks volumes about the standards of teaching and research that have taken root at JGLS. The recognition by QS World University Rankings will definitely inspire us to strive towards bringing greater glory to the Indian higher education space in general and JGLS in particular." Securing a place in this year's QS World University Rankings by Subject suggests that JGLS has put India on the global map for legal education.

Responding to this achievement, Professor Dabiru Sridhar Patnaik, Registrar, JGU, said, "The recognition of JGLS as one of the top 70 law schools in the world will help advance JGU's mission of producing global leaders of tomorrow through world-class education in India. The incredible support that JGLS has received from different sections of the society has inspired JGU to rapidly expand its capacities. Today, JGU has 12 schools which together offer a total of 52 programmes across a diverse range of disciplines in social sciences & management and arts & humanities. The scores provided by QS World University Rankings suggest that several other schools at JGU, besides JGLS, have made significant strides towards getting recognised as one of the best in the world in their respective disciplines."
April 06 : Actress Ameesha Patel says good content always works, The Kashmir Files is an amazing example of it.

Ameesha Patel was interacting with NewsHelpline at the launch of a Mexican Restaurant in Mumbai.

Vivek Agnihotri helmed The Kashmir Files, starring Anupam Kher, Pallavi Joshi, Mithun Chakraborty and Darshan Kumar, released amidst of controversial storm, but turned out to be biggest hit of recent times.

Ameesha Patel, who has been supportive of the film through her social media, said, I think every good content is important, and the reason I supported The Kashmir Files more, because audience tends not to give credibility to smaller films, people tend to run after big stars. The Kashmir Files was a small film, made with a very limited budget but this movie did a business of 250 Cr, which is unheard of, and now the film is unstoppable. People are taking out bigger films from theaters and running The Kahsmir Files, it shows that good content always works. The star of the film is content, not the actors or stars

Further adding, Ameesha Patel said she is happy that The Kashmir Files and RRR has done good business, which is good sign for her Gadar 2 with Sunny Deol.

She added, RRR has done a business of 800 Cr within weeks of its release, The Kashmir Files, has done phenomenal business, it is good to know that audience is going back to theaters, we need audiences to come to theaters and see our hard-work, Gadar 2 is releasing soon, so I am really happy that it has worked out in time

Gadar 2 is the sequel of the 2001 blockbuster Gadar. The film, will see Ameesha Patel and Utkarsh Sharma reprising their characters Sakeena and Charanjeet (Jeete) and Sunny Deol as Tara Singh. The film is helmed by Anil Sharma.

Talking about the film and her expecations, Ameesha Patel said, I am just hoping and praying that amount of love, Tara and Sakina, received for Gadar, I hope audience gives us as much love and adoration for Gadar 2, rest is in gods hand, we can only work hard, which were doing, hopefully our hard work finds success

The film is slated for 2022 release.
New Delhi, April 6 : Rajya Sabha Chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu on Wednesday praised the Members of the House for showing patience during the debate on the Chartered Accounts Bill and the Bill for re-unifications of the Delhi Municipal Corporations.

"I am so happy to see the patience shown by Deputy Chairman(Harivansh)and Members, cutting across the party lines. The Ministers who piloted the replies to the Bill were sharp but at the same time brief. I felt happy and also made a note to include it in my memoirs," Naidu said.

He also said the debates were very impressive and others called him up to know about them.

While mentioning about the cultural programme held at his residence on the occasion of retirement of 72 Members of the Upper House on March 31, he said that the performance of the six Members was very impressive. "I enjoyed the performance of the six Members and yesterday the Sansad TV broadcast the programme. Those who could not attend the event can see it on the Youtube channel of Sansad TV, he said.

The Chairman also said that some of the Members are very talented.

While moving ahead for the proceedings of the House, the Chairman also informed that the notices given by the Leader of Opposition Mallikarjun Kharge, Sushmita Dev, Nadimul Haq and other Members gave notices under rule 267 to suspend the business of the House to discuss various issues including price hike, stand rejected.

Amid the commotions of the Opposition Members, the Chairman reiterated that if they give notice everyday that was not correct as the chair has already stated its decision.

However, Leader of Opposition Kharge said that he a gave notice regarding the hate speeches and harassment of some journalists. In many religious assemblies, the leaders of one community threat a minority community, but he was interrupted by the Chair who asked him to refrain from taking name of a particular minority community.
Gadag : April 6 (IANS) Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal activists on Wednesday complained to the Superintendent of Police of Gadag district in Karnataka over distribution of copies of Bible to the prisoners in the jail and demanded immediate action and suspension against prison authorities.

The Hindu activists demanded that the Christian missionaries should not be allowed inside the premises of the Gadag district jail and also other prisons in the state. The incident had come to light when one of the workers had gone to meet a prisoner. The activists have collected photos and copies of the distributed Bible.

According to the complaint, a team of seven member Christian evangelists had visited the Gadag District Prison on March 12. The team had visited to 'conduct prayers and transform the mindset of prisoners' and had distributed the copies of the New Testament of Bible.

The activists alleged that the act was being done with an intention to carry out religious conversions. The Hindu activists also criticised the authorities for permitting them to distribute religious texts. The New Testament is a mini Bible, the Hindu activists alleged.

However, the prison authorities maintained that the missionaries were allowed inside the jail to carry out programmes for the prisoners by the department.
Mirzapur, April 6 : "After my husband's death five years ago, I had to struggle to raise my two children with the meagre monthly income (Rs 2,000) I earned as a cook at a government-run primary school. It was the training and support I received from Nav Chetna Agro Centre (NCAC) three years ago that turned my life around," said 40-year-old Radha Devi, who grows peas, chillies, tomatoes and potatoes on her half-acre organic farm.

"I grow three crops in a year. On average, I earn around Rs. 1.5 lakh annually from the farm. It's made life easier for me and my children. At the agro centre, I do vermicompost cleaning and packaging, and also take care of the beds," said Radha, who also works part-time for the centre for Rs 6,000 per month.

Radha is one of the 640 women from 15 villages in Uttar Pradesh's Mirzapur district who turned to organic farming after being trained by the NCAC, a farmer producer organisation (FPO)- a government-registered group engaged in vermicomposting that provides end-to-end support and assistance to member farmers, including technical services, marketing and other such aspects of agriculture.

Besides training farmers in organic farming and helping them procure necessary equipment, the NCAC also purchases their produce at prices up to Rs 5 per kg higher than what they would get locally, and then markets it across Uttar Pradesh. Also, in appreciation for its services, the state government provides the NCAC financial support and subsidies on the machinery it purchases to help the farmers. It also received an award from Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath for being the best FPO of the state.

A product of nobilityThis FPO was brought to Mirzapur by two well-meaning brothers who hail from the district's Sikhar village. Mukesh Pandey used to earn a lakh a month as a training consultant for the International Labour Organisation in rural Gujarat and Jharkhand. But he left the well-paying job because he "wanted to do something for the villagers in my state". His brother Chandra Mouli Pandey, on the other hand, owned a business in Varanasi, but joined Mukesh when he realised he needed help managing the vermicompost business.

"I used to earn Rs 2,000 a day from my business," said Chandra Mouli. "But when I realised the potential in vermicomposting, I decided to join my brother." When the brothers started the operations in Mirzapur in 2017 with only two vermicomposting beds, they found marketing a major challenge. While they intended to encourage farmers to turn to organic farming, Mukesh said spreading awareness about its benefits was a tough task.

"Sales started gaining momentum after we conducted awareness drives in the form of street plays," Chandra Mouli added. "Another obstacle was the social stigma associated with a business that used cow dung as a raw material. The villagers used to look down upon us." Finally, when the farmers in nearby villages began to turn to organic farming, they set up the FPO to support them. The NCAC now has around 1,000 vermicompost beds in the village of Sikhar and sells its organic fertiliser in 12 states, including Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Chandigarh as well as Jammu.

"Our business crossed the Rs 1.5-crore mark in annual turnover in 2020-21 fiscal, but our real feat is having managed to help 1,560 farmers take up organic farming. Of these, 60 per cent are women," claimed Chandra Mouli.

"Earlier, these women had no income of their own. The male members of their families earned money through odd jobs in the village or by migrating to cities."

Benefits of organic farmingThe FPO's director Rajnikant Pandey, also a farmer, told 101Reporters that using chemical fertilisers increased the cost of farming every season while simultaneously reducing the profit farmers made.

"Such fertilisers also reduce the fertility of the land and, in turn, farmers' income. However, the use of organic fertilisers such as vermicompost increases the fertility of the soil and, in the long run, reduces the cost of farming by around 60 per cent. As a result, farmers earn higher profits," he explained.

Rajnikant, who had 14 acres of land, turned to organic farming around four years ago after attending an awareness campaign organised by the NCAC.

"In 2018, I earned Rs 6,00,000 from cultivating peas," he said with pride. "Switching to organic farming increased the yield as well as the price I received for the produce."

Migration reversalThe success the NCAC member farmers saw in organic farming set off a reverse migration trend in the villages. Chandra Mouli told 101Reporters that around 40 men in his village had returned from cities, where they had migrated in search of work, after they saw the women in their families earning a decent income through organic farming.

Chanda Devi, a resident of Biththalpur village, is among the many women who have benefited from the NCAC. In fact, her husband Uma Shankar recently left his work at a construction site in Delhi and returned home.

"My husband earned around Rs 12,000 a month, but it was not enough to manage the expenses of our three children," she said. "Last year, when he realised that I could manage to make around Rs 2,00,000 a year by growing crops such as peas, chillies and tomatoes in our three-bigha farmland, he decided to join us." Today, Chanda also works at the FPO and draws a monthly salary of Rs 6,000. Similarly, Rishikesh Mishra, a 24-year-old farmer in Lalpur village of Shikhar block, used to work with a manufacturing company in Gujarat for Rs 15,000 per month.

"It was a struggle despite working hard, living away from my family. It was then that I heard about several farmers turning to organic farming and making good profits. I also gave it a try and was successful," said Mishra, adding that he now earned around Rs 3,00,000 annually from growing chillies and peas. "I'm also planting bananas 100 per cent organically. They will be ready for harvest in the next 13 to 14 months." There's more: the FPO was of immense help all through the Covid-19 outbreak, especially when scores of migrant workers were forced to return to their villages during the lockdown. Mahendra Tripathi is one such individual who is grateful to the organisation. He worked with a Kanpur-based company for Rs 10,000 a month, but lost his job when the entire country went into lockdown. He returned to his native place, Bhualpur, and joined the FPO to market their vermicompost fertilisers.

"I now earn around Rs 25,000 per month," he told 101Reporters.

(The author is a Mumbai-based freelance journalist and a member of 101Reporters, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters.)
Lucknow, April 6 : It is turning into a "meaty" issue and the scare over sale of meat in Uttar Pradesh is growing by the day.

Even though the state government on Tuesday clarified that there was no order for the closure of meat shops during the ongoing Navratri festival (April 2 to 10), municipal bodies of various cities in Uttar Pradesh are imposing and then withdrawing ban orders, apparently to appease the majority community ahead of the municipal polls, scheduled to be held later this year.

Navneet Sehgal, additional chief secretary, information, said, "No order has been issued by the Uttar Pradesh government for the closure of meat shops during the nine-day-long Navratri festival." Principal secretary (Uttar Pradesh Food and Drug Administration) Anita Singh has also informed officers concerned that no such notification had been issued by the state government.

Deputy Commissioner, FDA, Hari Singh, said the department made it clear to officers in all districts that no order for the closure of meat shops during Navratri was issued by the state government.

"Officers were directed to ensure that cleanliness was maintained near religious spots where devotees assemble to offer prayers. Meat shops should not be located within 200 metres of religious spots. It's a routine order that is issued by the department every year during the festivity. Officers are also directed to check slaughter of certain animals," he added.

However, reports coming in from various districts claim that meat shops are remaining closed, causing inconvenience to Muslim consumers during Ramzan.

In Gorakhpur, Abdul Rehmani, a meat seller, admitted that he has not opened his shop since Saturday when Navratri began.

"Anonymous callers claiming to be members of the Hindu Sena, have warned me against opening the shop during Navratri. I do not want any trouble and I am willing to suffer losses. I will open my shop after Ram Navmi next week," he said.

In Lucknow, Mayor Sanyukta Bhatia directed LMC officials to shift meat shops in narrow lanes to commercial areas on the city's outskirts.

She said this was aimed at saving the population living in narrow lanes from communicable diseases. She added, "I have only asked the shops to be shifted, not closed. And there is no religious angle to it." Meat sellers, however, question the timing of the order.

Kanpur mayor Pramila Pandey had said: "There will be complete closure of meat shops for nine days." "I am observing fast and seeing animals being slaughtered openly does make one feel bad. It is not a matter of Hindu or Muslim, the order will be for all," she added, ignoring the FDA order.

Saeeda Naim, a homemaker, said that since most meat sellers had already shut shop due to the fear of backlash from fringe outfits, members of the Muslim community were facing problems during Ramzan.

"Non vegetarian dishes are an integral part of Iftar and substituting them with vegetarian food is a difficult option. This is a major festival for us and for two years, we have faced a similar crisis during the lockdowns but this year, there is no such apparent reason. The government should emphatically clarify the issue," she said.

Roohi Altaf, a young businessman, said that in any case, Hindus turn vegetarian during Navratri and everyone respects their sentiments.

"In fact, most Hindus take off non-vegetarian dishes from their menu during this period but Muslims should be allowed to eat what they want during their festivals," he said.

A number of cloud kitchens have become operational in Lucknow during the ongoing festive season.

A lady who had started preparing non-vegetarian food on demand, said on condition of anonymity that, "Many of my friends were facing problems in getting meat because of the scare. I have arranged meat from a shop on the outskirts of the state capital and prepared biryani, kebabs and other dishes that are supplied to my customers from my home. We take orders early in the day so that I can arrange meat accordingly."
Seoul, April 6 : South Korea's outgoing top official on North Korea urged the country's incoming administration on Wednesday to adopt a "forward-looking" approach towards the latter, especially in order to prevent nuclear weapons testing amid heightening tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

Unification Minister Lee In-young made the remarks during his last regular press conference in his capacity as the liberal Moon Jae-in government's top official on Pyongyang, Yonhap news agency reported.

Earlier this week, Kim Yo-jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, issued a statement warning that her country could use nuclear forces against South Korea to "take initiative at the outset of war." "The North has broken its moratorium on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) and there are many signs regarding nuclear tests as well. We must put an end to this right here," Lee said.

A silver lining is that the North has not crossed the "red line" yet in terms of the moratorium on nuclear testing, which is regarded as a far more serious strategic provocation than the test-firing of a long-range missile on a lofted angle. Even China and Russia did not conceal their uneasiness or anger over the North's previous underground nuclear experiments.

Concerns have grown about the future of already soured inter-Korean ties, with Moon, who has endeavoured to advance the Korea peace process, set to be succeeded by Yoon Suk-yeol of the conservative People Power Party in May.

The minister said the Yoon administration needs to seek a "very forward-looking and active policy for peace" to stop the North from testing its nuclear weapons and create momentum for the resumption of dialogue. He raised the need for Yoon to take a "contrarian" approach amid the widespread view that conservative South Korean administrations tend to be more hawkish toward Pyongyang than liberal ones.

Meanwhile, Lee's ministry said it has reached out to the North to confirm the fate of the South Korean-built facilities at the Mount Kumgang resort, after detecting signs of the North dismantling some facilities.

"Last week, we asked the North via the inter-Korean joint liaison office to provide a full explanation on the dismantlement of facilities on Mount Kumgang, as it requires an agreement between the Koreas," the ministry said in a press release. "As of now, the North has not made any official announcement." A senior ministry official said on condition of anonymity that there has been "progress in the North's dismantlement work compared to before," referring to a floating hotel in the resort known as Haegumgang.

Pyongyang earlier announced that it would remove the facilities at Mount Kumgang, once regarded as a key symbol of inter-Korean reconciliation and economic cooperation, since leader Kim called for tearing down all "unpleasant-looking" facilities in 2019.

Tensions have escalated recently on the Korean Peninsula after the North fired its first ICBM since November 2017, formally ending its self-imposed moratorium on long-range missile testing, last month.

Observers here voice worries that the North could engage in additional provocative acts, like a nuclear test, on the occasion of the 110th birth anniversary of its founding leader Kim Il-sung on April 15 and the founding anniversary of the North Korean People's Revolutionary Army on April 25.

They say Pyongyang may try to use additional provocations to put more pressure on the new South Korean government to be launched on May 10 and the Joe Biden administration ahead of the mid-term elections in November.
New Delhi, April 6 : Chief Justice N.V. Ramana on Wednesday said he hopes he does not have to hear this case again, while recording that Amazon and Future Retail Ltd (FRL) will move the Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC) to resume arbitration proceedings.

A bench headed by him added that the tribunal will consider FRL's application on priority for termination of arbitration proceedings, and pass orders.

Concluding the hearing in the matter, the Chief Justice said: "I hope, I don't get to hear this case again". As senior advocate Gopal Subramanium, representing Amazon, said: "We look forward to appearing before you", he replied: "no, no, some other case!" Amazon and Future Group are locked in multi-forum litigation in connection with FRL's merger deal to the tune of Rs 24,500 crore with Reliance Retail Ltd, after Amazon dragged FRL into arbitration at the SIAC in October 2020.

The top court was considering an application by Amazon seeking a direction to restrain FRL from alienating its assets. Amazon has alleged that FRL surrendered its stores to Reliance.

Senior advocate K.V. Viswanathan, representing FRL, submitted before the court that the tribunal should decide on his client's application for termination of arbitration proceedings. FRL has sought termination of arbitration proceedings citing Competition Commission of India (CCI) order. In December last year, the CCI had imposed a penalty of Rs 202 crore on Amazon and suspended its approval for the deal with Future Coupons, a promoter firm of the group's public listed company Future Retail Ltd, seeking more information.

Subramanium submitted that the single judge of the Delhi High Court has taken over the enforcement application.

"Thus, we don't have to bother you and the other side also cooperated with us," he submitted before the bench, also comprising Krishna Murari and Hima Kohli.

The bench noted parties agree that proceedings are underway before the single judge of the high court and thus, these applications are also sent to the single judge. Disposing of the plea, the bench said parties will approach the tribunal to resume arbitral proceedings and the tribunal will consider the termination application by FRL as under Section 32(2)(C), of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act 1996, and pass orders.

Earlier, the top court had asked FRL and Amazon to jointly urge the Delhi High Court to first hear Amazon's enforcement petitions, in connection with preservation of assets of FRL.

Last week, senior advocate Harish Salve, representing FRL, told the Supreme Court that nobody wants to do business with it as Section 7 of the IBC may come any day, and the company owes landlords thousands of crores in rentals, as Amazon could not get Future Retail, it destroyed the company. He added that Reliance entered into agreement with the landlords (of its shops), and Future Retail owes Rs 3,000 crore in rentals.

Subramanium had vehemently objected to the sudden handover of Future Retail assets. Citing a prayer in Amazon's application, Subramanium opposed the alienation of Future Retail assets, saying: "Can't be a magical switch... Future Retail shops should continue to remain with it; operated by FRL until matter is resolved by an arbitral tribunal." Amazon moved the apex court challenging Delhi High Court's January 5 order, which stayed the proceedings before the arbitral tribunal over FRL's merger deal with Reliance Retail.
Chennai, April 6 : Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin on Wednesday said that a Global Investors Meet would be held at the end of 2023, while noting that the "pro -industrial policies of the government had boosted the confidence of industrialists".

In a statement, he said that between April and December 2021, the foreign direct investment in Tamil Nadu has increased by 41.5 per cent, and through the GIM, more investments will be attracted providing employment to more youth.

Stalin said that Guidance, the agency facilitating investment in the state, had won the Best Investment Promotion Agency award in the Asia Oceania region.

He said that his recent visit to the Dubai Expo had led to signing memorandum of understanding (MoU) for 14 projects worth Rs 6,100 crore and capable of generating 15,100 jobs.

Stalin said that efforts are on to meet investors in the World Economic Forum meeting in Geneva in May at an investor meet in Germany's Hanover, the Global Offshore Wind in England in June, and investors in the US.
Kabul, April 6 : At least six people were injured in a hand grenade explosion inside a mosque in Kabul on Wednesday, sources said.

"A man hurled a hand grenade inside Pul-e Khishti Mosque at midday. As a result, six people were wounded," Xinhua news agency reported citing the Afghan Interior Ministry's tweet.

The wounded were shifted to hospitals and a suspected man has been arrested, according to the ministry.

The official report spelled no further details.

"The blast occurred shortly after the people offered prayers at midday. The Taliban security forces have cordoned off the area for precautionary measures," eyewitness Najib Ullah told Xinhua.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack yet.
San Francisco, April 6 : Chipmaker Intel on Wednesday said it has suspended all business operations in Russia, a month after announcing to stop shipments to customers in Russia and Belarus in the wake of Ukraine invasion.

Intel said it continues to join the global community in condemning Russia's war against Ukraine and calling for a swift return to peace.

"Effective immediately, we have suspended all business operations in Russia. This follows our earlier decision to suspend all shipments to customers in Russia and Belarus," the US tech giant informed.

Other tech companies that have taken action in Russia are Apple, AMD, Adobe and General Electric.

Spotify, along with media outlets like CNN, ABC and the BBC have suspended services in Russia.

Intel further said that the company is working to support all employees through this difficult situation, "including our 1,200 employees in Russia.

"We have also implemented business continuity measures to minimise disruption to our global operations," it added.

In the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Twitter has also announced not to amplify or recommend government accounts in countries -- starting with Russia -- that limit access to free information and are engaged in armed interstate conflict whether Twitter is blocked in that country or not.

"We will first apply this policy to government accounts belonging to Russia," said the company.
Sydney, April 6 : Covid-19 cases have spiked sharply in Australia's most populous state of New South Wales (NSW), with daily caseload up almost to 10,000 in two days.

On Wednesday, the state reported 24,151 new Covid cases and 15 deaths. Daily cases have mounted at an alarming rate, with 19,183 new cases reported on Tuesday and 15,572 on Monday.

There are 1,444 Covid patients in NSW hospitals, 51 of whom require intensive care, Xinhua news agency reported.

Some schools in the state are either closed or operating with minimal staff due to the spread of Covid, forcing teachers or students to miss attendance at schools.

The Independent Education Union (IEU) revealed to the local media that 25 per cent of public school students were not in class on Monday because they were sick, self-isolating or were told to study online.

Under the pressure of staff shortage, NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell told local radio station 2GB on Wednesday that the potential easing of isolation rules for teachers as essential workers "is something that is on the table".

Meanwhile, the state of Queensland reported 8,534 new Covid cases and one death. The state has 468 people with Covid in hospital, 14 of them in intensive care.

Despite the increase, from 1 a.m. April 14, the state will ease Covid restrictions ahead of the Easter holiday. Queenslanders will no longer need to check-in or show vaccination status at venues and events, although vaccine requirements will still apply to visitors and workers in vulnerable settings.

In the state of Victoria, there were 12,150 new Covid cases and three deaths reported on Wednesday. Victoria currently has 331 patients at the hospital with the virus, including 16 in intensive care.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Hyderabad, April 6 : Telangana's ruling party TRS on Wednesday blocked National Highways demanding the Central government to procure paddy from the state.

The party leaders and workers staged 'rasta roko' protest at Mumbai, Nagpur, Bengaluru and Vijayawada National Highways.

Holding party flags, placards and raising slogans, the protestors squatted on the highways leading to huge traffic jams on both sides. Some of the protestors were also carrying the paddy plants.

Ministers, state legislators, other public representatives led the protest, demanding the Centre to procure entire paddy from Telangana during the ongoing Rabi season.

Minister for Forests Indrakaran Reddy led the road blockade on Hyderabad-Nagpur highway near Nirmal town.

He said that they were staging 'rasta roko' not to cause inconvenience to people but to raise their voice over paddy procurement.

"We want our voice to be heard in Delhi and that is why we are staging this rasta roko on National Highways," he added.

Excise Minister Srinivas Goud along with other TRS leaders participated in the road blockade on Hyderabad-Bengaluru highway near Bhoothpur in Mahabubnagar district.

A massive protest was held on Hyderabad-Nagpur highway at Medchal, leading to huge traffic jam. Police detained the protestors and shifted them to the police station.

TRS MP Prabhakar Reddy and other TRS leaders took part in the protest at Hyderabad-Mumbai highway at Patancheru in Sangareddy district.

Similar protest was held on Hyderabad-Vijayawada highway at Nakrekal in Nalgonda district.

The party leaders said that their protest would continue till the BJP government at the Centre agrees to procure entire paddy from Telangana "as is being done from Punjab and other states".

They said, "The BJP leaders, who were asking farmers to grow paddy and assuring them that the Centre will procure, are now hiding their faces." TRS leaders urged farmers to question the BJP leaders in every village about their assurance on paddy procurement.

The road blockade is the second of the five-phase protest programme chalked out by the TRS over the paddy procurement issue.

Under the first phase, TRS staged demonstrations in all mandals across the state on Monday.

As part of the third phase, protests will be organised in all 12,769 villages.

TRS working president K. T. Rama Rao has appealed to farmers to put up black flags atop their houses, take out protest rallies and burn effigies of the Central government.

Under the fifth phase, state ministers and public representatives will stage a protest in Delhi on April 11.

TRS leader said that despite repeated requests by the state government and the visit by a ministerial delegation to Delhi to meet Union Food Minister Piyush Goyal, the Centre refused to procure paddy from the state and was insisting on raw rice.

He said the state had been demanding that the Centre should procure the entire paddy as it is procuring from Punjab.

"When you can have one nation one ration, why can't you have one nation one procurement," he asked.
New Delhi, April 6 : Shares of sugar companies traded higher on Wednesday trade in an otherwise weak broader market.

Dwarikesh Sugar, Dalmia Bharat Sugar and Industries, and Triveni Engineering rallied between 4 per cent to 7 per cent.

Magadh Sugar & Energy, Rana Sugar, Uttam Sugar Mills, KM Sugar, Andhra Sugar, Mawana Sugar, and Shree Renuka Sugar were some of the other top runners in the sugar space.

According to a report by industry body Indian Sugar Mills Association (ISMA), India's sugar export is likely to touch 8.5 million tonne in the ongoing 2021-22 marketing year ending September.

The firm export outlook supported the sugar stocks.

Also, the Centre's decision to extend, up to September 30, the timeline for disbursement of loans to sugar mills in respect of all schemes notified during 2018-2021 to facilitate project proponents to complete their projects and to avail benefits of interest subvention for ethanol production too buoyed the shares.
San Francisco, April 6 : All smartphones do emit some level of radiation but a new report on Wednesday claimed that Google Pixel and Sony Xperia mobile devices are among the worst emitters of radiofrequency (RF) radiations, led by Motorola Edge model.

Niche news publisher Bankless Times has presented data showing different phones' specific absorption ratios (SAR).

SAR measures the rate at which the human body absorbs radio frequency electromagnetic field (RF-EMF) waves. The results are in watts per kilogram (W/Kg).

According to the report, Motorola Edge was the worst emitter, recording a SAR measure of 1.79 W/Kg. At the second place was the Axon 11 5G with a SAR value of 1.59 W/Kg and at the third place was the OnePlus 6T which had an SAR rating of 1.55.

"Sony contributes two smartphone models to the top 10 list. These are Xperia XA2 plus and Xperia XZ1 Compact," according to Elizabeth Kerr, a financial content specialist.

Google had three out of the top 10 biggest emitters -- Pixel 3XL, Pixel 4a and Pixel 3.

In the US, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) insists on a maximum SAR of 1.6.

"Our phones emit RF waves within the electromagnetic spectrum. Whereas 2G to 4G emit RFs in the 0.7-2.7 GHz range, 5G phones can do so up to 80 GHz. Owing to their low frequency, these are low energy frequencies. Their low energy isn't sufficient to alter DNA, thereby heightening cancer risks," explained Kerr.

However, to avoid any long-term impact on your health, limit your exposure to cell phone radiation by using those for shorter durations and use hands-free technology features.
Itanagar, April 6 : Three persons were arrested from Barrackpore near Kolkata and Lakhimpur district of Assam in connection with the murder of a Arunachal Pradesh police Sub-Inspector, officials said on Wednesday.

A police officer in Itanagar said that two suspects in the murder of Sub-Inspector Sibu George(50), were arrested from Barrackpore near Kolkata on Tuesday, while the key suspect was detained from Assam's Lakhimpur district on Wednesday.

On the basis of the information provided by the arrested people, sharp weapons, including a knife, were recovered from different locations, including the crime spot.

George, a Kerala resident posted at the Police Headquarters in Itanagar, was found dead in his official residence at the Police Colony here on Friday.

The slain police officer reportedly used to provide money to people as loans and the prime suspect used to work as his agent.

It appears that the police officer was murdered due to some financial matters, the official said. He declined to divulge further details of the crime in the interest of the investigation.
Bengaluru, April 6 : Karnataka Home Minister Araga Jnanendra said on Wednesday that the video of Al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri on the hijab row proves the involvement of "invisible hand" behind the row in the state.

Speaking to reporters, Jnanendra said the suspicions are coming true with the surfacing of video. "The Centre, the state Home Ministry and the police department are working on it. This is a very serious matter and duly handled by the authorities," he added.

Karnataka High Court Special Bench has also referred to the role of "invisible hand" in its verdict while dismissing the petitions seeking consent to attend classes wearing hijab, asserted the Home Minister.

"I have also mentioned about the presence of religious fanatic organisations behind the hijab row in the state. The video by Al Qaeda has now proven it," he said.

"The issue is being discussed at international levels. The children's (girl students who started the protest) behaviour, their talks and non-cooperation were not normal," he added.

Zawahari in his nine minute video praised Muskan Khan, the college student from Karnataka's Mandya district, for raising the slogans of 'Allah-Hu-Akbar' while countering the mob shouting 'Jai Shree Ram' slogans in the college premises.

In the video titled - 'The Noble Woman of India', the Al Qaeda chief has 'composed and recited' a poem in the praise of the Karnataka student". He maintained in the video that he came to know about Muskan Khan through social media videos and he is moved by the act of a sister.

Zawahari has also slammed countries banning hijab.

Reacting to the video, Pramod Muthalik, the founder of 'Sriram Sena' has said that a terrorist organisation does not have any standing to advice India. "They must address the issue related to women being treated cheaply and barbarically in Afghanistan and Pakistan." The row over hijab erupted in the state with the protest of six students of Udupi Girl's Pre-University College has turned into a major issue.

The row affected all schools and colleges in the state.

However, the High Court has dismissed the petitions asking for allowing hijab in educational institutions, and had noted that wearing of hijab is not an essential part of Islam.

The Karnataka government has implemented the verdict and banned the entry of students and teachers wearing hijab for SSLC (Class 10) examinations.
Thiruvananthapuram, April 6 : The ongoing tiff between Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB) chairman B. Ashok and the employees took a turn for the worse on Wednesday after the CPI-M backed KSEB Officers Association's president M.G.Suresh Kumar was suspended for dereliction of duty.

Surprisingly, State Minister for Electricity K.Krishnankutty welcomed it by saying none are above rules, including him.

Ashok and the employees, especially the CPI-M backed association, have been having a running feud for a while.

On Tuesday, the association staged a protest in front of the headquarters of the KSEB which led to Ashok suspending Kumar.

The association was protesting against the suspension of a lady engineer and according to the chairman, the strike was needless.

Another reason why the chairman was peeved with Kumar was after the lady engineer was suspended, Kumar took to the social media and in public platforms spoke ill of chairman.

Meanwhile, Kumar said this vindictive action cannot be seen as an action against him, instead it's directed against the Association.

But Krishnankutty told the media that rules and laws are for all.

"Even If I break it, it's improper and hence all are bound to follow the directives," said the Minister.

In the highly unionised KSEB, time and again there are confrontations like what has happened and what has shocked the CPI-M is this came at a time when the entire leadership is busy with the five day 23rd Party Congress that began in Kannur, Wednesday.

It is after a very long gap that the Electricity portfolio was given to an ally as all along it was held by a CPI-M leader, which included Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan (1996 to 98), who held it when E.K.Nayanar was the Chief Minister.

Kumar was the private secretary to former CPI-M Electricity Minister's A.K.Balan (2006) and M.M.Mani (2012).
New Delhi, April 6 : The Supreme Court on Wednesday said the Right to Education Act is a classic example where a right was created, but questioned where were the schools? Against the backdrop of this Act, the top court observed that the government should always bear in mind the financial impact, before developing any scheme.

A bench, headed by Justice U.U. Lalit and comprising Justices S.R. Bhat and P.S. Narasimha, told Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati, representing the Centre: "You have created a right. Where are the schools?" It further added that various authorities, including municipalities, state governments etc., were tasked to set up schools, but where do they get teachers from? Often, budget constraints are cited, it said.

The bench also emphasised that the scenario needs to be examined in totality, otherwise it becomes mere lip service. It suggested that the government should always evaluate the financial impact before it comes up with schemes or ideas.

The top court was hearing a plea seeking adequate infrastructure to provide effective legal aid to women abused in matrimonial homes and also to create shelter homes for them, across the country.

Bhati said substantial progress has been made and there were a lot of parleys and consultations with all states, and added that the Central government needs to keep all states in the loop.

The bench noted that revenue officers, in some states, are working as protection officers in terms of the Act. Bhati sought some time to place the details in the matter, as per court's earlier direction.

Emphasising on evaluating financial impact, the bench said: "We don't want multiplicity of grievances... states' resources may not match up to what you require." On the aspect of the petition, the bench said statistical analysis would be required to assess the requirement in a particular state, in connection with shelter homes. Bhati said a status report could be filed giving all the details.

The bench gave two weeks to the Centre to bring on record necessary details in the matter and scheduled it for further hearing on April 26.

The plea filed by "We The Women of India" had contended that domestic violence continues to be the most common crime against women, despite the Domestic Violence Act, 2005. The plea added that as per National Crime Records Bureau report for the year 2019, out of 4.05 lakh reported cases categorised under acrimes against women, and over 30 per cent were domestic violence cases.
New Delhi, April 6 : Stressing upon indigenisation, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Wednesday said the current geopolitical situation -- referring to the war between Russia and Ukraine, has highlighted the need for indigenisation.

India is dependent on Russia and Ukraine for various components used in arms and ammunition.

Speaking during the Air Force Commanders' Conference (AFCC) at Air Headquarters here, Singh discussed the entire canvas of issues and challenges that are being faced by the country.

He said he was happy to observe that the directions given by higher authorities were comprehensively being discussed in the conference and would be the guiding light for all future courses of action.

He covered the challenges being faced on the Northern and Western borders and expressed his satisfaction over the way the Indian armed forces have been able to respond to emerging situations.

The Defence Minister also praised the IAF's evacuation effort in 'Operation Ganga' which has been appreciated by the country.

In 'Operation Ganga', almost 20,000 Indians have been brought back in over 90 special flights from the Ukraine borders.

Indian Air Force (IAF) chief Air Chief Marshal VR Chaudhari, subsequently addressed the commanders and asked them to be ready to meet all challenges and enhance capabilities for responding in multiple domains at short notice.

He also emphasised the need for conserving assets, optimally utilising resources and the need for jointmanship to enhance the national security.

To provide a boost to the growing indigenous drone industry, Singh launched the "Mehar Baba Competition - II".

The competition is aimed at developing technology for a "Swarm Drone based system to detect Foreign Objects on Aircraft Operating Surfaces".

During the three-day conference, the Air Force commanders will discuss important issues related to future challenges in a hi-tech and evolving operational scenario.

The theme for this conference is 'optimising human resources' and the focus will be on the conduct of operations in a smart and efficient manner.

"Mitigation of threats posed by drones will also be brainstormed during the conference," said the IAF.
New Delhi, April 6 : The Rajya Sabha on Wednesday passed the Constitution (Scheduled Tribes) Order (Amendment) Bill 2022. The bill seeks to include the Darlong community in Tripura at par with the Kuki tibe in the Scheduled Tribes list.

During the discussion, Minister of State for Tribal Affairs, Renuka Singh Saruta said that she welcomed the suggestions made by the Members, and assured that the Tribal Ministry has been continuously working, and the inclusion of Darlong community into Schedule Tribes (ST) at par with the Kukis, will allow the community to avail the benefits given to the STs in the country.

Saruta said the culture and traditions of the tribal communities are a very sensitive issue, and the Tribal Ministry has been working continuously to provide the necessary help to these communities.

Responding to the queries of Congress MP Phulo Devi Netam, the Minister said that she hails from Bastar region of Chhattisgarh, and has requested to include more tribal communities to the STs' list.

Referring to the measures taken by the government for uplifting the lives of the tribal people and to provide better education to tribal children, the government established 'Eklavya Schools' in the region.

"In 2013-14, the number of Eklavya schools was 167 which has been increased to 689 in 2021-22. In these schools, 460 tribal children are studying from class 6 to 12 under the CBSE course," the Minister told the House.
Mumbai, April 6 : The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Wednesday took the custody of former Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh in connection with the ongoing probe into the corruption allegations against him.

A CBI team took charge of the senior Nationalist Congress Party leader Deshmukh from the Arthur Road Central Jail -- where he has been in judicial custody of the Special PMLA Court since over five months -- and placed him under arrest for further investigations.

Through his lawyer Aniket Nikam, Deshmukh had challenged before the Bombay High Court a Special Court's order allowing the CBI to take him into custody.

Deshmukh, who was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (D) in the early hours of November 2, 2021 is facing allegations levelled by former Mumbai commissioner of police Param Bir Singh pertaining to extortion from Mumbai hoteliers, payouts for police promotions/transfers, besides money-laundering and other charges.

When Deshmukh's plea against the CBI appeal came up on Wednesday, two judges of Bombay High Court separately recused themselves from hearing the matter.

Prior to this, the CBI took custody of a dismissed Mumbai cop Sachin Vaze and two aides of Deshmukh, Sanjeev Palande and Kundan Shinde, on Monday, and they were remanded to the central agency till April 11 by a Special PMLA Court.

The CBI told the Special Court that it wants to confront the trio and Deshmukh in connection with a Rs 400 crore corruption case with prima facie shocking details that could not be divulged in the open court, and later they may also be taken to Delhi for further probe with others.
Srinagar, April 6 : Two terrorists killed on Wednesday in an encounter between terrorists and security forces in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district were attempting to revive terror folds, officials said on Wednesday The terrorists, identified as Muzaffar Sofi of Ansar Gazwatul Hind (AGuH) and Umer Teli of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) were killed in Tral area of Awantipora.

Both were involved in many terror crimes, and active in Srinagar before shifting to Tral in Pulwama.

The police said that based on a specific input generated by Ganderbal police regarding the presence of terrorists in Tral area, a raid was conducted by Awantipora police.

"During the raid, as the search party proceeded towards the suspected spot, the hiding terrorists fired indiscriminately upon the search party which was retaliated effectively leading to an encounter," police said.

"In the ensuing encounter, one terrorist was neutralized and another was holed up. Meanwhile, reinforcement of Army (42RR) and 180Bn CRPF reached the encounter site and joined the operation. The joint team later neutralized the second holed up terrorist and the bodies were retrieved from the site of encounter." "As per police records, both were linked with proscribed terror outfits AGuH and LeT, and involved in several terror crime cases including attacks on police/ security forces and civilian atrocities. Before shifting to Tral area, both the killed terrorists were involved in several terror crimes in Srinagar city including recent killing of sarpanch (Sameer Ahmad) in Khanmoh, Srinagar. Besides, Muzaffar Sofi was also involved in grenade throwing on a CRPF camp on March 19.

"Moreover, both the killed terrorists were attempting to revive the terror folds by being instrumental in motivating gullible youth to join terror folds," a police officer said.

Incriminating materials, arms and ammunition were recovered from the site of the encounter.
Chennai, April 6 : The opposition AIADMK and its allies including the BJP walked out of the Tamil Nadu assembly on Wednesday demanding the withdrawal of the hike in property tax. Party joint coordinator and former Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami (EPS) led the AIADMK legislators in walking out of the assembly.

While walking out of the house, EPS said," In the last two years, people have suffered a lot due to the pandemic and have lost their livelihood. Even in such a situation, the government has increased the property tax which has come as a bolt from the blue for ordinary people." He said that the ruling party has reneged on its 487th poll promise that it would not increase the property tax until the people overcame the impact of Covid-19.

The leaders of the DMK allies like the Congress and the VCK however in their speech said that the property tax hike was inevitable but said that the government could bring it down to bring solace to the people who were suffering from the hike in fuel prices.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, M.K. Stalin while speaking in the house appealed to the opposition parties not to play politics over the hike in rates of property taxes and ruled out the possibility of any withdrawal from the hike announced.

He called upon the political parties to set aside their differences with the government and to work for the development of Tamil Nadu.

Stalin was responding to the calling attention motion in the Tamil Nadu assembly on Wednesday. He said that his government has not increased the property tax willingly and added that he was admitting it.

He said, "There is a compulsion hor the government to tackle the situation when the civic bodies are in dire need of funds".

He added that there were several development schemes that were getting affected due to the fund crunch and hence the government has increased property tax without affecting the poor and the middle class.
Chandigarh, April 6 : A state-level function will be held in Panipat on April 24 to mark the 400th Prakash Purb of Guru Tegh Bahadur, Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar said on Wednesday.

"In the one-day programme, devotees from across Haryana, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh are expected to participate in large numbers. The function aims to spread the message of communal harmony and brotherhood as preached by Guru Tegh Bahadur," Khattar told the media here.

Guru Tegh Bahadur, also known as Hind Di Chadar, stands as a shining symbol of the country's great pluralistic tradition and secularism, and his supreme sacrifice forms an important part of India's history.

According to the Chief Minister, Haryana shares a special bond not only with Guru Tegh Bahadur but all 10 Sikh gurus as most of them travelled across the state.

The Chief Minister said the state earlier celebrated the 350th birth anniversary of Guru Gobind Singh as well as the 550th Prakash Purab of Guru Nanak Dev.

The Chief Minister said since March last year, as part of the celebrations of the Prakash Purab of Guru Tegh Bahadur, various religious and cultural programmes have been started in some parts of the country. However, due to the pandemic, most of the programmes in Haryana got postponed.

"Now the state government has decided to organise a state-level function on April 24," he said.

The Chief Minister, who launched a devotional song composed by the Department of Information and Public Relations for the event, said invitations have been sent to renowned 'ragis' and 'katha vachaks' of international repute to attend the programme.

Sanjay Bhatia, the convener of the event management committee, said no previous government has ever thought of organising programmes highlighting the spiritual teachings and philosophies of the great gurus and saints.
Bhopal, April 6 : A group of armed men in Madhya Pradesh's Morena district looted a goods train carrying sugar and ran away after opening fire. However, in retaliatory firing by the Railway Protection Force (RPF), one of the members got injured and later held by the police.

As per the Morena district police, the incident occurred in the wee hours on Wednesday when a goods train carrying sugar was heading toward Delhi. As the train slowed down briefly awaiting the green signal at the Sikroda station, armed members reached there and started offloading the sugar.

The RPF patrolling at the station noticed it and rushed towards them. Seeing the RPF approaching them, the robbers started firing, the police said.

In retaliation, RPF personnel also opened fire on them and one of the gang members got injured and was later arrested. However, by the time the RPF reached the spot and chased away the robbers, they had offloaded over 40 sacks of sugar from the train.

"One of the members of the gang was injured in retaliatory firing by police and undergoing treatment," said Sub-Divisional Officer of Police (SDOP) A.K. Singh.

"The injured gang member has been identified as Ravi Sharma and is being treated for injuries at a government-run hospital in Morena," Singh said.

Morena district falls under Chambal area in the state, which had sheltered a long list of dacoits - Gabbar Singh Gadaria (Sholay movie is based on his life), Paan Singh Tomar, Daku Man Singh, Veerappan and many more.
New Delhi, April 6 : The Defence Ministry is expected to give the green signal to a proposal to recruit soldiers for three-year short service or 'Tour of Duty', initially floated by the Army in 2020, sources said on Wednesday.

The selected candidates will get a chance to serve the nation as officers and/or other ranks.

Initially, the number of vacancies would be around 100 which could be expanded later. It will not be military conscription like in some countries like Israel.

A Tour of Duty officer will be earning somewhere around Rs 80,000 to 90,000 per month.

It will be a voluntary engagement and there will be no dilution in selection criteria.

The Army has also branded this as an opportunity for India's youth to experience military life without having to join the armed forces on a long-term basis.

This will also be an opportunity for those who do not want to join the Army as a profession but wish to experience military life for a temporary duration.

The Tour of Duty recruitment model has been conceptualised to address the shortages of personnel, including officers.

The recruitment model has also been proposed as a means to generate increased employment opportunities within the country with the ultimate ambition being to ensure that nearly 40 per cent of the Indian Army's personnel are recruited through this medium.

Currently, the only option available to civilians to enlist in the Army apart from the regular permanent commission route is the Short Service Commission.

In this path, officers are recruited for a period of 14 years, after which, subject to eligibility, an officer has the option of switching to permanent commission.

The Army currently has roughly 43,000 officers -- 80 per cent of whom are in the permanent commission class -- and an additional 11.8 lakh forming other ranks.
Patna, April 6 : A day after RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav mocked BJP for talking about the "Yogi model" but not having a Chief Ministerial face in Bihar, Deputy Chief Minister Tar Kishore Prasad on Wednesday said that the BJP was contesting elections in the state in the name of Nitish Kumar.

In remarks at the BJP state headquarters here on the occasion of the party's foundation day ceremony, he said that the partners of the entire NDA had chosen Nitish Kumar as the CM face in Bihar.

"BJP top leadership has taken the decision to project Nitish Kumar as Chief Minister of Bihar," he said, without revealing the party's clear stand in the current circumstances where several BJP MLAs are seeking that the Chief Minister should come from BJP.

Meanwhile, BJP sources said that the party's stand could change any time if a situation arises where the party would be able to form government on its own.

BJP state President Sanjay Jaiswal, who was also present in the event, said that tge BJP has a structure where every decision will be taken by its top leadership.

"When Yogi Adityanath was declared as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, no one knew about it. Manohar Lal Khattar was declared as Chief Minister of Haryana in the same way post Assembly elections. After the top leadership of the party declared them as Chief Ministers of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, everyone in the party accepted it. Similarly, every decision is being taken for Bihar as well," he said.
Mumbai, April 6 : A woman costumes designer working with the Bollywood has become the country's first patient to test positive for the Covid XE variant, a BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) official said on Wednesday.

First found in the UK, the XE variant is a mutation of strains of the Omicron variant, and early indications suggest it could be around 10 per cent more transmissible than other Omicron mutations.

The 50-year-old costumes designer, whose identity has not been disclosed, was part of a film shooting crew which arrived here from South Africa on February 10.

She had no previous travel history and as per the protocols, she underwent the regular tests and was found Covid-19 negative.

Later, during a routine testing by Suburban Diagnostics, the woman who has been vaccinated with both doses of Comirnaty vaccine, tested positive on March 2.

She was immediately quarantined at Hotel Taj Land's End in Bandra, but another test conducted on her after 24 hours by Spice Health returned negative.

Subsequently, an analysis of her reports revealed that she was infected with the Covid XE variant, and her condition was described as asymptomatic without comorbidities.

This was among the 230 samples tested by the health authorities as part of its sero survey in which the XE variant was revealed, while another patient was found infected with the Kappa variant.

As per the World Health Organization, the new XE variant is a mutant hybrid of two other Omicron versions, BA.1 And BA.2, and accounts for a miniscule fraction of cases globally.

The WHO has said that the new mutant is around 10 per cent more transmissible than the BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron.

The latest development has caused concerns in the health circles as Maharashtra is on the path of recovery and in the final stages of the ongoing third wave which started in December 2021.

Till date, the state has notched 78,74,582 Covid-19 cases in over two years, along with 147,793 deaths, both highest in the country.

(Quaid Najmi can be contacted at: q.najmi@ians.in)

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New Delhi, April 6 : The Supreme Court on Wednesday observed that forcible dispossession of a person of his/her private property violated both human rights and constitutional rights under the Constitution's Article 300-A.

A bench of Justices S. Ravindra Bhat and P.S. Narasimha said: "In the absence of written consent to voluntarily give up their land, the appellants were entitled to compensation in terms of law. The need for written consent in matters of land acquisition proceedings, has been noted in fact, by the full court decision of the High Court in Shankar Dass (supra) itself, which is relied upon in the impugned judgment." Justice Bhat, who authored the judgment on behalf of the bench, said: "While the right to property is no longer a fundamental right, it is pertinent to note that at the time of dispossession of the subject land, this right was still included in Part III of the Constitution. The right against deprivation of property unless in accordance with procedure established by law, continues to be a constitutional right under Article 300-A." The top court judgment came on appeals filed by Sukh Dutt Ratra and Bhagat Ram claiming to be owners of land situated at Mauzal Sarol Basach in Himachal Pradesh's Sirmaur district. The state government utilised the subject land and adjoining lands for the construction of the Narag Fagla Road in 1972-73, but allegedly no land acquisition proceedings were initiated, nor compensation given to the appellants or owners of the adjoining land.

Some others, whose lands were utilised for construction of the same road received enhanced compensation of 30 per cent per annum on the market value of the land, and additional compensation at the rate of 12 percent per annum under Section 23(1-A) of the Act with effect from October 16, 2001.

In 2009, the Himachal Pradesh High Court dismissed the appeal against this order by those claimants, who were seeking statutory interest from the date of taking possession (rather than date of initiation of acquisition proceedings). A writ petition by some land owners was allowed by the high court with the direction to acquire lands of the writ petitioners under the Act, with consequential benefits, and subsequently other similarly situated owners also received the benefit of these directions.

This led the appellants to file a writ petition before the high court in 2011, seeking compensation for the subject land under the Section 4 of the Land Acquisition Act.

Relying on a full bench decision of the high court, it was held that the matter involved disputed questions of law and fact for determination on the starting point of limitation, which could not be adjudicated in writ proceedings. The writ petition was disposed of, with liberty to file a civil suit in accordance with law. Aggrieved, the appellants filed appeals in the top court.

The apex court said that it is not moved by the state government's contention that since the property is not adjoining to that of the appellants, it disentitles them from claiming benefit on the ground of parity.

"The facts of the present case reveal that the State has, in a clandestine and arbitrary manner, actively tried to limit disbursal of compensation as required by law, only to those for which it was specifically prodded by the courts, rather than to all those who are entitled," it noted.

The bench said that initiation of acquisition proceedings initially in the 1990s occurred only at the behest of the high court. It further added that even after such judicial intervention, the state continued to only extend the benefit of the court's directions to those who specifically approached the courts.

The top court said: "When it comes to the subject of private property, this court has upheld the high threshold of legality that must be met, to dispossess an individual of their property, and even more so when done by the state." Setting aside the high court judgment, it said: "The appellants would also be entitled to consequential benefits of solatium, and interest on all sums payable under law w.e.f 16.10.2001 (i.e. date of issuance of notification under Section 4 of the Act), till the date of the impugned judgment, i.e. 12.09.2013. Given the disregard for the appellants' fundamental rights which has caused them to approach this court and receive remedy decades after the act of dispossession, we also deem it appropriate to direct the Respondent-State to pay legal costs and expenses of Rs 50,000 to the appellants."
Panaji, April 6 : The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Goa has denied media reports which suggested that former Chief Minister and Congress MLA Digambar Kamat was likely to join the ruling party.

"The BJP has a majority government of 25 members. There is nothing to these rumours," Goa BJP spokesperson Sharmad Pai Raiturkar told reporters here.

"They are trying to re-boil a curry which has gone stale. There is no truth to this," he added.

Kamat was a former BJP legislator and a close aide of former Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar, before he quit the party to join the Congress in 2005. He was appointed Chief Minister of a Congress-led coalition in 2007.

Speculation has been rife about Kamat's political future in the Congress, after he was not considered for the post of Leader of Opposition soon after the party lost the February 14 polls.

He was appointed as a permanent invitee to the Congress Working Committee instead on March 31.
Bhopal, April 6 : In a bizarre development, two officers -- one deceased and one retired -- of the Madhya Pradesh Police were transferred by the Home Department, which later cancelled the order, calling it a 'typographical error'.

The error was detected in the transfer/posting order under which the Home Department had transferred 167 Deputy Superintendents of Police (DSPs) and Sub-Divisional Officers (SDOs).

In the list comprising the names of officers, an officiating DSP, Jitendra Yadav, was transferred from the 26th Battalion Guna to Gwalior. Yadav had died of Covid-19 about six months back.

Similarly, Shashibhushan Singh Raghuvanshi, who had retired about one-and-a-half years ago, was transferred from SDOP Kailaras in Morena district to the 18th Battalion of Shivpuri.

When the matter was brought to the notice of the Home Department, Under Secretary Annu Bhalavi issued an order cancelling both the transfers, calling them typographical errors.
Kolkata, April 6 : Union Home Minister Amit Shah is expected to be on a two-day visit to West Bengal on April 16 and April 17, a BJP leader said on Wednesday.

This will be Shah's first-ever visit to the state since the disappointing performance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the last year's West Bengal Assembly polls.

A BJP source told IANS that on April 16, the Home Minister would visit north Bengal, and next day, attend several government and party programmes in state capital Kolkata.

"He will hold meetings with all the elected party MPs and MLAs from the state, as well as the members of the newly formed state committee of the party. He is expected to seek details on the internal evaluations of the state committee on the election disaster," he said.

Confirming this, West Bengal BJP president Sukanta Majumdar said Shah will attend the party's organisational meetings, besides attending government programmes.

"The state committee will also hand over an organisational report to the Home Minister," Majumdar said.

Meanwhile, state BJP sources said there is also a possibility of Shah holding meeting with the rebel sections in the party's state unit, and suggest solutions to bring an end to the infighting.
Lahore, April 6 : The Pakistan Punjab Assembly was sealed on Wednesday, with barbed wires installed atop its boundary walls and the building's main gate locked, amid confusion over the scheduling of a crucial session for the election of the province's new chief minister, Dawn reported.

A large contingent of police has been deployed outside the Assembly, with personnel carrying batons and shields. Water cannons and Rescue 1122 vehicles have also been parked outside the Assembly premises.

The development coincides with the submission of a no-confidence motion against Deputy Speaker Sardar Dost Muhammad Mazari, after he said the session for the Chief Minister's election would take place on Wednesday, but a spokesperson for the provincial Assembly and Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) denied the development.

Reacting to the sealing of the provincial Assembly, PPP Chairperson Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari decried that the Deputy Speaker had been "locked out" of the Assembly on the day of voting for the Chief Minister's election.

The PPP chief said in a tweet: "If it takes 30 seconds to pull off a coup, it should take 30 seconds to undo a coup. Justice delayed is justice denied. After last week's constitutional breakdown in Islamabad, today Punjab deputy speaker was locked out of [the] assembly on [the] day of voting for CM. Barbered [sic] wire around people's house."
Lahore, April 6 : The confrontation between Pakistan's Punjab Assembly Speaker and Deputy Speaker took another turn after the Speaker Parvaiz Elahi issued a notification on Wednesday depriving Deputy Speaker Dost Muhammad Mazari of all his powers, Samaa TV reported.

They came face to face over the Assembly session to elect a new Chief Minister.

According to the notification, all powers of the Deputy Speaker have been taken away effective immediately under the rule of 25.

Earlier in the day, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) submitted a no-confidence motion against the Deputy Speaker, who ironically is also a PTI MPA, and PML-Q allegedly gathered its workers in Lahore to attack MPAs.

The move angered Deputy Speaker Mazari and he, with around 15 MPAs, is planning to support Hamza Shahbaz Sharif against Pervaiz Elahi, the report said.

Formation of Mazari-led group would worsens disintegration of the PTI, which has already seen three disgruntled groups led by Jahangir Tareen, Aleem Khan, and Ghazanfar Chheena.

Mazari had called the Punjab Assembly session for Wednesday evening. However, Speaker Pervaiz Elahi, who is also the PTI candidate for chief minister-slot, blocked Mazari's efforts.

The Speaker on Tuesday rescheduled the session from April 6 to April 16, citing ongoing repair work in the Assembly, after the commotion last week.
Kolkata, April 6 : The Central Bureau of Investigation team probing the recruitment irregularities in the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) on Wednesday filed an FIR at a local police station in the case.

It also submitted its preliminary findings report to the Calcutta High Court.

Following the instructions of Calcutta High Court, the CBI team has already interrogated four present and former associates of the WBSSC, and on Wednesday, they grilled WBSSC's programme officer, Samarjit Acharya and other officer Alok Kumar Sarkar.

Earlier the CBI team also integrated WBSSC advisor Santi Prasad Sinha in this connection. Sinha's counsel, Bishwarup Sinha told media persons that his client will fully cooperate with CBI and reach the agency's office whenever summoned.

The high court will hear the case again on April 27.

Since Monday there had been lots of complications relating to the hearing of the case by the high court as a number of judges heading division benches chose to recuse themselves. Finally, a division bench headed by Justice Subrata Talukdar agreed to hear it.
Islamabad, April 6 : The President of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), Shehbaz Sharif, on Wednesday rejected the name of former Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP), Gulzar Ahmed, for the post of caretaker Prime Minister of Pakistan, Dunya News reported.

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) had on Monday proposed the name of the former Chief Justice for the caretaker Prime Minister's slot.

Former Information and Broadcasting Minister, Fawad Chaudhry, said in a tweet that in response to President Arif Alvi's letter, Prime Minister Imran Khan recommended the former CJP's name after consultation and approval of the PTI's core committee.

It is pertinent to mention that the President had written a letter to Imran and Shehbaz Sharif in this regard.

Alvi and former federal ministers discussed legal issues related to the appointment of a caretaker Prime Minister following the dissolution of the National Assembly on April 3 on Imran Khan's advice, Express Tribune reported.

The discussion took place during a high-level meeting held at the Presidency. The meeting was chaired by the President and was attended by Attorney General Khalid Jawed Khan, and former federal ministers Babar Awan, Fawad Chaudhry, Imtiaz Siddiqui, Asad Umar, Shafqat Mahmood and Pervez Khattak.

Sources privy to the development said that the President wants to keep the way open for consultation with the Opposition. Sharif is considering sending two names in response to the letter, they added.
Hyderabad, April 6 : Making a breakthrough in the case relating to the death of an engineering graduate due to drug overdose, police on Wednesday arrested drug peddler V. Lakshmipati and a drug supplier.

Lakshmipati was on the run since last week when police revealed that a 23-year-old unemployed techie in Hyderabad died due to drug overdose.

The Hyderabad Narcotic Enforcement Wing (H-NEW), along with Nallakunta police, made the arrests. Deputy Commissioner of Police, H-NEW, G. Chakravarthi announced the arrests at a news conference.

Police seized 840 grams of hash oil from the accused. The investigations revealed that Lakshmipati was supplying drugs to 18 consumers.

He revealed details of some consumers. Two of them, Vamsi Krishna and Vikram Monga, were also arrested.

So far, police have arrested seven persons in the case while some others are still absconding. Hailing from Andhra Pradesh, Lakshmipati discontinued B. Tech. He shifted to Madhapur in Hyderabad and started peddling drugs.

According to police, Lakshmipati was arrested in two cases in 2016. He has six cases pending against him.

The accused was sourcing hash oil from Araku in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh. Police also arrested K. Nageswar Rao alias Nagesh who was selling hash oil to Lakshmipati.

Lakshmipati was also addicted to consuming hash oil and selling it to potential customers in Hyderabad through his organised drug network.

According to police, Lakshmipati used to purchase one kg of hash oil for Rs 50,000 and sell 5 grams for Rs 3,000. He formed a big organised network in Hyderabad, Cyberabad, and Rachakonda limits and supplied the hash oil to the sub-peddlers and addicted consumers.

Nageswara Rao cultivates and supplies ganja and hash oil to the peddlers. His entire family and relatives are involved in this business and supplies the drug to various parts of the country including Tamil Nadu, Odisha, Delhi, Karnataka, Kerala, Mumbai, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar.
London, April 6 : Former director-general of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) espionage agency Lt Gen Asad Durrani feels the US is unlikely to forget easily Imran Khan's allegations that it was involved in a conspiracy to oust him.

Circulating a blog on an encrypted social media post, Durrani wrote Khan has followed the tactics of the late People's Party founder and leader Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

"Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto famously used this card in 1977 when after a rigged electoral exercise, the opposition mobilised against him. The ploy backfired." Bhutto was ousted by General Zia-ul-Haq in a military coup and tragically meted out capital punishment by the dictator.

The General went on to pen: "Since IK (Imran Khan) has taken a page out of the ZAB's (Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's) book, he would do well to recall that his hanged predecessor had once labelled their common nemesis as elephants. The species is known for its remarkable memory." Durrani strongly suggested people "look at the significance of a rather unusual statement made by the incumbent Army Chief".

He noted: "When (General Qamar) Bajwa took a position on the Ukraine crisis, not quite in line with the government's policy; was it to make some reconciliatory noises to placate the Yanks; express his disagreement with IK's conspiracy thesis; or was it a precursor to bad tidings for his once favourite prime minister?" The general effectively dismissed a US hand in the tabling of a no-confidence motion against Khan by Pakistan's opposition parties.

He argued: "By the beginning of March, the Opposition's move to bring down the PTI's (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf's) government was not only well on its way but in fact looked in pretty good shape. If at that stage a US Assistant Secretary of State were to warn our Ambassador in Washington that POTUS (President of the United States Joe Biden) had decided to show Imran the door, it served only one purpose: subvert the credentials of the no-confidence move. Wasn't it wiser to keep quiet and let the 'American supported movement' come to its 'desirable' end?" Referring to past instances of civilian Pakistani prime ministers being toppled, Durrani cited: "Faced with a no-confidence motion in 1989, the daughter (of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Benazir) Bhutto appealed to the then American President, the elder (George) Bush, to save democracy in Pakistan. Nawaz Sharif in 1999 sent his brother to seek (Bill) Clinton's help against a likely military coup. And Musharraf in September 2008 was counting on the Amis (Americans) to pull his chestnuts out of the fire. None of them worked." General Durrani is a candid erstwhile senior Pakistani army officer and ISI chief. He co-authored with the now retired secretary of India's Research & Analysis Wing AS Dulat a book entitled The Spy Chronicles. His most recent effort as a writer is a work of fiction Honour Among Spies. His unorthodoxy has not best pleased the powers-that-be in Pakistan.
New Delhi, April 6 : A Liberian national was held by customs officials at Indira Gandhi International Airport for allegedly smuggling 5983 grams of cocaine worth Rs 89,745 cr, customs officials said on Wednesday.

A senior customs official said that the accused arrived at terminal no 3 of the IGI on April 3 from Doha.

The official said that first the accused took a flight from Los Angeles to Doha and then a flight to New Delhi. On suspicion the accused was intercepted by customs officers at IGI airport.

"Subsequently on thorough checking of his baggage, certain material was found to be secreted in the cavities of silver colour trolley bag. Eight packets of off-white and white coloured substances suspected to be narcotics were recovered. This material was subjected to field drug test kit and prima facie it appeared to contain cocaine," said the customs official.

The official said that a total of 5983 gram off-white and white colour substance which turned out to be cocaine worth Rs 89.745 crore was recovered from him.

"The accused had violated provisions of section & of the NDPS Act and had committed offence punishable under section 21, 23 and 29 of NDPS Act. Accordingly, he was placed under arrest under section 43(b) of NDPS Act. While the off-white colour substance appeared to be cocaine was seized along with concealing material under section 43(a) of NDPS Act," said the customs official.
New Delhi, April 6 : Automobile major Maruti Suzuki India on Wednesday announced a voluntarily recall of 19,731 units of its 'Eeco' model.

According to the company, the recall is being undertaken to inspect and rectify "incorrect marking of wheel rim size", if any, on the wheel in some of these vehicles.

"In a routine inspection, Maruti Suzuki found that in some units of EECO, manufactured between July 19, 2021 and October 5, 2021, the wheel rim size was incorrectly marked. This issue has no implication on performance, safety or environment," the company said.

"Affected vehicle owners will be receiving communication from Maruti Suzuki authorised workshops for vehicle inspection and necessary rectification, if wheel rim size marking is found incorrect." In industry parlance, a voluntary recall is conducted to rectify defects in the product. This exercise is done free of cost to the consumer.
The Hague : , April 6 (IANS) Calling for a new-age partnership between India and the Netherlands, President Ram Nath Kovind on Wednesday said it can focus on three broad elements and can combine resources, expertise and knowledge with the skills to address contemporary challenges, add strategic direction to the cooperation, and maximise benefits for both countries.

"First, we become knowledge and innovation partners with our people joining hands to undertake pioneering work in the fields of digital technology, artificial intelligence, semiconductors and fintech. Second, as two responsible members of the international community, we play a more proactive role in addressing common global challenges including climate change and adaptation. Third, India and the Netherlands, as key partners in defence and security work for a stable global order," he said in response to remarks by the Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte at a lunch the latter hosted in his honour.

The President, who is on a visit to the Netherlands and will return to India on Thursday, said the two countries are long-standing partners with historical ties of friendship and collaboration.

"In the 75 years of our diplomatic ties, we have worked together in wide-ranging areas of mutual interest. These include our cooperation in water, agriculture, healthcare, science and technology, urban development and smart cities. Our partnership has been both meaningful and impactful, contributing to improving the lives of our people," he said.

On his third day of his stay in the Netherlands, President Kovind met Prime Minister Rutte, President of the Senate, Jan Anthonie Bruijn; and President of the House of Representatives, Vera Bergkamp, a communique from the Rashtrapati Bhavan said.

During interaction with the Presidents of the Senate and House of Representatives, he said that he was happy to be in the Netherlands in this special year of 75th anniversary of establishment of diplomatic ties.

The President said that parliamentary exchanges between the two countries would help in promoting mutual understanding and exchange of ideas. He also said, there is a need for more regular exchanges among their Parliaments. India would be happy to receive a visit by a parliamentary delegation from the Netherlands and a similar goodwill delegation could visit the Netherlands at a mutually convenient time, he said.
Kathmandu, April 6 : In a major breakthrough in the energy trading sector, Nepal has received permission to export an additional 325 MW of electricity to the Indian energy market. The Indian Central Electricity Authority has given approval to the Nepal Electricity Authority to sell an additional 325 MW of electricity in the Indian market, Nepals Energy Minister Pampha Bhusal said during a press conference on Wednesday.

Earlier, Nepal had permission to export only 39 MW of electricity to the Indian Energy Exchange. With this new decision in effect, Nepal will now be allowed to export 364 MW of electricity. Nepal and India had signed various agreements during a recent visit of Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba to India. Those agreements are being implemented gradually, according to the Ministry of Energy, Water Resource and Irrigation.

For this new facility, we want to thank the government of India, said Bhusal adding that during the recent visit of Prime Minister Deuba to India we signed a Nepal-India Joint Vision Statement on Power Sector Cooperation which has come into effect.

Although Nepal has been making efforts for a long time to sell the surplus electricity produced during the monsoon in the regional market, it has not been successful. During the India visit of Prime Minister Deuba from April 1-3, India congratulated Nepal on its significant progress in the power sector including becoming a near power surplus country.

"Prime Minister Deuba appreciated India's recent cross-border electricity trade regulations that have enabled key partners like Nepal to access India's market and trade power with India. He also acknowledged with appreciation India's contribution to developing Nepal's power sector, through capacity building and direct support to infrastructure projects related to generation and transmission," said a statement issued by India's Ministry of External Affairs on August 2 after delegation level talks between Deuba and his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi.

During the visit, both Prime Ministers had agreed that there are unprecedented opportunities for expanding and further strengthening mutually beneficial bilateral cooperation in the power sector including joint development of power generation projects in Nepal; development of cross-border transmission infrastructure; bi-directional power trade with appropriate access to electricity markets in both countries based on mutual benefits; market demand and applicable domestic regulations of each country; coordinated operation of the national grids and institutional cooperation in sharing latest operational information, technology and know-how.

To expand such cooperation to include their partner countries under the BBIN (Bhutan, Bangladesh, India and Nepal) framework subject to mutually agreed terms and conditions between all involved parties. Based on their respective national policies and climate-change commitments, to make renewable energy production, hydropower in particular, a cornerstone of their energy partnership, the statement read. "That Indian investment into Nepal's renewable power sector, in particular the hydropower sector, has the potential to benefit both the countries by strengthening their economies, generating employment, enhancing export earnings and contributing to further development of industrial and financial capacities, and mutually agreed sharing of other benefits." Nepal, during the meeting between Deuba and Modi also invited Indian companies to invest in the development, construction and operation of viable renewable power projects, including in the hydropower sector. including storage-type projects through mutually beneficial partnerships. The Prime Ministers of both the countries have described the Common Vision as the biggest achievement so far in the energy sector. It is believed that this will pave the way for exporting surplus electricity to India, Bangladesh and Bhutan.

"It is a matter of happiness that Nepal is exporting her surplus electricity to India. This will make a huge contribution to Nepal's economic progress," Modi had said addressing the joint press conference with Deuba on Saturday. "I feel further happiness that we are going to accept Nepal's proposal to sell additional electricity in India." Modi's statement allayed longstanding Nepalese fears that India may refuse to procure surplus electricity generated in Nepal, assuring that proposals for import of Nepali electricity will be accepted. Nepal is currently buying electricity from India during the dry season but will be able to sell surplus elicitricty to India during the rainy season.
New Delhi, April 6 : Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), is an international organisation of seven South Asian and Southeast Asian countries, including Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand.

The leadership is rotated in alphabetical order of the name of countries. The permanent secretariat of BIMSTEC is in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

It is a cooperative arrangement aimed at synchronising the 'Look West' policy of some countries of ASEAN with the 'Look East/Act East' policies of certain South Asian countries.

Established in 1997, this year marks the 25th year of the establishment of BIMSTEC.

The organisation offers itself as an alternative regional arrangement to some South Asian countries to the SAARC, which failed to meet for quite some time.

Unlike other regional groups, BIMSTEC is a sector-driven cooperative organisation looking at seven sectors: science, technology and innovation; trade and investment; environment and climate change; agriculture and food security; security; people-to-people contacts; and connectivity.

Intra-regional trade in BIMSTEC is around $70 billion that constitutes only 7 per cent of the total global trade of its member countries. With 21.7 per cent of the world's population and combined GDP of $ 3.8 trillion, the BIMSTEC has potential to be an influential engine of economic growth.

The 5th Summit of BIMSTEC was hosted by the Government of Sri Lanka on 30 March, which was the current chair nation of BIMSTEC. Theme of the summit was "Towards a Resilient Region, Prosperous Economies, Healthy People" that highlighted the current priorities of member states, and the concerted efforts by BIMSTEC to develop cooperation activities that support member states' programmes to deal with the economic and developmental challenges in the Post Covid-19 pandemic era.

During the recent summit, the member countries adopted its Charter which is crucial towards creating an institutional architecture with a new orientation and concrete goals.

Under this Charter, the members will meet once in every two years.

India would provide $1 million to the secretariat to increase its operational budget.

It also agreed to form an eminent persons' group to prepare a vision document in order to enhance the capacity of the BIMSTEC Secretariat adding that a roadmap should be outlined at the earliest to achieve this goal.

New Delhi further called for a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) among the member countries underlining the necessity for coastal shipping ecosystem and electricity grid interconnectivity, as the necessary components of the evolving shape of BIMSTEC.

An FTA is a good option to enhance intra-regional trade volume. However, issues of trade patterns and complementarities remain hurdles. BIMSTEC members already have either bilateral or regional FTAs in the vicinity, such as the ASEAN FTA involving Thailand and Myanmar; the ASEAN-India FTA; the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), involving Myanmar and Thailand; ASEAN-India Comprehensive Economic Partnership; South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA) involving Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan; and the Asia-Pacific Trade Agreement (APTA) involving Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka. Some of the bilateral FTAs include India's FTAs with Sri Lanka and Bhutan and a Treaty of Trade with Nepal.

So, going by the web of FTAs touching almost all the member countries, a BIMSTEC FTA should not be difficult.

BIMSTEC member countries had indeed made it a priority since its commencement to enhance trade in goods and services, apart from investments. Although a Framework Agreement was signed in 2004 by establishing a Trade Negotiating Committee, the negotiations are still on.

The principal hurdle has been differences over market access between the two big economies of BIMSTEC: India and Thailand. In 2016, the countries agreed to speed up the negotiations on at least two issues in the FTA: preferential treatment to Least Developed Countries, and push on relaxations in services and investments.

As Thailand would hold the next Chair of the organisation, it is hoped that both India and Thailand will work together to do something concrete to make the FTA a success.

India viewed that the organisation should also increase exchanges between the countries.

The summit adopted the declaration of the Master Plan for Transport Connectivity that would provide a framework to entrepreneurs and startups, and adopt international norms in the field of trade facilitation.

The Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), in collaboration with the Asian Development Bank, will launch an awareness programme in this regard.

Citing Ukraine crisis, India noted that the developments in Europe in the last few weeks have raised a question mark on the stability of the international order. Therefore, it called upon the leaders to strive hard to transform the Bay of Bengal into a bridge of connectivity, prosperity and security. India emphasised for prioritising the collective regional security.

It claimed that without security, it was impossible to ensure the development and prosperity of the region. India reminded that at the grouping's fourth summit in Kathmandu, a decision had been taken to strengthen the regional legal framework against terrorism, trans-national crimes and non-traditional threats. Some of the common threats faced by BIMSTEC countries include terrorism, organised crime, drug trafficking, human trafficking, illegal migration, and radicalisation.

A Joint Working Group (JWG) on Counterterrorism and Transnational Crime (CTTC) was established to deal with these threats in the Bay of Bengal region. Six sub-groups, each working on a specific aspect of CTTC cooperation, were also formed to report to the JWG.

In 2009, the members signed the BIMSTEC Convention on Cooperation in Combating International Terrorism, Transnational Organised Crime and Illicit Drug Trafficking.

Though awaiting ratification from all members, it provides "each (member-State) has the widest possible measure of mutual assistance in the prevention, investigation, prosecution and suppression of such crimes." The BIMSTEC National Security Chiefs' meetings have been in place since 2017 to give teeth to the monitoring and implementation aspects of the legal frameworks on security.

In this context, the signing of the three BIMSTEC agreements at Colombo to boost cooperation activities captures attention. These include BIMSTEC Convention on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters, Mutual Cooperation between Diplomatic Academies/Training Institutions, Mutual Cooperation and Memorandum of Association (MoA) on the Establishment of BIMSTEC Technology Transfer Facility (TTF).

India hoped to move quickly to other similar instruments, so that there could be better coordination between the legal systems.

India is working on extending and expanding the scope of the BIMSTEC scholarship program offered by the Nalanda International University, Rajgir. India also highlighted the role of BIMSTEC Center for Weather and Climate on disaster risk reduction and showed its readiness for contributing USD three million dollars to restart the work of this centre.

Given the level of synergies and complementarities among the member states, it is viable to establish a Bay of Bengal Economic Community at some point. For wider acceptability and entrenchment, it is vital to take the grouping to the level of the people through dialogues.

The formation of the BIMSTEC Network of Policy Think Tanks (RC- BNPTT) for broader regional consultations on policy matters is a praiseworthy move. Having a charter on the lines of other regional groupings like ASEAN, SAARC, and the EU would provide much needed standards. Outreach activities with the UN and other similar organisations like ASEAN for maximum benefit including "recognition, financial assistance, expert assistance, market access etc." are also worth exploring.
Bhubaneswar, April 6 : The Puri police on Wednesday arrested one person on the charge of vandalisation of earthen ovens in Rosaghara (kitchen) of the Jagannath temple in Puri, police officials said.

Over 40 chullahs (earthen ovens) were found damaged when the doors of the kitchen opened on Sunday morning for cooking of Mahaprasad. This incident had shocked the Lord Jagannath devotees and they demanded strong action against the culprits.

Following this incident, the police had launched a manhunt and on Tuesday detained the prime suspect from Khurda. On Wednesday they arrested the accused person identified as J. Mohapatra.

Puri SP Kanwar Vishal Singh said that the arrested person has confessed to the crime during interrogation and he has been taken to court.

During interrogation, the suspected youth identified as J. Mohapatra (30) from Begunia area of Khurda district admitted that he felt uneasy about something in the kitchen and ransacked the ovens, Singh said.

The mental state of the accused youth will be known after taking the opinion of experts, he said.

Talking to a local news channel, the accused admitted that he had destroyed the 'chullahs' while visiting the temple kitchen.

"When I entered the kitchen, I found that it was dirty. After cleaning it, something uneasy came to my mind and I destroyed several chullahs," the accused said.

Speaking to reporters his father said, "He is a religious boy and had shared his displeasure over uncleanliness in Jagannath temple with us in the past. I do not know if he has vandalised the temple kitchen."
New Delhi, April 6 : A minor fire broke out at the Congress office in the national capital on Wednesday evening, and was soon extinguished, a fire department official said.

According to the official, they received a call about the fire incident at 24, Akbar Road around 7.30 p.m. and two fire tenders were immediately pressed into the service.

"The firemen doused the flames in just 30 minutes and even the cooling process was immediately completed," the official said.

The official said that some dry leaves on the roof of the Congress office had caught the fire.

"No one was injured in the incident as it was a minor fire," he added.
Islamabad, April 6 : Leader of the Opposition in the outgoing National Assembly of Pakistan, Shehbaz Sharif, informed President Arif Alvi on Wednesday that the Opposition does not agree with the suggestion of appointing Justice (Retd) Gulzar Ahmed as the interim Prime Minister and that the process for the appointment issued by the head of the state was a "violation of law and Constitution", Geo News reported.

In a letter, Sharif confirmed to the President that he had received the latter's April 4 message regarding the appointment of a caretaker Prime Minister.

Sharif, who's also the President of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), informed Alvi that the Speaker's ruling on April 3 on the no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Imran Khan was a "blatant violation of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan" and the "Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business" of the Lower House.

"The entire super-structure built thereon, including all consequential notifications relating to dismissal of the resolution, advice of the Prime Minister regarding dissolution of the National Assembly, and continuation of the Prime Minister in office are all illegal, without lawful authority and of no legal effect," wrote Shehbaz.

The former Opposition leader also informed President Alvi that the Supreme Court is holding suo motu hearings on the National Assembly deputy speaker's ruling.

"Thus, the process of appointing a caretaker Prime Minister initiated by you under Article 224(1A) of the Continuation in a hurried manner is simply to defeat the process of law and Constitution without waiting for the decision in the sou motu case and petitions filed by combined Opposition parties and other petitions challenging the rejection of the no-confidence motion against the Prime Minister and prorogation of requisitioned session of National Assembly by the Deputy Speaker and consequent dissolution of National Assembly by Prime Minister, which are still pending adjudication before the Supreme Court.

"Thus the start of the said process by you is not acceptable as it is violation of the law and Constitution and is subjudice," wrote Shehbaz, Geo News reported.

The PML-N President also said that Gulzar Ahmed's nomination as caretaker premier by Imran Khan was a "blatant attempt to subvert the provisions of the Constitution and to pre-empt the decision of the Supreme Court".

He added that all issues, including the violation of Article 244 and 224A at this point, are "subjudice" and informed the President that the Opposition does not agree with the suggestion of appointing Gulzar Ahmed as the caretaker Prime Minister.
New Delhi, April 6 : The current spell of heat wave, especially across northwest India, for a longer duration is neither unique nor uncommon, as 2017 and 2019 too had witnessed similar phenomena, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said on Wednesday.

It also said that a rise in maximum temperatures by about 2 degrees Celsius is very likely over many parts of northwest and central India during the next three days.

The current heat wave spell started mainly over west Rajasthan and adjoining areas of Gujarate and west Madhya Pradesh from March 27. It further extended to east Rajasthan, east Madhya Pradesh, south Haryana, Delhi and southern parts of Uttar Pradesh by March 29.

During this period of heat wave, maximum temperatures were recorded in the range of 40-42 degrees Celsius over most stations in these states, with a few stations mainly over western Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh recording in the range of 42-43 degrees Celsius.

Besides this persistent heat wave observed over northern plains and central India, parts of western Himalayan region also reported heat wave to severe heat wave conditions with maximum temperature in the range of 25-33 degrees Celsius at higher ridges while at lower ridges, it has been 33-39 degrees Celsius - 6 to 9 degrees Celsius above normal.

"The immediate past heat wave data during 2017-2021 for the month of April shows this type of longer spell is not unusual. The spells of heat wave to severe heat wave with 8-12 days duration were observed in April 2017 and 2019 over Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Chandigarh & Delhi, Punjab and parts of Gujarat and of 6-8 days duration over parts of Western Himalayan region covering Himachal Pradesh and Jammu in April 2017," the IMD bulletin said.

The forecast warned of a rise in maximum temperatures by about 2 degrees Celsius, very likely over many parts of northwest abd Central India during the next three days and no significant change thereafter.

However, a fall in maximum temperatures by about 2-3 degrees Celsius is very likely over Gujarat during next three days and no significant change thereafter.

No significant change in maximum temperatures is very likely over rest of the country during the next five days, the IMD said.

There would be heat wave conditions in most parts with severe heat wave conditions in isolated pockets very likely over west Rajasthan during next five days, heat wave conditions in some parts with severe heat wave conditions in isolated pockets over east Rajasthan during next five days, and heat wave to severe heat wave conditions in isolated/some pockets over south Haryana, Delhi, west Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh during next five days.

The IMD also warned that heat wave conditions in isolated pockets over Himachal Pradesh, Vidarbha, and Bihar during next five days, over central Maharashtra and Jammu division during next 2-3 days, over Jharkhand till April 8, over south Punjab till April 10 and over Chhattisgarh on April 9 and 10.
New Delhi, April 6 : Union Minister Smriti Irani on Wednesday expressed happiness over Congress leader Rahul Gandhi sending 'Puja Samagri' for Amethi temples. However, in a lighter vein she also made him realise that he wasn't the first to do so.

"If this is true then I am happy that Rahul ji is now impressed by the services done by me and is serving the Mother Goddess in the similar way. Imitation is the best way of complimenting an effort," the senior BJP leader said reacting to an IANS tweet which apprised of the development.

Notably, this is the first time that the former Congress president has sent puja samagri to Amethi temples, the constituency which he represented in the Lok Sabha three times.

Earlier, according to an IANS report from Lucknow, Gandhi had sent 'puja samagri' (worship material) for the Devi temples in Amethi on the occasion of Navaratri. The prominent temples where materials have been supplied include Maa Kalika Bhavani Dham Sangrampur, Maa Devi Patan Dham Amethi, Maa Durga Bhawani Dham Bhawan Shahpur Gauriganj, Budhan Mata Dham Gauriganj and Samsarian Dham.

Amethi is the former constituency of Rahul Gandhi which he lost to Smriti Irani of the BJP in 2019.

Irani has also been sending the worship material to Amethi temples every year during the Navaratri festival season.
New Delhi, April 6 : The Delhi High Court on Wednesday restrained three Chinese companies from using the 'HTC' Trade Mark on their hair-grooming products as it is deceptively similar to the trademark of the Taiwanese tech giant HTC.

Justice Asha Menon was dealing with the dispute between plaintiff HTC and the defendants -- Yongkang Geenew Imp and Exp Co, Ltd, Yongkang Xinshiji Hairdressing Tools Factory, and Yongkang Xinji Hair Dressing Appliance Factory.

As per the plea, the Chinese companies are manufacturers of electric hair trimmers, hair clippers, and hair dryers bearing identical infringing Trade Mark/HTC in China and exporting the same to the other defendants in India. These defendants are also selling their products through Amazon India website, it said.

The court observed that in the present case, since both the Trade Marks are registered, all the facts would have to be considered holistically to determine whether or not the plaintiff is entitled to interim protection.

However, it was noted HTC of the Taiwanese company, which was founded in 1997, stands for High Tech Computer, has gained immense recognition and popularity and indicates the origin of the products of the plaintiff. In contrast, defendants said that their HTC stood for High Tech Trimmers and Clippers, and that they have started use only in 2013, and are thus "subsequent user".

The court noted that these alphabets do not adequately stand for the products of the defendants, as it would then be "HTTC". It is clear, whereas the plaintiff has a logical explanation for using random alphabets in their Trade Mark, which, in course of time, has acquired a distinctiveness leading to even a change in the corporate name, the defendants have none, the court order said.

It was also highlighted by the court that the quality of the goods led to the reputation of the trademark HTC, which thus became an indicator of the origin of the goods. The action of the defendants, on the other hand, has no valid explanation and under no circumstance, can be taken as indicative of the origin of the products of the defendants.
Hyderabad, April 6 : Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) Working President K.T. Rama Rao on Wednesday wrote an open letter to the Central government, blaming its "inefficient policies" for the steep hike in fuel prices.

"On the one hand, the BJP Government at the Centre is constantly raising prices. But, on the other hand, it is trying to push the blame on state governments. This is blatant lying and totally unacceptable. That is why I am writing this letter to expose the inefficient policies of the Central Government which have inflated petrol rates in an unforeseen manner," he said.

"When he was in opposition, Narendra Modi shed crocodile tears over the sufferings of the poor and the plight of common people. However, he has been ruling the nation, completely ignoring the welfare of the people since he came to power. From the earliest days of Narendra Modi's swearing-in as the Prime Minister, the Central government has been making the country's people suffer with its incompetence and inefficient economic policies. The main reason behind my criticism is that petrol rates are rising daily without any control and the prices of essentials are skyrocketing," wrote KTR, as the TRS leader is popularly known.

He termed as "pure lies" the reasons cited by the Modi government for not controlling prices.

"BJP leaders are simply narrating stories, such as the problems in the international crude oil supply, the rise in crude oil prices, and the Russia-Ukraine war. But all this is not true. Union ministers who say prices are rising in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, and even France are deliberately hiding that the per litre petrol rate there is lower than ours. The petro products are still available at cheaper rates in some of our neighbouring countries, including Sri Lanka, which is reeling under the financial crisis." When the BJP government took office in 2014, the international price of crude oil was about $105. After that, due to various reasons, crude oil prices came down to below $40 a barrel at one stage. However, the BJP government has continued to raise petrol prices in the country, pointed out KTR, who is also the state's Information Technology and Industries Minister.

He alleged that the increase in excise duty during the Corona crisis is proof of the "cruelty and indifference" of the Narendra Modi government against the poor and middle class. "The price of a barrel of crude oil fell to less than $20 a barrel during the corona crisis. That should have led to a massive reduction in petrol rates in our country as well. But the ruthless Modi government, which has forced migrant workers to walk thousands of miles barefoot in the Corona crisis, has raised excise duty by Rs 20 without taking advantage of the reduced prices," wrote KTR.

He recalled that in 2014, the price of petrol per litre was Rs 70.51, and the price of diesel per litre was Rs 53.78. The Modi government gradually increased the prices to Rs 118.19 and Rs 104.62, respectively. Internationally, the crude oil price is currently $106, like 2014, "but the price of a litre of petrol in our country is not the same as in 2014".

"How did this happen? What are the reasons behind it? It is the responsibility of the BJP leaders to answer to the people for what purposes they are raising prices like this, he added.

"The current plight is due to the inefficient policies adopted by the BJP and its failure in managing the country's economy. The BJP leaders at the Center are lacking wealth-creating intellect. They are of the wrong impression that raising taxes exponentially with the power at hand is good governance. The useless BJP Government has levied a petro tax of Rs 26.51 lakh crore for seven and a half years on 26 crore families in the country. This means that, on average, the Modi government has looted one lakh of rupees from each family in the name of raising petrol prices. The union government and BJP leaders are answerable to the country's people," the TRS leader said.

KTR pointed out that prior to 2014, the excise duty on petrol was Rs 9.48. When Modi came to power, he increased it to Rs 32.98. It was slightly reduced last year to Rs 27.90. "The WhatsApp University batch, including Union ministers, has been spreading fake news on social media that 41 per cent of this excise duty will be returned to the states. But this is a blatant lie. Only basic excise duty is shared with the states from the total excise duty the Central government levies on petrol. At the current petrol price, the basic excise duty is only 1 rupee 40 paise. Of this, 41 per cent, which means 57 paise per litre, is distributed by the Centre to all the states. The share of Telangana is 2.133 per cent. That is 0.01 paise per litre. But the Modi government, which is levying an excise duty of Rs 28 rupees per litre, is making propaganda that it is giving a major share to the states." "Narendra Modi, who has been doing everything to weaken the states since he came to power, is looking to fill only the central exchequer by rising petrol prices. That is why, since the BJP came to power, petro rates have been rising in the form of cess rather than tariffs. The Modi government is levying Rs 18 for roads and infrastructure development, Rs 2.5 for agricultural and infrastructure development, and Rs 11 each in the name of special additional excise duty. The cess of over Rs 30 in the name of petro prices is the highest ever in the country's history. The benefit that the states get from this is nil," he added.
Jaipur, April 6 : Rajasthan needs to improve its ranking for tourist arrivals, a senior state government official said on Wednesday.

The desert state ranks 6th in the country in foreign tourist arrivals and 10th in domestic tourist arrivals, Principal Secretary, Tourism, Gayatri A. Rathore said, adding that her Department stands committed to improve the rankings for both categories of arrivals and take it to among the top 3 in the country.

"This is the aim with which the Department is proactively working," she said at the signing of an MoU between her Department and the Federation of Hospitality and Tourism of Rajasthan (FHTR) for organising the 'Rajasthan Domestic Travel Mart (RDTM) 2022', slated to be held July 22-24.

Rathore said that the event will play a significant role in boosting the domestic tourist arrivals in Rajasthan in the opening up after the Covid pandemic. Tourist arrivals to the state have already increased as have foreign tourist arrivals with the opening up of the international flights, she added.

Noting tourism contributes 9 per cent to the state's economy and is responsible for providing, directly and indirectly, 50 lakh jobs, she said that it is only appropriate that the government has accorded high priority to the sector and cited the recent tourism-friendly budget.

A large number of policies are on the anvil which will promote tourism in a big way. Among these policies are New Tourism Unit Policy, Home Stay Policy, Rural Tourism Policy, Heritage Scheme, and Full Tourism Policy, Rathore added.

The MoU was signed between the Director of Tourism, Nishant Jain and FHTR President, Apurv Kumar.
New Delhi, April 6 : The Rajya Sabha on Wednesday passed the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Bill, 2022. The bill seeks to enable investigating officers to collect certain identifiable information (fingerprints and footprints) of persons including convicts and arrested persons.

It was passed by the Lok Sabha on April 4.

A motion to refer the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Bill, 2022, to a Select Committee of the Rajya Sabha was rejected by a division with 59 voting in favour and 97 voting against.

During a discussion in the House, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said that the concerns about human rights violations raised by the opposition MPs, were not correct and further said that the victims of a crime also have human rights. He also said that those caught by the law also have human rights.

Stating the conviction rate in the country, he said that there has been only 39 per cent conviction rate in rape cases, 38 per cent in theft cases, and 27 per cent in child abuse cases. "So, should not we endeavour for better system, strengthening the criminal justice system in the country?" he asked.

Referring to the strictness of the laws, Shah said: "The conviction rate in South Africa is 82 per cent, 84 per cent in the UK, 69 per cent, 94 per cent in Australia, and 93 per cent in the US." Noting that the main objective of this bill is to strengthen the prosecution agencies to increase the conviction rate in the country and this will only possible when the prosecution agencies will have scientific evidence.

Further, he also assured the House that the data and the records collected by the government will not be accessed by third parties.

Describing that this Bill does not intend to infringe on anyone's privacy, the Home Minister said these data will be safely preserved at the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) and the government will set up a committee to formulate a policy to safely use these collected data.

He also said that the NCRB has data of one crore figure print and after the passing of this Bill this data will increase substantially.

He also said that once these data will be collected, the police station will send the sample of the suspect to NCRB and within minutes, the finger print or other identities will be matched and if the suspect's details are there, he can be easily identified and details will be directly sent to the concerned police station.

To keep its privacy and safety of the data, no investigation agencies will have direct access to the NCRB data centre where this evidence will be stored.

Shah also said that while amending the IPC, CrPC and Evidence Acts, the drafts will be sent to the Parliamentary Standing Committee of the Home Affairs and after detailed scrutiny, the Bills will be brought to Parliament for further discussion.

Earlier while debating on the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Bill, Congress MP P Chidambaram urged the government to refer to the standing committee or a select committee and also termed the Bill as "unconstitutional, illegal".

He also made a point that the records collected could be shared with any law enforcement agency.

Speaking on the Bill, the DMK MP T Siva said that the Bill should be discussed more elaborately and Athe bill to be referred to the select committee.

Declaring the Bill as "draconian", the CPI-M MP Binoy Viswam said the government wants to threaten everybody and wants to take away all the human rights, rights of democratic movement of the country.
New Delhi, April 6 : The Union Health Ministry on Wednesday denied reports, which claimed that the first case of XE Covid variant in India has been detected in Mumbai.

The clarification came shortly after reports, citing the BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), claimed that a female costumes designer of South African origin has been found to be infected with the new XE variant in the city.

The FastQ files in respect of the sample, which is being said to be the XE variant, were analysed in detail by genomic experts of INSACOG who have inferred that the genomic constitution of this variant does not correlate with the genomic picture of the XE variant, said a source.

After the genome sequencing of the sample, evidence does not suggest that XE variant has been detected in India, the source added.

XE is a mutant hybrid of the two previous versions of the Omicron variant, BA.1 and BA.2, which is spreading across the world. It was first detected in the UK on January 19 and since then a few hundred sequences have been reported and confirmed.
Patna, April 6 : A person, who fraudulently claimed to be the missing son of a big landlord in Bihar's Nalanda district and even became heir to his property, has been unmasked after 41 years.

The court of Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate Manwendra Mishra has convicted accused Dayanand Gosai under various sections of the IPC sections including cheating and criminal conspiracy and sent him to jail.

The case was similar to many Bollywood blockbusters where someone replaced the son of a rich man due to similar looks and personality.

In this case, the story began way back in 1977 when Kanhaiya Singh, son of big landlord Kameshwar Singh went to Chandi block for a examination but never returned home. A missing complaint was registered in the Silaw police station.

In 1981, a beggar, who was later identified as Gosai, came to Morgawan village and went door to door seeking alms. When some villagers ask him about his identity, he said that he is Kanhaiya Singh, son of Kameshwar Singh.

As Kameshwar Singh was called to the spot, the beggar greeted him and called "Papa".

As it was five years, no one could identify him properly, but as Gosai gave information related to Kanhaiya Singh and his family, Kameshwar Singh accepted him as his missing son and took him to the house.

However, Kanhaiya Singh's mother Ramsakhi Devi, was not convinced and refused to accept him as a son, citing some physical features of her son that were absent in him.

While the elderly Kameshwar Singh, 75, had under the beggar's and villagers' persuasion, accepted Gosai as his missing son, Ramsakhi Devi filed a case against him, alleging that he was a fraud and seeking he not be allowed to inherit the property.

However, after a few years, Ramsakhi Devi died due to illness and elderly age, and as Kameshwar Singh had already accepted him as son, a local Nalanda court declared Gosai as his heir.

Kameshwar Singh was having two shopping cum residential complexes in Patna with each spread in 15 kathas and worth more than Rs 200 crore at current market price. Besides 150 bighas agricultural land in Morgawan village, he owned two buildings and some more residential plots in the village.

Gosai now started living a luxurious life, especially after Kameshwar Singh also passed away.

However, Vidya Singh, the daughter of Kameshwar and Ramsakhi Devi, continued her mother's fight. She challenged the decision of Nalanda court in the Patna High Court but it ruled in favour of Gosai.

Vidya Singh then went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the case has several points which need investigation. It had also observed that a case cannot be rejected on the basis of death of a complainant.

Following that decision, the hearing of the fraud case started again in a Nalanda court, but saw may delays.

Three months ago, ACJM Mishra directed the judicial officers to start speedy trials of every case lodged before 2000. This case came to his notice and he directed it be heard on a daily basis.

"During the hearing of the case, we have submitted proof that the person who posed as Kanhaiya Singh is actually Dayanand Gosai, son of Prabhu Gosai, a native of Jamui district," said Dr Rajesh Pathak, the prosecution lawyer.

"We managed to find three persons named Nandan, Vishnu Gosai and a Chokidar of the village who identify him as Dayananand Gosai, younger son of Prabhu Gosai. During the hearing, we demanded for the DNA test of the alleged person which he denied," he added.

"As Kanhaiya Singh disappeared in 1977, and 'returned home' in 1981, Gosai, when asked by the court to provide proof about where he resided during this period, did not have convincing answers or any proof," Pathak said.

He also noted that the villagers of Morgawan said that when Kameshwar Singh died, he did not come for the last rites.
New Delhi, April 6 : The Ministry of Cooperation on Wednesday barred three Credit Cooperative Societies from collecting deposits from the public.

The three were identified as Sahara Credit Cooperative Society Ltd, Lucknow, Saharayn Universal Multipurpose Society Ltd, Bhopal, and Humara India Credit Cooperative Society, Kolkata.

According to a Ministry statement, the move comes in wake of Delhi High Court's March 22 order restraining all three from collecting any deposits from the public
New Delhi, April 6 : Union Minister G. Kishan Reddy claimed on Wednesday that the BJP will form the government in Telangana in the coming days.

The Union Minister for Culture, Tourism & Development Of North Eastern Region (DoNER) also held the Congress responsible for every problem in the country, and said that Sonia Gandhi has "no right" to criticise the BJP.

In an interview with IANS, the BJP leader and MP from Telangana expressed his views on a range of topics, including the party's foundation day, Vikas Yatra and prospects of BJP's expansion in south Indian states, among others.

Here are excerpts from the interview: Q: What's your take on the message that Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave to the party cadres on BJP's Foundation Day?

A: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spoken about the concerns of crores of workers and people of the country... Under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi, the NDA government is working in 18 states. In the coming days, our goal is to make India a world leader again.

We have to make the country powerful by eliminating poverty and unemployment. For this, he (Prime Minister Modi) called upon all the workers to work together. He has asked the people of the country to stay away from family or individual-centric political parties because such parties have no principle and can do anything for power.

Q: BJP's journey started with only two Lok Sabha seats and today you have coalition governments in 18 states, with 301 MPs in the Lok Sabha. For the first time, the party's tally in the Rajya Sabha has crossed 100. How do you see this journey of 42 years? A: When our journey started with just two seats, people made fun of us but we kept working hard under the leadership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani. Our workers worked hard, and sacrificed relentlessly.

Now, under the leadership of Narendra Modi, we have become the world's largest party. Today, the BJP is the number one party in the Lok Sabha as well as in the Rajya Sabha. We have governments in maximum number of states. The BJP is at the forefront in terms of number of SC, ST and women MLAs and MPs. Finally, a nationalist government is in power which is working in the interest of the country.

Q: The BJP is yet to make its presence felt in a big way in the south. Amit Shah has said on many occasions that the golden age of BJP is yet to come. What are the party's views in terms of expansion in south India? A: You are right... At present we have government in two southern states -- Karnataka and Puducherry. In the coming days, we are going to form government in Telangana as well. The BJP will also emerge stronger in Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, as people are angry with family and individual-centric parties in these states.

Q: Sonia Gandhi is criticising your government, alleging that the BJP is working on a divisive agenda. Your take...

A: Sonia Gandhi has no right to criticise the BJP on this issue. It is the Congress that has divided the country in the name of religion, caste, language and financial status. Whatever problems the country has today, the Congress is responsible for them.
New Delhi, April 6 : The government is quite committed and capable of returning the land that has been forcibly taken away from Kashmiri Pandits, Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai told the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday.

Responding to a question during the 'Question Hour', Rai said: "Those who have left the Kashmir Valley due to oppression... whose land has been forcibly taken away, the government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is quite capable to ensure that their land is returned to them." He also told the House that the properties of 610 applicants so far have been returned to them in Jammu and Kashmir, and the land of all those whose complaints are found to be correct, will be returned one by one.

Responding to another question on the overall infrastructure development in Jammu and Kashmir, the Minister said the government has taken several steps to improve the road connectivity in Jammu and Kashmir, and has fast tracked all the under-construction hydel projects while other measures are being taken to complete the projects in a time-bound manner.

The Minister also said Jammu and Kashmir has received investment proposals worth Rs 51,000 crore and these investments would provide employment opportunities to 4.5 lakh people.
New Delhi, April 6 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday praised bipartisanship in matters of foreign policy.

In a series of tweets, Modi said, "Over the last few days, the Parliament has witnessed a healthy discussion on the situation in Ukraine and India's efforts to bring back our citizens through Operation Ganga. I am grateful to all MP colleagues who enriched this discussion with their views." "The rich level of debate and the constructive points illustrate how there is bipartisanship when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Such bipartisanship augurs well for India at the world stage," he said.

"It is our collective duty to care for the safety and well-being of our fellow citizens and the government of India will leave no stone unturned to ensure our people do not face any troubles in adverse situations," he added.
Jaipur, April 6 : The Rajasthan Cabinet, which met under the chairmanship of Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot at the CM's residence on Wednesday, approved the Rajasthan Film Tourism Promotion Policy-2022.

The policy has been launched with the aim of developing Rajasthan as a film destination.

The other important decisions taken at the meeting included the formation of a Public Financial Management Training Society, and a cadre of Vice Principals in Government Higher Secondary Schools, among others.

The Cabinet approved the Rajasthan Film Tourism Promotion Policy-2022 with the objective of promoting film production activities in the state. The decision of the Cabinet will encourage film shooting in the state and promote the preservation of art and culture along with generating employment in various fields related to films.

Rajasthan has been a favourite state for national and international filmmakers, who are eager to shoot at the various locations of the state, including the fort-palaces, havelis, deserts, sanctuaries etc.

Through this policy, provisions for financial assistance, awards and cash prizes have been proposed to encourage film production in Rajasthani language. Along with this, it has also been proposed to give financial benefits and grants to domestic and foreign filmmakers for shooting in Rajasthan.

At the meeting, it was also decided to name the free IPD and OPD treatment scheme at all government medical institutions as 'Mukhyamantri Free Nirogi Rajasthan Yojana'.

The Cabinet also decided to set up a Public Financial Management Training Society, to be registered under the Rajasthan Societies Registration Act, 1958.

The Cabinet has approved amendment to the Rajasthan District Court Clerical Establishment Rules-1986 (Rule 7-C). With this decision of the Cabinet, the expression of 'outstanding sportsperson' as prescribed in this rule will be given more clarity, so that better opportunities can be made available to the eligible players.

The Cabinet also decided to appoint the Rajasthan State Road Development and Construction Corporation (RSRDC) as the executive agency for the construction work of the Mini Secretariat at Sri Ganganagar.
Gurugram, April 7 : To curb corruption and to facilitate the people in the execution of various types of sale seeds in Tehsil offices across Haryana, the state government has started a toll-free number (1800-180-2137) in the office of the Finance Commissioner Revenue and Chief Secretary Haryana.

Gurugram Deputy Commissioner Nishant Kumar Yadav said the toll-free number will help to curb corruption that is spread by the deed writers and employees in the Tehsil offices.

"People can use this toll-free number to register their complaints. I have directed all the Sub Divisional Magistrates of Gurugram to display this toll-free number publicly outside tehsil offices for the public convenience," Yadav said.

It may be noted that the BJP-JJP led Haryana government has decided to hold an inquiry into all land registrations from 2010 to 2016 for which a mandatory no-objection certificate was not obtained by the Revenue Department.

During an inquiry, it was revealed that over 58,000 land registration deeds have been found to be in violation of the rules between April 2017 to August 2021, and over 250 officials are under the scanner.
Washington, April 7 : The US has imposed additional sanctions on Russia for its military operation in Ukraine, targeting the country's major financial institutions and the two daughters of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

According to a factsheet from the White House detailing the measures, the US on Wednesday imposed full blocking sanctions on Russia's largest financial institution, Sberbank, and the country's largest private bank, Alfa Bank, freezing any of the two banks' assets in the US financial system and prohibiting Americans from doing business with them.

US President Joe Biden will sign an executive order banning new investment in Russia by Americans no matter where they live, the factsheet said, adding the executive order aims to "ensure the enduring weakening of the Russian Federation's global competitiveness".

Additionally, Americans will no longer be allowed to conduct business transactions with major Russian state-owned enterprises, whose assets subject to US jurisdiction will be frozen. The Department of the Treasury will announce the names of these entities on Thursday.

Full blocking sanctions will be imposed on Putin's two adult daughters, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's wife and daughter, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin as well as former Russia President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who is now Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia.

As a result, these individuals will be cut off from the US financial system and the Biden administration will freeze the assets they hold in the US, Xinhua news agency reported.

Separately, the Treasury Department on Tuesday barred Russia from making debt payments with US dollars from accounts at US financial institutions, making it harder for the Russian government to meet its financial obligations.

The White House said in the factsheet that the US and its allies will still allow Western companies to operate in Russia in sectors related to basic food provision, medicine and health care as well as telecommunications services, so as to alleviate the sanctions' negative impact on ordinary Russians.

If necessary, the factsheet added, appropriate exemptions and carveouts will be issued to ensure humanitarian activities are not disrupted.

Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
New Delhi, April 7 : Union Home Minister Amit Shah has said the Central government is committed to strictly act against the supply and smuggling of narcotics in the country.

Addressing a meeting of the Parliamentary Consultative Committee of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on the issue "Drug Abuse, Its Challenges and Regulation", he added on Wednesday that in the last three years, 17,20,574 kg of drugs worth Rs 12,142 crore were seized in just five operations.

"I want to assure you that the government is committed to strictly stopping the supply and smuggling of narcotics and with a lot of sympathy, also trying to bring out the children who have become victims of it," Shah said.

He added that several steps have been taken to destroy illegal cultivation (opium, poppy and cannabis). and the opium cultivation on nearly 2,100 acre was destroyed in 2013, 7,602 acre in 2017 and 10,798 acre in 2021.

Similarly, the cultivation of cannabis in 1,000 acre in 2013, 8,515 acre in 2017 and 26,717 acre in 2021 were destroyed by the government agencies.

The Union Home Minister informed the Committee that an inter-ministerial committee constituted to prevent misuse of dual-use prescription drugs and precursor chemicals through dark net and crypto-currency while a task force has been set up to address this issue.

During the meeting, Shah said a comprehensive drug training module is being prepared at the national level to train police, armed police force personnel and public prosecutors.

"As on date, India has bilateral agreements with 27 countries, Memorandum of Understanding with 15 countries and has signed two agreements on security cooperation with Germany and Saudi Arabia," the Minister informed the parliamentary panel.

He said the government has taken a slew of stringent measures to check smuggling in the border areas, various border guarding forces like BSF, SSB and Assam Rifles have been empowered to prohibit narcotics' smuggling under the NDPS Act, 1985, while the border mapping and specialised surveillance tools are being used.

A multi-agency maritime security group has been created in November 2021 to reduce the problem of smuggling by sea routes, he added.

The Union Home Minister also assured all Members of the Committee that under the visionary guidance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his vision of "Nasha Mukt Bharat" (addiction-free India), all agencies, departments and ministries are taking several concrete and coordinated steps against drug abuse.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Jakarta, April 7 : The Indonesian police has said its anti-terror squad has arrested five suspected terrorists in South Tangerang, a satellite town of the capital Jakarta.

National Police Spokesperson Ahmad Ramadhan on Wednesday said the suspects, believed to have affiliated with a terrorist network of the Indonesian Islamic State (NII), were apprehended on Sunday.

The police did not revealed the identities of the suspects as the investigation was underway, Xinhua news agency reported.

On March 25 in west Sumatra province, the Densus 88 police force arrested 16 terrorist suspects who massively recruited new members, including children. They were connected with other NII members in Jakarta, west Java province and the country's resort island of Bali.

NII is a rebel group that wants to make Indonesia an Islamic state led by Kartosoewirjo, who was arrested and executed in 1962.
Our teams work hard to deliver world-class results for our clients, and we are proud to celebrate our experts as they manage successful campaigns using Google products.

Recently, Google recognized the achievements of top-performing digital marketing partners across the globe by awarding Premier Partner status as part of the new Google Partners program. Recruitics, a global, data-powered recruitment marketing platform that ensures world-class results for their clients, is among the recent honorees to reach this level of service. Explore the full range of offerings on their website.

We are ecstatic to receive the Google Premier Partner distinction, says Recruitics CEO, Josh Gampel. Our teams work hard to deliver world-class results for our clients, and we are proud to celebrate our experts as they manage successful campaigns using Google products.

The Google Partners program has undergone significant changes for 2022, including redefining what it means to be a Premier Partner through new, advanced program requirements and offering new Premier Partner benefits to support growth and success with Google Ads.

Speaking to the programs importance, Davang Shah, Senior Director, Google Ads Marketing says, Congratulations to our Premier Partners for being among the top 3% of Google Partners in the US. These companies stand out based on their commitment to developing product expertise, building new client relationships, and helping their current clients grow. We look forward to supporting them as they help their customers succeed online.

Recruitics is part of a select group of Premier Partners in the Google Partners program. This program is designed for advertising agencies and third parties that manage Google Ads accounts on behalf of other brands or businesses. Its mission is to empower companies by providing them with innovative tools, resources, and support to help their clients succeed and grow online.

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ABOUT RECRUITICS

Recruitics is a data-powered recruitment marketing platform that makes it easy for the worlds leading brands to attract and hire great talent. Recruitics revolutionized recruitment advertising with the introduction of the industrys first programmatic buying platform in 2012. Since then, Recruitics has helped thousands of companies find, attract, and engage millions of job seekers. Today, Recruitics continues to lead the recruitment marketing industry with its state-of-the-art data optimization and analytics platform.

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"We believe subungual - topical terbinafine applied safely and easily by a podiatrist or dermatologist may dramatically improve efficacy. We look forward to Dr. Freeds findings." ~ Mark Taylor, Hallux Inc. CEO

Hallux Inc., a clinical stage pharmaceutical company, today announced the initial closing of $9.4 million in its Series A-2 preferred stock financing round led by existing investors in the company. The new proceeds will be used to fund the Companys Phase 2a clinical study evaluating Hallux Subungual Gel (HSG) for the treatment of onychomycosis. The 52-week study, HSG-201, is now enrolling patients at the OrthoArizona Foot and Ankle Clinic in Mesa, Arizona. The principal investigator is Lewis H. Freed DPM and the site manager is Physicians Research Group, LLC.

The trial is testing a new topical formulation of terbinafine designed for subungual treatment of the nail bed, the primary site of fungal infection. Qualified trial participants will receive the investigational medication at no cost and be monitored for 52 weeks. Interested patients can schedule a free evaluation by visiting the clinical research website, calling (480) 532-2711 or emailing fungus@prgadvising.com.

Toenail fungus, clinically known as onychomycosis, is characterized by toenails that are yellow, thick, cracked, and crusty. This is most often caused by the particular dermatophyte trichophyton rubrum that invades the nail bed from the distal end of the toe and advances proximally.

Hallux CEO Mark Taylor said, Toenail fungus is common. It is reported that over 35 million Americans have the infection that is very difficult to cure. In an area like Phoenix, where the weather is good and residents wear sandals and open-toed shoes year around, fungus-infested yellow toenails are not only embarrassing, but can be painful. Toenail fungus is commonly treated with oral terbinafine, but the medicine is underutilized because of its association with systemic safety issues. Alternatively, there are three FDA approved topical products, but their cure rates are absurdly low and each product has to be self-applied every day for a year or more. We believe subungual - topical terbinafine applied safely and easily by a podiatrist or dermatologist may dramatically improve efficacy without systemic risk or the burden of long daily treatment regimens. We look forward to Dr Freeds findings, which if promising could advance HSG to its final phase of clinical testing in the United States and key markets around the world.

About Dr. Lewis Freed, DPM

Dr. Freed is a Phoenix-area podiatrist and the senior partner in OrthoArizona East Valley Foot & Ankle Specialists. He has offices in Mesa, Gilbert, Scottsdale, Queen Creek, and Globe. Dr. Freed is a Fellow of the American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons and past-president of the Arizona Podiatric Medicine Association. In addition, he is a frequent lecturer on foot and ankle disease and injuries and has worked with numerous technology companies to develop procedures and products that are used to treat thousands of people each year.

About Physicians Research Group

Physicians Research Group (PRG) is a leading international, multispecialty research management organization that connects physician investigators with sponsors, patients, coordination, and support needed to conduct clinical trials within their practices. Conducting trials with PRG provides the most immediate and effective way to work at the forefront of medical research and discovery while focusing on patient care.

About Hallux

Hallux is clinical stage pharmaceutical company focused on developing novel medical solutions for common yet hard to treat disorders in podiatry and dermatology. Its lead clinical candidate is Hallux Subungual Gel (HSG), an investigational topical terbinafine formulation for direct to the nail bed treatment of onychomycosis.
Our first storefront was a natural progression of our customer relations. ATN has always embraced using social media to listen to our customers and also to educate our customers on our rapidly developing technologies.

When Marc Vayn, a Ukrainian-born American citizen, started the Silicon Valley start-up in 1995; American Technology Network Company (ATN). Vayn brought into his entrepreneurial endeavor experience in high-tech, and his acumen in business from the University of California, Los Angeles. The products he and his co-founder, James Munn, a US Army veteran, were designing and producing were some of the latest in the new technological field of night vision.

The early days of ATN were crazy, Marc Vayn said. We were a young company to reach out to the hunting and consumer communities while trying to increase our market share in law enforcement and the military, but the road to those goals meant we had to offer very unique products in order to differentiate ourselves from the competition.

One of the first companies to develop day/night scopes for rifles, the product allowed a user to simply add on to an existing daytime scope, allowing the user to now view in low to no night situations. This affordable night vision innovation became the go-to device for nighttime predator hunting and for law enforcement sniper units where a day scenario could easily slip into a nighttime scenario.

After 9/11 the global battlefield changed. Warfighters no longer fought using traditional military methods and the generation of urban warfighting specialists began. A prime tool for mission success was the NVG. Night vision products were designed specifically to outfit weapons, helmets, and as hand-held. ATN responded to growing demand, and in 2012, was awarded as an official supplier to the US Government under the GSA contract. Vayn and his company quickly expanded R&D and production to accommodate new government and military contracts, as well as the growing demand in law enforcement and the private sector. A new line of Thermal vision devices was developed to aid the user in identifying heat producing targets more easily.

The year 2014 was a pivotal year for the company and Vayn. With increasing pressure from new night vision start-ups, Vayn had a vision to incorporate a new technology into his products. ATN shifted its focus to the development of Smart IoT (internet of things). IoT technologies are capable of collecting and analyzing data and providing it to the user to make smart, real-time decisions. In the case of a hunter, it allowed the hunter to address multiple variables such as distance, elevation, moving speed, and location while providing some of the highest resolution and superior clarity. The Bluetooth technology allowed the user the ability to connect with a variety of other interfaces and accessories. In other words, ATNs Smart HD scopes and range finders gave hunters an edge not found before. Not only could they take better, more humane shots, but they could record the event and send it to a laptop or another computer. The recordings were more than a memory video; it housed critical information that could make the hunter a better shot, while maintaining a catalog of event conditions.

In order to stay on top of your competition, you need to often look elsewhere. If you become too focused on what the other guy is doing, you end up either copying the competition or falling behind, Vayn explained. At ATN, we look outside our industry at what other successful companies are employing, especially in the world of technology. We studied what companies were doing with the new IoT solutions and found ways to incorporate the same smart technologies into our products, giving our customers a leg up on any of our competition.

For the law enforcement and military professional, the Smart HD technology gave our police and soldiers the extra edge in the battles against crime and evil. The collection of data and analytics made better warfighters and made ATN a top choice for many large law enforcement and government agencies. Most of the ATN systems worked primarily in Infrared, and other systems provide Thermal imaging for unprecedented target acquisition. All of ATNs IoT solutions were housed in familiar glass optics packages, such as binoculars and rifle scopes, but with the addition of all the modern technologies that many people have come to rely on in their Smart phones and other gadgets.

As the company expanded, it took a step into the retail world in 2021 by opening a brick and mortar 1,300 sq. ft. storefront in the Dallas, Texas area. Serving a large base of hunters and law enforcement, the risky venture has paid off well for Vayn and his team by increasing brand awareness and driving sales in a receptive market.

As many company founders know, your companys health can be better monitored through your commitment to interface with the customer, Vayn added. Our first storefront was a natural progression of our customer relations. ATN has always embraced using social media to listen to our customers and also to educate our customers on our rapidly developing technologies.

Today, ATN boasts facility locations in the US, with a recently relocated headquarters in Doral, Florida; the UK, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and the UAE. With market insight reporting the Smart Internet of Things demand in modules will only increase and the technologies advance in 2022 through 2028. Already, Vayn and his company have responded with the new Battle Management System. Initially introduced as the ATN Radar App targeted the hunting community to allow hunters to create a group, by which team members were able to know each others location and provide critical information through a built-in laser rangefinder for a successful hunt. Using the ATN Radar app as the foundation for the Battle Management System, ATN incorporates its Auxiliary Ballistic Laser (ABL) and Ballistic Information Exchange (BIX) technology to allow warfighters to scout enemy using one of ATNs specialized binoculars or rangefinders and share data such as measured distance to an ATN rifle scope. The Battle Management System allows the warfighter the ability to pin the enemy on the apps map or copy coordinates of the pin(s) and share them with team members.

While ATN continues to dominate and innovate in the night vision/thermal market, the company recently became involved in the Ukrainian crisis. As Vayn saw tensions rising between his birth country and Russia, he took steps to move his Ukrainian team out of harms way. When the crisis exploded, Vayn quickly flew into Bulgaria, where his ATN team and he began to set up distribution into Ukraine for much needed ATN products for the Ukraine military and resistance troops. ATN set up a donation platform on the ATN website and Vayn was the first to donate $100K of his own money to the cause. As the crisis deepened, ATN formed a partnership with the GORTA Group, a large NGO with well established distribution and warehousing in the crisis zone, providing much needed humanitarian and medical supplies, donating $300K.

I could not stand by, and I am happy that ATN has joined the ranks of many companies helping the Ukrainian people defeat this unprovoked threat, Vayn commented. If our products can help the Ukrainian resistance in any way, it shows the best of capitalism and democracy can beat back communism.

As a small Silicon Valley start-up some twenty-seven years ago, Marc Vayn would go on to win nine years of awards from Optics Planet Inc., and Predator Xtreme Magazines Readers Choice Awards, as well as the coveted NRA American Hunter Magazines Golden Bullseye Award in 2022. Building on the companys success and popularity in multiple markets, Vayn now has his eyes set on expansion within the vertical market. As ATNs current Chairman of the Board and CMO, Vayn has recently added Shopping Officer to his title.

We have entered into an acquisition period in our companys growth, Vayn explained. We are actively looking for companies with the right fit, meaning companies within our current space with a tech factor, somewhere in the $20M to $100M range.

With 2022 promising to be one of ATNs most dynamic year with the release of their Gen-5 products, increased contributions to the defense and sectors, and the companys open efforts to defend Ukraine against Putins forces, Marc Vayn is not slowing down, in fact, he is just getting started.

About ATN:

American Technology Network is an industry leader, innovative producer of Smart Optics for the 21st-century in addition to night vision and thermal vision products. Founded in 1995, ATN has come to be known for dependable, quality products that enhance their customers outdoor experience and connect with the desires of outdoor enthusiasts. Scopes are user-friendly with Smart features, like allowing users to record video footage of their hunting experience. Top-selling models include the X-Sight 4K Pro series, ThOR 4 series, ThOR LT series, and the OTS LT series. To learn more about ATN and see the full details of ATNs products, visit http://www.atncorp.com
HYPR

HYPR, The Passwordless Company, today announced another record-breaking year with stellar growth across annual recurring revenue (ARR), customer acquisition, workforce expansion and overall company investment following its Series C $35 million financing. During its fiscal year ending February 2022, HYPR doubled its ARR and grew its customer base, signing new clients in traditional sectors such as banking and insurance, in addition to expanding into new markets.

2021 saw the highest number of breaches and the largest year-over-year increase to date, with a 68% increase in comparison to 2020. According to Verizons recent Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), credentials were the leading breach type, taking up 61% of the total. Despite the increase, only 35% of organizations believe their current authentication solution is fully secure and fewer than 16% have deployed an MFA solution that eliminates shared secrets and supports a strong Zero Trust strategy, according to HYPRs 2022 State of Passwordless Security report. With the standardization of remote work, regulatory pressures for Zero Trust initiatives, and the prolificacy of cyber-attacks, organizations are prioritizing authentication as part of their security framework  and more specifically, adopting FIDO-based methods, the gold standard in passwordless multi-factor authentication (MFA) set by CISA and OMB.

2021 was monumental for HYPR. We expanded our market visibility, grew our business and made significant inroads in debunking passwordless myths and misconceptions, said Bojan Simic, co-founder, CEO and CTO of HYPR. We see these milestones as a sign of evolution  not just of our business, but of the overall authentication market. We have the tools, resources and momentum to kickstart the next stage in our journey towards fixing the way the world logs in.

Customer Growth and Vertical Expansion

HYPRs $35 million Series C investment with Advent International and its go-to-market acceleration fueled the companys growth in 2021. In 4Q21, HYPR recorded rapid growth in passwordless authentication, nearly doubling its customer base, with the financial sector representing 150% of said growth. The company currently works with global enterprises across multiple verticals, including two of the four major U.S. financial institutions and several organizations in the banking sector, arguably the most at-risk market. Additionally, HYPR announced it was selected by Aon, a leading global professional services firm, to roll out HYPRs True Passwordless MFA solution to its approximately 50,000 employees. Aon joins long-standing customer Aetna CVS Health, who also shared a significant milestone: achieving a 98% reduction on account takeover fraud (ATO) and in investigation and incident response costs totaling millions of dollars, as a result of deploying HYPRs passwordless MFA. HYPR also executed the rollout of phishing-resistant MFA in more than 200 countries, supporting one of the world's largest manufacturing conglomerates.

HYPR expanded its presence beyond traditional sectors, partnering with customers in agriculture, auto and manufacturing, utilities, hospitality and tourism, and nonprofit. The company also broadened its global reach, securing new enterprise customers in EMEA, including financial institutions in Poland and Switzerland.

Partnerships and Global Accreditations

HYPR continues to leverage its partnerships and global ecosystem to deliver passwordless MFA to businesses of all sizes. Since the launch of the Velocity Partner Program, HYPR has tripled the number of signed members, and in 2021 alone, saw a 187% year-over-year growth in deals closed with its partnering vendors, generating an increase of more than 260% in ARR. With its ongoing success, HYPR plans to launch its Certification Program for Sales and Solution Delivery later this year, as part of the Velocity Program. This will further provide partners with the tools and enablement training to become FIDO-based phishing-resistant MFA experts.

The company also obtained its System and Organization Controls (SOC 2) Type II certification and three International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certifications adhering to cloud service security (ISO27001, ISO27017) and privacy (ISO27018) requirements. The accreditations followed HYPRs invitation to join Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA), a consortium of experts from across the cybersecurity industry.

Organizational Leadership and Workplace Excellence

HYPR appointed long-serving Goldman Sachs executive Michele Docharty to its Board of Directors. As a highly respected leader in financial services and a strong supporter of diversity initiatives, Michele will work alongside HYPR to drive market maturity and serve as an advocate and advisor on the companys Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts. HYPR also welcomed Jay Roxe as CMO and officially named HYPR founders Bojan Simic as CEO and Roman Kadinsky as President and COO.

HYPR continues to focus on advancing the company forward by investing in its workforce. As a result, the company has expanded its team across all areas of the business, increasing headcount by 107% over the last year, in addition to being recently named by BuiltIn as one of the best midsize companies to work for in NYC.

For more information on HYPR, visit https://www.hypr.com.

About HYPR

HYPR fixes the way the world logs in. HYPRs True Passwordless Multi-Factor Authentication (PMFA) platform eliminates the traditional trade-off between security and user experience by providing uncompromising assurance and consumer-grade experience.

By eliminating the password, organizations decrease the risk of a cyberattack, improve the user experience and lower operational costs. HYPR is trusted by more than 60 million users worldwide, including two of the top four US banks and a Fortune 10 healthcare company.

Welcome to The Passwordless Company. Additional information is available at https://www.hypr.com
The Citadel, an institution that has educated and developed principled leaders throughout its history, will offer two Ukrainian citizens a scholarship covering full tuition, room, board and fees. These scholarships will be given to those who have been affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The college will also provide services, such as housing, for those future cadets to support their time in the United States during furloughs and breaks when The Citadel is out of session.

As an institution, The Citadel has been dedicated to the ideals of liberty and freedom for almost two centuries, said The Citadel President Gen. Glenn Walters, USMC (Ret.), 79. What is happening right now in Ukraine is an affront to these values, and its our duty to support those fighting for their freedoms however we can. Even if these future cadets do not serve in the Ukrainian Armed Forces after graduating from The Citadel, they will leave prepared as leaders for Ukraine.

The applications for admission and subsequent scholarship consideration is now open at this link. Students must be admitted for scholarship consideration. The priority admissions application deadline is May 30; after that, applications and scholarship review will be considered based upon space available.

Additionally, The Citadel is coordinating with the Ukrainian Embassy in the U.S. to identify eligible applicants after Gen. Walters contacted the ambassador by letter in late March.

Helping the effort is Serhiy Ponomarov, Ph.D., a Supply Chain Management professor in the Tommy and Victoria Baker School of Business from Uzhhorod, Ukraine.

Even before the current tragic events, I saw how significantly a Citadel education could benefit students from Ukraine. Now, the need is much more urgent, said Ponomarov. Im extremely grateful for this opportunity The Citadel is extending to Ukrainian students and I hope this scholarship is the beginning of a long-lasting relationship so more Ukrainian students can experience the value of an education from The Citadel and return to Ukraine and use the knowledge and resiliency they gain here to help rebuild the country.

Ukrainian citizens interested in applying for the scholarship should contact Dr. Kelly Brennan, associate provost of enrollment management, by email at admissions@citadel.edu.

The Citadel has committed to funding these scholarships. However, anyone wishing to support this effort  or potentially allow for the scholarship to be expanded  is invited to donate. To make a gift through The Citadel Foundation, click here.
Employee Engagement and Google Workspace Adoption 53% of US employees are actively looking for a new role that will provide them with better training and upskilling opportunities. -Eric Farr, BrainStorm, Inc. CEO

BrainStorm, Inc. today announced it has joined the Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program as a build partner. This is an exciting partnership for customers who want to measure how their employees are adopting Google Workspace applications and tools, in addition to determining ROI.

Today, many U.S. companies have been impacted by the Great Resignation. Many are struggling to recruit and retain top-tier talent, while 79% of their employees fear that they are not prepared for an automated workplace.* As organizations look to rebuild their cultures  and help employees adjust  how they engage with software will become an essential way to unite their teams and create a great employee experience.

BrainStorms partnership with Google Cloud bolsters that effort by providing:



Detailed metrics that measure employee engagement.

Bite-sized training modules that engage and target specific behaviors to achieve business goals.

Behavioral data to create a tailored educational path that maps to both their knowledge and work habits.

Following the pandemic, firms are fighting for great employees, says Eric Farr, CEO at BrainStorm, Inc. According to a recent data literacy report from Qlik, 53% of US employees are actively looking for a new role that will provide them with better training and upskilling opportunities.* As an organization, people are your most valuable asset. This partnership will help firms that are struggling to protect their employees, by empowering them to truly embrace Google Workspace.

As a pioneer in software change management, BrainStorm drives maximum employee engagement for companies that are adopting new technology. The platform activates cultural learning shifts that lead to critical time savings and software ROI. Visit brainstorminc.com/google-workspace to learn more.

About BrainStorm, Inc. BrainStorm activates change by empowering people to transform the way they work with technology. With its 360-degree platform, BrainStorm delivers personalized, relevant content to every kind of employeeso even the most change-resistant user can build new skills and enjoy measurable results.

*Source: Qlik, 2022
Local Montrealer, Canadian army veteran and hospital worker Aaron Deck has written and self-published a horror novel, Spare Parts, during the pandemic. Aaron is 2-0 against the four horsemen of the apocalypse. After serving on the frontlines in the war in Afghanistan in 2006, he later served as a healthcare worker during the global pandemic, during which he completed and published a horror novel.

Spare Parts, released in both paperback and ebook on April 2nd, 2022, is Aarons first full-length novel and the first part of a horror series. The story centres around Simon and Alessia, workers at a hospital plagued by corruption -- and perhaps something worse. Both are caught in a web, but neither knows who or what is preying on the hospital, or how they can avoid becoming the next victims. Set in Montreal at the fictional St. Agnes Hospital, the book is a clear homage to classic horror stories such as Frankenstein and The Shining.

Decks medical mystery is an engaging slow burn. [...]Although spooky hospitals and deranged doctors are a frequent subject in horror, Decks take on the genre is nuanced enough that it will grab the attention of even the most seasoned horror fan. The BookLife Prize.

Aaron has a history of service, having been in the Canadian Reserve as a member of the Signals team for 5 years, including accepting a deployment to Afghanistan. After his return, he spent a lot of time bouncing around between service jobs, taking some courses, and playing in several bands, before he applied to work in housekeeping at a local Montreal hospital in 2011.

I like to help people, even if its in a support capacity, says Deck. Its important to me to be of service to others in need. First I found that in the military, and then I found that in the medical industry. When it came to the novel, you know, they say write what you know. So I know hospitals and I know horror, it seemed like a good fit! he laughs.

Decks talent lies in creating a creepy atmosphere. [...His] prose is taut and unflinching[, and] he manages to create enough intrigue and suspense to keep the readers interest piqued. The BookLife Prize

Spare Parts is available in digital and paperback formats through Amazon, Kobo and other major retailers. Order it today!

About the Author

Aaron Deck is a horror fanatic. He loves monsters, gore, thrillers and everything in between. Just look at the variety in his book of short stories, 14 Needles: An Unsettling Collection, to see how he likes to play with different aspects of the genre. When hes not writing, hes busy working as a janitor in a hospital, playing guitar in a punk band and travelling. He lives in Montreal, QC with his wife and zero pets.

Check out his website at aarondeck.com for the latest updates on his debut novel Spare Parts, and sign up for the mailing list for a free short story.

About Spare Parts

Old, outdated, and falling apart, St. Agnes Hospital's management is looking to upgrade locations. But the upcoming move provides an opportunity for things to slip between the cracks, and someone, or something, is taking advantage of the chaos.

Simon is working as a porter at the hospital when an anonymous doctor approaches him with the opportunity to make more money. But as the requests weigh on his conscience and the payoffs stop balancing out the questions, he's left wondering what he's gotten himself into.

Alessia is a physiotherapist trying to build a life of her own in spite of her past mistakes and overbearing parents. As the move looms closer, she notices strange and concerning irregularities in the wards, putting a target on her back.

Both are caught in a web, but neither knows who or what is preying on the hospital -- or how they can avoid becoming the next victims.
LightBeam is on a mission to empower organizations to manage and access their sensitive data securely As a data privacy automation (DPA) platform, LightBeam fosters autonomous privacy management tying together discovery, cataloging, access controls, and data loss prevention (DLP).

LightBeam.ai, a pioneer in data privacy automation, came out of stealth today and announced the general availability of its category-defining, AI-powered, identity-centric data privacy automation platform.

The trifecta of ubiquitous data collection, universal access, and uninhibited sharing makes it nearly impossible for companies to safeguard their sensitive data from accidental leakages and targeted breaches. Furthermore, a fast-evolving privacy regulatory environment has spawned a plethora of manual compliance processes that are both inefficient and ineffective in addressing the associated regulatory and reputational risks.

As a data privacy automation (DPA) platform, LightBeam fosters autonomous privacy management tying together discovery, cataloging, access controls, and data loss prevention (DLP). One of the platforms key innovations is LightBeams ability to detect fragments of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI) data and help privacy and security teams understand the identities (customers/patients/partners) to whom such data belongs, enabling them to automate security of all sensitive data proactively.

Privacy professionals in FinTech lose sleep over securing sensitive customer data and complying with privacy regulations, said Kiran Sharma, Senior Privacy Manager, Snap Finance. The legacy manual ways have become too limiting. I am impressed with LightBeams automation-first approach and how the platform enforces data privacy controls across structured and unstructured data.

The explosion of data, hybrid work, and risk has left organizations struggling to effectively manage their data from a risk and privacy compliance perspective. Unfortunately, businesses find themselves having to adhere to disparate regulations, which is confusing, manual and often expensive, said Ryan OLeary, Esq., Research Manager, Privacy and Legal Technology at International Data Corporation (IDC). A data discovery and governance first approach can help businesses lay the foundation of data privacy management. This approach also enables automation and helps them adhere to current and future regulations efficiently.

LightBeam consolidates the compliance processes required at each stage of a business, discovering and identifying ownership of sensitive data, automating previously manual processes, and enforcing regulations to remain compliant across a myriad of regulations. Its unique identity-centric approach helps customers automate compliance against a patchwork of existing and emerging privacy regulations such as GDPR, CPRA, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS.

In the healthcare industry, securing protected health information (PHI) is paramount, said Samir Ranjan, CIO of Family Health Centers San Diego. The industry has been looking for the holy grail where all PHI leakage including leakage via images/screenshots can be controlled. LightBeam can help organizations holistically manage and protect all sensitive patient data.

As a data-driven enterprise becomes a necessary reality, it brings with it hard-to-manage fragmentation, complexity and distribution across structured and unstructured data, said Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner at 8VC. Making discovery, compliance and governance work in this scenario with a rich and nuanced identity-centric view is necessary, but technically very challenging. LightBeams AI-enabled platform and use-case focused product offerings solves that, and much more. 8VC is proud to be part of this superb founding teams journey to redefine and enable an enterprises identity-first future.

Founded by ex-LinkedIn and ex-Nutanix executives Himanshu Shukla, Aditya Ramesh and Priyadarshi Prasad, LightBeam raised seed funding in December 2020, with 8VC leading the round. Village Global and Monta Vista Capital supported the round, together with a number of angel investors from the security and privacy space.

LightBeam.ai will be unveiling its generally available data privacy automation platform at booth #119 of the IAPP Global Privacy Summit 2022 in Washington, DC, April 11 - 13, 2022.

A quick overview of LightBeam can be seen here: https://youtu.be/bbAjMewSbCE.

For more information, visit http://www.lightbeam.ai.

About LightBeam

A pioneer in the data privacy automation (DPA) category, LightBeam is on a mission to empower organizations to manage and access their sensitive data securely. Leveraging its identity-centric discovery & classification engine, it ties data cataloging, access, and sharing into a unified privacy control tower. LightBeam empowers privacy and compliance executives to keep their organizations under continuous compliance, while information security executives can finally rest assured that sensitive data is being used and accessed securely.

Media Contact

Lauren Tascan

Fluid Group

lauren@fluidprgroup.com

Company Contact

Priyadarshi Prasad

Co-founder and Chief Product Officer

pd@lightbeam.ai

SOURCE LightBeam

Related Links

http://www.lightbeam.ai
"Just Pray NO!" Logo We are not only praying for the release of those bound by substance abuse but also for people to be delivered from pornography, gambling, obesity and smoking.

The weekend of April 23rd  24th, 2022 has been designated as the 32nd Annual Just Pray NO! to drugs Worldwide Weekend of Prayer and Fasting for the addicted and their families.

Since April 7th, 1991 Just Pray NO! has united Christians around the world in intercessory prayer on behalf of those bound by alcoholism, drug addiction and life controlling compulsions.

According to the University of Michigans Department of Psychiatry, COVID-19 related social isolation and stress can increase susceptibility to substance misuse, addiction, and relapse. Substance abuse use can lead to immune system, respiratory, and pulmonary changes and may increase susceptibility to COVID-19 as well as complications.

While the COVID-19 pandemic plagues this nation, so, too, do transnational criminal organizations and violent street gangs, adjusting to pandemic restrictions to flood our communities with dangerous drugs.

According to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug overdose deaths now total more than 100,000 annually in the United States. The number of overdose deaths accelerated significantly during the pandemic.

While synthetic opioids, such as illicit fentanyl, continue to be the primary cause of these deaths, there has also been an alarming increase in the number of deaths involving illicit stimulants, particularly methamphetamine. Overdose deaths connected to meth increased almost 35 percent in 2020, exceeding the number of cocaine-related deaths.

Another great concern is that a new synthetic opioid was found in the Tampa Bay area of Florida in January of this year. Commonly known as ISO, the synthetic opioid is 20 times more potent than fentanyl.

Addiction in America is an ever-increasing national crisis!

"Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much." James 5:16

Not only is substance abuse Americas number one health problem, the devastation of alcoholism and other drug addiction has impacted families and communities worldwide. Substance abuse has been directly linked to violence and sexual immorality and is a major source of income for organized crime and terrorist activities.

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Ephesians 6:12

Make a formal commitment to join with believers in Christ from around the globe this coming April. Put on the full armor of God and fervently pray in spirit and in truth. We are seeking to enlist millions of prayer warriors from around the world to join us in battle!

We are not only praying for the release of those bound by substance abuse but also for people to be delivered from pornography, gambling, obesity and smoking, said Steven Sherman, Just Pray NO! founder. We seek individuals and groups which are willing to commit to pray weekly on behalf of the addicted and their families, and then join with multitudes of other committed Christians from around the world in prayer and fasting April 23rd 24th, 2022.

If you believe that God is calling you to intercede for the addicted please contact us. To find help for addiction through prayer and Christian ministries log on to our web site: http://justprayno.org. To learn how groups can participate in our annual prayer event, click on Information on the Annual Worldwide Weekend of Prayer or email: justprayno@aol.com.

For a personal interview with Just Pray NO! Founder and Author Steven L. Sherman, in the U.S.A. call: (727) 647-6467 or email to: justprayno@aol.com.
Were proud supporters of Teletons mission, and we look forward to continuing to increase our teams contribution in the coming years, said Nicolas Amarelle, CEO of CodigoDelSur.

CodigoDelSurs commitment to corporate social responsibility has been highlighted time and time again in partnerships with nonprofits that focus on improving the lives of those less fortunate. Now, the renowned web development agency is reinforcing that commitment with a variety of partnerships and charity efforts.

CodigoDelSur is particularly excited about their ongoing partnership with Teleton, an organization that focuses on rehabilitating children and teenagers with neurological and musculoskeletal disabilities. Teleton started 15 years ago in Uruguay, where they assist families by supporting the physical rehabilitation of patients affected by these illnesses. They are also public advocates for awareness and education around these disabilities, endeavoring across all channels to make patients lives more accessible and fulfilling.

Each year, Teleton holds an annual fundraiser to support their costs. To help Teleton meet and surpass their fundraising goals, CodigoDelSur is bolstering Teletons efforts with their own internal fundraiser, which brought in 14,200 dollars from CodigoDelSur for the foundation this year. CodigoDelSurs fundraiser encourages each team member to donate by promising that every donation will be matched by the company, doubling the teams impact.

Were proud supporters of Teletons mission, and we look forward to continuing to increase our teams contribution in the coming years, said Nicolas Amarelle, CEO of CodigoDelSur.

CodigoDelsur works with a number of organizations as part of their corporate social responsibility platform. Seeking to add value to the community, they also invest in paid internships for high school students who look to someday start a career in technology.

So far, their initiative to contribute to Teleton has been ongoing for five years, but this is only the beginning. CodigoDelsur continues to pledge support to Teleton and other nonprofit organizations in the hopes of using their business to change the world, one donation at a time.

About CodigoDelSur

Founded in 2007, CodigoDelSur is a full-service web development, quality assurance, and UX/UI design company based in Montevideo, Uruguay, offering comprehensive and innovative solutions to various clients across the globe. CodigoDelSur is a trustworthy partner for custom software development and the first choice for many clients. For more information, please visit http://www.codigodelsur.com

For media inquiries, please contact:

Daniel Klein

1-800-663-0126

pr@josephstudios.net
Travel Category Rebounding to Pre-Pandemic Download Levels

Following the pandemic outbreak, the travel category was one of the most affected categories in the app stores in 2020. With restrictions on mobility within and across countries, people all over the world had to cancel travel plans. Exactly two years after the first lockdown, AppTweak data shows that the travel category is finally climbing back to pre-pandemic levels in terms of app downloads. Hopper and VRBO come out strong from the pandemic, whereas ride-sharing apps Uber and Lyft are still struggling to reach pre-pandemic highs.

Hopper hits 4.7M downloads in the US

Canadian travel app Hopper has emerged from the pandemic as the top travel booking app in the US, surpassing Booking.com and Expedia. Data from AppTweak Market Intelligence shows that in Q1 of 2022, Hopper received a total of 4.7M downloads in the US, 19% more than Booking.com and 52% more than Expedia.

Hopper was hit hard during the first lockdown. Downloads decreased 96% to a low of 2,690 daily downloads on March 26, 2020. Today, the app is the leading travel booking app in the US. In Q1 of 2022, downloads for Hopper were 145% higher than pre-pandemic levels (Q1 of 2019).

VRBO is surpassing Airbnb as the most popular vacation rental booking app

VRBO, part of the Expedia group, is now the most popular vacation rental booking app in the US. According to AppTweak analytics, in Q1 of 2022, the app received a total of 4.7M downloads, 22% more than Airbnb.

Vacation rental apps recovered more quickly than traditional hotel booking apps after the first lockdown.

VRBO, in particular, has seen an impressive growth during the pandemic. Downloads in Q1 of 2022 were 231% higher than the same quarter in 2019. In comparison, downloads for Airbnb only grew 10% in the same period.

Airline travel back to pre-pandemic levels reaching 6.5M downloads

Airline travel recovered much slower than any other category as a result of the pandemic and travel restrictions.

In 2020, app downloads for the top 3 US airlines (United Airlines, Delta, and American Airlines) dropped 51% compared to 2019.

As restrictions worldwide started to ease, downloads for airline apps surged and reached a high in July 2021. Today, the airline category seems to be back to pre-pandemic download levels. In Q1 (2022), the top 3 airline apps received a total of 6.5M downloads, 23% more than Q1 in 2019.

Uber downloads still 10% lower than before pandemic

Uber and Lyft are recovering more slowly from the turbulent pandemic years. AppTweak Market Intelligence data shows that downloads for the ride-hailing apps Uber and Lyft are respectively 10% and 21% lower than before the pandemic times (comparing Q1 2022 vs Q1 2019).

Stepping towards recovery

The travel category has certainly been one of the hardest hit by the pandemic. However, as countries and economies open up and most restrictions are lifted, app downloads in the travel category are soaring again. But the travel app landscape has changed.

Established apps like Booking.com and Airbnb need to make room for Hopper and VRBO. And the categorys most downloaded apps, Uber and Lyft continue to struggle to recover from stay-at-home guidelines.

The data in this report are estimates calculated by AppTweak. You can export download and revenue estimates for any app with AppTweaks App Store API. The App Store API is now available with your AppTweak subscription (Pro, Guru, Power, and Enterprise Plans).

About AppTweak

AppTweak is the #1 ASO tool for apps and games driven by data science. AppTweak empowers +1,700 mobile leaders  such as Amazon, Jam City, Yelp, and Adobe  to grow their apps and games with actionable insights in a simple interface. AppTweaks all-in-one platform offers ASO Intelligence, Ad Intelligence, App Intelligence, and Market Intelligence. Start your 7-day free trial now!

Learn more about AppTweak:Website
Ethical Clothing Search Engine The number of ethical and sustainable fashion brands in the US and Canada is significant, and the team hopes that their launch will make a difference, by helping smaller brands gain further recognition and making sustainable product discovery easier for shoppers.

An uptick in the importance of brand values and consumer consciousness has resulted in not only large high street brands taking sustainable fashion seriously, but also a significant increase in new smaller brands that have sustainability baked into their DNA. Studies in the US show that more than two thirds of Americans are willing to pay more for sustainable products, but most (74%) dont know how to identify them. The launch of Ethical Clothings sustainable fashion search engine in North America aims to resolve this problem.

The sustainable clothing search engine was launched in 2019 out of Barcelona, Spain by co-founders Ben Heinkel and Jack Hesketh, entrepreneurs with a keen interest in environmental issues. As tech savvy people, keen to shop consciously, they noticed a significant rise in the number of sustainable clothing brands. However, these same brands were often difficult to find online, struggling to compete against the huge advertising budgets of larger fashion brands. So, with this access issue in mind the idea of a single point of discovery for ethical and sustainably produced clothing was born.

Initially the platform launched with over a hundred European brands that matched sustainability criteria such as the use of organic certified or recycled materials, transparent supply chains, and non-toxic dyes. The search engine itself allows quick discovery of products based on a number of common eCommerce filters (such as gender, price, and product type) as well as the type of material being used (such as organic cotton, bamboo, and recycled synthetics like Tencel). But this is just the beginning, the team is now working on a sustainability rating system and many more advanced filters to make finding the right ethical product a seamless experience.

Our dream is for us to be able to ingest all the data the brands offer around their materials, processes and supply chains and provide our visitors with a scoring system that gives them the control as to how strict they want to be in their criteria for sustainable clothing - Ben Heinkel (Co-founder Ethical Clothing)

Having quickly validated their model in Europe with thousands of consumers successfully using their service every month to find sustainable fashion that fits their style and budget, the team has now launched a North American section, featuring hundreds of brands from the US and Canada.

We are always looking to partner with new ethical brands, regardless of their size. We hope to give more exposure to brands that go the extra mile in terms of sustainability. - Jack Hesketh (Co-founder Ethical Clothing)

The number of ethical and sustainable fashion brands in the US and Canada is significant, and the team hopes that their launch will make a difference, by helping smaller brands gain further recognition and making sustainable product discovery easier for shoppers.

Apart from their main offering, Ethical Clothing has developed additional tools to help with other difficulties faced by consumers and brands in the ethical clothing space. On the customer side they wanted to tackle the perception that ethical and sustainable clothing was unaffordable.So, they launched a price drop alert service that keeps users fully up to date on all the offers available across their full catalogue of brands.

In addition, theyve just launched the most comprehensive fashion footprint calculator to help consumers really understand how their fashion habits affect the planet across a range of metrics. Collecting twelve data points from fashion consumption, to washing habits, and sustainability awareness, the tool aims to inform users on their personal impact, as well as providing realistic action points to help everyone reduce their impact going forward.

Shoppers today are increasingly conscientious about the causes and values that they support with their purchasing power. Behemoths like Google, Amazon and Microsoft have taken note and recently launched additions to their existing products in an attempt to cater to new, more ethical, consumer demands. Google in 2021 launched their eco-certified hotel filter, Amazon has already had a climate pledge friendly search filter and Microsofts Bing has recently added an Ethical Hub to their search engine (UK only at the time of this writing), all providing validation to the Ethical Clothing team that they have stumbled upon an interesting problem worth solving.

If you have any questions about this release, please dont hesitate to get in touch.

About the founders:

Ben Heinkel - A serial entrepreneur that previously co-founded both bootstrapped and VC funded startups in the eCommerce industry where he has been involved in all areas of growing a tech startup from zero to millions in revenue. With ethical-clothing, he hopes to use this experience to help connect sustainable brands and conscious fashion consumers across the globe.

Jack Hesketh - A developer, researcher, writer and co-founder of ethical-clothing.com. He writes both code, and on environmental issues relating to the fashion and textile industries. After shifting from Evolutionary Genetics research, the goal has always been to build interesting projects such as Ethical Clothing, with the goal of distilling complex issues to help people make more informed choices on factors affecting the environment as a whole.

About Company:

Ethical Clothing was founded in 2019 by Ben Heinkel and Jack Hesketh and is based in Barcelona, Spain.

Contact Information:

info@photoslurp.com
The Divorce Financial PortraitTM Instead of months or years of costly Discovery and Settlement with an attorney, the Divorce Preparation PlatformTM can save clients up to 80% on divorce costs.

Today, women-owned company My Divorce Solution announced the release of its proprietary FinTech app - The Divorce Preparation Platform  which streamlines burdensome Discovery of financial information and Settlement in divorce.

Instead of months or years of costly Discovery and Settlement with an attorney, My Divorce Solution clients are eight weeks away from a personalized financial divorce plan. By systemizing these expensive and time-consuming phases,The Divorce Preparation Platform can save clients up to 80% on divorce costs.

The American divorce system is broken - divorces are lengthy, expensive, and contentious legal battles designed to produce a winner and a loser. Divorces can take years, cost thousands, and leave broken families in their wake.

My Divorce Solution is addressing the broken divorce system by preparing divorcing families with financial plans that lead to amicable and equitable divorces  where both parties can secure their financial futures without dumping unnecessary resources into the legal system.

Divorce is hard enough.

My Divorce Solution is making it easier  by supporting families with an innovative financial plan for divorce that lets families move forward with clarity and confidence.

You can learn more about the Divorce Preparation Platform on the My Divorce Solution website.

My Divorce Solution is co-founded by Karen Chellew, Legal Liaison, and Catherine Shanahan, Certified Divorce Financial Analyst (CDFA) and was recognized by the Philadelphia Business Journal as one of the largest women-owned businesses in 2020 and 2021.

My Divorce Solution was founded in the wake of Karen and Catherine's divorces  creating the company they wish had existed on their divorce journeys. Together, they are on a mission to disrupt divorce by shifting the power away from the fragmented legal system and into the hands of divorcing individuals and families.

Contact: hello@mydivorcesolution.com
Mobile Defense Platform "it allows underserved schools and municipalities to apply for grants to install our technology for free, it was our mission when developing this technology that it would be available to everyone, not just those that could afford it, " Mr. Paolo concluded.

Skypath Security, Inc., the leader in mobile intelligent and interactive threat assessment, threat awareness and personal safety, which is linked, in real time, directly to first responders, is announcing today that it will be awarding $5000 grants to EVERY SCHOOL at the 6th National Student Safety & Security Conference in Orlando totaling $1MIllion. This will allow every school in attendance to protect its students and teachers from active shooters and other hazards by installing its Flagship Mobile Defense Platform for FREE.

Skypath Security's Chief Threat Assessment officer, Derek Borek, will also be the Keynote Speaker of the opening ceremonies at the 6th National Student Safety & Security Conference in Orlando. Derek had been a member of the Rhode Island State Police for the past twenty-seven years and retired as a Captain assigned as the Director of Training. He was a member of the Tactical Team for eighteen years and was the Tactical Team Commander for RISP and the Statewide Weapons of Mass Destruction Tactical Team. He was the Divisions Armorer and the lead Officer Safety instructor. Captain Borek is a recognized expert in active shooter response in schools and workplace violence. He wrote an article on Active Shooter Awareness that was featured in a FEMA publication. He has conducted hundreds of presentations on how to prepare and respond to an active shooter situation for corporations as well as school administrators, teachers, state and municipal employees throughout New England. He conducts Critical Infrastructure Threat, Risk, and Vulnerability Assessments on state facilities and schools. He was the chairman of the Rhode Island School Safety Committee. He was appointed to the Governors Working Group for Gun Safety.

The 6th National Student Safety & Security Conference & Workshop, is scheduled on April 20-22, 2022, at Sheraton Lake Buena Vista Orlando, FL and over 200 school and university school district superintendents, principals, administrators, teachers, directors of transportation, police chiefs, first responders, safety professionals, public health professionals, and community leaders have already reserved seats for this 3-day national event. The goal of this conference is to educate and highlight the best practices, products, and solutions available to protect students from all forms of school violence including shootings, bullying, dating violence, vandalism, gang activity, and catastrophic events such as school massacres. In addition, special workshops will examine the latest community resources to fight teenage suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, and aggressive driving among high school and college students.

"We are very excited to have Skypath Security as a major sponsor of this year's conference, their groundbreaking Mobile Defense Platform is a tool every school should have to protect their students and teachers. Janet Silva Events Coordinator of the NSSSC Team stated, It is also an honor to have Derek Borek as our keynote speaker, his knowledge on safeguarding our schools is a topic every school administrator needs to hear and understand." Ms. Silva concluded.

Skypath Security, is the leader in solutions that exemplify community safety and is working to offer cities, states and countries around the world to equip local authorities and first responders with FREE ACCESS to the tools they need to communicate with the public and protect front-line workers as they respond to every possible hazard.

"We developed this technology to protect the lives of students and teachers in schools and people in public buildings regardless of social economic status," said David Paolo, Skypath Security President and CEO. "By partnering with the SkyToken Foundation ($SKY) it allows underserved schools and municipalities to apply for grants to install our technology for free, it was my mission when developing this technology that it would be available to everyone, not just those that could afford it," Mr. Paolo concluded.

Skypath Security has also partnered with The SkyToken Foundation ($SKY) which is the first of its kind Ethereum based ERC-20 charity token, created to work with Skypath Security. Skypath Security has developed a state-of-the-art technology aimed towards securing schools, churches, event halls or any public space. The SkyToken Foundation utility/charity function is offering the $5000 grants for free access to Skypath Securitys Mobile Defense Platform. SkyToken Mobile Defense Grant Program will allow all qualified applicants up to 12 months of free access to Skypath Securitys Mobile Defense Platform. The SkyToken Charity coin can be found under the ticker $SKY, contract number: 0x33e2c129eA670031659AC8852c01D0Fe4B297954

About Skypath Security, Inc.

Skypath Security is the leader in mobile intelligent and interactive threat assessment, threat awareness and threat safety which is linked directly to first responders. Skypath Security specializes in Certifying schools, retail stores, restaurants and all public buildings and spaces against threats with an interactive mobile defense platform and the development and commercialization of automated systems for control and tracking people, valuable assets through an online application that enables real-time information and live monitoring. Skypath Security Inc. is located at 1350 Division Rd Suite 303 West Warwick, RI 02893 and can be reached at 401-351-7900 or info@skypath.com and found on the web at http://www.skypath.com
Our growth is the result of businesses choosing to give their employees more flexibility and direct control over their schedules. This is especially important in a tight labor market

MakeShift, a cloud-based employee scheduling and time tracking platform, today announced record company growth with revenues increasing by double digits in 2021, as the healthcare, retail, and hospitality industries look to offer flexible scheduling and a better employee experience to their staff.

In 2021, MakeShift doubled its employee count, expanded new user bookings by almost 40%, and increased its partner community by 100%. Additionally, the company was awarded ADP Marketplace Platinum Partner rank and currently sits as a best-seller app for employee scheduling on the ADP Marketplace. MakeShift was also highlighted by Calgary Economic Development as a company that grew despite the pandemic, and more recently was named among the 30 Most Innovative Brands for 2022 by The Silicon Review.

"Our growth is the result of businesses choosing to give their employees more flexibility and direct control over their schedules. This is especially important in a tight labor market, said Adam Greenberg, CEO of MakeShift. We make the entire process from building schedules to tracking time and communicating sudden changes rapid and pain-free. As a result, more and more businesses in healthcare, retail, and hospitality are turning to MakeShift for agile employee scheduling."

The company plans to use its momentum to expand its footprint in North America, where the market is fractured with no clear leader, by investing in product innovation, focusing on verticalization, and signing new partners such as the companys forthcoming partnership with SAP SuccessFactors. The company is also exploring pay-on-demand partnerships as more and more shift workers struggle to make ends meet.

We finished 2021 strong and that has us excited for 2022, said Asher Fredricks, Chief Growth Officer at MakeShift. We take an integrated and measured approach to growth. Its a process. Its all about getting businesses to know us, like us, trust us, and buy us. We accomplish this through data-driven prospecting, value-driven brand building, smart expansion into our base to add new revenue streams, pro-actively working with our partners, and strategically enhancing our product to deliver on our brand promise: People First Scheduling.

With another year of growth in the forecast, MakeShift is raising capital to continue innovating and executing on its product roadmap.

MakeShifts Second Investor Summit

Fueled by the success of its first summit, MakeShift is hosting its Second Investor Summit on Tuesday, April 12 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time. The company is looking to raise funds to further enhance its product and execute its proven growth plans. Interested investors are welcome to register at https://get.makeshift.ca/invest-22 to listen to the live webcast with CEO, Adam Greenberg.

About MakeShift

MakeShift is an online employee scheduling app that empowers businesses to build employee schedules in less time with none of the hassles of clunky, error-prone systems of the past, creating happier teams that drive growth.

Established in 2014 to address the need for web and mobile-based scheduling for the healthcare industry, MakeShift has grown to serve teams of all sizes across diverse industries including retail and hospitality. Ask your MakeShift representative about our seamless integration with industry-leading human resource and payroll software.
Allegis Global Solutions Wins GM Overdrive Award and Is Named a GM Supplier of the Year for 10th Time We are honored and humbled to not only be named a GM Supplier of the Year for the 10th time but to also receive our first Overdrive Award.

Allegis Global Solutions (AGS), the leading provider of global workforce solutions, was recognized as a 2021 Supplier of the Year and an Overdrive Award winner at General Motors (GM) 30th annual Supplier of the Year awards ceremony last month.

This is the 10th time AGS has been recognized as a Supplier of the Year by GM and the first time AGS has earned the Overdrive Award.

We are honored and humbled to not only be named a GM Supplier of the Year for the 10th time but to also receive our first Overdrive Award, said AGS President Chad Lane. Im very proud of our GM team and the impact they have made on behalf of GM in areas of critical contract labor support, cost savings, and program advancement and growth, as well as their commitment to delivering excellence for GM over our 20 year-relationship.

GMs Supplier of the Year award recognizes global suppliers that distinguish themselves by exceeding GMs requirements, in turn providing GM customers with innovative technologies and among the highest quality in the automotive industry. This year, GM recognized 134 suppliers from 16 countries with the Supplier of the Year distinction.

In addition, AGS was one of 31 companies to earn an Overdrive Award for 2021. First presented in 2012, the Overdrive Award is a distinction reserved for suppliers that display outstanding achievement across key priorities for GMs Global Purchasing and Supply Chain organization. These areas of importance include sustainability, innovation, relationships, total enterprise cost, launch excellence and safety.

Allegis Group President Andy Hilger, AGS Vice President of North America Cory Hansen and AGS Director of Client Delivery at GM Julie Planko received the awards on behalf of AGS at the Phoenix, Arizona ceremony.

This years Supplier of the Year event was special not only because its the 30th anniversary of the program, but because it provided us with the opportunity to recognize our suppliers for persevering through one of the most challenging years the industry has ever faced, said GM Vice President, Global Purchasing and Supply Chain Shilpan Amin. These top suppliers showed resilience and reinforced their commitment to pursuing sustainability and innovation. Through our strong relationships and collaboration, GM and our suppliers are poised to build a brighter future for generations to come.

A global cross-functional team selected the 2021 Supplier of the Year and Overdrive Award winners based on performance criteria in Product Purchasing, Global Purchasing and Manufacturing Services, Customer Care and Aftersales and Logistics.

For more information about AGS industry-leading products and services, visit https://allegisglobalsolutions.com/ or subscribe to the AGS blog at https://blog.allegisglobalsolutions.com/.

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General Motors (NYSE:GM) is a global company focused on advancing an all-electric future that is inclusive and accessible to all. At the heart of this strategy is the Ultium battery platform, which will power everything from mass-market to high-performance vehicles. General Motors, its subsidiaries and its joint venture entities sell vehicles under the Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, Cadillac, Baojun and Wuling brands. More information on the company and its subsidiaries, including OnStar, a global leader in vehicle safety and security services, can be found at https://www.gm.com.

Allegis Global Solutions (AGS) is a leading provider of talent solutions. We transform the way the world acquires talent in order to deliver immediate and lasting impact. Through decades of industry experience, and with services across 60+ countries, we know what it takes to innovate, consult, design, and implement successful, creative and data-driven talent solutions across all workforce categories. Learn more at https://www.allegisglobalsolutions.com/.

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A rebate on new vehicle struts can save drivers up to $80 on purchase and installation

Carl Black Roswell is offering drivers a rebate on new vehicle struts. Carl Black Roswell is a Buick and GMC dealership with a service center located in Roswell, Georgia. Their full-service maintenance center can serve any type of vehicle, and strut replacement is just one of many services offered by the dealership. The current online coupon for a rebate can save drivers up to $80 off the price of purchase and installation of four select struts at the dealership.

The rebate being offered at Carl Black Roswell is available for select parts. The eligible brands which drivers can get a discount on include GM Genuine Parts, ACDelco Gold or ACDelco Silver. Drivers will save the most money if they opt for the GM Genuine Parts brands struts, as the rebate can save them up to $20 per strut up to four struts for this brand. The other brands clock in at $15 per strut for ACDelco Gold and $10 per strut saved for ACDelco Silver. Depending on the brand chosen, drivers can get a total rebate of either $80, $60 or $40.

Drivers who need their vehicles struts replaced are encouraged to do so while this temporary offer remains. In order to take advantage of the deal, the rebate must be submitted by May 31, 2022. After the rebate form is turned in, drivers can expect to receive their rebate as a Visa Gift Card within six to eight weeks. The service must be completed by April 30, 2022, in order to be eligible for the rebate. Drivers can learn more on the dealerships website, carlblackroswell.com.
Hurricane Gilbert: A Jamaican Saga: a thoughtfully crafted tale of love, faith, and unexpected turns of fate. Hurricane Gilbert: A Jamaican Saga is the creation of published author Desmond Lloyd Levene, a native of Jamaica who migrated to Toronto, Canada.

Levene shares, Hurricane Gilbert: A Jamaican Saga is a story told from the beginning of the islands culture to its current existence. An introduction depicts ships, explorers, the need to occupy, a chronology of conquistadors, natives shocked with reality, the battle for a new hemisphere, slaves scattered in a diaspora, and Michael Manley introducing the politics of change.

Fast-forward to the presence of Melvin and Vanessa Lex that is told through the eyes of their son, Michael. It also reveals an antagonist with a need to possess every dollar he could claim. Rooted with love and romance, Michael and Jessica met in high school one day when it rained. He did his best to conceal a fear of lightning and thunder while she was enthralled with his handsome, chiseled demeanor and instantly found love at first sighta delight distinct readers will appreciate. She blurted out, Hey, new boy, and thus, the conversation started between two unstoppable forces.

Moments later Jessicas father is found dead, drifting in his fishermans dinghy. Slowly, silently, the reader is exposed to a gutless profile of an antagonist gone loose.

Michael is sent off to England to pursue a career path designed by his father. He returned in midsemesters and somberly laid to rest his mother and father. The loss of both parents sent psychological shockwaves into Michaels being, transforming him into a journey; as time progresses, what seemed like a freak accident gradually unfolds as the murder plot that it is.

The boy returns from his studies with a bride on his arms, shattering the bond of love in devoted Jessicaa love which directed her not to relinquish. She is forced to make statements like, I am a twenty-five-year-old virgin in love with a boy I met one day when it rained.

Hours earlier, she watched as he became married to another.

In only a moment, Michael and his new wife are ambushed by the antagonist whose intent to cover his tracks is laced with blood.

A background of Jamaican realities serves as stocking stuffers or a plate of ackee and salt fish as we follow our protagonist through life and death and love situations. At one point, it is climaxing the very moment Hurricane Gilbert creeps across the island to a final resolution as the antagonist is revealed.

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Desmond Lloyd Levenes new book will pull at the heartstrings and excite the spirit as readers explore a compelling tale within the pages of this creative work.

Consumers can purchase Hurricane Gilbert: A Jamaican Saga at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about Hurricane Gilbert: A Jamaican Saga, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.
In Canada, 98% of businesses are small and have ongoing requirements for financial products. Enabling digital journeys and adding value for these businesses, as well as our bank and credit union customers is what our BAO solutions aim to achieve -- Shah Usama Javed, Product Manager, CEM

Doxim, the leading customer communications management (CCM) and engagement technology provider serving financial and regulated markets, today announced the latest addition to the Doxim Digital Origination platform, Doxim Self-Service Business Account Opening (BAO).

This new solution will add support for business accounts, providing a complete suite of digital origination solutions that is fully integrated, with shared data across the entire platform. It will also include full integration into the clients banking system.

Business banking is a lucrative and growing sector, so banks and credit unions want to make it as effortless as possible for business customers to work with them, said VP, Product Management, Payments and CEM Sean Kennelly. Business customers are strapped for time and seeking effortless banking solutions that fit into their schedules and can be accessed from any location. Doxim Self-Service Business Account Opening will help banks and credit unions meet these demands and delight business customers with a no-hassle, omnichannel account opening process that takes less than 10 minutes.

Since Covid-19, over 3 million businesses were registered in Canada and over 8 million were registered in the US underlying a broad trend towards a need for financial products, designed specifically for early-stage cross-sector enterprises, said Shah Usama Javed, Product Manager, CEM. In Canada, 98% of businesses are small and have ongoing requirements for financial products. Enabling digital journeys and adding value for these businesses, as well as our bank and credit union customers is what our BAO solutions aim to achieve."

With this new release, Doxim continues its journey to assist banks and credit unions in offering true digital omnichannel journeys without friction. This process began with Doxims innovative solutions to help banks and credit unions truly re-imagine their retail account opening and loan origination processes. These self-service solutions allowed credit unions and banks to make omnichannel banking a reality, with an end-to-end truly paperless solution that enables customers to open accounts in under 5 minutes.

Now, Doxim is bringing advantages like improved customer experience, accelerated deposit growth and operational efficiency to business banking. In the bank and credit union systems today, business account opening lags far behind in modernization, as it is burdened with legacy, disparate systems, manual paperwork and slow processes.

Doxim's Self-Service Business Account Opening is the industrys most comprehensive digital business account opening solution, enabling banks and credit unions to break free from branches and take account opening to their customers door steps.

Key features of the new solution include:

-- Omnichannel account opening, so sole proprietors, corporations, and not-for profit businesses can experience the convenience of banking 24/7, from anywhere, using the channel of their choice.

-- End-to-end digital account opening through a stress-free process that takes customers from application to real-time ID verification and authentication, all the way through to funding in 10 minutes or less

-- Multi-product support including a shopping cart experience for easy navigation. When the solution is paired with Doxims retail account opening solutions, customers can even open retail and business accounts in a single pass.

-- Dynamic and data driven workflows based on business structure and policy, to limit redundancy and save time.

-- In-app document bank which eliminates the burden of document management with a single repository where customers can quickly upload and update multiple documents and staff can be instantly notified .

-- State-of-the-art fraud prevention without friction, including everything from facial and social biometrics to real-time ID and business verification.

Doxim invites bank and credit union leaders who want to accelerate revenue by enabling new digital channels for business banking, to reach out to the company and book a demonstration of Doxim Self-Service Business Account Opening today.

About Doxim

Doxim is the customer communications management and engagement technology leader serving financial and regulated markets, providing omnichannel document and payment solutions that transform experiences to strengthen engagement throughout the entire lifecycle. The Doxim Platform helps clients communicate reliably and effectively, improve cross-sell and upsell opportunities, and drive increased loyalty and wallet share through personalized communications and easy-to-use payment processes. The platform addresses key digitization, operational efficiency, and customer experience challenges through our suite of plug-and-play, integrated, SaaS software and technology solutions. Learn more at http://www.doxim.com
Its about uniting to create more meaningful experiences and innovative services, and therefore better value for our customers, said CES Global Chief Marketing Officer Mehdi Tabrizi. Its also about further strengthening our strong customer relationships by engaging with them on their terms.

Top-ten electrical wholesale distributor City Electric Supply (CES) recently hired its first Global Chief Marketing Officer for the company, Mehdi Tabrizi. CES is preparing to expand its footprint around the world and continue to go above and beyond for customers everywhere.

Were thrilled to have Mehdi on board and to leverage his knowledge and experience to implement a global strategic marketing vision for CES in North America and our UK business, City Electrical Factors, said CES President and CEO Thomas Hartland-Mackie. As the Global Chief Marketing Officer, hell help grow our global brand and build upon our successes.

Its about uniting to create more meaningful experiences and innovative services, and therefore better value for our customers, said CES Global Chief Marketing Officer Mehdi Tabrizi. Its also about further strengthening our strong customer relationships by engaging with them on their terms.

In 2021, CES continued to expand its branch network and now employs more than 3,600 people across the U.S., and more than 7,000 worldwide. The company wants to support that growth globally and continue to make an impact on the electrical industry.

By evolving creative strategies and finding the most effective way to reach our audience, Mehdi and his role will help CES expand authentically and effectively.

Mehdi will ensure that we have a strong global, unified strategic direction and omni-channel plan that will boost brand awareness, grow our market share, foster ongoing customer loyalty, and deliver a consistent consumer experience across our stores and platforms, said Hartland-Mackie.

I have always had a passion for innovation and creativity, said Mehdi. I spent over a decade at one of the most renowned innovation and design agencies because I wanted to help organizations build their brands by creating better products and services and improving their customer experience.

With ambitions to unite missions and strategies across the globe, Mehdi will be partnering with the marketing departments across our electrical businesses in North America and Europe.

We want to continue to better understand the unique needs and evolving wants of all of our customers and translate them to new value-creating service offerings and more engaging, holistic experiences, said Mehdi.

What attracted Mehdi to CES were the values of the family organization.

I joined CES because of the organizations entrepreneurial culture, customer service DNA, and for its family visionary leadership. However, what was even more important for me was the strong family values of the organization, as they highly aligned with my own personal values, said Mehdi. Being part of an organization that genuinely, and passionately, cares for its people, customers and community is very unique and truly a blessing.

Mehdi has over 20 years of experience in business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketing. He has led marketing functions for global corporations, and is well versed in everything from brand strategy, consumer experience, digital experience, product marketing, and emerging technologies.

We have to continue to create meaningful experiences for our customers. We are living in a time of meaning, authenticity, and relevancy, said Mehdi. Meaning is truly understanding your audiences means and desires. Authenticity is being true to who you are- your purpose, promise, and values. And because of these things, you must always stay relevant to the time.

Born in Iran, Mehdi moved to the United States at an early age and relocated to Australia in his teens. Through these experiences growing up and becoming immersed in various cultures, Mehdi has come to appreciate peoples needs from a wider perspective.

With CES foundation of customer-centric service and continued success in the electrical industry, Mehdi is optimistic about what lies ahead.

It is incredible that CES has had 70-years of continued business success, and yet we still have so much more potential and opportunity ahead of us. That is very exciting, said Mehdi.

About City Electric Supply (CES) is a family-owned electrical wholesale distributor headquartered in Dallas, Texas. The company was founded in 1951 by Tom Mackie in the United Kingdom and expanded to the United States in 1983. Today, CES employs more than 3,000 people in over 500 branches across the U.S.

CES is dedicated to providing personalized service and support for customers in the residential, commercial, and industrial marketplace. While CES is a large company, it prides itself in keeping its founding principle of empowering people to make local business decisions by providing customers tailored services for all their electric supply needs.

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Media Contact:

Emily Davis

Public Relations Specialist

City Electric Supply

Emily.Davis@cityelectricsupply.com
Our passion is designing custom programs so our clients can identify trends across multiple platforms -- from social to lots and stations -- wherever their customers are, says Global Vice President Jason Bare. Every BARE program is unique, just like our clients businesses.

BARE International today announced new partnerships across multiple automotive industry clients, from sales, to automotive care such as oil changes, car washes, and repairs, to aftersales experiences.

BARE has been instrumental in the ongoing development, evolution and execution of our Quarterly CX Assessments and annual Brand Audits, says Craig Mundy, Global Program Manager of the Customer Experience Team for Shell Global. They have conducted over 50,000 assessments per year for Shell, across a variety of markets. Throughout our partnership, BARE teams have been thorough, detailed, responsive and available to us at all levels, market by market, globally, or directly through their President.

Celebrating 35 years as a leader in the customer experience market research industry, BARE International remains the premiere research partner for over 100 current automotive clients worldwide. Their solutions portfolio includes brand management, online reputation, on-site and website mystery shopping, satisfaction surveys, audits, and more.

Cecilia Bauche, Retail Processes and Customer Promise Section Manager for Nissan Automotive Europe, states, BARE is very flexible, can kick off a program on short notice, and adapt to any ad-hoc changes or requests."

The automotive industry offers so many unique customer experiences, says Jason Bare, Global Vice President at BARE International. There are many opportunities for automotive businesses to reach out to their customers, whether its branding and reputation pre-sale, to the sales experience, to after sale upkeep and care. Each experience has their own set of insight nuances that businesses need to grow their brand loyalty.

According to a survey by marketing agency Adtaxi, 86% of respondents research companies products and services online prior to making an automotive purchase. Therefore, providing a seamless transition from digital options, such as websites and social media, to onsite experiences is integral in building customer loyalty and making the sale.

We design experience research programs based on each clients needs, starting with what part of the automotive industry they primarily serve, explains Business Development Director Michele Jowdy. For example, an on-site mystery shopping program is the best option for a sales experience, whereas a QR code that links to a satisfaction survey works best for a gas or carwash client.

Vice President of Waterway Gas & Wash Company Mike Goldman says of BARE, The timely shops and well thought feedback has been an important facet in Waterways continuous improvement and growth over this time. We can rely on the folks at BARE to provide useful results.

As members of the International Car Wash Association, Jason Bare and Michele Jowdy will be on site at the International Car Wash Show in Nashville, Tennessee. The Car Wash Show is the premier gathering of owners, managers, and decision-makers from the car wash, quick lube and detailing segments, providing car wash operators with the information and products they need to succeed.

Our passion is designing custom programs so our clients can identify trends and brand perception across multiple platforms - from social to lots and stations - wherever their customers are, adds Bare. Every BARE program is unique, just like our clients businesses.

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About BARE International: BARE International sets the industry standard as the largest independent provider of customer experience research, data, and analytics for companies worldwide. Founded in 1987, BARE International is a family-owned business with global capabilities providing unmatched service and supporting businesses in over twenty industries.

BARE is headquartered in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Fairfax, Virginia with ten offices around the world. On any given day, BARE International is doing business for clients in more than 150 countries, completing more than 50,000 evaluations/audits each month. To learn more about BARE Internationals customer experience research services and their dedicated field force of evaluators, visit https://www.bareinternational.com
Initially, you get kicked in the teeth and its tough, but you keep getting up and as soon as you get in your groove, then it just gets so fun.

Geetesh Goyal, Co-Founder and CEO of Human Bees, recently spoke during the Inc. Founders House panel at South by Southwest. A mainstay event at SXSW, Inc. Founders House gives entrepreneurs the unique opportunity to share their experiences starting, running, and growing their businesses. Founders of all industries have been featured at the yearly event, which normally takes place not far from the Austin Convention Center.

I was so honored to be up on stage and to share my experiences since founding Human Bees, Goyal stated after the event. Having the chance to talk about entrepreneurship with so many incredible founders was something I will never forget.

Featured alongside Gail Becker, Founder and CEO of Caulipower, and Lora H. DiCarlo, Founder and CEO of Lora DiCarlo, Goyal was asked to give his thoughts on growth.

I see growth as something thats driven from within Its forward-thinking leadership, he said. Every segment and sector, to me, is almost irrelevant. [Human Bees] didnt innovate or create anything new, and were the fastest-growing company in America. Its not a specific market segment you need to be in Its about driving that growth initiative, that vision.

In describing Human Bees as the fastest-growing in America, Goyal was referencing the 2021 Inc. 5000 in which the staffing company was ranked #1 with a three-year revenue growth of 48,345%.

Later, when discussing what surprised him about founding a company, Goyal joked, Its the lack of sleep How youre looking forward to having a lack of sleep. That was the coolest thing for me. I didnt want to do anything else. It was so exhilarating. Initially, you get kicked in the teeth and its tough, but you keep getting up and as soon as you get in your groove, then it just gets so fun.

As the panel came to a close, Goyal was asked at what point he realized he was running what would become a $100 million company and the fastest growing company in America.

For me, it was having that core of 5-10 people [that set the foundation], Goyal asserted. Ive been an entrepreneur for 12 years, and that was when the code was crackedfinding those 10 people. [With past teams], there was nothing bad, there was nothing wrong, but their vision was not aligned. If peoples visions are not aligned with yours, youre always going to end up hitting a brick wall. So, once we got [our team], held the line, and made sure our people saw our vision, it was game over.



Human Bees, Inc. is a dynamic full-service staffing and recruiting company. We have unparalleled access to the talent our clients need, regardless of their industry. Whether our clients need only a few employees, or a large-scale workforce mobilization, we are equipped to move at a moments notice.

Contact:

Angela Murray

Senior Manager of Communications

530-208-0286

amurray@humanbees.com

Connect with us on social media.

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/humanbeesinc

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/humanbeesinc
Information Technology World Awards by GLOBEE IT industrys premier excellence awards program, the IT World Awards honors achievements in every facet of the information technology and cyber security industries.

The Globee Awards organizer of the worlds premier business awards programs and business ranking lists is now accepting nominations and entries for the 2022 IT World Awards honoring achievements and recognitions in the information technology and cyber security industries worldwide.

Subscribe to the Globee Weekly Newsletter

Subscribe to Globee Awards YouTube channel

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Watch the Globee Awards video

IT industrys premier excellence awards program, the IT World Awards honors achievements in every facet of the information technology and cyber security industries. This annual industry and peers program now has several major sections making this one of the most and only complete IT recognitions and achievements award programs in the world. There are many categories for which your organization and the people behind its success can be nominated. Categories are classified under the following groups:

Learn more about the 2022 IT World Awards and how to nominate here: https://globeeawards.com/it-world-awards/



Company-Organization Awards categories

Corporate Communications and Public Relations Awards categories

Creative, Social and Traditional Media Awards categories

Customer Service & Support Awards categories

Best Deployments and Customer Success of the Year Awards categories

Executive & Professional Awards categories

Chief Technology Officers Awards categories

Human Resources Awards categories

Information Technology Users Awards categories

Marketing Information Technology Awards categories

New Product & Service Awards categories

Product Development and Engineering Awards categories

Sales and Business Development Awards categories

COVID-19 Business Response Awards categories

A special category group for startups of the year will include the achievements of new startups formed since 2018 in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, IT Cloud/SaaS, IT Hardware, IT Hybrid, IT Services, IT Software, Security Cloud/SaaS, Security Hardware, Security Hybrid, Security Services, Security Software, and Telecommunications.

A worldwide judging panel of executives and professionals representing a wide spectrum of industries will determine the winners. Winners will be presented and honored in a virtual ceremony attended by the finalists, winners, judges, and industry peers from all over the world. Industry experts and end-users of information technology products and services can participate in the judging process.

IT World Awards will also recognize Chief Technology Officers from all over the world for their achievements in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, IT Cloud/SaaS, IT Hardware, IT Hybrid, IT Services, IT Software, Security Cloud/SaaS, Security Hardware, Security Hybrid, Security Services, Security Software, and Telecommunications.

Product Development Executives, Leadership, Professionals, and Engineers from all over the world can be nominated in categories such as Artificial Intelligence, IT Cloud/SaaS, IT Hardware, IT Hybrid, IT Services, IT Software, Security Cloud/SaaS, Security Hardware, Security Hybrid, Security Services, Security Software, and Telecommunications.

Winners of previous years are listed here: https://globeeawards.com/it-world-awards/winners/

Apply here to participate as a judge and an industry expert to help decide the winners: https://globeeawards.com/it-world-awards/judges/

Stay posted and read success stories of organizations by subscribing to the Globee Newsletter: https://globeeawards.com/subscribe/

About the Globee Awards

Globee Awards are conferred in eleven programs and competition: the American Best in Business Awards, Business Excellence Awards (Best Employers), CEO World Awards, Communications Excellence Awards, Customer Sales & Service World Awards, Cyber Security Global Excellence Awards, Disruptor Company Awards, Golden Bridge Awards, International Best in Business Awards, IT World Awards, and Women World Awards. Learn more about the Globee Awards at https://globeeawards.com

All trademarks belong to their respective owners.
GO Car Wash is excited to announce that after just one month of their ongoing partnership with One Tree Planted, they will be planting 35,708 trees in Susanville, California! GO Car Wash vowed to plant a tree for every new monthly membership sold, starting February 14th, 2022.

The wash organized an online vote, allowing members to select their preferred locations for new trees to be planted. California was the winner. The partnerships reforestation efforts in the Susanville, CA area are particularly timely as this area was recently damaged by wildfires, and the benefits of replanting trees on over 2,000 acres of land are enormous.

One Tree Planted said: The immediate local ecological benefits of reforestation include reduced post fire erosion, enhanced water quality and quantity, as well as wildlife habitat. The restoration and preservation of watersheds are particularly crucial to California in the face of Climate Change and the state's already limited water supply. This project takes place in watersheds that are both important to the state water supply and which have been hard hit by fire.

An additional unique aspect of this project is the presence of grey wolves in the project area. Grey wolves are a species that has just recently returned to the state after having been hunted to extinction within the state boundaries over 100 years ago. As a large predator, grey wolves rely on large landscapes with healthy ecosystems. This project will both restore and protect this important habitat.

The benefits of this replanting effort will remain far-reaching and sustainable well into the future. Wed like to thank each and every new GO member who has helped make this incredible reforestation effort possible, said Brett Meinberg, GO Car Wash COO.

For more information about One Tree Planted and how planting trees makes a difference, visit onetreeplanted.org

In similar news, GO Car Wash is expanding to a few more California locations. You can now find GO locations in Loma Linda, Highland, Riverside, and Hemet. You can find a GO Car Wash near you at gocarwash.com/locations/

About GO Car Wash

GO Car Wash was founded in 2019 with the goal of building a multi-regional eco-friendly car wash company with clusters throughout secondary cities across North America. Headquartered in Denver, CO, GO Car Wash will focus on high-quality exterior express car washes, with a multi-pronged growth strategy of acquisitions, partnerships, and new site build-outs.

Press Contacts

Brett Meinberg, COO

Brett.Meinberg@GOcarwash.com

Links

http://www.gocarwash.com

SOURCE: GO Car Wash
IKEA Philippines with CAYIN Technology to centralize all controls for its digital displays.

IKEA Philippines, located in Pasay City, is the largest IKEA store in the world's leading furniture brand. As an effort to streamline the management process for a store of considerable size, IKEA Philippines looks to CAYIN Technology to centralize all controls for its digital displays.

IKEA Philippines first objective was to simplify the execution of display changes, and second, to highlight its restaurant's menu, offers, and promotions in real-time.

Digital Signage Coverage Emphasizes Restaurant Food Selections

CAYIN digital signage installed thirty-five SMP-2300 players, fifty-nine Panasonic 43" displays, 7 LG 55" displays, and six kiosks throughout the store. The mass installation of digital signage helps IKEA Philippines promote its restaurant to consumers by showcasing different food options, the latest offers, promotions, and ads. Selected delicacies are also presented on the digital screens that function as menu boards to further promote the desirability and deliciousness of each item to visitors.

Centralized Control of Digital Displays

SMP-2300, a compact 4K HDMI player, pairs seamlessly with digital signage software SMP-NE02 and Panasonic and LG display screens to give IKEA Philippines the centralized digital signage solution they desired. With this centralized system, IKEA Philippines has complete control over display changes and can make real-time broadcasts to introduce new products and offers.

Noteworthy Thanks to Mediacast Digital Group

CAYIN partnered with Mediacast Digital Group Inc to complete this large-scale digital signage installation. Mediacast Digital Group, regarded as a trendsetter in the digital market, executed the installation with high-quality performance and professionalism.

Enhancing Deliciousness on Digital Screens

The digital signage implementation beautifully highlights the IKEA restaurant's menu options in a gourmet light. IKEA Philippines has expressed great satisfaction with the results, as it can now manage and update its restaurant and food displays easily in real-time.

For more information, please go to:

https://www.cayintech.com/digital-signage-case-studies/hospitality/case-detail.html?f=IKEA_Philippines
Based on my experience working with global teams, I see significant opportunities for Indicate Media as an agency to not only work alongside some of the most innovative B2B tech companies but also specifically help them achieve their business objectives.

Indicate Media, a data-driven public relations and content development agency specializing in B2B Technology and Financial Services, today announced the expansion of its team with the hire of veteran communications professional Julia Sherwin.

The strategic communications efforts of B2B tech companies selling into the enterprise have arguably never been more important than they are today, said Todd Barrish, Indicate Media President. Todays tech companies need to convey concise and calculated messaging through multiple channels to effectively tell their stories and close enterprise deals. Indicate Medias success in the ecosystem relies on having the smartest, most capable team dedicated to each clients mission. Julia is a perfect match for our rapidly expanding team and a great benefit to all our client partners.

Leveraging her PR experience in B2B technology, Sherwin will oversee the development of client PR programsfrom strategic ideation to tactical implementationwhile constantly identifying and executing on new opportunities in an effort to ensure Indicate Medias clients achieve strategic business outcomes. As a former manager, she will also lead a team of direct reports.

Sherwin comes to Indicate Media with more than 20 years of public relations and journalism experience within the financial services and technology industries. She most recently led global public relations initiatives for PTZOptics, a robotic camera manufacturer specializing in AV over IP video delivery methods. Prior to that role, Sherwin was the news director and program host at a Philadelphia talk radio station, where she highlighted a variety of local and national stories. Sherwins work has appeared in the Daily Local News, InBroadcast, the Pottstown Mercury, and Today.com.

Sherwin received a Master of Journalism degree from Temple University and a Bachelor of Arts in Communications from Rutgers University.

These last few years have been an incredible time, especially, to witness the rapid evolution of technologies that support digital transformation amongst businesses and their customers worldwide, said Sherwin. "Based on my experience working with global teams, I see significant opportunities for Indicate Media as an agency to not only work alongside some of the most innovative B2B tech companies but also specifically help them achieve their business objectives.

About Indicate Media

Indicate Media is a boutique public relations and digital marketing agency with headquarters in New York City and distributed team members across the United States. Founded in 2010, Indicate Media partners with global B2B technology, asset management, venture capital and growth equity firms to advance business objectives through strategic storytelling. The agencys campaigns are organized around its core offerings of public relations and content marketing and underpinned by a strong combination of analytics and creativity. With its data-driven approach, Indicate Media strives to ensure its clients are well-positioned to win the moments that matter, as well as track and measure success.
COVID-19 has changed healthcare for the betteran increase of 6,000% in telehealth visits(3), and a pivotal shift toward hospital-at-home care, among other changes. If the last few years have taught us one thing, its that healthcare is changing. And clinicians are challenged to navigate this without ever losing focus on the patient. In order to support this new world of healthcare, telemetry must also adapt.

It would be folly to try to say something positive about a disease that has killed approximately 980,000 people in the United States(1) and 6.17 million people around the world.(2) However, there is one factor that cannot be denied about this horrendous COVID-19 pandemic: It has changed healthcare for the betteran increase of 6,000% in telehealth visits(3), and a pivotal shift toward hospital-at-home care, among other changes. With these developments, innovative technologyespecially in remote cardiac telemetryhas surged.

When InfoBionic was founded more than a decade ago, we reimagined accepted norms for cardiac arrythmia detection with a full disclosure model that was built upon the principles of unwavering quality and continual innovation. Today, were carrying those same pillar forward as we make yet another bold foray into the future of virtual healthcare, says Stuart Long, CEO of InfoBionic, a Massachusetts-based digital health company.

As the industry has evolved through the COVID-19 pandemic, so has the need for greater reliance on remote monitoring, yet not just for cardiac arrythmias. The need to address the varying levels of clinical complexity from low acuity to high acuity with continuous cardiac telemetry in a remote or virtual care environment has risen to be one of the major efforts that healthcare is undertaking. The CMS hospital-without-walls and ensuing hospital-at-home initiatives have cemented their position towards this shift from brick-and-mortar care to virtual care.(4) As of March 30, 2022, there are 92 health systems and 205 hospitals in 34 states participating in CMS approved Hospital at Home initiatives.(5) The train has left the station.

This is pushing the industry to find ways to manage transferring patients from the hospital to the home on a platform that allows a seamless and unified monitoring experience, yet while being capable of extending and replicating as close to possible the step-down level of continuous telemetry monitoring they have in hospital.

The future of remote cardiac telemetry, says Long, lies not just in the wearable device itself, but in the platform it serves. For example, the MoMe Kardia device, which currently can detect and diagnose up to 30 different arrythmias, will record and send the data in near-real time to the clinician, who then can take immediate action, should it be warranted.

Yet in virtual care the goal for hospitals and health systems is to increase capacity and maximize resources to better manage patients by effectively removing the walls of the hospital.

In the hospital, Long notes, you have varying degrees of care. In patient cardiac monitoring its typically broken into 3 tiers of devices. High Acuity like the ICU & CCU the most sophisticated continuous ECG telemetry. A monitoring desk in the ICU is staffed 24/7 monitoring the patients in real-time. Mid Acuity is the step-down units where continuous ECG telemetry is also used for real-time monitoring, but to a lesser degree of sophistication yet still including basic vital signs. Lastly in Low Acuity, the standard medical surgical floor where there is typically no telemetry, yet periodic vital signs are taken by mobile vital signs monitors.

To ensure that all levels of acuity can be monitored in a virtual care environment, InfoBionic introduces the first continuous virtual telemetry platform: The MoMe(TM) ARC Platform. Built with the same standards of quality and innovation that have earned them the trust of cardiology leaders, the MoMe(TM) ARC Platform hands power back to clinicians while enabling them to step confidently into virtual care.

InfoBionic will present the MoMe(TM) ARC Platform at this years Heart Rhythm Society conference, to be heldboth in person and virtuallyat the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, CA, from April 29 to May 1. InfoBionic will be located within the Mayo Clinics booth #1927.

As a virtual telemetry company specialized in remote cardiac arrythmia monitoring, we are proud to deliver the MoMe ARC Platform, the only platform on the market that can support the full spectrum of acuity that is required in a virtual care world. If the last few years have taught us one thing, its that healthcare is changing. Care models are transforming. Providers are doing more in a virtual setting than ever before. Reimbursement paradigms are shifting to put value first. And clinicians are challenged to navigate all of this without ever losing focus on the patient. In order to support this new world of healthcare, telemetry must also adapt, says Long.

About InfoBionic:

InfoBionic is a digital health company transforming the efficiency and economics of ambulatory remote patient monitoring processes by optimizing clinical and real-world utility for the users that need it most  physicians and their patients. The Massachusetts-based team of seasoned entrepreneurs have had successful careers in healthcare, IT, medical devices and mobile technology, and bring specific expertise in remote monitoring and cardiology. They have seen first-hand the complexities of traditional cardiac arrhythmia detection and monitoring processes and designed the transformative MoMe Kardia device to remove the roadblocks hindering faster, more effective diagnosis and decision-making. Frost & Sullivan bestowed the 2019 North American Remote Cardiac Monitoring Technology Leadership Award upon InfoBionic.

1. Landing page; COVID Data Tracker; Last updated 04 APR 2022 | Accessed 04 APR 2022; CDC; cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home

2. Landing page; Coronavirus Death Toll; ; Last updated 04 APR 2022 | Accessed 04 APR 2022; WorldMeter; worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-toll/

3. Blog; COVID-19 Drives 6,000% Growth in Telemedicine Use; 2022 | Accessed 04 APR 2022; Definitive Healthcare; definitivehc.com/blog/covid-19-drives-6000-percent-growth-telemedicine-use

4. Bestsennyy, Oleg; Chmielewski, Michelle; Koffel, Anne; Shah, Amit; From facility to home: How healthcare could shift by 2025; 01 FEB 2022; McKinsey & Company; mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-services/our-insights/from-facility-to-home-how-healthcare-could-shift-by-2025

5. Landing page; Acute Hospital Care at Home Resources; Last updated 30 MAR 2022 | Accessed 04 APR 2022; CMS; qualitynet.cms.gov/acute-hospital-care-at-home/resources
Notes on the Book of Revelation: Harvesting Through the Scriptures: an engaging discussion of what to expect during the end times. Notes on the Book of Revelation: Harvesting Through the Scriptures is the creation of published author Isiah King Sr., MMin, a devoted husband, father, and grandfather who is a Pastor Emeritus.

King shares, Have you ever experienced competing in a game when it seemed like your opponent was so fierce, so challenging, so strong that you thought that you were going to lose? Or have you ever felt the strength of your opponent that you felt like you were a grasshopper in the eyes of giants? Well, this is what the book of revelation is all about. Its a book that inspires us as believers to be faith giants and to view our spiritual enemies as grasshoppers in our eyes; with that faith we can conquer and defeat anything that the enemy throws at us.

The purpose of this prophetic book is to give instructions, commendations, as well as warnings of discipline to the seven Churches of Asia Minor. Even though it was written for them, it will do us well if we truly glean from its spiritual treasures. It is a book of eschatology, a divine plan given by God about the end-times that warns unbelievers about Gods wrath and judgment. Not only does it warn the unsaved about Gods oncoming judgment, but it also gives joy to the faithful, who will be caught up during the Rapture and who will not have to experience or go through the seven-year tribulation period that will take place on earth after the church gets Raptured up to meet Christ in the air.

It is also a book that encourages believers to stay faithful to Christ until the end of time. Why? Because we win! It is a book that prepares and reminds those who accept Christ during the tribulation period that despite the Antichrists demonic attacks, we will triumph with Christ in the end. Even though this book is full of symbolism and various interpretations, Gods divine plan will be revealed by way of the Holy Spirit. This is what the word revelation means. It means to uncover or to unveil. Therefore, if there is ever a time that you thought that you were going to lose this Christian battle, be of good cheer. We win! Again, I say, as you face the trials and tribulations of the devil, be of good courage. You are on the right team!

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Isiah King Sr., MMins new book will challenge and encourage students of the Bible.

King offers a straightforward approach for ease of understanding and encouragement of those seeking a deeper understanding of Gods word.

Consumers can purchase Notes on the Book of Revelation: Harvesting Through the Scriptures at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about Notes on the Book of Revelation: Harvesting Through the Scriptures, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.
Lexmark, a global imaging and IoT solutions leader, today announced that Keypoint Intelligence-Buyers Lab has selected Lexmark Optra IoT Platform for the prestigious Buyers Lab (BLI) Winter 2022 Outstanding Innovation Award from Keypoint Intelligence, a leader in print industry research and testing.

BLI Outstanding Innovation Awards acknowledge newly introduced or publicly announced products, capabilities or technologies that Keypoint Intelligence analysts believe will advance a product category or move the industry forward in a meaningful way. In its report, analysts praised the Lexmark platforms product lifecycle maximization, data-driven insights that can be used to make smart decisions in R&D, manufacturing, marketing and service departments, and enablement of Anything-as-a-Service business model and predictive service capabilities.

Were honored to receive this recognition for our recently announced IoT platform offering, said Allen Waugerman, president and CEO of Lexmark. While weve seen first-hand the transformative impact of using our IoT platform to drive business outcomes within Lexmark, we are positioned to help manufacturers of all types unlock IoT insights in a meaningful way.

As the first offering in Lexmark Optra IoT Solutions portfolio, the Lexmark Optra IoT Platform is a ready-made IoT solution designed to help customers jumpstart their business transformation through predictive services, asset optimization, systemic innovation and as-a-service engagements, enabling them to create better products and more advanced services at lower costs.

Last year, Lexmark celebrated its 30th anniversary of manufacturing and servicing printers and MFPs  which, remember, are IoT products, said Lee Davis, associate director of Software/Scanners at Keypoint Intelligence. The expertise that the company brings to the table will help IoT device makers and service providers make smarter decisions, work more efficiently and reduce costs.

For more about the Keypoint Intelligence Buyers Lab (BLI) awards, visit here.

Suggested Resources



Learn more about Optra IoT Platform.

Subscribe to the Lexmark Blog.

Follow Lexmark on LinkedIn and Twitter.

About Lexmark

Lexmark creates cloud-enabled imaging and IoT technologies that help customers worldwide quickly realize business outcomes. Through a powerful combination of proven technologies and deep industry expertise, Lexmark accelerates business transformation, turning information into insights, data into decisions, and analytics into action.

Lexmark and the Lexmark logo are trademarks of Lexmark International, Inc., registered in the U.S. and/or other countries. Optra and Lexmark Optra are trademarks of Lexmark International, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

About Keypoint Intelligence

For 60 years, clients in the digital imaging industry have relied on Keypoint Intelligence for independent hands-on testing, lab data, and extensive market research to drive their product and sales success. Keypoint Intelligence has been recognized as the industrys most trusted resource for unbiased information, analysis, and awards due to decades of analyst experience. Customers have harnessed this mission-critical knowledge for strategic decision-making, daily sales enablement, and operational excellence to improve business goals and increase bottom lines. With a central focus on clients, Keypoint Intelligence continues to evolve as the industry changes by expanding offerings and updating methods, while intimately understanding and serving manufacturers, channels, and their customers transformation in the digital printing and imaging sector.

About BLI Outstanding Innovation Awards

Buyers Lab Outstanding Innovation Awards acknowledge newly introduced or publicly announced products, capabilities, or technologies that Keypoint Intelligence analysts believe will advance a product category or move the industry forward in a meaningful way.
Madison County joins vendor registry Registered vendors can access bids, related documents, addendum and award information.

Today, Madison County has officially partnered with vendor registry, powered by mdf commerce, providing vendors across the United States easy online access to its upcoming solicitations. vendor registry is a top-rated procurement suite for public purchasers at cities, counties, school districts, utilities, colleges, and universities. Madison County invites all current and interested vendors to register online.

Madison County joins 50 participating local government agencies in Alabama that utilize their prominent vendor and bid management platform. Some of the resources Madison County gains by joining vendor registry include vendor management, vendor self-service, solicitation management, electronic bidding, bid evaluation, and contract management. By posting their upcoming bids and RFPs through vendor registry, Madison County ensures a community of thousands of vendors can view their solicitations, download documents, and receive notification of their addenda.

vendor registry is a premier source for local government bids that include real-time bid alerts to create business growth by state, region, and even nationwide. All vendors looking to do business with Madison County and other nearby government agencies are encouraged to register today.

In addition to one centralized location for local government bids, benefits of registering with vendor registry include:



Instant Bid Notifications

Easy Registration

Stay Organized

Subscription Options

Our purchasing department is excited to able to improve our efficiency by using the tools provided through vendor registry. In addition to the time savings we will see, our vendors will also benefit from registering in one location for all government bids. We invite all our current vendors to register.

About Madison County:

Madison County is Alabama's third most populated county with a per capita income second only to Shelby County, Alabama. Madison County is located in the heart of the Tennessee Valley. Their neighbor to the north is Tennessee. They are approximately 100 miles directly south of Nashville.

About vendor registry:

vendor registry, powered by mdf commerce, is the top-rated procurement suite for public purchasers including cities, counties, school districts, utilities, colleges, and universities nationwide. To learn more about vendor registrys valuable procurement solutions for local agencies and government bids for vendors, please visit https://vendorregistry.com/ and register today.
Dozens of cancer specialists at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center have been invited to present their latest advances in cancer research at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), which will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana, from April 8 to 13.

Among the many Roswell Park researchers presenting their findings in areas ranging from newly approved targeted therapies to innate cancer immunity, highlights include a plenary session, a minisymposium and three late-breaking abstracts reporting findings from ongoing clinical trials.

Plenary: Clinical Trials Targeting the DNA Damage Response and KRAS

Grace Dy, MD, Chief of Thoracic Oncology in the Department of Medicine, will give a podium presentation reporting long-term outcomes in a study investigating the effectiveness of sotorasib, a drug that targets mutations of the KRAS gene, in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Dr. Dy will discuss new information from the pivotal CodeBreaK100, a phase 1/2 trial that led to accelerated U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval last year of sotorasib for treatment of KRAS G12C-mutated NSCLC. Dr. Dy will highlight these findings Sunday, April 10, both in an afternoon oral presentation and in an AACR press conference at 11 a.m. CT onsite at the meeting.

Presentation details: CT008 - Long-term outcomes with sotorasib in pretreated KRASp.G12C-mutated NSCLC: 2-year analysis of CodeBreaK100  Sunday, April 10, 4:31 p.m. CT, Great Hall AD, Convention Center

Minisymposium: Age and the Tumor Microenvironment

Irwin Gelman, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Oncology in the Department of Cancer Genetics and Genomics, will present the results of his research into the role of a protein, HBP1, and drugs that target this protein, in controlling breast cancer dormancy reawakening.

A significant portion of breast cancer cases recur years, sometimes decades after all evidence of the initial disease has been removed by surgery, systemic drug therapy and/or radiation, because cells that metastasize early in the initial breast cancer disseminate to and colonize peripheral sites, including the bone, says Dr. Gelman. We are planning a preclinical study to assess how effective two repurposed drugs may be in decreasing breast cancer recurrence and increasing the long-term survival of breast cancer patients.

In a minisymposium Tuesday, April 12, Dr. Gelman will share results of a Roswell Park study that used genomic screens to identify genes that specifically control breast cancer dormancy in the bone. The team discovered that shutting off the HBP1 gene, which normally turns off pathways that promote the growth and aggressiveness of metastases, causes the reawakening of dormant breast cancer cells grown in bone microenvironment culture conditions. Dr. Gelman will highlight how interactions between breast cancer and bone cells facilitate this dormancy signaling, and how drugs such as cyproheptadine may prevent the breast cancer metastases in the bone.

Presentation details:

3643 - The role of HBP1 in controlling breast cancer dormancy reawakening  Tuesday, April 12, Room 288-290, Convention Center

Late-Breaking Abstracts

Three Roswell Park researchers have been invited to share highly anticipated data on Monday, April 11, from ongoing phase 1 and 2 clinical trials for the treatment colorectal cancer, melanoma and breast cancer, in late-breaking poster abstracts.

Sarbajit Mukherjee, MD and Shipra Gandhi, MD, both Assistant Professors of Oncology in the Department of Medicine, will report findings from two studies that are part of a novel immunotherapy platform in development at Roswell Park under the leadership of Pawel Kalinski, MD, PhD, involving modulation of key proteins known as chemokines.

Dr. Mukherjee will present initial results of a phase 2 study evaluating a chemokine-modulatory regimen in patients with colorectal cancer metastatic to the liver (abstract CT105/ LB-7312), and Dr. Gandhi will present Systemic rintatolimod and interferon-2b selectively reprogram local tumor microenvironment in patients with metastatic triple negative breast cancer for enhanced influx of cytotoxic T-lymphocytes but not regulatory T-cells (abstract CT145/ LB-7620).

Benjamin Switzer, DO, a Fellow in the Department of Hematology, will report findings from a phase 2 clinical trial that advances knowledge in another signature area of Roswell Park research  the role of the sympathetic nervous system in cancer and response to cancer treatment. His presentation is -2 adrenergic receptor (AR): Another immune checkpoint (IC)" A phase II clinical trial of propranolol (P) with pembrolizumab (Pem) in patients with unresectable stage III and stage IV melanoma (abstract CT568/ LB-7806).

Additional Poster Abstracts

In addition, 27 teams from Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center have been invited to present their latest research findings during the meeting:



Gokul Das, PhD, Combination of tamoxifen and doxorubicin targets estrogen receptor beta-mutant p53-p73 axis: A novel therapeutic strategy for triple negative breast cancer

Seamus Degan, Novel AKT isoform-preferred substrates as potentially targetable drivers of metastatic prostate cancer

Ashish Gupta, MBBS, Favorable impact of higher environmental temperature on clinical outcomes in breast cancer - Does residence matter? A NCDB and SEER population-based study

Hannah Calkins, BRD9 inhibition overcomes epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT)-associated tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) tolerance in epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutant lung cancer

Edwin Yau, MD, PhD, Immunogenomic analysis identifies the complement pathway as a therapeutic target in STK11 mutant non-small cell lung cancer and Detection of circulating tumor DNA using CRISPR-Cas13a in non-small cell lung cancer

Sarah Athans, STAG2 acts as a transcriptional repressor and promotes invasion of muscle invasive bladder cancer cells

Rongrong Wu, MD, High RAD51 gene expression is associated with aggressive biology and with poor survival in breast cancer and Elevated bile acid metabolism is associated with breast cancer microbiome, less cell proliferation, and better survival

David Cheng, PhD (senior author), Weight changes between one year before and following breast cancer diagnosis in relation to mTOR protein expression in tumor tissues in the Womens Circle of Health Study

Sydney Grant, Comparison of mutational burden hotspots in cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma and UV-exposed healthy skin for development of optimal targeted sequencing panels

Aftab Alam, PhD, KRAS and fungi cooperate to drive IL33 secretion and type 2 immunity in the pancreatic cancer tumor microenvironment

Joseph Barbi, PhD, Obesity dependent benefits of metformin for improved anti-tumor immunity and outcomes in non-small cell lung cancer

Xiaozhuo Liu, PhD, Bioinformatics approaches to dissecting androgen receptor activity and cancer stemness during prostate cancer development and progression

Igor Puzanov, MD, MSCI, FACP, Effect of camidanlumab tesirine (Cami) as monotherapy and in combination with pembrolizumab (PEM) on the immune cell profile in patients with selected advanced solid tumors and First-in-human trial of intravenous MEDI9253, an oncolytic virus, in combination with durvalumab in patients with advanced solid tumors

Lu Yang, PhD, Depleting EGFR and HER2 overcomes resistance to EGFR inhibitors in colorectal cancer

Gabrielle Harmann, Novel pharmacological approaches of inhibiting the PI3K/AKT/mTOR signaling pathway in T-cell lymphoma (TCL)

Jennifer Mongiovi, Associations of sodium glucose cotransporter-2 (SGLT2), metabolic disorders, and survival following incident epithelial ovarian cancer

Shipra Gandhi, MD, Negative impact of paclitaxel on human breast tumor microenvironment and its reversal by the combination of interferon- with TLR3 agonist rintatolimod

Changchuan Charles Jiang, MD, Clinical outcomes in women with metastatic HER2-Low breast cancer in the real world

Global Scholar-in-Training Award

Additionally, Andrea Anampa-Guzman, a Research Assistant with the Lymphoma Service within the Department of Medicine, received a Global Scholar-in-Training Award for Breast cancer care quality in Peru (abstract 3656), a study of the impact of complementary medicine services on the quality of care among women undergoing treatment for breast cancer.

An online version of this release is available on our newsroom.

Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center is a community united by the drive to eliminate cancers grip on humanity by unlocking its secrets through personalized approaches and unleashing the healing power of hope. Founded by Dr. Roswell Park in 1898, it is the only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center in Upstate New York. Learn more at http://www.roswellpark.org, or contact us at 1-800-ROSWELL (1-800-767-9355) or ASKRoswell@RoswellPark.org.
"Spatium," the new solo piano album by Milen Kirov. There is no higher compliment for me than to be told that these sounds--Western classical music, American jazz and blues, and Bulgarian traditional music--merge together seamlessly in my playing.

Pianist Milen Kirov finds the perfect formula with the June 3 release of "Spatium" on Independent Creative Sound and Music (ICSM) Records. A solo piano performance of 13 originals, the album is precisely the melting pot of styles that has long been the focus of the multi-dimensional Kirovs creative journey.

My goal is to find the meeting point of three traditions: Western classical music, American jazz and blues, and Bulgarian traditional music, the native Bulgarian pianist says. There is no higher compliment for me than to be told these sounds merge together seamlessly in my playing.

Let the high compliments commence, then. Kirov not only strikes the delicate balance he seeks, but does so with such ease and aplomb that the three traditions sound as if they have always belonged together. For evidence, look no further than "Spatium"s opening one-two punch, Back to Bulgaria and Bulgarian Stride. The former combines Bulgarian folk melody and classical precision with jazzs rhythmic nuance and improvised playfulness, while the latter matches the stride piano tradition to the detailed latticework of Eastern European musics. Thracian Blues also sums up Kirovs aesthetic, playing two pianos (one prepared and sounding like a guitar) to generate down-home blues lines, Bulgarias distinctive odd-meter dance rhythms, and bravura classical passages.

In addition, Kirov performs Brahms-inspired four Intermezzos that are also infused with Bulgarian folk rhythms and jazz harmonies and improvisation. One of these, however, is fully notatedas are two other tracks on the album (Pharos and The Shepherd and the Mountain). The pianist offsets these with two thoroughly improvised pieces (For Grandma and Time), showing that his fluency in the jazz tradition is equal to those of the conservatory and his homeland.

Not to be overlooked is the albums gorgeous sound. Now based in Los Angeles, Kirov nevertheless traveled to the city of Radom, in central Poland, to record "Spatium" in the glorious acoustics of the Kryzstof Penderecki Concert Hall. Capturing the tenderness, nuance, and resonance of every note Kirov plays, the albums pristine sonics reinforce the perfection of the pianists delicate musical balance.

Milen Kirov was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria on February 6, 1977, the scion of an esteemed musical family. His mother plays the tambura and sings; his father is a virtuoso of the gadulka, a traditional Bulgarian fiddle, as well as an accomplished musical academic. Milen was only four when he entered the family business, studying the piano and working on ear training until by the age of eight he could accompany his father and his friends and colleagues in the family home.

Thus grounding in Bulgarian traditional music, Milen turned to a formal classical education, graduating from both the High School of Music and Plovdivs highly regarded Academy of Music, Dance, and Fine Arts. Along the way, however, he discovered American music: blues, jazz, rock, and pop, all of which gained currency in Eastern Europe after the Iron Curtain fell in 1989. These idioms impressed Milen enough that he sought out an American musical education.

Enrolling first in the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (where he received a full scholarship), Kirov later transferred to the more experimentally minded California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where he studied with David Rosenboom and Vicki Ray, earning a BFA and a Doctor of Musical Arts there as well as a Masters in composition from Cal State Northridge.

Kirov was then able to find a niche for himself in the busy music scene of Los Angeles. Along with his professorship at Los Angeles City College, he performs and records in a variety of contexts, including a number of film scores; classical piano pieces; his Balkan funk ensemble, Orkestar MEZE; and his world-jazz trio Bulgarian Moonshine Co.

The pianist cites a deep connection to Milcho Leviev, a jazz great from his hometown of Plovdiv who paved the way from Eastern Europe to Los Angeles. I feel a strong kinship with Milcho, says Kirov, who knew him from an early age but didnt see him perform until Leviev returned to Bulgaria in the early 1990s. It was as though he was speaking to me, validating what I was doing. It was through his playing that I recognized that jazz combined with Bulgarian folk and other traditional sounds could be good music and legitimate.

Milen Kirov will be performing a CD release show (solo piano) at Sam First Bar, Los Angeles, on Friday 6/3 (7:30 & 9:00pm).
The Port of Virginia, Virginia Maritime Association, and the International Longshoremen's Association have already raised more than $43,000 to help the Ukrainian people during this humanitarian crisis. To join, please visit https://give.chcimpact.org/p/portva_ukraine

Today, CHC: Creating Healthier Communities announced a new partnership with The Port of Virginia, Virginia Maritime Association, and the International Longshoremen's Association to aid those suffering during the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine. These three maritime organizations created a custom giving campaign with CHC for their association members and employees and have already raised more than $43,000.

It is important to be able to help the Ukrainian people, so many of whom are in an unimaginably difficult situation right now, said Stephen A. Edwards, CEO and executive director of The Virginia Port Authority. Its human nature to want to help, so we have put the groundwork in place for the port team to take action and give to an important, very worthy cause. The Port of Virginia hopes this effort can provide some relief to those who really need it.

To make a positive impact on the world and live their value of helpfulness, The Port of Virginia, Virginia Maritime Association, and the International Longshoremen's Association chose to respond to the Ukraine humanitarian crisis by supporting direct service nonprofit organizations offering health services, care packages, food, water, hygiene kits, and safety, especially for those most vulnerable, like children.

Over 10 million Ukrainians have been displaced by the invasion of their country, stated David White, executive director of the Virginia Maritime Association. The need for the basic necessities of life, medical care, and other services exceeds the imagination. Seeking to help beyond our financial contribution, the VMA is utilizing our extensive outreach to encourage our maritime community to give generously to these relief efforts for the people of Ukraine.

On behalf of the International Longshoremens Association (ILA), we are honored to join our Maritime partners and CHC in support of the citizens of Ukraine who are suffering as a result of an aggressive and shameful invasion of their country by Russia, said Thomas Tommy M. Little, co-chairman, international vice president, International Longshoremen's Association, AFL-CIO. We will continue to join forces with industries and organizations to fight against injustice, because injustice to some is injustice to all.

The Port of Virginia, Virginia Maritime Association, and the International Longshoremen's Association generously stepped up to help the Ukrainian people during this humanitarian crisis, said Shelley Hayes, chief engagement officer at CHC: Creating Healthier Communities. Were thankful for their leadership, standing with Ukraine, and their willingness to take action by donating and mobilizing their network.

To join this Ukraine relief effort, please visit https://give.chcimpact.org/p/portva_ukraine to donate securely by credit card to one or all five of the nonprofits delivering direct aid for those impacted.

About CHC: Creating Healthier Communities

CHC: Creating Healthier Communities brings nonprofits, businesses, and communities together around a shared commitment to better health and wellbeing. For more than 65 years, CHC has worked with partners to address the barriers to good health and equity and create resilient communities where everyone can thrive. CHCs role is to advance equity, enhance the capacity of nonprofit organizations, connect and convene diverse stakeholders, and harness collective resources and programs to activate collaborations that address root causes, increase impact, and improve the health of our communities. Join us at chcimpact.org or @chcimpact.

About The Virginia Port Authority

The Virginia Port Authority (VPA) is a political subdivision of the Commonwealth of Virginia. The VPA owns and through its private operating subsidiary, Virginia International Terminals, LLC (VIT), operates four general cargo facilities Norfolk International Terminals, Portsmouth Marine Terminal, Newport News Marine Terminal and the Virginia Inland Port in Warren County. The VPA leases Virginia International Gateway and Richmond Marine Terminal. A recent economic impact study from The College of William and Mary shows that The Port of Virginia helps to create more than 400,000 jobs and generates $92 billion in total economic impact throughout the Commonwealth on an annual basis. For more information, please visit http://www.portofvirginia.com.

About the VMA:

The Virginia Maritime Association (VMA) continues to promote, protect, and encourage international and domestic commerce through Virginia's Ports since 1920 through advocacy, industry intelligence distribution, and networking events. With a membership of over 450 companies from maritime and supply chain sectors, employing over 70,000 Virginians, the Virginia Maritime Association is widely recognized as "The Voice of Port Industries," the premier business organization to enhance competitiveness and promote commerce through Virginia's ports.

For more information: http://www.VAmaritime.com


RAI Jets in Kalamazoo has launched an internship program for students in Western Michigan Universitys College of Aviation. "We had been talking about starting an internship program to help aviation students get real-life, on-the-job experience for some time. With business booming, 2022 was the year to do it! --Becky Riley-Bakeman, president of RAI Jets.

RAI Jets, LLC, a part 135 operator headquartered at Kalamazoo Battle Creek International Airport (KAZO), is pleased to announce the successful launch of a new internship program in conjunction with nearby Western Michigan University College of Aviation.

We had been talking about starting an internship program to help aviation students get real-life, on-the-job experience for some time. With business booming, 2022 was the year to do it! said Becky Riley-Bakeman, president of RAI Jets.

RAI Jets has a special connection with Western Michigan University. The RAI Jets director of operations, sales and marketing director, and the office manager are all alumni from the school, and the company has also employed WMU College of Aviation alumni as pilots and technicians. RAI Jets worked with Tom Thinnes, recruitment, marketing, and outreach manager at WMUs College of Aviation to publicize the internship and recruit students.

We are pleased to count an internship at RAI Jets among the opportunities we offer our students to engage with local aviation companies, said Thinnes. RAI Jets has been a strong supporter of Western Michigan University for years, and this internship program is a natural progression for building a symbiotic relationship between our organizations. The internship experience at RAI Jets will help prepare our students well for careers in aviation upon graduation.

Two WMU interns are currently working at the RAI Jets headquarters at Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport (KAZO) in Kalamazoo: one from the aviation flight school and one from the aviation technical operations program. One more intern from aviation technical operations will join the RAI Jets for the summer. All of the interns are receiving experience in line service, which is helping to clean and prepare the aircraft for flight. They also help with wingwatching, when the aircraft are moved.

We are so fortunate to be located so closely to one of the countrys largest aviation schools and to be able to help each other in this way, said Riley-Bakeman. We look forward to a long-standing relationship between WMU aviation students with our internship program.

RAI Jets will soon be recruiting interns for the fall term. For more information about their internship program, contact RAI Jets at (800) 247-2834 or the Western Michigan University College of Aviation at 269-964-6375.

About RAI Jets

RAI Jets LLC is a Kalamazoo, MI-based aviation specialist featuring aircraft management, jet charter, and aircraft maintenance services. The family-owned company officially opened in 2009, preceded by more than two decades of generational experience in aviation. For individuals and businesses, the Part 135 operator offers customized, jet charter for business or leisure, as well as turnkey management and aircraft maintenance for jet owners. RAI Jets operates its own fleet of aircraft for charter and offers jet owners (personal and corporate) the possibility of offsetting operating costs by adding their aircraft to RAI Jets FAA-approved Part 135 Air Carrier Certificate. RAI Jets also offers aircraft acquisition service and hangar space. For more information visit FlyRAI.com or call (800) 247-2834.

About Western Michigan University College of Aviation

The College of Aviation at Western Michigan University offers the only comprehensive aviation program at a public university in Michigan. With just over 1,100 undergraduate students, it is one of the largest aviation programs in the nation and is backed by 80 years of aviation experience and an excellent industry reputation. The college's vision is to establish and maintain the most advanced training fleet and equipment available in collegiate aviation, complementing a world-class professional aviation program consistently viewed as one of the best in the world. For more information, visit the college online or call 269-964-6473.


Greenfield Village reopens for its 2022 season Saturday, April 16th with an exclusive members-only preview on Friday, April 15. Visitors will get a first look at the historic Detroit Central Market building over opening weekend and participate in curator-led tours through the space. The building is the first permanent addition to Greenfield Village since the Detroit, Toledo and Milwaukee Roundhouse in 2000.

Originally located in the shadow of old city hall, now known as Cadillac Square, The Detroit Central Market helped feed millions of Detroiters between 1861 through 1893. Like the farmers markets of today, the market was a commercial center, a hub of entrepreneurship and a community space where family, friends and neighbors congregated and socialized. In 2003, The Henry Ford acquired the building, saving it from demolition.

During opening weekend, the building will be fully accessible with curator-led discussions featuring the buildings architecture and history. A formal dedication to commemorate the structure will take place June 10-12 with additional programming to follow, including dramatic vignettes, cooking demonstrations, local vendors, activities for kids and more.

Guests will also have a chance to participate in Easter activities at Firestone Farm throughout the weekend, including egg dying on Saturday and an egg roll/hunt on Sunday. Ford Home and Edison Homestead will also feature craft activities on Saturday. The Easter Bunny will be making rounds throughout Sunday, including a visit to the new Detroit Central Market.

With the opening of the village, comes the return of signature programming. After a two-year absence, Thomas the Tank Engine is pulling back into the station at Greenfield Village May 13th -15th and 20th - 22nd. Day Out With Thomas, presented locally by Meijer, includes all-day access to a scheduled train ride, magic shows, storytelling, bubble activities, arts and crafts, live music and more. Tickets for members go on sale April 6th. Tickets for the general public go on sale April 13th.

Through June 19, the village will be open to the public Thursday-Monday and to members for Members-Only Strolling Days Tuesday-Wednesday. The village will shift to seven-day public operations June 20. For updates on hours, tickets and more, visit thf.org or follow The Henry Ford on social media @thehenryford.

About The Henry Ford

Located in Dearborn, Michigan, The Henry Ford, a globally recognized destination, fosters inspiration and learning from hands-on encounters with artifacts that represent the most comprehensive collection anywhere focusing on innovation, ingenuity and resourcefulness in America. Its unique venues include Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, Greenfield Village, Ford Rouge Factory Tour, Benson Ford Research Center and Henry Ford Academy, a public charter high school. Together with its online presence at thf.org, its national television series The Henry Fords Innovation Nation and Invention Convention Worldwide, the growing affiliation of organizations fostering innovation, invention and entrepreneurship in K-12 students, The Henry Ford inspires individuals to unlock their potential and help shape a better future.
SGF Richmonds Dr. Edelstein, Dr. Johnston-MacAnanny, and Dr. Shah are among those honored by Richmond Magazine as Top Docs for Infertility in 2022. "The recognition alongside my fellow physicians at SGF Richmond is an excellent testament to our patient-focused, cutting-edge fertility care."

Shady Grove Fertility (SGF) is proud to announce that Michael Edelstein, M.D., Erika Johnston-MacAnanny, M.D., and Anish A. Shah, M.D., M.H.S., have been named among Richmond Magazines 2022 Top Doctors for Infertility list. The 2022 Top Docs list, representing 489 top doctors, is compiled by best-in-care nominations in 97 health specialty categories.

Being recognized by Richmond Magazine among so many esteemed physicians is an incredible honor, reflects Dr. Johnston-MacAnanny, who serves as SGF Richmonds Medical Director. The recognition alongside my fellow physicians at SGF Richmond is an excellent testament to our patient-focused, cutting-edge fertility care.

SGF Richmond, the largest fertility center in the Richmond metro area, provides a full range of diagnostic and treatment options complete with a premier IVF laboratory to help individuals and couples achieve their family-building goals. The regional practice offers two convenient offices in Richmond  Stony Point and Henrico Doctors  Forest.

I am grateful for the recognition as a Richmond Top Doc, as this distinction is also a reflection of SGF Richmond's mission to provide more affordable access to top-notch fertility care, shares Dr. Edelstein. SGFs patient-centered approach to care aims to ensure fertility treatments are accessible and affordable through innovative financial programs.

SGF Richmond proudly offers the Shared Risk 100% Refund Program. This exclusive program provides patients with the opportunity to pay a fixed amount for up to six fresh IVF or donor egg cycles and any subsequent frozen embryo transfers (FETs). Of the total Shared Risk 100% Refund Program participants, 82 percent take home a baby, and the rest receive a full refund to use for other family-building options.

Im humbled to be recognized by Richmond Magazine as a Top Doctor for infertility and thank my patients for trusting me with their care, shares Dr. Shah, who serves as the Practice Director for SGF Richmond. Its important for patients to know that they are part of the process, and I will be there for them every step of the journey.

For people struggling to conceive, it may be time to consult a fertility specialist. Contact the SGF New Patient Center at 1-888-761-1967 or complete a brief online request form to schedule a virtual consult with an SGF physician. A virtual consult is the first step toward pursuing a pregnancy with the help of SGF.

About Shady Grove Fertility (SGF)

SGF is a leading fertility and IVF center of excellence with more than 100,000 babies born and 5,000+ 5-star patient reviews. With 47 locations, including new locations in Colorado and Norfolk, VA, as well as throughout CO, FL, GA, MD, NY, PA, TX, VA, D.C., and Santiago, Chile, SGF offers patients virtual physician consults, delivers individualized care, accepts most insurance plans, and makes treatment affordable through innovative financial options, including 100% refund guarantees. More physicians refer their patients to SGF than any other center. SGF is among the founding partner practices of US Fertility, the largest physician-led partnership of top-tier fertility practices in the U.S. Call 1-888-761-1967 or visit ShadyGroveFertility.com.
Rachael Garland, a Master of Science in Nursing student from the University of South Carolina AACN is grateful to University Advantage for providing much needed support to graduate students, who will serve as future leaders of the nursing profession

Uniform Advantage (UA), a multi-channel retailer of medical uniforms for medical and hospitality industries, along with the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), has awarded Rachael Garland, a Master of Science in Nursing student from the University of South Carolina, a $2,500 scholarship to pursue advanced-level nursing education.

Susan Masimore, Chief Executive Officer of Uniform Advantage, stressed the importance of helping healthcare students advance their education: Here at Uniform Advantage, we value and admire those who serve others. Were honored to provide this scholarship so future caregivers and health heroes can achieve their dreams.

AACN is grateful to University Advantage for providing much needed support to graduate students, who will serve as future leaders of the nursing profession, said Marta Okoniewski, Director of Student Engagement at AACN. The scholarship is incredibly helpful to masters and doctoral nursing students in need.

Two scholarships of $2,500 are awarded to graduate nursing students in the fall and spring semesters of the academic year, for a total of $5,000 per year. The UA-AACN partnership will continue until 2024.

Interested applicants must submit an application that can be found on the AACN website. The applicant may be asked to submit letters of recommendation, published articles, and awards/honors to the selection committee. The application deadline for the fall semester is September 2022. For more information on how to apply, please visit: http://www.aacnnursing.org/gnsa/ua-scholarship.

For more information on Uniform Advantage and their contributions and partnerships, or to shop online, please visit https://www.uniformadvantage.com/.

About the American Association of Colleges of Nursing

The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) is the national voice for academic nursing representing more than 850 schools of nursing nationwide. AACN establishes quality standards for nursing education, influences the nursing profession to improve health care, and promotes public support of baccalaureate and graduate nursing education, research and practice. See http://www.aacnnursing.org

About Uniform Advantage

Uniform Advantage has represented style, quality and, above all, customer satisfaction for more than 30 years. As the first division of UA Brands, the chain was launched with a single South Florida store in 1985. Today, the company operates 29 retail locations in key markets across the U.S.; e-commerce and print catalog divisions; plus, designs and manufactures its own proprietary healthcare apparel lines. The companys corporate office is based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with a distribution center near Atlanta, Georgia. Learn more at http://www.UniformAdvantage.com or by calling 800-283-8708.
As more hospitals seek Magnet status, more nurses will be required to have a bachelors degree or higher, which many do not. This degree will help nurses improve their knowledge and skills, as well as aid job security and mobility.

The University of La Verne announced today it is now accepting applications for a new bachelor of science in nursing program for registered nurses (RNs) who are ready to further their careers and enhance their leadership skills with a bachelors degree. The first cohort of students will begin fall 2022.

The Bachelor of Science in Nursing: RN to BSN program coursework is fully online so that working nurses can attend the 11 courses and complete assignments around their own schedules. It can be completed in as few as 15 months, with classes offered year-round in accelerated 8-week sessions. The program includes an in-person clinical component.

Rapid changes in the healthcare landscape, both in private and public health, have accelerated as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, creating shortages of all types of healthcare positions, including nurses, University of La Verne President Devorah Lieberman said. As more hospitals seek Magnet status, more nurses will be required to have a bachelors degree or higher, which many do not. This degree will help nurses improve their knowledge and skills, as well as aid job security and mobility.

The RN to BSN degree program will place special emphasis on teaching how health inequities and social determinants can negatively impact health and well-being outcomes at the individual and community levels.

Students will learn to apply knowledge of how social determinants can impact health, as well as health informatics, leadership, aging, nutrition, and health advocacy to their existing jobs, or use these highly sought skills to seek advancement in their organizations or in the marketplace.

The RN to BSN degree is open to recent graduates of associate degree in nursing (ADN) programs who are just starting their careers as well as experienced working nurses. Applicants must be licensed as an RN in good standing or be eligible for RN licensure prior to beginning classes.

As a designated Hispanic-Serving Institution, the University of La Verne is uniquely suited to train a diverse student population to understand and meet the needs of a growing multicultural region.

The University of La Verne partners with many Southern California health care providers and community colleges to provide scholarships and smooth transfer of college credits for employees or students from the partner organizations.

The Bachelor of Science in Nursing: RN to BSN is being offered through the University of La Vernes new College of Health and Community Well-Being, which is slated to officially open this summer. This degree is one of 10 bachelors and masters degree programs offered by the new college, all of which are designed to meet the growing need for skilled and culturally agile health care professionals in the Southern California region.

Additional new programs in nursing and other health and well-being related fields are planned for the next few years, including a pre-nursing program for freshmen in fall 2023. The second cohort for the RN to BSN degree will begin in spring 2023.

The University of La Verne is a pioneer in adult education and has provided flexible degree programs for working adults for more than 50 years.

To learn more about the Bachelor of Science in Nursing: RN to BSN, visit univ.lv/rnbsn.

About the University of La Verne

Founded in 1891, the University of La Verne is a private, nonprofit, comprehensive institution founded on four core values: lifelong learning, ethical reasoning, civic and community engagement, and diversity and inclusivity. The university, which is ranked among the best in the country for social mobility by US News & World Report, serves more than 6,000 students on the historic La Verne location as well as across multiple regional campuses and online.
Young readers will raise a glassor rather, a carton of milkto the often-overlooked school cafeteria employees on May 6 for the 10th anniversary of School Lunch Hero Day. What began as a humble testament by author-illustrator Jarrett J. Krosoczka (Lunch Lady) to his former school lunch ladies has morphed into a global celebration that recognizes the hard work and the hot meals prepared for students all over the world.

The idea for the first-ever School Lunch Hero Day was conceived on May 3, 2012. This marked three years after the publication of the first Lunch Lady graphic novels, when Krosoczka had invited had invited Jean Cariglia and Betty Pastore from his Worcester, Mass., elementary school (the inspiration for his books) to his launch event at the public library. I presented them with art and books, and a standing-room-only crowd, filled with people they fed over the years, erupted into thunderous applause, he told PW. Two years later at Cariglias wake, Krosoczka was touched by the familys decision to place the Lunch Lady artwork near her casket. Jeans widow told me how monumental that gesture back at the library had been for her and how it validated her lifes work, Krosoczka recalled.  Nobody ever thanks the lunch lady, [her husband] lamented.

Mulling over these words on the drive home, Krosoczka was inspired to create an event for students to share their gratitude for their cafeteria staff: writing cards, drawing pictures, and ultimately giving thanks. While the inaugural event took place on Cariglias birthday, the initiative is reserved for the first Friday in May each year.

Going Back for Seconds

School Lunch Hero Day has evolved into a burgeoning program over the past decade, with social media (using the hashtag #SchoolLunchHeroDay on Instagram and Twitter) and word of mouth helping to drive participation. Students have composed poems, raps, and songs, created artwork, and even choreographed dance numbers. It is awe-inspiring, and it all happens because everyone so appreciates all of the hard work that ensures kids bellies are full, so they are ready to learn, Krosoczka said.

Partnering with the School Nutrition Association, the author-illustrator has utilized the organizations real-world perspective and feedback, tweaking his character portrayals to represent a broader, more inclusive culture. Ive come to know that while some in the school food industry view the term lunch lady as endearing, others detest it and prefer school nutrition professional,  Krosoczka shared. To better reflect the people we are celebrating, I created a diverse group of inclusive characters in the style of the Lunch Lady graphic novels. And yes, even a few lunch dudes.  Downloadable images, bilingual greeting cards, and bookplate labels for School Lunch Hero Day can be found here.

Now more than ever, Krosoczka believes lunch heroes should be recognized for their tireless efforts in the wake of the pandemic. Once schools largely returned to in-person learning, he credited food service people among the ranks of those who prepared students for a warm welcome. When asked if he thought his beloved lunch ladies would have joined in the 10th anniversary festivities, Krosoczka answered unequivocally: Are you kidding me? Jean and Betty would be out there signing their copies of my books! (Pastore died in 2018.) And as to what theyd be whipping up for a celebratory meal? The same food that lured Krosoczka across the hall from the school library, into the kitchen: I still associate that time reading books with the smell (and taste) of their signature dish: the pizza burger, he said.
Knopf will be publishing three new books in its Millennium series, which launched with Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The new titles will be written by bestselling Swedish author Karin Smirnoff, with the first of them set to be released on September 5, 2023.

Smirnoff will be taking over the series from David Lagercrantz, who wrote three titles after the original three by Larsson. (Larsson died in 2004, and his original trilogy was published posthumously with the first book coming out in 2005.)

Knopf executive editor Diana Miller acquired U.S. rights to the new books, which all currently untitled, from U.K. publisher Quercus and Magdalena Hedlund at the Stockholm-based Hedlund Agency.

According to Knopf, Smirnoff, who grew up in a small Swedish town a short drive from where Larsson was raised, has sold over 700,000 copies of her books in her native country. Speaking to the job of continuing the series, Smirnoff said she will aim to "continue to build on Stieg Larsson's core themes, such as violence, abuse of power, and contemporary political currents.

The Millennium series, which is currently made up of six books, has, Knopf added, sold over 100 million copies worldwide. Knopf published The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in the U.S. in 2008.
Returning as an in-person event after a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic, the MoCCA Art Fest 2022, an indie comics and graphic novel festival held April 2-3, attracted nearly 6,000 fans to a new venue, the Metropolitan Pavilion, on 18th Street in Manhattan.

Anelle Miller, executive director of the Society of Illustrators, which organizes the annual event, said the rough estimate of the attendance was close to 6,000, noting that the bulk of attendees visited on Saturday. Indeed, on April 2 fans thronged the Metropolitan Pavilion and the line to get into the event extended up Sixth Avenue to nearly to 19th Street. The show had about 142 exhibitor tables. The last festival to be held in-person, the 2019 MoCCA Festival, attracted just under 7,000 fans.

Programming and in-person panels were held nearby at the School of Visual Arts Gallery on 21st Street. Guest artists included Derf Backderf (Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio), R. Kikuo Johnson (No One Else), Ron Wimberly (LAAB), Nora Krug (Belonging), and Rosemary Valero-OConnell (Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me).

Miller acknowledged that the crowds on Saturday surprised the organizers. What a great turnout from the public, she said. My thoughts are that everyone seemed so happy to be back after all this timethe mood was fantastic. The exhibitors were selling so much merchandise and artwhich is of course what we want to happen.

Publishers/exhibitors contacted by PW were quick to agree with Miller about the mood of the crowd. George Rohac, founder and manager of Organized Havoc, a manager/agent for comics and animation artists, said were all excited to see fans after not seeing people for nearly three years. Charles Kochman, editorial director of Abrams ComicArts, Abrams' graphic novel imprint, said that "the new venue feels like home, its the right size for MoCCA.

Miller agreed with Kochman about the new venue. She told PW, we will definitely be back in this space next yearwe're looking at the first weekend in April 2023.

Here are more photographs of the 2022 MoCCA Arts Festival.
























WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind.  Currently enrolled undergraduates at all public colleges and universities in the state of Indiana, including Purdue University, will soon receive an emailed survey seeking input on campus climates for free speech. The messages, and the survey itself, to be sent in early April, will come from Gallup Inc. and should be considered safe.

The Gallup-Indiana Free Speech Survey is a directive of the Indiana Legislature. As part of a House bill that Gov. Eric Holcomb signed into law last year, all public Indiana colleges and universities are required to survey their undergraduate students on the topic, with results due by the end of April. Data gathered will be shared with the Indiana Commission for Higher Education as part of a larger report on the protection of free speech on college campuses.

Students should receive the survey on April 5. Individual student participation is optional, but students are strongly encouraged to participate. Surveys will be anonymous, and no identifying information will be shared.

Purdue has long established itself as a proponent of and national leader in free speech. In May 2015, the university became the nations first public university to adopt the Chicago Principals of free speech, also undertaking a campaign to promote a commitment to freedom of expression on campus. Purdue Graduate Student Government, with support from the Office of the President, later hosted a public forum titled What is Free Speech? focusing on the Chicago Principles.

College Pulse has ranked Purdue as the No. 6 college for free speech in the United States.

As weve said before, no duty of a university is more central or solemn than to foster and promote the freedom to express ones views and to protect its members against those who would infringe those rights or attempt to impose views upon them. Our administration and student leaders have worked very closely to promote these values and we hope the survey results will show that those efforts have had some success, Purdue President Mitch Daniels said. We strongly encourage all our undergraduates to participate in order that we can obtain the fullest and most accurate reading.

The other public universities/colleges in addition to Purdue receiving the survey are Indiana University, Ball State University, Indiana State University, the University of Southern Indiana, Vincennes University and Ivy Tech Community College.

The survey consists of 18 questions from which students are asked to check boxes, from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Other questions will include choices from which students can choose alternative answers.

Once the survey is complete, Gallup will share the aggregate findings with the Indiana Higher Education Commission in order to gauge student perceptions of free speech at Indianas public college and university campuses. All questionnaires will be confidential and will be reported in aggregate.

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a top public research institution developing practical solutions to todays toughest challenges. Ranked in each of the last four years as one of the 10 Most Innovative universities in the United States by U.S. News & World Report, Purdue delivers world-changing research and out-of-this-world discovery. Committed to hands-on and online, real-world learning, Purdue offers a transformative education to all. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue has frozen tuition and most fees at 2012-13 levels, enabling more students than ever to graduate debt-free. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap at https://stories.purdue.edu.
Produced by the Telefonica-owne Spanish pay-TV platform Movistar Plus+ with AMC Studios and in collaboration with MOD Pictures, La Fortuna is inspired by the true events and follows the rookie diplomat Alex and free-spirited archival clerk Lucia, who form a highly unlikely team to recover the biggest sunken treasure in history from a modern-day pirate.It is the first-ever TV series by multi-awarded director Alejandro Amenabar, stars Oscar-nominated actor Stanley Tucci. The series was picked up by Sky Deutschland for Germany. SBS took it for Australia, and AMC secured rights for Portugal. Fox, The Walt Disney Company digital service, will stream in Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands before the series lands on Disney+. Beta also struck deals with Nova for Greece and Cyprus, Blue TV for Turkey, and Shahid for the Middle Eastern territories, among others.Beta has closed Both series have been sold to Italys RAI and to HBO for its platform HBO Max for Eastern Europe, Benelux, the Nordics, Netherlands and Portugal , among others. La Fortuna by Oscar-winning director Alejandro Amenabar and You Shall Not Lie by The Red Band Society co-creator Pau Freixas previously achieved excellent ratings on Spains Movistar Plus+.You Shall Not Lie is a six-part thriller produced by Movistar Plus+ in collaboration with Filmax. Set in upscale, coastal Belmonte, the story circles around a high school teacher, whose life falls apart when a video, showing her and one of her students in a compromising situation, goes viral.Led by The Piers Irene Arcos, You Shall Not Lie, was sold to RTL Deutschland for Germany, where it will premiere on its streaming platform RTL+ in the coming weeks. In France, the drama has been picked up by M6 with an exclusive window for its SVOD platform SALTO . Furthermore, Antenna TV secured rights for Greece and Cyprus, as well as Blue TV for Turkey. Beta Film is handling world sales for both shows.
Kim Kardashian says she's "very happy" with her boyfriend, actor and comedian Pete Davidson.

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The 41-year-old television personality discussed her relationship with Davidson, 28, in a preview of her ABC interview with Robin Roberts

Kardashian and Davidson were first linked in October 2021 after Kardashian hosted Saturday Night Live. Kardashian had filed for divorce from her husband, rapper and fashion designer Kanye West, in February 2021 after nearly seven years of marriage.

Kardashian has four children, North, 8, Saint, 6, Chicago, 4, and Psalm, 2, with West.

In the ABC special, Roberts asked Kardashian how "serious" her relationship with Davidson is.

"I mean, I am a relationship kind of girl, for sure. And I wouldn't be with someone if I didn't plan on spending a lot of my time with them," Kardashian said.

"Obviously I wanna take my time, but I'm very happy and very content and it's such a good feeling just to be at peace," she added.

Kardashian's mom, Kris Jenner, and sister Khloe Kardashian also weighed in on the relationship.

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"Pete's great. He's a really nice guy," Jenner said.

"He just makes her laugh, and she laughs all the time," Khloe Kardashian added.

The ABC special will air Wednesday at 8 p.m. EDT. The interview will also see Khloe Kardashian discuss her relationship with Tristan Thompson and Kourtney Kardashian talk about Travis Barker, whom she secretly married Monday after the Grammy Awards.

Kim Kardashian will also share "all the details" about her relationship with Davidson on her family's new Hulu reality series, The Kardashians.
Porterville, CA (93257)

Today

A clear sky. Low near 55F. Winds NW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

A clear sky. Low near 55F. Winds NW at 5 to 10 mph.
Now that Spring has started, so has allergy season. Allergies have many of the same symptoms as a cold or COVID-19, but what sets them apart is how long they last.
You are the owner of this article.
In 2020, then-presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg was asked how he could continue to demand gun control while being protected by private guards equipped with the same firearms and magazines that he wanted to ban others from owning. Does your life matter more than mine or my familys or these peoples? Bloombergs response, in essence, was that he was not an ordinary person. He was a celebrity and billionaire who received more threats than most people: That just happens when you are the mayor of New York City or you are very wealthy.

At the same time, another big-city Democrat politician known for pushing 'gun control' on the lower orders was being shielded by a small army of police officers, presumably at the taxpayers expense. The Chicago Sun-Times recently disclosed that a special police security detail, Unit 544, was created two years ago to protect Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, her home and office, and to oversee her personal bodyguard detail. The special unit consists of approximately 71 officers, in addition to the mayors existing separate personal bodyguard detail of 20 officers.

Both cities  ex-Mayor Bloombergs New York City and Lightfoots Chicago  are experiencing horrific surges in violent crime. The most recent CompStat report from the NYPD indicates rapes, robberies, felony assaults, burglaries, grand larceny, and auto thefts have all increased significantly as compared to the same time last year, and the Chicago Police Departments (CPD) own CompStat contains the same dismal message.

While privileged politicians float above this wave of criminality, untroubled by threats to person or property, less exalted individuals are forced to rely on whatever police resources may be available or become their own version of Unit 544. .....
MADISON, Wis. (AP)  Republican-backed candidates in local school board races came out as big winners in the Milwaukee suburbs that are critical for the Wisconsin GOP in statewide elections, but they had mixed results in other parts of the battleground state.

The school board elections Tuesday in Wisconsin were among the earliest nationwide this year and are the latest sign of how politicized typically nonpartisan races for local offices are becoming across the country.

Former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, a Republican candidate for governor, took the unusual step of endorsing 48 school board candidates. Of those, 34 won including eight incumbents, based on preliminary results. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, a former teacher, school administrator and state superintendent, did not endorse in any race.

The pattern was traditional GOP areas, the endorsed candidates did well," said Michael Ford, an associate professor of public administration at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh who studies school board races. "Places where it's more ideologically balanced it didn't seem to matter all that much.

Ben Wikler, chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, was buoyed by the results, saying Republicans should have performed better in a year that is supposed to favor them. They needed to perform better in swing parts of the state, he said.

What we saw last night is a sharply divided state thats likely to come down to the wire in the fall, Wikler said.

Conservative candidates picked up school board seats in Waukesha, Wausau and Kenosha, but lost races in Beloit and the western Wisconsin cities of La Crosse and Eau Claire.

The results reinforce the idea that the goal of Republicans getting behind school board candidates in a way they haven't in the past was to reinforce their base ahead of the midterm elections, Ford said. It also shows that key voters in Milwaukee's suburbs, who were uncomfortable voting for Donald Trump, swung back and voted for conservatives in the school board races, he said.

That could be a good sign for Republicans heading into the fall, when Evers and Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson are up for reelection in November. Johnson last year talked about the importance of local elections heading into the midterm and encouraged constituents to take back our school boards, our county boards, our city councils.

Republicans also saw wins beyond school board races. The Republican-backed candidate for a state appeals court seat in southeastern Wisconsin, Maria Lazar, defeated a sitting judge who was appointed by Evers. And Republican state Rep. Samantha Kerkman won the race for Kenosha County executive, replacing a Democrat. Republicans also touted wins in other Democratic parts of the state, including winning two of three seats on the Green Bay City Council and flipping majority control of seven county boards.

Kleefisch has made education one of her top issues and said Wednesday the wins show that Wisconsinites are fed up and want to take back control of their communities, schools and courts.

The GOP-backed school board candidates largely focused their campaigns on the response to COVID-19 in schools, like mask mandates and vaccination requirements, and on exerting more control over what can be taught, particularly as it relates to race, sex and gender issues.

Ballotpedia, which tracks election data, found that there were 53 school board elections in Wisconsin in which candidates took a stance on how race is taught, how schools or districts responded to the pandemic, or school-related sex and gender issues.

Here's a look at some of the more noteworthy races:

 Three Waukesha School Board candidates endorsed by the Republican Party and Kleefisch won, defeating a slate of candidates backed by the statewide teachers union. That was part of a near county-wide sweep by conservative backed candidates for school board.

 Scarlett Johnson, one of the organizers of an unsuccessful school board recall election last fall in the suburban Milwaukee district of Mequon-Thiensville, lost her bid for the board along with another conservative candidate.

 Eau Claire school board candidate Marquell Johnson, who was backed by Democrats, won. Johnson, who is Black, made public an email he received during the campaign calling for a Thank You White People Day.

 Eau Claire school board president Tim Nordin, who urged his community not to cede to fear, won. He received a death threat after three conservative candidates for school board seats criticized a teacher training program that they claimed could exclude parents from conversations about their children's gender identity or sexual orientation.

 In the small town of Holmen, a social media post in February showed a flyer asking voters to contact two conservative candidates for school board to Keep Holmen Schools White and Christian. Both of the named candidates who were also endorsed by Kleefisch  Josh Neumann and Chad Updyke  lost. They decried the postcard, which has not been connected to them. They ran as critics of the school districts COVID-19 restrictions and against the teaching of a divisive curriculum."

___

This story has been corrected to reflect that Scarlett Johnson is not an incumbent.
WASHINGTON (AP)  A federal judge on Wednesday acquitted a New Mexico man of misdemeanor charges that he illegally entered the U.S. Capitol and engaged in disorderly conduct after he walked into the building during last years riot.

U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden issued the verdict from the bench after hearing testimony without a jury in the case against Matthew Martin. McFadden, who was nominated by former President Donald Trump, acquitted Martin of all four counts for which he was charged.

McFadden said it was reasonable for Martin to believe that outnumbered police officers allowed him and others to enter the Capitol through the Rotunda doors on Jan. 6, 2021. The judge also said Martins actions were about as minimal and non-serious as anyone who was at the Capitol that day.

Martin is the third Capitol riot defendant whose case has been resolved by a trial. He is the first of the three to be acquitted of all charges that he faced. The first two Capitol riot trials ended with convictions, although McFadden acquitted one of those defendants of a disorderly conduct charge after a bench trial last month.

In the same courthouse where Martin was acquitted, a fourth trial continued on Wednesday for a former Virginia police officer who is charged with storming the Capitol with another off-duty officer. Jurors heard testimony from the fellow officer, who pleaded guilty to a riot-related charge and agreed to be a witness for prosecutors.

Martin, whose bench trial started Tuesday, testified that a police officer waved him into the building after the riot erupted. A prosecutor dismissed that testimony as nonsense.

The judge, however, said video shows two police officers standing near the Rotunda doors and allowing people to enter as Martin approached. One of the officers appeared to lean back before Martin placed a hand on the officer's shoulder as a possible sign of gratitude, the judge said.

McFadden described Martin's testimony as largely credible." The judge said it was not unreasonable for him to believe that officers allowed him to enter the Capitol, even though alarms were blaring and broken glass was strewn about the floor.

Martin was charged with four misdemeanor counts: entering and remaining in a restricted building, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building, violent entry and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building and parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building.

The judge said Martin appeared to be a silent observer of the actions of others." McFadden didn't find any evidence that Martin intended to disrupt Congress from certifying President Joe Bidens electoral victory.

Dozens of Capitol riot defendants have pleaded guilty and been sentenced, but Martin is the first to testify at a trial. His acquittal could embolden others to gamble on a bench trial, although McFadden so far is the only judge to preside over one and decide a case.

Martin said he went with the flow as he approached the Capitol and testified that he saw a police officer wave him into the building. Martin remained inside the Capitol for about 10 minutes after entering the building through the Rotunda doors, according to prosecutors.

Martin said he enjoyed the day of the riot.

It was a magical day in many ways, he testified on Tuesday before adding, I know some bad things happened.

You understand that police officers died? Justice Department prosecutor Michael Romano asked Martin.

At least nine people died in the riot or its aftermath. One officer died after he collapsed hours after being sprayed with bear spray and other officers who tried to quell the riot died by suicide in the months following the attack.

Prosecutors said Martin, an engineer, worked for a government contractor at the National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and held a top-secret security clearance on Jan. 6. Martin said he actually worked at a different facility in Los Alamos.

Defense attorney Dan Cron said Martin saw another person shake a police officers hand after entering the Capitol. Martin placed his hand on an officers shoulder as a gesture of thanks and of good will, Cron said.

Romano, the Justice Department prosecutor, said Martin joined the mob in crowding police officers who were trying to disperse the crowd. The prosecutor said Martin knew that he wasnt allowed to be in the Capitol.

The idea that he thought he had permission to do that is nonsense, Romano said.

Other riot defendants have claimed police waved them in or said they could enter.

McFadden presided over a bench trial last month for Cuoy Griffin, a county official in New Mexico. The judge on March 22 convicted Griffin of illegally entering restricted U.S. Capitol grounds but acquitted him of engaging in disorderly conduct.

On March 8, a jury decided the first Capitol riot trial by convicting a Texas man, Guy Reffitt, of storming the Capitol with a holstered handgun.

After Martin's acquittal Wednesday, a jury in a different courtroom heard a second day of testimony for the trial of former Rocky Mount, Virginia, police officer Thomas Robertson. The town fired Robertson and another officer, Jacob Fracker, who joined him at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Fracker was scheduled to be tried alongside Robertson before he pleaded guilty last month to a conspiracy charge and agreed to testify against somebody who was his mentor and a father figure.

I absolutely hate this, Fracker said. I've always been on the other side of things, the good guys' side so to speak."

Fracker testified that he and Robertson both believed the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Trump. Fracker said they both wore gas masks as they joined a mob in storming the Capitol.

Asked why he went to the Capitol that day, Fracker said he wanted to play a part in overturning the election results.

I felt like we had maybe been heard by whoever it was we needed to be heard by, Fracker said.

He said he has grown ashamed of his actions on Jan. 6.

That's not the person I am, he said. I wasn't raised like that.

Fracker is due to be cross-examined by one of Robertson's lawyers on Thursday.

Prosecutors plan to call two more witnesses, a police officer and FBI agent. A defense attorney said Robertson may testify. Jurors could hear attorneys' closing arguments as soon as Friday.

More than 770 people have been charged with riot-related federal crimes. Over 240 of them have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors, and over 140 of them have been sentenced.
The two nations recently signed a security pact that has raised concerns in the region.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (left) and Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare review an honor guard during a welcoming ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Oct. 9, 2019.

China is denying that it will build a military base in the Solomon Islands after agreeing with the South Pacific nation to a security pact that is raising concerns in the region and beyond.

Last week, the two sides quietly signed a Framework Agreement on bilateral security cooperation, saying it is conducive to stability and security of the Solomon Islands, and will promote common interests of other countries in the region. A framework agreement is not the final deal but confirms both countries intentions with details to be agreed in the future.

A draft agreement leaked online last week would allow Beijing to set up bases and deploy troops in the Solomon Islands, which lies about 1,700 km (1,050 miles) from the northeastern coast of Australia. The draft agreement and Framework Agreement are separate documents.

It remains unclear how the two documents differ but, in a statement released Tuesday, the Chinese Embassy in Honiara categorically denied that a military base would be developed in the Solomons.

This is utterly misinformation deliberately spread with [a] political motive, an embassy spokesperson said in the statement, responding to a question about whether China would build a military base in the islands.

China-Solomon Islands security cooperation is no different from the cooperation of Solomon Islands with other countries, the spokesperson added.

In recent years, China has been developing closer ties with the Pacific islands, wooing them with infrastructure loans and economic assistance, as well as military exchanges.

The Solomon Islands switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in 2019  a move to please Beijing which seeks to diminish the international diplomatic recognition of the government in Taiwan.

Concerns over pact

The draft agreement, meanwhile, has provoked fears in the South Pacific regions traditional powers, Australia and New Zealand. Last week, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that Wellington sees the pact as gravely concerning.

The U.S., which has been promoting a free and open Indo-Pacific, also expressed concerns about Chinas moves in the Solomons.

Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, was quoted by the Australian Broadcasting Corp. as saying earlier this week that he was undoubtedly concerned about the China-Solomon Islands security pact.

There is still a path ahead. But anytime that a secret security arrangement makes its way into the light of day, it is a concern, Paparo told the Australian network in Washington.

The U.S. admiral also warned that theres the potential of conflict within our region within a couple of years because of the incredible unpredictability of events.

The security agreement with China will allow the Solomon Islands government to invite China to send police and even military personnel to protect Chinese community and businesses in Solomon Islands during riots and social unrests, said a researcher specializing in the Pacific region at the Australian National University (ANU), who requested anonymity because of personal concerns.

This is different from China establishing a military base in Solomon Islands but may pave the way for China to do so, he told RFA.

'Diversification' of partnerships

Beijing doesnt hide its ambition to set up military bases in the South Pacific. In 2018, media reports about Chinas plan to build a base in Vanuatu prompted a stern warning from then-Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

A possible presence of Chinese law enforcement personnel so close to the homeland has rattled decision makers in Canberra. Australia is the biggest aid donor to the Solomon Islands and, in 2017, it signed a bilateral security treaty with Honiara, its first with a Pacific nation.

From traditional powers perspective, they think such security agreement is not necessary because existing regional mechanisms can meet the demands of Pacific islands like the Solomon Islands, the ANU researcher said.

But the incumbent Solomon Islands government said they need to diversify the countrys external security partnerships, especially with China, which lends strong support to the government during and after the riot in November 2021, he said.

Rioting broke out in Honiara, the nations capital, in late November over the governments decision to diplomatically recognize China over Taiwan.

Last week, Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare told lawmakers that to achieve the nations security needs, it is clear that we need to diversify the countrys relationship with other countries but existing security arrangements with Australia would remain.

His policy of diversification was evident in November when the PM asked Australia  and after that China  to send police forces to help him quell the riots that rocked Honiara.

The Chinese Embassy, for its part, warned against what it called Cold War and colonial mentality, saying the Pacific island nations are all sovereign and independent.

The region should not be considered a backyard of other countries, it said in its statement issued on Tuesday.
Among them is the former vice president of a labor union that disbanded under a draconian national security law.

A taxi drives past the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong on March 31, 2022, the day on which Australian and Canadian judges confirmed that they would stay on Hong Kong's top court after two senior British judges resigned to avoid endorsing China's crackdown on political freedoms in the financial hub.

Hong Kong police on Wednesday arrested six people including a former labor leader on suspicion of "sedition" under a colonial-era law, as the city's security chief  who is widely seen as Beijing's preferred candidate  resigned to run for chief executive.

Police said they had arrested four men and two women aged 32 to 67 on suspicion of "conducting acts with seditious intent."

Media reports said one of those arrested was Leo Tang, a former vice president of the now-disbanded Confederation of Trade Unions (CTU).

The arrests were in connection with "nuisances" allegedly caused by the six as they attended court hearings between December 2021 and January 2022. Police said their actions had "severely affected jurisdictional dignity and court operations."

Police also searched the homes of the arrestees and seized various items in connection with the case.

This arrests mark the first time that someone sitting in the public gallery of a Hong Kong court has been arrested for "actions with seditious intent," a charge that carries a maximum sentence of two years' imprisonment.

The police statement said the six are accused of "incitement to hatred, contempt or betrayal of Hong Kong's judiciary."

Previously, judges have responded to shouting and clapping from the public gallery by ignoring it or by ordering those responsible to leave the court.

Any behavior in court that could distract judges from hearing evidence or making a judgement could be regarded as "an obstacle to the work of the court," Hong Kong chief justice Andrew Cheung said in January.

He said at the time that such incidents should be handled on a case-by-case basis by the judge concerned.

Courtroom protests and vocal support for defendants has become increasingly common as Hong Kong continues with a citywide crackdown on public dissent and political opposition under a draconian national security law imposed on the city by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from July 1, 2020.

In January 2018, supporters at the trial of pro-independence politician Edward Leung were ordered to leave the courtroom and to view the remainder of the trial via a video screen in the lobby.

The arrests came as chief secretary John Lee  second-in-command to chief executive Carrie Lam  resigned from his post and announced he will run in an "election" for the city's top job that is tightly controlled by Beijing.

The successful candidate will be chosen on May 8 by a 1,500-strong Election Committee whose members have been hand-picked by Beijing.

The arrests came after two U.K. Supreme Court judges resigned from Hong Kong's Court of Final Appeal (CFA) last month, citing a recent crackdown on dissent under a draconian national security law imposed on the city by Beijing.

Non-permanent CFA judges Lord Reed and Lord Hodge had sat on the court "for many years" under an agreement governing the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, but Lam's administration had "departed from values of political freedom, and freedom of expression," Reed said in a statement.

The national security law ushered in a citywide crackdown on public dissent and criticism of the authorities that has seen several senior journalists, pro-democracy media magnate Jimmy Lai and 47 former lawmakers and democracy activists charged with offenses from "collusion with a foreign power" to "subversion."

Extracts from Lai's prison letters published by the Index on Censorship in late March 2022 quoted Lai as saying that "the muted anger of the Hong Kong people is not going away."

"This barbaric suppression [and] intimidation works," Lai wrote. "Hong Kong people are all quieted down. But the muted anger they have is not going away. Even those emigrating will have it forever. Many people are emigrating or planning to."

"The more barbaric [the] treatment of Hong Kong people, [the] greater is their anger, and power of their potential resistance; [the] greater is the distrust of Beijing, of Hong Kong, [the] stricter is their rule to control," Lai wrote.

"The vicious circle of suppression-anger-and-distrust eventually will turn Hong Kong into a prison, a cage, like Xinjiang."

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
Some of the Rohingya who were detained by police for leaving their refugee camps are seen at the Ukhia police station in Coxs Bazar, Bangladesh, April 5, 2022.

Bangladesh authorities were holding more than 300 Rohingya in transit camps after police caught them working outside their refugee camps in Coxs Bazar, or while leaving their shelters for other purposes, officials said Tuesday.

Human Rights Watch meanwhile renewed its call for the government to ease movement restrictions on Rohingya, saying that barring refugees from leaving the camps for work or shutting down their shops within the camps only compounds their misery.

During raids in the Ukhia sub-district of Coxs Bazar on Monday and Tuesday, police arrested 216 Rohingya refuges who had left the camps or were in the process of leaving them to go outside, Ahmed Sanjur Morhsed, officer-in-charge of the Ukhia police station, told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.

The Rohingya people are not permitted to go out of the camps, but very often they get out of the camps [by] adopting different tactics, he said.

Acting on a tip off, we conducted raids on Monday and Tuesday at different bazaars and detained Rohingya. We caught many Rohingya while they were heading out for various places [outside the refugee camps], he said, adding that the operation was a special drive.

He claimed that those arrested had admitted that they worked locally outside their refugee camps. After detaining them, police sent them to transit camps run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Police in neighboring Teknaf, another sub-district of Coxs Bazar, similarly arrested more than 100 Rohingya during the special drive on Monday and Tuesday.

The target of the special raids is to stop the Rohingya from getting out of the camps and to bar them from working in the local market, Md. Hafizur Rahman, the officer-in-charge of the Teknaf sub-district police station, told BenarNews.

All those Rohingya detained have been sent to the UNHCR transit camps ahead of their return to their respective refugee camps, he said.

Separately, Ukhia police also arrested 48 Rohingya who were preparing to be trafficked to Malaysia illegally, by sea.

Job competition

Nur Amin, a resident of Kutupalong camp, was one of the Rohingya refugees rounded up by police on Tuesday from a bazar in Ukhia.

We were warned not to go out for work. I was passing my time idle, Amin said.

So last month I took a job at a tea stall in return for 200 taka (U.S. $2.4) a day. The police arrested me from the stall, he added.

UNHCR has yet to confirm that the arrested Rohingya were handed over to the transit camp.

This is sort of incident would put stress on the Rohingya refugees. So the issue should be dealt with humanely, Ziaur Karim, a Rohingya leader at Kutupalong camp, told BenarNews.

Local Bangladeshis have voiced concerns about Rohingya refugees taking up jobs in Coxs Bazar.

The local Bangladeshi workers have been losing their job opportunities while the Rohingya people have been offering menial work with cheap wages, M. Gafur Uddin, chairman of Palongkhali union council, told BenarNews.

Meanwhile, in a statement issued Monday, Human Rights Watch pointed to how Bangladeshi authorities, in recent months, had intensified their restrictions on Rohingya refugees livelihoods, movement, and education.

Bangladesh is understandably burdened with hosting nearly one million Rohingya refugees, but cutting them off from opportunities to work and study is only compounding their vulnerability and dependence on aid, said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

The Bangladesh government should formalize and expand employment opportunities to bolster the Rohingyas self-reliance and enable them to support their families and communities.

Local humanitarian groups are aware of the issues raised by New York-based HRW.

Nur Khan Liton, a human rights activist, told BenarNews: I dont think theres an easy solution to many of these issues until Bangladesh officially recognizes these Rohingya as refugees.
The military has burned down nearly 700 houses in Khin-U township since the start of March.

The smoking remains of homes destroyed by the military in Khin-U township's Ngar Tin Gyi village, April 4, 2022.

A joint force of junta troops and pro-military militiamen set fire to a village in Myanmars embattled Sagaing region over the weekend, destroying around 250 homes and forcing more than 2,000 people to flee, residents said Tuesday.

A resident of Khin-U townships Ngar Tin Gyi village, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told RFAs Myanmar Service that soldiers and Pyu Saw Htee fighters stormed the settlement at around 7 a.m. on Sunday firing guns and heavy weapons.

On hearing gunfire, many villagers fled with only the clothes on their backs. Some of them were able to carry some small items and food, the resident said.

The soldiers set some houses on fire at about 10 a.m. They stopped for a while later for lunch and then they continued burning houses again at about 2 p.m. All we could do was watch the houses burning from a distance.

Junta forces left the next morning, he said, and residents returned to Ngar Tin Gyi to collect what was left of their belongings briefly before returning to makeshift camps in the jungle.

Another resident of Ngar Tin Gyi, who also declined to be named, said that villagers are too frightened of another raid to return to the area and rebuild.

Smoke billowed up and I could see the flames. The terrifying sound of gunfire echoed through the air, he said.

All the grain and farm equipment and cattle were lost. We have nothing left  no clothes, no [rice] paddy, no food, no oil. Not a brick was left to rebuild our houses. All that we have saved throughout the years is gone now. I dont know what to do. I cannot understand why they must be so cruel.

Others said it would take thirty or forty years to rebuild everything that was destroyed over the weekend.

It was not immediately clear why Ngar Tin Gyi was targeted.

The area has seen frequent clashes between the military and anti-junta Peoples Defense Force (PDF) paramilitary groups in recent weeks, and residents of other villages raided by junta forces have told RFA they were accused of providing haven to the armed opposition.

Not long after leaving Ngar Tin Gyi on Monday, the convoy of junta troops triggered a landmine planted by the PDF near Khin-U townships Sai Gaung village. Sources said the troops responded by setting fire to a school in the village, and on Tuesday burned down three homes in nearby Ohnbin Gone village.

An aerial view of Chaung Oo village, in Sagaing region's Pale township, where junta troops and Pyu Saw Htee fighters burned more than 300 homes, Dec. 18, 2022. Credit: RFA Scorched earth campaign

Junta Deputy Information Minister Zaw Min Tun on Tuesday called the accusations of arson attacks baseless and instead blamed the PDF, which the military regime has labeled a terrorist organization.

[The PDF] set fire to the houses and fled and, as usual, say the army is responsible, he said.

They are using the term Pyu Saw Htee in their accusations, but there is no Pyu Saw Htee. There is only a peoples militia group formed by residents [to protect themselves against the PDF].

Since the military seized power in a Feb. 1, 2021 coup, security forces have killed at least 1,730 civilians and detained more than 10,000 political prisoners, mostly during peaceful anti-junta protests, according to the Bangkok-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. The junta has also launched several troop offensives against the PDF and armed ethnic groups in Myanmars remote border regions.

On March 3, the military shut down internet access for several townships in Sagaing region before sending troops to the area two days later. Troops have encountered fierce resistance to military rule in the region and responded with a scorched earth campaign that reports say has included arson, looting, arbitrary arrests, rape, torture, and murder.

According to an investigation by RFA, troops torched at least 447 houses in Khin-U township in the month of March alone in the villages of Dan-gone, Hmantaw, Kyunlei, Thet Pay, Tamote, Kala Lu, and Shar Lwin. The destruction since Sunday brought the total number of homes destroyed by fire in the township to nearly 700.

Data For Myanmar, a group that researches the impact of conflict on communities, recently said that pro-junta forces had burned 7,973 houses across the country since last years the coup. Of those, 4954 houses were in Sagaing region.

A former member of parliament from the deposed National League for Democracy party from Sagaing region told RFA that villages in Myanmars ethnic areas are no stranger to arson attacks by the military.

This is undeniable. In Rakhine [state]  and in other areas like Kachin state and Chin state they have done the same thing, said the former lawmaker, who declined to be named.

Employing all of these horrible acts to keep the military dictatorship alive has become their tradition.

Chin refugees shelter near the Indian border after fleeing fighting in Northern Chin state's Falam township, March 10, 2022. Credit: Citizen journalist Thousands at India border

The reports of arson attacks in Sagaing came as sources in Northern Chin state said that intensifying clashes between the military and the Chin National Defense Force (CNDF) since early March had forced nearly all the 5,200 residents of Rikhawdar in Falam township to flee to Myanmars shared border with India.

A resident of the town told RFA that fighting in the past week had become so bad, with junta troops indiscriminately firing mortars, that only one percent of people remain.

Its all deserted. All that is left are the people guarding their houses and belongings that they cant take with them, he said.

One refugee sheltering near the border said that many people had crossed into Indias Mizoram state, but nearly 2,000 remain in makeshift camps on the Myanmar side and are running low on supplies.

Nearly 2,000 people who cannot afford rental fees over there have been living in tents along the border with India, he said.

They have to find their own food and water. If the fighting continues, they will be in trouble.

A CNDF official told RFA that the exodus was exacerbated by a March 26 military raid on his groups camp near a border bridge in Falam township.

He said the CNDF was forced to retreat after about 45 minutes of fighting, and that nearly all of the towns residents immediately fled the area.

When asked about the situation at the border, junta Deputy Information Minister Zaw Min Tun said the military is working to assist the refugees.

Our government is taking responsibility for those who have evacuated, he said.

To those who are fleeing across the border, I say you are welcome to stay in our refugee camps if you are innocent and have not committed any crimes. The government is ready to provide protection to all.

Salai Za Uk Ling, deputy executive director of the Chin Human Rights Group, dismissed the juntas claims and said the refugees are in desperate need of international aid due to food shortages.

Theres a shortage of food and water for those living in the [refugee] camps, so we are working on how to provide for them before the rainy season begins, he said.

We are still working hard to get international assistance.

According to Salai Za Uk Ling, more than 110,000 refugees have been displaced in Chin state since the coup last year. More than 60,000 are scattered throughout the state and the remaining 50,000 have fled across the border into Mizoram, he said.

Those displaced by the recent fighting join more than 500,000 refugees from decades of conflict between the military and ethnic armed groups who were already counted as displaced at the end of 2020, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, a Norwegian NGO.

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
The entrance to Monywa Prison in Sagaing region, in an undated photo.

A prison in Myanmars Sagaing region is under lockdown Tuesday after authorities opened fire on an inmate protest over the weekend, killing one prisoner and injuring as many as nine others, according to sources.

A source close to the prison on the outskirts of Sagaings Monywa city who spoke on condition of anonymity told RFAs Myanmar Service that junta troops have assumed control of security at the site and that all trials and family visits have been suspended indefinitely.

The army is still guarding the prison with military vehicles, the source said. Lawyers who usually attend special court proceedings [on site] are still not allowed inside. As families cannot enter the prison [for inmate visits], all information has been cut off.

Residents told RFA on Monday that gunfire was heard emanating from inside Monywa Prison the previous night and that authorities had opened fire on a group of inmates who were chanting anti-junta slogans in a rare display of opposition to military rule, killing one and injuring nine others.

One source with ties to inmates involved in the incident said they had been protesting harsh conditions at the prison, including the use of torture during interrogations.

During the daily inspection, as inmates were out of their cells, someone started shouting, Do we, the people, unite? Then, the others responded, saying, Yes, we do! A big crowd gathered, and the protest began, said the source, who also declined to be named.

The protest started at around 5 p.m. A half an hour later, two military trucks entered the compound, and the shooting began.

According to our sources inside, we can confirm one person was shot dead and five were injured, the source said.

The one who died was shot in the chest. One of the injured is in serious condition after losing a lot of blood from his thigh. But as far as we know, they have not been taken for medical treatment and were forced to help each other in the prison.

A member of the Monywa Peoples Strike Steering Committee, whose leader Wai Moe Naing is among several political prisoners being held at the prison, said emergency vehicles were diverted from patrols of the city prior to the shooting, including military trucks and ambulances.

Other sources said that as many as nine inmates had been injured in the crackdown.

RFA was unable to independently verify the number of casualties. Attempts to contact Khin Shwe, the juntas deputy director of the Department of Prisons, went unanswered Tuesday.

Bombing campaign

Following the unrest, several prodemocracy Peoples Defense Force (PDF) paramilitary groups issued a statement about the shooting and in retaliation carried out a joint bombing campaign against five junta targets in the city, according to Boh Dattha of the Monywa PDF.

We asked residents not to leave their houses beginning around 5:30 p.m., he said. In response to what happened in Monywa Prison, we, and three allied groups, carried out bombings against the military regime.

The other groups involved in the bombings were Monywa Generation Tiger, Monywa Special Date Date Kyei, and a third new group, Boh Dattha said. He provided no further details about the targets of the bombings or whether they resulted in any casualties.

A resident of the city confirmed to RFA that multiple explosions were heard in Monywa after the shooting on Sunday night.

We heard gunshots. Later, there were a lot of explosions in the city  in no less than 10 places, the resident said.

The junta has yet to issue a statement about the shooting incident or the explosions in Monywa, but sources described an increased presence of police and military troops since the weekend and said authorities have been conducting checks throughout the city.

Since seizing power in a Feb. 1, 2021, coup, junta troops have killed at least 1,730 civilians and detained more than 10,000 political prisoners, according to the Bangkok-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.

Last month, authorities in Sagaings Kalay township killed seven inmates and injured a dozen others after using live ammunition to quell what junta officials described as a prison riot. Sources told RFA the deaths were likely the result of a violent crackdown on a protest over ill-treatment at the facility.

According to the military, guards at the prison tried to disable the inmates by aiming below their waists. But residents noted that photos published by the junta on its online Viber Group platform to accompany its statement on the incident showed that at least some of those killed had been shot in the head and chest.

Authorities have responded to earlier protests over ill-treatment by political prisoners in Yangons Insein Prison and Mandalays Obo Prison by beating protesters, denying them medical treatment, and putting them in solitary confinement.

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
Tibetan exile leader Penpa Tsering will visit Washington D.C. from April 25 to 29 at the invitation of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Tsering confirmed to RFA in an interview on Tuesday.

The Washington visit will be followed by visits to Canada and Germany, the Sikyong, or elected head of Tibets India-based Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), added.

We have received an official invitation from the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who has been a strong supporter and advocate for Tibet, Tsering told RFA.

We will also be meeting with the State Departments special coordinator for Tibetan issues Uzra Zeya and with many other government and non-governmental officials.

Over the last decades, and especially under the leadership and authoritarian policies of Chinese president Xi Jinping, we have seen Tibetans face more and more religious and cultural repression aimed at wiping out the Tibetan identity, Tsering said.

A CTA report detailing what Tsering called the urgent issues surrounding Tibets environment and language and human rights situation, and prepared for submission to Xi Jinping, is being temporarily held back for a number of reasons, the Sikyong said.

One of these of course is the ongoing concern over Russia and Ukraine, he said.

CTA departments and a Permanent Strategy Committee established by the Sikyong are now working together to push again for a resumption of a Sino-Tibetan dialogue on Tibets status under Chinese rule, Tsering said.

Nine rounds of talks were previously held between envoys of exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and high-level Chinese officials beginning in 2002, but stalled in 2010 and were never resumed.

Divisions persist in the Tibetan exile communityabout 150,000 people living in 40 countriesover how best to advance the rights of the 6.3 million Tibetans living in China, with some calling for a restoration of the independence lost when Chinese troops marched into Tibet in 1950.

Penpa Tsering, a former speaker of Tibets exile parliament in Dharamsala, won a closely fought April 11, 2021 election to become Sikyong held in Tibetan communities worldwide.

The fifth elected CTA leader, Tsering replaced Lobsang Sangay, a Harvard-trained scholar of law, who had served two consecutive five-year terms as Sikyong, an office filled since 2011 by popular vote.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFAs Tibetan Service. Written in English by Richard Finney.
Qurban Mamut was arrested in 2017 after returning from a visit to the United States.

A prominent Uyghur journalist who went missing in November 2017 is serving 15 years in prison in northwestern Chinas Xinjiang region for political crimes, his son and authorities in the region told RFA.

Qurban Mamut, the former editor-in-chief of the popular Uyghur journal Xinjiang Civilization, disappeared several months after he and his wife returned home after visiting their son, Bahram Sintash, at his home in Virginia in 2017, RFA previously reported.

Chinese authorities had kept Mamuts imprisonment and sentence a secret since they arrested him, said his son, a police officer and a Chinese court official in Xinjiang.

Mamuts arrest coincided with a Chinese government crackdown on Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang. In some case, authorities have not disclosed sentencing terms from the families of the jailed Uyghurs.

Mamut, who is now 71, retired in 2011 after working for decades as the journals editor-in-chief, Sintash said.

His son tried to obtain information about his fathers disappearance by discussing his case with reporters across the globe and providing testimony to U.S. lawmakers, but he was unable to learn what exactly had happened to him.

None of these efforts helped me to get any information on my father, Sintash told RFA in February when he learned from his older sister that Mamut was alive but serving 15 years in prison.

When RFA contacted Chinese officials at the Cultural Affairs Bureau in Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi), Xinjiangs capital, where Mamut had worked as an editor, they declined to provide information on his situation.

A police officer in Urumqi told RFA that he was aware that Mamut had been sentenced but said he could confirm the length of prison term only after he received approval.

I can tell you about his situation after I get approval from my bureau chiefs, he said.

Previous RFA reports on jailed Uyghur intellectuals, businessmen and other socially prominent people have indicated that since 2017 Chinese authorities have returned Uyghurs to their ancestral towns in Xinjiang and detained them there in internment camps or sentenced them to prison in those jurisdictions.

RFA contacted police in Kuchar (Kuche) county, Aksu (Akesu) prefecture, where Mamut is from and where his nephews now reside. One officer in the countys seventh district confirmed that the editor was in prison.

Qurban Mamut was sentenced to 15 years in prison for political crimes, the police in Kucha told RFA in a phone call. We received the [official] document on his sentence almost two years ago.

A Chinese court official in Urumqi also confirmed that Mamut was serving a 15-year term but said he didnt know in which detention center.

I heard it was for 15 years, he said. I dont know what prison he is in since I took this position recently.

Sintash expressed deep concern about his fathers health now that he is confined to a hospital prison where detainees receive medical treatment while they are handcuffed to their beds and under increased supervision.

I dont know what hospital prison is or what kind of place it is  but after hearing the news I am more concerned about my father, he said. When his 15-year prison term ends, he will be in his 80s if he comes out from the Chinese prison live.

Translated by RFAs Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
People questioned across Russia have expressed mixed reactions to allegations that Russian forces committed war crimes in the Ukrainian town of Bucha. Dozens of civilians were found in mass graves or shot dead in the streets with their hands tied after Russian troops withdrew from the Kyiv suburb. Russian media are denouncing the discoveries as an elaborate hoax -- a narrative that international journalists have shown to be false. Current Time asked people in several cities across Russia: "Did you hear about the Ukrainian city of Bucha?" Many echoed the Kremlin's line that images of atrocities were "fake." Some Russians, however, expressed shock and called the killings "horrible," while others were too afraid to share their true feelings.
On March 11, the commander of an artillery unit belonging to Russia's famed 76th Guards Air Assault Division died in combat in the Ukrainian town of Bucha.

Captain Gennady Bayur was killed, according to a death announcement published some two weeks later in a chat room of the social-media site VK, in a land-mine explosion in the town northwest of Kyiv. He had commanded the 234th Guards Air Assault Regiment.

Another Russian soldier, from the 64th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade, lost his mobile phone or had it taken from him when he was killed. According to Ukrainian intelligence, which published a screenshot of the phone, it was found in Bucha; a number linked to the phone matches up to a social-media account located in the brigade's home base.

Bucha is a crime scene.

Increasingly, it is also a worldwide synonym for atrocities that may have been committed by Russian troops during the first six weeks of their assault on Ukraine.

Days after Russian forces withdrew from Bucha, workers are struggling to clear the bodies of dozens, possibly scores of civilians from the town's streets, from hastily dug mass graves, and from building basements, and to give them a proper burial. An unknown number of the civilian corpses show signs of having been summarily executed, with hands bound behind their backs. Some had gunshot wounds to their heads.

Ukrainian and Western investigators, meanwhile, are struggling to compile evidence and take witness accounts, as the government pledges to prosecute what it says are war crimes.

RFE/RL reporters, scouring through social-media posts, public lists of dead soldiers, video footage from the devastated town, and other information, have sought to pinpoint some of the military units that were known to have occupied Bucha between the start of the invasion on February 24 and April 1, when it was reclaimed by Ukrainian forces.

What Happened In Bucha?

The presence of Russian military units in Bucha, and other Ukrainian towns and cities they have occupied, is not proof that war crimes were committed, and investigators may be hard-pressed to accumulate conclusive, air-tight proof that could withstand scrutiny in a court or tribunal.

But in the case of Bucha, information that has already come to light -- photographs, videos, eyewitness accounts -- plus the fact that the town was under Russian military control for more than a month, provides strong circumstantial evidence pointing to Russian culpability.

Bucha's myor, Anatoliy Fedoruk, posted a video on March 31 in which he said the town had been recaptured by Ukrainian forces following a Russian withdrawal. It wasn't immediately clear if Russian troops had left on March 31 or earlier. The Ukrainian military said its forces entered Bucha on April 1.

On April 3, Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, published a list of Russian units, both military and National Guard, that he said had been deployed to Bucha and two other towns in the Kyiv region, Irpin and Hostomel.

Among those he named were the 104th and 234th Airborne Assault Regiments of the 76th Airborne Assault Division.

Based in the northwestern Russian city of Pskov, the division is renowned in Soviet and Russian military history, for both battlefield prowess and brutality. During the Second Chechen War in the early 2000s, paratroopers from the 76th Airborne Division were credibly accused of killing Chechen civilians indiscriminately.

The social-media post about the death of Bayur, the commander of the artillery unit, was one piece of evidence pointing to the presence of the paratroopers in Bucha.

Sometime around March 26, a video apparently produced by Ukraine's military intelligence agency appeared online, featuring a captured soldier whose unit is identified as the 76th Airborne Division. The video was later removed by YouTube but a copy was published on a Ukrainian journalist's Telegram channel.

In the video the soldier, who is identified as Timofei Bobov, describes how on February 24 his unit was ordered to Ukraine and deployed to "clean up Hostomel or Bucha." According to Bobov, he was instructed to break into apartments in residential buildings with a crowbar and take the people who were inside to the basement. He did not indicate what happened to them afterward.

RFE/RL could not independently verify the video, but there have been press reports from Bucha from witnesses who say their apartment doors were pried open with crowbars and relatives taken away by Russian soldiers. There is also footage of bodies in basements.

In a video published by AP on April 3 from Bucha, a discarded wooden ammunition box is briefly shown. The box has marking on it indicating it belonged to the 7th Airborne Assault Company, 234th Regiment, 76th Airborne Division.

Cell Phone, Instagram Account

Another unit identified by Arestovych as occupying some of the towns northwest and east of Kyiv is the 64th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade, whose headquarters is in the Khabarovsk region, on the Pacific coast in Russia's Far East.

On April 3, a Telegram channel that appears to have links to Ukraine's military published a screenshot from a Russian soldier's phone, describing it as "a phone of one of the occupiers of Bucha [that] was found."

The screenshot showed an Instagram account with a phone number that RFE/RL was able to trace to a 29-year-old Khabarovsk resident. RFE/RL was unable to determine whether the man was part of the 64th Brigade, but photographs from the man's social-media friends and acquaintances show soldiers from the 64th Brigade.

Ukraine's military intelligence agency later published a list with hundreds of names, and other identifying information, of officers and soldiers from the 64th Brigade. That list could also not be independently confirmed.

Belarus Deployment

Other units known to have occupied some of the towns north of Kyiv include another paratrooper unit: the 331st Guards Airborne Regiment of the 98th Division, based in Kostroma, northeast of Moscow. The regiment's commanding officer, Colonel Sergei Sukharev, was killed on March 13, and was posthumously awarded military honors. It was unclear exactly where and how he died, however.

The Defense Ministry in Belarus -- from which many of the Russian units that were sent toward Kyiv entered northern Ukraine -- also reported on a ceremony involving the 331st Airborne Regiment on January 25, a full month before the war began.

On February 28, meanwhile, a photograph of a list of soldiers killed in Bucha, from a unit identified as the "2nd Squad of the 2nd Platoon" appeared on another Telegram channel titled Search For Your Own. The channel is filled with photographs of Russian soldiers who have been killed or taken prisoner in Ukraine.

RFE/RL traced one of the names on the list of killed solders to a social-media profile that suggests the soldier served in the 56th Guards Air Assault Regiment, headquartered in Russia's Volgograd region.

Amid mounting international outcry and condemnation of Moscow, the Russian authorities have denied that Russian troops were involved in the killing of civilians in Bucha or other Kyiv region towns. Without providing evidence, Russian officials have claimed photographs and footage widely distributed by Ukrainian and Western media were staged.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has suggested, also without evidence, that the images showed signs of being faked, and that the timing of the retreat from Bucha means that Russian soldiers could not have been responsible. That statement is contradicted by eyewitness reports from Bucha.

The U.S.-based group Human Rights Watch also collected evidence and interviews with residents of Bucha, concluding that there were "obvious war crimes" committed in districts controlled by Russian forces.

Written by Mike Eckel based on reporting by Mark Krutov and Oleksandra Vagner of RFE/RL's Russian Service. RFE/RL's Belarus Service contributed to this report
Welcome back to the China In Eurasia briefing, an RFE/RL newsletter tracking Chinas resurgent influence from Eastern Europe to Central Asia.

Im RFE/RL correspondent Reid Standish and heres what Im following right now.

China has so far refused to condemn Russian President Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine, and its unclear whether reports of atrocities by Russian soldiers will alter Chinese support.

Finding Perspective: Given the muted reaction out of Beijing as photos and videos emerged over the weekend of people in civilian clothes -- some with their hands bound behind their backs -- shot dead in the town of Bucha, outside of Kyiv, it appears there is little that can alter Chinas backing of Russia.

Chinese officials have largely been silent. A few Chinese Embassy social media feeds around the world have reposted images and comments from Russian Embassy accounts questioning the legitimacy of the Bucha reports, and Zhang Jun, Chinas ambassador to the UN, called the images disturbing but added that accusations should be based on facts and that details were not yet verified.

Chinese state-run media have also treaded cautiously. Most outlets have not mentioned the killings in Bucha at all, while those that have reported on them have simply repeated Moscows denials that Russian forces were involved.

Online in China, however, discussion of the atrocities has been active, and not only echoing Russian denials of responsibility but also claims from Moscow that the Bucha killings are another hoax, as the Russian Defense Ministry and other officials have said.

Weibo, the popular Chinese social media site, has been full of posts by leading bloggers questioning not only reports about Russian involvement but also the veracity of the images and videos that have emerged of the corpses, with some blaming Ukrainian fighters for the civilian deaths.

While details are still emerging about Bucha and investigations are under way, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy alleged that Russia had tortured and killed more than 300 civilians in the area and said in remarks to the UN Security Council that Kyiv has irrefutable evidence to support its claims.

Why It Matters: Chinas state-run media have pushed Russias narrative of the invasion to audiences at home and abroad, and Bucha is the latest test for Beijings support.

Prior to news of the killings, I surveyed a group of leading experts about how they viewed the relationship between Beijing and Moscow after more than a month of war. Those insights resonate in the aftermath of the killings.

Steve Tsang of SOAS University London told me that China and Russia are wedded together for the time being because the reality is that Chinas policy is dictated by [President] Xi [Jinping] and he supports Putin.

Yurii Poita, head of the Asia-Pacific Section at the Kyiv-based Center for Army, Conversion, and Disarmament Studies, told me that while the Ukrainian government is looking to maintain friendly relations with Beijing, Chinas backing of Russia has deeply hurt the countrys perception in Ukraine, both with the public and behind-the-scenes politically.

In the [Ukrainian] expert community, it is believed that China -- with its tacit consent for Moscows war -- also bears its share of responsibility for the Russian invasion and even that Chinas lack of condemnation of the Kremlins actions indicates an indirect support for Russias war crimes.

Read More

 Russias Defense Ministry said that all Russian units withdrew completely from Bucha around March 30 and could therefore not be responsible for any atrocities, but an analysis of satellite images by The New York Times rebuts those claims, showing that many of the civilians were killed more than three weeks ago. Read it here.

 I interviewed the Brookings Institutions Jessica Brandt about whether Russia will start to borrow from Chinas online censorship controls and how the two governments are pushing similar disinformation narratives for different ends.

Expert Corner: China's Afghanistan Diplomacy

Readers asked: China hosted a series of meetings about Afghanistan last week with representatives from Russia, the United States, the Taliban, and South and Central Asian countries. Whats behind Beijings diplomacy?

To find out more, I asked Giulia Sciorati, a fellow at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies:

With the Ukraine crisis making the international system even more unstable, China is looking at other hot spots of instability that might emerge. So the Afghanistan meetings that China sponsored are actually a signal of where Beijings worries currently are.

Afghanistan is very troublesome for Beijing. Its geographically close to China and its security situation could spill over. The future of the country is far from resolved following the chaotic U.S. withdrawal in August 2021, and Afghanistan is directly tied to former Soviet states in the region that might also be facing some sort of instability following Russias invasion of Ukraine.

"The meeting is a way to assess the situation in Afghanistan, but also an opportunity to use the country as a shared issue to create dialogue and bring everyone to a shared table at a time when all these countries are very divided and relations are tense.

Do you have a question about Chinas growing footprint in Eurasia? Send it to me at StandishR@rferl.org or reply directly to this e-mail and Ill get it answered by leading experts and policymakers.

Three More Stories From Eurasia

1. To The Viktor Go The Spoils

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party won a major victory in April 3 elections.

The vote and its aftermath has many story threads, from potential voting irregularities to the future of Hungarian democracy, as my colleague Andy Heil explains here. But one big takeaway is that Beijing will retain a friendly outpost inside the European Union.

What It Means: Peter Marki-Zay, Orbans opposition challenger in the election, had pledged to shake up the countrys warm relationship with China and take aim at some controversial Chinese-funded projects in the country.

With Orban once again firmly embedded in Budapest, those projects are now safe. The big question is what kind of new projects could be in store and how Hungary and Chinas relationship will evolve.

With Beijings relations with Brussels increasingly frayed, Orban is perhaps more important to China as a partner than ever and could continue to exploit the EUs requirement for unanimity in crafting foreign policy to block some critical moves against China.

Beijing could also become increasingly important for Orban. The prime minister also toes a pro-Moscow line and has been critical of Zelenskiy throughout the campaign, which has angered Western partners far and wide. China was already an attractive source of investment for Budapest, and that could grow.

Another big question is what happens with Fudan University's Budapest campus, which sparked protests in 2021 over the governments plans to finance the project with taxpayer funds. Orban had previously said the project would get put to a vote and the campuss future looked tenuous, but with few obstacles now to his agenda the university could become a reality.

2. Not Business As Usual

China and the EU held a tense summit on April 1, in which Brussels looked to warn Beijing that there will be consequences if it provides aid to Russia amid its invasion of Ukraine, as I reported here.

But while China assured the EU that it would seek peace in Ukraine, it said this would be on its own terms.

What You Need To Know: Ties between Beijing and Brussels were already delicate, but Beijings alignment with Russia during its war in Ukraine has undercut its relations with the EU.

At the summit, the European strategy was to make it clear to China that more outright support for Russia would come at the expense of its wider relationship with the EU.

As Chinas largest trading market, the EU believes it has leverage to push this and was betting that Beijing would not want to jeopardize that relationship while also facing headwinds from a growing COVID outbreak inside China, a financial crisis in the countrys property sector, and a crucial Communist Party congress in the fall at which Xi is looking to extend his rule.

Beijings official comments about the summit showed that it was looking to deflect pressure for a tougher stance toward Russia, while EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said "this was not exactly a dialogue, maybe a dialogue of the deaf when describing the summit.

3. Khan In The Hot Seat

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khans political future is hanging in the balance, with Pakistans Supreme Court weighing in on the legality of his attempt to block a no-confidence vote to oust him, my colleagues at RFE/RLs Gandhara reported.

The Takeaway: The political crisis will have big ramifications for China, which has invested heavily in Pakistan as the flagship area for its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Khan lost his parliamentary majority last week and had been facing a no-confidence vote brought forward by a united opposition.

But the deputy speaker of the National Assembly, Qasim Suri, a member of Khans Tehrik-e Insaf (PTI) party, rejected the motion as unconstitutional and part of a foreign conspiracy.

Khan had claimed that the no-confidence motion was an attack against him by the United States in retaliation for his close relations with Russia and China -- an accusation that Washington has rejected.

While the courts ruling could have major repercussions for Pakistani domestic politics, the result of the turmoil is unlikely to cause Beijing to lose out. Pakistans staggering economy needs Chinese investment, and China has a strong relationship with the countrys military that provides continuity beyond the shifting political class.

Across The Supercontinent

Disinformation In Serbia: Both Russian and Chinese officials have pushed narratives about the United States funding biological weapons at labs in Ukraine, but some online conspiracy theories have also spread a narrative about U.S. labs in Serbia.

My colleagues Mila Durdevic and Miljana Miletic looked into the origins of the theories and spoke with Serbian officials who denied that any such labs exist in the country.

A Footprint: Niva Yau penned a recent study for the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) about Chinas evolving security engagement with Central Asia, which has been -- and still is -- mostly centered around Chinese concerns over Xinjiang.

A Food Crisis? Russia and Ukraine account for roughly 30 percent of global wheat exports, while Russia is the world's top exporter of fertilizer. With the Ukraine war showing no signs of slowing down, there are growing worries that it could spark a global food emergency.

To find out more, I spoke with Alex Smith, a food and agriculture analyst at the U.S.-based Breakthrough Institute.

Making Lemonade: Bloomberg reports that Chinese gas buyers are preparing to buy cheap Russian fuel that will be entering the market at a deep discount.

Yes, But: Elsewhere, Chinese companies are proceeding with extreme caution to avoid getting entangled by U.S. sanctions.

China's state-run Sinopec Group suspended talks for a major petrochemical investment and gas-marketing venture in Russia at the end of March, according to Reuters, and the South China Morning Post reported that Chinese companies are wary about being too exposed to the Russian market.

One Thing To Watch

There are also signs that Beijings diplomatic flurry around Afghanistan could lead to some interesting breakthroughs, including potentially recognizing the Taliban.

Russia recently accredited the first diplomat appointed by Afghanistan's Taliban government in Moscow, and Beijing has been particularly active in the country in the last few weeks, hosting a regional conference, and sending a surprise delegation to Kabul, where it signaled a desire to get back to business as usual in the country.

Beijing rarely likes to go it alone, and the Russian move could lead to more from Afghanistans neighbors. While theres no time line on such matters, its another sign that China is inching toward recognition of the Taliban.

Thats all from me for now. Dont forget to send me any questions, comments, or tips that you might have.

Until next time,

Reid Standish

If you enjoyed this briefing and don't want to miss the next edition, subscribe here. It will be sent to your in-box on the first and third Wednesdays of each month.
At least 50 Ukrainian civilians were evacuated from the besieged Azovstal steel plant amid the ruins of Mariupol, even as Russia continued to batter the strategic port city, Ukrainian officials said.

"Today we were able to evacuate from Azovstal 50 women, children, and elderly people," Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said on May 6 on her Telegram channel.



Vereshchuk added that, in the face of Russian attacks, the evacuation was extremely slowtomorrow morning we will continue the evacuation operation."

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the major developments on Russia's invasion, how Kyiv is fighting back, the plight of civilians, and Western reaction. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war, click here.

The United Nations has scrambled to broker a deal to help evacuate some of the 200 civilians who are holed up along with an estimated 2,000 Ukrainian fighters in the massive Azovstal steel plant, one of the largest in Europe.



Ukrainian officials have accused Russian forces of disrupting an agreed evacuation process by firing on vehicles attempting to transport people out of the plant.



Russia confirmed that some 50 people had been evacuated but did not comment on Ukrainian allegations of attacks on those leaving.



Throughout the day, Russian forces continued their assault on the sprawling steel factory against the Ukrainian fighters holding out there.

Ukraine's General Staff said in its daily assessment on May 6 that Russians were using aircraft as part of the renewed assault on the plant.

"There are many wounded, but they are not surrendering," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on May 5 in his nightly video address. "They are holding their positions."

Mariupol itself has been largely razed to the ground by weeks of street-to-street fighting and heavy bombardment. Azovstal has turned into a last stand for the Ukrainians troops struggling to prevent a complete Russian defeat of the city.

Zelenskiy said that, if Russian forces killed civilians or troops who could otherwise be released, his government would no longer hold peace talks with Moscow.



He said there was basically nothing left of the once-flourishing port city, only "this little turf, this little structure, the Azovstal steel mill, or what remains of it."

The fight for Azovstal also comes amid speculation that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants a battlefield triumph that he can showcase on May 9 when Russia marks Victory Day -- the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany.

"The renewed effort by Russia to secure Azovstal and complete the capture of Mariupol is likely linked to the upcoming 9 May Victory Day commemorations and Putin's desire to have a symbolic success in Ukraine," the British Defense Ministry said in its May 6 daily assessment.

"This effort has come at personnel, equipment, and munitions cost to Russia. Whilst Ukrainian resistance continues in Azovstal, Russian losses will continue to build and frustrate their operational plans in southern Donbas," the ministry said.

Losing Mariupol would deprive Ukraine of a vital port on the Sea of Azov. It would also give Russia the ability to establish a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula and free up troops to fight elsewhere in the Donbas.

The Ukrainians holed up in Azovstal's labyrinthine tunnels and industrial infrastructure have been posting videos and photographs to social media, appealing to the international community.

Soldiers are "dying in agony" due to the lack of proper treatment, Captain Svyatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the Azov Battalion, said in a video address on May 5. He pleaded for international help to evacuate the civilians and wounded fighters there.

Andriy Yermak, a top adviser to Zelenskiy, said on May 6 that nearly 500 civilians had been evacuated from the city and the Azovstal plant as part of a United Nations-led effort.



"The next stage of rescuing our people from Azovstal is under way at the moment. Information about the results will be provided later," Yermak said in a post on Telegram on May 6. Kyiv will "do everything to save all its civilians and military."

The fighting comes as Russia continues its offensive in the eastern Donbas, an offensive that has proceeded slowly and without major advances, as Ukrainian forces have blocked Russian movements and even regained territory.



Ukrainian forces have been increasingly equipped with heavy artillery and powerful anti-tank and antiaircraft weaponry supplied from NATO members.

Germany, which has come under pressure at home and abroad to step up its equipment supplies, said on May 6 that it would supply seven self-propelled howitzers to Ukraine after reversing its policy not to send heavy armaments to war zones.



Earlier, Berlin announced it would also be sending "Gepard" antiaircraft systems.



The Donbas offensive came after a thwarted campaign by Russian forces north of Kyiv in the early weeks of the war. The withdrawal of Russian troops from places like Bucha, near Kyiv, has led to a cascade of reports from witnesses who say Russian units committed atrocities that could amount to war crimes.



Rights watchdog Amnesty International said on May 6 there was compelling evidence that Russian troops had committed war crimes, including extrajudicial executions of civilians, when they occupied an area outside Ukraine's capital in February and March. Civilians also suffered abuses such as "reckless shootings and torture, the group said.



Russian troops had committed a "host of apparent war crimes" in Bucha, including "numerous unlawful killings," most of them near the intersection of Yablunska and Vodoprovidna streets, the report found.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service and AP
European Council chief Charles Michel says the European Union will need to slap sanctions on Russian energy such as oil and gas "sooner or later," as the bloc looks to ramp up pressure on Moscow in the face of reports of war atrocities being committed in Ukraine by Russian troops.



"I think that measures on oil and even gas will also be needed sooner or later," Michel told the European Parliament in an address on April 6.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the major developments on Russia's invasion, how Kyiv is fighting back, the plight of civilians, and Western reaction. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war, click here.

Michel urged European lawmakers to consider such moves, aimed at Moscow's main source of income, after he said reports of war crimes being committed by Russian troops in towns such as Bucha were "yet more proof that Russian brutality against the people of Ukraine has no limits."



Russian news agencies reported that the state-owned energy giant Gazprom continued to supply natural gas to Europe via Ukraine on April 6, in line with its contracts. Requests stood at 108.4 million cubic meters for April 6, similar to volumes on the previous day, the Interfax news agency reported, citing the operator of Ukraine's gas pipelines.



The United States and its European allies are expected to impose harsh new sanctions on Russia on April 6 in a move aimed at increasing Russias economic and technological isolation as a penalty for its attacks on civilians in Ukraine.



The joint action will include new sanctions on financial institutions, a ban on new investment in Russia, toughened sanctions on government-owned enterprises, and more sanctions on Russian government officials and their family members, according to the White House.

The biggest part of our objective here is to deplete the resources that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has to continue his war against Ukraine, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on April 5.



The U.S. Treasury Department already took steps on April 5 to make it harder for Russia to meet its financial obligations by blocking any Russian government debt payments with U.S. dollars from accounts at U.S. financial institutions.



Britain announced it has frozen some $350 billion in assets from Putin's "war chest" so far. Foreign Minister Liz Truss said that this makes more than 60 percent of Russias $604 billion in currency reserves unavailable.



The EU said a fifth package of measures that it announced targets oil and coal exports and bars Russian ships from European ports.

WATCH: A children's summer camp in Ukraine is the site of another grisly atrocity. In a basement, there were bodies with their hands tied behind their backs and bullet holes in their heads. The Ukrainian authorities said it was a war crime committed by Russian forces.



The actions come as evidence of atrocities committed by Russian troops continues to pile up. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told the UN Security Council on April 5 that Russian troops had committed some of the worst war crimes since World War II and urged the council to hold Moscow accountable.



Much of the focus has been on Bucha, a town near Kyiv where Russian forces were positioned until their withdrawal late last week. People there said they witnessed brutal killings and torture, and evidence has emerged of mass graves and the indiscriminate targeting of civilians.



Russian Ambassador to the UN Vasily Nebenzya said that while Bucha was under Russian control not a single local person has suffered from any violent action. Reiterating the Kremlins previous statements, he said videos showing bodies in the streets were a crude forgery staged by the Ukrainians.



You only saw what they showed you, he said. The only ones who would fall for this are Western dilettantes.



Zelenskiy said the events in Bucha will make even the possibility of peace talks with Russia a challenge.

WATCH: Russian troops allegedly shot a 72-year-old professor when he tried to defend his home and protect neighbors in the Kyiv suburb of Irpin. Yevhen Khrykov was killed after Russian forces found him and about a dozen neighbors sheltering in a basement, according to his widow.



Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the West of fueling "hysteria" over alleged Russian war crimes as a way to derail negotiations. Several rounds of talks so far have yielded no deal.



Lavrov said that Moscow wont accept a Ukrainian demand that any prospective peace deal include an immediate pullout of troops followed by a Ukrainian referendum on the agreement.



In televised remarks, he said a new deal would have to be negotiated if the vote failed, and we dont want to play such cat-and-mouse.



Western military officials say Russian forces that have pulled back from the area around Kyiv are now regrouping for deployment in eastern and southern Ukraine. Fresh battles are expected in the region commonly known as the Donbas, where Russia-backed separatists already hold territory.

With reporting by AP, Reuters, and RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service
The former CIA director and commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, David Petraeus, says that Ukraine is at a "pivotal" and "perilous" moment and that Eastern European countries could do more to provide Ukraine with weapons and supplies.

Speaking to RFE/RL's Balkan Service from New York on April 5, the retired general said that how Ukraine fared would depend "on how well we do, and 'we' means not just the United States, but all of the NATO nations put together and especially, frankly, those Eastern Europeans countries that have the air defenses, the multiple-launch rocket systems, the artillery, and the munitions...that are compatible with what Ukraine has."

The Pentagon announced on April 2 that it will provide $300 million worth of military supplies, including drones, machine guns, and armored vehicles, to Ukraine. The Pentagon said it had already committed more than $1.6 billion worth of security assistance, including antiaircraft Stinger missiles and anti-tank weapons, since Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on February 24.

Military experts have said that what Ukraine needs greatly is weapons, parts, and supplies that are compatible with Soviet-era technology. Some Western military technology can be hard to operate for Ukrainians without extensive training, plus spare parts are not readily available for repairs.

"The Ukrainians are fighting very effectively, very heroically, with enormous resourcefulness, creativity, courage, and effectiveness, and what we need to do is to help them," Petraeus said. "Eastern European countries should be scouring their own defense stocks and providing anything they have to Ukraine that would be useful."

In a Twitter thread on April 2, Mark Hertling, a former lieutenant general who commanded the U.S. Army in Europe, said that it made sense to transfer Soviet-era heavy weaponry, for example T-72 tanks, which Ukrainian forces would know well.

On April 5, the London-based Financial Times reported that the Czech Republic had been sending tanks, including Soviet-designed T-72s, and infantry fighting vehicles to Ukraine for several weeks. The Czech Republic was reportedly the first NATO country to deliver heavy weaponry to Ukraine.

In the interview with RFE/RL, Petraeus also spoke about the magnitude of Russia's military failure in Ukraine. "They failed. Ukraine has won the battle of Kyiv," he said. "They have also won the battles of Chernihiv in the far north and then Sumy in the northeast."

After Petraeus commanded the 101st Airborne Division following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, he led the coalition's military effort during the surge in 2007 and 2008, when the United States deployed an extra 20,000 troops. He said the "surge" was "the most important endeavor -- and greatest challenge -- of my 37 years in uniform.

"I cannot imagine having lost 15,000 soldiers in five weeks. It's staggering," Petraeus said about Russian troop losses, the exact numbers of which are not known. Ukraine says that Russia has lost more than 18,000 combatants in the war, whereas Western countries, including the United States, put the losses at around 10,000. The Russian authorities have reported their losses as a fraction of those numbers.

As to why Russian forces have been bogged down or forced to retreat in some parts of Ukraine, Petraeus said that Russia's "Achilles' heel" was "their lack of what might be termed expeditionary logistics. In other words, once they are away from a rail system or a port, their logistics are very, very modest."

He said that the Russian armed forces are tied to their railway system in Russia. "Once they leave it, as we saw, they are wholly inadequate in the provisions that they provided for their forces when it comes to food, fuel, and ammunition, medical evacuation, and all the rest of it," he said.

With multiple reports of atrocities in Ukraine allegedly committed by Russian troops, Petraeus said it was very clear that war crimes have been committed. "If they [Ukrainians] didn't hate Russia before, then they certainly do now because of the horrific way they [Russian forces] have treated the people," he said.

Most notably, the world's attention has focused on Bucha, a town near Kyiv where Russian forces were positioned until their withdrawal late last week. Eyewitness accounts from Bucha say that civilians were brutally killed and tortured and there is evidence of mass graves.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told the UN Security Council on April 5 that Russian troops had committed some of the worst war crimes since World War II and urged the council to hold Moscow accountable.

"I am sure we will find much more on a much greater scale in Mariupol eventually and some of the other cities that the Russians are leaving," Petraeus said.

After commanding U.S. forces in Iraq, Petraeus assumed command of U.S. Central Command in 2008-10, before going on to lead U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan. He was sworn in as director of the CIA in September 2011, but stepped down in November 2012.

While Petraeus said he couldn't imagine U.S. forces getting involved with "boots on the ground or actual military forces," he said that "we are approaching a moment that might be termed a Srebrenica moment," referring to the 1995 massacre in Bosnia-Herzegovina where 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces.

"Remember that the U.S. did not get involved with Bosnia until Srebrenica happened. And again, the moral outrage around the world was so great, the U.S. was finally compelled to take action. I'm not implying that the U.S. would take direct military action, but I think we would tear apart every supply chain that feeds any Russian industry and sanction every element of it."
Roman and Leonid Butusin were born in Vladivostok, in Russia's Far East, but both died fighting for the Ukrainian Army against Russian invaders. At their funeral, people knelt on the street in a mark of respect. "They were real Ukrainians," said one mourner. Their father moved the family to Ukraine in 2014, feeling disgusted by Russia's seizure of Crimea and support for separatists in the country's eastern Donbas region. Also a soldier, at the funeral he said he would soon be returning to the front line.
(diamonds.net) - On March 11, the US government banned imports of Russian diamonds. The sanctions extend to rough from Russia and stones cut and polished in the country. They do not include goods that were mined in Russia and polished elsewhere, which accounts for most of Russian supply. Many have understandably been calling for a blanket boycott of all Russian diamonds, or to label them as conflict or blood diamonds. However, according to the classic definition, these goods cannot be labeled as conflict diamonds as they are not funding a rebel movement engaged in civil war. Theyre also not stained by torture or human-rights violations carried out at a mine site. For now, the diamonds are simply sanctioned in the US. But the crisis certainly constitutes an ethical dilemma for the industry.
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Mai Tram
Indirect supply line

Russia and Ukraine are not major partners for the export and import of wood products from Vietnam. In 2021, Vietnam's wood imports from Russia only reached around USD 55 mn, a very small volume equivalent to 2% of the total import turnover of Vietnam's wood materials from all sources. The export of wood and wood products from Vietnam to the Russian market are even more modest. In 2021, the export turnover of Vietnam's wood and wood products to Russia only reached about USD 7.3 mn, equivalent to 0.05% of the total export turnover of Vietnam's wood and furniture items to the world market. Exports and imports of Vietnam's wood to Ukraine are also very modest.

Although the wood export market is low, there is concern about the negative impact of the Russia-Ukraine conflict on domestic wood enterprises. The first is in the supply of raw materials. Although Vietnam is not a country that directly imports a lot of wood materials from Russia, it is not small in importing raw materials indirectly through the intermediary markets. Currently, China is the largest market for importing wood materials from Russia, with imports to China accounting for around 50% of Russia's total annual exports of logs and sawn timber. After importing from Russia, Chinese wood enterprises then process and export to other markets, including Vietnam.

For many years, wood originating from Russia has been imported to Vietnam through China, mainly in the form of lumber and veneer products, accounting for a large proportion of the total amount of imported wood materials. On an average, each year Vietnam imports over 70,000 cubic meters of sawn timber and nearly 200,000 cubic meters of veneer from China, including birch, yellow maple, oak, and pine, originating from Russia. In 2021, veneer from birch wood imported into Vietnam reached more than 120,000 cubic meters, accounting for 89% of the total amount of veneer imported into Vietnam in that year. Vietnam's wood industry depends on input materials from China and Russia so much that there have been warnings about dire consequences.

According to Mr. Do Xuan Lap, Chairman of the Vietnam Timber and Forest Products Association, China is currently one of the three most important markets for Vietnam's wood industry, along with the US and EU, in terms of both supply and demand. On an average each year, the bilateral trade turnover of Vietnam and China in wood products reaches about USD 2 bn, with the trade balance in favor of Vietnam. However, the size of the surplus is gradually shrinking, when the export turnover of Vietnam's wood products to the Chinese market shows signs of declining or even a slight decrease from 2020 to now, while the import turnover of wood products into Vietnam from this market is increasing very strongly. However, most of the raw materials for the wood industry that Vietnamese enterprises import from China come from Russia.

Supply shortage

Russia is one country with an extremely large area under natural forests, about 815 mn hectares, nearly 60 times larger than the current forest area of Vietnam. Russia's annual logging volume is about 200 mn cubic meters, equivalent to 10% of the global supply. Every year, Russia exports about 15 mn cubic meters of logs, accounting for 12% of the global volume of logs. Russia is also the largest supplier of sawn timber in the world and ranks 7th in export turnover of wood products. In 2021, Russia's export turnover of wood and wood products reached about USD 12.3 bn, which mainly were wood materials. Russia also exports over 30 mn tons of logs and sawn timber every year.

The Russia-Ukraine conflict may shrink the supply of wood materials from Russia, creating a shortage of wood materials on a global scale in the future. In the short term, part of this shortfall can be offset by an increase in existing supplies from the EU and the US, which have similar timber species as Russia. However, the shortage in supply can create competition between countries importing raw wood, including Vietnam. Vietnam depends on imported raw materials, to the tune of five to six mn cubic meters of logs per year.

According to Dr. To Xuan Phuc, an expert at Forest Trends Vietnam, in the furniture export market of Vietnam, Russia is a very small market. However, Vietnam is a big wood furniture exporter, but depends a lot on imported raw materials. Therefore, the wood industry trade between Vietnam and Russia is tilted towards importing wood materials from China. If the Russia-Ukraine conflict lasts longer, the wood supply from Russia, with an annual supply of nearly 40 million tons of raw materials, will be lost. There is a shortage in the supply of raw wood while the consumer demand for wood products continues to increase, pushing up the price of raw wood materials, creating fierce competition for all raw materials.

The current Russia-Ukraine conflict has led to a negative impact on the domestic wood enterprises as the price of input materials has begun to increase. It is possible that Vietnamese enterprises will have to compete more fiercely with businesses from other countries for imported wood materials, especially in the important wood supply markets for Vietnam such as the EU and the US. In addition, the price of imported wood materials has increased, reducing the competitive advantage of domestic enterprises in the international arena. Shortage of supply from Russia may also create a new demand for many timber species to be replaced in the future.

Hoang Son


Tuesday, April 19, 7 p.m., LeRoux Conference Center (STCN 160)

American Sign Language interpretation provided

REGISTER HERE

Tickets: $40. Each paid ticket includes admission to the event and a signed copy of her book.

Update (April 8, 2022): Valerie Biden Owens tested positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday after experiencing mild symptoms. She is fully vaccinated and boosted, will isolate at home for five days following CDC recommendations and anticipates returning to her book tour upon testing negative.

This event will move online. You will receive your copy of Growing Up Biden by mail from Elliott Bay Book Company.

You will receive the Zoom link by email a few days prior to the event. Live captioning will be provided.

While we are disappointed that we will not gather in person, we are looking forward to the conversation with Valerie Biden Owens and Dr. Jeannette Rodriguez.

ABOUT THE BOOK: Biden Owens, one of the first female campaign managers in United States history, writes of the role of family, faith, and fate in shaping her life, and the power of empathy and kindness in the face of turmoil and division.

Growing Up Biden details Biden Owens' decades-long professional career in politics, and the central role she played in her brothers life as an insightful adviser, an ever-loyal advocate and best friend.

This memoir, full of candor and warmth, brings readers into the Biden home and shares stories from growing up in Delaware as the only daughter of the close-knit Irish Catholic family. Biden Owens writes in a compelling, relatable way about the challenges she faced breaking through gender barriers, the elusive nature of confidence and navigating professional responsibilities while raising children.

As a campaign manager, senior adviser or chief surrogate for every one of her brothers campaigns, Biden Owens has been an integral part of Joe Bidens success, and a profound influence in his life. Her stories of their close-knit Irish Catholic family are deeply moving and funny at the same time. As one of the first women to run major political campaigns, she has been much more than an eyewitness to historyshes been an important part of it.  Donna Brazile

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Valerie Biden Owens is the first woman in U.S. history to have run a presidential campaignthat of her brother, Joseph R. Biden, Jr. She also led his seven straight U.S. Senate victories and has been his principal surrogate on the campaign trail.

Biden Owens is vice chair of the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware and a partner at Owens Patrick Leadership Seminars. She sits on the Advisory Board of the Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children. For 20 years, when Biden Owens was not managing or advising President Bidens campaigns, she served as Executive Vice President of Joe Slade White & Co., a media consulting firm. She has worked extensively with Womens Campaign International, teaching women how to organize and develop communication and political skills. Biden Owens has also served on the National Board of the Womens Leadership Forum of the Democratic National Committee and has served for 35 years on the board of The Ministry of Caring. She is a graduate of the University of Delaware. She is married to Jack Owens, an attorney and businessman. They have three children.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Jeanette Rodriguez, PhD, is a professor at Seattle University and teaches in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies and the Couples and Family Therapy Program. She serves as Director of the Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture and holds the Malcolm and Mari Stamper Endowed Chair in Catholic Intellectual and Cultural Traditions. Rodriguez is the author of several books and articles concentrated in the areas of U.S. Hispanic theology, theologies of liberation, peacebuilding and womens spirituality.
During jury selection in a murder trial, a Los Angeles County prosecutor tested prospective jurors with a hypothetical: Suppose a mother and her 5-year-old son were at a swimming pool, mom had to leave for a few minutes, and when she returned she saw her son covered with water and wet footprints leading to the pool. What happened?

Hed stepped into the pool, the jury prospects answered, though a few offered alternatives. Maybe someone had turned the sprinklers on, or something else could have happened, said Juror 8061. When the prosecutor asked her what the reasonable answer was, she replied that the boy had been in the pool.

When it was time to whittle down the field, the prosecutor used five of his eight allotted challenges to remove Black women, including Juror 8061. When the defense lawyer claimed racial bias, the prosecutor said Juror 8061 had given him pushback and shown herself to be a juror who thinks of other possible answers away from the facts  an explanation the trial judge found properly race-neutral.

A state appeals court saw it otherwise this week and ordered a new trial for Salvador Solorio Salinas, sentenced to 15 years to life in 2020 for second-degree murder in the fatal beating of a man who was having an affair with Salinas wife.

The jurors dismissal is more likely than not attributable to unconstitutional discrimination, Justice Lamar Baker said in Mondays 2-1 ruling.

He said some white prospective jurors had given more combative answers and were not challenged by the prosecutor. Another Black panel member, who said at one point, I can think for myself, was removed by the prosecutor, who described her response as aggressive.

And Juror 8061s background showed no obvious drawbacks for the prosecution, Baker said: She was a recruiting trainer for a financial services company, her best friend was a security guard, her grandfather was a retired Los Angeles police officer, and she knew many officers through her work as an auto broker.

Though both state and federal law bar removal of any juror for racial reasons, courts rarely overturn convictions on those grounds, giving broad deference to prosecutors non-racial explanations for jury challenges.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

But in this case, Baker said, while the jury that was seated for Salinas case may have had one or more Black members  the record wasnt entirely clear  the prosecutors pattern of dismissals, and the trial judges approval with little explanation or discussion, led to the conclusion that the stated reason for removing Juror 8061 was obviously pretextual and the real motivation was her race.

Presiding Justice Laurence Rubin joined his opinion. Justice Dorothy Kim dissented, saying the court should have accepted the trial judges assessment that the challenge was nonracial.

District Attorney George Gascons office said it was reviewing the ruling and declined to further comment. Gascon, who was not in office when the trial took place, could ask state lawyers to seek review in the state Supreme Court.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
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A rope tied into a noose and placed in a tree was discovered at American High School in Fremont on Tuesday, prompting school officials to condemn the act and police to search for the person or people responsible.

Fremont Unified School District Superintendent C.J. Cammack labeled the noose a symbol of hate and violence and said the school district is working with the Fremont Police Department to identify whoever is responsible. He said that the perpetrator would face discipline from the school district to the fullest extent of our authority and that the district would pursue any criminal charges recommended by police.
A divided Supreme Court, without explanation, reinstated Trump administration rules Wednesday that stopped states and tribes from regulating or blocking pipelines and other federally authorized power projects that could pollute their waters. The courts order was opposed by environmentalists and a group of states led by California.

The justices voted 5-4 to suspend a ruling issued last October, by U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco, that halted enforcement of the September 2020 regulations from President Donald Trumps Environmental Protection Agency. Those rules, now back in effect, prohibited state and tribal governments from using their water laws to regulate discharges from pipelines, mines and other energy production or transmission, regulations that have barred some projects altogether.

The federal government had authorized state regulation of energy-project water pollution in 1971, two years after a burst offshore oil well spilled 3 million gallons of crude oil into the waters off Santa Barbara, and an oil slick several months later caught fire on the Cuyahoga River in Ohio. President Bidens EPA is working on rules to expressly restore state and tribal authority, but they will not take effect until sometime next spring.

Alsups ruling was challenged by oil and natural gas industry groups, companies producing hydroelectric power from dams and reservoirs and eight Republican-led states. LeRoy Coleman, spokesperson for the National Hydropower Association, said Wednesdays ruling was a step forward for safe energy production.

Hydropower projects often languish for years awaiting a state decision on the water certification, and those certifications often contain license conditions that are completely unrelated to water quality, Coleman said.

But Moneem Nasmith, an attorney with the nonprofit Earthjustice organization representing environmental groups, said the court had intervened in ongoing legal proceedings without any showing of a need for immediate action.

We will ask the EPA to restore the balance that the Trump rule has knocked out, with adequate state authority to test water quality, said Nasmith, whose clients included the Sierra Club, Columbia Riverkeeper and several Native American tribes. Other environmental groups also urged the court to maintain state authority, along with California, 19 other states and the District of Columbia.

State Attorney General Rob Bonta also expressed disappointment at the Supreme Courts decision. After Alsup restored state regulatory powers authority last fall, Bonta, noting that California was going through its driest year in nearly a century, said states rely on their longstanding authority under federal law to safeguard our precious resources by ensuring that federal projects meet the state's robust water quality requirements.

In his Oct. 21 ruling, Alsup said the Trump administrations rules conflicted with the goals of the 1972 federal Clean Water Act. He quoted an accompanying congressional declaration that said, It is the policy of the Congress to recognize, preserve, and protect the primary responsibilities and rights of States to prevent, reduce, and eliminate pollution, [and] to plan the development and use ... of land and water resources.

Industry groups and the eight states appealed to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where the case is still pending. But when the court denied a stay of Alsups order Feb. 24, the same groups sought intervention by the nations high court.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

Without holding a hearing, the court majority granted a stay in a brief order Wednesday, with votes from Justices Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas. The only written opinion was a dissent by Justice Elena Kagan, joined by fellow liberal Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor and Chief Justice John Roberts.

The industry groups claim that the (pre-2020) rule gave them protections against states that previously abuse[d] their statutory authority to review infrastructure projects for compliance w/water quality standards.  but they havent identified a single project that the states have obstructed since Alsups decision, or any that the ruling threatens or is likely to threaten before the appellate process concludes, Kagan said.

She noted that the majority had issued its ruling under the courts increasingly common emergency docket, also known as the shadow docket, which allows the justices to issue decisions with little briefing and no oral arguments. Wednesdays decision, Kagan said, showed that the docket is not for emergencies at all.

The case is Louisiana vs. American Rivers, 21A539.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
The Daily Californian faces its latest and most dire existential threat this week as students are being asked to vote themselves a $6 per semester fee to keep the student-run and independent newspaper in business, after 150 years.

A Save the Daily Cal Initiative is being voted on this week as part of the campus-wide election for officers to the Associated Students of the University of California. A simple majority is needed to pass, but the tougher hurdle is that it requires 20 percent of the student body to vote, either online or in person. A similar election last year failed to achieve the 20 percent threshold, but that was during COVID-19 when the campus was largely closed.

If the fee initiative doesnt pass, the Daily Californian as we know it will cease to exist, said Jasper Kenzo Sundeen, editor in chief and president. Without student support, the newspaper wont be able to give the community its news.

The Daily Cal, as it is commonly known, is independent of university authority, as is its rival, the Stanford Daily. The Daily Cal office is off campus, and the paper receives no direct university funding other than from its students, bolstered by alumni and philanthropic support. The news department covers both the UC Berkeley campus and the city of Berkeley and is free both online and in print, with 8,000 broadsheet copies circulated on news racks throughout the city.

If the fee passes, the initiative will raise about $400,000 per year for five years. The print edition traditionally comes out four mornings a week but had to cut back to weekly when COVID-19 wiped out the local advertising base. The hope is to return it to two or three print editions per week. The staff of 60 is paid a monthly stipend, but hundreds of staff contributors volunteer their time as reporters, photographers and designers. For the last decade, the Daily Cal has been funded by student fees, having passed two similar fee initiatives. The current rate is $2.75 per semester, but the funding expires at the end of the school year.

The annual budget is $490,000, covered one third by student fees, one third by advertising and one third by philanthropy. The budget has been cut in half in the last decade and by one-third since Sundeen joined the staff as a freshman, three years ago. The paper has been in print since 1871.

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The Daily Californian still stands for free speech of student voices, Sundeen said. When you lose that, you open yourself up to a lot of change that students might not be aware of.

Voting in the ASUC election ends Wednesday. Election results are expected to be announced later this week.

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @samwhitingsf
A mother fox that was captured after biting several people this week  likely including a Northern California lawmaker  has been killed, according to local health officials.

The fox tested positive for the rabies virus, local health officials said.

DC Health said in an email the fox was responsible for nine confirmed bites Tuesday on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

The wild animal tested positive for the rabies virus, and local health officials were notifying all victims who were bitten by the fox, a health department spokesperson said in an email.

Now Playing: Capitol Hill has a fox problem. And it's not the lead-in to a joke. (April 5) Video: Associated Press

Local law enforcement officials said at least six people reported being bitten near the Capitol in the last two days, including Rep. Ami Bera, D-Elk Grove (Sacramento County).

Bera said he was walking toward the Capitol on Monday evening when he felt something lunge at his ankle. He looked down expecting to see a small dog and used an umbrella to fend off what was actually a fox.

Its obviously a very weird event to happen, Bera told The Chronicle. I didnt know that there were foxes living on Capitol Hill.

Bera, who is a doctor himself, said on Twitter later that night that he was healthy and back at work. Bera is now receiving a series of rabies shots in the coming days, his spokesperson Travis Horne said in an email.

Foxes and other wild animals, such as skunks and raccoons, have been known to carry rabies and are often the main source of infection for humans in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. People can get the viral disease if they are bitten or scratched by infected animals.

Shortly after being bitten on Monday, Bera went to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after consulting with the Capitol physician. That night he received several vaccinations, including one shot against rabies and tetanus and five injections of immunoglobulin, Horne said.

The mother fox that was euthanized Wednesday was found that morning with her kits on Capitol Hill grounds, local officials said. A health department spokesperson said they were working on determining the next steps for the fox kits.

Its unclear whether the mother fox was the same animal that bit Bera, but local health officials said no other foxes were found in the area Wednesday.

While the congressman joked about his experience on Twitter, he reminded his followers that animal bites are extremely serious and encouraged people who have been bitten to see a physician.

He said he was sad to hear that the fox was euthanized, but I do want to keep the public safe.

Jessica Flores (she/her) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jessica.flores@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jesssmflores
Sacramento police said Wednesday that Sundays mass shooting was gang-related, and that investigators believe at least five people fired guns during the shooting.

The shootout between two groups in a crowded downtown corridor early Sunday left six people dead and 12 wounded  including one of three men who were arrested on suspicion of illegally possessing firearms following the shooting.

None of the three men arrested so far were booked on homicide charges but one faces charges of firing a gun during the shooting, police said.

The Police Department declined to elaborate on the gang affiliation of the individuals suspected to have been involved in the shooting in a statement released Wednesday, but said gangs and gang violence are inseparable from the events that drove these shootings.

This tragedy downtown is a very public example of what families in many of our neighborhoods know too well, Police Chief Kathy Lester said in a statement.

The suffering inflicted by gang violence does not limit itself to gang members. It spills over to claim and shatter innocent lives and harm our entire community, Lester said.

Police said the investigation was ongoing and that the number of identified shooters could grow beyond five people.

So far, three men have been arrested following the shooting on suspicion of illegal possession of a firearm: Daviyonne Dawson, 31; Smiley Martin, 27; and Dandrae Martin, 26. Dandrae Martin is also charged with suspicion of assault with a firearm in Sundays shooting.

Smiley and Dandrae are brothers, police said. Smiley suffered serious injuries from gunfire on Sunday and was under police supervision at a hospital Tuesday. Police said he will be booked into jail once his medical treatment is complete.

Dawson reportedly posted $500,000 bail and was released Tuesday, according to the Sacramento Bee, which cited an unnamed source.

Police said they have collected nearly 200 videos, photos and hundreds of items of evidence from the public and at the scene during the investigation. Among them were more than 100 shell casings and a stolen handgun modified to make it capable of firing as an automatic weapon. Police said they were investigating the stolen guns exact role in the shooting.

While law enforcement officials continue looking for answers in the complex investigation, families and community members were left mourning their loved ones who died in one of the deadliest mass shootings so far this year in the United States.

The horrific incident claimed the lives of six people, including two young women, three fathers, and a woman who had struggled with homelessness and was well-known among the downtown Sacramento community.

Their names are Johntaya Alexander, 21; Yamile Martinez-Andrade, 21; Devazia Turner, 29; Joshua Hoye-Lucchesi, 32; Sergio Harris, 38; and Melinda Davis, 57.

Jessica Flores (she/her) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jessica.flores@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jesssmflores
Welcome to the second installment of New in the East Bay, a monthly look at the latest restaurant and bar openings on this side of the Bay Bridge.

The region has seen plenty of action, with multiple new spots for intensely spicy fried chicken and a new lunch option from one of the founders of Oaklands popular Sequoia Diner. Beloved chains like Marugame Udon expanded in the region, and the East Bay finally got a new spot from the increasingly busy restaurant group behind hit ramen outfit Mensho Tokyo.

These openings join new restaurants The Chronicle has already visited and vetted for our monthly guide to the Bay Areas must-try new restaurants, which recently featured farm-to-table restaurant Pomet in Oakland and the Shizen teams new Tane Vegan Izakaya in Berkeley.

A beloved ramen chef comes to Union City

The team behind Mensho Tokyo, one of San Franciscos top ramen destinations, has expanded to Union City. First-time slurpers might want to start with the classic tori paitan, the creamy, chicken-based cousin of tonkotsu thats the most popular offering at Mensho Tokyo. On a second visit, try the spicy black garlic or lemony matcha variations. The restaurant also lets diners customize their bowls, choosing among pork chashu or spicy ground lamb, thin or thick noodles, and extras like fried garlic or a custardy egg. The Japan-born restaurant group by Tokyo ramen chef Tomoharu Shono arrived in San Francisco in 2016 with its Tenderloin shop, drawing huge lines for its rich broths and toothsome noodles. Since then, it has expanded with Menya Shono in San Rafael and Jikasei Mensho in San Franciscos Twitter building.

32165 Union Landing Blvd., Union City. 5-9 p.m. Wednesday to Sunday. 510-400-9257

Janelle Bitker / The Chronicle

Berkeley gets a hip salad bar

Tarocco, a breezy daytime restaurant with a sunny, Los Angeles vibe, is the answer to the sad desk lunches at home. Tarocco calls itself a salad bar, though the meaning of salad gets stretched here: Instead of leafy green-based salads, there might be options like roasted root vegetables with quinoa; sweet potatoes topped with cumin-lime yogurt; and simple white beans dressed in herb oil. Owner Sequoia Del Hoyo was also a co-founder of popular Oakland brunch spot Sequoia Diner.

2570 Ninth St., Berkeley. 9 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturday. mytarocco.com

Oaklands favorite Nashville-style hot chicken arrives in Walnut Creek

Ridiculously spicy fried chicken sandwiches are paired with hip-hop, old-school video games and street art in a former Mels Diner at the new World Famous Hotboys in Walnut Creek. Owners Victor Ghaben and Berk Gibbs have a reputation for making some of the Bay Areas most delicious Nashville-inspired hot chicken sandwiches at their Oakland restaurant, plus an offshoot in Sacramento. But the Walnut Creek location is the biggest, allowing for on-site enjoyment and a funky energy.

1394 N. Main St., Walnut Creek. 9 a.m.-9 p.m. daily. worldfamoushotboys.com

Janelle Bitker/The Chronicle

A Drake-backed hot chicken chain is also here

Daves Hot Chicken was born as a Nashville hot chicken pop-up in Los Angeles in 2017 and quickly grew to more than 50 locations, including one in Santa Rosa. That growth might be partially thanks to a major investor: the famed rapper Drake. The East Bays first spot landed in Union City, and its massive, with a psychedelic design and a simple menu of spicy fried chicken tenders, sliders and sides.

32200 Dyer St., Union City. 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Sunday-Thursday. 11 a.m.-midnight Friday-Saturday. daveshotchicken.com

Scott Strazzante/The Chronicle 2018

Udon mania hits San Ramon

Japanese chain Marugame Udon has found an immediate following at its third Bay Area location in San Ramon. The new, spacious restaurant sits within glitzy mall City Center Bishop Ranch and follows the cafeteria-style format of its locations in San Francisco and Berkeley: Choose a base bowl of udon noodle soup, customize it and then be tempted by tempura options. The restaurant is particularly popular with families, with a bowl of chewy noodles in broth starting at $5.95.

6000 Bollinger Canyon Road, Suite 1200. 11:30 a.m.-8 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday. 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Saturday-Saturday. 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Sunday. marugameudon.com

A new pizza joint opens in Emeryvilles food hall

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Pizzeria Mercato is now open at Public Market Emeryville, with an Italian menu of pastas, pizzas, sandwiches and salads from the same team behind Lokanta in Walnut Creek and Pleasanton. Despite the lengthy menu, pizzas are the star, with blistered Neapolitan crusts emerging from a custom brick oven. The flavors arent strictly traditional, ranging from mortadella with pesto to pepperoni with hot honey to barbecue chicken.

5959 Shellmound St., Suite 75, Emeryville. 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Sunday-Thursday. 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday. www.pizzeriamercato.us

Kellie Hwang / The Chronicle

Dumplings, dumplings and more dumplings in San Ramon

Dumpling 85 makes a ton of dumplings: juicy soup dumplings, pan-fried pork buns, crispy-bottomed pot stickers, handmade boiled dumplings, wontons in soup  the list goes on. Already a popular takeout spot, the restaurant offers a small show for diners who choose to eat at the restaurant, with cooks folding dumplings at a rapid pace in the open kitchen.

2005 Crow Canyon Place, Suite 138, San Ramon. 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m., 4:30-9 p.m. daily. dumpling85.com

Afghan classics get another home in Oakland

Traditional Afghan dishes are all on offer at Pachas Afghan Kebab House in Old Oakland. The menu includes bolani, the filled flatbread; mantoo, beef dumplings draped with yogurt sauce; quabili pallow, aromatic rice topped with a lamb shank; and several different kebab options. On the less expected end of the spectrum, Pachas also serves pizza.

1015 Clay St., Oakland. 11 a.m.-9 p.m. daily. 510-817-4951

Janelle Bitker is the San Francisco Chronicles senior editor of food and wine. Email: janelle.bitker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @janellebitker
WASHINGTON  The U.S. Senate will take up legislation Thursday to end normal trade relations with Russia and to ban the importation of its oil.

Both bills have been bogged down in the Senate, frustrating lawmakers who want to ratchet up the U.S. response to Russias war with Ukraine.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Russian President Vladimir Putin needs to be held accountable for what Schumer said were war crimes against Ukraine.

The trade suspension measure paves the way for U.S. President Joe Biden to enact higher tariffs on certain Russian imports.

The bill banning Russian oil would codify restrictions Biden has already put in place through executive action.

In a virtual speech to Congress last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said new packages of sanctions are needed constantly every week until the Russian military machine stops.

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KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR:

 Mariupols dead put at 5,000 as Ukraine braces in the east

 US targets Putins daughters, Russian banks in new sanctions

 Burned, piled bodies among latest horrors in Bucha, Ukraine

 Russia's setback in Kyiv was memorable military failure

 Russian media campaign falsely claims Bucha deaths are fakes

 China calls for probe into Bucha killings, assigns no blame

 Go to https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine for more coverage

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OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:

WASHINGTON  The U.S. House overwhelmingly passed legislation Wednesday calling for a federal government report on evidence of war crimes committed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Lawmakers backed the measure amid gruesome reports of atrocities in towns around Kyiv, particularly Bucha, and new accounts of the civilian death toll in the besieged port city of Mariupol.

The legislation calls for the U.S. president to submit to Congress a report on efforts to preserve evidence related to war crimes.

Last month, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution seeking an investigation of Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes.

In his daily nighttime video address to the nation late Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of trying to hide evidence of war crimes to interfere with the international investigation.

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LVIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of trying to hide the evidence of war crimes to interfere with the international investigation.

It seems that the Russian leadership was really afraid that the global anger over what was seen in Bucha would be repeated after what was seen in other cities, Zelenskyy said in his daily nighttime video address to the nation late Wednesday.

We have information that the Russian troops have changed tactics and are trying to remove the dead people, the dead Ukrainians, from the streets and cellars of territory they occupied. This is only an attempt to hide the evidence and nothing more, Zelenskyy said.

He also said thousands of people are now missing, either dead or deported to Russia.

Zelenskyy also urged Russian citizens not to be afraid to protest the war.

If you have even a little shame about what the Russian military is doing in Ukraine, then for such Russian citizens this is a key moment: You have to demand  just demand  an end to the war, he said.

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PARIS  French President Emmanuel Macron spoke out against Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Wednesday evening, defending himself over criticism he held multiple talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin to no avail.

On Monday, Morawiecki ridiculed the French leaders several hours of phone calls with Putin, saying that they achieved nothing.

Some fear the comments from Poland might destabilize unity of the European Union as it hopes to stand unified in the face of Putins aggression in Ukraine.

Macron told TF1 broadcasters evening news that he takes full responsibility for speaking to Putin in the name of France to avoid the war and to build a new architecture for peace in Europe several years ago.

Macron is standing for re-election in France in polls that begin Sunday.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian authorities say nearly 5,000 people were evacuated from combat areas Wednesday.

Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said 1,171 people were evacuated from the besieged Sea of Azov port of Mariupol, and 2,515 more left the cities of Berdyansk and Melitopol and other areas in the south.

She said an additional 1,206 people were evacuated from the eastern region of Luhansk.

Vereshchuk and other officials have been urging residents of eastern regions to evacuate in the face of an impending Russian offensive, saying that people in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions should leave for safer regions.

Donetsk region Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said at least five civilians were killed and eight others wounded by Russian shelling Wednesday.

Over 10 million people, about a quarter of Ukraines population, have been displaced by the war, and more than 4 million of them have fled the country.

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UNITED NATIONS  The United States and United Kingdom have boycotted an informal meeting of the U.N. Security Council called by Russia to press its baseless claims that the U.S. has biological warfare laboratories in Ukraine.

The move by Russia on Wednesday was the latest of several that have led Western countries to accuse Moscow of using the U.N. as a platform for disinformation to draw attention away from its war against its smaller neighbor.

U.N. disarmament chief Izumi Nakamitsu told the council at two official Security Council meetings called by Russia on the issue last month that the United Nations is not aware of any biological weapons program in Ukraine.

A smoke screen to draw attention away from the brutal warfare, irresponsible, dangerous and deplorable were just a few of the responses by countries, including Norway, France, Ireland and Albania.

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ROME  Italian Premier Mario Draghi says no embargo of Russian gas is up for consideration at this point as the European Union ponders its next package of sanctions over the war in Ukraine, adding: "I dont know if it ever will be on the table.

Draghi told reporters Monday night that in case a gas embargo is proposed, Italy will be very happy to follow it if that would make peace possible.

Draghi added: If the price of gas can be exchanged for peace ... what do we choose? Peace? Or to have the air conditioning running in the summer? This is the question we must pose.

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KYIV, Ukraine  The mayor of the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol says more than 5,000 civilians have been killed during the monthlong Russian blockade, among them 210 children.

Mayor Vadym Boichenko said Wednesday that Russian forces have among other targets bombed hospitals, including one where 50 people burned to death.

Boichenko said that more than 90% of the citys infrastructure has been destroyed by Russian shelling.

The Russian military is besieging the strategic Sea of Azov port, and has cut food, water and energy supplies and pummeled it with artillery and air raids. Capturing the city would allow Russia to secure a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

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WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden is saluting the international community and some of the largest corporations in the U.S. for further increasing Russias economic isolation.

Addressing thousands at the North Americas Building Trades Unions Legislative Conference at a Washington hotel on Wednesday, Biden said of the Russia-Ukraine war, Theres nothing less happening than credible war crimes.

The president said responsible nations have to come together to hold these perpetrators responsible, and vowed that were going to stifle Russias ability to grow for years to come.

He said corporate Americas stepping up for a chance, noting that 600-plus firms have chosen to leave Russia.

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MOSCOW  Russias Defense Ministry has accused Ukraine of sabotaging a pre-agreed prisoner swap.

Speaking at a briefing, Defense Ministry official Mikhail Mizintsev claimed that Kyiv had for a long time blocked prisoner exchanges, including a swap set to take place Wednesday involving 251 military personnel on each side.

He alleged that the delays gave Moscow all the reasons to suspect that Russian servicemen held in captivity are not at all well."

On April 1, representatives of the Ukrainian presidential office said Ukraine had secured the release of 86 soldiers, including 15 women, through a swap. This was confirmed by Russian officials on Wednesday.

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BRUSSELS  A new U.S. commitment of Javelin missiles means the West soon will have provided Ukrainian fighters with 10 anti-tank weapons for every Russian tank in their country, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday.

Blinken spoke to U.S. news broadcaster MSNBC after the U.S. announced an additional $100 million for more Javelin missiles for Ukraine. The U.S. says it has provided $1.7 billion for Ukraines defense and aid since Russia invaded on Feb. 24.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is pressing the West to provide more weapons, faster, and do more to cut off Russia from the global economy, to pressure Putin to make peace.

In terms of what they need to act quickly and act effectively, to deal with the planes that are firing at them from the skies, the tanks that are trying to destroy  their cities from the ground, they have the tools that they need, Blinken said of Ukraines forces. Theyre going to keep getting them, and were going to keep sustaining that.

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BUDAPEST, Hungary  Hungarys prime minister has asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to call an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine but says his country will comply with Russian demands to pay for natural gas imports in rubles.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he had spoken with Putin by phone and urged the Russian leader to end the military conflict in neighboring Ukraine. Orban said he also offered to host a conference in Hungarys capital between the warring parties.

I suggested that (Putin)  the Ukrainian president, the French president and the German chancellor hold a meeting here in Budapest, the sooner the better, Orban said. It should not be a peace negotiation and not a peace settlement, because that takes longer, but an immediate ceasefire agreement.

Orban spoke days after his Fidesz party won a fourth consecutive term leading the Hungarian government.

The right-wing nationalist leader, Putins closest ally in the European Union, has vehemently refused to supply weapons to Ukraine or allow their transport across the Hungary-Ukraine border. He also lobbied heavily against the EU imposing sanctions on Russian energy imports.

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LARNACA, Cyprus  Russian disinformation about its war against Ukraine needs to be exposed, including on Russias war crimes, a U.S. State Department official said on a visit to Cyprus Wednesday.

Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said Russian lies have evolved to the point of blaming Ukrainians for actions by Russian forces, including the war crimes we see on the ground.

So we all have an interest in exposing Russian disinformation, ensuring our citizens have the truth and ensuring that Russian citizens also (have the truth) ... despite the Iron Curtain that Putin has put down over that, Nuland said.

Nuland was in Cyprus as part of a five-nation tour aimed at strengthening bilateral ties and rallying support for Ukraine.

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LONDON  Britain says it will end imports of Russian oil and coal by the end of the year and ban U.K. investment in Russia as part of a new set of sanctions in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

The British government also announced a freeze on the assets of Credit Bank of Moscow and Sberbank, Russias largest bank, and slapped travel bans and asset freezes on eight more wealthy Russians. They included Andrey Guryev, founder of the fertilizer company PhosAgro, and Sergey Sergeyevich Ivanov, president of diamond producer Alrosa.

U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said the measures were coordinated with Britains allies. The U.S. also sanctioned SberBank on Wednesday, and the European Union plans to ban imports of Russian coal.

Truss said the sanctions were aimed at decimating (President Vladimir) Putins war machine and to show the Russian elite that they cannot wash their hands of the atrocities committed on Putins orders.

Britain had already announced a plan to phase out Russian oil, which accounts for 8% of the U.K. supply. Russia is the top supplier of imported coal to the U.K., though British demand for the polluting fuel has plummeted in the past decade. Britain has not ended imports of Russian natural gas, which accounts for 4% of its supply, saying only that it will do so as soon as possible.

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UNITED NATIONS  The U.N. General Assembly plans to vote Thursday on whether to suspend Russia from the U.N.s premiere human rights body.

The United States initiated the move in response to the discovery of hundreds of bodies after Russian troops withdrew from towns near Ukraine's capital. Videos and photos of corpses of people who appeared to be civilians have sparked calls for tougher sanctions and war crimes charges against Russia, which has vehemently denied responsibility.

General Assembly spokeswoman Paulina Kubiak said on Wednesday that an emergency special session on Ukraine will resume at 10 a.m. EDT on Thursday, when a resolution to suspend the rights of membership in the Human Rights Council of the Russian Federation will be put to a vote.

The brief resolution expresses grave concern at the ongoing human rights and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, particularly at the reports of violations and abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law by the Russian Federation, including gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights.

To be approved, the resolution requires a two-thirds majority of assembly members that vote yes or no. Abstentions dont count.

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WASHINGTON  The U.S. Justice Department is working with European allies and prosecutors in Ukraine to investigate potential war crimes after Russias invasion.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said Wednesday that U.S. prosecutors across the world are working to collect evidence and to collect the information on atrocities that we have all seen in both photographs and video footage.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

He pointed specifically to photos and videos from Bucha, where Associated Press journalists have witnessed evidence of killings and torture, including charred bodies.

But Garland stopped short of calling for a tribunal like the one set up to hold Nazi leaders to account after World War II. He said a U.S. prosecutors in Paris were meeting with the French war crimes prosecutor, and that other Justice Department lawyers had met with prosecutors in Europe to work out a plan for gathering evidence with respect to Ukraine.

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WASHINGTON  The U.S. on Wednesday announced that it is sanctioning Russian President Vladimir Putins two adult daughters as part of a new batch of penalties on the countrys political and economic system in retaliation for its war crimes in Ukraine.

The U.S. is also imposing toughened full blocking sanctions on Russias Sberbank and Alfa Bank, two of its largest financial institutions, as well as some Russian state-owned enterprises. President Joe Biden is also signing an executive order to ban new U.S. investment in Russia.

In addition to Putins adult daughters, the new sanctions also target the family of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

The U.S. actions are set to be imposed in concert with toughened sanctions by its European allies.

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LONDON  A Western official says it will take Russia up to a month to regroup its forces for a major push on eastern Ukraine.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence, said Wednesday that a reasonable estimate would be of three to four weeks before troops that have pulled back from the area around Kyiv and northern Ukraine can be re-equipped and redeployed against the Donbas region in the east.

The official said the Russian units would have to go through a pretty lengthy period of reconstitution and refurbishment before they could rejoin the war.

The official said almost a quarter of the Russian ground units known as battalion tactical groups in Ukraine had been rendered non-combat-effective in the fighting and either withdrawn or merged with other units.

The losses and pullback of Russian troops mean the threat posed to Kyiv is limited for the foreseeable future from Russian ground troops, the official said.

 AP writer Jill Lawless contributed.

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BRUSSELS  NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says Finland and Sweden would be welcomed with open arms should they decide to join the worlds biggest security alliance, as Russias war on Ukraine spurs public support in the two Nordic countries for membership.

Russia has demanded that the 30-nation military organization stop expanding, so the prospect of Finland and Sweden joining could anger President Vladimir Putin.

But Stoltenberg says NATO members might be prepared to provide security guarantees for the period from when the two might announce any membership bid and when their applications are approved. He declined to say what kind of protection they might get.

Once members, the two neutral Nordic nations would benefit from NATOs collective security guarantee, which obliges all members to come to the defense of any ally that comes under attack.

Stoltenberg told reporters Wednesday that he is certain that we will find ways to address concerns they may have regarding the period between the potential application and the final ratification.

A poll commissioned by Finnish broadcaster YLE last month showed that, for the first time, more than 50% of Finns support joining the Western military alliance. In neighboring Sweden, a similar poll showed that those in favor of NATO membership outnumber those against.

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BERLIN  A German spokesman says the government has information which indicates that bodies found after Ukraine retook Bucha last week had been lying there since at least March 10, when Russian troops were in control of the town.

Steffen Hebestreit told reporters in Berlin on Wednesday that the information was based on non-commercial satellite images taken March 10-18 of Yablonska Street in Bucha.

Credible information shows that from March 7 to March 30 Russian soldiers and security forces were deployed in this area, he said. They were also tasked with the interrogation of prisoners who were subsequently executed.

Hebestreit said that targeted killings by units of the Russian military and security forces are therefore proof that the Russian President and supreme commander has at least approvingly accepted human rights abuses and war crimes to achieve his goals.

The assertions made by the Russian side that these are staged scenes or they arent responsible for the murders are therefore not tenable, he added.

Asked about the source of this information, Hebestreit said that images reviewed by Germany were not commercial satellite images. He declined to elaborate.

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COPENHAGEN, Denmark  Norway is following other European nations and expelling Russian diplomats.

Norways Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt said Wednesday that three Russian diplomats had carried out activities incompatible with their status.

The timing for the expulsions was not accidental and comes at a time when the whole world is shaken by reports of Russian forces abusing civilians, especially in the city of Bucha, Huitfeldt said in a statement.

In recent days, numerous European countries have expelled Russian diplomats and staff at Russian diplomatic missions.

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GENEVA  The International Committee of the Red Cross says one of its teams in Ukraine has led some 500 people who fled Mariupol in a humanitarian convoy of buses and private cars to a safer location in the embattled country.

The ICRC says its team that has been trying to enter Mariupol since last Friday got within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the besieged city, but security conditions made it impossible to enter. The convoy escorted the civilians from coastal Berdyansk to Zaporizhzhia, to the north.

This convoys arrival to Zaporizhzhia is a huge relief for hundreds of people who have suffered immensely and are now in a safer location, said Pascal Hundt, ICRCs head of delegation in Ukraine. Its clear, though, that thousands more civilians trapped inside Mariupol need safe passage out and aid to come in.

He said the Geneva-based organization remains available as a neutral intermediary to help escort civilians out of Mariupol once concrete agreements and security conditions allow it.

___

LONDON  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of using hunger as a weapon of war by deliberately targeting Ukraines essential food supplies.

In an address to Irish lawmakers Wednesday, Zelenskyy said Russian forces are destroying things that are sustaining livelihoods including food storage depots, blocking ports so Ukraine could not export food and putting mines into the fields.

For them hunger is also a weapon, a weapon against us ordinary people, he said, accusing Russia of deliberately provoking a food crisis in Ukraine, a major global producer of staples including wheat and sunflower oil.

He said it would have international ramifications, because there will be a shortage of food and the prices will go up, and this is reality for the millions of people who are hungry, and it will be more difficult for them to feed their families.

Zelenskyy spoke by video to a joint session of Irelands two houses of parliament, the latest in a string of international addresses he has used to rally support for Ukraine.

___

BRUSSELS  A senior European Union official says the blocs member countries should think about ways of offering asylum to Russian soldiers willing to desert Ukraine battlefields.

European Council president Charles Michel on Wednesday expressed his outrage at crimes against humanity, against innocent civilians in Bucha and in many other cities.

He called on Russian soldiers to disobey orders.

If you want no part in killing your Ukrainian brothers and sisters, if you dont want to be a criminal, drop your weapons, stop fighting, leave the battlefield, Michel, who represents the blocs governments, said in a speech to the European Parliament

Endorsing an idea previously circulated by some EU lawmakers, Michel added that granting asylum to Russian deserters is a valuable idea that should be pursued.

___
Last week, workers at Amazons Staten Island warehouse voted to unionize. This is a spectacular win for organized labor, but poses the question: Will Amazons tech workers follow suit? Until recently, this would be all but unimaginable because the word union directly assaults the self-image of Big Tech professionals. Unions are for coal miners, auto workers and warehouse pickers: Working-class people without four-year college degrees.

However, as Big Tech has struggled to diversify, its own patterns of exploitation and pay inequality have become increasingly difficult to ignore. Two weeks ago, a former Google employee filed a class-action lawsuit against the tech giant alleging a pattern of discrimination against its Black employees, including steering them toward lower-level roles, lower pay and scant opportunities for career advancement.

Industry-wide salary surveys reinforce these allegations. A 2020 Computer World analysis of Charthop data showed that Black and Latinx tech professionals respectively make a whopping 30.3% and 24.8% less than their white peers. The gap actually grew between 2019 and 2020 as the pandemic raged around the world. A 2018 analysis by the New York City comptroller taking both gender and race into account showed that Hispanic and Asian American and Pacific Islander women software developers in the city respectively made an astonishing 30% and 32% less than their white male peers.

This problem usually gets framed individualistically; women and people of color need to lean in and ask for higher salaries and promotions. However, this framing obscures the shaky assumption that as the diversity of Big Tech increases, its pay will remain static. This is pure speculation. We must confront the possibility that positions are highly paid not because the work has intrinsic value, but because it has historically been dominated by white and Asian American men (like me).

This suggests a grim alternative to the lean in narrative: These lesser-paid professionals of color are correctly gauging what organizations are willing to pay for this work if they are the ones doing it. They ask for the salaries that will not breach an unspoken social norm. Nobody is missing out on an ironclad price tag attached to the work.

This pattern of discriminatory pay stretches back to the birth of computing. Women programmed the first electronic computer, the ENIAC, without the help of high-level languages or floating-point arithmetic, and performed ballistics calculations at the raw binary level. This would be fiendishly difficult for modern software engineers. A Virginia Tech study showed that, rather than being recognized and well-compensated, their jobs were considered secondary to the work of designing the surrounding hardware: The work the men were doing. In direct contradiction, a Illinois Institute of Technology study showed that women hardware operators in the United Kingdom during the same era were paid less for supposedly monotonous and routine machine work while the men doing the clean and cerebral calculations on that hardware were handsomely compensated. The pay follows the person, not the skill, and certainly not the merit.

These are the forms of systemic inequality that organized labor is designed to address. Collective bargaining agreements aim to restore a basic sense of fairness by standardizing equal wages for equal work, regardless of who is doing it. They are negotiated with a global view of everybodys salary: The exact perspective that individual workers lack. It breaks the fundamental information asymmetry of and what starting salary were you looking for?

Unionization in Big Tech is still an uphill battle because the popular imagination conjures a laundry list of stereotypes: unions steal from your paycheck, prevent your awful co-worker from getting fired and never lift a finger to address legitimate grievances. However, these same accusations, and worse, have been leveled at every company in Big Tech. Any large organization is susceptible to corruption. When they work effectively, unions can give employees a united voice against military contracts that violate a companys stated moral mission. They can push back when youre fired just for discussing your salary with co-workers. If you believe that the engineering and cleaning staff at your company should have access to the exact same health care, thats what a union is for.

At their best, they offer basic protections against irrational corporate logics. Even when corporations report record profits, it does not translate into job security for workers. This held true even before the pandemic. In 2018, I was working at Pixar when Incredibles 2 grossed $183 million on its opening weekend, putting it on track to $1 billion worldwide. Immediately after this, the biggest animated movie opening in history, the studio had layoffs. (My job survived.)

At Yale, where I now teach, computer science enrollment has exploded 400% over the past decade. Increasing the diversity of these ranks is an ongoing priority, but attracting more people of color to our field is disingenuous if we continue to sweep our problems of pay inequality under the rug. Without larger reforms, we are asking students to enter a professional landscape where their skills will be systematically devalued.

The image of the rugged, individualistic tech worker needs to be discarded because the reality is that unless you have an organization behind you as big as the one in front of you, you are going to lose. David fought Goliath, not an army of Goliaths. We need an army of Davids. Tech workers need to unionize.

Theodore Kim is an associate professor of computer science at Yale University and a Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project.
San Franciscos El Farolito, the Mission District restaurant that was temporarily blocked from opening in North Beach due to the citys ban on chain stores in that neighborhood, has overcome that challenge  and is expected to open sometime this month.

The yellow signage is up at 1230 Grant Ave., across Fresno alley from the Saloon watering hole. The opening is pending a final permit approval by the San Francisco Department of Public Health, according to Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who represents North Beach.

This closes out a brief dispute as to whether El Farolito should be categorized as a chain, which is defined by city planning code as 11 or more locations.

El Farolito already owns 11 stores in San Francisco, the North Bay and the Central Valley, but some outside of San Francisco are under the name El Favorito and have slightly different signage. In September, after a review, the planning department determined that El Farolito was, in fact a chain, and would not be allowed in North Beach.

That technicality was overcome by some modifications to signage at other outlets in the chain, Peskin said. The preliminary review decision was overturned and the Grant Avenue site was given final approval by the planning department on Monday.

All is well that ends well, and a vacant space is about to open with a new and popular restaurant in the recovering North Beach corridor, and everybody cant wait, said Peskin, who helped broker the deal to allow the restaurant into a space formerly occupied by a restaurant called the House.

The bottom line is at a time like this the city needs to be a better partner to a business like El Farolito, Peskin said.

The first El Farolito was opened in 1983 at 24th and Mission streets by the late Salvador Don Chava Lopez, who brought the name north from a restaurant where hed worked in Mexico City.

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Manager Santiago Lopez said Wednesday that the North Beach location would be small, with perhaps eight tables inside. El Farolito is known for its Mexican Torta and for the Boss Burrito it created, combining shrimp with pork.

Everybody in the company is excited and very motivated to continue Salvador Lopezs recipes and tradition of serving affordable food to the community, Lopez said.

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @samwhitings
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Uber, whose ride-hailing service disrupted the taxi industry, is now partnering with all taxicabs on its home turf of San Francisco, The Chronicle has learned.

Ubers deal, signed Monday with Yellow Cab SF and Flywheel Technologies, means that Bay Area passengers who summon an Uber ride might see one of the citys 1,075 taxis show up to ferry them in the coming months. Last month Uber signed a similar pact to put all New York City cabs on its app.

Taxis and Uber have long been at loggerheads. Uber founder Travis Kalanick famously scorned the industry as greedy and corrupt, while taxi drivers resent the startups lighter regulations as unfair. But Uber now sees taxis as a natural growth area  in fact, it hopes to have every taxi in the world on Uber by 2025, an executive said recently.

For Uber, the San Francisco partnership provides hundreds of additional drivers at a time when its contractors have been slow to return from pandemic hiatuses. For cab drivers, who saw ride-hailing siphon riders and now are struggling to recover from the pandemic, it brings additional customers  albeit sometimes at lower prices, since Uber fares are often cheaper than those of taxis, although they can be higher during surge, or times of high demand. For riders, it increases the supply of cars.

San Francisco taxi drivers will have more access to demand and cities will get fewer empty miles driven, which is a win for drivers, riders and the cities we serve, Dennis Cinelli, Uber vice president of mobility for the U.S. and Canada, said in a statement.

McArdle Hankin/San Francisco Chronicle

Clearing the way for the deal, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency board voted Tuesday to allow taxis to accept flat upfront fares  which could be different than metered rates  for e-hailed rides originated through a third party. The one-year pilot will be implemented by Aug. 5.

A little more than a dozen cabdrivers spoke out against partnering with Uber during the SFMTA meeting, while about four drivers and four cab company owners spoke in support of the idea, saying it would generate needed new business.

Mark Gruberg, a long-time driver with Green Cab and board member of the San Francisco Taxi Alliance, said he was worried that a flood of higher-paid surge requests during busy times would mean that regular taxi riders, particularly paratransit users, could be left out in the cold.

Kate Toran, SFMTA director of taxis, access and mobility services, said that about 60% of the citys 100 ramp taxis for wheelchair users are currently not in service. We have a lot of room to grow and we would be happy to grow, she said.

Taxi rides through Uber will cost the same as UberX rides, which are calculated on base fare plus trip time and distance. Taxi drivers, who will know in advance which rides come from Uber and what they will be paid, can accept or reject Uber rides without consequences for refusing them, Uber said.

A taxi drivers earnings for an Uber ride might be the same as, more than or less than what a metered fare would yield.

Toran said at Tuesdays meeting that Uber and Lyft fares are about 80% to 85% of taxi metered fares, according to an analysis of the companies 2020 reports to their state regulator.

Taxi drivers will be eligible for Ubers temporary gas surcharge of 45 to 55 cents per trip if it is still in effect when they join forces with it.

The heads of Flywheel and Yellow both said they think that cabdrivers will benefit from the deal.

For drivers, this could fill in a lot of gaps at times when theyre not busy, Chris Sweis, Yellow Cab CEO, said in an interview. If they have dead time during their day, having some revenue come in versus no revenue is a much better situation in the end, even if it is lower than the taxi rate. And its optional for drivers; they can choose to participate or not.

Hansu Kim, CEO of Flywheel, said he sees the arrangement as a win-win for cabbies and Uber.

I believe this will revitalize regulated taxi services into the future, he said in an interview. Even drivers who are skeptical are hopeful. We are now going to have access to all of Ubers passengers.

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San Franciscos taxi industry had about 1,800 cabs before the advent of Uber and Lyft. That numbers is now down to about 1,000  but since the pandemic, only a bit over half are on the streets, cab companies said.

In addition to phone dispatch and street hails, all San Francisco cabs already use smartphone apps, which will be integrated with Ubers app.

Flywheel Technologies provides an app for 425 cabs, including about 222 in its namesake Flywheel Taxi fleet, according to SFMTA figures from September. Yellow Cabs YoTaxi app is used by 437 cabs, including 407 Yellow cabs. Creative Mobile Technologies makes an app called Arro, which is used by 201 San Francisco taxis. CMT is a major player in New York, where Uber already inked a partnership with it.

Flywheel said its taxi-hailing app is used by over 30,000 cabs in 53 cities in the U.S. and Canada. Flywheels app will be integrated with Ubers app in other cities over the coming months, Kim said.

Uber, which started off trying to displace taxis, now talks about partnering with them as a natural way to conquer new markets.

Now, I understand the irony here. The Uber guy is telling you that taxis are the future, Ubers Andrew Macdonald, senior vice president of mobility, told investors in February.

But when we look at the next five years, we just dont see a world in which taxis and Uber exist separately, he said. Theres too much to gain for both sides. Thats why weve set a very ambitious goal to put every taxi on Uber by 2025.

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid
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For Rebecca Fedorko, a special education teacher at San Franciscos Sutro Elementary, theres nothing better than seeing the moment for a dyslexic or autistic child when her teaching clicks. Suddenly, after spending many hours with Fedorko, the students can turn the individual letter sounds into words. They can read.

But the joy and satisfaction she gets on the job dont pay the bills. And in a school district thats underpaid its teachers for years as the citys cost-of-living soars, a Dilbert-like payroll debacle has left teachers even more shortchanged.

Its one more pain point for a profession under intense pressure  and its contributing to an average of one teacher or classroom aide in San Francisco quitting each day. Resigning in the middle of the year is extremely unusual, but 20 to 30 teachers and aides are leaving every month, said Frank Lara, vice president of the local teachers union. School districts in other parts of the state and country are seeing far more midyear resignations than normal too due to pandemic burnout, but the payroll fiasco is an only-in-San-Francisco wrinkle potentially making the numbers here even worse.

Were seeing the cumulative effect in the frustration of educators who are choosing with their feet to not be in this profession or not be in San Francisco, Lara said, noting the union discourages midyear resignations because it can put teachers credentials at risk, but staff are leaving anyway.

Photos by Justin Katigbak / Special to The Chronicle

He said a normal year sees 600 people retire or resign out of the unions 5,000 teachers and aides, but he expects this years final tally will be much more than that. A spokesperson for the school district said it could not provide the number of resignations and retirements.

Fedorko might be among those leaving. This school year was already hard due to her students struggling academically and emotionally in the wake of endless Zoom school during the pandemic. But then her paychecks went bonkers.

She agreed to tutor kids in reading for extra hours after school to help them catch up, but that extra pay didnt come through. When she received it retroactively in one lump sum, there was no breakdown of the hours worked or hourly rate, and it was taxed higher than she expected. When she missed seven days of work in January after contracting COVID, she wasnt paid properly for those days, either.

I have to be a forensic accountant on every one of my paychecks now, she said. Ive been sending them to my uncle whos a CPA to help me figure out whats going on.

Then, because the school district unexpectedly paid the usual January check on Dec. 30 and appears to have reduced withholdings without teachers knowledge, the 2021 taxes Fedorko finished on Monday showed her owing $2,100 when shed always gotten a refund before.

I started crying, she said. I feel like such a loser. Im a grown woman, and this tax bill is half of my monthly pay.

Justin Katigbak/Special to The Chronicle

Meanwhile, the 31-year-old looks at her friends in the city who have work-from-home jobs that pay quadruple what she makes with a lot less stress and a lot more flexibility  they can grab a beer with co-workers! in the middle of the day!  and wonders what shes doing.

Im sitting there until 8 p.m. doing progress reports at school and eating Top Ramen, and Im saying, Why am I doing this? she said. Im really on the fence about continuing to be an educator. It feels dehumanizing.

Its hard to fathom underpaid teachers suffering because of a glitchy payroll system nobody seems capable of fixing in one of the richest, most tech-savvy cities in the world. But then, a lot about San Francisco is hard to fathom these days.

The payroll disaster is just one more crisis in a school district riddled with them. As the district copes with a $125 million budget gap, theres still no replacement for Superintendent Vince Matthews whos retiring June 30, and his deputy, Myong Leigh, told colleagues Monday hes also leaving at the end of June. Laura Dudnick, a spokesperson for the district, said Leighs departure was already planned and had nothing to do with the payroll breakdown he oversaw.

Voters in February recalled three school board members for incompetency and focusing on the wrong priorities during the pandemic, but the ineptitude certainly wasnt limited to just them.

The district issued a request for proposals to replace its old payroll system in 2017, and after years of bumps in the process, paid Infosys $13.7 million for a payroll system called EmPowerSF that debuted a few months ago, but doesnt seem to empower anybody, let alone pay them the right amount. Hundreds of teachers have reported being underpaid, not paid at all, owing far more in taxes than they expected or having retirement contributions vanish.

Matthews apologized, put more workers on the task of fixing the glitches, which under the contract strangely arent the responsibility of Infosys, and promised to make the teachers whole  with 15% interest.

SFUSD is aggressively working to resolve issues, Dudnick said Tuesday. Every staff member will be paid the money they are owed.

Justin Katigbak/Special to The Chronicle

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Staff will update the school boards budget committee about EmPowerSF on Wednesday.

But some teachers reported their most recent paychecks were flawed, too, and many of the existing mistakes havent been fixed. Teachers on leave  including one with a new baby and another caring for parents with COVID  have received no pay, Lara said.

Dudnick did not respond to questions about whether Matthews own paychecks totaling more than $300,000 a year have been affected, but said some people in the central office have seen mistakes on their checks.

David Knight, a French and economics teacher at Burton High, has become a defacto expert in the payroll problems, reviewing his colleagues paychecks for them and compiling a spreadsheet of all the issues.

He usually receives a $100 tax refund, but he owes $2,600 this year. He discovered that salary add-ons from previous bond and parcel tax measures passed by voters to pay teachers more have been mysteriously lowered on the most recent checks. He also noticed his union dues have varied wildly over the past few months, and hes been paid different amounts for sick days in different months. A colleague of his is missing $4,000 from her maternity leave, and another was short-changed $5,000 after agreeing to teach an extra class, he said.

This comes on top of an already challenging year, Knight said, in which many of his students are suffering social anxiety after 18 months of isolation, burying themselves in their phones because theyre so wedded to screens and refusing to participate in class.

He said teachers are doing what youd expect them to do given the circumstances. Theyre going to saner districts.

So what would the economics teacher grade the district for its payroll system rollout?

Well, I would make a lot of red marks on their paper and tell them to resubmit their work, he said. If I were them, Id be embarrassed.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf
Twitter may soon allow its users to edit their 280-character posts, announcing plans on Tuesday to test out a feature the company said has been in demand for many years.

The announcement came a day after Elon Musk, who bought a 9.2% stake in the company last month, polled his followers asking if the site should have an edit button  yse or on?

(N)ow now that everyone is asking yes, weve been working on an edit feature since last year! the San Francisco social media company said in a statement delivered via a tweet.

It added that it plans to test it in the coming months within its paid service, Twitter Blue, before deciding if it will roll it out for all users.

More than 4 million people had voted on Musks poll as of Tuesday evening, but Twitter said it didnt influence its decision. The company took a dig at the Tesla and SpaceX CEO in its statement, saying, no, we didnt get the idea from a poll.

Musk, a prolific Twitter critic with more than 80 million followers, launched a series of tweets recently in which he questioned if the site was impeding peoples freedom of speech, in reference to the companys policies around limiting certain types of hateful speech and other content.

Patrick Pleul / Associated Press

Twitter CEO and board member Parag Agrawal said Tuesday that the company appointed Musk to its board.

Hes both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service which is exactly what we need on @Twitter, and in the boardroom, to make us stronger in the long-term. Welcome Elon! Agrawal tweeted.

Many Twitter users  including celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Ice-T and Katy Perry  have long asked for an edit button.

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said in a January 2020 Q&A that well probably never do it, noting that the services current setup keeps the spirit of its text-message origins.

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But Jay Sullivan, Twitters head of consumer products, said in a separate thread Tuesday that the edit feature will allow users to fix mistakes, typos and hot takes in the moment. He said they no longer have to delete embarrassing tweets.

But Sullivan cautioned it will take time to get the feature right.

Without things like time limits, controls, and transparency about what has been edited, Edit could be misused to alter the record of the public conversation, he said. Protecting the integrity of that public conversation is our top priority when we approach this work.

Aidin Vaziri (he/him) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: avaziri@sfchronicle.com
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP)  A federal judge has ordered the immediate release of a computer hacker who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for helping the Islamic State, and accused the Justice Department of trumping up charges against him to keep him in jail.

The April 1 order from U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema includes a harsh rebuke of the Justice Department's conduct against Ardit Ferizi. The native of Kosovo is the first person convicted in the U.S. of both computer hacking and terrorism charges.

He pleaded guilty back in 2016 and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He admitted hacking a private company and pulling out the names, email passwords and phone numbers of about 1,300 people with .gov and .mil addresses and turning the data over to the "Islamic State Hacking Division. The Islamic State published the names with a threat to attack.

In 2020, in the earliest stages of the pandemic, Ferizi sought compassionate release, citing his asthma and obesity as placing him at greater risk of contracting COVID-19.

Brinkema initially denied his request. But Ferizi renewed his request when an outbreak spread through his prison, and Brinkema granted him compassionate release over prosecutors' objections.

Brinkema's ruling resulted in Ferizi's transfer to immigration authorities for deportation. Before he could be deported, though, federal prosecutors in California brought new charges against Ferizi. The criminal complaint accused him of identity theft and wire fraud by coordinating with a family member to preserve access to email accounts that included large amounts of stolen data.

Ferizi's lawyers filed to have the new charges dismissed, accusing the Justice Department of vindictive prosecution because agents were upset by Ferizi's early release.

On March 22, just before a court hearing was scheduled in California to consider the accusation of vindictive prosecution, the new charges against Ferizi were all dropped.

In her April 1 order, Brinkema said prosecutors in California built their case on information from a fellow inmate of Ferizi with a history of unreliability.

She wrote that the circumstances of the case lead her to conclude that there were elements within the Department of Justice who were so dissatisfied with this Court's decision to release defendant ... that they purposely tried to evade these decisions by filing very weak new charges against the defendant.

Prosecutors have argued that, now that the pandemic has subsided, the rationale for compassionate release no longer exists.

Brinkema, though, said it would set a terrible precedent to reverse the decision to release a defendant based on a change of circumstances caused by the government's manipulation of the criminal justice system.

Prosecutors, who filed an appeal with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond the first time Brinkema ordered Ferizi's release, have not yet indicated if they plan to appeal her most recent order.

Ferizi was among a relatively small number of inmates who successfully sought early release from prison under the pandemic. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, more than 12,000 inmates filed motions for compassionate release in 2020 because of the pandemic. About 21% of those requests  a little more than 2,500 inmates  were granted.

A public defender representing Ferizi and a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia each declined comment.
This article was first published on NerdWallet.com.

Federal student loan borrowers just got an extra four months before their payments resume.

If that feels like deja vu, its because this is the sixth extension of the interest-free payment pause that went into effect in March 2020 under the Trump administration, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Payments had been scheduled to restart beginning May 2.

This latest extension, through Aug. 31, will put the total number of months without payments at 30. Nearly 37 million of the nations federal student loan borrowers havent had to make payments during the pause, saving them a collective $195 billion in waived payments, according to a March report from the New York Federal Reserve.

They've used the wiggle room in their budgets to handle essentials like food, rent and child care. Some have managed to tackle larger financial goals, like paying down credit card debt or saving up for emergencies. Some even kept paying each month.

For months, Department of Education officials have expressed concern about whether the majority of borrowers could handle payments after more than two years without them, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report.

On Wednesday, the White House said borrowers still arent ready. And it offered up a huge win for 5 million borrowers with loans in default: an automatic return to good standing. Borrowers in default have long faced wage garnishment, damage to their credit and substantial collections fees. Debtors have had the option to pursue rehabilitation during the pause; now its automatic.

Its unclear if borrowers will be more able to cope with payments come September. At the very least, the additional reprieve provides borrowers with more time to plan.

But plan for what, exactly?

Is there an end game?

Forgive student debtors for being doubtful: The government labeled last Augusts extension as final, but that has been followed by several more.

Employment is back to near pre-pandemic levels, COVID-19 cases are dropping and other pandemic-related relief has expired. But the Biden administration, in a White House news release, said Federal Reserve data predicted a rise in late payments and defaults if payments resumed.

Some experts are skeptical.

This feels much more driven by politics than by public health, says Robert Kelchen, professor and head of the department of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

Kelchen says he thinks an additional extension this year could be likely. He also raised the question of whether the Biden administration will ever resume payments. Theyre not going to resume at the end of August to make voters repay right before the midterms, Kelchen says. And then, at that point, the re-election campaign starts.

Kelchen isnt the only one who sees the move as largely political. Betsy Mayotte, president and founder of The Institute of Student Loan Advisors, says any extension will benefit borrowers, but four months might be more palatable to voters during the midterm election, whether they support or oppose extending the payment pause.

If they had [extended] it through the end of the year, some people might take that as, he only did it to get through midterms, Mayotte says.

Too much? Not enough?

Extending the payment restart raises the stakes for the Biden administration to make a decision on debt cancellation, says Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center advocacy group. I think this is the clearest sign yet that big things are coming, he adds.

The extension "does not make sense if you decouple it from the broader conversation around student debt cancellation and student loan reform, says Pierce, adding that the timing of the extensions expiration does tee up the possibility of debt cancellation weeks before voters head for the polls.

The Biden administration has repeatedly said the president would support cancellation via congressional action despite calls from Democrats in Congress, along with student borrower advocates, state attorneys general and one former Secretary of Education, to do so via executive action. Biden has questioned his unilateral ability to do so.

The amount of cancellation, if any, has also been a tug-of-war. While on the campaign trail, Biden pledged to sign off on canceling $10,000 in debt per borrower, a promise he has distanced himself from since becoming president. Some Democratic lawmakers like Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have called for Biden to cancel $50,000 in debt.

While broad student debt cancellation has not come to pass, more than 700,000 borrowers have seen $17 billion in loan debt forgiven via a revamped Public Service Loan Forgiveness program and other existing forgiveness programs.

Is it time to get back to normal?

Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, have criticized both the extension and their Democratic colleagues calls to cancel student debt. Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, who sits on the House Education Committee, called the pause extension outrageous, while two others, Reps. Jim Banks of Indiana and Bob Good of Virginia, had previously introduced a bill to block another extension.

Leaders in the private student lending industry are also against extending the pause since their business has taken a two-year hit from federal borrowers who chose to stick with the pause rather than refinance privately. SoFi CEO Anthony Noto wrote in a March 17 blog post that extending the pause was at best fiscally irresponsible and takes from struggling families and gives to the affluent, and at worst its political theater.

Student loan servicers are unlikely to be more ready to resume processing payments or offering guidance to borrowers in September than May, says Scott Buchanan, executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance, which represents servicers. These private companies are contracted by the government to manage federal student loans.

Buchanan adds, In fact, we may be less ready just because youve burned through a bunch of resources to get ready and now all of those are wasted.

Who needs a plan? Borrowers

Buchanan says hes concerned that a further delay means borrowers wont take the restart seriously. Theyll ignore it until they get a delinquency notice, he says. The more we push this out and do it at the last minute, the worse our problems become.

What leaders from both sides of the aisle, the private lending industry and student borrower advocacy groups all seem to agree on is that the pause doesnt fix the core issue: The student lending system is broken. And, as Pierce says, a four-month extension isnt much time to implement meaningful reform.

Four months does give borrowers more time to, at a minimum, make a plan for payment to restart. Whenever that is.

Anna Helhoski writes for NerdWallet. Email: anna@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @AnnaHelhoski.

The article Student Loan Pause Extended Again  Is There an End Game? originally appeared on NerdWallet.
This article was first published on NerdWallet.com.

Conventional wisdom suggests that you book travel reservations in advance to nab the best deal. But when it comes to rental cars, this might surprise you: The best time to rent a car is last minute, when they tend to be cheaper.

Thats according to a NerdWallet analysis conducted in March 2022 of 360 rental car prices from eight major car rental companies in the United States. The prices chosen for this analysis were the cheapest possible option (typically a small sedan) that allowed you to pay at the counter (as opposed to in advance) and included taxes and fees. The analysis compared the cost to book three months in advance of the reservation date versus seven days before.

NerdWallet found that customers pay on average $75 more to book a weeklong rental car three months in advance compared with booking the same rental just a week in advance. That translates to an extra cost of around 15%, simply for booking early.

The best time to book rental cars

Do car rental prices go up closer to the date? Actually, not always  and not often.

The NerdWallet analysis  accounting for the booking time frame across multiple destinations and car rental brands  discovered that renting a car even three days before your reservation start date can yield significant savings.

Rental car companies Alamo, Avis, Budget, Dollar, Enterprise, Hertz, National and Thrifty were all included in the analysis.

The savings discovery materialized for every rental car company in the analysis. The difference was starkest at Enterprise, where it was, on average, nearly 40% more expensive to book three months in advance. Even at Dollar, which had the slightest difference, it was still more costly to book three months in advance.

Heres the percentage difference in costs by rental car company:

Rental car company Percent more youll pay to reserve 3 months in advance vs. 1 week out Alamo 13.56%. Avis 5.68%. Budget 6.21%. Dollar 2.09%. Enterprise 38.63%. Hertz 11.01%. National 6.23%. Thrifty 14.77%.

You dont save money by reserving a rental car in advance, no matter how you slice it. So why is it so much cheaper to procrastinate?

For starters, the past year has been brutal for car renters. Supply chain shortages have made cars more expensive in general. A newfound, pandemic-driven aversion to airplanes (by some) has inspired road trips as a vacation alternative, thus increasing rental car demand. And the widespread resurgence of all sorts of travel after a slow 2020 has disrupted an understaffed travel industry. All that, and its no surprise that some travelers have found limos are cheaper than rental cars.

Michael Taylor, travel intelligence lead at J.D. Power, a data analytics company, tells NerdWallet that he doesnt see the trend of cheaper last-minute rental cars as unusual, especially these days.

Rental car pricing algorithms have gone through a period of unexpected change, he says. The surging demand, coupled with the lack of rental cars available system-wide, has seemingly caused pricing models to fluctuate much more than in the past.

Taylor also calls out the challenge of repositioning fleets. For example, its common for travelers to fly into one airport and out of another. As a result, some travelers reserve one-way rentals for trips like driving along the California coast or making a cross-country road trip.

Rental car companies typically keep detailed data and make plans to ensure one locations supply isnt depleted from rentals that get checked out but returned elsewhere. They might even offer deals for one-way rentals in the reverse direction.

But given how drastically the pandemic has adjusted travel habits, that data has become less predictable. A cheap last-minute rental could simply be a plea from a car rental company for drivers to bring cars back to needed locations.

And in anticipation of significant demand in the coming year, some rental car companies set high prices  and will only bring them down last minute upon a glut. While some businesses and consumers perceive current travel conditions to be precarious, many expect a return to normalcy this summer. The data suggests that rental car companies are setting prices to predict the same.

Why you might still book rental cars in advance

Even though last-minute rental cars tend to be cheaper, it might not be a good idea to procrastinate on booking  whether intentionally or not.

You don't want to risk sold-out cars

With the shortage of cars, there is a definite risk that last-minute inquiries will yield no availability, Taylor says. That seems like a risky game in this environment.

You dont want to find yourself stuck in a city with no public transportation and limited availability of rideshare services only to realize rental cars are sold out. The bright side of booking now: You can lock in a rate that youre at least OK with, as its better than sold-out cars.

And while the data suggests that renting last minute is generally cheaper, thats not always the case. Especially in popular vacation destinations like Hawaii, there are horror stories of renters making last-minute bookings (or changes to existing bookings) only to incur extra costs of over a thousand dollars.

You might be able to reserve a car now  and rebook the same one later at a discount

Heres a strategy that might get you the best of both worlds: the guarantee of a reservation and the possibility of a cheaper reservation. Reserve your rental car as soon as possible, and select the option that allows you to lock in your rate but pay at the counter (most major rental car companies let you do this).

Ahead of your trip, periodically check your booked rental price. If the price dips lower than what you initially paid, cancel and rebook. If you didnt prepay for your reservation, most rental car companies won't charge you a cancellation fee.

JT Genter contributed to this report.

Sally French writes for NerdWallet. Email: sfrench@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @SAFmedia. Sam Kemmis writes for NerdWallet. Email: skemmis@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @samsambutdif.

The article Which Is Cheaper: Booking Rental Cars in Advance or Last Minute? originally appeared on NerdWallet.
The world loves Point Reyes for its beaches, its trails, glorious birdwatching, baby elephant seals and even its cheese. And every weekend, thousands of cars bomb down Sir Francis Drake Boulevard to revel in all it has to offer.

But what many folks dont realize as they zip over the road from Fairfax, and past Lagunitas-Forest Knolls, is that they are passing right by some very fine hiking trails while en route to the Bay Area regions gem of a national seashore.

One such trail is the hike to the top of Mount Barnabe, which is not only a lovely walk, but its summit offers unforgettable vistas in every direction. In fact, the vistas are so sweeping that this is one of two working lookout stations remaining in Marin County.

I came upon the Mount Barnabe hike while scouring various guides for something new and different in the West Marin area. After flipping past the usual 5-star spots such as the Coastal Trail on Mount Tamalpais or the Estero Trail at Point Reyes, there it was: a BEST rating for a hike Id passed countless times driving down this road. In fact, Id camped right by it during weekends spent at Samuel P. Taylor State Park, one of the Bay Areas most popular camping destinations.

So why would a person go to Mount Barnabe if its so close to a place like Point Reyes that lures hiking enthusiasts from all over the world?

Well, one big reason is because its NOT Point Reyes. As youre probably aware, on a busy weekend, trails at Point Reyes can give some in Yosemite Valley a run for their money. A walk down the Bear Valley Trail or out at Tomales Point can feel as overrun as a day at the mall when people actually went to malls.

David Curran David Curran David Curran David Curran Views and vistas from Mount Barnabe, along the Marin Coast (Photos by David Curran/SFGATE) Views and vistas from Mount Barnabe, along the Marin Coast (Photos by David Curran/SFGATE)

By contrast, the average number of hikers per day on Mount Barnabe is between 15 and 25, according to Natasha Gilchrist of California State Parks, and this is spread over a few different trails to the top.

Another reason is the aforementioned view. At 1,466 feet in elevation, Mount Barnabe towers high enough to offer sweeping vistas of Tomales Bay and beyond to the north. You can see Mount Diablo 42 miles to the east, and to the west, you can stare out at Inverness Ridge and Point Reyes. Not far to the south, there is Kent Lake, shimmering and (currently) full, surrounded by forest.

And then there is the trail itself. As you ascend Mount Barnabe, the path is so well maintained and such a gentle grade you barely realize youre going up. If ever there was a hike that defined moderate difficulty, this is it.

Getting to the Mount Barnabe trailhead is so simple you can give your Google Maps a day off. Head west on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and travel 0.8 mile past the turnoff for the Samuel P. Taylor State Park Campground. At this point, you will see a sign for Devils Gulch. Across the road from here is a large turnout with room for about 15 cars to park. On a sunny Saturday afternoon, this may seem like frightfully few, but this is also a reason the hike never gets too crowded. You can also park in the Samuel P. Taylor daytime parking lot, which will cost you $8. Then you walk down through the park and get here.

There are other routes up Mount Barnabe without starting at Devils Gulch, but today we are focusing on this one.

As you begin your walk, youre heading north along Devils Gulch Creek. Stay on the paved section and then peel off onto the trail to the right adjacent to the creek. Within 5 minutes or so youll cross a bridge where you can go left or right.

Go left.

Here youll see a sign for Bills Trail and Stairstep Falls. In the other direction is the Deadmans Gulch Trail, which seems a little hyperbolic for such an unperilous trail, except for one thing: this trail actually passes a dead man. Yes, in 0.3 mile in this direction, you can see the grave of Samuel P. Taylor himself.

David Curran

Resist the temptation. Taking this route will get you up Mount Barnabe but only via a steeper and less pleasant fire road. Those looking for a cardio workout may get excited by this. But if its the grave site thats attracting you, you can pay your respects to Mr. Taylor on the way down.

Instead, proceed up Bills Trail, which is 3.7 carefully maintained miles long and a dream for those needing an assured path underfoot. It is also so full of switchbacks it can be a little hypnotic, especially since the rise is so gently graded youll barely break a sweat while climbing more than 1,000 feet in elevation.

But Bills Trail isnt just gentle; its a beautiful forest hike. The sweeping branches of bay laurels bend over the trail that is also lined with plenty of oaks and old mossy Douglas firs while ferns cover the hillside. It also just recently reopened a few days before April 1 after a winter closure that is typically from November to April due to flooding. So go on this trail soon and be among the first for 2022.

I first took this hike on a sweltering summer day in 2021 and remained cool all the way up. It is a highly recommended heat-wave hiking destination. And while the trees offer shelter, the downslope direction has views out into a canyon and a grassy slope across the way. This is that perfect combination of a shaded forest hike with plenty of light.

After 0.6 mile on Bills Trail, there is the option to turn off to see Stairstep Falls. It is a brief diversion, but, given the current lack of water, it is not much of a cascade and only recommended for the most die-hard waterfall seekers.

David Curran

From here to the top of Bills Trail, the hike enters a period of very long, gently graded switchbacks. It was only near the top of this mesmerizing back and forth that I realized Id lost complete sense of how long Id been walking  it was about an hour and 45 minutes  and soon after this, the trail ended, popping me out onto a fire road.

Once on the fire road, you are instantly greeted with your first sweeping view, looking northwest toward Point Reyes and Tomales Bay.

Now you will proceed along the fire road to the top of Mount Barnabe. This is only a quarter of a mile long but steeper than any part of Bills Trail. But it is actually not that steep, as I was reminded upon reaching the top, where I was met by eight toddlers who had walked up there with their dads.

Now at the summit, you can take in the breathtaking views in every direction.

Returning from Mount Barnabe, you can retrace your steps down Bills Trail, which means a 3.7-mile descent. Or, you can take the express route, the fire road, which is about half the distance. Since it is also much steeper than the gentle Bills Trail, those with knee troubles might want to bring along their hiking sticks.

David Curran

Walking down the fire road offers opportunities to glance up at this mountain  which was incidentally named for the donkey of Samuel P. Taylor  and see how far you climbed. And then, as you near the bottom, you can stop for a visit to the grave of Mr. Taylor, putting the capper on an altogether pleasant hike you otherwise may have just passed right by while heading to that more famous destination down the road.
Dozens of body bags containing the remains of civilians killed by Russian occupying forces in the Ukrainian town of Bucha lay in rows Wednesday on the edge of a cemetery as authorities worked to identify the victims of unspeakable atrocities.

On a road nearby, two young girls, their little brother and father walked holding hands among the tangled metal of destroyed Russian tanks left behind by the retreating troops as they left the town on the outskirts of Kyiv.
Sunday, April 10

On this date in 1903, Mason Greenlee, pioneer from Kentucky for whom Greenlee County is named, died.

On this date in 1904, Sister Euphrasia, one of five sisters who came to Tucson in 1871 from St. Louis to establish the academy of St. Joseph, died.

On this date in 1907, the Western Federation of Miners attempted to organize and strike the mines at Bisbee without success.

Monday, April 11

On this date in 1903, A.H. Reynolds visited Benson to look into establishing experimental tobacco farms in the San Pedro Valley.

On this date in 1910, it was announced that Phoenix contractor R. Toohey had been given the contract for construction of the Globe-Roosevelt Highway.

On this date in 1919, Dr. Merrill P. Freeman, pioneer Tucson banker, member of the Board of Regents and Arizona historian, died.

On this date in 1938, Dr. Andrew E. Douglass, noted developer of the tree-ring dating technique, retired as director of the Steward Observatory.

Tuesday, April 12

On this date in 1886, Gen. Nelson A. Miles arrived at Bowie Station to open a new campaign against the Apaches.

On this date in 1889, Flagstaff residents burned in effigy Gov. Lewis Wolfley to protest his veto of a bill that was to create Coconino County.

On this date in 1902, the Village of Yuma was incorporated as a town. It became a city in 1914.

On this date in 1910, A.W. Stewart, a Prescott electrician, built a new airship embodying the principals of the Wright Brothers machine, but with many new improvements of his own.

Wednesday, April 13

On this date in 1820, Thomas Gardner, one of the earliest pioneers in Santa Cruz County, was born.

On this date in 1877, the first Desert Land entry was made by William A. Hancock at Florence.

On this date in 1892, Charles D. Poston filed a claim on land which he called Hole-in-the-Rock. The land was set aside as the Papago Saguaro National Monument in 1914 and in 1930, became Papago Park.

On this date in 1905, the Arizona Dam on the Salt River was washed out.

On this date in 1917, the town of Florence turned on its first electric street lights.

Thursday, April 14

On this date in 1919, 2nd Lt. Frank Luke Jr. of Phoenix was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for gallantry in action beyond the call of duty.

On this date in 1920, delegates to the district meeting of the State Womens Clubs in Phoenix exchanged heated words over the required medical examinations of students in public schools. Some called the requirements un-American.

On this date in 1927, the first passenger train of the Southern Pacific of Mexico Railroad left Nogales for Guadalajara.

On this date in 1928, Mexican and American firefighters in Nogales joined efforts to save the famous Nogales Brewery, but the building was completely destroyed by the fire.

Friday, April 15

On this date in 1859, Camp Colorado was established on the Colorado River as a base for California bound immigrants. One week later the name was changed to Fort Mohave. It was abandoned in 1861 and regarrisoned by troops from California on May 19, 1863.

On this date in 1893, an advertisement in the Mohave County Miner offered loaded dice, perfect work and weight & cannot be detected by outsider. Guaranteed to win. Also the finest marked cards made.

On this date in 1911, President William Howard Taft announced he would veto the joint resolution of Congress providing statehood for Arizona because the proposed state constitution allowed for the recall of judges.

On this date in 1915, state offices were closed in the Salt River Valley as thousands gathered to witness the first spillage of water over Roosevelt Dam.

On this date in 1928, Arizona Pioneers Historical Society and the Southern Pacific Railroad erected a stone shaft over the graves of Union soldiers who were killed in the skirmish with Confederate forces at Picacho Pass on April 15, 1862.

Saturday, April 16

On this date in 1915, melting snow in the White Mountains caused floods which took out two dams on the Little Colorado River near St. Johns. Eight people drowned and the reported property damage was $500,000.
BORODYANKA, Ukraine  Andreiy Ziuzko stood near the flattened apartment complex in Borodyanka that was once his home, his belongings in plastic bags on the sidewalk beside a few blackened cooking pots Tuesday.

The building had lain in ruins for weeks, struck just after fighting had driven him and his family to flee. It was only after a while that he explained something even worse had happened. His mother lived a few doors down, and her apartment had also been bombed.

Moms home was hit on the same day, Ziuzko said. I cant find her.

Russian troops recently withdrew from the area around Borodyanka, a Ukrainian commuter town near Kyiv, the capital, that was among the first places to be hit by Russian airstrikes after the invasion. Now, dozens of people who were sheltering in basements or apartments are missing and presumed dead under the rubble, the acting mayor said Tuesday.

We think over 200 people died, said Georgiy Yerko, the acting mayor of Borodyanka. But it is an assumption.

On Tuesday, New York Times journalists reached the town for the first time after Russian troops withdrew. The scars left behind were shocking, with great gashes sliced through multistory complexes along the main street. Four apartment buildings had collapsed in the bombing, residents said, their floors crushed down to ground level like concertinas. Heavy fighting left more destruction for 2 miles along the main street.

Russias pullout from areas around Kyiv in recent days has unveiled evidence of abuses that have galvanized the worlds attention. In places like Bucha, a closer-in suburb of the capital just a few miles from Borodyanka, the focus has been on evidence that Ukrainian civilians were killed by Russian forces, including bodies whose hands had been bound and who had been shot at close range.

In Borodyanka, and other places, the focus has been on evidence that civilian buildings were indiscriminately targeted. The topic was central in discussions at the United Nations Security Council Tuesday.

Rosemary DiCarlo, the U.N. chief for political and peace-building affairs, told the Security Council that explosive weapons had caused death and destruction in many populated areas, wrecking infrastructure that included residential buildings, hospitals, schools, water stations and electricity systems.

The U.N. received credible allegations that Russia had used cluster munitions  banned weapons that spew small explosive mines across a wide space  in populated areas at least 24 times, DiCarlo said. She added that there were accusations that Ukrainian forces had also used cluster munitions.

Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited under international humanitarian law and may amount to war crimes, DiCarlo told the council.

Borodyanka used to have about 13,000 residents, and the town  a simple, modest place, as one resident described it  was built along a highway crossroads. That convergence was a selling point for people who worked in Kyiv, just a short drive away to the southeast, and for Russian troops as well as their convoys that began piling into the countrys north to try to seal off the capital in the last days of February.

Residents said that the Russian forces began filing through the town around Feb. 27, and that volunteers with the Ukrainian territorial defense forces then attacked one of the convoys. After that, Russian soldiers started shooting at cars and buildings as they drove through town, said Valeriy Vishnyak, a resident. It was just lawlessness, he said.

Then, late on March 1, Russian jets came screaming overhead. We were sitting in the cellar, said Tamara Vishnyak, Vishnyaks mother. The plane flew very low. I counted three seconds and the bomb fell. The bomb crashed through the building across the street.

Ziuzko, 43, said that the only reason he and his family escaped the airstrikes was because they had fled their nearby building when the fighting set it on fire.

He said he did not know where his mother, Svetlana Ziuzko, 66, had been at the time the bombs hit, whether in her apartment or in the bomb shelter. His voice catching, he said he could not remember what day it was the last time he saw her.

The back of the building is gone; just the balcony is there, he said, pointing to the sixth-floor balcony hanging above a vacuum.

Behind the building, two women stood watch while their husbands climbed down into the basement next to the destroyed section. Tanya Hachnikova, 36, said her husband was trying to find his parents, who lived in the apartment building. The second woman, Oksana Dikan, 43, was looking for a colleague who lived there and was also missing.

They said they thought up to 20 people had been living in the building when it was hit, but the two men climbed back out saying they could not get through to the basement that lay under the rubble. We need help, and we need equipment, Dikan said later by telephone.

Many people fled the town to escape the fighting that raged there for days, until a sustained Ukrainian counterattack led Russian troops to pull out last week. Yerko said that digging for bodies would have to wait. The first task, he said, was to reconnect the electricity and remove unexploded ordinance and then clear the rubble.

Yaroslav, an information technology specialist who asked that only his first name be published to avoid being identified, was climbing onto a bench to look into a gutted apartment he said belonged to his parents. They had left, with just their documents and their cat, the day before the bomb fell on the building, he said. Almost certainly there were people still living in their apartments and hiding in the shelter when the airstrike hit, he said.

Asked if the Ukrainian military had been using the building, he said no. What army? My parents were living there.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
WICHITA, Kan. (AP)  Law enforcement officers in Kansas weren't adequately punished for joking about police violence and exchanging racist comments and images in a series of text messages, an independent report found.

The Wichita Citizens Review Board released the 27-page report Tuesday. It details officers sharing an image of a naked African American male sitting on another African American male behind a police vehicle. There also are negative references to Mexicans, Muslims and gays, officers joke about violence and share images of a Confederate flag, according to the report, which highlights issues first uncovered by The Wichita Eagle.

The contents of some messages show racial bias  or at minimum, a lack of cultural sensitivity and bad judgment, the report said. Other messages reveal disrespect for command authority and disrespect for efforts by the Department to promote de-escalation as a policy and to reduce use of force.

Created in 2018, the board is made up of business executives, non-profit workers and pastors. Members have the ability to review investigative reports on police cases, but it is only an advisory group. It cannot conduct its own investigations or recommend discipline for specific officers.

Investigators first discovered the messages in April 2021 while searching the phone of a Sedgwick County deputy in an unrelated case, according to The Eagle.

The board, which met five times, focused its review on eight cases involving 12 Wichita police officers  all of them SWAT team members. The bulk of the messages occurred between May 2018 and February 2021. Not all officers participated in all the messaging.

In one exchange, a sergeant sent a message to three officers, praising them for being the Ultimate De-Escalators, saying they permanently" de-escalated "people who needed permanent de-escalation.

In another message, an officer told a sergeant, Hey Wyatt Earp. How about saving some bad guys for us to deal with. The officer adds that you keep putting holes in all the good targets.

The board complained in the report that the police department failed to appropriately discipline the officers involved. Police has not responded to a phone message from The Associated Press seeking comment.

The report said all of the reviewed cases were initially charged as conduct unbecoming of an officer, which generally carries a punishment of suspension on a first offense.

But one officer had that charge reduced to insulting a supervisor upon retiring. Another officer got a written reprimand. In all the other cases, the conduct was reclassified as failure to use good judgement, with the officers receiving mentoring but no discipline.

Four officers mentioned in the report resigned or retired before the group's review and a fifth person retired during the review.

The report doesn't touch on the conduct of the sheriff's deputies.

We do not accept as a defense to the conduct that the messages were private messages' or that the Department should not regulate this conduct because it is protected speech under the First Amendment or did not involve officers on duty," the report said. On duty or not, these officers were communicating with fellow officers related to their policing activity."

The report also raised concerns that the police union had intervened inappropriately and noted that the city manager has convened a separate group to review the police department's disciplinary process.

The board said the messages have the ability to harm efforts the department has made to improve relationships with the community.

Board members wrote in their conclusion that they were frustrated by this entire case.
FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP)  Kentucky's new Republican-drawn legislative maps all but guarantee GOP victories in an outsized number of state House districts, a Democratic operative said during his party's legal challenge of the legislature's redistricting work.

The state Democratic Party is challenging new boundaries for the Kentucky House and the state's six congressional districts. The party claims the redrawn maps present an extreme partisan gerrymander and excessively split counties, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported.
LOS ANGELES  By the time a group of Los Angeles police officers cautiously approached Rosendo Olivio Jr. with guns drawn, more than six minutes had passed since they'd shot him.

Officers had confronted Olivio on a porch as the 34-year-old, seemingly in the grips of a mental crisis, held up a small knife and claimed to have doused the building behind him in gasoline, according to video from cameras worn by the officers. When he moved forward, imploring the officers to shoot, they did.

Olivio turned away and crumpled facedown on the steps. Officers screamed at him to "drop the knife!"

Blood pooled beneath Olivio as the minutes ticked by. Eventually, about 10 officers approached, their weapons trained on his motionless body. Two of them grabbed Olivio by the ankles and dragged him down the stairs. The knife fell from his hand as his face bounced off the last step.

They pulled his arms behind his back, handcuffing him. Video shot by a witness captured four officers carrying him through the street by his arms and legs. Paramedics later pronounced him dead.

The incident was a stark example of how LAPD officers  like police around the country  are trained to view people they've just shot as ongoing threats. The result is that officers routinely wait several minutes before approaching those suspects, then focus on handcuffing and searching them, often delaying medical attention or taking no steps to give any until paramedics arrive, a Los Angeles Times review of nearly 50 LAPD shootings and hours of associated video found.

Officers who did not provide aid  pressure on the wound, CPR or other measures  after some shootings were not punished, despite a department policy requiring them to assist those injured if they are able, according to the review. LAPD officials determined instead that discussions about the lapses and retraining on the department's policies were preferable.

Los Angeles Police Department/TNS

Police officials say that officers must ensure their own safety when dealing with potentially dangerous suspects, and that doing so can take time depending on the circumstances of each encounter. Officers say they sometimes fear making a person's injuries worse if they try to intervene.

But Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which advises police departments on policy matters nationwide, said rendering aid after shootings should be a "guiding principle" for police departments not only because it can save lives, but also for the impact it can have on the public's perception of police.

"Part of being a professional cop today means being able ... to quickly pivot and recognize that you have a responsibility, if your department really believes in the sanctity of human life, to do everything humanly possible to get that person aid immediately," Wexler said.

LAPD officials often spend a year investigating shootings by officers, analyzing second by second an officer's actions in the moments leading up to the shooting and each pull of the trigger. Less attention is paid, however, to the minutes after the shooting, The Times found.

The Times had access to videos recorded by officers' body-worn cameras or surveillance cameras in all but one of the 47 shootings in which LAPD officers struck someone since the start of 2020. The Times also reviewed detailed LAPD investigative reports available for 25 of the shootings.

All the videos were edited by the department before they were released and often excluded portions of time during the encounters. However, they usually captured and included time stamps for when the officers opened fire and when they handcuffed the person they'd shot.

In some cases where officers fired on a suspect at close range, they had the person in handcuffs within seconds. In other cases in which officers feared the person might still be armed, according to available video, they didn't approach them for more than 10 minutes.

Los Angeles Police Department/TNS

On average, 3 minutes and 40 seconds passed before officers reached the person they had shot in the 39 shootings in which it was possible to time their response, The Times found.

The suspect appeared to be unconscious by the time police reached them in 22 of the shootings, and was at least partially incapacitated in the rest, the videos show. And in all but one of the shootings, the person was handcuffed after being turned over onto their chest or moved in other ways that experts say could have exacerbated their injuries, video showed. In some cases, they were then left facedown or simply held on their side for several more minutes as officers waited for paramedics, The Times found.

In one video, LAPD officers shot a man holding a knife, then tasered him as he laid on the ground in an attempt to make his arm jerk farther away from the dropped blade.

"Don't move!" an officer screamed at the man, who was not moving.

In another incident, a team of officers trailed a mentally ill man who was holding a hammer for several blocks through Westlake before surrounding him with their guns drawn. When the man, Samuel Ponce, threw the hammer in the officers' direction and then raised another object in his hand, one of the officers shot him in the head.

An edited compilation of body-camera videos the LAPD released showed Ponce throwing the hammer and getting shot in slow motion, then cut to a supervisor instructing officers to start performing CPR  giving the impression the aid was swift.

A report on the shooting released months later gave a fuller account of what happened. Officers first handcuffed Ponce and rolled him onto his side to search him for weapons, and one officer poked him in the back, saying, "Hey, amigo." No one checked his pulse or whether he was breathing, the report noted. The officers then left him facedown on the ground for nearly two minutes. After eventually checking him for injuries, they again left him on the ground without tending to him.

The officers didn't start chest compressions until ordered to do so more than four minutes after the shooting.

One of the officers later explained his thinking to investigators. "I don't want to just start doing, let's say, like just random chest compressions if we don't see where exactly he was hit and where he was injured, because you don't want to just make the injury worse," he said, according to the report. "So, we roll him over just so he can get better oxygen. I don't know if at that point somebody did see where he was shot or try to put pressure on it, but compressions were started."

While the officer's decision to shoot Ponce was found to be justified, LAPD Chief Michel Moore ruled the officers had not properly cared for him afterward. In an internal report on the shooting, Moore wrote that his "expectation is that they would have kept Ponce in a recovery position after he was handcuffed, holding him in place if necessary, before initiating CPR." Moore was referring to turning a person on their side to help keep their airway open.

Moore directed supervisors to discuss Ponce's treatment after the shooting with the officers, but did not recommend they be punished.

Los Angeles Police Department/TNS

In its review, The Times found that detailed protocols related to officer safety were consistently followed after shootings, while the department's more vague mandate to render aid was not.

Crucial minutes

After someone is shot, "time is really of the essence," said Dr. Kenji Inaba, chief of trauma and surgical critical care at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. "There are limited but effective things that can be done in the field, and the sooner they can be done in these specific situations, the better off the patient will be."

Inaba, a reserve LAPD officer and the department's chief surgeon, consults on the care for injured officers and advises the LAPD on medical training for officers. He also helps lead the Stop the Bleed campaign, a national initiative teaching first responders the importance of stopping blood loss for gunshot victims in the field.

Wounds from handguns  which account for the vast majority of shootings by police and others in Los Angeles  are typically best treated in the field by putting immediate, direct pressure on the wound, Inaba said. Applying a tourniquet and applying pressure, part of officers' training, or packing the wound with gauze or cloth could also help in some situations, he added.

Luann Pannell, the LAPD's director of police training and education, said that in line with state law, all police recruits receive more than 20 hours of first aid and CPR training, "to be able to provide a basic medical response until emergency medical services can arrive on scene."

All officers are also issued a trauma kit and those working patrol assignments must get refresher training on CPR and the use of defibrillators every two years, Pannell said.

The fact that ambulances often arrive at shooting scenes quickly in L.A. does not mean police do not need to treat someone after a shooting, Inaba said. People can die from blood loss within minutes, he said, and for those who survive, blood loss complicates their treatment and recovery.

Policy vs. practice

Under the LAPD's use of force policy, officers are expected to "render aid" to people they have shot "to the extent of the officer's training and experience" and "to the level of equipment available," including by using basic first aid, CPR or automated defibrillators.

The policy, however, does not specify what steps officers must take to comply with the order. The vague wording has allowed police officers to respond in vastly different ways after shootings, and police officials to judge those actions differently from case to case, internal LAPD reports on police shootings and videos showed.

Officers initiated chest compressions a handful of times, including one who, after detecting a faint pulse in a woman who had just been shot, revived her on a sidewalk before paramedics arrived.

In other cases, however, officers appeared to do little other than place the person who was shot on their side, without applying pressure to their bullet wounds or providing any other direct medical care.

Officers were found to have acted appropriately in some cases simply by calling for an ambulance. In other cases, including the shooting of Ponce, it was determined that officers did not do enough to help someone they shot, but they were not disciplined.

On the same day Ponce was shot in March 2021, a man named Nathan Glover crashed a car into a home during a police pursuit and then was shot by an officer who said he saw Glover holding a gun as he jumped from the vehicle. A gun was recovered at the scene.

Video released by the department showed the officers screaming at Glover not to move as he moaned in a patch of grass at the side of the home.

"I'm dying," Glover said.

"The ambulance is coming, man. Relax," one of the officers replied, before the officers moved forward and handcuffed Glover behind his back.

According to a later investigative report, Glover was then left on his chest for almost five minutes as the officers waited for paramedics. One of the officers told investigators that "he did not want to place Glover in a seated or recovery position as he did not know if Glover had suffered a lower-body or back injury."

Moore later found that the officers had broken policy for failing to do more. But rather than recommend they face some punishment, he opted again to make the poor medical response "a topic of discussion."

Wexler said that it can be difficult for officers to suddenly start treating a threatening suspect as a victim in need of care, and that peer pressure among officers to continue treating suspects as threats can be strong. Those challenges, he said, make it more important for departments to train officers well on the rules  and then enforce them.

"This shouldn't be left to the judgment of the officers to decide what 'rendering aid' means and under what circumstances" it is required, Wexler said. "To make rendering aid real, I think you have to put a lot into it. It can't simply be an empty slogan."

While there is no policy requiring officers to handcuff a person they shoot, they are taught to approach suspects carefully, often as a group with shields and weapons at the ready. Officers are also expected to formulate a plan for who in the group will handcuff and search the suspect, the department said.

Even when a person "appears to be incapacitated, the fear of the suspect re-arming himself, or even gaining consciousness and continuing hostile actions remains a possibility," the department said in the statement.

In the more than 40 police shootings reviewed by The Times, none involved a person regaining consciousness or suddenly reaching for a weapon after being shot. Most who were conscious complied with officers' orders, while a few resisted being handcuffed.

Some medical and policing experts faulted the LAPD  and police departments generally  for failing to properly train officers on how to treat those they've just shot and to instill in them a sense of duty to try to save their lives.

"It's not the ethos," said Christy Lopez, a Georgetown Law professor and former deputy chief in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. And that "signals something really corrosive to community members."

The message is particularly acute for family members of people who have been shot by the police.

"They could have been more careful with him. They could have respected his body. But they didn't do none of that," said a relative of Olivio, who requested anonymity for fear the police would retaliate against her for speaking out. "They treated him like an animal, and he wasn't an animal. He was a human being."

The LAPD, which is still investigating Olivio's shooting, has not identified all of the officers involved, but has named the two who opened fire: Faviola Salinas and Kyle Locke.

David Winslow, an attorney for Salinas and Locke, declined to make the officers available for questions from The Times, but said that they had followed their training in a difficult situation.

Winslow alleged that Olivio was a gang member in gang territory, and that a hostile crowd of people had gathered after the shooting  increasing the risk to officers and complicating the medical response, in part because paramedics "did not want to go near that apartment."

And while Olivio may have been unconscious, the officers couldn't be sure, Winslow said.

At Olivio's viewing at the Funeraria Latino Americana in East L.A. in January, mourners could still see the wounds to his forehead, nose and lip from when his face bounced off the steps the day he died.

They were still there despite the mortician's makeup and his mother's attempts to hide them.


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WASHINGTON (AP)  Former Trump advisers Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino were held in contempt of Congress on Wednesday for their monthlong refusal to comply with subpoenas rendered by the House committees investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The two men became the latest members of former President Donald Trump's inner circle to face legal jeopardy as the select committee continues its more than nine-month-long probe into the worst attack on the Capitol in more than 200 years.

The near-party-line 220-203 vote will send the criminal referrals for Navarro and Scavino to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.

The contempt action followed hours of raw debate on the House floor as Republicans stood by Trump and charged that Democrats were trying to politicize the attack on the Capitol by his supporters.

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy accused the Jan. 6 committee of criminalizing dissent, defended Scavino as a good man and lobbed harsh criticism at members of the committee, some by name. Lets be honest, this is a political show trial, McCarthy said.

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, among the nine members of the Jan. 6 panel, noted that the committee has two Republicans, including Liz Cheney of Wyoming. He added that the purpose of the floor vote was to make clear that open contempt and mockery for this process, and for the rule of law will not be allowed by the chamber.

I mean, it is just amazing that they think they can get away with this, the three-term lawmaker told reporters about Scavino and Navarro as the debate raged on Wednesday.

Cheney and Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who is also on the select committee, were the only Republicans who voted in favor of the contempt charges.

While pursuing contempt charges may not yield any new information for the Jan. 6 committee  any prosecutions could drag for months or years  the vote Wednesday was the latest attempt to show that witnesses will suffer consequences if they dont cooperate or at least appear for questioning. Its all part of an effort to claw back legislative authority that eroded during the Trump era when congressional subpoenas were often flouted and ignored.

This vote will reveal to us who is willing to show tolerance for the intolerable, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland said on the floor, directing his comments to Republicans across the aisle.

Raskin and other Democrats made their case that Scavino and Navarro are among just a handful of individuals who have rebuffed the committee's requests and subpoenas for information. The panel has interviewed more than 800 witnesses so far.

In the last week alone, the committee scored two of those interviews from Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner. Their virtual testimonies are the closest lawmakers have gotten to the former president.

Members of the panel said Kushner's testimony last Thursday was helpful. Ivanka Trump, who was with her father in the White House on Jan. 6, was questioned for eight hours Tuesday as congressional investigators tried to piece together her fathers failed effort to delay the certification of the 2020 election results.

The main focus of the committee's outreach to the former first daughter surrounds a telephone call they say she witnessed from her father to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject Bidens 2020 election win as part of his ceremonial role overseeing the electoral count. Pence rejected those efforts.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the chairman of the committee, highlighted Ivanka Trump's voluntary cooperation with the committee as opposed to Scavino and Navarro's defiance. Raskin said Scavino has "refused to testify before Congress about what he knows about the most dangerous and sweeping assault on the United States Congress since the War of 1812.

The committee says Scavino helped promote Trump's false claims of a stolen election and was with him the day of the attack on the Capitol. As a result, he may have materials relevant to his videotaping and tweeting messages that day.

A lawyer for Scavino did not return multiple messages from The Associated Press seeking comment.

Navarro, 72, a former White House trade adviser, was subpoenaed in early February over his promotion of false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election that the committee believes contributed to the attack.

Navarro cited executive privilege when declining to testify, saying the committee should negotiate this matter with President Trump. He added, If he waived the privilege, I will be happy to comply.

But the Biden administration has already waived executive privilege for Navarro, Scavino and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, saying it was not justified or in the national interest for them to withhold their testimony.

Executive privilege was developed to protect a presidents ability to obtain candid counsel from his advisers without fear of immediate public disclosure, but it has limits. Courts have traditionally left questions of whether to invoke executive privilege up to the current White House occupant. The Supreme Court earlier this year rejected a bid by Trump to withhold documents from the committee.

The vote Wednesday will be the third time the panel has sent contempt charges to the House floor. The first two referrals, sent late last year, were for former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former Trump ally Steve Bannon.

The contempt referral against Bannon resulted in an indictment, with a trial set to start in July. The Justice Department has been slower to decide whether to prosecute Meadows, much to the frustration of the committee.

Its the committees hope that they will present it to a grand jury, Thompson told reporters Tuesday. Obviously, the Meadows case is still outstanding. We dont really know where that is, other than weve done our work.

He added, "The firewall goes up from our standpoint, and DOJ uses its systems to take it from there.

Thompson suggested more witnesses could still be held in contempt in the weeks ahead even as the committee looks to wrap up the investigative portion of their work in the next two months.

A conviction for contempt of Congress carries a fine of up to $100,000 and up to a year in prison.

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Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP)  Hungarys prime minister said he asked Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday to call an immediate cease-fire in the war in Ukraine and that his country will comply with Russian demands to pay for natural gas imports in rubles.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he spoke with Putin by phone and urged the Russian leader to end the military conflict in neighboring Ukraine. Orban said he also offered to host a conference in Hungary's capital between the warring parties.

I suggested that (Putin)  the Ukrainian president, the French president and the German chancellor hold a meeting here in Budapest, the sooner the better, Orban said. It should not be a peace negotiation and not a peace settlement, because that takes longer, but an immediate cease-fire agreement.

Orban spoke at a news conference days after his Fidesz party won a fourth consecutive term leading the Hungarian government. Hungary is a member of both the European Union and NATO.

The right-wing nationalist leader, who is considered Putins closest ally in the EU, has vehemently refused to supply weapons to Ukraine or allow their transport across the Hungary-Ukraine border. He also lobbied heavily against the EU imposing sanctions on Russian energy imports.

On Wednesday, Orban said his government would comply with Moscows demand that unfriendly countries pay for Russian gas imports in Russian rubles, a condition that some Western leaders have rejected.

We have no difficulty paying in rubles, so if the Russians ask for it, we will pay in rubles, he said, adding that Hungary would not give in to any pressure to extend sanctions against Russia to gas and oil. That would kill the Hungarian economy.

Orban sought to play down concerns among some of his critics that he had formed too close a relationship with Putin while acting to impede a united EU response to the Russian invasion. The Hungarian leader spoke with new clarity on Russia being the aggressor in the war.

He said that all reports of atrocities coming out of areas where Russian forces have withdrawn, such as in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, should be examined through independent and impartial investigation.

Civilians must be protected at all costs. Ill-treatment of civilians must be condemned in the strongest possible terms, and such cases must be investigated, Orban said.

Since taking office in 2010, Orban has overseen the burgeoning of diplomatic and economic cooperation with Moscow, and his government has increased Hungary's dependence on Russian fossil fuels.

Yet the war in Ukraine has changed the dynamics between the two countries as Hungary has sought to fulfill its obligations to its Western allies while trying to maintain the flow of Russian gas.

"(The Russians) know what I know: that we have built a well-functioning relationship system that is being broken down right now," Orban said. I am trying to save something from this that could survive this period. But it could easily be that the sanctions and the pressure from the West will be so strong that nothing will be left of it.
WEST PLAINS, Mo. (AP)  A man has been shot to death at a truck stop on Missouri's southern border, and two other men have been arrested in the case, police there said.

The shooting happened around 11 p.m. Tuesday at the 14-Junction Truck Stop along Highway 63 in West Plains, television station KYTV reported. Officers called to the scene found a 34-year-old man with several gunshot wounds and rushed him to a hospital, where he later died. His name was not immediately released.
ROCKVILLE, Md. (AP)  A 24-year-old man was sentenced Wednesday to 80 years in prison in the 2018 stabbing death of his mother outside a Maryland church, prosecutors said.

Montgomery County Circuit Judge Harry Storm sentenced Kevin McGuigan of Rockville to life in prison with all but 80 years suspended, according to the state's attorney's office. Last fall, Storm found McGuigan was competent to stand trial. McGuigan pleaded guilty in December to first-degree murder in the death of his 49-year-old mother, Jaclyn McGuigan, outside St. Raphael Catholic Church in Potomac.
MADISON, Miss. (AP)  A man shot at a police officer outside a restaurant in Mississippi, and the officer fired back and wounded the man, news outlets reported.

A Mississippi Bureau of Investigation spokesperson said Wednesday that the bureau is examining the Tuesday night shooting in Madison. The bureau investigates shootings by or of law enforcement officers.
Witthaya Prasongsin/Getty Images

NEW YORK (AP)  Media critic Eric Boehlert, who created the Press Run website and wrote for Rolling Stone and Media Matters for America, was killed in a bicycle accident. He was 57.

An avid bike rider, Boehlert was struck by a commuter train while riding near his home in Montclair, New Jersey, on Monday night, according to journalist Soledad O'Brien, a family friend.
DOBSON, N.C. (AP)  A Mississippi man arrested for the murder of a woman whose body was found on an interstate 30 years ago has been extradited to North Carolina, authorities said Wednesday.

The N.C. State Bureau of Investigation said Warren Luther Alexander, 71, was arrested March 15 in Diamondhead, Mississippi, as a result of a joint investigation by the Surry County Sheriffs Office and the SBI.
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BRUSSELS (AP)  NATO would quickly welcome Finland and Sweden into its ranks with open arms if they decided to apply, the military alliances top civilian official said Wednesday, as Russias war on Ukraine spurs public support in the two Nordic countries for membership.

The military organization might also be ready to provide security guarantees to the countries if any potential membership bid angers Russia, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said.

A poll last month by Finnish broadcaster YLE showed that, for the first time, more than 50% of Finns support joining the Western military alliance. In neighboring Sweden, a similar poll showed that those in favor of NATO membership outnumber those against.

If they decide to apply, I expect that all allies will welcome them, Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels, as NATO foreign ministers met to discuss the war in Ukraine. We know that they can easily join this alliance if they decide to apply.

Before launching the war on Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin demanded that the 30-nation military organization stop expanding and pull its troops back from Russias borders. So the prospect of neighboring Finland, and Sweden, joining is unlikely to be welcomed in Moscow.

To shield them, Stoltenberg said NATO member countries might be prepared to provide a security guarantee to cover the two neutral nations from when they announce a possible membership bid until their applications are endorsed.

Once members, they would benefit from NATOs collective defense clause, which obliges all members to come to the aid of any ally that comes under attack.

I am certain that we will find ways to address concerns they may have regarding the period between the potential application and the final ratification, Stoltenberg said. He declined to speculate about what those security guarantees might involve.

Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said his countrys lawmakers are due this month to debate a government white paper on security, including an option for NATO accession. He said Russias invasion of Ukraine has changed public opinion.

In three or four weeks we have a majority, first time ever in favor of joining, Haavisto said.

He said Finland knows that Russia is ready to take bigger risks, as we can see in Ukraine, bigger risks also for its own security. We can also see that Russia is capable of gathering more than 100,000 men against just one country, even without touching its reserves.

Haavisto added that the threshold has been lowered, at least in the debate, on Russias possible use of tactical nuclear or chemical weapons.

He too was reluctant to go into detail about any security guarantee that Finland might need, particularly as debate about joining continues at home. But Haavisto did say its something that his country would want to discuss with key NATO members, and that Finnish leaders have been in contact with U.S. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

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LINCOLN, Neb. (AP)  Nebraska would immediately ban abortions if the U.S. Supreme Court ever overturns its 1973 decision to legalize the procedure under a bill that sharply divided lawmakers on Wednesday.

Lawmakers remained stuck on the measure and weren't expected to take the first of three required votes on it until later Wednesday evening. If it passes, Nebraska would become the 14th state nationally to enact a so-called trigger law.

Supporters of the measure said it would ensure that Nebraska is among the first states to outlaw abortion if the court overturns Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that allowed the procedure.

This is about ensuring our most precious and vulnerable people, the preborn, are protected, said Sen. Joni Albrecht, the bill's lead sponsor.

Opponents slammed the measure as an intrusion on women's ability to make personal medical decisions.

What are you all thinking?" asked Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks, of Lincoln. I have a daughter, she's 25 years old, and you all are not invited into her medical examination appointments."

The debate comes ahead of an expected June ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which concerns a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks or pregnancy. The court's 1973 ruling, Roe v. Wade, allows state to regulate but not ban abortions up to the point of fetal viability, at roughly 24 weeks.

Nebraska became the first state to ban abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy in 2010, and the state outlawed a second-trimester abortion procedure in 2020 despite fervent protests from abortion-rights supporters.

The latest measure faces a tougher path, however, because of the current political make-up of Nebraskas one-house, officially nonpartisan Legislature.

At least 33 votes are required to overcome a filibuster and force a vote on the bill. Republicans in the Legislature hold 32 seats and Democrats have 17. One Democratic lawmaker also typically opposes abortion, but hes offset by a Republican who has voted in favor of abortion rights in recent years.

Another Republican lawmaker, state Sen. Robert Hilkemann, a retired Omaha doctor, said he was uncomfortable with parts of the measure that could expose physicians to felony charges in a situation where they end up terminating a pregnancy.

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GENEVA (AP)  Skirmishes echoing in the distance. Sleeping in a car, or a couple of nights in a Ukrainian monastery in the war zone. Driving gingerly thorough countless checkpoints staffed by jumpy Ukrainian or Russian soldiers.

The Ukraine office director for the International Committee of the Red Cross described these and other harrowing conditions faced by a small but determined team that tried and failed to reach the besieged city of Mariupol in a bid to evacuate civilians.

The humanitarian relief group's team set out for Mariupol on Friday but suspended the operation over what the Red Cross described as inadequate security guarantees. The three-vehicle, nine-person team tried again in the following days, hoping to escort a convoy out of the city, which has been surrounded by Russian troops and low on food and other supplies for weeks.

They ultimately succeeded in accompanying about 1,000 civilians who managed to get on their own from Mariupol to Berdyansk, a city 84 kilometers (52 miles)to the west, and made it safely Wednesday to Zaporizhzhia, a government-controlled city 206.5 kilometers (about 128 miles) to the north.

The level of stress is immense. We are working under a fragile cease-fire. You never know whether it would be respected, Pascal Hundt, the head of ICRC's delegation in Ukraine, said. Were quite relieved that they managed to go back.

ICRC previously said about 500 evacuees were escorted out, but Hundt said the final count was about twice that after many people fell into a growing caravan behind Red Cross vehicles.

Hundt told The Associated Press in a video call from the western Ukrainian city of Kamianets-Podilskyi that security officials told the team that conditions on the route to Mariupol prevented the evacuation operation from going forward.

When you travel with a convoy with buses, you have to stop at the checkpoint. You have to explain who you are, what you are doing there. They may be not necessarily aware of you coming in, and then it takes time, and then you proceed to the next one and you start again, he said. In the evening, theres a curfew. People cannot move. Everybody gets stressed, including the soldiers at the checkpoint.

Hundt described his team  which he was not a part of -- racing to move before nightfall, when its more dangerous to travel.

It took us five days to do that operation. Five days  to do a bit more than 200 kilometers. You can imagine the difficulties we faced, he said, referring to the distance between Zaporizhzhia to Mariupol.

One night, police detained the team members before eventually releasing them, the Red Cross said. The team found a monastery to sleep in and shower, Hundt said.

There were people in it, in there, and they did welcome us quite warmly, he said. And after having spent nights either in the car or in the petrol station, to find this hospitality there from the monastery was a great relief.

He said ICRC is still trying to arrange a larger evacuation from Mariupol and has asked Ukrainian and Russian officials for a four-day clearance so there is time to get more people out.

I think it is important that these people are given the opportunity to get out from hell, because this is really an apocalyptic situation there, Hundt said.

The Geneva-based ICRC says it doesnt have an estimate of how many civilians are left in Mariupol, which had a pre-war population of more than 400,000. Ukrainian officials have estimated the number to be around 160,000.

The Red Cross also has supplied emergency aid to other Ukrainian cities, including Cherhihiv and Mykolaiv.

This week, the organization dispatched teams of medical personnel and weapons experts to fan out from Kyiv, Ukraine's capital, to assess the needs in suburbs like Bucha and Irpin. Alleged atrocities against civilians were discovered after Russian forces pulled out from towns around Kyiv.

What I can tell you is that the needs are just gigantic, Hundt said. The testimonies that we are receiving are heartbreaking, and it is still dangerous.

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WASHINGTON (AP)  Kyiv was a Russian defeat for the ages. The fight started poorly for the invaders and went downhill from there.

When President Vladimir Putin launched his war on Feb. 24 after months of buildup on Ukraine's borders, he sent hundreds of helicopter-borne commandos  the best of the best of Russia's spetsnaz special forces soldiers  to assault and seize a lightly defended airfield on Kyiv's doorstep.

Other Russian forces struck elsewhere across Ukraine, including toward the eastern city of Kharkiv as well as in the contested Donbas region and along the Black Sea coast. But as the seat of national power, Kyiv was the main prize. Thus the thrust by elite airborne forces in the war's opening hours.

But Putin failed to achieve his goal of quickly crushing Ukraines outgunned and outnumbered army. The Russians were ill-prepared for Ukrainian resistance, proved incapable of adjusting to setbacks, failed to effectively combine air and land operations, misjudged Ukraines ability to defend its skies, and bungled basic military functions like planning and executing the movement of supplies.

Thats a really bad combination if you want to conquer a country, said Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel and professor of military history at Ohio State University.

For now at least, Putin's forces have shifted away from Kyiv, to eastern Ukraine. Ultimately, the Russian leader may achieve some of his objectives. Yet his failure to seize Kyiv will be long remembered  for how it defied prewar expectations and exposed surprising weaknesses in a military thought to be one of the strongest in the world.

Its stunning, said military historian Frederick Kagan of the the American Enterprise Institutes Critical Threats Project, who says he knows of no parallel to a major military power like Russia invading a country at the time of its choosing and failing so utterly.

On the first morning of the war, Russian Mi-8 assault helicopters soared south toward Kyiv on a mission to attack Hostomel airfield on the northwest outskirts of the capital. By capturing the airfield, also known as Antonov airport, the Russians planned to establish a base from which to fly in more troops and light armored vehicles within striking distance of the heart of the nation's largest city.

It didnt work that way. Several Russian helicopters were reported to be hit by missiles even before they got to Hostomel, and once settled in at the airfield they suffered heavy losses from artillery fire.

An effort to take control of a military airbase in Vasylkiv south of Kyiv also met stiff resistance and reportedly saw several Russian Il-76 heavy-lift transport planes carrying paratroopers downed by Ukrainian defenses.

Although the Russians eventually managed to control Hostomel airfield, the Ukrainians' fierce resistance in the capital region forced a rethinking of an invasion plan that was based on an expectation the Ukrainians would quickly fold, the West would dither, and Russian forces would have an easy fight.

Air assault missions behind enemy lines, like the one executed at Hostomel, are risky and difficult, as the U.S. Army showed on March 24, 2003, when it sent more than 30 Apache attack helicopters into Iraq from Kuwait to strike an Iraqi Republican Guard division. On their way, the Apaches encountered small arms and anti-aircraft fire that downed one of the helos, damaged others and forced the mission to be aborted. Even so, the U.S. military recovered from that setback and soon captured Baghdad.

The fact that the Hostomel assault by the Russian 45th Guards Special Purpose Airborne Brigade faltered might not stand out in retrospect if the broader Russian effort had improved from that point. But it did not.

The Russians did make small and unsuccessful probes into the heart of Kyiv, and later they tried at great cost to encircle the capital by arcing farther west. Against enormous odds, the Ukrainians held their ground and fought back, stalling the Russians, and put to effective use a wide array of Western arms, including Javelin portable anti-tank weapons, shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and much more.

Last week the Russians abandoned Hostomel airfield as part of a wholesale retreat into Belarus and Russia.

A sidelight of the battle for Kyiv was the widely reported saga of a Russian resupply convoy that stretched dozens of miles along a main roadway toward the capital. It initially seemed to be a worrisome sign for the Ukrainians, but they managed to attack elements of the convoy, which had limited off-road capability and thus eventually dispersed or otherwise became a non-factor in the fight.

They never really provided a resupply of any value to Russian forces that were assembling around Kyiv, never really came to their aid, said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. The Ukrainians put a stop to that convoy pretty quickly by being very nimble, knocking out bridges, hitting lead vehicles and stopping their movement.

Mansoor says the Russians underestimated the number of troops they would need and showed an astonishing inability to perform basic military functions. They vastly misjudged what it would take to win the battle for Kyiv, he says.

This was going to be hard even if the Russian army had proven itself to be competent, he said. Its proven itself to be wholly incapable of conducting modern armored warfare.

Putin was not the only one surprised by his armys initial failures. U.S. and other Western officials had figured that if the invasion happened, Russias seemingly superior forces would slice through Ukraines army like a hot knife through butter. They might seize Kyiv in a few days and the whole country in a few weeks, although some analysts did question whether Putin appreciated how much Ukraine's forces had gained from Western training that intensified after Putin's 2014 seizure of Crimea and incursion into the Donbas.

On March 25, barely a month after the invasion began, the Russians declared they had achieved their goals in the Kyiv region and would shift focus to the separatist Donbas area in eastern Ukraine. Some suspected a Putin ploy to buy time without giving up his maximalist aims, but within days the Kyiv retreat was in full view.

Putin may yet manage to refocus his war effort on a narrower goal of expanding Russian control in the Donbas and perhaps securing a land corridor from the Donbas to the Crimean Peninsula. But his failure in Kyiv revealed weaknesses that suggest Russia is unlikely to try again soon to take down the national capital.

I think they learned their lesson, said Mansoor.
NEW YORK (AP)  Russia said Wednesday that it made a debt payment in rubles this week, a move that may not be accepted by Russias foreign debt holders and could put the country on a path to an historic default.

The Ministry of Finance said in a statement that it tried to make a $649 million payment toward two bonds to an unnamed U.S. bank  previously reported as JPMorgan Chase  but that payment was not accepted because new U.S. sanctions prohibit Russia from using U.S. banks to pay its debts.

Russia said it has instead transferred the funds in rubles into a special bank account with Russias National Settlement Depository, the countrys securities regulator. The ministry added that once the country is allowed to access foreign exchange markets  not something that will happen for the foreseeable future due to sanctions  it will decide whether to allow bondholders to convert the ruble payment back into dollars or euros.

While Russia has 30 days of leeway to catch up with its payments, investors have been betting on a default. The contracts governing Russias bonds require in most cases payment in euros or dollars with few and narrow exceptions known as an alternative payments clause. Russia contends that it has met those exceptions but sovereign debt experts have argued otherwise.

It is not clear to me, even if the clause is there, that Russia would be entitled to use it, said G. Mitu Gulati, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and an expert on sovereign debt restructurings and contracts, in an email. Thats a debatable question. Id argue that they are not. But this would be a question for a court.

Ratings agencies like Standard & Poor's have downgraded Russia's debt deep into junk status and said a default is highly likely.

While Russia has signaled it remains willing to pay its debts, the Kremlin warned that if sanctions stayed in place, it would continue to pay debt holders in rubles instead of dollars or euros.

Russia has all the resources needed to service its debts, said Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman. If this blocking continues and transfers for debt repayments are also blocked from these frozen funds, they can be paid out in rubles.

The U.S. has been attempting to force Russia to use its foreign currency reserves  or any revenue from oil and gas sales  in order to deplete the countrys financial resources. The sanctions placed on Russia this week barred the country from using any of its foreign reserves held in U.S. banks for debt payments.

Previously the Treasury Department had been allowing Russia to make debt payments, which stopped Russia from defaulting last month when it transferred a payment on March 17.

Russia has been able to use the proceeds of oil and gas sales to prop up the ruble. Western powers are currently in talks about increasing sanctions on Russia's oil and gas industry in an effort to further hinder the country's economy.

Treasury is committed to holding Russia accountable for its actions so it cannot benefit from the international financial system, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said to Congress on Wednesday..

Russia has not defaulted on its foreign debts since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, when the collapse of the Russian Empire led to the creation of the Soviet Union. Even in the late 1990s during Russias sovereign debt crisis the country was able to continue to pay foreign debts with the help of international aid, although it did default on its domestic debt.
NEW ORLEANS (AP)  Ten gunmen kidnapped an 83-year-old American nun from her bed in the west African nation of Burkina Faso and destroyed almost everything in the house where she lived, but left four other women unhurt, a Louisiana official for the order said Wednesday.

Sister Suellen Tennyson was taken late Monday from her room in her pajamas  no shoes, no glasses, no phone, no medicine, Sister Ann Lacour, U.S. congregational leader for the Marianites of Holy Cross in Covington, Louisiana, told The Associated Press. Lacour provided additional details of the kidnapping a day after the AP reported it.

Lacour said Tennyson takes blood pressure medicine and she is not sure how she would fare without it. I do know without her glasses shed be totally disoriented, she said in a phone interview from the orders worldwide headquarters in Lemans, France.

Two other nuns  one from Canada and one from Burkina Faso  and two young Burkinabe women who were living in the same house in Yalgo are now safely at the Kaya Diocese headquarters, even though the gunmen shot up their new truck so they couldn't use it, Lacour said. Yalgo is roughly 100 kilometers (62 miles) northeast of Kaya.

Lacour says she believes Tennyson was taken because shes American, but the kidnappers have not been in touch with the order. Without Tennyson's phone, she noted, they might not have the phone numbers to do so.

Was she targeted? We don't really know that, Lacour said.

Tennyson had been a missionary in Burkina Faso since 2014, supporting Sister Pauline Drouin, a nurse from Lake Magantic in Canada, and Sister Pascaline Tougma, a midwife from Burkina Faso, Lacour said.

The once peaceful West African nation has seen a great deal of violence linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group over the past six years. Activist Daouda Diallo has documented more than 1,000 extrajudicial killings by security forces and jihadis over that period.

Jihadi groups linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State in the Sahel, the vast expanse south of the Sahara Desert, have been taking hostages for ransom to fund operations and expand their presence. Twenty-eight foreigners have been abducted in the Sahel since 2015 and six, including two Americans, are still captive, according to Heni Nsaibia, a senior researcher at the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. In addition to Tennyson, aid worker Jeffrey Woodke was kidnapped from Niger in 2016, he said.

Yalgo is in the north, near the province of Soum, where two attacks in November killed nearly 70 people, and not far from the nation of Mali, where Human Rights Watch said more than 100 civilians have been killed in recent months.

Tennyson worked in the New Orleans archdiocese for many years, Archbishop Gregory M. Aymond said.

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Associated Press reporter Sam Mednick in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, contributed to this report.
PIERRE, S.D. (AP)  A lawmaker who will cast a vote next week on whether to impeach South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg says he gave him legal advice following Ravnsborg's involvement in a fatal car crash.

Rep. Scott Odenbach, who at the time was running for the House seat he eventually won, says Ravnsborg reached out to him for input on a public statement that was released two days after the attorney general struck and killed Joe Boever, a pedestrian who was walking along a rural highway in September 2020.

Odenbach, a Republican and Spearfish attorney, told North Dakota special agents that he gave Ravnsborg advice on the wording of the statement, according to audio released recently with the file on the House impeachment committee's findings.

On this thing he did call and I did give him some counsel on kind of the best way forward on that in a capacity that I would characterize as his attorney, Odenbach said to a special agent.

OK, said North Dakota Special Agent Joe Arenz. So, it was somewhat of a legal advice, there?

Yes, for sure, it was, Odenbach said.

Odenbach says he edited the statement and sent it back to Ravnsborg, South Dakota Public Broadcasting reported.

Odenbach says his friendship with Ravnsborg and his informal legal advice do not preclude him from doing his job as a state representative, which includes considering impeachment.

Republican Speaker of the House Spencer Gosch says its up to Odenbach to decide whether to abstain.

If he gave any sort of legal counsel and theres some attorney-client privilege, thats something hell have to deal with in terms of his client. I dont know much about it, nor did I look into it because it was irrelevant to the case, Gosch said.

The Legislatures code of conduct says lawmakers must avoid any conflict of interest which would interfere with their duties and responsibilities as legislators, or with the exercise of their best judgment in support of the state.

The Republican-controlled impeachment committee voted on party lines to issue a report that found his actions did not merit impeachment.

Lawmakers in the full House meet on Tuesday to consider whether to impeach Ravnsborg.

The attorney general has cast Boevers death as a tragic accident and pleaded no contest last year to a pair of traffic misdemeanors in the crash.

Ravnsborg initially reported the crash as a collision with an animal and has said he did not realize he struck a man until he returned to the scene the next day and discovered his body. Criminal investigators doubted that account, but prosecutors said they were unable to prove that Ravnsborg realized he killed a man the night of the crash.
NEW YORK (AP)  A judge on New Yorks highest court has been referred to a disciplinary commission and could be kicked off the bench for failing to comply with a rule requiring proof of vaccination against COVID-19.

Judge Jenny Rivera, one of seven jurists on the state's Court of Appeals, is barred from court facilities and has been working remotely since October, court officials said. She is one of four judges statewide who have been referred to the state's Commission on Judicial Conduct for being out of compliance with the mandate that applies to all court personnel.

The Court of Appeals is New York's equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court.

We had made it clear from the outset that any Judge not in compliance subjects themselves to a referral to the Commission on Judicial Conduct for their determination, courts spokesperson Lucian Chalfen said.

Asked about Rivera's status, Chalfen said: She is not in compliance with the court's vaccination policy.

Responding to a message left with Rivera's chambers, Court of Appeals spokesperson Gary Spencer said: If true, any referral would be confidential under the Judiciary Law.

Rivera, who was appointed to the Court of Appeals by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2013, has been participating in hearings by video, questioning lawyers through a large television monitor positioned next to her colleagues on the bench in the Albany courtroom.

She was absent from Tuesday's ceremony, attended by Gov. Kathy Hochul, celebrating new appeals court judges.

New Yorks state court system requires all employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19, a policy it put in place last year. On March 21, the state court system notified 156 court employees that they failed to meet qualification for employment and would be fired if they did not show proof of vaccination by April 4.

Chalfen said of those employees, 103 are being sent termination letters, one has resigned, 11 have said they are retiring, and 41 have chosen to comply with the mandate and will return to duty.

That deadline did not apply to judges, who can only be removed by the Commission on Judicial Conduct. The commission has never sanctioned or removed a Court of Appeals judge, according to a database of its decisions.

Rivera can continue working as a judge while the commission process plays out. The timeline for that process hasn't been released.

On its website, the Commission on Judicial Conduct says all complaints remain confidential until it renders a public determination that a judge should be admonished, censured, removed or retired, or if the judge subject to a complaint has waived confidentiality.

A spokesperson for the commission, Marisa Harrison, declined to comment.

Since its inception in 1978, the commission has made determinations in 912 cases, about two-thirds of them involving low-level town or village court justices. The commission has removed 176 judges from office and publicly censured 342 judges. Another 114 judges have retired or resigned as a result of the commission's proceedings.

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Follow Michael Sisak on Twitter at twitter.com/mikesisak
DETROIT (AP)  Toyota customers soon won't be able to get U.S. federal tax credits for buying electric or hybrid vehicles.

The automaker expects that sometime before the end of June it will reach a 200,000-vehicle cap on the credits, Bob Carter, Toyota's head of North American sales, said Wednesday. After that, the credits will be phased out over the next year, reaching zero, as Tesla and General Motors already have.

The lack of credits is problematic for automakers shifting from petroleum-powered vehicles to batteries in the effort to reduce emissions, meet government fuel-economy standards and fight climate change. Nissan is about 30,000 vehicles away from reaching the cap, and others will follow as more EVs are introduced.

Tesla, the top seller of electric vehicles in the world, and GM already are at a price disadvantage to other automakers without the credits, and Toyota soon will be. Additional EV tax credits are in the Build Back Better spending bill backed by President Joe Biden, which is stalled in Congress.

Toyota reached the cap largely by selling plug-in gas-electric hybrid vehicles. The company's plug-in RAV4 Prime small SUV with 42 miles of electric range earns the buyer a $7,500 credit, the largest available. The Prius Prime plug-in, with 25 miles of electric range, gets $4,500. Toyota previously had offered a fully electric RAV4, but it didn't sell well and was canceled. It's rolling out a fully electric model called the bZ4X with 250 miles per charge, this summer.

The Build Back Better bill would give EV buyers a $7,500 tax credit through 2026 to charge up sales. But the following year, only electric vehicles made in the U.S. would qualify for the credit. And the base credit rises by $4,500 if the vehicle is made at a U.S. plant that runs under a union-negotiated collective bargaining agreement. Only GM, Ford and Stellantis vehicles would qualify.

Carter, on a conference call with reporters, said Toyota lobbied against the additional credit only for union plants, calling it unfair to nonunion workers. It just needs to be a level playing field, Carter said. We are not anti-EV credits."

Democrats backing the credits for EVs made by the United Auto Workers say supporting union jobs is good for the economy and communities because unions helped to build the middle class.

GM CEO Mary Barra has said automakers that offered electric vehicles early should not be placed at a disadvantage.

Restoring the credits is a question that congress really needs to resolve, Carter said.

Toyota plans to offer 30 fully electric vehicles from its Lexus and Toyota brands by 2030.
LONDON (AP)  A security guard at the British Embassy in Berlin has been extradited from Germany and charged with spying for Russia, U.K. police said Wednesday.

The Metropolitan Police force said David Ballantyne Smith, 57, was sent back to Britain on Wednesday. He faces nine charges under the Official Secrets Act related to the collection and communication of information useful to the Russian state.
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP)  By May 2014, American hostage Peter Kassig was losing hope that he would survive his captivity at the hands of the Islamic State group.

Dad, I'm paralyzed here. I'm afraid to fight back. Part of me still has hope. Part of me is sure I'm going to die, he wrote to his father, Ed Kassig, who read the letter from the witness stand Wednesday at the terrorism trial of British national El Shafee Elsheikh.

The testimony left many in the courtroom fighting back tears in what's so far been a two-week trial that has detailed in gruesome ways the brutality inflicted on more than 20 Western hostages held captive by the Islamic State roughly a decade ago.

Even the judge, T.S. Ellis III, appeared to be fighting back tears as he called an early recess in the proceedings immediately following Kassig's testimony.

Elsheikh  better known as one of the Beatles, a moniker given by the hostages to several of their captors who spoke with distinctive British accents  is accused of taking a leading role in the hostage-taking scheme that resulted in the deaths of four Americans: Kassig, James Foley, Steven Sotloff and Kayla Mueller. Kassig, Foley and Sotloff were beheaded in videos distributed across the world. Mueller was raped by Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi before she was killed.

Kassig's long, handwritten letter was delivered to his family by a released hostage. Peter Kassig wrote that his captors tried to tell him and the other hostages that they had been abandoned by their families and their countries for refusing to meet the Islamic State's demands.

"But of course we know you are doing everything you can and more. Don't worry Dad, if I do go down I won't go thinking anything but what I know to be true, that you and Mom love me more than the moon! Peter Kassig wrote.

He wrote that if I do die, I figure that at least you and I can take some refuge and comfort in knowing that I went out as a result of trying to alleviate suffering and helping those in need.

Kassig, an aid worker, was taken hostage in Syria in 2013. He had started his own nonprofit organization to provide medical training and supplies to areas beyond the reach of some of the larger aid groups.

Also Wednesday, the jury heard testimony from an FBI agent who helped plan an effort to rescue hostages in July 2014 that ultimately failed because the hostages had been moved from a desert prison south of Raqqa before the rescue attempt.

And they heard testimony from French hostage Nicolas Henin, who survived 300 days of captivity before his release in 2014. Under questioning from First Assistant U.S. Attorney Raj Parekh, Henin described escaping several days after he was taken hostage, and the torture inflicted on him when he was recaptured.

Henin said he asked his guards for a broom to clean up his cell, and he used the broom to help knock loose the bars covering a window. He crawled through the window in the middle of the night and ran for miles across the Syrian desert until he came to a village near the city of Raqqa, an Islamic State stronghold, where he sought help.

I met two people in pajamas, he said. Unfortunately you can't recognize an ISIS fighter in their pajamas. They took me to the local police station.

The authorities returned him to his captors, who beat him, strung him up in the air dangling from handcuffs that dug into his flesh in the Syrian sun, and finally left him in a cell for 11 days with his wrists chained to his ankles.

In his later months of captivity, he came across the Beatles, who were already recognized by his fellow hostages as particularly sadistic. He said the three Beatles would regularly inflict beatings, and that the Beatle they dubbed Ringo would frequently lecture the hostages on the justification for their captivity.

They were trying to explain to us that even though we were not carrying weapons, we were still somehow a kind of fighter in the war between the infidel West and Islam, Henin said.

Prosecutors have said that Elsheikh is Ringo, though none of the hostages who has yet testified has been able to explicitly identify him. Witnesses have said all the Beatles took great pains to keep their faces fully masked when they were in contact with the hostages.

They liked to consider that as long as they were masked, they were protected from prosecution. This was maybe a stupid idea, Henin said, grinning broadly in the direction of Elsheikh, who sat just feet from him at the defense table.
RICHMOND, Va. (AP)  Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced new nominees Wednesday to serve on the Virginia Parole Board, after Senate Democrats' decision last month to dump four members of his initial slate of picks.

The four nominees were caught up in a partisan back-and-forth over appointments during this year's regular session of the divided General Assembly.
By Keith Burbank

Bay City News

Consumers will have the choice to consent before companies collect and disclose consumers' biometric information, such as DNA and retina images, under a bill passed by the California Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

Senate Bill 1189, the Biometric Information Privacy Act, was authored by state Sen. Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont.

"SB 1189 expands consumers' control over their personal information by prohibiting private entities from selling, trading, or profiting from the disclosure of someone's biometric information without their consent," Wieckowski said in a statement.

"Biometric information involves immutable and highly distinctive traits that are irrevocably tied to our personal identities," Wieckowski said. "Unlike a password or a pin code, when compromised or leaked, biometrics cannot be easily changed."

Wieckowski's bill expands on what is considered biometric information to include data created through automatic measurements of a person's biological and behavioral characteristics. That could be faceprints, fingerprints, voiceprints, images of the retina and iris or other biological details that could establish a person's identity.

The bill will also give Californians a private right of action if a company violates a resident's rights.

If the bill becomes law, private entities will have to publish a written policy spelling out how long they will keep the information and guidelines for getting rid of it permanently.

SB 1189 aims to supplement the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, which gave consumers the right to deny businesses the opportunity to sell consumers' personal information. SB 1189 adds more biometric businesses to the list established by the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018.

"People should be able to choose which companies they trust with their biometric information," said Hayley Tsukayama, legislative activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is sponsoring the bill, in a statement.

"When this information is misused, it can threaten privacy, free expression, equity and security," Tsukayama said.

Co-sponsoring the bill is the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit focused on the privacy rights and issues of consumers.

Copyright  2022 Bay City News, Inc. All rights reserved. Republication, rebroadcast or redistribution without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Bay City News is a 24/7 news service covering the greater Bay Area.

Copyright  2022 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited.
Far-right conspiracy theorists and QAnon boosters have found their latest obsession: Elon Musks acquisition of a 9.2% stake in Twitter.

This week, the Tesla CEO purchased over 73 million shares of Twitter stock and was added to the companys board of directors, prompting plenty of questions about how the controversial tech billionaire will influence the social media platform. As usual, however, QAnon conspiracy theorists had a different take on the matter. Theyve become convinced this is all part of the plan.

For the uninitiated: QAnon believers, who call themselves anons, think a secret military operation will soon purge the world of their political enemies and restore former President Donald Trump to power, an event they refer to as "the storm." The conspiracy theory began in 2017, and until late 2020, someone using the name Q posted regularly on message boards. Anons continue to furiously decode these drops, certain they contain information about the secret military operation they believe may march into the White House and arrest Joe Biden at any time.

Twitter has played a huge part in the plan since nearly the beginning. The first year Q began posting, the account wrote, "Look to Twitter. Exactly this: 'My fellow Americans, the Storm is upon us. This post has taken on legendary status in the QAnon community, with many convincing themselves that Trump was going to post that exact phrase on Twitter. It caused much consternation when Trump was banned from the platform in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, and believers have speculated since about whether Trump must be allowed back on Twitter for the storm to officially begin.

Enter Musk. Some QAnon believers apparently have the mistaken assumption that a 9.2% stake is the same as owning the company. Twitter has 11 members of its board of directors  12 with Musk  and also answers to public shareholders, which makes any unilateral policy decisions by Musk highly unlikely.

Nonetheless, baseless speculation is running rampant on QAnon forums that Musk will soon merge Twitter with Truth Social, Trumps struggling social media platform. In recent weeks, Truth Social has lost two of its top executives, dropped to the 355th most popular app on the Apple app store and is still unavailable on desktop or Android. But none of these facts particularly matter to Q believers, many of whom are under the impression that theyll soon be rich thanks to Digital World Acquisition Corp., Truth Socials publicly traded parent company.

DWAC and DWACW stock has been sinking steadily in response to ongoing news about Truth Socials woes. On Wednesday, DWACW closed at $12.30 a share. For context, it sold for $22.70 a share a month ago.

Gonna keep holding DWAC and DWACW, reads a top-voted comment on a major QAnon forum. Yes, its down, I suspect it will go up after merger. Remember, its not a loss if you dont sell.

Ain't no patriot selling their shares right now, chimed in another. That'd be like throwing money down the river or burning it in the fire.

A dissenter was thoroughly downvoted for writing, Could you please point to any positive news that would encourage someone not to short sell this? The companys chiefs of technology and product development were reported to have resigned this week. And I still can't even be a user because I have an Android device.

This faith in Musk is not just on the fringes, however. Charlie Kirk, who runs Turning Point USA, a conservative nonprofit that aims to fight liberal politics primarily on college campuses, told Breitbart that he hopes prominent right-wing voices (including himself) will again be allowed to post with impunity on Twitter. Kirk, unlike the anons, does not seem to believe Twitter and Truth Social will be merged.

My hope is that now that Elon Musk is on the board that he will be able to change Twitter from the inside out, remove my suspension, and allow me along with the Babylon Bee, Tucker Carlson, and countless other silenced conservative accounts back on the platform, including President Trump, Kirk said.

Kirk was banned for violating Twitters hateful conduct policy by repeatedly misgendering and deadnaming U.S. assistant secretary for health Rachel Levine, who is transgender. Trump was banned due to the risk of further incitement of violence in January 2020.

And Kirk is wrong about Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the Babylon Bee, a satirical conservative blog in the style of the Onion. Neither were banned; both accounts were temporarily suspended for misgendering trans people. They have since deleted the offending tweets and have active accounts on the site.
WFO CORPUS CHRISTI Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Wednesday, April 6, 2022

_____

RED FLAG WARNING

URGENT - FIRE WEATHER MESSAGE

National Weather Service Corpus Christi TX

252 PM CDT Wed Apr 6 2022

...RED FLAG WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 8 PM CDT THIS EVENING

FOR STRONG WINDS AND VERY LOW HUMIDITY FOR SOUTH TEXAS...

...FIRE WEATHER WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM THURSDAY MORNING

THROUGH THURSDAY EVENING FOR STRONG WINDS AND VERY LOW HUMIDITY

FOR SOUTH TEXAS...

The National Weather Service in Corpus Christi has issued a Fire

Weather Watch, which is in effect from Thursday morning through

Thursday evening.

* AFFECTED AREA...La Salle...McMullen...Live Oak...Bee...

Goliad...Victoria...Webb...Duval...Jim Wells...Inland

Kleberg... Inland Nueces...Inland San Patricio...Coastal

Aransas...Inland Refugio...Inland Calhoun...Coastal Kleberg...

Coastal Nueces... Coastal San Patricio...Coastal Refugio...

Coastal Calhoun.

* TIMING...Until 8 PM tonight for the Red Flag Warning. From 10

AM Thursday to 7 PM Thursday for the Fire Weather Watch.

* WIND...North at 20 to 25 mph with gusts to 35 mph today, then

15 to 20 mph with gusts to 25 mph on Thursday.

* HUMIDITY...Minimum values around 15 percent in the Brush

Country to 20 to 30 percent for the coastal region today,

then down to 7 to 10 percent over the Brush Country to around

15 to 20 percent over the Coastal Bend on Thursday.

* IMPACTS...Any fires that develop will likely spread rapidly.

Outdoor burning is not recommended.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

A Red Flag Warning means that critical fire weather conditions

are either occurring now....or will shortly. A combination of

strong winds...low relative humidity...and warm temperatures can

contribute to extreme fire behavior.

Residents are urged to exercise care with respect to all outdoor

activities that could inadvertently cause wildfires. Report

wildfires quickly to the nearest fire department or law

enforcement office.

A Fire Weather Watch means that critical fire weather conditions

are forecast to occur. Listen for later forecasts and possible

Red Flag Warnings.

...RED FLAG WARNING IN EFFECT FROM 10 AM TO 8 PM CDT THURSDAY FOR

AREAS ALONG AND WEST OF I-35...

* AFFECTED AREA...Along and west of Interstate 35.

* TIMING...Late Thursday morning through Thursday evening.

* WINDS...Northwest 15 to 25 mph with gusts up to 40 mph.

* RELATIVE HUMIDITY...Around 10 percent.

* TEMPERATURES...In the lower 70s.

* IMPACTS...Wildfires will have the potential to grow and spread

rapidly. Any activities that can spark a wildfire should be

avoided. Planned burning is not recommended.

A Red Flag Warning means that extreme fire weather conditions are

either occurring now, or will shortly. A combination of strong

winds, low relative humidity, and dry vegetation can contribute

to extreme fire behavior. Avoid all outside burning and welding

today. Do not toss lit cigarette butts outside. Report wild fires

to the nearest fire department or law enforcement office.

* WINDS...Northwest 20 to 25 mph with gusts up to 45 mph.

* RELATIVE HUMIDITY...10 to 15 percent.

* TEMPERATURES...Near 70.

_____

Copyright 2022 AccuWeather
WFO HOUSTON/GALVESTON Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Wednesday, April 6, 2022

_____

FIRE WEATHER WATCH

URGENT - FIRE WEATHER MESSAGE

National Weather Service Houston/Galveston TX

321 PM CDT Wed Apr 6 2022

...RED FLAG WARNING IN EFFECT FOR THURSDAY 10 AM TO 7 PM...

.Dry air and gusty northwest winds will combine for critical fire

weather conditions. Relative humidity is expected to fall below 25

percent around noon and continue to lower through much of the

afternoon. Northwest winds will prevail through the day and in

the afternoon during the peak of drying 12 to 20 mph with gust of

25 mph at times.

...RED FLAG WARNING IN EFFECT FROM 10 AM TO 7 PM CDT THURSDAY FOR

DRY AND BREEZY CONDITIONS ACROSS SOUTHEAST TEXAS...

The National Weather Service in Houston/Galveston has issued a

Red Flag Warning, which is in effect from 10 AM to 7 PM CDT

Thursday. The Fire Weather Watch is no longer in effect.

* Dry air will overspread the region this afternoon with northwest

winds limiting the recovery overnight. Strong drying will take

place on Thursday the relative humidity falling very quickly

during the morning as winds strengthen and become gusty.

* AFFECTED COUNTIES... Madison...Walker...Burleson...Brazos...

Washington...Grimes...Montgomery...Colorado...Austin...

Waller...Inland Harris...Wharton...Fort Bend...Inland

Jackson... Inland Matagorda...Inland Brazoria...Inland

Galveston...Coastal Harris...Coastal Jackson...Coastal

Matagorda...Coastal Brazoria...Coastal Galveston...Matagorda

Islands...Brazoria Islands...Galveston Island.

* WIND...Northwest 15 to 25 mph.

* HUMIDITY...Minimum values 15 to 20 percent.

* IMPACTS...any fires that develop will likely spread rapidly.

Outdoor burning is not recommended.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

A Red Flag Warning means that critical fire weather conditions

are either occurring now...or will shortly. A combination of

strong winds...low relative humidity...and warm temperatures will

create explosive fire growth potential.

DRY AND BREEZY CONDITIONS IN SOUTHEAST TEXAS...

Thursday.

* AFFECTED COUNTIES... Houston...Trinity...San Jacinto...Polk...

Northern Liberty...Chambers...Southern Liberty...Bolivar

Peninsula.

* WIND...Northwest 15 to 20 mph with gusts to 25 mph

* HUMIDITY...Around 20 percent

_____

Copyright 2022 AccuWeather
By Kristin Ignacz

Roman Svirshchevskyy, Notary Public, recalls a specific moment in his first semester of the Master of Arts in Applied Legal Studies (MA ALS) program at Simon Fraser University, the prerequisite program to becoming a Notary in British Columbia. Svirshchevskyy recalls a professor describing the uniqueness of the Notary profession because it encompasses happy law.

Since Notaries in B.C. only address non-contentious issues, their clients are rarely in a win-or-lose situation. Instead, everyone gets what they expected to get, says Svirshchevskyy. Normally, when a real estate transaction goes through, you are acting for the buyer or the seller and everybody is happy and excited, explains Svirshchevskyy. I think that part is amazing.

Svirshchevskyy enjoys notarizing real estate transactions and has aptly tailored his Langley Notary practice to meet the demand of the B.C. housing market. Last year was extremely busy for real estate, says Svirshchevskyy, The market is crazy right now! Svirshchevskyy estimates 75 to 80 per cent of his practice involves real estate transactions including purchases, sales, refinancing, and private mortgages. The remaining portion of his services includes wills, estates, and general notarizations.

Originally a customs officer from Ukraine, Svirshchevskyy moved to Canada in 2009 but had long been interested in the Notary practice. Even back in Ukraine, I saw Notary as a great profession, he says.

While completing the challenging MA ALS course load in his second language, Svirshchevskyy worked full time as a Notary assistant to enhance his practical knowledge. He also became a father and managed life with a newborn at home. Svirshchevskyy laughs when he looks back at this defining period of his life, admitting he had apprehensions about whether he could do it all.

At graduation, Svirshchevskyys determination to succeed was evident. He won the Professor Reid Award, the Do Process Award, and the Real Estate Institute of B.C. Award for the highest marks in property, conveyancing, and contract examinations. He also won the prestigious Dr. Bernard W. Hoeter award for highest marks on all Notarial statutory examinations. Svirshchevskyy describes his receipt of these awards with humility. Maybe I just got lucky. I didnt expect that at all, he says with a laugh.

Svirshchevskyy recommends a career as a Notary in B.C. and indicates there is ample work available, particularly in smaller communities outside of the Lower Mainland.

Svirshchevskyy celebrates the cultural diversity and equity of opportunity within B.C.s current Notary practice. Prior to 2008, Notaries in B.C. were governed by a seal system that limited the number of practicing Notaries. When a Notary retired, they would pass their existing seal to a new Notary of their choice. Now you need to take the Master of Arts in Applied Legal Studies program, which is a much more professional and educational approach, similar to becoming a lawyer, says Svirshchevskyy. He champions the current qualification system as it ensures the Notary practice is open to anyone willing to put in the effort.

I think it is an amazing opportunity to get into something huge, especially for someone like myself who is an immigrant, says Svirshchevskyy. You are a professional, its your own business, and as long as you work hard, the achievement is great.
Page Content

A Los Angeles court recently struck down a law that requires publicly traded corporations headquartered in California to have board members from underrepresented communities. But the ruling likely won't be the last word on the issue, because California officials may file an appeal and are currently defending several lawsuits challenging the state's board diversity laws.

Law Deemed Unconstitutional



AB 979 required covered California corporations to have one director from an underrepresented community by the close of the 2021 calendar year. Additional requirements apply by the end of 2022, depending on the size of the board.

The bill defines a director from an underrepresented community as "an individual who self-identifies as Black, African American, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Native Hawaiian or Alaska Native; or who self-identifies as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender."

The law was modeled after SB 826, which requires boards of California-based publicly held companies to have a certain number of female directors.

Corporations that don't comply with these laws could face steep penalties, ranging from $100,000 to $300,000 for each violation.

In Crest v. Padilla, Judge Terry Green of the Los Angeles County Superior Court granted summary judgment to Judicial Watch, a foundation that files lawsuits to challenge alleged misconduct by government officials. Judicial Watch claimed the law violated the state constitution.

"Equal treatment and opportunity, of and for all individuals regardless of how they look or identify, is one of this state's basic commitments," Green said in an April 1 order. "Sometimes and in some places, the citizens of this state will not live up to that ideal. But the thing that caused the problem is not always the right tool to fix the problem. Only in very particular cases should discrimination be remedied by more discrimination, and that should only happen after obvious alternative measures have been tried."

What Does the Ruling Mean for Employers?

"If this ruling stands, publicly traded corporations headquartered in California will not be legally mandated to appoint board members based on their race or ethnicity," explained Christopher Olmsted, an attorney with Ogletree Deakins in San Diego.

The defendant in this case, California's secretary of state, could appeal the decision. If the state appeals, Olmsted noted, an appellate court or the California Supreme Court could reverse the trial court's ruling. He said publicly traded companies headquartered in California should continue to monitor the progress of this litigation.

Notably, the state is defending multiple lawsuits challenging AB 979 and SB 826.

But employers shouldn't halt their diversity, equity and inclusion programs. "The ruling does not diminish or call into question the benefits of diversity in the workplace, which served as the basis for the legislation," said Michael Thomas, an attorney with Jackson Lewis in Los Angeles. "Instead, the ruling is a reminder that employers must tread carefully when taking efforts to diversify the workplace or board."

Michelle Phillips, an attorney with Jackson Lewis in White Plains, N.Y., said the ruling highlights the importance of ultimately selecting the best qualified board candidates and employees to avoid so-called reverse discrimination claims.

"Having said that, if boards and employers don't start to take their role in attracting and retaining qualified diverse candidates seriously, there will be a limit to the impact of these recruitment efforts," she noted. "It's important for boards and employers to do a better job of creating opportunities for diverse talent."

Phillips said leaders should proactively assist and encourage individuals from diverse talent pools in finding a seat at the table and should use their allyship to mentor and develop this talent.

She expects that the decision in Crest will be appealed and that new legislation will continue to promote opportunities for women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people and other underrepresented groups regarding representation on boards, in leadership roles and in other areas of influence.


By now, most of us understand the real dangers of social media. Yes, social media does not present an immediate risk such as a street crime attack because it is virtual after all and that is well understood. However, not so fast. We are in the year 2022 which, ten years ago, seemed for most of us to be the distant neon-lit hyper-connected realm we could not fathom yet. Even though the 2020s have not turned out to be that drastically different, perhaps a lot more depressing than we initially thought, things are not too different overall. On the other hand, certain aspects of technology and the internet that affect our lives and lifestyles in big ways have indeed changed quite a bit. 5 billion of us now depend heavily on the internet for almost everything. For these reasons, we need to look at how exactly the internet has changed and why it is crucial you stay safe on social media these days, especially with upcoming social media revolutions like Metas Metaverse. Secondly, let's talk about that revolution a little too, before we get into the safety aspect of it.

First of all, how is the internet different now compared to ten years ago? Lets be honest, ten years is not an enormous expanse of time by any means, but when it comes to the way the technology world is moving, 10 years is colossal. In fact, the biggest changes and revolutions to the internet as well as technology like smartphones and mobile internet have come about in the past ten years. Some call that the birth of the Information Age, well, there are a lot of names for it. In the last ten years, the period between 2012 and now, a lot has changed in the tech world. First of all, we got introduced to that device billions of us carry around every day in our pockets, the smartphone. Secondly, we got 3G, and then 4G, and finally 5G at present. Third, we got social media. Fourth, we got other revolutions such as the blockchain and virtual reality VR. All of this happened in about a decade, and all of it relates to why we have breakthrough technologies like Metaverse around today, and why billions of people want to jump on the next thing as fast as possible.

Hold your horses, have you, your family, or your friends thought about security before you jump right on the Metaverse early adopter train? Lets talk about that.

What is the Metaverse?

The Metaverse is a product that comes from the newly established Meta Platforms Inc., (ex-Facebook) that is set to revolutionize the social media industry, how we connect, communicate and interact with each other all over the world. It is essentially Facebook 2.0. The major difference is that the Metaverse utilizes several different technologies such as VR (you know, those virtual reality goggles you can put on), and also leverages the blockchain which opens up new possibilities and aims to create an entire virtual universe. In Neal Stephensons 1992 novel Snow Crash, characters who wore VR goggles could log in through portals, having their avatars walk along virtual streets. For those of you that remember the Second life platform, Metaverse is essentially a bigger, more ambitious version of that. So, the Metaverse is going to leverage, as we said earlier, blockchain technologies (and cryptocurrency) such as Ethereum and NFTs. This will allow users to play, earn, learn, work, and much more in several different virtual worlds. The Metaverse is at an early stage right now and is far from the full-fledged version that tech entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg are envisioning, but many people are already using the early Metaverse. Some say it promises to change the internet forever, putting us on an Internet 3.0 trajectory. Of course, as VR technology advances and googles become less cumbersome, more immersive, and less expensive, a lot more users may gain interest in the Metaverse and similar products in the future.

Will You Be Safe on the Metaverse?

The short answer is a resolute no. The first Metaverse abuse cases have already been recorded, as was to be expected. It is simply in some peoples nature to hide behind anonymous accounts and avatars, and scam, virtually abuse, or try to extort others. Some find it funny, some seek attention, while others are genuinely malicious. Adding to that, nobody is certain how these worlds are going to function yet, so the uncertainties rise even further. With the old Facebook, for instance, privacy issues and social engineering scams, as well as romance schemes, and account hacking were a big problem. Another huge problem was that Facebook was dishonest about the way it handles user data (Cambridge Analytica case). Right off the bat, since cryptocurrency enters the picture with the Metaverse, things like crypto wallets are also going to be a cybercriminal target. How about moderating the Metaverse? How will that be done exactly? More questions like how will the mental health of children be affected on the Metaverse are also up in the air. Stepping into a 360-degree virtual environment may be too much to handle for some, especially if abusers are in that same environment. With developments like gloves that allow you to feel the Metaverse in the works, online perverts could have a field day with this one, as you can imagine.

Whether or not the Metaverse will usher in a new era is uncertain at this point. At the end of the day, users should always heed basic cybersecurity and privacy precautions no matter what the technology is that they are using. The way Metaverse is going to be moderated or created is something we cannot control, but what we can control is the use of internet best practices to avoid risks from the start. This means;
A man is facing charges after a traffic stop in Minersville led to drugs being found, and a foot chase that led to a police officer being assaulted.

According to Minersville Police Patrolman Jeffrey Bowers and Patrolman Ethan Powell, on Friday, April 1st, 2022, around 5:30pm, a traffic stop was conducted on Eric Thomas, 34, with a last known address of Philadelphia.

Ptlm. Powell had observed Thomas' Volkswagen Jetta was missing a passenger side mirror and began to follow.

As Powell followed, Thomas was unable to maintain his lane and began to gain speed up. He was also observed reaching under the driver seat to either hide or retrieve something. While doing this, he failed to signal and also cut off another vehicle, almost causing accident.

Once Powell activated his emergency lights, Powell pulled over on Dowdentown Road behind Miners Auto Sales.

Thomas told police he was on his way to pick up food for his family, but was unable to say where he lived.

During the stop, Thomas was asked to step out of the vehicle to verify his information, and as he climbed out of the car, a package was in view underneath the driver's side seat wrapped in cellophane wrapping.

The package was seized and found to contain 13 small resealable baggies containing crack cocaine.

At this time, Ptlm. Powell advised Thomas he was under arrest and to place his hands behind his back. Thomas then fled on foot with Powell in pursuit.

The foot chase would cross Route 901 into Miners Plaza after Ptlm. Powell utilized his taser twice.

In the parking lot of the plaza, Thomas would fight by punching and elbowing Ptlm. Powell in the head several times until Branch Township Deputy Chief Kattner arrived to assist.

The two officers would eventually take Thomas into custody.

Minersville Police charged Thomas with aggravated assault, resisting arrest, possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance, simple assault, possession of drug paraphernalia, harassment, disorderly conduct, careless driving, and other driving offenses.

Police also learned that Thomas was out on bail after being arrested by the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General Bureau of Narcotics Investigation on January 12th, 2022 where he is facing drug charges.

For the Minersville incident, Thomas was arraigned by on-call Magisterial District Judge Anthony Kilker and locked up in Schuylkill County Prison on $100,000 straight cash bail.

On Monday, April 4th, 2022, Thomas posted bail through a bondsman and was released.

Thomas is scheduled for a preliminary hearing before Magisterial District Judge Kilker on April 12th, 2022.
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Press Release

April 6, 2022 Investigate, hold to account BIR for uncollected P203B Marcos estate tax liabilities: Pangilinan

'MULA ILL-GOTTEN WEALTH, BAKA MAGING FORGOTTEN WEALTH' THE Senate must investigate the utter failure of the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) to collect the P203-billion estate tax liabilities owed by the descendants of former President Ferdinand Marcos to the government, vice-presidential aspirant Francis "Kiko" Pangilinan said Wednesday. "Nakapanlulumong isipin na P203 bilyong ng estate tax liabilities ng mga Marcoses ang ilang taon ng hindi nakokolekta ng BIR. Sa gobyernong tapat, marami ang matutulungan nang ganyang kalaking halaga. Malayo ang mararating ng P203 bilyon kung maayos na gagamitin at walang tongpats," Pangilinan said. "Baka mula sa ill-gotten wealth ay maging forgotten wealth na ang P203 bilyong estate tax liabilities ng mga Marcoses kapag naupo si Ferdinand Jr. Napakalaking dagok nitong pagkukulang na ito ng BIR sa ordinaryong taxpayer na Pilipino. Ang ordinaryong Pilipino taxpayer, bago makuha ang kakarampot na sweldo, ay nakaltas na ang sanlaksang taxes," Pangilinan said. "Kung maalala ninyo ay nagplano ang BIR na kumulekta ng taxes sa mga local small online sellers who were trying to keep their businesses alive and to pay their employees, pero mayroon palang uncollected na P203 bilyon mula sa mga Marcoses," Pangilinan said. "Dapat panagutin ang BIR leadership at lahat ng kasangkot sa kapabayaang ito," Pangilinan said. On Tuesday, Sen. Aquilino Pimentel III said he was seeking commitment from his colleagues to start a Senate investigation in aid of legislation on the uncollected Marcos estate taxes. Pimentel had earlier filed Senate Resolution 998, seeking to direct the concerned Senate committee to investigate the BIR failure to collect the taxes due on the Marcos estate since 1997. Earlier, retired Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio rejected statements that the Marcos descendants were not under any legal obligation to settle their unpaid estate tax. Carpio said Section 91 of the NIRC categorically states that the estate tax "shall be paid by the executor or administrator before delivery to any beneficiary of his distributive share of the estate." Similarly, Carpio said this was also mentioned in BIR Revenue Regulations Nos. 12-2018 and 17-1993, which added that "where there are two or more executors or administrators, all of them are severally liable for the payment of the tax." Carpio said the Supreme Court declared in its March 9, 1999, ruling on the Marcos estate tax case, filed as GR No. 120880, was already "final and executory." The Philippine Daily Inquirer estimated that P203 billion can: * build 406,000 housing units for the poor at P500,000 per unit;

* pay for 8 years the P56,000 monthly salary of the needed 398 doctors to the barrios;

* provide P9,900 assistance to each of the 20.5 million poor Filipino families;

* provide P270,000 to each of the 70,000 victim-claimants of the Marcos dictatorship;

* enough to feed children aged 5 to 11 for five years;

* enough to provide P750 minimum daily wage for one year to 902,000 workers;

* enough to pay nine times over the P21.1 billion debt of PhilHealth;

* enough to provide P120,000 scholarships to 422,000 students in higher educational institutes for four years;

* enough to provide P80,000 scholarships to 634,375 students in state colleges and universities for four years;

* at P2.3 billion per building, enough to construct 88 ten-story modern hospitals;

* at P80.2 million per building, enough to construct 2,500 eight-story buildings;

* using the proposed entry level rate of P30,000, enough to pay entry-level teachers. (NOTE: Data from PDI: https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1573606/in-bir-bid-to-collect-p203b-from-marcoses-benefits-already-listed)
Over 100 Coles-label products will be available on the shelves of Singapores biggest supermarket chain following a multimillion-dollar deal brokered by the federal governments trade agency to boost food exports.

Under the newly inked alliance agreement, Singaporean shoppers will be able to find up to 140 Coles products in a dedicated section at any of NTUC FairPrices 390 stores across the Asian country from Thursday.

Coles-owned products will be available to Singaporean shoppers from Thursday. Credit:Jacky Ghossein

The products include Coles Ultimate Biscuits, Urban Coffee, its Soup range, and a selection of its Wellness Road products. Wellness Road is a healthy food range owned by Coles.

NTUC FairPrice is the dominant supermarket in Singapore, with 60 per cent of market share. By contrast, Coles holds 28 per cent of Australias market share, behind Woolworths at 37 per cent.
The Institute of International Finance expects the surplus to rise this year to as high as $US240 billion ($317 billion) due to higher energy prices and the compression of internal demand. That will probably surpass the entire surplus of China in 2022. The Russian finance ministry says the country sold its Urals crude at an average $US89 a barrel in March, which amounts to bumper prices even after offering a sanctions discount. The Kremlin is in trouble on the battlefield but it is not yet running out of money. Eyewash sanctions against oligarchs and the seizure of yachts will no longer suffice. This has unpredictable consequences for the global economy. Equity markets have not yet priced in the political escalation. Germanys corporate elites are fighting a rearguard action to head off further sanctions, warning of a dangerous chain reaction if governments succumb to the mood of the moment. Emotionally, one can understand an embargo. But if it comes, it will very probably tip the whole European economy into a recession with long-lasting consequences. We mustnt let this out of our sight, said Christian Sewing, president of the German banking federation (BdB). Martin Brudermuller, head of the chemical giant BASF, predicted a catastrophic wave of bankruptcies. If gas supplies from Russia were cut off overnight, it could push Germany into the worst crisis since the end of the Second World War. Do we really want to destroy our whole economy? he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz has stuck closely to the script, bowing to the great industrial combines much like his predecessors. He has lashed out at German academic economists for suggesting that a full embargo is manageable if the country is willing to accept some contraction of GDP, angrily calling them irresponsible. The academics are right. There is by now a small literature on how it can be done, by the Bruegel think tank, by the IEA and by the University of Bonn. The winter is over and Europe has enough gas to muddle through until next November. It all comes down to whether Europe is willing to give up its comfortable status quo. For the German coalition it means recognising that its position is untenable, and risks frittering away 70 years of hard-won moral and diplomatic credibility. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz continues to resist a full Russian energy embargo. Credit:Getty Two thirds of the population wants an end to business-as-usual appeasement. They back the Polish plan for a full cut-off of energy purchases, a full ban on Russian ships entering EU ports, and a full expulsion of all Russian banks from Swift. A splash across the front of Die Welt accused the German government of joint guilt for the massacres of Bucha and Mariupol. This is the new mood. Former chancellor Gerhard Schroder, now a paid Kremlin agent, has become a pariah. This week it is the turn of president Frank-Walter Steinmeier to explain his actions, after the Ukrainian ambassador refused to be in the same room and accused him of creating a spiders web of contacts with Russia for decades.

Steinmeier is the architect of Germanys pro-Putin policy. He approved the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in 2015 months after the illegal annexation of Crimea, against the vehement protest of Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states. It was a message to Putin that Berlin was willing to acquiesce in the violent redrawing of borders in return for a sweetheart deal on discount gas. Steinmeier this week began a delicate mea culpa. My adherence to Nord Stream 2 was clearly wrong. My judgment was that Vladimir Putin would not bring about the economic, political and moral ruin of his country for his imperial lunacy. But I was wrong, like many others, he said. He will survive but his policy will not. Loading Wolfgang Munchau, from Eurointelligence, says Germany (and Italy) is objectively the financial sponsor of Russian war crimes and risks paying an exorbitant reputational price the longer it goes on. The fate of the European project is itself in question this week. If Germany resists, I expect at least some member states to question the wisdom of aligning themselves strategically with a country that keeps pursuing its self-interest at the expense of others, he said. Munchau said the EU has a bad record of standing up to Germany, but strategic collusion with the Kremlin is becoming too much to swallow.
When the Australian Ballets Rina Nemoto found herself dancing with artistic director and international superstar David Hallberg in the rehearsal room, her muscles tightened up and her nerves shrilled with tension.

Winners of the Telstra Ballet Dancer Awards Lilly Maskery and Rina Nemoto. Credit:Louise Kennerley

Hes my idol, she explains. Im such a big fan.

She wanted to show him how good she could be, all the talent and experience she has gathered since she began dancing age three in Tokyo, that she took to her teenage training in Paris, that won her a Prix de Lausanne scholarship to The Royal Ballet in London, that she developed since joining the Ballet in 2011 and becoming a soloist in 2018.

I wanted to do 120 per cent, she says.
Australian director Baz Luhrmanns new movie Elvis, a drama about the legendary king of rock and roll, will have a world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival next month.

In what is shaping as a banner year for Australian film internationally, there are reports that George Millers fantasy romance Three Thousand Years of Longing will also debut at the 75th festival and could even open it.

Austin Butler as Elvis Presley and Tom Hanks as manager Colonel Tom Parker in Baz Luhrmanns Elvis. Credit:Warner Bros

Cannes has officially confirmed that Elvis, which had a COVID-19-interrupted shoot on the Gold Coast, will screen, with Luhrmann and his key cast as guests.

Austin Butler, best known for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, plays Elvis Presley, with Tom Hanks as manager Colonel Tom Parker and Australias Olivia DeJonge as Priscilla Presley.
Scarborough College represented an all-round educational revolution that prioritised site, landscape and introduced remote teaching via television. In the words of Scarborough dean E.E. Beckel, it meant we can make a small number of really first-class professors available to the widest group of students. Marshall McLuhan famously popularised the importance of media intellectually. Scarborough took it into the classroom and dragged the medieval notion of the university into the 20th century. Fully 45 per cent of instruction was by television, and under COVID-19 and using Zoom, it was 100 per cent. John Andrews was the first Australian to shoot to architectural prominence internationally. He consistently won design competitions for prestigious commissions against stiff competition. It is a measure of his intelligence, sheer force of personality and determination that he was so successful. No one else has bettered him before or since. John Andrews at a press conference to disclose plans for the development of Luna Park, 1980. Credit:Fairfax While he himself was very Australian, his architecture, even after his return, struggled to be Australian and continued to be international. This can be traced to Josep Lluis Sert at Harvard, who had worked for le Corbusier in Paris, and Louis Kahns influence. Harvard placed Andrews in the international mainstream and lifted him from out of Australian imitative dependence, making him one of Australias most innovative architects. Unlike Seidler, who arrived as a missionary of Bauhaus modernism whose modus was to adapt to Australian conditions, always insisting on the superiority of Europe and America over Australia, Andrews was his reverse, a truly Australian champion.

Firmly established internationally after 1966, Andrews went on to compete and win numerous prestigious projects: Miami Port passenger terminal, Gund Hall GSD at Harvard University, the 533-metre CN Tower in Toronto (until 2007 the tallest free-standing structure in the world) and Intelsat Headquarters in Washington, DC. Lured back to Australia in 1969 by the Cameron Offices commission at Belconnen, like Jrn Utzon, Andrews, set up his office in a Palm Beach boat house sail loft and acquired a fishing trawler, on which he took clients deep-sea fishing. In true Andrews fashion, he purchased a garage for his house and converted the car hoist pit into an in-floor wine cellar, which, in James Bond fashion, rose and transformed into a coffee-table-come-bottle-dispenser at the flick of a switch. It was pure Andrews novelty. The Cameron Offices, part of the Belconnen Town Centre, marked Andrews return debut. Breaking with tower convention, it comprised a series of low-rise horizontal stretched floor plates separated by long courtyards running their length, hung circuitously from T-gallows frames; each courtyard planted to represent a different Australian landscape ecology. Roofs leaked, the courtyard plants died, a heavy light fixture fell and crushed a desk and the offices subsequently underwent repair and demolition. Nonetheless, Andrews International survived and went from strength to strength from its Palm Beach sail loft, with a slew of projects including the triangular King George Tower, Merlin Hotel Perth, Darling Harbours Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre, Main Railway Station and Office Building Adelaide, and later, Hyatt Hotel. The complex for veterinary science at the University of Sydney is one of Andrews last projects. The architect in later years.

Canada honoured Andrews with the Massey Medal; the United States with the Arnold W. Brinner Award, National Institute of Arts and Letters, and in Australia, he received the 1980 RAIA Gold Medal. The following year he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his services on the forum of the Australia Council. The farmhouse at Eugowra in western NSW climaxed Andrews ambition to design a house  an expressly Australian house at that. An earlier attempt at Palm Beach had produced a brutalist monster not even Andrews could live in, so Eugowra near Forbes would prove he could go from large institutional and commercial buildings where planning, circulation, structure, engineering services and site conditions dictated to a human scale. The result was something from Russel Wards The Australian Legend, centred around a water tank atop a tower below which corrugated iron roofs spilled out into verandahs. It was tough and aggressively asymmetric, like so much of Andrews work. It was unquestionably climate oriented, robust and tough like the surrounding landscape but unrecognisable as a dwelling in any conventional sense. What it lacked was empathy and emotion, some feeling for natures delicate lightness. I recall overhearing the wife of a western Sydney couple on entry to the Darling Harbour convention centre shortly after it opened softly commenting to her husband Its very concretey dear! So it was, as were many of Andrews buildings. Brutalism has undergone a reputation revival recently and is no longer a pariah from the 1960s. Scarborough College may look every bit a megastructure due to its size and internal street system, even its comparison to an Italian hill town, yet it is no such thing. Andrews was an artist on the high wire who chose danger and boldly took risks and sometimes crashed but was never dull or predictable.
Long-term Canada Bay Council mayor Angelo Tsirekas is facing a corruption inquiry over allegations he used his position to help developers in exchange for benefits including international flights and money.

The Independent Commission Against Corruption on Wednesday confirmed in a public statement that it would hold a public inquiry into the conduct of Mr Tsirekas, who was first elected Canada Bay mayor in 2002.

The ICAC inquiry will probe allegations that Mr Tsirekas, a former Labor candidate for state and federal seats, deliberately failed to disclose relationships he had with several individuals, and property and development companies.

Canada Bay mayor Angelo Tsirekas. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

The allegations concern multiple properties across the Canada Bay local government area, including two Victoria Road addresses in Drummoyne, and two properties in Rhodes.
One of the people who died in a helicopter crash near the NSW Snowy Mountains has been identified as former Barbeques Galore director Peter Woodland.

Emergency services were called on Monday night following a request from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority rescue centre after the aircraft was last tracked in the area.

Peter Woodland in a photo from 2002. Credit:Adam Hollingworth

Mystery surrounds the final flight of the helicopter and its last hours are still being traced.

The wreckage was found about 11.55pm on Monday, about 200 metres east of the Snowy Mountains Highway at Kiandra Flats.
It was about 8.30am on Monday, March 14. I was on the Spit Bridge, on the way to a domestic violence funding announcement when suddenly, without warning, everything came to a halt. It quickly became clear: the protesters were back, sitting in the middle of the bridge. And they didnt care about the havoc they were creating for everyone caught in the traffic standstill.

A protest at Port Botany last month. Credit:Blockade Australia

More was to come. Within a few weeks, they would target the Western Distributor, Port Botany  not once but for an entire week  then the Princes Highway near Sylvania and General Holmes Drive at Brighton-Le-Sands.

Loading

I was one of many stuck in that car park on the Spit Bridge, but that wasnt what made my blood boil most. It was the kids in the car next to me who couldnt get to school, the workers who couldnt get to their jobs.
A third man has been charged with the murder of missing man Lachlan James Griffiths, whose disappearance police believe is linked to another body found encased in concrete.

The body of Andrew Walsh was found at the commercial premises during a three-week excavation. Credit:Reece DAlessandro, Nine News Twitter

Mr Griffiths was reported missing by his family on January 26. The 35-year-old was last seen alive at Slacks Creek in November and had resided at hotels in the Brisbane area.

His disappearance has been linked to an investigation into a Coopers Plains business, where last month the body of Andrew Christopher Walsh was found encased in concrete.

On Tuesday, police searched a Waroon Street address at Coopers Plains and arrested a 28-year-old Stafford man, who will appear in Caboolture Magistrates Court on Wednesday.
An inner-Melbourne pharmacist has lost a bid to resume practising while she waits for the outcome of a suspension review, after a tribunal found her theories on COVID-19 health measures were dangerous nonsense at worst.

Yarraville pharmacist Maria Stogiannis applied to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal to overturn her suspension from the Pharmacy Board of Australia, which was prompted by her vocal opposition to COVID-19 vaccinations and alleged defiance of pandemic safety laws.

In a decision published on Tuesday, senior tribunal member Anna Dea urged her to seek professional legal advice, and consider whether she really wanted to pursue the review.

The pharmacy board suspended Ms Stogiannis registration on March 1 because the pharmacist posed a serious risk to people, and that it was in the public interest for her to be suspended.

The regulator accused Ms Stogiannis of not complying with the Victorian Chief Health Officers directions, and of having a blatant disregard for patient care and public safety.
A man charged with murdering his girlfriend has faced a Melbourne court after his extradition from Queensland, telling a magistrate he was going a bit crazy after his arrest.

Robert Rickerby, 28, is accused of murdering girlfriend Jessica Geddes, whose body was found inside an Endeavour Hills home, in Melbournes south-eastern suburbs, on November 6, 2020.

The home where Jessica Geddes was found dead in 2020. Credit:Google Maps

Police will allege Mr Rickerby called an ambulance that morning to the property on Haverstock Hill Close and reported finding his girlfriend unresponsive. Ms Geddes, 27, was declared dead at the scene.

Police will allege an autopsy found Ms Geddes had multiple broken bones that were in various stages of healing and showed little evidence of having been treated. It will be alleged she suffered physical trauma over a significant period.
The lack of accessible information means most people wont find out until after they buy. WAtoday has repeatedly asked for the Department for Water and Environments modelling of one-in-200-year and one-in-500-year flood events and has been told the state government agency is not in a position to provide these maps at this time. Perth flood mapping shows eastern suburbs landmarks that would be submerged if the water level rose 2 metres. Credit:Department of Water and Environment Regulation State government mapping of a one-in-100-year flood event is available online that shows older houses in Midland, Guildford, Bassendean, Ascot, Henley Brook and Herne Hill  constructed prior to the state undertaking flood mapping  would be inundated. Dr Mallon said part of the reason government and industry were reluctant to disclose flood risk was the negative impact it would have on property prices.

He estimated flooding would cause a relative loss of property value around Australia of $170 billion by 2050 as buyers adjust for very high insurance costs, a loss equivalent to $45,000 per exposed property. Dr Mallon said there were already reported cases of home insurance premiums topping $30,000. Theres very few people who could afford that, and we will see some insurers refuse to insure some properties, he said. There is no failure in the insurance industry  this is a failure in the property market if it is allowing vulnerable people to move into vulnerable properties in high risk locations. Instead of watching properties collapse in value, it would make more sense to invest the equivalent money in adaptation and loss prevention.

The Insurance Council of Australia has backed calls to provide more detailed information to homeowners about the risks posed by extreme weather, including flood, particularly given the risks posed by a changing climate. Loading It estimates two to three per cent of properties in Australia are at a high risk of flooding. The council said in reality, if you lived in a one-in-100-year flood zone, there was a 55 per cent chance that you will experience a flood event larger than the one-in-100-year flood within an 80-year lifetime. There are no areas in Australia that are currently uninsurable, however there are some areas that may become uninsurable in the future if we do not do more to protect at-risk communities from the risks of extreme weather, an ICA spokesman said.

Insurance prices risk, and unfortunately in some situations the risk of flood is such that the flood component of the policy can be prohibitively expensive. Ahead of the federal election, council chief executive Andrew Hall called for the next Australian government to boost investment in stronger homes and local infrastructure. Without this increased funding, coupled with a change in approach to what we build and where we build it, the risk profile of communities exposed to extreme weather will not change, he said. The ICA is also calling for a review of land use planning arrangements to ensure no more homes are built in areas with a high risk of extreme weather impacts, and for national building codes to be strengthened.

Under a worst case scenario where global average temperatures rise by 4.3 degrees by 2100, South Perth, Cannington and East Perth will have the most number of homes impacted by flooding. Dr Mallon said some communities such as Mandurah would be difficult to protect and there are some suburbs where moving the community should be considered. REIWA president Damian Collins said buyers were notified if their property may be affected by flooding if they also purchased a report from Landgate when purchasing a property. REIWA supports buyers having all available information to make decisions, he said. Climate change is happening and that will potentially impact the extent and frequency of floods in the future.

However it would be up to DWER to update their modelling and provide that advice to Landgate and property buyers. Loading Agents have an obligation to inform property buyers on all facts material to the transaction. According to REIWA, some material facts which a seller should disclose to an agent include asbestos, illegal drug contamination, serious crime committed on the property, current tenancy agreements or leases, pools and spas, building approvals and renovations, encroachments and sewer pipes passing through the property. Dr Mallon said climate risk screening should be conducted on properties in much the same way as a building and pest inspection.
Brightly coloured vaping products with flavours like bubble gum and fairy floss that claim to be nicotine-free could be banned in a national crackdown as new research finds e-cigarettes are harmful and addicting youth.

But any move to restrict e-cigarettes may face fierce resistance from a group of pro-vaping Coalition backbench MPs, who fought against Health Minister Greg Hunts move to ban liquid nicotine imports without a prescription.

The federal health department is finalising the National Tobacco Strategy 2022-2030 after circulating a draft that proposes restrictions on the marketing, availability and use of all e-cigarette components in Australia, regardless of their nicotine content.

New research has found e-cigarettes are harmful and addictive. Credit:AP

The Australian National University will on Thursday publish research commissioned by the department that found vaping is causing addiction in a new generation of users and makes young people three times more likely to take up cigarette smoking.
Truck drivers face going to the wall and consumers are unlikely to see a fall in the cost of their groceries after the federal government failed to act on pre-budget warnings that its cut to fuel excise would not help the industry.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is standing by his decision not to cut road-user charges imposed on truck drivers despite conceding there may be cash-flow issues caused by the governments budget decision.

Truck drivers face cash-flow problems and only a small fall in excise due to the governments decision to halve the fuel excise in the budget. Credit:Michael Clayton-Jones

The problem facing drivers is due to how the budget-night decision to halve fuel excise interacts with the road-user charge imposed on the trucking industry and the fuel tax credit that many truckers use to pay their Business Activity Statement obligations every month or quarter.

Pre-budget, fuel excise was 44.2 a litre, but truck drivers received a fuel tax credit of 17.8 a litre  a rebate of the excise minus 26.4 a litre, which is kept by the government as a road-user charge.
The 42,000-year-old remains of Mungo Lady and Mungo Man will be reburied in the Willandra Lakes Region in NSW, bringing a four-year saga over the issue to a close.

The Willandra Lakes Region World Heritage Area Aboriginal Advisory Group (AAG), representing the Barkindji/Paakantji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa people, first decided to rebury their ancestors in 2018.

Robert Kelly conducts a smoking ceremony as Environment Minister Sussan Ley made the announcement.

But because Mungo National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site the Commonwealth was required to approve any reburial under federal legislation.

Federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley announced the decision on Wednesday after meeting traditional owners from the area last month.
Back in 2020  yes, two years ago  the Prime Ministers office tasked Liberals in the federal electorate of Hughes with finding a competent female candidate to take on troublemaker Craig Kelly.

Kelly, who had his preselection saved by Scott Morrison ahead of the last federal election, was still a Liberal when the search for a new candidate began. He ultimately avoided a messy challenge because he defected to Clive Palmers cashed-up United Australia Party.

A debacle and an abject failure ... how Premier Dominic Perrottet described the Liberal preselection process. Credit:Natalie Grono .

Branch members in Hughes identified lawyer Jenny Ware as a strong option and forwarded her CV to the Prime Ministers office. She lives just outside the electorate, but that was not seen as a stumbling block.

A year later, unexpectedly, the Prime Ministers office asked Holsworthy MP Melanie Gibbons to consider a tilt at federal politics. To the surprise of branch members in Hughes, Gibbons sent out a statement confirming she would quit state politics to run for the seat. Luckily Gibbons had the foresight not to resign her NSW seat at the time, preferring to wait for her federal preselection to be rubber-stamped. Of course, that never happened.
Borodyanka, Ukraine: Andreiy Ziuzko stood near the flattened apartment complex in Borodyanka that was once his home, his belongings in plastic bags on the footpath beside a few blackened cooking pots.

The building had lain in ruins for weeks, struck just after fighting had driven him and his family to flee. It was only after a while that he explained something even worse had happened. His mother lived a few doors down, and her apartment had also been bombed.

Mums home was hit on the same day, Ziuzko said on Tuesday. I cant find her.

Cars are crushed under the rubble in Borodyanka, Ukraine. Borodyanka was among the first places to be hit by Russian airstrikes after the invasion. Credit:Ivor Prickett/The New York Times

Russian troops recently withdrew from the area around Borodyanka, a Ukrainian commuter town near Kyiv, the capital, that was among the first places to be hit by Russian airstrikes after the invasion. Now, dozens of people who were sheltering in basements or apartments are missing and presumed dead under the rubble.
Russias shocking war crimes in the towns of Bucha and Borodyanka must be punished. Unarmed prisoners were executed in cold blood, whether civilians or suspected Ukrainian defenders. Some were gruesomely tortured or raped. Defenceless civilians were murdered by snipers or ripped apart by tank shells, including when fleeing or searching for food or water. All of this follows a month of deliberate or indiscriminate Russian attacks on civilians elsewhere.

The Australian government is right to call these war crimes. They could also be crimes against humanity, which involve a widespread or systematic attack on the civilian population. They are unlikely to be genocide, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claims, since this requires the deliberate physical extermination of Ukraines people because of their nationality. Russias attacks instead seem intended to terrorise civilians, punish Ukraines resistance, eliminate non-existent Nazis, or inflict gratuitous or vengeful violence.

Ukrainian servicemen check for booby traps in bodies, homes and abandoned equipment after Russian forces attacked the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. Credit:AP

It matters little if these crimes are not genocide. War crimes and crimes against humanity are also grave international crimes, condemned by the whole world, and like genocide they can be punished with up to life imprisonment. Every country has the right of universal jurisdiction under international law to prosecute them, even when they occur in other countries.

Already, there are many legal processes under way to bring perpetrators to justice. Investigations are being conducted by prosecutors from Ukraine, many European countries, and the International Criminal Court. Evidence is also being documented by a United Nations Human Rights Council inquiry, as part of a European Court of Human Rights case, and many expert NGOs.
Washington: Confronting the pandemics lasting shadow, US President Joe Biden has ordered a new national research push on long COVID, while also directing federal agencies to support patients dealing with the mysterious and debilitating condition.

Biden, on Tuesday Washington time, assigned the Department of Health and Human Services to co-ordinate an urgent new initiative across federal agencies, building on research already under way at the National Institutes of Health.

People leave a testing and vaccination clinic for COVID-19 in Long Beach, California. Credit:AP

He also directed federal agencies to support patients and doctors by providing science-based best practices for treating long COVID, maintaining access to insurance coverage, and protecting the rights of workers coping with the uncertainties of the malaise. Of particular concern are effects on mental health.

Long COVID is the catch-all term for a hydra-headed condition whose symptoms can include brain fog, recurring shortness of breath, pain and fatigue.
SABA:--- On Tuesday, April 5, Saba Commissioner for Culture Rolando Wilson welcomed a team of scientific researchers working at the Saba Heritage Center to discuss the potential impact of research findings.

The Saba Heritage Center currently hosts several team members of the Island(er)s at the Helm research program, which focuses on social adaptation to climatic challenges in the (Dutch) Caribbean. The transdisciplinary project is supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) in collaboration with the University of St. Martin (USM) and various institutions and stakeholders across the Kingdom and the wider Caribbean. During the coming five years, the Caribbean-European team includes anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnobotanists, climatologists, engineers, human rights scholars and political scientists. They hope to engage in co-creative research with government agencies, NGOs, and first and foremost with local communities to develop sustainable and inclusive solutions for the challenges that the island(er)s faces in the context of climate change.

The visiting team looks into the islands deep past when Sabas first inhabitants settled the areas of Plum Piece, Old Booby Hill, Black Rock, and Fort Bay Ridge around 3,800 years ago, and the ensuing centuries when the island became more populated. The researchers laid out the questions they seek to answer to Commissioner Wilson: what did the islands climate look like over time? How did the first settlers on the island adapt and respond to the devastating hurricanes and extreme droughts? How were their houses built and how did they take care of their water? What did the first inhabitants of Saba eat and what were they planting? What knowledge can we obtain from the past and the present to become well equipped for the challenges of the future?

The Saba Heritage Center seeks to document and archive the islands unique heritage and preserve the Saban stories for generations to come. It houses all archaeological findings from the island which are curated by the Saba Archaeological Center (SABRC). Commissioner Wilson expressed the importance of Sabas cultural heritage and its safeguarding and protection for future generations. Sabas culture merits to be a top priority and should be taken care of, Wilson stated.

On Thursday, April 7 at 5.30 pm, researchers will present their initial findings to the public in an event sponsored by the Heritage Center. For more information, please visit Saba Heritage Presentations by Island(er)s at the Helm team. https://www.kitlv.nl/islanders-at-the-helm/

Island(er)s at the Helm will also hold a public meeting at USM on St. Martin on the evening of Tuesday, April 12 at the universitys lecture hall with some of the same scientists who will be carrying out research activities on the neighboring island.
PHILIPSBURG:--- In connection with the passing of civil servant Ms. Marcia Offerman a condolence-memorial book has been opened to the public.

The condolence-memorial book will be available daily from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm at the Government Administration Building on Pond Island until Thursday, April 14. Civil servants can sign the condolence book at any time throughout the day.

Ms. Offerman worked as an Administratief medewerker A, within the department of Comptabiliteit, and was an employee at the Ministry of Finance.

She will be remembered as a warm-hearted, energetic, and compassionate civil servant, always willing to provide service to the citizens of St. Maarten. May she rest in eternal peace
PHILIPSBURG:--- The focal point of the Honorable Minister of Justice Anna E. Richardsons work visit to Aruba during March 28-31, was the exploration of an optimal Border Control Management System for St. Maarten. Immigration matters have long been a very important, yet delicate topic in St. Maarten. Recent developments related to this topic have emphasized the need for updating and improving our current immigration management systems. Aruba has successfully been using the Radex system for immigration management and this visit was organized to get a closer and upfront view of how the system is used by several law enforcement agencies in Aruba.

A crucial part of Minister Richardsons visit, was to Gamma IT Solutions, the Aruba-based soft- and hardware provider for the Radex system. The system is a modular built application with an extensive array of modules, developed as a turn-key solution, to assist government agencies involved in law enforcement activities to protect their borders.

On March 28, the first day of the visit, Minister Richardson visited the airport Immigration department, where Immigration Director, Mr. Andrew Hoo was very honored to give an introduction to the Immigration Service of Aruba and their use of the Radex system. During the visit, Director Hoo also gave an explanation of the framework of the different sectors of Arubas Immigration Department.

On March 29, Minister Richardson visited the Aruba Border Control Department (GNC: Guarda nos Costa); a department comparable to St. Maartens Mobile Unit. During the visit, Department Head, Mr. Richard Kramers gave an extensive explanation of how the management of those who enter the country undocumented or overstay is handled in Aruba with the use of Radex. Minister Richardson was also given a guided tour of the GNC Housing units. The units can house up to 180 persons (male and female separately). The facility is currently being renovated to better accommodate the detainees according to international treaties and standards. All deportations go through GNC.

Minister Richardson also met with a representative from DIMAS, the department that handles residency permits in Aruba, where she was explained how Radex is incorporated in their process, especially as it relates to the sharing of information with other government agencies. Other agencies like the GNC and Immigration department can check an individuals residency permit status via the DIMAS information sharing platform and register this information in Radex to determine (at that point or for future use) if a person is allowed entry or if a person will be denied entry or deported.

On the last day of the work visit, March 31, Minister Richardson was invited to the Immigration department unit charged with the processing of tourist stay extensions and Guarantor requests. The entire process was explained, and best practices were shared. The importance of the role of the Radex system plays was also emphasized in this department, as crucial checks are required in the system to be able to process the requests. The Radex system is also used to keep track of overstay information, address information, number of requests and other statistical information.

The culmination of the trip was a visit to the Reina Beatrix International Airport where the Minister witnessed a live/real-time demonstration of the Radex system, to see how Aruba immigration officers at the different entry and departure points of the airport use the Radex system to process the entry and departure of travelers.

Discussions with Radex system administrators are on the way. They will be making a visit to St. Maarten within the coming weeks to further explore how the Radex system can be adapted for implementation in St. Maarten. With the adaptation of the Radex system, border management for Sint Maarten will be made easier and more efficient as the Radex system will offer the opportunity to generate monthy reports of overstayers, thereby giving the Mobile Unit an opportunity to visit them and regulate the next steps. As a result, we hope to welcome more visitors that will formally request extensions of their stay if so needed or desired, thereby preventing situations that lead to deportation, stated Minister Richardson.
MARIGOT:--- President Louis Mussington wishes to support President-candidate Emmanuel Macron, in the context of the 2022 presidential elections, the first round of which is taking place this Saturday, April 9, 2022, in Saint-Martin.

We are all once again called to the polls, Saturday, April 9, 2022, for the 1st round of the national presidential election. I invite every citizen to take an active part in this election. The challenge for our overseas territories is high: it is about the future of our territory and the treatment of its specificities within the Republic.

In view of the proposals presented to us during the campaign, I have chosen to support the outgoing President, Emmanuel Macron. And I invite and encourage each of you to express your feelings by going to vote. Vote in the interest of the Nation, vote in the interest of Saint-Martin!

In 2017, several of us, including Frantz Gumbs and myself, campaigned for Emmanuel Macron and his En Marche party. I renew my confidence in the President of the Republic and I call on the voters of Saint-Martin to follow me in this choice and to go out to vote massively on Saturday, April 9.

The Rassemblement Saint-Martinois-Alternative is an expression of the unity that made the difference at the ballot box. Our group represents all the components of our society and we are all fully aware of the expectations of the population and the challenges that await us.

Our country needs stability to face the changes that are looming and foster opportunities. I invite all the inhabitants of Saint-Martin to renew the momentum of commitment and hope that they showed us on Sunday, March 20 and 27, to go to the polls en masse so that the participation of Saint-Martin be up to the challenges ahead. ".

Louis MUSSINGTON

President

Reminder: The 19 polling stations will be open from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday, April 9, 2022.
After the huge success of the first series, the BBC have commissioned a second series of hit thriller, The Pact, a co-commission between BBC Drama and BBC Wales.Written and created by Pete McTighe, the second series will tell a suspenseful and emotional story over six episodes. This brand new story makes way for new characters with the cast, including Cardiff-born, BAFTA winning actress Rakie Ayola (Anthony), who takes centre stage alongside serving as executive producer. The series is being produced by Cardiff-based production company Little Door Productions.The Pact, currently filming in and around Wales, follows social worker Christine (Rakie Ayola) and her family whose loyalties are tested when theyre confronted by a stranger. Elizabeth Berrington (The Nevers), Lisa Palfrey (Chloe, Line of Duty), Christian Patterson (Mr Selfridge, In My Skin), Matthew Gravelle (Broadchurch, Keeping Faith), Aaron Anthony (Behind Her Eyes) and Jacob Ifan (Bang, A Discovery of Witches) join the cast. Plus, rising stars Jordan Wilks (Freshers), and Welsh talent including Lloyd Everitt (Casualty, The Deceived) Mali Ann Rees (Tourist Trap, Hidden).Christines family, oldest son Will (Lloyd Everitt), youngest son Jamie (Aaron Anthony) and daughter Megan (Mali Ann Rees), are trying to get on with their lives after the recent tragic death of their brother Liam. As they look forward to Megans wedding, the family have their lives turned upside down when a stranger, Connor (Jordan Wilks), arrives in town claiming a connection that nobody could have imagined. As buried secrets come to light, they must consider who they are and grapple with morality and divided loyalty. As their lives spiral out of control, a terrible pact may be all that can save them.Executive producer Rakie Ayola says: "I'm thrilled to be working again with Little Door and BBC Wales leading this talented cast to bring Pete's wonderfully mysterious story to life. As an Exec-Producer on this series, it's hugely important to me to see the wealth of opportunity this production is offering both to established talent and those new to the industry both behind and in front of camera.Executive Producer for Little Door Productions Elwen Rowlands says: Were delighted to be working with BBC Wales, BBC Drama and Pete McTighe on a new series of The Pact and to have the brilliant Rakie Ayola head up a cast of established and emerging talent. Its a gothic tale that puts loveable, complex, characters under extreme pressure, forcing them to confront their past. We look forward to bringing it to the screen.Head of Commissioning for BBC Wales, Nick Andrews says: The Pact gripped the nation, its impact spread like wildfire dominating BBC iPlayers most popular lists. When asked if we would go again, it was a very easy decision to make. Pete McTighes writing has more twists and turns than a bowl of spaghetti  we were absorbed by the characters and the story. Its brilliant to be going again and fans can be reassured that youll be guessing the ending right up until the final credits.The project has received support from Welsh Government via Creative Wales and Wales Screen. The production will be distributed by Lionsgate.Gerwyn Evans, Deputy Director of Creative Wales says: Im delighted that Creative Wales is able to support the second series of this popular BBC thriller. Cardiff-based Little Door is filming in and around Wales once again, showcasing our nation as the ideal location to shoot. The production will also create more opportunities for trainees, reflecting the Welsh Governments commitment to boosting skills and talent.Produced by Little Door Productions, The Pact is written and created by Pete McTighe (The Rising, Doctor Who, A Discovery of Witches), with further episodes written by Joy Wilkinson (Doctor Who), with Connor Allen (Childrens Laureate Wales 2021 2023) acting as story consultant. Elwen Rowlands and Hayley Manning executive produce for Little Door Productions and Ben Irving and Helen Perry serve as executive producers for BBC. The series is produced by Adam Knopf (War of the Worlds) and directed by Nicole Volavka (The Bay) and Christiana Ebohon-Green (Vera).The Pact is due to air later this year and is the second commission for Little Door Productions.
Bristol Police / Contributed

BRISTOL  A stretch of Route 6 was closed through Wednesday afternoon after a crash took down a utility pole, according to police.

Bristol police said Farmington Avenue was closed to eastbound traffic near the roads intersection with King Street after a crash just before 2 a.m. King Street was also closed to northbound traffic from Louisiana Avenue to Farmington Avenue.
An attorney for Superior Court Judge Alice Bruno argued before the state Supreme Court Tuesday that her more than two-year absence from the bench was not an ethics violation, but rather his client did not receive the necessary accommodations for her disability.

The show-cause hearing, which Chief Justice Richard A. Robinson said was held to determine if the matter should be further investigated, questioned whether Brunos absence since November 2019 had violated judicial code of conduct related to confidence in the court, competency and giving precedence to duty. No decision was made on Tuesday.

Judges have an extremely important job, extremely important, and ... the people of the state of Connecticut, through the constitution and through statute, give us (the Supreme Court) a certain responsibility over the administration of justice in Connecticut. That is what this is about, Robinson said.

In remarks before the court, Bruno described the process as extremely difficult, while acknowledging she has respect for the judiciary and the law.

Theres nothing I want more than to serve the people of Connecticut fairly and appropriately, Bruno said.

While Brunos health was at-part an underlying focus of the hearing, neither her attorney, Jacques Parenteau, nor the justices discussed specifics of her medical history.

In an affidavit filed by Bruno, she alleged that a hostile work environment had worsened preexisting conditions and eventually accommodations for those conditions were needed. A March court filing from Parenteau acknowledged his client first went on medical leave in November 2019 after she was hospitalized for cardiac testing related to the stress of her job.

Addressing whether her absence should be further investigated, Parenteau argued there is no reason to do so considering she had informed judicial administrators in December 2020 that there were judicial districts in which she could return based on the guidance of her medical providers.

Parenteau said those accommodations were not granted. And he later argued there was not a good faith on the side of court administration to find a solution that would return Bruno to the bench.

Judge Bruno wanted to be back at work in a judicial district where she had a supportive environment since 2020, so theres no cause to commence an investigation to determine whether or not she violated these judicial rules, the code of conduct, Parenteau said.

Despite her lengthy absence from the bench, Bruno has continued to be paid her roughly $170,000-a-year salary, state records show.

Youve indicated that over the last two-plus years, Judge Bruno has not performed any services on behalf of the people of Connecticut in exchange for the $400,000 she has received. Is that correct? Justice Andrew J. McDonald asked Parenteau.

While Parenteau was not sure if it was $400,000, he said Brunos pay was an accommodation given her condition.

A medical leave is a form of accommodations. She had every right to believe she was being accommodated by the Judicial Branch while we were trying to find a solution. And that solution was there to be had. We couldve had that solution if only there was good faith on the other side, Parenteau said.

In the hearing Tuesday, several justices asked about her service leading up to her extended absence, including assignments in courthouses in Bridgeport and Waterbury.

Amid questioning from Robinson on whether matters were being handled while she was working, Bruno said: Theres no doubt there are matters that may not have decisions, but I did everything I could to do all my decisions. I did all the data entry. I did all the decisions myself.

Robinson then replied, but you said you didnt complete them all before asking if any matters needed to be retried.

Bruno said she was not aware, and that no one had contacted her for any input. Im sure that may be the case, but again I dont know, she said.

Ahead of going on medical leave, court filings from Parenteau show court administrators suggested she seek disability retirement during an August 2019 meeting. Bruno later told the justices this was a daunting and devastating circumstance for me.

The filings show she later decided to withdraw the application for disability retirement and seek a return to work with accommodations.

Parenteau said he regretted advising Bruno to withdraw her disability retirement application in May 2020, acknowledging he believes she has been vilified in the ensuing months, referencing news headlines about her extended absence.

She wants to be at work. She wanted to be at work. She tried to come to work, Parenteau said.
Despite public behavior that includes few people wearing masks, Gov. Ned Lamont and Connecticut health officials caution that the COVID-19 pandemic is not over.

Though COVID cases and hospitalizations had been declining in Connecticut, recent increases have raised some concern about the BA.2 subvariant, which drove surges in other parts of the world.

If you remember from 1918, you could see that there were ripples that went on for maybe five, even 10 years, Lamont said during a Wednesday press conference. My instinct is, we're gonna have some ripples. I think what's coming out of Britain is a ripple. I worry a little bit about what happens in the fall.

There were an additional 2,621 COVID cases identified in Connecticut over the previous seven days, out of 54,962 reported tests, for a positivity rate of 4.77 percent, according to state data released Wednesday. In the past week, there was an increase of 19 patients in Connecticut hospitals with COVID infections for a total of 117.

We are definitely not ready to call the all clear, said Patrick Charmel, president and chief executive officer of Griffin Hospital. Obviously, the positivity rate is down. But it's at 4 percent. We used to say that the threshold for concern is 3 percent. We're above that right now. We're hoping that it doesn't return to the teens where it was during the last wave, which occurred from December to February. We need to stay diligent.

State Sen. Saud Anwar, D-East Hartford, a practicing physician, used the term cyclical resurgence.

This disease is not necessarily endemic, but it's a cyclical resurgence, because the virus is changing, said Anwar, who is the acting co-chair of the public health committee.

New tools, including antiviral medications designed specifically to fight the coronavirus, have allowed society and medical professionals to adapt to the virus as it changes, Awar said.

That gives us the ability to be able to live within the virus in the current form, Anwar said. So is it still a pandemic? In our view, it is.

Dr. Thomas Balcezak, chief clinical officer for Yale New Haven Health, said a pandemic is widespread, unchecked spread of the virus, and that is still occurring across the globe.

Until that ends, it will still be a pandemic. Our expectation in the health care world, is as it moves out of the widespread, unchecked spread phase  the pandemic phase  there will be sporadic flare-ups, if you will, of cases  thats when it will be declared endemic, Balcezak said.

Charmel, speaking after an event with Lamont where few people wore masks, said sometimes the reality inside hospitals does not match behavior outside emergency rooms.

To be honest with you, that was a concern on the part of health care providers during this last wave, that society was acting like it was over, he said. But if you were in a hospital (emergency department) or in an ICU, it looked like it did at the beginning of the pandemic, and that was just four weeks ago.

Charmel said the safety that comes with being up-to-date on COVID vaccinations provides that sense of freedom.

I think people who are vaccinated are boosted, like everybody in this room, feel that they're protected, he said. And what we're doing is saying, Hey, you can have more freedom if you go out and get vaccinated and boosted and you don't have to be as isolated as you were at the beginning.

Anwar said that while medicine has adapted to the changing disease, that does not mean the danger is completely past.

Is it as deadly as it was? No. And is it changing? Yes, it is. And is it changing in the way that it's more tolerable? Yes, it is, he said. But can it change to become ugly again? I, the doctor in me in the ICU, I have to be very vigilant and ready for that. So I'm not resting.

Staff writers Dan Haar and Nicholas Rondinone contributed to this report.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP)  Minnesota prosecutors declined to file charges Wednesday against a Minneapolis police SWAT team officer who fatally shot Amir Locke while executing an early morning no-knock search warrant in a downtown apartment in February.

Locke, 22, who was Black, was staying on a couch in his cousin's apartment when authorities entered it on Feb. 2 without knocking as part of an investigation into a homicide in neighboring St. Paul.

Prosecutors said body camera video showed that Locke pointed a gun at Officer Mark Hanneman, justifying his use of deadly force. Locke's family has disputed that, arguing that the footage suggests Locke was startled awake and that he grabbed for a gun he was licensed to carry.

Locke's mother, Karen Wells, said she was disgusted by the decision. At a news conference in New York with attorney Ben Crump and civil rights leader the Rev. Al Sharpton, she vowed to keep up pressure on Minneapolis city leaders and spoke directly to Hanneman.

This is not over. You may have been found not guilty, but in the eyes of me, being the mother who I am, you are guilty, Wells said. And Im not going to give up. Continue to have your restless nights, because I know you do.

Locke was shot seconds after officers entered the apartment. The body camera footage shows that Locke was holding a gun before he was shot.

Attorney General Keith Ellison and Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman, whose offices reviewed the case, said Locke might never have been shot if not for the no-knock warrant. But they said there was insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hanneman violated the state statute governing when police can use deadly force.

It would be unethical for us to file charges in a case in which we know that we will not be able to prevail because the law does not support the charges, Ellison said.

Lockes death came as three former Minneapolis police officers were on trial in federal court in St. Paul in George Floyd's killing. It sparked protests and a reexamination of no-knock search warrants. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey announced an immediate moratorium on such warrants, and on Tuesday, he formalized a new policy requiring officers to knock and wait before entering a residence, with limited exceptions. Some lawmakers have been pushing for a statewide ban on no-knock warrants, except in rare circumstances.

The department issued a statement from Interim Chief Amelia Huffman saying that Hanneman returned to active duty on Feb. 28 but is no longer on a SWAT team. She did not comment directly on Hannemans actions but said, Officers never want to face split-second decisions that end in the loss of life."

Locke's family was angry that police initially described him as a suspect, which police later said was a mistake.

Our investigation found no evidence that he had any role in the homicide investigation that brought the police to his door at 6:48 on Feb. 2, Ellison said. Amir was a victim. He never should have been called a suspect.

In their applications for search warrants of the Minneapolis apartment and other locations, authorities said a no-knock warrant was necessary to protect the public and officers as they looked for guns, drugs and clothing worn by people suspected in a violent killing. Authorities asked that officers be allowed to conduct the search without knocking, and outside the hours of 7 a.m. and 8 p.m., because the suspects being sought in the Jan. 10 killing of Otis Elder had a history of violence.

Locke was killed seconds after the SWAT team entered the apartment at 6:48 a.m. Body camera video shows an officer using a key to unlock the door and enter, followed by at least four officers in uniform and protective vests. As they enter, they repeatedly shout, Police, search warrant! They also shout Hands! and Get on the ground!

The video shows an officer kicking a sectional sofa, and Locke is seen wrapped in a comforter, holding a pistol. Three shots are heard and the video ends.

I was convinced that the individual was going to fire their handgun and that I would suffer great bodily harm or death," Hanneman wrote in his statement to investigators. "I felt in this moment that if I did not use deadly force myself, I would likely be killed.

Ellison and Freeman said they spoke with Locke's parents on Wednesday before announcing they wouldn't file charges.

They, like us, are very frustrated with no-knock warrants. They, like us, believe that if a no-knock warrant hadn't been used Amir Locke might well be here today, Freeman said, declining to give further details about their conversation.

Sharpton said the family will demand that the U.S. Justice Department review the case. Crump faulted police for creating a life-or-death situation, and said gun rights groups should join with the family in demanding an end to no-knock warrants.

He connected Locke's death with that of Breonna Taylor, who was killed in a botched police raid in Kentucky in 2020 in which her boyfriend shot at officers first as they broke into her apartment.

Because if it can happen to Amir, it can happen to Breonna Taylor, it could happen to your children, too," Crump said.

Although Locke was not named in the warrant, his then-17-year-old cousin, Mekhi Camden Speed, was named and has been charged with two counts of second-degree murder in Elder's killing.

Elder, a 38-year-old father, was found shot and laying in the street in what police believe was an apparent robbery. Drugs and money were found in Elders SUV, according to court documents.

The police department hired Hanneman in 2015. City records show there were three complaints made about him and that all were closed without him being disciplined, but they give no details. Data on the website of the citizen group Communities United Against Police Brutality shows a fourth complaint, in 2018, that remains open. No details were given.

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Associated Press writer Amy Forliti contributed to this report.

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Find the APs full coverage of the death of Amir Locke: https://apnews.com/hub/amir-locke
MERIDEN  A man accused of killing a Meriden woman in March was found dead Tuesday, according to the Meriden Police Department.

The police department was notified that Tyrese Worthy, 36, had died by suicide in New Haven around 12:35 a.m.

Worthy was accused of killing 37-year-old Dominique Curtis last month, police said.

Police found Curtis lying in the driveway to the Atrium condominium and apartment complex on East Main Street around 9:25 p.m. March 20 after receiving several calls reporting gunfire in the area. Curtis had multiple gunshot wounds and, despite life-saving measures from medical personnel, Curtis died from her injuries, police said.

A police captain also found children hiding behind a business near the apartment complex.

Worthy, who police identified as a suspect, fled the scene on foot. Reports to police said Worthy was knocking on doors in the neighborhoods off of East Main Street to try to use a phone.

Police searched the area, but learned Worthy allegedly committed an armed carjacking on the Interstate 91 ramp near Preston Avenue and fled. State police and surrounding agencies were notified and tried to locate Worthy and the stolen vehicle but were unsuccessful, the police department said.

Two days after the homicide, the Department of Probation secured a violation of probation warrant for Worthy. An arrest warrant for the carjacking was signed four days later, charging Worthy with first-degree robbery, first-degree larceny, criminal possession of a firearm and carrying a pistol without a permit. This prompted a multi-jurisdictional search for Worthy, police said.

Five days later, another arrest warrant was signed for Worthy charging him with murder, criminal possession of a firearm and three counts of risk of injury to a minor, according to police.

The police department said anyone who witnesses incidents of domestic violence, or knows someone who may be in a violent relationship, to reach out for help. For free, confidential help, call the states Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-888-774-2900 for English and 1-844-831-9200 for Spanish.

The National Domestic Violence Hotline also provides free and confidential support. The hotline can be reached at 1-800-799-7233. Advocates can also be accessed by chatting on TheHotline.org or by texting START to 88788.

To access free and confidential mental health support, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or visit SuicidePreventionLifeline.org.

To report tips for violent crimes, email the Meriden Major Crimes Unit at MPDTips@MeridenCT.gov or call 203-630-6253.
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JACKSON, Miss. (AP)  Mississippi legislators have finished their busiest session in years after enacting the largest teacher pay raise in a generation and setting the state's largest-ever income tax cut.

Clearly, by any stretch, the Mississippi Legislature performed this year, Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said Tuesday.

After more than a year of economic uncertainty because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mississippi's tax collections rebounded over the past several months, driven partly by massive federal spending for pandemic relief.

As they ended their session Tuesday, legislators completed work on two sets of spending bills.

The first was a state government budget for the year that begins July 1, using more than $7 billion in state money and billions more federal dollars.

The second was a plan to spend about $1.5 billion of the $1.8 billion Mississippi is receiving from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, a federal spending package aimed at revitalizing the economy amid the pandemic. Mississippi will use about $750 million for water system improvements.

When you contemplate the number of issues we had before us this year, it was pretty staggering in the beginning, House Speaker Philip Gunn, a Republican from Clinton, said as the session ended.

WHAT LEGISLATORS DID

TEACHER PAY

In the coming school year, teachers will receive raises that average about $5,100, and assistant teachers will receive $2,000. Mississippi's average teacher salary in 2019-20 was $46,843, according to the Southern Regional Education Board. The national average was $64,133.

TAX CUT

Mississippi will reduce its income tax over four years. Starting in 2023, the 4% income tax bracket will be eliminated. The following three years, the 5% bracket will be reduced to 4%. After the first year, the tax-free income levels would be $18,300 for a single person and $36,600 for a married couple.

MEDICAL MARIJUANA

Republican Gov. Tate Reeves signed a bill Feb. 2 to legalize medical marijuana for people with debilitating conditions. It became law immediately, but opening the first dispensaries will take months. In November 2020, Mississippi voters approved a medical marijuana initiative. The state Supreme Court overturned it six months later by ruling it was not properly on the ballot because the initiative process was outdated.

REDISTRICTING

Legislators updated boundaries for the four U.S. House districts, 52 state Senate districts and 122 state House districts to account for population changes revealed by the 2020 Census.

EQUAL PAY

Mississippi could become the final state to enact a law requiring equal pay for equal work by women and men. A bill awaits action by the governor. Critics said the bill is harmful because it would allow an employer to pay a woman less than a man based on the pay history that workers bring into new jobs.

STATE PARKS

Millions of dollars will go to improve the condition of state parks. Leaders said Mississippi could apply for federal money to supplement the state spending.

ELECTION SPENDING

State and local election offices are banned from accepting donations from outside groups for election operations, under a bill Reeves has signed. Mississippi joins other Republican-led states in setting a ban in reaction to donations that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made across the U.S. in 2020.

RURAL EMERGENCY ROOMS

The state Department of Health could issue up to five licenses for free-standing emergency rooms in rural areas, under a bill awaiting the governor.

PAY RAISES

Starting with the next four-year term, salaries would increase for the governor, lieutenant governor and six other statewide elected officials; the transportation and public service commissioners; and the House speaker, under a bill awaiting the governor.

TEACHING ABOUT RACE

In March, Reeves signed a bill banning schools, community colleges or universities from teaching that any sex, race, ethnicity, religion or national origin is inherently superior or inferior. It became law immediately. Several Black lawmakers said the limitations could squelch honest discussion about the harmful effects of racism.

STATE SONG

Legislators voted to ditch Go, Mississippi, which has been the state song since 1962. It uses the tune of Roll With Ross, the 1959 campaign jingle of segregationist Gov. Ross Barnett. A bill designates One Mississippi, by singer-songwriter Steve Azar, as one new state song. It also creates a committee to recommend additional state songs from various genres. The bill awaits the governor's action.

WHAT LEGISLATORS DID NOT DO

INITIATIVE PROCESS

House and Senate negotiators failed to agree on a plan to revive an initiative process that would allow people to petition to put issues on the statewide ballot. The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled in May that the state's initiative process was unworkable because it required people to gather signatures from five congressional districts the state had not used in decades.

MEDICAID FOR NEW MOMS

The Senate passed a bill to expand postpartum Medicaid coverage, but Gunn and House Medicaid Committee Chairman Joey Hood killed it without bringing it up for a House vote. Mississippi allows two months of Medicaid coverage for women after they give birth. Advocates for low-income women say expanding the coverage to a year could improve health outcomes in a state with a high rate of maternal mortality.

____

Follow Emily Wagster Pettus on Twitter: http://twitter.com/EWagsterPettus.
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Southwestern Mehedinti County border police have detected 30 Syrian citizens, including minors, in a minibus in Hinova, their intention being to reach Western Europe illegally, informs a release of the Territorial Inspectorate of Border Police (ITPF) Timisoara, sent on Wednesday to AGERPRES.

According to the source, the border police have identified and stopped an automobile registered in Romania, driven by a Romanian citizen, and a van registered in Bulgaria. At the time of making the regular stop signals, the driver of the van continued his movement for about 500 meters, then abandoned the vehicle. As a result of the control carried out in the cargo compartment, 30 foreign citizens were discovered, without identity documents on them.The driver of the automobile, who was established to having the role of forerunner, and the foreign citizens were also taken to the headquarters of the Territorial Service of the Mehedinti Border Police for verifications, where it was established that those in question are Syrian citizens, of whom seven are minors, aged between 10 years and 18 years, and 23 adults, between the ages of 18 and 46.Upon checking, the adults stated that they came from Bulgaria and wanted to reach western European countries.
"Babes-Bolyai" University (UBB) in Cluj-Napoca ranks among the top universities in the world in at least ten academic fields, according to the QS Ranking.

"UBB is one of the top universities in the world in at least 10 academic fields. The Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca has been ranked as one of the top universities in the world in 10 academic fields (out of 51 analyzed and included in the ranking) in the most used international university ranking, the QS ranking (Quacquarelli Symonds - https://www.topuniversities.com/subject-rankings/2022)," reads a press release sent on Wednesday by the UBB.

According to the same source, in the field of Psychology, UBB ranks 251-300th in the world and the first in Romania, while it is also the single university in Romania that appears in the ranking, in this field. UBB also ranks first in the country in Mathematics (301-350th internationally), Chemical Engineering (301-350th), Business&Management (351-400th), Modern Languages (251-300th), Informatics/Computer Science (451-500th). It also ranks second in the country in Economics&Econometrics (451-500th internationally), Chemistry (601-630th), Medicine (601-650th) and Agricultural Sciences (351-400th).

"In the large scientific/academic fields, things are as follows for UBB: Art & Humanities (it ranks 451-500th internationally and first at the national level, alongside the University of Bucharest, without any other Romanian presence); Natural Sciences (451-500th internationally and first at the national level, alongside the University of Bucharest, with no other Romanian presence) and Social Sciences&Management (401-500th internationally and first at the national level, with no other Romanian presence). The the other large scientific/academic fields, Romania is not present (Life Science & Medicine) or is represented by several technical universities (Engineering)," mentions the same press release, Agerpres informs.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs Bogdan Aurescu will participate on Wednesday and Thursday in the meeting of NATO Ministers of Foreign Affairs, which will take place at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, Agerpres reports.

Minister Bogdan Aurescu will reiterate, on this occasion, the importance of rapidly implementing the decisions of the Allied Summit on March 24, with an emphasis on establishing new NATO Battle Groups, of which one in Romania, which will contribute to strengthening security on the entire Eastern Flank, namely on transforming and consolidating the posture of NATO's long term deterrence and defence, especially on the Eastern Flank and in the Black Sea, in the context of the new security reality.During the talks regarding the preparation of NATO Summit in Madrid in June, Minister Bogdan Aurescu will plead for the necessity of NATO's future Strategic Concept to reflect, in a more adequate matter, the new security context the Alliance is currently facing, as well as the fact that Russia represents the main threat to the Alliance, but also will highlight the priority granted by the Alliance to collective defence, as NATO's main task.Furthermore, the head of the Romanian diplomacy will refer to the need of consolidating cooperation with like-minded partners, as well as the necessity of continuing support for partners in Georgia and the Republic of Moldova, to increase their resilience.On Thursday, the Minister of Foreign Affairs will also take part in the event dedicated to the inauguration of the office in Brussels of GLOBSEC's think tank, as an honorary speaker within the debate dedicated to European security.
Minister of European Investment and Projects Dan Vilceanu announced on Wednesday having tendered his resignation to Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca, Agerpres reports.

"About an hour ago, after the end of the government meeting, I submitted my resignation to Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca, as I announced a few days ago at the headquarters of the National Liberal Party," Vilceanu told a news conference.On Monday, Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca said that he had discussed with Vilceanu his resignation from the post of minister of European investment and projects and that he will announce the decision to take.Vilceanu had said on Saturday that he intended to step down."In the days ahead, when I have the opportunity for a talk with Mr Nicolae Ciuca, I would like, following this discussion, to submit my resignation from the position of minister of European investment and projects, given the fact that I started off in a team, which (...), like any other team, was based on trust (...). I am convinced that right now we can no longer talk about the kind of trust and cohesion that is needed in a government team, so I will have a discussion with the prime minister and I will resign," said Vilceanu back then.
The Minister of National Defense, Vasile Dincu, stated on Wednesday that Romania considers the use of diplomacy as a still viable solution for resolving the conflict in Ukraine, during a video conference on the security situation in the Black Sea region, in which he participated alongside counterparts from Bulgaria, Georgia, Poland, Turkey and Ukraine.

According to a release issued by the Ministry of Defense, at a video conference organized by Turkey, Dincu presented the recent assessments of the security situation generated by the brutal invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation, which "led to increased threats in the Black Sea, including restricting freedom of navigation and the emergence of dangers posed by drifting sea mines".

Also, according to the quoted source, Vasile Dincu harshly condemned the atrocities in Bucha and in other Ukrainian cities, mentioning that the deliberate killing of civilians goes beyond any rule of war.

The minister of defense underlined that Romania considers the use of diplomacy as a still viable solution for resolving the conflict and thanked, in this context, Turkey for its substantial involvement in the peace negotiation process, the Ministry of Defense states.

Vasile Dincu also reiterated Romania's support for the integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine and called for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Russian troops. He said that our country "remains firmly committed to providing humanitarian support to its Ukrainian partner through the management of the flow of refugees and through the actions carried out within the humanitarian hub in Suceava", Agerpres informs.
National Defense Minister Vasile Dincu had a working meeting on Tuesday at the Ministry headquarters with the chairman of the French Senate's Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defense and Armed Forces Christian Cambon, with the two tackling the Black Sea security situation in the context of the Ukraine war, a release informs, Agerpres repots.

The two officials also referred to the allied decisions and measures adopted at the recent NATO summit aimed at strengthening the allied deterrence and defense posture, as well as to intra-EU and bilateral cooperation.Vasile Dincu voiced appreciation for France's decision to assume the role of framework nation for the multinational battlegroup in Romania and thanked France for its substantial commitment to consolidating the allied presence on NATO's eastern flank.On the same day, Vasile Dincu met with the ambassadors of Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania and the deputies of Finland and Norway's diplomatic missions, with whom he had "a wide-ranging discussion about the security challenges facing the European states and the impact of Russia's aggression on the European security architecture."
The President of the Committee for culture, arts, mass media of the Deputies Chamber, Iulian Bulai, on Wednesday organized a debate on the violations of the right to freedom of expression committed in the case of journalist Emilia Sercan, with investigative journalists, politicians, representatives of the relevant organizations among the participants.

According to the participants in the debate, this is a growing phenomenon, and the discussions focused on the intimidation faced by journalists, the attempts to "cover up" the ongoing investigations by journalists, as well as the protection that journalists should enjoy.

"We are here because we face serious problems in Romania regarding the right to freedom of expression, problems like the intimidation of journalists, threats, bullying, even a cover-up of cases investigated by investigative journalists and not only. That is why we are here, to discuss where we are, what we can do, what our role as politicians is, what we can do in legislative terms, but especially to see where the problem is at the level of the authorities and how the law can be better applied," said USR (Save Romania Union) MP Iulian Bulai.

Journalist Catalin Tolontan said that Parliament is probably the best place to discuss these issues.

Journalist Alex Medea, who told the audience how he was abducted and beaten following an investigation, claimed that "all journalists in Romania are in danger."

In the opinion of journalist Emilia Sercan, "if the society does not react in a categorical and very harsh way towards the authorities that are involved in the cover-up operation, we will reach a point of no return."

"I want to say something that I have not mentioned so far, beyond threats, beyond the wave of hatred that can be raised against a journalist, which wave of hatred may even lead to physical aggression. After I wrote about the PhD thesis of PM Nicolae Ciuca, on January 18, the very second day I received a threat. I went to the police on the morning of January 20 (...) On 22, the same month, the Romania tv broadcaster, and I cannot even bring myself to call the people working there colleagues, presented some pieces of alleged information, a so-called disclosure, saying that I was a Russian spy, as well as the PressOne editorial office, as well as the owner, who is an American. I can't tell you how many messages I received, some of them even threatening, after that pseudo-investigation was aired, how many hate messages," Sercan said.

She reiterated that "Nicolae Ciuca's PhD thesis is plagiarized," and a government spokesman issued a statement on Tuesday, "somewhere in the back seat of the car taking him from home to government," after she posted on Facebook the questions addressed to the authorities regarding the case of intimidation.

Liana Ganea, programme coordinator at ActiveWatch Romania, highlighted the need for fundamental changes.

The executive manager of the Centre for Independent Journalism, Cristina Lupu, pointed out that one of the problems comes from the abstract way in which the authorities understand the use of public money.

Journalist Iulian Ionescu proposed to those present to initiate a legislative proposal that would provide a certain protection of the Romanian state for a journalist who files a complaint.

Attending the debate, the interim president of USR (Save Romania Union), Catalin Drula, stated that he heard with "a heavy heart that it is difficult for journalists to do their job., Agerpres informs.
The government will approve the granting of a monthly allowance similar to the one paid during the pandemic period, respectively 75 pct of the basic salary, for the employees of the companies where the activity is ceased, Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca said on Wednesday, at the beginning of the Cabinet meeting, Agerpres reports.

"Given the impact of the current crisis and, in particular, the current crisis of electricity and gas prices, as well as that of the effects generated by the war in Ukraine, we will adopt a piece of legislation by which we will continue to protect the economy and jobs. And thus, for the companies where the activity is ceased, we will ensure a monthly allowance similar to the one paid during the pandemic, respectively 75 pct of the basic salary," Ciuca said.The draft announced by the prime minister aims to establish social protection measures for the employees affected in the context of the current crisis in Ukraine, the Russian Federation and Belarus.The 75 pct allowance will be granted to the employees who have the individual employment contracts temporarily suspended from the employers' initiative, from the date of entry into force of the emergency ordinance and until 31 December 2022.
More than 200 people from Italy, Spain, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium were deceived by a group of Romanians by selling online goods they did not actually own, the damage in this case being about 450,000 euros.

The prosecutors of Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) - Pitesti Territorial Service, together with judicial police officers from the Pitesti Organized Crime Brigade, carried out six home searches in Bucharest and in the counties of Cluj, Valcea and Ilfov, in a case of organized criminal group, computer fraud with very serious consequences, fraud with very serious consequences and money laundering.

According to DIICOT, members of this group posted fictitious ads on several online commerce sites, offering for sale or rent goods they did not actually own. For this purpose, they accessed the accounts of some online merchants without permission and modified the bank account intended for the payment of the value of the rental products or services, the sums of money being paid by the persons in the accounts of the members of the organized criminal group.

As a result of the criminal activity, more than 200 people from Italy, Spain, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium were harmed. The total value of the damage is estimated at approximately 450,000 euros.

At the headquarters of DIIOCT - Pitesti Territorial Service, 28 persons were taken for questioning, who are suspected of being involved in these criminal activities, Agerpres informs.
The Japanese Government decided on Tuesday to provide additional emergency humanitarian assistance worth 100 million dollars to help both Ukrainians facing difficulties in their country and the refugees in the neighboring countries, according to a release from the Japanese Embassy in Bucharest.

This measure is to implement the emergency humanitarian assistance announced by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on March 24, responding to urgent needs in areas such as health and healthcare, food and food security, the protection of displaced persons in Ukraine, and in the neighboring countries Moldova, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, through nine international organizations and Japanese NGOs, the diplomatic mission shows.

Along with the humanitarian aid implemented and announced on March 11, the total amount granted will reach 200 million dollars. The Japanese Government, in collaboration with the international community, including G7 members, will continue to provide support and support to the troubled Ukrainian people, the release said.

The new funds will be distributed as follows: for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies - health and healthcare; water, sanitation and hygiene; shelters - 616,000 dollars for Romania and the World Health Organization - health and medical care; personal protective equipment; medical devices; drugs - 9.5 million dollars for Poland, Moldova, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

The exact amount for each country has not yet been determined, Agerpres informs.
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Labour Minister Marius Budai addressed the trade unionists protesting on Wednesday in front of the government and invited them to participate as partners in the implementation of the reforms in the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), Agerpres reports.

"I am here today to make sure that for us, the Romanian Government, social dialogue is extremely important. We are in this period in the construction of measures to support the Romanian citizens, to support the most vulnerable categories of people. Mr. President (of the BNS, ed. n.), I appeal here, in front of the citizens, to all the trade unions, to all the employers' associations. If we have all been excluded from the PNRR negotiation, I now invite you to be partners in the implementation of the reforms in the PNRR, to ensure together that the reform of the Salary Law, that the reform of the Pensions Law will not lead to the poverty of the Romanian citizens. I want you to accept this invitation, to be my partners in implementing these reforms," Marius Budai said.The National Trade Union Bloc (BNS) is holding a protest rally in Victoriei Square (Gov't venue) on Wednesday, followed by a march travelling to Constitution Square (Parliament's Hqs.). They observed a moment of silence for the victims of the war in Ukraine.All 35 trade union federations affiliated to the BNS, both in the private sector and in the public system, ensure the participation of at least 5,000 trade unions in the protest action.The BNS calls for the adoption of support measures to compensate for the economic and social effects of the war in Ukraine, at an economic and social level.On the other hand, the BNS urgently calls for measures for Romania's energy and food security and mentions that, on the energy front, the priority of eliminating dependence on energy resources imported from Russia overlaps with the effects of liberalizing the electricity and natural gas market, which has led to a strong interconnection of the Romanian energy markets (electricity, gas and fuel) with European ones, with effects especially in terms of rising prices.At the same time, the organization calls for the conclusion of a national pact for the defense industry that will contain concrete measures to relaunch this sector, as well as to limit the pressure felt by the population as a result of the financing costs for equipping the Army.The trade unionists of the National Trade Union Bloc who participated in the protest in front of the Government marched towards the Palace of the Parliament, and will reach the Constitution Square.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE) rejects the position of the Russian Federation's Embassy in Bucharest following the regrettable incident that took place on Wednesday morning.

"MAE considers as rash, completely inappropriate and inopportune the qualification in any way of this incident. MAE also rejects any attribution of political context or significance of this tragic event and appeals to the Embassy of the Russian Federation to manifest maximum restraint in offering any sort of interpretation before the responsible authorities conclude their investigation. Until the investigation is complete and the results of it communicated by the competent Romanian authorities, any sort of prior statements represent only unfounded speculations," reads a press release sent by MAE to AGERPRES.According to the quoted source, MAE highlights that the integrity of the staff of the Russian Federation Embassy in Romania was not affected, nor its building."MAE draws attention that Romanian institutions have prepared, since February 24, 2022, that the security staff allocated to the Russian Federation be supplemented. Also, on March 5, a new measure for consolidating the Russian Federation's Embassy protection was prepared, by allocating a new patrol, support and intervention team. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs highlights that these measures to supplement the protection staff were also disposed to operatively meet the expectations of the Embassy of the Russian Federation," the quoted press release specifies.The Ministry of Foreign Affairs reiterates, on this occasion, too, the firm condemnation of the crimes committed in Bucha and other cities in Ukraine, for which the responsibility belongs to Russia, being committed in areas in Ukraine that were under the occupation of the Russian armed forces at the time of their being committed."Romania considers that it is very important for all those that committed these actions to be investigated, brought to justice and to answer for their actions," MAE highlights.
A man died on Wednesday morning after his car hit the fence of a diplomatic representation on the Kiseleff Road, Agerpres reports.

The car caught fire following the impact.''This morning, around 06:00, an event was reported, in which a car was involved, which left the road and hit the fence of a diplomatic representation. The driver is deceased and it took the intervention of the firefighters to extinguish the fire that caught the car", informs the Bucharest Police.The investigations were taken over by the Prosecutor's Office attached to the Bucharest Tribunal and the Homicide Service of the Capital Police in order to establish the causes and conditions under which this event occurred.
The Romanian Ministry of Justice is ready to strengthen cooperation with the colleagues from the Republic of Moldova, including in the field of fighting corruption, Minister Catalin Predoiu said in the context of the International Moldova Support Conference held in Berlin.

"Since 2010, the Romanian Ministry of Justice has increased cooperation with the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Moldova, by signing a first Agreement on cooperation between the Romanian Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Moldova, as well as a Joint Action Plan in fighting severe forms of criminality and corruption. The Romanian Ministry of Justice is preparing to strengthen cooperation with colleagues in the Republic of Moldova, including in combating corruption. Among the tools to be used there is also the Bilateral Action Plan concluded by the two justice ministries and signed in Chisinau, on February 11, 2022, when a joint meeting of the Romanian and Moldovan governments took place, for the 2022-2024 period. The Plan includes joint actions and an exchange of good practices in several relevant areas, including in preventing and combating corruption," said Catalin Predoiu, as quoted in a press release of the Ministry of Justice sent to AGERPRES on Wednesday.The Minister of Justice also said that Romania is still ready to provide technical assistance to the Republic of Moldova and to increase cooperation between the relevant authorities in Chisinau and the Romanian Ministry of Justice, the National Anti-corruption Directorate, the National Integrity Authority, the Anti-corruption Directorate within the Ministry of Interior.The Ministry of Justice participated in the International Moldova Support Conference held in Berlin on Tuesday, through a delegation led by Secretary of State George Serban. Romania was co-organizer of the event, along with Germany (which is currently holding the G7 presidency) and France (which is currently holding the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union). The conference was attended by representatives of the European Commission, the G7 and several international financial institutions.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs informed on Wednesday that nine Ukrainian citizens have requested asylum in Romania, in the last 24 hours, Agerpres reports.

Since the start of the conflict in Ukraine, 4,335 Ukrainian citizens have applied for asylum in our country.They are benefiting from all rights provided by the national legislation.Currently, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the occupation rate within the General Inspectorate for Immigration (IGI) centers is 72.8%.
The Ministry of the Interior (MAI) State Secretary Raed Arafat visited the Ukrainian refugee camp in Husi on Wednesday, where he met with Assistant High Commissioner for Refugees (Operations), United Nations Refugee Agency, Raouf Mazou.

The point at Husi is the one in which the refugees who pass through the green corridor at Palanca reach. The UN official was briefed on the operation of the Husi refugee camp, set up by the Emergency Situations Inspectorate and the Husi City Hall, which has so far received more than 10,000 refugees.

"We have several things that have been done lately, we have increased our capacity and we continue to increase it. UNHCR has come up with additional accommodation capacity in Romania and we can make them available if necessary. Each ministry with medium and long-term competencies in the field of refugees already has coordinated commissions at the level of the Chancellery of the Prime Minister and which resolve the issues necessary for the integration of those who remain in Romania. Local authorities, civil society, citizens, central authorities have all worked together in one direction - to support refugees entering Romania," said Raed Arafat.

The MAI official specified that there are still things that can be improved in terms of managing the refugee situation and gave assurances that Romania has the capacity to receive a new wave of refugees, as the conflict continues.

"Since the aggression continues and people are not safe, there can always be a new wave and that wave can be of more vulnerable, more needy people, who are more dependent on what we have to offer, so we consider the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is that a new wave may appear and it could be a major wave, and we will continue to be prepared for that," Raed Arafat said.

Raouf Mazou said that after the visits to Husi, Isaccea and Siret, he found that everything was very well prepared and that there were good conditions in the camps for receiving refugees. He noted the special attention given to mothers with children, especially since the situation in Ukraine forced many women to leave with children, Agerpres informs.
At a meeting with German ambassador Peer Gebauer, Minister of Entrepreneurship and Tourism Constantin-Daniel Cadariu proposed the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding for bilateral tourism cooperation as a way of maximizing mutual tourist flows, the Tourism Ministry informs in a release, Agerpres reports.

The April 5 meeting was also an occasion for the sides to highlight the importance of cooperation between the two states as well as opportunities to intensify and extend the bilateral partnership."Regarding tourism, considering the high number of German visitors arriving every year in Romania, but also the presence here of some of the largest tour operators with German shareholdership, Minister Cadariu proposed the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding for bilateral cooperation in this field. To this effect, Romania intends to promote customised tourism offers in Germany, with an emphasis on the spa and health segment," the release states.The Romanian side underscored the need to reduce Romania's trade deficit with Germany, suggesting among others the relaunch of the institutional mechanisms for promoting economic cooperation at both federal and land level, specifically the Romanian-German Cooperation Council and the Joint Committees with the lands of Bavaria, Baden Wurttemberg and Hesse, as well as scaling up economic promotion actions - forums and business seminars with the participation of companies from both countries, the release mentions.Germany is Romania's main trading partner, accounting for over 20 percent of Romania's total exports.In 2021, bilateral trade amounted to 35.15 billion euros, up by about 14 percent compared to 2020, of which exports represented 15.34 billion euros (up 8 percent) and imports 19.81 billion euros (up 18 percent).By the amount of investments Germany currently ranks 3rd with an invested share capital of 5.18 billion euros (11.2 percent of the total foreign investments) and a number of 24,230 joint ventures registered in Romania.
As many as 2,320 new cases of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 were recorded in the last 24 hours in Romania, by 727 less than on the previous day, on almost 29,000 RT-PCR and rapid antigenic tests performed, the Health Ministry informed on Wednesday, Agerpres reports.

Of the new cases, 265 were in re-infected patients who tested positive more than 90 days after the first time they recovered from the disease.Most of the newly confirmed COVID-19 cases in Romania since the previous reporting were recorded in Bucharest City - 796, and in the counties of Cluj - 310, Timis - 245, Sibiu - 151, Hunedoara - 140, Iasi - 128, Ilfov - 113, Brasov - 112 and Constanta - 106.As of Monday, 2,866,793 cases of people infected with the novel coronavirus were confirmed in Romania.- Hospitalisations -As many as 2,290 people with COVID-19 are hospitalised at specialist care facilities across the country, by 87 fewer than the day before; 131 of this total are children.Out of the total number of hospitalised patients, 338 are in ICUs, by 22 fewer compared to the previous day. Of the 338 ICU patients, 292 are unvaccinated for COVID-19.- Deaths -According to the Ministry, another 18 Romanians infected with SARS-CoV-2 - 13 men and 5 women - were reported dead in the last 24 hours.Out of the total 18 fatalities, 16 were unvaccinated. The vaccinated patients were aged over 80, and suffered from underlying conditions.Since the beginning of the pandemic, 65,147 people diagnosed with the SARS-CoV-2 infection have died in Romania.
The driver who crashed into the fence of the Russian Embassy in Bucharest was under the "influence of an outburst of anti-Russian hysteria", the diplomatic mission claims, in a message posted on the official Facebook page.

"The embassy expresses its deepest condolences to the relatives and friends of the man who set himself on fire in his car after the failed attempt smash the gates of the Russian Embassy in Romania. We must state with regret that whatever the motive of the driver, there is no doubt that he committed this act under the influence of an outburst of anti-Russian hysteria," said the embassy representatives.According to the representatives of the diplomatic mission, none of the employees of the Embassy and the Romanian law enforcement forces were injured as a result of the incident.The prosecutor with the Prosecutor's Office of the Bucharest Tribunal, dealing with the case of the man who died on Wednesday morning after crashing into the fence of the Russian Embassy, declared that containers with flammable substances were found inside the car.Asked if the gesture could be considered terrorist, the investigator replied: "There are no concrete elements in this sense at the moment, we cannot say at the moment that this gesture is related to anything other than personal circumstances."
Several Ukrainian men who were trying to reach Romania, of whom one has died, are stranded in the northern Mountains of Maramures, at an altitude of over 1,900 meters, where they are being searched by a SMURD (Mobile Emergency Service for Resuscitation and Extrication) helicopter, the spokesperson for Maramures County Council for Emergency Situations (CJSU), Dan Buca, informed on Wednesday, Agerpres reports.

"A SMURD helicopter within General Aviation Inspectorate from the Ministry of Internal Affairs is hovering over the frontier area in sector 354-370, in the Pop Ivan Massif (from the Mountains of Maramures, ed. n), for rescuing people that requested help," Dan Buca said.Two rescuers from Ukraine arrived during the night between Tuesday and Wednesday to the group of men stranded in the alpine area, who requested the support of Romanian authorities.
Amazon.com Inc. labor organizer Christian Smalls said on Tuesday more than 50 warehouses of the e-commerce giant in the U.S. reached out after its warehouse in New York City voted to form the first union at the company.

Since we WON @amazonlabor has been contacted by workers in over 50 buildings Nationwide not including the several buildings overseas and counting, Smalls, a former Amazon employee, said in a tweet.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Employees at Amazons fulfillment center in the borough of Staten Island secured a majority by voting 2,654 to 2,131 in support of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), according to a count released on Friday by the National Labor Relations Board.
Thirteen St. Louis bands will perform and shoot music videos at 13 Cherokee Street venues as LoFi Cherokee makes its long-awaited return.

Its not just a performance for the audience, says LoFi Cherokee producer and director Bill Streeter. Theyre really up there shooting a music video.

The event debuted in 2012 and last took place in 2019.

Im glad people show up and enjoy it, he says. Its funny, people like watching it, though its really not for them. Its for the music video were producing.

The fact were doing it in public is a unique thing. Its one song (per act). Its a multi-music video shoot  not a festival.

The videos are compiled and presented at a premiere party in May; the date and venue will be announced. The videos will premiere online in June and July.

Bands participating this year are G.L., Jesus Christ Supercar, Rum Drum Ramblers, Jon Bonham and Friends, the Hamilton Band, Katarra Trio, Karen Choi, Starwolf, YOUPEOPL, DDare Bionic, Sinister Dane, Hacienda Nortega, and Bass Amp and Dano.

The acts will perform at Fortune Teller Bar, Cola Lounge, Yaquis, Infinite Spin Records, Art Monster, Earthbound, Flowers & Weeds, STL Style, Apotheosis Comics & Lounge, So Jeff Retro, Whiskey Ring, Hop Shoppe and the Golden Record.

It feels great to be back doing this thing, Streeter says. To get out and do anything is awesome. Its the favorite event of a lot of people, whether theyre working the event or attending it.

The bands that were selected for the 2020 installment of LoFi Cherokee were asked to perform this weekend. Most accepted, but a few either had disbanded or moved away.

We had 10 in that lineup who said they wanted to do it, and we added the others, Streeter says.

In shooting their videos, the bands are given 30 minutes in which to be as creative as possible with props, costumes and staging. Streeter recalls a past performance by Sleepy Kitty filmed in a freight elevator.

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In selecting the participating bands, LoFi Cherokee aims to reflect racial, gender and genre diversity. Streeter typically consults with an advisory group that includes previous performers.

This years lineup is heavy on male performers, he says, but includes two strong female artists: Katarra and Karen Choi.

Streeter says he typically struggles to book Hispanic bands, but he was happy to include Hacienda Nortena this year.

Its hard to find original acts who perform in Spanish, he says. Its just a deficit in St. Louis. Fortunately, we got one this year.

Typically, LoFi Cherokee features 17 or 18 bands  and thanks to a scheduling snafu, the 2019 event included 19 acts.

Weve scaled it back a little bit for 2022 for a couple of reasons, Streeter says. COVID is one of the reasons were going to do things a little different.

And spectators wont be allowed in the venues during filming, as they had been in years past. Speakers will be placed outside, and fans can watch through windows.

Were going to clear the room for each set, Streeter says. The rooms would be so packed, it became hard to work because so many people were in the room.

When the idea for LoFi Cherokee was first suggested to Streeter, he didnt think it was viable. But he gave it a try for what he thought would be a one-time event. It took place unpublicized but still gained a following.

People on Cherokee Street would be mad if we hadnt come back, he says. I didnt know how long it would go on. Im surprised its still here.

The event is going strong 10 years later because of the momentum that has been built. And its a totally unique event that he hasnt seen anywhere else.

Its like a bunch of Tiny Desk Concerts, Streeter says.

What LoFi Cherokee  When 9 a.m.-6 p.m. April 9  Where Various Cherokee Street venues; wrap party at the Golden Record  How much Free  More info lofistl.com

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Here's a look at some of the top news today, April 5.

Student loan payment pause

The Biden administration plans to freeze federal student loan payments through Aug. 31, extending a moratorium that has allowed millions of Americans to postpone payments during the coronavirus pandemic, according to an administration official familiar with the White House's decision-making.

Student loan payments were scheduled to resume May 1 after being halted since early in the pandemic. But following calls from Democrats in Congress, the White House plans to give borrowers additional time to prepare for payments. Read more on what that means here:

NCAA champions

Best. Comeback. Ever. Sounds pretty good next to Rock Chalk, Jayhawk.

What looked like a lost cause turned into one of the sweetest wins ever for Kansas.

The Jayhawks brought their fourth NCAA title back to Allen Fieldhouse on Monday thanks to a second-half flurry that erased a 16-point deficit and eventually overcame North Carolina 72-69 in an epic battle of power programs. Get a full recap here:

Sacramento shooting

Police have arrested a second suspect in connection to a mass shooting in downtown Sacramento, California, this weekend that left six people dead and a chaotic crime scene littered with more than 100 shell casings.

Smiley Martin, 27, who was taken into police custody Tuesday, was found at the scene of the shooting early Sunday with "serious injuries from gunfire" and taken to a local hospital, the Sacramento Police Department said in a news release. Police "quickly identified" him as a "person of interest" and kept him under police supervision at the hospital, the release said. Get background and updates here:

Severe weather

Violent storms killed one person in Texas on Tuesday as hail pelted communities and high winds knocked trees into power poles elsewhere in the South. Authorities issued a flurry of tornado warnings at the start of what could be two days of violent weather in the region.

In eastern Texas, W. M. Soloman, 71, died when storm winds toppled a tree onto Solomons home in Whitehouse, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) southeast of Dallas, Whitehouse Mayor James Wansley said. Officials said at least four homes in the area had trees fall on them. Find out more here:

Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker

With less than two weeks until The Kardashians debuts, the familys hype machine  aka Kris Jenner  is running full steam with promises of all the excitement that awaits on the new reality series.

And some of that excitement might happen in Las Vegas, where Jenners daughter Kourtney Kardashian and her fiance, Travis Barker, seem to have fooled a few people with their wedding-chapel high jinks. So what's the deal?
Aisha Sultan Aisha Sultan is home and family editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Follow Aisha Sultan Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today

The first female Jain monk in this country wrote down a vow after a revealing conversation with another monk in training. They were living in an ashram near Dallas and shared with each other memories about the traumas they had suffered as very young children.

The women vowed on June 3, 2013, to spend their lives trying to prevent and protect other children from what they had experienced and to eliminate the taboo around talking about sexual abuse.

That monk, Sadhvi Siddhali Shree, has since made two documentaries about sex trafficking. Sadhvi Anubhuti, the trainee now also a monk, worked as the cinematographer on their most recent film, Surviving Sex Trafficking. The documentary screened Thursday at Marcus Ronnies Cinema, 5320 South Lindbergh Boulevard in partnership with Crisis Aid, a St. Louis-based anti-trafficking organization. It will be available on video on demand April 15.

The film highlights the stories of several women who have survived sexual trafficking  two were lured as teenagers by phony modeling scams, another was drugged and kidnapped. The film doesnt shy away from the brutality they experienced as victims. One of the women, Angela, chillingly describes the way her pimp shattered her bones with a nightstick. The audience sees her battered face and bruised body from cell phone video and news footage taken at the time. Its difficult to hear her cries of pain and anguish.

But the question at the heart of this documentary is about how these survivors lives continued once they escaped their abusers.

People think once they are rescued they are free, but their healing journey is just going to begin, Anubhuti said. We witness Angelas ongoing journey for physical and emotional healing.

It was while editing the film that Shree decided to include her own story in it. Shree reveals details of the sexual assault she experienced when she was 6 years old. As an adult, she served as an army medic during the Iraq War and suffered from PTSD. She had repressed memories of the abuse until adulthood. Documenting the survival stories of the women she has profiled has helped in her own healing.

It might be helpful for the audience to connect to survivors through my lens, she explained. Her revelation helps the audience understand her dedication to this cause and her compassion toward those still trapped and those who have managed to escape.

Its difficult to know an exact number of how many people are trafficked globally. The International Labour Organization and the Walk Free Foundation released Global Estimates of Modern Slavery in September 2017. This report estimates that, at any given time in 2016, approximately 24.9 million people were in forced labor. Of these, 4.8 million were in forced sexual exploitation. Other estimates put the number much higher.

This film takes viewers to womens shelters around the world, revealing stories of how victims escaped, how they continue to survive and how they live with the horrors they experienced.

Each of the women profiled describes how pimps groom their victims and explain why its so difficult to leave the abusive situations they ended up in. The courage and strength of the women in this documentary is inspiring, and the films ultimate message is one of hope. The filmmakers aim to inspire activism against sexual trafficking  a goal they view as key to their religious mission.

Jainism is an ancient religion originating in India that values nonviolence above all else. Female monks can also be called nuns, although Shree prefers the gender-neutral title.

The monks have also started a nonprofit that provides survivors medical assistance, scholarships and support. For more information about the fight against sex trafficking and how to support survivors, visit stoppingtraffic.org.

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ST. LOUIS  Even as the contentious battle to confirm the nations first Black female Supreme Court justice rages in the Senate, Justice Sonia Sotomayor brought a sense of levity during a talk at Washington University on Tuesday afternoon.

Sotomayor was in St. Louis this week to sit down with the schools chancellor, Andrew Martin, to answer questions, share personal anecdotes and dole out life advice to the masked-up college students who filed into the schools Field House.

Serving as the first Hispanic and the third woman on the countrys highest court, she touched on topics from self-awareness, family and personal growth, to approaching the justice system as a minority and showing empathy as a judge.

Oh, and she let everyone know about her newfound interest in poker.

My playing is a bit of a charity. I invite people to my home, I feed them, I give them all the liquor they want ... and so when I win their money, I dont have to report it, she joked.

But more seriously, Sotomayor said she is engaged in and devoted to helping people understand the importance of their obligation to better the world  a value instilled by her mother and grandmother while she was growing up in the Bronx.

Sotomayor also told the audience she believes the path to self awareness and success involves a few key elements: seeking out mentorship, knowing and acknowledging ones own fault in a situation, and having the courage to say, I dont know.

The justice meandered her way through the audience for most of the talk, shaking hands and even taking photos with students, all while answering questions and reflecting on her experiences.

One person asked her how she approached discussing polarizing issues such as the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War during her formative years as a young woman, and what advice she would give young people navigating todays politically polarized landscape.

Sotomayor said she tries hard to see the good in everyone, something the justices mother, who died last year, was steadfast in doing throughout her life.

Youre going to differ in views with people and some of those views will be or feel offensive to you, she said.

Sotomayor shared her experience during the Supreme Court confirmation process, how she was hurt when people said she wasnt smart enough for the position and had only been nominated because of affirmative action efforts.

(They forget) you dont judge a person by who opens the door, you judge them by what they did when they went through the door, she said.

Sotomayor told the crowd that however hurt they may be by anothers views, they should not write people off.

Stop screaming, listen, try to put yourself in the shoes of that other person; try to figure out what it is theyre feeling and why they feel that way, she said.

In answer to a question about how to trust the justice system as a minority, knowing it has failed those groups of people in the past, she said its important to take the long view and recognize the, albeit slow, progress the system has made.

Thats how I keep confidence, by realizing yes, there have been inherent flaws in our system of justice, but I am here working as hard as I can, even when I dissent, to try to avoid us going off in the wrong direction, she said.

Sotomayor was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, 2009. The Senate confirmed her on Aug. 6, 2009, on a 68-31 vote divided mostly along party lines.

The first Black woman nominated to the high court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, is expected to be confirmed soon.
JEFFERSON CITY  Missouri lawmakers are again looking to shorten the time period to collect unemployment benefits, potentially leaving laid-off workers with five fewer weeks to find a job.

The measure, which received first-round approval by the House on Wednesday, would allow the period a person can receive unemployment payments to be shortened further when unemployment rates are lower.

The bill sponsor, Rep. J. Eggleston, R-Maysville, argued when there are plentiful jobs, there should be a stronger incentive for people to fill those jobs.

This is to help our businesses find some of the workers theyre so desperately seeking, Eggleston said. The phrase for years was good help is hard to find. In talking to employers, both private sector and public sector, over the last year or so, the new phrase is any help is hard to find.

The eligibility period is already tied to the states unemployment rate  longer when unemployment is high and shorter when unemployment is low.

The minimum period under current law is 13 weeks when unemployment is 6% or lower. Under the proposal, the minimum period would be eight weeks when unemployment is 3.5% or lower.

At the states latest reported unemployment rate of 3.7%, unemployed individuals could receive benefits for nine weeks.

Im a contractor, and the labor force is nonexistent, said Rep. Craig Fishel, R-Springfield, echoing the sentiment that something needs to be done to help employers.

Opponents argued the tiered system does not take into account unemployed individuals circumstances or the types of work available.

People looking for work, said Rep. Emily Weber, D-Kansas City, may need more time to find a job in line with their financial needs or specialized skills. As a young graphic designer, Weber said, job postings often had heavy competition and extended application processes.

Rep. Jerome Barnes, D-Raytown, noted the state unemployment rate is not directly representative of more local job markets, saying whats happening over in Joplin is not the same in Kansas City or St. Louis or Springfield.

The bill, Barnes said, dangerously narrows protections for the workers left vulnerable through no fault of their own.

I just asked the body to be very careful, Barnes continued. One day you may not be working and need unemployment.

The legislation is House Bill 1860.

Grace Zokovitch gzokovitch@post-dispatch.com
CLAYTON  St. Louis County Executive Sam Page is ready to quit working part-time as a doctor, a spokesman said Wednesday, a day after 61% of voters supported a measure to bar county executives from secondary work.

Proposition B requires the county executive to forfeit office if he or she holds other employment or works as a contractor.

The target of the measure was Page, who has admitted that he continues to work as an anesthesiologist, but has declined to provide the public with records of that outside employment.

On Wednesday, Page spokesman Doug Moore said in a statement that Dr. Page will abide by the charter as amended by the voters on Tuesday.

The statement came shortly after Page delivered a State of the County address to local municipal officials and other community leaders at the University of Missouri-St. Louis campus.

Page did not meet with reporters after his speech and did not take questions from news media.

In addition to Proposition B, voters on Tuesday also overwhelmingly supported Proposition A, which required salaries of the county executives political appointees be listed within his offices budget.

Pages critics on the County Council  two Republicans and two Democrats who make up a majority on the seven-member body  voted to put both measures on the ballots. Both were opposed by Pages reelection campaign.

Councilman Mark Harder, R-7th District, a member of the council majority and chairman of the councils ethics committee, said Wednesday that the council would finally get some closure thanks to Proposition B.

He said two weeks ago at our meeting that he will honor the charter, Harder said. I wish you would have honored the charter all along and we wouldve spent a lot less time on this issue.

State Rep. Shamed Dogan, a Ballwin Republican who is running for county executive, and Jane Dueker, an attorney and lobbyist challenging Page in the August Democratic primary, endorsed Proposition B and each promised to be a full-time county executive if elected.

Support for Proposition B was strongest in western portions of the county, including Eureka, Wildwood and parts of Chesterfield; and in southern areas including the Mehlville and Oakville neighborhoods. Meramec township, which includes Eureka, had the highest vote margin, with nearly 70% of voters in favor.

No townships in the county had a majority voting against the proposition, but support for it was weakest in Jefferson, University, and Creve Coeur townships in mid-county.

Josh Renaud of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.

Updated at 6:32 p.m. Wednesday, April 6.

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CLAYTON  St. Louis County voters said once and for all they dont want their county executive moonlighting, passing a measure that adds teeth to an existing charter provision that could force County Executive Sam Page to stop working part time as an anesthesiologist.

Proposition B follows a long-standing battle between Page and critics on the St. Louis County Council who charge he is violating the charter by continuing to work as a doctor, questioning just how much time he spends on his medical practice. Page has dismissed the inquiry as political theater, though he has declined to release a detailed schedule or his pay, maintaining he works one weekend a month and an occasional four-hour shift on weekdays.

The measure, which passed with over 60% of the vote, says the county executive must forfeit his office if he holds other employment or works as a contractor.

Jane Dueker, who is challenging Page in the August Democratic Party primary, called the results a referendum on Sam Page and said voters dont want a part-time county executive. She called on Page to quit his secondary employment immediately.

Another St. Louis County charter amendment reining in the countys executive branch also won by a wide margin. Proposition A would require that salaries of the county executives political appointees be listed within his offices budget  a recommendation in a critical state audit released in 2020 by Missouri Auditor Nicole Galloway. For years, county executives have embedded the salaries of many of their staffers in other departments budgets, concealing the true scope and cost of their staffs.

Those ballot measures are two of the most high profile of dozens of ballot measures that appeared on ballots around the region Tuesday.

Voters also denied leasing a portion of Queeny Park to the Raintree Foundation for the operation of a private school.

Voters resist internet sales tax

More than 40 municipalities in the region  as well as St. Louis County  had a use tax on the ballot allowing the collection of sales taxes on internet purchases from out-of-state vendors. The use taxes would mirror sales tax rates and are the final step in a yearslong effort to subject internet merchants to the same sales taxes as brick and mortar stores.

The issue hit ballots this year after the Missouri Legislature passed an enabling state law  one of the last in the country to do so  following a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling clearing the way for the local sales tax collections.

But voters in many places rejected the tax authorizations, including those in St. Louis County, where it garnered just 41% of the vote.

Webster Groves, Dellwood, Bellerive Acres, Hanley Hills, Florissant and Shrewsbury were among the only municipalities where the internet sales tax passed.

Public safety taxes

A proposed sales tax for fire department service and pensions in University City was among the most contested of municipal ballot issues, with organized support both for and against.

Voters there rejected the fire department tax.

A similar quarter-cent fire protection sales tax in Crestwood, on the other hand, won the support of voters.

In Shrewsbury, after several quarters of deficit spending, an additional property tax of up to $1 per $100 assessed value in property taxes was approved. The new tax will allow the suburb to more than double its current property tax rate of 56 cents per $100 assessed value.

And voters in the tiny South County burg of Bella Villa, population 757, voted down a property tax of $1 per $100 assessed valuation officials said would maintain city services.

Bella Villas 83 acres is surrounded by unincorporated St. Louis County, which is patrolled by St. Louis County police. More than half of the citys almost $500,000 budget goes to police protection. A November attempt to pass the citys first property tax failed by one vote.

St. Charles County voters again reauthorized their half-cent road sales tax for another decade. A sales tax for parks in Jefferson County failed by a wide margin. Property tax hikes for parks and pools appeared to pass in St. Ann but fell short of the needed four-sevenths in Florissant.

And area voters continued giving strong support to their fire protection districts, with property tax increases passing in Affton, Mehlville and North County and a bond issue leading in the Metro West Fire Protection District.

Updated at 10:12 p.m. Tuesday, April 5.

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Webster Groves Councilwoman Laura Arnold defeated former Councilwoman Kathy Hart on Tuesday to become the citys first new mayor in almost a quarter-century.

Arnold, who got 54% of the vote, succeeds Gerry Welch, who has been mayor since 1998 but didnt seek another term.

Arnold continues Webster Groves 36-year string of female mayors, begun in 1986 when Glenn Sheffield was elected.

Some other municipal contests across St. Louis County:

 Overland City Councilman Marty Little easily defeated Councilman Ken Owensby and Harold Stiffelman in the race to succeed Mayor Michael Schneider, who didnt run for reelection. Little got 65% of the vote.

 Mike Moeller, the longtime mayor of Maryland Heights, trounced Jamie Ann Gilley, rolling up 73% of the vote.

 Sunset Hills Mayor Patricia Fribis defeated her opponent, Councilwoman Christine Lieber, 55% to 45%.

 Former Berkeley Mayor Ted Hoskins, who lost his post in the 2020 election, staged a successful political comeback, narrowly winning a seat on the city council.

In Webster Groves, Arnold, 55, a retired college professor, was pitted against Hart, 57, an administrative law judge for the Missouri Department of Labor and Industrial Relations.

Arnold has been on the city council since 2018 while Hart served on the body from 2004 to 2016.

Last summer, Hart was a leader in a successful effort to get voters to overturn a council decision to allow construction of two-family dwellings in single-family neighborhoods in much of the city.

In Overland, Little, 35, a lawyer, has been on the council since 2012.

Owensby, 72, a businessman and teacher, has been a councilman since 2002 and simultaneously ran for reelection Tuesday to his 3rd Ward post. He also lost that contest, losing to Jessica Requejo in a three-way race. Had he won both races, he would have chosen between the two offices. Stiffelman is a retired senior federal air marshal.

The Sunset Hills contest featured Fribis, 72, a retired business owner, and Lieber, 42, a current business owner.

In Berkeley, Hoskins defeated Robert Martin Brown, an educator with the Riverview Gardens School District, for a 3rd Ward council seat, by eight votes.

Hoskins, 83, was defeated for reelection as mayor two years ago while facing felony charges filed against him in 2019. The charges are still pending; a trial has been set for October.

The charges allege that Hoskins, in the months leading up to the April 2018 election for four council seats, submitted fraudulent voter applications and other documents from at least three residents.

Hoskins, who also is a former state representative, has insisted he had done nothing wrong.

Updated at 10 p.m. Tuesday, April 5.

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Updated at 11 p.m. with additional details on the crash and victims.

ST. CLAIR COUNTY  A 23-year-old Fairview Heights woman died Tuesday when the car she was in struck a concrete barrier on Interstate 64, then veered into the back of one of three Illinois Department of Transportation dump trucks working in the area, police said.

The driver of the car that hit the dump truck, a 22-year-old man from Du Quoin, Illinois, had to be airlifted to an area hospital with life-threatening injuries, the Illinois State Police said.

The driver of the dump truck that was hit, a 64-year-old Belleville man, also was taken to a hospital, but his injuries were not considered life-threatening. A passenger in the dump truck, who was outside the vehicle picking up debris, was not injured.

According to the Illinois State Police report, a 2012 Nissan Altima driven by the Du Quoin man was traveling westbound in the right lane on I-64 near East St. Louis just before 3 p.m. when it came upon three IDOT dump trucks.

The first IDOT truck was parked on the shoulder with an arrow board directing traffic to the left. The second was ahead of that one, also with an arrow board, but in the right lane. The third truck was ahead of the second one, parked in the right lane, with a driver sitting inside and the passenger outside the vehicle.

The Altima passed the first IDOT truck that was on the shoulder, then veered onto the shoulder to avoid the second IDOT truck, the Illinois State Police report said. It hit the concrete wall and then spun around until the passenger side hit the back of the lead dump truck.

The passenger of the car was pronounced dead at the scene, the Illinois State Police said.

The westbound lanes of I-64 were closed for at least four hours Tuesday after the crash. Traffic was diverted at Illinois Highway 111 in Washington Park, police said.

An investigation continues.
Two hundred times, they failed to get it done.

They failed after 1899. That was the year an African-American man named Sam Hose was set upon by a white mob near Newnan, Georgia, that castrated him, skinned his face, then cooked him alive over a fire and parceled out pieces of his body; his knuckles were offered for sale by a grocer in Atlanta.

They failed after 1904, too. That was the year an African-American man named Luther Holbert and a woman who was never identified were put to death by a white mob in Doddsville, Mississippi, using a large corkscrew to drill into the pairs flesh and yank out raw chunks of them as spectators dined on deviled eggs and lemonade.

And they failed after 1934. That was the year an African-American man named Claude Neal was butchered by a white mob in Marianna, Florida, that castrated, burned and shot him, dragged his ruined body through the streets behind a car and then left it hanging from a tree that still stands in front of the Jackson County Courthouse.

This sort of thing was the opposite of uncommon. As documented by Tuskegee University, it happened 4,743 times between 1882 and 1968. The vast majority of the victims were African Americans. Their killers were virtually never tried and even less often punished. And approximately 200 times since 1900, legislation has been introduced in Congress to make lynching a federal crime. Each time, Congress has failed to pass it.

So its hard to know what to make of last weeks signing of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. The bill, named for the 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 for supposedly getting fresh with a white woman, at last achieves the old goal. And the response has been celebratory, as of a mountain finally scaled. You cant begrudge anyone who feels a sense of triumph, particularly Rep. Bobby Rush, the soon-to-retire Chicago Democrat who sponsored the bill.

He said in a statement that the new law corrects a historic and abhorrent injustice. And he invoked the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Youll get no argument here. But you will get some mixed emotions.

Two hundred times, Congress failed the likes of Sam Hose, Luther Holbert and Claude Neal. It failed Mary Turner and Rubin Stacy, failed Thomas Shipp, Abram Smith, Laura Nelson, Bennie Simmons, Emmett Till and 4,733 more. Two hundred times, it had the chance to declare on behalf of the nation that these Black lives mattered  and it did not. And if Rep. Rush is inspired by what King said about the arc of the moral universe, well, it is apropos that he also said this: We must come to see, with one our distinguished jurists, that justice too long delayed is justice denied. 

Amen. And no one can give justice to the 4,743 men and women Congress failed. Any meaningful chance to do so long ago turned to dust. Yes, people of color still suffer racially motivated killings, and this bill provides a new tool to hold perpetrators accountable. Thats an undeniably good thing.

But its a good thing wrapped in the frustration that getting America to do right by Americans of color is always such an ordeal. As Gil Scott-Heron once said: I have become a special amendment for what included me all along: All men are created equal. The bitterness of that truth shades the sweetness of any joy.

Two hundred times, they failed to get it done.

Apparently, the 201st was the charm.

Leonard Pitts Jr. lpitts@miamiherald.com
What does Jason Smith have against democracy? What is Billy Longs beef with defense against tyranny? The two Missouri congressmen were among 63 House Republicans who voted against a non-binding resolution expressing support for NATO and reinforcing its commitment to democratic principles.

The naysayers have some flimsy excuses about the wording of the resolution, which some of them worry is an insult to stumbling democracies like Hungary. But in the context of what the extreme right is doing here at home regarding voting access, its increasingly clear their real problem is with democracy itself.

NATO, formed by western democracies 73 years ago this week to contain Soviet aggression, is the most successful military alliance in history. Before the Trump era, it would have been unthinkable for any serious American politician, let alone a self-described conservative, to undermine this crucial institution, which has protected democracy around the world for generations.

But NATO was among former President Donald Trumps favorite punching bags, in service to his bizarre affection for Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Trump made it fashionable for American right-wingers to understate the dangers of authoritarianism and to undermine the most important global protection against it  as Tuesdays vote reaffirmed. In addition to Smith and Long (Missouris two Trumpiest House members), the list of nays included such loony luminaries as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina.

And what do they have against the NATO resolution? Some took issue with language supporting NATOs proposed Center for Democratic Resilience in order to shore up democracy among NATO members and address internal threats from proponents of illiberalism. Rep. Andy Harris, R-Maryland, called that wording a progressive left-wing dogwhistle against NATO members Poland and Hungary.

Deliberately or not, that rationale conflates what liberal means in American politics (the opposite of conservative) with what it means on the global stage (the opposite of authoritarian). The resolution doesnt mention Hungary specifically, but yes, that countrys leader, Viktor Orban, has transformed it from a democracy to something resembling an autocracy  and, yes, that should be of concern to an alliance whose legitimacy ultimately rests not in its weaponry but in its commitment to democracy.

As chilling as it is that roughly a third of the GOPs House caucus would oppose the NATO resolution in order to stand by a quasi-autocrat like Orban, their opposition is also nonsensical, since Hungary (like Poland) is on record supporting the principles underlying the resolution.

But it makes a little more sense when considering whats going on closer to home lately, with new laws in GOP-dominated states designed to tilt elections toward Republicans  which is how Orbans party just won reelection. Most NATO members may view Hungary as a lapsed partner in need of reform, but Americas hard-right Republicans seem to view it as more of an inspiration for sidestepping democracy.
In early 2022 Israel put its first Sky Dew aerostat (aerodynamic unpowered blimp) system into service along its northern border, to detect Iranian air attacks using low, slow UAVs equipped with explosives and a GPS guidance system programmed to head for specific targets. Sky Dew carries radars and other sensors to monitor large land areas for low, slow intruders. Another Sky Dew may be installed in the south, along the Gaza border, where the threat is less but may get worse because the Sunni Arab Hamas that rules Gaza is once against a recipient of Iranian military and economic aid.

Sky Dew specifications were not revealed, apparently because it uses new sensors that can detect a lot more threats at greater distances and lower altitudes and speeds than previous systems could. Iran has been developing new aerial threats designed to get past many current air defense radars so not letting Iran know exactly what Sky Dew is capable of will give Iran a more difficult time evading it.

Sky Dew is not the first Israeli aerostat system. In 2005 an Israeli firm introduced a smaller aerostat system; the ELM 2083 that was a substitute, in performance, to an American AWACS (Air Warning and Control) aircraft. This aerostat was designed to spot aircraft up to 500 kilometers distant and at low and medium altitudes. Unlike Sky Dew, ELM 2083 was less effective at detecting very low and slow threats. ELM was purchased by Israel, India and Singapore.

Modern aerostat systems have been around since the 1980s and have proliferated as more compact, lightweight and powerful sensors became available. Aerostat systems use a 100-250 foot long, helium filled, unmanned blimp equipped with radar and other sensors. The larger of these blimps are more than twice the size as the more familiar advertising blimps. An aerostat is designed to always turn into the wind and stay in the same place. An aerostat is unpowered, and secured by a cable that can keep the aerostat in position at its maximum altitude of 4,700 meters (15,000 feet). At that altitude, a large aerostat can carry a two-ton payload. The cable also supplies power, which means the blimp can stay up for about 30 days at a time before it has to be brought down for maintenance on its radars. Often, two radars are carried. One is for surveillance; the other is a precision track and illumination radar (PTIR). The surveillance radar provides long-range coverage (400 kilometers or more), while the PTIR, which is a steerable system capable of tracking multiple targets, can focus on items of interest. Current aerostats carry a larger array of more capable sensors.

Aerostat systems cost varies from under $10 million, to over $100 million each, depending on the size of the aerostat and the capabilities of the radar and other sensors. Aerostats work. Kuwait had one in 1990, and the ground radar spotted the Iraqis as soon as they crossed the border. The U.S. uses dozens of aerostat systems in Iraq and Afghanistan to guard bases.

One example of the new generation of sensors for aerostats and UAVS is the U.S. Army Starlite radar, which has been in use for over a decade. The AN/ZPY-1 Starlite lightweight radar weighs 29.5 kg (65 pounds), occupies 34 cc (1.2 cubic feet), uses 750 watts of power, and costs about $2.3 million each. Starlite can deliver photo quality black and white images of what is down there, in any weather. The army has developed software that enables the Starlite images to be transmitted to existing army video terminals and automatically appear on electronic versions of standard army maps. Starlite is used in combination with vidcams and heat sensors (infrared or thermal). The Starlite software enables the operator to quickly, or automatically, point a video camera at anything the Starlite can see.

The Starlite was originally designed for use in the army's 1.5-ton MQ-1C Sky Warrior UAV. While UAVs get more publicity, the army has found that its aerostats and tall towers also make good use of Starlite and do it a lot cheaper; under $1,000 an hour, mostly for maintenance, repairs, and personnel to monitor the sensors, and stay airborne nearly all the time. Compare this to Sky Warrior or Predator, which costs $6,000 an hour to fly. The stationary Starlites just need a way to keep an eye on a large area; like chunks of the Syrian, Iranian, or Pakistani border or the area surrounding a base 24/7.

Starlite thus became another component of the PTDS (Persistent Threat Detection Systems) that are mounted in the aerostats or towers. PTDS was developed because of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2004 the U.S. Army sent 22 aerostat systems to Iraq and Afghanistan. The most common model of aerostats float at about 330 meters (a thousand feet), tethered by a cable that provides power and communications to the day and night cameras, or Starlite radar, up there. The big problem was ground fire from rifles and machine-guns. Hostile gunmen liked using the aerostats as targets. Rifle fire would not destroy the aerostats but did cause them to be brought down more frequently for repairs. Normally the aerostats can stay up for 30 days at a time but the bullet damage repairs have some of them coming down every few days. The PTDS surveillance systems mounted on tall steel towers also suffer gunfire damage but rarely any that disables the equipment.

The first army aerostats went to Iraq to help defend offshore oil facilities from attack by terrorist speedboats. Those early systems used a 75 meter (233 foot) long, helium filled, unmanned aerostat equipped with radar and other sensors. The U.S. Navy operated aerostat systems from ships to spot small boats over a large area around the vessel. Larger aerostats, like JLENS, were originally designed to detect cruise missiles and were soon replaced by smaller and cheaper aerostat systems currently in use.

Israel worked with American aerostat developers and equipment suppliers to develop Sky Dew.
A decade of civil war has left Syria with a lot of losers and no clear winner. The Assad government is technically in control of 90 percent of Syria but that control is weaker than it was before 2011. There are not enough trained police and soldiers to maintain order throughout Syria and many areas are still generally lawless and dominated by Islamic terrorists, outlaw militias and gangsters of all sorts.

Arab states are willing to revive diplomatic and economic relationships with Syria, but only if the Assads break their ties with Iran. That can be announced but not enforced because there are thousands of Iranian-backed militias in Syria, who are occupied with carrying out attacks against Israel. If the Assad forces try to eject the Iranians, the Assad government becomes an enemy of Iran and subjected to all sorts of military, economic and terrorist retaliation. The Assads want to avoid that until they have solid links with Arab countries and Israel. The Arabs are willing but the Israelis are already at war with the Iranians in Syria and are no longer interested in establishing diplomatic relations with Syria. That means Syria remains a battlefield for Islamic terrorists and Israeli, Turkish, Russian, Iranian, Syrian, and American forces to fight each other in a constantly changing web of alliances. For Syria peace will have to wait, possibly for a long time.

The Missing Russians

Russians, Ukrainians and just about everyone else were surprised at the poor performance of Russian commanders, troops and equipment in Ukraine. Part of this was due to overestimating the value of combat experience Russian pilots and commanders gained in Syria and Libya. This was supposed to make a difference when fighting Ukrainians but did not. In 2021Russian openly boasted of the experience gained in Syria. Russia believed time spent in the Syrian fighting would prove invaluable in any future war. That was because 90 percent of Russian military pilots now had combat experience. Since 2015 many pilots have flown over a hundred combat sorties in Syria and a few of them over 400. This would account for so many Russian aircraft types showing up in Syria, sometimes in small numbers for short periods. Russia had earlier revealed that they combat tested a lot of new equipment and weapons in Syria, enabling the new gear to use a sales inducement of combat tested.

Russian aircraft have flown over 40,000 sorties in Syria so far, providing lots of opportunities for Russian pilots to get some combat experience. There was one catch, most of the sorties did not involve engaging the enemy. In Syria that meant lots of reconnaissance sorties and combat sorties where there was no combat, as in nothing to bomb or weather that prevented such attacks. The combat experience of the pilots wasnt all that dangerous because there were no enemy aircraft while the Islamic terrorists and irregulars below only had short range anti-aircraft weapons like heavy machine-guns and some portable heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles that were out of date compared to the missile defenses in Russian helicopters and fixed wing aircraft. Many of the targets in Syria consisted of pro-rebel civilians Russia was trying to force out of Syria. Most of the combat experience came in the form of finding designated targets and bombing them, often with unguided bombs that had to be dropped from low altitudes.

As of late 2021, nearly 70,000 Russian troops had served in Syria, many more than once. Both pilots and ground troops served in Syria for short periods, like three to six months at a time. Since Russia had been in Syria for six years, a growing number of Russian pilots and ground forces officers have served more than one tour.

Russia also confirmed that promising ground forces officers were also sent to Syria for some combat experience and currently most of the commanders and chiefs of staff of units from battalion size up to the divisions, armies and military districts have had some experience in Syria. For the ground force officers the experience often meant going into action as advisors to Syrian officers. This was often in the form of Russian officers leading by example because most Syrian officers had become reluctant to lead their troops into combat due to heavy casualties the Syrian army has suffered since 2011. Russia special operations officers got the most combat experience because they led Russia spetsnaz commandos on combat missions and took a few casualties. But for most Russian pilots and ground combat officers, experience in Syria was not much help in Ukraine because the opponents in Syria were far less capable and determined than those encountered inside Ukraine.

The increased economic sanctions applied to Russia after the Ukraine invasion has hurt Syria in other ways. Russia demanded that Syria assist Russian efforts to evade the new sanctions. This is done by spending Russian aid money in such a way that it launders Russian funds so they can be used freely outside Russia. There is a similar arrangement for assisting the Russians with oil smuggling. Syria loses the economic benefits of over a billion dollars in Russian aid but keeps the Russian air strikes coming. This air support is also useful to protect the Assads from Iranian retribution for cooperating with Gulf Arab states now under attack by Iran.

April 5, 2022: The Assad government supports Russian military operations in Ukraine and has agreed to supply as many Syrian soldiers and experienced militiamen the Russians can afford. Those accepted for the program must pass a Syrian background check and are given six-month contracts at the rate of $1,200 a month plus a $2,000 bonus if they complete their six-months and even larger payments if they are badly wounded and disabled or killed. The Assads take a large chunk of this as a commission but the volunteers are making a lot more than the $100 a month they get from the army or the more successful militias. The pay is also higher than what Russia pays for Syrians serving in Libya because service in Ukraine is a lot more dangerous. The Syrians will probably not be front line troops but rather replace Russian soldiers now used to guard rear areas or recently captured territory.

April 4, 2022: In the east (Homs and Raqqa provinces) operations against ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) groups in the Badia Desert south of the Euphrates River Valley. So far in 2022 Russian airstrikes and ground operations have left nearly 150 dead, most of them ISIL or associated groups using the largely empty desert as a sanctuary. This desert area extends into nearby Jordan. Baida covers 500,000 square kilometers (200,000 square miles) and represents about half of Syria and 85 percent of Jordan and smaller portions of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Russia supplies most of aerial surveillance and reconnaissance to find and track ISIL groups out there. The Baida desert was long been the scene of ISIL activity and fighting against and between Islamic terrorists. All these desert areas are thinly populated by Sunni Arabs who are inclined to tolerate or support ISIL as long as ISIL attacks were directed at military targets and not local civilians. In response ISIL has been waging an assassination campaign against Islamic clergy and staffs of religious schools who teach that Islamic terrorism is wrong.

In the northeast (Hasaka province) Turkish UAV missile attack against SDF (Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces rebels), wounding three Kurds. Elsewhere in Hasaka Turkish artillery fire on SDF positions continued for a second day.

April 3, 2022: In central Syria (eastern Homs province) Iran took advantage of Russia withdrawing its forces from Mahan, where a major weapons storage complex has long existed. Providing some protection from surrounding hills, the Mahan complex consists of 25 underground bunkers where weapons and ammunition are stored. Until recently a few Russians troops and a lot of Russian backed local mercenaries provided security. Some Assad forces, in the form of Lebanese Shia Hezbollah gunmen as well as some Syrian troops replaced the Russian force. But then several hundred Iran=backed mercenaries arrived to share the security duties, and exercise some control over how the Mahan complex would be used. The withdrawal, to Ukraine, of Russian troops and cash (for paying local mercenaries) provided several opportunities for Iran and Mahan was one of them. The Hezbollah forces took orders from Iran so now Mahan was controlled by Iran and the Assads lost exclusive control of a vital weapons and ammo storage site. Moreover, Mahan now becomes a major target for Israeli attacks, which can overcome the protection usually provided by the hills and underground bunkers. Until the departure of Russian forces the Mahan complex supplied Iranian, Assad and Russian attacks on ISIL operations in central and eastern Syria.

In the northeast (Hasaka province) a Turkish UAV missile attack and artillery fire wounded several people and damaged electrical distribution systems.

In the east (Deir Ezzor province) disputes between Iran-backed militias led to gunfire and one militia leader was killed.

April 2, 2022: In the northwest (Idlib province) Syrian artillery fire killed three HTS Islamic terrorists and wounded at least five. The artillery fire continued for several hours as HTS members took shelter. The fighting was about who controls territory in the province and has been going on for years, Aleppo province is adjacent to Idlib province.

April 1, 2022: In the northeast (Hasaka province) a Turkish TB2 UAV missile hit a vehicle on the M4 highway, killing an SDF member and wounding two Kurdish civilians. This is the 22nd TB2 attack so far in 2022 six TB2 attacks have occurred in Kurdish majority Hasaka province. SDF forces have clashed with Turkish troops and their Syrian mercenaries frequently, usually in response to a Turkish attack or attempt to gain control of more SDF territory.

In the north (Aleppo province) there is continued fighting between HTS Islamic terrorists and a faction of the Turkish backed SNA (Syrian National Army). The violence today left one SNA member dead, five wounded and over twenty SNA members captured.

March 31, 2022: In southern Syria (Daraa province) the violence continued with 45 incidents of violence in March leaving 39 dead. So far in 2022 there have been 117 attacks leaving 97 dead and many more wounded. been nearly twenty assassinations (of Syrian army officers) and related acts of violence so far this month. This level of violence remained fairly constant for three years until 2022. This is part of the undeclared war between Iranian and Syrian forces going on there since 2018. Anonymous assassins use pistols and hidden bombs to kill those who work, or worked for government forces or Russia and Syria backed local militias. There are also attacks against former members of ISIL and other militant groups. These victims had accepted amnesty. Russian and Assad forces openly force Iran-backed groups and individuals out of the area. There is no open violence because Iran, Syria and Russia are still officially allies. Israel sometimes fires on Iranian forces operating in Daraa, especially near the Israeli border. Israel also shares intel with Russia and Syria about Syrian officers who are secretly working for Iran. The Iranians pay well, and in dollars. Israel will sometimes release evidence of this to the media, so that Iranians back home have another reason to oppose Iranian foreign wars. Negotiations have been underway between Iran and Russia/Syria since 2020 but have not made much progress. The covert Iranian violence is just another incentive for Syria to get the Iranian agents out of the area. In 2022 much of the violence is from other groups, some of them criminal gangs retaliating against those who refuse to pay for protection from the violence.

March 28, 2022: In the north (Aleppo province) Russian air strikes and Syrian army artillery fire during the last 48 hours against Turkish forces caused several casualties among the Syrian mercenaries working for the Turks. These were the first Russian air strikes in Syria since the February 24 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Iranian backed Syrian militias joined in the attacks on the Turkish forces. The attacks attempt to dislodge the Turkish Syrian mercenaries and their families who now live in areas near the Turkish border that are meant to remain under Turkish control to keep Islamic terrorists out of Turkey. The Turks have established local governments in these border areas that collect taxes and operate municipal services.

March 23, 2022: In the north (Aleppo province) several Syrian Army officers were killed by assassins.

Syrian leader Bashir Assad attended a conference in the UAE (United Arab Emirates) where countries that already had established diplomatic relations with Israel agreed that Syria, or at least the Assad government controlled most of the country after ten years of civil war, receive backing in establishing diplomatic and economic relations with Israel. Until recently this was possible in 2018 where American, Israeli and Russian officials met and agreed that a deal with the Assad government was preferable to continued chaos, and an Iranian presence in Syria. That changed in mid-2021 when a new government took power in Israel and abandoned the Syrian deal. The current UAE conference lacked Israeli participation. There was unanimous agreement that an American effort to restore the 2015 treaty that lifted sanction in Iran was a bad idea. Many Americans oppose restoring the 2015 treaty, as do other nations in the region including the e=new Israeli government.

March 22, 2022: Over the last few weeks Russia has been transferring the few troops (mainly military police) it had in southern and eastern Syria to the Russian Hmeimim airbase in Latakia province, on the Mediterranean coast. Latakia is vital to the Assad government because it is the most loyal province and contains the Mediterranean ports and the Russian airbase. Most of the Latakia population is Shia, as is the Assad clan.

March 20, 2022: According to the 2021 Transparency International Corruption survey, Syria remains one of the three most corrupt nations in the world. Syria was 177 out of 180 nations. Neighboring Iraq ranked 157 . Transparency International measures corruption on a 1 (most corrupt) to 100 (not corrupt) scale. The nations with the worst score are currently Syria (score of 14), South Sudan (12) and Somalia (12). The least corrupt nations are currently Denmark and New Zealand, each with a score of 88. The war has greatly increased corruption. The Syrian corruption score was 26 in 2012, which today would put it above Iraq, with a score of 23, The current high level of corruption makes it difficult for anyone to justify investing in Syria or even providing foreign aid, which is not likely to reach those it is intended for.

March 13, 2022: Because of a recent Israeli airstrike in Syria, Iran launched a dozen cruise missiles at targets in or near Erbil, the capital of autonomous Kurdish northern Iraq. Some of the missiles landed near the American consulate but caused no damage or casualties. Other missiles did hit buildings and the damage was substantial for the palatial home of a wealthy Iraqi Kurd. Iran later took credit for the attack, explaining that it was directed at a mythical Israeli Mossad Base near Erbil. The mansion, used by the wealthy and influential Iraqi Kurd and his family, was demolished when no one was home. The bombed-out ruins were open for the media, who took lots of pictures. Iran had no explanation why their guided projectiles seemed to land randomly, except on the mansion. Iran said the attack was revenge for an Israeli airstrike in Syria last week that killed two senior Quds Force commanders. Kurdish officials speculated that the attack was made at a time when no one was in the mansion and avoiding any casualties was an objective, so the attack would serve as a warning rather than something demanding a retaliatory attack. The Kurds believe the attack was more about Iran reminding everyone that Iraq is subordinate to Iran and foreigners as well as Iraqis must remember this.

March 12, 2022: In the south Russian troops are now patrolling the Golan Heights border. Russia says it has expelled all Iran forces from the border region and will keep them out. This is part of an effort to reduce the need for Israeli attacks on Iranian forces operating in Syria. This is part of an effort to enable the Syrian government, still a dictatorship run by a Syrian Shia Arab Assad group, to abandon decades of dependence on Iranian military and diplomatic support. The Assads are seeking to joint an Arab alliance that is cooperating with Israel against Iran. Israel does not want to ruin its relationship with Russia, which is an unofficial ally of Israel against Iran.

March 7, 2022: In the south (Damascus) another Israeli air strike against Iranian targets left two Iranian Quds Force colonels dead and six Iran-backed militia wounded. Iran responded with threats of retaliatory attacks to avenge the loss of two Quds Force officers. This was the seventh Israeli airstrike in Syria for 2022.

February 28, 2022: In the northwest (Idlib province) Turkish and Syrian Assad forces have the remaining rebels and their supporters trapped. Syria continues their campaign to liberate and take control of the rebel-held portions of the province. This is being done with a lot of material assistance from Russia in the form of airstrikes and resupply of artillery shells and rockets fired by the Syrians into Idlib. Taking Idlib has to be done with the cooperation of the Turks, who do not want the 30,000 or 40,000 armed rebels trapped in Idlib and parts of adjacent Aleppo province, along with over a million pro-rebel civilians, forcing their way into Turkey. Why risk death from Turkish border guards and defenses? Because if the Assads get control of Idlib and its current population, the justifiably feared Assad secret police will arrive and interrogate (torture) those with a record of rebel activity. In other pro-rebel areas where the Assads took control, the secret police did their work and a lot of local civilians disappeared. This is not an issue with the Arab League, Turkey, Russia or Iran because all use similar techniques. The Assads simply do it more often.

February 24, 2022: In the south (Damascus) there was an Israeli air strike against Iranian targets. Three Syrian soldiers died. This was the seventh Israeli airstrike in Syria for 2022.

February 22, 2022: In Turkey, the government closed 16 provinces to newly arriving foreign residents. New arrivals include refugees. There will also be new residency quotas in other areas. The government plans to relocate Syrian refugees from districts where they currently make up more than 25 percent of the population.

February 16, 2022: In the south (Israeli Golan Heights) several Israeli surface-to-surface missiles were launched against targets near Damascus.
FILE PHOTO: Oil tankers are seen at a terminal of Sinopec Yaogang oil depot in Nantong, Jiangsu province, China June 11, 2019. REUTERS/Stringer

By David Gaffen

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Oil futures fell sharply on Wednesday after large consuming nations said they would release oil from reserves to counter tightening supply and hawkish minutes from the U.S. central bank that bolstered the dollar.

Selling accelerated into the close, leaving both the Brent and West Texas Intermediate benchmarks at their lowest closing levels since March 16. Brent crude futures settled down $5.57, or 5.2%, at $101.07 a barrel, while U.S. crude fell $5.73, or 5.6%, to $96.23 a barrel.

Member states of the International Energy Agency (IEA) will release 120 million barrels from strategic reserves to try to quell price gains. The release will include 60 million from the United States, according to two sources familiar with the matter. That commitment forms part of the previous U.S. announcement of a 180 million-barrel reserve release.

This is the second time the IEA has released reserves this year and effectively boosts worldwide supply by roughly 2 million barrels a day for at least the next two months as the world tries to overcome the potential loss of Russian oil. The group collectively has about 1.5 billion barrels in strategic reserves.

Crude markets have been through weeks of volatility, with prices surging on supply concerns after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctions on Moscow by the United States and its allies.

Lately the market has been pulling back following reserve releases along with worries of slowing demand in China, where a resurgent pandemic has prompted lockdowns of cities including Shanghai. Chinese refiners of late are avoiding new contracts with Russia, suggesting Beijing is being cautious not to overtly support Moscow at this time.

The U.S. Federal Reserve minutes, meanwhile, detailed that the U.S. central bank was planning to raise rates by 50 basis points at its most recent meeting, but opted for a smaller hike due to the war in Ukraine.

The minutes suggest a hawkish approach for the Fed as it tries to curb inflation, which boosted the U.S. dollar. Oil often moves in the opposite direction to the dollar because most oil transactions are conducted in the U.S. currency.

"This market mostly appears to be reacting around the Fed comments and the EIA storage report," said Gary Cunningham, director of market research at Tradition Energy. The Fed has "given some strength to the dollar and that's being reflected in lower oil prices."

U.S. crude stocks rose by 2.4 million barrels in the latest week, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said, while analysts had expected a drawdown. Output also rose, hitting 11.8 million barrels a day, the most since late 2021, and output is expected to continue rising. The United States also released nearly 4 million barrels from its strategic reserve in the week.

"The SPR release was huge which does raise confidence that they can move a lot out of the reserve on a weekly basis," said Phil Flynn, senior analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago.

The United States and allies on Wednesday prepared new sanctions on Moscow over civilian killings in Ukraine, which President Volodymyr Zelenskiy described as "war crimes." Russia denied targeting civilians.

The 27 member states will decide whether to approve proposed EU sanctions that would ban buying Russian coal and prevent Russian ships from entering EU ports.

The head of the EU's executive, Ursula von der Leyen, said the bloc was working on additional sanctions, including on oil imports.

(Reporting by Noah Browning and Yuka ObayashiEditing by Richard Pullin, Mark Potter and David Gregorio)
NASA brings its Technology Transfer University (T2U) program to the College of Charleston.

Charleston, South Carolina, March 09, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In addition to being the worlds leading space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) owns about 1,600 technological patents. Now, thanks to a new program, College of Charleston students have access to every single one of them.

CofC recently signed an agreement with NASA to become the newest member of the NASA Technology Transfer University (T2U) program. The program connects universities with NASA-developed technology to give students the opportunity to work with federal government research and technology. Student entrepreneurs build case studies with NASAs patent portfolio while learning about commercialization and licensing opportunities.

Kelly Shaver, professor of entrepreneurial studies, is teaching a technology commercialization course that is part of the program.

Several years ago, Shaver taught a course on biomedical commercialization with a neuroscientist from the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). Attracting both CofC undergraduate business students and doctoral-to-postdoctoral MUSC research students, the class produced feasibility studies for commercial opportunities arising out of research being conducted in MUSC laboratories. Shaver says when the College joined T2U last year, he realized this was a great opportunity to offer a technology commercialization course.

Like the biomedical commercialization course, this T2U course gives students the opportunity to work on a project thoroughly grounded on existing and patented technologies, says Shaver. We hope the experience will serve them well in their professional lives after graduation.

During a recent class presentation, students proposed using NASA patents to construct superelastic tires, a self-cleaning germicidal door handle and a treatment system for contaminated water. Students will now spend the rest of the semester investigating their chosen technologies and whether those could become viable commercial products.

CofC officials are hoping that the success of the T2U program will complement and create synergies with other NASA-related collaborations on campus.

The College of Charleston is the only university in South Carolina to be associated with this national program.

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(Tribune News Service)  The Air Force has identified the next commander of Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC), headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base  and that officer was ordered last year to be part of a jury in the historic court-martial of a two-star general, a former commander of another key Wright-Patterson mission.

Lt. Gen. Duke Z. Richardson has been nominated to serve as AFMC commander from his current job as military deputy, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics at the Pentagon.

If confirmed by the Senate as a four-star general, Richardson would be the highest ranking officer on Wright-Patterson, commanding one of the most important Air Force commands.

Gen. Arnold W. Bunch Jr. is the current AFMC commander. The Air Force has not publicly announced any future movement or action regarding Gen. Bunch, an AFMC spokesman said.

The next step for Richardson is a Senate confirmation process. Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is the largest single-site employer in Ohio, with more than 32,000 military and civilian employees.

Richardson is no stranger to AFMC or Wright-Patterson. From July 1997 to June 1999, he served in the F-15 System Program Office at Wright-Patt. He was also Designated Acquisition Commander Staff Officer at the Aeronautical Systems Center, also at Wright-Patterson, in 1999 and 2000.

AFMC manages more than one-third of the total Air Force budget, managing and dispersing funds across multiple installations, in support of missions ranging from research and development, to test, acquisition, life cycle management, sustainment, installation support and more.

Nearly a year ago, Richardson was named to the court-martial jury pool for Maj. Gen. William Cooley, a former commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson.

A sexual assault charge, with three specifications under Article 120 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, was referred against Cooley, as a result of an alleged August 2018 off-duty incident with a civilian adult woman in Albuquerque, N.M.

In an Air Force April 2021 special order, Richardson was ordered to participate as a court-martial jury member, with the proviso that his current commander would concur. It is unclear if Richardson will participate, given his new assignment as AFMC commander.

An AFMC spokesman confirmed Richardsons promotion Wednesday but declined to comment about potential jurors.

Jurors must be senior to the accused in either rank or date of promotion.

The general court-martial trial of Cooley is still scheduled to begin at Wright-Patterson on April 18, Cooleys attorney, Daniel Conway said.

The court-martial had been scheduled for January 2022, but was continued until April, with the Air Force citing COVID concerns.

Don Christensen, a former chief prosecutor for the Air Force and the president of the group Protect Our Defenders, told the Dayton Daily News in 2020 that if the Cooley case went to court-martial, he will be the first general officer in Air Force history to face such a proceeding.

(c)2022 Springfield News-Sun, Ohio

Visit at www.springfieldnewssun.com
The Defense Department is building the largest 3D-printed structures in the Western Hemisphere, military officials said.

Construction of the three barracks expected to set the record began at Fort Bliss, Texas, on Wednesday and should finish within 10 months, DOD said in a statement.

Each building will be over 5,700 square feet and be more energy-efficient and resilient than buildings made with traditional materials, the Defense Innovation Unit, a DOD organization working with the Army and contractors to complete the project, said in a separate statement.

Constructing facilities using this cutting-edge technology saves labor costs, reduces planning time and increases the speed of construction of future facilities, Army Lt. Gen. Doug Gabram, commander of U.S. Army Installation Management Command, was quoted in the DIU statement as saying.

The Army is looking to use the same techniques to build other facilities besides barracks, Gabram said in the statement.

The three barracks that will provide temporary housing for visiting troops. They will be the first 3D-printed structures to comply with DODs updated criteria for additive concrete construction, officials said. Previously, there were no specifications for 3D-printed concrete wall systems, meaning companies that used the technique were unable to bid for DOD projects.

The Pentagon selected ICON, a construction technology company based in Austin, Texas.

In August, a 3,800-square-foot barracks built with ICONs 3D printing was unveiled at Camp Swift, Texas, and was described by officials as being the largest 3D-printed structure in North America.

Neither DOD nor ICON revealed the cost of the project at the time. However, Maj. Gen. Tracy Norris, adjutant general of the Texas Military Department said it was about a third of what a traditionally constructed barracks would cost.

The cost of the latest barracks project also wasnt immediately available.

3D printing uses a digital design to deposit thin layers of material over each other. The material used in the latest barracks construction is called Lavacrete and is trademarked by ICON.

Lavacrete is described by the company as a high-strength concrete with a compression strength of 2,000 to 3,500 pounds per square inch that will last longer than traditional construction materials and methods. ICONs first prototype 3D-printed building was constructed in March 2018.

Supporters of 3D printing say it produces less waste than traditional construction techniques and that the resulting structures are usually more energy efficient, as the material is denser and offers better insulation than traditional concrete.

Florida-based technology corporation Apis Cor built the worlds largest 3D-prrinted building in the United Arab Emirates in 2019, according to Guinness World Records. The two-story Dubai Municipality building is 6,888 square feet.

Florida-based technology corporation Apis Cor built the worlds largest 3D-prrinted building in the United Arab Emirates in 2019, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. The two-story Dubai Municipality building is 6,888 square feet.
Adm. Linda L. Fagan has been nominated to serve as commandant of the Coast Guard, which would make her the first woman to lead a service branch of the armed forces, according to the White House.

The appointment made by President Joe Biden on Tuesday hinges on confirmation by the Senate.

Her leadership and integrity are second to none, Biden said in a statement. If confirmed, Adm. Fagan will be the first woman in history to serve as commandant and the first female service chief.

Fagan has served as the vice commandant since June and would replace Adm. Karl Schultz as the services top officer. She also was the first woman to take that job and the first to reach four stars in the Coast Guard. Schultz will retire following a command-change ceremony during the summer, the service said

Admiral Fagan is a tremendous leader, trailblazer, and respected public servant who will lead the Coast Guard across its critical missions with honor, said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the department that oversees the Coast Guard.

A 1985 Coast Guard Academy graduate, her tenure in the Coast Guard has earned her the services first-ever Gold Ancient Trident, as the officer with the longest service record in the marine safety field.

Fagan has served on all seven continents, according to her Coast Guard biography. Her command experience includes leading the Pacific Area, Coast Guard Defense Force West and First Coast Guard District. She has more than 15 years as a marine inspector and conducted sea duty aboard the USCGC Polar Star, the services 399-foot heavy polar icebreaker.

Within the Coast Guard and across the Department of Homeland Security, Admiral Fagan is admired as a role model of the utmost integrity, and her historic nomination is sure to inspire the next generation of women who are considering careers in military service, Mayorkas said.

Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., chairwoman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which oversees Coast Guard nominations, said Fagan is an outstanding choice.

Upon confirmation, she will become the first woman and mother to lead any branch of the armed forces. This nomination proves the value of enacting laws that provide family leave, child care, and health care access to support talented women in the Coast Guard who have dual roles as service members and parents. Adm. Fagans nomination will inspire generations of American women to strive to serve at the highest level in the armed forces, Cantwell said.

To replace Fagan as vice commandant, she selected and Biden nominated Vice Adm. Steven D. Poulin, the service said. Poulin now serves as the commander of the Coast Guard Atlantic Area and is responsible for all Coast Guard missions from the Rocky Mountains to the Arabian Gulf.

Pending confirmation, Poulin is expected to relieve Fagan as vice commandant during a change-of-watch ceremony planned for May 24. A ceremony for Fagan to replace Schultz, who took command in June 2018, is scheduled for June 1. Both ceremonies will occur in Washington, D.C., according to the Coast Guard.

The Coast Guard is the largest component of the Department of Homeland Security with about 88,000 active duty, Reserve, civilian and volunteer auxiliarists.
(Tribune News Service) The U.S. Coast Guard and the Hawaii Police Department are investigating a fatal boating incident that took place at near the Honokohau Marina.

At 6 p.m. on Monday, Kona officers responded to Honokohau Small Boat Harbor for what the Coast Guard called a serious marine incident  involving a crew member on the Uhane Nui O Naia boat.

No additional information was provided about the incident. HPD declined to provide any details, and the Coast Guard was not immediately available for questions.

A tour company called Sunlight on Water, which operates out of the marina, has a 40-foot boat called Uhane Nui O Naia boat. The company was not immediately available to answer any questions about the fatal incident.

Those with information about the incident are encouraged to contact the Coast Guards Petty Officer Graham at 808-763-6520.

(c)2022 The Honolulu Star-Advertiser

Visit The Honolulu Star-Advertiser at www.staradvertiser.com
The Space Force is zeroing in on the final location for one of its all-new training headquarters.

The Defense Departments newest service is considering six bases for the Space Training and Readiness Command, or STARCOM, and will begin site surveys by May to determine the best location to host STARCOM headquarters, the Air Force said in a statement.

Under consideration are Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif.; Buckley, Schriever and Peterson Space Force bases in Colorado; Patrick Space Force Base, Fla.; and Los Angeles Air Force Base, Calif., which is slated to be home to Space Systems Command and renamed as a Space Force base.

The assessment will be based on factors related to mission, infrastructure capacity, community support, environmental considerations and cost, the statement said Monday.

STARCOM operates its temporary headquarters in Colorado Springs as it waits for a final location to be determined.

The Space Force organizational structure is leaner than its Air Force counterpart and comprises headquarters operations at the Pentagon; field commands, similar to the Air Force's major commands; Space deltas, which function like Air Force wings; and squadrons.

Created in August 2021, STARCOM is one of three field commands, along with Space Operations Command and Space Systems Command.

STARCOM is charged with preparing for combat operations in space. It also must test plans and equipment, and train guardians  the name for Space Force service members.

STARCOM has five subordinate deltas. Delta 1, currently operating at Vandenberg, provides initial skills and advanced training in joint space, cyberspace and intelligence operations.

As the services wargaming organization, Delta 10 develops space doctrine and tactics.

Delta 11, the Range and Aggressor unit staffed with 100 active-duty guardians and airmen and located at Schriever Space Force Base, is tasked with delivering realistic, threat-informed live and virtual training and operations tests, the service says. The deltas symbol features a red five-pointed star under a target sight.

Delta 12 will evaluate new capabilities and provide information on weapon system acquisition, while Delta 13 will deliver the services education programs.

Delta 10 is slated to be based out of Patrick Space Force Base. Schriever and Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., are competing to host Delta 11 and Delta 12, with a decision expected this year, service officials have said.

All locations under consideration place units either near existing Air Force space operations or space industry centers.

In January 2021, the Trump administration announced it would move the joint U.S. Space Command, which oversees the militarys various space-based infrastructure and operations, from Peterson Space Force Base, Colo., to Redstone Arsenal, Ala., away from other space operations infrastructure. Lawmakers have raised concerns about potential political motivations for the move and last month again stressed the importance of a final decision on the transfer in a March 22 letter to President Joe Biden.

Investigations on the basing decision from the Government Accountability Office and the Defense Department Inspector General are still in progress.
Jaccuse! This was the famous title of a withering public letter Emile Zola wrote in 1898 to the president of France. In it, the author accused the government, and by extension the whole country, of anti-Semitism.

Ich klage an! This, in effect, would be the German version of Zolas letter. Ukraines ambassador to Berlin hurled just such an indictment at Germanys president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and by extension the countrys entire political class.

The charge is not anti-Semitism this time, but decades of fawning and hypocritical appeasement of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, who is currently committing war crimes in Ukraine.

With this and other outbursts of undiplomatic honesty, Andrij Melnyk, Ukraines ambassador in Berlin, has come to embody Germanys guilty conscience. When not seated like a moral phantom in the gallery of the Bundestag and glowering down at parliaments speakers, he goes from one talk show to another, relentlessly reminding Germans how theyre falling short of the historical responsibility theyre constantly invoking - by not sending Ukraine enough weapons, continuing to buy Russian gas, or what have you.

By aiming at Steinmeier, Melnyk has picked what is in some ways the most obvious and symbolic target. As head of state, Steinmeier holds a largely ceremonial office. This suits him perfectly because he excels at the main job requirement: bloviating. Steinmeier is especially good with pregnant pauses to accentuate absolutely meaningless platitudes.

He represents his nation and its political class in another sense, too. As a Social Democrat whos been chief of staff to one former chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, and foreign minister to another, Angela Merkel, he played a leading role in almost every misguided gesture Germany has made toward Putin in the last two decades.

Schroeder, you may recall, became best buds with Putin and - surprisingly soon after leaving the chancellery - the Kremlins most prominent energy lobbyist. He chairs the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, a gas pipeline connecting Russia and Germany under the Baltic Sea, as well as the board of Rosneft, a state-owned oil giant. Hes also due to join the board of Gazprom, which controls Nord Stream. As recently as February, Schroeder demanded that Kyiv - not Moscow - stop its saber-rattling, which is all you need to know.

After Schroeder, Merkel then spent 16 years adding to Germanys commercial and energy entanglements with Russia. With Steinmeier, she even green-lighted a second Nord Stream pipeline after Putins first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. That was nixed only last month.

During all those Schroeder and Merkel years, Steinmeier was saying cheese for the photographers next to Putin and his cronies. Like other German politicians, especially Social Democrats, he became an oratorical robot spouting the German conventional wisdom: the only way to deal with Moscow is dialogue and more dialogue, as well as more economic and cultural exchange.

Politely but obstinately, Steinmeier rebuffed the Poles, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians - not to mention the Ukrainians - who worried that Germany was in hock to the Kremlin. He lectured them that energy dependence was instead interdependence and would make the Russian Bear cuddly rather than scary. In 2016, when NATO maneuvered near its eastern flank, Steinmeier theatrically decried this saber-rattling and warmongering by his own countrys defensive alliance. Hear any echoes?

For Steinmeier, the relationship to Russia was and is something fundamental, even holy, Melnyk told a German newspaper this week. For decades, he added, Steinmeier has woven a spiders net of pro-Kremlin contacts. Melnyk then named some of them, including the current foreign-policy advisor of Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

It was Scholz, of course, who, in response to Putins attack on Ukraine, recently proclaimed a new era in German policy toward Russia. His administrations support for Ukraine is now unequivocal, its commitment to military deterrence and the NATO alliance reinvigorated. This is a good and probably permanent change of direction - and therefore historic.

And yet, Germanys policy elites and intellectuals will have a lot of soul-searching to do for years to come. Few are doing so honestly. They include a group of historians affiliated with the Social Democrats who published what amounts to a collective mea culpa, sniping that some Social Democrats in our party appear to mourn the ruins of their policies more than the ruined landscapes Putins bombs are making in Ukraine.

They probably also had in mind Germanys head of state. As is his wont, Steinmeier was until recently trying to gloss over his own responsibility with grand gestures of pacific high-mindedness. He invited Melnyk to a concert in which both Ukrainian and Russian musicians were to perform in demonstrative harmony. Melnyk RSVPed no, then called out Steinmeiers hypocrisy.

In response, Steinmeier this week admitted that he shouldnt have advocated for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. He even conceded that we failed, and that like others, I was wrong. If hed spoken English, he would have said mistakes were made. Where are you now, Emile Zola?

- - -

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist. Hes the author of Hannibal and Me.
We must formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture  than we have put forward in the past.

This is from the famous Long Telegram sent from Moscow to Washington by diplomat George F. Kennan in early 1946. This brutal invasion of western Ukraine by Russia provides undeniable reminder that the world is difficult and dangerous, including old-fashioned military aggression.

The end of the Cold War did not mean the end of war. On the contrary, the Cold War was a source of restraint on the superpowers  the Soviet Union and the United States  and on nations generally, whatever their military and economic strength.

The end of the overriding competition between the communist and anti-communist blocs opened the door for other conflicts and divisions to reemerge, as professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago has insightfully pointed out, now for many years. This includes ethnic and border conflicts crossing the always insecure, often ambiguous national boundaries of Eastern Europe. Deeply rooted Russian anxieties about invasion and subversion emanating from their western borders are of profound importance.

The alliance against Nazi Germany, vital to victory in World War II, collapsed soon thereafter. Soviet leaders efforts to force Britain, France and the United States out of Berlin sparked four decades of Cold War. The Korean War made the conflict global.

The Cold War was essentially rooted in different conceptions of society and relations between nations. The Soviet Communist Party was a passing political machine. More significant is enduring Russian insecurity and fear of invasion.

Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, Nazi Germanys vast surprise attack on the Soviet Union  until then a military ally  enormously reinforced this fear.

Earlier, Napoleons invasion of Russia in 1812 had a similar effect. Though the leaders and people ultimately repulsed these invasions, the cost was tremendous in human, material and psychological terms.

As the Soviet Union was collapsing, U.S. President George H.W. Bush and advisers, in particular Secretary of State James Baker and national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, proved extremely sensitive to history and sensible in developing policies and responses. Bush was clear and emphatic that we would not celebrate any sort of victory. As he put the matter, there would be no dancing on the Wall, referring to the heavily guarded barrier between East and West Berlin.

The Berlin Wall, built on the orders of Nikita Khrushchev in 1961, reflected desperation and fear in Moscow. The population of East Germany was literally flowing to West Germany through the open door provided by Berlin.

Kennan was among the most perceptive of the Cold War U.S. policy analysts. He focused on traditional realist diplomacy, including awareness of conflicting national interests.

He emphasized contrasts between Soviet and U.S. leaders in experiences and outlooks. Direct human experience with brutal total war informed Moscows worldview.

Russia President Vladimir Putin reflects this national anxiety regarding possible invasion, something relatively secure Americans can easily overlook. He also reflects the blindness and bad judgment of the dictator who listens only to his own voice. The invasion of Ukraine is proving to be a miscalculation of devastating scale.

Kennan argued a fundamentally unproductive Soviet system would eventually collapse. Alliances with friendly nations were the key.

The European Union and NATO alliance provide frameworks for nations to coordinate counter-pressures on Russia. The U.S. rightly emphasizes these established ties.

In fact, NATO is energized as at no time since the terrorist attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. At that time, French aircraft patrolled the skies of North America. That freed our advanced long-range military aircraft for strikes in Afghanistan, which had harbored the al-Qaida terrorists who carried out the attacks.

Putins Ukraine invasion has energized both organizations.

Learn more: John Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion.

Arthur I. Cyr is author of After the Cold War.
TOKYO  Japanese lawmakers say now is the time to improve ties with South Korea as a new South Korean president prepares to take office next month.

Members of the nonpartisan Japan-South Korea Parliamentarians Union pledged on Tuesday to work toward improving relations between Japan and South Korea when President-elect Yoon Seok-youl, of South Koreas People Power Party, takes office May 10.

Now is the chance to go back to the basics to build mutual understanding and improve Japan-Korea relations for the peace and stability of Asia, said Fukushiro Nukaga, the groups chairman and a member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

Yoon is seen as a leader who wants to improve relations between the two countries, according to a report Tuesday by Japanese broadcaster TBS.

The parliamentarians union promotes relations between Japan and South Korea. About 50 lawmakers from the Liberal Democratic Party and other parties attended Tuesdays meeting, public broadcaster NHK reported.

The group agreed to promote ties by meeting with South Korean lawmakers in Japan and Korea, and by assessing the situation around the COVID-19 pandemic, NHK reported.

Historical differences between Japan and South Korea, such as the World War II-era comfort women sexual slavery issue and an ongoing dispute over the sovereignty of islands known as Takeshima in Japan and Dokdo in South Korea, have soured their relationship in recent years.

In January, the Japanese embassy in Seoul returned a holiday gift box from South Koreas presidential Blue House because it contained an image of the disputed islands.

Yoon has voiced support for stronger U.S. ties and a tougher stance against neighboring North Korea.
Officials in Ukraine began urging people living in the eastern part of the country to evacuate Wednesday as new attacks on civilians were reported in areas where Russia is expected to step up offensives after withdrawing from Kyiv.

A 10-story building in Severodonetsk caught on fire amid mass shelling and at least five civilians died in the Donetsk region, local officials said. In a television broadcast, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said, You have to evacuate, if this is possible. And this is possible.

The attacks came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky demanded a tougher E.U. response Wednesday and criticized leaders who still think war crimes are not as horrific as financial losses. The Biden administration announced new sanctions that will target two of Russias largest banks and Russian President Vladimir Putins adult daughters. NATO foreign ministers are gathering in Brussels for discussions on Ukraine.

To the south of Donetsk, in the city of Mariupol, a grim account of the fighting came into sharper focus.

At least 5,000 residents have died in the month since Russian forces laid siege to and heavily bombarded Mariupol, Mayor Vadym Boychenko said on Telegram, citing preliminary estimates. Boychenko said that about 210 children are among the dead.

The Washington Post was unable to confirm those tallies.

Boychenko cited a hospital that had been bombed and the shelling of the port citys drama theater, where hundreds of people were hiding - attacks he called the deliberate destruction of the civilian population of Mariupol.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on Wednesday suspended efforts to evacuate residents after days of unsuccessful attempts, saying security conditions had made entering the city impossible. The ICRC, however, reported that it helped 1,000 Mariupol residents escape on their own to the town of Zaporizhzhia.

In his Telegram update, Boychenko said about 90% of Mariupols infrastructure had been destroyed.

Earlier Wednesday, Britains Defense Ministry said in an intelligence update that as many as 160,000 people remain trapped in Mariupol, surrounded by Russian forces. Many beleaguered residents are without electricity, food or water as humanitarian conditions deteriorate.

It is unclear how many people were injured or killed during the strike in Severodonetsk, regional military governor Serhii Haidai wrote Wednesday afternoon on Facebook. Volunteers working in a nearby storage area for humanitarian cargo were injured, Haidai later said in an interview with the Ukrainian TV channel Inter.

He shared a video, which was verified by The Post, showing a small crowd of pedestrians on Tankistiv Street crouching and running for cover in a grocery store. Seconds later, an onslaught of shelling kicks up dirt and damages a business in view of the camera.

The strike comes as Ukrainian officials have warned of a Russian offensive in the eastern region and told people in the Luhansk region to escape while they can.

In nearby Papasnoye, people have been unable to evacuate amid intense artillery fire, Haidai told Inter. Strikes in Rubezhnoye on Wednesday killed one, while seven people remain missing.

Apple has resumed allowing Russians to download an app run by supporters of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny after criticism that it was acceding to unreasonable government demands for censorship.

Law enforcement agents had repeatedly threatened the top Apple and Google officials in Russia with arrest in September unless they removed Navalnys Smart Voting app, which included more than 1,000 endorsements of candidates for seats in Russias legislature.

Those demands came as voting was about to begin, and both companies complied. Google later reinstated the app for Android phones soon after the election, while Apple did not.

That changed this week, according to independent researchers and Navalnys chief of staff, Leonid Volkov.

Apple spokesmen declined to comment on the decision.

The reversal comes amid escalating tensions between Russia and outside companies, many of which have withdrawn from the market or curtailed activities there since Russia invaded Ukraine. But civil liberties groups and American officials are pushing the other way, arguing that Apple and other tech companies provide ordinary Russians with the means to find independent news sources and to connect to activists and nonprofit organizations opposed to the war in Ukraine.

Apps are an especially critical form of communication in Russia now because the countrys censorship apparatus has not been able to block or modify content flowing from installed apps to users phones.

In other developments:

- The U.S. Justice Department has indicted Konstantin Malofeyev, the first criminal charges against an oligarch since the invasion of Ukraine began.

- Greece and Norway said Wednesday that they would expel Russian diplomats, and Moscow vowed to retaliate - the latest sign of a tit-for-tat downgrading of diplomatic relations between Russia and its European neighbors.

- The Kremlin described the withdrawal of troops from around Kyiv as a gesture of goodwill for negotiations, while its forces shifted to eastern Ukraine, where officials reported intensifying attacks.
A former Marine sergeant with two combat tours in Afghanistan must serve 28 years in prison for molesting a 3-year-old child, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a news release Monday.

Michael Hamby Jr., 30, was sentenced Monday by Judge John Houston under a plea deal in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California that also requires 20 years of supervised release for sexually assaulting the child in October 2016.

Hamby, who had been stationed at bases in Okinawa and California, pleaded guilty to enticement of a minor, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

The record reflects Hamby also advertised the child as available to others and expressed an intent to engage in sexual games with two other children, ages 4 and 8, the news release said.

Hamby pleaded guilty in May 2021 in exchange for a sentence of no less than 20 years and no more than 29.

A co-defendant in the case, Elijah Alexander Vazquez, was scheduled to be sentenced on Tuesday before the same judge.

Hambys pre-sentencing memorandum, which provides details of the crime to which he confessed, remained sealed as of Tuesday.

A brief sentencing memorandum filed in federal court Monday described Hamby as a man with two different identities.

To the public and members of his own family, he was a husband and a step-father who honorably served his country as a Marine, the memorandum states.

Hamby joined the Marine Corps in 2009 at age 18, according to court documents.

He was a beloved son and brother. Upon completing his first enlistment in 2013 with an honorable discharge, he reenlisted, the memo states.

In stark contrast was his predatory dark side, the memo states.

He is someone who handcuffed and sodomized a [3-year-old] child, the memo states. He is someone who advertised that this child was available for others to enjoy sexually with him.

Hamby admitted that while stationed at Camp Pendleton in October 2016 he engaged in sexual acts with the child, the DOJ news release said.

Hamby transferred to Camp Hansen on Okinawa the following year, where the Naval Criminal Investigative Service began investigating him.

Hamby was arrested in Okinawa on March 4, 2017, after an NCIS undercover agent responded to a posting the Marine had placed on craigslist.com with the title young girls, incest, taboo, according to a report by the San Diego Union Tribune in September 2017.

The newspapers report was based on a search warrant affidavit filed in San Diego federal court that was used by agents to gain access to Hambys laptop.

The female agent presented herself to Hamby as a mother with children ages 4 and 8, and Hamby sought to meet her for a sexual encounter with the children, the newspaper reported.

Hamby was held in the Camp Hansen brig from March 2017 to February 2019, according to court documents. He was indicted by a grand jury in May 2019.
(Tribune News Service)  A federal appeals court has ruled that the World Health Organization branch for the Americas is not immune from being sued for its alleged role in a scheme to traffic Cuban doctors for the benefit of the islands communist government, the first decision of its kind upholding a suit against an international organization for allegedly violating U.S. law.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld a lower district court decision, ruling last week that a lawsuit brought by several Cuban doctors against the Pan American Health Organization may continue. The court concluded that the organization lost its immunity protections as a foreign entity by allegedly engaging in commercial activities in its role as a financial intermediary in an alleged forced-labor scheme in Brazil.

The decision is important both as a legal precedent and as an opportunity for the doctors, my clients who were trafficked to Brazil by PAHO, to have an opportunity to hold PAHO accountable, said Sam Dubin, a lawyer representing the Cuban doctors. The Cuban government would have never been able to traffic my clients to Brazil without PAHOs central role as the financial intermediator.

Cubas medical missions are one of the countrys top sources of foreign income because Cuba sends the doctors to work overseas and keeps most of the payments made by the foreign governments. The lawsuit was first filed in 2018 in Miami by several Cuban doctors who escaped the medical mission in Brazil to come to the U.S.

The U.S. Supreme Court held in a 2019 decision that if an international organization engages in commercial activity in the United States, it is not immune from being sued by its alleged victims. The Washington appeals court ruling, handed down March 29, marks the first time since that decision that a court has said that an international organization might have violated the law by engaging in commercial activities in the U.S. and could stand trial for its actions, Dubin said.

The appeals court also dismissed PAHOs immunity claim under the World Health Organizations constitution. Although the constitution grants WHO agencies immunity to conduct their operations, it also says such privileges should be decided in a separate agreement. The appeals court judges concluded PAHO was not immune to the lawsuit under that provision because the U.S. has not signed such a separate agreement.

The appellate court decision does not amount to a ruling on whether or not PAHO benefited from human trafficking, and the legal proceedings will continue in federal court in Washington, D.C., where the lawsuit was moved from Miami.

In a statement sent to the Herald, PAHO Media Team said the Court of Appeals ruled on one single claim, declining to find PAHO immune if the plaintiffs entirely unproved allegations are assumed to be true. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision recognizes that PAHO will now have an opportunity in the District Court to contest the plaintiffs false allegations and establish PAHOs immunity from suit as to that one remaining claim.

PAHO had no role in trafficking or forced labor, the statement said.

The lawsuit has brought scrutiny to Mais Medicos, More Doctors, a program under which the former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff hired thousands of doctors from Cuba to provide services in Brazils remote areas. To avoid oversight by Brazils Congress, Brazilian officials tapped PAHO to facilitate the payments, Brazilian government documents show.

The lawsuit alleges that the Cuban government pocketed about 85 percent of the money Brazil paid for the doctors salaries. Brazil made the payments to PAHOs Citibank account in Washington, D.C. The organization then forwarded most of the money to Cuban authorities and only paid 10% to the physicians. The lawsuit says that the organization also retained a 5% fee for its services.

PAHO supposedly transferred about $1.3 billion paid by Brazil to Cubas government and pocketed $75 million, the lawsuit says. The Cuban doctors also said part of the money received through PAHO was frozen in Cuban bank accounts until the doctors return from the official missions. The lawsuit also details how Cuban authorities, and sometimes Cuban government officials working for PAHO, controlled the doctors movements and seized their travel documents.

In its statement, PAHO defended the Mais Medicos program, highlighting it provided medical care to millions of people, many of them impoverished and many of whom had never previously seen a doctor.

Cubas medical missions have been plagued by allegations of forced labor and human trafficking, according to testimonies shared by several doctors who left the program. The doctors said the Cuban government did not show them the original contracts, pocketed most of their salaries, kept them under strict surveillance and threatened them and their families when they defected. In 2019, the U.S. State Department labeled the medical missions managed by the Cuban government as forced labor in its annual Trafficking in Persons Report. The U.S. also imposed visa sanctions on Cuban officials involved in the program.

During the COVID pandemic, the Cuban government offered its doctors to several countries but refused to improve the programs transparency or address labor violations and trafficking crimes despite persistent allegations from observers, former participants, and foreign governments of Cuban officials involvement in abuses, the State Department said in its 2021 report on human trafficking.

What we experienced in Brazil was forced labor  plain and simple. On behalf of Cuban doctors who have defected around the world, were thrilled with the courts decision, said Dr. Ramona Matos, one of the Cuban doctors suing PAHO. This is a huge step toward some small form of justice.

------ 2022 Miami Herald. Visit at miamiherald.com.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Chinas envoy to the United Nations expressed dismay at the killing of unarmed civilians in Bucha, while calling on all sides to withhold judgment until a probe establishes who is responsible.

Attacks against civilians are unacceptable and should not occur, Ambassador Zhang Jun said Tuesday at a UN Security Council briefing on Ukraine. The reports and images of civilian deaths in Bucha are deeply disturbing.

Zhang stopped short of condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin for the violence, saying that circumstances and specific causes of the incident should be verified and established and all sides should exercise restraint and avoid unfounded accusations.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Wednesday at a regular press briefing in Beijing that China is highly concerned about the harm done to civilians. The reports and images of civilian deaths in Bucha are deeply disturbing, he said, echoing Zhang.

President Joe Biden has said Putin could face a war crimes trial related to the civilian deaths in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, and other Ukrainian towns vacated by Russian soldiers. Russia has denied its forces killed civilians, saying pictures of bodies strewn on the streets were a fabrication by Ukraine.

China has come under increased pressure from Washington and Brussels to take a stance on the conflict, as its diplomats and state media play down civilian casualties and cast Putin as a victim of the U.S.-backed expansion of NATO. European leaders told President Xi Jinping in a tense Friday video summit that equidistance is not enough on Ukraine, according to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

The European Unions top diplomat on Tuesday described that call as a deaf dialog, saying China wanted to avoid talking about the war. The European side made clear that this compartmentalization is not feasible, not acceptable, Josep Borrell, who accompanied European leaders in the exchange, told the European Parliament.

Chinese state media outlets including the overseas edition of Communist Party mouthpiece the Peoples Daily, China Central Televisions military affairs channel and China Daily posted Zhangs comments to Chinas Twitter-like Weibo. They attracted little attention compared to items on the Covid-19 outbreak in Shanghai and unverified footage of Ukrainian marines surrendering in Mariupol, which was briefly the second top trending item.

Before Zhangs remarks at the UN, state media had mostly amplified Russias denial that Putins army was involved in the killings. On Monday, CCTV published Russian defense ministry claims that all photos and videos of Bucha were directed by the Ukrainian government for Western media.

That theory, dismissed as a falsehood by numerous governments, was widely circulated on Chinese social media, while posts showing how newspapers around the world were condemning Russias massacre on their front pages were censored.

The Communist Party backed Global Times tabloid referred to the mass killings as the Bucha incident in a Wednesday editorial, which called the U.S. the initiator of the Ukraine crisis and blamed it for exacerbating tensions by sanctioning Russia.

Still, some internet users were outraged by Russians atrocities, comparing them to the Nanjing massacre, in which an invading Japanese army killed tens of thousands of people over several weeks from late 1937 to early 1938. While China puts the death toll of that incident at 300,000, some in Japan continue to question accounts of the event.

As Chinese people who have the memories of the Nanjing massacre, those who can still defend massacre of civilians have utterly lost their conscience, said one Weibo user in a post shared nearly 900 times.
WASHINGTON  Senators asked defense officials on Wednesday to send specific requests for money, personnel and additional support that could be needed for mental health programs as the military grapples with a marked increase in suicides.

Members of a subpanel of the Senate Armed Services Committee said they will use the recommendations to draft language in this years National Defense Authorization Act to address the alarming number of service member suicides, which climbed from 543 in 2018 to 580 last year. The NDAA sets annual spending and policy priorities for the Defense Department.

While Im cautiously optimistic about the 2021 data, which was just released last week and indicated a 10% drop in service members suicide, 518 service member deaths are still far too high, said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who was the chairwoman of a hearing on the issue Wednesday. The department still has so much work to do to prevent these tragic losses.

Defense Department officials described efforts to save lives through new training initiatives but admitted struggles with hiring and retaining medical staff, particularly at remote military installations where isolation, extreme weather and less access to mental health services can leave young service members in a vulnerable state.

Army bases in Alaska have seen the biggest increase in suicides, with deaths increasing from seven in 2020 to 11 in 2021. Last years figure does not include six soldier deaths still under investigation, according to the Pentagon.

Men between the ages of 18 and 34 are most at risk for suicide and can succumb to suicidal thoughts due to financial strain, intimate partner problems, loneliness and other factors, according to Air Force veteran Chris Ford, who now leads the nonprofit Stop Soldier Suicide. Some 120,000 service members and veterans have died by suicide since 2001, he said.

Internal reviews within the Pentagon found multiple deficiencies in stemming the tide in recent years, including failures to screen for suicide risks and provide continuous mental health care to members transitioning to civilian life, said Michael Roark, the departments deputy inspector general for evaluations.

Preliminary results from Operation Deep Dive, a University of Alabama study of former service members, showed reservists have a 45% higher rate of suicide than active-duty troops, said Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala. Some 160,000 service members transition to civilian life each year, Roark said.

He added the Defense Departments unclear and outdated policies and procedures, as well as health provider burnout caused by the pandemic, have also contributed to poor suicide prevention outcomes.

Senators on Wednesday said they were especially concerned with ending the longstanding stigma often associated with seeking mental health help in an environment that prizes toughness.

The culture in the military is you never ask for help and if youre asking for help, youre weak and to be honest, if youre asking for help in certain units, they actually get rid of you, said Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, who is a former Marine. Thats bad.

Beth Zimmer Carter, the mother of a 22-year-old Army Ranger who died by suicide in 2015, said her son Chris was demoted and belittled after telling his superiors that he suffered from anxiety, insomnia and post-traumatic stress disorder. Chris sought help from mental health professionals on base, but follow-up care was difficult to schedule and providers did not address his risk for suicide, she said.

Seven years later ... I know that many of the same deficiencies continue, and some issues have tragically reversed progress, Carter told senators.

Pentagon officials said they are training nonmedical providers about suicide risks, working to beef up staffing to ensure every active-duty service member can access a mental health professional on base and expanding access to telehealth services to free up in-person treatment for the most severe cases.

I fully recognize that we have more work to do, said Richard Mooney, acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for health services, policy and oversight.

There are glimmers of hope among the youngest generation of service members, he said, who are more likely to demand mental health services and feel less reluctant to seek help. This younger cohort will benefit the most from telehealth because they are more comfortable with messaging than phone calls and are more willing to reveal mental health information to a digital survey or chatbot than a human clinician, said Murali Doraiswamy, a professor at the Duke University School of Medicine.

The Pentagon is expected to announce more initiatives after the completion this year of an independent review of suicides at military installations in Alaska, South Korea and some other bases in the United States.

In the meantime, were going to use every resource thats available to us, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told lawmakers Tuesday during a House Armed Services Committee hearing. This is something thats very important to me and the department remains focused on it.

Lawmakers said they want to see wait times for mental health services drastically reduced despite assurances from Pentagon officials on Wednesday that service members with an acute mental health problem are seen in a clinic or hospital within 24 hours. The routine wait time for a non-emergency visit is 28 days, Mooney said.

Having a normal wait time of 28 days is fine if youre not in trauma or in distress but if these individuals cant self-identify that then its a failure, Gillibrand said. They need that intervention.
(Tribune News Service)  A member of the Ohio Army National Guard faces charges after officials say he made threats towards an Anheuser-Busch facility.

James Ricky Meade II, 26, was issued an arrest warrant March 30 on accusations he made a terroristic threat in December, according to court records. Its unclear if he has been arrested.

Meade posted on social media in December that he wanted to steal a plane and crash it into the Anheuser-Busch plant in Columbus, Ohio, according to court documents obtained by McClatchy News.

The facility in Columbus is one of Anheuser-Buschs 12 major breweries and resides on 138 acres.

Officials say the National Guardsman made the post on Discord, adding that he hoped they got a terrorism insurance plan the day before, WSYX reported. Police have not stated why he made the alleged threat.

A woman who said she saw the post alerted law enforcement and the National Guard, according to the complaint.

Meade has been enlisted in the Ohio National Guard since 2017 and has most recently served as an air defense battle management system operator in McConnelsville, an Ohio National Guard spokesperson told WBNS.

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday ordered the states National Guard to begin building mass detention areas along the border with Mexico and form boat blockades in the Rio Grande out of concern that changing federal policies will increase illegal crossings into Texas.

Texas will be taking its own unprecedented actions this month to do what no state in the America has ever done in the history of this country to better secure our state, as well as our nation, Abbott said during a news conference from the border town Weslaco.

The new measures are part of several additions that Abbott announced for his border security mission, known as Operation Lone Star, that will also order other state agencies to search commercial vehicles crossing into Texas from Mexico and charter buses to deliver legally processed migrants who volunteer for the trip to the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

Abbott said the actions are in response to President Joe Bidens decision to end a pandemic-driven border policy known as Title 42. The public health policy allowed federal Border Patrol agents to send migrants back across the border quickly because of concerns they would spread coronavirus.

The policy is scheduled to end May 23, and Abbott said the federal government is preparing for up to 18,000 illegal immigrants crossing per day.

Newly appointed Maj. Gen. Thomas Suelzer, commander of the Texas Military Department, joined Abbott during his announcement.

The day before, Suelzer told state senators that he was looking at how to use boats and contractors to lower the cost of the mission and reduce the number of troops deployed at the border. He said it would be Texas National Guard engineers, not contractors, building detainment areas out of coiled barbed wire capable of holding large groups of people.

Troops also will partner with Texas Department of Public Safety and Parks and Wildlife to form a boat blockade on the Rio Grande meant to keep people from crossing the water from Mexico into the state.

Lastly, our civil disturbance capabilities will be in full force to have a nonlethal means of blocking people from entering the state, Suelzer said. So if you're a caravan organizer, and you think you're going to overwhelm  a port of entry, we'll be there waiting for you.

Areas that can expect to see this activity include the Rio Grande Valley, Eagle Pass, Del Rio, Laredo and Zapata, he said.

There are about 10,000 troops deployed for the mission with about 6,500 working in areas along the Rio Grande. The remaining troops work to support the mission from elsewhere in the state. At the border, service members work alongside the DPS personnel to stop criminal activity between the ports of entry.

State and federal lawmakers, as well as human rights organizations, have called for reviews of Operation Lone Star, questioning the constitutionality of the state conducting immigration enforcement, the treatment of the National Guard troops and protection of the legal rights of those arrested as part of the mission.

Suelzer took command of the states Guard three weeks ago and told lawmakers the mission can be more effective and efficient, while also saying he would need $531 million to fund the operation to Aug. 31, the end of the fiscal year in Texas. Otherwise, the Texas Military Department will run out of money for its mission at the border by May 1.

Suelzer said how much money he would need to continue Operation Lone Star beyond the fiscal year would depend on how migration patterns shift with the end of Title 42.

Despite the increased measures, Abbott said none of it would require additional funding.

Border Patrol has said about one-third of people found crossing illegally between ports of entry are repeat offenders and were expelled under Title 42. When it lifts, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last week that his agencies will process individuals through its standard procedures, as it did before the coronavirus pandemic.

Let me be clear, those unable to establish a legal basis to remain in the United States will be removed, he said in a statement. We have put in place a comprehensive, whole-of-government strategy to manage any potential increase in the number of migrants encountered at our border.

That includes increasing capacity to process new arrivals, evaluate asylum requests and quickly remove those who do not qualify for protection. More than 600 law enforcement officers were redeployed across the southwest U.S. border, Mayorkas said.

Suelzer said Guard troops on Thursday will begin to conduct mass migration response rehearsals at five locations, which are meant to train troops on managing large groups of migrants crossing in the U.S. at one time. He did not name the locations of these exercises.
WASHINGTON  Russian ground forces have pulled back from the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Chernihiv but have not yet redeployed to the eastern region of the country, a senior U.S. defense official said Wednesday.

The roughly 40 Russian fast-response ground units  each made up of about 800-1,000 troops  that once surrounded the northern Ukrainian cities have returned to neighboring Belarus, said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"We are not showing Russian forces in or around [Ukraines capital] Kyiv or to the north of Kyiv and we're not showing Russian forces in or around Chernihiv, the official told reporters at the Pentagon.

About 80 of the roughly 130 units  known as battalion tactical groups  that Russia sent into Ukraine at the start of the invasion in late February remain in the country, the official said.

Since Friday, U.S. defense officials have predicted that withdrawing Russian forces will regroup, resupply and reinforce the units in Belarus and return to Ukraine, this time focused on the eastern separatist region of Donbas.

As of Wednesday none have returned, though we've seen indications that they're beginning to refit and resupply the units, the official said. Our assessment is that [Russia] won't want to spend too much time on refit and resupply because they have made a very public show of saying that they're going to prioritize their efforts on the Donbas region.

However, Russian mercenaries have been spotted in Donbas and Russia has prioritize[d] their airstrikes more and more on Ukrainian operations in the region and the nearby city of Izyum, the official said.

Izyum, which is in the Kharkiv region, is important in organizing the defense of ... the Donetsk region [in the Donbas], the Ukrainian military said in a statement Friday announcing Russia had gained control of the city.

The new focus on eastern Ukraine could "extend the conflict longer than anybody wants to see it go," chief Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Wednesday.

"The fact that [Russian President Vladimir Putin is] going to concentrate in a smaller geographic area certainly presents the possibility that the violence will continue. It could even intensify in that part of Ukraine," he said.

Still, Kirby said Ukraine can win the war.

"Look at what they've been able to do just thus far: Mr. Putin has achieved exactly zero of his strategic objectives inside Ukraine. He didn't take Kyiv. He didn't topple the government. He didn't remove Ukraine as a nation state," he said. "I think the proof [that Ukraine can win] is literally in the outcomes that you're seeing every day the Ukrainians are bravely fighting for their country."

Despite the withdrawing Russian ground forces from Kyiv and Chernihiv, Kyiv remains at risk for attack though the threat of ground invasion is clearly gone for the moment, the defense official said.

"Even though we haven't seen a lot of airstrikes there in the last 24 [hours,] that doesn't mean that the Russians still couldn't hit Kyiv, the official said. It's not like Kyiv is just somehow immune from further attack.

It remains unclear why Russia is focusing on Donbas, the official said. The Pentagon believes Putin at first wanted to topple the government in Kyiv. But his troops faced weeks of stagnation due to supply issues and Ukrainian resistance.

"The Russians are clearly reprioritizing in the east, but it's not clear what their longer-range goals are here, the official said. Are they just wanting Donbas [for] a negotiating chip at the table? Do they just want the Donbas in the southern part of Ukraine? Is that the end goal?"

Days before the war, Russian parliament declared the Donbas-region cities of Luhansk and Donetsk independent of Ukraine. The Russian Defense Ministry last week claimed the goal all along had been to liberate the region.

However, the U.S. rejected that notion, with a senior U.S. defense official on Tuesday calling the shift in focus part of classic Russian behavior in attempt to save face in the public sphere.

[Putin] made it very clear he was after regime change in Ukraine, and a key piece of achieving that regime change was taking the capital city, the official said. He made it very clear publicly what he was going after, no matter what their narrative is now."
DES MOINES, Iowa - In February, as Russian troops massed on Ukraines border, executives with a major energy firm here worked with U.S. energy and homeland security officials to draw up a playbook and help prepare the electricity sector to deal with potential cyberattacks by Russia.

Berkshire Hathaway Energy officers were among the small group that wrote the guidelines, which stressed the importance of quickly sharing cyberattack information between industry and government.

With President Joe Biden warning last month of evolving intelligence that Russia is exploring possible cyberattacks against American critical industries, companies such as Berkshire Hathaway Energy and the U.S. government are on high alert. After years of what critics saw as lip service, cybersecurity collaboration between the federal government and some critical industries has taken root, officials and industry leaders say, and it could be put to the test as Russian government hackers probe the defenses of American power plants, banks and telecom networks.

The collaboration between government and the private sector has seen exponential improvement over the last couple of years, said Bill Fehrman, president and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Energy (BHE), which provides electricity generated by wind, solar, natural gas and coal to 12 million customers in the United States, Canada and Britain. The main benefit, he said, is the more efficient transfer of information from the front line - the companies - to the government, and getting usable information back from the government in a timely manner.

In particular, he said, the declassification of information from the government has gone from months to in some cases hours.

Berkshire Hathaway Energy is so large - one of the biggest electricity firms in North America by numbers of customers - that if its systems were disrupted by a Russian cyberattack, officials say, the impact on Americans lives would be substantial. At the same time, they say, practices like those adopted by BHE, whose CEO chairs the electricity sector group that coordinates with the federal government, can serve as a model for the industry.

As a chill wind whipped off the farm fields an hour northwest of Des Moines, the warmth from a 10,000-horsepower engine and the smell of oil filled a compressor room. The engine, chugging so loudly that workers wear earplugs, powers pistons that compress natural gas. The compressor station in Ogden is one stop along the 13,000-mile-long Northern Natural Gas pipeline, which is part of BHE and studded with similar stations every 60 miles or so. The compressed gas is fed from one station to another in relay fashion, serving homes, hospitals and power plants from Bakersfield, Texas, to Michigans Upper Peninsula.

There has never been a cyberattack on any industrial control system within BHE and its 11 subsidiaries. That is because of strict security measures imposed over the past eight years, said Chief Security Officer Michael Ball. No operational network is connected to the Internet, and third party vendors coming in to do maintenance follow stringent rules, including a ban on plugging any outside hardware into the system.

But although its industrial control or operational technology (OT) systems are not connected to the Internet, the company still has to ensure that traffic flowing within its systems is not contaminated by malware.

In a campaign launched by the White House a year ago to boost the cyber defenses of critical sectors, Berkshire Hathaway Energy deployed sensor software in its OT networks to look for malicious activity and vulnerabilities. The software the firm chose, developed by a company called Dragos, detects suspicious traffic from nation-state actors. It also anonymizes the data and makes it available to analysts at the National Security Agency, the Energy Department and the Homeland Security Departments Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency [CISA].

We have confirmed foreign states are active in their targeting of U.S. energy industrial control systems, said Robert M. Lee, chief executive of Dragos, whose software allows the government to send queries to the companies to see if they have detected the presence of certain adversaries.

By the end of the first 100-day campaign, which focused on electricity firms, almost 60% of electricity customers in America were covered by companies that had or pledged to have commercial cyberthreat sensors on their OT networks, said Fehrman, who coordinated the effort across the sector.

Work with the natural gas sector followed, and in January a water sector effort began.

If power is disrupted, or if oil and gas is disrupted, or if clean water is disrupted, that really affects Americans lives, said Anne Neuberger, Deputy National Security adviser for Cyber and Emerging Technology. The collaboration between companies and with the government, the deployment of commercial sensors, the deepened information-sharing has been an important contribution to the sectors resilience, she said.

Though Bidens warning last month was based on intelligence gathered by the U.S. government, the sensors were helpful for additional insight, U.S. officials said.

Five years ago, Russian government hackers penetrated the OT systems of some American electricity companies, but the intrusions were not detected immediately. It took some companies months to realize they had been infiltrated. The sensors should cut that time drastically, U.S. and company officials said.

Last year, Russian criminals carried off a ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, snarling up the companys administrative computer network. Out of fear that the malware might spread to the OT system, the company shut down its fuel pipeline for five days, prompting mass panic at gas stations on the East Coast and raising concerns that Russia might target other critical companies.

The abundance of targets in American industry prompted CISA to issue a call in February to companies to harden their cyber defenses in a campaign the agency dubbed Shields Up.

On a recent day, a senior threat intelligence analyst at BHEs global security operations center pulled up a dashboard on a large screen on a wall, displaying some 3,000 Russian indicators of compromise or IP addresses and other digital clues that had been tied to cyberattacks on Ukraine government systems since January. The IOCs, as they are called, came from DHS, the Canadian Center for Cybersecurity, a government agency, and the Energy Department, as well as an industry information-sharing collective and private threat intelligence companies.

In years past companies might get this sort of data, but by the time it got to them, chances are really good I already knew about it, Ball said. Now its flipped, and were seeing stuff faster, more of the stuff we havent already heard about.

And, more importantly, company executives say, the quality of some of that information has improved.

We have been getting actionable intelligence - extremely helpful feedback that we can implement, said Fehrman. Thats intelligence obtained through U.S. government penetration of adversaries systems overseas, and enhanced with more information that, for instance, tells companies what threat is really significant, what techniques the hackers are using, what machines theyre targeting - sometimes down to make and model - and what defensive actions should be taken as a result.

A major milestone in facilitating some of the cooperation driven by the Ukraine crisis was a congressional mandate that CISA set up a 24/7 center for the real-time sharing of threat information that includes personnel from key industrial sectors as well as from the FBI, DHS, the NSA, Energy and Treasury departments, among others. The result was the launch last summer of what CISA Director Jen Easterly named the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative.

JCDC has created a beachhead, said Tom Fanning, CEO of the energy giant Southern Company, and a member of the Solarium Commission, which recommended the formation of the Collaborative. As we mature the process, it will get better and better and better.

A major spoke off the JCDC information-sharing hub is the Energy Departments Energy Threat Analysis Center, which was created in January to enable companies and the government to jointly analyze threats and develop measures to deal with them.

It will also feed that information back to the JCDC. If were seeing a threat to an energy industrial control system, we certainly want to make sure that information gets out to other sectors like water and chemical, [which] have similar systems, said Puesh Kumar, director of the departments Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response.

In February, the White House put CISA Executive Director Brandon Wales in charge of an effort to ensure the government can handle a cyberattack from the Russians, including any resulting physical consequences in the public or private sectors.

On the whole we are more prepared now than ever before, Wales said.

Russian malicious cyber actors have posed a high threat to the U.S. government and the critical infrastructure since before the invasion of Ukraine, he said, And they will present a threat after this current crisis is resolved.
(Tribune News Service)  A Hollywood, Fla., man who police say shot a caged dog in a Davie, Fla., veterinary clinic appeared before a judge Wednesday morning and was ordered held on a $25,000 bond, much to the relief of the clinic owner who is a childhood friend of the dogs owner.

We were always worried about the guy coming back, said Dr. Javier Borrero, who owns the Aycock Veterinary Clinic. We didnt know who he was.

Chayse Billie, 21, rode his bicycle to the clinic about 7 a.m. Friday, parked the bike, pulled out a gun and fired at least four shots into the cage, according to the probable cause affidavit from Davie police.

Billie then used the flashlight feature on his cellphone to look in the cage, picked up what appeared to be spent shell casings and left on foot, leaving his bicycle behind, the report said

Veterinary workers, including Borreros mother, arrived about 15 minutes later to open the clinic and while checking on the dogs they noticed Matilda, a 9-year-old Labrador mix, had blood on her bowl.

They initially thought Matilda might have had a heart attack and died. But when Borrero arrived and turned Matilda over he noticed bullet holes. Thats when they called police.

Matilda is owned by Daniel Perez, a Miami firefighter and U.S. Army veteran and reservist. Perez has been friends with Borrero since they were 10 years old.

Perez is currently in Puerto Rico for reserve duties.

Borrero called Perez and told him what happened. Theyd had an arrangement for years that Borrero would care for Matilda when Perez needed care for the dog.

He started saying, What?! Thats not possible,  Borrero said.

After Borrero called police he viewed surveillance video and saw what happened. He said the suspect was looking around the facility at first and then noticed Matilda in a cage.

Borrero called the act unbelievable and added Matilda was shot for no reason.

Davie police, along with the Seminole Tribe of Florida police, arrested Billie at his house Tuesday in Hollywood. Police said Billie confessed to the crime. He was taken to the Broward Main Jail and charged with one count of animal cruelty.

chperkins@sunsentinel.com .

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Rotorua Lakes councilor Tania Tapsell has ruled herself out of the running for Simon Bridges soon-to-be-vacant Tauranga seat.

Tapsell had been widely tipped to stand for the National Party ahead of the upcoming by-election, which was triggered last month following Bridges decision to move away from politics.

However, the 30-year-old has removed herself from the conversation after telling The AM Show she wont be switching cities in the Bay of Plenty.

I have been very humbled by how many times my name has been suggested, she says, but Ill be very honest with you; Im a Rotorua Lakes councillor based in Rotorua.

There will be a selection process and I wish them all the best, but it wont be me.

A councillor in her home city of Rotorua since the age of 21, Tapsell previously ran for National at the 2020 general election.

Despite losing the East Coast electorate to Labours Kiri Allan  a seat that had been held by National Party stalwart Anne Tolley for the previous 15 years  Tapsell was considered by some to be a strong candidate to fill Bridges shoes.

The by-election, which will take place later this year, will see the oppositions preferred candidate go up against current Labour list MP Jan Tinetti, in what is largely considered a National Party stronghold.

Labour have not won the seat since 1935, and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has already downplayed her partys chances of causing an upset in the Bay of Plenty.

Speaking last week, Ardern said: Weve been very clear. This is a seat that hasnt been held by Labour since the 1930s. So we dont expect there to be change from that fairly strong record in one direction.

Elsewhere, NZ Firsts Winston Peters, who held the Tauranga seat between 1984 and 2005, is remaining tight-lipped on whether or not hell run in the by-election, while ACT and the Green Party have yet to confirm a candidate.

Winston Peters has not yet declared whether or not hell run for his old seat in Tauranga.

Nationals final selection will take place on May 1, with the nominations window open now.

Tauranga needs a strong local champion, says National Party president Peter Goodfellow, and we look forward to our members delivering that candidate.

Our local members are looking for a candidate who is passionate about fighting for the issues that matter to communities across Tauranga  like addressing the crushing cost-of-living crisis, restoring local democracy, and delivering better transport solutions to get the city moving.

-Stuff/Dan Sheridan.
Racing Tauranga has outshone itself, winning the New Zealand Thoroughbred Racing Club of the Year award and further cementing the already established reputation for a high level of community engagement and financial viability.

Based at Tauranga Racecourse, one of the finest provincial racing venues in NZ, Racing Tauranga hosts some of the largest race meetings in the Waikato and Bay of Plenty region.

This is a jewel in the countrys racing clubs, says Racing Tauranga general manager Louise Dean.

Last year we were runner up, and this year we won for an all-round award that looks at every part of the business.

Louise says the award recognises a number of things, including community engagement, creating and promoting racing events that are fun, exciting and profitable, and introducing new people to racing.

It also recognises our financial viability, showing we are making money, which in turn supports local businesses, contractors and people who work for us.

Like many other organisations, the club has had to deal with restrictions around Covid. Adding to this has been the pressure from the public discussion initiated by the Tauranga City Councils Commissioners about the future of the racecourse.

Its really important we fight to keep it where it is.

The people of Tauranga and Western Bay of Plenty have always been supportive of racing, and our events cater to a large range of people; families, all age groups and corporates. This is a beautiful location that allows racegoers easy access to exciting racing events.

Our crowd numbers are always so good, with a huge amount of community of support.

Louise says there are also a lot of racehorse owners and people involved with racing who live in the Bay of Plenty region.

That the club has been able to still grow events and sponsorship in a time of Covid is a significant achievement.

Its been very difficult over the last 18 months operating in a Covid environment and weve been very fortunate to have sponsors and members who still supported our events even when there were restrictions on them.
Legislation that will see a radical overhaul of New Zealand's current workplace laws has passed its first reading.

The Fair Pay Agreements Bill will set up a new system for workers to negotiate minimum pay and working conditions across industries.

It's poised to pass under Labour's majority government, marking the biggest shake-up to workplace laws since the Employment Contracts Act 1991.

The Council of Trade Unions has endorsed the legislation while Business New Zealand has rejected the government's offer to play a role in the policy.

Minister of Workplace Relations Michael Wood says the bill fulfills a Labour manifesto commitment to improve the lives of working New Zealanders.

"This bill will help stop the race to the bottom. It will enable good faith bargaining at the sector level to overcome inequalities that have developed over the past 30 years."

Part of the government's reasoning for the new laws is to create a level playing field where good employers are not disadvantaged by paying reasonable, industry-standard wages.

However, its existence is entirely dependent on Labour; both the National Party and the ACT Party have promised it will not survive under their watch.

National's workplace relations spokesperson Paul Goldsmith says his party will repeal the legislation, arguing the potential new laws were not about fair pay.

"It is about the government imposing mandatory union deals on Kiwi workplaces. Let's not make any bones about this; there's no choice about this, either for workers or business operators."

Photo: RNZ / Dom Thomas.

ACT Party's workplace relations spokesperson Chris Baillie says his party will also roll the legislation back, saying workers are already free to join a union.

"This bill amounts to unionism by stealth and will simply make it tougher for businesses who have struggled to keep trading through a one-in-100-year pandemic, and who continue to struggle with the never-ending costs imposed on them by this government."

The proposed Fair Pay Agreements system is not compulsory, requiring either 10 per cent or 1000 workers' support or a public interest test to be met in order for the process to be triggered.

Wood acknowledges the bill proposed significant reform that will prompt questions but says spreading false information about the legislation is not helpful.

"The arguments that FPAs and sector-based bargaining stand contrary to good productivity growth are false. Debate based on misinformation and scaremongering will take us nowhere, and it will be seen by New Zealanders as a desperate smokescreen to block progress."

The Fair Pay Agreements Bill passed its first reading and is now headed to the select committee stage.

-RNZ/Anneke Smith.
Two schools are about to receive $10,000 worth of musical instruments this week personally delivered by some of New Zealands top musicians.

Stan Walker, Sons of Zion and Kings are visiting two Rotorua schools - Western Heights Primary School and Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Hurungaterangi - tomorrow to donate $10,000 worth of musical instruments as part of new NFT community initiative.

The Rotorua schools were named as the successful recipients of the music package this week following a nomination and voting process.

The donation to the community is part of a new NFT platform called Eager Beaver.

The New Zealand platform, which is the brainchild of Sons of Zion founding member and Rotorua local Riapo Panapa, was launched in March.

Panapa says the schools were blown away when they found out they had been selected,

They couldn't believe they had won or were even nominated in the first place. The Western Heights Primary School Principal said the visit would be an exciting one for his students who would get a huge buzz from the visit.

The new Eager Beaver platform was formed as a way for New Zealand artists to continue their creative work following the tough times that the Covid-19 epidemic inflicted on the music and live events industries.

It allowed musicians to take better control of their art and change the way fans interacted with their favourite artists and creators, says Panapa.

NFT stands for non-fungible token and is a unique digital certificate that contains distinguishing information, which means there is only one and ownership is easily verifiable.

Panapa describes NFTs as the future of business and trading and says he's looking forward to seeing more Kiwis and Maori in particular in the NFT space.

Unlike streaming platforms and distribution agreements with music labels, artists in the Eager Beaver platform will receive the lion's share of the royalties made from any content and music they release as an NFT with the project, he says.

The rest is distributed to the community as royalties and opportunities to give back through kaupapa such as the instruments to schools donation.

This is a community initiative led by our Eager Beaver community. Its been overwhelming to see the submissions come through and read through the individual stories for each deserving school, and we are looking forward to representing every one of them when we do the instrument drop off at the two successful schools.

On top of the rights to a unique Eager Beaver NFT, investors will also receive artist royalties, royalties from live events, AAA festival experiences, time in the studio with artists and royalties from up-and-coming artists launched by the platform.

To build the platform, Panapa engaged the skills and expertise of two of his childhood friends - Rotorua based electrical engineer Tim Wiringi, and financial advisor Kereopa Nepata, who has spent the past 17 years working for large Australasian financial institutions.

A total of six schools were shortlisted including Kaitaias Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Pukemiro, Te Kura Maori o Nga Tapuwae in Mangere, Triple 5 Rangatahi in Gisborne, Te Kura o Ngati Haua in Pukemoremore in the Waikato as well as the winning Western Heights Primary School and Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Hurungaterangi, both of which are in Rotorua.

Through a voting process, existing owners of Eager Beaver NFTs selected the two schools they felt most deserved a boost of $10,000 worth of musical instruments.

-Stuff/Annemarie Quill.
Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield will step down from the Ministry of Health in July, after leading the country through the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Public Service Commission announced Bloomfields resignation on Wednesday.

Public Service Commissioner Peter Hughes says Dr Bloomfield had done an outstanding job leading the Governments health response to Covid-19 and the vaccination rollout.

Dr Bloomfield signalled with the Commissioner late last year he intended to step down before his term officially ended on June 11, 2023.

New Zealand is in a strong position because of its response to Covid-19 and its high vaccination rates.

Dr Bloomfield has played a vital role in New Zealands success. At this stage in the Governments COVID-19 response, and at the beginning of significant changes to the health and disability sector, Dr Bloomfield feels July is a good time to step away and have an extended break.

Dr Bloomfield has worked tirelessly for more than two years to keep New Zealanders safe from coronavirus, says Hughes.

Dr Bloomfield has demonstrated remarkable resilience and courage in leading the health systems overall response to Covid-19. That response has saved lives.

I thank Dr Bloomfield for his commitment to public service, his spirit of service to the community and his exceptional contribution to New Zealands Covid-19 response. I know many New Zealanders will also be thankful for the job he has done.

Dr Bloomfield always wanted to stay until New Zealand was in a good place with coronavirus. That time is now.

The Commissioner will appoint an acting Director-General before Dr Bloomfield finishes on July 29, 2022.
Its time to Review Your Poo, New Zealand!

Knowing what is normal for you  and actively seeking medical advice if somethings not quite right  is the key to early detection of a wide range of bowel issues, says Gut Foundation General Manager Margaret Fitzgerald.

To tackle this tricky topic, the Gut Foundation has teamed up with its platinum sponsor, Purex.

The Review Your Poo campaign, which will run throughout the year, will include supermarket pop-ups and giveaways, appearances from the famous Purex Rolly dog, and a travelling Portaloo painted by well-known street artist, Jacob Yikes.

We are really trying to capture peoples attention with this eye-catching campaign because we want all New Zealanders to be more aware about their gut and bowel health, says Margaret.

Its so important we start to remove the hesitancy people have about discussing their poo. New Zealand has one of the highest rates of bowel cancer in the world; 70,000 people in New Zealand are living with Inflammatory Bowel Disease; and approximately one in 100 New Zealanders are affected by Coeliac Disease.

"Understanding what is normal for each individuals bowel health is essential, so people can identify any changes and seek early medical treatment, if it is needed.

Established in 1993, the Gut Foundation is a charitable trust, committed to promoting gut health through the advancement of education and the promotion, conduct and publication of gut research. Since its inception, the Trust has raised more than $1.5 million for gut health, including funding large research programmes and cutting-edge equipment.

Purex Essity Australasia Senior Brand Manager Donna Wafer says the company is proud to align with the Gut Foundation to educate the public in a campaign that can affect so many New Zealanders.

We were excited when the Gut Foundation approached us to partner with them. It was a natural fit, reviewing your poo and Purex toilet paper!" says Donna. "We were extremely alarmed when Margaret shared with us the statistics around bowel cancer in New Zealand, so we decided to make 2022 the year we draw attention to the importance of your gut health. Rolly will be a great tool to engage children and create some fun on the campaign trail.

Purex is a market leading toilet paper brand and has been a household name in New Zealand for over 65 years. Delivering a soft, strong, yet sustainable toilet paper made locally in Kawerau, Bay of Plenty. Purex is committed to supporting the health of New Zealanders and the health of our planet.

Global company PolyJohn has donated the GPS-tracked Portaloo for the use of the campaign, which will travel the country visiting stores and offices.

Having the famed Purex Rolly dog join the campaign will be a big win, Margaret says. Alongside the cuteness factor for children, Rollys appearances will be a nostalgic trip down memory lane for adults, who remember the iconic Purex television ads from the 1990s.

As the Gut Foundations Platinum sponsor, Purex will also be supporting the charitable trust with its World Microbiome Day promotion in June.

For more on The Gut Foundation visit, www.thegut.org.nz

For more, visit: www.purex.co.nz
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goacom BHPian

Join Date: Aug 2007 Location: San Jose USA, Panaji, Goa Posts: 75 Thanked: 207 Times

Re: Impact of the Russia-Ukraine war Quote: gauravdgr8 Originally Posted by



As I said before, even Germany and France don't trust US and therefore continue to talk to Putin.



Just not Afghanistan, but the list of countries destroyed by US due to misinformation and ego is endless.



Well the exercises are a need of the hour not just for India, but more for US too to contain China and safeguard it's interests in Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Phillipines



The MMRCA is definitely not on US engines. They are already talking to Safran.



I noticed you did not respond to the last point of US having rave interests in Ukraine which it wants to save?



Wait did I miss pointing that in the last 3 weeks, Rouble has gained from 140/USD to 84/USD. In effect the sanctions have been useless, with Anthony Blinken even talking about softening them



US has hit itself in the foot this time and time will tell. Well even US imported more oil. They showed they are releasing the reserves, however quietly added stock. If they seriously wanted to teach Russia a lesson, everything would have been sanctioned, but that's not the case.As I said before, even Germany and France don't trust US and therefore continue to talk to Putin.Just not Afghanistan, but the list of countries destroyed by US due to misinformation and ego is endless.Well the exercises are a need of the hour not just for India, but more for US too to contain China and safeguard it's interests in Japan, Taiwan, Australia, PhillipinesThe MMRCA is definitely not on US engines. They are already talking to Safran.I noticed you did not respond to the last point of US having rave interests in Ukraine which it wants to save?Wait did I miss pointing that in the last 3 weeks, Rouble has gained from 140/USD to 84/USD. In effect the sanctions have been useless, with Anthony Blinken even talking about softening themUS has hit itself in the foot this time and time will tell.



It is true that the Rouble has recovered much of its value. But this has come with significant costs. Russia has effectively halted most imports while it continues to export its oil and gas, so it has temporarily increased its balance of payments. It has also imposed limits on foreign currency exchange, so people and companies cant trade anymore. Russian factories are shutting down as a result. So yes, the Rouble is up, but it is destroying their economy. The damage from this will take time. There is no real demand for Roubles in international business. Yes, there may be increased Rouble/Rupee or Rouble/Yuan trade, but those are <1% of total trade amounts.



I had my aircraft procurement program names wrong. The MMRCA is India's plan to procure over 110 twin engine jet fighters from abroad. Right now the top candidates are the Rafale and the F-18. The Mig 35, Eurofighter and the Saab are outside contenders. So the two top contenders are either American or French.



What I had meant to say was the AMCA program. This is the domestically produced dual engine twin of the LCA. Like the LCA, the AMCA will be using American made GE jet engines. You can read about it here:



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_AMCA



Regards. The Russian apologists complain that one reason for Russia's attack on Ukraine was because of NATO's threat to it. The fact is the opposite. NATO has been significantly underinvesting in defence since the end of the cold war. Germany, Europe's largest country, has the 4th largest economy in the world (3.5x bigger than Russia) had a budget that was smaller than Russia. It barely had a few dozen operational jet fighters and was actually helping Russia develop with things like the gas line, instead of importing it from the US. After refusing to spend on its military forces for 30 years, Germany will be spending huge sums to upgrade its military. It is on track to have the third largest military budget in the world (after the US and China). But, if we are believe the Russian sympathizers here, it would seem that the US somehow forced Russia to attack Ukraine so that Germany would buy American oil and weapons.It is true that the Rouble has recovered much of its value. But this has come with significant costs. Russia has effectively halted most imports while it continues to export its oil and gas, so it has temporarily increased its balance of payments. It has also imposed limits on foreign currency exchange, so people and companies cant trade anymore. Russian factories are shutting down as a result. So yes, the Rouble is up, but it is destroying their economy. The damage from this will take time. There is no real demand for Roubles in international business. Yes, there may be increased Rouble/Rupee or Rouble/Yuan trade, but those are <1% of total trade amounts.I had my aircraft procurement program names wrong. The MMRCA is India's plan to procure over 110 twin engine jet fighters from abroad. Right now the top candidates are the Rafale and the F-18. The Mig 35, Eurofighter and the Saab are outside contenders. So the two top contenders are either American or French.What I had meant to say was the AMCA program. This is the domestically produced dual engine twin of the LCA. Like the LCA, the AMCA will be using American made GE jet engines. You can read about it here:Regards.
derick Newbie

Join Date: Sep 2021 Location: new delhi Posts: 13 Thanked: 59 Times

Lansdowne, Rishikesh and some frustration







Delhi to Lansdowne

We left Delhi at 4:45, picked up her in-laws from Indirapuram and took the Meerut expressway. Our route was completely dependent on google maps and waze. We took the Meerut expressway > Meerut bypass > Khatauli > Miranpur > Bijnor Bypass > Kotdwar > Lansdowne. The only toll was 95 Rupees on the Meerut Expressway. By the way, ever since fast tag, tolls have become slower, the attendants still enter some details manually before the boom lifts. And some cars will show ID cards and try to negotiate the toll?







The roads from Bijnor to Kotdwar were absolutely horrible, thankfully because of Holi the traffic was next to none and all cars were zigzagging all the way trying to find some road in between the potholes. Once the incline starts which is barely 30 minutes before Lansdowne the surface is smooth but the roads are single lane and there are a lot of blind turns. Thankfully I have spent my early driving years in Meghalaya and I'm comfortable with half clutch and mountain driving etiquettes. Side note if you drive in North Eastern States all cars honk while approaching a turn, No cars honked in this trip. Considering how intensely blind some turns were, I was surprised.





The Property

We reached the camp by 11:00AM. We checked the facilities and found it decent, negotiated the price a little bit and paid an advance. The weather was a little hot and the tents were preheating under the sun. We decided to go check some cafes or restaurants to have a bite and return later in the afternoon to avoid the sun. Yep, we bailed even before things got tough.











The Camp property is huge, with little nooks and corners made to give a boho vibe. There were picnic tables scattered around the property. The tents were placed a good distance from each other and even with full occupancy the place was very quiet and relaxing. The property is right next to a shallow river. Which is used only by guests to shower, yes there's no shower. We could take small hikes to find deeper water. The fresh water was very energizing and we had long swimming sessions. We fully enjoyed the property and made a few sightseeing drives around. That's mostly what Landsowne is for and we didn't want to go to crowded touristy places.







After spending a day at the camp we really didn't have much to do, we could either go back or travel to a new destination, after much deliberation we decided to go to Rishikesh and again wing the stay. We planned to reach rishikesh early and search for hotels around Tapovan. We entered Rishikesh within 3.5 hours but the traffic in the city was crazy. The inner roads of the city were closed and all cars were being diverted. We were stuck in traffic for 2 hours!



The frustration

Here's what happened while we were in this mad traffic, all cars lined up to one side of a hilly road towards Tapovan. The cars were barely moving. Two cars behind was a HR registered Scorpio with 5 guys in them. Everytime the traffic stopped one of them would get down and walk to the front of our car, acting as if checking the traffic ahead, but actually staring at us and getting back when the cars moved a bit. It was when the driver got down and walked towards the cars ahead I got a little alarmed. Heres what was happening, the car is ML registered, I was in the driver seat, my sister beside me, in the back my sisters sister in law and her cousin. Five desperate boys saw a car with three girls and planned to do a little bird watching while in traffic. I was constantly checking the doors were locked and nobody rolls down their window. There was a moment when our car was next to an ice cream seller. They saw a chance, all of them got down and grabbed popsicles with that same glare in their eyes. One of them was literally peeping inside the rear window about to say something and the traffic moved. Few gearshifts later I saw a turn towards hotels and cottages, I immediately turned the car fearing they also might turn. I saw their disappointing faces in the rearview mirror as they headed towards Tapovan.











Absolutely disgusted we found a great hotel to stay with a stunning view. We enjoyed the night roaming in Tapovan, buying a few souvenirs. We got healing crystals, everyone at work says it's fake but they look amazing. A little late into the night we spotted the Scorpio passing us, the boys seemed like they did not find a place to stay. We headed back to our hotel and enjoyed the view till the night let us.







We left for Delhi early in the morning fearing the traffic we got the previous day. The road was pretty great with a few diversions every now and then.







Just as usual, our Ertiga happily carried us through the trip. Its gave us fuel efficiency of 18.5 Km/l with air con always on, we covered 666 kms over three days. No fuss, all passengers had ample space and I love how the white gets dirty over a road trip telling everyone yes, we have been places.



As I am posting this my Ertiga has already left for Guwahati, I am very happy I could have one last road trip in it. My 2012 Ertiga is about to retire very soon and I wanted a last road trip before I bid adieu to my dear friend. You can find my search for the new car here, I welcome all suggestions. After a lot of planning and failed attempts, the Holi weekend was the best chance I had. My sister and her in-laws were pushing for Rishikesh but I knew since it was a Holi weekend there would be a lot of crowd. After a lot of back and forth I found a great property which was providing camping near the riverside a few kilometers before Lansdown. I sent the picture to my sister, but since we haven't done any camping before we wanted to make sure to see the tents and property before paying any money. And so we decided to wing it!We left Delhi at 4:45, picked up her in-laws from Indirapuram and took the Meerut expressway. Our route was completely dependent on google maps and waze. We took the Meerut expressway > Meerut bypass > Khatauli > Miranpur > Bijnor Bypass > Kotdwar > Lansdowne. The only toll was 95 Rupees on the Meerut Expressway. By the way, ever since fast tag, tolls have become slower, the attendants still enter some details manually before the boom lifts. And some cars will show ID cards and try to negotiate the toll?The roads from Bijnor to Kotdwar were absolutely horrible, thankfully because of Holi the traffic was next to none and all cars were zigzagging all the way trying to find some road in between the potholes. Once the incline starts which is barely 30 minutes before Lansdowne the surface is smooth but the roads are single lane and there are a lot of blind turns. Thankfully I have spent my early driving years in Meghalaya and I'm comfortable with half clutch and mountain driving etiquettes. Side note if you drive in North Eastern States all cars honk while approaching a turn, No cars honked in this trip. Considering how intensely blind some turns were, I was surprised.We reached the camp by 11:00AM. We checked the facilities and found it decent, negotiated the price a little bit and paid an advance. The weather was a little hot and the tents were preheating under the sun. We decided to go check some cafes or restaurants to have a bite and return later in the afternoon to avoid the sun. Yep, we bailed even before things got tough.The Camp property is huge, with little nooks and corners made to give a boho vibe. There were picnic tables scattered around the property. The tents were placed a good distance from each other and even with full occupancy the place was very quiet and relaxing. The property is right next to a shallow river. Which is used only by guests to shower, yes there's no shower. We could take small hikes to find deeper water. The fresh water was very energizing and we had long swimming sessions. We fully enjoyed the property and made a few sightseeing drives around. That's mostly what Landsowne is for and we didn't want to go to crowded touristy places.After spending a day at the camp we really didn't have much to do, we could either go back or travel to a new destination, after much deliberation we decided to go to Rishikesh and again wing the stay. We planned to reach rishikesh early and search for hotels around Tapovan. We entered Rishikesh within 3.5 hours but the traffic in the city was crazy. The inner roads of the city were closed and all cars were being diverted. We were stuck in traffic for 2 hours!Here's what happened while we were in this mad traffic, all cars lined up to one side of a hilly road towards Tapovan. The cars were barely moving. Two cars behind was a HR registered Scorpio with 5 guys in them. Everytime the traffic stopped one of them would get down and walk to the front of our car, acting as if checking the traffic ahead, but actually staring at us and getting back when the cars moved a bit. It was when the driver got down and walked towards the cars ahead I got a little alarmed. Heres what was happening, the car is ML registered, I was in the driver seat, my sister beside me, in the back my sisters sister in law and her cousin. Five desperate boys saw a car with three girls and planned to do a little bird watching while in traffic. I was constantly checking the doors were locked and nobody rolls down their window. There was a moment when our car was next to an ice cream seller. They saw a chance, all of them got down and grabbed popsicles with that same glare in their eyes. One of them was literally peeping inside the rear window about to say something and the traffic moved. Few gearshifts later I saw a turn towards hotels and cottages, I immediately turned the car fearing they also might turn. I saw their disappointing faces in the rearview mirror as they headed towards Tapovan.Absolutely disgusted we found a great hotel to stay with a stunning view. We enjoyed the night roaming in Tapovan, buying a few souvenirs. We got healing crystals, everyone at work says it's fake but they look amazing. A little late into the night we spotted the Scorpio passing us, the boys seemed like they did not find a place to stay. We headed back to our hotel and enjoyed the view till the night let us.We left for Delhi early in the morning fearing the traffic we got the previous day. The road was pretty great with a few diversions every now and then.Just as usual, our Ertiga happily carried us through the trip. Its gave us fuel efficiency of 18.5 Km/l with air con always on, we covered 666 kms over three days. No fuss, all passengers had ample space and I love how the white gets dirty over a road trip telling everyone yes, we have been places.As I am posting this my Ertiga has already left for Guwahati, I am very happy I could have one last road trip in it. Attached Thumbnails








In context: Last time Samsung used more than two chipsets in its flagship phones was back in 2011, when it tapped Qualcomm, Exynos, and Texas Instruments silicon to power different variants of the Galaxy S2. Now that third spot could be occupied by MediaTek's Dimensity silicon, which has been getting closer and closer to Qualcomm offerings in terms of performance.

For years, Samsung has stuck with Qualcomm and its own Exynos chipsets when it comes to its flagship phones. However, the Korean tech giant has been using MediaTek's Dimensity chipsets in a number of lower-end handsets. This has invited speculation that it won't be long before we'll see mid-range or flagship Samsung phones powered by Dimensity silicon.

According to a BusinessKorea report, Samsung is exploring the idea of using MediaTek chipsets for the Galaxy S22 FE and some Galaxy S23 units. The company might use MediaTek silicon for half of all Galaxy S22 FE units, as well as all Galaxy S23 handsets that will be sold on the Asian market.

At this point it isn't clear if Samsung will use fewer Exynos chipsets in its phones as a result of adopting more MediaTek silicon, but the latter company has been looking for avenues to grow its market share in several regions. Samsung has been trying to shake off the bad reputation of the Exynos brand, but even the latest Exynos 2200 SoC has been a rather disappointing release.

Earlier rumors pointed to Samsung eyeing MediaTek's Dimensity 9000 chipset for use in a high-end phone. The Dimensity 9000 has been shown to perform close to Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen1 chipset, and it's already powering phones like the Red K50 Pro and the Oppo Find X5 Pro. It would make sense for Samsung to use it in some of its higher-end offerings, if only to offer a more consistent experience between models sold in different regions.
What just happened? Intel has become the latest company to suspend operations in Russia following the country's invasion of Ukraine. The move comes after the firm paused deliveries of its chips to Russia and Belarus as part of the ongoing trade sanctions implemented by the US government.

It was back in February when Intel suspended shipments of industrial processors to Russia and its ally Belarus in compliance with international sanctions introduced following the invasion of Ukraine. Now the company has gone a step further and suspended all operations in Russia.

Intel said in a press release that it had implemented business continuity measures to minimize disruption to its global operations. The chipmaker added that it condemns Russia's war against Ukraine and calls for a swift return to peace.

"Our thoughts are with everyone who has been impacted by this war, particularly the people of Ukraine and the surrounding countries and all those around the world with family, friends and loved ones in the region," Intel wrote. "We are working to support all of our employees through this difficult situation, including our 1,200 employees in Russia."

Intel has suspended all business operations in Russia.



The company continues to join the global community in condemning Russia's war against Ukraine and calling for a swift return to peace. https://t.co/8YYASW36tb  Intel News (@intelnews) April 6, 2022

IBM has also suspended shipments to Russia. Its servers are market leaders in the country, which despite efforts to promote home-grown hardware, still relies on foreign companies for much of its technology. In addition to the economic effects, cutting off ties will likely impact Russia's ability to conduct cyberwarfare against Ukraine and other countriesPresident Biden recently warned US firms to bolster their cyber defenses in preparation for inevitable Russian attacks.

Intel is the latest tech firm to pause business in Russia. AMD suspended its sales in February, while Microsoft, Sony, Activision Blizzard, Epic Games, Netflix, Mastercard, Visa, Paypal, EA, Amazon, CD Projekt Red, Ubisoft, Apple, Nintendo, and Take-Two are just some of the names that have also taken some form of action.

World of Tanks developer Wargaming yesterday announced that it is pulling out of Russia and Belarus following a strategic review of business operations worldwide. Russian Victor Kislyi founded Wargaming in the Belarus capital of Minsk but moved its headquarters to Cyprus in 2011.
Elon Musk made massive headlines that swept through the world of tech lately, as he bought $3 billion worth of Twitter shares, making him the largest shareholder of the social media powerhouse at 9.2%. With this, many people are on the fence as to what the Tesla CEO plans to do with his new investment.

An article on Axios, for one, believes that this purchase is indicative of Musk's desire to change the platform's policies to his liking following his constant criticism of it. The SpaceX founder has chastised Twitter for its apparent "failure" to adhere to principles of free speech, while also considering the social media platform as the world's "de facto public town square."

Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.



What should be done? https://t.co/aPS9ycji37  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 26, 2022

Soon after tweeting that, the multi-billionaire then asked his over 80 million followers this:

Is a new platform needed?  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 26, 2022

These words from Musk were published late last month, and now it feels like it's gone full circle-albeit with a few compromises. He himself mulled on creating his own social media platform last March 28th, saying he is in "serious thought." Once again, the main reason was his grievances against Twitter, whose algorithm he claims has a so-called "de facto bias" affecting public discourse on the platform:

Im worried about de facto bias in the Twitter algorithm having a major effect on public discourse.



How do we know whats really happening?  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2022

'No Intentions To Agitate'

But even if there are fears that Musk could probably try to shape Twitter to his own liking, it might not happen at all. That's because in a certain filing to the US SEC, it was revealed that the multi-billionaire said he had no intentions to "agitate" as a shareholder.

What this could mean is that he doesn't plan to throw his new financial weight around the company, and will probably still focus on far bigger ventures-i.e. SpaceX and Tesla-to achieve his other goals.

Read Also: US Regulators Want Elon Musk's Tweets Monitored, Threatens to File a Subpoena

This makes sense considering his now 9.2% stake is still not a majority stake. As per Investopedia, the only time a shareholder wields considerable power of the company's direction is if he/she holds at least a 50% stake in it. Anybody who owns that much of a company's stocks can dictate its direction through their voting power, especially if the aforementioned shareholder also owns voting shares.

What's Happening Over At Twitter

As a result of Musk's purchase, Twitter's share price closed at a 27% increase-something that's quite expected if someone as high-profile as him does things like this. According to CNBC, the Tesla CEO's purchase is classified as a passive stake, which further reinforces his apparent lack of desire to not exert his influence over the company's dealings.

It's not just that, of course. Current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal will now have to wrangle the antics of one of the world's richest men, which Forbes says could still make sweeping demands despite his passive stake. For one, Agrawal perhaps has to deal with the shadow of Elliott Holdings, who bought a stake in the company and shook it up by asking founder Jack Dorsey to leave.

Eventually, both Twitter and Elliott settled. But this could not be similar with Pagrawal and Musk, who once tweeted a meme that didn't paint the newly installed CEO in a positive light. The aforementioned meme was that of Agrawal's face put on the body of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, with the face of Jack Dorsey on another person's body beside him:

As you can see, Dorsey's "character" in the image was shown being thrown into the water. For the unaware, Musk and the founder/former CEO of Twitter are close friends.

It remains to be seen whether this "war" of Twitter posts will indicate a major shakeup. But one thing is for certain: Elon's got his hands on a new, extremely delicious pie.

This is a developing story.

Related Article: Elon Musk Vs. SEC: Billionaire Compares Himself To Eminem as Pre-Approval Twitter Post Issue Continues

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by RJ Pierce

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
An announcement just came from Amazon regarded as the biggest deal in commercial launch ever made. The company confirmed they are finalizing agreements for 83 launches with three different rocket companies, but no SpaceX was found on the list.

Amazon Plans to Launch Constellation of Broadband Satellites Within Low-Earth-Orbit

According to the story by ArsTechnica, the rockets are expected to deploy a number of Amazon's constellation of broadband satellites within low-Earth-orbit. To add, Amazon has been buying out an extreme amount of both medium and heavy-lift launch capacity over the course of the next five years.

The company has been buying launches from numerous Western providers except for SpaceX, the company's direct satellite competitor. Excluding Amazon's competitor, SpaceX, the widespread purchase includes the majority of any available "spare" launch capacity for larger rockets over the course of the next five years in either Europe or the United States.

Amazon Partners with Blue Origin, Arianespace, and United Launch Alliance to Build 3,236 Satellites

The launch agreements included Arianespace, Blue Origin, and the United Launch Alliance, with a goal of building 3,236 satellites. Amazon recently purchased 18 Ariane 6 rockets from Arianespace in Europe, 12 launches of the New Glenn rocket from Blue Origin (with a potential 15 additional launches), and 38 launches from United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket.

In addition, Amazon announced in the past that it was able to buy the final nine Atlas V rocket launches from United Launch Alliance before the vehicle was retired. The Atlas V rockets were powered by Russian engines.

SpaceX Plans to Launch Two Prototypes in Q4 of 2022

Similar to SpaceX, Project Kuiper from Amazon is also looking to bring fast potentially and affordable broadband Internet access to people worldwide. The company also plans to launch two different prototype satellites during Q4 or 2022.

The company, however, hasn't set a date for the start of its final deployment, but a spokesperson noted that additional details would be shared later this year. According to the story by The Verge, Amazon's concept is close to that of SpaceX when it comes to having multiple satellites in low-Earth orbit.

Read Also: Elon Musk: SpaceX Raptor Engines Are Superior Over Tesla-No Electric Option for Starship?

SpaceX Starlink has a Head Start with Over 2,000 Satellites in Orbit

With identical goals, The Verge notes that Starlink currently has an advantage compared to Amazon as it has already been able to launch over 2,000 satellites into orbit. Starlink has also started providing limited services around the world, having 250,000 subscribers so far, according to SpaceX.

As of press time, Amazon has yet to launch any satellites within its Project Kuiper. The company has also not yet disclosed how many rockets can fit into each vehicle, but first, it still has to launch its prototypes with ABL.

Related Article: SpaceX To Send Axiom Space Ax-1 Crew Into Orbit! Launch Date, Spaceflight Price, and More

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Urian B.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Starbucks' NFT business may soon start, claimed the company's founder, Howard Schultz.

He added that the massive assets of the Seattle coffee giant would help it enter the blockchain industry more efficiently compared to other firms.

Currently, the NFT industry is growing as more and more companies and organizations try to take advantage of the rising blockchain market.

Now, Starbucks will soon be one of them, thanks to the return of Schultz, which happened on Apr. 5.

Starbucks' NFT Business To Begin!

According to Geek Wire's latest report, many videos of the Starbucks founder are now circulating the internet. He confirmed that the coffee giant would soon enter the NFT market in these clips.

Also Read: GameStop Wallet Trademark Registered! Crypto Wallet with NFT Marketplace Coming?

"If you look at the companies, the brands, the celebrities, the influencers that are trying to create a digital NFT platform and business," said the new interim CEO.

In the footage, he added that Starbucks is more fit to enter the NFT market because of its collectibles and the entire company heritage compared to other companies.

If you are a coffee fan, you will know that Starbucks is not only popular because of its high-end coffees. Many consumers are also flocking its stores across the globe because of the collectibles it offers, such as coffee mugs, calendars, and other items.

Now, these products may soon have their digital art versions. But, the exact date is not yet confirmed. Schultz only said that the Seattle coffee giant would start entering the NFT industry by the end of 2022.

Schultz Return

The official press release of Starbucks confirmed the return of Howard Schultz as the company's Chief Executive Officer and Director of Board.

Aside from entering the NFT industry, he also announced that the coffee giant would suspend its stock purchasing program. Howard further explained that this would allow the company to invest more in stores and people, greatly increasing consumer experience.

Meanwhile, Ukraine sold NFTs to support its military operations as the conflict between the country and Russia continues.

On the other hand, the new partnership between Coinbase and Rolling Stone Magazine is expected to offer animated NFT collections.

For more news updates about Starbucks NFT business and other related blockchain stories, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes.

Related Article: Goldman Sachs Worker Buys Bored Ape for $280K Saying Company is 'Aware of This New Asset Class'

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 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Chinese hackers have been caught using VLC Media Player to spread malware to its victims, which includes various groups linked to the government, legal, and religious affairs.

Chinese Hackers and VLC Media Player

As per a news story by Bleeping Computer, security researchers discovered that hackers who are reportedly backed by the Chinese government have been using VLC Media Player to launch their cyberattacks.

To be precise, these Chinese hackers have been using the VLC Media Player to launch their custom malware loader, which attacks the systems of their victims.

It turns out that the VLC Media Player was used in a malware campaign that was allegedly related to espionage.

The hacking campaign using the VLC Media Player appears to have started in the middle of 2021. It was last seen active last Feb., but cybersecurity researchers suggested that the hacking activities may still be ongoing.

The senior information developer of the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, Brigid O Gorman, stated to Bleeping Computer that the hackers are using a clean version of VLC Media Player.

However, the attackers stuffed a malicious DLL file, which is used for the exporting features of VLC.

The DLL side-loading scheme of the hackers allows them to spread malware in the systems of their victims.

Read Also: Hacked Nvidia Data Now Used as Malware Disguise! Malicious Programs Copying Nvidia Software Already Spotted

Chinese Hacker Campaign

The researchers of Symantec Threat Hunter Team said that cyberattack campaigns of the hackers target various government and non-governmental organizations on three continents, including North America, Asia, and Europe.

Meanwhile, according to a recent report by The Hacker News, the senior information developer of the Symantec Threat Hunter Team revealed more details about the espionage campaign.

Gorman told the news outlet that although the Chinese hackers targeted government and non-governmental organizations, they also attacked other education and religious groups.

The Symantec Threat Hunter Team developer also revealed that "there are also some victims in the telecoms, legal and pharmaceutical sectors."

However, he went on to note that the attackers primarily go after government orgs and NGOs.

The victims of the hackers were located in numerous countries across the globe, such as Turkey, Israel, India, Canada, the United States, Japan, and Italy.

It is worth noting that there are some instances wherein hackers spy on the systems of their victims for up to nine months without ever being detected.

Related Article: Hackers Backed by the Chinese Government Has Compromised the Computer System of 6 US States

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Amazon's Project Kuiper is now competing with Starlink and Viasat for its satellite internet, and the company revealed its plans in the next five years to bring it to orbit. It has already announced the partner companies that it has, focusing on its launches that will bring the satellites to orbit, and soon launching its internet connectivity for its offers.

Amazon Project Kuiper is Gearing Up to Compete with Starlink, Viasat

Amazon announced earlier that it is looking into expanding its services with its upcoming partnerships with many space companies for the rocket launches that contain its satellite cargo. It is a massive indication that the company is getting ready to compete with Starlink, Viasat, OneWeb, and other companies in the industry.

Unlike Starlink, OneWeb, and Viasat, Amazon's Project Kuiper is one going through the process of bringing its satellites to orbit for future ventures. However, the company is only at its start, and many factors may come to place for all their needs and plans for the project. Nevertheless, Amazon is looking forward and forging ahead with its satellite internet.

Read Also: Amazon Locks in Project Kuiper Deal With Three Companies | 83 Internet Satellites to Launch in Space

Amazon Partners with Space Companies for Satellite Launches

According to Space Reporter, Joey Roulette, Amazon is surrounding itself with many space companies to fulfill its goals and plans for the future. Instead of sticking with Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, the company went the extra mile by hiring the likes of United Launch Alliance and Arianespace for their launches in the coming times.

Amazon's Project Kuiper, Starlink, and MORE

Starlink is one of the most distributed services in the different nations, focusing on satellite internet capabilities for the service that brings a connection from out of this world. The company aims to add more ground terminals to the strength of its connections for everyone to enjoy, and the plan is at 250,000 ground terminals for the service.

OneWeb is also another service that is already available in the world's use of the internet that comes from satellites, and it is a London-based company that aims to deliver strong connections from above. However, its recent struggle with Russia and its spacecraft led to the company hiring SpaceX to bring its satellites to orbit, with Musk saying that it will do the right thing.

The world is not shy of companies offering their satellite internet for their needs, and another company offers this for everyone, with Viasat delivering home satellite internet.

Amazon's Project Kuiper is only one of the many corporations that are already filling up the orbit with satellites for all internet needs. The company intends to bring its satellite capabilities for an internet connection, something that would be the standard of connectivity for the service in the coming years, as many companies compete for it.

Related Article: Jeff Bezos and Amazon 'Project Kuiper' Books Up to 83 Rockets Bringing Everyone Onboard Except SpaceX

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With things starting to move more aggressively into the metaverse, Sony's PSVR 2's pre-order is expected to be announced soon. To add, the upcoming VR set is also expected to get its very own State of Play event.

PSVR 2 Pre-Order and Release Date Announcement to Come Soon

According to the story by TechRadar, for those that have been waiting for quite a while regarding the PSVR 2 pre-order announcement date by Sony, the long-awaited announcement is now expected to come really soon.

Tom Henderson, regarded as a prominent insider, shared a tweet stating that the company has already started sending out emails with the title "Introducing PlayStation VR2. This could potentially indicate that the brand new device will be getting its very own event, a PSVR 2 State of Play, sometime soon.

Potential State of Play Event for Sony's Upcoming VR

As per Henderson, both Kinda Funny's Greg Miller, as well as Jeff Grubb, from GamesBeat have heard the same thing when it came to the PSVR 2. This increases the support that the new Sony VR headset could be coming out with a deep-dive for its users through a potential event.

As per TechRadar, having a PSVR 2 State of Play event would make sense, especially since developers were already given access to the PSVR 2 during the GDC 2022. To add, certain studios were also able to receive their very own dev units as well.

PSVR 2 Release Date Set to Happen Around the End of 2023

Sony revealed that the PlayStation VR2 is geared towards releasing by the end of 2023, depending on how supply works. Should the global chip shortage situation start to cool down, this could increase the chances of Sony dropping the new PSVR 2.

Despite talks of the PSVR 2, a new device from Sony, buyers of the PS5 restock are still struggling to get their hands on the console. TechRadar also stated that there could be an advantage for the company if they announce the pre-order date and release date of the PSVR 2 ahead of time.

Read Also: [RUMOR] 'Call of Duty' NFT To Arrive! In-Game Effects of Non-Fungible Tokens Now Studied

Popularity of the Metaverse and Increasing Demand in VR

Due to the Oculus Quest 2, or rather known as the Meta Quest 2, VR headsets are starting to pick up in popularity now more than ever. With numerous companies already gearing up towards the VR and the metaverse, demand for the PSVR 2 is growing compared to Sony's first VR in 2016.

The largest problem, as of the moment, is the supply issues due to the global chip shortage. Since buyers are still struggling to get their hands on the PS5 and Sony is struggling to keep up with the demand, it remains unknown as to how the company will deal with supply issues regarding the PSVR 2 when it launches.

Related Article: 'Overwatch' Player Uses Motorized Mouse Wheel During Mercy Gameplay | Is this Some Kind of Cheating?

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 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Earlier this week, Google unveiled a series of announcements so that data scientists could take advantage of the Cloud data storage.

The search engine giant launched a preview release of the BigLake engine which will make data analysis in storage lakes much easier.

Google Introduces Open Ecosystem For Shared Data

According to a report by VentureBeat, Google recently announced that a new set of tools are coming to improve AI and machine learning experience for the users.

The open ecosystem which is expected to be a useful addition for data sharing could be the solution for the company to other cloud competitors.

Google Cloud VP for databases, data analytics, and looker Gerrit Kazmaier said that the company considered data as its top agenda for its C-suite. He acknowledged that every firm is considered a "big data" company.

"BigLake allows companies to unify their data warehouses and lakes to analyze data without worrying about the underlying storage format or system, which eliminates the need to duplicate or move data from a source and reduces cost and inefficiencies," Kazmaier announced in a statement, per Techcrunch.

What is Google BigLake Platform

Speaking of which, Google said that it's a special platform used for cloud storage. It covers both local and commercial use of data sharing even with the company's competitors.

In addition, this service offers sophisticated tools for the unification of data lakes and warehouses in the context of a multi-cloud environment.

Per Google Cloud Director Sudhir Hasbe, BigLake is important in merging various worlds together with regard to data storage. Of course, the freedom is limitless if you can store your data with no restrictions whatsoever.

Related Article: Google Cloud to Double in Cost from $0.10 to $0.20 per 10,000 Operations: Developers Aren't Happy

Google Data Cloud Alliance

Venture Beat added in the same article that it's planning to launch a special collaboration with other firms such as Elastic, Dataiku, Starburst, and more. The so-called partnership known as Data Cloud Alliance will allow the free flow of open data formats across different barriers in corporate and other related fields.

Google's venture with artificial intelligence looks promising so far, but to stay in the competition, it needs to steadily establish connections with several cloud vendors in the market.

Kazmaier said that the company is focused on creating "one-of-a-kind" technical products. Furthermore, the tech titan's mindset is glued to improving its innovation for seamless data sharing and storing. It also noted that there's a need to have an open ecosystem that will serve its purpose most appropriately.

Google's VP of cloud AI and innovation June Yang said that they will remove the limitations in data clouds en route to the gradual closing of the Data-to-AI-Value gap.

The company indeed wants to stay away from the traditional notebooks so it could construct more powerful models that are faster and more advanced than them.

With that, Google is looking forward to the data sharing that the businesses might want to do with their AI models. In this way, the developers and data scientists could have a good glimpse of the improvement of these models.

Read Also: Google Cloud Expands Anti-Crypto Hacking Security Through Virtual Machine Threat Detection | Here's How VMTD Works



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Some Nigerian bank lenders were penalized by the country's central bank after accusing them of allowing cryptocurrency transactions.

Because of this, the West African country's central bank decided to penalize the involved financial firms. This decision came as a part of the officials' efforts to ensure that the blockchain trading ban is still implemented.

Back in February 2021, the government decided to restrict all crypto activities in the country because of the threats they pose to Nigeria's financial system. But, it seems like some money lenders are not following the crypto restrictions.

Nigerian Lenders Allegedly Allow Crypto Transactions

According to Bloomberg's latest report, one of the accused lenders is the domestic Standard Bank Group unit, Stanbic IBTC Bank.

Also Read: Crypto Dystopia: Ethereum Founder Worries About Some Blockchain Trends, Including NFT's Rising Value

The financial company's CEO, Wole Adeniyi, said that Stanbic was fined over $478,000 because the Nigeria CB claims that it allowed two accounts to conduct crypto transactions.

On the other hand, the country's largest lender, Access Bank Plc. was also penalized. It was fined more than $1 billion after the central bank discovered that it failed to close customers' cryptocurrency accounts.

Meanwhile, Stanbic IBTC said that it followed the central bank's implemented crypto sanctions. However, the lender claimed that the detected blockchain activities may have bypassed its system, allowing them to push through.

Why is Cryptocurrency Being Banned?

Currently, Nigeria is just one of the countries to implement crypto restrictions. Although the rising digital currencies are attracting more investors and experiencing massive value growth, many countries don't approve of them.

CNBC TV18 reported that many government officials are concerned regarding the openness of cryptocurrencies. Because it offers almost complete anonymity, many malicious actors are trying to take advantage of the rising blockchain market.

Meanwhile, various critics claim that crypto can allow organizations to conduct illegal transactions. If you want to see further issues with cryptocurrencies, you can visit this link.

Meanwhile, more than 50 crypto firms received a new notice from the U.K. watchdog because of misleading advertisements.

On the other hand, Australia's crypto exchange approval finally happened.

For more news updates about cryptocurrencies and other business tech topics, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes.

Related Article: Australia's Crypto Regulation Move To Ensure Safer Investment, Transaction! Is This a Good Thing?

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 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Apple dominated the teen tech market, a new study claims. This means that young users prefer the giant tech firm's products, such as iPhones, AirPods, and Apple Watch.

For the past few years, the manufacturer's smartphones and other gadgets have always been among the most in-demand products in the technology industry.

Now, Piper Sandler, an American investment bank, conducted new surveys. The fintech firm undertakes two surveys to see what gadget brand teenagers in the United States prefer every year.

The last one, which covered 2021, showed that Apple is still the most preferred brand by young users.

Apple Dominates Teen Tech Market

According to Apple Insider, the latest Piper Sandler Spring 2022 report revealed that Apple dominates the teen technology market.

Also Read: Apple iPhone 14 Pro Camera: Not a Larger MP, But Bigger Sensor for its 48-Megapixel Lens

Based on the findings of the fintech firm, more than 87% of the 7,100 teenager participants own an iPhone, with iPhone 13 covering 23% of the teen ownership. These young people are located across 44 U.S. states.

Last year, Apple's advanced smartphone showed almost the same result, with 86% of teenagers owning the product.

Meanwhile, Apple Watch is also among the most preferred gadgets of young people in the United States, with 34% owning the smartwatch.

Aside from iPhone and Apple Watch, 72% of American teens also own a pair of AirPods. This shows that the giant gadget creator is attracting more young users as the years go by.

Why Teens Prefer Apple Gadgets

BGR reported that Samsung and other Apple competitors are also gaining traction for teenager users. But, all of them are still far away when it comes to the Apple product demand percentages.

One of the main efforts made by Apple that attracted a lot of young users is its advertising style. Back in 2020, its iPad commercial became appealing to teenagers.

After that, the tech firm became attuned to the young culture. If you want to see further details about why young users over other brands prefer Apple, you can view this link.

Recently, Ming-Chi Kuo claimed that the upcoming foldable iPhone might be a combination of the Apple handset and tablet.

Meanwhile, three Apple MacBooks are now obsolete.

For more news updates about Apple and other giant gadget makers, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes.

Related Article: #AppleToo Founders Clash in a Legal Battle After Accusing One Another of Harassment

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The current Tesla Gigafactory Shanghai seems to worsen as the factory remains closed. Recently, the giant automaker said that the production plant was supposed to reopen last weekend.

However, that didn't happen because factory employees were not enough. On the other hand, the suppliers needed for Gigafactory Shanghai's production were also insufficient.

The latest Tesla Giga Shanghai suspension happened because the Chinese city conducted a widespread lockdown as the COVID-19 cases increased.

Tesla Gigafactory Shanghai Worsens

According to Electrek's latest report, the giant EV production plant faced another issue on Wednesday, Apr. 6, after the Chinese officials decided to continue its lockdown.

Also Read: Tesla 2022 Q1 Report: 'Extremely Difficult' Says Musk, But Deliveries and Production Increased

Currently, China's largest city is already on its eight-day lockdown.

"#Shanghai's strict lockdown has been extended indefinitely, and it's still impossible to order food and water," said BCC journalist Edward Lawrence via his official Twitter post.

#Shanghais strict lockdown has been extended indefinitely, and its still impossible to order food and water. Got up at 5.30am again today but still, system gridlock. As I tried and tried to place my order, my basket depleted as essentials sold out. Madness. #shanghai #lockdown pic.twitter.com/vtkLW2zahH  Edward Lawrence (@EP_Lawrence) April 5, 2022

Due to the lockdown extension, Tesla is experiencing more difficulty in its Gigafactory Shanghai. Now, the automaker told its suppliers and staff at the manufacturing plant that the suspension would continue.

The EV developer added that the factory's reopening might happen on Friday, Apr. 8. However, the company is still not 100% sure regarding this expected restart production date.

Current Situation of China, Shanghai

Quartz reported that the Shanghai citywide lockdown is worsening as days go by. As of the moment, authorities are implementing stricter COVID-19 safety measures.

Although they are making drastic efforts, the infected cases continue to increase, with more than 17,000 new cases recorded on Tuesday, Apr. 5.

What makes the lockdown worst is the chaotic access to food and basic necessities. Because of this, many residents are now complaining about the government agencies' poor coordination.

But, this may still change since authorities are doing their best to lessen new COVID-19 infected cases.

On Apr. 3, Taiwan finally received new Tesla Model 3 police cars.

Recently, Giga Texas welcomed the new Tesla Cybertruck.

For more news updates about Tesla Giga Shanghai and its ongoing suspension, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes.

Related Article: Tesla Giga Shanghai Production to Pause AGAIN as COVID-19 Cases Skyrocket in China

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A group of Paraguayan medical students protested in front of the National Council of Higher Education (Cones) to demand the reinstatement of the medical career at the private Maria Serrana University after it was disqualified for alleged irregularities.

A group of professors in disagreement with the latest decision of the governing body to close medical careers at the university also supported the students' petition.

The protest was accompanied by posters with "We are not ghosts." Among them, several Brazilians, the students stood against the closure, defending the university's management and demanding the reopening of medical careers.

One of the spokespersons, Elizangela Neres, said that they do have internships and that the faculty currently has agreements with hospitals in several cities of the department of Alto Parana and Coronel Oviedo in Caaguazu.

Referring to the allegations against the Maria Serrana University regarding the delivery of alleged false degrees, the Deputy Minister of Health, Hernan Martinez, said that it is an issue that should be investigated in depth.

Estudiantes de Medicina protestan por titulos falsos en Paraguay



El escandalo se produjo luego que se revelara que, al menos unos 11 alumnos de la Universidad Maria Serrana habrian tenido problemas con sus titulos, tras detectarse irregularidades

https://t.co/DsaZB3ICzx pic.twitter.com/ZD5fJsrKOF  SoulPassion (@soulartillery69) April 5, 2022

Medical students protest against fake degrees in Paraguay. The scandal occurred after it was revealed that at least 11 students of the Universidad Maria Serrana had problems with their degrees after irregularities were detected.

Martinez also said that the resignation of the superintendent of Health, Ignacio Mendoza, should be evaluated by legal counsel. In this regard, he said that "there has to be a very deep investigation of all the problems that exist. The resignation has to be transferred to the legal advisor, so that they can decide whether it is appropriate".

The Paraguayan Medical Association also made a statement on the matter, rejecting the closure and calling for the resignation of the Health Superintendent.

According to the protesters, the commotion occurred after it became known that the degrees of at least 11 students of Maria Serrana University presented certain irregularities. The students had forged signatures on their studies certificates to receive their degrees.
It seems to be off work and yet it seems not to be off work? Investigate and rectify the problem of overtime and overtime in many places
From left, Amiri Joseph Benoit and Mactori Doucet are wanted on seven counts of attempted first-degree murder and other charges in a Friday drive-by shooting in New Iberia that injured a mother, her infant daughter and others, New Iberia Police Department officials said in a Tuesday press conference.
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Louisiana children would be allowed to leave public schools and take the state aid with them under a bill that won approval Wednesday in the House Education Committee.

The measure, House Bill 824, was one of a series, but easily the most sweeping, that would create education savings accounts that could be used to attend private schools or for tutoring, supplemental materials and other education services.

"I am doing this for our schools and our students," said Rep. Laurie Schlegel, R-Metairie and sponsor of the measure.

"When you are 49th in education rankings you are failing a lot of students," Schlegel said, a reference to national snapshots that often put the state at or near the bottom in measures of education achievement.

Teacher unions and other opponents said the change amounts to a new, ill-conceived voucher program  state aid for some low-income students to attend private schools  and lacks the follow-up oversight to see how students are faring academically.

"It is important that the use of public funds be accompanied by public accountability," said Mike Faulk, executive director of the Louisiana Association of School Superintendents, which opposed the measure.

Push to remake public schools on legislative agenda: 'Intended to empower parents' Ten years after the Louisiana Legislature approved sweeping changes in public schools, a new drive is underway that would allow students to op

HB834 won committee approval 8-3, with Republicans in favor and Democrats on the panel opposed.

It is expected to next face action in the House Appropriations Committee because it carries a price-tag.

The measure, which would take effect in 2024, faces an uphill climb and even backers have called it as a way to start the conversation in hopes of approval in the future.

Debate on all the bills was reminiscent of the historic 2012 push to overhaul public schools, with business groups and others behind the push and traditional public school groups vehemently opposed.

Backers of the Schlegel and similar bills include the Louisiana Association for Business and Industry, The Pelican Institute and The American Federation for Children.

"We believe that school choice is the most important option a parent can have," Lauren Gleason, LABI's director of education and workforce development told the committee.

Leaders of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education also backed the education savings account measures.

Aside from superintendents opponents included the Louisiana School Boards Association, the Louisiana Federation of Teachers and the Louisiana Association of Educators.

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All the bills envision students winning access to about $5,500 per year in state aid that currently goes to public schools they attend.

The committee also approved House Bill 33, which would legalize the accounts for students of military families, those in foster care and children attending public schools rated "D" or "F" who have been unable to transfer to other schools.

At least 14,000 children would be eligible under the measure by Rep. Phillip DeVillier, R-Eunice.

The House passed a similar bill last year 96-1 before it died in the Senate.

+2 Teacher pay, student learning loss among education priorities for 2022 regular legislative session How to address Louisiana's worsening teacher shortage, teacher pay raises, and steps to recover learning loss sparked by the pandemic will be 

Rep. Aimee Freeman, D-New Orleans, a member of the committee, repeatedly said DeVillier's bill lacks needed accountability provisions, and vendors who provide those services would only face state scrutiny every three years.

"That makes me nervous," Freeman said.

Faulk said DeVillier's bill would be unfair to students in low-income families because the $5,500 would not be enough to provide alternatives to traditional classes.

Other bills that cleared the committee would allow education savings accounts for students who are bullied -- House Bill 452 -- and for special education students -- House Bill 194.

In a statement, The Pelican Institute said the bills "give kids in Louisiana the ability to receive a tailored education that best fits his or her needs regardless of what zip code they live in."

Voting "yes" on the Schlegel bill were Reps. Lance Harris, R-Alexandria; Beyrl Amedee, R-Houma; Barbara Freiberg, R-Baton Rouge; Stephanie Hilferty, R-Metairie; Chuck Owen, R-Rosepine; Laurie Schlegel, R-Metairie; Vincent St. Blanc, R-Franklin and Phillip Tarver, R-Lake Charles.

Voting "no" were Reps. Ken Brass, D-Vacherie; Patrick Jefferson, D-Homer and Tammy Phelps. D-Shreveport.
BRAC: Let's keep the EBR school board at nine members. It just makes sense.
The co-author of a major environment report card the Morrison government received more than three months ago but is yet to make public says she hopes it will be released soon, so scientists can act on its findings.

The report  a five-yearly scorecard on the state of Australias environment, and the first one published since 2016  was given to Environment Minister Sussan Ley in December.

Professor Emma Johnston hopes the State of the Environment Report will be released as soon as possible. Credit:Lannon Harley / ANU / Supplied

Ms Ley is required to table the report in Parliament within 15 sitting days of receiving it, but with the election soon to be called, the federal government is not legally required to release it until the next Parliament.

Environmental groups, Labor and the Greens have been pushing Ms Ley to disclose when she will release the report, saying voters deserve a clear picture of the governments management of the environment.
Throughout her 34-year career at the helm of American Vogue, Anna Wintour has gathered more titles than the Queen, and weathered almost as many controversies. Installed as editor-in-chief in 1988, she has risen to become parent company Conde Nasts artistic director, global editorial director and global chief content officer, as well as being awarded a damehood in 2017. In the capricious world of fashion, where fortunes rise and fall like hemlines, Wintours survival skills are legendary.

Wintours frosty demeanour, love of fur and dextrous way of avoiding being eliminated by circumstances that would end most peoples careers are more than a little reminiscent of a cat. Credit:Getty Images

Why has she remained at the pinnacle for so long? Firstly, she is both dedicated to and good at her job: you dont get to stay at the top without this being a given. Secondly, she is surrounded by a loyal team built up over decades, with Conde Nasts board of directors continuing to support her.

Thirdly, and most pertinently, she is adroit at adapting: or at least, at seeming to adapt, positioning herself on the right side of history.

Like all good editors, Anna is interested in everything, says Australian journalist Jo Elvin, who edited Conde Nast title Glamour between 2001 and 2017. I remember when she put Kim Kardashian and Kanye West on the cover of Vogue in 2014. Some shook their fists at the move... but she rolled with the times and where peoples fascinations lay. Thats what keeps her in the game.
Four months into living with the virus, Western Australia is experiencing significantly less COVID-19 illness than predicted as its first Omicron wave begins to recede.

The states high vaccine booster rate, coupled with the milder variant, has made it a world-first experiment on how a highly immunised population relatively untouched by coronavirus responds to an outbreak.

WAs first COVID-19 wave has so far resulted in significantly lower severe illness than predicted.

Last years Delta wave in the eastern states recorded one death for every 128 cases. WAs death rate during the first three months of its Omicron wave was around one in every 3760 cases.

So with a hospitalisation rate significantly lower than forecast, who is at risk? And are people dying from the virus?
One of the hot button topics in education at the moment is the issue of classroom discipline and student behaviour.

Because everyone has been to school, everyone also has an opinion on the issue, often ill-informed and, at times, extremely unhelpful.

A hot button topic is the issue of student behaviour. Credit:iStock

As is commonly the case when we seek global responses to problems we face, the reality of the solutions required are more complex than they first seem. For example, there is a tendency to assume the solution always lies with the individual teacher and their capacity to maintain order in class. While there is certainly some truth in that view, consider a scenario that commonly occurs in schools.

Teacher A, in one classroom is valiantly seeking to implement the schools expectation that students do not use their mobile phones in class. On telling the students she requires them to put their phones away, she is told by one of her more voluble charges that Teacher B, a little further down the corridor, doesnt care if they do. Teacher A is immediately undermined and, despite her willingness and capacity to follow the rule, is somewhat less able to make it work.
A group of academics has quit the Australia India Institute at Melbourne University, citing concerns for academic freedom and alleging interference by the Indian High Commission.

A letter signed by 13 affiliated fellows sent to Vice-Chancellor Duncan Maskell on March 29 alleges the Indian High Commissioner to Australia has intervened in the institutes activities and there have been repeated instances where research or views that are unflattering to the image of India had been blanked.

Kevin Rudd organised the setting up of the Australia India Institute during difficult diplomatic times in 2009. Credit:AP

But the university insists that decisions not to publish particular articles were not restrictions of academic freedom, but rather are an exercise based on editorial judgement as practiced by academic institutions everywhere.

The institute was designed in 2009 to strengthen relations with India, which at the time had been fractured by reports of attacks against Indian students in Australia. The Rudd Labor government gave the university an $8 million grant to establish the institute, which continues to be funded by the Australian and Victorian governments. Its director is former Tasmanian Labor senator Lisa Singh.
A woman has been arrested over alleged animal baiting in Melbournes south-east, as authorities and locals warn of suspected incidents across several suburbs in recent weeks.

Victoria Police said a member of the public allegedly observed the woman, aged 52 from Prahran, laying pieces of meat along High Street at Armadale on Tuesday evening.

Officers attended the scene and arrested the woman. They retrieved suspected baits from about 19 sites along High Street between Glenferrie Road and Orrong Road.

Police interviewed the woman at Malvern Police Station on Tuesday evening and released her from custody. She has not been charged.
A proposed new tourism centre on Penguin Island was approved this week despite opposition from the community and scientists who say the decision will spell the end of the islands little penguin population.

The Western Australian Planning Commission voted to support a motion to conditionally approve the development plans, put forward by the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, to replace the existing outdated facility.

The population of little penguins in Rockingham, where this photo was taken, is already threatened.

The Rockingham community has called for the discovery centre to be built on the mainland, concerned the construction and subsequent tourism would be detrimental to the little penguins.

The penguin population has already plummeted 80 per cent over the past 15 years, and births last season were the second-lowest ever recorded. Now roughly just 300 remain.
Australian diplomats have warned Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his cabinet ministers that expelling Russian officials from Canberra would likely result in the closure of its Moscow embassy and put Australian lives at risk.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese on Wednesday night called on the government to boot out Russian diplomats in response to the latest revelations of Russias atrocities in Ukraine, after the national security committee of cabinet weighed up the options on Tuesday.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his cabinet are considering expelling Russian diplomats from Canberra. Credit:Rhett Wyman

Various options were canvassed at the meeting as Mr Morrison and Foreign Minister Marise Payne considered whether to move on the diplomats, according to multiple government sources who were not authorised to speak publicly but said the matter was under serious consideration.

The meeting was told that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trades advice was not to expel any Russian diplomats on the basis that it would almost certainly result in the closure of Australias Moscow embassy and put Australians living in Russia at risk.
Australias top cyber spy has suggested Russia has not launched a major cyber attack on Ukraine because it fears what Western countries such as Australia would do in return.

Australian Signals Directorate boss Rachel Noble also confirmed Australia was concerned about Chinas intent and their long-term interests in the Pacific after revelations of a pending security deal between Beijing and the Solomon Islands.

ASD director-general Rachel Noble warns Russia still has the capabilities to launch a major cyber attack on Ukraine. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Leading up to Russias invasion of Ukraine, there were widespread fears that there would be a major cyber attack to cut off electricity and communications given the nations long history of cyber warfare. But this hasnt materialised, with no significant hack during the invasion that could have sent large parts of the country dark.

In an exclusive interview with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Ms Noble warned Russia could still launch a major hack attack against Ukraine.
Greens leader Adam Bandt will launch an election fight over coal and gas by accusing Labor leader Anthony Albanese of being a small target on climate change with his support for fossil fuel exports, ramping up a message to voters to give the Greens the balance of power in parliament.

A new Greens campaign warns voters that Labor and the Coalition are taking donations from fossil fuel companies and that a third voice is needed to increase action on climate and remove Prime Minister Scott Morrison from office without giving Labor unfettered power.

Greens leader Adam Bandt will target the influence of fossil fuel companies on the major parties as he campaigns to win the balance of power in the Senate. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

But the party is facing growing competition for donations and volunteers from the voices of movement and the independent candidates who are challenging Liberal MPs in city seats, throwing national attention on the teal-coloured campaigns rather than the Greens.

With the formal election campaign about to begin, Mr Bandt denied the independents were costing the Greens any financial support and said voters who backed the new options in the lower house should give the Greens their support in the Senate.
Resilience NSW boss Shane Fitzsimmons said there was no confusion about who was in charge during unprecedented floods in the states north, denying the government dropped the ball in its response.

The head of the states disaster management agency said the scale of the February-March flood was not anticipated because the conditions were not predicted.

It caught all manner of people unawares, and it resulted in extraordinary widespread, unprecedented damage and destruction, he told a budget estimates hearing on Wednesday.

Shane Fitzsimmons gives evidence at NSW Parliament on Wednesday. Credit:Sam Mooy

In hindsight it would have been great to have all manner of additional things in place, if there was a forecast that indicated what ultimately happened  and there wasnt.
The Victorian Auditor-General has found the Andrews government used millions of taxpayer dollars to run party political advertisements that could have influenced voters, in breach of regulations.

Government campaigns are required to be in the public interest and have no political content, under legislation passed in 2017 to better regulate at least $80 million worth of public funds spent on advertisements each year.

The Victorian Auditor-Generals Office said the state governments our fair share campaign breached regulations. Credit:Victorian government

But two advertisements reviewed by the Victorian Auditor-Generals Office were both found to breach the law.

In a report tabled in State Parliament on Wednesday, the Auditor-General said there was no evidence government agencies acted in bad faith in creating the two campaigns, but they did not take sufficient steps to comply with the law. The agencies responded they believed they had complied. The Auditor-Generals Office said this suggested the laws could be unclear.
London: French President Emmanuel Macron has warned voters he could lose the election after a late surge in support for the far-right and forecasts of a lower-than-expected turnout at the Sunday polls amid deep social divisions throughout the country.

Marine Le Pen, the right-wing nationalist who was defeated 66 per cent to 34 per cent by Macron in the presidential run-off five years ago, has closed the gap in recent weeks, prompting the incumbent centrist to issue a rallying cry to supporters in the final days before they head to the ballot box.

French President Emmanuel Macron. Credit:Bloomberg

The 44-year-old said a Le Pen victory would take the country backwards during the biggest security challenge Europe has faced since World War II  the war in Ukraine  because Le Pen is hostile to the EU and NATO and wants to exclude foreigners from free healthcare, welfare benefits and access to jobs.

A Harris Interactive poll published on Wednesday showed support for Macron on 51.5 per cent and Le Pen on 48.4 per cent if the pair made it through to the second round, a result within the margin of error.
[April 06, 2022] GTT Announces New Board of Directors for Reorganized Company New chairman of the board will be Anthony Abate

Board member terms to commence following company emergence from chapter 11 MCLEAN, Va., April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- GTT Communications, Inc. , GTT or the Company, a leading global cloud networking provider to multinational clients, has announced the selection of directors that will be appointed to GTTs Board of Directors upon emergence from chapter 11. The new chairman of the board will be Anthony Abate, and the named directors will be Sherman Edmiston, Jon Lin, Adam Malin, Ernest Ortega, James Parker, and Wayne Rehberger. The new board of directors will be formally constituted and appointed upon GTTs and its debtor-subsidiaries emergence from their prepackaged chapter 11 cases, which is expected to occur within the next several months after certain required regulatory approvals have been obtained. The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York approved GTTs prepackaged plan of reorganization on December 16, 2021. The new board will bring substantial knowledge of the telecommunications industry and corporate finance, coupled with seasoned governance experience, in support of the Companys business transformation and growth phase of its multi-year strategy. Anthony Tony Abate, who will be the new chairman of the board of reorganized GTT, currently serves as a director of GTT and a member of GTTs Strategic Planning Committee. Mr. Abate also currently is the chairman of the board of directors of Southeastern Grocers and director and Audit Committee chair of Denbury, Inc. Previously, he served as an independent director of TOPS and Broadview Networks, after each emerged from bankruptcy. He also served as an independent director for Looking Glass Networks and Cbeyond Communications. In addition to his board activity, Mr. Abate spent the past 16 years in operating roles, most recently as chief operating officer and chief financial officer of Echo360, Inc. Mr. Abate also spent over a decade as an investor at Battery Ventures and Whitney & Co., serving on the board of several private equity backed businesses, and worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Co., where he advised several leading publicly traded companies on business performance improvement and new market expansion. Sherman Edmiston III currently serves as a director of GTT and a member of GTTs Strategic Planning Committee. Since August 2016, Mr. Edmiston has served as a managing member of HI CapM Advisors. He also currently serves as a director of Arko Corp., Key Energy Services, Inc., Real Alloy, and Riverbed Technology, Inc. Mr. Edmiston previously has served as a director of Arch Resources, Centric Brands, Inc., IPC Systems, Inc., Mallinckrodt SpecGX., and HCR ManorCare Inc. Jon Lin serves as the executive vice president and general manager at Equinix, responsible for Equinixs Data Center Services business. Mr. Lin has been with Equinix for more than 13 years, and has held senior leadership positions in strategy, product, engineering, sales engineering, and professional services throughout his career. Prior to Equinix, Mr. Lin held leadership roles at Tata Communications and UUNET/Verizon. Ernest Ernie Ortega currently serves as CEO of GTT and will continue on in this role. Mr. Ortega brings over 30 years of experience in the telecommunications industry with a strong record of delivering revenue growth at major companies. He has held various C-level roles with leading organizations with responsibility for $400 million to $1.7 billion in revenue. Prior to joining GTT in 2019, Mr. Ortega was CEO of Towerstream. He was also chief revenue officer at Colt Technology Services. Before joining Colt, Mr. Ortega was chief revenue officer at Cogent, and prior to that, he spent 14 years at XO Communications in leadership positions, including executive vice president of sales and marketing. James Parker is CEO and member of the board of directors for Tangoe and has two decades of leadership experience in enterprise software, cloud, and telecom. Prior to joining Tangoes leadership team, he was CEO and executive director for Masergy, a leading software-defined global network company. Before joining Masergy, Mr. Parker served as chief customer officer for Tata Communications. Earlier in his career, Mr. Parker held senior leadership roles with CenturyLink and Microsoft. Wayne Rehberger served as the senior vice president and CFO of Engility from 2015 until his retirement in 2019. Mr. Rehberger was also the CFO at TASC, from 2010 to its subsequent merger with Engility in 2015. Prior to his CFO roles in the professional services industry, Mr. Rehberger served as the COO of XO Communications. Before taking on the role of COO in 2004, Mr. Rehberger also served as XOs CFO for more than four years. Prior to that, Mr. Rehberger was affiliated with MCI Communications, where he held several broad financial roles. Mr. Rehberger also has served as a director on several public and private boards. He most recently was a director of QTS Realty Trust and, from 2020 to 2021, served on the board of Fusion Connect. Mr. Rehberger currently serves on the board of Abt Associates as a member of both the Audit and Compensation committees. He is also a member of the advisory boards of SAP National Security Services, a subsidiary of SAP, and Pixelligent, an international nano-technology company. Adam Malin is a partner and senior member of the investment team at Anchorage Capital Group. Mr. Malin has led investments for the firm for over 10 years in the technology and telecommunications sectors. Prior to joining Anchorage in 2009, he was an analyst inthe financial restructuring group with Goldman Sachs in New York, where he focused on advisory and financings for companies across a variety of industries. Mr. Malin has served as a board observer for several companies, including eir, a large fixed and mobile communications provider in Ireland, and SentinelOne, a cyber-security company. Additional information regarding GTTs reorganization, including court filings and additional information regarding the individuals selected to serve on the board of directors of reorganized GTT, can be accessed free of charge by visiting GTTs restructuring website at https://cases.primeclerk.com/GTT or for a fee via PACER at https://www.pacer.gov . About GTT GTT provides secure global connectivity, improving network performance and agility for your people, places, applications and clouds. We operate a global Tier 1 internet network and provide a comprehensive suite of cloud networking and managed solutions that utilize advanced software-defined networking and security technologies. We serve thousands of businesses with a portfolio that includes SD-WAN and other WAN services, internet, security and voice services. Our customers benefit from a customer-first service experience underpinned by our commitment to operational excellence. For more information on GTT, please visit www.gtt.net . GTT Media Inquiries:

Ed Stevenson, LEWIS

+44-207-802-2626

gttuk@teamlewis.com GTT Investor Relations:

Charlie Lucas, GTT

VP of Finance

investorrelations@gtt.net Forward Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and such statements are intended to be covered by the safe harbor provided by the same. These statements are based on the current beliefs and expectations of the Companys management and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. The above statements regarding the board of directors of reorganized GTT constitute forward-looking statements that are based on the Companys current expectations. Because these forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, there are important factors that could cause future events to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements, many of which are outside of the Companys control. These factors include, but are not limited to, the effects on the Companys business and clients of general economic and financial market conditions, as well as the following: (1) the Company has announced that its previously issued financial statements for the years ended December 31, 2019, 2018 and 2017, each of the quarters during the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2018 and the quarter ended March 31, 2020 (the Non-Reliance Periods) and related disclosures and communications should no longer be relied upon as a result of preliminary findings of the Companys previously disclosed review of certain accounting issues (the Review); the Company is continuing to finalize its quantification of the impact of errors identified by the Review on financial results for the Non-Reliance Periods and the impact may be materially different than previously disclosed estimates; (2) the completion of the Review and the completion and filing of the restated financial statements relating to the Companys previously issued consolidated financial statements for the Non-Reliance Periods, its Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q for the quarters ended June 30, 2020 and September 30, 2020, its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020, and its Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q for the quarters ended March 31, 2021 and June 30, 2021 may take longer than expected as a result of the timing or findings of the Review or the Companys independent registered public accounting firms review process; (3) existing cash balances and funds generated from operations may not be sufficient to finance the Companys operations and meet its cash requirements; (4) the Company is subject to risks associated with the actions of network providers and a concentrated number of vendors and clients; (5) the Company could be subject to cyber-attacks and other security breaches; (6) the Companys network could suffer serious disruption if certain locations experience damage or as the Company adds features and updates its network; (7) the Company is subject to risks associated with purchase commitments to vendors for longer terms or in excess of the volumes committed by the Companys underlying clients, or sales commitments to clients that extend beyond the Companys commitments from its underlying suppliers; (8) the Company may be unable to establish and maintain peering relationships with other providers or agreements with carrier neutral data center operators; (9) the Companys business, results of operation and financial condition are subject to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and related market and economic conditions; (10) the Company may be affected by information systems that do not perform as expected or by consolidation, competition, regulation or a downturn in the Companys industry; (11) the Company may be liable for the material that content providers distribute over its network; (12) the Company has generated net losses historically and may continue to do so; (13) the Company may fail to successfully integrate any future acquisitions or to efficiently manage its growth; (14) the Company may be unable to retain or hire key employees; (15) the Company recently announced management changes; (16) the Company is subject to risks relating to the international operations of its business; (17) the Company may be affected by tax assessments, unfavorable tax audit outcomes, delayed tax filings and future increased levels of taxation; (18) the Company has substantial indebtedness, which could prevent it from fulfilling its obligations under its debt agreements or subject the Company to interest rate risk; (19) the potential failure of the Company to realize anticipated benefits of the sale of the Companys infrastructure division (the Sale Transaction); (20) risks from relying on the buyer, Cube Telecom Europe Bidco Limited, for various critical transaction services and network services for an extended period under the transition services agreement and the master services agreement contemplated by the sale and purchase agreement for the Sale Transaction; (21) the potential impact of consummation of the Sale Transaction on relationships with third parties, including customers, employees and competitors; (22) the ability to attract new customers and retain existing customers in the manner anticipated; (23) the Company has announced that it expects to report material weaknesses in internal control over financial reporting and its internal control over financial reporting may have further weaknesses of which the Company is not currently aware or which have not been detected; (24) the restructuring support agreement in respect of the restructuring of the indebtedness and capitalization of the Company and certain of its direct and indirect subsidiaries may be terminated by certain of its parties if specified milestones are not achieved, amended or waived, or if certain other events occur; and (25) the risks and uncertainties relating to the cases for voluntary relief (the Chapter 11 Cases) that the Company filed under chapter 11 of title 11 of the United States Code, 11 U.S.C.  101-1532, including but not limited to, the Companys ability to obtain approval of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York (the Bankruptcy Court) with respect to motions, the effects of the Chapter 11 Cases on the Company and on the interests of various constituencies, Bankruptcy Court rulings in the Chapter 11 Cases and the outcome of the Chapter 11 Cases in general, the length of time the Company will operate under the Chapter 11 Cases, risks associated with third-party motions in the Chapter 11 Cases, regulatory approvals required to emerge from chapter 11, the potential adverse effects of the Chapter 11 Cases on the Companys liquidity or results of operations and increased legal and other professional costs in connection with the Chapter 11 Cases. The foregoing list of factors is not exhaustive. The Company does not undertake to update the forward-looking statements to reflect the impact of circumstances or events that may arise after the date of the forward-looking statements. For a discussion of a variety of risk factors affecting the Companys business and prospects, see Risk Factors in the Companys annual and quarterly reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC) including, but not limited to, its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019 and its Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2020, which have been filed with the SEC and are available on the Companys website (www.gtt.net) and on the SECs website (www.sec.gov).



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Back in May 2021, Netflix announced the release of a spinoff series of Bridgerton focussing on the younger years of Queen Charlotte, but since then, they've been relatively quiet about the upcoming series.

Here is everything we know so far.

The series is a prequel, traveling back to Queen Charlotte's younger years and exploring her rise to prominence and esteemed power.

Written by Bridgerton executive producer Shona Rhimes, the series will look into her life as a young woman and explore all of her romances and love affairs before she married King George III.
2 Men Charged in Buena Park Drug Bust

SANTA ANA, Calif.Two men were behind bars Wednesday on charges related to what Orange County authorities say was one of the largest drug busts in the past 16 years.

Edgar Alfonso Lamaslopez, 36, and Carlos Raygozaparedes, 53, were charged March 21 with multiple felonies, and the pair pleaded not guilty that same day. They are next due in court May 16 in the North Justice Center in Fullerton for a pretrial hearing.

The two were being held in lieu of $5 million bail.

Lamaslopezs attorney, Wilo Nunez, said it amounted to no bail. Nunez said his client is presumed innocent and that he has just received the evidence in the case from prosecutors and would reserve further comment until later when he has had a chance to review it.

Buena Park police recovered 821 pounds of methamphetamine, 189.7 pounds of cocaine and 20.5 pounds of fentanyl pills in a traffic stop of a minivan on March 17, according to the Orange County District Attorneys Office.

Lamaslopez and Raygozaparedes are charged with three felony counts each of possession of a controlled substance with the intent to sell and sale or transport of a controlled substance, and they face sentencing enhancements for substances exceeding 80 kilograms by weight and 20 kilograms by weight or 400 liters by liquid volume.

They face up to 37 years and four months in prison if convicted at trial.
22 Men in Florida Arrested in Undercover Child Sex Sting Called April Fools

Officials in Marion County, Florida have arrested nearly two dozen men seeking sex with kids during a six-day undercover sting operation called April Fools.

According to the Marion County Sheriffs Office (MCSO), county deputies, with assistance from local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, conducted an undercover operation that resulted in the arrest of 22 men who thought they were meeting underage children.

The operation saw undercover officers exchange messages with 19 men who later traveled to various locations in Marion County expecting to meet a child aged between 12 and 16 for sexual activity.

During the online exchanges, these men engaged in sexually explicit conversations, graphically describing the sexual acts they hoped to perform with the child, the Sheriffs Office said.

Upon arriving at the various locations in Marion County, the men were met by law enforcement officers, who immediately detained them.

Another eight men have warrants out for their arrest for sending sexually explicit pictures to individuals they believed were minors, however, those men did not travel to meet a child.

Of those eight additional men, three have been arrested and deputies are actively looking for the other five.

A childs innocence is something we should all strive to protect, said Sheriff Billy Woods. I will continue to use all of my resources to hunt down these predators so they may never hurt a child.

Speaking at a news conference following the sting operation, Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods said that officials had now arrested a total of 27 individuals as part of the six-day undercover operation.

At a news conference, Woods said 22 of the arrests were local and included one individual who works as a Florida Department of Corrections officer, another who works in the school system, and the son of Ocala City Council member Ire Bethea Sr.

Woods said his heart goes out to Ire Bethea Sr, but to him, not to his son.

You got one individual who thought he was meeting a 12-year-old paraplegic individual to have sex, Woods said. It infuriates me. As a father, my blood boils to think this occurs on a regular basis.

The Marion County Sheriff also urged parents to keep tabs on their children and ensure they are being safe when they are using technology.

Every day, there is somebody out there trying to get your teen into a dark place, Woods said.

During his impassioned conference, a visibly infuriated Woods said that he and other law enforcement officers will continue to investigate and track down child sex predators.

I will use every resource in my power to hunt you down, he said. I want this community to know they are the predators. They are the ones preying on your innocent children every day. Our detectives didnt ask them to have sex. They are the ones who reached out. These predators go where children are.
23 Members of Congress Demand Investigation of Possibly Illegal Abortions in Washington

A coalition of 23 Republican members of Congress is demanding that Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser and the Metropolitan Police Department carry out an investigation into the deaths of five fetuses in the city who may have been killed in violation of federal abortion laws.

The case came to light after activists with Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU) said they had obtained a box of medical waste containing 115 aborted fetuses from a Washington abortion clinic, and that there were indications that five of the procedures werent done legally.

They were so advanced in their gestational age and the patterns of their wounds suggest violent federal crimes, Lauren Handy, director of activism for the pro-life group, told reporters during a press conference.

Specifically, the five babies are suspected to have been killed by partial-birth abortion, an extremely controversial procedure that allows doctors to deliver and then end the childs life outside of the womb.

Under the standard set out in the 1973 case Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruled that once babies reached the point of viability, or the ability to live independently outside of the womb, restrictions on abortion were proper and aligned with the states interest in protecting life.

PAAUs discovery of the bodies caused an outcry of horror among many conservative and pro-life activists, with posts on the issue garnering thousands of views and shares on various social media platforms.

Now, a coalition of 23 Republicansincluding lawmakers such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), and Ted Cruz (R-Texas)are demanding that police conduct a more thorough investigation into the infants deaths.

As Members of Congress, we have an obligation to conduct oversight over the District of Columbia (D.C.), to ensure D.C. upholds laws enacted by Congress, particularly those enacted to protect and uphold the sanctity of human life, the coalition wrote in an April 6 letter addressed to Bowser and Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee.

Instead of ensuring that the horrific deaths of these children were properly investigated, Metropolitan Police made the assumption that each child died as the result of a legal abortion.

It is our understanding that the Metropolitan Police made this assumption without conducting any medical evaluations. We also understand from press reports that the D.C. medical examiner does not plan to perform autopsies on the children. This is completely unacceptable.

While other horrific methods of abortion unfortunately remain legal for the time being, killing a child through a partial-birth abortion is a crime under federal law. Under the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, a partial-birth abortion occurs when a physician partially delivers a living child for the purpose of performing an overt act that intentionally takes the life of the child.

They also noted that the partial-birth abortion ban was upheld by the Supreme Court in Gonzalez v. Carhart in 2007.

Based on evidence collected at the time of recovery and photos that have been publicly shared, all five of these children appear to have developed well past the point of viability, and likely suffered severely painful abortion procedures, though without an autopsy, it is not known how each child died, the letter continues.

For example, one baby girl has significant damage to her head, with deep lacerations at the back of the neck, and may have been victim of an illegal partial birth abortion. Another baby was found in its amniotic sac and could have been born alive.

These five children, like all children, have inherent value and deserved better than abortionthey deserved life. But at a minimum, they deserve to have their deaths investigated to ensure that no D.C. or federal laws were broken.

In light of this information, we demand that a thorough investigation is conducted into the death of each child. In order to accomplish such investigation, we request and fully expect the city to conduct autopsies on the children and preserve all collected evidence.

Finally, at the conclusion of such examinations, we urge the city to properly and respectfully bury the babies.

Affixed to the bottom of the letter were several specific questions regarding whether authorities would honor the request, and the lawmakers reiterated their demand for a proper burial for the victims.

Bowsers office didnt respond by press time to a request for comment. A Metropolitan Police Department spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email that because the case remains under active investigation, the department is unable to discuss specifics.

The case is emerging as battle lines over abortion are being drawn across the nation, with many red stateswhich have remained opposed to the practice since Roe v. Wade restricted states right to bar itapproving or enacting heartbeat bills, which ban abortion once a childs heartbeat becomes detectable.

In blue states such as Coloradowhere Gov. Jared Polis on April 5 signed a bill into law removing all restrictions on abortionDemocrats have sought to strengthen access to abortion and relax many remaining restrictions.

The conservative-dominated Supreme Court, for its part, has shown a willingness to relax the standards laid out in Roe v. Wade, returning the power to regulate abortion to the states.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
An 80-year-old retired business owner from Anchorage, Alaska, was always haunted by a red stamp on his 1961 high school diploma: This student met minimum state requirements. Having toiled to make ends meet, he felt the stamp was unfair.

However, with Billy Ray Macon Sr.s family being aware of this stain on his past, they organized a big surprise; the great-grandfather was invited to West Anchorage High School on Jan. 28, his 80th birthday, for a one man, one-day graduation.

(Courtesy of Tafena Timpson)

This all began with my granddaughter, Macon Sr. told The Epoch Times. She went through the school department and they gave her permission  they brought in the cheerleaders, the choir, the principal; everybody was there, and it really made me feel warm inside.

sixty-one years later, they hit me with this surprise  it was unbelievable. There is justice out there, believe it or not!

Tafena Timpson, the granddaughter of Macon Sr. who works for the Portland, Oregon, School District, wrote an open letter to the Anchorage School District and shared it on a Facebook post in January, explaining her grandfathers circumstances.

(Courtesy of Tafena Timpson)

I was about 10 years old when I first recall grandpa sharing his diploma with me, wrote Timpson. He had it in a drawer of treasures that I was going through. I brought the booklet over to my grandpa and asked what it was, and immediately saw the shame overtake his spirit.

That stamp, to grandpa, meant that he was a failure. That stamp, to grandpa, meant that his sacrifice was in vain, she explained.

Timpsons post reached West Anchorage High School principal Sven Gustafson. Rather than simply hand over a new diploma, Gustafson pulled out all the stops with a ceremony, yearbook, cap and gown, and other school memorabilia.

The stunned octogenarian, who suffers from back problems, was escorted to the school assembly in a wheelchair. The footage from the heartwarming ceremony was shared online.

(Courtesy of Tafena Timpson)

Macon Sr. was 19 when he graduated from high school. Already married to his high school sweetheart, Lourdes, with one child and another on the way, he walked over an hour to school every morning, then walked another six miles to work on an Air Force base until late, before returning to his shack with no running water or electricity to complete his homework under candlelight. He repeated the same routine every year around, despite the freezing temperatures.

Additionally, his work as a busboy would throw him into the midnight hours. Yet he always asked the dishwashers and janitors if he could help after hours for a little extra cash.

Life was never easy for Macon Sr., as there were different hurdles to cross at each point.

I promised myself Id never walk another mile, he told The Epoch Times. I bought a car for $50, went to pick it up, and then broke down. I was walking again  very seldom did we have money to buy new.

(Courtesy of Tafena Timpson)

Most of the teachers werent aware of his struggle. However, there was one teacher who did see what he was going through, and would check in with him using a special code.

Despite having his own family, Macon Sr., who was the oldest of ten kids to his parents, continued to support and care for his siblings, becoming somewhat of a parental figure to them.

Thus when he got that stamp on his diploma, he was really hurt.

Though he was an upbeat, chipper, and very affable person who created an influence on those around him, Timpson shared that, while talking about the stamp across his diploma, her grandfather would get emotional and she could hear his voice crack up.

They dismissed all my hard work Timpson shared of her grandfathers words. I would often hear as he trailed off in thought with a tear in his eye.

That stamp, to grandpa, meant that he wasnt worthy.

(Courtesy of Tafena Timpson)

Thus six decades later, his long-overdue high school graduation and new diploma were a symbol of justice to the entire family.

It moved us to tears, said his son, 62-year-old Billy Macon Jr. How can you not succeed and continue to be determined when you listen to his story? He overcame. He and my mother are models for all of us.

Macon Sr. says that, while life is tough, he believes that the key is never to give up.

I can do it; I know you can do it. Anybody can do it, he said.

(Courtesy of Tafena Timpson)

Having seen her husband work hard through the course of his life, Lourdes stated: Nothing stands in his way, and if its in his way, he finds a way to go round it.

Macon Sr.s sister-in-law Florentina Campos echoed similar sentiments.

I see greatness in his children that stems right from his passion, from his heart, and from his motivation to achieve, she told The Epoch Times. They look at him as an example, walking all that time to print money for his family, and yet his focus was to continue school and get his graduation; and he did.

Married over 60 years, now a grandfather to 12 and great-grandfather to 8, Macon Sr. worked for the U.S. postal service for six years, the Federal Aviation Administration for 13 years, ran a real estate business, and built his own home before he retired. He has even published a book of poetry.

(Courtesy of Tafena Timpson)

Share your stories with us at emg.inspired@epochtimes.com, and continue to get your daily dose of inspiration by signing up for the Bright newsletter at TheEpochTimes.com/newsletter
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, founder of space venture Blue Origin and owner of The Washington Post, participates in an event hosted by the Air Force Association in National Harbor, Md., on Sept. 19, 2018. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Amazon Signs Landmark Rocket Deal

Former Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos has reunited with his former company in a landmark deal to launch 83 satellites in upcoming years, in what has been described as the largest deal ever in the history of the commercial space industry.

On Tuesday, Amazon announced that it would be partnering with numerous companies to launch a total of 83 satellites over the span of five years, including 12 with Bezos-owned Blue Origin, 18 with French launch service provider Arianespace, and 38 with Boeing/Lockheed Martin joint venture United Launch Alliance. The contract also allows for 15 additional launches in collaboration with a private venture owned by Bezos.

These satellites are a feature of Project Kuiper, an undertaking by Amazon that seeks to provide broadband internet access worldwide by means of a series of satellites in low Earth orbit.

Project Kuiper will provide fast, affordable broadband to tens of millions of customers in unserved and underserved communities around the world, said Amazon executive David Limp in a press release.

We still have lots of work ahead, but the team has continued to hit milestone after milestone across every aspect of our satellite system. These launch agreements reflect our incredible commitment and belief in Project Kuiper, and were proud to be working with such an impressive lineup of partners to deliver on our mission.

Bezos retired from his role as CEO of Amazon in July 2020, but he retains a 12.7 percent share in the company he founded, where he still serves as executive chairman.

However, since Bezos stepped down as CEO of his most successful company, the billionaire has notably diversified his business ventures and shifted focus elsewhere.

Perhaps the most conspicuous of Bezos post-Amazon enterprises has been Blue Origin, a human spaceflight startup that has drawn headlines for shaking up the nascent commercial spaceflight industry. Founded by Bezos in 2000, Blue Origin has acquired a much higher profile since July 2021, when the Amazon founder took part in a manned spaceflight just weeks after stepping down as CEO of Amazon.

This space flight fuelled a media narrative of a supposed space race between Bezos and Elon Musk, the second-wealthiest and wealthiest men in the world, respectively. Musk, whose own startup SpaceX is Blue Origins primary competitor, has suggested that Blue Origins Project Jarvis had copied his own companys Starship.

While manned spaceflights have driven much of the media attention around Blue Origin and SpaceX, perhaps more significant for both companies are the satellites they have launched. With Earths orbit largely unregulated under international law, private companies have taken a proactive approach to claim the skies while the space is still available.

Musks SpaceX is seen as the dominant player in this space race, with over 2,000 SpaceX satellites, with the company owning 36 percent of all active satellites as of September 2021. The preeminence of SpaceX has drawn criticism from some such as Josef Aschbacher, head of the European Space Agency, who claimed last December that Musk was making the rules for space with his dominance of the satellite industry.
Anthony Albanese Decries Web Address Redirect to LNP as Childish

Australias Labor Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese has decried a move by the Liberal-National coalition party (LNP) after it registered a web address bearing his name.

The web address albanese.com.au is registered to a Sam Jackson from the LNP. But in a trick Albanese referred to as a childish, the site redirects visitors to the LNPs official website, liberal.org.au.

Albanese said this kind of tactic, which has come to light just days before the federal election campaign is expected to kick-off, was not on in a democracy such as Australia. He added that voters would not be fooled.

This is a test of integrity for Scott Morrison and for the Liberal Party  I think people should behave in a reasonably adult way, he told reporters in Perth on Wednesday.

It is childish; it is an example of this government just being not in a position to advance its own agenda, being embarrassed by its own record and having no agenda for the future.

The web address albanese.com.au redirects to the official liberal.org.au site. (Screenshot by The Epoch Times)

The national Labor leader called on the LNP to undo the action, saying it would show a lack of integrity if the redirect remained.

It will also show that this government will continue engaging in scare campaigns, tricks, misinformation (and) we will see more of it going forward, he said.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the LNP campaign told the AAP: Were glad to see the domain name has been promoted so heavily, which has helped to spread the message about the Morrison governments achievements.

The domain name was acquired appropriately, and its a matter for Mr Albanese to answer why he hadnt registered this domain if he wanted to use it.
People wait in line to drop off mail-in ballots in a file photo (Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)

Arizona Supreme Court Declines Request to End Early Voting

The Arizona Supreme Court declined on April 5 to hear a Republican Party request to deem the states early voting system as unconstitutional.

The court ruled that the case didnt meet the limited criteria for a lawsuit filed directly to the states high court but said the Republican Party could take its case to the Maricopa County Superior Court.

The lawsuit (pdf), which was filed in February, asserted that mail-in voting and other forms of early voting are invalid because the Arizona Constitution specifically directs voters to cast their ballots in person. Arizonas early voting system was adopted in 1991 and has expanded since then.

In-person voting at the polls on a fixed date is the only constitutionally permissible manner of voting, the lawsuit reads. Although litigants have challenged various mail-in voting statutes on other grounds, the statutory scheme itself has never been directly challenged on state constitutional grounds or directly authorized by constitutional amendment.

Chief Justice Robert Brutinel, who issued the order, said the argument lacked factual records. He was appointed to the court in 2010 by former Republican Gov. Jan Brewer.

It wasnt immediately known if the GOP would refile the case in Superior Court. The Arizona Republican Party didnt respond by press time to a request for comment.

The latest lawsuit was filed by the state GOP and Yvonne Cahill, the partys secretary.

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who is running for governor, praised the courts decision.

Today, the Arizona Supreme Court dismissed this dangerous lawsuit that threatened early voting in the state. Arizona Voters will still be able to vote early, access drop boxes, and make their voices heard, Hobbs wrote in an April 5 Twitter post.

Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, also voiced opposition to the lawsuit, claiming it would undo the work of many Republican governors and secretaries of state over the years.

Last week, Ducey signed a bill that would require all Arizonans to provide proof of citizenship and residency to register to vote. The move sparked criticism from left-wing activist groups and Democratic lawmakers.

Federal law prohibits non-citizens from voting in federal elections. Arizona law prohibits non-citizens from voting for all state and local offices, and requires proof of citizenship, Ducey said in a statement. H.B. 2492 provides clarity to Arizona law on how officials process federal form voter registration applications that lack evidence of citizenship.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Minister for Immigration Alex Hawke at a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on Oct. 20, 2021. (AAP Image/Mick Tsikas)

Australia to Offer 100 Visas to Skilled Refugees From Ukraine and Afghanistan

Australias federal government will expand one of its skilled refugee migrant employment programs to provide new opportunities for 100 people fleeing Afghanistan and Ukraine.

Splitting the placements with 50 from each country, the scheme will expand the 100 existing placements to 200 in the Skilled Refugee Pilot Program.

Announcing the decision on March 4, the Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services, and Multicultural Affairs, Alex Hawke, said that the program had successfully matched skilled refugees with Australian employers.

The Morrison Government recognises that in many cases refugees come with a range of skills and qualifications that are highly sought after in Australia, and where they are able to, we should do everything in our power to support them to use those skills, he said, referring to the leader of the incumbent government, Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

The program is run in partnership with global refugee employment organisation, Talent Beyond Boundaries (TBB). The Australian government hopes the program will allow for additional visa flexibility for candidates from Afghanistan.

TBB Global CEO Steph Cousins said the Skilled Refugee Pilot Program recognises that many refugees have skills and talents that make them an incredible asset to Australia.

When we give displaced people opportunities to move internationally for work, theyre able to resume their careers, rebuild their lives, and enrich our communities in the process, Cousins said.

Initially focused on helping skilled migrant refugees, many of whom were living in Lebanon and Jordan, the pilot program was designed by TBB to remove numerous obstacles that refugees encountered when trying to access employer-sponsored skilled migration pathways in Australia.

Among the obstacles the program removed was the required level of English proficiency and the age bracket, which has been extended to 50.

However, Australian employers are required to seek approval from TBB and enter into a company-specific labour agreement with the Department of Home Affairs before they can access the program. Additionally, employers can only sponsor a skilled overseas worker who is trained in one of the 103 approved occupations.

One of the first migrants helped through the pilot has said the program empowered her to aspire to a successful career in Australia.

Maya, a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon, who holds a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering and a Master of Science in Civil Engineering, moved to Western Australia with her husband and pre-school aged son in December 2021.

Being a refugee has always been a problem for me, but it was never a reason for giving up, Maya said. I believed in myself and worked very hard to achieve my goals. Now, I am recognised as a professional civil engineer in Australia and looking forward to many more successful years.

Meanwhile, Mayas employer, Bluemar Consulting Engineers, is also pleased with the program and its ability to attract skilled labour to regional areas of Australia, which is often difficult.

As well as the obvious humanitarian outcomes, hiring a refugee adds further diversity of human capital and technical skills to our team. Attracting labour to regional Australia has always been difficult. The pilot program is an innovative way for us to grow our team and strengthen our business to the benefit of our regional community, said Shaun Meares, Bluemars managing director .

The announcement of the new placements for skilled migrants comes after a Senate inquiry led by Liberal Senator Eric Abez and the late Labor Senator Kimberly Kitching recommended that the Australian government increase funding for humanitarian efforts in Afghanistan, including increased funding to support Afghan refugees and quicker approval processes for humanitarian visa applications.

At present, the Australian government has communicated that there are over 100,000 humanitarian visa applications from Afghanistan, and only approximately 1,000 humanitarian visas have been granted to Afghan applicants since July 2021.

Meanwhile, Hawk announced in January that a minimum of 15,000 visa places would be allocated to Afghan nationals over four years. This would include 10,000 places within Australias existing Humanitarian Program and a minimum of 5,000 visas within the family stream.
Australia, US, UK to Collaborate on Hypersonic Weapon Development

The heads of Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom have vowed to cooperate on the development of hypersonic weapons as the three nations push to advance the trilateral AUKUS agreement amid increasing tensions in the Indo-Pacific region.

On April 6, U.S. President Joe Biden and Prime Ministers Scott Morrison (Australia) and Boris Johnson (UK) released a joint statement outlining the progress of the AUKUS agreement thus far, including cooperation on establishing a nuclear-powered submarine fleet in Australia.

In light of Russias unprovoked, unjustified, and unlawful invasion of Ukraine, we reiterated our unwavering commitment to an international system that respects human rights, the rule of law, and the peaceful resolution of disputes free from coercion, the leaders said in the statement.

We also committed today to commence new trilateral cooperation on hypersonics and counter-hypersonics, and electronic warfare capabilities, as well as to expand information sharing and to deepen cooperation on defense innovation, they added.

Hypersonic weapons fly at five times the speed of sound, are launched from sub-orbital platforms and are designed to overcome enemy defence systems through sheer speed.

China and Russia are currently ahead of Western nations in the development of these weapons, prompting U.S. leaders to expedite their own development. Russia has deployed the weapons in the current invasion of Ukraine.

The latest move follows an earlier partnership between the United States and Australia on hypersonic weapons development called SCIFiRE (Southern Cross Integrated Flight Research Experiment).

In documents released by the AUKUS leaders (pdf), working groups from the three nations are busy exchanging information on top-secret nuclear propulsion technology and on establishing the workforce and infrastructure for Australia to support a nuclear submarine fleetincluding a new $10 billion (US$7.58 billion) naval base on Australias east coast.

The three nations will also develop cutting-edge technology in the fields of quantum technology, artificial intelligence, undersea capabilities (including drones), and advanced cyber.

As we mature trilateral lines of effort within these and other critical defense and security capabilities, we will seek to engage allies and close partners as appropriate, the document stated.

Meanwhile, the prime ministers of New Zealand and Canada, Jacinda Ardern and Justin Trudeau, have each received heavy criticism for their nations missing out on AUKUSdespite being part of the tight-knit Five Eyes intelligence-sharing group with Australia, the U.S. and the UKwith blame being directed at their soft stance on defence and Beijing relations.

AUKUS was established in September 2021 amid rising tensions with Beijing in the Indo-Pacific. The decision to arm Australia with nuclear-powered submarines would kick-start a major shift in the power balance in the region, with only six nations in the world currently carrying advanced weapons.

The signing of AUKUS was justified in light of the recent security deal between the Solomon Islands and Beijingthat will allow Chinese police, military personnel, weapons, and naval ships be stationed in the regionsaid Michael Shoebridge, defence director at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The Solomon Islands is located around 1,700 kilometres (1,056 miles) from Australias northern city of Cairns on the east coast.

Its this growing spread of Peoples Liberation Army power that is one of the reasons for AUKUS to come into being, he previously told The Epoch Times. All this will do is accelerate the efforts to implement the agreement.

Meanwhile, Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said developing hypersonics was not a game of catch-up with Russia and China.

These are the latest and high-tech missiles that were talking about. Its not like theyve been in operation for a decade or so, he told the Nine Network.

Chinas Ambassador to the United Nations Zhang Jun responded on April 4 warning the leaders to refrain from doing things which may lead to conflict, according to a statement to reporters.

Just a day earlier, the Australian defence minister announced a $3.5 billion plan to fast-track the arming of jet fighters and naval warships with new long-range missiles.

Under the new plan, 24 Super Hornet jets and the countrys F-35A Joint Strike Fighter fleet will be armed with Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSM-ER) by 2024three years ahead of schedule.

The JASSM-ER is an air-to-ground cruise missile manufactured by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and has a range of 900 kilometres.

While Australian naval vessels, the Anzac-class frigate and Hobart-class destroyers, will be armed with Naval Strike Missiles (NSM) manufactured by Norwegian firm Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace.

The new anti-ship missiles will arrive five years ahead of schedule and will have a range of 185 kilometres, replacing the current Harpoon missiles.

Minister Peter Dutton said there was a need to be realistic about the actions of the CCP and the likelihood of conflict in the region.

Nobody a couple of years ago could have predicted what happened in Ukraine and theres no sense in us being blind to the reality of whats happening in our own region; the amassing of nuclear weapons by China should cause anyone concern and thats why we need to make this investment and itll keep our country safer, he told 3AW radio.
A bucket-wheel dumping soil and sand removed from another area of the mine in Newcastle, Australia, the world's largest coal exporting port, on Nov. 5, 2021. (Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images)

Australian Coal Exports Forecasted to Break Records Amid Global Energy Scramble

Australian coal exports are expected to surpass a record $100 billion (US$76 billion) for the 2021-22 financial year, according to the governments latest Resources and Energy quarterly report.

On the back of spiking demand and prices for both metallurgical and thermal coal, the value of Australian coal exports will peak at above $105 billion before gradually easing back to typical levels, an annual $41 billion.

Increasing Chinese demand coinciding with weather disruptions, supply impacts, and the impacts from the Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to two waves of skyrocketing coal prices within the last six months.

The report said global thermal coal markets were undergoing a complex transition, with prices surging as demand outpaced supply due to supply chain disruptions.

A long-term shift in demand sources away from OECD nations towards Asia was accelerating and a global drive towards low-carbon energy sources had changed incentives for investors, deterring long-term investment away.

Demand for coal from the United States and European nations, particularly Austria, Belgium, and Sweden, has fallen at a rapid pace.

In the short-term however, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is expected to delay some coal plant closures, the report said. Germany has closed nearly all of its domestic nuclear generation, making up the loss with imported Russian gas.

The need to secure its energy supply is expected to lead to scheduled coal plant closures being delayed, and could even lead to some closed plants being temporarily re-opened.

Steam rises from the cooling tower of the nuclear power plant of Gundremmingen, in Bavaria, Germany, on Dec. 31, 2021. (Stefan Puchner/dpa via AP)

As conditions return to normal, the Newcastle benchmark price for thermal coal is expected to ease from a peak of US$184 (A$244) a tonne in 2022 to around US$60 a tonne in 2027.

Demand for metallurgical coal, primarily used to make steel, has also fallen as China curbs its steel production. However, India, Japan, and Korea have seen a pickup in their steel production.

Recent catastrophic flooding in Queensland and New South Wales, where most of this coal is mined, is expected to cause further disruptions in mining and transport.

Similarly to thermal coal, the price of Australias premium metallurgical coal is forecasted to fall from an average of over US$300 a tonne in 2022 to almost half as supply conditions return to normal in 2023.

Australia is the worlds largest exporter of metallurgical coal and the second-largest exporter of thermal coal behind Indonesia.

Meanwhile, the European Union has proposed to ban Russian coal in response to alleged war crimes, a move that is likely to further increase demand for Australian coal.

However, significant supply-side disruptions remain in Australia, particularly labour shortages, restricting the ability of miners to raise output.

Australia has already been bombarded with calls for coal since the Russian invasion began, with many European countries heavily reliant on Russia for energy supplies.
An aerial view of flooding in Gympie in Queensland, Australia, on Feb. 26, 2022. (AAP Image/Supplied by Brett's Drone Photography)

Australian PM Rejects Element of Queenslands $741M Flood Recovery Request

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said he wont fund selected parts of a $741 million (US$561 million) flood recovery package request from Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, reportedly citing almost $1 billion already provided to flood victims from the federal government.

Palaszczuk wrote to Morrison in March requesting the federal government cover half of the cost to buy back houses affected by flooding and for $30 million toward clean-up efforts.

In a letter sent to Palaszczuk on April 5, obtained by The Courier-Mail, Morrison agreed to fund half the $30 million for clean-up efforts, but said the proposed buyback scheme was outside the scope of our Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements process and therefore the states responsibility.

These programs can and should be directly funded and delivered by the Queensland Government in the same way that the Commonwealth fully funds significant elements of our own contribution, Morrison reportedly wrote.

The Epoch Times couldnt immediately verify the contents of the letter.

Morrison reportedly noted in his letter that the federal government had already paid out directly to Queensland residents needing immediate support more than half of its $632 million in financial contributions.

Water floods streets and houses in Maryborough, Australia, on Feb. 28, 2022. (Queensland Fire and Emergency Services via AP)

Morrison also offered to increase recovery grant payments for small businesses and nonprofits from $15,000 to $25,000.

A spokesperson for Morrison told The Courier-Mail that the federal government would continue to assess funding proposals from the Queensland government that fit within Category D funding parameters, as we did with New South Wales.

We will continue to work with the Queensland Government to support Queenslanders impacted by the floods, the spokesperson said.

Days out from the federal election campaign kicking off, Queensland Treasurer Cameron Dick, whos acting as premier while Palaszczuk is on leave, accused Morrison of not caring about the votes of flood victims.

It doesnt matter if your home floods two, three, or four times over, Scott Morrison wants no part in creating an ongoing solution, Dick said. It is clear the Prime Minister has made a political calculation. He has decided he doesnt need flood victims to vote for himso he has nothing to offer them.
Signage is seen outside of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) headquarters in White Oak, Md., on Aug. 29, 2020. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)

Biden Administration Stops Shipments of COVID-19 Treatment to All States

The U.S. government on April 5 immediately halted all shipments of a COVID-19 treatment to states and ordered health care providers not to use the drug.

The actions were taken because of the increasing prevalence of BA.2, a subvariant of Omicron, which is a variant of the CCP virus, the virus causes COVID-19.

Data so far indicate that the monoclonal antibody called sotrovimab doesnt work against BA.2, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Regulators initially told doctors in eight states on March 27 to stop administering sotrovimab to COVID-19 patients. Several days later, the FDA expanded the action, which essentially revokes the emergency use authorization granted in 2021, to 14 additional states.

With the April 5 move, the monoclonal therapy is no longer authorized to treat COVID-19 in any U.S. region due to increases in the proportion of COVID-19 cases caused by the Omicron BA.2 subvariant, the FDA said in a statement.

The regulator is relying on estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which pegs BA.2 as causing the majority of COVID-19 cases in all regions of the country.

According to pseudovirus testing performed by the FDA, sotrovimab worked about 16 times less well against BA.2. As a result, its unlikely that the authorized dose is effective against the subvariant, the FDA told health care providers in a recently updated fact sheet.

After the FDAs update, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it was stopping all shipments of sotrovimab.

Some 16,600 doses were allocated this week, down from over 50,000 per week in the weeks before BA.2 was pegged as causing a majority of cases in some regions.

Providers should turn to the remdesivir or paxlovid treatments from Gilead Sciences and Pfizer, respectively, according to the COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel.

In situations where neither are available, providers should use bebtelovimab, a monoclonal from Eli Lilly, or Mercks molnupiravir, the panel said.

GlaxoSmithKline and Vir Biotechnology, which make sotrovimab, didnt respond to requests for comment.

The companies have said data they generated suggested the drug retained neutralizing activity against BA.2. After the FDA ordered providers in some states to stop using the drug, the companies said they were preparing a package of data in support of a higher dose of sotrovimab for the Omicron BA.2 subvariant and will be sharing these data with regulatory and health authorities around the world for discussion.
President Joe Biden believes his son didnt break any laws. But what is Hunter Biden accused of? Now lawmakers are demanding more records.

Another city under Chinas lockdown is crippling Apple and Tesla products. Near Shanghai, the major manufacturing hub is stalling production, causing a global supply crisis.

China and Ukraines foreign ministers held peace talks on the phone. But questions arise over what Beijing truly wants. We take a look at what its saying to its own people.

China makes its biggest purchase of U.S. corn since May 2021. But why? Is a food crisis looming on the horizon?

Australia is arming itself as one of its neighbors is opening the door for Beijing to station troops in the South Pacific. Also at the forefront is the United States.

Topics in this episode:

What Hunter Biden Is Accused Of In China & Ukraine

Apple, Tesla Productions Stalled By China Lockdowns

China, Ukraine Foreign Ministers On Russian War

China Unifies Narrative On The Russia-Ukraine War

China Supports Investigation In Bucha, Ukraine

Australia, India Sign Trade Deal To Reduce Tariffs

China Makes Large Purchase Of U.S. Corn

Kansas Researcher Defends Ties With China

Australia To Arm Warships With New Missiles

China-Solomon Islands Deal Drives Pacific Concerns

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 newsletter for more first-hand news from China.

For more news and videos, please visit us on Gettr and Twitter.
Gas pipelines are seen in a gas distribution center near the Serbian border in Kiskundorozsma, Hungary, on Sept. 28, 2021. (Bernadett Szabo/Reuters)

Breaking Ranks With EU, Hungary Says Ready to Pay for Russian Gas in Roubles

BUDAPEST/LONDONHungary said on Wednesday it was prepared to pay roubles for Russian gas, breaking ranks with the European Union which has sought a united front in opposing Moscows demand for payment in the currency.

Hungary will pay for shipments in roubles if Russia asks it to, Prime Minister Viktor Orban told a news conference on Wednesday in reply to a Reuters question.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned Europe it risks having gas supplies cut unless it pays in roubles as he seeks retaliation over Western sanctions for Moscows invasion of Ukraine. With weeks go to before bills are due, the European Commission has said that those with contracts requiring payment in euros or dollars should stick to that. Hungarys Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto earlier said that EU authorities had no role to play in its gas supply deal with Russia, which was based on a bilateral contract between units of Hungarian state-owned MVM and of Gazprom.

The European Commission does not comment on declarations from national authorities, a spokesperson said. Hungary has been one of a few EU member states that have rejected energy sanctions against Moscow in response to the invasion, which Russia terms a special military operation.

Reliant on Russian Gas

While Putins demand has raised hackles in many of Europes capitals, its governmentswhich on average rely on Russia for more than a third of their gasare discussing the issue with energy companies. On Monday, Slovakia said it will act in unison with the EU, while Polands dominant gas company PGNiG has maintained that its original contract with Gazprom which expires at the end of this year is binding on both parties.

A view shows Russian rouble coins in this illustration picture taken on March 25, 2021. (Maxim Shemetov/Illustration/Reuters)

Austrias OMV and Russias Gazprom have had initial contact about paying for gas in roubles, a spokesperson for OMV said on Friday, though the government in Vienna said there was no basis for payment in any currency other than euros or dollars.

Ukraines foreign minister insisted an embargo on Russian gas and oil is needed but the European Union has so far stopped short, while preparing to propose a ban on coal imports and other products.

European buyers are increasing shipments of coal from across the globe against a backdrop of a proposed EU ban on Russian imports and the scramble to relieve tight gas supplies, according to data and shipping sources. The European Commissions intention that there should be some kind of common response from countries importing Russian gas was not considered necessary, Hungarys Szijjarto said, adding that nations had individually signed bilateral contracts. And  no one has a say in how we modify our own contract.

Hungary, which is heavily reliant on Russian gas and oil imports, signed a new long-term gas supply deal last year under which Gazprom is expected to ship 4.5 billion cubic meters of gas annually. Meanwhile, Putin has discussed expanding Moscows economic cooperation with Belgrade, including in the energy sector, with his Serbian counterpart Aleksandar Vucic.

Serbias contract for Russian gas expires on May 31. Talks about the new contract need to be launched as soon as possible, a statement from Vucics office said.

Latvias largest gas trader, which is a third owned by Gazprom, has said it is considering whether it should pay in euros or roubles for Russian gas but a Latvian foreign ministry spokesman said: Latvia does not support paying in roubles and there has to be a common EU approach.

Lithuania has said it will no longer import Russian gas to meet its domestic needs, becoming the first country in Europe to have secured its independence from Russian supplies. Russian gas deliveries to Europe via three key pipeline routes were broadly steady overall on Wednesday.

By Krisztina Than, Gergely Szakacs and Nina Chestney
Rishi Sunak announced the scheme where "stablecoins" will become recognised forms of payment to give people confidence in using digital currencies. (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

British Government Announces Move to Recognise and Regulate Cryptocurrency

Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, has announced his ambition to make the UK a global hub for crypto-asset technology, in a move thatll see some cryptocurrencies called stablecoins recognised as a valid form of payment.

Unlike Bitcoin, which is a private, decentralised digital currency, stablecoins are cryptocurrencies designed to have a stable value relative to traditional currencies, or to a commodity such as gold. For example, Tether is the largest stablecoin current market value of nearly $70 billion. Others include Dai and Binance USD. However, the Treasury has not yet confirmed which stablecoins will be regulated.

Stablecoins

After a consultation in January, where the government said that stablecoins could pave the way for faster, cheaper payments, making it easier for people to pay for things or store their money, it now intends to legislate them within the payments regulatory perimeter, creating conditions for stablecoins issuers and service providers to operate and invest in the UK.

Commentator and investor on the future of finance and technology, Simon Dixon, who runs the global online investment platform Bank To The Future, told The Epoch Times that countries all around the world for the last 10 years have been trying to figure out how to support or eliminate our industry.

Dixons platform has, to date, invested $825 million in the crypto sector. He said that who benefits from the process of creating money and stable coins is up for grabs.

Now all these different players said we should create stable coins but who creates them is the internal war, because whoever creates the money controls the economy, he said.

When a central bank creates a digital currency, it doesnt have to be backed by a loan so it is a radically different way of creating money, essentially you are just creating the money, it doesnt have to be lent into existence, he added.

Among the announcements included a commitment to launch an official Royal Mint NFT (non-fungible token) later this year as well a new financial market infrastructure sandbox and Financial Conduct Authority-led cryptosprint. According to the government, the last two can ensure financial stability and high regulatory standards so that these new technologies can ultimately be used both reliably and safely.

CBDC

The Treasury took a more optimistic tone than when Deputy Bank governor Sir Jon Cunliffe told the BBC that crypto-currency assets could pose a danger to the established financial system. Cunliffe said that about 0.1 percent of UK households wealth was in crypto-currencies. This amounted to an estimated 2.3 million people holding an average amount per person of about 300 ($392).

Their price can vary quite considerably and they could theoretically or practically drop to zero, said Cunliffe. We really need to roll our sleeves up and get on with it, so that by the time this becomes a much bigger issue, weve actually got the regulatory framework to contain the risks, he added.

Last November, the Bank of England announced that it was looking carefully at a UK central bank digital currency (CBDC). As of yet, it has not yet made the decision to introduce one. A CBDC is different from a cryptocurrency. The new form of digital money would be issued by the Bank of England, though there is public concern over the risk of state surveillance and control.

Scary Prospect

Dixon, who has a Youtube channel with 80,000 subscribers, said that CBDC puts through a mechanism in which theoretically, the government may not need to bail out the banks again as it did in 2007. At the time, a British government bank rescue package totaling some 500 billion ($653.8 billion) was spent in response to the global financial crisis.

The Treasury could decide to get rid of the central bank and then the Government could take full control over money rather than giving it to the central bank or to the private bank, which is a scary prospect, he said.

A CBDC could also mean automating tax collection at the point of transaction, which then would be tied to a passport which could stop people from traveling if this is in dispute.

The reason why people are scared about this is that by allowing the government to create money, history has shown that they will use that power in order to enforce agendas to make government bigger and bigger.

Dixon added that the counterforce is private cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Etherium. That allows the market to compete, he said.
California Assembly Committee Passes Bill That Could Legalize Infanticide

SACRAMENTOA proposed bill to bar criminal prosecution into the suspicious death of an unborn or newborn baby was passed by a state assembly committee on April 5.

Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) introduced Assembly Bill (AB) 2223 to prevent pregnant women from being prosecuted for either terminating a pregnancy or losing their baby, she said during an April 5 Judiciary Committee meeting.

AB 2223 is intended to protect against the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes, and people should not be subject to prosecution for any tragic situation that may happen during the pregnancy, Wicks said.

The bill would prohibit holding a personthe mother or a health care providerresponsible for miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion, or perinatal death of a baby based on their actions or omissions related to the pregnancy, according to the state legislative information website.

Although the bill doesnt give a precise definition of perinatal, it commonly entails the time frame between 22 weeks of pregnancy and seven days after birth, according to the committees bill analysis.

Existing law requires a county coroner to investigate the death of an unborn or newborn babyafter 20 weeks into pregnancyresulting from suspected self-induced or criminal abortion, according to the bill. Except for legal abortions, the coroner must record the conditions and causes of such death on a death certificate, which can be used to establish or support a criminal prosecution.

Under this proposed bill, the coroner would no longer be required to investigate such deaths, and it would be prohibited to use the coroners statement on a death certificate for prosecution in such cases.

Samantha Lee, an attorney at National Advocates for Pregnant Women, spoke in favor of Wicks bill while telling a story about one of her clients who was held in jail for over a year from November 2019 to March 2021 after experiencing a pregnancy loss.

Lees client Chelsea Becker faced first-degree murder charges following the stillbirth death of her baby while she was addicted to methamphetamine.

Upon being arrested, Becker lost custody of her son, who was later adopted following the drop of her criminal charges in May 2021, Lee explained while reading Beckers written statement urging lawmakers to vote in favor of the proposed bill.

If the hospital had never involved law enforcement due to this stillbirth happening, I would still have custody of my son, Lee read from Beckers statement.

Meanwhile, hundreds of opponents appeared in person or called into the committee to express their concerns.

Susan Arnall, California attorney and vice president of Legal Affairs at Right to Life Leaguethe first pro-life organization in the United Stateswarned lawmakers of the details of the bill that would allow intentional murders of infants to evade criminal investigation.

She said the bill would be blocking the use of coroners investigation and findings into a babys death in any criminal or civil action and against any person, not just the mother, but anyone who was involved in any way, she warns.

She went on to explain how the bill prohibits coroners from releasing information regarding perinatal deathsthe death of an infant before or after birth.

Americans United for Life warned about the lack of definition for perinatal that can legalize child abandonment immediately following the birth or shortly after.

If a child is found in a dumpster can law enforcement investigate the childs death? Probably not under AB 2223, the organization wrote in a statement to the legislature.

While many begged lawmakers to not approve the bill, the vote to advance the proposed legislation prevailed.

AB 2223 was referred to the Health Committee for another hearing at a later date.
California Taking Away Local Control on Housing: Laguna Beach Official

LAGUNA BEACH, Calif.Laguna Beach is among 12 cities in Orange County to put boundaries on a new state law that allows homeowners to convert single-family lots into multiple units.

Laguna Beach City Councilman George Weiss said residents fear the new state law.

There is that fear the state is taking too much power away from local authorities, Weiss told The Epoch Times. Its clearly there, whether its real or not.

Last year Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill (SB) 9 into law allowing single-family lot owners to subdivide their properties into a duplex or split the lot into halves for a total allowance of four units, each eligible for sale separately.

The law allows local governments to impose some guardrails, limiting the size and height of each unit approved under SB 9.

But cities dont have much room to maneuver without getting in the crosshairs of the state, Laguna Beach City Councilman Peter Blake told The Epoch Times.

All [Laguna Beach] can do is try to alleviate or mitigate some of the issues that come with it. Its a balance between what the state of California is requiring of us and what the residents of this community are requiring of us.

Last month, Laguna Beach implemented a 45-day emergency ordinance that places a limit on additional units under SB 9.

Under the ordinance, new structures must not exceed 1,000 square feet, 16 feet in height, and cannot add roof decks or balconies.

City officials indicated during a March 15 meeting that residents have already submitted such applications since SB 9 took effect on New Years Day.

Really, what the state is doing is taking away local control and discretion over housing, and then essentially adopting their own zoning standards, Marc Weiner, director of community development, said during a March 15 council meeting.

Weiner said that issuing an emergency ordinance rather than creating a permanent code amendment bypasses coastal review processes that could likely take over a year.

Weiner also said the state requires a 3-year occupancy to prevent developers from buying and dividing properties that could really change the character of those neighborhoods.

SB 9 also exempts property owners from design review, public hearings, and even some California Environmental Quality Act restrictions so long as the residences are not located in a historic district or within environmentally hazardous areas.

Last month, California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued a warning to the City of Pasadena for unlawfully blocking new housing through an urgency ordinance that exempts areas from SB 9 marked as landmark districts.

Surfers walk past a seawall built in front of a home at Victoria Beach, in the city of Laguna Beach, Calif., on Jan. 8, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Bonta called the ordinance a way to circumvent SB 9, leaving residents with grave housing insecurity concerns unaddressed, and the statewide housing crisis unabated.

As for Laguna Beach, city officials estimate that 75 percent of its residents could be eligible for an SB 9 application.

Laguna Beach city councilors may extend or amend the emergency ordinance at the end of its 45-day lifespan at the April 26 council meeting.
Capitol Report (April 5): Gen. Flynn on Ukraine-Russia War

Why are you really paying extra at the pump? Thats the question lawmakers say theyre trying to get the bottom of this week. Oil and gas CEOs are coming to Capitol Hill to testify.

Three states are suing the Biden administration over its lifting of a rule that blocks migrants from entering the United States. We talked to an Arizona representative about how this might affect the current border situation and the midterm election.

Oklahoma Congressman and candidate for Senate Markwayne Mullin visited the southern border recently, and hell share with us what he saw and the impact if Title 42 is not kept in place.

At Tuesdays U.N. meeting, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a plea for justice. He is accusing Russia of war crimes.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley share strategies on defending Europe as they testified before the House Armed Services Committee.

The Ukraine war wages on, and the United States is slated to impose more sanctions on Russia Wednesday. We spoke to former Trump national security adviser retired General Michael Flynn to get his assessment of the UkraineRussia war, and we ask him if the war could have been avoided.

Follow CapitolReport on social media:

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Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on her nomination to serve on the Supreme Court, on Capitol Hill on March 23, 2022. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

Child Porn Case White House Tried to Hide Reveals Jackson Went Easier Than Other Democratic DC Judges on Such Offenders

Commentary



Editors Note: The following article contains descriptions of graphic material that readers may find disturbing.

With three Republican senators breaking ranks to commit to voting to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, the controversial judge appears to be on a glide path to becoming the first black woman seated on the high bench. But the scandal of the White House allegedly covering up her judicial record, including the withholding of tens of thousands of pages of documents from Senate investigators, will outlast her appointment.

Senate sources say it sets a dangerous precedent for vetting future lifetime appointments.

For instance, the White House left the child-pornography distribution case of a schoolteacher, Lucas William Cane, out of materials it sent to the Judiciary Committee before last weeks confirmation hearings. Canes was one of the more heinous cases of child porn that Jackson heard as a federal trial judge on the D.C. bench from 2013 to 2021.

His May 2021 sentencing also was one of the last cases that came before her bench, making it even more politically radioactive.

The sources say the White House withheld the case files from the committee staff vetting Jackson because they simultaneously shattered two key talking points in defense of the judgeone, that she followed the recommendations of probation officers, and two, that she was well within the mainstream among other judges for sentencing child porn offenders.

Judge Jackson and the White House left it off the list [of her child sex abuse cases] not only because it was one of her most egregious cases and most recent cases, but also because other Democrat judges on the D.C. District Court handed down tougher sentences against Canes co-defendants in the same child porn sting operation, said an investigator involved in the vetting process. She under-sentenced Cane, going below even the probation officers recommendation, at the same time she was under confirmation for the D.C. circuit [court of appeals].

As part of the 2018 multistate sting operation targeting Cane and two co-defendants, the feds busted Cane posting files to the internet from a cache of over 6,500 files depicting children who were elementary school age, middle school, and high school ages, all engaged in sexual acts or posing sexually, according to the probation officer involved in the case, who recommended that Jackson sentence the defendant to 84 months in federal prison. According to a transcript of the May 2021 sentencing hearing, the officer pointed out that many of the files featured sadistic and masochistic conduct involving the underage victims.

According to the same transcript that the White House denied the Senate, the officer explained to the judge that those videos and images depicted children engaged in masturbation and vaginal and anal penetration with objects like hairbrushes, pins, pencils, curling irons [and] other objects, and minors also engaged in anal and vaginal sex.

An Obama appointee, Jackson disregarded the probation officers tough recommendation and sentenced Canea junior high school social studies teacher at the timeto the statutory mandatory minimum of 60 months. Her punishment was also below the prosecutions own recommended prison time; however, it isnt clear how far below, because the Biden administration has sealed the prosecutors sentencing memo in the case.

The White House is still sealing the governments sentencing memoits still under seal and it shouldnt be, said the investigator close to the confirmation proceedings, who spoke on condition of anonymity. They are covering it up, along with more than 48,000 pages of other documents, including her pre-sentencing reports and emails.

Although the White House belatedly unsealed the transcript of Jacksons sentencing hearing with Cane, almost 20 pages of the document are still blacked out. White House officials didnt respond to requests for comment.

The full Senate is expected to vote on Jacksons confirmation to the high court by the end of the week. Her appointment would be for life.

Countering Republican criticism that Jackson is soft on child porn criminals, the White House has said that her sentences werent out of line with those of other federal judges. However, Jackson handed down child porn sentences that were lighter than even her Democratic colleagues on the D.C. bench.

Cane was one of three defendants arrested in the same multistate child porn sting who were assigned to three D.C. judges, all appointed by Democratic presidents. Canes co-defendant Julian Philip Blanchard was assigned to D.C. District Judge James Boasberg, and their co-defendant, Daniel Allen Nickelson, was assigned to D.C. District Judge Paul Friedman. Records show that Jacksons sentencing of her defendant Cane was the softest punishment meted out in the three cases.

Court records show that Friedman, a Clinton appointee, sent Nickelson away for 180 months, or 15 years, in the federal pen. While Boasberg, an Obama appointee, matched Jackson in giving Blanchard 60 months, the fine print in Jacksons judgment (pdf) reveals that she made sure that Cane didnt have to actually serve his 60 months, by giving him credit for time served since he was first incarcerated. The credit shaved almost two years off his prison term. Boasberg, in contrast, handed down a straight five-year sentence with no time served.

Records (pdf) also reveal that Jackson ordered that Cane be housed in a facility that has a 500-hour residential drug abuse prevention program. Inmates who complete the program are awarded additional good-time credit, further shrinking the amount of time theyre locked up and away from children.

Also, in a similar recent case, a Clinton-appointed federal judge in Texas sentenced a Houston school teacher to 11 years in prison for possessing lewd and sadistic images and videos of children. Last month, U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison put Robert Gasper Peri, 57, away for 135 months for receipt and possession of child porn and ordered him to pay $25,000 in restitution to the child victims.

Jackson is by far the most extreme judge on child porn, said Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project, a Washington advocacy group for constitutional judges and the rule of law. Their [the White House and committee Democrats] everybodys-doing-it argument is nonsense.

The White House and Democrats have also complained that Republicans are citing one-off cases or cherry-picking Jacksons record. But Daviss group has analyzed the totality of her child porn cases.

When she had discretion in sentencing, Judge Jackson always sentenced these monsters to significantly less time than what the federal guidelines recommended47 percent below the national average for possession and 57 percent below the national average for distribution, said Davis, who previously served as chief Senate Judiciary counsel for nominations.

At 51, Jackson is relatively young and could have an increasing influence on Supreme Court decisions over time, including ones involving crime and punishment.

Jackson marked the first time the Senate Judiciary Committee deadlocked (1111) on a Supreme Court nod in the modern history of nominations. Democrats were forced to take an additional procedural step to discharge Jacksons nomination from committee on April 4 in order to advance her to the Senate floor for a final vote later this week.

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 speaks during a conference in Orlando, Fla., on Feb. 26, 2022. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Conservatives Urge Elon Musk to Reinstate Donald Trumps Twitter Account

Conservatives are calling on Elon Musk to restore former President Donald Trumps Twitter account after the Tesla CEO acquired a 9.2 percent passive stake in the company.

Taking to Twitter, a number of individuals who support Trump asked for his account to be reinstated after it was permanently removed from the social networking site in January 2021, with the tech giant citing his alleged violation of the companys Glorification of Violence policy.

Musk bought nearly 73.5 million shares of Twitter on March 14, 2022, and according to Twitters closing price on April 1, the billionaires stake in the company was worth $2.89 billion.

But while the businessman appeared to be focused this week on asking Twitter users if they would like an edit button on the platform, conservatives were pushing for Trumps account to be brought back to the social media site, which has been repeatedly accused of censoring some minority and politically conservative viewpoints.

The company denies such claims.

Taking to Twitter, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) wrote: Now that Elon Musk is Twitters largest shareholder, its time to lift the political censorship. Oh and BRING BACK TRUMP!

Monica Crowley, former assistant secretary of the Treasury under Trump, said in a tweet, Now that Elon Musk is Twitters largest shareholder, he should demand the end of political censorship, company-wide reform, and the reinstatement of President Trump.

Errol Webber, a Republican congressional candidate from California, wrote on Twitter that it is time to get this platform back to its former glory.

Step one  bring back President Trump! Step two  give everyone who has been banned a second chance. Step three  end all forms of political and other censorship, he continued.

Conservative activist Ned Ryun wrote: Fascinating. Would be epic if Musk forced Twitter to let Trump back on, although to be honest, Trump might not want to. Would dilute his value and power with Truth Social.

Academy Award-nominated actor Randy Quaid also said: Not only do we need Trump back in the White House we need him back on Twitter giving us hourly updates! Also good for Twitter stock price! And free speech! while tagging Musk in the post.

The Epoch Times has contacted a Musk spokesperson for comment.

Musk is a regular Twitter user and has 80.7 million followers.

After he acquired the 9.2 percent stake in Twitter, but before the news went public, Musk questioned the platforms attitude toward free speech, telling his followers that free speech is essential to a functioning democracy and asking them in a March 25 poll whether they believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle.

A day later, sharing the results of the poll, Musk described Twitter as the de facto public town square, adding that failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.

What should be done? he asked his followers.

In March 2022, the South African-born businessman said he was giving serious thought to creating a new social media platform that would prioritize free speech.

Meanwhile, Trumps new social media venture, Truth Social, launched in February 2022 on Apples app store.

The app is being touted as an alternative to Twitter that allows users to set up a profile, connect with other users, and access the truth feed, where they can get the scoop on the latest thoughts and activities from the people, organizations, and news outlets that interest them, according to the app store page.
President Joe Biden addresses trades leaders at the North Americas Building Trades Unions (NABTU) Legislative Conference at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington on April 6, 2022. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

US Announces New Sanctions Against Russia, Targeting Investments, Banks, Putins Daughters

The Biden administration on April 6 announced a fresh round of sanctions against Moscow after allegations that Russian forces committed war crimes in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, with the new measures including banning all new investment in Russia and sanctioning Russian President Vladimir Putins two adult daughters.

The United States, the Group of Seven allies, and the European Union are readying a round of measures that the White House said in an April 6 statement will continue to impose severe and immediate economic costs on Russia for what it described as atrocities in Ukraine, including in Bucha.

Grisly images emerged over the weekend from Bucha, a town near Kyiv, showing mass graves and bodies of slain individuals, some with their hands bound and others bearing marks of apparent torture.

Ukraine has accused Russian forces of committing war crimes in Bucha, claims that Moscow has denied.

Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has called the atrocity allegations a monstrous forgery meant to denigrate the Russian army and a pretext to torpedo the ongoing peace talks.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia hasnt been negotiating in good faith, saying Kyiv has repeatedly asked for a ceasefire to give talks a chance, but the war continues, and that Russia is not serious about peace.

Journalists work next to what is said to be a mass grave in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on April 4, 2022. (Rodrigo Abd/AP Photo)

Calling Russia a global financial pariah, the White House said the new measures will prohibit Moscow from making payments on Russian sovereign debt with funds that are subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

Russia will now need to choose between draining its available funds to make debt payments or default, the White House said.

The new measures also include full blocking sanctions on critical major Russian state-owned enterprises, prohibiting U.S. persons from engaging in transactions with those entities and freezing their assets. The Treasury Department is expected on April 7 to announce details of these measures, which the White House said would erode Russias ability to fund the war in Ukraine.

A view shows an armored convoy of pro-Russian troops during the UkraineRussia conflict on a road near Mariupol, Ukraine, on April 3, 2022. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)

The United States is also sanctioning Putins two adult daughters, Lavrovs wife and daughter, and senior members of Russias security council.

Also among those sanctioned were Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president and ex-prime minister and one of Putins closest allies. Others included Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and Justice Minister Konstantin Chuychenko.

The sanctions will cut them off from the U.S. financial system and freezes any assets they hold in the United States.

The punitive measures on Russia will also involve full blocking sanctions on Sberbank, which is Russias biggest financial institution, as well as Russias largest private bank, Alfa Bank.

Any assets of the two institutions that touch the U.S. financial system will be frozen, and Americans will be prohibited from doing business with them.

Sberbank, a systemically important financial institution that holds nearly one-third of the Russian banking sectors assets, downplayed the impact of the new measures.

The sanctions will not have a significant impact on the banks operations and will not affect service to Russians as the system has already adapted to the previous restrictions, Sberbank said in a statement.

Alfa Bank, too, seemed to take Washingtons new sanctions announcement in stride.

There have been 8,257 sanctions imposed against Russia. Previously we feared that, but nowworking as usual, Alfa Bank said in a statement.

The new sanctions will also include a prohibition of any new investment in Russia by U.S. persons, with the White House saying the measure will ensure the enduring weakening of the Russian Federations global competitiveness.

Russias Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on April 6 that the sanctions against Russia were dealing a heavy blow to the global economy, hurting countries that buy goods such as agricultural produce and fertilizer from Russia.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov attends a meeting with his Turkish counterpart in Moscow, on March 16, 2022. (Maxim Shemetov/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Experts have raised the alarm about surging food prices in the context of the RussiaUkraine conflict, which is poised to hit the worlds poorest nations the hardest. The International Food Policy Research Institute said recently that the fallout from the war was sure to drive food prices higher and erode food security for hundreds of millions of people.

The European Union, meanwhile, is set to ban imports of Russian coal, though EU countries remain divided over restricting Russias gas and oil sectors, which are more critical to their economies.

We are ready to move quickly with further coordinated, robust sanctions, said Charles Michel, president of the European Council, at a European Parliament plenary session in Brussels on April 6.

The new package includes a ban on coal imports, and I believe that measures on oil and even on gas will also be needed sooner or later.

European Council President Charles Michel attends the leaders summit on climate via video conference, in Brussels on April 22, 2021. (Johanna Geron/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Michel said the EU will block Russian ships from entering the blocs ports and impose a ban on Russian and Belarusian road transport. He added that the EU will also impose a full transaction ban on more banks to further weaken Russias financial system.

Michel also expressed outrage at crimes against humanityagainst innocent civiliansin Bucha and in many other cities, calling it yet more proof that Russian brutality against the people of Ukraine has no limits.

Russias embassy in the UK said that Ukrainian authorities and militarized formation have for years been exterminating civilians in the contested Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine.

It shared a graphic video purporting to show victims of the violence and claiming that mass graves are still being found in the area.

Reuters contributed to this report.
The President of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, speaks during the annual gathering for the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York City on Sept. 21, 2021. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Ecuadorian Legislator Accused of Trying to Sell Deputy Ministers Position

The Ecuadorian attorney generals list of corruption investigations just got longer as national assembly legislator Celestino Chumpi has come under fire after a video surfaced on March 31 showing a discussion over the sale of the deputy agriculture ministers position for $2.5 million.

Fueling the fire surrounding the legislator, President Guillermo Lasso said Chumpi was one of five national assembly members who tried to solicit a bribe from him to vote in favor of a new investment law last month.

In the video, which news outlet La Posta initially released, a man named Ernesto Ripalda claimed to be an adviser to Chumpi and spoke with two other men about the sale of the public office.

Ripalda specifically discussed the price of the position, the conditions, and form of payment, and inquired about any interest in the transaction.

Celestino Chumpi, my boss, was here in the morning. I work for him. Im an adviser to him.  I have lunch and I have to go to the Assembly, Ripalda said in the recording.

The men also agreed the price of the deputy ministry should be $2.3 million, to which an additional $200,000 dollars profit would be added as their fee, bringing the total sale price for the position up to $2.5 million.

There was also a discussion of an economist who would help coordinate the negotiation on behalf of the government.

Public and official outrage over the leaked video was swift.

Agriculture minister Pedro Alava said he hopes the full weight of the law will be applied against those who have taken the name of this portfolio with the clear political intention of attacking the national government and this ministry.

Chumpi addressed the accusations in a March 31 press conference. I am totally outraged and morally devastated because they have taken away my dignity, my good name, my good reputation, he said.

The legislator backed himself into a verbal corner with journalists after saying he didnt know Ripalda but admitted he hadnt watched the video.

Further, he announced that his attorney would present a request for precautionary measures before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, citing grounds of political persecution.

Since Chumpis initial comments, new evidence suggests that the accused legislator and Ripalda do know each other.

President of the Guayaquil Civic Board, Miguel Palacios, said Chumpi and Ripalda were part of an official delegation he met with back in March 2010 that aimed to gain support for an opposition front against the administration of former President Rafael Correa.

According to Palacios, Ripalda was a legal adviser in the meeting.

This scandal arrives just days after President Lasso identified five national assembly membersincluding Chumpiin a bribery scheme on March 26.

Five key members abstained from voting on Lassos new investment law after asking the head of state for economic benefits in exchange for favorable votes.

Besides Chumpi, the four other Pachakutik political party legislators accused by Lasso are Rosa Elizabeth Cerda Cerda, Gissella Cecibel Molina Alvarez, Edgar Patricio Quezada Patino, and Cristian Omar Yucailla Yucailla.

Lasso made his formal accusations in a letter addressed to the attorney generals office.

After the investment law failed to garner the required 70 votes for approval, the president announced on social media that the measure failed because he refused to be blackmailed by the Pachakutik assembly members.

Before coming forward with names, Lasso said on March 24 that some of the members who tried to extort a bribe asked for positions, hospitals, ministries, electric companies, and cash.

We cannot allow  corruption.  In this country, you have to tell the truth, Lasso said.

Responding to the corruption allegations and demands from Lassos office to investigate the new claims against Chumpi, the attorney generals office published a statement on March 31 saying it has been investigating alleged acts of corruption by different public institutions and political actors since September 2021.
Flowers are shown outside Maison Herron, a long term care home in the Montreal suburb of Dorval on April 12, 2020. (The Canadian Press/Graham Hughes)

Email Reveals Quebec Ministers Knew Earlier About Herron Care Home Tragedy

An email tabled at an inquest into pandemic deaths reveals Quebec cabinet ministers knew about the dire situation at the Herron long-term care home at least 10 days earlier than they had previously acknowledged.

Forty-seven residents of the Montreal-area private care home died during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, leading to several investigations, including one by the coroners office.

The March 29, 2020, emailfirst reported this week by Radio-Canadais labelled URGENT and warns the chief of staff to Seniors Minister Marguerite Blais that there were almost no more staff to care for Herrons 154 residents.

The email was reportedly forwarded to Blais that night, while the health minister at the time, Danielle McCann, received a briefing on the situation the next day.

However, both Blais and McCann have stated publicly that they only learned about conditions at the Herron care home from reading a news article in the Montreal Gazette on April 10, 2020.

Premier Francois Legault told reporters today his government was reassured by the March 29, 2020, email, because it stated that the local health authority was taking charge of the troubled long-term care home.

Liberal Opposition Leader Dominique Anglade on Tuesday demanded the resignations of McCann, who is now minister of higher education, and Blais, accusing them of lying to the public.
A nurse puts on PPE in a ward for COVID-19 patients at King's College Hospital in south east London on Dec. 21, 2021. (Victoria Jones/PA)

Englands Post-Restriction CCP Virus Wave May Have Peaked in Young: Study

CCP virus infections appear to be slowing or falling among young and middle-aged people just over one month after all COVID-19 restrictions were lifted in England, a new study has shown.

As part of the UK governments plan for living with COVID, all COVID-19 laws in England were scrapped on Feb. 24, including the legal requirement for people who test positive for the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus to isolate.

According to data from Imperial College Londons latest React-1 study, based on almost 110,000 swab tests taken between March 8 and 31, COVID-19 infections in England climbed to a record level in March, with around 1 in 16 people testing positive during this period, or 6.37 percent of the population.

This new wave of infections was caused by the emergence of a new strain of the Omicron variantBA.2which is even more transmissible than the original BA.1 strain, which caused a previous peak in January.

Researchers said that infections have risen in all age groups and remain highest in primary school-aged children.

However, the study found that, towards the end of the study period, there was a possible decrease in prevalence in those aged 5 to 17 and a possible plateauing prevalence in those aged 18 to 54.

Professor Paul Elliott, chairman in epidemiology at Imperial College London and director of the React programme, said: We are reassured that [the rates] in younger groups seem to be coming downthey cant go up forever.

But he said it was worrying that this slowing trend was not seen in older people above the age of 55, where infections were found to still be rising.

Commenting on the findings, Health Secretary Sajid Javid said the UK is leading the way in learning to live with the virus.

Despite high infection rates, the population now has much stronger protection against COVID-19 than at any other point in the pandemic, he said.

According to the latest results, the vast majority of the positive samples were of the new BA.2 strain of Omicron.

As of March 22, the research team estimated that 94.7 percent of the samples were BA.2, which has almost completely replaced BA.1 as the dominant strain.

Researchers also detected a very small number of recombinant Omicron variants, which are hybrids of the original BA.1 strain and BA.2.

But they said it has not been possible to tell from the data whether these variants are more transmissible than others, because the number of these recombinants was so small.

PA Media contributed to this report.
The lignite (brown coal) power plant complex of German energy supplier and utility RWE is reflected in a large puddle in Neurath, northwest of Cologne, Germany, on Feb. 5, 2020. (Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters)

EU Countries Hunt for Global Coal Stocks as Russian Ban Looms

LONDONEuropean buyers are increasing shipments of coal from across the globe against a backdrop of a proposed European Union ban on Russian imports and the scramble to relieve tight gas supplies, according to data and shipping sources.

The European Commission on Tuesday proposed new sanctions against Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine, including a ban on buying Russian coal and on Russian ships entering EU ports.

The new restrictions come at a time of uncertainty about future gas deliveries from Russia to the EU later this month after the Kremlins demand that buyers start paying Russian gas giant Gazprom in roubles.

In March, European countries imported a total of 7.1 million tonnes of thermal coal, which is used in power and heat generation, a 40.5 percent increase year-on-year and the highest level since March 2019, analysis from shipbroker Braemar ACM, based on ship tracking data, found.

Despite Russian coal shipments to Europe in March still continuing at pre-war levels, the expected alteration in coal flows into Europe has started to show, Braemar dry bulk analyst Mark Nugent said.

Shipments from Colombia and the United States have been strong in response to the conflict with Atlantic suppliers providing the most cost-efficient alternative for European end-users.

The EU depends on Russia for around 45 percent of its coal imports, 45 percent of its gas imports and around 25 percent of its oil imports, according to the European Commission website.

Braemar data showed 3.5 million tonnes of Russian thermal coal were imported into the EU in March, the highest monthly total since October 2020.

On a weekly basis, March 28-April 1 saw the highest levels of Russian thermal coal imports since the Feb. 24 invasion began, with 887,000 tonnes of Russian thermal coal imported into the EU, according to Braemar.

German coal importers group VDKi on Wednesday said the country should be able to find alternatives to Russian hard coal imports by the peak demand winter season, but there will be technical issues and increased costs.

Thermal coal imports from Colombia totalled 1.3 million tonnes in March, rising by 47.3 percent year-on-year, Braemar data showed.

Imports from the U.S. in March totalled 809,000 tonnes, rising by 30.3 percent year-on-year and at their highest level since October 2019.

Imports from South Africa also picked up with 287,000 tonnes arriving in March versus no shipments in March last year.

Australia has also found renewed buying interest from Europe, with thermal coal imports totalling 537,000 tonnes in the first quarter of this year, versus no shipments over the same period in 2021, Braemar said.

But Indonesia and Australia, among the worlds top coal exporters, have hit their production limits and are unlikely to meet Europes demand for additional supplies if the European Union bans Russian coal imports, mining executives said.

There is greater concern over the risks with trading Russian coal (due to broader sanctions), so that is already having an impact on shipments, one shipping source familiar with the trade said.

Although it is still more expensive to burn gas to produce power than coal, the price of thermalwhich is for heating and power generationhas reached all-time highs this year.

Alex Stuart-Grumbar, dry bulk analyst with shipping consultancy MSI, said Europes need to import more coal from sources further afield would be positive for the larger panamax and capesize shipping segments on long-haul coal trade routes.

The initial disruption to trade patterns will be positive for dry bulk markets, though ultimately, this will push global coal prices higher, incentivising China and India to produce more coal domestically, Stuart-Grumbar said.

By Jonathan Saul
A file image of then National Security Council Senior Director of Counterterrorism Kashyap "Kash" Pramod Patel in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House on Oct. 27, 2019. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Kash Patel: Ex-Clinton Campaign Lawyer Put Lie to FBI in Writing, Leaving Defense in Shambles

Former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmanns defense is in shambles after special counsel John Durhams latest filing, the former lead investigator for the House Intelligence Committees Russia investigation, Kash Patel, said.

Patel made the remarks after Durham late Monday published potentially conclusive evidence in the case against Sussmann. Patel remarks are part of the upcoming episode of Kashs Corner that will premiere on EpochTV on Friday, April 8 at 8pm Eastern time.

Durhams new filing showed alleged text messages the cybersecurity lawyer sent to the FBI general counsel, messages saying that he wasnt working for any client when he provided information to the bureau.

Sussmann, was charged last year with lying to the FBIs then-general counsel James Jim Baker in late 2016 about his client when he pushed claims that there was a secret link between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank, which the FBI later said was not credible. He worked with the high-powered Washington-based law firm Perkins Coiewhich was retained by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee during the 2016 campaign.

The text message Sussmann allegedly wrote to Baker, according to a late-night court filing (pdf) by Durham, read: Jimits Michael Sussmann. I have something time-sensitive (and sensitive) I need to discuss. Do you have availibilty [sic] for a short meeting tomorrow? Im coming on my ownnot on behalf of a client or company want to help the Bureau. Thanks.

Baker replied Ok. I will find a time. What might work for you? Sussmann then responded, Any time but lunchtimeyou name it.

Sussmanns lawyers previously denied that their client made such claims to Baker, saying it was made orally. However, Durhams latest filing suggests that Sussmann may have put it in writing.

Patel said the evidence has left Sussmanns defense in shambles.

I think largely because of some strategic blunders, but mostly because Michael Sussmann lied, and should be convicted of this crime, he said.

Patel said that based on his experience as a former public defender, one of the hardest things to defend against are statements made by your clients, because you cant run away from them.

You have to own them, and you have to craft a defense around them, he explained. The hardest thing to do is when you have written statements, recorded statements that your client gave at two different periods of time that are contradictory. And thats what you have here.

Patel outlined what steps he would take if he were a federal prosecutor in the case.

I would just take the transcript where he was deposed under oath and said X, and I [would] hand it to the jury. Then I would take the recorded statements from the FBI general counsel and their agents, where he said why on the exact same subjecttwo totally opposite statements that were recorded, said Patel.

You can just hand the jury the pieces of paper and say, this is what he said. He lied. Whats the defense gonna say? Well, he was just joking to Congress, the FBIs notes are inaccurate, the FBIs recordings of these conversations are wrong, multiple agents got it wrong. The general counsel for the FBI came in and testified during this trial and lied, Patel explained.

Sussmann has pleaded not guilty and said he committed no wrongdoing. His lawyers recently called on a federal judge to dismiss the case, arguing that Durhams probe is politically motivated.

The Epoch Times has contacted Sussmanns lawyers for comment.

Jack Phillips contributed to this report.

Isabel van Brugen Reporter Follow Isabel van Brugen is an award-winning journalist and currently a news reporter at The Epoch Times. She holds a master's in newspaper journalism from City, University of London.
Hong Kong Security Chief to Run for Citys Top Job, Signaling Continuation of Beijings Tightening Grip Over Territory

Hong Kongs No. 2 official declared on April 6 that he intends to enter the race to become the citys next leader, just days after the current chief executive said she wont seek another term.

John Lee, 64, former deputy commissioner of police, was elevated to chief secretary last June in a move that critics said signaled a further tightening of Beijings squeeze on the global financial hub.

The office of the citys current leader, Carrie Lam, who has announced that she wont seek a second five-year term, confirmed that Lee had submitted his resignation letter, according to a government notice released on April 6.

I indicate in the letter the reason for my resignation is that if my resignation is approved by the Central Peoples Government, I shall plan to prepare to stand for the upcoming chief executive election, Lee told a press conference.

He said he would elaborate on his next move once his resignation was formally approved by Beijing.

In January 2017, Lam stepped down from her role as Hong Kongs chief secretary, a resignation which was approved by Beijing four days after it was submitted.

The next leader will be chosen on May 8 by an election committee of roughly 1,500 members, most of whom are loyal to the Chinese Communist Party.

If Lee is successful, it would be the first time a security specialist has taken the leadership position since Hong Kongs handover to China from Britain in 1997. Previous chief executives have had extensive economic and social policy-making expertise.

According to his official website, Lee joined the Hong Kong police force in 1997 and became deputy police commissioner in 2010. He was appointed undersecretary for security in 2012 and was promoted to secretary by Lam when she took office in 2017.

Lee is the first government official to announce a bid for the citys top political position. The nomination period opened on April 3 and continues until April 16.

Attendees from various forces march next to a banner supporting the new national security law at the end of a flag-raising ceremony to mark the 23rd anniversary of Hong Kongs handover from the UK in Hong Kong on July 1, 2020. (Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images)

Lee is among the Chinese and Hong Kong officials who were sanctioned by the United States in 2020 for their roles in curtailing the citys autonomy and freedoms under the national security law. More than 150 people have been arrested under that law, leading to more than 60 charges, mostly against democratic politicians, activists, journalists, and students.

The sweeping legislation criminalizes four broadly defined categories of offenses, including secession, subversion, and collusion with a foreign country. People found guilty of violating this law can face up to life in prison.

On April 6, six more people were arrested for suspected sedition and contravention of the law. According to local media outlets, those arrested include Leo Tang, former vice chairman of the now-disbanded Confederation of Trade Unions, and citizen journalist Siew Yun-long.

The U.S. Department of State stated in a March 31 report that the citys freedom continues to deteriorate as the Chinese regime tightens its grip on Hong Kong.

Reuters contributed to the report.
The FBI seal is attached to a podium at a news conference at FBI Headquarters in Washington on June 14, 2018. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

FBI Memos Suggest Agency Had Moles in Media

Investigator Roger Charles was combing through records of the FBIs Oklahoma City bombing investigation more than a decade ago, when he discovered a memo suggesting that someone working at ABC News provided a tip to the bureau a day after the deadly April 19, 1995, domestic terrorist attack.

It appeared that a senior ABC News journalist had been doubling as an FBI informant. The memo made a few headlines in 2011, but quickly passed through the news cycle with little effect and hardly any coverage by major outlets.

However, Charless discovery stoked the curiosity of his friend, attorney Jesse Trentadue. At that time, Trentadue, a Utah resident, was suing the FBI for records related to his brothers murder, and he began filing requests in 2012 to see if the bureau had other informants in the media, or in places such as congressional offices, courts, churches, other government agencies, and the White House.

Trentadue said the governments response shocked him.

I thought theyd come back and say, We would never do that because that would be illegal and unconstitutional, he said. Instead, they came back and said, Yeah, we do that. We have manuals on that, but you cant have them because of national security.

The FBI fought against Trentadue for years in federal court to keep its manuals secret, and it was ultimately successful. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in 2015.

However, Trentadue said the litigation helped him piece together what he calls the FBIs sensitive informant program. According to his lawsuit, this program is used to place informants in the national media, among other institutions.

The FBI hasnt responded to questions from The Epoch Times for this story, including about Trentadues description of the sensitive informant program. The bureau has defended the use of informants in sensitive institutions as necessary to root out corruption and other crime, while former director J. Edgar Hoover deemed such tactics necessary to fight communism.

But in the wake of a recently released, scathing internal FBI auditwhich found special agents breaking their own rules more than twice per reviewed case when investigating sensitive institutionssome lawmakers are beginning to question the bureaus sweeping investigatory powers.

It has been nearly two weeks since this information was revealed, and the FBI has thus far declined to comment or provide additional transparency, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) wrote in a March 31 letter. I believe the Senate would benefit from hearing directly from Inspector General [Michael] Horowitz, FBI Director [Christopher] Wray, as well as any division directors with knowledge of the audit or the errors detailed in it.

Trentadues Records

According to Trentadue, the redacted FBI audit only begins to scratch the surface of the bureaus purported wrongdoing.

He would know. His litigation against the U.S. government, spanning four decades, has unearthed numerous revelations about the FBI, including details about undercover right-wing infiltration operations and previously hidden databases.

One of Trentadues findings that hasnt received media coverageuntil nowpertains to sensitive informants.

Documents Trentadue provided to The Epoch Times included the initial FBI memo Charles discovered about the informant within ABC, as well as previously unpublicized memos written by special agents receiving information from ABC and NBC.

Among those is a September 1996 FBI memo reporting that a confidential source who works for a news agency [learned] that ABC News was going to air an expose in the next few days concerning the OKC [Oklahoma City] bombing.

ABC will be interviewing a rescue worker who is going to state that ATF had stored a large amount of explosives in the MURRAH BUILDING, which contributed to the explosion. The rescue worker is also going to advise that evidence of these explosives was found by rescue workers, and this particular rescue worker had contacted the FBI with this information, and was told by the FBI to keep quiet, the FBI memo reads.

This rescue worker is currently upset because nothing has been done with this information and he feels the FBI has attempted to cover up the information.

The September 1996 memo identifies the person at the news agency as a confidential source, rather than referring to the person by a serial numbersuggesting that this source may be different than the aforementioned informant. Trentadue said he didnt know for sure, nor did he know whether the ABC report referenced in the memo was ever published.

Then theres a series of FBI memos that also serve as the subject of controversy in another Trentadue lawsuit. These memos describe FBI agents who were allegedly trying to sell surveillance footage of the Oklahoma City bombing to NBC.

No arrests resulted from the matter, and the government says the surveillance footage discussed in the memos doesnt exist. Trentadue is seeking to prove the existence of the footage in a separate, ongoing lawsuit against the FBI that has been sealed for the past seven years.

Putting aside the surveillance footage controversy, the memos show that the FBI was receiving information from within NBC.

The first tip from NBC came on Oct. 27, 1995, when a confidential source, whose identity is redacted, said the NBC show Dateline had been contacted by an attorney. According to the FBI memo, the attorney represented an FBI agent in Los Angeles who was seeking to sell surveillance footage for more than $1 million.

It was represented that the video tape would contain lapse photography of the arrival and then departure of a UPS truck. Then a Ryder truck pulls up and a male resembling Timothy McVeigh is seen exiting the drivers side of the Ryder truck and then walking away, the FBI memo reads. Next, a second male is seen exiting the passenger side of the Ryder truck and walking to the back of the truck. The second male then walks away in the same direction as the first male.

The FBI received five more tips through Nov. 7, 1995, about the matterincluding someone offering to provide a prepublication copy of a story about negotiations between an unknown Los Angeles Agent of the FBI and Dateline, according to the memo.

Other records suggest that the FBI used reporters as sources of informationwhether the reporter knew it or not. For instance, an April 25, 1995, FBI memo states that reporter Bob Norman, of The News-Press, a daily newspaper in Florida, called the bureau to provide information.

The FBI memo says Norman advised a special agent that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh had connections to Floridas militia. But Norman, currently an active reporter who has recently written for the Florida Bulldog, said he was simply calling for comment on a story he was writing at the time.

Im sure the agent wanted me to share my source material and, as his own report shows, I correctly refused to do so, Norman told The Epoch Times in a statement.

The FBI memo indeed reflects that Norman declined to provide the bureau with a videotapetelling the special agent that he was not convinced his superiors will approve of sharing this information with the FBI, and therefore he cannot provide a copy of the tapes or further information.

While I disagree with the agents characterization of the reason for the call, this is what journalists do, Norman said. We present our found information to authorities in order to get confirmation, additional information, context, denials, etc. It is, in fact, an essential part of the fact-gathering process.

Along with the FBI memos about reporters, Trentadue provided a memo that suggests the FBI had advanced knowledge of a new member joining McVeighs defense team. A special agent reported at the time that he received information from a confidential witness.

Confidential witnesses differ from typical informants in that they often testify at trials. This particular confidential witness identified in the May 1995 memo provided information about a loan shark scam and a special forces national convention set to take place in Nevada that year.

The confidential witness (CW) also provided information about McVeighs defense team, telling the FBI that a woman named Wilma Sparks was joining the team.

The CW advised that WILMA SPARKS is a close associate of the CW and that SPARKS is taking on the responsibility of investigating certain aspects of the investigation, the memo reads. SPARKS advised the CW that although this was a distasteful assignment, she was willing to accept the assignment to ensure that the case against MCVEIGH will not be overturned due to incompetent counsel.

McVeighs lead defense counsel, Stephen Jones, declined to comment on the memo.

Trentadues Court Case

Trentadue used the FBI memos and other documents as evidence to support his Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in 2012.

At the time, Trentadue was seeking fully unredacted copies of the FBI Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG), the FBI Confidential Human Source Validation Standards Manual, the FBI Confidential Human Source Policy Manual, and the FBI Confidential Human Source Policy Implementation Guide. The Utah attorney had received a few pages from those manuals that contained references to sensitive informants, but they offered few details due to the heavy redactions.

As part of his effort, Trentadue was seeking to conduct discovery. He wanted to know whether the FBI had informants in the courts, Congress, media, and other government agencies at any point since January 1995. He also sought information about how many sensitive informants the FBI had in each institution.

The government resisted Trentadues efforts to conduct discovery at every turn. In email correspondence, prosecutors told him he had no legal standing.

This case is not one where you have asked the Court to declare an alleged secret surveillance program illegal on any ground  nor have you sought to enjoin any activity that you allege any such program might be conducting, the Department of Justice (DOJ) told him.

Instead, this case, like the numerous other FOIA cases that you have filed in this Court, is about nothing except for whether the FBI performed an adequate search for records responsive to your FOIA requests.

In a January 2013 motion for a Salt Lake City federal judge to order the FBI to answer his questions, Trentadue argued against the DOJs explanation.

The issue in this dispute between the parties is not the adequacy of the FBIs search for the Manual. The FBI found the Manual, Trentadue said in his motion, referring to an FBI book on using sensitive informants. The issue for the Court to decide is whether the FOIA exemptions advanced by the FBI for withholding portions of the Manual apply and, even if they do apply, can those exemptions be lawfully asserted to conceal FBI activities that are unconstitutional and/or otherwise illegal?

Plaintiff submits that the answers to this two-part question are, NO.

However, federal Judge Dale Kimball ruled in favor of the FBI in July 2013, writing in his decision that discovery is generally unavailable in FOIA litigation and that he found no reason to deviate from that rule.

In April 2014, the FBI moved for a summary judgment to end the lawsuit once and for all. FBI agents provided written declarations in support of the motion, articulating the bureaus reasons for withholding information about sensitive informants.

Eric Velez-Villar, then-assistant director of the FBIs Directorate of Intelligence, said revealing information in the manuals would compromise sources and methods for how the bureau handles informants.

The effectiveness of techniques involving undisclosed participation [by informants] is directly contingent upon the FBI keeping its involvement in such activities undisclosed, Velez-Villar said. The information was intended for an audience of FBI employees only.

As for information specific to sensitive investigations and informants, Velez-Villar said disclosing such policies would disclose critical tools utilized by the FBI in its investigations and intelligence gathering efforts.

Releasing the policies governing these sensitive investigative techniques and strategies would compound the harm of such a disclosure by also revealing how and when the FBI can/will utilize these tools, he said.

The FBIs motion also included sworn statements from officials at the State Department and the CIA, both agreeing that the sensitive informant manuals should be kept secret.

The head of the CIAs litigation support unit, Martha Lutz, said disclosing the FBI manuals could compromise CIA sources.

In this case, the FBI manual indicates certain traits or characteristics of FBI confidential human sources that should give rise to notification or coordination with CIA. By doing so, the manuals reveal the particular traits or characteristics that may be associated with CIA human sources, such as an individuals national origin or travel habits, Lutz said.

Publicly disclosing this information creates the risk that adversaries of the United States may gain insight into the traits and characteristics that CIA values in human sources.

Trentadue opposed the FBIs motion for summary judgment and the two parties duked it out at a November 2014 hearing over the matter. But after reviewing the unredacted manuals in private, Judge Kimball granted the FBIs national security exemptions in June 2015.

Kimball noted that government agencies are entitled to considerable deference when they exercise national security or law enforcement exemptions. Unless theres evidence of bad faith by government actors, then the courts have no power to make government agencies disclose secret information, he said.

In this caseunlike in another ongoing FOIA lawsuit between Trentadue and the FBI, where theres an ongoing witness tampering investigation taking placeKimball said he found no evidence of bad faith on the part of the U.S. government.

Having conducted a thorough in camera review of the documents (or portions thereof) withheld by the agency, in conjunction with the agencys claimed reasons for so withholding the information, the court concludes that the claimed exemptions are valid, he said. The FBI has demonstrated  that it has withheld sensitive information because that information logically falls within the scope of the claimed exemption.

Kimball ordered the case closed on June 9, 2015.

Trentadues Findings

Trentadue argues that his FOIA litigation, coupled with the FBI memos hes procured, demonstrates that the FBI has much to hide about its use of sensitive informants.

Yes, the FBI does need sensitive informants to, as you say, investigate corruption and potential violent groups. Yes, the FBI should have manuals to make sure that these are done legally. But the key is that I asked for manuals governing recruitment/management of specific informants, which FBI produced but redacted, he said.

It is not a case of someone coming to the FBI offering to expose corruption. The bureau is recruiting spies.

Other FOIA and legal experts tend to agree.

My guess is that hes probably right, said Sean Dunagan, senior investigator at the conservative watchdog Judicial Watch. Its just very difficult to reach any conclusions with moral certitude, based on what the FBI didnt hand over.

Attorney and author Alexander Charns, who chronicled how J. Edgar Hoovers FBI infiltrated the federal judiciary in his book, Cloak and Gavel: FBI Wiretaps, Bugs, Informers, and the Supreme Court, said history supports Trentadues claims, and that Congress should look into the matter.

Charnss book, which covers thousands of Supreme Court and FBI records obtained by the author, details the many tactics Hoover used to influence the Supreme Courtfrom wiretaps to PR campaigns, and including the use of informants.

It is disturbing, but not surprising, to find that at least three Court employees reported directly to the FBI, he wrote.

Offering the qualifier that his expertise on FBI informants is limited to the Hoover era, Charns said the bureau has a natural tendency to push its spying powers to the legal limitsand sometimes beyond.

I dont have evidence that this is occurring now, but it seems like law enforcement is opportunistic. So if they have an opportunity to place an informant in an organization that raises constitutional questions, they often tend to look at it as: theyre not going to refuse information, he said.
German Government to Take Control of Gazproms German Subsidiary

The German government will take control of Gazprom Germaniathe energy trading, storage, and transmission German subsidiary of Russias Gazpromafter being abandoned by its parent company on April 1.

Gazprom left Germany without warning on April 1, after the German business daily Handelsblatt reported on March 31 that Berlin was considering expropriating all Gazprom and Rosneft assets in the country amid concerns about the security of energy supplies.

The Russian oil company gave no public details on its decision to terminate its stake in its holdings in Germany, which include subsidiaries in Britain, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic.

The gas companys operations will be transferred to Germanys regulatory Bundesnetzagentur (BNetzA), also known as the Federal Network Agency, to ensure energy security, said Economy Minister Robert Habeck on April 4, as tensions worsen between Russia and the European Union over gas and oil supplies.

The arrangement of the trust administration serves to protect public safety and order and to maintain the security of supply, Habeck said at a press conference. This step is urgently necessary.

Berlin has accused Gazprom of trying to sell its assets in Germany to Russian-controlled entities without prior approval from the German government, thus violating German law.

The economic ministry said that it warded off an unauthorized acquisition of the gas company by Russias JSC Palmary and Gazprom Export Business Services after Gazprom attempted to transfer ownership to those companies.

The seizure was also triggered by the sudden confusion on who now owns the assets after the parent company withdrew last week, said Habeck.

The German federal agency will act as the temporary trustee for Gazprom Germania for six months until Sept. 30, until the legal situation is cleared.

The order to take control of the company was immediately published by the German government in the Federal Gazette.

Berlin said that it remains unclear why Gazprom attempted to transfer ownership and why it did not communicate its intent to the German authorities.

German law requires that foreign acquisitions or transfers of strategic assets, such as energy infrastructure, must be approved by authorities if the buyer is a company from a non-EU third country.

Gazprom was mandated to seek German government authorization before transferring its assets in the country to a new owner.

The economic ministry in Berlin reserves the right to block or approve such a transaction.

Meanwhile, the energy minister said that the gas supply would continue, after Gazprom declared that it would fulfill its contract to export energy to Germany.

Gazprom Germania was responsible for maintaining and operating Gazproms energy infrastructure in Germany, including storage, trade, and the transportation of natural gas to Central Europe.

The BNetzA will be given the power to remove executives, control staff operations, and direct the companys management.

Our goal will be to run Gazprom Germania in the interests of Germany and Europe, said Klaus Mueller, head of the BNetzA.

Habeck said that he would direct his ministry to reduce Russias indirect economic influence on other parts of the German energy industry, and said that he would look into Rosnefts bid to buy into German refinery PCK Schwedt.

Germany had agreed to partake in certain Western sanctions against Moscow, including a pledge to cease its dependence on gas imports from Russia by 2024 and end Russian oil imports by the end of the year.

On Feb. 22, Berlin suspended the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project that was designed to dramatically increase the flow of Russian gas to Germany.

U.S. and European sanctions against Moscow after Russias invasion of Ukraine have triggered concerns that Russia will cease its commitment to provide oil and gas supplies to the EU.

Germany is heavily dependent on Russia for its energy needs, with 40 percent of its gas and about a third of its oil coming from Russia last year.

Over the last 20 years, consecutive German governments have gradually increased the countrys dependence on cheap energy imports from Russia.

German industry has put heavy pressure on the government in Berlin, which has so far rejected an outright ban on Russian gas imports amid fear that an embargo would destroy a German economy that is heavily dependent on foreign energy for heating, power generation, and industrial production.

President Vladimir Putin announced in March that Russia would only receive rubles as payment for gas exports from countries deemed unfriendly as of April 1.

The German government and other European nations have mostly balked at such a move, saying that they would continue to pay for Russian gas contracts in euros or dollars, which is the global norm.

Putin responded by outlining a plan where European customers would pay in euros or dollars to a Russian bank, which would then buy rubles to pay for the deliveries.

If accepted, the new regulations would cover payments for Russian energy contracts that must be paid later this month.

Last week, the German government activated the first stage of its contingency plan designed to protect the country against a potential reduction in Russian gas deliveries.

The worst-case scenario in the plan envisions gas and oil being rationed throughout Germany if energy supplies are seriously interrupted.
Gibsons Bakery Scores a Victory for Truth

Commentary

Periodically, in what seems like a never-ending assault on our basic values and the rule of law, good news emerges.

The good news now is the unanimous decision of a panel of three judges on an Ohio Court of Appeals, supporting a jury decision in favor of Gibsons Bakery in its case against Oberlin College.

Gibsons Bakery sued Oberlin College for libel, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and intentional interference with a business relationship, because of the schools involvement and support of student demonstrations accusing the bakery of racial profiling and discrimination.

The decision is worthy of our attention because it shows just how troubling the situation is at our colleges and universities.

As our nation leans increasingly to the left, as our most basic valuesnow called conservative valuesare being pushed out the door, while they are displaced by the chaos of moral relativism, some bold individualsin this case, the proprietors of Gibsons Bakery in Oberlin, Ohiorefuse to be intimidated and concede.

And that refusal has paid off for the Gibson family and for all Americans who care about truth.

Oberlin College now must pay $33 million in punitive damages and $11 million in compensatory damages to Gibsons Bakery.

In brief, a black student from Oberlin was chased down by the son of the stores proprietor when he saw him shoplift a bottle of wine.

The student, and two of his friends who then got involved, were arrested by the police and all subsequently pleaded guilty.

But the incident set off student demonstrations outside this mom and pop bakery, started by David Gibsons great-grandfather in 1885.

The owners were branded racists, and flyers were handed out claiming that the store had a history of racial profiling and discrimination.

Hopefully, the lawsuit filed and won by the Gibson family will put a damper on the casual use of these horrible accusations.

The snapshot we now have of the academic and social reality at Oberlin College, which has a reputation as one of the nations premier liberal arts colleges, is deeply troubling.

Oberlin is now on the line for millions of dollars in damages because its own school administrators are so self-absorbed in their own liberal dogma that they can no longer think clearly, honestly, and objectively.

The college maintains a website dedicated to the case, and now, even after they have experienced such a devastating defeat in court, they are still in denial about what happened.

Particularly troubling is that the school administration refuses to accept that this case was not about the First Amendment but about their support of their own students to libel the Gibson family.

Over the years, I have spoken at almost 300 colleges and universities, and I have watched and experienced these campuses taken over by dogma and left-wing activists.

In a study published in 2020 by the National Association of Scholars, 12,372 college and university faculty were surveyed regarding political affiliation.

Over the full sample, 8.4 were registered Democrat for each registered Republican. At Oberlin College, this ratio was 10.8 to 1.

Given that over the whole American population, the ratio of those identifying as Democrat to Republican is about 1 to 1, we get a picture of the incredibly distorted reality that has captured higher education.

In the last presidential election, former President Donald Trump won the vote of those with no college degree, 50 percent to 48 percent. However, he lost the vote of college graduates 43 percent to 55 percent.

The nation is indebted to the Gibson family for refusing to be intimidated by left-wing dogmatists at Oberlin and for standing hard and fast for what is true.

But despite this important victory, we remain with a big problem that young Americans are getting college degrees and learning how not to think.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
High Immunity Protecting Americans From Omicron BA.2: CDC Director

Americans have high enough immunity to ward off the threat posed by the BA.2 Omicron COVID-19 variant to some extent, according to Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The high level of immunity in the population from vaccines, boosters, and previous infection will provide some level of protection against BA.2, Walensky said during a press briefing by the White House COVID-19 response team and officials from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on April 5.

Looking across the country, we see that 95 percent of counties are reporting low COVID-19 community levels, which represent over 97 percent of the U.S. population, she said.

Health officials said BA.2 is estimated to account for 72 percent of all circulating COVID-19 variants in the country. All regions of the United States have reported the strain to be the dominant variant, the CDC director said. At the beginning of February 2022, BA.2 only made up around one percent of COVID-19 variants in the United States.

Although Walensky said theres no evidence that BA.2 causes more severe disease and evades immune protection compared to the BA.1 strain, it does appear to be more transmissible, she added.

The seven-day daily average of cases, as of April 5, was roughly 25,000 per day, which is lower by four percent compared to the previous week, the CDC director stated.

The seven-day average of hospital admissions was about 14,000 per day, a weekly decrease of 17 percent. Seven-day average daily deaths were about 570 per day, almost 16 percent lower compared to the previous week.

Walenskys comments come a week after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized a second booster shot of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for all adults 50 years or older.

Overall, this is the fourth COVID-19 shot approved for public use by the agency. Dr. Peter Marks, head of the FDA center that oversees vaccines, told reporters on March 29 that an additional booster might be required for some people in the fall season.

During the press briefing, Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the lead members of the COVID-19 response team, justified the fourth booster shot, saying that multiple studies prove that these vaccinations protect against serious illness, hospitalizations, and even death. The second booster shot can restore vaccine effectiveness for certain populations, he said.

However, the increasing use of COVID-19 vaccines has attracted criticism and raised health concerns. Marco Cavaleri, the European Medicines Agencys head of vaccines strategy, stated in January 2022 that the agency was worried about quick repeat vaccinations.

An additional vaccine booster shot could be considered as part of a contingency plan, but repeated vaccinations within short intervals will not represent a sustainable long-term strategy, he said in a media briefing.

In February 2022, it was reported that individuals who recovered from COVID-19 had protection against the infection for 20 months after being infected, indicating that natural immunity is long lasting.
Security cameras (R) along the Tsim Sha Tsui promenade next to Victoria Harbor in Hong Kong on September 17, 2020. (Isaac Lawrence/AFP via Getty Images)

Hong Kong Leadership Contender Emerges Amid Uncertain Future

HONG KONGHong Kongs deputy leader, former police officer John Lee, has signalled his intention to contest an election for the citys top job, media has reported, which could see Beijing signing off on the first security official to run the global financial hub.

Carrie Lam, the embattled incumbent leader who has seen her popularity slide, said on Monday she would not seek a second term, citing family considerations.

Hong Kong selects a leader every five years under a process that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Beijing oversees behind the scenes. Since the city reverted from British to Chinese rule in 1997, there have been four chief executives, all of whom have struggled to balance the democratic aspirations of some residents with the vision of CCP leaders.

How Democratic the Process?

The citys 7.4 million people have no say in who leads them.

City leaders are chosen in a vote by an election committee stacked with pro-CCP loyalists, ensuring that the CCP approves the decision. In a major overhaul of Hong Kongs electoral system last year to meet Beijings demands that only patriots run the city, this committee was enlarged from 1,200 to 1,500 members.

Hong Kongs mini-constitution, the Basic Law, states that full democracy is an ultimate aim for choosing the leader.

A voter leaves a polling station during the Legislative Council election in Hong Kongs Choi Hung area on Dec. 19, 2021. (Bertha Wang/AFP via Getty Images)

Who Are the Main Contenders for the Election?

The election was initially scheduled for March but was postponed because of a COVID-19 outbreak in which more than one million people have been infected, putting Lam under pressure.

Unlike previous times, when likely candidates have signaled their intention to run months in advance, no clear favorite has emerged, adding to the uncertainty over the citys future.

Chief Secretary Lee is a former Hong Kong security chief and deputy police commissioner who was known as an anglophile during British colonial rule.

In recent years, he has been forceful in enacting the CCPs harsher security regimenwith scores of democrats arrested, jailed, or forced into exile, civil society groups forced to disband, and liberal media outlets raided by police and shuttered.

Other possible contenders mentioned by media include the citys financial secretary, Paul Chan, as well as former leader Leung Chun-ying. None has announced a bid.

Hong Kong Secretary for Security John Lee at the Legislative Council complex in Hong Kong on Oct. 23, 2019. (Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images)

What Are the Arrangements?

The election is scheduled for May 8, with the new chief executive to take office on July 1. Some new chief executives have been personally sworn in by senior Chinese leaders. In 2017, on the 20th anniversary of Hong Kongs return to Chinese rule, CCP leader Xi Jinping swore in Lam.

A nomination period for candidates began on Sunday and will last for two weeks, with each candidate having to secure at least 188 nominations from the 1,500-member election committee.
Dane Donaldson (R), with his wife Jenn and sons Ryder (C) and Tanner, who is 9 years old and requires a kidney transplant. (Courtesy of Dane Donaldson)

Hospital Refuses Father-to-Son Kidney Transplant Over COVID Jab

A 9-year-old boy is being denied a life-saving kidney transplant because his father is not vaccinated against COVID-19.

Dane Donaldson was found to be a perfect match for his son Tanner back in early 2018 by the Cleveland Clinic Childrens Hospital before the outbreak of the pandemic.

The family decided to wait a little longer before having Tanner undergo the transplant since transplanted kidneys from a live donor only lasted about 20 years.

Then COVID-19 hit and put a freeze on the procedure.

Now the hospital is refusing to perform the life-saving father-to-son kidney transplant it agreed to do nearly four years ago over the senior Donaldsons unvaccinated status.

In a statement released to The Epoch Times, the Cleveland Clinic cited a 2021 policy it adopted requiring all donors and candidates for organ transplants to be fully vaccinated against the virus.

Individuals who are actively infected with COVID-19 have a much higher rate of complications during and after surgery, even if the infection is asymptomatic, the hospital stated.

Donaldson, who is in the insurance business, told The Epoch Times he is opposed to the COVID-19 vaccine for religious reasons, but also because he has seen a rising number of clients get critically ill after receiving it.

He believes the hospital is contradicting itself by requiring a living donor to be vaccinated, but not a deceased one.

I asked them in that car accident victim, would you vaccinate him on the way to the hospital to rip his kidney out and they said no, Donaldson told The Epoch Times.

Donaldson said he even offered to sign a waiver freeing the hospital from any liability should either himself or his son develop COVID-19. At the same time, the hospital has refused to agree to take any responsibility for any side effects that he or his son experienced from the vaccine.

The hospital, he said, is blowing the chance of a lifetime for his son.

A live donor is the best donor for kidneys, said Donaldson, but theyll take a kidney from a deceased person not vaccinated, it makes no sense.

The Cleveland hospital agreed that live donors are the best source for kidney transplant recipients, but emphasized that they were not without risksnoting that there is medication kidney transplant patients must take that compromises the immune system.

We continually strive to minimize risk to our living donors, and vaccination is an important component to ensure the safest approach and optimal outcomes for donors, it stated.

Donaldson said he and his wife Jenn are now in the process of finding another hospital to perform the transplant. They had wanted to stay with the childrens hospital because it has been treating his son since birth.

Tanner was born with compromised kidneys due to a rare birth defect that caused irreversible kidney damage in utero and resulted in stage 4 chronic kidney disease as well as bladder and urinary dysfunctions.

He now has only 18 percent function left of his kidneys, according to Donaldson.

The Donaldsons join a number of other publicized cases of U.S. hospitals that have refused to perform organ transplants because either the donor or recipient was not vaccinated.

Last month, The Epoch Times covered the story of an Air Force veteran who was denied a kidney transplant because he was refusing the vaccine.

Chad Carswell had only 4 percent kidney function left when the Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, refused to keep him on their candidate list for a donated kidney.

Fortunately, after his story went public the Medical City Fort Worth Transplant Institute in Texas offered to put Carswell on their recipient list for a kidney. His attorney Adam Draper said that as of April 3, Carswell was still in need of a match for the transplant.

In January, attorneys for the conservative organization Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) wrote a seven-page letter to the Cleveland Center requesting it reconsider the decision, and also the science behind it.

Presently, it appears the hospital is operating under a psychosis of flawed morality in choosing to sacrifice the health and wellness of its 9-year-old patient in exchange for what it perceives to be the greater good,' ICANs lawyers Aaron Siri and Elizabeth Brehm wrote.

ICAN also called the hospital irrational because the entire family, including Tanner and his older brother, all had COVID-19 and recovered from it, meaning they have natural immunity.

In its letter to the hospital, ICAN cited a number of international studies that showed that re-infection of COVID-19 after recovering from the virus was rare.

Of the studies it cited was one performed by Cleveland Clinic itself.

In the study, the hospital looked at SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) infections in 52,238 vaccinated and unvaccinated health care workers over a five-month period.

It found that none of the previously infected healthcare workers who remained unvaccinated contracted SARS-CoV-2 over the course of the research despite a high background rate of COVID-19 in the hospital.
House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) speaks to announce articles of impeachment for President Donald Trump during a press conference at the Capitol in Washington on Dec. 10, 2019. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

House Judiciary Committee Advances Domestic Terrorism Legislation, Minus Safeguards

The House Judiciary Committee has advanced legislation to provide federal law enforcement with an influx of resources to counter domestic terrorism, with Democrats voting down several attempts by Republicans to insert safeguards into the bill.

The committeeof 25 Democrats and 19 Republicansapproved the bill on April 6 with a 2117 vote along party lines. The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act now heads to the House floor after three days of contentious debate.

Republicans made four unsuccessful attempts to amend the legislation.

The first attempt was an April 5 proposed amendment to prevent the Department of Justice (DOJ) from monitoring parents who protest school board policies. Republicans introduced that in response to Attorney General Merrick Garlands decision last year to open a federal investigation into violence at school board meetings.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) opposed the amendment, scoffing at the notion that the DOJ is spying on protesting parents as being a Fox News conspiracy theory.

However, ranking GOP committee member Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) cited documents from an FBI whistleblower who revealed last November that the bureau was indeed tracking all investigations and assessments of threats of violence against educators. Reps. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) have warned that FBI assessments entail intrusive investigative techniques that can be initiated without a factual predicate of criminal wrongdoing.

Raskin also opposed the amendment, even after co-authoring a March 7 letter calling for an audit into the FBIs use of assessments.

Does anyone really believe this is going on? Raskin said, downplaying the notion that the FBI may be surveilling protesting parents.

The amendment was defeated 2418.

Republicans then proposed another amendment on April 5 that would have the FBI simply provide Congress with the number of protesting parents its tracking as possible threats. Democrats voted this proposal down 2317 with similar reasons given.

Another Republican attempt to add an amendment related to the legislations concentration on white supremacists and neo-Nazis. While the bill references those terms throughout, Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) sought to also insert Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and other radicalized social justice groups as intended targets of the legislation.

This time, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) spoke against the amendment along with the Democrats.

I am not going to support the amendment, because the biggest problem we face is the inward turning of these national security organizations, Gaetz said.

I do not believe we should do this to our fellow Americans, whether theyre members of Antifa, BLM, or some other group thats deemed a thought crime or a crime of bad politics in todays ethic.

Steube said he understands Gaetzs concerns, but that the reason he proposed the amendment was to expose the partisan politics being played by Democrats, he said.

The amendment was defeated in a vote of 2315, with Gaetz joining the Democrats in opposition.

Finally, Republicans proposed an amendment that would prevent the federal government from using counterterrorism resources against anyone who refuses a COVID-19 vaccine.

The Republicans noted that the threat against people who decline the vaccine being treated as domestic terrorists is far from hypothetical. They pointed to a February bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that declared a heightened terrorism threat because of false and misleading narratives, misinformation, and conspiracy theories.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) noted that he has been accused of spreading COVID-19 misinformation numerous times since the pandemic began. That prompted Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) to jokingly quip to Massie, Youre definitely a domestic terrorist.

Massie laughed, but stressed the seriousness of the matter.

It should terrify you that this amendment is germane to the bill, Massie said.

Democrats still opposed the proposal, arguing that the counterterrorism resources will only be used for legitimate law enforcement purposes. After a lengthy debate on April 5, the committee markup resumed on April 6 and the vaccination amendment was defeated 1916.
Ravioli is one of the most popular dishes at Americas best Italian restaurants, and for good reason. Soft pillows of pasta brimming with a cheese- or meat-based filling are hard to beat. But if you want to make this specialty in the comfort of your own home, its a little bit more complicated than you might think, even if you already know all the tricks to cooking pasta perfectly.

Its important to have a very strong but at the same time a very light and elastic dough, said Rome-born chef Antonio Morichini of Via Vai out of Queens, New York. The pasta has to be very thin.

Many popular fresh pasta recipes, like this one from Americas Test Kitchen, call for whole eggs and flour. In order to ensure that his ravioli are soft and elastic, however, Morichini uses only egg yolks and no whites, powder-fine 00 flour and a small amount of oil. After making his dough and letting it rest for an hour, he runs it through a pasta machine, starting at the highest setting and gradually reducing the thickness until its at almost zero. He fills it with a mixture of ricotta, Parmesan or grana Padano, and nutmeg to give aroma. After letting it boil for just a few minutes, he serves it with a simple sauce of butter, pasta water and sage and garnishes with a sprinkle of Parmesan.

If you want to try making this recipe for yourself, even if you dont have a pasta machine at home, you can find Morichinis recipe here. Before you know it, youll be making fresh pasta thats as good as Americas best restaurant pasta dishes.

By Dan Myers

 2020 Tribune Publishing; Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
Last week, a top U.S. banking regulator warned of growing risks as banks start to capitalize on the popularity of cryptocurrencies to offer related services to clients.

Here is how some of the biggest banks operating in the United States have gotten involved in crypto:

Custody Services

Bank of New York Mellon announced in February 2021 that it would hold, transfer and issue bitcoin for asset management clients, one of the first announcements of its kind for a major Wall Street bank. The launch is expected later this year.

Clients will be able to store bitcoin and ether, the two largest cryptocurrencies, in BNY Mellon crypto wallets, which will be created in partnership with crypto infrastructure company Fireblocks.

U.S. Bancorp went live in October with bitcoin custody services. Bitcoin company NYDIG is acting as a sub-custodian for the bank. The services are geared toward institutional investment managers with private funds.

State Street Corp in March said it intends to offer cryptocurrency custody services in partnership with crypto infrastructure platform Copper.co, although it cautioned that the offering was subject to regulatory approval.

Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank quietly revealed plans to develop a service to hold and trade cryptocurrencies for institutional investors in a 2020 report published by the World Economic Forum, adding it had already completed a proof of concept.

Also in 2020, BNP Paribas completed a proof of concept with crypto wallet provider Curv to develop a secure method to transfer tokenized securities. It said the development was a step toward creating an integrated custody solution for both traditional and digital assets.

Deutsche Bank and BNPP did not provide an update on these projects when contacted by Reuters.

Wealth Management

A slew of big banks began offering wealth management clients exposure to crypto in 2021, with Morgan Stanley leading the pack. CNBC reported in March that Morgan Stanley was enabling access to three bitcoin funds for clients with at least $2 million in assets held at the bank.

In July, JPMorgan Chase & Co allowed its financial advisers to accept buy and sell orders from its wealth management clients for five cryptocurrency products, according to Business Insider.

Wells Fargo & Co also began offering its wealthy clients cryptocurrency exposure in the summer of 2021, as did State Street.

JP Morgan and Wells Fargo both registered private bitcoin funds in partnership with NYDIG in August.

Citigroup Incs wealth management unit created a digital assets group in June to facilitate investments in cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, non-fungible tokens, and central bank digital currencies, according to media reports.

In March of this year, regulatory documents revealed that Goldman Sachs is offering wealthy clients access to an ethereum fund through crypto company Galaxy Digital.

Trading

In March 2021, Goldman rebooted its cryptocurrency trading desk after mothballing it in 2019. That team, which sits within the banks Global Markets division, deals bitcoin futures and nondeliverable forwards, a derivative that allows the banks clients to take a view on bitcoins future price.

In March of this year, Goldman Sachs went a step further and became the first major U.S. bank to carry out an over-the-counter crypto trade in partnership with Galaxy Digital, a crypto-focused asset manager.

Bank of America in July 2021 green-lit trading bitcoin futures for certain clients through a partnership with CME Group Inc, according to a report from CoinDesk. Bank of America declined to comment on the report, but said in a statement that it was currently considering strategies related to cryptocurrency and other digital assets.

Citigroup said last August the bank was considering offering bitcoin futures trading for some institutional clients, although media reports said the bank was awaiting regulatory approval. Citi had no immediate comment. IFR reported in December that Citi had recently cleared its first bitcoin futures trade through CME Group.

PNC Financial Services Group is also waiting for the OK from regulators to allow its customers to trade crypto.

Research Coverage

Banks are also plowing money into research.

Bank of America kicked off digital assets research coverage for clients in October.

Morgan Stanley stood up a new crypto research division in September, in what the bank said was a recognition of the growing significance of cryptocurrencies  in global markets.

Citigroup in November said it was looking to create this year 100 new roles focused on digital assets, including blockchain and digital currencies, at its institutional division.

By Hannah Lang

The Epoch Times Copyright  2022 The views and opinions expressed are only those of the authors. They are meant for general informational purposes only and should not be construed or interpreted as a recommendation or solicitation. The Epoch Times does not provide investment, tax, legal, financial planning, estate planning, or any other personal finance advice. The Epoch Times holds no liability for the accuracy or timeliness of the information provided.
Workers inspect newly assembled cars at a Beijing Benz Automotive Co. Ltd factory, a German joint venture company for Mercedes-Benz, in Beijing, China, on May 13, 2020. (Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

In Germany, New Factory Orders Declined in February 2022

Germanys new factory orders fell in February 2022 on a monthly basis for the first time in four months, according to provisional results from the countrys federal statistical office.

New orders decreased by 2.2 percent in February compared to January on a seasonally- and calendar-adjusted basis, the office said in an April 6 press release. Excluding major orders, new orders fell by 1.6 percent for the month. The decline in new orders was attributed largely to the 3.3 percent fall in foreign orders.

New orders from the eurozone fell by 3.3 percent while those from non-European regions declined by 3.4 percent. Only domestic orders registered a growth, marginally rising by 0.2 percent.

In terms of the types of products, new orders for consumer foods grew by 0.7 percent in February, but capital goods fell by 2.8 percent and intermediate goods declined by 1.9 percent.

As in the preceding months, the total of the values reported for new orders in many branches of manufacturing in February 2022 was higher than total turnover. The excess demand is likely to be due to the continuing acute shortage of intermediate products, the press release said.

As a result, many enterprises have problems filling new orders. The situation went slightly back to normal due to the decrease in new orders in February 2022.

The decline in new orders is not an insignificant matter as it followed a rise in demand in January, said Joerg Kraemer, chief economist at Commerzbank AG.

The main challenges for German manufacturers in the coming months will be less about demand and more about availability of raw materials as supplies have been hit due to the RussiaUkraine war and the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions in China, Kraemer said.

The drop in orders in February should be seen in view of the sharp rise in the previous month, the German economy ministry said in a statement. An impact of Russias war in Ukraine is hardly reflected in the data. Yet the war is causing high uncertainty especially on future demand.

The dismal new orders data comes a month after the German governments council of economic advisers cut the countrys economic growth forecast for 2022 from 4.6 percent to 1.8 percent. The advisers forecasts act as a guide for Berlin when deciding on fiscal policy.

We havent tried to calculate the exact probability of a recession, council member Volker Wieland said at a news conference. For example, we dont know if there will be a supply freeze or whether the West can no longer avoid imposing an energy embargo. But these are possibilities. So, the risk is substantial.

Unlike the United States, the German economy is yet to fully recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, Wieland added.

Reuters contributed to this report.
Police arrest protesters as mounted officers move toward the main Freedom Convoy protest in downtown Ottawa on Feb. 18, 2022. (Richard Moore/The Epoch Times)

Investigation Into Ottawa Horse Trampling Incident Closed as Injury Deemed Not Serious

The woman who was knocked down by mounted police during the Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa was not seriously injured, said Ontarios Special Investigations Unit (SIU) on April 4, hence closing its investigation of the matter.

The SIU said in a press release the decision to terminate the investigation was made after interviewing the woman, Candice Sero, and reviewing police drone and body-worn camera footage as well as Seros medical records.

On Feb. 18, a large police operation moved in to clear the site of the protest calling for the end of COVID-19 restrictions, which had been in place since Jan. 29, including hundreds of trucks parked in Ottawas downtown streets.

As police slowly pushed back non-violent protesters on Wellington Street, a mounted unit from the Toronto Police Service (TPS) made rounds in front of police lines to also push back the protesters.

Video footage showed horses knocking down Sero and a male protester, and the SIU reported the incident similarly.

The SIU said police officers then quickly surrounded Sero and she was assisted to her feet. She was taken to Montfort Hospital and subsequently attended Lennox & Addington County General Hospital with shoulder pain on Feb. 20.

A review of the available medical records indicates that the woman did not sustain any fractures and that her injury was limited to a strained shoulder, the SIU said. In the circumstances, as the woman did not sustain a serious injury within the terms of the SIUs mandate, the SIU does not have statutory jurisdiction to investigate the matter, and the file is closed.

Sero, a Mohawk from Tyendinaga territory, told Rebel News in an interview that she suffered a fractured collarbone and that she thinks a couple of officers kicked her while she was down and an officer dragged her off the premises by her coat.

But I walked right on by [police] lines and walked back into safetybecause outside of our circle it didnt feel safe. When I was back in with the convoy I felt safe, she said.

The SIU said the matter has now been referred to the TPS for further investigation as they deem appropriate.

Following the governments invocation of the Emergencies Act on Feb. 14 to clear protests and blockades, law enforcement was able to speed up the process to mobilize additional officers in Ottawa, and the measure provided them additional powers such as the ability to designate no-go zones, ban children from attending the protest, and compel towing companies to remove the trucks.

By the end of the weekend of Feb. 18, the protest had been completely removed and the public emergency was revoked on Feb. 23.
Iran Stabbing Attack Leaves 1 Dead, 2 Injured at Shiite Shrine

TEHRAN, IranAn assailant stabbed three clerics at a Shiite site in Iran on Tuesday, according to Iranian state-run media, killing one and injuring two before he was arrested. The motive for the attack remained unclear.

One cleric died almost instantly after being stabbed at the Imam Reza shrine in Irans northeast city of Mashhad. Two others were hospitalized, Irans state-run IRNA news agency reported.

Mashhad prosecutor Mohammad Hossein Darroudi described the assailant as a foreign national, without elaborating. He said four other suspects were arrested in connection with the case.

State media identified the cleric who was killed as Mohammad Aslani. It did not provide information about the conditions of the other victims.

In a video from the scene that was shared on social media, two men could be seen splayed on the shrines gray marbled floor covered with blood. IRNA news agency posted a video of police arresting the assailant.

The stabbings on Tuesday followed a separate attack targeting clerics earlier this week. On Sunday, two Sunni clerics were shot to death in a mosque in the northern town of Gonbad Kavus. Authorities did not offer a motive for that incident, either.
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during an event to mark the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act in the East Room of the White House on April 5, 2022. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Its Worse Than a Gaffe If Theres Method to His Madness

Commentary

At what point does Joe Bidens verbal incontinence start to become a mortal threat to Americans? asks Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journala purely rhetorical question meant to be understood as signifying that it is at this pointthe point of calling for regime change in Russia, as Biden did recentlythat he becomes a mortal threat to Americans.

Stephen Green of PJ Media, better known as VodkaPundit, put it more succinctly: Big Mouth Biden Talks His Way into World War III.

After noting the advice of Sun Tzu to generals in prospect of victory to build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across, Green draws a telling contrast with General Bidens insistence that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin must step downand presumably submit himself to be tried for the war crimes our president also claims he is guilty of.

Yeah, thatll work.

This would be the same Vladimir Putin whose finger, for so long as he remains in the office he currently holds, is on the button that will, if he chooses, launch thousands of nuclear warheadsnot at Ukraine, but at us.

You talk about war crimes, quoth Vlad. Ill give you war crimes.

Instead of Sun Tzus golden bridge to peace, writes the VodkaPundit, Biden has backed him into a corner and dared him to lash out. Thats the idiots way to start World War III, but from Joe Biden, what else did you expect?

What indeed! Yet the remarkable thing is that the presidents media supporters as well as his detractors appear to see only what they expect to see in his words, however maladroit. Where the latter see an idiots catastrophic blunder, the former see at worst the sign of highly creditable moral feelings and at best a foreign policy geniuss masterstroke.

It was former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Leon Panetta who put the gaffe down to the presidents warm heart, saying hes Irish [and] really has a great deal of compassion when he sees that people are suffering. And I think it overwhelmed him in the sense of seeing all of the horrors that were resulting from this war.

But this was faint praise compared with that of Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, who wrote that Bidens Putin ad-lib wasnt a gaffe. He was right.

Or Allan Katz of Newsweek: This Is Joe Bidens Finest Momentan opinion apparently shared by David Rothkopf of The Daily Beast, who thought the speech bore comparison to Winston Churchills Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946.

Not surprisingly, Joe himself favors this view over that of the VodkaPundit.

I was expressing the moral outrage that I feel, and I make no apologies for it, he said. Its ridiculous. Nobody believes I was talking about taking down Putin. Nobody believes that.

Oddly enough, this is almost true, since nobody believes anything he says. Except that, in this case, some people do believe him, albeit only with supporting evidence. One such is the historian Niall Ferguson, who writes for Bloomberg and who claims to have heard from a senior administration official at a private event that The only end-game now is the end of Putin [sic] regime.

The administrations thinking, according to Ferguson, appears to be that Putin and his regime can be brought down by a carefully judged supply of sophisticated weaponry to Ukraine by the United States and Europenot so much as to provoke a direct Russian retaliation, but just enough to keep Russian troops bogged down in an unwinnable quagmire, like Afghanistan, perhaps for years.

Presumably, some discontented generals or other Kremlin officials will eventually get tired of living in a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations and will then take down the man who got them into another forever warwhich will also, according to Fergusons senior administration official, put an end to the Sino-Russian alliance.

Whats not to like?

This is also the administrations thinking in the opinion of Curt Mills of The American Conservative, who writes that the fascinating thing about this strategy is the way it combines cynicism and optimism. It is when you come to think of it, archetypal Realpolitik to allow the carnage in Ukraine to continue; to sit back and watch the heroic Ukrainians bleed Russia dry; to think of the conflict as a mere subplot in Cold War II, a struggle in which China is our real opponent.

What could go wrong?

Leave aside for the moment the appalling cynicism of prolonging Ukraines suffering to achieve Americas foreign policy aims. Even Bidens celebrated Irish compassion for suffering must see that it wont be only the Russians who are bled dry.

Even if it were, even if we could be confident in the administrations judgment of exactly how much provocation Putin is prepared to endure before he launches his nukes, how can we believe that this strategy has been designed in such complete disregard of the old military maxim that the enemy gets a vote?

In other words, Putin may not be content either to stay in this quagmire of Americas devising and be bled dry or quietly to withdraw into his own pariah state to await the inevitable coup detat. He does have other options, and I dont think were going to like any of them.

It begins to look as if, whatever view we take of the sincerity of the Biden gaffe itself, its still more likely to be what VodkaPundit calls the idiots way to start World War III than it is to be for the good of either Ukraine or the United States.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Ivanka Trump, a daughter of and adviser to President Donald Trump, listens during a roundtable in the State Dining Room of the White House on May 18, 2020. (Doug Mills - Pool/Getty Images)

Ivanka Trump Testifies Before Jan. 6 Committee

Former President Donald Trumps daughter, Ivanka Trump, testified on April 5 before the U.S. House of Representatives committee investigating the origins of the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol.

The former senior adviser to the president testified remotely for several hours regarding the incident after declining to plead the Fifth Amendment or invoke executive privilege.

Shes answering questions. I mean, you know, not in a broad, chatty term, but shes answering questions, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the committee, told reporters at the Capitol on April 5.

Thompson said Ivanka Trump came in on her own, that has obviously significant value noting that the committee did not have to subpoena.

A spokesperson for Ivanka Trump didnt respond to a request for comment by press time.

The committee first wrote a letter (pdf) requesting her appearance in January, noting that the questions asked would be limited to the activities that contributed to or influenced events on that day and her role in the White House during that period.

Trumps daughter was in the West Wing of the White House on the day of the Capitol breach.

On January 6th, you were serving as Advisor to the President and head of the White House Office of Economic Initiatives and Entrepreneurship, and were present in the West Wing of the White House, Thompson wrote to Ivanka Trump at the time. We write to request your voluntary cooperation with our investigation on a range of critical topics.

Trumps appearance before the select committee comes a week after her husband, Jared Kushner, also appeared virtually before the nine-member bipartisan committee, which includes seven Democrats.

Kushner, like his wife, also served as a senior adviser to the Trump administration and is the only other family relative to have testified before the committee.

Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), a member of the committee, told MSNBC of Kushners attendance, It was really valuable for us to have the opportunity to speak to him.

He was able to voluntarily provide information to us to verify, substantiate, provide his own take on this different reporting.

Lawmakers have accused the former president of encouraging violence at the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol, a claim that Donald Trump strongly denies.

The House select committee has subpoenaed a number of people as part of its investigation, including former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn, former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon, and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

Former senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller filed a lawsuit on March 9 to block a subpoena from the committee for his phone records after they accused him of spreading misinformation about the November 2020 presidential election and alleged voter fraud.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell filed a lawsuit against the select committee in an effort to stop telecommunications company Verizon from sharing his information with the committee after it issued a subpoena for all of Lindells cellphone records.

In January, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said he wouldnt voluntarily cooperate with the select committee after they formally requested he appear and testify, calling the request unprecedented and inappropriate.

Reuters contributed to this report.
A child holds a placard during a protest against Russia's invasion of Ukraine in front of Shinjuku station in Tokyo, Japan on March 26, 2022. (Yuichi Yamazaki/Getty Images)

Japan Adds Luxury Goods to Russia Sanctions as It Takes in Ukrainian Refugees

Luxury products are among a list of items banned by the Japanese government for export to Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

Announced on March 29, the ban went into effect on April 5.

Nineteen luxury products, including perfume, fine artwork, and high-end cars, are now part of an expanding list of banned exports to Russia that also includes weapons, military-grade tools, carbon fiber, and general semiconductors.

Koichi Hagiuda, Japanese Economy, Trade, and Industry Minister, said on March 23 that Japan will cooperate with the Group of Seven (G7) global economy bodies to adopt stringent sanctions against Russia.

The ban on luxury goods exports to Russia is aimed at business oligarchs who support Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Koichi said that following western countries broader sanctions, Japanese lawmakers have also proposed to freeze the assets of Russian politicians and oligarchs and their families.

Russias oligarchs accumulated wealth following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and, to varying degrees, have supported Putins government for political influence.

Meanwhile, Russia has put Japan on its unfriendly nations list and suspended peace treaty talks with Japan in retaliation for Tokyos sanctions.

Moscow and Tokyo are also at loggerheads over the disputed Kuril Islands, which Japan refers to as the Northern Territories which Soviet troops seized at the end of World War II.

But Japan is hesitant to cut all economic ties with Russia.

Japan will not pull out from the Sakhalin-2 liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in Russia despite the withdrawal of other companies over Russias invasion of Ukraine, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on March 23. Kishida added that Japan would increase efforts to reduce reliance on Russian energy in coordination with the Group of Seven (G7) advanced countries plan.

Minoru Osugi, a New Conservative Party activist, told The Epoch Times that as well as economic sanctions  both imports and exportsJapanese development projects should be pulled out of Russia.

Nemoto, a media professional, told The Epoch Times that most Japanese media is supporting the sanction efforts against Russia over its invasion.

The ban on the export of luxury goods was used by Japan in 2006 after North Korea claimed to have conducted a nuclear test.

Japans Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi (L) and his Polish counterpart Zbigniew Rau give a joint press conference in Warsaw on April 4, 2022. (Photo by Janek Skarzynski/AFP via Getty Images)

While in Poland, Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi said on April 4 that 20 Ukrainian refugees were being sent to Japan on a government plane on that same day, Kyodo News reported.

Hayashi also met with Ukrainian Minister Dmytro Kuleba in the Polish capital Warsaw, that Japan would accept as many (Ukrainians) as possible from a humanitarian perspective.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroshi Matsuno told a news conference in Tokyo on April 4 that Japan had accepted 393 Ukrainian evacuees as of Saturday since Russia invaded Ukraine.

Japan will cover the Ukrainian refugees living expenses and medical care while assisting them to learn the Japanese language. They will also receive employment counseling and education for children.

Ms. Yamada, a self-employed businesswoman, told The Epoch Times was glad the government is helping the Ukrainian refugees.

People on both sides of the war are the most innocent, especially the children, who will always be accompanied by the shadow of the fear of war when they are young, Yamada said.

Since Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on March 2 that Japan can accept Ukrainian refugees.

As of April 3, more than 4.2 million refugees had fled Ukraine since the Feb. 24 start of the conflict. Of them, 2.45 million are in Poland, according to the UNHCR, reported France 24.

With additional reporting by Aldgra Fredly.
A Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) Type-74 tank fires ammunition during a live-fire exercise at the JSDF's training grounds in the East Fuji Maneuver area in Gotemba, Japan, on May 22, 2021. (Akio Kon/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Japans Defense: Is Japan Ready to Shoot?

Commentary

When the first Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF) contingent was dispatched to Iraq in 2004, a U.S. Marine officer gave its commander some parting advice: Youd better be ready to shoot somebody.

This wasnt said in jest.

Despite the JSDF being a military in all but name, shooting people really wasnt part of the deal back then. The Japanese government made sure of it and, in the case of Iraq, only agreed to the deployment provided that Japanese troops only built roads and schoolsand had Australian troops nearby to protect them.

Even in 2009, when a Japan Ground Self-Defense (GSDF) unit went to train at the U.S. Marine base at Camp Pendleton, California, a commissar from GSDF headquarters in Tokyo physically interfered with a Japanese NHK film crew trying to get some footage. Apparently, the idea of the Japanese army actually training for combat was a state secret.

As late as 2016, revelations that the GSDF unit in Iraq was actually on the receiving end of some enemy fire were used as a political weapon by Japanese leftists against the administration of then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abeeven if to little effect.

But that was then. Recently, the JSDF has been conducting serious, high-end exercises with the U.S. Navy and Marines on land and the seas around Japan, even in the middle of the South China Sea. And it is publicizing it, too.

This training included Japanese and American forces simulating targeting and launching missiles to sink ships. The Chinese Peoples Liberation Armys Navy (PLAN) ships come immediately to mind as the prime candidate.

The United States and Japan also just did a small amphibious training exercise near Tokyofor the first timeand went ashore for combat exercises, with the press warmly invited. And nobody complained about any of this.

Since the mid-2010s, Japan has been quietly fortifying the Nansei Shoto (also called the Ryukyu Islands, extending north from Taiwan) with anti-ship missiles and anti-aircraft systems. It is even talking with the Americans about getting into the mix.

In late 2021, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida called for Japan to have the capability to strike enemy bases. Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said similar things in public several times. And perhaps not surprisingly, given Chinese threats to launch many nuclear missiles into Japan if it intervenes on behalf of Taiwan, former PM Abe recently called for Japan to consider working a deal with the Americans to place nuclear weapons in Japan.

None of this is likely to happen anytime soon, but it is being said in Japans ruling circles. Not long ago, these ideas were taboo. And it appears Japans general population is coming around as well. This is a huge psychological change.

Its taken nearly 20 years, and Japans military capabilities still need much work, but Japan is now ready to shoot.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has accomplished what successive U.S. administrations could not in terms of getting Japan to take its own defense seriously. And Russian President Vladimir Putins assault on Ukraine has only solidified Japanese thinking.

After World War II, Japan renounced war as a way of settling disputesthats written in the Japanese constitution. But nobody else did. And it couldnt last forever.

While the Japanese military was perhaps better known for helping out after floods and earthquakes, or building roads in Iraq, there were always JSDF members who knew shooting is what militaries do. They tried to prepare as much as they could in case they were needed.

That included the Japan Airborne Brigade and the troops that became the core of the new amphibious brigade. And the Japanese navyparticularly its submarine and anti-submarine forcewere getting ready, and even put the fear of God in Chinese submariners on occasion.

Japan is not looking for a fight, but has two or three neighbors that are. And if the human experience tells us anything, its that the more willing you are to shoot, the less likely youll have to.

The outside world has caught up with Japan. Or at least Japan has woken up to it. And it seems like they want to be prepared for what comes next, however belatedly.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
A window cleaner works on a shop front in Melbourne's central business district in Melbourne, Australia, on May 11, 2021. (William West/AFP via Getty Images)

JobKeeper Scheme Delivered Effectively Despite Shortcomings: ANAO Report

An independent audit of Jobkeeper by the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) has found the federal government largely implemented the pandemic support scheme effectively while having some shortcomings.

The federal government created the JobKeeper scheme at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to keep Australians employed by supporting impacted businesses with payments of $1,500 (US$1,144) per worker per fortnight from March 30, 2020, to Sep. 28, 2020. The scheme was later extended twice at reduced rates.

The ANAO audit report found that the Australian Tax Office (ATO), which was tasked with administering the scheme, made around $89 billion in JobKeeper payments, with an average of 3.6 million individuals receiving support monthly in the first six months.

On average, the audit found that it took the ATO four days to process a claim, and businesses could claim the first monthly reimbursement five weeks after the government announced the scheme.

However, the audit report discovered that not all of the required compliance and integrity measures were carried out by the ATO as intended.

Among the 22 compliance measures, the ANAO found that two were partly implemented as intended, seven mostly as intended and eight fully as intended. However, the audit office could not provide conclusions on five measures because of data integrity issues.

One of the measures that the ATO did not carry out completely was ensuring businesses would pay their employees when receiving JobKeeper payments.

More specifically, the ANAO checked 49 compliance cases on this measure and detected that 15 cases were closed without evidence that the risk that the client receiving JobKeeper payments was not paying their employees had been addressed.

A general view of a Centrelink office in Footscray in Melbourne, Australia, on March 29, 2021. (Darrian Traynor/Getty Images)

Additionally, the audit found that the inconsistencies in the documentation that occurred when the tax authority conducted reviews on businesses proposed decline in turnover did not provide strong assurance on the assessed eligibility of entities that were reviewed.

In particular, there were concerns about the evidence asked for and received by the tax office showing a business satisfied the test of decline in turnover.

For instance, some entities submitted a spreadsheet that included only a calculation of their declines in turnover without indicating when the calculation was completed.

The ATO has acknowledged the issue and said that the variability of documentation existed because there was no definition of what records were required to be kept or how to present the calculation.

Meanwhile, the ATO reported in September 2021 that it had identified $470 million in JobKeeper overpayments and waived $180 million out of this amount using the legislative discretion provided to the tax authority.

The ATO used the discretion to forgive overpayments to ineligible businesses when it judged that those entities made an honest mistake and did not receive direct financial benefit from the JobKeeper payments.

Nevertheless, after reviewing a sample of 63 overpayments, the ANAO found that the tax authority did not consistently document how its exercise of discretion related to the two criteria above.

A more structured approach for documenting the reasons for exercising discretion on JobKeeper overpayments would have provided more transparency and accountability for the use of public funds, the audit report said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (C) in the town of Bucha, northwest of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, on April 4, 2022. (Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via Getty Images)

Kremlin Denies Claims Russian Authorities Want to Assassinate Zelenskyy

Russia has no plans to kill Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy or remove him from office, a top Kremlin spokesman said on April 6.

No, this is not true, spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state-run media, in response to a question about whether Russia wants Zelenskyy dead. He added that Russian authorities have never talked about the occupation of Ukraine.

Zelenskyy is the president of Ukraine, Peskov said, adding that Russia wants him to agree to demands that have been proposed during peace talks. Through those talks, we want to put an end to the military operation.

The two sides last met for face-to-face negotiations about a week ago in Istanbul.

Meanwhile, Western leaders continue to say that Russian forces have committed war crimes in Bucha, near Kyiv, coming days after Ukrainian officials made the allegations.

When you look at whats happening in Bucha, the revelations that we are seeing from what [Russia] has done in Ukraine, which doesnt look far short of genocide to me, it is no wonder that people are responding in the way that they are, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson told reporters on April 6.

And I have no doubt that the international communityBritain very much in the front rankwill be moving again in lockstep to impose more sanctions, Johnson said.

Russian government officials have categorically denied that Russian troops carried out atrocities in Bucha, claiming that videos and pictures that emerged last week were staged as a provocation.

These terrible, criminal fake [images] were published in order to justify another pre-arranged sanctions package, including a large-scale expulsion of diplomats from different countries, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on April 6. And also of course in order to complicate, if not completely disrupt [peace] talks.

The White House said the United States and its allies would target Russian banks and officials with new sanctions on April 6 and ban new investment in Russia; the head of the European Commission signaled further sanctionsincluding examining energy importsin addition to ones unveiled by the bloc on April 5.

Zelenskyy, for his part, addressed the U.N. Security Council and demanded that Russia be removed as a permanent member. He also questioned what role the Security Council, which includes China and the United States as members, even plays.

It is obvious that the key institution of the world designed to combat aggression and ensure peace cannot work effectively, he said.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to remind you of Article 1, Chapter 1 of the U.N. Charter. What is the purpose of our organization? Its purpose is to maintain and make sure that peace is adhered to. And now the U.N. charter is violated literally starting with Article 1. And so what is the point of all other Articles?

Reuters contributed to this report.
A service member of pro-Russian troops stands on the ruins of a destroyed apartment building in Mariupol, Ukraine, on March 30, 2022. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)

Kyiv Says Moscow Not Serious About Peace Talks as Russian Shelling of Key Ukrainian Cities Continues

Ukraines President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of being insincere in its peace talk overtures as Russia on Wednesday continued its bombardment of key Ukrainian cities.

Zelenskyy said in an address to the Spanish Parliament on Tuesday that Russia is not serious about peace and pleaded for Europe to do more to stop Moscows offensive.

We, Ukrainians, are committed to peace and a conflict-free environment, Zelenskyy said, adding that Ukraine has repeatedly called on Russia to agree to a ceasefire and resolve differences through talks.

Ukraine speaks about it every day. Every day throughout the days of this invasion. But the war continues. Russia is not serious about peace, he added.

A view of cars damaged during shelling, amid Russias invasion of Ukraine, in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on April 5, 2022. (Oleksandr Lapshyn/Reuters)

Russia Not Ready for Top-Level Talks

Ukraine has called for talks between Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin on a peace deal but Russias chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, has said that its too early for that.

A draft of a treaty between Russia and Ukraine is not yet ready to be presented at the top-level meeting, Medinsky said in an April 3 message on Telegram.

The Ukrainian side became more realistic in approaching the issues related to Ukraines neutral and non-nuclear status but the draft of the agreement is not ready to be presented at the top-level meeting, he wrote.

Medinsky said that Russia continues to insist Ukraine acknowledge Crimea as Russian and recognize the separatist-controlled regions in Donbass as independent. He added that talks between the two sides would continue in an online format.

Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, and that same year the conflicts in Donbass between the Ukrainian military and Russia-backed separatists escalated into a war.

The status of Crimea and the Donbass have been a key sticking point in the negotiations, with Ukraine offering to leave the issue of Crimea temporarily unsettled with a commitment to find a compromise on its status within 15 years.

Russian army military vehicles are seen in Armyansk, Crimea, on Feb. 25, 2022. (Stringer/AFP via Getty Images)

This Is Our Territory

Zelenskyy has insisted, however, that Ukraine would not cede any territory and that postponing a settlement on Crimea was already a concession on the part of Ukraines negotiating team.

There can be no discussion that we will allow someone to call Crimea someones territory. This is our territory, Ukrainian territory. Postponing this issue is a compromise, Zelenskyy said.

And Donbass for me is Ukraine, he continued, adding that preserving the status of these territories as Ukrainian is very important for us.

A man removes debris outside a residential building damaged by shelling during the Ukraine-Russia conflict in the separatist-controlled town of Makeyevka (Makiivka) outside Donetsk, Ukraine, on March 16, 2022. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)

Besides arguing that Russia wasnt serious about the peace talks, Zelenskyy called for additional tough sanctions against Moscow in the face of what he said were atrocities committed by Russian forces in Ukraine.

Really powerful sanctions are needed. The most powerful, Zelenskyy said. How can we allow Russian banks to generate profits while the Russian military tortures ordinary civilians to death in Ukrainian cities? How can European companies trade in a state that is deliberately destroying our people? he added.

Ukraine has accused Russia of committing war crimes in Bucha, a town near Kyiv, after grisly images emerged over the weekend of mass graves and bodies of slain individuals, some with hands bound and others bearing marks of apparent torture.

Russia has denied it committed any war crimes, claiming that allegations of atrocities in Bucha were a monstrous forgery meant to denigrate the Russian army.

Journalists work next to a mass grave in Bucha, in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on April 4, 2022. (Rodrigo Abd/AP Photo)

Meanwhile, Russian artillery pounded the Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Kharkiv on Wednesday.

The besieged southern port of Mariupol has been under almost constant bombardment since the early days of the invasion, with tens of thousands of residents trapped without food, water or power.

The humanitarian situation in the city is worsening, British military intelligence said in an update on Wednesday.

Most of the 160,000 remaining residents have no light, communication, medicine, heat or water. Russian forces have prevented humanitarian access, likely to pressure defenders to surrender.

The Epoch Times could not immediately verify the British intelligence report.
Los Angeles Armed-Robbery Suspect Arrested 4 Times in 3 Months

Los Angeles police have arrested an 18-year-old man four times this year following several armed robberies.

After each release, Matthew Adams returned to the streets and is suspected of holding victims at gunpoint while demanding jewelry and other expensive items, Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore told police commissioners April 5.

After the first three arrests, Adams was released by the courts within days.

Through a follow-home task force investigation, we have identified Mr. Adams as being involved in at least eight robberies, and potentially others, Moore said.

Matthew Adams was arrested multiple times this year by the Los Angeles Police Department and is suspected of being involved in eight robberies. (Courtesy of the Los Angeles Police Department)

Some of the suspected incidents include follow-home robberies, a trend that has spread fear throughout the Los Angeles area.

Im thankful that there was no loss of life through the course of these ordeals, Moore said.

Moore said he appreciated the arrests, but Im disappointed that the full weight of existing laws, and the support of our district attorney and the court to hold this individual responsible and accountable and keep him from the community, was missed.

Many Los Angeles officials and residents have alleged at least part of the blame for the recent spikes in robberies and violent crime falls on Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon.

The district attorney is facing a second recall effort and heavy criticism for what many say are crime-friendly policies, for example zero bail, reduced sentencing for some crimes, and eliminating sentencing enhancements for gun crimes or gang affiliations.

The recall effort has collected 200,000 signatures and raised $4 million, according to organizers. The effort needs 566,857 signatures, or 10 percent of the total current registered voters in the city, to qualify for the ballot.

This is an offender we believe has capitalized on weaknesses in the current system, Moore said.

Los Angeles Police Commission President William Briggs said local policies are failing.

The example that you just laid out with respect of Mr. Adams and this revolving door criminal justice system that we have right now clearly is not working and is endangering the citizens of Los Angeles and creating a public safety crisis that we need to find a solution for, Briggs told the police commission April 5.

Those who are in a position to change what is rapidly coming out of control they need to seize this moment and change policies that are demonstrably failing.

A man is arrested by a Los Angeles police officer in Venice Beach, Calif.,on June 2, 2020. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Adams was one of three men arrested after a task force investigation into recent follow-home robberies. He was first arrested Jan. 9 following two robberies. Adams was arrested in a car that was reportedly used in a robbery two days earlier.

In January, police investigated two Jan. 7 robberies. The first occurred in Burbank when the victim was followed home from Hollywood. Three male suspects armed with handguns took $51,000 in property.

That same day, a man and woman were followed home from a high-end restaurant on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. A watch, wallet, and cell phone were taken from the victims during the robbery.

Adams posted bond following the Jan. 9 arrest.

A week later, two tourists visiting from England were robbed of $73,000 in jewelry, cash, and a purse at a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, according to police.

Adams was again arrested Jan. 27 and released without posting bail.

The fact that he was out on an earlier bail for robbery at gunpoint, that enhancement was not filed and the court actually released Mr. Adams a few days later on his own recognizance, Moore said.

On Feb. 21, Adams was at the scene of a carjacking in the downtown jewelry district, Moore said. He was arrested for being in possession of a handgun and released again without posting bail.

Again, a filing was obtained for possession of that handgun but there was no enhancement filed, Moore said.

The latest arrest was March 31. Adams was arrested during a traffic stop and suspected of being involved in the robbery of two UCLA students the day before. During this crime, two men armed with guns were waiting outside the victims residence in West Los Angeles. One victim was struck on the head with a firearm and the suspects took two watches and an iPhone valued at $145,000.

Adams remains in jail, according to police. The Los Angeles District Attorneys Office filed multiple charges against Adams, including seven counts of robbery and two gun enhancements. His bail was set at $450,000.

Jayon Sparks and Eric Wilson were arrested on March 24 on suspicion of their suspected involvement in follow-home robberies and weapons violations, the LAPD reported. Wilson has been released on bond. Bail was set at $50,000 for Sparks.

Moore, who has been reluctant to criticize the district attorney until now, said every enhancement should be made available to the police department.

The increase in violence, with 35 percent of robberies in the city being at gunpoint, and 70-plus percent of our increase in robberies this year, is a result of firearms, Moore said.

A spokesman for Gascons recall effort said the recent case shows how dangerous the district attorneys policies are.

I think its emblematic of the false pretense of George Gascons policies and it paints a very clear picture of the danger of turning your back on crime, said recall spokesman Tim Lineberger. Every day, we just learn more and more about exactly how dangerous these policies really are. Its sad because a lot of this stuff is entirely preventable.

A spokesperson for District Attorney George Gascon was not immediately available for comment.
A plane flies in for landing at Los Angeles International Airport on Feb. 18, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

LA County Bans Official Travel to Texas, Florida Over LGBTQ Policies

LOS ANGELESThe Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to suspend all official travel to Texas and Florida due to highly publicized policies directed at LGBTQ+ youth and families.

The motion by Supervisors Sheila Kuehl and Hilda Solis called for the suspension of all travel to the states except for instances when failing to authorize such a trip would seriously harm the countys interests.

The move came in response to measures taken in both states that have made headlines.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered that gender-affirming treatments provided to transgender youth be investigated as child abuse. The declaration has led health providers in that state to suspend the treatments.

Abbotts declaration last month followed an opinion issued by that states attorney general declaring that gender-affirming treatments fall under the category of child abuse under state law. Abbott then ordered the state to investigate any instances of minors undergoing elective procedures for gender transitioning.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed into law the Parental Rights in Education Bill, which restricts instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in early grades.

DeSantis has defended that states legislation, saying it showed a commitment to education, not to indoctrination.

As the parent of three kids that are aged 5 and under, thank you for letting me and my wife be able to send our kids to kindergarten without them being sexualized, he said.

In their motion, LA Supervisors Kuehl and Solis said the Texas order flies in the face of all that we know about best practices when it comes to supporting children and young adults to discover who they are and feel secure in their sense of self.

The contend the Florida law will perpetuate a culture of bullying, secrecy, shame and fear.
Large Israeli Study Finds That Protection Against COVID-19 From 4th Shot Drops Quickly

An Israeli study found that a fourth dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine doesnt offer long-lived protection against the Omicron variant of the CCP virus.

Using Ministry of Health data on more than 1.2 million people, researchers found that a second booster dose of the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine offered protection against significant COVID-19 infections for six weeks. But protection against all virus infections started to drop quickly after four weeks and nearly disappeared after eight weeks, according to the study, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The researchers, however, said that there appears to be some benefit conferred by a second booster, or fourth dose, of the Pfizer vaccine.

Overall, these analyses provided evidence for the effectiveness of a fourth vaccine dose against severe illness caused by the omicron variant, as compared with a third dose administered more than 4 months earlier. For confirmed infection, a fourth dose appeared to provide only short-term protection and a modest absolute benefit, the studys authors wrote.

They made note of reports indicating that the protection against hospital admission conferred by a third dose given more than 3 months earlier is substantially lower against the omicron variant than the protection of a fresh third dose against hospital admission for illness caused by the B.1.617.2 (Delta) variant.

In our study, a fourth dose appeared to increase the protection against severe illness relative to three doses that were administered more than 4 months earlier, they added.

The authors further stipulated that because the study only covered a two-month period, its not clear if the vaccines protection against severe illness faded after eight weeks. More studies and follow-up research is needed to make a clear determination, the study said.

The study also focused on adults aged 60 and older. It did not provide data on the second boosters efficacy on younger groups.

Their findings come as policymakers publicly debate if Americans need additional booster shots. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) held a panel of advisers on Wednesday on the extra COVID-19 vaccine shots.

In March, the FDA issued an emergency use authorization for second boosters of the Pfizer and Moderna shots for individuals aged 50 and older as well as immunocompromised people aged 12 and up. The drug regulator also authorized giving an mRNA vaccine booster for those who received the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, which uses an adenovirus.

Several weeks ago, Israeli researchers found in a separate preprint study that the protection from a second Pfizer booster quickly diminished.

Protection against infection rose initially after the fourth dose, reaching 64 percent during the third week, but it rapidly declined to 29 percent by 10 weeks, they found.

It appears that effectiveness of the fourth dose wanes sooner, similarly to the fact that the third dose wants sooner than the second dose, the study said.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
The undated booking photo provided by the Indiana State Police shows Harry Edward Greenwell, the suspect in the "Days Inn" cold case. Police announced the identity of the suspect of the murders during a press conference in Indianapolis, on April 5, 2022. (Indiana State Police via AP)

Late Iowa Man Linked to 1980s Killings in Indiana, Kentucky

INDIANAPOLISThe Indiana State Police said Tuesday that they used genealogical data and crime scene evidence to link an Iowa man who died in 2013 to the killings of three female motel clerks and sexual assault of a fourth in Indiana and Kentucky from 1987 through 1990.

Harry Edward Greenwell, who died at age 68 in New Albin, Iowa, in January 2013, was the so-called I-65 killer, Sgt. Glen Fifield of the Indiana State Police said during a news conference in Indianapolis. The killings earned that moniker because they happened at motels near Interstate 65.

Greenwell had an extensive criminal history and had been in and out of prison several times, even escaping from jail on two separate occasions, he said. He was known to travel frequently in the Midwest.

Greenwell was born in Kentucky and died in Iowa, and his obituary listed cancer as his cause of death.

The undated booking photo provided by the Indiana State Police shows Harry Edward Greenwell, the suspect in the Days Inn cold case. Police announced the identity of the suspect of the murders during a press conference in Indianapolis, on April 5, 2022. (Indiana State Police via AP)

Fifield said evidence linked Greenwell to the Feb. 21, 1987, killing of Vicki Heath, 41, who was sexually assaulted and fatally shot while working a night shift at a Super 8 Hotel in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. It also linked him to the March 3, 1989, killings of Margaret Peggy Gill, and Jeanne Gilbert.

Gilbert, 34, was slain while working the night shift at a Days Inn in Remington, Indiana, while Gill, 24, was killed while working at a Days Inn in Merrillville, Indiana. Both were sexually assaulted and fatally shot.

Kim Gilbert Wright, daughter of Jeanne Gilbert, speaks after the Indiana State announced the identity of the suspect in the Days Inn cold case murders during a press conference in Indianapolis, on April 5, 2022. (Michael Conroy/AP Photo)

Fifield said Greenwell was also linked by investigators to the Jan. 2, 1990, sexual assault of a 21-year-old female clerk at a Days Inn in Columbus, Indiana.

This victim was able to escape her attacker and survive. She was later able to give an excellent physical description of the suspect and details of the crime, he said. She is the only known victim to have survived the vicious, brutal attacks of this killer.

Fifield said the state police crime lab matched ballistic evidence in the Gill and Gilbert slayings, and the crime lab later matched DNA evidence linking the Heath and Gilbert killings to the Columbus, Indiana, case.

He said one of the primary factors linking the four crimes scenes was their proximity to Interstate 65, which runs from Gary, Indiana, to Mobile, Alabama.

Fifield said investigative genealogy, the use of DNA analysis in combination with traditional genealogy research and historical records, generated a significant and important lead in the four cases.

Further investigation and kinship lab testing by the Indiana State Police lab of crime scene samples positive identified the suspect. The match was 99.9999 percent positive. It is this scientific breakthrough that ultimately led to the identification of the I-65 killer, Harry Edward Greenwell, Fifield said.

He said investigators continue reaching out to other police departments in the Midwest because there is a distinct possibility that Greenwell committed other unsolved killings, rapes, robberies or assaults.

Fifield was joined at the news conference by members of the FBI, the Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and Columbus, Indiana, police departments, and relatives of some of the victims.

Gilberts daughter, Kimberly Gilbert Wright, said her family was very grateful for law enforcements efforts to identify her mothers killer and helping bring some type of closure to her family and the other victims relatives.

Shes still in my familys hearts, she said of her mother. We talk about her as if she hasnt gone. My brother and I were fortunate enough to have spent the last seven months of her life living with her and experiencing the joy that she could bring to every day of our life.

By Rick Callahan
Law Prof Hopes Public Pressure, Legal Action Will Bring Disclosure on Emergencies Act

News Analysis

Questions regarding how the Liberal government decided to use the Emergencies Act deserve answers, says a Canadian law professor, who hopes that legal action and public pressure will bring disclosure.

In an interview with The Epoch Times, Ryan Alford, a law professor at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., said the requests for judicial review currently in the works are attempts worth making on such a serious issue.

When people are challenging the Emergencies Act, theyre asking whether or not the government did the most cynical and unconstitutional thing imaginable, namely, to expand their own powers unconstitutionally on a pretext, Alford said.

Its on everyones mind: Did the federal government unconstitutionally expand its powers pursuant to the Emergencies Act, such that not only did they take actions that were bad policy or repressive or even infringing of the charter, but unconstitutional on their face as an expansion of their own powers?

The act, invoked on Feb. 14, authorized the seizure of bank accounts of those involved in the trucker convoy protest in Ottawa. On Feb. 22, Isabelle Jacques, assistant deputy minister of finance, told a House of Commons committee that up to 206 bank accounts holding about $7.8 million were frozen under the provisions of the act.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, the Canadian Constitution Foundation, and the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms launched legal challenges over the invocation of the act. The litigants are seeking a judicial review on its use and an unsealing of documents regarding cabinet deliberations prior to the invoking of the act, such as transcripts of cabinet conversations and documents presented to cabinet.

Alford says the public record thus far is inadequate.

Police, including riot control officers and an armoured vehicle, take action to clear away Freedom Convoy protesters from downtown Ottawa on Feb. 19, 2022. (The Canadian Press/Justin Tang)

The Emergencies Act says you shall table in Parliament your explanation as a cabinet for the proclamation of the Emergencies Act. Now, let me tell you, this was quite remarkable. When I finally saw it I wasnt convinced that it was anything other than a forgery. I saw this document not on letterhead, with no signature. It had really poor legal reasoning in it, he said.

The specific allegation of why there was a public order emergency significant enough to affect the national security or territorial integrity of Canada was that there were people trying to execute political change in Canada and they were doing it by means of terrorism.

It talked about the hacked material from GiveSendGo, which of course has no chain of custody. And the other main thing cited in this official explanationand I am not making this upwas CBC news reports. CBC news reports were cited in the official explanation tabled in Parliament for a factual basis for the jurisdictional application of the Emergencies Act.

Testimony to House of Commons committees gave little indication of a serious threat. Barry MacKillop of the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) testified on Feb. 10 that there was no spike in suspicious transactions, despite millions of dollars given through crowdfunding to the convoy. On March 7, RCMP Director of Financial Crime Dennis Beaudoin said he had not seen any evidence of terrorist activity in the funding of the protests and blockades. And on March 24, Ottawa Police interim chief Steve Bell said there were no loaded firearms found at the protest, contradicting some media reports.

Alford says it is an uphill battle to have the confidences waived because no judge who requests it can legally compel the government to do so. He hopes that public pressure will make it impossible for the Liberal government to refuse.

Theres a special parliamentary committee  to review this very question of whether or not they had a basis to proclaim the Emergencies Act. How can that parliamentary committee do its job without a waiver of the cabinet confidences? he says.

If theyre going to then hide behind cabinet secrecy, I dont think anyones going to be convinced. And that would be incredibly corrosive of public confidence in governmentas if any further corrosion is possible.

The Epoch Times contacted the federal government for comment on the issue, but didnt hear back by publication time.

Alford says a judicial review could find the government guilty even without the evidence, and if so there will be redress for those impacted by the order.

What that would mean is, every action taken, every fine given, every punishment handed out under those regulations, was ultra viresbeyond the powers of the governmentand therefore of no force and effect. So what they did under that has to be undone to some degree.  Anyone who lost a mortgage would have to be made whole by the government here.

Politics and Law

Not all litigants against the Emergencies Act are seeking a judicial review. Alex Nanoff, spokesperson for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, told The Epoch Times: We did not structure our case in a way that requested the government disclose documents that might be subject to cabinet confidences, [but] we have been closely following the discussions between the other parties.

Protesters stand on the back of a truck during the Freedom Convoy demonstrations against COVID-19 vaccine mandates and other restrictions on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Jan. 29, 2022. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

Ottawa criminal lawyer David Anber has clients who were arrested at the protest site or had bank accounts seized. He said in an email that public pressure could potentially unseal cabinet discussions, but this specific issue is a political, not a legal one. Although he agrees there was inadequate justification for the Emergencies Act to be invoked, he did not apply for a judicial review.

This is a fools errand. Even assuming we get that [judicial review]which will itself be an exhausting and likely fruitless effortno charges to my knowledge were ever laid under the EA. Every case I have involves charges under the Criminal Code or other previously existing legislation.  [T]hey had the tools to do what they wanted without needing to engage the EA.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said on Feb. 14 the power to suspend peoples bank accounts was inadequate prior to the Emergencies Act, and announced that that aspect of its powers should be made permanent.

We  used all the tools that we had prior to invocation of the Emergencies Act, and we determined that we needed some additional tools. We will be putting forward measures to put those tools permanently in place, she said.

The authorities of FINTRAC, I believe, do need to be expanded to cover crowdsourcing platforms and their payment providers. So that is something that we need to do, and we will do, and that needs to be in place permanently.

Some opposition MPs remain deeply concerned about the net effect of the acts implementation, given that some people who were only marginally involved in what was ultimately a peaceful protest were nevertheless shut out of the financial system.

On a campaign stop in Moose Jaw, Sask., on April 4, Conservative MP and leadership candidate Leslyn Lewis said the prime minister had ruined the lives of truckers and others through using the act, including a single mother in her constituency of Haldimand-Norfolk, Ontario.

She bought her daughter a trucker T-shirt and her bank account was frozen. She had no food and she couldnt pay her rent. And she was in tears that a government can encroach on your personal freedom without any due process, without going to the court, and freeze your bank account. Can you imagine when we have digital currency how easy that will be? So it is scary.
Border Patrol agents apprehend illegal immigrants after they cross the Rio Grande from Mexico into the United States, in La Joya, Texas, on Jan. 14, 2022. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

Leaked DHS Document Says US Plans to Offer Broadscale Release Mechanisms for Illegal Aliens

A leaked U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plan published this week shows senior officials being told that the removal of Title 42 would lead to an increase in illegal immigration and one way to respond to the increase is to release many apprehended illegal aliens into the U.S. interior.

The 115-page document, dated Feb. 17 and published by Breitbart News, is titled the DHS Southwest Border Mass Irregular Migration Contingency Plan.

The plan was being put in place to comply with an earlier executive order from President Joe Biden that directed officials to create a framework to address the causes of migration and to manage migration in addition to providing safe and orderly processing of illegal immigrants claiming asylum once they cross into the United States.

The plan anticipates the eventual recession of Title 42 public health order, an action that will likely cause a surge in irregular immigration and have a direct impact to short-term holding and processing capacity along the U.S.Mexico border, the document states. That will stem in part from the perception that restrictions to entry will be reduced.

Top Biden administration officials on April 1 announced the decision to rescind the order, which has allowed for the quick expulsion of illegal immigrants since March 2020 due to concerns the aliens carry the virus that causes COVID-19.

As many as 450,000 illegal aliens could arrive along what the DHS calls the southwest border security and irregular migration zones of operation, which stretches from the southern U.S. border through Central America, in a 30-day period, according to one of the planning scenarios in the contingency plan. That could lead to multiple surges of 10,000 to 20,000 immigrants hitting different locations at the same time.

DHS, which already dealt with a record-level of illegal immigration during Bidens first year in office, says ways to remove illegal immigrants will be limited apart from pandemic-era powers.

That will lead to using broadscale release mechanisms like issuing notices to appear in court, or even releasing illegal immigrants without a court notice, a practice that was not used before Biden took office.

Nearly 95,000 illegal immigrants were released in 2021 without a court notice. Officials later mailed charging documents to them. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told members of Congress in November 2021 that the practice had been discontinued.

A DHS spokesman did not dispute the authenticity of the document.

Asked for comment, the spokesman in an email referred The Epoch Times to a portion of Mayorkass statement when the Title 42 decision was announced.

Once the Title 42 Order is no longer in place, DHS will process individuals encountered at the border pursuant to Title 8, which is the standard procedure we use to place individuals in removal proceedings. Nonetheless, we know that smugglers will spread misinformation to take advantage of vulnerable migrants. Let me be clear: those unable to establish a legal basis to remain in the United States will be removed, Mayorkas said at the time.

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who represents a portion of a border state, told The Epoch Times in an email after reviewing the report that Biden and Mayorkas have eviscerated our nations border security and immigration enforcement apparatus through various illegitimate executive orders and memorandums.

Their decisions over the past year have created an unprecedented border crisis that has led to more than 2.5 million people crashing our southern borderan all-time high. And now it appears that their plan to address a new self-created border surge is to simply release everyone into the interior of the United States by lifting the Title 42 public health order, Biggs said. The Department of Homeland Security must either enroll all illegal aliens in the Migrant Protection Protocols program or detain them as required by law. Simply releasing them is unacceptable and illegal.
Conservative MP Leona Alleslev rises during Question Period in the House of Commons Dec. 9, 2019, in Ottawa. (The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld)

Leona Alleslev Poised to Announce Conservative Party of Canada Leadership Bid

Former Conservative deputy leader Leona Alleslev is set to formally announce her candidacy to be the partys next leader tomorrow.

A source close to her campaign, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says she is expected to do so in Ottawa on Wednesday.

Alleslev has all but formally made the announcement, having set up a campaign website to collect signatures needed for her nomination.

She also posted on social media about hosting a meet-and-greet in Ottawa Wednesday, along with the tag line All in with Alleslev.

Alleslev was first elected as an Ontario Liberal MP who crossed the floor to join the Conservatives in 2018.

She was appointed to serve as deputy leader of the party by former leader Andrew Scheer before she stepped down from that role to help former federal Progressive Conservative leader Peter MacKay in the 2020 leadership race.

Alleslev ran for re-election in last years federal campaign and lost her seat.

By Stephanie Taylor
Russia-Ukraine War (April 6): Senate to Vote on Revoking Russias Trade Status, Oil Ban

The latest on the RussiaUkraine crisis, April 6. Click here for updates from April 5.

Senate to Vote on Revoking Russias Trade Status, Oil Ban

The Senate will take up legislation Thursday to end normal trade relations with Russia and to ban the importation of its oil, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced Wednesday. Both bills have been bogged down in the Senate, frustrating lawmakers who want to ratchet up the U.S. response as the Ukraine war enters a gruesome new phase. Its been three weeks since the House passed the trade suspension measure that paves the way for President Joe Biden to enact higher tariffs on certain Russian imports. At the time, the legislation was billed as sending a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his allies about the economic isolation Russia will face for invading Ukraine. The House also passed the oil ban about a month ago. The bill would codify restrictions on Russian oil that Biden has already put in place through executive action. ___ US House Passes Legislation on Documenting War Crimes in Ukraine The U.S. House overwhelmingly passed legislation Wednesday calling for a federal government report on evidence of war crimes committed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Lawmakers backed the measure amid gruesome reports of atrocities in towns around Kyiv, particularly Bucha, and new accounts of the civilian death toll in the besieged port city of Mariupol. The legislation calls for the U.S. president to submit to Congress a report on efforts to preserve evidence related to war crimes. Last month, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution seeking an investigation of Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes. In his daily nighttime video address to the nation late Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of trying to hide evidence of war crimes to interfere with the international investigation. ___ UN to Vote Thursday on Suspending Russia From Rights Council The U.N. General Assembly will vote Thursday on whether to suspend Russia from the U.N.s premier human rights body. The move was initiated by the United States in response to the discovery of hundreds of bodies after Russian troops withdrew from towns near the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, sparking calls for its forces to be tried for war crimes. U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield made the call for Russia to be stripped of its seat on the 47-member Human Rights Council in the wake of videos and photos of streets in the town of Bucha strewn with corpses of what appeared to be civilians. The videos and reporting from the town have sparked global revulsion and calls for tougher sanctions on Russia, which has vehemently denied responsibility. General Assembly spokeswoman Paulina Kubiak said Wednesday the assemblys emergency special session on Ukraine will resume at 10 a.m. EDT on Thursday when the resolution to suspend the rights of membership in the Human Rights Council of the Russian Federation will be put to a vote. ___

Mayor: Over 5,000 Civilians Dead in Mariupol

The mayor of the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol says more than 5,000 civilians have been killed during the monthlong Russian blockade, among them 210 children.

Mayor Vadym Boichenko said Wednesday that Russian forces have, among other targets, bombed hospitals, including one where 50 people burned to death.

Boichenko said that more than 90 percent of the citys infrastructure has been destroyed by Russian shelling.

The Russian military is besieging the strategic Sea of Azov port, and has cut food, water, and energy supplies and pummeled it with artillery and air raids. Capturing the city would allow Russia to secure a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

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FBI Says It Disrupted Russian Hackers

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has wrested control of thousands of routers and firewall appliances away from Russian military hackers by hijacking the same infrastructure Moscows spies were using to communicate with the devices, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

An unsealed redacted affidavit described the unusual operation as a preemptive move to stop Russian hackers from mobilizing the compromised devices into a botneta network of hacked computers that can bombard other servers with rogue traffic.

Fortunately, we were able to disrupt this botnet before it could be used, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said.

The Russian Embassy in Washington did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

The targeted botnet was controlled through malware called Cyclops Blink, which U.S. and UK cyber defense agencies had publicly attributed in late February to Sandworm, allegedly one of the Russian military intelligence services hacking teams that has repeatedly been accused of carrying out cyberattacks.

Cyclops Blink was designed to hijack devices made by WatchGuard Technologies Inc and ASUSTeK Computer Inc, according to research by private cybersecurity firms. It provides Russian services with access to those compromised systems, offering the ability to remotely exfiltrate or delete data or turn the devices against a third party.

Watchguard issued a statement confirming it worked with the U.S. Justice Department to disrupt the botnet but did not disclose the number of devices affectedsaying only that they represented less than 1 percent of WatchGuard appliances.

AsusTek, better known as Asus, did not immediately return messages seeking comment.

FBI Director Chris Wray told reporters the FBI, with court approval, secretly reached into thousands of routers and firewall appliances to delete the malware and reconfigure the devices.

We removed malware from devices used by thousands of mostly small businesses for network security all over the world, Wray said. We shut the door the Russians had used to get into them.

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Russia Warns Against Games Around Its Western Exclave

Moscow has cautioned neighboring European countries against the closure of their borders with Russia and Belarus, pointing out that such a scenario would mean the blockade of Russias westernmost exclave Kaliningrad.

Earlier this week Latvian and Lithuanian officials made statements regarding the possible closure of their borders with Russia and Belarus in response to Moscows military operation in Ukraine.

On Wednesday, commenting on the matter, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko expressed hope that common sense would prevent the Europeans from playing with fire. Such a measure would deprive Kaliningrad residents of the opportunity to reach Russias main territory by land.

I very much hope that common sense in Europe will not allow any games to be played around Kaliningrad. I think many people understand that this is playing with fire, the deputy minister told the media.

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Hungarys Orban Says He Asked Putin to Apply Ceasefire in Ukraine

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Wednesday he had spoken at length with Russian President Vladimir Putin and asked him to announce an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine.

Orban said he had invited Putin for talks in Hungary to be held with the Ukrainian and French presidents as well as the German chancellor. He said Putins response was positive, but that the Russian leader said this would carry conditions.

I suggested to President Putin that he should announce a ceasefire immediately, Orban told a news conference, adding that it was Putin who called him. He said European leaders had not yet been informed of the proposal.

Orban said the talks he proposed in Budapest should focus on an immediate ceasefire, as peace talks would take a longer time.

The response was positive but the Russian president said this had conditions, he said. I cannot negotiate to meet those conditionsit should be him and the Ukrainian president agreeing on those.

Orban, who won a fourth consecutive term with a landslide in an election on Sunday, again condemned the Russian invasion of neighboring Ukraine. But he has so far refrained from any criticism of Putin himself.

This is a war that the Russians started, they attacked Ukraine, and its aggression, this is the joint stance of the European Union, and Hungary shares that stance, he said.

Orban also said Hungary was prepared to pay roubles for Russian gas, breaking ranks with the European Union which has sought a united front in opposing Moscows demand for payment in the currency.

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UK: No Russian Oil, Coal Imports by Year-end

Britain says it will end imports of Russian oil and coal by the end of the year and ban UK investment in Russia as part of a new set of sanctions in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

The British government also announced a freeze on the assets of Credit Bank of Moscow and Sberbank, Russias largest bank, and slapped travel bans and asset freezes on eight more wealthy Russians. They included Andrey Guryev, founder of the fertilizer company PhosAgro, and Sergey Sergeyevich Ivanov, president of diamond producer Alrosa.

UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said the measures were coordinated with Britains allies. The U.S. also sanctioned SberBank on Wednesday, and the European Union plans to ban imports of Russian coal.

Britain had already announced a plan to phase out Russian oil, which accounts for 8 percent of the UK supply. Russia is the top supplier of imported coal to the UK Britain has not ended imports of Russian natural gas, which accounts for 4 percent of its supply, saying only that it will do so as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, Kremlin announced that UK will no longer be able to import Russian gas, in response to the Britain sanctions imposed on Moscow.

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US Sanctions Russias PM and Putins Daughters

Citing atrocities in Ukraine, including in Bucha, the United States on Wednesday rolled out new sanctions against the Putin regime and Russian banks, companies, and government officialsas well as their family members.

President Vladimir Putins daughters and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrovs wife and daughter were among the Russians listed in the latest round of full blocking sanctions, which the White House says intend to impose severe and immediate costs on Moscow. Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and former President Dmitry Medvedev were likewise sanctioned, for their membership on the Russian Security Council.

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If Finland and Sweden Apply to Join NATO, They Would Be Welcomed, Stoltenberg Says

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says Finland and Sweden would be welcomed with open arms should they decide to join NATO, as Russias war on Ukraine spurs public support in the two Nordic countries for membership.

Russia has demanded that the 30-nation military organization stop expanding, so the prospect of Finland and Sweden joining could anger President Vladimir Putin.

But Stoltenberg says NATO members might be prepared to provide security guarantees for the period from when the two might announce any membership bid and when their applications are approved. He declined to say what kind of protection they might get.

Once members, the two neutral Nordic nations would benefit from NATOs collective security guarantee, which obliges all members to come to the defense of any ally that comes under attack.

Stoltenberg told reporters Wednesday that he is certain that we will find ways to address concerns they may have regarding the period between the potential application and the final ratification.

A poll commissioned by Finnish broadcaster YLE last month showed that, for the first time, more than 50 percent of Finns support joining the Western military alliance. In neighboring Sweden, a similar poll showed that those in favor of NATO membership outnumber those against.

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Russia Reacts to Zelenskyy Assassination Claims

Russia has no plans to kill Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy or to remove him from power, Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov has stated.

No, this is not true, Peskov replied, when asked on Wednesday to comment on speculations that Moscow wanted Zelenskyy dead, during an interview French broadcaster LCI.

He also insisted that regime change in the neighboring country wasnt among the goals of Russias ongoing military operation.

Zelenskyy is the President of Ukraine, Peskov noted, and what Moscow wants from him is to agree to the demands that the Russian delegation has put forward during peace.

Through those talks we want to put an end to the military operation, Peskov said, adding that Moscows recent decision to withdraw its troops from areas near the Ukrainian capital Kyiv was a gesture of good will aimed at facilitating their positive outcome.

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Moscow Says Talks With Ukraine Are Continuing

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says negotiations with Ukraine are continuing despite allegations of war crimes against civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha.

Peskov said Wednesday the talks continued with Ukraine but that the Bucha revelationswhich he referred to as a staginghad hampered talks and there was a fairly long road ahead.

The working process continues but it is going much more tough than we would like. Of course we would like to see more dynamism from the Ukrainian side, but the process has not been broken off and is continuing, Peskov said.

Russia retreated from areas around Kyiv and the northern cities of Chernihiv and Sumy after talks with Ukraine in Turkey last week. Ukrainian troops entering the areas found evidence of widespread killings of civilians. Russia denies any war crimes and has alleged Ukraine has faked the incidents.

Since the talks in Turkey, Russia and Ukraines delegations have continued talks via video link.

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Convoy of More Than 500 People Reaches Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine: Red Cross

The International Committee of the Red Cross says one of its teams in Ukraine has led some 500 people who fled Mariupol on their own initiative in a humanitarian convoy of buses and private cars to a safer location in the embattled country.

The ICRC says its team that has been trying to enter Mariupol since last Friday got within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the besieged city, but security conditions made it impossible to enter. The convoy escorted the civilians from coastal Berdyansk to Zaporizhzhia, to the north.

This convoys arrival to Zaporizhzhia is a huge relief for hundreds of people who have suffered immensely and are now in a safer location, said Pascal Hundt, ICRCs head of delegation in Ukraine. Its clear, though, that thousands more civilians trapped inside Mariupol need safe passage out and aid to come in.

He said the Geneva-based organization remains available as a neutral intermediary to help escort civilians out of Mariupol once concrete agreements and security conditions allow it.

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Italian Lake Villa Seized From Russian TV Host Set on Fire

Italian firefighters have put out a fire at a villa on Lake Como reportedly owned by the Russian television personality Vladimir Soloyvev, who has been hit with European Union sanctions.

An official at the Como fire station confirmed that firefighters extinguished the early morning blaze Wednesday at the villa in Menaggio, one of the picturesque towns that dot the lake in northern Italy.

He said police were investigating the fire as a suspected act of protest. The villa was under renovation and the blaze involved tires at the site, said the official who declined to be identified by name, citing official policy.

Italian daily Corriere della Sera and news agency LaPresse said the villa was owned by Solovyev, a presenter on state-run Channel One.

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Russian Forces Pound Key Cities as West Prepares New Sanctions

Russian artillery pounded the Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Kharkiv on Wednesday as the West prepared more sanctions against Moscow in response to alleged civilian killings that Kyiv and its allies have called war crimes.

The besieged southern port of Mariupol has been under almost constant bombardment since the early days of the invasion that began on Feb. 24, trapping tens of thousands of residents without food, water, or power.

The humanitarian situation in the city is worsening, British military intelligence said on Wednesday.

Reuters could not immediately verify the report.

Ukraines Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said authorities would try to evacuate trapped civilians through 11 humanitarian corridors on Wednesday, though people trying to leave the besieged city of Mariupol would have to use their own vehicles.

Russian forces last week pulled back from positions outside Kyiv and shifted the focus of their assault away from the capital, and Ukraines general staff said the northeastern city of Kharkiv, the countrys second-largest, also remained under attack.

Western sanctions over Russias invasion of Ukraine gained new impetus this week after Russian forces were accused of killing civilians in the northern town of Bucha.

Moscow denied targeting civilians there and called the evidence presented a forgery staged by the West to discredit it.

Speaking a day after the European Union announced new sanctions, including a ban on Russian coal imports and denying Russian ships access to E.U. ports, the head of the E.U. executive, Ursula von der Leyen, said there was more to come.

The White House said it would also unveil new sanctions on Wednesday, in part in response to Bucha.

The new sanctions, coordinated between Washington, the Group of Seven advanced economies, and the E.U., will target Russian banks and officials and ban new investment in Russia, the White House said.

The United States has agreed to provide an additional $100 million in assistance to Ukraine, including Javelin anti-armour systems, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.

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West Working to Disrupt Ukraine Peace Talks: Russia

Russia believes the West is enabling hysteria around the alleged mass killings in the Ukrainian town of Bucha to derail the peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed on Tuesday.

The purported events in the town, which he referred to as a provocation, have been introduced just as progress was being made at the peace negotiations in Istanbul, he added.

We tend to think that the reason lies in the desire to find a reason to disrupt the ongoing negotiations. And to do it exactly at the moment when, as they say, the light, even if not very bright, but nevertheless, began to dawn.

Lavrov also accused Ukraines government of sabotaging talks on ending the fighting in Ukraine, warning that Moscow will not play cat and mouse.

Lavrov specifically warns that Moscow will not accept the Ukrainian demand that a prospective peace agreement include an immediate pullout of Russian troops to be followed by a referendum in Ukraine on accepting the deal.

In televised remarks Tuesday, he says that if the peace deal fails to win approval in a referendum, a new deal will have to be negotiated. He says that we dont want to play such cat and mouse.

Lavrov pointed at a 2015 peace deal for eastern Ukraine signed in Minsk, Belarus, that was brokered by France and Germany but never implemented. He says that we dont want a repeat of the Minsk agreements.

He also says Ukraine is sabotaging the talks by stonewalling Russian demands for demilitarization and denazification of the country.

The tough statements from Lavrov contrasted with optimistic signals made by both Ukrainian and Russian representatives after the latest round of talks in Istanbul, Turkey, on March 29.

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Russian Border Guards Came Under Fire on Ukraine Border, Schools Evacuated: Officials

A Russian regional official said on Wednesday that frontier guards in the Kursk region bordering Ukraine had come under fire, while schools in nearby Belgorod were evacuated after a bomb threat, according to the citys mayor.

Moscow has accused Ukraine of targeting Russian assets across the border.

Yesterday  they tried to fire mortars at the position of our border guards in the Sudzhansky district, said Roman Starovoit, the governor of the Kursk region.

Russian border guards returned fire.  There were no casualties or damage on our side.

Reuters could not immediately verify the report.

In response to a question about it, a spokesman for the general staff of Ukraines armed forces said: We do not have such information.

Starovoit said officials were in touch with the defense ministry and urged citizens to remain calm. In separate comments to the RIA news agency, he said the mortars fired at the Sudzha border crossing did not reach Russian territory.

The mayor of the Russian city of Belgorod, some 35 km (22 miles) from the border with Ukraine, said schools had been evacuated after receiving bomb threats.

We understand that this is part of the information pressure [campaign] against our region, mayor Anton Ivanov said, without saying who he thought was responsible for the threats.

Russia last week accused Ukrainian military helicopters of carrying out an airstrike against a fuel depot in Belgorod, one of Russias main logistics hubs for its military campaign in Ukraine. A senior Ukrainian official denied responsibility.

The Kremlin said at the time that the incident did not create comfortable conditions to continue peace talks with Kyiv.

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Norway Expels Russian Diplomats

Norway is following other European nations and expelling Russian diplomats.

Norways Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt said Wednesday that three Russian diplomats had carried out activities incompatible with their status.

In recent days, numerous European countries have expelled Russian diplomats and staff at Russian diplomatic missions.

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Turkey Finds Third Stray Naval Mine in Black Sea Amid Ukraine War

Turkeys defense ministry says authorities have detected a third naval mine drifting in the Black Sea and military teams have been dispatched to deactivate it.

The explosive device was detected on Wednesday off the coast of northwestern Kocaeli Province and the area has been secured, the ministry said.

It was the third mine spotted in Turkish waters since Russias invasion of Ukraine, including one that forced authorities to close Istanbuls Bosporus Strait to traffic.

Russia and Ukraine have traded accusations about the naval mines that have been threatening shipping in the Black Sea.

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Man Dies Crashing Car Into Russian Embassy in Romanian Capital

A driver died ramming his car into the gate of the Russian embassy in Bucharest early on Wednesday, police in the Romanian capital said in a statement.

A video recorded before firefighters arrived showed the front of the car in flames as it remained wedged in the gate.

It was unclear whether the crash was an accident or deliberate.

During recent weeks, several Russian embassies elsewhere in Europe have been targeted by protesters angered by the invasion of Ukraine.

Police said they were investigating and did not release the identity of the driver.

Romania said on Tuesday it would expel 10 Russian diplomats who are not acting in accordance with international rules, joining other European countries to have done so in recent days.

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Zelenskyy Says Russian Forces Trying to Push Deep Into Ukraine in East

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russian forces still are trying to push deep into Ukraine in the east, but he claimed the Ukrainian army is holding them back.

In his daily night-time video address to the nation late Tuesday, Zelenskyy said Ukraine was aware that Russia was gathering up reinforcements for another offensive.

We dont have a choicethe fate of our land and of our people is being decided, he said. We know what we are fighting for. And we will do everything to win.

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Ukrainian Official Claims Russian Missile Hit Fertilizer Tanks

A regional official in western Ukraine claims a Russian missile hit fertilizer tanks, polluting groundwater.

Ternopil region Gov. Volodymyr Trush said Tuesday that the Russian missile strike destroyed six reservoirs filled with fertilizers, resulting in an ammonia leak into groundwater and the Ikva River.

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Russian Forces Struck a Fuel Depot and a Factory in Ukraines Dnipropetrovsk: Ukraine

Russian forces overnight struck a fuel depot and a factory in Ukraines Dnipropetrovsk region, and the number of casualties remains unclear, the regions Governor Valentyn Reznichenko claimed Wednesday on the Telegram messaging app.

The night was alarming and difficult. The enemy attacked our area from the air and hit the oil depot and one of the plants. The oil depot with fuel was destroyed. Rescuers are still putting out the flames at the plant. There is a strong fire, Reznichenko wrote.

The Russian military continues to focus its efforts on preparing for an offensive in Ukraines east, according to a Wednesday morning update by Ukraines General Staff, with the aim to establish complete control over the territory of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Parts of the two regions have been under the control of Russia-backed rebels since 2014 and are recognized by Moscow as independent states.

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Zelenskyy Claims Ukraine Will Be a Big Israel

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that Ukraine will look to Israel for inspiration concerning its future security arrangements, arguing that an absolutely liberal Kyiv is now impossible after Moscows attack in late February.

Speaking to journalists on Tuesday, the president said security would be the number one issue for Ukrainians for the next decade, even going so far as to forecast a lasting armed military presence in the streets.

Ukraine will definitely not be what we wanted it to be from the beginning. It is impossible. Absolutely liberal, Europeanit will not be like that, he said. We will become a big Israel with its own face. We will not be surprised if we have representatives of the Armed Forces or the National Guard in cinemas, supermarkets, and people with weapons.

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Ukraine Accuses Moscow of Weaponizing Hunger

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of using hunger as a weapon of war by deliberately targeting Ukraines essential food supplies.

In an address to Irish lawmakers Wednesday, Zelenskyy claimed Russian forces are destroying things that are sustaining livelihoods including food storage depots, blocking ports so Ukraine could not export food, and putting mines into the fields.

For them hunger is also a weapon, a weapon against us ordinary people, he said, accusing Russia of deliberately provoking a food crisis in Ukraine, a major global producer of staples including wheat and sunflower oil.

Zelenskyy spoke by video to a joint session of Irelands two houses of parliament, the latest in a string of international addresses he has used to rally support for Ukraine.

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Greece Expels 12 Russian Diplomats

Greece has joined a list of European countries expelling Russian diplomats, with the foreign ministry announcing on Wednesday it had declared 12 diplomats unwelcome.

The ministry said it had declared 12 members of Russian diplomatic and consular missions accredited to Greece as personae non gratae, and that the Russian ambassador had been informed.

It did not specify which diplomats were being expelled or state a reason, beyond citing that the move was carried out in accordance with international treaties.

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Norway Boosts Intelligence Spending to Beef Up Border With Russia

Norway is beefing up its police and intelligence work, chiefly in the northern part of the country, which has a nearly 200-kilometer (124-mile) land border with Russia, and wants to spend 100 million kroner ($11.5 million) on it.

Norways domestic intelligence service considers the intelligence threat from Russia in the Scandinavian country to have increased, Justice Minister Emilie Enger Mehl said Wednesday.

The money would be spent on staff and equipment. The government also wants to exert more control over Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic with a Russian settlement. Under a 1920 treaty, Norway has sovereignty over Svalbard, but other signatory countries have rights to exploit its natural resourcescoal.

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Intel Suspends Business in Russia

Intel says it is suspending all its business operations in Russia, becoming the latest foreign company to leave because of Moscows war in Ukraine.

Effective immediately, we have suspended all business operations in Russia, the U.S. chipmaker said late Wednesday.

The company had already suspended shipments to customers in Russia and neighboring ally Belarus after the war broke out.

Intel said its working to support its 1,200 employees in Russia and has put in place business continuity measures to reduce disruption to its global operations, though it didnt provide details.

Intel continues to join the global community in condemning Russias war against Ukraine and calling for a swift return to peace, it said in a statement.

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China Urges Investigation Into Bucha Deaths

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Wednesday that China supports all initiatives and measures conducive to alleviating the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and is ready to continue to work together with the international community to prevent any harm to civilians.

Zhaos remarks echo those the previous day of Chinas ambassador to the United Nations, Zhang Jun, who called for an investigation, describing the reports and images of civilian deaths in Bucha as deeply disturbing.

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Hungary Summons Ukrainian Ambassador

Hungarys Foreign Ministry summoned the Ukrainian ambassador on Wednesday after days of the two countries officials trading barbs over Hungarys position on the war.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto wrote in a social media post on Wednesday that we condemn military aggression, we stand by Ukraines sovereignty, but that this is not our war, so we want to and will stay out of it.

Hungarys government has refused to supply weapons to Ukraine or allow their transfer across the Hungarian-Ukrainian border.

That position has prompted criticisms of Hungarys government by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksyy, who on Monday said in an address on Ukrainian television that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban would need to choose between Moscow and the other world of the West.

Orban, who won a landslide victory in Hungarian elections on Sunday, in a victory speech depicted Zelenskyy as one of the opponents he and his right-wing party had defeated.

On Tuesday, Szijjarto called on Ukrainian leaders to stop insulting Hungary and to take note of the will of the Hungarian people.

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Ukraine Makes New Attempts to Evacuate Civilians From Trapped Cities

Ukraine will try to evacuate trapped civilians through 11 humanitarian corridors on Wednesday but people trying to leave the besieged city of Mariupol will have to use their own vehicles, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said.

Efforts to get convoys of buses into the southern port city to evacuate residents who are trapped there have repeatedly failed.

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Britain Tells Russians to Use VPN

The Russian people deserve the truth about Ukraine and should use virtual private networks to access independent information from anywhere in the world, the British prime minister said in an address on Tuesday.

The recorded speech was partially delivered by Boris Johnson in Russian. He asked Russians to trust Kyivs unverified civilian murder accusations against Moscow and to be as horrified about them as, what he described as, the world.

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Dutch Government Preventing 14 Russian Yachts From Leaving Due to Sanctions

The Dutch government claimed on Wednesday it is currently preventing 14 yachtsincluding 12 that were under constructionfrom leaving the country due to sanctions on Russia.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs made the statement in a letter to parliament, updating lawmakers on the enforcement of sanctions after criticism that the Netherlands had lagged behind other European countries in enforcement and seizures.

Yacht-building is a significant industry in the Netherlands, with chamber of commerce records showing that major builders Heesen, Feadship, Damen Shipyards and Oceanco had combined sales of around 1.5 billion euros ($1.66 billion) in 2020.

Wednesdays letter said that while no superyachts are anchored in Dutch territories, including Caribbean islands like St. Maarten, the 12 yachts under construction for Russian owners cannot at this moment be delivered due to the current export measures and their ownership structures are being investigated.

In March, two Russian members of the supervisory board of Heesen Yachts stepped down. Heesen is owned by Morcell Ltd. of Cyprus, the investment vehicle of billionaire Lukoil president Vagit Alekperov, who is not on sanctions lists.

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Russias Medvedev Vows International Legal Battle Over Property Seizures

Moscow will fight attempts to seize Russian property abroad in courts around the world, former President Dmitry Medvedev said in a post on the Telegram social network on Wednesday.

Our opponents  should understand that they will face a large number of cases in courts. Both in the national courts of the United States and Europe and in international courts, said Medvedev, who served as president from 2008 to 2012 and is now deputy chairman of Russias Security Council.

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Website of Russian Oil Firm Gazprom Neft Goes Down After Apparent Hack

The website of Gazprom Neft, the oil arm of Russian state gas giant Gazprom, went down on Wednesday after an apparent hack, in what looked like the latest attack on government-linked sites following Russias actions in Ukraine.

The website briefly showed a statement purporting to be from Gazprom chief executive Alexei Miller, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin.

Miller last month urged the gas giants 500,000 employees to rally around Putin to preserve Russia as a great power in the face of foreign hostility.

The statement attributed to him on what looked like a hacked version of the site cited him as making critical comments about Russias decision to send tens of thousands of troops into neighboring Ukraine.

The information published on the site on the morning of April 6  is not true and cannot be regarded as an official statement of the companys representatives or shareholders, Gazprom Neft said.

A Gazprom spokesperson dismissed the statement on the website as nonsense.

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EU Will Put More Sanctions on RussiaCommission Head

The European Union will put more sanctions against Russia on top of the latest package announced on Tuesday, likely including measures against imports of Russian oil, the head of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen said on Wednesday.

These sanctions will not be our last sanctions, she told European Parliament in a presentation of the latest sanctions package that includes a ban on buying Russian coal.

Now we have to look into oil and revenues the Russia [sic] gets from fossil fuels, she said.

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Ukraines Luhansk Region Tells Civilians to Evacuate While It Is Safe

Authorities in the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk urged civilians on Wednesday to evacuate while it is safe, warning that Russian bombardments could cut off escape routes.

Ukraine has said Russian troops that invaded on Feb. 24 are regrouping and preparing for a new offensive in the Donbass area, which includes Luhansk.

I appeal to every resident of the Luhansk regionevacuate while it is safe  While there are buses and trainstake this opportunity. 

Gaidai said rail connections in the Donetsk region of Donbass had been damaged this week and took several hours to repair.

Gaidai claimed separately in a video address that Russian forces had not managed to break through Ukrainian defences in his region but were destroying everything in their path and would stop at nothing.

Vereshchuk said anyone trying to leave the besieged southern city of Mariupol would have to use their own vehicles.

Mariupols capture could enable Russia to create a land bridge between two separatist, self-proclaimed peoples republics in Donbass and the Crimea region which Russia seized in 2014.

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US, Allies to Ban Investments in Russia, Sanction Banks on Wednesday

The United States and its allies will on Wednesday impose new sanctions on Russian banks and officials and ban new investment in Russia, the White House said, after officials in Washington and Kyiv accused Moscow of committing war crimes in the Ukrainian town of Bucha.

The sanctions will increase curbs on financial institutions and state-owned enterprises in Russia and target Russian government officials and their families, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Tuesday.

Tomorrow, what were going to announce  in coordination with the G-7 and EU, [is] an additional sweeping package of sanctions measures that will impose costs on Russia and send it further down the road of economic, financial, and technological isolation, Psaki said, noting that the G-7 and EU comprised around 50 percent of the global economy.

The measures will degrade key instruments of Russian state power, impose acute and immediate economic harm on Russia, and hold accountable the Russian kleptocracy that funds and supports [Russian President Vladimir] Putins war, she said.

She declined to comment on reports that the sanctions would target the daughters of Putin.

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US Defense Chief Defends Ukraine Response

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin defended Americas response to the war in Ukraine on Tuesday during a heated exchange with a Republican lawmaker who accused the Pentagon of over-estimating Russias military capability.

Has it occurred to you that Russia has not overrun Ukraine because of what weve done? And our allies have done? Have you ever even thought about that? Austin asked rhetorically to Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) during testimony to the House Armed Services Committee. Austin and other U.S. officials say U.S. support to Ukrainian forces, along with Ukraines strong will to fight, has thwarted Russias plans for a swift victory in its now more than month-long invasion.

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US Imposes Sanctions on Russian Darknet Market and Crypto Exchange

The U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Tuesday on a prominent Russia-based darknet market site and a cryptocurrency exchange that it said operates primarily out of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The sanctions against Hydra and currency exchange Garantex, published on the Treasury Departments website, send a message today to criminals that you cannot hide on the darknet or their forums, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said.

According to blockchain researchers, approximately 86 percent of illicit bitcoin received directly by Russian crypto exchanges in 2019 came from Hydra, which the Treasury Department described as the worlds largest and most prominent darknet market.

The new sanctions prohibit U.S. persons from making or receiving any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services to Hydra or Garantex, the Treasury said.

The department said the sanctions, which prohibit U.S. transactions with Hydra and Garantex and seek to freeze any assets they may have under U.S. jurisdiction, is part of an international effort to disrupt proliferation of malicious cybercrime services, drugs, and other illegal offerings, including ransomware activity, that emanate from Russia.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
Los Angeles Speeds Up Cannabis License Application Process

The Los Angeles City Council on April 5 moved to speed up the process to apply for a commercial cannabis license.

This comes after the council cited it received dozens of complaints about licensing delays, with many complaining they have waited months to receive basic licensing responses from the city.

The council unanimously adopted changes to the citys cannabis ordinance (pdf) in a motion introduced by Councilors Marqueece Harris-Dawson and Curren Price in September 2021.

The motion shortens the timeline of the citys approval process of commercial cannabis license applications.

The Department of Cannabis Regulation, which is responsible for processing all cannabis licenses, maxed out its licensing capacity due to COVID-19 staffing shortages, according to the motion.

Because of this, the state granted the city $22 million in November 2021 to expedite cannabis licensing.

Harris-Dawson and Price said in the motion that the city should act quickly to maximize the value of this grant by ensuring that practical and efficient policies are in place at [Department of Cannabis Regulation] so that applications can be promptly processed without having to clear innumerable bureaucratic hurdles that serve no public interest.

City workers and first responders of Los Angeles gather in front of Los Angeles City Hall in protest of the citys required vaccine mandates on Nov. 8, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

The Studio City Neighborhood Council opposed the ordinance in a letter to the council, saying that the ordinance could create an influx of license applications and that current applicants submissions would be even more delayed.

The group said they opposed the ordinance unless the motion was amended to include both the ineligibility to apply for new licenses or change of address licenses within the boundaries of Neighborhood Council districts that have already reached their quota of cannabis regulation licenses.

However, other Angelenosincluding groups such as United Cannabis Business Association, Cannabis Equity Retailers Association, as well as union United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770wrote to the city council to support the ordinance.

We all share the mutual goal of fostering a thriving regulated cannabis industry in Los Angeles, wrote United Cannabis Business Association president Jerred Kiloh in a letter to the council. We know that this translates into more revenue and taxes to help fund the various housing, jobs, and social service programs Angelenos are clamoring for. In fact, it is also one of the strongest tools we have to combat the hundreds of illicit shops dotted all across our city.

John McGrant, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770, commended the city for its work to transform the cannabis industry in a letter.

Through the hard work of the City Council and the Department of Cannabis Regulation, we are transforming the industry dominated by illegal shops in which workers are paid under the table or in product and are victims of theft, violence, and harassment, to a safe retail market that respects workers and produces needed tax revenue for the city, McGrant wrote.

The ordinance also comes with an urgency clause, meaning it will go into effect as soon as it is signed by Mayor Eric Garcetti and published by the City Clerk.

Though it is unclear when the mayor will sign the ordinance, Garcetti signaled his support for the motion by approving the Planning and Land Use Committees report in February.

Studio City Neighborhood Council President Randall Fried did not respond to a request for comment by press deadline.
Voting booths are kept socially distant at the Chesterfield polling site during the New Hampshire state primaries on Sept. 8, 2020. (Kristopher Radder/The Brattleboro Reformer via AP)

Mail-in Ballots Fail to Arrive for Pennsylvania Special Election

Mail-in ballots for hundreds of voters in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, failed to arrive before a special election on April 5.

Slightly more than 300 people didnt receive ballots for the election in the 116th Legislative District, which is being held to elect a successor for Republican state Rep. Tarah Toohil, according to local media reports.

Local election officials are saying the Pennsylvania State Department made an error that led to roughly 10 percent of voters who requested mail-in ballots not receiving them in time, according to ABC16.

Which is very involved in a special election, in the processing of uploading of files, sending to the bureau and then the bureau sending to the mail-in vendor and that it was realized then, in discussion with the Pennsylvania Department of State that two files had not been properly uploaded, Denise Williams, chair of Luzerne County Board of Elections, told the news outlet.

According to ABC27, late ballots will still be accepted if theyre postmarked and mailed in by April 8.

The oversight created a delay in these voters receiving their mail-in ballots, receiving them with only a few days left until the 116th Legislative District Special Election Day, the Pennsylvania State Department said in a statement, according to WBRE.

Several state legislature members have asked for more information on why this error occurred, ABC27 reported.

Citing the Board of Elections, ABC16 said affected voters had been given several options, including bringing all mail-in ballot paperwork to the poll on April 5, surrendering it, and voting at the poll.

Luzerne County Councilman Brian Thornton in an email to Williams raised concerns that this current issue will once again lower our citizens confidence in our countys elections, according to WBRE.

Many view every election problem as the fault of our election board and our county, he said.

I dont see an end to these issues unless the election laws of our commonwealth change. We all need to do our part with pressuring our state legislators for the changes we desperately need.

The Epoch Times contacted the Luzerne County Board of Elections for comment, but didnt hear back by press time.

Republican Robert Schnee, Democrat Amilcar Arroyo, and Libertarian Paul Cwalina were on the ballot for the special election, with Schnee projected as winner by the end of the day.

Schnee, 62, has been serving as councilman since 2016, according to the Sunday Dispatch.
Memo Reveals State Department Assessed in Early 2020 That Lab Leak Was Most Likely Origin of COVID-19

News Analysis

A newly released memo from the U.S. State Department reveals that government officials knew early on that the COVID pandemic likely originated at a lab in Wuhan, China.

That memo, dated April 2020, states that out of five possible origins for COVID, a lab leak was by far the most likely. The memo also suggests that alternative theories had been introduced to prevent a lab leak from being investigated. The memo, which focuses almost entirely on the likelihood of a lab leak, contains a large amount of information that wasnt known publicly at the time it was written.

Although a lab leak is now widely accepted as a likely origin for the virus, when the memo was written, a concerted effort was underway to discredit that possibility. It also raises the question of what senior State Department leadershipincluding then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeoknew and why the information was withheld from the public.

According to the newly released memo, the State Department knew as of April 2020 that the central issue surrounded an obsession with collecting and testing a massive amount of virus-carrying bats on the part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Chinas Wuhan-located Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The State Department noted that lab testing of the earliest-known patient at the Wuhan Central Hospital in December 2019 determined that the virus was a Bat SARS-like Coronavirus. At the time this patient was tested, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hadnt disclosed that there was any problem at all.

When they finally acknowledged an outbreak, they initially blamed it on pneumonia. It was only at the end of January that the CCP finally started admitting that COVID-19 was caused by a new virus that was transmitted between humans.

By that time, the virus had already been seeded across the globe and any chance at suppression had been lost. It was during this same period that the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was made aware of the viruss likely origin, having been told by a group of scientists whom he was funding that there was a high probability that the virus was engineered.

Although its been known since June 2021 that Fauci and the NIH covered up his knowledge of the viruss origin, the State Departments early insight into these matters wasnt fully known until late March 2022, when the transparency group U.S. Right to Know obtained the April 2020 memo.

Two Labs

The memo, titled An Analysis of Circumstantial Evidence for Wuhan Labs as the Source of the Coronavirus, comprises five pages and is written in military BLUF style, meaning bottom line up front.

The memo begins by stating that one of two Wuhan labs is the likely source of the COVID outbreak. The two labs identified by the state department are the Wuhan CDCs lab located in downtown Wuhan and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Shi Zhengli was known to have conducted dangerous gain-of-function experiments on bat viruses.

The State Departments focus on the Wuhan CDC lab as a possible source is particularly significant as that facility is located only a few hundred feet from the Huanan Seafood Market where an already infected customer may have caused a superspreader event in December 2019.

Notably, the World Health Organizations lead investigator of the viruss origin, Peter Ben Embarek, privately told a Danish TV crew that he suspected that the Wuhan CDC lab was the origin of the pandemic. Embarek, who promoted a natural origin for the virus in his public report, privately noted that the CDC lab had mysteriously moved to its new downtown location in early December and that such a move may have increased the chances of a lab leak or accidental spillage.

The other lab identified by the State Department as the likely source of the pandemic is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has been the main focus of attention over the past two years.

The State Department memo noted that the Wuhan Institute, by far the most logical place to investigate the virus origin, had been completely sealed off from outside inquiry by the CCP. The memo also noted that a gag order regarding both Wuhan labs had been issued on Jan 1, 2020, and a major general from the Peoples Liberation Army had assumed control over the Wuhan Institute of Virology since early January of 2020.

The State Department memo emphatically stated that All other proposed theories are likely to be a decoy to prevent inquiry to Wuhan CDC and Wuhan Institute of Virology.

It bears repeating that the memo was written in April 2020.

Thats because the State Departments decoy argument mirrors the actions taken by Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health (NIH) head Dr. Francis Collins whoat the same time this memo was writtenwere actively suppressing and censoring any public discussion of the lab leak scenario. When Fox News ran a story in April 2020 suggesting that the virus came out of a Wuhan lab, Collins immediately contacted Fauci to explore ways the two men could put down this very destructive conspiracy.

Collins had previously told Fauci and his group of scientists that science and international harmony could be harmed if the lab leak theory took hold. Collinss directive led Faucis group to publish two papers that categorically dismissed the lab leak theory, one in the medical journal the Lancet and the other in the scientific journal Nature. Those two papers would become the cornerstone of combined efforts from Faucis scientists, the media, Big Tech, and the U.S. government to suppress any discussion of a lab leak, while simultaneously promoting the natural origin theory.

The State Department memo also lists many facts that the public has only come to know in piecemeal fashion over the course of the past two years. Weve previously covered many of these details on our show, including that the Wuhan CDC had a resident BatmanTian Junhuawho bragged about personally having collected more than 10,000 virus-carrying bats as lab samples from Chinese caves.

Tian also was widely known for his recklessness and carelessness during his collection process.

Regarding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the State Department memo noted that the director of the lab, Shi Zhengli, had conducted gain-of-function engineering of bat viruses to make them more easily transmittable to humans. As we now know, the defining feature of the COVID-19 virus, its furin cleavage site, is what makes the virus particularly transmissible in humans. While no furin cleavage site has ever been observed in naturally occurring SARS coronaviruses, Shi was part of a 2018 research proposal that aimed to insert exactly such a feature into coronaviruses.

The State Departments memo also highlights the poor safety standards at the Wuhan Institute, a fact that could easily lead to an unintentional leak of the deadly virus to the outside population. Interestingly, the memo also questions the disappearance of lab worker Huang Yanling, whose bio, profile, and picture were scrubbed from the institutes website shortly after the outbreak. To this day, Huangs whereabouts and well-being remain unknown.

Lastly, the memo takes a detailed look at a Chinese medical professional whose online name is Wu Xiaohua. Wu claimed that Shi Zhengli was playing God by creating coronaviruses with the specific aim of making them more transmissible in humans. Wu also claimed that Shi used intermediate animals in her lab and that her labs management of deadly viruses was appallingly poor and negligent.

The State Department memo found Wus claims to be credible and that assessment holds up well, given the information that has been made public in the intervening two years. We now know Shi had an active plan to insert furin cleavage sites into bat viruses, we know that she used humanized mice to test how her virus creations would affect humans, and we know that her lab was repeatedly cited for its poor safety record.

The most striking takeaway from the memo is that it focuses almost entirely on the lab leak scenario, reflecting that the State Department was almost certain in April 2020 that the virus had originated in a lab. What remains entirely unclear is why neither the State Department nor Secretary Pompeo released this information as soon as they had it.

Had the memo been made public nearly two years ago when it was written, the course of events would have been very different. Knowing that the virus came out of a lab would have refocused public attention and the search for remedies could have been more focused.

There also would have been more concerted efforts to prevent future leaks. Rather than misdirecting the public toward a natural origin, Fauci and the NIH would have been exposed for their role in funding the work at the Wuhan Institute.

Most importantly, the Chinese Communist Party would have been subjected to greater international pressure for its role in suppressing any advance information regarding the outbreak. The memo might also have had an impact on the 2020 presidential election, as voters tended to see Donald Trump as far more capable than Joe Biden in taking on the CCP.

While we dont know with certainty why the memo was concealed, the only person who had a constitutional role in deciding if suppression of a lab leak should be the policy of the U.S. government was President Trump. Although its possible that Trump decided it would be better to conceal the facts, its far more likely that, like all of us, the president was kept in the dark.

Jeff Carlson Follow Jeff Carlson is a co-host of Truth Over News on Epoch TV. Twitter: @themarketswork.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley speaks during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the conclusion of military operations in Afghanistan and plans for future counterterrorism operations, on Capitol Hill in Washington on Sept. 28, 2021. (Patrick Semansky/Pool via AP Photo)

Milley: Ukraine War Will Last Much Longer Than Anticipated

The top U.S. general acknowledged that he believes the Russia-Ukraine war will last much longer than previously anticipated and will develop into a protracted conflict.

Even though were a month-plus into the war, there is much of the ground war left in Ukraine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley told a House Armed Services hearing Tuesday when asked by Rep. Bill Keating (D-Mass.). But I do think this is a very protracted conflict, and I think its at least measured in years. I dont know about a decade, but at least years for sure.

Members of Congress also pressed Milley on whether the United States could have taken any action ahead of Russias invasion on Feb. 24. The general suggested that the only way to deter Russia would have been to send American troops into Ukraine, which isnt a member of NATO.

In early February, before Russia sent its forces across the border into Ukraine, Milley told House lawmakers that Moscow could take Kyiv, the capital city, in only 72 hours, according to reports. The Epoch Times has contacted the Department of Defense for comment.

Candidly, short of the commitment of U.S. forces into Ukraine proper, I am not sure he was deterrable, Milley told lawmakers, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This has been a long-term objective of his that goes back years, he continued to say. I think the idea of deterring Putin from invading Ukrainedeterring him by the United Stateswould have required the use of U.S. military forces and would have risked armed conflict with Russia, which I wouldnt advise.

Milley added that economic sanctions have a very poor track record of deterring aggression, but he added they have succeeded in imposing significant costs against Moscow.

Since the start of the invasion, the United States, the UK, and the E.U. have hammered Russias government, banking, and financial sectors, and top officials as well as their family members with sanctions in response to the conflict.

The objective of the sanctions is to impose significant costs if he invaded, those significant costs, the sanctions in combination with the export controls, are breaking the back of the Russian economy as we speak, he remarked.

Milley also answered questions about what weapons systems are being provided to Ukraines military, asking whether more weapons and equipment will be provided. Top Biden administration and Pentagon officials have said the United States will not send its forces to Ukraine as it would risk a broader conflict with Russia, a nuclear-armed state.
Moms for Liberty Vows Boycott: Disney Has Severely Underestimated Florida Parents

'Parents are not going to put up with this nonsense': Tiffany Justice

As the battle between The Walt Disney Co. and Florida rages on, the co-founders of Moms for Liberty are calling for a boycott, saying Disney has severely underestimated Florida parents.

On March 28, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education measure into law. House Bill 1557, inaccurately branded by liberal opponents as the Dont Say Gay bill, prohibits Florida educators from teaching anything about sexual orientation or gender identity to children in kindergarten through third grade. The law goes further, enabling parents to sue if they believe schools or instructors have violated it.

A week prior, after facing pressure from LGBT communities and staff for his silence, Disney CEO Bob Chapek issued a statement apologizing for not being a stronger ally to them, calling the legislation yet another challenge to basic human rights. Chapek then announced that Disney would immediately halt all political donations in Florida.

In a March 28 statement, Disneys corporate office said its new goal was for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts and vowed to support organizations working to make such a thing happen.

Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice told Fox News Digital in a March 30 interview that she found that to be striking language coming from a company with a target audience of children.

Parents are not going to put up with this nonsense, Justice told The Epoch Times. We are watching woke corporations chip away at our parental rights. So were not just going to stand out on the street with our Boycott Disney signs. Were going to do what we need to do as parents across the country and make sure we spend our money with companies that align with our values, and sexualizing children is not a value we hold. We do not believe thats an appropriate thing for any adult to be doing.

Tina Descovich, the groups other co-founder, said Moms for Libertys Florida chapters worked hard for months in support of the Parental Rights in Education legislation.

We are in a war, and our moms are going to do what theyre going to do when it comes to organizations and businesses that support the grooming of children, Descovich told The Epoch Times. We brought 200 moms to Tallahassee to rally in support of this bill so parents can reclaim their rights in public education in the state of Florida. The bill has now been signed, and we think its unacceptable that an organization like Disney wants to get involved with destroying the work weve been doing.

But Descovich insists their war isnt against Disney.

Our war is for the security and safety of our children, she said. So our strategy is the same as it was when we launched our organization in January of last year, and thats to empower moms and dads and families to stand up for parental rights at all levels of government.

According to Justice, not only is Moms for Liberty organizing to boycott Disney to fight back against leftist ideology, but they plan to secure every school board position they can in the Sunshine State to keep the ideology out of Floridas schools. Considering their pool of more than 80,000 members in 181 chapters in 34 states across the country, these parents could prove to be a formidable financial and political foe for the happiest place on earth.

We just added Hawaii, and were not leaving any of the states behind, she said. Were coming for California. We hear from parents in California all the time who are tired of the woke politics. We are the United States of America, and American parents are paying attention. We invited Disney into our homes, and these corporations are turning their backs on us and our children. We believe the innocence of children is sacred, and adults must work to protect that.

Tiffany Justice (L) and Tina Descovich, co-founders of Moms for Liberty. (Courtesy of Tiffany Justice)

In response to Disneys threats, Florida state Rep. Joe Harding, the Republican lawmaker who sponsored the measure, announced that hes returning the $3,126 he received in political donations associated with Disney. Other Florida lawmakers followed suit.

As DeSantis wrapped up a March 30 press conference in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, he hinted that state lawmakers might repeal the 1967 Reedy Creek Improvement Act, which provides Disney with what DeSantis called many special privileges.

We have some amazing elected leaders in Florida, and they are standing up for parents and for kids, Justice said. I am incredibly thankful. America needs strong elected leaders. We dont need followers who beg at the feet of woke corporations. If youre an elected official and youre accepting money from Disney, you are selling out parents.

To honor DeSantis for his dedication to standing up for families and children, Descovich said Moms for Liberty created a hashtag referring to DeSantis as #TheParentsGovernor long before the Disney battle began.

I think Disney has severely underestimated Florida parents because they live in a California bubble, not in reality, Justice said. But its not surprising to me that a company that plays make-believe for a living would be out of touch with the average American parent.

Its a sentiment shared wholeheartedly by Florida state Rep. Spencer Roach, a Republican.

Here in Florida, the two issues that have really galvanized voters and will continue to resonate all the way to 2024 are the woke corporations and woke school boards, he told The Epoch Times. I think when were looking at both of these issues, the fundamental issue is the same.

According to Roach, the question that keeps arising is one of instilling values.

Who is responsible with inculcating values systems in children? Should it be government, acting through these woke school boards and corporations, or should it be parents? he said. What were coming down with every time is parents. Parents want to ensure that they are the ones having these conversations with their children and teaching their children the values they hold dear. Not the government and not these corporations.

We cant overstate that that is such a fundamental, critical issue that school boards are missing. Terry McAuliffe missed it in Virginia and now Bob Chapek of Disney. Thats the theme they keep missing. These government actors, school boards, and corporate CEOs have awakened a sleeping giant of an interest group here in the United States called parents. Whats more about Florida is Bob Chapek doesnt understand a majority of Republicans and Democrats in Florida support the Parents Rights in Education law.

Descovich included Roach in a list of Florida leaders who have stood in defense of parental rights in Florida.

We have some great leaders in the state of Florida who really recognize the role of parents and families and really respect that role and are willing to stand up and fight for it, she said, citing Roach, Hardingwho sponsored House Bill 1557and Florida state Rep. Erin Grall, who sponsored the Parents Bill of Rights. We have some real champions in Florida for parental rights, and we are thankful that they are in the great state of Florida.

On June 9, 2021, The Epoch Times reported that Florida was the No. 1 relocation destination for Americans in 2020. New York and California, both heavily Democratic, had the most people choosing to leave. In 2021, Florida took second place as the most popular relocation state, behind Texas.

In September, satirical news site The Babylon Bee named California Gov. Gavin Newsom the U-Haul Salesperson of the Year. On March 12, Newsom told Disney through social media that the door is open to bring those jobs back to Californiathe state that actually represents the values of your workers. DeSantiss press secretary, Christina Pushaw, noted with a laughing emoji how Newsom had kept Disneyland closed for 13 months straight.

On April 1, The Epoch Times reported that Florida had reached a historic milestone. Republicans overtook Democrats in registered voters by a margin of 100,000.

Were just getting started, Justice said.

In the meantime, asked what advice she would offer to parents who want to let Disney know how they feel, she suggested they find another place to vacation this summer.

Joshua Phillip contributed to this report.
New Mexico Announces Tuition-Free Education in Public Colleges

New Mexico has passed a law that allows public university students to receive education without any tuition fees starting from July 1.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, signed the New Mexico Opportunity Scholarship Act on March 4 allocating millions of dollars in state funding toward free college education. Reportedly the most wide-reaching free-of-cost college program in the country, the Opportunity Scholarship Act has been enacted for state residents to obtain tuition-free education from qualifying in-state public universities, community colleges, or tribal colleges.

For over a quarter of a century, New Mexico has been a national leader in providing free college to its residents. A fully funded Opportunity Scholarship opens the door for every New Mexican to reach higher, strengthening our economy, our families and our communities, Grisham said in a press release when she signed the act.

Some of the conditions of scholarship eligibility are that the student must be enrolled for a minimum of six credit hours per semester in a credit-bearing two-year program, and maintain a 2.5 out of 4.0 cumulative grade point average.

A scholarship for a credit-bearing certificate may only be awarded where data indicates that the certificate is in high demand by New Mexico employers as determined by the department in consultation with the workforce solutions department, according to the bill.

The General Appropriations Act will direct $75 million to the scholarship program, an amount that can support at least 35,000 students, which is almost half of all undergraduates in the state.

Proponents of the bill claim that the initiative will impact the lives of millions of New Mexicans including adult learners returning to colleges to complete degree programs. Over the past two years the scholarship has been awarded to more than 10,000 students.

Opponents of the bill, including Republican Sen. David Gallegos, have questioned its long-term viability.

Where do we take the money from? Public safety? Public education? I just dont know where we continue the money, Gallegos told CNN in 2019 when the bill was first proposed.

Other than New Mexico, many states in the country have introduced initiatives to provide some sort of tuition-free education in colleges. California started offering free education for two-year full-time community college students in 2019, while the University of Texas established a $300 million endowment for assisting students with paying tuition in its institutions.

Currently, there is $7.4 billion of student loan debt in the state of New Mexico, according to Student Loan Hero, an online loan management application. There are almost 200,000 student loan borrowers in the state who owe an average of $32,986, which is 10 percent below the national average of $36,689.
North Korea Says It Will Strike With Nuclear Weapons If South Attacks: KCNA

SEOULNorth Korea opposes war but would use nuclear weapons if South Korea attacked, Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of leader Kim Jong Un, said on Tuesday, in a warning that analysts said is probably aimed at the Souths incoming conservative president.

Kim Yo Jong, a senior official in the North Korean regime, said it was a very big mistake for South Koreas minister of defense to make recent remarks discussing attacks on the North, state news agency KCNA reported.

South Korean Defense Minister Suh Wook had said on Friday that his countrys military has a variety of missiles with significantly improved range, accuracy, and power, with the ability to accurately and quickly hit any target in North Korea.

Both Koreas have increased displays of military strength after North Korea test-fired a range of increasingly powerful missiles this year. Officials in Seoul and Washington also fear it may be preparing to resume testing nuclear weapons for the first time since 2017 amid stalled negotiations.

Kim and another North Korean official issued earlier statements on Sunday condemning Suhs remarks, and warned that Pyongyang would destroy major targets in Seoul if the South takes any dangerous military action such as a preemptive strike.

Kims criticisms are most likely aimed at South Korean President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol, who has called for a more muscular defense against North Korean threats, said Rachel Minyoung Lee, an analyst with the U.S.-based 38 North project, which monitors North Korea.

Yoons preemptive strike comment made the headlines a few months ago, and Pyongyang is seizing Suhs remarks to make a point to the incoming South Korean administration, she said. North Korea has thus far refrained from criticizing Yoon at any authoritative level, but it certainly seems to be laying the groundwork for it.

The statements suggest Pyongyang is preparing the North Korean public for a possible shift in inter-Korean relations once Yoon takes office in May, Lee added.

A delegation from Yoons team was in Washington this week to meet with U.S. officials, who reiterated their commitment to defending South Korea, according to a statement by the U.S. State Department on Tuesday.
One woman makes child advocacy her lifes mission after taking a troubled youth under her wing

In her late 40s, Judy Crotchett would pick up a teenager named Richard from a group home in Kansas City, Missouri, on the weekends. This relationship with the troubled youth changed the direction of his lifeand hers. Nearly 30 years later, and still mentoring Richardwho now has a family of his ownCrotchett has signed up as a child advocate in court to give voice to institutionalized children.

The Ozanam Home for Boys is a facility that offers residential treatment and housing for youth ages 618. The facility provides emotional and behavioral support to help them heal from past trauma. Richard Schultz was 12 and living at Ozanam when Crotchett began voluntarily working with him as a youth mentor. After a while, Schultz started calling Crotchett Mom. He said, Youre the only mom Ive ever had. He was such a sweet, sweet boy, she said in an interview.

Asked if the two just clicked, Schultz replied, Yes, we did. I actually loved her, you know, like, three days after we met. Schultz said his childhood was far from ideal; he didnt realize his father and his mother were physically and emotionally abusive. By the time Schultz was taken into protective custody, he was malnourished and traumatized from years of abuse.

Every Sunday, Crotchett would pick him up from the group home and take him to Sunday school. Afterward, the two of them would play games, go to the park for a picnic or dine at a restaurant, ride bicycles, or watch a movie. She said, That day was his. Whatever he wanted to do, wherever he wanted to go, we did it. Crotchett owned a real estate company that purchased homes, rehabbed them, and then sold them. One Sunday, when Schultz was 13, the two visited one of the homes that was being rehabbed so Crotchett could check on progress.

Schultz took an interest in the construction work. I asked Richard if he wanted to work with [the foreman] and learn what he does; and he said, Yeah. So that became his favorite thing to do. If I was working on a house, Id pay him and wed go and spend the day working on that house together.

The two spent Sundays together until Schultz turned 18 and moved to a transitional living space in Bolivar, Missouri. Crotchett would visit him on occasion, and she remained his advocate, helping him move out of the temporary lodging and into his own home. Once he did that, Schultz began asking neighbors if he could mow their lawns or fix items around the house. He started taking home broken bicycles, televisions, or microwaves that were thrown in the trash and fixing them up. After working in Crotchetts repair business for so long, Schultz realized he had a knack for fixing things. He started running an ad that Crotchett helped design, announcing his repair services. Someone would say they had a broken window on their car, or an outdoor faucet that needed replacing. Richard didnt know how to fix these items but he would figure it out. He was naturally talented that way, Crotchett said.

Eventually, Schultz saved enough money for a down payment on a house. By then, he had a son, and he purchased a home near a lake where his family could live. Crotchett said of Schultz, He goes to church every Sunday. Hes a great father. He takes his boy with him everywhere he goes. He teaches him all these skills. He fishes with him. In fact, his wife and his boy go with him to work and they all work togetherlike theyll paint a deck or theyll build a deck or whatever the job is.

Now 41, Schultz said of their relationship, Before I met Judy, I never had a motherly figure. How youre treated as a kid affects every part of your life for the rest of your life. Judy was so inspiring for me. I think that she had more of an impact on my life than anybody else could even understand.

Schultz and Crotchett still speak on the phone weekly. Crotchett is getting ready to start a new chapter helping disadvantaged youth. The program was put on hold due to the pandemic, but she will soon take a training class to start working as a court-appointed advocate. She said that after training, she will start working with a youth who is in the court system, touching base once a week. Once the youth goes to court, Crotchett will attend and speak as an advocate and make recommendations for the child. She said it gives the child a voice that might not be heard without an adult advocatejust like she has done for so many years.

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.
Trucks of The People's Convoy traveling from Indiana to Lore City, Ohio, on March 3, 2022. (Enrico Trigoso/The Epoch Times)

Peoples Convoy to Reach Los Angeles for Rally by April 10

LOS ANGELESThe Peoples Convoy is expected to reach Los Angeles in time for the Defeat the Mandates rally at Grand Park on April 10.

Brian Brase, a trucker and co-organizer of The Peoples Convoy, told The Epoch Times he expects to reach Phoenix, Arizona, April 6.

Youre looking at about 100 trucks constantly, but our convoy is made up of cars and campers and motorcycles, not just trucks. So, youre probably looking at around 500 vehicles total right now that are pretty well sustained. But we grow and shrink throughout the day and multiple times a day, Brase said.

Brian Brase, a truck driver from Ohio and a co-organizer of The Peoples Convoy, speaks to drivers at Hagerstown Speedway, in Hagerstown, Md., on March 5, 2022. (Enrico Trigoso/The Epoch Times)

Organizers announced last week that they were headed to California to protest proposed legislation related to COVID-19 mandates, including Assembly Bill (AB) 1993, before state Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) announced on March 29 the bill would be put on hold.

The Convoy has listed 10 bills that it opposes on its website.

[AB] 1993 being thrown out was definitely a win. Were happy to see that, but weve still got nine others that we need to fight, Brase said. I do consider that a win. I obviously cant say its because of the convoy, but I like to think its the fact that the convoy is coming to town.

The other nine bills are equally as bad, he said.

Had it passed, the AB 1993 would require proof of COVID-19 vaccinations for all employees and independent contractors to work in California, including truck drivers trying to cross states lines to deliver freight, Brase said.

Though many supporters wanted the truckers to remain in the Washington, D.C. area to demand an end to the emergency orders and special government powers that go along with them, Brase indicated the convoy will return to the D.C. area to finish the job after the California mission.

Californians seem to very excited for us to come back, especially since were going there with a mission of fighting these bills, he said.

We are going to Sacramento, he said The hope is to meet with California legislators. Obviously, we want to do things diplomatically. We are a peaceful protest. Were law-abiding [and] peaceful, and we want to have meetings just like weve had in D.C. to discuss these issues and hopefully convince many of them to vote against them.

The convoy will stop in Los Angeles for a few days, then move north to Stockton and on to the Sacramento area, he said.

The convoy also hopes to hold a rally in Sacramento, but thats still a very fluid situation, he said. Were still developing that.

Trucks participating in The Peoples Convoy in Elk City, Okla., on Feb. 27, 2022. (Enrico Trigoso/The Epoch Times)

The route hasnt been 100 percent nailed down yet as far as California goes, but were coming in on the [Interstate] 10, he said.

From Los Angeles, the convoy will likely head up the I-5, but Brase wasnt certain.

I dont want to say that for sure. The 99 is obviously an option as well, he said.

Organizers are hopeful they will be able to meet with California lawmakers when they reach Sacramento after the Los Angeles rally.

Though the truckers ran into some roadblocks when the D.C. Metro Police blocked exit ramps on the beltway, Brase said he doesnt anticipate any problems with the police in Sacramento.

The Peoples Convoy would try to have permits in place for any rally or anything like that within Sacramento, he said.

In D.C., convoy organizers met only with Republicans, but not for the lack of trying to meet with Democrats, Brase said.

We definitely tried to get meetings with Democrats, and they just simply wouldnt see us. They didnt even give us the time of day, he said.

On our end, its not a left or right issue. This is an American issue, but our politicians are trying to make it a right issue or a left issue. They seem to be trying to paint us as being some alt-right or, or rightwing movement, he said.

While many convoy supporters may lean to the right politically, this movement isnt about the Republicans and Democrats, he said. Its not about being a conservative or a liberal. Its about our rights as Americansour constitutional rights against these mandates, and then, of course, our God-given rights as human beings walking this Earth, Brase said.

Ralliers cheer the convoy departing from Adelanto, Calif., on Feb. 23, 2022. (Enrico Trigoso/The Epoch Times)

Mike Landis, another trucker and lead organizer, flew back to California recently and met with Rep. Lou Correa (D-Calif.) in Santa Ana on March 21.

Its for the people, and its not a right or a left thing. Its an American issue, Landis said at the meeting which was live-streamed on YouTube.

The whole point behind what were doing comes down to our freedoms, and to get that we need the Constitution. A lot of people dont know that because of the Emergency Act due to COVID, the Constitution can be null at void at the hands of those in Washington. Right now with the Emergency Act in place, we technically could get in trouble with our convoy because they could say we dont have the right to our First Amendment if they wanted to, he said.

Landis thanked Correa for meeting with him. I am actually extremely excited that you being in the Democratic side have come out to meet with us today, he said.

(L to R) The Peoples Convoy co-organizer Mike Landis, co-organizer Brian Brase, the Unity Projects Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Paul Alexander, and emcee Marcus Summers at a rally at Hagerstown Speedway in Hagerstown, Md., on Mar. 26, 2022. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times)

Marcus Sommers, 51, also a trucker and co-organizer from Ohio, agreed that The Peoples Convoy is about protecting the rights of future generationsfor his own family and for every American.

Im committed and Ill be here until the mission is completed, Sommers told The Epoch Times.

The vaccine mandates are taking away the freedoms of every American, he said.

Its unconstitutional. Its government tyranny. Its control. It still is We, The People. We still have a constitution, and the people need to stand up and fight back, he said.

People really need to understand the importance of how much power they have together in the community, fighting together as the same like-minded people, Sommers said.

He encouraged community leaders to organize and demand responses from their state and local representatives to hold them accountable for the vaccine mandates.

Sommers said it would be amazing, if California Gov. Gavin Newsom met with the convoy organizers when they reach Sacramento.

Weve had Democrats with us joining us on this convoy. Its just been an amazing thing to watch happen and see how beautiful it can be when people are fighting [for] the same thing, he said.

Sommers said he expects a hardy response from Californians as the convoy returns to the state.

Theres a lot of people watching us. Theres a lot of people waiting for us, he said. They want to support us by either joining us or standing on the overpasses alongside the road.

The Peoples Convoy left Adelanto, California, on its way to the D.C. area on Feb. 23.
A file photo of the Placentia Yorba Linda Unified School District board of trustees in Yorba Linda, Calif., on Oct. 12, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Placentia-Yorba Linda School Board Bans Critical Race Theory

YORBA LINDA, Calif.Critical Race Theory (CRT) is now banned in the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified District following a school board vote on April 5.

The 32 vote Tuesday evening came following months of discussion over the theory, which divides society into oppressors and oppressed based on race.

Trustee Leandra Blades, who has been advocating for the ban, applauded the vote that she believes will ensure that history on race will be kept strictly to the textbook rather than political ideologies.

Things in California can change if they begin at a local level which is why we need local control, Blades told The Epoch Times.

Hundreds of people showed up to the board meeting to hear the final decision with about 50 public speakers giving their opinion, Blades said.

Some public commenters argued that banning CRT prevents the ability of teaching about topics of history such as slavery or school segregation.

However, Blades refuted these accusations, clarifying that the topics would still be taught, but without a political narrative and the teachers ability to state their opinion.

The school board is one of the few to ban CRT, Blades said, adding that she believes more districts will follow.

The two board members that voted against the ban on TuesdayPresident Carrie Buck and Trustee Karin Freemanargued against the ban on CRT, claiming that it was censorship.

This resolution is politically driven and it serves to ban and censor, Buck claimed. Curriculum development belongs in the hands of our educators.

Buck further stated that the ban was not wanted by a majority of students, parents, and teachers she has communicated with, and insisted those in favor of the ban werent listening to everyone.

She cited a list of people that was circulating since the ban was in discussion that counted more than 700 people against the ban and 140 in favor of it.

However, Blades contested the list from Buck while citing a study conducted by the Orange County Board of Education that showed 75 percent of those within the Placentia-Yorba Linda School District believed that CRT should not be taught in schools, while 19 percent agreed it should be.

The survey also concluded that a majority of participants agree that CRT should not be a high school requirement, according to Blades.

Blades further argued against the statements that claimed CRT was not taught in public schools, claiming her own children have been taught the theory in their curriculum.

Three of my kids have been taught CRT, and that has been in the last five years, she said. In 2017 and 2018, we didnt know what Critical Race Theory was; we thought they were just teaching communism.

Since the discussion began among the board members, Blades said she received inquiries from different school boards requesting to receive a copy of the resolution to ban CRT in hopes of proposing it.

The resolution to ban CRT went into effect immediately.
Police car on the corner of 10th and J street after a shooting that occurred in the early morning hours in Sacramento, Calif., on April 3, 2022. (David Odisho/Getty Images)

Police Make Third Arrest After Sacramento Shooting

Police investigating a mass shooting in Sacramento, California, over the weekend took a third man into custody on Tuesday a but said he was not accused of taking part in the shooting.

In the course of investigating the multiple homicides of April 3, 2022, detectives identified a man who was seen carrying a gun in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the Sacramento Police Department said in a statement.

Detectives recovered a handgun and arrested 31-year-old Daviyonne Dawson late Monday on charges of being a prohibited person in possession of a firearm.

Police said Dawson is not charged with crimes directly related to the shootings.

Two brothers Dandrae Martin and Smiley Martin were arrested in connection with the shooting earlier.

(Left) Dandrae Martin in a file photo. (Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry via AP); (Right) Smiley Allen Martin on Feb. 6, 2022. (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via AP)

Smiley Martin, 27, was arrested on Tuesday while hospitalized with bullet wounds from the shooting in Californias capital.

Martin was released from prison on probation in February after serving his term for punching a girlfriend, dragging her from her home by her hair and whipping her with a belt, prosecutors said.

Martin may have been released sooner, but a Parole Board rejected his bid for early release in May after prosecutors said the 2017 felony assault along with convictions for possessing an assault weapon and thefts posed a significant, unreasonable risk of safety to the community.

Martins criminal conduct is violent and lengthy, a Sacramento prosecutor wrote in a letter obtained by AP. Martin has committed several felony violations and clearly has little regard for human life and the law.

More than 100 shots were fired in rapid-fire succession early Sunday near the state Capitol, creating a chaotic scene with hundreds of panicked people trying desperately to reach safety. Twelve people were wounded by gunfire, including the Martin brothers.

Dandrae Martin, 26, was arrested Monday as a related suspect on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and being a convict carrying a loaded gun. He was not seriously wounded and made a brief appearance Tuesday in Sacramento Superior Court wearing orange jail scrubs.

Smiley Martin will be booked for possession of a firearm by a prohibited person and possession of a machine gun when his condition improves enough for him to be jailed, a police statement said.

Investigators search for evidence in the area of a mass shooting In Sacramento, Calif., on April 3, 2022. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP Photo)

Police were trying to determine if a stolen handgun found at the crime scene that had been converted to a weapon capable of automatic gunfire was used in the massacre.

Smiley Martin was taken to the hospital from the crime scene, police said.

Martin was quickly identified as a person of interest and has remained under the supervision of an officer at the hospital while his treatment continues, the statement said.

Detectives and SWAT team members also found a handgun during searches of three area homes.

The shooting happened at about 2 a.m. Sunday as bars were closing and patrons filled the streets. The three women and three men killed included a father of four, a young woman who wanted to be a social worker, a man described as the life of the party, and a homeless woman.

The Sacramento County coroner identified the women killed as Johntaya Alexander, 21; Melinda Davis, 57; and Yamile Martinez-Andrade, 21. The three men were Sergio Harris, 38; Joshua Hoye-Lucchesi, 32; and Devazia Turner, 29.

Photographs of DeVasia Turner are on display as Penelope Scott speaks to the media during an interview at the corner of 10th and K street in Sacramento, Calif., on April 4, 2022. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group via AP)

Police were investigating whether the shooting was connected with a street fight that broke out just before gunfire erupted. Several people could be seen fighting in videos on a street lined with an upscale hotel, nightclubs, and bars when gunshots sent people scattering.

Officers were reviewing more than 100 videos and photos sent by witnesses for possible use as evidence, police said.

District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert noted Monday that Dandrae Martin was not arrested on suspicion of homicide but said more arrests were expected.

Dandrae Martin, who was held without bail, was freed from an Arizona prison in 2020 after serving just over 1.5 years for violating probation in separate cases involving a felony conviction for aggravated assault in 2016 and a conviction on a marijuana charge in 2018. Court records show he pleaded guilty to punching, kicking, and choking a woman in a hotel room when she refused to work for him as a prostitute.

Defense lawyer Linda Parisi said she doesnt know enough about the case yet and whether she will seek Dandrae Martins release will depend on whether prosecutors bring stiffer charges.

If it turns out that the evidence demonstrates that this was mere presence at a scene that certainly argues more for a release, Parisi said. If it shows some more aggressive conduct then it would argue against it. But we dont know that yet.

It wasnt clear if Smiley Martin had an attorney who could speak on his behalf.

Four of those wounded suffered critical injuries, the Sacramento Fire Department has said. At least seven of the victims had been released from hospitals by Monday.

At the scene where the chaos erupted, memorials with candles and flowers grew on the same sidewalks where people had run in terror as others lay on the ground writhing in pain.

Reuters contributed to this report.
Pure Victims

Commentary

Change in linguistic usage is normal, and it can either add to or detract from languages expressive power. Its much more likely to be sinister when its directed by some organization acting in an official or public capacity than when it arises spontaneously from the population at large.

Directed change in linguistic usage is usually done in pursuit of some practical or ideological end, acknowledged or unacknowledgedor both.

The American Medical Association (AMA), for example, wants doctors to cease using the word disparity, meaning the difference in characteristics or in outcomes in different groups, and to instead use inequity, meaning (in its opinion) inequality, because it wants to replace inequality with inequity.

In so doing, its propounding a worldview thats thoroughly communist, more thoroughly communist in fact than that of Marx and Engels themselves, who had no inhibitions against denigrating whole groups for their own backwardness and cultural inferiority, and even wishing for them to disappear from the face of the earth.

According to the AMA, then, any and all differences in the fate of different human groups are, and can only be, the result of social injustice. For example, stand-up comedians as a group have a high rate of suicide and a low life expectancy by comparison with those in other professions (a friend of mine published a scientific paper on this subject); this must beaccording to the AMAbecause such comedians are persecuted or mistreated in some way. Perhaps theyre exploited by their managers or by impresarios, made to work too hard, given too little time off, and so forth.

They must, in the AMAs view, be pure victims of circumstance, or slaves to circumstance, contributing nothing to their own fate. They no more chose to be comedians, with the associated way of life, than did I, say, to suffer from hypothyroidism when I was in my 20s. And once a person is forced by circumstance to be a comedian, he must continue for the rest of his life to be a comedian: Theres nothing else he can do, and he exercises no choice in the matter.

Its therefore time to halt this gross injustice to comedians, if necessary by outlawing the profession itself. If there were no comedians, there could be no injustice done to them.

In the opinion of the AMA, theres no such thing as an illegal immigrant, presumably anywhere in the world (theres no reason why this view should apply only to the United States). An immigrant who enters a country illegally is simply undocumented. This has the corollary that no one is a citizen of anywhere in particular, and were all citizens of the world with the equal right to live anywhere in the world.

But whos to enforce this right, given thatas a matter of factmost governments refuse to recognize it? Try turning up in most countries and saying, Im going to stay here for the rest of my life, whether you want me to or not.

The only answer, of course, must be a world governmentof which, presumably, the AMA would be the conscience and ethical supervisor.

The AMA wants the morbidly obese to be known henceforth as people with obesity, as if obesity descended on people as the gentle rain droppeth from the heaven on the place beneath, with no intervening human conduct to mediate its action.

Morbid obesity and the worldwide increase in its prevalence is a complex phenomenon, and neither commercial interests nor government policies can be excluded from the analysis of its causes. This isnt, however, the same as saying that individuals exercise no responsibility whatsoever for their fate or that theyre mere helpless pawns in the hands of some evil great chess grandmaster. To say this is to reduce people to the level of inanimate objects.

Why is there this drive to exculpate people totally from their own situation, if that situation is in some way undesirable or worse?

First, theres the desire for power by those who see their fellow beings as pure victims, that is to say, as inanimate objects acted upon but not acting. But I dont think that this is the whole explanation.

Another part of the explanation is the debased secularization of Christian ethics. Christian ethics enjoin us to forgive our enemies, to love others as oneself, and to be charitable toward the unfortunate. But the secularized version of these ethics omits one important aspect, namely that were all sinners in need of mercy. In the secularized version of Christian ethics, theres no notion of sin, at least not in victims: Only perpetrators, such as commercial interests and governments, can sin in the new revised version.

Therefore, since its evident that the grossly fat are deserving of sympathy, for surely they suffer and dont want to be as they are, and would, if a magic wand could be waved, become slender, they have to be turned into pure victims, having contributed nothing to their own downfall in order for sympathy toward them to be exercised.

Theres no room for weakness of will or the tragic dimension of life in the AMAs worldview, as revealed by its proposed linguistic diktats, which make the approach of the Academie Francaise to language regulation look libertarian.

In the older view, a Christian couldand, in fact, shouldrecognize the sinfulness of every person, including the very fat, but at the same time attempt to be compassionate toward him. For essentially he, the Christian, was in the same boat, if not necessarily with regard to the same sinbut he was a sinner of some kind or another.

Again, it isnt the case that Christians always practiced what they preached or should have preached. Far from it: They can be as censorious, cruel, punitive, and sadistic as anyone else. But at least, in theory, their belief or doctrine allows them the possibility of recognizing both a persons sinful part in bringing about his own bad situation and being compassionate toward him.

Lets ascribe generous motives to the AMA: It wants to be compassionate toward those who suffer. But because it hangs on to Christian ethics with the concept of sin removed, that turns almost everyone, including the readers of this, into inanimate objects, with all the potential for a totalitarian dictatorship and abuse that such a worldview inevitably implies.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Rallies Afoot and Strategies in Play as Tory Leadership Race Gains Momentum

Pierre Poilievre is rallying big crowds in pursuit of the Conservative leadership, and analysts say it augurs well for both the candidate and the party come the next federal election. However, some say numbers at rallies arent the only factor in determining who will emerge the victor at the end of a very crowded leadership race.

Crowds have thronged to see Poilievre while campaigning. He rallied hundreds in Ottawa April 1 as he announced his opposition to the carbon tax, which increased that day. On April 2 in Winnipeg, the Carleton, Ont., MP filled a room of 600 as well as an overflow room, with some left waiting outside. The next day, Poilievre drew 1,000 people at the fairgrounds in Lindsay, a central Ontario town of 20,000.

Michael Taube, a speechwriter for former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, says the Poilievre crowds are significant for the candidate and the party.

While some leadership candidates have had large crowds right off the bat, Poilievres gatherings have been off the charts at times. In some ways, it seems to be expanding into a significant political movement, Taube told The Epoch Times.

Jean Charest poses for pictures with supporters as he launches the Quebec part of his campaign for the Consevative Party leadership in Laval, Quebec, on March 24, 2022 (The Canadian Press/Ryan Remiorz)

For a party thats been mired in the opposition benches since 2015, this is an encouraging development from one of its leading candidates. If this type of momentum continues, its going to be nearly impossible for another candidate to beat him.

Taube notes, however, that the leadership vote is not until Sept. 10, and there are several acts in this political play yet to be presented.

To win, he says, Poilievre and his team obviously need to keep the foot on the gas pedal and introduce many more small c conservative ideas and policies in the weeks and months ahead.

Tom Flanagan, a former political strategist who ran Harpers successful Canadian Alliance and Conservative Party leadership campaigns, says the attendance at Poilievres events is noteworthy and due in part to a well-executed campaign.

Crowd size and enthusiasm is a good indicator of how well a candidate is doing in a leadership race. Enthused supporters are more likely to buy memberships, to keep their memberships up to date, to sell other memberships, and to vote when the time comes. I cant say whether [leadership candidate Jean] Charest will find the same grassroots enthusiasm in some parts of the country, Flanagan told The Epoch Times.

One thing to keep in mind is the use of telephone messages, emails, and social media to boost attendance. You cant make people come if theyre not interested, but you can certainly give people a nudge. Pierres manager, Jenni Byrne, would be very familiar with these methods of turning out a crowd, as would Pierre himself.

Crowds Arent Everything

Flanagan assessed the reported attendance at Poilievres events as very good but not unheard of, and said the number of voting Conservative members could potentially be so large that a few thousand who have attended meetings cant determine the outcome by themselves. He says this factor is magnified when one considers the structure of the vote.

The rules of the leadership race give each electoral district the lesser of 100 points, or 1 point per vote cast, and candidates are assigned a point total based on their percentage of the vote in each electoral district. If no candidate gets more than half the total of points in a given round, the one with the fewest points drops off the ballot and those voters second preference is reallocated to the remaining candidates. This process repeats until a candidate wins by securing more than half the points.

Brampton, Ont., Mayor Patrick Brown announces his candidacy for the federal Conservative Party leadership at a rally in Brampton on March 13, 2022. (The Canadian Press/Chris Young)

Formerly, a riding got 100 points even if it had less than 100 voting members. Although that is no longer the case, Flanagan says ridings that lack Conservative members still carry a disproportionate weight.

The rules have been changed to reduce the outsized influence of rotten boroughs, but they still exist and can be important, he said, referring to parliamentary boroughs with a tiny electorate.

A hundred voters in a Quebec riding can exert as much or more influence as a thousand voters in a Western riding. [Former Tory candidate Andrew] Scheer won by appealing to rotten boroughs in Quebec on the basis of supply marketing.

This biased system could help more progressive candidates such as Charest. If the former Quebec premier can rally 100 people to become party members in every riding in his home province, and take a majority of votes in those ridings, it will give him the edge in 78 of the countrys 338 ridingsa sizeable chunk in a race that includes 11 candidates.

Finding Room

Poilievres campaign schedule includes stops in Quebec City as well as in the B.C. cities of Kelowna, Vernon, Prince George, and Vancouver. His competitors, meanwhile, are implementing their own best strategies to rally voters based on geography, policy, and demographics.

Charest launched his leadership campaign in Calgary, but has so far focused much of his attention on Eastern Canada. He made three campaign stops in Quebec in the final week of March, then kicked off his #BuiltToWin tour on April 4 with three stops in Nova Scotia, and a platform plank of more defence spending, including two new bases in the Arctic.

Our campaign focuses more on direct membership engagement and sales than crowd counts. Were also focused on developing meaningful policy  to present a substantive offering to members, Charest spokesperson Laurence Toth said in an email.

Conservative leadership candidate Leslyn Lewis rises during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Dec. 2, 2021. (The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick)

Toth said the response on the campaign trail has been very encouraging and positive.

Since the end of March, Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown has met with religious and minority ethnic groups in major urban areas, including Chinese in Vancouver, Sikhs and Tamils in Montreal, Baptists in Brampton, and Vietnamese in Vaughan. He has emphasized the importance of religious freedom and opposed Quebecs Bill 21 that bans religious garb. And, according to the Toronto Star, he has a non-aggression pact with Charest so that Poilievre does not prevail.

Leslyn Lewis, a pro-life MP and leadership candidate, dedicated the first days of April to Western ridings high in social conservatives. She drew more than 200 at recent gatherings in Steinbach, Man., 140 in Moose Jaw, Sask., and 200 in Swift Current, Sask. A gathering with 180 pastors in Calgary is planned for April 7, followed by a luncheon with businesspeople, and a reception for hundreds at a hotel.

Craig Chandler, a Calgary organizer for Lewiss campaign team, helped the candidate win Alberta and place third overall in the 2020 leadership race. He reminds voters that apparent front-runner Peter MacKay lost that race, and calls Poilievre a great second choice.

Leslyn will help us change the narrative in a number of ways, but shes also an international lawyer, she has private sector experience, whereas Pierres a career politician. Shes not as polished, which I think is what people liked last time, and theyre going to like this time, Chandler said.

She has a good core of people who are working hard and selling memberships and whatnot, so were excited, he adds. Pierrethats not our main focus. Our main focus is Charest and Browns non-aggression pact. Were concerned that if either of those two was to become leader of the party, you might as well kiss it goodbye.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) speaks during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, on July 29, 2020. (Graeme Jennings/Pool via Reuters)

Rep. Gaetz Accuses US Military Leadership of Pandering to Wokeism in Heated Exchange With Defense Secretary

A hearing on the Biden administrations proposed defense budget turned rancorous on April 5, with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin verbally sparring over the state of Americas hypersonic weapons capabilities.

Gaetz said that the hypersonic capabilities of the U.S. military had fallen behind those of the Chinese military, and cited Chinese advancements in hypersonic weapons technologies such as its test of an orbital bombardment system last July.

Austin rebuffed the comments and questioned the idea that the U.S. military was falling behind Chinas.

What do you mean were behind in hypersonics? Austin asked. How do you make that assessment?

Your own people brief us that were behind and China is winning, Gaetz said. Are you aware of the briefings we get on hypersonics?

I am certainly aware of the briefings that we provide to Congress, Austin responded.

The state of U.S. hypersonic capabilities is currently a point of contention among military leadership. Some believe it is imperative that America outproduce the Chinese communist when it comes to such weapons, while others believe that they are not necessary to carrying out the United States strategic goals.

Then-Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Hyten, said in October that the United States had initially begun to develop a hypersonics system back in 2011, but scrapped the project after just two failed tests.

Hyten blamed a brutal and out-of-control military bureaucracy which he said caused new weapons systems 10 to 15 years to develop on average, with some taking far longer.

He further said that while the Chinese Communist Party had conducting hundreds of hypersonics tests in the last decade, the United States had conducted just nine.

Single digits versus hundreds is not a good place, Hyten said.

Conversely, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall downplayed the need for U.S. hypersonics, saying that the nations strategic priorities were different than Chinas. Put simply, while hypersonics are required by China to penetrate U.S. defenses in the event of a war, the United States does not require them to strike its own targets.

Instead, Kendall said, the United States should invest in space-based systems that could adequately defend against hypersonics.

The kerfuffle between Gaetz and Austin reached a low point when Gaetz accused the U.S. military of pandering to wokeism and Austin accused Gaetz of being embarrased of the military and of America.

The fact that youre embarrassed by your country, by your military, Im sorry for that, Austin said.

Oh no, Gaetz said, Im embarrassed for your leadership. I am not embarrassed for my country.

This is the most capable, most combat critical force in the world, Austin said. It has been and it will be so going forward, and this budget helps us to do that.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) speaks during a House Intelligence Committee hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington on March 8, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Rep. Schiff Tests Positive for COVID-19

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has tested positive for COVID-19, he announced on social media on Tuesday evening.

This evening, I unfortunately tested positive for COVID-19, the lawmaker, who is fully vaccinated and boosted against the novel coronavirus, said in a Twitter post.

Im feeling fine, and grateful to be vaccinated and boosted. In the coming days, I will quarantine and follow CDC guidelines, he added. And remember, please get vaccinated!

Schiff, 61, chairs the House Intelligence Committee and represents Californias 28th congressional district.

The lawmaker didnt indicate where he might have contracted the infection or whether it involved a new COVID-19 sub-variant, BA.2, that has fueled an increase in cases overseas and is spreading in the United States.

Several other political figures have tested positive for COVID-19 recently, including White House press secretary Jen Psaki, CIA Director William Burns, and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy.

Reps. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) also announced positive COVID-19 tests on Tuesday. The pair said on Twitter that they were fully vaccinated and boosted.

Schultz, the former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, said she was experiencing manageable symptoms.

Thankfully, I am both vaccinated and boosted, she wrote. Please, if you havent yet, dont wait to get vaccinated and boosted.

Castro, a former chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said he was experiencing mild symptoms after avoiding COVID-19 for two years.

I tested negative yesterday & last Thursday, but positive today. Thankfully, Im fully vaccinated & boostedI will quarantine consistent with CDC guidelines, he said on Twitter.

According to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates, as of April 2, the BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron accounts for 72.2 percent of the COVID-19 variants in the United States, up from nearly 57.3 percent the week prior.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and Burma troops launch rockets from missile systems during the "Caucasus-2020" military drills at the Turali range on the Caspian Sea coast in the Republic of Dagestan in Southern Russia on Sept. 23, 2020. (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images)

Risk of Nuclear War From China and Russia Increases

Chinas hypersonic missile test flew 25,000 milesthe furthest ever

News Analysis

With rising global instability, caused primarily by the belligerence of the new China-Russia axis, these and other countries keep surprising America with their quest for new nuclear weapons and delivery systems, including the hypersonic variety.

The chief of U.S. Strategic Command, Adm. Charles Richard, believes that Chinas breathtaking expansion of its nuclear arsenal leads the United States in hypersonics and already escalates the risk for America, according to his April 5 congressional testimony.

In July, China launched its first test of a hypersonic glide vehicle, which was launched from an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

According to Richard, the test was a technological achievement with serious implications for strategic stability.

The hypersonic reentry vehicle flew 25,000 miles in one hour and 40 minutesthe greatest distance and longest flight time of any land attack weapon system of any nation to date, he wrote in his testimony, which was delivered to the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee on April 5.

Military vehicles carrying DF-5B intercontinental ballistic missiles participate in a military parade at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, on Oct. 1, 2019. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)

One of the greatest dangers of this high-speed nuclear-capable delivery vehicle is that it could destroy American defenses, including in space, before we had time to react adequately. That puts all major American weapons systems, which tend to be thoroughly technological and interdependent upon each other, at high risk of defeat at their weakest link.

According to Richard, all Pentagon operational plans and every other capability we have, rests on the assumption that strategic deterrence, and in particular nuclear deterrence, will hold.

Now that Beijing and Moscow have broken our assumption with their hypersonic capabilities, American nuclear deterrence may already have been defeated. Were just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Moscow and Beijing no longer seem scared of the United States, judging by China and Russias apparently coordinated belligerence in Ukraine and Asia, including alleged Chinese cyberattacks on Ukraine just before the invasion. They now feel confident in jointly violating international law by committing war crimes and genocide, including at the Bucha massacre.

This muscular disregard for international law, backed by a nuclear deterrent held by Moscow and Beijing, is fueling a global nuclear arms race. The good guys want to defend themselves with nuclear weaponsand they should. The bad guys want to acquire more nuclear weapons so they can continue their dictatorial rule over their own populations and their territorial theft from neighbors, abetted they hope by terrorizing nuclear threats.

Its not a spiral of insecurity, but the dictators are backing the democracies up a spiral staircase to choose between the suicide of their sovereignty or a catastrophic war they do not want to fight.

According to an April 4 report, spending on nuclear weapons, including bombs and delivery systems such as missiles, will surpass $126 billion over the next 10 years, an increase of 73 percent since 2020. Much of this will be small nuclear warheads for tactical use and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). Nuclear growth will be strong in China, India, and Pakistan, according to the report.

Yet the Biden administration is canceling American development of the tactical nuclear weapons necessary, according to one defense analyst, for deterring Russia and China at the regional level.

Nikkei reported on April 4 that the Biden administration decided to discontinue a new sea-launched nuclear-capable cruise missile (SLCM-N) championed by the Trump administration. By doing so, the administration reportedly hopes to add momentum to the flagging nuclear disarmament movement.

Richard Fisher, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Washington, wrote in an email that canceling the SLCM-N is a serious mistake that will only serve to increase the chances of aggression against the United States and its allies.

Fisher said that SLCM-N would have given the United States a near-term survivable tactical nuclear deterrentthat does not require the often difficult approval of allies for basingwith which it can help convince Russia and China not to initiate the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

Without a robust tactical nuclear option, the United States would be forced to back down given Russian or Chinese use of tactical nuclear weapons or escalate to the strategic level and risk retaliation against U.S. cities.

Today Russia has 2,000 or many more theater nuclear weapons and China likely has more than 1,000 whereas the United States reportedly only has about 500 tactical nuclear bombs and only deploys 100 of these in Europe and none in Asia, wrote Fisher.

The Biden administration is doing something to improve Americas nuclear arsenal, though not enough. It requested a record $813 billion in defense spending for 2023, which eclipses the former presidents. Some of this will be spent on modernizing the nuclear triad, which is composed of Americas nuclear weapons deployed on bombers, submarines, and land-based missiles, but not for the SLCM-N.

The Arleigh-Burke class guided-missile destroyer USS Barry (DDG 52) conducting underway operations in the South China Sea on April 28, 2020. (Samuel Hardgrove/U.S. Navy/AFP via Getty Images)

President Joe Biden is apparently attempting to return to the Barack Obama era of nuclear strategy, which sought a world without nuclear weapons through gradual acts of unilateral peacemaking at the expense of relative American power and the ultimate strategy of peace through strength.

In 2010, then-President Obama preceded Biden in scrapping the nuclear cruise missile, only briefly revived by President Donald Trump.

However nice a concept, the pacifist approach to nuclear strategy didnt work. Instead, it gave Russia and China a head-start on hypersonic missile development and the rapid buildup of their conventional military and nuclear forces, much of which is meant for offense rather than defense.

If America did ever fully disarm its nuclear arsenal, there is no guarantee that Moscow and Beijing would do the same, even if they promised otherwise. If they did, their larger conventional military power and Chinas massive population could then overwhelm American military forces, with no American nuclear deterrent available.

There is no risk-free solution to the threats above. Risks and costs abound whatever path is chosen because those risks and costs are imposed on America by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its allies, who respond to the olive branches of democracy with daggers hidden behind dictatorial backs. Appearing soft may be riskier than getting tougher.

America should beware of thinking that by being nicer, the CCP will somehow back off. It wont. It will take niceness as a sign of weakness and advance on our positions globally, starting with the weakest of democracies, like Ukraine and Taiwan, that we left out in the cold from our alliances.

Beijing has a goal of global hegemony and a set of sophisticated strategies to achieve this, including using tactical nuclear weapons to scare us into a fatal paralysis when we should be ever more active in our defense. Biden needs to return America to its only successful strategy against the worlds most ruthless dictators: peace through strength.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
The Department of Justice building in Washington on Jan. 2, 2020. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Russian Oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev Charged With Violating US Sanctions

Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev has been charged by U.S. authorities for allegedly violating U.S. sanctions.

Malofeyev, 47, was charged in an indictment unsealed on April 6 with conspiracy to violate the sanctions and actual violations of the sanctions.

Charging documents say Malofeyev hired Jack Hanick, an American citizen, to operate television networks in Russia and Greece for him.

Hanick is also said to have tried to acquire another network in Bulgaria on the oligarchs behalf.

In one message included in a filing, Hanick told Malofeyev that he traveled to Russia in 2013 to work for you. Hanick was paid a salary, a $5,000 monthly housing stipend, and health insurance. He moved from Russia to Greece in 2015.

According to court papers, Malofeyev conspired with Hanick and others to illegally transfer $10 million in investments that the oligarch made in a Texas-based bank holding company to a business partner in Greece, in violation of sanctions against Malofeyevs assets.

The alleged scheme saw Malofeyev invest using a shell company and transfer ownership of the company to the Greek partner, with Hanick in 2015 carrying a copy of the certificate of shares to the Greek associate before Malofeyevs attorney falsely represented to the bank that the transfer had actually taken place before the sanctions were imposed.

The sanctions were imposed in 2014 because, according to American officials, Malofeyev was a primary source of financing for Russians promoting separatism in Crimea, an area Russia seized during the Obama administration from Ukraine.

The United States sanctions on Malofeyev prohibit him from paying or receiving services from United States citizens, or from conducting transactions with his property in the United States. But as alleged, he systematically flouted those restrictions for years after being sanctioned, Damiam Williams, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.

The allegations in this case go back many years showing just how much effort the FBI and its partners put into investigating these crimes, added Alan Kohler Jr., an FBI counterintelligence official.

Neither Malofeyev nor Hanick had attorneys listed on the court docket.

U.S. officials said they seized millions of dollars from an account at a U.S. bank that is linked to the sanctions violations.

Malofeyev faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted of the two charges. He is at large.

Hanick was charged in November 2021, with the indictment being unsealed in March.

Hanick was arrested on Feb. 3 in London. U.S. authorities hope to extradite him to the United States.

Hanick knowingly chose to help Malofeyev spread his destabilizing messages by establishing, or attempting to establish, TV networks in Russia, Bulgaria, and Greece, in violation of sanctions, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen said in a previous statement.
The signature works of Ludwig van Beethoven

I am actually still shaking. I just listened to Beethovens Fifth Symphonyagainand it is simply apocalyptic! The fantastical, audacious bombast elicits an almost nervous laughter. It is thrilling and enthralling, truly and utterly stunningthe signature work of a singular man, a man with visionary clarity and absolutely zero time for ambiguity. That man is Ludwig van Beethoven.

It is almost impossible to think of Beethoven and not mention Mozart. While Beethoven was certainly following in Mozarts footsteps, he was unquestionably charting his own very distinctive course. A brief comparison of these two giants might be really useful in understanding who Beethoven was.

One main difference was Mozarts regular use of alternating major and minor scales. Minors are commonly understood to be sad. Mozarts technique of alternating between them changed the color in such a way that took the sadness and made it feel delicate, sensitive, or thoughtful. For Mozart, the sunshine is never far away, and is almost always about to peek through the clouds.

With Beethoven, however, you are never in any doubt about his intent. Mitsuko Uchida, renowned concert pianist, called Beethoven premeditated, because he used shock tactics by design. You are either staring into an abyss of sadness, or gallopingflag on a staffinto war on the back of a horse. That might be a slight overstatement, but Beethoven makes a decision and stands by it. It is equally rewarding and surprising, but there is much less room for equivocation.

Beethoven was a man of clear perspectives and objectives. He had a glorious vision of a universe of unimaginable scale, and he painted that glory in a way no one else could. Take a listen to the Fifth Symphony, with full orchestra, and see if you can think of any other piece of music that comes close to that bold, terrifying power. It is such a phenomenon, that even the heaviest of modern heavy metal just wilts in comparison.

Sonata No. 14, better known as Moonlight Sonata, brings me to tears every time I hear it: It is a hypnotic lament of such deep, searing beauty and utter sorrow. Beethoven took the commonly polite form of the sonata into unheard of emotional territory. Even the brief movements to G-sharp major seem hardly able to let in any light. And in some ways, classical music actually grew up because of it. Beethoven delivered dramatic angst rather than the gentle compassion of Mozart, and that unambiguous drama sets the two apart.

The fact that Beethoven was known to suffer from debilitating tinnitus, and was slowly going deaf, certainly contributed to the determined nature of his music. He spoke often of his fear that time was running out. By the time his Ninth Symphony was performed in Vienna in 1824, he was profoundly deaf.

It is impossible to conceive of a greater tragedy: that the man who composed music of such startling brilliance and yearning beauty would never actually hear it. It speaks to the indomitable power of the human spirit that seems ever present in his work. Beethoven himself had to overcome a difficult childhood, and he struggled with his health, but he maintained a determination to become a composeran artistin his own right.

Aware that public knowledge of his deafness could destroy his career, he withdrew into his music, living for a time almost as a recluse, determined to bring forth whatever music was left in him. One can hardly imagine the utter despair and desperation that must have been driving him. But somehow, he managed to pull himself back from the brink. Resigned to his fate, he composed his Third Symphony, or Eroica, as a defiant response. This piece thoroughly eclipsed the majesty and complexity of his previous works, and was received to wide acclaim as a masterpiece. He later wrote, Let my deafness no longer be a secret.

Then, just before Christmas in 1808, Beethoven gave a concert at the Theater an der Wien, in Vienna. Remarkably, he was to perform five major new works. Among them where the Pastoral Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, and the Fifth Symphony, some of the most important music ever writtenall to be debuted on that single winters night!

His finances where precarious, his health in decline, and yet, he delivered one of the most challenging concerts any audience of that time could have been expected to understand. To the very end, he would be uncompromising and defiant, choosing to live or die by the conviction he had in his music and in himself as an artist. The audience was enthralled. They loved it. He had proven himself to the world, and those compositionsicons of musicalitystand as testament to his absolute genius.

Soon after, Beethoven would have to give up public performances due to his health and increasing deafness. He still ended up composing some of the most astonishing, visionary music ever written: Fidelio, the mystifying Hammerklavier, the later String Quartets, and the incomparable Ninth Symphony among them. Typically groundbreaking, Beethovens Ninth was the first time a choir had been included in a symphony compositionand it is thunderous.

Beethoven was a difficult man, a man given to outbursts bordering on insanity. Though arrogant and stubborn, it is almost impossible to imagine that any other kind of man could have survived the road he was destined to travel and write with the passion and majestic audacity that was his ambition. He strove to rise above the sordidness of life, and through his music, bring us with him. Inwardly he was a deeply spiritual, religious man. He wrote that he saw God in all things and all things in God.

Upon the elevation of his patron, the Archduke Rudolf, to the position of Archbishop, Beethoven was commissioned to write the Missa Solemnis, the Solemn Mass. He considered it to be the most glorious day of his life, and this composition would be a monument to the miracle of human unity and faith. Through this work, he would be the advocate for humanity before God.

As such, the parts he wrote for the choir at the end of the Credo movement were almost impossible for any human being to sing. In Beethovens articulation of a glorification to God, the choir would be forced to give everything humanly possible, and then to strive beyond that, push higher, and then strive againas he himself had always done. Much of his work had this humanist, spiritual intent. The Ode to Joy, from the Ninth Symphony, as another famous example, has been sung by oppressed people all around the world as an expression of hope: from the African Congo, to Chile, to the Berlin Wall, even by the protestors in Tiananmen Square, in China.

Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart were the bridge between the Baroque and Romantic periods. Between them, these men explored, and exhausted, almost every possibility of musical expression. It has been said that, by design, Beethovens last String Quartet compositions left absolutely nothing for the Classicists to sayany musician who followed him would have to find a new way. I think its entirely fitting that this man (whose music often left people speechless) with his last works, would challenge his successors to pick up his audaciously placed baton, and have something new to say.

Pete McGrain is a professional writer/director/composer best known for the film Ethos, which stars Woody Harrelson. Currently living in Los Angeles, Pete hails from Dublin, Ireland, where he studied at Trinity College.

The Passions of Beethoven: The Story Behind one of his Beloved Piano Sonatas

Beethoven had been invited to a Viennese noblemans house for dinner. Vienna, at this time, was occupied by Napoleons troops, and occupying French officers were present at the dinner. The host implored Beethoven to play for his guests, but he demurred. Then, after an awkward scene, Beethoven stalked out of the house in the middle of the nightand in the middle of a storm. He walked the dozens of miles home that night in the pouring rain. He had a manuscript under his arm that night, the score to his latest Sonata, the Appassionata (formerly titled Piano Sonata No. 23). That manuscript can be seen, to this day, in Berlin. You can still actually see the streaks the rain made on the notes of the score that night. Beethoven was real. He is not a myth or an abstraction from a dusty portraithe was one of us.
The Edison powerplant in San Clemente, Calif., on Dec. 29, 2020. (John Fredricks/The EPoch Times)

San Clemente Officially Disapproves Storing Nuclear Waste From San Onofre Plant

SAN CLEMENTE, Calif.San Clemente officially disapproved on April 5 of the storage of nuclear wasteseveral million poundsat the permanently retired San Onofre nuclear power plant nearby, urging the U.S. Department of Energy to find a safer alternative location.

The city council unanimously approved a resolution stating the city does not consent to store the 3.6 million pounds of spent nuclear fuel at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station north of San Diego County and south of San Clemente.

Calling it a matter of high priority, the council reaffirmed its stance on urging the U.S. Department of Energy to remove the nuclear waste from the plant as soon as possible to a storage site farther away from populated areas.

Residents and city officials have been expressing concerns over public safety as the plant is located within 10 miles of San Clementes approximately 65,000 residents.

Through the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, U.S. Congress assigned the energy department to create an underground repository for nuclear waste.

The Department of Energy restarted last year a program that would identify communities across the country willing to store the nations spent nuclear fuel.

Southern California Edison permanently decommissioned the San Onofre plant in 2013 and has since distributed a three-volume set of plans to relocate 123 canisters of solid nuclear waste offsite.
Workers and volunteers stand in a compound where residents are being tested for COVID-19 during the second stage of a pandemic lockdown in Jing'an district in Shanghai, China, on April 6, 2022. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

Shanghai Orders Another Round of Citywide COVID-19 Tests as Public Criticism Mounts

Shanghai authorities chose to continue their draconian zero-COVID strategy on April 6 after ordering another round of citywide tests to control an outbreak that a local official described as extremely grim.

Gu Honghui, Shanghais deputy secretary-general, made the grim assessment during a briefing on Wednesday. He said the new COVID tests would target mainly locals whose residential compounds had reported infection cases between April 1 and April 5. Additionally, individuals who have tested negative after an initial positive result would also undergo another round of testing.

While Gu did not specify how many residentials will undergo the latest round of testing, millions will likely be tested in the city with a population of about 24 million.

Until all the required tests are done, Gu said the existing curbs would remain in place.

Gu also announced that there were 17,077 new infection cases for the previous 24 hours, bringing the citys total since March to over 90,000. However, according to various reports, the infection data should not be taken at face value since the actual infection rate could be significantly higher.

Health workers wearing personal protective gear walk on the street during the second stage of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in the Jingan district of Shanghai, China, on April 6, 2022. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

After Gus announcement, some Shanghai netizens decided to take to Chinas Twitter-like Weibo to vent their concerns. Some expressed fear about being infected while lining up to take the tests; others complained about the disorganized testing sites.

Asking residents to gather and come out to take a nucleic acid nearly every day, not isolating those that have tested positive, and infection spreading among people taking the test, there are some problems with the Shanghai government, a Shanghai netizen wrote on Weibo.

For over a month now, Shanghai has been hard hit by the highly transmissible Omicron variant of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. On March 28, Shanghai officials put the city into a two-stage lockdown, but they have yet to announce when the restrictions will be lifted.

On April 5, Wu Qianyu, an official with the municipal health commission, told a briefing that the citys zero-COVID policy would remain in place.

We must adhere to the general policy of dynamic clearance without hesitation, without wavering, Wu said, in order to reach the target of zero [COVID-19] target as soon as possible.

Various media outlets have reported a few deaths, but Shanghai authorities have not confirmed the reports nor officially announced any COVID-related deaths amid the current outbreak.

Complaints

Many Shanghai residents have complained about the harsh lockdown measures, pointing to a shortage of food and medicine and lacking access to medical treatment for non-COVID diseases. Parents have also complained about their children being forcibly taken away due to a government quarantine policy.

The problem with the food supply was brought up during the Wednesday briefing. Liu Min, the vice-director of Shanghais commerce commission, said that local officials were working hard to resolve bottlenecks in order to provide the basic living needs of the population.

Some Shanghai residents have decided not to take the government-mandated nucleic acid tests. One of them is Zhang Li (a pseudonym), who told The Epoch Times on April 5 that she denied a police request to take the test.

I told [the police] that I have been confined to my home for more than 10 days. Under the countrys rules, I have the right to choose to take the test or not, Zhang recalled.

Zhang explained that she didnt want to take the test because it would put her at risk of being targeted for political persecution. Chinese officials could manipulate test results and detain targeted individuals at an isolated facility under the guise of a positive test, she added.

In the previous round of citywide tests that began on April 4, Shanghai officials said over 25 million residents were tested.

A health worker prepares to conduct a swab test for COVID-19 at a residential compound during the second stage of a pandemic lockdown in Jingan district in Shanghai, China, on April 6, 2022. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

Shanghais makeshift hospitals have also come under heavy criticism for poor conditions.

Tang Ziqi (a pseudonym) told The Epoch Times on April 5 that he arrived at a makeshift quarantine center called Nanhui at around 5 a.m. local time on April 2, after testing positive for the CCP virus a day earlier. He said the center was originally a school dormitory.

Tang said when he first arrived, the place was a mess. He and others had to put together their own beds and clean filthy bathrooms.

He added that the place also lacked proper management, so people fought over food, sleeping blankets, and other supplies.

The living condition was particularly unbearable because the center did not have hot water, forcing many people to choose not to take a shower, he said.

Tang said he also became frustrated after seeing how doctors at the center did not have the proper medicine to treat a person with a high fever on April 4.

He was pretty supportive of the citys zero-COVID policy in the past. But after spending a few days at the center, he had become very disappointed with the local officials.

Tang said he had called government hotlines seeking help, but nobody had responded.

I want to go home. I really want to go home. I can isolate myself at my house, he said.

Zhao Fenghua, Luo Ya, Gu Qinger, Gu Xiaohua, and Reuters contributed to this report.
A policeman (C) wearing protective clothing reacts in an area where barriers are being placed to close off streets around a locked-down neighborhood in Shanghai on March 15, 2022. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

Shanghai Residents Assaulted by Pandemic Control Officers Amid Harsh Enforcement of COVID-19 Curbs

Law enforcement personnel have allegedly assaulted residents in Shanghai over apparent breaches of the locked-down citys stringent COVID-19 restrictions, according to footage circulating on the Chinese internet.

In one video, at least eight people wearing white protective gearincluding six who are said to be police officersrepeatedly punch and kick a young Shanghai resident on the street outside the Lianyang community in the Songjiang district. The man buries his head in his hands while being beaten, and later runs from the officers before being chased down and beaten again.

The video, apparently recorded from a nearby apartment, went viral on Chinas internet.

When The Epoch Times contacted a local police station about the incident, an unidentified officer who answered the phone didnt confirm or deny the incident, saying that the pandemic prevention is the top priority [in Shanghai], everything else is less important.

Whats the point of reporting the negative side of such an issue? said the officer, who refused to give further details, while indicating that inquiries should be made directly to the Shanghai Public Security Bureau (PSB), the citys main law enforcement body.

That incident occurred amid a citywide lockdown that began on March 28 as part of the Chinese regimes zero-COVID strategy. The measures include mass testing, central quarantining for all positive cases, and strict controls on the citys 26 million residents, barring them from even leaving home other than for COVID-19 tests.

While the restrictions were intended to be lifted on April 5, authorities have extended the lockdown without providing an end date.

The Chinese regime has dispatched more than 10,000 health workers from across the country to the financial hub, including 2,000 from the military, to assist in mass testing as the city struggles to stamp out the fast-spreading Omicron virus variant.

Amid the lockdown, police, health care staff, community workers, and volunteers in protective clothing form the main presence on near-empty streets and communities.

Another video documents a similar scene in Chedun town of Songjiang district. In it, a pandemic prevention worker in white protective gear pushes a resident to the ground, stomps on his head, and repeatedly kicks him in the back as the man groans in pain.

A user on Chinas Twitter-like Weibo who reposted the video posted an audio recording on the platform on April 5 revealing a call they received from an officer at the Songjiang branch of Shanghais PSB, asking for the video to be deleted. In the recording, the officer confirmed that the attack occurred in the past two days but refused to reveal the attackers identity, the user wrote.

If I told you he was a police officer, the matter would be complicated to investigate, the PSB officer told the user.

Weibo later took down the video, which triggered public anger online after more than 100,000 views. Some users drew comparisons with the Cultural Revolution, when roaming radicalized youths known as red guards would harass and assault anyone they deemed as falling afoul of Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedongs prescriptions on political correctness.

Radio Free Asia reported on April 4 that the Chinese regime has deployed armed police to patrol communities in Shanghai, spotlighting Beijings concern over public anger and potential social unrest.

Another video that surfaced online shows a law enforcement officer in a white protective suit grabbing a Shanghai woman by the arm and escorting her out of her apartment in Songjiang district on April 4. The woman had refused to submit to a nucleic acid test mandated by the city.

The middle-aged resident failed to implement a state of emergency decision made by local authorities, police officers say in the video.

Zhang Li (pseudonym) confirmed to The Epoch Times that the woman was from Xinfu Kangli, a community in central Shanghai. Zhang herself didnt take a COVID-19 test and worries that she will be taken away too.

I told [the police] that I have been confined to my home for more than 10 days. Under the countrys rules, I have the right to choose to take the test or not, Zhang said.

A woman hangs clothes outside her apartment during the second stage of the COVID-19 lockdown in the Jingan district of Shanghai on April 6, 2022. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

Zhang said she doesnt want to take a test because of a lack of transparency around the process and fears that officials may fake a positive result to frame her. In addition, people who test positive arent allowed to self-isolate at home and must be transferred to the citys quarantine centers, which are overcrowded and have poor living conditions.

I watched videos of several quarantine centers; some have no power outlets. Once your mobile phone is out of charge, you just dont expect to send anything to the outside, she said.

Shanghai authorities on April 7 announced that there were 17,077 new infection cases in the previous 24 hours, bringing the citys total since March to over 90,000. However, the actual infection rate is likely significantly higher, according to experts and residents, who point to the regimes propensity to downplay information that harms its image.

The strict curbs have triggered widespread complaints from residents, who have pointed to a shortage of food and medicine and a lack of access to medical treatment for non-COVID diseases. Parents have also complained about their children being forcibly taken away due to a government quarantine policy.

Officials have shown little sign of easing the measures, despite the growing human and economic toll of Beijings zero-tolerance COVID-19 strategy.

China-based author and dissident Huang Jinqiu previously told The Epoch Times that the current lockdown would do more harm than the virus itself, given the mounting suffering experienced by sealed-in residents.

It simply doesnt make sense to use such a large-scale, laborious, and economically destructive way to control the epidemic, he said, particularly given that the Omicron variant is highly transmissible but has relatively low hospitalization and mortality rates.

Zhao Fenghua, Luo Ya, Li Shanshan, Yi Ru, and Lin Cenxin contributed to this report.
Opposition activists protest against rising living costs at the entrance of the president's office in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on March 15, 2022. (Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP via Getty Images)

Sri Lankas President Lifts State of Emergency Amid Ongoing Protests

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has revoked a state of emergency, just days after enforcing it to quell protests over the countrys political and economic turmoil.

Rajapaksa stated in a gazette carried by Sri Lankan media agency News First that he revoked the emergency rule ordinance that took effect on April 1, which was imposed following a violent protest outside his private residence on March 31.

The move comes as the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) urged Sri Lankan authorities to defuse tensions peacefully, citing reports of excessive and unwarranted police violence against protesters.

We urge the government, political parties and civil society to engage in immediate, inclusive, and meaningful dialogue to find a solution for the pressing economic and political challenges that Sri Lanka faces and to avoid further polarization of the situation, OHCHR said in a statement.

Protests against the government had continued on April 5, with all roads in the Hambantota district being blocked to quell street protests, News First reported.

Chief Government Whip Johnston Fernando said on April 6 that Rajapaksa will not resign from his position under any circumstances, given that the president was elected on a mandate given by 6.9 million people.

Sri Lankas Cabinet ministers resigned en masse on April 3 over the countrys economic crisis, prompting Rajapaksa to call on all parties in Parliament to form a unity government. Sri Lankas new finance minister, Ali Sabry, also quit on April 5, just a day after being appointed.

The countrys stock exchange fell 5.9 percent following the mass resignation, prompting authorities to halt trading on April 4, AFP reported.

On March 31, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said it would soon begin talks with Sri Lanka about a potential financial program during the new finance ministers visit to Washington in April.

But Human Rights Watch said that any future IMF program in Sri Lanka should protect the human rights of low-income people, and address corruption and entrenched obstacles to the rule of law.

Sarah Saadoun, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, said the protests send a clear message about peoples economic situation in Sri Lanka.

The IMF and the Sri Lankan government should come to an agreement that supports peoples ability to afford life necessities and addresses the problems underlying the current crisis, Saadoun said in a statement.

Sri Lanka is experiencing its worst economic crisis in decades, with its foreign exchange reserves plummeting by 70 percent in the past two years to about $2.31 billion, leaving it unable to pay for essential imports. The country must also settle a $4 billion debt this year, including a $1 billion bond that matures in July.
Subpoena for Hunter Biden to Testify Before Congress Blocked by Democrats: GOP

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have blocked a Republican-backed subpoena to compel Hunter Biden to testify as a witness.

Democrats just denied our motion to subpoena Hunter Biden, the Republican members of the committee wrote on Twitter. They refuse to hold Hunter accountable for his shady business dealings that make us more dependent on China for renewable energy. Its past time for accountability.

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) made a motion to subpoena Hunter Biden, President Joe Bidens son, as a witness at its hearing about making all U.S. Postal Service (USPS) vehicles electric.

I just made a motion to subpoena Hunter Biden as a witness for the House Oversight and Reform Committees hearing on electrifying [the USPS], Biggs wrote on Twitter. Hunter sold a U.S. cobalt mine to a Chinese company. Cobalt is necessary for electric car production. Hunters expertise is invaluable!

Last week, House Republicans on the Oversight and Reform Committee called him to testify, according to a letter issued by Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), and Democrats on the committee blocked a motion to issue a subpoena.

It came as White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on April 5 that Biden has never spoken with his son about his overseas business dealings.

Recent reports from The Washington Post and other media outlets belatedly verified emails and documents on a laptop that formerly belonged to Hunter Biden. Reports about the younger Bidens laptop first surfaced in October 2020, with just days to go before the 2020 general election, although big tech firms quickly moved to suppress them.

A November report from The New York Times alleged that Hunter Biden was the part-owner of a venture involved in the $3.8 billion purchase by a Chinese company of one of the largest cobalt deposits in the world. Cobalt is a key component used in electric vehicles and other electronics.

A lot of stories about Hunter Biden are surfacing this week. So to ensure the independence of the investigation, would the president support the appointment of a special counsel? Fox News Peter Doocy asked Psaki.

Well first, the president has never had a conversation with the Department of Justice about any investigations into any member of his family, she said in response to Doocys question.

He said that during the campaign, and he will continue to abide by that. So I point you to the Department of Justice for any additional steps they would take. They would make those decisions independently.

The U.S. Attorneys Office in Delaware is investigating Hunter Biden for reported possible tax fraud, lobbying crimes, and money laundering.

Over the past weekend, Bidens chief of staff, Ron Klain, told ABC News that the president believes Hunter Biden didnt break the law.

Of course the presidents confident that his son didnt break the law. But, most importantly, as I said, thats a matter thats going to be decided by the Justice Department, by the legal process. Its something that no one at the White House has involvement in, Klain said in response to a question from ABC host George Stephanopoulos.

Hunter Biden didnt respond to a request for comment by press time.
Surgeons as Executioners: Chinese Doctors Committed Murder to Fuel Regimes Organ Transplant Industry, Study Finds

Hundreds of Chinese doctors and other medical workers have been acting as executioners for the state in order to sustain its lucrative organ transplant industry, a study published in a top U.S. medical journal has found.

The study, published in the American Journal of Transplantation on April 4, reviewed more than 120,000 Chinese-language publications on organ transplants and identified 71 papers where physicians had carved out hearts and lungs from people for transplant without first conducting a test to establish brain deathrevealing that patients were killed for their organs.

A total of 348 medical professionals or researchers, including surgeons, nurses, and anesthesiologists from 56 Chinese hospitals spread nationwide, were co-authors of these 71 papers.

Related Coverage Former Police Officer Recounts Witnessing Industrialized Organ Harvesting in China

The problematic papers came out between 1980 and 2015, during which period there was no official voluntary donation system in place in China and few voluntary donors. The regime had claimed that most organs taken for transplant at the time came from executed prisoners.

But in the early 2000s, reports and research emerged showing that Beijing was forcibly harvesting the organs from detained prisoners of conscience. These allegations were confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt by an independent peoples tribunal in 2019, which determined that such an atrocity had taken place for a long time on a substantial scale, with the persecuted faith group Falun Gong being a primary organ source.

In reaching its finding, the body, known as the China Tribunal, rejected claims by the Chinese regime that from 2015, all organs for transplant were sourced from an official organ donation system.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, features moral teachings based on truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, along with meditative exercises. Its practitioners in mainland China have been subjected to a sweeping persecution campaign since 1999, during which millions have been detained in various facilities across the country.

Smoking Gun

This new research is the first of its kind to uncover a smoking gun proving that doctors have been killing people for their organs, according to Dr. Jacob Lavee, co-author of the report and director of the Heart Transplantation Unit at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel.

In the Chinese publications flagged by the study, the doctors declared the prisoners they performed on to be brain dead, but other information revealed in the papers shows that this couldnt have been the case.

Confirming brain death is a lengthy process that typically takes hours, and one critical step involves turning off the ventilator to assess whether a patient can breathe on his own, a step known as an apnea test.

But the papers detail Chinese doctors pronouncing patients brain dead, but only then putting them on intubation or a ventilator, suggesting that the brain death assessment couldnt have taken place. It also cited instances where a face mask was used for ventilation, a reversal of normal medical procedures that, the authors said, makes the absence of a proper brain death assessment even more apparent.

They have procured organs from people who are not proclaimed dead, meaning they became the executioners, Lavee told The Epoch Times.

A demonstration to raise awareness about the persecution of Falun Gong by the Chinese communist regime, in Manhattan on May 16, 2019. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

The findings appear to be accidental admissions on the part of the Chinese doctors, according to Lavee.

Somehow both the authors and their editors in the respective medical journals have forgotten to take out these incriminating details, which we have found, he said.

If these papers were sent to Western medical journals, they would have been rejected outright because of these sentences, because no editor of any decent journal would have published a paper that incriminates the authors in such deeds, according to Lavee.

Such admissions stopped appearing in Chinese papers dated after 2015, but the abuse very likely hasnt stopped, according to the studys authors.

Theres a possibility that Chinese doctors have stopped carrying out this practice. But its far more plausible that theyve become more discrete, according to Matthew Robertson, a China studies fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation who co-authored the study.

He pointed to a 2014 research report by the advocacy group World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) that first highlighted alarming details revealed in Chinese medical papers, including the vast number of donors in prime health condition and how hospitals were conducting high volumes of major organ transplant surgeries in a single day.

Chinese medical leaders likely took note of this report and told all the journals to stop publishing such details, said Robertson, who previously worked as a reporter at The Epoch Times.

They keep an eye on what dissidents are saying, especially on this issue, which is very sensitive, he said. And it would just take an email or some phone calls to have those traces deleted.

Falun Gong demonstrators dramatize the illegal act of paying for human organs during a protest on April 19, 2006, in Washington, in conjunction with the visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao to the United States. (JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

Out for Profit

Two years ago, Robertson and Lavee found that the official Chinese donation datasets match almost precisely to a mathematical formula, a sign that the Chinese regime likely systemically falsified its organ donation data.

WOIPFG had made hundreds of undercover phone calls to Chinese hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, during which some doctors promised organs in as quickly as a week. The unusually fast turnaround timeunheard of in other countries with established organ donation systemssuggests that Beijing was continuing the grisly practice, according to the group.

Over the years, WOIPFG has carried out scores of undercover calls to Chinese hospitals in its ongoing probe of Beijings forced organ harvesting practices.

Robertson said he had previously done a study on some of WOIPFGs call logs and concluded that they were authentic.

They have a very distinct pattern over many years. And so Im inclined to believe the content of the calls as well, he said.

For the hospitals, the rationale is simple.

Its a very profitable industry, Lavee said. And if they can make profit out of it, while at the same timeas has been shown by the China Tribunaltaking care of the wishes of the Communist Party, thats a win-win situation.
Suspect in Sacramento Mass Shooting Released From Prison Just Weeks Before

One of the suspects in the Sacramento weekend mass shooting was released early from prison just weeks before the incident.

Smiley Martin, 27, was arrested Tuesday in connection to the incident that left six dead and a dozen more injured in downtown Sacramento. He was charged with possession of a firearm by a prohibited person and possession of a machine gun.

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) told The Epoch Times in an email that Martin, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2018, had already received 508 days of pre-sentencing credits, and received a variety of additional post-sentencing credits and was released to Sacramento County probation in February 2022

In 2018, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for domestic violence and assault with great bodily injury. Prosecutors said Martin entered his girlfriends home, punched her, whipped her with a belt, and dragged her from the home by her hair in that incident. Records obtained by The Epoch Times show that he has a criminal history dating back to 2013.

The Parole Board in 2021 rejected Martins bid for an early release in May because he poses a significant, unreasonable risk of safety to the community.

District attorneys last year vehemently opposed Martins release from the sentence.

Dandrae Martin makes his first court appearance in Sacramento County Superior Court in Sacramento, Calif., on April 5, 2022. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP Photo)

Inmate Martins criminal conduct is violent and lengthy, Deputy District Attorney Danielle Abildgaard wrote to the Board of Parole Hearings in a letter dated April 29, 2021.

The Sacramento Police Department said that Martin was injured during Sundays shooting and will be booked when his condition improves enough.

His brother, 26-year-old Dandrae Martin, was arrested Monday in connection to the shooting and was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and carrying a loaded gun as a convict. Daviyonne Dawson, 31, was also arrested on suspicion of carrying a firearm as a prohibited person, officials said.

At this time, Dawson is not charged with crimes directly related to the shootings, Sacramento police said in a statement. Based on the type of firearm recovered, detectives do not believe that this gun was used in the shooting.

The Sacramento County coroner identified the slain victims as Johntaya Alexander, 21; Melinda Davis, 57; Yamile Martinez-Andrade, 21; Sergio Harris, 38; Joshua Hoye-Lucchesi, 32; and Devazia Turner, 29.

California in recent years has seen cases where violent or repeat offenders have been released from prison or jail early before committing crimes just days later.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
Tasmanias Government Renews Public Health Emergency Declaration

The Tasmanian government has extended the public health emergency period for another eight weeks but has said it may end the emergency declaration earlier if the number of COVID-19 cases in the Australian state drops.

Mark Veitch, the director of public health for Tasmania, announced on April 5 that the Public Health Emergency Declaration was renewed under the Public Health Act.

However, the renewal lasts only eight weeks, much shorter than a usual 12-week extension.

This is the first time the Tasmania government has taken this approach since the initial emergency declaration in March 2020.

Our high vaccination rates have significantly reduced the risk of severe outcomes of COVID-19, particularly among those at higher risk of hospitalisation, admission to intensive care, and death, Veitch said in a statement.

Hobart Central Business District, with Wrest Point Casino looming over the harbour and Mt. Wellington in the background. (Aaroncrick/Wikimedia Commons)

He also said that the number of hospitalisations in the state was low despite Tasmania currently having a high COVID-19 infection rate per capita.

In the latest COVID-19 surveillance report published by the Tasmanian government on March 26, the states total number of cases was 11,586, with an infection rate of 21 cases per 1,000 people. However, only 28 people were admitted to the hospital.

Veitch also said that there could be a drop in case numbers by the end of April.

Measures to address COVID-19 will continue to aim to address the clinical and public health risks from the virus while minimising the risk of social and economic harms, he said.

The director noted that with authority provided under the Public Health Act, he could end the Emergency Declaration ahead of time or prolong it beyond the eight-week period, depending on the assessment of the COVID-19 situation at that time.

As of April 6, Tasmania has 2,408 new cases with no deaths. Thirty-nine people are also receiving treatment at the hospital, with one requiring treatment in intensive care.

Currently, 98.58 percent of people aged 16 and above have received two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine in Tasmania.
Larger than life: Art that inspires us through the ages

The St. Vitus Cathedral is located on a hill that overlooks the city of Prague. When construction began in the 14th century, Prague was the third-largest city in the world after Rome and Constantinople. In this grand Gothic cathedral, kings have been crowned, married, and buried, and national treasures have been held.

As in the past, pilgrims continue to pay their respects to the churchs patron saints Wenceslaus, Vitus, and others represented within.

French master-builder Matthias of Arras brought with him the French Gothic style. He employed a system of harmonious proportions to underpin the overarching composition. The cathedrals slender verticality is created by tall interior columns that form the central nave, and by ribbed vaulting that holds the seemingly weightless, high ceiling. On the exterior, carved stone spires top flying buttresses that support the walls, the pointed arched windows and portals, and the main facade.

A Gothic architect set the style of the cathedral, but it remained only half-completed for several centuries. A baroque spire was added to the south tower during the 18th century. Then, in the late 19th century, architect Josef Kranner took up the challenge, forging ahead with the buildings Gothic style. He and others who followed added the main nave and front facade, finally completing it in the early 20th century.

While architectural styles have come and gone, St. Vitus Cathedrals inherent beauty stands as a testimony to the structural mastery and lofty interiors of the timeless Gothic aesthetic. The cathedrals completion reflects the perseverance of a culture and its people.

The three portals are capped with pointed arches and reflect the triple-naved basilica plan within. The cathedral is characterized by two tall towers with long, thin windows and spires that create its verticality. The facade faces west, and in the center, a rose window allows in afternoon light. (TTstudio/Shutterstock)

The cathedral glows at dusk. The exterior of the three chapels is shown here at the east end of the building. (krcil/Shutterstock)

The flying buttresses, horizontal structures that extend from the main part of the church, support the vaulted ceiling. This allows for thinner walls and larger stained glass windows. The ornamental spires give weight and stability to the buttresses and offer a delicate quality to the architecture. (ABO Photography/Shutterstock)

The stone-sculpted gargoyles were created to prevent rain damage to the building by moving the water away from the stone walls. Their animated sculptural forms were intended to ward off evil spirits. (Tilman2007/CC BY-SA 4.0)

Statues of gargoyles, saints, or local, contemporary dignitaries animate the facade surrounding the central rose window. (elvistudio/Shutterstock)

Created by Frantisek Kysela in 1925, the rose window on the main west-facing facade forms a radiating pattern of eight petals. Filled with colorful geometric-shaped stained glass, the form is a beautiful centerpiece for the nave that glows in the afternoon sun. The inscriptions on the stained glass tell the story of creation as told in the Bible. (Romas-Vysniauskas/Shutterstock)

The interior columns elegantly line the nave leading to the pointed arch that frames the entrance, with the prominent rose window above. (WDG/Shutterstock)

The columns are carved in clusters, giving them a weightless feeling as they merge with the ribbed vaulting (arch-like ceiling structure). The rib-like supports unfurl like tendrils of ferns that seem to hold the weightless ceiling. The eye and heart lift upward to the tall upper-level windows that allow light to stream in, creating a lofty spiritual feeling. (siloto/Shutterstock)

Tracery are stone structures that hold the sections of stained glass windows. Their vine-like sculptural forms create a weightless effect, lightening the atmosphere of the window composition. The scene here is a depiction by famous Prague artist Max Svabinsky of the Last Judgment. (ErwinMeier/CC BY-SA 4.0)

In this triptych, the stained glass windows with angled sides appear on the south side of the cathedral. Their glowing quality creates a sense of awe. In the center, Jesus is held in the hands of the Creator, and above a white dove appears, symbolic of the Holy Trinity. On the left, we see the Virgin Mary and, on the right, St. Wenceslas and St. Vitus on their knees. (ErwinMeier/CC BY-SA 4.0)

German-Bohemian Peter Parler, who followed Matthias of Arras as the cathedral architect, treated the architecture as sculpture, as shown in the chapel dedicated to St. Wenceslaus. The dome vault and frescoed walls seem to extend the space beyond the plan of the interior walls. (ErwinMeier/CC BY-SA 4.0)

An aerial view of the St Vitus Cathedral in Prague. The light green copper spire was added during the Baroque period. (Otourly/CC BY-SA 4.0)
Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), in an interview with the "American Thought Leaders" program at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Fla. on Feb. 28, 2021. (The Epoch Times)

This Is a Committed Enemy: Rep. Green Seeks to Block Exports of Critical Technology to China

The Chinese communist regime is the greatest threat to the United States, according to Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), who urged Congress to pass a bill barring the exports of critical technology to China.

Our number one strategic threat to our sovereignty and security and prosperity is China, Green said during an April 6 talk at the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

Green said that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was engaged in an overt campaign of stealing, and was systematically thieving national security and intellectual property (IP) secrets from the United States. When it could not steal outright, he said, the regime worked to coopt students and American universities in order to gain access to emerging research.

This is a committed enemy, or committed competitor at a minimum, Green said.

The Department of Justice has unsealed several high-profile espionage cases in recent weeks against alleged agents of the Chinese Communist Party operating in the United States. In February, however, the Biden administration terminated the Trump-era China Initiative, an anti-espionage campaign amid criticisms of racism.

Green added that the threat posed by widespread IP theft was impacting both the U.S. economy and national security, and that the regime was exporting technologies to support authoritarian governments in South America and the Caribbean in order to undermine U.S. influence in the Western hemisphere.

To curb the damage, he urged his fellows in Congress to pass the China Technology Transfer Control Act, which he introduced in 2019.

The bipartisan legislation was designed to counter the Chinese regimes Made in China 2025 plan, a strategic effort to transform China into the worlds most dominant manufacturer in 10 strategic industries from pharmaceuticals to aviation.

The China Technology Transfer Control Act would place all the products listed by the Made in China 2025 plan on the U.S. export list, thereby requiring a license to export them overseas. The idea is that the United States would effectively cut off the flow of critical technologies to China, thereby preventing the communist government there from reverse engineering and ultimately manufacturing them.

Its past time we address the CCPs efforts to exert control in our economy, our educational institutions, and our military-industrial base, Green said when he introduced the bill. From stealing sensitive intellectual property to preying on vulnerable American companies, Chinas communist leaders have pursued their ambitions at a steep cost to the American people, their own people, and the world.

The bill would be the first piece of legislation, he said, that explicitly condemns the Chinese communist regime as an international thief of intellectual property.

The move, he said, would be vital to preventing the fulfillment of the regimes ambition to dislodge the United States as the worlds leading power and recreate the international order in its own image.

Its very well understood, Green said. They want to replace the United States as the world leader and then bring in their own version of a rules-based, their rules-based, world order, and do away with the liberal rules-based world order.

That is a threat to freedom and democracy. It is a threat to free speech. Its a threat to privacy. Its a threat to peoples lives if the race that you particularly belong to is one that they want to target.
This Is Not Normal and No One Should Accept It

Commentary

From the lepers in the Old Testament to the Plague of Justinian in Ancient Rome to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, COVID-19 represents the first time ever in the history of managing pandemics that we quarantined healthy populations.

While the ancients didnt understand the mechanisms of infectious diseasethey knew nothing of viruses and bacteriathey nevertheless figured out many ways to mitigate the spread of contagion during epidemics. These time-tested measures ranged from quarantining the sick to deploying those with natural immunitythose who had recovered from the illnessto care for them.

Lockdowns were never part of conventional public health measures. In 1968, 1 million to 4 million people died in the H2N3 influenza pandemic; businesses and schools never closed and large events were not canceled. One thing we never did until 2020 was lock down entire populations. And we didnt do this because it doesnt work. In 2020, we had no empirical evidence that it would work, only flawed mathematical models whose predictions were not just slightly off, but wildly off by several orders of magnitude.

These devastating economic consequences were not the only major societal shifts ushered in by lockdowns. Our ruling class saw in COVID an opportunity to radically revolutionize society: Recall how the phrase the new normal emerged almost immediately in the first weeks of the pandemic. In the first month, Anthony Fauci made the absurd suggestion that perhaps never again would we go back to shaking hands. Never again?

What emerged during lockdowns was not just a novel and untested method of trying to control a pandemic by quarantining healthy people. If we view lockdowns outside of the immediate context in which they supposedly functioned in early 2020, their real meaning comes into focus.

Changes ushered during lockdowns were signs of a broader social and political experiment in which a new paradigm of governance over people and things is at play, as described by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. This new paradigm began to emerge in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001.

The basic features were already sketched back in 2013 in a book by Patrick Zylberman, professor of the history of health in Paris, called Microbial Storms (Tempetes Microbiennes, Gallimard 2013). Zylbermans description was remarkably predictive of what emerged during the first year of the pandemic. He showed that biomedical security, which was previously a marginal part of political life and international relations, had assumed a central place in political strategies and calculations in recent years.

Already in 2005, for example, the WHO grossly over-predicted that the bird flu (avian influenza) would kill tens of millions of people. To prevent this impending disaster, WHO made recommendations that no nation was prepared to accept at the timeincluding population-wide lockdowns. Based upon these trends, Zylberman predicted that sanitary terror would be used as an instrument of governance.

Even earlier, in 2001, Richard Hatchett, who served as a member of George W. Bushs National Security Council, was already recommending obligatory confinement of the entire population. Hatchett now directs the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, an influential entity coordinating global vaccine investment in close collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry. The coalition is a brainchild of the World Economic Forum in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Like many others, Hatchett regards the fight against COVID-19 as a war, on the analogy to the war on terror. I confess that I took up the martial rhetoric early in the pandemic: In a March 2020 piece titled Battlefield Promotions, I issued a call to action encouraging medical students to stay involved in the COVID fight after they had been sent home. While the piece had some merit, I now regret my deployment of this military metaphor, which was misguided.

A kind of overbearing medical terror was deemed necessary to deal with worst-case scenarios, whether for naturally occurring pandemics or biological weapons. Agamben summarizes the political characteristics of the emerging biosecurity paradigm:

1) Measures were formulated based on possible risk in a hypothetical scenario, with data presented to promote behavior permitting management of an extreme situation; 2) worst case logic was adopted as a key element of political rationality; 3) a systematic organization of the entire body of citizens was required to reinforce adhesion to the institutions of government as much as possible. The intended result was a sort of super civic spirit, with imposed obligations presented as demonstrations of altruism. Under such control, citizens no longer have a right to health safety; instead, health is imposed on them as a legal obligation (biosecurity).

This is precisely the pandemic strategy we adopted in 2020. Lockdowns were formulated based on discredited worst-case-scenario modeling from the Imperial College London, which predicted 2.2 million deaths in the United States.

As a consequence, the entire body of citizens, as a manifestation of civic spirit, gave up freedoms and rights that were not relinquished even by the citizens of London during the bombing of the city in World War II (London adopted curfews but never locked down). The imposition of health as a legal obligation was accepted with little resistance. Even now, for many citizens it seems not to matter that these impositions utterly failed to deliver the public health outcomes that were promised.

The full significance of what transpired over the past two years may have escaped our attention. Perhaps without realizing it, we just lived through the design and implementation of a new political paradigma system that was far more effective at controlling the population than anything previously done by Western nations.

Under this novel biomedical security model, the total cessation of every form of political activity and social relationship [became] the ultimate act of civic participation. Neither the pre-war Fascist government in Italy nor the communist nations of the east ever dreamed of implementing such restrictions.

Social distancing became not just a public health practice but a political model and the new paradigm for social interactions, with a digital matrix replacing human interaction, which by definition from now on will be regarded as fundamentally suspicious and politically contagious, in Agambens words.

For the sake of health and human flourishing, this new normal should never be normalized.

Originally published on the authors Substack, reposted from the Brownstone Institute

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
(L to R) Minister for COVID-19 Response Chris Hipkins, Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield, and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at a press conference announcing the arrival of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in Auckland, New Zealand on Feb. 12, 2021. (Dave Rowland/Getty Images)

Three Top New Zealand Health Officials Announce Resignation

Three top New Zealand health officials will be stepping down from their posts, including Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield.

On Wednesday, Bloomfield announced his intention to retire from the role at the end of July, almost one year earlier than the official end of his contracted term, June 11, 2023.

Public Service Commissioner Peter Hughes said Bloomfield had played a vital role in New Zealands response to COVID-19 and had indicated that he believed July was a good time to step away and have an extended break.

Dr Bloomfield has worked tirelessly for more than two years to keep New Zealanders safe from coronavirus, Hughes said. I thank Dr Bloomfield for his commitment to public service, his spirit of service to the community and his exceptional contribution to New Zealands COVID-19 response.

COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins thanked Bloomfield for his work in advising the government every step of the way.

His workload has been enormous but it hasnt just been related to COVID-19 and in fact his entire life has been dedicated to the health and wellbeing of New Zealanders, he told reporters on Wednesday.

Hipkins said he absolutely respected Bloomfields decision to take a break and that he thoroughly deserved it.

Bloomfield said he had considering stepping down for a while and had been waiting for a suitable time, but now had mixed feelings about actually leaving.

It seems were at a good point in terms of the pandemic, the response is shifting, Im also confident that the system is in good hands with the changes that are afoot, and most certainly my family will be very pleased to have a little more of my time, he said.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern arrives with director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield (R) for the post-Cabinet press conference at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand, on Oct. 4, 2021. (Mark Mitchell/Pool Photo via AP)

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said Bloomfield has been a true public servant during his time in office.

When we spoke about his decision to move on, he mentioned that he wanted to spend time with his family, and thats the least we owe him. So kia ora (good health wishes) from across the Motu, Dr Bloomfield. We thank you, Ardern said in a post on Instagram.

The Ministry of Health also confirmed that two more top health officials will also be resigning this week, the Director of Public Health Caroline McElnay and Deputy-Director of Public Health Niki Stefanogiannis.

McElnays last day of service will be on Thursday while Stefanogianniss last day will be Friday.

The ministry said it recognised the outstanding service of both McElnay and Stefanogiannis, particularly over the past two years.

The ministry is in the process of recruiting for a new Director of Public Health but in the interim welcomes Dr Jim Miller from Toi te Ora Public Health, Bay of Plenty DHB from April 11 as Acting Director of Public Health, Deputy-Director General of Population Health Deborah Woodley said.

Meanwhile, New Zealand has ended most COVID-19 restrictions from April 5, including vaccine passports, QR codes, and mask rules.

However, Hipkins said it was not yet time to move from Red to Orange in its COVID traffic light framework.

Hospitalisations have dropped in Auckland, but continue to plateau in regions like Canterbury, Waikato, and Northland, he said in a statement. As a result, the public health advice is that it is not yet the time to ease the existing restrictions and drop down to Orange. Ministers will review these settings again next week.

Vaccination mandates remain for health and care workers, prison staff, and the border force. It has been lifted for all other sectors.

New Zealands vaccination rate for people aged 12 and over stands at 94 percent and 73 percent of people eligible for a third booster shot have received it.
Two People Dead in Murder-Suicide in Hamburg: Police

BERLINA man and a woman were found dead in Hamburg on Tuesday in an apparent murder-suicide, a police spokesperson in the northern German city said.

We have no indication whatsoever that this it was in anyway linked to political violence, the spokesperson said. We are treating it as a murder-suicide based on what we know. The investigation continues.

Several streets were closed to traffic and pedestrians due to a large deployment of officers.
Flags of Taiwan and the United States are placed for a meeting in Taipei, Taiwan, on March 27, 2018. (Tyrone Siu/Reuters)

US Approves $95 Million Potential Arms Sale to Taiwan for Air Defense Support

The United States has approved a possible $95 million sale of military equipment, training, and other items to Taiwan to boost the self-ruled islands air defenses, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.

The U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DCSA) said it had delivered the required certification notifying Congress of the possible sale, which was requested by the Taipei Economic Cultural Representative Office in Washington.

Taiwans presidential office said that this was the third arms deal announced since President Joe Biden took office, demonstrating the rock-solid nature of the countries relationship.

Taiwan will continue to demonstrate its determination to defend itself, and continue to deepen cooperative partnerships with the United States and other like-minded countries, Taiwanese spokesperson Xavier Chang said.

Taiwans Defense Ministry said it expected the deal to become effective within the month.

The proposed sale would include training, planning, fielding, deployment, operation, maintenance, and sustainment of the Patriot Air Defense System and associated equipment, according to DCSAs statement.

It stated that the proposed sale will help improve Taiwans security and support maintaining political stability, military balance, economic and progress in the region.

The proposed sale will help to sustain the recipients missile density and ensure readiness for air operations. The recipient will use this capability as a deterrent to regional threats and to strengthen homeland defense, DCSA said.

The recipient will have no difficulty absorbing this equipment and services into its armed forces. The proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the basic military balance in the region, it added.

The Pentagon said that the main contractor for the possible sale would be Raytheon Technologies.

Taiwans Defense Ministry said Tuesday that it detected four Chinese military jets entering its air defense identification zone (ADIZ), marking Beijings fourth incursion into Taiwan this month. It identified the aircraft as four J-11 fighter jets and said they were given radio warnings and monitored by air defense missile systems.

Taiwanese air force pilots run past an armed U.S.-made F-16V fighter jet at an air force base in Chiayi, a city in southern Taiwan, on Jan. 5, 2022. (Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images)

Tensions between the self-ruled island and the regime in Beijing have been escalating, with the largest Chinese incursion into Taiwanese airspace taking place on Jan. 23, which involved 39 aircraft including an H-6 bomber. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has vowed to conquer the island by force if necessary.

The United States is bound by law to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself, despite the absence of formal diplomatic ties and the anger such weapons sales always generate in Beijing.

Reuters contributed to this report.
The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Barry (DDG 52) conducting underway operations in the South China Sea on April 28, 2020. (Samuel Hardgrove/U.S. Navy/AFP)

US Forces Conducted Fewer Freedom of Navigation Patrols Near China in Fiscal Year 2021: Report

The U.S. military carried out fewer freedom of navigation operation patrols near China in fiscal year 2021 than it did the previous year, although the number of missions rose overall, according to a Department of Defense report published on April 1.

The report states that during the period from Oct. 1, 2020, through Sept. 30, 2021, U.S. forces operationally challenged 37 different excessive maritime claims made by 26 different claimants around the world.

It found that China in fiscal year 2021 had the most challenged territorial claims, but the U.S. Navy carried out freedom of navigation operation patrols against five claims. In fiscal 2020, U.S. forces conducted patrols against seven such claims.

The U.S. Freedom of Navigation Program was established in 1979 and consists of complementary diplomatic and operational efforts to safeguard lawful commerce and the global mobility of U.S. forces.

Excessive maritime claims are inconsistent with international law as reflected in the Law of the Sea Convention. They include a variety of restrictions on the exercise of navigation and overflight rights and other freedoms, the Pentagon said in an April 1 statement.

Unlawful maritime claimsor incoherent theories of maritime entitlementspose a threat to the legal foundation of the rules-based international order. If left unchallenged, excessive maritime claims could limit the rights and freedoms enjoyed by every nation.

The department clarified in its report that its operational challenges are also known as FON assertions, FON operations, and FONOPs.

The regular and routine execution of these operations supports the longstanding U.S. national interest in freedom of the seas worldwide, the report reads.

U.S. forces also challenged excessive claims by India, Italy, Japan, and Korea, according to the report.

The department stated that its report illustrates that U.S. FONOPs challenge a wide variety of excessive maritime claims made by allies, partners, and competitors.

They are not focused on any particular excessive claimant, and they are not executed in response to current events. Rather, their purpose is to reinforce international law peacefully and in a principled, unbiased manner, the Pentagon stated.

In an incident in January, Chinas military said its forces followed and warned away a U.S. warship that entered waters near the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea.

The Southern Theater Command of the Peoples Liberation Army stated that the USS Benfold illegally sailed into Chinese territorial waters without permission, violating the countrys sovereignty and that Chinese naval and air forces tracked the ship.

The U.S. Navy rejected the idea that the USS Benfold was warned away, but appeared to confirm that the ship was operating in the area, saying the mission reflected the U.S. Navys commitment to defend freedom of navigation.

The Benfold was conducting a freedom of navigation operation in accordance with international law, according to the statement. The ship then continued on to conduct normal operations in international waters.

The U.S. Navy frequently carries out such missions in the South China Sea to challenge Chinese territorial claims.

Reuters contributed to this report.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), speaks at a bipartisan news conference on the ongoing Afghanistan evacuations, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Aug. 25, 2021. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

US Lags on Delivery of Arms Promised for Taiwans Defense, Lawmaker Says

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) on April 6 accused the Biden administration of not adequately following through on the delivery of arms and technology earmarked for bolstering Taiwans defenses, which he said poses a danger not just to the self-ruled island, but to U.S. interests in the region.

At a Wednesday House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, McCaul aggressively questioned Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman about what he sees as the lack of follow-through on promises made to Taiwan in the areas of defense and trade.

McCaul described the Indo-Pacific as a battleground between democracy and tyranny for decades and a region where the United States has had a presence and helped countries maintain their freedom and economic well-being for more than 120 years, going back before the days of the Spanish-American War.

The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] is undermining this hard-won freedom and prosperity. Chairman Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have formed, as we saw at the Beijing Olympics, this unholy alliance of two dictators obsessed with rebuilding their empires. Their recent no limits partnership endorsed each others territorial aggression, the lawmaker said.

Putin has made his move against Ukraine, McCaul said. The question is, will Chairman Xi make his?

Beijing views Taiwan as part of its territory, to be taken by force if necessary.

A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be a disaster for the United States on many levels, weakening alliances, threatening American territory, and allowing the CCP to hold the world hostage by exercising control over the supply of semiconductors, according to McCaul. He noted the heavy concentration of the manufacture and sale of semiconductors in Taiwan.

Putins invasion of Ukraine has shown us how critical it is to get our allies the weapons they need before an invasion and not after. The invasion of Ukraine is also a reminder that we have the power to lead our allies in punishing and deterring our enemies, he added.

But the lawmaker sees that much work is still undone. McCaul said that just prior to the hearing, he had breakfast with Taiwans representative to the United States Hsiao Bi-khim, at which the question of Taiwans security and Washingtons role in buttressing that security were topics of discussion. McCaul said that Hsiao raised concerns about why many weapons and defense systems allocated for Taiwan have not yet reached the territory.

During the period from July 2019 to August 2021, McCaul said, he and his colleagues on the House committee signed off on the delivery of a wide range of weapons and technologies to Taiwan including Stinger missiles, torpedoes, aircraft, and field information and communication systems.

All these items would significantly bolster Taiwans ability to resist or deter an invasion from mainland China, but the U.S. commitment has fallen short insofar as they have not been delivered to Taiwan. McCaul said that this was Hsiaos single largest complaint.

If Chairman Xis on the same timetable here, Im concerned about what could happen, he added.

An Imbalance of Priorities?

Deputy Secretary of State Sherman went to lengths over the course of the hearing to emphasize the extent of the U.S. commitment to protecting Ukraine from Russian President Vladimir Putins aggression, including new sanctions unveiled today on Russian banking systems and investments in the country.

Between the U.S. and its allies and partners, there soon will be 10 anti-tank systems in Ukraine for every Russian tank, she said.

We have heard what President Zelenskyy has called for and we are working day and night to support Ukraine, Sherman said, adding, If I were him, I would want everything and I would want it yesterday.

In the case of Taiwan, Sherman made a case that the U.S. commitment has not fallen short. She noted that the United States has sold more than $30 billion worth of arms to Taiwan since 2009, has authorized over $18 billion in foreign military sales to Taiwan since 2017, and is currently undertaking a review of the defense trade enterprise between America and Taiwan to figure out where delivery timelines for weapons and technology can be improved.

We are outlining defense priorities to Taiwan and to the industry to increase transparency and predictability, expediting third-party transfers, reviewing possibilities for arms exports from other countries, pushing for the conclusion of defense agreements related to defense trade, and looking for ways to improve Taiwans indigenous defense capability, Sherman said.

Acknowledging that Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen wants everything delivered as soon as possible, Sherman described bolstering Taiwans own capabilities as a core part of the strategy.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen testifies before the House Committee on Financial Services in Washington on April 6, 2022. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

US Would Sanction China If It Invades Taiwan: Yellen

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on April 6 that the United States would levy sanctions on China should the communist regime invade Taiwan or provide material support to Russias war effort in Ukraine.

When asked by Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) during a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee about whether Washington is open to using all tools available in the event that China moves aggressively towards Taiwan, Yellen responded in the affirmative.

I believe weve shown that we can. In the case of Russia, we threatened significant consequences. Weve imposed significant consequences. And I think that you should not doubt our ability and resolve to do the same in other situations, Yellen said.

Likewise, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman told lawmakers on Wednesday that the breadth of sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine ought to give the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its leader Xi Jinping an understanding of what it would face if it provided material support to Russias ongoing war in Ukraine.

It gives President Xi, I think, a pretty good understanding of what might come his way should he, in fact, support Putin in any material fashion, Sherman said during a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

If China, in any way shape or form, provides material support to Putin [in] this premeditated, unjust, and unprovoked invasion, there will be consequences, she added.

Sherman said that Beijing should take away the right lessons from the Western response to Russias invasion of Ukraine, and noted that any moves by China to take the democratically-governed island of Taiwan by force would be met similarly.

We hope that the PRC understands that any such action would see a response from the international community, not just from the United States, she said, using the acronym for the official name for Chinas communist regime, the Peoples Republic of China.

The tough talk comes amid renewed accusations that China is providing tacit support to the Russian war effort. The CCP has refused to join international sanctions on Moscow, parrots Russian war propaganda, and censors negative perceptions of the Russian war effort within the country. It also continues to refuse to condemn Russian aggression and has repeatedly blamed the United States and NATO for instigating the conflict.

Sherman and Yellens comments also follow a report that the Chinese communist regime launched a large scale cyberattack on Ukraine the day before Russias invasion, adding evidence to support previous allegations that Chinese leadership knew about the invasion ahead of time and asked Russia to postpone the war until after the Beijing Olympics had concluded.

National intelligence leaders warned last month that the Sino-Russian partnership would only deepen in the coming years and that the no limits partnership declared between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in February would continue to shape world politics and geostrategy for the next decade at least. A diplomatic cable from the State Department also warned that China was mulling a request for military assistance from Russia.

President Joe Biden warned Xi in March of consequences should the latter provide material support to help Russia counter Western sanctions or provide military assistance, though the Biden administration declined to explicate at the time what those consequences would be or how precisely they would be triggered.

A March poll by the Trafalgar Group found that nearly 75 percent of Americans supported heavily sanctioning China in the event it provided support to Russia.
A Vietnamese flag flying atop Lung Cu flag tower in Dong Van district, northern province of Ha Giang, Vietnam, in an undated file photo. (Hoang Dinh Nam/AFP via Getty Images)

Vietnamese Reporter Jailed for Abusing Democratic Freedoms

A Vietnamese reporter has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison by a court in Ho Chi Minh City for abusing democratic freedoms through social media posts, a local newspaper reported Tuesday.

Nguyen Hoai Nam had pleaded not guilty and demanded further investigation into his case.

Nam, 49, wrote several articles about wrongdoing by employees of the Vietnam Inland Waterways Administration and provided evidence to authorities during his tenure as a reporter for the Ho Chi Minh City Law newspaper in 2018.

His evidence aided the prosecution of three officials, but Nam claimed that 12 others identified as being involved in bribery went unpunished, Vietnam-based news agency VN Express reported.

He posted his articles on Facebook and criticized authorities handling of the case, accusing them of letting the criminals off the hook.

Authorities detained Nam on April 3 on charges of abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state, lawful rights and interests of organizations and/or citizens, VN Express reported.

Prosecutors sought a four- to five-year prison sentence for Nam, claiming that his actions negatively affected social security and order. But the court said that it granted Nam leniency due to his good background and having won many merits and awards as a journalist.

Nam denied prosecutors assertion that his Facebook posts had a negative effect on social security and argued that his posts were based on evidence.

Facebook is a tool to inform the public. I fought for the state, not for any person. I wrote articles with evidence, so it cannot be said that I lied or fabricated things, he said during his trial.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) last year urged Vietnamese authorities to release Nam and drop all charges against him. It called on the communist-controlled country to stop jailing journalists on trumped-up anti-state allegations.

If Vietnams government wants to be viewed internationally as a responsible actor, it must stop treating journalism as a crime, and must stop harassing members of the press over their work, Shawn Crispin, CPJs senior Southeast Asia representative, said in a statement.

On March 23, independent Vietnamese journalist Le Van Dung was sentenced to five years in prison over posts he made on social media that authorities claimed were anti-state propaganda. Dung admitted to posting the videos on his social media accounts but refused to regard them as illegal acts.

Phil Robertson, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch, said on March 22 that the Vietnamese penal code provision on propaganda seeks to intimidate citizens with the threat of being locked up.

International donors and trade partners of Vietnam should press Hanoi to listen to its critics instead of prosecuting them, Robertson said.
There are quite a few explanations out there for the hole in the middle of a bagel, one of those foods that you absolutely need to try when in New York City. Some of them are more viable than others, and a couple theories are downright wild.

One less-wild theory is that the hole is there in order to make transporting and selling them easier. In the past, vendors threaded the circular breads onto dowels to hawk them on street corners. In fact, according to The New York Times, even up until the 70s, most bagels were still distributed to American delis and supermarkets on rope or string.

While this reason may be the most logical, its still fun to consider the other theories.

According to Dianna Daoheung, the executive chef and head baker of New York Citys Black Seed Bagels (which has become one of New York Citys most famed bagel shops), one theory posits that in the 1600s, a Polish baker invented bagels for a queen on the occasion of her sons birth; he modeled them after the many bracelets and bangles she wore. If you need further convincing, the words are even similar: bagel and bangle.

The origin of the hole in the bagel will most likely remain one of those unknowable food mysteries. But regardless of their origin, bagels (holes and all) are one of the most iconic breakfast foods in the United States.

By Dan Myers

 2020 Tribune Publishing; Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
Will China Create an Atlantic Naval Base in West Africa?

A Commercial Port in Equatorial Guinea Draws Speculation

Washington security hawks have been aflutter for months over claims China plans to plant a naval base on the oil-rich tropical nation of Equatorial Guinea in West Africa.

The Wall Street Journal got the buzz going with a bombshell feature on Dec. 5, 2021, citing classified American intelligence.

The officials declined to describe details of the secret intelligence findings. But they said the reports raise the prospect that Chinese warships would be able to rearm and refit opposite the East Coast of the United Statesa threat that is setting off alarm bells at the White House and Pentagon, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Top army officials have been vexed over the prospect since last May.

Theyre looking for a place where they can rearm and repair warships. That becomes militarily useful in conflict, according to Gen. Stephen Townsend, who heads U.S. Africa Command.

The Atlantic coast concerns me greatly, he said in a May 2021 interview, pointing to the relatively shorter distance from Africas west coast to the United States.

Responses have been mixed: The claims are alarmist and vague, according to Foreign Policy.

All the same, the thinking of policy experts interviewed by The Epoch Times suggests that Equatorial Guineas Atlantic-facing port city of Bata will host the Chinese naval base. The citythe countrys largestalready hosts a deep-water commercial port that Chinese contractors have improved in recent years.

Thomas Cromwell warns that a Chinese base in West Africa would bring a China threat closer to American shores. (Courtesy of Thomas Cromwell)

The Bata port is under-used right now, with the main export being timber, Thomas Cromwell, president of East West Communications, told The Epoch Times in an email.

Cromwell, who has done business in Equatorial Guinea and maintains links with officials, said despite its relatively small size, Bata could accommodate naval ships of middling size, but that this would likely interfere with its commercial activities.

Equatorial Guinea has excellent infrastructure [ports, airports, roads] for a sub-Saharan country and it has the ambition to be a business hub for the Gulf of Guinea region, he told The Epoch Times.

China would be thrilled to have a naval base at Bata. It would fit beautifully in its strategy of encircling America. A base in West Africa would bring that threat closer to American shores.

China established its first overseas military base in the Horn of Africa in Djibouti in 2017 at a cost of $590 million.

Situated at the strategic entrance to the Red Sea corridor across from Yemen, Djibouti today hosts military installations belonging to the United States, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, the UK, Japan, and Saudi Arabia.

But Washington is particularly concerned about the Chinese military presence on the Atlantic Coast.

A Chinese base in the Atlantic Ocean can play a decisive role in cutting off US access to strategic resources from many African states if conflict breaks out in the future, according to Dr. Freedom Onuoha, a senior lecturer at the Department of Political Science at the University of NigeriaNsukka.

In a situation of intense hostility or great power confrontation in the future, it makes it a lot easier for Chinas naval forces to stroll up and down Africas Atlantic coastline, Onuoha told The Epoch Times.

Dr. Freedom Onuoha says Equatorial Guineas unique locationalmost in the middle of Africas Gulf of Guineasuggests a perfect location for a Chinese naval base. (Courtesy of Freedom Onuoha)

The United States has heavily invested in the oil sector in Equatorial Guinea, which has provided the regime great financial wealth and has turned the country into a middle-income nation.

But Washington has recently come out against the countrys poor human rights record and corrupt governance.

Experts speculate US pressure might be pushing the West African country to move toward China, which has invested in the country extensively in recent years.

The emerging developments in a tiny, fragile country such as Equatorial Guinea in terms of two major global powers competition for resources and warm relations is a promising and perilous trend, Onuoha said.

It is promising in that with the right leadership, Equatorial Guinea can get the best value for her resources that are sought after by these powers. It is perilous because either of the powers can invest in or engineer forces to destabilize the tiny African country should it lose out in the evolving diplomatic and business environment.

This also has wider implications for good governance, as the government in power may lean on China for survival while undermining the human rights of citizens. Chinas investment in the oil and maritime sectors of Equatorial Guinea makes the situation even more dangerous, he said.

For now, Chinas real intentions for building a naval base in Equatorial Guinea remain murky. While some observers believe Chinas desire for ocean access may be chiefly for economic gains, others believe a Chinese base on Africas Atlantic coast will shift global power dynamics.

Cromwell holds the latter view.

Europe has powerful historical ties with Africa, but has not been very aggressive in fostering development in Africa until a recent decision by the European Union to compete with Chinas Belt and Road initiative in Africa, he told The Epoch Times.

There are a few critical sectors that Europe and the United States should focus on, including energy, infrastructure, agriculture, and trade. Instead of avoiding engagement because of concerns over poor governance and human rights, they should pursue an aggressive program of investment and trade to help Africa modernize, in both governance and infrastructure.

The Chinese on the other hand show no concern for governance or human rights in Africa.

This attitude makes it easy for them to do business with less-than-savory regimes in Africa, but it also translates into very negative behavior towards the people of Africa, including disastrous economic entanglements for African governments and the replacement of Africans with Chinese in the workforce, stunting indigenous economic growth, Cromwell said.

But Onuoha is rather more concerned with the economic spinoffs that could come with Chinas ocean access.

Entrance or foothold in Equatorial Guinea, as elsewhere in any other African country, is a product of Chinese expansion, he said.

As she wins trade concessions and finances infrastructural development, China looks likely to displace both the US and Europe in Africa. If not successfully resisted, the costs will come in different shades: decline in their share of trade with African countries, limited leverage to influence the internal politics of African states, and loss of African votes on issues before the United Nations Security Council.
16-month-old Mac (pictured with his parents) died in an accident at daycare in East Vancouver on Jan. 18, 2017. (GoFundMe)

Woman Pleads Guilty After Toddlers Death in Vancouver Daycare: Crown

The British Columbia Prosecution Service says a woman has pleaded guilty to a charge of failing to provide the necessities of life to children at an unlicensed daycare in Vancouver five years ago.

It says Susy Yasmine Saad entered the guilty plea in court on Monday to a single count affecting nine children, including one child who died.

There is a publication ban on all of the childrens names except for Macallan Saini, a 16-month-old boy who was found unresponsive in a playpen in January 2017.

The prosecution service says the case has been adjourned until next month when a date is expected to be set for Saads sentencing.

The service says its anticipated that a previous charge against Saad alleging fraud over $5,000 would be stayed at the conclusion of the sentencing proceedings.
Woman Pleads Guilty to Fatal Stabbing of Boyfriend in Laguna Niguel

SANTA ANA, Calif.A 56-year-old Laguna Niguel woman pleaded guilty Tuesday to fatally stabbing her live-in boyfriend six years ago.

Michele Lynn Green pleaded guilty to one felony count of voluntary manslaughter. She is scheduled to be sentenced July 22 in the Harbor Justice Center in Newport Beach.

Green had been facing charges of murder with a sentencing enhancement for the personal use of a deadly weapon.

Green fatally stabbed 52-year-old Richard Begley Feb. 21, 2015, in a domestic dispute at 24805 La Vida Drive.
Bridgerton and Dickinson fans might want to visit the Lockwood-Matthews Mansion Museum this summer.

The museum will open a new exhibit titled "Making It Last: Sustainable Fashion in Victorian America" starting May 19. The exhibit will showcase sustainability, clothing care and hazardous practices of 19th century fashion, according to a press release.

"This exhibition promises to be beautiful and thought-provoking," said Lynne Zacek Bassett, curator of the exhibit, in a press release.

The exhibit will also discuss the use of chemicals and metals, such as arsenic and mercury in the manufacturing of textiles, hats and fake flowers, according to the museum. The exhibit will run until Nov. 6, 2022.

What lessons can we learn from people in the Victorian era, who took measures to make a garment last as long as possible? And how were garments recycled once they were beyond salvaging for their original use? I hope that visitors are encouraged to think about what they can do to combat the environmental and human impact of fast fashion," said Bassett, who was the curator of textiles and fine arts at Old Sturbridge in Massachusetts in the late 1990s.

In recent years, with documentaries such as The True Cost, there has been an interest in the downside of fast fashion. This type of fashion focuses on developing trendy clothing that is affordable but is not meant to last a long time. In the European Union, for example, textile consumption for every person requires nine cubic metres of water, 400 square metres of land, 391kg of raw materials, and causes a carbon footprint of about 270kg, according to the BBC.

In the United Kingdom, politicians are asking the government to create a law that mandates fashion retailers to comply with environmental standards, reported the BBC.
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MIDDLETOWN  After Nazar Prudyvus celebrated his wedding day in Ukraine on Jan. 8, he returned to the United States to finish his wifes visa application so she could join him at his Connecticut home, but before he could file the paperwork, Russia invaded the country.

Prudyvus was born and raised in Ternopil, Ukraine. After finishing college in 2013, he moved to Connecticut, and started his own home improvement and remodeling business in Cheshire called New Fresh Homes.

He returned to Ukraine for a friends wedding in November 2019, where he fell in love with one of the bridesmaids, Anna. Just over two years later, the two were married overseas.

Unfortunately, Anna is now trapped in Ukraine, and Prudyvus efforts to bring her to the states have been put on hold. Now I am waiting because everyone left the embassy over there, he said.

When he first heard the news, he wanted to put his gun permit to use and fight, Prudyvus said. When everything first happened, I really wanted to go over there.

His wife, however, convinced him not to, saying it would be better to stay safe until she can escape. He agreed, but still felt the need to assist in some way.

Im doing everything I can here to send help, Prudyvus said.

He happened to cross paths with a member of the Middletown Police Department, who put him in touch with Community Relations Officer Jay Bodell.

Bodell and the rest of the department have been collecting supplies at the Main Street station, ranging from first aid kits and food to toiletries and stuffed animals.

We already sent one truckload, Bodell said.

On Wednesday, students at Beman Middle School helped Prudyvus and Bodell load another trailer full of supplies that the students collected the week prior.

The fact the students stepped up is incredible, Bodell said.

The students, led by members of the recently revived chapter of the National Junior Honor Society, collected more than 1,300 items in less than a week.

Beman Middle School Principal Raymond T. Byron Jr. said he was blown away.

I thought, How are we going to do this in a week? but the response has been tremendous, he explained.

Eighth-grader Ariel Mason, president of the honor society, explained why the group decided to help out.

NJHS has a value system based on helping others. Its usually just in the community, but we wanted to have a broader reach, Mason said.

She hopes their efforts can inspire the next generation of Beman students to volunteer. It shows even the smallest efforts can really make an impact, Mason said.

Students helped load the collected supplies into Prudyvus trailer Wednesday morning, before he and Bodell, along with canine officer Bear, brought it to the Ukranian National Home in Hartford.

I thought it would be good to put a face to your efforts, Bodell told students when introducing Prudyvus.

Prudyvus then gave students a bit more insight into the situation in Ukraine, and offered his thanks on behalf of everyone still there.

They appreciate your work, Prudyvus said.

A similar effort is underway at the South Fire District, where six local businesses and organizations are co-sponsoring a Ukrainian firefighters equipment drive that will support multiple fire services. The collection is set for Saturday and Sunday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the 445 Randolph Road station.
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BRIDGEPORT  After his first day of questioning under oath in the Sandy Hook defamation case, Alex Jones told viewers in a video that he was being demonized for falsely reporting that the worst crime in modern Connecticut history never happened.

Ill just admit it  I could have done a better job on Sandy Hook; some of the anomalies that were reported were not accurate, and I admitted it years before I was sued, Jones said in the video, after he sat for a deposition on Tuesday in Bridgeport with lawyers representing an FBI agent and eight families who won a defamation suit against him in November. Have I been a little reckless? Sometimes, I admit it. Ive tried to get better over the years, even before I was sued.

Jones video, which he recorded with his New Haven attorney Norm Pattis, alternated between admissions that Jones had made mistakes and accusations that the families lawyers were trying to shut Alex Jones down.

These people want to put us in prison for our speech, Jones said. They want to be holier-than-thou, using our emotion to manipulate and control us when theyre total sociopaths.

Jones statements came as he sat for a second full day of questions under oath on Wednesday, as both sides prepare for a trial in August where a jury will award damages.

By flying to Connecticut this week from the Texas headquarters of his Infowars internet program, Jones stopped the escalating $25,000 daily fines imposed by a Connecticut judge last week after Jones defied court orders to sit for depositions in March. Jones had already paid a $25,000 fine on Friday and an additional $50,000 fine on Monday, court records show.

Pattis said the questions from the families attorneys on Tuesday were repetitive, sneering and sometimes mocking and struck me as a broad wholesale attack on Mr. Jones and his Infowars questioning of narratives.

I had the impression watching the attack on Mr. Jones that this trial will be about something far greater than what happened at Sandy Hook, Pattis said on Jones video. This trial is going to be about ordinary peoples ability to say Im not buying it. I want to raise questions  I want to draw my own conclusions.

In a statement on Wednesday night after the second day of depositions was complete the families lead attorney from Koskoff, Koskoff and Bieder said they appreciated that state Superior Court took firm measures to compel this deposition, which likely would not have happened otherwise.

Over our objection, Mr. Jones now insists on declaring his entire deposition confidential even while he and his attorney conduct media interviews discussing the details, the families lead attorney Chris Mattei said. Accordingly, we are unable to comment further at this time.

Connecticut isnt the only state where Jones has a defamation trial looming. The first of two trials in Texas to determine damages in defamation cases Jones lost to four other Sandy Hook parents begins April 25.

Jones last week offered $120,000 each to the 15 people who won the defamation case against him in Connecticut and the four people who won the two defamation cases against him in Texas. The Connecticut families rejected the settlement offer. The Texas families are focusing on their trials, their lead attorney said last week.

In Connecticut, Pattis suggested Jones was being singled out because he draws unpopular conclusions.

Jones called the 2012 killing of 26 first-graders and educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School staged, synthetic, manufactured, a giant hoax, and completely fake with actors. In court papers, Jones argued that he no longer believes that, and has a right to be wrong.

This is a trial not about damage to Sandy Hook but what they perceive to be damage to the American republic, Pattis said on Jones video. They view Mr. Jones and Infowars as something akin to cancer  a cancer eating away at the truth.

rryser@newstimes.com 203-731-3342
BATAVIA, Ill. (AP)  A physicist who is the newly appointed director of the U.S. Energy Departments Fermilab facility will become the Chicago-area research center's first woman director.

Lia Merminga will assume Fermilab's leadership role on April 18, University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos announced Tuesday. He chairs the board of directors of Fermi Research Alliance, LLC, which operates the laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy.
STAMFORD  A Redding businessman could face witness tampering charges after he allegedly tried to contact a person he is accused of embezzling more than $200,000 from, according to a state prosecutor.

Assistant States Attorney Michelle Manning said the state is weighing the new charges after Raymond Sanzone, 54, allegedly sent an email to the victim over the weekend.

In the email, Manning said, a man police identified as Sanzone asked the victim if they could sit down and work out their differences outside of court.

Under state statute, tampering with a witness is a Class D felony. A witness tampering conviction could carry up to five years imprisonment and a fine up to $5,000.

Following the email, Judge Gary White ordered Sanzone, who is free after posting a $150,000 bond, to not have any further contact with any victims in the case.

Attorney Wayne Keeney, who represents Sanzone, did not argue against Whites order.

If Sanzone violates this new condition of release, he would be subject to re-arrest.

Sanzone was arrested by Wilton police in October 2020 on 14 counts each of first-degree identity theft and third-degree forgery, as well as a single count of first-degree larceny.

According to the arrest warrant, Sanzone allegedly embezzled about $212,000 from a Wilton-based company between 2018 and 2020.

Manning said the state recently offered Sanzone a deal in which the 54-year-old would plead guilty to first-degree larceny in return for a 15-year prison sentence, suspended after six years, and five years of probation.

Sanzone has until his next court date on June 15 to decide on the states offer.

In 2014, Sanzone was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison after pleading guilty to first-degree larceny in a separate embezzlement scheme where he overcharged schools and municipalities by more than $500,000 in commissions for arranging energy suppliers.

As a part of the 2014 plea agreement, Sanzone was ordered to pay nearly $350,000 in restitution.

Following his arrest in 2020, Sanzone was also charged with violation of probation. That case is still pending before Danbury Superior Court.
After meeting at a trap house, police said two people funded their drug addictions with a monthlong crime spree  stealing parking meters, shoplifting and burglarizing cars  that culminated with a chase through several Connecticut towns on Sunday, according to court documents.

Brookfield resident Hannah Casperson was taken into custody in Monroe after her Hummer crashed into a utility pole. Police said seven officers were injured after Casperson crashed into their vehicles during the pursuit from Waterbury to Monroe.

Two days earlier, police said they arrested Caspersons criminal partner, 31-year-old Waterbury resident Thomas Crawford. Police said Crawford was arrested trying to steal a cartload of groceries in Wolcott while Casperson fled when she saw officers arrive.

Police said they were closing in on the pair after they were seen earlier on Friday in the area where 41 vehicle burglaries occurred in Wolcott.

After his arrest, Crawford told investigators he met Casperson about a month ago at a Waterbury trap house, where people gather to buy and sell drugs, according to warrants for his arrest on larceny and criminal mischief charges. Police have said the crime spree was used to fund Crawford and Caspersons drug addictions.

He stated that they began to commit shopliftings at various locations throughout the city, including Dick's sporting goods, the mall and various other locations, according to one of the warrants filed in Waterbury Superior Court.

Crawford stated that it was always just him and Hannah committing the crimes, where she would drive her vehicle, the white Hummer, and he would go into the stores to steal, the warrant stated.

Police said they have also connected Crawford and Casperson with the thefts of several parking meters in Waterbury.

On March 11, a Waterbury police officer reported the meter heads and poles near St. Marys Hospital had been pulled out of the sidewalk, according to the warrant. Police said security footage from the hospital showed a Hummer in the area.

The vehicle was seen pulling up to the meter poles (where) a person exited the vehicle and pulled the meters out of the ground and placed them in the vehicle, the warrant stated. The vehicle then drove away.

Crawford admitted to stealing the parking meters when interviewed by investigators last Friday, the warrant stated.

Hannah would hit the meters with the Hummer to loosen them, then he would pull them from the ground, the warrant stated.

Crawford told police they took the meters to a street where he smashed them open, according to the warrant, netting about $60 in the process.

Police said they also believe the two were involved in burglarizing at least 14 vehicles in Waterbury last Thursday and Friday. Taken from one of the cars were three diamond rings, sweatshirts and a pair of Jordan sneakers worth a total of $6,100, according the warrant. Another car had $1,000 in cash stolen from a wallet, the warrant stated.

Crawford admitted to the Waterbury burglaries, telling police he used a window punch to smash the car windows, the warrant stated.

Police wrote in the warrants that the Hummer was registered to Casperson and her father in Brookfield. Police had flagged the vehicle to attempt to locate it, with notes stating to check the condition of Hannah, who was known to use drugs and frequent the Waterbury area, a warrant for Crawfords arrest stated.

Casperson was also wanted for failure to appear in court, according to officials.

This vehicle has been seen by officers on multiple occasions in the City of Waterbury, who attempted to stop the vehicle and identify the parties, however, they were unsuccessful as the Hummer did not stop for officers and it was not engaged in pursuits, the warrant stated.
NORWALK  After more than 46 years, authorities continue to search for answers in the disappearance of Maria Mia Anjiras, who was 14 when she vanished and has become one of Connecticuts oldest missing person cases listed by the National Center for Missing an Exploited Children.

On Wednesday, the department shared a recent interview with NBC New York about the case, urging anyone with information to reach out to the lead investigators with details that could help.

The Charley Project / Contributed

Anjiras, who would now be 60 years old, left her Midwood Road home on her bicycle during the afternoon of Feb. 12, 1976. Her father, who was leaving for work, said he last saw her around 2:15 p.m. She was expected to attend a vocal lesson later that afternoon before babysitting a neighbors child that evening. She never showed up to the lesson or to babysit.

Despite some reported sightings after her disappearance, family and friends have never heard from her again. Her case is one of the states oldest juvenile missing person investigation, according to Norwalk police.

All her friends who were 14, 15 years old at the time mightve been scared to talk to police, Lt. Art Weisgerber, of the departments Cold Case Unit, said in the interview with NBC New York. Weisgerber urged anyone who might fall in that category to reach out to investigators with anything they know or remember.

After her disappearance, Anjiras blue bicycle was found in front of her friends house near St. Marys Lane, about a half-mile from her home. The friend said Anjiras was never there, and she hadnt heard from her or seen her. There was no sign of Anjiras in the area, and she never returned home.

In the weeks following her disappearance, police said there were multiple sightings reported at Norwalk fast food restaurants. Many of the witnesses who reported sightings were people who knew her. She was reportedly seen at the Duchess Restaurant on Main Street, and possibly in an orange car and a black car in that same area.

The investigation led authorities to a tip that Anjiras was seen in front of the Charter Oak Motorcycle Club on Greenwood Avenue in Bethel in August 1976. Police said investigators tracked down that girl, who turned out to be a teen from Danbury.

Additional leads indicated Anjiras might have been with a Charter Oak member who went by the name Pepe, according to police.

The day she went missing, she was wearing a peach color sweater, white canvas pants, brown shoes and a green Norwalk High jacket with Mia and the number 79 on it. She was described as having brown hair and blue eyes.

When investigators spoke with Anjiras parents, they said she was behaving normally on the day of the disappearance. She had threatened to run away two weeks prior, but her father talked her out of it at the time. When she left her home on that day in 1976, Anjiras took a very small amount of money, pajamas, a pair of jeans and several sweaters. Authorities believe this collection of items indicated Anjiras left on her own accord.

Weisgerber, in his interview with NBC New York, said Anjiras may have initially run away to prove a point.

Did it continue to mushroom? he questioned. Did she get in with the wrong people and it just turned bad?

Her parents have since died without answers about what happened to their daughter. Her siblings  a brother and sister  remain hopeful she could be found alive. Weisgerber told NBC New York investigators collected sibling DNA through Anjiras brother and sister. He said the DNA has been entered into national databases, but it hasnt yielded any results.

Weisgerber said if Anjiras is alive and comes forward, she wouldnt face criminal charges.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Norwalk Police Cold Case Unit at 203-854-3028. Anonymous tips can also be submitted by calling 203-854-3111 or texting NPD and the information to 274637. Tips can also be submitted anonymously online at new.tipsubmit.com/en/.
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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is no longer warning Americans to avoid traveling to Canada due to the coronavirus as the CDC designated 25 countries and territories, also including Jamaica and Argentina, at lower-risk categories for the virus on Monday.

However, the CDC wrote that Americans should be up to date on their coronavirus vaccinations before visiting Canada, as the level of COVID-19 in the country was bumped down from "very high" to "high." Canada had been at Level 4 in a four-level system since Jan. 10 and is now at Level 3.
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After leaving office in 2017, former President Barack Obama visited the White House for the first time as former president on Tuesday in order to promote the White House's expansion of the Affordable Care Act.

The expansion would allow for more families to be able to access Affordable Care Act subsidies next year and seek to eliminate the "family glitch," a problem with ACA regulations dealing with the affordability of employer coverage. Workers who don't have "affordable" health insurance options through their jobs can qualify for subsidized coverage on ACA exchanges, and work-based policies are considered affordable if it costs the employee less than roughly 10% of his or her income for single coverage.
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Dozens of hillbillies and gnomes watched visitors entering the Granite City Moose Lodge on Saturday.

When I retired about six years ago I said, Well, I need something to do, said Paul Shane. So I started doing these gnomes and hillbillies and they really went over big.

Shane, who with his wife, Linda, is the co-owner of Crazy Bob Crafts, was among the vendors who gathered for the Small Business Extravaganza, an indoor fair featuring hand-made items by Granite City entrepreneurs.

I started whittling when I was about 8 years old, said Shane.

He said Saturdays extravaganza was one indication that Granite City is coming back economically.

Especially downtown, the way they are revitalizing it, a lot of businesses are going into downtown, Shane said.

Pam Murray of Simply Irresistible Bombs agreed that the city is experiencing a renaissance.

Our new mayor is bringing a lot to Granite City, Murray said. I think its amazing all of the events that hes really trying to pull together for small businesses.

Murrays local business produces hot cocoa, coffee and tea bombs. In the summer months she said it will have some fun ones, like sweet tea and lemonade bombs.

Its really fun; you put it into your mug and pour hot water or hot milk over the top of them, dissolve, stir and enjoy, said Murray, who liked Saturdays event because its hometown; its really nice to stay local and help out local businesses.

Glen Carbon resident Cheryl Proyaseng came to the Small Business Extravaganza on Saturday in search of some jewelry.

I think this will help to boost Granite City small businesses, mom and pops," she said. "They need all of the help they can get.

"I love craft fairs," she added. "I cant wait for spring because thats when they are all popping up. Any craft fair I see, I go to.

The extravaganza vendors were among the 40 small businesses that sell products at Sissys Space, a Granite City shop that also sells hippie-type items such as incense, tie-dye, kids games, dream catchers, clothes and bags.

These are all vendors in our store so we decided to get together as small businesses to promote shopping locally, said Sissys Space employee Hannah Groetecke.

We like to promote that," she said. "And hopefully we can bring new life to Granite City and more people open their own small businesses like we did.

Proceeds from Saturdays Small Business Extravaganza also supported the women of Granite City Moose Lodge No. 272.
For the first time in history the nation hit a milestone last year when more than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses over a 12-month period, about two-thirds of which were linked to fentanyl and other synthetic drugs, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the nation hit a milestone last year.

Fentanyl can be 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, heroin or prescription opioids, according to the Associated Press. Just 2 milligrams of fentanyl is considered a lethal dose, compared to 30 mg of heroin.

About 20.4 Illinois residents per 100,000 died of a drug overdose due to fentanyl between November 2020 and October 2021, the AP found, higher than some neighboring states like Wisconsin (20) and Iowa (6.3) but lower than others like Missouri (23) and Indiana (27.8).

Broken down into counties, Madison County saw 31.8 deaths per 100,000 residents in 2020 due to opioid overdoses, according to Illinois Department of Public Health data, tied with Cook County per capita and one of the highest rates in the state. Morgan County saw 8.8 deaths per 100,000 residents the same year.

Illinois saw the number of opioid overdose deaths in 2020 increase by 33% compared to 2019, the state found, with communities of color experiencing some of the highest rates of overdose deaths in the state. That comes after a 3% increase from 2018 to 2019, as Illinois saw the first decrease in five years from 2017 to 2018, dropping 1.6% in opioid deaths statewide.

Further, in 2021, fentanyl was responsible for 19 deaths in Madison County with fentanyl and another drug (including heroin) responsible for 14 deaths and fentanyl and methamphetamine responsible for 33 deaths. There were 82 opioid-related overdose deaths in Madison County last year, all but seven involving fentanyl.

Illinois is one of 26 states to introduce legislation dealing with fentanyl penalties and/or fentanyl-related harm reduction, the AP reported, with 12 states with fentanyl-specific drug trafficking or possession laws on the books as of last year, the National Conference of State Legislatures found.

Similar measures have been introduced or considered since the start of 2021 in at least 19 states, not including measures to add more synthetic opioids to controlled substances lists to mirror federal law which have been adopted in many states, with bipartisan support.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed about 2,700 cases involving crimes related to the distribution of fentanyl and similar synthetic drugs, up nearly tenfold from 2017. Some governors, like Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker who released a broad overdose action plan last month, are focused on harm reduction methods.

Illinois' plan

The 2022 State of Illinois Overdose Action Plan, a "comprehensive, equity-centric outline for combating the opioid epidemic" was outlined in March, and David Jones, the Associate Secretary for Behavioral Health at the Illinois Department of Human Services, was named Chief Behavioral Health Officer.

"As the Chief Behavioral Health Officer, I will work with people with lived expertise, Behavioral Health Providers, elected officials, people who use drugs and other stakeholders to transform how Illinois supports mental, emotional and overall behavioral health wellness for everyone," Chief Behavioral Health Officer David T. Jones said in a statement.

The fiscal year 2022 Illinois state budget included the largest-ever investments in the Department of Human Services and the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services to better deliver critical mental health and behavioral health services to Illinois residents, the state wrote in a press release. In the fiscal year 2023, the Illinois state budget aims to build on that progress, seeking to increase the mental health and substance abuse funding at DHS alone to over $979 million, about a $400 million increase over the fiscal year 2019.

Illinois invested more than $2.2 billion in mental and behavioral health services and supports between the fiscal year 2021 and 2022, with $1.16 billion heading to the DHS including more than $705 million to the Division of Mental Health and more than $388 million to the Division of Substance Use Prevention and Recovery, with $70 million in Behavioral Health American Rescue Plan Act appropriations.

More than $1.06 billion was invested in DHFS, including $88 million in American Rescue Plan Act enhanced match and $88.8 million in payments to psychiatric hospitals through the hospital assessment.

"Everybody knows somebody who is struggling and our support systems ought to reflect the universal importance of mental health," Pritzker said in a statement. "Our equity-driven State of Illinois Overdose Action Plan is just one way we're overhauling the state's behavioral health support systems."

"With Chief Behavioral Health Officer David T. Jones at the helm, I look forward to the progress we'll continue to make in supporting Illinois residents' access to help," Pritzker continued.

SOAP

The creation and implementation of the State of Illinois Overdose Action Plan (SOAP) aims to utilize a social equity framework and multi-agency collaborative model to change how Illinois deals with overdoses, the state wrote. the plan prioritizes outreach to and engagement with individuals who are at risk for both fatal and non-fatal overdose due to multiple drugs, including synthetic opioids, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other substances.

Based on three pillars, the SOAP, first initiated in 2017, forms the strategic framework for addressing the opioid crisis in the state, with nine evidenced-based strategies to achieve the goal of reducing the number of projected deaths in 2020 by one-third. Those three pillars are prevention, or preventing the further spread of the opioid epidemic; treatment and recovery, or providing evidence-based treatment and recovery services and response, or averting overdose deaths.

The SOAP builds on funding increases for mental and behavioral health implemented by the Pritzker Administration, Michael Claffey, public information officer for IDPH, wrote in an email.

"The comprehensive plan outlines 25 high priority recommendations that fall under 5 categories: Social Equity, Prevention, Treatment and Recovery, Harm Reduction, and Justice-Involved Populations and Public Safety," Claffey wrote.

"Priorities involving IDPH include promoting equitable access to harm reduction services, increasing the availability of fentanyl testing, partnering with IDOC to ensure justice-involved people and their loved ones receive naloxone and training to use naloxone, and increasing support and access to treatment for pregnant and postpartum women."

Several activities listed in the SOAP are already underway, the state wrote, with learning collaboratives supporting sheriffs and county health partners in reducing the number of those re-offending and reducing post-release overdoses in people leaving jail.

"Through critical interagency collaboration and ensuring the voices of individuals with lived experiences are at the forefront of our efforts, the State Overdose Action Plan outlines a comprehensive harm reduction strategy with equity at the center," Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton said in a statement. "We recognize that the most effective way to address the opioid crisis is by joining forces and working with the communities impacted to make needed change."

In the financial year 2021, Illinois spent $880.6 million on behavioral health, including $291 for Community Mental Health Centers and $110 million for providers of substance use disorder treatments.

Illinois was prevented from reaching its 2017 goal to reduce overdose deaths by one-third due to the dramatic increase in fatal overdose deaths, the state wrote in the 2022 SOAP plan. That's happening not just in Illinois but across the United States, as data from the CDC show that drug overdose deaths nationwide increased 29.4% from 2019 to 2020 with an estimated 93,000 deaths in 2020, then the highest number of overdose fatalities ever recorded in a 12-month period.

Overdose deaths from synthetic opioids increased by nearly 55% during this same time period, the state wrote, an increase that began before the COVID-19 pandemic but only accelerated throughout 2020. The influx of fentanyl in the drug supply and increased methamphetamine and polysubstance use are the primary drivers of this increase in overdose deaths, according to the CDC.

Increases in mortality are also likely due to people unknowingly using heroin and/or synthetic opioids laced with fentanyl, the state wrote, as well as people using stimulants including cocaine and methamphetamine in combination with opioids, as there has been a "significant increase" in people with opioid use disorder using stimulant drugs since 2018.

The state wrote that the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated stresses, especially social isolation, job loss and the disruption of in-person opioid use disorder/substance use disorder treatment and recovery support services also play a role in increased overdose deaths.

The first step for those at risk of drug overdose is to reach out for help, Claffey wrote. The Illinois Helpline can be found on its website or by calling 833-234-6343 or by texting "HELP" to 833234. Overdose Education and Naloxone Distribution and harm reduction groups also have naloxone and safe use supplies available, Claffey wrote.

"There are also medication-assisted recovery options for those who are seeking treatment for opioid use disorder," Claffey wrote. "Additionally, Illinois has a standing prescribing order for anyone to obtain naloxone, which can be purchased at most major pharmacies."
That release could not be found.
Prof Chukwuma Charles Soludo, Anambra State Governor has officially set the truth, justice and peace committee as part of the steps the government is adopting towards building and restoring peace and tranquillity to Anambra State.

The Secretary to the State Government, Prof Solo Chukwulobelu officially made this known when he addressed a press conference at Government House, Awka, on Wednesday, April 6, 2022

Below is the full text of the Press briefing

TRUTH, JUSTICE AND PEACE COMMITTEE

1.0 Preamble:

Nigeria is facing a historic security challenge, with the character and breadth of the conflicts differing in several parts of the country. In the Southeast of Nigeria, there is a mixture of separatist agitations with crass criminality. Despite the efforts by law enforcement agencies and enormous human and financial resources expended in the bid to contain the conflicts, including the banning/criminalizing of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), the insurgency (kidnapping, arson, brutal murder of innocent persons, etc) continues to escalate with humongous toll in lives, livelihoods and properties lost daily.

Following the arrest and detention of the leader of IPOB, the organization had, on August 9, 2021 issued a Sit-at-Home order every Monday throughout the Southeast. The brutal enforcement of the order has caused numerous deaths and incalculable damage to the economy of the Southeast. Despite the repeated announcements by IPOB leadership of the cancellation of the Monday Sit-at-Home order, there is continued vicious enforcement by disparate criminal gangs. Currently, every criminal gang claims to be freedom fighters. In addition to the Monday Sit at Home and its colossal costs, the region is daily experiencing unrelenting doses of kidnapping, killing of innocent persons, banditry, arson, etc. It is estimated that so far more than 150 police and other security personnel as well as an unknown number of innocent persons and criminals have been killed in the raging conflict.Anambra is a key state in the Southeast and Nigeria and has suffered heavily from the unrelenting conflict.

With the cross-border nature of the crisis, no sustainable solution in one state can happen without a comprehensive understanding of the regional and national dimensions. For example, recent arrests of some of the criminals showed that 85% of them are indigenes of one Southeast state and the remaining 15% from another Southeast state. Not one of them was an indigene of Anambra state. Anambra state, and indeed, the Southeast have huge potentials to leapfrog into an axis of prosperity. But the current crisis poses a near existential challenge which must be tackled with every means possible.

A sickness accurately diagnosed is halfway to its cure. So far, there have been ad-hoc discussions about, and reactions to, the raging conflict. There has been no systematic platform or framework to engage the various stakeholders with a view to understanding the causes and dynamics of the conflict. Thousands (mostly innocent persons) have died, injured or dispossessed but these have been largely treated as mere statistics.

How did we get here, and where do we go from here? It is our view that the current situation goes beyond a law enforcement problem. To get to the root of the problem and craft a comprehensive and credible roadmap to the future, we have decided to constitute a TRUTH, JUSTICE AND PEACE COMMITTEE.

2.0 The Purpose/Terms of Reference of the Committee:

The purpose of the Committee on Truth, Justice, and Peace is to seek a restorative justice approach for truth-telling or real facts, for the healing of the victims of the violence, accounting for responsibility and accountability of the actors, conditional mercy for the repentant perpetrators, restitution for certain losses and rehabilitation of the perpetrators, for the overall aim of restoration of peace and justice as well as the promotion of development in the State, and the region/Nigeria.

Given the cross-border nature of the conflict, the focus goes beyond Anambra, and possibly covers the entire Southeast.

Specifically, the Terms of Reference for the Committee are:

1) To identify the remote and immediate causes of the agitations, restiveness, violence, and armed struggle in the South East since 1999.

2) Document victims/circumstances of death, brutality and incarceration.

3) Identify stakeholders and groups who have played critical roles in the agitations and conflicts, their roles, capabilities and demands.

4) Address any other issue(s) that may be germane to unravelling the extent of the crisis and charting the roadmap for the future.

5) Make recommendations for sustainable peace and security in Anambra state/Southeast.

The Committee shall have a direct reporting line to the Governor or his designee, and will be provided with administrative support. The Committee shall be free to draw up the methodology to accomplish its assignment.

3.0 Time Frame:

The Committee shall conclude its work no later than 6 months from its inauguration, with its preliminary report due no later than 2 months after the sunset and the final report after 2 months of receiving feedback on the preliminary report from the government. The Committee shall be inaugurated on a date to be communicated to its members.

4:0 Membership:

The members of the Committee are as follows:

1) Professor Chidi Odinkalu--- Chairman

2) HE Amb. Bianca Ojukwu --- Member/Secretary

3) Dr. Joe NwaorguDr. Udenta Udenta  Member

4) Dr. Uju Agomoh --- Member

5) Rev. Fr (Msgnr) Jerome Madueke

6) Canon Dr. Okechukwu C. Obi-Okoye

7) Mr. Charles Oputa (Charly Boy)

8) Dr. John Otu

9) Mr. Ngozi Odumuko

10) Ms Onyeka Onwenu

11)Dr. Joe Abah

12) Mr. Chukwuma Okpalaezeukwu

13) Mr. Sam Egwuatu

14) Prof. Joseph Ikechebelu

Signed:

Prof. Solo Osita Chukwulobelu

Secretary to the State Government, Anambra State.


There is no denying the fact that the Statement made by the Senator representing Imo West, Rochas Okorocha during his formal declaration to run for President come 2023 is no doubt a magnum opus which has created a character that has to a large extent described who a people-oriented leader truly is.

It would be recalled that while addressing a Press Conference in Abuja on a particular Monday in January 2022 that Okorocha likened Nigeria to an aircraft that he would love to pilot. The senator said if elected president, the country would encounter challenges but he is capable of surmounting them.

He pleaded, Please permit me to be your pilot for a new Nigeria, as your pilot there might be small turbulence, no problem, Captain Rochas is in command, the former Imo governor said amid laughter.

Okorocha said if elected president, he would hand over power to the youths after the conclusion of his tenure, and assured that he would use his time as president to prepare the youths for leadership positions.

To the youths, if I become your president, I will hand over power to the next generation. Im not not-too-young-to-run and not too old to run, Im only 57. I created 25,000 jobs for the youths. I made 305 millionaires in Imo, he said.

The senator said he detests poverty because of his humble background, adding that his wealth is clean.

I will create wealth, I sold oranges, my wealth is clean, go and check CCB (forms), he said.

Our biggest problem is hunger, I have addressed that in the new Nigeria.

To anyone that understands the dynamics of vision or prophecy, particularly anyone that is affiliated to the Christendom, Okorocha was not speaking about himself per se about another leader that is of Eastern Nigerian extraction. This is because vision is convoluted and comes in different forms that cannot be easily understood, especially by the uninitiated.

If you want to understand who God is, you need to understand all of who God is. Getting your head around the difference between vision and imagination is one thing. But many struggle to grasp what vision is in a way they could clearly interpret to someone else. This is because deep calleth unto deep. That is not a simple idea to get to grips with.

Given the foregoing ecclesiastical backdrop of the fact that vision is intricate in understanding, particularly to the uninitiated is that Soludo has few days after inauguration into office without wasting time hits the ground running. To my view, Governor Soludo is the Pilot Okorocha saw in his vision as he has in no time been demonstrating the leadership traits alluded to in his declaration for presidency come 2023.

Like the leader Okorocha saw in his vision in the embodiment of a Pilot, Soludo is at the moment literarily flying Ndi Anambra on air in the professionalism that is reminiscent of the pilot Okorocha saw in the vision with the full assurance that he will land safely in the next four years, particularly as the plane took off well. The foregoing view is quite logical as he wasted no time in announcing the appointment of Dr. Chukwudi Okoli as the Accountant General and Chinedu Nwoye as the Deputy Chief of Staff/Chief of Protocol, and assured that the list of his commissioners will be forwarded to the House of Assembly in the spate of one week to which he fulfilled with a high sense of alacrity.

Since he mounted the cockpit, like a professional Pilot, he has consistently been urging Ndi Anambra to volunteer their time and treasure to create The homeland of our dream, and that Everybody is important in this journey and I need your help to succeed.

We must all strive to die empty, to give our all, in aid of Gods creation. Each day, every Onye Anambra must ask himself or /herself: What have I done today to make my home state livable and prosperous? It should be part of our daily devotion.

There must be a purpose why God in His infinite wisdom decided to make you Onye Anambra, and that must be to leave it better than you met it. No one is too poor to give or do something for Anambra. If not you, then who; if not now, then when?

Articulating his profound vision for Anambra, Soludo said: As I close my eyes and visualise our future, I can see millions of Ndi Anambra holding hands and working hard for a glorious future.

I see the skyscrapers along the banks of River Niger in Onitsha, Nnewi, Awka, Ekwulobia, etc.

I see a smart megacity with millions of happy and prosperous people.

I see us exporting massively to the world and the world coming to Anambra as a preferred destination to live, work, invest, learn, relax and enjoy.

History beckons. Seize this moment Ndi Anambra, and together, let us make it count. Anambra: the Light of the Nation shines!

Without doubt, and analyzing this contextual scenario from the perspective of Okorochas pilot, Anambra as a state would encounter challenges but Soludo has demonstrated his ability of being capable of surmounting such challenges.

For instance, that the task of boosting the economy of Anambra State is ostensibly bedeviled by a plethora of challenges is no more news, particularly with the most conspicuous being Monday Sit-At-Home Order by the leadership of the Independent People of Biafra (IPOB), and its concomitant growing height of insecurity and economic consequences. In his bid to find solution to the challenge, Soludo has asked all churches in the Southeast to utilize each passing Monday as a day of prayer for the entire communities in the South East region of the country as well as praying for improvement of the communities collective economy. He asserted that the prayers will also signal the end of the Monday sit-at-home Order that had lingered in the region for months, specifically since August, 2021.

The governor made the disclosure during a one-day Peacebuilding and Security Dialogue, held in Awka in response to the worsening security challenges in the region, and also gave the assurance that he will lead his brother governors in the Southeast to engage the Federal Government in dialogue to handle the insecurity situation in the zone.

Besides the foregoing, he has not relented in his bid to ensure that environment of the state is clean and aesthetic.

Even today as you read this piece, the contextual pilot has appointed a 15- member Truth, Justice and Peace Commission into his crew to stop the activities of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). The committee is headed by human rights activist, Prof Chidi Odinkalu with Amb. Bianca Ojukwu as Secretary

A statement on Wednesday by Secretary to the Anambra State Government, Prof Solo Chukwulobelu, named other members of the committee as Mr. Charles Oputa (Charley boy); music icon Onyeka Onwenu; Dr. Joe Nwaorgu; Dr. Udenta Udenta; Dr. Uju Agomoh; Rev. Fr (Msgnr); Jerome Madueke and Canon Dr. Okechukwu C. Obi-Okoye. Others are: Dr. John Out; Mr. Ngozi Odumuko; Dr. Joe Abah, Mr. Chukwuma Okpalaezeukwu; Mr. Sam Egwuatu and Prof. Joseph Ikechebelu.

Against the foregoing backdrop, one is compelled to ask, Is Soludo the pilot Okorocha saw in a vision? In as much as the answer is farfetched as it is too early to ascertain if he is the one, it is expedient to say Time will tell.
The sum of N18.9 million has been presented in valued cheques by the Katsina State Police Command to families/next-of-kin of police officers who died in active service.

Idrisu Dauda, the state Commissioner of Police made the presentation on behalf of the Inspector-General of Police, Alkali Baba Usman at the Command Headquarters in Katsina on Wednesday.

He noted that gesture was part of the IGPs Family Welfare Insurance Scheme being given to families of deceased Police operatives.

The program which was held today witnessed the presentation of various cheques containing different amounts of money to families of 20 deceased police officers who died in active service.

CP Idrisu Dauda, while presenting the cheques, expressed gratitude to the efforts of the Inspector-General of Police for improving the welfare of the officers of the Nigeria Police Force.

He also urged the beneficiaries to judiciously use the money given to them.

Speaking on behalf of other bbeneficiaries, Maryam Sabo, thanked the IGP for the welfare package, assuring that the money would be judiciously used.
Leicester unveil statue of Possible Man

FOOTBALL: Leicester Citys football family came together on Monday (Apr 4) for the inauguration of the Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha statue at King Power Stadium - an eternal tribute to the most influential figure in the clubs 138-year history.

FootballFA-CupPremier-League

By Bangkok Post

Wednesday 6 April 2022, 11:26AM

Leicester City chairman Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha (second left) and his family pose in front of Vichai Srivaddhanaprabhas statue at King Power Stadium. Photo: Bangkok Post

On what would have been the Thais 64th birthday, his son and current Leicester City chairman Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha and his family were joined by distinguished guests to celebrate Vichais Leicester legacy, reports the Bangkok Post.

The current Leicester City squad, led to a maiden FA Cup success in 2021 by manager Brendan Rodgers, were joined by members of the 2016 Premier League title-winning team and former managers Nigel Pearson, Claudio Ranieri and Craig Shakespeare.

Former club chairman Vichai - affectionately called the Boss or the Possible Man - passed away in a tragic helicopter accident at the home of Leicester City in Oct 2018.

Chief Executive Susan Whelan, a close friend and colleague of Vichai, opened proceedings, before Aiyawatt unveiled the statue of his father in front of a crowd of family and friends.

Whelan said: Khun Vichai loved this city. He greatly appreciated the affection shown by the people of Leicester and recognised how this community believed in his vision.

Today, his contribution to the club and to the city is made eternal. For generations to come, people will stand in this place and tell stories of the Possible Man.

They will speak of his leadership and ambition, but also of his generosity and kindness. However this site changes, in all the moments we will experience together, his presence will be permanent.

The statue inauguration ceremony was led by Buddhist monks, who travelled to Leicester from Thailand at the request of the Srivaddhanaprabha family.
Phuket gold shop robber probe nets B3.7mn cash, online gambling arrests

PHUKET: The arrest of the Myanmar man who robbed a gold store in Phuket Town last year has led to the arrests of two wanted men for operating an illegal online gambling website and the seizure of B3.7 million in cash, police announced today (Apr 6).

crimepolice

By The Phuket News

Wednesday 6 April 2022, 03:13PM

Region 8 Police Commander Pol Lt Gen Amphol Buarabporn announced the news at Tha Chatchai Police Station, at the northern end of Phuket, this morning.

Lt Gen Amphol explained that the two arrests followed an investigation that started with the arrest of Myanmar national Chai Aung, 26, for the robbery of the Thong Thaweechai gold shop on Ranong Rd in Phuket Town in October last year.

Police were especially motivated to track down and apprehend Chai Aung last October as he made off with more than B10mn in gold jewellery in the robbery.

He had also heavily assaulted an elderly couple  Wangdee Inthawong, 71, and Puangpen Sakkasemkrit, 65  who lived upstairs from the gold shop as caretakers for the store.

Chai Aung had struck both Mr Wangdee and Ms Puangpen on the head with a piece of wood that he had taken from the kitchen upstairs, where he also took a large knife that he had on him during the attack.

He bound the couples hands and feet with wire and threatened to beat Ms Puangpen if they did not open the safe.

Officers searched Chai Aungs rented room and recovered the stolen jewellery, reported as 363 bahtweight of gold, valued at more than B10.6mn. Officers also recovered B33,600 from the room.

Chai Aung blamed online gambling debts as his motivation for carrying out the robbery, which led officers to arrest the two men operating the website, Lt Gen Amphol explained today.

The investigation also found itself linked to a complaint filed with Udon Thani Police over a group of able-bodied men claiming to be police officers [sic] extorting property from the victim in the amount of B400,000 and one amulet after gambling on the online gambling site incurred almost B2mn debt.

The Udon Thani case saw a mans bank account, used to place bets with the website, being depleted, Lt Gen Amphol said.

The investigation saw the Phuket Provincial Court issue arrest warrants for the two men determined to be the main operators of the website, https://789xber.com, which has now been taken offline.

Nirawit Chanthaphun was arrested at a hotel in Mae Sai District, Chiang Rai Province.

Somsak Cherntong was arrested at a house on Naeb Kehat Rd in Hua Hin, Prachuap Khiri Khan Province.

In total, 58 items of evidence were seized, including B3,713,400 in cash, three land title deeds and four contracts of land for sale, Lt Gen Amphol said.

Also seized were eight mobile phones, two computers, one car, 14 bankbooks and 10 cash cards along with clothes, bags and electronic devices, Lt Gen Amphol added.

From the result of this case, I would like anyone who sees or knows about criminals trying to persuade them to gamble online on various social media, which intoxicates our youth and destroys the countrys economy, they can inform the hotline of the Information Technology Crime Suppression Center at 1599 and by their direct line 081-8663000, or people can report it to Information Technology Crime Suppression Center at Region 8 Police, Lt Gen Amphol said.
Schools to reopen on May 17 despite cases

BANGKOK: Schools will reopen as scheduled on May 17 for on-site teaching despite concerns about the rate of COVID-19 infections, according to the Office of the Basic Education Commission (Obec).

CoronavirusCOVID-19healthSafety

By Bangkok Post

Wednesday 6 April 2022, 09:08AM

Children wear face masks at a kindergarten. Photo: File / Bangkok Post

Obec is determined to push ahead with the opening of the new term after meeting school district directors and headmasters from across the country, reports the Bangkok Post.

Yesterday (Apr 5) Obecs secretary-general, Amporn Pinasa, said the meeting discussed and assessed the readiness of schools to reopen.

He insisted the May 17 opening date for the first term of the academic year still stands. There will be no postponement, he said.

The Obec secretary-general said he has directed schools to conduct mainly on-site classes. However, remote learning or other teaching methods or a combination of online and other methods may provide a useful alternative.

The ground rule was that on-site classes must conform strictly to COVID-free setting requirements issued by the Public Health Ministry.

Preparations must factor in the health safety issue associated with getting buildings, teaching methods and teachers ready for the new term.

Education zone offices are duty-bound to supervise schools in their areas closely and prepare them for any crisis stemming from the pandemic after reopening, Mr Amporn said.

He said readiness levels varied. More prone to the impact of crisis are small schools with 120 students or less.

Some of these state-run schools face a shortage of teachers. In many cases, retired teachers were not replaced.

Mr Amporn said he has instructed school zone offices to survey small schools and find out how many do not have enough teachers.

Other schools with a surplus of teaching staff may be asked to re-assign teachers to schools hit by shortages.

Many Thai families not equipped for online learning

The announcement came after a report revealed more than half of Thai families are not adequately equipped for their children to receive online education, on the same day the United Nations Childrens Fund (Unicef) released its own joint reflection on the impact of COVID-19 on education.

Unicef and the World Bank yesterday launched Where are we on education recovery, revealing that students all over the world are facing learning difficulties due to school closures throughout the outbreak, reports the Bangkok Post.

With a combined 2 trillion hours of in-person schooling lost due to school closures since March 2020, students in more than four out of five countries have fallen behind in their learning. Less well-off children have seen their learning falling back, Unesco Assistant Director-General for Education Stefania Giannini said.

In particular, the most marginalised - those living in poverty and rural areas, children with disabilities, and the youngest students - have fallen the furthest behind.

Ms Giannini insisted that due to the school shutdown, basic, foundational skills upon which every aspect of education is built have been erased in many countries.

Children who were poised to start school for the first time never got the chance to learn these skills in the first place, as early childhood education disappeared in most countries, she said.

Without urgent remedial action, she cautioned that this could carry serious lifelong consequences in terms of health and well-being, future learning and employment as this group reaches adulthood.

With the pandemic entering its third year, 23 countries - home to around 405 million schoolchildren - are yet to fully reopen their schools.

Meanwhile, in Thailand, a survey by the National Statistical Office in 2020 revealed that more than half of Thai families are not ready to educate their offspring at home, as 51% of them lacked the equipment, 26% did not even have internet access, and 40% of parents did not have time to assist their children with participating in the online classes.

In order to mitigate this problem, the Representative for Unicef Thailand Kyungsun Kim said it has been working with the Ministry of Education and allied agencies to reverse this worrying trend.
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Hundreds march for Ukraine in Old Port

Amanda Polese / By Amanda Polese The Suburban Demonstrators in front of Notre-Dame Basilica

Hundreds marched through the Old Port of Montreal in solidarity with Ukraine on Saturday.

About 200 demonstrators walked from Place Jacques Cartier to Notre-Dame Basilica where they said a prayer for the victims of the war and played music. Supporters carried Ukrainian flags and posters calling for an end to the ongoing conflict.

Several volunteers were also collecting donations to provide medical supplies for those fighting in the war. We are working with a lot of small organizations and churches. All Ukrainians are getting together to collect donations and send humanitarian aid, volunteer Victoria told The Suburban. So much help is needed. Organizations are finding their focus and doing what they can. We all are working together for the same cause and thats the most important.

Several Ukrainian churches in Montreal have been sending supplies overseas and collecting donations in preparation for the arrival of refugees over the last month.

Over four million people have fled Ukraine since the start of Russias invasion, many leaving their families behind.
Mariupol's dead put at 5,000 as Ukraine braces in the east

The mayor of the besieged port city of Mariupol has put the number of civilians killed there at more than 5,000
New library director looks to expand offerings at Boyden, make it center of community activity
SPRINGFIELD  Legislation is headed to Gov. J.B. Pritzker giving local control to Illinois nursing homes for visitation policies.

Sponsors of Senate Bill 1405, which passed the Illinois House on Monday, say the legislation is intended to protect nursing home residents from visitation restrictions in the event of disaster proclamations such as those made by the state during the pandemic.

Illinois nursing homes recorded more than 77,000 cases and 10,000 deaths.

State Rep. Charles Meier, R-Okawville, said family members should be allowed to be present for a loved one's final moments.

To hold their hand, to say that final good-bye  that is what this bill is about, Meier said.

It is not about fighting the governors power," Meier said. "It is so that these families can have their loved ones die with dignity.

State Rep. Carol Ammons, D-Champaign, said the governor should be allowed to outlaw visits.

The governor has to have the ability and the authority to make the decisions that are in the best interest of all the people of the state, and in this case this will usurp that authority, Ammons said.

The bill would not impact guidelines, conditions or limitations of a facilitys visitation policy.

Legislation was introduced last year that would have required nursing homes to provide video conferencing equipment for virtual visits. Nursing homes raised concerns about the costs of buying the assistive technology, as well the training and devoting staff to help residents with Zoom calls and other communication.

The bills House sponsor, state Rep. Chris Bos, R-Lake Zurich, said the state has to learn from mistakes made during the pandemic.

If we dont take the steps now moving forward to look back and make adjustments where we need to make adjustments like this bill so family members are not dying alone, shame on us, Bos said.
PARIS (AP)  French financial prosecutors have opened a preliminary investigation into suspected tax fraud by American management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

The national financial prosecutors office said Wednesday the investigation was launched last week for alleged money-laundering aggravated by tax fraud.

French President Emmanuel Macron said he was shocked by the suspicions of tax evasion on the part of consulting firms. The response will be European, since we have passed a reform which will allow ... a minimum tax on these companies which do not pay it in the countries where they nevertheless make profits, he said, speaking on TF1 evening news Wednesday.

A report by the French Senate issued last month said McKinsey had not paid corporate profit taxes in the country since at least 2011. The report also questioned the governments use of private consultants.

The so-called McKinsey Affair has prompted criticism from President Emmanuel Macron's rivals and is dogging him at campaign stops ahead of the first round of voting in France's presidential election vote on Sunday.

The report of the Senate, where opposition conservatives hold a majority, found that state spending on consulting contracts doubled in the past three years despite mixed results and the potential for conflicts of interest.

Dozens of private companies have provided consulting, including giants like Ireland-based multinational Accenture and French group Capgemini.

The report alleged that McKinsey used a system of tax optimization through its Delaware-based parent company.

McKinsey issued a statement saying it respects French tax rules that apply to it and defending its work in France.

The American company was notably hired to advise the French government on its COVID-19 vaccination campaign and other policies.
Without the ability to track the chain of custody, law enforcement will have a much harder time solving gun crimes. Thats unacceptable at a time when gun violence is plaguing so many Illinois communities.

Self-built ghost guns are a growing threat to Illinois communities. Before the Legislature ends its abbreviated session on April 8, it should ban them.

Ghost guns are firearms purchasers assemble themselves without serial numbers, making them easy to obtain and hard to trace. Some are printed on 3-D printers and include no metal, allowing owners to carry them through metal detectors undetected.

Its just too easy, and too life-threatening.

Ghost gun assembly is typically simple  the guns are shipped disassembled just enough to get around the law  and the resulting firearms are well-made. They look and operate just like traditional guns, whether they are handguns or assault weapons. And they are every bit as deadly.

Gun manufacturers and importers are required to put on guns serial numbers and markings that identify manufacturer or importer, make, model and caliber. If a gun has been recovered at a crime scene, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can trace it to the person who originally bought it. Although the original purchaser might no longer own the gun, it helps the ATF and law enforcement agencies track the guns,possibly all the way to the person who used it in a crime. In 2017, the ATF traced more than 408,000 firearms.

Its an important way to track down gun criminals.

Without the ability to track the chain of custody, law enforcement will have a much harder time solving gun crimes. Thats unacceptable at a time when gun violence is plaguing so many Illinois communities.

Even individuals who are barred from buying guns can order an easy-to-assemble ghost gun online, using nothing more than a shipping address and payment information, or they can print a less durable one with a 3-D printer. The Giffords Law Center says a 3-D printed assault rifle can fire over 600 rounds, three times the number fired in Floridas 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, which left 49 dead and 53 wounded. The code for printing up a gun is posted on the internet.

Because there is no limit on how many ghost guns an individual can buy, they can be assembled in mass and sold to others, including criminals. Ownership can be passed from one person to another without a trace.

Young people can order them on a phone without needing an Illinois Firearm Owners Identification Card. That means there is no need for a background check. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence says ghost guns are intentionally marketed to people who want to avoid background checks or who are gun traffickers.

Police say ghost guns are a growing problem. In 2019, law enforcement agencies recovered 10,000 ghost guns nationwide.

Ghost guns also are becoming the weapons of choice for domestic terrorists, gun safety activists say. Criminals who turn to ghost guns can get around the entire system of federal and state gun laws,

On the federal level, President Joe Biden has announced an executive order to regulate ghost guns. Public comment ended in August, but the rule-making process is dragging along slowly, and even when the rule is finally in place, it can be undone by a future president.

Illinois should not sit by in the face of a new deadly threat. Its time to send ghost guns on a one-way trip to the graveyard.
GLEN CARBON  De-escalation training recently was held at the Glen Carbon Police Department.

Last year Glen Carbon Police Department Sgt. Justin Click and Detective Ross Tyler attended a certified Realistic De-Escalation Instructor Course through the Force Science Institute. The two have developed lesson plans, for both classroom and scenario based instruction, on de-escalation techniques which have been recognized by the Illinois Training and Standards Board as certified training for police officers.

On March 29-30, Click and Tyler used the former Busey Bank building in Glen Carbon to present officers with several scenarios, referred to as simmunitions training using firearms that look and feel like actual firearms but use paint pellets to simulate gunfire.

The officers role played several situations that occur in a bank setting, including:

 An irate customer screaming at a bank employee who pulls out a knife;

 A burglary by two subjects late at night who hide when officers arrive; and

 A bank robbery where the suspect takes an employee hostage.

Officers were trained on how to de-escalate potentially life-threatening situations using techniques from the Force Science training. They also learned the correct level of force to use for a legal arrest. The training was video taped so officers can later review the training and use it to learn and improve tactics.
EDWARDSVILLE  A Highland man faces multiple counts of child pornography.

The charges were filed March 25 by the Madison County States Attorneys Office, but sealed until April 5.

William L. Gartee, 52, of Highland, was charged with five counts of child pornography, all Class 2 felonies.

The case was presented by the Highland Police Department.

According to court documents, on April 12, 2021, Gartee allegedly had numerous images of prepubescent girls under 13 engaging in sex acts. Bail was set at $100,000.

In an unrelated case, Marquis J. Higgins, 30, of Granite City, was charged April 5 with unlawful failure to register as a sex offender, a Class 3 felony.

The case was presented by the Granite City Police Department.

According to court documents, between Jan. 12 and March 31, Higgins allegedly failed to register with the Granite City Police Department.

Bail was set at $30,000.

Other felony charges filed April 5 include:

 David R. Elliott, 39, of Collinsville, was charged with aggravated domestic battery, a Class 2 felony; and interfering with the report of a domestic battery, a Class A misdemeanor. The case was presented by the Madison County Sheriffs Department. According to court documents, on April 3 Elliott allegedly strangled a household or family member and kept the victim from calling 911. Bail was set at $50,000.

 Paul A. Stroud,51, of Glen Carbon, was charged with criminal trespass to a residence, a Class 4 felony. The case was presented by the Glen Carbon Police Department. On April 4 Stroud allegedly entered a residence in Glen Carbon, knowing the resident was there. Bail was set at $50,000.

 Jayden L. Burklow, 18, of OFallon, Illinois, was charged with aggravated fleeing or attempting to elude a police officer, a Class 4 felony. The case was presented by the Madison County Sheriffs Department. On April 2 Burklow allegedly was driving a 2007 Acura passenger vehicle when he tried to flee from a sheriffs deputy, reaching speeds in excess of 21 miles above the posted speed limit. Bail was set at $30,000.
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JERSEYVILLE  City officials have contracted with PGAV Planners for its downtown master plan.

Last year Jerseyville began turning a community-shared vision into priorities and plans to revitalize the citys historic downtown. The goal is to reimagine and re-energize Jerseyvilles downtown as a vibrant, family- and pedestrian-friendly, inclusive and welcoming regional destination for shopping, dining, entertainment, and cultural experiences.

Based in St. Louis, PGAV Planners provides urban planning, financial development analysis, economic development planning and municipal advising.

Jerseyville City Council members on Tuesday unanimously approved the initial draft of a master plan proposed by PGAV for a reimagined Historic City Center District.

The district has its commercial center stretching along State Street/U.S. 67. It's generally bordered by Liberty and Jefferson streets to its west and east, Carpenter Street/Illinois 16 to the south, and Mulberry Street to the north. It includes the Jersey County Courthouse, the First Baptist Church and the Jerseyville (Carnegie) Public Library. It also pushes slightly north past Mulberry Street to include the Cheney Mansion, home to the Jersey County Historical Society.

Kevin Stork, Jerseyvilles Commissioner of Accounts and Finance, said the plan helps define a vision that is "fluid and continually adapting.

"It lays a groundwork for the city moving forward," he said. "With this plan, we are trying to create and identify as many opportunities for our citizens as we can, both in terms of quality of life and in livelihood. Things to do for them and their family, jobs, and entrepreneurship opportunities are all a part of it.

The plan identifies 15 themes, including landscape design, connectivity and walkability, activated alleys, pedestrian amenities, public parking, civic branding, wayfinding, public art and connectivity, public art and history, explore-play-learn, outdoor dining and patios, outdoor lighting, technology, land use and development, and economic development.

Some work has already begun, such as City Center Park, downtown parking and greenspace. More improvements will come as the city moves through the three phases proposed in the master plan, he said.

He noted the city's recently begun facade improvement grant program for businesses that helped restore and renovate the marquee at Stadium Theater.

The facade improvement grant program can help a business become accessible from both sides as well, he said. An example of this is with TCAD [Tonsor Custom Awards & Decal] and Linns Shoes. With its redesign and improvement, shoppers can now access TCAD from its alleyway rear entrance of the same building that houses Linns Shoes and its State Street entrance.

"Were also planning to develop the alleyways that run behind the commercial buildings along State Street," he said. "We want to encourage businesses to look at ways to improve the design of their backside facade that can also provide public entrances to their buildings from the alley side. We are looking for ways to make access to these establishments easier for downtown visitors walking from city parking areas to destinations throughout the district.

Stork said ayfinding signage has also begun popping up to help guide visitors in Jerseyvilles City Center District. Lighted kiosks are a part of guiding visitors as well, as is the recently launched Explore Jerseyville mobile app. He added that banners, street lighting, canopies and a consistently identifiable look will provide a positive welcome while recognizing Jerseyvilles historic past.

More greenspace and major improvements to the citys existing parks, along with expanding parking, are also part of the proposed plan, as are infrastructure improvements throughout the district.

I think its important to note that new and expanding parking will help alleviate the traffic congestion we already experience in Jerseyville, said Stork. It will help greatly, offering safer options for visitors to downtown, and potentially re-routing traffic patterns from the main route through the district to a block or so over.

Stork said no increase in property taxes is being considered as part of the effort.

We are looking instead at grant opportunities primarily, and investments from the private sector. And at some point, we may look at implementing a sales tax that would specifically support the plans projects and vision," he said. "If a sales tax is implemented, it would be paid on each purchase made, by everyone and not only by Jerseyville residents.

For more information contact Shari Albrecht, JEDC Partners in Progress executive director, at 217-556-8696 or visit jedc-il.us online.
EDWARDSVILLE  A Madison man faces several drug, DUI and weapons charges after an April 3 incident in Collinsville.

Jerron J. Foster, 20, of Madison, was charged April 4 with unlawful possession of cannabis with intent to deliver, a Class 3 felony; aggravated unlawful use of weapons, a Class 4 felony; and DUI, a Class A misdemeanor.

The case was presented by the Collinsville Police Department.

According to court documents, on April 3 Foster allegedly was found to be in possession of more than 30 grams of cannabis with intent to deliver; was carrying a loaded and accessible Smith & Wesson M&P .40 caliber handgun in a vehicle without a valid Firearm Owners Identification Card or concealed carry permit; and was driving a Nissan passenger car while under the influence of alcohol.

Bail was set at $45,000.

Other drug-related felony charges filed April 4 include:

 Marvin Moore III, 33, of East St. Louis, was charged with unlawful possession of a controlled substance, a Class 1 felony. The case was presented by the Metropolitan Enforcement Group of Southwestern Illinois. According to court documents, on April 1 Moore allegedly had more than 15 grams of cocaine. Bail was set at $100,000.

 Eron B. Edwards, 46, of Granite City, was charged with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Granite City Police Department. On April 3 Edwards allegedly had 5-15 grams of methamphetamine. Bail was set at $45,000.

 Tony O. Whitehead, 45, of Granite City, was charged with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony; and driving while license revoked, a Class 4 felony. The case was presented by the Granite City Police Department. On April 3 Whitehead allegedly had less than five grams of methamphetamine and was driving a 2012 Ford Escape at the intersection of Leonard and Myrtle avenues, Granite City, with a revoked drivers license. It was noted his license was revoked due to a conviction for DUI in 2000; and he has prior convictions for driving while license revoked in 2001, 2007 and 2011. Bail was set at $30,000.

 Ashley J. Feazel, 30, of Cottage Hills, was charged with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Madison County Sheriffs Department. According to court documents, on April 2 Feazel allegedly had less than five grams of methamphetamine. Bail was set at $30,000.

 Andrianna Argyropoulos, 37, of Alton, was charged with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Madison County Sheriffs Department. According to court documents, on April 3 Argyropoulos allegedly had less than five grams of methamphetamine. Bail was set at $30,000.

 Bruce A. Snyder, 61, of Granite City, was charged with unlawful possession of a controlled substance, a Class 3 felony, and driving while license revoked, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Granite City Police Department. On April 3 Snyder allegedly had less than 15 grams of alprazolam and was driving a Chevrolet S10 pickup on Veterans Parkway and State Street in Granite City with a revoked drivers license. It was noted his license was revoked due to a 1991 conviction for DUI; and he has prior convictions for driving while license revoked in 1992, 1993, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2005, 2009 and 2011. Bail was set at $30,000.
A record 1.7 million illegal aliens had encounters with our courageous border patrol agents in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2021. In addition, the number of known gotaways has exceeded 2,000 per day in recent months, plus many more who evade detection.

Amid this crisis, Biden opens the floodgates further to double or triple the influx by terminating Title 42 policy.

Section 265 of Title 42 of the United States Code authorizes the federal government to exclude persons at the border whose admission would endanger the public health from a communicable disease.

Last Friday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced the use of this law to stem illegal immigration would end May 23. That throws our border wide open.

Senseless liberal logic welcomes Covid-infected illegal aliens while imposing burdensome vaccination requirements on Americans and those who enter our country lawfully. When asked about this contradiction, Bidens press secretary Jen Psaki responded last year that the illegals do not intend to remain here for a long time.

They certainly do plan to stay, and consume billions of dollars in benefits while they are here. The strain of Ukrainian refugees on Europe dominates the media, while it ignores similar hordes of illegals here.

In the last month alone, our border agents had 165,000 encounters with illegal aliens. Many additional illegals are never caught.

The numbers this year are far higher than the record-breaking totals of last year. Democrats see a new voter for their side in every new illegal alien, no matter how much harm that causes to the United States.

The illegal drugs they bring into our country are enough to kill every single American. These drugs include 634 pounds of lethal fentanyl and 12,500 pounds of life-threatening methamphetamine that were seized in February alone.

To put this in perspective, merely one kilogram of fentanyl amounts to 500,000 lethal doses. The monthly seizure at our border of fentanyl exceeded 100 million fatal doses, while far more probably slipped through.

Biden, wanting future Democrat voters, vastly increases the border crossings by allowing the Title 42 restrictions to expire. A thousand miles from our southern border, even Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is shocked, calling this a frightening decision.

Title 42 has been an essential tool in combating the spread of COVID-19 and controlling the influx of migrants at our southern border, saidManchin. We are already facing an unprecedented increase in migrants this year, and that will only get worse if the administration ends the Title 42 policy.

Arizonas Democrat senators are complaining too. Todays decision to announce an end to Title 42 despite not yet having a comprehensive plan ready shows a lack of understanding about the crisis at our border, Kyrsten Sinema SAID.

To make room for this massive increase, Biden ordered ICE to dismiss up to 700,000 or 40% of the 1,700,000 cases that are pending for deportation orders by immigration courts. This means nearly a million will get a free ticket to stay and collect benefits here.

Already Bidens Justice Department is refusing to honor a judges order to reinstate A border policy which required all illegal migrants to remain in Mexico until their claims for asylum are heard. That case, Biden v. Texas, will be argued in the Supreme Court on April 26.

ABC News reports that DHS has prepared a 16-page strategic plan that includes frightening projections for post-Title 42 southwest border encounters. Based on these projections, the document says, the newly established Southwest Border Coordination Center is currently planning for 6,000, 12,000 (high) and 18,000 (very high) encounters per day.

Let those numbers sink in.

18,000 per day is more than 500,000 per month, and more than 6 million per year.

The flood of people crossing our southern border is not some natural disaster beyond anyones control. The reality, as stated by U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), is that This is deliberate, this is intentional.

It is intentional, to replenish the shrinking number of liberal voters.
ANDERSON, S.C. (AP)  A former employee shot and wounded two workers at an industrial plant in South Carolina before taking his own life, authorities said.

The shooting occurred about 10:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Fraenkische plant in Anderson County. Two people were wounded, and one remained on life support Wednesday, investigators said.
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SPRINGFIELD  The Illinois State Fire Marshal has awarded $2.5 million in grant money to 104 fire departments and districts, with each department receiving a maximum of $26,000 for purchasing small firefighting and ambulance equipment.

The allocated money comes from the 2022 Small Equipment Grant Program which was established to fix fire departments and not-for-profit ambulance services across Illinois who have issues raising necessary revenue for small, and essential equipment.
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WASHINGTON (AP)  Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned a House panel Wednesday that Russias aggression in Eastern Europe will have enormous economic repercussions in Ukraine and beyond. She added that the rising price of energy, metal, wheat and corn that Russia and Ukraine produce "is going to escalate inflationary pressures as well.

Russias invasion including the atrocities committed against innocent Ukrainians in Bucha, are reprehensible, represent an unacceptable affront to the rules-based global order, and will have enormous economic repercussions for the world," she told the House Financial Services Committee.

Her remarks were part of her annual testimony on the state of the international financial system.

Along with touching on the need for food and energy security and debt sustainability globally, Yellen called on Congress to provide support to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank organizations, which have provided grants and humanitarian funds financing to the worlds poorest and most vulnerable.

Globally, she said, spillovers from the crisis are heightening economic vulnerabilities in many countries that are already facing higher debt burdens and limited policy options as they recover from COVID-19.

The sanctions weve placed on Russia are pushing up the price of energy. Its a price thats important to pay to punish Russia for what its doing in Ukraine, she added, drawing on how the conflict is impacting Americans at home.

Inflation has reached 40-year highs as an inflation metric closely monitored by the Federal Reserve jumped 6.4% in February compared with a year ago, the largest year-over-year rise since January 1982.

The United States and Western allies have imposed an avalanche of sanctions against Russia in the first weeks of the war and administration officials in recent days have put more focus on closing loopholes that Russia might try to use to circumvent them.

On Wednesday morning, the U.S. announced more sanctions, this time targeting Russian President Vladimir Putins two adult daughters and toughening penalties against Russian banks in retaliation for war crimes in Ukraine.

Treasury is committed to holding Russia accountable for its actions so it cannot benefit from the international financial system, Yellen said.

Lawmakers also questioned Yellen on China and the threat of an invasion of Taiwan as the U.S. and its allies continue to impose sanctions on Russia. She said the U.S. is prepared to impose sanctions against China if Beijing moves aggressively toward Taiwan, as some fear it might.

I believe we've shown that we can in the case of Russia, she said. I think you should not doubt our ability to resolve to do the same in other situations.

She was also asked about Russia's involvement in the G-20 summit, which is set to take place in Indonesia later this year.

The Indonesian government has said it would hold the G-20 Summit impartially, resisting calls to exclude Russia.

Ive made clear to my colleagues in Indonesia that we will not be participating in a number of meetings at the annual summit where Russia would be involved, Yellen said.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki clarified later in the day that Yellen was referring to ministerial-level meetings and that the U.S. would not boycott the summit in its entirety.

It shouldnt be business as usual, she said.

President Joe Biden has said he would like to kick Russia out of the G-20.
IVY GOODMAN, Stonington, Girls, Lacrosse, Senior; Goodman scored 12 goals and had 13 assists in three games. Her seven assists in the Bears win over Waterford established a school record. She surpassed the 50-goal mark for the season in Stoningtons victory over Ledyard.

DEAN PONS JR., Westerly, Baseball, Senior; Pons, a senior, struck out 14 batters in the Bulldogs five-inning win against Wheeler School/Rocky Hill. Pons had an assist on the remaining out, throwing out a runner on a groundout. Pons allowed just one hit and walked only two.

KATIE PIERCE, Wheeler, Girls, Lacrosse, Sophomore; Pierce scored five goals and the Lions beat Griswold to earn their first victory of the season. Wheeler avenged an earlier loss to the Wolverines this season with the 15-4 victory.

WEEKO THOMPSON, Chariho, Girls, Track Sophomore; Thompson, a sophomore, bettered her school record in the discus at the Classical Classic meet. She finished first in the event and also won the shot put.

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For three decades, Jennifer had a high-flying career in banking, working in the City of London for the Royal Bank of Scotland.

But now, in her 70s and living with dementia, the bank she dedicated her working life to has abandoned her after she was repeatedly targeted by fraudsters.

Scammers conned Jennifer four times over six years, tricking her into trying to make payments of almost 50,000.

But RBS has blamed the pensioner, who once worked as chief cashier for the bank, for falling for the intimidating scams.

Special family: Jennifer on a day out at the seaside with her great-nephews and great-niece

It said there was 'no evidence' she was vulnerable when she lost 28,000 in 2017, just two years before her diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease was confirmed.

Instead, it claims she is at fault because she should have heeded warning messages on its website and mobile app  despite the fact she has never banked online.

Jennifer, whose full name Money Mail is not publishing to protect her identity, is just one of thousands of vulnerable customers who have missed out because they were conned before their banks signed up to a voluntary code agreeing to refund blameless scam victims.

The code, which launched in 2019, applies to authorised push payment (APP) fraud. These are sophisticated scams where criminals trick customers into transferring money, often by posing as legitimate companies, government officials or the police.

Incidents of this type of fraud are growing at an alarming rate.

Britons lost close to a record-breaking half a billion pounds to APP scammers in 2020, and cases rose by 71 per cent in the first half of 2021, according to trade body UK Finance.

While most major banks are now signed up to the code, the definition of 'at fault' is open to interpretation and there is wide variation in how often they pay out.

Most also refuse to pay for incidents that took place before 2019. Jennifer, who volunteered at a children's hospital for several years after taking early retirement from banking at 55, lives alone but is close to her sister and her extended family.

She first fell victim to scammers in December 2015 and was tricked into transferring 12,000.

Fortunately, although she tried twice to make the payments, they were automatically rejected by her bank. But this didn't stop her from falling victim again in August 2017.

This time, criminals posing as Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) officials called Jennifer and told her she needed to pay fines to prevent her family from being taken to court. Terrifyingly, they then knocked on the door of her home in West London.

'They physically took her to the bank and she took out the money,' says her niece, Lianne Owen, 46. 'It's absolutely horrifying.'

Scared about what would happen if she didn't pay, Jennifer gave 19,000 to the criminals and two days later made another payment of 9,000 via telephone banking.

It was only when she called her sister asking for more money that her family realised something was seriously wrong.

On the rise: Britons lost close to half a billion pounds to authorised push payment scammers in 2020, and cases rose by 71% in the first half of 2021, according to trade body UK Finance

'My aunt had never had financial problems. It was very strange for her to be asking for money out of the blue,' says Lianne. 'It turned out the fraudsters had told her everyone in her family would go to prison if she didn't pay or if she told anyone.'

The police were called and spoke to the bank but the money was never traced. Then, in May last year, Jennifer was targeted again.

This time, cynical fraudsters claimed they could get her money back from the previous scam if she paid them to help. She transferred 9,500 to the scammers via telephone banking.

Then, when she tried to make another payment in branch of 9,000 a few days later, staff called police and the transaction was stopped.

But it was only after Lianne  who now has power of attorney over her aunt's finances  contacted RBS this January that it agreed to refund the 9,500 Jennifer lost in May. And it has flatly refused to refund the 28,000 she lost previously.

Instead, it has accused Jennifer of failing to 'verify the validity of the caller' and said she should have known there was no reason for the genuine CPS to make such a call as there are 'plenty of warnings online' about such scams.

In a letter refusing the refund, RBS cited a warning message which has been on its online banking systems since March 2018  seven months after Jennifer was scammed  and said it issues plenty of additional warnings through its website and app.

It didn't acknowledge that Jennifer has never used the internet for banking.

Lianne believes the bank should have spotted the payments were unusual because they were for large sums, while Jennifer's typical spending was regular small payments on groceries and standing orders to charities.

'She has lost so much money and the bank just let it happen again and again,' she says. 'She didn't do anything wrong. She was targeted by criminals. The bank knew she was vulnerable. I can't believe they weren't proactive in any way and did nothing at all to protect her.'

The family have taken measures to protect Jennifer, including limiting which phone numbers can call her and putting a daily payment limit on her bank account.

RBS says it had prevented the 2015 fraud payments and refunded the 2021 one, but that when branch staff questioned Jennifer about the 2017 payments, she had insisted on taking out the money. There is now a flag on her account, meaning a manager will check future transactions.

A spokesman says: '[Jennifer] has been the victim of a horrific criminal whereby she was manipulated into misleading the bank as to the nature of payments she was making from her account.

'In situations like these, we do everything we can to spot and prevent this sort of scam . . . At no time were we advised of any customer vulnerability and so could not prevent these payments from being made by [her].'

moneymail@dailymail.co.uk
Scam victims who receive a penny of interest on their fake investments are being denied refunds by banks which refuse to consider it fraud.

Instead, they argue the matter is a civil dispute which is not covered by a voluntary scam reimbursement code. This promises to refund those tricked into making bank transfers to fraudsters, often posing as legitimate firms.

Money Mail has also heard of instances where police have refused to investigate scams on the same grounds.

Excuses: Banks are arguing that fake investment schemes are not covered by a voluntary scam reimbursement code

Under the code, an authorised push-payment scam is defined as when the customer transferred funds to another person for what they believed were legitimate purposes but which were, in fact, fraudulent.

This could include sending money for non-existent investments or goods that are never delivered.

The code does not apply to private civil disputes, such as where a customer has paid a legitimate supplier for goods, services or digital content but has not received them, they are defective in some way, or the customer is otherwise dissatisfied with the supplier.

Anti-fraud campaigner Mark Taber says: Banks often try to fob off victims by claiming the case is a civil dispute rather than a scam.

But most investment frauds operate as Ponzi schemes to some extent, whereby some of the funds taken from later victims are used to pay interest or dividends to earlier victims so they do not realise they have been scammed and report it.

He admits it is a grey area and banks will take their own approach.

The Financial Ombudsman Service says it sees cases where banks incorrectly classify scams as civil disputes.

Richard Emery, of 4Keys International, says: Banks are clearly acting in their own interests rather than their customers.

a.murray@dailymail.co.uk
Enough is enough. For months, Money Mail has been calling on energy giants to urgently improve their pitiful customer service.

Yet in households' hour of need last week, when the price cap hike finally hit home, major suppliers performed abysmally.

Was it really so surprising their helplines were flooded with panicked calls? Or that websites had record visitors as customers frantically tried to log meter readings? Of course not. It was inevitable.

Ill-prepared: In households' hour of need last week, when the price cap hike finally hit home, major energy suppliers performed abysmally

So why on earth weren't suppliers prepared? It's time they got a grip. Suppliers cannot hike direct debits to unaffordable levels with little or no explanation and expect households to just pay up.

Particularly not when many are still waiting for substantial credit refunds from collapsed suppliers.

Energy bills have always been confusing. Not least because there are two charges  one for each unit of power used and a second to cover connection costs, known as the standing charge.

Previously, many customers paid little attention to the ins and outs of how their bill was calculated. But now that every extra pound counts, they want answers.

Watchdog Ofgem needs to awaken from its deep slumber at the wheel and force firms to be transparent.

Had it been paying attention sooner, customers would not have been landed with a multi-billion pound bill for dozens of failed providers.

We have been warned repeatedly that this month's price rise is only the beginning, with more bill pain expected in the autumn. Suppliers must earn back their customers' trust before then.

Goodbye Tony

Today Money Mail marks the end of an era with the departure of our esteemed letters editor and consumer champion Tony Hazell.

For years Tony has tirelessly fought your corner against Britain's biggest businesses. His wealth of knowledge, experience and devilishly sharp wit has left more than one chief executive shaking in their boots.

But for ordinary people so often ignored by those at the top, he has been their hero: fair, tenacious in his quest for justice and a true advocate for our readers.

We will all miss him enormously  though I have a sneaking suspicion it won't be long until a colossal failing in the financial world riles him enough to return as a guest star.

Farewell: Letters editor and consumer champion Tony Hazell is riding off into the sunset after 32 years helping readers with their money problems

In the meantime, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Sally Hamilton, who will take over as consumer champion next week.

Sally has more than 25 years of personal finance experience and is already hard at work behind the scenes tackling your problems.

Any letters recently sent to Tony will be passed to her but in future please email sally@dailymail.co.uk or write to Sally Hamilton, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London, W8 5TT.

Heart of gold

Money Mail readers truly have hearts of gold. In our cost-of-living crisis special last week we featured harrowing calls to Independent Age's helpline for the elderly.

In one, a Parkinson's sufferer said her living expenses have risen by so much she cannot afford the shoes she needs for her condition and is in a great amount of pain.

Reader Lesley Williamson asked if she could donate towards the shoes. Thank you for your kind offer  we have forwarded your contact details to the charity.

Cheque mate?

While on holiday last month I finally had time to read the Thursday Murder Club sequel, The Man who Died Twice. It was a brilliant read but one part almost made me choke on my pina colada.

The character Joyce was collecting money for charity and a man tried to pay by cheque. 'A cheque book! Even I don't use cheques any more, and I'm 77,' she remarked.

Is this a true reflection of how older people feel about cheques? Or have banking giants infiltrated popular fiction to push their online agenda? I'd love to hear how often our readers still use cheques. Write to me at the email address below.

v.bischoff@dailymail.co.uk
Bus and train operator Go-Ahead is planning to reinstate dividends in the latest sign of its post-pandemic recovery.

The company is also vowing to increase profits as it bids to overhaul much of its strategy following a group-wide business review.

Shares in the company, down 60 per cent since the pandemic struck, rose 2.3 per cent, or 19p, to 861p.

Bouncing back: Go-Ahead is vowing to increase profits as it bids to overhaul much of its strategy following a group-wide business review

Go-Ahead has committed to returning to its pre-pandemic shareholder dividend policy from 2021-22 by offering at least 50p a share for the year to July 2.

And it aims to increase annual revenues by about 30 per cent to 4billion and operating profits to at least 150million in the medium term.

But topping a series of problems is removing the stain of the Southeastern rail franchise scandal.

It will not be easy to brush off. Southeastern, whose services run between London, Kent and East Sussex, is operated by Govia, a joint venture between transport operators Go-Ahead and Keolis.

Last October the Government seized the franchise from Govia over disclosure failings regarding more than 25million of taxpayer funding since 2014 that should have been returned.

This was in addition to 64million the Department for Transport is recovering from Govia in relation to the breach of its franchise and other costs.

Go-Aheads shares were suspended by the London Stock Exchange following the saga which caused a lengthy delay to its 2020-21 results.

And Govia was fined 23.5million over the scandal.

Stock Watch - Osirium Technologies Cybersecurity firm Osirium Technologies surged after enjoying record bookings. The company, which has been AIM-listed since 2016, said its Privileged Security capabilities were in demand while customer wins continued to be strong in the NHS and higher education. There was a return to pre-pandemic contract values, with five secured in the first three months of the 2022 financial year, each for more than any deal in 2021. It rose 102.4 per cent, or 6.53p, to 12.9p.

Steve Clayton, a fund manager at Hargreaves Lansdown, said that shareholders will be looking for consistency after recent poor execution.

The FTSE 100 rose 0.72 per cent, or 54.80 points, to 7613.72 while the FTSE 250 was up 0.13 per cent, or 27.09 points, to 21356.98.

The London Stock Exchange Group rose 2.7 per cent, or 220p, to 8360p after it agreed to buy the identity verification data company Global Data Consortium for an undisclosed fee.

One of the blue-chip indexs biggest risers was the National Grid  up 3.6 per cent, or 42p, to 1211p  while United Utilities rose 3.5 per cent, or 39p, to 1166p.

Also making a strong showing yesterday were the online review platform Trustpilot (up 3.3 per cent, or 4.8p, to 148.3p), cruise company Carnival (up 4.1 per cent, or 55p, to 1396.5p) and Baltic Classifieds (up 5.7 per cent, or 8.4p, to 155p).

But Cambridge cyber security firm Darktrace plunged 5.9 per cent, or 26.4p, to 424.6p after JP Morgan dished out an underweight rating, saying that higher customer acquisition and retention costs are likely to prove challenging. Homeserve was up 1.1 per cent, or 9.5p, to 874.5p after it hailed very good progress in the 12 months to the end of March.

Ahead of full-year figures next month, the repairs firm said it retained 84 per cent of its customers last year and results would be in line with expectations.

Last month Homeserve became the target of a potential takeover after Canadian asset manager Brookfield said it was considering a possible offer.

Brookfield has until April 21 to state if it will make a formal offer.

Online card retailer Moonpig cashed in on a successful Mothers Day and strong demand over the winter, and upgraded its revenue expectations for the year to April 30 to around 300million. Moonpig had previously predicted revenues of about 285million.

It said trading was better than previously forecast on the back of temporary changes in customer behaviour in late December and January, amid the rapid spread of Omicron.

The stock fell by 4.7 per cent, or 11.2p, to 226.8p.
The Bank of England spent over 50,000 on redesigning its logo, which was ridiculed for looking almost identical to its old one.

Responding to a freedom of information request from the Mail, the Bank said it paid three marketing firms and a photographer to work on the rebrand.

Threadneedle Street unveiled its new emblem last month, saying it was more inclusive.

The Bank of England has revealed it paid three marketing firms and one photographer to work on the redesign of its logo

It still features Britannia, the female warrior said to personify Britain, who has been the mascot since it was founded in 1694.

The main differences seemed to be that Britannias shield is now emblazoned with the Union Jack, rather than the Cross of St George and the pile of coins at her feet disappeared.

The Bank paid 6,720 for the design to Epic Icon, creator of the illustrated character for soft drink Irn Bru and the Premier League trophy icon.

It paid 14,809.27 to Lee Funnell, who took pictures for visual identity, and 7,728 to Red Sofa for animation guidelines and film.

The largest expenditure was changing the font which the Bank types its name in, from block capitals to a more rounded, lower-case version. This cost 22,337.22, paid to Monotype.
Billionaire Elon Musk has been given a seat on Twitter's board after becoming its biggest shareholder.

In a shock move, Twitter said he will become a director, giving him influence over strategy and direction  just a day after Musk revealed he has taken a 9.2 per cent stake.

Shares in Twitter rose 2 per cent in New York after soaring 27 per cent on Monday  the biggest one-day rise since its debut in 2013.

Buying in: Tesla boss Elon Musk is to become a director at Twitter after taking a 9.2% stake in the social media giant

Chief executive Parag Agrawal said: 'Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our board.

'He's both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service which is exactly what we need on Twitter to make us stronger in the long-term. Welcome Elon!'

Musk responded: 'Looking forward to working with Parag and Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!'

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, said he was 'really happy'. 'He cares deeply about our world and Twitter's role in it.

Parag and Elon both lead with their hearts, and they will be an incredible team.' Musk's investment followed his criticism of Twitter's approach to free speech last month, after he said he was giving serious thought' to building a social media platform.

His stake is considered a passive investment but analysts believe his ultimate aim is to buy the company outright despite agreeing not to acquire more than 15 per cent of Twitter while a company board director. His term ends in 2024.

Neil Wilson, analyst at Markets, said: 'No way is this passive. He is annoyed at the Twitter algorithms, the censorship and he wants to change it.

'He has built his stake and he'll make an offer in the next few years. He did the same thing with Tesla. He was not the founder.'

In the first sign that he plans to shake things up, Musk took to Twitter yesterday asking his 80million followers, 'Do you want an edit button?'

Many users feel such a function is overdue to prevent some of the hateful content. But Twitter has been resistant, defending its libertarian commitment to free speech.

Adding an edit button could mirror Facebook's initial rollout, giving users a window of a few seconds in which to change a message and remove misspelled words.

Wilson added: 'Twitter has always been reluctant to do this. The next move after an edit button would be hiring an army of editors to monitor the platform.

'This would come at a huge cost.'

Danni Hewson, a financial analyst at AJ Bell, said: 'Once again Elon Musk was a hot topic of conversation. But there's maverick and then there's a loose cannon, and Twitter investors might be wondering exactly which Musk will be sitting at the table, how great will his influence be, and how closely will regulators be watching?'

Musk's history on the platform has been controversial and involved a battle with US regulators.

Having tweeted that Tesla had 'funding secured' to take it private, the regulator enforced a penalty and condition that a company lawyer approves Musk's Twitter messages about Tesla's finances.

A recent filing shows Musk is trying to overturn this ruling.
Elon Musk has wasted no time imposing himself on Twitter after becoming its largest shareholder.

A day after it emerged he had snapped up a 9.2 per cent stake for 2.2billion, he was yesterday appointed to the board where he will have influence over strategy and direction.

Musk is a maverick and no stranger to controversy, so the shake-up at the social media platform over the coming months will be dramatic.

Maverick: Tesla boss Elon Musk - who is the world's richest man - has had snapped up a 9.2% stake for 2.2bn

Twitter took the world by storm in 2006 but has since come under criticism for its Left-leaning politics and banning of political figures.

Bruce Daisley, a former Twitter vice-president, said: 'Twitter has underperformed in the last ten years on price compared with other tech stocks. It has left itself open.'

Yesterday, Musk flexed his muscles, asking his 80million followers to vote on whether there should be an edit button on the platform  much to the dismay of new Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal.

Almost three-quarters of the 3million-plus respondents voted 'yes', forcing Agrawal to tweet: 'The consequences of this poll will be important.

Please vote carefully.' An edit button would give users a few seconds in which to change a message  something Twitter has traditionally been against.

Agrawal welcomed Musk to the board but the two have history.

In December the entrepreneur compared the Twitter boss to the former Soviet Union dictator Joseph Stalin.

Analysts have speculated that Musk might replace him.

Russ Shaw, founder at Tech London Advocates, said: 'He'd need the backing of the board but his first move could be bringing in his own guy. What a statement that would be.'

Neil Wilson, of Markets, believes Agrawal, who was made chief executive in November, is in for a rough ride as Musk views himself as the de facto head of the company.

'What is clear is Musk already thinks he's running Twitter,' said Wilson. 'Agrawal is going to have to deal with this.'

Debate is raging about where Musk will take Twitter, and he has been fiercely critical of its approach to free speech  and even suggested setting up his own platform.

The view is that Musk wants to bring the site back to its early libertarian days. There are even suggestions Musk might look to lift the ban on Donald Trump, who was kicked off the platform following the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021.

Errol Webber, who is a Republican party candidate in California, tweeted: 'Time to get this platform back to its former glory.

Step one  bring back President Trump! Step two  give everyone who has been banned a second chance. Step three  end all forms of political and other censorship.'

Musk has described himself as 'half Democrat, half Republican'. He is seen by many observers as socially liberal but fiscally conservative, publicly smoking marijuana in 2018, and dancing at business events.

He has previously attacked Democrats such as Bernie Sanders over high tax policies on corporations and wealthy individuals. Last year Musk said he would be moving Tesla's headquarters from California to Texas, citing the lower tax regime.

He has donated to both the Republican and Democrat parties. Shaw said: 'He leans Right on many issues, especially on taxation. Twitter is centre-Left. But there'll be a lot of different political views among the top executives at Twitter.'

One thing is for sure  Musk will make his views known.

He is the largest investor with a 9.2 per cent stake, buying around 73.5million shares that have already jumped 800million in value to 3billion.

After joining the board, Musk agreed not to increase his stake past 15 per cent until 2024, but tech experts believe his aim is to own it outright.

Wilson said: He is annoyed at the Twitter algorithms, the censorship and he wants to change it. He'll make an offer in the next few years.'

Interestingly, similar to Trump, Musk has a love-hate relationship with Twitter. In 2020, he tweeted that 'pronouns suck'  a slight to non-binary and trans people who put their pronouns in their Twitter bio.

Musician Claire Boucher, better known as Grimes, who has two children with Musk, responded: 'I love you but please turn off ur phone. I cannot support hate. Please stop this. I know this isn't your heart.'

The pair have since split.

The South African-born father of seven is also locked in a legal battle to free himself from a deal he made with US regulators in 2018 and regain control over his tweets.

The agreement forces him to have his messages about Tesla pre-approved by a lawyer to avoid breaking rules around the disclosure of market sensitive information.

Musk had tweeted that he had secured funding to take Tesla private at 325 a share.

And in 2018 he called a British caver who helped rescue trapped Thai schoolboys a 'pedo guy'.

A US jury in 2019 found that Musk did not defame caver Vernon Unsworth.

How this all ends no one can predict, but the next few months are set to be quite a ride.

Dan Ives, analyst at Wedbush said: 'Now it's time to get out the popcorn and watch the developments over the coming months with Musk on the board.'
Events organiser Hyde Group is set to make a loss from selling its Russian business, which bosses are eager to offload amid fears of an impending boycott.

Hyve Group has agreed to offload its Russian subsidiary to Rise Expo, a company incorporated in the United Arab Emirates and owned by 'a German national with significant experience in the events industry.'

Three weeks ago the firm announced it would join countless other Western brands in exiting the Russian Federation, following the country's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February.

Return: Hyve Group revealed on Wednesday that the relaxation of coronavirus restrictions helped its first-half revenues skyrocket more than elevenfold from the same time last year

Under the terms of the transaction, Hyve could earn up to 72million from the disposal over a ten-year period, though this will be reduced to 60million should it be paid by September 2027.

The London-listed firm said it intends to use the proceeds to reduce its existing liabilities, yet the decision to sell the division is predicted to cause the group serious financial repercussions.

As well as a forecast loss from the deal, it will no longer control one of its most significant sources of income, with Russia contributing around half of its revenues in the last financial year.

Hyve has also hiked its net debt guidance for this year to between 80million and 100million, compared with a previous forecast of 70million to 90million.

Hyve stated that the decision to leave the country was difficult, but was taken following 'considered feedback from a number of the company's stakeholders, including several customers of the company's events outside of Russia'.

It added: 'These customers had expressed material concerns relating to any ongoing activities by the company in Russia, with an indication of boycotts of the company's Western events.'

Even so, the firm revealed in a separate trading update on Wednesday that the relaxation of coronavirus restrictions helped its first-half revenues skyrocket more than elevenfold from the same time last year.

Busier: Hyve Group said that most of its exhibitions had gone ahead at least once since the pandemic started and forecasts holding a much fuller calendar of events this year

For the six months to 31 March, Hyve reported revenues of around 75million, with approximately 17million deriving from Russia, and forward order bookings for the current fiscal year of 103million - excluding Russian and Ukrainian events.

The group said the overwhelming majority of its exhibitions had gone ahead at least once since the pandemic started and forecasts holding a much fuller calendar of events this year, except in China, where Covid-19 regulations remain tight.

Chief executive Mark Shashoua said: 'I am delighted to see Hyve return to a schedule of events comparable to pre-pandemic levels and I am highly encouraged by the pent-up demand we continue to see among our customer communities.

He added: 'While we have not taken the decision to exit the Russian market lightly, the sale of the Russian business does accelerate our strategy to focus on omnichannel products in developed geographies.

'Russia has been a legacy of the company since 1991 and this exit creates value for shareholders and some security for the teams who have served the company so well for over 30 years.'

After a slow start to the day, Hyve Group shares ended trading 8.2 per cent higher at 79.3p on Wednesday. However, the mass cancellation of events during the pandemic has meant their value has plunged by over 80 per cent in the last three years.
More than 20 billion of support cash is going begging every year because households are unaware of their entitlements to tax perks and benefits.

As the cost-of-living crisis reaches boiling point  with energy bills and food costs soaring  Money Mail today reveals how families can claw back some cash.

Government figures show that a wide range of benefits, including marriage allowance, child benefit and pension credit, all have chronically low take- up rates.

Unclaimed cash: Government figures show that a wide range of benefits, including marriage allowance, child benefit and pension credit, all have chronically low take- up rates

It means HMRC is left sitting on mountains of unclaimed money, while families continue to struggle with rising costs.

The shocking toll of unclaimed money includes more than 15 billion in benefits, according to advice site EntitledTo.co.uk. Now ministers are facing calls to better promote the benefits and perks which could prove vital to families.

Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokeswoman Wendy Chamberlain says: Millions of families are grappling with the cost-of-living crisis, so its shocking to find out that 20 billion of benefit is going unclaimed.

The very least ministers should be doing is ensuring people know what support they are able to access and how to claim it, so no one falls through the cracks.

Among benefits critically under-claimed is pension credit, which gives money to those over state pension age and on a low income.

In 2020, some 850,000 eligible households missed out on 1.7 billion  around 1,900 each.

Helen Morrissey, senior pensions and retirement analyst at broker Hargreaves Lansdown, says: These enormous sums could really boost peoples income in retirement, and it is vitally important that those who think they may be entitled to support check.

Morgan Vine, head of policy at charity Independent Age, adds: These figures clearly show that not enough has been done.

Another benefit going unused is the tax-free childcare scheme.

Earlier this year, Money Mail revealed how less than a quarter of those eligible benefited from the help, based on official figures from March 2021.

Here, Money Mail talks you through the free money you may have a claim to . . .

Extra pension cash: Unclaimed: 1.7 billion

First step: Signing up to pension credit acts as a gateway for help with council tax, NHS prescriptions, glasses and a free TV licence

You can claim pension credit if you are above state pension age and on a low income, with few savings.

If your weekly income is below 177.10  or 270.30 with a partner  pension credit will top it up to that amount.

Signing up acts as a gateway for help with council tax, NHS prescriptions, glasses and a free TV licence.

The Department for Work and Pensions this week launched a campaign to increase awareness and uptake.

Pensions minister Guy Opperman says: We recognise the challenges some pensioners will be facing with the cost of living, which is why promoting pension credit is a priority.

How to claim: Call 0800 991234 or go to gov.uk/pension-credit/ how-to-claim.

Income boost: Unclaimed: 9.53 billion

Universal Credit is a monthly payment made to those who are unemployed or on a low income.

The Government no longer releases official statistics of how many eligible people are failing to claim.

But analysts at benefits calculator site Entitled To estimate that 9.53 billion is going unclaimed every year.

You may be eligible if youre on a low income. You could be working (including self-employed or part-time) or be out-of-work.

To claim, you must live in the UK, be over 18 (some exceptions apply), be under state pension age and have less than 16,000 in savings.

How to claim: Ring 0800 328 5644 or visit gov.uk/universal-credit/ how-to-claim.

Marriage tax perk: Unclaimed: 509 million

Married couples are entitled to a tax break worth 252 a year if one of them earns below the personal allowance.

HMRC estimates 4.2 million couples are eligible for the perk  but figures suggest take-up is around half that, at two million.

Wedding gift: Married couples are entitled to a tax-break worth 252 a year if one of them earns below the personal allowance

The good news is that anyone who has missed out on the payments can backdate their claim to include any tax year since April 5, 2017.

You are eligible if you are married and do not pay income tax or earn less than the 12,570 personal allowance. Your partner must pay income tax at the basic rate.

How to claim: Visit gov.uk/apply-marriage-allowance or include as part of your self- assessment tax return.

Council tax cut: Unclaimed: 2.7 billion

You can reduce your council tax bill by up to 100 pc if you are on a low income or claim benefits. Entitled To says 2.7 million eligible families failed to claim in the most up-to-date figures.

Eligibility depends on where you live (each council has its own scheme) and your income, number of children, benefits and residency status.

You can apply if you own your home, rent and are unemployed or working.

How to claim: Apply via your local council.

Child cash: Unclaimed: 944 million

Child benefit gives parents earning less than 50,000 21.15 a week for a first child, and 14 a week each for any subsequent children.

Anybody responsible for bringing up a child under 16 (or 20 if they are in approved education or training) can claim 21.15 a week for their first child - or 14 a week for any child after that

Anyone responsible for bringing up a child under 16 (or 20 if they are in approved education or training) can claim.

Eligibility rules differ if your child goes into hospital or care, or lives with someone else.

How to claim: Call the Governments Child Benefit helpline on 0300 200 3100 or log on to gov. uk/child-benefit/ how-to-claim.

Care relief: Unclaimed: 2.8 billion

Tax-free childcare tops up 20p to every 80p parents spend on nannies and nurseries, giving a maximum of 2,000 a year per child, or 4,000 for a disabled child.

The perk is available for 1.7 million children under the age of 11 but fewer than 300,000 parents use the scheme, according to HMRC figures from last year.

To qualify, both parents must be in work, each earning at least 142 a week but no more than 100,000 a year.

How to claim: Call HMRC on 0300 123 4097 or visit gov.uk/ tax-free-childcare.

Grown-up funds: Unclaimed: 2.2 billion

Children born between September 1, 2002, and January 2, 2011, were automatically set up with a child trust fund.

Dormant accounts: Children born between September 1, 2002 and January 2, 2011 were automatically set up with a child trust fund

The first wave of funds started maturing in September 2020 but HMRC says many have still not been claimed.

There are estimated to be as many as a million lost accounts, each containing 2,200.

To track one down, visit gov. uk/child-trust-funds/find-a-child- trust-fund

Help with housing: Unclaimed: 1.1 billion

If you rent over the state pension age and are on a low income, you could receive housing benefit worth up to 4,000 a year.

Entitled To estimates 880 million went unclaimed in 2019/20, but Hargreaves Lansdown puts the figure at 1.1 billion.

You may be eligible if you pay rent, are on a low income or are claiming benefits, have savings or investments amounting to less than 16,000 and are over the state pension age.

Call the Governments pension service on 0800 99 1234 or visit gov.uk/housing-benefit/ how-to-claim.

h.kelly@dailymail.co.uk
Thirty-two years ago I bounced enthusiastically into the Money Mail office for the first time.

Thus began a journey which has encompassed campaigns, scandals, stock market crashes, bank failures and financial crises.

From day one I learned that your letters are at the heart of everything we do. Your support lends strength to our campaigns, your information reveals facts firms try to hide and your requests for help tell us where customer service and consumer protection are failing.

Hi ho savers: Letters editor Tony Hazell is riding off into the sunset after 32 years helping readers with their money problems

I learned my trade at the knee of Margaret Stone  the woman who invented modern personal finance journalism - before taking over from her as Money Mail editor in 1999.

When I stepped down in 2011, I took up the cudgels as consumer champion to fight your corner against companies that refused to listen.

In the decade I've been doing this, I have won back millions of pounds for readers who have been treated appallingly by financial firms.

Many cases, particularly where fraud, pensions and life insurance policies were concerned, involved life-changing sums of money.

But while it is always satisfying to secure a big win, the most heart-wrenching and ultimately rewarding letters I've dealt with have been from the bereaved, very elderly and those acting as an attorney for loved ones.

The way some companies treat vulnerable customers never ceases to horrify me and it has given me great pleasure to help right these wrongs.

Sadly it seems that while consumer protection law has improved, customer service has got worse. Businesses claim their lines are especially busy regardless of when you phone.

No matter what time of day or night I open the EDF app, I see the same message: 'We're experiencing high call volumes right now.'

The lie masks under-staffed call centres, as firms try to force customers to use online 'bots'  computer algorithms posing as people.

The infirm and vulnerable are facing greater financial exclusion when they cannot deal face-to-face or penetrate the barriers companies construct both online and on the phone.

The push to online banking has also put vulnerable people more at risk of fraud from cold callers and internet scammers.

Warnings cannot prepare people for the sophisticated criminals they face. Banks that shut branches and force the vulnerable online bear direct responsibility.

Having said this, I despair of the increasing lack of personal responsibility and the hunt for compensation over the most trivial issues.

It is your money, so you must look after it. I receive pleas for help from people who do not look properly at bank or credit card statements.

Final words: Tony's best tips Tony became Money Mail editor in 1999 before taking the reins as consumer champion in 2011 Careful of calls: Beware of any calls you are not expecting. Scam calls will often have a pause before someone speaks starts speaking and they may know your name. Always hang up. Use BT Call Minder or similar services to screen calls. Banked to rights: You can get a refund from your credit card provider under Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act for purchases between 100 and 30,000 if something goes wrong. With a debit card, you have similar protection under chargeback rules. Record of receipts: Keep receipts to ensure that returning faulty goods is simple. A folder for each month can help. The Consumer Rights Act states your contract is with the retailer who sells you goods, so it must resolve the issue. If a retailer sends you to a manufacturer, inform Trading Standards. Dont just click: Look out for clone internet sites that look similar to genuine ones but will charge you extra for services such as replacing your driving licence or claiming tax relief. Any government website should end with gov.uk. Also, be wary of websites that appear at the top of any searches or claim to be sponsored. Look in the search bar at the top of the internet page to see if the web address corresponds to the organisation you want. Be responsible: Its your money so check your bank and credit card statements every month and query anything that looks out of place. The same goes for services bills. If youve signed up to internet-only billing, then go online or use the app to check. Complain like a king: Give the firm one chance to put it right. On the second, tell it you want to make an official complaint that you want recorded on its published complaints data. If this fails, the Financial Ombudsman Service will investigate most problems involving financial firms and services. Telephone 0800 023 4567 or see financial-ombudsman.org.uk.

How else can phantom or incorrect direct debits be paid for years before being spotted?

One reader wrote certain of errors as her electricity bills were so high.

Further investigation revealed she was running a hot tub and had expensive underfloor electric heating on for most of the day.

I've always considered it important to highlight that the reader is not always right

What should I make of the person who told me a water leak had ruined the kitchen and electrics?

The more I uncovered, the more I suspected she was trying to have her home rewired and a new kitchen courtesy of the insurance company.

Sorry, but while I will fight for readers, I won't be an advocate for fraud.

For more than three decades Money Mail has helped me personally as I have learned along with you.

I enjoyed the benefits of paying down my mortgage as fast as I could after seeing the tens of thousands of pounds it would save in interest.

I have never paid interest on credit cards. Every pound paid in interest is a pound you don't have available for your next holiday or meal out.

Financial advisers encouraged me to think long term on my investments, to make certain I've got balance in my portfolio and not to panic when the stock market falls. Time will help you ride out the shocks. If all your investments are soaring then you've probably got too much in one sector.

I learned for myself the damage charges can do to long-term investments such as pensions and Isas.

I've benefited from understanding income tax and using every scrap of tax relief.

Pensions, which offer income tax relief on money invested, and Isas, which provide a tax-free income, form the bedrock of my savings.

When it comes to consumer disputes, the key is: don't get angry, get even. It is not the fault of the person on the other end of the phone.

Write down the points you want to make and explain yourself clearly. If dealing with a company, say you want your complaint officially recorded.

If dealing with a retailer, familiarise yourself with the main points of the Consumer Rights Act.

There are good explanations on the internet at gov.uk, citizensadvice.org.uk and which.co.uk.

Use the various free ombudsman services rather than ambulance-chasing legal firms, which may take up to 40 per cent of your compensation.

To avoid fraud, don't engage with cold callers or unknown emailers.

My mother-in-law tells cold callers she is hard of hearing, asks them to write to her and puts the phone down without giving her address.

Finally, I'd like to share with you how Money Mail has played an even more important part in my life.

Back in 2003 a wonderful lady called Jill was reading Money Mail while sunning herself on a beach in Spain.

She spotted a case study of a boy about to go to Nottingham University in a feature about student finance.

That case study was my stepson. (We were desperate).

'Look, this boy is also going to Nottingham. Perhaps you'll meet him,' Jill told her daughter.

'Don't be ridiculous, Mum. Nottingham is a big university and he's doing a different subject.'

Mum, of course, knew best. They met in the first week, started going out months later (after he confessed to being the boy in the Mail), married (eventually!) and presented us with a granddaughter last summer. So, thanks Money Mail, for everything.

As I draw a line under resolving your problems, a word of warning, I may be stepping down but I'm not going away entirely. If something gets under my skin then like Arnie Schwarzenegger  I'll be back.

moneymail@dailymail.co.uk
Kingsport, TN (37660)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms, some locally strong to perhaps severe. Damaging winds, large hail and possibly a tornado with some storms. High near 70F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%..

Tonight

Considerable cloudiness with occasional rain showers. Thunder possible. Low 56F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 70%.
Kingsport, TN (37660)

Today

Thunderstorms, some strong early, then variable clouds overnight with still a chance of showers. Damaging winds and large hail with some storms. Low 56F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 80%..

Tonight

Thunderstorms, some strong early, then variable clouds overnight with still a chance of showers. Damaging winds and large hail with some storms. Low 56F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
Two leading human rights groups on Wednesday accused armed forces from Ethiopias Amhara region of waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing against ethnic Tigrayans during a war that has killed thousands of civilians and displaced more than a million.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a joint report that abuses by Amhara officials and regional special forces and militias during fighting in western Tigray amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity. They also accused Ethiopias military of complicity in those acts.

Since November 2020, Amhara officials and security forces have engaged in a relentless campaign of ethnic cleansing to force Tigrayans in western Tigray from their homes, said Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch.

Amhara government spokesman Gizachew Muluneh told Reuters the allegations of abuses and ethnic cleansing in western Tigray were lies and fabricated news.

Ethiopias government and military spokespeople, the former commander of Amharas special forces and the administrator for western Tigray did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Amnesty and HRW said Tigrayan forces also committed abuses during the 17-month war, but that this was not the focus of the report.

The report, which is based on 427 interviews with survivors, family members and witnesses, is the most comprehensive assessment to date of abuses during the war in western Tigray.

Western Tigray has seen some of the worst violence in the war, which has pitted Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmeds government and its allies from the Amhara region against the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF). The TPLF dominated Ethiopias government before Abiys rise to power in 2018.

Both Amhara and Tigray claim the area, which is controlled by Amhara forces and the Ethiopian military.

Besides repeated massacres, the report cited meetings in which Amhara officials discussed plans to remove Tigrayans and restrictions they imposed on the Tigrayan language as evidence of ethnic cleansing.

Federal authorities failed to investigate allegations of ethnic cleansing, while the national army committed murder, arbitrary arrest and detention, and torture against the Tigrayan population, the report said.

The Amhara government spokesman Gizachew said regional forces had always respected the rule of law.

Reuters could not independently verify details in the report. The news agency has previously reported about massacres committed by Amhara and Tigrayan forces in western Tigray.

In March of last year, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused forces from Amhara of committing acts of ethnic cleansing.

SOURCE: REUTERS
Sobbing uncontrollably, Serhii Lahovskyi nuzzles against the shrouded corpse of his closest childhood friend, who disappeared when Russian troops occupied the Ukrainian town of Bucha near Kyiv and was found shot through the head and dumped in a stairwell.

The labourers eyes cloudy and half open, black and crimson streaks of blood caked on his face and snaking down to his lips from an exit wound that cracked his skull, Igor Litvinenko had been shot through the mouth at very close range. He was found by local residents just days before his 30th birthday.

Dried clots of blood filled his nostrils. And his torso was covered with bright red welts, which Lahovskyi believes resulted from a beating. He was dumped together with another man who was found mutilated. His wife and other residents said the man who was mutilated had been taken prisoner by Russian troops who invaded Ukraine.

Reuters cannot independently verify the details of their accounts.

Litvinenko had been visiting his mother to bring her food when he disappeared.

Why did these animals shoot him so? Lahovskyi said on Tuesday, his eyes wide and reddened, gesturing with his hand to say they had been best friends since they were knee-high. This is not Russia, this is a monster.

Just point-blank. Why is it needed? Tell me please.

He and fellow residents in a housing complex in the ravaged town of Bucha, where Reuters has found a trail of what officials say are extra-judicial killings since Russian troops pulled back last week, grabbed shovels and dug a shallow grave on a grass verge by one housing block.

Then they used a carpet to carry the remains, placing him in the ditch, folding it over him and covering him with wooden boards, before shoveling earth on top.

Panting heavily after digging the grave, shaking his head in dismay, local locksmith and odd-job man Urii Churachenko bent down and placed two cigarettes in the earth as a token for his friend.

I have known him since childhood, he said. We have lived through everything together. He is our colleague, our brother-in-arms. Let them burn in hell. Thats it.

Reuters has seen at least four victims shot through the head in Bucha, one with their hands tied behind their back.

Residents have recounted cases of several others slain, some shot through their eyes and one apparently beaten to death and mutilated.

Officials say they have found more than 300 dead so far.

Ukrainian officials say Russia has committed genocide and have called for an investigation by the International Criminal Court.

The Kremlin dismisses the allegations as propaganda. Russias U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told the Security Council on Tuesday that Russian troops are not targeting civilians, dismissing accusations of abuse as lies. He said that while Bucha was under Russian control not a single civilian suffered from any kind of violence.

In Bucha, Liudmyla Verhinska cried as she recounted how she found her 32-year-old son was slain, shot through the eye. He worked in anti-terrorism unit and is now buried on another small patch of grass near the housing complex.

He went just to take out the trash and he was shot. After seven days, I found him, she said. And today I found his friend What else to tell you?

Source: Reuters
In her book, This Book is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake Up, Take Action and Do the Work, biracial author Tiffany Jewell describes a white elementary school teacher she had when she was a student in Syracuse.

My teachers prejudice was overt, Jewell writes. She didnt like Black and Brown children. She didnt like our city school. We didnt understand why she was our teacher. Why was she allowed to stay there?

That was the year Jewell realized all people are not treated equally. It caused me to look at the world differently. As I got into middle school I became very involved with feminist issues, and in high school I was deeply involved with environmental justice, racial justice and gender equality, but it was my first job teaching at a preschool in Philadelphia when I came upon anti-bias education and thought, this is it, this is exactly what I want to do with my life.

The work she did with those young children brought about an evolution in her. The children were excited to learn about who they are and where they came from, and I began to find my people, by connecting with other educators who were involved in anti-racism education.

Jewell will give a talk and be part of a later question-and-answer session in Albany on Tuesday, April 12, as part of the New York State Writers Institutes spring program.

Her book, intended for 11-15 year olds, was published in January 2020, was recommended by Oprah Winfrey and became a national bestseller. It is beautifully illustrated by Aurelia Durand and is filled with valuable information about social identity, race, ethnicity and racism. There are also 20 writing activities for young people to learn about themselves and to better understand racial oppression.

I knew this topic would shake up some people in the dominant culture, but even before the book was published it was already on a list of banned books, and its frequently taken off the shelves of libraries, Jewell said,

Her book clearly explains what it means to be anti-racist. Most people are clear about what it means to be racist, and just about everyone will say they are non-racist, but sometimes being non-racist is being complicit with the racist society were living in. If youre non-racist you know that youre a good person and have no prejudice, but are you doing anything to prevent racism? Being an anti-racist means that youre active. Youre constantly fighting against the injustices of the world, and your vision is a world where weve abolished all types of racism.

Jewell wanted to incorporate the writing activities in the book because she believes its the easiest way for someone to connect with an issue on a deeper level. Many of the writing activities are intended for young people to learn who they are, where they came from and hopefully teach them to be in a constant state of awareness. I never saw myself as a writer. I have a bachelors degree in English, but I never really liked to write. I found my writing voice and my love for writing years ago when I was working with the 6- and 7-year-olds I was teaching.

She had her young students write in her class. Sometimes they would illustrate a story with no words. She wanted them to have fun with language, and she began to have fun along with them. I was trained early as a writer to get it perfect the first time. Thats why it was never fun for me. I know now its impossible to be perfect, and today writing is a joy. I even like the revision process when I go back and polish up what Ive written.

Jewell knows her work as an anti-racist writer and educator will take the remainder of her life. I did have some many wonderful teachers as a student in Syracuse who helped me see the public school education system wasnt entirely broken. Many of these teachers showed me love every day in the classroom, but on an institutional level theres so much work to be done. Not every student can reach the bench marks of common core, and the way our schools are funded in this country are incredibly inequitable.

According to Jewell, having a fair and equal education system in our country is one of the best ways to turn away from the systemic racism that permeates throughout the entire culture. It all comes down to power. Is the dominant culture ready to give up or even share their power with the oppressed?

A clear message in her book is the importance of showing courage to take a stand to fight and call out racism. We cant wait for someone else to do it. If we see something wrong we should do more than take a video of the event. We also need to speak out, otherwise were complicit and everything will stay the same.

Jewell knows how easy it is to get discouraged about how strong racism is in this country. All you needed to see was how so many of the senators were questioning Ketanji Brown Jackson at the confirmation hearings. They belittled her qualifications and treated her with much disrespect.

Despite the difficulty of her work, Jewell is very optimistic, as is the book she wrote. I am an optimist. I have always been hopeful, and it doesnt take much for me to get inspired. I love my work with young people. I love seeing how they are so willing to work about bringing change. They understand inequity and injustice on a very clear level.

She was happy to see so many students in Florida protesting the Dont Say Gay law. It inspires me to see peaceful protest like that. My experience has shown me that young people will take what I can teach them and run with it. They feel it. They see it. They care.
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WASHINGTON  The U.S. Senate will take up legislation Thursday to end normal trade relations with Russia and to ban the importation of its oil.

Both bills have been bogged down in the Senate, frustrating lawmakers who want to ratchet up the U.S. response to Russias war with Ukraine.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Russian President Vladimir Putin needs to be held accountable for what Schumer said were war crimes against Ukraine.

The trade suspension measure paves the way for U.S. President Joe Biden to enact higher tariffs on certain Russian imports.

The bill banning Russian oil would codify restrictions Biden has already put in place through executive action.

In a virtual speech to Congress last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said new packages of sanctions are needed constantly every week until the Russian military machine stops.

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KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR:

 Mariupols dead put at 5,000 as Ukraine braces in the east

 US targets Putins daughters, Russian banks in new sanctions

 Burned, piled bodies among latest horrors in Bucha, Ukraine

 Russia's setback in Kyiv was memorable military failure

 Russian media campaign falsely claims Bucha deaths are fakes

 China calls for probe into Bucha killings, assigns no blame

 Go to https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine for more coverage

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OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:

WASHINGTON  The U.S. House overwhelmingly passed legislation Wednesday calling for a federal government report on evidence of war crimes committed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Lawmakers backed the measure amid gruesome reports of atrocities in towns around Kyiv, particularly Bucha, and new accounts of the civilian death toll in the besieged port city of Mariupol.

The legislation calls for the U.S. president to submit to Congress a report on efforts to preserve evidence related to war crimes.

Last month, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution seeking an investigation of Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes.

In his daily nighttime video address to the nation late Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of trying to hide evidence of war crimes to interfere with the international investigation.

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LVIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of trying to hide the evidence of war crimes to interfere with the international investigation.

It seems that the Russian leadership was really afraid that the global anger over what was seen in Bucha would be repeated after what was seen in other cities, Zelenskyy said in his daily nighttime video address to the nation late Wednesday.

We have information that the Russian troops have changed tactics and are trying to remove the dead people, the dead Ukrainians, from the streets and cellars of territory they occupied. This is only an attempt to hide the evidence and nothing more, Zelenskyy said.

He also said thousands of people are now missing, either dead or deported to Russia.

Zelenskyy also urged Russian citizens not to be afraid to protest the war.

If you have even a little shame about what the Russian military is doing in Ukraine, then for such Russian citizens this is a key moment: You have to demand  just demand  an end to the war, he said.

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PARIS  French President Emmanuel Macron spoke out against Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Wednesday evening, defending himself over criticism he held multiple talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin to no avail.

On Monday, Morawiecki ridiculed the French leaders several hours of phone calls with Putin, saying that they achieved nothing.

Some fear the comments from Poland might destabilize unity of the European Union as it hopes to stand unified in the face of Putins aggression in Ukraine.

Macron told TF1 broadcasters evening news that he takes full responsibility for speaking to Putin in the name of France to avoid the war and to build a new architecture for peace in Europe several years ago.

Macron is standing for re-election in France in polls that begin Sunday.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian authorities say nearly 5,000 people were evacuated from combat areas Wednesday.

Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said 1,171 people were evacuated from the besieged Sea of Azov port of Mariupol, and 2,515 more left the cities of Berdyansk and Melitopol and other areas in the south.

She said an additional 1,206 people were evacuated from the eastern region of Luhansk.

Vereshchuk and other officials have been urging residents of eastern regions to evacuate in the face of an impending Russian offensive, saying that people in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions should leave for safer regions.

Donetsk region Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said at least five civilians were killed and eight others wounded by Russian shelling Wednesday.

Over 10 million people, about a quarter of Ukraines population, have been displaced by the war, and more than 4 million of them have fled the country.

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UNITED NATIONS  The United States and United Kingdom have boycotted an informal meeting of the U.N. Security Council called by Russia to press its baseless claims that the U.S. has biological warfare laboratories in Ukraine.

The move by Russia on Wednesday was the latest of several that have led Western countries to accuse Moscow of using the U.N. as a platform for disinformation to draw attention away from its war against its smaller neighbor.

U.N. disarmament chief Izumi Nakamitsu told the council at two official Security Council meetings called by Russia on the issue last month that the United Nations is not aware of any biological weapons program in Ukraine.

A smoke screen to draw attention away from the brutal warfare, irresponsible, dangerous and deplorable were just a few of the responses by countries, including Norway, France, Ireland and Albania.

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ROME  Italian Premier Mario Draghi says no embargo of Russian gas is up for consideration at this point as the European Union ponders its next package of sanctions over the war in Ukraine, adding: "I dont know if it ever will be on the table.

Draghi told reporters Monday night that in case a gas embargo is proposed, Italy will be very happy to follow it if that would make peace possible.

Draghi added: If the price of gas can be exchanged for peace ... what do we choose? Peace? Or to have the air conditioning running in the summer? This is the question we must pose.

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KYIV, Ukraine  The mayor of the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol says more than 5,000 civilians have been killed during the monthlong Russian blockade, among them 210 children.

Mayor Vadym Boichenko said Wednesday that Russian forces have among other targets bombed hospitals, including one where 50 people burned to death.

Boichenko said that more than 90% of the citys infrastructure has been destroyed by Russian shelling.

The Russian military is besieging the strategic Sea of Azov port, and has cut food, water and energy supplies and pummeled it with artillery and air raids. Capturing the city would allow Russia to secure a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

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WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden is saluting the international community and some of the largest corporations in the U.S. for further increasing Russias economic isolation.

Addressing thousands at the North Americas Building Trades Unions Legislative Conference at a Washington hotel on Wednesday, Biden said of the Russia-Ukraine war, Theres nothing less happening than credible war crimes.

The president said responsible nations have to come together to hold these perpetrators responsible, and vowed that were going to stifle Russias ability to grow for years to come.

He said corporate Americas stepping up for a chance, noting that 600-plus firms have chosen to leave Russia.

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MOSCOW  Russias Defense Ministry has accused Ukraine of sabotaging a pre-agreed prisoner swap.

Speaking at a briefing, Defense Ministry official Mikhail Mizintsev claimed that Kyiv had for a long time blocked prisoner exchanges, including a swap set to take place Wednesday involving 251 military personnel on each side.

He alleged that the delays gave Moscow all the reasons to suspect that Russian servicemen held in captivity are not at all well."

On April 1, representatives of the Ukrainian presidential office said Ukraine had secured the release of 86 soldiers, including 15 women, through a swap. This was confirmed by Russian officials on Wednesday.

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BRUSSELS  A new U.S. commitment of Javelin missiles means the West soon will have provided Ukrainian fighters with 10 anti-tank weapons for every Russian tank in their country, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday.

Blinken spoke to U.S. news broadcaster MSNBC after the U.S. announced an additional $100 million for more Javelin missiles for Ukraine. The U.S. says it has provided $1.7 billion for Ukraines defense and aid since Russia invaded on Feb. 24.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is pressing the West to provide more weapons, faster, and do more to cut off Russia from the global economy, to pressure Putin to make peace.

In terms of what they need to act quickly and act effectively, to deal with the planes that are firing at them from the skies, the tanks that are trying to destroy  their cities from the ground, they have the tools that they need, Blinken said of Ukraines forces. Theyre going to keep getting them, and were going to keep sustaining that.

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BUDAPEST, Hungary  Hungarys prime minister has asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to call an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine but says his country will comply with Russian demands to pay for natural gas imports in rubles.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he had spoken with Putin by phone and urged the Russian leader to end the military conflict in neighboring Ukraine. Orban said he also offered to host a conference in Hungarys capital between the warring parties.

I suggested that (Putin)  the Ukrainian president, the French president and the German chancellor hold a meeting here in Budapest, the sooner the better, Orban said. It should not be a peace negotiation and not a peace settlement, because that takes longer, but an immediate ceasefire agreement.

Orban spoke days after his Fidesz party won a fourth consecutive term leading the Hungarian government.

The right-wing nationalist leader, Putins closest ally in the European Union, has vehemently refused to supply weapons to Ukraine or allow their transport across the Hungary-Ukraine border. He also lobbied heavily against the EU imposing sanctions on Russian energy imports.

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LARNACA, Cyprus  Russian disinformation about its war against Ukraine needs to be exposed, including on Russias war crimes, a U.S. State Department official said on a visit to Cyprus Wednesday.

Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said Russian lies have evolved to the point of blaming Ukrainians for actions by Russian forces, including the war crimes we see on the ground.

So we all have an interest in exposing Russian disinformation, ensuring our citizens have the truth and ensuring that Russian citizens also (have the truth) ... despite the Iron Curtain that Putin has put down over that, Nuland said.

Nuland was in Cyprus as part of a five-nation tour aimed at strengthening bilateral ties and rallying support for Ukraine.

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LONDON  Britain says it will end imports of Russian oil and coal by the end of the year and ban U.K. investment in Russia as part of a new set of sanctions in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

The British government also announced a freeze on the assets of Credit Bank of Moscow and Sberbank, Russias largest bank, and slapped travel bans and asset freezes on eight more wealthy Russians. They included Andrey Guryev, founder of the fertilizer company PhosAgro, and Sergey Sergeyevich Ivanov, president of diamond producer Alrosa.

U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said the measures were coordinated with Britains allies. The U.S. also sanctioned SberBank on Wednesday, and the European Union plans to ban imports of Russian coal.

Truss said the sanctions were aimed at decimating (President Vladimir) Putins war machine and to show the Russian elite that they cannot wash their hands of the atrocities committed on Putins orders.

Britain had already announced a plan to phase out Russian oil, which accounts for 8% of the U.K. supply. Russia is the top supplier of imported coal to the U.K., though British demand for the polluting fuel has plummeted in the past decade. Britain has not ended imports of Russian natural gas, which accounts for 4% of its supply, saying only that it will do so as soon as possible.

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UNITED NATIONS  The U.N. General Assembly plans to vote Thursday on whether to suspend Russia from the U.N.s premiere human rights body.

The United States initiated the move in response to the discovery of hundreds of bodies after Russian troops withdrew from towns near Ukraine's capital. Videos and photos of corpses of people who appeared to be civilians have sparked calls for tougher sanctions and war crimes charges against Russia, which has vehemently denied responsibility.

General Assembly spokeswoman Paulina Kubiak said on Wednesday that an emergency special session on Ukraine will resume at 10 a.m. EDT on Thursday, when a resolution to suspend the rights of membership in the Human Rights Council of the Russian Federation will be put to a vote.

The brief resolution expresses grave concern at the ongoing human rights and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, particularly at the reports of violations and abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law by the Russian Federation, including gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights.

To be approved, the resolution requires a two-thirds majority of assembly members that vote yes or no. Abstentions dont count.

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WASHINGTON  The U.S. Justice Department is working with European allies and prosecutors in Ukraine to investigate potential war crimes after Russias invasion.

The results are in See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said Wednesday that U.S. prosecutors across the world are working to collect evidence and to collect the information on atrocities that we have all seen in both photographs and video footage.

He pointed specifically to photos and videos from Bucha, where Associated Press journalists have witnessed evidence of killings and torture, including charred bodies.

But Garland stopped short of calling for a tribunal like the one set up to hold Nazi leaders to account after World War II. He said a U.S. prosecutors in Paris were meeting with the French war crimes prosecutor, and that other Justice Department lawyers had met with prosecutors in Europe to work out a plan for gathering evidence with respect to Ukraine.

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WASHINGTON  The U.S. on Wednesday announced that it is sanctioning Russian President Vladimir Putins two adult daughters as part of a new batch of penalties on the countrys political and economic system in retaliation for its war crimes in Ukraine.

The U.S. is also imposing toughened full blocking sanctions on Russias Sberbank and Alfa Bank, two of its largest financial institutions, as well as some Russian state-owned enterprises. President Joe Biden is also signing an executive order to ban new U.S. investment in Russia.

In addition to Putins adult daughters, the new sanctions also target the family of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

The U.S. actions are set to be imposed in concert with toughened sanctions by its European allies.

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LONDON  A Western official says it will take Russia up to a month to regroup its forces for a major push on eastern Ukraine.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence, said Wednesday that a reasonable estimate would be of three to four weeks before troops that have pulled back from the area around Kyiv and northern Ukraine can be re-equipped and redeployed against the Donbas region in the east.

The official said the Russian units would have to go through a pretty lengthy period of reconstitution and refurbishment before they could rejoin the war.

The official said almost a quarter of the Russian ground units known as battalion tactical groups in Ukraine had been rendered non-combat-effective in the fighting and either withdrawn or merged with other units.

The losses and pullback of Russian troops mean the threat posed to Kyiv is limited for the foreseeable future from Russian ground troops, the official said.

 AP writer Jill Lawless contributed.

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BRUSSELS  NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says Finland and Sweden would be welcomed with open arms should they decide to join the worlds biggest security alliance, as Russias war on Ukraine spurs public support in the two Nordic countries for membership.

Russia has demanded that the 30-nation military organization stop expanding, so the prospect of Finland and Sweden joining could anger President Vladimir Putin.

But Stoltenberg says NATO members might be prepared to provide security guarantees for the period from when the two might announce any membership bid and when their applications are approved. He declined to say what kind of protection they might get.

Once members, the two neutral Nordic nations would benefit from NATOs collective security guarantee, which obliges all members to come to the defense of any ally that comes under attack.

Stoltenberg told reporters Wednesday that he is certain that we will find ways to address concerns they may have regarding the period between the potential application and the final ratification.

A poll commissioned by Finnish broadcaster YLE last month showed that, for the first time, more than 50% of Finns support joining the Western military alliance. In neighboring Sweden, a similar poll showed that those in favor of NATO membership outnumber those against.

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BERLIN  A German spokesman says the government has information which indicates that bodies found after Ukraine retook Bucha last week had been lying there since at least March 10, when Russian troops were in control of the town.

Steffen Hebestreit told reporters in Berlin on Wednesday that the information was based on non-commercial satellite images taken March 10-18 of Yablonska Street in Bucha.

Credible information shows that from March 7 to March 30 Russian soldiers and security forces were deployed in this area, he said. They were also tasked with the interrogation of prisoners who were subsequently executed.

Hebestreit said that targeted killings by units of the Russian military and security forces are therefore proof that the Russian President and supreme commander has at least approvingly accepted human rights abuses and war crimes to achieve his goals.

The assertions made by the Russian side that these are staged scenes or they arent responsible for the murders are therefore not tenable, he added.

Asked about the source of this information, Hebestreit said that images reviewed by Germany were not commercial satellite images. He declined to elaborate.

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COPENHAGEN, Denmark  Norway is following other European nations and expelling Russian diplomats.

Norways Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt said Wednesday that three Russian diplomats had carried out activities incompatible with their status.

The timing for the expulsions was not accidental and comes at a time when the whole world is shaken by reports of Russian forces abusing civilians, especially in the city of Bucha, Huitfeldt said in a statement.

In recent days, numerous European countries have expelled Russian diplomats and staff at Russian diplomatic missions.

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GENEVA  The International Committee of the Red Cross says one of its teams in Ukraine has led some 500 people who fled Mariupol in a humanitarian convoy of buses and private cars to a safer location in the embattled country.

The ICRC says its team that has been trying to enter Mariupol since last Friday got within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the besieged city, but security conditions made it impossible to enter. The convoy escorted the civilians from coastal Berdyansk to Zaporizhzhia, to the north.

This convoys arrival to Zaporizhzhia is a huge relief for hundreds of people who have suffered immensely and are now in a safer location, said Pascal Hundt, ICRCs head of delegation in Ukraine. Its clear, though, that thousands more civilians trapped inside Mariupol need safe passage out and aid to come in.

He said the Geneva-based organization remains available as a neutral intermediary to help escort civilians out of Mariupol once concrete agreements and security conditions allow it.

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LONDON  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of using hunger as a weapon of war by deliberately targeting Ukraines essential food supplies.

In an address to Irish lawmakers Wednesday, Zelenskyy said Russian forces are destroying things that are sustaining livelihoods including food storage depots, blocking ports so Ukraine could not export food and putting mines into the fields.

For them hunger is also a weapon, a weapon against us ordinary people, he said, accusing Russia of deliberately provoking a food crisis in Ukraine, a major global producer of staples including wheat and sunflower oil.

He said it would have international ramifications, because there will be a shortage of food and the prices will go up, and this is reality for the millions of people who are hungry, and it will be more difficult for them to feed their families.

Zelenskyy spoke by video to a joint session of Irelands two houses of parliament, the latest in a string of international addresses he has used to rally support for Ukraine.

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BRUSSELS  A senior European Union official says the blocs member countries should think about ways of offering asylum to Russian soldiers willing to desert Ukraine battlefields.

European Council president Charles Michel on Wednesday expressed his outrage at crimes against humanity, against innocent civilians in Bucha and in many other cities.

He called on Russian soldiers to disobey orders.

If you want no part in killing your Ukrainian brothers and sisters, if you dont want to be a criminal, drop your weapons, stop fighting, leave the battlefield, Michel, who represents the blocs governments, said in a speech to the European Parliament

Endorsing an idea previously circulated by some EU lawmakers, Michel added that granting asylum to Russian deserters is a valuable idea that should be pursued.

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ALBANY  Alcohol to-go, relief from gas prices and public safety concerns are center items in the state's budget negotiations, while the child care, health care and home care are issues that remain unsettled, according to state Senate leadership.

Assembly Democrats are still grappling to reach consensus on the major policy items in the state budget. Senate Democrats have settled on their issues. The budget is on track to be finalized Thursday, a week after its initial deadline.

State Senate Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris told reporters Tuesday afternoon where several key issues stand for Senate Democrats. His comments generally echoed earlier remarks by Senate Finance Chair Liz Krueger and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins.

"It sounds like the beginning of the end," Gianaris said. "There's a real will to getting things closed and moving on."

Here's where's the state Senate, which is generally in agreement with Gov. Kathy Hochul, has landed so far on certain prominent policies, according to Gianaris:

Alcohol to-go

The policy is about "99.9 percent" complete, Gianaris said. The end result will likely allow restaurants to resume selling alcoholic drinks for takeout, which arose during the COVID-19 pandemic to keep businesses afloat during shutdowns. The result is expected to prevent "restaurants to start acting like liquor stores." The liquor store lobby is an opponent of the policy.

Gas tax

Relief from the high prices at the gas pump is anticipated, but the details are "still being discussed." A decision on whether to temporarily suspend the state's portion of the gas tax, which would be intended to drop the price of gas at the pump, or offer a rebate later on are still on the table.

Bail laws

The most debated issues  bail and pretrial discovery laws  are close to being settled.

Senate Democrats are "not at all touching this 'dangerousness' question," Gianaris said, which is similar to the posture of Assembly Democrats. A leaked proposal by Hochul, which became central to budget negotiations, proposed allowing judges to weigh a defendant's dangerousness to themselves or others in setting bail for "serious crimes."

Hochul's proposed changes to have additional gun-related offenses become clearly bail eligible is expected to be included, as well as creating a more straightforward lane for hate crimes to be bail eligible. The charges account for a sliver of the total violent felony rearrests in the state. A Hochul senior aide had told the Times Union the goal is to close loopholes around gun violence while rates of shootings are between 50 and 100 percent higher than they were prior to 2020.

Hochul proposes allowing judges to set bail for any offense if someone is rearrested while an earlier charge is pending. Senate Democrats are looking to clean up its 2020 amendments to the state's bail laws. They are discussing how to determine who is eligible for bail upon rearrest and reaffirm the Legislature's intent.

"My understanding is that some (district attorneys), some judges have not interpreted it the way that we may have intended so we're going to clarify that language," Gianaris said.

Kendra's Law

A likely extension of Kendra's Law is still being considered, while the most dramatic proposed expansions of it appear to be no longer part of negotiations, according to a source. Gianaris noted that lawmakers are "still figuring out" specifics of the 1999 law based on involuntary outpatient commitment to a psychiatric hospital. Instead of expanding Kendra's Law, similar changes may be made in criminal law to clearly expand the role of intervention in both Mental Health Court and criminal court.

421a

The New York City-centric law related to building "affordable" housing appears to have not made it into the budget despite a push by the administration of the city's mayor, Eric Adams. There is a push by the governor to extend the existing statute on year rather than overhaul it.

Child care, home care, health care

Decisions on whether and with how much money to dramatically expand access to child care, raise wages for home care workers and to provide funding for undocumented New Yorkers who lack access to health insurance all remain a part of the conversations.

Previously, despite vocal advocacy on the respective issues, they were not the primary driver of budget negotiations because of issues around the state's bail laws following the governor's leaked internal memo on public safety.

"These are the issues that we're now diving in with both feet since we've cleared out much of the non-budgetary questions," Gianaris said. "Hopefully we'll move toward a resolution in the next day or so."
CATSKILL  Voters will have the chance to decide whether to allow pot lounges in their community after a group of residents gathered enough signatures to force a referendum on the issue.

The residents disagreed with a Town Board vote in late December disallowing the lounges, but the decision would be overturned if a majority of residents vote in favor of the lounges Nov. 8.

Sara Pickens Verdon, one of the organizers of the campaign, said he hoped the referendum passed.

"There was a lot of enthusiasm regarding the petitions, so we're optimistic that enthusiasm will continue towards the November election," she said.

Verdon and her group needed to get 426 signatures  20 percent of registered voters  to force the referendum, according to Catskill Democratic Committee Chair Margaret Tomlinson. Verdon said the group collected more than that amount but didn't have the specific number.

The village of Catskill, a community with a separate municipal government within the town of Catskill, allowed pot lounges after a village board vote late last year. However, village residents are still part of November's referendum, and can vote whether to allow pot lounges in the surrounding town, according to the Greene County Board of Elections.

Verdon said she started gathering signatures so all of Catskill could take advantage of marijuana legalization in the state.

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"We just want the other parts of the town of Catskill to have the ability to benefit from the revenue, to be able to benefit from having another option for tourism," Verdon said.

New York legalized recreational marijuana in March 2021 but gave municipalities the ability to "opt out" of allowing dispensaries or lounges. Voters can overturn this decision with a simple majority of votes if the referendum is placed on the ballot through the petitioning process Verdon and others in Catskill undertook.

Eleven of the 19 communities in Greene County have opted out of allowing dispensaries, while 13 have opted out of allowing the lounges, including several Catskills destination spots. The Town of Catskill is the only municipality in the county to have forced a referendum.
A New York City-based developer known for his firms Hudson Valley luxury hospitality projects is proposing a high-end residential housing development at a historic estate in Rhinebeck.

CB Developers, led by part-time Hudson Valley resident Charles Blaichman, is behind several luxury hotels in the region, including Hotel Kinsley, a boutique hotel in Kingston, and Inness, a resort and golf course in Accord.

Now the Blaichman firm is pursuing a 36-condominium project called Rock Ledge at 492 Ackert Hook Road in Rhinebeck. A vocal group of residents, however, has secured more than 600 signatures on a petition opposing the project and shared concerns at town meetings.

The main concern about Rock Ledge is that dumping 36 private condominium developments along a rural road that is zoned to have houses built only on five acres destroys the rural character of the area, said David Weiner, a member of the Rhinebeck Coalition, which was formed in response to Rock Ledge but has since expanded to monitor other developments as well.

Blaichman argues that Rock Ledge will renovate and preserve historic buildings that would otherwise remain vacant and vulnerable to decay, and that there will be even less traffic at the site than when it operated as a drug rehabilitation facility decades ago.

History of luxury projects in the Hudson Valley

Blaichman, known for his transformation of New York Citys Meatpacking District, isnt a stranger to the region. After he bought a home in Woodstock over 20 years ago, he began to think about developing locally, too.

Being up in the Hudson Valley, I always thought there was potential there as well, said Blaichman, who restored four historic buildings in Kingston to create the Hotel Kinsley. A payment-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT) agreement with the Ulster County Industrial Development Agency saved his firm $1.4 million dollars on the project.

The developer said he was offered the Rock Ledge property about 10 years ago; his original plan was to build an inn. When that proposal was met with local opposition, he pivoted to residential housing.

The proposed condominium community would be developed on a 135-acre site that was once home to the Starr Miller Estate, built by renowned New York City architects Frank Hoppin and Whitney Warren for Warrens brother, William Starr Miller, and his wife. Most recently, the property was sold to Daytop Village Foundation, Inc. in 1987 to operate as a substance-abuse treatment center, which housed 50 people and included staff offices and a gym. Daytop closed in 2009, and the site has been vacant ever since.

Eight of the 36 homes in Blaichmans proposed development would be constructed within buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places; the remaining 28 condos would be brand-new. The property would also include a recreation center in a repurposed historic carriage house and a security gatehouse in a historic stone cottage.

Property needs rezoning, sewage upgrades

Residents in opposition are primarily led by the Rhinebeck Coalition and an informal group known as the Rock Ledge Neighbors. Chief among their stated concerns is the zoning variance request to allow more than one home per five acres and the subsequent impact on traffic and natural habitats.

The Rock Ledge development makes enjoyment of the rural community very difficult, said Weiner. Ackert Hill Road is a windy, hilly road that people go walking, horseback riding, and bike riding (on). Dumping more traffic onto a rural road like that is a hazard.

At a town planning board public hearing on Feb. 7 to review the site plan, special use permit and wetlands permit requests, residents also voiced concern that the new development would use nearby Fallsburg Creek for the release of wastewater from the propertys on-site sewage plant, and urged attention be paid to conservation and public trails.

Theres a concern that if anything goes wrong with the plant, it would be extremely damaging to the creek and marsh, said Weiner.

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However, Blaichman described this as a non-issue, and said that the development will bring the sewage plant, which was last operated by Daytop Village, up to modern standards.

Blaichman also said there will be trails throughout the property for the public to enjoy. Currently, the Vlei Marsh Preserve includes two hiking loops through 165 acres of wetlands near the property.

While the development would bring more housing to the community, Weiner said it isnt the kind of housing that is needed. A price has not yet been set for the condos, which Blaichman described as luxury units  that look like large farmhouses.

Housing is certainly a concern, Weiner said. The town should be concerned about workforce housing thats built near transportation, or on a main highway, (and) thats affordable.

Blaichman said his team conducted outreach with neighbors to discuss the plan prior to the pandemic and more recently sent out informational flyers. He insists most community members support the project. Ive had very good reactions from 95 percent of the neighbors, and most people are happy with it, he said. There are a few people that arent.  I feel good about it. We want to get this done.

CB Developers has invested $7.5 million in the project to date. If it comes to fruition, the total investment would be near $45 million and would, Blaichman said, help bring life back into the decaying estate.

I think the town is focused on preserving all of their historic buildings, he said, adding that he believes his project will help them accomplish that. Youre never going to build these things again. Theyre so important to history.

Currently the project is in front of the Town of Rhinebeck planning board as it waits for an environmental review to be completed, including updated wastewater reports.

The next planning board meeting for CB Developers to present is May 2, when a public hearing period would reopen.
A mysterious group seeking specifics about what kids are being taught about sex and sexuality in the state's public schools has been sending FOIL requests to upstate New York school districts for sex education materials produced since the start of the pandemic.

The "Parents Union" on Monday sent freedom of information (FOIL) requests to about a dozen upstate New York districts and BOCES organizations, most of them in the Capital Region, requesting information about what schools are teaching elementary and middle school children about sexuality and "critical race theory."

Despite the reference to "critical race theory," the document primarily seeks curricula mentioning "gender and sexuality, LGBTQ, differentiating between sexual orientation, gender identity, genitalia, reproduction, gender expression, social-emotional learning (SEL), transgender hormone treatment."

The request also inquires about any requirements for health and physical education instructors to define various specific sex acts, including masturbation, vaginal sex, oral sex and anal sex.

School leaders say they are unsure of the origins of the FOIL request. The "Parents Union" does not appear to be affiliated with a national organization of the same name which advocates for transparency in pandemic relief aid spending, or the New York City Parents Union which fights for educational equity.

The group pops up at a time when a moral panic gripping the nation over LGBTQ education has begun to filter down to local school boards.

Jay Worona, counsel for the New York State School Boards Association, said school leaders in every state are having similar conversations with the public about the substance of their curriculums.

While these FOIL requests appear to be politically motivated, schools leaders are advised to respond as best they can.

"The theory is that if there's information that one has, it might be better not to fight but to give information. If they are asking for something that is confidential or that is not readily accessible, obviously, they'd have to think long and hard about how to provide that information," Worona said.

The national debate over LGBTQ inclusivity in public schools has simmered for years, boiling over into state legislative houses with each new presidential administration. The Obama administration in 2016 directed schools to allow students to use the restrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identities, citing a federal law that protects students from gender discrimination.

When the Trump administration rescinded that guidance, then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman clarified that discrimination and harassment toward LGBTQ individuals was still prohibited by state and local laws. New York education officials have published guidance to districts on how to best support transgender and non-gender conforming youth.

Like anti-critical race theory legislation cropping up across the country, many states are debating bills restricting the discussion of sexuality and gender identity in public schools.

The results are in See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote.

Some local schools have recently reaffirmed their support for gay and transgender youth after the state of Florida passed a bill banning LGBTQ instruction in younger grades.

Dubbed by critics the "Don't Say Gay" law, the legislation prohibits school districts from teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity before the third grade, or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students"  language critics say is vague and leaves room to restrict LGBTQ-inclusive conversation in upper grades.

New York's Education Department also recently launched a statewide push for schools to revise their diversity, equity and inclusion policies, which some parents misconstrued as a campaign to indoctrinate students with "critical race theory."

In December 2020, New York passed a law requiring all single-occupancy bathrooms in public places, including schools, to be designated gender-neutral.

It doesn't appear that the Parents Union is going away anytime soon, and similar conversations are playing out on parent forums across the state.

In response to the Parents Union FOIL request, a Bethlehem Central School District FOIL officer stated all curriculum is aligned with the appropriate state learning standards and linked to a state Education Department website. The filer immediately appealed.
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SARATOGA SPRINGS  A 2021 candidate for city office was convicted Tuesday in Saratoga Springs City Court on one of two misdemeanor counts of mishandling her ballot petitions.

Republican Samantha Guerra took an Alford plea, acknowledging that there was, as a special prosecutor said, overwhelming evidence the ballot petitions she swore to have witnessed contained blatant forgeries." But the plea allows her to maintain her innocence.

She specifically swore to that she personally observed all of the signatures on the petitions and personally confirmed the identity of the signers, Schenectady County Assistant District Attorney John Carson said outside of the courtroom. Based on all of the evidence, that simply could not be true.

Her conviction, which has no punishment or fine as its an unclassified misdemeanor, comes six months after Democrats accused her of forging her petitions to gain an additional, independent line on the November ballot. The signatures were collected even though she had already secured the Republican, Conservative and Working Families Party lines.

Her attorney, Oscar Schreiber, said her November arrest, just days after she lost the election, was political. He is also calling on the State Police to arrest the person who forged the signatures on Guerras ballots.

During my meeting with the State Police, I informed them of whom allegedly forged the signatures on the petitions, said Schreiber who would not reveal the name to the Times Union. That campaign worker added names without Samanthas knowledge ... Im calling on the State Police to arrest that person for forgery. If they chose not to, then that only proves that her arrest was politically motivated and she was targeted and nothing else.

Carson, who was a special Schenectady County assistant district attorney named to the case, said the forgeries were obvious, contained in block lettering, not signatures, printed names that appear to be the same handwriting for multiple names and multiple addresses.

"State Police conducted a lengthy investigation and interviewed nearly every person that they could track down from those two petitions, each petition carrying 20 signatures, Carson said. A number of those interviewed and who provided written statements said they never signed the petitions despite their name appearing and never gave anyone permission to put their name of the petition.

He also said a number of the petition lines included incorrect addresses, incorrect names and nicknames that were not actual legal voting names.

The most glaring example was a witness who purportedly signed the petition (who) was in the state of Florida on vacation, Carson said. He said taking all the evidence together, "this was a particularly flagrant and indefensible.

Schreiber emphasized however, that Guerra is only guilty of trusting her campaign workers.

The results are in See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote.

Samantha today simply admitted that there is enough evidence against her that would likely result in trial, said Schreiber, who was assisted in court by former congressman John Sweeney. No one ever accused Samantha of forging anything. Samantha was a political newcomer. She relied, to her detriment, on her campaign committee.

Carson said that he is fine with the idea that Guerra will not face any punishment, saying the main thing is that she was held accountable.

Did it affect the election? No, she did not win the election, Carson said. But filing of documents matter ... a conviction is still appropriate.

Both attorneys acknowledge that things could have been worse for Guerra if she was charged with filing a false instrument, a felony. However, there was no proof, they both say, that she herself wrote in those names.

Despite her legal troubles, Guerra said she may try to get on an election ballot again.

I might, she said as she left City Hall. I havent decided yet.
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SCHENECTADY  A student demonstration at the high school Wednesday that included speeches and a march protested the school board's narrow decision last week to bring more city police officers work in the district's schools.

Many of the student speakers who addressed a crowd of about 150 students outside the Pat Riley Sports Center expressed dismay that board members seemed to be tone deaf to anxieties some students feel about having police officers in the building.

Proponents cite the slew of fights inside the building of 2,600 students early in the school year. And some police leaders contend this new approach of community engagement officers is an effort to build relationships with teens, particularly those of color.

Carmine Rivera, 14, was among the demonstrators.

"There shouldn't be cops in schools because it makes us students feel like we're in prison right now because when we walk in the hallways we see cops in the school with weapons," said the high school freshman."We have our own hall monitors getting paid in the school and it feels like the cops are just taking over."

Still, he acknowledged that he didn't feel threatened by the the two police officers already at the high school and that they were "two nice guys," referring to Sgt. Adriel Linyear and Albert Rivera.

Cameron Roulhac, a ninth-grader said, "we have enough protection already."

A few passing cars along The Plaza with student drivers either honked or shouted encouragement to protesters, some of whom clutched hand-written signs against police and having them in school buildings.

Afterward, senior Login Abudalla said she and some schoolmates felt the personal experiences and trauma about police that they shared with the school district were continuously disregarded.

At the protest, Abudalla invited Executive Principal Chris Chank and Tyrone O'Meally, the district's executive director of secondary schools, both of whom watched the speeches, to address the crowd. She said neither of them took to the microphone purportedly because they wanted the focus to remain on the students.

Superintendent Anibal Soler Jr issued a statement Wednesday afternoon that said the district encourages students to "have a voice and share their opinions on issues and topics they feel strongly about" and that administrators allowed the teens to students to leave the building because "it was important to give them the time and a safe, supervised space to share their voices and ensure that they returned to class immediately after."

Police Chief Eric Clifford, who was not at the rally, reiterated in a telephone conversation that the community engagement officers are at the high school mainly to try to build trust with students and not "to police students and look for criminal activity"

He said the community engagement officers will continue to have conversations with their detractors as a way to firm up relationships.

The results are in See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote.

In a 4-3 vote last week the school board approved adding four more community engagement officers to the two police officers already at the school. The new officers would be assigned to the middle schools and a supervising officer would visit all of the district's schools. The vote followed a weeks-long debate focused largely on whether armed police bolster school safety or cause more trauma to Black and brown students already fearful of them. Jamaica Miles, a school board member and social justice activist who voted against the proposal, attended Wednesday's protest.

Schenectady police officers at the time noted how they grew up in the city, attended its schools and that they promised to build a bond with students.

Critics maintained the $300,000 initial annual cost to the district with 2 percent increases each academic year over three years is money that could be better spent on social workers, counselors and other professional staff to help teenage students still grappling with the ongoing strain of the pandemic.

Citing the opt-out clause in the district's contract with the police department, Abudalla said she hopes to present alternatives to the community engagement officer program to present to board members in hopes of having the deal revoked.
Speed Khaleesi was born on a racehorse farm in Saratoga on Feb. 17, 2015. She won $75,261 for her various owners. So how did this beautiful, productive mare recently end up in a pen in Pennsylvania, destined to be shipped to Mexico to be slaughtered for food?

How can this be happening in a state that has some of the premier racetracks in the country and laws specifically directed at not letting this happen to these incredible equine athletes?

Horse slaughter in the United States is banned. But shipping horses to Mexico or Canada to be slaughtered is perfectly legal. And so there is a thriving business involving auctioning off horses at the end of their careers and shipping them north or south.

New York specifically bans the slaughter of racehorses and racehorse stock, and just this past session, the Legislature passed a law requiring that all horses seeking to race in New York first be microchipped as a way to identify them and follow their career paths, including what happens to them after their racing careers are over. The law, signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul, is further proof that we in New York dont want to see these beautiful animals collected in kill pens and shipped out of the country for food, enduring horrific conditions each step of the way.

So how did a horse born in New York in the famed Saratoga area find herself in this situation?

She last raced on August 30, 2020, at the Mountaineer race track in West Virginia, where she finished sixth. In 28 career starts, she came in first three times, second twice, and third once. Its a familiar pattern. As horses age and slow down theyre sent to less-competitive tracks until its clear that their running careers are over.

So what happens to a horse thats no longer finishing in the money?

Many off-the-track thoroughbreds have had amazing subsequent careers as jumpers, trail horses, show horses, or even as a kids best friend. I have three thoroughbred rescues myself. They are beautiful, fun, affectionate, and make me and some wonderful kids who regularly visit my barn very happy.

But in order for this to happen, it means time and money as you retrain them for a new life and career. So its far easier to send a horse to auction - and in some cases directly to a kill buyer  and get at least a small return on your investment than it is to actually help them transition to a new, good life.

Dont get me wrong: There are wonderful people who are active on this issue. One of my horses, Leroy, came from Second Chance Thoroughbreds, a New York-based nonprofit. Another, Wes, came from a gal who was his exercise rider at the Finger Lakes track. When he started to slow down at 8 years old, she asked if she could give him a home. But my third  Cady, a gorgeous little even-tempered mare  was in the kill pen. I rescued her 10 minutes before she was to be shipped to Mexico.

Sign up for the Observation Deck newsletter Read the latest Times Union opinion, perspective and letters to the editor on Mondays by signing up for our Observation Deck newsletter.

But such happy endings are hard-fought and rare. Thousands of healthy horses are shipped out to be killed in Mexico and Canada every year.

Speed Khaleesi, it turns out, is one of the lucky ones. Just before being shipped to Mexico, the David Cassidy I Think I Love You Animal Foundation stepped in, and shell be starting a new career off-track with owners who will take care of her for the rest of her life.

What we really need to do is close the slaughter loophole, which allows horses to be shipped out of the country for food. But that would require federal action. A good start would be for more states to follow New Yorks lead on microchipping so we can better track and raise awareness about the terrible fate that awaits so many horses after their racing careers are over.

Diana Urban of Chatham served in the Connecticut General Assembly for 18 years and is founder and CEO of Protecting Kids and Pets Partnership.
Last year, Gov. Kathy Hochul committed to recusing herself from actions related to Delaware North Cos., and for good reason: Her husband, William Hochul, is a high-level executive at the company.

At the time, with Ms. Hochul promising a new era of ethics and transparency, the step seemed like it would be enough to satisfy concerns about potential conflicts of interest involving the governors office and the Buffalo-based food, hospitality and gambling company.

But just eight months later, it has become clear that Ms. Hochuls recusal was not enough. Troubling conflicts have continued to arise.

Well start with the agreement Ms. Hochuls administration negotiated to keep the Buffalo Bills in New York, which requires the state and Erie County to contribute more than $1 billion in public funds toward the construction and maintenance of a new stadium.

While that extraordinary contribution to the Bills does not directly involve Delaware North, the company has operated concessions, dining and retail services at the teams existing stadium since 1992 and stands to benefit financially from a replacement loaded with luxury boxes and other amenities designed to generate significantly more revenue.

Indeed, the memorandum of understanding among the state, team and Erie County even specifies the location of the kitchen  likely to be operated by Delaware North  within the stadium and notes that the in-house facility will be responsible for providing most of the food to the buildings premium areas. While that alone may not be unusual or cause for suspicion, it illustrates the intertwining of Ms. Hochuls public business with the private business of Mr. Hochuls company .

More worrisome is the potential new gambling compact between the Seneca Nation and New York, a deal Ms. Hochul may have to sign.

As the Times Unions Chris Bragg reported, Delaware North and the Seneca Nation are fierce competitors in western New Yorks lucrative gambling market. And as the Seneca allege that the state allows Delaware North to improperly run gambling parlors in its gaming zone, the company has been lobbying Ms. Hochuls administration on issues related to the tribe.

Sign up for the Observation Deck newsletter Read the latest Times Union opinion, perspective and letters to the editor on Mondays by signing up for our Observation Deck newsletter.

That the administration froze Seneca bank accounts to secure $564 million under the contentious terms of a prior Seneca Nation compact  with much of the money to be used for the new Bills stadium  only complicates the plot.

This cant continue. Even if Ms. Hochul is, as a spokesperson asserts, committed to the strictest ethical standards, the appearance of impropriety is real enough to arouse suspicion from a public that is already inclined to believe the worst of state government.

Ms. Hochul must find a way to put more distance between her office and business involving Delaware North, perhaps by turning some of her responsibilities over to independent arbitrators. If thats not possible, Mr. Hochul must step down from his roles as senior vice president, general counsel and secretary at Delaware North.

Both Hochuls should consider whats at stake: The success of the governors administration, for one, but also her important pledge to restore faith in the honesty and legitimacy of state government.
MALTA  Tailored Real Estate Group, an independent real estate company founded by Jaylene Leonbruno, celebrated a ribbon cutting Tuesday.

Leonbruno was affiliated with Howard Hanna for 14 years before going out on her own. She is a lifelong resident of South Glens Falls. Seven additional agents have joined the new company since Leonbruno opened in November.

Representatives of Sen. Jim Tedisco (R-Glenville) and Assemblywoman Carrie Woerner, (D-Round Lake) attended the event along with Malta town officials and members of the Saratoga County Chamber of Commerce.

Im honored by the attendance of such prestigious guests, and unbelievably thankful for the support of all of my friends, family and colleagues that are here today. I would not have been able to do this without you all," Leonbruno said.

Your guide to living in the Capital Region, Hudson Valley and beyond New in town? Looking for a change of scenery? Find your new home or apartment. Your guide to living in the Capital Region, Catskills and Hudson Valley

Karen Heath, the first salesperson to join Tailored, said the atmosphere in the office is cooperative.

"We look forward to using our experience to help home buyers and sellers meet their dreams," Heath said.
The warm weather is soon to spike local crime stats but for right now we play a bit of catch up and take a glimpse at these local reports of ALLEGED misdeeds, police action, court cases and rising violence across the metro . . .

However, as always, we try to finish this compilation with a bit of hope . . .



Check TKC news gathering . . .



3 shot in disturbance in Jackson County, Missouri KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Three people were wounded in a shooting Monday afternoon in the 800 block of Southeast Sunnyside Road in Jackson County, Missouri. Investigators from the Jackson County Sheriff's Department were on scene gathering evidence. The incident began as a disturbance, but little else was known Monday night.

Cullan & Cullan wins biggest medical malpractice verdict in KC history - Kansas City Business Journal Cullan & Cullan earned a $25.4 million verdict, the largest ever for a medical malpractice case in the Kansas City area, according to the Greater Kansas City Jury Verdict Service. Joe Cullan, Pat Cullan and Ryan Terril of Kansas City-based Cullan & Cullan represented Kylie Harris and her mother, Rachel Harris, of Independence in a case that went to trial in Jackson County Circuit Court.

Judge dismisses charges for duck boat tragedy A judge on Tuesday dismissed criminal charges against three men prosecuted after a tourist boat sank and killed 17 people during a 2018 Missouri storm.The boat was swamped by waves caused by strong winds shortly after it entered Table Rock Lake near Branson on July 19, 2018.

23-year-old charged with 1st degree murder in fatal Kansas City shooting KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A 23-year-old Kansas City, Missouri man is facing first-degree murder charges for a fatal shooting in northeast Kansas City on March 25. Additionally, Gerald Robinson faces a count of armed criminal action in the death of Anthony Villareal near 24th Street and Quincy Avenue.

Missouri teacher arrested at school, charged with sexual contact with student A Butler, Missouri, teacher has been charged with three counts of sexual contact with a student. According to the Bates County Sheriff's Office, 38-year-old Charles Reece was arrested at Butler High School Thursday and charged with three counts of sexual contact with a student.

US airport security screening to become more gender-neutral U.S. airport security procedures will become more gender-neutral, with changes to scanners used for screening and the use of an "X" for travelers going through Precheck who do not identify as male or female, the Biden administration said Thursday.Transportation Security Administration officers will also receive new instructions on screening intended to make procedures less invasive, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.They are among a series of travel-security measures announced by the department in conjunction with Transgender Day of Visibility.

Legislators back measure creating a crime for flying a plane drunk, put sheriff amendment on ballot TOPEKA - Kansas legislators sent Friday a wide variety of criminal justice and law enforcement bills to the governor for consideration and placed an amendment on the ballot regarding how sheriffs are chosen. Among those approved initiatives was the creation of a new crime for operating an aircraft under the influence.

St. Louis' murder total has fallen, but some killings went uncounted When the final numbers showed that St. Louis had reduced its murders last year while other big cities were hitting records, city officials said their success was due to smart use of crime data and effective anti-violence programs. But over the past two years, St.

Officers Showcase Skills In Wheel School Officers of various ranks are trying out for KCPDs Traffic Enforcement Unit during Wheel School at the police academy. The school began on March 30 and concludes on April 15.

Developing . . .
Remember that not so long ago journalists wondered what would happen without newspapers to inform the public about important political issues.

Here we are . . .

KANSAS CITY TAX INCREASES THAT ARE FAVORED TO WIN ARE A DIRECT RESULT OF LOCAL MEDIA FAIL TO WARN THE VOTING PUBLIC!!!

This blog has provided more coverage and warning than anybody else and we're disappointed that there wasn't as single journalist who bothered to ask Mayor Q about his callous strategy that would raise taxes on locals at the outset of recession.

To be fair . . .

Mayor Q hasn't really campaigned much for this tax spike and the council is keeping their head down.

In fact . . .

It's hard to find anybody who REALLY supports these two tax increases that threat to make KCMO life just a little less affordable.



People seem to be more excited about po'dunk school board elections wherein the plebs get to pretend to be a part of the national news conversation.

Still . . .

This low point of American politics and local voter turnout deserves some consideration.

So TKC shares this coverage in hopes that people will make up their own mind . . .



Kansas City voters decide on three questions Tuesday at the polls Kansas City voters will decide on three questions that will be on the April 5 ballot that all require approval by a majority of voters to pass.

Will your taxes increase? Several Kansas City-area cities voting on tax questions KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Several Kansas City-area suburbs are asking taxpayers to fork over more money for a variety of municipal issues, many involving first responders. Lee's Summit voters will be asked to pass an extra half-cent sales tax "for public safety purposes."

'Clean up Independence': Will voters choose 'elitist' or reformer for mayor? OPINION AND COMMENTARY Editorials and other Opinion content offer perspectives on issues important to our community and are independent from the work of our newsroom reporters. In hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan's "C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me)," raspy-voiced member Method Man raps, "Cash rules everything around me/C.R.E.A.M., get the money/Dollar, dollar bill y'all."

'They saved my life': Rally supports extending KC's healthcare levy that helps poor Frontline healthcare workers, faith leaders, community activists and union leaders rallied outside of University Health Truman Medical Center Monday morning to show support for extending Kansas City's healthcare levy.

9 Kansas City-area school districts have tax issues on Tuesday's ballot KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Nine Kansas City-area school districts, including four north of the river, have tax-levy or bond issues before voters Tuesday as special elections take place across Missouri. The North Kansas City School District will have two tax-related questions before voters.

Voter guide: Here's a look at who's running for school board elections in the Kansas City area Voters will choose new school board members in some of the largest districts in the Kansas City area on Tuesday, April 5. They include the Liberty, Lee's Summit, Independence, North Kansas City, Raytown, Blue Springs and Park Hill school districts. School board elections were once low-profile affairs.

Election Day in Missouri will see decisions ranging from health levy to mayor KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Voters have a chance to cast their ballot on a variety of issues across Missouri Tuesday. KSHB 41 News compiled a list of key races. Nearly every voter in Kansas City's limits will answer three questions. The city has posted information about the first two on its website.

Developing . . .


A potential Chiefs move to Kansas in search of a stadium has our political "leaders" turning on one another.



Even better . . .

THE 'TRUCE' IN AN ECONOMIC BORDER WAR BETWIXT KANSAS & MISSOURI HAS BEEN BROKEN!!!

Most of our KICK-ASS TKC READERS understand that it never really existed.

Still . . .

Here's Pete Mundo to explain the science . . .



As always, money overrides political loyalties.

Developing . . .


Amazon Canada donated $128,000 to William Osler Health System Foundation in support of pandemic recovery efforts at William Osler Health System. From left, representing Amazon are Scott Truman, William Chu, Nitharson Parameswaran and Sushant Jha; Osler Foundation vice-president philanthropy Nicole McCahon and Osler Health System interim president and CEO Dr. Frank Martino along with Brampton deputy mayors Martin Medeiros and Pat Fortini. - Osler Foundation photo
Americans showed the world how to die from COVID-19. Are they about to do it again?

As case counts and deaths are low and falling, other political concerns have become higher priorities in American. That may be just the opening the next wave of COVID needs.
Mississauga high school teacher Laura Kirby-McIntosh on her front porch with her husband Bruce McIntosh and Clara, 19. They have all tested positive. The family is pictured with their dog, Baby Girl. - Richard Lautens / Toronto Star
Brampton Mayor and Conservative Party leadership candidate Patrick Brown feels pretty good about his decision not to take part in Thursdays leadership candidate debate.
Two of the four green-band-maxi-taxi routes yet to implement a fare increase will be doing so, come Monday.

Meantime discussions are underway with respect to raising fares on a third route, but the Route 3 Maxi-Taxi Association is giving its clients the opportunity to suggest a reasonable increase. Rynessa Cutting has more.
On April 5, 2022, the Ukrainian Air Force destroyed eight cruise missiles.

The relevant statement was made by the Air Force Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on Telegram, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

According to the Ukrainian defenders, the enemy has changed combat tactics in the air. Now Russian forces are trying not to enter the impact area of the Ukrainian anti-aircraft defense systems and avoid coming into direct contact with fighter jets.

Meanwhile, Russian invaders are launching missile strikes from the air, namely from the territory of Belarus.

The aviation of the Ukrainian Air Force continues to provide support for the land units of the Defense Forces, launching air strikes on the occupiers, the Air Force Command noted.

A reminder that, on April 5, 2022, within the control area of the East Operational and Tactical Group, the Ukrainian military repelled an enemy attack, having destroyed about 80 Russian invaders.

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Russian invaders are sending drones to the area of Odesa for air reconnaissance to determine targets for missile strikes, but Ukrainian air defense units are blocking enemy actions.

Serhii Bratchuk, spokesperson for the Odesa regional military administration, said this on Facebook, Ukrinform reports.

"Last night in Odesa and the region was relatively calm, although air raid sirens sounded, as the enemy is intensifying air reconnaissance. But our air defense forces are working and conducting defense operations," Bratchuk said.

He also warned residents of Odesa that Ukrainian drones and helicopters could be flying in the airspace around the city.

"If you hear the sound of a helicopter, don't worry: our forces are patrolling Mykolaiv and most likely fly to us. Our drones were also spotted over the city," he said.

On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the beginning of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian troops have been shelling and destroying critical infrastructure and residential areas of Ukrainian cities, towns and villages using artillery, multiple rocket launchers and ballistic missiles.
More than 55,000 people have crossed the western border of Ukraine in the past 24 hours, the Western Regional Department of the Ukrainian State Border Guard Service has said on Facebook.

"During the day on April 5, more than 55,000 people and more than 13,000 vehicles crossed Ukraine's western borders with the EU and Moldova. Passenger traffic in the western section of the border remains stable," the statement reads.

More than 32,000 people left Ukraine in the past day. More than 20,000 of them crossed the border through the Ukrainian-Polish section, and others used checkpoints on the border with Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Moldova. There are almost no queues of pedestrians and vehicles in all the above directions.

Some 23,000 people arrived in Ukraine on April 5, and more than 20,000 of them are Ukrainians.

All checkpoints on the western border, except for the Dzvinkove and Kosyno checkpoints, are operating around the clock.

On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the beginning of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian troops have been shelling and destroying critical infrastructure and residential areas of Ukrainian cities, towns and villages using artillery, multiple rocket launchers and ballistic missiles.
In Vuhledar town, Donetsk region, Russian aggressors fired on a humanitarian aid distribution spot, killing two and wounding five people.

"Russian fascists opened fire from rocket artillery on a spot where humanitarian aid was distributed in Vuhledar. It is currently known that two people were killed and five were wounded. We document all the crimes committed by the Russian Federation on our land. Those guilty will not be forgiven!" Head of the Donetsk Regional Military Administration Pavlo Kyrylenko posted on Telegram.

On February 24, Russian president Putin started a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian troops shell and destroy infrastructure, massively fire on residential areas of Ukrainian cities, towns, and villages using artillery, MLRS, and ballistic missiles.

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In Kherson region, the Russian military is torturing abducted locals.

"Captives, held in a basement of the police department premises seized by Russian Nazis in Nova Kakhovka, said they heard the voice and name of Vitaliy Peretiatko, a former member of the Nova Kakhovka Town Council, among other prisoners. They told what I know well from my own experience: they hear how other prisoners are constantly tortured, they hear people persuading their executioners to kill them not to suffer pain after the brutal beatings," Oleh Baturin, a journalist from Kakhovka who was abducted by the Russians on March 12 and spent almost eight days in captivity, wrote on Facebook, Ukrinform reports.

Also, according to him, the logic of the occupiers' actions gradually becomes clear. The prisoners said they had heard how tortured veterans of Anti-Terrorist Operation were required to confess that they had participated in the "Right sector" and were threatened to be sent either to Donetsk (to rebuild the city "damaged by Bandera adepts"), or to Crimea (to send for trial and create their own documented database of "evidence" of "atrocities" of "Right sector members").

People said that they heard the voice of prisoner Oleh Kozhemyakin [Russians abducted Kozhemyakin in Kakhovka on April 2]. He is alive, he is being tortured and "interrogated" in the basement almost every day, Baturin wrote.

Russian invaders abduct civilians in Kherson region, including journalists, community leaders, local council members, and activists. The occupiers hold the abducted people in prison cells in Kherson. The fate of many civilians has been unknown for many days.

In Kherson region, residents regularly hold peaceful protests against the Russian aggressor. The Russian military uses force and weapons against people, there are wounded and detained civilians.

On February 24, Russian president Putin started a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian troops shell and destroy infrastructure, massively fire on residential areas of Ukrainian cities, towns, and villages using artillery, MLRS, and ballistic missiles.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that after evidence emerged of atrocities carried out by the Russian military, he has no great desire to hold talks with Russia, but they are necessary to save the people.

He said this in an interview with Turkey's Haberturk television channel, according to an Ukrinform correspondent.

"After what we saw, frankly speaking, there is no great desire to negotiate with the Russian Federation, because we understand who we are dealing with," Zelensky said.

At the same time, he noted that regardless of the desire, steps must be taken every day to save as many people as possible.

"In any case, we must find even small opportunities for the negotiation process. Without this, I think it is difficult to end the war," he said.

In this context, Zelensky emphasized the importance of the mediation mission of certain leaders, including Turkey.

On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the beginning of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian troops have been shelling and destroying critical infrastructure and residential areas of Ukrainian cities, towns and villages using artillery, multiple rocket launchers and ballistic missiles.
Putin's system must be broken in Russia's war against Ukraine, and Germany must do everything possible to help make that happen.

German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said this during the debate in the Bundestag, according to an Ukrinform correspondent.

"On the streets of Bucha, we saw not only the bodies of those killed, but all the brutality of Putin's system. A system that considers all means good to promote its interests, that subordinates everything to the nationalist great-power idea, that has no restrictions and brakes, that tramples on law and humanity. Therefore, this system cannot win. Those who act like Putin do not care whether the bodies lie on the streets of Bucha or on the streets of Tbilisi, Vilnius or Berlin. Therefore, Germany must help Ukrainians as much as it can in their fight against Putin's system," Lambrecht said.

She stressed that this war of aggression is a crime in itself, but what the world saw in Bucha went beyond all bounds. In this regard, the politician noted that it would be wrong to reduce everything to just Putin. "It is not only his crimes, but also the crimes of every commander who gives orders, every soldier who carries out these orders or allows them to be carried out. They are all to blame. Every crime must be investigated and absolutely every perpetrator must be punished," the minister said.

Representatives of all factions of the Bundestag took part in the debate on the situation in Bucha. All of them unanimously condemned the actions of the Russian army. At the same time, many deputies criticized the German government for its slow decision-making on the provision of weapons to Ukraine.
If there is no really painful package of sanctions against Russia and if Ukraine does not get a real supply of weapons, which we have applied for many times, Russia will regard this as permission to go further.

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky stated this in his latest address.

Ukrainians!

Our defenders!

It seems that the attitude to the modern Russian state is finally changing in the world. After what the world saw in Bucha when Russian troops retreated.

Now the attitude to everyone in Russia will be simple: you support either the search for peace or unjustified massacre.

Killed Ukrainian men and women in Bucha, in Irpin, in other cities that Russian troops entered is the last argument. The last argument for every citizen of Russia to decide whether you are for war or for peace. If for war, then you will forever - until the end of your life - be outcasts and in the end you will lose everything. And if for peace, if you feel even a little bit of shame for what the Russian troops are doing in Ukraine, then now is a key moment for such citizens of Russia: you have to demand - exactly demand - an end to the war. It is better now, demanding peace, to lose something, to somehow face the Russian repressive machine than to be equated with the Nazis for the rest of your life. This applies not only to any public person in the Russian Federation, not only to businessmen, but also to ordinary citizens.

Nazism has no future. Mass killings have no future. Everyone in Russia who will not demand an end to this shameful war and the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine has no future.

It seems that the Russian leadership is really afraid that the anger of the world because of what they saw in Bucha would be repeated because of what they will see in other cities, from where we will definitely drive out the occupiers. We have information that the Russian troops have changed their tactics and are trying to remove the killed people from the streets and basements of the occupied territory. Killed Ukrainians. This is just an attempt to hide the evidence and nothing more.

But they will not succeed, because they killed a lot. Responsibility cannot be avoided.

We already know about thousands of missing people. We already know about thousands of people who could be either deported to Russia or killed. There are no other options for their fate.

The situation now is that thanks to an objective investigation, thanks to witnesses, thanks to satellite surveillance of events on earth, thanks to other tools that help establish the truth we will find out all the circumstances regarding the majority of our missing citizens. Regarding most of Russia's war crimes in Ukraine.

If the world has started a debate about whether it is permissible to call what the Russian military did on the territory of Ukraine genocide, the search for truth can no longer be stopped. You can't roll it back in any way. One can only quickly abandon further aggression against Ukraine and thus try to somehow reduce the damage to Russian statehood and to those who personally adopt key decisions in Russia.

If not, if nothing changes, then it is suicide. Suicide for anyone who chooses to continue the war.

Today, Western countries announced a new package of sanctions against the Russian Federation. New investments in Russia are blocked, restrictions are applied against several systemic banks in Russia, personal sanctions are added, as well as other restrictions. This package has a spectacular look. But this is not enough.

Still it can hardly be called commensurate with the evil that the world saw in Bucha. With the evil that continues in Mariupol, in the shelling of Kharkiv, in Russia's attempt to launch a new global bloody offensive in Donbas...

We will continue to insist on a complete blockade of the Russian banking system from international finance. We will also continue to insist on one or another format of the democratic world's refusal to buy Russian oil. It is the export of oil that is one of the foundations of Russia's aggression. One of the foundations that allows the Russian leadership not to take seriously the negotiations on ending the war and on the liberation of Ukrainian territory.

Some politicians are still unable to decide how to limit the flow of dollars and euros to Russia from the oil trade, so as not to jeopardize their own economies. But that's why people go into politics. To solve such problems, difficult tasks. To solve them quickly and in a principled fashion. If you are not capable, then you shouldnt have started political activity.

The embargo on Russian oil supplies will be applied anyway. The format will be found. The only question is how many more Ukrainian men and women the Russian military will have time to kill, so that you, some politicians - and we know you, can borrow a little determination somewhere.

It is good that the United States Department of the Treasury has suspended Russia's ability to use US bank accounts and related assets to pay its debt. It's tangible. And I'm grateful for that. But much more needs to be done to stop the war.

If there is no really painful package of sanctions against Russia and if there is no supply of weapons we really need and have applied for many times, it will be considered by Russia as a permission. A permission to go further. A permission to attack. A permission to start a new bloody wave in Donbas.

It is still possible to prevent this. It is still possible to impose such sanctions, which Ukraine insists on, our people insist on. It is still possible to give us weapons that will really stop this aggression. The West can do it.

Just as it could have applied preventive sanctions last year to prevent this invasion. If the mistake is made again, if there is no preventive action again, it will be a historic mistake for the whole Western world.

I addressed the parliament and the people of Ireland today. This country was one of the first to come to our aid after February 24. And it is one of those who shows principled leadership in the European house to put effective and decisive pressure on Russia.

As a result of my address, we have good news: Ireland fully supports Ukraine's accelerated accession to the European Union. And it will do everything to increase the pressure on Russia as much as necessary to end this war.

Tomorrow I will address the parliaments and nations of Greece and the Republic of Cyprus.

In the afternoon I held a meeting with members of the Cabinet of Ministers in Kyiv. The key issues are the implementation of the state budget and economic activity in our country. We must do everything possible to restore the work of domestic enterprises, trade activities, and revive small and medium-sized enterprises throughout our territory where it is safe and possible to work.

The economy is also a frontline on which we fight for our freedom, for our state, for our people. Therefore, we need to constantly look for ways to adapt to the circumstances. Now we need to be as creative and bold as possible in solving economic issues. It depends not only on government officials and the central government in general. In general, it also depends on all leaders at the local level, on the political and business communities.

We must all find the necessary ideas, the necessary solutions to stabilize the country's economy together. If we need to relocate businesses from certain areas, we have to do it. If we need to update legislation and give businesses more room for development, MPs must do so quickly. If we need to create special conditions for the return of people, and the security situation in a particular area allows, every leader at any level must make every effort and do everything possible to return people to such safe areas.

Today, the 42nd day of the Russian invasion has come to an end. This is not too much for military history. But for the life of a particular person - it is tangible. Right now, many of our people who left their cities, their communities after the invasion of Russia may wonder: what next? And where next? In particular, Ukrainians abroad. In particular, Kyivans and residents of other cities in the north and center of our state who moved to the western regions.

And I call on all community leaders in areas where there is no threat of direct confrontation with the enemy on the ground to do everything possible for people to return, for people to work, for economic processes to restart. To restore normal life as much as security allows.

This applies to the entire horizontal of local government - mayors, deputies of city and regional councils. Look for solutions for every district, for every region! Together with the government, together with us, with the Office of the President, together with the deputies of the Verkhovna Rada. A working economy is just as important as our brave, strong army.

The Russian occupiers continue to accumulate fighting force to realize their ill ambitions in Donbas. They are preparing to resume an active offensive.

We are preparing for a further reduction of Russia's military potential. Manpower and equipment. We will fight and we will not retreat. We will look for all possible options to defend ourselves until Russia begins to seriously seek peace.

This is our land. This is our future. And we will not give them up.

I never tire of thanking each of our defenders everyday - all our Armed Forces, intelligence, special services, the National Police, everyone who allows us to hope and believe in victory. Allows us to count on peace.

Sincere gratitude! Sincere respect!

And before delivering this evening's address, I traditionally signed decrees on awarding our heroes. 168 servicemen of the Armed Forces. And 3 servicemen from the Main Directorate of Intelligence.

Eternal glory to everyone who defends Ukraine!

Eternal memory to everyone who gave life for our state!

Glory to Ukraine!
The sanctions against the Russian Federation must be commensurate with the gravity of war crimes committed by Russian troops in Ukraine.

The relevant statement was made by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in his video address, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

We are preparing a new package of powerful sanctions against Russia for everything it has done to our people. Now it is a crucial moment, especially for Western leaders. And this is no longer about how our people will evaluate the new sanctions and what I will say about them. This is about how decisions on sanctions will be assessed in Western societies themselves, Zelensky told.

In his words, after what the world saw in Bucha, sanctions against Russia must be commensurate with the gravity of the occupiers war crimes.

If after that Russian banks will still be able to function as usual... If after that the transit of goods to Russia will continue as usual... If after that the EU countries will pay for Russian energy resources as usual... Then the political fate of some leaders will develop not as usual. My advice to everyone: feel now that the moment is really crucial, Zelensky stressed.

A reminder that such settlements as Irpin, Bucha, Hostomel, and the entire Kyiv Region, were liberated from Russian invaders. The mass killings of civilians, committed by Russian troops, were revealed within the liberated areas.

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The Russian military have come to Ukraine as an army of colonizers.

The relevant statement was made by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during his speech in Erachtas, Parliament of Ireland, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

The President of Ukraine stressed that Russia does not deserve to be among others in the international community.

The Russian military came to Ukraine as an army of colonizers. Their state propagandists, their politicians don't even hide what they want anymore. In the 21st century, they see their state as a colonial empire that allegedly has the right to subjugate neighboring nations and destroy any basis for their independent living. Destroy even the very identity of nations. Everything that makes us Ukrainians, Zelensky told.

The Russian military purposefully searched for and killed teachers in the occupied territories. Everyone who was associated with the army. They kidnap local government officials and kill community leaders. Along with the Russian army, units to suppress any political resistance were immediately created, as they entered the territory of Ukraine.

Zelensky also expressed outrage that, after all the horrors being experienced by Ukraine, they still have to persuade the international community to take more decisive actions against the aggressor state.

A reminder that, on February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin initiated a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, starting a war. Russian troops are shelling and destroying the key infrastructure facilities, launching missile and air strikes on residential areas in Ukrainian cities and villages, torturing and murdering civilians.

mk
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) President Tiny Kox has paid his first visit to Ukraine.

The relevant statement was made by Verkhovna Rada Chairman Ruslan Stefanchuk on Facebook, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

I congratulate PACE President Tiny Kox on his first visit to Ukraine. We have met in Lviv to discuss the consequences of the Russian aggression against Ukraine and the best ways for the Council of Europe to support Ukraine, Stefanchuk wrote.

Stefanchuk suggested that the PACE organize a mission to establish and collect the facts of the crimes committed by the Russian Federation in Ukraine for international courts. He expressed hope for PACEs help in bringing the aggressor to justice.

The Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine also expects a continuous assessment of the human rights situation within the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.

A reminder that, on February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin initiated a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, starting a war. Russian troops are shelling and destroying the key infrastructure facilities, launching missile and air strikes on residential areas in Ukrainian cities and villages, torturing and murdering civilians.

mk
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called on the Parliament of Ireland to persuade EU partners to toughen sanctions against the Russian Federation.

The relevant statement was made by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during his speech in Erachtas, Parliament of Ireland, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

I urge you to show even more leadership in our anti-war coalition! I urge you to persuade your EU partners to toughen sanctions against the Russian Federation. The sanctions that will really stop Russias military machine, Zelensky told.

In his words, it is necessary to stop all trade with Russia, block Russian banks ties with the worlds financial system, cut off the flow of money that the Russian budget receives for oil and spends it on missiles, bombs, artillery shelling.

The world has long developed appropriate mechanisms. Everyone knows what to do. The only obstacle is the lack of principled stance of individual leaders. Yet. Political leaders, business leaders. Those who still think that war and war crimes are not as terrible as financial losses, Zelensky stressed.

According to the President of Ukraine, the leadership of Ireland can change that.

It is simply impossible to procrastinate with this. The longer the Russian aggression lasts, the worse the consequences will be not only for our continent, but also for the neighboring regions of our planet, Zelensky added.

A reminder that, on February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin initiated a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, starting a war. Russian troops are shelling and destroying the key infrastructure facilities, launching missile and air strikes on residential areas in Ukrainian cities and villages, torturing and murdering civilians.

mk
Russia's full-scale armed aggression against Ukraine has made the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals impossible.

"Ukraine is committed to the values and Sustainable Development Goals set to be achieved by 2030. Since 2015, we have launched a series of reforms in the country that have developed our economic potential and democracy. However, it is now impossible to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals due to the full-scale armed aggression that Russia has launched against Ukraine," Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration of Ukraine Olha Stefanishyna said during the Regional Forum on Sustainable Development, hosted by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, the Government portal informs.

The official stressed that the UN Economic Commission for Europe, established in 1947, was to help rebuild post-war Europe, promote economic development and strengthen economic relations between European countries.

"However, on February 24, 2022, all the efforts of the international community and this organization to restore and develop on the European continent, as well as abroad, were undermined by Russias armed attack," said the Deputy Prime Minister.

As noted, the Russian armed forces, which operate in particular from the territory of Belarus, shell kindergartens and schools, universities, hospitals, food and fuel depots, etc. About 11 million people in Ukraine have been forced to flee their homes.

"At the same time, I regret to admit that some member states of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe are still reluctant to strongly oppose the aggression. This makes it extremely difficult to achieve peace and prosperity on the European continent. I am deeply convinced that the desire of Ukrainians to live in an independent, prosperous, and democratic state is much stronger than our enemy's desire to undermine the foundations of European security, and the victory of good over evil is only a matter of time," Stefanishyna said.

The Deputy Prime Minister also focused on the threat of the global food crisis posed by Russia's armed aggression.

On February 24, Russian president Putin started a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian troops shell and destroy key infrastructure, massively fire on residential areas of Ukrainian cities, towns, and villages using artillery, MLRS, and ballistic missiles.

Martial law was imposed in Ukraine and general mobilization was announced.

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Since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the invaders have damaged 279 Ukrainian hospitals and completely destroyed 19.

This was announced on Facebook by Health Minister Viktor Liashko, Ukrinform reports.

"Since war-start, 279 hospitals were damaged and 19  completely destroyed. Twenty medics were seriously injured, six were killed. But our doctors are not giving up, saving lines every day," he said.

According to the minister, Russia will be responsible for every hospital and ambulance fired on, for every doctor killed in Ukraine.

"The next step is a full-fledged restoration of every damaged or destroyed institution, every doctor's office," Liashko stressed.

As Ukrinform reported earlier, 11 ambulances and a batch of medicines were handed over from the western Ukrainian region of Bukovyna to the Ukrainian military.
About Asif

Asif Sultani has been supporting UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, since 2018 when he became an International Olympic Committee Refugee Athlete Scholarship holder.

Over the past couple of years, Asif has collaborated with UNHCR on multiple occasions, from World Refugee Day online campaigns, to featuring in UNHCRs short film The Journey. Asif also has experience fundraising and volunteering for UNHCR, working with key UNHCR partners in Australia, and is a compelling and inspiring public speaker with international media experience.

Originally from Afghanistan, Asif was only seven years old when he was first forced to flee to neighboring Iran due to ongoing war, conflict, and persecution within his homeland. Unfortunately, in Iran, Asif continued to experience hardship through daily discrimination that threatened his safety. This threat led Asif to learn Martial Arts for self-defense, and as his abilities grew, he became increasingly passionate about the sport. At just 16 years of age, Asif found himself in a leaky boat in search of Australia. Skip ahead a few years, in 2018 Asif became an International Olympic Committee Refugee Scholarship holder, where he hoped to represent millions of displaced people around the world. While he didnt end up making it to the Olympics, Asif learnt a lot along the way - from working as a disability support worker, running his own private personal training business, and his latest passion; motivational speaking.

Asif says the determination for building the life he cherishes today goes back to the life he knew as a child  the life of a refugee. Asif is an incredible advocate for refugees, and a true storyteller, who inspires everyone he speaks with to never give up on their dreams.

If only I can create my dreams, then only I can crush them.
Like all great things, the 2021-22 editorial boards term has come to an end. Read more
October 15 2014

Images courtesy of GSA

An endangered modernist church in East Kilbride has been handed a lifeline after waste management firm Viridor stumped up 1m to help finance the restoration and refurbishment of Gillespie, Kidd and Coias St. Brides Church A phased programme of works is planned by Stallan-Brand for the exposed building, with priority being given to the main church envelope which has suffered from water ingress over the years. The much needed cash will be ploughed into a restoration of the roof and walls of the A listed brick block, hailed as one of Britains best modern churches , which still remains in daily use.Later phases will concentrate on upgrading building services and an ancillary Presbytery + Church House, together with improvements to the external environment. Ultimately it is hoped to restore the original composition of the structure by rebuilding a feature bell tower which was sadly demolished in 1983. Fundraising to that end is still ongoing following the sad passing of its chief architect, Professor Andy McMillan, with well-wishers being urged to donate to the fund.Stallan-Brand design director Paul Stallan commented: "St.Brides for me is the most important modernist buildings of the period. The church made from Victorian sewer bricks and concrete is both simple and complex. The architecture continues to be a key reference for students of architecture from across the world interested in modernism and the contemporary vernacular in context. Andy and Isi's work is as important to Scotland as Alvar Aalto's work is to the Finnish."
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Awards

Bona Limited has won the Contract Flooring Journal award for the best Floor Finish for the past 19 years - this is an award voted for by the readers of the journal - professional flooring contractors.


(@ChaudhryMAli88)

The federal government has successfully launched the Ramzan Relief Package through Utility Stores Corporation (USC) to provide special subsidy on 19 basic items for the convenience of the people

ISLAMABAD, Apr 6 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 6th Apr, 2022 ) :The Federal government has successfully launched the Ramzan Relief Package through Utility Stores Corporation (USC) to provide special subsidy on 19 basic items for the convenience of the people.

Special discounts of up to 15% are also being offered on over 1500 items available at utility stores, said a press release issued here.

The USC has ensured uninterrupted supply of all items through more than 4,000 stores spread across the country.

All the stores across the country are crowded with people. USC is providing a large quantities of subsidized items.

The consumers are requested to visit the stores early in the day to avoid rush and bring a copy of their ID card with them so they can easily avail the Ramzan package.

More than 1.6 million families have benefited from this package since April 1.

This year's Ramzan package of utility stores is also significant because the corporation has adapted its store system to the modern lines of the ERP system in a very short period of time.

In order to discourage black marketing and sale of subsidized food items in bulk, the management of the corporation has decided that subsidized items will not be sold in bulk so that more consumers can benefit from the Ramzan relief package.
San Felipe, Mexico, April 5 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 6th Apr, 2022 ) :Mexican naval vessels, spotter planes and conservationists are patrolling the upper Gulf of California in a race against time to save the world's rarest marine mammal from extinction.

Mexico's navy and the environmental organization Sea Shepherd are working together to prevent the vaquita porpoise -- which counts Leonardo DiCaprio among its celebrity defenders -- disappearing forever.

The species is critically endangered, due to illegal gillnets used to catch totoaba, a large fish whose swim bladder can fetch thousands of Dollars in China thanks to its supposed medicinal properties.

The navy stepped up surveillance in January amid criticism from the United States that Mexico was not doing enough to protect the vaquita, the smallest porpoise on the planet.

The deployment came after researchers sighted eight specimens of the mammal -- known as the "panda of the sea" for the distinctive black circles around its eyes -- between October and November.

There are estimated to be fewer than 20 individuals left in a small area in the Gulf of California, the only place in the world where the vaquita is found, according to Sea Shepherd.

Navy personnel and activists from the conservation group now monitor the area every day, looking for illegal nets and preventing fishermen from approaching a "zero tolerance zone." In the skies overhead, naval aircraft look for boats venturing into forbidden waters, in the latest phase of "Operation Miracle" -- launched by Sea Shepherd in 2015 to try to save the vaquita.

"The efforts that we've seen, specifically seen over the last three or four months, mean the vaquita has the best chance that they've had in decades," Sea Shepherd CEO Chuck Lindsey told reporters.

During a tour of the area for media, including AFP, Mexico's navy said it had recovered 70 nets so far this year, compared with 172 for all of 2021.

Gillnets form invisible barriers under the water that can span several hundred feet and trap not just totoabas but also vaquitas, whales, dolphins, sharks and sea turtles, according to Sea Shepherd.

"As we see a dramatic reduction in the illegal nets in the water, we know that the vaquita have a fighting chance," Lindsey said.

Conservationists have previously been involved in a number of violent confrontations with fishermen while working with Mexican authorities to remove illegal nets.

The vaquita grows up to a length of around 1.5 meters (five feet) and a weight of 50 kilos (110 Pounds).

It has been listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature since 1996.

In 2019 UNESCO added the Gulf of California's islands and protected areas to the World Heritage in Danger list due to fears of the imminent extinction of the species.

From dawn, Mexican authorities now check that fishermen in the upper Gulf of California have the necessary paperwork, and later check their nets.

But "they should check beyond the breakwater. There are many boats that don't have permits," fisherman Roberto Lopez told reporters during an inspection.

Officials also scour beaches for nets washed ashore.

International attention on the vaquita's plight grew after DiCaprio in 2017 asked his millions of social media followers to sign a petition calling on Mexico's then-president Enrique Pena Nieto to do more to protect the porpoise.

Last August, the Hollywood star accused President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's government of abandoning the vaquita, "effectively ensuring that the remaining 10 or so porpoises will die in gillnets." Saving the vaquita has also become a source of diplomatic friction.

In February, the United States requested consultations with Mexico under a North American free trade pact on efforts to protect the species.

It was the first time a government has invoked the environmental provisions of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which took effect in July 2020.

Without a resolution, the move from the Washington could lead to imposition of tariffs, although US officials said at the time that it was premature to discuss punitive action.

In the meantime, the Mexican navy promises round-the-clock protection for the vaquita.

"The work that the navy has done, as in other places, is to protect the environment. We're doing that here every day," Admiral Luis Javier Robinson told AFP.
(@Abdulla99267510)

Fawad Chaudhary who is not Minister for Information and Broadcasting at the moment, calls a journalist "kiraye ka aadmi [a man on rent]".

ISLAMABAD: (UrduPoint/UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News-April 6th, 2022) PTI leader and former Minister for Information and Broadcasting Fawad Chaudhary called a journalist "kiraye ka aadmi [a man on rent]" when he continued to ask him a question about Farah Khan, the close aide of first lady Bushra Bibi.

Fawad Chaudhary flanked by Asad Umar were addressing a press conference outside the Supreme court on Wednesday when altercation took place between him and the journalists present there.

Fawad Chaudhary misbehaved with the journalists and showed them his attitude.

Taking to Twitter, senior journalist Hamid Mir shared the video clip in which Fawad Chaudhary is seen aggressive and accusing a journalist who posed him a question.

He wrote, "Fawad Chaudhry under-estimated journalists community. Qasim Suri was not present there to help him. He forgot that he was no more information minister. @Matiullahjan919 only asked him a question about Farah Khan but he never wanted to respond and declared him rented journalist, ".

Other journalists also condemned the attitude of Fawad Chaudhary in which he is seen talking full of hatred against a journalist.
Ambassador of Nepal Tapas Adhikari Tuesday called on Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Qamar Javed Bajwa here at GHQ and appreciated Pakistan's efforts for regional stability

RAWALPINDI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 5th Apr, 2022 ) :Ambassador of Nepal Tapas Adhikari Tuesday called on Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Qamar Javed Bajwa here at GHQ and appreciated Pakistan's efforts for regional stability.

During the meeting, matters of mutual interest, regional security situation and measures to improve bilateral relations between the two countries were discussed, said an Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) news release.

The COAS said that Pakistan wished to enhance long term multi-domain relations with Nepal based on common interests.

The Army Chief reiterated that all regional countries needed to work collectively for enduring peace and stability in the region.

The visiting dignitary pledged to play his part for further improvement in diplomatic cooperation with Pakistan at all levels.
MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 06th April, 2022) Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Tuesday that he had met with US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland to discuss the situation in Ukraine and Washington - Athens bilateral relations.

During her official visit to Greece, Nuland is heading an interagency delegation that has an aim to discuss "regional security, economic issues, and bilateral priorities" both with officials and civil society.

"Thorough exchange of views with Under Secretary Nuland on Ukraine and the latest developments in our region. Reaffirmed the excellent level of our bilateral relations with the US," Mitsotakis tweeted.

Nuland also held a "brief meeting" on Tuesday with Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias with the issue of bilateral strategic partnership being high on the agenda.

" met with V.Nuland to discuss opportunities to further advance the Greece-US strategic partnership in all areas.

A productive exchange of views on the situation in #Ukraine following the Russian invasion & developments in #EasternMediterranean," Dendias tweeted.

Later in the day, Nuland also held a meeting with Greek Defense Minister Nikos Panagiotopoulos, where the parties discussed expansion and deepening of the strategic defense partnership between the two countries alongside with Ukrainian developments and foreign aid to Kiev. Speaking of the security situation in the Eastern Mediterranean, Panagiotopoulos stated that Greece supports bilateral and trilateral cooperation with countries in the region as a pillar of security and stability.

On February 24, Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine after the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk appealed for help in defending themselves against Ukrainian provocations. In response to Russia's operation, Western countries have rolled out a comprehensive sanctions campaign against Moscow.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not rule out the possibility of severing diplomatic relations with Western countries if the practice of expelling Russian diplomats continues

PARIS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 06th April, 2022) Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not rule out the possibility of severing diplomatic relations with Western countries if the practice of expelling Russian diplomats continues.

The expulsion of diplomats is a decision that closes the window of diplomatic relations, Peskov said in an interview with French broadcaster LCI when asked whether there was such a possibility.

At the same time, he stressed that it was necessary to maintain diplomatic relations, especially in the current conditions.
(@FahadShabbir)

A Red Cross convoy arrived in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia on Wednesday after failing to reach the besieged port city of Mariupol, an AFP journalist on the scene reported

Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 6th Apr, 2022 ) :A Red Cross convoy arrived in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia on Wednesday after failing to reach the besieged port city of Mariupol, an AFP journalist on the scene reported.

Accompanied by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), seven buses and at least 40 private cars arrived in the city, the journalist said.

The ICRC said in a social media post Wednesday that more than 500 evacuees in total were escorted to Zaporizhzhia in the operation, including people who had been in Mariupol.

On Monday, the Red Cross said that the team it had dispatched several days earlier to help evacuate civilians from the besieged port of Mariupol was being held by police in Russian-controlled territory.

The organisation said on Twitter Wednesday that it had attempted for five days to reach the city, which has been under sustained Russia bombardment since Moscow invaded in late February.

"But security conditions made it impossible," it said.

"Thousands are still trapped in the city. They urgently need a safe passage out, and aid to come in," it added.

Russian forces late last month struck a Red Cross facility in the city, home to half a million people before the war, where officials have warned of a humanitarian disaster.

Repeated attempts to evacuate residents have collapsed, though some have made the dangerous dash to freedom from the city alone.

The city's mayor earlier this week estimated that some 90 percent of the city had been completely destroyed as a result of the war.
The expulsion of 12 Russian diplomats from Greece is intended to destroy bilateral channels of communication, but this does not mean the severance of diplomatic relations between the two countries, Russian Ambassador to Athens Andrey Maslov said on Wednesday

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 06th April, 2022) The expulsion of 12 Russian diplomats from Greece is intended to destroy bilateral channels of communication, but this does not mean the severance of diplomatic relations between the two countries, Russian Ambassador to Athens Andrey Maslov said on Wednesday.

"I think that this will not happen, diplomatic relations of course will not be severed," Maslov told the Rossiya 24 broadcaster.

At the same time, the ambassador stressed that the Russian side has lodged a strong protest against the actions of the Greek authorities.

"We emphasized that these actions will not remain without consequences," Maslov added.

He also noted that eight of the 12 employees expelled from the Russian embassy were top level, senior diplomats.

"They were our core. And therefore, we cannot but consider the Greek action as malicious, aimed not only at breaking down bilateral relations, but even at destroying diplomatic channels of communication," the ambassador said.

In addition, Maslov noted that there is currently no threat of freezing the accounts of the Russian embassy in Greece.

"We have some common understanding with the Greek authorities, with banks on this issue. We have not faced any problem here yet," he said.

Earlier in the day, the Greek Foreign Ministry declared 12 employees of Russian diplomatic and consular missions accredited in Greece as personae non gratae, in accordance with the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961 and Vienna Convention on Consular Relations of 1963.

Earlier this week, the European Union and individual countries, including Germany, France, Spain and Italy, decided to expel Russian diplomats amid recent reports of alleged atrocities in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, which Moscow called a staged provocation.

On February 24, Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine after the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk appealed for help in defending themselves against Ukrainian provocations. Russia said that the aim of its special operation is to demilitarize and "denazify" Ukraine and that only military infrastructure is being targeted. In response, Western countries have rolled out a comprehensive sanctions campaign against Russia.
The Ukrainian nationalists have shelled the Derhachi settlement in the Kharkhiv region, filmed destruction and "many dead" civilians to share this footage with the Western media, the head of the Russian National Defense Control Center, Mikhail Mizintsev, said on Wednesday

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 06th April, 2022) The Ukrainian nationalists have shelled the Derhachi settlement in the Kharkhiv region, filmed destruction and "many dead" civilians to share this footage with the Western media, the head of the Russian National Defense Control Center, Mikhail Mizintsev, said on Wednesday.

"Ukrainian nationalists fired at the settlement of Derhachi in the Kharkiv region, after which they filmed the destroyed buildings and 'many dead' to share it with the Western media," Mizintsev told a briefing, adding that the "representatives of Western news agencies participated" in this incident.

The defense official added that civilians were paid $25 each for participation in "staged filming."
Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) on Wednesday announced tightening control over exports of strategic high-tech commodities (SHTC) to Russia under the sanctions imposed amid Moscow's special military operation in Ukraine

BEIJING (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 06th April, 2022) Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) on Wednesday announced tightening control over exports of strategic high-tech commodities (SHTC) to Russia under the sanctions imposed amid Moscow's special military operation in Ukraine.

"Since March 1 this year, the MOEA has strictly scrutinized SHTC regulated by the Wassenaar Arrangement for sale to Russia. In referencing the measures taken by other like-minded countries to prevent Russian military use of SHTC, the MOEA has added the dual use 'High-Tech Commodities List for Exportation to Russia' (abbreviated as 'Russian List').

This List shall take effect from the date of announcement," the ministry said in a statement.

The statement added that the inclusion of 57 items in the so-called Russian list is stipulated by the Item 3 of Article 13 of the Foreign Trade Act, which says that high-tech goods cannot be transferred to restricted regions without authorization in order to ensure national security and comply with international agreements.

In February, the Taiwanese Foreign Ministry said Taiwan would join the international sanctions against Russia over the military operation in Ukraine, also ousting Russia from the SWIFT financial system.
WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 06th April, 2022) US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke by telephone with Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and agreed with respect to the situation in Ukraine to closely coordinate on the developments in that country, State Department spokesperson Ned price said on Tuesday.

"Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke with Indian External Affairs Minister Dr. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar today to review regional and global priorities, including the situation in Ukraine. They agreed to remain closely coordinated on developments and looked forward to meeting again soon," Price said in a statement.

On Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with Jaishankar in India and told him that Russia appreciates that Delhi does not have a one-sided approach to the crisis in Ukraine.

On February 24, Russia launched a special military operation in Ukraine after the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk requested help to defend them from attacks from Ukrainian troops. In response, the United States and its allies imposed comprehensive sanctions against Russia including airspace closures and restrictive measures targeting numerous Russian officials and entities, media and financial institutions.
The United States announced on Wednesday that it has indicted Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev for sanctions violations

Washington, April 6 (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 6th Apr, 2022 ) :The United States announced on Wednesday that it has indicted Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev for sanctions violations.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said the Russian billionaire had been previously identified as a source of financing for Russians promoting separatism in Crimea and as providing support for the so-called Donetsk People's Republic in eastern Ukraine.

"After being sanctioned by the United States, Malofeyev attempted to evade the sanctions by using co-conspirators to surreptitiously acquire and run media outlets across Europe," Garland told reporters.

The indictment was the first of a Russian oligarch in the United States since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said.

Garland also announced the "disruption" of a global botnet controlled by the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU.

"The Russian government has recently used similar infrastructure to attack Ukrainian targets," he said. "Fortunately, we were able to disrupt this botnet before it could be used.

"Thanks to our close work with international partners, we were able to detect the infection of thousands of network hardware devices," the attorney general said. "We were then able to disable the GRU's control over those devices before the botnet could be weaponized."
The Florida horse conch population  one of the worlds largest invertebrate animals  is shrinking. Established in 1969 as the Florida state shell with a record length of two feet, it has become symbolic of Floridas natural resources and widely used in advertising for the states tourism industry. But unregulated commercial harvesting and recreational live collection are pushing populations closer to collapse.

According to a study led by the University of South Florida, the average lifespan of a Florida horse conch is between eight and 10 years old, and it doesnt start reproducing until about age six, when they give birth to up to 28,000 offspring each year. This is a dramatic shift from previous belief that a horse conch could live for half a century  meaning far fewer offspring are born to replace those removed as a result of harvest or natural causes.

The interdisciplinary research team, which includes the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) and current and former USF graduate students, also found that the largest Florida horse conch is no more than 16 years old. The two-foot shell is on display at the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum in Sanibel. The teams results, published in PLOS ONE, were based on analyses of museum specimens, reducing harm to an already fragile population if they removed shells from the wild.

Credit: USF graduate student Stephen Hesterberg

To estimate horse conch ages, researchers analyzed chemical bands in the shell, which track water temperature as the snail grows and can be counted like tree rings to measure the passage of time. Unlike tree rings, which are visible, the chemical bands can only be determined by geochemical analysis.

The team was also able to determine the horse conchs amount of growth each year by wrapping string around each coil and then straightening and measuring the string. They found females grow rapidly each year of their lives, whereas males slow down early and mature at a much smaller size. Researchers determined that female horse conchs start laying eggs at about age six, based on spikes in shell carbon levels.

Our research shows that horse conch reproduction is less likely to keep pace with intense harvest than previously thought, said lead author Greg Herbert, associate professor from the USF School of Geosciences. Horse conch populations are important. They create habitat for other species by leaving empty shells of dead prey around for fish, crabs and other animals to use as homes. They also contribute to the unique experience that we have in Florida of being able to go to the beach and seeing one of the largest seashells in the world at the waters edge.

Data from FWC shows that there has been a steady population decline since the mid-1990s. Commercial fishermen reported a peak count of 14,511 Florida horse conchs in 1996, followed by 6,124 in 2000, 1,461 in 2015 and just 67 in 2020.

We still know very little about how many horse conchs exist and where their preferred habitats or what their optimal environmental conditions are, said co-author Stephen Geiger, research scientist at the FWC. Because we have no dedicated funding for more than 1,500 species of mollusks found in the waters that surround Florida, we continue to seek grants that enable us to study their biological traits, including those that will help managers decide if some species are in need of better protection.

The shells that were studied were collected from the Dry Tortugas, Vaca Key, Sanibel Island and Cape Romano. Researchers say the further north you go, the smaller the Florida horse conch, possibly due to overexploited fisheries and recreational collecting.
Portland, ME  The U.S. Marshals Service, Maine Violent Offender Task Force announces the arrest of Robert Santana, 26, of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Santana was being sought by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, State Police Violent Fugitive Apprehension Section on a warrant charging Carjacking, Un-Armed Robbery, Assault and Battery, and Threat to Commit a Crime. The warrant was issued on November 22nd, 2021. Authorities said, Santana, who is a known member of the gang Trinitarios had fled Massachusetts shortly after the incident and was believed to be Armed and Dangerous according to reports. Through a collaborative investigation, authorities determined that Santana was at a residence in Lewiston, Maine. U.S. Marshals were able to safely apprehend Santana at that address in Lewiston without incident. Santana was transported to the local county jail where he is charged as a Fugitive from Justice, pending his extradition back to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The USMS Maine Violent Offender Task Force was assisted by the U.S. Marshals Service District of Massachusetts, Massachusetts State Police Violent Fugitive Apprehension Section, and the Lewiston Police Department. The U.S. Marshals Service Maine Violent Offender Task Force is comprised of members of the U.S. Marshals Service, Maine State Police, Maine Department of Corrections, Biddeford Police Department and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. If you have any information regarding the whereabouts of any State or Federal Fugitive

please contact the United States Marshals Service, District of Maine at MED.TIPLINE@usdoj.gov. ####



Americas First Federal Law Enforcement Agency


Muslim and Christian religious leaders in Nigeria have condemned the recent spate of violence in Nigeria. In remarks made at a meeting in the wake of gunmen who attacked a passenger train on the Abuja - Kaduna route, religious leaders denounced the endless cycle of violence.

Delphine Asu  Abuja, Nigeria.

The concerns of the religious leaders were made at a meeting of religious and political leaders which was held recently in Abuja.

Sultan of Sokoto: We must always denounce violence

Addressing heads of religious institutions, traditional leaders and the press, the Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammad Saad Abubakar, expressed concerns over the continued bloodshed in the nation.

The Northern peoples blood is being spilt by these actions of either state or individuals, especially the bandits and terrorists. So, we need to always speak against violence, whether in Sokoto or in Washington or Moscow. As religious leaders, if we dont do so, we will face questions from our creator. We must always speak the truth, said the Sultan of Sokoto.

CAN: No one in Nigeria is safe

President of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) Reverend Samson Ayokunle, appreciated the efforts of security agents but lamented the prevailing insecurity under which Nigerians are living.

We religious leaders that hate bloodshed need to cry out against what is happening. While I thank the security agencies for what they are doing, I need to also show my heartbreak and disappointment about the level of insecurity in our country. I dont want us to play politics with it or mince words. None of us is safe. If they (bandits who attacked the Kaduna-bound train) have tried it in Kaduna, they can try it anywhere in Nigeria. We as leaders cannot just sit here and think that all is well. All is not well, emphasised Reverend Ayokunle.

And speaking at the same event, Islamic scholar, Prof. Afis Oladosu, outlined factors that influence peacebuilding. His focus was mostly on an improved economy that benefits everyone in Nigeria.

In brazen attacks, gunmen in Nigeria launched an assault on the Kaduna Airport, killing an official. Then on 28 March, bandits using explosives blew up a rail track before killing eight passengers. The whereabouts of 168 train passengers are still unknown.
Philippine Bishops president, Bishop Pablo Virgilio David of Kalookan, delivered a homily during the Solidarity Mass for Vote at the Baclaran Church on Wednesday, April 6.

By Robin Gomes

With the Philippine May 9 general election a little over a month away, the leader of the countrys Catholic bishops is calling on voters not to gamble away the countrys future by being indifferent to the plight of others.

The vote - a moral choice

Bishop Pablo Virgilio David of Kalookan, president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), urged the faithful of the largely Catholic country to actively engage in politics by supporting candidates who have the necessary skills and experience to perform well in their office.

He made the call on Wednesday at the Solidarity Mass for the Moral Choice at the National Shrine of Our Mother of Perpetual Help in Baclaran, in Metro Manilas Paranaque City.

Numerous bishops, priests, and religious men and women of the Manila Metropolitan See attended the Mass presided over by its archbishop Cardinal Jose Advincula.

Bishop David, who preached the homily in the Tagalog language insisted that now is not the time to be complacent about the countrys situation. Our low regard and inaction to politics will not bring development. Let us not gamble the future of our country. Let us fight indifference. Let us be concerned for the welfare of others, he said. We are all interconnected. Whats bad for them is bad for us As good Christians, we have a responsibility to God to vote correctly and in accordance with conscience on May 9, 2022, he urged.

The congregation at the end of the Solidarity Mass for the Moral Choice.

The election will give the country a new president, vice president, 12 senators, and a new term for local officials.

Fight disinformation

Bishop David also urged voters not to be swayed by disinformation, especially on social media. We can be blinded by lies and deception. It can put the conscience to sleep and can harden us like rocks, he said asking them to always side with the truth even if it is unpopular and even if it hurts.

The CBCP head said that Christians are called to vote rightly and according to their conscience and not be swayed by mass trends. Dont just rely on others. We need to be involved. Let us work to change our political culture, even if little by little, he said.

Church and politics

Speaking about the role of bishops he said, Our primary duty is to guide our countrymen in listening to Gods whisper on how a disciple of Christ should vote. This role of ours has become even more severe in the current situation of our country  especially now that the main issue in the field of politics has to do with spiritual and moral: the issue of truth and falsehood.

Our low regard and inaction to politics will not bring development. Let us not gamble the future of our country.

The Churchs failure to play its role in politics in the past, he noted, resulted in negative reactions when Church leaders started to speak out. He said that more than ever, the Church has a bigger task in the coming elections because the major issues raised during the campaign period concern morality, the truth, and lies.

No enemies except Satan

The head of the countrys Catholic bishops told Filipinos not to treat each other as enemies despite their political differences, especially in this years national elections. We have no other enemy in this world than the prince of lies, Satan. He is the only one the Church has taught us to reject, ever since our baptism, the 63-year-old bishop said, urging the faithful to be more involved in politics and stand for the truth. Sometimes anger and hatred can serve as blindfolds that cover our eyes, he warned.

The congregation at the Solidarity Mass for the Moral Choice.

Bishop David pointed out the fallacy in the argument, Vote for the popular and winnable. Where is the concern in that attitude? he asked. Let us share by doing our role, he urged, calling on the faithful not to leave to others the choice of leaders. We should be involved, we should be part of it, let us change even little by little our political culture. If we look down at political action, then it will not result in development, he added.

Criteria

The CBCP president suggested several criteria to help voters choose their leaders honestly. He said candidates should embody love for God and country, who will advocate for the environment, who have respect for human life, dignity and rights, who will maintain and strengthen democracy, who will rectify the culture of corruption in the country, and at the same time know how to listen to the voice of the people, especially the little ones.

We can be blinded by lies and deception. It can put the conscience to sleep and can harden us like rocks

The Solidarity Mass for the Moral Choice was in response to the CBCPs call for prayer for a credible and peaceful election next month. The Archdiocese of Manila had earlier issued a notice saying Wednesdays Eucharistic celebration will be in response to CBCPs request in its pastoral letter, Be Concerned about the Welfare of Others, released on March 27.
Vietnams General Department of Taxation (GDT) announced the launch of a web portal for overseas suppliers involved in cross-border activities. Foreign cross-border businesses that derive income from Vietnam can register, declare and pay tax through the web portal without submitting physical documents to the Vietnamese tax authorities.

Cross-border foreign businesses are those without permanent establishments in Vietnam and carry out e-commerce and other services with businesses and individuals in Vietnam.

Earlier, foreign businesses had to rely on an agent or third party to declare and pay taxes.

Online platform for direct tax payment

Foreign cross-border businesses are required to go through an initial registration procedure on the web portal the first time they access the platform. They need to have a valid email address to engage directly with Vietnams tax authorities.

Once registered, all the information including about the e-commerce platform, tax identification number, and email used will be sent to the tax authorities, after which they would be able to pay tax directly on the portal.

Steps for registration include:

The foreign cross-border business accesses the web portal of the GDT to file the tax registration dossier. The portal will send a confirmation code to the email address registered by the cross-border business. The cross-border business uses the confirmation code to submit the tax registration dossier on the portal. The portal sends a receipt notice of the electronic tax dossier to the cross-border business. After receiving the tax registration dossier, the tax authority will check details and information in the tax registration dossier If approved, the tax authority will send a transaction code to access and pay tax on the portal. If not, then the tax authority will notify of any additional documents to be submitted for correction and resubmission.

There are no fees or charges for using the web portal.

Foreign cross-border businesses are required to make quarterly tax declaration. The first direct registration can be done using Form 01/NCCNN while subsequent quarterly declarations can be made using Form No. 02/NCCNN as per Circular 80.

Cross-border providers are required to pay VAT and CIT calculated as a percentage of the business revenue generated from Vietnam. Businesses however can carry out tax exemption or reduction procedures under the relevant double tax avoidance agreement (DTAA).

Businesses that face difficulties can contact the support provided directly on the web portal.

Cross border platforms to be strictly scrutinized for tax compliance

The GDT has also been ordered to compile a list of all cross-border platforms in Vietnam with their websites and registered addresses.

The development comes after Vietnam issued Circular 80 guiding the implementation on the Law on Tax Administration. Circular 80 came into effect on January 1, 2022, and provides guidance on tax administration for e-commerce business activities based on digital platforms.

As per the Circular, businesses that do not register with the Vietnamese tax authorities will be subject to withholding payments. Business organizations or companies conducting transactions with foreign cross-border platforms are required to withhold tax and deposit to the tax authorities. For individuals that conduct transactions with foreign cross-border platforms  the bank or payment provider will be asked to withhold tax payment. If this is not possible then the bank or payment provider must monitor the amount paid by the individuals and report it to the tax authorities on the 10th of each month.

The GDT will also maintain a list of foreign cross-border businesses that will be shared with banks and payment providers for the collection of taxes.

The tax authorities acknowledge that it is challenging to tax e-commerce activities as several businesses do not maintain physical offices in Vietnam. In addition, individuals and businesses using social media to sell services or products do not issue invoices and do not pay taxes. Tracking payments becomes more challenging when products that are not physical such as software or music are sold.

Thang Vu, Associate Manager, Tax at Dezan Shira & Associates Ho Chi Minh City office notes that the new portal will help make it convenient for foreign cross-border platforms to pay tax directly rather than use a third party. In addition, Vietnam aims to rectify the shortfall of tax collection, particularly from foreign businesses, on Vietnam-sourced income.

Vietnams tax authorities stated that they are at least 64 foreign service providers in Vietnam. Cross-border platforms like Google and Facebook were taxed US$218.5 million (VND 5 trillion) between 2019 and 2021. Vietnams authorities have been calling for strict tax compliance and taxing tech giants like Google and Facebook saying that they account for 70 percent of online ad revenues but dont pay adequate taxes
Vietnams divestment and equitisation plans have opened several opportunities for investors while allowing additional funding options for the government.

To incentivize FDI in the SOEs, the government has been making several regulation changes, creating exciting opportunities for foreign investors.

While the process has been slow, the government continues to chip away and issue new decisions to further accelerate the divestment process.

For years, Vietnam has aimed to reduce its direct ownership in key state companies and promote private ownership. Nevertheless, equitisation and divestment have not yet taken place as scheduled and have experienced constant delays.

According to the Ministry of Finance (MoF), from 2016 to 2020, 180 state-owned enterprises (SOEs) were equitised. However, this included only 39 out of 128 enterprises on the list approved by the Prime Minister, meeting only 30 percent of the target. In 2021, three SOEs were equitised, but none were on the list approved by the Prime Minister.

Regarding the initial sale of shares, the total selling value was VND22.7 trillion (US$987 million), or 23 percent of the plan. For 2016-2020, the MoF said VND177.4 trillion was collected through divestment, about 6.5 times the book value.

Last year, only three SOEs completed the privatization process, citing the difficult economic environment due to the prolonged pandemic. It was estimated that 18 SOEs divested state capital worth VND4.4 trillion (US$192.4 million) for a combined book value of VND1.66 trillion (US$72.6 million) during the period.

Among the remaining SOEs that are required for privatization, those in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City make up 54 percent of the total, including 13 in the capital and 38 in the countrys southern hub. The others include six supervised by the Committee for State Capital Management (CSCM), four under the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT), and two under the Ministry of Construction (MoC).

Most recently on March 18, the Prime Minister signed a decision to deepen the restructuring of SOEs in 2021-2025 as well as target the completion of restructuring SOEs by 2025.

Decision No 360/Q-TTg aims to improve the operational efficiency and competitiveness of SOEs on the basis of technology, innovation, and management capacity. The move will facilitate more effective mobilization, allocation, and use of social resources while developing state capital and assets at enterprises.

By 2025, Vietnam expects to complete the restructuring process of SOEs, for which a minimum of US$10.84 billion in proceeds will be used.

Opportunities for foreign investors

The state divestment process is faced with several challenges but could be an exciting opportunity for foreign investors, especially as large banks and corporations are also on the list of government divestment plans.

For example, as large agriculture and forestry corporations are beginning their divestment projects, investors may consider investing in these sectors considering Vietnams comparative advantage in this industry in terms of market scale and growth, low labor cost, and stable political environment.

Besides the agriculture and water sectors, investors may also be interested in large, profitable SOEs in the tourism sector. The new list includes three leading travel businesses that own a range of luxury hotels, namely Saigontourist, Ben Thanh Group, and Hanoitourist.

Most of these businesses hold impressive property portfolios, with iconic hotels such as the Continental, Rex, and Majestic, as well as modern properties like the Caravelle Saigon. Investing in these enterprises may not only mean tapping into Vietnams profitable hospitality industry but also tapping into the real estate market in Vietnam.

Particularly now as Vietnam gradually opens up and international flights resume, there may be even further opportunities for business and investment in tourism and hospitality. It is advised that investors take advantage of the privatization of the national brand names to get involved in the industry at this stage.

Regulations facilitating the sale of SOEs

The government is working to strengthen the supervision and accountability of state firms as well as monitoring representatives at certain state corporations to create a healthy investment environment for foreign investors.

To facilitate the sale of SOEs, especially to foreign investors, the MoF came up with new supportive rules in the first half of 2019. Circular No.21/2019/TT-BTC provides a framework for book building, which is the process in which an underwriter attempts to determine the price at which an initial public offering will be offered.

This helps enterprises determine market interest and purchase power before a transaction. This is particularly helpful when it comes to major auctions involving foreign investors as it raises the efficiency and effectiveness of the first public sales of the enterprises.

Another Circular  No.03/2019/TT-NHNN was passed in May 2019, allowing overseas investors to make deposits in foreign currencies when they sign up for SOE auctions. This applies to both first-time sales of SOEs and state divestments, with transactions allowed to be carried out at all approved banks.

Government challenges

Many SOEs have announced their auction schedule for capital divestment plans, but many of them have been struggling to attract investors.

For example, in 2018, GENCO 3 was the first company of Vietnams state-owned electric utility EVN to be converted to a joint-stock company and listed on the Ho Chi Minh City stock exchange. But the companys IPO that year was not a success as it only managed to draw in US$8 million compared to a total offering of US$290 million.

In 2021, although the stock market grew and investment demand was greater than supply as the pandemic eased, the divestment of State capital was behind expectations. EVNGENCO 2 (Power Generation Corporation 2), for example, was only able to sell less than 1 percent of shares in the initial public offering session in early 2021.

More recently 122 million shares of Lien Viet Post Commercial Joint Stock Bank (LPB) were brought to auction by the Vietnam Post with a starting price of up to US$1.27, which is nearly 15 percent higher than LPBs market price. Only 800 shares were registered for purchase by a few individual investors.

Another auction of 35 million shares of Binh Duong Trade and Development JSC (TDC) with a starting price of US$1.22 per share was also a slump in terms of sales as only 50,000 shares were sold to four individual investors.

On auction day, TDCs market price was 10 percent lower than the starting price of the auction, not to mention the lengthy procedure for shares transfer.

Other auctions of companies with the capital portion of the State Capital Investment Corporation (SCIC) have been even canceled due to not having any investors participate.

Investment challenges

The major investment hurdles faced by foreign investors include the inability to acquire a controlling stake and delays in the transfer of ownership.

In addition, the lack of transparency in the divestment process, unreasonable evaluation of enterprises, poor management, existing company liabilities, and incompetent staff were highlighted as the other factors affecting investors sentiments.

Factors behind slow equitisation

The first factor that causes delay would be internal issues. Some firms may need more time to tackle internal issues prior to equitisation while others face difficulties in administrative procedures.

Another major obstacle to the equitisation process is the issue related to corporate valuation, bidding consultancy, and land use rights. Land use rights are a decisive factor that makes SOEs valuable to investors. However, conflicts and overlap among legal documents on land use right certificates have added to further delays.

For example, Agribank and Vinacomin face common obstacles in getting their real estate assets approved by the MoF due to their large size. To speed up equitisation, the government may remove the requirement of evaluating the firms annual land lease fee so that conflicts and overlap between legal documents can be avoided.

The governments anti-corruption campaign has also delayed the process with several divestments projects between 2011 and 2016 under investigation.

Subsequently, since the beginning of 2020, state privatization moved at a slow pace due to the COVID-19 pandemic as enterprises and local authorities had to perform mandatory requirements on pandemic prevention and control.

As a result, revenue from divestment and equitisation to the Enterprise Development and Arrangement Support Fund only reached US$16 million, which did not meet the requirements of revenue from the divestment of state capital in 2021 as per Decision 1950/QD-TTg.

Governments response and support

The government understands the challenges it has to deal with for more successful divestment projects to take place.

Vietnam has also committed to creating a level playing field for all businesses under its free trade agreements. In particular, Vietnam has committed to cutting state ownership under the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and European Union  Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA).

In addition, at the request to speed up the restructuring of SOEs, the MoF has developed a draft project aiming to restructure SOEs, focusing on corporations in 2021-2025.

At the same time, the Prime Minister ordered a simplified administrative procedure for local equitisation, without losing brand and corporate identity.

The Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI) also said that in 2022, it would focus on implementing the draft project on the restructuring of SOEs once approved. This includes the divestment of 17 large SOEs in key industries and fields for the development of the economy such as energy, industry, finance, agriculture, telecommunications, and infrastructure.

Further, in an effort to attract additional foreign investment, the Commission for Management of State Capital at Enterprises (CMSC) has been assigned to create a scheme to encourage foreign investment in the purchase of shares in SOEs. This was done under Resolution No. 58-NQ-CP issued in April 2020.

Plans for 2022

According to the MoF for the 2022 plan, the ministry is expected to remit US$440 million to the local budget from revenue from equitisation and divestment that has not been paid to the state previously.

It is estimated that the remittance to the local budget in 2022 is about US$440 million. Of which the amount collected from equitisation and divestment of state capital of the enterprises in Hanoi is about US$310 million, Ho Chi Minh City is at US$74.6 million, and another US$74.6 million for other localities.

For centrally-managed enterprises, the revenue from the equitisation and divestment in 2022 will depend on the divestment in enterprises managed by the State Capital and Investment Corporation (SCIC). The SCIC is a state-owned holding company formed as part of a range of reforms by the Vietnamese government.

Given the circumstances, the MoF has developed a plan to divest capital from six enterprises on the list according to Notice 281/TB-VPCP and is expected to remit US$880 million to the central budget from the divestment.

The MoF has also requested the SCIC to divest state capital in five enterprises including FPT Corporation, Bao Minh Joint Stock Corporation, Tien Phong Plastic Joint Stock Company, Vietnam Infrastructure, and Real Estate Joint Stock Company, and Bao Viet Group with the value of State capital at par value of US$81.2 million and expected revenue of US$370 million.

The MoF also plans for divestment of Hanoi Beer  Alcohol  Beverage Corporation (Habeco) with the value of State capital at a par value of nearly US$80 million and expected revenue of more than US$530 million.

As per the government source, it is expected that the revenue from equitisation and divestment to the central budget will reach about US$840 million by 2022 if the divestment of the above enterprises is successful.

Takeaways

The government understands the challenges it has to deal with for more successful divestment projects to take place.

SOE equitisation has brought positive changes. But there are several challenges, especially when the target investor is a foreign company. The government will need to continue to examine its approach, take more market-friendly measures to attract more investors to SOE equitisation such as increasing the limits on foreign ownership or application of tax preferences.
Coming up on Africa News Tonight: Global rights groups accuse forces from Ethiopias Amhara region of committing war crimes in the neighboring Tigray region. Former Burkina Faso leader Blaise Compaore has been convicted in abstentia and sentenced to life in prison for complicity in the murder of his predecessor, Thomas Sankara. More than 346 million face severe food insecurity triggered by a multitude of reasons, among them rising food and fuel costs after Russias invasion of Ukraine. For this and more stay tuned to Africa News Tonight!
As the European Union and the United States announced additional sanctions against Russia over alleged atrocities against civilians, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pushed Wednesday for more resolute action. Residents in the areas outside of Kyiv tell VOA they are terrified that Russian forces may return.
Somali-born refugee Ali Duale has positive memories of his arrival in Canada's Atlantic province of Nova Scotia, where he first entered his hotel room to find a welcoming note in his native language along with hygienic supplies and a check to pay for anything else that he needed.

Twenty-five years later, Duale is repaying the province with his service as an elected member of the provincial legislature representing a district in Halifax, the provincial capital. That service, he says, is all about his sense of community.

"The word community to me has many meanings," Duale told VOA in a recent interview. "I'm a Muslim, I'm Black, I'm a refugee, I'm a newcomer, I'm a Nova Scotian, I'm a Haligonian. Each one has a meaning to me and that's what brought me to what I am today."

Duale has a message for any other Somalis hoping to make a new home in Nova Scotia, an often-overlooked part of Canada with a sparse population, an otherworldly landscape and a quaint ocean-faring lifestyle in the fishing towns that dot its coast.

"It doesn't matter how much education you have, or experience," Duale told VOA. "Quite honestly, most of the time the newcomers, irrespective of their profession  it will not take less than five or 10 years to establish here or settle down. It's a great place to be but also people need to prepare for the reality of life here."

In spite of the warm welcome he received, Duale said he would like to see Nova Scotians do an even better job of welcoming new refugees.

"When people come here, as you know, these refugees have gone through a lot of mental issues, a lot of difficulties. We need to be more kind. We need to treat them with respect, and we need to not be judgmental. ... Other than that, I think that we're doing OK."

The province is perhaps an unlikely place for an African migrant to end up. Blacks account for only about 23,000 of the province's roughly 1 million inhabitants, and of those, fewer than 2,000 are foreign-born.

But people of African origin have a long history in Nova Scotia, dating back to Mathieu de Costa, who served as a translator speaking to indigenous people when French explorer Samuel de Champlain visited the coastline in the early 1600s, according to a provincial government website.

During the American Revolution in the 1770s, hundreds of African slaves escaped behind British lines and were transported to Nova Scotia, where they were joined two decades later by a group of rebellious slaves deported from Jamaica, known as Maroons. Many were later transported to what is now Sierra Leone.

In subsequent years the province became a destination for escaped American slaves spirited north along what was known as the "Underground Railroad." A thriving Black community known as Africville grew up near the Halifax harbor, where it remained until it was pushed out by industrial expansion in the 1960s.

Today, opportunities are available to Africans in Nova Scotia if they are persistent, according to Oluwaseyi Sanni, a lawyer from Nigeria who hopes to practice law in Halifax. While working toward his Canadian law degree, Sanni has been an editor and researcher for Afronomicslaw, a blog about African economics, politics and debt.

"Well, I guess I could say that finding a desirable job was not as easy as I imagined it would be when I moved here," Sanni told VOA. "I learned that just like everywhere, there is a sense of resilience and diligence required to getting one's desired career goals. The key is in being dedicated to whatever one finds their hands to do."

Currently, Sanni is working on one of the most famous legal projects in Nova Scotian history, the inquiry into a 2020 mass shooting that started in Portapique, Nova Scotia, and left 22 people dead.

"I am not at liberty to go into details about my work at the Mass Casualty Commission as the proceedings are still ongoing," Sanni told VOA. "However, I will say it has been a huge privilege being part of such important work. It has also been a learning curve for me as well."

"Nova Scotia has lots of Africans and this potentially makes it easy to get settled when one arrives here," Sanni added. "However, my advice would be to explore friendships and relationships that transcend race. Some of the deepest bonds I have established have been with people from other races."

That sentiment is warmly welcomed by Canadian Minister of Immigration Sean Fraser, who represents a Nova Scotia district in the federal parliament in Ottawa.

"In Canada, diversity is one of our greatest strengths," he said in a statement provided to VOA for this article. "Our government is committed to an immigration system that contributes to economic growth, supports diversity and helps build vibrant, dynamic and inclusive communities from coast to coast to coast, including right here in Nova Scotia."

"Atlantic Canadians are known for their hospitality and welcoming nature, making us one of the world's top destinations for international talent," Fraser added.

"We all benefit from new energy and ideas brought here by people who choose our province to build careers and raise their families. We'll continue to ensure that those of African descent equally and fully participate in the economic, social and political institutions in Canada."
Peruvian President Pedro Castillo Tuesday lifted a curfew imposed on the capital, Lima, hours before it was due to expire in the face of angry and defiant protests.

Residents were taken by surprise when President Castillo announced the curfew for Lima and neighboring port city of Callao in a nationally televised speech shortly before midnight Monday. The curfew, which took effect at 2 a.m. local time Tuesday and was due to expire at 11:59 p.m., was ordered to quell the growing wave of violent protests across Peru over soaring prices of fuel, food and fertilizer.

The streets of Lima were mostly empty during the day as security forces patrolled the city, with shops and schools closed and public transportation shut down. But residents in some neighborhoods opened their windows and banged pots and pans to protest the order, and thousands of citizens eventually gathered in downtown Lima in defiance of Castillo.

Castillo reversed course and signed an order that ended the curfew shortly after 5 p.m. local time.

Defense Minister Jose Gavidia told reporters earlier Tuesday that Castillo had imposed the curfew after the government received intelligence that protesters were planning to carry out vandalism in Lima. The decree was issued on the eve of the 30th anniversary of then-President Alberto Fujimoris moves to shut down Congress and the courts, marking the start of his authoritarian rule.

The protests in other areas of the Andes over the past week have provoked other clashes with police that have left four dead, including a child.

The demonstrations have added to the list of woes for Castillo, who has survived two impeachment attempts less than a year after taking office. He has tried a number of measures in response to the rising prices, including a 10% increase of the minimum wage and an order to lower most taxes on fuel until June.

The cost of fuel in Peru has soared between 28 and 30% due to rising international prices, sparked largely by Russias invasion of Ukraine.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
The Biden administration on Tuesday ordered the development of a new national action plan to halt long COVID  the long-term effects of COVID-19  which can involve lingering symptoms of fatigue, brain fog, pain and shortness of breath.

Under the new plan, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will expand its research, care and disability services for those experiencing long COVID, and also will promote provider education, strengthen health care coverage for long COVID care, expand long COVID clinics and connect people with the resources they need.

Long COVID, whose cause is still unknown, can arise months after a positive test for COVID-19. It affects as many as 1 in 3 people who recover from COVID-19, according to estimates. About 2.3% of the U.S. population is affected by long COVID, and the illness has cost those who have it about $386 billion in medical bills, savings and lost wages, according to the Solve Long Covid Initiative, a nonprofit research and advocacy group.

The White House said research has been underway at the National Institutes of Health, which will assist HHS in organizing a critical new initiative across federal agencies.

"Long COVID is real, and there is still so much we don't know about it," HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said Tuesday at a press briefing.

"Americans of every age and background are experiencing long COVID," he said. "To be clear, we are going to use every tool we have to be there for these Americans."

The White House has acknowledged that long COVID appears to be a disability. Patients who suffer from the chronic illness could be entitled to protection under federal laws that require accommodations for people with disabilities and prohibit discrimination against certain health conditions.

"The administration recognizes that the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in new members of the disability community and has had a tremendous impact on people with disabilities," the White House said in a statement.

Some information in this report comes from The Associated Press and Reuters.


The European Union is expected to join the United States in imposing new sanctions against Russia as horrific reports of possible war crimes in Ukraine continue to surface. But critics, including some EU members, are calling the measures insufficient.

The new EU sanctions  the fifth round by the bloc since Russia invaded Ukraine  are expected to target Russian coal, shipping and banking sectors, including Russias largest lender Sverbank, which says the move will be insignificant on its operations.

In a video address to the Irish parliament, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the EU indecisive for not adopting stronger measures to bar Russian energy imports.

Calls for tougher energy bans also are growing within the EU, including from Baltic states  which ended Russian natural gas imports as of April 1  and the blocs executive arm. That includes European Council President Charles Michel, who addressed the European Parliament on Wednesday.

Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "I think that measures on oil and even gas will also be needed sooner or later.

The same message was sent from EUs foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who said the EU had paid Russias President Vladimir Putin more than $35 billion for energy imports since the war began, compared with only about $1 billion worth of arms and weapons the EU sent to Ukraine.

The 27-member bloc has pledged to cut by two-thirds its Russian gas imports by years end, and completely end energy imports from Moscow this decade. But countries like Germany, which is highly dependent on Russian oil and gas, are worried about the economic hit of an immediate and total energy ban.

Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, who won another term in office Sunday and who has nurtured close ties with Russia, is also pushing back against tougher sanctions.

Still, horrific reports of possible Russian war crimes in Ukraine are hardening European mindsets. This week, more EU countries expelled dozens of Russian officials from their soil. Some member states also are sending their diplomats back to Ukraine, who left after Russias invasion six weeks ago.

On Tuesday, French prosecutors opened three probes into alleged war crimes for activities they said likely had been committed in Ukraine against French nationals.

Interviewed by French radio, President Emmanuel Macron of France, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency, said there are clear indications that war crimes were committed in Ukraine, likely perpetrated by Russias army. He said international justice must be served and perpetrators held responsible.



Still, Macron has maintained an open dialogue with Russian President Vladimir Putin to try to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict. That has been criticized by EU member state Poland, which compares Putin to Hitler.
As Hong Kongers trickle into Taiwan seeking asylum, a documentary about the Hong Kong protests of 2019-20 is prompting Taiwanese moviegoers and civic groups to question current immigration laws.

The documentary, "Revolution of Our Times," became the highest-grossing Chinese-language overseas documentary in Taiwan's film history in its first week of screening. It opened February 25 in more than 30 theaters throughout Taiwan, according to Taiwan's Central News Agency, grossing some $558,000 (NT$16 million) by March 8.

During that week, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen promoted the film on her Instagram feed, and on March 9, she took to Twitter, saying "The Hong Kong people's courage & commitment to democracy are an inspiration to us all, as we work to preserve our own freedoms & way of life."

The film is in Cantonese, the language spoken in Hong Kong. It chronicles the protests that erupted in Hong Kong in response to the Beijing-controlled government's introduction of an extradition bill.

The documentary covers key events in the sometimes-violent protest movement, with footage of the storming of the Legislative Council complex, the 2019 Yuen Long attack, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University siege.

"We've been waiting a long time for a commercial release in (Taiwan's) theater chains," Kiwi Chow Kwun-wai, the director, a Hong Konger, told VOA Mandarin. "This is the only chance at the moment to reach a wide audience in Taiwan. I am very excited about the positive aspects."

The film, which premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, is banned in China and Hong Kong. It has been getting an international rollout  San Francisco; London; Vancouver, British Columbia; and elsewhere  starting April 1.

After watching the documentary, Rebecca Hu, a Taiwanese YouTube influencer, told VOA Mandarin, "I think I am very lucky to live in Taiwan, because I think it's so disheartening to see police beat (Hong Kongers). The police are supposed to protect the people."

Chenter Yang, an educator in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, told VOA Mandarin that the documentary serves as a warning to citizens of liberal democracies "who are suppressed or threatened under the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) regime."

"I hope that in the future we can have the opportunity or have more ways to help (Hong Kongers) get the justice they deserve," Yang told VOA Mandarin after watching the documentary.

Yang's response to the 152-minute film  that Taiwan should offer Hong Kongers more immigration assistance  is now a topic of debate in the self-governing island nation that Beijing has viewed as its territory since the CCP won power in 1949 after a civil war.

On July 1, 2020, President Tsai's government opened the Taiwan-Hong Kong Services and Exchange Office in Taipei to help Hong Kongers work and study in Taiwan, a day after the new security law came into force in Hong Kong.

In August 2021, Taiwan's Interior Ministry revised its Measures for Hong Kong and Macao Residents to Enter Taiwan and Residency and Settlement Permits, the name of a law stating that if a resident of Hong Kong or Macau, both controlled by Beijing, has current or former work or investment ties to China's government, Taiwanese authorities will deny a residency application.

According to the latest data released by Taiwan's immigration service, the number of Hong Kong residents who have obtained Taiwan residence permits and settlement permits has hit a record high in 2021, when it granted 11,173 residence permits  an increase of 360 over 2020  and 1,685 settlement permits, an increase of 109 over the previous year.

Some Hong Kongers' applications for Taiwanese residency have been hampered because of Taiwan's national security review of their ties to China, said Hsiao Tu-huan, deputy secretary-general of Taiwan Friends of China, Hong Kong and Macau Association and assistant professor at the Mainland China Institute of Taiwan's Tamkang University.

"In the face of possible national security concerns," Hsaio suggested that the Taiwanese government enlist experts, scholars and Hong Kong fraternal associations already established in Taiwan to help authorities confirm the identities of Hong Kongers applying for residency. Such a public-private effort "will help speed up the review process."

Hsiao said that since the beginning of the anti-extradition movement in Hong Kong, the Chinese government has repeatedly accused the Taiwan government of being involved in Hong Kong's internal affairs.

"Although the (Taiwan) government continues to study and amend relevant laws and regulations, it is hoped that the restrictions ... can be relaxed," said Hsiao, adding that official assistance for Hong Kongers has been slow.

Chui Pak Tai, chairman of the China Fraternity Taiwan-Hong Kong Inclusion Association, wrote in an opinion piece published in Now News and told VOA Mandarin that Hong Kongers seeking residency were also thwarted by Taiwan's shifting standards for granting residency.

"(Taiwan's) immigration requirements have been continuously increased," he told VOA Mandarin, reprising the points he made in his op-ed. "The original one-year registration has been changed to three years. Many business projects cannot be applied for (because) it is necessary to hire two Taiwanese to work."

Because of the historically close relationship between Hong Kong and Taiwan, which dates to 1949, "most of Hong Kong people's ideas of democracy and freedom are absorbed in Taiwan," he wrote. "The development of Taiwan's democratic movement has also allowed Hong Kong people to follow suit."

After the 2019 anti-extradition movement was suppressed by Beijing, "Some people think that the Hong Kongers have blocked the bullet for Taiwan and influenced the 2020 Taiwan election," he said. "These Hong Kongers will become a new driving force for Taiwan's democracy."
Hong Kong's No. 2 official, a staunch supporter of a Beijing-backed crackdown on pro-democracy activists, tendered his resignation on Wednesday to pave the way for his run in the city's upcoming leadership race.

John Lee, who is the citys chief secretary for administration, submitted his resignation to Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam, according to a government statement.

"If my resignation is approved by the Central People's Government, I shall plan to stand for the upcoming chief executive election," said Lee at a news conference. "Having been in the government for over 40 years, to serve the people of Hong Kong is a glory."

He said he would elaborate on his "next move" if the Chinese government approves his resignation.

Lee, who is seen as Beijings favored candidate for the chief executive position, is a staunch advocate of the citys national security law, which has been used since 2020 to target pro-democracy activists, supporters and media, diminishing freedoms promised to Hong Kong at Britain's handover to China in 1997.

His potential leadership of Hong Kong could signal a further tightening of Beijings grip on the semi-autonomous Chinese city.

Lam said Monday she would not seek a second term, following a rocky five years punctuated by the COVID-19 pandemic, a crackdown on political freedoms and Beijings growing influence over the territory.

Local media, including the leading South China Morning Post newspaper, reported that Lee will be the sole candidate to be endorsed by the Chinese government.

Other candidates tipped by local media as likely contenders include the city's finance minister, Paul Chan, although he has yet to express an intention to run.

The city's next leader will be selected on May 8 by an election committee of about 1,500 people, a majority of whom are pro-Beijing.

Hong Kong's leader is chosen every five years, although the selection process is carefully orchestrated behind the scenes by Beijing.

The four chief executives selected since Hong Kong's handover to mainland China in 1997 have all been candidates seen as favored by Beijing.

Lee, 64, a former career police officer who rose steadily through the ranks, was named Hong Kong's chief secretary in June and previously served as Lams secretary for security.

He was a key figure in proposing contentious legislation in 2019 that would have allowed suspects in Hong Kong to be extradited to mainland China. He dismissed calls from critics to write safeguards into the bill.

The proposed bill led to massive protests in the city before it was withdrawn, and Lee oversaw a police crackdown on demonstrators during several months of massive anti-government protests in 2019.

After the protests were snuffed out, Lee threw his backing behind the sweeping security law, which was used as justification for the arrests of more than 150 people. It outlaws subversion, secession, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces in the city's affairs.

Lee, Lam and other Hong Kong and mainland Chinese government officials were sanctioned by the U.S. in 2020 for "undermining Hong Kong's autonomy and restricting the freedom of expression or assembly."

Nominations for the leadership race began Sunday and continue until April 16, with the committee vote scheduled for May 8.

The new leader takes office on July 1, the day Hong Kong was handed over to China by the British in 1997.
Human rights groups are condemning a Nigerian court's sentencing of an atheist activist to 24 years in prison on charges of blasphemy.

Mubarak Bala, 37, pleaded guilty to 18 charges, including criticizing Islam and its prophets on social media.

Rights group Humanists International said Bala's decision to plead guilty to the charges during a court hearing Tuesday was surprising, given that his legal team had advised him not to do so. Soon afterward, the Kano state high court issued its verdict.

In a statement late Tuesday, Amnesty International said, "No one should go to jail for peacefully exercising his rights to freedom of expression, thought and belief.

Seun Bakare, Amnesty Internationals spokesperson, said the ruling "came to us as a shock. We at Amnesty International remain deeply concerned; we do not believe that anyone should be sentenced basically for expressing themselves, and of course we've campaigned vigorously on this case before now.

The ruling followed Balas arrest at his home in April 2020 for making posts on Facebook that the court said criticized Islam and the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.

Humanists International called for a reversal of the ruling and said it was a day of shame for Nigerian authorities. The government has not commented on the court action.

Possible reasons for plea

Activists suggested that Bala's sudden decision to plead guilty was perhaps made under duress or done in hopes of getting a more lenient sentence.

"It is difficult to know what may have prompted Mubarak Bala to plead guilty even against the advice of his lawyer," Bakare said, but it's "very clear" that Nigeria's correctional system has an impact on those being held. A defendant's mental health history "certainly should be one of the factors that the court should consider in sentencing or handing down punishment.

This is not the first time citizens have been sentenced for blasphemy under the strict religious laws enforced in Nigeria's predominantly Muslim north.

In August 2020, a 22-year-old musician was sentenced to die for blasphemy, but the death penalty was later lifted. He still faces trial on blasphemy charges.

Ariyo-Dare Atoye of the Nigeria Liberty Center says sharia, or Islamic law, is taken very seriously in the north.

"The core northern part of Nigeria is still largely a closed society when it comes to religious freedom," Atoye said. "Extremism still rules.

Bala heads Humanist Internationals Nigeria chapter. Some observers said he could have faced the death penalty if his trial had taken place in a sharia court.
India has condemned the killing of civilians in Ukraine, marking the first time New Delhi has publicly criticized actions blamed on Russia but also said that Moscow continues to be a critical economic partner.

So far Delhi has refrained from censuring its long-time ally Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, despite mounting pressure from the United States and its allies.

We strongly condemn the killings in Bucha, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said in parliament Wednesday. This is an extremely serious matter and we support the call for an independent investigation.

Officials and residents in Ukraine have reported more than 300 civilians had been killed by Russian troops during the occupation of the town of Bucha near Kyiv. Moscow has denied any involvement and blamed Ukrainian "radicals."

We are strongly against the war and we believe that no solution can be arrived at by shedding blood and at the cost of innocent lives, Jaishankar said, reiterating Indias push for dialogue and diplomacy to resolve the conflict. If India has chosen a side, it has chosen side of peace and it is for an immediate end to the violence.

The foreign ministers statement came a day after India also condemned the civilian killings in Bucha at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, calling the reports deeply disturbing. India has abstained from several U.N. resolutions criticizing Russia.

It marks a shift in stance on Indias part, says Manoj Joshi, distinguished fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi. You cannot stay neutral on human rights issues.

However underlining Russias importance to India, the Indian foreign minister told parliament that efforts are underway to stabilize economic transactions between India and Russia because this is very important for us.

Although trade between India and Russia is only around nine billion dollars, India is critically dependent on Moscow, its Cold War ally, for much of its military hardware. In recent weeks, its oil companies have also sealed deals to buy crude oil from Russia being offered at a discounted rate. India has defended the purchases, citing its energy security and pointing out that Europe is also continuing to buy energy from Russia.

India and Russia are exploring using a mechanism to trade in their local currencies to bypass sanctions by Western countries, according to reports. Jaishankar told parliament that a group of ministers is seeing how the payments issue can be addressed.

Indias stance has frustrated the United States and its allies, which have repeatedly called on India to join them in strongly condemning Russia. Last month U.S. President, Joe Biden said India was somewhat shaky in acting against Russia.

Analysts say India is trying to navigate a middle ground between Moscow, which it needs for its defense supplies, and Washington, with which it has built a strong strategic partnership over the last two decades amid their growing convergence on the need to counter China.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in Washington Tuesday that it expects India to scale down its dependence on Russian military equipment, going forward. He was addressing a congressional hearing on the annual defense budget.

If the war intensifies, the pressures on New Delhi will mount. India is in a very tough spot. The point is how long can it juggle its ties with Russia and its Western partners? says analyst Joshi. The more prolonged the conflict is, the more challenging will be the situation for India.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who visited India last week, praised New Delhi for not taking a one-sided view of the conflict and said that ties between the two countries have sustained them through difficult times in the past.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett must deal with a major test for his ruling coalition after a lawmaker from his nationalist party quit, leaving his government without a majority in parliament less than a year after the coalition was formed.

Idit Silmans departure greatly increases the likelihood of a new parliamentary election less than a year after the government took office. Prime Minister Bennetts government enjoyed a one-seat majority but now will struggle to function.

Silman, who had served as a coalition whip for Bennetts Yamina party, announced Wednesday she would not continue supporting the unity government, and called for the formation of a right-wing government without elections.

Silman has had ideological clashes with members of the coalitions left-wing parties in her pursuit to preserve the Jewish identity in the nation. In a letter to Prime Minister Bennett, she admonished him to try to form a nationalist, Jewish, Zionist government.

Previously, she had opposed allowing people to bring leavened bread into public hospitals, products prohibited according to religious traditions during the Passover holiday. Israel's Supreme Court ruled that hospitals could not bar people from doing so in 2021 since they serve people of different religions.

Key values in my worldview are inconsistent with current reality, Silman wrote in the letter to Bennett.

Silman's departure has impeded Bennetts attempt to form a rare alliance of liberal and Arab deputies who decided to join his government last June. This alliance now holds 60 seats in the 120-seat Knesset.

Bennett had recently formed a coalition of eight political parties comprising staunch nationalists, liberals, and Islamists, who had found common ground in their opposition to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There have been apparent differences, however, within this union, now laid bare by Silmans exit.

To friends still sitting in this coalition, I say: come home, Netanyahu said. Join Idit Silman, join us, and together we will return Israel to the track of success, achievement, security, and peace.

The former leader has been attempting to win over members of Bennetts party and dissolve the coalition.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press.
Ivanka Trump, former U.S. President Donald Trump's eldest daughter and one of his senior advisers, testified Tuesday before the House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Her testimony, given remotely, came days after her husband, Jared Kushner, another former senior White House adviser, testified virtually before the committee.

The nine lawmakers investigating the attack  seven Democrats and two Republicans  have been intrigued by the role Ivanka Trump played at the White House as her father made last-minute pleas to then-Vice President Mike Pence to try to block lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden's presidential win.

After hundreds of his supporters stormed the Capitol, President Trump was widely reported to have rebuffed pleas from his aides, including at least two from Ivanka, to call off the rioters. Later in the afternoon that day, he released a video urging the throng to leave the Capitol.

"So, go home. We love you. You're very special," he told the rioters, adding, "I know your pain. I know you're hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it. Especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace."

The former president continues to spread the false conspiracy theory that he won the election.

Committee chairman Bennie Thompson called Kushner's testimony "valuable" and "helpful."

"There were some things revealed, but we'll just share that a little later," Thompson told reporters.

Several key Trump and Pence aides have been among the more than 800 witnesses who have testified before the investigative panel. Other aides have refused to testify, forcing the committee to pursue contempt of Congress charges against them.

More than 775 protesters have been charged with an array of criminal offenses in the riot ranging from minor trespassing allegations to charges that they attacked one or more of the 140 police officers injured during the riot.

In pursuing Ivanka Trump's testimony, Thompson said the committee wants to know about the former president's efforts to pressure Pence to block congressional certification of election results in key states where Biden edged Trump in the popular vote and thus claimed all of the electoral votes in those states.

"One of the president's discussions with the vice president occurred by phone on the morning of January 6th," Thompson wrote in the letter to Ivanka Trump. "You were present in the Oval Office and observed at least one side of that telephone conversation."

The committee also said it wanted to learn about Ivanka Trump's efforts to get her father to call off rioters after they stormed the Capitol. At an earlier rally near the White House that day, the former president urged supporters to go to the Capitol and "fight like hell" to stop Biden from being certified the winner of the 2020 election.

Hundreds of his supporters smashed windows and doors, ransacked offices and scuffled with police. Five people died that day or in the immediate aftermath, with one Trump protester fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer.

To date, more than 200 people have pleaded guilty or been convicted of criminal charges. Many have received sentences of a few weeks in jail, although some facing assault charges have been sentenced to more than four years. The rest of the cases remain unresolved as investigators pore through vast video footage of the mayhem to identify the rioters.


Medical aid group Doctors Without Borders, known by its French abbreviation MSF, has suspended its work in Cameroon's troubled Southwest region. The group is protesting a lack of progress toward the release of four MSF staff members arrested three months ago. Authorities accused the staffers of cooperating with regional separatists, something MSF denies.

Gisa Kohler is MSF's highest-ranking officer in the region. He said there has yet to be significant progress in MSF efforts to have its staff members released.

"We have been trying to communicate with the government to understand what we have been doing wrong according to them, following the statement or the press release by the minister of defense accusing MSF of supporting terrorists. We were looking for a conversation with the government authorities to understand what they think we have been doing not correctly to solve the issue and try to get our people as fast as possible out of prison," he said.

Kohler, speaking to VOA by a messaging app, said MSF has been giving psychological and financial support to the worried families of the arrested workers.

On December 27, 2021 MSF reported that two of its workers were arrested by Cameroon government troops. MSF said the military stopped an ambulance in which its workers were transporting a patient with gunshot wounds in the Southwest region town of Nguti.

On January 2, two other MSF staff members were arrested in an undisclosed Southwestern town.

The military accused the workers of complicity with separatists, who are fighting to carve out an independent English-speaking state from French-speaking majority Cameroon. The military said the staffers aided and transported separatist fighters in the medical aid groups ambulances.

MSF denies the accusation and says its only goal is to save lives irrespective of whose life it is.

The four MSF workers remain in pre-trial detention.

Fabrice Lena is Cameroon coordinator for the international rights group Prison Watch. Lena said Cameroon is making it very difficult for MSF to save lives of people who cannot afford medical care in the central African state.



"Doctors Without Borders have every right at this point with the degree of pressure, repression on them to suspend its activities in Cameroon. After following the due procedure of humanitarian assistance to someone that has bullet wounds, its staff are arrested, locked up, what do you expect them to do? The state is not functioning with respect to the laws it has ratified and at this point, it is a call for concern," said Lena.

Last June, Cameroons government banned MSF from operating in the Northwest region, where it also accused the group of being too close to anglophone separatists. The group denies the allegation.

Doctors Without Borders says over 1.4 million people in Cameroons restive western regions need humanitarian support. The aid charity says it will continue its activities in other regions, including Cameroons northern border area with Nigeria, where Boko Haram militants are active.

MSF says that in 2020, it treated more than one million patients in Cameroon.
The Oklahoma House gave final legislative approval on Tuesday to a bill that would make performing an abortion a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

With little discussion and no debate, the Republican-controlled House voted 70-14 to send the bill to Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, who has previously said he'd sign any anti-abortion bill that comes to his desk.

The bill is one of several anti-abortion measures still alive in Oklahoma's Legislature this year, part of a trend of GOP-led states passing aggressive anti-abortion legislation as the conservative U.S. Supreme Court is considering ratcheting back abortion rights that have been in place for nearly 50 years.

The Oklahoma bill, which passed the Senate last year, makes an exception only for an abortion performed to save the life of the mother, said GOP state Rep. Jim Olsen, of Roland, who sponsored the bill. Under the bill, a person convicted of performing an abortion would face up to 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine.

"The penalties are for the doctor, not for the woman," Olsen said.

Similar anti-abortion bills approved by the Oklahoma Legislature and in other conservative states in recent years have been stopped by the courts as unconstitutional, but anti-abortion lawmakers have been buoyed by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to allow new Texas abortion restrictions to remain in place.

The new Texas law, the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the U.S. in decades, leaves enforcement up to private citizens, who are entitled to collect what critics call a bounty of $10,000 if they bring a successful lawsuit against a provider or anyone who helps a patient obtain an abortion. Several states, including Oklahoma, are pursuing similar legislation this year.

The Oklahoma bill's passage came on the same day as more than 100 people attended a "Bans Off Oklahoma" rally outside the Capitol in support of abortion rights.

"These legislators have continued their relentless attacks on our freedoms," said Emily Wales, interim president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes. "These restrictions are not about improving the safety of the work that we do. They are about shaming and stigmatizing people who need and deserve abortion access."

Wales said Planned Parenthood's abortion clinic in Oklahoma has seen an 800% increase in the number of women from Texas after that state passed its new anti-abortion law last year.

The Texas law bans abortion once cardiac activity is detected, usually around six weeks of pregnancy, without exceptions in cases of rape or incest.

Also Tuesday, the Oklahoma House adopted a resolution to recognize lives lost to abortion and urge citizens to fly flags at half-staff on January 22, the day the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in its landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade.


A British rights group is taking Myanmars junta to court over allegations of widespread torture since a 2021 coup, frustrated by a perceived lack of meaningful action by the United Nations.

The Myanmar Accountability Project filed the criminal case with the Public Prosecutors Office in Istanbul, Turkey on March 29, pinning its hopes of holding the juntas leaders to account on the legal principle of universal jurisdiction.

Universal jurisdiction holds that some crimes are so heinous they transcend any one nation and can be tried anywhere. International treaties in its remit include the U.N.-sponsored Convention Against Torture. Turkey is one of the signatories.

Where there isnt any other meaningful international action ... a state party to a convention has a particular obligation to act, MAP director Chris Gunness told VOA.

The [U.N.] Security Council sure as hell isnt going to do anything about crimes against humanity being committed inside Myanmar. General Assembly resolutions ... are non-binding.

A resolution condemning the juntas bloody crackdown on peaceful protests against the Myanmar militarys February 2021 coup made it through the General Assembly in June. But China and Russia, the juntas main arms suppliers, are widely seen to be blocking the Security Council from imposing international sanctions and any hope of referring Myanmars leaders to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

What this [case] does is provide a legal process in which there can be accountability, said Gunness.

Myanmar is already on trial at the International Court of Justice in The Hague in a case brought by Gambia alleging genocide over the militarys treatment of ethnic minority Rohingya before last years coup. The military is also under investigation for the same alleged crimes, which it denies, in Argentina in another universal jurisdiction case filed there by a Rohingya rights group in 2019.

MAP says its case breaks new ground by taking Myanmars military to court in a foreign jurisdiction over alleged crimes committed since the coup that ousted the democratically elected government.

In a lengthy report issued last month, the U.N. accused the military of systematic human rights violations over the past year, some amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity. It says security forces targeted civilians, with many shot in the head, burned to death, arbitrarily arrested or used as human shields and tortured.

The case for torture

Gunness said MAP chose to focus on torture due to the strength of the evidence backing it up, although he refused to discuss what that was for fear of exposing the alleged victims. He said the case focuses on one alleged victims time at a notorious interrogation center called Ye Kyi Ain but includes evidence of several other victims as well to prove that the juntas practices amount to a crime against humanity.

He said the 24 accused include junta leader Min Aung Hlaing, military security chief Ye Win Oo, and the two men who run the interrogation center  Tun Tun Zan and Tun Nay Lin.

A spokesman for the military and junta leaders could not be reached for comment.

The military has denied committing atrocities since the coup and says it has a duty to ensure peace and security in the face of nationwide armed resistance to its rule.

Gunness said he considered filing the case in several countries but settled on Turkey for a number of reasons: popular sympathy for the plight of the Rohingya; support for last years U.N. General Assembly resolution; a track record of taking up universal jurisdiction cases; and its many extradition treaties with other countries.

Gunness said his hope is that some of the accused might be arrested while visiting or transiting through one of those countries and be extradited to Turkey to stand trial.

Short of that, he hopes the case can help further isolate the junta and keep it out of Myanmars U.N. seat. Kyaw Moe Tun, who was appointed before the coup, still holds the post and was quick to condemn the putsch. The junta has thus far failed in its bid to replace him.

A state's democratic credentials and human rights record are increasingly important considerations at the U.N.'s Credentials Committee, which decides who sits in the General Assembly and other U.N. bodies, Gunness said. The fact that the junta is in the dock for torturing and murdering its own people on an industrial scale can only isolate Myanmar's military clique even further across the international system."

The Public Prosecutors Office in Istanbul has yet to announce whether it will take up the case. It did not reply to VOAs requests for comment.

Better than nothing

Whatever its chances, universal jurisdiction cases can offer an antidote to impunity when countries like Myanmar refuse to recognize the ICC and allies on the U.N. Security Council, like China and Russia, stand in the way of referring them there, said Linda Lakhdhir, Asia division legal adviser to Human Rights Watch, a U.S.-based rights group.

And even if the accused never end up in the dock, she said, A jurisdiction like Turkey taking this case and hearing it does send a signal to Myanmar that their actions are being scrutinized and are considered worthy of this kind of scrutiny.

Universal jurisdiction, in principle and in practice, has its critics.

In practice, it matters that the country taking up a case is seen to have honest courts, said Catherine Renshaw, who teaches international law at Australias Western Sydney University and studies Myanmar.

The idea is that international justice proceedings should meet the highest levels of integrity and compliance with the rule of law, and thats what the International Criminal Court tries to pursue, and its one of the reasons why there are such terrible delays with ICC proceedings. But those sorts of guarantees are really what the system relies on, and we cant guarantee that they are in place in countries like Turkey, she said.

Turkeys government claims that its courts are on a par with the best in the world but is often accused at home and abroad of wielding them against its critics and political opponents.

Renshaw said victims may also see prosecutions abroad as poor substitutes for justice denied at home, especially when those who end up in a foreign courts grasp are among the least responsible, as has happened with some universal jurisdiction cases.

Even if Turkeys courts take up the case, she said the accused are not likely to end up there any time soon, and that the case might not shed much new light on the alleged torture without their testimony.

The Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, set up by the U.N. in 2018, is already at work collecting evidence of the most serious international crimes in the country from before the coup and since.

The thing that universal jurisdiction is said to provide is a degree of justice, which is better than nothing, but I wonder if the victims really feel the same about it, said Renshaw.

The biggest worry that you have about it is that it raises the hopes of victims and people in Myanmar that there is justice afoot and the reality of that is a much paler sort of justice than what they might be anticipating.
Human Rights Watch and Mali's National Commission on Human Rights have called for an independent investigation into an alleged massacre of hundreds of civilians by government troops and suspected Russian mercenaries. After reports surfaced of the killings last month in the central village of Moura, Mali's military government said their forces there had killed 203 "terrorists." But witness accounts contradict the official version of those killed and offer some of the clearest evidence that Mali's military is working with Russian mercenaries, despite the military's denial.

On a rooftop in Bamako Tuesday evening, a group of around 15 men sat together and spoke Fulani in hushed tones.

They arrived that afternoon from the village of Moura in central Mali, where reports of killings by the Malian army and Russian mercenaries have been circulating since last week. They said they are here in Bamako to testify for a human rights organization.

In the sparsely furnished living room in the house below, one man described how the killings began. He said helicopters arrived on the morning of Sunday, March 27, and began shooting indiscriminately.

He said white soldiers who spoke neither French nor English descended from the helicopters on the edge of town with a smaller number of Malian army soldiers, and began sorting men into groups.

For five days, town residents and those who were visiting for market day were seated on the ground, under guard by the Malian and foreign soldiers, while witnesses said summary executions were carried out.

Most residents of Moura and the surrounding villages are ethnic Fulani, a traditionally pastoralist ethnic group spread across West Africa, who have long accused the Malian army of unfairly targeting them during anti-terrorism operations.

He said, "They told us 'Wuli in Bambara. Wuli, we know that means get up. They chose another one, Hey! Wuli! Get up! They made maybe 12, 15 people stand up, they made them get in a line; they brought them barely 100 meters away. They made them kneel, they had dug a big ditch, they made them put their hands on their heads, then they killed them in front of everyone. Even in front of our children, he said.

Many governments have accused Malis military government of working with mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a private Russian military company with alleged links to the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Malian government denies the accusations, saying it only works with official Russian trainers.

Both the Russian embassy in Bamako and President Putin have denied an official Russian military presence in Mali, although Putin also said during a recent press conference that Mali has the right to work with private Russian military contractors.

Human Rights Watch published a report on the events in Moura on Tuesday, including reports of more than 200 men killed.

From Washington, Corinne Dufka, West Africa director at the organization, said Human Rights Watch spoke with 19 witnesses who were present in Moura during the five-day operation.

If people are killed in this manner, summarily executed, be they suspects or civilians, its against Malian law, international law, and on a practical level it serves to fill the ranks of the violent non-state actors, said Dufka.

Within Mali, the National Commission on Human Rights, or CNDH, a governmental agency, has also called for an investigation of events in Moura.

Aguibou Bouare, the president of the commission, said its important that an independent and credible investigation be conducted, as many times probes into state actions take place without results.

He said that although the CNDH does not yet have formal proof of a Wagner presence in Mali, they are opposed to such military collaborations.

Bouare said, We know that these are organizations that do not respect human rights, This is why we really fear interventions by these types of private military enterprises.

The Malian army released a statement last week saying it killed 203 terrorists in an air and land operation in Moura.

Another statement released Tuesday said the army has been the object of unfounded allegations of abuses against the civilian population.

A Malian army spokesman reached by phone declined to comment.

Last month, Radio France Internationale and France 24 were taken off the air in Mali after RFI reported on alleged human rights abuses by the army near Diabaly, Mali, also against the Fulani population.
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka has revoked a state of emergency order amid an economic crisis that triggered street protests and political upheaval posing a threat to his rule.

President Rajapaksa issued the order last week after demonstrations demanding his resignation outside his home in the capital, Colombo. The decree had given police the power to make arrests without warrants and made it illegal for people to leave their homes.

The president lifted the emergency decree Tuesday, shortly after 41 lawmakers abandoned the ruling coalition and became independent, leaving Rajapaksas party short of the 113 members needed to maintain its majority in Sri Lankas single-chamber parliament.

The mass resignations occurred two days after Rajapaksas entire 26-member Cabinet quit, including his brother, Basil, who served as finance minister, leaving only the president and another brother, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, in charge. Gotabaya Rajapaksas offer to all political parties to form a unity government was rejected Monday.

Sri Lankas economy has been battered by the coronavirus pandemic, which has crippled its tourism industry. The South Asian island nation is also struggling under the weight of heavy debt and declining foreign reserves that have created food and fuel shortages that led to power blackouts up to 13 hours a day.

The crisis has marred the second hold on power for the Rajapaksa family this century. Mahinda was president and Gotabaya defense minister when Sri Lankas long civil war between the government and Tamil rebels ended in 2009. The brothers were accused of carrying out war crimes and other human rights abuses during Mahindas 2005-15 tenure.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
The top U.S. military officer is warning that the war in Ukraine will likely last years, raising concerns that the world "is becoming more unstable and the potential for significant international conflict between great powers is increasing, not decreasing."

During testimony in front of the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley called Russia's invasion of Ukraine "the greatest threat to peace and security of Europe, and perhaps the world, in (his) 42 years of service in uniform."

"The United States is at a very critical and historic geostrategic inflection point. We need to pursue a clear-eyed strategy, maintaining the peace with the unambiguous capability of strength relative to China or Russia," he said, referring to the top two potential military threats to the U.S.

Asked by lawmakers what could have stopped Russian President Vladimir Putin from attacking Ukraine, Milley said the only defense possible may have been to put U.S. forces inside the country, which he would not advise because it would have risked an armed conflict with Russia.

"Candidly, short of the commitment of U.S. military forces into Ukraine proper, I'm not sure he (Putin) was deterrable. This has been a long-term objective of his that goes back years," Milley said.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin added that Russian demands, which include a ban on Ukraine entering NATO and a limit to NATO's deployments of troops and weapons on its eastern flank, were unacceptable.

He and Milley confirmed that while U.S. forces were not training Ukrainian forces inside Ukraine or in neighboring Poland, they were training them outside of Ukraine, including inside the United States.

The U.S. continues to talk to Ukraine on a "daily basis," and Ukrainians have used U.S. military aid, including Stinger and Javelin missiles, effectively against Russian troops and weapons, Austin told lawmakers.

"We look for things that also can provide them an advantage in this fight, and you've seen us begin to deploy some of those things," he said.

In addition to training Ukrainians, the U.S. is looking at ways to provide additional military training to non-NATO allies such as Georgia and Finland, Austin said.

Milley told lawmakers that NATO countries on the alliance's eastern flank, such as Poland and Romania, are "very willing" to establish permanent U.S. bases.

"They'll build them. They'll pay for them," Milley said, adding that U.S. forces could "cycle through on a rotational basis" to "get the effect of a permanent presence of forces" without asking U.S. troops to commit to two- or three-year deployments.
The U.N. Human Rights Office says recent measures taken by El Salvador's government to rein in gang violence violate international human rights law.

U.N. officials acknowledge the threat gang violence poses to Salvadoran society and the need to tackle it. But they say a series of measures recently taken by the government in response to the rise in gang killings is not in line with international human rights law.

The U.N. Human Rights Office is critical of the harsh crackdown on gangs by the government since it declared a state of emergency on March 27. It reports police and military forces have used excessive force against gang members. It notes that more than 5,700 people have been detained without an arrest warrant, and some reportedly have been subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment.

Human rights spokeswoman Liz Throssell said certain amendments to criminal law and procedure appear to breach international law and weaken due process guarantees.

"Criminal trials can now be held in absentia, in the case of alleged gang members, or presided over by so-called 'faceless' judges, that is, judges whose identity remains confidential," she said. "The previous two-year limit to pre-trial detention has been eliminated. Teenagers associated with gangs who are found guilty of serious offenses may now be sentenced as adults."

What is particularly troubling, she said, is children will have to serve their sentences in adult, rather than juvenile, detention. And under the new law, the period juveniles will have to spend in prison has been extended.

"Those aged 12 to 16 must now serve 10-year terms of imprisonment instead of seven years. And those aged 16 to 18 years must serve 20-year terms," Throssell said. "Now we recognize the challenges posed by gang violence in El Salvador and the state's duty to ensure security and justice. However, it is imperative that this is done in compliance with international human rights law."

News reports also say Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has threatened to cut off food to imprisoned gang members if gangs "unleash a wave of crimes." He earlier ordered that food for them be cut to two meals per day. The president has also ordered construction of a maximum-security prison to house 20,000 gang members.

Throssell said her office is seeking information from Salvadoran authorities as to what they have done to comply with their human rights obligations during the state of emergency. She added that certain rights continue to apply, even during this critical period.


The U.N. General Assembly is set to vote Thursday on whether to remove Russia from the Human Rights Council because of its action in Ukraine.

Two-thirds of the 193 member states would have to vote in favor of removing Russia.

The council, which is based in Geneva, is largely symbolic, but it can authorize investigations into human rights violations.

Russia is in its second year of a three-year term on the council.

Earlier this week, U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield called Russias presence on the council a farce and called for its removal.

Since Russias February 24 invasion of Ukraine, the General Assembly has passed two resolutions condemning Russias actions.

Some information in this report comes from Reuters.
The United States and its Western allies said they have imposed new, severe and immediate economic sanctions against Russia, banning American investment there, fully blocking the countrys largest financial institutions and targeting assets held by President Vladimir Putins adult children.

Together with our allies and our partners, we're going to keep raising economic costs, to ratchet up the pain for Putin and further increase Russia's economic isolation, President Joe Biden said Wednesday during remarks at a North Americas Building Trades Unions event.

The new measures, according to the White House, are in retribution for atrocities against Ukrainian civilians allegedly committed by Russian troops, including those discovered in recent days in Bucha, a suburb of the capital, Kyiv. The Russian military withdrew from the region while heightening its attacks on cities in southern and eastern Ukraine.

Biden said horrific images from Bucha, where dead civilians were left on the street, imparted "a sense of brutality and inhumanity left for all the world to see," as he outlined the steps his administration is taking to punish those responsible. Russia has denied killing civilians in Bucha.

The most punishing of the new measures are the full blocking sanctions on Sberbank, Russias largest financial institution, and the countrys largest private bank, Alfa Bank.

Applying full blocking sanctions against Russias largest bank takes U.S. measures against the Russian financial sector to their maximum level, said Andrew Lohsen, a fellow in the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies to VOA. Until now, the Biden administration had refrained from applying the same restrictions on Sberbank as it had on other Russian banks because Sberbank is one of the main institutions handling energy payments.

That seems to have changed as images from Bucha are circulating around the world, Lohsen said. The aversion to carve-outs is eroding, as evidence of Russian atrocities in Ukraine comes to light.

In a move to add psychological pressure on Putins inner circle, the White House said it is also sanctioning Putins adult children  daughters Mariya Putina and Katerina Tikhonova  as well as the wife and daughter of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and members of Russias Security Council. New sanctions were also applied to critical, major Russian state-owned enterprises.

We've seen attempts and efforts to stash assets in the accounts and resources of his (Putins) children, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a briefing to reporters Wednesday.

The U.S. is also blocking Russia from making debt payments with money subject to U.S. jurisdiction. This follows action earlier this week to make Russias frozen funds in the United States unavailable for debt payments. Psaki said Moscow will have to decide whether they are going to spend the dollars they have to avoid default or continue to fund military operations in Ukraine.

Part of our objective is to force them into a place where they are making that decision, Psaki said.

The move makes it more costly for Russia to remain current on foreign debt, which may eventually push it to default and lead to further consequences, Jacob Kirkegaard, senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told VOA.

There will be investor lawsuits. They will go after Russian government assets in Western jurisdictions. So, this could potentially be a further isolation of the Russian economy in general, he added.

Without access to its dollars held in American banks, Russias Finance Ministry announced Wednesday that it had used rubles to pay about $650 million in dollar-denominated debt obligations. Payments are usually required to be made in the currency the debt was sold in.

In his remarks, Biden said that the steps already taken to punish Russia are expected to shrink the countrys gross domestic product by double digits this year alone and wipe out the last 15 years of Russias economic gains.

Because weve cut Russia off from importing technologies like semiconductors and encryption security and critical components of quantum technology that they need to compete in the 21st century, were going to stifle Russias ability in its economy to grow for years to come, he added.

The steps announced Wednesday were sweeping and hard-hitting, but they also mean the West is running out of levers to stop Russian aggression, unless they are willing to apply direct pressure on the Russian oil and gas sector.

The remaining large category of unused tools would likely focus on both direct sanctions on Russian energy exports and importantly, secondary sanctions on any non-Western entities that take or facilitate such trade, said Daniel Ahn, global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, to VOA.

Alleged war crime

Meanwhile, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said the Justice Department is assisting Ukrainian and European partners and the State Department to collect evidence of alleged war crimes by Russan forces in Ukraine.

Federal criminal prosecutors met with prosecutors from Eurojust and Europol on Monday "to work out a plan for gathering evidence." On Tuesday, the top Justice Department prosecutor in Paris met with French prosecutors, Garland said at a news conference. He also announced the indictment of a Russian oligarch.

The actions by the U.S., G-7 countries and the European Union came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pushed for more resolute action against Russia.

"When we are hearing new rhetoric about sanctions ... I can't tolerate any indecisiveness after everything that Russian troops have done," Zelenskyy told Irelands parliament in a video address Wednesday.

He reiterated his criticism of European leaders that he says are more concerned with how potential bans on Russian energy imports will affect their economies than the welfare of the Ukrainian people.

Ahead of the start of a two-day NATO meeting in Brussels, the United States announced $100 million in military aid for Ukraine. Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said the assistance would meet an urgent Ukrainian need for additional Javelin anti-armor systems, which the United States has been providing to Ukraine, and they have been using so effectively to defend their country.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters that alliance members are determined to provide further support to Ukraine, including humanitarian and financial aid, in addition to military equipment and cybersecurity assistance.

I expect we will also decide to do more for NATOs other partners, which are vulnerable to Russian threats and interference, including Georgia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, Stoltenberg said.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba is scheduled to address the NATO ministerial meeting Thursday.

"The main topic of my discussion in Brussels will be the supply of all necessary weapons to Ukraine," he said.

VOAs Ken Bredemeier and Masood Farivar contributed to this report.
While many Americans are trying to move on with their lives after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. health officials are debating the best way to use vaccines to stay ahead of the coronavirus.

A panel of U.S. vaccine experts met Wednesday to discuss key questions for future COVID-19 booster campaigns. The Food and Drug Administration's vaccine advisers won't make any binding decisions, but they could help shape the government's approach for years to come.

FDA vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks told reporters last week that it wouldn't be surprising if the agency authorized another booster dose in the fall to protect most Americans against the latest coronavirus mutations. He opened Wednesday's meeting by cautioning that waning vaccine protection, new variants and colder weather later this year could raise the risk of more surges.

"All that taken together makes us conclude that a general discussion of booster vaccination against COVID-19 is warranted at this time so that we can potentially intervene," Marks said.

Some of the key questions for the panel:

How should the U.S. decide when to launch future rounds of booster shots? And who should get them?

The panel heard presentations from government health officials and independent researchers that underscored the challenges of predicting what the virus will do.

Trevor Bedford, a disease modeler with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, said a major new strain like omicron could emerge anywhere from every 1.5 years to once a decade, based on currently available data. Given that unpredictability, researchers will need methods to quickly determine whether current vaccines work against emerging variants.

Last week, the FDA authorized an extra Pfizer or Moderna shot for anyone 50 or older and for some younger people with severely weakened immune systems. It's an effort to get ahead of another possible surge.

Only about half of Americans eligible for a third shot have gotten one. And some independent experts disagree about the need for that additional protection in healthy individuals because of limited evidence of the benefit or how long it might last.

The last U.S. wave was driven by the omicron variant. During that surge, two vaccine doses were nearly 80% effective against needing a breathing machine or death  and a booster pushed that protection to 94%, federal scientists have reported.

COVID-19 cases have dropped to low levels in the U.S., but health officials are warily watching an omicron sibling that now accounts for most cases.

What's the process for updating vaccines to address new variants?

All the COVID-19 vaccines now used in the U.S. are based on the original coronavirus version that emerged in late 2019. Updating the vaccines will be a complex task, requiring coordination between the FDA, manufacturers and global health authorities.

In response to panel questions, a representative for the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) laid out the narrow window that manufacturers would face to reformulate, study and mass produce an updated vaccine by September.

"If you're not on your way to a clinical trial by the beginning of May, I think it's going to be very difficult to have enough product across manufacturers to meet demand," said Robert Johnson, deputy assistant secretary of BARDA.

The timeline for updating annual flu vaccines offers one possible model, and the FDA panel was expected to discuss the strengths and weakness of adopting such an approach.

Twice a year, World Health Organization experts recommend updates to flu vaccines to target emerging strains. The FDA then brings those recommendations to its own vaccine panel, which votes on whether they make sense for the U.S., setting the stage for manufacturers to tweak their shots and begin mass production.

But COVID-19 hasn't yet fallen into a predictable pattern like the flu. And vaccine manufacturers will likely need more time to conduct additional studies of their COVID-19 vaccines, which don't have the same decades-long record of safety and effectiveness as flu shots.
The parents of a former U.S. Marine held captive in Russia pleaded for information about him on Wednesday, expressing fears about his rapidly declining health and that something terrible had happened to him.

Joe and Paula Reed, who met last week with President Joe Biden about the plight of their son, Trevor, 30, said in a statement that it has been five days since he was last heard from, in a Friday phone call with his girlfriend.

With each passing hour, we are more and more worried that something terrible has happened," the parents said in their statement. "We believe there is a rapidly closing window for the Biden administration to bring our son home.

Russian news agencies reported Monday that Reed ended a hunger strike to protest his solitary confinement and was being treated in a prison medical center.

The younger Reed is serving a nine-year term after being convicted of endangering the lives of two police officers while drunk on a visit to Moscow in 2019. Reed denied the charges. The United States called his trial a "theater of the absurd.

After his parents met with Biden, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the president reiterated his commitment to continue to work to secure Reeds release and other Americans "wrongfully held in Russia and elsewhere.

U.S.-Russia relations, however, are severely strained after Moscows invasion of Ukraine and U.S. imposition of economic sanctions, including new ones on Wednesday.

Some information in this report came from Reuters.
Zoos across North America are moving their birds indoors and away from people and wildlife as they try to protect them from the highly contagious and potentially deadly avian influenza.

Penguins may be the only birds that visitors to many zoos can see right now, because they already are kept inside and usually protected behind glass in their exhibits, making it harder for the bird flu to reach them.

Nearly 23 million chickens and turkeys have already been killed across the United States to limit the spread of the virus, and zoos are working hard to prevent any of their birds from meeting the same fate. It would be especially upsetting for zoos to have to kill any of the endangered or threatened species in their care.

"It would be extremely devastating," said Maria Franke, who is the manager of welfare science at Toronto Zoo, which has fewer than two dozen Loggerhead Shrike songbirds that it's breeding with the hope of reintroducing them into the wild. "We take amazing care, and the welfare and well-being of our animals is the utmost importance. There's a lot of staff that has close connections with the animals that they care for here at the zoo."

Toronto Zoo workers are adding roofs to some outdoor bird exhibits and double-checking the mesh that surrounds enclosures to ensure it will keep wild birds out.

How it spreads

Birds shed the virus through their droppings and nasal discharge. Experts say it can be spread through contaminated equipment, clothing, boots and vehicles carrying supplies. Research has shown that small birds that squeeze into zoo exhibits or buildings can also spread the flu, and that mice can even track it inside.

So far, no outbreaks have been reported at zoos, but there have been wild birds found dead that had the flu. For example, a wild duck that died after tornadoes last month in a behind-the-scenes area of the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines, Iowa, tested positive, zoo spokesman Ryan Bickel said.

Most of the steps that zoos are taking are designed to prevent contact between wild birds and zoo animals. In some places, officials are requiring employees to change into clean boots and don protective gear before entering bird areas.

When bird flu cases are found in poultry, officials order the entire flock to be killed because the virus is so contagious. However, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has indicated that zoos might be able to avoid that by isolating infected birds and possibly euthanizing a small number of them.

Sarah Woodhouse, director of animal health at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium, said she is optimistic after talking with state and federal regulators.

"They all agree that ordering us to depopulate a large part of our collection would be the absolute last-ditch effort. So they're really interested in working with us to see what we can do to make sure that we're not going to spread the disease while also being able to take care of our birds and not have to euthanize," Woodhouse said.

Precautions taken

Among the precautions zoos are taking is to keep birds in smaller groups so that if a case is found, only a few would be affected. The USDA and state veterinarians would make the final decision about which birds had to be killed.

"Euthanasia is really the only way to keep it from spreading," said Luis Padilla, who is vice president of animal collections at the Saint Louis Zoo. "That's why we have so many of these very proactive measures in place."

The National Aviary in Pittsburgh  the nation's largest  is providing individual health checks for each of its roughly 500 birds. Many already live in large glass enclosures or outdoor habitats where they don't have direct exposure to wildlife, said Dr. Pilar Fish, the aviary's senior director of veterinary medicine and zoological advancement.

Kansas City Zoo CEO Sean Putney said he's heard a few complaints from visitors, but most people seem OK with not getting to see some birds. "I think our guests understand that we have what's in the best interests of the animals in mind when we make these decisions, even though they can't get to see them," Putney said.

Officials emphasize that bird flu doesn't jeopardize the safety of meat or eggs or represent a significant risk to human health. No infected birds are allowed into the food supply, and properly cooking poultry and eggs kills bacteria and viruses. No human cases have been found in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In an interview with MSNBCs The ReidOut on 5 April 2022, US Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield admitted that it would not be possible to exclude Russia from the Security Council.

Since day one of the Russian intervention in Ukraine, the United States has consulted with almost all of UN Member States in an effort to prepare for the exclusion of Russia.

Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield is now pushing to make Russias position in the Council particularly uncomfortable, a goal which she has already set in motion by accusing Moscow of committing a massacre in Bucha.
Nancy Crampton Brophy Photo: Dave Killen/AP/Shutterstock

On June 2, 2018, Oregon Culinary Institute instructor and chef Dan Brophy was found dead of two gunshot wounds in his classroom. His wife, Nancy Crampton Brophy, was arrested for the murder, with prosecutors pointing to a $1.5 million life-insurance payout as her motivation. The courts police had all kinds of evidence: footage of her driving to and from the scene, a Glock that matched the gunshot wounds on the body, reports from neighbors about strange behavior following the incident. But when the trial finally began on Monday, April 4, one detail that seems particularly pertinent to the specifics of this case was deemed inadmissible by the danger of unfair prejudice. In 2011, Crampton Brophy published an essay on the website See Jane Publish titled How to Murder Your Husband. Crampton Brophy is a self-published romance novelist, and the essay breaks down in great detail all of the motives and methods a wife might have for murdering her husband. The first motive on the list? Financial.

Hope Shondaland has eyes on this one.
Make Hollywood Horny Again A week-long celebration of erotic thrillers. Sydney Sweeney and Justice Smith in The Voyeurs. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo by Amazon Prime Video

We all feel it, that emptiness in our souls where the erotic thriller should be. A subgenre that wasnt necessarily invented but flew its closest to the sun in the 1990s is the grand unifying experience of cinema in so many ways. It is the bridge between the high and the low. It is the handshake between film snobs and trash collectors. Its the movie theater in old Times Square where any shade of person could go to watch something sexy, transgressive, and built for pure satisfaction. (Trust me: Im on the asexual spectrum, and even I cant resist this hot and bothered section at the video store.) The notion of guilty pleasures is a waste of time  love what you love and shout it out loud  but if theres one class of movies that easily slides into that folder, wrapped in black paper to protect the sensitive eyes of passersby, its this one.

And while we may not get as many new erotic thrillers as wed like (or deserve!), theres a lurid and sweaty archive waiting for you to access it at any time. Weve compiled a list of 15 movies you can watch right now with various streaming subscriptions, plus a little bonus at the end for the ones you shouldnt need anyone to tell you about. So whether youre an experienced collector in the field of film erotics or youre just now starting to dip your toe in the water, light a candle for Linda Fiorentino and burn a small offering for Adrian Lyne: Its time to watch some movies that require you to close the shades.

American Gigolo (1980), HBO Max

Richard Gere had already been cutting a handsome figure in crime thrillers for years before 1980, but American Gigolo helped cement him as a sex symbol for erotic-thriller connoisseur. In this film written and directed by Paul Schrader, Gere plays a sex worker named Julian who is generally enjoying the high life thanks to the compensation from his very satisfied clients. But one day he gets called to service a rich man (Tom Stewart) and his wife (Patricia Carr), and the husbands requests are far kinkier and more violent than Julian is comfortable carrying out. After the bad job, the wife turns up dead, and Julian ends up the prime suspect in her murder. Since no one is springing to the rescue of an escort they could more easily discard, its up to him to clear his own name  but can he do it before the hammer of justice comes down? Pull up this classic and find out!

Dream Lover (1993), Tubi

When you think of erotic thrillers, you probably think of the 1990s. What you might not think of but should is Madchen Amick, who should have been devouring the screen in a dozen entries for the subgenre in its most abundant decade. Instead, we got precious few starring thriller vehicles from Amick in her 90s zenith, and one of those is a true hidden treasure. Amick stars alongside James Spader as a beguiling beauty whom Spader is helpless before. She warns him that she isnt simply a pretty vessel in which to pour his fantasies, and old James insists he sees the truth of her beyond her good looks. Would you guess that hes calamitously wrong? The special thing about Dream Lover is that it plays out like a traditional erotic thriller until the halfway mark, leaving you to careen through unexpected twists and turns for its back half. Amick seethes sensuality and menace, and Spader is excellent as the hot idiot thinking with the wrong part of himself. And because this is from the 90s, there are entire extended dream sequences dedicated to Spader fantasizing about being in a circus. Okat!

The Crush (1993), Tubi & Peacock

There are three magic words that open the movie The Crush: Introducing Alicia Silverstone. One of the defining big-screen figures of the 1990s, she made her film debut in this erotic thriller about a teen girl pining after the boarder, Nick Eliot (Cary Elwes), who lives in her parents guest house. Everything about this movie is unhinged. It was written and directed by Alan Shapiro, who based the story on events from his own life. And the fact of a man making a movie that basically shouts, No, your honor, the 14-year-old seduced me! is, at the very least, a fascinating circumstance to ponder.

Nonetheless, Silverstone sets the celluloid on fire as the sinister, scheming teen, giving a performance that shows the meaning of star power. She had herself legally emancipated to be able to work on the film as a 15-year-old (she turned 16 during shooting), and its unreal that a brand-new kid can have this much presence in front of a camera. The real heads out there know why it sounds so weird whenever anyone in the movie says Adrian, and thats because the real girl whom Silverstones character was based on sued the production for illegally using her actual name, Darian, in the script. She won, so the movie had to be dubbed over following release. Watch this movie and behold the preeminent case study in how obsessed with Lolita films were in the 90s. Much to unpack there!

Jade (1995), Showtime

Whenever anyone starts talking erotic thrillers, the conversation will almost inevitably veer into someone shouting The Last Seduction! And, listen, the movie is great; its a classic. But the lack of respect for Linda Fiorentinos other contributions to the erotic thriller by constantly listing that one movie first is frankly disrespectful to her legacy. Consider instead a movie that is decidedly more thrilling (Seduction is more of a dark comedy if youre really being honest with yourself) than her most-cited sexy hit. Consider: Jade. This movie has a weirdly tepid reputation despite starring a hard-boiled David Caruso simply oozing Caruso as a detective trying to solve a string of high-profile murders related to kinky sex. Fiorentino becomes the prime suspect in it all, and she reminds you here why people have been mourning her absence from the screen for years. Jade also makes excellent use of one of the eras most stunning cinematic treasures: the city of San Francisco.

Bound (1996), Showtime

Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon star in this all-time sexy crime thriller about two women finding a steamy connection with one another and planning to do away with the violent man keeping them apart. Gershon plays Corky, a freshly out of prison construction lesbian who catches the eye of Violet (Tilly) in an elevator one day, and Joe Pantoliano co-stars as Caesar, the criminal and abusive boyfriend of Violet who needs to go. Bound is the directorial debut of Lilly and Lana Wachowski, and its truly a beautiful thing that before they took us into The Matrix and before they cast Channing Tatum as a human dog in Jupiter Ascending, they made a hall of fame Be Gay Do Crime film.

Wild Things (1998), Netflix

If youre a geriatric millennial, theres a good chance you have a formative relationship with Wild Things, which surely has the distinction of being the first screen threesome and/or first screen penis for so many. Not only is Wild Things a top-tier erotic thriller, its also an aces Florida crime movie, and theres nothing sweatier than Florida crime. Neve Campbell and Denise Richards star as the most grown-looking teens youve ever seen in this story of two high schoolers who accuse their guidance counselor, played by Matt Dillon, of a heinous crime. The entire sordid affair upends the posh seaside city of Blue Bay, and it puts surly detective Kevin Bacon on their tails as he tries to figure out who is lying about what. For all the sensation, it shouldnt be looked over that Campbell and Richards are both chewing up these roles and turning some delicious trash into a fine five-course meal of sexy thrills. Shouts out, too, to composer George S. Clinton, who did the score for both this movie and Red Shoe Diaries  which makes a hilarious amount of sense.

Cruel Intentions 2 (2002), Amazon Prime

The thing about Cruel Intentions 2 is that it wont surprise you with how good it is, but if you havent seen it before, it will surprise you to see Amy Adams succeed Sarah Michelle Gellar as the pretty rich girl with bad intentions Kathryn Merteuil. And somewhat unexpected: CI2 is actually a prequel! That means we get to see Adamss Merteuil antagonize Robin Dunnes Sebastian Valmont in this origin story of their psychosexual step-sibling relationship. We all know Adams should have at least two Oscars to her name by now, and while a direct-to-video YA erotic thriller may not be the most prestigious affair, she is still serving bad bitch like her life depends on it to fill Gellars formidable designer shoes. There are no small parts, only small actors! And even in this sequel-prequel from the early days of her career, Adams is a giant. Watch and pay your respects.

Swimfan (2002), Tubi

Congratulations, aughts teens, your savior is here to represent you. If youre in the market for teens with secrets and lies, either relive your sleepover days or enjoy for the first time this nasty little number about an all-star swimmer who gives in to the temptation of a new girl with a dangerous crush. This movie is so aughts it stars Jesse Bradford as the heartthrob athlete. This movie is so aughts its about a champion high-school swimmer. This movie is so aughts it features Erika Christensen going totally feral and laying emotional waste to people. Swimfan is deluxe Friday-night popcorn fare.

Unfaithful (2002), Hulu

There are few people who have done more for the erotic thriller than writer and director Adrian Lyne, who made everyone clutch their pearls with 9 Weeks before mastering the form with Fatal Attraction. Next came Indecent Proposal and a dip into even more taboo waters with Lolita before he delivered 2002s Unfaithful. Diane Lane earned an Oscar nomination for her turn as a wife who throws her marriage vows to the wind when she embars on an affair with Olivier Martinez. Richard Gere is a sexy movie icon in his own right, but here he is the cuckolded husband unaware that his wife is having sex everywhere with the confoundingly attractive Martinez. This is paperback sleaze with a prestige sheen.

Chloe (2009), Netflix

When we think of erotic thrillers, the first women that come to mind are titans of the genre such as Glenn Close, Sharon Stone, and Linda Fiorentino, but dont let the name Julianne Moore stay too far from your heart either. Moore is one of our most fearless performers, giving her all over and over in films that luxuriate in the taboo and the transgressive, from Boogie Nights to Body of Evidence to Maps to the Stars to Savage Grace and then some. Now, is Chloe the apex of her career when it comes to dark sexy material? No. But sometimes its just fun to play around in the mud. In this 2009 pulp drama, Moore plays Catherine, a woman so certain her husband (Liam Neeson) is cheating on her that she hires a sex worker (Amanda Seyfried) to tempt him for proof that hes a two-timing bastard. But soon enough, the business arrangement between Catherine and Seyfrieds Chloe turns into its own kind of affair with the wife asking her spy to recount every sexual encounter with the husband in lurid detail. Does this movie play into the sticky history of queerphobia thats rampant throughout the history of erotic thrillers? It sure does! But the gays deserve to have fun, too, so put your judgments aside and give yourself over to the charms of Chloe.

The Housemaid (2010), AMC/IFC

If youre looking to discover some international erotic thrills, consider dabbling in this domestic story of sex and betrayal and bourgeoisie malaise. The Housemaid follows a young woman (Jeon Do-yeon) whos hired as a nanny for a pregnant housewife (Seo Woo) and becomes the object of desire for the man of the house (Lee Jung-jae). As you can imagine, this goes wrong for everyone involved. When the nanny and the husband engage in an affair, the pregnant wife gets wise, and everything starts coming apart at the seams for all involved. All of this builds up to a shocking climax that just doesnt feel like anything youd get from an American film of the same class. If you like it, seek out the 1960 film of the same name this one is based on.

Strangers by the Lake (2013), Strand Releasing

What would a list of erotic thrillers be without something French? This simmering drama set at a cruising beach drips with longing, lust, and the breezy freedom of a warm and sunny day spent by the water watching bodies glisten. Alain Guiraudie wrote and directed this story of murder and desire, and it stars Pierre Deladonchamps as Franck, a handsome 30-something looking to indulge in the delights of this gay gathering spot. Franck connects with Henri (Patrick DAssumcao), but hes truly smitten with Michel, the mustached hunk of everyones dreams played by Christophe Paou. The whole movie takes place within the snow globe of the beach, and the suspense comes thanks to a discovered body and the downward spiral of Franck as he pines for the magnetic Michel. Stranger by the Lake is for those who want the French art-house experience: male bodies dazzlingly on display and sex scenes that dont hold back. Expand your cinematic palette and check out this critical darling.

The Handmaiden (2016), Prime

Erotic thrillers are famously lowbrow fare thats just so tantalizing it draws in even the highest-minded movie watchers. Of course, some of them are legitimately great  classics of cinema!  while still satisfying the viewers basest desires. The Handmaiden might be the highest-level work of them all. Park Chan-wooks sensual, stunning masterpiece collected accolades from film-awards bodies the world over before being blanked by the idiot Oscars, but every frame is a painting and every plot twist is a pearl clutcher in this thrilling amalgamation of drama, suspense, dark comedy, and eroticism out of South Korea. The plot concerns three main players: a suave con man (Ha Jung-woo), the low-level grifter hes conscripted into a scheme (Kim Tae-ri), and a housebound heiress (Kim Min-hee), all locked in a duplicitous love triangle. The two crooks are after the pretty rich girls fortune, but everything gets complicated when the women start developing feelings for one another. Or are they? Is this a burgeoning love affair or just another con job stacked on top of a labyrinth of deceptions? The performances are engrossing, the art direction is breathtaking, the sex scenes are eye-widening, and the betrayals are heart-racing.

Double Lover (2017), Tubi

If you know anything about director Francois Ozon (See the Sea, Swimming Pool), you should know that he revels in the carnal and the transgressive. If theres one thing to know about Double Lover going in, its that the movie basically opens with gyno-POV and a speculum entering a vagina. The story centers on Chloe (Marine Vacth), who starts seeing a therapist named Paul (Jeremie Renier), and before long, the pair become romantically involved. But after a time, Chloe meets another analyst who is a dead ringer (hint hint!) for her boyfriend. Hes Pauls twin brother, you see, and he thinks he can cure Chloe of what ails her via treatments that involve sex. There are secrets about her lovers that Chloe must uncover, and this loose adaptation of Joyce Carol Oatess Lives of the Twins should set off bells for fans of David Cronenbergs own erotic doppleganger thriller Dead Ringers, which is a wonderfully twisted tradition to follow in.

The Voyeurs (2021), Prime

If youre out there bemoaning the loss of the erotic thriller but youre not watching The Voyuers from 2021, are you even for real? If youre out here watching Euphoria and tweeting Sydney Sweeney ate that! but not seeking out her work as a sexy optometrist in this twisty thriller, do you even care about her or are you just riding the Zeitgeist wave? Michael Mohan wrote and directed this steamy little number about a couple (Sweeney and Justice Smith) who get approved for a stunning new apartment that comes with one very specific stipulation: You cant put any curtains up. Ever. This leads them to building weird little parasocial relationships with all the people they can snoop on across the way  particularly the incredibly attractive couple (Natasha Liu Bordizzo and Ben Hardy) with the sexually and emotionally explosive relationship right in their eyeline. Our hero couple, Pippa (Sweeney) and Seb (Smith), start overindulging in the voyeuristic delights of watching their hot neighbors with Pippas interest sliding into a full-blown obsession. The real suspense kicks in when something terrible happens across the way, and Pippa in particular is conflicted about what her duty is to the other woman, who might not know all her husbands extracurricular activities. The Voyeurs builds toward a truly bugfuck final act. If you really do miss the erotic thriller, you simply cannot miss this movie.

Plus: Some essentials

And finally, we shouldnt need to tell you to watch these erotic thrillers, but if youve got a hankering:

Fatal Attraction (1987), HBO Max

Glenn Close as the bunny boiler.

Basic Instinct (1992), HBO Max

Sharon Stone as the erotic-thriller femme fatale.

Single White Female (1992), Hulu

Jennifer Jason Leigh as the blueprint for modern-day toxic female friendship villains.

The Last Seduction (1994), Tubi

Linda Fiorentino as the seductress who can bring any man to his knees.
Michigan Representative Fred Upton announced on Monday that he wont run for re-election to the U.S. House this year. Upton had plenty of reasons. Hes the fourth Republican who had voted to impeach former President Donald Trump to retire, although he denies thats the reason. Thanks to redistricting, he wouldve been running against another incumbent Republican, Bill Huizenga, in a new district that only somewhat overlapped with his old one. Republican committee term limits may also have been a factor: Upton was the chairman of the energy and commerce committee for the six years beginning in 2011  but he had to hand over the gavel in 2017 at the onset of unified Republican government, and he would presumably not get that job back next year. At any rate, Upton will turn 69 later this month, so hes hardly retiring young.When I last wrote about House retirements, there was a huge party imbalance, with 18 Democrats and only four Republicans heading for the exits without seeking another office. Thats what one would expect during an election cycle in which just about everyone expects Republicans to win the House majority. However, some evidence pointed to other possibilities. The retiring Democrats were unusually old, even for House Democrats, suggesting that some of them simply had reached a natural retirement age. Its also the case that six of the seven senators retiring (including one, Oklahomas Jim Inhofe, who is leaving in the middle of his term) are Republicans, and an equal number from both parties (eight each) are leaving the House to run for higher office.Meanwhile, the recent retirements are different from those earlier in the cycle. The last 10 retirements are equally split between the parties, which has moved the ratio from 18D/4R to a somewhat less dramatic 23D/9R. Still lopsided, but less so, especially taking the Senate side into consideration. On the other hand, the recent Democratic retirements are much younger than the earlier ones, averaging only 61 years old as of the beginning of the next Congress compared to an average of 71 for the first 18. So the point about Democrats leaving for reasons other than fear of a Republican landslide might be somewhat weaker at this point. While we could see a handful of additional retirements, were close to the end, with many filing deadlines already having passed and almost all the redistricting lines complete. Only a single member of the House announced retirement from April on in 2020 and only three in 2012, the last redistricting year. So while its possible things could change at the last minute, perhaps the biggest development since mid-January is something that didnt happen: a flood of Democrats exiting. Without that, the number of Democrats leaving is quite moderate for a redistricting cycle, with the very small number of Republicans leaving somewhat more unusual.Its still hard to see the overall retirement story as signaling a collapse of Democratic resources  and candidates are an important resource  during the 2022 election cycle. That this has happened even as President Joe Biden remains unpopular and the conventional wisdom is even more settled on likely Republican gains suggests that if there is a landslide, it will be a bottom-up event driven by voters opposing Biden rather than a top-down defeat caused by Democrats disarray, hostility toward their own incumbents, or just plain fatigue. To be sure: If Biden remains unpopular, Democrats will suffer in November. But if not, Im not seeing any strong evidence of an already-built-in Republican landslide.
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Proponents of animal rights dont tend to see Wall Street corporate raiders as natural allies. But in their struggles to influence some of Americas biggest companies, theyve gained a collaborator who might actually help make some progress: Carl Icahn, the takeover-artist-turned-activist-investor who made his name dismantling the airline TWA. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Lately, Icahn has been spending a lot of time talking about pigs. In late February, he announced a plan to nominate two candidates to the McDonalds Corp. board of directors  part of a broader effort to put pressure on the company, which he says has failed to fulfill a 2012 promise to eliminate restrictive gestation crates for pregnant sows within 10 years. The company insists its honoring its commitment.

Last month, Icahn started a similar fight at Kroger Co., the Cincinnati-based grocery giant whose stores include Fred Meyer, Kroger and Ralphs  this time tying together the poor treatment of animals and workers, who he claimed were underpaid during the pandemic. What has happened at Kroger with the issues of animal welfare and employee wages is an affront to the basic fibers of our society  that of decency and dignity, Icahn wrote in a letter explaining his decision to nominate two directors to the companys board.

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Animal-rights organizations have long tried to employ shareholder activism to advance their goals, with little success. Back in 2008, the U.S. Humane Society sought a shareholder resolution on phasing out the use of gestation crates at Tyson Foods Inc. The proposal failed spectacularly, as most shareholder proposals do. Even when one passes, companies arent obligated to follow through and seldom do.

Icahn isnt a major investor in either McDonalds or Kroger: The companies have reported his holdings as 200 and 100 shares, respectively. Yet he has much that the typical small shareholder doesnt, including a bigger megaphone, a giant checkbook and a posse of lawyers at his disposal. Such resources matter. When activist investor Engine No. 1 nominated four directors to Exxon Mobil Corp. and ultimately won three board seats, the estimated cost for both parties was around $60 million. Its safe to say that proxy fights at McDonalds and Kroger will cost at least several million dollars, no matter what the outcome. Company executives are taking the challenge seriously: In recent months, McDonalds CEO Chris Kempczinski has participated in at least three phone calls with Icahn about gestation crates, according to the latters proxy statement.

One big question is why someone as notoriously profit-focused as Icahn would devote himself to a battle over animal rights. Perhaps, given the rise of ESG investing, he thinks treating pigs and people better will actually boost stock prices  but with his tiny holdings, he wouldnt stand to gain much. He also has long demonstrated a passion for the issue, having gotten involved a decade ago, when the Humane Society tried to nominate its CEO at the time, Wayne Pacelle, to Tysons board. Icahn served as an advisor in that effort, though the nomination was ultimately dropped.

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McDonalds and Kroger typically hold their annual meetings in late May and late June, respectively, so theres still time for both sides to sharpen their swords. Icahn isnt known for giving up, and this time hes actually doing the nominating, rather than just advising. With his extensive experience waging proxy fights, not to mention shifting public opinion on the treatment of animals, he might be able to achieve much more than rights activists could have on their own.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Michelle Leder is an expert on SEC filings, having launched her site, Footnoted.com, in 2003 after writing the book Financial Fineprint: Uncovering a Companys True Value.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion

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Jaccuse! This was the famous title of a withering public letter Emile Zola wrote in 1898 to the president of France. In it, the author accused the government, and by extension the whole country, of anti-Semitism. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Ich klage an! This, in effect, would be the German version of Zolas letter. Ukraines ambassador to Berlin hurled just such an indictment at Germanys president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and by extension the countrys entire political class.

The charge is not anti-Semitism this time, but decades of fawning and hypocritical appeasement of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, who is currently committing war crimes in Ukraine.

With this and other outbursts of undiplomatic honesty, Andrij Melnyk, Ukraines ambassador in Berlin, has come to embody Germanys guilty conscience. When not seated like a moral phantom in the gallery of the Bundestag and glowering down at parliaments speakers, he goes from one talk show to another, relentlessly reminding Germans how theyre falling short of the historical responsibility theyre constantly invoking  by not sending Ukraine enough weapons, continuing to buy Russian gas, or what have you.

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By aiming at Steinmeier, Melnyk has picked what is in some ways the most obvious and symbolic target. As head of state, Steinmeier holds a largely ceremonial office. This suits him perfectly because he excels at the main job requirement: bloviating. Steinmeier is especially good with pregnant pauses to accentuate absolutely meaningless platitudes.

He represents his nation and its political class in another sense, too. As a Social Democrat whos been chief of staff to one former chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, and foreign minister to another, Angela Merkel, he played a leading role in almost every misguided gesture Germany has made toward Putin in the last two decades.

Schroeder, you may recall, became best buds with Putin and  surprisingly soon after leaving the chancellery  the Kremlins most prominent energy lobbyist. He chairs the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, a gas pipeline connecting Russia and Germany under the Baltic Sea, as well as the board of Rosneft PJSC, a state-owned oil giant. Hes also due to join the board of Gazprom PJSC, which controls Nord Stream. As recently as February, Schroeder demanded that Kyiv  not Moscow  stop its saber-rattling, which is all you need to know.

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After Schroeder, Merkel then spent 16 years adding to Germanys commercial and energy entanglements with Russia. With Steinmeier, she even green-lighted a second Nord Stream pipeline after Putins first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. That was nixed only last month.

During all those Schroeder and Merkel years, Steinmeier was saying cheese for the photographers next to Putin and his cronies. Like other German politicians, especially Social Democrats, he became an oratorical robot spouting the German conventional wisdom: the only way to deal with Moscow is dialogue and more dialogue, as well as more economic and cultural exchange.

Politely but obstinately, Steinmeier rebuffed the Poles, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians  not to mention the Ukrainians  who worried that Germany was in hock to the Kremlin. He lectured them that energy dependence was instead interdependence and would make the Russian Bear cuddly rather than scary. In 2016, when NATO maneuvered near its eastern flank, Steinmeier theatrically decried this saber-rattling and warmongering by his own countrys defensive alliance. Hear any echoes?

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For Steinmeier, the relationship to Russia was and is something fundamental, even holy, Melnyk told a German newspaper this week. For decades, he added, Steinmeier has woven a spiders net of pro-Kremlin contacts. Melnyk then named some of them, including the current foreign-policy advisor of Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

It was Scholz, of course, who, in response to Putins attack on Ukraine, recently proclaimed a new era in German policy toward Russia. His administrations support for Ukraine is now unequivocal, its commitment to military deterrence and the NATO alliance reinvigorated. This is a good and probably permanent change of direction  and therefore historic.

And yet, Germanys policy elites and intellectuals will have a lot of soul-searching to do for years to come. Few are doing so honestly. They include a group of historians affiliated with the Social Democrats who published what amounts to a collective mea culpa, sniping that some Social Democrats in our party appear to mourn the ruins of their policies more than the ruined landscapes Putins bombs are making in Ukraine.

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They probably also had in mind Germanys head of state. As is his wont, Steinmeier was until recently trying to gloss over his own responsibility with grand gestures of pacific high-mindedness. He invited Melnyk to a concert in which both Ukrainian and Russian musicians were to perform in demonstrative harmony. Melnyk RSVPed no, then called out Steinmeiers hypocrisy.

In response, Steinmeier this week admitted that he shouldnt have advocated for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. He even conceded that we failed, and that like others, I was wrong. If hed spoken English, he would have said mistakes were made. Where are you now, Emile Zola?

More From This Writer and Others at Bloomberg Opinion:



Chinas Ukraine Doublespeak Is Becoming Unsustainable: Clara Ferreira Marques



Putin Has Already Caused a Revolution in Germany: Andreas Kluth

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 Ukrainians Russian Curses Are Like Verbal Molotov Cocktails: Leonid Bershidsky

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist. Hes the author of Hannibal and Me.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion

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Could the re-election campaign of Frances President Emmanuel Macron be any less inspiring? As French voters go to the polls on April 10 for the first of two voting rounds, gone is the enthusiasm or interest in the election of 2017, when Macron came to power as the youngest leader since Napoleon Bonaparte, with a new party promising to sweep out the establishment, knock out a rising Europhobic far right and bring about a liberal revolution.

Yet this year the stakes for France, Europe and the world are even higher in many ways. With Germanys new coalition government still finding its footing after the Angela Merkel era, the European Unions second biggest economy and only nuclear power could well be leading the continents response to a high Covid-19 debt load, a brutal war on Europes doorstep and a costly shift away from fossil fuels.

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Its not just the combination of pandemic and war that is smothering excitement on the campaign trail. Macron has changed his tune  the former disruptor is being cast as protector-in-chief by an entourage seeking to keep him above the fray. Wags have named it the eiderdown plan: sleepy, safe and padded with budget giveaways. Macrons legacy and leadership are to speak for themselves. Hes avoiding debates with rivals.

The ennui was evident at a recent campaign stop in Avesnes-sur-Helpe, a small town 20 minutes from the Belgian border. As a few locals hurled anti-Macron insults outside the red brick building, a parade of panjandrums rose up inside to defend Macrons record before an audience of 150 voters, local officials and party faithful. Despite being unlucky, facing protests, a pandemic and now a war on his watch, they said, Macron had delivered reforms, tax cuts and spending that had changed France for the better. Warning of the rise of his far-right nemesis Marine Le Pen, a dangerously close second in the polls, one minister asked: Who do you want in charge?

Attendees applauded and joined the presidents crew in a lusty rendition of the Marseillaise. The appeal to centrist values and crisis management has been enough to keep Macron top in the polls, but not enough to stop Le Pen climbing by the day. Voter apathy has been contagious, with turnout projected at a record low.

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Which begs a question: If a candidate is running on his record, what should we make of Macrons legacy after five years in power? To what extent has his mission to transform France succeeded? And could it all be reversed by a far-right resurgence?

Compared with the stasis of the past 20 years, France has certainly seen changes. Energized by reforms, its economy has weathered the Covid storm better than others; it ranks fifth in Bloombergs Covid Resilience index. Frances influence in Europe has risen. All that has happened even as its establishment political parties have steadily declined.

Yet Macrons glass was so big that it could never be half-full. Much remains undone. Some plans outright flopped. Political polarization and social divisions, meanwhile, have deepened. They could produce a late election upset by Le Pen. And even if Macron wins, these forces wont disappear.

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The tensions on display during the last presidential term have been unheard of, and only a pandemic was able to keep them relatively contained, Jean-Philippe Derosier, of Lille University, said last month. Macron the revolutionary delivered change, but he may not avoid another revolution before long.

One change Macron can claim is the performance and perception of Frances economy, long caricatured as a basket case. Even after protests that stopped his reform agenda, and a pandemic that dealt the worst recession since World War II, hes left the economy in better shape than he found it.

Unemployment is at a 15-year low, economic growth is outpacing Germanys and corporate investment has rebounded.

Calling that a revolution might be a stretch: Frances debt-to-GDP ratio of 113% is among the highest in the euro area. Its social spending is among the highest in the developed world. And Macrons pre-Covid bid for a Copernican revolution in the countrys Byzantine pension system fizzled in the face of protests and the pandemic.

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Yet when put into context, Macrons effective step-by-step reforms have set him apart from his predecessors Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande, who were forced to backtrack on many of their pledges. Their failures made Macron, whose brief ministerial career had yielded small-bore successes in liberalizing bus routes and Sunday trading, look in 2017 like Frances next homme providentiel  a term used by historian Jean Garrigues to describe the savior figures embraced by elites in times of crisis throughout history.

Macrons early reforms as president made hiring and firing easier, capped employment tribunal rewards and created a bigger window for companies to negotiate a 35-hour workweek. Trade unions had neither the support nor the stomach for a fight.

He also passed controversial tax cuts that earned him the nickname president of the rich  slashing a levy on net wealth to cover only property, cutting corporation taxes to 25% and instituting a flat tax on dividends. Hes the right-wing president we never expected, one rival exclaimed in 2018.

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In a modern twist on the post-Napoleonic monarchys offer of 1 billion francs to aristocrats who had fled the revolution, Macrons tax cuts and investor-friendly reforms stemmed brain drain and brought back exiles who were either filling the trading floors of investment banks in London or the golf resorts of tax havens abroad, data from the French prime ministers office and French consulates suggest. Efforts to foster a more attractive environment for foreign direct investment, symbolized by Macrons glitzy Choose France summits at the Palace of Versailles, paid off in a pre-Covid rebound in volumes measured by the World Bank and a bump in the annual rankings of the EY consultancy.

Beyond the well-off bankers bidding up apartments in Paris to eye-watering levels, broader property tax and income tax cuts have perked up the middle class. These were accelerated when protests over the cost of living by workers suffering wage stagnation  the so-called gilets jaunes, or yellow vests  called for a counterrevolution of sorts from Macron, in this case backed by 17 billion euros of budget giveaways.

Macrons tendency to write checks ramped up after Covid-19, as exemplified by 100 billion euros in pandemic stimulus, and his more statist stance today is dubbed the protectionist revolution. Still, the common thread connecting Macron the disruptor and Macron the protector has been bringing more people in an aging population into the workforce and shifting resources away from retirees.

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Apprenticeships have boomed, as have bonuses for those hiring workers under 26 years of age. Frances furlough schemes ensured that jobs were saved, avoiding deep economic scarring despite a painful recession.

And while talk of reindustrializing France after decades of factory closures remains more hope than reality, economic gains from stimulus spending are being felt even in former manufacturing heartlands, where Le Pens blue-collar base has felt abandoned by the state and impoverished by waves of deindustrialization.

Funds have been poured into green-energy projects like vehicle retrofitting at Greenmot or industrial production at AvosDim, which manufactures curtains and blinds. This is the most business-friendly environment weve ever seen, AvosDim founder Adrien Lombart says. Jerome Dron, founder of Redison, a music-technology startup that tapped a regional fund supported by the state, says the cash was a real boost.

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Macrons other big ambition beyond the economy was to liberalize the French state. If one plank of his legacy was a state of entrepreneurs, the other was the entrepreneurial state. It was to be remolded in his image: younger, more meritocratic, more digital, more open to competition and more McKinsey-ish. Macron in 2016 called the profligacy of the state an act of cowardice on the part of French governments.

Yet had Macrons 2016 manifesto imagined Frances current level of public spending and expansion of the civil service, commandeered by a head of state determined to protect supermarket chains from foreign takeovers and ordering state utility Electricite de France SA to cap power bills, it might have been subtitled: So Whats New? The country today has 170,000 more civil servants than in 2016.

Covid shifted outrage from the over-allocation of state resources to their under-allocation. Furlough schemes and a whatever-it-takes approach to state spending, backed by a well-oiled bureaucracy and regulated economy, earned praise. The highly centralized Parisian administration got the blame, however, for mask shortages, nurses poor pay and patchy public services in local areas. And Frances inability to develop a Covid vaccine of its own exposed a lack of spending on innovation.

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Meanwhile, Macrons pledges to make the state more efficient have become increasingly rhetorical, focused on technocrats groomed in Frances top academies (where he himself studied). His symbolic war on the elite, whom he accused of betrayal, has veered into populism. He accused the diplomats of the Quai dOrsay of working as a deep state against his plans to bring Vladimir Putin in from the cold. He waged a long internal battle with his own government to shutter the Ecole Nationale dAdministration and the hypercompetitive rankings that decide who gets the most prestigious postings. He opened their ranks to outsider applicants.

For Chloe Morin, a former government advisor, Macron has scored only small victories against those she calls the un-movables, the technocratic advisors and top civil servants who pack the corridors of power. She cites the ENAs overhaul under a new name, his appointment of a new wave of prefets  the emissaries of the state who are spread far and wide to oversee policy  and his renunciation of his own pension rights as president. Yet the cozy world of dominant elites in France in her view remains best summed up by a cooking analogy: Any object inserted into a pickle jar will, over the course of several weeks, become a pickle.

As for the enarques themselves, many slam their alma maters overhaul, seeing a dilution of a prestigious institution that will lead to more outsourcing and less efficacy. The goal of a more diverse student body, while worthy, looks to some like a category error. In their view, more attention should be paid to growing elite disaffection with a career in the civil service, which looks less glamorous after the 21st-century boom years of finance and Silicon Valley.

As alumnus and former civil servant Nicolas Colin puts it, the debate should be over what role the state should have in todays world and in what kind of economy. Judging by Macrons re-election campaign, a revolution here is unlikely.

Other pushes, such as for a more transparent French state and society, look here to stay. Macrons own entourage has not been spared: His centrist allies got tangled up in graft, his bodyguard Alexandre Benalla was filmed beating up protesters dressed as a policeman, and his environment minister was forced to step down after lavish dinners of lobster and Chateau dYquem. A recent string of high-society scandals, from an incest accusation that shook Sciences Po university to conflicts of interest in the respected Goncourt literary prize, point to an establishment increasingly under scrutiny.

Of course, Paris remains Paris, and not Copenhagen. The Automobile Club of France is still closed to women candidates; the French CAC 40 index is only about to welcome its second female CEO. French elites have railed against the import of le wokisme  Macrons wife, for instance, has pointedly noted that There are two pronouns, he and she. But gender equality initiatives are gaining ground, with one law passed in December setting quotas at management level.

Alongside re-creating Frances internal makeup, Macrons aim was to bind France closer to Europe at a time of rising euroskepticism. His lofty ambitions to kick-start the EUs Franco-German engine again after bitter financial and migration crises earned him the label the last president of Europe.

For a while, it looked more like talk than action. He fielded plenty of proposals and ideas, championing a more sovereign EU to resist Donald Trumps trade threats, trying to coax Vladimir Putin into a reset with Europe and playing the bad cop in Brexit talks with Britain. But Germany seemed broadly unmoved, and his labelling of NATO as brain-dead served to annoy allies.

Yet Macron can claim credit for a European shake-up brought about by Covid, when he proved that France could wield the Archimedean lever of Europe to its advantage. Securing Merkels support for a bazooka-shaped $1 trillion joint borrowing plan to rebuild the virus-scarred bloc, called NextGenerationEU, was a game-changer.

Barely a decade after Germany had insisted on austerity in response to the meltdown hitting Greece and Southern Europe, Berlin was now blessing an effective bailout partly funded by German taxpayers. The step closer to a transfer union for so long demonized in the German imagination proved that Paris and Berlin could muster leadership, and integrationist momentum, even after Brexit and Covid.

It showed that Macron  dubbed complex by Merkel  had restored France as a credible economic partner. Sarkozy and Hollande were trapped in a Madame Nein relationship in which France proposed and Germany disposed. Had either been in power during Covid, there might still have been a bazooka, but perhaps not as big.

And it also neutralized some of the loudest objections from domestic Frexiteers who had long railed against the EU as a German-led machine for austerity-driven policies that straitjacketed France.

In grabbing the slogan whatever it takes from former European Central Bank head and current Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi and applying it to fiscal stimulus in France, Macron appropriated some of the supposed benefits of Frexit. His rivals on the far right and far left are as contemptuous of Brussels as ever, but Frexit is off the menu in 2022, says Joseph de Weck, author of a biography of Macron. Le Pen, for instance, is no longer campaigning to take France out of the euro.

While certainly revolutionary in its own way, this shift doesnt preclude future internal fights on the EUs direction. A joint push by France and Italy to keep the EU from reimposing fiscal limits too soon, and a recent proposal to launch more fiscal stimulus after the Ukraine war, have had a chilly reception.

And the French have yet to be reconciled with an EU that has been a convenient political punching bag. An IFOP survey published last month found that while the French were proud to be European, more of them favor sovereignty at the national government than EU level.

Still, Frances influence in Europe has clearly risen since Macrons arrival, proving to be a force multiplier for the country. While his ill-judged attempts to woo Putin with a charm offensive were unsuccessful  Macrons regular phone calls since the invasion have delivered few obvious gains  Frances focus on strengthening European defense and its preference for nuclear power have been vindicated.

Macrons biggest and most visible change at home, however, has been one that could cause even more turbulent revolutions to come: his championing of Third Way politics and defeat of the left-right political parties that had governed for decades. The reshaping of the French electorate, which has left behind the 20th-century pillars of Catholicism and communism, is still underway and remains both an opportunity and a risk for Macron.

The Macron country he created in 2017 by appealing to a bourgeois bloc of aspiring white-collar urban workers with pro-EU tendencies is still loyal to the incumbent, as he throws out a mix of left-and-right policies for 2022, from hiking the retirement age to 65 and cutting taxes to increasing wages for teachers.

It is a country of the mind, and the metropolis. Surveys show Macron supporters to be more optimistic than the rest of the population, more inclined to believe France can change. They have tended to be young urbanites, a subgroup of the elite, in an aging country with a median age of 42, even if more retirees vote Macron these days. And a high proportion of them have masters-level education, according to political analyst Luc Rouban.

But with Macrons mix of elite political competence and appeals to sweep out the old  which academic Christopher Bickerton has called techno-populism  came increased polarization, frustration and violence.

Macrons seeming inability to broaden his appeal beyond his voter base has made him vulnerable. While he will be reassured by left-wingers recently crediting him with getting the job done, and the half of center-right candidate Valerie Pecresses conservative wing that saw his election as a good thing for France, he remains unloved, and his Jupiterian top-down style grates.

Le Pen country, meanwhile, has also grown. Macrons nemesis has also been strengthened by the death of establishment parties, and by her loyal disaffected blue-collar base. Research by Jean-Laurent Cassely and Jerome Fourquet examining the Alsace regions voting patterns in 2019 showed urban areas, tourist zones and wine country had gone to Macron, while areas that once hummed with textile factories and potash mining were in Le Pens hands.

Fears of rising inequality have also fueled the far left. French billionaires have seen their wealth over the past decade increase more than in any other country bar China, according to UBS/PwC. Ruchir Sharma, author of The 10 Rules of Successful Nations, notes that France has a rising proportion of billionaires who inherited their wealth. Purchasing power for the poorest 5% of France has fallen since 2017, making inflation a scarier prospect.

Macron has championed economic prosperity and liberalism over security issues like crime, terrorism and justice, and these areas are still seen as his weak points, partly explaining the rise of far-right anti-immigration pundit Eric Zemmour.

Gaps in Frances security services came under scrutiny after multiple terror attacks in 2020. The gilets jaunes lost eyes, and limbs, as police found themselves up against sporadic protests and guerrilla tactics they hadnt known. Music producer Michel Zecler was beaten by police after an apparent Covid lockdown check gone wrong.

In the first week of January, when parliament was voting on vaccine passes, 28 lawmakers received death threats. Surveys suggest a quarter of those aged 18 to 25 consider violence to be an acceptable way of expressing anger.

More broadly, what began as democratic fatigue, exemplified by Macrons rise to power, is turning into exhaustion. Turnout in his 2017 presidential election was about 75%; in the 2019 European elections, it was 50%; in 2020 local elections, 42%; in 2021 regional elections, 33%. Currently, only about 70% of French registered voters are sure of voting, 15 points less than in 2017. That could yield surprises.

A lot of Macrons legacy is wrapped up in one man. Macron has kept power centralized, Parisian and solitary. He replaced his popular prime minister Edouard Philippe with a relative nonentity. Defense committees and scientific advisors encircled the president, elevating his image while rendering those below a little more invisible.

Indeed, Macrons biggest failure has been his inability to turn his party into more than just a machine for handing out leaflets or rubber-stamping laws; it is seen as rootless. Some of the faces that stood out, like spider-brooch-toting mathematician Cedric Villani, have broken off from the party. Others, like Brune Poirson, have simply left politics.

Despite these failings, Macron may well be re-elected rather than turn out to be an accident of history. Describing what he calls the French paradox, Jean-Louis Missika, former advisor to Pariss Mayor Anne Hidalgo, notes that more voters today self-identify as centrist  neither left nor right  than before Macrons 2017 election, despite the collapse of political parties associated with the center. In fleeing the center for more polarized ground, he argues, Macrons rivals have made a serious miscalculation.

Yet as Le Pens surge in appeal shows, the divisions in French society and politics remain real, deep and abiding. Macron has changed France, and done so step-by-step rather than through revolution. That may propel him to another term. But rather like the case of the 18th-century minister Turgot who came up with his own kind of bus-route liberalization alongside other administrative initiatives during the Ancien Regime, moderate reforms dont always head off revolutions. Even if Macron wins, what happens next for France may not be so measured.

More From Bloomberg Opinion:

 EU Must Seize Hamilton Moment to Lift Euros Role: Jenny Paris

 The Post-Heroic Legacy of Angela Merkel: Andreas Kluth

 Will This Franco-Italian Bromance Save Europe?: Rachel Sanderson

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Lionel Laurent is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the European Union and France. He worked previously at Reuters and Forbes.

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In March 2020, during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, then-President Donald Trump dusted off a decades-old public health law known as Title 42 to curb crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border. President Joe Biden continued the policy but now plans to lift it on May 23. Theres concern that an expected migrant surge could cause humanitarian issues.

1. What is Title 42?

Its a provision included in the 1944 Public Health Service Act to permit federal health officials to ban people and goods from entering the country in the case of a pandemic. The notion had been around in varying forms since 1893 until finally being codified.

2. What did its invocation in 2020 accomplish?

Trumps public health order allowed for the rapid expulsion of nearly anyone trying to cross into the U.S. from Mexico or Canada, before they had the opportunity to seek asylum in the U.S. The Trump administration said the order would prevent the spread of Covid-19, specifically at border facilities, where overcrowding could have fueled transmission of the virus. The order doesnt apply to U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents and their spouses and children, nor does it apply to U.S. military personnel or those who arrive at a port of entry with valid travel documents. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention already terminated Title 42 for unaccompanied minors as of March 12.

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3. What was the result?

The policy produced backlash when images circulated of U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback appearing to brandish whip-like reins at the asylum-seekers. At the time, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Majorkas said he was horrified by the images. Haitian migrants had been arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border for years, with a noticeable uptick following the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise in July 2021 and a major earthquake in August. Title 42 was also used to expel asylum-seekers from Mexico, Brazil and other countries.

4. How many people have been affected?

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, more than 1.6 million migrants have been expelled under Title 42 since March 2020. Some of them have been expelled to their countries of origin through deportation flights, but others were simply returned to Mexico, causing some to worry about a buildup of people waiting to cross again when the policy is lifted. Officials from DHS said the administration is preparing by building new holding facilities, deploying more border agents and acquiring additional means of transportation.

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5. What are people saying?

Critics of the policy have repeatedly said its use is a misapplication of the law and is spurred by immigration concerns, not public-health worries. Former CDC officials and other public health experts wrote a letter to the Biden administration condemning its use of Title 42 in August 2021 and relayed those same concerns again in January. The advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights urged the administration to end Title 42, calling it a a grave misuse of public health as a pretext to end asylum. Republican lawmakers have largely criticized Biden for supporting policies they say have worsened circumstances at the border, including the plan to end Title 42.

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Theyre so fast, their speed can change the surrounding air molecules. They can carry a nuclear warhead, fly low and be hard to detect. Such weapons are also at the center of escalating competition between the U.S. and Russia and China. Russia claims that it used hypersonic weapons, Kinzhal missiles, for the first time in combat in Ukraine. Though the Kinzhal travels at hypersonic speeds, it doesnt fall into the category that arms experts mean when they talk about hypersonic weapons.

1. What are hypersonic weapons?

They are normally defined as fast, low-flying, and highly maneuverable weapons designed to be too quick and agile for traditional missile defense systems to detect in time. Unlike ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons dont follow a predetermined, arched trajectory and can maneuver on the way to their destination, according to the Congressional Research Service. The term hypersonic describes any speed faster than five times that of sound, which is roughly 760 miles (1,220 kilometers) per hour at sea level, meaning these weapons can travel at least 3,800 miles per hour. At hypersonic speeds, the air molecules around the flight vehicle start to change, breaking apart or gaining a charge in a process called ionization. This subjects the hypersonic vehicle to tremendous stresses as it pushes through the atmosphere, according to a 2018 U.S. Army paper.

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2. What are the different kinds of hypersonic weapons?

There are two main types--glide vehicles and cruise missiles. Most of the attention is focused on the former, which are launched from a rocket before gliding to their target, because of the challenges of achieving hypersonic propulsion of missiles. The missiles have engines called scramjets that use the airs oxygen and produce thrust during their flight, allowing them to cruise at a steady speed and altitude.

3. How is Russias Kinzhal missile different?

Its a ballistic missile. And although it reaches hypersonic speeds, thats true of nearly all ballistic missiles at some point during their path. Rather than a new system, the Kinzhal is thought to be derived from Russias ground-launched 9K720 Iskander-M, a short-range ballistic missile. Russias Ministry of Defense said it used Kinzhal, or Dagger, missiles in Ukraine to destroy a weapons cache and fuel depot on March 18 and 20. The missiles, which were fired from a plane, can carry conventional or nuclear warheads.

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4. Who has hypersonic weapons?

China, the U.S., and Russia have the most advanced capabilities, and several other countries are investigating the technology, including India, Japan, Australia, France, Germany and North Korea, which claims to have tested a hypersonic missile.

 Russia: Russias Avangard is a glide vehicle launched from an intercontinental ballistic missile and will reportedly carry a nuclear warhead. Russian news sources claim it entered combat duty in December 2019. Tsirkon is a ship-launched cruise missile said to be capable of striking both ground and naval targets.

 China: Its military conducted possibly two hypersonic weapons tests over last summer, including the launch into space of an orbiting hypersonic weapon capable of carrying a nuclear payload. The Financial Times first reported the tests. China has disputed reports of the tests, saying it simply launched a reusable space vehicle. Previously, China conducted a number of successful tests of the DF-17, a medium-range ballistic missile designed to launch hypersonic glide vehicles. U.S. intelligence analysts assess that it may now be deployed. China has also tested the DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missile, which could be modified to carry a conventional or nuclear glide vehicle.

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 The U.S.: Gregory Hayes, chief executive officer of U.S. defense contractor Raytheon Technologies Corp., told Bloomberg TV Oct. 26 that the U.S. is at least several years behind China in hypersonic technology despite significant investment. Development funding increased approximately 740% in the five years before 2020 and is expected to total almost $15 billion between 2015 and 2024, not including production costs. The U.S. Navy leads the development of a glide vehicle for use across the military branches, while the Air Force is working on an air-launched glider. The governments Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, with Air Force support, is developing an air-launched hypersonic cruise missile, according to CRS.

 The U.K., U.S. and Australia said in a joint statement April 5 they are cooperating on hypersonics and counter-hypersonics as part of their new Aukus security pact.

5. Whats the significance of hypersonic weapons?

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In an appearance on Bloomberg TV, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, likened Chinas suspected tests of a hypersonic weapons system last year to a Sputnik moment, a reference to the Soviet Unions pioneering launch of a satellite in 1957, giving it an early lead in the space race and shocking the U.S. Hypersonic weapons are very difficult to counter using existing defenses. U.S. officials say that American hypersonic weapons, unlike those being developed in China and Russia, are being designed to carry conventional rather than nuclear weapons. But this provides scant reassurance to potential U.S. adversaries, who would have no way of knowing whether such a weapon in fact carried a nuclear warhead while it was in flight. The pursuit of these systems by China and Russia reflects a concern that U.S. hypersonic weapons could enable America to conduct a preemptive, decapitating strike on their nuclear arsenals and supporting infrastructure. U.S. missile defense deployments could then limit their ability to conduct a retaliatory strike against the U.S.

(Updates with Aukus to develop hypersonic weapons, section 4)

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You probably know someone with a commemorative coin or two, on display among porcelain ornaments and family photos  a 1925 Stone Mountain Memorial silver half-dollar (worth $100), perhaps, or a silver 5-pound coin for Her Majesty the Queens 95th birthday. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight So, how about the same thing, but digital? Britains finance minister, Rishi Sunak, has asked the Royal Mint to come up with ideas for a non-fungible token (NFT) to show that the U.K. is hip to digital assets.

Maybe young people really will want to buy a state-backed piece of digital merch to add to their Minecraft and Fortnite skins, or virtual Nike sneakers and Gucci bags, to flaunt in the metaverse. It all sounds pretty silly to me, but then what do I know?

The idea of NFTs is to use cryptographic blockchain technology, the tools behind Bitcoin, to create unique tradeable claims on some digital thing  an image, a first edition of a piece of music, membership of the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

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These have really taken off in the past couple of years when people spent a lot of time at home, online and with money burning a hole in their pockets. Digital art has boomed: More than $18 billion was spent on almost 17 million images and other collectibles between April 2021 and March 2022, according to a report about money in the metaverse last week from Citigroup analysts. That all came after the OMG-moment when a piece by Beeple sold for $69 million at Christies auction house.

But art is barely the half of it: NFTs could be used to confer property rights throughout the metaverse, whatever that becomes. Projections about the potential value of digital stuff are all finger-in-the-air guesswork. What is real is the amount already being spent and invested. Last year, venture-capital funding to NFT startups jumped to $4.8 billion from next-to-nothing the year before, according to Citigroup.

So what would a Royal Mint NFT commemorate? Royal events are popular among the old crowd, but its probably not a theme the target market would fancy. The subject could be anything: The mint produces thousands of coins (made of actual stuff) for collectors interested in dinosaurs, Stephen Hawking, Wallace & Gromit, or Brexit among a mystifyingly large selection.

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But why is Sunak even doing this? Hes seen a vision of tax revenue flickering in the future. He wants to make the U.K. a global hub for crypto-asset technology.

Britain has a habit of jumping onto financial bandwagons. George Osborne, financial minister from 2010 to 2016, made huge fanfare of making London the global hub for offshore renminbi bonds outside China. In 2016, London welcomed the first renminbi Chinese sovereign bond sold offshore. Since then, well.The London Stock Exchange Group says 18 issuers have listed more than 100 bonds worth 32 billion renminbi, about $5 billion, which is not a lot.

Theres a lot of hype around crypto and no doubt Bitcoin and its rivals are still wildly volatile, speculative playthings. But big institutions are researching and experimenting with all aspects of this technology. Often its for dull things like payment processing: JPMorgan Chase & Co. for example, has JPM Coin, which is meant to make cross-border payments faster and cheaper.

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Banks are preparing for the day when they can use blockchain technology to tokenize all kinds of financial assets and make them more easily tradeable. They just need regulators to set some reliable ground rules.

Gary Gensler, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, is rallying support and pushing to collaborate with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to do just that  work out how market makers, custodians and other participants ought to have their roles defined and separated where necessary.

There are huge questions still to be answered. With NFTs, the collector who buys it doesnt necessarily own the thing theyve paid for. Typically, they own a record of a web address where they can view the metadata that says they own something. Maybe the creator retains the original property rights  though you could say the same about a first edition of Harry Potter or Oliver Twist. Maybe smart people can counterfeit versions of an NFT you think you own.

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Maybe the computer power needed for mining everything crypto-related is just too energy intensive to be viable for regular use. But to be clear, large banks and investors are gearing up to exploit it in any way that looks profitable. It could be nothing, or it could be the stepping stone to the financialization of anything and everything.

A Royal Mint NFT is a silly bit of political marketing. But governments and regulators absolutely should be doing everything possible to understand this technology deeply and prepare for all the ways in which it might be used in the decades ahead.

More From Bloomberg Opinion:

 Russias Push Into Crypto Is a Big Step Backwards: Izabella Kaminska

 Expensive Crypto Hacks Are Becoming Part of Web3 Life: Parmy Olson

 Fintechs Everywhere in India. Banks Need a Counterattack: Andy Mukherjee

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Paul J. Davies is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering banking and finance. He previously worked for the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.

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A rendering of the Allegheny Lock and Dam #2 project to electrify a dam near Highland Park Bridge in Pittsburgh. (Photo illustration by Rye Development)

Out of about 90,000 dams in the nation, few generate hydropower. A push to retrofit nonpowered dams could change that.
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Russias invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 and its repeated attacks on civilian targets have led to calls in the U.S., U.K. and Europe to hold President Vladimir Putin and his subordinates accountable. U.S. President Joe Biden on April 4 said Putin could face a war crimes trial, as images emerged of bodies strewn along streets in Bucha and other Ukrainian towns vacated by Russian soldiers. The International Criminal Court has opened an investigation into war crimes in Ukraine. However, its far from certain that anyone will be brought to justice under international law.

1. What are war crimes?

The definition used by the International Criminal Court in the Hague is extensive. It includes willful killing, torture, rape, forced prostitution, corporal punishment, hostage taking, unlawful deportation, using starvation as a weapon and shooting combatants whove surrendered, among many other acts. War crimes can also include using banned weapons such as chemical and biological arms, deliberately attacking civilians and non-military targets, targeting hospitals and other places where the sick and wounded are gathered, looting and carrying out attacks that will cause severe damage to the environment. Russias invasion could also be considered a so-called crime of aggression.

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2. Whats a crime of aggression?

Essentially, its an attack by one country on another where theres no justification of self-defense, according to former ICC President Chile Eboe-Osuji. The court defines it as the planning, preparation and execution by a state military or political leader of an act of aggression which, by its character, gravity and scale, constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations. An act of aggression means the use of armed force by a state against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State and can include invasion, occupation and annexation by the use of force, as well as the blockade of ports. The crime applies only to the highest ranking leaders who exercise control over or direct the political or military action of a state. The ICC adopted aggression as the fourth crime under its jurisdiction as of 2018, after war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.

3. How are war crimes prosecuted?

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The ICC was born out of an international treaty called the Rome Statute in 2002 as the first permanent, independent arena for holding people accountable for acts of mass inhumanity. It started with 60 countries and its membership has more that doubled since then. Notable countries that have not ratified the treaty are the U.S., China, Russia and India. (The U.S. says putting its citizens under the courts jurisdiction would violate their constitutional rights.) The ICC can pursue war crimes cases when alleged offenses were committed by a citizen of a member state, or in the territory of a member state or a non-member state thats accepted the courts jurisdiction, or when allegations are referred to the courts prosecutor by the United Nations Security Council.

4. Whats this mean for Ukraine?

Ukraine is not an ICC member but it accepted the courts jurisdiction for incidents on its territory starting in November 2013. That enabled the court to consider alleged crimes committed during and after Russias invasion and annexation of Ukraines Crimea peninsula in early 2014. On Feb. 28, the courts chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, said that based on a preliminary assessment by his office conducted mostly in 2020, there is a reasonable basis to believe that both alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed in Ukraine. He said the investigation he was opening would also encompass any new offenses committed in the expansion of the conflict since Russias full-scale invasion. Dozens of countries have asked the ICC to investigate in the wake of that action.

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5. What about prosecuting the crime of aggression?

The ICC prosecutors office can pursue crimes of aggression upon referral by the UN Security Council, upon request by a member state, or on its own initiative but only where the alleged offense was committed by a national or on the territory of a participating state. That takes prosecuting this crime off the table in the case of the Ukraine war because Russia, as a permanent member of the Security Council, can veto any of its decisions, and neither Ukraine nor Russia are ICC members.

6. What are the challenges to prosecuting war crimes?

Its easy enough to prove that Russian forces have struck civilian targets, including apartment blocks, hospitals, public squares, municipal buildings and a nuclear power plant. A flood of video recordings have been posted on social media, sometimes within minutes of such attacks occurring. And theres the testimony of Ukrainians experiencing the carnage. But such evidence doesnt tie specific strikes to specific individuals, which would be necessary for a prosecution. On the other hand, the U.S. has said it is already on the ground searching for evidence of whos culpable. After the discovery of bodies in Bucha, Biden said that we have to gather all the details in order to actually have a war crimes trial.

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7. What are the prospects of trying Russian officials?

Not good. The ICC doesnt permit trials in absentia, and the court, which has no police force, is unlikely to gets its hands on Putin or his lieutenants. It relies on its member states to make arrests. But they havent always respected their obligations to honor the courts warrants. And the accused could always avoid traveling to any country that might turn them over. Of the two dozen people against whom the ICC has pursued war crimes cases, about a third remain at large. A few turned themselves in and the rest were handed to the ICC, in roughly equal number, by authorities in their own country or a different one. The ICC has brought cases predominantly against members of armed groups rather than political or state military leaders. The court did issue arrest warrants for Sudans then-president, Omar al-Bashir, and two of his ministers for war crimes during a counter-insurgency campaign in the countrys Darfur region. After al-Bashir was deposed in 2019 and the three were jailed, transitional authorities said they favored surrendering them to the ICC, but that government was toppled in a military coup in October.

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Two years ago, China was being lauded by the World Health Organization for its success in beating the coronavirus. But its insistence on adhering to a so-called Covid Zero policy is leaving it increasingly isolated as other countries, most of which suffered far worse outbreaks and higher death tolls, wean themselves off harsh countermeasures and return to a semblance of pre-pandemic life. Their populations have built up a large degree of protection through previous infections and more effective vaccines. Chinese officials have said vaccines alone arent enough and stringent curbs aimed at wiping out the virus are needed to avoid a health care calamity. President Xi Jinping has pledged to try to reduce the economic impact of the strategy, which Hong Kong also follows. But continued flareups this year, including in the financial capital Shanghai, are putting it to the test as never before.

1. Does Covid Zero mean zero cases?

Yes, ideally. Beijings perception of Covid hasnt changed much since the virus first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan: Its a public health threat that must be eliminated at all costs, whether its spreading via people or animals or lurking on frozen food or mail from abroad. To achieve this, China requires at least two weeks in quarantine for anyone arriving from other countries. Domestically, even the slightest flareup is met with a barrage of targeted testing, contact tracing and quarantines to nip it in the bud, with citywide lockdowns as a last resort. The approach, which has become known as dynamic clearing, acknowledges that infections occur but aims to stop the transmission of the virus. The highly infectious delta and omicron variants have made it more difficult for China, which hasnt gone a day with zero new local cases reported since October. In April the daily tally topped 20,000, surpassing the numbers found in the early days of the pandemic in China, before testing was easily available.

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2. Why is China sticking to it?

In its calculus, the benefits outweigh the costs. The government estimates the strategy has avoided 1 million deaths and 50 million illnesses. Fewer than 5,000 people have died from Covid on the mainland, mostly during the virus initial spread. That compares to more than 900,000 deaths in the U.S., which has a population less than a quarter the size of Chinas. Beijing has used those figures to portray its system of governance as superior. Covid Zero also allowed the Chinese economy, the worlds second biggest, to grow while other major economies contracted in 2020. Growth continued last year and 2022 got off to a stronger-than-expected start, although the outlook is clouded not only by Covid but the global repercussions from Russias invasion of Ukraine. Thats prompted China to experiment with a closed-loop system to allow some factories to keep operating during outbreaks. Workers are effectively put in a bubble, ferried between their company-run dormitories and the plant -- or sleeping on the floor at work -- with regular testing and temperature checks. China will strive to achieve the maximum prevention and control effect at the least cost and minimize the impact of the epidemic on economic and social development, Xi said in March.

3. Whats the domestic impact been?

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As the virus has become more contagious, its led to more frequent outbreaks, some of which have resulted in hardcore lockdowns, where residents are asked to remain at home and barred from leaving town. A handful dragged on for weeks, such as in the northeastern industrial province of Jilin, and led to shortages of food and medical care. An extended one in the western city of Xian even cost lives. Under the tweaked policy, restrictions on movement imposed in March in the tech hub of Shenzhen were lifted after a week -- relatively short by past standards. But Shanghais initial plan for an 8-day, two-step lockdown to conduct Covid testing was extended in April as case numbers climbed. Flareups in Beijing and elsewhere have so far been tackled without citywide lockdowns. Still, people facing travel curbs and fearing infection have avoided vacations, shopping and dining out, dampening retail spending. The gloom has added to weak investment and a broader downturn in the property market. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. cut its forecast for Chinas growth in 2022 by 0.5 percentage points due to the increased difficulty of containing the omicron variant.

4. What are the hurdles to getting back to normal?

There are several:

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 While nearly 90% of the population has been vaccinated and a growing number received boosters, the rates are lower for the elderly: 82% for those between 70 and 79 and about 51% for those over 80, health officials said in mid-March. (In Hong Kong, where an even larger proportions unvaccinated, elderly people accounted for most of the thousands of Covid-related deaths in the city this year, as of late March.)

 Many analysts point to the lower efficacy of vaccines developed in China. The most widely used are inactivated shots, which offered less protection against infection caused by the original strain of the virus in clinical trials than the novel mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer Inc., BioNTech SE and Moderna Inc. The mRNA vaccines, unavailable in mainland China, are the backbone of immunization elsewhere in the world.

 The inactivated vaccines also appear to produce fewer protective antibodies against the omicron variant than those induced by shots developed in the West after three doses.

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 Chinese health officials have made it clear that vaccination alone isnt enough, since breakthrough infections are common even with Western vaccines. Researchers at Peking University estimated China would face a colossal outbreak, with more than 630,000 infections a day if it were to reopen in a similar manner to the U.S. -- and that was before the more-infectious omicron became predominant.

 The run on hospitals across the world, both in under-resourced places like India and in the developed world, is a constant reminder about how Chinas patchy hospital network could easily crash under a sudden spike in infections.

 Switching tactics to let the virus infect a large swath of the population could create bad optics ahead of the national congress of the ruling Communist Party slated for later this year, where Xi is expected to try to extend his power.

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5. Whats the cost to the rest of the world?

Covid Zero has sent ripples through the global supply chain. Outbreaks have led to temporary production halts at the China-based factories of top carmakers in the northern port city of Tianjin for people to undergo mass testing. Foxconn briefly suspended operations in March at its Shenzhen sites, one of which produces iPhones. The monthlong lockdown of Xian caused disruption for leading chipmakers Micron Technology Inc and Samsung Electronics Co., while Toyota Motor Corp. and Volkswagen AG had to suspend production at factories in Jilin. But abandoning the policy could cause far greater disruptions, at least temporarily, if workers were too sick to show up at work, given how much the world relies on China for everything from raw materials to finished consumer and industrial products. In the worse-case scenario of omicron spreading out of control and China imposing a national lockdown, Bloomberg Economics and Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that could slow Chinas economic growth to 1.6% this year -- the lowest in more than four decades -- and send shock waves through the world economy. Among the likely results: lower commodity prices, and a more gradual pace of Federal Reserve interest-rate hikes.

6. Whats the endgame for China?

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China has given no sign of backing away from its strategy in the hope that reacting forcibly to each flareup will quickly contain it with few economic and social ramifications. While local lockdowns cause disruptions and spur complaints on social media, the strategy ensures people in the rest of the country can generally carry on with normal life. The countrys top virus expert said in March that China should stick to its strategy, while fine-tuning some measures to be more targeted and deployed quicker to deal with omicron. Some experts think the strategy will eventually crumble as the virus becomes too transmissible to control. Another possibility is a new variant may emerge thats mild enough for the government to relent without harming the population.

7. Whats the outlook for Hong Kong?

The financial hub and gateway to China has prioritized aligning its policy with the mainland in an effort to reopen the border. Successive outbreaks on both sides have kept that from happening. Chief Executive Carrie Lam has vowed to stick with Covid Zero while conceding the city doesnt have the resources the mainland does to extinguish outbreaks. As omicron swept through Hong Kong early this year, public hospitals became overcrowded and the governments priorities shifted to vaccinating the elderly and reducing fatalities. In March, after acknowledging that public tolerance was fading, Lam revised a plan for mandatory citywide testing and instead sent kits to all residents and asked them to test themselves at home. She also announced the lifting of a ban on flights from nine countries including the U.S. and U.K., and cut by half the time incoming travelers need to spend in hotel quarantine -- provided they test negative. Social-distancing restrictions will be eased in phases if there is no rebound in infections, Lam said, but talks on reopening borders would have to wait.

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 Bloomberg Opinions Adam Minter asks how popular Covid Zero really is among the Chinese people, Shuli Ren looks at dynamic clearing, and Therese Raphael and Sam Fazeli examine why China cant loosen up yet.

 Bloomberg Economics and Bloomberg Intelligence analyzed three ways China could exit Covid Zero.

 Businessweek digs into the mounting economic damage from Covid Zero, and a Big Take looks at the havoc it wreaks.

 More QuickTakes on what we know about omicron and Covid therapies.

 Some of the stranger things that have been in Chinas crosshairs.

 Bloombergs Resilience Ranking charts the best and worst places to be during the pandemic.

(Updates with new case figures in section 1, Shanghai lockdown in section 3. Adds charts)

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com

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The government of Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett experienced its first (and very possible final) coalition crisis. A relatively obscure coalition member, Idit Silman, announced that she was leaving the coalition, setting up a tied Knesset. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight In some ways its a surprise that Bennetts government lasted this long. His coalition margin (61-59) was improbably narrow, and his reliance on a multi-party coalition of rivals made it too fragile to survive. The triviality of the issue that brought it down was also predictable. Silman resigned over a disagreement about kosher food enforcement by government hospitals during the passover holiday. This will seem strange to foreigners, but Israelis know that wobbly coalitions have often fallen on kosher and/or sabbath observance controversies that stand in for weightier matters. In this case, the underlying issue is the return of Benjamin Netanyahu to the prime ministers office.

Bennett has done a good job running his coalition of rivals and gave Israelis a sense at what a more centrist government could look like. But he hasnt been a particularly popular prime minister. Inexperience was one problem. He was not always good at articulating his policies to the public. And, crucially, he suffered from political blindness: He took his eye off Netanyahu.

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On Wednesday, Bibi called on additional members of the ruling coalition to defect and form a new government with him at the head. There is a fair chance this will happen. Its not only right wingers in Bennetts anti-Bibi coalition might be tempted. Ambitious and frustrated centrists (Defense Minister Benny Gantzs name comes up most often) who could give a new Likud government a wider public base may also wish to join.

If no one else defects, a 60-60 split will paralyze the Knesset (unlike in the U.S. Congress, there is no tie breaking vote). That would almost certainly lead to a new election in the summer, the fifth in the past four years. Netanyahu will be the candidate of Likud; polls show him by far the most popular party leader. He faces three indictments on criminal charges of fraud and corruption which rumble on. But those indictments are not looking as solid as the prosecution thought, and even if he is convicted, he could appeal, dragging out the process while staying in office.

If there is an election, Bennett would probably defer to Foreign Minister Yair Lapid. Lapid leads the biggest faction in the current coalition government and he is seen as a successful foreign minister. Lapid would probably receive the support of Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Minister of Justice Gideon Saar, both of whom are right-wingers but opponents of Netanyahu. But even if every one of the small parties that make up the current coalition hang together, their list is not likely to win outright victory in a new election.

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A new, narrowly elected Netanyahu government would revert to the well-worn themes of previous administrations. Bibi supports the Trump peace plan for the West Bank, which would leave Israel in strategic control of borders and limit Palestinian sovereignty to a disarmed mini-state. That will not be much of a change. At the moment there is no peace process to speak of, and the Bennett coalition is committed to not making waves. Netanyahu, however, will presumably attempt to revive U.S. support for unilateral Israeli measures.

Netanyahu would also raise the temperature of Israels disagreement with the U.S. over Bidens Iran policy. He wont get along well with the current U.S. foreign policy team, or the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. But Republicans will be happy to see him back. There will be pressure on him to embrace Trump, whom he has called Israels best friend, though Netanyahu may well prefer former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or even Trumps former Vice President Mike Pence, all of whom remain high on his list of preferred presidents.

Netanyahu has been relatively quiet on Ukraine, which would put him at odds with the current administration and key parts of the U.S. Republican Party. In the past he has seen Putin as a partner in fighting Iranian influence in Syria and in the effort to keep Iran from supplying Hezbollah and Hamas with cash and weapons. That is similar to Bennetts policy, though it is hard to imagine Bibi trying to mediate the conflict or allowing his foreign minister to call Putin a war criminal, as Lapid is now doing. For now, the balance in the Knesset is still in flux. Israels government is now paralyzed on all but the most pressing security issues.

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Everything else, from legislation to immigration, to tackling an acute housing shortage to recasting Israels foreign alliances in a changing world order, will be on hold.

The Bennett government made some small steps toward introducing a more secular, centrist and calmer political climate. It also showed that there is life after Bibi. But 10 months in office (or even a few months more, if there is an election) have been too short for fundamental change to how the government functions, plans for the future or speaks to the public and the rest of the world. That is a shame. Israel, after more than a decade under Bibi, needed a change. This one, it appears, will be brief.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Zev Chafets is a journalist and author of 14 books. He was a senior aide to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the founding managing editor of the Jerusalem Report Magazine.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion

2022 Bloomberg L.P.

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Gulls and terns on the southern end of Ocracoke Island in North Carolina. (Anna Mazurek for The Post)

This North Carolina barrier island has a colorful past that belies its tranquil present.
A former employee at one of the countrys biggest stockbroking houses has been accused by his wife of forging her signature to transfer shares in unlisted companies, which were not approved by the firm, and then secretly selling them to clients.

Kristofer Ridgway, a former adviser of Shaw and Partners, is said to have bought shares in Steppes Alternative Plc in his wifes name without her knowledge. He is then alleged to have sold the shares in Steppes to a client of Shaw and Partners.

Kristofer Ridgway was sacked from Shaw and Partners. Credit:LinkedIn

Steppes, an unlisted company, was an investment product that Shaw and Partners didnt authorise or recommend to clients.

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age revealed last week that Mr Ridgway was sacked by Shaw on February 25. Shaw discovered that Mr Ridgway had secretly put millions of dollars of clients money into three investment products, which the 35-year-old broking house didnt have on its approved product list, in breach of its rules.
Stock markets ducked for cover on Wednesday after a normally measured Federal Reserve governor warned of a stronger hiking cycle, with the ASX200 taking its biggest fall in four weeks when it opened.

However, the benchmark S&P/ASX 200 recovered during the day to close 37.7 points lower at seven-session low of 7490 points, a 0.5 per cent decline. The improvement from a 1.2 per cent fall in the morning was thanks to gains in banks, travel companies, and consumer staples. Endeavour Drinks reached an all-time higher of $7.61.

MLC Asset Management portfolio manager Anthony Golowenko said comments from Federal Reserve governor Lael Brainard overnight suddenly shifted market sentiment and increased uncertainty.

US Fed Reserve Governor Lael Brainard set off the latest interest rate jitters. Credit:Bloomberg

She gave a speech targeted primarily on inflation and the uneven impact on low income earners, he said.

Her comments about inflation getting much too high, the pace of rate rises, and shrinking the Fed balance sheet were much stronger language.

US inflation was running at 40-year highs of 7.9 per cent in February, and expected to reach 8.3 per cent in March.

But while the US central bank sharpened its tongue about the speed of rate rises, Mr Galowenko said Australias central bank was dawdling.

Unlike the Reserve Bank of Australia, if required (the Fed) is not going to mess around. This pace is going to be potentially, bigger chunks and bigger steps.

This could mean hikes of 50 basis points at a time, which would very quickly change the flow of capital. This was creating uncertainty, he explained.

On Wall Street the S&P500 dropped to a seven-session low after these comments and the Nasdaq fell 2.3 per cent, tipping Asian markets lower.

The heavyweight materials sector declined with BHP down 1 per cent, Lynas Rare Earths down 6 per cent, Newcrest down 2.4 per cent, and Rio Tinto down 1.2 per cent.

IGO fell 1.4 per cent as its friendly takeover of Western Areas stalled.

On the ASX, the banks improved steadily throughout the day. NAB closed at a five-year high of $32.56, Commonwealth Bank gained 1.3 per cent to $105.71, and ANZ Bank gained 1.2 per cent.

Travel stocks did well with Flight Centre up 3.6 per cent and Corporate Travel up 2.2 per cent, but Qantas declined 1.4 per cent.

Consumer staples finished strongly with Woolworths, Bega Cheese, and Costa Group higher, but Coles, a2 Milk, and Treasury Wine declined. Endeavour Drinks reached a post-float high of $7.58.
If you made a graph out of comedian Amanda Jane Pritchards life, she reckons it would be a mountain range. Boom and bust. Himalayan highs and Grand Canyon lows.

In fact, she literally does graph her mental state since a 2015 diagnosis as bipolar.

Amanda Jane Pritchard with her comedy colleagues.

At her worst points, her mania got close to hallucinatory  my family were worried at times, but you just think youre on top of the world.

The best example I can give  its very sad, quite tragic  when my father passed away, I was [up] here. Naturally I should have been devastated. I loved him so much, but I couldnt grieve.
Bathurst musician Gabbi Bolt once hustled her way into duetting with a former Australian prime minister.

During lockdown she got behind Kevin Rudds call for a Murdoch royal commission by making a really awful old-school hip-hop song [as an online video] which I tagged him in, she says. Then K-Rudd shared it to his socials. I wrote him another song and left a space for him to simply say his name and he actually went the whole nine yards and did some vocal ad-libs in his duet.

Gabbi Bolt went viral after an online exchange with Kevin Rudd.

Bolt is one of a handful of content creators performing at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival who blew up online  some before they ever saw a real life stage. Many found fame on TikTok, the Chinese-run social media platform which last September hit 1 billion active users.

For Bolt, the K-Rudd duet wasnt even The Big One.
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Theres a palpable sense of energy in the rehearsal room for Sydney Theatre Companys new production White Pearl. Its partly because playwright Anchuli Felicia King is present but also because, after endless COVID-19 cancellations, the show will finally reach the stage. The dialogue is sharp, the jokes are flying and King, who is watching alongside director Priscilla Jackman, is laughing as though this is the first time she has seen rehearsals for the play she wrote in 2016. King is effervescent with a clear passion for the play that has launched what looks set to be  no pressure  a spectacular career. The 28-year-old is one of Australias brightest new screen and stage writing talents. White Pearl, her laugh-out-loud first full-length play, was staged in Sydney, London and Washington DC in 2019. That same year her play Golden Shield was produced by Melbourne Theatre Company. Shes a Patrick White Fellow, the winner of 2021s Mona Brand Emerging Writer Award. King has also moved from stage to screen, in the writing room for HBOs The Baby, Foxtels The Twelve and the Amazon comedy series Deadloch. After rehearsals as we make our way to lunch, shielding ourselves from the torrential rain as the once in a century weather event takes hold of Sydney, we talk about her jet lag: she arrived in Sydney from London the previous night. Jet lag is my norm, she quips, with a trace of an American accent. For the last few years, King has been jetting around the world, living mostly out of her suitcase, making her way from London to New York to Melbourne, and back round all over again. Kaori Maeda-Judge, Nicole Milinkovic, Deborah An, Manali Datar and Melissa Gan in White Pearl. Credit:Phil Erbacher I dont know how sustainable it is. But its very liberating to not have that much shit in your life, King says. I have maybe seven shirts and three pairs of jeans. I have a laptop, an iPad, some notebooks, a bag for all my cables, a wallet, a USB microphone. That might be all of my earthly possessions. Im trying to think, oh yeah, and two pairs of shoes. Identifying as a third culture kid, King is used to making a home in different places. Born to an Australian father and a Thai mother, King spent her early childhood between the town of Kanchanaburi in western Thailand and Manila, before moving to Melbourne. She spent much of the lockdown in Melbourne and London is home, at least for now. I really do feel like, in a very practical, logistical sense, a global citizen, she says. By and large I have been working on projects that are about international culture, globalisation, macrocosmic themes and for that reason, my lifestyle invigorates my work. I find the constant travel and being exposed to other cultures and being in transit means that thats where I have time to think about this stuff.

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Loading King goes where the work takes her, and the work is taking her far and wide. She is in Sydney for a week, before briefly heading to Melbourne, then London and New York where she will need to be by the end of March for rehearsals of Golden Shield, which is being performed off-Broadway. King is enjoying the success most writers dream of, although she never even expected to become one. When I moved to New York, and I went for grad school, I wasnt a writer. I just knew that I wasnt excited about the theatre that was happening here [in Australia] at the time, King says. And I felt really strongly that the kinds of plays that I was interested in by writers of colour were happening in New York. So I was like, Ill just go there, and then I can work on the kind of theatre that politically I am interested in. And then in the time that I was there, and I started writing plays, the landscape changed, both in terms of the theatre and the media landscape. Shirong Wu, Manali Datar, Melissa Gan, Kaori Maeda-Judge and Deborah An in Sydney Theatre Companys White Pearl. Credit:Phil Erbacher Her career-launching play White Pearl is a fast-moving satire that follows the story of six young women from different Asian backgrounds working in a Singaporean start-up in damage control, after its racist commercial for whitening cream (or bright and light cream as they say) goes viral. As the clicks increase, the teams cohesiveness decreases. Twists and turns keep the audience in a state of discomfort, the show as edge-of-your-seat viewing as any Netflix episode. It is perhaps a play quite unlike anything weve seen on Australian main stages. But, King says, Australian theatres were the first to embrace White Pearl, which took off after it had a reading at the National Play Festival in Sydney in 2018. Sydney Theatre Company programmed it off the back of the National Play Festival reading. Somewhere in there, the Royal Court  it got on their desk, and they very quickly programmed it, which is one of the great things about that theatre. And then the play got programmed at Studio Theatre in DC at some point during there as well.

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King acknowledges shes experienced a level of success rare for a young playwright in Australia. Im a little confused. Like, it wasnt, you know, there was no master plan. I didnt intend on being a writer. I didnt really have any aspirations for what my career would look like, other than I think Id really like to work out how to be a theatre artist and subsist. And I thought I would keep just being a bit of a weirdo multidisciplinary artist for the rest of my life  But yeah, I feel the path of being a writer just kind of emerged and I was like, OK, sure. I feel enormously lucky. There was no master plan. I didnt intend on being a writer, says Anchuli Felicia King. Credit:James Brickwood I mention the evident enthusiasm in the rehearsal room, from her and the actors, who seemed buoyed by working on a play that not only has six weighty roles for Asian women but stands out for not presenting Asian as the only descriptor for a character. King says that theres a lack of creatively sustaining roles for Asian actresses. There was this sort of pervasiveness, like Asia as monolith narrative, but I think that has changed, King says. Even in the time since I wrote the play that narrative has been disrupted enormously. But were still lacking messy, ugly, complex Asian characters in a lot of media. It makes a huge difference to their careers to get to do roles like that where theyre not just bit parts playing one-dimensional characters, they actually get to show what they can do, she says.

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As for her enthusiasm?: Its my first play. Its like my baby, you know. I love it. Seeing it and hearing it again, I always discover new things about it that the actors are bringing to it that I find really exciting. Loading Did King, as a writer of colour, feel she had to go overseas to find the success she is enjoying now? It is a well-trodden path, after all. I mention how I, too, moved to London where I also got a start as a playwright because I didnt see playwrights who looked like me having their works presented on Australian stages. But King feels the landscape in Australia is changing. I do feel like there is a really exciting generation of playwrights of colour in Australia who are subsisting on screenwriting gigs. It is happening. Its changing. And a huge shift in the media landscape here has been streaming services. Like, there are opportunities for young writers of colour here now that didnt exist even three years ago, she says. To get to do this and make enough money to live like this is an incredible luxury. And I genuinely feel passionately about the job and I feel passionately about the impact that it can have. So I just hope that I have the opportunity to keep doing that. White Pearl is at Wharf 1 Theatre (Sydney) until April 23; The Playhouse Theatre (Canberra) from April 27 to 30 and the Riverside Theatre (Parramatta) from May 5 to 7. A cultural guide to going out and loving your city. Sign up to our Culture Fix newsletter here.
Over the past week, Ive been involved in a project tracking petrol prices around the country to monitor how retailers respond to the federal budgets 22 cents-per-litre cut to the fuel excise.

Each day, weve pored over the data to see which stations are passing on the full cut and by how much  and which ones arent.

The good news is that thousands of stations have now dropped their prices since budget night by 20 cents a litre or more. More than 400 have even cut prices by at least 30 cents a litre.

Petrol stations that havent passed on the cut to the fuel excise are running out of excuses. Credit:Eddie Jim

But still, a week on, there are hundreds that have not  and theyre fast running out of excuses.
Third, left-of-centre parties (never mind universities) appear incapable of grappling with the aforementioned conflicts with empathy, nuance and courage. As a result they risk devouring themselves and losing public trust.

Second, its inevitable the application of the rights of transgender people  who wish to be defined by their gender identity and not their sex at birth  will collide with the sex-based rights of women and gay people.

First, transgender people exist and have a right to live in dignity and be seen; as individuals theyre vulnerable to violence and social ostracism, and mental anguish resulting from both.

Which  fourth  brings us to the current controversy involving Melbourne councillor Rohan Leppert, a rising star of the Greens, or at least thats how he was referred to before his private Facebook comments came to light last week, igniting hundreds of members to demand the partys state executive resolve significant concerns about trans-exclusionary influences on the party.

As to the substance of Lepperts remarks, the themes are so tangled and intricate I could write acres on the subject  indeed, Ive spent the better part of a year wrestling with a long piece on gender transition in minors. Briefly, then.

Melbourne Greens Councillor Rohan Leppert. Credit:John Robenstone

Leppert was discussing Victorias recent conversion therapy law, which sets out hefty jail terms for anyone trying to suppress or change another persons sexuality or gender identity. It is the gender identity component thats relevant here for its potential impact on doctors treating children and teenagers suffering gender dysphoria  the stress a person may feel when their sex doesnt align with how they see themselves.

Leppert does not want to withhold medical treatment from young people; hes not channelling red-state Republicans or One Nation. But he worries an affirmation only approach will see too many gender-questioning young people undergo medical transition through puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery only to regret it later. He cites the example of a friend he said had managed to escape transition after realising they were more comfortable living as a lesbian woman.
Labor leader Anthony Albanese has increased his lead against Prime Minister Scott Morrison on managing healthcare and keeping the cost of living low but the gains have not been enough to reverse the governments lead on other major election tests.

The approval for Labor on healthcare, one of the partys traditional polling strengths, has not generated a boost for the party and its leader on the wider test of managing the pandemic at a time when the government is warning voters not to trust Mr Albanese with national leadership.

The Resolve Political Monitor shows Anthony Albanese is ahead of Scott Morrison with voters on keeping the cost of living low. Credit:Fairfax Media

Voters preferred Mr Morrison and the Coalition on key issues such as economic management, national security, managing the COVID-19 situation and building infrastructure when asked in the days after last weeks federal budget.

The findings are part of the exclusive Resolve Political Monitor conducted for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age after the government revealed payments to help with the cost of living, while Labor responded with a $2.5 billion aged care package.
Australia would bid to host a United Nations climate change summit in partnership with other Pacific nations if Labor won next months federal election as part of the federal oppositions bid to improve the nations credentials with the region on the issue.

The annual Conference of the Parties  known as COP  has brought together the worlds nations for deliberations for almost three decades, taking climate from a fringe issue to a global priority, including in 1995 for the Kyoto Protocol and in 2015 for the Paris Accord.

A Labor government would bid to host an international meeting on climate change.

The event is poised to take on greater significance in coming years as the world grapples with holding global warming to 1.5 degrees by 2030 while balancing major geo-strategic issues such as Europes reliance on Russian oil and gas and the efforts of global powerhouses China and India to decarbonise their growing economies.

Opposition climate and energy spokesman Chris Bowen said if Labor wins the federal election then bidding to host a COP would send a clear message that Australia is under new management.
Australians could face days or even weeks of political limbo after the federal election, with key crossbench MPs declaring there will be no deals struck with Scott Morrison or Anthony Albanese in the event of a hung parliament.

The five current independent MPs - Tasmanian Andrew Wilkie, Victorian Helen Haines, NSWs Zali Steggall, South Australias Rebekha Sharkie and Queenslands Bob Katter - spoke to The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald on the eve of the election to discuss what price they would ask for their support in the event of a hung parliament.

Crossbench MPs Andrew Wilkie, Rebekha Sharkie, Dr Helen Haines, Zali Steggal and Bob Katter. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Four of the MPs said they would not strike a formal deal with either Mr Morrison or Mr Albanese to help them form government, while the mercurial Mr Katter said he could work with either man.

Labors primary vote in the most recent Resolve Political Monitor is at 38 per cent to the Coalitions 34 per cent, but asked how firmly they were committed to that choice, 21 per cent of voters said they were uncommitted.
Russian mobile crematoria have started operating in Mariupol, he said on the citys Telegram account. The world has not seen the scale of the tragedy in Mariupol since the Nazi concentration camps. The racists turned our whole city into a death camp. Reports have emerged that more than 400 people are missing from the town of Hostomel, near Kyiv. Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraines human rights ombudsman, said witnesses had claimed some of the missing had been killed. Zelensky has described atrocities in towns outside the capital Kyiv as war crimes and genocide. Authorities said about 4400 incidents were being investigated. Australias Foreign Affairs Minister Senator Marise Payne, said the world must push back against authoritarian states that want to trample on the rights of democratic countries, as she arrived in Brussels to join her counterparts for two-day security talks on the war.

Payne, speaking before a bilateral meeting with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, did not mention Russia by name and her comments were just as likely aimed at Beijings suspected financial support of Moscow during the five-week-long conflict. Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne arrives for a meeting of NATO foreign ministers at NATO headquarters in Brussels. They are meeting to discuss how to bolster their support for Ukraine, including how to supply more weapons, without being drawn into a wider war with Russia. Credit:AP She said the meeting of NATO allies, as well as the alliances Asia-Pacific partners  Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea  came at a critical time. The new round of sanctions will target Russian banks and officials, as well as Putins inner circle and ban new foreign investment in Russia. Tikhonova was described by the US as a tech executive whose work supports the GoR [Russian government] and defence industry, while Vorontsova leads state-funded programs that have received billions of dollars from the Kremlin toward genetics research and are personally overseen by Putin.

Britain also imposed sanctions on Russias largest bank, Sberbank, and committed to ending all imports of Russian coal and oil by the end of the year. Payne said like-minded nations needed to be closely joined in responding to the actions of authoritarian states that were untenable, unacceptable, complete illegal violations, wholesale violations of international law and the UN charter. Im looking forward ... to reinforcing the importance that no matter where in the world they behave like this, authoritarian states cannot be allowed to trample on the rights of democratic countries and on the people who have chosen to live and work in those democracies. So it is a very important engagement, she said. US President Joe Biden said sanctions imposed on Moscow would stifle Russias ability to grow for years to come, while US prosecutors announced they were working with Ukrainian and European officials to gather evidence of possible Russian war crimes.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned that allies must plan for the possibility the war in Ukraine could last for months or even years. He urged members of the organisation to provide more weapons and not just defensive anti-tank and anti-craft arms. I have urged allies to provide further support of many different types of systems, both light weapons but also heavier weapon, Stoltenberg said. The coming weeks were a critical phase of the war as Russian troops regroup and Moscow plots its next move, he said.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday that images of bodies and mass graves from Bucha were designed to justify more sanctions against Moscow and to jeopardise peace talks with Kyiv. These terrible, criminal fake [images] were published in order to justify another prearranged sanctions package, including a large-scale expulsion of diplomats from different countries, spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said. But the German government said satellite pictures from last month provided strong counter evidence against Russian denials of involvement in civilian deaths. Government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit told reporters that the evaluation of satellite images led Berlin to conclude that Russian declarations that images of civilian deaths were posed scenes or that they were not responsible for the murders are in our view not tenable.

Russia said on Wednesday it would take further measures against British media based in the country, after the Foreign Office imposed sanctions on Russian state-controlled news outlets. British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss last week announced sanctions on RT and Sputnik. She said Putins war on Ukraine is based on a torrent of lies. Fighting in the east The United Nations refugee agency announced that 4.3 million Ukrainians had fled across borders since the war began on February 24  up 34,194 since Tuesday. Loading The UNs International Organisation for Migration estimates that 7.1 million internally displaced people had fled their homes but were still in Ukraine.

The eastern regions of Kharkiv, Donetsk and Luhansk are seeing the worst of the fighting after Russian forces withdrew from around Kyiv. A siege of the southern port of Mariupol continued, trapping tens of thousands of residents without food, water or power. The humanitarian situation in the city is worsening, British military intelligence said. Ukrainian Territorial Defence Force members search vehicles after a curfew on a road on the outskirts of Kharkiv. Although Ukraine has repelled Russian forces elsewhere in the country, it expects a renewed attack from the east. Credit:Getty State-owned Ukrainian Railways said there were a number of casualties after three rockets hit a station in eastern Ukraine. It did not give a precise location.

Many in the eastern town of Derhachi, just north of Kharkiv and near the border with Russia, have decided to leave while they can. Buildings have been badly damaged by Russian artillery. Kharkiv itself has been hammered by air and rocket strikes from the start. Ukraines military said Russian forces were continuing preparations for an eastern offensive to take full control of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. It said the main focus of current hostilities was Donetsk, where Russian troops were still trying to seize all of Mariupol. A Ukrainian mother and daughter, who are seeking asylum in the US, wait to cross the US-Mexico border at the San Ysidro Port of Entry amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Credit:Getty Ten high-rise buildings were on fire in the eastern town of Sievierodonetsk after Russian shelling on Wednesday, the regions governor said in an online post. with agencies
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Middle schoolers and teachers from all over the Lehigh Valley met at ArtsQuest Tuesday night for the "What's so Cool About Manufacturing" awards ceremony, aired live on WFMZ.

For months, students have been teamed up with local manufacturing companies to learn the ropes and then create a video of what they've learned about the company.

"I think this club is really great to show what manufacturing is instead of being just hard work with your hands," said Lower Macungie Middle School student Olive Whitney.

The videos are then voted on and awarded for certain categories. The ultimate goal is to inspire the next generation of manufacturers, which is what Gov. Tom Wolf expressed in his taped message.

"Pennsylvania's manufacturing industry is one that is growing, thriving, and most importantly evolving, and it is looking for new talent to help propel it forward even further," Wolf said.

And the big winner of the night was the Bangor Area Middle School Team, which won the award for outstanding overall program.

Being named the best of the best, that's something pretty cool about this contest.
Almost 60 years after Pinter wrote The Homecoming, it is still as mysterious and impenetrable as ever. The New Yorker's John Lahr described it as both "a family romance and a turf war" but it goes deeper than that. It's biblical, rat-a-tat funny, possibly misogynistic, arguably feminist. Its layers of meaning, ripe for each production to pluck, discard and find through a fresh lens is why the production is so often revived. Like the masterpieces of Shakespeare's great tragedies Hamlet, Lear or Othello there is no definitive production to be had. Each production simply shows us another element of arguably Pinter's greatest work.

It remains in form a domestic piece that sees the nightly squabbles of a north London family interrupted when one of the sons returns from his academic life in America with his wife Ruth. A battle for the head of the house ramps up, each player carrying aces but each unable or unwilling to put down the royal flush. The dynamics shift as sex and power collide and Ruth ends up whore and Madonna.

The last high-profile production saw Jamie Lloyd throw his trademark theatrical pizazz over it, turning the work into a stylised but revealing take that burrowed deep into the text. Jamie Glover's production for Theatre Royal Bath is more traditional in tone, in lots of ways it could be smothered in aspic from the '60s, aside from the transitions in which Johanna Town's throbbing lighting and Max Pappenheim's ominous sound score double down on the productions oppressive atmosphere, and designer Liz Ashcroft's walls of the living room set stretch into the flies, distorting the perspective in front of us.

Glover, best known for his acting work (he was Harry Potter in The Cursed Child) has the knack of getting his actors to sing more than the production. Keith Allen is in fine form as the brash Max, his familiarity with the play (this is the third role he has portrayed over the years) and his faculty for Pinter's language making him dominate the stage in a performance loaded with menace and pettiness. As his brother Sam, Ian Bartholomew seems to be playing his own power play through inscrutability, his calm facade masking the dropping of knockout blows as when he talks about afternoons spent with his brother's late wife.

Mathew Horne as Lenny tempers his usual geniality into something more unsettling, his wide-boy Pimp has a dead-eyed stare and empty smile that suggests a psychopath in the mix. Geoffrey Lumb and Sam Alexander are the brawn and brains as the other two brothers mired in the family power dynamics. As Ruth Shanaya Rafaat is clipped and poised, an innocent corrupted or a serpent chucked into the hornets' nest?

It's a question that never feels like it begins to be answered. Perhaps Glover is playing a straight bat to Pinter's text, not letting its audience get a glove on its overall meaning. But inevitably, this leaves its audience wanting answers; why this play right now? Without this urgency, it can't fulfill the knockout blow it once had. It drifts along, an entertaining evening elevated by strong performances but one that ultimately can't begin to reveal Pinter's secrets.
Judged solely on a selection of its songs, it's hard to fathom how Anyone Can Whistle wasn't a smash hit when it premiered in New York. From the bittersweet brass of "A Parade In Town" to the syncopated drama of "Everybody Says Don't" and "There Won't Be Trumpets", or the plangent longing of "So Little To Be Sure Of" and the title song, these numbers are vintage Sondheim: sophisticated mini-masterpieces of character development and revelation that have become staples of the cabaret and revue stage.

Experiencing these gems in the context of the Arthur Laurents script for which they were written however, gives a strong idea of why the Angela Lansbury-led original production folded on Broadway after a mere nine performances, and why the musical has never received an expensive, large scale revival since. Put simply, it doesn't really work, being a dazzling score tethered to an unwieldy, bewildering book. It's not always clear what's going on, or why we should especially care (this version's muddy sound design doesn't help here). The tale of a corrupt mayoress manufacturing a water-from-stone miracle to bolster the coffers of her small town while the denizens of the local mental health facility, the "Cookie Jar", run amok and mix in with allegedly sane members of society to confusing effect, this was considered experimental in 1964 but looks tame now.

As if acutely aware of this, director Georgie Rankcom has set this new production in a non-period-specific, candy-coloured fantasy land (American accents are jettisoned in favour of the actors own voices) and cast a joyously diverse ensemble to portray the cookies'. This cavalier attitude to mental health further dates the show, although Rankcom has had the inspired idea of having the company mingle with the audience throughout to blur the boundaries between who is "mad" and who is "sane", while questioning the validity of conformism. It's refreshing to see such a company of triple threat genuine talents who are so fabulously themselves, and they execute Lisa Stevens's high energy dances with gusto and character.

Some of the principal performances fare less well however: Jordan Broatch's perennially smiley Hapgood, the alleged "doctor" who makes some sense of the mess the town and its inhabitants are in while harbouring a secret, is implausible, even in a setting as outlandish as this one, and struggles with some of the vocal demands of the score. Opposite them, as a cynical nurse romantically disarmed, Chrystine Symone negotiates the rangy music with great skill but reads as way too young and uncomplicated.

As the egotistical, opportunistic mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper, Alex Young is worth the price of a ticket all by herself: this is a barnstorming performance that combines bravura vocals, killer comic timing and a thrilling ability to connect with the audience even when the character is behaving like an absolute nightmare. It's an object lesson in musical comedy playing, reminiscent of Julia McKenzie (still arguably this country's finest interpreter of Sondheim to date, and who played this role on an acclaimed symphonic recording finally released last year) at the height of her powers.

Charlie Ingles's pared down orchestrations manage to convey authentic Broadway brassiness, and Natalie Pound's five-piece band sounds smashing, although there are moments when they drown out some of Sondheim's ever brilliant lyrics. If Cory Shipp's costumes and traverse set look like an unexpected alliance between RENT and Play School, the aesthetic matches Rankcom's feverishly eccentric vision.

Ultimately, Sondheim and Laurents's bizarre confection isn't in whistling distance of being a great musical, but it is undeniably a notorious part of Broadway history, and one that all musical theatre completists will want to encounter. It's worth going along to hear these magnificent numbers performed live, and to witness the glorious Young take scenery-chewing and grabbing flailing material by the scruff of its neck, to new heights of dizzying delight.
Williamson, WV (25661)

Today

Thunderstorms, some strong this evening, then cloudy with rain likely overnight. Damaging winds and large hail with some storms. Low 57F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%..

Tonight

Thunderstorms, some strong this evening, then cloudy with rain likely overnight. Damaging winds and large hail with some storms. Low 57F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
NASAs Juno spacecraft flew through the intense beam of electrons traveling from Ganymede, Jupiters largest moon, to its auroral footprint on the gas giant. SwRI scientists used the resulting data to connect the particle population traveling along the beam with associated auroral emissions to unveil the mysterious processes creating the shimmering lights. Courtesy of NASA/Southwest Research Institute/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems/Kevin M. Gill/Italian Space Agency/Italian National Institute for Astrophysics/Bjorn Jonsson/ULiege/Bertrand Bonfond/Vincent Hue

On November 8, 2020, NASA's Juno spacecraft flew through an intense beam of electrons traveling from Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, to its auroral footprint on the gas giant.

Southwest Research Institute scientists used data from Juno's payload to study the particle population traveling along the magnetic field line connecting Ganymede to Jupiter while, at the same time, remotely sensing the associated auroral emissions to unveil the mysterious processes creating the shimmering lights.

"Jupiter's most massive moons each create their own auroras on Jupiter's north and south poles," said Dr. Vincent Hue, lead author of a paper outlining the results of this research. "Each auroral footprint, as we call them, is magnetically connected to their respective moon, kind of like a magnetic leash connected to the moon glowing on Jupiter itself."

Like the Earth, Jupiter experiences auroral light around the polar regions as particles from its massive magnetosphere interact with molecules in the Jovian atmosphere. However, Jupiter's auroras are significantly more intense than Earth's, and unlike Earth, Jupiter's largest moons also create auroral spots. The Juno mission, led by SwRI's Dr. Scott Bolton, is circling Jupiter in a polar orbit and flew through the electron "thread" connecting Ganymede with its associated auroral footprint.

"Prior to Juno, we knew that these emissions can be quite complex, ranging from a single auroral spot to multiple spots, which sometimes trail an auroral curtain that we called the footprint tail," said Dr. Jamey Szalay, a co-author from Princeton University. "Juno, flying extremely close to Jupiter, revealed these auroral spots to be even more complex than previously thought."

Ganymede is the only moon in our solar system that has its own magnetic field. Its mini-magnetosphere interacts with Jupiter's massive magnetosphere, creating waves that accelerate electrons along the gas giant's magnetic field lines, which can be directly measured by Juno.

Two SwRI-led instruments on Juno, the Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment (JADE) and the Ultraviolet Spectrometer (UVS) provided key data for this study, which was also supported by Juno's magnetic field sensor built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

"JADE measured the electrons traveling along the magnetic field lines, while UVS imaged the related auroral footprint spot," said SwRI's Dr. Thomas Greathouse, a co-author on this study.

In this way, Juno is both able to measure the electron "rain" and immediately observe the UV light it creates when it crashes into Jupiter. Previous Juno measurements showed that large magnetic perturbations accompanied the electron beams causing the auroral footprint. However, this time, Juno did not observe similar perturbations with the electron beam.

"If our interpretation is correct, this a confirmation of a decade-old theory that we put together to explain the morphology of the auroral footprints," said Dr. Bertrand Bonfond, a co-author of the study from the Liege University in Belgium. The theory suggests that electrons accelerated in both directions create the multi-spot dance of auroral footprints.

"The Jupiter-Ganymede relationship will be further explored by Juno's extended mission, as well as the forthcoming JUICE mission from the European Space Agency," Hue said. "SwRI is building the next generation of UVS instrumentation for the mission."

A paper describing this research was published in Geophysical Research Letters and can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL096994. To view a movie about this research, see https://youtu.be/xGUtx0IvYZI.

For more information, visit https://www.swri.org/planetary-science.



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A mother cradles her infant as bombs fall behind her. Her eyes are closed as the baby sleeps in her arms. This child was meant to be born into a world of hope and peace and love and serenity. Instead, war.

A mother cradles her infant as bombs fall behind her. Her eyes are closed as the baby sleeps in her arms. This child was meant to be born into a world of hope and peace and love and serenity. Instead, war.

Art preview Click to Expand F- War

By Bistyek

300 Ross Ave.

To April 15, 1-7 p.m.

Info at bistyek.ca

Bistyek, the artist responsible for the painting, knows war, and he didnt choose to meet it. Now 25 years old and living in Winnipeg, with pierced ears and wide eyes, Bistyek was once a child in Afrin, a Kurdish village in the northern part of Syria. He lived there, until war made him live elsewhere. Now, he lives here.

War.

JESSICA LEE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Syrian-born painter Bistyek, 25, was displaced by war.

It interrupts. It severs. It demoralizes. It kills. It ruins. It is a product and a producer of evil. War is a violation of life.

When Bistyek  a name that means 21 in his native tongue  thinks of war, he doesnt think of borders or politics or strategy, or the calibre of the gun. He thinks of the people caught in the crossfire, who did nothing to put themselves in the middle of the fog aside from being born and choosing to live.

So when he heard that an invasion had occurred in Ukraine, by Russian forces, he didnt need to turn on the news to comprehend who was right and who was wrong. He didnt feel compelled to dive into reports of geopolitics. He knew what was happening was reprehensible, immoral, unjustifiable. He had not been to Ukraine, but he didnt need to use his imagination to understand the terror the mothers felt, or the fear in the souls of the young boys who would soon become young men. He knew war and this was it.

So Bistyek did what he knows how to do: he painted. "In two days I made seven paintings," he says in his studio in the Exchange District. In three weeks, he had finished 10.

JESSICA LEE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Contrary to the way we might think of war zones, Winnipeg artist Bistyeks paintings are full of colour.

He looked into the faces of the current war and saw the faces he had been forced to leave behind. He saw his mother and his aunts and his siblings and his neighbours and the people whose names he never learned but whose faces he cannot forget.

Theres the mother with the child. A man screaming. A woman carrying a suitcase. The disjointed visage of a human being in distress, fingernails coated in blood, tears welling in their eyes, nostrils flaring, pupils dilated, gazing straight out in what must be shock but what might somehow be hope.

"When Russia invaded Ukraine, it reminded me of Afrin, of Afghanistan, of all of the wars that are happening and all of the wars that happened in the past," he says. "For me, I was thinking, Come on. Another one? The world does not need more children dying, more women dying, more men dying, more refugees searching for home. Its terrible. I am not a stranger to those kinds of feelings. When I see war  it could be in Ukraine, or the Middle East or in Africa  I feel pain. I feel the sadness. I want to stop it. But what can I do?

"Its just this," he says, gesturing to his showroom, filled with works of heart and heartache. "I say it on a canvas. Say it out loud. Say it unfiltered. F- war."

JESSICA LEE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Winnipeg artist Bistyeks latest exhibition comes from a personal understanding of war.

That four-letter word that cant be printed, and that three-letter word that is printed far too frequently, unite to form the title for Bistyeks current exhibition, in a gallery space on Ross Avenue, adjacent to the former Cosmans Furniture shop on Princess Street.

Inside the gallery, Bistyeks verbal statement is diffused into something visual one does not often associate with war: colour.

Close your eyes and picture a war zone: its probably grey and black and white. Theres rubble and crumbling concrete. Any spark of colour is incendiary in nature, and any face that can be seen is masked in a terror unlike any other. Even the faces are grey and ashen. The clothes too.

But thats not the war Bistyek sees when he closes his eyes. War is not colourless. An unfair trick that war plays is that the colour remains: something meant to connote joy is rendered joyless. Green comes to represent not grass but tanks and camouflage. Red is not a rose but blood. No longer fire in the heavens, orange becomes the fire of an airstrike.

JESSICA LEE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS When Bistyek closes his eyes and thinks of war, he sees those colours for what they are, for what they were and what he hopes they soon will be.

When Bistyek closes his eyes and thinks of war, he sees those colours for what they are, for what they were and what he hopes they soon will be.

Inside the gallery, which is huge and sparse, with white walls, those colours explode. And in front of them are faces  emotive, effusive faces. They feel pain and it is incontrovertible.

But walk along far enough, and youll find yourself in a smaller alcove where there are people, but they look different.

"In here, they have no faces," says Bistyek. This is another reality of war: it anonymizes. It wipes clean the demarcations of the individual and thrusts them into the collective. Some are on the side of the brutalizer and others are on the side of the brutalized, but all are enmeshed in the same brutality.

JESSICA LEE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS War makes victims, Bistyek says. It forces people to fight when they should be able to know peace.

In this room there is a faceless, nameless boy in fatigues, raising his right hand to his brow in salute to something he does not understand and should not have ever had to understand. There is a uniform on fire. There is a soldier carrying in his hands a fallen dove.

War makes victims, Bistyek says. It forces people to fight when they should be able to know peace. It compels the innocent to make choiceless choices to protect themselves and their loved ones. It scatters people like seeds in the wind.

Bistyek knows this. "My family has never all been together in the same room," he says, sitting in his studio a day before his show opens. Theyve gotten close, but there are always one or two or three who are somewhere else, not by choice, but by circumstance.

Its these thoughts that enter his mind when he paints. That even in a new country thousands of kilometres away from the place where he was born, he cannot forget, and will not forget, the pain of war.

"It is truly a terrible thing."

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com

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SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP)  Violent storms killed at least two people, one in Georgia and another in Texas, on Tuesday as hail, strong winds and tornadoes tore across the South, where authorities warned a second day of dangerous weather of violent weather could follow.

Brittaney Deaton, 17, left, comforts her mother Amber Zeleny, 53, while speaking with reporters after a severe storm passed in Johnson County near Burleson, Texas, Tuesday, April 5, 2022. The latest round of storms to pound the South prompted a flurry of tornado warnings at the start of what forecasters said could be two days of violent weather in the region. More than 55,000 homes and businesses were without power Tuesday morning from eastern Texas to southern Mississippi after storms. (Elias Valverde II /The Dallas Morning News via AP)

SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP)  Violent storms killed at least two people, one in Georgia and another in Texas, on Tuesday as hail, strong winds and tornadoes tore across the South, where authorities warned a second day of dangerous weather of violent weather could follow.

A woman died Tuesday evening in Pembroke, Georgia, where a suspected tornado ripped part of the roof from the Bryan County courthouse, destroyed the entrance to a local government building across the street and damaged homes in nearby neighborhoods, said Matthew Kent, a county government spokesman.

Kent said several others were injured in the county 30 miles (48 kilometers) west of Savannah. He said the death occurred in one of the damaged neighborhoods, but had no further details.

In eastern Texas, W. M. Soloman, 71, died when storm winds toppled a tree onto Solomons home in Whitehouse, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) southeast of Dallas, Whitehouse Mayor James Wansley said. Officials said trees fell on at least four homes there.

More than 50,000 homes and businesses were without power Tuesday night from eastern Texas to South Carolina. The outages came on a day when the National Weather Service issued a nonstop stream of tornado warnings for hours as the storm system tore across Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.

The damaged recreational vehicle of Brittaney Deaton and her belongings scatter the yard after a severe storm passed in Johnson County near Burleson, Texas, Tuesday, April 5, 2022. (Elias Valverde II /The Dallas Morning News via AP)

In southeast Georgia, Gage Moore, 23, was driving home from work Tuesday evening on Interstate 16 in the county where Pembroke is located when his fiance called saying she heard tornado sirens. About two minutes later, Moore said, he looked up to see a towering twister looming to the left of the highway.

Moore said he pulled over and stopped his car behind an overpass, then took cellphone video of the funnel cloud churning across the interstate.

Everybody started slamming on brakes all around me, Moore said. I could actually feel my truck shaking back and forth and hear the roar of it passing by. He added: Thankfully we all stopped and left a huge gap in the interstate where it crossed.

Two men on bicycles wait for a train to pass through downtown Hattiesburg, Miss. during a lull in heavy thunderstorms that moved through the state early in the morning of Tuesday, April 5, 2022. (Dominic Gwinn/Hattiesburg American via AP)

Afterward, Moore continued his commute home. He said he could tell where the twister crossed the highway because of the mangled exit sign and damaged trees left behind. Some were bent and some were broken, Moore said, the tops were broken out of them.

In South Carolina, Allendale County Manager William Goodson said a tornado, captured in a video on social media, caused damage in his rural county, but exactly how much and whether there were any injuries were unknown.

I know we have buildings damaged and power lines down, Goodson said.

Heavy storms Tuesday, April 5, 2022, morning left a large section of Rebecca Avenue under water by the Walthall Community Room in downtown Hattiesburg, Miss. The community center was fine, said Rob Mulholland, president of the Walthall Owners Association. "I've never seen it that bad," he said. (Dominic Gwinn/Hattiesburg American via AP)

Debate also was delayed for nearly an hour in the South Carolina legislature after the state House chamber was evacuated for a tornado warning for Columbia. The legislation being debated would require athletes to compete with the gender listed on their birth certificates.

The weather service said it was sending survey teams to examine potential tornado damage in Wetumpka, Alabama. Lightning struck a flea market in the north Alabama community of Laceys Spring, causing a fire that gutted the building, news outlets reported.

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Fallen trees and limbs closed a stretch of highway for hours in Newton County, Mississippi. As storms pushed into Georgia, a large tree fell and crashed through the roof of Marie Jordan's home in metro Atlanta, coming down in the living room, kitchen and garage.

Damage is seen at a house on South Main Street in Pembroke, Ga., 30 miles from Savannah, after a storm passed through the city, Tuesday, April 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Lewis Levine)

It just took everything, Jordan told WSB-TV. For years and years, I have watched that tree."

Elsewhere in Texas, one person was injured when the storms swept through Johnson County, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) southwest of Dallas. Brittaney Deaton said she became trapped in an RV trailer behind her familys home after the trailer flipped over. She said her stepfather got injured trying to free her.

I was screaming on the phone. I couldnt get out. I was terrified," Deaton told KDFW-TV. "And I felt like I was just trapped, like it was going to roll with me in it. And I just thank God that I got out.

The threat of damaging weather will move further north on Wednesday, forecasters said, with severe storms possible across an area stretching from western Alabama to the western tip of the Carolinas. More than 10 million people in metro areas including Atlanta; Birmingham; and Chattanooga, Tennessee, will be at risk, the Storm Prediction Center said.

Springtime often brings strong storms to the Southeast. Te region has faced a barrage of weather recently that included a tornado last month in metro New Orleans, where one person died, and storms that killed at least two people in the Florida Panhandle last week.
Canadian airlines asked a Federal Court of Appeal panel Wednesday to quash rules that bolster compensation for passengers subjected to delayed flights and damaged luggage.

Passengers wait to have their bags checked-in at MontrealTrudeau International Airport in Montreal, Saturday, December 19, 2020. Canadian airlines are asking a Federal Court of Appeal judge today to quash rules that beef up compensation for passengers subjected to delayed flights and damaged luggage. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes

Canadian airlines asked a Federal Court of Appeal panel Wednesday to quash rules that bolster compensation for passengers subjected to delayed flights and damaged luggage.

Air Canada and Porter Airlines Inc., along with 16 other appellants that include the International Air Transport Association  IATA has about 290 member airlines  argue that the countrys three-year-old passenger rights charter violates global standards and should be rendered invalid for international flights.

Launched in 2019, the legal action states the new provisions exceed the Canadian Transportation Agency's authority. They also contravene the Montreal Convention, a multilateral treaty, by imposing heftier compensation requirements for flight cancellations or lost baggage. For example, the rules demand higher damages based on the length of a delay and regardless of "the actual damage sustained by each individual passenger," according to the appellants.

An earlier filing said nullifying the regulations "would avoid the confusion to passengers" who could be subject to travel regimes from multiple jurisdictions on flights abroad.

"Justices, the solution cannot be for state parties to individually chip away at the Montreal Convention by adopting piecemeal domestic solutions that depart from the principles accepted by all state parties," appellant lawyer Pierre Bienvenu told the panel.

Under the federal rules, passengers have to be compensated up to $2,400 if they were denied boarding  so-called flight bumping  because a trip was overbooked, and receive up to $2,100 for lost or damaged luggage. Delays and other payments for cancelled flights warrant compensation of up to $1,000.

The issue came to the forefront after a 2017 incident in which two Montreal-bound Air Transat jets were diverted to Ottawa because of bad weather and held on the tarmac for up to six hours, leading some passengers to call 911 for rescue.

It took on renewed relevance to thousands of Canadians starting in March 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic and travel restrictions grounded fleets and prompted mass flight cancellations.

The hearings, which pit airlines against the federal government and the Canadian Transportation Agency, are slated to run Wednesday and Thursday.

Ottawa argues that there is no conflict between the passenger protections and the Montreal Convention.

More than 70 signatories to the treaty have adopted schemes around compensation for cancellations, delays and denied boarding.

"In the European Union, a regime similar to the regulations has been in force since 2004 and the Court of Justice of the European Union (the CJEU) has declared it compatible with the Montreal Convention, despite challenges from the airline industry," the attorney general writes in the factum.

"No regime analogous to the regulations has been invalidated on the ground of incompatibility with the Montreal Convention."

In 2020, the Federal Court of Appeal dismissed an attempt by airlines to freeze the country's new passenger bill of rights until an appeal of the regulations was heard.

Air Passenger Rights president Gabor Lukacs, an intervener on the case, argues that compensation rules on flights into and out of the country are entirely Canada's right.

"As part of its sovereignty, Canada has the freedom to decide what conditions it attaches in exchange for the privilege to operate airlines or commercial flights to and from Canada," he said in a phone interview.

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"This appeal, I view it as an attack in disguise on the validity of the entire Canadian regulatory scheme for transportation of passengers to and from Canada."

He and other consumer advocates also say the rules should go further, arguing that airlines' exemption from compensating customers in situations "outside of the airline's control" uses too broad a definition and amounts to a loophole.

The regulations impose no obligation on airlines to pay customers for delays or cancellations if they were caused by mechanical problems discovered in day-to-day maintenance or a pre-flight check, rather than during scheduled maintenance  more thorough inspections required after 100 hours cumulatively in the air.

AirHelp, a Berlin-based passenger rights company, has said the exemptions for weather or mechanical malfunctions fail to encourage airlines to avoid "so-called undiscovered issues" and allows them to sidestep compensation by pointing to malfunctions on the tarmac.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 6, 2022.

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PARIS (AP)  Luxury fashion brand Chanel says it has stopped selling its clothes, perfumes and other luxury goods to Russian customers abroad if they plan to take the products back home  a bold response to Moscows invasion of Ukraine that some say goes too far.

FILE - People walk past the temporarily closed Chanel shop on New Bond Street, during England's second coronavirus lockdown in London, on Nov. 25, 2020. French high fashion brand Chanel says it is stopping selling its clothes, perfumes and other luxury good to Russian customers abroad in a bold response to Moscows invasion of Ukraine. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

PARIS (AP)  Luxury fashion brand Chanel says it has stopped selling its clothes, perfumes and other luxury goods to Russian customers abroad if they plan to take the products back home  a bold response to Moscows invasion of Ukraine that some say goes too far.

The move, which some Russians have decried, comes after the Parisian company shuttered its boutiques in Russia. Many companies across all industries have halted business in the country in response to the war.

This further step, Chanel said Wednesday, is simply a case of complying with trade sanctions imposed on Russia by the European Union, Switzerland and others that prohibit transactions with designated individuals.

The most recent EU and Swiss sanction laws include a prohibition on the sale, supply, transfer or export, directly or indirectly, of luxury goods to any natural or legal person, entity or body in Russia or for use in Russia,' Chanel said in a statement.

It concerns products valued at over 300 euros ($328)  which is the majority of Chanel's design output.

We have rolled out a process to ask clients for whom we do not know the main residency to confirm that the items they are purchasing will not be used in Russia, Chanel said, without elaborating on what that process looks like.

Its a difficult measure to enforce, yet some Russian social media influencers have already said they are being asked for identification and denied the ability to buy goods at Chanel boutiques from Paris to the United Arab Emirates.

Russian socialite Anna Kalashnikova said last week that she had seen Russophobia in action after not being allowed to purchase earrings and a Chanel bag in an outlet in Dubai.

Fashion insiders say the brand's decision would not have been easy because they are set to take a financial hit.

Its bold for Chanel  this is almost unprecedented. The house is putting its principles above the buck, said Long Nguyen, a prominent fashion critic.

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Russia is one of their biggest luxury markets, and Chanel is certain to suffer financially from this choice," he said. But its also political for the brand  as it wants to appeal to Gen Z clients who are largely opposed to the war.

Nguyen said Chanel's move represents more than a mere application of the sanction laws.

Qing Wang, professor of marketing and innovation at Warwick Business School and a luxury brands expert, said, Taking a bold political stand like this is not without risks.

She cited research by PR firm Clutch that found consumers mainly think brands should stay silent on political issues.

Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed (63%) said they were likely to continue shopping at businesses that stayed silent on issues they care about," Wang said in a statement. Peoples true opinion on whether Chanels actions are appropriate, or a step too far that borders on Russophobia (which could be damaging to the brand), remain to be seen."

Luxury giants Kering and LVMH did not immediately respond to requests for comment about whether they also plan to curb sales to Russians.
OTTAWA - The Canadian government says it has learned from Australia's experience when it comes to requiring online giants to pay news outlets to use their journalism, and has framed its bill to avoid the country's pitfalls.

Minister of Canadian Heritage, Pablo Rodriguez, holds a press conference regarding the introduction of Bill C-18, the Online News Act, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday, April 5, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

OTTAWA - The Canadian government says it has learned from Australia's experience when it comes to requiring online giants to pay news outlets to use their journalism, and has framed its bill to avoid the country's pitfalls.

Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez on Tuesday introduced a bill modelled on an Australian law making digital platforms such as Google pay Canadian media outlets for reusing their journalism.

Digital giants will have six months to negotiate private deals to compensate Canadian media outlets or be forced to reach an agreement, under the terms of the bill.

The tech giants could face fines of up to $15 million a day if they fail to comply.

Australia's law prompted a fierce backlash last year, including from Facebook, which protested by blocking news on its platform across Australia.

The social media platform lifted the ban on Australians viewing and sharing news after striking a deal with the country's government.

One official in Rodriguez's Heritage Department, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters not public, said the government has studied the Australian bill and has spoken repeatedly to Australian officials.

The Heritage official said that, though using Australia's law as a model, the government is taking a more hands-off approach with Bill C-18, as it is known in Parliament.

Canada's bill, government officials say, will give less power to ministers than in Australia, with more decisions handed to an independent regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.

They say Canada's bill makes it clear digital companies will have the freedom to strike private deals with papers and other media outlets, which must fulfil set criteria.

The Canadian bill also defines terms more clearly  such as what kind of platforms and news outlets the law will apply to  to leave less space for ambiguity and make the system more transparent than in Australia, the Heritage official said.

But experts say Canada's bill is more heavy-handed in some respects and will make platforms also pay for audiovisual news content, unlike in Australia.

Michael Geist, the University of Ottawa's Canada Research Chair in internet and e-commerce law, predicts Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and Google will fiercely resist efforts to make them pay for links to news sites posted on their platforms.

He suggested that if a price tag is attached to internet links, the online companies could demand that news platforms compensate them for posting links to their journalism  not the other way around.

"The bill is requiring mandatory payments for links, but links should not be compensable at all," he said. "This hurts the dissemination of information in Canada."

Geist said the bill creates an incentive for news organizations to post more and more links on Facebook because they could get more compensation for doing so.

He said it could also give digital giants power over the way media organizations spend their money.

The Canadian bill says a portion of compensation should be used to support the production of local, regional and national news, as well as Indigenous and racialized content. Geist said platforms could insist a set proportion of funds back these objectives.

Meta and Google said they are still reviewing the bill and declined to comment.

Meta said Tuesday links to news articles and previews make up only four per cent of what people see on their Facebook feed, and that the company has committed $18 million in the last seven years to programs and partnerships with media in Canada.

Launching the bill, Rodriguez said it will bolster Canada's news industry which is at risk with 451 news outlets closing their doors since 2008.

At least one-third of Canadian journalism jobs have disappeared since 2010, he added.

Meanwhile, billions of advertising dollars have migrated from traditional news sources to tech platforms.

Online advertising revenue reached $9.7 billion in 2020 with Google and Facebook taking 80 per cent, the Heritage Department said.

The bill will also enhance media organizations' bargaining power and address a market imbalance. It will permit news organizations, big and small, to team up to bargain collectively with digital giants for compensation.

If they cannot reach a deal within six months, the tech platforms would be forced into mediation with news outlets and, if that doesn't work, then binding arbitration.

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The bill has been welcomed by News Media Canada, which represents more than 500 print and digital titles across Canada, saying it levels the playing field and gives Canada's news publishers a fair shot and doesn't require additional taxpayer funds.

This approach has been a shining success in Australia, where publishers large and small are inking meaningful content licensing agreements, said Jamie Irving, chair of News Media Canada, on Tuesday.

Trusted information is needed more today than ever before, and real news reported by real journalists costs real money.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 6, 2022.



Meta funds a fellowship that supports journalism positions at The Canadian Press.
BERLIN (AP)  The German government unveiled a major package of reforms Wednesday to boost the production of renewable power, meet its climate goals and become independent of energy imports from hostile nations such as Russia.

FILE -- A solar farm, front, and a biogas plant, rear, are seen in Oberkraemer, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 28, 2021. The German government presented a major package of reforms Wednesday to boost the construction of renewable power as part of its efforts to meet its climate goals and become independent of energy imports from hostile nations such as Russia. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn, file)

BERLIN (AP)  The German government unveiled a major package of reforms Wednesday to boost the production of renewable power, meet its climate goals and become independent of energy imports from hostile nations such as Russia.

The 600-page Easter package approved by Cabinet lays out ambitious goals for the expansion of offshore power and declares the installation of renewable energy to be of overriding public interest  a trump card meant to cut through Germany's often lengthy bureaucratic processes.

Europe's biggest economy aims to generate almost all of its electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar by 2035  more than doubling the current rate in 13 years. But the roll-out has slowed sharply in recent years due to complex rules and changes in feed-in subsidies.

"In sum, this package will lead to a significant increase in renewable energy, Economy and Energy Minister Robert Habeck told reporters in Berlin.

After adding no offshore wind in 2021, the new center-left government that took power in December said Germany will increase the installed capacity from under 8 Gigawatts currently to 30GW by 2030 and 40GW by 2035. The goal for 2045  by when Germany aims to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions  is 70 GW of offshore wind capacity.

The government has also set a target of more than doubling onshore wind capacity to 115GW by 2030, including by reducing the minimum distance to certain radio beacons and weather radars. The goal for solar is even more ambitious: almost quadrupling the existing capacity to 215GW by the next decade.

German Economy and Climate Minister Robert Habeck presents the government's so-called 'Easter Package' during a press conference in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, April 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn)

Habeck acknowledged the enormity of the task and said Germany will likely miss its short-term targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions due to failures of the past.

It's the precondition," he said of the new measures, not the solution for everything. Further measures will be agreed in the coming months and many must be approved by parliament before they come into force.

The war in Ukraine would also affect plans, with Germany likely having to use more domestic coal to fill the short-term gap caused by a reduction in Russian energy imports, Habeck said.

Still, the government has already managed to significantly cut its purchase of Russian coal, oil and gas in recent months and aims to stop importing oil and coal from Russia this year, and gas by mid-2024, he said.

You can see at what speed we are becoming independent of Russian energy," he added.

Germany's powerful industry lobby group BDI welcomed the new measures but warned that the targets will be tough to achieve.

Aside from renewables, Germany will also have to expand the use of hydrogen and biomass energy to safeguard the power supply during times when little wind or solar power can be generated, it said.

As Habeck unveiled the new energy package to journalists, about a dozen environmental activists glued themselves to a nearby bridge leading to the German parliament and chancellery.

Protester Cornelia Huth, a biologist and member of the group Scientist Rebellion, said Germany's targets aren't enough to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and should be even higher on account of the country's high historical emissions.

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Huth also called on the government to implement a number of measures she described as no brainers including a law against food waste and a universal speed limit.

Germany's transport minister this week dismissed the idea of even a temporary speed limit of 130 kilometers per hour (81 mph) on the Autobahn, saying the country doesn't have enough signs.

Neighboring Austria announced subsidies worth about 300 million euros ($327 million) Wednesday to install additional renewable energy facilities.

The Alpine nation is even more dependent on Russian gas than Germany, and Environment Minister Leonore Gewessler said every wind turbine or solar power facility frees us from Vladimir Putin's grip.

___

Follow AP's climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate
ANDRIIVKA, Ukraine (AP)  The mayor of the besieged port city of Mariupol put the number of civilians killed there at more than 5,000 Wednesday, as Ukraine collected evidence of Russian atrocities on the ruined outskirts of Kyiv and braced for what could become a climactic battle for control of the country's industrial east.

Tetiana Rurak, 25-year-old widow Oleksandra Rurak, visits her soldier husband Volodymyr Rurak's, grave with her one and a half year old daughter, after he was killed in action, at the Lychakiv cemetery, in Lviv, western Ukraine, Tuesday, April 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)

ANDRIIVKA, Ukraine (AP)  The mayor of the besieged port city of Mariupol put the number of civilians killed there at more than 5,000 Wednesday, as Ukraine collected evidence of Russian atrocities on the ruined outskirts of Kyiv and braced for what could become a climactic battle for control of the country's industrial east.

Ukrainian authorities continued gathering up the dead in shattered towns outside the capital amid telltale signs Moscow's troops killed civilians indiscriminately before retreating over the past several days.

In other developments, the U.S. and its Western allies moved to impose new sanctions against the Kremlin over what they branded war crimes.

And Russia completed the pullout of all of its estimated 24,000 or more troops from the Kyiv and Chernihiv areas in the north, sending them into Belarus or Russia to resupply and reorganize, probably to return to the fight in the east, a U.S. defense official speaking on condition of anonymity said.

In his nightly address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that the Russian military continues to build up its forces in preparation for the new offensive in the east, where the Kremlin has said its goal is to liberate the Donbas, Ukraines mostly Russian-speaking industrial heartland. He said Ukraine, too, was preparing for battle.

A dog stands next to the body of an elderly woman killed inside a house in Bucha, outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, April 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

We will fight and we will not retreat, he said. We will seek all possible options to defend ourselves until Russia begins to seriously seek peace. This is our land. This is our future. And we wont give them up.

Ukrainian authorities urged people living in the Donbas to evacuate now, ahead of an impending Russian offensive, while there is still time.

Later, people will come under fire, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said, and we wont be able to do anything to help them.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen delivers a speech during a debate on the conclusions of the European Council meeting of March 24-25 2022, including the latest developments of the war against Ukraine and the EU sanctions against Russia, Wednesday, April 6, 2022 in Strasbourg, eastern France. (AP Photo/Jean-Francois Badias)

A Western official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence estimates, said it will take Russia's battle-damaged forces as much as a month to regroup for a major push on eastern Ukraine.

Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko said that of the more than 5,000 civilians killed during weeks of Russian bombardment and street fighting, 210 were children. He said Russian forces bombed hospitals, including one where 50 people burned to death.

Boichenko said more than 90% of the citys infrastructure has been destroyed. The attacks on the strategic southern city on the Sea of Azov have cut off food, water, fuel and medicine and pulverized homes and businesses.

A dog stands next to the body of an elderly woman killed at the entrance of her house in Bucha, outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, April 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

British defense officials said 160,000 people remained trapped in the city, which had a prewar population of 430,000. A humanitarian relief convoy accompanied by the Red Cross has been trying for days without success to get into the city.

Capturing Mariupol would allow Russia to secure a continuous land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.

In the north, Ukrainian authorities said the bodies of least 410 civilians have been found in towns around Kyiv, victims of what Zelenskyy has portrayed as a Russian campaign of murder, rape, dismemberment and torture. Some victims had apparently been shot at close range. Some were found with their hands bound.

A Ukrainian soldier stands against the background of an apartment house ruined in the Russian shelling in Borodyanka, Ukraine, Wednesday, Apr. 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

At a cemetery in the town of Bucha, northeast of Kyiv, workers began to load more than 60 bodies apparently collected over the past few days into a grocery shipping truck for transport to a facility for further investigation.

Zelenskyy accused Russia of interfering with an international investigation into possible war crimes by removing corpses and trying to hide other evidence in Bucha.

We have information that the Russian troops have changed tactics and are trying to remove the dead people, the dead Ukrainians, from the streets and cellars of territory they occupied, he said in his address. This is only an attempt to hide the evidence and nothing more.

A Ukrainian serviceman stands amid destroyed Russian tanks in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, April 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

Switching from Ukrainian into Russian, Zelenskyy urged ordinary Russians to somehow confront the Russian repressive machine instead of being equated with the Nazis for the rest of your life.

He called on Russians to demand an end to the war, if you have even a little shame about what the Russian military is doing in Ukraine.

More bodies were yet to be collected in Bucha. The Associated Press saw two in a house in a silent neighborhood. From time to time there was the muffled boom of workers clearing the town of mines and other unexploded ordnance.

The Irpin river is seen through a damaged bridge in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, April 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

Police said they found at least 20 bodies in the Makariv area west of Kyiv. In the village of Andriivka, residents said the Russians arrived in early March and took locals' phones. Some people were detained, then released. Others met unknown fates. Some described sheltering for weeks in cellars normally used for storing vegetables for winter.

The soldiers were gone, and Russian armored personnel carriers, a tank and other vehicles sat destroyed on both ends of the road running through the village. Several buildings were reduced to mounds of bricks and corrugated metal. Residents struggled without heat, electricity or cooking gas.

First we were scared, now we are hysterical, said Valentyna Klymenko, 64. She said she, her husband and two neighbors weathered the siege by sleeping on stacks of potatoes covered with a mattress and blankets. We didnt cry at first. Now we are crying.

The Irpin river is seen under a damaged bridge in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, April 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

To the north of the village, in the town of Borodyanka, rescue workers combed through the rubble of apartment blocks, looking for bodies. Mine-disposal units worked nearby.

The Kremlin has insisted its troops have committed no war crimes, charging that the images out of Bucha were staged by the Ukrainians.

Thwarted in their efforts to swiftly take the capital, increasing numbers of President Vladimir Putins troops, along with mercenaries, have been reported moving into the Donbas.

Motria Oleksiienko, 99 years-old, traumatized by the Russian occupation, is comforted by daughter-in-law Tetiana Oleksiienko in a room without heating in the village of Andriivka, Ukraine, heavily affected by fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces, Wednesday, April 6, 2022. Several buildingsa in the village were reduced to mounds of bricks and corrugated metal and residents struggle without heat, electricity or cooking gas. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

At least five people were killed by Russian shelling Wednesday in the Donbas' Donetsk region, according to Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko, who urged civilians to leave for safer areas.

In the Luhansk region of the Donbas, Russian bombardment set fire to at least 10 multi-story buildings and a mall in the town of Sievierodonetsk, the regional governor reported. There was no immediate word on deaths or injuries.

Russian forces also attacked a fuel depot and a factory in the Dnipropetrovsk region, just west of the Donbas, authorities said.

Ammunition abandoned by retreating Russian forces or retrieved from destroyed fighting vehicles lies on the ground in the village of Andriivka, Ukraine, heavily affected by fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces, Wednesday, April 6, 2022. Several buildings in the village were reduced to mounds of bricks and corrugated metal and residents struggle without heat, electricity or cooking gas. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

Ukrainian forces have been fighting Russia-backed separatists in the Donbas since 2014. Ahead of its Feb. 24 invasion, Moscow recognized the Luhansk and Donetsk regions as independent states.

In reaction to the alleged atrocities outside Kyiv, the U.S. announced sanctions against Putins two adult daughters and said it is toughening penalties against Russian banks. Britain banned investment in Russia and pledged to end its dependence on Russian coal and oil by the end of the year.

The European Union is also expected to take additional punitive measures, including an embargo on coal.

Cemetery workers receive three corpses of civilians killed in Bucha, before the corpses are transported to the morgue, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, April 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

Meanwhile, the United States and the United Kingdom boycotted an informal meeting of the Security Council called by Russia to press its baseless claims that the U.S. has biological warfare laboratories in Ukraine.

The meeting was the latest of several moves by Russia that have led Western countries to accuse Moscow of using the U.N. as a platform for disinformation to divert attention from the war.

Russias deputy U.N. ambassador Dmitry Polyansky, who presided over the meeting, asserted that Ukraine, supported by the U.S., was implementing what he claimed were dangerous projects and experiments as part of a military biological program.

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Cemetery workers load the corpses of civilians killed in Bucha into a truck, to be transported to the morgue, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, April 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

The allegations have previously been debunked. Ukraine does own and operate a network of biological labs that have received funding and research support from the U.S. and are not a secret. The labs are part of a program that aims to reduce the likelihood of deadly outbreaks, whether natural or man-made.

The U.S. efforts date back to work in the 1990s to dismantle the former Soviet Unions program for weapons of mass destruction.

___

Oleksandr Stashevskyi and Cara Anna in Bucha, Ukraine, Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Ukraine, and Associated Press journalists around the world contributed to this report.

___

Follow the APs coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
British travelers faced more disruptions during the Easter holiday break as two major airlines, British Airways and easyJet, canceled about 100 flights Wednesday.

FILE - British Airways planes parked at Terminal 5 Heathrow airport in London, Wednesday, March 18, 2020. British travelers going abroad for the Easter holidays faced disruptions Monday, April 4, 2022 as two main carriers, British Airways and easyJet, canceled dozens of flights due to staff shortages related to soaring cases of COVID-19 in the U.K. Budget carrier easyJet grounded 62 flights scheduled for Monday after canceling at least 222 flights over the weekend. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, File)

British travelers faced more disruptions during the Easter holiday break as two major airlines, British Airways and easyJet, canceled about 100 flights Wednesday.

British Airways canceled two flights because of coronavirus-related staff absences, on top of more than 70 flights that it had canceled in advance as part of adjustments to its schedule. Budget carrier easyJet scrubbed at least 30 flights to or from London's Gatwick airport.

The aviation industry is suffering from staff shortages because of both a surge in coronavirus-related staff sickness in the U.K. and a shortage of workers because of pandemic-related job cuts.

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British Airways and easyJet have canceled hundreds of flights since the weekend, which marked the start of a two-week Easter school holiday break.

EasyJet said it will operate most of its 1,545 flights planned for Wednesday, with a small proportion" canceled in advance to give customers enough time to book new ones.

The airline says the number of crew illnesses are at more than double normal levels because of high COVID-19 infection rates across Europe.

British Airways said many of its cancellations include flights that were cut when it decided last month to reduce its schedule until the end of May to boost reliability amid rising COVID-19 cases.

Infections across the U.K. have soared again with the rapid spread of the more transmissible omicron BA.2 variant, reaching record levels last week when official figures showed that some 1 in 13 people had the virus.

The Easter school holidays are the first time many families in Britain have booked trips abroad after two years of pandemic restrictions. All remaining virus measures, including mandatory self-isolation for those infected and testing requirements for international travel, were scrapped in February and March.
TORONTO - Some of the most active companies traded Tuesday on the Toronto Stock Exchange:

Toronto Stock Exchange (21,930.83, down 154.77 points.)

Toronto-Dominion Bank (TSX:TD). Financials. Down 30 cents, or 0.3 per cent, to $100.19 on 16.6 million shares.

TC Energy Corp. (TSX:TRP). Energy. Up 41 cents, or 0.6 per cent, to $72.31 on 10 million shares.

Bank of Nova Scotia (TSX:BNS). Financials. Up 68 cents, or 0.8 per cent, to $89.22 on 8.9 million shares.

Cenovus Energy Inc. (TSX:CVE). Energy. Down 28 cents, or 1.3 per cent, to $21.35 on 8.1 million shares.

Crescent Point Energy Corp. (TSX:CPG). Energy. Down 56 cents, or 5.9 per cent, to $8.96 on 7.1 million shares.

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Canadian Natural Resources (TSX:CNQ). Energy. Down $1.78, or 2.2 per cent, to $78.20 on six million shares.

Companies in the news:

Suncor Energy Inc. (TSX:SU). Down 51 cents or 1.2 per cent to $41.22. Suncor Energy Inc. is getting out of the wind and solar business, even as a new UN report on climate change says wind and solar technologies are the two best avenues to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and limit the planet's warming to a critical 1.5 C. The Calgary-based energy giant  which has been involved in renewable energy production for two decades  announced Monday its plans to divest its wind and solar assets to focus on hydrogen and renewable fuels instead. In 2002, Suncor partnered with Enbridge to build one of the first renewable energy projects in Canada. Since then, Suncor has developed eight wind power projects in three provinces  Saskatchewan, Alberta and Ontario. But in a news release, the company  which has set a goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050  said it will sell those assets in order to bring more "fit and focus" to its portfolio.

Bank of Nova Scotia  Scotiabank faced criticism for not moving fast enough on climate change at the banks annual general meeting, while prepared remarks for chief executive Brian Porter, who missed the meeting due to COVID-19, focused especially on the economic challenges faced by Canadians. Speaking at the bank's 190th AGM Tuesday at the Scotiabank Centre, the Trottier Family Foundation, a Scotiabank shareholder, commended the bank for acknowledging climate change as a top risk, but said it was not acting with enough urgency. Following this, a proxy holder brought up the bank's approach to Scope 3 greenhouse-gas emissions and what they believe is a lack of reduction targets in the bank's net-zero plan. Meanwhile, Greenpeace activists attempted to disrupt the meeting, criticizing Scotiabank for its approach to fossil fuels and membership in the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, an oil lobby group. The bank and lobby group held an oil and gas conference together in Calgary on Tuesday.

Kinross Gold Corp. (TSX:K). Down 20 cents or 2.7 per cent to $7.30. Canadian miner Kinross Gold Corp. is selling all of its assets in Russia as a growing number of companies withdraw from the country following the invasion of Ukraine. The Toronto-based gold miner said Tuesday it's selling 100 per cent of its Russian assets to the Highland Gold Mining group of companies and its affiliates for US$680 million in cash. Kinross owns the Kupol underground mine in the country's eastern Chukotka region and surrounding exploration licences as well as the Udinsk development-stage project in the Khabarovsk region. The company said Highland Gold is one of the largest gold mining companies in Russia with mining operations in both of the areas where Kinross has assets. The transaction is subject to the approval of the Russian government.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 5, 2022.
ST. JOHN'S, N.L. - Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault has approved a controversial new oil project off the coast of Newfoundland with what Ottawa is calling the strongest emissions rules ever imposed.

Minister of Environment Steven Guilbeault speaks during a press conference outside the GLOBE Forum at the Convention Centre in Vancouver, B.C., on Tuesday, March 29, 2022. As Newfoundland and Labrador awaits word from Ottawa on a proposed new oilfield off the coast of St. John's, Shears Mercer says he's not worried  he's frustrated. CANADIAN PRESS/Chad Hipolito

ST. JOHN'S, N.L. - Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault has approved a controversial new oil project off the coast of Newfoundland with what Ottawa is calling the strongest emissions rules ever imposed.

His decision released Wednesday by the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada says Equinor's Bay du Nord project can proceed as long it achieves net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

That means the company will have to offset or capture any emissions the project produces by 2050. The announcement says this is the first time the federal government has imposed such a condition on an energy project.

Until 2050, Equinor is also legally required to consider and incorporate the best available options for reducing emissions.

"I have determined that the designated project is not likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects," Guilbeault said in the 22-page decision statement.

But the former environmental activist who used to lobby against oil and gas projects in his life before politics said the decision kept him up at night.

"It's one of the hardest decisions I've ever had to make," Guilbeault said in an interview.

But he said the government established a new environmental review process for such projects and created the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada to do it, with an aim of taking the politics out of the process.

This project was reviewed using the previous system because of when the application was received, but Guilbeault said going against the recommendation of an independent agency was not something he could do.

"They made a recommendation to me that they, after studying the project for four years, with 137 conditions, including the project be net zero by 2050, their conclusion was that the project could have no significant impact," he said. "So that was a challenge for me to go against this institution."

Bay du Nord is expected to produce around 300 million barrels of oil over its lifetime, though industry insiders in Newfoundland and Labrador say that figure could be more than 800 million barrels. Equinor has said Bay du Nord would likely start pumping in the latter half of the decade, and continue producing for 20 to 30 years. Production is expected to peak at around 200,000 barrels a day.

Greenhouse gas emissions from production are anticipated to be as low as eight kilograms per barrel. The average emissions from oil production in Canada is 40 kilograms per barrel, and in the oilsands, it's 80 kilograms.

Equinor predicts annual emissions from the project will be between 177,770 and 257,715 tonnes.

But climate scientists and environmentalists have opposed the project, saying it would undermine Canada's goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and say the emissions from production ignore how many greenhouse gas emissions will be produced when the fossil fuels are burned.

The government signalled Wednesday that the conditions being put on Bay du Nord, including net-zero by 2050, will become the legal standard for any future oil and gas project seeking federal approval.

Guilbeault said oil consumption is going to drop by 2050 but there will still be some demand, and it will only be for oil that is carbon neutral. He said projects like this one, which have a carbon footprint compatible with addressing climate change, are going to ultimately displace oil production that do not.

"Well, that's what we have to do," he said. "I mean, unless those other productions find ways to to be carbon neutral, that's the inevitable conclusion that the world is coming to."

Equinor spokesman Alex Collins said the Bay du Nord project "has the potential to produce the lowest-carbon oil in the country."

"Equinor is pleased with the strong support that the Bay du Nord project has received from stakeholders across the province and Canada," she said.

Collins noted in an earlier statement the company and its partners haven't yet sanctioned the development. That decision, she said, is expected "in the next couple years." Equinor has said the project will provide about $3.5 billion in total revenues for the cash-strapped government of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Premier Andrew Furey was beaming at an evening news conference, saying the project will be an economic driver for his province. He said greenhouse gas emissions from the project will be among the lowest in the world for an oil project and it will help meet global demand for "low-carbon, ethical oil."

"This will be a giant step forward in our economic recovery," Furey added.

Climate activists were not pleased.

"(The) decision represents a triumph of the kind of politics that will only deepen the climate crisis and global addiction to planet-wrecking fossil fuels," Keith Stewart, senior energy strategist at Greenpeace Canada, said in an emailed statement.

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"This decision isn't just a climate failure, it is a failure to imagine and invest in a sustainable energy future for the Atlantic region."

Caroline Brouillette, national policy manager at Climate Action Network Canada, said progress on climate over the last few years is being undermined by this approval.

"Frankly I think this is heartbreaking," she said.

Brouillette said it's coming just two days after a United Nations climate report that was clear there is no room for more oil and gas production if the world is to avoid the worst of the climate crisis.

"It's so clearly not compatible with climate safety," she said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 6, 2022.
ST. JOHN'S, N.L. - One of Canada's windiest provinces is ending a long-standing moratorium on the development of wind energy.

Newfoundland and Labrador's provincial flag flies on a flag pole in Ottawa, on July 3, 2020. Provincial Energy Minister Andrew Parsons has announced an end to a long-standing moratorium on wind energy development in the province. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

ST. JOHN'S, N.L. - One of Canada's windiest provinces is ending a long-standing moratorium on the development of wind energy.

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Newfoundland and Labrador Energy Minister Andrew Parsons made the announcement today, saying the province's relentless winds are now available to be harnessed.

Parsons told reporters the moratorium was introduced in 2007 and he hopes it will be lifted in the coming months after his department works through some policy details.

He says the ban will be lifted for onshore wind turbines, and conversations are ongoing with the federal government about wind potential in the offshore region.

Meanwhile, Parsons announced jointly with federal Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson that their governments have committed to "expedite" the elimination of subsidies for oil companies.

In a news release today, Parsons and Wilkinson said the province's oil industry regulator will now be mandated to oversee renewable energy as well as oil projects off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 5, 2022.
WASHINGTON - Republicans are doing their best to resurrect the controversy around the long-dead Keystone XL pipeline expansion, using it as an election-year political cudgel against Joe Biden in hopes of convincing voters that soaring gasoline prices are the U.S. president's fault.

A sign displays the price of a litre of regular grade gasoline at an Esso gas station as a motorist waits at a red light, in Vancouver, on Tuesday, March 8, 2022. Republicans on Capitol Hill are resurrecting the long-dead Keystone XL pipeline expansion in an effort to blame President Joe Biden for soaring gasoline prices. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

WASHINGTON - Republicans are doing their best to resurrect the controversy around the long-dead Keystone XL pipeline expansion, using it as an election-year political cudgel against Joe Biden in hopes of convincing voters that soaring gasoline prices are the U.S. president's fault.

Members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce took turns Wednesday grilling a group of senior oil and gas industry leaders summoned to testify before the committee about the apparent disconnect between crude oil prices and the cost at the pump.

The lines of questioning depended on political affiliation: Democrats excoriated the executives for doing little to help, banking billions in profits without boosting production, while Republicans looked for ways to pin the blame on the White House.

Keystone XL  the cross-border project Biden killed on his first day in office  proved a popular talking point.

"What happened is we denied Canada access to our market," said H.R. McMaster, one of Donald Trump's former national security advisers and the only one of Wednesday's panel of witnesses who wasn't an oil and gas executive.

"What's Canada going to do? They're going to have to sell oil elsewhere  maybe to China, for example, which will give China maybe more power over Canada's economy."

Rep. David McKinley, who has represented his West Virginia district for the Republicans since 2011, brandished a Wall Street Journal report from Tuesday citing anonymous sources who say the U.S. is actively seeking to boost energy imports from Canada.

"Really? Didn't he just cancel the permit for the Keystone pipeline that would have imported 830,000 barrels of crude oil per day from Canada?" McKinley asked.

"Canada's network of pipelines are already running at full capacity, so we'll have to import by rail, which according to analysts is more expensive."

Biden administration officials did not immediately respond Wednesday to questions about Canadian energy imports, which the White House is said to be anxious to increase to ease supply pressures that are largely the result of a North American ban on Russian energy.

The White House has, however, shrugged off the notion that a different outcome on Keystone XL would have had any impact on the current price of gas  a message repeated Wednesday by Virginia Democrat Rep. Donald McEachin.

"The reality is that the Keystone pipeline would not be operational until at least next year, so the notion that somehow that's adversely affecting the price of oil and the price of gas at the pump is to me somewhat mystifying," McEachin said.

"What's more, the Keystone XL was essentially a Canadian export pipeline designed to take Canadian oil to foreign markets, and Canadian officials have said as much."

Neither point, however, has discouraged Republicans from using the project against Biden, especially with Canada and the U.S. both blocking imports of Russian oil, gas and coal as part of a broad and expanding suite of punishing economic sanctions in response to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

Last week, Biden announced plans for the single largest release of oil from the country's extensive strategic reserves  up to a million barrels a day for the next six months  amid Democratic fears that the price of gas is going to cost them dearly in November's midterm elections.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday the administration is doing all it can to soften the blow for U.S. consumers, noting that in addition to U.S. plans, the International Energy Agency's 31 member countries plan to release an additional 60 million barrels.

"What we're trying to do is mitigate those impacts," Psaki said. "All of these (steps) are part of our collective effort to mitigate the impacts on the American people."

The Canadian Embassy in Washington responded to inquiries with a statement confirming only that Canada is hard at work with "international partners in Europe and around the world" to end the dependence of other countries on Russian energy.

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Longer term, the goal is "deepening our co-operation on energy security toward a net-zero energy transition," the statement said. Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson has already said Canada would be able to increase output by as much as 300,000 barrels a day in 2022.

Meanwhile, stakeholders are waiting for more clarity on the fate of another cross-border pipeline with an uncertain future  Enbridge Inc.'s Line 5, which Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is trying to shut down for fear of an ecological disaster where the twin line crosses beneath the Great Lakes.

Enbridge has a motion before a federal judge in Grand Rapids, Mich., for a summary judgment in the ongoing legal dispute that would formally prevent the state from unilaterally shutting down what proponents say is a vital energy artery for both Canada and the U.S.

The federal government in Ottawa, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and a variety of U.S. business institutions have filed briefs with the court supporting Enbridge's argument, while various Indigenous and environmental groups have urged Neff to reject it.

With filings in that case now largely complete, the next significant development is expected to be a decision on Enbridge's motion, which observers say is likely still a number of months away.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 6, 2022.
DETROIT (AP)  Toyota customers soon won't be able to get U.S. federal tax credits for buying electric or hybrid vehicles.

FILE - In this Sunday, March 21, 2021, photo, the company logo adorns a sign outside a Toyota dealership in Lakewood, Colo. Toyota customers soon wont be able to get U.S. federal tax credits for buying electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles. Toyota's sales chief for North American, Bob Carter, said Wednesday, April 6, 2022, that the automaker expects to reach a 200,000-vehicle cap on the credits before the end of June. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)

DETROIT (AP)  Toyota customers soon won't be able to get U.S. federal tax credits for buying electric or hybrid vehicles.

The automaker expects that sometime before the end of June it will reach a 200,000-vehicle cap on the credits, Bob Carter, Toyota's head of North American sales, said Wednesday. After that, the credits will be phased out over the next year, reaching zero, as Tesla and General Motors already have.

The lack of credits is problematic for automakers shifting from petroleum-powered vehicles to batteries in the effort to reduce emissions, meet government fuel-economy standards and fight climate change. Nissan is about 30,000 vehicles away from reaching the cap, and others will follow as more EVs are introduced.

Tesla, the top seller of electric vehicles in the world, and GM already are at a price disadvantage to other automakers without the credits, and Toyota soon will be. Additional EV tax credits are in the Build Back Better spending bill backed by President Joe Biden, which is stalled in Congress.

Toyota reached the cap largely by selling plug-in gas-electric hybrid vehicles. The company's plug-in RAV4 Prime small SUV with 42 miles of electric range earns the buyer a $7,500 credit, the largest available. The Prius Prime plug-in, with 25 miles of electric range, gets $4,500. Toyota previously had offered a fully electric RAV4, but it didn't sell well and was canceled. It's rolling out a fully electric model called the bZ4X with 250 miles per charge, this summer.

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The Build Back Better bill would give EV buyers a $7,500 tax credit through 2026 to charge up sales. But the following year, only electric vehicles made in the U.S. would qualify for the credit. And the base credit rises by $4,500 if the vehicle is made at a U.S. plant that runs under a union-negotiated collective bargaining agreement. Only GM, Ford and Stellantis vehicles would qualify.

Carter, on a conference call with reporters, said Toyota lobbied against the additional credit only for union plants, calling it unfair to nonunion workers. It just needs to be a level playing field, Carter said. We are not anti-EV credits."

Democrats backing the credits for EVs made by the United Auto Workers say supporting union jobs is good for the economy and communities because unions helped to build the middle class.

GM CEO Mary Barra has said automakers that offered electric vehicles early should not be placed at a disadvantage.

Restoring the credits is a question that congress really needs to resolve, Carter said.

Toyota plans to offer 30 fully electric vehicles from its Lexus and Toyota brands by 2030.
FILE - Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, attends the opening of the Tesla factory Berlin Brandenburg in Gruenheide, Germany, March 22, 2022. Musk, who is now Twitter's largest shareholder and newly appointed board member, may have thoughts on a long-standing request from users: Should there be an edit button? On Monday evening, Musk launched a Twitter poll about whether they want an edit button. More than 3 million people have voted as of Tuesday, April 5, 2022. The poll closes Tuesday evening Eastern time. (Patrick Pleul/Pool via AP)

Well, that was fast.

Twitter has announced, via Twitter, that it is indeed working on an edit feature for tweets.

Newly chosen board member and now Twitter's largest shareholder Elon Musk had run a Twitter poll that started Monday asking users if they wanted an edit button. It's something users have long requested.

Twitter's post says, "weve been working on an edit feature since last year! no, we didnt get the idea from a poll."

The company said it would test the feature in its paid service, Twitter Blue, in the coming months. It said the test would help it "learn what works, what doesnt, and whats possible."

So it'll be a while before most Twitter users get to use it, if they do.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. APs earlier story follows below.

Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO and power Twitter user who is now Twitter's largest shareholder and newly appointed board member, may have thoughts on a long-standing request from users: Should there be an edit button?

On Monday evening, Musk launched a Twitter poll about whether they want an edit button, cheekily misspelling "yes" as "yse" and "no" as "on." More than 3 million people had voted as of Tuesday morning. The poll closes Tuesday evening Eastern time.

Twitter's CEO, Parag Agrawal, retweeted the poll with a seeming reference to an earlier tweet by Musk, saying "The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully." Musk had used the same language in a March tweet describing another one of his polls that asked whether Twitter adheres to free speech principles.

Twitter spokesperson Catherine Hill declined to comment on whether Agrawal was joking, and did not answer whether Twitter would follow the results of Musk's poll. Musk tweeted Tuesday that he was looking forward to making "significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!"

Many Twitter users  among them, Kim Kardashian, Ice T, Katy Perry and McDonald's corporate account  have long begged for an edit button. The company itself recently teased users with an April Fool's Day tweet saying "we are working on an edit button."

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had said that Twitter had considered an edit button, but in a January 2020 Q&A maintained that "well probably never do it." He cited wanting to keep the spirit of Twitter's text-message origins  texts can't be edited  and the confusion that could result from users making changes to a tweet that has already been highly circulated by others. Dorsey stepped down as CEO in November 2021.

For what it's worth, the chief technology officer of Facebook owner Meta, Andrew Bosworth, tweeted Monday that big changes to posts that have already gone viral were not an issue. (Facebook lets you edit posts.) "You just include an indicator that it has been edited along with a change log," he wrote.

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Musks response: "Facebook gives me the willies."

But other people say adding an edit button would change the nature of Twitter, making it less valuable as a historical warehouse that stores official statements by politicians and other high-profile people. Twitter, for better or worse, "has become the de facto news wire," said Jennifer Grygiel, a Syracuse University communications professor and an expert on social media who researches propaganda.

Tweets are often embedded in news stories, which could cause problems if the users edit important or controversial tweets without leaving evidence of the original statement. Grygiel suggested instead giving Twitter users a window of time to edit their tweets before they publish them.

Letting powerful Twitter users edit their tweets means they would not be historical statements anymore, Grygiel said. "We need to think about what the implications are, what these tweets are, who has power."

Musk said that a related proposal for a post-publication edit window of a few minutes " sounds reasonable."

Musk is someone who could seemingly use an edit button. His tweet about taking Tesla private at $420 per share, when funding was not secured, led to a $40 million SEC settlement and a requirement that Musk's tweets be approved by a corporate lawyer. Musk is still embroiled in a fight over that settlement.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The Biden administration has charged a Russian oligarch with violating U.S. government sanctions and has disrupted a cybercrime operation launched by a Russian military intelligence agency, officials said Wednesday.

FILE - Attorney General Merrick Garland listens during a meeting of the COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force at the Justice Department, March 10, 2022 in Washington. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Garland on Wednesday, March 16, for the first time convened a multilateral task force known as REPO, short for Russian Elites, Proxies and Oligarchs, one of several new efforts dedicated to enforcing sanctions against Russian oligarchs over the war in Ukraine. (Kevin Lamarque/Pool via AP, File)

WASHINGTON (AP)  The Biden administration has charged a Russian oligarch with violating U.S. government sanctions and has disrupted a cybercrime operation launched by a Russian military intelligence agency, officials said Wednesday.

The action came as the Justice Department said it was accelerating efforts to track down illicit Russian assets and as U.S. prosecutors helped European counterparts gather evidence on potential war crimes committed by Russia during its war on Ukraine. FBI and Justice Department officials announced the moves as the U.S. separately revealed sanctions against the two adult daughters of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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We have our eyes on every dollar and jet. We have our eyes on every piece of art and real estate, purchased with dirty money and on every bitcoin wallet filled with proceeds of theft, and other crimes, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said. Together with our partners around the world, our goal is to ensure that sanctioned Russian oligarchs and cyber criminals will not find safe haven.

The indictment against Konstantin Malofeyev, a Russian media baron and founder of Russian Orthodox news channel, Tsargrad TV, is the first of an oligarch since the Russian invasion in February. The case accuses him of evading Treasury Department sanctions resulting from his financing of Russians promoting separatism in Crimea.

Though sanctions bar U.S. citizens from working for or doing business with him, Malofeyev hired an American television producer to work for him in networks in Russia and Greece and tried to buy a television network in Bulgaria, prosecutors said. Jack Hanick, a former CNBC and Fox News employee, was arrested last month for his work as a television producer for Malofeyev.

The Justice Department also announced that it had taken down a botnet  a network of hijacked computers typically used for malicious activity  that was controlled by the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU. The botnet was dismantled before it could cause any damage, said FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Wednesday's announcements came two days after U.S. officials seized a huge yacht in Spain belonging to a Russian oligarch, Viktor Vekselberg, with close ties to Russian President Putin.

The Justice Department in the past year has taken aim against Russia-based cybercrime, recovering in June most of a multimillion-dollar ransom that Colonial Pipeline paid to hackers after a ransomware attack that halted operations. And the department announced charges last fall against two suspected ransomware operators.
BRUSSELS (AP)  The United States on Wednesday announced sanctions targeting Russian President Vladimir Putins two adult daughters and said it was toughening penalties against Russian banks in retaliation for war crimes in Ukraine.

A dog stands next to the body of an elderly woman killed inside a house in Bucha, outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, April 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

BRUSSELS (AP)  The United States on Wednesday announced sanctions targeting Russian President Vladimir Putins two adult daughters and said it was toughening penalties against Russian banks in retaliation for war crimes in Ukraine.

The moves against Sberbank and Alfa Bank prohibit assets from touching the U.S. financial system and bar Americans from doing business with those institutions.

In addition to sanctions aimed at Putins adult daughters, Mariya Putina and Katerina Tikhonova, the U.S. is targeting Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin; the wife and children of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov; and members of Russias Security Council, including Dmitry Medvedev, a former president and prime minister.

The penalties cut of all of Putins close family members off from the U.S. financial system and freeze any assets they hold in the United States.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. APs earlier story follows below.

BRUSSELS (AP)  The United States, United Kingdom and the European Union were set Wednesday to impose new punishing sanctions targeting Russia, including a ban on all new investment in the country and an EU embargo on coal, after evidence of torture and killings emerged in recent days from a town outside of Kyiv.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen delivers a speech during a debate on the conclusions of the European Council meeting of March 24-25 2022, including the latest developments of the war against Ukraine and the EU sanctions against Russia, Wednesday, April 6, 2022 in Strasbourg, eastern France. (AP Photo/Jean-Francois Badias)

Videos and images of bodies in the streets of Bucha after it was recaptured from Russian forces have unleashed a wave of indignation among Western allies, who have drawn up new sanctions as a response.

The European Commissions proposed ban on coal imports would be the first EU sanctions targeting Russias lucrative energy industry over its war in Ukraine.

EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said energy was key to Russian President Vladimir Putins war coffers.

A billion euro is what we pay Putin every day for the energy he provides us since the beginning of the war. We have given him 35 billion euro. Compare that to the one billion that we have given to the Ukraine in arms and weapons, Borrell said.

After several European countries announced the expulsion of Russian diplomats, the European Commission proposed a fifth package of sanctions including a ban on coal imports that could be adopted as soon as Wednesday once unanimously approved by the 27-nation bloc's ambassadors.

The United States and Western allies plan to impose a ban on all new investment in Russia. Among the other measures being taken against Russia are greater sanctions on its financial institutions and state-owned enterprises, and sanctions on government officials and their family members, according to White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

Separately, the Treasury Department moved Tuesday to block any Russian government debt payments with U.S. dollars from accounts at U.S. financial institutions, making it harder for Russia to meet its financial obligations.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the coal ban is worth 4 billion euros ($4.4 billion) per year and that the EU has already started working on additional sanctions, including on oil imports.

She didnt mention natural gas, with consensus among the 27 EU countries on targeting the fuel used to generate electricity and heat homes difficult to secure amid opposition from gas-dependent members like Germany, the blocs largest economy.

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But European Council President Charles Michel said the bloc should keep up the pressure on the Kremlin, suggesting that an embargo on gas imports should also be required at some point in the future.

The new package includes a ban on coal imports, Michel said on Wednesday. I think that measures on oil, and even gas, will also be needed, sooner or later.

The new package of measures proposed by the commission also includes sanctions on more individuals and four key Russian banks, among them VTB, the second-largest Russian bank. The bloc also would ban Russian vessels and Russian-operated vessels from EU ports.

Further targeted export bans, worth 10 billion euros, in sectors covering quantum computers, advanced semiconductors, sensitive machinery and transportation equipment also were proposed.

I appreciate the strengthening of the 5th EU sanctions package: bans on Russian coal, vessels accessing EU ports, and road transport operators," Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on Twitter. But it will take a gas/oil embargo and de-SWIFTing of all Russian banks to stop Putin. Difficult times require difficult decisions."

Western allies have already cut out several Russian banks of the SWIFT financial messaging system, which daily moves countless billions of dollars around more than 11,000 banks and other financial institutions around the world.
Xplornet Communications Inc. has acquired Full Throttle Networks Inc., the second Manitoba Internet service provider it has bought in seven months.

Xplornet Communications Inc. has acquired Full Throttle Networks Inc., the second Manitoba Internet service provider it has bought in seven months.

The acquisition of Full Throttle and Swift High Speed in September allows the company to acquire close to 8,000 customers between the two.

In early December, Xplornet was awarded access to 3,200 kilometres of Manitoba Hydro Telecom-owned fibre optic network through a request for proposal process. That network, which Manitoba Hydro had built to maintain connectivity with its generating stations, has lots of excess capacity and its utilization is seen as integral to the broadband access for many of Manitobas severely under-serviced rural and northern communities.

Since Xplornet purchased Swift, construction is already underway to install fibre to the home for Swifts 6,000 customers and the same may happen for Full Throttles 1,600 customers.

Dane Davis, the former co-owner of Full Throttle with Kael Onchulenko, could not say that would happen for sure, but he said, "Xplornet are the new good guys. We are doing this deal with an understanding that things will get better (for our customers) to a degree that we could have never funded."

When its deal with the province was announced, Xplornet said it would spend about $200 million in Manitoba over the next two years and that 350 rural communities, including 30 First Nations, will benefit from increased connectivity.

Jordan Young, Xplornets vice-president business development, said that the work is progressing well.

He said, "Nearly half of the communities slated to benefit from our fixed wireless network, are already able to connect" to faster speeds.

"We will put shovels in the ground this build season in order to start rolling out our fibre-to-the-premise network," he said. "The project remains on track to connect over 125,000 rural Manitobans to high-speed Internet by the end of 2023."

While there are some reports that Xplornet is still experiencing delays in being able to connect more customers to the MHT backbone, others say that construction of fibre to the home is definitely ramping up.

Prior to the December deal between Hydro and Xplornet, Hydro had imposed a stop sell order for more than a year on new business with MHT as Manitoba Hydro undertook a re-organization of its non-core assets.

It meant that small ISPs such as Swift and Full Throttle could not embark on new developments even if they had the capital to do it.

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Evan Schroeder, the CEO of Swift, said there are many new broadband construction projects underway even if Xplornet is experiencing some delays in access.

(Swift sold its network infrastructure and customers to Xplornet but retained its construction business, now called Swift Underground.)

"Now we are doing the exact same work we were doing before but we are laying fibre to the home at a much faster pace than we could have done on our own," he said.

While it does have exclusive contract with Xplornet to do that work for its former customers in towns around Steinbach where it is based, it is currently also doing work for other ISPs including RFNow and Broadband Communications North which focuses almost exclusively on First Nation work.

"We have been able to diversify based on the fact we are no longer in competition," Schroeder said. "We still understand the market and understand how it should work and we are getting service to new customers or moving them from wireless back to fibre."

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca
Leona Alleslev rises during Question Period in the House of Commons, Monday, March 9, 2020 in Ottawa. The former Conservative deputy leader has officially announced she's running for leadership of the party. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

OTTAWA - Former Conservative deputy leader Leona Alleslev has officially entered the party's leadership race.

Alleslev, who lost her Greater Toronto Area seat in last years federal election, unveiled her plans at a Parliament Hill news conference Wednesday afternoon.

She did so standing alone behind a microphone, save for reporters and several of her team members who were in the room.

Despite her low-key launch, Alleslev said her campaign has a solid foundation. She denied that she was going to have to play catch-up to the other candidates in the race, who for weeks have been criss-crossing the country selling memberships and campaigning with supporters.

Candidates have until April 29 to submit all the necessary signatures and pay $300,000 in fees to appear on the ballot. They have until June 3 to sign up new members.

"Simply because I chose to wait until now to announce doesn't mean that I haven't been doing all of the work that the other candidates have been doing," she said.

"I am not behind."

Alleslev, a former logistics officer in the Air Force who then worked in the private sector, is one of 11 people who have declared they want to replace former leader Erin OToole in the Conservative partys top job.

The race was triggered after O'Toole was ousted by a majority caucus vote in early February.

Among the contestants Alleslev faces is former colleague and Ottawa-area MP Pierre Poilievre, whose recent rallies have attracted thousands, generating buzz about the level of momentum behind his message of "freedom."

Poilievre's campaign has also taken to accusing fellow candidate and former Quebec premier Jean Charest as being a Liberal for having led the Quebec Liberal Party.

Unlike Charest or any other candidate in the race, Alleslev was first sent to Parliament Hill as a Liberal MP in 2015 before she crossed the floor to join the Conservatives in 2018.

Former leader Andrew Scheer then appointed Alleslev to be the party's deputy leader. She stepped down from the role to help Peter MacKay, the ex-leader of the federal Progressive Conservatives, try to win the party's leadership in 2020.

On Wednesday, she defended her Liberal history by stating that she made her decision to cross the floor based on principle.

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"In order for (Conservatives) to be successful in an election, to win a majority government, we need a lot of other people to make the same choice that I did," Alleslev said.

The former MP also declined to identify why she thinks she lost her seat in last fall's federal election, saying there were a number of reasons.

"Even the best candidate can only do so much in an election. They actually also need a strong party and a strong leader."

In terms of policy, Alleslev raised concerns about the federal government's level of spending and its national carbon price. In her launch speech, she also spoke about how Canada needs to better support its military and the country's resource sector.

She was set to attend a meet and greet in Ottawa Wednesday evening.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 6, 2022.
WINNIPEGS two Roman Catholic archbishops will accompany Manitoba Metis Federation delegates when they meet the Pope at the Vatican this month to discuss the harms of residential schools.

WINNIPEGS two Roman Catholic archbishops will accompany Manitoba Metis Federation delegates when they meet the Pope at the Vatican this month to discuss the harms of residential schools.

"This is a pastoral initiative," said Archbishop Richard Gagnon, adding he wants to help facilitate the April 21 meeting because "its important the Manitoba Metis Federation have an opportunity to engage with the Holy Father."

St. Boniface Archbishop Albert LeGatt said the importance of the meeting is underscored by the "long history between the Archdiocese of St. Boniface and the Metis of the Red River." The history dates back to the early 1800s, when the first Catholic missionaries came to what later became Manitoba.

"We have had over 200 years of walking together," LeGatt said.

Last Friday, the Pope apologized to Indigenous peoples in Canada who suffered intergenerational trauma caused by residential schools. Following the apology, MMF president David Chartrand told the Free Press the Metis here had petitioned the Catholic church to build churches and create parishes in Manitoba.

That doesnt mean their children were exempt from trauma at the hands of the Catholic church, Chartrand added.

"There is no doubt the Metis people paid a price with what either Catholic priests or nuns did. First Nations people, no doubt, suffered the greatest of all, but the Metis did definitely pay a price."

When the Metis federation asked LeGatt to go to Rome, he readily agreed.

The same is true for Gagnon, whose archdiocese has a sizable number of Metis people.

"I want to facilitate and encourage their meeting with the Holy Father," he said. "This is a historic occasion for these members of my flock."

Neither archbishop plans to have a major speaking role during the meeting with the Pope.

"I just expect to be present when members of my flock meet the Holy Father," said LeGatt.

Both archbishops also intend to stay out of the fractious relations between the MMF and the Metis National Council; the federation left the council in 2021 in a dispute over who could identify as a Metis.

"I am just a pastor being with his people when they meet the Holy Father," said LeGatt. "I want to stay out of the politics."

Gagnon agreed. "I am going because the Red River Metis are an important part of Metis reality in Canada," he said.

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As for the goal of the meeting, "they just want to be seen, be recognized, for the Holy Father to know they exist," said LeGatt.

By meeting the Pope, "The (Metis federation) very much wants to strengthen its relationship with the Catholic church, seeing it as an important part of their culture," said Gagnon. "I look forward to being with them when they meet the Holy Father."

Chartrand said the delegation will ask the Pope to come "to the heart of the homeland of the Red River Metis to bless the final resting place of our great leader, Louis Riel."

The Red River Metis, he said, "will begin to find peace and justice through this important act of reconciliation."

"I am proud to be leading this pilgrimage to meet the Holy Father, and we look forward to discussing the renewal of our longstanding relationship," he said.

faith@freepress.mb.ca
New availability of a second COVID-19 booster dose has left some Manitobans excited and others scratching their heads.

New availability of a second COVID-19 booster dose has left some Manitobans excited and others scratching their heads.

On Wednesday, the province announced a second booster would be offered to anyone age 70 or older, residents of personal care homes and other congregate living sites for elderly people, and Indigenous people 50 or older no matter where they live.

Lindsay Wright ultimately drove across the U.S. border when her 13-year-old daughter was turned away from local pharmacies due to the provinces eligibility rules that qualify only some youth for a third dose. On April 1, she took her daughter to Grand Forks, N.D., and got her a booster shot there.

Wright, who is immunocompromised, said Manitobas decision to offer fourth doses to some while still holding back boosters from others is disappointing.

My husband is a front-line health-care worker, and he hasnt had a dose in quite a while. I know he would love a fourth dose, knowing what he could potentially be exposed to at work, and how important it is that he shows up for his shift, she told the Free Press Wednesday.

Even teachers in classrooms with kids for eight hours a day Im sure teachers would love to be on that list, too. It seems a little arbitrary and Manitoba seems very hesitant to go as far or as fast as other provinces are, and its frustrating.

When asked for comment, a spokesperson said the province had nothing further to add on the subject. Most provinces in Canada have opened up booster appointments to anyone 12 and older.

Wright said she was relieved to get her daughter a third dose by whatever means necessary, but wasnt hopeful the province would soon put all youth on the list.

I think if I felt hope in that direction, we would not have gone to the lengths we went to last week we would have waited a little bit longer, she said. Id love to be wrong about that, but it really seems like (Manitoba is) not being very proactive.

RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Lindsay Wright, who is immunocompromised, said Manitobas decision to offer fourth doses to some while still holding back boosters from others is disappointing.

The province has been offering fourth doses to moderately to severely immunocompromised youth and adults since December. Residents of First Nations communities age 18 or older were also previously eligible.

However, other vulnerable groups arent being considered for booster vaccinations, which remains a concern, Manitoba Child Care Association executive director Jodie Kehl said.

Facilities are definitely seeing increased cases, so there would be concern that we, again, are working with the most vulnerable population right now that have had no vaccinations, said Kehl, a parent of a teen yet not eligible for a booster.

Out of Manitobas 38,000 licensed child care spaces, around 13,000 are for school-aged children. While some staff are working with kids that have at least two doses, the majority are working with a largely unvaccinated clientele.

There are just too many unknowns, so there are concerns around the fact that the youngest population (up to age five) is not eligible for vaccines, now with obviously much more loose (public health) restrictions that transmission rate has certainly dramatically increased in facilities, Kehl said.

However, Wednesdays news was exciting for the large number of seniors in personal care homes and assisted living programs across the province, said Long Term & Continuing Care Association of Manitoba executive director Jan Legeros.

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Manitoba has more than 10,000 residents in personal care homes, more than 1,000 in supportive housing, and almost 5,000 seniors in assisted living  and many face a multitude of co-existing conditions, putting them at a heightened risk of severe COVID-19, Legeros said.

Many will receive their fourth doses in-house with the support of nurses either already working at or visiting the facilities, along with mobile clinics run by pharmacists, she said.

Legeros hopes the province will consider shifting its rollout plan to make it more accessible to care home staff.

Im hoping that at the same time as they offer the fourth dose to these residents, that they will also offer the third dose to the staff, because we havent had great uptake with the staff for the third dose, she said.

Offering it in-house, in the past, weve seen significant uptake from staff. It also sends a message to our staff that we value them and we are interested in keeping them safe and keeping their families safe.

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca
Manitoba Health Minister Audrey Gordon said her government is not taking away nurses vacation time to staff more surgical slates, as the province tries to pick away at a backlog of postponed operations.

Manitoba Health Minister Audrey Gordon said her government is not taking away nurses vacation time to staff more surgical slates, as the province tries to pick away at a backlog of postponed operations.

We have no plans to cancel nurse vacations, Gordon said during question period Tuesday, after being grilled by NDP health critic Uzoma Asagwara.

The Manitoba Nurses Union said while the employer hasnt outright cancelled summer vacations, it is hearing from members fewer nurses will be permitted to take time off.

After a very long and difficult two years, this request has been yet one more blow to morale, MNU president Darlene Jackson said Tuesday.

The assurance from the minister of health is less than reassuring for Manitoba nurses who have borne the brunt of poor pandemic planning. In fact, theyve heard this rhetoric on repeat over the past two years and have run out of faith.

The health minister told reporters in a scrum Shared Health has worked with each site to increase the surgical slates completed in coming months.

Its based on the projections of the staff who will be available this summer, said Gordon. Those plans are in place, and will result in approximately 200 additional surgical slates being completed this summer.

Gordon then thanked those whove come forward and very willingly stated they want to help Manitobans receive their surgeries over the summer. It will result in more people getting their surgery and not having to suffer in pain.

Last week, the health minister said the province plans to run surgical slates at 75 to 100 per cent capacity through the summer months in order to catch up on thousands of operations that were delayed owing to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Surgical volumes typically drop to about 40 per cent through the summer, as part of scheduled slowdowns to accommodate vacation time for surgeons, nurses and other health-care staff.

Shared Health said Tuesday in order to support this increased level of activity, changes were made to vacation scheduling for health-care workers in the surgery programs relating to the number of individuals who can be off on vacation at the same time.

To be clear, no vacations have been cancelled and the amount of available vacation for staff remains the same over the course of the year, Shared Health said in a statement.

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The change results in the number of staff who can schedule vacations at any one time more evenly distributed across the entire year, it said.

It also brings surgical unit vacation planning into alignment with other areas of the health system, such as emergency, critical care, medical wards, various clinics and dialysis, Shared Health said.

Meantime, Asagwara said nurses shouldnt be asked to give up summer vacation time.

We know that nurses  many of which are burned out  are being asked to give up time with their families, to give up their vacations, the former nurse told reporters in a scrum.

The minister has had an abundance of time to plan appropriately and invest in health care and staffing to make sure that exhausted nurses whove been working flat-out for two years during this pandemic can finally take a break.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca
Declaring the pandemic situation over, Manitobas largest school division has informed its education workers they must now obtain a doctors note if they call in sick for more than three days  even if they have tested positive for COVID-19.

Declaring the "pandemic situation" over, Manitobas largest school division has informed its education workers they must now obtain a doctors note if they call in sick for more than three days  even if they have tested positive for COVID-19.

A reminder sent to staff members in the Winnipeg School Division has sparked confusion about public-health protocols in kindergarten-to-Grade 12 buildings as the world marks nearly 25 months of an ongoing public-health crisis.

"Staff are basically being told to come back ASAP and not worry about who they infect anymore," said an employee at Elmwood High School, who received a memo Tuesday morning about WSD reverting to its pre-COVID-19 absence reporting protocols.

The internal email, which was sent from the human resources department, indicates staff members are expected to return with a medical note if they are off work for upwards of three days because Manitobas self-isolation mandate ended.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES The Winnipeg School Division administration building in Winnipeg.

"We are no longer in a pandemic situation and therefore quarantine (a specific absence management code) should not be used," it states.

On March 12, 2020, the day Manitoba confirmed the first local virus case, the provinces top doctor encouraged managers to review continuity plans and allow employees to stay home when ill, "without facing barriers such as the requirement for sick notes."

One day earlier, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. That global designation remains intact, despite the recent end to Manitobas public-health mandates, which have been replaced with recommendations.

We are no longer in a pandemic situation and therefore quarantine (a specific absence management code) should not be used.  Internal memo

It is now recommended rather than required that individuals who test positive for the virus self-isolate for five days after their symptoms started and until they have no fever and other symptoms have improved over a 24-hour period.

The mixed messaging between WSDs policy and provincial isolation advice is not lost on Michelle Driedger, a researcher interested in health risk communication and risk perception at the University of Manitoba, who noted emerging evidence suggests people should actually still be quarantining for eight to 10 days when they have COVID-19.

"This is going to push people to go to work when maybe they shouldnt," said the professor of community health sciences. "Its definitely confusing."

Driedger said requiring a sick note is an added burden being placed on K-12 workers who have been forced to pivot constantly throughout the pandemic, only to be told they cannot be trusted to be "good actors" anymore.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES This is going to push people to go to work when maybe they shouldnt, said Michelle Driedger, a professor of community health sciences at the University of Manitoba.

"The government messaging that the pandemic is over has been very well received by folks. People are tired. They are burned out. And its what weve been waiting to hear," said Lauren Hope, a parent and teacher who co-founded Safe September MB, a collective that has been advocating for additional public-health measures in schools since 2020.

The reality is that COVID-19 persists and is both infecting and reinfecting individuals, as well as greatly affecting families with children who cannot yet be immunized and Manitobans who are at a higher-risk of severe outcomes, Hope added.

Doctors Manitobas stance is that sick notes should not be required "at this stage of the pandemic" because public-health advice continues to include isolation after an infection.

The Manitoba Teachers Society echoed that perspective Tuesday.

"We realize that collective agreement language may require a sick note. But lets be reasonable about implementation," wrote union leader James Bedford, in a prepared statement.

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES We realize that collective agreement language may require a sick note. But lets be reasonable about implementation, wrote Manitoba Teachers Society president James Bedford in a prepared statement.

WSD spokeswoman Radean Carter indicated there is more leeway than the internal email implies and absences are being handled on a case-by-case basis.

"Human resources is taking into consideration those instances when a person is being responsible and self-isolating when discussing the need for a physicians note," Carter said, adding the division continues to encourage employees to stay home if they are sick and use standard sick time.

Teachers in WSD are allotted 20 sick days per year. During the period in which public health mandated that people with positive test results quarantine, the division introduced a provision for employees to take an additional five days off if they were either deemed a close contact or had contracted the virus.

Human resources is taking into consideration those instances when a person is being responsible and selfisolating when discussing the need for a physicians note.  WSD spokeswoman Radean Carter

The provision ceased to be in effect on March 15, when masks and isolation stints became optional. At the same time, schools entered code green on Manitobas colour-coded pandemic-response system, meaning there is apparently limited risk of transmission.

The COVID-19 school dashboard, a resource that once listed cases affiliated with schools, has since been scrubbed from a provincial website.

The provinces decision to stop publishing regular pandemic data makes it impossible to know the current risk level and whether Manitoba is on the cusp of another wave, according to Driedger.

"You have people who want to be responsible, and yet they are running into barriers and well, if they think: government doesnt seem to care and government doesnt want to make it easy for me to do the right thing, then why should I bother? then thats going to lead down a much scarier, slippery slope of people abandoning even what they know to be the right things to do," she said.

You have people who want to be responsible, and yet they are running into barriers and well, if they think: government doesnt seem to care and government doesnt want to make it easy for me to do the right thing, then why should I bother?"  Michelle Driedger, University of Manitoba

The professor added she is already seeing this play out, as fewer people don masks in schools and other public spaces when the science is clear that such personal protective equipment is an effective way to protect the person wearing it and others.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @macintoshmaggie

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An economic impact study of provincial government cuts and closures in Portage la Prairie shows 456 public sector jobs that pay $27.6 million in wages and salaries will be affected.

An economic impact study of provincial government cuts and closures in Portage la Prairie shows 456 public sector jobs that pay $27.6 million in wages and salaries will be affected.

The study looks at cuts to the Addictions Foundation of Manitobas Compass Residential Program, the Crown Lands Property Agencys real estate division and closures slated for this year at Red River College Polytechnics Stevenson campus in Southport, the Agassiz Youth Centre and the 2024 shutdown of the Manitoba Developmental Centre.

"There definitely will be a huge economic impact," said Portage la Prairie Mayor Irvine Ferris.

"These jobs that are being moved out of Portage are full-time jobs that pay benefits, they have a pension plan  the kind of jobs where people could take a mortgage, raise 2.5 kids and contribute to the community," he said.

An average annual salary of $64,600 is associated with the five Portage organizations, according to Economic and Tax Revenue Impact Assessment: Portage la Prairies Public Sector Employment Reductions. The report by Manitobas former chief statistician Wilf Falk was commissioned by the Manitoba Government and General Employees Union.

It found that 456 working families will be impacted if the Manitoba government goes ahead with its plans to cut and close public workplaces in Portage, which has a population of 13,270.

Of the 456 affected workers, 349 live and work in Portage and contribute $7.6 million in federal, provincial, and municipal taxes.

BORIS MINKEVICH / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS files Portage la Prairie Mayor Irvine Ferris

Ferris said its the first time the community has seen the impact of all the planned public sector cuts researched and spelled out.

"It looks very accurate and it really gives the business community an idea of what the impact is  this is something we didnt really have before," the mayor said.

Portage has long anticipated the 2024 closure of the Manitoba Developmental Centre and the loss of more than 400 jobs, said Ferris.

"For the last eight years, weve really focused on economic development, creating jobs, and weve seen some big successes," he said. "Weve seen over a billion dollars in industrial investment." The Roquette pea protein processing plant has 120 good paying jobs, said Ferris. The expansion of the Simplot potato processing plant added 79 jobs. Nearly 200 newer jobs wont offset the losses of the public sector cuts and closures, he said.

"So theres a pretty devastating impact."

Agriculture is the main industry in Portage, and the public sector jobs are what helps the local economy weather tough times in the ag sector, the mayor said.

"Every once in awhile they have bad year, they have weather events, commodity prices are low, and these other jobs really backstop our local economy because theyre stable," said Ferris. "Theyre not weather dependent. Theyre very different than ag jobs. Often they provide that stability for our business people, our merchants  and their incomes dont vary that much."

The economic assessment includes MGEU member salaries and benefits only, and not the loss of management salaries, Falk said in an interview from Victoria, B.C. where hes semi-retired and works as a consultant.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Closing the Manitoba Developmental Centre will mean a loss of 400 jobs in the city of Portage la Prairie.

"Whats more important is it doesnt include the goods and services that these organizations purchased," said Falk. "For example, the MDC and Agassiz buy food and beverages for residents  that is not included because we had no way of getting good, accurate information."

The report does not look at what the government would save from the public sector reductions but raises questions about their potential cost to the community. For instance, how will employees having to relocate affect housing in Portage, Falk asked.

"Whats the impact of a whole bunch of homes coming onto the market at the same time? Whats going to happen to house prices?"

Falk said the estimates cant be considered an "economic loss to the province" because not all the income received by the 456 impacted employees would disappear. Severance payments would be received for job losses, thered be retirements with pension benefits, job transfers to other public sector locations in the province, and employment insurance payments to those out of work.

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Ferris said Portage has submitted proposals to the province for re-purposing the MDC but has not received a response or any indication from the province that help is coming in its April 12 budget to offset public sector job losses.

"We know that the jobs being lost in the Portage la Prairie area are good, family-supporting jobs that contribute to the local economy," MGEU president Kyle Ross said in a press release Tuesday.

"These job losses hurt families, damage the local economy, and force future generations out of their community. We are calling on the provincial government to recommit to investing in the region," Ross said.

The Progressive Conservative MLA for Portage la Prairie, Ian Wishart, said he is committed to advocating for economic development in his constituency.

"Our government is working closely with staff to develop individualized plans," he said in a statement Wednesday. "We will be communicating with the union, staff representatives at AYC and directly with affected staff about next steps. As soon as the process is developed with the MGEU, we will be meeting with each staff individually to inform them how this closure affects them personally and an opportunity to ask questions."

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca
The geopolitical views of my grandmother, Florence ODriscoll, could have been summed up in seven words: The Germans have war in their blood. Even as a child, I suspected the world must be more complicated than that, but I never contradicted her. She came by those views the hard way.

Opinion

The geopolitical views of my grandmother, Florence ODriscoll, could have been summed up in seven words: "The Germans have war in their blood." Even as a child, I suspected the world must be more complicated than that, but I never contradicted her. She came by those views the hard way.

Most Irish Catholics of her time hated England, but she reserved her hatred for Germany because half the young men she had known were killed in the First World War. She had to make sense of why Newfoundlanders were being killed by Germans thousands of kilometres from home, and that was her answer.

During the Second World War, she ran a boarding house where naval officers on the North Atlantic convoy run stayed between trips. The only surviving baby picture shows me in the lap of a young Canadian lieutenant who was dead less than a month later, torpedoed by a U-boat right outside the harbour-mouth. Germans again. She never forgave them.

She was wrong, of course, and nobody talks about the Germans like that nowadays. Well, some Russians still do, but a lot of people in the West are in the process of transferring that slander to the Russians themselves. They now believe  largely thanks to the invasion of Ukraine  that its the Russians who have war in their blood.

What dragged this growing conviction out into the light was Joe Bidens unfortunate remark that Russian President Vladimir Putin "cannot remain in power." That was widely interpreted as an incitement to regime change in Moscow, which would be a good idea but is not a permissible comment in terms of international diplomatic discourse.

The White House duly issued denials that Biden was threatening to overthrow Putin, and the news cycle moved on to the next topic. However, public discussion of the possibility that Putin might be toppled has raised a different and more fundamental question: would getting rid of Putin actually make any difference?

There are doubtless another dozen people writing articles about this right now, but the first one to catch my attention was in the "i", the London paper which claims to be for "lapsed readers of quality newspapers." Its title was "Getting rid of Putin is not the answer  this runs deeper," and it is fairly representative of its kind.

It was written by Mark Wallace, chief executive of the ConservativeHome blog, who asserts that "the uncomfortable truth behind (Putins) retention of power, and what he chooses to do with it, is that a large and powerful portion of Russian society actively likes what he does.

"Putin assessed what would make him a popular leader and set about doing it. The bloody trail of conflict he has drawn from Moscow through Georgia, Syria and Ukraine  is inherent to his pitch to his constituency, both at the top of Russias economic, military and political establishments and to the man and woman on the street."

In other words, the Russians have war in their blood.

Even the polls say so. In a telephone survey of Russians three weeks ago by Lord Ashworth Polls, 76 per cent said that they supported the "special military operation" in Ukraine, 81 per cent said it was necessary to protect Russian security, and 85 per cent had a favourable view of Vladimir Putin.

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The numbers are untrustworthy, of course: would you always tell the truth to a stranger ringing up out of the blue and asking dangerous questions? It was also striking that a majority of the youngest age group (18-to-24-year-olds) actually opposed the war, so theres some hope there if you want it. But a clear majority of Russians strongly back the invasion of Ukraine.

The Russians are deluded, but its a delusion that has struck almost all the former European colonial powers after they lost their empires. You might call it "post-imperial muscle memory," like the phantom sensation that an amputated leg is still there even after its gone. It generally involves several foredoomed wars.

The peak period for this was 1950-1975, when the French, the British and the Portuguese each fought several futile wars to hang on to their colonies, or at least to ensure that "friendly" regimes inherited power after independence: Algeria and Vietnam; Kenya and Cyprus; Angola and Mozambique.

The Russian empire died much later (1991), partly because it was a land empire, with lots of Russians settled in all the colonies, and partly because it pretended not to be an empire for its last 70 years, calling itself the Soviet Union instead. So most Russians dont even grasp the connection with decolonization elsewhere.

But it is really the same transitory phenomenon, with the same inevitable outcome. The Russians dont really have war in their blood permanently. No more than everybody else does, anyway.

Gwynne Dyers new book is The Shortest History of War.
A NEW report issued by the National Housing Council reveals that most of the investments in new rental housing under the federal governments much anticipated National Housing Strategy are not going toward those with the greatest need for public housing.

Opinion

A NEW report issued by the National Housing Council reveals that most of the investments in new rental housing under the federal governments much anticipated National Housing Strategy are not going toward those with the greatest need for public housing.

In fact, the majority of the housing that has been funded is only affordable to high-income households.

For example, one affordable development in downtown Winnipeg charges $1,756 a month for a bachelor  2.3 times the average market rent for a bachelor in that area. To put this in perspective, a single person relying on social assistance for income receives $576 a month for rent.

Housing advocates across the country are disappointed. For years, they called on the federal government to create a national strategy to meet the housing needs of people living with low incomes and experiencing homelessness. At that time, Canada was the only G8 country without one.

The National Housing Strategy was finally launched in 2017 with much-needed ambitious goals. These include ending chronic homelessness in Canada by 2030 and removing 530,000 families from core housing need  these families are typically low-income renters who spend more than 30 per cent of their household income on rent.

In 2019, a requirement to improve housing outcomes for those in greatest need was embedded in federal legislation.

These are worthy goals. But it is not possible to end chronic homelessness and remove families from core housing need without an increase in the supply of deeply affordable housing whose rents are geared to a households income.

Unfortunately, the National Housing Councils report makes it clear that two of the three major National Housing Strategy programs holding the bulk of the funding for creating rental housing will produce very little housing that is deeply affordable.

The Rental Construction Financing Initiative is the largest program in the strategy by total funding, with 20,000 units planned, in progress or completed. More than 60 per cent of the units created under this loans program are unaffordable to middle-income households. About 97 per cent are unaffordable to low-income families.

The National Housing Co-Investment Fund is the second largest program, with 10,100 units planned, in progress or completed. About 50 per cent of the units created under this program are unaffordable to middle-income households; approximately 65 per cent are unaffordable to low-income households.

In both programs, nearly all units created are expected to be unaffordable to people experiencing homelessness and to families with very low incomes  those who make up the majority of families in core housing need.

One major reason for these outcomes is that these programs define affordability in a way that targets the creation of housing that is only affordable to middle- and high-income households.

The Rapid Housing Initiative is the third of the three major rental housing programs in the strategy. The report says it shows promise for addressing core housing need by creating housing affordable to people with low incomes, including those experiencing homelessness. This is no surprise, as it is the only program that was actually designed to do this.

However, it is the smallest of the three programs, with only 4,800 units planned, in progress or completed. Further, the program wasnt even part of the National Housing Strategy when it was launched; it was created in 2020 as a pandemic response and it is not clear whether it will continue to be available as a funding source throughout the rest of the strategy, which runs until 2028.

Several questions must be asked: Why has the federal government designed programs within the strategy in a way that makes it impossible to achieve the goals of the strategy? Why arent public dollars being prioritized for programs that provide housing for those who need it most?

The private rental market cannot be expected to provide adequate housing that rents for under $600 per month  it cannot make money under this model. It is the responsibility of all levels of government to step in and meet that need.

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With nearly 25 per cent of planned funding for the three major rental supply programs already committed, where do we go from here to ensure we make better use of whats left?

Advocates across the country are calling on the federal government to make changes to its strategy. At the very least, adjust program design to ensure existing programs actually target the creation of housing that is affordable to people living with low incomes and to those experiencing homelessness.

As an alternative, the federal government should reallocate funds away from programs that arent meeting those needs, such as the Rental Construction Financing Initiative, to programs that do, including the Rapid Housing Initiative.

Homelessness and housing insecurity cannot be addressed without a long-term financial commitment to provide and preserve deeply affordable non-market housing. The federal government has committed $40 billion for housing over 10 years; the potential to have an impact is there, but it requires the government to respond to the recommendations suggested by the National Housing Councils report and other advocates.

Lets not let this opportunity  and this money  go to waste.

Kirsten Bernas and Codi Guenther are members of the Winnipeg-based Right to Housing Coalition.
ITS supposed to address a crisis, but the name of the legislation may just put you to sleep  Act Respecting Online Communications Platforms that Make News Content Available to Persons in Canada.

Opinion

ITS supposed to address a crisis, but the name of the legislation may just put you to sleep  Act Respecting Online Communications Platforms that Make News Content Available to Persons in Canada.

In fact, many of us in the news business have pretty much nodded off waiting for the bill to be introduced in the House of Commons this week that would require digital platforms such as Google and Facebook to negotiate payments for content with news publishers.

News Media Canada, which represents daily and community newspapers across the country, started lobbying in early 2016 to get the federal government to force digital companies to support journalism. Six years later, we finally seem to be getting somewhere on what Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez described recently as "a crisis in the Canadian news system."

Crisis, indeed. News Media Canada representatives were met with blank stares when we first started using that word with federal politicians and officials six years ago. Even though a steady stream of newspapers had been closing for years and remaining newsrooms dwindled as staffing was cut, there was little awareness that public-interest journalism was in trouble in Canada, or that the government could play a role in helping it survive.

To be fair, the Liberal government eventually woke up to the problem and introduced unprecedented support programs for written journalism. The largest of these is a five-year program to subsidize newsroom salaries through refundable tax credits. There is also a consumer program, an annual tax credit for digital news subscriptions.

While welcome, many of us regarded these efforts as Band-Aids rather than cures for what ails the news business.

The macro problem for news is that advertising dollars have moved out of traditional media, especially newspapers, to digital platforms that are not in the business of running local, regional and national newsrooms to provide comprehensive reporting for communities.

Local auto dealers used to support local journalism by buying ads in local newspapers. Now they spend most of their budgets on digital ads, and most of that money goes to companies that produce no local news. Those ads often appear in conjunction with news and information generated by news publishers that arent getting paid anything for the content or the ads.

News Media Canada and others initially suggested that the Trudeau government tax companies like Google and Facebook and use that money to support journalism. The government took half the advice  it agreed to provide some support but did not get the money from the digital companies.

This was not surprising  Google and Facebook lobby hard against government regulation. In recent years they have also undertaken significant programs to support journalism and individual news outlets in an effort to demonstrate that government intervention is not necessary.

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Canada seemed content to accept this. Then the Australian government took on the digital giants and passed legislation to address the huge imbalance in media created by the dominance of Google and Facebook. The Australian law requires digital companies to negotiate deals with news publishers  or have them imposed by a regulator.

It became the model for Canadian news publishers, and the Liberal government has adopted a made-in-Canada version.

It legislates what already operates informally. Google and Facebook have both signed deals with multiple publishers, including the Winnipeg Free Press. The new bill will broaden the number of recipients and influence the size and scope of deals.

Most importantly, it will enshrine in law the principle that the journalism organizations that originate news content deserve to be compensated for it as it is searched and shared on digital platforms.

Thats a key step in addressing the "crisis" in Canadian news, and suggests were no longer just sleepwalking into the future.

Bob Cox is the publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press and past chair of News Media Canada.
The dream seems enticing: use the Port of Churchill to ship Canadian oil and gas to European customers so theyre not dependent on buying energy from Russia and thereby contributing to the war effort of President Vladimir Putin.

The dream seems enticing: use the Port of Churchill to ship Canadian oil and gas to European customers so theyre not dependent on buying energy from Russia and thereby contributing to the war effort of President Vladimir Putin.

The reality is more down to earth, especially for Manitobans who know previous grandiose plans to develop the port on Hudson Bay have been unable to adapt to the formidable challenges of inhospitable geography, extreme weather and legitimate environmental and land-claim concerns.

The latest enthusiastic proclamations of the ports unfulfilled potential came in the past week from two authoritative voices in the federal Conservative Party.

Conservative leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre wants to pre-approve export and shipping permits to export energy from Churchill. (Adrian Wyld / The Canadian Press files)

Peter MacKay, a former cabinet minister in the government of Stephen Harper, wrote an opinion column that appeared in the March 31 National Post, headlined "Manitoba could become Europes not-so-secret weapon against Russia."

He views Manitoba as aiding the worlds fight against Russias aggression against Ukraine by providing an alternative to the reliance on Russian gas, supplying allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific with Canadian energy through the Port of Churchill.

A related idea was outlined in Winnipeg last weekend by MP and leadership aspirant Pierre Poilievre, widely considered the frontrunner leading up to the Conservatives convention on Sept. 10. Were he to win the leadership and become prime minister, he says he would "quickly pre-approve export and shipping permits for oil at the port so that we can export Canadas energy to the world from Churchill."

Such think-big exhortations have been expressed often since the port was built in the late 1920s and began exporting grain shipments in 1931. Such ambitious concepts have usually been brought down to size by the magnitude of the obstacles that are specific to Churchill.

CP Previous plans to develop the port on Hudson Bay have been unable to adapt to the formidable challenges of inhospitable geography, extreme weather and environmental and land-claim concerns. (John Woods / The Canadian Press files)

Winter weather is a major handicap, as ice blocks the port for most of the year. In the past, its been accessible to ships only between late July and early November although, with climate change leading to ice melting more rapidly, the shipping season is expected to grow longer.

No roads lead to Churchill. Cargo must be brought in via a railway line from The Pas, and that track is occasionally unusable owing to shifting ground due to permafrost. The pipeline proposed by Mr. Poilievre  it would carry up to 200,000 barrels daily from Albertas oilsands to Churchill  would also inevitably be challenged by Indigenous groups that claim the land along the route of the pipeline, and also by environmental groups concerned about the impacts  including the danger of spillage  on the pristine northern terrain.

Realistic plans for the port are encouraged but, crucially, must be developed in co-operation with Arctic Gateway Group, the consortium of First Nations, local government and corporate investors that bought the port and the Hudson Bay Railway in 2018.

Mr. Poilievre did not consult the consortium or relevant Indigenous interests before presenting his pledge in Winnipeg on Saturday, a misstep that reveals a lack of familiarity with the essential protocols for doing business in northern Manitoba.

Acknowledging the challenges faced by the port in the past does not automatically discount future successes. New circumstances  notably, wide demand for alternatives to Russian energy and a longer shipping season created by climate change  warrant new consideration of the ports potential.

But the port dreams touted by the two Conservatives lack the depth to be taken seriously. Until Manitoba hears credible details, the musings of Mr. MacKay and Mr. Poilievre should be properly disregarded as off-the-cuff blueskying. They would be well advised to come back to Manitoba with a real plan.
Health Minister Audrey Gordon has some new talking points on Manitoba emergency room overcrowding.

Asked this week about soaring wait times at Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg, she said delays may be long for "less urgent" patients but the "sickest" ones are getting good care.

Thats either a deliberate attempt to play down the seriousness of long ER wait times or another example of the poor grasp Gordon has of her department.

"I want to assure Manitobans that our sickest patients that show up in our emergency departments, that we are providing quality, safe care," the health minister said in the legislature Monday.

"We know that less urgent patients, the levels are higher than we would like them to be, but we continue to work with our health system leadership to identify opportunities to increase medicine capacity, and there will be more news in the budget next week."

If the minister read her briefing books, she would know wait times for the "sickest" patients who present at emergency departments have never been long. Thats not where the problem lies.

SHANNON VANRAES / FREE PRESS FILES If the minister read her briefing books, she would know wait times for the "sickest" patients who present at emergency departments have never been long. Thats not where the problem lies.

Patients categorized as Level 1 or 2 under the Canadian Triage Acuity Scale who have life-threatening illnesses or injuries have always been given priority over less urgent patients, for good reason.

Those assessed at Level 4 or 5, the lowest levels of acuity, usually wait the longest. It doesnt mean the delays they face are acceptable. However, the CTAS system is a reasonable way of trying to get medical care to those who need it the quickest.

The greatest challenge when it comes to ER wait times revolves around Level 3 patients, the most common level of acuity in Winnipeg emergency departments.

They are not considered the "sickest," at least not when triaged, but they may have serious or multiple conditions that require admission to a hospital bed. Those are the patients who tend to wait the longest in ER wards, often because they may wait a day (or several) to get a hospital bed.

When that happens (it is happening often these days) there are fewer assessment spots and less available staff in ERs to examine new patients who arrive. That causes bottlenecks in the system and longer wait times for everyone.

Its not a new phenomenon; its been going on for at least two decades.

Its not a new phenomenon; its been going on for at least two decades.

A wait time reduction task force commissioned in 2016 by then-premier Brian Pallister (the findings of which were released in 2017, about the same time the Tories began implementing their hospital consolidation plan) confirmed ER wait times are caused largely by admitted patients in emergency departments waiting for medical beds.

It also found Level 3 patients experienced some of the longest wait times.

"(Level 3 patients) are often the ones contributing to long waits, as they are large in number, not sick enough to be first in line but often too weak or ill to be kept in a chair," the task force, co-chaired by Winnipeg ER physician Dr. Alecs Chochinov, wrote. "Once evaluated, if they cannot go home and there is no inpatient capacity, they can languish in the ED for hours or days, blocking beds. They are referred to, in common ED parlance, as boarders."

Theyre not the "sickest" patients, as Gordon referred to, but they are the ones waiting the longest and contributing to ER overcrowding, owing to a lack of hospital capacity.

MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS FILES Its startling Health Minister Audrey Gordon seems to have no understanding of those developments nor of the dynamics behind growing ER wait times.

Gordon said ERs have been particularly busy because of the pandemic. In fact, even when the number of COVID-19 patients in hospital were relatively low last year, ER wait times were rising. They are now higher than prior to hospital consolidation in 2017 and 2019.

The reason: the consolidation process was rushed, hospital budgets were cut and there werent enough resources allocated to the three remaining acute care hospitals in Winnipeg (HSC, St. Boniface and Grace hospitals).

The 2017 task force recommended government delay and reconsider aspects of the second phase of consolidation  and warned of the dangers of rushing the process without adequate resources in place. Government ignored those recommendations.

Its startling Gordon seems to have no understanding of those developments nor of the dynamics behind growing ER wait times. The talking points shes been given make her sound even more misinformed.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  The mass killing that left six people dead and 12 wounded outside bars just blocks from Californias Capitol last weekend was a gunfight involving at least five shooters from rival gangs, Sacramento police said Wednesday.

In this undated photo provided by the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry is Dandrae Martin. Sacramento police announced an arrest, Monday, April 4, 2022, connected to the shooting that killed and injured multiple people in the heart of California's capital as at least two shooters fired more than 100 rounds and people ran for their lives. Police said they booked Dandrae Martin, 26, as a "related suspect" on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and being a convict carrying a loaded gun. (Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry via AP)

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  The mass killing that left six people dead and 12 wounded outside bars just blocks from Californias Capitol last weekend was a gunfight involving at least five shooters from rival gangs, Sacramento police said Wednesday.

Police said they identified at least five gunmen but there may have been more. Only two suspects  both brothers wounded by gunfire  have been arrested in connection with the shooting and, so far, only face firearms charges.

We're still working through ... who the actual shooters are in the case, Sgt. Zach Eaton said.

Until Wednesday's announcement, police had been silent on what led to the shooting that erupted early Sunday as bars were letting out. Rapid-fire bursts of over 100 gunshots echoed through the streets as terrified patrons ran for their lives and others were hit by bullets.

Police said at least two gangs were involved. They declined to provide more details or name the gangs involved or the affiliation of any suspects.

In this 2018 photo provided by the Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff's Office is Dandrae Martin. Sacramento police announced an arrest, Monday, April 4, 2022, connected to the shooting that killed and injured multiple people in the heart of California's capital as at least two shooters fired more than 100 rounds and people ran for their lives. Police said they booked Dandrae Martin, 26, as a "related suspect" on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and being a convict carrying a loaded gun. (Maricopa County Sheriff's Office via AP)

Experts said that if gangs were to blame, it would mark an unusually bloody feud.

In 20 years of researching gangs in Los Angeles, Alex Alonso said he cant remember a gang-related shooting with such a high body count.

Its extremely rare that a gang shooting happened as the way this one is being characterized, Alonso said. Its extremely rare to have that happen in a public place with so many victims.

In this undated photo provided by the Sacramento Loaves & Fishes is Melinda Davis, 57, one of the people killed in the weekend mass shooting in California's capital. (Sacramento Loaves & Fishes via AP)

Gregory Chris Brown, a criminal justice professor at California State University, Fullerton, said gangs often target rivals in drive-by shootings with fewer victims, though innocent bystanders are sometimes also struck.

The location of the Sacramento shooting  in a bustling area of watering holes near the entertainment district  was incidental to whatever fueled the fight.

If rival gang members see each other it doesnt matter if theyre in the Capitol of the United States of America, Brown said. If you see a rival gang member and youre going to attack them, it doesnt matter where they are.

In this undated photo provided by the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry is Dandrae Martin. Sacramento police announced an arrest, Monday, April 4, 2022, connected to the shooting that killed and injured multiple people in the heart of California's capital as at least two shooters fired more than 100 rounds and people ran for their lives. Police said they booked Dandrae Martin, 26, as a "related suspect" on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and being a convict carrying a loaded gun. (Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry via AP)

The large number of casualties was the result of high-capacity weapons in a crowded area, he said.

Berry Accius, founder of Voice of the Youth who leads gun intervention and prevention programs and offered his services to counsel families who lost loved ones in the shooting, criticized police for characterizing the crime as gang-related, which he said will lead some to think Black people.

He said people will see the photos of the Black women and men who were shot, assume they were in a gang and wonder why gang members are downtown.

Penelope Scott talks about her son, De'vazia Turner, one of the victims killed in a mass shooting, during an interview with The Associate Press in Elk Grove, Calif., Monday, April 4, 2022. Multiple people were killed and injured in the shooting a day earlier.(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Thats the narrative we dont need at this particular time, Accius said. "This idea that were going to put blame to one demographic of folks and blame them for the violence that ensued.

Bill Sanders, a criminologist at Cal State LA, said he wanted to see more evidence the shooting was gang-related, a term police often use to drum up support. He said gang shootings are more mundane and most occur in what are considered gang neighborhoods.

If you looked at a map of gang homicides in the city  or any city  over time, youd see the same areas lighting up  meaning thats where they occur. If these guys were white, this wouldnt be considered gang related  not even for a minute.

Photographs of De'vazia Turner are on display as his mother Penelope Scott speaks to the media during an interview at the corner of 10th and K street in Sacramento, Calif., on Monday, April 4, 2022. Turner was shot and killed after a shooting broke out early Sunday morning. Multiple people were killed and injured in the shooting. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group via AP)

Authorities credited witnesses who contributed nearly 200 videos, photos and other tips with helping the investigation.

Police were trying to determine if a stolen handgun found at the crime scene was used in the massacre. It had been converted to a weapon capable of automatic gunfire.

They are also investigating whether a gun one of the brothers, Smiley Martin, 27, brandished in a video was used in the shooting, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press. The official was briefed on the investigation but was not authorized to publicly discuss details and spoke on condition of anonymity.

A person who did not want to be identified holds a photograph of Melinda Davis, 57, during a candlelight vigil held at Ali Youssefi Square in Sacramento, Calif., late Monday, April 4, 2022. Davis was one of the people killed after a shooting that occurred early Sunday. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group via AP)

Martin and his brother were among those wounded in the gunfire that erupted about 2 a.m. Sunday as bars closed and patrons filled the streets.

The Sacramento County coroner identified the three women killed as Johntaya Alexander, 21; Melinda Davis, 57; and Yamile Martinez-Andrade, 21. The three men killed were Sergio Harris, 38; Joshua Hoye-Lucchesi, 32; and Devazia Turner, 29.

Ten people were wounded in addition to the Martin brothers. At least two remained hospitalized with gunshot wounds.

Gabrielle Knox, 9, of Sacramento, stares at the flame of a candle during a vigil held at Ali Youssefi Square in Sacramento, Calif., late Monday, April 4, 2022. Multiple people were killed and injured after a shooting that occurred early Sunday. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group via AP)

Smiley Martin faces charges of possession of a firearm by a prohibited person and possession of a machine gun. He remained hospitalized and it wasnt clear if he had an attorney who could speak for him.

His brother, Dandrae Martin, 26, was arrested as a related suspect and appeared briefly Tuesday in Sacramento Superior Court on a charge of being a convict carrying a loaded gun.

He did not enter a plea and his attorney said she would wait to see if prosecutors brought more serious charges before deciding whether to seek his release.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg reads the names of the shooting victims during a candlelight vigil held at Ali Youssefi Square in Sacramento, Calif., late Monday, April 4, 2022. Multiple people were killed and injured after a shooting that occurred early Sunday. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group via AP)

Both men have criminal records. Smiley Martin was released from prison in February after serving about half of a 10-year prison sentence for beating a girlfriend. He was denied parole last year after prosecutors said he clearly has little regard for human life, documents show.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg questioned why the brothers were on the streets.

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Those questions need to be answered and they will be answered over the days ahead, Steinberg said.

Antoinette Walker cries on the shoulder of Frank Turner as Penelope Scott speaks to the media during an interview at the corner of 10th and K street in Sacramento, Calif., on Monday, April 4, 2022. Walker is the older sister of De'vazia Turner, who was shot and killed during a mass shooting a day earlier. Frank Turner and Penelope Scott are the mother and father of De'vazia Turner. Multiple people were killed and injured in the shooting (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group via AP)

A 31-year-old man seen carrying a handgun immediately after the shooting was arrested Tuesday on a weapons charge. Police said they dont believe his gun was used in the shooting.

___

This version corrects that Smiley Martin served about half of a 10-year prison sentence, not about two years of the term.

___

Melley reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Stefanie Dazio, Christopher Weber in Los Angeles, Don Thompson in Sacramento, Michael Balsamo in Washington, Jacques Billeaud in Phoenix and News Researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York City contributed to this report.
The First Congregational United Church of Christ, 131 Sixth Ave., Baraboo, will host adult nurture sessions at 9 a.m. Sundays. Featured speakers are local residents who are making a difference in the lives of others.

Sunday: Judy Ellington, nurse practitioner, will discuss the grieving process following loss of any kind and describe the Growing through Grief sessions she facilitates.

April 24: Terry Haag, registered nurse, will discuss the current activities of two local nonprofits, Haiti Medical Mission of Wisconsin and the Thiotte Haiti Vulnerable Children Relief Inc, both of which endeavor to address the medical and educational needs of the community.

May 1: Dr. Rainey Briggs, Baraboo School District superintendent, will host a meet and greet.

May 15: Mary Bowers, Kids Ranch educational specialist, will describe the mission and current activities of this nonprofit for at risk children.
While two candidates each looked to unseat incumbent Baraboo City Council opponents during the Tuesday election, only one achieved that goal.

Bryant Hazard, who also secured his own incumbent seat in an unopposed Sauk County Board supervisor race, won out against incumbent Mike Plautz with 102 votes to 78, according to unofficial results.

Im grateful I won, Hazard said. Everybody whos going to run for a position isnt going to run and hope to lose.

Plautz has been a member of the council since January 2010, when he was appointed to replace his ailing predecessor. He said he appreciates support over the years and accepts that residents want to see someone new in the seat.

Ill miss the friendships I had on City Council and serving the people, but the people said its time for someone else, Plautz said.

On the bright side, Plautz said he will now have more time to focus on mission trips to other countries, like Haiti and the Philippines, which havent been possible in the last two years.

Plautz said he feels most proud of his time on council when they made progress, especially when it was the result of listening to the people. A four-way stop to avoid tragedy at the intersection of 5th Avenue and Oak Street next to Nanny Park and the construction of Baraboo City Hall as well as the soon-to-break-ground public library are at the forefront of that list of accomplishments.

He said he is especially glad the government body was able to form connections despite members differences.

To me, thats what serving on City Council is all about, its being a servant to the people, listening to what they have to say and then taking action on it, Plautz said. Even though we were, a lot of times, on different sides of issues, we were always friends. We got along with one another and thats something you dont always see in politics today.

Hazard aims to make progress as well, focusing on all facets of the city, but especially its financial issues which came to light in recent months.

My goal with both the county and the city is to make them a better place, Hazard said. With the city, its going to be a lot more difficult because they have financial problems. Im not saying Im going to walk in with all the answers ... but I bring in common sense and familiarity with budgets and accounting.

District 9 incumbent Ald. Kathleen Thurow held onto her seat despite being opposed for the second year in a row by Bob Wood. In unofficial results, Thurow won by a larger margin than in the 2021 spring election, at 169 votes to Woods 115 total.

District 6 Ald. John Ellington was reelected in an unopposed race with 145 votes. Candidates will be sworn in to office during a reorganizational meeting April 19 at City Hall.

Follow Bridget on Twitter @cookebridget or contact her at 608-745-3513.

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Screams filled a Sauk County courtroom Tuesday as the prosecutor played a recording from a 911 call during the first day of an attempted homicide jury trial.

The yelling was from a North Freedom woman in June 2020. Suzanne Bahr had called the police initially to report that she and her husband, Bill Bahr, were in their home around 3 a.m. when they heard what they thought were rocks being thrown against the siding, breaking windows. Panic set in as they realized it was gunshots.

Outside of 113 South Oak St., her son, Gary Wayne Dickson, was firing a Taurus Judge revolver at the home, leaving holes within the siding and smashing the windows to their bedroom. As a dispatcher worked to retain information about what was happening and a Sauk County sheriffs deputy was speeding toward the home from West Baraboo, Dickson smashed in a sliding glass door and entered the home. The Bahrs went into their basement, with Bill carrying a gun he had recently purchased.

While the prosecution and defense echoed one another in describing how these events unfolded, what happened next is unclear due to a divergence in their opening arguments.

Assistant District Attorney Rick Spoengten argued Dickson walked down the hallway to his parents bedroom carrying a flashlight and a gun before discovering they had gone downstairs to hide and allegedly fired at them repeatedly, missing by inches. Bill fired back.

Rather than say, running away, dropping the gun, Gary goaded him, Spoentgen said. You think youre that good, Bill? is what he said.

Dicksons attorney, Steven Sarbacker, told jury members that Bill Bahr initially told police that he had been the one to fire the first shot at Dickson. Sarbacker said that was legal because Bahr had the right to protect his home and Sarbacker didnt seek to vilify him. Though Sarbacker said it was when Bahr aimed through the floor blindly and shot Dickson two more times that it was no longer in self-defense.

Your house is a temporary shelter, Sarbacker said. Its not an execution chamber to get someone out of your life.

The responding deputy found Dickson in a pool of his blood, shirtless, in the home. He was taken to UW Hospital via MedFlight and treated for his wounds, which Sarbacker said went through Dicksons body.

Spoentgen said that while Dickson initially told authorities he didnt remember anything about that night, he voluntarily told a deputy who had later accompanied him to the hospital for a follow-up visit that he remembered specific details, like how the gun felt in his hand.

While prosecutors are arguing that Dickson intended to kill his stepfather and harm his mother, Sarbacker laid out a story of a man who has struggled with addiction and maintaining relationships. A man who was feeling anxious over a scheduled court appearance and wanted to talk to his mom.

Dickson was charged with strangling and beating up a woman in January 2020 in a West Baraboo hotel room. Responding officers found a knife in the wall of the room and Dickson lying next to the pool with a bleeding arm. According to the criminal complaint, the woman told police Dickson had allegedly held her down to a bed by her neck while threatening her with a knife and wrapped a phone cord around her neck as she attempted to escape. Dickson was found to have a blood alcohol level of 0.20%.

Dickson is not allowed in the North Freedom home after years of disagreement, Sarbacker said. That night, he had been staying with a friend roughly 10 miles away. He had been drinking. According to the criminal complaint, when his blood was tested at the hospital roughly two hours after he had been shot, he had a blood alcohol content of 0.13%. A later test through the Wisconsin Crime Lab found he also had ketamine in his system that night, which was revealed during a motion hearing March 11, according to court records.

Dickson called his mom repeatedly, leaving voicemails on the answering machine. Neither of the Bahrs answered the ringing landline because they were getting ready for bed.

Sarbacker said Dickson had attempted to die by suicide for the third time in his life that night, but for some reason, the gun he took from the friend he was staying with didnt go off when he aimed it at himself. Thats when he decided to drive to North Freedom.

He argued that it was not really a shootout, and that Bill Bahr told police he had been the first one to fire, hitting Dickson, and Dicksons bullets ended up far away from his parents. Sarbacker told the jury that Dickson cannot be found guilty of attempted intentional homicide because authorities had not proven Dickson meant the Bahrs harm. There was no ballistics expert brought in for example, he said. Dickson was acting irrationally because of his involuntary intoxication brought on by having alcohol use disorder.

What we have here is a tragedy, theres no doubt about it, Sarbacker said. People have a breaking point, whether its emotions or a combination of a lot of alcohol and a lot of drugs.

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Nine Beaver Dam businesses have been cited by police for selling alcohol to minors.

Police Chief John Kreuziger assessed 150 demerit points to eight of the businesses and 300 points to one, as it violated the law twice in one weekend.

The demerit point system is used to guide the Beaver Dam Administrative Committee and City Council in making possible license suspensions and revocations. Exceeding 200 demerit points within a rolling 18-month period could come with a recommendation to revoke the license. The committee and the council ultimately have discretion over what actions to take.

Kreuziger told the Administrative Committee on Monday night that police conducted compliance checks over the course of two February weekends at stores that sold alcohol. Taverns werent included in these checks.

He said there was no attempt to trick employees at the retail locations. Most of the purchases were made by a 17-year-old who provided his or her actual drivers license for identification, if requested. After the purchase, an officer immediately talked to the employee who handled the transaction and issued a $376 citation.

Liquor law violations occurred at the following businesses: BP Travel Mart, 821 Park Ave.; Piggly Wiggly, 810 Park Ave.; Recheks Food Pride, 609 N. Spring St.; Caseys General Store, 906 N. University Ave.; Exxon, 1516 N. Spring St.; Mobil, 201 S. Spring St.; Chill Zone, 801 Park Ave.; Kwik Trip, 1504 N. Center St.; and Walmart, 120 Frances Lane (two violations).

Im disappointed but I realize also that this was a great opportunity for these businesses to review their policies and procedures, Kreuziger said.

The chief and city attorney met with the liquor license holders and reported that the businesses took ownership of what occurred and made no excuses. Kreuziger said every one of the businesses was cooperative and is taking steps to prevent future issues.

He noted that Exxon has been under new ownership since the close of 2021. The previous owner failed multiple compliance checks and lost its liquor license for 10 days last summer.

He also said that Walmart, which was assessed 300 demerit points, took the most drastic measures following the incidents and has assured city officials that the company has zero tolerance for the offense.

Both employees were fired and now all employees have to enter in a date of birth at the register (when selling alcohol to anyone), he said.

Kreuziger recommended to the Administrative Committee that no further action be taken at this time, and the committee followed his recommendation.

Follow Kelly Simon on Twitter @KSchmidSimon or contact her at 920-356-6757.

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State lawmakers and fair organizers worry a state administrative rule regarding county fairs and festivals could, if approved, negatively impact small, rural fairs that go on during the fall.

The Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection rule, which was approved by Gov. Tony Evers on Feb. 10, would not allow county or district fairs to submit to the state for reimbursement regarding premiums paid to exhibitors if that exhibitor presented the same exhibit at a fair earlier in the year, according to a release state Rep. Tony Kurtz, R-Wonewoc.

This will hurt our small, rural fairs that occur later in the year the hardest, Kurtz said in the release. I am very concerned about what this will do to our local fairs in our communities such as the Elroy Fair or the Juneau County Fair, where many students exhibit at both fairs.

My objection is not for the entire rule, Kurtz said. Its just that one particular part on the way theyre going to treat the premium payments. It will hurt smaller, rural fairs.

Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, also said in a release that the rule is reasonable except for the part where fairs getting the same exhibit as a previous one cannot get reimbursement for premiums paid to exhibitors.

This may seem like a minor thing, but to young people and adults who show at fairs and work hard all summer to raise animals, refine recipes and create intricate crafts, the small premium awards paid by the fairs are major, Marklein said in the release.

Juneau County Fair secretary/manager Vicki McGowan echoed similar sentiments, saying that the aspect of the rule will cause small fairs to pay out of their own budgets for many exhibits. She added that the Juneau County Fair, which is slated for Aug. 14-21 this year, shares roughly 30% of exhibits, namely large ones, with the Elroy Fair, which is scheduled to go on between June 22-26.

Right now, exhibits are going down all the time, and so are the number of exhibitors, McGowan said. I really strongly feel we shouldnt be penalizing these kids for wanting to share their exhibits.

The new rule would not allow the Juneau County Fair to get state reimbursement for premiums paid to exhibitors that presented the same exhibit at the Elroy Fair. Kurtz and McGowan argued that what seems like the same exhibit goes through subtle changes over time, using livestock as an example.

The animal you take to the Elroy Fair at the end of June is not the exact same animal that youre going to be taking to the Juneau County Fair in the middle of August, said McGowan. That animal has grown, has changed. Youve had to re-clip it and take care of it for those two months. The kids really work hard and I dont want to see them penalized and not show at both fairs and receive premium money.

She added that while exhibitors can still receive premiums, those premiums will not be reimbursed to the fair that paid them out.

They show that animal in June and get a first-place ribbon, said Kurtz, citing the livestock example. They get a premium based on the way they place. Elroy is first, but lets say that same exhibitor wants to go to the Vernon County Fair, which is in September. Theres almost a three-month gap. What Im worried about is exhibitors are going to have to make the choice. Do I go to Vernon County Fair or the Elroy Fair?

Kurtz lauded some aspects of the new rule. He said that it updates to how fairs can structure exhibits and changes the rules on fair participation in a positive way. He added that changed language in the rule that omits required membership with FFA and 4-H will open up possibilities for organizations such as Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts to present exhibits at smaller fairs across the state.

These are all good things that will not only reflect our current day practices, but hopefully increase participation at our wonderful fairs throughout the state, Kurtz said in the release.

They took out the terms FFA and 4-H and just say educational organizations, said McGowan. That will help encompass more exhibitors. This is something weve been working on for way over 10-15 years to encourage more exhibitors to come. Were working on more after-school programs like the library has and at some of the schools to get more of the school clubs involved.
A Madison man remains in custody after allegedly leading Columbia County deputies on a chase last week at speeds in excess of 100 mph while fleeing a town of Caledonia hotel where hundreds of grams of methamphetamine were later found.

Paul R. Ripp, 49, has been charged with vehicle operator flee/elude officer, second-degree recklessly endangering safety and possession with intent to deliver methamphetamine. He is also facing charges of felony and misdemeanor bail jumping, possession of cocaine and possession of drug paraphernalia.

At his initial appearance on April 1, Ripp appeared by video from the Columbia County Jail after being arrested on March 29. During the hearing, Columbia County Judge Troy Cross set standard felony conditions for Ripp and set his cash bond at $25,000.

According to the criminal complaint filed on April 1:

Columbia County Sheriffs deputies were notified about Ripp, who had multiple active warrants, possibly being at a hotel in Caledonia on March 28. Law enforcement spoke with a hotel employee who stated Ripp had been staying at the hotel.

Deputies arrived on the scene and observed a white pickup truck, allegedly driven by Ripp. The truck left the hotel parking lot at high speeds and deputies pursued it because they believed the truck was being driven by Ripp.

The deputies in pursuit turned on their emergency lights and located Ripp on the Interstate traveling westbound. During the chase the officers reported going up to 116 mph. The truck exited the Interstate and onto Tritz Road.

While on Tritz Road, the deputies reported speeds reaching 90 mph. The complaint alleges the truck then turned onto Highway 33 going over 100 mph.

During the pursuit, a female passenger called the Sheriffs Office to say she was going to jump out of the vehicle once it slowed down. Deputies reported seeing a woman jump from the vehicle after it slowed down.

A lieutenant located the truck later in the woods and reported it appeared to have collided with a tree.

Law enforcement entered the hotel room Ripp was allegedly staying at in Caldeonia and found smoking pipes and small plastic bags with an unknown residue in. They also located Ripps drivers license in the room.

In the hotel room, officers allegedly found 338.4 grams of methamphetamine with a glass pipe with suspected methamphetamine residue. There was also a bag of suspected cocaine in the hotel room.

Wisconsin Dells Police informed authorities Ripp was at a Dells hotel the following day on March 29, and he was taken into custody.

Two Columbia County Sheriffs detectives interviewed Ripp on March 29. He allegedly admitted to driving the white pickup and took off when he noticed deputies following him.

The complaint alleges Ripp told the detectives he drove as fast as 120 mph on the Interstate. During the interview, Ripp admitted there was three-quarters of a pound of methamphetamine in the room, the complaint said.

Ripp allegedly said he deals drugs, mostly methamphetamine, during the interview.

Ripp is scheduled to be back in court on April 26 for a pre-trial conference.

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A Marquette County Sheriff Deputy has been fired for allegedly soliciting sexual activities from a minor.

Columbia County Sheriffs Office, along with the Wisconsin Department of Justices Division of Criminal Investigation, are conducting an external criminal investigation of former deputy Travis Bittelman.

The Marquette County Sheriffs Office will be conducting an internal investigation and review their policies.

In a statement, Columbia Sheriff Roger Brandner said Bittelman worked in the Marquette County Jail. He was arrested Tuesday evening on a tentative charge of using a computer to facilitate a child sex crime, Brandner said.

Our detectives worked all night and will continue to investigate this case, Brandner said. Their focus is finding the facts and as with any alleged criminal matter involving the solicitation of minors using the internet and social media, their goal is to ensure there are no other victims.

A statement released by Marquette Sheriff Joseph Konrath said the sheriffs office was aware of a video on YouTube claiming to show an off-duty officer soliciting sexual activities with a minor.

These are very serious allegations that our agency is deeply concerned about. The investigation of this matter is multi-faceted, Konrath said.

The Marquette County Sheriffs Office is committed to maintaining public trust and the safety of our community. If anyone has any credible information related to this case, they are encouraged to come forward by calling the Marquette County Sheriffs Office at 608-297-2115. You can remain anonymous if you wish by calling Marquette County Crime Stoppers at 800-297-8477(TIPS), Konrath said.

Konrath said the department plans to share the investigation when its completed.

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Portage is separated from Haiti by 1,967 miles, but many community members say theres more things connecting them to Haiti than there are dividing them.

One such connection is Schools for Haiti, a nonprofit dedicated to providing over 1,900 Haitian children with an education, a daily meal and other resources.

While the organization is based in Florida, many Portage community members have joined the effort, including Doug and Lois Fearing, owners of Fearing Audio and Video Security. The Fearings joined Schools for Haiti in 2014, which Doug says was an opportunity God just placed in our hearts.

When Lois and I visited for ourselves and saw the need, we had to get involved, he said.

The Fearings host the annual Schools for Haiti Gala. This years event will take place on April 30 at the Marriott West in Middleton. The fundraiser will include a silent and live auction, dinner, speakers and live music.

In total, Schools for Haiti operates nine schools in the Montrouis and St. Marc areas, but according to Justin OBoyle, a pastor at Portages City of Refuge Church, its about so much more than just book learning.

Haitis had so much civil unrest, theyve had earthquakes, people are living in half fallen down buildings OBoyle said. Theyve never had a chance to rebuild, theres no infrastructure.

OBoyle and City of Refuge became involved with Schools for Haiti four years ag after being introduced to the nonprofit by the Fearings. Since then, OBoyle has witnessed firsthand what life is like in a country the CIA World Factbook describes as the poorest in the Western Hemisphere.

When it rains, the little kids run out with drinking bottles, he said. They struggle with things like clean water, food and education.

The past two years alone seem to have exacerbated the already dire situation. Besides the pandemic, Haiti faced the assassination of its President Jovenel Moise in July, as well as a magnitude 7.2 earthquake in August. The United States Agency for International Development reported that Haitis adult literacy rate currently sits at 61%.

When you look at what weve been through as a nation over the last few years and you look at what Haitis going through, those are two completely different things, OBoyle said.

Theres hurting people all over the world.

Recognizing that hurt, Schools for Haiti was able to supply the country with over 1.2 million meals in the early months of the pandemic, continuing their support amid Americas own political unrest and economic issues.

Portage Realtor Cory Otto was also introduced to the nonprofit by the Fearings. He now serves as a Schools for Haiti board member. For him, it started with a mission trip.

Once I was able to see Haiti and what the Schools for Haiti program was doing I wanted to become a part of it, Otto said.

Otto added that while the organization allows Haitian children to attend school, it also provides opportunities for the adults to become educators, serving as teachers, as well as taking on other roles building and managing the schools.

Not only are we supporting and helping the youth with their education were also helping the economy, said Otto.

Beyond the calculable aspects of education and economic growth, Otto said another rewarding aspect of the program is the pride hes observed in the children.

Just to see the growth of the children ... to actually see kids who are excited to go to school, he said.
Constitutional Court finds police negligent in gang rape case

The Constitutional Court has made a historic finding, granting damages against the police for their failures in a case of kidnapping and rape

On Tuesday 5 April, the Constitutional Court handed down judgment in an appeal brought by activist and rape survivor Andy Kawa against the Minister of Police. The Court upheld Ms Kawas appeal with costs, finding that police were negligent in their investigation of the crimes of kidnapping and rape perpetrated against her. CALS intervened as a friend of the court and was permitted to present evidence in the matter.

In December 2010, author and entrepreneur Andy Kawa was abducted and brutally gang raped near Kings Beach in Port Elizabeth. Ms Kawa spent years pushing for the police to investigate the crimes committed against her, but was failed time and again by those meant to protect her. After years of fierce advocacy, Ms Kawa turned to the courts in an attempt to hold the police accountable for their failures. The High Court ruled in her favour, granting damages against the police. This judgment was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court of Appeal  with costs awarded against Ms Kawa.

Ms Kawa then took the matter on appeal to the Constitutional Court, arguing that it raises important constitutional issues. The Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) was admitted as a friend of the court and applied to present evidence in the matter. We argued that the police have a duty of care towards victims of crime and particularly sexual offences, that a victim-centred approach is crucial in cases of gender-based violence, and that a failure to investigate these crimes may result in secondary trauma and victimisation. CALS was represented by advocate Nasreen Rajab-Budlender SC and in-house counsel Lerato Phasha.

Yesterday, the Court handed down judgment in Ms Kawas favour. Justice Tlaletsi found that the police had been negligent in conducting their search and investigation and that these failures contributed to the harm experienced by Ms Kawa. Not only was the polices inaction negligent, it was also found to be wrongful: the police breached their constitutional duties to victims of gender-based violence in ways that were significant and actionable.

The Court further dismissed the Minister of Polices claim that finding police liable in this case would have a chilling effect on their ability to fulfil their obligations, since this is at odds with the central value of accountability. If anything, the Court suggests, not imposing liability would have a chilling effect on the ability of survivors of gender-based violence to vindicate their rights and hold the SAPS liable for any secondary victimisation it has caused. The Supreme Courts order is thus set aside and the High Courts judgment awarding damages stands.

Justice Tlaletsi further granted CALS application to present new evidence, finding our submissions were relevant and of assistance to the Court. He concludes that the evidence brought by CALS demonstrates how when the SAPS fail to act with empathy and compassion or engage in victim-blaming behaviour, this results in secondary victimisation and that this violates victims rights to equality, dignity and freedom from violence.

We are pleased with the outcome of this matter, says Sheena Swemmer, head of the Gender Justice programme at CALS. We hope that Ms Kawa finally has some sense of justice and closure after more than eleven years engaging with the legal system. This judgment is a step towards acknowledging victims rights and holding the police to a standard that is professional and compassionate in dealing with cases of gender-based violence. We continue to advocate for a charter of victims rights to guide norms and standards of policing.

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Art history students get hands-on curatorial experience at W&Ms Muscarelle Museum of Art

Curatorial Project: Students in the Curatorial Project course at William & Mary work alongside Muscarelle Museum of Art staff to create the exhibition The Curatorial Project: Leonard Baskin that will open April 15. Photo by Stephen Salpukas Photo - of - Hide Caption

Students curating a museum exhibition at William & Mary get the full experience.

This includes choosing artwork, writing accompanying text and deciding on placement in the gallery  all while working with the on-campus Muscarelle Museum of Arts collection, galleries and curatorial staff.

Its a relatively new course in our curriculum  a response to our students interest in museum work and to the availability of the Muscarelle Museum of Art, our university museum, which takes very seriously its role as a laboratory for learning, said Charles Palermo, professor of art history, who is teaching the course for the first time this semester as part of a rotation of faculty members who do so.

The Curatorial Project is a required practicum course for art history majors that is taught each spring in collaboration with the Muscarelle.

This year the coursework will culminate in the opening of The Curatorial Project: Leonard Baskin on April 15 at the Muscarelle. Students will give presentations there on April 25 at 3:30 p.m. as part of Undergraduate Research Month.

I am thrilled to have the opportunity to get experience in a museum itself and outside of the classroom, said Ivana Genov 23. Presenting at the Muscarelle is a great way for students to get familiar with the workings and environment of a museum and better understand the curatorial process. Additionally, the museum staff seems delighted to have us, (is) genuinely excited about our exhibit and conveys complete confidence in our abilities to curate a great show.

After studying the history, theory and politics of curating, students went on to apply what theyd learned in the hands-on curating of the exhibition. The course combines critical readings, classroom discussion, writing, exhibition design and implementation.

Students selected, researched, documented and wrote texts for this exhibition from the Muscarelles growing collection of works by Baskin, a mid-century American artist best known for his works on paper and his bleak portrayals of the human figure.

In addition to hosting their exhibition, the museum has a unique role in working with students from the Curatorial Project by providing first-hand interaction with primary source materials and art objects to directly support their research, said Melissa Parris, the Muscarelles deputy director of collections, exhibitions and operations.

Close engagement with the objects also gives students the opportunity to learn archival methods, proper handling and best practices in museum work  all of which are foundations for curatorship.

Alice Baughman 24 said she has enjoyed the hands-on work in the museum the most.

Its an extremely valuable experience as a student of art history to learn directly from professionals about the timeline, process and analytical work of curation, Baughman said.

Faculty members teaching the course set the framework, and Palermo chose the prints of Baskin, calling him an important post-war U.S. sculptor. His choice was prompted by recent Baskin additions to the museums existing collection and the discovery that W&M Libraries Special Collections Research Center had a few of Baskins collaborations with poets as well as his book illustrations.

The course aims to get the students to do approximately the kinds of things curators do in museums as they prepare an exhibition, Palermo said.

This included looking over the works at the Muscarelle and Swem Library, researching Baskins career and discovering writing on its major themes and on Baskins collaborations and preoccupations, according to Palermo.

Researching Baskin and trying to figure out what key elements of his work and life to share has been a challenge in the best way, Baughman said. There are no specific guidelines for what information has already been deemed most important, so we get to discuss, investigate and puzzle through our understanding of Baskins motives, style and message.

For Genov, doing a deep dive on Baskin has been incredibly gratifying because it is a practical examination of his life's work in a way that is very different from what students do in other classes.

We are specifically researching him in order to best display his work thematically and to write interesting but succinct information about him that is appealing to the average museum-goer, Genov said. This goal and manner of framing our work is a new challenge for students who are generally required to write lengthy papers demonstrating intense knowledge on a single subject centered around a thesis.

Through proposals and discussions, the students selected the title The Human Frame and organized themselves into groups with assigned topics to guide the design of the exhibition space.

The Curatorial Project is a remarkable opportunity for students to get hands-on experience in a museum, with real pieces of art, to tackle the challenges that come with curating an exhibit, Genov said. From very official projects like press releases and wall text, to the mundane tasks of researching and corresponding with staff, the class is very student-led in which it is up to us to delegate work and meet deadlines under the guidance of Professor Palermo.

Working closely as a team allowed students to identify one anothers strengths to best delegate the tasks, according to Genov.

This experience has not only brought me closer to my fellow classmates at W&M, but has also made me feel more confident about entering the field of art history with goals of museum work and curation in mind, Genov said.

Staff members from the Muscarelle and W&M Libraries assisted with various steps while working alongside students. This ranged from looking over and discussing plans to helping to prepare works from Special Collections for inclusion in the show to matting and framing works prior to installation.

Being able to interact with the pieces were studying in person is an incredible addition to our course and adds a perspective that art history students dont always have, given that the pieces we study are all over the world and we often analyze photos or scans rather than the real works, Baughman said.

Additionally, the team working at the Muscarelle gives us practical advice and guidance that helps us learn more about the work of professional curators. This class is unlike any other  it is more involved, practical and student-led, and is a crucial part of William & Marys art history major.
BEIJING, April 5 (Xinhua)  Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday sent a congratulatory message to Aleksandar Vucic on his reelection as president of Serbia.

In his message, Xi pointed out that in recent years, the China-Serbia comprehensive strategic partnership has maintained vigorous development momentum, with the two sides seeing solid political mutual trust and fruitful bilateral practical cooperation.

Facing major global changes unseen in a century, the two sides firmly respect each other, treat each other as equals, and join hands in building a community with a shared future for mankind, making positive contributions to safeguarding international equity and justice, said the Chinese president.

Xi also said that he attaches great importance to the development of China-Serbia relations, and cherishes the good working relationship and friendship with President Vucic.

He added that he is willing to work with President Vucic to strengthen strategic communication, consolidate political mutual trust, expand and deepen mutually beneficial cooperation in all fields between the two countries, and steer China-Serbia ties towards new achievements, so as to benefit the two countries and their people.

(Source: Xinhua)
28-year-old man arrested on suspicion of arson offences in Wrexham town centre

A 28-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of arson offences in Wrexham.

It comes after three incidents in the town centre were reported to North Wales Police and North Wales Fire and Rescue Service.

The first incident took place yesterday (5 April) outside the Iceland store in Island Green Retail Park at 1.14am, before a second ignition was reported an hour later close to Freyja Medical Clinic on Grosvenor Road.

Both fires were found by patrolling officers and were subsequently extinguished.

A third report of arson was made on Lampit Street in the early hours of this morning, with deliberate ignition of waste bins noted on all three occasions.

CCTV footage of the incidents was reviewed by officers, and a suspect was subsequently identified, located and arrested on Rhosddu Road shortly before 2am today.

A/Inspector Mike Norbury said: Arson is a serious crime and these incidents caused significant damage to business properties within the town.

The effects of these fires would have been far more severe had officers patrol not located them so promptly after ignition.

Fortunately, incidents of this nature are rare in Wrexham and nobody was harmed on this occasion as a result of these fires.

I would like to thank the officers involved for their proactive police work, and thank members of the public for their continued support and reporting of such incidents.

The arrested suspect remains in custody and our investigation into these incidents remains ongoing. Anyone with further information or CCTV footage should report via 101, quoting incident reference 22000232556.
Six-year-old raises hundreds for childrens hospice selling handmade bracelets

A six-year-old has raised hundreds of pounds for a childrens hospice by making and selling handmade bracelets.

Sophie Morris, a year two pupil at Whittington C of E Primary School, has always been interested in beads, but one day decided she would use them to raise money for Hope House Childrens Hospices.

After spending weeks of her time visiting a nearby market to buy the beads and equipment, she set about making the colourful bracelets in aid of the charity.

So far she has raised around 200, but she is determined to keep making more and raising more money.

Mum, Anna Morris, said: We were sat one day and Sophie said she would like to do something like jewellery making for a job when she grows up, she then decided she would love to make some beaded bracelets now and sell them for charity.

Sophie decided to support Hope House because it is her schools charity of the year, and she also is in the same Rainbows group as Amelia Thompson, who receives care at the hospice and was recently the face of its winter fundraising campaign.

We are so proud of Sophie, said mum Anna.

Shes done all this off her own back and just wants to keep going, its wonderful.

Lynsey Kilvert, fundraiser, said: Its absolutely amazing that Sophie has raised such a great amount of money making these super bracelets.

Without our amazing community and those like Sophie, we would not be able to be here to provide the care to those that need us the most. Thank you Sophie.

If you would like to buy a bracelet for 2.50, or would like to make a donation to Sophies fundraising page then you can do so, here.
Welsh Government outlines 380m spend to help tackle cost-of-living crisis

A 150 council tax payment, winter fuel support and funding to relieve the pressures of increasing demand on food banks have been unveiled as part of a 380 million spend to tackle the cost-of-living crisis in Wales.

With the National Insurance rise kicking in this week on top of the energy price cap uplift, many people will be pushed further into hardship.

The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that 2022-2023 will see the biggest fall in living standards in the UK since records began.

Today Welsh government ministers have set out the details 380 million package of support developed to help the most vulnerable in society and have called for more action from the UK Government.

This includes:-

A 150 cost  of  living payment for all households in properties in council tax bands A to D and to all households which receive support from the Council Tax Reduction Scheme in all council tax bands.

  payment for all households in properties in council tax bands A to D and to all households which receive support from the Council Tax Reduction Scheme in all council tax bands. A 25m fund for a discretionary scheme, enabling local authorities to provide support to households with their living costs .

. A 200 Winter Fuel Support Scheme payment in 2021-22 for eligible households to meet the cost of essential bills through the winter and a further fuel support scheme in 2022-23 to be launched in the autumn with broader eligibility criteria so more households can benefit from the 200 payment..

essential bills through the winter and a further fuel support scheme in 2022-23 to be launched in the autumn with broader eligibility criteria so more households can benefit from the 200 payment.. 2.84 million to relieve the pressures of increasing demand on food banks and support action to help tackle food poverty.

Minister for Social Justice, Jane Hutt said: Despite widespread calls on the UK Government to deliver more support through the spring statement to help people who are struggling to meet the rising cost of household bills, the Chancellor announced an increase of just 27 million in the Welsh Governments resource funding for 2022-23.

The cost-of-living crisis is affecting every household across Wales, disgracefully, we have people that are being forced to make the unfortunate decision of whether to heat or to eat.

This is completely unacceptable for a modern day society. If the UK Government were serious about tackling the problem we would see real solutions and not soundbites about levelling up, when its clear for all to see, theyre levelling the country down.

Despite the lack of support and leadership from the UK Government, in Wales we are doing all we can, with the powers we have, to deliver for the most vulnerable.

Over the past few months, we have been working with partner organisations, the third sector and community leaders to develop a series of targeted packages to help the most vulnerable in our society deal with this cost-of-living crisis.

Minister for Finance and Local Government Rebecca Evans outlined the 380 million package of support that the Welsh Government has developed, including the Winter Fuel Support Scheme and the Cost-of-Living payment.

The Minister said: Since last November, we have invested more than 380 million in a package of support for low income households to meet the immediate and severe pressures on living costs.

This included funding for the Winter Fuel Support Scheme which provided a 200 payment for eligible households to help meet the cost of essential bills over the winter. 

We will also provide additional support for fuel costs for the coming winter and are considering how we can widen the scheme to ensure more people receive the 200 payment.

The package of support will also fund a 150 cost-of-living payment for households in Council tax bands A-D and to all households who receive support from the Council Tax Reduction Scheme.

A further 25m is available to local authorities in the form of a discretionary fund to provide additional and targeted support for households struggling with the massive surge in the costs of living.

A further 15m has been made available for the Discretionary Assistance Fund to provide financial support for those experiencing extreme financial pressures, extending the additional support until the end of March 2023.

In addition to this, we will continue to put pressure on the UK Government to use the significant levers they have to support the most vulnerable through the difficult times ahead.

Minister for Social Justice, Jane Hutt added: As a government we are determined to do all we can to support those who find themselves vulnerable at this time and take the steps needed to build resilience in our communities.

Im delighted to be hosting a second cost-of-living summit in the summer when we will look again at more we can do, working with partners, to address the inequalities that the current crisis has brought so starkly into focus.

Despite the complete lack of leadership and real action from the UK Government, we in the Welsh Government will continue to work in partnership with our communities to deliver for the most vulnerable in our society.
Tunisian President Kais Saied dissolved parliament last week, after more than half its members voted to repeal the draconian powers he had given himself after mounting a coup last July.

The powers included the suspension of parliament, the designation of ministers and chairing of the meetings of the council of ministers, the use of presidential decrees to pass legislation and dissolution in February of the Supreme Judicial Council that deals with judicial independence and assumption of control over the selection and promotion of judges.

Demonstrators in Tunis, Tunisia, Sunday, July 25, 2021. (AP Photo/Hedi Azouz)

Saieds latest move was made against a vote that while not legally binding is the most open sign yet of the bitter infighting within Tunisias political elite. It sets the stage for an intensification of the countrys political and economic crisis.

Last year he sacked the Islamist Ennahda Party government, suspended parliament, stripped legislators of parliamentary immunity and deployed the military to guard state buildings. This followed months of protests over police brutality, economic hardship and the governments handling of the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than 28,000 people of the countrys 12 million population. He went on television to warn that the military would not hesitate to use force against those who opposed his coup, a clear threat to the working class.

Saied banned dozens of judges, politicians and businessmen from traveling and put others under house arrest. He shut down the National Anti-Corruption Authority and sidelined the Independent High Authority for Elections. He appointed Najila Bouden, a professor of geophysics, to head a government and abolished the 2014 constitution. Saied said he would hold a referendum in July this year on a new constitution to be drafted by a panel of expertsafter a public online consultation processthat is widely expected to strengthen the powers of the presidency. The referendum, set for July 25, would be followed by parliamentary elections on December 17.

In the event, less than 10 percent of voters took part in the consultation, indicating the widespread hostility to the president and his policies. The two largest parties, Ennahda and the Free Constitutional Party, both also deeply unpopular, have rejected Saieds plans for a July referendum and called for elections to be held within the legally mandated 90 day period after the dissolution of parliament.

Kais Saied, President of Tunisia, on 26 February 2020. (Photo by Houcemmzoughi badoo)

Following the ouster in 2011 of long-time autocrat Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who fled to Riyadh, Saied, a former law professor and establishment figure with conservative views, entered politics, becoming president in 2019.

Saieds long-planned actions were the prelude to setting up a presidential dictatorship, aimed at maintaining the venal Tunisian elites grip on economic and political power in the face of mounting unrest among workers and young people. The major imperialist powers issued pro forma statements urging him to respect the constitution. The Tunisian General Labour Movement (UGTT), the largest union, called on him to guarantee the constitutional legitimacy of all actions taken in these difficult times.

In the eight months following his coup, the economic situation has worsened. The OECDs report, Tunisia 2022, published on Monday, stated, Tunisians are facing the worst crisis in a generation, as COVID-19 hit an economy that was already slowing down. The pandemic had led to a severe economic contraction, particularly in the tourism and service sectors. Unemployment has risen from already high levelsparticularly among Tunisias young population of whom more than one third are aged 15-29. Poverty is on the increase. Shortages of sugar and rice are widespread.

Public finances have collapsed, with some public sector wages paid late in recent months. This prompted the government to turn to the International Monetary Fund for a loan that would require privatising its state-run companies, slashing its public sector wage bill, imposing new taxes and increasing existing ones and taking the axe to bread subsidies under conditions of widespread food shortages. But any such loan, which would need the buy-in of the main political parties and the UGTT, is unlikely to be agreed before the summer, which may well be too late to prevent a collapse of the currency, late or non-payment of state salaries and the countrys ability to import basic state-subsidised foodstuffs.

Leader of Tunisia's Islamist Ennahda party House Speaker Rached Ghannouchi, center, arrives for questioning at the judicial police headquarters in Tunis, Tunisia, Friday, April 1, 2022. (AP Photo/Hassene Dridi)

The loan is further imperilled by Tunisias response to the US/NATO provoked war in Ukraine, as Saied tries to maintain relations with Russia which Tunisia relies on for tourism and trade, without antagonising the United States and Europe, whose financial and diplomatic support are crucial to keep the economy afloat. While Tunisia voted in favour of the UN General Assembly resolution denouncing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it has refrained from publicly denouncing Russia. In welcoming the new Russian ambassador to Tunisia a few days later, Foreign Minister Othman Jerandi stressed a desire to strengthen the relationship between the two countries.

This year has seen numerous demonstrations protesting social and economic conditions, with the total number of demonstrations in the eight months since Saieds July coup topping those that preceded it.

Last month, 13 Tunisian and international rights groups reported on a leaked draft law that would give government authorities huge powers and discretion to interfere with the formation, funding, operation and freedom of expression of NGOs and civil society organisations, reinstating many of the restrictive regulations of the repressive Ben Ali regime. Human rights groups have warned of growing repression of journalists and activists by a president who promised to uphold rights and freedoms won in the 2011 uprising.

Turning reality on its heels, Saied has accused the legislators of an attempted coup by holding an illegal meeting and defended his decision to dissolve parliament as a defence of the state. The justice minister has reportedly ordered an investigation of those who took part in the online session for conspiring against state security. Rached Ghannouchi, the parliamentary speaker of the assembly and head of the Ennahda Party, the largest with one quarter of its 217 seats, said that the Terror Crimes Investigation Unit had summoned him and at least 20 legislators from Ennahda and other parties for questioning.

Saied could again bank on the UGTTs support. Secretary-General Noureddine Taboubi has long called for the politicians to set aside their differences and hold a national dialogue before the elections, saying, We have to get over the difference of considering what happened last 25 July as a coup or not.

He had called for Saied to dissolve parliament and applauded him when he did so, stating that it was a response to an effort aiming to destabilise the country and lead it to a wave of legitimacy conflicts. On April 1, he held talks with Saied and agreed on the need for a partnership to overcome the economic crisis.

The major powers have largely remained silent, with the European Union (EU) keeping the financial taps flowing to prevent the countrys collapse. On the same day Saied dissolved parliament, the European Commission announced it would lend Tunisia 450 million in budget support this year, following a meeting between Saied and EU enlargement commissioner Oliver Varhelyi in Tunis.

The events of the last 11 years since the protests that toppled the Ben Ali regime have demonstrated that without the working class intervening independently of all the political parties and trade unions the ruling elite will, under the cover of a technocrat as in Tunisia, Lebanon and Iraq, or a military figure as in Egypt, resort to increasingly repressive means to maintain the rule of the kleptocracy.
Over a month into Russias invasion of Ukraine, the Western corporate media now uncritically passes on information sourced from the fascist Azov Battalion.

During the 2014 United States-backed coup of elected President Viktor Yanukovych, the general stance of Western media towards Kiev was uncritical, downplaying or ignoring the leading role fascist forces played in bringing down the Yanukovych government.

Armored vehicles of the Azov regiment in Mariupol [Credit: Wanderer777/CC BY-SA 4.0/Wikimedia]

These forces, including the Svoboda Party and the Right Sector, out of which the Azov Battalion emerged, openly place themselves in the traditions of Nazi collaborationist organizations like the OUN-B and the UPA, which were responsible for the massacres of tens of thousands of Jews, Poles as well as Ukrainian civilians during World War II.

So blatant was the presence of prominent neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine that following the 2014 coup and outbreak of civil war in the eastern Donbass region, several media outlets such as Time, USA Today, the New York Times and others released stories admitting that indeed, the most dedicated soldiers within Ukraines Armed Forces were neo-Nazis.

In a 2015 USA Today article titled Volunteer Ukrainian unit includes Nazis, Azov Battalion spokesman Andriy Diachenko admitted that 10 to 20 percent of Azovs members were neo-Nazis.

Time magazine noted in a January 2021 article How a white-supremacist Milita uses Facebook to Radicalize and Train New Members, that Azovs neo-Nazi ideology and history were undeniable.

Regarding Azov founder Andriy Biletsky and his former Patriot of Ukraine group, Time reported that Biletskys nickname within the group was Bely Vozhd, or White Ruler, and his manifesto seemed to pluck its narrative straight from Nazi ideology. Ukrainian nationalists, it said, must lead the white nations of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen, a German term for subhumans, with roots in Nazi propaganda.

Even though the US was funnelling billions of weapons into Ukraines military and paramilitary, Azov-related articles often attempted to distance the United States from the backing of Azov. Thus, a 2015 New York Times article on Ukraines far-right militias attempted to reassure its readers by uncritically reporting that Americans are specifically prohibited from giving [military] instruction to members of the Azov group.

A since deleted post on the website of the Azov Battalion, showing its members with representatives of the US and Canadian military in 2017

In reality, pictures show that US officers have long been involved in training members of the Azov Battalion.

Now, with NATOs proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, all such pretences by the media have been abandoned. The Azov Battalion is integrated into Ukraines National Guard and is now playing a prominent role in the war, especially in Mariupol, a predominantly Russian-speaking city in southern Ukraine, control over which is of key strategic significance.

As the Western media plays a critical role in distributing imperialist propaganda on the war, information from the Azov Battalion is now propagated directly to Western audiencesoften with no mention of its ties to neo-Nazis.

NBCs chief foreign policy correspondent Richard Engel led the way in whitewashing Azov when in early February he showed the Azov Battalion training Mariupol residents in the use of weapons and first aid. Despite the fact that Azovs use of a Wolfsangel insignia, which is associated with Hitlers SS in the Second World War, was clearly identifiable, Engel failed to mention Azov at all.

On March 22, CBS News published a defence of Azov titled The Azov Battalion: How Putin built a false premise for war against Nazis in Ukraine.

In the article, CBS quoted Ruslan Leviev, an analyst with the Conflict Intelligence Team, as an expert in its defence of Azov.

Leviev flatly lied to CBS: There are no Nazi battalions in Ukraine.

There is (the Azov) regiment  There are (estimated) several thousand people who are in this regiment. It is indeed a group where many members adhere to nationalist and far-right views. But a lot of people also join it because it is one of the most prepared and fit-for-war units, Leviev assured CBS.

Later, on April 1, CNN featured a video on the Erin Burnett Upfront show of Azov Battalion Captain Bohdan Krotevych claiming that Russian forces had created mountains of corpses on the streets, noting that Krotevych is part of ultra nationalist far-right battalion.

But this disclosure had no impact on Burnett, who repeated Krotevychs accusations as a statement of fact. Burnett also relayed Krotevychs claim that the Mariupol bombing had killed 400 people, 100 more than the widely quoted figure of 300 dead.

On March 29, CNN published a story titled A far-right battalion has a key role in Ukraine's resistance. Its neo-Nazi history has been exploited by Putin, defending Azov as an effective fighting force and downplaying its neo-Nazi ideology as a matter of the past.

After covering the myriad fascist violent incidents, and quoting at length from its leaders, the article denounces any questioning of the information coming from Azov regarding the war, such as the bombing of the Mariupol theatre as Russian disinformation.

Despite going to great lengths to sanitize Azov, the story was too truthful for the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, as parliament member Serhiy Taruta published an open letter and on Facebook called on CNN to quit publishing Russian propaganda.

Serious questions remain regarding the bombing of the Mariupol Theater, which Russia has accused Azov of blowing up as a false flag operation to elicit support for a no-fly zone in Ukraine. Whatever the nature of the bombing, it was quickly seized upon by Western media outlets and governments to call for an intensification of the anti-Russia war drive.

As Max Blumenthal reported on the GrayZone, Azov photos of the theatre bombing were quickly disseminated through western media outlets with no disclaimer that they were taken by a neo-Nazi militia.

Azov Battalion Deputy Commander Svyatoslav Palamar has been widely used as a source on the situation in Mariupol, including by CNN, the New York Post and the Telegraph. Again, no mention is made of Azovs neo-Nazi ideology.

Blumenthal also noted that the western media reporting on the bombing was largely based on tweets from Kyiv Independent reporter Illia Ponomarenko, who has admitted to being consecrated into the Azov Battalion.

Ponomarenko has built a large following on Twitter since the beginning of Russias invasion and serves as a conduit for Ukrainian war propaganda back to western audiences.

Twitter post of dead Russian soldiers by Illia Ponomarenko

A cheerleader for Ukrainian nationalism and war, Ponomarenko regularly posts gory photos of dead Russian soldiers and calls for NATO to intervene in the war on Ukraines behalf, thus assisting a social media campaign by Ukraines armed forces and the far-right that directly violates the Geneva Convention for the humane treatment of prisoners of war.

Notably, Ponomarenkos employer, the newly created Kyiv Independent, receives its funding from western imperialism, including Washingtons National Endowment for Democracy and the EUs European Endowment for Democracy.

More recently, photos of the apparent killing of civilians in Bucha first appeared on the social media accounts of figures such as Ponomarenko and the far-right activist thug Serhii Sternenko. The photos and reports were then fed to Western media outlets, which again seized upon them to call for increased sanctions against Russia and the prosecution of President Vladimir Putin as a war criminal.

Photo captions by the New York Times indicate that Azov Battalion soldiers were among the first to enter Bucha on April 2 after Russian forces left the town on March 30. Despite this fact, claims of a wanton Russian massacre are promoted uncritically while those calling for investigation before judgement are smeared as Russian trolls.
The United States and its NATO allies have militarily encroached upon Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. The arrival of the imperialist alliance on Russias doorstep prompted Russias incursion into Ukraine. With the ultimate goal of subjugating Russia, NATO is war-gaming every approach to Russian territory. In the largest military exercise led by NATO ally Norway in a generation, last week NATO finished a live-fire rehearsal for war on Russias northern flank, the High Arctic exercise dubbed Cold Response 2022.

The significance of such large-scale NATO exercises is underscored by the escalating conflict in Ukraine. As Russia desperately seeks to counter the spread of NATO influence over its neighbor with its reactionary invasion of that country, putting NATO military exercises into practice becomes an immediate possibility. Cold Response took place as the world powers tangle on the brink of World War III.

U.S. Marines inspect a MV-22B Osprey prior to flight at Norwegian Air Force Base Bodo during Exercise Cold Response 22, Norway, March 16, 2022. (Lance Cpl. Elias E. Pimentel III/U.S. Marine Corps via AP)

Cold Response is a biannual display of martial might that has grown with the immediacy of NATO war plans. We invite this exercise mainly within a NATO framework, and the size of it all depends on the interest from our allies and partners, Norwegian military spokesman Preben Aursand told High North News, before the maneuver. With the US and NATO considering direct conflict with Russia over Ukraine, the interest in preparing the northern theater is running especially high, and Cold Response has scaled up accordingly, more than doubling in size since 2020.

The objective of the large-scale military maneuver is to prepare to engage militarily with Russia on the sea, land and air in the Arctic environment. Approximately 30,000 troops from 27 countriesincluding 3,000 US Marines and 1,000 German Bundeswehr soldiersalong with 220 aircraft and 50 vessels converged on the north of Norway.

The first phase of Cold Response was a maritime access and denial operation, which amounts in practical terms to a blockade of Russian military and commercial vessels from accessing the Atlantic Ocean from the northern cold-water port of Arkhangelsk, as well as to assuring that NATO warships can reach the Barents Sea off Russias northern coast, where US and UK ships resumed patrols in 2020 after an absence since the 1980s.

The tremendous presentation of NATO sea power in these waters so critical to Russia included aircraft carrier strike groups from the UK and Italy, lead by the HMS Prince of Wales. A third carrier strike group led by the USS Harry S. Truman was scheduled to participate, having just completed exercise Neptune Strike 2022, but extended its deployment in the Mediterranean to reassure allies as the war in Ukraine escalates.

Intensive air operations, including the deployment of carrier-based air power, in the second phase of Cold Response served to prepare for amphibious invasion simulations in the third phase. Thousands of NATO troops have been congregating in Norway since last fall to practice assaults on coastal population centers.

Invariably presented as a defensive exercise to restore national integrity, these operations need only be shifted a little eastward along the northern Norwegian coast to become a real attack on the Russian north. Russias Northern Fleet, armed with nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles, makes berth in Murmansk, less than 150km from the Norwegian border.

Significantly, officials and commentators were increasingly dispensing with the pretense of the supposedly defensive nature of these military exercises. I think this exercise is a good counterpart, a good companion to the ongoing reinforcement of the (alliances) eastern flank that has been taking place since Russias invasion began, said Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Cold Response 2022 also marked the culmination of Operation Brilliant Jump, the exercise and a certification of the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, NATOs vanguard, all-theater rapid reaction force. Brilliant Jump, involving 2,500 troops, 10 warships and 750 sailors, began in Norway last February. Once certified, these elite units are deployable within five days to any NATO theater, including the High North.

While Moscow declined an invitation to formally observe the exercise, Russian warships patrolled at a distance.

As large as Cold Response is, it threatens primarily the northern approach to Russia. In imperialisms encirclement of its geopolitical rival, however, NATO conducts a host of massive military exercises along Russias western and southern flanks. The massive Steadfast Defender 2020 exercise war-gamed the approach to Russia from northern Europe while Steadfast Defender 2021 practiced the approach from the south, preparing for combat in the Balkans and Black Sea Region. War games on the Black Sea itself were staged in Operation Sea Breeze. Trident Juncture, like Cold Response, war-gamed the far north in 2018. The list goes on.

The eastward expansion of NATO beginning after the fall of the Soviet Union has steadily crossed Eastern Europe, absorbing the post WWII buffer states and reaching Russias boarder in the Baltic in 2004. In 2014, a Western-orchestrated right-wing coup in theretofore Russia-aligned Ukraine installed a pro-western government deep in Russias side. That Russia retained control of Crimea, which hosts Russias Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol, was considered a military imperative as NATO spread its sphere of influence over Russias strategically important neighbor. Russia responded to NATOs continued arming and training of anti-Russian elements within Ukrainethe Ukrainian army, led by a pro-Western government, as well as neo-Nazi paramilitary groups like the Azov Battalionby launching its military attack at the end of February.

Western cries of Russian aggression in an unprovoked invasion serve only as political cover while NATO pushes eastward with the ultimate aim of removing Russia as an obstacle to a global rules-based order, that is, US political and economic domination. Whether by instigating a regime change, inciting internal divisions or by direct military confrontation, imperialism, driven by nationally-based capitalisms demand for control of global markets and resources, considers it in its interest to subjugate by whatever means its Russian, and for that matter Chinese, rival. Without defending the reactionary Putin regime of oligarchs and kleptocrats, it is NATO, not Russia, which is the aggressor.

Beyond the immediate confrontation with Russia, heightened interest in the Arctic, embodied by Cold Response and the even larger Trident Juncture in 2018, is driven by what capitalist governments perceive as opportunities as manmade climate change causes sea ice to retreat. The shortened shipping routes with the opening of the Northwest and Northeast Passages are viewed not as a manifest catastrophe but as potentially lucrative for business, requiring military control in the national interest of Arctic nations. Mineral and fossil fuel deposits becoming accessible in Arctic regions likewise have world powers jostling to exploit them. It is an irredeemable indictment of capitalism that its response to the irrefutable consequences of climate change does not inspire an alarmed re-prioritization of resources to save the planet but rather renewed vigor in geopolitical machinations.

Because capitalist governments are incapable of resisting their interest in world domination to the point of risking full-scale war and the irreversible destabilization of whole ecosystems, it is entirely futile to appeal to these powers for peace or sustainable stewardship of the Earth. Only an independent, international movement of the working class can muster the social strength necessary to take the reins of power from the capitalists and reorganize the world economy to stop war and meet the needs of humanity.
In recent days, a longstanding investigation by the Department of Justice (DoJ) into the taxes and financial affairs of Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, has become the subject of prominent news reports in the mainstream press. The reports, nearly all citing anonymous sources within the DoJ, confirm that the investigation, which began during the Trump administration but was not disclosed by Hunter Biden until December 2020, has broadened in scope.

As of this writing, no official charges have been made against Hunter Biden or any other member of the Biden family.

Prominent articles on the federal investigation into the younger Bidens international business dealings began to appear in mid-March. On March 16, the New York Times reported that the presidents son recently paid off an outstanding tax liability of over $1 million. Nevertheless, a grand jury continued to gather evidence in a wide-ranging examination of his international business dealings, according to people familiar with the case, the newspaper wrote.

Subsequent reports, citing sources within the DoJ, confirmed that witnesses with close ties to Hunter Biden, including former business and romantic partners, are being interviewed by a federal grand jury located in Wilmington, Delaware. Among them is former business associate and fellow Yale University alumnus Devon Archer.

Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, centre, his son Hunter Biden, left, and his sister Valerie Biden Owens, right (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)

Archer was sentenced to 13 months imprisonment in February for his participation in a fraud scheme, following his conviction in 2018. The operation involved defrauding the Oglala Sioux tribe of roughly $60 million in bonds.

While Hunter Biden was not involved in Archers fraud case, the former friends and business partners both sat on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, which, the DoJ has confirmed, is under investigation.

Hunter Biden was appointed to the Burisma board, despite having no experience in the field, during the period when his father, then vice president, served as the point-man for the Obama administrations imperialist operations in Ukraine following the US-backed Maidan coup of February 2014.

Burisma paid Hunter Biden roughly $50,000 a month between 2014 and 2019. The money was wired to a Delaware-based corporation called Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC, which was owned by Archer and registered by him on February 13, 2014. The company, according to a September 2020 report by Senate Republicans, acted as a shell entity to receive an estimated $3.5 million in payments from Burisma to Archer and Hunter Biden. In the same report, the Republicans detailed Hunter Bidens business dealings in China.

Citing emails on Bidens laptop, the Washington Post on March 30 confirmed that over a 14-month period, Hunter and his uncle, James Biden, received $4.8 million in consulting fees from the China Energy Company Limited (CEFC).

The fees were part of a contract signed by Biden and Dong Gongwen, president of CEFC, on August 2, 2017. In its article on the contract, the Washington Post reported that Hunter Biden would get a one-time retainer of $500,000 and would then receive a monthly stipend of $100,000, with his uncle James Biden getting $65,000 a month.

While the federal investigation was originally centered on alleged tax violations and money laundering by Hunter Biden, recent press reports indicate that the government is also looking into whether Biden violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by failing to register with the State Department.

The Republicans are seeking to make these shady dealings a centerpiece of their 2022 midterm election campaign. Spearheaded by Trumps fascist former White House adviser Stephen Bannon and Trumps coup lawyer Rudy Giuliani, they are presenting Joe Biden as the head of a crime family that is in the thrall of the Chinese Communist Party. According to their conspiracy theory, the CCP, seeking to protect its investment in the Bidens, intervened in the 2020 presidential election to falsify the vote in favor of its preferred candidate.

The reports confirm evidence of self-dealing and corruption on the part of Hunter Biden, which one would be safe in assuming did not stop with him. Corruption is pervasive in the bourgeois political system and both of its corporate-controlled parties.

Under conditions of a global pandemic in which the financial oligarchy has enriched itself fabulously over the bodies of millions of workers, it is not surprising that its political puppets exploit their office for personal gain.

That, however, does not alter the fact that the Republican Party is massively implicated in the attempted coup of January 6, 2021 and is being transformed under its Fuehrer Trump into a fascistic party. The petty, or not-so-petty, corruption of the Bidens (as well as the Obamas, the Clintons, etc.) in no way lessens the danger to the working class represented by the growth of a fascist movement in the US.

In this connection, it is noteworthy that as evidence of widespread support for Trumps coup attempt within the ruling class and its military, police and intelligence agencies has mounted, extending to the Supreme Court itself, Democratic-aligned organs such as the Washington Post and New York Times have taken to reporting details of Hunter Bidens business dealings that were previously the specialty of right-wing, pro-Trump news outlets such as the New York Post.

When the latter began publishing articles on the subject in October 2020, the Washington Post and the Times dismissed them as Russian disinformation.

The timing of the rash of recent articles by Democratic-aligned newspapers publicizing and lending credibility to the charges against Hunter Biden suggests a push-back by factions within the Biden administration, the Democratic Party and the Justice Department to calls from some Democrats, including members of the January 6 Committee, for Attorney General Garland to end his silence and announce prosecutions of Trump and his top co-conspirators.

Last Monday, March 28, during a meeting of the House Select Committee on January 6 that voted unanimously to refer Trump accomplices Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro to Congress on criminal contempt charges, several committee members, including Democrats Elaine Luria, Adam Schiff and Zoe Lofgren, forcefully called on Garland to bring charges against those previously referred to the DoJ for contempt of Congress.

This committee is doing its job. The Department of Justice needs to do theirs, demanded Lofgren. So far, only Bannon has been arraigned on criminal contempt of Congress charges, while former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, whom Congress voted to hold in contempt in December 2020, has yet to be arraigned.

Less than a week later, the New York Times published a front-page article titled Garland Faces Growing Pressure as Jan. 6 Investigation Widens. The Times reported that while there is no indication that federal prosecutors are close to charging the former president, Joe Biden was allegedly aghast that Trumps inner circle could defy congressional subpoenas.

The Times reported that Biden expressed frustration to his inner circle late last year regarding Garlands refusal to date to launch high-level prosecutions.

The very next day, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, appearing on ABC News This Week with George Stephanopoulos, denied the reporting in the Times, telling his host, Ive never heard the president say that. He hastened to add that Biden has confidence in the attorney general.

One day later, on Monday, April 4, Politico ran an interview with Lofgren in which the January 6 Committee member suggested there was no point in the committee sending a criminal referral against Trump to the Justice Department.

A referral doesnt mean anything, Lofgren said. It has no legal weight whatsoever.

These developments underscore the role of the Democratic Party in covering up the fascist plot that culminated in the January 6, 2021 attempt to overthrow the US Constitution, and in keeping the working class in the dark about the ongoing and accelerating preparations for dictatorial rule.
In yet another major effort to escalate NATOs proxy war against Russia, the Biden administration is seizing upon claims by Ukrainian officials of a massacre by Russian forces in the Kiev suburb of Bucha to implement a new round of sanctions and undermine any effort at a peaceful settlement of the war.

I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal, US President Joe Biden said Monday. Well, the truth of the matter, you saw what happened in Bucha. He is a war criminal. Biden added, We have to continue to provide Ukraine with the weapons they need in order to fight.

The American government, along with the media, proceeds according to the principle: first the conclusion, then the investigation. Biden, who more than one year after the January 6 coup attempt cannot make up his mind whether Trump is guilty of a crime, has already decided that Russian President Vladimir Putin is guilty of war crimes in Bucha.

The actual facts, however, do not prove the conclusion. Russian troops withdrew from Bucha right after the Kremlin promised to dramatically reduce its forces in the direction of Kiev in peace negotiations last Tuesday. For days, no significant civilian casualties were reported. On Saturday, Ukrainian forcesincluding members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalionentered the town, and a torrent of reports were unleashed in the Western press about alleged atrocities.

Images from from Ukraine are displayed during a meeting of the UN Security Council, Tuesday, April 5, 2022. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

The images shown widely only indicate that bodies were found, but not who killed whom, when and under what circumstances. While video evidence has emerged of Ukrainian forces executing and torturing unarmed people, no similar evidence has emerged for Russian troops.

Given the systematic use by the United States of false allegations of atrocities to justify wars all over the world, and absent clear and convincing evidence, there is no reason to view the claims of a massacre in Bucha as anything other than war propaganda, aimed at enraging the population to justify military escalation.

Even if it were established that Russian troops fired on civiliansand that has not been establishedthat would not mean that they were acting under the instruction of the Russian government.

In the past 30 years of unending warsand, of course, one can go back furtherthe American military has committed countless atrocities: firing on civilians, drone attacks on wedding parties, helicopter assaults on hospitals, the massacre of entire towns. In this time of universal amnesia, is it again necessary to remind everyone that the United States tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib in the most barbaric manner and then sought to destroy the evidence? Or that, for this reason and many others, it does not even recognize that International Criminal Court before which it insists its antagonists must be tried?

If these crimes are ever acknowledged by the American media, they are invariably attributed by the media to mistakes or bad apples. No leading officials have ever been prosecuted. Yet here, on the basis of a few photos, it is already concluded that Putin is guilty of war crimes, even genocide. Under such logic, why is not every American president, Biden included, behind bars?

Beyond the obvious element of hypocrisy, there is another legal concept that must be leveraged in evaluating the conflicting allegations between the United States and Russia: Cui bono?

Who benefits from the intensification of the war? Here, clearly, the answer is the American government. Bidens conclusion of war crimes, made in an almost offhand manner, is intended to preclude negotiations. The US does not want the war to end. Bidens declaration in Warsaw last month that Putin cannot remain in power was not a gaffe, as presented by the US media, but expressed actual US policy toward Russia, which is regime change.

All of this takes place amidst a media campaign demanding that the war be won. In an article published Tuesday, Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh declared, America will be the ultimate winner of the Ukrainian crisis. The Economist, for its part, has called for a decisive victory against Russia in Ukraine.

Atrocity allegations are a critical element of US war propaganda. Every aggressive war ever launched by the United States was built upon allegations of atrocities by the targets of US military intervention. In every case, whether the first Gulf War, Afghanistan, Syria, or Libya, the script is the same: the government targeted by the US has murdered civilians and threatens to kill more unless the US intervenes.

Then, when the US intervention leads to the mass murder of civilians on an even greater scale in the country being rescued, the press simply moves on to breathlessly report the atrocities by the next targets of US imperialism.

In addition to escalating the US-NATO conflict against Russia, US officials are using the anti-Russia war hysteria in the liberal upper middle class to promote a massive military buildup whose ultimate target is China no less than Russia. On Tuesday, the White House announced a new agreement by the Australia-UK-US (AUKUS) partnership to produce a new generation of nuclear weapons targeting China.

Under such conditions, it is necessary not to be swayed by the torrent of war propaganda in the media. The United States instigated this war, provoking the Russian government into a reactionary and desperate invasion of Ukraine. Having begun the conflict, the American ruling classdriven by geopolitical interests and a deepening economic, social and political crisisis determined to see it to the end, whatever the disastrous consequences.

A central target of the US war drive is the working class at home, which will be told to sacrifice its social interests in the name of promoting the war effort. Workers must oppose both the disastrous invasion by Russia and the US-NATO war drive and mobilize across national borders against the capitalist system that is the root cause of war and inequality.
As the US death toll from COVID-19 climbs above 1 million, the government and its mouthpieces in the media continue to perpetuate the myth that deaths from COVID-19 are a generally natural phenomenon that authorities have been all but powerless to stop. According to this lie, SARS-CoV-2 has spread and killed without concern for the socioeconomic status of its victims.

However, a new report exposes the grim reality that among the more than 81 million Americans who have been infected by the deadly virus, the poor and those living in low-income communities have been far more likely to die. During the repeated COVID-19 waves that have struck down hundreds of thousands over the last two years, death rates were as much as five times higher in the poorest counties than in those with the highest median incomes.

The report was produced by the Poor Peoples Campaign in partnership with economists at the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network led by Jeffrey Sachs. Analyzing statistics from more than 3,200 US counties, the report compares the poorest 10 percent of counties with the richest 10 percent. And the results are staggering.

The study clearly shows that it is the working classthe low-paid, the unemployed, those in essential workplaces, those without health insurance, the rent-burdenedwho have been disproportionately and devastatingly impacted by the pandemic.

Children and their caregivers arrive for school in New York, Monday, March 7, 2022. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

As the authors write: The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated preexisting social and economic disparities that have long festered in the US. Widespread and unequal distribution of wealth, income and resources prior to the pandemic created the conditions for many of the negative outcomes associated with the virus.

In other words, the immense class divide in US society has been further demonstrated by the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on the millions of people who live in impoverished counties across America. Government policies have created poverty, hunger, hyper-exploitation on the job, unemployment and deplorable living conditions that have created the prime conditions for COVID-19 to fester and kill.

The report divides US counties into deciles, each representing approximately 10 percent of the population by income. It also provides valuable interactive maps and graphics that chart the course of the pandemic in these counties.

In the poorest decile, in which 42-94 percent of people live in poverty, the death rate is near double that of counties with less than a fifth of people live in poverty. Approximately 31 million people live in the poorest decile of counties studied.

Mingo County, West Virginia, is one of the lowest income counties in the US, with 52.41 percent of the population living under 200 percent of the federal poverty guideline, which stands at about $36,000 for a household of two. The Appalachian state has been devastated by unemployment and the opioid crisis.

Mingo Countys COVID-19 death rate is 470 per 100,000, ranking it in the highest quarter of counties. The county is 95 percent white and media income is $32,746 with over half of its residents living under 200 percent of the poverty line. The official unemployment rate currently stands at 7.5 percent.

In the Bronx in New York City, 51 percent of county residents live under 200 percent of the poverty line. Over 60 percent of residents are rent-burdened, paying more than 30 percent of household income towards rent. It is one of the most ethnically diverse counties in the US. Of its 1.4 million residents, 55 percent are Hispanic, 29 percent black, 9 percent white and around 5 percent Asian. It has a COVID-19 death rate of 538 per 100,000, which is among the highest death rates in the country. Many Bronx residents work in Manhattan, servicing New York Citys wealthy elite.

By contrast, in Fairfax County, Virginia, one of the richest counties in the US, the median income stands at $124,831, with 15.1 percent of people living below the 200 percent poverty line. The COVID-19 death rate stands at 115 per 100,000. Fairfax revolves around professional service and technology, with many employees working for the US government. The county hosts several intelligence agencies, including the CIA. It is also headquarters to seven of the Fortune 500 Companies.

Nearly three-quarters of the counties with the lowest median incomes and highest percentage of people living in poverty are in the countrys Southeast and Southwest.

Wilkinson County, Mississippi, in the Deep South, has a median income of $27,313. More than 60 percent of people there live below 200 percent of the poverty line. The COVID-19 death rate stands at 510 per 100,000 people. About two-thirds of the countys population is African American.

In Gila County, Arizona, in the Southwest, 44.68 percent of residents live below the 200 percent poverty line. The COVID-19 death rate is 641 per 100,000 people, one of the nations highest. The county is 77 percent white and 15 percent Native American. Eighteen percent are Hispanic or Latino.

The COVID-19 death rate in McKinley County, New Mexico, is 786 per 100,000 people. The median income is $33,834, and more than 61 percent lives below the 200 percent poverty line. Three-quarters of the countys population are Native American.

According to the report, the two most deadly periods for the pandemic have been the third wave, of winter 2020-2021, accounting for nearly 40 percent of all deaths to date, and the ongoing Omicron wave, accounting for nearly 20 percent of deaths so far.

During the third wave, deaths rates were 4.5 times higher in the group of counties in the decile with the lowest median income compared to those with the highest median income. Deaths rates were five times higher in the poorest counties during the Delta variant phase, while the Omicron phase has seen a death rate nearly three times higher in counties with lower median incomes.

While vaccination rates tend to be higher in wealthier counties, vaccination status does not explain all the variation across income groups, as in almost every decile, county vaccine coverage ranges from 85 percent or higher to under 5 percent.

The report aggregates data by connecting information about COVID-19 deaths to other demographic features, including income, race, health insurance status and other characteristics. It demonstrates the connections between poverty, race and the pandemic and seeks to show how poverty, age, gender, race, ethnicity, disability and class intersect with COVID-19 outcomes.

As the county examples above demonstrate, however, it is class that is driving the misery of the COVID-19 pandemic. The poorest counties, which have suffered the most and seen the most deaths, vary widely by ethnic make-up, with socioeconomic class being the overriding factor.

As the report correctly states on the pandemic, While US billionaires increased their wealth by $2.1 trillion, or by 70 percent, many Americans faced eviction, hunger, and record unemployment. As in all aspects of social life, it is the working class that has been the main target of SARS-CoV-2, driven by the criminal policies of the ruling elite and the two big-business parties.
Yesterday about 300 tea plantation workers from the Glenugie Estate near Upcot in Sri Lankas central plantation district joined a strike calling for the overthrow of the government of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse and for a government of workers and peasants.

The strike was called by the Glenugie Estate Workers Action Committee (GEWAC), which was formed with the political support of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP).

In addition to demanding the replacement of the Rajapakse government with a government of workers in alliance with the rural poor, the main slogans of the strike opposed the formation of any interim government of the parliamentary parties. The slogans included Reject interim government and Break from unions and form action committees at every estate and workplace.

The walkout was called amid growing protests throughout the country demanding the ouster of the Rajapakse government over its brutal austerity measures, the skyrocketing cost of essential food items, fuel, cooking gas and medicine shortages, and the extended daily power cuts.

Estate workers march towards Upcot town in protest organised by the Glenugie Estate Workers Action Committee 5 April 2022 [WSWS Media]

The GEWAC met the previous evening and decided to organise a one-day strike and hold a demonstration. GEWAC members went door-to-door at workers quarters informing them of the strike call. Glenugie workers responded enthusiastically, indicating the developing opposition among plantation workers to the government.

Yesterday morning, striking workers joined the GEWAC protest at Malliheppu Junction, where the estate office is located. About 50 initially joined the demonstration with numbers increasing to more than 100 as other workers joined.

SEP political committee member M. Thevarajah and party member Kandipan, the GEWAC secretary, led the chanting of slogans, such as: Overthrow the Rajapakse government, Reject interim government, Fight for a government of workers and peasants, Break from the unions and Form action committees. Workers displayed placards with similar slogans.

In addition, workers raised their own slogans, demanding: Gotabhaya [Rajapakse] must go, All Rajapakses must go and They all are thieves. Other slogans related to the soaring prices of essential food items.

Plantation workers holding placards during Glenugie Estate Workers Action Committee demonstration, 5 April [WSWS Media]

At the conclusion of the demonstration, before a march toward Upcot town, Kandipan addressed the gathering. He said: Plantation workers are facing unbearable conditions with the skyrocketing cost of living. The prices of essential goods are increasing almost daily. We are facing starvation conditions. It is in this situation that plantation workers are coming to fight against the Rajapakse government, alongside other workers and the oppressed masses.

Kandipan pointed out that the trade unions were silent about the ongoing popular movement against the Rajapakse government. He explained that workers needed to break from the unions and form action committees at every estate and workplace. He also explained the need for workers to fight to overthrow the Rajapakse government and establish a government of workers and peasants.

Following the demonstration, which lasted for an hour, about 150 workers shouting the slogans marched about one kilometre to the tea factory on the D-side division of the estate. D-side division workers joined the protest and the march returned to Malliheppu Junction and then towards Upcot town. By then, about 200 workers had joined the march, which concluded near the town.

Addressing workers at the end of the march Thevarajah said: The GEWAC has called the strike of Glenugie workers with the support of the SEP on these basic slogans: Overthrow the Rajapakse government, Reject any interim government, Fight for a government of workers and peasants and socialist policies, Break from the unions and build action committees at every estate and workplace, and Workers of the world unite.

There are massive protests all over the country, including in the North and East, demanding the resignation of the Rajapakse government. This is the only demonstration and meeting based on an alternative independent working-class program and perspective for a government of workers and peasants.

Protest march in Kandy on 4 April 2022 [WSWS Media]

The speaker explained the need to establish the unity of Sri Lankan workers with their class brothers and sisters internationally in the struggle against the Rajapakse regime. The International Committee of the Fourth International, as the world party of socialist revolution, is fighting to mobilise the support of the international working class for Sri Lankan workers, he said.

Thevarajah outlined the bitter historical experiences of workers in Sri Lanka. Successive bourgeois governments during the almost 74 years of so-called independence in Sri Lanka have provided no solutions for working people. Tens of thousands of Tamils in the North and East were killed during 30 years of the anti-Tamil racist war and tens of thousands of Sinhala rural youth in the south were killed during the 198889 period. Immediately after independence, the citizenship rights of plantation workers were abolished, he said.

The speaker also pointed to the disastrous consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and danger of a world war posed by the US-NATO proxy war against Russia. Now, after all these experiences, workers and the oppressed masses have come onto streets against the Rajapakse government. This is the time for workers to prepare to take power, as the Russian workers did in October 1917, he said.

The walkout at Glenuge Estate is an indication of the growing movement of workers in the plantations and throughout Sri Lanka as part of the developing class struggles internationally. Plantation workers are among the most oppressed sections of the Sri Lankan working class. Amid the social and political crisis in the country triggered by the pandemic, the plantation companies have deepened their attacks on the conditions of workers and increased workloads.

The trade unions have taken the side of the big plantation companies and the government authorities. The Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC) was a partner in President Rajapakses government and the CWC leader Jeevan Thondaman was a state minister. As the masses came onto the streets against the Colombo regime, Thondaman resigned from the government. He declared in parliament yesterday that two CWC MPs had decided to act independently of the government.

We urge plantation workers throughout Sri Lanka to build similar action committees to fight for the defence of their rights and unite with other sections of the working class in a broader struggle for socialist policies.
Chinas Global Times reported that Shanghai had accomplished mission impossible Mondaythe PCR testing of all 25 million-plus people in one day. Placing this figure into context, it is 10 times higher than all the tests conducted in the United States on January 10, 2022, when Omicron was surging across the country.

City officials said that the massive first-of-its-kind public health initiative was completed ahead of schedule at around 7 p.m. Monday. The previous day a city-wide antigen testing was conducted as a prelude to the PCR testing of the population.

A medical worker collects sample swab sample from residents in a lockdown area in the Jingan district of western Shanghai, China, Monday, April 4, 2022. (AP Photo/Chen Si)

On Monday, 13,354 new COVID cases were reported, a significant jump from 9,000 on Sunday. However, these are attributed to the more robust testing that identifies all the sources of infection in Chinas financial capital. Of these, only 268 were symptomatic. Overall, Chinas mainland reported 16,590 cases, a single-day high during the current Omicron surge. In Jilin province, the trend of daily cases is on the decline as lockdowns continue.

The two-phased lockdown that began more than a week ago in Shanghai morphed into a city-wide lockdown last Friday when lockdown measures were extended for the east side of the city across the Huangpu River due to the rising number of confirmed COVID cases.

Throughout March, following the explosion of cases in Hong Kong, Chinese health officials documented a growing number of community transmissions throughout most provinces in China. Yet, Shanghai had resisted employing more stringent measures to minimize the impact of the pandemic on the economy until health officials raised concerns about the growing unrecognized spread of infection.

The implementation of the lockdown in Shanghai signaled to the Chinese people and the international financial markets that the Politburos commitment remained to a now-globally unique strategyfine-tuned across outbreaks from Xian to Shenzhenof attempting to completely eliminate local cases no matter the economic and social costs, as characterized by the Financial Times (FT).

Given recent experiences with the massive surge and deaths in Hong Kong and, in general, with the deadly impact of the virus allowed to take flight across the globe, elimination remains popular with the Chinese population. Yet, it is being met with vicious denunciation in the bourgeois press.

Daily COVID cases China March 1 to April 5, 2022. Source WSWS.

On this issue, the World Socialist Web Site recently noted that the Financial Times, Speaking for the city of London, Wall Street and the global financial oligarchy that once controlled Shanghai and aims to establish neocolonial domination over all of China, [the FT Editorial Board] denounces lockdowns and all other public health measures that impinge on the production of profits but have saved millions of lives in China.

In short, they deem Zero-COVID an untenable prospect and demand that China begin a plan of action to end the elimination strategy and learn to live with the virus. Beijing, however, is not presently willing to concede defeat and acquiesce to these stipulations that would see millions of its inhabitants suffer the same deadly consequences.

It would be essential, in that regard, to take a brief account of the pandemic in the US over the last two years.

Over 1 million Americans have officially perished from their infections. However, as Scientific American recently noted, This toll is likely an undercount because more than 200,000 other excess deaths go beyond typical mortality rates, caused in part by lingering effects of the disease and the strain of the pandemic. COVID has become the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer in the US.

Nyesha Black, director of demographic research at the University of Alabama, speaking with Scientific American, said, We will see the rippling effects of the pandemic on our society and the way it impacts individuals for generations. Three-quarters of all the dead in the US have been among people 65 years and older, representing a critical part of the intergenerational family structure among the working class. Indeed, one out of every 74 people in this age bracket has been wiped off the face of the earth by a preventable disease.

Nearly one-quarter of all COVID deaths occurred among working-age Americans. As J Scott Davidson, CEO of the insurance company OneAmerica said in December 2021, We are seeing right now the highest death rates we have ever seen in the history of this business. Death rates are up 40 percent over what they were pre-pandemic, calling it a one-in-200-year catastrophe.

These deaths will have a lasting tragic impact on the lives of the youngest. It has been estimated that over 243,000 children have lost a caregiver to COVID, which includes 194,000 who have lost one or both parents.

Jennifer Dowd, a demographer at the University of Oxford, told Scientific American that a lot of us demographers have just been tallying the losses, and it kind of snuck up on us, the scale of it all. We never thought it would keep going like this. And even still, the long-term consequences on health and mortality have yet to be ascertained. Meanwhile, US politicians are wrangling over a few billion dollars in COVID funding while almost a trillion is to be made available for war-making.

For China, a co-existence strategy would have equally devastating consequences. Those 80 years of age and over, the most vulnerable, are the least vaccinated. And a considerable number of those 60 to 80 have only received two doses. With an immune evading virus and waning immunity, the virus would run like a massive tsunami wave through densely populated megacities across the mainland. The present attempts to bring Omicron under control attest to the difficulties faced by Chinese authorities.

Currently, China remains the only country that has continued to wage a campaign against the virus by mustering all available national resources to extinguish every outbreak through mass testing, tracing primary and secondary contacts, and isolating and treating the infectedall fundamental cornerstones of pandemic response.

The Chinese authorities mobilized all their national resources to test every person in Shanghai. As Reuters explained, The Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) on Sunday dispatched more than 2,000 medical personnel from across the army, navy and joint logistics support forces to Shanghai  about 38,000 healthcare workers from provinces such as Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and the capital Beijing have been dispatched to Shanghai, according to state media, which showed them arriving, suitcase-laden and masked up, by high-speed rail and aircraft.

Many had compared the current initiative to events in Wuhan in February of 2020, when the country faced its last real threat from the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The current testing strategy in Shanghai will inform the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and health authorities of the public health measures effectiveness and direct immediate actions to attempt to eliminate the virus from the city. However, as the FT noted, only three of 31 provinces have reported zero cases. Outside of Shanghai, Jilin, and possibly Hebei provinces, case numbers remain under 100 per day though almost half are seeing a rising trajectory.

The challenge and fundamental weakness of Chinas Zero-COVID policy is its national character. The current relentless nature of the outbreaks may very well drive the ruling class of China to be more concerned about its economic standing and insist on the futility of elimination. In collaboration with their international brothers and sisters, the Chinese working class must resist abandoning elimination and demand a globally coordinated action. The fundamental reality remains that there is no national solution to the pandemic, which remains in its acute phase, despite more than two years it has been allowed to run rampant across the globe.
The president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, has been traveling throughout Poland, including towns on the Ukrainian border, over the last several days. Weingarten has tweeted about her exploits, which have also been reported by CBS News and Politico .

Weingarten touched down at Polands border with Ukraine on Sunday as the first U.S. union official to visit the conflict-torn region, Politico reported Monday, in a piece titled Organized labor hits the ground in Ukraine.

The AFT president has portrayed her trip as a humanitarian mission at the invitation of the Polish Teachers Union ZNP to distribute money and educational materials to help the children of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion. The trip would also serve as a fact-finding mission to help understand how we continue to support and assist kids and teachers and communities whose lives have been completely torn apart, Weingarten said. Politico reported, Weingarten will brief the Biden administration, as well as AFL-CIO and others after she returns to the US.

In a CBS News interview recorded from inside a van as she was returning from the border town of Medyka Tuesday, Weingarten said, Weve met with humanitarian agencies, mayors and teachers, adding, we are doing what we can as Americans to help refugees.

Her comments quickly shifted, however, to the unsubstantiated claims of Russian atrocities and war crimes that the Biden administration is churning out to torpedo any peace talks and justify the escalation of US-NATO proxy war.

One of the kids yesterday said to me, Did you hear what happened in Bucha? A Ukrainian kid, and with the terror in her face at the atrocities that happened to her, to people in Ukraine.

The AFT president traveled to the Polish-Ukrainian border not as a humanitarian but as a long-time operative of the US State Department. Her aim was not to provide relief to refugees but to promote the war propaganda of the Biden administration and the geo-political interests of US imperialism.

In statement after statement in her weekly column in the New York Times and other media outlets, Weingarten has repeated Bidens lies about an unprovoked Russian invasion. The US-NATO arming of Ukraine and right-wing paramilitary forces, according to the AFT president, represents the defense of democracy and self-determination against an oppressive, autocratic dictator who seeks to establish Russian hegemony and military domination in Eastern Europe, as she wrote in a Times column hours after the February 24 invasion.

Of course, Weingarten says nothing about NATOs 800-mile eastward expansion since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 and military encirclement of Russia, which provoked Putin into his desperate and reactionary invasion. As a member of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and former board member with the late Madeleine Albright on the State Department-funded National Democratic Institute (NDI) think tank, Weingarten has long supported this anti-Russian policy.

On April 4, Weingarten tweeted a photo of herself with the US Ambassador to Poland Mark Brzezinski taken at the American embassy in Warsaw. The ambassador is the son of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former US National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977-1981 and Cold War anti-communist who helped shape the aggressive foreign and military policy of both parties against the USSR and then Russia.

(left) Mark Brzezinski, US Ambassador to Poland , and (right) Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) trade union. Mark is the son of Zbigniew Brzezinski. (Twitter.com/rweingarten, April 4, 2022)

The elder Brzezinski was the architect of the plan to arm Islamic fundamentalist insurgents in Afghanistan to involve the Soviet Union into a drawn-out occupation, which would inflict unsustainable military casualties and destabilize the USSR. The current US-NATO proxy war is based on the same playbook, using the US-armed ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazis paramilitary forces like the Azov Battalion. The latter are described by Weingarten as Ukrainian freedom fighters.

In a March 20 Times column, Weingarten notes, In 2014, I went to Ukraine on a solidarity mission with other labor leaders shortly after dozens of demonstrators were fatally shot there during a pro-democracy uprising. The uprising ousted Ukraines Russian-backed president and ushered in a new era of freedom and democracy that the Ukrainian people have long wanted.

CBS News interview Tuesday (Twitter @rweingarten)

The main purpose of her trip in 2014 was to provide a democratic veneer for the Western-backed coup, which relied on neo-Nazi shock troops from the Svoboda Party and Right Sector to install an anti-Russian government. In her public tweets at the time, Weingarten denounced as Russian propaganda any talk about Ukraines fascist protesters.

In a display of utter cynicism, Weingarten and other representatives of teacher unions in Europe visited the memorial at Babi Yar, where between 100,000 and 150,000 people were murdered by the Nazis, including tens of thousands of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war.

At the time, the WSWS wrote, the forces Weingarten traveled to Ukraine to support are the political descendants of those who helped perpetrate this horrific crime. The Svoboda party, which was the major political force in the protests that overthrew [former Ukrainian president] Yanukovych, was originally called the Social-National Party of Ukraine (SNPU) and its members wore swastika-style insignias. It was compelled to change its name because its open association with fascism complicated the US effort to integrate it into the Orange Revolution of 2004-2005.

It is noteworthy that in this weeks tweets from Poland, Weingarten includes the hashtag, #SlavaUkraini or Glory to Ukraine! The slogan was first used by Ukrainian nationalists in the 1930s, most notably the anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and his Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) and Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which carried out the mass extermination of Jews, Poles and left-wing opponents.

Like Biden, Weingarten presents the US-NATO war against Russia as a twilight struggle of the free world against autocracy. But the Polish regime, which is part of this so-called democratic front, is ruled by the extreme right-wing, nationalist Law and Justice Party (PiS). It has completely banned abortion, criminalized the exposure of Polish complicity in the Holocaust and scapegoated immigrants, especially refugees fleeing from Americas wars in the Middle East and North Africa.

The Polish government is also notorious for persecuting the LGBT community. This is something Weingarten neglected to mention in her tweet from Poland Tuesday denouncing similar actions by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: Lets show DeSantis and the forces behind this bill that the American people wont stand for this. Show your support for LGBTQIA+ teachers now.

It is also noteworthy that Weingartens trip was hosted by the Polish Teachers Union. The ZNP, along with the AFL-CIO-backed Solidarnosc and other unions, betrayed and shut down a powerful 17-day nationwide strike of 300,000 educators in 2019 against the PiS government, which pays teachers poverty wages of 1,800 to 3,000 zlotys (US$470 to US$780) per month, forcing many to work second jobs to make ends meet.

Over the course of many decades, the AFL-CIO trade union federation has funded and promoted far-right and fascistic forces against left-wing trade unions around the world. The former longtime president of the AFT, Albert Shanker, was a particularly rabid anti-communist who supported the Vietnam War and CIA subversion campaigns.

Organizations such as the Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers (ORIT) and the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), the predecessors of the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, functioned as labor fronts for CIA-organized coups in Guatemala (1954), British Guiana (1963), Brazil (1964), the Dominican Republic (1965) and Chile (1973). Solidarity Center was a conduit for money from the National Endowment for Democracy to right-wing trade unions active in the failed attempt to overthrow Venezuelas Hugo Chavez in 2002.

Weingarten, who pulls in a salary of over half a million dollars, is a hated figure among US educators who have seen her betray strike after strike, collaborate with school privatizers like Bill Gates, and force teachers and students into schools infected with COVID-19 as part of Bidens policy of prioritizing profits over human life. Now, after the pandemic has taken the lives of 1 million in the US, the AFT president is supporting a reckless conflict with nuclear-armed Russia.
Premier Productions and Donut Media Announce Their First Live Tour

YouTube Sensations Hit the Road for 5-City Arena Tour



NEWS PROVIDED BY

EPIC Agency

April 5, 2022



NASHVILLE, April 5, 2022 /Standard Newswire/ -- Premier Productions and Donut Media announce Donut Media's first live tour. The YouTube famous Donut crew  James, Nolan, Zach, Jeremiah and Justin  are piling in a bus this June to travel to five different cities for their interactive World Tour across the southwestern United States.



"Over the past six years the Donut community has grown into something we could have never imagined, we had no idea that so many people shared our weird sense of humor as well as our real passion for cars," said James Pumphrey, Donut's Editor in Chief. "Their constant support has encouraged us to take big risks and continue to evolve what Donut is and can be. They helped us define who we are, from YouTube videos to podcasts to apparel and collectibles and now a live tour. We've been wanting to get out into the world and do this for a long time and finally, all of the pieces are coming together to make it a reality. Get ready, y'all. We promise to melt your brains...and your hearts."



The automotive gurus are planning to bring audiences a wild night to remember directly inspired by their STREAMY AWARD WINNINGTM YouTube content. Audiences can expect a dynamic performance including elements from across the automotive landscape including history, science and of course comedic relief. Audience members will not only be able to participate in the show, but have access to exclusive Donut Media merchandise.



"We are so honored and excited to be partnering with the Donut Media team on this tour," said Dan Rauter, Premier's SVP of Global Touring. "James, Nolan, Zach, Jeremiah, Justin and their crew have built such a massive community of gear heads and car lovers. We're thrilled to be able to showcase their expertise and authentic hilarity to their fans, live and in-person."



Tickets go on sale to the public on Friday, April 8th at 10:00 a.m. local time and can be purchased at donutlive.com. Fans can access their local pre-sale on Thursday, April 7th with code: GARAGE.



The five-city tour will begin on June 10th in El Cajon, Calif., and will stop in Riverside, Calif., Mesa, Ariz. and San Antonio, Tex. before the final show on June 16th in Houston, Tex. For a full list of dates and cites, see below. The Donut crew will be sleeping on the same bus so there's a decent chance they'll all break up. This may be your last chance to see them live.



About Premier Productions:

Founded in 1996, Premier Productions has sold over 20 million tickets to patrons. Premier has been a Top 20 global promoter and has produced more than 2,000 concerts and events in the past five years. Pollstar named Premier the #1 faith and family independent promoter in the last 10 years. Producing events that move the soul both nationally and internationally, Premier is proud to have helped raise more than $271 million to improve the lives of children and communities in 100+ countries worldwide. Whether it's a large multi-day festival, sold-out concert or intimate conference, Premier seeks to positively impact the lives of every attendee so they leave encouraged, happy and hopeful. Premier is currently promoting acts including Hillsong UNITED, Dude Perfect, Lauren Daigle, Hillsong Worship, Baby Shark, Casting Crowns, Chris Tomlin, Sadie Robertson, Elevation Worship, Kari Jobe Bethel Music and many more.



About Donut Media:

Founded in 2015 Donut Media is a multi-platform media company dedicated to bringing accessible automotive content to audiences of all ages. As the top automotive YouTube channel in the U.S. and a STREAMY AWARDTM winner, Donut has recorded over 2 billion views and over 6.25 million followers by pioneering a comedic and informative approach to car content that rebuked the gatekeeper traditions of past car culture. Donut Media's expanding catalog of original series include Up to Speed, HiLow, DIY or Don't, and D-list. Beyond digital content and crazy stunts, Donut operates a wildly successful merchandise line, produces two podcasts, brokers on-screen branding deals, licenses content internationally, and has a collectible car brand, STOCKY. Donut is part of Recurrent Ventures, a digital media company that owns and operates 20 enthusiast-driven brands including The Drive, Field & Stream, Popular Science, and more.



Contact:

Jennifer Willingham

EPIC Agency

jennifer@epic.inc

615-483-4729

Friday, June 10, 2022 El Cajon, CA



Saturday, June 11, 2022 Riverside, CA



Sunday, June 12, 2022 Mesa, AZ



Wednesday, June 15, 2022 San Antonio, TX



Thursday, June 16, 2022 Houston, TX

SOURCE EPIC Agency



CONTACT: Jennifer Willingham, 615-483-4729, jennifer@epic.inc


Bucha, Ukraine

GENYA SAVILOV/AFP via Getty

In Bucha, Ukraine  where Russian soldiers have been accused of raping, torturing and killing hundreds of civilians  a lone cyclist was struck in March by high-caliber rounds fired from Russian armored vehicles, according to video verified by The New York Times.

Weeks later, after Russian soldiers abandoned their occupation of the suburban town outside the capital of Kyiv, the bike and the cyclist's body were filmed lying on the street.

Video of the attack published by the Times on Tuesday shows the rider dismounting and walking their bike around a corner before two of more than 20 Russian vehicles in the area fired rounds at the cyclist, creating a cloud of smoke and debris.

The footage is from early March, according to the report, when Russian troops held Bucha.

After the forces withdrew over the weekend, the extent of the destruction and the horror of the occupation were revealed, Ukraine says  though Russia insisted such accounts were faked.

RELATED: Zelenskyy Reacts to Mass Graves and Suspected War Crimes in Ukrainian Cities

"Corpses of executed people still line the Yabluska street in Bucha," the town's mayor, Anatoliy Fedoruk, said. "Their hands are tied behind their backs with white 'civilian' rags, they were shot in the back of their heads. So you can imagine what kind of lawlessness they perpetrated here."

A Bucha coroner and his colleagues reportedly collected more than 100 bodies in recent weeks, according to the Times. Only three of the bodies, the coroner said, were Ukrainian soldiers. The others were civilians and most had died as a result of being shot or hit with shrapnel.

The town resorted to burying the dead in a mass grave because the morgue there was without electricity for refrigeration.

Russia has denied any involvement in the killings, with the country's Ministry of Defense saying the images of bodies on the streets of Bucha  taken by seasoned journalists for outlets across the world  had been "staged" and that "not a single" civilian had been injured there, per the Times and other reports.

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Ukainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP via Getty Ukainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

Clad in a bulletproof vest, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy toured Bucha on Monday and said thousands of people have been killed or tortured.

"These are war crimes and this will be recognized by the world as genocide," Zelenskyy, 44, said.

Russia's attack on Ukraine continues after their forces launched a large-scale invasion on Feb. 24  the first major land conflict in Europe in decades.

RELATED: Zelenskyy Remembers How His Family Woke Him Up to Say a War Had Started

Details of the fighting change by the day, but hundreds of civilians have already been reported dead or wounded, including children, though the actual number of deaths is difficult to determine. More than 4 million have fled the country as refugees  and half are children, according to the United Nations. Millions more have been displaced inside Ukraine.

The invasion, ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, has drawn condemnation around the world and increasingly severe economic sanctions against Russia.

Bucha, Ukraine

DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP via Getty Police officers and residents stand next to a crater in front of a house damaged by recent shelling, on the outskirts Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 12.

RELATED: Mom Says She Wrote Her Contact Info on Daughter's Body in Case She was Orphaned in Ukraine

With NATO forces massing in the region around Ukraine, various countries are offering aid or military support to the resistance. Zelenskyy has called for peace talks  so far unsuccessful  while urging his country to fight back.

Putin insists Ukraine has historic ties to Russia and he is acting in the best security interests of his country. Zelenskyy vowed not to bend.

"Nobody is going to break us, we're strong, we're Ukrainians," he told the European Union in a speech in the early days of the fighting, adding, "Life will win over death. And light will win over darkness."

The Russian attack on Ukraine is an evolving story, with information changing quickly. Follow PEOPLE's complete coverage of the war here, including stories from citizens on the ground and ways to help.
With North Korea set to celebrate its most important holiday next week, the U.S. is concerned that Pyongyang "may be tempted to take another provocative action," including a possible nuclear test.

"We, in cooperation and coordination with our allies and partners, are prepared to deal with whatever they may undertake, and I want to emphasize that we obviously hope that they will refrain from further provocation," U.S. Special Envoy for North Korea Sung Kim said.

North Korea will celebrate the birth of the country's founder, Kim Il Sung, on April 15. Kim is the grandfather of current dictator Kim Jong Un.

The isolated country has not conducted a nuclear test since September 2017, its sixth on record.

As Russia's war in Ukraine exacerbates tensions between the Kremlin and the West, Kim said Russian and Chinese diplomats at the United Nations have obstructed any U.S. effort to condemn North Korea's recent spate of missile launches -- including the kind of long-range one that Russia and China used to condemn back in 2017.

MORE: North Korea did not launch 'monster' missile as they claimed, South Korean lawmakers say

"Unfortunately, I cannot report that we have had productive discussions with" China or Russia about a new U.N. Security Council resolution, Kim told reporters during a briefing Wednesday.

The two countries have blocked even a public statement from the U.N. Security Council condemning the 13 recent launches, per Kim, even though they violate multiple U.N. resolutions.

Still, the U.S. and its allies are pursuing a new resolution to condemn North Korea's launches because "the Security Council needs to respond to these blatant violations of multiple Security Council resolutions," Kim said. "This is about the credibility of the United Nations."

PHOTO: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un attends a meeting of the politburo of the ruling Workers' Party in Pyongyang, North Korea, Jan. 19, 2022, in this photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency. (KCNA via Reuters, FILE)

Kim, who also serves as the U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, traveled to Washington this week, including to meet his Chinese counterpart Tuesday for a "very long and detailed discussion."

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He said despite Chinese opposition, he remains "convinced that Beijing shares our goal of the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."

Part of the U.S. outreach to China on this issue is because North Korea has rejected all U.S. entreaties under the Biden administration.

"We have sent several messages, both public and private, inviting them to a dialogue without any conditions," Kim told reporters, but North Korea has yet to respond, which Kim called "very disappointing."

MORE: North Korea may have tested its biggest long-range missile yet in another foreign policy crisis for Biden

He declined to speculate on why, but said the COVID-19 pandemic could be one reason. North Korea "finds itself isolated in unprecedented ways and has shut itself off during the COVID pandemic. Only the resumption of diplomacy can break this isolation," he said.

Instead, the U.S. has heard more fiery rhetoric from Kim Jong Un's sister, Kim Yo Jong, who this week warned of a nuclear response if South Korea prepared to strike. Kim said the U.S. was "concerned" by the "provocative" comments.

With Biden's North Korea policy going nowhere fast, Kim argued it is still having an important effect. While Pyongyang remains committed to perfecting its nuclear weapons program, U.S. sanctions and pressure "are constraining their progress," he said.

North Korea could test nuclear device next week, US envoy warns originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
American pilot Bessie Coleman in her bi-plane, circa 1920.

When I need some change, Im only accepting Bessies from now on.

It was announced by the United States Mint that Bessie Coleman, along with four other women who were pioneers in their field, will appear on select U.S. quarters in 2023.

Read more

The other women being honored include a former first lady, a prima ballerina, a journalist and a composer. The Secretary of the Treasury selected the women following discussions with the Smithsonian Institutions American Womens History Initiative, the National Womens History Museum and the Congressional Bipartisan Womens Caucus.

Coleman was born in 1892 in Atlanta, Texas and was the tenth child out of thirteen children born to an African American mother and a Cherokee and African American father.

More than 100 years ago, Coleman became the first African American and Native American woman to get an International Pilots License in 1921 and in 1922 she completed the first public flight by an African American woman.

From the United States Mint:

The range of accomplishments and experiences of these extraordinary women speak to the contributions women have always made in the history of our country, said Mint Deputy Director Ventris C. Gibson. I am proud that the Mint continues to connect America through coins by honoring these pioneering women and their groundbreaking contributions to our society.

The other women being honored on the 2023 quarters include Jovita Idar, a Mexican American journalist, activist and teacher; Edith Kanakaole, an indigenous Hawaiian composer, dancer and teacher; Eleanor Roosevelt, first lady and author, and Maria Tallchief, a Native American who became the first prima ballerina in the history of America, according to the United States Mint.

The first Black woman to be featured on a U.S. quarter was Maya Angelou and were still waiting for Harriet Tubman to make her long-awaited debut on the $20 dollar bill after it was delayed by the Trump administration.
From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Just 35, Johnson is Milwaukees first millennial mayor, his triumph confirming his swift six-year rise from Common Council freshman to the seat of power in Wisconsins largest city.

This city for the first time in our 176-year history has elected its first Black mayor. We did it, Johnson told supporters at the Hilton Milwaukee City Center.

Accompanied by his wife and their three children, Johnson said we want our city to be loving, nurturing and stable. Thats why I ran for mayor.

Johnson said weve got a lot to do, adding the city has to stem violence, restore its neighborhoods, create jobs and repair the broken relationship with state government.
Donald Trump sits with Russias president, Vladimir Putin (Reuters)

Donald Trump is not known for careful remarks that always reflect the truth, but theres one subject on which he seems to veer from reality the sharpest: Russia.

The former president ended his one-term stint in the White House in January 2021 after spending four years publicly contradicting journalists, other Republicans, and even his own intelligence agencies on issues of US-Russia relations and Moscows campaign to influence US politics through misinformation on social media. But his warm words for Vladimir Putin and the Russian government wouldnt end there, as the US president would frequently touch on the subject after leaving office in interviews, at campaign-style rallies, and elsewhere.

Some of Mr Trumps statements on Russia didnt rise to the level of outright lies or incorrect claims, of course; in many instances, the 45th president merely diverted from norms by appearing to wholeheartedly embrace a foreign leader denounced by US officials and Americas allies around the world as a murderer and brutal autocrat.

In recent weeks, much of the former presidents past statements are being revisited amid Russias invasion of Ukraine and the assertion of Mr Trump and his allies that he was tough on Russia and Mr Putin and would not have permitted such a war to break out under his watch.

With that in mind, lets take a look at some of Donald Trumps greatest hits when it comes to Russia and its work to put him in office in 2016, from before he was sworn in to the present day.

1. The first and last joint press conference

When Donald Trump met in Helsinki, Finland, with Vladimir Putin in 2018, the shockwaves resulting from their conversation reverberated for months.

Emerging from a private meeting with the Russian leader, Mr Trump stood alongside Mr Putin, a rare enough occurrence for any US president, before doing something that would go down in history: publicly contradicting the conclusions of his own intelligence community, and siding with Russia on its explanation for interference in the 2016 election.

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(AFP)

"President Putin says it's not Russia. I don't see any reason why it would be," Mr Trump told shocked reporters, while many US officials and his own aides likely felt that same sense of surprise.

The US intelligence community had concluded in a report, published publicly more than a year earlier: We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.

The damage that Mr Trump inflicted with his words was immediate, and White House aides attempted to walk his statement back. But it followed a long pattern of Mr Trump casting doubt on the explanation for interference in the 2016 election released by US intelligence officials.

2. Hunter Bidens supposed $3.5m gift

While very real criminal investigations into the workings of the Trump Organization, as well as surrounding the January 6 attack on Congress continue, Donald Trump has remained focused on crimes he has baselessly alleged that the Biden family is involved with.

Among the latest of his allegations against the Biden family is the charge that Hunter Biden was the recipient of a gift of $3.5m from the wife of Moscows former mayor through an investment firm he supposedly co-founded.

Hunter Biden (DNCC via Getty Images)

The problem? Hunter Bidens attorneys have strongly denied that he had any involvement in the investment firm in question, and was not a co-founder, as Republicans have alleged. Mr Biden did co-found a firm known as Rosement Seneca, but has strongly denied any involvement in Rosemont Seneca Thornton, the firm which received the $3.5m.

Mr Trumps claim in this instance is actually based on a finding of a report from Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which too stated that Hunter Biden received a wire transfer for $3.5m from Elena Baturina, widow to Moscows former mayor Yury Luzhkov. Mr Bidens lawyers have said that reports finding is in error, as it is based off the same assumption that Mr Biden is involved with Rosemont Seneca Thornton.

3. I have nothing to do with Russia

Throughout the 2016 campaign and into the early months of his presidency (when the Russia intelligence community assessment was released), then-candidate Trump repeatedly insisted that he had no business in Russia or interests in the country beyond an old business deal.

What do I have to do with Russia? You know the closest I came to Russia, I bought a house a number of years ago in Palm Beach, Florida," Mr Trump said at a press conference shortly before taking office in January of 2017. "There was a man who went bankrupt and I bought the house for $40m and I sold it to a Russian for $100m including brokerage commissions.

That wasnt true. It was later revealed that Mr Trump had pursued plans for a Trump Tower Moscow, and in 2019 Buzzfeed News reported that Mr Trumps then-attorney Michael Cohen had lied to Congress about the scope of his Russian business dealings. Mr Trump was found in the Mueller Report, which investigated his connections to Russia, to have potentially known this. The report stated: There is evidence ... that the president knew Cohen provided false testimony to Congress regarding his business dealings.

4. Nato nonsense

One of former President Trumps favourite claims to return to on the issue of US-Russia relations is his persistent falsehood regarding the participation of Nato-aligned countries in the alliances defensive pact.

Mr Trump has repeatedly insisted that he was responsible for countries like Germany vowing to contribute more to the Nato alliance, even declaring to the UN Security Council in 2019, while he was still president: I was able to, over the last couple of years, increase their contribution, referring to Nato countries.

[O]ver the last couple years, I had them increase by $130bn, he went on to falsely claim.

There is one Nato-aligned nation that significantly increased European defensive spending during the Trump administration  the United States, which as Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltentberg noted in 2018 had increased by nearly half since Mr Trump took office.

Since Trump became president, US funding for military presence in Europe  the European Deterrence Initiative  has been increased by 40 per cent, Mr Stoltenberg said at a Nato summit that year, quipping [a]ctions speak louder than words. Mr Trump had vowed to decrease spending to Nato if US allies did not increase their own contributions.

As for other nations in the defensive pact, spending increases for European defense far predate Mr Trumps presidency. A graph of Nato member-state contributions compiled by the organisation itself shows that military spending began steadily increasing in 2014 following Russias invasion of Crimea, and that trend did not change in a meaningful way up or down during the Trump presidency.

5. I sent the Javelins

At a post-presidency rally in Florence, South Carolina earlier this month, Mr Trump made one of his most brazen attempts yet to alter his legacy on the issue of Russia.

Addressing the invasion of Ukraine, and the Ukrainian militarys fight against Russian forces, Mr Trump declared: I sent the Javelins that Ukrainian forces are using against Russian tanks and other vehicles. It was one of several statements the ex-president and his allies have made in recent days attempting to take credit for US aid to Ukraine, which has suddenly become an extremely popular political issue.

While not an outright lie, as noted above, the statement clearly falls into the realm of an attempt to misrepresent the truth given that the 45th president was famously impeached (for the first time) in 2020 after it was revealed that he had tried to pressure Ukraines now wartime leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, into opening a highly political criminal investigation into claims that Joe Biden or his son broke the law in the country with their past business dealings.

At the time, the Trump administration was actually holding up military aid to Ukraine, rather than letting it be transferred unimpeded. And while Mr Trump didnt mention the military aid shipments on his call with Mr Zelensky, the decision to hold up the aid was made around the same time as the July 2019 conversation and the aid was not released for months.
Shinola has signed a multiyear eyewear license with Marchon. The two companies unveiled the deal on Wednesday under which Marchon will oversee the design, production and global distribution of Shinola optical eyewear and sunglasses.

The first designs will be released in the fall of 2022 in the U.S. and Canada, with styles made available at select retailers and on Shinolas website.

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All of the eyewear will utilize Marchons proprietary Flexon material, which allows frames to be bent or twisted without damage. An initial range of mens and unisex styles will include six optical designs and five sunglasses. Most of the designs take inspiration from key Shinola watch collections.

Marchon president Nicola Zotta said the company is thrilled to partner with Shinola, a distinct brand that will fit well into our portfolio. We look forward to offering new eyewear styles that will complement our Flexon technology and stand out to customers who are looking for frames designed with expert, quality craftsmanship.

Shinolas vice president of creative design Ruthie Underwood added: Shinola is known for classic design that proves to be distinctive and timeless, whether were styling watches, leather bags or home accessories. Were excited to extend our legacy for delivering high-quality manufactured goods to eyewear consumers who treat their glasses as a meaningful symbol of who they are and aspire to be.

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Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. (Rex Features)

As former Moonie-turned-cult-expert Steven Hassan watched the Capitol Riots unfolding last January, there was a familiar face among the thousands of MAGA supporters clamouring to overturn the 2020 election result.

Hyung Jin Sean Moon, head of the far-right, AR-15-worshiping Rod of Iron Ministries and son of Moonie founder Sun Myung Moon, had joined Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to protest in front of the US Capitol. The group has been widely described as a cult.

The Rod of Iron Ministries posted a clip to its Instagram page showing Sean Moon wiping tear gas from his eyes while blaming the violence on Antifa.

The clip had particular resonance for Dr Hassan: he was among a group of 350 Moonies who, on the orders of Sun Myung Moon, prayed and fasted for 72 hours on the steps of the US Capitol to protest Richard Nixons Watergate impeachment in 1972.

I thought if I wasnt de-programmed I could have been there, I could have been arrested for this, Dr Hassan told The Independent.

Thats how far gone I was.

Dr Hassan left the Moonies in 1976 aged 22, became a whistleblower in congressional hearings, and has since helped deprogamme thousands of other former cult members while becoming an expert and author in the influence tactics used by authoritarian leaders.

While hosting an event for former cult members in Kansas City in 1986, he met a 29-year-old Ginni Thomas, then known by her maiden name Ginni Lamp, who spoke about wanting to expose Lifespring, a controversial self-help group that practiced intensive self examination, and disbanded in the 1990s.

It was eight years on from the infamous Jonestown massacre, where more than 900 followers of preacher Jim Jones were murdered or died by suicide under his instructions at a remote settlement in Guyana. Ms Thomas and others were pushing Congress to create an annual Cult Awareness Week to shine a spotlight on these groups destructive practices.

Dr Hassan posted footage of the meeting to Twitter last week, where it has since racked up more than 1.6 million views.

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Ginni Thomas talks about leaving the Lifespring cult in 1986 (Twitter/StevenHassan)

In the footage, Ms Thomas discusses the need for cult survivors to reconnect with their spiritual needs.

When you come away from a cult, you have to find a balance in your life as far as getting involved with fighting the cult or exposing it, Ms Thomas says.

And I think Im really trying and struggling with the balance between that. I want to expose Lifespring, I want to keep other people from going through that experience, she added.

But I also dont want to go overboard in that regard so that I can reconnect with my own needs in a spiritual way, which I still havent done.

In an interview with The Washington Post in 1987, Ms Thomas spoke about taking part in a stripper exercise, which involved Lifespring members getting undressed while taking turns to make fun of anyone who was overweight.

Former members say Lifespring, which trained as many as 400,000 people in the US, employed deceptive and indirect techniques of persuasion and control.

Ms Thomas has previously spoken about how Lifespring leaders separated her from her family and friends, and being forced into hiding as she sought to leave the group in the mid-1980s.

Last month, Ms Thomas was revealed to have tried to pressure former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to overturn the 2020 presidential elections in favour of Donald Trump.

She also attended the Stop the Steal rally on 6 January, but in an interview said she left early as she was cold.

The Independent has attempted to contact Ms Thomas for comment.

Ms Thomas had long been known as a prominent conservative activist, but the text messages appeared to reveal her as believing the effort to overturn the election was a battle of good versus evil, regardless of who had won the most votes.

Ginni used to be anti-cult and pro-freedom, and the fact she was sending those messages seemed very culty, Dr Hassan told The Independent.

I think someone is unduly influencing Ginni Thomas to believe those things.

After the 1986 meeting, Ms Thomas continued to be active in cult awareness networks for years, and Dr Hassan met her again at another survivors meeting in 1992.

Steven Hassan left the Moonies aged 22, and has since become a leading expert on cults and mind control (Supplied)

Dr Hassan says that once a person has been indoctrinated into an authoritarian group, they are much more susceptible to falling prey to one again.

When somebody leaves a cult because they realise that group is bad, but havent understood the psychological processes they were subjected to, and been able to digest them and undo them, then its difficult for them to truly change.

Dr Hassans 2019 book The Cult of Trump found strong parallels between the former presidents tactics and notorious leaders like Jim Jones, David Koresh and L Ron Hubbard.

The lying, the need for absolute loyalty, the us vs them and framing of the next election as an apocalyptic battle bore all the hallmarks of a destructive cult. What has changed since the era of the Moonies, Lifespring, the Jonestown massacre and Waco is technology: the internet, smartphones, social media, and AI.

Or as Dr Hassan puts it, the tools of psychological warfare.

Jim Jones, leader of the Peoples Temple cult, who ordered the deaths of more than 900 followers in 1978 (AP/words by Adam Lusher)

And then the pandemic made us all isolate where people were spending even more time online, and our minds can be bent, he said.

This is the feature of being human, we can learn wrong things and believe that theyre true.

In the mind of someone in a mind control cult they cant imagine leaving and being happy and fulfilled.

Ms Thomas has spoken of having a staunchly Christian conservative upbringing in Nebraska.

Ginni and Clarence Thomas were married in 1987, the year after she was filmed discussing her departure from Lifespring. She supported her husband through his bruising Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991 when he was credibly accused of sexual harrassment by Anita Hill.

Clarence Thomas forged a reputation as a staunchly ideological Supreme Court justice, often staking out positions on abortion, voting rights and healthcare far to the right of his colleagues.

At the same time, Ginni Thomas would often lobby and advise conservative groups who were bringing cases before the court through her firm, Liberty Consulting.

Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas (AP)

Justice Thomas was also the sole dissenting vote in the courts January decision that rejected Mr Trumps bid to withhold documents from the 6 January panel.

They have referred to each other as best friends, and that they share every aspect of each others lives.

Dr Hassan says its almost impossible to believe that Justice Thomas doesnt share her beliefs that the election was stolen.

I think that based on their history, they were always enmeshed, he said.

There are people who are puppeteers of Trump, and then there are different cults that are his base. It seems to me that Clarence and Ginni are part of this religious Christian-right group.

He thinks there is sufficient evidence for an impeachment hearing for Justice Thomas, a call echoed by legal scholars and Democrats.

Dr Hassan said there were many factors that went into someone being at risk of falling prey to cultish leanings, including their upbringing, age, social and information networks.

Dr Hassan says laws surrounding cults were woefully out of date, and it was time to put in place a legal framework to combat uninformed consent.

He wants to see congressional hearings with panels made up of social psychologists, attorneys and Christian ministers to debate the problem.

It would be a way to create a public dialogue internationally to say this technology on how to manipulate minds exists, and we need regulation, we need to hold bad actors accountable.

The pimps, the traffickers who are grooming people and making them slaves, they need to be put in jail.
Russian opposition activists Ilya Yashin, right, and Vladimir Milov in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, March 14, 2018. AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin

A former Russian official told CNN that Russia's elite will begin to question Putin's leadership.

Vladimir Milov said officials are already concerned about Putin's aggression in Ukraine.

Milov said officials are monitored and are afraid to communicate with each other about the policies.

A former Russian deputy energy minister who is now an adviser to opposition leader Alexy Navalny said Russian President Vladimir Putin's time in office is numbered.

Vladimir Milov told CNN's Erin Burnett on Saturday that top officials in the Russian government are "personally devastated" by Putin's aggression in Ukraine.

"For the first time ever, we are moving in a backwards direction. We had a lot of difficulties in the 70s, and the 80s, and the 90s, but we were still somewhat opening to the world and the direction was very different," Milov said. "Now Russia is being disconnected from global markets, global financial architecture, technology, logistics, and so on."

Milov said this disconnection isn't something that's happened before and those in positions of power recognize that.

"So, when I say devastated, I mean it," Milov said.

In a March 18, op-ed in the Journal of Democracy, Milov wrote that Putin's "days are numbered."

He told Burnett on Saturday, that Putin still maintains a strong grip on power but most likely not for long.

"He can hang on for some time, but few weeks, months, down the road, many more people inside the system will begin questioning what he's doing, ordinary Russians will express discontent with deteriorating economic situation, huge losses in the war. This is something Putin never experienced," Milov said.

Milov said Russian elites will start questioning the direction of the country and if Putin is the right leader.

Right now, however, he said communication between government officials is monitored significantly, possibly even greater than surveillance of opposition. Opponents are afraid to speak up about Putin's policies in Ukraine.

"If like two people, three people, or more will start to discuss that Putin is taking the country in the wrong direction, this is with large certain going to be recorded and reported to Putin," Milov said.

Read the original article on Business Insider
An Iranian American woman is appealing to the Biden administration to secure the release of her husband, who has been imprisoned in Iran for six years, and says she fears he will be left behind if Washington agrees to a prisoner swap with Tehran.

Shahab Dalili, 59, was arrested and imprisoned in 2016 while he was visiting Tehran for his fathers funeral, according to his wife, Nahid Dalili. The family had recently immigrated to the U.S. and settled in Gainesville, Virginia, when Dalili was detained. Although he is a legal permanent U.S. resident with a green card, he is not a citizen.

Its important for Shahab to come back home. If there is a deal, if they are trying to release the hostages, then all the hostages should be free, Nahid Dalili said in an interview.

She said Iran charged her husband with "aiding and abetting" the U.S.

In the years since his detention, Dalili said, she chose not to speak publicly about her husbands case for fear of jeopardizing his possible release. But when she heard Biden administration officials refer to four Americans imprisoned in Iran, she decided last month to break her silence.

Shahab Dalili. (Courtesy Nahid Dalili)

I want them to hear me. They cant say they didnt know about this, she said. The Biden administration shouldnt leave Shahab behind. He is a permanent legal resident, and all of his family are citizens.

Human rights groups say Shahab Dalili is one of multiple foreign nationals being held on baseless charges without due process. Iran denies the accusation and says all those detained have been prosecuted in accordance with Iranian law. Irans U.N. mission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Iran and world powers appear close to clinching an agreement that would revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

U.S. officials say they are negotiating a parallel agreement with Iran to address the fate of Americans held in Iran and, possibly, Iranian nationals imprisoned in the U.S.

The final issue to be resolved to restore the 2015 nuclear accord involves Tehrans demand that the U.S. government lift the blacklisting of Irans Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization, current and former officials say. The possible move has already drawn fierce criticism from Republicans in Congress.

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The U.S. special envoy to Iran, Robert Malley, who is overseeing the negotiations over restoring the 2015 nuclear accord, has vowed not to repeat a 2016 prisoner swap that freed a group of Americans but failed to secure the release of Siamak Namazi, an Iranian American businessman held in Tehran, and a U.S. legal resident, Nizar Zakka. Zakka was released in 2019; Namazi remains behind bars, and his elderly father is not being allowed to leave Iran.

Asked about Dalilis case, a spokesperson said the State Department regularly assesses the circumstances of cases brought to the Departments attention in Iran and elsewhere, adding, Due to privacy considerations we are not in a position to comment further.

The spokesperson added that the Iranian government must fully account for U.S. citizens missing or abducted in Iran.

The Biden administration has called for the release of four U.S. citizens held in Iran, without referring to legal permanent residents like Dalili.

Under a law adopted in 2020, known as the Levinson Act, the U.S. government is obligated to work for the release of both U.S. citizens and green card holders, whom the law describes as U.S. nationals.

Unlike 2015, when the Levinson Law was not in force, the Biden administration now has more tools and more direction from Congress to secure the release of all US nationals held in Iran including Dalili and others, wrote Jason Poblete, a lawyer helping to represent Dalili.

Poblete is also representing the family of Jamshid Sharmahd, a legal U.S. resident who lived in California before he was alleged to have been abducted while traveling in the United Arab Emirates and moved to a prison in Iran. Sharmahd, who has German citizenship, has been denied any contact with his family since 2001 and faces a potential death sentence for charges of corruption on earth, according to Amnesty International.

Last year, a bipartisan group of four senators urged the Biden administration not to reach any agreement with Iran without ensuring the release of Americans held in Iran. In a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the senators  Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Tim Kaine, D-Va., Todd Young, R-Ind., and Chris Coons, D-Del.  specifically called on the administration to address the plight of permanent legal residents such as Shahab Dalili."

Two former cellmates of Dalili who were released in 2019 have urged the Biden administration not to agree to any deal without ensuring Dalilis freedom. Zakka, a legal U.S. resident who was imprisoned for four years in Iran, and Xiyue Wang, a U.S. citizen who was detained while conducting academic research in Iran as a Princeton University graduate student, have issued online appeals for Dalilis release.

He needs to be included & come home if Biden is going to do a prisoner swap deal with Iran, Wang wrote on Twitter.

Dalili worked for more than 26 years for the Iranian state shipping company, IRISL, retiring in 2012 as deputy general manager of the companys department of maritime affairs. The U.S. has sanctioned the company a number of times, alleging it is involved in arms proliferation. In 2014, Dalili, his wife and two sons immigrated to the U.S., where he set up a consultancy business in the marine industry.

Four U.S. citizens are known to be held by Iran: Siamak Namazi, a business consultant who has been behind bars since 2015; his elderly father, Baquer Namazi, who is no longer in prison but has not been allowed to leave the country; Morad Tahbaz, 66, a conservationist with U.S. and British citizenship, who was arrested in 2018; and Emad Shargi, 56, a businessman first detained in 2018, later released and then charged again in 2020.
Homes throughout New Mexico could become more energy efficient during extreme weather events as the state will receive up to $22 million in federal grant dollars to do so via the infrastructure bill recently signed into law by President Joe Biden.

The bill earmarked the federal dollars for New Mexico through the U.S. Department of Energys Weatherization Assistance Program.

Money would provide rebates to aid low-income families retrofitting their homes for better energy efficiency, intended to reduce utility bills.

The program, created in 1976, was estimated to save homes an average of at least $372 a year and served 7 million families since its inception, per a report from the DOE.

More: Los Alamos National Laboratory agrees to clean up nuclear pollution, ends watchdog lawsuit

That also supported 8,500 jobs, per the report.

U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) said the work will help his constituents save money while improving energy efficiency and could promote more electric, energy-efficient appliances.

When New Mexico homes use less energy, New Mexico families save more money, he said. Im proud to see the Infrastructure Law deliver investments that provide New Mexicans the opportunity to upgrade and weatherproof their homes that will result in lower monthly energy costs.

More: Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance members confident of federal approval for nuclear waste facility

Heinrich said the funding in conjunction with Zero Emissions Homes Act he sponsored, which was most recently assigned the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, would help cut environmental impacts and save New Mexicans on their bills.

With Democrats in control of both Congress and White House, we have a prime opportunity to create more dollar-saving opportunities that will help even more New Mexicans electrify their homes, he said. We are already making the clean energy transition more accessible to all Americans, implementing this rebate system will make it more affordable.

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More: Oil industry urges support from Biden as energy costs soar in the wake of Russia conflict

The rest of New Mexicos Democrat congressional delegation signaled support for the funding and legislation to address climate change and provide an economic boost for their state.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is making a difference in New Mexico  helping lower costs for New Mexicans and making our homes more energy efficient, said U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Lujan. This investment in the Weatherization Assistance Program will support jobs and opportunities and provide support for thousands of households across the country.

U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) touted the assistance program saving hundreds of dollars annually on electric bills in New Mexico and across the U.S. while also reducing pollution from fossil fuels.

More: Xcel Energy pushing electric vehicles in New Mexico, plan to cut emissions by 2050

Im proud that the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law makes historic investments in the Weatherization Assistance Program, which will help New Mexicans across the state and help to address climate change, she said.

By reducing energy costs for New Mexico families and increasing energy efficiency, this funding will help improve homes, save families an average of $283 or more a year, and support good paying jobsall while saving energy and helping build a more resilient future.

And U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-NM) said the funding and weatherization program would particularly help New Mexicans both in local communities and Indigenous groups.

More: 'A long way to go' to reduce oil and gas' pollution in the Permian, despite company efforts

"Investing in energy efficiency and weatherization is a win for everyone, she said. This program will reduce utility costs for our low-income families and ensure the health and safety of their homes. Let's build on these investments and continue to deliver for our communities.

New Mexicos top utility companies also assisted to their customers in weatherizing their homes for better energy efficiency.

Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM), the states biggest power provider, provides home energy checkups by sending specialists to home customers to evaluate energy efficiency in person or virtually.

More: New Mexico needs electric vehicles to clean up air pollution, prevent deaths study says

Retrofits for home lighting could save up to $75 a year, PNM reported, while weather insulation can prevent up to 40 percent of air leaks.

Xcel Energy, which serves regions in southeast New Mexico, offered incentives since 2001 along with access for New Mexico users to renewable energy both in residential and commercial sectors.

The company provided $750,000 to residential customers in 2021, along with $1.5 million for low income homes.

The Residential and Low Income Home Energy Service was developed by Xcel Energy to provide an incentive to suppliers of energy services to implement electric energy-efficiency projects at Xcel Energy residential customers' facilities, read a statement from Xcel.

The primary objective of the Home Energy Service is to achieve cost-effective reduction in peak summer demand.

Adrian Hedden can be reached at 575-628-5516, achedden@currentargus.com or @AdrianHedden on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Carlsbad Current-Argus: New Mexico gets $22M from feds to improve home energy efficiency
Apr. 5PORTLAND, Maine  Former Gov. Paul LePage said he welcomed refugees and thought former President Donald Trump had been "too harsh" on immigrants, signaling a shift from his own hard line on immigration during his two terms in the Blaine House.

The Republican running against Gov. Janet Mills in 2022 was one of the figures who spoke in Portland on Tuesday at the opening of a multicultural center run by the Maine Republican Party that aims to boost the party's outreach toward immigrant and minority voters in the liberal city.

The comments suggest a recalibration on the issue and Republicans seek to make inroads with Maine's small but growing immigrant community. Some of the most controversial remarks of LePage's tenure centered on immigration. Days before the 2016 election, he ended Maine's cooperation with a federal refugee resettlement program.

He also sought to limit aid to asylum seekers in Maine and said immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally were driving cases of infectious diseases. Some comments prompted significant pushback among immigrant leaders, who said his rhetoric was causing immigrants to leave Maine out of fear. Mills, a Democrat, reversed some of his policies after taking office in 2019.

Asked about his past policies on Tuesday, LePage denied that he had tried to pull Maine out of the refugee program, saying he "loved refugees" and only had concerns about the flow of drugs at the U.S.-Mexico border.

"People coming in, I endorse them, I love them, especially when they speak French," LePage said in a nod to his native language also spoken by immigrants from some African countries.

The former governor, an early endorser of Trump in 2016, also said he thought the former president, along with the rest of the country, was overly harsh on immigrants after he made immigration a central issue of his 2016 campaign and sought as president to ban immigrants from several Muslim-majority countries, including Somalia, which LePage supported at the time. Legal immigration dropped sharply over Trump's four years in office.

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But LePage said Tuesday he would like to see "Ellis Island again," saying Maine needed more workers and the federal government should reform immigration law to provide pathways other than the southern border. He also called for allowing asylum seekers to work sooner after getting to the U.S. rather than relying on public assistance, something widely supported by business interests and Maine's bipartisan congressional delegation.

"Let's get together, fix the immigration laws so that people do not have to be brought in by cartels," LePage said. "I'm all for people coming in the front door."

The opening of a multicultural center in Portland also represented a shift for the Maine Republican Party, which has seen its vote share in Maine's largest city shrink even further in the past decade. Democrats indicated skepticism, noting LePage's past comments.

"Opening a campaign office during an election year isn't going to erase the harm that Paul LePage has done to new Mainers or make them forget who he really is," Maine Democratic Party Chair Drew Gattine said in a statement.

The office mirrors "community centers" for immigrants and minority groups that the Republican National Committee has helped fund in other states in the past year. Its stated goals include helping with voter registration and political training, as well as other issues such as aid with resumes or starting a business.

Suheir Alaskari, the chair of the Maine GOP center, said she was not looking to work with one party or the other, but appreciated the support offered by Republicans and had felt welcomed by them. Alaskari, who was born in Iraq and moved to Maine five years ago, said the goal of the center was not electoral but in boosting economic development opportunities.

She is working toward becoming a U.S. citizen, but said her interest is in helping the community more than politics.

"I prefer to work with people, not necessarily politics," she said. "But I will definitely always be an advocate."
The Erie High School student who shot another student on Tuesday has "turned himself into the Erie police," a spokesman for Erie Mayor Joe Schember said in a brief statement at 5:50 p.m. on Wednesday.

"The investigation is ongoing," the spokesman, Frank Strumila, said in an email. He had no other comment, and no other information was immediately available.

Erie County District Attorney Elizabeth Hirz told the Erie Times-News that the suspect is being held at the Edmund L. Thomas Adolescent Center, with a detention hearing scheduled for Friday. A judge at the hearing will decide where the suspect should stay pending the prosecution of the case.

"I want to add my appreciation for everyone's hard work and assistance these past two days," Hirz said.

Hirz said the suspect will be charged as a juvenile and not an adult because the person is younger than 15, though authorities have not disclosed the suspect's age. If the suspect was older, Hirz said the person could be charged as an adult under the Fisher Bill.

Changes for juveniles: Juvenile detention or adult prison? New federal law lets Erie County judges decide

The Fisher Bill, effective since 1996, applies only to juveniles who are at least 15 years old. The only exception is that juveniles younger than 15 can be charged with homicide.

In the Erie High case, "due to the age of the juvenile, the Fisher Bill would not be appropriate," Hirz said at a news conference on Tuesday.

From earlier coverage on Wednesday:

An Erie High School student was shot at least three times, including in the abdomen, during a confrontation with another student in a hallway of the school before the suspect fled the building on Tuesday morning, Erie police revealed on Wednesday.

At least five shots from a 9 mm handgun were fired during the encounter, as officers recovered that number of shell casings inside of the school.

Earlier coverage: DA, police: Suspect in Erie High shooting is under 15, still at large

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Authorities did not release the name, age and gender of the student who was shot. But the victim, who was observed to be a male at the scene, was taken to the hospital by ambulance after the shooting. Information on the student's condition was not available Wednesday morning.

Sharteya Evans, 36, looks for her daughter to leave Erie High School after a student was shot and injured there in Erie on April 5, 2022. Evans said she had spoken with her daughter multiple times and that she was not injured.

Shooting caught on surveillance video

The shooting was reported on Tuesday at 9:22 a.m. at the 2,300-student Erie High School, 3325 Cherry St. City police investigators said Wednesday that it appears to have been the result of a confrontation between two individuals.

Erie police Inspector Mike Nolan said there is nothing that leads police to believe the shooting was related to group violence or gang activity. That characterization echoed Nolan's comments at Tuesday's news conference, when he called the shooting an "isolated, targeted incident" that was not "a random act of violence."

He said there have been rumors that the suspect and the shooting victim are related, but police have not been able to confirm that.

Latest details: Here's what we know about the Erie High School shooting

Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Andrew Hacke walks near Erie High School after a student was shot and injured inside in Erie on Tuesday.

According to police, the shooting was captured on surveillance video from cameras inside the school. The video shows that close to a dozen people were in the hallway in the immediate area of the shooting, according to Erie police Deputy Chief Rick Lorah.

Some school staff members witnessed the suspect fleeing immediately after the shooting, he said.

Erie High put on lockdown; students were later dismissed

School officials put the high school on lockdown after the shooting, with students and staff huddled in locked classrooms. The first Erie police officers arrived on the scene within 90 seconds and the officers immediately went inside the building, Deputy Chief William Marucci said.

The student who was shot was in the nurse's office when police entered the building, Marucci said. Teams of officers then began clearing the building and systematically moving students and staff in each classroom to the building's gymnasium, Marucci said.

The process took just under three hours to complete, he said.

Other law enforcement officers from Erie and a number of other area agencies also set up a perimeter outside of Erie High School while additional officers searched the area for the suspect after police obtained a description of the suspect and then the suspect's identity, according to police.

Officers additionally searched the area for the gun, but were unable to find it, Nolan said.

Nolan said he does not believe that there is an increased level of risk to the public from the shooting and with the suspect still at large. He said, however, that police are concerned about any "retaliatory violence" stemming from the incident.

Pennsylvania State Police vehicles park near Erie High School after a student was shot and injured inside in Erie on Tuesday.

Erie High security under review

The Erie School District said it is focusing on security in response to the shooting.

Erie schools Superintendent Brian Polito said at Tuesday's news conference that the Erie School District, with more than 10,000 students, is developing a security plan for Erie High for when students return after spring break, which ends April 18.

The district canceled classes at Erie High for the rest of the week in light of the shooting, and the district's spring break starts next week. The district also made counseling available.

Polito said the district has never used metal detectors at Erie High, but that staff used security wands on students who arrive to school late and "do random wandings as well."

"We are working on a plan to safely return our students to school," Polito said.

On Tuesday, the president of the Erie Education Association teachers' union issued a statement that sharply criticized the Erie School District for its handling of security measures at Erie High. The EEA said that it has pushed for increased security at the school.

Responding to threats: How unfounded threats of violence to Erie-area schools stir stress, create more work

Students and parents leave Erie High School on Tuesday following a shooting that injured one student earlier in the day.

"No bureaucracy is worth a human life," according to the statement from the president, Mary Theuerkauf. "We will not stand by one day more until the safety of our students and staff is properly addressed. This is a demand, not a suggestion, that Administration and School Board start acting to protect the lives in our buildings."

In a statement, Polito linked the shooting to the increase in violence among juveniles in the city during the pandemic. The spike in crime among juveniles, including gun crimes, has been so great that the Unified Erie anti-crime initiative is tailoring its prevention efforts to children of middle-school age.

Revamped mission: Rise in juvenile offenses leads Unified Erie anti-crime effort to focus on middle school kids

"Incidents like these are a reflection of a troubling rise in youth violence in Erie," Polito said in the statement. "As we ask the entire community to come together to address this challenge, we are working on a comprehensive plan for students and staff to safely return to school. The well-being of our students and staff is and always will be our priority, and we will take every measure possible to ensure their safety and security."

Contact Tim Hahn at thahn@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ETNhahn.

Contact Ed Palattella at epalattella@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ETNpalattella.

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Erie High shooting: Police say victim shot 3 times
Sean Penn says Ukraine will win the ongoing war with Russia but that the cost of victory remains unclear.

The 61-year-old filmmaker and Oscar-winning actor said no one on the planet has been tested in leadership like Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Penn, who has been in and out of Ukraine while making a documentary about the ongoing Russian invasion, appeared on Fox Newss Hannity on Tuesday (5 April) evening.

Ive never felt this way about Ukraine or about where our country is, and what I experienced emotionally in Ukraine, he told host Sean Hannity.

We all talk about how divided things are here, but when you step into a country of such incredible unity, you realise what weve all been missing.

These people are fighting for the very dreams that are the aspirations of all of us Americans.

HANNITY EXCLUSIVE: @SeanPenn will join "Hannity" TONIGHT for an EXCLUSIVE interview. We'll talk about his experience filming a documentary in Ukraine. Tune in at 9 PM ET or set your DVR!  Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) April 6, 2022

Speaking about Zelenskys leadership he said: I dont know that theres a person on earth that could know that they were born for such a day, that they could rise to it.

In him, I saw something that Ive never seen before in my lifetime this extraordinary courage was in his eyes. No one on the planet has been tested in leadership like this one human being.

He added: It is clear to me, the Ukrainians will win this, the question is at what cost.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky (Getty Images)

The Ukrainians are fighting to win and theyre fighting to win for the very thing were able to do right now, to be free, to dream.

Penn declined to give his thoughts on what direct action should be taken against Russian leader Vladimir Putin, but he said: If there is a God, there will be vengeance beyond all possible comprehension.

Story continues

The actor was branded as an enemy of the state by Hannity back in 2007, but said he now wore the comment as a badge of honour as he refused to get drawn into a political debate by the host.

Penn later appeared on the more left-leaning MSNBC on the show The Last Word With Lawrence ODonnell to heap further praise on President Zelensky.

The Oscar-winner has been actively involved in humanitarian projects throughout the years, including founding the non-profit organisation CORE (Community Organised Relief Effort) in response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Additional reporting by outlets
It was the "smell of death" that struck Vladimir Basovskyi of Kyiv as he delivered food and medicine to the surviving residents of towns surrounding Ukraine's capital city.

Burned cars. Blackened apartments. Demolished roofs. Streets crawling with journalists and investigators, documenting bodies.

"Then everything was like in fog  a lot of crying, a lot of happiness to see Ukrainian people, a lot of fear in eyes, a lot of anger," Basovskyi, 35, told USA TODAY this week via WhatsApp from Kyiv. "Next what I remember, I am sitting at home and crying like a child.

"It is a hell."

Days after Russian forces retreated from the Kyiv area, investigators and volunteers are beginning the long, grim work of chronicling what U.S. officials have described as a "troubling campaign" of brutality against civilians.

Ukrainian officials say the bodies of more than 400 civilians were found in towns around Kyiv after Russian forces withdrew. In Bucha, more than 320 civilians were killed, Mayor Anatolii Fedoruk said Wednesday.

A day after visiting Bucha, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy detailed reports of killing, rape and torture in an address to the U.N. Security Council. He said Russian forces "killed entire families," crushed civilians with tanks, cut off limbs and slashed throats.

"Women were raped and killed in front of their children. Their tongues were pulled out," Zelenskyy said.

ATROCITIES NEAR KYIV: Will it be a tipping point in the war?

April 5, 2022: People walk by an apartment building destroyed during fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces in Borodyanka, Ukraine.

While Russian officials continue to deny the allegations and attribute the killings to Ukrainian forces, satellite images shared by numerous outlets  including The New York Times, CNN and Reuters  show bodies were lying on the streets of Bucha weeks ago, during Russian occupation.

U.N. Human Rights High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet said this week that preserving, exhuming and identifying bodies would be crucial for an independent investigation into possible war crimes. Meanwhile on Wednesday, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said for the first time that the Justice Department is assisting in efforts to examine possible war crimes.

Story continues

Ukraines prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, is overseeing a sweeping investigation into civilian killings in various parts of the country, gathering evidence and personal accounts. In Bucha, she reported a "horrifying fact of torturing, killing and attempting burning of bodies of six civilians," she said Tuesday on Twitter.

The nearby town of Borodyanka, further outside Kyiv, suffered the greatest number of civilian casualties under Russian occupation, Venediktova said on national television Monday.

Volodymyr Omelyan, Ukraines former infrastructure minister who joined the nation's volunteer Territorial Defense Forces, visited Borodyanka on Wednesday with other volunteers and national guardsmen. He shared images with USA TODAY of brick homes turned to piles of rubble and buildings with glass windows blown out.

"Many multi-story buildings were ruined during the occupation because of Russian artillery," Omelyan said over the phone from Kyiv, "but we still dont know how many people are under those ruins."

Omelyan said his small convoy also traveled to Irpin, Hostomel, Bucha and a number of surrounding villages, where residents are without electricity or heat. As his group reached the village of Zdvyzhivka, residents were concluding a funeral for five people.

"It is a disaster when you see. But it's a much bigger disaster when you hear also stories of how people suffered," Omelyan said.

Emergency workers search through the rubble of an apartment building following a Russian attack in Borodyanka, Ukraine, on April 6, 2022.

Also documenting deaths and destruction are a patchwork of groups including Human Rights Watch and Ukrainian nonprofits and volunteers.

Yuriy Bilous, an attorney who lives near Bucha, said via WhatsApp on Wednesday that he began collecting accounts of killings near Kyiv even before the Russian military left the area and sent some to the International Criminal Court.

Bilous, 34, said he interviewed the family of a man shot and killed at a checkpoint while riding bicycles with his 14-year-old son to get medicine.

"It hurts," Bilous said of hearing such stories. USA TODAY could not independently verify the account.

'NOW WE ARE LIKE ONE FAMILY': Despite past tensions, Poles open their homes to Ukrainians in wake of war

A Human Rights Watch researcher was in Bucha on Wednesday, the group said. An NBC video showed him examining casings near a damaged building to try to determine how a woman was killed. Elsewhere, workers hauled bodies from inside a building.

Among those killed in Bucha were people caught in the crossfire or from shelling, along with apparent "face-to-face" violence against civilians while Russians held the town, said Fred Abrahams, an associate program director for Human Rights Watch who spoke via phone from Germany where he was helping coordinate the effort.

It wasn't one large massacre, he said. It was scores of incidents spread across the town.

"It's an absolute horror show. There are crime scenes on almost every corner," Abrahams said, adding the process would take months. "They're still finding bodies."

Dozens of bodies wait to be buried at a cemetery in Bucha, outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, April 5, 2022. Ukraines president told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday that the Russian military must be brought to justice immediately for war crimes, accusing invading troops of the worst atrocities since World War II. He stressed that Bucha was only one place and there are more with similar horrors.

Trained volunteers are helping interview witnesses and document the targeting of civilians.

Kyiv resident and activist Kateryna Butko, who said she works for a nongovernmental organization focused on judicial reform, was among them. She was working Tuesday in Bucha to help "ensure that the stories that people have experienced are not forgotten and those who are guilty are punished," she told USA TODAY in a series of messages.

The once-comfortable suburb she had visited, home to many young families, was now a scene of devastation, with burned children's bicycles and toys littering yards. Near a church was an open pit where bodies had been laid, Butko said.

Butko said she listened to the account of a man as he stood in the basement of a building where he had been hiding with others when a Russian soldier shot a woman in the head.

"There are still her sneakers," the man kept repeating, Butko said.

USA TODAY could not independently verify the account.

Butko said she was stunned by what she heard from residents: "It is very difficult to realize that these stories that are told can happen now, in 2022, right next to you."

USA TODAY ON TELEGRAM: Join our new Russia-Ukraine war channel to receive updates straight to your phone

Other volunteers have been focused on distributing humanitarian aid.

Omelyan's group distributed bread, meat and water to residents Wednesday. Many, fearing the return of Russian forces, were still hiding in basements until he and others called out to them, Omelyan said.

In the small village of Andriivka, a group of children ran out of a damaged building to greet Omelyan and the other volunteers. "One kid was just kissing bread  not eating it, but was just kissing it like a miracle happened in his life," he said.

Some Ukrainians are working to clean up the streets and bring generators to towns and villages, Omelyan said. By the time his caravan returned to Kyiv, the vehicles' tires had been torn up by pieces of mines and artillery on the streets.

LAND MINES: Russians leave deadly land mines behind as troops withdraw in Ukraine

For 12 hours Sunday, Basovskyi and others in a caravan of eight cars delivered aid  bread, fruit, medicine and hygiene products  to exhausted adults and children in many of the same towns and villages.

"After all (the) days of war, I understood (the) scales of disaster  awareness (of) what really is happening to my compatriots. And I was afraid for everyone who is in even more dangerous places, such as Mariupol," Basovskyi said, referencing the southeastern port city that has been under siege for weeks.

Fellow volunteer Oleksandr Kuzniak, 27, said the group fell silent as they passed by corpses on the ground. He recalled seeing the body of an old man on the side of a road near Irpin, a bicycle lying next to him.

"I still cannot realize what suffering they endured," Kuzniak told USA TODAY in a series of WhatsApp messages.

Kuzniak said he has been heartened by a few precious moments: Children laughing when he gave them sweets, older women crying when he gave them tangerines, a group of kids running off to play with the soccer ball he had in his trunk.

Though reports suggest Putin is believed to have shifted focus on eastern Ukraine, it remains unclear if the Russian military was gone for good from the Kyiv area.

Asked how he keeps going, Basovskyi said: "I am dreaming and talking with everyone about Ukrainian future."

Contributing: Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY

Chris Kenning reported from Louisville, Kentucky. He can be reached at ckenning@gannett.com or on Twitter at @chris_kennin. Grace Hauck reported from Chicago. She can be reached at ghauck@usatoday.com or @grace_hauck.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Bucha massacre, Ukraine deaths: Crime scenes surround Kyiv
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The European Commission has formally notified Hungary that it is activating the mechanism in the European Union budget, which links EU funding to the rule of law, against the country, EC President Ursula von der Leyen said on Tuesday.

The EC has given Hungary the opportunity to answer its questions on the issue of the rule of law, Von der Leyen told MEPs in response to a question on the state of the rule of law in Hungary and Poland.



The commission has assessed Hungarys answers and our conclusion is we have to move on the next step, she said.



The ruling of the European Court of Justice rejecting actions brought against the rule of law conditionality by Hungary and Poland fully confirmed the approach followed by the commission, Von der Leyen said.



Gulyas on EU Activating Rule of Law Mechanism



The prime minister's chief of staff on Tuesday said Brussels was making a mistake "by dancing to the Hungarian left-wing's whistle", in response to the EC's announcement on activating the rule-of-law conditionality against the country.



European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in Strasbourg earlier on Tuesday that the EC has sent a notification to Hungary, the first step in activating the mechanism which links the payment of EU funds to the state of the rule of law.



In response, Gergely Gulyas said that the ruling Fidesz-Christian Democrat (KDNP) alliance garnered nearly 2.9 million votes at Sundays general election.



Some 3.3 million people expressed agreement with the governments stance on child protection in the referendum, he said.



Gulyas said that the turnout shows unprecedented support for the ruling parties and for the amendment to Hungarys child protection law, which the European Union has called discriminatory against the LGBTQ community.



Justice Minister Judit Varga said the Hungarian government had received no formal notification of the vote by the College of Commissioners.



In a Facebook post, she said the Hungarian government was not interested in political statements and was waiting to receive a formal notification with concrete details to which Varga said the government would respond.
Five people died and over ten were injured when a van drove in front of a train in Mindszent, in southern Hungary, on Tuesday morning, MTIs on-site correspondent reported.

The accident took place just before 7am at a rail crossing in the town centre when the van drove onto the rails and collided with a train from Szentes to Hodmezovasarhely.



The train derailed and careened into a ditch 60 metres from the site of the impact, while five out of the vans seven passengers died at the scene. Police closed the road to aid inspection and rescue efforts, while an ambulance helicopter was dispatched to the site.



Firefighters were alerted to the scene, while the rescue was coordinated by the Disaster Management Operations Service.



National railway company MAV said the train had been carrying 22 passengers, two of whom suffered serious injuries, while eight were lightly hurt.



According to MAV, the railway lights were functioning properly and the van had driven in front of the train when the light was red. Replacement buses will carry railway passengers between Szentes and

Hodmezovasarhely until Wednesday morning.





MTI Photo: Tibor Rosta
As PM Viktor Orban secures a record fourth consecutive term in office with a crushing parliamentary majority, partisan commentators offer diametrically opposing explanations of the result of Sundays general election.

In Magyar Nemzet, Tamas Toot-Hollo interprets the result as a personal victory of the Prime Minister, whose experience in government and in diplomacy as well as his flight of oratory ensured a decisive majority on Sunday. People chose him, he argues, because he inspired a sense of security with his moderate stance over the war in Ukraine while remaining unflinchingly faithful to Hungarys allies.



In an embittered editorial in Nepszava, Peter Nemeth lambasts the bulk of the population which, as he sees it, turns a blind eye to the governments misdeeds. He accuses PM Orban of running a regime based on widespread corruption and teaming up with Putin. He predicts that, despite the economic difficulties ahead, the population will be duped once again into believing that they live well.



Fidesz wins two-thirds majority for the fourth time in a row



Both a pro-government and a liberal pundit predict that after Sundays landslide Fidesz victory, the opposition alliance will disintegrate.



According to the preliminary results, Fidesz got 53 per cent of the votes and will enjoy another two-thirds majority in Parliament. The opposition coalition received 35 per cent. The radical right-wing Our Homeland party crossed the parliamentary threshold with 6 per cent of the votes.



On Mandiner, Daniel Kacsoh interprets the results as a devastating defeat for the opposition coalition. The pro-government commentator suspects that the opposition will blame its total electoral failure on frontrunner Peter Marki-Zay. In an aside, Kacsoh claims that as the Our Homeland party is likely to pass the 5 per cent threshold, Fidesz will again occupy the centre in Parliament.



On 444, Peter Magyari attributes Fideszs landslide victory to the governments lavish handouts, price caps, propaganda and the voting system that, according to the liberal pundit, enables Fidesz to win even if its supporters do not drastically outnumber the opposition voters. He suspects that the opposition coalition will break up.



Concerning the future, Magyari believes that despite its two-thirds majority in the Parliament, Fidesz will have a hard time managing the economic crisis Hungary must now face.



This opinion does not necessarily represent the views of XpatLoop.com or the publisher.

Your opinions are welcome too - for editorial review before possible publication online.

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MTI Photo
Weve suffered a heavy defeat, Ferenc Gyurcsany, leader of the opposition Democratic Coalition, said, reacting to the outcome of Sundays general election in which Fidesz won a fourth successive supermajority.

The shared dream of the kind of Hungary we want has suffered a heavy defeat, Gyurcsany said.



Referring to the united oppositions PM candidate Peter Marki-Zay, Gyurcsany said: The ship we share must sail on, adding, however, that they had not chosen the best captain to steer it.



Gyurcsany said the election was neither free nor fair, but there was no doubt that a vast majority of Hungarians has accepted this election and has given yesterdays government a mandate for tomorrow.



He said the situation must be acknowledged, but it must also be said, he added, that the opposition had not given up its dream of the Hungary they wanted to see.



Gyurcsany said he would not evade the question of why the opposition had been defeated. If someone goes to battle, they cannot give up their views for tactical reasons, he said.



A European, civic and fundamentally left-wing opposition cannot be successful with a programme which, in many respects, considers the governing right wing its example and model.



The alternative to Fidesz on the left is in the liberal world, the moderate centre-right world and the green world, he said, adding that if the opposition chose a leader who cant or doesnt want to pursue such policies, they will fail.





MTI Photo
YORK  Chad Tolly, 54, of Wood Lake, Nebraska, has been charged with 12 drug-related counts in York County and he has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

His arraignment was held this past week in York County District Court.

The case began when a deputy with the York County Sheriffs Department was on regular patrol on Interstate 80 in the middle of the night. He allegedly saw a Tesla speeding and tried to initiate a traffic stop at milemarker 346 but Tolly, the driver, didnt pull over until milemarker 353.

The deputy also noted the license plates on the Tesla were registered as being for a different vehicle.

In court documents, the deputy says Tolly was unable to produce any documentation except for a piece of paper he said indicated he had purchased the vehicle. It was found that Tolly had a revoked drivers license.

The deputy alleges he could see an open alcohol container in the vehicle and Tolly had watery eyes.

During a probable cause search of the vehicle, deputies allegedly found multiple containers of concentrated THC as well as 596 prescription pills with Tolly having no valid prescription for any of them.

He has been charged with possession of a controlled substance, a Class 4 felony; having no drug tax stamp, a Class 4 felony; five counts of unlawful acts relating to drugs, all Class 3 misdemeanors; and five counts of possession of legend drugs, Class 3 misdemeanors.

A jury trial has been set in the matter for late July.
Bollywood actor Ishaan Khattar recently bought a new Triumph Bonneville Speed Twin, which he has posted images of on social media. The actor is best known for films such as Suitable Boy and Dhadak. A helmet was given to Ishaan Khattar by Shahid Kapoor, who is Ishaan Khattar's brother. The price of the Triumph Bonneville Speed Twin stands at Rs 11 lakh (ex-showroom).

The Triumph Bonneville Speed Twin, a neo-retro roadster from the Bonneville line of Triumph motorbikes, has been acquired by Ishan Khattar in the "Red Hopper" colour. The new Bonneville Speed Twin was unveiled in 2021 by Triumph.

In addition to the 43 mm Marzocchi inverted front forks up front and the pre-load adjustable shock absorber, the front and rear brake discs have a combined diameter of 320 mm and 220 mm, respectively. There is Brembo M50 radial callipers on the front and Nissin callipers on the back.

Read also: Top 5 upcoming Tata electric cars to launch in India: Curvv, Altroz and more

In addition, the Triumph Speed Twin comes with under-seat USB charging sockets, a tyre pressure monitoring system, and an engine immobilizer. Additionally, the bike has LED rear lights and indicators, as well as LED Daytime Running Lights (DRLs) incorporated into the headlight.

The Triumph Speed Twin has three riding modes: Rain, Road, and Sport, which can all be toggled at the touch of a button while the bike is moving. The bike has a wheelbase of 1413 mm, weighs 216 kg, and has a fuel capacity of 14.5 litres.

The Triumph Bonneville Speed Twin is powered by a liquid-cooled, 1200cc engine that makes 100 PS of power and 112 Nm of torque and is mated to a 6-speed gearbox which gets slip and assists the clutch.

Recently, Shahid Kapoor also gifted himself a brand new Mercedes-Maybach S580 saloon on his 41st birthday, worth Rs 2.79 crore (ex-showroom).

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Emphasizing the need for an immediate direct air link between Chandigarh and London, the Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann on April 6 urged the British Deputy High Commissioner Caroline Rowett, to take up with the British High Commissioner to India of starting direct flights between London and Chandigarh.

Taking part in deliberations, Rowett, who paid a courtesy call to the chief minister at his official residence, said she would certainly take up this matter with the British High Commissioner to start these flights to facilitate the Punjabi diaspora settled in the UK.

These flights will also help people residing in neighbouring states of Punjab to have a seamless journey to Punjab and the UK, she said, according to an official release. She also congratulated Mann for securing a massive mandate in the recently held Punjab assembly polls.

Also read: AirAsia to start international flights from India to Malaysia and Thailand starting this month

Mann apprised Rowett that besides Punjab, the Chandigarh international airport also caters to the demands of the people of neighbouring states of Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, and the Union Territory of Chandigarh.

The airport has basic facilities for handling wide-bodied aircraft such as the Boeing 777 and is equipped with the CAT-IIB instrument landing system, he said, adding that the airport also has the latest infrastructure for handling international flights.

(With inputs from PTI)

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Along with the international flights and travel, the facilities provided by the airports have also been affected because of the Covid-19 restrictions. Following ease of the Covid-19 restrictions, San Francisco airport has reopened its Yoga rooms after a two-year hiatus. It is to be noted that the airport has two dedicated Yoga rooms falling in the category of free-of-charge airport facility opened back in 2012.

The Yoga rooms of the San Francisco International Airport were closed at the time of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The authorities opened the facilities for travellers on April 4. The free-of-charge Yoga facility equipped with yoga mats is divided into two rooms. These facilities are present in the airport's post-security locations in Terminal 2 and Terminal 3.

Namaste! SFO re-opens its 2 Yoga Rooms today! SFO was the first airport in the US to offer Yoga Rooms. Check them out in Terminals 2 and 3 on your next trip through SFO! pic.twitter.com/OIrKRm8frg  San Francisco International Airport (SFO) (@flySFO) April 4, 2022

The Yoga room at the San Francisco Airport is designed by converting a Storage room into a facility. Moving ahead with the idea of such a facility at the airport, the design and architectural duties of converting the storage room to a yoga facility were done by Gensler for the T2 project. The T3 yoga facility was built down the road following the T2 yoga facility.

Also read: Hyderabad International Airport to soon get revamped terminal with world-class amenities

Talking about the design, the facilities have been designed following a minimalist design pattern. The reason for following the design pattern can be traced back to providing a disturbance-free environment. Talking about a distraction-free environment, there are no televisions in the facility. In addition, things like phones, shoes, food, and drinks are prohibited in the area.

At the time of opening the facility back in 2012, the San Francisco International Airport claimed that the yoga room facility at the airport was a unique one. Following the example of San Francisco, other airports like Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport opened their own yoga facility later in 2012, followed by Chicago O'Hare International Airport in December 2013 and Chicago Midway Airport in 2014. Similarly, Miami International Airport and Burlington International Airport have their own yoga facilities.

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NEW DELHI: Bollywoods renowned producer Sajid Nadiadwala surely knows where to invest money in order to woo his audience.

After roping in some of Hollywoods biggest action directors to work on the action sequences for Heropanti 2, the producer also spared no cost in mounting the film on a mega-scale which included filming at some prime international locations.

Shot in England, India, Russia, Thailand, and Abu Dhabi, Heropanti 2 promises to take audiences on a visual journey of some of the most scenic, exclusive locations and hidden gems apart from having every other ingredient of a wholesome action-entertainer.

After films like Baaghi 2 and Baaghi 3, trio Sajid Nadiadwala, Tiger Shroff and director Ahmed Khan are now looking to push the envelope and set a new benchmark in action with Heropanti 2. This time around the sequel of the blockbuster has been mounted on a huge budget and will witness never-seen-before action.

Written by Rajat Arora and music by A R Rahman, Sajid Nadiadwalas Heropanti 2 is directed by Ahmed Khan, who also directed Tigers last release Baaghi 3. The movie is scheduled to release in theatres on 29th April, 2022 on the auspicious occasion of Eid.
Tata Motors has unveiled a special electric SUV concept in India called Tata Curvv Electric SUV with coupe-styled body. While Tata Motors is planning to launch a long range Nexon EV and Altroz EV in the coming days, the new SUV concept highlights the brand's future perspective on the EVs. As per Tata Motors, the Curvv will be an electric-first SUV and will later get petrol and diesel engine options.

Tata Curvv is designed with a coupe roofline and is an evolution of Tata Sierra EV concept showcased at the Auto Expo 2020. As per Tata, the Curvv will be placed above the mid-size SUV and below the premium SUV segment. In its second gen, it can have a range as high as 500 km on a single charge.

As per the images released, the front gets LED Daytime Running Lamps (DRLs) that extend across the width of the bonnet crease, through the side, and into the ORVMs. The primary headlights are located on the bumper of the vehicle. The headlight unit is housed in a triangle-shaped casing.

The grey machine-cut alloy wheels can also be seen, while the highlight is the coupe body design. Tata and EV logos are emblazoned on the vehicle's backside. With its curved back windshield and sleek roof-mounted spoiler, the SUV copue looks futuristic.

The X1 platform that supports the Nexon will be used for this model. The back doors will be longer, the roof will be tapered, and the whole back end will be redesigned with a longer overhang. The wheelbase is expected to rise by around 50 millimetres. It is projected to be around 4.3 metres long.

Also read: Tata Electric SUV Concept to be unveiled in India today - Watch it live here [Video]

A 40kWh battery pack and 400km range had previously been rumoured for the upcoming Tata Coupe SUV. The SUV will also be available with fuel-efficient, turbo-charged petrol and diesel engines.

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Tata Motors is keen on increasing the number of EV models in its line-up. The increase in EV models seems like an imminent step considering consumers' enthusiasm toward electric vehicles. Another reason pooling in towards this development is the increasing competition from its rivals in the segment like MG Motors and others. To take on this competition they have recently unveiled the Tata Curvv electric concept SUV for the Indian market.

Tata Motors already has quite a few electric vehicles in the Indian market, like the Nexon EV and Tigor EV, among others. Adding to its current line-up, they have a few facelifts and new models in its pipeline, either confirmed or speculated to be in the market soon. Here we put together a list of top Tata electric vehicles you can expect to see in the market soon.

Tata Curvv Concept

The homegrown automaker has unveiled a new model christened Tata Curvv Concept and highlights the upcoming mid-size electric SUV. This new model comes with the new design language of the automaker with a LED light running across the front fascia of the vehicle. This new car is expected to come with a powertrain tuned for giving increased range as well a host of new features to aid the driver.

Also read: Tata Concept Curvv Electric SUV unveiled in India, to get petrol/ diesel engine options later

Tata Nexon EV Long-Range

Tata Nexon EV is one of the mid-size SUVs from the automaker that's been in the market since 2020 and needs an update. Considering the need, the Indian automaker plans to release a longer-range version of the SUV. The new car will have a bigger battery pack expected to have a range of 400 km per charge. It might also get a few interior and exterior upgrades.

Tata Tigor EV Long-Range

Tata Tigor EV debuted back in 2021 and has been in the market ever since. Now, the 2022 version of the model is in the discussion. The new updated model will come with interior and exterior upgrades and is likely to have a range of 370 km to 400 km, very similar to the Nexon EV. As per the reports, the test mule of the Tigor EV has been spotted testing.

Tata Sierra EV

Tata Sierra EV is one of the cars from the automakers that has been getting a lot of attention since it was first showcased in the 2020 Auto expo. The Sierra EV is expected to be launched by 2025 as it is still undergoing development. It is expected to have the Sigma platform based on the ALFA platform used by the automakers in EVs.

Tata Altroz EV

Tata Altroz EV, first showcased at Geneva Motor Show in 2019, is expected to hit the markets soon. The hatchback is expected to have similar looks as the ICE version though it will likely have a similar powertrain as in the Nexon EV. The new EV is expected to have connectivity features.

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#mute
Police on Wednesday registered an FIR against an Aligarh Muslim University professor who referred to examples of rape in Hindu mythology during a forensic science class, provoking accusations of hurting religious sentiments. The university has suspended the professor, who offered an apology for the inadvertent mistake.

According to AMU officials, Dr Jitendra Kumar, an assistant professor at AMU's Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, made the references to rape in mythology while conducting a class on medical jurisprudence.

He was served a show cause notice asking him to explain within 24 hours why disciplinary action should not be taken against him. The university authorities also set up a two-member probe committee, but he was suspended pending the outcome of the inquiry, an official told PTI.

This was because of the seriousness of the issue and preliminary evidence that indicated misconduct, the official said.

After getting the notice, the professor apologised. In a letter to AMU vice chancellor Tariq Mansoor on Wednesday, Kumar said, My intention was not to hurt religious sentiments of any particular religion and it was done only to highlight that rape has been a part of our society since long.

He said it was an inadvertent mistake and assured that no such incident will occur in the future.

His lecture, which included a slide show, led to complaints that he had hurt the religious sentiments of students and staff members.

A controversy erupted after someone posted a video clip of the lecture on social media. The AMU authorities acted after reporters approached them for comment on Wednesday.

The AMU authorities initially issued a show cause notice on the recommendation of the dean of the faculty of medicine, Prof Rakesh Bhargava.

You deliberately and maliciously played a slide in the powerpoint (presentation) in the classroom under the heading Rape, so as to outrage the religious feelings of a particular community, the notice from AMU Registrar Abdul Hamid said, warning him of possible disciplinary action.

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad termed the professor's suspension an eyewash. In a tweet, VHP spokesperson Vinod Bansal demanded that he should be booked under the stringent National Security Act and sent behind the bars.

In another tweet, he said AMU should be sanitised completely to put an end to its anti-Hindu and anti-national mindset.

The FIR was registered with the city's Civil Lines police station on the basis of a complaint filed by a BJP leader.

Police sources said the case has been registered under the Indian Penal Code sections 153A (promoting enmity between on ground of religion), 295A (deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings by insulting or religious beliefs), 298 (uttering words with deliberate intent to wound religious feelings) and 505 (statements conducive to public mischief).

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Indian Army Recruitment 2022: Candidates looking to work with the Indian Army need to hurry up as today (April 6, 2022) is the last day to apply for over 180 vacancies.

Applications have been invited from unmarried male, unmarried female Engineering Graduates and from the Widows of Indian Armed Forces Defence Personnel who died in harness for a grant of the Short Service Commission (SSC) in the Indian Army. The detailed notification is available on the Indian Army's official website at joinindianarmy.nic.in.

The Course will commence in October 2022 at the Officers Training Academy (OTA) in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.

Indian Army Recruitment 2022: Vacancy details

For SSC(Tech) - 175

For SSCW(Tech) - 14

For Widows of Defence Personnel - 02

Indian Army Recruitment 2022: Educational qualification

Candidates should have passed the requisite Engineering Degree course or should be in the final year of the Engineering Degree course.

Army Recruitment 2022: Age limit

SSC (Tech) and SSCW(Tech): 20 to 27 years as on October 1, 2022 (Candidates born between 02 Oct 1995 and 01 Oct 2002, both days inclusive).

For widows of Indian Armed Forces Defence Personnel: A maximum of 35 years of age as on October 1, 2022.

Indian Army Jobs: How to apply

Candidates need to apply ONLINE at www.joinindianarmy.nic.in.

Indian Army Jobs: Last date

Interested candidates can apply till 3 PM (April 6).

Candidates are advised to keep checking the Indian Army's official website for the latest updates.

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CBI has taken former Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh in its custody from Arthur Road Jail in the money laundering case registered against him. He is likely to be produced before CBI Court shortly.

CBI had earlier taken Deshmukh's personal assistant Kundan Shinde and secretary Sanjeev Palande too under its custody.

Notably, a special court in Mumbai had rejected Deshmukhs bail plea in money laundering case. Deshmukh had filed a petition seeking default bail under section 167(2) of the IPC. The Bombay High Court too had refused to hear his plea.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) opposed the bail petition of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader. The former Maharashtra Home Minister was arrested by the ED on November 1, last year in connection with the alleged Rs 100-crore extortion and money laundering case.

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India's first case of Omicron's XE variant has been detected in Mumbai, civic body BMC said today. "Results of 11th test under the Covid virus genetic formula determination - 228 or 99.13% (230 samples) patients detected with Omicron. One patient is affected by the 'XE' variant and another is affected by the 'Kapa' variant of Covid-19,'' the Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation was quoted as saying by the news agency ANI.

BMC Commissioner Iqbal Singh Chahal said that out of 376 samples that were tested by the Next Generation Genome Sequencing Lab at Kasturba Hospital of BMC and the National Institute of Virology at Pune, 230 were residents of Mumbai.

Mangala Gomare, executive health officer of the BMC, told PTI that the woman who was found to have contacted the XE variant had arrived from South Africa and tested positive for coronavirus infection three weeks after arriving. "She was asymptomatic and tested negative the next day," Gomare said.

The woman, who is a costume designer, was a member of a film shooting crew. She arrived from South Africa on February 10, 2022.

"She did not have any travel history prior to that. She had been vaccinated with both doses of the COMIRNATY vaccine," the official said, adding that she suffered from no co-morbidities.

On arrival in India she tested negative for COVID-19, but on March 2, she tested positive during routine testing. In the subsequent test, she tested negative.

She had been quarantined in a hotel rook during this period. As to whether it was the first case of the XE variant detected in India, BMC officials said they could not confirm this.

The World Health Organisation had said in its latest report and noted that XE may be more transmissible than the BA.2 sublineage of COVID-19. XE is recombinant of Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 sublineages of COVID-19. "The XE recombinant (BA.1-BA.2), was first detected in the United Kingdom on January 19 and >600 sequences have been reported and confirmed since," the WHO said.
BERLIN: Germany will not end mandatory isolation for most people who catch Covid-19, the health minister said on Wednesday, reversing course after concerns were raised that lifting quarantine restrictions would suggest the pandemic was over.

"Coronavirus is not a cold. That is why there must continue to be isolation after an infection," Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said on Twitter, adding he had made a mistake by suggesting an end to mandatory quarantine.

Under the existing rules, people with COVID must isolate for at least seven days. Lauterbach suggested last week a shift to a voluntary five-day period of self-isolation with the recommendation of a COVID test at the end of that time.

The idea of ending quarantine, except for medical staff, had emerged after COVID cases soared in recent weeks, hitting staffing in hospitals and many other workplaces.

Lauterbach said he had made the proposal to try to ease the burden on the health authorities that have to order quarantine and isolation, but he said on Wednesday that it sent the wrong signal that the pandemic was over and the danger was past.

"That is not the case," he told a news conference, noting that more than 300 people were still dying a day. People who have had contact with an infected person will no longer be compelled to quarantine from May 1, although they will still be strongly encouraged to do so.

Daily infections have fallen in the last week or so, with 214,985 new infections reported on Wednesday, about 20% fewer than a week ago. That took total cases since the pandemic began beyond 22 million, with 130,708 deaths.

Lauterbach has come under fire for the policy reversal, but he said on Wednesday he would not resign. The government has also been under pressure for a failure to reach a cross-party consensus on making vaccinations mandatory.

Lauterbach said he expected parliament to approve legislation on Thursday that would compel those over 60 to be vaccinated by Oct. 1, leaving it open whether shots might still be made compulsory for younger people at a later date.

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In a bizarre development, two officers -- one deceased and one retired -- of the Madhya Pradesh Police were transferred by the Home Department, which later cancelled the order, calling it a `typographical error`.

The error was detected in the transfer/posting order under which the Home Department had transferred 167 Deputy Superintendents of Police (DSPs) and Sub-Divisional Officers (SDOs).

In the list comprising the names of officers, an officiating DSP, Jitendra Yadav, was transferred from the 26th Battalion Guna to Gwalior. Yadav died of Covid-19 about six months back.

Similarly, Shashibhushan Singh Raghuvanshi, who had retired about one-and-a-half years ago, was transferred from SDOP Kailaras in Morena district to the 18th Battalion of Shivpuri.

When the matter was brought to the notice of the Home Department, Under Secretary Annu Bhalavi issued an order cancelling both the transfers, calling them typographical errors.

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A government bus caught fire, which spread and burnt down a few shops in southwest Delhi on Wednesday, officials said.

They said they received information regarding the blaze in Mahipalpur area at 2.21 pm.

Nine fire tenders were rushed to the area where the Delhi Transport Corporation bus caught fire. The flames were doused by 3.40 pm and cooling process was underway, an official said.

No one was injured, he said, adding that at least three outlets selling air coolers were damaged.

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New Delhi: Delhi University Vice Chancellor Yogesh Singh on Tuesday (April 5) released the varsity's admission policy for the 2022-23 academic year and said eligibility will be decided on the basis of Common University Entrance Test marks. The admissions to the university will be held through the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) which has been made mandatory for getting into 45 central varsities in the country. Till last year, admission to Delhi University was on the basis of cut-offs marks in Class 12 board exams.

CUET 2022: Mandatory for all candidates

Calling the new admission policy a landmark policy, DU VC Yogesh Singh said except for the School of Open Learning and the National Collegiate Women's Education Board, admission to all undergraduate programmes will only be through CUET.

Singh also said during the e-counselling that will be held post the declaration of CUET results, they will admit 30 percent more students than the allocated seats so that in case of cancellation, the seats will remain at par.

"It is mandatory for all candidates to appear in CUET-2022, including those seeking admission to supernumerary seats. The eligibility criteria will be decided on the basis of marks obtained in CUET," he said.

Admission criteria

In 50 per cent of seats reserved for minority colleges, 85 per cent of the marks for admission will be taken from the CUET and the remaining 15 per cent will be decided by the colleges, Singh said. Admission to non-reserved 50 per cent seats will be purely on the basis of CUET, he said. Haneet Gandhi, Dean (admissions), said candidates will be able to appear for the CUET only in those subjects which they have studied in class 12. The merit will also be calculated on the basis of a combination of only those subjects in which the candidate has appeared in the CUET, she said.

Gap year students will also be eligible to apply for CUET, she said. There will be no disadvantage to anyone on changing the stream, Gandhi said.

There are three sections in CUET-2022. The first section is divided into two parts and consists of 13 languages in the first part and 20 languages in the second part, Haneet Gandhi said. "It is mandatory for candidates to appear in at least one language for admission to the Delhi University, out of both these parts combined. The second section of the entrance exam consists of 27 domain-specific topics. The third section is based on general knowledge which will be for admission to BA programmes only," Gandhi said.

She said for admission to most of the programmes of the Delhi University, a candidate has to choose at least three subjects from the second section, that is the domain-specific subjects. The second section is classified as two lists - B1 and B2. The candidates have to choose the subjects appropriately so that not more than one subject is selected at a time.

Gandhi said the eligibility for admission to most BSc courses would be calculated on the basis of Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics or Biology. It is mandatory to obtain at least 30 per cent marks in any one language in CUET, she said.

For admission to Bachelor of Arts, a candidate will have to appear in the entrance test in any one language from section one and in any three subjects from the other section. Merit will be calculated on the basis of marks obtained by the candidate in the same subject and language.

For admission to BA (Hons) Economics, it is mandatory for the candidates to take the test in Mathematics in the CUET. Merit for this will be calculated on the basis of marks obtained in the chosen language, Mathematics and any two subjects, Gandhi said.

A candidate can appear for CUET in a maximum of six subjects, out of which one must be a language subject. "Just like when we had cut-offs, we used to take best of four subject marks, similarly, here we will take into consideration the best score of CUET for admission to the Delhi University," she added.

BBA, BMS and BBE candidates will have to appear in any one language, Mathematics and as per section 3 of the CUET. For BA, B.Voc and B.Com programmes (popularly known as "pass" courses), candidates have the choice of a language along with one domain-specific subject and a general examination or a three-subject test.

For admission to linguistic programmes, candidates can choose a particular language at CUET or take a test in any other language. "However, preference will be given to those appearing in the particular language. Centralized e-counselling will be done after the test," Gandhi said.

After the CUET results are announced, there will be an e-counselling by the university. Candidates will have the option to choose the colleges of their choice and on the basis of their marks, they will be given colleges.

Vice-Chancellor Singh said that before each counselling, the candidate will be given a chance to re-fill his or her preference. There is a likelihood of three rounds of counselling being held, the third being a spot round, he said, adding that things will be clearer once the results are announced.

Gandhi said that the university's admission website, which will have illustrative examples, will go live on Wednesday (April 6). The CUET forms will have drop-down menus for choosing universities and courses, said a DU official, adding that the university will help the students during the counselling process in case they hadn't picked a course during the initial stage but wish to study it now.

"There will be a provision of help desk to assist the candidates in the selection of question papers and open house and webinars will also be organized to help the candidates," he said.

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New Delhi: Deva Gurjar, a 40-year-old history-sheeter, was killed in Rajasthan's Kota on Monday (April 4, 2022) evening after a group of 10-15 unidentified men fired shots at him and attacked him with iron rods and sharp-edged weapons.

Gurjar, a resident of Borabas village in the Kota district, was murdered at a salon on Barrier Dam road in adjoining Rawatbhata town in Chittorgarh district.

He was taken to a local hospital in a serious condition and then referred to Kota, where he succumbed on the way to another medical facility, police officials informed.

A case of murder has been registered against 9-10 identified accused and six of them have been detained for interrogation.

Prima facie, personal enmity seems to be the reason behind the fatal attack on Gurjar, the police said.

Deva Gurjar was declared history-sheeter by Rawatbhata police station.

Meanwhile, a mob vandalised two buses of the Rajasthan roadways and blocked a road on Tuesday in protest against Gurjar's murder.

Angry villagers from Borabas and nearby areas set afire a roadways bus from Kota depot on Tuesday morning and broke the glasses of another bus from Pratapgarh depot, Circle Inspector (CI) Manoj Singh Sikarwal said.

The villagers also blocked a road near Borabas by placing burning beams and wood, demanding immediate arrest of the murder accused, Sikarwal added.

#WATCH | Supporters of gangster Deva Gurjar create ruckus outside a mortuary over his alleged murder in Rajasthan's Kota pic.twitter.com/tnCGA3ioaj  ANI MP/CG/Rajasthan (@ANI_MP_CG_RJ) April 5, 2022

A large number of people also assembled outside the mortuary room of the MBS hospital, where the post-mortem was conducted, and created a ruckus. The mob allegedly stopped the ambulance and pelted police with stones while they were taking the body for post-mortem.

However, Nayapura Circle Officer (CO) Kaluram Verma said no case has been lodged in connection with the stone-pelting on the hospital premises. No one, including police personnel, received any injury in the stone-pelting, the CO said.

The blockade on the Kota-Rawatbhata road was cleared after around eight hours, Kota SP (City) Kesar Singh Shekhawat told PTI news agency. The SP said the body was handed over to the family members of Gurjar later in the day after post-mortem.

(With agency inputs)
Horrific visuals of mass killings in Ukraine's north-western city of Bucha have sent shockwaves across the world. Ukraine has claimed that at least 300 civilians were killed in this city by Russian troops during the war. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has claimed that Russian troops carried out horrific war crimes that included shooting citizens at point-blank.

In today's DNA, Zee News Editor In Chief Sudhir Chaudhary makes an analysis of the ground reality of 'Bucha massacre'

Bucha is a city the north-western side of Ukraine that has a population of only 36,000 people. Most of the citizens in Bucha fled the city when the war began, however, an estimated 2,000 people coudn't escape.

It is claimed that Russian troops attacked these people when they invaded the city. Russia, on the other hand, has denied all the allegations.

Zee News correspondent Shivangi Thakur reached Bucha to bring the truth from ground zero.

As Zee News reached Bucha, horrific scenes were on display in the city streets. Many bodies are still lying unattended here. Many bodies were seen lying on the streets with bags of essential products. Prima facie, it appears that people were killed when they stepped out to buy groceries and other daily need products.

And as claimed by Ukraine, many bodies were found with their hands tied. A satellite footage of Bucha showed a mass grave of 50 people.

However, there a few things that are noteworthy about the Bucha killings. The city was siezed was by Russian troop, however, it was later re-captured by Ukraine. Russia has claimed that its troops vacated the city by 30th March only. The Ukrainian claims of mass killings, however, came out by April 3rd.

Watch DNA with Sudhir Chaudhary for a detailed analysis of Bucha killings.
New Delhi: A fire broke out at the All India Congress Committee office on Akbar Road office in New Delhi on Wednesday (April 6) evening.

The minor fire broke out at Congress' office in Lutyen's Delhi due to a short circuit in an AC unit, officials told PTI. The fire officials said they received a call around 7.30 pm today and two fire tenders were rushed to the spot. They attributed the blaze to an electric fault in the compressor of an air-conditioner.

Delhi | A fire that broke out at Congress' office in New Delhi district around 7 pm today has been brought under control. There was an electric fault in ACs due to which the fire occurred. It has been doused completely, said Prem Lal from Connaught Place Fire Station pic.twitter.com/Tt1SMirsRQ  ANI (@ANI) April 6, 2022

"The firemen doused the flames in just 30 minutes and even the cooling process was immediately completed," IANS quoted an official as saying. He added that some dry leaves on the roof of the Congress office had caught the fire.

There were no injuries in the incident, the official added.

(With agency inputs)

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Uttar Pradesh Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) on Wednesday reached its headquarters with the accused of the Gorakhnath temple attack case, Murtaza, for further inquiry. Before moving to Lucknow Murtaza underwent a medical test. His laptop and mobile have also been sent to Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) for further investigation.

The UP ATS on Monday reached Mumbai and learnt that the accused Murtaza had not met his family members since last three years. Yesterday, the team visited Navi Mumbai where the accused Murtaza used to live earlier with his family. UP ATS team has reached Mumbai to investigate the Gorakhnath Temple attack case.

Yesterday, the team visited Navi Mumbai where the accused Murtaza used to live earlier with his family. Murtaza did not meet his family members for the last 3 years. Notably, the father of the accused has said that his son is mentally not stable and had no plan to commit the offence."He is not mentally stable. Since childhood, he is suffering from depression.

Earlier, he also received medical treatment, Munir Ahmed Abbasi, the father of the accused, told ANI while adding that due to some developments (in his mental health), the accused believed that police were after him.

"He had no planning and did this due to his current mental state," Abbasi added. According to Uttar Pradesh Police, a man forcibly tried to enter the Gorakhnath Temple premises and attacked the on-duty police personnel with a sharp weapon on Sunday. The accused has been identified as Ahmed Murtaza Abbasi, a resident of Gorakhpur.

The Uttar Pradesh government has decided to hand over the probe to the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS). ADG (Law and Order) Prashant Kumar said the man who attacked two police personnel at Gorakhnath temple has been arrested. "He is a resident of Gorakhpur. A sickle has been recovered from him. An FIR has been lodged against him. There could be a terror angle in it. The case will be transferred to ATS," he said.

Police said the accused Ahmed Murtaza Abbasi, after being presented in court on Monday, has been sent to judicial custody. Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya said strict action will be taken based on the investigation.

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New Delhi: Newly-made Punjab MLA Labh Singh Ugoke on Tuesday (April 5, 2022) presided over a function at a school where his mother works as a sanitation worker.

Ugoke, who defeated former Punjab chief minister Charanjit Singh Channi in the Bhadaur assembly segment, was the chief guest at the school in Ugoke.

"It's a matter of great pride, I'm very happy that my son has become an MLA," Ugoke's mother Baldev Kaur, who has been working for the last 25 years in the school, told ANI.

Punjab| AAP MLA from Bhadaur, Labh Singh Ugoke, reached a govt school in Ugoke village as Chief Guest where his mother Baldev Kaur has been working as a sanitation worker for last 25yrs "It's a matter of great pride, I'm very happy that my son has become an MLA,"she says (05.04) pic.twitter.com/EevndNEp1z  ANI (@ANI) April 6, 2022

According to reports, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader had also studied in the same school.

"We have always worked hard to earn money. Irrespective of my son`s position, I will continue to perform my duty in the school," Kaur had said after her son's victory.

Punjab | Baldev Kaur, mother of AAP's Labh Singh, who defeated Congress' Charanjit S Channi from Bhadaur in Barnala, continues to work as a sweeper at a govt school in Ugoke village. She says," 'Jhadu' is an important part of my life. I'll continue to do my duty at the school." pic.twitter.com/OuX5kIPLFr  ANI (@ANI) March 13, 2022

Ugoke, who used to work in a mobile repairing shop, had defeated Channi from the Bhadaur seat by a margin of 37,550 votes. He had joined the Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP in 2013 and rose in the ranks of the party quickly.

It is notable that the AAP bagged a landslide victory in the recently-concluded Punjab polls, winning 92 Assembly seats in the 117-member Assembly.

(With agency inputs)

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By Trend

It is planned to build a new power plant in Azerbaijans Yashma village based on modern technologies and innovations in the next five years, Azerbaijani Deputy Energy Minister Elnur Soltanov told Trend.

According to him, it is planned to attract private investments, both local and foreign, for the construction of this plant.

Work is underway in Azerbaijan to replace old power plants left over from the Soviet period with new high-tech ones, he noted.

The Mingachevir power plant is one of the largest in the country with an installed capacity of 2,400 megawatts. It is planned to minimize its use and increase the number of plants that consume less gas, deputy minister said.

Saved gas can either be used on the local market or sent for export. Work in this direction is underway, the use of the Mingachevir power plant is being minimized, the deputy minister added.

Government of Azerbaijan will create all the necessary favorable conditions for private investors, he emphasized.
After dedicating your uninterrupted attention to a 30-60 second super chic fashion reel on Instagram, you hastily hit on the brand's name mentioned at the end of "Paid Promotions with..." don't you?

Behind all this lightning-speed persuasion are impeccable influencers like Charmi Jhaveri!

Meet Charmi Jhaveri, the woman who epitomizes fashion. Her unprecedented stylishness and immaculate dressing sense have made her extremely influential in the fashion space. She posts her regular outfits and breathtakingly regal ensembles on her Instagram, @charmi_jhaveri.

While influencer marketing is here to stay, several maturing and fabled clothing brands are making the best of it. As an esteemed fashion influencer, Charmi Jhaveri has promoted several clothing houses and brands, including Style Junkiie, Pernia's Pop-Up Shop, Aza Fashions, Amani, etc. She has also collaborated with a few startup fashion brands like Vyusti, Neeva A, Richa Goenka, and more.

But how is she promoting these brands and herself so effectively?

Charmi Jhaveri knows how to make it unique. Donning just the outfits was never her thing, as she always styled them with her best accessories, hairstyle, and makeup. Charmi also focused on using the best transitions and good editing to make the reel or post more captivating. And speaking of the remaining onlookers or new followers, she hooked them by making fashion reels of the trendiest audio bits.

One more thing that Charmi Jhaveri does is mention the brand of the outfit she is wearing. Till now, she has tagged brands like Siddhartha Bansal, Aartivijay Gupta, Kalighata, Karigiri by Sulakshna & Arpita, etc. in her caption. This way, she is not only outlining brands but also grabbing their attention.

Charmi Jhaveri is one of the most influential people in the digital fashion space. She is a contemporary fashion icon who has been on the front lines of the industry for years now. She inspires a lot of people with her styling skills. Besides promoting fashion brands, Charmi Jhaveri also promotes Kobe, Japan, as she is the Kobe PR Ambassador.

In her future, we hope Charmi Jhaveri reaches ultimate success and represents a brand of high standing!

(Sponsored Feature)
MUMBAI: Amid growing concerns about the resurgence of Covid-19 in some parts of the world, the Mumbai civic body - BMC - on Wednesday confirmed the detection of the first case of Omicron's new sub-variant XE in the city.

"Results of 11th test under the Covid virus genetic formula determination - 228 or 99.13% (230 samples) patients detected with Omicron. One patient is affected by the 'XE' variant and another is affected by the 'Kapa' variant of Covid-19,'' the Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation was quoted as saying by the news agency ANI.

Maharashtra | Results of 11th test under the Covid virus genetic formula determination - 228 or 99.13% (230 samples) patients detected with Omicron. One patient affected by 'XE' variant and another is affected by the 'Kapa' variant of COVID19: Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation  ANI (@ANI) April 6, 2022

Sharing more details, BMC Commissioner Iqbal Singh Chahal said that out of 376 samples that were tested by the Next Generation Genome Sequencing Lab at Kasturba Hospital of BMC and the National Institute of Virology at Pune, 230 were residents of Mumbai.

Omicron XE variant -What we know so far

The WHO has recently warned that the new Covid variant found in the UK, called XE, maybe more transmissible than any strain of COVID-19. XE is a "recombinant" which is a mutation of BA'1 and BA.2 Omicron strains, it global health body said.

Recombinant mutations emerge when a patient is infected by multiple variants of Covid. The variants mix up their genetic material during replication and form a new mutation, UK experts said in a paper published in British Medical Journal.

The World Health Organisation said that the new mutation XE appears to be 10 per cent more transmissible than the BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron.

When was XE first detected?

Britain's health agency said that XE was first detected on January 19 and 637 cases of the new variant have been reported yet.

Meanwhile, the BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron is spreading rapidly across the globe. Some 4.9 million people in the UK are estimated to have had Covid-19 in the week ending March 26, or 600,000 more than the previous week, the latest survey by the Office for National Statistics said.

US and China have also reported a surge in Covid cases driven by the BA.2 variant.

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Jammu: Fear, panic and anger has gripped people in a remote village of Jammu and Kashmirs Shopian after a Kashmiri Pandit was shot and injured by a suspected terrorist last evening.

Balkrishna, commonly known as Sonu in the Chotigam village, suffered three bullet injuries in his arm, leg and abdomen when terrorists shot at him outside his medical store. He survived the attack and is recovering in the Army hospital in Srinagar, but this attack has frightened the whole village. Since the nineties when mass migration of Pandits happened from Kashmir it's the first such kind of incident to have occurred in this small village where only two pandit families are residing with Muslims for the last 32 years.

The local Imam of the village mosque expressed grief over this incident and said this is not what Islam teaches us, Islam is the religion of peace. Mir Ghulam Rasool (Imam) said, This kind of incident happened for the first time here. We used to live like relatives here not neighbours, I only don't condemn but am very upset. Kashmir was already having bad name now our village too has a bad name.

This Pandit family did not migrate in the nineties during the Kashmiri Hindus' exodus. They along with the other Pandit family are living with the local Muslims of the village happily for the last three decades. They have land, apple orchards and a medical shop in front of the home. But what happened on Monday evening has shaken them, for the first time in 32 years the family members say that they feel insecure.

Balakrishna's brother Anil Kumar, an eyewitness in this incident, said "Till yesterday there was no fear but now we feel insecure. He said they never imagined that this incident would happen to them. People (Pandits) want to come but how will they survive in those conditions, local villagers are very helpful and have remained in our support since 90ties but in those conditions they too feel helpless, Anil said.

Describing the incident in a shaky voice, Anil said, "I was outside the shop, two people came on a bike, stopped near shop and one went inside, fired at him, he got three bullets."

There were hundreds of villagers visiting since morning to Sonu's house inquiring about his health and trying to console them. Locals don't want that they should leave the village as it will make the gap widen more.

Bilal Ahmad, the lone friend of Balkrishna, said that not only they are sacred but the Muslims of the area are scared too. No one knows who did it who is behind it but whosoever has done this did bad, we don't want to repeat what happened 30 years before.

Since Sunday evening the way attacks are happening on non-locals had created a new challenge for security forces. At Chotigam, a minority guard post is established by the police, while such posts are also being planned in many areas where minorities are residing. The other challenge for forces is to protect the thousands of non-local labourers who have reached Kashmir and are working in different remote areas.

It is pertinent to mention that since Sunday evening unknown terrorists have twice attacked four non-local labourers two from Pathankot and two from Bihar. These incidents have raised concern among security forces as in Kashmir.

ALSO READ: One CRPF Jawan dead, four including Kashmiri Pandit injured in three terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir

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New Delhi: Condemning the recent communal clashes in Karauli, Rajasthan Governor Kalraj Mishra on Wednesday (April 6) said the stone-pelting incident could have been pre-planned.

He also said the Ashok Gehlot-led government should be careful and ensure such incidents do not repeat. It's unfortunate and condemnable. The manner in which stone-pelting took place, I can say that it could've been pre-planned. It's being investigated, all facts will come to the fore. Govt should be careful and see that it doesn't happen again, ANI quoted the Rajasthan Governor as saying.

It's unfortunate & condemnable. The manner in which stone pelting took place, I can say that it could've been pre-planned. It's being investigated, all facts will come to the fore. Govt should be careful & see that it doesn't happen again: Rajasthan Gov on Karauli stone-pelting pic.twitter.com/TyzVan8u1p  ANI MP/CG/Rajasthan (@ANI_MP_CG_RJ) April 6, 2022

On April 2, communal clashes broke out in Karauli after stones were pelted at a motorcycle rally celebrating Nav Samvatsar as it passed through a Muslim-dominated area. A few shops and a bike were also torched in the violent clashes.

As many as two dozen people were wounded in the violence while 30 others were detained. Following the incident, on April 4, the district administration extended the curfew till April 7 along with suspending the internet till further orders.

Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Rajasthan Assembly Rajendra Rathore on Tuesday had alleged that the Karauli violence was planned. He claimed that hundreds of stones were collected a day before the bike rally in Karauli.

Earlier on Monday, Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot had accused the BJP of creating a law and order issue in the state. Commenting on Karauli violence and BJP national president JP Nadda's visit to Sawai Madhopur, Gehlot said, "They (BJP leaders) come to set fire. They are setting the whole country on fire...He came and fire erupted. They are creating such an atmosphere."

Meanwhile, as per IANS, an Independent councillor, Matloom Ahmed, has been booked for allegedly inciting the violence in Karauli. As per IANS sources, Ahmed, who has been identified as the main conspirator, is absconding.

(With agency inputs)

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Mandya: The father of Karnataka Muslim student BV Muskan Khan, who was praised by Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri for her "Allahu Akbar" slogans while confronting a mob chanting "Jai Shri Ram" in connection with the hijab row, has asked the terror outfit chief to spare his family and leave them alone.

Reacting to Muskans video and praising her, al-Zawahiri called the Mandya student `the Noble Woman from India`. Snubbing the Al-Qaeda chief, Hussain on Wednesday said his daughter is more interested in studies.

Speaking to the media, Hussain said his family does not want any "unwanted attention". "It has become a big headache for us. We do not know him. I saw Zawahiri for the first time. We are happy here and living together with everyone like brothers and sisters in the Mandya district of Karnataka," he said.

Hussain said the terror outfit talking about his daughter "creates confusions".

"It is wrong to drag Muskan. I request them, do not to drag the matter any further. We do not want him to talk about us. Why is he talking? Muskan saw the video today. Talking about her is wrong. She is a student, and she is interested in her studies. She does not want all this," he said.

Hussain added: "We were born and brought up in Mandya. We are happy and peaceful here." "There are rumours spread about crores of rupees given to Muskan which is false," he said, adding, "Let the agencies conduct the investigation. There are no qualms about it."

He said that there was no need for the money and they have sufficient resources gained through hard work. In a 9-minute video, Zawahiri praised Muskan Khan, a Karnataka college student from Mandya district for raising the slogan of "Allahu Akbar" against the mob shouting "Jai Shri Ram" slogans on the college premises at the height of the hijab crisis in the state.

The video has been titled The Noble Woman of India. Zawahari has composed and recited a poem in praise of the Karnataka student. In the video, he was heard saying that he came to know about Muskan Khan through social media videos and he is "moved by the act of a sister".

Meanwhile, Karnataka Home Minister Araga Jnanedra said on Wednesday that the video is "a proof of the play of the invisible hands playing behind the hijab row in the state", adding "suspicions turned true".

"Union Home Ministry and state Home Ministry and police department are working on it. This is a very serious matter," he said. The Karnataka High Court Special Bench has also referred to the role of invisible hands in its verdict while dismissing the petitions seeking consent to attend classes wearing a hijab.

"I have also mentioned the presence of religious fanatic organisations behind creating the hijab crisis in the state. The video by Al-Qaeda has proved it at last," he said.

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New Delhi: After securing a massive victory in Punjab, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is now vying to expand its base in Himachal Pradesh. With this aim, the AAP national convenor and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal along with his Punjab counterpart Bhagwant Mann held a roadshow in Himachal Pradesh's Mandi on Wednesday (April 6).

Addressing the crowd, Kejriwal vowed to end corruption in the hill state. "We're common people, we don't know how to do politics. Instead, we know how to work for people, build schools and end corruption. We've ended corruption in just 20 days in Punjab since Bhagwant Mann became the CM. Now 'kranti' should happen in Himachal Pradesh too," ANI quoted the AAP convenor as saying.

We're common people, we don't know how to do politics. Instead, we know how to work for people, build schools & end corruption. We've ended corruption in just 20 days in Punjab since Bhagwant Mann became the CM. Now 'Kranti' should happen in Himachal Pradesh too: Arvind Kejriwal pic.twitter.com/w4bU3WqQfU  ANI (@ANI) April 6, 2022

On its Twitter handle, the AAP Himachal Pradesh wrote, "Now 'politics of work' will resonate in the mountains of Himachal."

It is noteworthy that Mandi is the home district of current Himachal Pradesh CM Jai Ram Thakur.

Earlier on Tuesday, AAP leader Satyendar Jain had projected his party as an alternative to the ruling BJP and Opposition Congress in Himachal Pradesh. Jain had claimed that the contest for forming the next government in Himachal Pradesh in the coming Assembly elections will be between the BJP and AAP.

"The Congress has lost its ground and AAP has sufficient experience of defeating it," Jain said as per PTI.

He also said that AAP's membership drive has been successful with three lakh people joining the Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP in the last fortnight.

Besides Himachal, Gujarat will also witness Assembly polls later this year. AAP leaders Kejriwal and Mann had held a massive roadshow in Gujarat last week, presenting itself as the main alternative to BJP.

(With agency inputs)

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New Delhi: Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar paid a visit to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday (April 6) creating a buzz in political circles.

Pawar met Modi at the Prime Minister's Office in Parliament for around 20 minutes. Pawar told reporters after the meeting that he raised the issue of central agencies targeting Shiv Sena MP and editor Sanjay Raut. "On what basis was action taken against Sanjay Raut? This is injustice. What was the provocation? Just because he is making some statements and criticisms does not mean action should be taken against him. What was the need," the NCP supremo was quoted as saying by PTI.

"It is our duty to bring to the Prime Minister's notice the injustice being done to a journalist and a senior Parliamentarian," Pawar added. A day ago, the Enforcement Directorate attached assets worth more than Rs 11.15 crore of Sanjay Raut's wife and two of his associates in a money-laundering case linked to certain land deals. The MVA leaders have accused the BJP-led central government of "misusing" central agencies for political gains.

The meeting comes in the wake of recent investigations against leaders of the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi in Maharashtra, a coalition government of Shiv Sena, Congress and NCP.

Earlier today, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) took custody of NCP leader and former Maharashtra home minister Anil Deshmukh. The CBI has also sought 10-day custody of Deshmukh in connection with an extortion case.

Commenting on the meeting earlier today, Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar said the two leaders discussed "developmental works". Pawar told reporters he had no information about it and thus would not be right for him to comment. "But the country's prime minister and the national president of a party can meet over developmental works. There are some important issues which need to be discussed when Parliament is in session. There may be such issues," Ajit Pawar, who is also the NCP chief's nephew, was quoted as saying.

(With agency inputs)

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New Delhi: The government sources on Wednesday said that there is no evidence yet to suggest the presence of a new Omicron subvariant XE in India. According to news agency ANI, the sources also categorically denied media reports that claimed that the first case of the variant had been detected in Mumbai.

The government sources said that FastQ files of the sample, being said to be `XE` variant, was analysed by INSACOG (Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium) which inferred that the genomic constitution of this variant doesnt correlate with the genomic picture of `XE`.

FastQ files in respect of the sample, which is being said to be 'XE' variant were analysed in detail by genomic experts of INSACOG who have inferred that the genomic constitution of this variant does not correlate with the genomic picture of 'XE' variant: Official sources  ANI (@ANI) April 6, 2022

"Present evidence does not suggest that it is `XE` variant of COVID-19," a source was quoted as saying by ANI. The Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation had earlier in the day said that "one patient is affected by Kappa variant and another by `XE` variant" based on regular testing of samples.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) had recently said that a new Covid-19 mutant `XE` has been found in the UK and noted that it may be more transmissible than the BA.2 sublineage of COVID-19.

However, the virologists in India have said that it is not clear that the variant is strong enough to cause another Covid wave in the country even as they advised to exercise caution and follow COVID-appropriate behaviour.

XE is recombinant of Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 sublineages of COVID-19. "The XE recombinant (BA.1-BA.2), was first detected in the United Kingdom on January 19 and >600 sequences have been reported and confirmed since," the WHO had said.

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New Delhi: Parliament on Wednesday passed the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Bill, with Home Minister Amit Shah assuring the Rajya Sabha that biometric data of political detainees will not be collected and the proposed law will exclude brain mapping and polygraph test from its ambit.

The bill was passed by a voice vote after Shah sought to allay concerns raised by the Opposition, which claimed the draft law was "draconian".

The Lok Sabha had passed the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Bill, 2022, which replaces the Identification of Prisoners Act, 1920, on Monday. The legislation will now be forwarded to the President for approval before it becomes law.

"Under section 3, the government of India has the right to make rules. We will define it and ensure that no person involved in a political agitation has to give (physical and biometric) measurements only for political agitation. But, if a political leader is arrested in a criminal case, then he will have to be at par with a citizen," Shah said.

He said no measurements will be taken of any political person for violation of prohibitory orders promulgated by police.

While replying to a debate on the bill, Shah underlined the legislation is aimed at improving the conviction rate.

"It is aimed at building capacity for the police and forensic teams," he said, adding the measure was intended to preclude the use of third degree methods (custodial torture) and making available the benefits of science and technology to prosecuting agencies.

Shah deplored none of the members rose to say conviction rates in the country are low and should be increased.

According to the minister, 66 out of 100 people charged with murder and 70 of 100 arraigned for dacoity get acquitted.

Shah said the bill has been brought to ensure that police and investigators remain two steps ahead of criminals.

"I want to assure you that this is not going to violate the privacy of anyone," Shah said, seeking to assuage the concerns of opposition MPs. The data collected will be completely secure, he said.

"No provision of this bill permits performing narco analysis, polygraph test and brain mapping of any prisoner," the home minister said.

Shah said police will send fingerprint impressions to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), which will share the name of the person with the investigators only if it matches with the records present in the database. Police will not have access to fingerprint data of others, he said.

"We will notify it after making a complete system. We will have to understand next generation crime and break their cycle as well. We want police, law enforcement agencies to be two steps ahead of criminals. This effort is to empower police," he said.

Shah said the government intends to amend the Indian Penal Code, Criminal Procedure Code and Evidence Act, and has invited suggestions from public.

He said the government has created the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems (CCTNS), which has been adopted by 100 per cent police stations across the country.

The home minister asserted he had no apprehensions about the proposed law being abused.

"There has been misuse. We have fought and come out of it," Shah said.

Responding to AAP member Sanjay Singh, who spoke about a false case allegedly filed against a party worker in Gujarat, Shah said he was no aware of that, but if you go to Bengal, you will lose your life, provoking a protest by TMC MPs.

Shah also accused the Left of killing 100 BJP members for political reasons.

Undeterred by the TMC protest, the home minister continued to attack its government in West Bengal, saying its acts had "changed even the harshest definition of the word Fascist".

Participating in the discussion, Sukhendu Sekhar Roy (TMC) opposed the bill calling it "draconian".

He said the government wants to use its "brute majority" to pass the bill that "violates the principle of natural justice", and demanded that it be sent to a select committee for vetting.

Tiruchi Siva of the DMK supported his demand, claiming the government wants to armour itself with draconian laws which can be used even against political and social activists.

Sujeet Kumar (BJD) said the bill, even if passed, will not withstand judicial scrutiny.

Ram Gopal Yadav (SP) opposed the bill and noted it will be challenged in the Supreme Court even if it is passed in Parliament. A D Singh of the RJD also opposed the legislation.

The support for the government came from V Vijaysai Reddy (YSRCP), who said it will help improve the conviction rate, and attacked the Congress for foisting false cases against political adversaries.

A Navaneethakrishnan (AIDMK), a BJP ally, came out in support of the legislation, calling it a right intervention. He noted the legislation does not violate constitutional provisions. Ram Nath Thakur (JD-U), a partner in the ruling NDA, also supported the bill.

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New Delhi: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Wednesday (April 6, 2022) said that India is strongly against the Russia-Ukraine conflict and said that if New Delhi has chosen a side, it is the side of peace.

Replying to the discussion in the Lok Sabha on the situation in Ukraine, Jaishankar also talked about the recent civilian killings in the Ukrainian city of Bucha and said that India is "deeply disturbed" by the reports.

"We are strongly against the conflict, we believe that no solution can be arrived at by shedding blood and at the cost of innocent lives. In this day and age, dialogue and diplomacy are the right answers to any disputes," he said.

ALSO READ | Gruesome images emerge from battered Ukraine as Russia continues its attack - In Pics

"If India has chosen a side, it is a side of peace and it is for an immediate end to violence. This is our principled stand and has consistently guided our position in international forums and debates, including in the UN," Jaishankar added.

He also stated that all members would agree that India's approach should be guided by its national beliefs and values, national interest and by its national strategy.

"One should bear in mind that the contemporary global order has been built on the UN Charter, on respect for international law and for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states," he asserted.

"We strongly condemn the killings that have taken place there. This is an extremely serious matter and we support the call for an independent investigation," he added.

Jaishankar also said that attributing a political colour to India's actions vis-a-vis the Ukraine situation was unfortunate.

(With agency inputs)

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The electoral battle between Ravi Shankar Prasad and Shatrughan Sinha in Patna Sahib was one of the more talked about contests in the 2019 poll, and it is deja vu all over as the BJP is now banking on the former Union minister to bolster its fight in Asansol bypoll against Sinha, now a Trinamool Congress candidate.

Prasad will be joined by Ram Kripal Yadav, also a former Union minister and MP from neighbouring Pataliputra, in campaign on Friday with the BJP relying on a number of leaders from Bihar to retain its influence among Asansol's sizeable non-Bengali voters, a segment the TMC is eying by fielding Sinha.

The Lok Sabha bypoll to Asansol, necessitated after Babul Supriyo quit the BJP and as its MP, is scheduled for April 12.

The BJP has now fielded Agnimitra Paul, who is an MLA in the West Bengal assembly.

Taking a swipe at the cine star-turned politician, Yadav said people of Asansol must be told about Sinha's performance as Patna Sahib MP for 10 years. The BJP has alleged that his lack of diligence and performance as a parliamentarian was a major reason for his falling out with the party, leading him to quit it and fight the 2019 poll as a Congress candidate. Prasad had handily defeated Sinha then.

"People must elect someone who will stay in their midst and be available to their needs," Yadav said.

Both Prasad and Yadav will be addressing various meetings as part of the BJP's campaign.

Though the BJP won the seat in 2014 and 2019 polls, there is a view that the state's ruling party is on a strong wicket now after it decisively quelled the saffron challenge in the 2021 assembly polls.

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Awantipora: Two terrorists were killed in an encounter in the Tral area of Jammu and Kashmirs Awantipora in a joint operation of security forces on Wednesday (April 6).

The slain terrorists were identified as Safat Muzaffar Sofi alias Muavia of Ansar Ghazwatul Hind (AGuH) and Umer Teli alias Talha of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).

"AGuH terrorist Safat Muzzaffar Sofi @ Muavia and LeT`s terrorist Umer Teli @ Talha killed in Tral. Before shifting to the Tral area both were involved in several terror crimes in Srinagar city including the recent killing of Sarpanch (Sameer Ahmad) in Khanmoh Srinagar," IGP Kashmir Vijay Kumar said.

Yesterday in a top-level security meeting it was decided that anti-terror operations will be intensified mostly in south Kashmir. The decision came in view of targeted attacks on non-locals and Kashmiri pandit in Shopian.

DGP Jammu Kashmir said, "While the process of picking up OGWs (over ground workers) of terrorists is on, leads from one OGW were followed by police Awantipora to raid a particular location."

He added, "While on way the party came across some suspects who started running, but they were intercepted. One of them took out a weapon and fired but got killed in effective retaliation by the police raiding party. Another got injured but was chased and killed in operation."

It is pertinent to mention that this year as per data given by police, security forces have killed 44 terrorists since January in 31 encounters and brief shootouts.

Moreover, 26 active terrorists, over 160 terrorist associates were also arrested while 18 youngsters joined terror outfits ranks this year.

ALSO READ: 'Substantial decline in terrorist incidents in J&K in past 4 years': Home Ministry

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New Delhi: Under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi the BJP has emerged as the party of the poor, backwards, Dalits and the downtrodden in the society who were not taken care of by anyone so far, party president JP Nadda said on Wednesday. Participating in a procession on the BJP's foundation day in the Rajendra Nagar Assembly constituency that is due for bypoll, Nadda called upon the party workers to ensure the benefits of the Modi government's schemes reach the street vendors, drivers and rickshaw pullers.

The Rajendra Nagar seat got vacant recently with the resignation of sitting AAP MLA Raghav Chadha who was promoted by his party as a Rajya Sabha MP. Paying homage to the founders of the party, Nadda said the BJP has formed governments in 12 states on its own while in some others NDA is in power.

"There was a time when we were mocked as 'Hum Do Hamare Do' but now we have become the world's largest party. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP has now become a party of poor, backwards, Dalits and the last man on the social ladder who were unheard so far," Nadda said. "The BJP has been winning polls and we have to maintain this and take it forward. In many states we are in opposition fighting dynastic parties which are a danger for democracy," he said.

Nadda claimed that the BJP was the only party infused with nationalism while the opposition are concerned about individual interest.

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Bengaluru: Karnataka Home Minister Araga Jnanendra on Wednesday said the video statement released by Al-Qaeda chief Ayman Al Zawahiri on the hijab row and praising student Muskaan Khan for standing in defence of headscarf and chanting 'Allah-hu-Akbar', proves the involvement of "unseen hands" behind the row.

Jnanendra said the Home and Police department officials are keeping a watch on developments and track things in this connection.

"We have been saying this from the beginning, and the High Court too during the hijab verdict had suggested the possibility of some unseen hands behind the hijab row...Now it is proved, because Al-Qaeda people are now releasing videos," Jnanendra said in response to a question on Zawahiri praising Muskaan.

"How things are happening, what is the link. All these things are being looked into by the police...They will find out," he added. At the peak of hijab row in February, Muskan Khan, a second-year BCom student in Mandya was heckled by a group of students, wearing saffron shawl, for entering the college with hijab.

As they shouted "Jai Shri Ram", Muskan retorted by shouting "Allah-hu-Akbar." Following this, college authorities intervened and brought the situation under control.

Condemning the statement by a terror group about internal matters, Higher Education Minister C N Ashwath Narayn said, "action will be taken against organisations and people linked to them".

He said the state government has not brought any legislation against practices of any community and was only following the law.

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New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government is capable and making efforts to restore assets belonging to the Kashmiri migrants and so far properties of 610 applicants have been returned, Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityananda Rai told Rajya Sabha on Wednesday.

Responding to queries during the Question Hour in the Upper House, the Minister said the District Magistrate has been designated as the custodian of the migrants' properties. The state government has also started a portal to resolve the complaints of migrants.

"The Modi government and Home Minister is capable of returning the assets to migrant Kashmiris. Constant efforts are being made," he said. If the complaint of migrants is genuine and correct, their assets will be returned. So far, the assets of 610 applicants have been returned, he added.

Investment proposal of Rs 51,000 crore for J&K

Asserting that Jammu and Kashmir is on a development track, the Minister while responding to a supplementary query said that the state has received an investment proposal of Rs 51,000 crore for industrial development which will help create employment opportunities for 4.50 lakh people.

The construction of about 13 roads has provided better reach in the state. Prior to 2019, the speed of construction was at 6.54 km per day, which has increased to 20,68 km per day now. A village housing over 1,000 people is connected with roads. By 2023, a hamlet with 500 people will also get the road connection, he added.

24 hours electricity in J&K

The Minister further said that there is a 24 hours electricity supply due to excess power production. Even IIT and IIM have been set up.

Employment portal for jobs in J&K



Responding to another supplementary on growing unemployment, the Minister said the employment and confidence in people has increased in the state.

About 26,303 posts have been identified in the state from 2019 and till date. The process of hiring is underway, he said, and an employment portal has been set up, counselling sections and career centres have been put in place in the state.

On jobs promised for migrant Kashmiri, the minister said the state government has given jobs to 841 in 2020-21 and 1,264 in 2021-22. The government is ready to give jobs to migrant Kashmiris who wish to settle back in their home state, he added.

Four Kashmiri Pandits among 14 Hindus killed in J&K

Four Kashmiri Pandits among 14 Hindus were killed by terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir since 2019, Rai told Rajya Sabha.

Rai said that 34 people belonging to minority communities were killed by terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir in the last five years., including 11 in 2021. Replying to questions in the upper house, the minister said that after the repeal of Article 370 of the Constitution, 2105 migrants have returned to Kashmir valley for taking up jobs provided under the Prime Minister's Development Package.

On the status of a development package announced in 2015 for the state, the minister said Rs 58,466 crore was approved as part of the package.

"The projects are being implemented in a speedy manner. Many projects have been implemented. The ones which are completed are inspected and gaps, if any, are addressed," he said and added, "soon all projects will be implemented."

A decline in terror incidents

Rai also presented the data before the Upper House, mentioning "the government has a policy of zero-tolerance against terrorism and there has been a substantial decline in terrorist attacks from 417 in 2018 to 255 in 2019, 244 in 2020 and 229 in 2021".

(With Agency Inputs)

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New Delhi: As the wedding season is gradually approaching its conclusion, it seems like B-towns most adorable couple, Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor, are in line to get hitched while following the age-old Bollywood tradition of discreet marriages. Adorably called Ralia by some fans, the couple has often teased netizens with glimpses of their relationship. The celebrity sweethearts have recently sparked wedding rumours, and if reports are to be believed, they will be taking the plunge by tying the knot this April.

While the news of their wedding can be interpreted as that of a match made in heaven, Alia and Ranbir`s love story isn't a typical `guy-meets-girl` romance, with details about the couple`s timeline mostly shrouded by secrecy. So let's look back at how it all began!

Not many people might know, but Alia had reportedly said that she first had a crush on Ranbir when she was just 11 years old. The actor had revealed that she was auditioning for Sanjay Leela Bhansali`s `Black` where the suave star was working as an assistant director, and she fell head over heels for him.

Years later, after Alia had made her Bollywood debut as an actor in 2014, she expressed her desire to marry Ranbir during one of the episodes of Karan Johar`s talk show `Koffee with Karan`.

Not just that, Ranbir too showed up that year to promote Alia`s film `Highway`.

Following that, both Alia and Ranbir were linked to several Bollywood celebs over the years, however, rumours about the two dating each other were also rife back then.

When the actors got roped in for filmmaker Ayan Mukerji`s `Brahmastra` in 2017, those rumours gained more momentum, and it was finally in 2018 that the duo made head turns by marking their first appearance as a couple at the wedding reception of Sonam Kapoor and Anand Ahuja.

Both of them were dressed in their traditional best, complimenting each other perfectly.

Soon after making the appearance, Ranbir confirmed their relationship to a magazine. Back then, he had stated that their relationship was "new" and that he didn't want to speak much about it.

This was followed by several more appearances on many occasions, including family weddings and cozy lunch or dinner parties.

When in September 2018, Ranbir`s father, Rishi Kapoor, got admitted to a medical facility in New York, the couple was often snapped visiting him together. Alia also rang in the 2019 New Year celebrations with Ranbir's family and the pictures of their gathering went viral on social media in no time. The entire gang seemed like one big happy family.

The same year, while making an appearance at an awards ceremony, Ranbir and Alia openly proclaimed their love for each other. The actors had won Filmfare awards for best acting in their respective roles that year.

In December 2020, Alia also accompanied Ranbir and his mother Neetu Kapoor to Armaan Jain`s wedding celebration.

Almost every time they stepped out, Ranbir and Alia made headlines for their adorable chemistry. That year, there had been strong rumours about them tying the knot, but it did not happen, and COVID might have been a contributing factor to that.

Later, Alia`s 2021 Instagram posts proved that the duo was still very much in love. The couple had even flown to Rajasthan to celebrate Ranbir`s 39th birthday. Alia shared a picture from the calm, natural setting as she wished Ranbir a happy birthday.

She also shared a post with Ranbir on the festival of Diwali, which left fans excited and craving for more. In the picture, Alia and Ranbir could be seen in an embrace while gazing deeply into each other`s eyes.

In December 2021, during the motion poster launch event of `Brahmastra`, the adorable couple was seen at their candid best. They answered several fan questions while subtly engaging in some adorable PDA. On being asked by a fan, "When will you marry Alia or someone else?" Ranbir wittily replied, "Haven`t we seen a lot of people getting married in the last year? I think we should be happy with that." However, turning towards Alia, he cheekily added, "Humari kab hogi?" to which a visibly blushing Alia replied, "Why are you asking me?"

Now it remains to be seen whether Alia and Ranbir will take their relationship to the next level and breathe life into their marriage rumours by tying the knot this April, or will fans still have to wait for the union of their favourite Bollywood couple.
New Delhi: Superstar Bollywood couple Kajol and Ajay Devgn's darling daughter Nysa Devgn's latest party pictures with her gang of friends have surfaced online and fans are loving it. The popular star kid has already many dedicated fan pages to her name.

Nysa can be seen posing for the photo-op in a baby pink satin short backless dress with statement high heels. Her friends too happily strike a cool party pose for the clicks:

Recently, Nysa was spotted at FDCI X Lakme Fashion Week 2022 and her pictures flooded social media. Ace designer Manish Malhotra took to Instagram and dropped a stunning photo of Nysa Devgn in his latest collection - Diffuse. Many fans pointed out how Nysa resembles her mommy Kajol and appreciated her for posing brilliantly.

Nysa Devgn has been papped on several occasions with mom Kajol or dad Ajay Devgn and often stays away from the shutterbugs. The stunning teenager headed to Singapore for her higher education but is currently with fam jam in Mumbai.

She did her schooling at Mumbai's Dhirubhai Ambani International School and is enrolled in the United College of Southeast Asia in Singapore.

Kajol and Ajay Devgn got married on February 24, 1999, and Nysa was born in 2003. In 2010, the couple welcomed their second child, son Yug Devgn.
New Delhi: India`s largest private lender HDFC Bank will merge with HDFC Ltd, the country`s largest housing finance company to create a financial services conglomerate.

As part of the deal, shareholders of HDFC Ltd will receive 42 shares of the bank for 25 shares held. Existing shareholders of HDFC Ltd will own 41% of HDFC Bank. Shares held by the housing finance company in the lender will be extinguished, making HDFC Bank a full-fledged public company. (Also read: Google Maps to help you save money on toll prices --5 big points for Android and iOS users)

What happens to customers after the HDFC-HDFC Bank merger?

As of date, HDFC Bank has more than 68 million customers, 6,342 branches.

HDFC Bank has said that merger of Indias largest Housing Finance Company, HDFC Limited, with HDFC Bank, will enable seamless delivery of home loans and leverage on the large base of over 68 million customers of HDFC Bank and inter alia improve the pace of credit growth in the economy. (Also read: Petrol, diesel costlier by Rs 10/litre in last 16 days; CNG prices burning hole in pocket too Check latest rates)

"Post the combination, HDFC Banks customers will be offered mortgages as a core product in a seamless manner. HDFC Bank will also leverage the long tenor mortgage relationship to offer varied credit and deposit products enabled through better insights through-out the customer life-cycle. This will result in an enhanced value proposition and customer experience for all customers of the combined entity," said the bank.

What happens to HDFC Ltd employees after the HDFC-HDFC Bank merger?

Shivaji Thapliyal, Lead Analyst  Institutional Equities, YES SECURITIES commenting on the Banking perspective of the HDFC-HDFC Bank merger said, "The jobs of HDFC Limited employees will remain protected."

What happens to HDFC Ltd branches after the HDFC-HDFC Bank merger?

Thapliyal added that the HDFC Limited branches will be retained but, at some point in the future, they could be converted to full-service bank branches.

Deepak Parekh, Chairman HDFC Limited, said, This is a merger of equals. We believe that the housing finance business is poised to grow in leaps and bounds due to the implementation of RERA, infrastructure status to the housing sector, government initiatives like affordable housing for all, amongst others. Over the last few years, various regulations for banks and NBFCs have been harmonised, thereby enabling the potential merger. Further, the resulting larger balance sheet would allow underwriting of large ticket infrastructure loans, accelerate the pace of credit growth in the economy, boost affordable housing and increase the quantum of credit to the priority sector, including credit to the agriculture sector.

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Bucha (Ukraine): Civilian killings in northern Ukraine have shocked the world and devasted an already war-torn Ukraine which have been fighting the Russian forces over the last several weeks. The Ukrainian human rights ombudswoman said between 150 and 300 bodies may be in a mass grave by a church in Bucha, where Ukraine has accused Russian troops of killing civilians. Russia, however, has rejected the accusations. Russia's UN ambassador told the Security Council that Russian troops are not targeting civilians, dismissing accusations of abuse as lies.

Scenes of horror and devastation

One blackened body had arms raised in supplication, the face contorted in a horrible scream. The skull of another had a bullet hole in the left temple. The small blackened foot of a child could be seen in the tangle of charred bodies piled together in Bucha, the town outside of Kyiv where graphic evidence of killings and torture has emerged following the withdrawal of Russian forces. The six burned and blackened corpses were just the latest gruesome scene to emerge from Bucha as world leaders push for Russia to be held accountable, including for possible war crimes. It was not clear who the people were or under what circumstances they were killed.

The pile of bodies, seen by Associated Press journalists Tuesday, was just off a residential street, near a colorful and empty playground, visible to passersby as they warily went outdoors to collect aid. In a house nearby, the twisted and bloody body of a young man who had been shot to death lay in the basement entrance. At least four other bodies lay strewn in the street, one with the eye gouged out, apparently by a bullet.

"It's horrible," said Ukrainian Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky at the scene. The minister said Russian President Vladimir Putin should "go to hell." Andrii Nebytov, head of police in the Kyiv region, noted one of the charred bodies was a child. Sobbing uncontrollably, Serhii Lahovskyi was seen nuzzling against the shrouded corpse of his closest childhood friend, who disappeared when Russian troops occupied Bucha and was found shot through the head and dumped in a stairwell.

Graves with bodies of civilians, who according to local residents were killed by Russian soldiers, are seen, in Bucha (Pic: Reuters)

Horrific images of people killed, which included some with their arms bound, have surfaced. Many victims appeared to have been shot at close range, some in the head. At least two had their hands tied. High-resolution satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showed that many of the bodies had been lying in the open for weeks, during the time that Russian forces were in the town.

Ukrainian officials have said the bodies of at least 410 civilians have been found in towns around Kyiv that were recaptured from Russian forces in recent days. The Ukrainian prosecutor-general's office has described one room discovered in Bucha as a "torture chamber."

Call for tougher sanctions against Russia

The grisly images of battered and burned corpses left out in the open or hastily buried have led to calls for tougher sanctions against the Kremlin, especially a cutoff of fuel imports from Russia. Germany and France reacted by expelling dozens of Russian diplomats, suggesting they were spies, and US President Joe Biden said Putin should be tried for war crimes.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this week left Kyiv for his first reported trip since the war began nearly six weeks ago to see for himself what he called the "genocide" and "war crimes" in Bucha. The chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court at The Hague opened an investigation a month ago into possible war crimes in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Russia is likely to launch a new offensive soon in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said. The Russian defence ministry says its forces will "liberate" the southeastern port of Mariupol from Ukrainian "nationalists".

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By Azernews

By Ayya Lmahamad

Azerbaijans State Tax Service and Israels Rayzone Group company have signed a memorandum on the project to develop and manage the big data platform.

At the same time, Azerbaijans Amelioration and Water Management OJSC and Israels Mekorot have signed an agreement on the provision of consulting services.

The documents were signed during the meeting of the Israel-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

The document signed between the State Tax Service of Azerbaijan and Rayzone Group, a company operating in the field of cyber security, and Azerbaijan Amelioration and Water Management OJSC and Mekorot, a company specializing in water resources management, will facilitate the transfer of Israels best practices to our country, the expansion of technological capabilities, the creation of a new platform for cooperation in the application of innovative tools, and will benefit both parties, Economy Minister Mikayil Jabbarov wrote on his official Twitter page.

Economic cooperation, trade turnover

Speaking at the meeting, Israel-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce and Industry President Alex Kaplun stressed the importance of the meeting in enhancing cooperation between the business communities of the two countries. He briefed on the organizations activities, the work done to strengthen relations between businessmen, as well as planned measures.

Azerbaijans Economy Minister Mikayil Jabbarov emphasized the importance of expanding ties between the relevant agencies and business communities of the two countries in the sphere of trade and economic cooperation and the development of business relations.

He stressed that the volume of trade between the two countries almost doubled in 2021, and in January-February of this year increased sixfold.

Noting that currently, more than 90 Israeli companies operate in Azerbaijan in the fields of services, industry, trade, agriculture and construction, the minister stated that Azerbaijani trade and tourism missions to Israel contribute to the development of trade and economic relations.

Moreover, Jabbarov noted that cooperation in the field of mutual investment continues. In this regard, he stated that the Investment Roadshow, which is planned to be held in Israel, will be useful for the development of investment cooperation.

The economy minister also briefed on the favorable business environment in Azerbaijan, the economic potential of liberated lands, and opportunities for strengthening partnerships in agriculture, alternative energy, tourism, health, education, ICT, etc.

He invited Israeli companies to take advantage of the business environment in the country and actively cooperate.

In turn, Israels Tourism Minister Yoel Razvozov emphasized the importance of such events and fruitful discussions in expanding partnerships between the business communities of the two countries. He briefed on the possibilities of cooperation in various economic spheres.

The participants of the meeting also discussed the issues of the development of Azerbaijan-Israel trade and economic relations.

Bilateral relations

Mikayil Jabbarov and Yoel Razvozov also held a bilateral meeting, during which they discussed the work done to strengthen trade and economic cooperation between the two countries.

They noted that the joint commission between Azerbaijan and Israel, as well as the Israel-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce and Industry are important platforms for the development of the economic partnership.

Mikayil Jabbarov briefed on the reforms carried out in Azerbaijan, the favorable business and investment climate, and share his views on the prospects of trade and economic cooperation.

In turn, Yoel Razvozov noted that Israel attaches great importance to relations with Azerbaijan. He added that Israeli companies are interested in participating in different projects, including those related to the restoration of liberated territories. The minister also noted ample opportunities for strengthening partnership.

During the meeting, the parties discussed the current state and directions of the development of Azerbaijan-Israel relations.
By Azernews

By Ayya Lmahamad

The construction of the gas Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria (IGB), which will supply natural gas from Azerbaijan to Bulgaria, has been completed to 90-95 percent, Day.az reported, citing Greek media.

George Tasakos, head of the department of education and networks of AVAX, the contractor for the design, supply and construction contract of the IGB, stated that the construction of the pipeline will be completed on time.

He noted that the gas supplies from Greece to Bulgaria via this pipeline will start in early July.

Earlier, Bulgarian Energy Minister Alexander Nikolov stated that the construction of the gas interconnector with Greece should be completed by July 1, after which the country will be able to rely on Azerbaijani gas supplies.

Azerbaijan and Bulgaria agreed to supply 1 billion cubic meters of gas per year through the Greece-Bulgaria Interconnector beginning in 2021. However, because the IGB is still under construction, Azerbaijani gas is delivered to Bulgaria via the Kulata-Sidirokastro interconnection point. Currently, the country receives only one-third of this volume.

The IGB Project (Gas Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria) is being carried out by the joint venture company ICGB AD, which was established in Bulgaria in 2011 and is owned by Bulgarian Energy Holding EAD and IGI Poseidon.

The IGB gas pipeline will connect to the Greek national gas transmission system in Komotini and the Bulgarian national gas transmission system in Stara Zagora. The pipeline's planned length is 182 kilometers, with a capacity of up to 3 billion cubic meters per year in the direction from Greece to Bulgaria. The pipeline is designed to increase its capacity up to 5 bcm/y depending on market interest and the capacities of neighboring gas transmission systems.

A cooperation memorandum has been signed between ICGB AD and TAP AG regarding joint actions in relation to the future connection of the IGB pipeline and the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline.

The IGB project is critical in terms of increasing supply security and diversifying gas supplies for Bulgaria and the SEE region.
By Azernews

By Sabina Mammadli

A large number of Armenian army weapons and ammunition have been found Khojavand region liberated from occupation in 2020, the Interior Ministry has reported.

Officers from the Lachin region police department seized four machine guns, three grenade launchers, one anti-tank guided missile, 40 clips for machine guns, 3,500 bullets of various calibers and other ammunition at the positions left by the Armenian military in Khojavand regions Uchtepe area.

Azerbaijani police continue to carry out activities to identify weapons, ammunition and explosives in Azerbaijans liberated territories.

Azerbaijan discovered and seized 225 assault rifles, 102 grenade launchers, 68 machine guns, 64 anti-tank and anti-personnel guided missile systems, 10 mortar installations, eight air defense systems, 721 grenades, 129 mines, and tens of thousands of shells and cartridges of various calibers in the liberated lands in 2021. Moreover, about 17 tons of wild hemp plants were burned and destroyed last year.

During its 30-year occupation of Azerbaijani territories, Armenia used Karabakh and adjacent seven regions for its illegal activities, including arms and drugs trafficking. Although Azerbaijan repeatedly raised the issue before the international organizations, Armenia continued in the same vein, creating all the necessary conditions there for the illegal cultivation, production, and further distribution of narcotic substances.

Azerbaijan and Armenia resumed the second war after the latter started firing at Azerbaijani civilians and military positions starting September 27, 2020. The war ended on November 10 with the signing of a trilateral ceasefire deal by the Azerbaijani, Russian and Armenian leaders.

The ceasefire agreement stipulated the return of Azerbaijan's Armenian-occupied Kalbajar, Aghdam and Lachin regions. Before the signing of the deal, the Azerbaijani army had liberated around 300 villages, settlements, city centers, and historic Shusha city. The Azerbaijani army declared a victory against the Armenian troops.

The signed agreement obliged Armenia to withdraw all its troops from the Azerbaijani lands that it had occupied since the early 1990s.




"Regarding conflicts, I think we all agree that we have to resolve them through dialogue, and we are permanently solving a series of conflicts through this mechanism," he said during a meeting with parliamentarian spokespersons at Congress.





The Cabinet chief affirmed that the Government has been resolving these problems in the mining corridor and the conflicts that have remained unresolved for months, such as those in Toquepala and Bloc 95.





Moreover, the Prime Minister found that the Executive Branch and Congress must work together for the country.





"The differences are political, which instead of uniting us in order to work together, divide us," the high-ranking official stated.





"We have to make every effort to be united, both Congress and the Executive Branch; we need one another for the country," he added.





State of Emergency





Mr. Torres explained that the Government approved the declaration of the State of Emergency because, according to intelligence reports, looting, robbery and confrontations were going to take place in Lima and Callao, in order to seek the resignation of President Pedro Castillo.





"The Executive Branch's decision on the State of Emergency did not come out of nowhere, but was based on data we obtained on the possibility of social unrest, robbery, looting, vandalism, business closure, and violent confrontations with the police, as well as shortages, which may result in a request for a presidential impeachment," he added.





(END) GSR/JCR/RMB




At a press conference, after a new Council of Ministers session, the Cabinet chief said that the abovementioned meeting, which saw the participation of the President of the Republic Pedro Castillo, took place in a frank atmosphere and addressed various issues that need to be solved.





"We are people with morals and ethics; we keep our word, and both parties have agreed to work together to make laws for the benefit of our country. Besides, we verbally agreed that teams at Congress commissions will coordinate with technical teams from the ministries to issue the most beneficial laws for the country," he affirmed.





Likewise, Mr. Torres indicated that members of the Parliament pledged to debate and approve the bills that may be introduced by the Executive Branch.





The high-ranking official said that he has always heard comments that the Executive Branch has not submitted initiatives, but he emphasized that 20 proposals have been presented to Congress, but the latter has not yet made any pronouncement in this regard.





The Prime Minister affirmed that one of them refers to the constitutional reform bill that seeks to strengthen governance and confidence between the Executive Branch and Congress, to reduce to its essential kernel of meaning the presidents impeachment for "permanent moral incapacity," which is a concept empty of meaning, as well as the question of confidence.





"These two elements have been used, one by the Legislative Branch and the other by the Executive Branch, and resulted in five presidents and three congresses in the previous five-year period, which was a horrible political instability that harmed us," he said.





In this sense, Torres expressed confidence that the initiatives submitted by the Executive Branch would be addressed by the Congress of the Republic.





(END) JCC/JCR/RMB
YEREVAN, APRIL 6, ARMENPRESS. Speaker of Parliament of Armenia Alen Simonyan attended the event organized by the Moscow House Cultural-Business Center in Yerevan on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of establishment of diplomatic relations between Armenia and Russia.

In his remarks, Simonyan said that Armenia and Russia, by preserving the centuries-old traditional friendly nature, continue to develop the relations not only in political and economic directions but also in culture and arts.

The Russian Ambassador to Armenia Sergey Kopyrkin was also in attendance. He said that over the course of the last 30 years there are big and important positive changes in all sectors of the friendly relations.

Works of Armenian and Russian composers were played.

The event featured screening of excusive archive documents and articles, as well as various photographs relating to the history of diplomatic relations between Armenia and Russia from the archives of the ARMENPRESS State News Agency of Armenia and the TASS State News Agency of Russia.
YEREVAN, APRIL 6, ARMENPRESS. On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Armenia and China, Premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China Li Keqiang sent a message to the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan.

The message, in particular, reads,

"Dear Mr. Prime Minister,

Your Excellency,

On behalf of the Government of the People's Republic of China, and on my personal behalf, I convey my heartfelt congratulations, best wishes to you, and to the Government and people of the Republic of Armenia, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the People's Republic of China and the Republic of Armenia.

Since the establishment of diplomatic relations, healthy and sustainable development dynamics has been observed in the Chinese -Armenian relations during the last 30 years. The political mutual trust between the two countries is constantly deepening, the practical cooperation in different spheres is progressing, and the cultural and humanitarian exchanges are getting closer.

Taking the opportunity of the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations, I express my readiness to make joint efforts with you to deepen bilateral relations in various spheres, to enrich the agenda of the Chinese-Armenian friendly relations for the benefit of our countries and peoples.

I wish success in your mission and good health. I wish eternal friendship between China and Armenia.
YEREVAN, APRIL 6, ARMENPRESS. Speaker of Parliament of Armenia Alen Simonyan received today Executive Secretary of the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly Sergei Pospelov, the Armenian Parliaments press service said.

Within the framework of the chairmanship in the CSTO, the Parliament of Armenia made a proposal to hold the session dedicated to the 15th anniversary of the Parliamentary Assembly in Yerevan in June.

The meeting sides then touched upon the standing committees of the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly. The outgoing session of the CSTO PA Standing Committee on political affairs and international cooperation will be held in the second half of 2022.

The discussion also focused on issues relating to expanding the structure of the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly.
By Azernews

By Vugar Khalilov

Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov and his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu have discussed the region and Ukraine, the ministry reported on April 5.

In a telephone conversation, the ministers focused on the current regional situation, including the implementation of the trilateral statements signed by Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia, as well as the situation in Ukraine, the report added.

The sides also discussed other issues of mutual interest.

On June 15, Azerbaijan and Turkey signed the Shusha Declaration on Allied Relations, during Erdogans first official visit to Shusha, eight months after Azerbaijans victory in the war with Armenia in 2020. The document focuses on defence cooperation, promoting regional stability and prosperity, and establishing new transportation routes.

Azerbaijan and Turkey cooperate in various fields of economy and have jointly completed giant energy and infrastructure projects such as Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, Baku-Tbilisi-Kars, and TANAP.

Eleven agreements were signed between the two countries during the Azerbaijani-Turkish business forum held in Ankara on February 18. The agreements envisage the development of Azerbaijani-Turkish cooperation in the economic, trade, and other spheres.

The two countries set up a goal to bring the mutual trade turnover to $15 billion in 2023. It should be noted that so far, Turkey is Azerbaijans second-largest investor followed by the UK.

Additionally, Turkey was one of the first countries that expressed its interest and readiness to participate in the restoration of Azerbaijans liberated territories.

Azerbaijan and Turkey periodically hold joint drills to improve interaction and communication between their army units. In 2021 number of joint drills took place with the participation of servicemen of the two countries.

The trilateral peace deal signed by the Azerbaijani, Russian and Armenian leaders on November 10, 2020, ended the 30-decade conflict over Azerbaijans former Nagorno-Karabakh region along with seven adjacent districts came under the occupation of Armenian armed forces in the war in the 1990s.

On January 11, 2021, the Azerbaijani, Russian and Armenian leaders signed the second statement since the end of the 44-day war. The newly-signed statement is set to implement clause 9 of the November 2020 statement related to the unblocking of all economic and transport communications in the region.
YEREVAN, APRIL 6, ARMENPRESS. The relations between Armenia and Kazakhstan have a big potential and prospects for further development, Ambassador of Kazakhstan to Armenia Bolat Imanbayev said during a round-table today, dedicated to the new challenges and prospects of the Eurasian Economic Union.

In his remarks the Ambassador congratulated on the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Armenia and Kazakhstan, that marks this year.

What has started with a ritual, diplomatic action, with the exchange of verbal notes, has now turned into multifaceted, lively and intensive relations and mutual partnership. I am convinced that the friendly and mutually beneficial Kazakh-Armenian relations will continue deepening for the benefit of our peoples, our states and the Eurasian Economic Union, in general, the Kazakh Ambassador said.

He stated that the Armenian-Kazakh relations are based on traditions of friendship and mutual understanding, and the legal-contractual field between the two countries allows to regulate the bilateral and multilateral cooperation in all directions. Moreover, the Kazakh-Armenian relations have a big potential and prospects for further development, including in the Eurasian integration space, the Ambassador said.

The round-table discussion, entitled EAEU opportunities and prospects after Wests announcement of economic war against Russia, was organized by the Integration and Development research NGO and the Eurasian Expert Club.

Reporting by Aram Sargsyan
STEPANAKERT, APRIL 6, ARMENPRESS. The Speaker of Parliament of Artsakh Artur Tovmasyan says he thinks no document relating to the status of Artsakh will be signed today at the upcoming Pashinyan-Aliyev meeting in Brussels.

Artsakh cant be part of Azerbaijan, thats impossible, Tovmasyan told ARTSAKHPRESS. Both our colleagues in Armenia and the international community in person of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chair countries realize this. We are utilizing all our inter-parliamentary and diplomatic opportunities to regularly update on the developments taking place in Artsakh, while these [developments] every time directly prove the well known truth that this conflict has only one solution which must happen based on the principle of the right to self-determination of nations, Tovmasyan added.

The Speaker said there is no peace in Artsakh today, there is simply relative silence, and it is wrong to speak about peace when the November 9, 2020 trilateral statements terms are regularly violated.

The Republic of Armenia was, is, and must be the number one guarantor of security of our people. Together we must find our own place in the rapidly changing world order and in this context the Armenia-Artsakh-Diaspora union is very important. Yesterdays statement adopted by the parliament contained these messages. But we must state the unquestionable role of the Russian peacekeeping contingent and generally the Russian Federation in our security system. Without it we cant withstand the regional challenges of the collapsing world order, Tovmasyan added, stating that losing the war doesnt mean losing the negotiations.
YEREVAN, 6 APRIL, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs Armenpress that today, 6 April, USD exchange rate down by 2.21 drams to 479.38 drams. EUR exchange rate down by 5.06 drams to 523.20 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate up by 0.06 drams to 5.85 drams. GBP exchange rate down by 5.01 drams to 627.08 drams.

The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals.

Gold price up by 74.77 drams to 29962.52 drams. Silver price down by 1.60 drams to 380.30 drams. Platinum price stood at 16414.1 drams.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had a telephonic conversation Tuesday with President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, according to a press release attributable to spokesperson Ned Price of the US Department of State.

April 6, 2022, 09:36 Blinken expresses his encouragement for Armenia-Azerbaijan peace negotiations

STEPANAKERT, APRIL 6, ARTSAKHPRESS: The Secretary offered his condolences for the tragic gas explosion in Baku over the weekend. The Secretary condemned the Kremlins heinous war crimes in Ukraine and highlighted the continued commitment of the U.S. and its partners to hold the Russian Federation and its enablers accountable for the unprovoked and unjustified war against Ukraine.

The Secretary called for restraint, de-escalation, and renewed diplomacy. The Secretary expressed his encouragement for peace negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan, including President Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Pashinyans planned meeting on April 6 with European Council President Michel. He reiterated the United States stood ready to help by engaging bilaterally and with like-minded partners, including through our role as an OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chair, to help the countries find a long-term comprehensive peace, the press release adds.
Additional US sanctions will include, among other things, a ban on investments in Russia and will be designed to weaken the key instruments of the Russian government, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said, Tass informs.

April 6, 2022, 09:50 Additional US sanctions to include ban on investment in Russia  White House

STEPANAKERT, APRIL 6, ARTSAKHPRESS: "This will include a ban on all new investment in Russia, increased sanctions on financial institutions and state-owned enterprises in Russia, and sanctions on Russian government officials and their family members," she said, adding that "these measures will degrade key instruments of Russian state power."

Washington expects the sanctions to "impose acute and immediate economic harm on Russia."

The United States is trying to put Russia in a situation when it will have to choose between a default or draining of its remaining foreign currency reserves, Psaki has told.

"The goal is to force them to make a choice," she said, when asked whether the US goal at this stage was to trigger a sovereign default in Russia. "Russia does not have unlimited resources - especially now, given the crippling sanctions weve put in place - and they are going to be forced to choose between draining remaining valuable dollar reserves <> or default."

When asked about whether the White House had any assessment on when a default may be expected, she replied "I dont have an assessment of that. <> It depends, in part, on what decisions they [the Russians] make."

On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an early morning televised address that he had launched a special military operation in Ukraine in response to a request for help from the leaders of the Donbass republics. He stressed that Moscow had no intention of occupying Ukrainian territories, the sole purpose of the operation, the leader stressed, is the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.

The United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and some other countries responded by imposing sanctions on Russian individuals and companies.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan sent congratulatory messages to the President of the People's Republic of China Xi Jinping and the Premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China Li Keqiang on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Armenia and China, the Prime Ministers Office reported.

April 6, 2022, 11:25 Nikol Pashinyan congratulates Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang on Armenia-China 30 years of diplomatic ties

STEPANAKERT, APRIL 6, ARTSAKHPRESS: The message of the Prime Minister to the President of China reads as follows,

"Your Excellency,

I cordially congratulate you on the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Republic of Armenia and the People's Republic of China.

The Armenian-Chinese friendly relations have a rich history, are distinguished by mutual trust and great respect. It is this rich traditional foundation that our interstate cooperation is anchored on, which has continuously developed over the past thirty years in a healthy and stable way. A high-level political dialogue has been maintained between Armenia and China, the partnership over international and regional issues, including on multilateral platforms, has been strengthened.

During these three decades, our countries have achieved significant results in cooperation in trade, economy, development, security, culture, education, science and other spheres, the friendship between the Armenian and Chinese peoples has strengthened, mutual understanding and recognition has deepened.

The Government of Armenia attaches great importance to the Armenian-Chinese relations, considering the development of multifaceted cooperation with the People's Republic of China as one of its foreign policy priorities.

I would like to express our gratitude for the support provided by the Chinese Government to the development of Armenia over these years, which has helped to solve important problems for broad layers of population in Armenia. One of the latest episodes in this series is the assistance provided in the fight against COVID-19.

Marking the 30th anniversary of the establishment of Armenian-Chinese diplomatic relations, I express my readiness to make efforts with you to achieve new success in the future-oriented Armenian-Chinese relations.

I wish you good health and further success, and prosperity and peace to the friendly people of China".

Nikol Pashinyans message to Li Keqiang runs as follows,

Your Excellency,

I cordially congratulate you on the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Republic of Armenia and the People's Republic of China.

The traditional Armenian-Chinese friendly relations come from the depths of history, having a solid foundation of mutual trust and respect. The establishment of interstate relations three decades ago gave our countries and peoples an opportunity to open a new era, to develop and strengthen cooperation in various fields, recording significant achievements.

Armenia highly values the existing political dialogue between our countries, attaching great importance to the further comprehensive, sustainable, consistent development and expansion of the partnership with China, on both bilateral and multilateral formats. Significant results have been achieved in the past period in trade, economics, security, science, education, culture, interpersonal exchanges, and many other areas.

One of the important components of the Armenian-Chinese relations is the economic cooperation, which we are committed to maximally expanding, embracing new and promising programs of mutual interest. In this regard, we attach importance to Armenia's participation in the "Belt and Road" initiative, which creates new development opportunities for the region.

China has stood with Armenia over these years also through programs implemented within the framework of gratuitous assistance provided by the Chinese government. One of the latest examples of mutual support and cooperation between our countries is the joint fight against COVID-19.

On the occasion of this remarkable anniversary, I would like to express my readiness to work with you to bring the Armenian-Chinese relations to a new level for the benefit of our countries and peoples.

I wish you good health and further success, and prosperity and peace to the friendly people of China.
Duties of 35% will be imposed on the import of all goods from Russia to New Zealand due to a special operation in Ukraine. Information about this is given in a joint statement by Foreign Minister Nanaya Mahuta and Minister of Commerce Damien OConnor, Oops Top reported.

April 6, 2022, 12:43 New Zealand to impose 35% customs duty on all Russia imports

STEPANAKERT, APRIL 6, ARTSAKHPRESS: These measures will come into force on April 25.

Wellington is also imposing a ban on the export of information and communication technology (ICT) equipment and engines. The document states that this is New Zealands most significant economic response to a military operation by Russian forces so far.
New York State Supreme Court Judge John Michalski, 61, was found dead at his home in Amherst, NY. (WIVBTV/Screengrab video)

New York State Supreme Court Justice John Michalski has died by suicide weeks after his home was searched by federal agents and state police while he was questioned about his relationship to a person involved in a federal prosecution.

Judge Michalski, 61, was found deceased at his home in Amherst, NY shortly before noon on Tuesday, lawyer Terrence Connors told The New York Times.

Its difficult to explain what a tragedy this is ... it would be difficult to find a judge who was more respected, in the Western New York legal community, Mr Connors, a longtime friend of the justice, told the newspaper.

The Times reported that the local police in Amherst were unable to provide information about Judge Michalski on Tuesday, but as of early Wednesday a spokesperson for the state court system said police had confirmed his death.

The death of the 61-year-old judge arrives a little more than year after he was struck by a freight train at a rail yard near Buffalo, which prompted a leave of absence that he only returned from in January 2022 after the State Office of Court Administration reinstated him.

State Supreme Court Judge Thomas Brown upheld a decision last year not to release video footage of the train incident, labelling it an apparent suicide attempt, according to The Buffalo News.

The outlet reported last month that Judge Michalski had been questioned last year ahead of being struck by the train by FBI agents about his longtime friendship with a strip club owner, Peter Gerace, who is staring down federal charges of drug trafficking, sex trafficking and bribing Drug Enforcement Administration Agent Joseph Bongiovanni, who was also indicted.

The judge came under renewed scrutiny last month when his home was raided by federal agents.

The Times reported that this recent raid was connected to the Supreme Court judges ties to Mr Gerace, who was charged in federal court in Florida last year the same day that Judge Michalski was struck by the train, though hed been questioned about their relationship by agents weeks earlier.

Story continues

In his interview with the Times this week, Mr Connors said Judge Michalski had conveyed to the authorities repeatedly that he had no knowledge of any of Mr Geraces allegedly illegal activities, noting that, he was a client.

Mr Connors said based on the information he saw in the search warrant executed on the judges home last month, the authorities seemed to be more focused on his wifes business, where she reportedly sells clothes online.

If they would have called me and asked for what they were looking for, we would have given it to them, Mr Connors said.

If you are experiencing feelings of distress and isolation, or are struggling to cope, The Samaritans offers support; you can speak to someone for free over the phone, in confidence, on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email jo@samaritans.org, or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch.

If you are based in the USA, and you or someone you know needs mental health assistance right now, call National Suicide Prevention Helpline on 1-800-273-TALK (8255). The Helpline is a free, confidential crisis hotline that is available to everyone 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

If you are in another country, you can go to www.befrienders.org to find a helpline near you.

This article was amended on April 11 2022 to change a reference to the train accident to the train incident, as the court ruled it to be an apparent suicide attempt.
A judge has ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to reconsider its decision denying the Cayuga Nation Police Department access to highly sensitive law enforcement databases.

In a March 29 ruling that granted and denied motions made by both sides in a federal lawsuit brought by the Cayuga Nation, U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the District of Columbia said the FBI's denial was "arbitrary and capricious."

He stopped short, however, of ordering the agency to grant the nation's application for what's called an "Originating Agency Identification Number" for its police department, which would authorize access to FBI-administered databases that are used by law enforcement agencies around the nation.

The Cayuga Nation first applied for its access to the National Crime Information Center in 2018, shortly after forming the police department at the direction of the nation's governing council run by Clint Halftown. The Halftown council in 2017 successfully secured recognition as the nation's federal representative and governing leader from the U.S. Department Interior.

Another group of Cayuga Nation citizens have long disputed Halftown's leadership status, saying he's been removed under traditional tribal law. The dispute has been entangled in state and federal lawsuits for nearly two decades, and has led to violent clashes at times on nation-owned land in Cayuga and Seneca counties.

Federal government upholds decision on Cayuga Nation leadership The federal government upheld a decision by the Bureau of Indian Affairs Eastern Regional Director Bruce Maytubby to recognize Clint Halftown 

That leadership dispute was one of the reasons the FBI said it could not grant the Cayuga Nation Police Department the official recognition that would grant it access to the databases.

Following the original denial by the FBI, the Cayuga Nation re-applied on June 5, 2020, but the federal agency denied that application five days later. In an explanation of its determination, according the judge's decision, the FBI "cited the fact that 'the Tribe does not have lands in Trust; the fact that the New York Court of Appeals recently identified a 'serious dispute about who represents the lawful government' of the Nation; the fact that the Department of the Interior 'does not have any relationship' with the Nation PD; and the fact that the BIA had not 'commissioned' the Nation PD."

The nation filed its lawsuit challenging the FBI's decision on Nov. 3, 2020. It argued that the FBI's reasoning was factually inaccurate and also did not follow a federal law known as the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010. The nation asked the judge to vacate the FBI's denial and order the agency to grant the Cayuga Nation PD access to the databases.

In agreeing to vacate the FBI's denial, the judge said the federal agency "relied on a 'slew of considerations' that are irrelevant under the (Tribal Law and Order Act)."

That act, the judge said, requires the FBI must only focus on three issues in evaluating the Cayuga Nation's application: "(1) whether the Nation PD were tribal justice officials; (2) whether the Nation PD served an Indian tribe; and (3) whether the Nation had criminal jurisdiction over its Indian country."

The FBI's explanations cited incidents in which it said the Cayuga Nation PD failed to show "restraint," such as its February 2020 seizure and demolition of buildings in Seneca County previously controlled by anti-Halftown nation citizens, followed by violent clashes on the property at a protest of that action a week later.

"The Nations unilateral demolition of property, detention of Tribe members, and subsequent violence were serious matters that weakened the trust that the Nations government can operate at this time in a harmonious nature with the other governments and law enforcement officers that share the same geography, the FBI said.

But the judge said such considerations were irrelevant to the federal law at hand.

"Congress did not mandate that the FBI shall grant an ORI only to a tribal law enforcement agency that operates harmoniously with other governments in the area. It did not instruct the FBI to grant an ORI only to tribes that have FBI-approved 'Tribal laws protecting its members,'" the decision said. "It did not grant the FBI the authority to deny a tribal law enforcement agencys application based on an 'unwillingness' to use restraint. ... Still, the FBI denied the application based on the above-mentioned factors  factors manifestly different from the narrow criteria Congress provided."

What the judge's ruling did not do, however, is grant the Cayuga Nation's motion for an injunction that would automatically give it access to the FBI databases. To do so, the ruling said, would be going too far.

"The FBI did not refuse to consider the ORI application at all," the decision states. "Instead, the FBI determined that the three requirements triggering a mandatory duty were not met  so it did not perform that duty. While the FBI exceeded the bounds set by Congress in making that determination ... the Court will not go so far as to say that the FBI has no judgment or discretion in determining whether the three TLOA criteria are met."

The decision directs the FBI to provide "additional explanation and investigation consistent with this opinion."

In a press release, the Cayuga Nation hailed the decision as a victory.

"As a legal, recognized, and lawfully established law enforcement agency with jurisdiction over lands and matters on the Cayuga Nations Reservation, the Cayuga Nation Police Department is entitled to access these criminal databases, Halftown said. As we continue to expand our law enforcement department, having the ability to communicate with other departments and obtain critical information from these databases will help the CNPD maintain peace and safety within the boundaries of the Cayuga Nation reservation.

The FBI division handling the lawsuit did not respond to a request for comment.

Jeremy Boyer can be reached at (315) 282-2231 or jeremy.boyer@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @CitizenBoyer

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April 6, 2007

SKANEATELES  Bunny McLaud shook her head in disbelief Thursday night after the Skaneateles Town Board recommended a proposal to expand the mining district in the Town of Skaneateles.

There's sad, sad people leaving here tonight, McLaud said.

As her eyes began to water she said that the future of Shepard Settlement, in the northern part of the town, is now in turmoil.

I'm so disgusted. We fought and fought and begged not to ruin our place and they refused to do anything, McLaud said. They have devalued our property.

In a 3-2 vote Thursday night, town board members authorized the Orange Alternate, a proposal Town Engineer Doug Wickman presented to the board in January. The measure must now be the subject of a public hearing, which will likely take place in late May, before the board can take a final vote.

The town currently permits what is primarily sand and gravel mining anywhere north of Old Seneca Turnpike and east of Route 321 in the rural and farming district.

Councilor Dave Laxton motioned for the Orange Alternate proposal that broadens the mining district, giving mines a larger area but not permitting a new mine to operate within 200 feet of property lines or within 100 feet of watercourse. Property lines include roadways and the cemetery that is located in the district. Before voting, Laxton successfully motioned to remove the cemetery from the district.

Laxton, councilor Barbara Spain and councilor Ted Astemborski approved the proposal.

Approval of this alternate may give Cemento LLC, owned by Vitale/Robinson Companies, which has been operating its Sandy Hill Mine on the south side of Stump Road for four years, the ability to start mining 77 acres across the road from Shepard Settlement.

Shepard Settlement residents have since October 2006 expressed their concerns about allowing continued mining in the town with the reasoning that it will damage the landscape and the quality of life for residents.

The orange proposal is the best alternative available, Laxton said.

Council members also had the opportunity to approve the Blue Alternative, which would have allowed mining to operate only in the currently existing mines. District boundaries would have been drawn specifically around the existing mines.

Town Supervisor Phil Tierney and councilor Ellen Kulik cast the opposing votes, citing that the action will hamper future housing development in the area.

I think it will have a destructive effect on the community, Tierney said.

 Compiled by David Wilcox

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Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev is expected to meet European Council President Charles Michel and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on April 6 in Belgium's Brussels.

The meeting between the Azerbaijani president and the Armenian prime minister is scheduled to be attended by Charles Michel. A one-on-one meeting between Azerbaijani and Armenian leaders is also not ruled out.

Earlier, the meeting in a trilateral format was held in Brussels on December 14, 2021.

On December 14, 2021, during the Brussels meeting, organized between Azerbaijani and Armenian leaders at the initiative of European Council President Charles Michel, the sides reaffirmed their commitment to the conditions agreed in the Sochi meeting.

Both sides agreed to establish a temporary working group on the delimitation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border.

The issue of demining the liberated territories of Azerbaijan was also brought up on the agenda, and the European Union's readiness to provide technical assistance to Azerbaijan in this regard was underlined at the meeting.

On November 26, 2021, in Sochi, the leaders of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Russia signed a statement in which they agreed on a number of issues, including the demarcation and delimitation of the Azerbaijani-Armenian border by late 2021, some humanitarian issues, and the issue of unblocking transport corridors, which applies to railway and automobile communications.
Beijing (Gasgoo)- On April 5th, Chinas navigation giant NavInfo announced a strategic cooperation with Honeywell Sensing & Control China Co., Ltd. (Honeywell) for automotive chip, autonomous driving and intelligent V2X development.

Photo credit: NavInfo



The agreement specifies that the partners will deepen their current cooperation in the auto-grade chip aspect. NavInfo will continue supplying various professional automotive chips for Honeywell. Honeywell is obligated to prioritize NavInfos chips when selecting suppliers for its onboard hardware and equipment.

The two companies also have plans in intelligent driving and new energy fields. Specifically, the partners aim to provide production-ready autonomous driving solutions by combining NavInfos L2 to L4 autonomous driving solutions with Honeywells IMU sensors.

With each companys resources and capabilities, NavInfo and Honeywell will co-develop new energy solutions, and explore the possibilities of international business.

Through the cooperation, NavInfo and Honeywell aim to reinforce their market share and competitiveness in the auto-grade chip and autonomous driving fields, furthering their product industrialization.

Notably, NavInfos efforts in enhancing its performance are fruitful. In 2021, the company celebrated a turnaround from loss to profit, with annual revenue of RMB3.06 billion ($482.4 million), surging 42.48% from a year ago, resulting in a net profit of RMB122 million ($19.22 million).
Beijing (Gasgoo)- Chinas automaker Jiangling Motors Corporation Group (JMC) celebrated a year-over-year growth in its SUV sales in March 2022, according to the automakers report on April 6th.

Equator Sport; photo credit: JMC Ford



In the third month of 2022, JMC sold a total of 30,001 vehicles, representing a 19.18% decline from a year ago, caused by the respective sales decrease in its light bus and truck sectors by 32.7% and 31.79%.

On the other hand, with 8,972 vehicles sold, JMCs pickup truck sector saw a 7.76% year-on-year increase in March. Meanwhile, the company sold 3,889 SUVs, increasing 10.17% compared to a year ago.

From January to March, the cumulative sales volume of JMC amounted to 70,157 vehicles, down 14.21% from the same quarter in 2021. However, the cumulative sales volume of its SUV sector achieved a 43.48% year-over-year jump to 13,504 vehicles.

Notably, the newly established joint venture of JMC and Ford, namely, JMC Ford Technology, launched its first vehicle model on March 28th, the Equator Sport. The Equator Sport is a mid-sized SUV priced at RMB139,800 to RMB165,800 ($21,974 to $26,061), completing JMC and Fords SUV lineup in China.
Shanghai (Gasgoo)- In 2022, three all-new models under Denza brand will be launched, including a MPV, a full-sized SUV, and a mid-sized SUV, Zhao Changjiang, general manager of Denza's sales division, recently disclosed via his twitter-like Weibo account.

Spy shot of Denza's yet-to-be-launched MPV model; photo credit: Zhao Changjiang's Weibo account

The MPV will be the first one to be released. With more and more details unveiled on the executive's personal social platform, the long-awaited MPV is grabbing attention of increasingly more consumers and industry insiders.

Mr. Zhao said the MPV will feature a pretty wide price range as it will come with both EV and DM power solutions, and both all-wheel-drive and two-wheel-drive variants.

Reportedly, the MPV's DM version is likely to boast BYD's super hybrid technology that allows a combined range of over 1,000km, while the range for the all-electric one may stand between 600km to 800km.

According to the spy shots seen on Zhao's Weibo account, the MPV rides on a chassis installed higher than that of a common car, while lower than an SUV. It will adopt a 2-2-3 seating arrangement with an overall seating space larger than that of a conventional oil-fueled model. The rear bench seat can lay flat to allow passengers to have a rest. Besides, all variants of the MPV will come standard with power sliding doors, double-glazed windows, and double sunroofs.

Mr. Zhao also noted that Denza has prepared solutions for multiple scenarios and details in terms of car intelligence and digital cockpit. Moreover, the BYD-backed high-end brand will rebuild its sales and service channels to better meet users' demands for mid-/high-end after-sale services and social contact.
WASSERBILLIG/LUXEMBOURG  One year ago, pjur launched its campaign Normalize Lube with the aim of normalizing the use of personal lubricants. In spring 2022, pjur is taking steps to shine a light on female masturbation. The #FemaleMasturbation campaign includes insights from the pjur&yourself survey that pjur conducted in 2021. The online campaign goes live early April, predominantly on social media.

With its latest campaign topic #femalemasturbation, pjur is addressing another taboo which mostly affects women. Very little is said (in public) about female masturbation, so pjur decided to check in with women who masturbate. The survey pjur&yourself sums up the results and wants to encourage more open discussion about masturbation.

pjur offered six facts about masturbation that "deserve more attention."

1) Women like to do it using their hands, toys and a lot of personal lubricant. When women are asked how they masturbate, those are the three most common answers: with their hands, toys and personal lubricant. Several said that personal lubricant helped them to orgasm.

2) Getting to know their own body and their own desire is just one of the reasons women masturbate. Orgasms are also the number one reason women masturbate.

3) Being in a relationship is not a reason for not pleasuring yourself. It became clear that whether or not someone masturbated was not related to their relationship status. Masturbation is primarily a part of our relationship with ourselves, and part of our own, lived sexuality. It is not replaced by sexual activities with other people.

4) Women most frequently masturbate in the bedroom, under the shower or in the lounge. Women dont want to restrict themselves to one location, so theres no clear winner. A change every now and then is a good thing.

5) 63% of women masturbate 2-4 times every week. This demonstrates that women who masturbate do so regularly, and it is definitely not a minority activity (any more). Yet another reason why it shouldnt be taboo to talk about it.

6) 68% of women prefer pjur WOMAN Aloe for masturbation. In a practical test, the consistency of the water-based personal lubricant and its compatibility with sex toys were mentioned, and it was cho- sen as the preferred formula by more than two thirds of testers.

*Source: pjur & yourself, survey about masturbation, conducted in 2021

More information about the campaign can be found here.
Flagstaff will have to elect at least two write-in candidates in order to have a full city council following the 2022 election cycle.

Concerns over the unusually high amount of petition signatures needed to qualify for the ballot circulated last week, and after Mondays filing deadline, the dearth of qualifying city council candidates became official.

All four mayoral candidates -- incumbent Paul Deasy, Vice Mayor Becky Daggett, Councilmember Regina Salas and Daniel Williamson -- qualified for the ballot. Salas is in the last year of her term as a councilmember, but Daggett has more than two years remaining in her term. She will step down in order to campaign for mayor, leaving an open seat that will be filled by the current city council's appointment until Dec. 20, when the newly elected Council takes office.

Normally there are three city council seats available every election cycle, but with Daggett stepping down, a fourth half-term seat will be open. According to Flagstaff City Clerk Stacy Saltzburg, the city council candidate with the fourth-most votes in this year's election will take over Daggetts seat and serve the remaining two years of her term, while the others hold their positions until 2026.

But in a city council election with four open seats, only two of nine candidates received enough petition signatures to be included on the ballot: Austin Aslan and Lori Matthews.

That leaves seven candidates  Kevin Dobbe, Matt Eckhoff, Sean Golliher, Deborah Harris, Livandrea Knoki, Alec Sheedy and Sydney Shevat  who pulled papers but did not collect enough signatures to make the ballot. They still have the option of running as write-in candidates. Of these seven, Dobbe, Harris and Knoki confirmed to the Arizona Daily Sun that they intend to run a write-in campaign. Eckhoff and Golliher are undecided about their next moves. Sheedy and Shevat did not return requests for comment.

Its a situation Ive never been faced with, Saltzburg said. Its definitely a conundrum.

She explained that in order to be eligible for write-in votes, candidates must file the appropriate paperwork, which her office will begin accepting June 11. Write-in candidates must also receive at least 1,602 votes  equal to the number of signatures required to qualify for the ballot  in order to be elected. Saltzburg estimated that during the last election cycle, the top three candidates received about 11,000 votes each.

Even with four open seats, the two official candidates  Matthews and Aslan  are not guaranteed a seat on Council. In Saltzburgs opinion, its unlikely, but possible, that the election could result in a city council with empty seats filled entirely by write-in candidates.

Theres several things for Flagstaff voters to remember about casting write-in votes, said Patty Hansen, Coconino County recorder.

The main thing people will need to remember is that you need to fill in the oval and write the name, she said. If you just write the name, its not a valid vote.

Hansen also wants voters to know that there is some acceptable variation within how to write in a candidates name. Some use of initials, common nicknames or misspellings are permissible so long as the voting board can trace the name to an official write-in candidate. Using her name, Patricia Hansen, as an example, she said P. Hansen, Patty Hansen and Patricia Hanson would all be acceptable in a write-in situation.

When it comes to concerns over voter fraud, Hansen explained that there is no reason to believe that a write-in election will be more vulnerable to fraud. Bipartisan voting boards oversee the tabulation of all write-in votes, and write-in candidates can also arrange to have observers positioned at polling stations to monitor the process.

What will be impacted is the time it takes to get election results. Because write-in votes must be hand-counted to ensure accuracy, Hansen estimated it would take two or three days, after election night to receive results for the Council race.

Like Saltzburg, Hansen was surprised that Flagstaff will not have a ballot filled by officially qualified candidates.

We haven't had this happen before she said. At least not in the time I've been here since 2003.

Residents of Flagstaff also expressed some disappointment over the situation.

Somethings rotten in the State of Denmark, said Leslie Baker, quoting Shakespeare to express her dismay over the amount of signatures city council candidates were asked to collect. It shouldnt be this hard to serve your city.

I think it shows a lack of trust, a lack of engagement, said Stu Howe, who noted that he hadnt encountered any candidates collecting signatures in public.

Learning about local elections and city candidates has been extremely difficult, said Jason Napolitano, who moved to Flagstaff 10 months ago, intends to vote, but tries to stay off social media.

Without that, where do I go? he asked.

The City of Flagstaff will conduct a primary election on Aug. 2. The candidate primary will take place to determine two mayoral candidates for the Nov. 8 general election. Council candidates will not be considered at the primary election.

Sean Golightly can be reached at sgolightly@azdailysun.com

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In Flagstaff, mental health and social service providers have always believed that the best way to help the most people is to work together.

Our mantra, there is no wrong door, invites residents to access mental health services whenever and wherever they are, whether its at home, at a counselors office, the hospital, the police department or another location, through the Northern Arizona crisis hotline, 1-877-756-4090, operated by Solari Crisis and Human Services.

As a result, Im proud to say we have one of the states most coordinated systems of care.

It is in that spirit of collaboration that Terros Health and the City of Flagstaff have formed an enhanced partnership for mobile crisis services. The partnership followed a competitive public bid in which the City of Flagstaff awarded our company a three-year contract to develop and employ an alternative response mobile unit, with unanimous support from the Flagstaff City Council.

The benefits of this partnership cannot be overstated.

Late last month, we launched the CARE (Community Alliance, Response, & Engagement) Unit. One of our behavioral health specialists along with a Flagstaff Fire emergency medical technician began working out of a specially equipped van to respond to 911 calls and proactively move throughout and outreach to the community.

Collaboration between Flagstaff and Terros Health is not new; our team has been providing mobile behavioral health crisis services in Flagstaff and the surrounding area for nearly six years and we respond to approximately 175 calls for help each month through the Northern Arizona crisis hotline that send us deep into the community.

What is new with this expanded partnership is the availability of a 911 response unit that includes behavioral health specialists who can engage with individuals experiencing a mental health or substance use crisis in a customized and compassionate way, reducing the need for police involvement and emergency room visits. We are making it a priority to be trauma-informed and culturally sensitive.

As part of our work, we also will connect individuals to mental health, substance use and other resources in the community, and transport individuals to shelters, medical facilities, and other locations, when needed.

Alternative policing and mobile crisis models of care continue to be part of the national conversation and with good reason. The number of individuals with depression and other mental health conditions continues to grow. From Sept. 29 to Oct. 11 of 2021, 31.6% of adults in the United States reported symptoms of anxiety and/or depressive disorder, up from 11% during the same period in 2019, according to research from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Arizonas numbers were even higher: In 2021, 33% of adults had anxiety or a depressive disorder, the report showed. The problem is especially pronounced among youth: 17.4% of those between the ages of 12-17 reported a major depressive episode in the past year.

Kaiser Family Foundation also tracked substance use, which increased fivefold nationally from 2000 to 2020. At 18.4%, fatalities per 100,000 population, Arizona recorded 1,939 opioid deaths in 2020, accounting for 73% of all drug overdose deaths in the state.

Here in Flagstaff, the CARE Unit will respond to calls to 911 that do not necessitate a police presence but for which no other response resource currently exists. We think of this as a fourth type of unit -- in addition to police, fire and EMS -- that will be available through the 911 system to provide the best and most efficient response possible.

The good news is that this fourth unit will supplement, rather than reduce, existing 911 and police resources.

The unit will be active for approximately 10 hours per day, with plans to move to a 24/7 operation.

Collaboration with, and referral to, community partners will be crucial for the CARE Unit. We recently held two virtual forums to gather feedback from healthcare and social services agencies as well as individuals and that live and work within our Indigenous communities. Local agencies including The Guidance Center, Flagstaff Medical Center, Catholic Charities, Flagstaff Shelter Services, and Native Americans for Community Action (NACA) have expressed a desire to partner and coordinate with us in this new endeavor.

Our shared mission is to work in the best interest of our community. The CARE Unit exemplifies that commitment.

Bryan Gest is Terros Healths director of Northern Arizona Crisis Services. Note: If you or someone you know is in crisis, call the Northern Arizona crisis hotline at 1-877-756-4090.

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On the afternoon of April 4, the Thailand famtrip delegation came to Hue to visit and survey tourist attractions, proceeding to build new tours to bring guests to the Ancient Capital in the coming time.

This is the first international famtrip delegation coming to Hue after more than two years of being affected by the pandemic

The famtrip delegation has 33 members, including travel agencies, tourism promotion agencies, newspapers and media agencies in Thailand. This is a continuation of the cooperation after Thai Vietjet's survey trip to Hue Ancient Capital at the end of March to open a route to Hue.

In Hue, the delegation took a city tour by cyclo. They also visited the Imperial Citadel, watched royal art show and scenes re-creating life in the old Nguyen dynasty; visited Thien Mu pagoda, enjoy Hue cuisine; watched Ca Hue (Hue Singing) on the Perfume River, enjoyed Vietnamese traditional costumes and went shopping at Dong Ba market, ect.

The return of the first international famtrip delegation after more than two-year hiatus due to the pandemic is an opportunity for the tourism industry and travel agencies in Hue to promote cooperation; speed up, propagate, introduce and spread to Thailand market the unique tourist attractions and products, especially the brands: Hue - the Capital of Gastronomy, Hue - the Capital of Ao dai Vietnam and the destination of festivals.

It is known that, in addition to Hue, the delegation also surveyed destinations in Da Nang and Quang Nam. Previously, Thailand was the traditional market of the Ancient Capital tourism.

These are some photos of the famtrip delegation visiting and experiencing Hue tourism:

Enjoying the traditional five-panel Ao Dai in Hue

Leaders of Hue tourism industry presents flowers to welcome the delegation

Guiding the famtrip delegation to visit the Citadel

Being mpressed by the culture - heritage of Hue Ancient Capital

Experiencing going by cyclo to visit the ancient Hue city

Crossing Truong Tien Bridge

Smile promises a good cooperation between Hue tourism and partners from Thailand

By Duc Quang - Hai Hoang
By Azernews

By Vugar Khalilov

Azerbaijan's and New-Zealand's ambassadors to Russia have met to discuss bilateral ties and regional issues in Moscow, Azertag reported on April 6.

Speaking about Azerbaijan-New Zealand ties, Azerbaijani ambassador Polad Bulbuloglu stated that the two countries' relations have great potential for growth. The need of fostering tourism-related collaboration was stressed in this aspect.

Bulbuloglu briefed his counterpart about the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, its history, the negotiating process, and four known UN Security Council resolutions that were implemented as a result of the Azerbaijani army's victory in the 44-day war in 2020.

He detailed the content of a number of documents adopted in connection with the conflict by various international agencies.

The diplomats also exchanged views on the post-conflict period, as well as the progress of large-scale rehabilitation and reconstruction efforts in Azerbaijans liberated lands.

Furthermore, the officials touched upon the processes taking place in the region and other issues of interest.

During the meeting, Bulbuloglu congratulated his counterpart Sarah Walsh on her appointment and wished her success in the new position.

As dean of the diplomatic corps accredited in Russia, Bulbuloglu spoke about the activities, numerous meetings and cultural events organized jointly with the Russian Foreign Ministry.

At the end of the meeting, the New Zealand ambassador thanked his Azerbaijani counterpart for an interesting and productive meeting.
Michelle* feels like the walls of her bedroom are closing in on her. After three years of online classes, hours spent every day staring at a screen, the once social and bubbly 14-year-old is exhausted.

The youthful resilience that kept her going through the first year of the coronavirus pandemic is waning as she sees her peers around the world living their lives and having teenage fun.

I feel Im back where I was. I dont want to kill myself, but I would rather be dead, she says.

The pandemic has disrupted schooling for children around the world, but for those in Hong Kong the ordeal has lasted longer than for most others.

Their online lessons began in 2019 with the closure of schools because of the anti-government protests that rocked the city for seven months. Then came the global pandemic, which has dragged on in Hong Kong as the city strives to meet the demands of Chinas dynamic zero-Covid strategy.



Sabrina* is also sitting alone in her bedroom and feeling at rock bottom. The 13-year-old is grieving the loss of her best friend since childhood, who recently left Hong Kong for good with her family.

This is the saddest day of my life, but then everything feels the same, so its weird, she says.



So much of life for children and young people has been played out in their bedrooms over the past few years  from the challenges of online learning to the struggle to make friends and connect with others through a screen.

It has been a surreal three years at a time that is critical to their social development.

Children are amazingly resilient, and many will navigate the challenges, but others wont. Hong Kong-based clinical psychologist Kimberley Carder is worried about the kind of adulthood these kids will step into.

We know that most mental health disorders show symptoms and development before the age of 14 and that early childhood experiences are one of the greatest indicators of poor mental health in adulthood, says Carder.

With all the children in Hong Kong who havent had a full in-person school year since 2019, three academic years ago, we are witnessing the development of a completely new generation of people.

The prolonged exposure to the threat from the coronavirus, the constant flip-flopping of policy  school is on, school is off, you can see your friends, no you cant  and knowing things could change at any moment seriously undermine a childs sense of safety and security.



Of course, this is something we have all been going through in Hong Kong. But for adults it is a chapter in our life, while for young people whose lives have been directed towards finishing high school, there are no points of comparison.

The brain doesnt finish fully developing until the age of 25, says Carder. The last part of the brain to develop is the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for our sense of time.



When I tell a young person that this wont last forever, they understand that as a concept, but they cant feel it or process it as an adult.

Carder was alarmed when a teenage client had an IQ and educational assessment  which measures cognitive ability and academic strengths and weaknesses  that found the childs ability to hold information and retain it had dropped; where previously they had been in the 90th percentile, now they were in the 12th percentile.

Such a dramatic shift usually only happens if there has been an accident or brain trauma, but that wasnt the case. She just became depressed in the past three years, and depression affects our memory, overrides our cognitive functioning, Carder says.



There would not have been such a significant drop if there wasnt also a complete change in lifestyle  online learning has such different cognitive demands. Its the internet brain  you dont need to remember information because you are sitting in front of a computer.



Many young people spend a lot of time online, not just for school but also playing games. Their visual processing  understanding images and patterns and how they fit together  is fast, but their verbal comprehension, understanding of language and how words connect to one another is decreasing.

Whats more, their brains have not yet developed fully to comprehend it.





With home learning and fewer opportunities to be off the computer, we are seeing more of an ADHD [attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder] nation, where the attention span is short, says Carder.



Online learning and social-distancing regulations result in children and young people in Hong Kong having few opportunities to meet their peers. Instead of meeting in person, they are doing it online, by text and in Google Hangouts.

In such an artificial environment, where emotions are expressed in emojis, they are not learning how to pick up on social cues or social nuances.

The teenage years are the time of identity formation, but now much of that self-expression is done online. Many young people are developing two identities: who they are in person and who they are online, a split sense of self.

What is the adult version of this? I dont think any of us know the answer to that. It could be nothing, or it could be we are looking at a very different generation, says Carder.

If you have a child or young person in the house, what can you do to support them? The greatest indicator of well-being is the quality of connection with other people. When you do spend time with them, make sure that their attention is really engaged.

If you are watching a movie together, talk about it afterwards. When you are having a conversation, keep the technology away, suggests Carder.

When its not possible to meet their peers in person, encourage video calls rather than text. Seeing the other person increases the chances of social reciprocity and a higher quality connection in terms of social skills.

Looking through photos of past happy times and telling stories about them will instil a sense of optimism, while recalling details from the past will support good memory functioning.

Reflecting on what you would like to do in the future helps to develop a sense of hope  there were happy times before and well be able to develop them again, Carder says.



At a time when so many days blend into each other, Carder suggests marking on a calendar a highlight of the day to help the days count a little more.

Make sure you are making an active cognitive effort to make the day feel a little different  you could have a photo of the day, something to show a sense of progress, of growth and development, individually or as a family, Carder says.

Science teaches us that the brain is malleable, able to change and adapt as a result of experience. We saw this in the case of Carders teenage client, whose ability to retain information fell dramatically during the pandemic, but neuroplasticity works both ways. If children have lost memory and social skills over the last few years, with patience and encouragement they can be restored.

[After the pandemic] there will be a lot of things that feel scary when they engage in the real world, says Carder. We have to encourage young people to continue to push themselves  that warm push into the unknown.
Twitter Inc. said it would appoint Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk to its board, bringing the billionaire social-media agitator inside the fold.

The announcement Tuesday came after a flurry of calls in recent weeks between Mr. Musk, Twitter Chief Executive Parag Agrawal, and independent board Chairman Bret Taylor, as company officials learned that Mr. Musk was amassing a 9.2% stake in the platform, a person familiar with the matter said. The discussions culminated, according to the person, in the company offering a board seat to Mr. Musk.

Mr. Musks intentions for the company remain cloudy. In his initial disclosures related to the investment Monday, he indicated his stake would be passive. Late Tuesday, he filed amended paperwork known as a 13D, more commonly associated with activist investors. In that form, he said he had no present plans or intentions to force a merger or sale, shake up the board or change the companys dividend or share-buyback policy.

The Tesla CEO has long been one of Twitters most prominent users and, at times, one of its loudest critics. A self-described free speech absolutist, Mr. Musk has publicly encouraged the platform to allow a wide range of opinions.

Mr. Musk began buying Twitter shares on Jan. 31, when the stock traded at $36.83, according to Tuesdays filing. Those purchases continued through April 1.

Twitter shares soared over 27% on Monday, after Mr. Musks position in the company was first disclosed, and advanced 2% on Tuesday, closing at $50.98.

Hes both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service which is exactly what we need on @Twitter, and in the boardroom, to make us stronger in the long-term. Welcome Elon! Mr. Agrawal tweeted.

Mr. Musk tweeted: Looking forward to working with Parag & Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!

Mr. Musks board term is set for two years. So long as he remains a director, he cant own more than 14.9% of the companys stock, according to a securities filing. While neither Twitter nor Mr. Musk would give a reason for the cap, that means that Mr. Musk, for now, is precluded from taking over the company outright.

The Tesla and SpaceX chief executive has used the service for years to opine on everything from cryptocurrencies to free expression. That opens up a potential area of tension between the company and Mr. Musk over content moderation, analysts said.

The social-media platform has suspended some users, including then-President Donald Trump in 2021, for comments made on the platform, and placed labels on posts to stop what it says is the spread of false information.

Twitter said separately on Tuesday that it would begin removing tweets posted by government or state-affiliated accounts that showed prisoners of war related to Russias invasion of Ukraine, citing international humanitarian law. The company also said it wont amplify or recommend government accounts of states that limit access to free information after Moscow curtailed Western media in the country.

Last month, Mr. Musk said he would only block Russian news sources from the satellite-based internet service provided by his space company at gunpoint. The comment came at a time many Western companies put limits on Russian media over Moscows invasion of Ukraine.

Later, Mr. Musk tweeted a poll, saying, Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle? More than 70% of the roughly two million accounts that voted said no.

In landing a board seat, Mr. Musk will be in a position to really kick up dirt, said AB Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik. He moved from the back seat of the car to the front seat of the car. In fact, hes probably the driver.

Boasting more than 80 million followers, Mr. Musk is a master operator on Twitter. While rivals to Tesla spend heavily on brand or product advertisement, Mr. Musk effectively acts as his companys chief marketing officer with tweets that reach audiences far beyond his immediate followers.

Mr. Musk hasnt specified what, if any, formal plans he has to change Twitter. On Monday, he asked his Twitter followers to vote on whether the company should add the ability to edit existing tweets.



On Tuesday, the company said it had been working on that functionality since last year.

We believe one of Musks main motives could be to influence TWTRs moderation policies, which he has often criticized as being too restrictive, Brent Hill, an analyst at Jefferies wrote in an investor note, using Twitters stock symbol.

Any loosening of content restrictions could also backfire with advertising customers, said Brian Wieser, global president of business intelligence at GroupM, a part of ad giant WPP PLC. Advertisers dont want their brands associated with advocations for insurrection or advocations for hate and harm, Mr. Wieser said. They dont want to associate with environments which create a toxicity for people who might be using the platform.

Mr. Musk hasnt been shy about questioning Twitters values. After building his stake in the company, he mused publicly in recent weeks about Twitters commitment to free speech and even said he was considering starting a rival social-media platform of his own.

Twitter will have 12 board members, including Mr. Agrawal and co-founder Jack Dorsey. In a tweet, Mr. Dorsey said that he welcomed Mr. Musk onto the board. He cares deeply about our world and Twitters role in it, Mr. Dorsey wrote, adding, Ive wanted Elon on the board for a long time.

Mr. Musk has long had a direct line to some of Twitters senior ranks, the person familiar with the situation said, adding that the Tesla CEO earlier relayed ideas about the company to Mr. Dorsey.

Mr. Musk remains on the board of at least two other companies: Tesla and rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as SpaceX is formally known.

The manner in which Mr. Musk disclosed his investment in Twitter could flare tensions between him and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, securities lawyers say. He was late in disclosing his 9.2% holding on a form that investors are required to file when they buy more than 5% of a companys stock, without planning to seek control. The filing also didnt include a standard certification that underscores an investors passive status.
Officials in Gage County took an important step this week toward bringing broadband service to rural residents.

The Board of Supervisors approved several items during Wednesdays regular meeting related to a rural broadband project, opting to move forward with Nextlink Internet and pursue contract negotiations.

In late January the board called for project bids, and received proposals from three companies.

Board member Emily Haxby, who spearheaded the plan, said the proposal from Nextlink was the option that would benefit the most people of Gage County.

When we talk about broadband, we are helping farmers in the field, people working from home, kids being able to do their homework and more, Haxby said. This impact would be far reaching. Medicine, education, agriculture, businesses, the list goes on. This would do so much, not just for the people and businesses in our county, but it would also help the people of our county further reach other parts of the state, nation and beyond Our subcommittee unanimously recommends moving forward with contract negotiations with Nextlink. Their proposal covered a significant part of rural Gage County with fiber. They will hit about 1,000 homes in the next two years and their cost per month was about $30 less than the next closest applicant.

The plan to add broadband to many areas of northern Gage County  it was stated Wednesday that much of the southern portions are too rocky to bury fiber lines  was launched after Gage County was awarded just over $4 million in American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA) funds last year that are earmarked for water, sewer or broadband projects.

Oliver Borchers-Williams, who specializes in broadband development for Southeast Nebraska Development District, said the need for quality rural broadband service became clear during the pandemic.

The need for improved connectivity in much of rural Gage County became abundantly clear during the COVID-19 pandemic, as residents found themselves with insufficient bandwidth to attend online classes, work remotely, receive tele-healthcare and stream Sunday services, he said. ARPA funds provided the county with a once-in-a-generation opportunity.

Under the proposal all of the funds awarded to Gage County would be put toward the project, with the company awarded the project picking up the remainder of the cost over time.

County Board Chairman Erich Tiemann said the project will represent a significant investment in Gage County.

Nextlink, if we work out a contract here, will be building or buying a facility in Gage County and operating a permanent service center, Tiemann said. This should be an incredible step forward for Gage County as far as broadband connectivity. Its incredible, this is the direction things are going.

We talked about how to make that $4.2 million into more. We didnt want to take that and just purchase something.

The total project is estimated to be up to a $12 million investment in Gage County.

Haxby has previously stated Gage County will not contribute any funds to the project, other than the awarded ARPA dollars.

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Eight of the eleven candidates for Beatrice Board of Education answered questions at a public forum on Tuesday night.

The forum, hosted by the Beatrice Chamber of Commerce, started at 7:45 p.m. and lasted about an hour. The candidates present included Doris Martin, who is running for re-election, Sabrina Glynn, Joseph Brewer, Charles Riedesel, Brandon Vetrovsky, Crystal Anderson, Matt Anderson and Nelson Dungan.

Incumbents Eric Trusty and Erin Chadwick and non-incumbent Roger Aden did not attend the forum.

Each candidate was allowed time for introductions at the beginning and summations at the end. They were asked what skills and know-how they would bring to the School Board, what they believe the function of the School Board is, what their vision for the future of Beatrice Public Schools is and if they approved of the use of the Interlocal Agreement Act to finance a new elementary school in the district.

Martin, running for her fourth term, discussed how her life revolved around education. She said her more than 30 years as the Beatrice High School journalism teacher gave her insight into how policy takes shape in individual classrooms.

I think its important that we meet the child where he or she is and move them forward in their educational journey, she said. And that becomes increasingly difficult with standards that are set by the State, and we have to meet those standards. I think thats an issue that needs to be addressed by boards across the state I think helping children feeling successful is really a key to helping them stay interested in school.

Glynn said running a daycare helps her see the needs of kids in the community. She said she began attending School Board meetings because of the Board's response to COVID-19. She also said she wants to see the school focus more on what comes after graduation.

One of the things Id like to see if elected is that the school follow through with more of their policies, she said. When we were dealing with the mask issue in 2020, there was no transparency. There were things that were brought to the School Board that there was no acknowledgement of I hope that Im elected so we can have that transparency for the community and for the parents But the biggest one is to our after school plans. I think sometimes we set our kids up for failure by not giving them all of the information.

Brewer, a local business owner, said hed try to tackle the problem of brain drain in the community.

Really, I want to provide an idea within the school system that education is also a competition  and the world outside of school is filled with competition, he said. And as much as we can celebrate our sports, we should be trying to celebrate that competition with academics and realize that theres a lot that goes on outside of our school district... I really want to try to grow community buy-in to our high school and our elementary schools.

Riedesel said his time as a professor and undergraduate advisor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln gave him the tools he needs to help kids come out of school with a well-rounded education.

We have a public school system, he said. Being a public school system means we serve all the students. We have that obligation What I want for our students is that we have graduates that are of good character We need a child-centric education, where we pay attention to each one. We want to address the factors that impact learning. We need to understand where theyre coming from.

Vetrovsky said hes running for the School Board so the district can continue on a great path forward for our students.

Im a very open-minded candidate, he said. I feel like I can be progressive on issues that this town desperately needs progression on. I can be conservative when needs be. I have relationships with all types of people in this community, from doctors to ditch-diggers. And guess what? They all have kids. They all love their kids. They all have concerns; they all have ideas.

Crystal emphasized parental rights and the necessity of Constitutional-mindedness.

I feel that the School Board is the representative of the parents, and I want to be able to help the parents have a voice, she said. And also, just want to make sure that the Constitution is respected.

Matt said the schools response to COVID-19 spurred his interest in local politics and stressed the importance of parental rights

There are many candidates that are running here that have a lot of educational experience, he said. But I also think its very important that we have representative on the School Board and in the government that have not been in the system their entire life The School Board is part of the government and needs to be representative of us, and we need to make sure that were not acting because we know better than the parent.

Dungan focused on his time as an educator, with more than 30 years as the BHS art teacher. He said he would want to direct policy toward lifting up the value of every individual student.

Well I think the future for all students in Beatrice Public Schools should be one where every child is important, regardless of ability, regardless of financial standards in the family, he said. I think we as a Board need to make sure that every child is education, that every child is important I believe in all areas of education because everyone has a special interest.

The 11 candidates will appear on the May 10 ballot, and eight will move on to the November election.

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On April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans took to hundreds of city streets and college campuses to raise environmental awareness and spark change.

Fifty two years later, the theme for April 22, 2022 is to "invest in our planet." And while you may not be ready to make a big, sweeping investment, there are plenty of small, local actions you can take today for a better tomorrow.

While food choices may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about being kind to Mother Earth, they have an undeniable impact. Here are a few things to consider when deciding how your own eating pattern stacks up.

Buy fresh, buy local

Did you know that less than one percent of the U.S. population claims farming as an occupation?

On average, only 10 cents of each dollar spent on food returns to the farmer. The other 90 cents goes to corporations for things like packaging, marketing and transportation (not super Earth friendly). Farmers who sell direct to consumers receive 80 cents of each food dollar and fewer natural resources are used on packaging and transportation.

Not only is buying locally a win for farmers, but you benefit by getting to know your fellow Nebraskans and eating food that is healthier and fresher. Win, win!

Consume and waste less

According to a Rethink Food Waste report, it is estimated that the Earths population will top 9 billion by the year 2050. This growing population will undeniably stress our food systems, natural resources and ecosystems.

Now consider that worldwide we waste 40% of our food supply. To put this into perspective, the numbers equate to each American tossing out roughly 400 pounds of uneaten food every year. Thats a lot of unnecessary waste, especially when you think about the water and other natural resources used to produce and transport the tossed food.

So how can you have a positive influence?

Take stock of what you already have in your kitchen before heading to the grocery store or farmers market, and try including realistic amounts for foods when you make your list. Example: Salad greens, enough for three lunches.

Look up how to properly store different kinds of fresh foods. Hint: Some prefer room temperature environments, some prefer refrigerator crisper bins. And consider buying canned and frozen options if you know you end up tossing the fresh varieties often.

Be curious about your food

If you Google this topic, youll undoubtedly come across articles telling you to eat only organic and avoid all conventionally grown or raised foods.

While its true that some methods of food production put greater stresses on our environment and natural resources than others, its important to remember that organic methods are not inherently more environmentally ethical than conventional.

Our food supply and our environment are complex systems, with pros and cons around every corner. Do your own research on the things that matter to you, and make food choices based on best-known facts, not fear.

Earth, and your local farmers, will thank you.

If you have any further questions, please contact Tara Dunker at 402-223-1384, tara.dunker@unl.edu, or visit the Gage County Extension website at www.gage.unl.edu.

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Billings West High junior Emily Pennington is one step closer to attending her senior year.

The school board passed the first reading of a change to policy that will allow all students up to age 20 to enroll in high school. The change was prompted by Pennington, who has Down syndrome, and her parents' intense efforts to persuade the district to enroll Emily for her senior year, and let her graduate with her class.

The change will affect students whether they are special-needs or are not.

Policy 2050 had barred any student who turned 19 before Sept. 10 from enrolling in school. The new policy changes 19 to 20, and allows for students meeting certain special-needs criteria to enroll, provided they do not turn 21 before the Sept. 10 deadline. Pennington is 18 years old and turns 19 in July.

The policy will be read a second time at the regular board meeting on April 18 and the members will vote on it again.

The controversial policy came to light after Jana Pennington, Emily's mother, posted to social media about her struggle. She had been working for months to have the issue of enrolling her daughter in her senior year added to a board meeting agenda.

Since the public post and subsequent media coverage, the issue was raised with the superintendent and the board of trustees who hastily held a public meeting last week to discuss the policy and its relation to a 2021 law known as House Bill 233, that offered funding for extended education for special-needs students.

The board Tuesday reviewed five possible options ranging from broad enrollment of 19-year-olds across the district to taking no action at all.

Superintendent Greg Upham cautioned that a one-year general addition to the age-out policy would be doable without major additions to staff but that a two-year general change would require more full-time employees and funding. He also cautioned against another "zero-tolerance" policy.

It goes both ways, he said. It makes it simpler for decision makers, but it makes it more difficult to take in any consideration of any extenuating circumstances that would come into play in the opportunity to make the decision.

Trustee Russell Hall also advocated for a policy that allowed for exceptions because the zero-tolerance is why were talking today, he said.

In the end, three trustees voted against the measure and six trustees voted to amend. Every trustee expressed interest in moving forward with changing the policy, but some wanted it implemented immediately while others wanted to wait.

Trustees Janna Hafer and Zack Terakedis opposed an immediate policy change along with Chairperson Greta Besch Moen. The board also acted on a motion to waive the three reading policy for the amendment, but that measure needed to be unanimous and failed with a single no-vote by Trustee Janna Hafer.

Following the vote, Upham apologized to the Pennington family and took responsibility for not bringing the district's policy in line with the changing law when it happened last year.

"I take full responsibility for it, I apologize," he said. "I apologize to you, and we will correct this issue in the future, and Im sorry."

Besch Moen told the members of the board that the deadline to apply a permissive levy for the next school year passed in March meaning the district could not add to their coming funds without passing a levy to supplement. Immediate funding needs were not clear for the policy change at the meeting.

"These comments about the fiscal note and if OPI has budgeted enough for this is immaterial," said trustee Mike Leo. "We can certainly see what the implications are over the next year and take those into account, and revise this if we need to...it's the right thing to do."

House Bill 233 was passed last July to provide funding for special-needs students until they are 21 years old. The law does not mandate that districts take advantage of that funding, which does not cover the total projected expenses.

But Emily Pennington and her family's struggle to enroll her in her senior year has made her the face of this controversy in Montana. The coverage has drawn commentary and support from Montana's superintendent of public instruction, Elsie Arntzen, a large number of state lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and even Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., all of whom urged the school board ahead of last week's meeting to "do the right thing" for Pennington and allow her to continue her education.

Walkout at West high school

In support of Pennington ahead of Tuesday's meeting, hundreds of West High students walked out of class Tuesday morning.

The students rallied outside for about 30 minutes with some chanting let her stay and cheering on Pennington.

Ive always thought that [special-needs students] definitely need more attention because they go unrecognized for the struggles they get put through and how they get made fun of all the time, Cami Goodman, a West High sophomore attending the walk-out said Tuesday.

This controversy brings awareness to those struggles, she added.

Katie Rousch, a junior, has attended school with Pennington since seventh grade describing her as having a positive attitude, working hard in class and deserving of attending her senior year. She frequently helped another special-needs girl in one class, Rousch remembered of Pennington.

Emily faces aging out after she repeated kindergarten because of numerous serious health conditions and medical operations as a child, including open heart surgery, a seizure disorder and leukemia. At one point, she spent six months in a childrens hospital in Salt Lake City.

Rousch also had open-heart surgery, so she knows how hard it can be to recover.

I got it done during the summer because my parents didnt want me to have to try to catch up, but sometimes you dont get to choose, she said.

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After two years of pandemic silence, James Corden revives his Carpool Karaoke franchise with Nicki Minaj in the passenger seat. An inspiring TLC docuseries spotlights a prosthetics pro who helps patients adjust to their artificial yet real-looking replacements. FXs drug drama Snowfall stages a wedding thats bound to cause mayhem. Nature tracks the life story of a battle-scarred hippo bull in Zambia.

12:35am/11:35c

Another welcome sign of a return to normalcy: James Corden is back in the drivers seat for the first new round of his award-winning Carpool Karaoke segment since the pandemic outbreak. Theres no such thing as social distancing when a live wire like rapper Nicki Minaj is reliving her hits from the passengers side as Corden drives and sings along. (Camila Cabello will be the next passenger on April 18.) Cordens other scheduled guests include Mark Wahlberg and Judy Greer. Dont worry if you cant stay up late to watch as it airs. These things go viral instantly.

Series Premiere 10/9c

Alison Vest is a certified anaplastologist (translation: prosthetics expert) with 20-plus years of experience in helping patients recover from the devastating loss of major body parts by creating artificial replacements that look real and guiding them through the transition. An uplifting new series shows her at work, in the opener treating cancer survivor Jay, whose nose was amputated in 2020. Other cases include a woman who lost her hands during an extreme bout of pneumonia and a boy who needs both ears replaced after a savage dog attack.

10/9c

Let the rice fly like a snowdrift of cocaine when kingpin Franklin Saint (Damson Idris) helps celebrate the wedding of his partners in crime, Aunt Louie (Angela Lewis) and Uncle Jerome (Amin Joseph). As the family gathers, dont be surprised if and when mayhem ensues.

8/7c

The long-running natural history series turns its focus to the chronically misunderstood hippopotamus in Hippo King, charting the life story of a 35-year-old battle-scarred hippo. Follow one of the planets largest land mammals as he rises from a vulnerable orphan to a powerful leader in Zambias Luangwa Valley.

Steven learns more about his inner alter ego Marc (both played by the appealing Oscar Isaac) in the exhilarating second episode of the Marvel fantasy adventure. The meek shop clerk soon realizes hes out of his depth, once he encounters Kayla (May Calamawy), who only knows him as the mercenary Marc, telling her, I think Im in real danger and I think maybe that youre the only person that can help me. So why in moments of peril does he keep refusing to let Marc take over his body and become the fearsome Moon Knight?

Inside Wednesday TV:

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SCL Health, the Catholic-based health care company that owns St. Vincent Healthcare, announced Tuesday that the merger with Intermountain Health has been finalized, creating the eleventh largest nonprofit health system in the country.

While there will be few changes to the care patients currently receive at St. Vs, the hope is that the merger will expand telehealth opportunities to help fill the specialist shortage, particularly in rural Montana, said St. Vincents President Jen Alderfer.

Getting to understand the 2022 strategic imperatives and then thinking strategically about how the merger will help us to further that (agenda), thats been an area of focus, Alderfer said.

Patients in rural Montana will have access to over 500 specialists and 35 advanced specialties through the merger, according to Alderfer.

And for those in eastern Montana without telehealth capabilities due to infrastructure or equipment barriers, Alderfer said patients may be able to access specialists by traveling to Holy Rosary in Miles City, the eastern most SCL Health center in the state, where support staff could help patients navigate their appointment.

We need to think about meeting the needs of our patients and providing some resources so that they can leverage the technology platform, said Alderfer.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought to light a workforce shortage that persists despite lower hospitalizations. St. Vs has voiced a commitment to retaining existing staff through an initiative called caring for the caregiver. During COVID surges, the initiative mostly consisted of health-felt notes of encouragement and gift cards, but now Alderfer said the hospital is looking at creative ways to schedule shifts for their current staff.

In the past, nurses would regularly work three 12-hour shifts. St. Vs is considering scheduling nurses for one or two 12-hour shifts or converting shifts to be eight hours to better meet the needs of the workforce."

When asked if the merger will attract more permanent, in-house physicians to Montana, Alderfer pointed to past partnerships with Utah-based Intermountain Health, in particular expansions to pediatrics and maternal-fetal medicine (MFM).

In October 2022, SCL Health announced an MFM expansion that rotates four doctors through outreach clinics in the state. Each doctor spends one week per month in Montana before returning to their practices in Utah.

The merger wont bring immediate changes to existing providers with St. Vs, but she hopes that caregivers will utilize the expanded resources.

I think that this is an exciting opportunity for our team members as this opens up a whole new world of access to colleagues working in other parts of the country. I am very excited about the opportunity that it presents for all of us to learn some leading practices in adjacent states, Alderfer said.

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Costco's meeting with the Billings Board of Adjustment has been pushed back to May 3.

Planners from the Washington-based wholesale company were to meet with city planners Wednesday night to request what's known as a zoning variance for Costco's proposed new location at Shiloh Road and Zoo Drive.

Costco is looking at building a new warehouse store on a 25-acre parcel at 3840 Zoo Drive, pending approval of the city. Costco's preliminary plans for developing the site include a parking lot configuration not allowed by current zoning and as such would need special approval.

The Costco projects senior planner requested a 30-day delay for its meeting with the Board of Adjustment, pushing it back to May 3. Costco planners want more time to refine their proposal, the city said.

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Following a gate failure at Hebgen Dam in December that dewatered the Madison River for 46 hours, NorthWestern Energy is proposing to improve spawning habitat on tributaries and help monitor fish populations and spawning bed locations as part of its mitigation plan.

The details of the companys proposal are outlined in a March 23 letter NorthWestern sent to Federal Energy Regulatory Commissions (FERC) secretary Kimberly Bose. FERC oversees dam operations and licensing. The agency has 60 days to respond to NorthWestern.

The proposals dont seem likely to satisfy conservation groups that have asked FERC to employ an impartial third party to investigate the incident and the effects of the dewatering.

"The long-term impacts of this devastating dewatering event need to be understood, not flushed down the river and ignored, Quincey Johnson, outreach director for Upper Missouri Waterkeeper, wrote in an email. An independent investigation to understand the impacts on this world-class fishery and the downstream communities that rely on a healthy Madison River is the only responsible way to hold NorthWestern Energy accountable and provide additional monitoring and redundancy to ensure it never happens again."

Mike Bias, executive director of the Fishing Outfitters Association of Montana, said he feels the agencies and NorthWestern have done a good job responding to the dam failure and subsequent river dewatering.

Were not out to punish NorthWestern Energy, Bias said. Wed like to keep them as a partner and work through it.

Impacts

According to NorthWesterns letter, company officials met in January with biologists from Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, the Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management to discuss the incident and potential approaches to identify and address impacts.

NorthWestern told FERC the agency biologists agreed the impacts were not catastrophic, such as losing an entire year class of salmonids due to the reduced flows. Salmonidae is the family of fish that includes rainbow and brown trout, the two prized species of gamefish in the river.

The greatest impacts, the company went on to say, were likely on brown trout redds, young salmonids, and sculpins. Redds are where fish lay their eggs when spawning.

With 45% of the upper Madison Rivers rainbow and brown trout spawning in tributaries, the group agreed the fish were resistant to environmental impacts in the Madison River drainage.

Bias questioned how scientists could tease out the effects of the dewatering from the worst drought to hit the region in decades.

Hopefully, it wont happen again, he added.

By region

It was between Hebgen Dam and Quake Lake that the water dropped most precipitously, falling from 648 cubic feet per second to 278 cfs in about 15 minutes. It was in this stretch of river where the largest number of fish were stranded and redds left dewatered. Unfortunately, this is also where the agencies have little fisheries information available to ascertain the impact of the lower flows.

The inability to compare future data collected to pre-incident data limits the ability to make inferences about the impacts of the event to the fishery in this reach, NorthWestern wrote.

In the next 13 miles of river downstream  between Quake Lake and Lyons Bridge  the loss of water was slower, providing time for many fish to move from side channels into the main river. In this stretch it was mostly smaller fish trapped when the water dropped.

From Lyons Bridge to the community of Ennis, no stranded fish or dry redds were seen. So the advisory group agreed no further monitoring or mitigation would be needed there.

Monitoring

To establish a baseline elsewhere on the upper river, the group will rely on annual electrofishing population estimates, gillnetting data on Quake Lake, and an otolith microchemistry study that identifies where fish are born. But the group said even this information has limitations to assess the dewaterings impact.

To more accurately estimate the effects of the incident, NorthWestern Energy said studies requiring significant additions of personnel and about $900,000 in funding would be needed to conduct long-term studies.

However, it was agreed that even if these studies were undertaken there would remain uncertainty and/or lack of confidence that the results would clearly link the flow deviation to potential population level changes given the large amount of variability that drives fish populations, NorthWestern wrote. Furthermore, the length of time for all of the studies to be completed would be upwards of four to six years before results would be fully available.

Given the cost, time and uncertainty of the results, the group agreed that obtaining an estimate of fish population was preferable. NorthWestern also contended that mitigation and enhancement work would most likely have the same focus as those proposed following a more rigorous study.

Actions

Given all of these considerations, the agencies and NorthWestern agreed to:

1. Continue population estimates in the longstanding electrofishing Pine Butte section (near Kirby) to gain information on species ratios and cohort tracking.

2. Backpack electrofishing side channels and margins to look for young-of-the-year, 1- and 2-year-old salmonids. This is primarily a presence/absence exercise and would be focused between the lakes and may include down to Kirby.

3. Electrofishing the section between the lakes to capture catch-per-unit-effort data and population structure information. Safety is a concern in this reach due to swift water currents and large, slippery substrate and will need to be considered before fully committing to this type of sampling.

4. Conduct fall redd counts between the lakes to identify those key areas of fish use.

The work will begin this year, with some of it continuing until 2025. The information from the analyses would be published yearly through 2025 as a supplement to the companys annual project monitoring report.

Enhancement

At the same time, NorthWestern is proposing projects to improve embryo or young-of-the-year survival, developing or enhancing spawning habitat, and/or protection of key habitats from Lyons Bridge upstream to Hebgen.

In addition, FWP recommended the following projects to improve instream conditions for fish embryos and fry, estimated to cost from $195,000 to $260,000.

1. Install 2,500 feet of jackleg fence to exclude cattle from a tributary stream to reduce sedimentation and bank trampling.

2. Install two to four miles of cattle exclusion fencing on a tributary, install three water gaps to allow controlled cattle access, and plant willow stakes to improve shoreline stability and minimize erosion.

3. Conduct an alternative analysis and preliminary engineering report to evaluate alternatives to improve spawning habitat, gravel recruitment and embryo survival within the affected reach of the mainstem Madison River.

These latest proposals are in addition to FERCs December request for NorthWestern to install alarms to alert the company when the flows downstream of Hebgen Dam drop dangerously low and to consider installing a camera at the dam toe to monitor flows.

Whats ahead

NorthWestern Energy filed its Root Cause Analysis for the dam failure on March 23. FERC will review the document to determine if the incident violates the companys license.

As a public utility, NorthWestern Energy must be held accountable for mismanagement of Montanas natural resources, especially our water, said Derf Johnson, staff attorney and Clean Water Director at the Montana Environmental Information Center (MEIC), in a January news release. NorthWestern needs to fully cooperate with a comprehensive and transparent investigation, mitigate the impacts to the environment, community, and economy, take measures to ensure that this never happens again, and pay to fix the problem out of its shareholders' pockets.

MEIC, Upper Missouri Waterkeeper, and the Madison River Foundation have filed a citizens complaint with FERC regarding the Hebgen Dam gate failure and subsequent dewatering of the Madison River.

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By Azernews

By Sabina Mammadli

Director-General of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) Kathryne Bomberger has expressed her appreciation for the work done in forensic medical examination of Azerbaijani citizens' remains discovered in liberated territories.

She made the remarks during a visit to the Azerbaijani Health Ministry's Forensic Medical Examination and Pathological Anatomy Association along with ICMP Director of Policy and Cooperation Andreas Kleiser.

During the visit, the association's director, Adalat Hasanov, briefed the guests on the tasks that the association's employees face. He emphasized the tasks involved in conducting forensic medical examinations and identifying the remains of thousands of Azerbaijani military personnel and civilians who went missing during the first Karabakh war.

Hasanov stated that the acceptance of the remains discovered in mass graves in Azerbaijani territories liberated from Armenian occupation in the 2020 second Karabakh war was organized in the association's relevant departments.

At the same time, on the basis of the decisions of the prosecutor's office, a forensic medical examination of the remains is being carried out, he noted.

Furthermore, he emphasized that, under the president's order, the association's workers jointly with law enforcement officers, are exhuming the remains of unknown martyrs who died during the first Karabakh war in various cities and regions of Azerbaijan for forensic medical examination.

Further, the ICMP officials inspected the forensic medical examination conditions and storage of the discovered remains in the association's relevant departments.

A wide exchange of views on these topics also took place.

It should be noted that on April 6, Azerbaijan's State Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing Persons and the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) signed a document on the search for Azerbaijanis missing since the early 1990s and 2020.

Under the document, the International Commission will assist the State Commission in the search for missing persons.
The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces, advised wildlife biologist Aldo Leopold.

In ecology that means saving diverse niches, all the habitat types necessary for native species to thrive. That is appropriate for our public lands.

But some public land users are taking the best, the highest-grade resources for private uses. When the best is gone, they go after the next-best, and then the next-best. This is the high grading downward spiral.

Grazing, for example, had so damaged public lands in the West, and each cow required so much arid land, that neither private landowners nor the states would accept ownership of those lands, so the lands were formally placed under federal protection. That was the origin of what is today the Bureau of Land Management.

Yet, by permit, commercial livestock grazing continues to degrade public lands by extracting grasses, forage, and water; by displacing native wildlife, introducing invasive plants, and disturbing the soil biome. This damage covers about half of the public lands in grazing allotments.

The proposed Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Act is based on a collaboration seeking what works only for people rather than building a scientific foundation of what works for healthy forests and wildlife. This act provides for roads, trails, and logging in sections with the best resources available, despite the sections being critical habitat for the grizzly bear and other wildlife and fragmenting the remaining habitat.

The new Custer Gallatin National Forest plan similarly gives recreationists high-grade habitat. It also reduces the acreage under protection for wilderness qualities and wildlife. Given the thousands of miles of bike trails, off-road vehicle paths, etc., available on public lands in Montana, why expand such recreation into roadless wildlands at the expense of the land and wildlife?

High-grading disrupts wildlife, reduces biodiversity, introduces invasive species, and contributes to erosion, sediment runoff into streams, and the land drying out. Furthermore, wildlife in proximity with people is an invitation for zoonotic diseases, such as Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and severe acute respiratory syndromes like COVID.

Pieces are lost when high-graders rule the day.

The Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act represents a better approach. This bill is a product of collaboration that uses science as the guiding principle to determine what is best for the land and wildlife. What's good for the forests, meadows, and grasslands, for the riparian areas and wetlands, creeks and rivers, is good for wildlife and for people!

Climate change will affect species in different yet linked ways. Climate change is already shifting seasons, shifting stressors, shifting species, and presenting more extreme and variable weather. Conservation of native vegetation and healthy soils is cheaper than artificial methods of capturing carbon. Thats the premise of 30x30, protecting 30% of the land by 2030.

Wildlife need diverse niches to survive in a changing world, as well as to survive through their annual cycles and their life cycles.

Birds are an excellent indicator of the health of the environment, and bird populations are plummeting  down three billion birds, nearly 30%, in the past 50 years, according to a study published in the journal Science in 2019. Western forest birds are down about 50%.

Ecological forestry is bird friendly forestry. Different species of birds need different habitat and different habitat at different stages of any birds life. As an agency, the U.S. Forest Service has adopted ecological forestry in principle because each type of habitat is important healthy forests. Each niche is a piece of our natural heritage.

Lets not give away pieces of Montana.

Lets save all the pieces.

Anne Millbrooke is a writer living in Bozeman.

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Something doesnt sit right with an Australian CEO living in Canada telling Montanans how to best use our land and manage our resources. Yet, thats just what Rob Scargill, CEO of Australian company Sandfire Resources, did in a recent op-ed in the Great Falls Tribune. He doesnt know Montanas history of failing to protect water from mining activity, so were hoping he listens to us now.

Mr. Scargill, you dont have to travel far from White Sulphur Springs to see how the legacy of over-promising mining companies have saddled the state and taxpayers with contaminated water and perpetual remediation costs.

First, travel west. The legacy of gold mining in Montanas capital, Helena, continues to haunt the community with recurring heavy metal and arsenic contamination, years after operations ceased. The community still needs to import water from different reservoirs.

From there, travel south to the Montana Tunnels mine near Jefferson City. This recently defunct operation was permitted utilizing modern bonding regulations and requirements, but is now underbonded by approximately $16.5 million and counting. The highwall for the mine is in serious danger of catastrophic collapse, and Clancy Creek has been turned into a small diameter pipe, which has entirely choked off fish passage.

From there, head southwest to Anaconda. The nearby Beal Mountain Mine was an open-pit cyanide heap leach mine that operated through the '80s and '90s, promising jobs, full remediation, and few environmental impacts. When the company declared bankruptcy in 1997, taxpayers were saddled with costs of cleanup and perpetual water treatment for this (and other) mines. Beal tailings also pose a threat to ongoing cleanup efforts downstream in the Clark Fork River, which are focused on removing tailings contamination from a different mining operation.

Finally, head toward north central Montana until you reach the Fort Belknap Reservation. The residents there can tell you about the gold mines that have caused perpetual acid mine drainage, which contaminates their water, desecrates their land, and costs taxpayers millions of dollars. This water will be contaminated forever, because a mining company made promises they didnt keep.

We arent saying that youll do this, Mr. Scargill, but the old adage is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Your company, Sandfire Resources, owns the Black Butte Copper Mine, which has had its sights on mining the most important tributary of the Smith River for years. Sandfire has partnered with a Canadian startup called Tintina Resources to submit an application for a massive copper mine on Sheep Creek, a headwater tributary of the Smith River.

For Montanans, the Smith is a treasure worth more than profits going to corporate mine investors overseas, Mr. Scargill. The Smith is world-renowned for its solitude, rugged canyon scenery, and blue ribbon trout fishery. People travel from around the world to float its waters. Thousands of people apply for permits to float the Smith each year, with only a lucky few scoring a permit. For millennia, Native Americans called the Smith watershed their home and adorned the high canyon walls with some of the best and most prolific examples of pictographs in Montana, which visitors cherish seeing today.

And the fish! Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks classifies the Smith Rivers fishery as high-value, owing to its bountiful population of rainbow, brown, westslope cutthroat, and brook trout. Actor Henry Winkler said fly-fishing the Smith is the closest hes come to the divine.

Dozens of businesses rely on the Smith being a healthy fishery and floating destination. It is estimated that fishing alone on the Smith River provides a $10 million annual impact to outfitters and surrounding communities. Over the years, this impact only grows as more of the public gets to experience and revisit this special river. The Smith is at the heart of the state's $7.1 billion outdoor recreation economy. If we can't protect this place from the risks of industrial mining, it's a spike in the heart of Montana's outdoor economy and heritage.

Mr. Scargills promises are not new. They are part of the same old story Montanans have heard from mining companies before. Well be careful. We have the best technology. Well clean up after ourselves. Time and time again, Montana has trusted these companies, only to be burned and left with contaminated water and exorbitant cleanup costs.

The Smith River is not something were willing to gamble with.

Derf Johnson, MEIC Clean Water Director and staff attorney; Scott Bosse, Northern Rockies Director, American Rivers; David Brooks, Executive Director, Montana Trout Unlimited

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BILLINGS, Mont.  A subsidiary of one of the largest U.S. providers of renewable energy pleaded guilty to criminal charges and was ordered to pay over $8 million in fines and restitution after at least 150 eagles were killed at its wind farms in eight states, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

NextEra Energy subsidiary ESI Energy was also sentenced to five years probation after being charged with three counts of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act during a court appearance in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The charges arose from the deaths of nine eagles at three wind farms in Wyoming and New Mexico.

In addition to those deaths, the company acknowledged the deaths of golden and bald eagles at 50 wind farms affiliated with ESI and NextEra since 2012, prosecutors said. Birds were killed in eight states: Wyoming, California, New Mexico, North Dakota, Colorado, Michigan, Arizona and Illinois.

NextEra, based in Juno Beach, Florida, bills itself as the worlds largest utility company by market value. It has more than 100 wind farms in the U.S. and Canada and also generates natural gas, nuclear and solar power.

Almost all of the eagles killed at the NextEra subsidiary's facilities were struck by the blades of wind turbines, prosecutors said. Some turbines killed multiple eagles and because the carcasses are not always found, officials said the number killed was likely higher than the 150 birds cited in court documents.

Prosecutors said the company's failure to take steps to protect eagles or to obtain permits to kill the birds gave it an advantage over competitors that did take such steps  even as ESI and other NextEra affiliates received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal tax credits from the wind power they produced.

NextEra spokesperson Steven Stengel said the company didn't seek permits because it believes the law didn't require them for unintentional bird deaths. The company said its guilty plea will resolve all allegations over past fatalities and allow it to move forward without a continued threat of prosecution.

The criminal case comes amid a push by President Joe Biden for more renewable energy from wind, solar and other sources to help reduce climate changing emissions. It also follows a renewed commitment by federal wildlife officials under Biden to enforce protections for eagles and other birds under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Criminal prosecutions had been halted under former President Donald Trump for birds killed inadvertently by industry.

Its illegal to kill or harm eagles under the migratory bird act. However, a wide range of industries  from energy firms to manufacturing companies  have lobbied for years against enforcing the law for accidental bird deaths.

The bald eagle  the U.S. national symbol since the 1700s  saw its populations widely decimated last century due to harmful pesticides such as DDT and other problems. Following a dramatic recovery, it was removed from protection under the Endangered Species Act in 2007. Biologists say more than 300,000 bald eagles now occupy the U.S., not including Alaska.

Golden eagles have not fared as well, with populations considered stable but under pressure from wind farms, collisions with vehicles, illegal shootings and poisoning from lead ammunition.

Most of the eagles killed at the ESI and NextEra wind farms were golden eagles, according to court documents.

There are an estimated 31,800 golden eagles in the Western U.S. with an estimated 2,200 killed annually due to human causes, or about 60% of all deaths, according to a study released last week by leading eagle researchers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other entities.

The study concluded that golden eagle deaths will likely increase in the future because of wind energy development and other human activities.

Companies historically have been able to avoid prosecution under the century-old Migratory Bird Treaty law if they take steps to avoid deaths and seek permits for those that occur.

Charging documents said company representatives, including ESI's president, were warned that eagles would be killed if the company built two wind farms in central and southeastern Wyoming, and also knew about a risk to eagles when they authorized the repowering of a New Mexico wind farm, about 170 miles from Albuquerque.

The company proceeded anyway and at times ignored further advice from federal wildlife officials about how to minimize the deaths, according to court documents.

For more than a decade, ESI has violated (wildlife) laws, taking eagles without obtaining or even seeking the necessary permit, said Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Departments Environment and Natural Resources Division in a statement.

ESI agreed under a plea deal to spend up to $27 million during its five-year probationary period on measures to prevent future eagle deaths. That includes shutting down turbines at times when eagles are more likely to be present.

Despite those measures, wildlife officials anticipate that some eagles still could die. When that happens, the company will pay $29,623 per dead eagle under the plea deal.

NextEra President Rebecca Kujawa said collisions of birds with wind turbines are unavoidable accidents that should not be criminalized. She said the company is committed to reducing damage to wildlife from its projects.

We disagree with the government's underlying enforcement activity, Kujawa said in a statement. Building any structure, driving any vehicle, or flying any airplane carries with it a possibility that accidental eagle and other bird collisions may occur.

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North Dakota Speaker of the House Kim Koppelman will not seek reelection and will retire after his current term expires late this year.

His announcement is the latest in a series of high-profile retirements at the Legislature.

Koppelman, R-West Fargo, announced his decision Wednesday, following the District 13 Republican endorsing convention Tuesday night during which he did not receive an endorsement.

I announced last evening, before the vote, that I would not run for the Republican nomination in the June primary election, although I believe I could win such a race," he said in a statement. "This is not about me. I have always believed that one should run for office in order to do something, not in order to be something.

Party endorsement is not required to run in the primary, during which voters select nominees for state offices in the November general election.

Having served for many years and accomplished much, I had seriously considered retiring from the Legislature this year and it was only the strong encouragement from constituents and legislative colleagues which prompted me to throw my hat in the ring, once more," Koppelman said. "I even considered withdrawing as a candidate before last nights meeting, but did not feel that would have been fair to the many who gave of their time and money to attend and support me.

Koppelman has served in the House since 1994. House members elected him speaker in 2020. As such, he presided over the chamber.

Koppelman told the Tribune late last year that like some other lawmakers he was "seeing some of the lack of respect and lack of civility creeping into the North Dakota Legislature just like it is in our culture nationwide."

The Legislature is seeing a departure of longtime leaders including Senate Majority Leader Rich Wardner, R-Dickinson; House Majority Leader Chet Pollert, R-Carrington; and Sen. Ray Holmberg, R-Grand Forks, who was first elected in 1976 and is North Dakota's current longest continuously serving state lawmaker.

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I want to go to America where its safe. The speaker, a little boy, is one of 4.2 million Ukrainian refugees. Of the 100,000 of them promised admittance to the U.S., how many will come to North Dakota? Could they be the answer to our labor shortage as some state officials suggest? What do we need to do to make that happen?

After all, many of them are highly skilled professionals  doctors, nurses, agricultural experts, teachers. They can do far more than work at Walmart or dead-end factory jobs as other New Americans are doing.

To use their skills in North Dakota what they will require is fluency in English. Many of them already know English but they may need to be brought up to speed in the English used in their field. Those who are in their late teens -- soon to join the labor force or enter college may need intensive classroom training to learn the English necessary for future success in this country. Furthermore, where American licensure is required in fields like medicine, teaching and the like, organizations like Sanford might do well to develop programs that expedite obtaining American credentials.

With a little effort we can provide the safety the little boy begged for while we fill gaps in our own labor force. All that just for being the kind & generous people that we are!

Merne Manor, Fargo

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Many organizations suffer from siloed operating models when it comes to monitoring. Asian Development Bank (ADB) had a different monitoring tool for each team, resulting in data and remediation being disconnected.

This white paper explains how they broke down these silos and adopted a single observability platform, enabling them to foster a culture of collaboration with increased efficiency.

Access it here to learn how your organization can put these practices in place without having to repeat the same errors they did.
The build-up to the attack on Ukraine by Russia saw widespread warnings from cyber security pros that the world was on the verge of a cyber war. So far, such cyber attacks have been confined to the theatre of conflict, but this doesn't mean things won't change. In this e-guide, we will explore some of the more impactful cybersecurity stories that have unfolded around the war.

In this e-guide:

Prepare, but dont panic, over supposed Russian cyber threat

Why security professionals should pay attention to what Russia is doing

Use of encrypted Telegram platform soars in Ukraine, Russia

Direct action is a risky business for Ukraine's volunteer hackers

Dark web littered with Ukraine crypto scammers

Ukrainian cyber defences prove resilient
By Azernews

By Orkhan Amashov

The protest that took place in central Yerevan on 5 April, the day prior to the Brussels meeting of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, has received substantial coverage in both countries and beyond, and happens to be of some significance when one thinks of the soul-searching within Armenian nationalism, which has been going through its most lugubrious phase.

The self-declared organisers of the rally are known - they are the forces loyal to the former leaders, Serzh Sargsyan and Robert Kocharyan - who oppose the incumbent government, as they consider it to have adopted a defeatist and surrender policy over Karabakh, and believe any peace deal will be fatal. No surprise here.

What they do not concur with, in precise terms, is also far from being a secret. The revenge-induced dogmatism encapsulating their worldview demands that any step that may lead to a comprehensive and sustainable agreement, dictated by the results of the Second Karabakh War, with the former foe, must be blocked.

The steps that they find inadmissible correspond to the range of issues that fall within the preview of todays meeting; they include the demarcation and delimitation of the Azerbaijani-Armenian state border; the opening of communication routes, including the Zangazur corridor; and the removal of the remaining separatist forces from Karabakh, the last item being particularly petrifying for those who have yet to come to terms with what the recent campaign has engendered.

However, the most important aspect of the whole story is not what the opposition wants, but to what extent Pashinyan himself may be interested in such a highly-publicised rally prior to facing President Aliyev in Brussels, where his hands will be forced. Many in Azerbaijan believe the protest was a theatrical performance of the disaffected, which was clandestinely encouraged by the incumbent prime minister himself.

One of the arguments put forward is that, despite its superficially anti-government tenets, the demonstration received favourable coverage by the media outlets supportive of Pashinyan, who will be able to use the fact of the discontent as evidence of the difficulties that any of the anticipated compromises could cause.

There is some logic to this assumption. It is a known method, put into practice by many leaders, to resort to an unfavourable internal political situation as an excuse to obviate the necessity of an unavoidably impending concession. The question is whether such a measure is being undertaken for tactical or strategic reasons.

If Pashinyan, whether or not he played any significant role in staging the April 5 demonstration, is contemplating using this in the light of tactical considerations with the purpose of achieving greater rights for the Armenian population in Karabakh, then such an outlook could be deemed understandable and even sensible, if one, for a moment, puts oneself in the Armenian leaders ill-fitting shoes. After all, any negotiation is about bargaining chips and their effective use for advancing ones aims and objectives.

However, if Pashinyan himself is involved in a certain larger regressive plot, aimed at reversing the consequences of the recent war, then the cause for concern should naturally be far greater.

Armenia is painstakingly striving to find an answer as to what it got wrong and what must be done to fix the issue. The completion of this existential task requires realism and courage to face the essence of the delusions of grandeur that have entrapped the country.

Armenia is a recovering patient with toxic habits which refuse to fade away. Full resuscitation is not in sight, as yet. So much poppycock and wishful thinking have been infested into the psyche of the nation that it will take some time before a sufficient degree of sobriety is achieved.

Pashinyan has occasionally shown discernible signs of half-hearted maturity and semi-resolve to address this malaise. The one possibility is that he has made a half-authentic diagnosis as to what went wrong, and has already taken a course, which amid its shortcomings and inconsistencies, is fundamentally correct, despite the full extent of its righteousness being questionable.

Back to the question concerning the place of the demonstration in Pashinyans thinking, the crucial point is as how it should be viewed in the context of the aforementioned soul-searching process, which is bound to manifest itself in some form of detoxification, as Armenia is a sick patient, addicted to myths, legends and unrealistic futurism.

And we know that soul purification of any variety is not a straight process of withdrawal and extinction. There are times a patient needs occasional injections of that very toxic substance, albeit in lower doses, that has caused the illness in the first place. What matters is whether the rally was an episode engineered with the purpose of easing the pain for tactical reasons, or indicative of avoidance of a full recovery.
Students at a school board meeting said De Morrow-Perry, the principal of Huntington East Middle School in West Virginia, held an assembly for the girls and told them the school would "do nothing" if a student was sexually assaulted while wearing certain clothing items or for showing a shoulder.

From The Herald-Dispatch:

"They called us to the cafeteria to talk about the dress code, and once we got in there, they told us not to wear pajamas, crop tops, or ripped jeans or show our shoulders," Hughes said, later referring to Perry as "they." "After that, they told us that they do not want boys to be distracted by our clothes, and they said that if we get touched inappropriately while we are wearing these clothes to not tell the school because they won't do anything."

Following an executive session, the board approved a motion to suspend Perry for three days without pay, but Superintendent Ryan Saxe said the suspension was unrelated to the allegations made during the meeting. Saxe said there will be an investigation into the allegations made Tuesday, but he would not comment on the cause of the suspension.
Buffalo Public Schools will pay more than $1 million to clean up the McKinley High School mess that started nearly five years ago, when principal Crystal Barton was put on paid leave.

Barton will receive $200,000 from the school district as part of a settlement approved Monday, and lawyers who represented her will receive another $75,000 from the district.

That is in addition to $644,877 in salary that the district paid Barton to not work during her nearly five years on leave.

The School Board voted unanimously on Monday to approve the settlement, which indicates that the $200,000 is for overtime and/or extra-activity payments that she would have earned since May 2017.

The district has made her whole, said Robert Boreanaz, the attorney for her union, the Buffalo Council of Supervisors and Administrators. She was paid for her lost wages while she was out.

Barton can return as principal of McKinley High School, School Board decides Crystal Barton has been principal of McKinley for 35 years. For the last five of those, she has been on paid administrative leave, receiving more than $600,000, while the Buffalo Public Schools sought to fire her.

In addition to the payments to Barton and her lawyers, the district has paid an $89,316 arbitration award to former McKinley assistant principal Naomi Cerre, who was passed over when former Superintendent Kriner Cash named Bartons successor as principal. Cerre was eventually named principal of the school.

That pushes the total cost of the McKinley High School principal controversy to more than $1 million.

Other than providing a prepared statement praising Barton, district officials had no comment Tuesday about the settlement.

Boreanaz, the union attorney, lauded Interim Superintendent Tonja Williams for correcting, through the settlement, mistakes that had been made under her predecessor.

In a series of grievances and legal filings over the past five years, Barton and her union have argued that the school district, under Cash, has improperly placed her on paid leave twice  once in May 2017, and again a few months later.

Suspended McKinley principal paid $606,000 as effort to fire her drags on The Boling-Barton 3020-a proceedings, referring to the state law granting due process protections to tenured educators before they can be disciplined or terminated, date back to 2017.

Barton asked a number of times in the past five years to be reinstated as principal of McKinley, according to her unions attorney. Each time, he said, Cash denied her request.

She wasnt out on leave getting paid to do nothing because of some contractual requirement, because of some contractual obligation, Boreanaz said. She was placed on leave and remained on leave solely and exclusively at the direction of Superintendent Cash.

Barton, who has been the principal at McKinley for 35 years, has been president of the administrators union for more than a decade. In that position, she was a fierce advocate for her members, Boreanaz said, and butted heads with Cash numerous times, in contract negotiations and other matters.

In a complaint she filed in 2019 with the New York State Division of Human Rights, Barton, who is now 70, accused Cash of sexually harassing her and discriminating against her on the basis of age and race.

She alleged in her Division of Human Rights complaint that Superintendent Cash had an animus toward her because of being a strong African American female, Boreanaz said, and the superintendent likely had an animus against her because of her union activity.

Buffalo School Board seeks to fire longtime McKinley principal The Buffalo Board of Education is trying to fire Crystal Boling-Barton, the longtime, polarizing principal and union leader, after more than 2 1/2 years of keeping her on paid administrative

In addition to the money the district agreed to pay Barton in the settlement, the district also agreed this week to pay $60,000 to Lindy Korn, Bartons personal attorney, to cover the legal fees related to her complaint with the Division of Human Rights, according to the settlement, which The Buffalo News obtained under the Freedom of Information Law.

The district also agreed to pay $15,000 to the administrators union to cover legal costs for representing Barton.

As part of the settlement reached this week, she and the district each agreed to drop all complaints, grievances and legal actions against one another.

Both sides also stipulated in the settlement that neither of them admitted any wrongdoing and agreed not to disparage each other.

And the school district agreed to issue this public statement about the settlement:

The District and Mrs. Barton have amicably resolved and settled various forms of litigation amongst them.

As part of the settlement, Mrs. Barton, who is one of the longest tenured and highly regarded principals in the District, is eligible to immediately return to service at McKinley High School. Mrs. Barton is currently considering her options at this time.

We are all very pleased to have finally put all these matters behind us and the District is appreciative and thankful to Principal Barton for all of her years of service.

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When residents at one stop on Interim Buffalo School Superintendent Tonja Williams listening tour called for more teachers of color, it may have sounded like an echo chamber.

The fact that this demand has reverberated for years only adds to the frustration of parents and other advocates who recognize the importance of having more teachers who share the backgrounds of the students of color who make up more than three-quarters of the districts enrollment.

But its not just the city of Buffalo that falls short. A new analysis by the consumer research site Smartest Dollar found that the Buffalo Niagara region as a whole has the 12th fewest minority teachers of the nations top 100 metropolitan areas.

Using U.S. Census Bureau data, the study found that while 34% of the regions students are nonwhite, only 12.3% of the instructors are teachers of color. But while Buffalo Niagara may be near the bottom in terms of raw numbers, its 21.7 percentage point teacher diversity gap is identical to the gap facing the nation as a whole, according to this analysis.

Why does this gap matter?

Because research has long shown that having more teachers of color  especially in heavily Black and Hispanic districts like Buffalo  can improve everything from achievement levels to special education placements to suspension rates.

For instance, a 2017 American Educational Research Association study found consistent evidence that having more teachers of the same race as students results in reduced rates of exclusionary discipline for Black students.

Similarly, a 2012 analysis in Research & Reviews cited the cultural mismatch that hinders the effectiveness of teachers as a key factor contributing to disparities in educational outcomes.

Buffalo school officials  pressed by parent advocates  have long been mindful of the impact of such gaps, but can cite little actual improvement. Asked on the We The Parents of WNY radio show recently, Williams said the district has tried recruiting at conferences and Black colleges and universities, but that she has come to believe in growing our own by creating a pipeline that channels current Buffalo students into teaching.

However, a 2017 analysis cited in the new study indicates it may not be that easy.

The Urban Institute found that the problem is not as simple as people of color choosing not to become teachers. In fact, Black and Hispanic college graduates become teachers at almost the same rates as their white peers. According to the institute, 10.8% of white college graduates were teachers in 2015, compared to 9.4% of Hispanic and 8.6% of Black graduates.

Rather, the problem starts much sooner. Proportionately fewer Blacks and Hispanics earn high school diplomas than whites, and that gap becomes a chasm by the time college degrees are handed out. The Urban Institute study found, for instance, that while 40% of white adults and 65% of Asian adults had college degrees in 2015, only 21% of Black adults and 16% of Hispanic adults had earned such a credential. That college graduation disparity creates a much smaller pool of potential Black and Hispanic teachers.

Paired with the research showing the impact teachers of color can have on minority students, those numbers mean society is creating a self-perpetuating cycle of educational inequality: Fewer teachers of color contributes to disparities in achievement that result in fewer Black and Hispanic students qualifying for college, which then results in fewer minority graduates who can become teachers to help the next cohort of students.

Despite the recent emphasis on alternative credentialing programs to increase the number of minority teachers, the Urban Institute concludes that the most important first step is getting people of color through college.

Efforts like those of Say Yes Buffalo definitely will help. But it still wont be easy in the face of conservatives lawsuits and U.S. Supreme Court hostility to college affirmative action programs. Yet its essential  and not just for minority students. White kids, too, benefit from seeing people of color in positions of authority at the head of a classroom as well as from the perspectives they bring in preparing students for a diverse work world.

Teachers of color who share the backgrounds of many of their students may also have new approaches for getting buy-in from parents who  whether they or teachers like it or not  are essential educational partners. Yet despite their critical role in signaling to kids the importance of education, many either dont get involved or take the wrong tack in responding to issues their children face.

However, its one thing for schools to complain about parents who are AWOL or who make things worse by creating problems themselves. Its another for school staffs to know how to cultivate a more welcoming environment to make parents feel like actual partners rather than adversaries. Having more diverse staffs can help create that environment.

But as the combination of studies makes clear, Williams  or whoever the next permanent superintendent is  cant close that teacher diversity gap without also closing the educational achievement gap.

Bottom line: If Buffalo wants more teachers of color, its not enough just to encourage more minority students to think about teaching as a career. The district also has to do a better job of preparing them for that career, because the two problems go hand in hand.

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If you've been hanging onto a years-old library book because you're too broke or embarrassed to return it, here's some good news.

Starting May 1, the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library system will be doing away with fines for overdue materials. The traditional practice of issuing a cumulative fine for each day your library materials are overdue will soon be a thing of the past.

The library system has already cleared all outstanding overdue daily fines in library card user accounts, as well as hold and unclaimed pick-up fees, according to Interim Director Jeannine Doyle.

Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz is expected to announce the dropping of library fines Thursday as one element of his State of the County address. The address, to be held in the Buffalo Bills Fieldhouse, will be the first in-person State of the County that Poloncarz has given in three years, due to the Covid-19 health crisis.

"There's anecdotal evidence, as well as some scientific evidence that the fines don't really do a good job of getting people to bring books back on time," Poloncarz told The News. "But they do keep people from patronizing the libraries. So, working with the library system, we're announcing we're getting rid of the fine system for everyone."

There are some caveats. Library users won't be off the hook for charges associated with the loss or damage of library materials. And an official policy regarding fines still must be approved by the library board.

But the trend of eliminating most library fines is growing across the country. The American Library Association in 2019 approved a resolution urging libraries to eventually end the collection of fines and the reliance on fines as a source of revenue. The association said the collection of fines is an unnecessary barrier to library access.

Poloncarz said the policy change in other library systems has shown that more people will actually use their local libraries "if people aren't worried that they're going to get fined and have to pay for being late to return a book by a week."

That's proven to be the case in the New York City library system, which just eliminated overdue fines in October. The policy change resulted in a wave of returned items and a bump up in library usage from patrons, according to the New York Times.

"While the rate of overdue materials has been found to be equal for library cardholders regardless of income, those in low-income households are more likely to have their accounts blocked due to inability to pay overdue fines," Doyle, the Erie County library system's interim director, said in a statement. "The value of increased access to library resources for the residents of Erie County outweighs the loss of revenue."

Historically, fines have represented a small amount of the Erie County library system's overall budget, she said. Moreover, with more library patrons borrowing digital content instead of physical library materials, fines are becoming a dwindling source of library revenue.

Fines on borrowed digital library materials aren't an issue because once digital materials like e-books are due, they are automatically removed from the library card holder's account, unless the materials are renewed.

The library system will use savings from last year's budget to offset the loss in fine revenue this year, Doyle said.

The new policy will mark the first major library system change under new Buffalo & Erie County Library Director John Spears, who officially begins work on Monday. Spears, who comes from Colorado Springs, Colo., is a Chicago native who has served as the chief librarian and chief executive officer of the Pikes Peak Library District since 2016.

Poloncarz's announcement about the elimination of library fines is part of his four-part "Back on Track Agenda," being formally announced on Thursday, to help children recover from the pandemic.

The library board is set to vote on two resolutions regarding the fine elimination plan on April 21. The library system plans to offer more details about the change in the fine system at a news conference immediately after the board meeting.

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A couple of weeks ago, the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) released the Hunting Accident Report for the state for 2021. The facts: Hunting accidents hit record lows in 2021. Further, no incidents resulted from the new law allowing 12- and 13-year-old licensed hunters to hunt deer with a rifle, shotgun, muzzleloader or crossbow under adult supervision.

Herein lies my dilemma: Our Erie County executive was the only county in upstate New York to veto passage of this law for 12- and 13-year-olds to hunt with adult supervision. Last October, Mark Poloncarz stated his reasoning at a press conference was for the inherent danger it possesses as he stated for children involved with adult supervised hunting.

Statistically with zero incidents as factually shown throughout the entire state, how can the argument of the inherent danger apply when nothing happened? Perhaps our county executive should refocus his inherent danger for our children concerns to area schools in the county. Every couple of days another student seems to be taken to an area hospital after some sort of skirmish on school grounds. Just recently (March 22) on local news a mother pleaded after her 12-year-old was beaten at school to what end will our children be safe at schools?

I have been a member of our local sportsmens club for more than 20 years. I would like to invite Poloncarz to come and experience our facility. Im sure I can get some of my friends, members with over 40 years of certified safe firearm training, to show our county executive what is involved with hunter safety. Im sure he will have a greater understanding of proper and safe hunting especially for the 12- and 13-year-olds who proved this past season that they were 100% safe as the hunting incident reports concluded.

In the meantime, as the saying goes, its time for our county executive to bite the bullet and rescind his veto on 12- and 13-year-old hunters for the next deer season in Erie County. For Erie County, simply, do your job properly.

Dennis Kujawa

East Aurora
CHATHAM  Having just returned from a volunteer trip to Poland to help Ukrainian refugees, Stacey Henderson and Laura Gill hope theyve changed some lives. Given the things theyve seen and the people theyve met, theyve certainly changed their own.

Not to sound hyperbolic, [but] Stacey and I are changed forever and are so grateful we could make this trip, Gill wrote in a Facebook post to supporters of the week-long expedition. We could not have done it without your support.

Gill, a nurse and Brewster resident whos made humanitarian relief trips around the world, and Henderson, a Chatham firefighter-paramedic with her own track record of relief trips, returned to the Cape Monday.

In posts chronicling their trip, Gill described how she and Henderson were part of a truly international community of relief workers who put their own lives on hold to help Ukrainians fleeing leveled cities, broken families and alleged genocide at the hands of Russian and separatist forces. There was Gert from the Netherlands who helped them get oriented in Poland, Steve from China who assisted in getting supplies to the Ukrainian border, and others from Poland, Germany, Ireland, England and other nations. A symbol of the effort was Davide Martello, who drove all the way from his home in Germany with a baby grand piano in tow, and played soothing music for arriving refugees and overwhelmed volunteers.

Very moving, like so much else here, Gill wrote.

At the massive welcome center in Przemsyl, Poland, close to a key border crossing with Ukraine, volunteers and Polish officials found creative ways to help the tide of humanity flowing through the city.

The train station was filled with weary Ukrainian families, mostly figuring out how to get transported to points all over Europe. There are volunteers who take whole families to Hungary, Slovakia, Austria and Germany in their cars and then return to bring more families where they need to go, Gill wrote. I have been fortunate enough to volunteer in several refugee situations; I have never witnessed this level of selflessness of volunteer drivers answering the call to help.

In another key welcome center in the town of Medyka, donations from around the world were being prepared for shipment into Ukraine. The crossing is a pop-up city of every kind of aid you can fathom: SIM cards, first aid, clothing, food, all in huge quantities. The ongoing irony is that on the Polish side, its rainbows and unicorns, while just a few hundred meters away, there is no food, no medical, long lines of people waiting for up to 15 hours in subzero temperatures to gain access to Poland. Seeing this, Gill and Henderson knew that they needed to cross the Ukrainian border to deliver the medical supplies and funds to refugees who needed them. It was a departure from their original plan to work entirely from bases in Poland.

On Tuesday, March 29, using funds donated by Lower Cape friends, Henderson and Gill went grocery shopping, buying three shopping carts worth of canned tuna, bread, milk, pasta, sauce, jam, cereal, cookies, orange juice and more, delivering it to the Medyka border. They then made the crossing into Ukraine, delivering suitcases filled with over-the-counter medicines and medical supplies.

Our meds and supplies were gratefully received, but what they really need at the tiny hospital tent is a LifePack 12, an EKG monitor with defibrillator. Theres only one in the whole city of Szegini. As a reference, the Chatham Fire Department has five, Gill wrote.

Henderson and Gill couldnt help but be impressed with the resolve of the refugees.

Suffice it to say, Ukrainians are so very proud, almost stubbornly proud, Gill wrote. Its no wonder they are fighting tooth and nail to be free from Russian oppression. They encountered a family from the occupied eastern part of Ukraine, but saw only women who had left all the men in their lives behind to fight. They felt ashamed and embarrassed to accept money from me, but they did [so] with tears of gratitude in their eyes. They had a happy chocolate lab and an unhappy, weepy teenager. Very heartbreaking. I have seen only young people display their trauma, while the adults (mostly women) appear stoic, Gill wrote.

But when they are asked to share their stories, its clear they are all traumatized on some level, she said.

The donations Henderson and Gill collected before leaving the Cape were put to good use, supporting individual families and other nonprofit groups.

Stacey Henderson and I feel like Santa Claus as we distribute funds to myriad grassroots organizations that have popped up to fill the many voids created by this war, Gill said. The Cape funds helped buy 6,000 rain ponchos to help people waiting outside in the freezing rain, a team providing food to mothers and their children, a group that needed washing machines for an impromptu lodging house for Ukrainians that lack the documentation they need to leave the country, and other large and small relief efforts.

I think after nearly a week, we have determined that our main goal is to identify worthy causes and fund them, Gill wrote on Friday. Having made vital connections with aid workers on the ground, Henderson and Gill will continue raising funds locally to funnel to these volunteers. As of Tuesday, their online fundraiser (visit GoFundMe.com and search for Cape Codders Helping Ukraine) has raised nearly $3,000 toward a goal of $10,000.
A new study shows the drug ivermectin, a controversial treatment for COVID-19, is unsuccessful in preventing hospitalization.

The anti-parasitic drug has been touted by some as an effective prescription for those with the coronavirus, and individuals have taken the drug, which is not supported by most physicians, off label by purchasing it at farm supply stores, where it is sold for use on large animals.

The FDA warned in a tweet last summer, You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, yall. Stop it. Taking large doses of this drug is dangerous and can cause serious harm. However, some high profile athletes and media personalities have touted taking the drug themselves while positive for the virus.

A form of ivermectin was considered as a potential treatment early in the pandemic, but studies, including one published March 30, 2022, in The New England Journal of Medicine, have proven it ineffective.

The double blind, randomized, placebo controlled study looked at 3,515 COVID positive patients at 12 clinics in Brazil who had symptoms up to a week and at least one risk factor for severe disease. Daily doses of ivermectin for three days were given to 679 patients, and another 679 had the placebo. The remainder were given other, unspecified treatments.

Looking at those who had ivermectin or the placebo, the drug did not reduce chance of hospitalization due to COVID infection.

The study authors note that while a few studies have shown benefits of ivermectin treatment: The overall number of events that occurred in our trial is larger than the number of all the combined events in these meta-analyses. The results of this trial will, therefore, reduce the effect size of the meta-analyses that have indicated any benefits.

One trial which showed ivermectin efficacy was retracted due to suspected malfeasance and was withdrawn from publication. The World Health Organization, in addition to the FDA, recommends against the use of ivermectin in COVID patients.

Emily Pyrek can be reached at emily.pyrek@lee.net.
A one-on-one meeting has been held between President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, who is on a working visit to Brussels, and President of the European Council Charles Michel.

President of the European Council Charles Michel welcomed President Ilham Aliyev.

They then posed for photos.

The head of state praised the President of the European Council Charles Michels contribution to the normalization process of relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the post-conflict period and emphasized the importance of the Brussels peace agenda set at the trilateral meeting last December. President Ilham Aliyev expressed his hope that today's trilateral meeting to be held as a continuation of the Brussels peace agenda with the participation of Armenia would be result-oriented.

President of the European Council Charles Michel hailed the importance of a dialogue between Armenia and Azerbaijan in this format.

He praised Azerbaijan's role in Europe's energy security.

The sides discussed the issues on the bilateral agenda between the European Union and Azerbaijan, underlining the dynamic development of bilateral cooperation in various fields.

During the conversation they exchanged views on other issues of mutual interest, including regional security.








An ATV accident on Saturday resulted in injuries.

According to a Monday press release from the Platte County Sheriffs Office, deputies were dispatched on Saturday at 11:30 p.m. to an area just east of Webster Street on Gerrard Avenue in Monroe regarding an ATV accident with injuries.

An investigation showed that a 2012 Kawasaki ATV operated by 19-year-old Hannah Shemek of Monroe was traveling eastbound on Gerrard Avenue when Shemek lost control of the vehicle and collided into the back of a parked vehicle east of Webster Street.

Shemek was transported to the Columbus Community Hospital by Monroe Rescue where she was later flown by medical helicopter to Bryan West Hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Damage to the parked vehicle, a 2006 Kia Rio, was estimated at $1,000. Damage to the Kawasaki ATV was estimated at $300.

Alcohol is believed to have been a factor of the accident, stated the press release.

This accident remains under investigation by the Platte County Sheriffs Office.

Anyone with information regarding this accident is asked to contact the Platte County Sheriffs Office at 402-564-3229 or Platte County Area Crime Stoppers at 402-563-4000.

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Lucy Winn is a busy bee.

The 20-year-old from Carlisle is a sophomore at DeSales University in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, where she studies business management and marketing. She fills her time with tutoring, reading, throwing pottery, walking her dog and keeping bees. Winn also happens to be a queen.

The American Beekeeping Federation selected Winn as the 2022 American Honey Queen at the American Beekeeping Federation Conference and Tradeshow in Las Vegas, Nevada, a news release from the federation said.

Winn will spend the year promoting the beekeeping industry across the United States, according to the release. She previously served as the 2020 and 2021 Pennsylvania Honey Queen.

The Sentinel gave Winn an opportunity to share about the role and what it means to her.

What did the process look like for you to become the American Honey Queen?

A: I have had a passion for both beekeeping and public speaking for a long time. After serving as the 2020 and 2021 Pennsylvania Honey Queen, I knew that I wanted to continue to the national level. At the 2022 American Beekeeping Federation conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, I applied for the American Honey Queen position. I was evaluated based on communication skills and knowledge of the industry.

What does that title mean to you and what message do you want to share?

A: The American Honey Queen is the national spokesperson for the beekeeping and honey industry. During my year, I will travel throughout the country promoting the industry at events like fairs, festivals and farmers markets; speaking at schools, to civic organizations and to elected officials; participating in television, radio and print media interviews; and other wonderful opportunities emphasizing the vital role that honeybees play in pollination. The honeybee is vital to American agriculture. One-third of the food we eat needs pollination to grow. Honeybees pollinate 80% of that food. Honeybees truly do provide both environmentally as well as economically. So many different crops grown in the United States depend on honeybee pollination. Without honeybee pollination, not only would those industries be significantly smaller, but there would also be a shortage of food and job opportunities. For instance, if the California almond growers could not have their trees pollinated by the honeybee, that would not just affect the number of almonds grown, it would mean less farmers, less transportation jobs, less packing jobs, and so on.

Where have you traveled so far for this role as the American Honey Queen and where do you intend to travel for the rest of the year?

A: As American Honey Queen I have been to Nevada, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. I have also given virtual presentations in Minnesota, Kentucky, North Carolina and Connecticut. I am excited to continue to travel across the United States, promoting beekeeping and honey. In the near future, I have trips planned to Texas, Kansas and California, and there are many more events throughout the country this summer and autumn. I look forward to meeting beekeepers and nonbeekeepers alike in my effort to emphasize the importance of honeybees.

How did you get into bee keeping and how has your passion for that grown into what it is today?

A: I have been keeping bees with my family since I was 13 years old. Almost instantly I became captivated with honeybees as well as working in the hives. Currently, we keep seven colonies. Attending classes and educational seminars on beekeeping has really furthered my love for honeybees. Not only is education crucial before starting a hive, but beekeeping is a field in which one can constantly learn, even after keeping bees for many years. Through these classes, not only did I become even more fascinated with honeybees the more I learned, but I also met a community of beekeepers that is supportive and a pleasure to be around. Beekeepers hard work and dedication in their field is truly what drives honeybee pollination across the United States. The role of the honeybee is so important, and through learning about their individual ability to produce honey as well as their significant role in pollination, I developed a great passion for them.

What has been your favorite event, trip or opportunity since becoming the American Honey Queen and why?

A: I have genuinely loved and cherished every promotion and opportunity I have had since becoming the American Honey Queen. The opportunity to travel across the country, meeting new people and speaking about honeybees has been incredible. I really enjoy presenting to schools and youth groups. Seeing kids curiosity and sparking interest in honeybees and pollination is one of my personal favorite parts of the job. I am always eager to answer questions and help develop deeper thoughts on beekeeping.

Maddie Seiler is a news reporter for The Sentinel and cumberlink.com covering Carlisle and Newville. You can contact her at mseiler@cumberlink.com and follow her on Twitter at: @SeilerMadalyn

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A Carlisle man was sentenced Tuesday to 18 months in prison for engaging in illegal monetary transactions involving $467,200 in COVID-19 relief funds, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.

Keith McConnell, 43, was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Conner Tuesday. The court said McConnell perpetrated a wire fraud and money laundering scheme with relief funds that were guaranteed by the U.S. Small Business Administration through the Paycheck Protection Program.

According to U.S. Attorney John C. Gurganus, McConnell submitted fraudulent PPP loan applications and forged documents on behalf of his Carlisle-area trucking company, KB Transportation LLC. In both 2019 and 2020, KB Transportation LLC was not in business, had no employees and had no payroll expenses. On June 5, 2020, however, McConnell falsely certified that KB Transportation LLC employed 26 employees and had monthly payroll expenses totaling $124,800. As a result of the fraud, McConnell received $312,000 in PPP loan proceeds.

Within weeks, McConnell spent the PPP funds on unauthorized expenditures including the purchase of a residential property, two personal vehicles, cash withdrawals and stock market investments. On Jan. 20, 2021, McConnell used KB Transportation LLC to apply for a second PPP loan in the amount of $155,200, and again submitted false and fraudulent loan applications and documents. The second PPP loan was never disbursed.

In addition to the 18-month prison sentence, the court ordered McConnell to serve three years of supervised release following incarceration, and to pay $312,200 in restitution for disbursement to the victims of his crimes. To date, McConnell has paid back $237,515.50 in restitution.

The case was investigated by the Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorney Samuel S. Dalke prosecuted the case.

McConnells wife, Christina, was sentenced to two years of probation in March, including four months of home confinement, for engaging in illegal monetary transactions involving $232,300 in COVID-19 relief funds, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.

The U.S. Attorneys Office said Christina McConnell knowingly used criminally derived PPP loan proceeds to purchase personal-use vehicles and residential property in June and July 2020.

The court ordered her to pay $232,200 in restitution, and she paid the full amount prior to sentencing.

Email Jeff at jpratt@cumberlink.com or follow him on Twitter @SentinelPratt.

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Two people are dead and one hurt after a domestic-violence related shooting in New Cumberland Wednesday morning, Cumberland County Public Information Officer John Bruetsch said.

He said Cumberland County Dispatch received a call for the incident about 6:15 a.m. and responded to a residence in the 1200 block of Bridge Street.

"The police department arrived on the scene and confirmed ... that they had three people shot [and] requested an ambulance," Bruetsch said. "One patient was transported to the hospital with ... gunshot injuries and the other two were deceased on the scene."

Bruetsch said the situation was contained to the three people in the house and that police are not looking for anybody. He also said no one has been taken into custody.

"There were children in the house," Bruetsch said. "The children are fine, they werent injured."

He said the condition of the person transported to the hospital is expected to be released by Sean McCormack, the Cumberland County district attorney, Wednesday afternoon. The identities of the dead individuals has not yet been released, but Bruetsch said the coroner's office is working on that information.

Posted earlier on Cumberlink:

The Cumberland County Coroner is at the scene of a shooting in which three people have been shot in New Cumberland Wednesday morning, ABC27 reported.

The news station said the shooting was domestic-related, and children were inside the residence in the 1200 block of Bridge Street at the time but were not shot. The Cumberland County Public Information Officer told ABC27 that there is no threat to the public.

Check back to Cumberlink.com as more information becomes available.

Email Naomi Creason at ncreason@cumberlink.com or follow her on Twitter @SentinelCreason.

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Carlisle Area School Board may review a proposed policy Thursday that would set down rules for employees who telework from a remote location.

The board will convene two committee meetings starting at 7 p.m. in the large group instruction room of the Fowler building of Carlisle High School. The telework policy is on the agenda of the governance committee.

If approved, the policy would direct the superintendent or a designee to develop procedures that outline the circumstances and expectations under which employees may telework when appropriate to maintain district programs or operations.

Such a situation would only be utilized if the employee is capable of fulfilling 100% of their job responsibilities remotely, Assistant Superintendent Colleen Friend said in a memo to committee members.

Under policy guidelines, employees may be required to sign a teleworking agreement or to acknowledge teleworking provisions within a labor contract. Such an agreement may be waived under emergency conditions at the boards discretion.

While teleworking, employees must comply with the same board policies, administrative regulations and standards of conduct as are expected at their regularly assigned place of work.

The performance of each employee will continue to be monitored and assessed as they work from a dedicated workplace free from health or safety hazards, undue distractions, or undue risk that confidential or private information will be discovered, the policy reads.

The policy would also hold employees liable for damaged or lost district equipment brought to the remote work location. Since employees do not have the right to telework, the teleworking arrangement may be terminated by the board or district administration at any time.

The board finance committee is also scheduled to meet Thursday with an agenda that includes a review of the draft district budget for 2022-23.

Joseph Cress is a reporter for The Sentinel covering education and history. You can reach him at jcress@cumberlink.com or by calling 717-218-0022.

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Man acquitted of all charges in shooting death

PHILADELPHIA  A man has been acquitted of all charges in the shooting death of the son of a high-ranking police official during a brawl at a south Philadelphia park three years ago.

A Common Pleas Court jury on Wednesday acquitted Tyquan Atkinson, 22, of murder, criminal conspiracy and weapons offenses in the March 2019 death of 20-year-old Nicholas Flacco at FDR park.

Prosecutors said the victim was tailgating with friends after a Phillies game when several fights broke out among women from different groups and one threatened to call her man. Officials said a man later fired twice and left but shortly afterward returned and shot Flacco, the son of an Internal Affairs commander who was home from college.

Prosecutors showed a video of the brawl, called eyewitnesses and cited cellphone records they said put Atkinson in the park at the time of the shooting.

But Atkinson took the stand and denied any role in the killing, saying he wasnt in the park and was elsewhere in south Philadelphia that night. He said he drove by the park at some point and saw police lights flashing, but did not go in. The defense also cited inconsistencies in the states case such as what clothes the shooter wore.

Shooting suspect turns self in

ERIE  A juvenile suspect being sought in a shooting that injured another student inside a northwestern Pennsylvania high school has turned himself in to police, authorities said.

Earlier today, the suspect in yesterdays school shooting turned himself in to the Erie police department, Erie city officials said in a social media post Wednesday evening.

Erie police earlier said the suspect left the school after multiple shots were fired just after 9:20 a.m. Tuesday in a hallway at Erie High School.

Mike Nolan, deputy chief of the Erie police department, said investigators were confident that it was what he called an isolated targeted incident and not a random act of violence. He declined to discuss a possible motive but said both victim and suspect were students at the high school.

Nolan said juvenile allegations had already been filed. District Attorney Elizabeth Hirz indicated that the suspect would face only juvenile charges because the persons age is younger than 15. Nolan said the 9 mm weapon used hadnt been recovered and the exact number of shots fired hadnt yet been confirmed.

The school district has said there would be no school for Erie High School students for the remainder of the week, with the annual spring break to be observed next week. Officials said counselors would be available for students, staff and parents at an adult education school.

Officials said they would release detailed information in the coming days about the plan for a return to school and vowed to take every measure possible to ensure the safety of students and staff.

Court: Prosecutors can try to drop case

SPRING GROVE  A court has decided to allow prosecutors in a Pennsylvania county to continue their quest to drop a misdemeanor charge against a former police officer who shot a man in handcuffs outside a bank almost four years ago.

The Pennsylvania Superior Court issued a two-sentence order Monday to clear the way for an appeal to proceed in the case of Stu Harrison. The court also granted a similar petition by Harrisons defense attorneys, the York Daily Record reported.

Harrison had been on the Southwestern Regional police force for more than 15 years when he shot a handcuffed prisoner who refused to get into the back of a police car outside a Spring Grove bank.

Harrison, 60, now of Bluffton, South Carolina, said he meant to use a stun gun when he shot the 33-year-old suspect in the leg. State police said the stun gun and firearm were worn on different sides of the officers belt and were different colors and weights.

Prosecutors have tried to drop a simple assault charge against Harrison several times, most recently arguing that they could no longer prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt following the 2019 death of a key witness. A judge refused, saying about 80% of criminal cases before the court lack an independent witness.

The judge said, in denying an earlier bid to drop the case, that it was inappropriate for county prosecutors to usurp the role of the sentencing court or even a fact-finder.

Authorities said the defendant sought $500,000 from a bank teller but didnt have ID or an account. His mother said he had been released from a psychiatric unit the day before and was confused. He pleaded guilty to defiant trespass and disorderly conduct and was placed on probation. He and his mother opposed dropping the case, saying the officer should face even more serious charges. They filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging excessive force.

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An investigation through Medicaid Fraud Control Division of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has resulted in the arrest of a caregiver in Clarksville.

Gena Kilgore was arrested Wednesday in connection with allegations of fraudulent timesheets being submitted for in-home care in Cordova, according to TBI's spokesperson Keli McAlister.

Division of TennCares Office of Program Integrity and TBI agents began investigating the fraudulent activity in Sept. 2021.

Previous coverage: Clarksville woman charged with TennCare fraud

More: Elkton man charged with TennCare fraud

Related: Kentucky man charged with TennCare fraud

Agents determined that between July 2017 and March 2020, Kilgore, 61, enrolled a family member to receive home healthcare services from her employer at an address in Cordova, submitted timesheets on behalf of other caregivers for the family members care, and collected payments for services that were not provided by the caregivers, McAlister said in a news release.

Kilgore, who resides in Clarksville, was booked into Montgomery County jail Wednesday and charged in connection with TennCare fraud, forgery and theft between $60,000 - $250,000.

Alexis Clark can be reached at aclark@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle: Clarksville caregiver arrested in connection with TennCare fraud
By Trend

Uzbekistan Airways will resume regular return flights from Tashkent (Uzbekistan) to Paris (France),Trend reports via the companys statement.

Flights will be operated from April 29 to June 10 twice a week - on Tuesdays and Fridays.

In March 2020, Uzbekistan closed air and road communications with all foreign countries due coronavirus pandemic.

Previously, Uzbekistan Airways resumed regular direct flights between Baku (Azerbaijan) and Tashkent (Uzbekistan), which were also suspended due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Bismarck voters passed a tax levy on Tuesday's ballot aimed at securing much-needed funding for the fire department.

The final vote came to 206 in favor of the measure, with 167 voting in opposition.

Bismarck Fire Chief John Colwell said the department was ready to use the extra funds to step up fire protection services to area citizens.

"We are super excited and greatly appreciative of our community coming out and supporting us," said Colwell. "We look forward to improving and being able to provide the best coverage possible to our community ... and we are ready to start getting some wheels in motion, start making some improvements, and working toward giving back to our community."

The tax levy passed by voters allows for $0.30 per $100 assessed valuation of personal property and real estate.

The fire department has existed as three separate entities: the Bismarck City Fire Department, the Bismarck Rural Fire Protection Association, and the Bismarck Fire Protection District.

The Bismarck City Fire Department is funded through the general revenue tax collected within the city limits. Bismarck Rural Fire Protection Association covers everything in the area outside Bismarck city limits and is funded solely by annual fire tag sales and fundraising.

The third entity, Bismarck Fire Protection District, was formed in August 2000 by voter approval, but with no funding.

Now that the tax has been approved, both the Bismarck City Fire Department and the Bismarck Rural Fire Protection Association will dissolve, and the Bismarck Fire Protection District will remain the only operating entity.

Bismarck voters also approved Proposition 1 regarding the city collector's office, with 102 votes in favor and 76 opposed.

The approval of Prop 1 allows the Bismarck Board of Aldermen to appoint a city collector. Before voters passed the measure, the job of the city collector was an elected position within Bismarck. The Board of Aldermen does not currently have any specific person chosen to serve as the city collector.

Bobby Radford is a reporter for the Daily Journal. He can be reached at bradford@dailyjournalonline.com

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The Madison County voters have spoken with the passing of one proposition, rejection of two proposals and a new mayor of Fredericktown.

In the race for mayor of Fredericktown, the vote totals were as follows: Travis Parker, 265 votes; Donald Reese 129 votes; and Kelly Korokis, 82 votes.

"I am extremely blessed and humbled to be elected as the next mayor of Fredericktown, Missouri," Parker said. "My family and I have met so many wonderful people throughout the campaign and learned so much about the true heart of our city.

"The citizens of Fredericktown are some of the most encouraging and amazing people that I have met, and with their continued support now as mayor we can accomplish great things for us all and the next generation.

"Thank you so much to those who support the campaign by volunteering at events and spreading my message of positivity and unity. I look forward to what is in store for Fredericktown and how I will get to play a part in its growth and improvements. From the depths of my heart and on behalf of my family, thank you Fredericktown. I am excited to serve you. God bless."

The Cherokee Pass Volunteer Fire Department Proposition passed with 237 yes votes and 171 voting no.

The passing of the proposition means the fire department will become a tax-based fire district. Citizens within the district will no longer need to purchase a fire tag, currently set at $45 per household, but instead will pay $0.30 per $100 of actual assessed taxed valuation on their yearly property taxes.

"We really appreciate the support from the community," Cherokee Pass Volunteer Fire Chief Bill Starkey said. "The passing of this proposition is going to help the department grow in the future and make the community a safer place."

Bill Long was elected as a write-in for alderman Ward II with 56 votes.

Daytona Brown was the candidate on the ballot but was determined ineligible at the last minute due to residency issues.

The Madison County Use Tax failed 617 (voting no) to 371 (voting yes).

If passed the "use tax" would have mirrored the county sales tax. The tax would only have been applied to purchases made from online retailers outside of the state of Missouri.

The City of Fredericktown Use Tax failed 296 (voting no) to 171 (voting yes).

If passed the "use tax" would have mirrored the city sales tax. The tax would only have been applied to purchases made from online retailers outside the state of Missouri.

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Tuesday was a day of victories for all but one ballot proposal in St. Francois County.

Park Hills' Proposition SWIM passed. Bismarck's fire district tax passed. Bonne Terre, Leadwood and Leadington each had a proposal for public safety pass. Iron Mountain Lake also passed their parks tax with 65% approval.

The St. Francois County Local Use Tax Proposition failed with 1,696 yes votes (47.27%) and 1,892 no votes.

St. Francois County officials voiced their disappointment that the use tax failed Tuesday. It would have allowed them to collect sales tax on internet purchases.

People are already paying the tax, its not a new tax, Presiding Commissioner Harold Gallaher said. Now it wont be forwarded to us, the state will keep the money.

"People see the tax on the ballot and say no, they dont understand what it means or (what) the ramifications are. We got close.

St. Francois County Clerk Kevin Engler said the voter turnout was 8.49%, with only 3,680 voters out of 43,356 registered voters making casting ballots.

(The election) went off pretty well, he said. We were a little disappointed that the county use tax didnt pass. I think people didnt know enough about it, if they knew what it was about, they would have given it to us.

"Hopefully, the commission will regroup and get back at it. Everything else was pretty clear cut. We didnt see any technical problems. Turnout was less than 10%.

Bismarck

Voters in Bismarck elected a new mayor on Tuesday, welcoming back a previous mayor, Seth Radford.

Radford secured the win with 102 votes while his opponent, Ralph Scherffius, received 76 votes.

Radford said he is looking forward to serving the residents of Bismarck again and building on what the current administration had accomplished.

"I definitely appreciate the support of all the citizens of Bismarck," said Radford. "I look forward to serving them again. I think we can make lots of great things happen within our city.

"We've always been a great city," he noted. "I look forward to carrying the torch for what the current administration has done, working forward to make things even better and make sure the city invests in the citizens; That's my biggest thing.

"It's the citizens' city, and it's the people's city, and everything that we do is for the advancement of the citizens and making sure that we invest in them, our families, and the community," said Radford.

Radford will be sworn in as mayor at the upcoming Bismarck Board of Aldermen meeting on April 14.

For Alderman Ward 1, Camille Brixey was elected with 67 votes, beating Glenn Meador who received 51 votes.

Doe Run

John Sherrill was elected to a six-year term on the Doe Run Fire Protection District. He received 157 votes while his opponent Jean Usher received 72 votes.

Desloge

Mark Bonney won the seat for Alderman Ward 1 with 56 votes while his opponent J.T. Black received 40 votes.

Pete Pasternak received 60 votes to win the election for Ward 3. Chuck Schwartz received 33 votes while Russel Kester received 51 votes.

Farmington

Adam Parks was elected to Ward 1 with 111 votes while opponent Abigail Jonson received 50 votes.

Garett Boatright was elected to Ward 40 with 150 votes while his opponent Keli Keutzer received 63 votes.

Park Hills

Carl Courtois was elected to Ward 1, receiving 95 votes. Opponent Jody Joe Adams received 44 votes.

Stacey Easter will continue to serve in Ward 2. She received 57 votes while Larry LaChance received 39 and David Easter received 36.

Leadwood

Aaron Penberthy will continue to serve Ward 1. He received 19 votes while Thomas Watson received 11.

School Districts

Elected to the Farmington School Board were Kerry Noble (730) votes) and Jeff Lawson (644). They had been challenged by Dylan Nicholson (387), Duane Hampton (367), and Derek Gollaher (317).

Shawn Meinershagen (228 votes) and Kimber Monroe (177) will serve on the West County School Board, defeating challenger Brent Belfield (139).

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A neo-Nazi podcaster and fugitive has again been sanctioned by a federal judge in a major rally lawsuit, now owing nearly $1 million in fines.

Robert Azzmador Ray is one of more than a dozen defendants named in the federal Sines v. Kessler lawsuit, which sought to hold key organizers and participants of the Unite the Right rally responsible for the violence that descended upon Charlottesville in August 2017.

Unlike many of the defendants, Ray has been wholly absent from the lawsuit, failing to respond to any motions or show up at trial. This had led to a warrant for his arrest for contempt of court and steep, still-growing economic sanctions.

U.S. District Judge Norman K. Moon added around $18,000 to Rays total on March 30 following a petition from the plaintiffs counsel to recover their reasonable expenses and attorneys fees.

To date, our case has resulted in nearly $800,000 in damages and sanctions against Ray  and a warrant for his arrest, Integrity First for America, which funded the lawsuit, tweeted after the order.

The figure was less than what the plaintiffs counsel had initially sought. According to Moon, the plaintiffs sought a total award of $25,960.75 in attorneys fees and out-of-pocket expenses, but Moon reduced the figure after scrutinizing plaintiffs petitions and supporting documentation.

This reflect[ed] minor reductions in the hourly rates sought by plaintiffs attorneys, but no reduction in the hourly rate sought by their paralegals, and a slight reduction in the number of hours claimed, Moon wrote.

Upon recommendation from a magistrate judge, Moon also denied the plaintiffs request for $2,025.75 in out-of-pocket expenses for Rays depositions being denied.

Even among those sanctioned, Ray stands out due to his apparent disappearance and fugitive status both for a criminal warrant stemming from the Aug. 11 torch rally and a bench warrant for contempt of court for a failure to comply in 2020.

Ray was also accused in the lawsuit of helping plan the torch rally, which drew worldwide condemnation in its wake due to the violence and hate speech spewed by participants.

During the trial, plaintiffs counsel presented a trove of digital evidence against Ray. The evidence, which stretched from February 2017 up the rallies, depicted Ray as openly racist and anti-Semitic, with several messages calling for violence against minority groups before and during the rallies.

Because Ray was not present for the trial, the jury was instructed that they could choose to view this behavior and the evidence in an adverse light, though only against him and not the other defendants. Consequently, Ray was found by the jury to be liable to pay $700,000 in damages, with the bulk of that sum being punitive in origin.

Although virtually all of the defendants who were ordered to pay damages have filed post-trial motions seeking to reduce the figure or be retried, Ray continues to remain silent and out of the public eye.

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The protracted legal case over a long-incarcerated Staffordshire bull terrier again made its way to the Virginia Court of Appeals on Wednesday as the dogs owner continues to seek the release of her pet.

Nine-year-old Niko has been in isolated custody at the Charlottesville-Albemarle SPCA for more than six years after a woman said he got loose in her yard and killed her cat.

The long legal battle to rehome Niko or return him to his owners has seen multiple appeals since 2015, with the latest being largely denied by the Virginia Court of Appeals in March 2021.

However, the state appeals court granted an appeal for a May 2021 decision from an Albemarle County Circuit Court judge, giving the pup what may be one last shot at freedom.

Toni Stacy, Nikos owner, was represented Wednesday by Elliott Harding, who argued the complicated case virtually in front of a three-judge panel.

The legal saga kicked off in 2015, when Stacy was convicted of being the owner of a dog that killed a cat. On Aug. 6, 2015, Stacy was sentenced to 90 days in jail with 90 days suspended. Part of the sentencing order included putting Niko down.

Last year, Harding argued that because Stacys conviction was a Class 2 misdemeanor six years ago, the court no longer has jurisdiction to revoke her suspended sentence for failure to comply with the conditions of suspension.

That, he argued, means the courts no longer the authority to order that Stacy comply with the conditions of the suspended sentence, including euthanizing the dog.

This case concerns the scope of a circuit courts jurisdiction to order a third party to execute a condition of a defendants suspended sentence for a class two misdemeanor six years after the sentence was imposed, Harding said Wednesday.

This is not the first time Stacys case has appeared before the Virginia Court of Appeals, who last heard an appeal from the defendant in March 2021. That hearing was spurred by a 2019 Albemarle County Circuit Court order that lifted the stay in Stacys criminal matter and ordered Niko to be killed.

Stacy filed a motion to vacate the amended order and, after her motion was denied, subsequently appealed the case to the Court of Appeals of Virginia.

Following her appeal hearing, the Court of Appeals held that the county courts original sentencing was issued under a Virginia law giving trial courts general authority to place reasonable conditions on a suspended jail sentence.

The Court of Appeals sent her criminal case back to local courts for the sole purpose of the county circuit court clarifying under which subsection of state code Stacy was convicted.

On Wednesday, Harding argued that the county circuit courts ability to hold off her criminal sentence lapsed after December 8, 2016, when the state Supreme Court denied her appeal of the 2015 conviction and the court lifted the stay of sentence.

But the issue in this case is a May 21, 2021, order that, when put up against the original sentencing order, has material differences that render it outside of the courts scope and jurisdiction, Harding said. It orders Albemarle county to dispose of Nico six years after the fact, while the original sentencing order just merely listed his euthanization as a condition of Ms. Stacys suspended sentence. It was up for her to either satisfy that or not for fear of incarceration.

Arguing on behalf of the Commonwealth, Timothy J. Huffstutter, an assistant attorney general, said the court did have the jurisdiction to enforce the conditions of Stacys suspended sentence and order Nikos death.

Citing the many stays issued by the court due to appeals and civil actions, Huffstutter argued that only around 78 days of Stacys sentence have run. This would mean she falls within the 90 days she was given by the court to comply with her suspended sentence requirements, Huffstutter said.

That includes euthanizing the dog.

Just from a policy standpoint, if Ms. Stacy is correct, then I think trial courts would be influenced to just forgo imposing suspended sentences, which I think makes for poor public policy, he said. If a defendant can appeal and delay and appeal and delay and run out the clock on a condition of a suspended sentence, and then turn around and tell the court well, you dont have you dont have the authority to enforce the conditions on my suspended sentence anymore because Ive appealed and delayed then I think thats not a good motivation for trial courts to suspend sentences.

During his rebuttal, Harding again emphasized that the issue at hand currently was whether the Albemarle County Circuit Court has the jurisdiction to impose a condition that relies on a third party.

This would be a very unique precedent that has negative implications throughout criminal cases throughout the Commonwealth if were going to say that someones potential incarceration is subject to the execution of a condition by a third party, Harding said.

It remains to be seen how the state Court of Appeals panel will rule and whether that decision will mark the end of Nikos life.

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The good news is that Chuck and Carolyn Westrater will not have to pay the Virginia Department of Transportation $2,440 for cutting up a tree that fell on and crushed their car.

The bad news is that they got a bill in the first place.

Here is what happened: On March 7, the Westraters were driving on Route 53, which runs through Charlottesville and Fluvanna County. As they drove, the roots of a tree on adjacent private property suddenly tore out of the ground, causing the entire tree to fall and crush the Westraters Toyota sedan. Flying glass from a broken windshield cut Carolyns forehead. A man in a car behind the couple got out and helped her husband free himself from the damaged car. A rescue squad took Carolyn to the hospital. Fortunately, her injuries were not serious.

Chuck, 80, and Carolyn, 79, counted themselves lucky. They figured they had escaped from a freaky accident with a cool tale to tell family and friends. Only a week later, their story turned from freak show to theater of the absurd with the arrival of a letter from the transportation department.

The letter said the accident had required a response from VDOT. It is VDOTs responsibility to collect for such responses, the letter stated. It noted that the Westraters would receive an invoice for what they owed as soon as the state agency calculated response costs. They should send the invoice to their insurance company.

The invoice that arrived totaled $2,440.36 to pay for labor and equipment and guardrail damage. This struck the Westraters as strange because there was no guardrail beside the road in the area where the tree crashed. Nevertheless, Chuck took the bill to his insurance company where an agent told him he had never heard of anything like this, but would submit the claim.

Meanwhile, theater of the absurd turned into a newspaper feature story when it turned out that Carlos Santos, editor of the weekly Fluvanna Review newspaper, was the fellow who had helped Chuck out of his crushed car. Santoss dispatch about the bizarre accident and subsequent bill caught the eye of state Rep. Rob Bell, who reached out.

Finally, Carolyn got a call from a highway department district engineer who apologized, said it was all a mistake and that the Westraters owed the state nothing.

On the other hand, if it had been an actual debt, Carolyn was told, only the attorney general could have forgiven it.

As the Westraters await delivery of a letter confirming that they are in the clear, Stacy Londrey, a manager of business functions at the Culpeper VDOT office, told The Daily Progress that what happened to the couple was a billing error. She said the mistake resulted from someones misinterpretation of what was provided. The state code requires VDOT to collect the cost of repairing damage to state property or assets, as well as some cleanup and traffic control costs caused by motorists. In the Westraters case, Londrey continued, the uprooted tree fell from private property. No state property or assets suffered damage.

We regret the billing error, Londrey said. That is never pleasant. I regret the extra stress this might have caused.

While VDOT will review its procedures to see if they need to be tightened, Londrey said that what happened to the Westraters was really a training thing, not a policy problem.

This conclusion begs further investigation.

We know that VDOT has its hands full maintaining 58,000 miles of roads. We also believe the agencys employees understand that they serve the public and usually succeed in that mission. But the Westraters tale is one of those sagas that makes government look hidebound and bureaucratic. That is a sure way to make folks forget that they generally drive on highways and byways that are solid and safe.

And we cant quite shake the feeling that without Santos journalistic instinct and Bells constituent service, the Westraters checkbookor at least their insurance companycould have easily suffered a head-on collision with state policy.
By Trend

The US successfully tested a hypersonic missile in mid-March but kept it quiet for two weeks to avoid escalating tensions with Russia as President Joe Biden was about to travel to Europe, according to a defense official familiar with the matter, Trend reports citing CNN.

The Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) was launched from a B-52 bomber off the west coast, the official said, in the first successful test of the Lockheed Martin version of the system. A booster engine accelerated the missile to high speed, at which point the air-breathing scramjet engine ignited and propelled the missile at hypersonic speeds of Mach 5 and above.

The official offered scant details of the missile test, only noting the missile flew above 65,000 feet and for more than 300 miles. But even at the lower end of hypersonic range -- about 3,800 miles per hour -- a flight of 300 miles is less than 5 minutes.
A machine gun? Is that what Charlottesvilles thugs now carry? An arrest warrant for 25-year-old Miracle Octayvis Sims in connection with a March 20 gun battle charges Sims with possession of a machine gun.

Police already had reported the troubling news that they found shell casings from at least five different weapons in the parking lot at Frys Spring Beach Club after a 120-round shootout wounded two people. It was bad enough that people felt compelled to carry weapons to the parking lot. It was downright depressing that they opened fire less than an hour after a fundraiser concluded for Peace in the Streets, a group dedicated to ending gun violence. But thugs toting machine guns raises the stakes exponentially for every Charlottesville resident in every corner of the city.

The Code of Virginia defines a machine gun as any weapon which shoots or is designed to shoot automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger. That means one continuous squeeze can empty the magazine of ammunition no matter how many rounds are in it. High capacity magazines can include as many as 100 rounds.

Some states have laws that limit the size of magazines to 10 rounds in an attempt to control gun violence. Sadly, Virginia is not among them.

Sadder still is the culture of violence that infects America. In a nation where hundreds of millions of guns float unregulated in an ocean of anger and deadly intent, no law guarantees that weapons or ammunition will ever be unavailable to those forbidden to have them. Laws only restrain those who respect them. Thugs do not. Nor do criminals of any vintage. Meanwhile, attempts to ban assault weapons designed to kill people, not animals, die on the altar of the Second Amendment interpreted by crazies who vow to give up their weapons when they are pried from my cold, dead hand.

Cold, dead hand. Thats a fitting battle cry for so much of what threatens this country as politicians shuck their humanity and shirk their duty. One of the lowest points in the United States bloody dicta of free fire came at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012. Twenty-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 six- and seven-year-olds and a half-dozen adult staff members. Four months later, despite the outrageous slaughter, the U.S. Senate could not pass a law requiring background checks for firearms purchasers at gun shows or online.

In the Charlottesville area, this absence of oversight makes a semi-automatic rifle with a 30-round clip legally accessible with a few keystrokes and a transfer of funds, according to an arms list website.

But were betting if Sims had a machine gun, he did not get it legally. This is because in America it is often even easierand only slightly more riskyto get a weapon on the street.

Or maybe he built it himself.

In the Frys Spring shooting, Charlottesville police arrested Sims as a felon possessing a machine gun on March 30. Police also took 23-year-old felon Rymese Walker into custody on a weapons charge March 26.

On April 3, Sacramento became the latest American city victimized by a senseless shooting spree. The California shooting killed six and injured 12.

To grasp the creepy link between what happened in California and what could have happened here, consider this: Shooters in Sacramento fired more than 100 rounds, just like the shooters in the Frys Spring parking lot. Also, police in Sacramento charged one of two alleged shooters with possession of a machine gun. Police said he may have altered his weapon to make it fully automatic. When you do that, you cast your lot with gun violence in a way that likely renders futile intervention by ex-gang bangers or do-gooders or Gospel preachers or even cops.

If firearms modification from semi-automatic to automatic status turns out to be a new thing among thugs, Charlottesville will need to deal quickly with an ugly truth.

The only miracle that occurred when Miracle Sims brought a machine gun to the Frys Spring parking lot on March 20 was that nobody got killed.
Public workers in the mid-valleys third-largest city are about to see some pandemic relief.

City of Lebanon employees will each receive up to $1,000 in federal COVID-19 stimulus funding issued in a one-time bonus the City Council is calling appreciation pay.

Councilors granted City Manager Nancy Brewer the authority at a March 23 meeting to pay $500 in American Rescue Plan Act funds to each part-time employee. Full-time employees stand to see $1,000.

Thats just under the equivalent $42 for each month so far in the coronavirus pandemic.

Lebanon has 116 job positions in its 2021-2022 budget, the majority of those paid full time. The city budgeted to pay the equivalent of about 112 full-time employees.

Brewer said shell seek a letter of agreement between the city and two unions, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; and the Lebanon Police Association.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury directed about $3.48 million to Lebanon from the $1.9-trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, awarding half that year with the remainder to arrive this May. The funds increased the citys projected operating revenue by about 12%.

Benton County officials in October also agreed to offer their employees a one-time pandemic-related bonus and paid holidays from $445,000 of its own ARPA funding.

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The Lebanon City Council met for a work session, then entered an about 1-hour executive session called under an Oregon law that grants public bodies the right to shield deliberation in a closed meeting to consider employing a public officer, employee, staff member or individual agent.

The council emerged from executive session then voted unanimously and without discussion to approve a city-wide COVID-119-related bonus.

Can you insert the word appreciation there? asked Ward 1 councilor Wayne Dykstra. Appreciation bonus?

Councilors also approved hiring bonuses at the Lebanon Police Department, where chief Frank Stevenson is trying to fill six openings.

While the department hasnt announced how much it will offer, Stevenson confirmed in an email March 30 that Lebanon will offer bonuses to certified, experienced officers  commonly called a lateral hire. That money will pay out in portions, upon hiring and the rest after completing a 12- or 18-month probationary period, job depending, in line with other police agencies in the mid-valley area.

Alex Powers covers business, environment and healthcare for Mid-Valley Media. Contact him at 541-812-6116 or alex.powers@lee.net.

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Justice Clarence Thomas is not going to resign from the Supreme Court. He will not be impeached. And anyone who imagines that Thomas will recuse himself from cases before the Court that are connected to his wifes efforts to overthrow the 2020 election is mistaken.

The right has worked hard to engineer a six-member conservative majority on the Court, and now that it has the power, it will use it. In fact, we can expect the right to continue to embrace the essential principle of modern American politics: Concede nothing.

If you want to argue that the left is sometimes as bad about this as the right, well, OK, Ill concede your point.

But Republicans have a special penchant for declining to concede anything  even elections  especially if they can make the left squirm. They have a term for it: owning the libs.

But the libs have a right to be concerned about a Supreme Court justice whose wife is deeply committed to invalidating an entirely legitimate election. Even if Thomas is able to isolate his jurisprudential reasoning from his wifes fantasies of voter fraud, shouldnt all Americans expect the appearance of evenhandedness and the rejection of conflicts of interest?

Not according to conservative columnist George Will, who in last weeks Washington Post dismissed concerns about the appearance of impartiality on the Court as mere kerfuffle.

Will admits that Thomass wife, Ginni Thomas, is mistaken, and he describes her confusion in terms worth quoting: The shelves of her mental pantry groan beneath the weight of Trumpian hysterics about the 2020 presidential election having been stolen and the republics certain ruination under Joe Biden.

But Will does not concede that Ginni Thomas has any influence over Justice Thomas, suggesting that anyone who has a problem with appearances on the Court has a problem himself.

But I have two problems with this casual dismissal of appearances:

The first is access. I dont know what the pillow talk is like around the Thomas household, but nothing about Ginni suggests that she is reluctant to express her opinions. Its easy to imagine that in all matters related to the 2020 election, Clarence Thomas has been subjected to a persistent oral argument with no opportunity to hear a rebuttal.

But heres a bigger problem: George Will casually dismisses Ginnis opinions, calling her politically, mad as a hatter. The problem is that, in fact, her opinions are not exactly on the Republican fringe.

According to a recent University of Massachusetts at Amherst poll, only 21% of Republicans say that Joe Bidens victory in 2020 was legitimate. Eighty-three percent say that fraudulent ballots were counted for Joe Biden.

In short, while Ginni Thomas may be particularly outspoken, she cannot be dismissed as an outlying crackpot. I dont know if she actually believes the election was stolen or whether her position  in the face of all the contrary evidence  is merely a refusal to concede. But the really important question here is not what Ginni thinks, but what Clarence thinks.

Justice Thomas could defuse concerns about his wifes influence, as well as the impartiality of the Court, by telling us whether he thinks the 2020 election was legitimate. Of course, justices should not telegraph how they will rule on particular cases, but Thomas has never been shy about revealing his outlook and opinions.

He publicly professes a faith in God, as well as an affinity for Ayn Rand. He has said, I certainly have some very strong libertarian leanings.

If Thomas is willing to reveal this much about himself, why cant he tell us whether he believes the election was legitimate? He could support Ginnis right to her opinion, but he might be able to reassure Americans who are concerned about politicization of the Court simply by being as straightforward and honest as his wife.

The notion of a Supreme Court justice who believes  against all evidence  that the current administration is illegitimate is deeply alarming. Justice Thomas could alleviate much of the concern just by telling us what he thinks about the election.

John M. Crisp, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, lives in Georgetown, Texas, and can be reached at jcrispcolumns@gmail.com.

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By Trend

As many as 4,228 people have been infected with the coronavirus (COVID-19) in the past 24 hours in Iran, reads the statement of the Ministry of Health and Medical Education of Iran, Trend reports.

In addition, 44 people have died from the coronavirus over the past day.

At the same time, the condition of 1,483 people remains critical.

So far, more than 49.7 million tests have been conducted in Iran for the diagnosis of coronavirus.

In total, over 147 million doses of vaccines have been used in Iran so far. A total of 64 million doses have been used in the first stage, 57 million doses - in the second stage, and 26.4 million doses  in the third stage.

Iran continues to monitor the coronavirus situation in the country. According to recent reports from Iranian officials, over 7.18 million people have been infected, and 140,451 people have already died.

Meanwhile, over 6.9 million people have reportedly recovered from the disease. The country continues to apply strict measures to contain the further spread of the virus.

Reportedly, the disease was brought to Iran by a businessman from Iran's Qom city, who went on a business trip to China, despite official warnings. The man died later from the disease. The Islamic Republic announced its first infections and deaths from the coronavirus on Feb. 19.

The outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan - which is an international transport hub - began at a fish market in late December 2019.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11 declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Some sources claim the coronavirus outbreak started as early as November 2019.
Louisville-based Sierra Space officials for months have been talking about the need to hire more employees as the company has picked up more a
The Alabama House of Representatives has rejected a bill that would have required the state health officer to receive approval by the governor for emergency health orders that restrict activities by private citizens and businesses.

The bill failed in the House Wednesday on a procedural vote. The legislation came in response to a committee that has reviewed the states responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, the House sponsor, Rep. Rex Reynolds, a Republican from Madison County, said.

In addition to requiring approval by the governor, orders from the health officer would have required a 35-day notice before taking effect, a requirement already in place for many state agency actions under the states administrative procedure law. Exceptions to that notice requirement are allowed if an agency finds an immediate danger to public health or safety.

Rep. Chris Pringle, R-Mobile, said he supported the bill and that it was important to have public health orders subject to approval by an elected official, like the governor.

The state health officer is appointed by the state health board.

I think its important that we allow somebody thats accountable to be involved in the decision process, Pringle said.

Rep. Sam Jones, D-Mobile, spoke in opposition to the bill, saying it would politicize health orders.

I would not want to get into position where there is a dire need and the health officer cant do anything until he goes through the political process, Jones said. To me, that is not making the process better.

Reynolds said the provision that allows an agency to bypass the 35-day notice requirement should address that concern.

But the House rejected the measure, which had passed the Senate. Representatives voted 54-44 in favor of a resolution needed to bring the bill up for a final vote. But the resolution needed approval by 60% of those voting, so it was five votes short.

Gov. Kay Ivey and State Health Officer Dr. Scott Harris generally made announcements about orders during the COVID-19 pandemic jointly and did not publicly disagree on orders.
Blaming rising costs, animal feed producers have announced a 5 percent hike in prices, a move certain to increase the burden on farmers.

CP Vietnam, the countrys biggest animal feed producer, adjusted the prices of its fish feed products up by VND400 per kilogram Monday.

Last month it had increased pig and compound feed by VND300.

Other manufacturers like CJ Vina Agri and GreenFeed Vietnam raised prices by VND300-500 last Friday, to around VND11,000-13,000 per kilogram (US$1=VND22,800).

They cited rising production costs since the world's biggest exporters of raw materials for animal feed production, South America, Russia and Ukraine, have been hit by adverse weather and conflict.

Vietnam imported around $551 million worth of animal feed and raw materials in January-February, mainly from Argentina, Brazil and the U.S.

Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Phung Duc Tien said last month that feed prices had risen by 25-40 percent since the beginning of 2022.

With feed accounting for 65-70 percent of livestock farmers' costs, the price hikes have caused them huge losses.

Giau, a pig farmer in the southern Long An province, said he is struggling to break even despite selling pigs on the hoof at VND54,000 per kilogram and having his own brood animals stock.

"Costs have risen to VND54,000-60,000 per kilogram."

Hoa, another farmer in Dong Nai who buys brood animals, claimed she is losing VND500,000-700,000 on every pig she sells due to the high feed costs, and has reduced her scale to reduce losses.

Tien has called for producing domestic alternatives and expanding the fodder farming area in the country.
By Trend

The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Georgia, Ilia Darchiashvili, will visit the EU and NATO headquarters on April 6-8, Trend reports citing 1tv.ge.

Ilia Darchiashvili will meet with the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell.

Georgian Minister will take part in the NATO ministerial at the invitation of the Alliance. The Foreign Ministers of NATOs partner nations (Australia, Finland, Georgia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Sweden and Ukraine), as well as the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, will join a NATO session within the framework of the NAC Meeting.

On the sidelines of the Ministerial Meeting, Ilia Darchiashvili will hold meetings with his colleague ministers.
The stone relief that depicts a U.S. aircraft being shot down in Hanoi during the Vietnam War in 1967 is displayed on Le Truc Street in Ba Dinh District. Photo by VnExpress/Van Hieu

The investor about to demolish a French-built factory in Hanoi for rebuilding must maintain the status quo of a historic stone relief there, local authorities have ordered.

The order was passed Monday by Hanoi's Ba Dinh District and delivered to the Post and Telecommunication Equipment Factory JSC (Postef).

Postef was set to take down the building at 61 Tran Phu Street for reconstruction.

Existing facilities on the site, which serves as the company's headquarters and hosts its factory, were built by the French in the early 20th century.

As per the original plan, Postef was to build a Hi-Tech Research and Development Center, but it changed course and decided to enter into a partnership with a real estate developer and build a "multi-functional project."

The new plan would end up destroying a stone relief on the wall next to the intersection of Nguyen Thai Hoc and Le Truc streets.

The relief depicts how Hanoi was heroically protected from deadly bombings by U.S. aircraft in early 1967 by the nations air force.

On May 19, 1967, the People's Air Force and militiamen working with it shot down six aircraft, and one of them crashed on Le Truc Street.

Now, Ba Dinh District has asked Postef to submit a specific plan for moving, protecting and restoring the relief once the new building is rebuilt.

As per a plan approved by the city administration, the VND1.57 trillion ($68.4 million) development will rise 17 floors to a height of 43m, including six basement floors.
A new study commissioned by U.S. Gold Corp. takes a look at the economic impact the companys CK Gold Project in southeastern Wyoming could have on the region.

The study, conducted by the University of Wyoming Center for Business and Economic Analysis, estimates that the CK Gold Project could create 324 long-term direct jobs and up to 1,024 local jobs throughout the region. Total taxes generated during the construction, operation, and closure phases of the project over 13 years were estimated at $75 million.

Additionally, the total tax generated does not consider the royalty payments due to the State of Wyoming over the life of the project, which are estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars, said U.S. Gold Corp. Chief Financial Officer Eric Alexander. These royalty payments are earmarked for the benefit of the states K-12 education fund.

The CK Gold Project site is on State of Wyoming school trust land.

The University of Wyoming study was based on U.S. Golds CK Gold Project prefeasibility report which was published on Dec. 1, 2021. The study used software to calculate the potential direct, indirect and induced economic effects of the mine.

While we understand the direct impact of our proposed project and the spin-off economic activity are difficult to estimate, we hope the information presented helps those parties interested in the project and its effect on the local economy to better understand the economic implications of the CK Gold Project, Alexander said.

As plans progress for the CK Gold Project, in 2022 U.S. Gold expects to complete the final feasibility study, the next phase of engineering, and the mining permit application. The company hopes to begin production in 2025.

U.S. Gold, which has its headquarters in Elko, has a portfolio of exploration properties, including the Keystone and Maggie Creek Projects on the Cortez and Carlin Trends in Nevada and the Challis Gold Project in Idaho.

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ELKO  A Wells businesswoman who has been disqualified to run for Elko County Sheriff says she was told by the county clerk that the Nevada Secretary of State had approved her being able to run.

People have no voice, Cummins told the Elko Daily Free Press on Wednesday through her publicist.

Qualifications for office are posted in Nevada Revised Statutes on the Legislatures website, but they have not been updated since the 2021 session ended. They still list the 2019 threshold for stricter qualifications at counties of more than 100,000 people, although Assembly Bill 440 lowered the limit to 30,000.

Why that number? asked Cummins. In 10 counties out of the 17 in Nevada, the change in numbers required to be affected by this change in law are under 30,000. So, why was 30,000 chosen? Even brothels are allowed in towns under 100,000, said Cummins, who operates Bellas Hacienda Ranch in Wells.

AB 440 as introduced in the Assembly was intended to require law enforcement agencies to cite people for misdemeanor violations instead of arrest them. The original version did not include the change in sheriff qualifications.

The changes appear in the third reprint of the bill dated March 29, 2021. The Legislatures records, however, show that the bill received final passage by the Assembly on April 20. The changes do not appear in either adopted amendment to the bill posted online.

What else is on the agenda? What other changes are going to be made without warning? said Cummins. Citizens need to know that laws are being changed without public approval.

The Elko County Clerk issued a notice on Tuesday afternoon that Cummins name would not be on the Primary Election ballot since she is not entitled to be voted for in Elko County pursuant to NRS 293.187(b).

Cummins responded, The arbitrary change in law, without constituent input, which keeps citizens of the county from running for the elected office of sheriff is unconstitutional and should not be allowed to stand. An elected position should be decided by the people not by legislators or good old boys in back rooms figuring out a strategy on how to keep control.

At one point during the open filing period in March, Cummins name disappeared from the list of candidates. When the Elko Daily Free Press asked about the deletion, the newspaper was told that it was a clerical error and Cummins name was put back on the list.

Three challengers remain on the ballot along with incumbent Sheriff Aitor Narvaiza. Two are deputies and one is a former deputy.

The most important point is that no one is coming to save the people of Elko County, Cummins said. WE are the people weve been waiting for.

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ELKO  The Phi Theta Kappa Chapter (Beta Beta Epsilon) and the student government association at Great Basin College are hosting a food and book drive from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. April 15 in the GBC Solarium and theater parking lot.

The Beta Beta Epsilon Chapter focuses on community service for children and their families, wrote advisor Lynette Macfarlan in an email.

The food donations will be delivered to Head Start, Nevada Early Intervention and Communities in Schools food pantries.

Recommended food and hygiene products include cereal bowls, baby food, single packaged oatmeal, Masa Harina, baking mixes, canned vegetables, canned meat, shampoos, baby wipes, and toothpaste. For a full list, contact Macfarlan.

The group is also accepting new childrens books for infants, toddlers and pre-school children who have limited literacy in their homes.

Scholastic books will be on sale from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the GBC Child Center the same day. Children at the center will host a dessert and lemonade bar for the shoppers.

For more information, contact lynette.macfarlan@gbcnv.edu.

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Ambassador Nguyen Phuong Tra, Deputy Permanent Representative of Vietnam to the United Nations (UN) (Photo: VNA)



The Vietnamese diplomat further said that Vietnam had fulfilled its notification obligation under Article 2 of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) after the treaty officially came into force.



She also affirmed the right of the countries to research, develop and use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

Regarding the use of the outer space, the ambassador welcomed the adoption of a resolution by the UN General Assembly to establish an open-ended working group on outer space security, thereby providing recommendations on the norms, rules and principles of responsible behaviours of countries in the use of the outer space.



Participants at the meeting (Photo: VNA)



Meanwhile, Under-Secretary-General and High-Representative for Disarmament Affairs Izumi Nakamitsu emphasised the threat posed by nuclear weapons from the humanitarian and environmental perspective, saying that nothing could justify the use of weapons.



Countries should discuss the development of standards in this field in the context of more and more countries participating in the use of the outer space, Izumi said.



The UNDCs meeting takes place every year with the participation of representatives from all UN member states. This years meeting is scheduled to last until April 22./.




A photo of the missing citizen, Nguyen Hai Binh. (Photo: plo.vn)

The citizen, born in 1993, was a student of the Nong Lam University - Ho Chi Minh City (NLU). He participated in a study and work programme in Israel organised by the Arava International Center for Agriculture Training (AICAT) from August 2, 2016. Contact with him was lost on September 17, 2016.



Informed of the case by the NLU, the embassy considers it a priority for the citizen protection mission. During the search for the man, it has promptly worked with Israeli competent agencies as well as search and rescue units and the Vietnamese expatriate community in the country, while keeping a regular contact with AICAT.

Recently, the office of the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) in Israel announced that it had found a body with identity documents, verified to belong to the Vietnamese citizen, in the desert area of Naot Hakikar in Arava. Upon the announcement, the embassy worked with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the local police to coordinate the implementation of related citizen protection works.

According to the embassy, the forensic work is being completed and the Israeli side has confirmed that it will closely coordinate with Vietnam in handling the funeral matter.

The embassy will closely follow the case and work with relevant agencies and AICAT to soon draw an official conclusion; coordinate with domestic authorities to arrange the funeral according to wishes of the family; and take necessary measures to ensure the legitimate rights and interests of the Vietnamese citizen./.




Mayor of Toulouse Jean-Luc Moudenc receives Vietnamese Ambassador to France Dinh Toan Thang (L). (Photo: VNA)

The ambassador listed a series of potential fields for cooperation including industry, services, health, education-training, research, and high technology to contribute to recover after the pandemic.



According to the ambassador, Toulouse city has cooperated with Vietnam, particularly the capital Hanoi, many times, and the both sides have effectively implemented projects on archeology and cultural heritage preservation and promotion.

For his part, the mayor noted he is willing to work with Vietnam in fields of the sides advantages and pledged to increase cooperation with Hanoi and the union of French cities (Cites Unies France  CUF) to hold the 12th edition of a Vietnam-France conference of decentralised cooperation in Hanoi this December.

During his visit, the Vietnamese ambassador had a working session with the leader of Toulouse's chamber of commerce and industry to discuss measures to promote bilateral exchanges in trade, investment, and tourism.

Ambassador Dinh Toan Thang also visited the European multinational aerospace corporation Airbus and the French national centre for space studies CNES, and signed agreements to boost Vietnam-France collaboration in aviation industry, satellite manufacturing, digital transition, and human resources training in the high-tech field./.
Ambassador Ly Quoc Tuan meets the Vietnamese community in southern Shan state

Accordingly, on March 28, the delegation had a working session with the government, police, Immigration Department and Anti-Trafficking Police of Eastern Shan State when many cases of Vietnamese citizens were deported in the region in 2021, and visited some Vietnamese citizens who are being detained by Myanmar authorities because of illegal entry.

On March 30, the delegation met and visited representatives of 10 Vietnamese families currently residing in Tachilek town of Shan state. On this occasion, Ambassador Ly Quoc Tuan, on behalf of the Vietnam Fatherland Front and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, handed over support to representatives of families facing difficulties due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the days from March 26-31, the delegation visited and worked with Mytel and VCM businesses, and met Vietnamese citizens who are working and living in Taunggyi town, Kyaing Tong, Tachilek and Lashio.

At the meetings, Ambassador Ly Quoc Tuan learned about business, life and difficulties the Vietnamese businesses and citizens are facing.

The Ambassador informed overseas Vietnamese about the situation of the country, the Party and State's interest in the community, encouraged them to stabilize their lives, and expressed his hope that they would continue to promote the tradition of Vietnamese people, look towards the Fatherland and visit the homeland.

He also suggested that the government of the state and at all levels help Vietnamese citizens in the region. At the same time, they should create conditions for law-breaking citizens to be guaranteed their legitimate rights and interests, soon to be free, and to return to the country.

Representatives of overseas Vietnamese in Tachilek and groups of citizens in four towns reported to the Ambassador about the situation of business and living in the region, and expressed their sincere thanks for the concern of the Party, State and Embassy./.
By Trend

The Turkish Embassy will resume its work in the capital of Ukraine.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry resumed the work of the embassy in Kyiv after a month of evacuation in Chernivtsi, Trend reports.

"We temporarily moved our activities to Chernivtsi, which turned into our logistics center. And today we returned to our house, to Kyiv. From tomorrow we will continue our work, including the provision of consular services in our building at the address: st. Panas Mirny, 22," the embassy said in a Facebook post.

Turkey was the last embassy to leave Kyiv.
The ambassadors of the European Union have approved the access of the member states to funding in the amount of EUR3.5 billion to help Ukrainians who are fleeing the war unleashed by Russia.

"EU ambassadors endorsed a proposal giving member states immediate access to an additional EUR3.5 billion in funding, as well as facilitating the provision of basic needs and support for refugees from Ukraine. The money will be paid out this year under REACT-EU (Recovery Assistance for Cohesion and the Territories of Europe), one of the largest post-pandemic recovery programs aimed at reinforcing cohesion policy funds and the Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived (FEAD)," the report says.

"Member states with higher numbers of arrivals, as either transit countries or countries of final destination, will receive a larger share. The proposal makes it possible to alleviate the pressure on the public budgets of member states, so that they can deal with the inflow of refugees from Ukraine. To this end, the pre-financing from the 2021 tranche of REACT-EU will be increased from 11% to 15% for all member states, and from 11% to 45% for those EU countries where the inflow of refugees from Ukraine amounted to over 1% of their populations at the end of the first month following the Russian invasion," it reads.

"The countries which will receive 45% pre-financing are Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, which share a border with Ukraine, as well as Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Lithuania, which had accommodated a number of displaced persons equivalent to over 1% of their populations by March 23, 2022," according to the document.
Ukraine launches DO NOT sponsor murder international information campaign to boycott russian and belarusian goods and companies

Ukrainian government institutions have launched an international information campaign DO NOT sponsor murder to help businesses boycott russian and belarusian goods and services, reported Office of Entrepreneurship and Export Development in an official press release on Wednesday

The main idea of the project is:

to convey to foreign business the importance of boycotting russian and belarusian goods and services;

to contribute to the rapid and large-scale decline of the aggressor countries' economies;

to replace russian and belarusian goods and services with goods and services of countries that oppose the war in Ukraine, or in support of Ukraine's economy - with Ukrainian ones.

How can a foreign business join the campaign?

Refuse further cooperation with russian and belarusian counterparts.

Remove russian and belarusian goods from store shelves.

Replace russian and belarusian partners with partners of countries that oppose the war in Ukraine, or in support of Ukraine's economy  with Ukrainian ones. You can apply to find partners in Ukraine here https://imp.export.gov.ua/buy_ukrainian .

. Put one of the ticker options on the company's website:

We support the boycott of russian and belarusian products. Glory to Ukraine!

Support Ukrainians. Boycott russian and belarusian products

Use other DO NOT sponsor murder visuals on the company's social media

The initiators of the international information campaign DO NOT sponsor murder are the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, the Ukrainian State Institution Entrepreneurship and Export Promotion Office, the national project for entrepreneurship and export development Diia.Business, the Ministry of Economy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine.
War-conditioned change of crops for sowing to not be massive  UCAB

The traditional structure of spring crops in Ukraine consists of wheat (25% of all sown areas in 2021), sunflower (24%) and corn (20%), and the factors associated with Russia's military invasion will not lead to a change in this ratio in favor of other agricultural crops by more than 10-15% in 2022.

The corresponding forecast was published by the Ukrainian Agribusiness Club (UCAB) on its Facebook page on Wednesday.

According to the organization, usually agrarians preferred sowing to the most marginal crops, but the war partially changed priorities  many farmers plan to cultivate those crops that can support Ukraine's food security first of all.

"However, such a replacement will not exceed 10-15%, since farmers are preparing for the sowing campaign in advance and already have some of the necessary seeds, fertilizers and plant protection products, as well as appropriate equipment," the UCAB quotes its analyst Svitlana Lytvyn.

As reported, Minister of Agrarian Policy Mykola Solsky recommended that farmers sow crops with the maximum unit value in order to receive maximum revenue from their export by supplying relatively small batches of agricultural raw materials abroad. He clarified that these include sunflower, rapeseed and soybeans.

As of April 1, Ukraine sowed 600,000 hectares with basic agricultural crops, which is 4.4% of 13.44 million hectares planned for the current season.
Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine Kyrylo Shevchenko called on the heads of international non-banking financial groups to stop any activity of their subsidiaries and branches in the Russian Federation and Belarus and join international measures aimed at reducing the ability of the aggressor economy to finance military operations in Ukraine, according to regulator website.

"Any financial transactions with the institutions of these countries and, as a result, the payment of taxes to their budget will contribute to the financing of war crimes and terrorist acts against the civilian population of Ukraine," the National Bank said.

The regulator emphasizes that the war crimes exposed in the suburbs of Kyiv, the targeted destruction of entire cities, the undisguised propaganda of the genocide of Ukraine are evidence of the insufficiency of the sanctions imposed against the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus.

"Given this, it is extremely important to continue to increase pressure on the aggressors to weaken their positions," the report says.

Termination by non-banking financial groups of their activities in the markets of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus will contribute to strengthening the impact of the already existing economic sanctions of the world community.

"One of the main battles today is taking place on the financial front. The National Bank is taking measures aimed at ensuring the stability of the financial system of Ukraine under martial law. Another key task is to strengthen sanctions and external pressure on the economy of the Russian Federation and Belarus to reduce their ability to finance a war in our country," Shevchenko, who signed this appeal, emphasized.

As reported, on March 22, 2022, the National Bank of Ukraine appealed to international banking groups with a call to stop their activities in the Russian market.
UK to end all imports of Russian coal, oil by end of 2022 - Foreign Office

The United Kingdom will end all imports of Russian coal and oil by the end of 2022, and will end imports of gas as soon as possible, the British Foreign Office said in a statement.

"By the end of 2022, the UK will end all dependency on Russian coal and oil, and end imports of gas as soon as possible thereafter," the statement said.

From next week, the UK will ban the export of key oil refining equipment and catalysts, "degrading Russia's ability to produce and export oil," it also said.
Russia should unblock Ukrainian ports to allow export of agricultural products to Arab countries - Kuleba at meeting with reps of Arab Contact Group

Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba at a meeting with representatives of the Arab Contact Group stressed the importance of unblocking Ukrainian ports by the Russian side for the export of agricultural products to Arab countries.

"Today, I met with the Arab Contact Group. Grateful to Secretary-General of the Arab League Ahmed Aboul Gheit and my Arab counterparts for their diplomatic efforts. Russia must unlock Ukrainian seaports to allow agricultural exports to global markets, especially to Arab countries," Kuleba said on Twitter Tuesday.

As reported, Ukraine has consistently been in the top five world exporters of agricultural products in recent years. At the same time, 90% of exports were carried out through the ports of Odesa and Mykolaiv, which have been closed for more than a month since the beginning of full-scale aggression by the Russian Federation.
France to provide expert support to investigation of crimes of Russian invaders

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky held a telephone conversation with French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday.

In his traditional video message on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday, Zelensky said that they discussed "the humanitarian situation in the temporarily occupied regions of Ukraine, how we can help people in the blocked Mariupol."

"We agreed that France will provide the necessary expert support to the investigation of the crimes of Russian invaders in Bucha and other places of our country," Zelensky said.
By Trend

The United States and its allies will announce a sweeping new round of Russia-related sanctions on Wednesday, a source familiar with the planned announcement said, Trend reports citing Reuters.

The sanctions will ban on all new investments in Russia, increase curbs on financial institutions and state-owned enterprises in Russia, and target Russian government officials and their families, the source said on Tuesday.
US President orders to provide additional military assistance to Ukraine for $100 mln

U.S. President Joe Biden has ordered to provide $100 million in additional military aid to Ukraine, the White House has reported.

According to the memorandum released by the U.S. authorities, the equivalent of $100 million in assistance to Ukraine will include defense articles and services, military education and training.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the $100 million additional military aid to Ukraine also includes anti-armor systems.

According to his statement released by the U.S.Department of State, he authorized, pursuant to a delegation from the President earlier today, the immediate drawdown of security assistance valued at up to $100 million to meet Ukraine's urgent need for additional anti-armor systems."

On Monday, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the U.S. would announce more military aid to Ukraine in the coming days.

"Material is arriving every day, including today, from the United States and our Allies and partners. And we will have further announcements of additional military assistance in the coming days," Sullivan said during a White House press briefing.

He said that since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Russia, the United States has allocated weapons and ammunition to Ukraine in the amount of $1.65 billion.
Since the beginning of the fullscale invasion of the Russian Federation in Ukraine, 167 children have been killed, 279 injured, the press service of the Prosecutor General's Office (PGO) reports.

"As of the morning of April 6, 2022, more than 446 children were injured in Ukraine as a result of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation. At the same time, 167 children were killed and more than 279 were injured of varying severity. According to the data received, the most affected children were in Kyiv: 78, Donetsk: 81, Kharkiv: 64, Chernihiv: 49, Mykolaiv: 39, Luhansk: 31, Zaporizhia: 22, Kherson: 29, the capital: 16, Sumy: 16, and Zhytomyr: 15 regions," the message published on the Telegram channel on Wednesday reads.
On Tuesday, Ukrainian soldiers shot down eight enemy cruise missiles, the press service of the Air Force Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) has reported.

"During April 5, units of the anti-aircraft missile forces of the Air Force shot down eight cruise missiles," reads a message posted on Facebook on Wednesday night.

According to the report, "the enemy has changed the tactics of conducting combat operations in the air: it tries not to enter the zone of destruction of our air defense and does not make direct contact with fighters. It delivers missile strikes from the air, in particular from Belarusian airspace."
On Tuesday, the Ukrainian military destroyed up to 80 enemy personnel and 45 pieces of enemy equipment in the area of responsibility of the Skhid (East) task force.

"Ukrainian defenders continue to hold back the aggressor. In particular, on April 5, Russian troops launched one attack. Our artillery also inflicted fire damage on the personnel and equipment. During the fighting, our soldiers destroyed: personnel - up to 80; tanks - four (one was seized), armored personnel carriers - nine; infantry fighting vehicles  ten, mortars - 1; military vehicle BM-21  1 and artillery pieces  17.

Also, on Tuesday, the Ukrainian military repulsed nine enemy attacks and destroyed 53 pieces of equipment in the Donetsk and Luhansk directions, Joint Forces Operation headquarters said.

"Thanks to the skillful actions and competence of the military personnel of the Joint Forces grouping, 9 enemy attacks were successfully repulsed during the current day. Our soldiers inflicted damage on the Russian invaders. In particular, the Ukrainian defenders destroyed four tanks, 24 armored vehicles and 20 vehicles, five enemy artillery systems," the JFO HQ said.

In addition, Ukrainian soldiers seized one tank of the aggressor.

"Also, our soldiers of the Air Defense Unit in the sky of the Ukrainian Donbas shot down six unmanned aerial vehicles of the enemy," the JFO said.
China not in mood to indifferently watch situation in Ukraine, not to mention adding fuel to fire  representative to UN

China cannot remain indifferent watching the situation in Ukraine from the outside, not to mention adding fuel to the fire, Zhang Jun, Permanent Representative of China to the UN, has said.

"In the issue of Ukraine, China is not seeking geopolitical self-interest. We are not in the mood to watch the situation from the sidelines, not to mention adding fuel to the fire. There is only one goal that we sincerely desire, and that is peace. China will continue to promote peace talks and play a constructive and responsible role to help resolve the crisis in Ukraine," Jun said at a UN Security Council meeting on the situation in Ukraine in New York on Tuesday.

The diplomat said that China has provided and will continue to provide humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and neighboring countries.

"According to international law, civilians must be spared any form of violence in armed conflicts. Attacks on civilians are unacceptable and must not occur. The reports and images of civilian deaths in Bucha are very disconcerting, and the relevant circumstances and specific causes of the incident must be verified and established," Jun said.
Mass killings in occupied Ukrainian cities to be included in list of atrocities committed by Russia on European soil - EU permanent rep to UN

Mass killings with a large number of deaths and civilian casualties, as well as the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine shows the real face of Russia's brutal aggressive war against Ukraine, these massacres will be included in the list of atrocities committed by Russia on European soil, Olof Skoog, Head of the European Union delegation, said.

He said at a meeting of the UN Security Council on the situation in Ukraine in New York on Tuesday that they condemn in the strongest terms the atrocities committed by the Russian armed forces in a number of occupied Ukrainian cities. Haunting images of mass killings with a large number of deaths and civilian casualties, as well as the destruction of civilian infrastructure, show the real face of Russia's brutal aggressive war, he said, adding that those massacres will be included in the list of atrocities committed by Russia on European soil.

He stressed that the Russian authorities are responsible for these crimes committed while they held actual control over these territories.

Skoog explained that they are a subject of the international law of occupation.

The diplomat added that the EU condemns in the strongest terms Russia's unjustified and unprovoked aggressive war against Ukraine.

Skoog said they demand that Russia immediately cease its military aggression, immediately and unconditionally withdraw its troops from the entire territory of Ukraine and fully respect the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders, as required by the UN General Assembly.

The Ambassador called on Russia to stop attacks on civilians and shelling of civilian objects, including hospitals, medical institutions, schools and shelters.

Skoog said that these war crimes must stop immediately, adding that the perpetrators will be brought to justice in accordance with international law.
More than 400 residents of the town of Hostomel, Bucha district, Kyiv region, have been reported missing after 35 days of Russian occupation, Head of the Hostomel town military administration Taras Dumenko has said.

"We are now inspecting the basements of Hostomel together with the State Emergency Service and patrol police. We have about 1,200 residents, with whom contact has been confirmed and who have told us about the whereabouts of those who have left," Dumenko said in an interview with Hromadske Radio.

According to him, not many bodies of killed residents were found in Hostomel, but the killed residents of the town were found in the villages of the Hostomel amalgamated territorial community and in the neighboring town of Bucha.

"You have to understand that the invaders moved people around. We have confirmed information that people from Hlebivka traveled to Hostomel before communication with them ended," he said.

Dumenko also said that the Russians cleaned up the traces of their atrocities.

"You could move in the direction of Hostomel and along the road, where there were shot up cars and corpses, including dead children. And you could drive back and these bodies were gone. My hypothesis is that the more at ease the invaders felt in some areas, away from the front line, the more carefully they covered their traces," he said.

He said that in Hostomel, Russian troops killed the head of the settlement, Yuriy Prylypko, along with volunteers Ruslan Karpenko and Ivan Zoria, whose dead bodies were found.

"We have a doctor who provided medical care for 35 days in Hostomel, when the town was occupied and under shelling. Her husband and son were taken away from her 12 days ago. We are still looking for them. In addition, we are looking for the body of the fire chief of Hostomel's airport," Dumenko said.

According to his estimates, about 5,000 now live in the Hostomel community, which, in addition to Hostomel, includes the villages of Horenka, Moschun and Ozera.

In 2020, 25,800 inhabitants lived in the community, and 16,900 in Hostomel.
President of the European Council Charles Michel has said that war crimes committed by the Russian occupiers in Ukraine will have severe consequences, and those responsible will face international justice.

"We express our outrage at crimes against humanity, against innocent civilians in Bucha and in many other cities. Yet more proof that Russian brutality against the people of Ukraine has no limits... Bodies littered in the streets, mass graves, this is not a special operation, these are war crimes," he said on Wednesday in Strasbourg, speaking to the deputies of the European Parliament within the framework of the plenary meetings.

Michel assured that "the EU will not turn our backs (from what is happening), we will look reality straight in the eye. There must be and there will be severe consequences for all those responsible. We are already supporting all efforts to collect the evidence and we will do everything, everything we can to bring the perpetrators to justice. International justice will be served," the President of the European Council said.
EU considers it possible to grant asylum to Russian soldiers who drop their arms

President of the European Council Charles Michel believes that the European Union can grant asylum to those Russian soldiers who will drop their arms and not kill Ukrainians.

"I've one message for the Russian soldiers on the battlefield: if you want no part in killings of your Ukrainian brothers and sisters, if you dont want to be a criminal, drop your arms, stop fighting, leave the battlefield," he told the Russian soldiers from the rostrum of the European Parliament.

He said that he is aware that some members of the European Parliament have suggested granting asylum for those Russian soldiers who disobey Russian orders. In my opinion, this is a valuable idea that should be pursued," Michel said.
With the Saudi sovereign wealth fund Public Investment Fund (PIF) pushing for more projects spurred by improved macroeconomic fundamentals and the uptick in contract awards over five consecutive quarters, industry experts believe the kingdom's construction market will soon be back to its pre-pandemic levels this year, reported Arab News.

This push is mainly the result of the PIF spending on big-ticket developments like Neom and The Red Sea Project as well as the increase in capital investments by Saudi Aramco, which plans to raise its oil and gas production capacity further, they stated. In 2021, the contracts industry registered a 78% rise in activities when compared to 2020 and this upward momentum is expected to continue in 2022 as well, according to the US-Saudi Business Council.

The increase last year, however, was still below the levels the industry saw in 2013 and 2014 during the boom in oil prices, it stated.

The region will witness considerable investments in the medium to the long run with government entities such as the PIF and policies such as the National Investment Strategy injecting liquidity into sectors will result in further growth, according to the industry experts.
After what the world saw in Bucha sanctions against Russia must be commensurate with gravity of its war crimes  Zelensky

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has said that sanctions against Russia should be commensurate with the war crimes committed by it.

"After what the world saw in Bucha, sanctions against Russia must be commensurate with the gravity of the occupiers' war crimes. If after that Russian banks will still be able to function as usual... If after that the transit of goods to Russia will continue as usual... If after that the EU countries will pay for Russian energy resources as usualThen the political fate of some leaders will develop not as usual," he said in a video address late on Tuesday.

"Now is a crucial moment, especially for Western leaders," Zelensky said, adding that "this is about how decisions on sanctions will be assessed in Western societies themselves My advice to everyone: feel now that the moment is really crucial," he said.
UK National Health Service will hand over about 20 ambulances to the government of Ukraine, the UK government has announced.

"The donation of around 20 NHS ambulances will help bring vital lifesaving care to Ukrainians remaining in towns and cities under attack from Russian bombardments. This donation will help replace those Ukrainian ambulances lost to Russian attacks, bolstering the existing fleets resilience as the barbaric war goes on, " the British government said on its website Wednesday.

The first ambulances will arrive this week in Lviv, from where they will be delivered to the most needy areas.

"We have sadly seen day after day the horrific impacts of Putins cruel war on the people of Ukraine, including evidence of appalling acts by Russian troops in towns such as Irpin and Bucha. The UK has been among the biggest aid donors, providing food, medicines and generators to help those affected. These world class NHS ambulances will now help bring lifesaving care directly to those injured in the conflict, " British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said.

The government noted that the UK had already allocated about GBP 400 million of aid to Ukraine in connection with the Russian war, including GBP 220 million for humanitarian aid.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen assures that the new package of sanctions proposed by the European Commission against Russia for its war against Ukraine will not be the last sanctions.

Speaking in the European Parliament on Wednesday, the President of the European Commission informed the deputies about the latest proposals, among which, in particular, is a proposal to introduce a ban on buying Russian coal. "These sanctions will not be our last sanctions. Yes, we will ban coal imports, but now we have to look into oil and revenues the Russia gets from fossil fuels (oil and gas). This will be our next step that we will take," she said.

The President of the European Commission is convinced that the EU must get rid of "our dependence on (Russian) fossil fuels, and for this we must diversify supplies." She called the supply of liquefied natural gas from the United States and the transition to green energy such diversification.
Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba welcomes the strengthening of the package of sanctions against the Russian Federation, but emphasizes that the measures taken are still not enough.

"I appreciate the strengthening of the 5th EU sanctions package: bans on Russian coal, vessels accessing EU ports, and road transport operators. But it will take a gas/oil embargo and de-SWIFTing of all Russian banks to stop Putin. Difficult times require difficult decisions," Kuleba wrote on Twitter.
NATO allies will discuss further financial, humanitarian and military support for Ukraine at a meeting in Brussels on April 6-7, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said.

"Allies will discuss how we can further support Ukraine. This is partly about financial support, partly about humanitarian support, but also of course, partly about military support both non-lethal and lethal military support which allies have provided for several years, " Stoltenberg said at a press conference ahead of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels on Tuesday.

The Secretary General did not specify which systems he was talking about.

"But it's well known that we speak about advanced weapon systems, we speak about for instance, javelins and other anti-tank weapons, which have proven extremely effective on the battlefield. If there's anything we have seen is that these relatively light weapons have a huge impact. And when we see all the pictures from the destroyed Russian armour, this is first and foremost the result of these weapons. And of course, the courage of the soldiers who are carrying them, " Stoltenberg said.

He noted that the meeting of NATO Foreign Ministers on Thursday will be attended by Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba, who will inform about the latest developments, including Kyiv's negotiations with Moscow.

"And I expect that he will address the needs that Ukraine have or has to reinforce their troops and to make sure that they continue to push back and to provide fierce resistance against the invading Russian troops, " Stoltenberg added.

The Secretary General said that at the same time, the allies agree that NATO should not send NATO troops to Ukraine and should not send NATO aircraft into Ukrainian airspace.

"And that's because we also have the responsibility to prevent a war between Russia and NATO. That will cause more deaths, more destruction, and even more dangers. So yes, we will discuss how we can further support, what more we can do to support Ukraine, including what kind of costs, additional costs, we can put on Russia. I welcome that allies are discussing more sanctions, but I don't expect any Ally to be in favour of sending NATO troops into Ukraine, " he stressed.
Russian mobile crematoria have been launched in the partially occupied city of Mariupol, Donetsk region to cover up the war crimes of Russia-occupation forces, the Mariupol City Council said on Telegram on Wednesday.

"The murderers are covering their tracks. Russian mobile crematoria have begun operating in Mariupol. After the wide international publicity of the genocide in Bucha, the top leadership of Russia ordered to destroy any evidence of is war crimes in Mariupol," the report says.

The city council recalled that a week ago, cautious estimates indicated 5,000 dead civilians in the city, but given the size of the city, destruction, the duration of the blockade and tough resistance, the number of killed civilians could reach tens of thousands.

"The world has not seen the scale of the tragedy in Mariupol since the existence of the Nazi concentration camps. Russia-occupation forces turned our entire city into a death camp. Unfortunately, we can compare the situation to what happened in Chechnya or Aleppo. This is the new Auschwitz and Majdanek. The world must help punish Putin's monsters," Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko said.

According to the report, Russians are trying to identify all potential witnesses of the atrocities of the invaders through the filtration camps and destroy them.

To destroy the bodies of the dead, Russia-occupation forces have created special brigades, staffed by local collaborators and so-called terrorists from the so-called "Donetsk People's Republic." Self-proclaimed collaborator and "mayor" Konstiantyn Ivaschenko is coordinating the work of these groups, the city council said.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky thanked Ireland for supporting the special fast-track procedure for granting Ukraine's membership in the European Union and invited her to participate in the restoration of Kherson region.

"From the first days of the Russian invasion, you have been on the side of good, on the side of freedom, on the side of Ukraine. You didn't hesitate to help us. You immediately began to help. And although you are a neutral country, you have not remained neutral to the grief and suffering that Russia has brought to the Ukrainians. I am grateful to all of you for this," he said on Wednesday, speaking via video link to Parliament and the people of Ireland.

"I am grateful to the leadership of your state, and to every Irishman. Grateful for supporting sanctions against Russia. I am grateful for the humanitarian and financial aid provided to us. Grateful for your special concern for our people who have sought and found safety on the land of Ireland," the President said, adding: "Our mutual understanding and mutual respect is already at a level where it can be said that it is only a matter of time before we live together in our common European home. I am grateful to you for supporting the special fast-track procedure for granting Ukraine's membership in the European Union. With your leadership, it will be even faster and more profitable for both our nations."

Noting that "we should already think about the restoration of our country, about the resumption after the war," Zelensky invited Ireland to participate in the restoration of Ukraine, "for example, in our Kherson region."
Pope Francis has been handed the flag of Ukraine from Bucha.

"Ever more horrendous cruelties [are occurring], even against civilians, women, and helpless children. They are victims whose innocent blood cries out to heaven and implores. May this war cease! May weapons fall silent. Stop sowing death and destruction," the Vatican News agency quotes the pontiff as saying at a general audience on Wednesday.

He also invited everyone to pray in silence for a moment to ask God for this intention.

The Pope said that on Tuesday he had received a Ukrainian flag from the town of Bucha.

"The flag came from war, from that martyred city of Bucha. These children had to flee, and have come to a strange land. This is one of the fruits of war. Let us not forget them, and let us not forget the Ukrainian people, "he said.
Stefanchuk invites PACE to organize mission to establish, collect facts of Russia's crimes in Ukraine for intl courts

At a meeting with President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Tiny Kox in Lviv, Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Ruslan Stefanchuk suggested that PACE organize a mission to establish and collect facts of Russia's crimes in Ukraine for international courts.

"I proposed PACE to organize a mission to establish and collect the facts of Russia's crimes in Ukraine for international courts. I hope for help in bringing the aggressor to justice. I also look forward to an ongoing assessment of the human rights situation in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine," Stefanchuk said, whose words are quoted on the Verkhovna Rada's Telegram channel on Wednesday.

He stressed that this is Kox's first visit to Ukraine.

"We met in Lviv to discuss the consequences of Russia's aggression against Ukraine and the best ways for the Council of Europe to support Ukraine," Stefanchuk said.

In turn, Kox indicated that he discussed with Stefanchuk the role of PACE in eliminating the consequences of Russian aggression against Ukraine, including war crimes committed by Russian troops, and ensuring the post-war reconstruction of Ukraine.

"A constructive meeting with Verhovna Rada Speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk in Lviv, discussing the role of PACE in addressing the consequences of the Russian aggression against Ukraine (including the war crimes committed by the Russian forces) and assuring post-war reconstruction," Kox said on Twitter on Wednesday.
Prosecutors, SBU officers and experts from the Research Institute of Forensic Examinations are documenting war crimes committed by the Russian armed forces in Bucha and Borodianka, Kyiv region, Kyiv regional prosecutor's office reports.

"During armed aggression, the enemy inflicted numerous blows on the peaceful city of Borodianka. Air bombardments, shelling from rocket artillery systems, as well as prohibited cluster munitions  the settlement was under constant attacks by the occupiers," the regional prosecutor's office said on the Telegram channel on Wednesday.

According to the prosecutor's office, due to daily shelling, private and multi-storey residential buildings, schools, kindergartens, medical institutions, churches, shops, garages and storage facilities have been completely or partially destroyed. Civil and municipal vehicles were also damaged.

The report notes that there are no military facilities near the places where the shells hit.

"Currently, a number of criminal proceedings have been opened on violations of the laws and customs of war [Article 438 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine]. As part of the pretrial investigation, a comprehensive examination has been appointed to establish the volume of destruction and damage to movable and immovable property, the assessment of material damage," the prosecutor's office informs.
Gulf Insurance Group, the largest insurance group in Kuwait, is set to distribute 35% (35 fils per share) cash dividends for the year ended December 31, 2021, which is equal to KD9.9 million ($32.4 million) to the company's shareholders.

The announcement was made at the Ordinary General Assembly Meeting held today (April 6) under the chairmanship of Farqad Abdullah Al Sane.

With an attendance of 91.73%, shareholders approved the board's recommendation to distribute cash dividends of 35% (35 fils per share) for the year ended 31 December 2021.

During the meeting, the group also reviewed the 2021 results as well as forecasts for 2022.

On the solid results, Al Sane said: "GIG had done remarkably well. We had reported a net profit of KD50.2 million ($166.2 million) and earnings per share of 223.68 fils, for the year ended December 31, 2021, compared to KD16.3 million ($54 million) registered last year with a significant growth of 207%. "

The consolidated gross written premiums, recorded a growth of 23 percent reaching KD 548.5 million

($1.81 billion) compared to KD444.4 million ($1.47 billion) last year, while the total assets recorded a growth of 69% reaching KD1.4 billion ($4.5 billion) compared to KD800.7 million ($2.65 billion) last year, stated Al Sane.

An interim cash dividend of 71% (71 fils per share) had already been distributed in 2021, thus taking the total cash dividends to 106 fils per share for the year 2021 equal to KD30.08 million, he added.
Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine Iryna Vereschuk called on representatives of international legal organizations to join the release of Ukrainian hostages.

"Currently, there are about 600 Russian prisoners in Ukraine. We are continuously negotiating their exchange for our defenders. We draw up lists, involve the International Committee of the Red Cross in the process. But there is also a separate problem. The Russians are holding hostage not only the military, but also many Ukrainian civilians: mayors of cities, journalists, volunteers, clergymen, ordinary workers who have never taken up arms," Vereschuk is quoted by the ministry's press service.

The Deputy Prime Minister stressed that the Russian side puts a condition: the military  for the military, civilians  for civilians.

"I constantly ask negotiators from the Russian side: should we also capture Russians around the world to put them up as an exchange fund? But we are not terrorists or pirates, so we will not act like that," she added.

Vereschuk also accused Russia of non-compliance with international humanitarian law. "The exchange of military for civilians is prohibited by the Geneva Convention. Therefore, I appeal to the international community and human rights organizations with a demand to work together to achieve the release of Ukrainian civilians from the occupiers! This is the only way out in this situation," the Deputy Prime Minister concluded.
Russian troops in the occupied Ukrainian territories are massively kidnapping Ukrainian civilians for further representation as prisoners of war (POWs), Liudmyla Denisova, Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights, has said.

"There is evidence that, while retreating from Kyiv region, Russian troops abducted Ukrainian civilians, who are now shown in the Russian media as 'prisoners' of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Our citizens were dressed in military uniforms and forced to participate in propaganda videos on YouTube and TV channels. One of the men on the video were identified by his relatives," Denisova wrote on the Telegram channel on Wednesday.

Also, a Ukrainian soldier released from Russian captivity reported on the mass capture of civilians, who stated that there were more than 40 civilian prisoners in the Kursk pretrial detention center.

In addition, the Russian media began to disseminate information about the alleged liquidation of 93 "Ukrainian deserters" from Mariupol, who fled in civilian clothes.

"In fact, this may indicate a mass execution of civilians in Ukraine," the Ombudsperson said.

She stressed that such actions of the Russian Federation are a war crime and a crime against humanity in accordance with Articles 7 and 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and a direct violation of Articles 3 and 34 of the Geneva Convention for the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, Articles 9 and 21 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

"I call on the UN Commission to Investigate Human Rights Violations During Russia's Invasion of Ukraine and the expert mission established by the OSCE participating States in accordance with the Moscow Mechanism to take into account these crimes and human rights violations of the Russian Federation in Ukraine," Denisova urged.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says that during her visit to Ukraine later this week, she intends to convey to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky the assurance that Europe stands together with Ukraine.

Speaking in the European Parliament on Wednesday, the President of the European Commission recalled recent events, in particular, the brutality of the Russian occupiers in Bucha.

"They killed everyone when they left. This is what is happening. When Putin's soldiers occupy the Ukrainian territory, they call it liberation. No, we call it the crime of war. And we really should give it that name," von der Leyen said emotionally. These words were met with applause.

She informed the deputies that together with Ukraine the EU has set up a joint investigation team to collect evidence and testimonies of these crimes.

"We will bring to justice those who are guilty of war crimes. The criminals must be punished. After Bucha, more than ever, Europe stands together with Ukraine... We will do everything in our power to ensure that refugees can safely return home. I will bring this message to Zelensky at the end of this week," von der Leyen said.

Speaking about the upcoming event that the EU will hold in Warsaw this Saturday, together with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the participation of Polish President Andrzej Duda, the President of the European Commission recalled that it is aimed at gathering refugees in and outside Ukraine and is called Stand Up for Ukraine.

"And we are doing this together with international organizations. We are mobilizing support for those fleeing Ukraine. Together with us, citizens, representatives of sports, civil society, such artists as Bono, U2, Madonna will stand up for Ukraine. They will call on governments and the business community to join our efforts. The brave people of Ukraine deserve solidarity around the world. Glory to Ukraine!" she concluded her speech.

<<< back
As of April 6, as a result of the Russian armed aggression in Kharkiv region, some 21 children were killed, another 50 children were wounded, the press service of the regional prosecutor's office has said.

"In Kharkiv region, since the beginning of the war, the occupiers have killed 21 children, wounded another 50," the prosecutor's office said.

According to the agency, as a result of regular bombardments and shelling by invaders in Kharkiv, some 156 educational institutions were damaged (including 83 schools, 61 kindergartens, nine institutions of out-of-school education, three buildings of education departments). One school and three kindergartens were completely destroyed.

On the territory of the region, as a result of shelling, some 15 educational institutions were damaged (including 12 schools, two kindergartens, one technical school). At least two schools and one kindergarten were completely destroyed.

The prosecutor's office said these data are not final, since it is not possible to inspect the places of shelling in areas of active hostilities and in the temporarily occupied territories.

"The collection and recording of evidence of war crimes by the occupiers continues. In all criminal proceedings initiated on violations of the laws and customs of war, proper procedural guidance is provided by the prosecutor's office of the region. We assure you that all those responsible will suffer inevitable punishment," the prosecutor's office press service said in the statement.
This was announced today by the Minister of Internal Affairs Denys Monastyrsky.

The executions of civilians by the Russian military were documented (images and videos) and demonstrated to the world during a UN Security Council meeting following a speech by the President of Ukraine and published in all major international media.

Russian war crimes in Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel and other settlements of Kyiv region have been condemned by officials of 45 countries at the level of heads of state, heads of government, parliaments and foreign ministries, as well as the most authoritative international organizations such as the UN, EU, NATO and OSCE. The European Union has introduced the 5th package of economic sanctions against Russia," said Denys Monastyrsky.

Together with the National Police, the Prosecutor's Office and the Security Service of Ukraine, the Ministry of Internal Affairs records Russian war crimes and gathers evidence together with victims and witnesses.

The Minister also noted that the military of the National Guard of Ukraine, conducting reconnaissance during the liberation near one of the settlements of the former Borodyanka area, found the headquarters of one of the battalion tactical groups (BTG) of the enemy.

Among the documents, the fighters found a book of staff records, a list of personnel, combat and numerical calculations, as well as a table of call signs of this BTG. Therefore, the criminals are already known by name," said Denys Monastyrsky.

The personal data of looters who sent home loot from the Ukrainian cities of Irpin, Bucha and Hostomel from the Belarusian city of Mozyr also became known.

In total, since the beginning of the war, Ukrainian police have recorded almost 5,000 violations of the laws and customs of war and encroachments on the territorial integrity of Ukraine.
EXANTE, an international broker licensed in Cyprus and active in the Ukrainian markets, announced a $1 million donation to UNICEF to help children and families affected by the ongoing war in Ukraine.

"Our company was founded on the belief that freedom is an inherent human right, and at times like these it's more important than ever. As a result, our shareholders feel compelled to take action - after all, actions speak louder than words. Whilst we cannot change what's happening, together with our colleagues and clients we hope that the money donated will truly make a difference and help the thousands of children and families affected," Alexey Kirienko, the CEO of EXANTE, said.

"UNICEF is rapidly scaling up its humanitarian response in Ukraine and in neighboring countries. To date, UNICEF has delivered 858 tonnes of emergency supplies, including health supplies, hygiene kits, education and recreation supplies for children and adolescents, in addition to winter clothing," the report says.

"UNICEF is appealing for $349 million to provide critical life-saving support for children and their families. This includes $ 276 million to respond to immediate needs within Ukraine and $ 73 million for humanitarian needs in neighboring countries. This funding will help to support over 3.5 million people, including 2.2 million children," it states.

Founded in 2011, EXANTE describes itself as a wealth-tech company providing centralized investment solutions and infrastructure for financial institutions. The company employs over 500 people and manages $1.6 billion.
Head of the President's Office Andriy Yermak and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valeriy Zaluzhny had a conversation with U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley.

"Together with the Commander-in-Chief, General Valeriy Zaluzhny, we had a conversation with U.S. President National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley. I'm grateful for a frank and meaningful conversation," Yermak wrote on the Telegram social network.

As reported, on April 3, Zaluzhny had a telephone conversation with Milley. During the conversation, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine shared with the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff his assessments of the operational situation in Ukraine against the backdrop of the Russian invasion and noted the needs of the Ukrainian army during the defense.
The Security Service of Ukraine exposed and detained enemy informants in a number of regions of Ukraine.

An agent of the special services of the Russian Federation collecting intelligence on the location of strategically important objects and military units in the region, was exposed in the Dnipropetrovsk region, speaker of the Ukrainian special services Artem Dekhtiarenko reported in the SBU Telegram channel on Wednesday.

"In Sumy, the chairman of one of the city's public organizations turned out to be an agent of the special services of the Russian Federation, who was trying to hand over lists with the data of Ukrainian patriots and fighters of the local territorial defense to the occupiers," the SBU spokesman said.

According to him, two enemy informants who collected data on the places of deployment and movement of Ukrainian troops with reference to the terrain, were detained in Donetsk region.

In addition, as Dekhtiarenko said, the SBU continues to document the criminal activities of collaborators in the temporarily occupied territory of the state.

In particular, according to him, it concerns the former head of the Stanychno-Luhanska settlement community, as well as the so-called "chairman of the Volnovakha city council of the DPR" and one of the local deputies of the Opposition Platform for Life, who headed the "Volniansky village council" under the occupation administration of the Russian Federation.
Germany cannot immediately stop buying Russian energy, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said.

Everybody knows that the country's current dependency on Russian energy can't be stopped instantly, Scholz said in reply to questions from German parliament members in the Bundestag on Wednesday.

German Finance Minister Christian Lindner said earlier that the country sought to get rid of its dependency on Russia in the field of energy as soon as possible.
The Turkish embassy has returned from Chernivtsi to Kyiv, the Embassy of the Republic of Turkey in Ukraine reports.

"Dear citizens and friends of Ukraine, we have temporarily moved our activities to the city of Chernivtsi, which has become our logistics center for evacuation. Today, we have returned home to Kyiv. From tomorrow, we will continue our activities, including consular services, from our building at 22 Panas Myrny Street," the message published on Wednesday night says.

As reported, on March 11, the Turkish embassy moved from Kyiv to Chernivtsi.
Nutanix, a leader in private cloud, hybrid and multicloud computing, has named Mandy Dhaliwal as Chief Marketing Officer and Shyam Desirazu as Head of Engineering.

Each brings more than two decades of experience building and scaling high performing, mission-driven organisations. They will both report to Rajiv Ramaswami, the Chief Executive Officer at Nutanix.

Both Mandy and Shyam are exceptional leaders with proven technological savvy and unique insight into what it takes to build and drive industry leading solutions that meet the needs of the market, said Ramaswami.

Next phase of growth

The addition of Mandy and Shyam to our organisation will be instrumental in driving our vision as Nutanix continues its next phase of growth.

I am very excited about the opportunity to take Nutanixs industry leading cloud platform to market and showcase how we uniquely enable enterprises to modernise their applications and digitally transform their businesses with speed, simplicity and efficiency, said Dhaliwal. As we move steadily into a hybrid multicloud era, I will be laser focused on driving long-term sustainable growth for the Nutanix business and tangible value for our customers.

Dhaliwal brings to Nutanix more than 25 years of experience in driving growth and innovation strategies across the cloud and software markets, and building high performing, mission-driven organisations.

Global marketing strategy

In this role, she will work closely with the companys executive leadership team to drive a global marketing strategy that will accelerate the adoption of Nutanixs enterprise hybrid multicloud solutions. Most recently, Dhaliwal was the Chief Marketing Officer for Boomi, where she was responsible for leading, planning and executing the company's global go-to-market, brand presence, product marketing, demand generation, partner marketing, field marketing, customer advocacy, strategic events and corporate communications functions.

Dhaliwals career experience spans high profile positions at venture-backed startups, high-growth businesses and large public corporations. Before joining Boomi, she served as Fugues CMO, and held senior marketing leadership positions at BlazeMeter, SOASTA, EMC, and Legato Systems.

Many businesses today are grappling with the reality of multicloud deployments, said Desirazu. I believe that hybrid multicloud is the future and that Nutanixs fast-moving culture of innovation is uniquely positioned to help customers navigate todays cloud complexities, while deploying solutions that help to future-proof IT. The opportunity to lead and build Nutanixs engineering organisation as the industry evolves towards this future is incredibly exciting.

Driving technology

In this role, Desirazu will work in close partnership with Ramaswami and Nutanixs executive leadership team to evolve and drive the companys technology and platform vision, roadmap, innovation strategy, and R&D investments across the portfolio. He will own the engineering function of the organisation and will play an essential role in driving the future growth of the business.

With more than 20 years of experience building and scaling world class engineering teams, Desirazu brings deep technical and leadership expertise from positions across early-stage startups, high-growth businesses and large public enterprises. He has a proven track-record of building, deploying and managing cloud-based services and an extensive systems background with broad technical expertise, especially in core storage. Most recently, he was Vice President of Engineering for VMware Cloud on AWS at VMware. In this role, he led the engineering team that built VMware Cloud on AWS as well as other cloud solutions.

Prior to that, he served as Senior Vice President of Engineering at BlueTalon focused on building the global development organisation and defining the product design, strategic partnership and engineering processes. He also has held engineering leadership positions at Panzura, Zynga, Citrix and Netapp.

-- TradeArabia News Service
Humanitarian supplies not allowed in Mariupol so that world does not see what happening there

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky is confident that humanitarian supplies from the Ukrainian side are not allowed into Mariupol because the Russian side is afraid that "the world will see what is happening there."

"They are all afraid that the world will see what is there. Therefore, we cannot bring in humanitarian supplies. There are not dozens, but thousands of dead, thousands of wounded," he said on Wednesday in an interview with the Turkish Haberturk TV channel.

"We do not know how many Mariupol residents ended this life tragically. But they can't hide it. It's thousands of people, it's impossible to do. We will see this when we can enter our city," the President believes.

Answering a question about responsibility for crimes against civilians, Zelensky said: "The Russian army and political leadership, everyone who developed this operation, gave orders and carried them out  all are war criminals. Everyone must be held accountable."
Civilian casualties from February 24, when Russia started the war against Ukraine, to 24:00 on April 5 amounted to 3,776 civilians (3,675 in a report a day earlier), including 1,563 dead (1,480), the Office of the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights reports on Wednesday.

"OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration," the document said.

This concerns, for example, Mariupol and Volnovakha (Donetsk region), Izium (Kharkiv region), Popasna (Luhansk region), and Borodianka (Kyiv region), where there are allegations of numerous civilian casualties. These figures are being further corroborated and are not included in the above statistics.

"Most of the civilian casualties recorded were caused by the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multiple launch rocket systems, and missile and air strikes," the report notes.

According to confirmed UN data, 379 men, 237 women, 43 boys and 24 girls died, while the sex of 63 children and 817 adults has not yet been determined.

Among the 2,213 wounded, there are 44 girls and 40 boys, as well as 104 children, whose sex has not yet been determined.

Compared to the previous day, seven children were killed and five injured, according to the UN.

In Donetsk and Luhansk regions: 1,567 casualties (487 killed and 1,080 injured); on government-controlled territory: 1,241 casualties (420 killed and 821 injured); and on territory controlled by the self-proclaimed "republics": 326 casualties (67 killed and 259 injured).

In other regions of Ukraine (the city of Kyiv, and Cherkasy, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Sumy, Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Zhytomyr regions), which were under Government control when casualties occurred: 2,209 casualties (1,076 killed and 1,133 injured).

OHCHR notes the report of the Prosecutor Generals Office of Ukraine, according to which as of 8 a.m. 6 April (local time), 167 children had been killed and at least 279 injured.

The increase in indicators in this report compared to the figures in the previous report should not be attributed only to new cases that occurred on April 5, since OHCHR also verified a number of cases that occurred in previous days during the day, the document specifies. However, the increase in the number of deaths compared to the previous report is one of the largest in the entire war.
Five killed, eight more wounded in Donetsk region as result of enemy shelling

As of the evening of April 6, five people were killed in Donetsk region as a result of enemy shelling, eight people more were wounded, Head of the regional military administration Pavlo Kyrylenko has said.

"Today, the Russians are again most active in the center and south of the region. In the morning, the enemy cynically fired at the civilians of Vuhledar, who came to receive humanitarian aid. As a result of the shelling, four people were killed and four more were wounded. Ocheretianska community came under shelling twice, it is known about one killed person, at least six residential buildings, a kindergarten and non-residential premises were damaged," he said on Facebook.

In Maryinska community, as a result of shelling, four civilians were wounded, two houses were damaged.

In addition, enemy troops opened fire in the direction of Hrodivka and Novohrodivka
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said that negotiations are currently underway regarding Turkey's mediating role in the evacuation of the wounded from Mariupol on ships.

"The mediation mission [between Ukraine and Russia] will be carried out by certain leaders. Turkey is one of them. Today we are talking about taking out wounded people from Mariupol. And it is too early to talk about the result of this operation. It is open, and here there is an intermediary role of Turkey, because we plan to do this on the ships of the Republic of Turkey. And that's why such things are needed," Zelensky said in an interview with the Turkish Haberturk TV channel.

He added that "no matter how much Ukraine wants or does not want negotiations with Russia, daily steps must be taken to save people's lives as much as possible."

"We must find even small opportunities for negotiations with the Russian Federation. Without this, it is difficult to end the war. Although there is no desire to negotiate after what we saw in Bucha," he said.

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There are 42 days of Ukraine's heroic opposition to the Russian military invasion, the enemy continues to prepare for an offensive operation in the east in order to establish full control of the territory of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine has said.

"The Russian invaders are regrouping troops and reconnaissance, trying to improve the tactical position of individual units in Yuzhnobuzhsk task area and gain a foothold on the administrative borders of Kherson region. The enemy is concentrating the main efforts on offensive operations in order to break through the defense of the Joint Forces grouping in Donetsk direction. It is also trying to take under full control of the city of Mariupol," the General Staff said on Facebook.

The units of the Eastern military district, withdrawn to the territory of Gomel region, are completing the regrouping. The movement of enemy units to railway stations for loading and subsequent redeployment is noted.

"In order to increase the efficiency of overturning military cargoes, the enemy started to use railway communication. The arrival of railway echelons with weapons and military equipment from Valuyki station (Russia) to Kupyansk railway station (Ukraine) was recorded," the General Staff said.

The preparation and movement of units of the troops of the Russian armed forces to the territory of Ukraine continues. According to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the enemy plans to move units of the 38th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 35th combined arms army of the Eastern military district from the territory of Belarus to Belgorod region. The movement of individual units of the Central military district to this area is also recorded.

The enemy also continues to block Kharkiv. The enemy is regrouping with the forces of individual units of the 20th combined arms and first tank armies of the Western military district.

In Donetsk and Luhansk directions, the main efforts of the enemy are concentrated on combat operations in the areas of Popasna, Rubizhne and the establishment of control over the city of Mariupol, and also continues to fire in most directions.

"The assault on the city of Mariupol continues, the enemy is actively using aircraft," the General Staff said.

In Pivdennobuzk direction, the enemy continues to shell the settlements of Scherbaky, Komyshuvakha, Novodanylivka, Mala Tokmachka, Huliaypilske, Lukyanivske, Preobrazhenka and Huliay Pole. As a result of the offensive actions of the units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the enemy lost control over the settlement of Osokorivka.
All-Ukrainian Council of Churches calls on world community to recognize actions of Russia in Ukraine as genocide of Ukrainian people

The All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations calls on the international community to recognize the actions of the Russian army in Ukraine, in particular, in the settlements of Kyiv region, as genocide of the Ukrainian people.

"The whole of Ukraine and the whole world were horrified by the numerous facts of the bullying and inhuman cruelty that Russian soldiers committed against innocent civilians in the captured cities of Kyiv region. A month of temporary occupation by Russian troops of Bucha, Irpen, Hostomel and the surrounding villages has led not only to large-scale destruction of beautiful new residential areas, playgrounds, hospitals and other social institutions, but also to the total annihilation of the civilian population of this region," an official statement from the Council, released on Wednesday, says.

It notes that "such a terrible bloody trail of Russian invaders on Ukrainian lands, as well as support for their misanthropic actions by their mothers, wives and the general public in Russia, is evidence of a complete distortion of the worldview and moral degradation of Russian society."

"The war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Ukraine are a convincing argument in favor of comprehensive, with no exception sanctions against the Russian economy in all its sectors, and should finally encourage world leaders, NATO and the EU to provide Ukraine with all the necessary weapons to defeat Russia as a terrorist state, including air defenses, fighter planes, lethal offensive weapons, tanks and anti-ship missiles.

The Council notes that the whole world must realize that this is "not a Ukrainian crisis, this is not even a war of Russia against Ukraine - this is a war of humanity, moral values, virtue with concentrated evil, which has a satanic fascist nature."

"The cult of war and chauvinism have been glorified for decades in Russian society, which worshiped war, built a temple for it in Moscow, and justifies new sacrifices to its bloody idol with the slogan 'We can repeat," the statement said.

They add that every state in the world "now cannot be silent."

"Every state in the world must recognize the genocide of the Ukrainian people during the Russian invasion in 2022 and condemn the ideology of the 'Russian World' as justifying the genocide of peoples and the destruction of entire states," the Council says.
Biden approves another military aid package to send Javelin missiles to Ukraine

U.S. President Joe Biden said on Wednesday that he had approved an additional aid package to Ukraine, which implies sending Javelin missiles to Ukraine.

Yesterday, I signed another aid package that provides for sending additional Javelin missiles (to Ukraine), Biden said during a speech at the NABTU 2022 legislative conference.

He noted that weapons and ammunition from the United States and allies enter Ukraine every day.
President of the European Council Charles Michel has said that "massive investments" will be sent to rebuild Ukraine after the war, which was waged against it by Russia.

"We will continue to assist Ukraine with political, financial, humanitarian and material support. We've agreed to develop a Ukraine development trust fund. In the short term, it will help support Ukraine, and in the long term, it will provide massive investments to rebuild economy and infrastructure," he said, speaking at the European Parliament on Wednesday.

The President of the European Council also assured that the EU's support for Ukraine is "rock solid." "We are more united than ever. United in sanctions on Russia, united in putting pressure on the Kremlin, united in supporting Ukraine as much as we can. We know we are with the US, Canada, Japan, Australia, the Republic of Korea, the UK and many countries of the world, we are ready [to bear the burden of] the sanctions. And, most importantly, our unity, our EU unity, our Atlantic unity, our determination. These are our main assets to end the war, to stop these atrocities and to help rebuild Ukraine," Michel said.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi discussed with French President Emmanuel Macron developments in the Ukraine crisis as well as Egypts scheduled hosting of the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in November.
The BMW Group has announced the appointment of Jean-Philippe Parain as Senior Vice President Sales Regions Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa. Parain will succeed Hendrik von Kuenheim, who took the decision to retire after 37 years at the BMW Group.

Parain took over the new role as of April 1, 2022. With a wealth of experience since he joined the company in 1997 at BMW France in the marketing department. Parain held several senior management roles including President and CEO BMW Group Belux, Head of MINI Europe and Senior Vice President Sales Region Europe.

Vital region

Parain said: It is an honour and privilege to take on the role of Senior Vice President Sales Regions Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa. This is a vital region for our industry, with a very promising potential as we continue to lead the future of mobility. I am looking forward to work with all our colleagues and partners to continue winning the hearts of our customers and sustain our strong positioning in the region.

Pieter Nota, Member of the Board of Management of BMW AG, Customer, Brands, Sales said: We are very excited to welcome Jean-Philippe Parain into his new role and look forward to the continued success of the BMW Group across the region. As former head of Europe, Jean-Philippe is a well-known member of our team and brings a proven track record of excellence and a vast portfolio of experience to his new role.

Hendrik von Kuenheim combines passion and professionalism like few others and was the driving force of the company's success in the Region Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa. He has successfully led his team through a rapidly evolving era in the industry. We wish him a well-deserved and fulfilling retirement.

Success factors

Von Kuenheim started his career at BMW Group 37 years ago. Right from the beginning he has gained extensive sales experience from various senior management roles with the BMW Group across all regions worldwide before he took over the position as General Director at BMW Motorrad in 2008. Since 2012 he has led the expansion of the company across the region Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa as Senior Vice President.

von Kuenheim said: It has been my privilege to work for the BMW Group over the past three decades. In this time, we have seen as many changes as rarely before in our industry. But teamwork, intercultural understanding and a clear objective have remained as success factors. Id like to thank the many colleagues, partners, and customers I have had the pleasure to work alongside and wish everyone the best for the future.-- TradeArabia News Service
Cairo governorate started on Thursday the operation of new automated garbage trucks in an experimental phase in southern Cairo, replacing traditional manual collection methods.
The United States was occupied for 12 hours with a terrorist incident in Texas, where a British person held hostage a synagogue rabbi and three worshipers for long hours. The terrorist claimed to be the brother of Dr. Afia Siddiqui, and demanded her release in exchange for the release of the hostages. The terrorist was killed in the incident and no one was injured.
As much of the world's attention is focused on the bloodshed in Ukraine, the head of the World Health Organization said Wednesday there's ''nowhere on earth where the health of millions of people is more under threat`` than Ethiopia's Tigray region.

WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the situation in Tigray from where he hails was ``catastrophic,'' saying the region had been ``sealed off from the outside world'' for about 500 days.

``No food aid has been delivered since the middle of December,'' Tedros told a press briefing, adding that about three quarters of health facilities assessed by WHO in the region had been destroyed. He said there was no treatment for about 40,000 people with HIV in the region.

``Yes, I'm from Tigray and this crisis affects me, my family and my friends very personally,'' Tedros said. ``But I, the director general of WHO, I have a duty to protect and promote health wherever it's under threat,'' he said. ``And there is nowhere on earth where the health of millions of people is more under threat than Tigray.''

Tedros said the U.N. health agency had now documented 43 attacks on health care workers and facilities in Ukraine since the Russian invasion began last month.

WHO has now opened supply lines to many cities in Ukraine, but some access challenges remained. The agency continued to call for attacks on health workers and facilities to stop.

But Tedros said the crisis in Ukraine was ``far from the only crisis to which WHO is responding,'' citing ongoing problems in Yemen, Syria and Ethiopia.

Earlier this year, the government of Ethiopia sent a letter to the World Health Organization, accusing Tedros of ``misconduct'' after his sharp criticism of the war and humanitarian crisis in the country.

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Ethiopia has declared a conditional truce, and their opponents in Tigray have agreed to cease hostilities if certain terms are met. Does this bring Ethiopia any closer to peace?

Why now?

There has been sustained diplomatic pressure to end the conflict between the federal government and rebels aligned to the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) that has raged since November 2020.

Diplomats have been shuttling back and forth between the two sides for months. The new US special envoy to the region, David Satterfield, was in Ethiopia earlier this week.

"I think international pressure has played a part in this decision," Awet Weldemichael, a Horn of Africa security expert at Queen's University in Canada, told AFP.

"Ethiopia is facing economic challenges due to the war, meanwhile negotiations have been going on behind the scenes."

The US has not imposed sanctions so far but legislation making it possible has been advanced. Limits on financial assistance from international lenders and US development agencies has also been considered.

It comes as Ethiopia faces "one of its worst food crises in decades" with nearly 30 percent of its 110 million people in dire need of assistance, said Rene Lefort, an independent researcher on the Horn of Africa.

"Yet, Ethiopia cannot face a food crisis without international aid," Lefort said.

The TPLF has also been forced to reconsider its position. Their stronghold of Tigray reels from what the UN says is a de facto blockade on the region where famine looms.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, meanwhile, has abandoned his quest to recapture Tigray to the displeasure of allies in the Amhara region, while confronting a simmering rebellion from an insurgent group in Oromia, Lefort said.

"In recent months, there has been a change in priority for Abiy Ahmed."

Will it work ?

The government said it hoped the truce would hasten aid delivery to Tigray, where food, fuel and medicine are desperately needed.

But at present, road convoys would need to pass through the Afar region, where the TPLF is present and local authorities have refused aid passage to Tigray until the rebels withdraw.

"It is not certain that convoys would be able to resume quickly" just because a truce was declared, a humanitarian source told AFP.

Ethiopia made the truce conditional on the TPLF withdrawing from Amhara and Afar.

The TPLF, in turn, agreed to cease hostilities only if food aid reached Tigray.

The TPLF may be willing to make concessions on Afar but would not likely withdraw from Amhara, analysts say.

But the impasse in Afar posed a particular challenge on its own, Lefort said.

"The Afar government has little control over Afar territory. It will be difficult to prevent the population, which is also hungry, from blocking convoys," he said.

Observers said it was also unlikely the TPLF's opponents in Amhara would open their region to allow aid convoys to travel onward to Tigray.

Is peace near?

The Eurasia Group said both sides continued to see military pressure as a means to extracting concessions ahead of any talks, even if outright victory was no longer the objective.

"The 'truce' effectively acts as a trust-building exercise between the TPLF and federal government, yet a comprehensive and sustainable ceasefire remains unlikely in the short-term given both sides' hardline stances on outstanding issues," the think tank said.

The quick restoration of basic services denied to Tigray for months -- electricity, communications and banking chief among them -- would be a test of the government's goodwill, observers said.

The truce "could be a turning point, but it will depend on whether it's genuinely intentioned," said Awet.

"I hope this is a starting point for peace talks but it's not very promising".

What hurdles remain?

Even if a lasting ceasefire was brokered with the TPLF, the rebels are not the only armed actor in northern Ethiopia.

Abiy faces increasing pressure from hardliners in the Ahmara elite unhappy the TPLF is not being pursued in Tigray.

The Amhara have territorial disputes with the TPLF in western Tigray, where they have militias that do not fall under federal control.

"For some within the Amhara, you have to go all the way to Mekele to crush the TPLF," said Lefort, referring to the capital of the Tigray region.

"But authorising humanitarian convoys to Tigray means giving up this military conquest, and leaving the TPLF in place."

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The Ethiopian government and Tigrayan rebels on Tuesday accused each other of blocking a humanitarian aid convoy carrying emergency supplies for a starving population in the northern region.

On March 24, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government announced "an indefinite humanitarian truce effective immediately", saying it hoped to help hasten the delivery of emergency aid into the Tigray region, where hundreds of thousands face starvation.

Hours later the rebels agreed to a "cessation of hostilities", a new turning point in the nearly 17-month war in northern Ethiopia which has left thousands dead.

But each side has issued demands.

The government has called on the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) to "desist from all acts of further aggression and withdraw from areas they have occupied in neighboring regions" Afar and Amhara.

The rebels have in turn urged the Ethiopian authorities "to go beyond empty promises and take concrete steps to facilitate unfettered humanitarian access to Tigray."

Since then, however, none of the aid trucks currently waiting in Semera, the capital of Afar, has reached Tigray, where no aid has arrived by road since December 15.

'False Claims'

In a statement issued Tuesday, the government assured that it "has been using all available means to rescue its citizens in the Tigray region but has not been able to secure the cooperation of the other party".

A convoy of 43 trucks of food aid, authorized by the UN World Food Program (WFP) has not been able to enter the Tigray region "due to the closure of Abala Road by TPLF militants," the statement added.

Earlier Tuesday, as it has been doing daily, the TPLF rebels reiterated that no humanitarian aid has arrived in Tigray while denouncing the "false claims" of the Ethiopian authorities and demanding that the "unimpeded delivery of humanitarian aid be separated from political issues".

On Saturday, the rebels accused the government of "peddling fictitious stories" in claiming that the TPLF was blocking the delivery of aid to Tigray.

The situation on the ground in Afar or Tigray is difficult to verify independently and humanitarian organizations have not commented on the situation of the aid convoys since the truce.

The WFP estimated in January that 4.6 million people in Tigray, from a population of around six million, were "food insecure", with two million of those suffering from "extreme food shortages".

Since mid-February, humanitarian operations in Tigray, where more than 400,000 people have been displaced by the conflict, have been virtually halted by local shortages of fuel, food, and cash, according to the UN.

The conflict erupted when Abiy sent troops into Tigray to topple the TPLF, the region's former ruling party, saying the move came in response to rebel attacks on army camps.

Fighting has dragged on, triggering the humanitarian crisis, as accounts have emerged of massacres and mass rapes, with both sides accused of human rights violations.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appeared in a video message at the Grammy Awards to ask for support in telling the story of Ukraine's invasion by Russia.

During the pre-recorded message that aired on the show Sunday, he likened the invasion to a deadly silence threatening to extinguish the dreams and lives of the Ukrainian people, including children.

Our musicians wear body armor instead of tuxedos. They sing to the wounded in hospitals, even to those who can't hear them,'' he said in English. But the music will break through anyway.''

The Recording Academy, with its partner Global Citizen, prior to the ceremony highlighted a social media campaign called Stand Up For Ukraine'' to raise money and support during the humanitarian crisis.

Fill the silence with your music. Fill it today to tell our story. Tell the truth about the war on your social networks, on TV, support us in any way you can any, but not silence. And then peace will come to all our cities,'' Zelenskyy said.

Following Zelenskyy's message, John Legend performed his song Free'' with Ukrainian musicians Siuzanna Iglidan and Mika Newton, and poet Lyuba Yakimchuk, as images from the war were shown on screens behind them.

The war in Ukraine had taken a particularly gruesome turn Sunday when Ukrainian forces entering the town of Bucha, recently held by Russian soldiers, found bodies of people who had been shot, some after being bound and tortured. Ukrainian authorities accused the Russians of war crimes, and European leaders called for tougher sanctions against Moscow. Russia said the atrocities had been committed by Ukrainians.

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Russia faced a fresh wave of condemnation on Monday after evidence emerged of what appeared to be deliberate killings of civilians in Ukraine. Some Western leaders called for further sanctions in response to the alleged atrocities, even as Moscow continued to press its offensive in the country's east.

Germany's defense minister suggested the European Union discuss a ban on Russian gas imports, but more senior officials indicated an immediate boycott was not possible - a sign that leaders could struggle in the short-term to ramp up already severe sanctions on Russia.

Ukrainian officials said bodies of 410 civilians were found in towns around the capital, Kyiv, that were recaptured from Russian forces in recent days. In Bucha, northwest of the capital, Associated Press journalists saw 21 bodies. One group of nine, all in civilian clothes, were scattered around a site that residents said Russian troops used as a base. They appeared to have been shot at close range. At least two had their hands tied behind their backs.

The images of battered bodies lying in the streets or hastily dug graves unleashed a wave of outrage that could signal a turning point in the nearly 6-week-old war. But sanctions have thus far failed to halt the offensive, and rising energy prices along with the tight controls on Russian currency market have blunted their impact, with the ruble rebounding strongly after initially crashing.

Western and Ukrainian leaders have accused Russia of war crimes before, and the International Criminal Court's prosecutor has opened a probe to investigate the conflict. But the latest reports ratcheted up the condemnation even further, with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and some Western leaders going so far as to accuse Russia of genocide.

Russia's Defense Ministry rejected the accusations. It said photos and videos of dead bodies ``have been stage managed by the Kyiv regime for the Western media.'' The ministry said ``not a single civilian'' in Bucha faced any violent military action.

In a video shown during the Grammy Awards in Las Vegas for musicians and other artists, Zelenskyy implored them to support his nation and ``fill the silence with your music.''

French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that there is ``clear evidence of war crimes'' in Bucha.

``What just happened in Bucha calls for a new round of sanctions and very clear measures,`` he said on France-Inter radio. ``I'm in favor of a new round of sanctions and in particular on coal and petrol. We need to act.''

European Council President Charles Michel earlier tweeted that the EU is assisting Ukrainians and rights groups in gathering evidence to be used in international courts, adding that ``further EU sanctions & support are on their way.''

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez also called for those responsible for the slayings in Bucha to be punished, saying they should ``answer these alleged cases of crimes against humanity, war crimes and, why not say it, of genocide, too.''

Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki described Russia as a ``totalitarian-fascist state,`` saying ``the bloody massacres perpetrated by Russian soldiers deserve to be called by name: This is genocide.``

The crime of genocide is difficult to prove, as prosecutors would have to show that the killers or their commanders had a ``specific intent'' to partially or wholly destroy a group of people.

In the meantime, the U.S. and its allies have sought to punish Russia for the war by imposing sweeping sanctions on Russia. But they may be reluctant to impose measures that cause further harm to a global economy still recovering from the coronavirus pandemic. As a major oil and gas exporter, Russia stands to benefit from any rise in already high global energy prices.

Europe is in a particular bind, since it gets 40% of its gas and 25% of its oil from Russia. Governments have been scrambling to find ways to reduce that reliance. Estimates of the impact of a gas boycott on European countries vary but most involve a substantial loss of economic output.

German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, who is also the economy minister and responsible for energy, said Europe can go ``significantly further'' in imposing sanctions against Russia. But he said Germany is right to take a longer-term approach to abandoning Russian energy imports.

Germany has faced criticism for opposing an immediate halt to Russian energy deliveries. The country says it hopes to end Russian coal imports this summer and oil imports by the end of the year, but halting gas will take longer.

``We are working every day on creating the conditions for and steps toward an embargo,'' Habeck said. ``We are on the right track.''

German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht had earlier said on public broadcaster ARD that the reports of atrocities were severe enough that European officials ``would have to talk about halting gas supplies from Russia.''

Russian President Vladimir Putin's Feb. 24 invasion has killed thousands of people and forced more than 4 million Ukrainians to flee their country. Putin has said the attack is aimed at eliminating a security threat and demanded that Ukraine drop its bid to join the NATO military alliance of Western countries. Ukraine insists it never posed any threat but has offered to officially declare itself neutral.

The head of Ukraine's delegation in talks with Russia has said Moscow's negotiators informally agreed to most of a draft proposal discussed during talks in Istanbul, but no written confirmation has been provided.

While Western officials initially said they believed Putin's goal was to take Kyiv and potentially install a Kremlin-friendly government, Russian forces faced stiff resistance on their road to the capital and have now retreated from some areas around it. Now, Moscow says it is focusing its offensive on the Donbas in the country's east, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces for years.

Britain's Defense Ministry said Monday that Russia is continuing to flood soldiers and mercenaries from the Wagner private military group into the Donbas. It said Russian troops are also still trying to take strategic port city of Mariupol, which lies in the region and has seen weeks of heavy fighting and some of the worst suffering of the war.

``The city continues to be subject to intense, indiscriminate strikes, but Ukrainian Forces maintain a staunch resistance, retaining control in central areas,'' the ministry said. ``Mariupol is almost certainly a key objective of the Russian invasion as it will secure a land corridor from Russia to the occupied territory of Crimea,'' in the south, which Moscow annexed in 2014.

On Monday, the Ukrainian military said its forces had retaken some towns in the northern Chernihiv region and humanitarian aid was being delivered. The road between Chernihiv and Kyiv was to reopen to some traffic, according to the news agency RBK Ukraina.

The mayor of Chernihiv, which has been cut off from food and other supplies for weeks, said Russian shelling has destroyed 70% of the northern city.

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The United States plans to seek a suspension of Russia from its seat on the U.N.'s top human rights body in the wake of rising signs that Russian forces may have committed war crimes in Ukraine, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Monday.

According to a statement from her office, Thomas-Greenfield made the call for Russia to be stripped of its seat in the Human Rights Council in the wake of reports over the weekend about violence against civilians in the town of Bucha, near the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, after Russian forces pulled out.

Any decision to suspend Russia would require a decision by the U.N. General Assembly in New York.

Russia and the other four permanent members of the U.N. Security Council _ Britain, China, France and the United States _ all currently have seats on the 47-member rights council, which is based in Geneva. The United States rejoined the council this year.

Thomas-Greenfield mentioned the U.S. plan in a meeting with Romanian Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca, her office said.

In New York, General Assembly spokeswoman Paulina Kubiak said on Monday that no request for a meeting on the issue has been received yet.

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Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky will address the UN Security Council on Tuesday, where he is expected to demand tough new sanctions on Moscow over killings in the town of Bucha he has called "war crimes" and "genocide".

The speech, Zelensky's first to the body since Russia's invasion, comes after he made an emotional trip to Bucha outside the capital, where dozens of bodies were discovered after the withdrawal of Russian troops.

Horrific images of corpses lying in the streets, some with their hands bound behind them, have drawn international condemnation of Russia.

It has denied responsibility and suggested the images are fake or that the deaths occurred after Russian forces pulled out of the area.

But newly released satellite photographs taken by Maxar Technologies in mid-March, before the Russian withdrawal, showed what appeared to be bodies in some of the same places they were later found by Ukrainian troops and seen by journalists.

On Monday, wearing body armour and visibly distressed, Zelensky spent half an hour in Bucha, where he blamed Russian troops for the killings.

"These are war crimes and it will be recognised by the world as genocide," he said.

Later in his nightly address, he demanded "the sanctions response to Russia's massacre of civilians must finally be powerful".

"But... did hundreds of our people have to die in agony for some European leaders to finally understand that the Russian state deserves the most severe pressure?" he asked in the video posted to Telegram.

He also called for additional weapons from Western allies, saying more equipment could have saved thousands.

"I do not blame you -- I blame only the Russian military," he said. "But you could have helped."

More sanctions 'this week'

Ukraine's allies have called the killings in Bucha war crimes, with the EU offering to send investigators to gather evidence.

"(Russian President Vladimir Putin) is a war criminal," US President Biden told reporters at the White House. "What's happening to Bucha is outrageous and everyone's seen it."

The White House said it would announce fresh sanctions on Moscow "this week" with France suggesting new measures could target Russian oil and coal exports.

But Germany warned it was too soon to cut off Russian gas.

"We have to cut all economic relationship to Russia, but at the moment, it's not possible to cut the gas supplies. We need some time," German Finance Minister Christian Lindner said.

Elsewhere, the United States and Britain said they would seek Russia's suspension from the UN Human Rights Council -- a move Moscow branded "unbelievable".

Russia has called for a UN Security Council meeting on what it dubbed the "heinous provocation of Ukrainian radicals in Bucha", but Britain -- which holds the Council presidency -- has so far refused the request.

More horrors emerge

The full nature of the killings in Bucha and other areas from which Russian troops have withdrawn is still being pieced together.

On Monday, the bodies of five men were found in a children's sanatorium basement in Bucha. The Ukrainian prosecutor general's office said they were unarmed civilians, who had been bound, beaten and killed by Russian troops.

And in Motyzhyn, west of Kyiv, Ukrainian police showed AFP journalists the bodies of five civilians with their hands tied, including those of the village's mayor, her husband and son.

Ukrainian officials say over 400 civilian bodies have been recovered from the Kyiv region, many of whom have been laid to rest in mass graves.

But Zelensky has warned that the deaths in Bucha could be only the tip of the iceberg, saying he had information even more people had been killed in places like nearby Borodianka.

AFP reporters who briefly visited the area saw no bodies in the streets, but locals reported many deaths.

"I know five civilians were killed," said 58-year-old Rafik Azimov. "But we don't know how many more are left in the basements of the ruined buildings after the bombardments."

"I buried six people," another resident, Volodymyr Nahornyi, said. "More people are under the ruins."

Mariupol '90 percent destroyed'

The Russian withdrawal from Kyiv has been seen as a pivot to a renewed offensive in the country's east and south, where Moscow wants to consolidate territory around occupied Crimea and the separatist statelets of Donetsk and Lugansk.

The Ukrainian government has warned Moscow is preparing a "full-scale" attack in the country's east and regional officials urged civilians to evacuate Lugansk fearing a major Russian attack.

The Pentagon estimates Russia has withdrawn about two thirds of the troops it had around Kyiv and will redeploy them to the east and south, with the White House warning the war's "next phase could be measured in months or longer."

Even where troops have withdrawn, fears remain, with Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko telling residents to wait before returning, citing the danger of continued shelling and the danger of unexploded munitions.

Overnight, air raid sirens rang out across much of the country, from Lviv in the west to southern Mykolaiv, where officials said Monday that Russian strikes killed 10 civilians and wounded 46.

Elsewhere in the south, concerns remain about civilians trapped in the besieged city of Mariupol.

Authorities say at least 5,000 people have been killed in the city, 90 percent of which has been destroyed, according to mayor Vadim Boichenko.

Around 130,000 residents are still trapped inside, and efforts to evacuate them are now on hold because of "incessant" bombing, he said.

The Red Cross said Monday a team it sent to help get civilians out of Mariupol was being held by police in Russian-controlled territory.

Europe's worst conflict in decades, sparked by Russia's invasion on February 24, has killed as many as 20,000 people, according to Ukrainian estimates.

More than 4.2 million Ukrainians have fled the country and about 6.5 million have been internally displaced, UN agencies say.

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Kuwait's government submitted its resignation on Tuesday, reported Kuwait News Agency (Kuna), ahead of a no-confidence vote against the prime minister in parliament, amid a lengthy political feud that has hindered fiscal reform in the Gulf oil producer.

Sheikh Mishal Al Ahmad Al Jaber Al Sabah, Crown Prince of the State of Kuwait, who took over most of the ruling emir's duties late last year, received the government's letter of resignation from Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah Al Khalid, the state news agency reported.

The government's resignation comes less than three months after it was sworn in, it added.

On November 23, 2021, the Kuwaiti Crown Prince issued an order on behalf of the Emir to appoint Sheikh Sabah as prime minister and assign him to form a government and consequently on December 28, he formed a new government.

Sheikh Sabah, a member of the ruling Al Sabah family and premier since late 2019, has faced a combative legislature as the head of successive cabinets, with opposition MPs bent on questioning him over issues including perceived corruption, reported Reuters.

The vote in parliament, called a non-cooperation motion, was scheduled for Wednesday. The current government was appointed in December, the third in 2021 as the standoff with the elected parliament dragged on, stated the report.
Egypt has dispatched a shipment of two million doses of veterinary vaccines to brotherly South Sudan to protect the livestock there, the Egyptian Ministry for Agriculture and Land Reclamation announced on Tuesday evening.

The step is meant to deepen cooperation between both countries and provide all forms of support to the Sudanese people as per the directives issued by Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, the statement added.

The vaccines are produced by the agriculture ministrys Veterinary Serum and Vaccine Institute and aim to protect the livestock in South Sudan against epidemic diseases, said Mohamed Saad  the director of the Veterinary Serum and Vaccine Institute.

A delegation of Egyptian veterinarians arrived on Sunday to South Sudan to provide technical support to the South Sudanese side regarding their livestock.

In July 2021, a delegation headed by South Sudanese VP James Wani Igga visited Egypt and met with El-Sisi, who reiterated during the meeting Egypts full support and determination to transfer expertise to South Sudan, especially in agriculture and industry.

In the presence of Igga and Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly, a host of agreement was signed on the side-lines of the visit to boost cooperation between the two countries, including in the fields of irrigation, trade, and industry.

In recent months, Egypt has sent several humanitarian aid shipments to South Sudan during the recent crises it faced that were caused by floods and the coronavirus pandemic.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of using hunger as a weapon of war by deliberately targeting Ukraine's essential food supplies.

In an address to Irish lawmakers Wednesday, Zelenskyy said Russian forces ``are destroying things that are sustaining livelihoods'' including food storage depots, blocking ports so Ukraine could not export food and ``putting mines into the fields.''

``For them hunger is also a weapon, a weapon against us ordinary people,'' he said, accusing Russia of ``deliberately provoking a food crisis'' in Ukraine, a major global producer of staples including wheat and sunflower oil.

He said it would have international ramifications, because ``there will be a shortage of food and the prices will go up, and this is reality for the millions of people who are hungry, and it will be more difficult for them to feed their families.''

Zelenskyy spoke by video to a joint session of Ireland's two houses of parliament, the latest in a string of international addresses he has used to rally support for Ukraine.

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Iran on Wednesday said it has sent documents on its undeclared nuclear facilities to the UN atomic watchdog, bringing it a step closer to reviving its 2015 nuclear accord.

Iran has restricted some inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which had previously called on Tehran to resolve questions surrounding the previous presence of nuclear material at undeclared sites.

"We provided on March 20 the documents that we had to send to the IAEA," said Mohammad Eslami, the head of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran.

He added in a news conference that "most likely, the agency's representatives will come to Iran to review the responses and then prepare their final report".

An agreement that was reached between Iran and the IAEA in March "seeks to resolve the issues regarding four sites", Eslami said.

"The ambiguity over one of the locations has been resolved so far, and we are hopeful that (outstanding issues concerning) the other three sites will be closed" by June 21, he added.

On March 5, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi visited Iran and said the agency and Tehran had agreed on an approach for resolving issues crucial to reviving the country's nuclear accord with world powers.

Eslami's remarks come as talks in Vienna to restore the 2015 deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), have been on pause for nearly a month.

The deal gave Iran sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear programme to guarantee that Tehran could not develop a nuclear weapon -- something it has always denied wanting to do.

But the US unilaterally withdrew from the accord in 2018 and reimposed biting economic sanctions, prompting Iran to begin rolling back on its own commitments the following year.

The negotiations that started about a year ago involve Iran as well as France, Germany, Britain, Russia and China directly, and the United States indirectly.

But talks were halted on March 11 after Russia demanded guarantees that Western sanctions imposed following its invasion of Ukraine would not damage its trade with Iran.

Days later, Moscow said it had received the necessary guarantees, but the impasse has continued as Tehran and Washington have traded accusations over the causes of the delay.

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Security forces and their allies in a disputed part of conflict-hit northern Ethiopia committed abuses against Tigrayans that amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity, two rights groups said Wednesday.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Tigrayan civilians had been targeted in "a relentless campaign of ethnic cleansing" in the long-contested western Tigray region since the outbreak of Ethiopia's war in November 2020.

Over the ensuing months, several hundred thousand Tigrayans were forcibly expelled from western Tigray in a "coordinated" manner by security forces and civilian authorities through ethnically-motivated rape, murder, starvation, and other serious violations.

"These widespread and systematic attacks against the Tigrayan civilian population amount to crimes against humanity, as well as war crimes," Amnesty and HRW said in a joint report titled "We Will Erase You From This Land".

Over 15 months, HRW and Amnesty interviewed more than 400 people including refugees who fled into Sudan, and witnesses to the violence still living inside western Tigray and elsewhere in Ethiopia.

They documented the sexual enslavement and gang rape of Tigrayan women, including a victim whose attackers said they were "purifying" her blood.

They also gathered testimony about the death of Tigrayans in overcrowded prisons, and the summary execution of dozens of men by a river.

The atrocities were blamed on newly-appointed civilian administrators in western Tigray, and regional forces and irregular militias from the neighbouring Amhara region.

Gizachew Muluneh, a spokesman for Amhara's regional government, told AFP the findings were "lies" and the report "irresponsible and biased".

"None of our forces are involved in such crimes as stated by the report," he said.

Gizachew accused the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), the former ruling party in Tigray that once dominated Ethiopian politics, of subjecting Amharas to such abuses for decades.

Amharas and Tigrayans are two of Ethiopia's largest ethnic groups, and both lay historic claim in full to the vast fertile expanse of western Tigray that stretches from the Tekeze River to Sudan.

'Shocking' crimes

But the rights watchdogs also pointed the finger at Addis Ababa, accusing the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of covering up abuses and severely restricting independent access to western Tigray.

The atrocities there unfolded "with the acquiescence and possible participation of Ethiopian federal forces", the report said.

"Ethiopian authorities have steadfastly denied the shocking breadth of the crimes that have unfolded and have egregiously failed to address them," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW.

Seventeen months ago Abiy sent troops into Tigray after accusing the TPLF of orchestrating attacks on federal army camps.

Western Tigray was swiftly captured by federal and Amhara forces, and a new administration appointed.

HRW and Amnesty said local officials banned the Tigrayan language from use, displayed signs around towns ordering Tigrayans to leave, and denied access to farmland and humanitarian aid.

Eritrean troops -- allied with Ethiopia in the fight against the TPLF -- joined Amhara forces in looting crops and livestock, and driving Tigrayans from their homes, the rights groups said.

Thousands were rounded up and held in grim detention camps where deaths occurred: "Some died as a result of torture, denial of medical care, and lack of food and water; guards killed others," the report said.

In early 2021, the United States warned that "acts of ethnic cleansing" were taking place in western Tigray.

Abiy promised a swift end to the conflict but it dragged on, with the frontline shifting many times and fighting expanding beyond Tigray.

Untold numbers of civilians have died, millions are in need of aid, and fighters on all sides have been accused of grave atrocities.

Addis Ababa declared a "humanitarian truce" last month, while the rebels agreed to a "cessation of hostilities" on the condition that aid reach Tigray.

Some supplies has since reached the stricken region but humanitarian groups say it is nowhere near enough given the hundreds of thousands facing starvation across Tigray.

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The United States, France, and other countries pledged Wednesday to increase their financial aid to West African and Sahel countries to fight a worsening famine, during an OECD meeting.

During a round table initiated by the EU, the Sahel region, and West Africa, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said in a video message that France would provide "financial support totaling 166 million euros ($181 million) " in 2022.

Responding to Niger President Mohamed Bazoum, who called for a "significant and urgent" increase in international financing, the United States pledged to give another $311 million dollars and Canada promised another 82 million dollars.

Extreme drought, the Covid-19 pandemic and now the war in Ukraine are leading factors exacerbating the risks of famine in the Sahel and West Africa, experts warned at the meeting of the OECD, a group of developed countries.

Russia and Ukraine are huge wheat exporters.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization had warned that hunger and malnutrition could hit 38.3 million people by June for a lack of appropriate measures.

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Three rockets landed on Wednesday near an oil refinery in Iraq's northern autonomous Kurdistan region, with "no casualties or material damage reported", Kurdish counter-terrorism forces said.

The rockets fell near the Kawergosk refinery, one of the largest in the oil-rich area, located about 20 kilometers (12 miles) northwest of regional capital Arbil, the forces said in a statement.

"The rockets were launched from Khazir area in Mosul," Iraq's second city, located to the west of Arbil, the statement added.

The attack was not immediately claimed.

It comes less than a month after Iran's Revolutionary Guards -- the Islamic republic's ideological army -- claimed an assault on Arbil that it said targeted an Israeli "strategic center".

The Guards fired a dozen ballistic missiles in the March 13 attack, which caused extensive damage to buildings without resulting in any deaths.

Kurdish authorities have insisted the Jewish state has no sites in or near Arbil.

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World Bank (WB) Managing Director of Development Policy and Partnerships Mari Pangestu said on Tuesday that the bank is keen to provide all means of support to Egypt during its presidency of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) and to stimulate climate action-related efforts in Egypt and the African continent.

During her meeting with Minister of International Cooperation and Egypts Governor to the WB Rania Al-Mashat, Pangestu praised the international cooperation ministrys efforts to activate innovative financing tools in Egypt.

The meeting was held during Pangestus visit to Egypt to hold a number of meetings as part of cooperation with the government given the country's presidency of COP27.

The meeting touched on the relevant international initiatives and efforts that would help achieve the message of COP27.

The WB presented several proposals on cooperation with the government including implementing joint development projects and offering technical consultations at the national and regional levels.

Al-Mashat said Egypt is working, as part of its COP27 presidency, to promote climate action and green transformation efforts.

She added that Egypt has taken clear steps to support green transformation, highlighting the establishment of the National Council for Climate Change and the launch of the national strategy for adaptation to climate change in addition to identifying projects supporting green transformation in various sectors.

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The European Union will provide Egypt with a grant worth 100 million in response to the surging food prices on the heels of Russias war on Ukraine, EU Ambassador Christian Berger said in a statement on Wednesday.

The EU stands by its partners in these difficult times of economic ordeal caused by the Russian aggression, Berger said in the statement.

Egypt can count on 100 million of assistance in its role as a regional food hub, Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Oliver Varhelyi tweeted after a phone call with Minister of Foreign Affairs Sameh Shoukry on Wednesday.

During another phone call with his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian earlier on 2 April, Shoukry said Egypt is calling on France  within the framework of its presidency of the European Union  to provide economic and political support to help Egypt mitigate the impacts of the Russia-Ukraine crisis.

Last month, Egypt officially requested support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to implement the countrys comprehensive economic programme, which "possibly" included new financing to support the country's plans for comprehensive economic reforms amid the ongoing global crisis.

A report on the repercussions of the Russia-Ukraine war on food security in Egypt by an Egyptian NGO has found that Egypt is hit hard given the fact that it imports 80 percent of its wheat from Ukraine and Russia.

Egypts dependence on food imports exacerbates problems associated with food subsidies, including state spending deficits and the depletion of foreign exchange reserves, the FDHRD report read.

Egypt is considered one of the most affected countries by the Russian-Ukrainian war as a result of the direct connection to its food security, depending on the import of food grains mainly from the two parties to the conflict, the report said.

The prices of wheat and cooking oil in Egypt have increased by 17 percent and 10 percent, respectively, which is still considered a lower level of increase compared to other countries. Only the prices of meat and poultry products in Egypt have exceeded the global rates at the beginning of the crisis.

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Egypt recorded a 54 percent decline in the number of coronavirus infections and a 45 percent decline in COVID-19-related-deaths over the past week, leading the country to reduce the number of isolation hospitals nationwide, according to acting Minister of Health and Population Khaled Abdel-Ghaffar.

In a statement on Wednesday, the ministry said that coinciding with the decline in infections, it was decided to reduce the number of facilities designated for full isolation to only four hospitals  El-Agouza Hospital in Giza, Qaha Hospital in Qalioubiya, El-Odaisat Hospital in Luxor, and El-Nagila Hospital in Matrouh.

The ministry also reduced the number of partial isolation hospitals to 16 facilities nationwide, said Hossam Abdel-Ghaffar  the health ministrys spokesperson.

The decision was issued following a meeting between Abdel-Ghaffar and the ministrys top officials on Tuesday evening to follow up on the situation of the pandemic countrywide.

In mid-March, the health ministry announced that it would issue weekly, instead of daily, reports on the number of coronavirus infections and deaths, right after the fifth wave of the pandemic  which drove infection rates up in January and February  started to gradually subside.

The ministry said in its latest bulletin on the pandemic that was released on Saturday that Egypts average daily coronavirus infection toll decreased to an average of 559 infections and eight deaths per day from 26 March to 1 April.

During Tuesdays meeting, the minister reviewed the occupancy rates in all hospitals nationwide for all patients during last week, the statement added, indicating that the occupancy rates reached 29 percent in internal beds and 49 percent in intensive care units, while ventilator usage stood at 24 percent.

Vaccination rates and rewarding incentives

The spokesperson added that the coronavirus vaccinations rate since the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan has ranged between 100,000 to 150,000 doses per day.

The health minister ordered earmarking rewarding incentives for medical staff that achieve high rates of vaccinating citizens during the holy month of Ramadan, according to the statement.

Egypt  which started its vaccination campaign in early 2021  has so far vaccinated more than 32.5m citizens to date, according to the ministry, which has been urging citizens to register on its website to receive the vaccine.

By the second half of 2022, the country plans to vaccinate 70 percent of its eligible population, which includes 12-year-olds and above, in order for life in Egypt to return to the way it was before the pandemic.

In late March, Minister Abdel-Ghaffar announced that 52 percent of the targeted population has been vaccinated.

Egypt has already eased its coronavirus restrictions with the commencement of Ramadan, lifting a two-year suspension on the traditional Ramadan charity banquets, where free food is provided to millions of needy people around tables in the streets.

Mosques have also been allowed to open their annex event halls and conduct afternoon prayer sermons (El-Asr) and mass Ramadan night prayers (Taraweeh) during the holy month.

Ramadan late-night prayers (Tahajjud) and seclusion in mosques for a period of time (I'tikaf), however, are still banned.

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The UKs Daily Mail news website has selected Egypt as one of the best tourist destinations for the spring and summer this year, coming in second place on the list of top holiday destinations of 2022.

Few countries boast the same combination of stunning landscapes and incredible history. This year promises to be a blockbuster year for the country as well, so if you need a sign to finally book tickets, this is it, the Daily Mail wrote.

The website has chosen Cairo, Marsa Alam, Luxor and Hurghada as top destinations to visit in Egypt, adding that with the opening of the all-new Grand Egyptian Museum, visiting Cairo is a must.

Meanwhile, it described Marsa Alam as a scuba divers paradise on the banks of the Red Sea and Hurghada as a resort-style holiday spot that has a bonus due to its proximity to Giftun Island.

Compared to an open-air museum, Luxor is a treasure trove of artefacts, it added.

Follow the Sun

Two weeks after its launch, a promotional video dubbed Follow the Sun has made Egypt trend online worldwide, especially on social media platforms in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France and the United States.

Google searches for Egypt increased in Germany by 187 percent, in France by more than 125 percent, in the United Kingdom by 106 percent, and in Italy by 240 percent, said Assistant Minister of Tourism and Antiquities for Promotion Lamia Kamel in a statement on Wednesday.

The video amassed more than 22 million views on YouTube, and Google searches for Egypt increased by 102 percent compared to last year in the targeted markets, Amr El-Kady, CEO of the Egyptian General Tourism Authority, also said in the statement.

The video is part of an online promotional campaign launched by the ministry earlier this year, which has achieved remarkable success on various social media sites, reaching 107 million users.

Cairo was also named the second most trending destination in the world a day earlier by the world's largest travel guidance platform Tripadvisor.

Egypts capital came in ninth spot for city lovers in 2022, while Hurghada was named the 10th most popular destination by the travel guidance platform.

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UAE start-up, CanCan, is revolutionising the way consumers buy kandoras, with a ground-breaking, convenient, price-competitive artificial intelligence (AI) platform.

The worlds first and only application in the traditional menswear market to use AI body-scanning technology, CanCan takes accurate measurements through a mobile phone camera and delivers a quality kandora four days later.

Backed by prominent UAE businessman Sultan Al Darmaki, the unique technology-meets-tradition start-up was founded in 2019 by four Emirati entrepreneurs who identified a gap in the kandora-buying market. Using their professional, managerial and entrepreneurial experience, Saleh Hamed, Mohamed Al Jneibi, Yaqoob Al Shehhi and Khalid Al Hashimi developed, fine-tuned and raised funds for the service when the Covid-19 pandemic struck.

Kuwaiti and Arabic/Emirati styles

Nearly 4,000 customers have already registered on the platform, and the app has been downloaded over 10,000 times.

Currently, Kuwaiti and Arabic/Emirati styles are available in a wide range of quality materials and colours, with additional ranges in the pipeline as the company expands to enter new markets and reflect other countries styles and preferences.

Hamed, Managing Director of CanCan, says: CanCan is modernising the kandora buying experience while honouring the regions heritage and culture. The pandemic, new technology, and fast-paced lifestyles have dramatically changed consumer shopping trends. Our high quality, timesaving, wallet-friendly service provides an alternative to a physical visit to a tailor and helps the environment by cutting car journeys and reducing fuel consumption.

Al Darmaki invested in CanCan as part of his commitment to continuing his fathers legacy by supporting new and upcoming pioneers in the UAE.

CanCan is living proof that homegrown ideas and concepts work in the UAE and internationally, and a catalyst for others to take risks and explore new territory. The team is harnessing innovation to deliver a product that is integral to our culture in a way that suits todays fast-paced lifestyles and consumers increasing reliance on technology. I am delighted to be part of this exciting new venture, and to promote growth among young, forward-thinking entrepreneurs, he said.-- TradeArabia News Service
It is the time of the year where Ramadan merchandise from lanterns to decorations invade Egypts streets; despite overcoming the coronavirus pandemic, the recent surge in prices nationwide is taking its toll.

People are just tired from high prices one of the vendors in the big makeshift Ramadan market in the famous El-Sayeda Zeinab quarter told Ahram Online when asked about the surge of prices in general and its impact on the market and Ramadan lanterns.

The famous and popular El-Sayeda Zeinab quarter in Cairo is known for many things, whether for the Shrine of El-Sayeda Zeinab (the granddaughter of Prophet Mohamed) and her famous birthday celebration (moulid), the Islamic Museum of Cairo, or its old mosques, and buildings that are part of UNESCOs World Heritage Islamic Cairo.

Its annual market selling Ramadan lanterns is one more tradition that can be added to the list of famous attractions.

Traditional Egyptian Ramadan lanterns, which reportedly originated in Medieval Fatimid Egypt, are handmade in the quarters workshops before being sold in the market.

On El-Sad Street right beside El-Sayeda Zeinab, the makeshift lantern market is held for three weeks before the holy month starts, selling all sorts and shapes of traditional Ramadan lanterns. More recently, they have begun selling other Ramadan decorations and merchandises as well. Their wares appeal to customers from the middle and working classes looking for a bargain.

According to several vendors on El-Sad Street who spoke to Ahram Online, the lantern prices increased by 25 percent over last year.

There are lanterns of all types and styles available in the market that are sold for as little as EGP three to as much as EGP 1,500.

The cheapest lanterns are plastic while the more expensive ones are made of tin, wood and cloth.

The most expensive electric lanterns are handmade in a traditional style from glass and tin. These are the biggest of the lanterns and are typically sold to hotels and restaurants.

The increase in the price of lanterns across the city, not just in El-Sayeda Zeinab, comes despite the Cairo Chamber of Commerces announcement in March that Egypt has reached self-sufficiency in Ramadan lanterns, except for a small microchip unit for sound and light imported from China.

In late 1990s, the traditional lantern industry was on the verge of the extinction thanks to an invasion of plastic Chinese lanterns. The domestic industry was saved by a 2015 decision to ban the import of Chinese lanterns, which even helped the industry expand with ideas and designs to attract new generations.

Yet, the Chinese lanterns still find their ways onto shop shelves despite the ban, where they are easily spotted compared to the real thing.

Merchants have circumvented the ban by importing lanterns as house decorations or toys.

In the El-Sayeda Zeinab market, there is growing interest in other Ramadan decorations and merchandise, especially the new line of tableware and glassware including trays and glasses styled in the famous Khayamia patterns. Nonetheless, Ramadan lanterns are still finding customers from children and grandparents alike.

Nuts, dried fruits and dates, which are staple Ramadan food, are being sold at a discount this year, since many nuts (walnuts, hazlenuts and pistachios) and dried fruits like (raisins, dried figs and apricots) are expensive imported commodities.

In the street, a huge booth set up by Egypts Parliamentary majority party (Mostaqbel Watan) is selling Ramadan food, nuts, dried fruits as well as Ramadan drinks (Carob, hibiscus and Kamaredin) with discounts reaching 30 percent.

The party has set up booths like this throughout Cairo and other governorates in cooperation with the government to help people deal with the current surge in prices.

Customers are still buying merchandise, but in less quantity than in previous years. However, demand is still sufficient for the merchants and vendors this year.

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Yemen's humanitarian conditions are deteriorating significantly, and the country is teetering on the edge of outright catastrophe due to the hunger crisis, said UN agency chiefs last week.

Making matters worse, the interest of international relief organisations in Yemen has dwindled in recent years as a result of global changes and shifting priorities.

As new data from the war-ravaged country indicates potentially record food insecurity, there arises the need to improve humanitarian relief channels to alleviate the Yemenis' suffering.

The internationally recognised government, supported by a Saudi-led military coalition, and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels have been locked in a violent power struggle since 2014, when the insurgents seized the capital Sanaa.

Yemen's war began in September 2014, when the Houthis swept into the capital, Sanaa, from their northwestern stronghold in the Arab world's poorest country. The Houthis then pushed into exile the government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, elected in 2012 as the sole candidate after the long rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh.

A Saudi-led coalition, including the UAE, entered the war in March 2015 to restore Hadi's government.

Yemen's warring parties on Tuesday traded accusations of violating a two-month ceasefire agreement, three days after it went into effect at the start of Ramadan.

More than 17.4 million Yemenis are food insecure; an additional 1.6 million are expected to fall into emergency levels of hunger in the coming months, taking the total of those with emergency needs to 7.3 million people by the end of the year.

Highlighting the long-lasting, negative impact on children, UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell warned that more and more children were going to bed hungry in Yemen.

This puts them at increased risk of physical and cognitive impairment, and even death, Russell added. The plight of children in Yemen can no longer be overlooked. Lives are at stake.

With the advent of Ramadan, the Emirates Red Crescent (ERC) announced the launch of one of the largest relief and humanitarian operations in Yemen, covering roughly one-third of the country's population, to benefit seven million Yemenis in the governorates of Shabwa, Hadramout, Taiz, Hodeidah, and Socotra islands during Ramadan. This project instilled hope because it would reduce the level of rampant human suffering.

It has also drawn attention back to Yemen's human tragedy.

No international or regional relief organisation has ever organised such a large-scale relief effort in such a short period of time. Logically, it is difficult to provide aid to seven million people spread across vast and dispersed areas in highly complex geography in a short period of time. This task necessitates high-level coordination, careful execution, and a large number of relief workers to transport, unload, store, and distribute this aid to those in need, as well as conduct field surveys to track cases due for this aid during the initial phase.

The UAE has made significant contributions to reducing human suffering in Yemen since the conflict began in 2015. It took an active role in restoring public services, boosting quality of life and education, and maintaining infrastructure. It also launched humanitarian initiatives during Ramadan and on other occasions such as feasts in previous years.

This year it doubled the standard value of the level of support, indicating that it recognises the magnitude of the humanitarian need that necessitates such a large level of humanitarian intervention.

So far, the UAE has struck an unrivalled balance in humanitarian aid. Between April 2015 and February 2020, the total value of Emirati humanitarian aid to Yemen surpassed $23 billion for relief, health, and development projects. To this day, the UAE actively competes with other international relief organisations in relief and development tasks throughout Yemen.

The reality of human suffering in Yemen necessitates such humanitarian interventions. However, there is a "fatal" absence or "fragile" presence of international relief organisations whose role is insufficient to bridge the humanitarian gap in which 30 million Yemenis, the country's total population, are trapped, including approximately 23.7 million people in need of humanitarian aid, according to UN estimated s. According to these data for emergency and interim humanitarian interventions, the ERC remains the first and most generous donor to Yemen humanitarian relief efforts.

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if we want to know what officials really have in mind, it might be wise to pay attention to what they say off-script, before the remarks are walked back.

It would not be the first time. A senior official of a world power blurts out something that causes a political storm and then, after the race to contain the damage  claims that the remarks were off the cuff, taken out of context and not intended as understood  it turns out that the remarks have achieved precisely the intended aim.

The US President Joe Bidens recent outburst that Russian President Vladimir Putin can not remain in power has been described as shocking. How can the US president come out and say who should or should not stay in power in other countries without consideration of the will of the people or democratic procedures in that country? some gasped, as though George Bush Jr had not said that Saddam Hussein had to go or Barack Obama had not called on Hosni Mubarak to step aside Now, meaning now!

In these two instances - exceptionally - there was no back-peddling. But this time, Biden administration officials rushed forward to say that his remarks should not be taken literally, he was just speaking from the heart after finishing his scripted speech, etc, etc. But Washingtons message had already reached its intended recipients: some members of the Russian military establishment are now feeling threatened by Putins policies. News of these people has begun to circulate in the Western media and evidently some quarters of US intelligence decided to signal Washingtons support in case they had plans.

The same applies to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on how Ukraine belonged in the EU. There, too, EU officials scrambled to lighten the impact against the backdrop of the current Russian-Western dispute. There is no fast track to EU membership; accession takes years, they reminded everyone. But her message had already reached Ukrainians: keep facing westward and turn your backs on Russia. So, if we want to know what officials really have in mind, it might be wise to pay attention to what they say off-script, before the remarks are walked back. In politics nothing is genuinely spontaneous.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 7 April, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.

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The Peace Treaty signed between Egypt and Israel in March 1979 remains an unfulfilled promise in the absence of a political resolution to the Palestinian question in line with UN resolutions.

Last month marked the 43rd anniversary of the Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel that was signed at the White House on 26 March 1979. The treaty laid the basis for a political settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, including the Palestinian question according to the United Nations.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, and the peace that was intended to end all wars in the Middle East region has proved elusive. Not only that, but Israel has lived under extreme-right governments from Menachem Begin to Naftali Bennett, and Benjamin Netanyahu substituted the promise of region-wide peace with the imagined Iranian threat to the existence of the state of Israel.

The Israelis summarised this threat in that of Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb. Prior to the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015, Israel, under the premiership of Netanyahu that spanned almost two decades, kept warning the world that it would act alone if need be to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities that could produce atomic weapons.

The Israelis have used the imagined Iranian threat to achieve two objectives. The first is to push back against international and US efforts to negotiate a resolution of the Palestinian question with the Palestinian Authority (PA). The second stems from an Israeli strategy to remain the only Middle Eastern power that possesses nuclear arms and the long-range ballistic missiles that can carry those weapons.

Needless to say, the Israelis have never said that their country does possess such weapons of mass destruction, and they prefer to follow what they call strategic ambiguity in this regard. They have insisted on Israeli security, absolute security, in the face of all peace efforts in the Middle East.

Israel was aided significantly in this context by the former US Trump administration that went along with Israel to the extent that it decided to pull out of the Iranian nuclear deal on the pretext that this would help Iran to manufacture a nuclear weapon. This was the Israeli argument from day one. The Trump administration then took drastic steps under its strategy of maximum pressure on Iran to force Tehran to acquiesce to US demands concerning an altered deal with new provisions that would satisfy the Israelis.

The results of this strategy have been contrary to expectations. Today Iran, according to US, European, and Israeli officials and experts is nearer the point of producing a nuclear weapon than it had been prior to the US withdrawal from the JCPOA.

The Israelis with US backing provided by the Trump administration signed a series of peace accords with some Arab countries, which they dubbed the Abraham Accords. The intention was to expand these Accords to include other Arab countries aside from the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco, the four Arab nations that have signed the accords with Israel.

Surprisingly enough, the accords, unlike the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty, are not linked to the peaceful resolution of the Palestinian question (the two-state solution). This is why we should not consider the Abraham Accords and the Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel as one, at least from a historical and political point of view.

On 27 March, Israel hosted a regional meeting on the level of foreign ministers that it surprisingly called the Negev Summit. This was attended by the US secretary of state and the foreign ministers of Egypt, the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco. Jordan, the second Arab state to sign a peace treaty with Israel in October 1994, was conspicuous by its absence.

The Israelis wanted the meeting to look like the launch of a regional coalition against the common enemy  you guessed it, this is Iran. Of course, Israeli senior officials and commentators were effusive in describing the ministerial meeting, calling it unprecedented and historic.

Four Arab foreign ministers had gathered in Israel with their US and Israeli counterparts to talk about common challenges and threats  primarily meaning Iran with terrorism as a footnote. It goes without saying that the Arab ministers at the meeting do not share the same definition of terrorism as the Israelis and Americans. For the Arab side, a Palestinian defending his plot of land or his house that is threatened with demolition by Israeli earthmoving equipment is not a terrorist.

Besides, the Israelis have not shown a markedly keen interest in fighting the terrorist groups that have been threatening the Arab countries over the past four decades.

Another fault line is the perception on their part of what the Israelis call an existential threat posed by Iran to Israel. The four Arab countries may conclude that Iranian policies in the region are challenging, but I guess they would prefer to discuss them with the Iranian themselves instead of being considered by Tehran as members of a regional alliance specifically targeting Iran.

Probably the four countries, like all the Arab countries, are against Iran becoming a nuclear power. However, they would prefer diplomacy and negotiations with Iran to preclude the possibility of its becoming a nuclear power. In other words, most of them would oppose the use of force by Israel against Iran because they are afraid that the cost to be paid would be quite high when it comes to regional security and stability.

As far as Egypt is concerned, I doubt that it would be interested in membership of a regional alliance targeting Tehran. Nor would it give its support, tacit or public, to an Israeli attack on Iran.

Given the divergent aims and core perceptions of the participating countries on the Arab side at the Negev meeting, this ministerial meeting was not the proper venue for celebrating the 43rd anniversary of the Peace Treaty that Egypt signed with Israel in 1979. It only served the foreign-policy objectives of Israel and to a lesser degree the US strategy of deepening relations between the signatories of the Abraham Accords and expanding them in future to include other Arab countries.

In the absence of a peaceful and political resolution to the Palestinian question in line with UN resolutions. I am afraid that the peace between Egypt and Israel will remain an unfulfilled promise of peace.

* The writer is former assistant foreign minister.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 7 April, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.

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There needs to be a greater emphasis on science and collaboration between science and industry to meet the challenges of climate change.

Science, as embodied in the theorists, researchers, and other experts that abound in universities and research centres around the world, is what is needed to address climate change and help countries meet their pledges regarding reducing carbon emissions.

It was science that sounded the early alarms cautioning humanity that it could not continue to abuse nature in such an aggressive and unrestrained manner without endangering the planet and human life on it.

Scientific papers have furnished proof after proof of the detrimental effects of mounting carbon emissions on the climate and environment as a whole. They have warned of increases in the numbers and severity of floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes, forest fires, drought and desertification, and the consequent loss of life and property.

However, due to the advice of those having vested interests in the status quo and to the many who have opted for denial, the world has lost decades without taking resolute action. When the warnings came true and the perils loomed right before our eyes, we saw the usual bewilderment and confusion that prevail in the face of crises that erupt after warnings have gone unheeded and precautions have come too late, if they come at all.

With the problems that have arisen in the management of climate change and securing energy sources, confusion then turned to bedlam, especially after the Ukrainian crisis erupted. Of course, this is hardly the first time that innocent people have ended up paying for crises in which they played no role. It will also not be the last.

Of crucial importance are the measures that need to be taken to reduce the planets average temperature rise to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above its temperature at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The Paris Climate Accords, signed by nearly all governments around the world, set two degrees as the target, but the latest scientific studies have shown that even that is extremely risky, since the average temperature is already 1.1 degrees higher than it was.

Even if countries keep to the pledges they made under the Paris Agreement, temperatures could rise by a dangerous 2.7 degrees. Moreover, with the new pledges made at the Glasgow COP26 Summit held in November to salvage what could be salvageable, they would still not achieve more than 1.8 degrees above the temperature at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

This is also only if the countries meet their pledges. Lack of transparency is a passport to impunity and continued indulgence in bad practices while mouthing more promises.

It is not surprising to hear the increasing complaints over the lack of established criteria with which to assess commitments to climate pledges because of the spread of greenwashing  the provision of misleading information to deceive people into believing that a companys products or operations are environmentally sound.

For example, the London Financial Times newspaper recently reported that around $2.7 trillion worth of assets are managed in more than 2,900 funds around the world that apply ESG (environmental, social and governance) criteria designed for investors looking for companies with positive social and environmental impacts.

The growing priority that investors are giving to climate change and sustainability has triggered a gold rush in ESG funds, complete with a boom in ESG ratings consultants to guide investors to the best available opportunities in the field in terms of risk and compliance. However, as the Financial Times also pointed out, problems have emerged because each of the consultancies has a method and approach of its own, making it hard to shop for the right investment.

A company could score well on the ESG ranking of one provider and poorly on another. Investors and other members of the public are confused and at a loss to compare which fund performs better.

According to experts at the MIT Sloan School of Management in the US cited by the Financial Times, the disparities in approaches and conflicting results create what they call aggregate confusion, ultimately hampering efforts to improve ESG performance. Companies themselves are unsure of how to proceed because of the many mixed signals they receive regarding what they need to do to improve performance or reduce risk.

In the light of the foregoing, one cannot help but welcome the news of the launch of a group of experts tasked with developing stronger and clearer standards to help businesses, investors, cities and regions, and others commit and live up to their pledges on reducing their carbon footprints. The creation of the UN High-Level Expert Group on the Net-Zero Emissions Commitments of Non-State Entities stems from the realisation that the only way to address problems related to climate-related pledges and investment is to agree on sets of concepts, criteria, and measures that will help ensure transparency and proper implementation.

The group, chaired by Catherine McKenna, a former Canadian minister of the environment and climate change, and consisting of prominent experts in climate change and the environment, finance, development, energy and other fields, will present recommendations by the end of the year addressing the following areas: standards and concepts for setting net-zero targets;

the criteria used to assess the objectives, measurement, and reporting of net-zero pledges; processes for verifying progress towards net-zero commitments and a roadmap towards developing international and national regulations.

It is to be hoped that the group will consult widely with the many relevant experts and professionals in prominent universities and research centres in order to benefit from the latest developments in science and its emphasis on empirical processes and proof.

Meanwhile, as we in Egypt prepare for the next climate summit, the COP27 meeting to be held in November in Sharm El-Sheikh, we should build on the contributions of the scientific bodies that supported the summit in Glasgow. Among the most important were the contributions of the COP26 UK Universities Climate Network, a group chaired by Alyssa Gilbert of Imperial College, London, and Emily Shuckburgh of Cambridge University that brought together eminent experts from over 55 UK-based universities.

If given the opportunity, scientific research institutions with their teams of specialists will not just diagnose the causes of climate deterioration but will also probe further in order to develop practical solutions to aid in the fight against carbon emissions and other environmental pollutants and the transition to clean energy.

There are now feasible and low-cost alternative energy sources, cleaner modes of transportation, and more ecologically friendly forms of urban expansion and agriculture. These all came about thanks to investments in human capital and scientific research and to promoting collaborations between the scientific community and the industrial and business sectors aimed at transforming theory and laboratory work into feasible projects.

These collaborations have also helped steer decision-makers, investors, and business operations towards the best means to transition to better policies and methods for water management, food provision, protecting infrastructure and coastal areas, and rural and urban development programmes.

Efforts to attain sustainable development, which include combatting climate change, offer science and research great opportunities to produce rational and informed solutions and policies that will enhance the efficacy of government and other agencies in dealing with problems. Once science comes up with the solutions and room is made for their implementation, the massive funding needed to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to protect the environment will step in because funders will feel assured that they have not been led astray.

* An Arabic version of this article appeared on Wednesday in Asharq Al-Awsat.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 7 April, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.

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Inspired by the music and television of the 1980s and 90s, the alternative rock band TeleChild has released their debut album Turn On Your Favourite Show last month on numerous streaming platforms.

Turn On Your Favourite Show was created over the last four years, including during the pandemic and its long days of lockdown. Most of the tracks were written in Dubai, as well as during their trip to Thailand.

The final album was recorded at Tunefork Studios in Lebanon over two separate sessions. The album was mastered at the famed Abbey Road Studios of The Beatles.

Consisting of 10 tracks, the songs' lyrics explore family bonds, relationship struggles, regret, a sense of escape, and the band's cynical view on society.

TeleChild take inspiration for their alternative rock sound from the magical and addictive world of television.

Their name is inspired by their childhood interests in the 1980s and 90s, when TV channels and music programmes were finding their groove. The new album is a personalised reflection of these channels and times.

The band consists of Lebanese childhood friends Hadi Baba and Charles Anouzi.

As you listen through the songs with the different rock styles, youll get the same feeling of randomness as if youre zapping through TV channels, but hopefully you wont be able to stop, says Hadi Baba.

The album showcases a variety of musical genres, with the musicians moving from indie and rock music to the blues, funk and soul, topping it with orchestral power. One track even features bosanova, adding yet more colour to the album.

There are many tempo changes within the same song, for example, and a lot of the tracks dont follow the typical verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge formula, Baba comments on the album's repertoire.

The duo started collaborating in their university days, and decided to work on their first album when they met again in Dubai.

The album also features Nimri on vocals, Akram Hajj (from Kinematic) on drums, Marwan Tohme (from Postcards) on bass.

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NATO would quickly welcome Finland and Sweden into its ranks with open arms if they decided to apply, the military alliance's top civilian official said Wednesday, as Russia's war on Ukraine spurs public support in the two Nordic countries for membership.

The military organization might also be ready to provide security guarantees to the countries if any potential membership bid angers Russia, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said.

A poll last month by Finnish broadcaster YLE showed that, for the first time, more than 50% of Finns support joining the Western military alliance. In neighboring Sweden, a similar poll showed that those in favor of NATO membership outnumber those against it.

``If they decide to apply, I expect that all allies will welcome them,'' Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels, as NATO foreign ministers met to discuss the war in Ukraine. ``We know that they can easily join this alliance if they decide to apply.''

Before launching the war on Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin demanded that the 30-nation military organization stop expanding and pull its troops back from Russia's borders. So the prospect of neighboring Finland, and Sweden, joining is unlikely to be welcomed in Moscow.

To shield them, Stoltenberg said NATO member countries might be prepared to provide a security guarantee to cover the two neutral nations from when they announce a possible membership bid until their applications are endorsed.

Once members, they would benefit from NATO's collective defense clause, which obliges all members to come to the aid of any ally that comes under attack.

``I am certain that we will find ways to address concerns they may have regarding the period between the potential application and the final ratification,'' Stoltenberg said. He declined to speculate about what those security guarantees might involve.

Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said his country's lawmakers are due this month to debate a government white paper on security, including an option for NATO accession. He said Russia's invasion of Ukraine has changed public opinion.

``In three or four weeks we have a majority, first time ever'' in favor of joining, Haavisto said.

He said Finland knows that ``Russia is ready to take bigger risks, as we can see in Ukraine, bigger risks also for its own security. We can also see that Russia is capable of gathering more than 100,000 men against just one country, even without touching its reserves.''

Haavisto added that ``the threshold has been lowered, at least in the debate,'' on Russia's possible use of tactical nuclear or chemical weapons.

He too was reluctant to go into detail about any security guarantee that Finland might need, particularly as debate about joining continues at home.

But Haavisto did say it's something that his country would want to discuss with ``key'' NATO members, and that Finnish leaders have been in contact with US President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

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The UN General Assembly will vote Thursday on suspending Russia from the UN Human Rights Council following allegations that Russian troops deliberately murdered civilians in Bucha, Ukraine, the assembly presidency said.

The vote is "confirmed for 10:00 am," Paulina Kubiak, a spokeswoman for the presidency, said Wednesday.

Two-thirds of the countries who cast votes in the 193-member assembly must support suspension for Russia to be temporarily removed from the Geneva-based Human Rights Council.

The vote comes amid international outrage over horrific scenes of civilian killings in areas of Ukraine recently retaken from Russian forces, like Bucha outside Kyiv, including people apparently executed with their hands tied behind their backs.

"The images out of Bucha and devastation across Ukraine require us to now match our words with action," US ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Monday.

"We cannot let a member state that is subverting every principle we hold dear to continue to participate" in the council, she said.

The UN Human Rights Council is the world body's main forum in this domain. Founded in 2006, it is composed of 47 member states which are chosen by the General Assembly.

Libya was suspended from the council in 2011.

"Russia should not have a position of authority in that body, nor should we allow Russia to use its seat on the Council as a tool of propaganda to suggest they have a legitimate concern about human rights," the US ambassador said.

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Canada summoned Russia's ambassador on Wednesday to show him images of "egregious" killings in Bucha, outside Kyiv, while petitioning the International Criminal Court to expedite a war crimes investigation.

Speaking in Brussels ahead of a NATO meeting, Foreign Minister Melanie Joly said she "instructed my deputy minister to summon the Russian ambassador in Ottawa to make sure that he is presented with the images of what happened in Bucha."

Ukrainian officials say hundreds of civilians were found dead in areas vacated by Russian troops, and images of bodies in the streets sparked global outrage. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described the killings as "war crimes" and "genocide."

The Kremlin has denied the accusations of mass killings and claimed the images emerging from Bucha and other towns are fakes produced by Ukrainian forces, or that the deaths occurred after Russian soldiers pulled out.

Joly also said more sanctions against Russia are coming that, along with weaponry sent to Ukraine, would strengthen Kyiv's hand in negotiations with Moscow and on the battlefield.

"Our goal is to suffocate the Russian regime," she said.

Ottawa has sent Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigators to the International Criminal Court to help gather evidence of alleged Russian war crimes.

Joly said the specialized police unit was sent "to make sure that the investigation is ongoing and ongoing fast."

Meanwhile, as allies expelled more than 200 Russian envoys and staff this week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he was hesitant to follow suit.

"I am just not sure the symbolic gesture of excluding Russian diplomats from what they are doing in Canada is worth the cost of losing our diplomats in Moscow," Trudeau said in Ottawa.

"We know that Russian diplomats in Canada are not being helpful. They are spreading disinformation. They are pushing pro-Putin propaganda in a time of conflict and war," he said.

"We have to weigh the negative of that against the positive of having extraordinary Canadians in Moscow who are giving us feedback on what the Russian people are doing."

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The United States was expected to announce tough new sanctions on Russia Wednesday, including a ban on new investments, a day after Ukraine's president showed the UN Security Council harrowing images of violence and accused Moscow of widespread atrocities.

The sanctions come after an outcry over the discovery of dozens of bodies in civilian clothing in areas from which Russian troops have withdrawn around Ukraine's capital, including the town of Bucha.

Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky likened Russia's actions to Nazi atrocities in an impassioned speech by videolink to the 15-member UN Security Council on Tuesday.

"They cut off limbs, slashed their throats, women were raped and killed in front of their children," Zelensky said.

He demanded stronger action from Western powers and called for Russia's exclusion from the Council, where it holds veto power.

Later in his nightly address, a frustrated Zelensky said Russia was blocking the UN from carrying out "the functions for which it was created".

"The UN Security Council exists, and security in the world doesn't," he said.

In an interview with the BBC, the US ambassador to the UN admitted that "no one can question (Zelensky's) frustration with the Council and how the Council operates".

But she insisted that the Council was holding Russia to account, and that Moscow was isolated within it.

Push to isolate Moscow

The killings in Bucha and elsewhere have galvanised support for Ukraine, with Washington announcing another $100 million in military aid, and produced new momentum for additional sanctions on Moscow.

"We had already concluded that Russia committed war crimes in Ukraine, and the information from Bucha appears to show further evidence of war crimes," a US source familiar with the planned measures said.

On Wednesday, Washington, in coordination with the G7 and the European Union, is expected to announce measures including a ban on all new investments in Russia.

"You can expect... that they will target Russian government officials, their family members, Russian-owned financial institutions, also state-owned enterprises," White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told a briefing on Tuesday.

A new sanctions package being prepared by Europe, meanwhile, is set to include oil and coal, France's foreign minister said at EU talks in Luxembourg.

And Britain said it has so far frozen some $350 billion in assets from President Vladimir Putin's "war chest".

As part of the push to isolate Moscow, Spain, Italy, Denmark and Slovenia expelled dozens of Russian diplomats suspected of being intelligence operatives on Tuesday, following similar moves in France and Germany -- a total of some 180 expulsions in 48 hours.

The Kremlin called it a "short-sighted move" that would complicate efforts to negotiate an end to the hostilities.

Putin also warned of "reprisals" for recent European measures targeting Russian gas giant Gazprom -- and said Moscow would "monitor" its food exports to "hostile" nations, raising the spectre of shortages and price spikes.

Kremlin denials

The Kremlin has denied any civilian killings, claiming the images emerging from Bucha and other sites are fakes produced by Ukrainian forces, or that the deaths occurred after Russian soldiers pulled out.

At the Security Council meeting, Moscow's ambassador rejected Zelensky's claims, saying the "ungrounded accusations... are not confirmed by any eyewitnesses".

But satellite photos taken while Bucha was still under Moscow's control show what appear to be bodies lying in streets where the dead were later found by Ukrainian forces and seen by journalists.

And multiple Bucha residents told AFP they had seen Russian soldiers killing civilians.

"Right in front of my eyes, they fired on a man who was going to get food at the supermarket," said 43-year-old Olena, who declined to give her family name.

During a grim cleanup, the remains of partially burned bodies in black bags were lifted into a van, with officials telling journalists "dozens of bodies" remained in apartments and in nearby woods.

Western nations have given short shrift to Russia's denials.

"What we've seen in Bucha is not the random act of a rogue unit. It's a deliberate campaign to kill, to torture, to rape, to commit atrocities," US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, who will visit Kyiv this week, has offered the bloc's assistance in documenting proof of war crimes.

Cluster bombs

Ukrainian authorities have warned that others areas may have suffered even worse fates than Bucha.

Scenes of devastation have met those venturing into areas from which Russian forces have withdrawn.

In the northern city of Chernigiv, which was besieged from the early days of the invasion, a charred children's hospital, full of bullet and shrapnel holes, served as a shelter.

In the dank basement, children painted on walls -- tiny handprints, a smeared rainbow, a fluttering Ukrainian flag.

"Cluster bombs were flying, we have traces of these bombs," said 51-year-old Olena Makoviy. "The injured were brought to the children's hospital, both adults and children."

City officials estimate around 350 civilians have been killed in Chernigiv, with fellow residents digging mass graves to bury them.

"It was very scary here from the first days of the war," said Makoviy. "They brought guys, handsome, young, but no longer alive,"

We are ready

The Russian withdrawal from areas around Kyiv and the north is part of a shift of focus towards Ukraine's southeast, in a bid to create a land bridge between occupied Crimea and Moscow-backed separatist statelets in Donbas.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance expects a Russian push in "coming weeks" to try to seize the entire Donbas.

In the village of Krasnopillia there, Ukrainian forces were preparing to counter that push.

"We know the Russians are reinforcing and are getting ready to attack," a senior Ukrainian officer on the ground told AFP. "We are ready... we've planned some surprises for them along the way."

Civilians have been asked to evacuate west and on Tuesday a line of cars stretching three kilometres was waiting to pass a checkpoint, while thousands of other residents boarded trains to leave.

And violence has continued elsewhere, with Ukraine's prosecutor general saying Tuesday that bombing around Kyiv had killed 12 people.

Peace talks between the sides have so far gone nowhere, though Moscow says it is "ready" to continue.

Ukraine has proposed an agreement where other countries would guarantee its security in return for Kyiv accepting a neutral and non-nuclear status, not joining NATO and refusing to host foreign military bases.

The proposal would also see Russia accept Kyiv's admission to the European Union.

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EU leaders on Wednesday said the bloc will soon have to sanction all of Russia's hydrocarbon exports as they blamed Moscow for "war crimes" discovered in Ukraine, especially in the town of Bucha.

The declarations, made to the European Parliament in the French city of Strasbourg, came as the European Union was poised to implement a fifth round of sanctions cutting off Russian coal imports, while NATO and G7 foreign ministers gathered in Brussels for further steps on coordinated action.

The EU must also impose oil and gas sanctions on Russia "sooner or later", European Council chief Charles Michel told MEPs.

The deaths of civilians in Bucha and other parts of Ukraine were "war crimes" and "yet more proof that Russian brutality against the people of Ukraine has no limits," he said.

"We the EU, we will not turn our backs. We will look reality straight in the eye. There must be, and there will be, severe consequences for all those responsible," he said.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen echoed that, saying: "We will hold accountable those who are responsible for war crimes. The perpetrators must pay after Bucha more than ever."

She said the EU intended to keep ramping up "smart" sanctions that would hurt Russia more than the European Union.

The latest package of measures, she said, "will not be our last sanctions".

"Yes, we've now banned coal. But now we have to look into oil. And we'll have to look into the revenues that Russia gets from the fossil fuels," she said.

Russia's oil, gas and coal exports are its key sources of foreign income, with the EU its main customer.

Some EU countries, notably Germany, have been reluctant to hit Russian energy exports because of the damage it would do to their own economies.

But pressure has been building to go after them following the reports of mass civilian deaths in Bucha and other areas in Ukraine formerly held by Russian troops.

The EU's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell stressed to the European Parliament that the bloc's payments for Russian fossil fuels were funding President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine.

"A billion euros ($1.1 billion) is what we have paid Putin every day for the energy he provides us since the beginning of the war. We have given him 35 billion euros," since the February 24 invasion date, Borrell said.

"Compare that to the one billion (euros) that we have given to the Ukraine in arms and weapons.

"This gigantic difference has to highlight the importance and need of implementing what the (European) Council asked to do -- we have to reduce energy dependence."

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A veritable fleet of ships are suspected of violating international sanctions against North Korea by transporting North Korean coal or carrying out ship-to-ship transfers of crude oil to the North while exploiting tracking flaws.

Illegal ship-to-ship transfers and cargo laundering are flourishing everywhere. The case of Kim Jong-un's luxury Maybach limousines that were tracked by the detective work of an American think tank all along their circuitous journey via China, Japan, South Korea and Russia is only the tip of the iceberg.

China and Russia are also suspected of still hiring North Korean laborers ahead of a deadline set by the UN for their repatriation by year's end.

The U.S. Treasury Department in March listed a total of 34 ships suspected of violating sanctions. According to ship trackers MarineTraffic, 17 of the 34 ships have been navigating around with their automatic identification systems turned off for more than a year. Eight have been fingered in illegal ship-to-ship transfers of oil and nine in illegal exports of North Korean coal.

AIS is an international tracking system by which vessels ping their location to others. The International Maritime Organization makes it mandatory for all 300-ton or larger ships in international waters to keep it on at all times.

Turning it off is the most common way of evading prying eyes. The UN Security Council's resolution adopted in 2017 "expresses concern that [North Korea]-flagged, controlled, chartered, or operated vessels intentionally disregard requirements to operate their [AIS] to evade... sanctions monitoring by turning off such systems to mask their full movement history."

Last October, the Togo-flagged DN5505 left Busan for Nakhodka in Russia with two Maybachs but then switched off the AIS and vanished, before reappearing in more or less the same place but headed in the opposite direction with a cargo of coal.

The resolution calls on member states to repatriate North Korean laborers around the world by Dec. 22 in an effort to block the flow of hard currency to the North Korean regime. But many fresh North Korean laborers arrived recently in Russia, the Daily NK reported Wednesday. And China is refusing to submit an interim report on its repatriation of North Korean laborers to the UNSC.

"In many cases, North Korean laborers in China scatter in all directions as soon as they arrive to places like small restaurants or construction sites," a source said. "There's no way to locate them if the Chinese government turns a blind eye." There is speculation in diplomatic circles that Russia and China have made secret pacts with Kim Jong-un to delay the repatriation as long as possible.

A researcher with a government-funded think tank here said, "Sanctions will be less than half as effective unless China and Russia cooperate."


The overall cost and timing of launches booked to make Amazon's Project Kuiper a reality were not disclosed. "We still have lots of work ahead, but the team has continued to hit milestone after milestone across every aspect of our satellite system," Amazon senior vice president Dave Limp said in a statement. "Project Kuiper will provide fast, affordable broadband to tens of millions of customers in unserved and underserved communities around the world."

Amazon said that its contracts with Arianespace, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance (ULA) are the largest commercial procurement of launch vehicles in history.

Amazon on Tuesday announced deals for scores of launches to deploy a "constellation" of satellites in low orbit around the Earth to provide internet service to people below.

U.S. billionaire Elon Musk, head of the space company SpaceX, has already put more than 1,500 satellites into orbit to create a Starlink internet service network.

Late last year Boeing entered the space internet race, getting U.S. authorization for satellites that will provide internet services from above. Project Kuiper aims to provide high-speed broadband internet service to households, schools, hospitals, businesses, disaster relief operations and others in places without reliable connectivity, according to Amazon.

Amazon is developing Kuiper in-house, and planned to take advantage of capabilities already present in its other divisions, such as logistics operations and AWS cloud computing arm. Musk formed an alliance with Microsoft, which is Amazon's biggest rival in the cloud computing market, to use its Azure platform to provide his version of satellite-powered internet service.

With some of Amazon's launch contracts awarded to Blue Origin, one Bezos operation will be feeding business to another. Bezos has used some of his Amazon wealth to create and fund private space exploration enterprise Blue Origin.

"We're honored to support Amazon's ambitious mission to provide reliable, affordable broadband to unserved and underserved communities around the world," Blue Origin senior vice president Jarrett Jones said in a joint release.

 Rocket Booster

It was Amazon's plan from the outset to enlist multiple rocket launch companies, according to Project Kuiper vice president of technology Rajeev Badyal. The approach reduces risk of launch delays slowing the project, and saves Amazon money with competitive pricing, according to Badyal. "These large, heavy-lift rockets also mean we can deploy more of our constellation with fewer launches, helping simplify our launch and deployment schedule," Badyal said.

The massive number of launch bookings was also expected to boost that industry in the U.S. and Europe. Badyal gave the example of Arianespace relying on suppliers from 13 European countries to produce its Ariane 6 rockets.

Eighteen of the contracted launches will employ Ariane 6 rockets. "This contract, the largest we've ever signed, is a great moment in Arianespace's history," Arianespace chief executive Stephane Israel said in the release. "It is a major win for the European launcher industry."

ULA won the largest share of contracts and planned to build a second launch platform at its site in Cape Canaveral, Florida as part of the arrangement. That joint venture is operated by U.S. giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin. "This agreement marks the beginning of an exciting new era for ULA and for the entire U.S. launch industry," said ULA chief executive Tory Bruno.
Two oil tankers that belonged to South Korean shipping firms appear to have been sold to North Korea, prompting the UN Security Council to launch an investigation.

The UN Security Council's Panel of Experts overseeing sanctions against North Korea said in a recent report that it is investigating the case of a South Korean-flagged oil tanker named Daeho Sunrise being sold to a Chinese company and ending up as the Ocean Sky under the nominal flag of Sierra Leone but owned by North Korea.

The Ocean Sky is a mid-sized tanker of 5,807 DWT that was built in 1996.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's younger sister Yo-jong has resurfaced to threaten to "exterminate" the South Korean military with a "nuclear attack" in a war.

It was the frankest expression yet who North Korea's nuclear arms are aimed at. Until recently, the regime maintained that its nuclear arsenal is deterring a U.S. nuclear attack, calling it a "treasured sword."

But in a statement carried by the official Rodong Sinmun daily on Tuesday, Kim Yo-jong said, "If South Korea, for any reason -- whether or not it is blinded by misjudgment -- opts for such military action as 'preemptive strike'... the situation will change. In that case, South Korea itself will become a target."

She was responding to South Korean Defense Minister Suh Wook, who warned last week of South Korea's capability to take a preemptive strike against the North if there is any indication of the North firing missiles toward the South.

"In case South Korea adopts military confrontation against us, our nuclear combat forces are inevitably obliged to carry out its mission," Kim fumed. "If the situation develops to such an extent, terrible attack would be mounted and the South Korean army would have no other choice but to suffer tragic lot of extermination."

But she claimed North Korea is at bottom devoted to peace. "'Preemptive strike' on a nuclear state is a wild dream. We definitely clarify once again that we won't fire any single shot at South Korea as we do not regard it as the opponent of our armed forces," she said.

In fact the North has killed and maimed more than 50 South Korean soldiers and civilians through provocations in the last decade or so, including the sinking of the South Korean Navy corvette Cheonan in March 2010, the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island in November 2010, and the scattering of box mines in the demilitarized zone in August 2015.
KYODO NEWS - Apr 5, 2022 - 14:40 | All, World

The commander of the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet said Monday the time frame of China's possible attempt to take Taiwan by force was unpredictable, with Beijing apparently learning from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Adm. Samuel Paparo also called for the importance of "constant vigilance," in what appears to be remarks intended to play down an assessment voiced last year by then Indo-Pacific Command chief Philip Davidson that China could invade Taiwan "in the next six years."

"I think the window of a potential unification by force is highly, highly unpredictable," Paparo told a group of reporters in Washington, while noting that the so-called Davidson window is "actually based on open source speeches" made by Chinese leaders.

Noting the "many complex factors" that would play into Beijing's decision to attempt to unify with the self-ruled democratic island by force, including its examination of the Ukraine crisis, the commander said, "I think, to anybody that for somehow believes that we can take a breath or relax or relent on our own commitment to a 'free and open Indo-Pacific'...I would not support that because nature is so unpredictable."

Taiwan and mainland China have been separately governed since they split as a result of a civil war in 1949. Beijing, which regards Taiwan as a renegade province, has since endeavored to bring the island back into its fold.

As the Ukraine crisis has unfolded, attention has also grown on Taiwan, a potential military flashpoint that could draw the United States into conflict with China and could also pose serious security challenges to Japan, a close U.S. ally. Taiwan is located just 170 kilometers away from the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. The islets are also claimed by China.

As for the cooperation between the United States and Japan in addressing regional security situations, the commander reassured that he has "never seen greater convergence" within the bilateral alliance in terms of realizing the U.S. strategy for the Indo-Pacific that pursues enhanced deterrence against potential aggression in the region that is facing China's assertiveness.

On North Korea, he expressed his deep concern over the continuing test-firing of its weapons, which included an intercontinental ballistic missile launch on March 24.

He said the United States is "cultivating some options" to demonstrate U.S. commitment to the security of South Korea in response to North Korea's provocative behavior, but did not elaborate.

Amid Pyongyang's increased pace and scale of ballistic missile launches, the U.S. military said in mid-March that it had conducted an exercise involving fighter jets launched from an aircraft carrier in the Yellow Sea.

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KYODO NEWS - Apr 5, 2022 - 22:12 | All, Japan

A major fisheries group in Japan told Prime Minister Fumio Kishida Tuesday it remains firmly opposed to the planned discharge of treated water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant into the sea due to concern over negative impact on the industry.

"I told (Kishida) our position to oppose (the discharge) remains exactly the same," Hiroshi Kishi, head of the national fisheries cooperatives, told reporters after visiting the prime minister's office.

It was the first meeting between the head of the national fisheries cooperatives and Japan's prime minister since April last year when the decision was made to release treated low-level radioactive water into the sea from around the spring of 2023.

Then Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced the policy without gaining consent from the fisheries group.

Kishida said the government will be fully responsible for the impact of the discharged treated water and vowed to support fishermen, according to Kishi and officials who attended the meeting.

"Steady progress in the decommissioning (of the Fukushima plant) is a prerequisite for reconstruction (of the affected areas), and we cannot avoid the issue of how to dispose of treated water," Kishida said. "We will continue to exchange opinions and will make all-out efforts to tackle harmful rumors."

Earlier in the day, Kishi conveyed similar concern to industry minister Koichi Hagiuda. "We just hope people in the fisheries industry will be able to continue fishing with peace of mind," he told reporters after seeing Hagiuda in the federation's office in Tokyo.

During the meeting, Hagiuda handed the group answers in writing to five requests it had submitted.

The government pledged in the document to ensure the safety of treated water as well as take appropriate measures to prevent and tackle reputational damage to food products, among others.

Hagiuda also told the federation it will stick to its promise to the fishermen that the Fukushima plant will not release the water into the sea without their understanding.

The minister told reporters that Kishi "understands the recovery of Fukushima will not complete without disposal of treated water" and expressed hope that the government will "clear anxiety of fishermen by taking appropriate measures."

The government has already set up a 30 billion yen ($245 million) fund to support the fisheries industry and pledged to buy seafood when demand falls due to harmful rumors.

In the meantime, more than 1 million tons of treated water has accumulated on the premises of the plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. after a massive earthquake and tsunami triggered a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in March 2011.

The water, which was contaminated after being pumped in to cool melted reactor fuel, is treated through an advanced liquid processing system that removes radionuclides except for tritium.

Before discharge, it will be diluted with seawater below one 40th of the current regulations, according to the government. It will also be lower than the World Health Organization's tritium limit in drinking water.

Earlier this year, the International Atomic Energy Agency evaluated the safety of the release of treated water by sending a task force to the Fukushima plant to enhance transparency of the discharge plan and gain international understanding.

In addition to Japan's local fishing communities, neighboring China and South Korea have also expressed their worries over the water discharge plan.

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KYODO NEWS - Apr 6, 2022 - 09:55 | All, World

The United States, Britain and Australia said Tuesday they will work together on the development of hypersonic weapons and electronic warfare capabilities, expanding the efforts of the three-way security partnership focusing on the Indo-Pacific region.

In making the fresh announcement on the AUKUS partnership, U.S. President Joe Biden, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also reaffirmed their commitment to a "free and open Indo-Pacific" and an international system that respects human rights and the rule of law, saying the group's importance "has only grown" amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The latest move signaled the growing security role of AUKUS, which was initially launched in September as a partnership to help Canberra acquire nuclear-powered submarines in the face of Beijing's growing maritime assertiveness.

In a statement, the three leaders said that AUKUS is committed to commencing "new trilateral cooperation" on hypersonics, counter-hypersonics and electronic warfare capabilities, as well as expanding information-sharing and deepening cooperation on defense innovation.

The initiatives will add to their existing efforts to deepen cooperation on cyber, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and other advanced capabilities, the statement said.

The U.S. government has expressed concerns over China's hypersonic weapons development. Hypersonic missiles are designed to travel at more than five times the speed of sound.
By Maricar Cinco, KYODO NEWS - Apr 6, 2022 - 16:39 | World, All, Feature

As outgoing Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's foreign policy has largely been defined by his appeasement of China, experts warn this could make it harder for his successor to push back and reverse China's territorial advances in the South China Sea.

Duterte, who will step down on June 30 as he is barred by the Constitution from seeking another six-year term, has taken an accommodating stance toward Beijing's incursions in waters claimed by Manila, in exchange for promised investments from China.

The Philippines and China have overlapping claims in the South China Sea, areas believed to be rich in minerals, gas and oil deposits, and other marine resources.

Shortly after Duterte took office, the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague in July 2016 handed down a ruling that invalidated China's sweeping claim over most of the South China Sea.

However, the president stirred controversy last year when he called the landmark ruling favoring the Philippine position in the territorial dispute "a piece of paper fit for a wastebasket."

Ferdinand Marcos Jr., a frontrunner in the May 9 presidential race, has been leaning toward the same policy as Duterte to push forward talks with China, saying the arbitration is "no longer available to us" since it is dismissed by Beijing as a "political farce."

"We cannot afford that our next president will follow President Duterte, who infamously announced after he assumed office (that) the Philippine Navy will...avoid patrolling our (exclusive economic zone) so as not to displease China," said Antonio Carpio, a retired Supreme Court justice and a Duterte critic.

Maritime law expert Jay Batongbacal pointed out less than $1 billion of the $24 billion in projects promised by China was realized as of 2021, with the most prominent being two bridges in Metro Manila, loans for dam projects, and a proposed railway.

He said Duterte at some point changed tune amid mounting pressure from the domestic security sector to take a harder line against China.

Since the president was inaugurated in June 2016, Manila has filed over 230 diplomatic protests against Chinese incursions in the South China Sea, locally called West Philippine Sea, a 3.5 million square kilometer-shipping lane through which $3 trillion worth of trade passes annually.

In 2020, Duterte told the United Nations General Assembly that the 2016 arbitration had become "part of international law" and rejected attempts to undermine it.

Duterte also increased military presence and assets in the South China Sea in 2021 after over 200 Chinese ships anchored around the disputed Spratly Islands, an archipelago partly or wholly claimed by Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam and Brunei in addition to the two countries.

However, Batongbacal said, "(Duterte's) legacy will be defined by the fact that he became overly accommodating (of China and) at the same time gave...minimum support to the military here." But it had little impact since China had already made "such big inroads" into the disputed waters, he added.

Although the tribunal said China had unlawfully prevented Filipinos from fishing in Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea since 2012 and ruled key marine features are part of the Philippine EEZ, Filipino fishermen in the area said they could "never be at ease" with the Chinese constantly watching and intimidating them.

The shoal located 124 nautical miles off the Philippines' Luzon Island is a fishing ground accessed by many nationalities.

Vicente Paluan, a skipper of a wooden-hulled boat in the Pangasinan Province of Luzon, said China Coast Guard ships restricted his movement inside the lagoon, a shallow fishing ground in Scarborough.

All in all, he counted six Coast Guard vessels and a number of Chinese commercial fishing boats in the vicinity, he told Kyodo News in mid-March having just returned from an 11-day fishing trip.

The China Coast Guard patrolled at least twice a day, Paluan said. They made hand gestures or chased off fishermen from other countries, telling them to stop fishing and leave in a game of hide-and-seek in open waters, he explained.

Chinese fishing vessels, however, moved around freely. "That's how different (the treatment) is," he said.

On March 2, a China Coast Guard ship risked a collision with a Philippine Coast Guard vessel off Scarborough Shoal.

China responded by saying that Huangyan Dao, its name for Scarborough, is its "inherent territory" and told the Philippines not to interfere with its law enforcement activities.

The Philippines annually harvests over 300,000 metric tons of fish -- mostly scad, mackerel, and grouper -- in the South China Sea. An opposition senator argued Chinese land reclamation activities in the sea have damaged 1,850 hectares of reef ecosystem.

Vice President Leni Robredo, an opposition icon who trails frontrunner Marcos Jr. in the presidential election, said she wants to use the 2016 arbitration as a "leverage" to craft a Code of Conduct in the South China Sea with other Southeast Asian countries to manage tensions in the disputed area.

Duterte is set to speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday, but critics doubt the meeting will result in any meaningful concessions from China.

The Philippine leader has mentioned a past verbal agreement with Xi to allow Filipinos to fish in Scarborough Shoal. He said Tuesday, "Philippines and China, we don't have any quarrel and we can talk about the Spratly Islands and probably the fishing rights of my countrymen -- plain talk, nothing else."
KYODO NEWS - Apr 6, 2022 - 21:04 | All, World, Japan

The government has given up on its plan to have U.S. President Joe Biden visit Japan this month due to the crisis in Ukraine and is now aiming to realize it in late May, diplomatic sources said Wednesday.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida proposed a visit in late April, which would have been Biden's first trip to the country as president, when they held a brief conversation last month in Belgium where Kishida attended a Group of Seven summit.

Tokyo is looking to have Kishida-Biden talks when it hosts a summit of the "Quad" group, which also involves Australia and India. The Quad leaders have agreed to meet in Tokyo by the end of June.

The U.S. side initially sounded out Japan about Biden visiting in late May, according to the Japanese and U.S. diplomatic sources. It later showed reluctance to accept Kishida's proposal as the war in Ukraine has made Biden's schedule tight.

In Australia, a general election is to be held by May, adding to uncertainty over the timing for the Quad summit.

When Biden visits Japan, he may also travel to South Korea, another ally in Asia, observers say. South Korean President-elect Yoon Suk Yeol is set to be sworn in on May 10.

The envisaged Quad summit would be an opportunity for the four democracies to deepen cooperation in the fields of security and economy in the Indo-Pacific region where China's clout has been increasing.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has also raised concern about its ramifications for the region. Quad unity will likely come into focus as India also has close ties with Russia.
KYODO NEWS - Apr 6, 2022 - 21:39 | World, All

Hong Kong government's No. 2, Chief Secretary for Administration John Lee, tendered his resignation Wednesday and announced his intention to run in the city's leadership election slated for May 8.

Lee, who had directed the police response to large-scale protests during the 2019 anti-government movement as the top security official, told reporters that he would stand for the chief executive election once Beijing approves his resignation.

"Having been in the government for over 40 years to serve the people of Hong Kong has been a glory," Lee said.

Officials of the mainland government told members of the city's Election Committee in a meeting Wednesday that Lee is the only candidate favored by Beijing, according to a South China Morning Post report.

The powerful 1,500-strong committee is tasked with picking the city's chief executive in the election.

The announcement comes just two days after current leader Carrie Lam announced she would not run for a second term as the territory's chief executive, citing family reasons.

During Lee's tenure as the secretary for security from 2017, the Hong Kong government cracked down on pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, causing the paper to fold on June 24, 2021.

A day after the paper's closure, Lee was promoted to the chief secretary.

Related coverage:

Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam will not seek re-election
KYODO NEWS - Apr 6, 2022 - 13:40 | All, Japan

Japanese students forced to suddenly depart Russia are hoping to make use of their language skills and act as a bridge between their country and Moscow, following the latter's invasion of Ukraine that has sparked international condemnation and sanctions.

"I want to take on a job that would make use of my Russian language skills," said Sakurako Mitsushima, a fourth-year student of Osaka University in western Japan who was studying at Moscow State University.

She recalled how her dream life in the Russian capital was suddenly halted after the Russian military attack which has now moved into its second month and led to the deaths of more than 1,400 civilians and caused more than 4 million more to flee, according to the United Nations.

Mitsushima said she felt a drastic change in the atmosphere in Moscow from Feb. 24, when the Russian military operation started. She saw signs and stickers reading "No War" posted on walls and poles everywhere in the city. They would then be removed only to soon reappear.

"I was surprised at how the antiwar mood heightened," the 21-year-old said, adding how she saw an anti-war protester holding up a placard that read "I've had enough of murders."

Mitsushima said she was scheduled to stay until June but decided to return home earlier, worried about how she would be able to sustain her day-to-day life given the exclusion of Russia from the SWIFT international money transfer network.

Just before boarding a plane to leave Russia on March 4, she recounted how she was filled with emotion due to the circumstances which forced her departure.

Currently taking online classes with the university in Moscow, she stressed the need for interactions between people in Japan and Russia, saying Russian people should not be considered evil because of the actions of their leaders.

A fourth-year student at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, whose stay also was cut short all too abruptly, also believes that now is a good time to utilize his language skills.

The 22-year-old student, who asked not to be named, said he had just entered Russia in February to study at St Petersburg University. He returned to Japan on March 9.

During his short period there, he frequently visited a theater to watch ballet and he eventually became friends with staff there. He recalled one of the staff members telling him that she did not see this war as necessary.

His dream is to invite a ballet company from overseas to perform in Japan. "I hope there would be peace soon and I can convey to Japan the cultures of Russia and Ukraine," he said.

Related coverage:

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KYODO NEWS - Apr 6, 2022 - 12:42 | All, World

U.S. special envoy to North Korea Sung Kim stressed in a meeting on Tuesday with his Chinese counterpart the importance of responding "firmly" to North Korea's ballistic missile tests, calling them "increasingly escalatory actions," the State Department said.

The talks took place in Washington as the United States pursues a new U.N. Security Council resolution against North Korea following its test-firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile on March 24, the first such launch by Pyongyang since November 2017.

Winning support from China, a key ally of Pyongyang and a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, is crucial to such U.S. efforts. But the prospects of Beijing giving its backing are dim amid the increasing rivalry between the United States and China and tense ties between the United States and Russia, another veto holder, over Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

Related coverage:

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During the talks with China's special representative for Korean Peninsula affairs Liu Xiaoming, Kim emphasized that North Korea has violated existing U.N. Security Council resolutions through each of its 13 ballistic missile launches this year.

They posed "a serious threat to regional stability," Kim was quoted as telling Liu.

Kim and Liu also discussed opportunities to advance the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and how to encourage Pyongyang to engage in "meaningful negotiations" to that end, according to the State Department said.

Kim also said that the United States is committed to engage in "serious and sustained diplomacy" with North Korea, it said.
TEHRAN, April 6 (Xinhua) -- One Iranian cleric was killed and two others wounded Tuesday in a knife attack at the courtyard of Iran's holy shrine of Imam Reza in the northeastern city of Mashhad, according to a statement by the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC).

The statement said, the assailant, whose identity and nationality have been determined, was immediately arrested by security forces.

The injured clerics were immediately transferred to the hospital for treatment.

Mashhad Governor Mohsen Davari said that the assailant had carried out the attack under the impact of Takfiri beliefs and ideas, according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency. 
MOGADISHU, April 6 (Xinhua) -- The Somali National Army (SNA) said its forces on Wednesday arrested two members of al-Shabab near Guriel, a town in central Somalia.

Ahmed Dahir Abdulle, a SNA commander who led the security operation, said the troops also intercepted a vehicle laden with explosive devices that the militants intended to detonate in the town, in Galgaduud region, in Galmudug state.

"The two terrorists who were heading to Guriel town were arrested and are now in police custody for questioning to establish their target," he told Radio Mogadishu.

Abdulle said the two were arrested during the joint security operation carried out by the SNA in collaboration with the Galmudug state administration. The operation comes as security forces heighten security to secure the ongoing elections

Al-Shabab, which usually stages attacks across Somalia, did not comment on the latest arrest, which came after the National Intelligence and Security Agency warned of a plot to assassinate President Mohamed Farmajo and Prime Minister Mohamed Roble. 
WASHINGTON, April 5 (Xinhua) -- The United States, Britain and Australia announced Tuesday that they will cooperate on developing hypersonic missiles.

In a joint statement issued after conducting a review of the trilateral defense cooperation, U.S. President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said they "committed today to commence new trilateral cooperation on hypersonics and counter-hypersonics, and electronic warfare capabilities, as well as to expand information sharing and to deepen cooperation on defense innovation."

The leaders of the three nations, which formed a security alliance known as AUKUS in September 2021, said the newly announced areas of cooperation "will add to our existing efforts to deepen cooperation on cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and additional undersea capabilities."

When the three nations announced the creation of AUKUS, under which the United States and Britain promised to arm Australia with nuclear-powered submarines, France considered it "a stab in the back," because Canberra abruptly abandoned a conventionally powered submarine deal with Paris without prior notice.

In addition, AUKUS also created fears about arms race among great powers that will destabilize the Southeast Asian region.

Shortly after the establishment of the alliance, the Indonesian Foreign Ministry said it was "deeply concerned about the continuing arms race and power projection in the region."

Around the same time, Malaysian Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob said the nuclear-powered submarine project could "provoke other powers to take more aggressive action in this region." 
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett (R) and visiting U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken attend a joint press conference in Jerusalem, March 27, 2022. (Olivier Fitoussi/JINI via Xinhua)

The willingness of the United States to seek long-term peace and stability in the Middle East remains doubtful, as maintaining animosity among Mideast countries and dividing the region serve U.S. interests both economically and strategically, analysts have argued.



by Xinhua writers Tian Ye, Li Rui

CAIRO, April 6 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken's recent Mideast tour, which was aimed at addressing U.S. allies' concerns before reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, enlisting regional countries' support for sanctions against Russia and strengthening Israel's relations with Arab countries, is unlikely to contribute to the region's long-term stability and peace, analysts have said.

The willingness of the United States to seek long-term peace and stability in the Middle East remains doubtful, as maintaining animosity among Mideast countries and dividing the region serve U.S. interests both economically and strategically, analysts have argued.





ISRAEL VISIT NOT SUBSTANTIVE

The revival of the Iran nuclear pact, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), is currently the top priority of the United States in the Middle East, according to analysts.

By reaching an agreement with Iran, Washington hopes to limit Iran's nuclear capability as well as the development of other sectors such as defense and economy, while pumping more Iranian oil into the international market to meet the demands of European consumers, who have cut Russian gas supplies, said Lu Jin, a research fellow with the Institute of West-Asian and African Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

An important goal of Blinken's Mideast tour was to address the concerns of Israel, a close U.S. ally and an arch-enemy of Iran, who worries that easing sanctions will bolster the Islamic republic militarily and economically, added Lu.

During Blinken's visit to Israel, where he took part in a two-day conference with the participation of foreign ministers from Israel and four Arab states, namely, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Morocco and Egypt, the top U.S. diplomat vowed that his country will continue to work together with its allies to confront "common security challenges and threats, including those from Iran and its proxies."

Despite Blinken's remarks, Israel would maintain its posture against Iran, since Iran remains the most powerful country in the Middle East region to challenge Israel, analysts said, adding Blinken's visit to Israel is mostly symbolic rather than substantive and will have little impact on the improvement of ties between Israel and Iran.





FAILURE TO BUILD "UNITED FRONT"

"The U.S. is eager to press Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Gulf oil-producing countries to increase their production capacity in order to relieve the European Union's burden of high energy costs and the bloc's reliance on Russia's energy supply," said Ma Xiaolin, dean of the Mediterranean Institute at Zhejiang International Studies University.

The Gulf Arab states, primarily Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have largely stayed put despite Washington's repeated calls for increased oil output. Senior officials from both countries have pledged to follow the plan for progressively increasing oil production as adopted by the OPEC+, of which Russia is a member.

While meeting with Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi of the UAE Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan during his visit to Morocco, Blinken told the UAE leader that Washington is determined to help the Gulf state fend off attacks from the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen, apparently in response to the UAE's concerns about the declining U.S. commitment to the region's security.

The top U.S. diplomat revealed in Algeria, the last leg of his Mideast tour, that energy was not a focus of his talks with the UAE leader, even though Washington wanted Gulf nations to increase production to temper soaring crude prices, which are partially caused by the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

One day after Blinken left the Middle East, the OPEC+ only agreed on a modest oil output increase, ignoring Western pressure to significantly increase production. After the OPEC+ refused to bend, the United States opted to tap its strategic reserves to keep prices from rising too high.

The message was that Blinken's Mideast tour did not bridge the rift between Washington and its Gulf allies, and that his goal of uniting the stance against Russia had obviously failed, said analysts.

"For the time being, it's very difficult for the United States to seek Mideast countries' support for sanctions against Russia, because it might hurt their interests," said Li Weijian, vice president of the Chinese Association of Middle East Studies and researcher at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies.

Given what the United States has done in the Middle East, countries in the region have learned lessons from the past and begun to pursue an independent foreign policy, he said, adding Russia's growing influence in the region makes siding with the United States now an "unwise choice."

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (R) meets with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the West Bank city of Ramallah, on March 27, 2022. (Palestinian President Office/Handout via Xinhua)

PALESTINIAN ISSUE

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has hailed the conference of foreign ministers between Israel and four Arab countries as "making history," as it marks the first time that Israel hosts a meeting with Arab foreign ministers.

However, the absence of Jordan, which made peace with Israel in 1994 but did not join the conference, shows that the Palestinian issue is not forgotten.

On the day of the Israeli conference, Jordan's King Abdullah arrived in Ramallah for the first time in years to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

"Arab normalization meetings are nothing but an illusion and a free reward for Israel unless the occupation ends," Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Ishtaye reportedly told his Cabinet on the day of the conference.

Although the reconciliation between Israel and some Arab countries is supposed to ease some tensions in the Middle East, it could also further marginalize the Palestinian issue, said Wu Bingbing, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Peking University.

"Closer relations between Israel and several Arab countries will help the United States transfer its commitment to ensuring their security partially through a regional arrangement including Israel, who is happy to do so because the move will improve its own security situation," said Wu.

If the conference between Israeli and Arab foreign ministers is successful in becoming an annual regional forum, it will have a long-term impact on the Middle East and may provoke moves from Turkey, Iran, and other countries, said Li, the researcher at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies.

He emphasized that the conference's impact must be assessed further because it is still unclear whether it would serve as a long-term mechanism.

However, the Palestinian issue will remain a sensitive one for Arab countries for a long time to come, and the United States, which tries hard to portray itself as a peace-maker in the Middle East, has done little to address the root cause of the issue as illustrated by Blinken's reiteration of Washington's "ironclad commitment" to Israel, analysts observed. 
Zhang Jun (C, front), China's permanent representative to the United Nations, makes his explanatory remarks after the vote on the humanitarian situation in Ukraine, at the UN headquarters in New York, on March 23, 2022. (Xinhua/Xie E)

"De-escalation and putting an early end to the conflict in Ukraine is the earnest expectation of the international community and the strong desire of China," China's permanent representative to the UN Zhang Jun said.

UNITED NATIONS, April 5 (Xinhua) -- China is strongly committed to de-escalating and ending the conflict in Ukraine as soon as possible, an envoy said on Tuesday.

"De-escalation and putting an early end to the conflict in Ukraine is the earnest expectation of the international community and the strong desire of China," China's permanent representative to the United Nations Zhang Jun told the UN Security Council's briefing on Ukraine.

Zhang said that the Russian Federation and Ukraine have had rounds of negotiations and China welcomes the two sides to stick to the general direction of peace negotiations, overcome difficulties and differences, and continue to build conditions for a comprehensive settlement of the crisis.

"The international community should create favorable conditions and environment for negotiations between the two sides, open up space for political settlement, and should not set up obstacles for peace, let alone add fuel to the fire in aggravation of confrontations. Every effort should be made to prevent the escalation of the local conflict," Zhang said.

Speaking of the humanitarian issue, Zhang said that China attaches great importance to this issue in Ukraine and supports all initiatives and measures conducive to alleviating the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.

"As the conflict continues, we call on the parties to abide by international humanitarian law, protect the safety of civilians and civilian facilities, minimize civilian casualties, ensure safe and smooth humanitarian corridors for evacuees and humanitarian assistance, and guarantee the basic rights of women, children, and wounded and detained fighters. Humanitarian issues should not be politicized," he said.

A woman walks past a damaged building in Mariupol, April 1, 2022. (Photo by Victor/Xinhua)

On the protection of civilians, the ambassador said that "civilians should be spared of any forms of violence in armed conflicts."

"Attacks against civilians are unacceptable and should not occur," he said, noting that "the reports and images of civilian deaths in Bucha are deeply disturbing."

"The relevant circumstances and specific causes of the incident should be verified and established. Any accusations should be based on facts. Before the full picture is clear, all sides should exercise restraint and avoid unfounded accusations," he stressed.

Echoing the views of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Zhang said that "the spillover effects of the Ukraine crisis is having a major impact on the world, developing countries in particular."

Referring to sanctions imposed, the ambassador said that "sanctions are not an effective means to solve the problem, but will instead accelerate the spillover of the crisis, and bring new and complex problems."

"Today, with the deep development of globalization and the closely linked community of mankind, the implementation of all-dimensional and indiscriminate sanctions is tantamount to politicizing, instrumentalizing and weaponizing the world economy, triggering a serious crisis in the fields of global economy and trade, finance, energy, food, industrial chain, and supply chain, endangering decades of development gains of the international community, and making people of all countries pay a hefty price," he said.

A man walks past a damaged building in Mariupol, April 1, 2022. (Photo by Victor/Xinhua)

Zhang underscored the fact that the vast number of developing countries are not parties to the conflict, and should not be involved in this confrontation, let alone be forced to bear the consequences of geopolitical conflicts and great power competition.

"The world's major economies should be responsible for managing the risk of spillover of the crisis, and maintaining the stability of global markets and the momentum of global economic recovery," said the envoy.

Talking about sovereignty and territorial integrity, Zhang said that more than 30 years after the end of the Cold War, such a geopolitical tragedy taking place in Europe now "deserves our profound reflection."

"The sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries should be respected, and small- and medium-sized countries should not be pushed to the forefront of confrontation between great powers. All countries have the right to decide their foreign policy independently, and should not be forced to take sides," he said.

"The security of all countries is indivisible, and the security of one country cannot be achieved at the expense of the security of others. We call upon the United States, NATO, and the European Union to engage in comprehensive dialogues with Russia to face head on their differences accumulated over the years, find solutions to the problem, and promote the building of a balanced, effective and sustainable regional security framework," added the ambassador.

Zhang pointed out that on the issue of Ukraine, China does not seek geopolitical self-interest.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (C) meets with Russian and Ukrainian delegations before a fresh round of face-to-face peace talks in Istanbul, Turkey, March 29, 2022. (Xinhua)

"It is not our mindset to watch the situation indifferently from the side line, let alone do anything to add fuel to the fire. There is only one goal we sincerely look forward to, and that is peace. China will continue to promote peace talks and play a constructive and responsible role in helping resolve the crisis in Ukraine," he concluded.

The secretary-general provided introductory remarks at the briefing. Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo also briefed the council in person, while Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths briefed via video link. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a speech via video link as well.

Britain, April's Security Council president, initiated this meeting with the aim of providing a comprehensive update on the political and humanitarian aspects of the conflict in Ukraine.

The speakers called for an immediate end to the conflict and expressed deep concerns over the humanitarian crisis caused by it. They stressed the importance of dialogue and negotiation in resolving the crisis.

They also addressed a number of other issues, such as food and energy shortages and price hikes, while calling for the protection of civilians, especially women and children, as well as humanitarian workers and the protection of the basic rights of prisoners of war, civilian infrastructure and cultural relics.

Griffiths urged council members and all powerful member states to work together for peace and to alleviate the humanitarian disaster. 
BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) -- China said Wednesday it is firmly opposed to and strongly condemns the proposed U.S. arms sales to Taiwan worth 95 million U.S. dollars, urging the U.S. to withdraw its plan.

"The U.S. arms sales to the Taiwan region of China seriously violate the one-China principle and the stipulations of the three China-U.S. joint communiques, especially the August 17 Communique, gravely undermine China's sovereignty and security interests, and severely harm China-U.S. relations and peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait," foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at a regular press briefing.

According to reports, the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency on Tuesday said that the U.S. State Department has approved the sale, which would include training, planning, fielding, deployment, operation, maintenance and sustainment of the Patriot Air Defense System and associated equipment.

"The U.S. should abide by the one-China principle and the stipulations of the three China-U.S. joint communiques, revoke the arms sales plan and stop arms sales to and military ties with Taiwan," Zhao said, adding that China will continue to take firm and strong measures to resolutely defend its sovereignty and security interests. 
People attend a jobs and career expo at the University of Zambia in Lusaka, Zambia, on Oct. 27, 2021. (Photo by Martin Mbangweta/Xinhua)

Chinese enterprises operating in Zambia have been commended for contributing to skills development in the country, an industry body says.

LUSAKA, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Chinese enterprises operating in Zambia have been commended for contributing to skills development in the country, an industry body said Tuesday.

The Zambia-China Friendship Association said a visit to some Chinese enterprises operating in the country revealed an exciting trend of skills transfer in the local workforce.

People attend a jobs and career expo at the University of Zambia in Lusaka, Zambia, on Oct. 27, 2021. (Photo by Martin Mbangweta/Xinhua)

Fredrick Mutesa, the association's secretary-general, said it was gratifying that local workers who did not have any skills have been provided skills and were able to use the skills acquired in their workplaces.

He said when he appeared on a live radio interview "Let the People Talk" on Radio Phoenix that a number of Chinese enterprises have put in place deliberate programs aimed at imparting skills to local workers in order to improve productivity.

Chibeza Mfune, the association's deputy secretary-general, also said the association was happy that China has been at the forefront of providing skills in Zambia.

He said during the same program that apart from providing skills through scholarships in various skills such as medicine and engineering, local people undertaking China-funded projects were also being imparted with skills. 
Children wait to be served food in Samburu County, Kenya, March 30, 2022. (Photo by Chrispinus Omar/Xinhua)

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it's ramping up humanitarian operations in ten African countries to support an additional 2.8 million people facing a food security crisis.

NAIROBI, April 6 (Xinhua) -- The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said Tuesday it's ramping up humanitarian operations in ten African countries to support an additional 2.8 million people facing a food security crisis.

The charity said the crisis has left millions of families skipping meals every day, an alarming hunger situation that risks intensifying in the coming months. "We are scaling up our operations in countries like Somalia, Kenya, Nigeria and Burkina Faso and many others to try and help as many people as we can, but the number of people going without food and water is staggering," Dominik Stillhart, the head of ICRC's global operations said in a statement issued in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya.

A boy loads a bucket of water onto a bicycle in Kidemu sub-location in Kilifi County, Kenya, March 23, 2022.(Xinhua/Dong Jianghui)

Stillhart said the food crisis spans across the continent, noting that the ICRC will ramp up operations in ten countries in response, in close coordination with other components of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, to support an additional 2.8 million people.

The charity said conflict, climatic shocks like the droughts in East Africa and cumulative poor rainfalls in West Africa, a dramatic rise in displaced people, and surging food and fuel prices have contributed to the overwhelming needs in the region.

ICRC said many of the affected countries are still reeling from the adverse economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic thus complicating matters further. It said more challenges include limited access to vulnerable populations due to insecurity, as well as the international armed conflict in Ukraine, which has contributed to rising food and fuel costs and longer delivery times due to supply route disruptions.

The ICRC is carrying out assistance efforts across Africa -- Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Nigeria, Central African Republic, Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali and Mauritania -- where the food security crisis is most felt. 
BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Dongfeng Honda Automobile Co., Ltd., a joint venture between China's Dongfeng Motor Corp. and Japan's Honda Motor Co., has issued recalls for 6,493 Elysion models due to hatch defects, according to China's market regulator.

The recall began on April 2, involving select Elysion multi-purpose vehicles manufactured between Oct. 12, 2021 and Feb. 26, 2022, according to the State Administration for Market Regulation.

A riveting defect may lead hatch struts to break off suddenly, posing potential safety hazards, according to the administration.

The Wuhan-based carmaker will replace the defective parts free of charge. 
BEIRUT, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Lebanon's Minister of Economy and Trade Amin Salam warned Wednesday that Lebanon would face a shortage of wheat if the central bank fails to release sufficient funds for purchasing it.

"The cabinet urged the central bank to open lines of credit for the purchase of wheat," Salam in a statement by the Council of Ministers.

Lebanon hoards over 50,000 tonnes of wheat, a quantity merely sufficient for one month, said the minister.

Salam added that Lebanon is working with the World Bank on a program that will provide the country with wheat and some essential food items to cover a period of six to eight months.

Lebanon has been suffering from an unprecedented financial crisis amid a shortage of U.S. currency reserves, threatening its ability to import its basic food needs in the near future.

The country imports more than 85 percent of its wheat needs from Russia and Ukraine. 
Bhopal: An incident of MP's capture of 4 members of the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) module in Bhopal has come to light. A house in Ahmed Ali Colony near Fatima Masjid, about 200 metres from Aishbagh police station in Bhopal, was attacked by the Madhya Pradesh STF. From where members associated with the JMB module were detained 4. The Home Ministry has handed over the investigation of the case to the NIA.

Let me tell you that the suspects arrested are of Bangladeshi origin. All were preparing sleeper cells for the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) outfit here. This organization has been banned by the Government of India. A large quantity of jihadi literature, electronic equipment and incriminating documents have been recovered from the criminals. The culprits are active members of Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB). The jihadi literature recovered by the MP police has been taken over by the NIA.

According to information received from sources, the arrested suspects were involved in jihadi activities. The sleepers were preparing the cell so that serious anti-national incidents could be carried out in the future. Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) is a terrorist organization that carried out 500 small blasts at 300 locations in 50 cities and towns of Bangladesh in 2005. At the same time, there was also a large-scale massacre in Bangladesh. The organisation had carried out an explosion in Vardhman in West Bengal, India in 2014 and an explosion in Bodh Gaya in 2018.

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April 14 will be a holiday across India, central govt announced
South's superstar Thalapathy Vijay's movie 'Beast' is going to be released in a week, but before that a bad news is coming out for the fans of the actor. It is being told that this film of Thalapathy Vijay has been banned in Kuwait. The direction of the movie is handled by Nelson Dilip Kumar. It is a hostage thriller movie. Some Islamic terrorism has also been shown in this movie, which is against the interest of Kuwait. In such a situation, the government of Kuwait has decided to ban this movie. Prior to which Dulquer Salmaan's movie 'Kurup' and Vishnu Vishal's film 'FIR' have been banned.

The film 'Beast' will not be released in Kuwait: Thalapathy Vijay's movie 'Beast' is going to be released in theaters on 13 April 2022. If this movie is banned in Kuwait, then it seems that the fans of the actor will have to travel to other countries to watch this movie. According to the news, 'Beast' has already been banned by the Kuwait government before its release. It is being said that there are some terrorism angles in the movie which can also be a reason for the ban. From the trailer it appeared that this film is a hostage thriller movie. There are some scenes in it, in which Islamic terrorism has been shown.

Before which Dulquer Salmaan's movie 'Kurup' and Vishnu Vishal's movie 'FIR' have also been banned in Kuwait. Terrorism was shown in both the movies. It has been seen many times that whenever Arab countries have been called as a country harboring terrorism in movies, they have not got a clean chit. Kuwait is one of them. There may be some loss regarding the movie. Overseas collections can make a difference. However, its release has been announced in the UAE and the rest of the Arab country.

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ATHENS: Greece, Cyprus, and Israel vowed on Tuesday in Athens, Greece's capital, to strengthen energy cooperation in the aftermath of the Ukraine-Russia crisis.

"Diversifying gas supply has become a high priority," Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias said during a trilateral meeting of foreign ministers. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said the Ukraine crisis "stands to disrupt the structure of the European and Middle Eastern oil markets."

He said, "There are dangers in this situation, but there are also opportunities that we must consider jointly.

"The three nations "can and should be part of the solution for Europe's quest for varied, secure, and cleaner energy gas supplies from the Levantine corridor (in the Eastern Mediterranean)," according to the statement "Foreign Minister Ioannis Kasoulides of Cyprus stated.

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Amir Liaquat Hussain, a disgruntled leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, said that Prime Minister Imran Khan attempted to remove Pakistan Chief of the Army Staff Qamar Javed Bajwa and that he witnessed it, The News reported.

He stated the prime minister discussed the matter with him in a video message that went viral on social media, and the PM remarked, "I am going to remove COAS Qamar Javed Bajwa." He claimed that he knew a lot of secrets and that revealing them would cause a ruckus.

He said that the existence of any threat letter was untrue. Asad Qaiser wrote the supposed 'threat letter' stated by PM Khan, and Shah Mehmood Qureshi was reportedly involved in the scheme. He also warned Pakistani President Arif Alvi against issuing irrational presidential decrees.

As per the Dawn report, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) vice president Maryam Nawaz claimed that the main character behind the so-called "threat letter," former Pakistani ambassador to the United States Asad Majid, was transferred to Belgium just a day before Imran Khan invented the conspiracy drama to gain public sympathy.

"At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the so-called "threat letter" was drafted. A day before Imran Khan waved the letter at a public assembly, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Asad Majid, was abruptly relocated to Brussels. Why hasn't this letter been given to the Supreme Court and the rest of the country? There is no such (threat) letter, in fact "Nawaz remarked.

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Raipur: Kalicharan Maharaj, arrested under several serious sections including sedition, finally got bail after 93 days from the Raipur High Court. After getting bail, Kalicharan directly reached Indore's Devi Ahilya Bai Airport where he was given a huge welcome by his supporters. There was also a lot of scuffle among the supporters as the airport gathered a huge crowd.

Due to this, Kalicharan, while discussing with the journalists, said that he has no regrets on his statement about Mahatma Gandhi. He has been given this reward for speaking the truth. In Kaliyuga, there is a punishment for speaking the truth. In fact, politics has always been heating up in the country regarding Mahatma Gandhi and Godse. In a similar case, Kalicharan has been in jail for 93 days.

Let us tell you that in December last year, Kalicharan Maharaj had said due to his speech in Dharmasansad in Raipur that 'the goal of Islam is to capture the nation through political means. Before our eyes they captured it in 1947. They had previously occupied Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. He had captured Bangladesh and Pakistan through politics. I salute Nathuram Godse for killing Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. There was a lot of controversy on this statement of Kalicharan Maharaj, after which he was caught in criminal cases and he was arrested by Chhattisgarh Police from Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh.

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After being found guilty of blaspheming Islam, a Nigerian atheist was sentenced to 24 years in prison by a high court in the northern state of Kano.

Mubarak Bala, the 37-year-old president of the Nigerian Humanist Association, pled guilty to all 18 charges and requested leniency. He has been detained since the year 2020.

Bala was accused by a group of Muslims of spreading derogatory statements about Islam on social media, according to the statement.

Kano is a predominantly Muslim city. It is one of about a dozen states in northern Nigeria where Islamic and secular laws coexist. If Bala had been prosecuted in an Islamic court, he could have been sentenced to death. His detention had been criticised by UN human rights experts and international rights organisations, who had appealed for his release.

In 2014, Bala renounced his Islamic beliefs. He was subsequently brought to a psychiatric facility before being released, according to reports. In 2020, he was apprehended in Kaduna state and brought to Kano, his home state.

Nigeria is Africa's most populous country, and the majority of its residents, both in the predominantly Muslim north and the predominantly Christian south, are highly religious.

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Defence Minister Charalambos Petrides said on Tuesday that Cyprus cannot accept the US proposal to deliver its Russian-made weapons to Ukraine because it would leave gaps in the country's deterrence capabilities.

Petrides was replying to press claims that anonymous US officials had asked the Cypriot government if it would be willing to transfer all or part of the Russian-made arms it possesses to Ukraine. He added that legal issues could develop as a result of a clause prohibiting the sale of military systems obtained from Russia to other parties.

Following the European Union's (EU) sanctions on Russia, Cyprus is currently obsessed with concerns connected to the maintenance of its Russian-made armaments, according to Petrides.

Cyprus currently employs two types of Russian anti-aircraft systems that were acquired after the United States imposed an arms embargo on Cyprus in 1974.

Ukraine-Russia conflict made significant consequences on global economy: Jaishankar

EU proposing fifth sanction package against Russia

Greece, Cyprus, Israel pledge to strengthen energy cooperation
Home  Just In  Malicious prosecution: How Nepal police abuse their power at the cost of innocent peoples dignity

On February 8, 2015, Nepal Polices Metropolitan Crime Division arrested Hem Dorje Tamang from Rasuwa on the charge of stealing a motorbike and brought him to Kathmandu. But, as soon as he came to the capital, Tamang tried to escape, read the police report.,

The polices preliminary report further states that Tamang also had possession of 5.89 grams of heroin. Following the report prepared by Inspector Bharat Thapa, Kathmandu District Court sentenced Tamang to five years in prison.

But, three years later, judges Megh Nath Bhattarai and Shanta Singh Thapa of Patan High Court acquitted Tamang. In 2021, justice Tej Bahadur KC and Hari Phuyal at the Supreme Court also upheld the high courts decision stating that the charges against Tamang were vengeful and false and it was an act of malicious prosecution.

It is wrong to assume that a person under police arrest would have been in possession of illicit drugs, said the Supreme Court.

Similarly, Indian citizens Ramesh Sah and Prakash Patel were arrested by the police on the charge of having 28 grams of brown sugar. Police report prepared by Inspector Rabindra Nath Paudel and assistant sub-inspectors Yam Bahadur Nepal and Jeevan Kapil Joshi stated that the two also had chemicals to polish metals.

The report also stated that the two were arrested after the police received a tip that the two Indian citizens were selling illegal contrabands. Following the reports, the Kaski District Court sentenced the two to 10 years in jail. The then appellate court upheld the decision too, but when the case reached the Supreme Court, new things came to the surface, ultimately proving them to be innocent.

On October 25, 2003, Rita Lama Moktan was raped and murdered at New Parbat Guest House in Gongabu. Pressure mounted on the police to find the murderer, but the accused Bishnu Silwal had fled.

To save face, the police arrested constable Madan Narayan Shrestha and took him to Metropolitan Crime Division. There, Shrestha was tortured by the police into giving a false statement that it was him who committed the crime.

Even though the Kathmandu District Court asked the government to give Shrestha a compensation of Rs 40,000 for torturing him, he was not acquitted. The appellate court also did not free him. The Supreme Court did, but he spent over 13 years in prison before being released.

These are a few examples where innocent people have been sent to jail by state bodies as they are subjected to malicious prosecution to meet the vested interests of investigating police officials.

Why malicious prosecution?

File: Supreme Court of Nepal

Former chief justice Kalyan Shrestha says the police destroying and creating evidence to facilitate malicious prosecution has put multiple innocent people in jail.

There is a trend of botching up investigations and sending innocent people to prison, says Shrestha.

Criminologist and senior advocate Rajit Bhakta Pradhananga blames the carelessness of state bodies for the wrongful sentencing of innocent people in malicious prosecution cases.

High-ranking police officers make the lower level staffer do everything. This carelessness has caused a lot of problems, says Pradhananga. There hasnt been any research done yet, but I think 20 per cent of people in jail are innocent.

He says police arrest innocent people due to pressure from the public. He says there are 10 similar cases that he is currently fighting at the Supreme Court.

Deputy attorney general Padma Prasad Pandey who studied malicious prosecution in the United States of America says that there are seven reasons why innocent people get wrongful sentencing.

He says the first reason is the lack of qualified government attorneys who can fight the case on behalf of these innocent survivors.

If there were lawyers who worked hard to fight on their behalf and submitted the right type of evidence that proves the persons innocence, things would be different, says Pandey.

Second, he believes that people get wrongly accused because of Nepals poor forensic science. Pandey says there are a lot of faults during testing in laboratories that changes the way a case is seen by judges.

Imagine that during a rape case, DNA tests of two suspects get switched. What will happen when that happens, he questions. This is also something that causes problems.

Thirdly, Pandey says that the investigation officers deciding on who the culprit is before the investigation also does not help. Giving an example of the Brady v United States Case, Pandey explains how the government cannot collect evidence that helps the government attorneys win a case.

The police and government attorneys have been removing evidence that proves someones innocence, says Pandey. The Office of the Attorney General has even written to them.

He, hence, says malicious prosecution happens when the police and lawyers assume that a person is guilty.

In May 2020, the Supreme Court during a case said that the police or the government attorneys could not take away documents that were in favour of the defendant.

But that hasnt come into practice yet. If there is evidence that works in favour of the defendant, you need to find another that will support your claim. You cant go remove important documents. This not a fight for whos right, says Pandey.

Another reason for malicious prosecution is false information given by the complainant. This has resulted in multiple people being sentenced to prison.

People do that because they have an ulterior motive and want to see people in jail for their gain. We see these in cases related to rape and harassment and human trafficking, says Pandey.

The abuse of authority

Representational image: A prison

Last week, the Achham District Court sentenced a teenage girl to three years in prison for filing a fake rape case.

The girl had accused a man of raping her on January 29. The man reportedly had gone to the girls house to ask her to marry her. But, according to the court statement, the girl confessed that she filed the case out of anger when the man told her they could not get married then. Her confession made her a victim of malicious prosecution by the government attorney.

Hence, wrongful testimony is another reason why innocent people go to jail in cases of malicious prosecution, says Pandey.

According to him, in other types of cases, many admit to the crime after being put under immense pressure. When former prince Paras Shah killed a pedestrian over two decades ago, another person took the blame.

Pandey says that police and government attorneys themselves lead the malicious prosecution. When this happens, the bodies above them do not do anything. An example of this is the arrest of a journalist in Rautaht on the charge that he had drugs when the police themselves put the drugs.

He also says that not identifying eye-witnesses is also another reason why innocent people go to jail.

There are times when an eyewitnesses testimony is proved wrong in court, says Pandey.

Controlling efforts

File: Nepal Police Headquarters, Naxal

Former chief justice Kalyan Shrestha says that as the cases of malicious prosecution increased, a provision has been kept in the Penal Code to punish these officials.

If these people are found guilty, there is a provision to send them to prison for six months or a fine of Rs 5,000 or both.

But, Nepali Police has shown disdain for the new provision. The police officials argue that this will not give investigative officers the freedom to investigate a case.

There are people who are punished needlessly. If they argue this, who will bear what these people go through, argues Shrestha.

He says everyone should be aware of malicious prosecution as the judge cannot be the only person being rational in all this.

Investigators and government attorneys need to work harder, he says.

He says that this provision has been kept in the law because it was wrong of police and government attorneys to send people to jail despite knowing they were innocent.

In most countries around the world, the state offers compensation to the people who get wrongfully accused in cases of malicious prosecution. But in Nepal, even when the Supreme Court tells the state, people do not receive compensation.

Criminal law expert and senior advocate Satish Krishna Kharel says that because the rich do not need compensation, the government has not made it easier to provide compensation to the poor.

We dont think how this will affect a person. If someone is innocent but falls victim to malicious prosecution, their mental health will take a toll. That is why these people need to be compensated by the state because its the states fault they were wrongfully accused, says Kharel.

This story was translated from the original Nepali version and edited for clarity and length.
(Adds details, quotes)

LONDON, April 6 (Reuters) - Britain froze the assets of Russia's largest bank Sberbank on Wednesday and said it would ban imports of Russian coal by the end of 2022 in a new round of sanctions coordinated with Western allies to "starve Putin's war machine".

A further eight oligarchs active in industries including fertilizers, oil, gas, trucks and diamonds, were also sanctioned by Britain.

It will also ban outward investment to Russia, which was worth over 11 billion pounds ($14.4 billion) in 2020, and the export of key oil refining equipment and catalysts.

British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said: "Our latest wave of measures will bring an end to the UK's imports of Russian energy and sanction yet more individuals and businesses, decimating Putin's war machine."

"Together with our allies, we are showing the Russian elite that they cannot wash their hands of the atrocities committed on (Russian President Vladimir) Putin's orders."

The new sanctions, Britain's fifth package since the crisis began, follow reports of attacks on civilians, including shocking images emerging from the Ukrainian city of Bucha.

The asset freeze on Sberbank was taken in co-ordination with the United States, which announced full blocking sanctions on the bank on Wednesday, Britain said, while the European Commission has proposed a ban on Russian coal.

($1 = 0.7649 pounds) (Reporting by Paul Sandle; Editing by Kate Holton)
SINGAPORE, April 06, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--AM Best has affirmed the Financial Strength Rating (FSR) of C (Weak) and the Long-Term Issuer Credit Rating (Long-Term ICR) of "ccc+" (Weak) of PT Asuransi Jasa Indonesia (Asuransi Jasindo) (Indonesia). The outlook of the FSR is stable, while the outlook of the Long-Term ICR is negative. Concurrently, these Credit Ratings (ratings) have been withdrawn as the company has requested to no longer participate in AM Bests interactive rating process.

The ratings reflect Asuransi Jasindos balance sheet strength, which AM Best assesses as weak, as well as its marginal operating performance, neutral business profile and marginal enterprise risk management (ERM).

Asuransi Jasindos risk-adjusted capitalisation, as measured by Bests Capital Adequacy Ratio (BCAR), was at the very weak level as of year-end 2020 and is expected to remain at this level for year-end 2021. In addition, Asuransi Jasindos local regulatory solvency ratio has fallen significantly below the minimum regulatory requirement in 2020 and 2021. AM Best expects the companys capital adequacy to remain under pressure over the near term, with subsequent improvement subject to the timely and successful execution of capital management actions being planned and implemented by the company.

The operating performance assessment of marginal reflects the companys under-performance and earnings volatility in recent periods. Underwriting performance has demonstrated significant deterioration over recent years, driven by unfavourable claims experience from the companys credit insurance business, which has been impacted materially by the COVID-19 environment.

The companys ERM is considered to be marginal. AM Best views the profile of some key risks as exceeding Asuransi Jasindos risk management capabilities. Recent technical losses raise concern over inadequacies in underwriting controls and governance. Weaknesses in capital management are highlighted by the companys inability to meet minimum regulatory requirements at present.

Story continues

The negative Long-Term ICR outlook reflects AM Bests expectation of continued pressure on the companys balance sheet strength, operating performance and ERM fundamentals over the intermediate term. While Asuransi Jasindos management team continues to implement a turnaround strategy aimed at restoring capital adequacy and improving prospective operating performance, significant execution and downside risks remain at present.

Ratings are communicated to rated entities prior to publication. Unless stated otherwise, the ratings were not amended subsequent to that communication.

This press release relates to Credit Ratings that have been published on AM Bests website. For all rating information relating to the release and pertinent disclosures, including details of the office responsible for issuing each of the individual ratings referenced in this release, please see AM Bests Recent Rating Activity web page. For additional information regarding the use and limitations of Credit Rating opinions, please view Guide to Bests Credit Ratings. For information on the proper use of Bests Credit Ratings, Bests Performance Assessments, Bests Preliminary Credit Assessments and AM Best press releases, please view Guide to Proper Use of Bests Ratings & Assessments.

AM Best is a global credit rating agency, news publisher and data analytics provider specialising in the insurance industry. Headquartered in the United States, the company does business in over 100 countries with regional offices in London, Amsterdam, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Mexico City. For more information, visit www.ambest.com.

Copyright  2022 by A.M. Best Rating Services, Inc. and/or its affiliates. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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Boris Johnson urges Russians to download VPNs to get round Putin's censorship of mass killings in Ukraine

People evacuating from the Russian advance towards Bucha and Irpin, near Kyiv in Ukraine, on March 10 2022. Ukraine has accused Russia of atrocities against the population while it occupied the areas. Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Boris Johnson has told Russian citizens to use a VPN to evade censorship of massacres in Ukraine.

The UK Prime Minister said the atrocities were so bad the Kremlin was "seeking to hide them".

Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of genocide against his people.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson urged Russian people to install VPNs to avoid censorship of the mass killings blamed on Russian forces in Ukraine.

In a video clip book-ended by him speaking in Russian, Johnson said the recent atrocities carried out in "Bucha, Irpin and elsewhere in Ukraine have horrified the world."

He said Russians "deserve the truth" about what their military was doing. In Russia, coverage of the invasion of Ukraine is heavily censored to fit the Kremlin narrative that its forces are not harming civilians.

Its officials have characterized the mass killings there as a hoax created by Ukraine, relying on claims which are have been proved false.

"When you find the truth, share it," Johnson added.

Western officials and governments have repeatedly pushed back against Russian disinformation, including in the form of rare public statements from intelligence officials including Richard Moore, the head of MI6.

Johnson's intervention came after the massacre at Bucha, a Ukrainian town near Kyiv, was uncovered following the withdrawal of Russian troops. The town's mayor, Anatoliy Fedoruk, said on Monday that at least 300 civilians had been killed, with some of the victims' hands tied behind their backs. Satellite imagery also showed evidence of a mass grave in the town.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine's president, said of Russia's actions there that "this is genocide."

In an address to the United Nations Tuesday night, Zelenskyy described Russia's actions as "war crimes".

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Johnson's social media clip included some footage from Ukraine, as he described the mass killings and rapes that reported in recent days.

"The reports are so shocking and so sickening, it's no wonder your government is seeking to hide them from you," said Johnson.

"Your president knows that if you could see what was happening, you would not support his war. He knows that these crimes betray the trust of every Russian mother who proudly waves goodbye to her son as he heads off to join the military.

"And he knows they are a stain on the honour of Russia itself."

Speaking in Russian, he concluded: "Your president stands accused of committing war crimes. But I cannot believe he's acting in your name."

Johnson's address to the people of Russia comes ahead of an expected fresh wave of sanctions, as Britain, the US and allies look to put further economic pressure on Vladimir Putin.

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss will announce measures targeted at Russia's strategic industries with a focus on energy, Politico reported.

Read the original article on Business Insider
BriteCo

Series A Round Led by Brand Foundry Ventures will be Used to Enhance Technology, Expand Omnichannel Offerings, and Grow the Company into New Markets

CHICAGO, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- BriteCo , a leading direct-to-consumer jewelry and watch insurance company, today announced a $9 million Series A investment led by Brand Foundry Ventures. Additional investors in the round include Western Technology Investment and Hyde Park Angels. The funding will help insurtech company BriteCo grow its customer base and fulfill the companys mission to bring the jewelry insurance experience into the digital age.



BriteCos specialized jewelry insurance online platform enables customers to receive a custom insurance quote in 60 seconds and A+ rated coverage for theft, loss, damage, and mysterious disappearance in under two minutes. With the support of BriteCos strategic partner and investor, Hannover Re, BriteCo has developed a more accessible jewelry insurance product with better prices and coverage.

At BriteCo, weve democratized the jewelry insurance market by making the process of buying jewelry insurance faster, easier and more affordable than ever before, says Dustin Lemick, Founder and CEO of BriteCo. Developing a unique, specialized jewelry insurance program and gaining efficiencies with proprietary underwriting tools, he continued, allows us to offer a highly competitive product in an industry thats lagged in leveraging digital technology to improve the consumer buying experience.

BriteCos clear vision and impressive execution in modernizing the jewelry insurance customer experience is exciting. Were proud to be a part of the digital transformation and innovation that BriteCo is bringing to this industry, says Brand Foundry Ventures General Partner, Brian Spaly, who is joining BriteCos board of directors.

Angel investors who contributed to the Series A include Caribou Honig and Jay Weintraub. Honig was an early executive at Capital One and is co-founder of QED Investors, a venture fund focused on catalyzing the digital transformation of financial services and insurance industries. Weintraub founded LeadsCon, the world's largest gathering of vertical media professionals and brands. In 2016, Honig and Jay Weintraub founded InsureTech Connect, the world's largest gathering of entrepreneurs, investors, and industry executives which has drawn more than 7500 attendees. John Bunch, previously head of product and internal operations at Zappos, also joins the current round.

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About BriteCo

Established in 2018 by a third-generation retail jeweler, BriteCo is a leading insurance technology company focused on transforming the jewelry insurance industry for the digital age. BriteCo has democratized the process of buying A + rated jewelry and watch insurance for consumers with an easy-to-use online application, superior coverage in minutes, and an affordable subscription-like monthly payment option.

Media Contact

Lulu Cohen

Broadsheet Communications for BriteCo

917-318-2161

lulu@broadsheetcomms.com




Canacol Energy Ltd.

CALGARY, Alberta, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Canacol Energy Ltd. (Canacol or the Corporation) (TSX: CNE; OTCQX: CNNEF; BVC: CNEC) is pleased to report on the conventional natural gas prospective resources (resources other than reserves) for its Esperanza, VIM21, VIM5, VIM-33, VIM-44 and SSJN-7 exploration blocks located in the Lower Magdalena Valley (LMV) basin, and VMM-45, VMM-47, VMM-49, VMM-53 and VMM-10-1 exploration blocks located in the Middle Magdalena Valley (MMV) basin of Colombia (collectively, the Audited Areas). Boury Global Energy Consultants Ltd. (BGEC), Canacols independent qualified resources auditor, was commissioned to conduct a new independent prospective resources audit of Canacols internal estimates of prospective resources for the Audited Areas effective December 31, 2021 (the BGEC Report). Canacol is a natural gas focused exploration and production company, and the largest independent gas producer in Colombia.



Canacol Energy Ltd.  Audited Areas  Gross Working Interest Prospective Resources Summary

Gross Working Interest Prospective Resources (1)(2)(3)(4)(5) Mean Conventional Natural Gas (Bcf) Unrisked Risked As of December 31, 2021 20,525 7,576

(1) Gross prospective resources are represented at Canacols gross working interest share before royalties.

(2) The representation of prospective resources in the BGEC Report reflects the resource potential of the Corporations net working interest land position (1,524,793 acres) in the Audited Areas.

(3) The BGEC Report includes estimates of unrisked prospective resources and risked prospective resources. The aggregation of these estimates presented in this press release were carried out by BGEC.

(4) There is no certainty that any portion of the resources will be discovered. If discovered, there is no certainty that it will be commercially viable to produce any portion of the resources.

(5) See Canacol Energy Ltd.  Audited Areas  Gross Prospective Resources Detail, below, for further information.

Mr. Mark Teare, Senior Vice President of Exploration for Canacol, stated, Canacol is the largest independent producer of gas in Colombia, with a track record of gas exploration success. BGECs independent prospective resource audit evaluated and estimated conventional natural gas prospective resources for 178 individual prospects and leads, which BGEC has aggregated to an unrisked mean of 20.5 trillion standard cubic feet and a risked mean of 7.6 trillion standard cubic feet. The estimated prospective resources underline the significant potential of Canacols six exploration blocks located in the Lower Magdalena Valley basin and five exploration blocks in the Middle Magdalena Valley basin of northern Colombia.

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The Corporations successful gas exploration program has been enhanced by using 3D seismic acquisition and processing technologies. In the LMV basin, the application of the Amplitude Versus Offset (AVO) methodology to investigate the presence of gascharged reservoir sandstones has significantly reduced the risk on the outcome of our gas exploration wells in both the Corporations key play types in the Cienaga de Oro Formation (CDO) and in the Porquero Formation.

In the MMV basin, the Corporation has assembled a 610,981 net acre position in 5 Exploration and Production Contracts won in 3 bid rounds administered by Colombias hydrocarbon regulatory authority, the Agencia Nacional de Hidrocarburos, over the past 3 years. The Corporation operates all 5 contracts with a 100% working interest. The Corporation has identified conventional natural gas plays within the Cretaceous La Luna Formation (La Luna), which consists of up to 3,300 ft of marine carbonates and clastics, and is the primary source rock for most of the proven oil and gas reserves in Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador. The La Luna itself is productive in various oil and gas fields in Colombia. The Corporation anticipates drilling the Pola 1 exploration well in the third quarter of 2022, Pola 1 will be the first of several high impact exploration wells in this new La Luna play.

Third Party Independent Audit for Conventional Natural Gas Prospective Resources

(Resources Other Than Reserves)

The following discussion is subject to a number of cautionary statements, assumptions and risks as set forth therein. See Information Regarding Disclosure on Oil and Gas Resources and Operational Information at the end of this release for additional cautionary language, explanations and discussion, and see Forwardlooking Statements for a statement of principal assumptions and risks that may apply. See also Definitions in this press release. The discussion includes reference to prospective resources as per the BGEC Report, which was prepared in accordance with definitions, standards, and procedures contained in the Canadian Oil and Gas Evaluation Handbook (COGE Handbook) and National Instrument 51-101  Standards of Disclosure for Oil and Gas Activities (NI 51-101).

BGEC was commissioned to conduct an independent prospective resources audit of Canacols internal estimates of prospective resources for Audited Areas effective December 31, 2021, being the Corporations 100% Working Interest position in exploration blocks Esperanza, VIM21, VIM5, VIM-33 and VIM-44 and its 50% Working Interest position in SSJN-7 in the LMV, and the Corporations 100% Working Interest position in exploration blocks VMM-45, VMM-47, VMM-49, VMM-53 and VMM-10-1 in the MMV. All references in the following discussion to prospective resources are in reference to conventional natural gas in the Audited Areas included in the BGEC Report.

On an unrisked and risked basis, the following table represents an aggregation of gross prospective resources for identified plays(1), leads(2) and prospects(3) on the eleven exploration blocks.

(1) Play: A family of geologically similar fields, discoveries, prospects and leads.

(2) Lead: A potential accumulation within a play that requires more data acquisition and/or evaluation in order to be classified as a prospect.

(3) Prospect: A potential accumulation within a play that is sufficiently well defined to represent a viable drilling target.

Canacol Energy Ltd.  Audited Areas  Gross Working Interest Prospective Resources Detail

As of December 31, 2021

Gross Working Interest Prospective Resources

Conventional Natural Gas (Bcf) Unrisked Risked Low Best Mean High Mean P90 P50 P10 Tertiary Reservoirs in LMV & MMV 2,533 3,098 3,221 4,012 986 Cretaceous Reservoirs in MMV 12,278 16,618 17,304 23,080 6,590 Aggregate Total 15,414 19,870 20,525 26,380 7,576

Cautionary Statement

There is no certainty that any portion of the resources will be discovered. If discovered, there is no certainty that it will be commercially viable to produce any portion of the resources.

Table Notes:

(1) The BGEC Report includes estimates of unrisked prospective resources and risked prospective resources for individual prospects and leads. The aggregations of these estimates were prepared by BGEC. (2) The Corporation aggregates probabilistically to the country level for internal portfolio management and long term planning. As required by COGE Handbook Section 5.7, an explanation of this aggregation methodology is provided as follows. A single distribution of prospective resources volumes on an unrisked and risked basis was generated by means of a multiple trial Monte Carlo simulation incorporating Chance of Discovery (Geological Chance of Success (GCoS)), and Chance of Development (CoD) of all 178 prospects and leads from BGECs audit. From the distribution, the Mean is the average value of the distribution, and as such represents the most accurate single point estimation of the expected recoverable volume. The Mean of the distribution is represented on a risked basis relative to the unrisked case to provide the reader a more balanced perspective on the likely outcome of an exploration drilling program of all 178 prospects and leads. (3) CoD was quantified by BGEC for each prospect and lead by combining the chance of achieving a minimum economic field size (MEFS) with the chance that a discovery would be developed, i.e., the chance of achieving commerciality. The overall risked volume for a given prospect or lead is the combination of GCoS and CoD applied to the unrisked volume with the exception that if the risked mean volume for the prospect is less than MEFS, the CoD was set to zero resulting in zero risked resource. (4) The volumes reported in the table above (Low (P90), Best (P50), Mean, High (P10)) on gross prospective resources are gross unrisked and risked mean prospective resources volumes at Canacols gross working interest of 100% in the blocks Esperanza, VIM-5, VIM-21, VIM-33 and VIM-44, 50% in the block SSJN-7, and 100% in the blocks VMM-45, VMM-47, VMM-49, VMM-53 and VMM-10-1. (5) All prospects and leads included in this release are conventional natural gas. Conventional natural gas volumes are reported in Bcf at standard conditions of 1 Bar and 20 Celsius. (6) Opportunities reported above are potential hydrocarbon accumulations identified on the basis of available data, and depending on the level of information available for their assessment are sub classified as plays, leads and prospects. The assessed GCoS varies, from opportunity to opportunity, and BGEC has stated that the leads may require additional seismic data prior to becoming viable drillable prospects. 109 of the opportunities are classified as leads with the remaining opportunities classified as prospects. (7) The representation of prospective resources in the BGEC report reflects the resource potential of the Corporations net working interest land position (1,524,793 acres) in the Audited Areas. (8) Compared to prior evaluations of the Corporations conventional natural gas prospective resources, a significant increase in total aggregated gross prospective resources (both unrisked and risked) is attributable to increased estimates for the Companys prospects, leads, or plays in the Middle Magdalena Basin, as well as the addition of new prospects, leads or plays in that basin.

Of primary importance in the LMV basin is the resource potential of the CDO comprised of up to 5,000 feet of deltaic and marginal marine sandstones and shales. The CDO play is characterized by structural features such as faulted horst blocks and faulted threeway dip anticlinal closures. Specific prospects are identified and mapped using 3D seismic, and technical risk is further mitigated by the application of seismic attribute analysis to investigate the presence of gascharged sandstones. Since 2014, the Corporation has enjoyed significant success in both its exploration and development drilling program within the CDO play, with 23 out of 29 exploration and appraisal wells encountering gas (79% success rate), and 11 out of 11 development wells encountering gas (100% success rate).



In addition, the Corporation has further investigated the emerging play type in the turbiditic sandstone reservoirs of the shallow Porquero Formation. As for the CDO play, Porquero exploration prospects are identified and mapped using 3D seismic, and technical risk is further mitigated by the application of seismic attribute analysis to investigate the presence of gascharged sandstones. Since 2016, the Corporation has achieved noted success in its exploration drilling program with the Porquero play, with six out of six exploration and appraisal wells encountering gas (100% success rate).

For the exploratory opportunity on the exploration blocks in the MMV basin, the Corporation has identified conventional natural gas plays within the Cretaceous La Luna Formation, and it anticipates maturing by means of investigative geological studies, the reprocessing of existing 2D and 3D seismic, seismic acquisition and drilling over the next three years.

For all plays in the LMV and MMV basins and based upon the representation of prospective resources in the BGEC Report, management expects that significant additional resources will be developed in the future with continued drilling success on currently undeveloped blocks. In the future, significant factors that may change the prospective resource estimates include the outcome of further exploration and appraisal drilling that may change the estimates either positively or negatively. Furthermore, prospective resource estimates may be impacted by future improvements in technologies such as optimized seismic acquisition parameters, drilling fluid properties, and downhole petrophysical data acquisition methodologies. In addition, recoverable volumes may be enhanced by improved downhole completion and production technologies, additional processing capacity and compression.

In accordance with COGE Handbook 1.4.7.2, BGEC represents risked prospective resources as a function of the Chance of Development (CoD) of any future discovery. Estimating CoD requires that the related development project be commercial such that the commerciality conditions of regulatory approval for facilities, flow lines and access to markets are met.

For the LMV basin, the prospects and leads fall within 50 km of the Corporations central processing facility at Jobo that may be expanded as required. For the MMV basin, the Corporations exploration blocks are situated near existing infrastructure with access to local markets in the interior of Colombia, assuming a successful outcome of the Corporations proposed exploration program over the next three years.

Historically, the Corporation has successfully secured sales contracts for its existing production. It is confident of its ability to secure future contracts in an expanding market along the Caribbean coast and the Colombian interior. Since 2012, the Corporation has demonstrated its ability to manage other contingencies such as legal, regulatory, political, social license, internal and external approvals, and access to project finance to ensure the timely execution of its exploration and field development plans with respect to achieving existing production levels for natural gas in northern Colombia.

Appropriate levels of capital investment are anticipated to ensure future full field development including drilling, tiein, infrastructure buildout for facilities and flowlines, and abandonment and reclamation. The estimated total costs required to achieve commercial production range from between $5 million and $10 million for Lower Magdalena Valley prospects where adequate facilities and sales infrastructure are close by, to between $10 million and $140 million for prospects in the Middle Magdalena Valley where new facilities and pipelines to sales require construction and La Luna drilling and completion costs are more expensive and sometimes require new 3D seismic prior to drilling. The Corporation has prepared a realistic time and capital schedule for the execution of its proposed exploration, appraisal, and development campaign over the next three years to ensure compliance with its contractual obligations during the exploratory phase of each block while accounting for additional time for follow up appraisal and development drilling, installation of flowlines, and plant expansion as required. The estimated date of first commercial production is late 2022 for Lower Magdalena Valley prospects drilled this year. Dollar amounts are expressed in United States dollars.

Future field development will be for conventional natural gas. The Corporation is equipped with the experience to manage any subsurface challenges related to HPHT (High Pressure High Temperature) reservoirs in its go forward exploration and development program Any discovery will be developed using existing industry technology with standard gas completions in the wellbores, and standard surface treatment and compression facilities in the same manner as the operated fields presently tiedin and under production.

There are a number of positive and negative factors which BGEC considered in determining risk and overall uncertainty.

The key positive factors:

Canacol is the largest independent gas producer in Colombia with an established record in exploration, operations, and regulatory approval Track record of exploration and development success of 86% 1 Successful history of negotiating long term contracts with high quality off-takers Experience in regulatory permitting and licensing, with strong relationships with local communities Corporate-owned facilities and infrastructure are in-place, with proven ability to expand and build-out as required

Strong market fundamentals for development of new gas in Colombia, underpinned by declining supply, economic growth, and a national plan to use gas as a transitional energy source

(1) Track record reflects drilling success for the period 2014 through February 2022. For more information, see our latest Corporate Presentation on www.canacolenergy.com.

The key negative factors or critical risks:

The commercial viability of new projects depends on the Corporations ability to mitigate risks associated with the exploration for and production of natural gas including, among other things, uncertainties related to the estimation of prospective resources, the potential for negative technical results, access to capital, execution and timing risk, availability of equipment and access restrictions, and market events and conditions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively impacted global economies and disrupted global supply chains. The full extent of the risks surrounding the pandemic continues to evolve and create uncertainty.

Further information regarding risks and uncertainties can be found in Risk Factors  Risks Related to the Industry and the Business of Canacol in our most recent Annual Information Form.

Economic modeling was based on a pre-development study representing assumptions derived from Canacols experience of drilling exploration and development wells, construction of gathering systems and flowlines, and the expansion of processing facilities within the prospective area.

Definitions

Resource definitions, including those set out below, are as specified by NI 51101 and the COGE Handbook.

Bcf means billion standard cubic feet. 

Chance of Development means the chance that an exploration project will result in the discovery of petroleum.

Chance of Discovery means the estimated probability that, once discovered, a known accumulation will be commercially developed.

Conventional natural gas means natural gas that has been generated elsewhere and has migrated as a result of hydrodynamic forces and is trapped in discrete accumulations by seals that may be formed by localized structural, depositional or erosional geological features.

Natural gas means a naturally occurring mixture of hydrocarbon gases and other gases;

Resources encompasses all petroleum quantities that originally existed on or within the earths crust in naturally occurring accumulations, including discovered and undiscovered (recoverable and unrecoverable) plus quantities already produced.

Prospective Resources are those quantities of petroleum estimated, as of a given date, to be potentially recoverable from undiscovered accumulations by applying future development projects. Prospective Resources have both an associated Chance of Discovery and a Chance of Development.

Tcf means Trillion standard cubic feet. 

Prospective resource volumes under the heading unrisked have not been adjusted for the Chance of Discovery and the Chance of Development. Prospective resource volumes under the heading risked have been risk discounted to reflect BGECs estimates of Chance of Discovery (Geological Chance of Success (GCoS)) and Chance of Development (CoD) which involves assessing various risks based upon a number of assumptions and other factors. The Chance of Discovery is the estimated probability that, once discovered, a known accumulation will be commercially developed.

The Chance of Development is the estimated probability that a resource, once it has been discovered, will ultimately be commercially developed. While the Corporation believes that such estimates and underlying assumptions are reasonable, many of these assumptions are beyond the Corporations control, are subject to change and may not, over time, prove to be accurate. As a result, the actual level of various risks (including those currently identified and that may be identified in the future) could prove to be greater and the Chance of Development lower than currently estimated. Such differences could be material.

The estimates of prospective resources provided in this press release are estimates only, and there is no guarantee that the estimated prospective resources will be recovered. Actual prospective resources may be greater than or less than the estimates provided in this press release and the differences may be material. There is no certainty that any portion of the prospective resources will be discovered. If discovered, there is no certainty that it will be commercially viable to produce any portion of the prospective resources.

Estimates of prospective resources are by their nature more speculative than estimates of proved reserves. They would require substantial capital spending over a significant number of years to implement recovery. Actual locations drilled and quantities that may be recovered from the Corporations properties may differ from one property to another quite substantially. In addition, Canacol has made no commitment to drill, and likely will not drill, all of the drilling locations that have been attributable to these estimates of prospective resources.

Estimates of resource volumes can be categorized according to the range of uncertainty associated with the estimates. Uncertainty ranges are described in COGE Handbook as low, best and high estimates as follows:

Low Estimate is a conservative estimate of the quantity that will be recovered. It is likely the actual remaining quantities recovered will exceed the Low Estimate. If probabilistic methods are used, there should be at least a 90 percent probability (P90) the quantities actually recovered will equal or exceed the Low Estimate; provided that, with regards to leads and prospects, this assumes discovery and commercial development. 

Best Estimate is considered to be the Best Estimate of the quantity that will be recovered. It is equally likely the actual remaining quantities recovered will be greater or less than the Best Estimate. If probabilistic methods are used, there should be at least a 50 percent probability (P50) that the quantities actually recovered will equal or exceed the Best Estimate.



High Estimate is considered to be an optimistic estimate of the quantity that will be recovered. It is unlikely the actual remaining quantities recovered will exceed the High Estimate. If probabilistic methods are used, there should be at least a 10 percent probability (P10) the quantities actually recovered will equal or exceed the High Estimate.



Mean Estimate represents the arithmetic average of the expected recoverable volume. It is the most accurate single point representation of the volume distribution.



Information Regarding Disclosure on Oil and Gas Resources and Operations

Other than as otherwise disclosed in this press release, projects have not been defined to develop the resources in the evaluated areas. Such projects have historically been developed sequentially over a number of drilling seasons and are subject to annual budget constraints.

Canacols policy of orderly development on a staged basis is influenced by the timing of the growth of thirdparty infrastructure, Canacols short and long-term view of gas prices, the results of exploration and development activities of Canacol and others, and possible infrastructure capacity constraints.

About Canacol

Canacol is a natural gas exploration and production company with operations focused in Colombia. The Corporations common stock trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange, the OTCQX in the United States of America, and the Colombia Stock Exchange under ticker symbol CNE, CNNEF, and CNEC, respectively.

Forward-Looking Information and Statements

This press release contains certain forwardlooking information and statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. The use of any of the words expect, anticipate, continue, estimate, objective, ongoing, may, will, project, should, believe, plans, intends, strategy, and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking information or statements.

The forwardlooking information and statements contained in this press release reflect several material factors and expectations and assumptions of Canacol including, without limitation: that Canacol will continue to conduct its operations in a manner consistent with past operations; results from drilling and development activities are consistent with past results; the continued and timely development of infrastructure in areas of new production; the general continuance of current industry conditions; the continuance of existing (and in certain circumstances, the implementation of proposed) tax, royalty and regulatory regimes; the accuracy of the estimates of Canacols resource volumes; certain commodity price and other cost assumptions; and the continued availability of adequate debt and equity financing and cash flow to fund its planned expenditures. There are a number of assumptions associated with the development of the prospects and leads, including the quality of the reservoirs, continued performance from existing wells, future drilling programs and performance from new wells, the growth of infrastructure, well density per section, and recovery factors and development necessary involves known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including those risks identified in this press release. Canacol believes the material factors, expectations and assumptions reflected in the forward looking information and statements are reasonable but no assurance can be given that these factors, expectations and assumptions will prove to be correct.

The forwardlooking information and statements included in this press release are not guarantees of future performance and should not be unduly relied upon. Such information and statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those anticipated in such forwardlooking information or statements including, without limitation: changes in commodity prices; the early stage of development of some areas in the Audit Areas; the potential for variation in the quality of formations, changes in the demand for or supply of Canacols products; unanticipated operating results or production declines unanticipated results from Canacols exploration and development activities; changes in tax or environmental laws, royalty rates or other regulatory matters; changes in development plans of Canacol, increased debt levels or debt service requirements; inaccurate estimation of Canacols oil and gas reserve and resource volumes; limited, unfavorable or a lack of access to capital markets; increased costs; a lack of adequate insurance coverage; the impact of competitors; and certain other risks detailed from time to time in Canacols public disclosure documents (including, without limitation, those risks identified in this news release and in Canacols most recent Annual Information Form).

The forwardlooking information and statements contained in this news release speak only as of the date of this news release, and none of Canacol or its subsidiaries assumes any obligation to publicly update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances, except as may be required pursuant to applicable laws.

CONTACT: For further information please contact: Investor Relations Ph: +57 (1) 621 1747 Ph: +(1) 403.561.1648 Email: IR@canacolenergy.com Website: canacolenergy.com




In China, livestreaming promotion is emerging as a popular way for brands and influencers to reach consumers, challenging the traditional e-commerce model where users browse static pictures, read reviews and place orders. Arising from this trend are tools that help brands better predict what and how to sell through their live commerce stores.

One of the players providing such software is Zhiyi Tech, a four-year-old company based out of Hangzhou, Alibaba's backyard, and run by two Carnegie Mellon Ph.D.s specializing in artificial intelligence. The company said it recently raised close to $100 million from three rounds of funding led respectively by GL Ventures -- Hillhouse Capital's early-stage arm, Zoo Capital, Xianghe Capital and CE Innovation Capital.

Other investors from the round included existing shareholders Legend Capital and Yonghua Capital. The proceeds add to the "tens of millions of dollars" Zhiyi raised from a Series A round in 2018.

Zhiyi works by scouring the internet for styles, including those from Instagram influencers and fashion shows, and turning them into actionable insight for designers, such as which color, material or pattern is trending. On top of that, it analyzes apparel sales on e-commerce sites like Alibaba's Taobao marketplace and Douyin, TikTok's Chinese version, and breaks down the bestsellers. Finally, it has an ecosystem of suppliers that retailers can tap. In other words, Zhiyi is building a one-stop solution for brands and influencers making money off live commerce. With the new funding, Zhiyi plans to hire more staff and conduct product R&D.

Zhiyi is mostly serving brands in China at the moment, but the change in the fashion industry it represents has a wider global reach. The success of global fast fashion e-commerce upstart Shein has helped populate the idea of "on-demand fashion": Brands design and manufacture clothes based on real-time consumer sentiment and fashion trends rather than trying to build a supply chain that can sell. A raft of online fashion startups, such as Cider, has been working to replicate Shein's success by leveraging big data to forecast consumer behavior worldwide and tapping China's rich supply chain resources.
NEW YORK, April 06, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Citigroup will issue its first quarter results via press release at approximately 8:00 AM (ET) on Thursday, April 14, 2022. At 11:00 AM (ET), results will be reviewed via live webcast and teleconference.

The press release, webcast and presentation materials will be available at https://www.citigroup.com/citi/investor/pres.htm. A replay and transcript of the webcast will be available shortly after the event.

To dial-in to the live teleconference, please call (866) 516-9582 (for U.S. and Canada callers) or (973) 409-9210 (for international callers). Conference ID: 8238026. A telephonic replay of the call will be available beginning approximately two hours after the event until Thursday, April 21, 2022 by calling (855) 859-2056 (for U.S. and Canada callers) or (404) 537-3406 (for international callers). Conference ID: 8238026.

Citi, the leading global bank, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions. Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, transaction services, and wealth management.

Additional information may be found at www.citigroup.com | Twitter: @Citi | YouTube: www.youtube.com/citi | Blog: http://blog.citigroup.com | Facebook: www.facebook.com/citi | LinkedIn:www.linkedin.com/company/citi

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220406005974/en/

Contacts

Investors: Jennifer Landis (212) 559-2718

Media: Danielle Romero-Apsilos (212) 816-2264
Clear Cannabis Inc.

The leader in cannabis concentrates products won first place in the Flavored Vape category, third place in both Distillate Vape and Caviar categories

DENVER, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Clear, a legacy national cannabis brand of innovative distilled concentrate products, receives additional industry recognition, earning top awards in Rooster Magazines 2022 THC Classic.

Lime Sorbet, a sativa-influenced flavor from The Clears signature Elite line, received first place in the Flavored Vape category. Containing 350 milligrams of ultra-premium distillate with all-natural plant-derived terpenes, the All-in-one vape begins with a lime-like bite and finishes with a touch of sweet cream.



Earning two additional notable awards for its inventive cannabis products, The Clears Golden Goat All-in-one vape was awarded third place in the Distillate Vape category. The brands TWAX  Blueberry distillate-infused pre-rolled joint received third place in the Caviar category.



From the moment The Clear brand was developed, weve focused on creating clean consumption products that dont falter on potency, said Rebecca Maestas, Clear Cannabis, Inc.s Executive Director of Marketing. Were especially proud to be acknowledged by one of the nations most trustworthy, unbiased cannabis competitions. This incredible honor displays our dedication to providing quality, consistent products, and flavors in a variety of consumption formats that are enjoyable and effective.



Acclaimed nationally as Colorados largest blind-judging cannabis and hemp competition, the 11th annual THC Classics reputable board of judges determined the best line of products for 2022. Each category has five judges, and judges are picked based on their expertise in the cannabis products in their category.



A sponsor of the 2022 THC Classic, The Clear was invented in California by a group of enthusiasts determined to find cleaner ways to consume cannabis. With products available in seven states, The Clears nationwide recognition, and longstanding commitment to innovation demonstrates the brands innate ability to produce high-quality products grown and manufactured by multiple operators.



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The Clear line is available in Colorado, California, Nevada, Oklahoma, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Missouri. Learn more about the worlds first and original distilled cannabis product by visiting ClearConcentrate.com.



About Clear Cannabis, Inc.

The Clear is one of the original cannabis brands. The brand was founded in 2013 by a team of scientists who introduced molecular distillation to the legal cannabis market and in the process reinvented the cannabis vape category. As a national cannabis brand and licensor of The Clear, Clear Cannabis, Inc. products are available in multiple cannabis markets in the U.S. The company is focused on product consistency regardless of state, proprietary formulations, product safety, consumer experience, and expanding product lines.

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CONTACT: Tatiyana Brooks tbrooks@comprise.agency 314-258-9556




VANCOUVER, BC, April 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Copper Mountain Mining Corporation (TSX: CMMC) (ASX: C6C) (the "Company" or "Copper Mountain") announces a revised date for its first quarter 2022 conference call and the release of its earnings results due to an ASX public holiday. The Company will now be hosting a conference call on Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at 7:30 am (Pacific Time) for senior management to discuss its first quarter 2022 results. The Company will be releasing its first quarter 2022 financial and operating results before markets open on Tuesday, April 26, 2022.

Copper Mountain Mining Corporation Logo (CNW Group/Copper Mountain Mining Corporation)

Dial-in information:

Toronto and international: 1 (416) 764 8650

North America (toll-free): 1 (888) 664 6383

Webcast: https://produceredition.webcasts.com/starthere.jsp?ei=1540119&tp_key=3297d7e2a6

Replay information:

Toronto and international: 1 (416) 764 8677, Passcode: 910085#

North America (toll-free): 1 (888) 390 0541, Passcode: 910085#

The conference call replay will be available until 8:59 pm (Pacific Time) on May 3, 2022. An archive of the audio webcast will also be available on the company's website at http://www.cumtn.com.

About Copper Mountain Mining Corporation

Copper Mountain's flagship asset is the 75% owned Copper Mountain Mine located in southern British Columbia near the town of Princeton. The Copper Mountain Mine currently produces approximately 100 million pounds of copper equivalent per year. Copper Mountain also has the development-stage Eva Copper Project in Queensland, Australia and an extensive 2,100 km2 highly prospective land package in the Mount Isa area. Copper Mountain trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol "CMMC" and Australian Stock Exchange under the symbol "C6C".

Additional information is available on the Company's web page at www.CuMtn.com.

On behalf of the Board of

COPPER MOUNTAIN MINING CORPORATION

"Gil Clausen"

Gil Clausen, P.Eng.

President and Chief Executive Officer

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Website: www.CuMtn.com

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This news release may contain forward-looking statements and forward-looking information (together, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable securities laws. All statements, other than statements of historical facts, are forward-looking statements. Generally, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of terminology such as "plans", "expects", "estimates", "intends", "anticipates", "believes" or variations of such words, or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might", "occur" or "be achieved". Forward-looking statements involve risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results, performance and opportunities to differ materially from those implied by such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements include the risks set out in Copper Mountain's public documents, including in each management discussion and analysis, filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Although Copper Mountain believes that the information and assumptions used in preparing the forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on these statements, which only apply as of the date of this news release, and no assurance can be given that such events will occur in the disclosed time frames or at all. Except where required by applicable law, Copper Mountain disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Cision

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/copper-mountain-mining-announces-revised-q1-2022-results-conference-call-date-301518537.html

SOURCE Copper Mountain Mining Corporation
Chicago, April 05, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- DBSA PEER SPECIALIST INSTRUCTOR AND MILITARY VETERAN PROVIDES TESTIMONY

IN SUPPORT OF PENDING LEGISLATION FOR THE VIRTUAL PEER SUPPORT ACT

(CHICAGO)  LeVail Smith, Peer Specialist and instructor for the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA), spoke Tuesday as a panelist at the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee hearing in support of pending legislation H.R. 2929, the Virtual Peer Support Act.

Mr. Smith was invited to the hearing, entitled Communities in Need: Legislation to Support Mental Health ad Well Being, to offer input on legislation to support the behavioral health of Americans severely challenged due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As an instructor for the DBSA Peer Support Specialist course and a mentor for other peers participating in the DBSA peer apprentice program, Smith shared his experiences as an individual in recovery and wellness living with a mental health issue and substance use condition.

After years in and out of psychiatric wards and institutions, and being lost on the streets, I began a comeback in which DBSA played an integral role, said Smith. As a participant with DBSA, the leading national organization for people living with mood disorders, I have been directly impacted by many of the programs Congress will re-authorize this year. As a peer specialist course instructor, I have been able to share my journey with my students. I sit before you today as a man in recovery, living a life of which I am proud.

Among the legislation Smith highlighted in his testimony was H.R. 2929, the Virtual Peer Support Act that, if it becomes law, will provide funding to expand access to virtual peer support services, including virtual support group meetings, and provide training to individuals who want to become state-certified peer support specialists.

We have seen the demand for DBSA virtual support groups jump by more than 137% since the start of the pandemic, said Michael Pollock, CEO of DBSA. And even though weve increased the number of support groups, we still have waiting lists of people wanting to join. The evidence shows virtual groups can improve an individuals ability to manage his or her mental health. We need so many more of these groups to help the substantial number of Americans whose health has been compromised by COVID-19.

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Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance

The Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA) is a not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) organization that provides hope, help, support, and education to serve the estimated 21 million people throughout the U.S. who live with mood disorders. Programs and resources are offered through our website, dbsalliance.org, and through our 400+ support groups across the country. DBSA emphasizes the value of peer support as a crucial resource for wellness. The term peer describes someone who lives with a mood disorder. DBSA believes in the strength and resilience of each person and supports the individuals right to create his/her/their own path to wellness. DBSA also serves caregivers, families, and friends of people living with mood disorders because family and social support are central to wellness.

CONTACT: Kevin Williams Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance 312-342-7693 kwilliams@dbsalliance.org




FILE PHOTO: A general view shows the eastern swiss Alps, Lake Zurich and the city of Zurich

ZURICH (Reuters) - Armed with a banking licence from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, digital wealth manager Alpian plans to launch in Switzerland in the third quarter of 2022, the fintech group said on Wednesday.

A startup two years ago, it is now the first licensed digital private bank in Switzerland, Chief Executive Schuyler Weiss told Reuters.

"Yes, we are digital. But first and foremost we are personal private bank. We want to tailor the experience. You give a very human experience to our client," he said.

He said Alpian, in which Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo also has a stake, aims to have 5,000 customers by the end of the year. The company is entering a market segment that has hardly been occupied so far.

Traditional asset managers for millionaires and billionaires like Julius Baer or big banks UBS and Credit Suisse usually provide their full range of services only to clients with several million dollars in assets.

Retail banks or even smartphone banks such as Revolut or N26 have only a limited and standardised offering. This also applies, for example, to the U.S. robo-adviser Wealthfront, which UBS acquired this year.

Weiss said the group was primarily targeting clients with liquid assets of 100,000 to 1 million Swiss francs ($108,000 to $1.08 million). Weiss would not disclose fees, but called them "significantly less" than those of traditional private banks.

Alpian has secured 48 million francs in several rounds of financing so far.

The firm, which also has offices in Rome and London, aims to employ around 100 people by year's end, from just under 70 now.

An initial public offering was not envisaged for now, but another round of financing was possible. Alpian wants to break even in 2025. ($1 = 0.9281 Swiss francs)

(Reporting by Oliver Hirt; Writing by Michael Shields; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
Ogden Inaugural Accelerator

Digital Data Strategies

Ogden Catalyst Accelerator

OGDEN, UTAH, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Eight small businesses will come together from across the United States for the Ogden Catalyst Accelerators inaugural cohort focused on Digital Data Strategies for the US Air Forces Digital Transformation Office (DTO).

The Ogden Catalyst Accelerator, powered by the Air Force DTO, was developed to promote technology advancement for the warfighter and guide technology transfer for the government to industry and vice versa. Digital Data Strategies are focused on creating a digital governance structure and facilitate ongoing and new digital acquisition transformation activities across the enterprise.

The Digital Data Strategies cohort will meet every other week for 3 months beginning May 2nd. Each company will collaborate with subject matter experts, work with government and commercial Sherpas, and complete an intensive customer discovery process. The cohort will conclude with a Demo Day on July 25th where companies will pitch their technology to government and industry partners.

Jess Rees, Program Director for the Ogden Catalyst Accelerator, stated, We are so excited to kick off our first Ogden Accelerator and to work with local and out of state Subject Matter Experts to help these companies understand the government problem statement and how to do business with the government. We have some incredible teams from Hill AFB, who will be participating with these businesses as key stakeholders to build our National Defense Ecosystem in Ogden, UT.

The Ogden Catalyst Accelerator team, with technical advisement from both military and industry experts, selected the following small businesses to participate in the upcoming Digital Data Strategies cohort:

Cymantix builds tools such as Publication Access Through Tiered Interaction & Exploration (PATTIE) to enable analysts to search, explore, interact, and visualize high-dimensional unstructured data (e.g., audio transcriptions, OSINT, etc.) through a spatial-semantic user interface. Their primary innovation behind this paradigm is the application of information foraging theory and scatter/gather for browsing large document collections through a visual metaphor.

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https://www.cymantix.com

DARE Venture Group brings together the very best technology talent, and teams to bring groundbreaking capabilities directly to the hands of our countrys warfighters. DARE is committed to remaining dynamic, agile, and high-powered to conquer their customers toughest problems. Their focus is on the criticality of the merger between warfighters and emerging technologies. They take pride in the fact that their customers are top tier and their support to them will be unencumbered by traditional government boundaries.

https://dareventuregroup.com

DataCrunch Lab is on a mission to modernize maintenance planning through analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and automation. Analytics to gather and analyze data quickly, AI to anticipate needs, and automation to assist in procuring parts, schedule skilled labor and create work orders. Their goal is to maximize operational availability, expedite maintenance operations, and reduce operational costs.

https://www.datacrunchlab.com

KANA Systems brings Aloha Spirit and grit to government contracting. Their expertise is delivering data excellence to enable warfighters and leaders to make timely, better decisions. They partner with customers committed to modernization, leaders who fear the status quo more than they fear change, and people who seek help and are eager to collaborate. Their technology, the Kokua Hub, makes it simpler, faster, and cheaper for organizations to leverage the value in their data to optimize decision-making.

https://www.kana.systems

Programs Management Analytics & Technologies (PMAT) is disrupting the way we share and visualize domain awareness data for military, commercial and humanitarian efforts. Their talented team is building a microservices led collaborative awareness data engine that links structured and unstructured multi-INT data to provide a shared situational awareness picture no matter the platform or location. With an extensible architecture and the ability to operate in bandwidth restricted areas at near real time, PMAT offers the next wave in ISR mission capabilities. A future that is built for speed, mission interoperability and distributed operations.

https://pmatinc.com

Polysentry is a technology company, based in San Francisco and Washington DC, that provides artificial intelligence (AI) enabled software platforms for analyzing large datasets. Their platforms transform how organizations use their data by removing the barriers between back-end data management and front-end data analysis. The companys solutions are built to support operations and intelligence-focused data analytics and decision support functions for both commercial and government customers. Their core product has already been successfully commercialized, providing decision makers with the ability to analyze large structured and unstructured data sets.

https://www.polysentry.com

Securboration is a high technology company founded on the belief that Security and Collaboration will have a significant impact on the evolution of software architecture across a variety of domains. As such, they are focused on developing and transitioning innovative technologies that address current mission problems facing the DoD spanning areas from intelligence operations, mission planning, effects-based assessment, adversarial modeling, cybers operations, and digital engineering.

https://www.securboration.com

MSB.AI enables you to set up simulations in minutes, with a Universal Interface for Simulation called GURU. Three verticals they focus on are: 1) Computer-aided engineering, 2) Trajectory and mission planning and 3) Virtual world immersive training. They have been awarded two Phase II SBIRs so far with DAF + MDA for threat trajectory simulation and DAF for digital engineering. Right now, only 1% of engineers use simulation in their day-to-day work. GURU will make it 100!

https://microsurgeonbot.com

About Catalyst Campus for Technology and Innovation

Catalyst Campus for Technology and Innovation (CCTI, a Colorado 501(c)3) in partnership with the United States Space Force and the US Air Force is a collaborative ecosystem where industry, small business, entrepreneurs, startups, government, academia, and investors intersect with Colorados aerospace and defense industry to create community, spark innovation, and stimulate business growth.

CCTI, is expanding into Ogden, UT to drive the National Defense Innovation Ecosystem into the area and to support the missions of Hill, AFB. The Ogden Catalyst Accelerator is a semi-residential, 3-month program for small businesses with innovative, dual-use technologies to meet with industry subject matters experts, government teams, funding opportunities, and business development coaches to accelerate their technology into the hands of our warfighters.

Attachment

CONTACT: Jess Rees Ogden Catalyst Accelerator Program Director 801-682-0150 Jess.Rees@catalystcampus.org




LONDON (Reuters) - The United States has blocked the Russian government from paying owners of its sovereign debt from reserves held at U.S. banks, raising the spectre of default unless Russia can find other sources of cash or a workaround within 30 days.

Russia has managed to avoid defaulting on its international debt so far, despite unprecedented Western sanctions imposed after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine. But the task just became a lot tougher as Washington tries to up the pressure.

WHAT DID THE U.S. TREASURY SAY?

Russia was due to pay $552.4 million on a maturing bond on Monday as well as an $84 million coupon payment on Monday on a 2042 sovereign bond.

The U.S. Treasury Department had been allowing the Russian government to use foreign currency reserves held by its central bank at U.S. financial institutions to make coupon payments on dollar-denominated sovereign debt on a "case-by-case basis."

But, as of Monday, the U.S. Treasury said it would "not permit any dollar debt payments to be made from Russian government accounts at U.S. financial institutions."

"Russia must choose between draining remaining valuable dollar reserves or new revenue coming in, or default," a spokesperson added.

Roughly half of the $640 billion in Russia's gold and foreign currency reserves has been frozen by the United States and its allies since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which Moscow calls a "special military operation."

WHAT HAS CHANGED?

The U.S. Treasury said the size of the payment due on Monday - the largest due on sovereign debt since the Feb. 24 invasion - had presented "the right opportunity to force Russia into more difficult decisions."

However, there was no suggestion U.S. banks might be banned from acting as correspondent banks - or processing any Russian debt payments. JPMorgan Chase has been processing the recent debt coupon payments as a correspondent bank.

Russia may already have been using funds from the half of its reserves that have not been frozen by sanctions, and it could still turn to those resources to avoid default.

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It also still receives billions of dollars from exporting crude and gas. Analysing tanker traffic data, the Institute of International Finance (IIF) estimates Russia's March oil export earnings will total $12.3 billion - up sharply on March 2021.

Moscow said on Monday it expected higher oil prices will boost its April revenue from energy sales by 798.4 billion roubles ($9.6 billion).

WHAT WILL HAPPEN NOW?

The bonds have 30 day grace periods, meaning Russia still has time to pay before default is triggered.

Russia's willingness to pay means - so far - it has swerved its first default of any kind since a 1998 financial crisis, and its first on international market debt since the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

Russia has also been working on managing its external liabilities - last week it bought back about three-quarters of a $2 billion bond payment by paying in roubles just before it matured on Monday. The move was targeted at local rather than international owners though reduced its dollar liabilities.

But there is another deadline looming: transactions by U.S. persons and entities with Russia's finance ministry, central bank or national wealth fund in relation to debt payments are only allowed under a temporary general licence 9A issued by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

That licence is due to expire on May 25 and the U.S. Treasury has not commented on whether it will be extended.

Russia has more payments due on May 27, and has a total of 15 international bonds outstanding with a face value of around $40 billion. Prior to the Ukraine crisis, roughly $20 billion was held by investment funds and money managers outside Russia.

(Reporting by Tommy Reggiori Wilkes, Karin Strohecker and Marc Jones in London, and Alexandra Alper in Washington; Editing by Mark Potter)
Mayor Paul TenHaken and his two challengers, Taneeza Islam and David Zokaites, took to the stage at the Washington Pavilion for the mayoral debate on Monday evening.

During the hour-long debate, hosted by the Argus Leader, Dakota News Now, the Greater Sioux Falls Area Chamber of Commerce and AARP South Dakota, candidates touched on affordable housing, a rapidly growing Sioux Falls, crime and more.

More: Sioux Falls mayoral candidates say why they want the seat and what they'd do with it

Here's what we learned during the course of the evening.

1. Surprise, no surprise: Affordable housing is on all the candidates minds

Sioux Falls has experienced massive growth during the past few years, with the 2020 Census counting a population just over 200,000. With more people, comes the need for more housing, something each candidate spoke on.

"The bottom line is we need an infusion of money into our system to incentivize developers to build affordable housing, because they cannot make a profit out of it," Islam said. "We need to ask our big businesses who are lucky enough to be building in Sioux Falls right now to provide money for basic infrastructure like affordable housing.

She accused the TenHaken administration for not asking Amazon to invest into Sioux Falls.

More: Taneeza Islam walks back calls to postpone 'staged' vote on $2K bonus for city employees

Mayor Paul TenHaken speaks during a mayoral debate on Monday, April 4, 2022, at the Washington Pavilion in Sioux Falls.

TenHaken responded by saying they had asked, but the city was not "on their radar in terms of market size for those sorts of investments."

"Affordable housing is a very challenging topic, because it's market driven," he continued. "We'll continue to do things like purchasing land for home loans and providing other incentives, but the market is the market."

Zokaites pitched the idea of investing into tiny homes and for every large house that is bought, a tiny affordable home should be built.

2. Access to information in other languages is needed

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In the debate, it was hit upon the COVID-19 pandemic showed multilingual people could not get the information they needed, because of a lack of translation.

Islam said while things were changing by the hour during the pandemic, she reached out to local news for translations. Schools also reached out to her organization for translations.

Taneeza Islam speaks during a mayoral debate on Monday, April 4, 2022, at the Washington Pavilion in Sioux Falls.

"It is time that the city understand the essential services that is due to our residents, not just multilingual communities but all of us," she said.

More: Sioux Falls city officials push sustainability plan to 2023 after 'extensive' feedback

TenHaken said that they've been working on the translation weaknesses the pandemic exposed, especially within the Multicultural Center.

"We've been working on that," he said, stressing that community partners helped out when the city couldn't solve the problems by itself.

Zokaites said that he wasn't aware of the issue, but was open to solutions.

3. Revitalization efforts and infrastructure improvements are key for city growth

Throughout the night, Islam hit on the fact that revitalization needs to happen in core neighborhoods across the city, not just focusing on the sprawl of Sioux Falls.

"What I'd like to see is more density in core neighborhoods that are growing up, because that is more cost effective for a growing city," she said.

Zokaites said it was important for there to be more access to green space and nature, including the Big Sioux River.

Mayoral candidates David Zokaites and Taneeza Islam and Mayor Paul TenHaken participate in a debate ahead of the election, moderated by Argus Leader's Trevor Mitchell and Dakota News Now's Brian Allen on Monday, April 4, 2022, at the Washington Pavilion in Sioux Falls.

"It should be clean enough to swim in," he said, explaining the river needs to be cleaned up.

TenHaken focused on how his administration has helped rebuild roads, but the next steps include water needs like waste water.

"We have to get this big sewer plant expansion done," he said.

4. To stop crime, there needs to be investment in youths and addiction services

TenHaken and Islam both talked about the importance of investing in youths, either by creating affordable childcare or fostering community mentoring programs, to keep them away from crime.

"Honestly, so many criminals in our community are youths, and those youths need role models in their lives to keep them on track," TenHaken said.

More: As police shift to rising mental health needs, social media plays role in rapid response

Zokaites focused on that many crimes committed in the country are driven by drug addiction.

"What we need to do is to stop hurting addicts by sending them jail, and treat addiction as a substance abuse disorder and send these people off for treatment, he said.

5. More green space and parks as the city continues to grow

Zokaites, a nature lover, said it was important to keep building parks and improving the bike path as the city continues to grow toward the south.

David Zokaites speaks during a mayoral debate on Monday, April 4, 2022, at the Washington Pavilion in Sioux Falls.

"The city needs to make sure we have parks in new areas and if that's not being done, then there's something wrong with the Planning and Zoning service," he said. "I see a lot of agriculture to suburb. I don't see very much agriculture to park, so it looks like the city's zoning department is not doing [it's] job very well."

TenHaken questioned Zokaites statement that parks weren't being considered in the south part of the city, saying there were plenty of parks in the area. Currently, as part of the Parks Masterplan, they're undergoing the process of determining where the next aquatic facility could be.

More: A beer garden and ziplines? Design firm shows big ideas for Falls Park master plan

"It could be a small investment in Hayward Park. It could be the south side. It could be the revitalization of Frank Olson," he said.

Islam called for a city masterplan to "meet the needs of the residents in the way that they deserve" and that plan would include where parks would be needed citywide.

Recap: Watch Sioux Falls mayor debate between Taneeza Islam, Paul TenHaken and David Zokaites a

Where to cast your ballot

Election Day is April 12. Early voting has already started.

More: Here's what voters should know before the April 12 election in Sioux Falls

Registered Sioux Falls voters can vote at the Minnehaha County Auditor's Office (415 N. Dakota Avenue) with a valid photo ID from March 28 until April 11. The office will also be open from 8 a.m. to noon Saturday for in-person absentee voting.

Follow Annie Todd on Twitter @AnnieTodd96. Reach out to her with tips, questions and other community news at atodd@argusleader.com or give her a call at 605-215-3757.

This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: Here's what we learned from the Sioux Falls mayoral debate
VANCOUVER, BC, April 6, 2022 /CNW/ - GR Silver Mining Ltd. ("GR Silver Mining" or the "Company") (TSXV: GRSL) (OTCQB: GRSLF) (FRANKFURT: GPE)  is pleased to confirm the extension of wide high-grade silver (Ag) mineralization from underground drilling in the San Marcial Area, at the Plomosas Project, Sinaloa, Mexico. These assay results are from three underground drill holes completed in 2021 and reinforce the widening of the mineral body at depth and along strike, supporting potential resource expansion. The successful eight-hole underground drill program confirmed a significant expansion of high-grade Ag mineralization approximately 300 m down dip below the lower limit of the pit-constrained San Marcial NI 43-101 (2019) mineral resource. High-grade drill hole SMI21-07 indicates extension of the Ag mineralization by almost 100 m down dip below previously released drill hole SMI21-04 (Figures 1 and 2) (see News Release dated January 31, 2022).

Highlights:

Ag and Au results from San Marcial include:

4.8 m at 223 g/t Ag within 17.0 m at 124 g/t Ag

The 2021 underground drilling program has confirmed wide and high-grade Ag mineralization below the San Marcial NI 43-101 mineral resource, providing justification for another resource expansion drilling program in 2022.



The results confirm the predominance of silver, with subordinate base metals, within the San Marcial breccia-hosted mineralized zone.



Results from the final hole in the eight-hole, 2,436 m, 2021 underground drill program are pending.



The 2022 San Marcial surface and underground resource expansion drill program is underway with three drill rigs on site. The program is targeting additional extensions to the SE of the current NI 43-101 mineral resource, as well as down plunge from wide, high-grade silver mineralization intersected in drill holes SMI21-04 and SMI21-07 (Figure 1).



GR Silver Mining Chairman and CEO, Eric Zaunscherb commented "The combination of contemporary and extensive historical data has allowed GR Silver's geologists to formulate a modern exploration model focused on high-grade silver and gold mineralization. These results continue to encourage us to explore San Marcial at depth and to the SE. With the recently completed financing, the Company is fully financed to extend its sophisticated approach, including as much as 10,000m of drilling, seeking to extend San Marcial and further surgical infill drilling at the former Plomosas Mine Area. We are extremely proud of the exploration platform that has been assembled to advance the overall Plomosas Project, especially our talented Mexican geological team, as well as the strong community relationships that have been nurtured."

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Figure 1: Longitudinal section displaying Ag Grade x Thickness contours of the San Marcial NI 43-101 resource model and new extensions to the mineralized body, down dip and along strike (CNW Group/GR Silver Mining Ltd.)

The following table (Table 1) summarizes the most important results of the three drill holes presented in this News Release. There is one hole pending results from the 2021 underground drilling program.

Table 1: San Marcial Drill Results

Drill Hole From

(m) To (m) Apparent

width (m) True width (m) Ag g/t Au g/t Pb % Zn % SMI21-05 137.4 141.7 4.3 2.5 5 0.83 0.3 0.1 includes 139.0 139.8 0.8 0.5 11 2.51 0.5 na

199.2 203.1 3.9 2.2 2 1.52 na 0.1 includes 202.0 203.1 1.1 0.6 3 5.32 na 0.1 SMI21-06 213.7 233.0 19.3 17.5 40 0.07 0.1 0.4 SMI21-07 239.6 247.0 7.4 3.7 201 0.02 0.2 0.3 includes 239.6 240.0 0.4 0.2 1,413 0.11 0.9 1.3

270.0 287.0 17.0 8.5 124 0.01 0.1 0.1 includes 277.0 281.8 4.8 2.4 223 0.01 0.1 0.1 includes 277.0 278.0 1.0 0.5 553 0.03 0.2 0.4



na" = no significant result. Numbers may be rounded. Results are uncut and undiluted. True sample widths are approximate

due to complexity of structural orientations.

Figure 2: San Marcial NI 43-101 Resource Model - Down Dip Extension Drill Programs 2021 & 2022 (CNW Group/GR Silver Mining Ltd.)

Table 2: San Marcial Underground Drill Hole Details

Drill Hole East (m) North (m) RL (m) Dip () Azimuth () Depth (m) Results Status SMI21-01 451033 2546021 818 -48 218 330 Received SMI21-02 451033 2546021 818 -43 183 345 Received SMI21-03 451033 2546021 818 -90 0 300 Received SMI21-04 451033 2546021 818 -70 148 234 Received SMI21-05 451033 2546021 818 -70 325 330 Received SMI21-06 451033 2546021 818 -50 285 255 Received SMI21-07 451033 2546021 818 -75 90 333 Received SMI21-08 451033 2546021 818 -80 360 309 Pending



Note: all holes drilled from the same underground drill platform

2022 Drilling Program

A two phase 4,500 m drilling program is planned for 2022 at San Marcial. Phase 1 (2,000 m) is now in progress and incorporates surface diamond drilling as well as a continuation of the underground drilling from the existing tunnel. Phase 2 of the planned drilling program will test potential step outs outside of the main mineralized area to search for extensions.

The Company currently has three drill rigs on site at San Marcial: one is fully dedicated to the underground drill program, and the other two rigs are drilling shallow holes along strike, stepping out from the Resource Area limits and also testing potential extensions down dip from the lower limits of the Resource Area.

The 2022 San Marcial drill program will support future resource expansion and an updated NI 43-101 mineral resource estimate.

Surface exploration is in progress following up the major controls of the breccia-hosted mineralization, defined by recent successful drilling, and geophysical and geochemical surveys. The focus is along 1.5 km of favorable geological setting similar to the 500 m strike length of structures hosting the San Marcial silver mineralization. Subject to results of this exploration program, the Company will review the need for additional rigs to advance drilling of new targets identified to the SE of the Resource Area.

Geological Setting

Drill holes SMI21-05 and SMI21-06 intersected the central to NW extension of the breccia in an area with known E-W and N-S trending faults that are displacing the breccia, resulting in a reduced or segmented breccia thickness. SMI21-05 intersected Au anomalies related to quartz-sulphide veining in the upper zone above the San Marcial Breccia position, whilst SMI21-06 cut a wide 19 m zone of Ag mineralization in veining and stockwork zones in the footwall of the San Marcial Breccia, hosted within the volcano-sedimentary unit.

Drill hole SMI21-07 is the deepest hole to date, drilled in the central area of the San Marcial Breccia which is located at the contact between dacitic "block and ash", of the upper volcanic sequence, with the lower volcano-sedimentary unit. Silver assays returned up to 1,413 g/t Ag (over 0.4 m) (Table 1). The typical breccia is composed of silicified wallrock fragments within a fine-grained hematite matrix, cemented by disseminated, but visible, galena and sphalerite. Where SMI21-07 intersects the upper section of the San Marcial Breccia, the presence of quartz, galena and Ag-bearing acanthite sulphides is associated with high-grade Ag values (237 to 247 m interval) within the breccia (Table 1). High-grade examples of the deep mineralization can be observed at the following link (see Core Photos)

Previous metallurgical test work by the Company has indicated positive metallurgical recoveries of silver from the San Marcial breccia-style mineralization. The results demonstrated that the high-grade silver mineralization at San Marcial is amenable to standard cyanidation processing with recoveries of up to 92% silver (see News Release dated February 28, 2019).

The mineral assemblage observed is typical of low sulphidation epithermal deposits with breccia ore type deposition, with late cross-cutting veining and stockworks related to reactivation of regional, extensional NW-oriented graben stress.

Corporate Update - Allotment of Options

The Company also announces that, pursuant to its 10% rolling stock option plan and in compliance with the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange, it has granted incentive stock options to certain officers, consultants and employees of the Company's Mexican subsidiaries, to purchase up to an aggregate of 920,000 common shares of the Company. These options are exercisable for a period of five years at a price of $0.25 per share. Of these options, 100,000 options granted to an officer will vest as to 1/3 on the date of grant, and a further 1/3 on each of the 1st and 2nd anniversaries of the date of grant.

Qualified Person

The scientific and technical data contained in this News Release related to the exploration program were reviewed and/or prepared under the supervision of Marcio Fonseca, P. Geo. He has approved the disclosure herein.

About GR Silver Mining Ltd.

GR Silver Mining is a Canadian-based, Mexico-focused junior mineral exploration company engaged in cost-effective silver-gold resource expansion on its 100%-owned assets, located on the eastern edge of the Rosario Mining District, in the southeast of Sinaloa State, Mexico. GR Silver Mining controls 100% of two past producer precious metal underground and open pit mines, within the expanded Plomosas Project, which includes the integrated San Marcial Area and La Trinidad acquisition. In conjunction with a portfolio of early to advanced stage exploration targets, the Company holds 734 km2 of concessions containing several structural corridors totaling over 75 km in strike length.

GR Silver Mining Ltd.

Eric Zaunscherb

Chairman & CEO

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation and information that are based on the beliefs of management and reflect the Company's current expectations. When used in this press release, the words "estimate", "project", "belief", "anticipate", "intend", "expect", "plan", "predict", "may" or "should" and the negative of these words or such variations thereon or comparable terminology are intended to identify forward-looking statements and information. Such statements and information reflect the current view of the Company. Risks and uncertainties may cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated in those forward-looking statements and information. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause our actual results, performance or achievements, or other future events, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release.

GR Silver Mining Ltd. Logo (CNW Group/GR Silver Mining Ltd.)

SOURCE GR Silver Mining Ltd.

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Grafana Labs

New round gives Grafana Labs fuel to aggressively deliver on its open source and cloud product roadmap for observability and to drive innovation tailored for its community and customers.

NEW YORK, April 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Grafana Labs , the company behind the worlds most ubiquitous open and composable operational dashboards, today announced a $240 million Series D round of investment led by GIC, with participation from new investor J.P. Morgan.



GIC, Singapores sovereign wealth fund, made its initial investment in Grafana Labs Series B round in 2020. Grafana Labs is a strong, product-led company that has built a committed customer base and has significant adoption, said Choo Yong Cheen, GICs Chief Investment Officer for Private Equity. We are enthusiastic to lead the round, particularly as weve witnessed Grafana Labs ability to translate a portion of their free adoption into consistent business results. We see significant global interest in Grafana Labs products and look forward to leveraging GICs network to support the companys global growth ambitions and drive deeper relationships in APAC over the long term.

This round also marks the addition of J.P. Morgan as an investor. All other existing investors  Sequoia Capital, Coatue, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Lead Edge Capital  participated in this round, just seven months after the companys Series C .

Grafana Labs delivers a well-known and adopted observability stack. In evaluating Grafana Labs as an investment opportunity, we were able to draw on our relationship, along with detailed analysis on the broader market, vendor landscape, and customer input. Its clear that customers and prospects see both short-term and long-term success working with Grafana Labs and, with our investment, we are happy to enable Grafana Labs to continue to grow and scale, said Elena Zislin, Managing Director, J.P. Morgan.

With this round of investment, Grafana Labs CEO and Co-founder Raj Dutt said, Our plans are simple: aggressively deliver on our product roadmap and our commitment to embracing the big tent  enabling our users to compose and visualize data from any source  while continuing to build out modern observability capabilities across metrics, logs, tracing, and more. We are committed to the continual release of impactful open source software, bringing many new capabilities to market, and constantly listening to the community and our customers to drive innovation.

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Worldwide adoption of Grafana has increased 25x in the past 6 years, and today there are more than 900,000 active installations and 10 million global users. Grafana Labs has also launched a full slate of open source observability projects, including Grafana Loki (for logging), Grafana Tempo (for traces), and most recently, Grafana Mimir (for metrics). Grafana Mimir represents a significant ongoing investment and commitment to deliver the worlds most highly performant, horizontally scaling time series database backend; Mimir has already been tested and hardened in production to support more than 1 billion active series. At the heart of the Grafana observability stack are the popular dashboards that are interoperable with any number of disparate data sources, enabling users of the Grafana platform to visualize anything they want and control their own observability strategy.

About Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs provides an open and composable monitoring and observability stack built around Grafana, the leading open source technology for dashboards and visualization. There are more than 2,000 Grafana Labs customers including Bloomberg, eBay, PayPal, and Sony, and more than 900,000 active installations of Grafana around the globe. Grafana Labs helps companies manage their observability strategies with full-stack offerings that can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud, or self-managed with Grafana Enterprise Stack, both featuring extensive enterprise data source plugins, dashboard management, alerting, reporting and security, scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo). Grafana Labs is backed by leading investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lead Edge Capital, GIC, Sequoia Capital, Coatue, and J.P. Morgan. Follow Grafana Labs on Twitter at @grafana or visit www.grafana.com.

Media Contact:

mentha.benek@grafana.com




SINGAPORE, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Integral Ad Science (Nasdaq: IAS), a global leader in digital media quality, announced new reporting enhancements that provide advertisers with a unified view of their global campaigns. Clients will now be able to analyze data by custom filters created automatically from their unique campaign naming convention. This Unified View will allow clients to slice and dice their data by dimensions such as regions, lines of business, campaign types, and more!

This Unified View will allow clients to slice and dice their data by dimensions such as regions, lines of business, campaign types, and more.

"Globalization of technology and media are proliferating at lightning speed," said Colin Kurth, Global Head of Biddable Media, Publicis Media. "Solutions that deliver on transparency and consolidated reporting needs across countries, brands and campaigns are requirements of Publicis Media. We commend IAS for building tools like Unified View to enable agencies and clients to help deliver on these standards."

Additionally, IAS augmented its Report Builder to now include IAS's time-in-view insights as well as several new open web video metrics so advertisers can evaluate their performance beyond core verification. There is now an option for clients to pull an Attention Metrics Report which will highlight metrics that are commonly associated with attention including average time-in-view, time-in-view distribution, pause/unpause, volume up/down/mute and more. Through IAS's consultative custom insights team, campaigns can be tested to determine which metrics are driving clients' desired business results.

"Our enhancements to the IAS Signal reporting platform will provide clients with the flexibility to evaluate campaign performance and drive optimal business outcomes that are aligned with their most important KPIs" said Lisa Utzschneider, CEO, IAS. "This is yet another example of our ongoing efforts to provide our customers with all the quality metrics they need to inform their strategies, while giving them the tools and flexibility to maximize global marketing outcomes and make every impression count."

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About IAS

Integral Ad Science (IAS) is a global leader in digital media quality. IAS makes every impression count, ensuring that ads are viewable by real people, in safe and suitable environments, activating contextual targeting, and driving supply path optimization. Our mission is to be the global benchmark for trust and transparency in digital media quality for the world's leading brands, publishers, and platforms. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in New York, IAS works with thousands of top advertisers and premium publishers worldwide. For more information, visit integralads.com .

Media Contact: Pooja Singh, psingh@integralads.com

Integral Ad Science Logo (PRNewsfoto/Integral Ad Science (IAS))

SOURCE Integral Ad Science (IAS)
Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker get married in Las Vegas (Getty Images)

The owner of the Las Vegas chapel where Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker reportedly tied the knot has said that the couple insisted on having an Elvis impersonator to marry them.

According to reports, the engaged couple wed in a short ceremony after attending the 64thGrammy awards on Monday 4 April.

They exchanged vows and were serenaded by the Elvis impersonator, who officiated the short ceremony at the One Love Chapel in Nevada.

Marty Frierson, owner of the chapel, told the PA news agency that he received a phone call asking for Elvis in the early hours of Monday morning.

They said we need Elvis and I said that may be possible but let me check, he said.

He found an Elvis who could officiate the wedding, but fearing that it may have been a prank, Frierson told them that they had to book online to make sure they were serious.

He was not told which celebrities were coming to be wed prior to their arrival.

Kardashian and Barker arrived at 1.45am (9.45am BST) with four guests who filmed the occasion, Frierson said.

They spoke to Elvis, did the paperwork and Elvis married them, they danced, there was a lot of kissing and hugging.

Afterwards Elvis sang three songs, they walked out and did the bouquet toss [Kourtney] tossed it It was maybe a two-minute ceremony.

Frierson added that he had asked for a picture with the couple but his request was denied.

But despite going through the ceremony, Page Six reports that Kardashian and Barker are not legally married because they did not get a marriage license.

In the state of Nevada, it is required that couples obtain a marriage license before the union is official.

The pair have not announced the news officially on social media or through their agents.

Barker proposed to Kardashian in October 2021 on a beach in Montecito, California. They were first reported to be dating in January 2021, but have been friends for more than ten years before that.
NEW YORK, April 06, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--MetLife, Inc. (NYSE: MET) today announced a series of leadership changes. All new appointments are effective July 1, 2022.

After a distinguished career spanning corporate leadership and consultancy roles  including more than a decade with MetLife  Kishore Ponnavolu, Regional President, Asia, will step down effective June 30, 2022, and return to the U.S. to explore the next chapter in his career. Ponnavolu joined MetLife in 2011 as Chief Enterprise Strategy Officer where he helped develop the companys global strategy. In 2013, he assumed leadership of MetLife Auto & Home, overseeing the launch of numerous initiatives to improve product, distribution, and customer focus. For the past three and a half years, Ponnavolu has led the Asia region, guiding digital transformation efforts across mature and emerging markets and delivering outstanding results.

Succeeding Ponnavolu will be Lyndon Oliver, Executive Vice President, Treasurer and head of Strategy. Oliver will join MetLifes Executive Leadership Team and report to President and CEO Michel Khalaf. Oliver has more than three decades of insurance industry experience. He has lived and worked in Hong Kong, Tokyo and the U.S., where he held executive, finance and strategy roles for MetLife, AXA, AIG, Hartford Life and ING. Oliver joined MetLife in 2010 through the acquisition of Alico, where he had been CFO for the AIG Life Companies in Japan and Korea. During his time with MetLife, he served as CFO across many markets and businesses  Asia, EMEA and Group Benefits in the U.S.  before assuming the role of Treasurer and, most recently, the head of Strategy.

John Hall, MetLifes Senior Vice President and head of Investor Relations, will become Executive Vice President and Treasurer for MetLife, in addition to his current responsibilities. Throughout his 32-year-career, Hall has held various roles as an insurance equity analyst that have given him an in-depth perspective on the financial workings of the insurance industry. Hall will continue to report to Chief Financial Officer John McCallion.

Dimitri Lorenzon, Senior Vice President and head of Strategy, Product and Marketing for MetLife Japan, will become head of Strategy for MetLife as well as Chief Financial Officer for MetLifes Global Technology & Operations organization. Lorenzon brings more than 25 years of experience in global life insurance organizations to this new role, including expertise in product development, risk management, and investments. He joined MetLife through the Alico acquisition and has held various strategic leadership roles in the Japan business.

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Danny Garver, Vice President and Chief of Staff for the Office of the CEO, will take on the additional responsibility of leading MetLifes Next Gen initiative, which aims to prepare MetLife for the future through insight into emerging and disruptive opportunities. Garver joined MetLife in 2016, and she has played a key leadership role in the implementation of MetLifes Next Horizon strategy.

"I am grateful to Kishore for his significant contributions to MetLife throughout his tenure; these appointments showcase the depth and breadth of leadership talent at MetLife and our deep commitment to building a robust leadership pipeline," said Khalaf. "I am confident that Lyndon, John, Dimitri and Danny will excel in their new and expanded roles and help create significant customer and shareholder value."

About MetLife

MetLife, Inc. (NYSE: MET), through its subsidiaries and affiliates ("MetLife"), is one of the worlds leading financial services companies, providing insurance, annuities, employee benefits and asset management to help individual and institutional customers build a more confident future. Founded in 1868, MetLife has operations in more than 40 markets globally and holds leading positions in the United States, Japan, Latin America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. For more information, visit www.metlife.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220406005435/en/

Contacts

Media Contact: Meredith Hyland (212) 578-9415

Investor Contact: John Hall (212) 578-7888
Agreement will see Japan-based Mitsui take 49% stake in the project

ReNew signed 400 MW round-the-clock (RTC) PPA last year to supply electricity to Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI)

For the 400 MW PPA, the company will install 1,300 MW of renewable energy capacity and up to 100 MWh of battery storage

GURGAON, India, April 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- ReNew Power ("ReNew", RNW, RNWWW: NASDAQ), India's leading renewable energy company, has finalized a partnership with Mitsui & Co., Ltd. ("Mitsui", 8031.T-JP: Tokyo Stock Exchange), a leading global general trading and investment firm.

ReNew_Power_New_Logo

The partnership will see Mitsui invest in the RTC renewable energy project being developed by ReNew.

The RTC project will consist of three newly built wind farms and one solar plus battery storage farm (1,300 MW in total plus up to 100 MWh battery storage) across the states of Rajasthan, Karnataka, and Maharashtra, and provide 400 MW electricity to SECI, an Indian central government-owned entity with an AA+ domestic debt rating by ICRA, a subsidiary of Standard & Poor's.

The project's commercial operations are expected to start in the third calendar quarter of 2023. ReNew, through its affiliates, will also undertake EPC, O&M, and project management for the RTC project.

The 25-year PPA for the project, the first-of-its-kind renewable energy PPA in India, was signed last year with SECI for supplying electricity at 2.90/kWh (~US 3.8), which will increase by 3% annually for 15 years after which it will stabilise for remaining period of the project.

India, being the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases globally, made commitments at the Glasgow COP26 summit last year to reach 500 GW of non-fossil fuel-based installed capacity by 2030, and to source 50% of all its energy from renewables by then. The RTC project will feed into this target and support the Government of India's policy of scaling up the renewable energy sector as part of the country's historic clean energy transition.

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Speaking about this partnership with Mitsui, Mr. Sumant Sinha, Founder, Chairman and CEO of ReNew Power said, "The RTC project, the first-of-its-kind in India, provides the lowest cost and emission-free 24 X 7 renewable electricity. We are proud to partner with Mitsui, a leading global conglomerate, to support India's green energy transition and look forward to strengthening this partnership in the future."

Ryoichiro Uno, General Manager in charge of infrastructure projects in India, Middle East, and Africa of Mitsui, said, "Our mission is to build brighter futures for people around the world through infrastructure development. We view India as an extremely promising market for many reasons, including its high economic growth and strong commitment towards decarbonization. Through this project, Mitsui will accelerate India's clean energy transition together with ReNew, and contribute to the project's successful development by leveraging our extensive global experience in power project development, as well as our wide-ranging business network across industries. We look forward to expanding Mitsui's further collaboration with ReNew beyond this RTC project in India."

US$ 1.0 = INR 76.29 (as on 27-03-2022)

About ReNew

ReNew is one of the largest renewable energy Independent Power Producers (IPPs) in India and globally. ReNew develops, builds, owns, and operates utility-scale wind and solar energy projects, and hydro projects. As of February 1, 2022, ReNew had a total portfolio of 10.2 GW of renewable energy projects across India, including commissioned and committed projects

About Mitsui:

Mitsui & Co., Ltd. is one of the leading Japanese general trading and investment firms, established in 1947, with global presence in various business fields and across 63 countries/regions with approximately 45,000 employees. Mitsui's core strategic aim is to pursue sustainable growth, and through its business activities contribute to the development of countries and regions around the world while addressing climate change and other global issues. As part of this, Mitsui has set a target to reduce its GHG impact by 2030 to half of what it was in 2020 and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Mitsui currently has 65 power assets in 22 countries, with a gross capacity of 39.6 GW and a net capacity (Mitsui's share) of 10.8 GW.

Press Enquiries

Kamil Zaheer

Kamil.zaheer@renewpower.in

+ 91 9811538880

Anurit Kanti

anurit.kanti@renewpower.in

+91 9920190905

Investor Enquiries

Nathan Judge

Anunay Shahi

investors@renewpower.in

Mitsui Contact

Corporate Communications Division

Telephone: +81-80-5912-0321

Facsimile: +81-3-3285-9819

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/653741/ReNew_Power_New_Logo.jpg
MONTREAL, April 6, 2022 /CNW Telbec/ - The Montreal Port Authority (MPA) and Canadian National Railway (CN) are pleased to announce that they have reached an agreement to integrate rail transport at the MPA's new container terminal in Contrecur. This initiative will help maximize the terminal's efficiency and ensure a competitive commercial offering.

The Montreal Port Authority and Canadian National (CNW Group/Montreal Port Authority)

Along with a private partner that will be retained to develop and operate the terminal, the parties will define the technical aspects of the project's intermodal service. The agreement will lead to stronger market positioning of the new terminal with port users and give companies greater access to key markets in the North American industrial heartland, particularly those in Ontario and the U.S. Midwest.

"The Contrecur container terminal is a strategic project for Quebec's economic development, which will make it possible for local businesses to be more resilient and keep growing. This partnership with CN will ensure optimal integration of rail-related intermodality for strategic, competitive and enhanced access to key markets such as Ontario and the U.S. Midwest, to the benefit of Port of Montreal user companies and the ultimate client, the consumer," said Martin Imbleau, President and Chief Executive Officer of the MPA.

The CN rail line is already in place in the area covered by the Port of Montreal's expansion in Contrecur. In addition to establishing an efficient intermodal service, the partnership aims to ensure close cooperation between CN, the MPA and the private partner that will be selected to design, build, finance, operate and maintain the future terminal, following a procurement process led by the MPA.

"We are pleased to partner on this agreement. Teaming up with the Montreal Port Authority and future partners allows us to design an efficient rail served terminal to provide customers with a high quality, consistent and safe intermodal service on our network. This will help support our long term, sustainable growth." said Tracy Robinson, President and Chief Executive Officer of CN.

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Please note that the Port of Montreal's facilities are already served by railway services, including CN, which is connected to the MPA's facilities. Railway services connected to the Port of Montreal provide daily service to major domestic markets in Canada and to the U.S. Midwest and Northeast.

About CN

CN is a world-class transportation leader and trade-enabler. Essential to the economy, to the customers, and to the communities it serves, CN safely transports more than 300 million tons of natural resources, manufactured products, and finished goods throughout North America every year. As the only railroad connecting Canada's Eastern and Western coasts with the U.S. South through a 19,500-mile rail network, CN and its affiliates have been contributing to community prosperity and sustainable trade since 1919. CN is committed to programs supporting social responsibility and environmental stewardship.

About the Port of Montreal

Operated by the Montreal Port Authority (MPA), the Port of Montreal is the second largest port in Canada and a diversified transshipment centre that handles all types of goods: containerized and non-containerized cargo, liquid bulk and dry bulk. The only container port in Quebec, it is a destination port served by the largest shipping lines in the world. It is also an intermodal hub with a service offering that is unique in North America, featuring its own rail network directly dockside connected to Canada's two national rail networks. The MPA also operates a Cruise Terminal and a Port Centre. The MPA factors economic, social and environmental components into its corporate initiatives. This commitment is governed by a sustainable development policy whose guiding principles focus on involvement, cooperation and accountability. Port activity supports 19,000 jobs and generates $2.6 billion in economic benefits annually.

About the Contrecur expansion

Located in an industrial zone, the Contrecur land reserve was acquired 30+ years ago by the Montreal Port Authority and has been the focus of careful collaborative planning to support the development of the supply chain in Quebec and Eastern Canada. With the support of Canada Infrastructure Bank and the Government of Quebec, the Port of Montreal and its partners plan to develop a new state-of-the-art container terminal able to handle up to 1.15 million containers (TEUs). Advantageously located in the core of the largest pool of consumers, importers and exporters in Quebec and Eastern Canada, close to a major rail line and road routes, the Port of Montreal's Contrecur expansion will consolidate local strengths to effectively meet future needs. This project will strengthen the world-class logistics centre in the heart of the St. Lawrence Valley. A procurement process is currently underway to determine the private partner that will work with the MPA to design, build, finance, operate and maintain the terminal.

SOURCE Montreal Port Authority

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PGS ASA

Oslo, Norway, April 6, 2022: As announced on March 8, 2022, PGS ASA ("PGS" or the "Company") will with effect from January 1, 2022 discontinue its previous Segment Reporting to simplify external and internal reporting.



Consequently, from and including Q1 2022, the Company will no longer present revenue and amortization for pre-funding contracts on a percentage of completion basis as its segment information.

In the Companys pre-announcement for Q1 2022, scheduled for April 11, 2022, at 08:00am CEST, PGS will disclose only the expected revenues with IFRS 15 as measurement basis, specified into Contract revenues, MultiClient late sales and MultiClient pre-funding revenues. In addition, vessel utilization statistics for Q1 2022 will be provided.

In the Q1 2022 Earnings Release, scheduled for April 28, 2022, the Company will report order book information on a basis consistent with revenue recognition under IFRS and include a restatement of order book for historical periods to the same basis.

FOR DETAILS, CONTACT: Bard Stenberg, VP IR & Corporate Communication

Mobile: +47 99 24 52 35

PGS ASA and its subsidiaries (PGS or the Company) is an integrated marine geophysics company, which operates world-wide. The Company supports the energy industry, including oil and gas, offshore renewables and carbon storage. PGS headquarters is in Oslo, Norway and the PGS share is listed on the Oslo stock exchange (OSE: PGS). For more information about PGS visit www.pgs.com.



The information included herein contains certain forward-looking statements that address activities, events or developments that the Company expects, projects, believes or anticipates will or may occur in the future. These statements are based on various assumptions made by the Company, which are beyond its control and are subject to certain additional risks and uncertainties. The Company is subject to a large number of risk factors including but not limited to the demand for seismic services, the demand for data from our multi-client data library, the attractiveness of our technology, unpredictable changes in governmental regulations affecting our markets and extreme weather conditions. For a further description of other relevant risk factors, we refer to our Annual Report for 2021. As a result of these and other risk factors, actual events and our actual results may differ materially from those indicated in or implied by such forward-looking statements. The reservation is also made that inaccuracies or mistakes may occur in the information given above about the status of the Company or its business. Any reliance on the information above is at the risk of the reader, and PGS disclaims any and all liability in this respect.



--END--

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Key Highlights

Kuwait has plans to increase oil production from 2.6 million bpd to 4 million bpd

These plans have been stalled by political infighting over increasing spending

These arguments may abate with a new government in place

The resignation yesterday of the entire government of Kuwait, including its oil minister, may be exactly what the country needs in order to press ahead with long-delayed plans to increase crude oil production to a minimum of 4 million barrels per day (bpd) by 2040  up from a current average of around 2.6 million bpd.

These plans have long been predicated on an intended investment of at least US$6.1 billion in exploration over the next five years. This US$6 billion+ investment plan from the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) involves drilling 700 wells per year over the investment period (up from approximately 300 wells), having also completed to date around 93 per cent of the heavy oil plant project in the promising South Ratqa field.

KOC had already announced last year contract awards of around KWD350 million (US$1.16 billion) to a range of international oil companies for the supply of 31 oil rigs. The largest of these (10 rigs) went to China National Petroleum Corporation, with the remainder going to a mix of seven foreign firms, from Oman, the UK, and Egypt, plus domestic Kuwaiti companies.

Oil Production Boost Stymied By Spending Arguments

The key problem in moving ahead with these plans, however, was that implementing them requires a firm consensus to increase national budget spending, and this has not been easy to achieve.

Before the recent run-up in oil prices, Kuwaits budget deficit had increased by 175 percent in 2020-21 to KWD10.8 billion  the highest deficit in its budgetary history. In response, the Governor of Kuwaits Central Bank, Mohammad al-Hashel, highlighted that there was an urgent need for economic reforms, and all parties, especially the executive and legislative authority, must work to address all imbalances.

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It is the Kuwaiti National Assembly that has to authorise an increase in pre-agreed government borrowing, including allowing for any international bond offering (none had occurred to that point since 2017) and this they perennially refused to do.

Last June, Kuwaits parliament approved the 2021-22 state budget but failed to resolve the long-running standoff between the then-government and opposition that has blocked economic reforms. The impasse has also negatively impacted the ability of Kuwaits US$580 billion sovereign wealth fund  the Kuwait Investment Authority  to make effective decisions to direct investment at boosting the output from the countrys oil sector.

As a result of this previous lack of any meaningful funding strategy, the Big Two global rating agency, S&P, cut Kuwaits key foreign currency credit rating by one notch (to A+ from AA-) in July last year. Even less propitiously, S&P kept its outlook on the country negative.

This article was originally posted on FX Empire

More From FXEMPIRE:
BALTIMORE, April 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Urology Care Foundation (UCF), the world's leading nonprofit urological health foundation and official foundation of the American Urological Association (AUA), announces the creation of the new humanitarian endowment fund between the UCF, the AUA Southeastern Section (SESAUA) and the Puerto Rico Urological Association (PRUA). The new $150,000 fund between UCF/SESAUA/PRUA supports humanitarian work within the geographic area of Puerto Rico.

Urology Care Foundation

Harris M. Nagler, MD, Urology Care Foundation President, said, "This tripartite collaboration is evidence of our organization's focus on eliminating health care disparities with the UCF's burgeoning focus on the humanitarian efforts."

An annual $4,500 grant will be available starting in 2023. The selected grantee and identified project will support the improvement of urological care in underserved communities and/or research involving health policy to improve patient access to care and education.

"On behalf of the Southeastern Section of the American Urological Association, we are grateful to partner with PRUA and UCF to establish the SESAUA/PRUA/UCF Humanitarian Endowment," said David M. Kraebber, MD, SESAUA Immediate Past President. "The Section understands the importance of humanitarian volunteerism and this endowment will serve to elevate urologic care in underserved communities in Puerto Rico."

This program is designated for AUA members who are Board certified urologists and for Resident/Fellow members who are sponsored by and work in collaboration with a board-certified urologist providing oversight in connection with the project. Residents/Fellows must also provide permission/approval from their institutions to participate in the project.

Applicants must highlight their affiliation with an established organization and project taking place in Puerto Rico. A Program Announcement detailing the application requirements, review and selection process will be distributed by the Urology Care Foundation at the beginning of the application cycle. Applications will open in January 2023.

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"On behalf of the Puerto Rico Urological Association, I would like to give thanks to all the parties involved in making the Puerto Rico Humanitarian Fund a reality," said Marcos Perez Brayfield, MD, FAAP, FACS, PRUA President. "We applaud the initiative of UCF and SESAUA to elevate urological care in underserved communities and we look forward to all the initiatives arising from this fund that will contribute to the wellbeing of all the communities in Puerto Rico."

For more information visit www.urologyhealth.org.

About the Urology Care Foundation: The Urology Care Foundation is the world's leading nonprofit urological health foundation, and the official foundation of the American Urological Association. Collaborating with physicians, researchers, patients and the public, the Foundation supports and improves urologic clinical care by funding research, developing patient education and pursuing philanthropic support. To learn more about the Urology Care Foundation and its programs visit: www.urologyhealth.org.

About the American Urological Association: Founded in 1902 and headquartered near Baltimore, Maryland, the American Urological Association is a leading advocate for the specialty of urology and has nearly 24,000 members throughout the world. The AUA is a premier urologic association, providing invaluable support to the urologic community as it pursues its mission of fostering the highest standards of urologic care through education, research and the formulation of health policy.

Media Contact:

Caitlin Lukacs, Corporate Communications and Media Relations Manager

410-689-4081, clukacs@auanet.org

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SOURCE Urology Care Foundation
Social media platforms blocked in Sri Lanka amid curfew, opposition protest

Sri Lanka is the latest Asian country to block social media.

Bushwacked by a critical economic crisis that has also spawned civil and political unrest, the island nation, on April 3, banned the use of social media and messaging platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and WhatsApp. This was in anticipation of mass protests against the governments failure to halt the economic slide.

The shutdown makes Sri Lanka the 11th Asian country, since 2015, to have banned social media to counter public protests, research by UK-based privacy and VPN service company Surfshark shows. Overall, 30 countries in Asia alone have used social media bans to various ends.

China blocks almost all foreign social media at present, while several countries in the past have used bans for short durations. Vietnam, for instance, blocked Facebook during then US president Barack Obamas visit.

In India, internet shutdowns in regions like Jammu & Kashmir meant there was no access to social media. Faster data service like 4G was restored in the region only in January 2021, nearly 18 months after being withdrawn following the erstwhile states restructuring by the Indian government.

Overall, Asias social media censorship has been the strictest among the 193 UN countries, according to Surfsharks report. Up to 72 of these countries have taken drastic measures.

The tendency to block access to social media sites is especially prevalent in countries where state authorities own or control the internet infrastructure, Surfshark said in its report. This enables the authorities to quickly employ sporadic shutdowns to disrupt the expected movements of the democratic public.

Which governments choose to exercise control over the internet also points to the state of freedom and democracy in these nations.

Internet and the state of democracy

African nations are notorious for blocking access to social media during elections, protests, or civil unrest. The continent has a volatile environment for such firms, according to Surfshark.

Story continues

Northern American countries have largely avoided such bans, but countries like Brazil, Cuba, and Ecuador have come down heavily at various juncturesVenezuela has imposed social media bans 12 times since 2015. In Europe, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Montenegro are the only nations to have taken that dark path.

The notable exception has been the Australian continent, with no curbs ever imposed since 2015.

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JAKARTA, Indonesia and TORONTO, April 5, 2022 /CNW/ - PT Sun Life Financial Indonesia (Sun Life Indonesia), a subsidiary of Sun Life Financial Inc. (TSX: SLF) (NYSE: SLF), and PT Bank CIMB Niaga Tbk (CIMB Niaga; IDX: BNGA) announced today that they are deepening their existing partnership in Indonesia.

Sun Life logo (CNW Group/Sun Life Financial Inc.)

Sun Life Indonesia currently offers insurance solutions to CIMB Niaga customers through digital and out-of-branch channels. This new agreement makes Sun Life Indonesia the provider of insurance solutions to CIMB Niaga customers through all channels for a term of 15 years starting in January 2025. It also extends the term of the existing relationship by six (6) years to 2039.

This partnership combines Sun Life Indonesia's comprehensive range of insurance solutions and expert Client care across all life stages with CIMB Niaga's extensive distribution network of 427 branches serving seven (7) million customers across Indonesia. Established in 1955, CIMB Niaga is the second largest private bank by total assets in Indonesia as of December 31, 2021. Sun Life is also the exclusive bancassurance partner for CIMB Group in Malaysia.

The Indonesian market is the largest economy in Southeast Asia and offers significant growth potential, reflecting a young, emerging middle class with low insurance penetration rates. This deepening partnership will accelerate Sun Life's long-term strategy to grow its distribution capacity, supported by bancassurance. It will also enhance the value proposition for CIMB Niaga customers and provide them with a comprehensive range of protection and long-term savings solutions to address their evolving needs.

"We are delighted to deepen our regional partnership with CIMB to help millions more Clients in Indonesia achieve lifetime financial security and live healthier lives," said Ingrid Johnson, President of Sun Life Asia. "It will also extend Sun Life's reach in a market with tremendous potential for further growth with a partner that shares our focus on building a brighter, more sustainable future for Clients, employees and communities."

Story continues

"We are pleased to deepen our partnership with Sun Life Indonesia. This partnership marks another step in CIMB Niaga's continued efforts to be the bank of choice for Indonesian consumers and businesses. CIMB Niaga and Sun Life Indonesia have highly complementary strengths and a shared focus on providing an extraordinary experience for our customers. Together, we foresee that this partnership will help us create significant lasting value for our customers and key stakeholders," said CIMB Niaga President Director Lani Darmawan.

"As one of Indonesia's leading banks, our customers rely on us to deliver best-in-class products and services. By deepening our partnership with Sun Life Indonesia, we are reaffirming our commitment to provide high-quality solutions across wealth and insurance products to serve customers' needs today and in the future," said Noviady Wahyudi, Chief of Consumer Banking CIMB Niaga.

"It is a great honour to strengthen the partnership between Sun Life Indonesia and CIMB Niaga. CIMB Niaga is a quality bank with a well-known brand and has been a trusted partner to Sun Life Indonesia since 2009. During that time, we have developed a lasting partnership as we worked together to build a comprehensive range of protection and financial solutions for Indonesians at every life stage," says Elin Waty, President Director of Sun Life Indonesia.

Visit www.sunlife.com for slides and more information related to this announcement.

About Sun Life

Sun Life is a leading international financial services organization providing asset management, wealth, insurance and health solutions to individual and corporate Clients. Sun Life has operations in a number of markets worldwide, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, India, China, Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia and Bermuda. As of December 31, 2021, Sun Life had total assets under management of $1.44 trillion. For more information please visit www.sunlife.com.

Sun Life Financial Inc. trades on the Toronto (TSX), New York (NYSE) and Philippine (PSE) stock exchanges under the ticker symbol SLF.

About Sun Life Indonesia

Sun Life Indonesia is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sun Life Financial Inc. It offers a variety of protection and financial management products, from life insurance, education insurance, health insurance, and retirement plans. Sun Life Indonesia partners with leading financial institutions, both national and international, to serve multi-channel distribution strategies and provide wider access to our insurance solutions.

For more information please visit www.sunlife.co.id

About CIMB Niaga

CIMB Niaga was established under the name PT Bank Niaga in 1955. Approximately 92.5% of CIMB Niaga's shares (including the 1.02% owned by PT Commerce Kapital) are owned by CIMB Group. As the second largest private bank in Indonesia by assets, CIMB Niaga offers a comprehensive portfolio of conventional and shariah banking services, including consumer banking, SME banking, commercial and corporate banking, treasury and capital markets, and transaction banking services, supported by nationwide 427 branch offices, 4,481 ATM units, branchless banking networks, as well as 12,217 employees (consolidated) as of December 31, 2021.

Sun Life Press Contacts

Shierly Ge

Chief Marketing Officer

Sun Life Indonesia

T: +62 21 5289 0000

shierly.ge@sunlife.com Sun Life Investor Relations Contacts

Yaniv Bitton

Vice-President, Head of Investor Relations

& Capital Markets

T: +1 (416) 979-6496

Investor_relations@sunlife.com



Sarah James

Head of Communications

Sun Life Asia

T: +852 6021 5797

sarah.james@sunlife.com David Mathews

Assistant Vice-President,

Investor Relations & Capital Markets

T: +1 (416) 979-6464

Investor_relations@sunlife.com



Rajani Kamath

Associate Vice-President

Corporate Communications

Sun Life

T: +1 (647) 515-7514

rajani.kamath@sunlife.com





CIMB Niaga Press Contact

Deddy T. Hasibuan

Media Relations and Reputation Group Head

CIMB Niaga

T: +62 21 270 0555 CIMB Niaga Investor Relations Contact

Graha CIMB Niaga

Jl. Jend Sudirman Kav. 58

Jakarta 12190, Indonesia

T: +62 21 250 5252, 250 5353

Website: www.cimbniaga.co.id

investor.relations@cimbniaga.co.id

CIMB Niaga logo (CNW Group/Sun Life Financial Inc.)

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EXCLUSIVE: There was an accident on the set of AMCs upcoming anthology series Tales of the Walking Dead Monday night, sources tell Deadline. The incident occurred in Stone Mountain Park near Atlanta, GA, after the production day had ended. The 911 call was made at 8:30 PM, we hear.

Stone Mountain Park - Credit: Georgia Parks

Georgia Parks

More from Deadline

According to multiple sources, the accident involved a riverboat and a plank connecting the boat to a pier. A crew member fell into the water and was taken to the hospital by ambulance. She is believed to be in stable condition. Eyewitnesses say that the crew member fell off of the top deck, bounced off of the lower level railing before hitting the dock and falling into the lake. Marine safety crew was present during the incident and pulled the crew member out of the water as she was unable to swim. They are currently investigating what happened. When reached by Deadline, a rep for AMC declined comment.

We also hear IATSE has been notified of the incident and have reached out to the union for more information.

Production was suspended Tuesday and resumed again today. The boat and dock involved in the accident are commonly used by Netflixs Ozark as their casino boat setting.

This was the second accident involving The Walking Dead franchise within weeks. Norman Reedus, who portrays Daryl Dixon on the mothership series, suffered a concussion on-set in Georgia on March 11 as the AMC series completed filming its final episodes. Production on the final wrap day for TWD was pushed for a few days because of the accident. In 2017, a stuntman for The Walking Dead died from a head injury while performing a fall from a balcony during filming.

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Click here to read the full article.
KIYOSU, Japan, April 06, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Toyoda Gosei Co., Ltd. (TOKYO:7282) will establish a new plant in Guangdong Province, China, to enhance its production network for airbags and steering wheels, its major products, in China, where the automobile market continues to grow.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220405005102/en/

Safety system product manufacturing locations in China (Graphic: Business Wire)

The new plant will be established as a branch plant of Toyoda Gosei Group company Toyoda Gosei (Foshan) Auto Parts Co., Ltd., with production planned to start around the summer of 2023. With this expansion, the company will raise its sales of airbags, for which there is growing demand due to strengthened safety systems in China, and the increasing automobile production in south China.

This plant will be established as a "smart plant" that pursues efficient and environmentally-friendly manufacturing. The status of processes from production to delivery will be grasped in real time with the use of IoT and AI. To contribute to carbon neutrality, the plant will use energy-saving production equipment and renewable energy. By 2030, this will reduce CO 2 emissions by more than 50% compared with conventional equipment.

New plant outline

Location Shunde District, Foshan City, Guangdong Province Land area Approx. 54,000 m2 Bldg. area Approx. 43,000 m2 Products Safety System products

(airbags, steering wheels, pop-up hood actuators) Start of production Summer 2023 (start of construction April 2022) Employees Approx. 280 (at start of operations) Machinery/ equipment Production equipment

 Collaborative robots

 Automatic guided vehicles

Environmental equipment

 Solar panels

Outline of Toyoda Gosei (Foshan) Auto Parts Co., Ltd.

Founded October 2004 Capital USD 19.1 million

After capital increase: USD 70.5 million Location No. 3 Wusha Section, Shunpan Rd. Daliang town, Shunde, Foshan City, Guangdong Province, 528333, China Employees 722 (as of Feb. 28, 2022)

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220405005102/en/

Contacts

Toyoda Gosei Co., Ltd.

Public Relations

Chihiro Suzuki

inquiry@mail.toyoda-gosei.co.jp
Photo credit: Lockheed Martin

The U.S. government successfully tested a hypersonic cruise missile last month.

To avoid alarming Russia, the test was carried out in secret.

In addition to the secret test, STRATCOM has also twice postponed a Minuteman III ICBM test.

Sometime in mid-March, the U.S Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) tested a hypersonic weapon system ... but didnt tell anyone. The Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) test took place a few weeks ago, in the midst of Russias invasion of Ukraine, but the Pentagon delayed the announcement to avoid alarming Moscow. The U.S. has also twice delayed a routine ICBM test for the same reason.

 Dont miss any of our best-in-class military and defense coverage. Join Pop Mech Pro.

The test of the HAWC hypersonic weapon took place off the West Coast, according to Defense News. A B-52 bomber mothership released the HAWC, whereupon the weapons Aerojet Rocketdyne scramjet engine kicked in. The vehicle quickly accelerated to speeds faster than Mach 5, though DARPAthe research and development arm of the Department of Defensehasnt said exactly how fast the craft went. (Mach 5 is approximately 3,836 miles per hour.)

Heres a video from 2019 involving the Air Forces Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), a conventional hypersonic weapon. Generally, theyre designed to catch fleeting targets, like a missile launcher or a surface-to-air missile radar, before they safely redeploy. The ARRW hypersonic weapon test also involved a B-52 Stratofortress as a carry vehicle and did not involve an actual launch:

In a statement released Tuesday, DARPA announced that the vehicle reached altitudes greater than 65,000 feet and flew for more than 300 nautical miles. Lockheed Martin developed the hypersonic vehicle, itself, and a concept image (at the top of this story) bears the unmistakable mascot of the companys legendary Skunk Works division, a bushy-tailed skunk.

This marks the second successful test of an HAWC vehicle. In September 2021, a competing design developed by another contractor team also reached hypersonic speeds. The two successful tests come after a string of failures for Pentagon hypersonic weapon programs. The Department of Defense has several hypersonic test programs in the oven, including those for the Air Force, Army/Navy, and DARPA.

Story continues

Photo credit: Anadolu Agency - Getty Images

Hypersonic weapons reached new notoriety in March after Russia announced it had struck several targets in Ukraine with Kinzhal air-launched hypersonic weapons. While technically a hypersonic weapon, Kinzhal is actually just the mating of two previous weaponsthe Iskander-M short-range ballistic missile and the MiG-31 fighterto launch an Iskander-M missile from the air.

This latest U.S. hypersonic test vehicle uses an Aerojet Rocketdyne scramjet engine. Scramjet is short for supersonic combustible ramjet. Scramjets are air-breathing engines that, unlike traditional aircraft engines, suck in oxygen from the surrounding air at supersonic speeds. This vastly increases the amount of oxygen the engine receives, increasing thrust.

The Pentagon is keeping details of the HAWC program a closely-held secret. The vehicles top speed has not been publicly revealed, with the Department of Defense only stating that it exceeded Mach 5. We dont know how far it can actually travel, what aircraft will carry it into combat, or what kind of warhead HAWC will be fitted with.

Photo credit: U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Aubree Milks

In addition to the hush-hush test, the U.S. has twice delayed a routine test of a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile. The test, originally scheduled to take place in March, was rescheduled f0r early April, but canceled yet again. According to Reuters, the tests were delayed in a bid to lower nuclear tensions with Russia during its war against Ukraine.

Minuteman III tests occur every six months or so, with the last known test in September 2021. The tests are routine and meant to assess the Minuteman III forces reliability. Four-hundred Minuteman IIIs are deployed in hardened concrete launch silos across the American West and are the fastest and most responsive weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

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The F. Francis and Dionne Najafi Thunderbird Global Headquarters at ASUs downtown Phoenix campus is perhaps the most obvious sign of the schools recent turnaround. (Photo Credit: Thunderbird School of Global Management)

Founders Day April 8, 2018, the anniversary of Thunderbird Schools official charter, was meant to be a celebration. Arizona State University President Michael Crow was there. So was Phoenix mayor, then councilwoman, Kate Gallego. There were podiums, banners, and a crowd of alumni, students, and faculty waiting to hear from the schools new dean.

The site was carefully chosen: an empty lot on the ASU campus that would one day house the schools gleaming new headquarters. It was a symbol of new beginnings for a school that had fallen from a once lofty perch.

But to many, it felt like an ending.

The day before, nearly 1,400 alumni gathered at Thunderbirds old campus in Glendale, Arizona. They were there to say goodbye. After 70 years as an independent nonprofit, Thunderbird had been acquired by ASU four years earlier after decades of decline. Their beloved campus amongst the cactus and the jack rabbits was the latest piece of the Thunderbird mystique to be getting the chop.

Sanjeev Khagram. Thunderbird photo

Sanjeev Khagram

It was heartbreaking for alumni, says Sanjeev Khagram, the Thunderbird dean who was first introduced to the school community four years ago on the empty dirt lot.

The school was in such bad shape, it sort of felt like it was really over. There was this sense of Who is this new guy coming in, and whats really going to happen?

THUNDERBIRDS RISE AND FALL

For the literary minded, the metaphor could practically smack one in the face. Thunderbird soared at one timethe pinnacle of global leadership education with students coming from around the world to learn international business before international business was really a thing. Then it crashed. Nearly burned. It was the business school that nearly went out of business.

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However, in the last four years or so, Thunderbird has achieved a remarkable turnaround. Enrollments are way up. The budget is in the black. Its gleaming new global headquarters rose from the pile of dirt on which Khagram had once stood to introduce himself to a skeptical crowd.

Ive been in the business world for 40 years, and more than half of my business experience is in presidential positions, or as CEO of global, public companies, says Hiroshi Hamada, a 1991 Thunderbird alumni, co-chair of the Thunderbird Global Alumni Network and CEO of ARUHI Corporation, the largest mortgage bank in Japan.

I have, myself, been involved in a lot of turnarounds. But this is a much more amazing story than I have ever seen in my business experience.

This week, Hamada and more than 2,000 other Thunderbird alumni descended on ASU again. Theyre celebrating Thunderbirds 75th anniversary, after last years events were postponed because of the pandemic. This time around, they have a lot to celebrate.

A BUSINESS SCHOOL IN CHRONIC DECLINE

To gauge the height of Thunderbirds rise over the last four years, you need a sense of how far it had fallen. So first, a bit of history.

Thunderbird was chartered on April 8, 1946, on the site of a deactivated Army Air training base outside of Phoenix. Lt. General Barton Kyle Yount founded the school to help American men enter an emerging international business environment emerging after World War II. For nearly 30 years, it was the only American business school with an international program and the only one in which graduates were required to be proficient in at least two languages. Its graduates spread across the globe, and boasted leadership in BP, Morgan Stanley, and other top companies.

In the mid-to-late 80s, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and other world events fast-tracking globalization, Thunderbirds international focus was a clear differentiator. Enrollments soared to a peak of about 1,600 in 1992 while its endowment grew from about $1 million in 1982 to $20 million in the late 90s. However, as other brand name universities in the U.S. and abroad started their own international programs, Thunderbirds differentiator lost its cache.

A trend of declining enrollments across business schools in general hit Thunderbird particularly hard, and the school made strategic missteps along the way. Long story short, enrollments dropped to 600 by 2003, including a 75% decline in its full-time MBA enrollment. In fiscal year 2012, the school was $4 million in the red and had $24.5 million in debt. Thunderbird also reported among the lowest graduation employment rates in the country with 76.1% of its graduates not having jobs at commencement.

A PROPOSED VENTURE AND A CIVIL WAR

Enter Laureate Education Inc.

In 2013, then president Larry Penley, announced a joint venture with the for-profit education company. At the time, many for-profit endeavors were under heavy scrutiny for operating degree mills with low completion rates and high student debt.

Many of Thunderbird alumni revolted. At least five board members resigned in protestone claiming the deal would make Thunderbird a laughing stock. Nearly 2,000 alumni signed a petition contending that the agreement with Laureate would cheapen the value of the (Thunderbird) degree, according to P&Q reporting. The deal collapsed. In July 2014, Arizona State University announced a deal to bring Thunderbird under its umbrella.

Hiroshi Hamada (Thunderbird 91) is co-chair of the Thunderbird Global Alumni Network and CEO of ARUHI Corporation, the largest mortgage bank in Japan. He also spearheaded fundraising efforts for a Thunderbird Regional Center of Excellence in Tokyo, the first of 20 to open around the world. (Photo Credit: Thunderbird School of Global Management)

But the fractures in the T-Bird alumni network only grew. Some alumni broke away to form the Thunderbird Independent Alumni Association. The network of about 45,000 T-Birds in more than 140 countries was largely disengaged and disenchanted.

It was like a civil war. The alumni association split in two and started battling each other. They were shouting at each other, blaming and attacking each other, Hamada tells P&Q. Quite frankly, I stayed away from the school because all I heard were the stories of it going downthe number of students, the reputation, the rankingseverything was going down. So emotionally, spiritually or whatever, I just stayed away for more than 20 years.

STATELESS REFUGEE TO GLOBAL ECONOMIST

Thunderbird Dean Sanjeev Khagram. Courtesy photo

As Thunderbird was rising and falling in Arizona, Sanjeev Khagram was creating his own story of reinvention. Born in Uganda, Khagrams family was once among the richest in the country, a family of entrepreneurs on both his mothers and fathers side. In 1972, when Khagram was about 5 years old, Ugandan president Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of the countrys Asian minority, turning his family into stateless refugees. They fled with just $50.

After spending time in refugee camps in Italy, the family resettled in New Jersey. Khagram watched his mother take over the family and start to rebuild.

That is an important part of my story, because womens leadership and entrepreneurship are very important to Thunderbird and to me personally. And it all has to do with my mothers role in our family, Khagram tells Poets&Quants.

He started his first businesses with his mother when he was 13. By the time he graduated high school, his family had a chain of five hotel gift shops across New Jersey. He was a first-generation college student, earning a full-ride scholarship to Stanford and designing his own major in development engineering. He dreamed of building large infrastructure projects to improve lives for people around the world.

Throughout his career, he built a resume that allowed him to do just that: He was selected as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, was a dean of the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre, and authored UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moons Report on the Impacts of the Global Economic Crisis in 2009. He was senior policy and strategy director at the World Commission on Dams and founded organizations that worked in sustainable development. He earned a PhD from Stanford, and he was recruited to help globalize Harvard Business School and the Harvards Kennedy School of Government. He looked to Thunderbird for inspiration.

When ASU President Michael Crow called him in 2018, Khagram was semi-retired and living in Los Angeles. Thunderbird was still on the brink of collapse after nearly four years under ASU. Some in the ASU leadership wanted to dismantle the school and absorb its assets, Khagram tells P&Q.

ASU President Michael Crow (Courtesy photo).

Khagram had known Crow for about 20 years, back from when Khagram was at Harvard and Crow was at Columbia. While Crow still believed in Thunderbird and its mission, he told Khagram he needed someone who could turn it around and turn it around quickly. But who would be crazy enough to attach themselves to a falling rocket?

Khagram thought about legacy. Not for him or his career, but for the planet and the kind of world we were leaving the people who come after.

Our vision at Thunderbird is building a world of sustainable and equitable prosperity. Because if you think about my background and what happened in Uganda, the expulsion would have never happened if there had been sustainable and equitable prosperity, Khagram says.

With ASU, and Thunderbirds history in global leadership and innovation, that combination doesnt come around very often. Even though it was a disaster when I came in, both President Crow and I believed that we could turn this thing around. And that Thunderbird would be a force not just for education, but for solutions and impact for the planet.

Next page: Engineering the turnaround

Thunderbird Dean Sanjeev Khagram, second from right, going over plans for the schools new headquarters. The new building opened in 2021. (Courtesy photo)

ENGINEERING A TURNAROUND

After being introduced to alumni and faculty on April 8, 2018, Khagram officially took over as dean that July. There were two things he had to do almost immediately.

First, he needed to shore up Thunderbirds budget that was, by that time, nearly $10 million in the hole. Within his first three months, Thunderbird underwent a massive reorganization, letting go of a third of its stafffrom about 120 people down to 80. His team also evaluated every single degree program against the schools global, digital, and technological-focused mission. It culled some programs, reinvented others.

Faculty and staff who stayed had to buy into the new vision. Professor of Global Leadership Christine Pearson, who has been at Thunderbird for 18 years, noticed a clear change in the vision coming from Thunderbirds new dean.

The early days of ASUs acquisition featured many leadership blunders. The first positive change was the arrival of Dean Khagram, she tells Poets&Quants. He held a faculty meeting before he was even on payroll. His energy, savvy, and personal fit for Thunderbird were evident in that first meeting. He was clearly a force of positive change.

Next, Khagram had to reunify the T-bird alumni. He traveled to 62 countries in his first 18 months to meet, face-to-face, with alumni and other partners turned off by the schools decline and infighting.

Heather Wise (Thunderbird 94) is co-chair of the Thunderbird Global Alumni Network. Her Thunderbird degree allowed her to work around the world in electronic data systems for the banking industry. (Photo Credit: Thunderbird School of Global Management)

In those meetings, Khagram had a lot of tough conversations.

For example, Sabic, a large Saudi Arabia chemical manufacturing company that had once been a large Thunderbird client in executive education, told Khagram they were meeting him out of respect. However, they said, they would never work with Thunderbird again.

Today, Thunderbird is the single largest provider for Sabics executive education, Khagram says.

Another tough one: Khagram recalls a conversation with alum Francis Najafi (Thunderbird 77). Najafi loved Thunderbird. He thought Khagram was the right man to turn it around, but he was never giving another cent to the school.

Early this year, the school announced it was naming its new global headquarters for Najafi and his wife after a $25 million giftthe largest donation Thunderbird has received since joining ASU.

He traveled the world, talking to people, sharing the vision, where we were going, and the plan to get there. And then he executed on that plan, says Heather Wise, (Thunderbird 94), co-chair of the Thunderbird Global Alumni Network. It has been so exciting to see so many people engaged, making large donations, and contributing again. Sanjeev loves to say we are not just surviving, were thriving. The energy is there and people are so excited to come back.

A TURNAROUND, BY THE NUMBERS

Business folk like a good metric, something by which to measure success or failure. So, lets take a look at the numbers behind Thunderbirds turnaround.

Thunderbird fact sheet provided by the school.

Its budget went from nearly $10 million in the hole when Khagram joined in 2018 to $35 million to the good today, the dean says.

Total enrollment is up 122%, rising from 675 students in 2018 to more than 1,500 now.

Thunderbird went from 3 Regional Centers for Excellence to 20. They are located around the world, in cities like Shanghai, Tokyo, Jakarta, Seoul, London, Amsterdam, Mexico City, and Nairobi.

It has already raised $80 million in gifts from newly engaged alumni, including 1,000 new donors. It expects that number to hit $100 million by summer. Alumni are three times more engaged.

Graduate internship rates are up from 50% to 95% while graduate employment rates are up 90% six months after earning their degrees. Average starting salaries are up 36.4%.

The dual language requirement returned for its core Masters degree, a point of pride for Thunderbird alumni, and the school opened the first ever AR/VR Digital Language Lab.

Thunderbird has also launched or transformed 10 new programs, including four STEM-certified programs and the worlds first ever graduate degree in space business, policy and leadership which launched in January. It offered degrees in select school locations, such as an Executive Master of Arts in Global Affairs in Washington, D.C., and an Executive Masters in Global Leadership and Strategy in six cities around the world. Its Master of Global Managementthe predecessor of Thunderbirds historic flagship degree absorbed by the schools ill-fated, full-time Global MBAwas ranked No. 1 by the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education in 2019.

Tomas Bilbao

After cutting staff by a third when Khagram first arrived, Thunderbird has since taken great care to attract exceptional people inspired by what Khagram and the school are trying to achieve. Theyre now up to 240 faculty and staff, up from 80 right after the restructuring.

The dean inspired and recruited a group of people who identified with him and his vision, says Tomas Bilbao, executive director of branding and communications at Thunderbird.

Bilbao is one of those recruits. He came to Phoenix in 2018 after 20 years in Washington, D.C., working on democratic issues.

I was very concerned about the state of the world and the state of democracy. The reason my wife left the White House and I left my job to move to Arizona was because we knew that education is the best protection against populism, he tells P&Q. We also know that with all the challenges facing the world, we need to create a new brand of leader who can help preserve the international order. The dean, thanks to his vision, has positioned the school to actually make an impact at a global scale, from here in downtown Phoenix.

Next Page: Looking Ahead to the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Thunderbird Dean Sanjeev Khagram celebrates the launch of the 100 million learners global initiative with Francis and Dionne Najafi in January. The initiative, made possible by a $25m donation from the Najafis, will educate and empower 100 million learners by 2030, with 70% of them women. (Photo Credit: Thunderbird School of Global Management)

LOOKING AHEAD: THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Central to Thunderbirds vision of the future is creating leaders for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. If steam power mechanized production in the first such revolution, electricity enabled mass production in the second, and information technology automated production in the third, the Fourth is all about the blurring of boundaries between our technological and physical worlds. Advances in AI, robotics, The Internet of Things, and other technologies will drastically change business and our lives in the coming years. Global leaders are critical, Khagram says.

The most obvious symbol of Thunderbirds reclaiming global mantle is the $85 million F. Francis and Dionne Najafi Thunderbird Global Headquarters at ASUs downtown Phoenix campus, named for the alum who once vowed to never give another penny.

Thunderbird hosted a Global Challenge Lab Celebration in its Haas Digital Global Forum in March. (Photo Credit: Thunderbird School of Global Management)

We wanted to give every student the resources to change the world so we built the most technologically advanced educational headquarters on the planet, the school says on its virtual tour of the new building. The five-floor, 110,000-square-foot building features 9 state-of-the-art flexible classrooms, the VR language lab, a Global Decision Theater, a Greenscreen studio and more.

Christine Pearson

The headquarters opened to students in the fall, but the pandemic delayed an official grand opening event. This week on Founders Day, Friday April 8, some of the thousands of alumni in Phoenix for their global reunion will see it for the first time. It rounds off a week of activities celebrating the schools anniversaryand its rebirth.

Looking to the future, Thunderbird will on Friday also launch the first course in its 100 million learners initiative. The one-of-a-kind initiative seeks to bring world-class business education to underserved communities around the world by the year 2030, 70% of whom will be women.

Many are quick to point to the new building, its award-winning architecture and techno-advances. That remarkable symbol was funded and resourced largely because of the revised spirit and support of our alumni, which was energized by the dean. The buildings form and decor capture the open, global, forward-thinking spirit that has always characterized the best of Thunderbird, Pearson tells P&Q.

However, the elevation of women into faculty and staff senior leadership, and the achievement of gender equity in faculty salaries are even more significant advancements for the future of Thunderbird. Dean Khagram is the soul of these changes.

DONT MISS: ACCEPTANCE RATES AT THE TOP 50 U.S. MBA PROGRAMS + SECTION 4: BUSINESS EDUCATION AT A FRACTION OF THE COST

The post After Unprecedented Turnaround, Thunderbird Soars Again appeared first on Poets&Quants.
Advocates for the U.S. Postal Service have secured a major victory in Washington that, they say, will keep the agency afloat and address service delays affecting millions of mail recipients in recent years.

President Joe Biden has signed the Postal Service Reform Act into law, after two years of widespread complaints about mail service slowdowns under Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and a persistent fear the agency could even run out of cash.

The bill has various provisions to ensure on-time delivery and to eliminate the possibility of service deductions. It also restructures the agency's balance sheet to allay fears of funding shortages.

I think it's an extremely important piece of legislation because the public Postal Service belongs to everybody in the country, and serves everybody in the country, said Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, which represents more than 200,000 postal employees and retirees.

A United States Postal Service tow truck prepares to haul away two broken down delivery vehicles in California in 2022. (George Rose/Getty Images)

The bill had bipartisan support, passing the House 342-92 and the Senate 79-19. The National Association of Letter Carriers, another key representative of postal employees, has also praised the bill.

We are finally delivering for the Post Office, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said recently as the bill neared the finish line in the Senate. [It] is providing the Postal Service a much-needed reset.

"The post office is central to our economy," President Biden said Wednesday before signing the bill, adding that the bill is "setting the postal services on a more sustainable and stable financial footing."

The bill vows not to cut back on service, guaranteeing that mail will be delivered six days a week.

The new law has other provisions around increased transparency and accountability when it comes to on-time mail delivery. To measure progress, the bill will require the USPS to set up an online "dashboard" that will be searchable by ZIP code to show consumers how long it takes to deliver letters and packages.

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It will help put the USPS on a long-term, stable financial footing that will allow our post offices to provide the level of service Americans expect, said Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) on the Senate floor recently.

This ridiculous, onerous and draconian pre-funding mandate

The bill restructures the Postal Service's balance sheet by eliminating a requirement that the agency pre-fund retirees' health care and benefits. That mandate has contributed to 14 years of red ink at the Post Service, and repealing it will save an estimated $49 billion over the coming decade.

This bill, which has been 15 years in the making, will finally help the Postal Service overcome burdensome requirements that threaten their ability to provide reliable service to the American people, said Senator Gary Peters (D-MI) in a statement.

Senator Gary Peters (D-MI) rallies in support of the United States Postal Service (USPS) outside of a post office in Old Redford, Michigan (REUTERS/Rebecca Cook)

Some Republicans have opposed the bill, often arguing that its fiscally shortsighted. This bill doesnt reduce costs  it just shifts them from one unfunded government program to another unfunded government program, Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) has said.

The fate of Louis DeJoy

Postmaster General DeJoy has praised the bill, but his job security has been an open question since Bidens inauguration. He became a lightning rod during Donald Trumps presidency, especially as the U.S. experienced mail delays ahead of the 2020 election, which was largely conducted using voting by mail.

Biden doesnt have the power to directly fire DeJoy  a Trump supporter and donor  but the Postal Board of Governors does and the Senate has advanced two of Bidens nominees to be postal governors.

U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy during a pledge ceremony for new local postmasters in Denver (Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

If they are confirmed in the weeks ahead, it would increase Biden's influence over DeJoys fate.

For now, both Dejoy and postal advocates can celebrate the new bill. Dimondstein says that the bipartisan support for the bill underscores just how much the people, the country support and need and want a vibrant public Postal Service.

Ben Werschkul is a writer and producer for Yahoo Finance in Washington, DC.

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W Investments is also thrilled to welcome Desjardins Capital among its investors

MONTREAL, April 6, 2022 /CNW Telbec/ - W Investments is very pleased to announce today the final closing of its second fund, W Investments Group II L.P ("W II"). W Investments thereby concludes a fundraising of $150 million, including $125 million from private investors and Quebec entrepreneurs. The fund acquires minority positions in both technological and traditional companies and invests in real estate developments.

"We couldn't be happier with this turnout of events and have far exceeded our initial objectives. W II has been very active since its initial close last September, having already concluded six transactions totalling nearly $30M in commitments. We will continue to build on this momentum and find other attractive transactions that will please our investors," states David Waddell, co-founder and managing partner.

Over the years, W Investments has built an impressive network in the Quebec business and financial community, which has proven to be a success factor for its portfolio companies.

"We are a group of private investors who joined forces to invest our own capital. Our investors are, without a doubt, a significant asset to any management team we partner with. Partnering with W unlocks access to a strong and diverse network of entrepreneurs with operational experience and great reputation," reinforces Nicolas Belanger, co-founder.

Desjardins Capital invests $25M

W Investments also has the privilege of counting on the support of a lead investor in Desjardins Capital, who has committed $25 million to W Investments Group II L.P., in addition to setting funds aside for future co-investment opportunities.

"We were looking for a partner that embedded our values and that was solution-oriented, which is exactly what we found in Desjardins Capital. We are combining the depth, reputation, and network of Desjardins with the agility, versatility, and entrepreneurial spirit of W. We firmly believe that this partnership will be beneficial for both parties as well as for our portfolio companies," explains Maxime St-Laurent, co-founder and managing partner.

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"W Investments is a fund managed by high-quality entrepreneurs who share our desire to support SMEs in their ambitions for growth," highlights Marie-Helene Nolet, chief operating officer at Desjardins Capital. "Our partnership gives us the opportunity to support a larger number of Quebec businesses by giving them access to a diversified network and a leading expertise."

About W Investments Group

We are W Investments, a private equity fund based in Montreal, Canada. A significant portion of our capital was invested by our five founders, which provides a true alignment of interests with investors. We leverage our extensive network to create opportunities and support our portfolio companies. We target minority positions in businesses with at least $30M in enterprise value. We are open to all sectors of activity, and we want to partner with experienced managers to support them in their growth plan, while we unlock value for all our partners.

For more information, visit our website.

About Desjardins Capital

Over 45 years strong, Desjardins Capital has a mission to value, support and nurture the best of Quebec entrepreneurship. With assets under management of C$3.0 billion as of December 31, 2021, Desjardins Capital helps contribute to the longevity of more than 670 companies, cooperatives and funds in various sectors from across Quebec. In addition to helping to maintain and create many thousands of jobs, this subsidiary of Desjardins Group offers business owners access to a large business network and supports their business growth.

For more information, visit our website.

SOURCE W Investments

Cision

View original content to download multimedia: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/April2022/06/c8653.html
The Edwards Law Firm has filed an appeal of a judges dismissal of two claims made on behalf of Courtland High School graduate Makaila Keyes against the Spotsylvania School Board.

The original lawsuit filed last month alleges that School Board Chairman Kirk Twigg violated Keyess rights under Virginias Freedom of Information Act by presenting a substantially and materially altered agenda for the Jan. 10, 2022, meeting that had not been made available to the public in advance; by not notifying the public in advance of plans to hold a closed meeting; and by not properly holding a vote to go into the closed meeting.

Judge John Martin at a hearing on March 25 agreed to dismiss the first two claims on the basis that there is no existing case law to support a ruling.

We have accordingly appealed this part of the decision to the Circuit Court, reads a statement the Edwards Law Firm posted Monday to its Facebook page.

In effect, Honorable Judge Martin paved the way for this appeal to set precedents that (1) public officials cannot frustrate FOIA by presenting palatable agendas for public inspection only to substitute them for a more controversial agenda once a meeting is underway, and (2) public officials cannot conduct back-room business in closed meetings without first giving the public proper notice that such closed meetings are planned in a manner that provides the public an opportunity to respond, the statement continues.

A hearing on the appeal has been scheduled for April 18 at 9 a.m. in Spotsylvania Circuit Court.

Martin found that the lawsuits third claimthat the board violated FOIA laws by failing to hold a vote before entering the closed meetinghas merit and can proceed. There will be a trial on that claim April 29 in Spotsylvania General District Court.

Jeremy Capps, the attorney representing Twigg and the other three school board members named in the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to a request to comment on the case.

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Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the network of Fredericksburg churches that together operate Micah Ecumenical Ministries has continued to care for, shelter and feed the downtown areas homeless population.

But for two years, the churches have been unable to gather to host services to meet the spiritual needs of the population.

The last collective worship service was a Lenten service at Shiloh Baptist Church (Old Site) in March 2020.

Two years later, the downtown churches are gathering again during the Lent season. Shiloh Old Site and St. Marys Catholic Church offered a joint service March 23, and on Monday evening, Shiloh Baptist Church (New Site) hosted a vigil in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated that day 54 years ago.

[Dr. King] spoke in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, said Nathaniel Harley of Shiloh New Site. He taught us that we cannot love the God we never see and hate the neighbor we see every day. He was a 20th-century Moses who cried out, Let my people go. Today, let us thank the God who sent him.

The Rev. Cynthia McKenna, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, also connected Kings life and death with the Old Testament, reading aloud a passage from the book of Genesis about Josephs brothers plotting to kill him.

They said to one another, Here comes this dreamer! Now then, come and lets kill him, and throw him into one of the pits; and we will say, A vicious animal devoured him. Then we will see what will become of his dreams! McKenna read.

Allen Fisher, pastor of The Presbyterian Church of Fredericksburg, and Joe Hensley, rector of St. Georges Episcopal Church, called on congregants to keep Kings message of hope and light in the darkness, with Hensley leading the audience in singing This Little Light of Mine.

Aaron Dobynes, pastor of Shiloh Old Site, talked about Kings final days, April 3 and 4, 1968.

King had traveled to Memphis to support Black sanitation workers, who were striking in protest of segregation laws that prevented them from riding inside trucks and resulted in the death of two workers, who were crushed when their trucks compression mechanism was activated.

King was resting in his room at the Lorraine Motel after arriving April 3 when his friend, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, told him a crowd had gathered at the Mason Temple, headquarters of the Church of God in Christ, and were asking to hear him speak.

Dobynes said King asked if Abernathy would speak to them instead, and Abernathy told him, They dont want to hear me. They want you.

At the Mason Temple, King delivered his last public address, now known as the Ive Been to a Mountaintop speech, which Dobynes recited from memory in a powerful voice.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life, King told the crowd. Longevity has its place. But Im not concerned about that now. I just want to do Gods will. And Hes allowed me to go up to the mountain. And Ive looked over. And Ive seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so Im happy, tonight. Im not worried about anything. Im not fearing any man. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

The next day, at 6:01 p.m., as he leaned over the balcony of room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, King was struck and killed by a single bullet.

They killed the dreamer, but they cannot kill the dream, Dobynes said. Keep on dreaming.

The churches then honored two members of the Fredericksburg community who have carried Kings dream forwardformer mayor Lawrence Davies and Larry Haun, pastor of Fredericksburg Baptist Church.

Davies is the pastor emeritus of Shiloh Old Site. In 1966, he became the first Black man ever elected to Fredericksburg City Council, and he served as the citys mayor from 1976 to 1996. As mayor, he championed the construction of low-income housing, the establishment of an affordable bus system and increased access to mental health treatment.

Haun was instrumental in the establishment of Micah Ministries and has made Fredericksburg Baptist a home for immigrant and refugee families, Dobynes said.

He has been a voice for the voiceless, Dobynes said.

The Micah community will gather again for a Good Friday service April 15 at 2 p.m. to walk the Stations of the Cross.

Shiloh Old Site will host an Easter Sunday sunrise service at the Fredericksburg Fairgrounds on April 17 at 6:30 a.m.

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OMAHA -- Next year, the Omaha Airport Authority will launch a $600 million effort to modernize Eppley Airfields main terminal, which has not seen major changes to its configuration since it was built in the mid-1980s.

Construction could run through 2027.

Plans call for the expansion of the 368,000-square-foot terminal building to between 650,000 and 700,000 square feet. Changes include moving ticket counters to the second floor and increasing the number of gates from 20 to 22. The concourse would be unified, with a single security entrance, unlike the split concourses the airport now has.

The project opens the possibility for additional flight routes, said Steve McCoy, the Airport Authoritys chief information and development officer.

The Airport Authority also is working to assess demand for international travel to hotspots such as Cancun, Mexico. Offering international commercial flights, a first for Omaha, would require the addition of a Federal Inspection Station, where passengers and luggage are screened by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The cost of the terminal project, which still is being designed, likely will be about $100 million more than originally envisioned, a reflection of pandemic-related cost increases in materials and labor, said Dave Roth, the Airport Authoritys executive director.

The Airport Authority intends to finance the project with bonds, airport revenue, passenger facility charges and federal money.

Last year, as part of $1 trillion federal infrastructure legislation, the Airport Authority received a grant that will provide Eppley with about $7.2 million each year for five years. Administrators recently applied for a second federal grant that would help pay for terminal construction.

If demand meets the Airport Authoritys expectations, additional work could see the terminal expanded to accommodate 28 gates.

Already underway are a pair of construction projects: the $20.3 million remodeling of the terminals access roadway, which moved the main airport entrance to the south, and an $8.3 million renovation of the airports older, south parking garage. Both projects should be finished by the end of this year.

While the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic marked a sharp decline in air travel and continued COVID flare-ups made for a fitful recovery, Omaha Airport Authority officials expect the market to rebound, justifying the continued need for expanded facilities at Eppley.

I think the folks who like to get on an airplane are going to continue to get on it, whether its business or leisure, Roth said. We only build as we need, to support the traffic of the travelers.

Like the rest of the nation, ridership at Eppley Airfield plummeted when the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

Traffic dropped from about 5 million passengers in 2019 to 2.1 million in 2020. Conditions partially recovered in 2021, with 3.7 million passengers flying.

The recovery of business travel is crucial to the Airport Authoritys plans.

In 2020, total travel spending was down 42% from what it had been the year before, and domestic business travel was down more than 67%, according to the U.S. Travel Association. That was devastating for airports and airline companies that earn a significant share of their revenue from corporate travelers, who generally pay a premium for pricier airfare, parking and meals.

Nationally, the association expects that by next year, domestic leisure travel spending will return to levels seen before the pandemic, and by 2024, business travel spending should exceed pre-pandemic numbers.

But Roth thinks Omaha will see a full recovery by 2023.

For most of 2021, Eppley Airfield experienced less ridership loss compared to the national average. Counts of people passing through Transportation Security Administration screening checkpoints stand at about 88% of traffic for the same week in March 2019.

Omahas economy, the business in Omaha, is very stable and has been for decades, Roth said.

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Staff of the Chinese Embassy in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) present flower basket to the China-DPRK Friendship Tower in Pyongyang, capital of DPRK on April 5, 2022.

PYONGYANG, April 6 -- The Chinese Embassy in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) presented flower baskets to the China-DPRK Friendship Tower in Pyongyang and paid tribute to the Chinese People's Volunteers (CPV) martyrs on April 5, 2022.

The memorial ceremony was held on the Qingming Festival, also known as the Tomb-sweeping Day, an important day in the Chinese lunar calendar, which falls on April 5 this year. Sun Hongliang, Charge d'Affaires of the Chinese Embassy in the DPRK, all embassy staff and representatives of Chinese agencies stationed in the DPRK attended the event.

The ceremony began at 9:00 a.m. All people present lined up towards the Friendship Tower as the Chinese national anthem was played.

The Chinese diplomats then presented a flower basket to the Friendship Tower, while all people bowed in silence and paid the highest tribute to the CPV martyrs.

Three days earlier, diplomats from the Chinese Embassy in the DPRK visited the CPV Martyrs' Cemetery in Unsan County, North Pyongan Province, where they held tomb-sweeping and memorial ceremonies.

The Friendship Tower was built in October 1959. The tower is made of 1025 pieces of granite and marble, symbolizing that the CPV entered the DPRK to fight in the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea on October 25, 1950. An inscription written in the Korean language to sing praises to the great achievements of the CPV martyrs and the friendship between the two countries is on the front of the tower.

The CPV Martyrs' Cemetery located in Unsan County was built in March 1955. A total of 1,160 martyrs were buried here and most of them laid down their lives during the First Campaign launched by the CPV from October 25 to November 5, 1950 in the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea.
PLATTSMOUTH  The idea of bringing solar power to Plattsmouth was brought up Monday evening.

Craig Vincent, account manager for the Nebraska Public Power District, went before the Plattsmouth City Council to discuss NPPDs Sunwise Community Solar Program.

Weve had discussions with Plattsmouth going on several years now, Vincent said. Its a service to communities to facilitate a solar energy product for communities to use and residents to take advantage of. It is sized to the community.

According to Vincent, the program features a utility scale solar facility interconnected to an electric distribution or sub-transmission line where multiple end-use customers within the community could participate.

End-use customers would avoid up front capital investments for solar power with the developer responsible for a solar facility installation and maintenance, Vincent said.

It would also eliminate taxes, insurance and electrical inspections for end-use customers, he said.

For its part, the city of Plattsmouth would identify interest in a solar facility and the available land where a 1.7 megawatt facility would be located on 10 acres.

For customers wanting to participate, they would subscribe to shares that are blocks of energy equal to 150 kWh per month. They would pay a $50 enrollment fee that would be refundable after three years in the program.

Customers would receive credit/charge on monthly bills per subscription.

With city approval, NPPD would sign agreements with a developer for a 20- to 30-year term. The city would sign a land lease agreement with the developer, who would construct the facility with NPPD providing interconnection.

Following the presentation, the council seemed to take a cautious approach and simply requested City Administrator Emily Bausch look into possible sites for such a facility.

We have not committed to it at all, yet, said Mayor Paul Lambert. I think its an opportunity for us to move forward to see if we really want it, to see if its an advantage to the citizens. I think its something we need to look at.

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I know its been a few weeks since youve heard from me. Things got busy and life happened.

Im sure you can relate.

Then I was gone a week for a conference (Public Library Association Biannual Conference in Portland, Oregon). I attended sessions on timely topics in library-land, met new people, heard some great keynote speakers, and reconnected with friends from other libraries.

I found out that were not alone in some of our challenges, and learned some new ways to approach services and programs to be more inclusive. While I enjoyed my time away and learned a lot, I am so glad to be home in Fremont where I belong!

The day after I returned home from Portland was also the last day of the Friends of Keene Memorial Library Book Sale.

I brought (read: dragged) my husband along to help with the clean-up process Sunday afternoon. Just based on the hard work I saw going on that day, I know there are scores of folks to thank for their dedication and efforts to bring this event back after a two-year pause.

Final figures will be shared at the Friends Annual Meeting Sunday, April 24, following a presentation by Nebraska author Jonis Agee (her Bones of Paradise was selected as the One Book, One Nebraska title for 202). The 2 p.m. author presentation is open to the public, and is sponsored by the Friends of Keene Memorial Library and Humanities Nebraska.

One of the books I picked up in Portland is Uncommon Quotes for Library Lovers, put out by ALA (American Library Association) Editions.

I have been scanning through it while waiting in doctors offices with my dad over the past week. I think the one I like best so far is this one from Vicki Myron: A great library doesnt have to be big or beautiful. It doesnt have to have the best facilities or the most efficient staff or the most users. A great library provides. It is enmeshed in the life of a community in a way that makes it indispensable.

Were hoping that youll tell us what the library can do to become indispensable to Fremont. Were conducting a survey for our Community Needs Response Planning process (strategic planning). You can access that survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TSTBRJ7.

If you know someone who needs the survey in Spanish, the link is here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/JJMCYPT.

There are questions about the community, the library and some simple demographics. It should take about 10 minutes to complete.

We are grateful to everyone who has already given us their feedback, and hope you will join them in sharing your ideas and suggestions.

Laura England-Biggs is the Director at Keene Memorial Library.

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Pakistans Supreme Court will resume hearings on April 6 to decide whether Prime Minister Imran Khan and his allies move to dissolve parliament breached the countrys constitution.

A five-judge panel has been hearing arguments from Khans lawyers and the opposition since April 4.

Khan lost his parliamentary majority last week and had been facing a no-confidence vote brought forward by a united opposition that he was expected to lose on April 3.

But the deputy speaker of the National Assembly, Qasim Suri, a member of Khans Tehrik-e Insaf party, rejected the motion as unconstitutional and part of foreign conspiracy.

The ruling allowed Khan to get the presidency -- a largely ceremonial role -- to dissolve parliament and order an election, which must be held within 90 days.

The opposition filed a petition with the Supreme Court to rule on whether the move to block the vote was constitutional.

The standoff has thrown the nuclear-armed country of 220 million people, which the military has ruled for extended periods since independence in 1947, into political turmoil.

Khan had claimed the no-confidence motion was an attack against him by the United States in retaliation for his close relations with Russia and China. But Washington has rejected that accusation.

The opposition accuses Khan of mismanaging the economy and foreign policy, and political analysts also say Khan has fallen out with Pakistan's powerful military, whose support is critical for any party to attain power.

Khan denies ever having the backing of the military, and the military also maintains that it has no involvement in the political process.

With reporting by Reuters, AP, AFP
Reporter

Stephanie Earls is a news reporter and columnist at The Gazette. Before moving to Colorado Springs in 2012, she worked for newspapers in upstate NY, WA, OR and at her hometown weekly in Berkeley Springs, WV, where she got her start in journalism.
Alan Gottlieb is editor of Denver-based public education watchdog boardhawk.org. Gottlieb covered Denver Public Schools as a newspaper reporter in the mid-1990s, worked as an education program officer for The Piton Foundation and co-founded Education News Colorado and Chalkbeat.
The criminal trial of kidney care company DaVita, Inc. and its former leader, Kent Thiry, ended its first week with a detailed look at the flow of DaVita employees to Radiology Partners, another healthcare company the government alleges was involved in a conspiracy to stifle competition in the labor market.
FREMONT COUNTY  A jury on Tuesday found a 47-year-old man guilty of charges including first-degree murder in the May 2018 killing of 76-year-old Kenneth Orchard.

Gazette news partner KKTV reported the jury found Rodgers guilty of murder, arson, burglary and tampering with a deceased human body, among other charges.

In September 2020, the Fremont County Sheriff's Office announced that a DNA match led to Rodgers' arrest in the May 22, 2018 killing of Orchard in the town of Brookside, The Gazette previously reported.

According to a letter published in the Canon City Daily Record, written by the victim's widow, Orchard was slain in the home he shared with his mother by an assailant who set fire to the residence in a cover-up attempt.

The case went cold soon after Orchard's death, but was revived in September 2020 with a DNA match linking Rodgers to the crime.

In Colorado, first-degree murder carries a life sentence in prison. Rodgers is expected to be sentenced May 23, KKTV reported.

In April 2019, a former Fremont County sheriff's deputy, Christopher Pape, was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to stealing silver ingots and other valuables from Orchard's home while helping to investigate his death, according to a report in the Daily Record.
Gary Wockner, PhD, is an environmental activist and a consultant to scientific, political and environmental organizations in Colorado. Contact: GaryWockner.com
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell painted a dire picture of American democracy at a rally at the Colorado Capitol Tuesday, where he repeated unsubstantiated claims of coordinated rigging in the 2020 elections.

Lindell, who faces a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit from Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems, told reporters there will never be another election if "we don't get rid of the [Dominion Voting] machines."

"They stole the 2020 election, they stole down tickets, they stole everything," Lindell said at the west steps of the state Capitol. "None of you guys elected your officials  they were selected for you!"

Lindell joined several of Colorado's conservative firebrands, notably Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters and Rep. Ron Hanks, R-Canon City, for the "election truth" rally, which organizers framed as a platform to "voice concerns about free & fair elections."

In its review of alleged cases of fraud in six battleground states, The Associated Press said it found fewer than 475 and concluded the number would not have made a difference in the 2020 election. An audit ordered by the Arizona Senate ultimately concluded that Joe Biden won the votes in Maricopa County, the state's biggest county, although auditors also insisted they uncovered irregularities. County election officials disputed those findings.

The rally offered politicians who are running in this year's elections the opportunity to amplify their message and court the GOP's most conservative flank. Hanks, who attended the Jan. 6 protest at the U.S. Capitol and has repeatedly questioned the results of the 2020 election, hopes to defeat primary rivals for Colorado's U.S. Senate seat. Peters, who seeks to unseat Jena Griswold as secretary of state, will vie for a spot on the primary ballot at Saturday's state GOP assembly in Colorado Springs, where she's expected to easily clear the necessary 30% support from delegates.

The rally attracted roughly 150 people, the majority of whom are united by the belief that Donald Trump, and not Biden, won in 2020.

But the Lindell-headlined event also brought in curious onlookers and counterprotesters.

More Democratic members of the legislature showed up at the rally than Republicans. The Democrats told Colorado Politics they were curious to see Lindell.

Among the other speakers at the event were former congressional candidate Casper Stockham, who now trains candidates; Republican state Rep. Dave Williams of Colorado Springs, who's running against U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn  and told the crowd the GOP needs to purge itself of RINOs  a derisive term for "Republicans in name only"; Rep. Mark Baisley, R-Woodland Park; and Rep. Richard Holtorf, R-Akron.

"Is everyone ready to fight for election integrity?" Williams asked the crowd, which erupted in cheers. "Is everyone ready to get rid of Dominion Voting?"

Williams a few days ago won top-line designation on Colorado's Republican primary ballot in the 5th Congressional District, guaranteeing that U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn will face at least two GOP challengers in his bid for a ninth term.

Other speakers at Tuesday's rally decried policies adopted by officials during the pandemic.

Stacy Adair, a teacher at Wilson Elementary in Colorado Springs, recounted her struggles against masks in her classrooms and how it made her angry. She also called teachers' unions "the devil."

Lindell also defended Peters against allegations she and others tampered with secure voting equipment and software as part of a scheme to uncover evidence of election fraud.

"She did her job to save this country," Lindell said. "For the first time in our country, we know what's inside these Dominion machines that they've been hiding from us."

Peters was indicted a month ago on 11 felony and misdemeanor charges related to allegations she and others tampered with secure voting equipment and software as part of a scheme to uncover evidence of election fraud. Peters has maintained she did nothing illegal and rejected her party's entreaty for her to suspend her campaign after the indictment. .

Not everyone who showed up agreed with claims of election rigging.

Adrienne, who only gave her first name, described herself as a disgruntled Republican who voted for Trump in 2016. That all changed on Jan. 6, 2021.

"My heart sank. I felt I could no longer support this party," she said after seeing a mob of protesters crash through the windows of the U.S. Capitol in a violent attempt to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election results .

"I don't know what to do with my party," she added, adding she missed the Republican Party that was once a "big umbrella."

Jeff Brothers, a resident of Castle Rock who showed up for the counterprotest, said he wanted to start a dialogue with the other side.

"We can all say what we think, but can we still talk to each other?" he asked.

George Dunbar, a resident of Aurora, said American democracy in a sad state and accused the rallygoers of spreading lies about the 2020 elections.

"If they're got proof, show it," he said.

And just before Mike Lindell makes his way to the State Capitol steps, he gets served with a lawsuit. Details to follow. #copolitics pic.twitter.com/Xn8HMD1vvp  Marshall Zelinger (@Marshall9News) April 5, 2022

In February, Dominion added Lindell to the list of defendants in its $1.3 billion defamation suit, saying the MyPillow CEO aggressively promoted the theory that millions of votes were "stolen by Dominion machines."
bonjour_india wrote:





Can you help me with this question please. I am not sure what triggered the Parallism in this sentence .



Thanks Hey mSKR Can you help me with this question please. I am not sure what triggered the Parallism in this sentence .Thanks

a corporation commits a crime whenever one of its employees commits a crime, if the employee acted

In many nations,

criminal law does not apply to corporations,

in the United Stated today

a corporation commits a crime whenever one of its employees commits a crime , if the employee acted

within the scope of his or her authority and if the corporation benefited as a result

does not apply

is committing a crime

its

it was while acting

acted

I don't think use of different tense should be called as parallelism issue

In many nations, criminal law does not apply to corporations, but in the United Stated today,within the scope of his or her authority and if the corporation benefited as a result.Step: split the sentence into small chunks ; remove unnecessary wordsbutso the core of sentence is ==Subject Verb , conjunction BUT SUBJECT VERB ( Dependent clause) i.e.:criminal law does not apply to corporations , BUT a corporation commits a crime whenever one of its employees commits a crimeBy now , you have understood the core of sentence and its meaning.how about we keep this option on hold for now and lets see if we can reject other options easily?Ok 1st part we have : criminal lawto corporations(B) a corporationwhenever one of its employees committed a crime, if those employees were actingI would not reject it directly just because it is in continuous tense. i will reject because the meaning is non sensical tense wiseIf X happens , then Y happensIf X happens, then Y is happening --> it may make sense in some scenario but at least in this scenario its better to use both in same tense ( present tense to display information . we donot use +ing because some action is not happening continuously).Some people say it as parallelism, I would say it as wrong tense.For me parallelism issue means if both parallel parts are using the same structure elementsIf X happens, Y is happening - i wont say it as parallelism issueIf X happens, Y might have happened - no parallelism issue - both sides have nouns and verbsWhen X happened , I went by car ,boat and by walk --> i would say this as parallelism issue because on parallelism marker : by car, boat( sentence element - preposition "by") is missing.(C) corporations commit a crime whenever one ofemployees does, on the condition that the employee acts= its has no antecedent(D) corporations commit crimes whenever an employee of those corporations commit a crime, if- wrong tense(E) the corporation whose employees commit a crime, commits a crime, whenever the employee- wrong tensewrong options are rejected because of tense issues/SV agreement issue ,. But it doesn't matter to our end result of getting the right answer.In summary, Once you understand the meaning and core structure, you can see the right and wrong options more easily. Sometimes even 2 options are grammatically correct and same as meaning wise. You would be able to make a decision why one option is better than others.I just noticed that even Expert in this post has not used the parallelism error in his explanation .(sometimes we may not even know what could be the name of this error but it would not hurt our chances of getting the right answer as far as we 1. extract the meaning 2. understand the structure )I hope it helps.
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Bottoms up.

Danville City Council approved a proposal to allow outdoor alcohol consumption in part of the city during its meeting Tuesday night.

I wish it could start tonight, City Councilman Lee Vogler said just before making the motion to amend the city code to add a chapter entitled outdoor refreshment area.

The Danville Development Council, a 501(c)(4), has agreed to be the license-holder for the area, said City Attorney Clarke Whitfield.

The next step is for the Danville Development Council to apply for and obtain an ABC license, which could take up to 60 days, Vogler said Wednesday.

The agenda item passed by an 8-1 vote, with City Councilman Madison Whittle opposing the idea.

The bulk of the zone will include Craghead, Bridge, Market, North Union, South Union, Patton, Wilson, Newton, Spring, Floyd and Main streets downtown, as well as parts of Monument and Lynn streets.

Within that 159-acre area in the River District, visitors will be able to purchase alcoholic beverages at an establishment and move freely on foot within the zone.

City officials have said the zone would attract more tourists to the area and enhance the appeal of the River District, especially with the number of bars, restaurants and other amenities downtown.

A state law that went into effect July 1, 2021, allows localities to establish up to three designated outdoor refreshment areas.

Under Danvilles proposed zone, visitors will be allowed to drink alcoholic beverages at certain places within the refreshment area including outdoor seating, public sidewalks, public plazas and private businesses without ABC licenses (contingent upon consent of each individual business owner).

No alcohol may be consumed upon privately-owned property within the outdoor refreshment area, unless such privately-owned property consents, the ordinance states.

In addition, the property owner can make a person leave their property at any time, the proposed ordinance states.

Alcohol consumed within the area must be in paper, plastic or similar disposable containers of no more than 16 ounces. They must also display the name and logo of the ABC-licensed business where the drinks were bought, according to the proposed city ordinance.

Under the license, the Danville Development Council could hold up to 16 special events, such as block parties, in the outdoor refreshment area.

There are about 10 ABC-licensed establishments that would be in the designated area, including Mes Burgers & Brews, Funkys Arcade Bar, Culture Restaurant and Grill, Ballad Brewing, Golden Leaf Bistro, Mucho Taqueria and Tequileria, DellAnnos Pizza Kitchen, Cotton at Riverside Mill, Dry Fork Fruit Distillery and Grizzlys Hatchet House and River City Escapes.

The rules forbid individuals from drinking alcoholic beverages on or inside city-owned property within the zone. However, a separate ABC license would allow consumption for events within the Danville Science Center, Community Market, Carrington Pavilion and any city park or recreation trail.

Under the citys proposed ordinance, the zone would shut down from midnight to 8 a.m.

Besides the River District, city officials would have the option of establishing the designation for two other zones in Danville.

Schoolfield, where the Caesars Virginia casino will open in late 2023, and North Main hill are two other possibilities, officials have said.

The area would also include an Uber pick-up zone in case those imbibing outdoors do not want to walk to another location, Whitfield said.

Consumption of alcohol would be forbidden also outside places of worship, at schools and on public transportation.

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For one couple in Danville, fairy tales do come true after all.

Chris and Zenaida Herbon, who met while Zenaida was performing as a fairy during a Renaissance Fair, exchanged wedding vows during a ceremony at an 1889-built Queen Anne Victorian home on Chestnut Street in Danville on Tuesday afternoon.

The couple, who moved to Danville from outside the area, had always dreamed of restoring a historic home.

"Unbeknownst to each other, Chris and I both always had the same dream," Zenaida, 39, told the Danville Register & Bee via email last week. "When it came time to go house shopping, we knew we wanted a Queen Anne Victorian, but did not know where."

After doing research, the couple fell in love with Danville's selection of Victorian homes and the convenience of being close to family, she said.

In the late 1800s, the property at 126 Chestnut St. was gifted to Mae Talley, a niece of William T. Sutherlin and his wife.

"The home she [Talley] designed is considered one of the town's most architecturally significant houses and is considered of the most striking houses in the downtown area," the couple said in the email. "While we had read this, we did not realize at the time the impact this house had, but since purchasing it, nearly everyone who finds out we bought it has a story of how they always wanted to live there or wished they could buy it because they grew up driving or walking past it, loved it so much."

Sutherlin, who was both an alderman and mayor in Danville, had made his fortune from tobacco, banking, textiles, real estate and railroad development.

During the Civil War, he served the Confederacy as quartermaster of the district, with poor health preventing him from serving actively. The Sutherlin Mansion, built in 1859, is named after him and currently houses the Danville Museum of Fine Arts & History.

While researching the Talley House, the couple discovered there had been a wedding at the home 100 years ago. They were supposed to tie the knot at another location, but they couldn't pass up a chance to "'marry' everything together by involving the house on such a fantastic occasion and anniversary," Zenaida said.

"So we canceled our other wedding venue and moved everything local," she said.

The couple married legally last year during a small, private ceremony during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Restoring the home

With Zenaida's background in art and design, and Chris' experience as a finish carpenter, the couple will be ready to get to work restoring the home.

"We looked at many [homes], including some that were already move-in ready, but upon seeing the Talley, we absolutely fell in love with all the potential she has," Zenaida said.

Zenaida, 39, was born in New York but moved around growing up because her father was a U.S. Marine.

"We eventually settled just outside of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which I consider my hometown and love that I am still close to," she said.

Chris, 40, grew up just outside of Detroit and looks forward to experiencing Southside Virginia's more moderate climate.

"I didn't appreciate the harsh winters any longer and am excited to be further south where the climate is much more mild and we can enjoy all four seasons," Chris said.

The Herbons' Talley House project will include wiring and plumbing work, and repair and replacement of gutters and water-damaged areas.

"Upon completion of that, the entire first floor will be a full, Victorian-style restoration," Zenaida said. "We are hoping to find some original photos of the house interior from back then so we can retain as much of the original beauty the home once had."

The Herbons will design the second- and third-floor rooms to reflect other decades the house has withstood, she said.

"We will bring back such themes as art deco, 40s vintage, and the glamour of the Hollywood regency design era," she said. "A treat on the third floor will be the train room, in which Chris is designing a miniature-scale model of Danville and the wreck of the Old '97, as well as incorporating other train details to accent throughout the house."

The rear of the home and a carriage house behind the home will be restored.

Mae Talley, who was openly divorced during a time when such situations were rare, lived in the home for several years with her son, Herbert. She taught music lessons out of the conservatory to support herself and her son.

"Many families have since owned the home, including a partner in the Danville Hardware Company and a gentleman who worked with Reynolds Tobacco Company," Zenaida said.

The house had been empty since 1984  nearly 40 years  until Chris and Zenaida bought it, she said.

"From what we can find, it did change hands a few times during its empty period, but everyone gave up on the project and moved on, leaving it subsequently in the hands of the city, which is how we came to acquire it," she said.

The ceremony

As for the ceremony Tuesday, it included a combination of themes blending Zenaida's and Chris' respective heritages. The bride's outfit included a Taino Native American headdress and the groom were a kilt to reflect his Scottish background.

A handfasting with a golden coin attached was wrapped around the couple's arms during the ceremony on the front porch of the home.

"This was Chris and Zen's way of combining the Taino and Scottish cultures to bring their union together because not only where they're going but where they have come from are important to these two people," the man who officiated the ceremony told attendees.

Some guests dressed up in Renaissance-themed outfits and the event included, for a whimsy, two participants dressed as dinosaurs.

Chris and Zenaida met while she was on tour as Spark the Fairy during a Renaissance Fair event just outside of Atlanta. Chris was managing a rose company, for which he is now a consultant.

The couple bought a cottage in Pittsylvania County on the outskirts of Danville and has been living there since June. They will live there while they restore the pastel yellow, sky blue and purple Chestnut Street home, which they expect to take about a year or two.

Everything about the home, including its towering turret, wrap-around porch, original features and the story of Mae Talley attracted the couple, Zenaida said.

The original fireplaces are still intact and include tiles from the late 1800s "with fleur-de-lis details that remind us of our time in New Orleans and the ribbon and bow design in the conservatory tiles, which adds the perfect feminine touch," she said.

"The house also has both sets of it original pocket doors intact, which we were shocked and elated to discover," she said. "We also appreciated that the demo had already been done on the interior, so there was no disaster to clean up before we could get started with the restoration."

The Herbons hope that another couple will exchange vows at the home a century from now.

"We can only hope that one day, 100 years from now, some other couple will want to do something similar," they said.

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If you plan to hit the road with your pet, one North Carolina destination may be an ideal place to visit.

Thats because a new report finds Asheville is one of the most pet-friendly spots in the nation.

The mountain tourist town ranks No. 9 on a list of places offering some of the best amenities that appeal to furry friends, according to figures published by Motel 6.

Pets are members of the family, so travelers are eager to bring them along for the ride as they explore the U.S., Rob Palleschi, CEO of the motel chain, said in a March 31 news release.

Motel 6 said Asheville made its nationwide list after it evaluated the citys access to several locations, including pet-friendly restaurants, veterinarians, dog parks, greenspaces and hiking trails.

Of the places considered across the country, one city was chosen for each state, and the Top 10 list was compiled based off those finalists, a spokesperson said.

Its not the first time Asheville has been recognized as a top destination.

Recently, the city also ranked among the best U.S. cities for beer drinkers, and its Biltmore Estate made a list of the most beautiful landmarks nationwide.

In the latest rankings, the best tourist spot for pets was Santa Monica, Calif. Rounding out the top five were Rockville, Md.; Santa Fe, N.M.; Mount Pleasant, S.C.; and Newport, R.I.
Nobody puts Baby in a corner. Is there anyone on the planet who doesnt know the famous line Patrick Swayzes character Johnny Castle utters in the 1987 movie Dirty Dancing? But the reality was nobody could put Swayze in a corner. The star died in 2009 at the age of 57 from pancreatic cancer and to this day, its rare that one can turn on the television and not see one of his films airing ...
Historic Princeville, on the banks of the Tar River in eastern North Carolina, is one hurricane away from disaster. The town, which stakes its claim as the oldest in the U.S. founded by Black Americans nearly 140 years ago, has flooded many times. Two hurricanes 17 years apart created catastrophic flooding in the town, which was built on swampy, low-lying land. The town also has endured racism, bigotry and attempts by white neighbors to erase it from existence. Now, with an ever-changing climate, the future is uncertain. Hurricanes are likely to be more intense, and melting glaciers are causing sea levels to rise, making more flooding inevitable.
RURAL HALL  After months of being mired in controversy, Megan Garner now finds herself in another one: a lawsuit from an ex-wife accusing the former town manager of ruining her marriage.

The lawsuit, filed days ago in Forsyth Superior Court, accuses Garner of seducing and having sex with Andy Marshall, who was fired as the towns fire chief in December  in part because of the alleged affair  and says that proof of the relationship exists in text messages, emails and on social media.

North Carolina is one of the few states that allows spouses to sue third parties they think ruined their marriage.

This is the latest in the head-spinning scandal that has embroiled the small town of 3,500 residents in northern Forsyth County. It all started about six months ago when Garner, three members of the Rural Hall council and the towns attorney all abruptly resigned at a meeting in October. That happened after the majority of the town council approved a six-figure severance package worth $150,000 for Garner, who accepted a job the next day with the city of Graham, where she currently works.

The town filed a lawsuit about a month after Garner resigned, accusing her and the three former council members  John McDermon, Ricky Plunkett and Jesse Stigall  of violating town protocols and state law in drafting and approving the severance package.

The town filed an amended complaint in December accusing Garner of having an affair with Marshall, a subordinate to her, and violating town protocols in doing so. Garner filed a motion to dismiss and a counterclaim in February, denying the affair. Garner said in court papers that she was driven out of her job due to a sex-based smear campaign against her.

Initially, no official disclosed the amount of the settlement agreement, including the towns interim attorney, Randy James, until Garner filed her counterclaim in February. State law prohibits settlement agreements made on behalf of public officials from being confidential. James said he didnt disclose the settlement agreement amount because it was declared confidential and he wanted a judge to decide the issue.

Natalie Vermitsky filed the alienation of affection lawsuit on behalf of Stacy Marshall, the ex-wife of Andy Marshall. Vermitsky did not return a message seeking comment.

Messages left for Garner and for her attorney, Valerie Bateman, were not immediately returned.

Andy Marshall did not return a message left on two phone numbers associated with him.

According to the lawsuit, Stacy and Andy Marshall were married May 28, 2016, and separated on April 4, 2019.

Stacy Marshall said Garner, who divorced in 2016, seduced her husband for months before their separation, starting in December 2017. That seduction included giving Andy Marshall an unexpected raise in March 2018. The lawsuit also alleges Garner would make up excuses to come over to the couples house to bring gifts and would text Andy Marshall throughout the day.

In or around March 2019 the texting had become so frequent and explicit that (Marshal) started hiding his phone, the lawsuit said.

According to the lawsuit, Andy Marshall and Garner frequently had lunch together. The lawsuit also alleges that the two had sex while one or both of them were working.

The lawsuit said Stacy Marshall has suffered great mental and emotional anguish.

According to the lawsuit, her husband and Garner continue to date.
A Forsyth County grand jury has declined to indict five former detention officers for involuntary manslaughter in the December 2019 death of John Elliott Neville.

Michelle Heughins, a nurse who worked at the Forsyth County Jail, was the only defendant indicted Monday in John Nevilles death, according to court documents.

Forsyth County prosecutors can seek indictments for involuntary manslaughter against the detention officers at another session of the grand jury, which generally meets twice a month.

Forsyth County District Attorney Jim ONeill said in a statement Monday that in North Carolina, the grand jury process is set up to be a secretive undertaking and prosecutors do not participate or appear during the private hearings. The grand jury hears evidence presented by law enforcement officers.

While I was disappointed in todays outcome, our prosecutors will continue to meet again with investigators and speak with the Neville family and their attorneys before deciding on any further action, ONeill said. I understand that there is a great deal of interest in this case, and I ask for the continued peaceful support of this community as we gather with the Neville family in determining how we will proceed from here.

Sean Neville, the executor of his fathers estate who filed a federal lawsuit late last year against the defendants, Sheriff Bobby Kimbrough Jr., Forsyth County and the jails former medical provider, Wellpath LLC, could not be reached for comment on Monday.

Kimbrough issued this statement on Monday: My heart and my prayers go out to all those affected by this incident, but especially to the Neville family for the loss of their father.

Kimbrough continued: As it relates to the findings of the court and their determination, it would not be proper or ethical for me to comment as this is still a civil and criminal case up for litigation. Again, our prayers are still with the family and all those involved. May God give us peace and understanding.

Neville, 56, of Greensboro, died Dec. 4, 2019, three days after prosecutors and the federal lawsuit allege the detention officers  Lt. Lavette Maria Williams, Cpl. Edward Joseph Roussel, Officer Sarah Elizabeth Poole, Officer Antonio Woodley Jr. and Officer Christopher Bryan Stamper  and Heughins ignored his medical distress and had him pinned in a prone restraint in a cell for nearly an hour. Over the course of three minutes, Neville said I cant breathe at least 28 times while he was in a hog tie position on his stomach on a blue mattress in a narrow cell, video recordings showed.

Kernersville police officers arrested Neville on Dec. 1, 2019, on an outstanding arrest warrant for assault on a female, and Neville was taken to the Forsyth County Jail. At 3:26 a.m. on Dec. 2, 2019, Nevilles cellmate notified officers that Neville had fallen from his top bunk bed. When detention officers reached him, he was shaking and sweating, with vomit on his clothes and blood around his mouth.

Neville was placed in a restraint chair and moved from his cell to a multipurpose room on another floor, where Heughins tried to check his pulse, and eventually to another cell, where officers attempted to unlock his handcuffs. One key broke, and officers tried another key and two bolt cutters before the handcuffs were taken off. By that time, Neville was unresponsive.

At one point, as Neville cried for help, a detention officer told Neville to calm down, saying that if he was talking, he was breathing. That same officer, according to video, also appears to kneel on Nevilles back.

An autopsy report said Neville died from a brain injury caused when his heart stopped beating and his brain was deprived of oxygen. He asphyxiated while being restrained with his arms behind his back, and his legs folded.

Kimbrough did not publicly acknowledge Nevilles death for six months. On June 26, 2020, he provided limited information in response to questions from the Winston-Salem Journal.

In July 2020, ONeill announced involuntary manslaughter charges against Heughins and five former detention officers.

Nevilles death prompted protests during the summer of 2020, and Triad Abolition Project staged a 49-day occupation of Bailey Park. Protesters held signs saying that Kimbrough and ONeill had blood on their hands.

Triad Abolition Project issued a statement late Monday night, showing support for John Nevilles family. The group said that the criminal legal system can never be the site of true justice. Triad Abolition Project said that the criminal justice system is not designed to hold law-enforcement officers accountable for their actions.

In this way, even if every single person involved in the murder of John Neville was indicted, there could still be no justice because Mr. Neville is still gone from his loved ones and the conditions which allowed him to be brutalized in his cell while Sheriffs Deputies maliciously and callously joked about breaking handcuffs as he gasped for air still exist, the group's statement said.

The cases against the detention officers had been pending in Forsyth District Court since their arrest in July 2020, and their next court date was scheduled for May 20. Heughins case is now in Forsyth Superior Court, and she has a court date of May 20, according to court records.

Michelle Heughins was the only person who tried to save Mr. Neville at the jail that day, Claire J. Rauscher, one of Heughins attorneys, said Monday. It was the detention officers who restrained him and put him on his stomach, handcuffed, and had her leave the room.

According to the lawsuit, detention officers and Heughins went back into the cell after Heughins noticed that Neville wasnt breathing. She started CPR on Neville nearly 20 minutes after he was first placed in the prone position.

Rauscher said Heughins will be fully vindicated when the case gets to trial. Heughins attorneys filed a notice asking to waive a probable cause hearing in Forsyth District Court and to request a speedy trial, according to court documents.
A Yellowstone County district court judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked four new Republican-backed election laws that a coalition of Native American tribes, voting-rights groups and Democrats believe unconstitutionally restrict Montanans voting rights.

Judge Michael Moses granted a preliminary injunction to the coalition of plaintiffs, putting on hold controversial legislation that added new voter identification restrictions and ended Montanas practice of allowing residents to register and vote on Election Day. Two other laws were also blocked, which limit third-party ballot collection and prevent ballots from being sent out to new voters in advance of their 18th birthdays.

Moses ruling applies in three different cases challenging the new election laws that were consolidated last year. It prevents Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen, the sole defendant in all three cases, from enforcing the laws until the court makes a final decision on their constitutionality. Oral arguments in the consolidated case were held last month.

Members of the coalition challenging the voting laws hailed Moses's decision Wednesday, including Ronnie Jo Horse, the executive director of Western Native Voice.

"We will continue to hold our elected officials accountable, especially when it comes to voting rights for our Native communities," Horse stated in a press release. "We look forward to a day when we can continue doing this important work without the added burdens on our right to vote.

In an emailed statement on Wednesday, Jacobsen vowed to "immediately appeal" the decision.

"Wednesday's decision defies Montana's common-sense approach to running our elections," Jacobsen said. "It's impossible to undo the steps that have already been taken to implement these legislative changes, including direct voter communication, education and outreach."

Plaintiffs have argued that the new laws are designed to deter certain groups of voters from exercising their right to vote, while Republicans have argued that the measures were necessary to strengthen Montanas election security.

Moses found that each of the four laws potentially creates an unconstitutional burden on the plaintiffs right to vote, as well as their right to equal protection.

The Montana Democratic Party last year challenged three of the laws: Senate Bill 169, which added new restrictions to the states voter ID requirements; House Bill 176, which ended Election Day voter registration; and House Bill 530, which prohibits people from collecting and submitting other peoples voted ballots if they are receiving any financial compensation for doing so.

SB 169 removed student photo IDs from the states list of acceptable photo identification at the polls. Under the Legislatures changes, those photo IDs would need to be paired with another form of official documentation, like bank statements, tax documents or vehicle registrations.

Moses wrote, citing plaintiffs testimony describing the new hoops that out-of-state and transgender students will have to jump through under the new law.

These additional costs to voting are unique to young voters given their mobility and the fact that they are less likely to possess the primary forms of ID and the forms that must be presented in addition to the student ID, he wrote in his order.

The Blackfeet Nation, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, the Fort Belknap Indian Community, the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, Western Native Voice and Montana Native Vote separately sued to overturn HB 176 and HB 530. They are being represented by the Montana chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Moses sided with the plaintiffs arguments that HB 176 may unconstitutionally burden the right to vote by ending voter registration on Election Day. While Jacobsens office presented evidence from some election officials that doing so would reduce extra work for them on Election Day, Moses noted that the plaintiffs also provided testimony from election staff in support of keeping registration open through the last day of elections.

He also found that HB 530, placing restrictions on ballot-collection practices in Montana, burdens the voters who rely on organized absentee ballot assistance, specifically citing testimony that Native American voters often have to travel farther to vote in person, and have more difficulties with on-reservation mail delivery.

It is still possible that the fundamental right to vote can be infringed by legislation affecting that right through limiting the voting options available to Montanans, Moses wrote.

And three groups representing young Montanans  Montana Youth Action, the Forward Montana Foundation and the Montana Public Interest Research Group  also filed suit to challenge SB 169, HB 176 and House Bill 506. The latter measure prevents anyone who turns 18 before Election Day from getting a ballot before their birthday.

The youth groups alleged that newly eligible voters turning 18 in the two weeks before Election Day would be unable to access mail-in ballots, which they may need for reasons including travel, going to school out of state, illness or a disability.

Rejecting Jacobsens argument that only a small sliver of potential voters would be affected, Moses wrote that these voters previously had a voting avenue open to them that has now been closed. He noted that the youth groups showed that an estimated 763 new voters would face confusion and difficulty when voting due to the law.

Republicans in Montana have argued for tightening up the states voting laws by citing waning public confidence in elections. But Moses wrote that Jacobsens rationale for the laws under review was rebutted by expert testimony from plaintiffs that voter fraud in Montana is vanishingly rare and hasnt been attributed to Election Day registration, ballot collection or the use of student ID as voter identification.

He also noted that Jacobsen had presented no evidence of voter fraud in Montana related to student IDs or ballot collection efforts.

One of Montana's top two Republican lawmakers blasted Moses's decision as "judicial activism at its worst."

"It's no surprise that a liberal judge appointed by Democratic governors ruled in favor of his political allies instead of Montanans who support voter ID and secure elections," Senate President Mark Blasdel said in an emailed statement.

But Rylee Sommers-Flanagan, an attorney representing the coalition of youth groups, cast the preliminary injunctions as "a victory for young voters and for all Montanans."

We will continue fighting until these laws are permanently prevented from restricting access to the ballot box," she said.

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In 2021, a state audit of the Montana Public Service Commission (PSC) revealed several situations indicative of an unhealthy organizational culture and ineffective leadership, including certain commissioners overriding department controls. They added, We believe this culture limited management personnels ability to enforce compliance with state and department policy.

Put differently, at a taxpayer funded agency there was a complete failure of integrity which created an environment ripe for fraud. Being incompetent is bad, but collecting six figure salaries while abusing the trust and resources of Montana voters and taxpayers is inexcusable. While we can add up the sum of their paychecks, the full cost of this mess is unknown as the auditors give no reliance to the information in the financial schedules.

Dont let anyone try to convince you that failing an audit is common. Its not. And there is nothing worse than an unhealthy organizational culture and ineffective leadership. I know this because I have 40 years of experience in private sector finance. Ive been through many rigorous audits. No organization that I managed ever failed an audit and certainly no auditor ever questioned my integrity or the culture of the organization of which I led. On rare occasions when bad behavior was discovered, it was dealt with immediately. Dishonesty had real consequences.

Unbelievably, none of the commissioners exposed in the audit have been held accountable. The long held Montana value of personal responsibility apparently does not apply to PSC commissioners. Maybe this is because they are all cut from the same political cloth that puts more stock in party loyalty than doing the important, complicated work of the PSC. While they maintain their PSC platform to take extreme positions on issues entirely unrelated to the work of the PSC, Montana ratepayers wait for capable, thoughtful representation.

The PSC exists primarily to regulate investor-owned electric and natural gas companies. The purpose is to ensure that Montana ratepayers have continued access to utility services that are affordable, reliable, and sustainable. This important regulatory work often goes unnoticed, until something goes wrong or rates skyrocket. Most Montanans likely do not pay much attention to the PSC because they assume the current system is working. Unfortunately, it is broken.

There are five PSC districts in the state and each elects one commissioner. Commissioners, like any elected official, should have expertise and experience in the area they oversee. At a minimum, commissioners should at least act with integrity. Failing to do so happens routinely at the PSC and without consequence. But we can change that and elect commissioners worthy of our trust.

I am running for PSC commissioner for District 5 because I have the experience necessary to competently represent Montana ratepayers and I will bring professional, honest leadership to the PSC. Montanans should expect nothing less from elected officials. When it is time to vote, please remember that only one candidate  John Repke  has the industry experience, financial knowledge and integrity to represent PSC District 5.

John Repke, Democrat, is a candidate for PSC District 5, Whitefish.

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DECATUR  Michael Gremo is living a good life now, but that wasnt the case five years ago.

At 70 years old, the Decatur resident was given a grim diagnosis from local doctors. He was told his liver was affected by cirrhosis and had a cancerous tumor attached to it. He had three months to a year to live.

I had turned yellow, he said. They knew I had a death sentence.

Physicians at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, Mo. were able to remove the tumor. But after six months, Gremo was put on a waiting list for a new liver.

He received the new organ and was given another five years to live. My fifth year anniversary was two weeks ago, Gremo said. Well, here I am.

April is National Donate Life Month. HSHS St. Marys Hospital honored the occasion with a flag blessing ceremony on Wednesday. The purple flag will be flown throughout April at the 16th Street entrance to the hospital.

Gremo and representatives from the hospital, as well as organ and tissue donor agencies Gift of Hope and Life Goes On, attended the ceremony.

Its a time when we pause and reflect on the need for donors to give at the time that they die, said Sister Ritamary Brown, HSHS St. Marys Hospital health advocate. We know that many lives are saved.

Various donated organs, including hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs, are credited for saving lives. Its a life-giving event, Brown said. And were all about life here.

Agencies encourage drivers to register as a donor whenever they renew their licenses. Then people will know at the time of your death, Brown said. They can look at your drivers license and know that youre a donor.

According to the Illinois Secretary of State Organ and Tissue Donor Program, 7.3 million people are registered as organ and tissue donors. Approximately 5,000 people are on the waiting list for an organ, and 300 people die each year waiting for an organ, the agency stated.

The sacrifice of an organ is a gift to others, according to Brown. And your life goes on and on and on in that other individual, she said.

After a 13-hour surgery and three weeks of rehabilitation, Gremo returned home. Regular check ups were scheduled, then tapered off to one-year visits. Five years later, Gremo, 76, is still healthy and works at HSHS St. Marys Hospital two days a week assisting patients to the various departments. I feel great, I really do, he said. Physically I have no restrictions.

He credited the doctors and the manual he was given for his speedy progress. And I thank the Lord many times a day, he said.

Gremo is also grateful for the donors family. I cant thank them enough, he said.

He and his family were given little information on the 27-year-old man who died.

I wish I could see them face-to-face, but they dont want to, he said. I can appreciate that.

Contact Donnette Beckett at (217) 421-6983. Follow her on Twitter: @donnettebHR

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Michael Madigan was still the most powerful politician in the state when two FBI agents went to Springfield in 2019 and asked his former chief of staff to sit down for coffee, according to a court filing unsealed Wednesday.

Two years later, a memo that the former Madigan staffer, Tim Mapes, wrote to himself about the unusual meeting was shown to him during questioning before a federal grand jury, where Mapes had been granted immunity in exchange for his sworn testimony about his former boss, the filing stated.

This memo was the only document they showed (Mapes) to refresh his admittedly foggy memory of events, and it did the trick, Mapes lawyers wrote in a motion to dismiss made public in U.S. District Court. Mr. Mapes remembered the meeting after being shown the document.

What Mapes discussed with the FBI was not revealed, but the conversation was among several new details included in the motion asking U.S. District Judge John Lee to dismiss large portions of the obstruction of justice indictment against Mapes.

The 11-page indictment alleged Mapes repeatedly lied during a March 31, 2021, appearance before the grand jury when asked about Madigans relationship with his longtime confidant Michael McClain, who was charged in 2020 with orchestrating a bribery scheme by Commonwealth Edison to shower money on Madigans associates in exchange for the speakers help with legislation in Springfield.

Mapes also lied when he said he had no knowledge that McClain had communicated with two unnamed state representatives in 2018 on Madigans behalf, the indictment alleged. The Tribune reported they are Rep. Bob Rita of Blue Island and former Rep. Lou Lang of Skokie.

Mapes is one of the closest advisers from Madigans extremely small circle of trusted associates to face federal charges. He has denied wrongdoing and maintained that federal authorities are attempting to squeeze him to give up incriminating information on Madigan.

His indictment in May 2021 caught many by surprise, particularly since he was granted immunity from prosecution by the U.S. attorneys office and warned by the chief judge before his testimony before the grand jury that failing to answer truthfully could result in criminal charges against him.

His attorneys have said in court filings their defense will include that Madigan kept information close to the vest and kept private conversations with others private, and that McClain often talked mysteriously, cryptically, and oddly  including about and when referring to Madigan.

According to the motion unsealed Tuesday, Mapes was asked more than 650 questions over hours of testimony that day, and that Mapes did his best to answer truthfully.

In his testimony, Mapes gave high-level examples of McClain passing along pieces of information providing his perspective to Madigan on various matters, attorney Andrew Porter stated in the motion.

But when questions turned to Mapes recollection of specific phone calls and dates, his memory was admittedly hazy, the motion stated.

At one point, immediately before one of the answers that prosecutors say was a lie, Mapes told the grand jury he had no recollection of an event, but could come back to it later if he was shown something and it pops my memory, the motion stated.

The prosecutor did not follow up on any of these matters  nor did the prosecutor attempt to refresh Mr. Mapes recollection on any specific subject matters that could pop Mr. Mapes memory, Porter said.

The new filing reveals the FBI has recordings in which McClain and Mapes talked after Mr. Mapes retirement in 2018. But Porter wrote that none of those recordings prove Mapes was lying three years later when he told the grand jury he couldnt recall specific tasks or assignments that he and McClain had talked about.

Indeed, the government never played those conversations for Mr. Mapes in the grand jury, the motion stated. Nor did the government even reference those conversations in an attempt to refresh his memory or to probe his understanding of what Mr. McClain was talking about during those conversations.

Madigan and McClain were indicted last month on racketeering conspiracy charges alleging a range of corruption schemes spanning more than a decade, including the scheme involving ComEd. Both have pleaded not guilty.

In addition to their motion to dismiss, Mapes attorneys also filed a second motion Friday asking that references to him being granted immunity by prosecutors be stricken from the indictment against him.

Mapes attorneys say there was no legal reason for prosecutors to include the references to immunization and speculated in their filing that prosecutors were putting other witnesses on notice about the weapons at its disposal if they didnt testify as expected.

One possible motive for adding such language to the indictment is to send a signal to other witnesses with whom the government was attempting to meet in 2021 concerning its investigation of Mr. Madigan, the motion stated. While the government may have had a motive to publicize to other potential witnesses the weapons at its disposal, the fact of immunization has no relevance to the charges against Mr. Mapes.

Lee gave prosecutors two weeks to respond. A status hearing was set for June 1.

Mapes lost his public positions as Madigans chief of staff and House clerk in 2018, when a staffer accused Mapes of sexual harassment over several years and fostering a culture of sexism, harassment and bullying that creates an extremely difficult working environment.

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On Saturday, March 26, I was fortunate to attend the Vietnam War Veterans recognition event in Decatur. It was a fantastic event which honored those who served in Vietnam and all veterans and the public who wished to attend.

There were a number of speakers and recognition of personnel who helped organize the event. There were a few hundred people in attendance and the attendees seemed very thankful for the recognition.

The keynote speaker was SSG Shilo Harris, a veteran who was wounded in by an IED explosion in Irag in 2007. His presentation was one of patriotism and hope for our country. If you are not familiar with Shilo Harris I urge you to look up his incredible story.

At the conclusion of the ceremony all of the veterans in attendance were offered a challenge coin as a remembrance of the occasion. A challenge coin is a military symbol dating to WWI and one which all military veterans immediately recognize.

In queuing up to receive the coins the veterans waited patiently.

One of those veterans was my wife, a retired Army Veteran and Nurse Anesthetist.

When it came time for my favorite veteran to receive her challenge coin the vet handing out the coins asked if she was a veteran. I was stunned. No male veteran had been asked that question.

My wife, LTC Jill Henry, USA (retired), is the Illinois Ambassador to the Military Women's Memorial. An inscription at the memorial reads in part: "Let the generations know that women in uniform also guaranteed our freedom, And their tears fell just as hard."

Please remember, women are veterans too.

Gordon Herbert, Bloomington

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The Ukraine war presents the entire world with an existential threat. You need to know how we got here.

In 1991, then-U.S. president George H.W. Bush and his Secretary of State, James Baker, promised Mikhail Gorbachev that if he agreed to the unification of Germany, NATO would not expand eastward, toward Russia, "not one inch."

That promise was broken when, in 1999, Bill Clinton helped usher Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into NATO. Russia considered this move not just a betrayal, but an act of aggression.

George Kennan, the pre-eminent U.S. strategist of the post-World War II era, declared that "NATO expansion will prove the greatest U.S. foreign policy blunder of the twentieth century."

The U.S. promise to not move NATO eastward was broken again, in 2004, when, during the George W. Bush administration, NATO admitted Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to membership. All three nations adjoin Russia, placing NATO forces on Russia's borders.

The best way to understand the provocativeness of this move to the Russians is the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1962, the Soviet Union began placing offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba, 90 miles off the coast of Florida. It was in response to the U.S. having installed similar missiles in Turkey. The Cuban missiles would be able to hit Washington D.C. in 30 minutes.

It was only John Kennedy's deft handling of the situation that defused the Crisis. Part of the resolution was that the U.S. agreed to remove its missiles from Turkey.

An internet search for Noam Chomsky: US military escalation against Russia would have no victors will give you all the information you need.

Ron Adams, Decatur

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Two Dallas men charged with smuggling of persons remained in the Comal County Jail Wednesday afternoon, and the arresting agency had few details on the circumstances behind their arrests.

Jail records indicated Texas Department of Public Safety troopers arrested Humberto Martinez (aka Humberto Martinez-Sanchez) 32, and Luis Alfredo Martinez-Sanchez, 29, both of Dallas, around 2:42 p.m. Monday. Both are charged with smuggling of persons and remained jailed under $10,000 bond.

Sgt. Orlando Moreno, DPSs San Antonio-area public information officer, said details about the arrest were contained in an arrest affidavit filed with the Comal County Jail.

While the Comal County Sheriffs Office confirmed both suspects were also under holds placed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), it could not provide details in the affidavit.

Unclear is the suspects relationship to each other, what led to their arrests, where they were arrested and if other persons were involved. CCSO said it could not release the information because it is not the arresting agency.

Additional calls and emails requesting those details from DPS were returned Wednesday after the Herald-Zeitung filed an open records request for the information Tuesday afternoon.

Smuggling of persons charges range from a third-degree felony  such as using a vehicle to hide illegal aliens from law enforcement or transporting them in exchange for money  to a first-degree felony if those being transported suffer serious injury or death.

911 call leads to mans arrest on human smuggling charge in New Braunfels After being alerted by one of four Mexican nationals inside a car headed northbound on Inter

Both smuggling arrests are the first in the area since New Braunfels Police Department officers arrested and charged a Uvalde man with the offense Feb. 23. One of four Mexican nationals being transported northbound on Interstate 35 used a cell phone to place the 9-1-1 call that tipped off police, who stopped the car in the Buc-ees parking lot around 9 p.m.

Jaime Patrick Perez, 25, of Uvalde, was charged with smuggling of persons and eluding arrest with a vehicle. He bonded out of the county lockup two days later after posting $12,000 bond. The other men were not detained.
The 24th RiverRun International Film Festivals film lineup will include two opening films  The Rose Maker and We Feed People.

The film festival will run April 21-30 offering traditional in-person and virtual screenings. It will feature 174 films representing 33 countries. Nearly 1,700 films were submitted to the festival this year.

Tickets will be available to RiverRun members on Wednesday and Thursday and to the general public starting Friday.

The Rose Maker tells the story of Eve (Catherine Frot), an artisanal rose grower struggling to stay afloat until her assistant comes up with a solution.

We Feed People spotlights chef Jose Andres and his nonprofit World Central Kitchens evolution from being a scrappy group of volunteers to becoming one of the most highly regarded humanitarian aid organizations in the disaster relief sector.

On closing night, A Love Song will be the highlighted film.

This is a tale of two childhood sweethearts (Dale Dickey and Wes Studi), now both widowed, who share a night by a lake in the mountains. Reuniting after 40 years, the pair share childhood memories, make small talk, and shelter together from loneliness, RiverRun stated.

Rob Davis, RiverRuns executive director, said organizers of the film festival are presenting what they believe to be one of the finest programs RiverRun has ever offered.

From French comedies to Mexican narrative and documentary offerings, a Hungarian film noir, and a womans quest to become the first Nepali woman to summit Mount Everest, our international offerings truly encompass the global community of narrative and documentary filmmaking, he said in a press release.

RiverRun has also put together a diverse selection of films from around the United States and across North Carolina  from documentaries to narratives, Davis said.

Our documentaries range from the recording of an album in Nashvilles famed RCA Studio B to the challenges of preserving and protecting New Jerseys Passaic River. On the narrative front, our films include a tense thriller set in a Georgia bank, an estranged family coming together on their Montana ranch, and a Muslim American rom com about a group of sisters in Queens, he said.

This year, the festivals honorees will highlight women spanning the history of film. They include Master of Cinema Award recipients Karen Allen, Gigi Perreau, Hayley Mills, Kristi Zea and Karmic Release Ltd. Spark Awards for 2022 will go to Natalie Bullock Brown and Iman Zawahry.

Other special screenings include 18, Marvelous and the Black Hole and Montana Story.

18 is a dramatic/comedic thriller set in 1974 that supposes that a White House transcriber is thrust into the Watergate scandal when she obtains the only copy of the infamous 18 minute gap in President Nixons tapes.

In Marvelous and the Black Hole, a 21 Sundance hit, a teenage delinquent (Miya Cech) befriends a surly magician (Rhea Perlman) who helps her navigate her inner demons and dysfunctional family with sleight of hand magic.

A neo-Western, Montana Story is from acclaimed writer/directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel (What Maisie Knew, The Deep End). Two estranged siblings (Haley Lu Richardson, Owen Teague) return home to the sprawling ranch they once knew and loved, confronting a deep and bitter family legacy against a mythic American backdrop. The fates of their ailing, unscrupulous father and a beloved old horse hang in the balance, RiverRun stated.

The festival will also have a number of free offerings, several panel opportunities, Family Night screenings at Bailey Park and Crossnore Communities for children, Saturday Morning Cartoons, and the 11th annual Pitch Fest competition.

336-727-7366 @fdanielWSJ

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A jury Wednesday found a Lincoln man guilty of shooting his then-girlfriend during a Halloween-night fight in 2019 as she sat in an SUV, rejecting a defense theory that the woman, a trouble-making ex who admittedly tried to bribe him, had made up the story.

The man on trial, Ryan Long, already is serving time for shooting and killing a man seven months later, though the jury wasn't told that information.

Last October, another Lancaster County jury in the same courtroom found the 31-year-old guilty of manslaughter and use of a firearm to commit a felony for the shooting death of Michael Whitemagpie in an alley near 33rd and T streets before sunrise May 23, 2020.

The state had argued it was first-degree murder. Long argued it was self-defense. The jury rejected both, ultimately finding him guilty of a killing without malice upon a sudden quarrel.

A month later, Lancaster County District Court Judge Jodi Nelson sentenced him to 49 to 60 years in prison for it, plus another one to three years on a felony DUI charge.

In the latest trial, which started Monday, Long was accused of second-degree assault, use of a firearm to commit a felony and possession of a firearm by a prohibited person.

Champaynne King, now 23, alleges that at about 4 a.m. Nov. 1, 2019, after being out Halloween night, she and Long got into an argument about his cellphone, which she'd taken.

He was outside the driver's side of a Nissan Pathfinder parked at 21st and Garfield streets. She was in the passenger seat, with Long's cousin in the driver's seat, when, she says, Long fired a gun with the bullet hitting her right thigh and going out the passenger side door.

King didn't report it for six weeks, at which point police documented her healing wounds and the hole in the Pathfinder.

In closing arguments Tuesday, Deputy Lancaster County Attorney Ashley Bohnet said King wasn't the perfect victim.

"But no matter what her mistakes were, that's no justification for what Ryan Long did to her back on Nov. 1, 2019," she said.

King told the jury she didn't realize she'd been shot at first, it happened so quickly. The confrontation was over within 30 seconds.

After, King said, Long's cousin took her to a friend's to get her cleaned up, then took her to a hotel.

She also admitted she'd tried to bribe Long, telling him for $10,000 she could "make it go away," a fact Long's attorney, Nancy Peterson, pounced on in closing arguments.

"This is a woman you would not trust to walk your dog," the attorney said. "How can you trust this woman with the verdict?"

But perhaps the most damning evidence came in the form of texts sent four days after the shooting between Long's number and a number Long's cousin used where he called Long out for "blowing the hammer 2 inches from my face," after talking about taking care of her to make sure she didn't name any names.

At trial, Long took the stand against the advice of his attorney to tell the jury that while he is a convicted felon and did possess a firearm a month or two after the incident (thereby admitting one of the charges), he didn't do what the state alleges.

"I guess the bottom line, the question is, did you shoot Champaynne King?" Peterson asked him.

"No," Long said.

"Do you know how she got those injuries?" the attorney asked.

"I have no idea," he answered.

The case was submitted to the jury at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, which returned with guilty verdicts on all three charges midmorning Wednesday.

Long will face a minimum of eight years in prison and up to 120 on the charges at his sentencing in June.

Reach the writer at 402-473-7237 or lpilger@journalstar.com. On Twitter @LJSpilger

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A wheelchair belonging to a Randolph Elementary School first grader that went missing Monday morning has been returned  and just in time for a field trip.

Melissa Eusterwiemann confirmed that a woman returned the purple manual wheelchair belonging to Eusterwiemann's 7-year-old daughter Lily on Tuesday morning, a day after it was taken from the family's driveway in central Lincoln.

"When (Lily) saw the wheelchair, she was so happy," her mother told the Journal Star.

The wheelchair went missing Monday morning as Eusterwiemann and Lily, who has spina bifida, were preparing for the school bus to arrive.

Eusterwiemann said she put the wheelchair at the end of the driveway while she went back inside to get her daughter. When she returned, the wheelchair was gone.

The woman who returned the wheelchair said her children had taken it Monday morning. As promised, Eusterwiemann gratefully accepted the wheelchair with no questions asked. The wheelchair appeared in the same shape as when it was taken, she said.

"I don't know where they live. I said, 'I don't care,' I'm just glad to have it back," she said.

It was good timing, since Lily's class was going on a field trip Tuesday. School officials did reach out Monday to work on accommodating Lily, who can get around with the help of a walker but relies on a wheelchair for longer distances.

Lincoln Police had been investigating the incident. Eusterwiemann said she has not been in contact with police since the wheelchair was returned.

After news of the missing wheelchair began to circulate on social media, neighbors and strangers came together to help. Eusterwiemann guesses about 50 people reached out to her, including one person who offered to buy a replacement wheelchair and others who had equipment to donate.

"The support was pretty overwhelming, I'll be honest," she said.

Now that Lily has her wheelchair back, Eusterwiemann wants to pay forward her neighbors' kindness. She said those looking to donate used or new medical equipment can reach out to the Assistive Technology Partnership's Reuse Network at atp.nebraska.gov/services/reuse-network.

"We're just very thankful."

Contact the writer at zhammack@journalstar.com or 402-473-7225. On Twitter @zach_hammack

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